Congressman Devin Nunes, representative from California’s 22nd district and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, is here to talk about his op-ed in the Washington Examiner, and his decision to make 8 criminal referrals to the department of justice and Attorney General Barr. It is astonishing that intelligence leaders did not immediately recognize they were being manipulated in an information operation or understand the danger that the dossier could contain deliberate disinformation from Steele’s Russian sources. In fact, it is impossible to believe in light of everything we now know about the FBI’s conduct of this investigation, including the astounding level of anti-Trump animus shown by high-level FBI figures like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, as well as the inspector general’s discovery of a shocking number of leaks by FBI 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.
It is going to be one of those news days, and there is a lot to get to, and a lot happening.
And we're going to break it all down for you.
The ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, is going to be with us for the full hour coming up in the program later today.
And he released a letter.
It is amazing to watch, and you're going to see a media meltdown and a coordinated assault because the media that has lied, the Democrats that have lied, those that have advanced with hysteria and anonymous sources and breathless reporting and lies for two and a half years,
as all of the information that is now about to come cascading down upon them, and we're getting more and more every day, they are not going to be able to handle the pressure of what's going to happen.
And it is just Attorney General Barr mentioning that, yes, confirming that the Obama administration did spy on the Trump campaign is sending people over the edge.
And then when you add to that, Barr saying he has formed a team to review the FBI.
This isn't going to be against rank and file, FBI guys, but a team of FBI officials to look at the decisions that were made all throughout these investigations, throughout the summer, the probe of the Trump campaign, what led up to it, et cetera, and the Justice Department.
It is going to rock their world because they have been wrong on a level that has never been seen in media history.
They had an opportunity to cover the biggest abuse of power scandal in their lifetime, and they preferred to remain in their bubble of hate and rage and tinfoil hat conspiracies in the hopes that they could eliminate Donald Trump and have him impeached.
And now the boomerang has happened.
We'll get to all of that.
I'm going to get back to this letter in a second.
I'm going to get back to what is coming in a second.
Also, you saw earlier today, Julian Assange was taken out of the Ecuadorian embassy and apparently has been charged with a conspiracy.
There's going to be extradition battles, I assume, going on with his lawyers, etc.
Under arrest, facing extradition to the U.S. for a conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to assist Chelsea Manning.
Remember, it was Obama that pardoned Chelsea Manning in hacking a Department of Defense computer.
The Department of Justice released the following on Assange.
The indictment alleges that in March of 2010, Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network, a U.S. government network used for classified documents, communications.
Manning, who had access to the computers in connection with her duties as an intelligence analyst at the time, was using computers to download classified records to transmit to WikiLeaks.
Cracking the password would have allowed Manning to log onto the computers under a username that Not in their possession, rightly in their possession.
Such a deceptive measure would have made it more difficult for investigators to determine the source of the disclosures during the conspiracy.
That's what it basically is.
It is interesting to watch the reactions to all of this.
Ecuador's former president, Rafael Correa, blasted his successor, Lenin Moreno, as a traitor for allowing the arrest of Julian Assange, quote, the greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history.
Moreno was allowed the British police to enter our embassy in London to arrest Assange.
Moreno's a corrupt man, but what he has done is a crime that humanity will never forget.
And anyway, the arrest was released as a video of it.
Glenn Greenwald has raged against this and is battling journalists.
It is the criminalization of journalism.
Everybody's going to have to make up their own decision on Julian Assange, et cetera, et cetera.
And what happened?
Let me just raise one sidebar issue before we get into some of the issues involved here because it does raise a lot of questions.
Because let's take, for example, the WikiLeaks publication of the DNC hack emails.
And I asked Julian Assange this.
Well, remember, we went, we took the time, we flew to London, we went to the Ecuadorian embassy.
By the way, it is amazing.
You would think that maybe this is, he lived in like 300 square feet, basically the equivalent of a small, maybe one-bedroom apartment.
Nothing extravagant.
Stayed there, obviously, because he had strong feelings about his work.
And remember, the original reason that he went there went away as it related to allegations and charges that were brought against him.
This is seven years.
But those allegations went away, and then it became an issue of what the United States was going to do.
So, but here's the question because first, let me play.
I dug in pretty deep on the issue of did you get this from Russia, Russia sources?
And here's his question and an answer that was on Hannity.
Russia give you this information or anybody associated with Russia.
Our source is not a state party.
So the answer for our interactions is no.
You did not get this information about the DNC, John Podesta's emails.
Can you tell the American people 1,000% you did not get it from Russia or anybody associated with Russia?
We can say, and we have said repeatedly over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party.
Now, remember, this is where I think Greenwald has actually touched on an issue that nobody would dare touch.
I have always wondered, always, I thought, okay, so they're investigating where the hack came.
Look, Devin Nunes will join us later.
He warned us all that the hostile regime, Russia, they're hostile.
They have a history of interfering or trying to interfere or create chaos in elections.
He warned in 2014 they would do it in 2016.
Nobody in the Obama administration gave a rip.
Remember, this all happened in the Obama years.
And they have done this to other countries.
And it's fascinating how Ukraine has been desperately trying.
They have admitted that they did interfere in the 2016 elections.
Don Solomon's investigative reporting has been telling us.
And they desperately want to give us the evidence of it, which would be, again, it's sort of like liberals only care about issues of Me Too or sexual harassment if they can bludgeon a Trump Supreme Court nominee.
But they're stone cold silent when there are significant, real, serious allegations of rape and violent sexual assault by a Democrat, the lieutenant governor of Virginia.
They don't care about the issue.
They only care if they can use the issue.
Do they care about America's security?
I think this is a very key question.
And those countries that work to influence our elections, they care about it.
I care about it.
I talked about it yesterday.
You want to beat Putin?
I know how to beat Putin.
You want to run Russia and make it an insignificant country, but for the nuclear weapons they have.
Put that aside for a second, although you really can't.
We just got to up our production.
We have more energy resources, the lifeblood of every economy, than everybody else.
How ironic we're talking about eliminating gas and oil when we are now for the first time in 70, 75 years, the number one producer of oil and natural gas.
We figure out a way to take care of our friends in Western Europe at the right price.
Guess what?
Putin's out of business.
Their entire economy is based on it.
And it would render those bad actors insignificant.
But what Greenwald is interesting, I've never understood if they wanted to get a feel about Russia's influence in the election or chaos production in the election, why did they never go and ask Assange?
Now, I would have thought that he probably, guessing, whoever, wherever he got this information from, doesn't it make sense to think that he probably has some forensic footprint of where it all came from?
Now, I do talk to intelligence people.
Most of them seem convinced it was a Russia or Russia-connected source for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
He denies it adamantly, asked him again and again in that interview.
And then it raises this question.
You know, remember the, well, the New York Times ended up printing all those emails, and the Washington Post printed all those emails.
You can't forget the history of the Pentagon papers.
I mean, you know, it was given a top-secret Department of Defense study of U.S. political military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.
And if you look at the history of it, the Vietnam War is dragging on more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam by 1968.
You have military analyst Daniel Ellsberg worked on the study.
He came to oppose the war, decided that the information contained in the Pentagon Papers, top secret, should be made available to the American public.
And he photocopied the report in March of 71 and gave it to the New York Times.
Stolen military documents.
Almost identical to the whole Assange issue with Chelsea Manning.
And the New York Times published it in a series of scathing articles based on the report's most damning secrets.
And it was, you remember, this all started in 67 at the request of then U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
And you have this team of analysts working for the Department of Defense, preparing a highly classified document and a study about our involvement in Vietnam from the end of World War II to present day.
They're called the Pentagon Papers.
That's the official report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, later becoming famous as the Pentagon Papers.
Anyway, contained 3,000 pages, a 3,000-page narrative along with 4,000 pages of supported documents.
It was finished in 69.
It's fed to the New York Times in 71.
And Ellsberg changes his opinion.
So it becomes a big Supreme Court case after the Times publishes the front page articles based on the information contained in the Pentagon Papers.
Anyway, then after the third article, the Department of Justice got a temporary restraining order against further publication of the material, arguing it was detrimental to U.S. national security.
Anyway, and then in the famous case, New York Times versus the U.S. and the Washington Post, they joined forces to fight for the right to publish.
Now think about that.
If it's, again, the charges about Chelsea Manning, tell me what the difference is here.
I mean, I think in that sense, Glenn Greenwald is right.
If it's about journalism, if it's about getting information.
Well, if the information is true, now think about this.
If WikiLeaks publishes it, and it's copied and pasted like most media do this all the time, you don't even know it.
They just, they don't even give attribution half the time.
But if this case, the impact of that decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, I'll get into it in a second here.
Why wouldn't that apply in this case?
And I've never understood, if you want to know if he got it from Russia, why didn't you, you're doing an investigation this deep, this long?
Why did nobody look for that forensic footprint?
The only person that tried it, to my knowledge, was Dana Rohrbacher.
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All right, so you have the confidential, what becomes known as the Pentagon Papers.
Then you have the lawsuit that ensues with all the information.
The New York Times versus the United States, U.S., after they published a series of front-page articles, the U.S. Justice Department gets a temporary restraining order against further publication.
Now, by the way, I mean, let me stop and say one thing.
The fact this, this country better wake up.
And I mean this, and they better recognize, and Newt Gingrich touched on this on radio the other day, that if we don't start defending ourselves against these, any cyber attack whatsoever, there comes a point where it's shame on you, shame on you, shame.
No, it's shame on us.
This has been going on way too long.
Where are the defenses?
That's what made Hillary's email server with top secret classified special access program information, likely hacked, we're told by six foreign countries, what, North Korea, Russia, Iran, you know, China?
Come on.
It's not brain surgery.
And it is, we have got to take this seriously.
It is part of our national security and the defense of our country.
And these, and we are compromising potentially.
Look at the testimony that was released this week when it was discovered that Hillary had the classified emails.
I'm like, our entire foreign policy relationships go up in smoke as a result.
Sources and methods are put in danger.
That means lives are put in danger.
At some point, we got to say this is a top national security priority.
All right, 25 till the top of the hour.
Devin Nunes for the full hour if you're just joining us.
He has now sent a letter to the Attorney General Barr saying that for more than two years, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence conducted a wide-ranging investigation into the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
As part of that investigation, committee Republicans identified several potential violations of law.
Given the sensitivity surrounding the matter, I will have my staff contact the department to arrange a time for Representative John Ratcliffe and me to brief you directly on the eight criminal referrals.
I appreciate your consideration in this matter.
He'll join us at the top of the next hour.
Congressman, I know, what's his name?
Congressman Meadows from North Carolina said there's going to be more.
Now, we also have today the Obama White House counsel, Greg Craig, Gregory Craig.
He has now been charged by federal prosecutors on two separate issues.
One, having to do with being indicted on charges of lying and hiding information related to his work for Ukraine, and two, charged by the Justice Department's Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA.
Remember, this is a law that was rarely used until Manafort.
And it was all brought up again during this whole Russia thing.
And the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, as they call it, and faces five years in prison for each of the charges.
Now, this is just interesting.
Interesting in as much as we've had up to now a two-tier justice system.
Interesting because we've not had equal justice under the law, equal application of our laws.
Interesting that you watch a meltdown, and it's going to get louder and more extreme as the news media now begins to understand that they have been wrong on a spectacular level, that they've missed the biggest abuse of power corruption scandal in American history.
And with the information that I know is coming, that I know some of you have been impatient.
When, Hannity, when, and what's going to happen?
I don't, I, I, look, we've been unpeeling the layers of this onion with this ensemble cast on radio and TV now for over two years.
The media, the Democrats, have been pushing nothing but lies and tinfoil hat conspiracy theories for two and a half years because four separate investigations have now shown there's no evidence of any Trump-Russia collusion.
The FBI nine-month investigation.
Page instruct.
Nope, no there there.
Lisa Page, we didn't have anything before Mueller took this over.
We've been digging for nine months.
Began in July of 2016.
Mueller was appointed in May of 2017.
They didn't find anything, not a single thing.
But not only are the criminal referrals coming out and likely more than the eight that Devin Nunes talks about today, and he'll join us at the top of the hour, but now there is a full freak out happening within the deep state.
Those people that abused their power, you know, those people that helped Hillary get elected and rigged an investigation.
Those people that were responsible for a fraud committed against the FISA court, those responsible for violating the constitutional rights of Carter Page, those that were involved in spying on the Trump campaign.
You know, then we're going to get on top of the bar investigation, which I believe, once it begins, will be exhaustive.
If we care about truth and we care about laws and we care about the weaponry of intelligence not being turned on the American people, we better get to the bottom of it.
Or else there will be coups that happen in this country by people that think that they know better than we, the people, who ought to be president.
The people that refer to us as the smelly Walmart people or irredeemable deplorables or, you know, bitter Americans clinging to their God, their guns, their Bibles, their religion.
Those that support Donald Trump, that like the success of Donald Trump, that see America thriving on the world stage with strength again, etc.
But after that, you're going to get the Barr investigation, the Horowitz report, the Huber report, more of this testimony.
I mean, it has been so enlightening the last couple of weeks, thanks to Congressman Doug Collins of Georgia.
And all that we learned this week with the testimony, the fact that the general counsel, the FBI, yeah, they tested four, 40 emails of Hillary's, just 40, and they found four labeled, classified, top secret that she had on that hard drive.
Clearly, that met the standard of gross negligence.
And you want to meet the standard, all these people hoping they get a sentence out of the Mueller report about obstruction of justice, which, by the way, it took seconds for Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Barr to say, well, they don't have the, it doesn't rise to the level, but they'll cling to that, but they'll ignore subpoenaed emails, 33,000 deleted emails.
We now know the actual date, the date when it happened.
In other words, the acid wash of the hard drive.
We know when that happened.
And nobody seems to care in the media.
It's just like they don't care about the issue of women and sexual assault unless it's a Republican they can bludgeon.
Otherwise, all the I-believers would be out there believing the women that claim that they were raped and violently assaulted by the lieutenant governor of Virginia.
You know, there's clear evidence.
Barr is right.
We have gone over this exhaustively.
When they went before, remember, Bruce Orr's testimony, thanks to Congressman Collins, Nellior's testimony, Bruce Orr testifying behind closed doors.
He warned everybody in the FBI, upper echelon, DOJ, warned them all that, in fact, the dossier was Clinton paid for, put together after funneled money to a law firm, to an op research firm, to a former MI6 foreign national by the name of Christopher Steele, that nobody verified it.
We now know it's unverifiable because under an interrogatory, Christopher Steele himself, he acknowledges he doesn't know if any of the dossier is true, but it was the, quote, bulk of information according to the Grassley Graham Nunes memos of the application to get a FISA warrant to deny Carter Page's constitutional rights.
They committed a fraud on the court and they used, bought, and paid for Russian lies to do it.
How ironically.
You know, all of this.
Wow, Barr has gone off the rails.
Well, wait till all this other information comes out.
They have no idea how hard they're going to get hit with truth that we have been revealing for two years plus on this program and on TV.
When those FISA applications come out, Americans will see for themselves what we've been telling you.
Gang of eight materials, the FBI acknowledging.
Yeah, we really messed this up.
Wait till you see their own acknowledgements of such.
The 302s, you know, the conversations with Orr, Steele, and others.
You know, now we've got Ukraine.
Ukraine is begging to give us evidence that they interfered in the 2016 election.
But because it favored Hillary, they don't want to go there.
You know, when you look, it's the spying that occurred, the evidence is overwhelming.
It is incontrovertible.
What do you think?
Why would career people put that didn't want Trump elected put their everything on the line?
Number one, they thought Hillary was going to win.
Everything's predicated on that.
Number two, they wanted to have an insurance policy just in case they lost.
So you go before a FISA court, look at the first FISA warrant.
You don't put in bold letters, Hillary paid for this.
Just that asterisk might have a slight political taint to it.
Okay.
But if you said, you know, you have to testify that it is true to the best of your knowledge.
But we now know the dossier's been debunked most of it.
And secondly, we know that the dossier was a bunch of Russian lies put together by a guy that hates Trump and continue to try and influence even the special counsel's office using Bruce Orr as a conduit.
They missed all of this because they don't care.
It was to bludgeon.
It was political.
They were motivated by rage and hatred, both the media and Democrats.
They can't even stop, even though we have four separate, you know, the FBI nine-month investigation, the House Intel Committee investigation, the bipartisan Senate Intel Committee investigation, and now the Mueller report.
No collusion.
You know, but there's Adam Schiff, the one guy caught on tape colluding with Russians, thinking he can get dirt so he can influence the elections.
You know, what is the nature of the compromising materials?
Then picks up the naked Trump.
Naked Trump.
Does Vladimir know?
Yeah, Vladimir Kosikos.
He knows Butchuba.
He knows it all.
He's seen it all.
Can you get him, Nas?
He's the only one.
But the fact that they would commit a fraud against the court, deny Carter Page's constitutional rights, wiretap him, get a backdoor through every computer all into the past and right into the Trump campaign.
Everything is for grabs at that point.
Never mind the fact, and it goes deeper than that.
There's a great piece that was put out by Byron York.
Headline pretty much says it all.
Barr's right, spying did occur on the Trump campaign.
And he reminds us, Stefan Halper, the FBI engaged him as an informant.
New York Times reported agents involved in the Russian investigations asked Halper, an American academic teaching in Great Britain, to gather information on Paige and Papadopoulos, another Trump campaign foreign policy advisor.
Halper went beyond Paige and Papadopoulos, also seeking information from Trump campaign aide Sam Clovis.
Wasn't clear whether Halper and the FBI had the FBI's blessing to do Clovis.
The Halper case is more evidence that spying occurred.
Of course it did.
And of course, the insurance policy, you know, we haven't even touched the rigged investigation part of this.
And that is, we learned through all of these closed-door testimonies.
Yeah.
Well, number one, James Baker thought Hillary should be indicted.
He was talked out of it by everyone else that loved Hillary.
Okay, then what happened there?
What happened with the investigation?
Okay, began, you know, a midterm exam.
But what do we know?
They were writing an exoneration to May of 2016 before she's interviewed or 17 other people are interviewed.
She's allowed to bring two other people into the interview with the FBI.
The interviewer is Peter Strzok, the guy that says Hillary needs to win $100 million to zero.
I can smell the Trump Walmart voters, Peter Strzok said.
And we know, in fact, that 18 USC, once they identified top secret classified information on that mom and pop shop bathroom closet, that's the law.
It is clear she violated it.
18 USC 793.
And what do you think?
You want obstruction?
These people don't care about obstruction.
Just think like they don't care about the women stories or believe the women against the lieutenant governor of Virginia because it's not, it doesn't benefit their political narrative.
Yeah, when you delete 33,000 subpoenaed emails and then you have, we know the date of the hard drive being acid washed now.
Yeah, sure.
And then bust up devices, remove SIM cards.
It all comes together.
Now that has to, if we have equal justice under the law, equal application under the law, that all has to happen immediately.
And that's what they're all afraid of because they've all been wrong.
Back to this Assange thing for just a second.
So the Pentagon Papers, anyway, is a task force at the request of then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, 47 volumes, 3,000 pages, 4,000 pages of supporting documents.
Anyway, Daniel Ellsberg served in the Marines.
And anyway, he ends up giving it to the New York Times after he concluded, you know what, this wasn't the right war to fight.
After three reports, the New York Times is sued by the U.S. government.
And, you know, now referred to as the Pentagon Papers.
And this happened after the third article was reported.
And anyway, they joined forces with the Washington Post for the right to publish.
June 30th, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the government had failed to prove harm to national security and the publication of the papers was justified under the First Amendment's protection of the freedom of the press.
Now, the impact of that is dramatic.
Okay, so the charges against Julian Assange have to do with his work with Chelsea Manning, who's already been pardoned by Barack Obama.
I think Greenwald is on to something here as well, is like the press doesn't care because that hurt Democrats.
It's political.
Okay, but looks like there's a precedence here.
The question is, why didn't they ever look into, if they think all this came from Russia, why didn't they ever go to the Ecuadorian embassy and talk to Assange?
From what we know, they never did that.
Maybe they didn't want the forensics.
Maybe there were other sources.
Now, most people tell me my sources say, yeah, probably it was connected in Russia to some way.
Maybe a third party, some outlet, whatever.
I have other people, smart, smart people telling me, nope.
Might have come from a couple of sources.
Some of them might have even been Bernie's supporters.
Who knows?
I don't know the answer to that.
I only know the answer he gave me.
But I wonder, I would assume, based on the past actions of WikiLeaks and Assange, that there's probably, I don't think everything he owned is in the Ecuadorian embassy at that point.
A lot of people would come and go, like Pam Anderson, for example.
My guess would be, I'd be interested to find out what they know.
What the forensics show, where did it come from?
And I think it should have been asked if we really cared about it, just like we should ask Ukraine for the evidence that they have that they helped Hillary Clinton in 2016.
All right, Devin Nunes in the next hour.
You know, all right, we got to take, you want me to take a break, or you want me to tell him about your condo that you never go to?
Take a break, boss.
Take a break.
All right.
Quick break, right back.
We'll continue.
Devin Nunes at the top of the next hour.
Big news day.
And, of course, Greg Craig now, the White House counsel of Obama.
Well, he's been federal charges against him, the Farah Act, and hiding information, his work related to the Ukraine again.
On the first one, is FISA abuse and other matters.
We believe there was a conspiracy to lie to the FISA court, mislead the Pfizer court by numerous individuals that all need to be investigated and looked at.
And we believe the statute is the conspiracy statute.
The second conspiracy one is involving manipulation of intelligence.
That also could ensnar many Americans.
And we are, so that's kind of the second one.
As you know, we've had a lot of concerns with the way intelligence was used.
So that would be kind of the two conspiracy recommendations, referrals that we're making.
The third is what I would call a global leak referral.
So there are about a dozen highly sensified, highly sensitive, classified information leaks that were given to only a few reporters over the last two and a half plus years.
So, you know, we don't know if there's actually been any leak investigations that have been opened, but we do believe that we've got pretty good information and a pretty good idea of who could be behind these leaks.
It doesn't mean we know all the people that are behind the leaks because, you know, when you read these, a lot of these, they're always anonymous sources.
And they always say something to the effect of current and former senior officials.
So we think we've got a pretty good idea of who some of the sources are behind these leaks.
We don't know if the Department of Justice has been looking at these, but there's just been unprecedented things have happened.
But first, tell us how many people is this capturing?
Can you give us any names on this list in terms of your referrals?
Well, I'm not prepared to give any names, but I think most people that have followed Russia Gate for a long time, they know a lot of the names.
But there's five that are straight up, five names.
Then there are, when you get to the leaks, we don't know.
We think there's only a few people behind these leaks, but there could be multiple people.
So on the leak, the global leak referral, there could be several individuals.
When you look at the conspiracy, I mean, that could get up to a dozen, two dozen people.
So, you know, for example, we don't know all the people that are involved.
Look, we know Strzzok and Page, and we know their involvement because they've been interviewed.
But, you know, there's other people that were above Strzzok and below Strzzok that have not been interviewed.
So we don't know if they're involved in this conspiracy or not.
My question is, now that President Trump has been exonerated of Russia collusion, is the Justice Department investigating how it came to be that your agency used a salacious and unverified dossier as a predicate for a FISA order on a U.S. citizen?
The Office of the Inspector General has a pending investigation of the FISA process in the Russian investigation, and I expect that that will be complete in probably in May or June, I am told.
So hopefully we'll have some answers from Inspector General Horowitz on the issue of the FISA warrants.
More generally, I am reviewing the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016.
All right, the Attorney General Barr, before that, we have Devin Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee, one of the committees that after an exhaustive investigation determined that there was no evidence of Trump campaign collusion with Russia.
Devin Nunes earlier today sent a letter to the Attorney General, as we've been telling you it is coming.
For more than two years, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee, in parentheses, conducted a wide-ranging investigation into the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
As part of that investigation, committee Republicans identified several potential violations of law.
Given the sensitivity surrounding this matter, I will have my staff contact the department to arrange a time for Representative John Ratcliffe and me to brief you directly on the eight criminal referrals.
I appreciate your consideration of this matter.
Now, the former head of the House Intelligence Committee, now minority leader, is Devin Nunes from California, their 22nd District.
Welcome back, Congressman.
Well, you said this was coming, so here it is.
Thanks, Sean, and thanks for all your work on this and making sure that the American people actually knew the truth.
It's been a long road, but it's great today to be able to send this to the Attorney General, and we're prepared to brief him.
It's quite exhaustive, and I think the Attorney General will find it quite interesting for the investigation that now we know that he's doing.
Well, let me go into the issue, which I think is very important here, because I'm assuming you're not going to name the names, but I think a lot of them are very obvious, at least to me.
And I won't sit here and offer conjecture.
You're not going to talk publicly about it at this point.
No, and it wouldn't be appropriate, right?
Because a lot of this is highly sensitive, classified information.
The Attorney General, everything that I've seen, he's a grown-up.
And so, you know, part of the reason why we're sending these over in this way where we want to brief him directly is because we have trust and confidence in him.
So this isn't one of these things where we have to get a bunch of media and hype it up.
The fact of the matter is I want to send this to the Attorney General, brief him, let him look at it, ask us questions that he may have about this.
And look, these people that were involved in this, let's just say what we feel is inappropriate behavior and we think that they broke the law or we wouldn't refer them for criminal prosecution.
Look, they don't need to know what we know.
And that's the bottom line.
I mean, I think they all know who they are.
But there could be other people that don't know that we've actually found out what they were doing was wrong.
So I'm not going to give these guys any advantage and tip them off as to what we have.
Let me ask you, I keep saying and describing to our audience, you know, there have been four separate conclusions as it relates to Trump-Russia collusion.
The FBI nine-month investigation, you know, even Page and Struck, there's no there, both of them saying it repeatedly.
Lisa Page saying after nine months, they had nothing before the appointment of Mueller.
We had the House Intelligence Committee investigation, which you ran.
You found no evidence of collusion.
The same with the bipartisan Senate Committee investigation led by Senator Burr.
Now the Mueller report couldn't be any more clear on the issue of collusion.
But that's not stopping people on the other side, be it people that have been selling conspiracy theories and outright lies and anonymous sources and breathless hysterical reporting and pronouncements by people in Congress.
But there is information.
There has been a parallel investigation that I know you have been aware of and on the front lines of discovering where there is real evidence.
We have not only your criminal referrals, but we now know and have confirmation from this week that the Attorney General has formed a team to review the FBI and Department of Justice's actions during this probe.
That will be big.
The Inspector General Horowitz's report on FISA abuse, I think that's going to be big.
Not sure exactly what John Huber is going to come up with, but I expect it's going to be interesting.
More closed-door testimony will be released.
And then, of course, the president, in an interview with me a week and a half ago, talked about releasing the FISA applications, Gang of Eight materials, 302s, and we're awaiting a court potentially giving us some information on Christopher Steele that will be hopefully as revealing as I'm told it will be.
And of course, now we have evidence.
The Ukrainians want to give us evidence that they work to influence our elections.
Do you have plans to release those FISA applications, Gang of Eight information, the 302s of Bruce Orr and others, and the five buckets of John Solomon, as they call them?
I do.
I have plans to declassify and release.
I have plans to absolutely release.
But I have some very talented people working for me, lawyers, and they really didn't want me to do it early on.
One of the reasons that my lawyers didn't want me to do it is they said if I do it, they'll call it a form of obstruction.
So they'll say, oh, you released these documents.
So we would make all of this information transparent.
You know, in politics, you always hear transparency.
We'd make it transparent, and then they'd call it obstruction, knowing the people we're dealing with.
So frankly, I thought it would be better if we held it to the end.
No, but at the right time, we will be absolutely releasing.
And I did the right thing by not doing it so far.
But you understand, they would call it something that it wouldn't be.
It's the only time you'd be transparent where they'd say bad things about transparency.
A lot of stuff coming.
So there's a lot there.
So let me tell you a couple things that I think are important here and unpack some of this that's coming out and try to prioritize it.
Number one is this Mueller dossier that I now call it because I'm, you know, this 400 pages and all this talk about releasing it.
And remember, I was the first member of Congress to actually say all of this should be out.
But what is important is the underlying information and how they reached their conclusions and what made it on the page of their 400-page Moeller dossier.
Because I am convinced that with Weissman and all these other bad actors who should not have been involved in this in the first place, because they should have been conflicted out.
I think a lot of your listeners understand this, but you had Weissman and another lawyer who were on Moeller's team who were part of the chain of custody of the Steel Democrat dirt dossier in 2016.
So if there are all these people that are clamoring for transparency and they want to see the 400 pages, I just hope that the Attorney General goes farther than that and sends us all the information, all the underlying information, because I'm looking forward to looking into all of these people that were sitting on this two-year witch hunt.
I want to look at the work that they did.
Just because you're on a special counsel doesn't mean you get special powers and that we don't, as a Congress and a legislative branch, don't get to investigate you if you're not on the up and up.
And I have a lot of reason to believe that Weissman and others were not on the up and up with the American people and they're going to be held accountable also.
Do you believe as I do, and I believe that these transcripts that have been released by Congressman Doug Collins closed-door testimony that, in fact, the investigation into Hillary Clinton and her email server was rigged, and they did it for the favored candidate that should win $100 million to zero, as Peter Strzok said.
And he could smell, you know, not the smelly Walmart voters that were voting for Donald Trump like me.
Do you believe there was a fraud committed in the FISA courts by A, withholding information from the court?
That being that everybody had been told Hillary paid for it.
It was unverified.
We now know the dossier is unverifiable and largely debunked.
And was that the bulk of information used?
Yeah, so look, you know from our memo that we put out over a year ago that they lied to the FISA court.
And there was a whole bunch of other lying, which is why we want the other, the rest of the so-called Comey mosaic.
We want the rest of it out too, because you'll see just how fraudulent they were and what they were willing to do to spy on the Trump campaign.
And isn't it nice now that we can actually call it spying on the Trump campaign because that's what they did?
It's just so ridiculous that we haven't been able to use that term spy.
But let me say, I think another important part of all this, Sean, I think, will answer your question.
So I was going through some of my notes, just the history of this this morning.
And, you know, when we looked back when we first opened our investigation, the House Intelligence Committee's like official investigation that was at the beginning of 2016, at that time, you know, we had been already being have ongoing briefings as it relates to Russia, Russia, and counterintelligence investigations.
And so remember, in January and February 2016, I'm out there doing interviews and getting attacked in these interviews when I would, that was back when I used to talk to the Democrat-controlled media, and I would take every question, and they would be like, you don't know who Roger Stone is.
And what I would say was, I said, look, I have yet to see one ounce of evidence against any American at all.
And a court, supposedly NSA, FBI, all the ICIA, everybody's giving us everything that they have on Russia that people are demanding.
And I'm sitting there taking ridiculous questions from pressed people saying, look, I don't have any evidence of collusion.
And what was interesting at that time, when I go back and look, and I don't know if you remember this, this was, we had real work to do on the House Intelligence Committee at that time.
And this was such, it was beginning such a circus that I actually said, look, this has become such a joke because we have no evidence after a couple months looking at this.
So I'm going to have Trey Gowdy and Tom Rooney, two lawyers that were sitting on the intelligence committee.
I'm basically going to put them on a task force and let them conduct all these interviews because until somebody somewhere gives us an ounce of evidence, we're not going to waste time on this.
We have real problems in this country and real challenges with the IC.
So this is a couple months before Moeller comes on.
There is no way on earth that Bob Moeller didn't know from day one when he walked in that door that there wasn't an ounce of evidence of Trump colluding with Russians, period.
There has been a little bit of a shocking news event happening, and that is the Obama White House counsel.
Greg Craig has been charged by federal prosecutors for alleged lies about his work in Ukraine.
We continue with the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, is with us.
He's with California's 22nd District.
Thanks for sticking around.
There's a lot happening.
First, your reaction to, and by the way, your criminal referrals, which we've been talking about, and your letter to the Attorney General Barr about eight specific, by the way, will there be more criminal referrals, do you think?
It's very possible because as I said in the last segment, the Moeller dossier, once we go through that, I want to, you know, we're going to hold all these people accountable too.
And so if there's anything that made it into the Moeller dossier that's fake or phony or a lie, we're going to investigate it.
Also, on the positive side, there could be something.
I mean, I'm hopeful.
Hope Springs Eternal in this case, but hopefully the Moeller dossier actually gives us perhaps some more information, sheds more light on other people that we can hold accountable and whether it's FISA abuse, other matters, unmasking, that sort of thing.
All right, this to me is a huge, I mean, we remember Greg Craig going back to the Clinton administration.
He's an attorney.
He was the Obama White House counsel, now charged by federal prosecutors for lies and Ukrainian work in his case, lying, hiding information related to the work.
Of course, then we get back to the whole foreign agents registration act that really nobody had been held accountable till Mueller came on board.
What's your reaction to that?
Do you know specifically, is he actually being brought up for lying to investigators and FARA?
Is it both of them or just the lying?
Charged by the department's Foreign Agents Registration Act, FARA, and also indicted for charges of lying and hiding information related to his work in Ukraine.
If we're going to have a fair justice system, then the law has to be equally enforced on both sides.
So look, the law's in place.
I think that if you are working for a foreign government and you're lobbying on their behalf, you should have to register.
That's why we have the law.
Now, in the past, as you know, a lot of times this law has been enforced by somebody being able to go back in time and pay a fine and fill out the proper form.
So, you know, hopefully this will set a marker down and make sure that every lobbyist, everybody in the swamp that's going to work for a foreign government, look, let me just say, it's not a crime to work for a foreign government.
But if you are going to do that, you should make sure that you're being on the up and up.
So all this information is transparent for the American people to see.
With the release of these closed-door testimonies, and we've had a number of them now.
Bruce and Nelly Orr, for example, we learned that Bruce Orr, in fact, warned everybody about the Steele dossier, telling everybody Clinton paid for it.
Remember, the money was funneled through a law firm to an op research firm hiring Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent.
And that was not highlighted, we're told, in the FISA application at all.
It was basically a random footnote about might have a political taint to it rather than speaking boldly and clearly that the opposition party paid for it.
So when we look at all of those things, I want to just dig down here.
I see that as a fraud on the court.
Now, we know that James Comey signed the first FISA warrant in October of 2016, which, according to Rod Rosenstein, would mean that, to the best of his knowledge, it is true and accurate and has been verified and corroborated.
But then he told Donald Trump, president-elect, in January of 2017, that it's salacious, but not verified.
Wouldn't that mean that James Comey lied?
So, Sean, this is, as you know, one of our referrals is on conspiracy as it relates to FISA abuse and what we call other matters.
So, you can rest assured that a lot of what you're talking about there are the questions that we raise where we believe that there is circumstantial evidence that people did more than just make a mistake.
This was not a mistake.
You point out, they knew exactly where this information came from, and they chose to do word salads to basically have it both ways, where they could say, oh, we told the court, but in reality, they didn't tell the court.
That would be a fraud by omission.
And now that we know it's unverifiable, they just basically took Hillary Clinton's political document and used it to violate a citizens' constitutional rights, but it also gave them a backdoor to spy on the Trump campaign, which the Attorney General confirmed happened yesterday.
But this is why what we're referring over is the statute of conspiracy, right?
So they conspire to do a lot of bad things.
Lie to federal judges.
That's the easy one that you're pointing out.
They obstructed justice.
They defrauded the United States of America.
They abused their power.
What we're pointing out in our referral is people conspired to do this.
Somebody conspired to decide not to tell the information that they knew directly from Christopher Steele that he was biased, that he was against Trump, that this was paid for by Democrats.
And I find it's impossible for me to believe that all these people at the Justice Department and the FBI just had no idea.
That's why they had to leave it a vague footnote in the FISA application.
Well, not all the respect.
It's not believable to the American people.
Bruce Orr has testified that, in fact, he told everybody, warned everybody.
And that was in August before the October filing.
Let me ask you about Hillary.
Now that we have the closed-door testimony of people like Strzzk and Page and James Baker, the general counsel, in other words, the top lawyer at the FBI, who thought he was fighting, he believed Hillary should have been indicted.
That's an interesting part of his transcript that Doug Collins was able to give us yesterday, two days in a row.
But more importantly, Strzok and Page said everything as it relates to the Hillary investigation was being run through the Attorney General's office.
That would be at the time Loretta Lynch, who forced Comey to refer to it not as an investigation, but a matter that was on a tarmac for 45 minutes just prior to the decision about Bill Clinton's wife supposedly talking about their grandchildren.
And then, of course, we see, in spite of what Comey had said, they were writing an exoneration in May of 2017, 2016, before they actually interviewed Hillary or 17 other witnesses.
Hillary's interview happened on July 2nd, 2016, and they allowed two other people in the room and Peter Strzok that thought Hillary should win $100 million to zero did the interview.
And then Comey exonerated her after they had changed the legal standard gross negligence to extreme carelessness.
Do you believe this investigation was rigged?
And if it was rigged, do we now need to reopen it?
Well, that's hard to say because what we focused on, and I want to make sure you know I'm not dodging your question.
Just remember what we looked at.
We looked at Russia collusion in depth.
We looked at the FISA abuse and other matters in depth.
We looked at unmaskings in depth.
And so a lot of that investigation was done by Bob Goodlatt and the Judiciary Committee.
They painstakingly went through all of that.
I mean, look, at the end of the day, you have to, it's complicated because you have to be able to prove conspiracy.
Did they conspire to do it?
Now, look, from a layman out there who hasn't seen all the information, I mean, look, it looks clear to me that they conspired.
Well, let me put it this way.
I think that's the point you're trying to make.
In the testimony, closed-door testimony, we now know that they took 40 emails, random emails of the 30,000.
40, and of the 44 were top secret or classified and labeled as such.
The Espionage Act, 18 U.S.C. 793, that is a clear violation of that law.
That's a felony.
And that's why I assume James Baker was saying, yeah, we should charge her if we have equal justice and equal application of our laws.
But clearly, they didn't want that to happen.
Now, more importantly, if every Democrat is saying, well, maybe there's a nugget in the Mueller report that will show that Donald Trump obstructed, well, the obstruction statute needs to show intent.
And Donald Trump hoping that General Flynn doesn't get in trouble is not obstruction.
He didn't stop the investigation.
Look, I can easily comment on the emails and the classified information on the emails.
It's a crime, okay?
So it's plain and simple.
It's a crime.
So the thing we don't know about, because all those bad characters you just talked about were the ones who did the interview.
We don't know what it is she said, right?
So if she basically denied it, I assume that's what they're going with.
Don't we have intent when you go back and when you delete the 33,000, isn't there intent?
When you acid wash the hard drive with bleach pit, isn't that intent?
When you bust up your devices, isn't that intent?
You remove SIM cards?
Well, and it's more than, I mean, look, it's not just that, but it's obstruction.
It's obstruction of justice.
Exactly.
That's what that is.
So, you know, the other issue I would say, too, is that when you go back, we talked about Clinton a little bit earlier here when they were working on that investigation and how the same people that were involved in the Trump investigation colluding with Russia, people forget, and this was in our report that's largely overlooked, that Comey briefed Lynch and Yates early in the spring of 2016.
So they were in full motion and briefing at the highest levels that they were investigating Trump for colluding with Russians.
I mean, that's incredible.
And so if you take that date, right, which is, you know, we only know it's the springtime of 16.
So Moeller doesn't get appointed for a full 12, 13 months after that.
So you're telling me with the most sophisticated intelligence agencies ever created on the planet, after 13 months of investigation, you don't have one ounce of evidence that anybody was colluding with Russians.
Think about that.
Let me ask.
And that's key.
Now, let me ask you this with the Assange news today.
I think it's a little bit odd.
Now, I know I've talked to many, many people that are in the intelligence community.
I won't ask you to know.
You know things that I don't know.
And the general consensus is, and I interviewed him in January of 2017.
I've interviewed him on the radio.
And I've asked him, did you get this?
I was very clear.
We have the question.
Did you get this from Russia or anybody associated with Russia?
He says, no, no state party, not Russia, et cetera.
All right.
Wouldn't the one person that would know the answer to those questions be Assange?
Now, I know he's being brought up on charges related to the Afghanistan release, et cetera, et cetera.
Why was he never approached?
Because I've got to believe that if he told me the truth, there would be forensic proof of such.
And if he didn't tell the truth that it was Russia, there would be proof of that as it relates to the well what I would say, what I would say about Assaj is this, that what he did with the Snowden and Manning leaks, it was really bad and really dangerous.
And I guess the case that they're making here, now, look, it's not, it's the people that did those, that perpetuated those crimes, they were busted for it.
In fact, one was released early, as I remember, if I remember correctly.
Snowden is still on the run.
Those guys need to be, you know, need to absolutely be prosecuted.
The claim, as I understand it, I have not read the indictment yet, is that Assaj was working in conjunction to figure out ways to break the codes down to get the information.
So that would be problematic for Assaj, and that's got to be, look, it's got to be proven in court.
As it relates to the Russia matters, that stuff is still classified at this time, and it's hard for me to really comment on it.
One of the things that bothers me, you warned everybody in 2014 that Russia was going to pull this crap on us again, and that they do it against other countries.
Nobody listened to you.
You were right.
You were right.
And now we see the Ukraine is admitting that they tried to help Hillary in the 2016 election.
Nobody cares because it's not against Donald Trump.
And what bothers me in all of this is, and this is what was so serious about the Clinton email server issue, is that why have we in all these years as a country, knowing that these hostile regimes, Russia is a hostile regime, Putin a hostile actor.
Why haven't we built the defenses to prevent this?
This has gone on for 30 years, and we haven't built a defense capable of stopping this yet.
Why?
Well, we're always, to be fair, I mean, we do spend a lot of money trying to build this infrastructure to combat the Chinese, Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, other bad actors.
We spend a lot of money doing it.
I think the more important point, though, that you brought up there, Sean, is that we had administration after administration who wanted to cozy up to Putin.
I mean, going back to Bill Clinton, starting with Bill Clinton, then all through George W. Bush, all through the Obama administration.
And largely, if you go back and you look, Donald Trump's position that they claimed, oh my God, they were frightened by the words that Donald Trump was saying about the Russians, it was no different than what Hillary or Obama or George W. Bush or Condoleezza Rice or anybody said about Putin.
By the way, the only one caught on tape colluding was your friend the cowardly shift, but Adam Schiff.
Congressman, thank you for spending the hours with us, hour with us.
We appreciate your time.
Very enlightening.
News Roundup Information Overload.
Jonathan Gillum, Danielle McLaughlin, next.
Yeah, as I said in my confirmation hearing, I am going to be reviewing both the genesis and the conduct of intelligence activities directed at the Trump campaign during 2016.
And A lot has already been invested.
A lot of this has already been investigated, and a substantial portion of it has been investigated and is being investigated by the Office of Inspector General at the Department.
But one of the things I want to do is pull together all the information from the various investigations that have gone on, including on the Hill and in the Department, and see if there are any remaining questions to be addressed.
And can you share with us why you feel a need to do that?
Well, you know, for the same reason we're worried about foreign influence in elections.
We want to make sure that during an election, I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal.
It's a big deal.
I spy an attorney general giving credence to conspiracy theories.
It feels like that basically the attorney general gaslit the country.
Bill Barr, one of our nation's most respected lawyers, a two-time Attorney General, turn in his tortoiseshell glasses for a tinfoil hat.
Barr has made really clear: I'm going to be an engine for the President of the United States.
I am not the Attorney General for the country.
The Attorney General of the United States in a dog whistle to Sean Hannity is a big deal.
He is a flunky for Donald Trump.
He's not an independent thinker.
He sounds good.
He seems sincere.
But if you look at what he does, not what he says, then you see the actions of a hatchet man here, and it's really disturbing.
To use another American word, is he a toady?
Is he saying the kind of language that Trump wants to hear him use?
Well, unfortunately, I think over the past several weeks, I've been very disappointed in Attorney General Barr.
I had higher expectations for him.
He shaped the narrative after the Mueller report.
He, in fact, then also had this testimony today that I think was very carefully nuanced as a way to try to support Donald Trump's positions.
So he acted more like a personal lawyer for Donald Trump today rather than the Attorney General.
Poor said today that spying did occur on the president's campaign.
I'm wondering what your reaction was.
Well, I thought it was both stunning and scary.
I was amazed at that and rather disappointed that the Attorney General would say such a thing.
The term spying has all kinds of negative connotations.
And I have to believe he chose that term deliberately.
Donald Trump wanted his Roy Cohn.
He got his Roy Cohn.
Except you can tell Barr doesn't really feel it like Roy Cohn did.
He knows that what he's saying is unbelievably reckless.
And you can almost see in his mind Barr going, okay, how do I answer this question so Trump doesn't tweet at me, so I keep my job, but still not make a jackass of myself for life.
That's tough.
Fox News is in charge of the Justice Department.
I mean, this really is an extraordinary adoption of the conspiratorial language that the president and his supporters in the news media use to describe the Mueller investigation, the Justice Department.
He's obviously been watching a lot of Fox since he became a private citizen.
All right, there you have the reaction.
By the way, very predictable.
And I've been warning that this would happen, that this would come, that this is real.
Bill Barr, the Attorney General, confirming what we have known now for a long time.
The evidence now is not even in dispute.
It is overwhelming and it is incontrovertible.
On multiple fronts, there was spying on the Trump campaign by the Obama administration officials, some of whose voices I believe you heard right there in that montage.
We now have four examples.
The nine-month FBI investigation, the House Intelligence Committee investigation, the bipartisan Senate Committee investigation into Trump-Russia collusion, and now definitively the Mueller report, no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.
By the way, that was quoted in the Attorney General's letter.
We'll probably know more by Monday.
If this is their reaction to just this small bit of information, what are they going to do as we now get these criminal referrals?
What are they going to do now that Barr has launched an investigation into the investigation?
What have we been calling it for such a long period of time?
Investigate the investigators.
What are they going to do as it relates to the FISA abuse that we know occurred?
We know that everybody in the upper echelon, FBI DOJ, was warned.
They were warned in August of 2016 by Bruce Orr that this Russian dossier was bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and company, funneled money, law firm Perkins Cooey, to a op research firm, Fusion GPS, to a foreign agent, spy, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele.
And we now know Christopher Steele does not himself stand by his dossier, claims it's raw intelligence.
I don't know if any of it's true, 50-50.
Well, the problem is, is that 50-50 intelligence, the ones that he doesn't stand by, as Bruce Orr warned, she paid for it.
It's never been verified or corroborated.
And Steele hated Trump and was invested in Trump losing.
Well, that was never told the FISA court.
Well, then the FISA court was given a fraudulent application.
And remember, McCabe says no dossier.
There is no FISA warrant.
It wouldn't have happened.
So they withhold information that's critical to the court, which is that Hillary paid for it.
Now we know it's an unverifiable document.
They can't claim they verified it because most of it's been debunked.
And secondly, the author of the dossier doesn't support it.
And they did it four separate times.
They did this every three months.
And they did it by getting by going after Trump campaign associate, Carter Page.
That gave them a backdoor into all things Trump world.
It gave them everything.
So spying did occur.
That's another example.
And by the way, we did have a 350% increase in the surveillance unmasking of American citizens in 2016 by the Obama administration.
You know, even Samantha Powers of the UN, you know, is out there 300 unmasking requests that she says she, I never did that.
I don't know what that's about.
And you can go, there were other issues as well that came up.
You know, we know, for example, look at the case of Stefan Halper.
You know, we know that Halper was a professor, was asked by the FBI, engaged by the FBI, to be an informant for the FBI to penetrate the Trump campaign.
New York Times reported, quote, agents involved in the Russia investigation asked Mr. Halper, an American academic who teaches in Britain, to gather information on Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, another, well, he was a low-level Trump campaign foreign policy advisor.
And Halper went beyond Page and Papadopoulos and also contacting and seeking information from Sam Clovis.
And it wasn't clear whether Halper had the FBI's blessings to contact Mr. Clovis.
Anyway, so the Halper case, as Brian Byron York writes today, is more evidence that spying did occur.
And as to the question of bar, he continues, the question is whether or not it was adequately predicated, meaning whether the FBI presented evidence sufficient to justify the surveillance.
Well, the Grassley Graham memo tells us the bulk of the application and the FISA warrant was the phony Clinton bought and paid for Russian dossier.
And we know they didn't tell the court, the judges, the FISA court judges, that she paid for it.
Well, that's spying.
Jonathan Gillum, former FBI agent, federal air marshal, author of the bestseller Sheep No More, Danielle McLaughlin, attorney, constitutional expert.
Welcome both of you.
Jonathan, you've been in this game, this business long enough.
Sounds like spying to me.
It sounds like Barr told the truth and they can't handle it.
Yeah, and I tell you, that is one of the greatest montages that you've ever played because there are several, I don't know if people realize this, but there are several very important people that are making comments, congresswomen, former head of the CIA, NSA, that are saying things so ridiculous that you know that they're freaking out, that now they see what's really going to happen,
and this is the ultimate thing that they didn't want to happen when Hillary lost, was for this to go forward and nothing to come out, and now the AG has the ability to do a real investigation to see if spying occurred.
The fact that she would ask, whichever congresswoman that was, would ask the attorney general, well, why would you look into this?
That is the craziest, dumbest question I've ever heard.
That's his job.
That's why he's hired.
The very fact that he said he's going to look into this should give people a sense of respect for him, a sense of strength that he's going to go and do his job that he was hired to do.
And I think when we look at the other thing that really bothers me about that montage is the fact that we don't have journalism anymore.
There's very few news agencies, we want to call them news agencies, that actually stick to collecting information and disseminating information.
These are echo chambers for the DNC.
And I think this really bothers me tremendously because they have free reign of the airways to say whatever they want for the DNC, and they're going after government officials that are doing their job.
And that's kind of shaky ground for illegal behavior in my book.
What do you think, Danielle?
I mean, you're a lawyer, so if you don't present information that is pertinent, and remember, Andrew McCabe, deputy FBI director, said no dossier, no FISA warrant.
But they never told the court that Hillary bought and paid for this Russian information.
They never told the court that Christopher Steele, that he himself didn't stand by his own dossier, that it's really unverifiable.
There is, to me, that is beyond a constitutional violation of Mr. Page's rights against unreasonable search, seizure, warrant issues, etc.
But more importantly, it gave them a backdoor into the Trump campaign by committing a fraud.
We'll let you answer that on the other side.
All right, Danielle.
So they don't tell the FISA court Hillary paid for it.
We now know that the author of the dossier doesn't even stand by his own dossier.
He has no idea if the information is true.
They were all warned about this ahead of time, but yet they used it as the bulk of information in a FISA application.
Is that a fraud on the court?
The court was informed in a pretty lengthy footnote that the dossier was the result of a political candidate's work.
No, it says it might have a slight political taint.
And the judge was able to knew that and was able to make their own determination.
That's a great bubble.
But they know Hillary paid for it.
You should have put in big bold letters, this document was bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton, the opposition party candidate.
Here's the thing.
Notice, Jonathan, she doesn't want to deal with that fact.
I want to ask this is the context of all of this, okay?
Carter Page was of concern to the FBI going back to 2013 because of his relationships and contacts with people that the FBI believed to be connected to Russian intelligence.
So it wasn't that he was associated with the Trump campaign solely.
He had been talking to the FBI.
They had warned him to stay away from these people.
He declined to do so.
And George Papadopoulos, the reason he was swept up in this was because, as we all know, he got drunk with an Australian diplomat in London and said that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
That was May of 2016.
I want our government to look into these kinds of things.
I don't want our government to spy on me, on you, on a candidate for president, but I do want them to do their job.
And I do think they did their job.
That's fine if Barr wants to investigate, but the DOJ's Office of Inspector General has been investigating this for a year, specifically whether there were Pfizer abuses.
So let's wait and see what they come out with.
Their last report was 500 pages long, and that was looking at what the FBI did as it related to the Clinton email investigation and her server.
Let's let the OIG do the job that they're meant to do.
All right, Jonathan, we'll give you the last word today.
Well, I've calmed down now after hearing that montage because I love that montage that you played earlier.
But I got to tell you, this whole thing is just utterly ridiculous in the way of how this case came about.
Any agent that's ever worked with a Pfizer would tell you that information that has to get scrubbed, and there's a special unit that actually scrubs that information to make sure that it is viable and to make sure that it is real.
That did not happen in this case.
That is, in and of itself, a big deal.
But the fact that this entire case was built upon false evidence and that they were allowed to go and, yes, spy on a presidential candidate is a major thing.
What is even worse, though, is the fact that people who were elected to protect this country, that's one of the reasons why they're elected into office, to protect this country, are playing political games to the point where they were actually involved with the reasons why the spying was being done.
And now they're trying to cover that up on a massive scale.
This is something we've never seen.
All right.
Thank you both.
We appreciate it.
Quick break.
Right back.
We'll get to your phone calls next half hour.
We have a great Hannity tonight, nine Eastern.
Hey guys, we're in D.C. today asking what people think about President Obama's comments on assimilation.
Is it good?
Is it bad?
Is it racist?
We're going to ask.
If you're going to have a coherent, cohesive society, then everybody has to have some agreed upon rules.
It's not racist to say, ah, if you're going to be here, then you should learn the language of the country that you just arrived at.
These are comments from the president about immigration from this weekend.
And we're just seeing what people think, and you can read it here.
That's most definitely a racist idea.
I don't know what he's going.
You just thought what he's going for.
It's extremely racist for him to believe that English is the only language that we should know.
I don't agree with that statement that you have to learn English in order to come to this country.
So you're not in favor of any kind of assimilation at all?
No, no.
English isn't even the dominant language in the world.
I'm against the idea of forcing people to learn English or saying that if you don't learn English, you can't get a job here.
Do you think people should adopt any parts of American culture or not really?
No, I really don't.
I think people should be free to live their life wherever they want to live.
Do you think you should be encouraged?
I think that the resources should be made available and accessible to everyone.
Are you in favor of open borders as well?
Yes.
Well, I mean, you should learn the language, but you can't learn it immediately if you don't know it.
If you're going to have a coherent, cohesive society, then everybody has to have some agreed upon rules.
I agree.
I travel around the world.
Just got back from Cuba.
I can't get benefits for Cuba.
I mean, I think it's good for, yeah, some people should learn English because they're not going to understand a lot.
I agree wholeheartedly.
If you're going to come to our country, you should assimilate.
It's only fair if you're a citizen and you have the proper documents.
Would you say that you support the president on this particular issue?
Well, you know, if you're asking me about this particular comment, then that's about all I can say is I can understand and appreciate that comment.
I think Trump is right.
He needs to enforce this law.
Americans should be first.
So would it surprise you if I told you that these are President Obama's comments, actually not President Trump?
So that surprise you?
No, I know I don't agree with a lot of President Obama's immigration policy ideas as well.
So my ideas definitely wouldn't change.
It doesn't surprise me at all.
If it's Obama, Trump, whoever, it's law as a law.
Like, what's up with Obama?
I didn't talk to him.
For real.
Let me call Obama.
Just get him up on the phone.
So does it surprise you at all if I tell you these are from President Obama as opposed to President Trump?
These are actually President Obama's quotes?
To me, that would make a lot more sense.
Would it surprise you if I said these are actually President Obama's comments?
No, not really.
I don't think any of our presidents have been completely great.
So it would open up opportunities for them if they learned English.
Yes.
Yeah, it would, yes, most definitely.
So that sounds a little bit like you might be in favor of some parts of assimilation.
Probably some.
So maybe some assimilation, but with respect for original cultures.
Yeah.
Do you get ever any heat from anybody for supporting Trump on that issue?
Yeah, they have their common, but I really don't care because I've been around the world and I can't get what you can get.
Only in America you can do this.
Now that's extremely funny.
Glad you're with us 24 now till the top of the hour.
800-941 Sean toll-free telephone number.
RedState.com put that together.
And what they did is, you know, people were asked if Trump's immigration quotes are racist.
Yeah, then they turned out to be Obama's.
You know, you think about it.
What is the language of success?
You know, all of this, put everything else aside.
Will you be denied opportunities?
Let's assume for a second you come to this country, you come to this country legally, you go through the process.
Are there going to be jobs and opportunities, many of them, that you will not be qualified for if you don't speak English?
And the answer is yes.
So that would be assimilation.
That would be English, the language of success.
And if you care about people and you want them to be successful, that at some point has to be a requirement for them.
But apparently, I guess not for some others.
Anyway, it's funny.
I mean, through the prism of politics, isn't it?
It's interesting to watch.
You know, everybody's, oh my gosh, Julian Assange hacked us.
Well, we know Hillary's email server was hacked with classified, marked classified, top secret, marked top secret, and special access programming information.
You know, we learned this week that they took a sampling of only 40 emails from Hillary's 30, some odd thousand of them.
And yeah, four of the 40 were marked top secret.
And that's, but if it's Hillary, it's a different story.
If it's Justice Kavanaugh and a Trump appointee going on the Supreme Court, then I believe.
If it's the lieutenant governor of Virginia, yeah, not so much.
You care about building walls and keeping our borders secure and helping dreamers and you believe in DACA and all these things.
Yeah, if Obama's president, but not if Trump is president.
On so many of the same issues.
It is time and time again.
This hypocrisy just rains down on you.
All right, let's get to our phones.
800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program, we had a great Hannity tonight.
Remember, we're the only ones that interviewed Julian Assange, and we're going to go back to that issue as well.
You know, I go back to an original question I asked earlier in the program.
Now, Julian Assange was steadfast in my interviews with him in saying that it was not Russia, that it was not a state, not a state party.
Okay, maybe it's parsing of words in some way.
And if you wanted to get to the truth of exactly where the information, I don't care if it's the Chelsea Manning, Afghanistan tape, which goes back in 2010, or whether or not it's the DNC emails, Podesta emails, whatever it happens to be.
I've got to imagine that probably the one guy that has the answer as to where he got his information from would be Julian Assange.
And yet, as far as I know, the only lawmaker to ever make an attempt to go see the guy and talk to him and ask him was Dana Rohrbacher.
I don't know anybody else that did, but you would think forensically he might actually have the evidence that could say, I got it here.
Now, maybe that leads back to a Russian agent of some kind.
Maybe it doesn't.
Maybe they don't want the answer.
Maybe they didn't want the answer.
Maybe, you know, most in the intel community, they will say, yeah, they believe the information came from Russia or these pot companies.
And, you know, the sad thing is, is all of this is preventable because we've been warned.
2014, Devin Nunes warned the world, yes, the Russians are going to do what they always do, which is trying to wreak havoc on the American electoral system.
And this time, you know, they tried again.
Now, nobody seems to care that we have evidence.
Ukraine wants to give us the evidence.
And nobody seems interested of their attempts to help influence the 2016 election in Hillary Clinton's favor.
And yet, we have a case where Joe Biden's son, you know, is involved in a business deal and that his son is being investigated by a prosecutor.
And Joe Biden then leverages taxpayer money.
And we have that on tape and brags about, well, I'm only here six hours.
Either he's gone or you don't get the money.
You don't trust me?
Call Obama.
He's going to do what I say.
I said, I'm not going to give, we're not going to give you the billion dollars.
They said, you have no authority.
You're not the president.
The president said, I said, call him.
I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting a billion dollars.
I said, you're not getting a billion.
I'm going to be leaving here.
I think it was, what, six hours?
I looked.
I said, I'm leaving in six hours.
If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money.
Oh, son of a b ⁇ .
Got fired.
Yeah, this creepy, crazy Uncle Joe.
We didn't realize maybe he did.
Why did he want him fired so bad?
Wanted him fired because the guy was investigating his own son.
That's why the guy had to be fired to get the billion dollars.
And he's using taxpayer money to leverage and end an investigation into his own son.
Pretty unbelievable.
This will be a big issue in the campaign, as reported by John Solomon, investigated by him at The Hill.
All right, let's get to our busy telephones, 800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
All right.
Let's say hi to Lori is in Austin.
Hi, Lori.
How are you?
We're glad you called.
Hi, Sean.
It's an honor to talk to you.
It's a first-time caller, long-time listener.
Honor to talk to you.
Oh, you're so sweet.
Anyway, we just wanted to let you know that I got married almost 20 years ago at West Point to my Army football husband.
Congratulations.
Good for you.
Wow.
He's a good dude.
And we chose to move our five kids from Boston to Austin.
So from Sassachusetts to Tax Less Texas.
And I can't even tell you the difference.
The first year we got a refund check from the government.
I looked at my husband.
I begged him.
I said, please put it in a bank account.
Don't touch it.
Make believe it's not there because they're going to want it back.
I didn't believe that we were getting money back from the government with such a foreign concept.
And this year, we are going to be getting the single largest tax return in our 46 years on planet Earth.
And I want to say a huge thank you to President Trump.
You want to know what the irony of this is, is I'm going to pay more this year.
Now, I've always said it's not about me.
And by the way, I'm so happy for you because that's money you can put away for your kids, maybe get a new car, maybe go out to dinner and save for college fund.
I don't know.
Whatever you guys want to do.
Life is expensive.
I always say to every single person that works for me, they all get talks about money.
Linda, right?
How many times have I, have you heard the talk that I've given?
Many, many times.
I haven't given it to Katie yet, but she's getting it.
And Kylie's going to get it too.
And what do I always say about money?
Money is freedom.
Exactly.
And, you know, every year I like to give everybody that works for me.
It doesn't matter what position.
We have a very big TV staff.
We have a kind of small, we'll call it familiar, right?
We have like family radio staff.
And I like to give people bonuses.
I try to be generous and I try and consider how hard everybody works every year.
And we try and build in good raises when people deserve it and all that sort of thing.
And the thing is that I, you know, when let's say you give somebody a $5,000 bonus.
That's a lot of money, right?
I'll always say to people, I'm going to come from, that's a ton of money.
Yeah, don't blow this money.
You know, maybe get one thing you want, put the rest away, because then it gives you freedom to make better choices.
Maybe freedom at one point, maybe you want to buy a house, you want to get a car, all those things.
So for years, red states have the low-taxed states or no-tax state income tax states, they have not had the benefit of states like New York, California, New Jersey that have very high state income taxes.
And as a result, they never got to deduct that money from their taxes.
And in many ways, they were subsidizing a benefit for states that elect these tax and spend politicians.
Now, I didn't vote for Andrew Cuomo.
I haven't voted for any Democrat in New York.
But as a result of the president's tax cuts, he's not giving that benefit to high-tax states anymore.
And frankly, I don't think it's fair that he did, that the government did before him, because he's given a benefit and rewarding states for taxing their citizens, their residents, even more.
And so as a result, you see this mass exodus out of states like New York, California, New Jersey, and Illinois.
And I don't blame people.
We did.
We did.
Still are.
Forbid the rich leave.
Bye-bye.
I mean, it's crazy.
Anyway, 800-941, Sean.
Congratulations, Lori.
Happy anniversary to you as well.
And we wish you all the best.
Let's say hi to Bob.
He's in Florida.
Bob, a no-income tax state.
How are you?
I'm great, Sean.
Thank you so much for taking my call.
I listen all the time and watch there most every night.
And if I fall asleep and crash early, I've got it recorded so I still catch it.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Oh, you're quite welcome.
I was calling about Uncle Bernie's comments about the new Medicare for all, how it's going to be a great boon to the whole country, and nobody will have to pay for it.
And the economy of scale is going to save them money so they can afford it, which is a bunch of baloney.
Okay.
I paid into Medicare my whole working life, a lot.
And now I finally get to retirement.
I still pay into Medicare as it's deducted from my Social Security.
And I don't think it's right that I and other people along the line have paid all that money in.
And now all you have to do is sneak across the border and get the Medicare for free.
That's just not right.
It's going to clog our hospitals, our emergency rooms.
Doctors are going to leave.
They're going to just retire early and get out.
I've talked to many of them who are friends, and they tell me that.
If that ever happens, they're done.
So it's only going to make the system worse.
It's not going to work.
And I just don't think that they're treating everybody fairly when they do that.
Listen, I agree completely with you.
I got to take a quick break.
We'll come back.
800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of this program, we had a great Hannity tonight.
All right, that's going to wrap things up for today.
We have an awesome Hannity tonight.
Yeah, the Obama White House counsel charged Greg Craig.
We'll follow that tonight.
Also, the latest meltdown from the left as it relates to the Attorney General saying he will review the FBI and the DOJ's actions, investigate the investigators.
We'll get into that.
We have the Julian Assange issue, and we will get into all the other news of the day, including the criminal referrals.
Devin Nunes, we have Alan Dershowitz, Carter Page, Greg Jarrett, Sarah Carter, Geraldo, D'Ambangino, and much more.
Tonight at 9 on Hannity, news you will not get from the Rage Trump media mob.
