Senator Mike Lee, author of the new book, "OUR LOST DECLARATION: America’s Fight Against Tyranny from King George to the Deep State " OUT TODAY - is here to discuss the news of the day and the latest on what is happening in the halls of Congress and our government. 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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It's 800-941 Sean.
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You know, I'm beginning to think there's like all of us, those of you that get it, have common sense, work hard really hard, 12, 14, 16 hours a day, you know, try and provide for your families.
You pay your taxes.
You abide by the laws.
You may speed, but we're not counting that.
You want a better life for your kids.
You sacrifice a life for your kids.
And, you know, there's got to be moments where people are just looking at what's going on and thinking, what is happening here?
How have we gotten to this point?
You know, with all the putting aside for a minute, the abuse of power, corruption, you know, rigging investigations, trying to rig presidential elections, trying to, you know, breathlessly trying to do anything and everything possible in this psychotic rage to destroy President Trump.
They can't get over their loss.
They can't get over their loss in the Mueller report.
They're just freaking out.
You know, I'm looking to New York.
You've got Comrade Bill de Blasio, maybe one day presidential candidate, and he has this green plan he wants to implement in five years.
Five years.
What is the green plan?
Oh, we'll get rid of all glass structures and all steel in terms of building you can't build with them.
And then we're going to retrofit every other building in New York, in New York City.
No, that's just like Ocasio-Cortez's, but by the way, it's not just her.
This is why it's a problem.
You know, there are now presidential candidates buying into all of this madness.
All of them.
You know, getting rid of oil and gas and getting rid of the combustion engine and getting rid of cows and airplanes.
And I'm like, okay, you have, they've all lost their minds.
You know, it's, it's really, but it's real.
That's the problem.
And it's real in as much as it's, you know, it's not just Ocasio-Cortez.
They got at least 100 of these house lunatics that are advocating, you know, free everything.
You're guaranteed a free guaranteed job, guaranteed wages, guaranteed nursery school through college or trade school or both or whatever you prefer.
Free government Medicare for all, but you can't buy private insurance.
Free, free, free.
Free retirement, everybody, whether you're willing or unwilling to work.
Guaranteed healthy government food.
Great.
Well, you know, there are days I just want original recipe from KFC.
There are days I just want a Wendy's quarter pounder with cheese and a large fry and a large Coke with a real straw.
There are days that I want a quarter pounder with cheese.
Some days I just craving a piece of pizza.
I'm saying all of this because I've been on a dice.
It's all making me starving.
But this is insanity.
And I know many of you think this can't be possible, but it is.
This is, and the lunatics, they can't accept the Trump one.
They can't accept the Mueller report.
They can't accept that everything they've built up, all the anticipation, oh, so overpromising and under-delivering.
It was never happening.
They have no idea, earthly idea, what is about to hit them.
Look at this in Starbucks.
Starbucks.
According to Business Insider, they're now installing needle disposal boxes in their bathrooms.
If ever there was a reason, besides the coffee's horrible, it really is.
It's awful.
When you try BlackRifleCoffee.com, oh, you're going to love it.
It is the best.
Why?
Why?
Why is Starbucks stores in 25 markets now feel the need to install needle disposal boxes?
All that's going to do is encourage drug addicts to go in there and shoot up.
Or if they need a needle, they'll dig their hands in and pull one out.
Dirty needle.
Not a good idea.
But that's all part of the world we're living in now.
This is now a new reality.
And I don't, I'm watching these 2020 candidates last night.
I'm like, whoa.
You know, I didn't watch it actually, but I mean, I watched the headlines and I read what happened.
I mean, it's one insane thing after all.
Amy Klobuchar impeachment proceedings are up to the house.
All right, fairly reasonable statement.
She doesn't want to go too deep into this, begging the audience at one point to clap, which cracked me up.
Bernie Sanders, even people like the Boston Marathon bombers.
Yeah, let's allow those guys to vote from prison.
And Bernie Sanders, Israel is run by a racist government?
Wow.
You talk about the rise of anti-Semitism in some in the Democratic Party.
It is outrageous.
Robert Francis Beto Bozo pretty much had said the same thing.
Bernie's confronted about socialism by the daughter of Russian refugees.
This was a great exchange.
It's two minutes.
I won't run it now, but it was, you know, he doesn't have an answer because it hasn't worked where it's tried.
And, you know, forget about keep your doctor, keep your plan, and pay less.
Millions lost doctors, millions lost plans, millions lost any choice whatsoever.
Counties, cities, towns, they have one provider they can choose from, one.
And everybody paid more money.
So much for socialism.
So much for big government promises.
You know, what happens when 180 plus million Americans don't have the choice of their own private health care?
And it's Medicare for all.
Good luck because it's not going to work.
You know, it's unbelievable.
It really is.
Then you got Elizabeth Warren.
She wants to impeach.
You know, she wants to go crazy, as crazy left as she can, thinking that's the winning lane in this primary for the Democrats.
They should vote on impeachment.
And, you know, she's going to roll back student debt and make college free.
Okay, what about the $670, what, billion dollars that people already paid?
They're asking, whoa, whoa, slow down.
What about us?
When do we get paid back?
Why do we have to pay?
I'm like, well, that's what a loan is for.
You know, when did we guarantee college?
Well, especially when we spend more money per education per capita on every student in America of any other industrialized country.
And guess what?
We have the worst results.
Kamala Harris wants to use executive action for gun control if she's elected.
Wow.
It's unreal.
By the way, Bernie Sanders is winning in all these polls.
Joe Biden apparently is getting cold feet.
And Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Amazon, but she still shops there.
That was a great headline to come out of this.
Please cheer.
Please clap.
So we're going to have impeachment, felons voting.
It is the most radical shift in American politics we've ever seen in our lives and probably will ever see.
The problem is, is that on some basic core level, there is an innate, natural human fear.
And that is that, you know, we were guaranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We're endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.
Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
No guarantee at all of anything.
But you have freedom and what people have been able to do in this country.
There's no perfect system because man is imperfect.
We'll have Mike Leon later in the program today.
He wrote a book about all this.
It's fascinating.
You know, we're not perfect people, but there's never been a country that has created more wealth, more opportunity that provides anybody from any station in life, if you will, including me, to pursue your dreams, your goals, your aspirations.
And if you really work, work, work, work, work.
I don't know people born with silver spoons in their mouths.
But all the people I know, they actually worked really, really hard for the things that they have.
You know, Bernie Sanders, grilled by this student, you know, which I thought was pretty interesting.
This woman, Samantha Frankel Papel, told Sanders about how socialism impacted her family's life, grilled him on how his version of democratic socialism will aim to be different from the socialist regimes of other countries.
My father's family, we left the Soviet Union in 79, fleeing from some of the same socialist policies you seem so eager to implement in this country.
How do you rectify your notion of democratic socialism with the failures of socialism in nearly every country that has tried it?
Sanders smiles.
Well, thank you for asking the question.
That's buying time to figure out an answer.
Is it your assumption that I supported or I believed in authoritarian communism that existed in the Soviet Union?
I don't.
I never have.
I've opposed it.
I've been, I believe, in a vigorous democracy.
Didn't he get married in the Soviet former Soviet Union?
Or didn't he go on the honeymoon there or something?
I remember reading that sometime back.
Anyway, he goes on to explain his tirade against millionaires and billionaire.
He's a millionaire and he's a cheapskate on top of it.
Him and Robert Francis Beto.
Back to Elizabeth Warren.
$640 billion student loan cancellation question, you know, over fairness to the students who did pay off those debts, by the way, including me.
Jamaica Savings Bank, $58.05.
That's what I paid at the time.
Had to pay it back for 10 years.
Made every payment.
The one student loan I got.
Regretted it every month when I had to write that check when I didn't have money.
You're right.
He did honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988.
Are you saying that on the air or on the air?
Yeah, I said it on the air.
Very good.
On the air.
On.
Yeah, he honeymoon right at the height of the Cold War.
Great place.
All of this now, you might want to dismiss some of this.
Part of you might say, oh, come on.
America's not going to do this.
I'm telling you, there is a certain appeal.
This is not one congresswoman or three congresswomen, you know, that are just pushing this radical agenda.
Is the new radical, extreme Democratic socialist party.
The same ones that want to abandon the Electoral College so New York, New Jersey, California, and Illinois will elect every president.
The same people that want to stack the Supreme Court.
The same people that want everything for free, so they will take away a certain natural innate fear.
A lot of people worry about money.
It's normal.
It's natural.
The best way to deal with that fear is to dig deeper and deeper and work harder and harder and don't spend money.
The only way you save money is you don't spend as much money, except if you're Joe Biden.
Only way to spend money is to make money or save money is to spend it.
No, save it.
All right, as you roll, I know these are really, you know, troubled times.
I mean, it really just, you don't even believe it's possible.
You know, I never thought in my life we'd live through what we've just lived through.
I never thought we'd discover the things that we've discovered.
And the amount of work, we're only a quarter into the story.
The Mueller report, all right, it is the fourth time now that we've had investigations that came up with the same answer.
No, Russia, Trump, Trump campaign, collusion.
You had the FBI nine-month investigation, struck and paid.
No, they're there.
Nope.
Came up empty.
We had nothing before Mueller was appointed.
And the House Intel Committee and the Senate Bipartisan Committee, then the Mueller report.
But they just can't stop themselves because they are just full of this hate.
You know, they pumped up their base, the resistance, those that never got over Donald Trump winning.
They raised their expectations, praising and putting on a pedestal Robert Mueller.
They were finally going to get what they wanted to remove Donald Trump.
But sad thing, along the way, truth and facts got in the way.
And the reality that there wasn't any collusion or conspiracy or obstruction is not even stopping them.
They just, well, we'll do it this way now.
Or we'll just, I'll tell you what, why don't we start another investigation?
We'll empower the IRS to go after our political enemies and turn over private personal information.
That's how we'll do it.
Is that the government we expected when we grew up?
All right, so now Democrats, they just have to hit new levels of delusion.
They just have to come up with new conspiracy theories, new reckless fantasies about how they'll impeach Trump.
You know, everything to harass a sitting president.
Let's go down that road.
There are important questions like, when did Robert Mueller know there was no collusion, no coordination?
And why didn't he tell us immediately and let this cloud hang over a duly elected president?
Why hold it back?
If they knew there was no underlying crime, why not tell us, we, the people, you know, hello, we, the people, that little thing called the Constitution.
You know, how do you not investigate in a Russian interference investigation?
And by the way, Devin Nunes warned everybody.
They've done it before.
They'll do it again.
In 2014, and the Obama administration, remember, this all happened on their watch.
Of course, they didn't listen to Devin Nunes.
They didn't even acknowledge it until it became politically expedient as an excuse for Hillary's beatdown in the election that nobody saw coming.
They didn't see the Mueller report coming and they didn't see Trump coming in 2016.
They were laughing when those exit polls came out.
I can tell you on election day, ah, watch, media's giddy.
Eight or nine o'clock Eastern.
Uh-oh, panic set in and you could see it.
Doesn't putting a lot of Democrats focused on impeaching the president, which is not going to pass in the Senate, it's not really going to go anywhere in that sense, doesn't that take away focus from the tabletop issues that you and other Democrats say they want to run on?
So, you know, let me just say, if you've actually read the Mueller report, it's all laid out there.
It's not like it's going to take a long time to figure this out.
It's there.
It's got the footnotes.
It's got the points.
It connects directly to the law.
But this really is fundamentally.
I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.
And so did everybody else in the Senate and in the House.
And I believe that every person in the Senate and the House ought to have to vote and to say either, yeah, that's okay with me.
Yeah, let a president just step in the way he did when he told the White House counsel to go fire Mueller and then told the White House counsel to go lie about having told the White House counsel to go fire Mueller and then told the White House counsel to write a letter saying that Donald Trump had not told him to go fire Mueller and then to say, why on earth would you take notes about what I said to you?
The lawyers I deal with never put anything in writing.
If there are people in the House of the Senate who want to say that's what a president can do when the president is being investigated for his own wrongdoings or when a foreign government attacks our country, then they should have to take that vote and live with it for the rest of their lives.
Senator Sanders, you have said that you believe that people with felony records should be allowed to vote while in prison.
Does this mean that you would support enfranchising people like the Boston marathon bomber, a convicted terrorist and murderer?
Do you think that those convicted of sexual assault should have the opportunity to vote for politicians who could have a direct impact on women's rights?
I think the right to vote is inherent to our democracy.
Yes, even for terrible people.
Because once you start chipping away and you say, well, that guy committed a terrible crime, not going to let him vote.
Or that person did that.
Not going to let that person vote.
You're running down a slippery slope.
So I believe that people who commit crimes, they pay the price.
When they got out of jail, I believe they certainly should have the right to vote.
But I do believe that even if they are in jail, they're paying their price to society.
But that should not take away their inherent American right to participate in our democracy.
Upon being elected, I will give the United States Congress 100 days to get their act together and have the courage to pass reasonable gun safety laws.
And if they fail to do it, then I will take executive action.
And specifically, what I will do is put in place a requirement that for anyone who sells more than five guns a year, they are required to do background checks when they sell those guns.
I will require that for any gun dealer that breaks the law, the ATF take their license.
And by the way, ATF, alcohol, tobacco, and firearms.
Well, the ATF has been doing a lot of the A and the T, but not much to the F.
And we need to fix that.
No, we'll just do everything by executive fiat power.
We'll just delegate what I want.
Forget legislation.
You know, we don't need a legislative branch, but by the way, remember, they're going to say, well, Donald Trump used the emergency service to get.
Well, there's actually a real law that we cited to you that specifically grants the president of the United States to actually use funds when there's drug trafficking on our southern border.
On top of, yeah, there's been a lot of homicides and 90% of heroin crosses that border, now fentanyl crossing that border and cartels and gang members and 30,000 sexual assaults in two years, nearly 4,000 plus homicides and 100,000 violent assaults by illegal immigrant alien criminals.
That's not good for the American people.
The president also has a little constitutional pledge that he makes as he takes on the role as commander in chief to keep us safe.
It's just unbelievable.
This is your modern, radical, extreme Democratic socialist party.
This is what they stand for.
You know, it's amazing.
You look at some of the numbers.
I'm watching some of these highlights and listening to some of these highlights today.
And it's just so outrageous.
Wall Street Journal had a good piece out today.
As the Democrats, remember, Medicare for all means to Kamala Harris and some of these other candidates, you have no option.
We have over 180 million Americans that have private insurance.
You have no option to get your own plan.
You're stuck.
So if it doesn't work out, if the promises aren't fulfilled, if they run out of money, well, it's going to be like the National Health Services in Great Britain.
They actually, if you're a person that has met your life expectancy, you need a hip replacement, knee replacement.
Well, you've already lived your expected amount of years.
You're likely not going to get it.
There's a reason that so many wealthy Canadians come to America for health care.
Their single payer system is so great that people prefer to spend money out of pocket in the United States to get, you know, their stents, their knee replacements, back work, whatever they happen to need cancer treatment here in the U.S.
And what makes me mad about the Republicans on this side is, you know, here they tell us for seven years they're going to do something and then vote 65 times, show votes.
And then when the moment comes, the moment of truth, they get a real president that is going to repeal and replace.
You know, they didn't even have an idea.
And how many times in that seven-year period did we put Dr. Josh Umber on this program from Wichita, who has created a system that is brilliant.
Concierge medical care for every American.
50 bucks a month, unlimited care for adults, 10 bucks a month for your kids.
He negotiates directly with the pharmaceutical companies, 95% reduction in prices.
If you have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, whatever you need in terms of a prescription, you walk out of the doctor's office with it.
50 bucks a month.
Stitches, broken bones.
If you need an x-ray, you pay an extra couple of bucks, not even $10.
He has cancer treatment drugs, breast cancer drugs, chemotherapy drugs.
He's told me six bucks a treatment because he negotiated directly.
He's duplicated this model around the country.
Now you couple that 50 bucks a month.
You buy a catastrophic health care plan.
God forbid you get the cancer.
God forbid the bad accident.
God forbid the heart attack.
That costs real money and you need a big hospital, not the day-to-day stuff, blood pressure, cholesterol, you know, oh, my toes are going numb, whatever, whatever.
I mean, everybody has whatever.
And the higher the deductible, let's say you have a $10,000 deductible.
All right, maybe you can't afford $10,000, $5,000, but the higher the deductible, the catastrophic plan is going to pay for everything if just in case something horrible happens.
That's what insurance is supposed to be about.
Now nobody wants to pay a $10 copay.
And everybody thinks doctors who spend all these years in college and medical school and residencies and internships.
And then I have all those student loans to pay back.
And then they want to put an office light on and they got to pay the rent.
And then they got to pay the electric bill.
Then they got to hire the nurses and the aides and the blah, blah, blah.
It's, you know, when do they, and people get upset.
Doctors make too much money.
No, they don't.
By the time they start paying back, nope.
I know, for whatever reason, I'm friends with so many doctors.
And it's not what you think.
In part because the government dictates, it's not supply and demand crisscrossing and dictating price.
No.
The government says how much you can charge.
I know doctors that will forbid their own kids that probably have a natural inclination or talent towards medicine because they've been around it their whole life.
And you talk them out of it.
Like I talk my kids out.
Don't go in the public eye no matter what you do.
That's what I tell mine.
Just stay, you know, go do something where it's not public.
That's my advice.
I don't care what you do.
It's up to you.
Well, anyway, back to the Wall Street Journal.
You know, it's a little reality check for people.
You know, we can afford to expand Medicare coverage.
Every single person.
You know, keep your doctor, keep your plan, save less.
Here we go again.
By the way, no doubt coverage probably for illegal immigrants, too.
We already paid that cost, billions and billions of dollars.
Educational system, the healthcare system, criminal justice system, because we don't secure our borders.
Anyway, so the Wall Street Journal's reality check on this, their latest report by the trustees of Social Security and Medicare, quote, both Social Security and Medicare face long-term financing shortfalls under currently scheduled benefits and financing.
Medicare's hospital insurance fund would be depleted in 2026 as lower payroll taxes and reduced income from the taxation of Social Security benefits weighed on the trust fund's income.
Basically like a Ponzi scheme that they've had all these years.
Problem is the population now is aging.
What it means is if you're 50 years old now, you're going to see major cuts in your Social Security.
And then let me tell you what else is coming.
Then they're going to do a, if you were smart enough to save money, well, we're not going to give you your, sorry, we're going to legalize stealing it.
You pay it in your whole working life, and they will come across, means test the whole thing.
And the trust funds costs, the journal goes on, meanwhile, are expected to be slightly higher than last year due to higher spending and higher projected provider payment updates.
The cost of both programs projected to rise substantially as a share of the economy over the next 16 years as a wave of retiring baby boomers boost the number of beneficiaries and lower birth rates over the past few decades weigh on employment growth and economic output.
Whoopsie daisy, they can't afford it.
You know, one of the things, you know, America is going to have a choice election in 2020.
It's going to be, do you want the new Green Deal?
Do you want everything, every fear taken away by people that will never be able to fulfill it?
$94 trillion original cost.
Literally, it takes up Medicare for all in the first 10 years will take up 80% of the budget.
Forget about the new Green Deal.
Now there's economic thought that's been saying, well, the Trump economy has been doing so well, so long that a contraction is pretty much inevitable, but MarketWatch has a different take on that today.
Economists have been busy ratcheting up their estimates of first quarter gross domestic product after a series of signs that growth sped up towards the end of the period.
Bright spots included a rebound in consumer spending, declining U.S. trade deficit, and a rock-solid labor market.
One of the top Wall Street forecasters, macroeconomic advisors lifted their GDP estimate to 2.8%, just 1% a month ago.
Art Laffer, tight labor markets help the poor, the minorities, and the disenfranchised.
Art Laffer, economist, author of Trump Enomics Inside the America, First Plan to Revive Our Economy.
Yeah, well, we know that already because we see record low unemployment for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, women in the workplace, youth unemployment.
Yeah.
And by the way, that means we have more than a million jobs, the lowest record unemployment applications ever.
And that means we have a million more jobs available today than we have people to fill them.
Now we're going to risk that for the new Green Deal and no steel or glass buildings in New York, no oil and gas.
Oil and gas, it is like it is the key.
We're now energy independent for the first time in 70 years.
But you want what we partnered with North Dakota oil companies or in the Balkan boom.
Remember, I believe prices were driven down by OPEC.
We don't need to be dependent on countries that hate our guts for the lifeblood of our economy.
Nor should Western Europe be dependent on Vladimir Putin and making Russia rich again.
That pisses me off, like Germany did with Merkel.
So now we're a net exporter of energy.
You want every American to get rich?
Well, in North Dakota, they were paying truck drivers to train them, pay them a base salary of 80 grand a year and all the overtime you can have.
Now, if you work hard, wow, that's life-changing for somebody who's making 40 grand a year.
Now you can afford that truck you've always had your eye on.
Now you can maybe, you know, start saving for a down payment for a new house.
If we went full bore energy in this country, every American would have a shot at being rich in the sense that a nice home in a safe neighborhood, a nice car, truck, whatever you want, van, and then you'd be able to take your kids to Disney.
You'll hate it, but you'll have to do it.
At least by the second trip, you'll begin to hate it.
Trust me, the lines are atrocious, even with FastPass.
You know, or whatever other vacation you want, be able to go out to dinner, not have to worry about it.
I mean, that would be great for every American.
The great thing about the Trump economic boom is it helped the forgotten men and women in this country.
That's the best part of it.
The people that deserve it the most.
What I found out recently, which was really quite surprising, the dossier, which really is got a lot of garbage in it, and Mueller found that to be the case, early in building the intelligence community assessment on Russian interference in an early draft, they actually put the dossier on page two in kind of a breakout box.
I think it was the CIA pushing this.
Real intelligence experts looked at this and said, no, this is not intelligence.
This is garbage.
And they took it out.
But in this process, the idea that they would include something like that in one of the great stellar intelligence assessments, as Mueller also found out, is highly questionable.
Needs to be investigated.
Sir, could I ask you a couple of questions?
Will you testify before Congress, sir?
No comment.
Are you sure about that, sir?
If he were anybody but the president, would Mr. Trump be indicted, sir?
Now that you now that you finish, now that you finished.
Sir, why didn't you make a recommendation to Congress one way or the other?
Are you going on vacation on these?
Did the Attorney General accurately characterize your positions on conspiracy and obstruction, sir?
It's amazing.
New York Times, Bob Woodward said, the steel dossier is garbage.
It should be investigated.
All right, a little too late, but welcome to the club.
And NBC correspondent tries to ask Mueller a question.
Leave people at church alone, just like leave their kids alone.
It's ridiculous.
Even, you know, it's Easter Sunday.
He can't take the camera out of the guy's face.
Newt Kingrich is with us, former Speaker of the House, Fox News contributor, who has a brand new novel he wrote, and it's coming out, I think, next Tuesday.
It's called Collusion that he wrote.
Boy, I'm sure that's not ripped from the day's headlines.
How are you?
I'm having a ball.
And I just want to point out my novel is about real collusion, in which a Senate aide tries to help the Russians poison the U.S. Senate.
So it gives you a taste of what real collusion.
Wait a minute.
Wouldn't it be real collusion, too, if you paid for a Russian dossier that was filled with, as the New York Times is now reporting, likely Russian disinformation?
Hmm.
Why didn't they investigate that?
That could be real collusion.
Of course, that's why I think I may be one of the few people who believes that this dance is not yet over.
I don't think that we are at the end of the game here.
I think we're maybe one-third of the way into the game because the more you look at the Mueller report, the more you think about it, the more questions there are.
And there's more by the day.
So we get the Mueller report.
They can't be any more clear about there's no collusion.
You know, as Bill Barr said, he had been as long, well as Rob Rosenstein.
It took them really seconds to determine.
It didn't rise to the level on obstruction.
And then he also included the office of legal counsel and that it had no consideration on the question of whether you can or cannot indict a sitting president.
That wasn't an issue.
But you still have the obsessive, compulsive, rage, Trump-hating Democrats and this media mob that is addicted to waking up.
You once said every morning, how do I hate Donald Trump today?
Right.
Well, but I'm just, look, I'm surprised that you're surprised.
This is who they are.
Well, sometimes you cut your losses, that you got your ass kicked.
You should be embarrassed by now.
That would require rationality.
Good point.
I stand corrected.
Yeah, I mean, that would require them to actually think in a calculating way.
And I think they're incapable of that because I think they are so psychologically traumatized.
These people are watching the end of their world.
And I think that's what we don't fully appreciate.
That if you are the old establishment, day by day, week by week, you are watching your system being torn apart.
And every week that goes by, you're watching Donald Trump appoint more conservative judges.
You're watching Mitch McConnell get him through the Senate.
You're watching more regulations being repealed.
So if you're a real old-time liberal, this is just terrifying.
And the guy doing it to you is Donald Trump.
And you know that can't be true.
I mean, you know, he wasn't on TBS.
He wasn't in Downtown Abbey.
He did a reality show.
How can a reality show president be beating you and yet he is defeating the entire establishment?
He lives in their minds, the minds of Democrats, the minds of those in the media, the 99% that missed the biggest story of their life and got wrong for two plus years, their narrative, their lies, their anonymous sources on collusion, et cetera, in Russia.
Let me ask you, when you combine now, it's like, all right, well, let's empower the IRS.
Well, we'll subpoena the IRS.
They'll give us Donald Trump's taxes.
I'm like, really?
We're going to now head off on a fishing expedition anywhere we can go and empower the IRS to do something like that.
And then you add the new Green Deal.
The New Green Deal is interesting.
I don't know if you saw what's going on in New York, but Comrade Bill de Blasio in five years is going to prevent skyscrapers from being made with glass and steel.
I don't know we can't build them with any lumber because that would be a bad idea.
We'd be killing trees.
Look, no, no.
Look, given de Blasio's mental IQ, they should be made with Play-Doh.
Well, there's nothing else that's suitable.
We can't use trees.
What are we going to use then to build the buildings?
We're not.
They don't want to build buildings.
They want to replicate the homelessness of San Francisco and Los Angeles and Seattle.
Where do you see what we got tonight?
Oh, right where Nancy Pelosi lives.
We sent our cameras back.
They have two massive, well, three massive problems.
Record high homelessness, feces.
They're literally going to the bathroom in the streets all over the place, and needles are everywhere.
Right.
The American left is recreating the third world.
They are trying to guarantee that you can live in poverty, misery, without any of the things which we've come to consider civilization.
And then they retreat to their well-protected, very expensive enclaves, where they, by the way, have walls and guards.
And they commiserate about how sad it all is.
Well, you're on your game.
All right.
So let me ask you a political question.
So let's assume the Democrats, the radicals went out and they want to go for impeachment.
They want the tax returns.
They begin investigation after investigation.
In the meantime, they're doing no work for the American people.
Put that aside.
Then they also pursue no oil, no gas, no glass or steel for structures, no combustion engine, and eventually no planes and cars.
I'm sorry, planes or cows.
And in the meantime, everything's going to be free.
70% top marginal tax rate for individuals, 90% for corporations.
Then the wealth tax, if you happen to save a few bucks after you paid everything, you know, Elizabeth Warren wants to tax you again, which would legalize stealing.
So let's remember where this all started.
I started in several months ago talking about a wealth tax, an ultra-millionaire's tax.
It's two cents on every dollar of the great fortunes above $50 million.
So you're $50 million and first dollar.
You got to pay two cents and two cents on all of the dollars after that.
And here's how the money works out.
If we put that two cent wealth tax in place on the 75,000 largest fortunes in this country, two cents, we can do universal child care for every baby zero to five, universal pre-K, universal college, and knock back the student loan debt burden for 95% of our students and still have nearly a trillion dollars left over.
Part one is that we say that we are going to roll back student loan debt for about 95% of students who have debt.
That's part one.
And part two is to make sure that we never get in this mess again on student loan debt, and that is to make college universally available with free tuition and fees and to put more money into Pell Grants so that students of color, so that our poorest students have real access to college, and that we put some real money into our historically black colleges and universities.
This is about opportunity for everyone.
And then if you die, you pay another 50%.
What difference does it make?
Give it all.
But the point is, then they're going to give everybody everything for free.
Daycare, health care, you know, from nursery school through college, retirement, guaranteed job, guaranteed healthy food.
Even if you're unwilling to work, you still get the benefits.
How is all this combined going to play out in an election in 2020?
Well, the first thing it's going to do by probably this summer or early this fall, it's just going to split the Democratic Party.
I mean, you've got a lot of Democrats from districts that Donald Trump carried who they can't go home and be for this stuff.
Well, where are their voices now?
Because this has been unfolding for months and I don't hear them.
Oh, I think if you watch, I think 48 of them wrote a letter at Pelosi saying, you know, we didn't come here to investigate.
came here to legislate um and i i think 48 of 200 however many yeah that's not a lot About a fifth.
But here's the point.
All right, one out of five Democrats are halfway normal.
Okay, that's what you're saying.
Well, I would say two out of five are crazy.
Two out of five are strange but quiet.
And one out of five is normal.
I think that's about the modern Democratic Party in the House.
But I think what you've got to recognize is that the crazies have the energy and the drive and the moral assertiveness to make life miserable if you're a normal person.
And so part of what happens is if you represent a district where you've got to be normal to get reelected, do you really want to stick your head up and have, you know, a half dozen of these freshmen surrounding you, chanting at you, yelling at you?
I mean, you know, you get to a point where you try to get in an elevator and everybody in the elevator is mad at you because you're not true blue and perfect.
And as a result, they just quote, they say, shut people up.
But isn't there a certain appeal?
Like, for example, the Obamacare was sold very well.
Keep your doctor, keep your plan, and save money.
Sounds great.
The mantra was repeated again.
It was, well, millions lost their plans, their doctors, and everybody paid a lot more.
And that's why we caught a lot.
Okay, so now the promise is, okay, we're going to guarantee you a job, guaranteed salary.
We're going to guarantee your retirement, guaranteed health care, but you can't buy private health care.
Guaranteed, not K through college, it's going to be preschool through college.
And daycare is going to be for free with the wealth tax.
and you guaranteed government healthy food and no more gas or oil, and we're going to get rid of the engines and the airplanes and the cows.
The sad part is this is real.
There are 100 House members that support this that I know of.
There are now at least on some level, most of the Democratic candidates embracing a big portion of this.
So who wins the nomination?
Joe Biden seems to be showing fear of getting in every day.
Well, look, I mean, I frankly, I looked at the results in Ukraine, and I mean, they think that Jon Stewart should have run.
I mean, a comedian in Ukraine got 73% of the vote against the incumbent president.
And compared to the current Democrats, you know, Jon Stewart would look rational and intelligent.
Sort of like when he had the, what was the name of that concert that he had?
Then he had Kat Stevens playing, formerly Kat Stevens, Yusuf, whatever his name is.
Anyway.
Oh, hang on.
We'll take a quick break.
More with Newt Gingrich.
His new book out Tuesday, by the way, Collusion, a novel, and he's going to look at some of the pressing questions facing this country and much more.
800-941-Sean, toll-free number.
We got a great Hannity tonight.
We do head to the streets of San Francisco.
We got a full report and also a big announcement tonight.
Straight ahead.
All right, a final moment with Newt Kingrich's new book out.
It's on Amazon.com, Hannity.com, bookstores everywhere.
It's called Collusion.
Make a prediction.
Do they impeach or not impeach?
Lindsey Graham thinks they're going to stampede towards.
I don't think so either.
I don't think they're going to impeach.
They're going to try and gin up enough support.
They'll make lots of noise.
They'll make lots and lots of noise.
They will have a hardcore group that would love to impeach.
People are going to get very tired of this.
I mean, the American people are looking at the best economy that they can remember, the lowest black unemployment in history, the lowest Latino unemployment in history.
They're looking at an opportunity here to have a much better future.
And then they got these Democrats who are just whacked out and who want to throw it all away for partisan reasons.
That is not a winning formula.
The one thing at the end of the day, George Will used to always say this, what drives elections are peace and prosperity.
And the prosperity is at a record high with record lows in terms of unemployment, et cetera, setting one economic record after another.
In terms of America's position on the world stage, we're now showing a lot of strength that we haven't shown the last eight years.
I think that's right.
And I think that they're glad that we have an assertive pro-American foreign policy.
And they think that it's actually good to have a president who puts America first because that's what they think the American president ought to do.
I think I'm going to send a plane over to Italy like once a week and fly you back and forth.
You're too much.
I got to run.
Mr. Speaker, thank you for being with us.
You have called for impeachment proceedings to be initiated against President Trump.
What do you say to those Democrats who say, look, this is not the time.
It's going to take away focus from winning in 2020.
Speaker Pelosi told her caucus again just today that she has no plans to immediately initiate impeachment proceedings.
So there is no political inconvenience exception to the United States Constitution.
Obstruction of justice is a serious crime in this country.
But Mueller believed, because of the directions from Donald Trump's Justice Department, that he could not bring a criminal indictment against a sitting president.
So I think he's wrong on that, but that's what he believed.
So he serves the whole thing up to the United States Congress and says, in effect, if there's going to be any accountability, that accountability has to come from the Congress.
And the tool that we are given for that accountability is the impeachment process.
For those of us who have been following the investigation and have seen any part of that report, it is very clear that there is a lot of good evidence pointing to obstruction and obstruction of justice.
And I believe very strongly, first of all, let me just be very clear about the table set.
I believe that we need to get rid of this president.
That's why I'm running to become president of the United States.
So that is part of the premise, obviously, of my point.
But I think we have very good reason to believe that there is an investigation that has been conducted which has produced evidence that tells us that this president and his administration engaged in obstruction of justice.
I believe Congress should take the steps towards impeachment.
If proven, which hasn't been proven yet, some of this would be impeachable.
Yes.
All right.
Obstruction of justice, if proven, would be impeachable.
And you're going to go about to see if you can prove it.
Well, we're going to see where the facts lead us.
Two of the 2020 New Deal radical extreme Democratic Socialist Party candidates, and they're all out of their mind.
You know, it's so frustrating as somebody that has pointed out that there's so many other things that the media did not cover, the 99.9% of issues, the rigged investigation.
Struck and Page were laughing at the idea that this wasn't rigged.
It's being done in the Justice Department.
They're all Democrats.
The fix is in as it relates to Hillary.
There was an underlying crime.
There's no ambiguity about the Espionage Act, 18, U.S.C. 793.
There is also, when she deleted and bleach bit and busted up devices and pulled out SIM cards, there was intent, the intent to destroy evidence of the underlying crime, which was the Espionage Act.
There's no bigger slam-dunk case for either the Espionage Act.
Even James Baker, the general counsel under Comey, number one lawyer in the FBI, thought she should be indicted.
And obstruction than hers.
And these people want to be president.
They don't know about separation of powers.
They don't know the role of Congress.
They don't know the law.
It's just that, well, Bill Barr specifically stated that no consideration on the issue of whether or whether or not a sitting president can be indicted weighed on his decision, or the Office of Legal Counsel agreeing, or Rod Rosenstein, the deputy AG who appointed Mueller, also signed the fourth FISA warrant, the third renewal warrant.
They all agreed.
It's ridiculous.
Anyway, Mike Lee is with us, one of the real constitutional scholars in the U.S. Senate.
And he has a new book.
And to me, it's a really important read for everybody.
It's Our Lost Declaration, America's Fight Against Tyranny from King George to the Deep State.
It just came out today.
It's on Amazon.com.
We'll throw it up on Hannity.com.
Senator, how are you?
And welcome to New York.
Thank you very much, Sean.
It's good to be with you.
Let me start first, though.
You have written two columns, one on CBSNewsIsaw.com and the other on Foxnews.com.
They might have just written them up differently.
No evidence of Trump wrongdoing to begin the impeachment process.
And you also said it would be a mistake for the Democrats to pursue impeachment.
But let's talk about the law, which is your area of expertise first.
The merits just aren't there.
There's not a basis to charge him, separate and apart from Whether or not you believe that it's appropriate to indict a sitting president, which the current Justice Department policy is that they don't.
But the merits aren't there.
I mean, look, there was no collusion, no evidence of collusion, not a scintilla of evidence of collusion.
And what they're coming up with as far as obstruction refers to a series of what we call inchoate acts.
In other words, that they're basically saying he was mad, he thought about doing something that they think might have been wrong, and that that somehow amounts to obstruction of justice.
It isn't there.
And no matter how much they scream and yell and want to pound the table, it still isn't fair, which means their only remedy is a political one involving the impeachment process.
If they want to do that, it's fine, but that's also their political funeral.
It doesn't work out well when you pursue frivolous impeachment charges against the sitting president.
So we now know, as a matter of fact, that a lot of these upper echelon deep state actors, and I want to get into your thoughts on it all because you chronicled this in the book, but they thought about secretly recording a president of the United States.
They thought about invoking the 25th Amendment.
He was not their chosen candidate.
And again, many of these same players were involved in rigging Hillary's investigation, trying to rig a presidential election.
You know, all the talk about Russia collusion, well, Hillary did pay for a Russian document that even the New York Times says now might have been Russian disinformation.
And that was leaked to the media to influence voters before the election and also used as a backdoor to take away Carter Page's constitutional rights and spy on the Trump campaign as they had Stefan Halper spying on Papadopoulos, Clovis, and Page.
There's a lot of spying on that campaign.
Exactly.
And these are all problems.
Look, anytime you try to take debatable matters and move them beyond debate using the overpowering force that is government, you've got a problem.
It's even more of a problem when you try to put those running the deep state beyond the reach of the law.
Now, that was the case at the time of King George III.
As I point out in my book, the deep state then was headed by a guy who wore a crown and called himself King George III, purported to have divinely appointed authority from God himself to rule and reign.
We don't have a king today, but we do have thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of federal bureaucrats who wield basically unreviewable and unreviewed power.
That is its own form of problem, and we've got to fix that by returning to our founding era values.
You know, you talk about the Declaration drafted by Thomas Jefferson.
I refer to it, and people have said, you're wrong, Hannity.
I said, it's our founding document.
And it is our founding document.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
And it goes on from there.
All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that rights come from God.
I believe that with all my heart.
Do you agree with me that that's our founding document?
Because to me, it is.
Absolutely.
It is our founding document.
As I sometimes put it, it's the picture.
The Constitution is the frame surrounding the picture.
The Declaration is itself the picture.
Here in your studio, you've got some amazing paintings of various U.S. Forgotten men and women.
Exactly.
By the way, the guy that draws them is in Utah.
Which is part of why those paintings are so amazing.
All good things have a tie back to Utah, these parents in particular.
Listen, I love Utah.
The sting still a little bit that I got thrown out as the MC at the Freedom Fest every year in Provo.
Which still makes no sense to me.
That's all right.
Because they love you there.
We as Utah's love you and we love your show.
It makes no sense that they didn't.
You know what I love about Salt Lake and Utah in general?
It brings you back to another era.
It's almost like America circa 1950.
I remember going to the 4th of July parade there, and it was just, it's so different from so many other cities.
And I know that a lot of people are LDS, and I don't know a whole lot about the religion.
I just know the people that I meet are the nicest people.
And I know the value system of the family is paramount.
And I know that, like, it seems, you know, Judaism is under attack.
Christianity is under attack.
Everyone wants to attack everybody else's religion.
And I think, frankly, the more that people cling to their God, Bible, guns, and religion as irredeemable, deplorable, smelly Walmart people, I think we'll be a better country.
It's the elites that are out of touch with that part of America.
That's right.
One of the things that distinguishes elites, whether they wear a crown or sit at a bureaucrat's desk, is that they consider themselves unreviewable.
They consider themselves above and beyond not only the law, but also criticism.
One of the reasons why we ought to fear the deep state, why we ought to shun, like the plague, the trend that I identify in our lost declaration over the last 80 years of the people's elected lawmakers in Congress shifting lawmaking power over to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats.
That is undermining our very way of life, and we can't let that continue.
That's why we've got to continue to focus again and again back on what you rightly call the founding document, which is the Declaration of Independence.
It's the picture, while the Constitution is the frame.
You know, you quote Thomas Paine in 1776, the great pamphleteer that he was, and, you know, a populist disgusted with Britain's rigid class system.
Well, many years before James Madison wrote Federalist 51, he was expressing a similar sentiment.
If human beings were angels, we wouldn't have need of government.
And if we had access to angels to run our government, we wouldn't need all these rules.
But we're in a fallen condition.
So we need governments, and we have to have rules governing those who govern us.
You know, just looking big picture, because really this book goes so deep into all of the legal framework and so on and so forth, our underpinnings, our principles, the great pamphleteers, the great those that defied tyranny, those that gave their lives, those that stood up for the principles of freedom.
You know, I know we're not a perfect country, but there's never been in the history of the world a country that has accumulated more power, abused it less, and used its power for the advancement of the human condition and protecting innocent people than the United States.
That's exactly right.
And the reason we have been strong, the reason we've developed the greatest civilization the world has ever known, it's not about who we are, it's about what we do, the choices that we've made, the fact that we've chosen liberty over tyranny.
Many in our society, including many in the media industry, in the education establishment, would have our children believe that we're something less than our highest ideals.
One of the reasons I wrote our lost issues.
Well, we may not be able to have kids, according to Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez.
Right, right.
Or perhaps we should decline to do so out of concern for the environment.
In fact, we as a country have done more to develop more innovative solutions that reduce emissions, that make our planet cleaner.
And if we'll continue those trends, we will be better off.
But we've got to get back in touch with those founding era ideals.
And that's one of the reasons why I think this book can help people, people who want their children to learn the things that perhaps they learned in school, but their children aren't being taught today.
This makes a perfect gift for them.
I can tell you with two of my own kids, there's not a lot of American history throughout the Greats.
Not much at all.
Senator Mike Lee, Utah, in our studios today, our Lost Declaration, America's Fight Against Tyranny from King George to the Deep State, will come back, will continue.
You can get it on Amazon.com, bookstores everywhere, Hannity.com.
But when we come back, we'll get also our news roundup information overload.
We have David Schoen and Danielle McLaughlin coming up.
And as we continue, final moments here with Senator Mike Lee, our Lost Declaration, America's Fight Against Tyranny from King George to the Deep State.
Do you see what I see coming?
And that is FISA warrant applications, 302s, more closed-door interviews, gang evade information.
We are going to get to the bottom of those that abuse power.
I believe we are.
It's going to take time.
Anytime you try to drain the swamp, the swamp being an organic entity itself tries to fight back.
But there's no stopping the American people once they get wind of something.
What they've figured out, Sean, what I've been trying to address for the eight years I've been in the United States Senate is that when you have things like Section 702 under FISA, where people can go and they can collect information and gain access to supposedly incidentally collected information on U.S. citizens.
Unless you have rules that carefully constrain what happens there, you're going to end up with partisan political manipulation.
All right, Mike Lee, his book, Our Lost Declaration, America's Fight Against Tyranny from King George to the Deep State.
Thank you for being with us.
When we come back, we investigate the investigators, holding them accountable.
That's coming up.
Our news roundup, Information Overload Hour, is next.
Oh, and De Blasio's idea: no more glass, no more steel buildings in New York.
Good luck.
We'll discuss.
The Chicagoan brothers told the truth.
They could have remained silent, but instead, they told the truth to the police.
And with their right hand in the air, they told the truth to the grand jury.
We're going to make sure that the lies and malice attacking our city, our police department, and my two clients are met with truth and healing.
At this time, I'd like to read to you a statement that Ola and Bola prepared themselves.
We have sat back and watched lie after lie being fabricated about us in the media.
Only so one big lie can continue to have life.
These lies are destroying our character and our reputation in our personal and professional lives.
Those who know us personally know that we don't have hate for anyone that is not who we are.
We try to spread as much love and positivity with whoever we come into contact with.
We will no longer sit back and allow these lies to continue.
All right, that was, if you can believe it, the attorney for Gloria Schmidt is her name.
And they are now suing the two brothers lawyers, suing Jussie Smollett or Smollett and his attorneys as this story now winds into one big mess.
This is going to get interesting.
Now, we do know that there is, again, we're all in favor of due process.
I really don't know what happened here.
It was a freezing cold night in Chicago.
And supposedly it was a bunch of MAGA people beating up Jussie Smollett and so on and so forth.
Then it turns out you got two guys saying, no, we were in on it and we did it.
And we actually were a part of it from the beginning and we even practiced it.
And then we have video from a store where they are buying, let's see, rope and a red hat.
And so you begin to wonder, well, those two guys telling the truth or is Jussie Smollett telling the truth?
And why, after a grand jury indicted him, well, why did the prosecutor just say, no, never mind, he gets to walk free.
Now, there's still a federal investigation going into this, so we'll see what happens there.
David Schoen is with us, criminal defense civil liberties attorney, Danielle McLaughlin, also an attorney, is with us.
Welcome both of you back to the program.
Thank you, Sean.
Look, I know you're a great criminal defense attorney.
David, I'm not exactly sure when you have two eyewitnesses that have given such specificity about practicing and preparing for this attack and then caught on video buying the very things used in the attack.
I'm not exactly sure how you get around that as a criminal defense attorney, but again, I believe in the presumption of innocence.
Listen, it turns out what we know now is both of these brothers have testified.
The whole thing was a hoax that Smollett set up.
He paid them to do it according to them.
They testified accordingly before the grand jury.
And they were vetted by a number of police officers and prosecutors before they were put before the grand jury.
The grand jury found they were telling the truth, and they indicted Smollett on 16 felony counts of setting up this whole thing, both to promote himself, according to the brothers in their lawsuit.
What they say is Smollett's agenda was to make his employer appreciate him as a gay, black, talented actor.
He didn't feel he was being appreciated enough.
So he set this thing up to cause the international outrage it was caused.
Didn't think that he was going to be able to do it.
You don't sound like a criminal defense attorney here.
I mean, I would think you're laying out the case of the prosecution, but it seems overwhelming the evidence.
And what I don't understand is, I mean, he just digs deeper.
If he did this, let's just assume for a second he did all of this and these brothers are telling the truth and he's not telling the truth and what we saw on the videotape is true.
Why would somebody dig down this deep and why after a grand jury indicted based on that evidence, would the prosecutor just say, never mind?
Yeah, it's a freakish situation.
First of all, I've never seen a prosecutor do something like this.
You know, we know now based on news reports that Mrs. Obama's sort of right-hand person, Tina Chen, intervened at some point with the prosecutor.
Tina Chen, who, by the way, now is running the investigation with the Southern Poverty Law Center.
She's got her own problems as a result of this political influence.
The whole thing is a mess.
But what's crazy is that after all of this, that Mark Garragos and his associate, Tina Glandian, would continue to malign these brothers.
You know, they should have walked away and thanked their lucky stars that everything happened.
They had Al Sharpton on their side, which is another irony after the Tawana Brawley thing.
The whole thing is a big mess, and Garrego should have kept his mouth shut and walked away.
The fact that these brothers are now suing him is indicative of something pretty strong on their side, it seems to me.
What do you think, Danielle?
What's your take on this?
You know, I agree with David Schoen.
As it relates to defamation law, there are a certain number of privileges.
And so if you're an attorney or you're a litigant and you say something that's damaging, if you say something like X committed a crime, and if you do that in relation to an ongoing proceeding under Illinois law, you're protected.
The point being that you should be able to, as a lawyer or a litigant, make your accusations and make the judicial process kind of do its own thing and find the truth and find justice.
The problem here is that Mark Garagos' associate said defamatory, made defamatory comments about the brothers saying that they had lied in the grand jury, saying that they had in fact committed a hate crime against Mr. Smollett.
This was all happening.
These comments were made after the charges were dropped, which means it's a question whether they get the privilege as it relates to defamation or whether they will actually be on the hook for making these defamatory statements.
Because of course, being accused of a crime is extremely damaging to your reputation.
And what they've alleged in their complaint is defamation per se, where words are obviously and materially harmful.
And the thing about defamation per se is that your damages are presumed.
So these brothers are not going to have to prove that they lost money in their livelihood.
The damages are presumed by the court.
What do you think the odds, David, that federal charges are brought against Smollett?
I don't think they'll be brought against him, frankly.
I think it's another, probably just a waste of time and money.
But there supposedly is a serious investigation going on.
If the allegations we hear are true about what Smollett did, then there should be charges brought against him.
It's a very serious abuse of the system, and it ruins the integrity of the system for everybody.
But, you know, let's be clear.
What these brothers have said now, Mark Garagos is a savvy guy.
And remember, supposedly, Avenatti was in this case also.
Garagos is a savvy guy.
According to the brothers, though.
I've known Garagos for years.
He's not a bad attorney.
He's smart.
He's tough.
But he and his associate, according to the complaint, went on Good Morning America, a podcast, other shows.
The boys said they were lying about this, these two young men, two brothers, but also one of them, he accused one of them of engaging in homosexual acts with Smollett, which, according to this guy, puts his life in danger.
He's dating, he's heterosexual, he says, he's dating a Nigerian woman.
And in Nigeria, homosexuality is illegal.
He says it puts his life in danger.
He accused him of running a business that's a hoax and all of that, according to the allegations in the complaint.
So there's a lot of serious stuff going on here.
And we're going to see how it plays out.
Yeah, Danielle, I mean, yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, I agree.
Garagos, because, of course, there's another lawsuit where the city of Chicago is trying to recoup its money that it spent on the investigation.
There are 1,836 overtime hours spent on this investigation.
They want that money back.
And statutorily, they can get it plus three times.
So they can get about $400,000 if they win that lawsuit.
And now we have Garagos saying that he's going to sue the city for defamation because he says the city is defaming Mr. Smollett by saying that this was a hoax.
And he's obviously going to, he says it's because the charges have been dropped.
So it's a real mess here.
I agree.
Garagos is a very sophisticated lawyer.
And the idea that he could send someone to Good Morning America or a podcast after charges had been dropped to further some of these damaging statements, including statements about perjury and steroids and all sorts of terrible stuff.
I'm scratching my head a little bit because it doesn't seem to have been a very smart move.
Let me switch topics on both of you because you've both been engaged in this whole issue of Mueller, the Mueller report.
One interesting development we had today, Judicial Watch says that a senior FBI official admitted in writing and under oath that the agency found Clinton email records in the Obama White House, specifically the executive office of the president, Bill Prestep, the assistant director of the FBI counterintelligence division, made the disclosure to Judicial Watch as part of a court-ordered discovery in the Clinton email issue.
This astonishing confirmation made under oath by the FBI shows that the Obama FBI had to go to Obama's White House office to find emails that Hillary Clinton tried to destroy or hide from the American people, according to Tom Fitton, who is the Judicial Watch president.
No wonder Hillary Clinton has thus far skated because Barack Obama is implicated in the scheme.
David, does that make sense to you, especially in light of the struck page closed-door testimony which said, huh?
This was all being run by Loretta Lynch and her Justice Department that was never going to rigged the investigation into Hillary.
It more than makes sense to me.
Listen, it still should be shocking, but I'm afraid after all of the stuff that you've learned about what went on with the Hillary Clinton emails and then what followed, I'm afraid I'm not shocked by any of it anymore.
And I think that, as you have said and others have said, if there's going to be an investigation here, it needs to be a full investigation of exactly what happened that caused the American taxpayers to pay $35 million or however many billions of dollars and paralyzed the country with this Muller so-called investigation all of this time.
And it looks like the bad guys are walking off scot-free.
The folks who are going to be able to do that.
We still have the FISA applications.
We still have the Horowitz report, the Hoover report.
We now have an attorney general that is starting his own investigation into spying.
He said it.
It happened.
We know it happened on multiple levels.
Then we got the rigged investigation into Hillary, the attempt to rig the presidential election by cheating and spying on the Trump campaign and that back door by lying to a FISA court and committing fraud and then trying to bludgeon the president and undo the election of the American people, duly elected president.
Danielle, it all happened.
We have a Mueller report which we're seeing about 92% of, and that is really now in the hands of Congress.
I don't see any attacking that report.
There were 2,300 or so footnotes.
It was very carefully and clearly investigated.
That has nothing to do with my question.
I'm asking about these deep state actors that abused their power, rigged Hillary's investigation.
We know she violated the Espionage Act, and we know she obstructed justice.
And then, of course, the FISA abuse.
Then, of course, oh, backdooring their way by committing Pfizer fraud into the Trump campaign.
You know, the FBI did a full and fair investigation into her FERCA practices, and they found that she was careless, of course, but there wasn't enough incident to the majority of the money.
No, the original language was gross negligence until it was changed to extreme carelessness to get rid of the legal standard.
But she did have classified top secret marked on her private email server in a mom-and-pop bathroom closet.
So there's nothing really left to say about it.
And although the statute does not require mishandling its classified information, it does not require intent.
The Supreme Court has required that for a showing.
And the prosecution is a very important thing.
Well, what was the intent of putting it in a bathroom closet when you told your own employees not to do it?
I think she was trying to, frankly, trying to separate the personal from the personality.
Well, she didn't succeed at it.
Everybody knew it.
Then why did she do it?
What was the intent of deleting and bleach bit and busting up devices?
What was the intent there?
Well, busting up a device is to make sure that nobody gets their hand on your Blackberry, which has classified information on it through proper channels.
So some people have said that she should have busted up more of them.
And so in that sense, that was a national security.
I'm going to ask David the same question on the other side.
All right, as we continue, David Schoen, attorney, Danielle McLaughlin, attorney.
We're just getting into, Danielle is making excuses here.
What was Hillary's intent with the private server with the top secret classified information, which is a clear violation of the Espionage Act?
And didn't she show intent to destroy the evidence with deletions and bleach bit and hammers and no SIM cards?
Well, let me say this.
We respectfully disagree, I suppose.
In every other case I have seen, and I've had clients charged with destroying emails.
Clients who misplace emails, inadvertently destroy them, are charged with the intent to destroy those emails, to obstruct justice, etc.
What Hillary Clinton did and her team.
Oh, slow down a second.
Are we required to?
I don't save emails, do you?
Well, it depends on the situation.
In that situation, she certainly had a requirement to save the emails.
In my client's situation, hers were subpoenaed when this all happened.
I'm asking, in our day-to-day lives, if I saved my emails, I'd never be able to find anything.
No, no, you are not required to save.
Sorry.
David, you know as well as I do that you're only required to preserve emails that are relevant to the subject of the inquiry.
So she's got a subpoena.
I'm not the subject of any inquiry for the record.
No, no, you're fine, Sean.
You're fine.
But the point is, the 30,000 emails that were deleted were personal.
They were not the subject of the subpoena.
So what Dave's talking about, I absolutely agree.
It's something called spoliation.
You can't be told to preserve something and then destroy it.
Her argument, her lawyer's argument, was I was told to preserve A.
I did preserve A.
I did not preserve B, which was not the subject of the subpoena.
That's not true.
Here's part of the other problems.
We know now from the IG's report that the Justice Department slow walked the investigation into her email, into Anthony Wiener's email server, all of those things.
That's all true.
We know from Tom Fitton's work.
We know that there's a lot of problems.
I don't mean to cut you off, David.
I hate.
I want to hear what you have to say.
But all right, let's move on.
News roundup.
Information overload continues.
Your calls and much more coming up next.
David Schoen, Danielle McLaughlin, thank you.
Hannity tonight at nine.
We've got a great show and a big announcement tonight.
And it talks to the people involved in the top stories of the day.
Every day, Sean Hannity is on.
All right, 25 to the top of the hour.
Glad you're with us.
800-941.
Sean, you want to be a part of this extravaganza.
Great New York, New York Post has been doing great covers lately.
And they've got one of Comrade Bill de Blasio.
Is he still thinking, Linda, about running for mayor?
I don't even know anybody.
I hear he's going for president now because he's reached his terms.
He's going for president.
He's going for president.
Yeah, is he in or not?
Is he in what?
Insane?
Absolutely.
Well, okay, he's insane.
So it says Stone Age.
It has a picture of Fred Flintstone.
Okay.
And what's amazing is it says, de Blasio's green plan, we're going to ban classic glass and steel skyscrapers and retrofit every building in New York.
Do you know?
I mean, so they have a picture of the New York skyline, including the Freedom Tower.
And with De Blasio saying that they're going to get rid of all glass and all steel, and in the new Hudson Yard structures in the not environmentally friendly, even though they've been awarded the highest green rating, what are we allowed to build with then?
Whatever puts money in his pocket.
I want to know, here's the question on my mind.
On your mind?
On my mind.
And here's the thing.
You know, this is a New York issue.
This is a New York state of mind problem.
And, you know, not all of our listeners are from this area.
But I think that this could be a national problem, which is these people that become mayors and state legislators.
You know, they're playing games with our money.
And, you know, his wife just lost $900 million.
She doesn't know where it is.
So the same guy that wants to retrofit all these buildings, takes helicopters when he doesn't want to be caught in the traffic, takes a SUV, which is not a green emissions car, let me tell you, all the way to Brooklyn because he wants to work out in the gym that he grew up in in the area he grew up in with his people who he knows where he's from, as opposed to just acclimating to his current surroundings so he wouldn't have to do any sort of emissions from any sort of large gas-guzzling SUV.
This is the same man who now wants to retrofit all the buildings in New York City.
You know what?
Go for it.
Get all the bids.
I can't wait to see how many bids you get.
Let's get all the bids.
For bamboo.
Bamboo.
You're going to build, let's see, you're going to build.
Let's build bamboo buildings.
Let's do it.
No, no, no.
Bamboo is we are taking from the earth.
What are you talking about?
You know, or we can't build it out of, you can't.
You're making my point for me.
This is the bottom line.
You know, it's kind of like when AOC said, you know, I'm the boss because nobody else has solutions.
Lady, you don't have solutions.
You can't even spell solutions.
The problem with the socialists is that all of these idiots are out there making all of these grand justifications.
AOC, that's mean.
Oh, please.
Please.
We should invite her on the show.
I thought we tried.
I'm sorry.
I love our listeners.
I would never do that to her.
No, no, no, no, no.
Wrong.
This is a woman who does videos eating carrots.
Okay.
We'd like to invite her on the show.
I'd like to talk over her plan for the new Green Deal.
Is it a carrot-free interview?
She can eat whatever she wants on the air.
I don't care.
The sad part is, actually, Mitch McConnell of all people gave a speech in Kentucky and he said, the problem is it's not just her.
It's the Democratic Party.
You have Democratic presidential candidates.
What we saw on display last night, which we've been talking about throughout the day today, is an unmitigated disaster.
It is a five hours of crazy.
It was a completely insane.
Five hours of crazy.
That's a great way to.
Five hours of crazy.
I was like, good God.
And I bet you CNN still had bad ratings.
Better than normal, but normal is bad.
So it's still fake news.
And yeah, we were number one again.
Don't worry.
The only reason we have good ratings are because of our audience.
End of sentence, boom, done.
But I will tell you that this idea of retrofitting every building in the country and every home and the dream of banning glass and steel skyscrapers and the taxes on top of it, New York is going to see a mass exit.
The only idiot that's going to be left here is me because this is where they demand that I work at Fox.
I can do radio anywhere.
Listen, I grew up in New York.
Here's what Long Island, New York is like.
If you're a young person, you can't afford the first home.
If you're an older person, you can't afford to stay in your home.
They make it impossible for people to live.
There are young kids, I call them kids.
They're in the, you know, they graduated college.
Some have postgraduate degrees, law degrees.
You have 100 degrees for crying out loud.
And they live in these itsy bitsy closets.
And in the closet is like a little baby stove and a little baby shower.
And, you know, most of them have mice running up and down the floor half the night.
It's horrible how that, but we try to move them up quickly and be as generous as we can be at Christmas, as you know.
I'll tell you what I want, Sean.
What do you want?
I'm taking a slight digression from Christmas here.
Here's what I want from de Blasio.
I want de Blasio and his wife, Shirleen.
I want them to find the $900 million.
I want them to find the money.
And every day we should say, well, Bill, where is it?
I agree.
And when he finds that money, that this the program was called Thrive.
I had to look it up because I couldn't remember.
It was supposed to be this mental health initiative, right?
So four years ago, she gets $900 million.
She's already got $250 million this year.
You're really on a tear about all this.
It just burns me up.
But this woman and her husband walking around acting like they care when they lost $900 million.
Do you know how many families that could feed in New York City?
Do you know how much they could do to help people in New York City?
And instead, they're out there talking about how they got to get to Brooklyn to work out in the gym they like, and he wants to retrofit all the buildings, bamboo buildings or, you know, saran wrap buildings.
You're not answering my question.
I told you, how are they going to make these buildings?
You're not answering.
So that's what we should do.
I have no idea.
I could care less.
I like stealing glass.
Keep it up there.
These people all think they're going to win over Mother Nature.
She's been around for years.
They're not winning that war.
Mother Nature is going to tell you when your time is up.
Don't want to worry about it.
Let me tell you about this.
This is an unmitigated disaster for the city.
Nobody's going to want to build.
Nobody's going to want to invest.
They chased out Amazon.
Now, I thought the city and the state was paying a fortune for every job they were bringing in.
You know what?
I was kind of happy for the local people in Queens, New York that they were going to get this.
I'm just going to tell you, it is, well, it's like everything else that they're doing now.
Let them explode and then they're going to lose everything.
All right, Bob is in Michigan.
Bob, how are you?
Welcome to the program.
Hi, Sean.
Good to talk to you.
And by the way, don't sit on bamboo.
It does make quite an impression.
I don't think, look, I'm sure you can hold up, you know, a nice house if you knew skillfully how to build with bamboo, but I don't think you're going to hold up a skyscraper.
I agree with you.
But you know what?
Sean, I call because I believe one question, just one, can put all of the Mueller stuff in the rearview mirror once and for all just to upset the left, get rid of the impeachment obstruction, collusion talk.
Just ask Mueller under oath.
Ask him to explain.
Explain Representative Adam Schiff's collusion evidence as well as just conspiracy evidence.
He doesn't have any.
We know that.
And we know also, and thanks for the call, Adam Schiff's the biggest liar in Congress.
Charlie out in Seattle.
Charlie, hope it's sunny.
No rain, no clouds today.
No rain, no clouds today.
I live on Kameno Island, which is about an hour and a half north of Seattle.
How many days a year does Seattle get the rainy, dark, cloudy, no sun days?
A lot, right?
Right.
But the other thing is living on the island, the sound pushes a lot of the rain away from us.
So we get a little bit more sunshine than they do in Seattle.
So we're a little happier.
A little happier.
But I mean, it's literally, it's been shown that if you don't get enough sunshine, that, you know, it makes you sadder in life.
And it makes sense.
You know, there are days I'm so wrapped up in this job, just to get off topic a little bit.
I'm so wrapped up.
And then I like, I just take a walk from radio to TV and I'm like, oh, sun, fresh air, snow, rain.
I don't care.
It's just nice to be outside.
That is true.
That is true.
I digress.
My problem that I have in Seattle or Fon Kameno is I've watched Seattle be destroyed by the Democrats.
And they want to talk environment.
You can't get a straw in Seattle now.
But you should go down there.
There are feces and urine and tent cities and trash everywhere.
What used to be the Emerald City of Beauty where you could take your kids.
15 years ago, I would take my two children down there to the aquarium, the zoo.
No worries.
No problem with crime or anything like that.
And now I wouldn't go down there at all.
There's been people, the crime is outrageous.
The police hands are tied.
In fact, the local news did a thing about Seattle dying.
I don't know if you saw it or not, but it's pretty tragic.
I did not see that.
And I'm not surprised.
Look, there's a reason people are leaving New York, New Jersey, California, Seattle, Washington, and elsewhere.
Anyway, thanks for a good call.
Appreciate it.
All right, Moses is in New Jersey.
The all-new AM710, the talk of New York, New Joise, Long Island.
What's going on, Moses?
How are you, sir?
I'm doing great, Sean.
I'm living the dream.
How about yourself?
I'm good, man.
What's happening?
All right.
So I actually just had a great conversation with one of the Border Patrol vice presidents of the Rio Grande Valley and also my Democratic congressman.
But I'm not a Democrat.
I just want him to actually do the work of the people down there.
And I think two points very quickly.
I think the one solution to solve the entire crisis is to identify the real crisis, and that's Congress.
Congress is the crisis.
That should be the new brand name for the president.
And I think that they should appoint a nonpartisan, independent, 9-11 style type of commission to actually address what's happening at the border because Congress has been incapable of doing so since the 80s.
The only good news, Moses, is this.
The president got his money.
They reallocated unspent monies from the Defense Department.
Nobody's talking about it, which is interesting because once he issued the emergency order and they didn't override his veto, he has the money.
By the way, I'll get the exact numbers.
The wall's going up.
Repairs have taken place.
And if this new company is able to pull this off, they say they can get the whole job done by 2020.
I'm like, get that company.
And they were ensuring it.
They would assure and ensure that they can do it at a price, by the way, that seemed really reasonable.
Yeah, definitely.
But what I'm talking about is everything other than the wall and what the president's working on right now.
The other half of it, that's what has to be done through a commission and do Congress's work, basically.
And once they get a blank check and give their findings to Congress, then in return, the president should start giving in a little bit on what to do with the illegal population in the country, starting with DACA.
Yeah, well said.
All right, Moses, thanks, brother.
Curtis, Salt Lake City, Rod Arquette Land, K-N-R-S.
What's up, sir?
Oh, hey, what's up, Sean?
How's it going?
The home of Crown Burger and Rod Arquette.
It doesn't get any better than that.
Yeah, I'm right by a crown burger, actually.
I hate you right now because I love it.
For those that never had a crown burger, they actually put pastrami on the burger, and you're like, no, that's not going to work.
Oh, it works.
And they've got the best milkshakes, sort of like In N-Out, and the best French fries, too.
They're amazing.
I haven't been back there in a long time because I got kicked out of being the MC of the Freedom Fest every year in Provo.
Yeah, I usually get the junior.
But the reason why I called was, so the investigation on Trump was called the Crossfire Hurricane.
Right.
I think the investigation on the investigator should be called Crossfire Boomerang.
Linda, write that down, okay?
Write it down.
Cross and send it to Tiffin Porter.
Do you mind?
No, not at all.
You know what you're going to see on TV tonight?
Crossfire boomerang.
I promise you.
I'm going to get a big, big still store and put it up there as soon as I can.
All right.
We'll put it up on TV.
Forget about my equipment, by the way, because it's all ruined.
You can see it.
I just dropped the all we heard was crash bang boo.
Yeah, crash bang boo.
It was, I knocked the boomerang came back and hit you.
The boomerang came back and hit me.
Oh, God.
I don't do that.
You know, there are radio stations in the country that do not allow hosts to have any liquids in their studios, and I refuse to abide by that rule.
I've even been in stations where there's somebody to say, you know, they don't let you drink this in the studio.
And I'm like, okay, fire me.
Throw me out.
Because I like to drink during the show.
I drink, that's all I drink.
So many places we can take this.
Oh, God.
What?
Take it.
I don't care.
Do whatever you want.
You need to be more specific about what we're drinking in the studio here, Sean.
Let's turn it into a different kind of show.
Well, I'm drinking Black Rifle coffee and I'm drinking ice water.
I like ice.
We actually have an ice-making machine in our studio.
