It's been over a week since the Mueller Report was released and President Trump has hit the ground running trying to undo the damage that this witch hunt caused. Listen as Senator Lyndsey Graham and Attorney General William Barr discuss the Report.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.
They're not going to win with the people that I see.
And they're not going to win against me.
The only way they can maybe luck out, and I don't think that's going to happen.
It might make it even the opposite.
That's what a lot of people are saying.
The only way they can luck out is by constantly going after me or nonsense.
But they should be really focused on legislation, not the things that have been l this has been litigated, just so you understand.
This has been litigated for the last two years, almost since I got into office.
Now, if you want to litigate, go after the DNC, crooked Hillary, the dirty cops.
All of these things, that's what should be litigated.
Because that was a rigged system.
And I'm breaking down, I am breaking down the swamp.
If you look at what's happening, they're getting caught, they're getting fired.
Who knows what's going to happen from now on, but I hope it's I hope it's very strong.
But if you look at drain the swamp, I am draining the swamp.
Thank you very much.
All right, that was the president earlier today.
Uh hour two Sean Hannity Show, 800-941 Sean Toprey uh telephone number.
You want to be a part of the program.
President, the most cooperative of any investigation ever going on in a modern day presidency.
And by the way, that includes Barack Obama, that includes the Clintons, uh, all of who that includes George W. Bush's administration.
They all exerted executive privilege.
This president, none.
Not once.
Nobody, I uh I could not believe the idea that the White House General Counsel, Don McGahn spent 30 hours with Mueller.
He seems to think that he's the one that saved the Republic.
Not exactly.
If Don Donald Trump had it even within his authority to fire Mueller under Article 2 of the Constitution, he could have fired him.
Just because you're complaining about a witch hunt, that's not obstruction just because you're complaining about Rod Rosenstein.
That's not a w and it's a witch hunt.
That's not obstruction.
None of it.
So now that we have the look at what the Democrats are moving in a thousand different directions.
Because they they can't accept now the fourth definitive investigation that says no Trump Russia collusion.
First the FBI nine-month investigation, even struck and page said, nope, we had nothing.
No, there or there.
Then of course we have the House Intel Committee, their investigation.
Nope, nothing.
Then we have the bipartisan Senate Committee.
Nope, nothing.
Now the Mueller report can't be any more clear on any of these issues.
Well, then we'll well let's weaponize the IRS for no real reason at all, except that let's go after his taxes.
That'll help.
We'll get him there.
I'm sure there's a reason why he was audited all those years.
Anyway, so now they want to impeach the IRS commissioner for not turning over Trump's taxes.
Elijah Cummings wants to hold stonewalling White House witnesses in contempt on the same issue.
Unbelievable.
Nadler wants to jail Trump officials who won't comply with his subpoenas.
Why do are they gonna pay for the attorneys in DC a thousand dollars an hour for a decent attorney?
Maybe 800 if you're lucky, 600 if they give you a cut rate.
But these people have all been interviewed.
Maxime Waters claims America's clamoring for impeachment.
No.
Now Lindsey Graham is gonna join us at the bottom of the half hour.
He's gonna be telling us where his investigation's gonna be going.
And uh also the he believes there's gonna be a Democratic Party stampede uh stampede to impeach the uh president.
Anyway, here to sort through all the legal issues on all of this.
Uh we have Alan Dershowitz, who uh professor Harvard, and he contributed an introduction to Skyhorse uh Publishings edition of the Mueller Report.
Uh Greg Jarrett, his bestseller, the Russia hoax.
All right, I want to ask you both.
Here's where I think we've got to go in this.
We now have evidence that Hillary's investigation was rigged from the beginning, even struck in page recognize such 18 USC.
Uh 793, the espionage act is clear.
That's the underlying crime.
The intent to take subpoenaed emails, delete 33,000 of them, bleach bit your hard drive, eliminate the evidence, beat up your devices, remove SIM cards.
That would be an intent to obstruct.
I think we gotta make that one bucket.
Number two.
We gotta get into the whole Pfizer abuse.
The inspector general will weigh in on that.
Was there fraud committed to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign?
We also have to get into the spying of the Trump campaign, Stephon Halper, who enlisted him, etcetera.
Then we need to get into the whole issue of why did we have a 350% increase in unmasking American citizens in 2016?
That's an important bucket.
Then we've got to get the release of the Pfizer warrants, gang of eight information, 302s, as we've been telling you, five buckets there.
Then we've got to get into the question of, okay, those people that tried to undo an election and bludgeon a president.
When did they know that there was no collusion?
And why didn't they investigate Hillary's dirty dossier, which the New York Times suggests this week could have been all disinformation to create chaos from the beginning?
We'll start with you, Professor Dershowitz.
W why where do we go next?
Well, I think the most important thing is the way in which the Pfizer Court was misled.
Uh we now know for certain that the information provided to the Pfizer court in the ex party application was incomplete.
It was not the whole truth, it was a half truth.
And a half truth is a lie.
And I think there should be an investigation conducted by the inspector general.
Apparently that's going on, but also by the Pfizer Court itself.
The Pfizer Court was misled, and I think there was a contempt of court committed by those A, who submitted the Pfizer application without indicating the source, and B, failed to correct the Pfizer application once they got more information about the source, and indeed sought renewals of the Pfizer application.
So those are I think very important areas for any civil libertarian, because remember, Pfizer warrants can be issued against any of us.
And if it can be done without any consequence based on misleading and incomplete information, then we're all victims.
And so I think you start with anything that involves every American potentially a victim of a violation of civil liberties.
That has to be the first order of business.
Do you think the president is right before I get to Greg Professor?
The President is right saying, you know what, you've had your four investigations, uh, we're gonna fight everything now.
He'd never he never used executive privilege.
He could have.
He could have prevented people from talking to Mueller.
He could have fired Mueller, by the way.
I think you'll even agree, could have done so legally under his authority under uh Article Two.
Without a doubt.
And in the introduction to my book, I go through the whole obstruction of justice uh argument presented by Mueller.
Muller turns out to be dead wrong on the law.
He has some idea that if in fact the president had decided to fire Mueller, indeed, firing Colmey, he thinks could be an obstruction of justice.
He just has the law wrong.
By the way, uh on the Amazon reviews, everybody's ganging up on me.
All the anti-Trump people are writing terrible reviews saying I never should have been allowed to do the introduction to the book because I'm objective and honest and nonpartisan.
So I urge any of you who read uh the my introduction and who think differently, uh, write uh a review saying my introduction is objective, it's nonpartisan.
I end by saying I would have written the same review, the same introduction if the shoe had been on the other foot.
If Hillary Clinton had been impeached improperly or been subject to an investigation improperly, I would have been defending her as well.
I am not defending Trump on a partisan basis.
I'm defending civil liberties and constitutional rights.
Greg Jarrett.
Well, uh I want to say I just ordered uh Professor's book, and I anxiously uh look forward to reading uh the obstruction of justice.
Why doesn't he just give us a free copy?
I mean, we're friends, Professor.
You can get a free copy.
All you have to do is write a review and you get a free copy.
You got it.
Deal.
But you know, this is why prosecutors should never comment on uncharged crimes.
It's unfair to the uncharged person.
Muller went out of his way to smear Trump with the patina of a crime that he couldn't prove.
Muller didn't find sufficient evidence for an obstruction charge.
If he had, he would have said so.
So what he does is he turns the law completely upside down and he says, well, I couldn't prove the president didn't obstruct.
You know, prosecutors are not in the business uh of exoneration.
They're in in the business of proving crimes based on evidence.
Exactly.
Muller couldn't prove an obstruction and when Comey went after Hillary Clinton that way, we all objected.
Democrats and Republicans alike.
Why is it different when uh Mueller goes after people who have not been charged and sets out non-criminal conduct that he disagrees with?
That's just not the proper function of a prosecutor.
If Muller could not prove an obstruction crime, and he could not, then he should have simply stated that he wasn't recommending any charges.
Anything other than that is blatantly unfair.
I agree.
I agree.
And let me let me ask you this is Trump's unclear when it's done to uh to Trump.
Is Trump right not to cooperate any further, considering there's been four separate conclusions and investigations on this?
Well, you know, he has to listen to his lawyer on this.
Uh I think that he's a very good thing.
Well, what would you advise he I would have c I would uh certainly advise them not to testify.
Uh my advice to him was don't don't pardon, don't fire, don't testify, and don't tweet.
He listened to three of them, but not the fourth.
Uh but right now I would say it depends.
If if you think the investigations by Congress are improperly motivated and don't have a legitimate legislative purpose, you have no obligation not to raise your constitutional privileges.
And remember, executive privilege is designed to protect all Americans, not just the president.
It's designed to protect the president C from improper intrusion by the legislative or the judicial branch.
And so it's there as part of our separation of powers and checks and balances to protect all Americans.
He's not just doing it in a self-serving way.
And Nadler Nadler is now taking the position.
Well, you've waived the privilege because uh McGant uh spoke with the special counsel.
No.
So you've got uh one branch of the Department of Justice, White House Counsel, talking to another uh branch uh of the executive.
Uh so i it's not a waiver of a privilege at all.
You can actually never waive executive privilege.
It's been invoked by almost every president.
The first was George Washington who invoked it.
All right, when we get back, I want both of you to debate the question as to what we do with the Hillary quite Clinton question and how far back who needs to be held accountable.
As we roll along, Alan Derschwitz, Greg Jarrett with us.
All right.
What are your thoughts on the president challenging these subpoenas?
Who's going to win this battle, Greg Jarrett?
Well, I I think the president will, because it does appear that this is nothing more than presidential harassment.
You know, there has to be a reasonable basis for this.
Uh that is to say, there has to be some sort of articulable factual basis for the investigation that indicates that a crime has or or uh will take place.
Well, there's none of that here.
This is a fishing expedition, a safari uh to search for anything under any rock they can find to damage Trump.
I think the president has a solid legal basis to oppose it.
What do you think uh Alan Dershwitz?
I have a slightly different view.
I think that if subpoenas come from the legislative branch, they don't have to be looking for crime.
They can be looking for information relevant to their appropriate role of legislating and uh oversight.
But there comes a time, and it happened during the McCarthy era, when the Supreme Court or other courts will look At subpoenas and look at uh requests for testimony and say, enough's enough.
Uh you've now exceeded your legitimate authority, and you're just doing this to harass or expose the proper function of Congress.
I think I don't you think we're at that point, Professor, come on.
Well, no, that's the point.
And I think uh the courts will look at it on a case by case basis.
They're not gonna just say willy-nilly that no subpoenas will be enforced.
They'll look at every subpoena, they'll look at whether there's an articulable basis for any legitimate legislative purpose, and I think they will begin to refuse to enforce some of them as they did during the McCarthy period.
But what about all the one?
What about all these people that are gonna be called back again that can't afford these lawyers that are very expensive?
Listen, Professor, what do you charge an hour?
You don't want to know.
Half of my cases are pro bono and the other half are pretty expensive because I do represent a lot of very wealthy people, and even if you're wealthy, uh getting these subpoenas can really, really be very expensive.
Washington lawyers do charge in excess of a thousand dollars an hour, and the hours accumulate because you have to do the research, you have to check out all the facts, and so we're talking easily about six-figure legal bills that can sometimes get up to the seven figures.
Yeah, Greg.
Yeah, I mean you look at people like Jerome, of course.
He was never charged with anything.
He was threatened.
Uh they tried to pressure and extort him into signing a false statement implicating Trump, which would have been a lie.
Um, you know, that's the equivalent of attempting to suborn perjury.
He had to hire a team of lawyers to represent him.
Uh, you know, and his bank account is empty as a result of the state.
Well, let's look at General Flynn wrong.
We but yeah, both McCabe bragging well, I don't he doesn't need a lawyer, then call me bragging, ha, I wouldn't do this in the Obama or Bush administrations.
Top two FBI guys, they're setting him up.
I mean, Professor, and then he loses his house.
Now he's millions of dollars in debt.
They threaten to go after his kid.
This is how we treat 33 year veterans that put their lives in harm's way.
Look, it's a terrible, terrible thing, and it's been a terrible thing for many years that prosecutors do abuse their authority.
You know, the idea of arresting people at gunpoint, whether it be somebody who is like uh Stone or somebody who is Felicity Huffman, uh, whatever you think of them, you don't have to arrest these people at gunpoint and threaten them and show how powerful and strong you are, and you don't have to machine of them.
You can write them a nice letter saying if you have any information, please provide it.
But you know, it turns to harassment at some point.
And I gotta let you both go.
Thank you, Professor Dershowitz.
Thank you, Greg Jarrett Lindsey Graham next.
This was an investigation at its core about Donald Trump's daily, sometimes hourly, assault on the rule of law in this country.
As the country's chief executive, he sat in his pajamas watching Fox & Friends maligning the FBI.
Bill Gard didn't walk into that room with the scale at zero.
Rule of law had a deficit because Donald Trump had been kicking it in the teeth.
Can I just uh uh talk about this issue of the president's concerns about leaks?
Well, Jake, what I did is I looked on my shelf for the Watergate Senate Watergate Committee report.
I looked at the Iran Contra report.
I also looked at the the uh Ken Starr report, which is too big big to bring to the set here.
It's four volumes over two thousand words.
And I've got to tell you I've read all those, and in four hundred words, Mr. This report uh from the special counsel is more damning than all those reports about a president.
That is the predictable freak out, of course, by the left-wing media Democrats.
They cannot accept now four separate findings, no Russia collusion, none whatsoever.
Anyway, joining us now is South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham, and well, you've been saying that in spite of four separate reports and it's done, and none of this is gonna happen, that they're gonna stampede towards impeachment anyway.
Well, we can see the process now beginning to unfold before our eyes, and you know, the predictable names and characters, Maxime Waters and you know, Chairman Schiff and who by the way did collude and Nadler and the rest of them they're going nuts.
Well, so here's what I think you need to look for.
Number one, the Mueller report should be the last word on all things uh Russia and Trump, all things obstruction of justice, but it won't be.
So uh there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
If you don't believe me as Mueller, that's what started this whole mess as a two obstruction of justice.
How can you say President Trump impeded the Mueller investigation?
Give me one example of where Mueller was impeded from doing his job.
Quite the opposite you've got the best research team probably on television.
What I would like you to do for your show is to give a list of the things that the White House did to cooperate with Mueller, the number of documents, the number of people that were allowed to be interviewed by Mueller.
I would suggest in the history of the investigating of the presidency, nobody has been more cooperative than the Trump presidency toward Mueller.
We know they handed over almost one point five million documents when we know this is the first time an administration has not invoked executive privilege and Can I just stop you right there?
Okay.
Obstruction of justice has to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
Name an event that actually impeded uh Mueller from doing his job you've just laid out one point five million documents turned over by the Trump administration to Mueller voluntarily and they refuse to claim executive privilege at any stage in the process.
How in the hell is that obstructing justice?
Can I ask you, you know the people that are supposedly care about other people you know how much it cost when you have to hire a Washington DC lawyer and you're a staff person that works for the president and they drag you in there ten, fifteen, twenty hours uh now they want to drag you back again and what, ask the same questions over and over again just to come to a different conclusion where the evidence doesn't support it.
Uh what do you recommend I that what point does this get labeled what it is?
This is harassment people can't afford these lawyers that are working for the government.
Frankly even Senators and congressmen can't afford it.
Well hell no I couldn't afford this so I don't know if there's some fun we can create to help these people but here's what's happening how about they all go in and plead the fifth and say it's over.
I'm not used I I refer to my previous testimony I don't I don't know if that's a smart move because you know I don't think they've got anything to hide criminally but let me just say this.
We'll deal with that issue but what I want your listeners to understand is that sometimes you and I have disagreed.
I thought Mueller needed to be allowed to do this because there was a conflict with Sessions.
He was part of the campaign and I fought to make sure Mueller had the resources and the time to finish the job.
He has now finished the job President Trump came out of this thing great he was cleared on without any doubt uh about colluding with the Russians and there was no effort by Trump to impede the Mueller investigation so it's over for me.
Now what do you have?
You have people taking the document and trying to turn it into an impeachment document.
You have to really be unhinged and hate Trump to want to know more about the Mueller investigation.
This is not about learning more it is about getting a different outcome.
They can't stand the fact that Trump withstood two years 25 million dollars 40 FBI agents two thousand subpoenas whatever the numbers are and he made it through it's driving them crazy so they're unhinged and they're coming after Trump Sean not because he did anything wrong because they want to destroy his presidency.
But this is where we are now if it's not that well let's move on to taxes they want to now impeach the IRS commissioner for not turning over Donald Trump's taxes.
Elijah Cummings wants to hold uh the White House a White House witness in contempt of of Congress and by the way this is also about you know at some point every time you go under oath you know that they're setting perjury traps for these people.
Nadler wants to jail all Trump officials who won't comply with his subpoenas the president has laid down his marker enough he's not going to allow this anymore and I think the President's right and I also believe that he's on you know sound legal and constitutional footing that he does not have to cooperate anymore.
Everything he's allowed everybody that they ever wanted to talk on these issues.
Maxime Waters is claiming America's clamoring for impeachment.
She's been clamoring for it before the election.
Okay, we've gone from an inquiry based on a special counsel trying to find out if the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians.
Two years later, 25 million dollars later, 40 FBI agents later, we know the answer is no.
So everything they're doing now is to try to destroy the Trump presidency and his family.
This has got nothing to do with the truth, the rule of law.
This is political revenge.
What is playing out in front of us is using the power of the Congress to oversee the executive branch, abuse that power to destroy the president and his family.
And if I were President Trump, I would fight back.
If there's a site we could go to get money to help these people in the crosshairs of this, count me in, I'll write a check.
Okay, so you now are an important member of the United States Senate with a lot of subpoena powering its uh powers itself.
Uh we now know that the general counsel under Jim Comey, the FBI's top lawyer, thought that Hillary should be indicted.
Uh we know that Strck and Page were laughing because they knew the investigation was rigged, and Strzok himself, who said that Hillary should win a hundred million to zero because Trump is loathsome.
He did the interview with Hillary and also allowed two friends of hers in the room at the time, which is doesn't happen.
And so we have that aspect.
Then if we care about collusion, the Ukraine is now saying, well, we're guilty.
We colluded with the Clinton campaign and offering us evidence, nobody seems interested.
Then you got the dirty Russian dossier that the New York Times even acknowledged this week, uh, could have very likely been, as Hillary bought and paid for misinformation on purpose.
And it was used as the foundation for the Pfizer warrants.
Where when do we get those people and hold them accountable?
Well, it's going to start.
Uh uh Bob Barr uh is uh excuse me, Bill Barr is going to testify.
Uh the Attorney General, May 1st, before my committee in the Senate, about his uh view of the Mueller investigation, the decisions he's made and why he made them.
Then that ends it in the Senate, and we're going to move on to four areas.
I'm going to look at how the Clinton investigation was handled, not in a way to go back and put her in jail, but to find out why she was basically given a pass.
Slow down.
What if it what if it's proven that investigation was rigged and laws were broken?
Well, that that's why you need a special counsel.
I don't want Lindsay Graham to do that.
I want somebody outside of politics to look and see if there's criminal liability regarding the way the Clinton email investigation was conducted.
The second bucket is the counterintelligence counterintelligence investigation.
I want to know was it a legitimate counterintelligence investigation, or was it a ruse and a backdoor way to get into the Trump campaign?
I want to know about the FISA warrant, how it could be issued four times based on a bunch of political garbage.
And the last bucket I want to look at is why did they surveil General Flynn in transition?
What was the purpose of surveilling the Trump uh transition team?
And was there an effort after the election to invoke the 25th Amendment?
Those are the four areas I'm going to look at.
Well, we know that that's all true, that we have enough evidence and testimony to such at this point.
Let me go back to all of these issues.
Uh, because I think the evidence is clear, incontrovertible, it is overwhelming.
And that is that the uh 18 USC 793, the espionage act is clear.
You cannot have secret, top secret, classified information outside of a government server.
It was put there.
So you have multiple felonies, it would be for every instance.
We've already I would say that that if you did what she did with classified information, you'd probably be in jail.
But rather than Sean Hannity conducting the investigation or Lindsay Graham for criminal liability, I am begging the attorney general to assign somebody to this case for the very reasons you just suggested, independent of the political process, some neutral person to give this a look like they did uh Mueller did Trump.
Well, I think That has to happen.
And I have, you know, I actually think that a lot of things should happen even beyond that.
What do you think?
Well, let me get to a quick break here.
We'll continue.
Senator Lindsay Graham, South Carolina with us, 800 941 Sean Tollfrey telephone number.
And as we continue, Lindsay uh Graham of South Carolina is with us.
He's the chairman of the all-powerful judiciary committee.
Um, so you want you you there's four areas of interest.
The Clinton investigation.
Why was the counterintelligence investigation started in the first place?
Uh all evidence is now beginning to point that it started much earlier, not as we have been told.
Yes.
Well, you know, you know probably more than me.
Um, and also we want to get the Pfizer warrants, the bulk of information of which was Hillary's bought and paid for Russian dirty dossier, and then you want to get to the issue surrounding General Flynn.
Well, we know he was illegally unmasked.
We know he was illegally surveilled.
We know raw intelligence on the general was released.
I mean, I you know, the fact that you know he's going bankrupt, sold his home, is in millions of dollars of debt, and has no idea what his future is going to be.
You know, a great way to treat a 33-year vet.
And by the way, Comey and McKay bragging how they treated him and tricked him and told him he doesn't need a lawyer, and they would never do this type of thing in the Obama or Bush White House.
Wow.
So uh let me just follow through of that.
Yes.
I want to know what authority they had and what information they had, evidence to suggest that they should surveil the transition team.
I want to try to find out who leaked the fact that Flynn was being surveilled to the Washington Post.
Did Obama himself know about the uh counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign before the election?
Did Obama himself know about the surveillance of the Trump transition team after the election?
What was the basis of the surveillance and uh go from there?
I also think we've got to look into the abuse of intelligence.
We had a 350 percent increase in 2016 in the unmasking of American citizens.
That's a problem.
Yeah, it is.
And uh did the UN ambassador she request unmasking.
So three hundred times, but she says she didn't do it.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, so what I want to do is there's really three things going on here.
Horowitz is looking at the um the FISA warrant uh process.
His report should be out in the next thirty days, I hope.
I will take a look at it from a different point of view.
He's looking at it from an in-house counsel to try to find out who inside the FBI DOJ needs to be disciplined.
What I want to do is look at it to make sure it never happens again, change our laws if necessary and hold people accountable in a different way.
Uh after the election, I want Horwitz or somebody, including me, to look at whether or not the surveillance of the transition team was lawful, legitimate.
And was there an effort by DOJ types, FBI types, to try to invoke the 25th Amendment against newly elected President Trump?
Wow.
All right.
Uh we look forward to this.
You won't believe this.
You will just promise me that's the sell this as a movie.
Well, you can't, but if we don't hold them accountable, rigging investigations, trying to steal a presidential election and trying to uh basically undo an election using Russian lies is pretty amazing to me and abusing power all along the way.
When did uh President Trump say, hey, uh go out there and fire Mueller?
He never did.
You know, I was there at the same time that uh that the report says that you know McGean uh mentioned this.
And uh I dealt with I was I was assigned to deal with Mueller.
And I briefed the president every day.
And every week I saw Mueller or quarrels for eight months.
Right.
At no time did the president ever say, you know, John, I'm gonna get rid of him.
John is not gonna do it.
It was just the opposite.
Here's the message the president had for Bob Mueller to me to carry.
One, you tell him I respect what he's doing.
Number two, you tell him he's got my full cooperation.
Number three, get it done as quickly as possible.
And number and number four, uh whatever else you need.
Yeah.
Let me know.
So that was always the message, and that's exactly what we did.
He once described to me on this program that the Trump administration's actions related to the Russia probe are, quote, of a size and scope probably beyond Watergate.
What do you say now?
Well, I think it's clear from the Mueller report that that's exactly right.
The obstruction of justice uh in particular in this case is far worse than anything that Richard Nixon did.
Uh the uh the the break in by the Russians of the Democratic institutions, a foreign adversary, far more significant than the plumbers breaking into the Democratic headquarters.
So, yes, I would say in every way this is more significant than Watergate.
Uh and the fact that a candidate for president and now a president of the United States would not only not stand up and resist Russian interference in our election, but would welcome it, goes well beyond anything Nixon did.
The fact that the President of the United States would take Putin's side over his own intelligence agencies go well beyond anything Richard Nixon did.
So, yes, I think it is far more serious than Watergate.
Yeah, of course.
He's been saying that just like he's been saying, I have all the evidence of collusion and it doesn't exist.
I mean, it's really when you have four separate investigations that have all concluded the same thing.
How many more times do I have to go back to this Mueller report and read no collusion?
Just like the FBI uh struck and page, no collusion, a nine-month investigation, although it might have even started earlier, which we're doing a deep dive into even as we speak, and they cannot help themselves.
It is a level of rage, hatred, and psychosis.
You know, the the big question now is is the left-wing radicals of the Democratic Party, are they going to override any bit of common sense?
You have the the newness House Intel report, the bipartisan Senate Committee report, the FBI report, and the Mueller report.
Clearly, no collusion, no obstruction.
It doesn't matter.
And then we want your taxes.
We want it's tell me where any of this is good for the American people.
What are they doing to serve their constituents?
This is not service.
And the biggest liar of them all is, you know, Adam the Cowardly Schiff.
And it's like the media cannot give up the the addiction that they have.
Anyway, John Solomon is with us, investigative reporter, executive vice president of the Hill on the latest on the probe.
John has given me a little bit of a preview.
We'll have more details on this tonight.
I don't know how much you can give me, but like we're doing on this program in our own way, you in your own way, you know, you want really specific things answered.
And if we don't answer them and we don't solve the underlying causes, we are risking a system of justice that really does is not predicated on our Constitution any longer.
It's a dual system of justice, no equal justice under the law or application of our laws, and those that abuse power must be held accountable.
That's we're on the same page on that.
Yeah, listen, I think the American public is on the same page as well.
Uh they they this concern about dual justice and and uh uh hijacking of the intelligence and law enforcement community for political purposes is becoming more rooted in the American contest now that the uh Mueller report is out.
I think the most interesting thing I've heard the last five or six days, and it was in my column uh this morning, uh Sean, is that a growing number of intel people that I'm talking to you are beginning to say we may have had the assessment wrong.
That when we said that Russia was trying to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton, it may not be that clear.
In fact, a lot of people look at the facts that Mueller has put in the report and said, instead of a collusion uh uh strategy, it looks like uh Vladimir Putin was doing what is known in the spy trade craft as a discoverable influence operation.
What does that mean in layman's terms?
It means he was set up.
It was a setup.
It was designed to be detected so that people would then question uh Donald Trump, a sort of a uh the intelligence equivalent of a framing someone.
So to hear that, and one of the people who said this, Daniel Hoffman, the former CIA station chief in Moscow.
If anyone knows Russian spy craft, it's Daniel Hoffman.
When you start to hear the intelligence community talk that way, you realize how wrong the early assessments were and all the early reporting in my industry was, and how much there's uh a welcoming of a fresh review of all of these conclusions.
When are we talking about going back as far as what?
You know, I I I think you have to begin to take a look at the period that begins in December 2015.
If, as a lot of the facts seem to suggest, this was a political operation, a political Oppo research operation designed to create a breadcrumb trail that the FBI would bite on and then go after Donald Trump.
The first key moment seems to occur around December 2015, when, as I previously reported last year, Bruce Orr and uh Christopher Steele, soon to become the APA researcher of the of the Clinton campaign, start talking about trying to get dirt on Paul Manafort through a Russian connection they know as Oleg Deropaska, one of the oligarchs they were targeting.
From that point forward, I believe over the next few weeks and months, we will be able to track a series of events where you can see the Democrats working with foreign powers, foreign people.
Uh and uh let me let me interrupt you because I think I know what you're saying.
In other words, that we might have very high-level people within, say, the intelligence community that were farming out things to other allied countries that would be illegal for them themselves to do.
Exactly.
I think that's going to be one of the predominant questions.
Did we did we ask the foreigners to do what our law prevented us from doing uh against American citizens like Trump or any of his advisors?
I think that's one piece of it.
I think a second piece of it is the Democrats, the Justice Department under Democratic control, State Department under Democratic control, the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign.
Did they work with foreign powers to get information?
We have some pretty strong hints of it, right?
We know that uh Christopher Steele and Bruce Orr are targeting a Russian, Oleg Daropaskin.
We know Christopher Steele got uh the majority of his information from a former Russian intelligence officer, which by the way, doesn't exist.
When you're in the Russian intelligence, you never leave.
And then we know that there were these contacts with the Ukrainian embassy that Politico wrote about in 2017.
I think we're gonna be able to fill in a lot of gaps between those different points and show a much more robust effort by Democrats and the Democratic administration to work with foreigners to get dirt on Donald Trump.
You go through tonight, and I don't want to give away your story tonight because we're going to break it on Hannity to the extent that uh you and I have talked.
I'm going from memory here.
Sure.
Um, but in he you know, if Mr. Editor tear down these false and unproven Russia collusion stories, which is all true, but you go into very specific detail about very specific instances that there was an epic fail at the media, and now we have cable TV, that's one aspect of it.
The Washington Post, the New York Times is an aspect of it.
Um the you know, the other tales about Carter Page and and Manafort Assange and Buzzfeed's unfounded scoop on the Trump Tower Moscow project, et cetera, et cetera, or you know, Michael Cohn in Prague or you know, McClatchy who got so much wrong in all of this.
Yep.
Uh you're right.
You know, I uh there's a I go back to a very important point in journalism.
I remembered 1998.
That's the day that the Wall Street Journal broke a story about uh Bill Clinton that turned out and Monica Lewinsky that turned out to be false.
And they did the right thing.
Uh they did the wrong reporting, but when they were called on it, they retracted it.
What we've seen my industry do these last few years as overt obvious uh uh information has come out that contradict or uh uh debunk a story.
Instead of correcting and retracting the story, they're just doing appendages, things that people won't notice.
So add a little bit, oh Bob Muller says he doesn't agree with our assessment.
Well, in the old days, we used to call that story wrong, and we would retract it.
And uh I think the discussion I'd like to have in my own profession is what are the stories that should be retracted, because they're either demonstrably false or now two years in can't be proven.
That standard used to be uh the standard by which we retracted stories, and I think we'll be able to talk tonight about a whole bunch of those stories that don't meet the test of journalism accuracy, turn journalism ethics.
And uh I think there's a good discussion for the American people to demand that our industry fix and retract these stories.
You know, it is an amazing thing.
I got into a I stay off Twitter now.
I don't even have access to my accounts either.
And I went through a series of tweets this weekend after there was this ridiculous report by the you know absolutely hardline left-wing um, you know, daily beast.
And I just I just we just got into it because there's so much that they have not that they have gotten wrong from the very beginning on all of this.
And you know, it was time for somebody to call them out.
I called them lazy, overpaid, propagandists, you know, false politically driven coverage.
You know, the only the media mob is likely lost all credibility forever.
I made a list of everything that they have been wrong about in terms of of you know, going through the list of smullett, starting with, for example, Richard Jewell and and straight on through Nicholas Sandman and Cambridge and police and Duke LaCrosse, UVA, Ferguson, Baltimore, vetting Obama, they were, you know, or Kavanaugh, I believe, versus the Virginia Virginia Lieutenant Governor.
They've got it all wrong.
And they never are held accountable.
Yeah, we need a we need a moment in our profession, and and I say this as someone that still reveres the profession and still believes it can do good things in the world.
Uh that we need to have an inflection point to acknowledge where we've gotten off the rails.
There was a quote back from 1998 that uh uh uh uh journalism expert said at the time, which is the danger of scandals is that you get so emotionally invested in them that you mistake a bullet for an atom bomb.
And I I think that a lot of what happened here in the intelligence world uh Hey John, with all due respect, you're being very kind and gracious, they always get it wrong.
Well, I I can think of times where we got the profession got it right.
I know what we're doing.
Well, okay, but hang on.
Think think of the the extent on Donald Trump, everything is wrong.
They loved Obama, they hated Trump, and they acted as such.
And yeah, th are there exceptions to the rules?
Sure.
Um Cheryl Atkinson is an exception.
You're an exception.
But generally speaking, they are hardline left that now has gone so over to the other side.
They, you know, there's an indignation that they cannot admit or retract and apologize, as you said, it's never hell will freeze over, John.
It's never gonna happen.
It it may, it may, and that will be an unfortunate thing, because I I think we have to fix ourselves as an industry.
Journalism's dead, except for the few people that really care about truth.
Yeah.
And the uh you know it's not by accident that I have a track record that I'm right s almost all the time when they're wrong.
And the same with you.
And the key is to stick to the facts.
And I think so much emotion and politics have gotten into the profession that it clouds the judgment of editors and and of Oh, you think.
Um let's go back now because let's get a big picture of the days, the weeks, the months ahead, what's coming.
Yeah, I think the biggest dynamic to see is watching the investigators now become the investigated.
That is going to be the dynamic that will uh dominate the next six months.
And that will occur on many fronts.
It'll occur in the intelligence community, it'll occur with Attorney General Barr, who is doing his own assessment.
It will occur with the inspector general of the Justice Department, and I believe it will occur in both the House and the Senate.
Even Republicans in the minority are starting to do some pretty remarkable things, digging into uh some of the issues, and even though they don't have committee power, they still have the power of their office.
And I think you'll see House Republicans, Lindsey Graham, uh uh Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has a very powerful committee.
I think you'll see between those five sectors a lot of accountability coming out and a lot of hard questions.
And I think the biggest thing the president of the United States can do to help all of those uh gain transparency, declassify the documents that have been identified in those five buckets.
Well, uh you want to go remind people.
I remind them often, but the way you say it is different.
So maybe they'll hear from you better than me.
Well, you've had it right from the beginning.
So it's it's the FISA document.
It's the gang of eight documents.
The gang of eight would expose the FBI acknowledging failure.
Yes, and showing the missteps.
So when you read those two together, you sort of have the perfect compendium of what went wrong in the FBI.
Then there are some emails that show how early on the FBI knew that there were problems with Christopher Steele as an informant.
Remember, affirmatively they told the court he was uh in good standing and they knew of no derogatory information.
I don't think that declaration is gonna turn to be out to be true.
You know, I I've gotta give props and kudos to you, and I I can't mention every person, but there's maybe twenty or thirty of us that have been on this from day one, and uh uh we wouldn't be here, honestly, without you know, th this is too now critical and crucial to the the republic that we love.
And if we don't solve these problems, it's gonna happen again.
Anyway, thank you so much, John Solomon.
We'll see you tonight on Hannity Nine Eastern, Fox News Channel.
Quick break, right back.
Democrat Mark Penn, a hard-hitting article about Mueller being done and Democrats uh should be too, because Trump is no Nixon.
Uh well, he'll weigh in on the extremists now, taking over the Democratic Party.
Straight ahead.
Have all of this case of obstruction presented in the Muller report as you just stated.
Some might ask, why haven't you start why haven't you opened an impeachment inquiry?
Or in fairness, is that what you're doing right now?
I don't think we're doing that.
We may get to that, we may not.
As I said before, it is our job to go to go through all the evidence uh to all the information.
And some of us go with the matter and to go where the evidence leads us.
Do you think this is impeachable?
Yeah, I do.
I do think that this if proven, if proven, uh which hasn't been proven yet, some of this uh if proven, some of this would be impeachable.
Yes.
All right.
Construction of justice, if proven would be impeachable.
And then you're gonna go about to see if you can prove it.
Well, we're gonna see where the facts lead us.
The report is out.
The partisan divide seems wide or even wider than ever.
What happens now?
This document, the Mueller document, has now left us with a roadmap to go forward.
Uh I think he basically said to us uh as a Congress, it's up to you to take this further with regard to obstruction and uh the and other matters that might come up.
Well, already, Mr. Chairman, uh Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocacio Cortez, Maxine Waters, Julia and Castro have said we should begin proceedings to impeach the president.
Are you there yet?
I'm not I'm not there yet, but um I I I can foresee that possibly coming.
I and my staff began to look very closely at this president early on.
And when we looked at all of his allies and the people who were connected with him and with Putin and the Kremlin and with the oligarchs of Russia, we determined something was very wrong, and we dubbed them the Kremlin Klan.
The Kremlin Klan as identified has been on my face page on Twitter for almost two years.
We know who they are, and this report only confirms that.
What more do we need to do?
Okay.
So if we cannot decide, if the Democrats cannot decide that they're gonna move with impeachment, I guess they're gonna go on with these investigations.
How long are they going to go on with them?
What more do they need to prove?
That's Nadler, uh Congressman Cummings, Congresswoman, Maxime Waters, and you know, look at the headline say Democrats may pursue impeachment against Donald Trump.
Uh Schiff Dems may take up impeachment proceedings if it's in the best if it's the best thing for the country.
Waters enough information in the Mueller report to move forward with impeachment.
If we do nothing after Mueller report, Trump is going to be emboldened another headline.
Um, and it gets on from there.
You know, there's a a conspiracy TV MSNBC panel debating over the weekend the strategy on impeachment.
It'd be a mistake to start the hearings right away, but we gotta do it.
You know, Joy Reid badgering a Democratic uh a Congressperson for not wanting to impeach Donald Trump.
Um, this is who they have now become.
When is there ever somebody tell me an instance where they say, you know, maybe we can work with the president, secure our border, lower the prices of prescription drugs like we have been how many times have has Dr. Josh been on this program of Atlas MD, and he gets his own negotiations with with drug companies at 95% discounts?
Um and concierge care for every American at price 50 bucks a month for adults.
It's unbelievable.
You walk out of the doctor's office with your prescription, and he's duplicated that nearly a thousand times.
When are they gonna talk about?
Oh, how can we be energy independent?
How you know how what do we do with the vast resources of energy?
Is there anything the Democrats are offering that helps forgotten men and women that were were so hurt during the Obama years?
Anyway, there is one Democrat with a lot of courage in all of this, as a new piece in the hill today.
Mark Penn is headline, Muller's done, Democrat should be two, Trump is no Nixon.
But how much abuse do you get for saying what is so obvious that they're destroying the Democratic Party?
Well, you know, I get a mix of everything.
I have had people write me, even from the Watergate era thanking me.
So, you know, look, I know it's a controversial uh viewpoint, but I was in impeachment in the middle of it in ninety-eight, working with President Clinton, and I saw how destructive these things are to the country.
You want to have an election, have an election.
You want to have an impeachment.
You sure can't have one on the basis of this report.
You know what's amazing, Mark, is uh and I said this in in terms of Bill Clinton and the difference between him and Obama.
And I felt like I was out there on a limb with the smallest twig hanging on a leaf from that was left from last fall and about to, you know, Duke Gingrich told me if I keep pushing so hard and vetting Obama that I'm probably gonna ruin my career, that I can't stop, it's who I am.
And I concluded after Frank Marshall Davis, Olinski Acorn uh community organizer and Reverend Wright and Ayers and Doran that Obama's gonna be a r radical ideologue, and he was.
He never changed.
Bill Clinton, you know, after two years, Republicans take back Congress for the first time in 40, comes up with the era of big government is over and the end of welfare as we know it.
He governed conservatively as a Democrat from that point on, or at least moderate moderately, working with Newt Gingrich to solve problems.
Well, yeah, I was part of that effort, right?
And we had welfare reform, we had a balanced budget.
We we had an immigration reform bill at the time.
Uh we we had a lot we did a lot of good.
We said, look, let's put the country first.
You know, a lot of good listen, the last time we had a balanced budget was with Newt as speaker and and Clinton as president.
Yeah, that's true.
Look, right.
And and Newt Newt and the president would pound at each other all day and they would go and negotiate all night.
And it worked.
And the country was better off.
Correct.
So you see the headlines, you see the new Green Deal, you hear impeachment impeachment.
You know, they're still pushing collusion for crying out loud, even though the Mueller report couldn't be any more clear.
What what does this do?
Who wins this battle if there even is a battle?
I mean, Stanny Hoyer's trying to pull back, even Pelosi tried a little, but then she gets hammered from her left flank.
I I would argue that the radicals have taken over the Democratic Party.
They win.
Well, look, Gingrich at the time went too far, and we gained seats in in ninety-eight.
And I think Democrats are on the path of going too far.
They're too far because the Mueller report showed no collusion.
And if it showed no collusion, how do you obstruct justice that wasn't gonna happen?
Then in fact, uh the injustice was the investigation itself.
And I've seen how frustrated presidents get when they're investigated for things they did do, let alone for things they didn't do.
You know, I love that whole thing on obstruction.
Well, he said that um uh I want to fire Mueller.
This is ridiculous.
This is a witch hunt.
He said it all publicly, or Rod Rosenstein is a bad guy, he needs to go.
Or um, I hope General Flynn doesn't get in trouble.
He never took any steps, and he had the authority himself to do all of that.
He would have legally he could have fired Mueller.
Right.
He actually had he had the constitutional authority to fire Mueller.
And what did he actually do with Mueller?
He turned over more documents than we ever would have.
Never invoked executive privilege one time.
Not once.
Not one time.
So he did the same thing.
He hit him during the day in the politics, and by night he cooperated fully, gave them full access.
And, you know, what did they find?
That sometimes you got frustrated.
Who wouldn't get frustrated?
But he didn't step over any lines.
He didn't shut down their investigation.
He didn't pay hush money.
There was none of the things that was done like Nixon did.
This is this is absurd.
This is a president who was continually frustrated that an that an investigation that should never have happened was plaguing his presidency over something that didn't happen.
I mean, it's incredible when you think about it.
It's scary, actually.
Now, I can tell you my last interview with the president, he was very clear that he will declassify he Russia Gate documents.
And from all of my sources, and I worked a lot of sources in the two plus years this has been going on, I think you're pretty well aware this was uh a team effort.
This was not just Sean Hannity.
And we know that there's damning information in those FISA applications.
I'll quote the Grassley Graham memo.
The The bulk of information in the FISA applications came from that Hillary Clinton paid for Russian dossier with lies, and it was also disseminated to the public.
And we also know that the fix was in even Paige and Strzok threw it right on the desk of Loretta Lynch that they rigged the investigation into Hillary's email server and obvious obstruction of justice.
Um when we get the gang of eight, those Pfizer applications, those five buckets that I always talk about, then there's going to be a new narrative in this country.
You're you're keenly aware of it as well.
And that's the abuse of power that took place and the effort to undermine a duly elected president.
Look, there were three things that that that you know that that caught my eye, right?
I mean, first, when it came out that that the dossier itself was really paid for through an Oppo research group that actually was in fact funded by the DMC and the Hillary Campaign.
So anyone would have would have said, hey, why are we using a document?
It's not legitimate intelligence.
Second, anybody should just read it.
It's a joke when you read it.
It's a complete sham joke if if if you just read actually a document.
It's not a joke, though.
It's not a joke.
Right?
Which the Struck Page text, which said, you know what?
The possibility of a conspiracy inside is real.
The stuff that you had on was real.
That there was more evidence for that than for the opposite.
And any objective journalist should have seen that.
You know, I I went on a tweet storm last night, and I I don't have access to any social media, haven't for a long time.
So I have to I have to ask my staff.
Uh I wrote it out and I sent it to them.
I said, could you send this out in a series of tweets?
And all the things that they didn't do, all the the you know, the fact that they tried to unseat a duly elected president, that there was an insurance policy for such, the fact that the news media was so wrong so often, as we have pointed out, um, the fact that you know all of these things happen, and they get it wrong on Richard Jewell, Cambridge Police, UVA, Duke Lacrosse, Ferguson, Baltimore, vetting Obama, the Covington kids, uh, Kavanaugh, you know, I can go on forever.
And they never this is the biggest epic fail ever by the news media.
How does this fall out for them?
Well, it it ranks up there with weapons of mass destruction.
So it's a, you know, uh, you look, in fact, I don't understand how the media hasn't said, look, all of these connections with Russia, we didn't we only looked at at this campaign.
We didn't look at everybody's connections.
We didn't look at at the Democrats connecting.
We looked at these connections and none of them led to anything that could remotely be called the collusion and and therefore the media should have in effect apologized.
And frankly, it's incredible that it went, you know, for any real observer of what Mueller was doing, he didn't have a single prosecution based on that.
He either has it on on Faro registration taxes or process crimes related to his own investigation.
Without even a single person indicted for obstruction or for collusion, how are you then gonna put this at the at the president's feet unless you think the president is a magician?
I think it's well said.
All right, stay right there.
More with Mark Penn, the former polster for the Clintons.
It's his article, Muller's done, Democrat should be too.
Trump is not Nixon.
800 941 Sean, if you want to be a part of this uh program.
But as we continue, Mark Penn, former Clinton polster is with us.
Mueller's done, Democrat should be too.
Trump is no Nixon, uh, but it's not gonna happen.
Now, what I imagine is gonna happen at some point based on some of the closed door testimony that we got, especially on the Clinton email investigation, and I don't know where you stand.
The evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible.
She had top secret classified information on a private server.
The law is clear, 18 USC 793.
But Strck and Paige referred to the fix being in on that investigation.
Also, that would be an underlying crime.
Then the if you want real obstruction, well, there was a real intent when you delete 33,000 subpoenaed emails, you bleach bit your hard drive to make it clean and it makes it unrecoverable, and have an aide bust up your Devices in case there's any evidence on that, so that would be intent.
Then you have the whole FISA abuse scandal and then an attempt to undo a duly elected president.
Do you see all of these things now coming to light?
And isn't it in the country's best interest to get to the bottom of all of it?
Well, you know, as someone who worked for the Clinton Sun, I stay away from commenting directly on people whom I respect and and I feel did did a lot of good for the country.
I don't think let me ask you another way.
If you deleted 33,000 subpoenaed emails you tried me to do that.
No, no.
If you deleted 33,000 subpoenaed emails, acid washed your hard drive with bleach pit, had an aid bust up your phones and blackberries, um, do you think you'd be in trouble?
Well, let me put it this way you don't delete emails unless you're really lead to, especially if there are other congressional subpoena as it's as a general rule.
I just don't think I'm going to be nice and just let that pass, by the way.
Go ahead.
I don't think they're going to go back to there.
I think the focus here is going to be on the FBI, the CIA, the Obama administration, the listening in, the unmasking, the trick that was done against against Flynn by Sally Yates.
That was terrible.
That's where things are going to center, and I think it is the most explosive scandal really certainly in my lifetime in American history.
You're on the right side of history.
It is the biggest abuse of power corruption scandal we've ever seen.
They tried to rig an election, they saved one candidate from indictment, then they tried to undo an election, and they knew what they were doing.
And unfortunately for those involved, there's the evidence that is coming that proves it all.
And we already have a lot of it.
Mark Penn, thank you.
Appreciate it.
All right, glad you're with us.
News Roundup Information Overload Hour.
Look, a lot of you working, a lot of you busy, 9 30.
The Attorney General with Rod Rosenstein with him, and of course, with consultation of the Special Counsel and the Office of Independent Counsel.
Uh, yeah, they made the decision because there's no evidence that rises to any level of obstruction.
Many of you missed it.
I want you to hear it in full.
And this is the Attorney General Barr from earlier today.
The Special Counsel's report states that his quote investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
I am sure that all Americans share my concern about the efforts of the Russian government to interfere in our presidential election.
As the Special Counsel report makes clear, the Russian government sought to interfere in our election process.
But thanks to the special counsel's thorough investigation, we now know that the Russian operatives who perpetrated these schemes did not have the cooperation of President Trump or the Trump campaign, or the knowing assistance of any other American for that matter.
That is something that all Americans can and should be grateful to have confirmed.
First, the report details efforts by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company with close ties to the Russian government to sow social discord among American voters through disinformation and social media operations.
Following a thorough investigation of this disinformation campaign, the special counsel brought charges in federal court against several Russian nationals and entities for their respective roles in this scheme.
Those charges remain pending, and the individual defendants remain at large.
But the special counsel found no evidence that any American, including anyone associated with the Trump campaign, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government or the IRA.
In another way, the special counsel found no collusion by any Americans in IRA's illegal activities.
Second, the report details efforts by the Russian military officials associated with the GRU, the Russian military intelligence organization, to hack into computers and steal documents and emails from individuals associated with the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton's campaign.
But again, the special counsel's Report did not find any evidence that members of the Trump campaign or anyone associated with the campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these hacking operations.
In other words, there was no evidence of the Trump campaign collusion with the Russian government's hacking.
The Special Counsel's investigation also examined Russian efforts to publish stolen emails and documents on the Internet.
The Special Counsel found that after the GRU disseminated some of the stolen documents to entities that it controlled, D.C. Leaks and Goosefer II, the GRU transferred some of the stolen materials to WikiLeaks for publication.
WikiLeaks then made a series of document dumps.
The Special Counsel also investigated whether any member or affiliate of the Trump campaign encouraged or otherwise played a role in these dissemination efforts.
Under applicable law, publication of these types of material would not be criminal unless the publisher also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy.
After finding no underlying collusion with Russia, the Special Counsel's report goes on to consider whether certain actions of the President could amount to obstruction of the Special Counsel's investigation.
As I addressed in my March 24th letter, the Special Counsel did not make a traditional prosecutorial judgment regarding this allegation.
Instead, the report recounts ten episodes involving the President and discusses potential legal theories for connecting those activities to the elements of an obstruction offense.
After carefully reviewing the facts and legal theories outlined in the report, and in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other Department lawyers, the Deputy Attorney General and I concluded that the evidence developed by the Special Counsel is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction of justice offense.
Although the Deputy Attorney General and I disagreed with some of the Special Counsel's legal theories and felt that some of the episodes examined did not amount to obstruction as a matter of law, we did not rely solely on that in making our decision.
Instead, we accepted the Special Counsel's legal framework for purposes of our analysis and evaluated the evidence as presented by the Special Counsel in reaching our conclusions.
In assessing the President's actions discussed in the report, it is important to bear in mind the context.
President Trump faced an unprecedented situation.
As he entered into office and sought to perform his responsibilities as president, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking office and the conduct of some of his associates.
At the same time, there was relentless speculation in the news media about the president's personal culpability.
Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was in fact no collusion.
And as the Special Counsel's report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks.
Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the Special Counsel's investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privileged claims.
And at the same time, the President took no act that in fact deprived the Special Counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation.
Apart from whether the acts were obstructive, this evidence of noncorrupt motives weighs heavily against any allegation that the President had a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation.
As you will see, most of the redactions were compelled by the need to prevent harm to ongoing matters and to comply with court orders prohibiting the public disclosure of information bearing on ongoing investigations and criminal cases, such as the IRA case and the Roger Stone case.
These redactions were applied by Department of Justice attorneys working closely together with attorneys from the Special Counsel's office, as well as the intelligence community.
And prosecutors are handling the ongoing cases.
The redactions are their work product.
No redactions done by anybody outside this group.
There were no redactions done by anybody outside this group.
No one outside this group proposed any redactions.
And no one outside the Department has seen the unredacted report, with the exception of certain sections that were made available to IC, the intelligence community, for their advice on protecting intelligence sources and methods.
Consistent with longstanding executive branch practice, the decision whether to assert executive privilege over any portion of the report rested with the President of the United States.
Because the White House had voluntarily cooperated with the Special Counsel, significant portions of the report contained material over which the President could have asserted privilege.
And he would have been well within his rights to do so.
Following my March 29th letter, the Office of the White House Counsel requested the opportunity to review the redacted version of the report in order to advise the President on the potential invocation of privilege, which is consistent with long-standing practice.
Following that review, the President confirmed that in the interest of transparency and full disclosure to the American people, he would not assert privilege over the special counsel's report.
Accordingly, the public report I am releasing today contains redactions only for the four categories that I previously outlined, and no material has been redacted based on executive privilege.
In addition, earlier this week, the President's personal counsel requested and was given the opportunity to read a final version of the redacted report before it was publicly released.
That request was consistent with the practice followed under the Ethics and Government Act, which permitted individuals named in a report prepared by an independent counsel the opportunity to read the report before publication.
The President's personal lawyers were not permitted to make and did not request any redactions.
In addition to making the redacted report public, we are also working with Congress to accommodate their legitimate oversight interests with respect to the Special Counsel's investigation.
We have been consulting with Chairman Graham and Chairman Nadler through this process, and we will continue to do so.
Given the limited nature of the redactions, I believe that the publicly released report will allow every American to understand the results of the Special Counsel's investigation.
Nevertheless, in an effort to accommodate Congressional requests, we will make available, subject to appropriate safeguards, to a bipartisan group of leaders from several congressional committees, a version of the report with all redactions removed except those relating to grand jury information.
Thus, these members of Congress will be able to see all of the redacted material for themselves, with the limited exception of that which by law cannot be shared.
I believe that this accommodation, together with my upcoming testimony before the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, will satisfy any need Congress has for information regarding the Special Counsel's investigation.
Mr. Attorney General, we don't have the report in hand.
So could you explain for us the Special Counsel's articulated reason for not reaching a decision on obstruction of justice and if it had anything to do with the Department's long-standing guidance on not indicting a sitting president, and you say you disagree with some of his legal theories, what did you disagree with him on?
I I I'd leave it to his description in the report, the Special Counsel's own articulation of why he did not want to make a determination as to whether or not there was an obstruction offense.
But I will say that when we met with him, uh, Deputy Attorney General uh Rosenstein and I met with him along with Ed O'Callaghan, uh, who is the principal associate deputy on March 5th, we specifically asked him about the OLC opinion and whether or not he was taking the position that he would have found a crime but for the existence of the OLC opinion, and he made it very clear several times that that was not his position.
He he was not saying that but for the OLC opinion he would have found a crime.
He made it clear that he had not made the determination that there was a crime.
Given That uh why did you, Mr. Rosenstein, feel the need you had to take it to the next step to conclude that there was no crime, especially given that DOJ policy?
Well, the very prosecutorial function and all our powers as prosecutors, including the power to convene grand juries and the compulsory process that's involved there is for one purpose and one purpose only.
It's determine yes or no, was alleged conduct criminal or not criminal.
That is that is our responsibility, and that's why we have the tools we have, and we don't go through this process just to collect information and throw it out to the public.
We collect this information, we use that compulsory process for the purpose of making that decision.
And because the special counsel did not make that decision, we felt the department had to.
And that was a decision by me and the deputy attorney general.
Did the special counsel indicate that he wanted you to make the decision or that it should be left for Congress?
And also, how do you respond to criticism you're receiving receiving from Congressional Democrats that you're acting more as a attorney for the president rather than uh as the chief law enforcement officer?
Well, uh special counsel Muller did not indicate that his purpose was to leave the decision to Congress.
I hope that was not his view, since we don't convene grand juries and conduct criminal investigations for that purpose.
Uh he did not, I didn't talk to him directly about uh the fact that we were making the decision, but I am told that his reaction to that was that it was uh my my prerogative as attorney general to make that decision.
Uh Robert Mueller remains a Justice Department employee as of this moment.
Will you permit him to testify publicly to Congress?
I have no objection to Bob Mueller personally testifying.
Um, Mr. Attorney General, it's not the Democrats who have questioned some of the process here.
A Republican appointed judge on Tuesday said you have, quote, created an environment that has caused a significant part of the American public to be concerned about these redactions.
You clear the president on obstruction, the president is fundraising off of your comments about spying.
And here you have remarks that are quite generous to the president, including acknowledging his feelings and his emotions.
So what do you say to people on both sides of the aisle who are concerned that you are trying to protect the president?
Well, actually, the the statements about his his uh sincere beliefs are from are are recognized in the report that there was substantial evidence for that.
So I'm not sure what your basis is for saying that I am being generous to the president.
He makes an unprecedented situation.
It just seems like there's a lot of effort to say to go out of your way to acknowledge how this was a very important thing.
Well, is there is there another precedent for it?
No, but it's a unprecedented as an accurate description, isn't it?
Yes, Eric, there's a lot of public interest in the absence of the special counsel and members of his team.
Was he invited to join you up on the podium?
Why is he not here?
This is his report, obviously, that you're talking about today.
The report he did it for me as the attorney general.
He is required under the regulation to pro to provide me with a confidential report.
I'm here to discuss my response to that report and my decision, entirely discretionary, to make it public, since these reports are not supposed to be made public.
That's what I'm here to discuss.
And with respect to the breaking New York Times uh story about about the White House and Justice Department, the only collusion here is colluding on the collusion.
This is actually collusion.
By the way, in case you're wondering, what is collusion look like?
It looks like the attorney general briefing the attorney general's lawyers briefing the president before Congress or the public.
Here's a different theory.
That he spent the last 20 years watching Fox News, and he's become a real Trump supporter.
And he's like everyone else in the Trump administration.
I was asking if there's another explanation.
Okay, but I mean, it's the explanation.
I I just think, you know, if you look at his behavior, it is not that of a geriatric, it is that of a partisan.
And although we thought going into it that he was he's deeply conservative as well, that he was very close to Trump, that he was going to be a truck lackey of the president.
It turns out that this attorney general is.
He was under oath.
He said he wasn't going to talk about the report until it comes out.
So I think people are confused, at best confused.
Why would you come out and talk about a document and shape perspective of a perspective on a Document document that nobody has been able to see.
What has changed in a week?
The president is the subject of the investigation.
And honestly, I've never heard of such a thing.
It's a complete breach of precedent.
It's a breach of common sense.
And indeed, it makes Trump look plainly guilty.
We shouldn't take anything that Barr says tomorrow.
You said it exactly right in the open.
We shouldn't take anything that Barr says tomorrow as anything other than performative coonery.
We shouldn't take anything that the president says tomorrow as anything other than spin.
This seems to me, it's just analysis here, exactly like something Trump would do is push someone out to brand it, then rebrand it himself, and then the report comes out.
And we have to go through all of it and do our best to deal with it fairly with every piece of information painstakingly.
But Michael, it's also short-sighted.
He he again, he does something once again that is going to scuff up his reputation.
Actually, his reputation.
You mean the attorney general.
I'm talking about the attorney general.
Barr may be the person ultimately responsible for a change in how we select our attorney generals.
And it seems uh bizarre at this point.
Luckily, this president has a pliant attorney general.
Clearly, and and a very amped up, jacked up message operation.
Sean Hannity said two years ago that Richard Nixon wouldn't have had to resign if he'd had Fox News.
Actually, I think Geraldo said it too, Sean Hannity, and they chuckled.
That might be true, because this conduct is as um sort of impeachable looking, if you put it in a time capsule as Nixon's conduct.
But what Nixon didn't have was a an overdrive sort of social media we now know aided and embedded by Russian trolls, um, and and a news network dedicated to amplifying um what is a very subjective read of of uh of a report that in the end, if it exonerates them, why are they so upset by all the details?
All right, they have it more of the media meltdown.
I'll take it as a compliment because we told the truth.
It is amazing.
It's so predictable.
It's everything I told you would happen yesterday happens, but it's over.
And they don't know yet that it's over, uh, in so many different ways.
Uh 800-941 Sean Tollfreed telephone number.
Now we played in the last half hour, uh, the attorney general Bill Barr, and he had Rod Rosenstein right next to him, and the Office of Legal Counsel in conjunction with uh with consulting the special counsel, uh, yeah, they left it to them to decide on obstruction.
And for all the reasons that we've discussed earlier in the program today, it's over.
It doesn't matter what these people think.
None of these people care about real obstruction.
It's like they cared about I believe every woman has a right to be believed.
I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, that it's a democratic governor, lieutenant governor in the state or the commonwealth of Virginia, state of Virginia, who is accused of rape and violent sexual assault by two separate individuals who told people at the time, give compelling interviews to Gail King of CBS, and all the I believers are nowhere to be found.
They don't care about a real obstruction, but with an underlying crime, which is the biggest problem here.
Biggest problem they have is that they have no underlying crime.
The president is totally and completely exonerated.
The idea, the these ten items laid out in part two of this, you know, waste, monotonous, boring, dull, ridiculous report that took two and a half years to put together, is that they have nothing except innuendo, which is all they're left with, and process crimes.
Yeah, well, I I conclude things I've gotten things out of this that nobody else seems to get, and you know what?
They blow up the most insignificant things, ignoring the biggest one, is that we are vulnerable as a country, which brings to light the danger of what Hillary did by putting top secret classified information on a mom and pop, you know, server.
And then, yeah, that was a real violation, felony, espionage act, and then, of course, uh they they rigged that investigation.
And then, of course, the intent destroying subpoenaed emails and washing her hard drive and beating up her blackberries and iPhones.
Yeah, that was all that was the intention was to destroy the evidence.
Slam done case, not one person in this corrupt rage, hatred media mob dare bring that up because they lose.
But then with it's now now everything begins to go back to what I've been saying.
Anyway, joining us now, we have Jonathan Gillum, former FBI agent, Federal Air Marshal, author of Sheep No No More, Danielle McLaughlin, attorney constitutional expert.
Thank you both for being with us.
When you get to the bottom line in all of this, there is no collusion.
There is no obstruction.
There is no case for such.
And now we have...
This is their last gasp at hysterical and feigning coverage of moral outrage, which we know is selective and phony.
Yeah, and I think you know, I watched your show last night on uh Fox News, John, and one thing that really stood out as I went around because I wanted to see how the media was uh spinning certain things and how people were going to say stuff.
What you just brought up is something that's very important is that throughout this entire time, you all have been showing proof.
You've been saying this, you know, these are the examples of what happened uh and how this uh case should have never gone forward with the fake dossier and the fake evidence and all these other things.
And uh it was very important because last night was validating for you, and today is validating for you.
But what it showed me was that when people on the right discuss and analyze this, they do it with evidence, not with emotion.
And that is the biggest thing that you see today with all those clips that you just played, is that it's a hundred percent emotion, and these people are are being fed their own information that they created, and then they get emotional about it.
And uh it it reminds me of when it's not.
Well, it's what they've wanted, and they put all their credibility, not that they had any on the line, and they ran with their anonymous sources, but when you get to the whole issue, they've been saying Russia, Russia, Russia, collusion, collusion, collusion, collusion.
And even when the Mueller report and with his partisan team of hacks, I mean, you could they're seething with hatred and dying and wishing and hoping that they could nail this guy and they can't.
You know, and when the report has to state the investigation did not establish members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities, the case is over.
And then you say, well, the president wanted to fire sessions and he wanted to fire Mueller, and he wanted to he wanted General Flynn not to get in trouble.
And you know, all of this, okay.
Well, the uh Danielle, you also had people in the deep state that wanted to wear a wire on the president and talked openly about it and wanted to invoke the 25th amendment and talked openly about it.
Uh and then you have real evidence where Hillary Clinton, you know, had our investigation rigged from the get-go, and real evidence of obstruction.
The double standard is nauseating in this country.
Good afternoon, guys.
You know, there are ten uh instances in this report where uh the president is alleged to have obstructed justice, and there are many more where it's reported by the investigators that he tried and failed because people around him uh decided that they weren't going to go along.
I agree.
Uh, you know, Robert Muller did his job, Bill Bond did his job.
They have concluded basically because the president have decided to not be indicted for a crime, which is DOG DOJ guidance, uh, that there is not a crime there.
The answer here will be political.
And the way I think about it is this would you lose your job if you'd done these things?
I would lose my job.
This is a political thing.
This is I suspect there may be a lot of people.
If you've done what things?
Done what?
If there's an internal investigation at your job and you go out of your way to destroy evidence, You lie to the American people, which is what Sarah Sanders did when she talked about that FBI agents all over the country were glad that Jim Comey was was fired.
By the way, no, I excuse me.
Every FBI agent I know, and Jonathan knows more than me.
None of them like what what the likes of Comey struck, Paige, McCabe, and others did.
None of them.
But that's not what Sarah said.
She said that people had told her that from the FBI, and that was a lie.
She lied to the American.
How do you know?
Wait a minute.
I'm hearing it from my FBI friends all the time.
As a matter of fact, I'm wearing an FBI pin a lot of nights on TV because one of my FBI buddies said, you know, thank you for sticking up for the 99% of us that are honest and decent and hard working and And take our job seriously, and we would never do what they did here.
I have ultimate respect for any person in law enforcement.
I'm talking about Sarah Sanders lying about what a purported is.
You keep repeating it, but you know, but I'm telling you, I'm hearing it everywhere from the same FBI agents, probably.
Jonathan, what do you hear from your FBI buddies?
Still a lie.
It's still a lie that you told because no one's told me.
What people are looking at when they're saying that somebody obstructed justice, there was nothing there.
And if you're being investigator, if anybody else is being investigated and they didn't do anything wrong, I would be telling people as well as a former FBI agent, I would tell people, don't cooperate.
Go get an attorney.
If somebody's trying to prove you guilty of something that you didn't do and they're fabricating evidence, and the entire case is hinging on fake evidence, I would say get an attorney, don't cooperate.
And then if you get a chance to go out into the media and stand up for yourself, I would say do that.
And that is exactly what the Trump administration did.
There's no obstruction of justice because there was no justice.
How can you obstruct a fake investigation?
There is a difference between not cooperating and actively obstructing an investigation investigation.
Why would you cooperate?
Why would you cooperate with a fake investigation?
If if you had if you were conducting an investigation as an agent and you knew that someone was trying to tell people to lie, was destroying evidence, was telling people to lie on other accounts, would you would you go after that person for obstructing your investigation?
Danielle, I would never investigate somebody unless and this is the way the FBI works, unless we have probable cause to believe that they're guilty.
And in this case, there was no cause probable cause.
It was a fake piece of evidence that was paid for by political operatives.
I would never have brought that investigation forward.
Danielle?
We know about Papadopoulos.
We know about the Australian ambassador.
We know about the fact that somebody connected to that campaign knew that Russia had hacked the DNC and there was damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
That is probable cause.
You cannot have foreign interference in an election.
And I want to say this again.
I accept the report as all Americans should.
They did not find criminal wrongdoing.
This will become a political process and who knows what's going to happen.
We saw what happened with Bill Clinton.
Newt Gingrich got over his skis.
He went too hard and the Republicans lost the House.
So Democrats are going to have to decide what they do.
But when I see this stuff in writing, I just think if I had a job and I did all this stuff and I'm thinking about people at home, would you keep your job or not?
This conversation that you're having with us doesn't mean anything because it was a completely fake investigation.
And let me tell you something.
If you were standing and you were really hungry and you were standing under an apple tree that was swarming with worms, but there was one small apple up on top of that tree, would you even waste your time with that?
No, because it's a spoiled tree.
And that's the way justice works.
We don't look at one thing that one person said and then build a case around that.
We look at the entire case and we say, is there criminal activity going on here?
And one person having one meeting when they were drinking does not make a case.
Right, but it was more than that.
Okay.
There were people who had ties.
There were folks who have been asking.
There were all of these things that happened in due time.
It was firing James Comey that got the special counsel prosecutor because the president reportedly, and this is in the report, asked uh uh Jim Comey to go easy on Michael Flynn.
To go easy on Michael Flynn because Michael Flynn, and he was on tape, he was lying about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during uh the campaign and I think maybe into the transition.
So folks were worried that there was act uh there was an actor who was getting rid of people who was investigating his friends because and so they thought there might be something there.
Turns out there was no connection between Russia and WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign.
They could not thread those dots.
And I said anybody in media, anyone on the left who was still banging the drums, the facts are there, you have to live with that, okay?
