Former Army First Lieutenant Michael Behenna, Vicky Behenna, Michael’s mother and Former Asst US Atty in Western District of Oklahoma-she was one of the prosecution team members who prosecuted Tim McVeigh for OKC bombing - now a criminal Defense atty in Okla, and Exec Dir of the Oklahoma Innocence Project and John Richter, former US Attorney from the state of Oklahoma Partner, Special Matters and Government Investigation Team, at King & Spalding. John was formerly U.S. Attorney and Acting Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division at Main Justice. and has been doing pro bono work for the family, they are here to discuss Michael Behenna's pardon from President Trump yesterday and his entire experience from being wrongly accused, and slandered to this vindication.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.
And as you know, Sean and I never promote the stock market or investing in it.
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All right, loaded up and glad you are with us.
Write down our toll-free telephone number.
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We got a really big interview today.
I really want you to hear this because it really angers me when I hear that we send brave men and women, we send American treasure.
We ask them to go fight wars for us.
They volunteer to put their lives on hold and put their lives on the line for our freedoms that we take for granted every day.
Let's be honest.
We don't wake up every day and say, oh, I live in the greatest country God gave man.
I'm free.
I'm free.
You know, we usually wake up and say, oh, crap.
I'm tired.
I want, oh, where's my black rifle coffee?
I need to get going.
Think of it.
Most people, you wake up in the morning, you shovel coffee down your throat.
If you're like me and you're trying to lose weight, you know, maybe you have what I've been eating, I have cabbage and one egg.
That's been my breakfast for the last three months.
Yeah, I know.
It's pathetic, right?
It's totally pathetic.
I'm with you.
But actually, it works.
So then we, what?
We get our kids dressed.
We get them off to school.
We put in our 14-hour workday.
And then, you know, moms are finishing work.
They take the kids to the whatever activity the kids are activitying that particular day.
And then you get them home and then you get them washed up.
And then you get them, you know, you have to slop some dinner together, whatever it happens to be, a little spaghetti tonight.
Why are you complaining?
I want steak.
No, my son, it was like since Tilly was 12.
What do you want?
Pasta and butter.
Like, what?
Pasta and butter.
And I'm like, no, no, no.
There's other foods besides pasta and butter.
It's like a constant war when my son was young.
Now, the interesting thing is he's almost as bad as Linda.
By the way, in there, she has, she's worse than a sailor.
I'm just warned.
We have Operation 300 friends here today.
You are worse than a sailor.
I don't know what you mean by that.
Okay, count how many F-bombs she drops.
First of all.
First of all, you're going to fake it.
You're going to be a phony.
I'm going to fake it till I make it.
Okay, so you're going to be a phony for the next hour.
You're going to be a phony.
You're going to be a phony for the next hour, and you're not going to be yourself.
And you're not going to drop an F-bomb every other second.
You know, I get through church every Sunday for an hour, too.
It's amazing.
Thank God for small blessings.
You know, that's Jesus working his magic.
That's all right.
He works his magic for a whole 60 minutes.
That's borderline miraculous.
I think that there is a divine intervention if that mouth stays shut and doesn't curse for a week.
Wow.
I'm shocked.
I can't believe it.
It's a tough room today.
It's not a tough room.
It's a banana room.
Anyway, so we send these guys.
How many hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of heroes have we met over the years?
How many people have I met that had their legs blown off, their arms blown off?
How many times have I met the parents that lost, you know, these gold star families that lost their kids?
And I'm going to tell you something.
The last two major wars in this country has now changed my mind on whether we're going to go to war.
And we sent 58,000 kids died in Vietnam.
58,000.
And then all of a sudden the war gets politicized.
And once Washington gets their grubby little hands involved in anything, well, then the concept known as winning goes out the door and we end up pulling out without finishing the job.
Now, we can say the same thing about what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That too became politicized.
And I'm thinking if I'm one of the 7,500 parents or so that lost kids and the thousands of others that had their sons had their legs blown off or their arms blown off or half their brains spilling out of their head when they got hit with an IED, I'm a little pissed off that we put restraints on men that are supposed to be fighting wars for us and women, and we send them into harm's way, and then we put handcuffs on them,
and then we bring them to trial if in fact they make a split-second decision that frankly nobody in the comfort of their homes right here in the United States is thinking about the dangers that they go through every day.
And if they make a wrong decision, we end up putting them in jail, even if it's an innocent decision.
I mean, it's frankly, it's unfathomable.
You know, we can't fight wars like we did in Iraq.
When we now, we've got to build the next generation of warfare.
I acknowledge this world is evil.
It has darkness all over it.
And the human condition is such that it's going to remain that way.
It's the story of mankind.
I wrote a book, Deliver Us From Evil.
Talked about 100 plus million human beings slaughtered in wars by governments, tyranny, fascism, communism, Nazism, the killing fields.
Go through it.
Stalin's Russia.
What, 30 million or so people, give or take a couple of million?
Nazi Germany, fascism, Tojo's Japan.
You know, we fight these wars.
But the difference was when my dad fought in World War II, that was a war that we fought to win.
Now, to this day, I assume in the minds of some people, Harry Truman dropping the big bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a controversial decision.
Yes, innocent people died.
Permanent damage was done to others.
Do we start these wars?
No, we did not.
Pearl Harbor was attacked.
It was an unprovoked attack on our homeland.
They started the war.
Somebody starts a fight with me.
I don't want to fight.
I'll try and walk away from the fight.
I train now.
I've trained seven years.
I mean, there's a part of me that probably would like to see if it really works.
We're talking about the DNC today.
No, just calm down.
Okay.
But if somebody's going to fight me, I'm going to fight to win.
If America is going to fight a conflict of battle, we don't need to send Americans door to door without up armored Humvees like happened in Iraq.
And literally, they're walking into a death trap for them.
So we have the president yesterday ended up giving a grant of clemency or a full pardon for former Army First Lieutenant Michael Bahanna of Oklahoma.
He's going to join us later in the program today.
And his story, we told you the story of Clint Lawrence.
You know, everyone, you know, talks about Hillary Clinton, the server of husband.
Well, why do we have equal justice?
Because there was a kid named Christian Saussier who was put in jail for a year because he had six pictures on his cell phone that he never shared with anybody of the submarine that he was so proud to work in.
You're not allowed to have those pictures.
Now, the submarine's 40 years old.
It's not like the enemy doesn't have the pictures because we've got the worst IT defenses in the entire world because we're really stupid sometimes as a country.
And apparently, it's pretty easy to hack into everything that is known as U.S. government computer property.
And why we don't solve that problem is another big, I don't know why.
We're pretty dumb if we don't.
And in this day and age, you've got to know that all of our secrets are now vulnerable if these people can hack into it.
But let me not digress too much here.
Now, in this case, Christian Saussier also got pardoned by the president.
He had spent a year in jail.
Well, this guy that we're going to interview later, former Army First Lieutenant Michael Bahanna, I mean, his story is fascinating.
He actually spent five years at Leavenworth, and he was given a 15-year sentence.
Now, 15 years.
Get this, for unpremeditated murder.
He was sent to Leavenworth.
Now, they did let him out.
It all started in 2008.
He was a young commander, a 17-man platoon.
I mean, this kid was born and trained his whole life.
He wanted to be in the military.
He had an ROTC scholarship.
He went to airborne school, became an infantry officer, joined the famed 101st Airborne Division after obtaining his Ranger tab.
And anyway, so he's the commander of a small 17-man platoon, and he and his men were struck in front of him with an IED, a massive one, killed four people, two of which were his own soldiers, severely injuring many others in his platoon.
And after the attack, well, he started reading the intelligence reports, and they found a connection to that IED attack to an al-Qaeda operative.
Yeah, they killed 3,000 Americans on 9-11, 2001.
Anyway, the Al-Qaeda operative's name was Ali Mansoor.
An Army intelligence report specifically cited Mansoor as someone who transports explosives for the terror group.
And anyway, so Michael does his job.
He does his research.
He finds a local sheikh to locate Mansoor, takes him into custody, and Mansoor was ordered released by the Army, and Michael's company commander told him to transport him home while transporting home.
You know, Michael was determined.
He wanted a new, he wanted to know, you know, what do you know about this al-Qaeda cell?
He wants to protect his soldiers.
That's his job as a leader.
If I'm leading a platoon and I think this guy's got answers, I'm going to get the answers.
That's my job, to protect them.
Everyone here that works for me, I take a big responsibility, especially with Linda, on my shoulders.
If I'm stupid and blow up my career, they're all out of a job.
And Ethan's got a new baby on the way, which he's not going to end up naming you.
Watch.
He thinks he is, but he's not.
Anyway, so Mansoor ordered release.
Then he's transported.
And he interrogates the guy, did a field interrogation of the guy, big deal.
Then the Monsour guy tries to take, in this case, First Lieutenant Michael Bahanna's gun.
And so he had to kill the guy.
Now he had an interpreter with him.
He had an eyewitness with him.
And then we find out, I mean, you can't make this stuff up.
It just sounds like the Mueller report.
You have, you know, just like Andrew Weissman.
But how do we, they have a court-martial hearing.
The prosecutors, oh, they didn't hand over.
They didn't tell the defense lawyers that they had exculpatory evidence in the form of a forensic expert that the prosecution hired that actually sided with Michael's version of events.
And then the prosecutor sent home the forensics expert that would have exonerated Army First Lieutenant Michael Bahanna.
I mean, you can't make this up.
They sent him home.
Now, he spent five years in Leavenworth, then he was eligible for parole in 2014 and he got out.
But yesterday, the president gave him a full par.
If we're going to send you to war, I don't want to second guess you.
If we're trusting you and putting guns in your hands and putting the lives of other Americans in your hands as a leader, we can't sit in the safety and comfort of the greatest country God gave man that they're protecting and second guess what they're possibly going through over there.
And if any benefit of the doubt goes out at all, it must be on the side of the American soldier.
That's it.
Case closed.
Because you know, and I know, if Monsor had an opportunity, he'd cut his throat off and leave it in a ditch.
Because that's what al-Qaeda does.
That's what this enemy does.
That's what this evil does.
You can't send kids to war and put handcuffs on them.
And we ought to get a list of every single person from the Iraq-Afghanistan conflict that was found guilty.
And we need to review every single case.
Under Obama's rules of engagement, good grief.
What's up, everybody?
Linda, executive producer from the Sean Hannity Show here to talk to you about your money, your retirement.
Your money is like your health.
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And literally, we have never endorsed any financial software until now.
Why?
Well, because some of his customers say he's created lightning in the bottle.
So go see for yourself.
Go to Hannity.com, retirement.
That's Hannity.com forward slash retirement.
All right, as we roll along, Sean Hannity Show 800-941 Sean John Solomon has some big breaking news that he will be giving us a tease of.
He's not finished with the report.
Has to do with Christopher Steele, has to do with who knew what about Steele, who knew what about Steele's agenda, and how they still used it as the basis of the bulk of information to put out a FISA application to spite not only take away the constitutional rights of an American citizen, Carter Page, but also then take it further.
And that would be a backdoor into the Trump campaign and all things Trump world so that they can impact an election.
Remember, they rigged her investigation.
They tried to rig in it.
They tried to rig a presidential election.
They had an insurance policy when they lost.
I'm going to get into all those details.
Now, we have some news.
I'm going to get into the struck page thing in a minute.
We have, yes, new lovebird texting that gives us a lot of insight into the thinking of what's going on behind everybody here.
Clapper is now trying to point fingers at the FBI, which is interesting.
He's the top Intel official.
He had jurisdiction over all the surveillance activities conducted by the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other agencies, which means this further confirms that, yeah, Clapper lied and Brennan lied.
But anyway, he's now saying that, in fact, well, it does meet the dictionary definition of spying.
You know, now we have not only our intelligence people empowering Stefan Halper to talk to Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Sam Clovis, but now we got the hot blonde bombshell in her 30s that's flirting with Papadopoulos, suggestively offering a quid pro quo.
Trade information, and I'm yours.
Yeah, you can't make this up in a bond movie.
Hey guys, this is Linda, executive producer for the Sean Hannity Show.
You might also know me as Sean's daily sparring partner now that he's a ninja, of course.
Well, today I'm here to tell you about how to fight for your retirement, and that's right, fight.
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Using undercover agents is a standard and legitimate technique that is widely used in investigations.
That technique has been used to thwart a lot of counterterrorism plots in this country.
So I'm sure, I mean, there are protocols and standards for using an agent, and I'm sure that's the case here.
So you're saying this was not done lightly?
No, it's never done lightly.
Was it spying?
Well, yeah, I guess it meets the dictionary definition of surveillance or spying, a term I don't particularly like.
It's not a term of art used by intelligence people.
It has a negative connotation of a rogue operation, out of control, not in compliance with the law, and that's not the case at all.
Do you believe, Director Wray, that the FBI and its agents spied into the 2016 presidential campaign operation?
Well, again, I want to be careful about how I answer that question here because there is an ongoing Inspector General investigation.
I have my own thoughts based on the limited information I've seen so far, but I don't think it would be right or appropriate for me to share those at this stage.
And at this time, do you have any evidence that any illegal surveillance into the campaigns or individuals associated with the campaigns by the FBI occurred?
I don't think I personally have any evidence of that sort.
Have you initiated any internal reviews of the FBI's action during the 2016 election?
Well, Mr. Chairman, there are a couple things going on.
First, there is, of course, the ongoing Inspector General's investigation that's being conducted by the Independent Office of Inspector General, and our folks are assisting them with their effort.
And then second, as you alluded to, now that the special counsel investigation is completed and having only recently returned to the department, the Attorney General is seeking to understand better the circumstances at the department and the FBI relating to how this investigation started.
And we're working to help him get that understanding.
I think that's part of his job and part of mine.
What they failed to say in that same report is that Mifsud was actually related to Italian intelligence services.
So you can't, if you're Moeller, you don't get to just report part of what you want in the story.
You have to put the entire piece before the American people.
He didn't do that, so we're calling him out.
This is not how investigations are supposed to be run.
When you look into Mifsud closer, Professor Mifsud closer, you realize that he is connected with all kinds of intelligence agencies, including our own FBI.
And in that letter, Sean, you'll see there's pictures with FBI agents at the Link campus where Professor Mifsud teaches at.
So we asked the question, and I'll just get to the, I'll sum it up like this, we want to know every document that these agencies have related to Mifsud, because if he is in fact a Russian agent, this would be one of the biggest intelligence scandals for not only the United States, but also our allies like the Italians and the Brits and others.
Because if Mifsud is a Russian agent, he would know all kinds of our intelligence agents throughout the globe.
So we ask those questions.
We want those documents.
We're giving them a week.
Do you believe that the FBI had all of these sources out to entrap people from the Trump campaign so that they could claim that there was a conspiracy, that Donald Trump was colluding with the Russians?
But in fact, they put all of these sources all across the world to get to members of the Trump campaign like they reached out to Papadopoulos.
Well, remember what I said on your show last year.
Yep.
I think I actually said, I think I said it first on your show, as I recall.
I said, I'm not worried about whether or not they were spying on the Trump campaign.
That is fact.
What I want to know is how many spies with an S were involved in this.
But Mr. Clapper then went on to say that to his knowledge, there was no evidence of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians.
We did not conclude any evidence in our report.
And when I say our report, that is the NSA, FBI, and CIA with my office.
The Director of National Intelligence had anything, any reflection of collusion between the members of the Trump campaign and the Russians.
There was no evidence of that in our report.
Was Mr. Clapper wrong when he said that?
I think he's right about characterizing the report, which you all have read.
We did not include any evidence in our report, and I say our, that's NSA, FBI, and CIA with my office, the Director of National Intelligence, that had anything, that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians.
There was no evidence of that included in our report.
Have you seen anything, either intelligence briefings, through intelligence briefings, anything to back up any of the accusations that you have made?
They have the documentation that they did the hacking.
The hacking.
On the DNC.
Right.
And on some of us, you know, that happened.
But the collusion, though.
No, we have not.
Do you have evidence that there was in fact collusion between Trump associates and Russia during the campaign?
Not at this time.
Have you seen anything that suggests any collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign?
Well, there's an awful lot of smoke there, let's put it that way.
People that might have said they were involved, to what extent they were involved, to what extent the president might have known about these people or whatever.
There's nothing there from that standpoint that we have seen directly linking our president to any of that.
Did evidence exist of collusion, coordination, conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian state actors at the time you learned of 2016 efforts?
I don't know whether or not such collusion, and that's your term, such collusion.
It's fascinating to me that we have evidence of real collusion with Ukraine.
They are begging to give it to us.
They are openly acknowledging they did collude with the Hillary Clinton on Hillary Clinton's behalf with real evidence known as emails from DNC members asking for dirt on Paul Manafort and Manafort's work from years gone by, not with Russia, but with Ukraine.
We have evidence that matters.
But the same people that have been saying collusion, collusion, they don't ever want to talk about that.
Now, they only care about collusion if it's Donald Trump.
Now, we've been hearing a lot of, well, there's hundreds of former DOJ prosecutors who say Trump obstructed justice.
Not one of them has ever pointed out that if you have an underlying crime where the evidence is overwhelming, incontrovertible, Hillary Clinton had top secret classified emails on that secret server in a mom and pop bathroom shop closet known as Platts Rivers Network.
Okay, there is an underlying crime.
18 USC 793.
Trying to make it easy for these fake news phonies that only selectively care about collusion, but only if it's Trump, not if it's Hillary and the DNC.
Similarly, they say obstruction, obstruction, obstruction.
Okay, then Hillary, why did Hillary, let's just ask a logical question.
Why, if you have a subpoena of your emails, do you delete 33,000 of them?
Why do you acid wash your hard drive with something none of us had ever heard of before, but the world knows now, called bleach bit.
You mean like with a cloth?
No, not with a cloth, with bleach bit to eliminate any evidence or possibility you can ever forensically retrieve those emails that you deleted that had been subpoenaed.
Why do you think an aide was sent out with a hammer to bust up BlackBerry's and iPhones and remove the SIM cards?
The only Hillary phones that were given to the FBI had no SIM cards.
Where's the memory on the phone?
The memory's on the SIM card.
Of course it didn't have anything on there.
Now, what is that called?
Obstruction of justice.
Not one of the hundreds of prosecutors that think that Trump obstructed justice, they're all liberal, ever said a word about Hillary and her conduct and her treatment of those emails.
That's called intent.
The intent was destroy the evidence.
The crime was violating the Espionage Act.
They don't care.
Just like all of a sudden, Obama's second term, they all want a wall.
They're willing to fund a wall.
They're sounding like Donald Trump just a few years ago.
We need a wall because drugs and cartels and gang members and human traffickers are at our border.
Now it's immoral to build a wall because only Donald Trump wants to build the wall.
We don't want to give Donald Trump a win.
So it's not the issue.
Just like all the I believers, where are the I believers?
I'm looking for that group of I believers.
I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe.
They all believed.
We hadn't heard from Professor Ford.
We haven't heard from Julie Swetnik at the time.
Julie Swetnik made the allegation that almost every other weekend, then high school student Brett Kavanaugh and his buddies, they had these parties almost every other weekend.
And they'd spike the punch.
And they would incapacitate all these young teenage girls every other weekend.
And then the boys would line up in the hall and wait their turn to gang rape these young teenage girls every other weekend.
Then she gave a response, a story, and she said, well, I never saw him spike the punch bowl, but he was near the punch pole at a party once.
I saw him there.
Well, I saw him with a red solo cup, but I didn't see him give it to anybody.
Well, he was in the hall, but he definitely wasn't on the line.
Okay.
They believed in that case.
They believed everybody.
Now we've got two credible women.
Gail King did two amazing interviews that say the lieutenant governor, oh, Democrat.
Wait a minute.
Oh, it just dawned on me.
Maybe that's why there's no believers.
No I believers because it's a Democrat.
I thought they cared about the issue because the two women that were interviewed by Gail King said that the lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia raped them and committed violent sexual assault and both of them have witnesses that they told at the time that it happened.
Now, where are all the I believers?
They're missing in action.
You see where we're going with this?
This is selective political moral outrage.
It is a show.
It is not about real principled views on the assault against women.
And by the way, I think I was like the only one in the country.
If you want to take it a little step further, I don't think there's anybody more critical of, oh, living conditions for women and gays and lesbians and Christians and Jews in countries like Saudi Arabia,
where Hillary took a fortune, or Kuwait, or any of these other countries that have Sharia law, where women, in many instances, they don't vote, they don't drive, they don't get to leave their home without a male relative, and they are treated brutally, horribly.
And gays and lesbians are thrown off roofs or stoned to death for being who they are.
And then we've got, no, you can't, no, you can't build a temple, trust me, in many of these countries.
You can't build a Christian house of worship.
If you do, you're dead.
It's just not going to work that way.
No freedom of any.
Would you take money from those countries?
I don't.
I wouldn't take a penny.
One of the best things about Trump, making this country energy independent on top of we now can bring Russia to its knees, bring the hostile regime of Russia, the hostile actor Putin.
We all agree it's true.
You want to get to Putin?
Out-produce him with oil and gas.
That is the backbone of his economy.
We will drive Russia financially right into the ground.
But then the new Green Deal, of course, would stop oil and gas production and take away the combustion engine.
And, you know, if you want to go to Europe, no airplanes.
So you're going to have to take a little sailboat.
You know, if it's not a windy day, good luck.
It might take longer than you think.
And I don't know how you're going to get to Australia, Asia, or anywhere else.
I could see Linda in a sailboat.
All right, I'm leaving.
It was bad enough.
She left 39 hours before we did to go to Vietnam and arrived one hour before we did because she was too stubborn to take my plan and not take the plan that took you on 42 airplanes that you had to transfer on.
Every time you transfer a plane, maybe you save $10, but you lost it back in terms of your life.
I'm never going to live that down.
No, you never are.
That was the dumbest single decision.
No.
The problem was that it had to be both ways.
Boss, I know how to do this.
Let me do it my way.
Hey, I carried all the gear.
That was your problem.
Oh, I'm aware it was my problem.
Thank you.
Yeah, exactly.
Director Ray, that the FBI and its agents spied into the 2016 presidential campaign operation.
Well, again, I want to be careful about how I answer that question here because there is an ongoing Inspector General investigation.
I have my own thoughts based on the limited information I've seen so far, but I don't think it would be right or appropriate for me to share those at this stage.
And at this time, do you have any evidence that any illegal surveillance into the campaigns or individuals associated with the campaigns by the FBI occurred?
I don't think I personally have any evidence of that sort.
Mr. Papadopoulos got this offer of cooperation from the Russians, in essence.
The FBI set about trying to figure out what he knew, and they wanted to do it secretly.
So they arranged a meeting in London with an informant, a professor named Stefan Halper, and a woman named Azra Turk, who was a government investigator that the FBI had sent to London to work with the informant.
And is it clear why the decision was made by the FBI to send this particular investigator to London?
This person would play the role of Stephan Halper's research assistant.
And I thought the FBI believes she would make a good fit.
I think part of the rationale was also to have an American investigator there who could provide some oversight and make sure this operation stayed on the rails.
But at this moment, nobody's provided any evidence that the FBI actually committed wrongdoing.
They were simply being aggressive when it came to what they say is a lawfully predicated investigation, though an extraordinary one.
All right, hour two, Sean Hannity show, write down our toll-free number.
It's 800-941 Sean.
You want to be a part of the program?
That is Adam Goldman.
He was the New York Times reporter that, yeah, talked about there is real spying, was real spying on the Trump campaign.
As we now get more of the details as it relates to the setup of Papadopoulos, you have this young 30, flirtatious, blonde bombshell now added to the mix.
Her name is Azra Turk.
We now know an FBI agent.
And he goes on to say that the article on spying shows what the FBI was doing was lawful, not nefarious.
I don't necessarily agree with that conclusion at all.
And the other questions surrounding how many people were spied on, how many spies were involved.
And as George Papanopoulos said on this program, he does not believe that this was the FBI at all.
He says that was the one thing that the New York Times, he believes, got wrong in a big way.
And he says he meets this woman.
She reached out to him.
And all of a sudden, she's making it known that she's available and being very flirtatious.
If he would just give a little bit of information, which he didn't even have.
Anyway, John Solomon is on this and much more today.
We have some other breaking news as it relates to the deep state.
Even though Mueller is over, well, now part two, Act Two, begins.
James Clapper even acknowledging what the FBI did meets the dictionary definition of spying.
Finally, Mitch McConnell says what we've been saying, case is closed on the Trump-Russia investigation.
The FBI director calls Barr's FISA abuse investigation appropriate, but on the other hand, doesn't see much of anything done wrong by the FBI.
It's sort of like hear no evil, see no evil, whatever.
John Solomon is going to be breaking, I believe, a big story tonight on Hannity.
Do you want to give us a heads up of that before we get into this?
Sure, yeah.
So, Sean, we're going to have a new revelation of just how much the United States government knew about Christopher Steele's political motivations and a specific political deadline he had called the election to get this information out.
There are new documents that are surfacing, documents that were kept from Congress for much of the last three years that will be breaking tonight, and it will give us some brand new insight into who knew that Christopher Steele was really politically motivated.
Who was he telling?
And what was his deadline and his actual mission from his client?
What was his client's mission?
It turns out it wasn't to be a good FBI informer.
It had a lot more to do with election dirty tricks.
And these documents will be dispositive.
They'll also be pretty shocking that for three years they've flown out of our radar, and even places like the House Intelligence Committee were not allowed to see the documents that I'm about to air tonight.
So hopefully it'll be an important story.
It'll further cement that the FBI was misleading the FISA court about its knowledges.
The thing that nobody's really seemingly understanding in the media mob is that it's been self-evident what happened here from day one, that this plan to exonerate Hillary without even a real investigation because she was the favored candidate, that is illegal, and the people involved in that were obstructing real justice themselves by doing as much.
Then, of course, you know, we have all this talk about Mueller testifying.
I'm like, okay, Mueller, testify.
When did you know there was no collusion?
John Dowd says you knew a year ago, that you told him a year ago, that there was no effort, no collusion by the Trump campaign.
I'd like to know how, you know, your mandate was so broad you can get into taxi medallions, loan applications, FARA violations, and taxes, but you can't get into the dirty Russian dossier that even the New York Times is suggesting is Russian disinformation that was paid for to influence the 2016 campaign.
How did you avoid that topic altogether?
That may be a really important question, Sean.
It could be that Mueller determined very quickly that the dossier was bad information or that the government as a whole had already concluded that, which would mean the origins of the Mueller investigation were tainted, right?
It meant that he was investigating something the government had already concluded was a false allegation.
I think if he does testify on May 15th, the Republicans will be able to draw out a large part of their story about what they've always feared about the dossier, about when the Russia collusion angle was completely debunked or set aside as fiction.
And I think that the Dems may have more to lose in this testimony than they're appreciating right now.
Well, I mean, let's get to the bottom line here.
Explain the avalanche of information.
And first, do you agree with me?
Because everything I'm saying is predicated on Barr's testimony last week, that he's finished with the Mueller report.
It's over.
He's not going to change his mind.
So anything we hear from this point forward is basically noise about the Mueller report.
Do you agree with that?
It is.
It's just a sideshow to distract us from Act II.
As I've said on your show at night, Sean, I think this is a stage show.
And in the old days, when they had summer theater, when they would change the set, they didn't want people to pay attention on stage.
They'd send a minstrel and a mime out to entertain the crowd and keep you distracted.
What's going on with all of this stuff in Congress and Mueller and Barr is really a sideshow because on the main stage, we are transitioning from Russia collusion, which turned out to be a fiction billed as a nonfiction story.
And we're now moving to this thing called accountability and the FISA abuses and the FBI's conduct of spying on a political campaign.
That is going to be the story that everyone will be paying attention to this summer and fall.
I think you're right.
And there's this avalanche of information that is coming.
All right.
So, you know, what we have here now, though, is we're getting a little bit closer into the Obama administration.
How high up do you think this is now beginning to go?
I mean, the closed-door testimony has been very revealing because Strzok and Page, they're saying a lot of interesting things, not the least of which is this goes right into the office of the Attorney General at the time.
That would be Loretta Lynch, and she was making all the decisions.
They're also confirming that after the nine-month investigation by the FBI before the appointment of Mueller, there was no there, and they didn't have any evidence of so-called Trump-Russia collusion, which backs up the Mueller report.
And they're also now beginning to turn on each other, it seems, a circular firing squad among those in the deep state that have abused power.
That's absolutely what's going on.
And I think one of the more interesting developments, when you look at what we're going to report tonight, Sean, there was no reason for Christopher Steele to be at the State Department, none whatsoever.
He's a controlled FBI informant, allegedly working on a counterintelligence investigation, and yet he is inside the State Department three weeks before the election, passing around the same information he's already given to the FBI, and most importantly, talking about the election as a deadline, talking about his need to get this information out before the election.
By definition, what he told the State Department, by what he told Bruce Orr, by his own actions in going to the media and leaking, he was carrying out a political dirty trick tying to the election, and yet the FBI portrayed him as an informant with credible, relevant information with no derogatory background.
All of these biases, his anti-Trump hatred, his desire to contact the media, his desire to spread his information outside the FBI, not only violated the FBI's informant rules, it was evidence that this was a political, dirty trick.
It was not a normal counterintelligence informant trying to develop a normal case.
And the FBI's failure to stop it, to acknowledge what it really was before the court, is really what we're going to learn painfully about in the next half of this year.
And to remind everybody, Christopher Steele, he was hired by, well, really with Clinton campaign and DNC money she controlled with funneled money through Perkins Cooey, a law firm.
They hired Fusion GPS, an op research firm.
They hired Steele.
And you're basically saying that Steele had a mandate and a deadline, and he had contacts.
How high up did his contacts go, and how many people knew that he had this hatred towards Donald Trump and agenda?
You're going to find out that he was meeting with a very senior State Department official, and that State Department official immediately relayed the information she just got to others in the government.
And the government is trying to hide who she emailed right now and what she specifically told them.
But it is clear there is no way for the FBI to argue anymore.
They did not know about Christopher Steele's political motivations, his client, his deadline, his election obsession, his hatred for Trump before they went to the FISA court.
These documents will be dispositive, and I think by the end of this week or early next week, we're going to be realizing that everybody knew this was a Hillary Clinton operation, not just Bruce Steele.
But didn't Bruce apply to that.
But Bruce Orr did tell everybody in the FBI and DOJ, and as I understand it, even Andrew Weissman, the pitpole for Mueller, he told them all that this was Hillary Clinton's bought and paid for Russian dossier.
None of it was verified, and that Steele hated Donald Trump.
Didn't he say that in August of 2016 before the first FISA application in October?
Yep, absolutely.
All of this was known before the FISA application was submitted.
And now, if you go back with what we're going to learn today and what we learned over the last few weeks with the Bruce Orr stuff that you and I dug up and others, you're going to see an amazing thing going on inside the FBI.
Go back to those text messages of Pete Stroke and Lisa Page.
Remember the famous hurry the F up.
We've got to get this thing done.
I'm fighting with justice.
If this was a good FISA, there was no reason to be fighting over it.
There'd be no reason for pressure.
What was going on in the FBI is they knew that Steele was going rogue on them.
He was going political, that he was always political, and that he had this election deadline.
And they're panicking that they might not get that FISA in before the cat gets out of the bag.
And you can see now when you look back at those text messages, that panic of the FBI agents, they were trying to get it past the FISA court before they would have to tell the FISA court, guess what?
This guy's a dirty political trickster on the DNC and Hillary Clinton's payroll.
That's what's going on in October, and that should concern us all, that a FISA process was used or infected by politics.
John Solomon breaking a big story tonight about Christopher Steele.
This is now going to blow this thing wide open.
Everybody knew that this was phony Russian disinformation paid for by Hillary, and they still used it as the bulk of information for the FISA warrant.
This is now the second or third bit of evidence we have now been able to gather that everybody knew.
Now, this is definitive evidence.
Tonight at 9, John Solomon, investigative reporter, will be breaking this news about Christopher Steele tonight.
But there's still more to come.
Like, for example, the president in his interview with Catherine Herridge last week said very soon we're going to be getting the FISA applications, gang of eight information.
We're going to be getting, you know, 302s and the five buckets of Solomon, we'll call it, if you will.
Actually, I think we have to give credit to Devin Nunez.
I think it's his five buckets.
Yeah, well, you know, he's not here, so I'll give it to you.
Yeah, all right, I'll take it.
Yeah, you're right, Sean.
There is a moment of transparency.
The thing I'm most interested in, if you remember about a year ago, we talked about a column I wrote called the London Bridges Falling Down, the Curious Origins of the Russia case.
And in that, we talked about these events that predate the FBI opening a criminal investigation, predate even that Turkish woman intercepting with Papadopoulos in September in London.
Something was going on in the winter and spring of 2016 that we don't fully understand.
It looks to be a more sophisticated operation, maybe letting a breadcrumb trail for the FBI to ultimately open up an investigation.
Who was involved in that?
Was that Fusion GPS?
Was it George Soros?
Was it the CIA?
Those are the questions that the documents the president can declassify may answer for us.
And I'm hoping to look back at that period.
I think January to July is far more significant to this ruse that it was played in 2016 than what we've previously known.
And I think getting answers to who did what and what was set in motion may explain how we ended up where we did on Election Day and afterwards.
All right, John Solomon, we'll see you at this new news tonight.
We'll break it on Hannity, 9 Eastern, Fox News Channel, as the media still obsesses over something that is now officially dead.
It won't stop them.
They can't help themselves.
All right, 800-94-1 Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
All right, when we come back, an American hero pardoned by the president.
He'll tell his story first right here.
I'm not about to be able to male kill a woman what you want to hurt.
She has the right to make that scene herself.
To rape the hearse.
Some kids are unwanted.
So you kill them now and kill them later.
You bring them in the world unwanted, unloved.
These things are legitimate.
So you kill them now and kill them later.
The economy added more than a quarter million jobs, better than economists expected.
Unemployment is at its lowest level in almost 50 years.
Wages grew faster than prices did.
Do you give President Trump the credit?
I give our workers and our businesses the credit, Jake.
When you're out there across the country, you see people working harder and harder every day.
And this has meant that our businesses are strong and we're selling American goods.
That being said, a lot of people aren't sharing in this prosperity because of the costs, the cost of college, the cost of health care, the fact that the president had promised that he would bring down the prices of their prescription drugs, and that just hasn't happened.
Unemployment is the lowest it's been since I was nine months old.
You're really not going to give President Trump any credit for that in terms of his tax cuts or deregulation or anything he's done?
You know what I'm thinking about?
I'm thinking about when we were in that downturn and President Obama came into office and he had to deal with that with the Congress to try to, one, write the financial industry and then two, get us on the road to recovery.
And I remember that the Republicans were giving him grief when he took any credit for that.
So I think that we have had policies in place, starting with President Obama, that have aided that recovery.
Are you concerned that impeachment talk may actually help the president's reelection?
I'm concerned that if we don't impeach this president, he will get re-elected.
If we don't impeach him, he will say he has been vindicated.
You have said that you think that the House Judiciary Committee should open impeachment proceedings.
I think they should begin the process.
I do think they should begin the process.
Of course she thinks they should begin the process.
And the only one speaking the truth in all that was Al Green.
You got this Alabama Democratic state representative, you know, going after Donald Trump Jr., you know, using the R word, which I guess now you're not allowed to use it, and then saying he's the best defense for having an abortion.
It doesn't get, but Al Green's saying something that's true.
Oh, he better impeach him because otherwise he's going to get reelected.
An acknowledgement that, yeah, he's going to get reelected.
You know, but this is all part of the media madness in this country.
Look, I think, as I said yesterday, it's worse than it was on election night 2016 and the mass psychosis that then followed and the hatred and the rage.
They all thought Mueller, which is now officially dead.
There's no more Mueller talk that is of any significance or meaning whatsoever.
All it is now is noise and Gerald Nadler trying to put on a show and moving towards some type of contempt effort against the Attorney General because he wants to change a rule that's been established for 206 years.
They're afraid to, I guess, interview Barr by themselves.
They want their lawyers to do it.
Well, that has not happened in the 206-year history of the House Judiciary Committee, of which he is now the chairman.
Not once.
So Barr is saying, well, I'm glad.
Of course, Congress has the right to oversight, but oversight by the people that were elected that are accountable to their constituents, not strangers because we're too weak to do the job.
It doesn't work that way.
You know, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, what, to cover for you?
800-941-Sean, tollfrey a telephone number.
We're joined by Kaylee McEdaney, National Press Secretary for Trump 2020.
And Jeff Lord, he has a new book coming out called The Swamp Wars, Donald Trump and the New American Populism in the Old versus the Old Order.
You know, I think a lot of the hatred of Trump, Jeff, and Welcome Back Both of you, is it's all rooted in the fact that he's not them.
He's never going to be them.
If he cured cancer, gave every American $5 million, co-opted even the new Green Deal agenda, dropped another $150 billion on the tarmacs of the Mullahs in Iran, they'd still hate him.
Yeah, they would, Sean.
And, you know, I think one of the things that really drives this is that he could have been one of them had he chosen to be so.
I mean, this is a guy who went to an Ivy League school there at the University of Pennsylvania, and he's made himself into a billionaire.
How easy would it have been for Donald Trump to be one of them?
He not only doesn't want to be one of them, I mean, he just rejects them out of hand, and they hate him for it.
They just cannot abide him.
Well, I mean, you were one of the few of us that saw it coming.
I'm beginning now to think, Kaylee McEdany, that, you know, it was so bad post-2016.
Remember, the exit poll showed that Donald Trump didn't win a state.
And just like 2004, it showed John Kerry was going to be the next president.
And I don't think this president in particular polls very well, just by virtue of the fact, I don't think, I think a lot of people are like, don't ask me your nosy questions who I'm voting for.
It's none of your business.
And frankly, if anyone asked me, I probably would have said Hillary.
I never get asked.
I've never been interviewed after I vote.
But the point of it is, is their reaction from that day forward, once the night started to roll in and Donald Trump became clear he's the next president of the United States, there's this collective meltdown because nobody saw it coming, number one.
And now the Mueller report, it seems that in spite of everything we have pointed out for the last two years, they weren't paying attention and they believed their own lies about Russia collusion.
And now they can't handle the results of that investigation.
Exactly.
And they can't handle the thought of the president winning reelection and them once again never seeing it coming.
You know, you point out a key fact here.
I talked to a pollster and they said, look, double digits, when I went out and polled the hidden Trump voter, tried to find that voter that told the pollster they were voting Clinton, but really voted Trump, he found them to a double-digit tune.
That's why every exit poll was wrong.
You know, see, Jeff and I were both on CNN set that night.
I remember the Hillary folks rejoicing to saw the exit polls, showed Trump losing in virtually every state, like you noted.
But how'd that work out for them?
Jeff and I. By the way, when did they stop going to you guys for commentary?
And when did the depression begin to set in?
Yes, exactly.
I was on every single solitary network.
I don't work election nights.
I don't waste my time for the five seconds they'll put me on a Fox.
So I stay home, and I'm looking up Cuyahoga County and Hamilton County and Southwest Florida, the Panhandle, and Broward and Palm Beach counties to see if there's any cheating going on.
And that's how I like to spend my election nights.
One of the stories I tell is that the Saturday before Halloween in 2016, I put my then 97-year-old mom in the car to go out in the countryside and get pumpkins.
And I noticed there were Trump signs everywhere, hundreds of them.
I started counting.
There was one Hillary sign.
I get to CNN on the following Monday.
I tell that story on the air, and they're all looking at me like I'm a loon.
And they're saying, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, upholding data, upholding data.
I mean, I tried to tell them that there was something going on here.
This is coming.
I'm just not seeing it there for in the middle of Pennsylvania.
And they just, you know, wouldn't believe it.
Well, listen, there's a funny thing because Joe Biden, I know he went to a union, gave a union speech, and he acknowledges that if he can't win, Pennsylvania is not going to win.
Here's the problem: the economy in Pennsylvania is so strong right now that they're actually going inside of prisons, asking the prisoners, when are you getting out?
Because we want to hire you.
That's a big problem.
We now have 1.7 million more jobs available than we have people on unemployment.
When I drive around this area, all I see are, not all, but I certainly see more and more, plenty and plenty of now hiring funds.
They're all over the place.
Sure, exactly.
And I think that's the point.
I think, you know, how do you win in that economy with that economy so strong that anybody that wants a job is working?
That's why we have record low unemployment, a 50-year record-low unemployment numbers in the country.
Now, what they can't figure out is, well, it happened when Reagan was president.
Now it's happening again when Trump is president.
It's the same policies that they put in place, eliminating the bureaucracy, cutting back needless and burdensome regulation, and lowering taxes and incentivizing investment.
It's not that hard, Kaylee.
That's exactly right.
Free market policies work.
We have the hottest economy on record today is maybe 1980, which was probably right there with us.
So you're exactly right.
In Pennsylvania, you point out the lowest unemployment rate on record.
And I can tell you this: the Democrats aren't going to win by going around and putting forth these policies like Joe Biden saying China's not a threat.
When meanwhile, President Trump rightfully points out we lost 60,000 factories when China entered the WTO.
It's an extraordinary number that even the Washington Post fact checkers, who we know are always off base, rated as true.
So you're not going to win going around underestimating the threats we face from China against the hottest economy on record brought about by free market policies.
So now we've got an issue that everybody pretty much in the media, there's a very small group of us that saw an entirely different set of facts emerging the last two years, and that is, oh, a rigged investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server, real obstruction of justice.
Then we saw a dirty Russian dossier bought and paid for by Clinton with funneled money to Fusion GPS through a law firm, hiring a guy that we're going to break a big story tonight with our friend John Solomon about how everybody knew what Christopher Steele's agenda was, and they still used his dirty dossier, which the New York Times is even suggesting could be Russian disinformation from the get-go.
How does Mueller justify not going into that issue?
But that became then the basis of these four FISA warrant applications, the original in October of 2016 to spy on the Trump campaign.
Now we've got Stefan Halper spying on the Trump campaign.
And now we've got the added component of some, you know, hot spy coming on to George Papadopoulos, flirting with him in an attempt.
How many spies were there?
How many attempts to spy on the Trump campaign were there?
And who ordered it?
And why wasn't any of that looked into by Mueller?
I mean, that's absolutely right.
And Sean, the thing that I think is so notable here is all these people that you have had on your show for the last two years have very patiently and relentlessly spent time unraveling the facts.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media has gone out of its way to ignore the facts and bet the ranch on some collusion fantasy that just simply never happened.
I mean, it is the most massive piece of journalism malpractice that I think we've ever seen in American history.
That is a big story in and of itself right there.
Oh, I think it is too.
And it's, you know, do they care about the truth?
No.
Now, has anybody in the media apologized?
No, they just doubled down on stupid.
And I think if it was bad, their reaction to the 2016 election results, it's even worse that the Mueller report that they put so much faith, hope, and trust in didn't come out the way they wanted, Kaylee.
And I just think at the end of the day, they're never going to change.
There's never any hope for them.
They are agenda-driven at the highest level possible.
That's exactly right.
And they commit journalistic malpractice regularly.
Look, you know, you've reported on these huge scandals that have happened, this investigation started on a fraudulent document funded by Democrats.
There's not been a single prosecution, by the way, but last week you have the New York Times finally confirming, hey, there were human sources on Papadopoulos, more than what we knew.
How many networks picked up that coverage?
How many newspapers ran with that coverage?
None.
Because they have an agenda.
They're not going to change.
And they're going to derelict their duty to report the facts and be journalists.
They don't deserve that title that they hold.
You know, you just watch CNN fake news.
You know, there's Wolfie Blitzer asking, will they throw the U.S. attorney in jail?
You know, they're talking now such insanity that they'll send the sergeant of arms to capture the attorney general and bring him in in handcuffs before Congress as if that's going to happen.
I mean, this is how insane.
Then you've got NBC, this guy, what's his name?
The guy before Rachel Maddow.
Somebody Hayes.
I don't know this guy's name.
Chris Hayes.
So he actually has a theory about a conspiracy where millions and millions of business owners were secretly plotting to damage Obama's economy.
And then now they're secretly plotting together to benefit the Trump economy.
And he's making these statements.
I mean, how do you advance something that nuts?
Not for nothing.
Do you call them conspiracy TV?
I mean, it is just stunning to watch.
I thought to myself, the real invisible headline here is Hennedy was right, but we don't want to say it.
Yeah, no, listen.
Yeah, I'm sure that Hell Wolf freeze over first.
Jeff Floyd, thanks for being with us.
Kaylee McAdaney, thank you.
When we come back, the president has granted clemency, a full pardon for former Army First Lieutenant Michael B Henna of Oklahoma.
He'll join us in his first interview, and he had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for, quote, unpremeditated murder in a combat zone.
President did a huge, did the right thing when you get to the details of this case.
That's coming up next as we continue.
Coming up next, our final news roundup, an information overload hour.
It's hard to put in words.
It's tough, you know.
Seeing Fort Leavenworth for the first time, you know, when I got locked up, sent to Leavenworth, it was one or two o'clock in the morning.
So I didn't get to see what the boats looked like.
The only thing I've seen for the past five years is concrete and a little bit of grass, fence, and razor wire.
And so this morning when they put me on the van and took me to meet up with you guys, that emotion is hard to describe.
It's hard to put in words.
It was a good feeling.
And it's a day that I won't forget.
What you heard there was former Army First Lieutenant Michael Bahanna and him discussing after spending five years in prison talking about his release.
Earlier yesterday, the president has granted, quote, today, President Donald J. Trump, this was yesterday, signed an executive grant of clemency, parentheses, full pardon for former Army First Lieutenant Michael Bahena of Oklahoma.
Now, in 2009, a military court had sentenced Mr. Behenna to 25 years in prison for unpremeditated murder in a combat zone.
And after judgment, however, the U.S. Army's highest appellate court noted concern about how the trial court had handled Mr. Behenna's claim of self-defense.
Additionally, the Army Clemency and Parole Board reduced his sentence to 15 years and paroled him as soon as he was eligible.
In 2014, after five years served of his sentence, upon his release, well, dozens of Patriot Guard motorcycle riders met Mr. Behenna to escort him back to his home in Oklahoma.
And his case has attracted broad support from the military.
Oklahoma elected officials and the public.
You have 37 generals, admirals, along with the former Inspector General of the Department of Defense signing a brief in support of Mr. Behenna's self-defense claim.
Numerous members of the Oklahoma Congressional Delegation, Oklahoma's then governor, Mary Fallon, at the time, current Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter also expressed support.
And while serving his sentence, Mr. Behenna was a monoprisoner in light of these facts.
He is entirely deserving of the executive clemency, but I'm not sure.
And he joins us right now, I think his first interview since yesterday.
Former Army First Lieutenant Michael Behenna, his mother Vicki is with us.
And also we're joined by the executive director of the Oklahoma Innocence Project, John Richter, is with us.
Thank you all for being here.
We appreciate your time.
Well, first, thank you for serving your country.
I get very troubled, Lieutenant, when I hear that we're second-guessing brave men in battlefield conditions having to make split-second decisions, and then you're getting second-guessed.
And I certainly did not like the rules of engagement under the last administration of Barack Obama.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And what I tell people is don't judge somebody, especially in a combat zone, if you've never been there.
You have no idea what it's like.
And so there are people out there that are going to judge.
And that's unfortunate.
What did it feel like yesterday when the president, I understand, called you personally to deliver the news that you would be pardoned?
I'll tell you what.
It was totally unexpected.
Yeah, I was talking on the phone with my dad, and I get a call on the other line, and I didn't recognize the number.
I just figured it was a solicitor trying to call, and so I didn't answer it.
Well, they left the message.
After I got off the phone with my dad, I listened to the message, and the woman said, Lieutenant Behanna, this is Molly from President Trump's office.
He would like to talk to you, and if you would, please give a call back when you get a chance.
That might be a message you saved for a few years, right?
Well, I still have it in my phone, and I plan on hanging on to it.
Yeah, I think I might hang on to that, maybe make a recording of it.
Let's go back to what happened here.
This is April 2008.
You were a young commander, right?
You had a 17-man platoon, as I understand it.
Yeah, 18-man platoon.
Okay.
And you guys were struck.
Your men were struck by a massive IED.
You lost two of your soldiers.
Is that true?
And others were severely injured?
Well, there were four people killed that day.
Two of them were my soldiers, yes.
And several wounded.
And after the attack, you were reading the intelligence reports, which you drew a connection, which is your job between the IED and an al-Qaeda operative named Ali Mansoor.
Is that true?
That's true.
Yes.
And then an Army intelligence report specifically cited Mansoor as someone who transports explosives to kill Americans for the terror group, correct?
Absolutely, yes.
Okay, so now take us from that moment while you were transporting.
You actually were able to get this guy, correct?
You took him into custody.
Yes.
All right.
Now you're taking him home and bring us into the interrogation of this guy and what happened in that interrogation room.
So the interrogation was done on my behalf because he was released.
And I know some people are going to say, well, why was he released?
He was released because at the time, you had to have two intelligence reports on a detainee in order to keep that detainee for further questioning and possible further detention.
Well, the Army had said they only had one report, which there were more.
But there's other things that were in play in order for Monsor to get released.
Anyway, so I end up wanting to question him, of course, to get more intel out of him because information in Intel is what runs counterinsurgency, which is what we were fighting at the time.
And so fast forward to me taking Monsor out to the culvert to question him, I told him I wanted some specific information, which was I wanted to know the others that were in play.
In other words, you wanted to learn what other people were involved in this al-Qaeda cell that were killing American soldiers so you could protect your fellow soldiers from future attacks like what you witnessed when you lost four guys in a day, two from your particular platoon.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
And so I'm trying to get this information out of him.
And, of course, he's a seasoned al-Qaeda terrorist.
And, of course, he doesn't just answer questions anytime you ask him.
So there are techniques that are used in order to get information out of people like that.
But you aren't torturing him.
You aren't waterboarding the guy.
I don't think waterboarding is torture anyway.
You're just using basic interrogation techniques, correct?
Well, basic for over there, one of which was pointing a weapon at Mansoor and trying to get the information out of him.
Because he would say, I don't know, to every question I asked him.
He kept saying, I don't know, I don't know.
So, you know, in order for those techniques to be effective, you have to make it feel like, you know, the guy is in danger.
He's going to die.
And I was telling him that.
And he finally says to my interpreter that something that I didn't recognize, I spoke a little bit of Arabic, but not enough to understand what he said.
And so Monsour said to my interpreter, something I didn't recognize.
I turned to my interpreter to get the translation, and Mansoor throws a piece of concrete at me, which hits right beside my head.
And as I turn to look towards Mansoor, he's standing up, reaching out with his hands towards me and my weapon.
Why was he not cuffed?
He was cuffed.
He was cuffed, and we had cut the flex cuffs off him along with his clothes, which was another technique that, unfortunately, I mean, it's used over there.
It's a technique that's used to humiliate the guy you're questioning.
All right, so let me get to so you he reaches for your gun and you're now your life is in jeopardy.
You have to make a split-second decision, and you kill the guy.
Yes.
Okay.
I don't think any American that's not in that situation has a right to judge your decision-making.
And you had witnesses that, an interpreter at least, that can testify to your account of what happened, correct?
Yes.
Okay, so your story is confirmed.
It should be case closed here.
And then we find out later that the court martial, that prosecutors didn't notify your defense attorneys that a forensic expert for the prosecution sided with your version of events surrounding the shooting.
They held back that exculpatory information.
That's correct.
Yes.
And can I just put, this is Vicki, if I can just put a fine point on that.
The case during the court-martial, the government never introduced the forensic evidence.
The forensic evidence, which was consistent with...
Well, that's called withholding exculpatory evidence.
That's evidence that would have freed your son.
That's right.
And they sent that expert home so that he couldn't testify, didn't testify.
But the forensic evidence supported Michael's version of what happened during the interrogation.
Unbelievable story.
All right, quick break.
We'll have more with former Army First Lieutenant Michael Bahanna and his mother, and also John Richter is with us as well as the president yesterday signing an executive grant of clemency, a full pardon for the issues we've just been talking about.
We'll have more on the other side.
He'll also join us on TV tonight on Hannity 9 Eastern on the Fox News channel.
All right, as we continue with former Army First Lieutenant Michael Bahanna and his mom, Vicki Bahanna and John Richter are with us as they have now the president yesterday granting.
Now, let me bring in John Richter.
You know, John, I do like the Innocence Project, and Barry Scheck has actually convinced me, unless there's a video of a murder and somebody getting the death penalty, we've made so many stupid mistakes and some political and some over-aggressive prosecutors.
I'm not supporting the death penalty unless we've got a video.
Hey, Sean.
So I appreciate you posing the question to me, but Vicki is actually the executive director in Oklahoma.
In addition to being Michael's mother, she obviously joined this cause after many years as a career federal prosecutor.
I've had the honor of representing Michael through this pardon process and serving as his lawyer in this pardon process.
And as a former United States attorney and former head of the criminal division, I can tell you personally that the actions of the prosecution in this case violate all decent standards for fair prosecution of a defendant.
And while obviously a pardon process was not here to relitigate the case, it nonetheless is an important part of considering whether forgiveness and an act of grace like the president has given Michael is appropriate.
Well, I just don't like the fact, honestly, at all, that we now are putting handcuffs on people we put in life and death situations.
We're sending these guys out to fight wars.
Their lives are at risk.
We're second-guessing what they do, and we're putting handcuffs on them and rules of engagement that are obscene that puts their lives in jeopardy.
I mean, you know, when I hear Michael's story about, you know, his friends being blown up by IEDs, you know, put yourself in his position, and this is the guy you believe has the information about where those explosives are coming from.
I'm sorry, I'm not going to be polite asking the guy that has the answer to that question that we can save American lives with.
That's not a moment to be polite.
War is a very dark, ugly, horrible, but necessary evil.
And our guys are the good guys.
You know, Al-Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans in 2001.
I mean, this really pisses me off because we're doing this not just to you, Michael.
We're doing it to too many people.
There's a long laundry list of guys that are in prison for instances like yours.
And I don't think it's fair.
If we're going to ask you to go fight, bleed, die, risk your life, and many don't come home or many don't come home with legs and arms.
I think we ought to be able to put enough faith, hope, and trust that you're going to make the right decision and not second-guess you.
Sorry, I got a little worked up.
Well, we appreciate the passion.
Let me ask you, mom, it's got to be hell when your son is in Leavenworth for five years.
Oh, I would not wish that experience on my worst enemy.
It was, you know, again, as John was saying, I mean, when he was the U.S. Attorney, I was an assistant United States Attorney working in that office.
And you just never think you're going to have to hire a criminal defense lawyer for your assistant.
I'm sure don't think that's going to happen when you send them off to combat.
I mean, I worried when I send them off to combat that.
Well, we're glad you're home.
And I'm sorry you had to go through this, Michael.
And Vicki, you have a loving mom there for you and family.
And I do thank you for serving your country.
We owed you better than this, though.
You did not deserve this.
This has to stop.
And I want to wish you the best in all future endeavors.
And we'll see you on TV tonight.
We get to actually see you guys.
You're going to join us and tell your story on television.
I can't wait to see you.
All right, 25 till the top of the hour, 800-941.
Sean, if you want to be a part of the program, our friends at the Daily Caller, they did something really cool.
They actually hit the streets asking people, do they want the wall or do they want open borders?
It's interesting because if you read polls by your fake news media industrial complex, I don't think you get straight answers.
Let's hear what the people say.
What's up, America?
Today we're in DC and we want to know if you don't like the border wall, how would you solve illegal immigration?
I will build a great, great wall.
Completely against the wall.
I think it's ridiculous.
Absolutely a very bad idea.
I think the border wall was just for the drugs, to be honest, to stop the drugs from coming over.
The wall is a wall that Trump envisions?
No.
I think it's incredibly unfair and it's going to limit opportunities for our country in the future.
What would your ideal solution to illegal immigration be?
How would you stop it?
The best way to handle illegal immigration is really enforcing the rules that we already have.
The best thing to do would be to overhaul the laws of the United States on immigration.
But first of all, I love asylums, first of all, okay?
That's one.
But I mean, I think, you know, it's a combination of looking at the provisions that we have in place.
I think it's a good structure that we have.
I don't agree with illegal immigration.
I believe everybody should leave freely.
Everybody should be able to have a happy life.
You know, stopping them from coming over here is kind of ruining their chances of having a better future than me.
To actually start better vetting people that are trying to come into the United States.
To be honest, on my behalf, it's not harming me at all, to be honest.
I say it's a free country, so I mean, everybody should be welcome.
I mean, we all share the same blood, I mean.
A system where people can come in and over a period of time, Stay clean, and they're able to automatically assume presidents.
Like an assimilation period?
Yeah, you know, obviously, just doing the work a little bit better.
Definitely, as we, I did hear you say vetting, you know, so obviously, you know, we want to do that.
Is there any limit that you would feel comfortable putting on immigration or no?
I don't think so.
I think people should be able to move between countries as they please.
I think it's best for the economy and for the people in them.
I'm hesitant to put a limit on it.
I believe that we should have restrictions, but ones that make sense for what this country was built on.
So you guys are totally in favor of open borders, like no restriction to immigration at all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So do you think there's a limit on how many people that a country can sustain?
Yeah, there should be a limit.
You know, you can't just let everybody come over.
It should be a limit.
I don't know what exactly the restrictions should say, but definitely not.
You know, it just seemed like the tone of the ones that are being put out there now seemed to be a little counterproductive to what America stands for.
I don't want it to be overpopulated now because then there's not enough jobs, not enough homes for people to live.
That means that that creates more problems such as homeless, maybe violence, but who knows.
So if you have a limit though, you have to have a way to enforce that, right?
So how would you guys enforce the limit?
That, I don't have an answer for that right now, to be honest with you.
That's a good question right there that I can't answer.
So I would hate to put a limit on it because we need people to work.
But are you in favor of open border policies at all or no?
No, not open border.
Every country has a right to regulate the number of people and who comes in.
So you have to have that kind of interviewing process and you have to have that kind of control and background check and so forth.
Open borders, absolutely no way.
How do you feel about open borders policies?
I think they're a great opportunity.
If we handle them the right way, it ensures that our country stays very diverse.
No, we can't have people overrunning our borders.
That's clearly, clearly wrong.
If whoever says that, well, I would say we've got to take their citizenship away, but no, we can't say that.
We can't say that.
Programs that we have through the government to support people who might be like on welfare, for example.
Do you think there's a limit for who can have access to those programs?
I don't think there should be.
I mean, that's not why they were created.
They're supposed to be around to help people and get them on their feet.
So maybe just put more policy development into the programs themselves.
I don't know.
But don't forget this is a manufactured crisis.
How do we know?
Because the Democrats and the media, they all say the same thing: manufactured, manufactured crisis.
And of course, walls are immoral only when it's Donald Trump that wants to put them up, not when Barack Obama wants to put them up.
The big scam of the whole address was that there's a crisis.
There's not a crisis.
Folks, the president has manufactured one heck of a political crisis for himself.
Donald Trump is manufacturing a national security crisis.
You will hear them say that this is a manufactured crisis.
It's not a national security crisis.
It remains a Seinfeld shutdown.
All about nothing.
What happens when there is a real crisis?
When there is a real emergency?
Does he take to the airwaves?
Do we give him the airwaves?
Do we believe him?
Some question if there is a crisis at all, as the president has claimed.
There is not a crisis at the border.
It's a manufactured crisis for the president to get a political win.
Crisis can have, as we see now, a very elastic definition.
He's determined to convince you there is a crisis at the border.
Even though an intelligence official tells Sin and no one is saying this is a crisis except them.
President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage, must stop manufacturing a crisis.
This president just used the backdrop of the Oval Office to manufacture a crisis.
This is a manufactured crisis.
No crisis exists, and anyone making the argument is most likely guilty of fear-mongering and willfully misleading the American people.
Locals will tell him on the border, even conservatives, is that there isn't a national security crisis.
The notion that we have a crisis there, a security crisis, is absolute nonsense.
All right, let's hit our busy telephones.
I mean, you can't make this stuff up.
It's like they're one.
You know, like two become one.
It's sort of like the act of marriage where two become one.
Why are you laughing?
Oh, I love talking about the activity.
Let's talk about it.
We'll talk about that.
No, because they think alike.
They can't even, they're so intertwined here.
Look, this is the Washington, D.C. swamp that nobody knows.
All these congressmen, senators, their staff, all the people that work in the Department of Education, the Commerce Department, the State Department, the Defense, they're all friends.
They're all friends with the media people.
And what most people don't know is they all socialize together.
They all go to dinner together.
Oh, that monocle, forget about it.
They go out drinking together.
Many of them end up dating together.
And it is an incestuous cesspool.
And nobody seems to really understand that we're all out of the loop by design.
And, you know, I don't want to be a part of their club.
I'm proud not to be a part of their club.
They don't like me.
I think, as a matter of fact, not liking me is probably an understatement.
You know why?
Because you're an investigative journalist by choice.
And you've had to do their own.
You have to do their job.
You have to do their job.
Somebody's got to do it.
Somebody's got to do it.
And you know what?
You've got to go out on that branch.
The furthest branch on the biggest tree over the biggest cliff.
Are you done?
Over the water.
You're hanging on.
Save water.
It's like a piece of floss.
It's a nightmare.
So she is mocking me because I am not mocking you.
You absolutely are, because that is my line where I say, look, I don't care if you're not going to be able to do it.
First of all, I elaborated.
I actually think myself, but you know.
Okay, so when we vet Obama and Frank Marshall Davis and Alinsky and Acorn and community organizers.
Stephanopoulos.
Okay.
And give questions to Stefanabos because he didn't do his job.
He's like, well, I don't know who Arizona are.
Oh, let me write that down.
Let me write that down.
That's very interesting.
I said, you want more questions?
I got a lot of questions.
You had an Alec Baldwin moment.
Yeah, exactly.
It's interesting.
It's very interesting.
Very interesting.
Interesting.
Very interesting.
Can we talk about something fun for a moment?
Call me.
No.
Why don't we talk about something fun?
Because then I go out on a limb.
Just one thing.
Go out on a limb.
And it's true.
Just like with investigating 99.9%.
Every newsroom in the country got it wrong.
And the dopey talk show hosts, oh, the one that was right on Richard Jewell, the guy that was right on what would happen in Florida, the guy that saw what happened in Baltimore and Ferguson and Cambridge police and UVA and soon the Covington kids.
The Covington kids and Smullett case.
Yeah, we're the ones that don't rush the judgment.
We get it right.
They all rush.
I can't wait.
Lynn Wood, who now represents Nicholas Sanders, filed three.
Oh, there's going to be hundreds of lawsuits.
It reads like a beautiful play.
And the latest lawsuit against NBC for $275 million.
The first one was against the Washington Post 250, fake news, CNN, $275 million.
And then, oh, and he does all the math.
This company makes X numbers a dollar profit.
This is just a small percentage.
And let's not forget, Sean.
These are grown men.
What are we bringing?
These are grown men and women on networks threatening a teenager, saying, I wish I could beat him up.
I wish I could punch him.
I wish I could kick his ass.
Well, they're about to get their asses kicked, and they're going to get verbally punched in the head, and they're going to open up their checkbook.
Yes, they are.
And Lynn Wood, they're going to be begging Lynn Wood to not go to court, to settle out of court, and they're going to be writing massive sums of money.
Now, you know who's going to be really rich in this?
Nicholas Sandman.
He's going to be a rich kid.
And he wasn't trying.
He did the right thing.
Amazingly, when you get to the truth, they never picked up a phone.
They didn't talk to a single person.
And then when the truth came out, they still doubled down on stupid and kept reporting fake news.
They would rather.
I would rather double down on the lie and defend one another than actually say, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I messed up.
Maya Culpa.
Moving on.
Now can I tell my next story?
What?
Today we had a surprise baby shower for Ethan and Annie in the studio.
You know how I know that happened?
Because you were late and you missed it.
No, because I paid for it.
You paid for the pizza.
Paid for the party.
You paid for the pizza.
And the party stuff.
It's highly decorated.
Katie went and got the cake.
And who paid for the decorations?
Me.
And who paid for the cake?
These are the finer details, you know?
You know, you just sit there like.
Who's the brand new father?
Are you going to take credit for that too?
I'm not the father.
Oh, man.
That got really weird.
Oh, man.
That got really weird.
What kind of party is this?
Sounds like Maury Povich.
You are not the father.
You certainly are not.
You know, and by the way, you know when Maury Povich does that, right?
He's like, they build this tension up.
There's two guys sitting there and the girl, neither one can be the father.
And they're just sitting there.
You are.
And then when the girl's upset that the person that she thought was the father isn't the father, you know, and all on TV.
Oh, we'll help you find the father.
We'll bring you back 10 times if needed to find the father.
And they're just using people.
Can we move off of this?
I mean, I am the father.
He is the father.
Let's discuss this.
And it's a little baby.
Boy.
Boy.
Do you know the name yet?
We were thinking Sean.
Okay.
Sean Hannity.
What's the real.
People have named.
There are kids named Hannity.
There are indeed.
We have a few names, but we haven't settled on one yet.
Well, where are you leaning?
In other words, I'll tell you what the kids name is going to be.
What's your first choice?
The April Fools Their Family.
And they told the kid, they said they were going to name the kid Ludwig.
Oh, geez.
Ludwig.
Beethoven's first name.
So here in the studio, we call his baby Wiggy.
Wiggie?
Yeah.
My father-in-law said that.
You do have to think of kids that are going to be made fun of, you know.
Yeah, but my father-in-law said if I named my son Wiggy, he would buy him a baseball bat to beat the crap out of me with.
Okay, so what is your number one choice and what's your wife's number one choice?
I'd rather not say.
Stop being a baby.
Speak up.
He can't say it because then one side of family is going to be mad.
The other side of family is going to be mad.
I tell you what, let's take a bet.
No, let's take a bet.
I bet I win.
I bet I win.
How about you shush up?
Oh, man.
You shush up and let me do my job.
Is this the Sean Hannity show?
Yes, it is.
What's your number one choice?
What's her number one choice?
She likes Nicholas.
I like Thomas.
Okay.
Nicholas, it will be, because she's going to win.
There's my bet.
You want to have a bet?
But there are other names we're considering.
Let's have a bet.
I bet it's going to be Nicholas.
If it's down to those two names, I say she wins.
I say he wins.
$100, whoever wins gives to the college scholarship for the kid.
They're obviously going to send it to the $500.
$100.
How much college is going to be for?
This is my own kid, the kid.
Dopey kid when he gets to college edge.
Well, sorry.
I mean, he's probably going to go through the public education system.
I mean, you're going to have to tutor him on the side of the school.
His wife is a teacher.
I'm joking.
Listen, there are good public school districts, and I hope yours is one of them.
But a lot of college.
Is this going to be free eventually for the kid?
You don't think that's going to happen?
You know, not if I have anything to say, but maybe if I'm dead and gone and you don't have anybody fighting.
It's in the Hannity Mausoleum.
Well, I want to be in a mausoleum.
I wanted to say Hannity's American.
Yes, I know.
Would you like me to put space in there for you and your loved ones?
Absolutely.
It's great that we've gone from life to death all in one school.
One minute.
It's wonderful.
Listen, I'm not going to be able to do that.
On that happy note, I don't want to be burned, and I don't want to be way down on the ground with a bunch of worms crawling up my nose.
You could be sunk into the sea like a sailor.
Go to the bottom of the ocean.
Okay, I don't want to be eaten by a shark either or have these little fish nipping at my...
What about a nice flaking funeral?
How about we just let...
I want my mausoleum.
It's going to be in the woods somewhere, safe, secure, isolated where nobody can find it.
All right, Hannity tonight, 9 Eastern on Fox.
All right, big breaking news on Christopher Steele and this entire knowledge base of everybody and what he was doing and what his agenda was.
Also, you will meet former Army First Lieutenant Michael Bahena.
He was the one that got a full pardon from the president yesterday.
We have John Solomon, Carter Page, Sarah Carter, Mark Penn, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Geraldo and Dan Bongino.
Nine Eastern Hannity Fox, we'll see you then back here tomorrow.
