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Well, everything we said, everything we were reported, everything we told you was dead on center accurate, and the mob and the media has missed what is the biggest abuse of power corruption scandal in the history of the country.
It is the you can't this report putting aside whatever differences and for the attorney general and for John Durham to come out like they have, and I'll get to these statements in a second.
Uh, and it is all there in black and white.
It's all there.
Put the conclusion differences aside for a second here.
There is no more doubt the FBI launched an intrusive investigation in a presidential campaign on what is described as the thinnest of suspicions, the attorney general said, and in my view were insufficient to justify the steps taken.
It is also clear from its inception that the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory.
By the way, they actually took out exculpatory information.
They purposely misled repeatedly the Pfizer court.
It goes on that nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump's administration.
In the rush to obtain and maintain Pfizer surveillance of the Trump campaign associates, the FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information, negating the reliability of their principal source.
The inspector general found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Now that's from Bill Barr.
Now, remember, and this is very critical in where we are at this particular moment, because, and I've spent a lot of time explaining this.
Horowitz has already made numerous referrals from all the people that we're now going to be talking about today in the upper echelon of the FBI long before uh in his earlier reports.
Nobody's lifted a finger because an inspector general does not have the power to convene a grand jury, make charges.
And what I suspect is going on here is now the final step of all this is going to be Durham's report.
Because Durham said I have the utmost respect for the mission of the inspector general, the comprehensive work that went into the report prepared by Mr. Horowitz and his staff.
However, our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department.
This is why do you think they've been in Italy, Great Britain so often?
What do you think is going on over there?
We're gonna know soon enough.
Our investigation is included developing information from other persons, entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. Clapper Brennan, are you paying attention?
Based on the evidence collected to date.
And while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General, we don't agree with some of their conclusions as to the predication of how the FBI's Case was opened.
In other words, we've got evidence to the contrary.
Let's be let's let's be blunt here.
That's what he's saying.
And it's also uh a preview, if you will, of coming attractions.
He's he's pretty much saying, stay tuned.
We have a lot more.
Now remember, Inspector General referred Comey already prior to this release today over leaking memos and lack of candor.
And Horrow it's found the FBI's handling of the Clinton emails.
Remember, senior bureau officials showed a quote willingness to take official action to prevent Trump from becoming president.
He's already said all of that.
He's referred Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, Kevin Kleinsmith, and others, including Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe for further investigation.
Kleinsmith is the same anti-Trump lawyer we're expecting to hear a lot more about in days to come.
And back in May, the IG referred to an unnamed FBI deputy assistant director for referred this person for prosecution for leaking sealed court records.
And in April, the DOJ watchdog, the inspector general sent a criminal referral for the disgraced ex-FBI official Andrew McCabe for unauthorized leaks and quote lacking candor.
But now it's what Durham and Barr are saying, now it's time for accountability, because that's that's all you're gonna get out of the inspector general.
He can't convene a grand jury.
He can't.
So now it's in the attorney general's hand and Durham's hand in their words today should send shivers and shocks down the spines of these people involved in this abuse of power corruption scandal, the biggest in history here.
Because this is what it is.
And what, you know, you you look at the numerous factual errors and omissions.
They failed to vet the information.
Numerous serious performance failures by those handling the FISA application.
The applications were oh, relied on the discredited work of Christopher Steele.
Just the Clinton bought and paid for dirty steel dossier, whose own author said, uh, yeah, no, I have no idea if any of it's true.
In other words, it was an unverifiable document from the get-go.
How could you conclude anything other than, yeah, they did it by design?
As far as the numerous factual errors and omissions, I mean, yeah, as we discussed below, we identified numerous serious factual errors and omissions.
The omissions were exculpatory information, which I'll get into as this day unfolds.
There were serious performance failures.
We conclude the failures described uh in this report represents serious performance failures by the super advisory and non-supervisory agents with responsibility over FISA applications.
Uh 17 significant errors or omissions in the FISA applications.
17 at least that they've identified.
IG did not receive satisfactory explanations for any of their conduct in the errors in the applications.
Procedures, we also did not receive satisfactory explanations for the errors or the problems that we identified.
In most instances, the agents and supervisors told us that they did not know or recall why the information was not shared uh with the Pfizer court, that the failure to do so may have been an oversight.
They didn't recognize at the time the relevance of the information.
FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement that they ensure that all information in a FISA application is accurate.
And it goes to crossfire hurricane team that McCabe, Comey, others, they wanted to rely on Steele's dossier, despite knowing the concerns that Steele was being funded by the Clinton and the DNC.
And Comey and McCabe pushed for Steele's debunked reporting to be in the intelligence assessment on the 2016 election, despite pushback from the CIA.
There were concerns about struck and page bypassing the chain of command to advise McCabe.
The IG report concludes Bruce Orr committed uh consequential errors in judgment.
The FBI also, it goes on from there, received information, raising significant questions about Steele's findings and did not press steel for information.
Steele's information played the central and essential role in the decision to seek the FISA order.
The FBI did not have information corroborating any of the Steele dossier and the allegations that are being made here.
Do you see where this is all going?
So, you know, what is in here?
We're learning in, I mean, how many pages total is this?
I didn't even get to the last page, Linda.
What is it?
500 and what?
Yeah, it's almost 500.
Almost 500 pages.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
The failure to vet steel.
Now, here's why would that matter?
All right, they fell far short in abiding by FISA policy.
No corroborating evidence as it relates to Page allegations.
They purposefully changed, you know, Page, everything he had told us on this program according to this is all true.
He worked for the government.
He worked for another agency.
And then when they were handed that information, they altered the information to get into everything backdoor.
Remember, secondhand information.
Once you get to Christopher Carter Page, now you're in all things Trump campaign world, Trump transition world, et cetera.
There were, quote, mountains of flags regarding Steele's work.
The FBI fell far short in abiding by Pfizer policy.
Our review found FBI personnel fell far short.
Factual assertions relied upon in the first PISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, unsupported by appropriate documentation.
None of these inaccuracies and omissions were brought to the attention of the Office of Inspector General before the last FISA application.
This went on for almost a year.
They were Operation Crossfire Hurricane, was unable to corroborate any of the specific allegations regarding Carter Page contained in Steele's dossier.
They couldn't corroborate any of it.
The FBI's failures created misleading, a misleading FISA application.
17 specific errors and omissions we have identified in these FISA applications.
There are so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate handpicked teams on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations.
This is all in the report.
And then it goes on from there.
They didn't give equal attention, by the way, to the relevant facts on the other side.
They purposely took all the exculpatory information, said, no, we don't want to see that.
I mean, the FISA application, it was made clear.
The information supporting probable cause was non-existent in this case.
They found the quantity of omissions and inaccuracies breathtaking.
And by the way, the agents may have improperly substituted their own judgments.
You think serious performance failures.
Then it gets into, you know, the very, very specific issues involving the dossier, which we've got to now pay very close attention to.
Because if we don't get to the basics in this, then we're screwed.
Because, you know, Steele, by the way, in his own sense, in his own way, was up to his eyeballs in this and was doing it for money.
And he, when he finally pushed Came to shove, which they could have done from the very beginning, they would have found, uh, yeah.
Yeah.
Now, one of the, I think, most damning things in this, which validates every single thing that we told you.
Christopher Steele was paid by the FBI.
Steele denies ever agreeing to become to work for the FBI, which is an interesting sidebar.
But what I found most telling is what you find out is without any dossier, there was no FISA application.
Remember, we kept saying the bulk of information comes from the unverifiable steel dossier.
It says it exactly like that in this report.
They had absolutely zero confirmation or even an ability to confirm everything.
James, if you can bring in that earlier version, I would appreciate it.
Um they didn't even have the ability to verify it because they never took the time to verify it.
And they went as to so far as to actually change the evidence that was presented in this case.
Every bit of it.
They want to, well, okay, so without the steel dossier, quote, they would not have even pursued the Pfizer warrant because they weren't getting it.
When asked about the motivations behind the Steel dossier, agent involved didn't respond.
The Pfizer application form was almost entirely based on the unverifiable steel dossier.
And this whole circular reporting.
Remember, one step, two step.
Once you get into everything Carter paid, now you're into everything Trump worlds, because he worked as a campaign associate in the Trump campaign.
That gave them a backdoor to the Trump campaign, the Trump transition team and the Trump presidency.
The Pfizer application was almost entirely based on the Steele dossier.
Oh, who's been telling you that?
Nobody in the fake news media.
Without the dossier, they wouldn't have pursued a Pfizer warrant because they wouldn't have gotten one.
Who's been telling you that?
About the motivations.
Pfizer application called Steele a reliable source and lied that his info had been used in criminal proceedings.
They actually lied about that.
Struck himself signed off on an expedited Pfizer application.
They misleared uh the agent misled the attorney, saying that Carter Page never met with us.
Then you have the actual changing of this thing to the where it would have been exculpatory to Carter Page, and then they did it to screw him so that they could still get to Trump.
Page to McCabe.
We can we can overcome looking biased in the Pfizer application.
We can overcome it.
They're bragging about it.
And then Paige to McCabe.
Oh, she's so innocent, I thought.
Uh, we have a robust explanation for any possible bias charges here.
Um, and it goes on from there.
It is a lot to absorb.
It's nearly 500 pages.
I've only had it in my hands for well, a little over two hours.
And my entire team here, we're still going through it.
But it is everything we said is true.
Everything.
Every single thing.
The mob was wrong every step of the way.
Now imagine if this was done to Hillary or Barack Obama or any Democratic candidate ever.
You think the mob would care?
Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started normally a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass.
You're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
I'm Ben Ferguson.
And I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
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So what were we telling you versus the mob in the media?
We were telling you that the bulk of information was the Hillary Clinton unverifiable bought and paid for steel dossier.
Now we know the Pfizer request, quote 126-127 page, uh drew almost entirely from Steele's reporting in describing the factual basis to establish probable cause.
The bulk of information was the dirty dossier, the unverifiable dirty dossier.
Now, we also know when asked for the motivations behind this the steele dossier, they didn't know.
Without Steele, they could not have gotten a Pfizer warrant.
The unit chief told the OIG that the receipt of Steele's quote reporting changed their mind on whether they could establish probable cause.
In other words, without the dirty Clinton bought and paid for unverifiable, dirty Russian dossier, there Is no Pfizer report on top of all the lying and exculpatory information withheld.
We'll continue.
Hey there.
I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started normally a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass.
You're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
I'm Ben Ferguson.
And I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else.
We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family.
So Dell a verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, 25 now till the top of the hour, 800-941.
Sean, if you want to be a part of this extravaganza, so much to unchase trying to stand back and look at the big picture.
There's so much damning information in this thing.
And what I've now concluded is if you remember the Mueller report, the way the Democrats saw it, was gonna lead to the roadmap to impeachment.
That got blown out of the water.
By the way, another thing that we find out in this Horowitz report uh on, you know, it's so it's so outrageous because all of this is such an abuse disgusting abuse of power.
It really is.
I I mean, you if you listen to the words of Durham and Barr, it's devastating.
And Dorham has the wider scope.
Dorum has the power.
Doram is now officially a criminal investigation.
He can convene grand juries and he's making clear uh he will be doing that.
And, you know, when with Barr and his statements, it is it is beyond damning.
Um now, I want to go back now that I'm explaining to you everything that we told you is true.
And you can go to page 125 and you can go to 124 and 126 and 127 of this report.
What are we looking for here?
All right, steel Christopher Steele.
Or is it motivations?
Remember, we found out when he when he was pressed under oath in an interrogatory in Great Britain.
I have no idea if any of it's true.
Single sourced information from a crazy person that he describes as a crazy person.
Without without the steel dossier, they knew they couldn't get the Pfizer application.
McCabe, so McCabe did say it.
He's saying now he didn't say, of course, he probably said it, in my view, but they're saying in the report that with that it pushed it over the line in terms of, yeah, that was what that was what did it for us.
And don't forget, they also used the circular reporting.
They leaked it out to Isakov and uh what's that other hack's name, conspiracy theorist?
Oh, David Korn and Isakoff, by the way, willing dupes.
Oh, thank you for the information.
Let me report it as true.
And using that, um, conspiracy theorists that they are.
But anyway, without the dirty dossier that Clinton pays for that we now know is unverifiable, that's how they get in a backdoor.
Now, of course, you get once you get to Carter Page.
Well, now you get into the Trump campaign.
And then after the Trump campaign, you get into the Trump transition, then the Trump presidency.
And what's remarkable in all of this is Comey lies through his teeth repeatedly, because he signed off on the application in October of 2016.
He put his signature on that first Pfizer application with the unverifiable bulk of information.
I'll read from page 126 and 7.
The Pfizer request form drew almost entirely from Steele's reporting and describing the factual basis to establish probable cause to believe that Page was an agent of a foreign power.
The only additional information cited in the Pfizer request form, the only the rest of it was a statement that Paige was a senior foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign and had extensive ties to various state owned or affiliated entities of the Russian Federation.
The only other thing besides the dossier used to secure the warrant, Papadopoulos' statement, which by the way, even that's altered, and an open source, which is articles discussing what all that was was leaks to Isakoff and Corn, as I understand it, to make it seem like it was independent corroboration.
That was done on purpose, too.
So without the dirty, unverifiable Clinton bought and paid for Russian dossier, you don't get the backdoor.
So remember the standard, because if you look at a FISA application, it has the word verified at the top of it.
Oh, it's unverifiable, but it was the it was based almost entirely.
But for those three things, the statement that Paige was a senior foreign policy, blah, blah, blah, blah, Papadopoulos' statement and these two articles written by two conspiracy theorists' hacks that they leaked to and did no verification on their own, obviously, because they're just hacks that hate Trump.
That was it.
So it was the dirty dossier, bought and paid for, unverifiable.
And then, but but the standard, well, Rod Rosenstein told us in May of last year what the standard was.
Pay close attention.
The way we operate in the Department of Justice, if we can accuse somebody of wrongdoing, we have to have admissible evidence and credible witnesses.
We need to prepare to prove our case in court.
And we have to affix our signature to the charging document.
That's something that not everybody appreciates.
Let's go back to the beginning.
You need to have real evidence.
Play that again.
The way we operate in the Department of Justice, if we can accuse somebody of wrongdoing, we have to have admissible evidence and credible witnesses.
If that's not an abuse of power, I don't know what is.
And and we're gonna, we're we're clear law enforcement officials.
Listen to this.
Charging document.
That's something that not everybody appreciates.
There's a lot of talk about Pfizer applications, and many people that I see talking about it seem not to recognize what a Pfizer applicant.
A Pfizer application is actually a warrant, just like a search warrant.
In order to get a Pfizer uh search warrant, you need an affidavit signed by a career federal law enforcement officer who swears that the information in the affidavit is true and correct to the best of his knowledge and belief.
Uh, and that's the way we operate.
And if it's wrong, sometimes it is, if you find out there's anything incorrect in there, that person is gonna face consequences.
There was at no time every ability to verify the bulk of that application.
It's unverifiable.
That's why I think we're hearing from Horowitz and Durham, they're like, okay, I don't know where you're getting this.
You're trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, fine, but you know, with all due respect, they failed to meet the basic obligation to ensure applications were scrupulously accurate.
It was never that there was no possibility any of it was uh was accurate.
It's unverifiable, and they used it four times, a full year of spying.
Then they launch an investigation into a presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions, as Bill Barr says.
And he says, in my view, insufficient to justify these steps taken.
And then you go to Durham.
And Durham's the one that's doing the criminal investigation.
And he was about as clear as he could be.
Yes, sure, I respect Harwitz.
Our investigation, though, is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department.
Oh, other people that have information, we can go talk to them.
Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside the U.S., based on the evidence collected to date.
And while our investigation is ongoing, uh, we do not agree with some of the report's conclusions as to a prediction of how the FBI case was opened.
Remember, Horowitz found the dossier provided probable cause to spy on Carter Page.
Well, yeah, but they had to alter information about Carter Page to get there, which I'll get to.
Omitted information the FBI obtained from another U.S. government agency detailing its prior relationship with Paige, including Paige had been approved as an operational contact for the other agency, three letter agency from 2008 to 13.
Page had provided information to other agency concerning his prior contacts with certain Russian intelligence officials and officers, one of which overlap with facts asserted in the visa application.
Now, we also have a included in this whole thing, a source characterization statement about Steele's prior reporting had been, quote, corroborated and used in criminal proceedings.
That is a lie.
That's not true.
And I've talked to high-ranking people all day that know within the Justice Department, overstating the significance of Steele's past reporting and was not approved by Steele's handling agent, as required by Wood's procedures.
Three, they omitted information relevant to the reliability of person, a key Steele's subsource.
This is the one source.
He only had one source.
Steele himself told members of the crossfire hurricane team that one who was at a big ego and was a boaster, gave him the information, may engage in some embellishment.
Steele even told them that.
One source by somebody that lies, basically.
And if you look at the report, 95, you know, and some if you look at who the attribute attribution here with provided information in the report, and some information in other reports relied on the application.
Steele himself told members of the whole team, yeah, it's only one guy.
He's basically telling them, I have no idea if it's true then.
That would mean premeditated fraud.
And that the FBI assessed Steele did not directly provide to the press the information for that Yahoo Michael Izakoff article based on the premise that Steele had told the FBI he only shared his election-related research with FBI and Fusion GPS as client.
The premise was incorrect and contradicted by documentation in the Woods file.
Steele had told the FBI he also gave information to the State Department.
They omitted Papadopoulos' statements monitored to an FBI guess informant, denying that anyone associated with the Trump campaign ever corroborated with Russia or outside groups like WikiLeaks.
Oopsie Daisy, that would be important.
They omitted Page's statements that he had literally never met or said one word to Manafort.
And Manafort did not represent to any of Paige's emails.
And by the way, number seven, Page's consensually monitored statements, uh, et cetera.
They omitted other statements paid mage that were inconsistent with their theory, including denying having met with certain individuals.
If true, those statements contradicted the claims in the report that Paige had met secretly with them about future cooperation.
I'm going to tell you one thing that's going to emerge at some point here that you pay close attention that I'm right on on this.
They never once gave the Trump team a defensive briefing and said, hey, uh, just to give you a heads up, we're looking into this possibility.
But my sources confirming for me today, the U.S. government through Brennan and Obama himself informed the Russians of a possible compromise with the Trump campaign.
That is breathtaking.
Brennan called the Russians in August and September of 2016.
Did they ever think they should call the Trump campaign?
Obama called the Russians in September.
Um, how is that possible?
You got Paige and Papadopoulos, you know, literally Page didn't lie to us once.
Do you see that?
Remember some people saying don't trust Paige.
This report exonerates him.
But they had to use Manafort, Paige, Papadopoulos, and Flynn.
Oh, they just used them.
All these guys were used and abused for the purpose of getting it Trump.
Just like Comey also lied when he said, Oh, yeah, it's salacious, but not verified, because three months earlier he was he was saying it was verified.
When he signed off on the FISA application, then signed off on two others after he lied to Trump.
He's caught in a million lies here.
And if I'm Durham and I'm Bill Barr, yeah, I'm I'm looking at this saying, yeah, this is not true.
Um what else do we have in all this?
We have so they're concerned about the DOJ FBI policies didn't require senior officials to be notified.
The confidential source on Paige and Papadopoulos before and after they joined the Trump team.
They altered, literally altered the exact wordings.
They failed to ever vet Christopher Steele or the one egotist that he told them not to trust.
There's a mountain of red flags they point out in terms of serious problems with Steele's descriptions, but they did it anyway.
They never corroborated the allegations against Page, just the opposite.
The FBI didn't have information corroborating the allegations against Paige, and as a matter of fact, they had exculpatory information that they purposely withheld from the Pfizer court.
They never told the FISA court that Hillary paid for the dirty Russian dossier.
That would be important if I was a Pfizer court judge.
Christopher Steele and the FBI, yeah, they didn't have the relationship that the FBI officials were saying that they had.
You know, one weird thing that came out of this is apparently Steele says he personally knows a member of the Trump family.
The some suspect it was a Vankai.
I have no idea.
I'm not unable to even get into that.
So you get into this.
Okay, the FISA application is we now know unverifiable with a single source lunatic that they even told everybody was a single source lunatic, is an ego maniac that makes things up.
They FISA request form referred to steel as a reliable source, but yet Steele was not considered a reliable source.
He was even fired by the FBI for lying and leaking.
Strux telling the Office of Inspector General that he approved the request to expedite the Pfizer sense of urgency.
That's not how it works, though, is it?
According to Rod Rosenstein, which we just played.
By the way, do we have we have Comey?
Let's play Comey here.
Because Comey confessed in this to the uh inspector general that the Steele dossier shouldn't have been used in the application.
But that's not what he said back when.
Listen.
Jane Mayer wrote a very comprehensive piece in the New Yorker about uh Christopher Steele's dossier and about Christopher Steele.
Uh is he considered reliable according to your sources as an intelligence agent?
Yes.
As it was described to me when it came in, it was raw intelligence, so a series of reports from a credible person with a reliable track record and a known experience and source network in Russia.
And so it was something to be taken seriously.
Didn't mean that it was all true, but it was to be taken seriously.
And it's core assertion was corroborated by other intelligence.
It's core assertion being the Russians have a campaign going on to interfere in the American election.
Just like he lied to Trump, salacious and unverified.
Everything about this that we told you is true.
That you have literally an unverifiable Clinton bought and paid for Russian dossier, the bulk of information used for the FISA applications, and it to abuse power and get at a candidate, a transition team, and a president.
I can't wait to Durham and Barr get a hold of this.
A lot of people are done here.
Trust me, this is bad.
Hey there.
I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started normally a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass.
You're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
I'm Ben Ferguson, and I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdic with Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else.
We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family.
So down a verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts.
Well, I'm not going to go into the details of the conversations I had with Sue.
Um, but at the end of the day, we put forth a package that, to my understanding, people in my building and the department were satisfied with.
So to the extent that there were any concerns about how we represented what we knew about the informant and his potential, um, how he came involved in in acquiring this information and and uh what his background might say about his involvement in that collection.
Um, I think everyone was satisfied that we had represented that accurately and adequately in the package.
Um the court was obviously satisfied.
They signed it what, three or four times.
I think.
But there were three.
There was one, right?
There were three renewals, including by Rod, the last one.
That's right.
And Maysian and three renewals, one of which I signed.
It took place after the director had been fired.
Uh it's almost a joke listening to McCabe in retrospect.
When did he actually say that?
Because the report today, what's what was that?
March?
Because the report today shows, yeah, the dirty dossier.
They wouldn't have gotten, they wouldn't have have gotten a FISA uh warrant without the dirty dossier.
And yeah, the application was almost entirely based on an unverifiable document, almost entirely.
And that yeah, um Christopher Steele without the dossier, they wouldn't have even pursued it.
Now we know that the Clinton bought and paid for unverifiable Russian dirty dossier was it to spy on Carter Page, denying him his constitutional rights.
By the way, now we know also Manafort and Papadopoulos, and wow, they went after General Flynn.
That's how we treat 33-year veterans in this country.
This is an excoriating beatdown of how corrupt this whole thing was, and what an abuse of power.
And it's, you know, and forget about whatever Horowitz doesn't have the ability.
He's he's referred people left and right and all over the place.
Nothing happens.
When Dorum comes out as he does today and says the things he's been saying today, now we're like, okay, this is uh a pro investigation, he goes on, has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside the U.S., Italy, Great Britain, uh, Australia.
And based on the evidence collected to date, and our investigation is ongoing.
We invite the inspector general.
We don't agree with some of the report's conclusions.
Interpretation, yeah, we've got um we've got a lot more than you do.
Yeah, because we're because we're not limited in our purview.
You know, you also say the steel dossier provided, you know, probable cause.
No, that every every indication was it was unverifiable.
Even the interview that he gave.
We all know in the interrogatory what he said, but now we know in the interview he said, yeah, one source, and the guy was a negomaniac who is known to make up crap.
So that's that's where we are here.
And the inspector general finding himself 17 significant errors.
We've identified at least 17 significant errors or missions in the FISA applications.
Uh, and additional errors in wood procedures, it goes on to say in great detail, under the so-called two-hop rule, investigations, investigators could collect the communication of every person that Paige interacted with.
Why is that important?
Because the reason they had to alter the documents that actually show that Carter Page was a patriot.
Carter Page worked with a three-letter agency.
The three-letter agency warned them all that, yeah, no, he's good.
And then they changed it to make it sound just the opposite.
Why?
Because once you got to Carter Page, then you got into the Trump campaign transition team and presidency.
That's why.
That's how bad this is for them.
And to have the attorney general of the United States now weighing in as strongly as he is weighed in saying, uh, yeah, this is bad.
Mm-hmm.
And Durham saying it is bad.
Jim Jordan rightly pointing out we thought they spied on two Americans.
Now we know it was four.
We know within one week of the investigations opening, the FBI was surveilling the campaign and four specific individuals.
Do you realize how thin it is?
It is so thin that it's based on one thing we're learning today.
Just one.
And that is George Papadopoulos' what he said at a party.
That's thin.
The attorney general rejecting all of this in a lengthy statement, you know, saying this is how intrusive this all is.
And him going really deep into this never should have happened.
Under the thinnest of suspicions.
He goes in, launched on the thinnest of suspicions.
The inspector general's report now makes clear the FBI launched the investigation, a U.S. presidential campaign on the sinist, the thinnest of suspicions, in my view, insufficient to justify.
And they knew that they knew and the overwhelming bulk of evidence was what?
It was the dirty Clinton bought and paid for dossier, just as we have reported and told you.
And what was the what was the point of this?
They couldn't have gotten a warrant without the dirty dossier that's unverifiable.
That uh go to page 126, 127.
The Pfizer request form drew almost entirely from the dirty dossier.
Almost, and then three little other things.
That's it.
It was the bulk of information was this.
The Grassley Graham Nunes memos were correct.
Dorham blasting this rightly so.
Barr blasting this also and saying that, you know, the report insufficient basis to do any of this.
And it's clear from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory.
Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance were was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign into deep into the president's administration.
Now we know if you go back, and we'll get to this later, the statements are barr from that speech that he gave.
Ooh.
Now it's beginning to take on greater meaning than ever before.
And we'll play that.
But we know numerous errors, serious performance failures, relied on the discredited, unverifiable work of the steel dossier.
Comey even Comey's confessing in his interview.
Yeah, yeah, no, this wasn't ripe enough.
Well, why'd you sign it three times?
That's a problem for him.
Yeah, finally, Director Ray says something.
Oh, he promises reforms.
He's saying that now because he knows it's trouble in terms of this.
I'm gonna tell you right now, there's gonna be a push to get rid of FISA.
Anyway, two people that have been right with us all along.
Investigative reporter John Solomon, vindicated today.
Greg Jarrett vindicated today, and this is only the beginning of the vindication.
Thank you both for your great work.
We were right the whole time.
We were all right the whole time.
The mob in the media did nothing.
Anyway, John Solomon, your take, and we're gonna keep you guys for the hour, so we have plenty of time.
It is just stunning.
Um a level of misinformation and erroneous information and disproven information that the FBI allowed to persist with the Pfizer court.
They fleeced the Pfizer court.
The FBI using its most awesome spy powers fleece the Pfizer court.
And in so doing, they fleeced the American public And they violated the civil liberties of the four men who were targeted by this investigation.
It is just when you look at these 17 uh failures, these 17 misinformations, these 17 omissions, they are so glaring as to almost appear intentional.
And I think that at the end of the day, the idea that this was just simply uh uh uh a case of uh uh incompetent cops really really uh pales when you start to read the facts that the knowing and willful decisions not to provide information up the chain, the changing of a document that had Carter Page's relationship with the U.S. intelligence agency.
Oh, by the way, to say that he didn't have it when in fact that it said just the opposite.
That's right.
I mean, and the core thing, the only thing that would justify a FISA against Carter Page was that he had met with these two guys in Russia, the two Igors I call them, the FBI knew that wasn't true.
It allowed that to persist for a year and allowed the court to keep extending these warrants.
And in January 2017, the FBI interviewed Christopher Steele's subsource, something I told you many months ago.
That subsource disowned the information attributed to him in the dossier.
We could have saved two years of the Mueller investigation if the FBI had just come clean about that.
It is tragic to civil liberties, it's tragic to the American desire for truth that these FBI agents and officials allowed this farce to go on for two years.
Greg Jarrett, your takeaway from this.
Uh I guess your two books have been vindicated as well, because everything you reported is true.
Yes.
Uh, you know, in my books, I go through all of the misrepresentations that were made uh by the FBI and the Department of Justice to spy on the Trump campaign.
Uh never told that uh Clinton's campaign had paid for the phony dossier, not told that Steele uh had leaked and lied, instead they vouched that he was credible.
Uh you know, not told that the FBI's evidence was was unverified, and it it clearly was it's worse than that, though, unverifiable.
And by the way, the page 126 of that the Pfizer request form, which says at the top, verified, drew almost entirely from the dirty Clinton bought and paid for Russian steel dossier.
Oh, sure.
And and and they were not told of excavatory evidence.
That's really where Bar and Durham come in.
You know, what's revealing about the report today is Bill Barr's damning assessment of it.
Misconduct reasons, misfeasance, clear abuse of of FISA process.
Uh what's baffling is how the IG seems to have blindly accepted the stories.
Sorry, my apologies.
Okay.
Should have turned it off.
What uh they even said it was really accepted all these stories by people like Comey and McCabe and Baker, not to mention Chris Steele himself.
You know, but Horowitz offers the following vacuous excuse.
Uh it's not my role to second guess discretionary judgment.
You know, all America was so weakly troubled.
Well, it is, I mean, but I'll tell you, it's so egregious.
I mean, when you see that the the Durham and Barr came out as strongly as they did, it's sort of like this is the appetizer, John.
Now we've got a lot of the facts outlined here.
Everything corroborated that we believe to be true.
But you know, an inspector general he's already referred Comey Page, struck McCabe for referral.
He's already referred to us.
So it doesn't really matter what it is his assumption is here.
But what I think Durham is saying, oh God, we've got it all we've got this buttoned up so tight you have no idea because you can't do what we've been doing on top of what you did.
Keep in mind he also uh uh today revealed that he caught an FBI agent intentionally willfully doctoring a document to keep the FISA scam going.
That is one of the most serious criminal violations I've ever seen come out of an IG report.
So he has provided some new evidence of criminality.
But at the end of the day, I mean Klein Smith.
Klein Smith, right.
Yep, the uh the the lawyer who uh who who uh doctors are.
Explain what he did, because he actually this was on Carter Page in particular.
Yeah.
That wasn't being divulged.
And if the if the FISA court knew that Carter Page was trusted by the CIA, they might have had some serious reservations about spying on him.
You know what I forgot to say?
And also they never told anybody that Hillary paid for it.
That's right.
And here's another one.
When the assessment came out in December, the rushed Obama assessment that Russia, you know, in uh uh uh had uh tried to infiltrate our camp uh our election, had tried to influence our election.
The CIA specifically told the FBI, don't use the steel dossier.
What did what did McCabe and Comey do?
They used it as part of the assessment, which means that assessment is flawed.
It really if if the vices are flawed, the intelligence assessment that relied on the dossier, it now needs to be revisited for the failures that that Steele brought to this table.
But the fact that the CIA was objecting to Steele's dossier tells you something big about just how bad and how little a secret the FBI's misconduct was in the parents community.
John Solomon, Greg Jarrett vindicated both as well as this program.
Uh everything we told you was true.
And now we have the attorney general and prosecutor at Durham.
Wow, this is going to blow up into something massive.
I can tell you right now, there's no way they would say these things if that was not true.
Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started Normally, a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass.
You're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
I'm Ben Ferguson, and I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes, inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else.
We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family.
So down a verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts.
And as we continue, Sean Hannity show, uh, John Solomon, investigator reporter, Greg Jarrett, uh legal analyst for Fox, also two bestsellers as a result of all of this.
Everything we've told you is dead on accurate.
John, you actually go through the list of 17 things.
What are the top takeaways you get, Greg, before we'll go through the 17 that the inspector general identified?
Serious omissions and accuracies, failures, etc.
What do you what stands out the most to you, Greg?
That the FBI knew that Carter Page was not a spy.
You'll recall in the first FISA Warren application, they absolutely did declare that Carter Page is a spy.
They knew he wasn't because they knew he had assisted the U.S. government in previous cases against Russian spies.
And, you know, they also knew that Carter Page had sent a letter to James Comey saying, hey, I'm getting badgered by reporters here.
I'm happy to sit down and talk to you about my recent trip to Russia.
And instead of doing that, Comey decided to go to a FISA court, lie to them, and spy on Carter Page and ruining his life.
You know, it's amazing because Carter Page, we figured him out over time.
He was very reluctant to give me the information that you're saying here.
He did not want to.
I said, I I had to figure out.
So basically you worked, you you worked for our government.
Well, let's just say I, yeah, I kind of did.
And I was like pulling teeth.
And I was warned, don't trust Carter Page.
I'm like, really?
Because I was asking him all the hard questions, Greg.
No, I mean, I dug up the court documents and put it in my book about how he had assisted in the prosecution of Russians who were trolling uh, you know, Americans uh for espionage purposes.
Stay right there.
When we come back, we'll go through the 17 massive failures.
Uh Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, more with Greg and John, and what a Hannity tonight at nine.
Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten well a little insane.
That's why we started normally a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass.
You're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
I'm Ben Ferguson.
And I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else.
We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family.
So down a verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts.
Immediately after President Trump won election, opponents inaugurated what they called the resistance.
And they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver to sabotage the functioning of the executive branch and his administration.
Now, resistance is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power.
This is a very dangerous and indeed incendiary notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic.
The fact of the matter is that in waging a scorched earth, no holds barred war of resistance against this administration.
It is the left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and undermining the rule of law.
Remember that from the speech given recently by the Attorney General Bill Barr.
Today, Barr saying the FBI had insufficient basis to justify the steps they had taken into the investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016.
And he said it's also clear from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory.
Nevertheless, the investigation, the surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into the into President Trump's administration.
He also said FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critically exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information, negating the reliability of their principal source in a rush to maintain surveillance warrants on members of the Trump campaign, followed up by the criminal investigator at this point, the U.S. attorney uh Durham, John Durham.
And we, by the way, who, unlike Horowitz, has the ability to convene grand juries and go forward with uh yes, charging individuals based on the evidence collected to date while our investigation is ongoing.
We advise the inspector general that we don't agree with some of his report's conclusions as to uh prediction uh predictions on how the FBI case was open.
He said, The utmost respect, our investigation is not limited to, like what she's saying is Horwitz's limitations to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department.
Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside the U.S. Now, this is very key because these are fiercely strong comments made by the attorney general and by the U.S. Attorney Durham.
Put it this way.
I'd have a lot to be worried about today.
And what they are what they are telegraphing here is very plain for anyone to see.
Because what what do we learn today?
We learned everything we told you was true.
Yep, that the bought and paid for unverifiable Clinton Russian dossier, that that was the FISA application was almost entirely based on it.
As a matter of fact, that actually that only was three other things.
The only additional information.
This is on page 126 and 7.
A statement that Page was a senior foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign and had extensive ties to various state-owned or affiliated entities of the Russian Federation.
Yeah, he was working for the CIA.
And then, yeah, when the CIA said no, this guy's credible for our side.
Yeah, they changed it.
They literally altered the document on purpose.
Wow.
Two, the only other thing besides the dirty Clinton bought and paid for Russian dossier by Steele that is unverifiable, because he even he told them.
Yeah, no, this guy's nuts.
He's an egomaniac and known to make things up, and that was my only source.
Wow.
And the only other two things were Papadopoulos' statement, which, by the way, also they took they took out the exculpatory information there and three open sources articles.
Yeah, but that was leaked on purpose from the steel dirty dossier.
The rest of it was all the bought and paid for unverifiable, because it's not true.
Now proven 90% of it not true, because they can't prove 100% yet.
And that was used for the whole time.
And this is these stinks too high heaven.
If this had ever gone on, if it was Obama or Hillary, wow.
And then you got this this witch hunt continuing all day today.
No fact witnesses again.
Here say witnesses' opinion witnesses.
Let's stay focused on this with John Solomon, investigative reporter, vindicated in a massive way today, is his reporting as well as Greg Jarrett's reporting.
Um let's go through the list, both of you, of the 17 failures that were identified in this report.
Horowitz's own words.
John will start with you on number one, omitted information.
Yeah, they omitted the mayor the fact that Carter Page was considered a friendly to the U.S. government, working with the intelligence community in a Russia capacity unrelated to the Trump campaign.
Uh and to facilitate or to sustain that lie, they ultimately uh falsified documents to try to keep that uh uh omission from the court.
Uh just remarkable.
If the court knew that Carter Page was considered a friendly, useful to the United States government, might they have proceeded with this?
I bet not.
And oh, by the way, they didn't tell the court Hillary paid for it.
I think that might have made a difference.
They didn't tell the court it was unverified.
That would have made a difference.
They acted like this is gospel truth.
Greg Jarrett, number two is the a source characterization statement asserting Steele's prior reporting had been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings.
Uh yeah, that wasn't true, was it?
No, it wasn't true at all.
Uh, and they knew that Steele was dodgy and that his information was uh not just dubious, but likely phony, because they've been warned by people uh at the Department of Justice, Bruce Orr, they'd been warned by Kathleen Cavillac at the State Department, don't trust this guy.
You gotta vet his information.
They didn't vet it, they didn't corroborate it.
Uh, it was unverified.
And as you know, when you submit uh an FBI warrant or surveil to a FISA court, the regulations specifically state, and I'll quote, only document documented and verified information may be used in support of a FISA application.
End of quote.
They didn't do it.
Let's go to the omitted information, John Solomon.
Again, we're laying out 17 unbelievable failures.
Spectacular failures and omissions and inaccuracies.
Um, but the omitted information relevant to person one, what we believe to be Carter Page, I think.
Uh oh no, I'm sorry.
No, this is the same thing.
No, no, the the steel, the one source of steel, they omitted that this guy, and Steele had even told them.
That's right.
That this guy lies, and yeah, he doesn't tell the truth.
Here's the cure.
Here's the amazing thing about the single subsource that made up most of Steele's report.
The subsource tells the FBI in January 17, I didn't say a lot of the stuff that's attributed to me.
And Steele tells the FBI this guy's a bloviator.
And yet, based on those two really bad References, they go ahead and use the uh dossier and its information anyways.
It is the most clear evidence of intention.
Knowing that those two things were that big a problem and still proceeding with the application tells you these guys are in it for something other than the normal process that the FBI follows.
It's really, really egregious.
And another key finding, Greg Jarrett is the circular reporting and that the FBI had assessed Steele did not directly provide the information to Yahoo, I assume Isakoff and corn, based on the premise that Steele had told the FBI only shared it with Fusion GPS and the FBI and his client.
Um they they cite the Izakoff Yahoo news article as being a secondary corroborating source when in fact it came from the original source, Christopher Steele, and the FBI pretends to the FICE Accord Um that Steele didn't provide that information when they knew he did.
Uh you know, another lie to the FICE Accord.
And that that is clearly intentional.
This isn't sloppy, reckless errors and omissions.
No.
These are deliberate lies and deceptions uh and concealing of information to the court.
And when they talk, Johnny's important on that.
Greg has it so right, uh, Sean, but here's one thing in the bottom of that note four.
It says that when the FBI told the court that uh Steele had only uh talked to uh the FBI infusion GPS about the um about the dossier, the FBI already knew he had talked to the State Department, that famous Kathleen Kavlack.
That amounts to a false statement before federal court.
So true.
And look, in the case of both Papadopoulos and Page, and these were their consensually monitored statements to the FBI.
Uh one in September, one in August in Page's case.
Uh they literally omit these very exculpatory pieces of information.
Yeah, there's no doubt.
Five, six, and seven.
Significant omissions.
Statements made of innocence to uh uh unwitting to uh uh undercover informants and the FBI repeatedly withholds them from the dossier.
That's what makes this go beyond just incompetence.
Those are conscious decisions not to put evidence of innocence into uh to inform the court into the FICE application.
I think it's among the most serious stuff that was found by the IG.
I agree because of the federal law has been consistent for decades.
If you have exculpatory information, you must run to the nearest judge and tell him that they didn't do it.
And they knew it uh very early in the process.
Um what about let's go back to the subsource for just a second, which they admitted, you know, they're saying that the FBI found credible the subsource that even Steele said to them was a liar and an egomaniac.
Uh that he'd made statements in January of 2017 that raised questions about the reliability of allegations that were in the applications.
And including, for example, that they had no discussion with individuals concerning WikiLeaks or there was nothing bad about the communication between the Kremlin and the Trump team.
Yeah, I would think that's important, John Solomon.
Oh, yeah.
In fact, it's uh it constitutes what is known as derogatory information under the FBI's confidential human source information.
When you interview an informant subsource and that subsource doesn't stand by what the informant is saying he reported, that's known as derogatory information.
And they had so much derogatory information on Steele.
Not just what he told, not the fact that his subsource disowned him, but also the fact that he had been talking to Steele of the State Department.
The State Department flagged that he was giving them bad information.
Remember that famous story that he claimed that the Miami consulate was coordinating the hacking activities.
There was no Miami consulate for the Russian uh government.
There is enormous evidence that the FBI had derogatory information about Steele, and yet they certified in four consecutive FICE applications were unaware of any derogatory information about this source.
That is a lie.
All right, let me ask you both this, because I want to let me jump forward because number one, I would say there are a lot of people in deep trouble here.
Not the least is the liar and leaker, Jim Comey.
Um based on the statements of both Barr and Durham today, Greg Jarrett.
Where do you see this now headed?
Well, I think Durham has obtained uh either leads or solid information of corruption and lawlessness and will pursue it against those individuals.
We just don't know who they are.
I find it interesting.
I have candidates.
would it likely be Comey, Clapper, Brennan, and company?
Those would be the logical candidates, but we can't say for sure because we just don't know what Durham has.
But he seems very confident that he has it.
Where do you see it going, John?
Listen, I think the very next step is what does the Justice Department do to the FISA court?
Does it go to the FISA court in light of these revelations and say we need to withdraw these vice applications?
We need to come clean with you, court.
That would be a momentous first step in trying to create accountability and and uh uh clean up this process.
Then there's the grand jury, and and Durham has the ability to go bring people before it and get things that the IG couldn't get.
Then there's the hearing with uh Senator Grassley, uh excuse me, Senator Graham.
That's Wednesday.
This is a long sprint, and accountability is going to occur over multiple steps over multiple months.
But the first thing to watch for, does the Justice Department do something with the FISA court over the next few days?
Well, I think they have to.
I mean, we just played Rod Rosenstein earlier.
I mean, he says, and if you find out you got something wrong, you gotta go back and fix it.
And by the way, that's another issue that really wasn't addressed.
They had an obligation when they knew this information they presented to the court, the dirty dossier, the bulk of the applications four times, uh withholding exculpatory information that the court withholding information about Hillary's involvement, only one source.
I mean, they've known this all forever and they never went back to fix it.
All right, wrapping up as we conclude vindication, John Solomon, Greg Jarrett.
Um I think it's look, it's a long report.
It's a lot to digest.
We're we're gonna really try and sum it up on Hannity tonight.
Both of you will be joining us.
If this doesn't if we don't get to the bottom of this, Greg Jarrett, and we don't hold these people accountable for this abuse of power, we're in trouble, I think, real quick.
It'll continue to happen.
Um we learned from this report how easy it is for the FBI to open an investigation of anybody and convince a judge to permit court sanction surveillance and deception was the key.
It's all true.
John?
Yeah, I think Greg said it perfectly.
I think there are two other revelations in this report that are going to sink in in a few days.
One of them is about Bruce Orr.
It's it's the report concludes that he showed exorbitantly bad judgment in allowing becoming a conduit and a witness and allowing Christopher Steele to keep communicating to the FBI after you've been fired.
I think there's more to that thread that we ought to be paying attention to.
And then here's the one that no one picked up on yet that I think is so important.
The FBI sent an agent to go see the city.
I got a role a lot more tonight.
Meadows and Jordan next.
Stay right here for our final news roundup and information overload.
So what is your view of the way the the FBI interacted with Steele and how we should understand what his role was here?
That's a big question.
So look, the investigation was not predicated on the basis of the information that Christopher Steele gave to us in the form of the dossier.
That is just not was not my understanding at the time and has never been my understanding.
So just to say that flat out.
Uh Steele at the time, my understanding was that he was thought to be a reliable source that had a had had a prior relationship with the FBI and brought this information to us.
Look, with I don't know how to say this other than we're not stupid, right?
The FBI.
We're not stupid.
You take the information and you try to vet it.
And that my recollection is we spent a lot, we, the BERT Bureau, uh, the folks in the counterintelligence division, spent a lot of time trying to vet that information line by line.
Uh yeah, they didn't do that because it was unverifiable.
I mean, this is the this is the most amazing thing.
Because we now know everything we've been telling you is true.
That was Baker saying that whenever he said it.
Line by line, we went by.
No, when the FBI finally got around to vetting it long after the fact, we know that none of it was verifiable.
And now we also know that Steele told him it was unverifiable.
Pretty unbelievable.
But we know that, okay, so the bulk of information, as the newness report told us, and as the Grassley Graham memo told us, yeah, that would have been the steel dossier.
The unverified Clinton bought and paid for a dirty Russian dossier.
They wouldn't have gotten the Pfizer.
Tipped the balance, it said.
What were they saying?
Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, that was what tipped the balance in all of this.
Well kind of pushed it over the line in terms of the FBI being ready to use this.
And I'll tell you another thing that nobody's really paying attention to here is I want to know the calls by Brennan to Russia in August and September of 2016, giving them a heads up, according to a report.
And the Obama called to Russia, giving them a head up heads up, but no defense defensive briefing with the Trump campaign.
Why wouldn't they ask the American citizen first and say, because I'm sure Trump would have said, oh wow, we got to get to the bottom of that.
They never gave him that chance.
And, you know, then we know that we have Paige and Papadopoulos.
Yeah, alterations left and right.
Unbelievable.
Anyway, somebody who's been critical in getting all of this information out.
Um, frankly, I don't know where we'd be, as I say many, many times without the Freedom Caucus.
And uh, I guess you were the original president of the Freedom Caucus.
Is that true?
Well, uh Sean, actually, Jim Jordan was the original chairman.
He and I founded it.
I was the second chairman, and uh then we went on uh to actually uh pass the baton to Andy Biggs.
No.
All right, let's get your take.
The bulk of information, there were only three minor other items used in the FISA application.
The rest of it was what we now know to be an unverifiable Russian dossier that Hillary paid for, that even when they checked in with Christopher Steele, the Christopher Steele knew was uh phony too.
He said, Yeah, my one source was nuts and egomaniac and didn't often tell the truth.
Right.
And and and here's a bigger problem.
It's not that it was just unverifiable, it's just it was verifiably wrong and a lie.
I mean, when when we look at this, Sean, everything that you've been saying and reporting on for many, many months, over yeah, you know, over a year now, we know now, based on the IG's report, that that indeed you were accurate.
The FBI, James Baker, you just played that little tape.
Uh, maybe he wasn't stupid, but he certainly was looking the other way.
And and I've found uh in reading through this report, as you know, I've gone through a couple of hours briefing.
We've been going through this report, combing it uh through with a fine-toothed comb.
One of the biggest things that is not being uh widely reported yet is when the FBI came in to do a defensive briefing with candidate Donald Trump and candidate Hillary Clinton, they did two defensive briefings.
They were supposed to be exactly alike, except the FBI proved put in an informant in the defensive briefing.
While they were supposed to be helping candidate Donald Trump, they were actually surveilling him.
Uh, and that goes along with 12 other times that they actually secretly recorded uh Trump campaign officials.
I just find it appalling.
The American people should be up in arms.
I know you and I are.
Well, we were right all along.
You were right all along.
Uh Jim Jordan was right all along, John Solomon, Greg Jarrett, you know, Victoria Joe, go go down the list.
You know, Jim actually pointed out today, oh, we only thought that they spied on two Americans.
Now we know it was four.
Yeah, it was four multiple times.
And one of uh one of the people that they spied on was not even a subject or a target of the investigation.
So what that means for your your listeners is is that they actually spied on a Trump campaign associate that was not even under uh suspicion for this investigation.
And I I guess I have to ask for what reason.
Mm-hmm.
Well, let's go to what the prosecutor John Durham has said.
Let's go.
This is fascinating to me.
Because you have the Attorney General Barr saying that this it, you know, this investigation launched on the the thinnest of suspicions.
We now know all it was was one comment at a party or a bar by George Pompanopoulos.
That was it.
And that bar also said that the report you know the FBI had insufficient basis to justify the steps they took in investigating the Trump campaign in 2016.
And that concluding that the report the Bureau had authorized purpose but it's also clear from its inception the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory and nonetheless the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into Trump's administration.
Now we also know that it's an unverifiable document but yet if you go to page 126 and 127 what do we see we say that the bulk of information the f I'll read it the Pfizer request form drew almost entirely from Steele's reporting in describing the factual basis to establish probable cause to believe that Page was an agent of a foreign power.
And on top of that to get there to get to Carter Page then they actually had to change the fact that he was working with the CIA and in good standing apparently well yes and and so now what we do know is that one of the documents that was changed they actually go in to review that and they get a confirmation back that says yeah Page has been helping out the U.S. government and the FBI changes that document and
then does not allow the FISA court to know any of that.
So you know here's here's the troubling part as we start to dig into this the deeper you you dig the the more difficult it is to comprehend how anyone could let this happen.
How could James Comey allow this to happen?
How could Andrew McCabe allow this to happen on their watch and and all you can say is they were either extremely poor supervisors yet they were getting briefed every week on this investigation or they were complicit in allowing it to get uh to continue.
you.
Durham, you're right, has mentioned a couple of things.
He is going beyond where the inspector general is going, where he's looking at the origins of that.
Does it include other intel agencies?
Were they involved?
What was the predicate for opening all of this up?
And I can tell you that some of our worst fears have come really to fruition as we look at this report.
the deeper we dive into it, the the more um scathing the review is uh I I think uh director Ray has said there's going to be 40 different things that he is going to put into place to try to make sure this doesn't happen again.
40, 4-0.
Why has he been so MIA?
Why is he so quiet?
You know, I think he got in and originally he was being told by some in that small inner circle, oh, we didn't do anything wrong.
Then all of a sudden, as this report started to pick up steam and as his review, along with Attorney General Barr, started to take on hold, I think they realized that not only did they have a problem, but they had a systemic problem that had to be addressed.
But for a long time, I was questioning Director Ray was going to address it or cover it up hopefully today is the start of actually addressing it.
Do you believe at the end of the day that this was just because they hated Donald Trump and would try this was the insurance policy?
Well I think this was the insurance policy that they referred to uh as as part of it to try to make sure that this investigation but here's what you're also going to find and here's what you and I and a number of us need to make sure the American people are reminded of before President Trump was actually inaugurated in January of 2017 The FBI knew they had no case.
They didn't tell President elect Trump they had no case.
They continued to investigate from January through May.
Then they get a special prosecutor.
They spend 30 million dollars.
All of this based on the fact that they knew they had no case, and they they continued to uh you know just place a hoax on the American people.
And and I I find that not only a waste of taxpayer money, but it is really a breach of trust between the FBI and the American people.
The idea that one source that was questionable, look, Christopher Steele didn't stand by his own dossier.
You know, they lied, they literally had to alter a thing with Carter Page.
Right.
And I I I've got to be honest, I've never seen such a corrupt abuse of power.
And to think that none of this should have happened, what do you make of Durham saying our investigation is not limited to developing information from within the component parts of the Justice Department?
Meaning we have the ability to go way beyond your little area.
Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside the U.S. I take that to mean Great Britain, Italy, Australia, and then we get into the Intel issues.
Well, as I've mentioned before, once again, Sean, you're over the target.
You're exactly over the target because that's what uh John Durham is looking at.
We now know that uh that this investigation was done just wholly within the FBI and didn't even go beyond some of the key witnesses.
For example, the IG's report did not interview Lynn Simpson with Fusion GPS.
And and yet he would be a central key in the dossier and all the coordinating efforts, and yet they did not interview that because he he declined to be interviewed.
And if he declined to be interviewed, how does Comey get to lie?
Think of the spectacular lies identified here.
Now remember, he signed the first dossier, uh, the first Pfizer warrant application.
Then he goes to the White House, I'm sorry, goes to Trump Tower in January before the president's sworn in and says it's salacious but unverified.
But yet at the top of the dossier, it says verified.
So that makes him a big liar.
Because then he signed two more Pfizer applications with the bulk of information being the unverifiable steel dossier that Hillary paid for, Russian dossier.
Right.
And that's where the problem's going to come in is James Comey uh either was an ept in his job or he was part of this whole FISA abuse, as you mentioned, a fraud on the FISA abuse court.
Indeed, it happened.
Here's the interesting thing is the FBI was tasked with getting the information.
They were supposed to give the information over to uh the National Security Council who would drive uh uh uh draft up the FISA application.
Well, the the National Security Council, they weren't even getting the information from the investigators.
They were, you know, putting it in a closet or in a desk drawer instead of actually conveying it to the court, and uh, and this is what Andrew McCabe and James Comey were getting briefed every week on, and somehow uh it slipped through not once, not twice, but three different times.
Uh it it's just uh beyond comprehension.
All right, Mark Meadows, we'd be lost without you.
Great job.
We appreciate uh all that you did here.
You made a lot of this possible today.
Um, blood, sweat, tears, you, Devin, Ratcliffe, Jordan, uh, Gates was great today.
Everybody, uh honestly, all the Freedom Caucus guys have been phenomenal.
Well, thank you, Sean.
Appreciate you leading the charge and keeping the American people informed.
We couldn't have done it without you.
Hey, Liv, do you see that the super patriot Jim Comey, the liar Comey, is now...
Is now he said, I I offered to be on Fox and Friends, and Fox and Friends canceled me.
Now, meanwhile, the people at Fox and Friends, I just checked, is that we didn't have them booked on anything.
What do you think?
Should I invite him on this radio show again for three hours?
He hasn't taken us up on our offer, and I'll give him an hour on TV.
You think he'll come?
I mean, listen, he's an egomaniac, so anything's possible.
You think he's in it?
Does he not know at this point?
This is amazing to me.
Because he went in January 2017, goes to the Trump Tower, says in the meeting to the president, uh then president elect.
Um, the the dossier is salacious but unverified.
Okay.
But at the top of Pfizer application that he signed in October, and the two two of the three subsequent renewals, it says verified.
Now, we have the report that says the bulk of information was the dirty bought and paid for Clinton Russian dossier.
So he's using an unverified, and that was the bulk of information.
How does he get out of that one?
He just lies, right?
He's very good at lying.
He's perfected that because nobody ever questions him.
When no one questions you, no higher loyalty becomes a bestseller.
That's a good point.
All right, we'll invite him.
What the hell?
Quick break, right back.
Uh, a lot more explaining.
Big day, big night tonight on Hannity.
You don't want to miss this nine Eastern on the Fox News Channel.
All right, 25 till the top of the hour.
Well, what did we tell you?
We said premeditated fraud on a FISA court uh and an operation crossfire hurricane.
But you know what's so amazing about that is this is not even really in the spectrum of where Horowitz does most of his his work here.
All of it is proven now.
And as I look at the extraordinary statements that were released today by the attorney general and by John Durham, I I mean it's almost unprecedented.
Now, for a lot of reasons of which I went into in the first hour today, I won't go back into it now.
Um, Barr saying of this IG report, how the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of President Trump's campaign on the thinnest of suspicions.
And what did we say?
Premeditated fraud on a FISA court for the purpose of backdooring, which is all confirmed in this in this report, spying or all things into Trump world.
Trump campaign, then transition, and then Trump presidency.
And all predicated, the whole thing gets launched over what Papadopoulus says at a bar.
That's it.
That's how thin it was.
But again, we have Hillary Clinton and a dirty dossier.
Nobody ever paid attention to that.
And when Barr is saying the thinnest of suspicions, it was launched, saying that this report, in his opinion, the FBI had insufficient basis to justify the steps taken in the investigation of the Trump campaign, putting him at odds with Arrowitz in some ways, aspects, more especially about Operation Crossfire Hurricane.
That um, you know, it's clear from its inception the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory.
Think about that.
That is huge.
Yet the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump's administration.
Now, when you have an attorney general saying this on top of his previously made comments, and then John Duran's comments, he got to pay close attention to this, because this is now what what we'll learn, what we've learned here is everything we've reported is true.
We've been right the whole time.
But it's not one thing we can see here that we got wrong.
And that the, you know, the FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source in a rush to maintain surveillance warrants on members of the Trump campaign.
And while most of the misconduct identified by the inspector general was committed in 2016 and 17 by this now by these now former FBI officials, the malfeasance and misfeasance detailed in the inspector general's report reflects a clear abuse of the FISA process.
And this then gets to the comments of John Durham.
I have the utmost respect for the Office of Inspector General and the comprehensive work that went into the report prepared by Mr. Horowitz and his staff.
However, now remember, Inspector General has no ability, because he he's already made referrals for Comey and McCabe and Struck and Paid.
That's all's happened in his previous reports.
I have the utmost respect for him.
Now, the real criminal investigation, that is in the realm of Durham.
Our investigation is not Limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department.
He's basically what he's saying here is well, no, we got a lot more coming.
And our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities.
By the way, this is where we're now going to get into Italy and Great Britain, Australia, and outsourcing of spying and all of that, on top of really hammering home on how corrupt and what an abuse of power all of this was and how political it's been.
And Durham goes on, based on the evidence collected to date, and our while our investigation is ongoing.
Last month we advised the Inspector General we do not agree with some of the report's conclusions as to prediction and how the FBI case was open.
It was open on one issue, the Papadopoulos call.
Let me go to the page 414.
We're deeply concerned with so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate hand-picked investigative teams on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI,
even though the information sought through use of FISA authority related so closely to an ongoing presidential campaign, even though those involved with the investigation knew that their actions were likely to be subjected to close scrutiny.
We believe that this circumstance reflects a failure, not just by those who prepared the FISA applications, but also by the managers and supervisors in the crossfire hurricane chain of command, including FBI senior officials who are briefed as the investigation progressed.
Great job, Jim Comey.
We do not expect managers and supervisors to know every fact about an investigation or senior leaders to know all the details of cases of which they are briefed.
However, especially in the FBI's most sensitive and high priority matters, and especially when seeking court permission to use an intrusive tool such as a FISA order, it is incumbent upon the entire chain of command, including senior officials,
to take the necessary steps to ensure that they're sufficiently familiar with the facts and circumstances supporting and potentially undermining a FISA application in order to provide effective oversight consistent with their level of supervisory responsibility.
Such oversight requires greater familiarity with the facts than we saw in this review, where time and again during the interviews, FBI managers, supervisors, senior officials displayed a lack of understanding or awareness of important information concerning many of the problems we have identified in the preparation of FISA applications to surveil Carter Page,
crossfire hurricane team failed to comply with FBI follow policies, and in so doing fell short of what is rightfully expected from the premier law enforcement agency entrusted with such an intrusive surveillance tool in light of the significant concerns identified with the Carter Page FISA applications.
Oh, we now know that they actually changed that they literally altered so that they could use this process.
Anyway, uh and other described in the board, the OIG today initiated an audit that will further examine the FBI's compliance with Wood's procedures and PISA applications that target U.S. persons in both counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations.
Then they go on to make recommendations into all of this.
But when you think Barr saying that the FBI launched this thing on the thinnest of suspicions, insufficient to justify any of the steps taken, is mind numbing.
They omitted the FBI had obtained from another U.S. agency a details of Carter Page's prior work as an operational contact for that other agency.
He worked for our side, as he'd been telling us, he didn't lie to us on the show.
And he provided information to other agencies uh concerning his prior contacts, one of which overlapped the facts asserted in FISA, included uh Including a source characterization statement, which, by the way, overstated the significance of Steele's past reporting not approved by Steele's handling agent, omitted information relevant to the reliability of person, a key steel subsource.
By the way, we now know again, it was never verifiable.
Steele himself told members of the crossfire hurricane team that person one was a boaster and an egoist.
I have no idea if any of it's true.
Asserted the FBI had assessed that Steele did not directly provide to the press information based on the Yahoo News.
This is the hacks.
We talk about Michael Lizikoff and David Korn.
Oh, yeah, they're exposed here big time.
They just took, they took propaganda and ran with it.
Lies and ran with it.
Welcome to your fake news media.
And shared uh Steele had told the FBI he only shared with uh his election-related research with the FBI Fusion GPS, his client.
The premise was incorrect, contradicted by documentation in the Woods file.
Steele had told the FBI he also gave information to the State Department.
They omitted Papadopoulos' consensually monitored statements, exculpatory.
Let's put it that way, as it related to outside groups.
They omitted Page's consensually monitored statements, literally never met or said one word to Paul Manafort.
Wow, amazing.
You can say that, and then it gets changed around, isn't it?
Omitted other statements Paige made that were inconsistence with their theory, denying having met certain individuals.
See where this is going here, all of it.
They didn't provide anything that was correct.
This, you know, go back to the beginning.
What matters here?
What matters here is, well, how did we, how did we have the biggest abuse of power corruption scandal ever?
Not only is he talking about severely flawed FISA applications, failures to properly vet Steele and seek information about Clinton funding.
What else do what else do we find out?
They sought to spy on Carter Page because uh an agent thought his past relationship with Russia could be a clandestine relationship.
Oh, but take out that he actually worked for another agency with three letters.
When asked for the motivations behind the steel dossier, the agent involved doesn't respond.
And uh everything that we've been saying, no dossier, no Pfizer application weren't approved.
That is clear.
Without the Steele dossier, they would not have gotten the FISA application approved.
Period.
The FISA application, remember the bulk of information from the FISA application was almost entirely based on the Steele dossier.
We learned that today.
The, you know, how much more do we have to know here?
But this is, you know, nothing but corruption at the highest level.
This was about getting Trump.
This was about destroying, this was their whole insurance policy.
You know, you look at every aspect of this.
You know, you have the uh what, you know, what was Steele hired to do.
Well, now we know Steele under oath said I have no idea if any of it's true.
The FBI could articulate why it deems Steele's reporting to be credible because they were advised based on information from Steele that Steele was specifically hired by an individual to provide the information on the candidate.
They failed to, they failed to tell the court that Hillary paid for this.
How do you, how do you not tell the court what is the number one conclusion in all of this?
How do you get there?
You don't vet Steele and seek information about you know being funded by by the Clinton camp.
Well, that that might be, you know, the dirty dossier, by the way, played an essential role in the decision to seek FISA.
And by the way, they never bothered to ever corroborate any of it, and they used it anyway because it was the only part that they can use.
Um, this is devastating.
But I'll tell you what's even more devastating is that now the now you have the prosecutor involved in the real criminal investigation, because Harwood's never had that power to convene a grand jury or to press charges on anybody.
But they found the quantity of omissions And inaccuracies and all the obvious uh errors that were made, deeply concerning, you think?
May have improperly substituted their own judgment instead of what facts are.
Yeah, that would be because they hated Trump so bad.
So many basic fundamental errors were made on four FISA applications by three separate hand picked teams on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations that was briefed to the highest levels within the FBI, and FBI officials expected would eventually be subjected to close scrutiny, raise significant questions according regarding the FBI's chain of command management, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
You look at this.
We believe the more should have been done to examine Steele's contacts.
It's all there.
They never bothered.
They never cared because they had their predetermined conclusion in all of this.
You know, a mountain of red flags that they ignored regarding steel, their failure and creating, you know, the misleading application.
They were all warned ahead of time.
17 specific errors and omissions in these applications.
17 of them.
They didn't give equal attention or treatment of the relevant facts or probable cause at any point.
It was all a foregone conclusion.
Steele was paid by the FBI for years.
FBI admitted much of Steele's work was never corroborated or verified.
But how does it then become the bulk of information in the FISA application as confirmed in this report today?
How does that happen?
Unless you have an agenda.
I will say this.
Again, the mob and the media was wrong.
They lie constantly.
This should have been their story.
The biggest abuse of power corruption scandal in history.
And the good news today is both Barr and Durham are like adamant that this is getting worse by the hour for them and all these deep state operatives.
All right, Hannity Tonight, 9 Eastern Fox News Channel, Devin Nunes, he was right.
Jim Jordan was right.
Ted Cruz was right.
They'll all join us.
Lindsey Graham was right.
Carter Page, wow.
He actually served the country.
He told us on this program the truth.
Also, Greg Jarrett, John Solomon, uh Dan Bongino tonight, and much, much more.
The news, the mob and the media is not going to cover.
They're going to stick with their phony impeachment narrative.
Yeah, with their non-fact opinion and hearsay witnesses that's going nowhere.
Hannity tonight, full coverage.
Dorum, Bar, Horowitz, we've got you covered.
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