While Sean rests for the New Year, "Best of Hannity" goes on a journey from January 1st of 2019 and tracks the many ways that the Mueller witch hunt was a complete failure.The Sean Hannity Show is on weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on iHeartRadio and Hannity.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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| I'm Carol Markowitz and I'm Mary Catherine Hamm. | |
| We've been around the block in media and we're doing things differently. | |
| Normally is about real conversations. | |
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| Join us every Tuesday and Thursday, normally, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| 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 with Verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| All right, glad you're with us. | |
| We're waiting. | |
| Hopefully, want to see what happens with the judge in the Flynn sentencing case. | |
| There was a 3 p.m. deadline Eastern Time. | |
| It's now 3.06 Eastern that the special counsel needed to hand over all the relevant 302 information as it relates, interview information as it relates to General Flynn. | |
| I went through all of this in great specificity and detail yesterday. | |
| I still cannot believe that this has happened in our country. | |
| The judge in this case, a guy by the name of Emmett Sullivan. | |
| And he was the one that presided over the appeal and overturn in the Ted Stevens corruption case. | |
| Ted Stevens, if you don't remember, convicted on eight counts when he was a senator, also running for reelection, lost his reelection, but every one of those, in every one of those charges, it was overthrown. | |
| And this judge got so mad and so angry. | |
| New York Times described it this way. | |
| Emmett Sullivan speaking in a slow, deliberate manner that failed to conceal his anger, saying that in the 25 years he's been on the bench, he had, quote, never seen mishandling and misconduct like what I have seen by the Justice Department prosecutors who tried the Stevens case. | |
| They write he did a lacerating Judge Sullivan's lacerating 14-minute speech focusing on disclosures that prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence in the case, virtually guaranteeing reverberations beyond the dismissal of the verdict in the case of Senator Stevens. | |
| And that, by the way, Stevens lost his whole career over it, so he was not guilty. | |
| And this is what I keep saying. | |
| Andrew Weissman has this history. | |
| We've talked to author of the book, License to Lie, Sidney Powell, many times. | |
| It's a must-read book when you think that it can't happen in America. | |
| It can happen in America and the history of tampering with FBI 302s. | |
| And I thought the Federalists made a very strong case that I really make sense that, well, there had to be an earlier 302 because both Strzok and Paige allude to it in their text messages. | |
| And Comey alluded to reading it before he was fired in May. | |
| But yet the official one on the record, well, that would be the 302 from August. | |
| But Flynn was interviewed the first week of the Trump presidency on January 24th. | |
| So, I mean, this is going to be fascinating. | |
| I don't know why. | |
| I can see this judge, maybe I'm wrong, throwing the whole thing out, the plea, everything, and saying it's over based on misconduct. | |
| And I wonder if he will do what he did the last time. | |
| Last time he ordered literally a special investigation into the prosecutors, which is almost unheard of. | |
| And, you know, he talked about, he actually named, the judge named a federal district court by Bill Clinton anyway, talked about the troubling tendency he had among prosecutors to stretch the boundaries of ethics restrictions, concealing evidence to win cases. | |
| You know, it is a danger that you see with prosecutors that it becomes a game of winning and losing to them instead of what's right and what's wrong and what's just and what's not just. | |
| You know, that we throw around the term prosecutorial discretion all the time, but you know, it really does mean something because I do think if that's your job day in and day out, maybe you become cynical because you are dealing with a lot of bad people and you think everybody's lying and you think everybody's corrupt, but sometimes there are good people that get caught up in bad situations that they're not guilty of. | |
| And wanting to weed them out and find the truth ought to be the goal, not about winning and not about losing. | |
| What's interesting, Kimberly Strossel had a great piece out noting on this all today about Judge Emmett Sullivan demanding that Robert Mueller produce these key documents to justify his indictment of General Flynn. | |
| Now, the problem here, too, is you got to remember, none of the FBI agents thought that General Flynn had lied, including Strzok, including McCabe, and including Comey. | |
| And the bizarre part of this is the statement that Comey had made. | |
| Let's go back and play this statement that we have. | |
| This is James Comey admitting, well, I wouldn't have tried to pull off this interview in the Bush administration or the Obama administration, but I saw an opening and I took it. | |
| But so before the agents actually went in, there was a call with Andrew McCabe, the deputy FBI director, and he's telling General Flynn, oh, you don't need a lawyer. | |
| And they're going in in a relaxed manner to see, well, what's General Flynn's mood? | |
| The problem is they already had illegal surveillance on masking in this particular case and raw intelligence. | |
| They had basically a printout of the conversation that General Flynn had with his soon-to-be Russian counterpart. | |
| And anything that he said that maybe didn't match perfectly, meaning his recollection with what was on the transcript, they were going to nail him for lying to the FBI. | |
| But the question is, will that never happen? | |
| Anyway, here's what Comey said, which I think should blow everybody away. | |
| You look at this White House now, and it's hard to imagine two FBI agents ending up in this room. | |
| How did that happen? | |
| I sent them. | |
| Something I probably wouldn't have done or maybe gotten away with in a more organized investigation, a more organized administration, in the George W. Bush administration, for example, or the Obama administration. | |
| The protocol, two men that all of us have perhaps increased appreciation for over the last two years. | |
| And in both of those administrations, there was process. | |
| And so if the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House itself to interview a senior official, you would work through the White House counsel and there'd be discussions and approvals and who would be there. | |
| And I thought it's early enough. | |
| Let's just send a couple guys over. | |
| I mean, he's bragging about it, bragging about it not being the standard order of doing things because there's, quote, this is a chaotic White House. | |
| Well, they had only been in office four days. | |
| It's breathtaking in terms of the magnitude of arrogance. | |
| And, you know, this is a higher calling. | |
| Really? | |
| James Comey, he bragging about setting up a three-star general, 33 years of service to his country, after you had your deputy call over and say, nah, you don't need a lawyer. | |
| I can't imagine. | |
| Now, the special counsel did submit the documents about Flynn's January 2017 interview with the FBI. | |
| It's going to be interesting. | |
| What their other 302s? | |
| This information is just coming out as it gets out. | |
| We'll get it to you. | |
| But anyway, back to the Kimberly Strassel column today about Judge Emmett Sullivan, who's demanded, and it's now turned over. | |
| We now have confirmation. | |
| They did submit the documents to the judge, and they have to now justify their indictment of General Michael Flynn. | |
| I've got to believe that this judge is seeing parallels between Flynn's case and the FBI's corrupt attempt to railroad Ted Stevens 10 years ago. | |
| And it's not merely because Judge Sullivan presided over both Stevens and Flynn's cases. | |
| It turns out that the same Justice Department official who played a critical role in the Stevens case now presides over the highly dubious prosecution of General Flynn because that person is none other than Robert Mueller. | |
| You know, we keep getting back to the same group of people. | |
| You know, we keep getting back to who? | |
| By the way, if we can print that out, I see it's now currently available. | |
| Linda, thank you. | |
| You still have Rod Rosenstein and Comey and McCabe and Robert Mueller. | |
| They're all in this little, they're always touching base throughout the entirety of their careers. | |
| And it makes you wonder. | |
| And I was the one that was always warning why did Robert Mueller, who, by the way, James Comey was hoping would get appointed special counsel, which is why he leaked information that may be a legal problem for him in the end too, but leaked it to the professor to the New York Times for the purpose of getting a special counsel. | |
| But the sad thing is, is Comey's after Trump on the fourth day of his administration. | |
| Because if you're going to treat him and his administration differently than you treated past administrations and you're going to break all protocols to do it, you know, you're going to sign off on a FISA application, one that you have to say, according to Rod Rosenstein, to the best of your knowledge, is true. | |
| And James Comey signed the first FISA warrant application in October of 2016, based on we now know the phony Clinton bought and paid for Russian lies dossier. | |
| And then in January, before he became president, when he was president-elect, Donald Trump meets with all of these guys, Clapper, Comey, et cetera. | |
| Comey pulls him aside and says, just so you know, there's this dossier out there. | |
| It's unproven and it's salacious. | |
| Well, that's not what they were telling the FISA court back in October, you know, or when they were just about to renew it. | |
| Probably right around that time, they weren't telling the FISA court that it wasn't verified either. | |
| And they never told the FISA court who paid for it. | |
| None of this is standard operating procedure. | |
| The fact that he's so arrogantly bragging about the fact I sent my agents over. | |
| They're too chaotic. | |
| Let's take advantage. | |
| We'll tell Flynn not to get a lawyer and then we'll charge him with perjury. | |
| It blows my mind. | |
| 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. | |
| Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hammond. | |
| 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. | |
| What I told people, I was making a podcast about Benghazi. | |
| Nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? | |
| Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. | |
| It's almost a dirty word, one that connotes conspiracy theory. | |
| Will we ever get the truth about the Benghazi massacre? | |
| Bad faith, political warfare, and, frankly, bullshit. | |
| We kill the ambassador just to cover something up. | |
| You put two and two together. | |
| Was it an overblown distraction or a sinister conspiracy? | |
| Benghazi is a Rosetta Stone for everything that's been going on for the last 20 years. | |
| I'm Leon Nayfak from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries. | |
| This is Fiasco Benghazi. | |
| What difference at this point does it make? | |
| Yes, that's right. | |
| Lock her up. | |
| Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| Kimberly Strasso writes, Emmett Sullivan got a wake-up call in 2008 while overseeing the trial of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska. | |
| Judge Sullivan ultimately assigned a lawyer to investigate the Justice Department misconduct. | |
| The investigator's report found the prosecutors had engaged in deliberate, repeated ethical violations, withholding key evidence from the defense. | |
| It also excoriated the FBI for failing to write up 302s for omitting key facts from those it did write. | |
| The head of the FBI at the time was Robert Mueller. | |
| And Judge Sullivan since has made it his practice to begin every case with a Brady order, which reminds prosecutors of their constitutional obligation to provide the defense with any exculpatory evidence. | |
| And on December 12, 2017, days after being assigned the Flynn case, Judge Sullivan issued that order instructing Mueller's team to turn over any evidence in its possession that is favorable to the defendant and material either to defendants' guilt or punishment. | |
| And had the other, had any other judge drawn that case, we likely would never have seen the details of the FBI's behavior. | |
| So it's clear something has this judge on high alert here. | |
| And he's seeing the obvious parallels, I think, and Kimberly Strassel clearly agrees in her piece to the Stevens case because the media was predicting a quick ruling in the Flynn case. | |
| Now Judge Sullivan, with his new orders, is demanding to see for himself the McCabe memo and the Flynn 302 and ordering the special counsel to hand over today the other documents they've since been handed over. | |
| Special counsel says defendants' cooperation military service justify a sentence at the low end of the guideline range. | |
| Anyway, judges have the ability to reject plea deals. | |
| They can require a prosecutor to make a case at a trial. | |
| Criminal justice system isn't only about holding defendants accountable. | |
| Trials also provide oversight of investigators and their tactics. | |
| Judges are not obliged to follow prosecutors' sentencing recommendations. | |
| You know, no one knows what Judge Sullivan is going to do here, but his reputation is no nonsense, straight shooter, advocate for government transparency. | |
| And my gut is telling me that this is not going to break the way Mueller thinks it's going to break. | |
| So we'll see. | |
| 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. | |
| 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. | |
| What I told people I was making a podcast about Benghazi, nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? | |
| Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. | |
| It's almost a dirty word, one that connotes conspiracy theory. | |
| Will we ever get the truth about the Benghazi massacre? | |
| Bad faith, political warfare, and frankly, bullshit. | |
| We kill the ambassador just to cover something up. | |
| You put two and two together. | |
| Was it an overblown distraction or a sinister conspiracy? | |
| Benghazi is a Rosetta Stone for everything that's been going on for the last 20 years. | |
| I'm Leon Nafok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries. | |
| This is Fiasco, Benghazi. | |
| What difference at this point does it make? | |
| Yes, that's right. | |
| Lock her up. | |
| Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| Well, we're finding all the subpoenas. | |
| Look, these aren't like impartial people. | |
| The Democrats are trying to win 2020. | |
| They're not going to win with the people that I see, and they're not going to win against me. | |
| The only way they can maybe luck out, and I don't think that's going to happen, it might make it even the opposite. | |
| That's what a lot of people are saying. | |
| The only way they can luck out is by constantly going after me on nonsense. | |
| But they should be really focused on legislation, not the things that have been. | |
| This has been litigated, just so you understand. | |
| This has been litigated for the last two years, almost since I got into office. | |
| Now, if you want to litigate, go after the DNC, Crooked Hillary, the dirty cops, all of these things. | |
| That's what should be litigated because that was a rigged system. | |
| And I'm breaking down. | |
| I am breaking down the swamp. | |
| If you look at what's happening, they're getting caught. | |
| They're getting fired. | |
| Who knows what's going to happen from now on? | |
| But I hope it's very strong. | |
| But if you look at Drain the Swamp, I am draining the swamp. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| All right, that was the president earlier today. | |
| Hour two Sean Hannity show, 800-941 Sean tollfrey telephone number. | |
| You want to be a part of the program. | |
| President, the most cooperative of any investigation ever going on in a modern-day presidency. | |
| And by the way, that includes Barack Obama. | |
| That includes the Clintons. | |
| All of that includes George W. Bush's administration. | |
| They all exerted executive privilege. | |
| This president, none, not once. | |
| Nobody, I could not believe the idea that the White House general counsel, Don McGahn, spent 30 hours with Mueller. | |
| He seems to think that he's the one that saved the Republic. | |
| Not exactly. | |
| If Donald Trump had it even within his authority to fire Mueller under Article II of the Constitution, he could have fired him. | |
| Just because you're complaining about a witch hunt, That's not obstruction. | |
| Just because you're complaining about Rod Rosenstein, that's not a, and it's a witch hunt. | |
| That's not obstruction. | |
| None of it. | |
| So now that we have the, look at what the Democrats are moving in a thousand different directions because they can't accept now the fourth definitive investigation that says no Trump-Russia collusion. | |
| First, the FBI nine-month investigation even struck in Page said, nope, we had nothing. | |
| No, they're there. | |
| Then, of course, we have the House Intel Committee, their investigation. | |
| Nope, nothing. | |
| Then we have the bipartisan Senate Committee. | |
| Nope, nothing. | |
| Now the Mueller report can't be any more clear on any of these issues. | |
| Well, then let's weaponize the IRS for no real reason at all, except that let's go after his taxes. | |
| We'll get him there. | |
| I'm sure there's a reason why he was audited all those years. | |
| Anyway, so now they want to impeach the IRS commissioner for not turning over Trump's taxes. | |
| Elijah Cummings wants to hold stonewalling White House witnesses in contempt on the same issue. | |
| Nadler wants to jail Trump officials who won't comply with his subpoenas. | |
| Are they going to pay for the attorneys in D.C. $1,000 an hour for a decent attorney? | |
| Maybe $800 if you're lucky, $600 if they give you a cut rate. | |
| But these people have all been interviewed. | |
| Maxime Waters claims America's clamoring for impeachment. | |
| No. | |
| Now, Lindsey Graham is going to join us at the bottom of the half hour. | |
| He's going to be telling us where his investigation is going to be going. | |
| And also, he believes there's going to be a Democratic Party stampede to impeach the president. | |
| Anyway, here to sort through all the legal issues on all of this, we have Alan Dershowitz, who professor of Harvard, and he contributed an introduction to Skyhorse Publishing's edition of the Mueller Report. | |
| Greg Jarrett, his bestseller, The Russia Hoax. | |
| All right, I want to ask you both, here's where I think we've got to go in this. | |
| We now have evidence that Hillary's investigation was rigged from the beginning, even struck in Page, recognized such. | |
| 18 U.S.C. 793, the Espionage Act is clear. | |
| That's the underlying crime. | |
| The intent to take subpoenaed emails, delete 33,000 of them, bleach bit your hard drive, eliminate the evidence, beat up your devices, remove SIM cards. | |
| That would be an intent to obstruct. | |
| I think we got to make that one bucket. | |
| Number two, we got to get into the whole FISA abuse. | |
| The Inspector General will weigh in on that. | |
| Was there fraud committed to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign? | |
| We also have to get into the spying of the Trump campaign, Stefan Halper, who enlisted him, etc. | |
| Then we need to get into the whole issue of why did we have a 350% increase in unmasking American citizens in 2016. | |
| That's an important bucket. | |
| Then we've got to get the release of the FISA warrants, gang of eight information, 302s, as we've been telling you, five buckets there. | |
| Then we've got to get into the question of, okay, those people that tried to undo an election and bludgeon a president, when did they know that there was no collusion? | |
| And why didn't they investigate Hillary's dirty dossier, which the New York Times suggests this week could have been all disinformation to create chaos from the beginning? | |
| We'll start with you, Professor Dershowitz. | |
| Where do we go next? | |
| Well, I think the most important thing is the way in which the Pfizer court was misled. | |
| We now know for certain that the information provided to the Pfizer Court in the ex-party application was incomplete. | |
| It was not the whole truth. | |
| It was a half-truth. | |
| And a half-truth is a lie. | |
| And I think there should be an investigation conducted by the Inspector General. | |
| Apparently, that's going on. | |
| But also by the Pfizer court itself. | |
| The Pfizer Court was misled. | |
| And I think there was a contempt of court committed by those, A, who submitted the FISA application without indicating the source, and B, failed to correct the FISA application once they got more information about the source and indeed sought renewals of the FISA application. | |
| So those are, I think, very important areas for any civil libertarian, because remember, FISA warrants can be issued against any of us. | |
| And if it can be done without any consequence based on misleading and incomplete information, then we're all victims. | |
| And so I think you start with anything that involves every American potentially a victim of a violation of civil liberties. | |
| That has to be the first order of business. | |
| Do you think the president is right before I get to Greg, Professor? | |
| The President is right saying, you know what, you've had your four investigations. | |
| We're going to fight everything now. | |
| He never used executive privilege. | |
| He could have. | |
| He could have prevented people from talking to Mueller. | |
| He could have fired Mueller. | |
| By the way, I think you'll even agree he could have done so legally under his authority under Article 2. | |
| Without a doubt. | |
| And in the introduction to my book, I go through the whole obstruction of justice argument presented by Mueller. | |
| Mueller turns out to be dead wrong on the law. | |
| He has some idea that if, in fact, the president had decided to fire Mueller, indeed, firing Comey, he thinks could be an obstruction of justice. | |
| He just has the law wrong. | |
| By the way, on the Amazon reviews, everybody's ganging up on me. | |
| All the anti-Trump people are writing terrible reviews saying I never should have been allowed to do the introduction to the book because I'm objective and honest and non-partisan. | |
| So I urge any of you who read my introduction and who think differently, write a review saying my introduction is objective. | |
| It's non-partisan. | |
| I end by saying I would have written the same review, the same introduction, if the shoe had been on the other foot. | |
| If Hillary Clinton had been impeached improperly or been subject to an investigation improperly, I would have been defending her as well. | |
| I am not defending Trump on a partisan basis. | |
| I'm defending civil liberties and constitutional rights. | |
| Greg Jarrett. | |
| Well, I want to say I just ordered Professor's book, and I anxiously look forward to reading The Obstruction of Justice. | |
| Why doesn't he just give us a free copy? | |
| I mean, we're friends, Professor Caroline. | |
| You're going to get a free copy. | |
| All you have to do is write a review, and you get a free copy. | |
| You got it. | |
| Deal. | |
| But, you know, this is why prosecutors should never comment on uncharged crimes. | |
| It's not fair to the uncharged person. | |
| Mueller went out of his way to smear Trump with the patina of a crime that he couldn't prove. | |
| Mueller didn't find sufficient evidence for an obstruction charge. | |
| If he had, he would have said so. | |
| So what he does is he turns the law completely upside down, and he says, well, I couldn't prove the president didn't obstruct. | |
| You know, prosecutors are not in the business of exoneration. | |
| They're in the business of proving crimes based on evidence. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Mueller couldn't prove an obstruction. | |
| And when Comey went after Hillary Clinton that way, we all objected, Democrats and Republicans alike. | |
| Why is it different when Mueller goes after people who have not been charged and sets out non-criminal conduct that he disagrees with? | |
| That's just not the proper function of a prosecutor. | |
| If Mueller could not prove an obstruction crime, and he could not, then he should have simply stated that he wasn't recommending any charges. | |
| Anything other than that is blatantly unfair. | |
| I agree. | |
| I agree. | |
| Let me ask you this. | |
| Is Trump unclear when it's done to Trump? | |
| Is Trump right not to cooperate any further, considering there's been four separate conclusions and investigations on this? | |
| Well, you know, he has to listen to his lawyer on this. | |
| I think that he's a good idea. | |
| Well, what would you advise him? | |
| I would certainly advise them not to testify. | |
| My advice to him was don't pardon, don't fire, don't testify, and don't tweet. | |
| He listened to three of them, but not the fourth. | |
| But right now, I would say it depends. | |
| If you think the investigations by Congress are improperly motivated and don't have a legitimate legislative purpose, you have no obligation not to raise your constitutional privileges. | |
| And remember, executive privilege is designed to protect all Americans, not just the president. | |
| It's designed to protect the presidency from improper intrusion by the legislative or the judicial branch. | |
| And so it's there as part of our separation of powers and checks and balances to protect all Americans. | |
| He's not just doing it in a self-serving way. | |
| And Nadler is now taking the position, well, you've waived the privilege because McGant spoke with the special counsel. | |
| No, special counsel is an employee of the Department of Justice. | |
| So you've got one branch of the Department of Justice, White House Counsel, talking to another branch of the executive. | |
| So it's not a waiver of a privilege at all. | |
| You can actually never waive executive privilege. | |
| It's been invoked by almost every president. | |
| The first was George Washington who invoked it. | |
| All right, when we get back, I want both of you to debate the question as to what we do with the Hillary Clinton question and how far back who needs to be held accountable. | |
| 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 with Verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Howe, 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 Podcast, or wherever you listen. | |
| When I told people I was making a podcast about Benghazi, nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? | |
| Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. | |
| It's almost a dirty word, one that connotes conspiracy theories. | |
| Will we ever get the truth about the Benghazi massacre? | |
| Bad faith, political warfare, and, frankly, bullshit. | |
| We kill the ambassador just to cover something up. | |
| You put two and two together. | |
| Was it an overblown distraction or a sinister conspiracy? | |
| Benghazi is a Rosetta Stone for everything that's been going on for the last 20 years. | |
| I'm Leon Navok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries. | |
| This is Fiasco, Benghazi. | |
| What difference at this point does it make? | |
| Yes, that's right. | |
| Lock her up. | |
| Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| All right, as we roll along, Alan Dershowitz, Greg Jarrett with us. | |
| All right. | |
| What are your thoughts on the president challenging these subpoenas? | |
| Who's going to win this battle? | |
| Greg Jarrett? | |
| Well, I think the president will, because it does appear that this is nothing more than presidential harassment. | |
| You know, there has to be a reasonable basis for this. | |
| That is to say, there has to be some sort of articulable factual basis for the investigation that indicates that a crime has or will take place. | |
| Well, there's none of that here. | |
| This is a phishing expedition, a safari, to search for anything under any rock they can find to damage Trump. | |
| I think the president has a solid legal basis to oppose it. | |
| What do you think, Alan Dershowitz? | |
| I have a slightly different view. | |
| I think that if subpoenas come from the legislative branch, they don't have to be looking for crime. | |
| They can be looking for information relevant to their appropriate role of legislating and oversight. | |
| But there comes a time, and it happened during the McCarthy era, when the Supreme Court or other courts will look at subpoenas and look at requests for testimony and say, enough's enough. | |
| You've now exceeded your legitimate authority, and you're just doing this to harass or expose the proper function of Congress. | |
| Don't you think we're at that point, Professor? | |
| Come on. | |
| Well, no, that's the point. | |
| And I think the courts will look at it on a case-by-case basis. | |
| They're not going to just say willy-nilly that no subpoenas will be enforced. | |
| They'll look at every subpoena. | |
| They'll look at whether there's an articulable basis for any legitimate legislative purpose. | |
| And I think they will begin to refuse to enforce some of them as they did during the McCarthy period. | |
| What about all these? | |
| What about all these people that are going to be called back again that can't afford these lawyers that are very expensive? | |
| Listen, Professor, what do you charge an hour? | |
| A lot. | |
| You don't want to know. | |
| Half of my cases are pro bono. | |
| Oh, I know. | |
| The other half are pretty expensive because I do represent a lot of very wealthy people. | |
| And even if you're wealthy, getting these subpoenas can really, really be very expensive. | |
| Washington lawyers do charge in excess of $1,000 an hour. | |
| And the hours accumulate because you have to do the research. | |
| You have to check out all the facts. | |
| And so we're talking easily about six-figure legal bills that can sometimes get up to the seven figures. | |
| Greg? | |
| Yeah, I mean, look at people like Jerome Coursey. | |
| He was never charged with anything. | |
| He was threatened. | |
| They tried to pressure and extort him into signing a false statement, implicating Trump, which would have been a lie. | |
| You know, that's the equivalent of attempting to suborn perjury. | |
| He had to hire a team of lawyers to represent him, you know, and his bank account is empty as a result of that. | |
| Well, let's look at General Flynn. | |
| But you have both McCabe bragging. | |
| He doesn't need a lawyer. | |
| Then Comey bragging, ha, I wouldn't do this in the Obama or Bush administrations. | |
| Top two FBI guys. | |
| They're setting him up. | |
| I mean, Professor, and then he loses his house. | |
| Now he's millions of dollars in debt. | |
| They threaten to go after his kid. | |
| This is how we treat 33-year veterans that put their lives in harm's way. | |
| Look, it's a terrible, terrible thing, and it's been a terrible thing for many years that prosecutors do abuse their authority. | |
| You know, the idea of arresting people at gunpoint, whether it be somebody who is like Stone or somebody who is Felicity Huffman, whatever you think of them, you don't have to arrest those people at gunpoint and threaten them and show how powerful and strong you are. | |
| And you don't have to be mean to them. | |
| You can write them a nice letter saying, if you have any information, please provide it. | |
| But, you know, it turns to harassment at some point. | |
| And all right, I got to let you both go. | |
| Thank you, Professor Dershowitz. | |
| Thank you, Greg Jarrett. | |
| 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 with Verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hammond. | |
| 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. | |
| What I told people I was making a podcast about Benghazi, nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? | |
| Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. | |
| It's almost a dirty word, one that connotes conspiracy theory. | |
| Will we ever get the truth about the Benghazi massacre? | |
| Bad faith, political warfare, and frankly, bullshit. | |
| We kill the ambassador just to cover something up. | |
| You put two and two together. | |
| Was it an overblown distraction or a sinister conspiracy? | |
| Benghazi is a Rosetta Stone for everything that's been going on for the last 20 years. | |
| I'm Leon Nafok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries. | |
| This is Fiasco, Benghazi. | |
| What difference at this point does it make? | |
| Yes, that's right. | |
| Lock her up. | |
| Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| All right, glad you're with us. | |
| Happy Friday. | |
| Happy Passover. | |
| Happy Good Friday. | |
| Holy Saturday, and happy Easter Sunday. | |
| We have so much, all of us, to be thankful for the greatest, freest, best country God has ever given man, a country that has accumulated more power than any other country in the history of mankind and abused it less and advanced the human condition all over the world more. | |
| The United States of America, there's one blessing. | |
| That's why all of this that we've been dealing with, all that is about to come, is so important. | |
| We've never been a perfect country, no. | |
| But in their wisdom, our framers, our founders, they created a system of governance. | |
| And remember, government in its best state is but a necessary evil and its worst state an intolerable one. | |
| That was Thomas Paine. | |
| He also said where the guides and dictates of conscience irresistibly obeyed. | |
| Conscience meaning defined as God telling us right and wrong in our hearts, and we all are failures in that respect. | |
| There would be no need for government, but that not being the case, we've got the best system. | |
| And it keeps getting threatened by very powerful people. | |
| That's what this is all about. | |
| Forget, listen, people have been writing me, telling me, you know, a lot of things, some favorable too. | |
| I mean, thank you for staying on this for two years. | |
| Thank you for the team that you put together that have that is maybe 25, 30 of us, including my TV and radio staff that you know radio more than TV, the names that we talk about every day and the ones that jump in and interrupt me all the time here on my own show and don't even ask permission to put on a mic every once in a while. | |
| But I'm just teasing. | |
| But there's maybe 25 or 30 of us. | |
| The rest of the corrupt media, they were in unison in what is the biggest lie ever told, groupthink lie. | |
| And it was a coordination with a Democratic Party apparatus, if you will, or apparatchek, whatever you prefer, and a media that is compliant and in unison with their message and has a political agenda. | |
| And they share one common trait, a psychotic rage and hatred of all things Donald Trump. | |
| That means Donald Trump, all his family, all that he stands for, anybody that likes him. | |
| Remember, we're the smelly Walmart people. | |
| Those of us that like Trump, we're the ones that, oh, I can smell them, the Walmart, smelly Walmart Trump voters. | |
| We are, in their private moments, we're looked down on. | |
| You know, the people that, who are the people that really make this country great? | |
| It's we the people. | |
| It doesn't matter what you do for a living. | |
| Everybody I know gets up out of bed. | |
| They serve other people. | |
| You know, and in the process, they get to make some money so that they can buy a house and a car and or get an apartment or whatever you're doing. | |
| You know, every business is either you're producing goods or services for other people, like a mailman. | |
| A mailman, I love my mailman. | |
| I love my UPS driver. | |
| I love my FedEx driver. | |
| I get to know these guys. | |
| They're great guys. | |
| And every day, they got to work their ass off. | |
| They're like being monitored and GPS'd around their route every day. | |
| And God forbid they stop for lunch 10 seconds longer than they should. | |
| They're getting trouble. | |
| It's ridiculous. | |
| And all, you know, if you go to a restaurant, think of all the people that are behind the scenes to get that meal to you and your family or friends or whoever you happen to be hanging out with. | |
| I mean, first you got, you know, you got the cooks, you got the waiter, you got the busboys, you got the bartenders, you got, you know, all these people serving you. | |
| But then you hopefully leave them a good tip and they get to, they get paid for what they do and you have a great meal and you have a good time and the good restaurants will stay in business and the bad ones will go out of business. | |
| And but that that's what life is. | |
| And it's just when you see that 99.999% of the media went hook, line, and sinker into lying daily with anonymous sources, breathless hysteria, hyper-ventilating fake news, conspiracy TV, and the noise continues. | |
| It's not like they're going out there today or yesterday and saying, wow, every time we said Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Trump, Russia, Russia, Trump, Trump, Trump, collusion, collusion, collusion. | |
| You know, you might think at some point they say, uh-oh, we might have gotten this all wrong. | |
| We might, well, hmm. | |
| Let's talk about the Steele dossier. | |
| You know, what they have done here is irreparable harm to the country and to themselves. | |
| Their inability to retract, to apologize, to their inability of any self-reflection or introspection. | |
| You know, I was raised Catholic, so I was talking about Catholic. | |
| I feel guilty over everything. | |
| If I have bad thoughts, I feel guilty. | |
| And, you know, it's just one of those things, but I've never looked at that guilt as necessarily a bad thing because often it informs me that maybe I'm wrong. | |
| The hardest words for people to say is, I'm wrong. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| And that's a big part of life. | |
| 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 with Verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| 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 Podcast, or wherever you listen. | |
| What I told people I was making a podcast about Benghazi, nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? | |
| Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. | |
| It's almost a dirty word, one that connotes conspiracy theory. | |
| Will we ever get the truth about the Benghazi massacre? | |
| Bad faith, political warfare, and frankly, bullshit. | |
| We kill the ambassador just to cover something up. | |
| You put two and two together. | |
| Was it an overblown distraction or a sinister conspiracy? | |
| Benghazi is a Rosetta Stone for everything that's been going on for the last 20 years. | |
| I'm Leon Nafok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries. | |
| This is Fiasco, Benghazi. | |
| What difference at this point does it make? | |
| Yes, that's right. | |
| Lock her up. | |
| Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| But we're imperfect people. | |
| That's just who we are. | |
| But, you know, we have major components here because what happened puts this great democratic republic, this constitutional republic in jeopardy. | |
| These are not words that I came up with for the sake of speaking them when we talk about a dual justice system, an equal justice under the law, an equal application of our laws. | |
| If you really want to sum it up into different phases, you know, you have one phase where you have a favored candidate that committed felonies, violated the Espionage Act. | |
| There's no debate any longer. | |
| The evidence is there, overwhelming, incontrovertible, irrefutable evidence that Hillary Clinton had top secret classified information on a private email server, likely hacked by six foreign intelligence services, but that's a different story. | |
| Probably one of them, Russia, probably another one, North Korea, probably another one, China, probably another one, Japan, and God knows how many others. | |
| That's why you don't put it there. | |
| And then, you know, you had a group of people that favored her. | |
| Even the person interviewing her thinks that she should win $100 million to zero and said so, and still got to interview her and was writing her exoneration in May of 2016 before the interview of her and 17 other key witnesses and actually allowed in the interview Hillary to bring two other people in. | |
| You think that would be afforded to General Flynn, who both McCabe and Comey bragged about setting up the deputy FBI director. | |
| I told him he doesn't need a lawyer. | |
| And Comey saying, no, sure, I wouldn't do this in the Obama administration or the Bush administration. | |
| I took full advantage of the chaos on day four of the Trump administration. | |
| Okay, that's how we treat 33-year veterans to our country. | |
| And then create a perjury trap. | |
| And then even after they find out, the FBI agent still didn't think he lied. | |
| But because he has no more money, because he worked for the military, not in the private sector, where he would make a lot more money. | |
| Then they're like throwing the book, well, either you sign this, that you lied to the FBI, or and you cooperate with us so we can put the screws to you so that you'll sing or compose, or we're going to have, you were in business with your son, we're going to begin our investigation into your family. | |
| What father and husband's not going to say, screw it, just dive on the sword. | |
| I'll go to jail. | |
| I'm not going to let that happen to my family. | |
| And now he's millions of dollars in debt and he's still facing sentencing. | |
| But the three components are what they are. | |
| You've got a rigged investigation by biased people that abuse their power. | |
| And then you've got everybody knew Bruce Orr testified to it in August of 2016, including the pit bull of Robert Mueller's team. | |
| They knew that in fact Hillary bought the irony of all ironies, bought and paid for a Russian dossier with money she funneled from a law firm to an op research firm to hire a foreign national who's not supposed to influence our elections. | |
| That that foreign national we knew in August of 2016, according to Bruce Orr, hated Trump, had an agenda. | |
| Hillary bought and paid for it, the opposition party, and it can't be verified because even its own author under oath in an interrogatory said, I have no idea if it's true. | |
| So you rig Hillary's investigation. | |
| She gets to remain in the race. | |
| The favored candidate over the, you know, the candidate that should lose $100 million to zero. | |
| That is a loathsome human being, according to Strzok and Page. | |
| Please tell me he's not going to win. | |
| And then, well, if he does, we have an insurance policy. | |
| Then we have the outright spying of the Trump campaign. | |
| Stefan Halper is tasked to spy on Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and also Sam Clovis. | |
| Then they lie to a FISA court. | |
| They didn't tell the FISA court Christopher Steele hates Trump. | |
| They didn't tell the FISA court Hillary paid for it. | |
| They just had an asterisk say it might have slight political taint. | |
| That's not being, that's that's lying by omission to a court. | |
| That is an outright fraud to a court. | |
| They didn't tell the court that it was unverified. | |
| We now know it's unverifiable. | |
| Even Steele doesn't believe in his own dossier. | |
| And then they used that to spy. | |
| Once you got into Carter Page's old emails, you were in the whole, you were in the whole, you were in all of Trump world at that point. | |
| And then that information from that phony dossier was leaked. | |
| Harry Reid got some. | |
| Let's see. | |
| Michael Isikoff, David Korn, The Washington Post. | |
| Well, where did they get the dossier information from? | |
| And why was it disseminated? | |
| Well, they got it from the deep state. | |
| We believe probably Clapper or Brennan, maybe Brennan more than Clapper. | |
| And it needs to be investigated. | |
| And they wrote about it. | |
| Hookers, Ritz Carlton, Moscow, peeing on Donald Trump's bed. | |
| Not true, but people heard it. | |
| It went pretty viral before the election. | |
| Why? | |
| To impact the election. | |
| And then it's used to influence the election. | |
| And then lo and behold, they lose. | |
| They didn't think that was, nobody expected that part. | |
| Then when they lose, well, that's all right, because now they've got the insurance policy. | |
| James Comey signed that first FISA application that was a fraud before the court in October of 2016 before the election. | |
| Then he heads on up to Trump Tower when it's president-elect Trump and pulls him aside and says, Yeah, just so you know, there's this dossier out there. | |
| It's salacious, but it's not verified. | |
| Well, that's not what he was saying to the FISA court three months prior. | |
| So either he lied in October of 2016 or was lying in January of 2017. | |
| And then the whole lead up, we have three invest four investigations, no collusion. | |
| You know, how many more times do I need to read from the Mueller report before it is etched in the brain of these fake news, lying conspiracy theorists in the media that the investigation did not establish members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities? | |
| And every time they said it, they were lying. | |
| Every anonymous source, they were breathlessly, you know, hyperventilating on the air, breathlessly reporting fake news, lies, conspiracies, and no reflection today. | |
| Later on, we have Geraldo on. | |
| Well, we also have Sidney Powell, Peter Schweitzer. | |
| John Solomon's got a lot of news of what's coming. | |
| We're going to get into that too. | |
| Geraldo wonders if there's any Democratic candidate that's going to apologize. | |
| The answer is no, Geraldo. | |
| We'll have you on in a little bit to talk about it. | |
| It's not going to happen. | |
| All right, let me tell you about blinds.com. | |
| We have a lot to get to today. | |
| Happy Friday. | |
| The only thing I'm going to say to you one last thing before we go to break: don't listen to the noise anymore. | |
| They're just doubling down on stupid. | |
| They have forever been exposed for who they are. | |
| And they are about to be hit with the biggest avalanche tsunami of truth that proves that they are liars and have been from the beginning and conspiracy theorists that nobody will ever trust them again, nor should they. | |
| There's a reason why we've been right and they've been wrong. | |
| And I'm not taking the credit. | |
| This is an ensemble cast of very brave people that we've all worked really hard to get to truth. | |
| And we got there. | |
| And believe me, you think a lot of these people like us? | |
| No. | |
| They want to take us all out. | |
| You want smart political talk without the meltdowns? | |
| We got you. | |
| And I'm Carol Markowitz. | |
| And I'm Mary Catherine Hamm. | |
| We've been around the block in media and we're doing things differently. | |
| Normally is about real conversations. | |
| Thoughtful, try to be funny, grounded, and no panic. | |
| We'll keep you informed and entertained without ruining your day. | |
| Join us every Tuesday and Thursday, normally, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| 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 download Verdict with Ted Cruz Now, wherever you get your podcasts. |