Former Speaker Newt Gingrich joins Sean to discuss the issues in the Middle East and what our big "language" problem is. We've actually been at war with Iran since 1979. Plus, Joe Concha, Host of WOR tonight and opinion columnist for The Hill, and Mark Simone, host of the morning show on WOR cover last night’s epic monologue roasting the ridiculous left at their own big party, the Golden Globes. Ricky Gervais is taking the home win for the most honest and direct performance.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.
You want smart political talk without the meltdowns?
We got you.
I'm Carol Markovich.
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 Delaware, verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts.
I fuckle up.
Happy New Year.
Glad you're all with us.
302 days, the best election coverage available on your radio dial, the best liberal insanity coverage available on your radio dial.
And if you weren't around Friday, we were here back early based on events, obviously.
I had I couldn't, I couldn't stay home.
I could not take it anymore.
Uh, based on the issues involving the killing of Solomon, a huge success by every single measure.
And it doesn't matter.
Whatever Donald Trump does.
There's nobody in the mob in the media that'll ever give him credit.
Very few.
There are the Democrats have lost it all.
Uh so now the president doing something phenomenal for world safety.
There needs to be a sort of how to deal with uh world the world's most evil terrorists uh for dummies because there's so much stupid commentary out there.
There's there's so much that people read into something that is not existent.
There's such a fear.
People live in fear, constant fear of everything.
And it's all, oh, what if they get mad?
Oh, oh, oh it's like I I can't stand the fear.
You can't live your life in fear to this extent and survive.
But this is this but the fear is by the way, it's selective.
They only express the fear when it suits their their crappy political agenda.
You know, they look for example, the Democrats, they never said a word about notifying Congress when Obama launched 2008 strikes on Iraq and Syria.
No, there was no congressional approval needed in any way by any of them.
And now we've got Nancy Pelosi resolution to limit the president's military actions.
She obviously knows nothing about the constitution and co-equal branches of government and separation of powers.
She doesn't seem to understand, nor do her colleagues in the house with their ridiculous obstruction of justice impeachment charge when we all know every president in modern history has used executive privilege, and that the third branch of government,
when there's a conflict between the executive and legislative branch of government, that would be the judicial branch where you go to seek remedy, which is what they have agreed to look into at the United States Supreme Court.
And I would expect that that's going to come down uh on the president's side uh by the time this is all said and done.
And it's it is just raw politics on every level.
And it does they don't seem to care.
I mean, this whole argument, well, well, yeah, he's evil.
Yeah, he's horrible.
Yeah, he killed Americans, yeah.
Iran is the number one state sponsor of terror.
Uh, yeah, there's no good reason he was at Baghdad Airport.
None whatsoever.
I'm sure all of you have seen on Twitter the question from uh Solomon to Trump are you gonna give us 150 billion just like Obama did?
And Trump answers, again, it's Twitter.
They have fun on Twitter.
And the president answers, sure, meet me at Baghdad Airport.
There's never any good reason to be there.
Now, let me explain.
If you're not a Benghazi Democrat, if you're not a let's bribe the world's dictators Democrat, because that was that was Clinton with Kim Jong il.
And this is a good deal for American people.
No, it wasn't a good deal for the American people.
Uh, yeah, we gave them uh all this money and we got nothing for it, and they got the nuclear weapons anyway.
Great job bribing a dictator.
The worst deal ever, that that award goes to Obama and Biden.
150 billion in cash and other currencies, cargo planes, the cash and other currencies landing in Tehran for the mullahs of Iran.
Uh, what do we think they're gonna do with that money?
Well, they're doing what they've always been doing.
They're the number one state sponsor of terror.
They are fighting one proxy war after another.
Solomani directly responsible for orchestrating the attacks and the killings of uh hundreds of Americans in Iraq during this conflict.
There's no good reason he was in Iraq.
But you got this, yeah, and by the part of it's in the Republican uh there's a small wing.
Uh this is where I part waves with my friend Rand Paul.
I like Rand Paul, but I disagree with him.
And also I disagree with the assessment that this is gonna escalate into a full-fledged protracted conflict.
I don't think it needs to be.
And if they retaliate, the options we have are so numerous because of our superior military power that the Iranians, they ought to be pretty nervous right now.
They might be saber rattling like they are, but um, if I was them internally, I'd be saying, uh-oh, what is Trump gonna do next?
And I guarantee you that is happening.
Not a matter of even guessing here.
Uh evil people are evil, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're evil and stupid.
Some of them could be evil and as it we use the term evil geniuses.
They could be intellectually bright, but evil.
Um, so here's like sort of a 101 for dummies that don't understand, especially in the mob and the media, especially those in the Democratic Party.
I mean, it it just is it gets frustrating at times, but I guess it's it's so predictable, I shouldn't allow it to frustrate me.
But I I'm listening to these people on television and I'm watching, which which literally it forced me and compelled me to call into my own TV show last Thursday night, because I had information that nobody else had, because I actually worked the phones.
You know, part of the job is a talk show host.
Uh I'm a member of the press.
Remember, we vetted Obama, they didn't.
We did their work, journalism's dead.
Uh, we've been doing the deep state deep dive proven correct, a thousand percent correct, exonerated of you, vindicated, if you will, by the Horowitz report.
I think it's even gonna be more shocking to the conscience of America when the Durham Report, Nabar report come out, and now in that case, unlike an inspector general with Michael Horowitz, they're actually having the ability to convene grand juries and charges can be brought against the individuals that abused power and especially the powerful tools of intelligence.
Now, as I said from the beginning, this is the 99% of our intelligence community that that literally risk their lives daily to keep us safe.
And these are the people that are out there in the front lines, we entrust them with the best.
We we have the best intelligence gathering capabilities on the face of the earth.
Thank God we have them.
Well, one percent turns them on we, the people, yeah.
At that point, now we're at a constitutional crisis tipping point because we have civil liberties, we have constitutional protections that clearly weren't used when they abused power and they were corrupt.
But if you want to know how the world works, and you're not willing to be a Benghazi Democrat and tell people that want to save American lives a mile away that they've got to stand down three times.
And we had Mark Mark Geist on the program Friday, one of the Benghazi heroes.
If you're not part of the appeasement democratic mindset that believes in bribing dictators, then you got to understand there's some simple rules in life.
Now, you don't get to shoot American drones out of the sky and not expect that the United States of America is gonna respond.
We now get to attack our embassy through your surrogates that your funding, and I would argue probably in all likelihood, when we finally get to the bottom line information, the reason that Solomon was on the ground at Baghdad Airport.
Remember, days before the words Salomani is our leader.
We knew that they had ties to Hezbollah.
Hezbollah, party of God, hates Israel, hates the United States, death to Israel, death to the U.S., burn our flags, burn their flags, the Israeli flags.
So he was there for no good.
The idea, this the President Trump was clear.
This was not gonna be another Benghazi.
And this is the only way you stop it from becoming another Benghazi.
You don't get to take hostage in the narrow straits of Hormuz, where a third of the world's oil supply, the lifeblood of the world's economy, you don't get to take British tankers hostage.
If you do that, then the likelihood increases that we're gonna respond.
You don't get to disrupt the world's oil supply in that way and then go after the Saudis for no reason at all, so that you can then sell more of your oil on the free market because the Trump sanctions are creating a lot of conflict for you, the mullahs with inside of Iran.
There's a lot of political disruption that's been going on because of the president's sanctions against Iran.
Very different approach if you're not an appeaser, if you don't believe in bribing dictators.
You don't get to kill Americans in Iraq and not expect to pay a price.
You don't orchestrate attacks on our embassy and try to kill Americans and don't get a response.
At some point, your funding of terrorism worldwide has to be dealt with, and it's not by bribing you into stopping.
That's not gonna work.
It never has, never will be.
That is called appeasement.
You don't get to fight proxy wars around the globe and not expect a response.
You don't get to try and take over the entire region and not expect reprisals.
And by the way, uh, you can do all of this, and you can still, because I don't ever want boots on the ground going door to door like we did in Iraq.
Because these idiots in the swamp in Washington, like Joe Biden, he's Joe Biden's now claiming that he didn't support the Iraq war.
He's a liar.
Even fake news CNN broke the story, he's lying.
But you don't get to start these wars all gung-ho, ready to go, send our national treasure, our brave men and women, the greatest military fighting force in the history of mankind, to go fight, bleed and die and give up their limbs and come back disfigured if you come back at all, and then say never mind.
So the only option to that, and it's a great option that we develop and we have been developing, and we do have the capability right now.
How do we know?
Because Trump showed us it works in Syria.
That's how he defeated the caliphate in Syria, and he pushed it all the way back and crushed it, and culminating with the with the death of uh Baghdadi and a lot of his top uh commanders and associates.
Well, now, okay, so let's say the fear of the Democrats that want to bribe dictators, the appeasers, is that Iran may retaliate.
Well, the president was pretty clear.
We've identified 52 targets, symbolic for a reason, obviously, the hostage situation.
Uh 444 days.
Americans held hostage.
And what's the first thing the president can do?
You want to hurt Iran's economy and make it collapse?
Take out their refineries.
It'll collapse.
If you want to, you maybe at some point, okay, we've been worried about these nuclear facilities in Iran, dug deep underground.
They're targets too.
And also, the Mullah's got to be thinking they're targets.
I know we're not allowed to call for the assassination of foreign leaders unless, of course, you're what's his name, George Lopez.
You know, the Iranians have put an 80 what million dollar bounty on Trump's head, and Lopez, ha ha joking, we can do it for 40.
Really?
Talking about a president?
Secret service, you allowed to do that?
I don't know.
I wouldn't do it for anybody.
So the option is not, oh, uh, he's evil, do nothing, or bribe them into liking us.
These are the false options that they're creating.
Or that you gotta put boots on the ground and fight this as a conventional war.
No, that doesn't have to happen either.
The next generation of weaponry, offensive and defensive, we push the buttons, we take out strategic locations that go to the heart of their economy, that go to the heart of where they're trying to create the most chaos and havoc in the world, their nuclear facilities.
That's it.
They attack us again, we hit them again and again.
And you don't have to have kids banging on their doors.
Now, if the people of Iran, if they want regime change, that's up to them.
At that point, they might have a bigger opportunity than they ever dreamed.
All right, we got a lot to get to today.
Eight hunt, but it's great to be back.
Happy New Year to all of you.
302 days.
I this is it.
Game on.
Let's play.
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 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 Mayfock from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries.
This is Fiasco Benghazi.
What difference at this point does it make?
Yeah, that's right.
Locker up.
Listen to Fiasco Benghazi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I never thought I'd ever want to watch any Hollywood award show, but man, how great was uh Ricky Gervais.
Oh, I mean, he what a takedown.
It was epic.
Just epic.
You know that if uh ISIS had a channel that you'd have your agents calling them in two seconds.
Uh just tearing into all the Hollywood elite.
And and just Vicious.
You know, you're in no position to lecture uh about anything because you know nothing about the real world.
And oh, not to mention, you're all perverts.
Ouch.
Uh, even Joaquin Phoenix lectured his uh Hollywood friends about, yeah, you claim environmentalism all you want.
Yeah, I know you had your old vegan menu, I guess they had for this thing.
I I don't like to watch these shows.
And then this happened, and I'm like, now I'm watching every rerun I could watch, every tape of highlight that I can see.
Uh, we'll hit that later in the program today.
Also, Newt Gingrich, Daniel Hoffman, 30 year CIA ops officer.
Uh, Contra Mark Simone on Ricky Gervais, Colin Kaepernick, Nike.
But why what is Nike C and Colin Kaepernick?
Is that I don't I don't see it.
And they're under heavy fire too.
All right, we'll get this all in.
Glad you're with us.
Best election coverage, 302 days to go.
We'll continue.
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, 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 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 Nayfok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries.
This is Fiasco Benghazi.
What difference at this point does it make?
Yeah, that's right.
Locker up.
Listen to Fiasco Benghazi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, 25 to the top of the hour.
You know, um, before the break, I kept highlighting how it was not one poll or outlier uh with the president's approval rating with African Americans.
Uh you had eight polls, credible polls, as uh and the president's support.
One had the president at 34-5, another 34, another 33, another 28, 20, I think 22, and the lowest was 16.
Now, 16 would be twice the level of support at the president.
Again, breaking things down demographically, uh, with the African American community, that is a game changer.
And for good reason, because you know, you you look at all you have to do is is look at liberal policies disproportionately.
I have hammered the failure of the Obama Biden years, and those disproportionately impacted were minorities in America.
You see the same trend lines, in spite of what the mob and the media is telling you with Hispanic Americans.
And now Zagby Zogby was the first guy to pick up on this trend of support within the African American community for the president.
His latest survey now has picked up something else that I'm I'm just gonna keep an eye on.
It's early, 302 days away.
But anyway, it shows the president is above water with his approval rating, 5048, a key level his political team has been working hard to reach.
I think one of the reasons he gets there is because in spite of all of the crap that they have piled on this guy in three years, he's kept working.
And the list of promises made and kept are huge.
And yeah, and then he's still acting.
He's he's not the appeaser, he's not bribing the dictators, and we didn't have as MBC fake news, you know, conspiracy channel TV, Area 51 Roswell Rachel Maddow's conspiracy channels suggesting, oh, Donald Trump's Benghazi.
No, wasn't at all.
Uh, but the one demographic breakout in Zogby's poll that I paid attention to was 51% of support with millennials and 56% support with Generation X. Those numbers help give him an edge over the top five candidates fighting it out in Iowa.
And what's more is he's building support with independence, Hispanics, women, and African Americans.
And I'll read directly from Zogby's report.
Trump is doing well, winning back support with important swing voters.
Independence, 42%, at least somewhat approve of Donald Trump.
Hispanics, 45% uh approval, 44% among women, and against Joe Biden, Trump wins.
And he leads Bloomberg.
Uh it doesn't really seem to be surging.
He's spending millions and millions of millions.
When people get to Bloomberg's opinions, I don't think he's a horrible person.
I just think he's a radical leftist.
And I think that that all the policies that he would implement, it basically is that like being in New York, having a liberal New Yorker as your president.
Trump was not.
I remember I went out on a limb.
I told all my conservative friends he's not going to govern as a liberal because he's not one.
I I said directly, and so many conservatives beat the crap out of me.
You know, I do what I do.
I tell the truth as I know it.
I knew it wasn't true.
I knew where he stood.
It's like I know he's not gonna have this long protracted boots on the ground conflict.
Yeah, we need more boots there now in the region, but not to invade Iran.
We're not doing that.
That doesn't, that doesn't have to factor in even to our consideration.
And this is what frustrates me when I'm listening to these Benghazi Democrats or bribe dictator Democrats and you know, think that you can 150 billion dollars that they may begin to like us.
Uh, because that's not gonna happen.
Now, it's the the civil war within the Democratic ranks are real.
Carl Rove is saying watch for a brokered convention this year.
I could see it.
You got uh Ocasio Cortez, the real speaker of the House, Pelosi's speaker in name only.
His latest attack on Biden, I think, you know, foreshadows what's coming here because she attacked Biden this weekend, and it's kind of getting harder and harder to see how Bernie Sanders progressives would ever put aside their differences with Biden, especially after they all got screwed the last time.
Could never understand why I was like the only one saying, uh, they stole the primary from you guys.
Hello.
I cannot believe that's happening.
I'm literally about to tell myself that I'm not kidding.
You better pick this right now.
I literally am gonna die.
I need an ambulance.
Oh boy.
Wasn't that a that was a Bernie supporter?
Pretty scary times we have.
I've got to tell you.
Anyway, so the rift is real.
The riff was real with Hillary.
Not sure why Bernie backed off.
He shouldn't have.
But she said in this interview, Ocasio Cortez said that Democrats can cultivate too big of a tent, asserting that she and her party's 2020 frontrunner, Joe Biden, would be in different political parties In any other nation.
She said this in a profile in New York magazine.
Some are now saying and suggesting she may want to run at some point herself.
You know, Biden, by the way, sided with Solomonny in handing control of Iraq to Iran.
It was a Washington free beacon piece.
This I did not know.
Apparently, he played a decisive role in enabling the recently assassinated Cud force leader Solomonni to push the U.S. out of Iraq and deliver the country into the hands of Iran.
And they go through that whole story.
I won't go into it now.
Polls now show that Bernie seems that Warren was on the rise.
She's now on the decline, and Bernie now is on the rise in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Um, you got an anti-war activist says it's unacceptable for Elizabeth Warren to even call Solomonny a bad guy.
By the way, what a dumb argument.
He's evil, he's killed Americans.
He leads the number one, number one state sponsor of terrorist country and their real efforts supporting Hezbollah, going back into his history and fighting proxy war after proxy war, but we don't want to kill them because we might piss them off.
We might make them mad.
Like, wow.
How do you get to a place in your head that it's okay to bribe mullahs that chant death to America and death to Israel and threaten to wipe Israel off the map and burn our flag and the American flag?
What would possess anybody to give these idiots 150 billion dollars?
What would have possess Clinton to think he can bribe the North Koreans into giving up their nuclear program?
We all we give the money and then they do it anyway.
At some point, you got to realize that there's only one way to stop evil.
And when you see it and you identify it, and they're the number one state sponsor of terror, they're shooting down drones.
They are stopping the free flow of oil at market prices.
They're taking hostage tankers and they're they're literally bombing out facilities of their competitors.
That impacts the world economy.
Killing Americans in Iraq, you know, orchestrating the entire attack on our embassy to kill Americans and turn it into a Benghazi, which it wasn't and didn't become, thanks to the president, thanks to our Intel community, the 99% and others.
And they get all wigged out because Iran's general replacing Solomon is vowing for revenge.
Okay, shocker, saber rattling, or that uh, I guess we have Solomonis uh, what was it, his daughter warning families of U.S. troops waiting for their death.
At some point, you gotta stand up and say, if you do it, you're gonna pay the price.
If you and the price does not need to be a boots on the ground historically fought war.
You know, and and Pompeo said it on Fox News Sunday, he said endless wars are the direct result of weakness.
The president is never gonna let that happen.
Now, so far, the president has kind of kept his word on the promises he made.
Now, Pompeo says, we're gonna get it right.
We're gonna get the force posture correct, but make no mistake, America's mission is to have our footprint in the Middle East reduced while still keeping America safe from rogue regimes like the Islamic Republic of Iran and from terrorist activity broadly and throughout the region.
What in what world do some people think it's okay to try and kill Americans abroad and try and take over our embassy and our interest in abroad and not think there's gonna be a price to pay.
That's the only thing that works.
It's as simple as the bully argument, or that the fact that some Iranian lawmaker is offering an 80 million dollar bounty on Trump's head, that's not unique either.
None of what they're saying or doing is unique.
What people seem not to get is even after they were bribed with 150 billion dollars, they still hate us.
They've always hated us.
And if at some point they do try and retaliate or do retaliate, then America's got a lot of options here.
And we will use them.
Hence my argument.
I don't want any more long protracted conflicts.
I don't want to send our national treasure abroad anymore.
Hence the investment in the next generation of weaponry, offensive, defensive.
So when we need to take out their refineries, well, our brilliant military will hit a couple of buttons, hopefully, from an air-conditioned office in Tampa, Florida, or the desert in Nevada.
Because that's the way it's got to be fought.
Now, assuming that they might one day develop the same technology as we built, then we've got to protect ourselves defensively.
That means, like, for example, the Iron Dome in Israel.
It's worked better than anyone ever imagined.
Democrats mocked strategic defense, Star Wars.
They made fun of Reagan.
I've said and I remain committed to this comment today.
That will go down as Reagan's greatest legacy.
Because it was way ahead of the curve.
And if you want to talk about hypocrisy, yeah, Obama launched 2,800 strikes on Iraq, Syria, without any congressional approval.
So I don't really want to get lectured from the likes of Nancy Pelosi or anyone else.
And they sound pretty dumb, stupid and idiotic with their hell, yeah, he's horrible.
He's dark.
He's evil.
He's all these things.
He's done all of these things, but we can't do anything.
Now imagine for a second, Donald Trump didn't do anything.
And six months from now, we found out that he knew that Solomon was on the tarmac in Baghdad.
Well, who do you think would be criticizing the president for not acting?
Well, that would be the same Democrats that can't stand Trump at all.
Ever.
There's nothing Donald Trump will ever do right in their minds.
Why do you think Nancy Pelosi's obsessed with impeachment?
And by the way, this is now, you know, coming to a head as well.
Uh Josh Hawley rightly, you know, look, so Senate, the Senate has rules of impeachment.
We've been through this.
I'll just give you the quick abbreviated cliff note version here.
So they set impeachment rules, and you're treated like 44 standing rules of the Senate.
Thus, to make a rules change, the parliamentarian will declare that they need 67 votes.
However, what you can do to change the rules is then upon that, you can vote to change the rules of the Senate, and you'd only need a 51 vote margin to get it done.
Now, constitutionally, it's very clear that the president of the United States that the House impeaches, and the trial is held in the Senate.
As Josh Hawley, who introduced this resolution to allow dismissal of the bogus impeachment charges against the president.
President's kind of busy, and the American people will weigh in in 302 days.
But this whole charade is a threat to democracy.
And now that they don't like their own impeachment vote, which they thought would had to be done so expeditiously, now they're trying to dictate how the Senate does their constitutional role.
Sorry, Nancy, it's not gonna work that way.
And you've got most Republican senators saying, uh-uh, you're not lecturing us how to do it.
You failed to deliver articles of impeachment, you're admitting you bumbled your partisan impeachment.
That was said by Tom Cotton.
Ted Cruz said since the impeachment process started, Pelosi and the House Democrats have made a mockery of our constitution and abused impeachment for political gain.
Now they're undermining the role of the Senate by attempting to dictate the terms of the Senate trial.
Under our constitution, the Senate has the sole authority to try impeachment.
That's correct.
And the quote of Chucky Schumer back during Clinton's impeachment that he wasn't objective, kind of puts to rest this entire argument that, well, Republicans uh if it if if they don't do it the way Chuck Schumer wants, uh, then somehow that they're being unfair.
Nice try, Chuck.
Your words are coming back to haunt you, and I will play them tonight on Hannity.
Ineastern on Fox.
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, 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 sas.
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 10, 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 Nafock from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries.
This is Fiasco Benghazi.
What difference at this point does it make?
Yeah, that's right.
Locker up.
Listen to Fiasco Benghazi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, 302 days, best election coverage available on your radio dial.
Uh, we've got a lot to get to.
Now, one update on the Senate resolution of Senator Josh Hawley, he will be on Hannity tonight, uh, introducing a measure accusing Mrs. Pelosi of obstructing a Senate trial, which is to occur after the House votes to impeach a sitting president under the U.S. Constitution.
Resolution states that if the House fails to transmit articles of impeachment within 25 calendar days, a senator could then introduce a motion to dismiss the articles with prejudice for failure by the House of Representatives to prosecute.
It has been 20 calendar days since Pelosi's chamber voted to impeach President Trump on December the 18th.
Now, if this resolution passes, and at some point this week, we may be giving out the Senate phone numbers, just giving you a heads up of a pre preview of coming attractions.
But if this passes the Senate, and it should, it would mean that the impeachment clock of Pelosi, she constitutionally does not get to dictate the Senate's role in an impeachment trial.
We need assurance.
You don't get assurances.
Chuck Schumer admitted, and we have the tape, we'll play it tonight, that he was biased in the Clinton impeachment era.
There were 11 specific felonies laid out there.
Uh, 10 sponsors, co-sponsors, Mike Braun, Rick Scott, Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, uh, Steve Danes, Tom Cotton, John Barroso, Joni Ernst, Jim Inhoff, and David Purdue.
Good for them.
Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, here to talk about this, the elections, so much more, the taking out of Solomon, and of course, even that can't get any praise from any Democrat.
How are you, sir?
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
And uh, you know, I think actually Pelosi may be subjected to a privileged resolution that she is holding the House in contempt and in disrepute.
Uh, because what she's done is, I think, putting the House itself in jeopardy of uh looking like it doesn't care about the Constitution.
And so clearly political.
Every day this goes on.
Uh, it just becomes it just becomes more and more political and less and less constitutional and less uh historic.
So on the other hand, I have to say, Sean, I do think President Trump should send her a nice note uh making her the number one fundraiser for his campaign.
By the way, they're smashing every fundraising record.
Let me let me ask you anecdotally.
Because I have my long vacation around Christmas.
I'm like, I'm I'm jumping out of my skin by the time I get back on the air, just ready to I can't take it anymore.
I gotta let it all out, uh, which is why I came back Friday early.
But I everywhere I go, every person without exception that I saw and met over this holiday season all saying the same thing.
They have had it.
They are fed up.
Yeah.
We had we had random phone calls of people uh that we're close to who are not at all political, who would just suddenly in the middle of a conversation say, I can't tell you how sick I am of all of this baloney.
And I was really surprised.
And people who are very non-political just get it.
They're tired of it, they think they're all liars, the Democrats.
Uh, and I think that they're doing between their reaction to Solomon and Iran and their reaction to this game playing uh with the impeachment, I think they're doing substantial damage to their party as an institution.
The other thing is this look, the the Constitution's clear.
The House has a role, the Senate has a role.
Um, every consideration you gave both Bill Clinton, his team of attorneys, the time frame dictated by them, not by you, the right to cross-examine, the right to propose witnesses, everything that you did slowly, it was sober, very fair all across the board, none of which was affordable.
We were we were told we had to do this immediately.
So they have their every one of their quote witnesses, opinion witnesses here say witnesses, and only one fact witness.
Now they're saying, well, we've got to have the right to call more witnesses.
But wouldn't the Senate only be right to call the witnesses that the House brought up?
They don't get to bring in a whole series, they don't get to re-litigate what the House brings as their evidence for this impeachment.
That's not the Senate's role.
Well, it's that the Senate can create its own set of rules.
I I sort of think it would be uh fascinating if Lindsey Graham as the chairman of the judiciary committee happened to bring in, for example, Hunter Biden, um, totally within the rules to ask him under oath to explain a lot of this stuff to get to the bottom of it.
But I but I think there's a there's a deeper thing going on here that um I I tell everybody if you if you read Mitch McConnell's memoir, uh The Long Game, you you understand from McConnell that the idea that Nancy Pelosi thinks that she can bluff him or bully him or blackmail him is just absurd.
Uh this is a guy who is tough and and uh professional, takes a long view of things, and I suspect in the evening he thinks, I wonder how many more judges I can get through this week uh while Nancy's uh playing her games.
But he and he has said this.
He said, we're just gonna go back to uh getting people through and making the appointments uh go through, and you know, Nancy can play games as long as she wants to.
Well, I agree, but I uh but I don't think that that's the way to handle this.
I uh because it's not fair to and well, constitutionally, you know, we're not talking about the presidency here.
This isn't a game.
They they've now they've they've lowered the bar, they've politicized it, it's repugnant, it's repulsive, there's no evidence.
Um the whole idea that executive privilege is invoked, and because they seek remedy from the other branch of government when there's a conflict between the legislative and executive branch, and they they are getting relief and a decision sometime this year from the U.S. Supreme Court, but they're saying it's obstruction because they seek remedy is insane.
So the whole thing is a sham and it was rushed through, and now they're trying to get a redo or add new articles of impeachment, I guess in the interim.
I guess they're in a constant impeachment mode now.
Sure, but you know, you you're you're being reasonable, and you're trying to describe this as though facts matter.
Instead of saying Democratic, you just said this is the hate Trump party.
And then you sort of understand what's going on.
I mean, it's a these are people who get up every morning and are friends.
Can you imagine Adam Schiff every morning?
He wakes up, you know, Trump tweets something.
It reminds Chef, he turns on Fox and Friends.
He starts to get catatonic.
The staff has to calm him down.
Um we're dealing with people who have a psychosis.
We're not dealing with people who are playing with a full deck.
It is amazing.
And you know, we always talk about choice elections.
We always say that this will define the future of the country.
I I think this is it.
Um let me move on.
And so here we've got, and I'm I'm trying to do like a how do you deal with maniacal dictatorships if you're not part of the Benghazi Democratic Party or the bribe mullahs and Iran Party?
Uh, when you shoot out American drones when you in the narrow streets of Hormuz are taking British tankers hostage and trying to disrupt the world supply of oil, and you hit the Saudis to disrupt the world supply of the lifeblood of every economy, and you kill Americans in Iraq, and you orchestrate the attack to kill Americans in our embassy, you fund terrorism worldwide, you fight proxy world wars worldwide.
For those of us that don't believe in rewarding that behavior with 150 billion, uh, I think a reasonable person and polls now prove it out to be true, think the killing of Solomon was a great thing.
I think it was an amazing thing.
I I thought it was remarkable.
I thought it was exactly the right thing to do.
And uh I was amazed that they could target him in Baghdad uh and actually get to him at exactly the right moment.
But I I think we have a problem.
I actually had a meeting on this today talking about our language problem.
The the Iranian dictatorship has been at war with us since 1979.
That's just a fact.
They say it openly.
Last year, the Majlis, which is their Congress, went into session chanting death to America.
Now, personally, I believe as a historian, when somebody chants death to America, what they mean is death to America.
And this particular guy, Solomon, had been their most successful, most powerful general in waging a regional campaign from Gaza to Lebanon to Syria to Iraq to Afghanistan, and had we've had public statements again and again.
He killed at least 700 Americans and wounded thousands more.
And to suggest that it's inappropriate to take out an enemy general, I think is just a sign of being out of touch with reality.
How do you see that now that Iowa's fast approaching New Hampshire closely thereafter, South Carolina on our way to Super Tuesday, no real clear front runner?
What do you see among the Democratic uh in the Democratic primary?
And you know, maybe Rove is right.
Maybe this all ends in a brokered convention because you got you've got more infighting going on, and frankly, uh, the weakest slate of candidates I've ever seen.
And most extreme.
First of all, the the the next big story may be um the rise of um Bloomberg, who, by the sheer volume of money he's spending, uh is beginning to really rise because you go to a place like California, nobody else has a presence.
But he's rich enough he can afford to buy a substantial presence.
And so I think by Super Tuesday, you may be in a totally different environment.
Don't but but he supports every other crazy position.
And and he's probably the most anti-gun, pro-new Green Deal, pro-Obamacare and and more.
Um, and and and pro-Chinese.
I mean, he was he recently gave an interview explaining that Xi Jinping is not really a dictator.
No, you mean the president.
You mean the president, the self-appointed president for life?
Yes.
President Chi.
Man who can say that with a straight face can say anything.
Pretty I I'm not look, I just think he's buying all the ads, I guess, that money can buy, and I just don't see his gun position, his free health care positions, his new Green Deal positions as in sync with people in Wisconsin, Michigan, uh, and Pennsylvania.
But with that said, always in the back of my mind, I know for a Republican to win the presidency, you've got to thread that needle.
You need North Carolina, you need Florida, you need Ohio.
Then you gotta pick off, let's see, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire.
Gotta keep Arizona, uh, Nevada, New Mexico in play.
You gotta fight for all of them.
Right.
And I think the right way to think of this is they may end up running so far to the left that we have a chance at a 1972 or a 1984, and then it's a totally different game.
I I was surprised last night to discover we have over 800 candidates running for Congress.
Um, we have over 180 women running for Congressmen.
This is this is a new emerging Republican party.
And uh I wouldn't foreclose right now the possibility of a genuinely different election than anybody expects.
Oh, I that look, I hope it plays out that way.
Um let me ask you from the standpoint of how the president, let's assume for a second the mullahs are now sitting around a table and they're thinking about retaliation.
Which I would not doubt it they're doing.
And okay, if they retaliate, to me, it seems like the only other option people have in their heads is that we send boots on the ground.
I think that's the I would never want that option.
I think we now have the next generation of weaponry.
Go ahead.
Go back and look at Reagan.
Reagan, when we were faced with a uh terrorist bombing in uh Berlin, Reagan went after um Gaddafi with air power, scared him so badly that he was peaceful for a decade.
Uh, when the um Iranians uh used a mine to hit an American warship.
Reagan took out one half of the Iranian Navy.
Um, but he never even thought about boots in the ground.
I think Trump is in that sense, uh I hope.
And then from what I've seen so far, he's beginning to learn the Reagan message, which is you can use air power, you can use advanced missiles, uh, you can use your Navy, and you can you can break a country like Iran without ever putting a single infantryman on the ground.
Well, I mean, didn't we do that with the caliphate in Syria?
I mean, yeah, you know, haven't we now proven we you take out their refineries and nuclear sites, and then the Iranian people might have the option of regime change on their own.
Look, if I were the Mullers and I looked at the ability to track and target and get Suleimani, I wouldn't be too eager to get into a running fight with Trump.
Former Speaker of the House, New Kingrich, happy new year, 302 days to go.
We'll have you on often.
Thank you.
800-941 Sean.
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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
What I told people, I was making a podcast about Benghazi.
Nine times out of 10, 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 Navok from Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries.
This is Fiasco Benghazi.
What difference at this point does it make?
Yeah, that's right.
Locker up.
Listen to Fiasco Benghazi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Former General David Petraeus said the killing of the top Iranian Kuds force, General Solomonni was more important than the killing of Al Qaeda founder bin Laden, quote, it is impossible to overstate the importance of this particular action.
It is more significant than the killing of Osama bin Laden, or even the death of uh Islamic State leader El Baghdadi.
He told a foreign policy magazine, he said Solemanni was the architect and operational commander of the Iranian effort to solidify control of the so-called Shia Crescent, stretching from Iran to Iraq, through Syria into southern Lebanon.
And he said that he is responsible for providing the explosives and projectiles and arms and munitions that killed over 600 American soldiers and many more of our coalition and Iraqi partners in Iraq, as well as in so many other countries, such as Syria, so his death is of enormous significance.
He said many people had rightly questioned whether America, American deterrence had eroded uh somewhat because of a relatively insignificant response to earlier actions.
By the way, yeah, the president can't win no matter what he does.
Uh, and he said this clearly was of vastly greater importance, and he said per the Defense Department was a defensive action, and the planning and the contingency, Solomonny was going to Iraq to discuss, presumably approve.
Yeah, it was pretty obvious to figure that out.
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 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?
Yeah, that's right.
Locker up.
Listen to Fiasco Benghazi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The death of innocent people, his sick passion.
Contributing to terrorist plots as far away as New Delhi in London.
Today we remember and honor the victims of Salomani's many atrocities, and we take comfort in knowing that his reign of terror is over.
What the United States did yesterday should have been done long ago.
We took action last night to stop a war.
We did not take action to start a war.
He's got hundreds of American lives, blood on his hands.
But what was sitting before us was uh his travels throughout the region and his efforts to make a significant strike against Americans.
There would have been many Muslims killed as well, Iraqis people in other countries as well.
Uh it was a strike that was aimed at both uh disrupting that plot and deterring further aggression.
We hope setting the conditions for de-escalization as well.
Uh the amazing thing about Biden, by the way, glad you're with us.
Uh 25 now till the top of the hour, 800-941.
Sean, you want to be a part of this extravaganza.
Uh Biden's actually now claiming things that just aren't true.
He just makes it up as usual, uh, claiming while he opposed the Iraq war.
Uh, no matter how many times he says it, or his aides tell him to stop saying it, that he opposed the war, he just can't help himself.
You know, he said from the very moment President George W. Bush launched his shock and all military campaign, and right after that occurred, I oppose what he was doing.
I spoke to him.
Uh, even fake news CNN is pointing out it's false that Biden opposed the war from the moment Bush started it in March of 2003.
He repeatedly spoke in favor of the war, both before and after it began.
I it's just bizarre.
And in 96, it was Biden that urged Clinton to use, quote, any level of force that he deemed necessary to respond to the Cobart Towers bombing.
What about that at length and let freedom ring years ago?
Um, so I'm I'm you know, what what part of they were at war with us and we weren't at war with them, didn't we understand then?
This is uh there's nothing that this president will do that they'll ever give him credit for.
Doesn't matter.
Just, you know, this whole idea is so insane what they're trying to argue here because the trend is literally thread this needle and say, yeah, he was evil, he was a murderer, he was terrible.
Uh yeah, it was the it was the world's worst.
And yeah, he killed Americans, and yeah, he fomented terror, and yeah, he's responsible for proxy wars, and yeah, creating instability all throughout the Middle East, and yeah, they're seeking nuclear weapons, and the bribery efforts of Biden Obama didn't work, 150 billion.
Um, but uh Trump is but we should we we can't dare take him out because they might get mad.
Oh, well, like we're not supposed to be mad at how they treat us.
Um, one of the things I said when I called in last Thursday night to my own TV show, and then I I did come in from back early from vacation for Friday night show, is that this was a massive success for the great people in our intelligence community?
How many times have I delineated in the last few years on this show the 99% of intelligence officials that do the great work of keeping us safe every day versus that 1% that abuse power, turn the powerful tools of intelligence we entrust to them on the American people, uh abusing their power and being corrupt.
Same with the FBI, it's the greatest law enforcement agency on the planet.
It just is.
We have the best intelligence community in the world by far.
And again, it's the 99% are great.
So when the 1% goes rogue, we got a problem.
Uh, one such officer, 30-year CIA operations officer, a friend of the program, actually a friend of mine now, Daniel Hoffman is with us.
Sir, how are you?
You said we need to be very alert.
I'm sure our state and local law enforcement is working with our intelligence community to be on alert as as much as possible.
But the the level of sophistication to get this intelligence that uh Solomon was going to be at Baghdad Airport and then pinpoint the strike at exactly that right moment was uh is an amazing feat.
Yeah, Sean, at first it's just always a pleasure and an honor to join you on the program.
So thanks again for having me on this uh you know to talk about this historically important strike.
When you're talking about striking a terrorist, or in this case, Jason Sulamani, the head of Iran's good force, it's all about finding the target, fixing the target location, and then finishing the target.
In this case, with no collateral damage, it's really important to note that we killed the high value.
Uh and it's bitter and a sweet irony, I think, for us that Solomon was killed on that route iris uh from the airport into town in Iraq, where he had his own Iranian proxy militias in Iraq, like IEDs improvised explosive devices that were targeting our people there when I served in Iraq 607.
What do you think, based on your 30 years experience as a CIA ops officer?
Uh, because the fact that he was bold and brazen enough to just be right there uh in Baghdad at Baghdad Airport, you're right.
This is the cuds, you know, the the cuds are the leading military elite force of the Iranians.
Uh this guy's been responsible for all that I mentioned earlier and a lot more in the death of Americans directly.
Uh, but to me, it looks like uh he felt emboldened enough and and perhaps protected enough that he could go in there and lead this assault, if not worse, on our embassy, um, and and God only knows what else.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
He misjudged President Trump.
You know, he he was behaving as if he were in Tehran.
That Baghdad International Airport, I've flown there many times.
I've been over that route Irish, uh, both on by land and by air.
They choke point.
He put himself at risk, but he did it because he felt like there was nothing to worry about.
We've had him in our crosshairs in the past and chose not to strike him, uh, a mistake, in my view, as you noted in the past.
And make no mistake, this administration made a strategic calculus, the right one in my view, that if Iran's leadership is going to continue to authorize attacks against our people and our installations on top of the attack against our drone facility on top of the attack against our oil tankers and Saudi uh oil infrastructure back in September, then we are going to attack the Iranian leaders and make them pay a price for the decisions they make.
We'll deal with the foot soldiers separately, but we are going to do a little bit of what the Israelis call brain brain, old school, and eliminate those leaders for threatening us.
That's what this administration did.
Intelligence was important, but this was above all else, in my view at least, a policy decision by the president and a great one.
So for the average person, and look, I mean we obviously can't give away our methods and and the tools of intelligence.
They're so powerful now, though.
Um, you know, having spent time with you in Vietnam and in Singapore, well, number one, but if you hang around with Dan Hoffman, his thirty years as a CIA ops officer, it just scares the crap out of you, because he's basically saying everything you do is monitored by somebody, someplace, somewhere, which I've heard from many other people as well, and I think that kind of freaks a lot of people out.
But for example, if we wanted to target any one conversation of any one individual on the face of this earth, you have zero doubt that we have the capacity uh to easily do that.
Is that a fair statement or assessment?
It is.
And listen, even though we didn't strike Solomon, it doesn't mean that we weren't collecting intelligence on his location and doing it in a variety of ways through human sources, through signals intelligence, in other words, when he's speaking to someone on a cellular phone of or something of that sort.
And that allows us to have options uh so that when we're tracking his location, we can then decide present to the president the option of striking him.
Consider, I think our intelligence community like snipers, uh, you know, high technology snipers looking at the target from very, very far away, pinpointing the target's location, so that if the president authorizes the finish operation, we're ready uh to implement that operation on a moment's notice.
Well, and then this is the danger that I have spoken of.
And by the way, I think you agree with me, because most of my friends in the FBI and intelligence community that I know, uh, they're not happy at all when they hear the powerful tools that we entrust the people to keep us safe in a very dangerous world.
Um you know, there is a rub here when those tools are turned on the American people, and which I believe happened in a in a huge way, and and in a way that was ex that's extraordinarily dangerous constitutionally, um, and more importantly, to target uh uh one particular candidate, then one particular transition team and one particular president deep into his presidency.
Um how dangerous is that?
Well, you know, in our country, we've got a strong democracy, we've got oversight, we've got freedom of The press and so that when if there are rules and regulations which are not followed for whatever reason that might be, there are lots of options, lots of opportunities to detect that and then do something about it, as you point out.
Uh I can tell you from my experience in the intelligence community, we are entrusted with a lot of tools to do our job and the expectation that we'll do our job commensurate with the laws of our nation, and then in extraordinarily rare circumstances that doesn't happen, uh then the proper legal action needs to be taken, of course.
All right, quick break.
We'll come back more with uh Daniel Hoffman, 30 year CIA ops officer on the other side.
As we continue with Daniel Hoffman, Fox News contributor, 30 years CIA ops officer.
So as we move forward in this particular case, we you would agree with me that this is a major victory for the intelligence community.
Uh the president's decision was the right decision.
This was an opportunity that perhaps wouldn't come about any time soon.
What do you suspect that Solomani was doing in Baghdad?
Because I have my own suspicions.
One of the things we we know Iran support for terrorism worldwide, they're the number one state sponsor of terror, in particular Hezbollah, which was largely engaged in attacking our embassy.
So my question is, what was his real goal of being there?
And what was he trying, what effort was he trying to lead, and why do I suspect that you know this could have become Benghazi too?
Well, look, we know that uh Iranian proxy militias gathered as a mob and penetrated uh the fur the outer perimeter of our embassy, and they were allowed to get that far by Iraqi security forces.
Soleimani was kind of the puppet master of domestic Iraqi politics.
He was directing those Iranian proxy militias, including Abu Mahdi almohandas, the late Mohandas' uh Khatab Hezbollah proxy militia, among others.
And his ultimate strategic goal was for the United States to have to withdraw our troops and potentially even withdraw our embassy from Iraq, and they were going to continue to escalate until we did what we did, which was to wrap them on the knuckles, uh a little bit harsher than that.
And sometimes that's what you have to do.
We've seen Iran escalate inside Iraq against us.
And uh, and I think it would have continued.
And I think the the imminent intelligence that that Secretary Pompeo was referring to over the weekend was likely attacks against our people and installations, the embassy, Iraqi bases, which house U.S. service uh men and women, uh, potentially in the region in in in Lebanon, where Lebanese Hezbollah is active and has been active against us.
Uh removing Soleimani, look, i if the supreme leader of Iran wants to launch an attack against us right now, uh the guy he would have chosen to plan it, Solomani is dead.
One of the guys, Soleimani might have picked to execute that operation, Mohandas also dead.
So we've disrupted their attack plans for sure.
Knowing what you know about the Iranians and and look, let's go let's look at the saber rattling that's been going on.
Uh number one, the sanctions are working.
Uh according to my sources, there's a lot of internal strife that's not being reported.
The people have been rising up.
The economy has been impacted negatively in a pretty big way.
It's been had a the president's sanctions have had a big effect on the people in Iran.
Um, and more importantly, they what they did with the oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz, shooting down an American drone, uh going after the Saudi oil fields to interrupt the free flow of oil at market prices.
I mean, they've been begging for this.
Um what do you suspect they're thinking uh in spite of their threats that they're gonna target Americans, they're gonna retaliate, etc.
etc.
I think Trump's pretty clear.
We've we've identified 52 targets.
I would assume they're refineries.
I would assume that that would probably include some of their uh underground nuclear facilities, etc.
But do you think there's that do they understand what our capabilities are and do they fear it or no?
No, they absolutely fear it, and I think their concern, some of their bellicose threats, I think results from the fact that they want us to hold off on taking any more shots against their leadership or against their facility.
And we've made it clear when our embassy was under threat, we took very decisive action, which Secretary Pompeo promised we would take in early December.
And uh, I think there's no question Iran fears ongoing uh follow-on attacks from us.
But let me get back to something else you said, which is also important.
Iran is not a monolith.
They'd like us to think that a hundred percent of the population is mourning Soleimani's death.
But there have been ongoing protests over the last few months in Iran um against the regime, over over the fact that their economy is in free fall and that Solomonni has been taking Iran's very finite resources, P and diverting them for these foreign adventures in Syria and Yemen and Iraq.
And uh so the Iranians are uh are certainly you know outwardly, I think uh many of them mourning Solomon.
They're forced to do so in a police state, but I think maybe quite a few of them are are privately celebrating uh this important strike.
Well, Al Jazeera of all places, interestingly, many in the Middle East are celebrating Soleimani's death.
Uh and I think that's why we have this new alliance with uh Israel, obviously, but also the Jordanians, Egyptians, the Saudis, the Emirates, all against uh Iranian hegemony.
Um thank you, Dan Hoffman.
Always great to have you back.
30 year CIA ops officer.
He gets it, he knows, he understands, and he's one of the 99%, obviously.
Uh 800 nine-four one Sean, you want to be a part of the program.
Wow, if you didn't see uh Ricky Gervais last night, wow, it was amazing.
Get to that, some of the other issues of the date.
I'm Ricky Gervais, thank you.
Um you'll be pleased to know this is the last time I'm hosting these awards, so I don't care anymore.
Um I'm joking.
I never did.
Um NBC clearly don't care either.
Fifth time.
So, I mean, Kevin Hart was fired from the Oscars because of some offensive tweets.
Hello.
Lucky for me, the Hollywood Foreign Press can barely speak English.
And they've no idea what Twitter is.
So I got offered this gig by facts.
So let's go with a bang.
Let's have a laugh at your expense, shall we?
Remember, they're just jokes.
We're all gonna die soon, and there's no sequel.
So yeah, remember that.
Um, but you all look lovely.
Oh, don't up.
You came here in your limos.
I came here in a limo tonight, and the license plate was made by Felicity Huffman.
So tonight isn't just about the people in front of the camera.
In this room are some of the most important TV and film executives in the world, people from every background, but they all have one thing in common.
They're all terrified of Ronan Farrow.
He's coming for you.
He's coming for you.
Look, talking of all you perverts, it was a big year.
It was a big year for pedophile movies.
Um surviving R. Kelly, leaving Neverland, two popes.
Shut up.
Shut up.
I don't care.
I don't care.
No one cares about movies anymore.
No one goes to cinema, no one really watches network TV.
Everyone's watching Netflix.
This show should just be me coming out going, Well done, Netflix, you win.
Everything.
Good night.
But no, no, we've got to drag it out for three hours.
You could binge watch the entire first season of Afterlife instead of watching this show.
That that's a show about a man who wants to kill himself because his wife dies of cancer, and it's still more fun than this.
All right, news roundup information overload.
Uh, if you didn't watch Wow, Ricky Gervais, he was uh speaking at the 77th annual Golden Globe Awards uh at the Beverly Hills.
I I was shocked.
I don't watch these award shows.
I never watch these awards.
I could care less about these award shows.
This was worth watching.
I mean, he just he just went at Hollywood and hit them right between the eyes and did it with a p just it with perfection.
Listen.
I mean, it just it honestly honestly doesn't get any better than that.
I don't know how it could get any better than that.
Anyway, joining us now, uh, my two buddies and friends, my uh colleagues at our flagship in New York, W O R uh the Talk of New York, New Jersey, Long Island.
How are you?
Mark Simone, Joe Kancha, happy new year.
Good to talk to you guys.
Mark, uh you you you cover culture a lot more than I do.
Yeah.
Uh did you see that coming?
I didn't see it coming.
I love that Golden Globes.
I think it was secretly funded by the Trump administration.
There is nothing better for Donald Trump than watching these coked up drunks endorse Democrats.
All right, no, oh, whoa, oh, slow down.
Now look, if you want to, you know, say they're coked up drunks.
Okay, I don't want that lawsuit.
So we don't know that.
Allegedly.
Okay, let's just say uh they seem to be very happy.
I don't know.
I don't think they were doing any drugs.
That's not the Hollywood I know.
Uh I can't imagine drinking.
You know, by the way, Hollywood's in no position to lecture about anything because you know nothing about the real world.
Boom.
Well, uh they were eating a vegan meal to help fight climate change while 750 limousines were idling outside and over a hundred, a hundred private.
Did they still use the stretch ones?
Oh, they have everything.
They got the SUVs, which burn even more gas, but 700 of them idling outside.
They had a hundred private jets to get them all there.
And after they left, believe me, they all went to In N Out Burger because they couldn't uh live just on that vegan stuff.
Yeah, the good point.
Um, and I thought what was also, you know, really interesting is you know, he made a couple of comments.
One about Jeffrey Epstein, one about Harvey Weinstein, basically saying you're all perverts.
You know, you have the most important TV film executives from around the world, every background, but you're all terrified of Ronan Farrow.
And look, talking to all you perverts, it was a big year for pedophile movies, surviving R. Kelly, leaving Netherlands, uh, and the two popes, he says.
And you know, I'm like, then the Epstein crack, then the Weinstein crap uh crack, and I'm like, wow.
Well, uh, and that's another thing.
They're so brave at standing up to Donald Trump.
For the last 15 years, where were you on Harvey Weinstein?
Everybody knew what was going on.
Why didn't you say something?
Well, a lot of people knew about Epstein, and many of them were hanging around with Epstein after he got up out of prison the first time he got caught.
How creepy were those autopsy photos in that 60 minutes piece last night.
Uh, that was one creepy looking cell.
And uh the funny thing, they let him have uh that sleep apnea machine, which had a long electrical cord.
I know, right?
Yeah.
Well, well, if you don't want and then they're saying that he hung himself with that orange news thing, and Botan's like, no, and then they show where the actual uh the line that the autopsy photo.
I was like, oh man, I saw the pick.
It was creepy.
Uh Mr. Concha, welcome aboard, sir.
How are you guys?
Happy New Year.
All right.
Ricky Gervais.
Unbelievable.
The best line of the night, guys.
If you do win an award tonight, don't use it as a platform to make a political speech.
You're in no position to lecture the public about anything.
You know nothing about the real world.
Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Toomberg.
I mean, that's just genius stuff.
Yeah.
He's the biggest hero on the right right now of almost anybody in the country outside of the president himself.
I mean, uh, because this is what half of America's been screaming at their television for the to Mark's point for the last 20 years since these things became so political.
I love Boa Keen uh Phoenix also.
Uh, you know, all you environmentalists in Hollywood, stop taking your private jets to the award shows.
Uh we know that's not gonna happen, is it?
No, and here's the thing.
They served a plant-based menu on this.
Mark did this on the show last week.
It was uh on his show last week.
It was hilarious.
And yeah, okay, that that's nice that you're not gonna serve any meat, but how did you get to the award show exactly?
Did you take a limo, an SUV, a private jet?
And as Joaquin Phoenix is saying that, uh, he hears the exit music like I do on Hannity on your TV show so much.
Suddenly that music's in my ear, and you gotta go.
They basically chased them off the stage for saying that.
That's our way of saying you're done.
Um, without being rude.
Um, you know, look, you gotta pay the bills.
You guys know what it's like.
We all work in radio together, so um uh let me go to another issue that happened over the holiday.
Look, I'll be honest, I am non-plus by Colin Kaepernick.
I really I could care less about this guy.
And I know he wants attention, and you know, he's blasting capitalism.
He's making millions off of Nike.
Um, and I think they have issues with overseas uh labor force uh issues, accusing our military of terrorist attacks.
And uh, you know, I I just it just seems like the press can't get enough of them.
Uh and I'm Mark, I'm looking at this guy and I'm thinking you were you weren't a great quarterback.
People figured out after a couple of years that you're gonna run the football and they're not gonna let you get away with it anymore.
And he wasn't such a great quarterback in the end.
No, he wasn't.
Hey, Listen, uh clearly, I mean, let's be honest.
This is not a guy whose uh test paper you would copy off of.
Uh I mean, and and he's been hit in the head a hundred times.
So uh I uh but again, the press will embrace anybody, anybody that's anti-Trump, anti-Republican.
I mean, can you imagine the Solomon if he uh survived how touched he'd be by uh how revered he is on the fake news networks all of a sudden?
Uh yeah, and what's your take on Kaepernick?
I mean, oh, he's discriminated against.
I saw that uh what was his name?
Congressman Hank Johnson, he's a victim, Kaepernick, mistreated by the NFL.
How's he a if you either hire him or you don't hire him?
I think an argument could be made.
Maybe Tim Tebow was uh people teams didn't want any part of Tim Tebow because he created such a controversy, even though everybody wanted him on his uh you know the the fans wanted him to play.
I mean, and he did win a big game for Denver in the playoffs, I recall.
That's right.
Yeah, he threw uh touchdown and overtime for the Broncos to beat the Steelers, right?
The Steelers are rolling the Super Bowl the year before.
So Tim Tebow was capable.
I mean, he certainly could play in the NFL, maybe not as a quarterback.
He put him on special teams, a guy will do whatever you want.
He's the ultimate team player.
But Kaepernick is a different kind of distraction because he is he good enough to play in the league?
I think so.
I mean, as a backup, sure.
Why not?
I mean, he did go to a Super Bowl, but the problem is that all the press that he would attract after every game, and then he has to do some sort of political speech, every tweet, everything.
If you don't want a guy like that on your team where then your coaches and your teammates have to answer for everything he's saying politically.
And by the way, in terms of numbers, he went one in ten in his final season with the 49ers, two and six the year before that, often injured.
There's another reason why to sign this guy as well.
He just simply wasn't a winner.
He wasn't a good clubhouse guy, so he's not a victim at all.
I mean, most NFL players last a maximum of three years in the league.
He was lucky to get six years out of it, and now he's just too much of a headache to put on a team because of all the negative attention he would attract.
Well, I think that's what why is Nike, you know, look, I'm not the boycott person.
I don't do boycotts.
I never have my whole career.
I'm not going to start now.
But I'm less interested in Nike and Nike products than ever before.
What is what is it with Nike?
Is it that Kaepernick brings that much of an of uh I guess this radical left wing base that supports him to Nike that they're willing to take on that controversial figure and make him a spokesperson?
Well, you it's also demographic.
They're calculating who's their audience, what age group, you know.
And if you're in that age group, you're probably going to be uh, you know, anti-Republican, anti-Trump, anti-this.
So they'll go for that market.
Whereas another company might uh chase the senior citizens, and then they don't need that headache.
So uh demographics that play a big part in it.
What do you think?
I think that yeah, it marks exactly right that in terms of age groups, they want young people who are buying shoes, and once they like Nikes, they're gonna buy him their whole lives.
Uh older folks, uh, you know, are kind of stuck in their ways.
I'll never buy anything but new balance, and that's just the way it's gonna go.
So I don't they don't want me so much, and they don't want you, Sean or Mark, but they want uh younger people who most of them probably are of that political mindset ideology, like a lot of people when they're young, uh, that probably agree with Kaepernick and what he has to say on a certain level.
But you know, what he did with the Betsy Ross flag sneaker, where he said, Well, this brings us back to a time before the revolutionary war because we're using that 13-star flag, and that represents slavery, and Nike just folded on it and said, Okay, we won't go ahead with the Betsy Ross sneaker.
Uh, the problem was that uh President Obama literally had the Betsy Ross flag, so to speak, uh at one of his major events, and no one seemed to have a problem with that because they shouldn't have a problem with that because it was an American flag at one point.
So, yeah, he's an anti-American guy.
I have no sympathy for him.
And by the way, when was the last time he ever did an interview?
He's so outspoken.
Is he really?
He doesn't sit down with anybody to answer any questions about anything that he has to say because he's a coward.
He hides the city.
I've tried to get him on the program.
I've tried many times to get him on.
I bet you have.
Everybody, a lot of people have, and he doesn't want to talk to anybody because that would actually mean having to answer some questions about some of the ridiculous things that he says, including that the killing of Solomon was race-based.
Are you kidding me?
I I mean, we kill a terrorist, and you're gonna take that side.
Uh uh, I mean, uh, he's a coward.
I got nothing left to say about him.
I have never tried to get him on my program because I wouldn't want to have to spend five minutes having to talk to this guy.
Can you imagine?
I mean, if so I'm with him.
All right, quick break, right back.
We'll continue more with Mark Simone, Joe Kancha, and on the other side, media insanity uh and democratic reaction to the death of Solomonny, even Petraeus calling it bigger than bin Laden, and he explains why.
And as we continue with Joe Concha, Mark Simone, both hosts of our flagship in New York.
Let me ask both of you as New York guys, because it came out that New York lost more population.
They're probably going to lose congressional seats to Florida as a result of, you know, these policies of unbelievable taxation and uh gun control and regulation.
I mean, rent regulations.
They tell you whether you can rent, how much you can rent for New York, now you got a wealth tax in New York, a mansion tax if you sell something in New York.
And then Cuomo signs this new bill that is, oh, the no-bail bill.
Explain how I mean, how bad is this from your perspective, Mark Simone?
Because you're like the quintessential New Yorker.
No matter how much you'll save in taxes, you're never gonna leave New York, are you?
No.
And uh I don't know if you heard, but you haul has named Andrew Cuomo, the governor, U-Hall Salesman of the Year.
He's done more for their business.
Number one in people leaving the state, literally number one in the country.
How many people did we lose last year?
Uh was it 70,000 or something like that?
I thought it was 80,000, 78,000.
And the thing is, those are all taxpayers.
They're leaving and they're taking their money with you.
My every year I get the same call, Joe Kancha, uh, from my financial guy.
Don't die in New York.
I'm like, okay, I'll really work on that this year.
I'll try not to die this year.
But he's right, because it's 13%.
They get 13% between the city and the state if you're a state tax.
I would move tomorrow, I swear.
I say this on my show all the time.
Why do I live here?
Why do I live here when I have the worst commute of any commute in the country in terms of New Jersey and New York, with the taxes that I have to pay in New Jersey, but also I work in New York, so I gotta pay the state tax there as well.
And just for what I can get, I I tease myself.
I go into realtor.com and I look at properties outside of like Charleston, South Carolina, or outside of Tampa, Florida.
I'm like, my God, I could get three times of what I'm having right now in New Jersey in terms of space in terms of property, and I don't do it because my family is here, and that's that's the unfortunate.
So that raises the question: what is wrong with our colleague and friend Mark Simone that he's so married to New York?
I don't get it, Mark.
Well, I love it here.
You you love it here, but you know that it's not just a state.
I don't love it as much as you do.
Uh all right, thank you both, Mark Simone, Joe Kancha.
Uh appreciate you being with us.
800-94-1 Sean.
You want to be a part of the program?
We'll get to our phones back to our top story.
Uh the media's sick reaction to the killing of Solomon, and much more straight ahead.
This is a dangerous escalation that brings us closer to another disastrous wall in the Middle East, which could cost countless lives and trillions more dollars and lead to even more deaths, more conflict, more displacement in that already highly volatile region of the world.
Look, it was uh a targeted attack on a government official, a high-ranking military official for the government of Iran.
And what it's done has moved this country closer to war.
We are not safer today than we were before Donald Trump at I don't believe that taking out this particular man was a good idea.
It's not that he was a good man or nice man, that he was more dangerous dead than alive.
He was already a hero, and now he'll be a martyr as well as a hero.
Taking out a bad guy is not a good idea unless you are ready for what comes next.
So there are a lot of questions that Americans are asking today.
First of all, was this decision made carelessly or was it made strategically?
Was there any preparation for the secondary effects and the effects that are going to come after that?
Well, we do know is that Solomon is a person with American blood on his hands.
He's plotted plan and executed attacks uh on American citizens, American soldiers.
He's been doing much to destabilize that region, destabilize Iraq.
Uh but we also know there's uh are larger challenges, strategic challenges in that region.
And we have a president who's failed to show any larger strategic plan.
And under his leadership, uh, with his so-called uh maximum forces, Iran has become a more dangerous, more influential uh regime in that region.
A USA strike killed Iran's most notorious military commander, a murderer with the blood of Americans on his hands.
And uh with the without more information, I can only hope that the president has carefully thought out the national security implications of this attack on our country and the grave risks that it involves.
Uh, but given his track record and his history of making reckless decisions and impulsive decisions uh that undermine U.S. strategic objectives and weaken our allies, particularly recently in Syria.
There's every reason, I think, to be deeply concerned.
Trump's actions last night in bombing the Baghdad airport with a targeted killing of Iran's top military general was an act of war with no authorization or declaration of war from Congress.
He has put us in a state of war with Iran and has seriously escalated this tit for tat conflict, pushing us deeper into an endless quagmire.
So the question is what's the end goal?
What are we trying to achieve here?
This is and was an enormous escalation.
And it follows a string of dubious actions that President Trump has taken that have drastically increased the prospects and the risk of war with Iran and danger to Americans.
So the question, the question is do Donald Trump and his administration have a strategy for what comes next.
Have they thought through and plan for a wide range of retaliatory and asymmetric actions that we'll almost certainly see from Iran in the near term?
Unfortunately, nothing we have seen from this administration over the past three years suggests that they're prepared to deal with the very real risks we now confront.
All right, 20 uh 4 now before the top of the hour.
I mean, this there's nothing Donald Trump can ever, ever, ever do that is gonna please any Democrat.
Oh, but he it shouldn't have been Trump that did it.
I, you know, Joe Lieberman nails it, the opposition to Trump's Solomon strike is untenable, it is senseless, and it is who these Democrats now are.
And oh, he's threatening, he's threatening the the Iranians and their cultural sites.
Oh my goodness.
Um, the Iranians need to know, and and this goes to the heart of what got us here.
You know, this is sort of like, okay, how to deal with murdering dictators, uh, terrorists abroad for dummies.
And if, for example, they orchestrate attacks on American citizens abroad and American interests abroad, yeah, you could expect that America is probably in the right to defend its interests and its people.
Is it any more complicated than just that?
Um, the idea that this is going to lead to boots.
No, Donald Trump's not.
I I can't see any scenario under which that is gonna happen.
Uh escalation, retaliation.
Yeah, the president's clear.
52 sites they've identified.
Yeah.
You don't get to take hostage uh oil tankers from our allies in the narrow straits or Hormuz and disrupt the free flow of oil at market prices, which is the lifeblood of every economy.
You don't get to shoot American drones out of the air and not think America is not gonna respond.
Um, you know, I it just it's it's so basic, it's so fundamental.
Now I know there's a mindset that thinks that we ought to be bribing the dictators.
Sort of like, well, you're gonna give us a hundred and fifty billion dollars like Biden and Obama did.
Yeah, sure.
Meet me at the Baghdad Airport.
We'll we'll do the transfer there.
That's been all over Twitter all weekend.
You don't get to kill Americans in Iraq and not expect that there's going to be a price to pay.
There has to be.
Otherwise, they will continue to do it.
You don't get to orchestrate the attacks on our embassy.
Solomani is our leader.
That was written on the embassy in Baghdad on the wall before we ever got Solomonny.
We know that the Iranians, they have been funding the number one state sponsor of terror, including all of Hezbollah.
They fight proxy wars worldwide.
They fund terrorism worldwide.
They're trying to take over the entire region.
Why do you think Solomani was in Baghdad?
And uh yeah, no, we would not go into war with Iran.
What we will likely do if they retaliate is they're always saber-rattling.
What do you think they've been doing for all these years?
But by the way, after they got the hundred and fifty billion dollars that was supposed to make them be nice to us.
So there are strategic options and decisions.
Again, it goes back to my philosophy that okay, the next generation of weaponry, both offensive and defensive, needs to be built by America so that we never have to send boots on the ground, meaning door to door.
Doesn't mean look, for intelligence purposes alone, you're going to need boots on the ground, but not boots and harm's way in the ground.
Uh back protected, not on the front lines.
That's going to be up to the Iranian people if they want regime change in Tehran.
But I will say this if the three huge refineries of Iran are destroyed, because the president's sanctions already have have caused a lot of instability within Iran, which is why they've been doing this.
They're trying to get America and the world's attention and play off the fears of the appeasers.
And in doing so, they hope that America is going to pony up more money.
And just the opposite happened.
No, we're not paying you any more money.
The era of bribery and trying to extort goodwill out of dictators is over.
And that's why America elected Donald Trump.
You know, note to sell for the Democrats, by the way, that Obama launched 2,800 strikes on Iraq, Syria, none of which had any congressional approval.
All right, let's get to our phones.
Um, let's say hi to Doug is in Florida.
Doug, how are you?
Uh 302 days until we're paying very close attention to your state, sir.
How are you?
Good afternoon, Mr. Hannity.
It's a pleasure to speak with you.
Um a first-time caller and a longtime listener.
Happy New Year, sir.
Glad you called.
Happy New Year to you.
I have two things.
One is a point about the FBI, and then I want to have that lead into a question about Pfizer.
I've heard it said that the upper level management, if you will, of the FBI is corrupt, but the rank and file are just good guys.
And I have to tell you, I I respectfully disagree with that point of view.
And here's why.
Every organization, no matter how what their size, they've all got a grapevine in there.
The administrative staff, the clerical staff, supervisors, subsupervisors, they all know that this stuff's been going on at the top, and they've known it for a long time.
So to simply replace one leader of the FBI with another does not impress me as wow, we got good people there.
Mueller's corrupt, Comey's corrupt, and I believe Chris Ray is corrupt.
I think he's done nothing but stand in Trump's way at every opportunity he's had.
And any of those FBI agents underneath them that know this stuff, have seen the news, have uh listened to the congressional hearings, know that things are rotten and they don't stand up and speak out.
Well, then by their own behavior, listen, I'm gonna be honest.
I uh the rank and file, they don't know what the top brass leadership is doing.
That's not their job to know what they're doing.
Their job, if you work in a field office and you're an FBI guy, you know, you're doing your job every day, and you're doing it within the the confines of what the law allows you to do, which makes what you're doing look, being an FBI agent is dangerous work.
You'll you go undercover, you're going after cartels, you're going after gang members, you're going after uh mob families, you're going after murderers, you're going after kidnappers, you're going after drug dealers.
There's nothing easy about what these guys do.
They're not they're not wired into what's going on in Washington, D.C. Trust me, I've I've got friends that are, you know, in the FBI.
They're just that that's not how they roll.
What the top management's doing is is on their own.
That's what they do.
Anyway, good points, Doug.
Appreciate it.
Uh let's go to Eric in Denver.
Eric, Rocky Mountain High, literally.
How are you?
Glad you called.
Excellent, sir.
I'm uh I'm actually recently transplanted here from the crazy state of California because I couldn't stand it anymore.
But uh well, you're kind of in a half crazy state, but I'm just teasing.
I'll take it.
I'm not sure I like the legalization of marijuana for recreational use at all.
I think it's I I it bothers me.
I think it's a gateway drug.
I think it's um I think there's a danger with it, but people are gonna argue, well, what about alcohol?
I'm not, you know.
I look, I'm I'm libertarian.
People can decide how to live their lives.
I would not engage in that myself.
I agree 100%.
Um anyways, it's uh it's definitely an honor to talk to you.
I uh I watch every night.
I'm a huge supporter, and I want to thank you for the constant pressure you put on the mainstream media to do their job, which is to report facts instead of uh their narrative.
I've I've given up any hope.
It's never gonna happen, but go ahead.
You know, the the the point on Friday was you know, do you know do we think that Iran is going to retaliate?
And then I'm gonna jump ahead.
If you look at the the Democrats' consistent response over the weekend, uh everything that they've all said, you know.
Their position is canon about to the fact that they don't want to rip a band-aid off of the wound because it's gonna hurt.
But ultimately, that's what needs to be done.
You know, the pressure in in with Iran has been building for 40 years.
They've been spoiling for a war with us for 40 years.
And I think that they're gonna look they're gonna look at what the Democrats' response is, knowing that if we if we continue to escalate, it's gonna give a talking point to them, and that's gonna affect Trump in the election.
So I I think they're gonna keep pushing.
There's nothing that Donald Trump is ever going to be able to do if he adopted their entire new Green Deal and their Medicare for all, and he did everything they ever wanted him to do.
And on top of that, uh it cured cancer, they'd still want to impeach him.
They just they can't get over their rage, their hatred, the shock to their system from you know, now it's going on by November, it'll be four years ago.
They they just they are who they are.
They've done nothing for the country.
Um, and the president just has to keep governing.
And he's governing under really difficult circumstances.
That's why I'm saying this is this is now an all hands on deck moment.
You know, some people say, well, what can I do?
And I uh uh my answer is if you vote, thank you.
I'll take it.
That's a big one.
That's huge.
302 days.
Uh I see America literally on the brink here, and the world following, because as goes America, the world shall go also.
And I think that the the path that they would take us down is one of not only appeasement and foreign policy and giving up the lifeblood of our economy, oil and creating more dependency, but it is is it is so fundamentally uh transformational in a negative sense.
I don't know how you ever dig out of the new green deal, everything's free whole that they're they want to dig.
I think it's that bad.
That answer your question.
Yeah, if I if I can make you know one more point, can you imagine the outrage that we would be looking at now if Trump didn't do anything with this actual intel?
You know, I I I made the same point.
If and by the way, thanks for the call.
Imagine we found out six months from now, he had a shot at Solomon and didn't take it.
What?
What?
You you know, he can't win with he's never gonna win with them.
And I just, you know, uh look at the Zogby poll showing the president's approval rating soaring among young young voters now.
He first picked up African Americans, massive support.
It's not an outlier, it's now a trend.
Uh but we got 302 days to go.
I count on nothing.
All right, that's gonna wrap things up.
We are loaded up uh tonight, Hannity, nine Eastern on the Fox News Channel.
Now, we do have uh Senator Josh Hawley.
He has made the introduction of a bill, thankfully, rightfully, that will end Nancy Pelosi's power grab trying to dictate to the U.S. Senate.
Also, Nikki Haley, Congressman Dan Crenshaw, Sarah Sanders, Matt Gates, Jason Chaffetz, Tony Tata, General Tata, Larry Elder, Matt Slap.
We'll cover all grounds of every aspect of all that's happening.
We'll see you at nine back here tomorrow.
Thanks for being with us.
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 down a verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts.
