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April 15, 2022 - Sean Hannity Show
33:07
Best of Hannity: Sean Penn - April 15th, Hour 2
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America Trapped Behind Enemy Lines.
Day number 244.
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All right, news roundup, information overload hour, Sean Hannity Show, 800-941.
Sean, if you want to be a part of the program, two things we're going to hit with our next guest, Kash Patel, former chief of staff of the Pentagon.
And what's fascinating in all of this is nobody in the media mob really has paid attention to the fact that all these reports, Biden sharing intelligence of Russian aggression in the lead up to this invasion of Ukraine with China and then China passing it on to their buddy Putin and their friends in Russia.
How did that not get widely reported and widely criticized?
Listen to Kash Patel.
Good morning, Marie.
It is a colossal failure of leadership.
And it shows another distinction yet between the Biden administration and the Trump administration.
The fact that the commander-in-chief wouldn't answer that question that no one is covering leads me to believe that he took classified intelligence and the reporting is accurate now from multiple sources and handed it over to our world's biggest enemy, U.S.'s biggest enemy, China.
And then, of course, China was going to turn around and give it to Russia because Xi Jinping and Putin have paired up and teamed up against the United States of America.
The fact that this commander-in-chief did not know that was going to happen is outrageous.
But what is tantamount and disrupts American national security is that we're actually doing that.
We, as the United States, are actually sharing classified information that jeopardizes Ukrainian national security interests, European national security interests, and Americans' lives.
It's being shared with our enemy who is sharing it with the next biggest enemy of America.
It is just something that never happened under Trump.
And the fact that it's happening under Biden needs to be fully investigated.
You can't even make this up.
Kash Patel is with us, former Pentagon Chief of Staff.
Sir, great question.
How did that happen?
And why didn't anybody realize how stupid that is?
Hey, Sean, great to be with you.
And thanks for covering this important topic that literally almost no one else is talking about.
I mean, I'll just flip the script, Sean.
Imagine if President Trump took classified information and gave it to Xi Jinping or Putin.
We'd be in 15 rounds of impeachment.
And the reason that Joe Biden is allowed to get away with it is because he obviously has a media that's covering up for him and that won't cover these issues.
But he and his national security apparatus actually convinced him it was a good idea to share classified information with China.
My question is, did they go through the declassification process before they gave it to Xi Jinping?
that they did it, that's a violation of federal law.
They charged me and Trump with doing that, but we abided by the process anytime we dealt with classified information.
And it's another example of a two-tiered system of how the rules apply to a commander-in-chief if you're a Democrat and your name is Joe Biden.
But the biggest travesty is the fact that our commander-in-chief thinks or thought and his team thinks or thought that that was a good idea.
When you look back now and how the media, for example, this phone call with Zelensky and Donald Trump and Zelensky even said publicly that I didn't feel any pressure from Donald Trump, the one fact witness, there was only one, one fact witness in that whole impeachment.
Everybody else was a hearsay witness or an opinion witness, none of which, their testimony was meaningless.
But then you have Joe Biden on tape admitting, you're not getting a billion dollars unless you fire this Ukrainian prosecutor investigating my son being paid millions, who admits on Good Morning America he had no experience in energy, oil, gas, or Ukraine.
And then he's asked, well, why do you think you got all this money?
I don't know.
Maybe because your dad's in charge of Ukraine for the Obama administration?
Probably.
So they ignore that.
But there's something bigger here.
And that is this Hunter Biden laptop from hell.
Almost everybody said the same thing, that this laptop was Russian misinformation.
It was two weeks before the election.
And if you look at the money that Hunter Biden made and look what's on that laptop and look at the emails specifically referencing Joe Biden's cut in all of this and the billion five deal with the Bank of China or Peter Schweitzer's new book points out the 30 million other monies from China.
When you look at the Russian oligarch and the former first lady of Moscow and millions of dollars going to Hunter's firm, you look at Burisman, the millions that he made in Ukraine.
It seems to me that if the last name were Trump, that the media would have handled this very differently starting with the laptop two weeks before the election.
Yep, you're exactly right.
Just like the classified information we just talked about, if the last name were Trump and we were talking about Don Jr., there would have been federal inquiries from now until the end of time, and not to mention all the grand juries that would have been utilized.
But at least finally, it's now coming out.
And thanks to your reporting, the continuous, relentless reporting on the truth on this one, that Hunter Biden laptop is not a fiction.
And here's the stunning part.
And you and I knew it long ago.
50 national security officials, two former CIA directors, and one former director of the National Security Agency all came out and signed a document and said that the Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation and they lopped it over to the left-wing media and the fake news ran with it to crush that narrative, even though they knew it was false.
And it's one step removed from that is these national security officials were not in position to have access to that information.
So what did they do?
They just guessed because they knew the left wing would latch onto it and the media would report it.
And who gets hurt by that type of misinformation?
The American people and our faith in our institutions of justice and intelligence because you see a two-tiered system of justice for the likes of Hunter Biden versus the likes of Don Jr.
versus the likes of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
And that's what ticks off America the most.
But it's finally coming out.
And it looks like, you know, from my days as a former federal prosecutor, it looks like this investigation to Hunter Biden is still active and is very much ongoing.
And they've put people in the grand jury.
And I didn't put Grant people in the grand jury unless I was bringing a federal indictment.
Or as the March 19th Saturday edition of the New York Post had as their front cover, Spies Who Lie, the intelligence experts that falsely discredited Hunter Biden's laptop and still won't say they're sorry.
That included Brennan and Clapper and people like Leon Panetta and then a lot of names.
Michael Hayden was one of them.
And then a lot of names that you would know that many other Americans wouldn't know, but these are the people that are at the highest level, 51 former intelligence officials.
They were willing to go with the lie for political reasons, which shouldn't surprise everybody because these are the same people, many of the same people that pushed the phony Russian dirty disinformation dossier that Hillary Clinton paid for, that literally put this country on hold for three and a half years, and it all turned out to be debunked and full of lies.
You're absolutely right.
It's the same M.O., whether it's RussiaGate, Ukraine impeachment fiasco hoax or Tunner Biden laptop, what do they do?
They damn the facts.
They say, let's get anonymous reporting.
Then let's get former federal officials to talk about the anonymous reporting.
And then we'll put it on the front page of every fake news publication.
And we'll say the right-wing media was lying the entire time because we have anonymous reporting and completely biased individuals like Comey, Clapper, McCabe, and the like, who all have been caught, I believe, lying under oath, doing their jobs improperly, fired for doing so.
And these are the sources and individuals that what left-wing media is relying on to prop up these narratives.
And they've done it over and over and over again.
And we caught him in Russia Gate.
We caught him in the Ukraine impeachment fiasco.
We caught him during Hunter Biden's laptop nonsense.
And I think John Durham is going to catch them all.
Why do you believe that?
Because I don't have the confidence that that's going to happen.
For the life of me, I was pretty pissed off that it took Michael Horowitz, the Inspector General, as long as it took him, but he did have referrals, and it was a very, for me, it was full vindication of all my reporting, pretty damning for the rest of the media mob.
And I would argue that even the low-hanging fruit he could have gone after, and he hasn't done so.
Why?
Yeah, so I think, you know, from my days as a former federal prosecutor building large-scale conspiracy cases and doing terrorism prosecutions, when you involve classified information, I spent three, four, five years before I got to the X on an indictment.
And he's in year two.
And if you look at the three indictments he's leveled so far against the FBI, against the Clinton lawyer campaign, and against the Steele dossier source, he's listed in those indictments by name dozens of individuals, or at least by title, like Jake Sullivans of the world, who have had their hand in this conspiracy.
And you don't do that as a federal prosecutor unless you've put witnesses in a grand jury, unless you've obtained documents and you're working on the larger-scale conspiracy case.
And that's the thing that comes at the end.
These little indictments, little is not the right word, but these indictments at the precursor indictments that lay out their entire strategy for this prosecution.
So who would you see as the natural targets of Durham at this point, based on the little that we know in terms of the direction he's headed with Sussman, et cetera?
Andy McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI and the acting director of the FBI, who signed one of the FISAs, as I think.
Wait a minute.
James Comey signed three of the four FISAs, and we knew by that point, we knew that Christopher Steele even admitted that some of his dossier wasn't accurate.
The sub-source denied the entire dossier by the time the third warrant came around, or the second warrant even, and then he still did it, and Rod Rosenstein signed the fourth warrant.
No, I agree.
Look, I think all of those people should be indicted.
But the problem is, you and I, Sean, both know that is there enough evidence to do that?
And I just don't think James Comey.
Wait a minute.
Doesn't it say that you have affirmed the veracity of this on the top of a FISA warrant?
It does, but he can come in and say he was just relying on 17 people in front of him.
He always left himself an out.
That's why that guy's the biggest, most corrupt FBI director we'll ever have in U.S. history.
He's not dumb, unfortunately, and he knew exactly what he was doing to the detriment of the American people.
So he could come out and thump his chest and say he was, you know, the savior of our republic.
What would like say happen to Strzz and Paige or the director of national intelligence or former CIA directors or any of these other people?
Are they going to be held accountable?
I think the likes of Strzok and Paige will.
If I was them, I'd be cooperating.
And I'm hearing that they might be already cooperating to get the individuals you just talked to or at least get them in the report.
But I'm hopeful for about six more indictments come this spring and summer about some of the individuals we've talked about, about the individuals I investigated when I ran the Russian Gate investigation for Chairman Nunes and exposed this whole thing.
I have some personal stake in this, Sean.
So Strzzok, Paige, and all those, all that entire crew, Bruce Orr, Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, all of them.
Quick break.
We'll be right back.
More with Kash Patel, former Pentagon Chief of Staff, 800-941.
Sean is on number.
We'll get to your calls at the bottom of the half hour.
All right, more with Kash Patel, former Pentagon chief of staff, is with us.
Let me ask you this question because you went before the January 6th Committee, and I keep saying the fact that the chairman has said that Nancy Pelosi is off limits, and you were in the Oval Office with five people on January 4th when President Trump authorized, you told me, up to 20,000 troops should they be needed for January 6th, knowing a lot of people were going to be in town, knowing we came off a summer rioting, knowing that there's always unsavory characters in any big crowd.
So my question to you is you have confirmed this to me.
President Trump has publicly confirmed this to me.
Mark Meadows has confirmed this to me.
Now, the other two people in the room, if I'm not mistaken, were the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Have either one of them publicly said that that's accurate?
I believe the Defense Secretary Chris Miller has said that publicly.
I'm not sure what he said under closed door testimony, but I've known Chris for 20 plus years.
And I can't see him saying otherwise because he was in the room.
Now, as to Mark Milley, you and I both know what kind of man Mark Milley is.
He'll say and do anything, including call our enemy China and give him a heads up if we're going to go to war to them and save time for interviews with Bob Woodward and company before actually strategizing how to get out of Afghanistan.
So it wouldn't shock you.
So then the question is, if we want to, and by the way, I want to make sure this never happens again.
And I was saying it in real time on January 6th on air on this radio program when it was unfolding.
And I said it that night on TV.
I couldn't have been more clear.
And just like I spoke out about the 574 riots, I believe in the rule of law, and I believe that people that don't follow it deserve to get punished.
But the question is, once Donald Trump, as required by law, authorized the calling up of the guard, then the jurisdiction switched to Nancy Pelosi, the speaker.
It's her job to protect the Capitol and the jurisdiction of Mayor Bowser, and yet neither one of these people are being interviewed by the committee.
Why is that?
Well, I mean, they call themselves a Jan 6 committee, Sean, and I can tell you about my time, my six hours in front of them.
They spent four of those hours talking to me about Afghanistan, the Oval Office, President Trump, the media, and they spent less than half that time talking about Jan Six.
So you and I both know it's a political charade to get guys like me rolled up, spend six figures in attorneys, and try to stamp out the media narrative, but I'm not taking a knee.
And why isn't these people being held accountable, Pelosi and Bowser and stuff?
That won't happen.
You and I both know that, Sean, until the Republicans have the gavel.
They're not going to call those folks in to testify.
So you believe in the end it's a predetermined outcome?
Yes, a political narrative.
Look, the only thing they have to run on right now for the midterm election, they being the Democrats in Pelosi, is Jan 6th.
And up until a while ago, they had no other narrative.
And now they're running, you know, somehow on the Ukraine tragedy.
They'll politicize that.
But that's the only thing they got left because their policies that you've reported have completely failed the American people.
And Joe Biden, at least on a national security and law enforcement front, has beyond failed Americans.
Listen, beyond them willing to give humanitarian aid and some javelins and stingers, I'm not exactly sure why Joe Biden denied the MiGs to the Ukrainian people that are showing a willingness to fight hard and save their own freedom and their own country is beyond what I understand.
It's certainly not the Reagan doctrine as I understood it, nor was it the Trump doctrine as I understood it, the two doctrines I support the most.
But Kash Patel, always love having you on.
Thank you for being with us, former Pentagon Chief of Staff.
thanks for uh all you do and hopefully we'll have you back soon when we come back more of the best of the sean hannity show Stay tuned.
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All right, 25 to the top of the hour.
Got a ton of reaction, most of it very positive.
Some people didn't like that I had Sean Penn on, but I would say 95, 7% of people like the exchange, the back and forth, because it's not somebody I would ever agree with on any other political issue.
But we talked, we had a discussion about Ukraine.
He's very passionate about it, teared up a number of times.
And it's, anyway, it's got such a reaction.
We're going to play some of it here, the highlights here.
Then we'll get to the gubernatorial race in New York.
Believe it or not, it's within the margin of error.
And then we'll get to your calls also coming up at 800-941-Sean.
But let me play my interview with Sean Penn.
Here with Moore is the award-winning actor, filmmaker, co-founder of CORE.
His name is actor Sean Penn.
How are you?
Thanks for coming in.
Appreciate it.
I want to start this.
So I made a phone call to you.
I read that you were there.
And the story interested me.
If you were on this set 99 out of 100 times, we probably would be in full disagreement, right?
No question about that.
All right.
So I make the first phone call to you.
I don't know if you remember.
And I said, I'm interested in the work that you're doing and why you were there even before the war started and this documentary you're doing.
You remember what you first said to me?
I do.
What'd you say?
I said that I don't trust you.
Is there a reason you didn't trust me?
Yeah, there's a lot of reasons I don't trust you, but my trust or your trust, you know, there's so many people that don't trust their spouse, and yet we've got to get on with life.
And we've got a situation.
I've never felt this way about where our country is and what I experienced emotionally in Ukraine, where it had not, we all talk about how divisive things are, how divided things are here.
But when you step into a country of such incredible unity, you realize what we've all been missing.
And I don't think that I've got time to indulge my lack of trust, which becomes a petty thing as people and babies are being vaporized.
And that these people are fighting for the very dreams that are the aspiration of all of us Americans.
And we talked about that too.
We agreed on that.
That we've got to take their examples.
We'll worry about political disagreements.
If you ever want to come back another day, you're always in fair enough.
Here's what I want to know.
You were there in November of 2021.
Okay.
We really, we're not even talking about the real lead-up to this conflict by that point.
Right.
Why were you there originally to do a documentary?
What was it about Ukraine, or maybe it was about Zelensky that interested you?
Well, I think I was in the better part of the population of most Americans in any understanding of Ukraine.
What was Ukraine?
Who was Ukraine?
Where was Ukraine?
With the exception of a phone call between President Zelensky and President Trump that was made a lot of, and the fact that President Zelensky had been a comedic actor who had played a character that then became the president and then became the president.
We went initially to make a documentary that would bring home a sense of Ukraine and of a profile of this president.
But it wouldn't have been as interesting.
And then the next thing you do is you see this buildup of Vladimir Putin on the eastern side of Ukraine.
You got, first we have 50,000 troops, then it's 100,000 troops, and all the military equipment.
And you're chronicling all of this and you develop a relationship with Zelensky.
Tell us, as this was unfolding, a lot of the world didn't think that Putin would do it.
I did think he would.
You know, all the experts I talked to thought that he would.
Most of the experts that were speaking out, the United States Intelligence Agency and others felt that he would.
I'll tell you that to the last minute, I think the part of me, the part of me that would want to be in denial of what that would mean to Ukraine and ultimately to the world, I thought, really?
Is there an upside to this for him?
But what I wasn't really savvy to was that I gather you, but in particular, well, so universally the experts on Putin felt this was going to happen.
And what didn't happen, therefore, were the preemptive sanctions on enough of a dramatic level before he was so deep in that the humiliation wasn't going to let it stop and that you weren't going to have the simplicity of negotiations for regions of the East or Marupol to be able to make the bridge from Crimea.
And now it was going to be this full-on assault, and here we are.
Okay, prior to Zelensky, I didn't know a whole lot about Zelensky like a lot of people until the infamous phone call.
I still to this day think there was nothing to that phone call.
Separate issue.
But he had taken Georgia.
Putin had taken Georgia in 08.
He annexed Crimea in 2014.
He has shown a willingness to annex, take over land, showing his territorial ambitions.
So you get there, you're interviewing Zelensky at this time.
Did he see this coming?
Did he believe that this was real?
Well, it's interesting because we had met initially on a Zoom call back.
Did you trust him?
I was really interested to see who he was.
And I didn't have the baggage with him I have with you.
What is the baggage?
We never met before.
Go on.
Well, actually, I have as a badge of honor.
No, as a badge of honor in my house, I've got the full screen that I dominate as an enemy of the state with you in Ford.
I don't remember.
It's a true thing.
But here's what happened: then, because of COVID, once we had gotten a sense that he was very much considering giving us some kind of access and spending some time with us, we were delayed and we were delayed.
And so then we went back.
We started in shooting in November.
We went to Mariupol on the front lines.
And then we also were in Kiev and talking to musicians and to get a sense of the culture.
But there was the Wagner problem that was going on at the time.
And so the administration was very, so we couldn't see him.
We came back and then this thing really escalated.
So then we went, I think we got there, I don't know, roughly a week before the invasion, and we met him.
I met him face to face for the first time the day before the invasion and then spent time with him, which we document in the film during the invasion on the day of the invasion.
And I don't know that there's a person on earth who could know that they were born for such a day, that they could rise to it.
I want to make sure we're on the same page.
When you say invasion, was this him taking the two region Donbass, et cetera?
Or there were also rockets coming in.
This is also when they hit the airport 15 clicks out of Kyiv.
So it was game on.
And so in him, I saw something that I've never seen before in my lifetime.
That, like I said, having seen him, yes, prepared for it.
Yes, hoping against hope it would not happen.
But a man who'd not yet been challenged with it's happening.
And the next day, I saw something that is a man, but it's a man with the adrenalized.
He's the face of something that you see in all the Ukrainians we saw and talked to, whether they were in uniform, out of uniform, school teachers, even children.
This extraordinary courage that's come up.
And it was in his eyes.
And it is clear to me that the Ukrainians will win this.
The question is at what cost.
And so one of the things we're not seeing, we're not seeing by any scale UN organizations operating, they can.
We're also talking a lot of, they talk about security for aid and supplies being resourced to civilians and to military.
And for civilians, in many cases, up armored, armored vests are important.
So one of the things I want to say just about what it is being there is that, of course, there are risks in a conflict zone.
But it is not what we picture so often about a bunch of here we come to save the day foreigners.
You take one car and one truck of supplies to that border, give that truck and those supplies to Ukrainians who aren't going to leave if you ask them to and are going to be at risk with or without our help.
So we might as well give them the help.
They'll bring the supplies to where they've got to go.
How is that any different than I'm saying?
Supply the drones, supply the javelins, supply the stingers.
Because I'm not talking about anybody's doctrine that got us into a lot of other anti-missile systems they need, the defense systems, the anti-military aircraft systems hanging.
And I would give them the MIGS.
So we're in agreement.
We absolutely agree.
And fight the war to win it.
And that means defeat Russia.
Or let them fight it to win it because they will.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
Let the Ukrainians fight themselves.
We agree.
The only thing we talked about, the only thing we felt, was the deepest sense of heartbreak, first for the Ukrainians who were going to fight, be maimed, be injured, be in a war of attrition.
But very quickly, I thought, this one, this one, my children are going to feel if this thing is not one.
They're going to feel it in tangible ways in their life.
Our children in America.
This is, you and I can argue all day, but I look at you and I think you believe in this country in your way.
I believe in it in mine.
And I think it's at risk because the great dream of it, the aspiration of it with all its diversity, because Ukrainians, with all their unity, they got a lot of diverse thought over there, too.
I think we're really at risk if we let the greatest, most historic in our lifetime fight for democracy against a gigantic superpower of a military intimidation.
They've done amazingly well.
With what they've had, outmanned, outgunned.
Yeah, so that's what I felt from my time there.
I talked to the mayor of Kiev, who's Mayor Klitschko, who former world heavyweight champion.
Yeah.
Read about.
This was in November.
This was somebody who very well could have run against Zelensky in the next election and perhaps beaten him.
We talked to a lot of people, and that seemed to be the consensus that this would be competitive.
He didn't have a lot of praise for the president.
Tonight, as we're sitting here, that same very powerful figure, Klitschko, has enlisted in President Zelensky, that commander-in-chief's military.
He's in the fight.
So it tells you everything.
I mean, this is leadership.
We talk about leadership.
We talk to leaders.
No one on the planet's been tested in leadership like this human being.
You're really emotional about this.
Yeah.
And I think the Ukrainians will win.
Western Europe and America needs to supply them with the weaponry to win.
And if they do, they'll be defeating, in my view, evil in our time.
And that's following the Reagan doctrine and, frankly, the Trump doctrine, even though you don't care about doctrines.
You know what the Hannity Doctrine is?
I'll give it to you quick.
If you invade a sovereign country, you forfeit your right to lead a country and you forfeit your right to live.
Meaning Vladimir Putin has forfeited his right to live.
Last word.
Well, I think that what would be most interesting about that conversation is to ask those generals, those military commanders in Russia who also have been sanctioned, whose children won't become the United States for their education or going to England for their education or a lot of other places.
I don't want to invest in a conversation, not that I don't have it privately, about my feelings about what direct action should happen to a leader who does that.
But if there is a God, there will be vengeance beyond all possible comprehension.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.
It's a quoted in a very famous book.
Good luck with your work.
I hope that this war ends soon.
And I hope they are victorious.
And I hope Putin gets put right back in the grave that he deserves to be in for doing this.
And I hope it stops here.
And that's it.
By the way, we've got to ask you.
You never let a dollar happen.
That's a bad answer on the other side.
You're invited to come back and talk, but you'll never talk politics with me on this show, will you?
I don't know because I think we're in a different time.
We all got stuck to talk to you.
Do you trust me now more than you did?
I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to weigh in on the Putin thing.
No, no, you said to me, first of all, I don't trust you.
That's what you said to me.
Do you trust me that I keep my word?
You absolutely kept your word.
So why don't you trust me?
You know what happens is that there's a lot of physical therapy necessary after a big car accident.
You don't get it all done in a day.
All right.
I wish our prayers are with the innocent victims of this conflict.
Yes.
Dying, and I wish you luck and the heroes you were fighting for.
But we'll come back next time.
We'll battle over Hugo Chavez or something fun.
That's an interesting conversation.
All right.
All right.
Seriously?
Thank you for being with us.
Thank you.
All right.
We appreciate it.
All right.
That was from my interview with Sean Penn from last night on Hannity on the Fox News channel.
When we get back, believe it or not, a poll just came out showing the gubernatorial race in New York between Kathy Hochul, who used to be lieutenant governor, took over for Andrew Cuomo, and Lee Zeldon, Congressman, is pretty much within the margin of error, dead even.
I mean, this is a shocking poll.
Is New York in play?
I mean, looking at these numbers, I can make a great case that it is.
We'll get to that.
Your calls, 800-941-Sean, as we continue.
Up next, our final roundup and information overload hour.
Hey, don't forget, catch the best of the Sean Hannity Show every weekend, right here on this station.
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