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Feb. 20, 2026 - Sean Hannity Show
29:12
FBI Under the Microscope
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FBI's Journalist Investigation 00:14:29
This is an iHeart podcast.
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Hour to Sean Hannity Show.
Here's our toll-free number.
It's 800-941.
Sean, if you want to be a part of the program, while I guess the rest of the world has kind of been caught flat-footed, John Solomon, I think the greatest investigative reporter we have in our time at justthenews.com.
It's a founder, its editor-in-chief, chief investigative reporter, has been busy at work, and he has a story out how the FBI went after reporters and journalists and clergy with zero evidence, zero probable cause using a loophole.
And the FBI opened over 1,000, matter of fact, over 1,200 probes related to politicians, journalists, religious leaders, academics, others tied to sensitive investigative matters using a special investigative tool that requires no factual predicate to launch, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Now, the GAO report, which was obtained by justthenews.com, published last month, not made public, and it's titled FBI Investigative Activities, Oversight Efforts for Opening and Conducting Assessments Should Be Strengthened.
And the report now is assisting Congressional Oversight and the executive branch providing details on roughly 127,000 FBI assessments in all open, you know, all that were open from 2018 to 2024, the vast majority of which were eventually closed without accusations of wrongdoing or criminal charges.
It's sort of like Big Brother personified in ways that nobody really ever knew.
And anyway, let's go back.
You know, for some reason, Director Chris Ray has kind of ducked any responsibility or questioning.
And I know there's been more focus on James Comey.
And as far as I'm concerned, James Comey knew everything that he was doing and was involved in, you know, everything from helping Hillary Clinton and helping cover up the Hunter Biden laptop and the Russia collusion hoax and everything in between.
And he knew damn well what he was doing.
That's my personal opinion based on my knowledge of what we know at this time.
We'll see what happens over time if there's a grand conspiracy investigation that is real.
But let's go back to a hearing.
This is in 2023 of Jim Jordan questioning Director Wr about suppression of conservatives investigating Catholics.
Well, your FBI wrote a memo talking about radical traditional Catholics.
I'm just wondering if you can define it for us.
Well, what I can tell you is you're referring to the Richmond product, which was a single product by a single field office, which as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast.
Do you think priests should be informants inside the church, director?
We do not recruit, open, or operate confidential human sources to infiltrate, target, report.
But that's not like religious.
That's not what this said.
It sounds like you were trying to do it in Richmond, Virginia.
No, sir.
No, sir.
You weren't?
This didn't happen.
You can assure us that this didn't happen.
That product did not, to its best as we can tell, result in any investigative action as a result of it.
None.
Now, the other big issue, and this goes for tiger moms like Linda, Linda likes to show up at school board meetings because she wants to know what her kids are being taught, and she doesn't want her kids to be indoctrinated.
And remember, the FBI was getting involved in school board meetings.
Here's Christopher Wray testifying to Laurel Lee, the FBI is not policing speech at school board meetings, which is just not true.
They were.
Agents surveilled that agents did in fact surveil and investigate certain parents who were attending school board meetings.
No, ma'am, that's actually not correct.
We opened 25 assessments into reports that were tagged, but none of those involved incidents at school board meetings.
And to my knowledge, the FBI has not opened investigations on any parent for exercising speech at school board meetings.
Would you be concerned that to do so would be an infringement or perhaps a chilling on the First Amendment rights of parents to participate freely and openly in those meetings?
Do you believe that would be an appropriate function of the Bureau?
I believe that our mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution.
And the uphold the Constitution part is very important to me and to our people.
And I will say to you the same thing I said to all 56 of our field offices as soon as I read that memo, which is the FBI is not and has never been in the business of policing or investigating speech by parents at school board meetings.
And we're not about to start now.
Joining us now, founder, editor-in-chief, chief investigative reporter, justthenews.com, John Solomon.
Is what we heard from then director of the FBI, Director Ray, true?
I don't think so.
Now, there are three things we have to decide in that.
One, was Chris Ray not told the truth about what his agents were doing?
That's a strong possibility given what we've learned over the last three years.
Two is he's trying to play cute and play in the ambiguity of terms that mean something very specific in the FBI, but to the average human doesn't mean anything.
So you can say we never opened up an investigated, predicated investigation on the school fair.
But if you did 25 assessments, which he admitted to, you've been investigating those parents.
You just investigated them under a standard that was lower, which is we don't have reason to believe they committed a crime.
We just looked at them.
That's what an assessment is.
And I think that he played in the margins of ambiguity, and he hasn't been pinned down.
But I think the era of Chris Ray is going to become the most troubling era of the FBI since the J. Edgar Hoover era.
I think we're moving into some really extraordinary revelations about what Chris Ray's FBI did, what they knew, what they didn't tell.
By the way, I want everyone to pay very close attention because what John Solomon is saying to you now is what he knows to be true and is in the process of putting together in what will be a blockbuster, I think, report at some point in the near future.
I'm just going based on my past experience with you.
Let's be real because I've known you for 15 years and this is John Solomon.
Speak for you.
I know what's coming.
Yeah, I think, yeah, we are really very close to putting some very troubling pieces together.
Some of them will be what we weren't told about foreign influence operations in the United States aimed at elections.
Some of it will be the monitoring of what these assessments ultimately did, these assessments.
Let me just tell you what an assessment is.
An assessment is I don't have enough to investigate John Solomon and Sean Hannity.
I can't open up a preliminary investigation, and I certainly can't open up a full investigation because I don't have a predicate.
But I assess that I should be looking at John Solomon.
There's something bad about this guy.
He's been writing about Hunter Biden.
He's a national security threat.
And so you open up an assessment.
And those assessments, according to the GAO report that was never released, but that we made public last week, include the ability to monitor someone, basically have a surveillance team on them, be able to do peek and seeks and try to find out, go interview people around them and cause doubt about them.
I believe we're about to learn about a new operation.
All right.
We know of several operations.
Let's go to Operation Crossfire Hurricane.
A fake effort to make it look like Trump World was in bed with Russia.
It was never true, right?
We know about Arctic Frost, an effort to look at everybody around Donald Trump in hopes that they would one day find some sort of crime.
And oh, by the way, that meant monitoring the protected communications of nine members of Congress.
Between Operation Arctic Frost 2022 to 25 and Operation Crossfire Hurricane, there is going to be a new operation that was looking at people who dared to investigate the Biden family, who dared to investigate things that challenged the official narrative in Washington, who dared to ask questions about Ukraine and view them as national security risks and assess them as that and begin to use the tools of the FBI.
So Chris Ray will say, we didn't investigate journalists.
We didn't investigate parents.
Nah, you couldn't meet the standard of an investigation.
So you just put us under review under a thing called an assessment, basically a no-proof, use the tools of the FBI to turn someone's life upside down.
I believe that's what we're going to learn in the next few weeks.
A brand new operation that fell between Arctic Frost and Crossfire Hurricane that has some very troubling hallmarks of the Jay Edgar Hoover era all over again.
Let me ask you this, because I know that both the Attorney General Pam Bondi, the FBI Director Kash Patel, then Deputy FBI Director Dan Bungie, you know, have all spoken publicly about opening a grand conspiracy investigation.
Do you have an update on whether or not that is progressing, whether or not that is a possibility?
Because why that would be critical is all the statute of limitations that apply to James Comey and others, that that would be washed away.
Now, I do need to caution people.
Grand conspiracies are very hard to prove in a court of law.
It takes a lot of thought to get to this.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
Yes, in Fort Pierce, Florida, there is a very active grand jury investigation, lots of subpoenas.
This is a sign that we know it's a conspiracy case and not a case looking just at crimes that are currently in the statute of limitations.
One of the people we know got grand jury subpoenas and that the subpoenas are about the former CIA director, John Brennan.
Now, there is a legitimate criminal referral against John Brennan for testimony he gave in 2023 to the House Judiciary Committee.
jim jordan made that referral that is a chargeable offense within the by the way i've been hearing rumors for weeks now that his arrest is possibly imminent Yeah, I think that there's, well, at least a decision by the grand jury.
They're going to ask the grand jury soon.
It seems like they're certainly moving in that direction.
All the signs that you watch as a reporter.
But something happened last week that is very important.
The grand jury and the prosecutors running it made a request to the United States Senate for things that John Brennan said that are outside the statute of limitations.
Remember, he started testifying about Russia collusion in 17, way outside the statute of limitations.
The fact that the grand jury and the prosecutors running that grand jury want things outside the statute of limitations, clearly a sign that they're looking at an ongoing conspiracy and not things that just happened in the time.
That is a big, giant revelation.
The request came into the Senate.
Unfortunately, the Senate's on vacation again.
So until they get back, that may not be fully returned to the grand jury.
But those are the sort of things that are going on.
And, you know, John Brennan's lawyers know this.
They're watching it.
But these are very big moments.
And there are real signs that this Miami U.S. Attorney's Office and that career group of prosecutors who are really battle-tested, excellent conspiracy case prosecutors.
They went after the drug lords and the cartels and the mob.
They're now running this case.
And it's going to be done professionally.
The grand jury is going to make a decision based on the evidence, not on the politics.
And we'll know soon.
But certainly there is clear evidence that John Brennan is currently a focal point of that conspiracy investigation.
We'll see whether they take any action or whether, as he has always said, he says he thinks he's innocent.
There's a lot of evidence that contradicts that, but we'll see, see what happens.
Well, we are going to see what happens, and it's going to get very, very interesting.
One of the things that I hear from my sources all the time is that they are discovering more and more evidence.
I mean, we had the burn bag issue, but more things that maybe we thought were never going to be recovered, but we'd never get a hold of.
I'm even hearing, you know, chatter about Hillary Clinton's servers that she washed clean with bleach bit, you know, like with a cloth, that that may be on the table.
That may be recovered.
Is there any truth to that?
There are some efforts that have been going on in the intelligence committee, which are completely legitimate.
And by the way, the first reason to do this is not just to go get Hillary Clinton, it's to make sure that if there were national security vulnerabilities that Hillary Clinton's reckless use of the private email server for classified information created, that those be gotten to the bottom of it.
There's a second reason.
There's been ongoing concern, and we broke the story last summer, and you were kind enough to have me on the show.
There were three separate FBI investigations looking at whether the Clinton Foundation operated as a pay-to-play operation.
There is some new evidence that has been recovered because in the world we live in, you may have your server, but when you send your email out, it goes out into the web and various bits of it stay in different servers around the world.
And there are new technologies that our government has that can recreate emails from 10 years ago, 14 years ago, and also allow some of our allies to do so in Europe.
And there has been an effort to recover some of Hillary Clinton's unrecovered emails, the ones that have yet not been, along with many other pieces of information that would help us understand: did a bad actor like China gain access to something?
Did somebody compromise a public figure because they got access to something they shouldn't have?
All of that is going on.
And while that's going on, those capabilities have also led the United States government to discover some new types of intrusions into our elections and into certain types of election databases.
Now, I'm not talking voting machines.
I'm talking about where your voter IDs are kept and where your registration records are correct.
And they're beginning to make connections.
Remember, we talked about this in November, Sean, that they had these driver's licenses that China sent to the United States in a plot to help Joe Biden potentially win the election.
Where did the data come from that?
That could have come from hacking.
And we're now being recreating some of these capabilities to find out what was going on that we haven't been told.
Those are important moments.
Same technology, same group of people doing it.
Giving Up Hockey 00:06:39
John Solomon, founder, creator, editor-in-chief, chief investigative reporter, justthenews.com.
Always, John, a pleasure.
We appreciate you sharing your information, your hard work with us.
Thank you, sir.
Yeah, good to be with you.
Thanks so much.
All right, lightning round with Linda today.
Now, just you got to be careful.
You know, this is radio.
We are governed by some rules, and some of this may trigger you knowing your personality, which, you know, can be at times volatile.
Wow.
Your school board meeting.
A good leader.
True or false.
Are you a Tiger Mama at the school?
I'm working my way to Lion.
I never heard of a Lion mom.
I want to be.
That's pretty cool.
I want to be the first one.
I think that's a compliment.
I think it's cool.
Agreed.
You're care enough about your kids.
You show up and you want to make sure.
If you think you're teaching that crap to my kids, you got another thing coming.
That's them getting a piece of your mind.
Anyway, so just a quick reaction.
I just thought I just thought of this idea today.
Don Lemon says people of Minnesota and the church he entered didn't believe he was a journalist because he is black.
Reaction.
One sentence.
Nobody cares that he's black.
They just don't care about him, period.
Nobody, in other words, people are not looking at skin color.
That's simple.
But even if they are, they hate him because he's him, not because he's black.
So those people are Christians.
They probably don't hate anybody.
Tom Holman, we just found one two days ago, a 14-year-old girl, little girl, living with two adult males.
We found her.
She's pregnant from trafficking forced into prostitution.
14 years old.
They have found hundreds of thousands of these children lost during the Biden years of open borders and no vetting.
This is insane.
I'm sure that we are going to have a lot of buttons worn on red carpets for that 14-year-old.
I'm sure everybody cares a lot about her.
Okay.
Well, it just breaks my heart.
You know, there were 5,400 arrests of illegal immigrants accused or found guilty or convicted of raping or sexually assaulting Americans.
Right, but the problem is how fast do they let out on cash-free bail sanctuary cities and states?
That's the real issue.
32% of the country, as we learned earlier in the week, 31% of the country lives in a sanctuary under sanctuary provisions.
31% of the country.
I mean, it's insane.
2,100 Americans last year, 2,100 illegals that murdered Americans or either accused or convicted of murdering Americans were captured by ICE.
You never hear about that part of the story.
You do not.
You hear about the Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee's vehicle stolen after someone broke into her office?
That I did not hear.
You didn't hear about that.
I did not.
You stumped me on that.
Well, I mean, a liberal is only a liberal until they get robbed.
They're all against gun control until somebody breaks into their house.
Maybe they have a different view on him.
Our buddy Stephen A. Smith, he's getting pissed at Gavin.
Did you see what he said?
That Gavin's ducking his show.
Still waiting, Gavin Newsom.
I simply want you to answer for your state about homelessness, crime, defunding police, being sanctuary city and state billions in debt.
Okay.
Well, how about all the money he fundled to his wife?
They just uncovered that, too.
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
What else do we have here that I think you might be interested in?
Oh, did you see the only sport I care about in the Olympics?
There's only one.
You know what it is.
What is it?
Hockey.
Oh, come on.
This is not hard.
Hockey.
Hockey.
Yeah.
Anyway, so we had a really close game the other night, and we won an overtime.
And this guy, Quinn Hughes, who scored the overtime goal, says he loves representing the U.S. because it's the greatest country in the world, unlike all these other woke athletes.
I won't watch it.
I don't want anything to do with any sport that's woke.
Hockey is the coolest sport.
I mean, American hockey players are the coolest people out there.
You know what's sad?
When I was a kid, I always remember watching the Olympics and it being such a big deal.
And it was on, you know, typically NBC.
And it was, you know, we all watched it.
It was like so cool.
And now it's like, our kids don't even know what it is, nor do they have any interest in it.
And then when they get up there and you finally get to hear them speak, they trash the country.
And I'm like, what are we doing?
Like the one guy urinated in the snow, F-Ice.
And I'm like, really, bro?
That's your moment?
That's what you want to do with your five seconds of fame?
It's pathetic.
No.
All right, let's get to our busy phones.
Catherine Missouri on the Sean Hannity show.
Catherine, how are you?
Glad you called.
Well, you know, I called because of Linda giving up chocolate for Lent.
But no, no, no, no.
We have to give a history here.
Oh, okay.
For years, she's tried to give up cursing, and within like three hours, she's already failed spectacularly.
And now she's like, oh, I'm going to give up chocolate.
Meaning, she needs to give up that which she is hardest to give up, right?
Yes.
But she should not give up dark chocolate, 85% cocoa or cocoa.
Never, because that stuff is good for your cardiovascular system.
It's anti-carcinogen.
It's good for your gut biome.
It's just all around good.
You know, women who participate in dark chocolate have less breast cancer.
It's good.
It's for 40 days for crying out loud.
Sean's like, screw your breast cancer.
She's not giving it up for her.
She's not giving it up for the rest of her life.
Poor Catherine.
Catherine's calling him a positivity.
Sean's like, rush it.
No.
You know, I just try to live a good life every day.
And maybe this is just faulty thinking on my part.
And yesterday was Ash Wednesday.
And but I haven't really thought, maybe I should need to start thinking about going back to what I did as a kid and giving up something.
I don't know.
I haven't.
You don't give up anything?
I give up being aggravated by you because you try to aggravate me every day.
You got to give up something you love.
You don't love that.
I do, Catherine.
This is what this is, let me advise you.
I am not proud.
AI Learning Faster 00:03:43
I am definitely somebody who swears a lot and I swear in many languages because I want to make sure the person I'm yelling at understands, just in case they don't.
Yesterday I yelled at somebody in Italian.
Oh, okay.
Well, you know, coming from a Norwegian background, try that.
I'm going to look it up.
Thank you, Catherine.
Oh, great.
You're going to teach her new ways to curse, considering she can't give it up for length.
Good grief.
You're not a lot of help.
But we love you, Catherine.
Thank you.
We appreciate the call.
Let's go say hi to Marty.
He is, or she is in Texas.
Marty, how are you?
Glad you called.
I'm glad to be talking to you.
Glad to be alive.
And I heard you.
I'm glad to talk to you.
I love Texas.
God bless Texas.
Oh, yes, absolutely.
Wanted to talk to you about AI and let you know at 75 years, young, old, whatever you want to call it, I'm still here.
And I'm using that tool to kind of learn a lot.
I think that it can be used for good, and I'm aware that it certainly can be used for evil.
But I'm using it, choosing to use it for good.
And I used it even to get some medical results, some like a little pre-diagnosis, words to ask or questions to ask.
So there is a great article that is freaking people out, and it's gone very viral from a tech worker.
The guy's name is Matt Schuman.
And he describes how recent AI advances have made his expertise obsolete as models are handling complex tasks.
And he said last year, he writes, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress.
And then it got even faster and then faster again.
And each new model wasn't just better than the last.
It was better by a wider margin.
And the time between the new model releases was shorter.
And he said he was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less and less, watching AI handle things that he used to think required his expertise.
And then he goes on to explain a couple of examples.
And they releasing new models all the time.
And he said, he came to the realization that he is no longer needed for actual technical work for his job.
And then he goes on to say, and he says He will put in the information, walk away, and not a rough draft that he needs to fix anymore.
He says he tells AI what he wants, walks away from his computer for four hours, comes back, and finds the work done, done well, done better than I could have done it myself.
No corrections needed.
And a couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with AI, guiding it, making edits.
Now I just describe the outcome and I leave.
And what he's saying is that AI is not just executing his instructions.
Now, he's an expert.
It was making intelligent decisions.
It had something that felt for the first time like judgment and taste and the inexplicable sense of knowing what the right call is that people always said AI would never have.
The model has it.
And something close enough to that distinction that doesn't matter anymore.
He said it will impact law, finance, medicine, everything.
Here's my point: I want Marty, this audience, to dig deep into artificial intelligence.
You need to understand it.
Artificial Intelligence's Impact 00:04:20
I don't care what your age.
And you're saying that you're doing that, right?
Yes, I am.
I'm dabbling with it, and I'm finding it very fascinating.
And I use it as a tool just to help guide me along the way.
But I know who my big boss is, and that's Jesus himself.
Well, amen to that.
I can't disagree with that.
And at the end of the day, the guy that built universes and galaxies within universes and galaxies is way smarter than anything any human can build.
I can promise you that.
Praise God.
Anyway, appreciate you being with us.
God bless you, Marty.
God bless Texas.
All right, let's get back to our busy phones.
Poll-free.
It's 800-941 Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
Rich in New Jersey.
Rich, how are you?
Sean, it's such a pleasure to speak with you.
Just, you know, piggybacking on what Buck Sexton was talking about regarding the colleges, you know, with this indoctrination, you know, we could do this with half our brains tied behind our backs, you know, with a little tribute to Rush.
That this indoctrination starts in the public schools in kindergarten.
I've seen it.
I lived through it.
So, and I believe that so much of the left hypocrisy that you talk about all the time has to do with this as well.
And you could look at even just, I mean, you've spoken about how you need an ID to get into the Democratic National Convention, you know, but of course, you know, you don't need one to vote.
They won't fund ICE because they want federal agents who are trying to uphold law to have IDs, but yet anyone can go and cast a vote in a federal election.
It is insane.
And on another little, little, little, just side note, you know, you've got some, I'm surprised that I would love to ask Jasmine Crockett, who throws around the race card like manhole covers, why she was not outraged at the turn at the results of the Virginia governorial race, where, you know, of course, the white Democrat woman won, the black Republican woman lost.
And I have to believe that if it were switched, that that's what we would have heard about, would have been racism and, you know, the race card thrown out there.
And it's just, it's just unbelievable.
The double standard is unbelievable.
And you're right about Buck in his book.
You know, for example, hypnotism is real.
All right, imagine that you're in front of me.
I'm going to, you know how easy it is to hypnotize somebody?
Let me tell you how to do it.
Ready?
All right, first I want you to, you have rings on, take off your rings.
Okay, take off my ring.
Okay, sit in a straight-back chair and sit up straight.
I'm in my car sitting up straight with my ring off.
Remove your shoes.
Remove my shoes.
Okay, I have sneakers on.
Is that okay?
Yep.
Take them off.
Yep.
Now put your hands together in prayer-like fashion.
And when I say squeeze your hands together, I want you to squeeze them.
Yes.
Okay.
I'm going to stop here.
And then I would have you squeeze so hard.
And then I'd say, and if you try to open your hands, your hands won't open up.
You see these people doing on stage called the law of reverse suggestion.
When I started telling you, take off your rings, sit in a straight-back chair, take off your shoes, they were all commands.
I wasn't requesting.
I wasn't being polite.
Hypnotism, that stuff you see on stage that's funny, is real.
You can hypnotize people.
Some people are more susceptible than others.
Anyway, it's a topic near and dear to my heart.
We'll talk more about it maybe tomorrow.
Rich, gotta run, man.
Appreciate it.
800-941 Sean is our number.
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