Senator John Fetterman joins to debate the "Midnight Hammer" strikes on Iran, arguing the halted nuclear program and destroyed navy signal a positive peace shift despite Democratic inconsistency. The conversation pivots to John Solomon's reporting on four FBI counterintelligence investigations—Arctic Frost, Crossfire Hurricane, Round River, and Plasmic Echo—that targeted hundreds from 2016 through January 2025. A GAO report reveals 1,200 protected individuals faced threat assessments without criminal evidence, suggesting law enforcement weaponization that could trigger RICO or civil rights conspiracy charges against former officials. [Automatically generated summary]
You want to be a part of this extravaganza 800-941-Sean, Senator John Fetterman in a moment.
Breaking news, justthenews.com.
Police in Toronto in Canada announcing gunmen had fired on the U.S. consulate there.
Thank God, no injuries.
Suspects reportedly driving a white Honda CR-V. stopped in front of the building, fired multiple rounds before returning to the vehicle and fleeing the scene.
None injured in the incident.
I mentioned earlier another incident at Gracie Mansion in New York.
Thank God that situation has been resolved.
And another report.
Now, this is going to end up being a huge mistake because Erdogan, the leader of Turkey, is nuts.
I'm telling you, and he's gotten more extreme.
And the Turkish government said Monday that NATO forces had to intercept a second Iranian ballistic missile that entered Turkey's southern airspace.
This is not going to go over well if the Iranians start pissing off Erdogan, the president of Turkey.
And I'm just telling you, they're making another huge mistake, but they made a miscalculation.
You would have thought after Midnight Hammer that if Donald Trump gives you a deadline, you might actually listen to it.
Anyway, joining us now is a senator from the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
John Fetterman is with us.
Senator, how are you?
Glad you could be with us.
Hey, Sean, it's great to be here.
Yeah.
We appreciate having you.
I recently got to spend time with you.
I've really enjoyed the time.
I mean, a real substantive conversation.
I have a hard time understanding, and I'm bringing Steve Wickoff back on the TV show tonight for a reason.
He was involved with the negotiations with the Iranians, and two things came out of that.
They offered Iran low-grade civilian-use uranium that they would provide to them for free in perpetuity in exchange for them agreeing they can no longer enrich uranium and turn it into weapons-grade uranium.
The Iranians said we reserve the right to enrich uranium and build a bomb.
They wouldn't give up on that.
Then they disclosed in that conversation, which is scary, that they had 60% enriched uranium, which means that they were only a couple of weeks away from having the ability to have a nuclear weapon.
That's why the president decided to go.
And what part of this being an existential threat to our country don't people understand?
Yeah, I truly don't get it either.
Now, I put that on my social media.
You know, whether Hillary Clinton, she said she would never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb, and she would use the military if that became the case.
And then Kamala Harris in late 24, she identified Iran as her top, you know, international concern and our adversary.
And now she said she would never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb.
So when now the president accomplished that, why can't you just acknowledge and even celebrate that now Iran can develop a nuclear bomb and now their missile program is now severely damaged?
And now, if you look at the kind of statistics now, you know, the strikes are down 90% and now most of their entire Navy has been destroyed.
I mean, it's just been a remarkable testament to our military, but I don't understand why Democrats that all agree we could never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb, now that's possible now.
And here we are.
So I'm the only Democrat to support that.
And there'll be more and more votes trying to restrict this at this point.
I'll be the one Democrat to refuse that.
I'm always going to support our military if there is another vote for more resources.
Well, it's sort of like with Libya.
I mean, there was a seven-month campaign by Barack Obama as it relates to Libya.
And, you know, every Democrat's on record saying, oh, no, he doesn't need to get the approval of Congress.
Just to highlight your point, let me play Democrats over the years talking about the threat of Iran.
I think this is important.
We will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.
If I'm the president, we will attack Iran.
Whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program in the next 10 years during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.
That's a terrible thing to say, but those people who run Iran need to understand that.
Make no mistake, a nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained.
It would threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations, and the stability of the global economy.
It risks triggering a nuclear arms race in the region and the unraveling of the non-proliferation treaty.
That's why a coalition of countries is holding the Iranian government accountable.
And that's why the United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Look, I mean, Iran has American blood on their hands, okay?
And what we saw in terms of just this attack on Israel, 200 ballistic missiles, What we need to do to ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power, that is one of my highest priorities.
Senator, it's inexplicable to me.
They sound like Donald Trump today, and now Donald Trump did what they all said they would do.
And look at where they are.
I can't explain it.
Can you?
I can't explain it.
As a Democrat, I can't explain it.
All I can do is just acknowledge that this has been an incredible development.
I'm insanely proud of our military for what they've accomplished.
And I would remind everybody listening to Iran was behind Tan Seven, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis doing those kinds of things.
They were, I mean, and speaking there, that's 53, 53 House members refused to even vote to acknowledge Iran was a terrorist underwriting nation.
It's crazy.
I can't understand that.
I mean, everybody used to agree that we can never allow them to acquire this, the president, and here we are now.
Why can't you just acknowledge that this is a profound development for world peace, regional peace, and also on the right side of history of putting Iran in check and preventing them for acquiring nuclear bombs?
And that makes true peace in that region possible.
And I can't believe Iran thought that attacking the Arab nations in the region was smart.
And now that can continue to isolate them.
And perhaps even the Abraham, of course, could be more part of that conversation after this development as well, too.
Steve Witcoff, the Middle East envoy, along with Jared Kushner, were the ones negotiating.
And I'm bringing Steve back on TV tonight for a reason.
He said to me they offered them the civilian use, low-grade enriched uranium if they wanted to use it for civilian purposes, which I argue they probably don't.
But they offered it to them.
They offered it to them for free.
They offered it to them in perpetuity.
The only thing that they needed in exchange was a pledge, trust but verified, backed by U.S. inspectors anyplace, anywhere, anytime.
And they outright refused and were clinging to their right to build ballistic missiles, nuclear ballistic missiles, long-range missiles.
And my question is, what part of what happened after Midnight Hammer and 14 bunker buster bombs did not wake them up?
Yeah, of course.
And the only thing they ever respect, that's raw power and to use it.
And now they've got the message now.
And, you know, remind, really, what is what's Iran even capable at this point?
You know, just empty threats.
They can't back up any of it.
And, you know, just what's accomplished, you know, I was the only Democrat to support Midnight Hammer, and here I am again.
And now Iran has been forced and held accountable.
And all Democrats used to agree that was the right thing.
Why they think it's the wrong thing, I don't understand, other than that, happened to be behind the president's ambition.
Do you ever talk to your fellow Democrats and ask them what happened?
Why did you once support this policy and now you don't?
I've tried, you know, even in a casual way.
It's like, why isn't this a good thing?
I don't understand.
You don't have to agree on every single point, but Iran denied nuclear ambitions, their Navy destroyed.
And now no one's talking about or reminding that they executed up to 35,000 of their young people.
Now they are threatening even those poor soccer team in Australia.
And who knows what they might do to their families?
That's the truth about this dynamic.
Why we can't just acknowledge this has been a good thing for world peace, regional peace, and making it point part of enduring peace rather than appeasement.
We've all seen, we've all tried the old thing.
How many different presidents have tried this?
You know, in this case, President Trump addressed that.
Yes, he's a Republican as a Democrat.
I will call that as a good thing.
You know, I know what my party demands right now, but I'm country over party, and that's why I think it was the right call, and that's why I support it.
Let me ask you this, Senator, because there's other things that the Democrats are doing right now.
And right now, they're not funding the Department of Homeland Security while we're in the middle of a conflict.
And that includes not only ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, but it also means the TSA.
It means FEMA.
It means the Coast Guard.
It means the Secret Service.
The next thing is, I don't think it's that complicated.
I mean, do you support the SAFE Act?
All it requires is proof of citizenship and voter ID to vote.
I mean, where do you stand on both of those issues?
What I think you bring up at DHS.
Now, I became, I was the only Democrat that refused to shut down the entire DHS apparatus.
We all agree that there could be some, you know, and again, I'm looking forward to support my friend Senator Mullen for the new lead of DHS.
Now, I refuse to shut that down because that's never going to lead to any kinds of reforms about ICE that was behind that.
Now, last time I was at the airport, I asked every single TSA agent that I encountered, hey, do you like getting paid?
You know, do you think you should be paid for that?
Yes, absolutely, 100%.
You know, it makes us less safe.
I put that out on my social media yesterday.
The Coast Guard just seeped 11 tons of cocaine.
kept that off American streets.
They're not getting paid part of this.
This is part of what the base might demand, but I'm always going to pick, you know, I'm going to pick country over the party what the base demands.
And that puts me in another situation.
As a Democrat, it's getting increasingly difficult to just, you know, but for me, this is the right side of history about Iran, and it's never the right thing to shut our government down.
Where do you stand on proof of citizenship and voter ID?
Well, where I'm at, where I'm at is that I think 83% of Americans think it's appropriate to show their ID.
And I'm not going to tell 83 Americans that they're wrong or they're crazy or it's Jim Crow or for this some kinds of voter suppression.
I constantly reference things like what happened in Wisconsin, that election less than a year ago.
They picked a very, very liberal justice, but by nearly two-thirds, they all decided, and they put that in their constitution, showing valid state ID to vote.
And that's what the vast Americans agree with that.
So that's part of what I do with support.
Well, just to be clear, you would support the SAVE Act, but I mean, that seems to be a big point of contention right now.
And I don't know.
I mean, I want both, you know, both Democrats and Republicans over the years, and I can name names, have complained about election results and voter integrity and confidence of results.
FBI Targeting Hunter Biden00:14:47
You know, to me, it's just basic, fundamental common sense.
You know, Senator, I've gotten to know you and become friends with you even, if you don't mind me admitting that.
You may not want to admit it publicly.
And I look forward.
We're going to have you on our new video podcast soon, and I look forward to it.
And I really appreciate you being a voice of sanity and putting partisanship aside.
When something is right, it's got to just stay right, and that's the end of it.
And I know you take a lot of heed for it.
We appreciate you also being on this program.
Thank you, sir.
Hey, thanks for having me back up.
Thanks.
All right, Senator John Fetterman, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Well, there's really one reporter in the country that just stands out above the others, and it's our friend John Solomon, justthenews.com.
He's its founder, editor-in-chief, and chief investigative reporter.
He has a piece out today.
Trump targeted by four FBI code name counter-intel probes that ensnared hundreds of Americans.
Now, Kash Patel's building this criminal case in one operation, planning the declassification of two others so that Congress can be informed of the abuses by previous administrations targeting Donald Trump.
But what you're learning here is pretty much for nine straight years, Donald Trump was targeted.
Now, we've known about Arctic Frost.
We've known about Crossfire Hurricane.
Now, the FBI director has personally led the effort to review the operations, those two operations, and two others I'd not heard of before, Round River and Plasmic Echo.
And it stretched all the way from the summer of 2016 before he was ever elected.
As you know, if the Justice Department can be weaponized this way and the FBI is used in this way for political purposes, you will lose your country.
And that's what Dan Bongino put out with that cryptic tweet that one day, no Democratic Republican survive based on what he had just seen.
And we had him on this show, and he explained what he meant by that based on what he had seen about the abuse of power.
Anyway, John Solomon can better explain all of this.
Mr. Solomon, thank you for being with us.
Great work, as always.
This is chilling when you really get into it.
How deep does this go and what does it mean and who might be impacted by this?
Well, it'll be hundreds of people when we're done.
We know that Charlie Kirk's TPSA was targeted.
We know Rudy Giuliani was targeted.
We know that certain filmmakers who tried to make movies about Hunter Biden based on the reporting I did back in 2019, they were targeted.
One of them just got a letter acknowledging it saying, hey, yeah, we took your email and your phone records, but sorry about that.
and we've closed it down.
It will be one of the largest drag nets in FBI history because of...
What do you mean with...
Can I just stop here for a second?
I don't like to interrupt you, but I want a clarification on this.
You're going to get a letter saying, oh, you were targeted.
You didn't know you were targeted.
And I guess that means spying on your phone records like they did with congressmen and senators and maybe even more.
Sorry.
Oops.
It was a mistake.
We shut it down.
Is there any recourse if there was no justification?
Whatever happened about something called unreasonable search and seizure?
Well, that is such an important question.
And I think it's the thing that Harmee Dillon keeps talking about as the Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division, which is once before in American history, we had an era where the law enforcement agencies went after people.
It was a civil rights era.
And black people were discriminated against during the KKK era.
There were these police departments that did awful things to black Americans, and the law allowed the Justice Department in those days to bring criminal racketeering cases and civil racketeering cases.
And that's how they cleaned up the era of Jim Crow and began to bring justice and break that.
Harmee Dillon says that they are looking at that possibility here, that they're looking at the way the FBI and the intelligence community was used here, that it might mirror that and that you might bring a RICO or conspiracy case, as Kash Patel laid out in his memo a year ago.
And the charge will be deprivation of civil rights.
You deprive President Trump and his supporters of the civil rights.
You didn't protect their privacy.
You didn't protect their Fourth Amendment privileges.
That is what the Justice Department is looking at.
Now, looking at it and doing something, two different things.
We'll have to see if they get there.
But that is a very important part of what the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami and Fort Pierce, Florida, are now looking at.
But you said something profound.
It really is the nut of this.
When we step back and you get above the trees, because all these things have come out in like little increments over eight years, the real truth of the matter is from the moment Donald Trump began running for president, the FBI, even though American people twice said they wanted him to be president, the American people or the FBI treated the president as a national security threat.
He was subjected to four consecutive counterintelligence criminal code name investigations.
And it started with Russia collusion in the summer of 2016 and goes all the way to January of 2025.
I've confirmed that there were activities the FBI was still conducting in the final days before Donald Trump raised his hand a second time and took the oath of office in January 2025.
They all have cute code names, Plasmic Echo, Round River.
But at the end of the day, what the FBI was doing is repeatedly treating the president like a national security threat and trying to find something to hang on his campaign or presidential home.
And I think that that is really shocking to hear it that way, but it really is what the evidence shows.
Well, if we go back and you reference this in your piece, you know, we know at least 400 conservative groups with Arctic Frost.
We've spent a lot of time talking about that.
We know about Crossfire Hurricane, you know, the disproven Russia collusion lie.
We know about the dirty dossier, separate and apart from all of that.
But then we have these new investigations that you're going into detail, and they're all equally troubling to me.
Now there's two that I'd never heard of.
I've never heard of Plasmic Echo before.
That has to do with Mar-a-Lago, and that has to do with Biden, Merrick Garland, personally approving the decision for a search warrant, the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago.
Now we're getting to the bottom of that.
And, you know, what did Director Ray know who was against this?
Who was for this?
And here's what's even more troubling.
Then you have this operation code-named Round River.
You point out maybe the most troubling of all the counterintelligence probes targeting the Trump universe, though at present it's mostly classified.
What does that mean?
If I had to guess, I imagine if it has to do with Biden and his family in Ukraine and zero experience Hunter, you and I are screwed.
Yeah, well, we may have been screwed long ago.
We didn't know it, right?
I think we'll have to wait and see what the fouls show.
My understanding is the FBI is in the process of declassifying them.
They put agents on this, even senior executives on this, to get to the bottom of it.
But what they found early on is very troubling.
And that is the reason it's troubling is that the delimiters, the reason the case was set up was basically an assessment that said, if you talked a certain way, if you said certain things about Hunter Biden or Ukraine, as all of us were talking about in 2019.
You mean if we told the truth about the fact that he had no experience and was addicted to crack and admitted as much in his own words that we're in trouble?
Yeah, they would deem you a national security threat, that you were purveying Russian disinformation, and therefore you could be assessed the threat.
And then some of us were, some people were put under investigation.
And these people who were put under investigation, someone who just made a movie about Hunter Biden, that's protected by the First Amendment.
But we now know that that occurred.
That was really a remarkable letter.
And there's an amazing part about that particular filmmaker who, by the way, was an advisor in Trump 1, then made the movie about, made a movie, a documentary about Hunter Biden.
And then he went to advise President Trump in the 2024 campaign.
And in the exchange of letters between his lawyer and the FBI, you learn that the FBI obtained his emails.
And in those emails, the FBI obtained some of the advice he was giving President Trump's 2024 campaign.
Do we really want the FBI spying on political advice to the opposition candidate?
It doesn't seem like the sort of thing that Americans accept.
But that's what's in these letters that we can see.
That appears to be related to Round River.
But the idea that the FBI would predicate an investigation based on the words that we speak or the things that we said about Hunter Biden, if that turns out to be true when the documents are released, that's going to be very troubling.
We know from Senator Chuck Grassley that that is what the whistleblowers have told his committee.
And now we're getting some inkling that the FBI has found the case file, the predication for it, and we may see some new evidence on that soon.
So you're really talking about, you know, a massive civil rights violation for political purposes.
Am I characterizing that right?
That's exactly how someone who really knows the law, right?
Harmie Dillon is the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.
This is what she's been talking about.
She's going to come back on my show tonight to answer some of the questions about this new stuff.
But that is what is being developed in the case in Florida, a conspiracy to violate civil liberties from a criminal side.
And then the question is, when all the evidence is out, and we've heard Senator Lindsey Graham, whose phone records were taken in one of those cases, Arctic Frost saying, hey, I'm going to sue.
And you can understand why he had constitutional protections as a member of Congress.
There are very serious issues here.
And I think when the evidence is all out, and I think it'll be out within the next month or so, there'll be two tacks for accountability.
The criminal investigation, does anyone get charged?
We'll see.
And then people who believe their civil liberties were violated, can they sue?
And the clock will start once this classified evidence is made public and the people find out who was really targeted in these investigations.
Are you saying that anybody that brought up the issue of zero experience, Hunter?
I mean, how are you not on the list?
Now we're talking about anybody in Trump's orbit.
Is that what you're saying here?
Well, it's a large number, not everybody, but there'd be a large number.
It looks to be in the hundreds.
We know just Arctic Frost alone targeted 400 conservative figures and groups.
That's just one of the four code-named investigations that we've tracked.
We don't know the full amount yet, but we expect to.
We have some indication.
You and I talked about this a week or two ago.
The GAO just did a report in January that didn't get released, but we got a copy of it.
1,200 people who fall into special circumstances subjects, meaning people who have special protections.
You're a lawyer, you're supposed to have privilege with your client.
You're a member of Congress.
You've got constitutional separation of power.
By the way, in the case of Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, that would mean when she was talking to her lawyer, that lawyer, that's supposed to be privileged.
As a Reuters, yeah, that they actually listened in on one of her conversations.
Now, let's see if that turns out to be true when the evidence comes out.
But special circumstances targets are people like you and I. We're journalists, we're protected.
You're supposed to have a special layer of protection.
1,200 people that fell into that corridor.
I just want to say that again.
1,200 people that fell into that category of lawyer, clergy, journalist, filmmaker, congressional person, political advisor to a campaign.
They were investigated under these things called assessments.
Assessments require no proof of wrongdoing.
The FBI can just simply say, John Solomon, I assess you're a threat, and I'm going to start looking at you.
That is what the GAO said they found when they looked at the Chris Ray era of the FBI, 2018 to 2024.
That report we put up, everybody can read it.
That is very frightening because there weren't 1,200 lawyers and journalists indicted over the last six years.
So what does it tell you?
A lot of people were assessed and investigated who did nothing wrong.
They were innocent.
And I think that that is the big concern here.
And when it comes to Round River, Round River, if the speech delimiters are certain things said about Hunter Biden or the Biden family or Ukraine, what if those turned out to be true?
What if at the end of the day, the things that people were targeted for saying in these movies or in our stories or on social media, what if those turned out to be true?
Imagine the FBI would have been investigating people for saying true things.
And we now know that everything we reported about Hunter Biden in 19, it actually came out to be true.
And you and I had one indication of this.
I've had two indications.
You've had one.
We learned a couple of years ago from documents released under FOIA at the State Department that your my social media accounts were monitored by the State Department's intelligence service.
That's something that's out in public.
People, it is what it is.
The State Department's not supposed to target Americans, but they did in 2022.
Well, Jim Jordan said they actually suppressed my social media, but go ahead.
Yeah, yeah.
No, that's it.
Once they flagged it and monitored it, they had the ability to turn the dials down and keep you from being successful, suppressing the First Amendment.
The second thing that I learned in 2022, I was suddenly informed by the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York that I was a subject of a criminal investigation.
I'm like, what?
I'm a journalist.
What the heck?
And I learned that the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI believed that I had been conspiring with Russian sources to put out misinformation in the public.
And so I cooperated.
I got my release from my sources, and I went to the U.S. Attorney's Office and said, all right, you think I got this stuff from Russians through Rudy Giuliani.
Here's the truth.
I actually filed a waiver saying that I couldn't do any reporting with Rudy Giuliani because I was negotiating a podcast with him at my employer, The Hill, and because I had a financial deal going with him, I couldn't rely on as a reporter.
That would be a conflict of interest.
I recused myself.
I didn't get anything from Rudy Giuliani.
It would have been wrong to get something from Rudy Giuliani.
I just didn't.
I got it from the FBI, and I turned over all the documents I got in December 2018.
I got those documents in December 2018, a year before the laptop was found.
And I had emails from Hunter Biden.
I had analyses from the U.S. government.
And that was the basis of those stories that I came.
When the government found out, wait, you got this from us, they dropped the case right away.
But that's the sort of danger when the FBI goes after free speech.
They may go after something that may be totally true, yet they made it look like Russian disinformation.
John Solomon, editor-in-chief, founder and chief investigator reporter, justthenews.com.