Sean Hannity and Gordon Chang analyze Operation Epic Fury, asserting the conflict targets Iran's nuclear threat involving 1,000 pounds of 60% enriched uranium and North Korean Wasong-15 missiles. They argue that destroying Iran's military infrastructure has enabled a new leadership group to allow oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, proving the operation's success beyond regime change. The discussion highlights how de-globalization harms China while defending executive orders for TSA pay against Democratic opposition, ultimately framing Trump's strategy as an existential necessity to prevent nuclear proliferation and secure U.S. cities from long-range missile attacks. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, as we went through, whether people in the media want to acknowledge or listen to Donald Trump or not, it doesn't really matter because it's going to play out exactly.
Well, I can't say exactly because it's either going to play out one way or it's going to play out the other way, but it's going to be on the verge of wrapping up no later than three weeks from today is my prediction.
People don't really seem to want to listen to the actual words of President Trump.
They don't want to listen to Marco Rubio.
They don't want to listen to what the mission has been.
While it certainly has been regime change in the sense that Ali Khamani and his top advisors and the next tier and the next tier of so-called leaders in Iran are all dead, that by definition, you can argue is regime change, but it has never been, it has never been about that for the president.
And when the president tweeted out, and again, I wish people would listen to him, that this has always been, and then you go back to my interview with Steve Witkoff, this has always been about never allowing the Iranians to have nuclear weapons because they're an existential threat to the United States.
And the president said the U.S. is in serious discussions.
We now know it's the head of the parliament, which we had confirmed for you last week, although nobody seemed to want to listen to that either.
But anyway, they are in serious discussions with a new, more reasonable regime to end the military operations.
By the way, as evidenced, as the president said, with the 20 tankers they've allowed through the Straits of Hormuz, that would not have happened or the Strait of Hormuz if they were not, quote, open for business.
He said great progress is being made.
If for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, the Hormuz Strait open for business, well, you know, that would mean our lovely stay in Iran will be blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plants, oil wells, Karg Island, and possibly desalinization plants, which we have purposely not touched.
This will be retribution for our many soldiers and others that Iran has butchered and killed over the old regime's 47-year reign of terror.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump.
Let's go aboard the Air Force One.
Yesterday, the president said, well, Iran gave us 20 boats of oil, which I think is kind of like proof of life in a kidnapped hostage situation.
If they can allow your tankers to go through with no problems at all, that means they have a pretty high degree of power in terms of who is now actually in charge.
Here's what he said.
We destroyed many, many targets today.
It was a big day.
And we are negotiating with them directly and indirectly.
We have emissaries, but we also are dealing directly.
And as you know, they've agreed to send eight boats two days ago, and then they added another two, so it was ten boats.
And now today they gave us as a tribute, I don't know, I can't define it exactly, but they gave us, I think out of a sign of respect, 20 boats of oil, big, big boats of oil going through the Hormo Strait.
And that's taking place starting tomorrow morning over the next couple of days, a lot of boats.
And I would only say that we're doing extremely well in that negotiation.
But you never know with Iran because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up.
And then the president said we are weeks ahead of schedule in terms of Iran.
And again, this is now culminating in this pivotal moment.
Either they will voluntarily give up their nuclear material or the president has indicated and is showing enough military force that America would intend to take it.
They'll either open the Strait of Hormuz or they won't.
And otherwise, pretty much every other military objective will be achieved.
And I am predicting this will then come to a natural conclusion much faster than these naysayers have said from the beginning.
There have been people that never wanted to listen to what Steve Witkoff told me not once, but twice during interviews that they were bragging about their thousand-plus pounds of 60% enriched uranium.
That was the tipping point, obvious tipping point, if anyone's paying attention.
But for the people that want to come up with their own fake, phony, fraudulent, conspiratorial narratives that Israel made this happen, the talk show hosts influenced the president.
First of all, they don't know Donald Trump.
They've never really been big Trump supporters.
They don't understand what he's saying.
He's not complicated.
He is being very straightforward in terms of what his objectives are, what they have been, and what they will remain.
Anyway, here's the president discussing the last part.
Are you considering still putting boots on the ground, and would you do that without going to farm?
I just have lots of alternatives.
We have tremendous numbers of ships over there.
We don't need them all because of, you know, the power.
Look, I would say we're just like we're ahead of schedule on the ballroom.
In a much bigger way, we're ahead of schedule with Iran.
We're weeks ahead of schedule.
If you would have said that in three days we were going to knock out 158 ships, their entire navy, which we did, we knocked out their entire Air Force.
We knocked out most of their missiles.
That's why you see missile attacks, but they're down to sputtering.
And we have a group.
It's really a new regime.
It's a new group of people, people that we've never dealt with before, that are acting very reasonable.
It is truly regime change.
It is.
Was it our initial goal?
No, but that ended in the first five minutes of this conflict.
Anyway, Gordon Chang, Premier, I mean, you want to talk about the premier expert on the impact all of this is having China, geopolitical ramifications.
We have reports the Russians are providing the Iranians with satellite imagery and intelligence.
The North Koreans are providing weaponry.
What might the repercussions of that be?
Gordon Chang, thank you for being with us.
How is China, first of all, being impacted?
Because on the other side of this, the president has plans to go to China to meet with President Xi.
I would imagine the Chinese want the Strait of Hormuz open for their own selfish reasons.
Am I wrong?
Well, you're certainly right about that, Sean.
On Friday, actually, three Chinese container ships were turned back as they were about to clear the Strait of Hormuz out into the Arabian Sea.
Also, there are six Chinese tankers trapped in the Persian Gulf.
China would like all of those out.
And right now, they are still there.
This is interesting because in the beginning phases of the war, Iran was allowing Chinese-bound tankers out of the Strait of Hormuz.
Now they're not doing that.
So I imagine they're very apprehensive in Beijing right now about the way the war is going because it's not really going in their favor as it was, for instance, in the first couple of weeks.
Well, explain that because I don't see how the first couple of weeks was in any way favorable to them.
Well, they were getting their oil through the Strait, and that was really what they wanted.
In the larger issue, though, there are a couple of things about this war that are really bad for China.
One of them is that China has never been more trade dependent in its history.
We are seeing because of this war shocks through economies around the world, which means they won't be able to buy as many Chinese goods as Beijing needs them to.
But even more important than that, this war and other wars that are going on right now are de-globalizing the world.
They're severing the links among countries, among companies, among people.
And that is something that has really been, would be really bad for China.
China prospered and was biggest beneficiary of three decades of globalization.
So they will be the biggest victims of de-globalization.
They're very worried about that.
But it's all really their fault because they've been empowering Iran.
They've been empowering Russia and Ukraine.
They've been creating insurgencies in North Africa that look like wars.
They were behind the October 7th attacks on Israel.
So this is payback from the world to China, in effect.
Why do you think there's so many people that just refuse to listen to President Trump, his words, his strategies?
He's being as transparent as he can, as is the Secretary of State, Mark Orubio, and their objectives have been clear.
I'm not sure if you had an opportunity to watch or to listen to my interview with Steve Witkoff.
I had two of them.
And the tipping point that I believe resulted in the president making this decision for Operation Epic Fury was the fact that they had all of this 60% enriched uranium.
We've gone through this in great specificity and detail.
It would take 7 to 12 days to enrich it to weapons grade 90% enrichment.
And we learned something else in this conflict is that the ballistic missile range capabilities of the Iranians was much further than we had believed it to be, which means that they could put a warhead on one of those ballistic missiles and they'd be able to hit Paris and London and other countries as well.
So it was a far greater danger than I think anybody really anticipated.
Yes, and we should also add to your list of cities, New York and San Francisco, Los Angeles, Kansas City, and every other city in the United States.
We know that Iran has had for quite some time an 80-ton rocket booster.
That's the first stage of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
We also know, Sean, from various open source reporting that China, that Iran has basically all of the components for a Wasong-15 missile.
That's a North Korean ICBM.
The only thing we don't know is whether the Iranians have been able to assemble all of that under wartime conditions.
But we have to assume that they do have an ICBM with a range of 8,100 miles that can hit any part of the United States.
Well, we know from this conflict, and it believed that their maximum range, maximum, would be 2,000.
And now we know that that number is well above that, at 2,500 plus.
Why do you get to the number over 8,000 miles?
Because the Wasong 15 has a range of 8,100 miles.
We know they have the components for a Wasong-15.
What we don't know, as I mentioned, is whether they have been able to successfully integrate all of those components.
But they've had help from the North Koreans, because a Wasong-15 is a North Korean missile.
And we know that essentially every Iranian missile comes from North Korea.
Not all of them, but almost all of them.
And so this is in open source reporting.
You can see this from Treasury Department sanction notices and also reports from the UN panel of experts while it was still in existence.
And also we have got just other indications that show this.
than most people and actually I I know that that's that is not true I know that the CIA director himself, John Ratcliffe, basically stated pretty much close to everything that you said, and that was his assessment.
I know there were varying assessments, but an assessment is basically an estimate based on the intelligence that you're able to gather.
It's not a pure science.
Right.
And yes, there are differing views in the intelligence community.
The consensus estimate is that North Korea, that Iran does not have a North Korean missile that can hit the United States.
But I believe that that assessment is incorrect.
And as we have seen, the assessments of our intelligence community on Iran's missiles have been wrong.
After all, on March 20th, they did fire those two missiles at Diego Garcia.
That took our intelligence community by surprise.
It should not have, given the level of cooperation between Pyongyang and Tehran.
And one other point, Sean, and that is, if they were going to add another chapter to Profiles and Courage, John F. Kennedy's book, they should add one on President Trump, because this was not a popular thing for President Trump to start this war, but it was absolutely necessary to protect the American homeland.
And not just because of the missiles that I talked about, and not just because of this 60% enriched uranium.
North Korea had given Iranians other things that actually could threaten the U.S. homeland.
So it was really important for President Trump to do this.
And the reason why President Trump doesn't get praised for this is because a lot of people hate him.
But if they were actually to listen to what he says, to look at what he's doing, to assess the situation, they would be supporting our president on this.
All right, quick break more with Gordon Chang on the other side.
Then your call's coming up.
800-941-SHAWN is our number if you want to be a part of the program as we continue.
Get out of the media spin room.
Well, you've come to the right place.
This is The Sean Hannity Show.
All right, we continue now.
Gordon Chang analyzing the world impact of now Operation Epic Fury and now seeming to be in his waning couple of weeks and what impact that'll have moving forward.
Let me ask you in the short time we have left, assuming that the enriched uranium will be negotiated out or taken out, the Strait of Hormuz will be open, the destruction of their Navy, their Air Force, their ability to make missiles and drones, dramatically reducing their missile launchers, destroying their air defense systems.
At that point, I think the president's stated military objective ends, and I believe this conflict will then end, and then it's up to the Iranian people, whatever they decide to do.
Trump's Nuclear Deal Decision00:08:15
That was regime change was never the top priority of the president.
Yes.
And President Trump has made it very clear that his goal was to protect the United States and the American homeland.
And he's well on the way to doing that.
And the critics should understand that this was absolutely necessary at this time.
You know, I think very, very well said.
I wish there was more informed analysis from people like you out there.
And I wish people would just pay a little bit more, a little closer attention to what it is the president says, what his objectives have been from the beginning, and then you will understand that this president, unlike many in the past, actually means what he says.
But you know what?
The next three weeks, I think, will determine the outcome of all of this in terms of our total success in the region.
Up to now, it's been extraordinarily successful on every level.
Gordon Cheng, thank you.
800-941-SHAWN is our number if you want to be a part of the program.
Bold, inspired solutions for America.
This is the Sean Hannity Show.
Now, Americans rightly are fed up.
Finally, these wonderful people that I have met, I don't have the problems Linda and Sweet Baby James have.
I don't get wanded at every term when I go through TSA.
Thankfully, these people now are going to get paid.
They're getting paid this week thanks to an executive order of President Trump.
Latest Matt Towery Insider Advantage poll shows a huge percent of Americans approve of President Trump's executive order to pay these TSA workers.
And, you know, I know we've got this battle with the Senate, sharp differences between the House and GOP leaders.
And, you know, why they passed this bill late on a Friday night is unbelievable.
But anyway, the House has three times now voted to fund the Department of Homeland Security, President Trump stepping in.
Not every Democrat is happy about this.
They're not happy at all.
Listen to Congressman Jim Himes claiming that Trump is illegally paying TSA agents.
He should be celebrating working men and women, but he's not.
Listen.
What did Democrats get out of this standoff?
Yeah, well, Margaret, the standoff is not done yet, right?
The president is illegally paying, apparently, TSA agents.
You had the Senate, as you pointed out with Mr. Hone and Homan, pass a bipartisan bill unanimously in the United States Senate to say, look, let's fund everybody else and let's deal with this thorny issue about ICE.
And then you had the Republican House say, hell no, we're not doing that.
Unbelievable.
You know, the party that has a monopoly on compassion doesn't care about working men and women.
Otherwise, they would have voted for no tax on tips, no tax on overtime.
They would have voted for the largest tax cut in history.
They would have cared about the elderly.
They would have voted for no tax on Social Security.
Nope.
Donald Trump's idea has to be bad.
All right, let's get to our busy telephones.
Let us say hi to Keith in California, Gavin Newsom's Marxist Utopia.
What's going on, sir?
How are you?
I'm good.
I'm concerned about this time that Trump has given the Iranians to basically make a decision.
They asked for seven days and he gave them 10 days.
I'm wondering why it takes seven days to make a decision.
I'm wondering why Trump gave them 10 days, especially if.
Well, that's a number of days ago.
So those days are ticked, the clock's ticking.
And I would, again, I have a very high degree of confidence, not because of insider information, I know, although I do have plenty of sources.
I have a high degree of confidence based on public statements of the president.
This is beginning to wind down.
There's not many targets left.
And the Iranians now are, this is their moment of truth.
Wouldn't you agree?
Well, yeah, I'm just concerned if they still have that 60% enriched uranium.
If we're not in possession of that, I'm wondering if it's a good idea.
If we're not in possession of it, we'll either destroy it or we won't leave.
You're describing the final piece of the puzzle.
Another final piece of the puzzle.
There's a couple of pieces left.
Is the opening of the Strait of Hormuz.
Frankly, our allies in Europe have been weak and pathetic and negligent, and they should have come when the president asked.
Now they're going to get involved a little too little too late.
But I would imagine there's a resolution here.
Now, what's on the table for them, it's either that or all of their infrastructure, all of their energy infrastructure, even their desalination plans, Carg Island, it's all gone.
So after watching Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury, if you have even an ounce of common sense in your brain and you are the fourth-tier level of leadership that's actually talking to the president, allowing the 20 tanker ships to go through the Strait of Hormuz without any problem, showing that you have the authority to make that happen, I would imagine that they might be willing to take the deal, but they've never proven to be that smart up to this point.
You just don't think they'll take this time to regroup and come back at us.
It's impossible.
It is impossible.
By the way, this would, to me, would be the riskiest part of any military effort on our end.
However, if the predicate for this was we can't have a nuclear-armed Iran, that has been the most consistent thing that the president has said.
You can't leave behind a thousand pounds of 60% enriched uranium for whoever takes over at whatever point.
And there's a question as to who ultimately will end up in power.
But regime change was never one of our goals, was it?
No.
No, so it's going to play out.
I'm hoping it plays out the right way.
I will tell you this.
It is incalculable for the people that have been way too nonchalant and willing to dismiss this 60% enriched uranium and the people that underestimated the ballistic missile capability of the Iranians, never mind the boosters that Gordon Chang was talking about.
The saddest part in this equation is assuming the president is able to make a deal, get a hold of that nuclear material, bring American troops home, the world will never know how many lives, human lives may have been saved.
But not to do it would have meant, I'm pretty convinced now more than ever, that they would have had nuclear capability and likely ballistic missile capability to deliver those weapons.
That could have easily been turned into 11 nuclear weapons.
And the president, I believe, made the right call.
He removed a potential modern-day Holocaust by acting based on intelligence and what he knows and his own instincts.
And that is, you know, when he took out the ISIS Caliphate, very few people paid attention to it.
He's bombing the hell out of them.
And nobody really gave him credit for that.
But he eliminated an existential threat to the world.
Due Process vs National Security00:02:02
Converter die.
Anyway, appreciate the call.
800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
John San Diego, Cogo Radio.
What's up, John?
How are you?
Glad you joined us this Monday.
Hey, Sean.
Hey, John.
Okay.
I'm sick and tired of hearing every government official and every media personality yammer on about what they think due process clause means.
It is very simple and straightforward.
No one can be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process.
That means due process is predicated on the punishment.
Being deprived of life, that means you've been executed.
Being deprived of liberty means you've been imprisoned.
Being deprived of property means you've been fined.
That's it.
You cannot be imprisoned, executed, or fined without due process of law.
You can damn well be deported without any due process.
And the Trump administration needs to start shoving this down everybody's throat, especially the idiots in the Democrat Party.
And this is also how it has to be argued in the Supreme Court.
You can't argue the Alien Enemies Act because it's a subservient law to the Constitution.
When you're arguing the constitutionality of a law, you argue the Constitution, not another law.
And this is how it has to work.
Are you a lawyer by any chance or no?
No, I'm not a lawyer.
How dare you?
No, you sound pretty well versed in the law.
That's why I'm asking.
You're 100% right.
By virtue of the fact that you're not in the country legally, you don't have the same constitutional rights, but this has been an age-old argument and due process rights, as you're rightly pointing out.
Anyway, good call.
Smart.
Scott, Utah, next Sean Hannity show.
Grateful for Rising Stars00:04:48
Hey, Scott, happy Monday.
Glad you called.
Thank you for letting me on.
Last week, you were talking about Mark Wayne Mullins being insulted for being a plumber and everything.
And I just have to laugh.
Yourself and me, we came from backgrounds that weren't wealthy.
I was dirt poor when I was young.
And my father was a Mason.
And he always said, first and foremost, you're a salesman.
I don't care what you do for a living.
You have to promote yourself and your business.
And he was all about rising up.
And he did, and I did, and you did, and Mark Wayne Mullins did.
It's the American way.
And those Democrats will never get it.
They will not get it.
You know, I don't know.
I am so grateful, and I mean to God, that I've had the upbringing I've had.
I am grateful my parents work so much and they were not able to be to me what I became to my children.
And Linda and I often joke about the fact that how is it that I had total freedom from the time I'm five years old to run the streets and then I became this crazy helicopter parent, right?
But the times have changed and I think demanded it in a lot of different ways.
But I was able to focus my kids into sports And other things and make investments in their future, which, you know, thank God turned out okay.
But I will tell you, the greatest thing in my life is that I spent those 10 years in the restaurant business and those 10 years in construction and never expected when I got into radio, I'd even remotely be successful.
I'm very grateful to all of you for helping to make that happen.
And I take, I bring that same work ethic to the show every day.
And I'll add one thing: the people that work hard, like you, the people, those Masons you're discussing, those plumbers that Mark Wade Mullen was, the people like me that did all sorts of jobs in construction, and all the people that work in those restaurants and all the nurses and all the people that do all the living and dying and serving and sacrifice for their families.
And they get up and they obey the laws, they pay their taxes, they take their kids to church, they make their lunches, they study with them at night.
You want to know what makes America great?
The people.
The people that do that every day.
The people that don't get asked to get a selfie.
The people that never give autographs in their life.
They're the people that make this country great.
And I'm very grateful to all of them.
Linda, you wanted to say something?
No, I think you make some really great points.
You know, we're sort of at a point in time in our life where people like you who came from nothing and worked their way all the way up.
And we have to remember what a great country it is and how lucky and blessed we are.
I mean, people that want to make sure that.
Well, we've got to preserve it.
I mean, honestly, we have to be able to give, there has to be a legacy that we can pass on because that's what was given to us.
You know, those guys stormed the beaches of Normandy and were iron workers and bricklayers and plumbers and construction workers.
And we're blessed to be descendants of such incredible people.
I read a criticism of me.
I think Sweet Baby James handed it to me because I don't read this garbage.
Well, Hannity, you said it's the greatest intelligence military effort, you know, to date.
It's obviously not finished.
And a lot can go wrong.
There's great risk involved in this and always has been.
And what about D-Day?
I'm like, okay, you mean the one that cost what nearly was it, was it nearly 2,500 Americans their lives as they slammed the beaches of Normandy and they were being slaughtered down on those beaches there.
Yes, they were successful.
But what I mean by the most successful is we've been able to do all of this with minimizing death.
And like then, I believe the threat, while different, is grave.
And that is we were fighting against, as Winston Churchill famously called it, a monstrous tyranny.
What does that aim?
Victory.
You know, a nuclear-armed Iran put our children and grandchildren and every future generation at risk of a modern day Holocaust.
And I don't throw that word or that term around loosely because that's what those weapons in the hands of madmen would do.
Not women.
Women have no rights.
Anyway, 800-941-SHAWN is our number if you want to be part of the program.
Fighting Modern Day Tyranny00:00:58
Our roundup is next.
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