Who Was NYC Shooter Target, and New Reporting on Russiagate Hoax Collusion, with Buck Sexton and Aaron Mate

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Speaker 6 Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.

Speaker 6 Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
We begin today with a terrifying scene in New York City as we learn new information about the gunman's potential motive.

Speaker 6 Around 6:30 p.m.

Speaker 6 last night, Monday, a lone gunman armed with an M4 rifle marched into 345 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, a 44-floor skyscraper that houses the likes of the NFL, private equity behemoth Blackstone, the accounting firm KPMG,

Speaker 6 and the management company for the building, and went on the deadliest shooting spree the city has seen in the last 25 years.

Speaker 6 This is a picture for the listening audience we were seeing of the suspect walking in very calmly with, you've probably seen the picture by now,

Speaker 6 the rifle casually hanging down on his right side. He looks like he's going for a stroll.

Speaker 6 The shooter, and we do not name mass shooters here on the Megan Kelly show, killed four individuals, including a police officer, before turning the gun on himself.

Speaker 6 Another victim remains in critical condition. It is interesting to note that he killed himself with the long gun by shooting himself in the chest.

Speaker 6 And there had been some comments wondering last night why, how.

Speaker 6 He had a revolver as well that was found in his BMW outside of the building, which, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, but would have been a far easier weapon with which to commit suicide.

Speaker 6 But we, I think, are getting some new information on why he did what he did. And I'll get to that in a second.
The 27-year-old male suspect is from Las Vegas, originally born in Hawaii.

Speaker 6 He drove across the country directly to New York City to inflict his carnage.

Speaker 6 According to the police, the shooter's vehicle was seen in Colorado on Saturday, Nebraska and Iowa on Sunday, and then in Columbia, New Jersey at 4.24 p.m. Monday before entering New York City.

Speaker 6 And I'm sure our listeners in those places are wondering whether they encountered him and must be feeling some gratitude and relief that their cities were spared.

Speaker 6 It does appear he was targeting New York and this building for a reason.

Speaker 6 Here's the New York City police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, who, by the way, has received received praise from left and right prior to this incident.

Speaker 6 She seems to be the one person we can feel good about in New York City government.

Speaker 6 She's describing here the harrowing scene of how the shooting unfolded. Watch.

Speaker 8 Surveillance video shows a male exit a double-parked black BMW on Park Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets carrying an M4 rifle in his right hand. He walks towards the building's entrance.

Speaker 8 That individual was seen exiting the BMW alone. The building security camera footage shows the shooter enter the lobby, turn right, and immediately open fire on an NYPD officer.

Speaker 8 He then shoots a woman who took cover behind a pillar and proceeds through the lobby, spraying it with gunfire.

Speaker 8 He makes his way to the elevator bank, where he shoots a security guard who was taking cover behind the security desk. One additional male is shot in the lobby per his own statement from the hospital.

Speaker 8 The shooter then calls the elevator, which opens in the lobby. A female exits that elevator and he allows her to walk past him unharmed.

Speaker 8 He goes up to the 33rd floor, which is root in management, and begins to walk the floor, firing rounds as he traveled. One person was struck and killed on that floor.

Speaker 8 He then proceeds down a hallway and shoots himself in the chest.

Speaker 6 Take a look at your screen for our YouTube audience. You can see the dead shooter on the ground here, his final act of cowardice forever memorialized.

Speaker 6 For the listening audience, you see a typical office setting with a long runner, a white runner it looks like,

Speaker 6 down in front of the desks and the shooter lying horizontally across it. Another photo emerged of his weapon.
smeared with blood.

Speaker 6 If you really zoom in, you can see it's got blood on the handle and among other places. At first, this is so extraordinary, they don't normally release photos like this.

Speaker 6 We wondered if it was real, but it is.

Speaker 6 According to CNN, the shooter had no significant criminal background and had a concealed carry permit for a handgun, as well as an expired private investigator license in Nevada.

Speaker 6 Former NYPD on Fox News this morning was saying he had at least two mental health incidents that had been documented in Nevada and also adding that his information was that this guy worked at security at a casino in Las Vegas.

Speaker 6 Again, that's from a former NYPD officer appearing on America's Newsroom this morning.

Speaker 6 The shooter was a competitive football player in his youth, and Commissioner Tisch in New York said he had a quote documented mental health history.

Speaker 6 Without going into details, again, our information now is that there were at least two incidents in Las Vegas that will absolutely lead to appropriate questions about why his gun license was not revoked.

Speaker 6 That's not a gun-nut thing. You got two documented mental health incidents reportedly out in Las Vegas.
You lose your concealed carry permit. You lose your permit to carry a gun.

Speaker 6 And I understand, you know, we can't get them all, but if it's documented, if he's having interactions with officials, with authorities of any kind,

Speaker 6 something happened with the system, and we're going to have to figure out what.

Speaker 6 There was also reported this morning a three-page note found on the gunman claiming that he suffered from the degenerative brain disease known as CTE from playing football.

Speaker 6 CNN reporting the note reads, quote, Terry Long,

Speaker 6 and that's a man I'll get into. He was a Pittsburgh stealer who had CTE and died by suicide.

Speaker 6 But he writes, Terry Long, I guess there's supposed to be kind of a comment as though he's addressing it to him.

Speaker 6 Football gave me CTE

Speaker 6 and it caused me to drink a gallon of antifreeze. That's also something Terry Long did.

Speaker 6 You can't go against the NFL. They'll squash you.

Speaker 6 Okay, so Long was a former offensive lineman for the Steelers and did commit suicide in 2005 by drinking antifreeze. The note went on to say, study my brain, please.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 6 Tell Rick I'm sorry for everything.

Speaker 6 We don't know who Rick is.

Speaker 6 The New York Times reports investigators are focusing on whether the gunman was targeting the NFL, with Mayor Eric Adams saying this morning the shooter appears to have intended to go to the Football League's offices, but took the wrong elevator bank.

Speaker 6 I don't know how it is in your city, but in New York, you basically can't get into a building anymore without selecting like the floor.

Speaker 6 All the elevators and virtually all these high-rises, and I've worked in plenty of them, require you to select whether you're going to like floor one through 15, or floor 16 through 30, or floors 31 through 44.

Speaker 6 And depending on which one you want, you get into a different elevator. And if you wanted floor 44, but you got into the first bank that services 1 through 15, you're screwed.

Speaker 6 That seems to be what Eric Adams is saying happened,

Speaker 6 suggesting that it is possible this shooter wanted to go to the floor that housed the NFL

Speaker 6 staff,

Speaker 6 but didn't press the right numbers, went up to the 33rd floor. which is where the management company for the building was and started shooting and did in fact shoot one person there.

Speaker 6 The NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, says one NFL employee was quote seriously injured in the incident.

Speaker 6 We don't have all the details on where everyone was, but we know that most of the carnage happened in the lobby.

Speaker 6 We're also starting to learn more about the victims, including the NYPD officer who was on duty in uniform and was shot to death in the back. Here's Commissioner Tish.

Speaker 8 But today,

Speaker 8 four innocent victims are dead. Among them, Zen YPD Police Officer Didarul Islam, 36 years old, four years on the job.
Officer Islam was married with two young boys.

Speaker 8 His wife is pregnant with their third child.

Speaker 8 He's assigned to the 4-7 precinct of the Bronx. He was doing the job that we asked him to do.
He put himself in harm's way.

Speaker 8 He made the ultimate sacrifice, shot in cold blood, wearing a uniform that stood for the promise that he made to this city. He died as he lived, a hero.

Speaker 6 Oh, God, it's so awful.

Speaker 6 Two little boys and a third baby on the way, his poor wife.

Speaker 6 Take a look at your screen now, this moving picture of Officer Islam's body removed from the building. Just absolutely heartbreaking.

Speaker 6 Beyond the loss of Officer Islam, Bloomberg reporting another victim is Wesley Lapatner, the CEO of Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust. This is a woman.

Speaker 6 Bloomberg's Sonali Basek writes, quote, she was a rising star in a crown jewel of a business and was caught in the crossfire of an active shooter trying to reach the NFL. Can I tell you something?

Speaker 6 Do you know how hard it is to get hired by Blackstone for anyone, male or female?

Speaker 6 And then once there, to actually get promoted to run one of the large groups as a female, no no less, she looks relatively young, too. I mean,

Speaker 6 this person obviously was incredibly driven and accomplished and died yesterday for what?

Speaker 6 For what?

Speaker 6 Clearly, she was one of the ones in the lobby. She was probably terrified as she saw this guy pull out that.
M4 rifle, point it at her, and shoot.

Speaker 6 We know at least one of the victims was trying to hide behind a pillar. Our understanding is

Speaker 6 they shot the cop who was there in uniform, which is allowed by the NYPD, especially with young cops, they let them do it because they need to supplement their income.

Speaker 6 So totally blessed by the NYPD, and it helps keep a building safe, ostensibly, because they're there in uniform. There was also a security guard.
Both of them were shot.

Speaker 6 We know that only one of the people, five people were shot. One survived and is in the hospital now.
We don't know who that is, but we know the cop was shot dead. A security guard was shot.

Speaker 6 We know one of the other victims was the woman I just showed you, Wesley, from Blackstone. And then there are two more who were shot and killed.

Speaker 6 And we believe one of those was shot and killed on the 33rd floor, and the other one would have been shot and killed in the lobby.

Speaker 6 So we'll bring you updates on the other victims and their identities as we learn them. Joining me now for reaction is Buck Sexton.

Speaker 6 He's a former NYPD employee who worked on counterterrorism with the CIA too and co-host of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton show.

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Speaker 6 Buck, very good to see you.

Speaker 6 You know, the thing that jumped out at me and Doug, my husband, as you know, you know him, we were chatting this over this morning, was because it's so odd that he shot himself in the heart with a long gun.

Speaker 6 And now that you see the note saying he thought he had CTE and begging for them to study his brain, It makes a bit more sense that he would shoot himself in the chest instead of in the head, potentially.

Speaker 6 But this was obviously a mentally unwell man. There's nothing coming out this morning about connections to terror or radicalization or anything like that.
You're the expert. What do you think?

Speaker 9 Well, he's a crazy person, and trying to understand

Speaker 9 his mindset and motivations is going to be complicated, and I think will be debated even by people who study this kind of

Speaker 9 mass shooting

Speaker 9 for a living. You know, what I did was ideologically based terrorism and I worked in the NYPD intelligence division and it was essentially jihadist terrorism.
That was

Speaker 9 99% of what the workload was. But we would look at mass shooting scenarios around the world, study them.

Speaker 9 And in fact, Jessica Tisch, who's now the commissioner of the NYPD, this was now 15 years ago, but she was a rising star in the counterterrorism division, which did assessments to protect buildings like this one at the time.

Speaker 9 And I knew Jesse when I was at the NYPD on the Intel Division side working against jihadism.

Speaker 9 So this is something that you can prepare for at some level in terms of security precautions, but there's never going to be a perfect security coordinate that you can have here.

Speaker 9 This also, by the way, hits home, Megan. I know

Speaker 9 you know this area. I know this area well.
I had a family member who walked across this plaza 10 minutes before the shooting happened.

Speaker 9 So last night I was at dinner and I was getting text messages about this and I realized where it was. I know people who work at Blackstone.

Speaker 9 In fact, one of my cousins' husbands works in that building on that floor. And it was

Speaker 9 quite

Speaker 9 one of those times when you have to sit there and think, oh my God. And I had to go through and make sure that everybody that I knew

Speaker 9 was accounted for. So I know this area very well.
I know people who work in that building and even on the the Blackstone floors, I should say, not on the NFL floors. As for the shooter himself,

Speaker 9 I think that you'll find more about him

Speaker 9 in those incidents likely, the mental health incidents that you noted.

Speaker 9 The fact that this guy, I would be curious to know how he was able to transport this long gun, which the New York Post was reporting as an M4. So I'm assuming it's a civilian version of the M4.

Speaker 9 The military version would be fully automatic. I'd be curious to know how he was able to get around with this as a clearly a mentally disturbed person without anybody noticing.

Speaker 9 Now, it's possible, but in New York City, AR-15s, for example, are all illegal. You know, you wouldn't, it's not like you could walk around.
If I was loading this into my car, I have an AR-15.

Speaker 9 I have a couple of them. If I was loading one into my car in Florida, totally legal, right? As long as I have a legitimate purpose for it.

Speaker 9 This guy, what he's carrying around, that alone would get him sent to prison for years.

Speaker 9 So I'm just saying he he might have been planning this out with some degree of caution, because at least until he strolled, as you pointed out, into the building.

Speaker 9 I think we'll find out more in these mental health incidents, though, that this is somebody who should have been flagged. I think there'll be more discussion about

Speaker 9 what could have been done to

Speaker 9 perhaps involuntarily commit him. I mean, this is the kind of person that should have been historically involved.
And Trump is on this, and Trump just signed an executive order about this.

Speaker 9 And we need to really think more about this.

Speaker 9 And the people in New York City, you know, my wife was just, I was just in New York, Megan, visiting my family the day, well, day before this happened for my dad's birthday.

Speaker 9 And my wife was on the subway and there was a stampede into her subway car because in the subway car next to her, there was some complete maniac with no shirt on who smelled like he hadn't bathed in, you know, a couple of years, screaming at everybody.

Speaker 9 We actually have to take action and take dangerous, mentally unstable people out of circulation in broader society, get them help. No one's saying be inhumane.
Get them.

Speaker 9 But you can't allow things like this to happen because the ACLU wants to bring down the pillars of civilization and see what happens.

Speaker 9 I mean, we have to be able to do things about those who are dangerously mentally ill, like this individual who now took a number of lives.

Speaker 6 They're so worried, the ACLU, about the civil liberties of shooters like this, and not at all about the civil liberties of his victims,

Speaker 6 of the right of the rest of us to live a peaceful life without having to worry about getting shot in the lobbies of our building. I mean, involuntary commitment is the bare minimum we should be doing.

Speaker 6 And yet

Speaker 6 this won't start that conversation, Buck. You know it as well as I do.

Speaker 6 We're going to go back to, and it's fine, we should talk about why this guy still didn't have his firearms taken away from him if he really did have two

Speaker 6 mental health incidents with authorities, you know, to the point where it was documented and our cops have already uncovered them. We should have that discussion in this.

Speaker 6 But that's, they won't cover it. They never cover anything on the left other than guns, gun violence.

Speaker 9 Well, and as we know, because the shooter is not a white male, this is going to be and has been treated very differently. I know everyone's pointed out what was said on CNN, which

Speaker 9 was quite, yeah, quite twice, which is quite a moment for CNN to say possibly a white male. We all understand that in the world of the Democrat

Speaker 9 on TV or just the left-wing mindset,

Speaker 9 it's much more of a story if it's a white guy who's doing the mass killing, because then you can maybe you can attach it to Trump more easily, or maybe you can attach it.

Speaker 9 We all know the routine and it's pathetic and it's gross. And it's why those

Speaker 9 pre-established media outlets have completely destroyed their credibility and are in a free fall that's not going to stop.

Speaker 9 So I don't think there's really a need to spend too much time on that aspect of it. But I do think that the fact that this guy is a

Speaker 9 minority, I saw it reported that they think he's half black, half Japanese. I'm not sure if that's true, but it's clearly not a white guy.
Oh, he's born at home.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 10 Okay.

Speaker 9 So, I mean, whatever the case may be, he's not some white guy.

Speaker 9 And so therefore, it's not an opportunity to, in bad faith, manufacture a MAGA connection and make it somehow about that, even though there's no real basis for it.

Speaker 9 We know that that's what they do all the time.

Speaker 9 In this case, they'll try to make it about guns, I think. But the problem that we keep running into is that I think, Megan,

Speaker 9 if you were a serious person about, if someone was seriously trying to deal with whether it's crime or even mass shootings,

Speaker 9 but there are steps they would take. And in the mass shooting context,

Speaker 9 looking at the mental health component of this, which means involuntary commitment.

Speaker 9 I mean, it means that when you've had a few incidents where people are scared to be around you and it's clear that, I mean, this guy thought he was in the NFL. He was never in the NFL.

Speaker 9 He's nuts, okay? He's nuts. And now obviously he's gone.

Speaker 9 But the fact that it would be almost impossible by the laws of really every state, almost impossible to put him on an involuntary psychiatric hold where you could really establish what kind of a risk is he to the public?

Speaker 9 Should we really take away any access that he has to firearms?

Speaker 9 This kind of a problem, if you're not going to address what could be addressable, you're going to repeat the scenario uh and i i think that's likely unfortunately to be the case with this where you have somebody who they're going to do everything they can to find some way to make this about politics in the media that that they favor right whatever it may be they'll attack the disfavored group in this case gun owners and they won't deal with the reality which is this guy is an absolute wacko and uh should have been flagged and stopped in advance of this i mean the other side of megan is you know you can't we're a country of 350 million people give or or take, and there are some very bad, very crazy people out there.

Speaker 9 You're not going to be able to stop all of them. You know, it's unfortunate here.
There was a good guy with a gun, so to speak. There was an NYPD officer on the scene.

Speaker 9 But first of all, he's outgunned. You know, he's going to have just his sidearm or rather his pistol against somebody who's got a long gun like this.
That's going to be very tough.

Speaker 9 And he was shot in the back. He probably didn't even have a chance to react to the unfolding threat.

Speaker 9 And even obviously, if he had a ballistic vest on, not enough to stop the 5.56 round that was shot out of this rifle. So

Speaker 9 it's a very tough situation when someone who is a dedicated shooter like this, who has access to that firearm and doesn't care about living, right? I mean, that's the other part of this.

Speaker 9 So that's very tough to neutralize this threat in advance of any casualties.

Speaker 9 The only other thing is this could have been, unfortunately, I mean, you always hate saying this, this could have been much worse.

Speaker 9 You know, this guy, fortunately,

Speaker 9 didn't keep going on this rampage because it's not like they were able to get ESU, which is the New York version of SWAT, there to stop him in time before he could do any of this.

Speaker 9 So, in a sense, because he's so crazy, he killed himself. And that, I think, probably spared a number of lives.
I also know there's the photos of people barricading their offices.

Speaker 9 I mean, think about the trauma of that, too. You know, there's an active shooter on your office floor, and you're just trying to take the sofa and the chair and wedge it against the door.

Speaker 6 I know.

Speaker 6 Those were reportedly Blackstone employees, and those guys must have been in a full panic, hearing gunshots or maybe having gotten a call to tell them that there was an active shooter in the building.

Speaker 6 And what can you do? It's like

Speaker 10 what they did is the right move, by the way. I mean, I just

Speaker 6 want to them, right?

Speaker 6 But I imagine that this is going to lead to even more security provisions in some New York City buildings, especially those that have high-target profiles, like a Blackstone, like an NFL.

Speaker 6 I mean, I actually did work right across the street from this for three years when I was at Jones Day. I was at 53rd and Lex for three years of my life.
It's a relatively quiet area of New York.

Speaker 6 I mean, it's Midtown, but it's not like the hop in Times Square, which is just a few blocks to the west. And

Speaker 6 it's clear that this was targeted. I mean, we don't know for sure that he was going to the NFL, but if you just wanted to unleash carnage, you'd go to Times Square, which is just a few blocks west.

Speaker 6 As I said, you wouldn't go into this particular building. This guy seemed to have a mission.
It's not like he, I listed the states he had driven through.

Speaker 6 He appears to have gotten into New York City, driven right to this building, just left his car and walked right in.

Speaker 6 The only way for a cop like this one to protect a building like that would have been for him to be on guard at the door.

Speaker 6 And you and I both know, Buck, these guys are there generally as a deterrent and to like intervene once something has happened.

Speaker 6 They're not really like a military guy standing at the door to prevent armed intruders like this guy.

Speaker 9 I mean, I'm just a civilian who goes to the range regularly, Megan, and I shoot a lot more than 95% of people in the NYPD. And I was in the NYPD and went shooting with them, just to be clear.

Speaker 9 Like, I know it's a budgetary thing. They don't get, they're not, I mentioned ESU, that's emergency services unit.
That's think SWAT.

Speaker 9 It's the same thing, essentially, but they're called ESU and the NYPD. Those guys shoot a lot.
Those guys are tactical. They can handle a threat like this.

Speaker 9 They're trained to handle a threat like this. A beat cop essentially on his own when somebody's ambushing him and got a long gun.

Speaker 9 I mean, you know, know, this is just, you know, they're just human beings trying to do a job on their end. I mean, you know, they're not Superman.

Speaker 9 They're not able to necessarily engage and neutralize a threat of that magnitude.

Speaker 9 And, you know, this is now going to have, I think, there'll be more discussion about what about having armed security personnel in more lobbies. Well, there was an NYPD cop on duty here.

Speaker 9 I mean, you had a guy show up with

Speaker 9 a semi-automatic rifle who wanted to kill a lot of people. And

Speaker 9 that's a major threat to tackle for

Speaker 9 anybody, no matter what your level of training is. And so, yeah, on the NYPD side,

Speaker 9 I just think that this is one of those times where it was

Speaker 9 a terrible scenario that there aren't going to be that many lessons learned in terms of response, in terms of protective procedures, essentially.

Speaker 6 I don't know what the layout was on the floors, but in most buildings in New York now, you go up to the individual floor and now you have to get through another layer of security where there will be glass and in some cases, bulletproof glass, and you don't get to even see a receptionist unless you can get yourself through the glass.

Speaker 6 I can't imagine they would not have that at a place like Blackstone. He didn't go to that floor.
He went to the floor of the management company.

Speaker 6 That's what the cops said, where I imagine the security probably would have been lesser. So, yeah, it's

Speaker 6 room for improvement, but we can't, we've chosen not to live like this in general in America.

Speaker 9 Yeah, well, that's, I think, the critical point, Megan, is that we can't think that we're all going to be going to work in bunkers every day.

Speaker 9 You know, look, I would say this,

Speaker 9 as a former New Yorker for almost 40 years and now a Floridian and a Floridian who often conceal carries, you know, that's another good, good, you know,

Speaker 9 I would be, I feel better about these situations, or I think we could think that there's a better chance that this could be thwarted if you had people with training who choose to carry, who are law-abiding gun owners.

Speaker 9 You know, gun owners are, concealed carry gun owners owners specifically are incredibly law-abiding by the numbers.

Speaker 9 And that may be

Speaker 9 another thing to consider in a place, unfortunately, that's not New York, because New York's a gun-free zone.

Speaker 6 New York's a gun-funded zone. The good guys don't have guns in New York.

Speaker 9 This is what I was going to say. I mean, there are signs up.
I mean, I've actually taken photos of this. It's so preposterous.

Speaker 9 That Times Square is a gun-free zone, which is, you can't carry a gun anywhere in New York, really.

Speaker 9 I mean, and people will say, oh, but there are very, very few people can get, even getting a premise permit is pretty hard, but getting a concealed carry permit is almost impossible.

Speaker 9 You have to prove need, and there's all these different steps, and it takes like a year, and the whole thing is a mess.

Speaker 9 But I'm reminded of this,

Speaker 9 of the old, the quote, the kind of very harrowing, ominous quote from the IRA.

Speaker 9 I think after they tried to get Thatcher one time, they just said, you know, you have to be lucky all the time. We only have to be lucky once.

Speaker 9 And when you're dealing with something like this, you know, you really want to establish, you'd like to establish perfect security, perfect deterrence. It's just not possible.

Speaker 9 There are always going to be individuals. I mean, you mentioned the different layers of security and those are important.

Speaker 9 They're particularly important for, as you and I know, Megan, like in the media business, maniacs who want to get onto your floor if you're, you know, and maybe they, you know, they think that they're

Speaker 6 a guy showed up at Fox News one time ready to kill me with a knife. I mean, it was like, if we didn't have security there, it would have been very dangerous situation.

Speaker 9 So that's just one of many incidents i'm sure i mean but that that so that shows you the security procedures are generally working there's no security procedures in these office buildings that are going to be perfect and in this context even if you had say the you know the elevator go to a floor where there was a secondary barrier to entry you know we have this now it is standard and most it's standard in my office in new york where you have to badge in okay well this guy if he gets in the elevator bank he can take somebody He has a gun.

Speaker 9 He can take somebody and say, all right, you're going to open this for me now, right?

Speaker 9 I mean, it's not, there's ways that you can get around this right it's not foolproof there's always layers of or or i mean i don't know if the glass or the doors are going to be ballistic but if you shoot a glass door with enough five five six rounds guess what it's going to it's going to break apart so uh you know even if it's supposedly bulletproof so but isn't it more about isn't it you tell me because when when you know there was a very dark period in my life where a different guy was stalking me and um

Speaker 6 The one lesson I learned more than any other from all the security we had in our lives back then was it's all about putting layers between you and the battery. Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 6 Just to slow the person down. So it's not that you're assuming they're going to be foolproof.
It's just assuming the more layers, the more I can slow them down.

Speaker 6 So if you had cops, if you had civilians in the lobby who actually were carrying, maybe one would have gotten a shot off against the guy.

Speaker 6 If you had that sort of security on the floors, maybe there could have been more advanced warning. And again, we're all lucky it wasn't worse than it was.
I hate to say it with people dead.

Speaker 6 But I don't know. In America, we generally just don't live like that.
We generally live as it's a free country and we know there's going to be some nut cases.

Speaker 6 And sadly, we've gotten to assume because of the ACLU that they will be roaming around our loved ones because their civil liberties are what is most important.

Speaker 9 Well, that's what I think we're doing is we're sitting here and we're going through the layers of security. And what you said is absolutely correct, which is that at every, and this was true.
So

Speaker 9 for people to understand, NYPD, and it may have switched a little bit, but when I was there, the breakdown was there was intelligence division, which was doing essentially intel gathering, often using undercovers and sources of active plots against the city of New York.

Speaker 9 And then there was something else called CTD, which was Counterterrorism Division.

Speaker 9 The Counterterrorism Division, and I know it's confusing because their missions cross over, but CTD, which is where now Commissioner Tisch worked when I was there, they did things like, how secure is the building?

Speaker 9 What's the blast radius of somebody parks a car bomb in front of this federal building or that office building or whatever? They looked at all these layers, did assessments, did secure.

Speaker 9 So that that was the mission because they recognized New York City is such a target.

Speaker 6 And that's why you have those huge planters out in front of places like the JCC. So someone can't ram the building with a car bomb.

Speaker 9 Or somebody can't do what we've seen where these vehicle attacks, which unfortunately in the past have been horrifically high body counts where somebody will just get into a

Speaker 9 vehicle and start mowing people down. They'll put barriers in the way.
Again, the barriers don't mean that some maniac can't run over one or two people.

Speaker 9 The barriers mean some maniac hopefully can't run over 50 or 100, right? So this is, it's all about mitigation and it's about layers.

Speaker 9 And that is how the professionals do these security assessments in these buildings.

Speaker 9 There's different groups, you know, some of them are led by former NYPD commissioners, and that is their job where they go in and they look at security.

Speaker 9 I'm just looking at what happened here in this instance and saying there's not a,

Speaker 9 I'm not aware of, at least from the reporting so far, a gaping security vulnerability or a lack of law enforcement response, right? Or a too slow.

Speaker 6 No, no, I get it. I get it.
I mean, I will say it's just jarring. One of these bad times.

Speaker 6 It's jarring to see the guy on the walk-in shot with the long gun down at his right side walking across the plaza to enter the building. And if you zoom out, you can see civilians just walking about.

Speaker 6 They clearly don't see that he has a gun on the side of his body because otherwise there would have been some sort of a panic. They would have screamed, gun, you know, something would have gotten you.

Speaker 6 You can see, look at these people, these two guys in the back on the top of the shot. They can't see.

Speaker 6 I don't know whether

Speaker 6 on this guy's right side or whether it's one of those situations buck where like you don't believe you're seeing what you think you're seeing you know i've i've had

Speaker 6 like there's no way that's and you don't want to be like that hysterical person you know like

Speaker 6 i reported some guy had a long gun when really it was just like i don't know an umbrella you know like our

Speaker 6 as new yorkers our instinct is much more to be like everything's fine we're fine

Speaker 9 move on yeah there must be something else it's a toy it's a paintball gun it's It's a gag. It's a joke.

Speaker 9 I mean, this is where your brain goes, unless you're somebody who is trained and looking for these kinds of things.

Speaker 9 And like I said, I mean, even one NYPD officer, this is why I think, you know, in some cases, you've had in the school shooting situations, for example, it's clear that the school shooter had, first of all, this was clear with a terrible Tennessee, the Nashville school shooting, that the shooter was looking for a place where there was nobody who was going to have a gun, right?

Speaker 9 We know that schools are generally gun-free zones, which is also preposterous because the bad guys don't care about those laws, but there are armed security at some schools.

Speaker 9 That shooter looked for a school where there was no armed security, so they would have total freedom of movement, no chance that anybody would stop them.

Speaker 9 You know, in this instance, you have an NYPD guy in the lobby, and

Speaker 9 that wasn't sufficient to stop this threat. And

Speaker 9 no, obviously, fault of that officer's who died a hero. And

Speaker 9 he was there really, as you pointed out, it's more of a deterrent. And it's also more to deal with some maniac who wants to run upstairs and

Speaker 9 cause problems, maybe has a knife. But when somebody shows up and they're a committed shooter and they have a semi-automatic rifle and this guy obviously

Speaker 9 knew how to

Speaker 9 work the gun and understood enough of it to do some real damage, that's going to be a very challenging thing for any...

Speaker 9 any security assessment to be able to handle.

Speaker 9 So I know it's unsatisfying to anybody who wants to hear this won't happen again, that there's not really a lot that could have been done differently here in the moment to stop this.

Speaker 9 But short of New York City changing its laws so you have people that can conceal carry the general population, you know, the good guys and gals with a gun, short of putting really substantive, I mean, it's just not possible.

Speaker 9 You're not going to have to do that.

Speaker 6 Well, look,

Speaker 6 you could, you could, if I'm running Apollo,

Speaker 6 they have more money than God or Blackstone.

Speaker 6 more money than God, I'm saying we are going to put an armed guard at the entrance to the building to watch out for something like this in addition to another armed guard inside who watches like the people once they're already in the building.

Speaker 6 But nine times out of ten, somebody who's a shooter like this doesn't walk in into a building like this with it totally exposed. I mean, they just, I think, anticipate something will happen to them.

Speaker 6 They would be more concealed. And look, the worst school shooting in American history was at Virginia Tech, and that guy did not use an AR-15.
He used semi-automatic handguns.

Speaker 6 Yeah, so, I mean, it's like we can do all we want to protect people. Oh, I'm not.
I'm not. I'm just saying.
I do want want to say this. No, I know you're not saying that.

Speaker 6 I just, I do want to point out that to the point we're making, which is it's a free country and sadly this kind of thing happens.

Speaker 6 His home state, adopted home state, Nevada, had another shooting not involving him, Reno. Six people were shot.
Three are dead. It was outside of a casino, and it happened yesterday.

Speaker 6 Three people killed, several others injured in a shooting outside a casino in Reno on Monday morning. It happened around 7.25 a.m.
in the valet area outside of of the Grand Sierra Resort and Casino.

Speaker 6 The suspect and adult man was found within minutes. He's been taken to a hospital following an officer-involved shooting.

Speaker 6 The shooter walked into the parking lot in the valet area of the hotel and casino, pulled out a handgun, which initially malfunctioned, but after he made it operable, he began firing at victims.

Speaker 6 He had multiple magazines. He ran through the parking lot, said police, where he exchanged gunfire with a security guard.

Speaker 6 Almost nobody's reporting on this because it didn't happen in New York City, which is the media hub. They don't care when it happens with a Nevada man who actually lives in Nevada.

Speaker 6 You see, that doesn't matter to the Acela media. What matters is themselves and their safety.
That's why they're super interested in this guy.

Speaker 6 But, you know, there's what are you going to do? Like, that's okay. That's you're in a parking lot leaving a casino where you had a good time with your friends and family.

Speaker 6 And this guy pulls out a gun.

Speaker 6 Not for nothing, but all those security guards I work with over the years have told me the best thing, the number one thing, this applies to everybody that you can do to protect yourself,

Speaker 6 get a dog. Get a dog.
They all say that. Like, there's no better deterrent against somebody coming into your home and potentially your workplace than, you know, a mean-looking guard dock.

Speaker 6 Now, I don't have a mean-looking guard. I have a big galute named Streadwick who is more likely to lick your face and eat your snack.

Speaker 6 But a dog in general is a deterrent against someone looking to enter your home and do harm to you. And they don't know that it's a big galute.
In most cases, they hear barking and they think.

Speaker 9 The barking is what matters. You're not looking for, you know, you don't have a malinois with titanium inserts in your house, but you don't need one.

Speaker 9 I mean, you can just have a dog that lets everybody know that, hey, there's a bad guy around here because people,

Speaker 9 element of surprise for bad guys is

Speaker 9 critical. And

Speaker 9 if all of a sudden people know they're at the door, or in this case, if all of a sudden people know that a maniac with a gun is entering a lobby in advance,

Speaker 9 then people can take evasive action or even counter the threat much more much more easily. So it's...

Speaker 6 All right, Buck, let's spend a minute on Zora Mamdani, who's likely to be the next mayor of New York and how this affects.

Speaker 6 I'm interested in the politics of it. I am, but I'm really more interested in just the utter failure that's coming our way in Manhattan because this is a defund the police guy, and he has the nerve.

Speaker 6 He has the nerve yesterday to start tweeting. Honestly, I think it would have been better if he didn't.
He's trying to look like he cares about the cops.

Speaker 6 First he tweeted, oh, I'm so sorry he's in critical condition because there were reports early on that the cop was.

Speaker 6 And then

Speaker 6 when he learned that he had died, he sent out, you know, the appropriate, I'm very sorry, he was a hero kind of tweet.

Speaker 6 This guy, Zoram Mandami, if he's elected, will get cops and other New York civilians killed with his policies.

Speaker 6 He wants to defund when challenged by somebody who said, oh, when we say defund, we don't really mean defund. We mean like reallocate.
And he said, no, we mean defund.

Speaker 6 The police are racist, anti-queer, and endanger Americans.

Speaker 6 And so now he tried to soften it when he was running for the actual mayoral nomination because he was running against people who were not for defunding the cops.

Speaker 6 But this guy is still saying he wants domestic violence victims to be treated with social workers showing up and not cops and so on.

Speaker 6 I'm incensed by it. I do not believe him that his heart is totally in the right place when it comes to our New York City cops.

Speaker 6 I believed him the first time that he thinks they're racist and ought to be defunded. So what's coming our way in New York if this guy wins as he's overwhelmingly likely to do?

Speaker 9 What's coming your way is people like my family who still live in Manhattan, at least half of my family, my immediate family does, are thinking about moving, which even didn't happen during COVID.

Speaker 9 Or at least, I mean, I moved because of COVID, but my mom, dad, and my sister decided that they were going to stick it out in New York City, but they're not sure they can stick out a mom Dani administration.

Speaker 9 This is... It's troubling because when you look at the numbers, people, and this is a frustration for me, Megan, people will say, well, New York is getting what it deserves, or New York is getting

Speaker 9 what it wants.

Speaker 9 And it's actually a very small percentage of the 8.5 million residents of New York who want this guy to be mayor, to be clear.

Speaker 9 It's depending on, and I know we haven't had the general election, and maybe he won't win, but even just based on what just happened in this primary,

Speaker 9 you're going to end up having like 20% or 15% of New Yorkers actually end up voting for this guy, maybe. It's going to be a very small.

Speaker 9 Now, you can blame people who don't get off their butts butts and get up and vote, you know, in the sense that

Speaker 9 they should have their voices heard here and not vote for this guy. But the

Speaker 9 disaster that is the Mamdani administration, I think, is unfortunately going to result in not only a lot of really good people fleeing the city, but a lot of people who

Speaker 9 stay behind suffering. I mean, you pointed out what would happen on the crime front.

Speaker 9 And one of the things that I find most frustrating about his philosophy, if you can call it that, or his communism, is

Speaker 9 he he is appealing to people mostly on the New York is really expensive line, right? That's the cop stuff.

Speaker 9 Yeah, he's anti-cop, and there's a maybe a 10 to 15% of the New York City electorate that are far-left Democrats that like that anti-cop stuff.

Speaker 9 But really, he's appealing to people on the New York is so expensive, you can't afford the rent. I'm going to make it cheaper for you.

Speaker 9 And what's so maddening about this is that the approach that someone like Amamdani takes is only going to make it worse. And every time this has been shown anywhere, I mean,

Speaker 9 you pick the case, you show me the case study when somebody comes in and decides to play God in the market, right?

Speaker 9 They decide what supply and demand really is, they decide what the price should be, price controls.

Speaker 9 Price controls is why Venezuela went from one of the richest countries in the Western hemisphere to an impoverished hellhole with a level four advisory from the State Department telling Americans not to go.

Speaker 9 That only took about 20 years for that to happen, but price controls were a big part of that.

Speaker 9 The idea that Mamdani is going to come in and have city houses, like have all this housing built for people. First of all, is it going to be housing anybody's going to want to live in?

Speaker 9 What makes him think he knows how to get this done? He has no managerial experience whatsoever.

Speaker 9 And if you're going to set artificial rates for what people would pay for this housing or just add it to the city's already massive budget for

Speaker 9 what is essentially welfare housing, the projects,

Speaker 9 you're going to blow a giant hole through the city budget. You're going to have to raise taxes on people and cause even more people to leave.
And it creates this vortex of destruction.

Speaker 9 And how people can't see that is enraging, honestly, at this point.

Speaker 9 How any New Yorker, you know, there are some people who, if they tell me they're going to vote for the Megan, I say, all right, I disagree, but like, I get it.

Speaker 9 You know, you're like so into being, I don't know, you know, pro-choice or you're so opposed to the Republican foreign policy. You know, I disagree with you, but I don't think you're insane.

Speaker 9 Voting for Momdani is insane. It's going to make it worse for everybody.
It actually would make it worse for all the residents of New York City.

Speaker 6 There will be no benefits. I really hope people reconsider.

Speaker 6 Now that this has happened, I really hope, you know, they take this as the reminder they needed that safety and security in New York are an absolute essential or New York doesn't exist in the way that we knew it.

Speaker 6 Tourism dies. It's a critical industry of New York.

Speaker 6 The New Yorker, 8 million New Yorkers live there full-time, but 20 million New Yorkers, about 22, come in and fill the city on a workday. And that needs to be able to go on without people

Speaker 6 fearing for their lives. And you take away the cops, you defund the cops in any meaningful way, and it changes.
It changes dramatically.

Speaker 6 All right, I want to move on to Cincinnati in the time we have left. So, Cincinnati had this terrible fight, which we showed yesterday, where

Speaker 6 we came in and pointing out we didn't know where in the dispute this was, but what we saw was a group of black people beating the hell out of a white man, a white woman, and then a second white man in three different, though it seems,

Speaker 6 if not related, at least closely located spots. In this first video, the white man strikes first.
He reaches across and appears to smack a black man.

Speaker 6 And then this mob of black people beats the living daylights out of the white man over and over and over. And it's obviously disproportionate and it's awful.

Speaker 6 And it's women and men who are kicking him and stomping on his head. And then a white woman tries to save him.

Speaker 6 At least that's what the report was, but she appears to be one of the only ones trying to intervene.

Speaker 6 And she gets the shit kicked out of her by men and women to the point where the vice president of the United States commented on what kind of a man would punch a woman in the face like this.

Speaker 6 And then there's another white man who gets attacked. Okay, so that's what happened in Cincinnati yesterday.
There were no cops.

Speaker 6 Now the Cincinnati police chief, whose name is Teresa Fiji, is how you pronounce her last name. She's the first woman to lead the department.
She took over in January 2023.

Speaker 6 She would like us all to know that we've gotten it all wrong, that we journalists and social media people are the ones really responsible for making this into a thing.

Speaker 6 And then when asked by a journalist who was there, how exactly have we misrepresented anything that happened? We're totally open-minded. You know, tell us, was there a mob beating up?

Speaker 6 The first mob first? Like, tell what happened that we didn't? No answers. Absolutely no additional information.

Speaker 6 It appears this woman is just making it up, trying to shame journalists out of covering this story. She's a woke warrior.

Speaker 6 She's already been sued by four white cops in her department for discriminating against white men. The only one they say she will promote are either women or minorities.

Speaker 6 And this is her message for the rest of us in the wake of her city's embarrassment. Watch:

Speaker 11 social media and journalism and the role it plays in this incident. And yes, guys, that's you.

Speaker 11 That is you.

Speaker 11 At times, social media and mainstream media and their commentaries are a misrepresentation of the circumstances surrounding any given event.

Speaker 11 Because what happens, that social media post and your coverage of it

Speaker 11 distorts the content of what actually happened.

Speaker 11 And it makes our job more difficult.

Speaker 6 What exactly was distorted? I think

Speaker 11 by

Speaker 11 the irresponsibility with social media is it just shows one side of the equation quite frequently without context, without factual context.

Speaker 11 And then people run with that and then it grows legs and it becomes something bigger that we then have to try to manage as part of the investigation.

Speaker 6 What context would make a mob of people in the dozens kicking the living shit out of three people in separate incidents? Again, we don't know whether they were related or not better or okay.

Speaker 6 She failed to tell us.

Speaker 9 I hadn't seen that clip until you just played it now. And I just,

Speaker 9 it's good to know that the police commissioner or the police chief of Cincinnati is an absolute moron. That's helpful going forward to understand how this is going to be covered and talked about.

Speaker 9 That was shocking.

Speaker 9 I can't believe that that person's in charge of anything, never mind men and women who are carrying firearms and trying to keep people safe. That's really appalling.

Speaker 9 But this is unfortunately the reality of a lot of city bureaucracies. They've elevated.

Speaker 9 We're allowed to talk about this now. And some of us have been talking about it for a long time, Megan.
You have, I have many others, but I mean broadly in the culture.

Speaker 9 A lot of people were elevated under DEI principles, especially in large cities in the bureaucracy, whether it's the police commissioner, the mayor, et cetera,

Speaker 6 for

Speaker 9 the characteristics of skin color and gender. And that results in what we just saw there, which is people who are completely unqualified.
So

Speaker 9 I don't even know what she thinks she's saying, other than clearly she's a lib and she thinks that there's some story that she doesn't want coming out of this.

Speaker 9 But there's no context. That's That's the critical point.
And I did see a lot of comments online. You probably saw this too.
Well,

Speaker 9 what did the guy say before? This is also something we might have to address a little bit more as a society. I don't care what he said before.

Speaker 10 I don't care. There's not some word.

Speaker 9 There's not some word, any word that allows people to say, we're going to engage in mob violence and maybe stomp you to death on the street. There's no word.
Doesn't exist. Sorry.

Speaker 9 So, you know, that's another part of the conversation that I think people need to own up to and have more frequently now, which is you can't just attack somebody because you don't like what they say, if in fact that's what happened.

Speaker 6 We don't even know. Yeah.
And there she is in front of the very journalists she says are so evil. And they're asking, what did we miss? Please tell us.
And you heard her inane, empty answer.

Speaker 6 She seems to just be angry that they're showing the video, which doesn't reflect well on her city or for that matter, the cops who were not called until well into it, because apparently the

Speaker 6 bystanders were enjoying watching the fight more than they cared about the lives being risked. Buck Sexton, always a pleasure, my friend.
Thanks for being here with your expertise.

Speaker 6 Coming up next, we're going to dig into the latest in the Russia Gate story with an independent journalist who's been covering it extensively for years.

Speaker 6 You've heard his name mentioned repeatedly by Matt Taibi. Well, we wanted to meet him and he's here next.

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Speaker 6 Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show. Now, if there's one thing the left does not want to talk about these days, it is the Russiagate hoax that was perpetrated against Donald Trump.

Speaker 6 People like the Pod Save America bros, even National Review, our friends over there, dismiss the latest revelations by director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard as nothing new.

Speaker 6 That there's no scandal that warrants an investigation and even go so far as to say this is all just a distraction from either the Epstein scandal or something else, but there's absolutely no there there.

Speaker 6 Well, there is there.

Speaker 6 There is there.

Speaker 6 But our next guest is a glaring exception to the rule of these leftist naysayers. Aaron Mate is an independent journalist who has been covering the story from the beginning.

Speaker 6 He's been sharply critical of the actions the Obama administration took to investigate claims of Russian election interference.

Speaker 6 You may remember his name from last week when Matt Taibbi mentioned he was one of the reporters who cast significant doubt on that Senate Intel Committee report that everyone on the left, including President Obama, has cited to defend their actions.

Speaker 6 You remember they're saying like in response to Tulsi, hey, you know, the Russians did interfere. We didn't misstate anything.

Speaker 6 And you need only look at Marco Rubio's Senate Intel Committee report to know that we're telling the truth. Why would he say Russia interfered to help Trump if it weren't true?

Speaker 6 Well, Mate has a different view.

Speaker 6 He previously worked for left-wing organizations, by the way, like Democracy Now, Vice News, but now he's an independent journalist where he covers the Trump-Russia story for real clear investigations.

Speaker 6 And he's been on Tucker Carlson's show over on when he was on Fox a bunch of times. Aaron, welcome to the show.

Speaker 10 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 6 Okay, so this is really interesting to me. And there aren't more than a handful of journalists who have been neck deep in RussiaGate from the start, and you're one of them.

Speaker 6 I'm not one of them because I freely confess that when this was all unfolding, I had just started started at NBC

Speaker 6 and I was trying to do not non-political stuff.

Speaker 6 And it was a delight not to be immersed in all the Russiagate nonsense back then, which seemed like bullshit, but you really had to get neck deep in order to know one way or another, you know, and there were a few who did it, and you're one of them.

Speaker 6 So now that it all comes out, that it was even more of a hoax than we knew, people like you are invaluable who have been on it from the beginning. So let's go through it because there's new.

Speaker 6 Like we've been having Taibbi on.

Speaker 6 We had him on twice last week to walk us through the initial tranches of information, what Tulsi released that one Friday night, what we then gleaned from that House intelligence report of 2020 that was stuck in a vault at CIA until it was just declassified and we got a look at it last week.

Speaker 6 And we've learned that the intelligence community was preparing a report for Barack Obama, Presidential Daily Brief, that was going to really downplay Russia's interference.

Speaker 6 And then Obama said, hold on, hold on, hold on. They had a big meeting.
And the next thing you know, he received a report saying, Oh, Russia did interfere. It was bad.
It was bad, sir.

Speaker 6 And then we got the January of 17 intelligence community assessment that said they interfered and they did it to help Trump. And now we've learned that that second,

Speaker 6 we learned from Matt Taibbi last week, who analyzed the latest releases for us, that that did it to help Trump thing was just completely made up. They knew it was made up.

Speaker 6 Brennan required it based on a bunch of bullshit.

Speaker 6 The Steele dossier, yes, but also three other really flimsy, even more pathetic pieces of so-called analysis or data that were just completely made up and he knew it.

Speaker 6 Some of them preceded like 2014 analysis before Trump was even running. So that and did it to Trump helped win thing was completely

Speaker 6 made up and nonsense. And now you've got a piece out talking about how that's not all that was nonsense.

Speaker 6 The Russia interfered in the election piece also turns out to be almost entirely bullshit, including the piece we all accepted, which was that they hacked those DNC emails.

Speaker 6 They were responsible for hacking the DNC emails and that later got posted on WikiLeaks. So do I accurately state like the overview as to where we are now?

Speaker 10 Yes.

Speaker 10 And the intelligence that has just been declassified by Tulsa Gabbard gives us some really important new information on the latter piece that you mentioned, the core allegation at the heart of Russia gate, even before collusion became a public thing.

Speaker 10 It was that Russia hacked the DNC and gave the emails to WikiLeaks. That basically broke out in June 2016, followed by the release of the WikiLeaks emails in July 2016.

Speaker 10 And at that point, the Clinton campaign, through its contractor CrowdStrike, was the first entity to say that the Russians did it.

Speaker 10 And a lot of people in the media just ran with it because that's what they were saying.

Speaker 10 And for some reason, if you accuse a foreign actor of something uh then we just have to take it on faith that's sort of an established playbook going back to you know the iraq war and many other similar propaganda campaigns and then the intelligence community assessment that you talked about that was released in january that formally endorsed that said with high confidence russia hacked the dnc gave the emails to wiki leaks and along with collusion that russian email hacking allegation was the core plank of Russia gate.

Speaker 10 Now, we all know by now that collusion was a complete scam, laundered through the Clinton campaign, through Christopher Stilton.

Speaker 10 Nobody even in corporate media that was all about it even defends that anymore.

Speaker 10 Even Adam Schiff, I think, has stopped defending the collusion allegation, even though he was claiming for years he had seen secret evidence of it.

Speaker 10 But as you said, they have clung to the Russian email hacking allegation.

Speaker 10 And what we get now from Tulsi Gabbard's declassification is that in September of 2016, less than two months before the election, The FBI and the NSA, which are the two premier intelligence agencies that would be able to investigate this hack and leak allegation.

Speaker 10 The FBI taking the lead in investigating the hacking of the DNC. And the NSA is, we all know, like the premier surveillance agency in the world.

Speaker 10 They can see anything that comes in and out over cyber warfare. So they'd be in the best position to assess whether or not Russia hacked the DNC and gave the emails to Wikileaks.

Speaker 10 And what they said, and we're only learning this now, nearly nine years later, is that they had low confidence in the Russia hack and leak allegation. That was suppressed.

Speaker 10 Instead of the public hearing about that, the Obama administration put out a report through Clapper, who was then heading the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Jay Johnson, who was heading Department of Homeland Security, on October 7th.

Speaker 10 And they said, in the name of the intelligence community, they have high confidence that Russia was behind the hacking of the DNC, suppressing what the FBI and the NSA had said.

Speaker 10 And that remains the same after the election.

Speaker 10 There was another assessment circulated that we learned about through Tulsi Gabbard that said the picture of the attribution of doubting the attribution of Russia had not changed at all.

Speaker 10 And the reason was, as the FBI and the NSA said, we didn't have the technical evidence for it.

Speaker 10 And that was the point that people like myself have been making is like, yes, intelligence officials were telling us Russia did it, but where's the evidence? We were never told it.

Speaker 10 And now we know the reason why is because they had none. So that gets suppressed.
And as you said, then Obama orders the production of a new intelligence community assessment.

Speaker 10 That gets released in January 2017. And the low confidence assessment of the FBI and the NSA gets buried.
And, you know, someone might argue, okay, well, fine. What if the U.S.

Speaker 10 got new intelligence after the FBI and the NSA first made that low confidence assessment? Well, now we know from the declassified HIPSI report that you mentioned that just came out that basically.

Speaker 6 That's the House intelligence report from 2020 that was in the vault. Keep going.

Speaker 10 Exactly.

Speaker 10 Now we learned from them that basically no new intelligence was collected after the election, that most of the intelligence that went into the ICA was collected before the election, which means at the time that the FBI and the NSA made their low confidence assessment that Russia Russia hacked the DNC, no new evidence was collected after that to change their minds.

Speaker 10 And think about it. This makes sense.

Speaker 10 At the same time as the Clinton campaign was framing Trump as a Russian asset, they were also hiring a firm CrowdStrike, which first accused Russia of hacking the DNC.

Speaker 10 And when the FBI went to CrowdStrike and said, can we investigate the DNC servers for ourselves? CrowdStrike said no. And for some reason, the FBI agreed to that.

Speaker 10 This would be as if, you know, I accused someone of robbing my house. And And then when the police came, I said, yeah, I think that person did it, but you can't investigate yourself.

Speaker 10 You have to rely on my own internal investigation. But that's what happened.

Speaker 6 No, wait, let me let me jump in because that raises an interesting issue. Why would the FBI accept that?

Speaker 6 Why would the FBI say, okay, we accept your word, Hillary Clinton, that CrowdStrike is saying it was the Russians who hacked the DNC emails, and therefore we accept that it was Russia who hacked the DNC emails.

Speaker 6 And it brings me to a report that's just out or it's coming. It's it's coming, I guess.
Hold on, I want to make sure I have it right.

Speaker 6 Fox News yesterday reported that before the FBI ever launched its probe into

Speaker 6 Russia and collusion with Trump and all that, before that, U.S. Intel agencies had credible foreign sources saying that the FBI would help spread the Russia collusion hoax.

Speaker 6 That in other words, there were going to see documents, according to Fox News, I think this week from Tulsi, that show before the FBI started probing Trump and this alleged collusion nonsense, they

Speaker 6 had been told by credible foreign sources that, or sorry, U.S.

Speaker 6 Intel agencies had credible foreign sources that indicated the FBI, one of our intel services, was going to help spread the Russian collusion hoax.

Speaker 6 So in other words, is that Russia, Russia's, like they know the FBI is going to help Hillary spread nonsense about them and Donald Trump?

Speaker 10 Well, we do know that John Brennan briefed Obama right before the Trump-Russia investigation was open on July 31st, that he had picked up intelligence that Russia was aware of a plot in which Hillary was going to frame Trump as a Russian asset and tie that to alleged Russian interference.

Speaker 10 And Brennan

Speaker 10 got that and briefed it to Obama. And now we learn actually what Brennan was concerned about was not that Hillary was framing Trump as a Russian asset, but that Russia was aware of it.

Speaker 10 That's what allies of Brennan have said.

Speaker 10 And that's why even when Brennan sent a referral to the FBI making sure that they're aware of this in early September, James Comey later said he couldn't remember it. He didn't ring any bells.

Speaker 10 That was his testimony to Congress. You're not aware that the CIA told you that a major presidential candidate was framing her rival as a Russian asset, which you happen to be investigating on.

Speaker 10 And look, just based on what we know already, the FBI claims that the steel dossier had nothing to do with the decision to to open up Crossfire Hurricane. But yet we also know.

Speaker 6 Which is the investigation by the FBI into Donald Trump and whether he colluded with Russia to win.

Speaker 10 Correct. But we also know that weeks before the FBI opened up its investigation, Victoria Newland, who was then a senior State Department official and a very hawkish

Speaker 10 bureaucrat when it comes to Russia and was really alarmed by Trump's rhetoric on the campaign trail where he was criticizing foreign interventions and even talking about getting along with Russia, even saying we don't want to have World War III over Ukraine.

Speaker 10 Victoria Newland approves the deployment of an FBI agent to go to Rome and meet with Christopher Steele and receive his dossier. And this FBI agent received the dossier.

Speaker 10 This is early July 2016 and gives it to his colleagues.

Speaker 10 And then three weeks later, the FBI opens up the Trump-Russia investigation, immediately uses Steele's dossier as source material, including for surveillance warrants on Carter Page.

Speaker 10 And they want us to believe that this had nothing to do, that the FBI receiving the Steele dossier weeks earlier had nothing to do with opening up crossfire hurricane and they want us to look at the official pretext is this ridiculous official predicate of George Papadopoulos a low-level Trump campaign volunteer receiving quote a suggestion of a suggestion of some unspecified Russian help it just it doesn't make any sense so if this Fox News is if this Fox News report is correct that there's new evidence that the FBI was in on this it just it tracks exactly with what we already know because they did everything right what else it explains the behavior that that seems somewhat mysterious right now yeah exactly exactly and oh by the way on the issue of crowd strike what the public also wasn't told until a year after mueller shut down was that crowd strike in december 2017 their president sean henry who by the way used to work with james comey and rober mueller at the fbi he testified before congress in december 2017 that crowd strike which had first accused russia of hacking the dnc actually had no evidence that's a quote no evidence that these alleged russian hackers actually took anything from the dnc And that's a pretty big admission.

Speaker 10 You're accusing Russia of hacking and leaking these emails, but you have no evidence that they actually took anything from your servers. So how can you possibly make this allegation?

Speaker 10 Well, the public wasn't allowed to ask this question because that was buried for almost three years and only got released a year after the Mueller probe shut down.

Speaker 10 So that's just another example of countervailing evidence that comes out years after the fact that undermines this explosive allegation that at the time, if you recall this, it seems so silly now, like hacking, leaking emails.

Speaker 10 It's, you know, people were comparing this to Pearl Harbor in 9-11. Even if Russia did do that, you can't compare it to these seismic events.

Speaker 10 And by the way, we do, I think, far worse things around the world to other countries. Right.

Speaker 6 We do the same. Sure.
And by the way, Russia has done this in many elections.

Speaker 6 It wasn't just the 16 election in which they tried to sow chaos or amplify, you know, bad news articles that would make us fight.

Speaker 6 That was when I, before I went to interview Putin, that was one of the main things that I learned was what he was really interested in doing is sowing chaos.

Speaker 6 Like they would amplify, for example, in 2020, maybe Black Lives Matter articles that would sort of get people fired up and riled up and start like fighting internally.

Speaker 6 That's his real goal is to make us fight each other. But like they'd been doing that for a long time.
It was nothing new to help Trump in 2016.

Speaker 10 What I think is documented is that a Russian troll farm put out some really dumb memes and ads on social media that nobody saw. and that were barely about the election.
That's documented.

Speaker 10 That's what Russia actually did. If you want to call that interference, okay.
I mean, some Russians did do that. I don't think it impacted a single person in the U.S.

Speaker 10 Certainly did not impact a single vote, let alone swing the election, as we were told. I mean, this was, there were academic studies trying to argue that Russian trolls swung the election.

Speaker 10 It's an insult to everybody's intelligence. And it was a way to cover up for the Democratic Party's own failures in that election and their refusal to come to grips with that.

Speaker 10 So blaming Russia was a convenient foil. But the hysteria around this was just, it was unbelievable.

Speaker 10 So I don't know if you remember this, but when Trump gave his joint press conference with Putin in July 2018, and Trump next to Putin said that Putin had denied interfering and Trump said, you know, I have no reason to doubt him.

Speaker 10 The freak out was unbelievable. Like the way this was described, this was like the worst thing a president has ever done.

Speaker 10 John Brennan described Trump as, quote, nothing short of treasonous when John Brennan must have known that the FBI and the NSA actually shared Trump's conclusions.

Speaker 10 Certainly they had the low confidence assessment that had been buried. And by the way, we also learned now from the House intelligence report that

Speaker 10 they were aware of Putin's view on the election. And people close to Putin were saying that Putin didn't care because no matter who won, in Putin's view, it wouldn't really matter.

Speaker 10 Policy towards Russia wouldn't change. And of course, that's one of many pieces of critical information that got suppressed in order to put out this narrative that Russia was backing Trump.

Speaker 6 Exactly. So they were taking out.
actual human intelligence of somebody close to Putin who was saying he doesn't care who.

Speaker 6 And they were putting in nonsense like information from the Steele dossier and little sentence fragments that five different CIA analysts could not agree upon and stuff that predated Trump's even arrival on the political scene from like 2014 and one other statement saying, you know, Trump and Putin could work together as businessmen or something like that.

Speaker 6 It was like completely amorphous, empty stuff that they used to try to say he wants Trump to win. And that's

Speaker 6 how they got to it.

Speaker 6 So it seems very clear that they had an agenda within the intelligence community to make sure this assessment came out as it did, saying Russia interfered and they did it to help Trump, which was, to some extent, a reversal from where they had been going prior to the Obama meeting.

Speaker 6 And this is where you get the Andy McCarthy's, who I really like and admire and respect, but I just really disagree with him on this, of the world saying it's apples to oranges, because he keeps focusing on the fact that that Presidential Daily brief they were going to prepare for Obama on December 8th was really just going to say that it wasn't downplaying all Russian interference.

Speaker 6 It was just going to say that the Russians didn't hack election machines. And

Speaker 6 that's fine. They didn't, is his point.
And so it's fine. They were going to say that.
What happened in the ultimate report is they didn't come out and say they did hack election machines.

Speaker 6 They never reversed on that. It wasn't a 180 after the Obama meeting on that.

Speaker 6 It just simply focused on what the Russians did succeed at doing, like hacking the DNC and interfering in general with the goal of helping Trump.

Speaker 6 But hacking the DNC, now we're learning, appears to have been false. General interference was way overplayed.
It was a bunch of bullshit, like you point out with the farms.

Speaker 6 And to help Trump was completely made up.

Speaker 10 Correct. And look, here's the one criticism you can make of Tulsi Gabbard here.
You can criticize her language, like accusing Obama of treason. Maybe that's not her place to make that determination.

Speaker 10 That's for the Justice Department. And also, she did conflate vote hacking with email hacking in the way that she put out these findings.
So I think that's a fair critique.

Speaker 10 But as you point out, it doesn't matter because the fact is we learned from Tulsi's declassification something really important, which is that the intelligence on the email hacking, forget the vote hacking, that was suppressed.

Speaker 10 And the two premier U.S. intelligence agencies who would be best placed to assess who hacked the DNC and gave the emails to WikiLeaks, they had low confidence in the allegation that it was Russia.

Speaker 10 That's the bottom line here.

Speaker 10 So, even if there was a conflation made between vote machine hacking and DNC server hacking, it doesn't matter because the intelligence on the email hacking said that we don't have any evidence that Russia did it.

Speaker 10 And that was kept from the public. That's a major scandal because for years we were told this was the intelligence, this was the intelligence consensus.

Speaker 10 If you question this, you're a Russian propagandist. You're treasonous, as John Brennan said of Donald Trump when he questioned this.

Speaker 10 And that is the scandal here: the suppression of intelligence to manufacture a lie in the same way that the U.S. government did in going to war in Iraq.

Speaker 10 And by the way, some of the same players in the Iraq WMD hoax are involved here, including James Clapper, who oversaw the production of the intelligence community assessment along with John Brennan.

Speaker 10 In his memoir, James Clapper writes about how he basically, in the rush to help the Bush administration make its case for invading Iraq, he went and found things that weren't there.

Speaker 10 That's almost a direct quote. I went and found things that weren't there.
So what he was admitting to is manufacturing intelligence. So why are we surprised that he wouldn't?

Speaker 10 Why are we surprised that he did the same thing here? And why are we supposed to take these people's word on faith, especially given their record?

Speaker 10 And as a journalist, I mean, look, I'm not a Trump guy.

Speaker 10 I'm not a fan, but it's not for unelected intelligence bureaucrats to decide who gets to be in power,

Speaker 10 what the foreign policy of the U.S. is.
It's for the elected president. And what we saw here was just a contemptuous response to an election in which the wrong guy in the eyes of powerful people won.

Speaker 10 And so they did work to undermine him. And no matter where you are on the political spectrum, you shouldn't support that.

Speaker 6 The other thing about now learning that Russia hacked the DNC being a lie, or at least being totally unsupported, is it remains to this day one of the main things people

Speaker 6 downplaying the Tulsi news rely on to stand up their own conclusions that Russia was trying to help Trump. They say

Speaker 6 he hacked, you know, Putin hacked the DNC. Putin released through WikiLeaks the dirt, at least some of it, that he had on Hillary.

Speaker 6 And therefore, how can you say he had any goal other than to help Donald Trump? That was not a helpful release for Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 6 And that's yet another reason why it is so significant that we're now learning

Speaker 6 that we don't actually have the goods on Russia being behind that DNC hack.

Speaker 10 Exactly. Exactly.
We're learning this nearly nine years later. And this is not the peak of Russia Gay anymore.
People have moved on to other stories.

Speaker 10 But at the time, if you read any single news account in establishment media, it's just taken as fact that Russia hacked and leaked those emails. And there was never any scrutiny whatsoever.

Speaker 10 And the point that people like myself and Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibby and others were trying to make is, you know, Russia might have hacked the DNC.

Speaker 10 It's certainly possible, but we've never been given the evidence for it. And the role of a journalist is not to write down what intelligence officials tell you to say, it's to look for the facts.

Speaker 10 And the more facts we get, the more they undermine the narrative that Russia hacked the DNC. And even on the issue of voting machines, yes, it's true.

Speaker 10 You know, the Obama Russia never said that Russia hacked voting machines. But if you look at the media clips, like what was the

Speaker 10 common talking point from Hillary Clinton on down? Russia hacked the election. Russia hacked the election.
And it did create an impression.

Speaker 10 among many people, especially Democratic voters, if you look at polls, that Russia had changed the votes.

Speaker 10 And that's what happens when you have these propaganda campaigns that you're not allowed to question.

Speaker 10 And if you do, you're called names, you're marginalized, you're kicked out of media spaces, they just create consensus.

Speaker 10 Like no one issued an edict saying you all have to believe that Russia hacked the DNC, but just this, this, this sort of group mania allowed for this to be pervasive.

Speaker 10 And even now, when evidence comes out showing that the intelligence wasn't there to support it, has any

Speaker 10 mainstream outlet reported on this? Have they reported that the NSA and the FBI had low confidence in the Russia hacking leak allegation?

Speaker 6 Has anyone ever reported that? They're ignoring all of of this.

Speaker 6 They're going with the Democrat line of like, there's no there there, the Obama line, there's no there, the Pod Save America line, there's no there there, which I'm going to get to in one second, but let me show a little bit of that.

Speaker 6 This is from the Media Research Center in what we were hearing about Russia hacking the election at the time, SOT63.

Speaker 6 Russia hacking the election to elect Trump.

Speaker 12 What is the end of our democracy? Votes were definitely affected.

Speaker 6 Russia hacked the election to tilt it to Mr.

Speaker 13 Trump.

Speaker 11 The Russians definitively hacked the election.

Speaker 6 Russia did hack the election. No doubt.
The Russians hacked the election.

Speaker 14 Yes, Russia hacked the election.

Speaker 15 In fact, Russia hacked the election.

Speaker 16 President-elect Donald Trump still not sounding convinced that Russia hacked the election.

Speaker 17 If you can get him to accept that Russia hacked the election, see if you can get him to accept who won the civil war.

Speaker 18 The director of national intelligence, the head of the National Security Agency, the head of the FBI. All of these intelligence experts saying Russia hacked the intelligence.

Speaker 18 intelligence Russia hacked the election.

Speaker 14 The FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, I mean, they've all said this.

Speaker 14 So to believe that that's wrong, you have to believe they're all involved in an elaborate conspiracy to get Donald Trump.

Speaker 6 Oh my God, that's an amazing clip. I hadn't actually seen it myself, Aaron.
And by the way, the lower third on the CNN clip where they're saying, you know, they hacked.

Speaker 6 These are all the officials and the agencies that said they hacked. The lower third is Trump, colon, unsure if Russia interfered.
So like Trump was the the only one who actually was right.

Speaker 6 Actually, I'm not quite certain whether they did or they didn't.

Speaker 6 And all those media figures, so sure, because the NSA and the CIA and the FBI were undoubtedly leaking to them, telling them that it was so.

Speaker 6 And they completely forgot a journalist's obligation, which is to kick the tires, especially on a story that is hand-delivered to you with a big red ribbon on it from any three-letter agency.

Speaker 10 It's unlike anything I've ever seen, the level of media subservance to this narrative.

Speaker 10 And also, everyone also was convinced that there was a conspiracy between Trump and Russia, too. I mean, try to challenge that on one of these

Speaker 10 network shows, and it was very, very difficult. In fact, they didn't even allow on guests who would challenge that narrative.
It's just this was the talking point.

Speaker 10 And even though there's no one, like, we don't live in a totalitarian society. There's no official telling people what to say, but everybody just intuited that this was the narrative to go with.

Speaker 10 This was the way to respond to Trump. If you wanted to get into media spaces, this is what you had to say.
And it was absolute mania.

Speaker 10 And by the way, for me, you know, this, all this fear-mongering about foreign interference, like I'm on the left end of the spectrum. I do think there's foreign interference.

Speaker 10 I think Israeli interference in U.S. democracy is a lot more significant.

Speaker 10 APAC spends tens of millions of dollars to elect candidates and defeat candidates based on what it deems to be in the interests of Israel.

Speaker 10 Marjorie Taylor Greens called for APAC to be registered as a foreign agent. I think that's a much more significant foreign interference in U.S.

Speaker 10 democracy than whenever Russian trolls put out on social media. But that all gets completely ignored because that is bipartisan.
And here, because there was this partisan effort

Speaker 10 started by Hillary Clinton to frame Trump as a Russian asset and blame Russia for his election, rather than look at the Clinton wing's own dysfunctions, their own failures, everybody went along with it.

Speaker 10 And we're still paying the price because now, you know, people still want answers.

Speaker 10 And, you know, Trump voters especially were, you know, dismissed with contempt as malleable dupes who were brainwashed by Russia into not voting for, you know, saintly Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 10 And so there's also this elitist contempt that underpins all this. So accordingly, people in the media don't want to be embarrassed for going along with a massive scam.

Speaker 10 And that's why it's still very difficult to get accountability. And that's why they're still not reporting on the counteravailing facts, the low confidence assessment from the FBI and the NSA.

Speaker 10 No one ever acknowledged that CrowdStrike, the Clinton campaign contractor, had admitted under oath they had no evidence of Russian hacking and leaking. No one.

Speaker 6 It's amazing

Speaker 6 when you pair that with the red

Speaker 6 siren warning they'd been given that, hey, Hillary Clinton's team is planning to try to paint Trump as a Russian proxy and agent of some sort in order,

Speaker 6 the purpose was in order to distract from her email scandal. If you look at what's unveiled in the intelligence.

Speaker 6 So our intelligence agencies knew that at a minimum, and if the Fox News reporting turns out to be true, cooperated with it, but at a minimum knew.

Speaker 6 And then when the alleged intel started coming in from Hillary sources like the Steele dossier and the crowd strike thing on who hacked the DNC,

Speaker 6 they didn't say, okay, we were warned this is going to happen. Here's the bullshit that this woman is orchestrating.
Let's not get hooked on that line like a gullible fish.

Speaker 6 They jumped on it, ran with it.

Speaker 6 And while an initial report to President Obama was going to say, well, they didn't, the Russians didn't really do this much, it took one wood shedding from him from the sound of it.

Speaker 6 And they were all on board with, they did it, cite the sealed dossier, cite the crowd strike information. They were completely on team.
Let's get Trump.

Speaker 10 They were. And that's what the Mueller investigation was for.
Like the Mueller investigation essentially was waged to make this whole narrative look credible.

Speaker 10 And they spent tens of millions of dollars making this thing seem somewhat legitimate. And of course, the media ran with it.

Speaker 10 And if you read all the indictments that came out of the Mueller probe, in retrospect, I mean, at the time, they were so dumb.

Speaker 10 But even now, especially given all we know now, they're written by really smart people, people have probably gone to Ivy League schools, law schools, and they're basically, you know, wielding their intelligence to make it appear as if they have something.

Speaker 10 on Trump and Russia when there was absolutely nothing. The indictment of George Papadopoulos and

Speaker 10 Harter Page and Michael Flynn, Michael Flynn, who was accused of lying to the FBI about discussing sanctions with the Russian ambassador.

Speaker 10 When if you actually read the transcript of his wiretap conversation, they're not even talking about sanctions. They're talking about the fact that Obama had kicked out a bunch of Russian diplomats.

Speaker 10 And all Flynn basically said was, listen, we're going to come in soon. Things will be different.
So don't retaliate too harshly because we want to have good relations.

Speaker 10 We don't want this to go out of hand. That's all he said.
And he gets indicted and he's forced to resign. He's basically sabotaged by the FBI.
and all this.

Speaker 10 And they actually, this was, it's pretty well established that this was a deliberate effort. So, I mean, there's so much malpractice here, so much deception.

Speaker 10 And it was, again, no matter what you think about Donald Trump,

Speaker 10 why do we accept the intrusion of the national security state into the democratic process? And geopolitically, it had many consequences.

Speaker 10 You know, Trump on the campaign trail was talking about getting along with Russia, which I think is a good thing. Why do we want to have tensions with another nuclear armed power between the U.S.

Speaker 10 and Russia? Both countries can destroy the world many times over. So I think it's good to have cooperation and diplomacy with Russia.
And Russia Gate basically made that impossible.

Speaker 10 In fact, Trump even complained about that in the fall of 2017.

Speaker 10 He said, Russia Gate is going to get people killed because his mandate, as he saw it, which was to cooperate, reduce foreign interventions, that was undermined by people basically urging him to get so-called tough on Russia.

Speaker 6 Yeah, now he had something to prove where he didn't before. All right.
Exactly. Let me stand you by because there's a couple things I want to go through.

Speaker 6 I do want to show you some of the defenses that these Obama acolytes, the Pod Save America guys, have been offering and talk about that Senate Intel report.

Speaker 6 And then I've got to show you what happened on MSNBC and Morning Joe. This morning, this is a must-do.

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Speaker 6 Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show, independent journalist and contributor to Real Clear Investigations. Aaron Mate is back with me now.

Speaker 6 Erin, I just want to make something perfectly clear because I think I glossed over it.

Speaker 6 We talked and I outlined about the info we got from Tulsi on that Friday night and then the House intelligence report that came out the next week from Tulsi

Speaker 6 from 2020.

Speaker 6 and how it showed the Intel community was about to give Obama this presidential daily brief that kind of downplayed Russia's involvement.

Speaker 6 Then he has a big meeting, and the next thing you know, they produce a report that says, oh, no, Russia, Russia, Russia interfered and did it to help Trump.

Speaker 6 What you and I have been discussing is something else, which is the low-quality intelligence assessment earlier that fall that Russia hacked the DNC.

Speaker 6 And we've talked about how then that low-quality assessment was turned into a high-confidence assessment for no apparent reason. But here, too,

Speaker 6 having reviewed the documents, you're reporting is that Obama got involved. Once again, it was Obama stepped in and appears to have said,

Speaker 6 that's not the assessment I want. You outlined it as follows.

Speaker 6 On September 12, 2016, the FBI and NSA expressed low confidence in the core Russia gate allegation that they hacked and leaked these Democratic Party emails.

Speaker 6 By December 7th, 2016, that assessment hadn't changed. Most Most U.S.
agencies only had moderate confidence at best that Russia was maybe probably behind the hack and the leak.

Speaker 6 And that was also concealed from us. And then Obama had that principal's meeting that same day where he did the reversal on all the other stuff we're talking about.
And it was there, too,

Speaker 6 that he appears to have decided that he wanted a write-up saying Russia did this. Anyway.
So, I mean, his fingerprints are all over this reversal in the Russian information.

Speaker 10 Obama, to me, was pretty malleable. So I don't know to what extent this is Obama running the show or just Obama standing down to John Brennan and Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 10 But regardless, Obama's fingerprints are on this. And if you look at the timeline, September 12th, we now know this has just come out from Tulsi Gabbard.

Speaker 10 NSA, FBI, say they have low confidence in the Russia hacky leak. hacking leak allegation.

Speaker 10 Okay, October 7th, even though that's the view of the FBI and the NSA, Obama gets the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of the National Intelligence to put out a statement saying the intelligence community has high confidence that Russia is behind the hacking, contradicting what the FBI and the NSA were concluding.

Speaker 10 And let me just pause you there.

Speaker 6 Just hold that thought because we do have the Obama sound bite here.

Speaker 6 Well, it's former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jay Johnson talking about Obama approving that statement that Russia was behind the DNC hack, even though he knew that there was at best a low confidence assessment to that effect.

Speaker 6 Here it is in SOT 55 when he, Jay Johnson, testified before the House Intelligence Committee.

Speaker 22 On October 7th, we issued a very clear declaration based upon what we knew at the time that the Russian government was behind the hacks of the DNC.

Speaker 22 The October 7th statement was an administration statement. That was

Speaker 22 the result of an intelligence community assessment.

Speaker 22 The president approved the statement. I know he wanted us to make the statement.
So that was very definitely a statement by the United States government, not just Jim Clapper and me.

Speaker 6 But he doesn't reveal that the intelligence that had been given to Obama was low confidence, and then somehow Obama interferes, and we wind up with a high confidence assessment that they did this, and it does not appear any additional information was received to change it from low to high.

Speaker 10 And that latter point about no additional information being received, that's now documented in the House Intelligence Committee report that's just being released by Tulsi Gabbard, where they say the only new intelligence that came in, their words are, it's quote, paltry.

Speaker 10 So most of the intelligence that was produced for the ISA was collected before the election at a time when the FBI and the NSA were saying that they had low confidence.

Speaker 10 And yeah, Jay Johnson's saying there, this was an administration document.

Speaker 10 He's saying it speaks in the name of the intelligence community, but that's false because the two premier agencies that were best placed to assess this, the FBI and the NSA, they were dissenting on the allegation that Jay Johnson and Obama put out publicly.

Speaker 10 And by the the way, meanwhile, and the recent CIA review by John Ratcliffe made this point, other key intelligence agencies were excluded altogether.

Speaker 10 So the Defense Intelligence Agency of the Pentagon and the State Department's Intelligence Bureau, the INR, they were completely excluded from the process.

Speaker 10 And the CIA review by Ratcliffe noted that this was odd, especially if you're talking about the actions of an adversary, Russia.

Speaker 10 Why are you excluding the Pentagon's intelligence agency and the State Department, which we presumably have a lot to contribute?

Speaker 10 So you have overruling and ignoring the dissenting view of the NSA and the FBI,

Speaker 10 the dissenting view of the NSA and the FBI and completely excluding the Pentagon and the State Department.

Speaker 6 Wow. Okay.
Well, we'll put a pin in that one and see, because it also does raise questions.

Speaker 6 If the FBI actually wanted to help participate in a Hillary Clinton lie that Russia interfered, then why would they have been coming forward saying, we don't think they hacked the DNC.

Speaker 6 We only have low confidence and we're going to dissent from anything that tries to pin it on them.

Speaker 10 Well, I can answer that because, look, at the time, they were relying on CrowdStrike to investigate the DNC server hacking, and CrowdStrike wasn't cooperating.

Speaker 10 And I suspect, you know, obviously, someone like Peter Strzzok, who was the lead FBI agent on Crossfire Hurricane, he was all on board with framing Trump as a Russian agent.

Speaker 10 You know, there's text messages of him disparaging Trump, disparaging Trump, voters, his bias, and also talking about the Russians as, you know, effing savages. So, you know, his view is pretty clear.

Speaker 10 Not everybody in the FBI was on board with this. And I think what happened with Comey is this.

Speaker 10 So Comey, after Trump wins, he gets blamed because of his handling of the Clinton email investigation when he came out right before the election and talked about the FBI going back into the laptop and uncovering the Anthony Wiener stuff.

Speaker 10 So Comey is under a lot of fire now from the Clinton wing.

Speaker 10 And so I think Comey, being the sycophant that he is, decided just to completely shift gears and go along with anything that was asked of him.

Speaker 10 And that's why we now learn he was pushing for the steel dossier to be included in the intelligence community assessment.

Speaker 10 And funnily enough, I mean, maybe this is a coincidence, but you know, at that December 9th meeting between Obama and his top principals, where all of a sudden the narrative really shifts.

Speaker 10 So, you know,

Speaker 10 James Clapper's there, John Brennan is there. Susan Rice is there.
But representing the FBI and the NSA are not the respective heads of the FBI and the NSA.

Speaker 10 James Comey and Mike Rogers were not there at that meeting the fbi was represented by andrew mccabe who was a hardcore uh russia gator he's the one who in may of 2017 opened up a new probe of trump while he was a sitting president as a potential russian asset so mccabe is there uh not comey and the head of the nsa mike rogers also was not there and maybe that's just a coincidence that the heads of these dissenting agencies weren't there or maybe uh they weren't there and they were told basically in their absence afterwards to fall online and that's at least what I think Comey did.

Speaker 6 Wow. Just to clarify, Obama wasn't personally there, but his chief of staff, Dennis McDonough, was there at that meeting at his behest.

Speaker 6 And we have many officials on record after the fact saying these are the orders that they were given were per the president's request.

Speaker 6 I mean, it was very clear that McDonough was speaking for Obama and that Obama was on board with the change in intelligence or the representation of the intelligence, which did not look anything like the actual intelligence that they had.

Speaker 6 Okay.

Speaker 6 there's a couple things I want to get to. These Pod Save America guys have been running cover for Obama since the story broke.
They're crapping all over it.

Speaker 6 They think people like you, like me, like Matt are completely irresponsible. I'm going to give you a flavor for it and let you respond SOT 50.

Speaker 23 Do you think they can will this scandal into existence just by repeating treasonous coup and false narrative and manipulated intelligence over and over again?

Speaker 24 I don't think we should call this a scandal.

Speaker 25 Like, I don't even know what else to call it, like, a crock of shit.

Speaker 24 Like, it's not a scandal suggests that there was an allegation of something. There's a,

Speaker 24 at least, credible allegation of something. There's, there is, they can't even explain the allegation.
It makes no sense. This is the most easily debunked thing in the world.

Speaker 24 And the shortest way I would do that is, how could it possibly be that Obama was trying to steal the election from Trump when during the election, the FBI was investigating Trump and told no one, but the FBI instead announced an investigation of Hillary Clinton three weeks before the election?

Speaker 6 It's all part of the plan, Dan.

Speaker 24 Yeah, it's, I mean, it's, it's so stupid.

Speaker 6 Thoughts on that one, Aaron?

Speaker 10 First of all, it's not true that the investigation into Trump and Russia was suppressed. It came out in the New York Times shortly before the election.
So that's not even true.

Speaker 6 And yeah,

Speaker 10 they couldn't say very much because they didn't have anything. It was a scam.

Speaker 10 And I think they were still putting together exactly what kind of conspiracy theory they wanted to go with and what aspects of it because Trump was being framed as a Russian asset. And so, yes.

Speaker 10 And the point is, whatever they did before the election, after the election, they ran with this and they basically sabotaged Trump's incoming presidency before it even began.

Speaker 10 They released an intelligence assessment saying that basically Trump was the product of Russian interference.

Speaker 10 They sabotaged his cabinet by going after Mike Flynn.

Speaker 10 And they, through leaks to credulous media stenographers, they basically painted this picture that Trump was being controlled by Vladimir Putin and they made the steel dossier look credible.

Speaker 10 So sure, you can say maybe Obama wasn't trying to tip the scales for Trump in the election, but certainly other people were. John Brennan was.

Speaker 10 John Brennan was briefing members of Congress in August, trying to basically say that Russia was backing Trump.

Speaker 10 And that's why you had letters from Harry Reid to Obama demanding that Obama put out there what he knew about Russia meddling in the election. So, even if Obama wasn't trying to

Speaker 10 help Hillary Clinton out with this, he was allowing it to happen by having a CIA and an FBI help frame Trump as a Russian Russian agent.

Speaker 10 And he was briefed back in July by Brennan that Russia was aware of a plot to frame Trump. So really, what Obama should have done is called all this out and said, like, we can't have

Speaker 10 a baseless investigation, which the FBI had already launched and had massive consequences way into Trump's first term.

Speaker 6 Sure did.

Speaker 6 By the way, that first guy on there was Jon Favreau of Pod Save America, who has said he really, really, really wants to debate somebody on this issue. And

Speaker 6 I mean, you're the perfect guy. I'd be happy to host it here.
Has he invited you to go on his show to actually have the debate he claims he so desperately wants?

Speaker 10 No, I've never been invited by any prominent proponent of the Russia Gate controversy because they, because like you can't, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. And that's the problem here.

Speaker 10 This was a propaganda campaign. You know, people make fun of QAnon and all the conspiracy theories around QAnon.
This was Bluenon. This was a Democratic Party conspiracy theory.

Speaker 10 And it had catastrophic consequences. So many of them.
Domestic, it increased polarization.

Speaker 10 For me, you know, someone who was very supportive of the policies of Bernie Sanders, I believe in Medicare for all. I don't support attacking other countries.

Speaker 10 I believe in cutting military aid to Israel. After 2016, that would have been a great chance for Bernie Sanders to take control of the party and say, unlike Trump, I'm a genuine populist alternative.

Speaker 10 Like Trump appealed to working class people. I actually have policies that can actually benefit them.

Speaker 10 And Bernie Sanders, unfortunately, rather than stand up and say, you know, it's my turn now, he bowed down to the Russiate narrative and he paid lip service. He paid lip service to it.

Speaker 10 And how was he rewarded, by the way, for his obedience? In 2020, when he was running against Biden in the primaries,

Speaker 10 the Russiagate narrative gets used against him

Speaker 10 by these same people, including Pod Save America.

Speaker 6 Oh, the Democrats have been out to get Bernie from the beginning. I mean, just ask Tulsi.
That's one of the reasons she got

Speaker 6 excised from the Democrat Party because she stood up to it saying, this is wrong. What are you you doing? We shouldn't be putting our finger on the scale to help one Democrat win over another.

Speaker 10 Which raises a great point.

Speaker 10 If they don't like the fact that Tulsi is now accusing people of treason, they shouldn't have tolerated it back when they were accusing Tulsi of treason and being a Russian asset.

Speaker 10 Hillary Clinton calls him a Russian asset.

Speaker 10 That's right. And they were accusing Trump and all his supporters of being Russian assets, too.

Speaker 10 So if they don't like that language now, they're getting exactly what they asked for when they're the ones who put this out there in the first place and still win. When they actually

Speaker 6 one more from the pod save america guys and their attempted defense this is on that senate intel report that we've seen obama himself rely on to say there's no they're there move on here it is sot 51.

Speaker 13 she lays that out in great detail but then claims somehow uh because that that because the intelligence community didn't include didn't conclude that the voting systems were hacked

Speaker 13 therefore this has all been a conspiracy by barack obama to commit some kind of a coup after the fact, even though Donald Trump became president.

Speaker 13 I don't, I don't, like, it doesn't meet, it doesn't make any fucking sense.

Speaker 25 We all keep having a version of this conversation, which is like, am I missing something?

Speaker 6 Because I just feel like this doesn't make any sense at all.

Speaker 25 Like, they're saying that, yeah, they're releasing new intelligence that shows Russia didn't launch a cyber attack on our election infrastructure that altered the outcome, which is

Speaker 25 what the Obama administration has said. What they said.
And they're trying to make it sound like that's a smoking gun that proves that the Russians didn't interfere in the 2016 election.

Speaker 25 But as you mentioned at at the top, we know that they did, in part because the Senate Intelligence Committee, then led by Marco Rubio, now the Secretary of State, conducted a three-year investigation that determined Russia waged an aggressive effort to interfere in our election.

Speaker 6 Okay, so the entire two-thirds of that was just a straw man misstating Tulsi's argument, your argument, everyone's argument.

Speaker 6 No one's saying the ultimate PDB or intelligence community assessment needed to say that the Russians hacked election machines.

Speaker 6 No one is saying that. Or it's not even about the election machines.
It's about all the other things that we've been discussing and they're strawmanning it.

Speaker 6 But the Senate Intel Committee report, can you speak to that?

Speaker 10 Yeah, just last point on the point about the election hacking.

Speaker 10 Tulsi and her team, I think, made a narrative mistake in focusing on the intelligence that found there was no Russian hacking of election infrastructure.

Speaker 10 But as you say, it's also a complete straw man because what the intelligence she released also shows is that the FBI and NSA were, again, relying on Steele dossier, lying about it.

Speaker 10 John Brennan told Congress it was not a part of the intelligence community assessment. It was.

Speaker 10 And also critically, they buried the low confidence assessment that the FBI and the NSA made in the Russian hacking leaking allegation.

Speaker 10 And that's not something I've ever seen Pod Save America or any other Russia gate adhering media outlet address.

Speaker 10 And so until they address that, they just cannot dismiss this as nothing because what they're doing is simply cherry-picking a conflation that Tulsi made and ignoring the actual real revelations here.

Speaker 10 On the issue of the Senate Intelligence Committee,

Speaker 10 look,

Speaker 10 if you read that report, there is so much that they either missed on purpose or weren't aware of.

Speaker 10 So if you look at the House Intelligence Committee report that we've just got, they talk about the fact that intelligence was cherry-picked. They talk about the fact that the U.S.

Speaker 10 had intelligence, that Putin didn't care who won the election, and that was all cherry-picked.

Speaker 10 Either the Senate Intelligence Committee had that intelligence, same access, either the Senate Intelligence Committee either had the same access and just simply ignored it, or they didn't have the access.

Speaker 10 Either way, the point is the fact that we're still learning new revelations now from Hipsy shows that the Senate Intelligence Committee didn't do its job.

Speaker 10 And therefore, why should we take their word seriously? All they really cared about on the Republican side was disproving collusion, and they did.

Speaker 10 I think they just ignored the Russian interference side. But now, thankfully, from this Hipsy report and more disclosures, we're learning the truth that was suppressed.

Speaker 6 I've got to go over this. This guy writes for the new republic.
His name is Michael Tomosky, and he was on Morning Joe this morning

Speaker 6 discussing this whole storyline. And here's his take on it.

Speaker 7 The question is, how much does Trump mean this? We don't really know.

Speaker 12 But by God, if he means it, there's every reason to suspect that they will go out and do it.

Speaker 6 And by do it, you mean they will indict

Speaker 6 President Obama for something.

Speaker 6 Something? Something for what? I mean,

Speaker 7 that's a good question.

Speaker 7 And I was discussing this with a friend who is a former prosecutor. He said, yeah, but where are they going to find a witness, you know, who's willing to say that Obama did something illegal?

Speaker 7 How are they going to actually prosecute the case? And I said, fair point. But in this instance, maybe that isn't really even the point.
The point's retribution. The point's revenge.

Speaker 7 The point is the besmirching of Obama's character and so on and so on.

Speaker 6 Okay, and he's very upset about that. He doesn't want that at all.
And they had him on to discuss the article that he had posted earlier today, right? Is today the 27th or 20th or 28th?

Speaker 6 Yesterday, earlier on the 28th. And here's what he wrote: On planet Earth, Obama cannot be indicted, but we live on planet Trump.

Speaker 6 The attempted persecution of a former president is both a dangerous line to cross and an expression of this failed administration.

Speaker 6 He's very upset about the attempted persecution of a former president. It's a dangerous line to cross.

Speaker 6 It took me about 10 seconds to see what this same guy wrote when Donald Trump was indicted by Alvin Bragg, also a former president, and here's how that went. The title was The Trump Indictment.

Speaker 6 He's had it coming for years, he writes. This is historic, he goes on.
He even uses the planet Earth line, only here it goes as follows.

Speaker 6 On planet Earth, this means Trump singularly may have, even he is still presumed innocent, violated laws and norms that everyone else has followed.

Speaker 6 The bottom line here, and the one big thing that we know above all else, Donald Trump has had this coming for years. This feels like justice coming.
And he ended with this.

Speaker 6 They have to revere the law, these former presidents. This has been a given throughout our history until Trump.

Speaker 6 Then he goes off on a tangent about Nixon, goes on, only Trump knows and respects no law. He got away with what was in the inherently sleazy business.

Speaker 6 He got away with it when he was in the inherently sleazy business of slapping his name on casinos.

Speaker 6 But the presidency of the United States is not an inherently sleazy business, or at least it's not supposed to be. Trump made it that.

Speaker 6 If there's any justice left in this country, he will die in a jumpsuit that matches his cratered skin.

Speaker 6 We're a far cry from the attempted persecution of a former president, is a dangerous line to cross.

Speaker 6 Michael Tomaski. So I don't know.
I'm not expecting a piece from him or anybody at the new republic or for that matter, the National Review saying

Speaker 6 this may not be a dangerous line to cross. President Obama and his top

Speaker 6 emissaries in particular really do appear to have done something deeply wrong.

Speaker 10 It's all projection. They talk about persecution of political opponents wanting to jail them.
Well, this is what they tried to do with Russia Gate.

Speaker 10 And then when that failed, they tried again with the two impeachments and then all the lawfare that followed Trump after he left office, which, again, even if you put aside basic ethics where we hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold other people to, putting that aside, just politically, this was a disaster for Democrats to try to use the legal system to go after their political opponent, to try to jail Trump and basically make him unqualified for office.

Speaker 10 People rebelled against that because they saw this, I think, rightfully, as an intrusion into the Democratic process where you're supposed to win at the ballot box, not in courts.

Speaker 10 And it goes beyond Trump. I mean, people forget this, but many people in Trump's circle had their lives ruined as a result of this Russia Gates scam.

Speaker 10 Rick Gates, who is an associate of Paul Manafort, he was indicted by Mueller on some ridiculous Trumped-up charges because, again, Mueller and their team needed to bring charges to justify their existence and justify their investigation.

Speaker 10 So Rick Gates, you know, had

Speaker 10 went through a lot of trouble and people lost a lot of money.

Speaker 10 Roger Stone, if you remember, CNN, you know, very giddily broadcast a raid on his home by armed police officers to arrest him in his case, which is over what? Lying to Congress.

Speaker 10 Who else lied to Congress?

Speaker 10 We now know that John Brennan lied to Congress when he got up and said the steel dossier played no role in the intelligence community assessment when we know from the available evidence that, in fact, it did.

Speaker 10 And John Brennan even pushed to have it included in the intelligence community assessment. So they've normalized this climate now where, yeah, people are going to be persecuted.

Speaker 10 And unlike with Russia Gate, RussiaGate fraudsters actually have something to be concerned about because, you know,

Speaker 10 John Brennan, I think, committed perjury.

Speaker 10 Wait, was it here?

Speaker 6 This is May May 23rd, 2017, in front of the House Intel Committee.

Speaker 6 John Brennan sought 58.

Speaker 26 Do you know if the Bureau ever relied on the steel dossier

Speaker 12 as part of any court filings, applications, petitions, pleadings?

Speaker 27 I have no awareness.

Speaker 26 Did the CIA rely on it?

Speaker 6 No. Why not?

Speaker 27 Because we didn't. It wasn't part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had.
It was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done.

Speaker 27 It was not.

Speaker 6 Was that it, Aaron?

Speaker 10 Yeah, yeah, that's it. And so that's just not true.
It was used as the basis for the intelligence community assessment.

Speaker 10 It's referenced in the body of the ICA, we now know, because it was declassified by Tulsi Gabbard. And the footnote is an annex which has the steel dossier.
So it's just not true that it wasn't used.

Speaker 10 And if you look at the language about Putin aspiring to help Trump, and it mirrors a lot of the Steele dossier.

Speaker 10 So even if we didn't know from the documents that the Steele dossier was used, it was pretty apparent, especially when you also understand that the FBI was using the Steele dossier to get surveillance warrants on Carter Page and using it for investigative leads.

Speaker 10 So yeah, John Brennan has exposed himself here to a perjury case. And unlike the perjury cases in Russia Gate, this actually is consequential and it's substantive.

Speaker 10 And all those cases back then were cheered on.

Speaker 10 Like, you know, with every, if you remember this, with every indictment of George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn and Rick Gates and Paul Manafort, media loved this.

Speaker 10 Everyone was giddy over this because they felt as if Mueller was getting closer and closer to the secret Trump-Russia conspiracy.

Speaker 10 In real life, it was just political lawfare to make a fake investigation that was aimed at framing a campaign as Russian assets. look credible.

Speaker 10 And so anybody who defries now accountability for that, you know, has no leg to stand on. And by the way, you know, I think we should oppose this equally, no matter who's doing it.

Speaker 10 So I'm personally opposed to the Trump administration criminalizing free speech because they don't like what student protesters are saying about Israel.

Speaker 10 But the Russiagate playbook was to normalize that, to say that the government can go after people if they deem to be spreading disinformation or acting on behalf of a foreign power, even when there's no evidence whatsoever.

Speaker 6 CIA director current, John Radcliffe, spoke to what might be the potential charges in this, because that's the big question, right? Question mark. Tulsi used the word treason.

Speaker 6 That's very, very hard to prove. You basically have to be like working to undermine the United States with a, or have turned on the United States with a foreign government.

Speaker 6 But there are a bunch of other charges that could potentially be brought by the DOJ to which she's made a referral. And so they're reviewing that right now.

Speaker 6 Now, that testimony by John Brennan is dated 2017, and it's been more than five years. The federal statute of limitations on perjury is five years.

Speaker 6 But we had Mike Davis, who's very close to the administration. He runs the Article III project, which is basically kind of like MAGA law.

Speaker 6 They've been right about a lot saying there's really no statute of limitations that would be, that would stop us from bringing conspiracy claims.

Speaker 6 And that could envelop Brennan's statement. That could have been part of the conspiracy.

Speaker 6 Perjury charges, the statute of limitations gets told, meaning it won't start running.

Speaker 6 If the person who lied did something to make it impossible or near impossible for people to unearth the lie, like taking maybe the House intelligence report that put the lie to what he said and burying it in a safe, in a vault at Langley to the point where it took a presidential intervention years later to actually get it out and figure out whether there's a lie.

Speaker 6 But having

Speaker 6 said all that here.

Speaker 10 But that's on Trump too, because Cash Patel tried to get that report released during Trump's first term. And Trump listened instead to William Barr and Gina Haspel, who did not want that released.

Speaker 10 So Trump has responsibility there as well.

Speaker 6 That's awful. Did not know that.
Okay, here's CIA Director Radcliffe.

Speaker 6 This is on Fox News Sunday, speaking to the potential charges. SAT 40.

Speaker 15 John Brennan testified to Congress, and so did Hillary Clinton, within five years. I think it was in 2020, and then again in 2021.
Are those statute of limitations still live?

Speaker 28 What hasn't come out yet, and what's going to come out, is the underlying intelligence that will come out out in the John Durham Report Classified Annex.

Speaker 28 And what that intelligence shows, Maria, is that part of this was a Hillary Clinton plan, but part of it was an FBI plan to be an accelerant to that fake steel dossier. And you're right, Maria.

Speaker 28 John Brennan testified to John Durham in August of 2020. He also testified to the House Oversight Committee in 2022.
Hillary Clinton testified before John Durham under oath in 2022.

Speaker 28 James Comey testified before the Senate Committee in September 2020. All of that's within the last five years.

Speaker 28 And much of that testimony is, frankly, completely inconsistent with what our underlying intelligence that is about to be declassified in the Durham annex.

Speaker 6 That's very interesting. And I just want to note, he mentioned September 2020.
One of those other dates was August 2020 in connection with the Durham investigation.

Speaker 6 If those dates are operative and they're they're basing any sort of potential perjury charge or other charge on those dates,

Speaker 6 we could see indictments within the next 32 days because the statute is about to run and they have a deadline. They have to get it in under.
And we're almost there, Aaron.

Speaker 6 Yeah, we are.

Speaker 10 And can I make a point about media? The media here has an opportunity to question these key figures if they wanted to.

Speaker 10 John Brennan is an analyst at MSNBC, and he's been interviewed now multiple times ever since Tulsi Gabbard's documents were released.

Speaker 10 MSNBC has never asked him about his testimony to Congress that the Steele dossier was not used for the intelligence community assessment.

Speaker 10 When that's just an obvious question, you told Congress one thing. This is what the documents say, that you relied on the Steele dossier.

Speaker 10 In fact, Brennan fought to have it included because the quote was, according to one CIA official, that John Brennan said it just feels right, which meant it fell right to the conspiracy theory that he was pursuing as part of a plot to frame.

Speaker 6 Can I show you something, Aaron? Can I? Please. Can I show you something? I got to show you something.

Speaker 6 So John Brennan did go on msnbc just the other day with jen sake this is last wednesday and we the questioning was so pathetic we did a montage of it because we this is the entirety of what she asked him watch this

Speaker 6 44.

Speaker 29 i know you have been through a lot but this is still a lot what did i miss that people should understand here don't you think the timing is around the epstein files and changing the subject i mean i was there just in responsible for releasing things not not any of this.

Speaker 29 And I President Obama wanted to make sure people understood, as you just said.

Speaker 29 And this is not something that the Russians see through a partisan lens in the sense of they could do it again many times.

Speaker 29 So everybody should have this information, which I think is important to know. Director Brennan, I'm so grateful that you're here.
You never shy away from telling your story.

Speaker 6 Oh, God, is it over, Aaron?

Speaker 10 Well, that's what happens when you have a media in which one former government official interviews a former government official colleague, and they've all been enlisted in this scam to fool the public into believing Trump was a Russian asset and won't take responsibility for it.

Speaker 10 I mean, the question is so obvious. You told Congress this.
The documents show otherwise. What's your explanation? But this isn't journalism.
It's just stenography. And it's unfortunate.

Speaker 10 And perhaps we'll get accountability through the judicial process. I got to say, it's very difficult, though, to go after a former director of the CIA.

Speaker 6 That's a pretty

Speaker 6 tough. But he's a very powerful person.
They do seem determined. And I mean, that's the problem with having gone after Trump is he's not really, I don't think he cares.

Speaker 6 Like, I think he's like, okay, you know, I've got a lot more on you than you guys ever had on me. And you were full steam ahead against me.

Speaker 6 I want to give you one more from that Saki Brennan interview. It's unbelievable.
Listen to SOT 43.

Speaker 12 And the fact that Donald Trump now is saying that Barack Obama was the head of this conspiracy is just so absurd.

Speaker 12 Now, I certainly understand why Donald Trump has such a deep-seated inferiority complex vis-a-vis Barack Obama, given their respective records.

Speaker 12 And also, it's quite remarkable the coincidence of timing between the release of these documents that seem to have been pulled together just in a very short period of time,

Speaker 12 as compared to these multi-year investigations and reviews that were done about this issue, and the furor that is around the Epstein files.

Speaker 12 So, again, I think it's very suspicious as far as the motivations here.

Speaker 6 That is incredible.

Speaker 10 Well, look, let's say it's true let's say trump is motivated right now to distract from the epstein thing because he feels he has something to hide and his base is angry even if that were 100 true it wouldn't matter the question is is this material significant is it real does it show malfeasance

Speaker 10 thing that is so ridiculous like that is absurd that is a leftist dream well brennan's doing psychology look and there's an irony here i mean uh trump tried to uh frame obama as being born in africa when you know when he wasn't so uh trump pushed the the like the birther conspiracy theory.

Speaker 10 How did Democrats respond by their own conspiracy theory that he was being

Speaker 10 blackmailed by Vladimir Putin? It's truly the dumbest conspiracy theory of all time.

Speaker 10 And Democrats having to make made the choice to elevate that as the way to resist Trump in his first term, they're still paying the price.

Speaker 10 And they should not feign outrage now or claim outrage now when there's demands for accountability, because a lot more people than Trump were hurt.

Speaker 10 You know, there were a lot of consequences. And so we do need these answers.
At the very minimum, these declassifications by Tulsi Gabbard are very important. It should have happened a long time ago.

Speaker 10 But it speaks to the entrenched power of the national security state that this couldn't get out during Trump's first term because people around Trump didn't want a release because they didn't want to embarrass the CIA.

Speaker 10 But now, thankfully, we have different people who feel differently and are getting the truth out to the public.

Speaker 6 I want to mention before we go, this Susan Miller. Have you seen her? She's sort of surfacing around this whole thing.

Speaker 6 And Susan Miller is a retired CIA spy who says she led the team that helped draft that controversial 2016 U.S. intelligence community assessment on Russian election meddling.

Speaker 6 I think the one that ultimately hit in 2017, in January 2017. She says that she led that team.

Speaker 6 Well, it comes out now, just the news is Jerry Dunlavey reporting here, that she's a bit of a partisan hack. She has called Donald Trump a dictator.
She's called MAGA supporters Nazis.

Speaker 6 and she insists that the now discredited Steele dossier, quote, might be true. Oh, is that all?

Speaker 6 I'm not shocked, but like, it is very interesting to get a closer look at the real feelings of the people who were behind that ultimate assessment, Aaron.

Speaker 10 What you had here in all these intelligence officials is a convergence of contempt for average voters who don't vote for the candidate they prefer, which was Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 10 We saw that with Peter Strzok and Lisa Page making fun of MAGA MAGA voters who go to Walmart, you know, just making fun of people.

Speaker 10 James Clapper, he talked about how, in his view, Russians are genetically predisposed to deceit. So he holds a bigoted view towards Russians.
And he said, you know, I'm a cold warrior.

Speaker 10 And also, he has a record, as he, I talked about earlier in the main interview, that in his book, he admitted to fabricating intelligence for the Iraq WMD hoax.

Speaker 10 So you have a convergence of people who have contempt for average voters, the entitlement to believe that they can meddle in an election, and a real pathology, you know, a real just hatred of Russia and a real aversion to talk about cooperation with Russia.

Speaker 10 It all converged here into this massive scam. And I'm not surprised at all to learn that yet one more official was afflicted by this.
And yes, so partisan hackery is a recurring theme throughout this.

Speaker 10 I mean, Peter Strzok, there's that text message where he tells Lisa, Paige, yeah, don't worry, we're going to stop Trump.

Speaker 10 And basically the Russian investigation

Speaker 10 is an insurance policy against him. And

Speaker 6 for some reason, we're supposed to take these people seriously and take their investigation seriously when she she let me just give you one on this susan miller so they to their credit the folks at just the news reached out to her and her response was long but i'll give you part of it first she says your comments are mean spirited and uninformed she doesn't like that they're that they're and by the way their request for comment was so straightforward they actually weren't mean spirited at all and she didn't like it then she tried to claim that I was originally pro-Trump and a solid Republican since I could start voting.

Speaker 6 I even voted for him in his first election, which would have been months before that intelligence community assessment, so close in time.

Speaker 6 And then she goes off about how our Constitution limits the president to two terms. Trump is already talking about a third.
I refuse to put the dossier in our report as it could not be corroborated.

Speaker 6 Sorry to ruin your view of me as a left-wing Republican hater. And then she goes on how she was out of overseas.

Speaker 6 I don't know. All I know is what she's saying literally still to almost this day.
July 17th. She gave an interview to Times Radio, and here's what she said, SOT 45.

Speaker 10 Have you seen or heard any information, which seems to you credible evidence that the president might be a Kremlin asset? Direct question. What do you say to that?

Speaker 30 I say I have seen some things.

Speaker 7 don't

Speaker 30 i'm i'm still working out whether or not it is true but yes, there has been some information that's out there that's been on the web and some other things like that

Speaker 30 that make it look like he could be. Oh.

Speaker 10 Okay.

Speaker 10 You can't share details of what you're referring to there.

Speaker 30 No,

Speaker 30 there was some posting, I want to say,

Speaker 30 a month or two ago

Speaker 30 that made it sound like

Speaker 30 there might be something there.

Speaker 6 This is what we're dealing with, Aaron.

Speaker 10 It's so embarrassing. It's just so embarrassing, but this has been the norm.

Speaker 10 You're allowed to go on TV and accuse someone of being a Kremlin asset, the president of the United States of being a Kremlin asset, and not present anything to back it up. And

Speaker 10 even given the minimal challenge of saying something, she can't offer anything.

Speaker 10 You know, Adam Schiff kept saying he had seen secret evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, which he wasn't allowed to divulge. And he went on.

Speaker 10 establishment networks and kept saying that.

Speaker 10 And the only time I've ever seen him subjected to actual real journalistic scrutiny was when he went on the view and a conservative guest co-host actually challenged him on this and destroyed him because this is the first time that Adam Schiff had actually been challenged to, you know, substantiate his allegation that Trump was committing treason, including with Russia.

Speaker 10 And that's the norm here. It's just like this was abetted by a media class that let people go on TV and say the most insane things, launch the most wild accusations, and this was treated.

Speaker 10 as as normal. And so for people who are tired of the story, because it's been going on now for nearly nine years,

Speaker 10 it's understandable, but it's not going away because this is a massive scandal. A president and his campaign were framed as being agents of a foreign power.
There was so much deceit to

Speaker 10 advance this scam. And amazingly, we're still even learning details of it so many years later.

Speaker 6 That conservative person was Morgan Ortegas, who did a great job and was never invited back again.

Speaker 6 Aaron, what a pleasure. Thank you for being so clear and so well informed on this.
It's been a great service to our audience. I appreciate it.

Speaker 10 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 6 Yeah, we'll talk again. Coming up tomorrow, our pal Walter Kern is here.
And also, and you'll figure out why,

Speaker 6 the girlfriend of Cash Patel wanted to come on. You'll find out why.

Speaker 6 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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