Bombshell Russiagate Docs Explained, and the Truth About Putin and Hillary, with Matt Taibbi and Ruthless | Ep. 1115

1h 41m
Megyn Kelly is joined by Matt Taibbi, founder of Racket News, to discuss Tulsi Gabbard’s new Russiagate bombshell documents, the buried 2020 House Intel report alleging Obama directed a narrative shift around Russian interference, former CIA director John Brennan’s role in shaping the “Trump collusion” storyline, why it appears now Brennan wasn't telling the truth in his 2017 testimony before Congress about the Steele Dossier, new information about why he included faulty information, the shocking info we learned that Putin had about Hillary Clinton’s health, why he may have chosen not to release it during the election, the spin from the left, and more. Then Josh Holmes, Comfortably Smug, Michael Duncan, and John Ashbrook, the hosts of the Ruthless Podcast, join to discuss how the documents suggest Putin may have actually favored Hillary Clinton winning in 2016, how the media monetized the Trump-Russia story despite a lack of evidence, how the media and political elites bought the Russiagate hoax because they couldn't believe Trump really won in 2016, the false narratives that the left continues to believe in 2025, her viral X post after Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin’s took a shot at her over J. Lo, the truth about Doug's history with her and other women, and more.

Taibbi: https://www.racket.news/
Ruthless: https://ruthlesspodcast.com/

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Runtime: 1h 41m

Transcript

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Speaker 29 Welcome Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.

Speaker 29 Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.

Speaker 29 The guys from Ruthless will be here in a minute, but we have got to begin with the latest stunning revelations about intelligence manipulation from President Obama and his top national security officials aimed at discrediting the incoming President-elect Trump and undermining his entire presidency.

Speaker 29 It's a scandal. It's disgusting.

Speaker 29 Is it criminal? I don't know, but I'm very certain on point one.

Speaker 29 Yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, released the declassified 2020 House Intelligence Report. Okay, now just follow with me.
We already talked about how in 2017,

Speaker 29 the intelligence community issued this assessment. It was just before Obama left office.

Speaker 29 Well, then in 2020, Trump's now president, and the House Intelligence Committee issued its own report looking back at that 2017 Intel Community Assessment, or ICA.

Speaker 29 They'd been working on it since they came into power at the beginning of the Trump presidency.

Speaker 29 And by the time they actually issued it, Adam Schiff was running the committee, which is why the 2020 House report gets buried and we're only now seeing it today.

Speaker 29 All right. But that 2017 intelligence community assessment is the one that we've been discussing this week with Matt Taibbi and others.

Speaker 29 That's the one that concluded Vladimir Putin not only interfered in the election

Speaker 29 of 2016, but that he, quote, aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances. That's the important one to keep your eye on.

Speaker 29 This newly released report from the House in 2020 that we're just now getting to see includes some bombshells about the Russians' intel on Hillary Clinton's health, which we've never seen before.

Speaker 29 If they wanted to help Hillary so badly and hurt Trump, sorry, reverse that. If they wanted to help Trump so badly and hurt Hillary, why didn't the Russians release that?

Speaker 29 Plus the lengths that CIA director John Brennan, who really is emerging as the villain here, went to include the now-discredited steel dossier in the annex to that January 17 report

Speaker 29 because it included the real dirt he desperately wanted. It was really his main hook to say that Putin wanted Trump.

Speaker 29 And now we've seen a look at the other three alleged hooks, and as Matt Taibbi is going to tell us, they're even lamer than we suspected. It's worse than we feared.

Speaker 29 But when we learned in this 2020 House document we're just now seeing that Brennan, who was running CIA under Obama, was confronted by a CIA officer about the flaws in the dossier.

Speaker 29 The guy was like, dude, we can't rely on this. We can't use this to say there was aspiration to help Trump.

Speaker 29 We shouldn't be sticking it in the annex to our report, in our report, or relying on it in any way. This needs to come out.
It's fatally flawed.

Speaker 29 Brennan allegedly said, quote, yes, but doesn't it ring true?

Speaker 29 Holy cow. Joining me now to react to all of this and more is Matt Taibi.
He's founder of Racket News on Substack and co-host of America This Week podcast.

Speaker 29 He's been owning this beat, I mean, for years now.

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Speaker 29 Matt, welcome back. So we lit up the internet with our segment the other day.
And here's part two. Here's part two.
Just to be clear, earlier this week, I actually wrote this down.

Speaker 29 I rarely write down what I'm going to say, but I just didn't want to forget it because there's so many moving parts. We learned that the intelligence community assessment of January 17

Speaker 29 was set

Speaker 29 to downplay Russian interference in the 16 election.

Speaker 29 And then after a meeting with Obama and the top intelligence community officials, or at Obama's direction at least, the intelligence community did a complete 180

Speaker 29 and played up Russian interference instead of playing it down. And we learned from what was released by Tulsi last Friday that that was all at Obama's direction.

Speaker 29 He made clear he wanted that 180 and they had the flimsiest of evidence to do it. In particular,

Speaker 29 this piece about that they aspired, the Russians did, aspired to help Trump win. So you and I talked about that.

Speaker 29 earlier this week and how what they did what we've seen in the release that came yesterday is this house intelligence report from 2020, buried up until now, that shows just how flimsy the evidence supporting that

Speaker 29 aspirational point was. Yes, steel dossier, we knew that one sucked, but we didn't know about this Brenning quote, you know, has the ring of truth.

Speaker 29 And the other alleged supporting evidence was even flimsier, arguably, than the steel dossier. Do I have it right?

Speaker 34 Yes,

Speaker 35 that's pretty much it.

Speaker 36 You've got it, Megan.

Speaker 37 Yeah.

Speaker 37 Okay.

Speaker 29 So to go through, like when you saw what was released yesterday, this House Intel report, first of all,

Speaker 29 why was this buried when

Speaker 29 Andy McCarthy, who's again dumping on the story, he points out, hey, that House Intel report was largely put together by Cash Patel, who was a committee staffer at the time.

Speaker 29 And like,

Speaker 29 it was a Republican-controlled house for a couple of those years.

Speaker 29 And even when it became a Democrat-controlled house, there were Republicans who knew about this. So, why did this report stay hidden up until 2025?

Speaker 38 Okay, that's a really interesting question, Megan. And it's got a fascinating answer that should give everybody a lot of pause.

Speaker 38 So, as you correctly note, this investigation, the bulk of it was done by a team

Speaker 38 that was assembled by then chairman Devin Nunes

Speaker 36 of the

Speaker 48 Devin Nunes

Speaker 50 in 2017 and a little bit of 2018, if I'm not mistaken.

Speaker 38 So there were two teams.

Speaker 51 One of the teams

Speaker 52 put together what was later called the Nunes memo.

Speaker 53 If you remember, that was the one outlining the abuse of the FISA system.

Speaker 51 Everybody dumped on that.

Speaker 54 And then there was an inspector general report that came out a year later that completely vindicated it and proved that it was true.

Speaker 48 Well, the other half of this team, there was a small unit that worked out of

Speaker 54 a little room in the CIA headquarters, a little room at Langley, and their work product was locked in that secure vault the entire time.

Speaker 42 And it has not been allowed out.

Speaker 51 since then through all the different political situations you mentioned.

Speaker 59 It was still there even up until about three weeks ago.

Speaker 51 You might have noticed the House Intelligence Chair now, Rick Crawford, he complained publicly to Donald Trump and said that there was a whitewash going on.

Speaker 38 My understanding is that Trump interceded

Speaker 52 and resolved some kind of conflict that had been going on with the CIA.

Speaker 41 And now,

Speaker 51 as a result, the document was finally returned to the Hills.

Speaker 38 So anybody who was thinking that it was just sitting there in

Speaker 48 Congress awaiting release, no, it wasn't.

Speaker 51 It was locked up and classified the entire time.

Speaker 29 Wow. Okay, so now we've gotten a look at it.
And this is in part what we've learned.

Speaker 29 That they concluded in this House document that the Intelligence Community Assessment, or ICA, of January 17, was subject, quoting here, to unusual directives from President Obama and senior political appointees, particularly CIA Director Brennan.

Speaker 29 Unlike, still quoting, routine intelligence community analysis, this ICA was a high-profile product ordered by the president, directed by senior IC agency heads, and created by just five CIA analysts using one principal drafter.

Speaker 29 Production of this document was subject to unusual directives from the president and senior political appointees, and particularly Brennan.

Speaker 29 The draft was not properly coordinated within the CIA or the intelligence community, ensuring it would be published without significant challenges to its conclusions.

Speaker 29 And then it goes on to say, hold on,

Speaker 29 the judgment therein that Putin had a clear preference for Trump and, quote, aspired to help Trump's chances at victory did not adhere to the intelligence community's standards and

Speaker 29 was based on

Speaker 29 potentially biased and implausible information that Brennan ordered published. Your headline in your document is, it's worse than we thought.

Speaker 29 And I think that's based in part on what now we see the full panopoly of information that Brennan used to get to that conclusion.

Speaker 29 Because it matters.

Speaker 29 Everybody who's defending what Obama did says, we knew the Russians interfered. Stop trying to tell us the Russians didn't interfere.
That's all we ever said. That's not true.

Speaker 29 They did say more than they said the Russians interfered because they wanted to get Trump elected and that Trump colluded with them.

Speaker 29 Collusion fell apart, but they still hung on to, but Putin interfered to help Trump.

Speaker 29 So in other words, the election was unfair and it was unfair in Trump's benefit because that's who they meant to help. That has now fallen apart.

Speaker 29 And now we're seeing how that other lie got shoved out there. By the way, that lie was the basis for the collusion narrative, too.

Speaker 29 Now we're seeing how that other lie got pushed out there by Brennan at Obama's direction. And we're seeing what Brennan used to push the lie.

Speaker 29 One was steel dossier, which this points out as it fell apart. And the guy went to him, CIA analyst, to say, it's fallen apart.
We can't use this. He said, yes, but doesn't it ring true?

Speaker 29 Which is an outrage. That in and of itself is a scandal.
But there are three other legs to this stool, which are equally, if not more pathetic, Matt. Let's talk about those.

Speaker 37 You're right.

Speaker 51 The response to this whole thing has from everybody has been, well, yes, we knew the steel dossier was included in this report.

Speaker 54 And yes, that was bad, kind of a black eye.

Speaker 45 But, you know, as the Washington Post put it the other day, you know, there had to have been better updated intelligence that they got in the meantime.

Speaker 44 that pointed to Trump, I'm sorry, to Putin interfering specifically to help Donald Trump.

Speaker 62 And even I thought, you know, you never know, there might be something in there, I mean, you know, of some worth that would have pointed in that direction.

Speaker 51 No, it turns out that there are three pieces of intelligence that they were relying on for those two key phrases.

Speaker 41 One, which is that Putin aspired to help Trump.

Speaker 40 The other is that Putin had developed a clear preference for Trump and

Speaker 57 ordered his intelligence services to help him whenever possible.

Speaker 43 So the first

Speaker 50 item that they used to

Speaker 59 support that data data was a quote scant, unclear, and

Speaker 41 unverifiable fragment of one sentence that was really ambiguous.

Speaker 39 And in fact, the report was written by five CIA authors, and the quote was, five people read it five ways.

Speaker 35 They left it out initially.

Speaker 41 It was so, it was also unverifiable.

Speaker 40 So the authors left it out.

Speaker 35 Brennan ordered them to stick it back in.

Speaker 64 And this is a recurring theme.

Speaker 51 All of this stuff, all of the other three pieces were initially rejected by the cia as intelligence they were literally picked out of the garbage uh to put be put back into this uh thing the second item was an email with quote no date no identified sender no clear recipient and no classification uh and the third item was uh an assertion basically that

Speaker 38 Russia preferred Republicans because they didn't care so much about human rights and some other comments.

Speaker 40 And they said that this was backed up

Speaker 61 by liaison reporting, diplomatic reporting, press reporting, as well as signals intelligence.

Speaker 39 But when you write these reports, they have little citations that you can look at to see where that comes from.

Speaker 51 And when they looked at the citations, none of them made sense. Like one of them was from

Speaker 51 before the election, didn't even mention Trump.

Speaker 60 Another one was after the election.

Speaker 29 2014.

Speaker 51 Yeah, didn't mention Trump.

Speaker 39 And another one was

Speaker 57 quoting quoting like a Russian pundit saying that Putin and Trump should work together like businessmen.

Speaker 39 This is the stuff that they used to conclude that they had gotten into the very head of Vladimir Putin and assessed his preference for the election.

Speaker 39 It's absurd. I mean, the low standards are amazing.

Speaker 50 It's amazing that they had so little intelligence at all, even to manipulate.

Speaker 29 Which, of course, proves, just to batter the point, that this was inserted in there for political reasons,

Speaker 29 as an attempt to undermine Donald Trump's presidency. And what we know from the Tulsi Gabbard dump on Friday that you and I discussed earlier this week is it was done at President Obama's direction.

Speaker 29 So they included bad information.

Speaker 29 He rejected the concerns of CIA, Brennan did, CIA officers.

Speaker 29 It goes on to say that Brennan overruled professionals on the determination that Putin aspired to help Trump, who said said there's no direct evidence of this. There's none.

Speaker 29 Two officers argued to Brennan: quote, we don't have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected, and therefore the judgment that Putin was counting on Trump's victory should be removed from this ICA or the ICA should be changed.

Speaker 29 Nonetheless, it wasn't. Then the ICA excluded evidence from a Putin confidant that said the Russian president actually didn't care who won.

Speaker 29 So they included bad information in the report based on that flimsy, unsubstantiated, outdated BS.

Speaker 29 They overruled CIA analysts who were telling them, this should come out. We don't have support for this.
And then they rejected,

Speaker 29 sorry, and then

Speaker 29 they

Speaker 29 ignored contradictory evidence that would have pushed them the other way, including this.

Speaker 29 A Putin confidant,

Speaker 29 let's see, came to them

Speaker 29 and told a

Speaker 29 sensitive contact that one, Putin told him he did not care who won the election. Two, Putin had out had often outlined the weaknesses of both major candidates.

Speaker 29 And three, Putin had asserted that in either case, quote, Russia was strategically placed to outmaneuver either one.

Speaker 29 I mean,

Speaker 29 all of this shows

Speaker 29 They had one mission, Matt, and one mission only.

Speaker 29 And that aspirational point that he was determined to help Trump and get get Trump elected was a political hit job that they then leaked to the media immediately, as you pointed out the other day, that before the homework assignment was even completed.

Speaker 29 In other words, Obama said, go back and change your report. They had leaked to the media what the conclusion of it would be.

Speaker 29 They had one goal and one goal only, which was to undermine Trump.

Speaker 50 Yeah, and

Speaker 54 your quoting of that expert is

Speaker 44 in that one source is really an important moment, right?

Speaker 54 Because when I read this report, that jumped out at me.

Speaker 48 Out of all these things that they had, these fragments of emails and little bits of conversations from this and that, here they have the gold standard of intelligence, an actual human source who's a confidant of Putin.

Speaker 46 And he says, Putin doesn't care who wins.

Speaker 51 We don't think it's going to get better either way.

Speaker 50 You know, no matter what happens, we're in a good position.

Speaker 57 That's exactly the kind of thing that you need to include in this sort of thing.

Speaker 39 You're required to include, but they did not.

Speaker 40 And so the analysts were told, like, it's exactly like the WMD story.

Speaker 46 There's a quote from an FBI person who says, our instructions were that anything that we had was to be used. We were to push this.

Speaker 51 They talked about the steel material and they said including it was the right thing to do, but we were not able to verify it.

Speaker 52 This is, again, it's the same thing as the WMD business when they were told to find the sites or find the WMD sites,

Speaker 50 even when they didn't exist. And here, they did exactly the same thing.

Speaker 51 They found stuff that wasn't there and they covered up the relevant good intelligence they had that contradicted their points.

Speaker 29 How about the crazy Brennan quote in response to the Steele dossier? Yes, but doesn't it ring true? That is so damning.

Speaker 67 It's incredibly damning, and it's even more damning when you look at his testimony about about the steel dossier, where he says things like, Oh, I didn't know anything about it, I didn't know where it came from.

Speaker 64 And I can assure you that it wasn't in the 2000s, it played no role in the 2017

Speaker 38 intelligence community assessment.

Speaker 51 He said he just looked right in the camera and said that.

Speaker 29 Wait, we have that. We have that.
Let me play that, Matt, and then you pick it up on the back end. So, here is Brennan telling Congress the CIA did not rely on the steel dossier.

Speaker 29 This is from May of 2017,

Speaker 29 as now the Republican-controlled House Intel Committee is looking into this obviously bogus January 17 ICA report.

Speaker 29 And again, we are just now getting our hands on that House Intel Committee report, which was buried in a safe at Langley until President Trump just intervened. So

Speaker 29 they were doing an investigation, a real investigation into how this BS wound up in this ICA. And they called Brennan, Obama's CIA director, to testify.

Speaker 29 And keep in mind now, this is Brennan knows, but we don't, that he has been warned by multiple CIA agents under him that this is bullshit.

Speaker 29 We should not include this aspirational point in this report, and we definitely should not include the steel dossier. And his response was, but it has the ring of truth.

Speaker 29 That feels like it has the ring of truth, doesn't it? And here's what he testified, knowing all that to Congress under oath, SOT 17.

Speaker 18 Do you know if the Bureau ever relied on the Steel dossier

Speaker 18 as part of any court filings, applications, petitions, pleadings? I have no awareness.

Speaker 18 Did the CIA rely on it?

Speaker 37 No. Why not?

Speaker 18 Because

Speaker 18 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 18 It was not.

Speaker 29 Go ahead, Matt.

Speaker 51 If you look closely at that video, you can see his lip trembles sort of uncontrollably at the end of that statement.

Speaker 45 Look, that's what lying looks like. It's not a matter of dispute that the steel dossier was in this report.

Speaker 57 It was in the so-called classified annex that was declassified in 2020.

Speaker 51 So he's saying this in 2017. It wasn't known for sure until three years later, but everybody kind of guessed that it was in there.

Speaker 35 So he said that.

Speaker 51 He gave interviews, multiple interviews to the news media.

Speaker 57 And I believe he testified on other occasions that it was not part of

Speaker 60 the ICA.

Speaker 59 So look,

Speaker 50 they deflected constantly about this thing, and they always suggested that they had more that they weren't showing.

Speaker 39 And

Speaker 46 when you see under the hood and you get this quote, quote, and we have to remember this is

Speaker 41 an unnamed source.

Speaker 51 There's no way to confirm this.

Speaker 57 But

Speaker 40 the analysts who did this report

Speaker 51 are basically promising that they would be able to produce this witness

Speaker 46 if asked to. But apparently somebody heard

Speaker 46 Brennan say, yeah, but doesn't it have the ring of truth?

Speaker 52 And that is exactly the kind of behavior that got us in trouble in Iraq and multiple other episodes.

Speaker 59 So

Speaker 46 it's crazy stuff.

Speaker 29 It's not just Brennan either. Comey, of course, is one of the main villains here.

Speaker 29 And he too, I mean, the FBI knew just as well as the CIA that the Steele dossier was a made-up document by someone hired to do dirty work for Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 29 And yet, this was making the rounds on X the other day. Here's James Comey.

Speaker 29 This is April of 2018. All right, we just saw this is what lying looks like.
John Brennan in 2017, May of 17.

Speaker 29 He knew it was bullshit. His analysts had come to him saying, don't put that in there for the love of God, ring of truth.
And it wound up in the annex.

Speaker 29 Comey knew too. Here's Comey in April of 18 on ABC News.

Speaker 29 still pushing the allegations that were in the steel dossier as though they're legit. Watch.

Speaker 68 If there's even a 1% chance my wife thinks that's true, that's terrible. And I remember thinking, how could your wife think there's a 1% chance you were with prostitutes being on each other in Moscow?

Speaker 69 I'm a flawed human being, but

Speaker 68 there's literally zero chance that my wife would think that was true. So what kind of marriage to what kind of man does your wife think there's only a 99% chance you didn't do that?

Speaker 68 And I said to him, sir,

Speaker 68 when he started talking talking about it, I may order you to investigate that. I said, sir, that's up to you.

Speaker 68 But you'd want to be careful about that because it might create a narrative that we're investigating you personally. And second, it's very difficult to prove something didn't happen.

Speaker 68 Did you believe his denial? I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don't know whether the

Speaker 68 current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013.

Speaker 69 It's possible.

Speaker 29 Oh, he's such a scoundrel, Matt.

Speaker 56 Yeah, and I

Speaker 49 we have to remember that the material that eventually came out in the Justice Department Inspector General General's report about the Steele dossier in 2019 showed that the FBI already knew as early as early 2017 that there were serious problems with that report, that the

Speaker 44 most crucial elements of it, like the P-tape, like the allegations of sexual blackmail, that they were made in quote jest with friends over beers,

Speaker 40 and that these were just

Speaker 38 conversation, that it was internet rumor.

Speaker 54 All this stuff had already been gathered by post factum by FBI investigators

Speaker 51 early in 2017.

Speaker 40 So they knew that this story wasn't true.

Speaker 51 They had very solid evidence that the entire thing was a problem.

Speaker 52 They had already fired Steele as a source for lying to them about talking to the media.

Speaker 46 So

Speaker 51 for them to go out in a limb about this story that they knew had no backing

Speaker 51 is incredible, frankly.

Speaker 29 Okay, but now what's happening is everyone from the Pod Save America guys who they looked at our segment the other day, which the great Molly Hemingway retweeted and

Speaker 29 said, one of them said, I'm very disappointed in you to me. Like I expected better, which shows you and I are right over the right target.
We're doing things exactly right.

Speaker 29 They're all in this. They're Obama guys.
They're Obama loyalists. So they're out there.

Speaker 29 There's Annie McCarthy and there are others who are defending the position that this is all made up by Gabbard by pointing to the Senate Intel report that came out in 2020, 2020.

Speaker 29 It was a Senate Intel report chaired by Marco Rubio that everybody keeps pointing out. And the left keeps citing this because they say it came to the same conclusions as the

Speaker 29 intelligence community assessment. It backed up that bogus intelligence community assessment.
I've read Molly Hemingway on this.

Speaker 29 She has serious questions about that Senate Intel investigation and believes and would like to know further, but believes it was likely just a rubber stamp.

Speaker 29 Like what did the Senate really have its own independent Intel sources beyond what the CIA had, beyond what the FBI had, that it was using for this?

Speaker 29 Or did they really just use the same pathetic sources that Brennan used? We don't know. But you have reported, we have serious reason to doubt the integrity and vigor behind that Senate Intel report.

Speaker 29 Tell us why.

Speaker 38 Well, for one thing, a lot of that report hangs on this assessment that Konstantin Kalimnik, an aide to

Speaker 42 Paul Manafort, a Russian-Ukrainian aide,

Speaker 29 and Trump's campaign manager for a time.

Speaker 52 Right, an aide to Trump's campaign manager.

Speaker 40 They just flat out call him a Russian intelligence officer.

Speaker 38 Now, the previous investigations had not gone so far.

Speaker 61 Mueller said he had links to Russian intelligence.

Speaker 51 They left out the fact that he was a long-serving employee of the International Republican Institute, that he was also a source, a regular source in writing for the U.S.

Speaker 35 Embassy in Kiev, that he had extensive correspondence with people there.

Speaker 64 But most shockingly of all, they didn't even contact

Speaker 39 Kalimnik or attempt to interview him.

Speaker 70 His phone was published,

Speaker 39 right, the Senate.

Speaker 62 And

Speaker 35 which was strange because the U.S.

Speaker 39 government had a relationship with him, a long-standing relationship with him.

Speaker 53 Why not call the guy?

Speaker 51 Again, his phone number was published in a previous investigation.

Speaker 63 Aaron Mate was the first person to give him a call in the media.

Speaker 52 I think I was the second, and no one else did.

Speaker 37 And

Speaker 51 it's a thing that has gone on consistently with these investigations where they'll identify somebody like Julian Assange, who is eminently approach, or at least was eminently approachable at the time, and did not attempt to reach out.

Speaker 41 But more than that, they never presented any evidence for their assessment that he was a Russian intelligence officer.

Speaker 54 And we'd like to see that.

Speaker 52 It's not impossible.

Speaker 41 Of course, there are lots of people who do work as aides and translators overseas who have contacts with the various bureaus. But we need to see that.

Speaker 46 They just say we assess and that's it.

Speaker 41 And it's behind closed doors and we see how much that's worth with this.

Speaker 39 intelligence community assessment, right?

Speaker 29 Yeah, how did they assess? Because you point out over at Racket News.

Speaker 29 In speaking to him,

Speaker 29 let's see, the question was, how many times was he questioned by American authorities?

Speaker 29 And

Speaker 29 his answer was, not a single person from the U.S. government has ever reached out to me.
Not one. No one from the Office of Special Counsel, the FBI, or the Senate Intel Committee ever contacted him.

Speaker 29 Not once. Nobody.
So that's...

Speaker 29 This guy is integral to the Senate Intel Committee report that Obama's defenders are now using to say, because they are all using this report by the Senate, saying they found the same thing as that January 17 ICA.

Speaker 29 And therefore, this is all a nothing burger. And your point is you can put no stock in that Senate Intel Committee report.

Speaker 35 I think it's sort of proof that the original ICA is bunk because they had to do a completely new investigation

Speaker 52 and not use any of the intel from the 2017 intelligence community assessment to come to the same conclusion.

Speaker 60 Like, what does that tell you?

Speaker 51 Like if a prosecution brings an entirely new case in a criminal court and says, yeah, we're not going to use any of the evidence from that first prosecution that we brought,

Speaker 64 wouldn't you have a few thoughts about those prosecutors and what they were up to?

Speaker 48 That's what happened in this case.

Speaker 38 And it wasn't just one investigation.

Speaker 65 There were many of them, right?

Speaker 40 So

Speaker 39 the whole thing, I don't think it holds water.

Speaker 48 I think that 2020 assessment is deeply flawed.

Speaker 40 It also,

Speaker 62 you know, hangs

Speaker 39 significantly on Lisa Monaco, who is one of the figures who's in the middle of this original December 8th or December 9th decision.

Speaker 50 Like her name's on that piece of paper.

Speaker 47 She's a nightmare.

Speaker 29 This woman is an obvious partisan hack. We saw that throughout the

Speaker 29 last two Democratic administrations, her work at DOJ.

Speaker 29 She was one of the ones accused of covering up the entire Hunter Biden scandal, running cover for him, trying to pull back those IRS agents who were onto his tracks.

Speaker 29 This person is not somebody we should be putting any faith in. All right.
Also, in this latest House report, they talk about how

Speaker 29 they also in the House. This is the House in 2020 pointing out that the ICA of 2017

Speaker 29 ignored evidence that Putin seemed to be protecting Hillary Clinton in a couple of ways.

Speaker 29 It did not mention, for example, that Putin chose not to leak info he appeared to have on Hillary Clinton's health, including that she suffered from psycho-emotional problems and was on daily tranquilizers.

Speaker 29 We don't know whether that's true. We know that Putin appeared to have that intel in his pocket and chose not to share it.
And the relevant point here, Matt, is that

Speaker 29 the ICA didn't mention, they knew that he had that in his pocket, and it didn't mention that he did not release it. This is the man so determined to help Trump win.
And he's got evidence that

Speaker 29 she's on daily tranquilizers and has psycho-emotional problems, but he doesn't release it.

Speaker 35 He doesn't release it even after

Speaker 42 being briefed by the GRU, Army Intelligence, that Trump was...

Speaker 41 likely not going to win the election absent a quote remarkable intervention of derogatory information against hillary clinton and they had that kind of derogatory information, or at least thought they had it.

Speaker 46 And here's the really interesting thing, I think, Megan, which is that this material that he had was a large trove of hacked correspondence centered around,

Speaker 55 it appears, the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton, a number of members of Congress, including W.

Speaker 38 Wasserman Schultz.

Speaker 51 And it's the same stuff that

Speaker 51 came out in a declassified report earlier this week with regard to

Speaker 41 the mid-year exam email investigation.

Speaker 51 So there's this weird tie between the two investigations. But the point is, they had a lot of stuff they could have leaked

Speaker 41 about Hillary, and they chose not to do it, largely because it appears they expected Hillary to win and were holding in reserve the best stuff for the president.

Speaker 29 Right, exactly. All of which was known by these Intel officials drafting this report, but concealed.

Speaker 29 Meanwhile,

Speaker 29 you know, all this other flimsy documentation or material on whether there was an aspiration to help Trump made it in over the objections of the core Intel analysts.

Speaker 29 All right, so Matt, where does this go from here? Because Tulsi mentions treason. Trump mentions treason.
Treason is very narrowly defined under the law.

Speaker 29 It's basically aiding or abetting an enemy of the United States or trying to overthrow the U.S. government.
I mean, I see the argument, but that's a stretch. And also,

Speaker 29 there's a question about whether other lesser crimes are even viable now, given statute of limitations issues, and given the U.S.

Speaker 29 Supreme Court ruling on immunity for a president for official acts taken while in office. So, where does this go from here? Because it's been referred to the DOJ by Tulsi Gabbard.

Speaker 38 It has. And

Speaker 64 Emily

Speaker 38 Jashinsky yesterday in a

Speaker 42 press conference conference asked Tulsi about criminal charges and where they might be headed.

Speaker 61 I thought it was very interesting that Tulsi went out of her way in response to some of those questions to point out that, you know, we've determined that Barack Obama directed the manufacture of this intelligence.

Speaker 52 So that sounds to me like there's some kind of

Speaker 40 conspiracy or RICO style case that they're thinking of, but I don't know what that would be.

Speaker 60 Honestly, I've had no luck at all figuring out what the, you know, clearly it's going to be a conspiracy case, but conspiracy to do what?

Speaker 53 I'm not sure.

Speaker 54 And when I posited the idea

Speaker 35 of perjury cases, because some of them seem pretty obvious, even though the statute of limitations has expired,

Speaker 40 you know, I've been, the response has been pretty tepid.

Speaker 41 So I don't know.

Speaker 29 I don't know what the what kind of case they think they're building, but they seem pretty confident that they're ready to turn it over to, or that they, that there's enough to already turn over to a prosecutor yeah the um generally the statute of limitations on perjury will be like a year i think it is it's very low is it we're definitely past it and rico i'm trying to think it's either five years or ten at the outset which would be we'd be past that too

Speaker 29 we'd be past five

Speaker 29 um

Speaker 29 i'm pretty sure it is five we're looking it up now but in any event

Speaker 29 Oh, it looks like it's four. Okay, my team's telling me it's four.
So we're definitely past the RICO statute of limitations.

Speaker 29 So I'm not, my own initial reaction to this without having done the legal research yet is it's not going to be a legal case it's going to be it's a public scandal but the problem for the trump administration is the same media who participated willingly and knowingly in some cases in the scandal are the ones now being asked to report on their own malfeasance

Speaker 37 yeah uh

Speaker 50 I don't know.

Speaker 52 I've been assured that it's not a hearts and minds thing that they're trying to do now, that they're they're actually trying to build cases.

Speaker 59 So

Speaker 57 I just don't know what kind of.

Speaker 29 I'm sure they've done more legal research on it than I have, which is zero.

Speaker 42 Yeah, and I haven't really either yet.

Speaker 41 So

Speaker 44 it's been enough to try to keep pace with what has come out.

Speaker 37 Right.

Speaker 51 So, but clearly

Speaker 65 they have something in mind.

Speaker 39 There are already referrals that have been made for criminal cases to be opened.

Speaker 46 So

Speaker 44 clearly they've conceived of what they think might be a charge and have directed investigators to go gathering evidence for that or assembling that for a prosecutor.

Speaker 40 So

Speaker 51 we'll see. We'll see what pans out.

Speaker 29 Yeah. I mean, listen, those prosecutors who went after Trump were extremely clever and creative in coming up with something.

Speaker 29 And we'll see whether the Trump administration is equally creative on what is an actual scandal, unlike what they did to him. Matt, thanks thanks for everything.

Speaker 29 Everybody's got to check out Racket News. Well worth your time and so informational.
All the best.

Speaker 48 Thanks so much, Megan. Thank you.

Speaker 29 Coming up, the fellas from Ruthless join me for the rest of the show. They kind of like oppose PodSave America in a way.
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Speaker 29 Here to react to the latest Russia Gate revelations and much more, including Colbert, Epstein, there's a lot, are the fellas from the Ruthless program, Josh Holmes, Michael Duncan, John Ashbrook, and Comfortably Smug.

Speaker 29 Guys, welcome back. Great to see you.

Speaker 70 Oh, great to see you. You're looking bright and cheery today.

Speaker 29 Thank you. Thank you.
I've got my red on, and it's the summer, and we've having like really nice days now without humidity. So I'm happy.

Speaker 29 Can you believe this story? It gets crazier and crazier now.

Speaker 29 The House report exposing the flimsy evidence, and I use that term loosely, underlying the 2017 ICA was shoved in a vault over at CIA. It took Trump intervening to get it out.

Speaker 29 And now we see why the Democrats appear to have been actively concealing it for years. They did not want this thing to see the light of day because they've been lying to us for a long, long time.

Speaker 29 That's how it looks.

Speaker 70 Yeah. I mean, look, this is a story that is especially frustrating to the fellows here because I think we've landed on this conclusion years ago.

Speaker 70 All of the evidence pointed and all the facts that we knew

Speaker 70 pointed to a very concerted effort by then CIA director Brennan in concert with the Clinton campaign and a bunch of other operatives within DOJ, FBI,

Speaker 70 and in the White House that basically were trying to manipulate a narrative here that would help Clinton towards the end of what they thought was going to be a victorious 2016 election.

Speaker 70 And I think the only question that we've always had here is whether or not they thought they were going to get their hands caught in the cookie jar.

Speaker 70 And that's why they kept perpetuating the narrative and tried to cover their tracks, or whether this was just solely an effort to delegitimize the Trump administration in their early days and that they just kept it going on and on.

Speaker 70 But there was never really any evidence. And we found it in the Mueller report.

Speaker 70 There was never really any evidence that there was this basis of Russian support for Donald Trump in which they were trying to sway the election.

Speaker 70 I mean, Duncan talks about this all the time, but it boiled down to $100,000 worth of Facebook ads in a campaign that was running $100,000 a minute.

Speaker 73 Right. I mean, like between Clinton and Trump, they were spending like hundreds of millions of dollars on Facebook.

Speaker 73 And the idea that Donald Trump would have to outsource his Facebook Facebook strategy, spending $100,000 to the Kremlin is just a patently absurd thing, right?

Speaker 72 And it was all sort of absurd.

Speaker 73 And the basis of all this being the dossier in the first place and Brennan hiding that fact or Comey going to Trump Tower and saying, you know, president-elect, Donald Trump, congratulations.

Speaker 73 Hey, by the way, did you pee on some Russian prostitutes?

Speaker 29 They peed on each other, Duncan. Please get it straight.

Speaker 72 I want to make sure I get that fake fact straight, Megan.

Speaker 29 That's right.

Speaker 73 You know, but to never tell Donald Trump the provenance of this dossier during that interrogation of what it was

Speaker 73 and basically just using it as the premise for then leaking to the media and starting the Russia Gate probe. I mean, it was cooked up between our intelligence agencies.

Speaker 73 the Obama, White House, and the Hillary Clinton campaign. They said Russian collusion for years.
And in fact, the collusion was between our own government and the Clinton campaign.

Speaker 29 Okay, but here's what so Andy McCarthy at National Review is a skeptic on this whole story, as you heard me raise with Matt. And he keeps saying we knew about collusion.

Speaker 29 The collusion was with Hillary and Fusion GPS, who created the Phony Steal dossier and then managed to get it used by the intel agencies to start an investigation against Trump, suggesting he colluded with Russia to steal the election.

Speaker 29 He's right that that piece of it has long been known. What's happening happening now is an entirely different piece, which is equally pernicious.

Speaker 29 All along, we have just accepted that Russia did interfere in the election to help Trump. Like, that's been kind of an accepted thing.
And what skeptics have been saying all along is that

Speaker 29 they interfered like barely in the way they had interfered in many elections prior to 16, and not just in the United States, by the way, and that there's zero proof that they actually wanted to help Trump.

Speaker 29 And they got dumped on. People like Taibbi, Molly Hemingway, Maria Bartaromo got crapped all over for years for saying those two things.

Speaker 29 Because when collusion fell apart, the left held on to those little darlings. Well, he did interfere, and he did it to help Trump.
So it wasn't a fair election.

Speaker 29 They've been clinging to them just like, you know, your kids cling to their little stuffies in their cribs. And now those are falling apart in spectacular fashion.

Speaker 29 Those were just as dishonest distortions as the collusion narrative. The Russian interference was barely there.
It was like what Putin does to everyone's elections. So chaos, anybody who doesn't like.

Speaker 29 Let's get like some fake news articles going. Let's amplify the Black Lives Matter stuff.
Well, that was 2020, but you know what I'm saying? Like new stuff that divides Americans.

Speaker 29 Let's amplify all that. We enjoy that.
And that's it. And on top of that, the big kahuna that was left, which was he did it because he wanted to help Donald Trump, was the biggest lie of them all.

Speaker 29 He didn't want to help Trump. He had actually very little belief that Trump was going to win.

Speaker 29 He had a bunch of stuff he could have released on Hillary Clinton that would have made her look terrible and was in the news cycle. There were tons of speculations going on about her health.

Speaker 29 He could have dropped that shit and blown up her campaign, but he didn't. And now we're finding all this that there wasn't one piece of the Russia narrative that A, was true or B

Speaker 29 wasn't understood to be false when it was getting peddled to us by John Brennan and Jim Comey and Clapper and Obama.

Speaker 29 That's the other big piece that's come out, that Obama himself was the one who stopped the intelligence community chain from about to report in a document that Trump's team would have seen too, that the Russian interference really wasn't a thing.

Speaker 29 It was really kind of not much. To

Speaker 29 right after he demanded that meeting, it's all these untrue things.

Speaker 70 Yeah. Well, I mean, this is a gargantuan scandal.
And I understand.

Speaker 70 I mean, if you go to like New York Times or Washington Post, you're not going to find a single story anywhere on the website about it, right?

Speaker 70 I mean, they just want this to go away, in large part because they were key to the entire strategy to make this thing work.

Speaker 76 They really were. And I don't think I talked about this on our show today, but something that I remember from the time, because you guys,

Speaker 76 every other guy on this set, Megan,

Speaker 76 they were like,

Speaker 76 this is not true. This is not true.
And I... I believed them, but I was working with a lot of reporters at the time.

Speaker 76 And up until that time, up until that point, it was like, you know, 10 years working reporters and political stuff, trying trying to sell Republican talking points and all that sort of thing.

Speaker 76 And we, you know, it's a left-wing media, but we were making some inroads. Trump wins.

Speaker 76 And then all of a sudden, every single person who I was talking to about the campaign, all of a sudden, overnight, became a Russia reporter.

Speaker 76 And that sort of thing does not happen just because they're like, oh, well, we're trying. to drive a wedge with the new president.

Speaker 76 That sort of sustained, coordinated effort can only happen if someone as influential as Barack Obama and the people around him cared so much about driving it that they spent time doing it.

Speaker 47 So I agree with you, Ashbrook.

Speaker 73 I think that's the inside game. I think the outside game for the media was that this whole narrative served as a warm comfort, a just

Speaker 73 a coping mechanism for the entire Democratic base and all of these voters who were like, how is it that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton? Right. And so Russia Gate became that on the outside.

Speaker 73 So the media monetized this fake stuff. That's the thing.
You know, and so I think it was, it perpetuated itself both on the inside from the intel agency and the Obama administration.

Speaker 73 And then on the outside, all of these reporters who are writing all the salacious Russiagate stuff, they're getting clicks.

Speaker 75 And beyond getting clicks, you saw the rise of reporters who have zero journalistic capabilities.

Speaker 47 And Toshi

Speaker 75 who have created not only careers, book deals. They've gotten rich off of this.
They collected awards, accolades, made careers.

Speaker 75 They jumped from paper to paper, getting pay raise after pay raise off of this whole delusion, off of this whole lie, which is why, like Holmes said, you don't see this reporting today in the Washington Post or in the New York Times because all the money they made, are they willing to admit, you know what?

Speaker 75 I guess these millions were all just bullshit.

Speaker 76 But you do not get that sort of uniform commitment to a single storyline across every single major broadcast network and major daily newspaper without people at the top telling them we are we are pursuing this.

Speaker 73 Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 47 And there's little evidence.

Speaker 76 I mean, it's my

Speaker 29 and they wrote those articles before the renewed, revised Russia, Russia, Russia did it all Intel report hit.

Speaker 29 So they, they, as soon as Obama said, we want to change this narrative, the intelligence community did it.

Speaker 29 But before they put pen to paper or made a single phone call, they got on the phone with the reporters to make sure they knew where the story was going, that it was a bombshell, Russia had interfered.

Speaker 76 And I don't think it's just reporters. I think it goes to editors.
I think it goes to publishers.

Speaker 76 I think that there was a lot more involvement with the media than we know because the whole storyline is absolutely preposterous to begin with.

Speaker 76 I mean, you talked about how the Russians meddle in all kinds of elections. And I mean, okay, that's what they do.

Speaker 76 But we're talking about an American election that is run by 60-year-olds who have been in the business for 40 years and they're trying their best to win and get a good message out.

Speaker 76 The idea that some Russian 20-year-old who barely speaks English is going to be able to like jump in and all of a sudden change the face of American elections is preposterous.

Speaker 29 They just wanted enough to hurt him. Stand by.
Quick break, back with the fellas. They're here for the whole program.
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Speaker 77 She has all the documents. She has everything that you need.
And she found out that Barack Hussein Obama led a group of people and they cheated in the elections. And they cheated without question.

Speaker 77 It's not even a quote. Would you say there's even a little question there, Tulsi? She says, no.

Speaker 77 And you found things that nobody thought we'd ever find.

Speaker 77 And very happy and very honored to have you with us. She's right now by far, Speaker.
She's hotter than you right now, Speaker.

Speaker 77 She's the hottest person in the room right now, Speaker. So, Tulsi, great job.
And I know you have a lot more coming. She told me

Speaker 77 you've seen nothing yet.

Speaker 77 So I heard those rumors about you, but now I know they're true. So we're very proud of you, Tulsi.
They cheated so badly.

Speaker 29 President Trump on this story on Tuesday. Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show.
Back with me now are friends from the Ruthless program.

Speaker 29 Guys, Trump keeps using the word treason, and we are trying to figure out what possible way there could be to charge any of these officials.

Speaker 29 I don't think treason is going to work just based on, you know, like I said earlier, my instincts, because it doesn't, you know,

Speaker 29 that's a tough one. However,

Speaker 29 perjury at the federal level has a five-year statute of limitations, which can potentially be told, meaning it won't start running until the crime is discovered, like the lie is discovered, if the person who's about to get charged was responsible for actively concealing the truth, like maybe putting the truth in a safe at Langley where it would never be unearthed for the next five years.

Speaker 29 I mean,

Speaker 29 that's the kind of clever behavior we might be seeing from this DOJ, which got very, very clever under Merrick Garland and Joe Biden. And the left love that.

Speaker 29 So let's see if they use their same creativity now. to find ways to extend the statute of limitations for lying under oath for people like John Brennan and Jim Comey.

Speaker 29 That would be really interesting.

Speaker 29 And I don't think Barack Obama is going to get pulled into this very easily, given the fact that thanks to Trump, it's clear he has immunity for his official acts while president.

Speaker 29 But that doesn't mean he can't be called as a witness.

Speaker 29 I don't know that he's totally in the clear because anything he did after he left office, and they said they're looking at conduct all the way through 2024, could be brought up.

Speaker 29 I have no idea, but I have absolutely no sympathy for him. And the left is going to have a really difficult time trying to say you can't do this to a former president or his top aides.

Speaker 75 i think that's that's to me the central issue in all of this all of this insanity all these horrific things is this is a tragedy this was a group of individuals powerful individuals who decided that they were willing for their own egos and resentments to divide this entire country because half of this country has

Speaker 75 they still believe it they still believe it they were They were basically given brain damage and now believe that President Trump is a Russian asset.

Speaker 75 They were told that there's Russians hiding in every corner. They could take over this country at any moment, every election we have.

Speaker 75 You can't believe the results if it doesn't go the way that you want.

Speaker 70 And you know what?

Speaker 75 President Trump is trying to kill every single American in this country. COVID came over here because he's a Putin stooge.

Speaker 75 There are people in this country that damaged and it was done by a group of powerful individuals. And then the media was another cog in their machines.
They had a profit motive. in getting that done.

Speaker 75 They wanted to be buddies with the Obama folks always. They ran with the message that he gave them.
They all made millions off of it.

Speaker 75 And they're wondering, why have Americans lost faith in institutions? Well, their institutions divided this entire country. They're the problem.

Speaker 70 I mean, what this is about fundamentally is breaking the systemic failure that these partisans led in large part by John Brennan, who I large, I think he is probably the most politically partisan director of the CIA in its history.

Speaker 70 And by the way, that's a pretty high bar.

Speaker 47 That's a high bar.

Speaker 72 Exactly.

Speaker 70 History.

Speaker 70 But what they did and what they were able to do is not only just conceal the truth, not only perpetuate a narrative, but then become a part of the media business, not just as a source, as a single source to some of these disreputable reporters out there, but then literally become.

Speaker 73 part of the media apparatus.

Speaker 70 They all signed deals, right? And they would all go on all these cable shows, some of which I was on. I sat in the green room and watched these guys.

Speaker 70 And they would say, well, you know, we have this top secret clearance. So I can't really tell you all of the things that I've seen, but I can tell you it's very concerning.

Speaker 70 Of course, the inference to the viewer and the listener at that point is like, well, I don't know. This guy was in charge of the CIA.
He probably has access to information that I don't know.

Speaker 70 So I should probably believe it. Because at that point in time, we still believe in our institutions because up to that point, they had sort of served the country well in many.
many regards.

Speaker 70 But this whole circle that wrapped into the media is really, I think, one of the biggest benefits of having this conversation now, because that needs to be broken at its core.

Speaker 70 Duncan, I know that you, for example, had interactions with some of these reporters who didn't know shit from Sean.

Speaker 73 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Megan, this is incredible.
I have a great story for you because it went way beyond 2016 and then the Mueller investigation, even after all of that was proven false.

Speaker 73 It continued into 2020.

Speaker 73 I remember I got a call from a fact checker at the New Yorker in 2020, leading up to the 2020 election, where the contention of this article that was under review was basically that one of our clients, you know, a high-profile Republican senator, their website actually was communicating data back to a Russian server.

Speaker 73 And perhaps there might be voter file data that, you know, Putin and the Russians were using to collude with this Republican, which of course was a fundamentally insane thing.

Speaker 73 And so I sort of like probed the fact checker, like, where are you getting this information? Like, is this public?

Speaker 73 Is there some sort of confidential source and i was like if you want me to actually respond to this like which is totally baseless you're gonna have to give me a little bit of something you know what the something was megan it was a twitter thread by louise mensch

Speaker 73 that was the basis for the whole article they were about to write and i just kind of said to i mean after laughing hysterically i was kind of like if you guys go to print on this just like as a professional courtesy i don't know if you've went through the rest of her twitter uh page but you're going to publicly embarrass yourself and they eventually spiked the story.

Speaker 73 But, like, I mean, just having a fact-checker who would do that, there are many publications who wouldn't, who would be, it would be too good to print, right?

Speaker 72 Because they just wanted the clicks.

Speaker 73 They didn't care if it was actually true.

Speaker 29 Here's the other piece of it.

Speaker 29 You got to keep in mind, you guys know this, the audience knows this too, but it's worthwhile to revisit.

Speaker 29 Keep in mind the time that we were dealing with here, end of 16,

Speaker 29 the very, very beginning of January 17, when the nation was in shock that Trump won.

Speaker 29 In shock, especially the left. They were having open struggle sessions.

Speaker 29 They were crying openly, like they were calling off school so children could, you know, go see their trauma counselors about what had happened. And

Speaker 29 they did not believe. He could do it.
None of them believed he could do it for a second prior to the Nets announcing he had done it.

Speaker 29 And they still probably didn't believe he had done it At the time, Obama was like, we're turning around this ICA.

Speaker 29 You're not submitting something saying Russia didn't help him do this. We are submitting something that shows how this really happened, which is Russia and he worked together and it was stolen.

Speaker 29 And I had the team pull this. This is, I think this is from N Wokeness on X that put together a good montage.
We stole part of it from him. And

Speaker 29 this is the mentality that was driving the decisions I maintain behind the scenes at the White House still

Speaker 29 in late December or early December through early January 16 to 17 when Obama did his 180 flipping the Intel analysis. Watch.

Speaker 29 He's not going to be president. He is not.
Donald Trump is not going to be president of the United States. Take it to the bank.

Speaker 78 I guarantee it. All right.
All right.

Speaker 29 You think if he becomes the president, he'll make it great because the states is already.

Speaker 79 I think that man will be president of the United States right about the time that spaceships come down filled with dinosaurs and red caps.

Speaker 78 I'm not like Tom.

Speaker 78 How about this?

Speaker 29 And then, of course, there's Donald Trump. Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke.

Speaker 80 Part of your mind or brain, can you imagine Donald Trump standing up one day and delivering a State of the Union address?

Speaker 80 Well, I can imagine it

Speaker 18 in a Saturday night skit.

Speaker 14 I continue to believe Mr. Trump will not be president.

Speaker 29 And Obama, of course, mocked him openly, saying, you know, he may be this, he may be that. One thing he never will be is president of the United States.
That's how they all felt.

Speaker 29 So for them, it was so easy. It was stolen by the Russians.
That dirty Trump worked with them, the dirty tricks of Vladimir Putin, who's another boogeyman to them.

Speaker 29 And that, to me, is so clear when you read these documents like the Brennan, it has the ring of truth. The Steele dossier, it has the ring.
What kind of CIA director talks like that?

Speaker 75 These people are, like I said, they're so egotistical. They're so full of themselves.
For so long, they've looked down on the rest of America so blatantly, so openly.

Speaker 75 Like you saw all the jokes they were making, like Trump supporters, why? They're just a bunch of dumb rednecks. Of course, those people will never win.

Speaker 75 We're surrounded by Ivy League geniuses, and we're going to give Obama a Netflix deal.

Speaker 75 These people really thought they were like the cream of the crop and to be defeated and humiliated and shown that this belief system that they've held so dearly is all just a house of cards and built on lies.

Speaker 75 It upset them so much. They're not willing to accept defeat.
They say, okay, well, let's just cook up a lie because we can't look bad. We're egotistical monsters.

Speaker 70 Yeah, it's also a perfect vignette in how the left wing is willing to compromise major institutions within this country, the things that sort of make us work.

Speaker 70 I mean, when I started in politics, both intelligence and law enforcement was kind of like a church and state with politics, right?

Speaker 70 You had them as they were political appointees and whatnot, but you always operated with it offshore because of things like this, right?

Speaker 70 And there was a bipartisan agreement at one point in time, 25 years ago, where everybody sort of believed you just can't venture into that territory.

Speaker 70 You can't allow intelligence agencies to operate like a third world country protecting a dictator to manipulate intelligence against political opponents and things like that.

Speaker 70 If there's ever any evidence of that, boy, that's an impeachable offense.

Speaker 70 And that was basically an accepted rule right up until the point where John Brennan leads the CIA.

Speaker 70 And at that point, all of a sudden, now you can see from all the things that have unearthed, it was the opposite.

Speaker 75 They work hand in hand.

Speaker 70 I mean, there's handwritten notes that Senate Intel Committee that they keep talking about to try to, which they're talking about something entirely different, but they're trying to use that as a way to insulate the criticism.

Speaker 70 One of the things that came out on that was handwritten notes from John Brennan after a briefing with the Clinton campaign, where he

Speaker 70 understood that they were going to weaponize the intelligence that he was conjuring up, that he originally got from them, that he was briefing congressional leaders on it.

Speaker 70 And the Clinton campaign was going to actually weaponize it and put it into play in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign.

Speaker 70 If your intelligence agency is acting as a tool for a political campaign, that is the worst possible thing you can do in this country from a government standpoint, from a trust and institution standpoint.

Speaker 70 It is the way that you absolutely drag an electorate into a point where they don't trust their country.

Speaker 29 And that's sadly where we find ourselves.

Speaker 29 Were you with McConnell in 16?

Speaker 70 So I was outside by then. I'd left in 2014, but I was close enough to all of this.
Yeah, I can give you a good idea.

Speaker 29 In 16,

Speaker 29 we know this from John Brennan's memoir. So this is not in dispute.
John Brennan recounted this story himself.

Speaker 29 He briefed in September of 16, then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on his claim that Russia sought to

Speaker 29 quote enhance the electoral prospects of Donald Trump. And we now know from what's getting released here, Brennan had been told, that's bullshit.
That's bullshit. But it has the feel.

Speaker 29 It has a, has a whiff of being true. Okay.

Speaker 29 This is based on this deal dossier. And he said that to McConnell.

Speaker 29 And according to Brennan, McConnell responded dryly, quote, one might say that the CIA and the Obama administration are making such claims in order to prevent Donald Trump from getting elected president.

Speaker 29 He knew, he knew, I mean,

Speaker 29 McConnell has been around a long time and Brennan went to him to try to soft-sell it. And McConnell was like, would you stop with this bullshit?

Speaker 29 And it didn't stop. It went on and on and on.

Speaker 47 It got worse. Go ahead.

Speaker 70 It got worse. So we were in charge of electing Senate Republicans at this point.

Speaker 70 And so all of this information is relevant to us because it splashed all over the newspapers when McConnell refuses to sign a letter that Brennan wants him to pen that implicates Donald Trump in Russia, refused to do it.

Speaker 70 So all of a sudden, the entirety of the national media is focused on Mitch McConnell protecting Russians, working for Russians, working for Trump. They started calling him Moscow Mitch.

Speaker 70 You had that scumbag on MSNBC.

Speaker 34 Got that.

Speaker 70 Joe Scarborough, who like led every show with Moscow Mitch type stuff. And I didn't, I was out of government.
I didn't have a security clearance. So he couldn't tell me what the conversations were.

Speaker 70 It didn't stop John Brennan, by the way, from writing exactly what happened in that secure intelligence briefing.

Speaker 70 By the way, I don't know if you're looking around at charges, maybe that's somewhere to start.

Speaker 70 But anyway, all of this, we can't formulate the truth because I can't get it from a principle, but you're getting incoming from the outside on all of this.

Speaker 70 And they then take that and try to weaponize it, not only against Donald Trump, but against every single Republican who looked at what we're now all looking at and said, none of this adds up.

Speaker 70 We went through three

Speaker 70 long years where this was A1A on the talking point list of all the liberal pundits, every single campaign, every single Democrat. This is the John Brennan effect.

Speaker 70 This is why he is the key to all of this, because he buried the intel, made up a narrative, and then weaponized it through the media in a way that could help their campaign chances, which is really what the only thing that they were focused on at this point, delegitimizing the Trump administration and making sure the Republicans had somewhat of a liability for speaking the truth.

Speaker 75 And then he monetized it. He went and got himself a contributor contract and a book deal.
Yep.

Speaker 29 Okay, I wanted to play one other because we're on Brennan and we pulled another soundbite from him. This one's from Meet the Press, February 3rd, 2018.
Okay, so by this point, he knows everything.

Speaker 29 Everything that we have discussed on this program and earlier ones this week, he knows it all. It's all, you know, they're still pushing Russia Gate and all that nonsense.

Speaker 29 But in any event, here he is on Meet the Press February 3rd, 2018. 17B is the SOC.

Speaker 18 When did you first learn of the so-called Steele dossier and what Christopher Steele was doing? Well, it was not a very well-kept secret among press circles for several months before it came out.

Speaker 18 And it was in late summer of 2016 when there were some individuals from the various U.S. news outlets who asked me about my familiarity with it.
And I had heard just snippets about it.

Speaker 18 I did not know what was in there. I did not see it until later in that year.
I think it was in December.

Speaker 18 But I was unaware of the provenance of it as well as what was in it.

Speaker 18 And it did not play any role whatsoever in the intelligence community assessment that was done that was presented to then President Obama and then President-elect Trump.

Speaker 29 That's not true.

Speaker 29 That last part is is not true. It was attached to the ICA in the appendix.
Information from it was in there and relied upon.

Speaker 29 That's what all these documents we're seeing now, thanks to Tulsi, are showing us, that it was

Speaker 29 item one, like the crucial item that got them to the point where they could say interference and with the goal of helping Trump.

Speaker 29 And the three other items that just came out and what was unearthed late yesterday are even more pathetic, if possible, than the dossier.

Speaker 29 It's like unverified snippets from a conversation that all the intelligence agents on it said, we absolutely cannot rely on this. This is not reliable.
Don't put this in the report.

Speaker 29 And Brennan just kept rubber stamping it all there.

Speaker 29 If it suggested there was a motive to help Trump, it made it in. It was relied upon.
And there he is knowing all of that, being like, oh. Of course, would never rely on the steel dossier.

Speaker 29 Fucking liar.

Speaker 37 Yep. Yeah.

Speaker 70 It's the genesis. It's the genesis for all of it, right?

Speaker 70 I mean, that's the thing that I find so amazing about that comment is that he's pretending as though, well, I was vaguely aware of it because the press was aware of it.

Speaker 70 I'm the director of the CIA and I don't know, but like all of our press somehow got a handle on it.

Speaker 47 I've got a question.

Speaker 72 What a whale of an intelligence agent.

Speaker 73 I have a question back to you, Megan, you know, because you are a lawyer and you probably know more about this than any of us.

Speaker 73 But like in sort of going through all of Brennan's decision-making in that process, including all of this unverified, you know, reporting in the dossier and stuff, the career intelligence agents were like, please do not include this.

Speaker 73 We do not want our names attached to it. We don't believe this is credible.
And he did it anyway.

Speaker 73 At what point do you pass beyond the immunity that you have in your official capacity as John Brennan to being willfully malicious?

Speaker 29 That's a good question. I don't know.

Speaker 29 This is all new territory, right? Because we only recently have the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity within his official acts.

Speaker 29 I don't know. And then you have to look at statute of limitations, right? This all happened a long time ago, unless they can prove it's an ongoing issue.

Speaker 29 Because like right now, they're looking at John Brennan's statement, you know, because we found out that the CIA had referred Brennan and Comey to the DOJ prior to Tulsi's document, dump.

Speaker 29 The CIA first came out and was like, those two. But they didn't really tell us why Comey exactly.
I mean, shake your pick with Comey. There's so much.

Speaker 29 But with Brennan, with Brennan, they zeroed in on under under oath testimony that he gave about the dossier. Again, downplaying its role in the assessment and his knowledge of it.

Speaker 29 So I don't know, Duncan. It'll be interesting.
I mean, again.

Speaker 29 They have very clever lawyers over there, and I'm sure someone's thinking of something right now. But my first look at this tells me it's not a criminal case.
It's a political one.

Speaker 29 It's an accountability story.

Speaker 29 Like these guys, and trust me, I'm wide open to the possible legal theories against these people. I would frankly love to see them suffer.
And I have said since Trump was running, this must be done.

Speaker 29 If there's a colorable claim,

Speaker 29 you don't make it up, but if there is a colorable claim, their people must be put through what Trump was put through. They must, or they will not learn.
They will do it to the right again.

Speaker 29 So I'm totally in favor of making them suffer if there's an actual good faith basis to do so.

Speaker 29 But just my initial instinct is this is probably just the truth coming out and that the remedy is to rub their noses in it publicly and shame them and understand how much wrong was done to President Trump.

Speaker 29 And frankly, is still being done to President Trump by these lunatics who want us to think they're the virtuous ones.

Speaker 37 Yep. Yeah.

Speaker 70 I mean, it may be subject to like some kind of legislation or something. I mean, something needs to change where the system in and of itself.

Speaker 75 I think legislation, that kind of stuff is, it's way too slow. It does, it does, it's not.

Speaker 70 Well, I'm not talking about the accountability on this. I'm just saying anytime,

Speaker 70 for example, if you have a director of the CIA that is interfacing with a campaign

Speaker 70 at any point during the final weeks of the campaign and they're having gives and takes, like we know, that they're about a campaign plan, something needs to change.

Speaker 70 Something needs to insulate a process of intelligence.

Speaker 29 Let me give you one more from the documents. It was in our AM update podcast this morning.

Speaker 29 There's another piece of evidence in there in what just got released from that House report from 2020 that was in the vault

Speaker 29 that

Speaker 29 Loretta Lynch, Barack Obama's attorney general, who oversees FBI, was allegedly informing the Clinton campaign of what the FBI was doing and where its investigation into her stood,

Speaker 29 and keeping tabs on the FBI agent who was running it and on Comey.

Speaker 47 I mean, I mean, that's why we don't

Speaker 29 know that's true, but that's one of the allegations. Keep going.

Speaker 70 If that's not prosecutable, we need to make a law to make it prosecutable because that is wildly inappropriate.

Speaker 76 It has to change. And it goes beyond just the loss of trust in our institutions.
I mean, thank God we were not attacked in a significant way during that period of time.

Speaker 76 I mean, aren't they supposed to be doing their day jobs to keep us safe instead of playing grab ass with reporters and like pretend like moonlighting as campaign operatives?

Speaker 76 I mean, what was the one thing that we learned ahead of 9-11? That all of these, all of these entities were out for their own benefit and they weren't talking to each other.

Speaker 76 And therefore, it led to a cataclysmic result in New York.

Speaker 76 And in the months and the years and the weeks after 9-11, all of the Intel communities came together and they were sharing information and they took it very seriously that we need to protect this country.

Speaker 76 Somehow, when Obama became president, they all became campaign operatives and took their eye off the ball.

Speaker 76 I just have to say, like, from a national security perspective, I think this is a very, very important issue.

Speaker 29 And the thing is, by the way, John Brennan is still to this day an MSNBC contributor.

Speaker 47 Yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing is.

Speaker 75 The only way behavior changes is when there are consequences. That's the only teacher that people understand and learn lessons from.
There have to be dire consequences.

Speaker 75 There have to be charges brought up against these people. I don't care whether we think they'll see the inside of a jail cell or not.
I want the Justice Department to use everything in its power.

Speaker 75 I mean, when the government sues you, it's a problem because they've got more money and resources. They bankrupt people.
Let's bankrupt all these people. He sold his soul for an MSNBC contributorship.

Speaker 75 I want him bankrupted at the very least. I pray to God he sees a jail cell.

Speaker 70 He'd still have a security clearance. if it wasn't for Trump, by the way.

Speaker 29 We need those other agents who warned him to be subpoenaed. You know, those are the agents we want to hear from.

Speaker 29 There needs to be some sort of congressional proceeding where we hear directly from them.

Speaker 29 And because apparently there are now multiple, I mean, I've heard the word dozens in some of these reports who are ready to, at least behind the scenes, stand up and say, I tried to tell them not to do this and they didn't listen to me.

Speaker 29 I mean, it was a John Brennan special from all accounts and a Jim Comey special. That's why there's no accident that that's why the CIA referred those two.

Speaker 29 Yes, they found some recent grounds apparently apparently to do it. But I mean, I'm sure it's related to their ongoing deceit campaign against the government.

Speaker 29 I mean, in fairness, I guess, yes, the press too, though the press's job is not to just be stenographers for the Intel community, and they did at WAPO and they did it at New York Times, and they did it Politico, and they did at CNN.

Speaker 29 And the American public, most importantly of all, just completely misled. And then they'll put like Obama's like, oh, we did more.
We did no more than conclude what everyone knows.

Speaker 29 We said Russia interfered.

Speaker 29 How does everyone know that, President Obama? How does everyone know? Because you and your people spread the lie. You put it in these intel reports.
You leaked it to every media outlet in the country.

Speaker 29 You beat the drum for years. And people don't have enough time to run down these massive lies, especially when you take the proof that they're lies and shove them in vaults in Langley.

Speaker 29 My imaginary viewer, Madge in Iowa, she doesn't have access to that, nor does she have the fucking time time or inclination to go try to figure this shit out. It's ridiculous.

Speaker 53 Right.

Speaker 70 No, there needs to be accountability.

Speaker 70 And it needs to look, it's going to take hard work by shows like yours, shows like ours, and independent media and everything else, because as evidence of what we're talking about, all the people who created the problem are still in on it.

Speaker 70 Yep. And you're not going to find this on CNN.
You're not going to find this. If you find it on CNN, it'll be Barack Obama's triumphant slap back

Speaker 29 of the lunatic Tulsi.

Speaker 70 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Through a spokesperson, right? And it's just, it's nonsense.
It's garbage.

Speaker 29 Can I ask you about, because I asked Haibi about this, but you're of the Senate.

Speaker 29 What do you make? Because this is emerging as a principal defense. The PodSave guys, McCarthy and others.

Speaker 29 pointing to the fact that the Senate Intel Committee did its own investigation into the Russian interference.

Speaker 29 And they say, under Marco Rubio as chair, concluded that that intelligence community assessment was right, that there was interference meant to help Trump.

Speaker 29 And both, you know, Molly has serious, Molly Hemingway, I pointed out to Matt, has serious doubts about how they got there. Did they rely on the same intel? Did they just do the rubber stamping?

Speaker 29 Or you're saying

Speaker 29 they did their own intel. Matt Taibbi suggested that they did their own.

Speaker 29 But Matt's point was it was very flimsy at best because the main guy they were basing a lot of it on was never even contacted by anybody on that committee.

Speaker 29 So what do you say to the left's chief tool in trying to bat down the Tulsi story by saying, look at the Senate, the Senate, the Senate, the Senate?

Speaker 70 Yeah, I think it's two different issues, right? They were trying to figure out whether there was significant action by Russia that affected the outcome of the 2016 campaign in many ways.

Speaker 70 Their conclusion on that, by the way, was it did not. It did not.
What they're pointing to, what the left is pointing to, is the conclusion that Russia, in fact, did have some involvement.

Speaker 70 Again, I think you mentioned it at the top of the show, and I know Duncan just talked about it. Can you argue whether or not $150 or $200,000 worth of Facebook ads affected an election?

Speaker 70 No, you certainly can't. Can you argue that $150,000,000 worth of Facebook ads trying to sow Discord was interference? I mean, technically, you could.
It's just because that did happen.

Speaker 29 Sure. That's their bread and butter.

Speaker 70 Yeah, I mean, and they do that, like you said, in every election in probably every country across the.

Speaker 29 No, I'm pretty sure that's how I lost the fifth grade presidency. I had a very solid platform.

Speaker 70 Right, right. Which, by the way, the Obama administration was doing in Israel to try to oust Netanyahu at the time with far greater resources than 150,000 to 200,000.

Speaker 29 Yeah. How about Ukraine?

Speaker 70 I mean, you name it. You name it.
Right. I mean, so the idea that this is somehow a novel concept, that Russia was just trying to do this with the United States is insane.

Speaker 70 But I think that their conclusion, what they were attempting to conclude in that Senate report is totally irrelevant from the conversation that we're having now.

Speaker 70 If they were tasked at actually finding out how all of this became part of the public lexicon, they probably would have found out what we're talking about now, that this thing is buried, that this somehow was conjured up by Brennan and co to try to figure out how to perpetuate a narrative to delegitimize the Trump administration.

Speaker 70 That wasn't the remit at the time.

Speaker 70 And so I just find it hilarious that they're trying to use as somehow an insulation to the intelligence that we now know for the first time is the American public, but was there since 2016.

Speaker 29 The only way we're really going to get this nailed down, I mean, with more documents that are in the public and the newspapers have to cover, is if there is a criminal charge, because everyone's ignoring it.

Speaker 29 I mean, I listen to the New York Times's, the daily,

Speaker 29 you know, often. They haven't touched it.

Speaker 29 I know. I do it because I like to keep an eye on both sides.
You know, I don't want anybody corrupting my mind. But

Speaker 29 they haven't touched it. They haven't touched it.
That's the New York Times' daily news podcast. It has not touched it.

Speaker 29 And the only way of making these newspapers who were complicit start covering it, I do think, are actual charges, not just investigations, not referrals, actual charges.

Speaker 29 By the way, we need to hire more lawyers at the DOJ ASAP. They are understaffed.
All right, stand by.

Speaker 29 We're going to take a quick break, and then we'll come back with some other news, and there's plenty of it. Stand by as the rootless guys stay with me.

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Speaker 82 What happened last week when they took a shot at my hero

Speaker 82 and they tried to kill the next President of of the United States.

Speaker 82 Enough was enough. And I said, let Trumpomania run wild, brother.
Let Trumpomania rule again.

Speaker 82 Let Trumpomania make America great again.

Speaker 29 Wow, what a moment that was. And I mean, unbelievable, gone too soon.
Hulk Hogan died today at age 71 per TMZ

Speaker 29 and

Speaker 29 WWE confirming it now. They say, according to TMZ, that medics were dispatched to his home in Clearwater, Florida, early Thursday morning, operators stating that it was regarding a cardiac arrest.

Speaker 29 A slew of police cars and EMTs were packed outside of his home. He was carried on a stretcher and into an ambulance just a few weeks ago.

Speaker 29 His wife denied rumors that he was in a coma, stating his heart was strong as he recovered from surgeries.

Speaker 29 TMZ saying there had been rumblings that Hogan was dying, but then they were told that he was just dealing with a symptom of the symptoms following a neck procedure he underwent in May.

Speaker 29 But that guy transformed professional wrestling. I mean, even for people like me who don't know much about it, that's the name you know.
He was a larger-than-life figure.

Speaker 29 His, you know, enthusiasm, his

Speaker 29 love of country,

Speaker 29 how fun he was was obvious to anybody who spent two minutes with this guy. He used to go on Fox a lot.

Speaker 29 What do you make of it? Because now we've had three losses, guys, of well-known people in the past few days: Malcolm Jamal Warner, Ozzy Osborne, and now Hulk.

Speaker 70 Yeah, I mean, look, tough week for children of the 80s, no question. Yeah.

Speaker 70 On the Hulkster in particular,

Speaker 70 it is hard to fully encapsulate and explain what a cultural icon that guy was.

Speaker 70 You know, I think to people who are just sort of becoming aware of him or were unaware of the 80s and 90s, you know, you think of him in the political context or in that big speech, but this guy transformed not only wrestling, everything.

Speaker 70 I mean, he was wrap your flag and around it, sort of symbolic of the rise of the Reagan era and into the 90s and

Speaker 70 the whole wrestling culture. And I mean, this guy was America, always was.
And I mean, we were down

Speaker 70 on the floor during the convention watching him deliver that speech that you just played.

Speaker 75 That's it was electric seeing it in person because you remember as a kid seeing him during the Reagan era, it's perfect comparison because he was like a symbol of American greatness and Americans feeling great and coming back from the Malays and that America is number one.

Speaker 75 And he was always so patriotic. And then for it to come full circle and see him there at the convention, yet again, taking a stand.
for America, making America great again, it was electric.

Speaker 75 And the audience just started chanting USA. It was an incredible moment.
He had always been a huge patriot and an inspiration to Americans of how great a country we have.

Speaker 75 And it's also important to remember one of his many patriotic things is he destroyed Gawker, a fake news left-wing organization, taught him a lesson that you can't get away with printing lies.

Speaker 75 And the more consequences, you know, the fake news gets, the better.

Speaker 27 Yeah, I think it was one of those things.

Speaker 29 Because it was this, you know, celebrity, salacious news tabloid website that was just absolutely vicious.

Speaker 29 And they printed a story about they were airing sex tapes, if memory serves, of him with a woman he was having an affair with. She was the wife of his friend, Bubba, somebody.
Bubba the love sponge.

Speaker 29 Bubba the Love Sponge, Steve reminds me. Bubba, of course, how did I forget? And

Speaker 29 he was one of the first celebrities to sort of stand up and say, you can't do this to me.

Speaker 29 We later found out, I believe it was bankrolled by Peter Thiel, right, who was like in favor of taking a stand on this. And he brought down Gawker.
I mean, it was...

Speaker 29 Not a victory for free speech, but free speech, even in America, has some limitations.

Speaker 29 You cannot just go as a newspaper and openly, actively invade somebody's private life with defamatory material to that degree and not expect to pay a penalty. And that was made clear by the courts.

Speaker 29 Keep going. We were going to say something, Duncan.

Speaker 73 Yeah, it was just sort of a surreal moment there at the convention because, you know, back to Holmes's point, he really was a cultural icon, even just beyond wrestling. He was like,

Speaker 73 you know, he was such a commodity too. I remember growing up and having a wrestle buddy, which was basically like this, like this pillow that is like sort of formed to his body.

Speaker 73 And I remember being a little kid and we had one of those and one of the macho man Randy Savage ones. And like, you could put him in a headlock.

Speaker 73 And so like sitting there, you know, at the convention in 2020, being like, the, the wrestle buddy guy that I grew up on is now on this stage talking about how we have to elect Donald Trump was just sort of a surreal moment.

Speaker 73 And just, it speaks to like how he

Speaker 73 endured as that cultural icon for decades, which is an incredible thing to do in entertainment.

Speaker 76 Yeah, I think he was more than just a cultural icon too and a big personality. The guy obviously had a very big heart.
And you've seen all the videos.

Speaker 73 You've heard all the stories.

Speaker 76 One of my favorite videos is when this dad is walking in, like two or three years ago, he's walking into an autographed signing session. He's got his six-year-old kid with him.

Speaker 76 And a six-year-old kid comes in and he's like getting ready to beat up Hulkamania. And Hulk Hogan gets up and he's like, he's going to fight him back again.

Speaker 76 And it's just like you put yourself in the shoes of that dad. You grew up every Saturday morning rooting on Hulk Hogan, fighting against the iron chic and, you know, macho man and everybody.

Speaker 76 And you watch your kid get up there and just do the muscles and hawk a mania reacts. Like this is a guy who had a very, very big heart and cared about people.

Speaker 29 I mean, it seems like it's always the ones with the big hearts that go by cardiac arrest for some reason. And it just seems like this bitter irony that those big hearts wind up failing them.

Speaker 29 He was a giant, you know, of a man.

Speaker 29 Terry Balea was his real name. And he's really going to be missed.
It's sad to see your icons die.

Speaker 29 It's sad to see even if you have no personal connection with them. Like Ozzy Osborne, too.
I didn't know Ozzie at all. I'm not one of those people who had met him, but I knew Sharon.
I know Sharon.

Speaker 29 She's a delight. I love her.
She's been on the show. She's just so sweet.
She's so fun. Those two had a real love affair.
I mean, legit.

Speaker 29 And despite all of his successes and riches, he said to his dying day, the best thing he ever did in his life was marry Sharon Osborne.

Speaker 29 Just in the past couple of days, watching the tributes to them, to him come out, it's been so entertaining because I didn't know that much about Ozzy.

Speaker 29 I wasn't like a Black Sabbath fan, but I liked him as a personality, and he just always seemed so funny. One of the clips they surfaced was of him on his reality show with her.

Speaker 29 They kind of invented reality TV,

Speaker 29 where she was like, oh, the truck driver, he's been issued a citation. Oh, yeah, yeah.
He says, how come? Well, it turns out he was getting a blowjob while while he was driving the truck.

Speaker 29 Yeah, sounds about right. Yeah, yeah.
And he was entirely naked. Okay, well, that'll do it.
That'll do it.

Speaker 29 Ozzy Osborne's not shocked at all or horrified that his employee was caught in this condition.

Speaker 70 Just a Tuesday at the Osbourne's.

Speaker 29 Yes, right? Like these rock stars, like our true rock stars, ours, the UK's, whatever, they've had these huge lives, right? You kind of forget like how mega those lives can go.

Speaker 29 To where, can you imagine like Duncan coming home and finding out like one of the ruthless producers was pulled over?

Speaker 70 We try to live the exact same way, Megan.

Speaker 70 That's you know, we've got a

Speaker 29 bigger deal.

Speaker 47 Can I bring up something?

Speaker 75 Uh, I didn't know, I didn't see it was mentioned as one of the possible topics, but I'd be remiss if I didn't bring this up. You completely destroyed Doug Amhoff's ex on Twitter.
Did you guys

Speaker 46 see this?

Speaker 47 I haven't.

Speaker 34 I mean, I am honestly an expert in Twitter history.

Speaker 75 I think that's the most brutal bodybagging I've eaten.

Speaker 29 Oh, thank you.

Speaker 29 Yes. Do you believe this person? The nerve of Doug M.
Hoff's ex-wife to try to shit stir with me, step away, Matt.

Speaker 47 Huge mistake.

Speaker 47 Huge mistake.

Speaker 70 She doesn't listen to the show evidently.

Speaker 29 Exactly. A simple Google search would have told her it's not a good idea.

Speaker 29 I'm going to hurt you, and it's going to be painful. She jumped in from the train and was like, I got this.

Speaker 29 Those who didn't see it, hold on a second. I'll find it.

Speaker 37 Oh, my God.

Speaker 29 Let's see. She, okay, her name is Kirsten M.
Hoff, K-E-R-S-T-I-N, which is already where she's a problem. Nobody should spell their name Kirsten.
And she

Speaker 29 was mad about my J-Lo commentary the other day where I said, she's too old at 55 to be making her living solely on being this sex kitten who people want to F. I'm sorry.
I just think it's sad.

Speaker 29 It's like even the greatest sex kitten of all time, Ann Margaret, understood by her mid-50s to approach life with a bit more class. She was still sexy as hell, but she knew

Speaker 29 people were going to want to hear her talk and hear her speak more than they were going to just want her shake, see her shake her boobs at them.

Speaker 29 J-Lo hasn't gotten the message and is still out there, literally half-naked, shoving her vag into the faces of her dancers on stage. It's too much.
That was my commentary. Kirsten

Speaker 29 didn't like it. So she tweeted out without CCing me, without adding me.

Speaker 29 I bet tons of people look at J-Lo and want to have sex with her. Megan, spelled wrong, if you actually think post-menopausal women can't be sexual, you are missing out.

Speaker 29 You can close up your 55-year-old shop while the rest of us are open for business.

Speaker 29 Not for nothing.

Speaker 29 But this is one of the most unattractive people on Twitter. So

Speaker 29 the thought of Kirsten Amhoff being open for business is jarring and upsetting in and of itself. And my response for the record was, he's already done.

Speaker 29 was

Speaker 29 you were too chicken shit to actually cc me on your post, Kirsten. But let's just say I'm sexy enough to keep my husband from sleeping with the nanny.

Speaker 29 Unlike J-Lo, however, I don't feel the need to fake hump a bunch of strangers to prove I've still got it.

Speaker 29 I believe that's pretty much the end of Kirsten Amhoff, as it should be.

Speaker 47 I think you took care of that.

Speaker 70 Holy smokes. Well, look, reasonable people can disagree about whether J-Lo doing on stage is something we'd like to see or not.

Speaker 70 But I think we can all conclude that you probably shouldn't come at Megan with something like the expectations taking away.

Speaker 75 Yeah, Yeah, and the video you had, it's like very clear, like, okay, this is a bit out of pocket. You make a great point.
Why would she jump in on this?

Speaker 46 That guy needs a snorkel.

Speaker 47 I have no idea.

Speaker 29 And by the way, I've been told by reliable sources, Kirsten M. Hoff plays for the other team.

Speaker 29 I don't even think

Speaker 29 if she's open for business, nothing's going in.

Speaker 29 I have it on good authority. But look,

Speaker 29 this is a woman who's married to a man who turned out to be a woman abuser, a real shit of a person, and reportedly cheated on her while they were married with the nanny, which is an extra bonus.

Speaker 29 I mean, look, I realize some marriages break up, but there's a real question about why she's out there. Was she out there during the campaign defending him?

Speaker 29 And by the way, Kirsten, now that you've rattled my cage, I'm looking into exactly why you did that and what favors Doug Emhoff and his wife Kamala Harris may have done for you in your legal life because she's been involved in some legal battles

Speaker 29 and possibly led to your admiration.

Speaker 29 So keep coming for me, madam. I'm here.
I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 57 Paul's into the sleeping dogs.

Speaker 72 Let them lie.

Speaker 47 Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 29 That's incredible.

Speaker 23 I mean, to me.

Speaker 29 Who gets married to like a woman abuser and a serial cheater from what we hear, and somebody who allegedly impregnated the nanny, but certainly seems to have at least been sleeping with her, wants to run out there talking to others about their, about how sexy they are to their husbands.

Speaker 29 My God, woman, stop, slow your role.

Speaker 23 Makes no sense.

Speaker 70 Makes no sense. I will say, like, I have to take your word on her sexual orientation.
I don't know anything about that.

Speaker 70 But if you marry Doug Aimhoff, I get it.

Speaker 33 Right.

Speaker 64 I get it.

Speaker 70 Like, it's pretty tough to stay on the same squat if that's your only frame of reference.

Speaker 47 He could turn you.

Speaker 29 He could turn you. True.
Maybe we should be feeling sorry for her. Though she's standing by, you know, she stood by him at that campaign.

Speaker 29 She looked at him with the doe-eyed, you know, look at the convention. And now I'm really interested why she did that.
Now I suddenly do care, Kirsten, why you did that.

Speaker 29 And I'm going to try to find out. Okay.
So thank you for bringing that up, Smug, because that was a fun thing that we didn't officially have on the agenda. But why not? Why shouldn't we?

Speaker 29 Okay.

Speaker 29 Lastly, Epstein, the

Speaker 29 Deputy Attorney General is meeting with Ghelene Maxwell today, which which ought to be potentially interesting for him.

Speaker 29 Query whether we can really believe a thing she says, because she's going to want to cop a deal to get out of prison early. But it's happening.

Speaker 29 The House has also, I think, either issued a subpoena or settled on a plan to try to depose her in front of Congress.

Speaker 29 May still have some similar problems as the Wall Street Journal offers its second attack on Trump and Epstein,

Speaker 29 saying Trump was told in May by his Justice Department, I think Pam Bondi, that he is allegedly in the Epstein files, which is supposed to be a big headline.

Speaker 29 But didn't Elon Musk tell us all that prior to then? Like, we've known that thanks to Elon.

Speaker 29 And this all, the Wall Street Journal, you know, publishing that thing about his alleged letter to Epstein and now publishing that he was allegedly told he's in the files, along with hundreds of others, by the way, has led to this moment on the view today.

Speaker 29 Watch.

Speaker 83 And before we go on hiatus, we only have one more show after this I'm gonna have to say that right too late now

Speaker 83 before we go I wanted to tell people that the tide is turning the tide is turning and things are changing I mean the ultimate irony would be that Rupert Murdoch will take him down yeah Fox News who created the monster will take him down okay

Speaker 29 So Fox News is going to take him down because he Rupert owns Fox and Rupert owns the journal and now she's determined I guess guess, that Rupert's going to end Trump.

Speaker 29 This will be the thing that does it because

Speaker 29 Rupert's journal will continue reporting that the Epstein scandal, as the left is now trying to make it, is all about DJT. Your thoughts?

Speaker 70 It's just so dumb. I mean, this thing has veered so far off the tracks.

Speaker 70 You almost have to have like a full SSRI prescription just to begin discussing where the left is taking this. I mean,

Speaker 70 my patience for anyone like Joy Behar

Speaker 70 to even weigh in on this or any Democrats in Congress to weigh in on this is infinitely small. They had 12 long years to try to examine anything they wanted to examine with the Epstein files.

Speaker 70 By the way, this brought, what, 80 charges, 80 different indictments against Donald Trump in the process while they're sitting on all this information. Somehow, this like lost the grasp.

Speaker 70 And so now their newfound interest is simply political, right? And I think this is the problem problem that we find ourselves. Like there are answers that need to be done.

Speaker 70 I think the Trump administration seems more than committed to trying to figure out exactly because now we need transparency on everything, what happened here.

Speaker 70 But like the fact that this is political, it's truly, I hate it. I just hate it.
Yep.

Speaker 29 Well, it's a very good question. I was supposed to show you the left.
They never cared about it and they still don't care about it.

Speaker 29 If they still cared about it, they wouldn't be trying to make it political and all about Trump. Go ahead, Michael.

Speaker 73 Well, I was going to say, it's just like Russia hacked the election. Like Epstein Files has become for the liberals this catch-all thing where they feel like they can get Trump.

Speaker 73 I mean, we know from like, we know from the Ghalayan Maxwell trial and the depositions and stuff that Trump, you know, had some interactions with Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 75 But when I think of Epstein Files, I think of like, here are the people who diddle kids, right?

Speaker 72 Like not like hearsay from some court document, you know?

Speaker 29 No one, right. No one Sane believes there's anything damning about Trump in the Epstein

Speaker 29 or the Biden administration would have released it. Fellas, wonderful to see you.
Thanks for being here. Gotta run.

Speaker 29 Back tomorrow with new revelations about Brian Kohlberger from the just released Police Docs.

Speaker 29 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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