New Revelations Connect Obama to Russiagate Hoax, and Hunter Biden Starts Dem Civil War, with Matt Taibbi and Emily Jashinsky | Ep. 1113

1h 59m
Megyn Kelly is joined by Matt Taibbi, editor of Racket News, to discuss Tulsi Gabbard’s release of explosive documents on Russian interference, why the Obama White House meeting on December 9, 2016 is the key Russiagate “smoking gun,” how Obama Era intel officials changed their assessment after an Obama-directed meeting, what we now know about the apparent collusion between Obama and the press on Russiagate, how the press ignored the Steele dossier until Obama's White House elevated the nonsense, and more. Then Emily Jashinsky, host of "After Party," to discuss how Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewert are acting like whiny has-beens, liberals crying over Colbert’s canceled show despite losing $40 million a year with 200 staffers, Stewart’s profane gospel choir rant trying to recreate his old style, J. Lo's outrageous new dancing and having no class, why she needs to retire her entire act, why all their schticks are tired and old like themselves, Hunter Biden taking aim at George Clooney and the entire Democratic party in wild new interviews, his profane comments but truthful and interesting revelations, news about why Clooney may have really wanted Biden out of the race, going after the Pod Save America guys and their response, the wild Democratic party civil war now happening, and more.

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Runtime: 1h 59m

Transcript

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Speaker 11 Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.

Speaker 11 Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
We've got a big show for you today.

Speaker 11 After party host Emily Jashinsky will be here to react to Hunter Biden lashing out and how on everyone in the Democratic establishment in not one but two lengthy and rather profane interviews.

Speaker 11 But first, an update to a story we told you about yesterday that's been all over the place, at least on right-wing media, but not at all in the mainstream media.

Speaker 11 Director of National Intelligence, Telsi Gabbard, releasing Russia Gate documents Friday evening that she says show, quote, there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government.

Speaker 11 Now, I want to tell you that she,

Speaker 11 Matt Taibbi, is also reporting, his information is

Speaker 11 that

Speaker 11 these documents are also potentially going to ensnare officials all the way up to 2024

Speaker 11 in alleged conspiracy problems. So we could be talking about Biden administration officials that could be getting pulled into this.
And

Speaker 11 it could get all the way up to President Obama. I mean, having now really read in on this

Speaker 11 case, there's a real question about whether Barack Obama is about to have the same kind of trouble that Jack Smith caused for Donald Trump.

Speaker 11 Taibi reporting that Trump's national security team is also looking at evidence that members of Trump's 2024 campaign were spied on too.

Speaker 11 So the story we're about to bring you is going to touch on Barack Obama's administration and him personally,

Speaker 11 as well as Joe Biden and his administration and what they may have been doing, both to undermine Trump in general and possibly spying on Trump's campaign the second time around. Matt is here.

Speaker 11 He's joining me in one second, but I'm just going to set up the story for you first. Not everyone agrees that there's any there there.

Speaker 11 And I teed this up for you yesterday saying to the audience, this is what Tulsi said. Matt Taibbi is saying the following.
And on the opposite side is National Reviews Andy Andy McCarthy.

Speaker 11 And Andy's argument is that Gabbard is placing too much emphasis on the conclusion that Russia,

Speaker 11 this is confusing. Okay.

Speaker 11 Never mind. Forget this explanation.
Please just get right to Matt. Okay.
I'm going to explain it to the audience directly. Here's what happened.
You had

Speaker 11 intel officials. We had intel officials.
Okay.

Speaker 11 And they were under Barack Obama planning a December 9th, 2016 presidential daily brief. Oh, they brought in, they brought in Matt.
Okay, here he is. Hi, Matt.
Nice to see you. Matt Taibes here.

Speaker 15 How's it going?

Speaker 11 Great. All right.
So your postings on Racket News over the past few days have really helped me tremendously.

Speaker 11 And so the audience knows, as I always do, I've read all of Andy McCarthy's postings as well. I've read your detractors in the mainstream media.
And I have to say, you've totally convinced me.

Speaker 11 You're, as always, you're an honest broker, but you've totally convinced me. This is actually, I think they're in deep shit.

Speaker 11 And it's amazing, but then my biggest takeaway is how did Trump 1.0 not find these documents that Tulsi just revealed? Because they really show the story.

Speaker 11 But we're just going to walk the audience through it like third graders because it's extremely dense. And it's taken me time and time again and reading all the materials to get it.

Speaker 11 So the deal was, let's start with.

Speaker 11 Let's go back to December of 2016.

Speaker 11 Barack Obama's president, but Trump has won and is going to be taking over as president in January.

Speaker 11 And they planned, the Intel officials under Barack Obama planned, this is a lot of this is from Racket News, which everybody should read directly, Matt's group.

Speaker 11 Intel officials planned a December 9th, 2016 presidential daily brief, which is always from the Intel community for the president, letting him know what's happening in the world.

Speaker 11 They planned a PDB that would say

Speaker 11 foreign adversaries, quoting here, foreign adversaries did not use cyber attacks on election infrastructure to alter the U.S. presidential election outcome.

Speaker 11 And they also plan to say we have no evidence of cyber manipulation of election infrastructure intended to alter results. Here's the bottom line.
What people need to know is

Speaker 11 Obama's Intel community was about to give Obama a presidential daily brief that totally dismissed, downplayed, poo-pooed, choose your word,

Speaker 11 the notion that Russia had meaningfully interfered in the 2016 presidential election. That's true.

Speaker 11 And by the way, Matt has gone well beyond the language that just speaks to manipulation of election infrastructure and pointed out that if you look at what the Intel community had been saying, it went well beyond dismissing they're not attacking our election infrastructure.

Speaker 11 They had doubts up and down the board about whether Russia had done anything more in 2016 than it had had ever done, which was just kind of attempts to be a menace and sow a little bit of chaos.

Speaker 11 And the intel communications that are released now by Tulsi show that.

Speaker 11 So while Andy and others are zeroing in on the notion that before they sat with Obama, they were going to tell him no attempts to hack our election infrastructure. And Andy will later argue.

Speaker 11 them later coming out and saying, but lots of attempts to interfere in the election in general and totally to help Donald Trump. He's saying that's apples to oranges.

Speaker 11 Jim Himes, you point out at Racket News, is saying that's apples to oranges.

Speaker 11 There's no gotcha in Tulsi's big reveals about what was about to happen next because nothing that happened next contradicted that they didn't try to hack our election databases.

Speaker 11 Okay, so hopefully the audience is with me so far. What Tulsi revealed was that

Speaker 11 The Intel community was about to issue that statement to President Obama saying they didn't.

Speaker 11 Like they didn't try to hack our election infrastructure, and there's no evidence that they intended to alter the results this way. And what happened was James Comey's FBI said, We're out.

Speaker 11 We're not joining that. We don't agree with that.
And we're going to issue our own briefing later.

Speaker 11 And as a result of the FBI saying that and saying that it was going to draft a dissent, an official from Clapper's office,

Speaker 11 Clapper, again, at the time, he was national security

Speaker 11 DNI. He was director of national intelligence.

Speaker 11 And by the way, Matt points out, Clapper of all the Intel officials was probably the least enthusiastic about Russia, Russia, Russia. It was a lot more Brennan over at CIA.

Speaker 11 But anyway, Clapper's office, okay, said we're axing the PDB. Because the DNI, like Tulsi now, she does the PDB for Trump.
Whoever runs the intelligence apparatus does it.

Speaker 11 And that was Clapper under Obama. So he said, oh, FBI's out.
Okay, we're killing it. We're killing the PDB for the time being.
And at that point, a meeting was held.

Speaker 11 It was called and held, including all of Obama's top people, all of them.

Speaker 11 And they had a big meeting on this. And the next day,

Speaker 11 things changed dramatically on the Russia narrative and changed in a way that would support the Russia, Russia, Russia allegations that would go on to undermine the entire first term of Donald J.

Speaker 11 Trump. And Matt is going to help us lay out this whole story.

Speaker 11 So, and Matt contends, and he's convinced me too, it was not a matter of changing it from apples to oranges, you know, just like pointing out apples and pointing out oranges before and after this critical meeting.

Speaker 11 It was, they had been saying, there's no apples, there's no apples, there's no apples. And as a result of this meeting, they changed it to say, apples abound.
We're in an orchard. They're everywhere.

Speaker 11 We see nothing but apples. So it's really not an an apples to oranges situation.
We're going to get into all of this.

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Speaker 11 Okay, Matt, thank you for being patient through my thumbnail sketch. What's the first thing you want to say about this story?

Speaker 15 Well, first of all,

Speaker 15 I understand,

Speaker 15 and I think you did a great job walking people through everything.

Speaker 15 I understand the confusion about this. I don't think that the report, as it was released,

Speaker 15 did a particularly good job of explaining

Speaker 15 what exactly the significance of these documents was, but they were very significant.

Speaker 15 If you remember before the election,

Speaker 15 there was a story in the New York Times, for instance, on October

Speaker 15 31st saying

Speaker 15 FBI sees no link between Russia and Trump and the election. This was sort of what officials were telling people in the media.

Speaker 15 There were a few fringe attempts to kind of work the steele dossier material, this full-on Trump-Russia conspiracy narrative into the media. But for the most part, they didn't get there.

Speaker 15 After the election, it was the same thing until this moment

Speaker 15 on December 9th, 2016, when Barack Obama convened this meeting, ordered a new intelligence assessment, and then immediately that same night,

Speaker 15 there were leaks from the administration telling people that there had been interference by Russia specifically to help Donald Trump. Because because there were two different

Speaker 11 top people and the

Speaker 11 no revised PDB has been issued yet no revised intelligence community assessment has happened yet the last thing that happened in the Intel community was we're going to tell them that there really was no significant Russian interference at least insofar as election apparatus goes and FBI said we're out we're going to issue our own and then Clapper said all right let's just pause everything.

Speaker 11 Then everybody gets together.

Speaker 11 Right after that, before any revised intel happened, before anything happened, they began leaking to the media, WAPO, New York Times, CNN,

Speaker 11 saying something diametrically opposed, saying, Russia, Russia interfered.

Speaker 11 And that to you, you describe that as the smoking gun that shows there had been a decision to shift the entire messaging around this in a way they thought would undermine Trump.

Speaker 11 Because why, if that were not the case, wouldn't they have just waited until they had the new and newly ordered Intel assessment and then figured out what was what?

Speaker 15 Yeah, and that's really the striking

Speaker 15 set of documents is you can see on December 9th, there is an order from the Director of National National Intelligence Office

Speaker 15 basically giving out directions on how to put together a new intelligence community assessment per the president's request.

Speaker 15 But as they're giving out the assignment, the homework is already published in the New York Times and the Washington Post. In other words,

Speaker 15 they hadn't even started work yet or group work on this assessment and they were already telling everybody in in the media what the conclusion was. So the entire

Speaker 15 work period of this had to be a sham. Essentially, they pre-concluded what was going to be in the assessment and started leaking in advance.

Speaker 11 And there's no question,

Speaker 11 it appears, that this was done at the direction of the President of the United States, then Barack Obama.

Speaker 11 They convened, it was all of his top emissaries. It was John Kerry, Victoria Newland, John Brennan, Ben Rhodes, Andy McCabe.

Speaker 11 You point at Richard Ledgett from NSA, all of these top emissaries for Obama. I mean, these are his top, top, top officials when it comes to national security.
They get together and they

Speaker 11 received a group email the next day from Clapper's office.

Speaker 11 He was DNI again, headed POTUS, meaning President of the United States, POTUS tasking on Russia election meddling, asking them to produce an assessment per the president's request.

Speaker 11 Quoting, quoting there.

Speaker 11 He says,

Speaker 11 the intelligence community is prepared to produce an assessment, quote, per the president's request, that pulls together the information we have on the tools Moscow used and the actions it took to influence the 2016 election, an explanation of why Moscow directed these activities and how Moscow's approach has changed over time, going back to 2008 and 2012, as reference points.

Speaker 11 And you're right

Speaker 11 in assessing this.

Speaker 11 In sum, just before Obama was about to receive a briefing that contained no reference to significant Russian interference, that briefing was called off and a high-level meeting of White House security officials was convened, after which Obama himself tasked them with a new assessment that would lean toward a more aggressive conclusion.

Speaker 11 The critical job of divining Russia's motives would be given to the CIA and Brennan.

Speaker 11 And I think you're suggesting here there's a reason that even though it was technically all under Clapper, who was the DNI, it was given to the CIA and Brennan, who all along had been very pro-Russia, Russia, Russia.

Speaker 11 And they knew full well he would go along to get along.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and this coincides with other information that we already had.

Speaker 15 Obviously, the CIA director John Ratcliffe a few weeks ago released the note talking about how Brennan overrode the objections of his deputy director of analysis and two of his hand-picked Russia experts to include steel dossier material in this assessment.

Speaker 15 I also did a story last year with Michael Schellenberger about that, about how they

Speaker 15 suppressed dissent in the ICA

Speaker 15 that said that Russia was actually hesitant about Trump. They considered him mercurial and unreliable

Speaker 15 and saw that Hillary Clinton represented continuity and was manageable. And they weren't so concerned about her being president.
All of this was suppressed.

Speaker 15 And Brennan was the person who was most aggressive in pushing the other line. So the fact that he was in charge of divining Russia's motives, and remember, motive is a key thing here.

Speaker 15 It's not just that Russia interfered. It's that Russia interfered specifically to help Donald Trump.
Those are two things.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and so he was in charge of that second part.

Speaker 11 Okay, and that's this dovetails with the report that's in the Federalist today

Speaker 11 entitled by Molly Hemingway. Top intelligence officials contradicted the CIA's Brennan, saying there is no intelligence to support this key Russian hoax claim.

Speaker 11 And just not to get too into the weeds, but she too is reporting that at the time, okay, so leading up to this assessment, CIA Director John Brennan was pushing Russia, Russia, Russia, and that top officials working on this intelligence community analysis about Russia's alleged interference went to him and said, we don't have it, and we definitely should not be including in this thing the so-called key judgment, which is an important intelligence term, that Russia interfered specifically to help Trump.

Speaker 11 We do not have that, and you should not put that in there.

Speaker 11 And reporting here, dovetailing with what you just said, and you've reported, the senior intelligence officials pointed out the lack of evidence to substantiate that claim.

Speaker 11 Quote, we have no intelligence to directly support this aspiration point,

Speaker 11 said one member of the group.

Speaker 11 The official worried that the inclusion of that claim would, quote, open the intelligence community to a line of very politicized inquiry that is sure to come up when this paper is shared with the Hill, meaning when it goes more public.

Speaker 11 And the Ratcliffe analysis, so that's Trump's current CIA director, he just last week took a look at all of this.

Speaker 11 And he just concluded that the inclusion of that term, that this was a key judgment, that Putin was trying to help Trump,

Speaker 11 saying that

Speaker 11 the inclusion of that

Speaker 11 noted, he noted the risks of including poorly supported judgments since skeptical readers are inclined to reject an entire analysis if a single judgment appears exaggerated, biased, or unsupported.

Speaker 11 It goes on to say, this is from, I think, this is Molly writing, the experts did not disagree that Russia had continued its practice of attempting to sow chaos in presidential elections.

Speaker 11 They believe the intel indicated Russia sought to weaken presumptive winner Hillary Clinton, and those efforts may have indirectly helped Trump.

Speaker 11 But they were concerned about the lack of evidence for the claim that became a cornerstone of the Russia collusion narrative in which Trump was accused of conspiring with Russia to steal the election.

Speaker 11 The official who was objecting to all of this wrote

Speaker 11 in December of 2016: Can you really prove Moscow was trying to get Trump elected?

Speaker 11 And you've written to this too, Matt, that there is a difference between trying to weaken the woman they presumed would win, Hillary, and trying to help Trump get elected.

Speaker 15 That's right. And that's the key distinction, Megan, is that

Speaker 15 while a lot of people believe that that was apparent on

Speaker 15 Hillary Clinton was going to be president and that they were to some degree comfortable with that,

Speaker 15 but that

Speaker 15 they were engaging in influence activities nonetheless. However, they just did not have concrete evidence that they were trying to help Trump.
And

Speaker 15 Molly is quoting security officials. I don't know from which agency, but I know that they came from all three of the agencies that participated in this intelligence community assessment.

Speaker 15 Brennan overrode people within the CIA who objected to that conclusion. He overrode people in the director of national intelligence office who could not sign off on that and in the FBI.

Speaker 15 So there was certainly not unanimous belief, even though they published that at the time.

Speaker 11 Yes, we'll get to the media in one sec.

Speaker 15 Yeah. So this is all very important.
They just didn't have it. And the important thing about that

Speaker 15 is that that's the reason they had to use the steel dossier stuff is because it was the only.

Speaker 11 Wait, hold on that too. Well, next we'll do steel dossier and then we'll do what they did with the media.
But I just want to read this other little piece from Molly's reporting today.

Speaker 11 So the, so she's reporting he had underlings coming to him saying, we don't have it. We do not, we cannot say in this briefing that the Russians wanted to help Trump.
We don't have that.

Speaker 11 And she writes that Brennan called the dissenting individuals into his office on December 30th, 2016, had a lengthy meeting.

Speaker 11 Again, this is all post, like putting the brakes on that report report they were going to give, but being told by Obama, give me a new report.

Speaker 11 And now Brennan is doing his level best to say exactly what he's been told to say.

Speaker 11 So he calls in those people into his office, has a lengthy meeting in which they articulated their serious concerns and says, quote, the assessment will stay the same,

Speaker 11 which is all I can think of is the Godfather. The rent stays like before.

Speaker 11 Nothing will change. So he gives the aura, nothing's changing.
We're sticking with Russia, Russia, Russia. And then she writes the following.

Speaker 11 The paper trail about this dispute posed a problem for Brennan, again, CIA director, because his underlings are putting this shit in writing. And he's not really thrilled about that.

Speaker 11 Because Brennan had presented the information as being universally held with a high degree of confidence.

Speaker 11 The CIA review noted that the key judgment that Putin was trying to help Trump was given a higher confidence level than was justified.

Speaker 11 And it further noted, the CIA review, sorry, that Ratcliffe just did last week.

Speaker 11 He just said, hey, when we look back at this, you said that was a key judgment, and that was giving it a higher confidence level than was justified. There was all this internal dissent.

Speaker 11 You did not have it that Putin was trying to help Trump. And it further noted that the intelligence community assessment had been drafted under an unusually rushed timeline.

Speaker 11 And then she gets into the leaks that happened before they even finished it off.

Speaker 11 So before we get to the leaks, now tell me how at this point they're trying to come up with the thing Obama wanted, which is Russia, they were involved. They wanted to help Trump.
That's why she lost.

Speaker 11 And suddenly the steel dossier, which had already been out there, this is one of Andy's points that he thinks undermines Tulsi.

Speaker 11 How the steel dossier became super important because what Andy says is they already, they didn't say Russia was extra involved just because Obama told them to.

Speaker 11 They had already relied on the Steele dossier in the fall of 16 to get the ability to spy on Carter Page, where they went into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and they used the Steele dossier to get a warrant to spy on Carter Page.

Speaker 11 So his point is they were already focused on Russian interference and they used the Steele dossier in the fall of 16. But you're making the point that

Speaker 11 at this point in the timeline, the steel dossier became extremely important. Why?

Speaker 15 Well, with all due respect to Andy, for whom I have a lot of respect, I think that actually is kind of an apples to oranges comparison because the September 2016 issue with the FISA Warren application, that was I would say more of an internal

Speaker 15 mishap within the FBI.

Speaker 15 This is part of the crossfire hurricane investigation into

Speaker 15 Trump and Russia. And they were attempting to find someone they could get surveillance, FISA surveillance authority on.

Speaker 15 The initial target was George Papadopoulos, but they threw him out in August of 2016 as not having any credible links to Russia. So they settled on Carter Page.

Speaker 15 And in order to get a surveillance authority on Page, they had to use the Steele dossier because there was no other credible intelligence.

Speaker 15 In fact, he was an informant, or he was in good standing with the CIA at the time, which they kept out of that warrant application.

Speaker 15 So that was just the use of the steel dossier earlier in 2016, that was sort of a self-contained little thing that happened within the FBI.

Speaker 15 What happens in December of 2016 is a much bigger and more important embrace of the steel dossier.

Speaker 15 This is when the entire intelligence community throws its weight behind this document, which by the way had been poo-pooed

Speaker 15 previously by the CIA as being internet rumor.

Speaker 15 And the other agencies didn't think of it in terribly high regard either until this moment when it became important. So I think that's important.

Speaker 15 And it's also important to note that this was why the press was suddenly able to write about this because everybody had the steel dossier meg.

Speaker 15 And you know this in September and October of 2016, but nobody published it for the very good reason they couldn't confirm it.

Speaker 15 It wasn't until the Obama administration threw their weight behind it that they could report it.

Speaker 11 They had the permission slip. So now they need the steel dossier because the boss has told them to get back to him with an assessment that says Russia did interfere and Russia meant to help Trump.

Speaker 11 And so where do they turn? They don't have it except in the steel dossier, which we now know was totally made up. It's been entirely discredited.

Speaker 11 That was the best evidence they had, which you're reporting to, even at the time, they knew was bullshit, but they decided to go with it anyway. So now they start to lean on that.

Speaker 11 And now we get to the

Speaker 11 press. This is so interesting.
So you write at Racket, it's suspicious.

Speaker 11 that a presidential daily briefing was postponed to make way for an intelligence community assessment ordered at Obama's request.

Speaker 11 It's fishier yet that the evidence that Putin intended to help Trump came from a classified annex.

Speaker 11 It didn't make its way into the principal report because the main intelligence agents objected too much to that. So they stuck it in an annex to the intelligence community assessment.

Speaker 11 So anyway, fishier yet that the evidence Putin intended to help Trump came from a classified annex containing steel dossier material. And here we go.

Speaker 11 But the smoking gun is that these eventual conclusions leaked instantly, instantly, not one or two weeks after Obama ordered the intelligence community assessment,

Speaker 11 but the same day before any group work could possibly have been done.

Speaker 11 And this is you writing on December 9th, 2016, the New York Times ran with the headline, quote, Russian hackers acted to aid Trump in election, U.S. says.

Speaker 11 The exact thing it appears Obama wanted and they didn't have. And the lower intelligence agents were saying we can't include that.
That cannot be a key judgment, but got overruled by Brennan.

Speaker 11 The New York Times has it the next day. It was just the previous day that Comey was like, I'm out.
I'm not doing that. And that

Speaker 11 Brennan or Clapper put a hold on that planned presidential daily brief. Within 24 hours, the New York Times headline is exactly what Obama.
wanted. Russian hackers acted to aid Trump in election, U.S.

Speaker 11 says. And you say the piece not only led with a full-blown steel dossier

Speaker 11 saying it that Putin acted to help Trump at Hillary Clinton's expense, but it followed with aggressive conclusions about Russian hacks of both Democratic and Republican Party infrastructure.

Speaker 11 Also that same day, the Washington Post ran a piece describing a secret assessment that Russia worked to help Trump, even though the group assessment had only just been assigned.

Speaker 11 Washington Post reporter Greg Miller went on air with PBS to flog the paper's secret assessment story and spoke of Russians having weaponized material.

Speaker 11 And not for nothing, Matt, but you point out all these reporters would go on to win Pulitzer prizes for their reporting.

Speaker 15 I mean, it's kind of amazing.

Speaker 15 You know, I look back at this, Megan,

Speaker 15 at the time.

Speaker 15 I was a Democrat. I had voted for Hillary Clinton in that election cycle.

Speaker 15 I wasn't particularly a fan of Donald Trump, but all of this material about Trump and Russia, as soon as it came out, my instantaneous reaction was, this doesn't feel right.

Speaker 15 I remember putting out a column said something about this stinks.

Speaker 15 And it was sourced in the same way that the WMD.

Speaker 15 story was sourced with lots of unnamed officials referring to things that could not be independently verified by other reporters, which is always a big red flag with this serious of a charge.

Speaker 15 But everybody piled on. And it was, I had never seen anything like it in media before.
You know, even the WMD story, it took some time for there to be consensus formed. Here, it happened overnight.

Speaker 15 Everybody jumped on the bandwagon and it was crazy.

Speaker 11 And we know why. We know why, because at least with WMD, they realized printing that shit was going to get us into a war.
And there should be some hesitancy before doing it.

Speaker 11 But this, the only stakes involved were you would unfairly condemn donald trump and maybe not undermine his presidency which is meaningless to the washington post and the new york times and cnn which was just as guilty those three were the worst politico two all those four the absolute worst and now we can see completely doing stenography for this dishonest intelligence community

Speaker 15 yeah

Speaker 15 and again

Speaker 15 i think most journalists of the old school, you know, if you interviewed reporters from the 70s and 80s, like the frontline investigative reporter types who would have done that kind of story back then, they were always motivated primarily

Speaker 15 by the fear of getting something big wrong, right?

Speaker 15 And this is exactly the kind of story that would

Speaker 15 worry a good reporter a lot because you're not able to see the thing at the middle

Speaker 15 of this big

Speaker 15 sort of

Speaker 15 presentation or what's inside the sort of Christmas wrapping in your story.

Speaker 15 You just can't see the evidence.

Speaker 15 And yet you're going to make this enormous conclusion on the front page of your newspaper. And if that turns out to be wrong, once upon a time, that was your career.

Speaker 15 You were never going to work again.

Speaker 15 But we're in a different world. Now you can make those kinds of mistakes and get promoted afterwards.

Speaker 11 Pulling surprises. So

Speaker 11 here's the next piece of it. So you write, from there,

Speaker 11 from there,

Speaker 11 officials built the Trump-Russia narrative brick by brick. You write on December 15th, the NSA's Admiral Michael Rogers,

Speaker 11 who in private refused.

Speaker 11 to upgrade his agency, the NSA's confidence level, from moderate to high on this nonsense, gave an interview to the New York times in which he said there should be no doubt this was a conscious effort by a nation state to attempt to achieve a specific effect news that the fbi agreed ran the next day this is exactly like covid and how fauci and collins got all those virologists who had been saying it looks like it came from a lab after a brow beating within 24 hours to completely reverse themselves and then they were saying it was racist to say it came from a lab.

Speaker 11 Okay, same thing, but like very dangerous. Okay.

Speaker 11 And you say this is the process that led to the release of the much-discussed January 16th, 2017 intelligence community assessment that concluded Vladimir Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.

Speaker 11 The very report that magically Washington Post and New York Times knew how it was going to come out before it had even been drafted or before they'd even started working on it.

Speaker 11 And this dovetails, because you say it started brick by brick, the whole narrative about Russia Gate and the Intel community using these media outlets as their stenographers.

Speaker 11 And it just happens to track with a clip that went viral this week in the wake of the Colbert cancellation, which shows actress Claire Daines, who of course starred in that great Homeland Security or Homeland series on Showtime.

Speaker 11 And she talked about how she in that role, playing a spy, meets with or was meeting with spies on the regular during this time frame. It was 2018 under Trump.

Speaker 11 And as soon as she starts to talk about how cozy the Intel community was getting with reporters, Colbert, who is not dumb, though he's a hack, stepped all over her and tried to change the subject.

Speaker 11 Here's the clip.

Speaker 12 So now one of the things that you do, do you do this every season where you go get to spend some time with some actual spies?

Speaker 10 Oh, we do. It's like the coolest part of my job.
Spy camp for us producers and writers and really?

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 10 Is it like you know? Yeah, so we park ourselves in a club in Georgetown and talk to like

Speaker 10 real

Speaker 11 spooks.

Speaker 10 And, you know, people in the intelligence community and the State Department and journalists and people who really...

Speaker 11 What do they tell you?

Speaker 13 What's the most surprising thing that they've told you about their jobs and something you would need to know for?

Speaker 11 Well every year it's different, right?

Speaker 10 We've been at it for a while and the climate has been, has changed. But this year, it was all about the distrust between the administration and the intelligence world.

Speaker 10 And the intelligence community was suddenly kind of allying itself with journalists, which usually they're long.

Speaker 12 How long ago did you start shooting

Speaker 1 this season?

Speaker 11 How long?

Speaker 10 We started in late August, September.

Speaker 11 No, didn't happen. Didn't hear it.

Speaker 11 How long have you been shooting this season?

Speaker 15 It's unbelievable that clip. I mean, I've been on Stephen's show.
I liked him, you know,

Speaker 15 but that's very embarrassing. And, you know, all these journalists, they were in bed with

Speaker 15 these spooks at this time, and they were essentially just

Speaker 15 printing wholesale these conclusions that they were fed.

Speaker 15 I mean, just think about it. That story that came out in the New York Times on what, December 10th or whatever it is, about Russia interfering to help Trump or Putin interfering to help Trump.

Speaker 15 Think about how quickly they had to put that together.

Speaker 15 You know,

Speaker 15 unless that was somehow in the works with CIA sources early, like from much earlier on,

Speaker 15 that's doing a story on that scale in 24 hours is just incredible.

Speaker 11 You have not checked what you've been told. You have just been a stenographer.
That's what that shows. And now, so now Trump.

Speaker 11 is very interested in this story, understandably, since his entire first term was undermined by this fake narrative.

Speaker 11 And now for the first time, we're really learning that it really was directed by Barack Obama. I mean, that's what the Tulsi reveal on Friday night shows.

Speaker 11 That's, you tell me, Matt, because you've been following a lot more closely than I have, that the biggest reveal on Friday night was this was all directed by Barack Obama.

Speaker 15 Yeah, so that's absolutely. uh the big reveal there were a lot of reporters you know um like aaron mate paul Sperry, even Dan Bongino when he was still in the media, not in the FBI yet.

Speaker 15 I worked with Michael Schellenberger. We all worked on this question.
Ray McGovern, by the way, another former intelligence official.

Speaker 15 Everybody worked on this ICA and we all knew that there had been a big change and that somehow

Speaker 15 the disagreement about Russia's involvement between the FBI, CIA, and NSA had somehow magically resolved around this time. But we all thought this was an intramural process between the agencies.

Speaker 15 What is new now is that we see that it was directed by the White House, that there was an order that came on from on high

Speaker 15 to come up with a new ICA, and that this didn't come from the agencies themselves. It came from Obama.

Speaker 15 Either that or one of the agencies briefed Obama, who in turn gave the order,

Speaker 15 And that's still a mystery. But Obama being in the middle of this is now the story.

Speaker 11 Yeah. I mean, he clearly gave the order one way or the other because it says per the president's request.
I mean, that's in writing now. So here is Trump just now.

Speaker 11 He was just caught on camera saying, well, we'll play both of them in succession. Let her rep.

Speaker 19 The witch hunt that you should be talking about is they caught President Obama absolutely called Tulsi Gabbard.

Speaker 19 What they did to this country in 2016, starting in 2016, but going up all the way going up to 2020 of the election. They tried to rig the election and they got caught.

Speaker 19 And there should be very severe consequences for that. It wasn't lots of people all over the place.
It was them too. But the leader of the gang was President Obama, Barack Hussein Obama.

Speaker 19 Have you heard of him? And except for the fact that he gets shielded by the press for his entire life, that's the one they,

Speaker 19 look, he's guilty. It's not a question, you know, I like to say,

Speaker 19 let's give it time.

Speaker 19 It's there. He's guilty.

Speaker 19 This was treason. This was every word you can think of.
They tried to steal the election.

Speaker 19 They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody's ever even imagined, even in other countries.
You've seen some pretty rough countries.

Speaker 19 This man has seen some pretty rough countries, but you've never seen anything like that. And we have all of the documents.

Speaker 19 And from what Tulsi told me, she's got thousands of additional documents coming.

Speaker 11 I mean,

Speaker 11 there he is on camera saying he thinks Barack Obama is guilty of treason. And that is a word Tulsi used too.
It may be too dramatic, but I don't know. I mean, it certainly is a threat.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, look, look, the reporter in me

Speaker 15 always gets nervous when a president is commenting on a potential criminal case and giving the verdict ahead of time. But

Speaker 15 I understand why he feels strongly about this.

Speaker 15 This directly, I mean, frankly, this whole caper

Speaker 15 paralyzed his entire first presidency.

Speaker 15 And the people who are wondering about the officials in his first term who didn't come up with these documents, I think they have good reason to wonder about that.

Speaker 15 But this is

Speaker 15 an enormous story.

Speaker 15 In our time, I think it's maybe second to the WMD story in terms of intelligence deceptions, but it might even be a bigger one given that there has not yet been a public reckoning about it.

Speaker 15 This deception continues to be mainstream opinion in this country. And

Speaker 15 it's unfortunate that there just has not been a case that would make this clear to the people.

Speaker 11 Well, we had the Durham investigation. So how, what did, what did that do?

Speaker 15 Well, it is the Durham investigation did establish pretty clearly the manipulation of the FISA warrant by the FBI. They obviously obtained

Speaker 15 or it led to one conviction of an official named, a lawyer named Kevin Kleinsmith, who, as I mentioned before, omitted the key detail that Carter Page

Speaker 15 had a relationship and was in good standing with the CIA when they depicted him as an agent of a foreign power.

Speaker 15 So

Speaker 15 it did that, but

Speaker 15 it seemed to miss some other things. Now, I say that

Speaker 15 the best way I can put this is I think it's a little early to close the book on what Durham found.

Speaker 15 There may or may not be more to come from that. We know that there is material that was not released from that investigation.
So

Speaker 11 may still be coming because Tulsi's promising she's going to release more as the week goes on and presumably the weeks. So maybe we'll get that.

Speaker 11 You seem to be suggesting you think we're going to get that, which good. I hope we get that.

Speaker 11 The wait, I just want to read one other thing from your writing.

Speaker 11 You write that the meeting on December 9th that switched out a tepid presidential daily brief for a dramatic narrative about Russian interference to help Trump was hugely meaningful.

Speaker 11 It positioned Steele dossier conclusions as mainstream news.

Speaker 11 It set up Trump to be investigated by his own incoming FBI director and made sure the incoming administration did not see dissenting intelligence about Russian meddling. More to come.

Speaker 11 And what you mean by that last point

Speaker 11 is

Speaker 11 that discussion about we're going to give him a PDB on December 8th that says the Russians

Speaker 11 did not hack into the election in any meaningful way.

Speaker 11 That would have gone not just to the sitting president, but to the president-elect.

Speaker 11 And you are positing here that another goal of spiking it was so that Mike Flynn, the incoming DNI, would not be able to see it.

Speaker 15 Yeah, oh,

Speaker 15 I think he was the national security advisor, right?

Speaker 11 Yes, yeah, he was national security advisor, yes.

Speaker 15 But

Speaker 11 Ratcliffe was the DNI.

Speaker 15 Right. Well, eventually, yes, yeah.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 I wasn't sure about this, you know, the but I

Speaker 15 reached out to Michael Flynn over the weekend and asked him,

Speaker 15 if they had gone forward with this PDB, would you have seen it? And he said, I would have read it. And

Speaker 15 he said he was already accessing, he was going to a SCIF, which is a secure facility,

Speaker 15 and regularly accessing the PDBs for

Speaker 15 Trump, who had already, by the way, invoked the displeasure of the intelligence community by saying that he wasn't particularly interested in reading the PDBs every day.

Speaker 15 But

Speaker 15 when I asked Flynn if he thought it might have been a factor in holding the PDB, the fact that they knew he was going to see it, he said very likely. So,

Speaker 15 you know, that's what he said.

Speaker 11 Why would they want the Trump administration to see anything that was downplaying Russians' interference? They knew that that was already being rejected entirely by Team Trump.

Speaker 11 Now, what if about, I mentioned it in the intro before you came on, you're reporting that this investigation may involve Biden-era issues too.

Speaker 11 That the DOJ, to whom Tulsi has referred this case, though we don't know exactly why, we know from reporting that preceded Tulsi's Friday night announcement, they've got some sort of investigation going at DOJ into James Comey.

Speaker 11 We don't know why, and also John Brennan. And we think that's over Brennan, including the Steele dossier in the annex to this report.

Speaker 11 and the testimony he gave around that process to Congress. I think that's as good good a summary as we're going to get, though we don't totally understand the whole thing.
Anyway,

Speaker 11 you're reporting that DOJ is also focusing on conspiracy charges, looking at conduct from 16 through 2024,

Speaker 11 and also at evidence that members of Trump's campaign may have been spied on in 2024. So what, can you please elaborate on either of those points?

Speaker 15 I can't say a whole lot, Megan, other than what I wrote, but I've heard a couple of different stories.

Speaker 15 I have one source who has a very concrete story about this,

Speaker 15 but I can't go forward with it yet.

Speaker 15 But

Speaker 15 what I can say is that

Speaker 15 there's a statute of limitations issue with some of these 2016 behaviors. that

Speaker 15 would be solved if they could prove a continuing pattern of conduct. And

Speaker 15 there were various investigations that took place during

Speaker 15 the Biden era, some of which the public knows about, some of which they don't know about.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 those, I think, would become tied to a conspiracy charge that would relate to these 2016 behaviors. So I know that's kind of a,

Speaker 15 you know, not a very clear answer, but I can tell you that they're looking at investigations from the Biden period and suggesting that there's a pattern of conduct, you know, potentially to obtain surveillance authority in one case, right?

Speaker 15 That might be established. And

Speaker 15 that might be how they look at this criminally.

Speaker 11 Wow. And do we know? who they're looking at.
I mean, you heard President Trump there say Obama committed treason.

Speaker 11 Obama, somebody was just pointing this out the other day, that Obama would not have immunity for anything that happened once he was out of office.

Speaker 11 And I wonder whether there's any evidence he did anything once he was out of office. But what about Clapper, Brennan,

Speaker 11 Ben Rhodes,

Speaker 11 Susan Rice? None of these people has immunity. They were not given any sort of blanket pardon.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I heard everybody's in play. Everybody at that meeting is in play.
play. The only thing we've heard concretely, though,

Speaker 15 is about Brennan

Speaker 15 and

Speaker 15 Comey. Comey.

Speaker 11 Yep.

Speaker 15 There was one report that I heard that there had been a referral involving Clapper, but I haven't been able to confirm that yet.

Speaker 15 So,

Speaker 15 and it's conspicuous that he's not on that list

Speaker 15 already that's been released. So that's interesting.
But

Speaker 15 you have to think that everybody who is at that meeting

Speaker 15 is probably lowering up at this moment.

Speaker 11 So in the minute we have left, Matt, just give us the big picture perspective on this story, what it is and what it means about

Speaker 11 everything, about the Intel community and Trump, Obama, and the press.

Speaker 15 I think

Speaker 15 the core thing that people have to remember about this story is that at the center of it, it's about taking basically a forgery, a manufactured piece of paid campaign research and making it an officially backed policy of the United States government.

Speaker 15 And they use that to generate a years-long investigation that paralyzed the American government. And

Speaker 15 it's one of the biggest lies ever perpetrated on the public by the intelligence community ever. And we've had a lot of them in this country.

Speaker 15 So it's fascinating to see it finally unwind.

Speaker 11 Wow. And there need to be consequences.

Speaker 11 They cannot just get away with this. These are villains.
Matt Taibi, thank you as always for your honest, straightforward reporting. Love talking to you.

Speaker 15 Thanks so much, Megan.

Speaker 11 Take care. Wow.
Wow. Wow.

Speaker 11 Coming up, Emily Jashinsky is here. We'll talk about this and it's Hunter Biden time.
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Speaker 11 The son of former President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, is the internet's main character today.

Speaker 11 Amazingly, in the span of two conversations, Hunter Biden went on an expletive-filled rant against George Clooney and other key Democratic figures, claimed ambien is what caused his father's horrific debate performance, speculated crack cocaine is probably safer than alcohol, and says the reason that the Dems lost 2024 is because they did not remain loyal to his dad.

Speaker 11 Also, he says the cocaine found in the White House is not his. That's just a start.

Speaker 11 Plus, you would not believe how Stephen Colbert and his buddy Jon Stewart responded to his cancellation. Cry me a river.

Speaker 11 Would you grow up, you children, put on your big boy pants and take it like a man? This is absurd. Many of us have had very public cancellations, and some were absolutely fucking brutal.

Speaker 11 And we didn't invite all our friends to come cry on the set and say, poor, poor her, poor, poor him. American democracy will not be the same.
Some of us took it like professionals, then

Speaker 11 picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves off, and moved on with life. Is this how it's going to be for the next year? Watching this crybaby try to play the victim that his show got canceled? Grow up.

Speaker 11 It's called television. You toddler.
Here to discuss it.

Speaker 11 One of our EJ's pair, Emily Jashinsky, host of Afterparty on the MK Media Podcast Network. Thank God this will never happen to you, Emily Jashinsky, on the MK Media Podcast Network.

Speaker 11 But I'm sure if I ever did,

Speaker 11 you wouldn't take it like an infant in the crib. This is absurd, this man.

Speaker 10 Hiring a gospel choir. Did you see Jon Stewart?

Speaker 10 He hired like a gospel choir to sing behind him and said F you to Donald Trump or like F off to Donald Trump because they think they're the outpouring of Democrats saying thank you to Stephen Colbert for quote like standing up to power or speaking truth to power.

Speaker 10 There are like more than five Democratic politicians posting that in unison. Funny how that happens over the last several days.

Speaker 10 And hilariously, they see themselves genuinely as the like protagonists of the story, as though Stephen Colbert wasn't, according to Puck News, losing $40 million a year.

Speaker 10 That show was apparently losing $40 million a year. And you can see how the math doesn't math for the Colbert, for the, I was going to say the Colbert report, but for the show,

Speaker 10 because I mean, you can't have overhead like an old late-night show in 2025. It just, it doesn't make sense when you're getting 3 million people a night.
It's an absurd equation.

Speaker 10 And so to act like this is...

Speaker 10 No, and to act like this is all because Paramount has a a merger in front of Donald Trump, which is true, they do.

Speaker 10 The Trump administration is looking at the Paramount Skydance merger, but to act like that's why they pulled the plug on Colbert, it's insane.

Speaker 10 They're actually getting rid of the entire franchise, not just the host. Right.

Speaker 11 Why wouldn't you just replace the host?

Speaker 11 And by the way, if Trump were in there bargaining for the, you know, summary firing of people on CBS airwaves who are terrible to him and don't like him, there'd be no one left.

Speaker 11 Literally, who would be left? Nora O'Donnell would have to go entirely. So would that Margaret Brennan.
So would Gail King.

Speaker 11 I mean, if really, if Trump were in there bargaining for like, these are the people who have to go, Colbert is an antagonist, but, you know, is he any worse than these others I've named?

Speaker 11 Margaret Brennan is out there trying to skewer, ineffectively, though, his top administration officials every week.

Speaker 11 She tried to tank a vice presidential debate in favor of the Dems, as did Nora O'Donnell. So it's like...

Speaker 11 I don't know, there'd be a lot of targets that I'd probably want to take care of before I got rid of this loser in late night who nobody's watching.

Speaker 11 By the way, so they say his show caused, that it was losing $40 million a year. Can I tell you something? The Kelly file, this is back in 2014 through 17,

Speaker 11 and they have 100 employees on this thing. For 100 employees, they lose $40 million a year.
On the Kelly file, we had nine producers. That's it.
And maybe a handful of tech staff, maybe five.

Speaker 11 So let's call it 15 roundup. And we made $100 million a year on that show.

Speaker 11 Just the Kelly file brought in $100 million a year in revenue. This guy has 100 employees.
So almost 10 times what I had. And he's losing 40 million.
That's what gets you fired, you loser.

Speaker 11 It's unbelievable that they kept him on the air at all based on this, like as long as they have. And they're like, oh, I was number one in late night.
Okay, you were number one by 1,000.

Speaker 11 You were beating Jimmy Kimmel in the overall number by 1,000. You were losing in the advertiser advertiser key demo from 18 to 49-year-olds to Jimmy Kimmel.
Jimmy Fallon is no longer on the board.

Speaker 11 He might no longer be with us for as long as I know because, literally, as Roger Rails once said about Paula Zahn, you could put a dead raccoon in his chair and get the same ratings that Jimmy Fallon's getting.

Speaker 11 Okay, but there was, he wasn't number one in the key advertiser-friendly demo. And irrespective of that, all the numbers had fallen almost 50%

Speaker 11 just since 2018. No one's watching late night television anymore.
It's a failed business model. Right.

Speaker 10 And that's why they're getting rid of the whole franchise.

Speaker 10 So for Colbert and Stewart to slot themselves into these roles as protagonists against the big bad corporate overlord and the Trump administration is just like, it is completely laughable.

Speaker 10 And for Democrats to do the same is completely laughable. I mean, laughable.
It's obviously cynical, but at the same time, it's just like, give me a break.

Speaker 10 They're getting rid of the entire show, not just Colbert. There are all kinds of different people at CBS who are bad.
But Colbert is even losing on digital.

Speaker 10 I mean, he can be the number one on late night, even if he's like losing in the demo. But like, Fallon does better than him on digital, according to reports.

Speaker 10 Like, he's, he's of all the late night hosts, the one that does most poorly on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and those platforms, which is not surprising at all because my new theory on why we have all of these like Gen X politicians flocking to Colbert's defense on the left, you know, you're Chris Murphy, Hakeem Jeffries, it's because they're,

Speaker 10 yeah, she might be a boomer. I don't know, but they

Speaker 10 boomers count in this too. But Colbert and Stewart remind them of this time period when people felt like they were, they had this moral energy around resistance to the Bush administration.

Speaker 10 And there was something really edgy about tuning into Comedy Central late night back in like 2009 or 2007.

Speaker 10 That it just makes them, it's this wave of nostalgia to look like you're standing up and standing by Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, who honestly shouldn't.

Speaker 11 You missed it. There's shit.
All these losers who go out there and like march on Harvard's campus. You missed the civil rights era.
Sorry, you weren't around for it. You're cosplaying now.

Speaker 11 No one's believing you. You're not making any sort of a difference.

Speaker 11 Steve Krackauer corrects me. There are 200 employees on Colbert's show.

Speaker 11 200.

Speaker 11 Literally, we had nine producers to produce the highest rated show in all of cable news in the key advertiser friendly demo 25 to 54 on cable news with the kelly file i had nine producers and like i say just a handful of techs it for a hundred million dollars a year that show netted this show is losing 40 million a year with 200 employees it's a loser what you call that in the kids talk is a loser it's a hard loser and he can't accept it and just one other thing

Speaker 11 jon stewart i i love to talk about this. Okay.
What a pathetic has-been.

Speaker 11 He had his role during the heyday. He was very relevant for a time.
That time has passed and all of his ratings support my statement. Okay.

Speaker 11 Some of us were able to reinvent ourselves after we left the cable news universe and some of us weren't.

Speaker 11 So he came back still thinking he'd be the king of the cool kids and he's had absolutely middling ratings. Nobody's watching him.
And so he decided to bring back some of his old tricks.

Speaker 11 Believe me, I've been on the receiving end of his little gospel choir. He's done more hit pieces on me than anybody I can think of that has attacked me time and time again.

Speaker 11 When I had just had my babies, I'd be nursing them on my couch and he would drop yet another hit piece on me because I was a threat on Fox News and he was afraid of me.

Speaker 11 He didn't want my message getting out there. He wanted to, you know, to diminish me and my shows in their crib.
That failed too.

Speaker 11 Anyway, so there was speculation yesterday in the podcast universe.

Speaker 11 Bill Simmons had on Matthew Bellany of Puck News, formerly Hollywood Reporter, and they openly wondered whether when Jon Stewart went on the air Monday night, he would quit because he was so outraged over the wrong, the deep wrong that had been done to his good friend Stephen Colbert, you know, clearly

Speaker 11 fired over politics. And so there was some anticipation.

Speaker 11 They both said they were going to watch Stewart live that night to see whether he would quit and make a point that this was deeply immoral, so much so that he would sacrifice the millions and

Speaker 11 the fame

Speaker 11 air quotes that he's getting from his reappearance on Mondays on the Daily Show. And instead, this is what we got:

Speaker 11 this ain't the time to shrink,

Speaker 11 this is the time to fight,

Speaker 11 this is the time to rise up.

Speaker 11 You're afraid,

Speaker 22 and you protect your bottom line.

Speaker 18 I've got but one thing to say:

Speaker 18 just one little phrase.

Speaker 18 Go fuck yourself.

Speaker 11 Fuck, fuck, fuck yourself. Just go fuck yourself.

Speaker 11 Everybody,

Speaker 11 fuck, fuck yourself. Fuck yourself.
Just go fuck yourself.

Speaker 11 So it was a no. He did not forego his millions of dollars or his ridiculous do-nothing post on The Daily Show.

Speaker 11 Instead, he chose himself and he chose to go with a profanity-laced rant against the company that owns Comedy Central, Paramount, with whom this merger has happened. They also own CBS.

Speaker 11 And this came as no surprise to me because he's always been all about himself.

Speaker 11 However, I did not expect that he would really kind of embrace the same mistakes Oprah Winfrey has embraced that have made her an official has been too, where they take their old shtick that worked 20 years ago, try to revive it in their older bodies with their gray hair, and think in the modern day media environment, which you know better than anybody, Emily, doesn't work.

Speaker 11 You cannot, as a 60-year-old dude, whatever Jon Stewart is, he's around there, or in Oprah's case, 70-something, come out and still pull off the, I am shouting at people.

Speaker 11 I will be heard.

Speaker 11 You look old and weird, and it's too jarring. It no longer works.

Speaker 11 And so it's not surprising to me, because I don't watch his show, that he too is failing and that he felt the need to hold on to his one little loser show a week because who else would hire that?

Speaker 10 You know, that's kind of interesting because the podcast version of Jon Stewart is different than that.

Speaker 10 And so to have that actually be in his life and him not sort of understand the distinctions, I think is pretty interesting.

Speaker 10 The other thing I'll add on that is what you just described and what we just watched, unfortunately, is obviously also tiresome, but it's also the type of thing that people saw as really avant-garde in, again, like 2007, because you had someone on this cable network speaking to younger Americans.

Speaker 10 He was doing the kind of anti-network late night show thing, like the anti-tonight show type of thing over on Comedy Central. And he was, you know, using profanity.

Speaker 10 He was being much more directly political than the late night hosts were. And that felt at the time novel and fresh and edgy.

Speaker 10 And now it feels like another shtick instead of something that's honest and authentic. It feels like this overproduced.

Speaker 10 Like to act that you're speaking truth to corporate power on a corporate platform by doing the same shtick you've been doing for 20 years, it obviously does not have any of the same edge or novelty that it had back then, but he doesn't realize it.

Speaker 10 I think that is actually really interesting.

Speaker 11 You're so right. It's so true.
He would have been so much better off if he had just opened up with just him at the desk, looking at the camera and just speaking extemporaneously.

Speaker 11 Like, I'm really distressed over this. This is why.
This is what I think. These are the things I've known this guy for this long.
Here's my own experience and what parallels it.

Speaker 11 Like, people would have watched that. It would have been gripping.
People, you know, on his side at least, would have found it really interesting.

Speaker 11 But he went back to the gospel choir, it is one of his favorite tools. He just looks like a fool.
Now he's 62, jumping and dancing and screaming at us in front of it.

Speaker 11 He looks old, dare I say, elderly, and like he's trying to hold on to his golden years, like his youth years it's not that far afield from what j-lo is on stage doing right now with her fake sex simulations you know might as well just show it i mean there's a lot to go over in this next hour j-lo's out on tour in the middle of nowhere i don't i don't know where she no one's listening to j-lo her her tours have been a mess her songs are unpopular here's a man with his face in her crotch for listening audience we see heine with a thong and a man looks like he's giving her oral sex, like his face is in her crotch.

Speaker 11 Now she bends over. And then, for the next several minutes, she simulates actual sex acts.

Speaker 11 Like, you know, there, she's doing actual sex acts, though she's clothed with a bunch of men wearing just pants and corsets, I guess. I don't, I don't know what they're wearing.

Speaker 11 Um, yeah, like doggy style, missionary, her sitting up on them and writhing and grinding. She's 55 years old, and she hasn't come to grips with the fact that she's not a sex symbol anymore.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 11 I can say this because I'll be 55 in November. We're not sex symbols.
We could look great for our age. We could rock a bikini in the right setting.
That's terrific. Good for us.

Speaker 11 But asking the American public to look at you and be like, I want to have sex when I look at her.

Speaker 11 That ship has sailed. I'm sorry.
It's sailed with menopause. And a post-menopausal woman.
Out there bumping and grinding against 30-year-old men. It just makes us think about how old you are.

Speaker 11 Try to have some class instead of embracing life as a now soft porn actress. These are the same people in different bodies, Stuart and Lopez.

Speaker 10 Holy shit, that's so funny.

Speaker 10 I didn't know where that was going to go and it just landed perfectly.

Speaker 10 But truly, there's something interesting about that because with J-Lo,

Speaker 10 if you are trying to impress people by looking good for your age, baked into that is still people thinking about your age, which is not what people think when you're actually 25 and you look like you're 25.

Speaker 10 You're drawing attention to your age. So if you want people to be thinking,

Speaker 10 yes, this woman is beautiful for her age, then by all means.

Speaker 10 But we know that what, here I go, Jon Stewart and Jennifer Lopez both want people to think is that they're actually still at the top of their edginess and their novelty.

Speaker 10 And that doesn't work at this point in their careers. And there is something culturally going on right now.

Speaker 10 Part of it just has to do with our technological abilities to tweak our appearances and keep looking younger and younger that has an element of arrested development to it.

Speaker 10 Like this is a serious thing that's happening of like adults flocking to Disney World alone and in mass, apparently. Like this is a thing that's really happening across the culture.

Speaker 10 And part of it is probably people being able to tweak their appearances, getting married later, buying houses later. And there's all kinds of stuff going on here.

Speaker 10 But it is, I think, like getting us stuck in this loop of just tired, tired culture. But people are now starting to reject it because the gatekeepers are losing their power.

Speaker 10 And that's where you see JLo failing to sell tickets.

Speaker 11 The thing is, is like you can look sexy as an older woman. Absolutely.
You know, hello. Tina Turner was the goddess of this into her 80s.

Speaker 11 And she would wear a tight dress or a short dress and she would show off those unbelievable legs and arms and everything in between. But with class, she never,

Speaker 11 you never saw Tina Turner shoving her vadge in some 30-year-old dancer's face and then simulating every, like it was like reading the Kama Sutra watching that J-Lo performance. She wasn't desperate.

Speaker 11 for attention. She was, yes, always a sex symbol in a way, just because she was so sexy and strong and talented.
But J-Lo's crossed over to actually trying to be like a porn star.

Speaker 11 That's what she's she's closer to somebody you'd see on OnlyFans. And that's where it falls apart.
You know, you look at a lot of these. Look at Celine Dion.

Speaker 11 I mean, Celine's now having some health problems, but like she's always had this very thin body, but she wears these totally glamorous gowns.

Speaker 11 She's never had to do this because her talent reigns supreme. You know it as soon as your ear hears it.
And she has a world-famous talent and voice. J-Lo doesn't.

Speaker 11 And she's tried to make up the gap with her, with by being a sex symbol, by being like a sex pot, a sex kitten for her entire career. And when you are 29, it's great.
Even 39, you can pull it off.

Speaker 11 My friend, at 55, you need to retire that act, put on a great dress, and try, try

Speaker 11 to sing. Like, I'm sorry, that's the point at which you found yourself.
This thing is not working. Okay, back to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
The Colbert meltdown has reached epic proportions.

Speaker 11 There were actual protests outside of his studio last night in New York.

Speaker 11 Like people are gathering to chant something like down with Trump, up with Colbert, or like kill Trump, save Colbert, whatever it is.

Speaker 11 And in his show, Colbert show, because they're leaving him on the air. Steve, is it through the end of next year? Is it there? Is it like through the through the May of 2026?

Speaker 11 So they've got how many, almost not quite a year left of these nine months of these shows. I'm going to tell you right now, that's not going to happen.

Speaker 11 They're going to pull the plug, at least if he continues with this nonsense.

Speaker 11 He brings in all these Hollywood and late night and related stars to try to, I guess, make us cry about his cancellation. And here's how that looked.

Speaker 11 Look at those guys.

Speaker 11 Anderson Cooper, Andy Cooper, and Andy Cohen kissing.

Speaker 11 Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers. Seth Meyers, complete loser.
Can't stand it.

Speaker 11 Adam Standler, love him. Shame on you for appearing in this.

Speaker 11 Stewart and, what's his name, John Oliver?

Speaker 11 Like a couple of teenage girls in the audience

Speaker 11 overacting. A cartoon version of Trump.

Speaker 10 Sorry. Stop.
Stop. Stop playing.

Speaker 11 I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
I'm just spoiled.

Speaker 11 Hold. Give me a sec.

Speaker 10 Your song has been canceled.

Speaker 18 What?

Speaker 18 Why?

Speaker 10 Why? I don't know. Hold on.
It says here, this is a purely financial decision.

Speaker 20 What does that mean?

Speaker 10 I think it means money.

Speaker 11 Well, yeah, but what money?

Speaker 10 I don't, hold on.

Speaker 11 It says here that since you started playing that song, the network has lost, and I don't know how this is possible, $40 to $50 million.

Speaker 11 He just looks so out of touch, Emily. Like,

Speaker 11 it's the same thing as Kamala Harris parading out those celebrities to try to save her campaign. It didn't work on Democrats.
That's who he's trying to appeal to.

Speaker 11 It didn't work on Democrats for her, and it doesn't work on his Democrat audience for him. It only makes him look like the elitist, out-of-touch, rich snob that he is.

Speaker 10 And this is, we were talking about this actually on After Party last night. There's this difference between macroculture.

Speaker 11 After party, it's on at 10 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays on YouTube, live with Emily Jashinsky.
You should totally tune in. It's super hot.
Keep going.

Speaker 10 That's right. We're having fun.
We're live.

Speaker 10 And so Colbert is doing this thing where he's like still pretending that he's Johnny Carson, even though what he's doing is for a really niche audience of educated, affluent coastal liberals, the types of people who watch John Oliver and Jon Stewart and really like those weird Trump jokes that he does that are more like uncomfortable than they are funny.

Speaker 10 And so this is the problem is he's still acting.

Speaker 10 Part of the reason he sees himself as a martyr and a victim is because he's acting like they canceled Johnny Carson for saying something mean about Ronald Reagan. And that's not what's happening.

Speaker 10 He's trying to do microculture versus macro monoculture, but he's trying to do it on a macro monoc. culture budget with a 200 person staff losing 40 million people a year, $40 million a year.

Speaker 10 And I forget, I wish I could credit the person who said this because it's so smart, but it was basically his show was basically affirmative action for anti-Trump coastal elitism because it was losing all of that money.

Speaker 10 And yet CBS had to be careful with it because they don't want to look like they're getting rid of this political opponent of the president.

Speaker 10 They don't want to upset all of the other people in the industry. who they know are going to jump to Colbert's defense and frame it sympathetically.
And Colbert genuinely was funny at a point.

Speaker 10 That's why he has some like genuinely funny friends, like Adam Sandler. But it's the same thing.
I'm going to do this one more time, Megan. I'm going to go back to this well one more time.

Speaker 10 It is JLo-esque, right? It's our culture doing the Steve Buscemi meme where he says hello, fellow kids, with the skateboard over his shoulder in perpetuity because J-Lo was a dancer.

Speaker 10 She was famous for being a her talent, wasn't dance, her talent was being really hot and a really good dancer.

Speaker 10 Colbert and Stewart, their talents were being these like young, edgy, anti-establishment comedians.

Speaker 10 And you can't be a young, edgy, anti-establishment comedian or an incredible dancer when you're not young anymore and they haven't adapted.

Speaker 11 This is why I like being in news because getting older in news is actually a bonus. It gives you a lot of wisdom from your years of covering the news.
It's not a deal breaker.

Speaker 11 You don't have to be fired. It's not like your vagina looks different, so you can't be on air anymore.

Speaker 10 Yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 10 It's been great for Leslie Stahl.

Speaker 11 I just, I love, I love that they're trying to do the same shtick they did 20 years ago. And they're just all getting terrible results.

Speaker 11 Matt Taibbi was on the first hour, as you know. And in watching one of their shows, they were talking about this, he and Walter Kern, and they revived this clip because this is Colbert.

Speaker 11 This is the reason Colbert failed. He took a great franchise, The Late Show, great franchise.

Speaker 11 You know, David Letterman used to be there and absolutely fucking ruined it by segments like this, where he went to Russia to the Ritz-Carlton presidential suite,

Speaker 11 where the alleged Trump P-tape from the Steele dossier was said to have happened with the prostitutes so he could do on-scene reporting. Look at this.

Speaker 11 Hello.

Speaker 16 Join me, won't you?

Speaker 16 In the bedroom of the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow. The room we've heard so much about, and yet no one has come to check it out.

Speaker 13 I don't know why.

Speaker 16 When you're in this room,

Speaker 16 I don't know how to describe it.

Speaker 19 It's soaked in history.

Speaker 12 It just...

Speaker 7 It just washes over you.

Speaker 16 I mean, it's not even like it's in the past.

Speaker 13 You're in history.

Speaker 19 You're in it.

Speaker 19 You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 16 I'm saying the pee-pee tape supposedly took place on that bed, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 12 The dossier alleges that President Trump was somewhere in this room.

Speaker 16 We don't know where he sat. Could have been on this bench down here.
Though I doubt it because that's in what's called the splash zone.

Speaker 16 Are you going to want to wear a poncho? Could have been on the couch over there.

Speaker 18 But what would that look like?

Speaker 16 Join us when my investigative journalism continues.

Speaker 12 Beep, beep, tape. Beep, beep, tape.

Speaker 16 You know when you've imagined something for so long and then when you finally see it, it just doesn't match what you pictured in your head.

Speaker 16 That's not this feeling at all.

Speaker 11 It's amazing to me, Emily, how every single one of those laughs was laugh track.

Speaker 11 It wasn't funny. The whole thing wasn't funny.
And by the way, even his side has now had to admit the steel tape has been totally discredited and it was all a lie.

Speaker 11 That's that's how you fail in television.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 10 Well, it's you know what would have been funny is if that entire shtick, well, first of all, if the jokes were funny, but if the entire shtick was satirizing the political establishment cooking up a conspiracy hoax and making fun of this idea that there was a dossier that had legitimate credible information because Christopher Steele stitched it together from all of these these different sources, which was really one primary source, sub-source, all of that.

Speaker 10 The idea that this suggested that Donald Trump really credibly had colluded with the Russian government, making fun of the CIA and the FBI and the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign for cooking up such a hilarious hoax, that would have been funny.

Speaker 10 And by the way, that's exactly what Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart were standing up against, the excesses of the intelligence community during the Bush administration.

Speaker 10 And it reminds me, one person who has adapted really well, I was thinking about this while you were talking to Matt, is the great Matt Taibbi because he mentioned he'd been on Colbert's show and he used to like Colbert.

Speaker 10 And I'm like, you know what? Taibbi is one of the people who was anti-establishment when those guys were anti-establishment. And Taibbi has remained consistent and he has adapted instead of just

Speaker 10 hook line and sinker buying what the intelligence

Speaker 10 community is selling because they happen to be on your sort of ideological side at any given moment. That's actually

Speaker 10 right, Glenn. Yep, that's actually Edgy.
That's why they're actually interesting, compelling people.

Speaker 10 And Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart look so hollowed out and sad and are just going back to these same shticks over and over again for like 10 years now in a way that is only funny to like 5% of the country that is still reliving the moral energy they had in 2007 because they were laughing at Jon Stewart for taking down the Bush administration.

Speaker 10 And it just,

Speaker 10 it's not the same anymore. It doesn't work anymore.

Speaker 11 Yeah. I've been on Colbert's show multiple times.
I've been on Kimmel's show. I've been on Fallon's show.
I've been on Seth Meyer's show. I've been on all of them.
I was on Jay Leno, all of them.

Speaker 11 And I can affirmatively tell you that Stephen Colbert is not funny. He's not funny behind the scenes.
He's not funny on camera.

Speaker 11 And the only reason he really wanted me is because back when I went on, they would occasionally book journalists, just ask Brian Williams, it was his downfall.

Speaker 11 It's because all of them would occasionally do like news, but it would be like a smattering.

Speaker 11 You know, we would be like a sprinkle on top of the cake, which the cake was always real celebrities, like actual Hollywood A-listers who would go and be the first two acts.

Speaker 11 Then you'd come on as a news person, like as the C-team, which is fine. You're a news person.
You're not expecting to be the lead act. But they completely lost their mission.

Speaker 11 And we talked about this when Colbert got canceled last week and the news broke. His lead guest the night he got canceled was Adam Schiff.

Speaker 11 Adam Schiff.

Speaker 11 I got to read you part of what Charles C.W. Cook wrote in National Review about Colbert, because it's so good.

Speaker 11 He writes, since the news was promulgated, entertainment analysts have been busy looking for the murder weapon.

Speaker 11 Some have suggested it was Trump, others have pointed to political climate, the state of the TV market, the economics of producing a spectacle in contemporary New York. My choice is less complex.

Speaker 11 The executioner was Stephen Colbert. As the host of the late show, Stephen Colbert was annoying in a direct and palpable sense.
He hectored, he sneered, he gatecapped for a narrow, pious worldview.

Speaker 11 And above

Speaker 11 all else, he sacrificed jocosity meaning being funny for ideology a trade that never ever pays under colbert's inadequate leadership the program came to resemble the sort of bedeviled mutt that one might expect if one were to instruct artificial intelligence to produce a chat show having trained it solely on old episodes of the view Not only did the product fail to look like America, its architects neither knew what America looked like nor wanted to know.

Speaker 11 It was insular, smug, and self-serious, and worst of all, it routinely committed the only mortal sin in show business. It was boring.
Last but not least, most of this was directly Colbert's fault.

Speaker 11 The rest was indirectly his fault.

Speaker 11 Many of the post-mortems have noted correctly that Colbert was obsessed with a particular strand of American politics, and that in addition to giving the show a dull, Manichian tone, this obsession led him to offer up a surfeit.

Speaker 11 that means excessive amount, of left-leaning politicians as his guests. Right on.
What has received less attention is that his non-political invitees were also habitually dreary. Why?

Speaker 11 Because in the environment that the Stephen Colberts of the world have created, they had no choice but to be so.

Speaker 11 It is indeed true, he writes, that the death of the movie star system has made late shows more difficult to stage. But in the grand scheme of things, this is a red herring.

Speaker 11 A media universe that was engineered by the likes of Stephen Colbert was always destined to be a media universe in which interesting people sedulously, that means constantly, avoided saying anything of consequence and in which those who tried to say compelling things were swiftly cut off at the pass.

Speaker 11 Ultimately, the problem was of demand, not of supply. And he goes on from there.
It's a great piece. Charles is so smart with his fancy words, but I get it.
I think we get it. And he's not wrong.

Speaker 11 I'll give you the last word, Emily.

Speaker 10 Well, I was going to say, I don't know how Charlie had time to watch so much Colbert when he was nose deep in his thesaurus, apparently, after all those hours. But he's right.

Speaker 10 I mean, it was just for a tiny slice of the public, and it was operating on a budget that couldn't possibly sustain that.

Speaker 10 And it took, you know, I think a big corporation like Paramount CBS a long time to reconcile with the death of monoculture. They just, they can't do it anymore.

Speaker 10 And they're not, it doesn't make Colbert a martyr in any way, but we can expect him to be.

Speaker 11 They're all dinosaurs.

Speaker 11 They're all getting canceled. Trump actually just posted on Truth Social that he or Jimmy Kimmel is going to be canceled next.
That could be.

Speaker 11 Trump actually does have very good sources in television across the board. So he could be right.
Kimmel's numbers are also terrible. Fallon's literally are, I mean, in the bottom of the barrel.

Speaker 11 You can't even see Fallon. He's so far behind the other two, and the other two are already losers.
So they're not going to be around. In five years, none of them will be around.
They're too expensive.

Speaker 11 for too little return. The day of the late night talk show host and the late night talk show has passed.
It had its heyday. Carson, Leno too, was great.
Letterman, awesome. It's over.
Accept it.

Speaker 11 Move on. Cut your losses.
CBS was the first. It won't be the last.
Emily stays with me, and we have a fun announcement coming about the other EJ in a moment. That plus Hunter Biden.

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Speaker 11 Here with me today, Emily Joshinsky, host of Afterparty on the MK Media Podcast Network.

Speaker 11 Just go to wherever you get your podcast, type in Afterparty or Emily, Jashinsky, J-A-S-H, it starts, and you will find her show, follow on podcast, and watch live on YouTube on Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 p.m.

Speaker 11 And you can have a beer with Emily. Not everybody gets to do that.
Okay, so

Speaker 10 Margarita, courtesy of Megan and Doug.

Speaker 11 That's right. I didn't know that you didn't, you can't drink tequila.
So we had a last-minute substitution on your margarita. What? That's a terrible affliction, by the way.

Speaker 10 Yeah, it's really embarrassing, actually. I'm deeply embarrassed by it.

Speaker 11 It's like an allergy?

Speaker 10 Yeah, it's, and I don't know why. I'm not allergic to anything.
I'm sure I'm going to get all kinds of comments from doctors being like, it's this, it's that, or it's nothing.

Speaker 10 But truly, trust me, I've experimented many times. It's

Speaker 11 been horrible the first time you found that out the hard way.

Speaker 10 It was. And I was in a tequila phase of my life.
And I found out even just like a little sip, it doesn't matter. It'll, it doesn't work.
It doesn't work anymore.

Speaker 11 Oh, no. Did you look like Hitch, like Will Smith in the movie Hitch, with like the swollen everything?

Speaker 10 No, I didn't, not quite that bad, but bad enough that I can't keep doing it.

Speaker 11 Okay, okay, good. Well, got it.

Speaker 11 The problem was rectified before I served you anything dangerous, and I'm thrilled it worked out. Okay, see, this is all the fun you're missing if you're not watching After Party with EJ.

Speaker 11 Hunter Biden. I'm going to kick it off with this, comfortably smug of Ruthless, such a great guy.
He tweeted the following and he's not wrong. Hunter Biden is the Joe Rogan of the left.

Speaker 11 I wonder if they will realize it. Put Hunter in front of a mic.
That's how you save the Democrat Party.

Speaker 11 Kind of true. He's joking, but he was highly entertaining.

Speaker 11 I mean, a little misguided on pointing the finger at others, many others for doing things that he himself has done exactly and times 10, but fine.

Speaker 11 It was very entertaining to see him break out the machine gun, the rhetorical machine gun, and go after every prominent Democrat who's been in the news lately.

Speaker 11 Maybe we have that SAT. Let's see.

Speaker 6 I don't know.

Speaker 11 Sot 12. Let's start with SOT 12.

Speaker 11 Fuck him.

Speaker 18 Fuck him and everybody around him. I don't know not to be fucking nice.
Number one, I agree with Quentin Tarantino. Fucking George Clooney is not a fucking actor.
He is a fucking,

Speaker 18 like, I don't know what he is.

Speaker 18 He's a brand. Fuck you.
What do you have to do with fucking anything? Why do I have to fucking listen to you?

Speaker 18 We, me, and James Carville, who hasn't run a race in 40 fucking years, and David Axelrod, who had one success in his political life, and that was Barack Obama.

Speaker 18 And that was because of Barack Obama, not because of fucking David Axelrod.

Speaker 18 And David Plough, and all of these guys, and the Pod Save America guys, who were junior fucking speechwriters in, you know, on Barack Obama's Senate staff, who have been dining out on the relationship with him for years making millions of dollars the Anita Dunns of the world who's made 40 50 million dollars off the Democratic Party they're all going to insert their judgment over a man who has figured out unlike anybody else how to get elected to the United States Senate over seven times and how to garner more votes than any president that has ever won what influence does Jake Tapper have over anything he has the smallest audience on cable news and beyond that I think that the book is right now on Amazon that he put out I mean mean, his ratings just went to shit after he put the book out.

Speaker 18 You know, they did a two-week infomercial for it. I mean, it was such a money grab.

Speaker 11 You know, you feel like you might like him if you had dinner with him. You know, I'd like maybe just a drink, like a short.

Speaker 11 Well, maybe he can't, maybe if he had, he did his crack and you had your non-tequila drink, you know, you could have an interesting conversation for 10 minutes.

Speaker 11 He's not wrong about what anything he said there.

Speaker 10 No, and this is the thing. Like, there's something very serious in what Smug said.

Speaker 10 Because right now, Jamie Harrison, former head of the DNC, his first guest on his new podcast was Hunter Biden, but it was it was a much different conversation than Hunter had with Callahan.

Speaker 10 And in this conversation, what you see is a man who he's completely wrong to frame himself as a victim of the political establishment. Like that is absolutely laughable.

Speaker 10 It is true that Jake Tapper and others in the political establishment decided to aim their fire at Hunter Biden as soon as it was clear the Biden family was no longer going to be in a position of power.

Speaker 10 So yes, it's true that that there was this big book by a major CNN anchor that was going after the family. Of course, it only happened after they were out of power.

Speaker 10 But what Hunter Biden is doing there is attacking the Democratic establishment.

Speaker 10 He is actually believably, even though he's wrong about like 90% of the stuff that just came out of his mouth, he's believable in his sentiments. And he comes across as like authentically angry.

Speaker 10 And by the way, he was spitting some facts about the Pod Save bros. Like he was, he was cooking.

Speaker 10 Those guys do live in their Hollywood mansions and then tell the Democratic Party what it needs to do to regain the trust of voters based on their experience in Washington 10 plus years ago at this point.

Speaker 10 So he's not entirely wrong about that. But I think what the truth.

Speaker 10 the kernel of truth, I should say, in Smugg's point, is that what Jamie Harrison is never, ever, ever going to do is sincerely attack the political establishment.

Speaker 10 And that's why people like Joe Rogan, period.

Speaker 11 God, that's so right. That's so right.
So by the way, this other guy, Jamie, needs to understand that the first rule of news is when you make news, put out the news. Don't sit on the news.

Speaker 11 Don't wait months to release the news. You will get scooped on the news.
So there is your news lesson of the day from a news person, Jamie.

Speaker 11 He had Hunter Biden long before this YouTuber, Callahan, had him. And he didn't put out the news.
And the news was very interesting.

Speaker 11 It was Hunter Biden trying to tell us what actually happened between George Clooney and Joe Biden at that LA fundraiser.

Speaker 11 And it's a very different story than the one George Clooney and Jake Tapper have been telling us. Here it is.

Speaker 18 George Clooney, before that event,

Speaker 18 and it literally threatened to pull out of the event.

Speaker 20 How many times?

Speaker 18 Five, six times, over and over again, saying that he was so upset because my dad refused to recognize the arrest warrant for Netanyahu and would not commit to not allowing Netanyahu to enter the country after the ICC

Speaker 18 warrant went out for his arrest. And the reason is, is that George Clooney, as if we were supposed to know this, is because his wife was one of the principal architects of

Speaker 18 that warrant. Anytime they're doing these pictures, as you know, there's somebody standing next to the president.
Mr. President.
Says, Mr. President.
Jamie Harrison, chair of the George Clooney.

Speaker 18 right not because my dad didn't know who george clooney because i was literally whispering literally i was whispering in his ear saying dad

Speaker 18 him and he claims in his arrogance that my dad the president of the united states didn't know who the actor was and to say something that is so patently untrue in order to justify what you did afterwards

Speaker 18 is cowardly yep is weak

Speaker 11 very interesting he's saying that his dad, and if you hear the longer clip, he's saying, of course, Joe Biden knew who George Clooney was: A, because he's George Clooney, but B, because there had been this ongoing threat by Clooney not to attend the fundraiser, including four or five emails and exchanges just in the days leading up to the fundraiser, because he was so angry that Joe Biden wasn't going to enforce the arrest warrant from the ICC that Amal Clooney orchestrated working for the UN.

Speaker 11 You know, she's supposed to be this human rights lawyer. So she wanted to see Netanyahu arrested.
She wanted Joe Biden to do what she said he had to do. And Biden wasn't doing it.

Speaker 11 And Hunter says George Clooney made this a big thing.

Speaker 11 He actually tried to use it as leverage, like his appearance at the fundraiser, tried to use that as leverage to make him do the arrest of Netanyahu.

Speaker 11 So Hunter's overall point is, of course, he knew who George Clooney was. This is bullshit.
And George Clooney just had his stupid star nose out of joint because his sweet maul didn't get her way.

Speaker 11 Very interesting

Speaker 10 It is really interesting.

Speaker 10 I mean, it's a completely different story, and it's one that's super newsy because it also, as you just outlined, involves the president of the United States being threatened by a donor and Hollywood celebrity over this arrest warrant for

Speaker 10 ostensibly an ally of the United States of America, somebody who Biden was aligning himself with. So it's a much more interesting story, a much more newsy story this way.

Speaker 10 And it makes you wonder who the source is in the Tapper book

Speaker 10 because it now sounds like it probably came from Clooney's camp, given that Clooney.

Speaker 11 It's clearly George Clooney.

Speaker 10 And Clooney, if he's being honest, has been around these lines, these

Speaker 10 meet and greet lines. It should have been more than a meet and greet because it was probably a smaller group if he was the big headliner in this fundraiser.

Speaker 10 But he knows that you have Gary from Veep whispering in the president's ear, George Clooney. So if he said if he leaked that, it's pretty interesting because he knows that if they're saying, Mr.

Speaker 10 President George Clooney, they're not saying, Mr. President, don't you know this is George Clooney? They're just, they're just kind of at the same time, should you really have to say Mr.

Speaker 10 President George Clooney? Probably not. Maybe Biden had that very familiar, vacant look in his eyes.

Speaker 11 But I get that. But what Hunter seems to be saying here is that Clooney had a motive to lie.
He was pissed at Joe Biden. And he had a motive.

Speaker 11 on top of, you know, just his eyes and ears and what he saw with Joe Biden to bring him down. He was pissed off about the Amal thing.

Speaker 11 And not only did he lie in his op-ed, but he lied when he obviously talked to Jake Tapper and maybe Alex Thompson in the working of that book.

Speaker 11 And honestly, it would have been valuable for Hunter to come out before now. I don't think he could have saved his father, but it's very interesting to hear him.
He's obviously a smart man.

Speaker 11 He's articulate and he's smart. And you can hear him putting his thoughts together in a persuasive way.

Speaker 11 It's probably less compelling when he uses it here in SOT 16, but I'll let you be the judge.

Speaker 18 The only difference between crack cocaine and cocaine is sodium biopicarbonate and water and heat, literally. That's it.
That's it.

Speaker 13 And those things are pretty much free if you go to like a science store.

Speaker 18 This is free.

Speaker 18 You can go to

Speaker 18 your neighborhood convenience store and just get, anyway, I don't want to tell people

Speaker 18 how to make crack cocaine, but it literally is a managed jar of cocaine and baking soda.

Speaker 9 How different is the experience?

Speaker 18 Oh, it's vastly, vastly different. And like for real, real,

Speaker 18 I feel really reluctant to kind of have some euphoric discussion. I know you're not asking me to do that, but have some euphoric discussion about crack cocaine.

Speaker 13 I think this might be kind of the opposite here.

Speaker 18 Okay, no, it's the exact opposite. I'm saying I don't want to have the experience of some euphoric recall.
That's how powerful. crack cocaine is.
Does crack cocaine make you act any differently? No.

Speaker 18 Is it safer than alcohol? Probably. People think of crack as being dirty.
It's the exact opposite.

Speaker 18 When you make crack, what you're doing is you're burning off all the impurities so that it combines with the sodium bicarbonate, which makes it smokable. That's all.

Speaker 11 I'm now sending you crack at tomorrow's after party. I think we've settled.

Speaker 11 We're done with the tequila. We're moving on to crack cocaine.

Speaker 10 It's got to be clean, Megan. So that's, I actually think it sounds like a good plan.
Crack is the new maha.

Speaker 10 That's where the public health conversation needs to go. Someone, I'm cribbing from Twitter again.

Speaker 10 This was so funny, and I wish I could give credit to whoever said this, but they were like, that was like watching LeBron James talk about basketball, listening to Hunter Biden talking about crack.

Speaker 10 And I will say, some of their conversation about addiction, I found to be genuinely compelling and moving. And Hunter Biden is clearly very smart.

Speaker 10 And he has had a hell of a life starting with that crazy car accident and all of the things that his family has been through. Awful, crazy stuff, wild stuff.

Speaker 10 But it is sort of, this is a really hot take, what the Democratic Party needs in a way that reminds me of what, I know it's apples and oranges, but there is something here with Donald Trump coming down the golden escalator in 2015 and calling bullshit on everything that Jeb Bush and these establishment Republicans were saying in front of the public and kind of hashing out, forcing them to confront

Speaker 10 the problems that had been brewing and had gone unaddressed. I mean, the 2012 Republican autopsy after Mitt Romney lost was basically a prescription of what not to do, but everyone here in D.C.

Speaker 10 thought it was exactly what you should do. And so Hunter Biden coming in and kind of, you know,

Speaker 10 spearing some of the sacred cows in the Democratic Party,

Speaker 10 it actually might help jostle something better loose, as crazy as that sounds.

Speaker 10 It might be kind of, it's like crack. It's what the doctor ordered, Megan.

Speaker 11 Yeah. It's the problem is when you really delve into it, you know, what he's criticizing is like people like Anita Dunn, who made $40 million off the Democrat Party.

Speaker 11 Hello, hello, McFly.

Speaker 11 What have you been doing for your entire adult life? Do we have to talk about what was on that laptop and how he was just a grifter off of his dad's name and the Biden corruption?

Speaker 11 All right, last but not least, I've got to get this in before we go. The other EJ, Eliana Johnson, has been off because she had a baby.
She's had a new baby boy. His name is Louis.

Speaker 11 He's six weeks old and here she is with little Louis and older sister Arielle. God bless them.
Good luck to them. Beautiful and growing family.
So happy for her.

Speaker 10 He's so cute.

Speaker 11 I know. So hopefully she'll be, I didn't even know she was pregnant.
I never get to see her, you know, because I only get to see the top half of you gals.

Speaker 11 And it's very rare to see her, but she was pregnant and she had a baby. And I'm so excited for her.

Speaker 10 Yeah, she's a hard worker. You never know.

Speaker 11 I know. She's nose to the grindstone.
All right, Emily's going to stick around. We're going to continue this discussion because obviously we're not done with Hunter.

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Speaker 11 I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.

Speaker 11 It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today.

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Speaker 18 And I'll tell you what, I know exactly what happened in that debate. He flew around the world basically in the mileage that he could have flown around the world three times.
He's 81 years old.

Speaker 22 He's tired as shit.

Speaker 18 Give him ambient to be able to sleep. He gets up on the stage and he looks like he's a deer in the headlights.
And it feeds into every fucking story that anybody wants to tell.

Speaker 18 And Jake Tapper, with literally how many anonymous sources, if this was a conspiracy, Andrew, you know this. Somehow,

Speaker 18 the entirety of a White House in which you literally living on top of each other has kept their mouths shut about, you know, like what? And what's conspiracy?

Speaker 11 Yeah. Did Joe Biden got old? Yeah, he got old.

Speaker 18 He got old before our eyes.

Speaker 11 Okay, so the news that Biden was on Ambien heading into that debate is new.

Speaker 11 No one knew that. And many people are asking how much Ambien he was on because the debate took place two weeks after he had returned stateside from that international trip.

Speaker 11 He'd been hauled up at Camp David. So, you know, the internet asking how much Ambien had he possibly taken.
My God, this sort of hangover effect.

Speaker 11 I will give you one. He rips on Pods Save America and I'll get to them in a second, but there was a funny response to the whole thing from Tommy Veter, who's on that podcast, as follows.

Speaker 11 It's good to see that Hunter has taken some time to process the election, look inward, and hold himself accountable for how his family's insular, dare I say, arrogant at times approach to politics led to this catastrophic outcome we're all now living with.

Speaker 11 It's good. It was good.
Your thoughts on the news that it was the ambient, Emily. It was the ambient.

Speaker 10 You know, Sam Stein,

Speaker 10 he actually is at the bulwark now, pointed out the timeline here is crazy because the Europe trip, I think, was over by a week plus before

Speaker 10 the actual debate itself.

Speaker 10 Biden had, everyone remembers this because it was so bizarre at the time, which was bizarrely only a year ago, but he had been holed up at Camp David for the week before the debate.

Speaker 10 And everyone was thinking, what is going on? He needs a week to do debate prep at Camp David. Like he's not even at the White House.
This is very strange.

Speaker 10 He's clearly taking this seriously, but he needs a full week. And the idea that that had been...

Speaker 11 He had been back for 13 days. He had been back from Europe for 13 days.
He'd been at Camp David for seven days.

Speaker 10 I mean, so again, this is just an argument against him being the president of the United States.

Speaker 10 If he needs that level of a drug cocktail to recover for two weeks after a trip to Europe, where you're representing, you are not just representing, you are governing on behalf of the American people.

Speaker 10 Like, that's not just an argument for poor debate performance.

Speaker 10 Although, I think politically, just to go back to this comparison we're drawing between Hunter and Donald Trump, if Hunter at the time had come out and been like, hey, my dad was on ambient, everyone would have been like, oh yeah, that makes way more sense.

Speaker 10 Please stop trying to tell us he had a cold. Like there's something to just like getting rid of this faux,

Speaker 10 like

Speaker 10 it's just a scripted Democratic Party talking point bullshit that Trump kind of got rid of in the Republican Party.

Speaker 10 And now Dems have this handicap because they still, nobody has forced them to get rid of it yet. And it's why they're so bad on shows like Rogan.

Speaker 11 You're so right. It's so interesting to hear a Democrat saying what he thinks is the truth.
And I believe him that Biden was on Ambien. And I realize he's using it as an excuse and a crutch.

Speaker 11 But still, it is interesting to hear a Democrat just completely saying, like, all that stuff he said about Anita Dunn and the Pod Save guys. and George Clooney.
You know, it's true.

Speaker 11 I mean, he had a good point. Like, who is this asshole to tell Joe Biden, who'd been in service for 52 years in the public eye, when it's time to step down?

Speaker 11 Like, that would have been a great response at the time. He should have brought that howitzer out this time last year.
It was literally a year ago yesterday that Biden stepped down.

Speaker 10 And can I say that's actually also interesting because it reminds me a little bit of how Republican candidates were with Fox News back in 2015.

Speaker 10 And Trump, like, why would nobody else say what Hunter Biden just said about the PodSave guys?

Speaker 10 It's because they want to, at least in the sort of uh democratic party establishment it's because they don't want the pod save guys with a very popular podcast to go after them they want to be able to go on the show they want to not get criticized by these guys and it does remind me again a little bit of what trump just blew up on the right back in 2015 he went after fox music right away um he had his own motivations for doing yeah i'm sure you do he had his own motivations for doing it but that sort of created a permission structure where everyone just got freer and looser and it ended up being better for the republican party in terms of like sharpening its policy positions and and leveling with voters at least more than it had been before and that's an interesting observation

Speaker 11 yeah you're so spot on here we've been teasing it here's him slamming the pod save guys um

Speaker 11 he went on but here's part of it sat 14.

Speaker 18 for some reason

Speaker 18 The intelligentsia of the Democratic Party with 2020 hindsight believes that Joe Biden should have considered not running again because of their perception that he was too old.

Speaker 18 And so then the drumbeat began. And the New York Post wrote, I mean, the New York Times, on a near daily basis,

Speaker 18 egged on by the

Speaker 18 Pod Save America

Speaker 18 saviors of the Democratic Party, with what, four

Speaker 18 white millionaires that are dining out

Speaker 18 on their association

Speaker 18 with Barack Obama from 16 years ago, living in Beverly fucking hills, telling the rest of the world what black voters in South Carolina really want.

Speaker 18 They're trying to take South Carolina away as the first primary state. The first time

Speaker 18 in history that the heart and soul of the Democratic Party gets to have its voice heard first after

Speaker 18 50 years of

Speaker 18 Iowa and New Hampshire with 3% black population states.

Speaker 9 I thought it was less.

Speaker 18 Less than that.

Speaker 13 New Hampshire has got to be closer to one.

Speaker 18 Closer to one. I saw a few blacks in the forest.
Finally, and you know what?

Speaker 22 You know what you have?

Speaker 18 You have the Pod Save America, motherfuckers, saying, you know, I don't think South Carolina, that's only, was only there because of Joe Biden.

Speaker 18 Joe Biden, and that's what he did to save his own self, his soul. Why should South Carolina have the vote?

Speaker 11 What the fuck?

Speaker 18 I mean, aren't they out of their fucking minds?

Speaker 11 He's a lawyer. I hope he wasn't like this in court.
That doesn't work as well with the judge. What the fuck, Your Honor?

Speaker 10 I mean, he's like, this is Hunter's moment, and he knows it.

Speaker 10 It's like, America is ready for Hunter Biden. I genuinely think that that's true.

Speaker 10 Because Democrats are right now, like in political playbook this morning, Democrats were talking about what a disaster Hunter Biden was because they felt like they had energy talking about Trump and the Epstein story.

Speaker 10 That there was all of this momentum. Ball was in the Democrats' court going after hammering Trump on the Epstein stuff.

Speaker 10 And then Hunter Hunter comes in and starts sucking up a bunch of oxygen with this unnecessary three-hour interview with Andrew Callahan.

Speaker 10 But actually, there's something interesting about that, which is they don't, I mean, of course it's bad for the Democrats, the centrist Democrats who are leaking to playbook because their power is threatened by Hunter Biden.

Speaker 10 As silly as that sounds, Hunter Biden now has nothing to lose because he knows that his family is not, like completely is out of power.

Speaker 10 There is no more Biden dynasty or aspirations for a Biden dynasty.

Speaker 10 James Biden, Frank Biden, Valerie Biden, they don't have power in the lobbying world anymore because they can't trade on their name in the same way they used to be able to.

Speaker 10 So he's now sort of unfettered and free to go out there and say whatever he wants. That is a threat to the dumbest.

Speaker 11 Free things that pardon.

Speaker 11 Frank thanks that pardon his dad gave him before he left office, the blanket pardon. So Emily, what you're saying is that I should reach out to him about joining the MK Media Podcast Network.

Speaker 11 Is that what you're doing? That's what I hear.

Speaker 11 I mean, that's my advice, but i i have to imagine megan you think that's a good idea too yeah i i'm sure people would watch it i i'm gonna i feel like it's not on brand uh but i bet he would do well if he came over

Speaker 10 hunter biden

Speaker 11 not gonna lie i'd probably listen i'd probably download it at least for a time emily thank you a pleasure see you soon thanks megan

Speaker 11 Okay, so she had a run because she's got a lot of work to do. She's got another show.
She's got a couple of other shows.

Speaker 11 But we're going to keep going here because we do have, for example, a response from the Pod Save America guys to the attack that the foul-mouthed Hunter Biden launched on them.

Speaker 11 And here's that in SOT 14B.

Speaker 23 It must be just so hard for Hunter Biden to watch all these people dining out on somebody's name.

Speaker 25 You were on the board of burisma because of who your dad is.

Speaker 9 And that is what people hate about Washington.

Speaker 1 And it was part of the problem.

Speaker 26 One thing we know is that Hunter Biden,

Speaker 11 throughout Joe Biden's presidency, was a terrible liability for him.

Speaker 23 You should be ashamed of the ways in which you made your father's political life worse. And like the idea that we're going to listen to you now, like, give me a fucking break.
It's ridiculous.

Speaker 25 I know you're angry personally, but you're not the fucking victim here.

Speaker 20 We're all living with what happened in this election.

Speaker 11 You've got a pardon.

Speaker 24 You're fine. It's just

Speaker 20 utter lack of self-awareness.

Speaker 23 It's the shamelessness that really, that really gets you in the end.

Speaker 11 So

Speaker 11 he won't be welcomed with open arms by the more establishment-type Dems. You can see the war unfolding over there on the left, and it's interesting.
I mean, it's very interesting.

Speaker 11 I don't, it doesn't seem to me like Hunter Biden's done talking. He's welcome to do some of that talking right here.

Speaker 11 I think we'd have a very interesting conversation anytime. Come on, we'll give you a fair shot.
Okay, moving on, not from Hunter. I want to play a couple more.

Speaker 11 Here he is with thoughts on why we should keep illegals in the country. SOT 15.

Speaker 18 All these Democrats say, you have to talk about and realize that people are really upset about illegal immigration. Fuck you.
How do you think your hotel room gets cleaned?

Speaker 18 How do you think you got food on your fucking table? Who do you think washes your dishes? Who do you think does your fucking garden?

Speaker 18 Who do you think is here by the fucking sheer fucking just grit and will that they figured out a way to get here because they thought that they could give themselves and their family a better chance?

Speaker 18 And he's somehow convinced all of us that these people are the fucking criminals.

Speaker 11 Okay. So once again, it's a leftist.
How many of them have we seen exposing his racism on camera in defending illegals? That every single time.

Speaker 11 Remember we saw the one Dem saying, who's going to wipe your ass? Actually on camera, who's going to wipe your ass? Like when you're older and you need help, this guy,

Speaker 11 who's going to clean your hotel room? They're all illegals. I'm like, who's going to tend to your garden? I mean, I've got gardeners.
They're legal.

Speaker 11 We make sure that the people who come on our property are legal, are here legally for many reasons. Morally, it's right.
Legally, it's right.

Speaker 11 And I'm a public figure and I don't need that bullshit coming into my life.

Speaker 11 Honestly, like Abby will tell you, she's our first screener for anybody who wants to work for me and, you know, in the home context. And we make sure that everybody who comes here is legal.
What?

Speaker 11 How about you, Hunter? Who have you been having working on the Biden family estate? A bunch of illegals? Because I'm going to send Tom Holman to come visit you.

Speaker 11 This isn't going to help me, my quest to get an interview with him. But in any event, it's amazing.

Speaker 11 This is where the Democrats always go, that every Hispanic who's here is like some absolute low life who's wiping ass and working in like the hotel janitorial.

Speaker 11 Not that there's anything wrong with that, but they can't envision a Hispanic person who came to the United States legally or otherwise ascending to anything higher than menial labor.

Speaker 11 That's how they view them. That's how they talk about them.

Speaker 11 And I think it's really truly their own racism because just because you're here illegally doesn't mean you're not capable of more than that.

Speaker 11 It's tough, but there are plenty of left-wing employers who will employ you and give you a shot. But in the minds of these Dems, they never ascend above the bottom rung of American labor.

Speaker 11 And they use this as a tool to try to stop the deportations. I'm sorry, some of these folks actually come here as doctors from their home countries.

Speaker 11 And then, yes, rightfully, we make it a little difficult for them to get jobs and ascend to that same post here, but go back home.

Speaker 11 The answer is to go back home where your medical degree counts, not to stay here.

Speaker 11 Okay, last but not least, he's got thoughts on why the Democrats lost the election. And I'll play that.
This is from a different interview.

Speaker 11 The one we were watching was from Andrew Callahan, who's got a YouTube channel called Channel 5. And I played you one from the podcast with the former head of the DNC, Jamie Harrison,

Speaker 11 who just launched his podcast. The Democrats have decided that this guy Harrison is their new Joe Rogan.
He literally has 400 followers, 400 at his YouTube channel.

Speaker 11 So it's not going that well because he's interviewed Hunter. And who else did he have? Somebody else.

Speaker 11 Tim Walz. Okay.
And with all that, he's gotten 400 followers. In any event, here is Hunter telling Jamie Harrison why he thinks the Dems lost the presidential election in Sod 18.

Speaker 17 And I will tell you why we lost the last election.

Speaker 18 We lost the last election because we did not remain loyal to the leader of the party. That's my position.
We had the advantage of incumbency.

Speaker 18 We had the advantage of an incredibly successful administration. And the Democratic Party literally melted down

Speaker 18 and or portions of it, portions of it.

Speaker 18 Okay.

Speaker 11 This is just revisionist history. Joe Biden, no matter what he says, ambient or not, lost his ability to run for reelection the night of that debate.

Speaker 11 It had been building in the news for quite some time. The entire news media and Democratic

Speaker 11 establishment was running cover for Joe Biden to try to tell us not to believe our lying eyes.

Speaker 11 We had seen the whole public, nearly 80%, had been polled and they saw that he was too old, that was the nice way of putting it, to run for reelection.

Speaker 11 It is a joke to suggest that that man had another four years in him as the president of the United States.

Speaker 11 So while Hunter Biden may be speaking some truths to Democratic power, he is not speaking the truth there. They did not lose the election because they abandoned Joe Biden.

Speaker 11 They lost it because they didn't have a primary and find some actual vibrant candidate to run. anyone with a pulse for that matter.

Speaker 11 They kept him in too long and then they replaced him with a completely banal, uninteresting, rather stupid, empty candidate who had had absolutely no authenticity. That's why they lost.
Simple.

Speaker 11 That's the truth, not what he just said. All right, last but not least,

Speaker 11 Epstein. Emily mentioned Epstein at the tail end of our conversation.
There's news on that today, and this is real news.

Speaker 11 We've been talking about how the DOJ says it's going to move and has moved now to unseal the grand jury transcripts from the Epstein indictment.

Speaker 11 in 2019 and the Ghillain-Maxwell indictment that happened a couple years thereafter. And no one's expecting any real bombshells to come out of that, but you know, okay, it's something.

Speaker 11 It's more feels more like a fig leaf, frankly. But now,

Speaker 11 the number two guy, Todd Blanche at DOJ, has announced that Pam Bondi and he, I believe, have are going to meet with Ghelane Maxwell. They're meeting with her and they are giving her the chance.

Speaker 11 They're using the word testify, so I'm not sure what that means. There's no active proceeding that's open.
She's got an appeal present, but one would not testify in the context of an appeal.

Speaker 11 So perhaps simply as a deposition or while under oath

Speaker 11 about Epstein to tell, you know, the full story. Now we're talking.
That could get interesting.

Speaker 11 And of course, you could put it on pay-per-view and fund Trump's presidential library with the proceeds. You could fund pretty much anything.

Speaker 11 We could pay probably the national debt with what people would pay to

Speaker 11 hear that.

Speaker 11 So that's something that's real, that really could pay dividends.

Speaker 11 I don't know whether it will, but the administration is doing a much better job of doing the kinds of things that should, I don't know if they will, but that should satisfy the Epstein skeptics. And

Speaker 11 they're not conspiracy theorists, the ones who genuinely have questions about what went on there. So anyway, thumbs up for that development, and we'll continue to

Speaker 11 monitor how and when and if that actually happens.

Speaker 11 She also sent out a tweet, her lawyer did, saying something to the effect of, she looks forward to working with the administration like to make sure justice is done, something like that.

Speaker 11 It definitely sounded like she's fishing for a pardon. I don't really care what her motivation is.
Like,

Speaker 11 I don't know. I guess we do care about her punishment, but like, is it more important to you that she sits in jail for the next 20 years or that she tell the full scoop on Epstein?

Speaker 11 There'd have to be a proffer if she was going to get any sort of a pardon based on telling the full truth.

Speaker 11 Like we'd have to see what she's going to say, because you can't give her immunity and then have her give up nothing.

Speaker 11 But things are getting more interesting on the Jeffrey Epstein front, and I'll leave it at that. We'll see you tomorrow for Kelly's Court.
Ryan Kohlberger gets sentenced.

Speaker 11 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show: No BS, No Agenda, and No Fear.

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