We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jashnski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at FDRLST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts into the premium version of our
website, The Federalist dot Com as well. Today we're joined for an emergency
pot of sorts by the one and only Sean Davis, CEO of The Federalist.
Sean, thanks for coming on, Thanks for having me on, Emily.
Of course, this is, like I said, an emergency pot of
sorts, because we got the Durham Report yesterday Monday afternoon. It dropped with
all kinds of juicy details from the investigation. Sean, if we could just
start from square one, if you're talking to somebody, obviously you followed the
story and you've broken news on the story for years. But if you were
explaining to somebody who had not followed the story, what the Durham Report is,
what the Durham investigation, the Special Console investigation is, how would you
explain it? That's a great question. I would describe it as an FBI
led coup against an entire political party and against the American people. So what
happened in twenty sixteen is, at the urging of the Hillary Clinton campaign,
the FBI decided to assert itself into the presidential election by opening an investigation under
false pretenses against Donald Trump. Is in his campaign, using lies that were
given to it directly by the Clinton campaign and its contractors, to get warrants
to spy on Trump's campaign, to spy on his campaign affiliates. And they
did this all in the hopes first of swinging the presidential election in twenty sixteen,
and when that failed, they transitioned to using the opt that they had
spun up to potentially end and at least cripple the entire Trump presidential administration.
And it involved honey traps, it involved human sources, involved illegal spying.
And if you're familiar with Watergate, which was kind of a two bit break
in by some random people affiliated with the CIA at the time, they were
allegedly looking for dirt on Nixon's opponents. Take that. Just pump it full
of steroids, let it metastasize for years on end. That's what you had
with this Russia Gate collusion effort. It made Watergate look like absolute child's play.
You had the CIA director, the FBI director, the president himself,
the vice president are now president, all being briefed at the time on Hillary
Clinton's plan to just spin up wise about Trump, and they were all in
on it. To me, even talking about it, it's shocking how corrupt
and brazen the whole thing was. And while I know a lot of people
are upset that Durham didn't go after more people, didn't put more people in
prison, what he lays out in his report is just an utter indictment of
the entire culture at the FBI, at the CIA, given that they they
were deliberately openly trying to subvert an entire presidential election and they nearly got away
with it. I think that's a really great place. It's a great launch
point into this next part of the conversation, which is usefully debunking the media,
the corporate media narrative over the last twenty four hours or so about how
the Durham probe. Because it did not result in any major criminal findings,
this is the line that the media has taken. It sort of went out
with a whimper, what's your response to the media coverage of the some of
which I've seen on MSNBC is just outright dismissive of Durham. Some of it
is completely just downplaying it. Like the Wall Street Journal. You have to
kind of look to find their reporting on the Durham report coming out just yesterday.
So what do you what would you say if the media is like basically
Durham didn't find much. Well, first off, remember that the corporate corrupt
media just lies. They lie about everything. They lie instinctively, It's what
they do. So how dare you? Oh, I have far more offensive
things to say about them, if we've got time, please, But they
lie about they lie about everything, and the stuff they don't lie about,
they just pretend never happened and they don't cover it at all, much like
the Wall Street Journal news pages did. But yeah, they came out and
said, well, nobody went to prison for it, which is true,
which means some of the things were bad. Durham actually addresses this in his
report, and the big problem he had was that all of his charges,
because all of these crimes were perpetrated in DC, had to be brought into
the DC trial court and they had to face a DC jury. Now,
DC, as many people know, is about as left winge as you can
get in a city, you know, maybe San Francisco, maybe Philly,
maybe they're a little more democratic. But DC went something like ninety five percent
for Hillary, ninety five percent for Joe Biden. And I know everyone likes
to say, well, the Constitution, you get a jury of your peers
and a fair jury representative. They looked at that and they'll be impartial.
That's a total lie. We all know what these juries do, especially in
cases that are political. And while there were obviously crimes committed here, this
was an inherently political case because it had everything to do with how we run
our elections and who you happen to be supporting in twenty sixteen or twenty twenty.
So what happened was Durham, I believe, brought three cases in DC.
Kevin Clin Smith was an FBI ernie who fabricated information in spy warrants against
carter Page. He put in lies about carter Page. The CIA told Kevin
Cline Smith, a top FBI attorney, that carter Page had actually assisted the
US government in tracking down a whole bunch of Russian spies. What clin Smith
did is he changed this email from the CIA to say the opposite of what
it actually said to make carter Page look like a liar when he had claimed
that he had worked with the CIA and the government to root out Russia spying
in the US. So he changed that to give it the opposite of what
reality was in this warrant to spying carter Page. Then you had Michael Sessman,
a DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer who was doing all kinds of shenanigans
with the FBI, peddling lines to them, peddling information that he either knew
was false or should have known to be false. He was indicted, that
went to a jury. Clin Smith pleaded. He's probably kicking himself for having
pleaded, now knowing how politicized DC juries are. Susman went and he was
acquitted. And you even had people in this trial saying, well, we
don't even think they should have brought this case. This is a waste of
time. This is the same jury pool. Mind you throwing grannies in prison
because they glanced at the Capitol for five seconds on January six, twenty twenty
one. And then you had the same thing with Ivor Danshenko, a major
source for the so called Steele dossier, who made up all kinds of crap.
Same thing happened there. So Durham addressed it in his report. He
didn't say this, he all but said it, which is that it's a
political case. There was no chance of getting a fair trial or a fair
jury who was willing to look at the facts of the law, and so
it would have been utterly pointless. He could have brought all the indictments in
the world he wanted, and those juries in DC, because they are so
left wing and so partisan, would have dismissed all of them out of hand.
So, just given how our system is now, Durham was kind of
was kind of stuck. If it were up to eat, I would completely
abolish the DC trial system and these political cases that arise out of political stuff
in DC, I would farm them out randomly to districts around the country to
get rid of this this one district with ninety five percent Dems basically holding the
country hostage with their partisan hackery. M Yeah, it's amazing. Now there
was some it seems like there's some new information about Egor Denchenko the primary subsource
of the Steel dossier in the Durham report yesterday, Did we learn anything new
about Dencenko? I believe he was actually making money for his lies. Well,
yeah, so the FBI initially paid him as a confidential human source that
they knew he was the subsource, and so they brought him in. They
paid him I think two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. That's a lot of
First off, that's a lot of money to do anything. That's a crap
ton of money to just feed him lie which they knew were lies, which
ought to tell you something about the credibility of this investigation from the beginning.
But even after they determined that he was the primary subsource, that everything he
had fed them was nonsense that they couldn't corroborate in any way, shape or
form, they proposed to give him I think another three hundred grand. And
it wasn't because he was such a good, reliable source of intel. The
real reason they did it was that if they could keep him tied up as
a confidential human source, they could shield him from congressional oversight, congressional questioning,
in congressional scrutiny. And that's what actually happens in this little example here
is a microcosm of how corrupt, how irreparably broken the FBI is. That
they could get away with something like this. They knew what was happening,
they knew they were going to get caught, and their way to address it
wasn't to just come clean and say, hey, we screwed up, you
got us. It was to pay off people who they knew had been lying
on their behalf so congressional investigators couldn't get to them. It seems completely unbelievable.
I mean, it's like it's just hard to even wrap your head around
the fact that the media has had zero interest first of all that had happened,
and secondly that the media has had absolutely zero interest in this except for
buying the line that was fed to the FBI from Denchenko to Steel and all
this under the Clinton campaign goes straight into the media with like no questioning.
Here we are years later and they don't want to reckon at all with something
they got completely wrong in the service of the government. Yeah, it's the
media's role in this is even crazier. And basically what happened is somebody in
the FBI or DJ one of these people running these cups against the American people
would call a reporter and was just pedal absolute nonsense to them. Hey,
I heard Trump paid a whole bunch of prostitutes to pee on a bed at
the Moscow rits that Obama once slept it. Now I'm not making that up.
This rule or this lie actually happened, and people who pretend to be
very smart and thoughtful and intellectual actually bought it. So there's this rumor out
there, and then you have the FBI call for report and say, hey,
have you heard this. We're looking into this week, and then the
media will go and will report it breathlessly. Investigators are digging into allegations that
Trump may have been compromised by Vladimir Putin with information about his sexcapades. And
then what the FBI will turn around and do is they'll take that media report,
which they themselves sourced, and they'll use that as evidence and the spy
warrant, which this is something they actually did with Yahoo News. It wasn't
this particular example in the Steel dossier, but they took a bunch of nonsense
from the dossier they fed it to reporters. Reporters dutifully reported, oh,
the FBI is looking into these various serious allegations. And then the FBI took
those news reports and put them in FISS spy warrant applications. Is proof that
the allegations were correct, because obviously the media wouldn't report on something if it
weren't true. And they called this stovepiping in the intel industry. I call
it the media and the FBI getting high on their own parts. But it's
what they did constantly. They would pedal lies to their friends in the media,
the media would dutifully rebroadcast and republish them, and then the FBI would
use those articles as proof in official government documents seeking to spy on people.
And it all worked. It worked flawlessly at the time until Devin nun has
showed up as the skunk in their little picnic and blew the whole thing up
again. It just it's insane to think how all of this happened basically in
full public view. People like Devon Nuna's outlets, like the Federalists are calling
attention to it, and the media just is if anything turning turning, it's
it's gun aiming, it's fire at the people who are trying to do basically
it's job for it. It's unreal the Clinton There is some Clinton stuff in
the Durham Report. Do we learn anything new about the Clinton plan intelligence this
is how Durham describes it in the report. Or is it more just confirmation
of what we already knew the Clinton campaign was doing and feeding all of this
information to the FBI. I think it's a little both. There's a lot
that I think those of us who have followed the story new, but is
probably is probably new news to those who haven't followed it obsessively like we have.
For example, the CIA was told, I believe, in mid twenty
sixteen that the Russians were themselves aware of a plan by Hillary to pedal nonsense
about collusion with Trump and then to use that to bilify him and win the
presidential election. The Russians were aware of it. Now, what do you
think would happen? If you're the Russians? You know this and kind of
your whole goal is just to destabilize countries and people that are getting in your
way. You'd assume that they would jump right on it, And wouldn't you
know it? I Gordan Chinko, the primary subsource, the guy who was
feeding lies to the Clinton campaign and the FBI was himself previously a Russian intelligence
source. And this happened over and over again, and so you end up
with the Hillary Clinton campaign saying Trump colluded with the Russians, when there we
know for a fact there was one campaign that was continuously colluding with Russian intel
sources, Russian oligarchs, and Russian sources to tilt a presidential election. And
it wasn't Donald Trump's, it was Hillary Clinton's. The Russians knew it,
our own CIA knew it, and they never said a word any of us
about it. The washed Alto on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every
day, Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and the economy and how it
affects your wallet. Are you at risk of losing your job to AI?
Although some jobs will be a eliminated, more jobs could be created as the
fears of artificial intelligence grow. Will creative destruction work in this decade? What
should you do to prepare? Whether it's happening in DC or down on Wall
Street, it's affecting you financially? Be informed? Check out the Watchdought on
Wall Street Podcast with Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your
podcasts. Well, and that's particularly interesting because one of the big takeaways from
the durm Report he lays out right away basically how the FBI had no substantiating
information, no intelligence apparatus, the United States government had any substantiating information that
the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia or was in contact with Russia at all
when Crossfire Hurricane gets opened. And yet what the CIA has here is that
the Clinton campaign is in contact with the Russians. Right. It's fascinating.
You know, we know from the Muller Report in poor Muller that poured daughter
or in old Pool and his little band of Keystone cops tried so hard they
spent years, in tens of millions of dollars trying to get rid of Trump
with this rush inclusion nonsense. They couldn't find anything. That was after several
years. But now we find out from this Durham report that when they opened
the investigation against Trump in July twenty sixteen, they called it Crossfire Hurricane,
they had no evidence, they had no information, they had no proof of
anything suggesting any ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, and it proves that
the thing from the beginning was nonsense. It was a hoax based on nothing
but documents and lies peddled by the Clinton campaign itself. And Durham has called
me. I think there's our emails from call me saying where is the FISA?
Where is the FISA? That's in relation to George Popadopolis? Right,
Yeah, it was either Popadopoulos or Page. There were two people the FBI
tried to go after with FISA warrants. They tried with Popodopholis and failed when
they started their little campaign of sending honey traps after him and getting confidential human
sources from the FBI to record their conversations with him Carter Page. According to
the report, it looks like the whole campaign by the FBI against him was
basically just a personal vendetta within the FBI. They didn't like him for some
reason, maybe because he had so effectively without their help previously brought in a
whole bunch of actual Russian spies. But we know they spied on him.
We know their warrant applications were full of lies, mostly from the Steel dossier.
We know that those warrants were illegal because the FIS accord itself after all
this came out, said yeah, we know at least the third and fourth
FISEL warrants were illegal. And then we find out through this Durham report that
not only was there no evidence anywhere that carter Page was cluding with anyone,
he had helped the US government track down Russian spies number one and number two,
the FBI just didn't like him, and this whole thing was retribution against
him. That's stocking to think about that our government can go and just decide
to ruin your life because it personally dislikes you, and you have no recourse
whatsoever. Well, in speaking of Watergate, I mean, FISA itself came
out of the Church Committee era. It was supposed to be a reform that
reigned in the excesses of the intelligence community that had been sort of laid bare
in the previous decade. And yet FISA is so easily abused, and it
doesn't seem like there's any appetite for reform whatsoever, because both the media,
Democrats and centrist Republicans have no interest in this story, and if anything,
seemed to want the intelligence community to have broader surveillance powers at this point.
Yeah, it seems like the Intel community, CIA, whatever, the deep
state, whatever term you want to use. It seems like they just own
Congress in the Intel Committee. And it's almost a chance of faith that we
even got as much as we have on this, and it's because Devin Nunez,
when he was running House Intel, was one of the very few people
who weren't owned lock stock and barrel by the CIA. I mean, you
look at the Senate Intel Committee and it's an absolute joke, with the exception
of maybe one or two people maybe, But I don't know how they do
it. I don't know if it's just old style kind of j Edgar Hoover
nonsense where he just digs up dirt on everyone and blackmails them. But yeah,
there's no recent PISO should exist anymore in its current form because of how
utterly corrupt it is. And unfortunately, since so many people in Congress just
have no interest in doing their actual jobs, they're just willing to let the
CIA run the entire country. You know, in general, it seems like
the DRM report a lot of what the media claims is no new bombshells.
He ended with a whimper, etcetera, etcetera. What he's doing is laying
out the lack of justification for crossfire, hurricane, and for the entire pro
And so it's not as though there would be like shocking bits of information,
although I think there aren't plenty of shocking bits of information. But it's not
as though it's it's like brand new things nobody knew before. It's basically that
there was nothing like. He just says like he is going down all of
these different avenues saying there's nothing. For instance, here's this is about Carter
Page. Durham says the FBI quote failed to follow logical investigated leads about his
quote recorded denials of having any relationship with Paul Manaford, a fact about which
there was available evidence. And so what he's doing is going down all of
these different sort of side streets saying the FBI didn't do this, The FBI
didn't do that, The FBI didn't check this out. They didn't check that
out. But they did when it came to you the double standard. They
were doing it when it came to the Clintons. You know, if it
was going to exonerate Hillary Clinton, Yes, they were going down that avenue.
But if it was going to exonerate Carter Page, they weren't. Well.
I think a perfect example of how the media decided they were going to
cover this, I think it was CNN. So in the report, Durham
has a section where he says, yeah, you know what, I could
propose a whole bunch of new rules at the FBI that might help here.
But since there is no fidelity, since there is no integrity, since there
is no sense of moral right and wrong at the FBI, Basically this institution
is so corrupt from the inside out that to push new rules would be utterly
worthless because the people who actually worked there and would have to be following them
have no moral compass. They don't care what the rules are. They don't
care about right or wrong. So, you know, based on what I've
learned, it would be a total waste of time to pass new rules because
this agency is completely without integrity whatsoever, and they wouldn't follow them anyway.
So that's what Durham lays out in the report. How do you think CNN
covered CNN covered it by saying Durham says, no new rules because nothing was
wrong. I mean, you almost have to app and like tip your hat
at the HUTSPA there. That's what we're dealing with the media. And you
know, if you look at all the lives they pedaled in service of this
coup and this hoax for years and years and years, who on earth would
think that now would be the time that they would actually fess up to them.
They're all in on this, like if anything else, they're just going
to keep doubling down. So I just don't think you can take at face
value these claims from corrupt corporate media outlets like CNN that oh, there were
no bombshell. The whole thing was a bombshell. It was a bombshell constructed
of smaller bombshells to make one giant vultron bombshell. And because they just can't
handle it, because they're tiny little brains, just can't deal with the cognitive
dissidence between the facts and what they've been saying, they just pretend it was
nothing was there. They lie to their viewers and they go back to rending
their garments over January sixth, I mean, I don't know why people think
they're supposed to trust the media on the story when you have immediate reaction from
Andrew Weisman on MSNBC, Frank Figliuzi on MSNBC. Then you go to CNN
and it's shrinking Jim Shudo, who worked for the Obama stration, Like it's
just they're completely in bed with the organizations they're supposed to be covering and there
that's a huge part of why they're not able to concede that they lied.
I mean a lot of it was intentional. I mean, you had McCabe
on, it was either CNN or one of the NBC's who was fired for
lying to the DOJ Inspector General going on and saying, oh, Durham's a
crank, and this whole thing's nonsense. And that's like, what's so insidious
about how the deep state works now is these guys they go into the government,
they use their power in the information, they weaponize it against their political
enemies. When they leave or get fired, all these networks go and hire
them. They get massive seven figure book deals in the case of James Komey,
and then they get to go on TV and just lie out in the
open of everything about everything and shape the narrative. So they get to do
all their shenanigans behind closed doors, and then when they get busted, they
get to leave, and they get these massively lucrative sitting heres at the end.
Like it is such a broken joke of a system that I really don't
know how you deal with it other than just getting rid of these agencies whole
cloth. I mean, in my view, the FBI, based on what
we've learned, based on what we've seen them do for twenty thirty forty years,
it's a domestic terror organization. It's the most dangerous domestic terror organization in
America, and it is long past time for us to defund it. I
mean, for goodness sake. The agency is housed in a building named after
Jay Edgar Hoover. Right, So, like this isn't this isn't something that
just started yesterday, or they're like, hey, we should be corrupt and
like do crimes on America. No, No, they've been doing it from
the very beginning. Like this entire agency was conceived in nonsense and it's long
past time that we get rid of it entirely. Yeah, Bedford likes to
point out. Chris Bedford likes to point out that they Goldwater Campaign. Lyndon
Johnson had the CIA spy on the Goldwater campaign. It wasn't just you know,
leftist organizations being infiltrated by Hoover. It was basically everyone, and regardless
of whether there was any legitimate predicate. Sean, is there is there anything
that we're missing because there's a three hundred plus page report. Are there any
highlights that we haven't touched on yet? Oh gosh, I think they're all
low lights. No. But the big thing are big things to remember are
that the entire investigation by the FBI from beginning to end, was a hoax.
They didn't have any any evidence at the beginning when they opened it.
They didn't find any evidence while it was open, and they didn't even find
anything at the end when they spun up this doddering, old, demented fool
Bob Muller to try and clean up their mess. From beginning to end,
they never had any evidence. It was a coup, it was a lie.
It was a crime permitted committed against the American people in the government they
elected, and the fact that not a single person is gone to prison over
it is an absolute tragedy. David Rsani has a piece saying John Brennan should
be in prison. Basically, if we were a truly healthy democracy, John
Brennan should be in prison just as that one example. Sean, what do
we know about how John Brennan abused his public office? Well, John Brennan
should have been in prison long before this. This is a guy who went
and blatantly lied to Congress about how the CIA was illegally spying on Congress.
Okay, the guy is dirty as the day is long. We could spend
hours just on his Shenanians and misdeeds. He's a crook, he's a liar,
he's utterly corrupt. We've got evidence out the WAHO of him lying to
Congress. He was in I believe, August of twenty sixteen, working with
Harry Reid just to try and spin up the whole collusion hoax. So I
mean Brennan, Clapper, McCabe, Coomy, Struck, Lisa Page, Kevin
Klein Smith. We could go on and on and on about all the people
who are in prison. And it is I said years ago, if nobody
goes to prison for this, they're going to do it again. And what
did they do in twenty twenty They did it again. They're going to keep
doing it until they are no longer given the tools to do it, or
because they're finally behind bars. Yeah, that's a story that Sean broke last
week about the CIA actually being You have somebody who's working for the CIA asking
seeking signatures on the Hunter Biden laptop is disinformation letter that was used as a
predicate by the media to ignore the story. Sean. One last question,
what is the appropriate position for a Republican candidate? Hey, let's just even
open it up to Democratic candidates if they're interested in truly reforming or improving the
intelligence community or getting rid of the intelligence community, what is the appropriate position?
What is the litmus test? If someone is voting in a primary in
twenty twenty four, what should a candidate be saying about how to approach the
FBI, the CIA, the deep state. The entire apparatus needs to be
torn down to the studs. We may even need to dig up the whole
foundation and start from scratch. And if the Republican position isn't somewhere near that,
they're not serious and they can't be trusted. And if they ever get
into office, they're just going to be let around by the nose by these
people who've been perpetrating these hoaxes on us for years. The FBI cannot be
fixed, The CIA cannot be fixed. I mean, again to go back
to how the FBI was conceived and nonsense. This was an agency that tried
to convince Martin Luther King Jr. To kill himself. Okay, we had
the US government going and setting people up so that they could then come and
shoot their kids, and their wives and their dogs. So I'm talking about
the Weaver family and Ruby Ridge. This is an agency in dj that went
and burned down an entire compound of men, women and children in Waco.
I believe twenty or thirty years ago. They blew up an entire city block
in Philadelphia. We can go on and on and on weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq. What happened with those oh isis being the JB team. Oh
that's another oopsie by the CIA. The fact that one of the nine to
eleven hijackers and maybe even two was staying at the apartment of a FED informant
in two thousand and one and the FBI just never knew about it, and
then you know, a month later, we have nine to eleven these people
are incompetent, and those who aren't incompetent are utterly corrupt. And until we
completely clean the slate of what they've done in this country by tearing down their
organizations to the studs, we're going to be having these conversations over and over
and over again about the crimes that they're committing against the American public. Sean
Davis, CEO of The Federalist, thank you so much for stopping by today.
Thank you you've been listening to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm Emil Drashynski, culture editor here at the Federalist. Will be back soon
with more. Until then, belovers of freedom and anxious for the prey,
you go right, what are you wrong? Ro