Speaker 1: Welcome back, everyone to a new episode of You Were
Wrong with Molly Hemingway, editor and chief for The Federalist
and David Harsani, senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Just
as a reminder, if you'd like to email the show,
please do so at radio at the Federalist dot com.
We love to hear from you. This week, Molly, I
think we'll start with Tulca Gabbard's declassification of documents related
to the Russia collusion claims from the twenty sixteen election,
specifically a January twenty seventeenth intelligence community assessment and the
debate over it, which we didn't hear about originally, or
initially where there is a senior intelligence official or it
might be officials, you let us know who kind of disagreed,
not kind of like pretty vehemently, I think, disagreed with
the assessment or it said that there was no evidence
to say that Russians had even changed certainly tallies, but
had enough power to change the results of the elections.
So I have that right.
Speaker 2: Well, yes, I think it's actually helpful because the story
is so old to kind of go back and just
remember what it is that we know and what we
don't know. We have interns working at the Federalist who
were in their very young like they weren't even teenagers
yet when this whole thing happened.
Speaker 1: And so it's crazy. I know.
Speaker 2: It's so weird, by the way, when you're I teach
college students and I remember the first year, which was
a long time ago now that people didn't remember nine
to eleven. And now I'm like, they don't even remember
the Russia hoax, Like this is crazy. How time marches on. Anyway,
So yeah, we all know about about how there were
these claims that Trump had colluded with Russia to steal
the twenty sixteen election. It wasn't a big story. It
was the biggest story that the country had ever gone through.
It led the news every night for eighteen months. It
was at the front page of every paper every day,
and every show.
Speaker 3: Was obsessed about it.
Speaker 2: I mean, it was this thing that delegitimized, as was
the intent the entire first presidency of Trump.
Speaker 3: It led to the opening of a special.
Speaker 2: Council which further constrained him, put allies of Trump in prison.
Speaker 3: It was just it was horrific.
Speaker 2: And a lot of Americans kind of knew from the
beginning that it was also horsepucky, but it has been
a long, hard fought battle to really understand what went
on there. And not only did Tulci Gabbard release information,
so did CIA director John Ratcliffe, and so there are
two different buckets of information here. But what we learned
that I think is just absolutely fascinating from this document
dump is how involved Obama was in the creation of
the Russia collusion hoax. Now you could say, oh, of
course he was, but we didn't really understand exactly how
it worked. And what these documents have shown that have
gotten people who know a lot about the Russia collusion
hoaks so interested is that after the twenty sixteen election,
there were you know, you're doing presidential daily briefings, right,
and these briefings are delivered not just to President Obama,
the current president at the time, but they also start
being delivered to the incoming president, Donald Trump and his
national security advisor who was coming in, Mike Flynn, and
they have one based on a bunch of different intelligence that,
you know, just to kind of sum up, Yeah, Russia
was trying to meddle, but as with previous efforts, it
was no big deal and it didn't really affect the election.
So that is going to be briefed to both the
President and President elect I in early December, and all
of a sudden, the FBI says, we're not going to
support this, and they pull the intelligence. They pull the
intelligence from the tampered or not tamper, but like they
take it away so that it can't be given to
the Trump administration. And then in the place of that,
Barack Obama says, how about we do an intelligence assessment
that gets into everything you know about Russia.
Speaker 3: Uh uh wink wink, nudge, nudge.
Speaker 2: And they decide to rush out in a matter of
just a few short weeks an intelligence assessment that says
that Russia basically that Russia was including with Trump to
steal the election.
Speaker 1: And I asked you a quick question on timeline. Was
this by this point, was the Steele dossier in the
hands of the FBI and stuff like, what did that
have anything to do with this? How what's the timeline here?
Speaker 2: Okay, So Steele dossier is getting injected into the government
months prior, right, So, the FBI had been working with Steel.
They'd actually already fired him for being a liar and
for talking to the media, like already that had happened
right before I think this meeting to set up the assessment,
and so, yeah, they'd been playing around with it for
months and then you know, people, the operation to paint
Trump as a Russian stooge had many elements, and the Steele.
Speaker 3: Dossier was one of them. But yeah, it had been
going on, but nobody.
Speaker 2: Else knew it but the FBI at that time, and
it wasn't even an official FBI product or it didn't
have like a number or anything. But once Barack Obama
asks for people to put together this intelligence assessment, the
FBI then shares it with the CIA and says, we
want this to be we want a summary of this
to be in there, including the claims that that Russia
had sexual compromise. Okay, we now know the Steele dossier
is like completely made up and manufactured. They actually should
have known it at that time too, whether you know so, Okay,
so then yeah, so they say Barack Obama's like, get
me an intelligence assessment, rush it out. They put it together,
They throw it together, and there's lots of interesting stuff
that we're learning about how they threw it together. And
how they threw it together over the objections of career
officers in the intelligence community and experts in Russia. So
that's what the documents are really about. But then they
brief it to President Obama and President elect Trump, and
within hours it's leaked to CNN and it gets the
whole Russia collusion hoax going. So, yeah, you know, people
like a few hundred people had the dossier, including John
McCain and people like that. But this was the means
by which they inserted the dossier into the general conversation
and really launched the intelligence community assessment that included This
was how they launched the Russia collusion hoax. The other
thing that's interesting is that when Obama has a meeting
to start this conspiracy again, within hours leaks are placed
in the Washington Post and New York Times falsely claiming
that they have a high degree of confidence that Russia
interfered in the election to help Trump. So this is
what kind of lays the groundwork for the collusion narrative.
You can't have Trump colluding with Russia if Russia doesn't want.
Speaker 3: To collude with Trump, right, So this is the means that.
Speaker 2: By which they do it, and the leaks are all lies,
by the way, like they're all like CIA has determined
with a high degree of confidence that Russia was trying
to help Trump, and the media like the Washington Post
just immediately runs with it uncritically, as does the New
York Times and I think a few other places.
Speaker 1: Is it true though? And I'm going to just play
Devil's advocate a little? Is it true though that any
kind of assessment like this will always have people actually
who are playing Devil's advocate who are unsure? Is there
always an argument? And then the CIA director has to
or whoever's in charge of the FBI or wherever, has
to decide we're going to go forward with it. Is
it typically include or do you know if it's typically
or this kind of kind of dallas typically included in
the report? Or how does it work?
Speaker 2: I just first off want to say that I talked
to someone.
Speaker 3: About this.
Speaker 2: I was talking to a source about like we were
kind of going down memory lane about this whole assessment.
And prior to the Intelligence community assessment, there was a
separate one I think, put out by DHS and FBI,
and it was about Russian hacks. It sort of like
laying the groundwork that Russia had hacked the election, and
this guy was saying that the poor quality of that report,
like that just had it was so bad that even
left wing media were kind of making fun of it.
I don't know if you remember it at the time.
It was late December or early January, after the first
Trump election, But seeing that, he was like, wow, is
all the intelligence that our agencies do this bad?
Speaker 3: Because it's just laughably bad.
Speaker 2: He's just a corporate guy anyway. Normally, if you were
going to do an analysis of an election, you would
understand that this was a highly politically charged analysis. You
would work really hard to make sure it did not
seem political. As a result, you might spend many months,
months and months and months and months. You would actually
survey the intelligence community about everything that they had. You
would have, you know, a large group of people working
on it. They would be independently chosen, They would spend
a lot of time, and then, yes, you would characterize
the degree of confidence accurately, which would mean mentioning both
why some people thought it was valid and why other
people didn't. Okay, none of that happens with this ica,
none of it.
Speaker 3: It's rushed.
Speaker 2: I mean it's literally thrown together in a matter of weeks.
What we're seeing in these documents is that the actual
office officers working on it. So, oh, the other thing
is Brennan and company do this very like small, hand
selected group of people working on it, and then even
those people that the hand select are like, what the
heck are you talking about here?
Speaker 3: Like this is what are you talk like?
Speaker 2: There's no you know when I have a story about this,
about the objections of senior senior officials telling Brennan, we
have no evidence to support your claim that Russia was
trying to help Trump and.
Speaker 1: Did we know that from the Ratcliffe files the other
week that were released.
Speaker 2: So the Ratcliffe files the other way, do say that, right,
they say it. But one of the things that's been
a problem with all this is government. The Ratclife files
are actually great. The summary that was done by career
CIA officers, like he released it, but he had nothing
to do with the analysis. It's great and it really
does say, you know, all of this stuff was rushed,
it was inappropriate the degrees of confidence.
Speaker 3: But it's kind of dry.
Speaker 2: What my story about kind of shows how viscerally opposed
these people were because I exclusively reviewed some information showing
that it wasn't just that they opposed it. They were
screaming from the rooftops like this is not good. And
then they were brought in to Brennan's office, they make
their claims. He tells them he has secret knowledge that
they don't have access to, which is not how you
do an intelligence assessment, by.
Speaker 3: The way, and then at the end he's like, we're
going to keep it how we have it.
Speaker 2: So you kind of wondered when this was going on,
like why did nobody do anything and why did nobody
in the government say anything? Well, when you did have
people doing it, and these are not the only ones,
like there are more documents coming out, and I have
another story that I'm working on that'll be out tomorrow
about additional information like this, okay, But when that happened,
when people would say what you're doing is wrong and
this is ridiculous and all that, you would have Obama
officials shutting them up, overruling them, telling them that they
didn't know what they were talking about and that there
was secret knowledge that they did not have access to,
and then later Brennan publicly defames them. I mean, he
does it in that very Brennan way. He's like, these
are good men, but they just didn't have the secret
knowledge had they weren't.
Speaker 3: Up to speed on everything.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 2: The other thing is once the dossier gets injected into
the rest of the intelligence community, they start compartmentalizing it.
So they're using it, but they're not letting everybody see it.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: The reason why that's key is as everyone who's read
the dossier knows the moment you read it, the moment
you know it's horse Pockey like, you have to be
an absolute idiot to think this is real. So the
more that they could they could hide it from people,
the less they were able to fight it. As you know,
they were less able to say this is illegitimate intelligence.
There's some of that in the documents released from Tulci Gabbard.
You have someone saying like I was working on the assessment.
I have been working on these topics since twenty fifteen,
and I have you know, I am really concerned if
the dossier were being used, meaning it was kept from
this person too. So sorry, there's so much to cover here,
but do you see why.
Speaker 3: It's a big deal.
Speaker 2: Is like a It shows that Obama engineered the conspiracy. Now,
probably Brennan brought the idea to him and said, what
if we kill the intelligence that says the opposite of
what we want to say, and what if we create
a new intelligence product will put the right stuff in there.
So Brennan really pushes for this claim that Trump was
trying that Russia was trying to help Trump. Komy pushes
to include the dossier, and they do. They always say,
we never actually made it, we never actually got it
included in the assessment. That's not true on two fronts. One,
who the heck cares if it's an appendix or in
the body of the assessment. The whole point of having
it as an appendix was to make sure it was
briefed to Trump and leaked to CNN. But also it's
not true that it wasn't in the body because when
they say we assess with a high degree of confidence
that Russia was trying not just to like sow chaos
or even harm Hillary Clinton, things that.
Speaker 3: We've known for a long time, but they.
Speaker 2: Were actually trying to hurt or to help Trump, which
is like the cornerstone of the collusion claim. One of
the reasons they give for the substantiation is the Steele dossier.
Speaker 1: Well, hold on the collusion. The crux of the collusion
claim was not that Russia tried to help, because maybe
they did on the edges in some way, right, but
that someone in the Trump campaign that the campaigners had
some kind of colluded collusion with Russian whoever, right.
Speaker 3: Which is what the Steele dossier claims.
Speaker 1: Yes, right. I just wanted to go back to the
hacking claim. You mentioned the hacking word, and people today
I've seen saying no one ever said that they hack
this or hack that. Well, I went back to a
story I wrote right when Trump became president for the
Federalists twenty seventeen, where I have a quote from Adam
Schiff saying, mister President, the Russians hacked our election and interfered.
No one disputes this now, but you this is what's
called fact. So, I mean, obviously he's an incredible liar
and he knew he was lying at that point, but
plenty of people in the media immediately use the word hacking.
I just want to stress that which is a lot
different than oh, you know, some low level even though
that might not have been true, but that some low
level Trump campaign official had once spoken to a Russian
ambassador or something.
Speaker 2: And remember the intelligence that they smothered and conspired to
hide from Trump was that essentially Russia hadn't hacked the election.
Speaker 1: Right, And one other thing, Yeah.
Speaker 2: They were always doing what the Russians always do, but
like it didn't matter, right, That's what they suppressed before
they put out this other narrative. And I just want
to say also, yes, in November, December, and early January,
that is the main narrative of the Russia collusion hoaxers.
Speaker 3: It's that Russia hacked the election.
Speaker 2: You see such a you can go into Google trends
and look at the phrase hacked election or hacked the election.
It's almost never used before or after. But this is
what gets it going. People are like, wait, did they
actually hack our election? And you might have thousands of
examples of Democrats and the media saying they did so
when people say, we never said that, are you kidding me?
I remember being on TV and being.
Speaker 3: Like, what the heck are you talking about?
Speaker 2: Like I think he just won because people voted for
him and didn't like Hillary Clinton, And they're like.
Speaker 3: No, it's because the Russians hacked the election.
Speaker 2: So you also see in I don't know if it's
late twenty sixteen or early twenty seventeen, a significant number
of Democrats believed that Russia tampered with the vote totals
in the election. By twenty eighteen, it's not just a
majority of Democrats, it's sixty six percent believe that Russia
didn't just hack the election, changed the voting tallies. Like
the belief that Russia stole Russia and Trump conspired to
steal the election is widely held among Democrats. And when
you're like why because it's completely made up, Well, this
is how it starts. And again, learning that it starts
through a meaning of Obama and his high level intel chiefs, Well,
that's that's a conspiracy. That's a seditious conspiracy. I mean,
it's it's a really big deal.
Speaker 1: Some of that was driven by the hacking of Podesta's email.
I don't know, if you want to dive into that.
I don't think there's ever been any connection. Obviously the
Russians might have done it, I don't know. I don't
know do we know who did that?
Speaker 2: In the end, so I think and I need to
kind of go back and refresh on all of this.
But you have a couple of different situations. The Podesta email,
I believe was just him getting spearfished, like you know
when people say, click on this link and you get
a million dollars. He clicked on the link and exposed
his email. The hack of the DNC is separate, and
that is we've never had the high rigor of analysis
that you would like to have. Like I have no
problem believing that Russia or another country might have hacked
the or you know, tried to hack these things or
get this information. It also probably even more likely was
just as these things usually are, a rando on the internet.
Speaker 3: You know who does it.
Speaker 2: The reason for why they think it's Russia is considered
by many people to be laughable. I am not in
any way enough an cybersecurity person or someone who's read
enough on this to know whether the experts who doubt
this claim are legitimate or not.
Speaker 1: I assume rando's do it and then sell it to
nations or sell it to agencies, or yeah.
Speaker 2: To corporations or any number. Yeah so, But frequently when
we see hacks of this nature, they are people who
are interested parties, but not necessarily you know, Russia, Israel
or whatever.
Speaker 1: Let me touch on an another thing here, Obama. Now
Trump put out sort of an AI video Obama being
arrested or something. I think he has completely plausible deniability here,
or even better than that, in the sense that CIA
director comes with you. We don't know how he phrased it.
We don't know what happened there. It's not like there's
any evidence. And again, just asking doesn't seem like there's
any evidence that Obama was like, yeah, let's set him up,
let's ruin his presidency or anything like that. He's saying, Hey,
the CIA director is the guy I have to trust
on this, and he says there's something here or not
or whatever. How do you what do you make of
Obama's role here or what do we know?
Speaker 2: So let's also just kind of get cut to the end,
which is the Supreme Court ruled, after a bunch of
Democrat law fair against Trump that presidents have a lot
of immunity for anything that's done in office. Sure, so
these people who are like we got it, you know,
probably not. But there are a few problems for Obama.
One is that he is briefed in late July by
Brennan about how they have knowledge that Russia knows about
Hillary Clinton's hoax for Russia hoax, and he is personally
briefed by Brennan that the Russia hoax is like a
thing and that Russia knows about it.
Speaker 1: At this point, what does that mean? Russia hoax? He's
briefed on the Russia hoax. He knows it's untrue.
Speaker 2: So Hillary Clinton, well, Hillary Clinton, I have this thing
that probably would make some people mad, which is believing
that all not that all is fair in love and
warn campaign campaigns. But people do dirty tricks in campaigns.
It's just a fact. What makes the Russia collusion hoax
so horrific is that the dirty trick is completely adopted
by our government. That's where it's like, okay, So the
dirty trick that Hillary conspired to do was to create
a narrative that would be released during the campaign that
Trump had problematic ties to Russia. And as part of this,
she secretly hires and I say secretly because she funnels
the purchase of this of this plot through Perkins Cooey,
a big Democrat law firm, and Mark Elias, who at
the time worked at that law firm, to hire people
will who will run this operation. And the people hired
to run the operation are Fusion GPS. Hillary Clinton hires
Fusion GPS through a cutout, which is a law firm,
to hide what she's doing. And they hire Christopher Steele,
who for years is presented as like a superspy. It
turns out that he's not at all, you know, like
not at all. His information is minimal corroborated, even when
it's not about Russia. And the Fusion GPS doesn't just collect.
Speaker 3: The information, they also disseminate it, and so.
Speaker 2: They are briefing people, they are also inserting it into
the FBI. They're spreading it around to all sorts of
people in Washington, DC.
Speaker 3: Okay, the first Steel Dossier Again, I can't remember what
I've forgotten, you know, but.
Speaker 2: I feel like the first Steel Dossier product isn't even
issued until late July, if I recall correctly, But on
I think it's July twenty eight. Brennan goes to the
White House and tells Obama the Russians know what the
Russians know, Hillary is trying to collect information wo on Trump,
and so at that point they then decide to start
an investigation into Trump, and I say.
Speaker 3: They loosely like this is when the FBI.
Speaker 2: Is launching it's investigation into Trump, not Hillary, but Trump,
and not like, hey, Trump, you need to know that
Hillary is going to is like doing this thing, like
we need to give you a defensive briefing because Russia.
Speaker 3: Might do things to you.
Speaker 2: Now, No, they just start like spying on Trump and
his people and running an investigation. So by the time
of early December, when when Obama conspires with his intel
chiefs to suppress the real truth and put out a
fake product, He's known for months what's going on. Also,
Brennan starts running around the Hill in August telling, you know,
telling the Gang of Eight, just you guys know, we
have reason to believe that Russia is trying to help Trump.
He briefs Harry Reid. Harry Reid issues a public letter
to Komy saying like, we really want you to start
an investigation into Trump. And my favorite thing, I actually
bought Brennan's book to do some research on this. And
Brennan says that when he tells Mitch McConnell this, Mitch
McConnell just looks at him and says huh, this sounds
like something Obama and his CIA might say to hurt
Trump's chances in the election, Like he's no dummy. He
knows right away what Brennan is doing with the briefing. Now,
I thought it was a And Brennan writes up that
he was just so personally insulted that Mitch McConnell thought
he was playing games. It's like, well, he'd known you
for a long time, John Brennan. But disappointing for people
on the right is that how could Mitch McConnell have
known this in late August or early September and then
been so impotent in fighting the russiacclusion hoax. Once it
gets going, he tells the Democrats like Kerry read as
I mentioned, and they start running.
Speaker 3: Wild with it.
Speaker 2: But he also tells Devin Newness. Now, he writes in
his book that he tells all of these people that
he has you know that Russia's trying to help Trump.
I'm pretty sure that he didn't actually tell everybody what
he claimed he did. He says Devin Nunez, who is
known as at this time as perhaps the biggest Russia
hawk in the entire Congress, and that he just wasn't interested. Now, again,
by this point nunes knew not to trust Brennan about anything.
I'm sure he did not react to anything he was told,
but also I am curious about what he was really told.
Speaker 3: I wonder if that.
Speaker 1: And just for contexts, Brennan had spied on a senator,
so do you know what I'm saying while he was
a CIA chief. Also just for timeline purposes, in July
of that year was when Calemy let Hillary go even
though she had broken the law with the servers and
all that. Exactly the same month.
Speaker 2: And also this week, we get information about how crazy
the effort to suppress a real investigation into that was. Grassley.
Senator Grassley from Iowa had been asking for little early
eight years for a classified annex to the I guess
not for that entire time, because it didn't come out
until a couple of years later, but for you know,
there's like a classified annex or something to that report
that gave more detail. And it turns out they basically
never did the investigation into Hillary server, and they had
real information about like foreign access to the server that
they just never investigated. And the report from the Inspector
General Michael Horwitz is like, yeah, they just said that.
Speaker 3: They just didn't. They just didn't.
Speaker 2: They just decided not to look into how foreigners had
a lot of knowledge from Hillary Clinton, and they.
Speaker 1: Get preemptive immunities to virtually everyone who had access to that,
so no one had any kind of incentive to tell
anyone anything. You remember that, I mean, it's insane.
Speaker 2: It's a really interesting document for people who want to
go back down that rabbit hole. But one of the
things that's interesting that was just released is that they
have information and they're not sure it's real. They're really
not sure it's real, but it's kind of information.
Speaker 3: In saying that.
Speaker 2: They have information that Loretta Lynch was corresponding with the
Hillary Clinton campaign and when they present her with the information,
she just kind of doesn't really respond.
Speaker 3: But they don't really like going to it.
Speaker 2: Again, the FBI clearly did not want to in.
Speaker 3: Any way get involved in.
Speaker 2: Hillary Clinton's in the scandal involving Hillary Clinton, they I'm
sure thought she would win and they wanted her to
like them. And it's a real contrast to how they
treated Donald Trump, who they did not think would win,
and then how they freaked out what he did win.
There are other things with Obama about what he knew,
but this information shows that that that when he ordered
the Intelligence community assessment, the end of the assessment was already.
Speaker 3: Like baked in.
Speaker 2: And this gives us insight into into the conspiracy that
we just didn't have before. We have spent a lot
of time focused on the FBI and their use of
the Steele dossier, but that was just one part of
the hoax, and so this this info is very helpful.
Speaker 3: I think.
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Speaker 1: I feel from what I've read so far, you have
much more expertise on this that the folks who think
someone's going to jail over this, I think that that's
not going to happen. I mean, Telsea Gabbert's claim seems
to be that the argument over whether Russia had the
capability to do, you know, to change election results and
kind of putting that aside as Brandon did and maybe
Obama did, is criminal. And it just seems to me
that it's corruption that is very going to be very
difficult to charge anyone with any kind of crime. How
do you feel about what we know? Do you think
there's enough there or not?
Speaker 2: So what I think about as someone who has covered
this story quite a bit. I've written before about how
I kind of got into this story. It was around
this time I was starting to do more TV. Everybody
was saying that Russia had hacked the election, and I
was pushing back against it. But I was pushing back
in like a tsunami. Everybody in DC was saying the opposite,
And if you pushed back at all, they'd be like,
you disagree with the intelligence community, the United intelligence community,
where there's not a drip of disagreement about anything, like
you're an election denier and an Intel denier. Now I
didn't really have a problem with this because I sort
of started getting interested in the topic through my lack
of belief in the intel community's weapons of mass destruction
claim during the Iraq War. So saying like, you don't
believe John Brennan, how dare you like? It didn't work
on me because I had been not believing outlandish claims
from the ICA for a while or from the intelligence community.
But then we get these reports giving government reports into
what happened, and that includes Michael Horowitz, the former Department
of Justice Inspector General. He puts out like a four
hundred and fifty page report on the FBI's participation in
aspects of the Russia collusion hoax it is. And then
you have the John Durham in thestigation and report. And
what I find interesting about these reports is how dryly
everything is described. So, for instance, in a story I'm
working on right now, he says that there were people
who were quote unquote concerned about the use of the
dossier and the level at which it would be used.
Speaker 3: I mean, is so dry.
Speaker 2: And then you look at what they were actually thinking
about it, and they are again screaming from the rooftops,
are you kidding me? This does not mean even our lowest,
barest minimum standards for inclusion in an intelligence product. You
have in mid December people being like, wait, you're telling
me that this product was paid for first by an
anti Trump Republican and then which is not true, but
that's what they were told, and then by a Democrat.
And you don't think that that incentivized the source to
give material that would keep them getting p Like.
Speaker 3: Are you kids?
Speaker 2: So they figure out, like immediately, Christopher Steele is not
to be trusted, something the FBI still has not admitted.
And the way that it's written up by Horowitz is
they expressed concern that's not accurate. They were like, this
cannot be included, and they are what do they say?
They say it's extremely sketchy sourcing, that it is poor
source tradecraft, that you know that, it's just they're they're
like shocked that they're even being asked to consider it
as anything real. And so when you say, like why
you know, well, the Horowitz report came out and nobody
went to jail. Well, I'm sorry, you're not going to
like go after people because someone said that some people
expressed concern and other people didn't. You know, you have
the Durham Report, which I think says that the everything,
according to what he knows, the intelligence community assessment was
put together brilliantly and without any contradiction or concern, which
just is all of these documents, hundreds of pages of
documents show is not true.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: And so when it comes to actual prosecution for this conspiracy,
and it is a seditious conspiracy, I mean, they were
trying to keep Trump from being inaugurated, and then when
that failed, they just decided to destroy his presidency. That
type of conspiracy is maybe the worst crime of a
government official of government officials in our history. And so
the idea that like nobody goes to jail is hard
for a lot of people to stomach. Having said that,
part of the conspiracy was to suppress the ability to
learn of their conspiracy. That's what the Molar probe was
all about. It was not about finding out more info
on how Trump and Russia colluded, that's what they claimed
it was about. It was about keeping anybody from which
it was bad enough, by the way, but it was
about keeping anyone from figuring out what they had done,
and then you've got statutes of limitations running out, although
the fact that the conspiracy is ongoing, like to this day,
Obama yesterday saying.
Speaker 3: I didn't do anything you know you have, which is
not true.
Speaker 2: He did, you know, And you have people making claims
publicly to this day that they believe Trump and Russia
colluded based on their you know, how they had pushed
out this false intelligence, and so it would be very,
very tricky. But it's also true that if you can't
prosecute people for sedition when you've kind of got them
dead to rights, that's not a good thing for the
country either.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, you had the UH, I
forgot what your report it was, but you have, for instance,
we know that every FISA application was fake, right, I
think all of them, maybe you know, that started this thing,
and yet no one was even reprimanded for that. Really,
I don't think maybe one person was slightly. But like so,
the idea that someone's going to jail who is running
the CIA or running you know, the FBI, it just
seems implausible to me.
Speaker 3: David.
Speaker 2: There's one more aspect to this that I think needs
to be discussed, which is the role the media played
in this seditious conspiracy. We mentioned that on the day
they hatch the plot to do this ica, there are
these leaks that immediately go out to the Washington Post
in New York Times. The reporters who uncritically posted those
that leaked information would later receive Pulitzers for their role
in pushing the Russia collusion hoax. Let's skip all the
way forward to this last weekend. Tulca Gabbert releases all
this information, just objectively speaking, learning about Obama's involvement and
just how it all got started and how much objection
there was within the intelligence community to what the Obama
chiefs were doing.
Speaker 3: This is all just.
Speaker 2: Objectively speaking, massive, massive, massive story, and our corporate media
either completely failed to mention it, completely ignored it, or
continued perpetuating the hoax as Margaret Brennan did. She did
not cover the she did not journalistically cover the story,
she pushed to protect the hoaxers.
Speaker 3: Themselves of what she is one or they just like
downplayed it because I mean, I think there's like got to.
Speaker 2: Be room, at least partly in here for just people
who are stupid or don't understand the significance of this
reporting or too lazy to look into it. But for
those people who are knowingly perpetuating the Russia collusion hoax,
a seditious conspiracy against the United States? Against US, should
is claiming to be a journalist protection from involvement.
Speaker 3: In this conspiracy? Like is there anything that should be
looked into here?
Speaker 2: Like it's actually quite frustrating how much people who present
themselves as journalists are really just partisans pushing Democrat talking points,
Like we see it all the time, but when it
actually goes from your partisan hackery into a conspiracy against
the United States, Does being a journalist protect you from
the crimes being committed or from investigation for the crimes
being committed?
Speaker 3: What do you think?
Speaker 1: Yes, I think it does? Does it?
Speaker 2: Like if do you think that being a journalist should
protect you from a conspiracy involving murder? Like an investigation
into murder.
Speaker 1: If you know there's been a murder and you cover
it up?
Speaker 2: Okay, we know these people know that this is a hoax,
Like we can't keep playing like, oh maybe they don't know,
they know, they know it's a hoax, and they're still
continuing to perpetuate it.
Speaker 3: Like, at what point, Well, if.
Speaker 1: There's a predicate, like there's no one, no one's even to.
Speaker 2: Protect their buddy who committed the murder, they might not
know that he committed the murder. At what point do
you sort of go that we know that Jake Tapper
knows there was a murder here, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but there was no one even who's been prosecuted,
who perpetuated the hoax itself, initially meaning from the government.
So now you're going to start aiming at journalists. I
just don't I think it's a slippery slope in the
sense also like how do we know who's stupid and
who's in on it? Or like I think it began
like this. Someone in the CIA tells you something's going
on in the old days, you believe them right now.
I'm not saying all everyone did right away or whatever,
but I think some of these people did. And then
when they realized it was probably BS, they they were
in already the incentive, you know, there was a culture
of panic. The incentive was to keep it going. They
started lying. Now, journalists have done this before. I just
don't know what you start prosecuting journalists for sending bad
information out I mean, they do it all the time.
I think the punishment here is that you should be
going out of business. People don't trust them, you know,
and all of that. I don't Pulitzer Prize is nice
for them, but their industry is tanking, right and well,
I don't know.
Speaker 2: Take the situation right now, which is you've got this
release of just really important information and you have people
saying it's not a big deal, like yes, okay, or
here's another way of thinking about it. When you look
at the people involved in the conspiracy to spread the
lie that Donald Trump was an agent of Russia, a
lot of them are gone, right Obama, Biden, Brennan, Comy Clapper,
and I think Clapper is like the least of those.
It must be acknowledged, you know, not that we're fans
of him. All the other people who were involved in
the conspiracy, who were in the government, they are, you know,
all the big ones, they're gone. When you look at
the media who were in on the conspiracy and who
perpetuated the conspiracy, they're all still there, Like Jake Tapper
is still there. And I want to remind you I
wrote a piece about how I knew the Russia collusion
hoax was a hoax because of information that was given
to me in Jake Tapper's presence, and I have very
strong reason to believe, and I write about it in
the piece about how Jake Tapper lied about the Russia
collusion thing, and he of course was the original author
of the piece on the intelligence community assessment. So if
I stupid Molly know based on things that I'm learning
in Jake Tapper's presence, that it's a hoax, which give
me the courage to fight all of Washington DC calling
me horrible, horrible names and pressuring me to shut up.
If that information I get in Jake Tapper's presence is
enough for me to fight the intelligence community's hoax. Certainly,
the very smart and talented Jake Tapper, you know, knows
what's going on. And he's still there. Margaret Brennan is
still there. The Washington Post and New York Times are
still there. So we could be like, oh, this is
in the past. It's not in the past. They are
continuing the hoax right now. They are covering for like
they're not going to be honest about the crimes committed
because they're complicit in the crimes and what do we
do about that, like saying just.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's not just that there's the Kavanaugh
hoax right, or there will be a hoax tomorrow. It's
not over the auto pen stuff. I mean, I'm just
saying that you start going after journalists in that way.
That's a precedent you said for others to go after
journalists for reporting that bad stories are being in on conspiracies.
I just I think that the others officials need to
be punished.
Speaker 2: Conspiracies isn't journalism, It's not.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't think they're involved in journalism. I
think they're propaganda's for the most part. But propagandists aren't
the I don't know. I mean, I'm I need a
lot of evidence that someone you know, to say that
a journalist should be prosecuted for something like that. Though
now that you're talking about I just hadn't really thought
this through. Journalists do go to jail for protecting sources
for instance, you know, which which is because there might
be criminality there, right, and things like that, and the
court says you have to reveal your sources. So maybe
the better way to go to a journalist is that
show me your notes on this, tell me what happened here,
you know, Like I don't know. I mean, if they're
part of a conspiracy in a larger trial.
Speaker 2: But I also am concerned about targeting of real journalists
of real journalism, like that's a bad thing.
Speaker 3: I just think there should be some creative.
Speaker 2: Lawyerly minds, lawyer minds thinking about whether there's anything that
can be done to make sure that this type of.
Speaker 3: I mean, it is amazing that we haven't been.
Speaker 2: In a hotter war with Russia because of the lies
that these people spread. And yes, part of it is
partisans in the government part of it, but part of
it is this really horrifically shoddy propaganda that was put
out willingly and knowingly and like easily by lots of
bad people who won awards for what they were doing.
And some I don't think it's right that they can say, oh,
I took part in a seditious conspiracy, but I have
a get out of jail free card. It's that I'm
a journalist. Like that's that's just not how you could
but by that to the mob or whatever.
Speaker 1: No one's been Yeah, you could do a racketeering truck,
no one, No one is no one has been prosecuted
in the government, So I mean, you can't you know,
if you prosecute people in the government, they tell you. Yeah.
Jake Tapper was in on this, you know, we talked
about it. This that I mean, I think you can't
start backwards with the journalists. I just don't. I think
that that's a dangerous precedent in the sense that you know,
there'll be a next Biden or Hillary or Obama.
Speaker 2: Well, the dangerous president is the other one actually, which
is also they or they could continue to try to
destroy the country through the next hoax. And so that's
what I'm concerned about, thinking of ways that we can
encourage people not to lie or knowingly spread lies in
their propaganda.
Speaker 1: Well, the fight against this is the best way to
fight against this is there is Molly Hemingway, who has
one point whatever million followers on Twitter, who is bigger
than Jake Tapper's audience every night, by men many times
over fighting back and throwing out you know, her facts.
I realize it's imperfect and these people are still on
a perched in positions of authority, But I don't know,
I don't know.
Speaker 2: You just brought it and here's what I want to say.
This information operation involves so many aspects. Part of it
involves this conspiracy to frame Trump as having included with Russia.
Speaker 1: When this works without journalism, I get that none. I mean,
none of this works without CNN and MS and all
these people spread.
Speaker 2: It doesn't work without a corrupt censorship environment. And of
course I've been a victim of censorship, and the Federalist
has been a victim of censorship for years. And it
involves like corporations subsidizing the propaganda too. Like there's so
many angles to this. So saying like, oh, you've got
one point four million followers on Twitter, like, yeah, I do,
and that is not a reflection of what it should
be outside of censorship environment.
Speaker 1: I want those I want those institutions destroyed. I think
NBC News, ABC News, CBS, all of them. I mean,
I just think that they are propaganda's for one political
party and it's bad for the country. They're beyond biased.
I think Trump broke them, you know that. I just
I worry when you start getting the state involved deciding
deciding these things and deciding who is targeted, it's just
a dangerous precedent. And anyway we'll see. That's obviously, there's
so many facets to this story that are interesting, so
we just covered some of them, but there are others,
and we'll probably going back to it. It's incredible how
I remember this sort of breaking and I never thought
it would consume my life ten years later. Do you
know what I'm saying? Yeah, all right, let's talk about
something funnier. Okay, I was gonna say funnier like Stephen Colbert,
but that's not very funny. Let's talk about Hunter Hunter
Biden's interview the other day. Did you see this?
Speaker 2: I haven't watch it in its entirety, but I did
watch a few clips and I thought it was super interesting.
I know you're supposed to say, like Hunter Biden is
the devil or whatever, but I thought I thought his
loyalty to his father was impressive. Obviously, we already knew
that there was a lot of family loyalty there, given
their business and.
Speaker 3: How they make money.
Speaker 2: But what he was saying, like all the people he
was throwing under the bus, I thought was interesting. And
it kind of needs to be said again because of
this propaganda environment in we never get people speaking freely
about problems in the Democrat Party like it can literally
be on fire and people are like, the Republicans are
in disarray when it's you know, Democrats are having all
this trouble. So I thought it was super interesting. What
did you think?
Speaker 1: It made me want to interview him so badly because
I think it would be interesting to ask him actually
tougher questions and see how you reacted. So let's go
through some of the big Let's go through some of
the highlights. He was dropping f bounds between like every
second word. I think that was just acting, but he
was so I can't really read full quotes, but he
went after Jake Tapper essentially said no one listens to him,
and that that he has that he made, that he
sort of cat he cashed in on on stuff that
he should have been covering. Was to me the subs
text of that. I liked when he went off on
George Clooney. Now if people remember it was George Clooney
who wrote that was it in the New York Times?
Off ed yes, asking Biden to get out, and he's like,
who is he? Do you think in Middle America anyone
cares about him? In Green Bay, Wisconsin, anyone cares about
him what does he know about the real world? And
he kept saying f him of everyone. So I like
that that was a good point. And in that rant,
I think he started to go after Obama's speech writers
who were dining out on being what do he say,
like low level speech writers. He talking about the pod
saves What is it, pod Saves America or something? Podcasts? Yeah,
that was fun.
Speaker 3: Well done.
Speaker 2: David just went over the most interesting part about the
Coney stuff.
Speaker 1: What was that?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 2: So the story Clooney tells is that he was motivated
to express concern about Biden solely because at this fundraiser
where everybody saw Biden kind of wander off stage or
need to be helped off stage by Obama. Well, at
that fundraiser, he didn't know who George Clooney was. Do
you remember that story? So Hunter says, that's not it
at all. He says, leading up to that fundraiser, Clooney
was really trying to pressure Biden and became enraged that
Biden wasn't supporting the What is the like you know,
the cord that had gone after net and.
Speaker 1: Yahoo International ICC is it or Yeah?
Speaker 2: So he his wife was part of the group that
tried to get net and Yahoo jailed or whatever, and
he didn't think that Biden was being properly responsive. So
they're having fights leading up to this event, so things
are already kind of cold.
Speaker 3: Also, this speaks to motivation, right, he.
Speaker 2: Was angry with Biden on behalf of his wife over
a disagreement on Netanyahu, which he does not mention in
his piece, saying, oh, he's just throwing Biden under the
bus out of like concern now that everybody can talk
about it. And the other thing is that Hunter says,
and this is very very true. I say this is
someone who has like tasted a little tiny tiny bit
of this that when you're doing a photo line, someone
will say to you who the person walking up is.
Speaker 3: And that's true.
Speaker 2: So someone will say, Molly, this is John Blickensterfer. He's
a state senator from whatever, you know, And so you
kind of get like even half the time you actually
know who's being introduced to you, but someone still does it.
And so when Clooney said he didn't know who I was,
he's referencing, according to Hunter, someone saying mister President George Clooney,
you know.
Speaker 3: Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And that is a very different story than
the one Clooney told, and it's a it actually makes
sense more. Not that we don't think Biden also is
seen now we've seen that. But I mean, this is
why I'm saying the Hunter Biden interview was interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Still, there were so many other instances where Joe
Biden was clearly not aware of his surroundings that it's plausible.
Then I like that he was said he was against
having the debate at all, and his reasoning was quite sound.
I don't know if it was true at the time,
but he you know, he said that why are we
rushing to debate someone who has just been indicted? Right,
But then he talks about how they'd given him his
dad ambient and that's why he performed poorly. I don't
believe that's true. I mean, it could have been part
of it, but obviously he was not up for it.
He also I liked that he went out after David
Axelrod and said his like, his one accomplishment was just
kind of being there for you know, with Obomber early on,
he never did anything. And then he went after James Carville,
who hasn't run an election twenty years or whatever talked
about cocaine in his own you know, they claimed he
was cleaning sober since twenty nineteen, hadn't touched anything.
Speaker 2: That part was kind of clipped out of context if
people saw it where he's talking about how pure crack
cocaine is and people are like, he's making the case
for crack cocaine.
Speaker 3: If you watch it in context.
Speaker 2: He's actually like, I don't even like talking about it
because I don't want to, you know, make people think
it's good.
Speaker 1: Why would I bring cocaine into the White House and
stick it into a cubby outside the situation room in
the West Wing. Listen. I don't know if it was
his or not. It's not crazy to think it would
have been. And he's a liar, he's been known to lie.
But I'm sure there are plenty of people who were
doing cocaine who went into the White House.
Speaker 3: I loved like that. By the way, why would I
do that?
Speaker 2: Did he say he didn't do it? Or did he
say why would I do that? It's like when your
kids get in trouble and they're like, well, yeah.
Speaker 1: But you did Yeah. Anyway, it was it was interesting.
They should give that guy a podcast would be interesting.
I mean, he said a lot of idiotic things as
well about politics, but it was interesting. Happy to hear
from him, nice to hear from him. He went on
his whole rant on illegal immigrants and how we need
them to clean our toilets and our hotel rooms and stuff.
Now I'm on two minds of this. I hate when
we pretend that people who do things that are not
glamorous or slave labor. I mean, this is a lot
how a lot of people have part time jobs and whatever.
But the idea that we have to import people just
to do that under the radar or whatever, it's just
it's idiotic.
Speaker 2: I think when people refer to it that way, they're
referencing how when you're illegal, your wages are much lower
than if you're not, and that is, you know, and
the way people just celebrate it, like he's out there
being like.
Speaker 3: Oh, who's changing your sheets?
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, I oh, I come from a
different background than Hunter Biden, but I know people. I
know people in my life who who currently work as maids,
you know, and have worked as maids at hotels, and
the way that they don't get paid well is because
there's this influx of illegal labor that enables some payments
that are below what they should be.
Speaker 1: I don't want to argue about that part. I think
that there are minimums.
Speaker 2: Arguing about whether illegal immigrants decrease wages, because that's just
a fact.
Speaker 1: I am arguing, No, it's not a fact. I mean
it is. I do not affect the wage rate. Like
you're going to fight, yes, I am, if you let
me finish. I'm not saying that it doesn't affect the
wage rate in any industry. I'm saying it doesn't affect
the wage rate in other industries, in other industries. For instance,
it's in a hotel. People who work in big hotel
chains are not illegal immigrants. They don't hire illegal immigrants.
Those are for smaller businesses. Well, all the minimum.
Speaker 2: Waights ways you can hire illegal immigrants, even at big companies,
and we've had recent prosecutions involving that, including document thefts
and otherwise.
Speaker 1: But go on, I don't want I know this is
we'll talk about this and other I'm against illegal immigration.
Whether it lowers rates or doesn't row weights, I don't care.
I don't like lawlessness, and I want Americans to work
in America unless they have a visa, but I just
don't like when people talk about work like that in
the way that Frankly, I hear some people on the
right talk about it where they call people slaves who
don't make a lot of money. Well, my parents started
out with bad jobs and then they got better jobs.
Young people started out with bad jobs, they get better jobs.
So anyway, it was interesting. We both agree right that
we need to hear more from Hunter.
Speaker 2: Biden would I would listen to a podcast. Also, if
I were Democrats, I would just use him to clean
out some of their mess because they are in this
information propaganda environment that doesn't allow open criticism of what's
happening in the Democrat Party. They struggled to fix what
they need to fix. And not just Hunter, but other
people should be speaking more if they want to help
out the Democrat Party, I think.
Speaker 1: And he's right about something. I wrote about it at
the time and I got a lot of blowback, but
I thought that Biden would do better than Kamala. I mean,
I just think that people in general, he seems to them,
even though I don't know that it's true, more moderate
and more reasonable.
Speaker 3: I agree.
Speaker 2: I've said it, and people I've also gotten blowback into it.
Speaker 1: Now we have to go move on to something less funny,
and that's Stephen Colbert's cancelation at CBS, which left took
very hard and immediately conspiracized that it was a sacrifice.
His show had been said sacrifice because Paramount's trying to
merge with this company called Skydance where it was run
by David Ellison. I forgot Larry Ellison's son who is
and his dad's a Republican donor in this and that
the whole thing reeks to me of the entitlement that
is like a core characteristic of the Democratic Party right now,
like that we or CBS stockholders or whoever would think
about MPR and PBS, that we have some responsibility to
make sure that lefties are on television or in our
ear all the time. And I am so happy that
after twenty years of writing about politics, we have finally
defunded PBS and MPR. I never thought it was going
to happen. People have talked about it forever. But here's
a Christopher Hayes at MSNBC quote. Not really an overstatement
to say that a test of a free society is
whether or not. Comedians can make fun of the country's
leader on TV without repercussion. And now the idea that
making Trump hurts your career is just literally not.
Speaker 3: Backed by evidence.
Speaker 1: Right, No, not back by evidence does not mesh with reality.
Colbert was making fifteen million a year and he did
it for a decade.
Speaker 2: Right, and he was horrifically angry and attacking Trump every
single day of that. So the idea that after ten
years of it, you getting fired because you haven't been
able to make the show profitable in a long time,
saying it's actually the ten years of hysteria I've been doing.
I mean, it just doesn't make sense. So I'm getting
punished for the ten years of hysteria.
Speaker 1: Right. Here's Jim Hemes's Connecticut house member. He was a
guest on Colbert because people are just clamoring for him
to be on late night TV, right, Like, I wonder
why that show didn't do well. But anyway, he says
that freedom of expression is fundamental to any democracy in
America deserves more hosts like Stephen who asked the tough questions.
Edward R. Murraw is rolling in his grave. So now
Colbert was a journalist, he had Ilhan omar On, He
had Stacy abrams On, Tim Walltz Kamala Harris never asked
them a single tough question. Okay, so they that idea
is nonsense, but mostly it's clear that this was capitalism.
I'm going to just read you these numbers. You might
have heard them, but his audience had fallen thirty percent.
It started like eight million. Fewer than two hundred thousand
nightly people who watched him were from the eighteen to
forty nine demographic, which is a one year.
Speaker 3: Really after because that's the advertising demo.
Speaker 1: Yeah, his average reviewer was sixty eight years old. This
is obviously antiquated. I used to watch letter.
Speaker 2: Not just that his average viewer was sixty eight years old,
it's that when they hired him, they hoped he would
lower the average age from what it was then, which
was below sixty eight years old.
Speaker 1: It was sixty and it went to sixty eight over
the time he was there. But Jimmy Kimmel, everyone says
Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon had lower ratings than he did,
but there revenue was high, and now now they're I
wouldn't be surprised at the cancel all of this stuff.
It's very expensive to produce for the outcome, right, But
so here it is. Late night shows on major networks
earned four hundred and thirty nine million in AD revenue
in twenty eighteen. Now they are in two twenty, so
basically half that's not sustainable. I could when I I
am not a big like celebrity watcher, but if I
do want to hear from a celebrity, I go to
a podcast and hear in our conversation with them. It's
far more interesting than watching these, you know, watching Colbert
or whoever interject constantly, and more than that, I get
a real sense of the person. And the podcasts cost
a fraction of the you know, of the of the
of the amount to produce, so they're just much better.
I just think this is a dying medium.
Speaker 2: Yeah it is, and some of that is his fault
and a lot of it isn't. But it does seem
that the scandal is not that he is going to
be let go in May of twenty ten, twenty six,
which is an interminably long time away. Yeah, it's that
he wasn't let go in like twenty fifteen when he
started getting unwatchable that's the scandal to me. How could
they afford to keep an unfunny, hate filled rantfest show
for ten years if it weren't for some other reason,
Like they weren't making money, so why were they doing it?
It wasn't funny. He'd replaced celebrities with Democrat officials, Like
why was it going on for the last ten years?
That's the scandal to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I thought he was a mildly entertaining,
satirical conservative blowhard on Comedy Central, but then he turned
into a blowhard, you know, didactic, unbearable, you know, unfunny,
actual liberal on CBS. I think the part of it
is probably that the Late Show is kind of a
legacy show for that network, so they kept him on
because they'd a bad choice obviously. Now I'll tell you,
we know that it is still viable maybe if you
find someone funny, who doesn't take them selves that seriously,
who has funny guests and smart guests, because Gutfeld beats
all these shows and it has only access which you
appear on, and it has only access to half the audience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's on cable, and it's on cable, So I
do I uh two quick thoughts on it. One is
when they showed that the day after he'd been told
he was let go, he all the different late night
hosts came and sat in his audience. Apparently Colbert is
particularly bad. Okay, and so is Kimmel's pretty bad. But like,
in general, it does make me feel that Hollywood is
racist that they chose all these very unfunny white men
to host their late night shows when there are like
zins of better choices who are black. They are even
funnier women than we are being subjected to in these
late night shows. How is it that they're all white
men and so bad at their jobs? Like it feels
a little racist.
Speaker 3: I'm maybe I'm run.
Speaker 1: Okay, here's how I get. I don't think Jimmy Kimmel
is not to me not funny. But also Jon Stewart,
I understand. I used to understand this popularity somewhat in
the past, but not anymore. He's just unbearable. And then
John Oliver, like, I can't even watch that show. Jimmy
Fallon to me seems like a nice enough guy, right,
so you're not feeling like he's When when I was young,
I watched Letterman, I used to watch him on the
Late Late Show. I love that show. You know, I'd
watched Johnny Carson's. I never felt excluded. I never felt like, oh,
here we go again with the with the preaching, so
the other.
Speaker 3: Thing, and this will make me out to be a
fuddy duddy.
Speaker 2: But when Trump first came on the scene, one of
the more effective criticisms of him, I felt was that
he was impolite in how he spoke, that he was
he was cussing a lot, he was he just he
did not have the dignity that you would want for
the presidential office. And Colbert his whole reason for existence
is to is to oppose Trump, and that's one thing.
But he also began with some of those criticisms, and
by his last show that they were shown, you know
that everyone was talking about he was literally just saying
F Trump or no, F yourself. He confused about who
was saying yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Just by the way, is twenty writers and that's the
best comeback you could do.
Speaker 2: You can come up with us so full of hate
and it's so you know, it's the anger, but it's
also just like the inappropriate language that you couldn't show
a chill child and what happened to the like when
you can't even do your legitimate Trump criticism because you've
become a gazillion times worse than him on on whatever
score you're going for.
Speaker 3: It's just ridiculous.
Speaker 1: And there's nothing wrong with making fun of the president, right,
I mean, but you can tell when something is just
angry and mean spirit in when something is funny. And
I'm sure that Johnny Carson made fun of whoever was
president when he came out plenty, right, But there's just
a difference, And listen, that's all. That's all I was
going to say. Everyone you know talks about censor SHABOLDI
celebrities came out on that. There would be nothing wrong
actually with CBS firing Stephen Colbert because he's too political.
That is not that. That's not a political show you
want it. It's a it's a mass culture I don't
know that there's much mass culture left anymore, mostly because
Democrats have to inject politics into everything all the time.
But it's a mass culture show. You don't want to
turn off half your audience. I mean, it's completely legitimate
reason to get rid of someone. There's no nothing that
says you have to be anti Trump all the time,
and it's ridiculous something's supposed to be a political show
NBC News. We have for that already. I mean, what
do we need that you know, this show to be
that way.
Speaker 3: And then just on that point of all these people.
Speaker 2: Saying you can't live in a free country if you
can't attack the president, I agree with that we have
no shortage like we have. Our problem right now isn't
that we have too few attacks on Trump, but like
too many people just deranged and unable to process information
without their anti Trump hysteria. But also Ace of Spades
had a really great point that is, you know, during
the Clinton or during the Obama administration, you might recall
that the so called comedians openly said that Obama was
impossible to make fun of. The culture was such that
you weren't allowed to make fun of him. Supposed comedy
shows took eight years off from comedy because of it.
Speaker 3: You also have I think this.
Speaker 2: Is when Colbert and John's to where it say that
there's just nothing to do, there's nothing to make fun of.
Do you remember when a literal rodeo clown was fired
from making fun of Obama at a rodeo, and did
these people say, gosh, that seems very bad that you're
not allowed to make fun of the most powerful man
in the world when it was a rodeo clown. But
all of a sudden, after a decade of losing money
and poisoning discourse, finally in a year Colbert is going
to go. And that's a threat to democracy.
Speaker 1: Oh all right about culture, real culture, not Colbert culture.
Speaker 2: I think you're going to need to carry this part.
I am very busy. I did go to Chicago with
my husband to the Issues et Cetera conference, where I
talked to a bunch of people who are just I
love David Hersani, Hi, Molly, I love David Harsani.
Speaker 1: I never meet these people in the real world. I
don't know.
Speaker 2: Oh, you should come, you should come next year. It's
it's the best conference. And Scott Jennings from CNN was
also there, Carl Truman, who's a great uh, a great
public intellectual. So we went there and I like Chicago.
There's something about Chicago. We were out in Forest Park
at Concordia Chicago, but that's actually in Forest Park and
in Oak Park, and there is good food there and
just good, Like the men are really manly and the
women are womanly. You know they even yeah masculine, the
woman womanly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're doing they're doing their thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just nice to be in a city like that,
even if it's kind of losing some of its charm.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've always kind of liked Chicago. Maybe I'll go
if I'm invited. At one point, it's funny when my
sibling was someone when it's getting in touch with me
and he's like, you can you know, here's his email,
But he's a recluse. I'm like, you called me a recluse?
Am I really a recluse? It seems kind of harsh.
Speaker 3: I agree. I agree.
Speaker 1: Not very social, maybe introverted slightly, but recluse. Well, what
did I do here? I forgot to mention last week
when we were talking about books, that I'm also reading
a really good book I wanted to recommend. It's a
Mark Twain biography written by Ron Chernow who wrote the
Hamilton Biography and the Washington Biography and many others. It's
a door stop or it's quite a book. But he's
just such a uniquely American character and interesting. I watched
a documentary half of one now I think each half
is around two and a half hours long. On Billy
Joel on HBO. I'm not a fan.
Speaker 3: Mark wants to watch that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not a fan of his, but I tend
to watch all of these and they're really well done.
I mean, I have to say, HBO does a really
good job. It was a is one and another one.
It's just that it's just really well done.
Speaker 2: So yeah, Mark and I were talking about it. I
find okay. This is this is a surprisingly anger inducing discussion.
What do you think about Billy Joel in my family
and friend set? I have family and friends who adure him,
and I find him a bit schmaltzy. Also, Guy Benson
loves him, like went to his last show at Madison
Square Garden and all that.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 2: But Mark's point, because he's not a big Billy Joel
fan either. It is just that objectively speaking, the man
is an amazing songwriter. Like you might not like the
end result, but there's no debate that he has mad
skills and is and also that many people do love
him and that he's had an interesting life. And so
that was his case for why we should watch the
documentary when we're done, right, I think.
Speaker 1: He makes a good point. I appreciate him much more
now seeing I sometimes when you watch a documentary, you
know people are in your life, like I grew up
on Long Island. He's from Long Island. He's it's a
big deal there.
Speaker 5: He uh.
Speaker 1: But a lot of his songs come in and out
of your life, but when you have them in a documentary,
like wow, he wrote that too, and that too, and
that's like he wrote a lot of songs that are
just I know and are part of my life despite
my best efforts.
Speaker 2: One of Mark's points for Billy Joel being a super
impressive person was, of course he married Christy Brinkley.
Speaker 1: He did, and his personal life is actually quite interesting.
In fact, whatever has happened all his songs that we know,
they're all just things that happen in his life, which
made me laugh, like he's just literally writing down almost
exactly what's going on in his life. So like I
even confuse songs like so there's Piano Man, which is
a very famous song, and there's like scenes from an
Italian restaurant or something. I thought those were that was
the same song, because so now I'm like, oh, there
are two different songs so on. So we haven't even
gotten to Christy Brinkley yet. And he had a very
interesting childhood and stuff worth watching if you're interested. I
just think it's interesting, even if you're not a big,
a big fan. One other thing I watch, which I
don't know. It's a guy named Justin Willman. Have you
heard of him. He's like a magician, used to be
like a street magician, right, But so I don't enjoy
watching magicians because all I do the whole time is
think about how it was done and how they're cheating,
you know, and fooling people. So this is more like
a it's an on stage like a comedy. He's kind
of a comedian also, and he talks about that. So
the whole shows about people who actually are are nice
and normal and sit down and enjoy magic, and then
the plus ones, which he calls like the cynical people,
which like I am, And so he plays with that
a bit. He was mildly entertaining. I think it's on
Netflix if it's something you want to, you know, if
that interests you. Guys, So you have nothing or I'm
so sorry, I no, no, it's okay.
Speaker 3: I might also add.
Speaker 2: On the Brennan book, which I just there's so many
of these books that come out from Washington figures, and
unless there's a reason for me to read it at
the time that it comes out, I frequently don't.
Speaker 3: But it's just a reminder.
Speaker 2: This is like my number one reporting tip is just
read the books of the people. You would not believe
what you learn when you do. And nobody reads books
like they might buy them, but nobody reads them, and
so you get this like secret knowledge that nobody else has,
and and ideas for how to you know, how to
shape a story too. I just want to say when sorry,
do you mind.
Speaker 1: If I no, No, that's what we're here for.
Speaker 2: We talked about how Brennan's top there were top people
that we're trying to push back against Brennan's effort to
push his key Russia collusion hoax claim. And he says,
you know, I talked to them, and I learned that
they didn't actually know what they were talking about. And
I told him that I wasn't going to change what
the analysts had written. So he describes like what he did,
which is overruling them, as if he were upholding the
integrity product, and it's just great to see that written
down and then you can, you know, use it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess it's interesting to see what the public
record is and later learn and then you know, as
a kind of way of proving their liars. I just
want to quickly say I was going to say that
in modern times, most political books are just so boring.
They're just garbage, right, Like if candidates write books, they're
just so bad. And this is why I enjoy reading
the old ones, which are actually like Henry Kissinger books
are really interesting if you're into that time period and
stuff like that. But at some point they became like
these self aggrandizing campaign things. You know.
Speaker 2: John McCain's speech writer, I forget his name, wrote a
book for Cassidy. Yeah, Mark Salter, he wrote a book
for Cassidy Hutchinson under her name. I think that was
all about how she.
Speaker 4: Was.
Speaker 1: That was.
Speaker 2: Included a lot of information that I knew personally not
to be true, including that like it said that I
had received illegally received classified documents from like a guy
in a trench coat in Georgetown, And that was fun
to read when you see someone just making up stories
about you that are completely untrue. And then I asked
her very.
Speaker 3: Nicely to correct the air, and she refused.
Speaker 1: No, you know something's fake when it's so filmic. I
think that's a word. And like in movies, spies are
always meeting, like on the Washington Mall at the mall, like, yeah,
I'm going to go right next to the FBI building
to get my spy stuff, like not drive out to
Silver Springs to a diebar or something. Right, So what
I'm saying, so when you got that information, I'm sure
you were in some other place, not Georgetown with the
guy with the trench code.
Speaker 3: He never got some information. So that's the actual you know,
that's sting.
Speaker 2: Although I did. I have talked with Sean Davis about this.
How funny it would be if they ever wrote about
our roles on unspooling the Russia collusion hoax, because it's
not just that we did it, it's that we did
it while doing a million other things, including being parents
of young children. Like it would be you know, me
cooking while figuring out, you know, some next angle of
the hoax. It's not at all like what you see
in spy movies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if people would like to contact us, they can
do so at radio at the Federalist dot com. Would
like to get your emails and we will be back
next week. Until them be Lovers of freedom.
Speaker 3: And thiosu SS plans for some day
Speaker 4: Cont