Juno News - September 18, 2020


ObamaGate The Movie aims to ＂expose the deep state＂

Topics
Showtime whitewashing
Mentioned
Peter Strzok James Comey Phelan McAleer Andrew Lawton Show Anne McElhinney Barack Obama Donald Trump Carter Page Chris Swanson Mark Stein Lisa Page Ferguson Gosnell George W. Bush Jean Le Carrier John Kerry Walter Mondale Ronald Reagan Salman Rusty Bob Mueller and 6 more
Another Lockdown is Coming The Liberals have a history of corruption

Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

174.23

Word count

3,055

Sentence count

189

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Andrew Lawton talks with Anne McElhenney and Phelan McAleer about their new film, Obamagate, a documentary that exposes the deep state conspiracy to take down President Trump.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:01.000 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:00:09.300 Conservatives all the time complain that Hollywood and the entertainment world have this big liberal bias.
00:00:15.080 And that's true. That is so very true. I'm not going to dispute that at all.
00:00:18.720 But it's all the more reason why conservatives need to support art and entertainment, films, music, whatever it is that is conservative friendly.
00:00:27.200 And I think this is such an important message, but it's one that also goes along with supporting good conservative content.
00:00:34.580 And when it comes to creating good content that is friendly to a conservative audience,
00:00:39.420 no better duo than Anne McElhenney and Phelan McAleer, filmmakers, documentarians, authors.
00:00:45.460 Their newest project, Obamagate the Movie, a film they're producing that they're actually crowdfunding for with a goal of exposing the deep state.
00:00:54.460 The deep state that tried to take down President Trump and continues to try to take down President Trump.
00:01:00.320 This is a movie that really follows a lot of the other work they've done, most notably with FBI Lovebirds,
00:01:06.100 a play featuring Dean Cain and Christy Swanson, who are actually going to be in the film as well,
00:01:11.220 playing the same characters, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page,
00:01:14.260 the former FBI agents that are household names now for their collusion during the 2016 election.
00:01:21.380 And joining me on the line is one of the fantastic duo, I was just talking about,
00:01:26.360 producer and co-writer of Obamagate the Movie, Phelan McAleer.
00:01:30.820 Phelan, good to talk to you again. Thanks for coming on the show.
00:01:33.380 Thanks for having me, Andrew. It's always a pleasure to be on your show and talk to your audience.
00:01:39.360 We are now almost four years after the election.
00:01:42.800 Barack Obama's been out of office for almost four years.
00:01:46.260 Why is this a story that, in your view, still needs to be told?
00:01:49.520 Because it started at the tail end of the Obama administration, it's hard to believe, right?
00:01:57.660 It is actually hard to believe, and I think it's missed in a lot of this.
00:02:00.860 This is an investigation by the most powerful parts of the intelligence apparatus
00:02:08.560 under one administration into the rival political candidates running in the next election
00:02:15.280 from the other party.
00:02:18.080 It's like Ronald Reagan having Walter Mondale investigated,
00:02:27.420 or I can't remember who ran against Harvard, Walker, George H.W. Bush,
00:02:34.700 using the power of the presidency and the power of the intelligence organization
00:02:40.940 to investigate your political opponents.
00:02:43.940 And this is not, though, investigating their tax returns.
00:02:46.560 This is using secret warrants, recordings, tapping people's phones,
00:02:54.280 turning people, using spies, using a honey trap.
00:02:57.420 They sent a girl in a short skirt to a meeting in London to try and get a senior member 0.80
00:03:04.700 of the Trump campaign to incriminate himself and incriminate the campaign.
00:03:10.660 None of this worked, but they lied to the FISA court, the supposedly secret
00:03:16.000 but highly, you know, highly skeptical special warrant court, you know,
00:03:21.560 because you need a special warrant to spy on your own people.
00:03:26.220 And they just lied and they made stuff up and the judges just handed out warrants like confetti.
00:03:32.940 But these are all, this all happened under the Obama administration.
00:03:36.720 And then it continued, the cabal of FBI and DOJ, deep state,
00:03:42.560 they continued it after Obama was out of power, but it was started under his watch.
00:03:48.900 And that is the most fascinating part of this story is that when you say deep state,
00:03:54.820 there are a lot of people that immediately they put up their sort of conspiracy theory alert beacon
00:03:59.280 and say, oh, you know, that's just nonsense.
00:04:00.780 But you really have seen in the last few years how a lot of these intelligence community people,
00:04:07.040 these bureaucracy operatives, they really do have a mind of their own in a way
00:04:11.360 where once the old guy is out, they still are loyal to that regime that's no longer there.
00:04:16.860 Yeah, it's not just the regime, it's the consensus they're loyal to.
00:04:21.180 I mean, Peter Strzok is quite clear about it in his book and in interviews
00:04:25.560 that Donald Trump is a threat to the national security of the United States
00:04:30.320 because of his cozy relationship with Putin.
00:04:34.360 Now, that is a political decision.
00:04:37.320 That is an attack on the consensus.
00:04:40.200 Trump is attacking the political consensus.
00:04:42.780 He's not, it's not a national security threat.
00:04:45.960 They just think that anyone who disagrees with their consensus establishment view
00:04:50.780 is a national security threat.
00:04:53.060 That's not actually factually true.
00:04:55.600 So that's what, I mean, this is kind of, that's the deep political side to it. 0.59
00:05:01.920 At the other side of it is Strzok and Page were having this ridiculous affair
00:05:06.300 and texting on their FBI work phones because their wives allegedly couldn't get access to those,
00:05:14.240 wives and husband couldn't get access to those. 1.00
00:05:17.000 And they, you know, they thought they would get away with that and they almost did.
00:05:22.120 But in these texts, you know, and you see the mainstream media are calling them anti-Trump texts.
00:05:27.120 They weren't anti-Trump texts.
00:05:29.140 You know, they weren't Trump.
00:05:30.340 Of course, there was a lot of anti-Trump texts, but there's actually conspiratorial texts.
00:05:34.140 There was her saying, he's not going to win, is he?
00:05:36.780 And the chief counterespionage operative and the FBI saying, no, we're going to stop it.
00:05:42.780 You mentioned Strzok's book.
00:05:44.560 I find that to be interesting because this is, I mean, some people would argue this is bordering
00:05:49.160 on treasonous behavior.
00:05:50.440 At the very least, it's undermining the democratic process.
00:05:53.760 But all of the players involved in this seem to have been able to kind of cement themselves
00:05:58.320 as celebrities to the left.
00:06:00.460 You know, James Comey, Peter Strzok, and we're going to see this with Bob Mueller and all these
00:06:05.100 other people.
00:06:05.700 And there is something very insidious about that.
00:06:08.340 Just the hero treatment that if the roles were reversed, if this were Trump doing this to Biden,
00:06:14.280 depending on what happens in 2020, this would be riots in the street.
00:06:20.100 Yeah.
00:06:20.340 I mean, I'm old enough to remember when the FBI were the evil deep state and the left hated
00:06:27.380 them.
00:06:27.620 In fact, I have a friend whose baby was born last year.
00:06:30.740 That's probably old enough to remember when the FBI were the enemy.
00:06:36.340 You know, the FBI now are the heroes of the left and must be protected by the left.
00:06:42.920 But the things they did, they spied on a political campaign for no good reason.
00:06:51.060 They lied to get the warrants to spy on a political campaign long after the political,
00:06:56.620 long after it was clear there was no there.
00:06:59.000 I mean, to use Peter Strzok's exact words, I think there's no there there.
00:07:03.660 Long after there's no there there, they kept going.
00:07:06.440 So you have this Jean Le Carrier deep state cabal conspiracy mixed in with a bit of teen
00:07:15.760 romance texting between these embarrassingly middle aged lovers.
00:07:20.940 And then in the middle of it, you have their one of their wife, his wife, finding his work
00:07:27.000 phone and somehow getting access to the texts in his work for in his FBI work phone and then
00:07:33.960 phoning Lisa Page and threatening to set a private investigator on her.
00:07:38.160 And, you know, I mean, there's so many questions and so much madness there that it's a really
00:07:44.940 entertaining movie and that's, you know, this has to be entertaining, you know, we it's you
00:07:51.400 saw the play, you saw the we did the excerpt of the play original play on my on the Mark
00:07:56.980 Stein cruise.
00:07:57.740 It's a scream.
00:07:58.700 It's a laugh a minute.
00:07:59.700 So those apps are still there.
00:08:01.380 But we've extended it now to bring in the whole Comey stuff, the Flynn stuff, all all the other
00:08:07.120 memos and conspiracies that have come out since then.
00:08:11.500 Oh, yeah, it's 100 percent verbatim.
00:08:14.420 That's what I want to say.
00:08:15.540 And that's the part I wanted to ask you about, because you've had a fantastic ability with
00:08:19.400 past work, whether it was your play on Ferguson or the Gosnell trial and FBI lovebirds of taking
00:08:26.120 things that have actually happened, not just events that have happened, but but actual
00:08:30.580 conversations verbatim and bringing them to life in a way.
00:08:34.060 And I guess there are two parts to the question.
00:08:35.580 One is a bit facetious.
00:08:36.820 You know, is there much work for you as a writer or co-writer of this film when you're
00:08:40.380 using verbatim words?
00:08:42.240 But but more seriously, why is that something that needs to be done?
00:08:47.680 Well, yes, I saw someone on YouTube called me a lazy writer and I or maybe it's on Twitter
00:08:52.840 because you could be more nasty on Twitter.
00:08:54.880 And I went, yeah, that's me.
00:08:57.000 You know, well, actually, you know.
00:08:59.780 You know, when the mainstream media has failed to do its job, when the media won't do its
00:09:05.480 job, then that's where verbatim plays and verbatim theater and verbatim movies, that's
00:09:11.940 where they come in.
00:09:12.640 And that's where they're strongest. 0.96
00:09:13.620 I mean, in some ways, I'm lucky that the mainstream media is so crap because if there were any 0.95
00:09:21.720 good, I'd be out of work. 0.96
00:09:23.180 Right.
00:09:23.420 I'd be, you know, shoveling cement in back in Ireland or whatever.
00:09:28.880 You know, they will not tell the truth.
00:09:33.260 You know, they will not highlight the stories that should be highlighted.
00:09:37.420 They will not quote directly when the quote doesn't help them.
00:09:42.000 What they do is they paraphrase it in the most benign way.
00:09:45.080 You know, it's like, as Mark Stein once said, you know, I mean, this is, you know, when Salman 0.99
00:09:48.960 Rusty's book, you know, 20 people were killed and reviewers talk about it.
00:09:54.040 It caused some controversy.
00:09:55.920 You know, I mean, they will paraphrase things and make things as benign as possible when they
00:10:01.540 don't like them.
00:10:02.080 But the great thing about verbatim is, you know, there's no filter.
00:10:06.880 There's no editorial filter on it.
00:10:09.280 You know, there's some, but this is what the people said and the audience loves it because
00:10:14.260 I always notice when you're in the theater, you know, people are sitting back like this
00:10:18.080 thinking, what's the playwright going to, oh, that's an interesting drama that, you
00:10:21.660 know, all really good.
00:10:22.640 They get invested in the characters, but they're sitting back absorbing it when the, when it's
00:10:27.240 verbatim, they're leaning forward, trying to hear every word because they know these are
00:10:30.900 the words that were actually said by real people.
00:10:33.060 And, you know, it hasn't been easy getting actors for Obamacate.
00:10:37.360 We've, we've, we've lost a few, you know, for various reasons and we don't know why.
00:10:42.260 Same with Ferguson, nine of the actors walked out and, you know, they walked out.
00:10:48.220 These were African-Americans giving, getting their voices in the theater because it was eyewitness 0.70
00:10:53.260 accounts from the grand jury testimony and, you know, the, the, the, so, so they don't
00:11:00.300 want the act.
00:11:01.680 They'd rather have some black lives matter activists tell you what the street is thinking
00:11:06.440 rather than people on the street speaking for themselves.
00:11:09.600 And that tells you a lot.
00:11:10.840 And it tells you a lot about the acting profession, about who they're really speaking for.
00:11:14.600 And when you talk about that whitewashing, that's particularly important because I know 1.00
00:11:18.360 when you and Anne announced this project, you had mentioned that Showtime is doing some
00:11:22.660 big special, but instead of basing it on the transcripts, which are publicly available,
00:11:26.840 they're basing it on James Comey's book.
00:11:29.000 They're basing it off of a very, you know, I don't even know what a self-aggrandizing version
00:11:35.680 of event through the, through the eyes of, of James Comey.
00:11:38.900 And they're getting, I think you said a $40 million budget that they're putting towards
00:11:43.480 this, whereas you and Anne are crowdfunding, I think you're, you're down to $103,000 or
00:11:48.660 so that you need left in this.
00:11:50.320 You're doing this and it's going to be better at a fraction of the budget.
00:11:53.820 Yeah, that's it.
00:11:54.680 They're spending $40 million and I've seen, it's a mini series.
00:11:58.260 I've seen it.
00:11:58.780 I got an early copy of it.
00:12:00.180 It's really turgid and boring and they don't do the, I mean, there's so much verbatim drama
00:12:06.560 here.
00:12:07.040 Like there's people getting caught in affairs.
00:12:09.660 Yeah.
00:12:09.680 You don't need to fictionalize when the real story is as exciting as this one is.
00:12:14.100 I mean, they're doing honey traps in a pub in London.
00:12:16.840 They're, they're, they're lying to the FISA courts.
00:12:19.400 You know, there's an agent who, who rewrites an email to, you know, Carter Page, you go,
00:12:24.680 why was Carter Page so, so involved with dodgy Russians? 1.00
00:12:28.120 Turns out Carter Page was working for the CIA and that was for free.
00:12:34.080 That he, as a patriot, he decided to work for the CIA and feed information, meet these dodgy
00:12:39.660 Russians, feed information back to the CIA. 1.00
00:12:42.380 The CIA wrote to the FBI and said, don't be suspicious of this guy meeting dodgy people.
00:12:47.320 He works for us.
00:12:48.500 They rewrote that email and said, oh, actually he's not working for the CIA.
00:12:53.820 Then they used his dodgy connections for Russians to get warrants to surveil the whole of the 0.92
00:12:59.200 Trump campaign.
00:13:01.320 It's, it's, it's an amazing story.
00:13:03.540 Why would you, why would you have to fictionalize it?
00:13:06.100 Why would you have to rely on James Comey's version of events when, when the truth, I
00:13:10.560 mean, that's a, that's a movie there.
00:13:11.840 There's a movie that's drama, isn't it?
00:13:15.120 There is.
00:13:15.860 I mean, you're, and you're right about this and you've got a great cast too.
00:13:19.080 Christy Swanson, Dean Cain, Superman himself.
00:13:21.680 They did a great job in Lovebirds and I know we'll do well in this.
00:13:25.260 I have to ask, you know, the, the fact that you're crowdfunding, is that just something
00:13:29.300 you want to do or is there genuinely no studio money behind anything like this from the perspective
00:13:35.080 that you're putting on it?
00:13:36.520 Yeah, there's no, no studio, no studio money behind it at all.
00:13:39.920 Thanks for mentioning the crowdfunding.
00:13:41.260 You can go to ObamaGateMovie.com if you'd like to help.
00:13:44.300 Uh, it's ObamaGateMovie.com.
00:13:46.580 I mean, it's funny when we first came to Hollywood, you know, eight or nine years ago, there was
00:13:51.940 a feeling that you could go to a studio and pitch your best.
00:13:54.800 And of course they're all liberal, but they would give you a hearing and maybe once in
00:13:59.160 time and 20, you might get a something made.
00:14:01.980 Now it's very clear that that's not going to happen because even if there was some guy
00:14:06.500 up there who would want to make this, the employees would walk out like they have at
00:14:12.560 the New York times, like they have even at the wall street journal, they would say, we
00:14:16.100 don't want JK Rowling's publisher as well.
00:14:18.680 Yeah.
00:14:18.860 JK Rowling's publisher.
00:14:20.360 Uh, you know, so there is no chance that Hollywood would make this even if they wanted to.
00:14:27.320 And you know, because their, their, their woke staff will not tolerate this.
00:14:32.440 And it's a terrible disaster for art.
00:14:35.960 It's a terrible disaster for diversity. 1.00
00:14:38.180 It's a terrible disaster for fun and entertainment because you've got three hours of
00:14:42.260 turgid James Comey prose opposed to, uh, uh, one hour and 10 minutes of our sex romp
00:14:49.820 meets, uh, John le Carrier meets, uh, you know, Mrs. uh, the Vickers coming, get your 0.95
00:14:56.000 pants up, uh, Obamagate.
00:14:59.520 I I've had this conversation with you before, and I mentioned it briefly at the beginning
00:15:04.020 of the segment here.
00:15:04.860 I think it's important for conservatives to support conservative friendly art and in this
00:15:10.500 context film, but I also think it's important for any movie or product that is really aiming
00:15:16.580 at a bit of a conservative audience to be good.
00:15:19.060 And I've always admired that your stuff is good quality first before it's ideological
00:15:24.020 or partisan or anything like that.
00:15:26.160 And I think that's so key.
00:15:27.260 A lot of people, I think, just think that, you know, they're going to put something out
00:15:30.040 and because they put an eagle and a flag on it, everyone's going to buy it.
00:15:33.320 You're doing something that is a good product.
00:15:35.660 And I know you did that with Gosnell.
00:15:37.440 What's your message to conservatives that a lot of the time just complain about Hollywood.
00:15:41.940 They complain about the bias, complain about all of that stuff, but don't really do anything
00:15:45.920 to support the work that is out there for them.
00:15:48.900 Well, I mean, you're just, you're terrible, right?
00:15:50.680 You're terrible.
00:15:51.560 You know, if there's a conservative movie out there and you can't go to it, buy a ticket
00:15:56.040 online. If there's a conservative book out there, buy the book, give it to someone as
00:16:01.580 a gift. You know, I mean, it breaks my heart.
00:16:06.780 You see billionaires, conservative billionaires giving 40 million to the Lincoln Center for
00:16:12.260 the Arts to make product that's attacking them.
00:16:16.000 Stop funding. Stop funding Harvard.
00:16:18.460 Stop giving money to your alma mater to attack America.
00:16:21.720 Fund projects like ours.
00:16:23.100 Fund your podcast.
00:16:24.300 You know, start your own podcast.
00:16:28.120 But people who don't fund and don't buy books and don't buy DVDs and don't buy, I mean, there's
00:16:35.820 a movie on there at the moment, Infidel.
00:16:38.360 It's in 200 theaters.
00:16:39.960 Maybe you can't go, but you should buy a ticket, you know, and you could find it's the number
00:16:46.220 one movie of the weekend.
00:16:47.500 And suddenly, when it's number one, the great thing about, you know, people, when they hear
00:16:51.940 something's number one, they automatically want to go and see it, even liberals.
00:16:56.220 So you've got to make it the number one.
00:16:58.520 You've got to make it.
00:16:59.340 Nothing succeeds like success.
00:17:00.920 So let's make it a success.
00:17:02.320 Well said, and I appreciate the plug to my show as well.
00:17:05.900 Certainly people can contribute to that, but I also very much encourage them to head on
00:17:09.680 over to ObamagateMovie.com, and we'll have a link up there on the screen right now, and
00:17:15.080 chip in a few bucks if you can to Anne McElhenney's and Phelan McAleer's latest project.
00:17:19.720 Looking forward to it.
00:17:20.780 Phelan, thank you so much.
00:17:21.920 I really appreciate it.
00:17:23.300 Thanks, Andrew.
00:17:23.960 All the best.
00:17:24.440 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:17:26.560 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.