The Charlie Kirk Show - Russiagate Returns, Eight Years Later

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio.

00:00:04.000 A comprehensive review of what is Russia gave?

00:00:08.000 What was this?

00:00:09.000 We go back eight years meticulously of where we were eight years ago during Trump 1.0, and we make the argument that we are not just in a far better place, but the place that we are in was created and manufactured by the intel agencies against the American people.

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00:00:45.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:46.000 Here, we go.

00:00:47.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:49.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:51.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:54.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:58.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:59.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:00.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

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00:01:46.000 Where were we at this point in Trump 1.0?

00:01:49.000 We are now in the midst of Trump 2.0.

00:01:51.000 We are getting trade deals.

00:01:52.000 We have a secure border.

00:01:53.000 We got a tax cut.

00:01:54.000 We got incredible funding for mass deportations.

00:01:57.000 We're doing mass deportations.

00:01:59.000 We're ending wars between the Congo and Rwanda, between Pakistan and India, between Israel and Iran.

00:02:06.000 We have incredible trade deals that are coming through with Japan.

00:02:10.000 But where were we at this moment back in July of 2017?

00:02:17.000 I went to the New York Times archive page, which is fun to do.

00:02:21.000 Kind of see what was on the front page of the newspapers back during Trump 1.0.

00:02:27.000 It's almost looking through a time capsule.

00:02:29.000 Front page of the New York Times exactly eight years ago today.

00:02:33.000 As Congress aims to punish Russia, Trump faces bind.

00:02:38.000 You read this article, it's remarkable.

00:02:39.000 Put up 366.

00:02:41.000 Congress's number one focus, while we had a Republican House and a Republican Senate during Trump 1.0 was to punish Russia.

00:02:52.000 Why?

00:02:54.000 Because they say they interfered with the 2016 election.

00:02:59.000 Donald Trump's first term was largely taken from him, was largely stolen from him.

00:03:04.000 In fact, if we want to talk about the stolen presidency, we should be talking about what happened in the first, second, and third year of the Trump administration.

00:03:12.000 The Republican House and the Republican Senate both had Russia investigations ongoing.

00:03:16.000 They were investigating their own president.

00:03:20.000 Remember, Jeff Sessions recused himself in March of 2017, March 2nd, 2017.

00:03:26.000 So President Donald Trump did not even have his own attorney general.

00:03:30.000 He never should have recused himself.

00:03:31.000 It was a terrible mistake.

00:03:33.000 And then Bob Mueller was appointed as a special counsel in May of 2017 to basically be able to marauder around after all allies around the Trump administration.

00:03:46.000 Republicans led this against Donald Trump.

00:03:50.000 So we go back into this moment in Trump 1.0.

00:03:53.000 We were not doing trade deals.

00:03:54.000 We did not have, he was fighting like mad to try to secure the border and do all this.

00:03:59.000 But every hour on the hour, another Russia lie came to the surface. 0.54

00:04:04.000 President Donald Trump had to push back the salvos that were coming from Capitol Hill.

00:04:10.000 And you're seeing on your screen, this was the front page of the New York Times at this moment during the first Trump term.

00:04:16.000 Congress reaches deal on Russia sanctions, setting up tough choice for Trump.

00:04:21.000 This is before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

00:04:23.000 We were sanctioning Russia based on a lie. 0.80

00:04:28.000 Donald Trump was fighting as hard as he's ever fought to just keep his head above water, let alone do trade deals or put forward some sort of monumental or significant policy agenda.

00:04:41.000 This was all BS, and we are learning that now.

00:04:44.000 Tulsi Gabbard, who is doing a phenomenal job as director of national intelligence, she has come out with some bombshell revelations.

00:04:52.000 And we're going back into a time warp all the way back into 2016.

00:04:56.000 Now, we know that Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump.

00:04:59.000 It was a big upset.

00:05:00.000 There was a major election forecaster who said he would eat a bug if he was wrong about Clinton winning, and then he had to go eat a bug.

00:05:06.000 Hillary's loss was shocking and humiliating.

00:05:09.000 And when politicians get humiliated, they go hunting for excuses. 0.98

00:05:13.000 They never take ownership for their decisions.

00:05:15.000 They never assume personal responsibility.

00:05:18.000 And what was the excuse that they decided to communicate?

00:05:23.000 What was the consensus excuse?

00:05:25.000 The consensus excuse was Russia, because that excuse had multiple benefits for the D.C. ruling class, had multiple benefits for the Uniparty Republicans and Uniparty Democrats.

00:05:37.000 Not only was Russia very hatable for the octogenarian 88-year-old senator who still thinks the Cold War is going on, but it allowed for a new theater for the neocons to create a new war.

00:05:48.000 So the war contractors, the war machine, and the endless military conflict position of D.C. had a new emphasis to focus on.

00:05:59.000 Almost overnight, the new inventive narrative was that Donald Trump only won because Russia intervened with fake news and cyber warfare to hack our democracy.

00:06:10.000 Every night, Rachel Maddow would get massive numbers.

00:06:14.000 She would get four, five, six million people watching her at night when she would just peddle lie after lie after lie.

00:06:22.000 Adam Schiff, who is now a U.S. senator, went on television and said that there is verifiable proof.

00:06:30.000 Let's get that clip where he said that Donald Trump colluded with the Kremlin.

00:06:34.000 The chief driver of the Russia conspiracy theory was a report from the outgoing Obama administration.

00:06:40.000 The report published in January of 2017 claimed that Russia extensively interfered in the 2016 election with the explicit goal of defeating Hillary Clinton and getting Trump elected.

00:06:50.000 This report justified almost everything that happened in the following year.

00:06:53.000 And that's the, let's go back to the front page of the New York Times.

00:06:56.000 So the report that the Obama administration did, it was a mine.

00:07:02.000 It was a time bomb that was inserted underneath the Trump presidency.

00:07:10.000 The report justified almost all of this then.

00:07:13.000 It justified the FBI to entrap President Trump and Michael Flynn.

00:07:18.000 It justified the Mueller probe.

00:07:20.000 It justified the years of media hysteria.

00:07:22.000 It practically wrecked the first Trump administration right out of the gate.

00:07:25.000 The fact that Trump got anything done in the first administration while having to deal with all this garbage from our own Intel services is a remarkable accomplishment.

00:07:34.000 And now we know, thanks to Tulsi Gabbard, it was all a fabrication from the beginning.

00:07:40.000 Today, Tulsi Gabbard declassified a House Intel Committee report from 2020, which was kept under wraps until now.

00:07:46.000 The report across 47 pages reveals in shocking detail how shoddy, inept, and half-baked the original claims of the Russia hoax were.

00:07:55.000 Quote, the director of the CIA ordered the post-election publication of 15 reports containing previously collected but unpublished intelligence.

00:08:04.000 Three of the reports were substandard, containing information that was unclear of uncertain origin, potentially biased or implausible.

00:08:13.000 These three reports became the foundational sources for the intelligence community, saying that their judgments that Trump preferred Putin preferred Trump over Clinton.

00:08:22.000 The ICA misrepresented these reports as reliable without mentioning their significant underlying flaws.

00:08:29.000 In fact, the claim that Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the election was based entirely on one quote: quote, one scant, unclear, unverifiable, scant, unclear, unverifiable fragment of a sentence from just one of the substandard reports.

00:08:46.000 Scant, unclear, unverifiable, substandard, torpedoed a majority of Trump's first administration.

00:08:53.000 This is what RussiaGate was based on.

00:08:56.000 And for those of you that don't remember this, I want to bring you back into that moment.

00:09:00.000 We had a special counselor, Bob Mueller.

00:09:02.000 We didn't have an attorney general.

00:09:04.000 It's all the media cared about.

00:09:05.000 And there were sanctions of a foreign country that we were preparing to go to war against, a kinetic part of a major war against Russia, all based on a lie from the Intel services.

00:09:17.000 RussiaGate, that derailed the entire focus of our nation, was a legitimate conspiracy theory. 0.96

00:09:24.000 It was a legitimate lie in front of us.

00:09:27.000 They bugged Trump's phone calls.

00:09:29.000 They impeached Donald Trump because of a phone call to Zelensky.

00:09:33.000 A fragment of a sentence from one low-quality intelligence report of unclear origin.

00:09:38.000 That's the only evidence the CIA ever had for Vladimir Putin wanting Trump to win in 2016.

00:09:44.000 But that did not stop the entire Democrat pace from getting behind it.

00:09:47.000 It did not stop Rachel Maddow from getting record numbers every single night.

00:09:51.000 It did not stop the Democrat Party from saying that the Republican Party was infiltrated with Russian influence.

00:09:57.000 It did not stop the New York Times and every major outlet to drumbeat every day.

00:10:02.000 It was a soft coup against popular sovereignty and against the will of the American people.

00:10:06.000 You could make an argument that the first Trump administration was largely stolen from the American people.

00:10:11.000 Yes, President Trump was allowed to remain as president, but he had to fight with every ounce of energy he had just to be able to survive.

00:10:21.000 And we, the people, got hosed.

00:10:23.000 I think it's time for people to go to jail for this.

00:10:26.000 This is far worse than a 75-year-old grandma walking into the U.S. Capitol on January 6th and saying a prayer with a pocket constitution. 0.84

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00:11:41.000 So much of Trump 1.0 was taken from us.

00:11:47.000 Here's James Comey, John Brennan, and Hillary Clinton peddling what they knew was a lie.

00:11:52.000 Brennan is easily the number one villain in this declassified report. 0.84

00:11:57.000 He is a sinister human being.

00:11:59.000 All roads lead back to John Brennan. 0.76

00:12:03.000 He basically took the intelligence and shaped it into a Trump hit job.

00:12:08.000 Let's play Cut 365, please.

00:12:10.000 The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle.

00:12:15.000 It is a high confidence judgment of the entire intelligence community.

00:12:19.000 It was Russia in a very systematic way and tried to interfere in the election and to try to advance the prospects of Donald Trump being elected.

00:12:27.000 Donald Trump knows that the Russians helped him win in 2016.

00:12:31.000 There will always be an air of illegitimacy around the 2016 campaign.

00:12:38.000 Okay, so this is what's really important.

00:12:40.000 Nobody disputes that Russia did some just opaque political digital stuff in the 2016 election.

00:12:50.000 But here's the part that Brennan made up, and Hillary repeated it to advance the prospects of Trump being elected.

00:12:56.000 That is the mega lie, where he threw out all the evidence.

00:13:01.000 Russia wanted to create chaos and distrust. 0.91

00:13:04.000 Mission accomplished.

00:13:04.000 Good job, Democrats.

00:13:06.000 So apparent John Brennan, again, that's not in front of Congress.

00:13:10.000 He's there on MSNBC in 2019, peddling a grotesque lie.

00:13:18.000 And the consequences of it was non-stop media obsession.

00:13:23.000 Non-stop.

00:13:24.000 And there's another consequence as well.

00:13:27.000 One that's right in front of us that's still happening to this day.

00:13:31.000 Let's first play Cut 368.

00:13:33.000 So disappointing to look at what we're seeing from right-wing media these days where there's such an obsession with the deep state and these revelations about the Russia probe.

00:13:43.000 Latest on the Robert Mueller Russia investigation.

00:13:45.000 Mueller investigation.

00:13:46.000 The Russian investigation, Trump's Russia ties, and Robert Mueller.

00:13:48.000 The real Russia story.

00:13:50.000 Russia probe.

00:13:50.000 The ongoing Russia probe.

00:13:51.000 Russia probe.

00:13:52.000 The Russian investigation.

00:13:53.000 But Mueller and the Russia probe.

00:13:54.000 Russia synergies.

00:13:56.000 They wonder if Russia has compromising information on the president.

00:13:59.000 What is the source for the president's claim that they have found no collusion with Russia?

00:14:03.000 He misspelled collusion.

00:14:04.000 Every day we're trying to keep track of the drip, drip, drip of the Russia investigation.

00:14:08.000 Drip, drip, Trump and Russia to see whether Trump was secretly working for Russia.

00:14:16.000 And that's just a little taste of one anchor on one show on one network.

00:14:21.000 Multiply that times a thousand for every single day.

00:14:25.000 And I only do this to bring you back into the time and place.

00:14:28.000 And now we look at Trump 2.0.

00:14:31.000 And we're getting trade deals and we're securing border and we're getting tax cuts.

00:14:34.000 And of course, we have so much more to do.

00:14:36.000 And they did that relentlessly for years because they needed to find an excuse.

00:14:41.000 But understand that sanctioning a country is a big deal.

00:14:45.000 So Congress went about to sanction Russia for something Russia did not ultimately do.

00:14:54.000 Yeah, they wanted to sow chaos and distraction, even though it was a very small amount.

00:14:59.000 And Iran does this and the Chinese Communist Party does this in their own way.

00:15:04.000 Is the current hot war between Russia and Ukraine and the West's involvement of it, is it connected to Russia gate?

00:15:12.000 Almost certainly.

00:15:14.000 Because Russia was the blame, was the filler-in excuse as to why Donald Trump became president, which then gave the Democrat Party license to be able to finance the Ukrainian effort, war effort.

00:15:30.000 Russia was also sitting on a ton of information.

00:15:33.000 This is page 17 of the now declassified House intelligence report.

00:15:38.000 Russia was sitting on a huge amount of potential anti-Clinton dirt that it sat on throughout the final days of the 2016 campaign.

00:15:47.000 It included internal claims that Hillary was on heavy tranquilizers and suffering from intensified psycho-emotional problems.

00:15:54.000 We suspected that.

00:15:56.000 Evidence of severe health ailments like type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

00:16:00.000 Internal DNC comms found that Obama and others said that Hillary's health was extraordinarily alarming.

00:16:07.000 Evidence of secret meetings with religious leaders where Clinton offered, quote, significant increases in funding from the State Department in return for their support.

00:16:15.000 Oh, you mean the same stuff that we accused them of?

00:16:18.000 Internal Democrat admissions that European allies were unenthusiastic about a Clinton presidency and thought she was not up to the job of heads of state.

00:16:26.000 So if Russia was really all in on supporting Trump and hurting Clinton, it would have leaked information in October 2016 when her lead in the RCP average slipped to just plus 1.3 points.

00:16:37.000 Instead, Russia did not completely debunk the core assumptions of the Russia hooks.

00:16:42.000 Rather, than admit they were wrong, Brennan's CIA buried the info and manufactured a completely alternative reality to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump.

00:16:55.000 I say this for many reasons, but one that I want to repeat: let's be grateful to God at how much better of a place we are on July 23rd, 2025 than we were in 2017.

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00:18:25.000 Let me just kind of take a step back, though, and reiterate the significance of not having a first six months derailed.

00:18:34.000 You can have reasonable disagreements with the Trump administration.

00:18:37.000 Nobody agrees on everything.

00:18:40.000 But look at the successes and the victories.

00:18:43.000 And I want to push back on just how some people are overly dooming.

00:18:47.000 Oh, you know, I wish one, two, three, four that was happening.

00:18:50.000 We have a secure border.

00:18:52.000 We have an amazing tax cut package.

00:18:54.000 We need to get more spending cuts.

00:18:55.000 Totally agree.

00:18:56.000 Let's not take our progress for granted.

00:19:00.000 Let's not forget that we were just in a non-stop.

00:19:07.000 We were bunkered down at this point in the summer of 17.

00:19:12.000 In the summer of 17, we were bunkered down, relentlessly attacked, basically at the abyss at times.

00:19:20.000 Remember, Donald Trump was impeached twice in his first term.

00:19:23.000 It wrecked the two-year window where we had Congress.

00:19:26.000 All they needed after 2018, no house, and then COVID came.

00:19:31.000 And you look at the first Trump term, what he was able to get done with Russia, Mueller, all of the internal investigations, plus COVID, plus two impeachments.

00:19:45.000 It's remarkable, and we're in a much better footing.

00:19:47.000 Joining us now is Mark Halperin, editor-in-chief of Two Way and host of Next Up on the Megan Kelly Network.

00:19:53.000 Mark, great to see you.

00:19:54.000 Thank you for taking the time.

00:19:55.000 Mark, can we just go back in time for a little bit?

00:19:57.000 I went back and I looked at the front page of the New York Times back on this date in 2017, July 23rd, 2017, and it was all Russia.

00:20:06.000 And in fact, it was so much so that it was that Congress was passing sanctions to try to punish Russia for their interference in the 2017 and the 2016 election.

00:20:16.000 Can you just remind some of our younger people in the audience, Mark, of how overwhelming the Russian interference narrative was, especially in the first year of the Trump presidency?

00:20:26.000 It's hard to explain to someone who didn't live through it because the degree to which it's all the press wanted to cover and talk about and the degree to which the president's attention was to Biden, his ability to get his message out.

00:20:42.000 Now, there's some caveats.

00:20:46.000 There was a Russian attempt to interfere with the election, and that's a serious thing to have our biggest adversary use America's freedom, America's openness to take advantage of the capacity to use social media, et cetera, acting.

00:20:59.000 They did stuff, and the Obama administration had to deal with that, number one.

00:21:04.000 Number two, there were contacts between some people in the Trump war and Russians that aroused suspicion.

00:21:12.000 But those are the caveats.

00:21:13.000 The reality is, and the Mueller investigation wore this out, this was a hoax.

00:21:19.000 This was an attempt to, partly because of Trump derangement syndrome, explain to the tens of millions of Americans who to this day can't understand how their fellow countrymen and women would vote for Donald Trump.

00:21:32.000 They needed an explanation.

00:21:34.000 And they channeled their belief that Russia won the election for Donald Trump into a massive media and congressional and legal investigation into not just Donald Trump, but everyone around him.

00:21:47.000 And the reason I think this is so resonant on the right is because imagine that happening to a Democratic president and how outraged the media would be if a Democratic president was simply swallowed up for something that turned out to be a hoax.

00:22:03.000 What is the counter to this?

00:22:04.000 What are the naysayers saying?

00:22:07.000 Like, what are the people that were the defenders of the Russian narrative?

00:22:11.000 I always want our audience to hear both sides in a fair way.

00:22:15.000 I don't want, obviously, want them to watch the propagandist networks, but what are the naysayers saying to this story, Mark?

00:22:21.000 Well, before I do that, let me say one other thing that I think the left doesn't understand.

00:22:28.000 The people involved in this, both directly by the narrative of the Attorney General and indirectly, people like Brennan, people like Adam Schiff, they have a documented history of using their expertise in an access to intelligence information to tell public untruths to try to destroy Donald Trump.

00:22:50.000 So I tell my friends on the left, you know, you have to understand that these are people who have dirty hands.

00:22:56.000 Now, maybe their hands got dirty doing other things, but they've got dirty hands.

00:23:00.000 And so you have to understand why there'd be some level of suspicion.

00:23:04.000 What are the caveats on the other side?

00:23:05.000 First of all, the attorney general has not only been unclear, but she's been, I'm sorry, not the attorney general, the director of national intelligence.

00:23:13.000 She's not only been unclear, she's been sloppy, unspecific.

00:23:17.000 And, you know, Sean Spicer on Tuay this morning compared this to the binders for the Epstein matter.

00:23:26.000 If you're going to do something that you purport to be extremely serious, and the charges she's making are obviously extremely serious, and the president's picked them up and said this could lead to the indictment of a former president.

00:23:37.000 If you're going to do that, this can't be done in this vague, shadowy, you know, send a few tweets, go on a few cable hits away.

00:23:45.000 So one thing is it's not specific and it's sloppy.

00:23:48.000 The other thing is, you know, I'm a stickler for this.

00:23:52.000 If somebody says laws were broken, I always go right to the first question.

00:23:56.000 What were the laws?

00:23:57.000 What laws were broken?

00:23:58.000 There's lots of behavior by people in government and out of government that's immoral, hurtful, deceitful, but it doesn't necessarily violate a law.

00:24:10.000 So before people start talking about indictments and incarceration, let's hear some specific names, specific actions, specific laws that would have been violated.

00:24:20.000 Because I'll say again, I know lots of things Adam Schiff did that shouldn't have done, but I don't know that they violated any law.

00:24:28.000 So what would then the counter to that would be, and I'm looking at the Washington Post's fact check, they say the seditious conspiracy claim is based on thin grueling something.

00:24:42.000 This declassified report today talks a lot about unprofessional behavior.

00:24:47.000 And I suppose why I am so fired up about this and animated about it, and you're right, we have to be very methodical and precise as we proceed.

00:24:54.000 And I love Tulsi.

00:24:55.000 I think she's doing a phenomenal job.

00:24:57.000 I will say, though, the reason why I get so worked up about this and the audience is because of how this got so wildly out of control to derail the first term of the Trump presidency.

00:25:11.000 It was used as a baseline media narrative tool.

00:25:15.000 And so in some ways, the crime, the consequences was even greater than the initial Intel report crime, which became a overwhelming, not just a distraction, but impediment for Trump's ability to govern for many months.

00:25:34.000 Your thoughts, Mark Helper?

00:25:36.000 Something was stolen from him and from his supporters and from the country that shouldn't have been stolen.

00:25:44.000 The most precious thing a president has is time.

00:25:47.000 The most precious thing.

00:25:49.000 And again, as you say, it subsumed his presidency.

00:25:53.000 It didn't just distract him.

00:25:55.000 And it also painted him as a tool of Russia.

00:25:58.000 It painted him as a collaborator with Putin.

00:26:01.000 Now, you want another mitigating factor.

00:26:05.000 To this day, no one's explained why your friend, the president, has talked so favorably about Putin for the last 10 years.

00:26:12.000 There are times when it seems tactical, but there are times when it's inexplicable.

00:26:17.000 And so I think that as much as I've thought about all the costs that he incurred and the administration incurred, and as much as he's thought about it, it's incalculable.

00:26:32.000 You literally can't go back and do the counterfactual to say, had he not spent all this time dealing with the investigations and the press questions and the legal and the bandwidth, what might he have done in the first term?

00:26:43.000 Now, Bill Clinton faced a lot of investigations.

00:26:46.000 His adversaries would say he brought them on himself, but some of the investigations, like Whitewater, Whitewater itself, not the things that grew out of it, same thing.

00:26:56.000 This is not the first president who has been over investigated.

00:26:59.000 But in this case, I mean, it's hard to justify what happened on any level, even being prudent, even taking into account what he said about Putin, even taking into account some of the other contacts there were with Russia.

00:27:12.000 And there were some contacts.

00:27:14.000 But I say again, those mistakes weren't necessarily a crime.

00:27:21.000 They were political, politically harmful.

00:27:26.000 But I don't know.

00:27:27.000 I just don't know the crimes were committed.

00:27:29.000 But I also, I don't want to be misunderstood.

00:27:31.000 There might have been.

00:27:32.000 And I know you're a supporter and friend of Tulsi Gabbard, but this is not the way you present to the country allegations that a former president and his top aides broke the law.

00:27:46.000 It's just, it's not a partisan statement, and it's not even being, it's not speaking to the underlying charges because I just don't know.

00:27:53.000 But I can tell you without fear of contradiction that no textbook would tell you to do it this way.

00:28:01.000 And what you might gain in a few days' headlines and excitable activity on X, you lose in terms of, I think, credibility to some extent, but also in terms of doing it right.

00:28:13.000 This is just not the way you hold people accountable.

00:28:17.000 I believe in a society that's meant to hold people accountable, but say, hold people accountable, but also treat them fairly.

00:28:24.000 How would then you would, what is the textbook way?

00:28:28.000 And that's not even a, it's not a sarcastic question because I've been enjoying all this, as you would imagine, as a podcaster and MAGA guy.

00:28:35.000 And I appreciate the kind of counterfactual.

00:28:37.000 I mean, it's not breaking news to you.

00:28:40.000 But no, seriously, kind of tell the audience in one minute, how would then you think this should be presented and handled?

00:28:47.000 I don't need a minute.

00:28:48.000 Send a quiet, private referral to the Department of Justice, to the applicable prosecutors of the Department of Justice and say, based on the facts that we've unearthed, there needs to be a criminal investigation here.

00:28:59.000 And if they decide there's no criminal charges, but it's still something that should be exposed, write a comprehensive report, invite all the media, even the biased liberal media, into a room and slowly, methodically, carefully, and clearly say, we found the Justice Department found no laws broken.

00:29:17.000 Here's the story of what happened and why it's a danger and why history must never let this happen again.

00:29:22.000 That's not what she did.

00:29:23.000 I'm not a dumb guy.

00:29:25.000 I'm reading everything she says.

00:29:27.000 I can't summarize for you what she's saying.

00:29:30.000 It's not clear.

00:29:31.000 I will say, though, and I don't want to spend too much time on this guy.

00:29:34.000 I do want to get your thoughts on some of this polling.

00:29:37.000 I will say, I think the declassified report today is great.

00:29:40.000 And I think it's important that people get a chance to read it.

00:29:43.000 And it turns out five years ago, it was obvious that Russia Gate was BS and fake.

00:29:48.000 And so why wasn't it public then?

00:29:49.000 But Mark, the reason I love having you on the show is that I think it's really important for the audience to hear a broader perspective on this because, hey, I'll be honest.

00:29:59.000 I get very excited about this stuff as a MAGA media guy.

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00:31:00.000 So Mark, I want to play this piece of tape.

00:31:03.000 And it is Harry Enton from CNN who has a series of very negative polls about the president that I'm not sure how accurate or inaccurate they are.

00:31:13.000 In fact, that's going to be part of my question after I play the tape is how accurate actually are the mid the interim polling during a presidency.

00:31:24.000 So I want to play this here.

00:31:25.000 Let's play cut 376.

00:31:27.000 And then I want to get your reaction, Mark Halperin, to say, is there some shreds of truth to this?

00:31:30.000 We trust this play cut 376.

00:31:32.000 I do have one piece of good news for Donald Trump, and that there is one other presidency that has a lower net approval rating at this point than this one.

00:31:41.000 The bad news is that it was Donald Trump's other presidency, his first presidency, net approval rating six months in.

00:31:47.000 The worst was in 2017.

00:31:49.000 Donald Trump was 16 points underwater.

00:31:51.000 The second worst, however, is this Donald Trump presidency, 11 points underwater.

00:31:56.000 The average president at this point since 1953 has a plus 27 net approval rating.

00:32:04.000 John, do some quick myth with me.

00:32:05.000 It seems to me that Donald Trump is about 40 points lower than the average president at this particular point.

00:32:11.000 He has the second worst net approval rating at this point.

00:32:13.000 He is underwater on all the major issues of the day.

00:32:16.000 The bottom line is six months into this administration.

00:32:19.000 I think that most Americans would apply the word or words disaster, terrible, awful, horrible.

00:32:29.000 Okay.

00:32:30.000 So I think that's, I think the end of it is a little bit wrong.

00:32:35.000 Disaster.

00:32:36.000 Over the horrible.

00:32:37.000 Terrible.

00:32:39.000 I don't think that's right by any means.

00:32:40.000 But I only play that as a nice provocative conversation start.

00:32:44.000 I don't think that's true.

00:32:45.000 Mark, how accurate is this polling?

00:32:47.000 And is there any data that you think our audience should be aware of?

00:32:50.000 Mark Halperin.

00:32:51.000 Well, it's a complicated time for polling.

00:32:53.000 First of all, Harry Enton's a friend of mine, and I'm a pretty decent mimic, but I never try to imitate Harry because that thing is just a beast of its own.

00:33:01.000 I don't understand that voice.

00:33:04.000 So let's just talk sort of 101 here on polling.

00:33:08.000 First of all, a lot of the issues that are being polled now, you know, it's a truism in polling.

00:33:14.000 It depends on how you ask it, right?

00:33:16.000 How do you phrase the question?

00:33:17.000 A lot of the issues at stake now, I think it's very difficult to poll and get people.

00:33:22.000 So you say, is the president being forthcoming enough about Epstein?

00:33:28.000 Who would say yes?

00:33:29.000 Even if unless you're following it really closely and you make some sort of Solomon-like judgment, like are Americans' attitude towards their presidents and the government be more open?

00:33:38.000 So is he being forthcoming, transparent enough?

00:33:40.000 Like, I think just a lot of people reflexively say no without really understanding the baseline of comparison.

00:33:46.000 Same with immigration. 0.54

00:33:47.000 If you say, should people who have never broken the, you know, broken an additional law and they're here and they're contributing to the economy, should they be deported?

00:33:56.000 I think a lot of people, it's a complicated question.

00:33:58.000 It's like sort of depends.

00:34:00.000 You know, what are the other options?

00:34:01.000 So I think a lot of the issues that are front and center are difficult to poll.

00:34:05.000 That's number one.

00:34:06.000 Number two, the president's got a lot of bad news coverage.

00:34:09.000 Now, he always gets bad news coverage from the liberal press, right?

00:34:12.000 Almost always.

00:34:13.000 Now he's getting bad coverage from, you know, if you're pardoned, the shorthand people like you, right?

00:34:18.000 So, so just the general.

00:34:23.000 I don't mean from others in an ecosystem.

00:34:26.000 Yeah, I don't mean you.

00:34:27.000 I mean people like you, not you.

00:34:30.000 So now all the, you know, a lot more of the coverage is bad.

00:34:34.000 And it's this sort of mirror image of why is the Democratic Party have a 19% approval rating?

00:34:40.000 It's not because Republicans are hating them more.

00:34:43.000 It's because Independents and Democrats are hating them more.

00:34:46.000 Same thing's happening with the president on Ukraine, on Iran for some maybe, on immigration for some maybe, where he's talked about a path to legal status for some people who came here illegally.

00:34:57.000 And on Epstein, there are going to be people who are currently unhappy.

00:35:02.000 And again, it doesn't mean if they were voting in election, they wouldn't vote for the president.

00:35:06.000 But if they answer a poll, it gives them an opportunity to be negative about the president.

00:35:10.000 Okay.

00:35:11.000 Now, lastly, I'd say the president has done big things and he's frustrated.

00:35:16.000 You and I both know it that he's not, that the conversation is about Epstein and other things that he doesn't want to be about, and that the polls are not great.

00:35:24.000 I'm sure he thinks he should be at his highest approval rating ever.

00:35:27.000 But the reality is, even on the big things that he's accomplished, take the reconciliation law.

00:35:33.000 There's things in there that are not popular.

00:35:35.000 And voters know about some of them or they hear about them, maybe in a misleading way, maybe not.

00:35:40.000 But the tariffs, I think the tariff plan is working extremely well, certainly better than all our rich friends thought it would.

00:35:47.000 But I totally agree with you.

00:35:50.000 Some prices are up.

00:35:51.000 Bombing Iran seems very successful, very bold at a minimum. 1.00

00:35:55.000 And yet some people think don't get entangled with the Middle East.

00:35:59.000 Immigration, the borders closed, but some people don't like the way the way the current deportation operations are going.

00:36:08.000 So even if his greatest successes.

00:36:11.000 Yep.

00:36:11.000 Yes, sir.

00:36:12.000 I know you got a dash in a second.

00:36:13.000 Just finish your thought, two minutes.

00:36:15.000 And also, in your experience, what can bring those numbers down or up that we should keep our eyes on?

00:36:21.000 Final thoughts, Mark Halperin.

00:36:23.000 Even on his greatest achievements so far, there's negatives that even some people in his base don't like.

00:36:28.000 And the Democrats are united against him.

00:36:29.000 And some of the things he's doing are turning off independents.

00:36:32.000 So he's going to have to sell it better.

00:36:34.000 But again, he's selling it in an environment where the press, including a lot of the conservative press, is focused on things that people aren't delighted with.

00:36:42.000 And then finally, I'd say this president has a pretty rock-solid floor in polling support and a pretty rock-solid ceiling.

00:36:50.000 The people who like him are going to like him no matter what.

00:36:52.000 And there's a limit on the people who will ever like him.

00:36:55.000 So while we're seeing now, there's no doubt the polling for him is negative, including a lot of issues where he would say it should be much more positive.

00:37:03.000 But I don't think that's fundamentally going to shift things.

00:37:05.000 And I'll say finally, he's not running for re-election.

00:37:09.000 Now, the midterms could be and historically would be dependent to some extent, the outcome on his polling, but that's more than a year away.

00:37:17.000 So I don't pay much attention to the polls right now because what does it mean?

00:37:21.000 It's something to talk about.

00:37:23.000 It's something that maybe his team will say, well, we need a misforce correction because your policy is not as popular as we thought it would be.

00:37:30.000 But in terms of having any actual sort of meaning or impacting the world, I think it's pretty limited right now.

00:37:36.000 Mark Halperin, I know you got a dash.

00:37:38.000 We're going to have you back on soon.

00:37:39.000 Thank you so much.

00:37:40.000 Everyone, email us freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:37:42.000 MarkTerrific28TV.

00:37:44.000 Come back anytime.

00:37:44.000 Thanks so much.

00:37:45.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:37:47.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:37:49.000 Thanks so much for listening and God bless.

00:37:53.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - July 23, 2025

Russiagate Returns, Eight Years Later

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