00:00:09.000We 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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00:02:54.000Because they say they interfered with the 2016 election.
00:02:59.000Donald Trump's first term was largely taken from him, was largely stolen from him.
00:03:04.000In 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.
00:03:12.000The Republican House and the Republican Senate both had Russia investigations ongoing.
00:03:16.000They were investigating their own president.
00:03:20.000Remember, Jeff Sessions recused himself in March of 2017, March 2nd, 2017.
00:03:26.000So President Donald Trump did not even have his own attorney general.
00:03:33.000And 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.
00:03:46.000Republicans led this against Donald Trump.
00:03:50.000So we go back into this moment in Trump 1.0.
00:03:54.000We did not have, he was fighting like mad to try to secure the border and do all this.
00:03:59.000But every hour on the hour, another Russia lie came to the surface.
00:04:04.000President Donald Trump had to push back the salvos that were coming from Capitol Hill.
00:04:10.000And you're seeing on your screen, this was the front page of the New York Times at this moment during the first Trump term.
00:04:16.000Congress reaches deal on Russia sanctions, setting up tough choice for Trump.
00:04:21.000This is before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.
00:04:23.000We were sanctioning Russia based on a lie.
00:04:28.000Donald 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.
00:04:41.000This was all BS, and we are learning that now.
00:04:44.000Tulsi Gabbard, who is doing a phenomenal job as director of national intelligence, she has come out with some bombshell revelations.
00:04:52.000And we're going back into a time warp all the way back into 2016.
00:04:56.000Now, we know that Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump.
00:05:25.000The 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.
00:05:37.000Not 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.
00:05:48.000So the war contractors, the war machine, and the endless military conflict position of D.C. had a new emphasis to focus on.
00:05:59.000Almost overnight, the new inventive narrative was that Donald Trump only won because Russia intervened with fake news and cyber warfare to hack our democracy.
00:06:10.000Every night, Rachel Maddow would get massive numbers.
00:06:14.000She would get four, five, six million people watching her at night when she would just peddle lie after lie after lie.
00:06:22.000Adam Schiff, who is now a U.S. senator, went on television and said that there is verifiable proof.
00:06:30.000Let's get that clip where he said that Donald Trump colluded with the Kremlin.
00:06:34.000The chief driver of the Russia conspiracy theory was a report from the outgoing Obama administration.
00:06:40.000The 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.
00:06:50.000This report justified almost everything that happened in the following year.
00:06:53.000And that's the, let's go back to the front page of the New York Times.
00:06:56.000So the report that the Obama administration did, it was a mine.
00:07:02.000It was a time bomb that was inserted underneath the Trump presidency.
00:07:10.000The report justified almost all of this then.
00:07:13.000It justified the FBI to entrap President Trump and Michael Flynn.
00:07:20.000It justified the years of media hysteria.
00:07:22.000It practically wrecked the first Trump administration right out of the gate.
00:07:25.000The 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.
00:07:34.000And now we know, thanks to Tulsi Gabbard, it was all a fabrication from the beginning.
00:07:40.000Today, Tulsi Gabbard declassified a House Intel Committee report from 2020, which was kept under wraps until now.
00:07:46.000The report across 47 pages reveals in shocking detail how shoddy, inept, and half-baked the original claims of the Russia hoax were.
00:07:55.000Quote, the director of the CIA ordered the post-election publication of 15 reports containing previously collected but unpublished intelligence.
00:08:04.000Three of the reports were substandard, containing information that was unclear of uncertain origin, potentially biased or implausible.
00:08:13.000These three reports became the foundational sources for the intelligence community, saying that their judgments that Trump preferred Putin preferred Trump over Clinton.
00:08:22.000The ICA misrepresented these reports as reliable without mentioning their significant underlying flaws.
00:08:29.000In 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.
00:08:46.000Scant, unclear, unverifiable, substandard, torpedoed a majority of Trump's first administration.
00:09:05.000And 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.
00:09:17.000RussiaGate, that derailed the entire focus of our nation, was a legitimate conspiracy theory.
00:09:24.000It was a legitimate lie in front of us.
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00:12:10.000The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle.
00:12:15.000It is a high confidence judgment of the entire intelligence community.
00:12:19.000It 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.
00:12:27.000Donald Trump knows that the Russians helped him win in 2016.
00:12:31.000There will always be an air of illegitimacy around the 2016 campaign.
00:12:38.000Okay, so this is what's really important.
00:12:40.000Nobody disputes that Russia did some just opaque political digital stuff in the 2016 election.
00:12:50.000But here's the part that Brennan made up, and Hillary repeated it to advance the prospects of Trump being elected.
00:12:56.000That is the mega lie, where he threw out all the evidence.
00:13:01.000Russia wanted to create chaos and distrust.
00:13:33.000So 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.
00:13:43.000Latest on the Robert Mueller Russia investigation.
00:15:14.000Because 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.
00:15:30.000Russia was also sitting on a ton of information.
00:15:33.000This is page 17 of the now declassified House intelligence report.
00:15:38.000Russia was sitting on a huge amount of potential anti-Clinton dirt that it sat on throughout the final days of the 2016 campaign.
00:15:47.000It included internal claims that Hillary was on heavy tranquilizers and suffering from intensified psycho-emotional problems.
00:15:56.000Evidence of severe health ailments like type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
00:16:00.000Internal DNC comms found that Obama and others said that Hillary's health was extraordinarily alarming.
00:16:07.000Evidence of secret meetings with religious leaders where Clinton offered, quote, significant increases in funding from the State Department in return for their support.
00:16:15.000Oh, you mean the same stuff that we accused them of?
00:16:18.000Internal Democrat admissions that European allies were unenthusiastic about a Clinton presidency and thought she was not up to the job of heads of state.
00:16:26.000So 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.
00:16:37.000Instead, Russia did not completely debunk the core assumptions of the Russia hooks.
00:16:42.000Rather, than admit they were wrong, Brennan's CIA buried the info and manufactured a completely alternative reality to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump.
00:16:55.000I 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.
00:17:08.000Gentlemen, let's get real for a second.
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00:18:56.000Let's not take our progress for granted.
00:19:00.000Let's not forget that we were just in a non-stop.
00:19:07.000We were bunkered down at this point in the summer of 17.
00:19:12.000In the summer of 17, we were bunkered down, relentlessly attacked, basically at the abyss at times.
00:19:20.000Remember, Donald Trump was impeached twice in his first term.
00:19:23.000It wrecked the two-year window where we had Congress.
00:19:26.000All they needed after 2018, no house, and then COVID came.
00:19:31.000And 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.
00:19:45.000It's remarkable, and we're in a much better footing.
00:19:47.000Joining us now is Mark Halperin, editor-in-chief of Two Way and host of Next Up on the Megan Kelly Network.
00:19:55.000Mark, can we just go back in time for a little bit?
00:19:57.000I 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.
00:20:06.000And 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.
00:20:16.000Can 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?
00:20:26.000It'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.
00:20:46.000There 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.
00:20:59.000They did stuff, and the Obama administration had to deal with that, number one.
00:21:04.000Number two, there were contacts between some people in the Trump war and Russians that aroused suspicion.
00:21:13.000The reality is, and the Mueller investigation wore this out, this was a hoax.
00:21:19.000This 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.
00:21:34.000And 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.
00:21:47.000And 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.
00:22:07.000Like, what are the people that were the defenders of the Russian narrative?
00:22:11.000I always want our audience to hear both sides in a fair way.
00:22:15.000I don't want, obviously, want them to watch the propagandist networks, but what are the naysayers saying to this story, Mark?
00:22:21.000Well, before I do that, let me say one other thing that I think the left doesn't understand.
00:22:28.000The 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.
00:22:50.000So I tell my friends on the left, you know, you have to understand that these are people who have dirty hands.
00:22:56.000Now, maybe their hands got dirty doing other things, but they've got dirty hands.
00:23:00.000And so you have to understand why there'd be some level of suspicion.
00:23:04.000What are the caveats on the other side?
00:23:05.000First 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.
00:23:13.000She's not only been unclear, she's been sloppy, unspecific.
00:23:17.000And, you know, Sean Spicer on Tuay this morning compared this to the binders for the Epstein matter.
00:23:26.000If 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.
00:23:37.000If 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.
00:23:45.000So one thing is it's not specific and it's sloppy.
00:23:48.000The other thing is, you know, I'm a stickler for this.
00:23:52.000If somebody says laws were broken, I always go right to the first question.
00:23:58.000There'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.
00:24:10.000So before people start talking about indictments and incarceration, let's hear some specific names, specific actions, specific laws that would have been violated.
00:24:20.000Because 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.
00:24:28.000So 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.
00:24:42.000This declassified report today talks a lot about unprofessional behavior.
00:24:47.000And 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.
00:24:57.000I 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.
00:25:11.000It was used as a baseline media narrative tool.
00:25:15.000And 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.
00:25:55.000And it also painted him as a tool of Russia.
00:25:58.000It painted him as a collaborator with Putin.
00:26:01.000Now, you want another mitigating factor.
00:26:05.000To this day, no one's explained why your friend, the president, has talked so favorably about Putin for the last 10 years.
00:26:12.000There are times when it seems tactical, but there are times when it's inexplicable.
00:26:17.000And 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.
00:26:32.000You 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?
00:26:43.000Now, Bill Clinton faced a lot of investigations.
00:26:46.000His 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.
00:26:56.000This is not the first president who has been over investigated.
00:26:59.000But 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.
00:27:32.000And 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.
00:27:46.000It'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.
00:27:53.000But I can tell you without fear of contradiction that no textbook would tell you to do it this way.
00:28:01.000And 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.
00:28:13.000This is just not the way you hold people accountable.
00:28:17.000I believe in a society that's meant to hold people accountable, but say, hold people accountable, but also treat them fairly.
00:28:24.000How would then you would, what is the textbook way?
00:28:28.000And 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.
00:28:35.000And I appreciate the kind of counterfactual.
00:28:37.000I mean, it's not breaking news to you.
00:28:40.000But no, seriously, kind of tell the audience in one minute, how would then you think this should be presented and handled?
00:28:48.000Send 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.
00:28:59.000And 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.
00:29:17.000Here's the story of what happened and why it's a danger and why history must never let this happen again.
00:29:49.000But 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.
00:29:59.000I get very excited about this stuff as a MAGA media guy.
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00:31:00.000So Mark, I want to play this piece of tape.
00:31:03.000And 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.
00:31:13.000In 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.
00:31:32.000I 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.
00:31:41.000The bad news is that it was Donald Trump's other presidency, his first presidency, net approval rating six months in.
00:32:51.000Well, it's a complicated time for polling.
00:32:53.000First 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.
00:33:29.000Even 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?
00:33:38.000So is he being forthcoming, transparent enough?
00:33:40.000Like, I think just a lot of people reflexively say no without really understanding the baseline of comparison.
00:33:47.000If 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?
00:33:56.000I think a lot of people, it's a complicated question.
00:34:30.000So now all the, you know, a lot more of the coverage is bad.
00:34:34.000And it's this sort of mirror image of why is the Democratic Party have a 19% approval rating?
00:34:40.000It's not because Republicans are hating them more.
00:34:43.000It's because Independents and Democrats are hating them more.
00:34:46.000Same 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.
00:34:57.000And on Epstein, there are going to be people who are currently unhappy.
00:35:02.000And again, it doesn't mean if they were voting in election, they wouldn't vote for the president.
00:35:06.000But if they answer a poll, it gives them an opportunity to be negative about the president.
00:35:11.000Now, lastly, I'd say the president has done big things and he's frustrated.
00:35:16.000You 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.
00:35:24.000I'm sure he thinks he should be at his highest approval rating ever.
00:35:27.000But the reality is, even on the big things that he's accomplished, take the reconciliation law.
00:35:33.000There's things in there that are not popular.
00:35:35.000And voters know about some of them or they hear about them, maybe in a misleading way, maybe not.
00:35:40.000But the tariffs, I think the tariff plan is working extremely well, certainly better than all our rich friends thought it would.
00:36:23.000Even on his greatest achievements so far, there's negatives that even some people in his base don't like.
00:36:28.000And the Democrats are united against him.
00:36:29.000And some of the things he's doing are turning off independents.
00:36:32.000So he's going to have to sell it better.
00:36:34.000But 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.
00:36:42.000And then finally, I'd say this president has a pretty rock-solid floor in polling support and a pretty rock-solid ceiling.
00:36:50.000The people who like him are going to like him no matter what.
00:36:52.000And there's a limit on the people who will ever like him.
00:36:55.000So 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.
00:37:03.000But I don't think that's fundamentally going to shift things.
00:37:05.000And I'll say finally, he's not running for re-election.
00:37:09.000Now, 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.
00:37:17.000So I don't pay much attention to the polls right now because what does it mean?
00:37:23.000It'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.
00:37:30.000But in terms of having any actual sort of meaning or impacting the world, I think it's pretty limited right now.