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00:01:28.000Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:30.000I am honored to be joined today with Carter Page.
00:01:35.000Carter, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:36.000You have a new book called Abuse and Power.
00:01:39.000And on kind of the press release you have that you've sent out, you say, what happened to me should never happen to another American ever again.
00:01:49.000And while most Americans do know what happened to you, we have a lot of younger listeners that have just become aware of politics in the last couple months.
00:01:56.000Can you give us the short version of what you have been through, which is nothing short of hell in the last couple of years?
00:02:03.000Charlie, I think what I've been through is very similar to what so many Americans have been through more recently.
00:02:10.000As we've seen with a lot of unrest and a lot of aggressive actions by very various Democrat operatives over the course, you know, throughout this year, unfortunately, there is a big operation by the Democrat Party to essentially come after me with a lot of disinformation, which then was used.
00:02:34.000So they distributed a number of Democrat operatives, distributed it through the mainstream media.
00:02:52.000And what President Trump has been talking about over the years since is exactly what happened.
00:02:58.000Essentially, they used this disinformation campaign to work in conjunction with the Obama-Biden administration prior to the last presidential election and get authorization to spy on myself as a way of infiltrating the Trump campaign.
00:03:18.000So you worked with investigators through the Justice Department, but they still forged evidence against you.
00:03:27.000Well, there's a lot that keeps coming out.
00:03:31.000Several top members of Congress and members of the Justice Department, including the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General, have uncovered a lot of evidence that much of this information, which was being sent in by the Democrat operatives, was then used to totally misportray me.
00:03:54.000I have served my country in various capacities throughout most of my life.
00:04:01.000And after serving in the military, I helped the U.S. intelligence community in various capacities, both the CIA and FBI.
00:04:12.000And I never used to like to talk about that, but unfortunately, through various leaks and through various disinformation campaigns, it ended up coming out as part of the DOJ report.
00:04:23.000And now it's pretty well established that significant abuses of power have been committed, various, a lot of crimes and so many elements to it.
00:04:36.000And again, I understand, and as a lot of investigators have been figuring out both in Congress and in the DOJ, as well as a small handful of investigative reporters, there were a lot of people involved in this.
00:04:51.000And although there's been an initial guilty play in this ongoing investigation, so much more still needs to be uncovered.
00:05:00.000And that's part of the goal of my book is to help to provide more of a full picture as to what exactly happened in this terrible scheme.
00:05:08.000So you served our country in the United States Navy, then you had a company that you did consulting for oil and gas across the world.
00:05:23.000Are you able to disclose that aspect of it?
00:05:26.000Well, I never wanted to disclose it previously, but it's now been disclosed by the U.S. Department of Justice.
00:05:34.000Back last December, December 2019, they put out a big 480-page report, which discussed these terrible abuses, which were started during the Obama-Biden administration in conjunction with various operatives in the Democrat Party.
00:05:51.000And in that, there was a disclosure that I was an asset for U.S. intelligence, both in terms of the CIA as well as the FBI.
00:06:03.000And again, some things are pretty blurry, but it's now well recognized.
00:06:07.000But that's what's so confusing to me, Carter.
00:06:10.000How are you an asset and then they turn you into a target?
00:06:13.000I mean, again, I'm just kind of looking at this from just a normal person's perspective.
00:06:20.000Well, it just is a reflection of how, and this goes back to what I was saying about how so many things are completely misportrayed by the Democrat Party.
00:06:30.000I think as we've similarly seen with President Trump over the last several days with this infamous report from the Atlantic giving all kinds of accusations, which are entirely the opposite of the truth, that's basically the same exact thing they did to me, only focusing more on my intelligence service.
00:06:54.000So you were part of something that I call destination journalism.
00:07:00.000You were the victim of it, where these people have a narrative that they found in the rumor mill and they try to find something even remotely in the ether that might confirm that narrative so that they can go find power.
00:07:12.000And that narrative was something around Russia, right?
00:07:15.000So they wanted more than anything else to confirm, but they weren't able to, that Donald Trump is somehow a proxy of the Kremlin and of the Russian government.
00:07:26.000And then it actually resulted in a FISA warrant being signed, which I, again, for those of us that are not in this every single day, and I'm pretty aware of this stuff, I still don't, I'm losing faith in our system if this is really allowed to happen.
00:07:41.000I mean, can you walk us through exactly some of the specifics of how our government was allowed to spy on an incoming president, yourself and others, on just complete total piles of garbage and nonsense?
00:07:54.000Well, there's a lot to unpack there, Charlie.
00:07:58.000And essentially, the Democrat Party had a multi-million dollar operation trying to hiring actually themselves hiring foreign agents and having a network of spies working for the Democrat Party in Russia of all places to concoct totally false information.
00:08:22.000And so there's a lot of elements to it where first, They tried the more respected news outlets.
00:08:30.000So they make up these false allegations against me as a way of smearing then-candidate Trump.
00:08:37.000And so they tried the Wall Street, pitching this story to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, CNN.
00:08:47.000And they all refused initially, although they caught on to the story later.
00:08:53.000Finally, they found someone at Yahoo News just a couple of months, less than two months before the last election, and they accepted it.
00:09:04.000And the following month, James Comey and one of the DNC speakers a couple weeks ago, Sally Yates, signed off on a false foreign intelligence surveillance court warrant application, which they used, and they and their operatives used to deceive this once respected court.
00:09:26.000So you're absolutely right in terms of the lack of faith.
00:09:32.000And there is so much more that needs to be done in terms of restoring that faith now that this has been uncovered.
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00:10:33.000Could this happen to every American citizen?
00:10:35.000I try to tell people that the government can be abused against you at any time, that if the wrong people get in power, you can get spied on.
00:10:43.000So walk us through how you were surveilled and spied on and why every American should care about this because people are sometimes dismissive.
00:10:57.000And unfortunately, just this past week, there's been so many court actions starting to resolve this process in the wake of this blockbuster inspector general report last December.
00:11:10.000But just last week, there was a big case in the Ninth Circuit, you know, not exactly the most Trump-friendly jurisdiction out west.
00:11:19.000And they came to the conclusion that some of these spying powers used by the U.S. government were, in fact, illegal.
00:11:28.000And that is actually, I was part of one particular program, which, again, through complete lies pumped out by the Democrats, they were able to convince the court.
00:11:40.000However, there are a lot of other very strong powers where the government can essentially infiltrate all aspects of your life in terms of the extraordinary surveillance power.
00:11:53.000The government, several laws were passed in the 1970s after serious abuses were found during the J. Edgar Hoover FBI, including spying on various political operatives, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
00:12:11.000And this new law was created to try to make the system more robust.
00:12:15.000And unfortunately, with these terrible abuses that have been uncovered by the Department of Justice and by members of Congress, we now know that the abuses this time around were infinitely worse and it goes very far in terms of its reach.
00:12:34.000The other main difference is the level of technology.
00:12:38.000So back in the 1960s when Dr. Martin Luther King was getting spied on by the FBI, they just used more basic technologies.
00:12:49.000But now with your iPhone and all the technologies that are available, the government's reach, if abused, is so much deeper.
00:12:59.000And I think we have a real civil rights leader in our president who's been speaking out, trying to get some reforms related to this.
00:13:08.000Well, here's what's been amazing, Carter, is that the Democrats used to care about this stuff.
00:13:13.000The Democrats used to actually talk a good game on civil liberties.
00:13:16.000And now they're the ones that are more than happy to use the levers of power if they don't like an election outcome.
00:13:23.000And yet, so have you found any sort of, have you found any allies in the Democrat establishment or anyone that thinks what happened to you is wrong?
00:13:43.000Unfortunately, it's even worse than the way you describe it because so many operatives, again, the Democrats are the ones that made up this completely false story and this multi-million dollar defamatory scheme.
00:13:58.000Unfortunately, when that big inspector general report came out in December, Chairman Lindsey Graham of the Senate Judiciary Committee ended up calling a hearing.
00:14:10.000And there were a lot of people quite outraged during that hearing.
00:14:14.000Unfortunately, one of the members, just to give you an example, was Senator Kamala Harris.
00:14:20.000And instead of addressing these issues, she touched on it very briefly, she instead directed all of her anger and all of her focus on Attorney General Barr, someone who's actually been trying to take some initial steps to restore our justice system.
00:14:39.000But again, as from since the very beginning in our last presidential election cycle, they have just used this false narrative to constantly just attack their political enemies, which is precisely the opposite of the way this system was designed in terms of protecting U.S. civil liberties.
00:15:00.000Can you talk about how the media has been in collusion with the Democrat Party and also the government apparatus here that you would show up for a Senate intelligence committee or something, and all of a sudden there'd be a reporter there waiting for you?
00:15:16.000I mean, there are different, there's good and bad people in any organization.
00:15:20.000And unfortunately, the Senate Intelligence Committee, which again, during these reforms in the 1970s, was put together as a way of looking out for both national security on the one side, but also civil liberties and making sure these terrible abuses don't happen.
00:15:41.000Unfortunately, as you're correctly alluding to, the quote-unquote security director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, this gentleman, had a girlfriend who worked for none other than BuzzFeed.
00:15:58.000And so he was feeding her a lot of damaging and, frankly speaking, very dangerous information about me.
00:16:11.000And in April of 2017, early in the Trump administration, and this girlfriend of the then security director of the Senate Intel Committee then tells me, well, I have this breaking news report coming out.
00:16:27.000And sure enough, she's on the Rachel Maddow show the same evening telling these stories, which are a complete misrepresentation of the truth.
00:16:37.000And unfortunately, and as I discussed with the FBI the month prior, all these false stories led to a ton of death threats.
00:16:46.000So right after that Rachel Maddow interview on MSNBC, I ended up getting additional calls and death threats from the same, one of the same perpetrators.
00:16:59.000And again, there are so many elements to this.
00:17:02.000And unfortunately, in terms of the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, they have a number of important roles in terms of, you know, like the term implies, intelligence, having insights.
00:17:16.000But they also have a national security role.
00:17:19.000And when they're instead of enhancing national security, they're actually putting American lives at risk by being part of this Democrat scheme to take down our duly elected president.
00:17:32.000It just is, it's hard to overstate how terrible and how dangerous this is on so many levels for our country.
00:17:43.000So you then endured years of government persecution under the guise of an investigation, and then you're finally vindicated.
00:18:19.000I mean, I don't know if you have any inside thoughts here, and I wouldn't want you to compromise any sort of confidentiality, but what's going on here?
00:18:29.000Why is no one going to jail for what happened to you?
00:18:34.000And just to be clear, it's not only just what happened to me.
00:18:37.000This was entirely a scheme to totally interfere in President Trump's, then candidate Trump's first ever election in his life and create so much damage through his transition and throughout his administration.
00:18:54.000But unfortunately, there really has not been full justice restored as part of this process.
00:19:08.000There are some hints that perhaps there will be additional repercussions for so many perpetrators.
00:19:16.000Unfortunately, it remains an open issue.
00:19:19.000And I think there's a lot also that the Senate and other members of Congress can do to help keep the pressure on in terms of disclosing some of this information.
00:19:31.000Unfortunately, a number of operators within the U.S. justice system, both DOJ and the FBI, have been doing an incredible amount of work to try to cover this up as much as possible because it is, I mean, it is a terrible black eye on the Obama-Biden administration and the entire Democrat Party, which continues to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars.
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00:21:29.000Well, we know there was a meeting just two weeks before the inauguration in the Oval Office with then President Obama, then Vice President Joe Biden, Susan Rice, who was a national security advisor at the time,
00:21:44.000as well as those same two people I mentioned who signed off on the false FISA warrants right within a week of that in January of 2017 and also in the pre-election interference campaign with these with these false court documents.
00:22:02.000So Joe Biden, Obama, Susan Rice, Yates, and Comey are all having these meetings or had this one meeting on January 5th, 2017.
00:22:14.000And there's like I was just saying, there's a lot of big questions.
00:22:18.000I know Chairman Chuck Grassley and Chairman Lindsey Graham have highlighted this and have been trying to get some information as to the these questionable steps that were taken during that meeting.
00:22:32.000And unfortunately, there hasn't been many answers.
00:22:35.000And I think part of it relates back to the fact that I have been, you know, as part of this whole process, subject to over 40 hours of interrogation by both the Congress and DOJ and the Mueller witch hunt, as well as the FBI.
00:22:53.000And unfortunately, most of these people who were involved in this illicit scheme have not really been forced to answer any questions.
00:23:12.000Well, and I get into this a bit later in my book.
00:23:17.000I was fortunate that I decided because I knew it was going to completely wipe me out.
00:23:22.000Although I did have some legal help, I decided much of it I'm just going to do on my own.
00:23:29.000And I think that it has been an incredible intellectual journey for me.
00:23:35.000When I was totally smashed in terms of my, just as a junior unpaid volunteer on the Trump campaign, focusing on foreign policy and national security, I instead focus my intellectual energies on learning the law.
00:23:52.000And I think that has been the most incredible part of that process.
00:23:56.000Just watching and listening to that, you know, looking at what was done compared to what the law actually states.
00:24:05.000I mean, we are just really in a authoritarian type.
00:24:35.000No, and unfortunately, I mean, there are, and this kind of speaks more to the conflicts of interest in Washington with so many insiders that it's a great point.
00:24:47.000That's why, that's why everything changed for Michael Flynn as soon as he brought in Sidney Powell from outside the DC Circuit and from Texas and because he had a conflicted legal team.
00:24:57.000Well, to your point, so the firm that was representing him, one of the senior partners in that firm, is none other than Obama's six-year attorney general, Eric Holder.
00:25:10.000So he, you know, he's from this same firm and part of the.
00:25:15.000And it used to be, you know, a couple decades ago, you could have a lawyer that would be able to represent either types of clients, and you would be okay with that.
00:26:14.000It's hard and you're up against unlimited budgets.
00:26:18.000Well, I mean, the only advantage I have is, I mean, this 480-page Inspector General report really, although it was very incomplete, it doesn't give the full story.
00:26:30.000And again, that's part of the reason I wrote this book.
00:26:34.000But by the same token, there were a lot of errors and omissions in a federal court document, 17 errors and omissions.
00:26:44.000And now with this first guilty play by Mr. Kleinsmith, you know, we'll have to wait and see how it goes.
00:27:08.000It was a taxpayer-funded tragedy on our country.
00:27:12.000So you're thinking of possibly having some civil remedies.
00:27:17.000Can you just reinforce just how badly the establishment wanted to take out Donald Trump and they were willing to sacrifice anyone throughout this?
00:27:27.000I mean, there were some really dark days for you and others where you thought that, you know, the truth was never going to get out.
00:27:34.000In fact, one of your chapters comes out with Chris Hayes, who's a real beauty, says, I generally hope, Carter, that you're innocent of everything because you're doing a lot of talking.
00:27:42.000It's either admirably bold or reckless.
00:27:48.000Yeah, I think, you know, along the lines of what we were discussing about how there's so much implications for all Americans.
00:28:00.000I think what I experience going back to the first Trump campaign and throughout the early years of the Trump administration and to this day is something that all Americans have been observing over the time since.
00:28:14.000And along the lines of your question about the media, so much of the story, so much of the media narrative is just completely fabricated.
00:28:24.000And we see example after example of this.
00:28:28.000And even to this day, even though all of these false, most of the false stories have been completely, you know, shown to be as false as they are.
00:28:41.000We now, you know, they keep coming out with additional false stories about Russian bounties and how, you know, is there some deal between the president and Putin, et cetera.
00:28:54.000And they, with no basis whatsoever, even though President Trump has tried to do so many steps to fix this, it just remains unresolved.
00:29:03.000And I think one of the biggest shames about all this is if you look back at the history of President Reagan, one of his biggest accomplishments was the end of the First Cold War, right?
00:29:16.000And that was based on him actually questioning the foreign policy establishment and deciding that we need to have a new approach in terms of Washington's relationship with Moscow.
00:29:28.000And that is exactly what President Trump, first as a candidate and throughout his administration, has tried to do.
00:29:38.000And unfortunately, these headwinds have just been huge challenges.
00:29:44.000But I think it's a tribute or it's characteristic of his strength and his determination that he still somehow keeps going forward and keeps fighting for the interests of all Americans and our country.
00:30:00.000Well, it's also, I just can't stand dishonesty.
00:30:02.000The president has actually been harder on Russia than any of his people, any in the media will ever communicate.
00:30:09.000He's put more sanctions on Russia, expelled diplomats, helped arm Ukrainian forces against Russia.
00:30:16.000And the entire impeachment showed that.
00:30:18.000However, that's just a different topic within it.
00:30:21.000Any other parts of the book we didn't touch on, Carter, that you want our audience to be aware of?
00:30:24.000I encourage all of our listeners and viewers, abuse and power by Carter Page.
00:30:28.000Are there other parts we didn't touch on that you want to make sure we hit on?
00:30:32.000Well, I think overall, in the conclusion, it goes to your question about the implications for all Americans.
00:30:39.000Towards the end of my book, particularly in chapter nine, I talk about the important reforms that are urgently needed for our country right now.
00:30:48.000And I think, you know, the more people understand the full extent of this story, I mean, in many ways, it's a spy thriller.
00:30:57.000Unfortunately, much of it is just made-up abuses by the intelligence community as a way of colluding with the Democrat Party and manipulating the media in a severe propaganda disinformation campaign.
00:31:16.000So I think there's certainly a lot more we could get into, but I think there's well, and Carter, Adam Schiff is still pushing the Russia deal right now, isn't he?
00:31:29.000And unfortunately, and again, it's what I'm saying about over the summer and the unrest that a lot of Democrat operatives have been doing in terms of not restoring the rule of law in Democrat-run cities, etc.
00:31:46.000I think we see precisely the same thing.
00:31:49.000And it's a serious warning sign in terms of our national security on a much bigger scale, just given the stakes involved in our national security and our international relations programs.