The Great America Show - September 12, 2022


FBI AND DOJ ARE CAUGHT PUBLICLY IN ANOTHER RAW ILLEGAL POLITICAL PERSECUTION OF PRES. TRUMP

Topics
Bill Barr indictment Trump
Hosted by
Lou Dobbs John Fawcett
Guests
Tom Fenton
Mentioned
Bill Barr Donald Trump Joe Biden John Ratcliffe Hunter Biden Hillary Clinton Eileen Cannon John Solomon Barack Obama Mike Flynn George W. Bush Merrick Garland James Comey Kevin Brock Follow John Deep State Bill Bryson
THE LEFT SAYS NO ONE NEEDS AN AR-15 AND SUDDENLY THE IRS NEEDS THEM TO DO ACCOUNTING THE FACT THE DOJ IS EVEN CONSIDERING AN INDICTMENT AGAINST PRES. TRUMP IS AN INDICTMENT AGAINST THE DOJ SAYS TOM FITTON

Episode Stats


Length

35 minutes

Words per minute

168.34

Word count

5,976

Sentence count

354

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Former Attorney General Bill Barr has emerged as a staunch defender of the corrupt FBI and DOJ and the crooked, impaired President who ordered that outrageous and unlawful raid on Mar-A-Lago. At the same time, Barr has become a persistent, frequent, and impassioned assailant of President Trump, so much so that large questions are arising.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.
00:00:00.000 Hello, everybody. I'm Lou Dobbs, and this is The Great America Show.
00:00:04.920 Welcome and thank you for being with us as together we defend truth, justice, and the American way.
00:00:12.120 And defend we must.
00:00:14.120 We have now incredibly entered the seventh year of the deep state and Marxist Dems political persecution of President Donald Trump.
00:00:24.000 Think of that. More than six years of persecution, assaults on President Trump.
00:00:29.800 Ongoing harassment, hounding, prosecution, lawsuits, and to what end, and when will it end?
00:00:36.980 The Dems and deep state have from the beginning meant to destroy President Trump if they can, any way they can.
00:00:44.760 And to this point, the only crimes that have been revealed are their own, and there have been many.
00:00:50.140 In carrying out a search and seizure raid on President Trump's Mar-a-Lago offices,
00:00:55.240 the politically corrupt FBI and DOJ have again broken laws and only added to their increasingly sordid legacy.
00:01:04.240 The strangest of many strange elements in the FBI-DOJ Mar-a-Lago scandal has been the sudden, it seems, emergence of former Attorney General Bill Barr.
00:01:14.900 His emergence as the staunch, vocal defender of the corrupt FBI and DOJ and the crooked, impaired, puppet president who ordered that outrageous and unlawful raid on Mar-a-Lago. 0.79
00:01:28.520 At the same time, Barr has become a persistent, frequent, and impassioned assailant of President Trump, so much so that large questions are arising. 0.95
00:01:40.940 Among them, first, why would the former top law enforcement officer in America choose to defend a president he knows for certain fact to be a liar and thoroughly corrupt?
00:01:53.160 Second, why would Barr attack former President Donald Trump, who Barr knows for a certain fact has been the innocent target of the Marxist Dems and Deep State for more than six long years?
00:02:08.100 And third, has Barr forgotten that his oath of office was to protect and defend the Constitution, not the institution he once headed?
00:02:19.740 There's a lot to consider in all this. There's little that's simple here.
00:02:24.600 And to take up all of this and more, our guest today is the remarkable, highly respected journalist, John Solomon.
00:02:31.120 John is the founder and editor-in-chief of JustTheNews.com.
00:02:36.900 John, thanks so much for being with us here.
00:02:39.340 I want to turn to the issue of the sudden public parade of William Barr and his judgments on applicable law to the search and seizure of Mar-a-Lago documents from President Trump.
00:02:55.920 First, I'd like to play this sound of Barr addressing why it was necessary for the Department of Justice and FBI to suddenly carry out a raid against Mar-a-Lago.
00:03:12.260 Here is, cut one, Bill Barr.
00:03:15.920 People say this was unprecedented. Well, it's also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put him in a country club.
00:03:24.820 OK, and how long is the government going to try to get that back?
00:03:29.480 You know, they jawbone for a year. They were deceived on the voluntary actions taken.
00:03:35.260 They then went and got a subpoena. They were deceived on that, they feel.
00:03:42.580 And the facts are starting to show that they were being jerked around.
00:03:47.440 John, I didn't hear a single reference to law, to regulation, convention.
00:03:55.040 I just heard about feelings and a conclusion, certainly not in law.
00:04:01.520 What is this felony called being jerked around?
00:04:05.880 Yeah, listen, it's certainly not a term that shows up in any of the statutes that I've been able to find.
00:04:12.140 It's very interesting. I think you get to see in this recent wave of interviews that Bill Barr has done, two things about him.
00:04:19.460 One, he is an institutionalist. He actually believes the Justice Department and the FBI are good organizations fundamentally,
00:04:25.060 and they can be trusted on most things, and that the president should have bent to the will of the Justice Department and the FBI.
00:04:32.500 Now, to make that argument, the logical arguments he's making in those interviews,
00:04:39.880 he has to eat all the words he said about the FBI and Justice Department in its unlawful, illegal pursuit of the very same president under Russia collusion.
00:04:48.260 He assigns a level of trust to the FBI and Justice Department on this issue that his own investigation about the FBI and Justice Department just a few years ago said there wasn't trust to be warranted.
00:05:02.040 There were egregious behavior, and I think you see two different Bill Barrs here,
00:05:07.720 basically almost forgetting that this was the same Justice Department pursuing the president unlawfully five years ago.
00:05:14.340 And I think at the end of the day, he's making an emotional argument not rooted in the law.
00:05:19.020 And when we get to the issue of trust, let's just take a look at what we learned four or five days ago from Judge Eileen Cannon in the state of Florida.
00:05:28.980 She names a special master. That's what everyone remembers from her ruling.
00:05:33.060 But when you dig into the ruling, Judge Cannon debunks the Justice Department's you-can-trust-us argument.
00:05:40.100 Remember, the Justice Department said two things going into this hearing.
00:05:43.400 There was only a small number of privileged documents that we found and took and seized.
00:05:49.840 And two, we have this great system called the filter-slash-taint team system, and we took care of this.
00:05:56.200 We got it right. You have nothing to worry about.
00:05:58.240 Well, here's what the judge revealed about that.
00:06:00.680 That small number of privileged documents was more than 500 pages of attorney-client-privileged documents.
00:06:07.200 I talked to the former FBI's assistant director for intelligence, a guy who did these sort of cases,
00:06:11.660 these classified national security cases, he said no agent in their right mind with all of their training that they get at Quantico
00:06:18.180 would ever take 500 pages of attorney-client-privileged documents.
00:06:21.920 But the second thing that Judge Eileen Cannon pointed out is, hey, that filter system, it failed.
00:06:27.500 There are at least two sets of documents that were clearly marked privileged that the filter team allowed to get to the front-line investigators.
00:06:35.980 In other words, fruits of the poison tree got all the way to the front-line of the investigation.
00:06:40.860 The filter system, the we trust us, the honor system failed.
00:06:45.520 So the judge who looks at this from a legal and evidentiary standpoint, which Bill Barr doesn't seem to have done,
00:06:51.600 sees a very serious problem.
00:06:53.860 In fact, multiple times in her ruling, she says, I disagree with the Justice Department.
00:06:58.840 I have a different opinion.
00:06:59.740 The court takes a different view on the record of the Justice Department in this case.
00:07:05.060 That's the sort of Bill Barr I would have appreciated, looking at the evidence and the fact, not the emotion and the rhetoric,
00:07:11.120 and also being consistent because he told us repeatedly during the Russia collusion case there was cheating.
00:07:17.840 The honor system didn't work.
00:07:19.300 They didn't tell the FISA court of the exculpatory evidence.
00:07:24.680 Why should we believe that that Justice Department suddenly got fixed in time for this raid?
00:07:30.140 There's a disconnect between Bill Barr, his rhetoric, and his own history of uncovering problems in the Justice Department.
00:07:36.200 You know, all great points, and points that you would have, as you said, expected Bill Barr to be making.
00:07:45.680 Let's hear Bill Barr on the special master appointment issue.
00:07:50.300 Now, a number of highly respected attorneys have said that if there's a problem with the special master,
00:07:57.600 it is that the plaintiff's attorneys didn't do it soon enough.
00:08:01.900 Here is Bill Barr, again, going after the president and the only judge that has stood up in southern Florida to the Justice Department.
00:08:15.100 I think it was wrong, and I think the government should appeal it.
00:08:19.500 It's deeply flawed in a number of ways.
00:08:22.620 I don't think the appointment of a special master is going to hold up, but even if it does,
00:08:28.500 I don't see it fundamentally changing the trajectory.
00:08:31.060 In other words, I don't think it changes the ballgame so much as maybe we'll have a rain delay for a couple of innings.
00:08:40.380 He sounds more like a meteorologist than an attorney or former attorney general.
00:08:47.240 His reasoning is specious.
00:08:49.860 There is no reference to law whatsoever or precedent,
00:08:54.140 except to say it's unprecedented, to acknowledge that it's unprecedented,
00:08:58.640 to raid a former president's house.
00:09:01.480 What's going on in this instance, John?
00:09:04.020 Well, listen, it's really a comment unbecoming someone as learned as Bill Barr.
00:09:12.300 Why?
00:09:12.740 Because Bill Barr knows if there are 500 pages of attorney-client privilege passports,
00:09:18.100 medical records seized by the FBI during this raid,
00:09:22.280 that there has been a significant and serious over-collection of evidence.
00:09:26.280 The sort of thing that defense lawyers would go to court for any defendant,
00:09:32.460 even if they were a drug dealer or a con artist or a pyramid scheme conspiracy.
00:09:41.060 We believe in the fundamental belief that the justice system has to be fair.
00:09:47.520 And if it's not fair, it has to be adversarial so that the defendant gets a chance to do this.
00:09:52.280 Bill Barr is arguing again for a, hey, the Justice Department can be trusted.
00:09:57.720 And again, I go and say, Bill Barr just told us three years ago,
00:10:01.000 we couldn't trust the Justice Department in a similar investigation of the same guy, Donald Trump.
00:10:06.220 And then inside the judge's ruling, there are all the reasons why the trust the Justice Department,
00:10:12.800 no need for a special master argument falls apart.
00:10:15.180 They admit taking 500 pages of attorney-client privilege materials.
00:10:18.880 They admit taking passports, articles of clothing, medical records,
00:10:22.920 which are clearly privileged, sensitive information, tax records.
00:10:27.300 None of that was in the warrant.
00:10:29.040 So the judge has already found enough evidence of over-collection and improper behavior.
00:10:34.820 And then it's Taint Team allowing some of that privilege material to get to the frontline investigators
00:10:39.760 that there is a red flag already.
00:10:42.460 There is already a record of failure by the Justice Department.
00:10:45.280 How Bill Barr can sit there and not want to cure that, not have a thing,
00:10:51.520 or to minimize the gathering of privileged protected materials as some sort of rain delay in a baseball game,
00:10:58.040 I think he does a disservice to the Constitution.
00:11:00.760 And remember, this judge has said right now, your system failed, Justice Department.
00:11:05.880 You allowed documents you told me you wouldn't allow to get to the frontline.
00:11:09.800 And, oh, by the way, when I looked at your behavior, I see no evidence that you knocked the two people
00:11:14.860 who have the fruits of the poison tree now, who got privileged materials, who shouldn't have got.
00:11:18.980 You didn't even take them off the case.
00:11:20.680 You didn't even do the basics to protect the constitutional interests of the president.
00:11:26.080 And I think that what Bill Barr has in this interview is more Trump derangement syndrome than real legal analysis,
00:11:32.620 because if he read the judge's rulings, he sees the same sort of concerns he was yakking about two or three years ago in the Russia case.
00:11:40.520 Absolutely. And I want to go to what is motivating.
00:11:46.440 It's going to be speculative, of course, on our part.
00:11:49.420 But I'd like us to speculate, after we review a few of his other remarks,
00:11:55.460 about what is motivating Barr to suddenly be in departure from his previous behavior and public statements,
00:12:05.120 because there is a significantly different Bill Barr, who is giving voice right now publicly.
00:12:13.520 I'd like to go to the issue, too, of Trump's basic defense, that he declassified all of these documents
00:12:20.860 and get the former attorney general's view here in cut number two, Barr, please.
00:12:29.460 I frankly am skeptical of this claim that I declassified everything, you know,
00:12:35.920 because frankly, I think it's highly improbable.
00:12:39.440 And second, if in fact he sort of stood over scores of boxes, not really knowing what was in them,
00:12:45.780 and said, I hereby declassify everything in here, that would be such an abuse
00:12:49.960 and that shows such recklessness that it's almost worse than taking the documents.
00:12:57.160 For a moment there, I thought it was James Comey talking about recklessness and negligence
00:13:05.160 rather than felonious intent.
00:13:07.680 I mean, this is a man saying he's skeptical.
00:13:11.940 Okay, fair enough.
00:13:13.600 But on what basis?
00:13:16.800 Improbability?
00:13:17.480 I mean, I don't even know what he was even thinking about as he tried to build a case
00:13:24.540 for there to be no right of classification on the part of the commander-in-chief
00:13:30.540 or the right of declassification.
00:13:34.120 Yeah, listen, and I've done a lot of reporting on this.
00:13:37.260 I've tried to pin down the president, his lawyers, and his office on how did that declassification occur?
00:13:43.860 And they have given a very detailed answer, which I don't know if the attorney general saw
00:13:48.320 or paid attention to or considered.
00:13:49.960 It didn't seem like he considered it in that answer.
00:13:52.060 By the way, I want to say this.
00:13:53.340 Attorney General Barr is a very accomplished lawyer.
00:13:56.060 He's had a very real successful career.
00:13:59.740 I think he was instrumental in calling out and trying to stop some of the abuses of the Russia collusion case.
00:14:05.660 The bill bar I saw on TV the other day felt like a pundit and not the accomplished lawyer that I came to cover in 20 or 30 years of my career.
00:14:14.320 He seemed to be loose on the facts, imprecise on the law.
00:14:17.940 And what he's arguing is, hey, it's okay to punish a president for exercising an authority that the Constitution gave him.
00:14:26.060 That's what he basically is saying in that sound clip.
00:14:28.120 Wait a second.
00:14:28.800 The president's the ultimate declassifying authority.
00:14:30.840 He's not like Hillary Clinton, who didn't have the declassification authority, who had a very specific process that she would have had to follow to declassify any of those things that she had put on her email server.
00:14:43.120 The executive orders that are in place, because Bill Barr is a law guy, right?
00:14:47.640 He's supposed to be precise.
00:14:49.300 There is a prevailing executive order.
00:14:51.160 It was first signed by George W. Bush in 03.
00:14:53.560 It was updated but kept pretty much the same by Barack Obama.
00:14:56.320 It's never been changed since then.
00:14:57.540 So it is the prevailing order.
00:14:59.360 It explicitly states that the president does not have to follow any of the declassification procedures that every other government official does.
00:15:07.320 They are an ultimate classified authority.
00:15:08.760 They can decide on a whim with a wave of a hand, a tweak of their eye, or a wrinkle of their nose that a document's declassified.
00:15:15.940 But President Trump, through his lawyers, has put a more specific piece of information out there.
00:15:21.640 He described why he knew the documents that were in the residence and then taken to Mar-a-Lago or declassified.
00:15:27.980 According to him, and again, it's going to come down to the evidence, well, can he back it up?
00:15:32.060 Are there witnesses?
00:15:33.140 What the president has said is that I knew these documents were not classified because I created a standing order that allowed me to take documents from the Oval Office,
00:15:41.980 where they were still in a SCIF, a protected environment, and take them to my residence, which isn't technically a SCIF.
00:15:48.020 And that the standing order said, if I took home classified documents with me, if I told the intelligence officials who brought the documents in and were waiting to get them back, go home, I'm taking these with me, it was a standing order to declassify them.
00:16:01.580 And that's how declassified documents got up to the residents, why the national security officers who normally would have stayed with the documents and taken them back when the president was done, left ship, abandoned post, left the documents there.
00:16:13.560 The president says he had a standing order, and that's how the documents got declassified, and he did so to facilitate his job as president in taking homework home with him.
00:16:23.220 And that's something Bill Barr doesn't even acknowledge or put into the equation of what's going on, and he doesn't address the fact.
00:16:30.480 He sort of suggests, well, every president has to follow a procedure.
00:16:32.600 The answer is they don't.
00:16:34.220 The executive order actually is explicit that the president and vice president don't have to follow the procedures that everybody else has.
00:16:40.300 So, again, I don't see in these recent interviews the same Bill Barr that I saw as a very accomplished, smart lawyer and, you know, had a pretty good record in the Justice Department in both of his tenures as attorney general.
00:16:52.480 He seems loose and more TV pundit, less careful lawyer than I'm used to seeing.
00:16:58.920 Less careful and also more inventive, as is the Justice Department and the FBI.
00:17:05.480 There is no question whatsoever in law that these documents in the possession of a former president are his.
00:17:15.600 Now, there is nothing that sets a time limit on that or sets a specific period in which there has to be a completed negotiation with an archivist.
00:17:25.660 We are basically talking about a librarian, an assistant librarian at that, talking about an overdue book and turning it into a nuclear confrontation legally with a former president.
00:17:41.180 And, by the way, with the authorization, she says, of the president of the United States.
00:17:47.340 This is mind-boggling.
00:17:49.380 And an attorney general and Merrick Garland, who is now caught in a lie, who said he had nothing to do with it.
00:17:56.760 And it turns out he had everything to do with it.
00:18:00.160 He did.
00:18:00.720 It was two weeks ago today that I broke the story that there was a memo from the National Archives.
00:18:05.680 And this is very important.
00:18:08.440 The archives, in some ways, gets a little bit of a bum rap here because the archives were still in a negotiation mode until President Joe Biden, according to the archives' own records, said,
00:18:18.500 you know what, take those boxes you got that President Trump voluntarily returned to the archives, send them to the FBI.
00:18:24.100 By sending them to the FBI, they made a criminal referral.
00:18:26.360 Within a couple of days of Joe Biden giving that instruction, and that's the word the court uses, it's also the word that the letter uses that we made public, the FBI opened up a grand jury investigation.
00:18:37.600 Joe Biden, the sitting president, initiated a criminal investigation of his chief rival from 2020 and his likely rival in 2024.
00:18:46.560 He initiated the powers of the FBI to be unleashed on the man who was the opposition party leader in his government.
00:18:53.660 That is something that can't be glossed over.
00:18:56.060 It is something that Bill Barr didn't address at all.
00:18:58.200 Maybe he didn't read into it.
00:18:59.280 Maybe he missed the important reference that the judge made, or maybe he missed my story from two weeks ago.
00:19:04.000 But Joe Biden is at the initiation point of this criminal investigation.
00:19:08.040 And according to many of the great people I've interviewed, including FBI agents who, on most days, defend the FBI's conduct, people like Kevin Brock,
00:19:16.560 they said they never saw a president order up a criminal investigation of a political rival in all their years and decades in government service,
00:19:23.880 that it was very, very troubling.
00:19:27.000 I don't know where Bill Barr is.
00:19:28.300 Bill Barr was upset that Barack Obama got a briefing about Hillary Clinton's plan to dirty up Donald Trump.
00:19:34.120 Well, this goes way farther than Barack Obama's briefing that, hey, Hillary Clinton might be dirtying up Donald Trump with some fake Russia allegations.
00:19:42.520 That occurred in July 2016.
00:19:44.660 Bill Barr made a big deal about that.
00:19:46.800 But he doesn't seem to even recognize that Joe Biden ordered up this investigation on Hunter Biden,
00:19:52.460 which, by the way, until the president did that, it was being treated like a records dispute.
00:19:56.840 The National Archives and the government were going back and forth trying to iron out these differences.
00:20:01.700 So, again, I don't see the Bill Barr with a precise mind, the careful analysis of the evidence, considering all the facts.
00:20:09.820 He seems like he's become an anti-Trump TV pundit.
00:20:12.960 Maybe his departure from the administration, maybe the shots that President Trump has taken at him,
00:20:17.740 which are personal sometimes, have gotten to him.
00:20:20.320 But it's a different Bill Barr than the person I saw for most of my 30 years covering him in government and in the private sector as well.
00:20:28.800 Yeah.
00:20:29.440 And let's turn to one more piece of sound from Bill Barr on the issue of action.
00:20:36.880 Now, with everything that you and I have talked about, and this audience is following along all of this,
00:20:41.860 and I'm sure that many of those who read Just the News and watch you on Real America's Voice,
00:20:51.140 they know much of this, and our audience on The Great America Show knows much of this.
00:20:58.300 But here is Bill Barr talking about the, despite everything we've said,
00:21:04.340 talking about the likelihood of indicting President Trump.
00:21:10.500 Cut four.
00:21:11.860 There are two questions.
00:21:13.940 Will the government be able to make out a technical case?
00:21:16.940 Will they have evidence by which, that they could indict somebody on including him?
00:21:21.240 And I, that's the first question, and I think they're getting very close to that point, frankly.
00:21:26.920 But I think at the end of the day, there's another question is, do you indict a former president?
00:21:31.620 What will that do to the country?
00:21:33.080 What kind of precedent will that set?
00:21:34.800 Will the people really understand that this is not, you know, failing to return a library book, that this was serious?
00:21:40.380 And so you have to worry about those things.
00:21:42.320 And I hope that those kinds of factors will incline the administration not to indict him,
00:21:46.980 because I don't want to see him indicted as a former president.
00:21:49.340 But I also think they'll be under a lot of pressure to indict him, because, you know, one question is, look, if anyone else would have gotten indicted, why not indict him?
00:21:59.600 Well, I guess he answered his own question, didn't he?
00:22:02.000 He's a former president of the United States, who has the authority of classification and declassification.
00:22:10.920 Your reaction to this Bill Barr, who argues both sides of the question about indictment, and I think leaves us hanging as to what he truly wants the DOJ to do?
00:22:22.860 Well, listen, even more troubling than that, there is a political component that he makes into what is supposed to be a criminal analysis.
00:22:30.740 He actually breaks his own rule of not allowing politics to affect.
00:22:34.940 He just said, just because the president is a former president, I don't want to see him indicted.
00:22:39.960 That isn't the standard that we use in America.
00:22:42.400 But it is the standard that seems to have seeped into the mentality of the Justice Department in the permanent bureaucracy, which is politics can infect a decision.
00:22:52.900 And when our founding fathers created this country, they said that politics should be, that justice should be blind.
00:22:59.720 Political considerations should not apply.
00:23:01.460 Now, most of the time when we talk about this context, we talk about it in the context of you shouldn't pursue a prosecution just because you want to get your political enemy, which was the story of the Russia collusion case.
00:23:12.880 But it's just as damning for a person like Bill Barr to say, Donald Trump shouldn't be president or shouldn't be prosecuted simply because he's a former president.
00:23:21.860 That's a political consideration that treats Donald Trump differently under law.
00:23:25.880 By the way, Donald Trump doesn't want to be treated differently under law.
00:23:28.860 He wants to be treated like everybody else.
00:23:30.460 This this this sentiment that Bill Barr expresses here is behoving to me.
00:23:35.760 It's so different from the scholarly, constitutionally accurate Bill Barr I've seen.
00:23:40.820 And it's just a sloppier version of him.
00:23:43.360 And why do I say that?
00:23:44.780 Listen, if the president committed a murder tomorrow, God, not that I say he would.
00:23:48.720 But are we going to just say, oh, we don't want to see him prosecuted because he's the former president. 0.69
00:23:53.400 It's a silly rationale that Bill Barr is spewing here.
00:23:56.380 And it gets into, I think, what has been an erosion of the bright line in the Justice Department.
00:24:02.540 Politics shouldn't matter at any moment.
00:24:04.800 And that includes in the Hunter Biden investigation.
00:24:07.040 I have a bone to pick with Bill Barr's Justice Department, because in the summer of 2020, on multiple occasions, I had been told that there was a criminal investigation of Hunter Biden.
00:24:17.480 And they waved me off it. And when I mean waved me off it, they said, it's not true.
00:24:21.220 Don't go with that. You'll be embarrassed.
00:24:23.120 That's a hard wave off.
00:24:24.700 So like a good reporter, I didn't use it until I could prove they were wrong.
00:24:28.840 And later, Bill Barr describes how excruciating it was to keep that a secret.
00:24:33.460 In my argument, I would argue as people lied to me.
00:24:35.960 But let's assume that it wasn't a lie.
00:24:38.140 It was some effort to keep the secret.
00:24:41.560 He's so conflicted.
00:24:42.900 He basically says, well, we have a rule in the Justice Department in the 90 days before elections.
00:24:47.500 You don't take actions that can impact the election.
00:24:50.180 OK. But Bill Barr didn't actually abide by that rule.
00:24:54.600 In the fall of 2020, he released a whole bunch of documents about Mike Flynn that implicated the Obama-Bide administration and wrongdoing that showed that Flynn was wrongly prosecuted,
00:25:04.220 that quoted an FBI agent saying that the FBI had politicized and pursued an investigation without evidence.
00:25:10.800 That clearly had an impact on the election.
00:25:13.040 It clearly shined a light on Joe Biden.
00:25:14.880 And oh, by the way, one of the documents Bill Barr released in the 2020 election implicated Joe Biden in sitting on a meeting and Joe Biden suggesting one of the crimes that maybe they could pursue against Mike Flynn,
00:25:28.260 which was this crazy idea of the Logan Act.
00:25:30.200 Bill Barr had no problem putting that out in an election year and some of that out in the 60-day window.
00:25:35.820 But he did have a problem just confirming a factual thing that Hunter Biden was under criminal investigation.
00:25:41.620 Again, inconsistency in his argument that I think really undercuts the seriousness by which we should treat these interviews.
00:25:48.700 And let's take all of this, put it together with what we know, and I can come to only one reasonable conclusion right now.
00:26:00.560 And that is that Bill Barr has been part of a cover-up for the Department of Justice and the FBI.
00:26:08.360 Because as you said, talking about your experience with him in September of 2020, he also famously said that he knew that Joe Biden, the former vice president, in the second and final debate,
00:26:24.680 it was actually the third debate, became the second because they got rid of the second debate.
00:26:29.080 That he knew he was lying.
00:26:32.840 He knew he was lying about the Hunter Biden laptop, knew he was lying about Russian disinformation, knew that the 51 veterans who had signed that famous letter,
00:26:42.120 including five former CIA directors, was all a lie.
00:26:46.160 It was a lie.
00:26:47.240 And he dispatched his FBI agents to big media, big tech, big social media to make certain that the October, I believe it was October 14th story by the New York Post was shut down on the Biden laptop and dismissed as Russian disinformation. 0.81
00:27:09.420 He sent those FBI agents out while he's saying he didn't want to intervene and tell the American people that he knew Biden to be the liar that he is.
00:27:17.600 How do you square that one up?
00:27:19.040 Listen, and John Ratcliffe, less than 20 days from the election, went out and made a statement as the intelligence chief that the Hunter Biden laptop is not Russian disinformation.
00:27:27.980 Bill Barr didn't stop him then.
00:27:29.980 Bill Barr is all over the map on this issue of using the 60-day window.
00:27:33.720 And I think he uses it now to excuse behavior that, in retrospect, doesn't seem to have been beneficial to the American people.
00:27:40.460 It's a contrived excuse because he did release information on other things that negatively affected Joe Biden.
00:27:46.380 It helped Donald Trump on the Russia collusion side, yet says, I didn't want to do the same thing on Hunter Biden.
00:27:51.900 I can't understand the consistency or how he reconciles the lack of consistency in his behavior.
00:27:58.280 I think he's trying to apply arcane bureaucratic rules to mistakes that people are looking back with a critical eye.
00:28:06.840 If you knew the vice president was lying, why not tell us?
00:28:10.300 If you knew that the president and his son might have compromised national security with all of these former deals, why not tell us?
00:28:18.960 And then, by the way, the Justice Department investigation goes all the way back to December of 2018.
00:28:24.540 He had three years to tell us.
00:28:26.320 All right, if he wants to say I didn't want to do it in September, why not in the spring and summer of 2020 when I first asked his people?
00:28:32.100 And I want to be clear, I never talked to Bill Barr about this, but I did talk about to his deputies and the people authorized to talk to the press, and they waved me off a true story well before the 60-day window.
00:28:42.920 So, again, all I know is the Bill Barr I'm hearing in these recent interviews doesn't feel like the precise, careful, lawyerly, and very accomplished Justice Department official I saw for most of his career.
00:28:54.200 There's a disconnect, and I think he's doing a disservice with all of this disassembling excuses.
00:29:01.260 And, of course, there are the lies.
00:29:04.140 There are the leaks.
00:29:05.700 And this is Bill Barr concerned about the unprecedented nature of what Trump had done, which is absolutely specious nonsense or dissembling, or maybe just go to what it is.
00:29:21.100 It's a lie.
00:29:21.640 It is not okay to leak the FBI, the DOJ, leaking from those documents that they seized illegally, and my judgment, I will speak only for myself, that they seized illegally from Donald Trump.
00:29:37.900 And we're going on.
00:29:39.040 This is like deja vu.
00:29:40.820 We're watching the crossfire hurricane.
00:29:43.320 We're watching the Russian collusion hoax all over again.
00:29:45.960 They're leaking what works for them.
00:29:48.300 They are seizing documents that are absolutely incriminating, including it may well be documents pertaining to crossfire hurricane that they want to bury.
00:30:01.300 They may also want to know the legal strategy of Donald Trump as he pursues the RICO case against these very same characters from crossfire hurricane.
00:30:12.640 It's astonishing the possibilities here.
00:30:16.860 Yeah, listen, and as a journalist, I'm not going to speculate what motivates him.
00:30:20.000 All I can say is that the precision that Bill Barr used for most of his career as a very successful, accomplished lawyer and Justice Department official and twice the Attorney General, I don't see that same carefulness in this recent television appearance.
00:30:33.260 As there are, with the book and some of these interviews, he has contradictions and conflicts in both his behavior and in his answers that don't add up.
00:30:43.300 And I think Americans will make up their own mind.
00:30:45.640 I don't know what's in his heart, what his motive is.
00:30:47.380 He'll have to answer for that.
00:30:48.460 But there was nothing preventing Bill Barr from letting the American people know in the summer and spring of 2020 that there was an investigation.
00:30:59.400 Investigations are confirmed all the time.
00:31:01.040 By the way, almost every aspect of an investigation of Donald Trump was always public.
00:31:05.320 So why did Joe Biden get that protection?
00:31:07.420 I think history will look back and say there was an unequal system, a thumb on the scale during the 2020 election.
00:31:16.100 And either through silence and omission or through commission, large numbers of Justice Department and FBI officials put the weight of that thumb on the scale.
00:31:25.340 And Bill Barr is part of that.
00:31:27.040 And as far as he stayed silent and allowed the American people to stay in the dark.
00:31:31.140 And there were plenty of mechanisms by which he could have done it accurately and legally that he chose not to do.
00:31:38.040 You can confirm the existence of an investigation.
00:31:40.500 That's not impossible or improbable.
00:31:42.760 It could have been a notification to Congress.
00:31:44.580 A lot of different ways he could have done it.
00:31:46.260 It's done almost every day in the Justice Department, including the way we learned about President Trump being under investigation.
00:31:52.280 And we also have the knowledge that Bill Barr, at least in one meeting, told the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia not to pursue a significant election fraud irregularity.
00:32:09.260 He thought it would take too much time.
00:32:12.240 That was his remarks.
00:32:13.460 And there are other examples of dissuading the FBI and the Department of Justice from pursuing election fraud cases.
00:32:25.560 There's just so much to answer here.
00:32:28.640 And I agree with you about speculation.
00:32:32.180 But when you have a former attorney general, the current attorney general, the president of the United States lying to the American people with frequency, regularity, and substantively, I don't think there's anything speculative about the plight of this country when it comes to the character of its leadership, at least as expressed in this Marxist-Dim administration.
00:32:58.340 And, unfortunately, with Bill Barr as well.
00:33:03.140 You get the last word here, John.
00:33:05.300 You know, just real quickly, there was an interview that Bill Barr did in December with 2020, just before he quit with Politico, and he made these comments.
00:33:13.220 There is fraud, unfortunately, in most elections.
00:33:15.280 I think we're too tolerant of this, and I'm sure there was fraud in this election.
00:33:19.020 Wow.
00:33:19.840 That's pretty accepting of the idea that we should just let fraud go on.
00:33:22.840 And let's keep in mind, when he uttered those words in December of 2020, the FBI and the attorney general and the Justice Department were aware that a foreign power, Iran, had breached a state voter database, stole 150,000 identities of American voters, and were using it to try to influence the election for and against Republicans.
00:33:42.800 That is known now because eight or nine months after Bill Barr resigned, the Justice Department brought that indictment, but they acknowledged in the indictment they knew about in the summer of 2020.
00:33:54.220 So even when you look back at Bill Barr's comments on elections, first off, there's a tolerance.
00:33:59.400 Yeah, there's fraud all the time.
00:34:00.520 We're too tolerant of it.
00:34:01.820 Well, what did you do to stop it?
00:34:03.000 Secondly, at the time he downplayed and poo-pooed those ideas, he was aware, the FBI was aware, of a major foreign power breach, Iran.
00:34:12.000 And John Ratcliffe was trying to send us signals that, hey, there's something about Iran, but the attorney general didn't give us that visibility before the election was certified on January 6th.
00:34:22.480 In fact, it took eight, nine months after that for us to learn that the FBI knew that Iran and these hackers had carried out this hideous plan. 0.70
00:34:29.560 And so history will look back, and there's a lot of facts that when added up against Bill Barr's words, there are contradictions and conflicts.
00:34:36.220 And I think Americans will make a good, informed judgment about Bill Barr's legacy when they have the full picture.
00:34:42.780 And important to having that full picture is Just the News and a great reporter who also happens to be founder and editor-in-chief of Just the News, John Solomon.
00:34:55.400 John, you're a great American.
00:34:57.360 Thanks for being with us.
00:34:58.320 We appreciate it so much.
00:35:00.080 Thank you, Lou.
00:35:00.780 An honor to be on your show.
00:35:03.260 John Solomon.
00:35:04.360 Follow John and his outstanding reporting on JustTheNews.com and his terrific podcast as well.
00:35:10.480 Thanks, everybody, for being with us here tomorrow.
00:35:12.760 We'll be joined by Tom Fenton, the president of Judicial Watch.
00:35:16.760 Tom is a keen watcher of the D.C. Swamp.
00:35:19.860 He and Judicial Watch do a great public service for all of us.
00:35:23.740 Tom's here tomorrow.
00:35:24.740 Please join us.
00:35:25.580 Till then, God bless you, and may God bless America.