On this episode of The Great America Show, host Lou Dobbs is joined by reporter Paul Sperry to discuss the FBI raid of President Trump's Mar-A-Lago estate and the cover-up surrounding it.
00:00:00.000Hello, everybody. I'm Lou Dobbs. Welcome to this episode of The Great America Show. Good to have you with us. And let me say to you, you're much appreciated. Thanks for joining us. And all of a sudden, we're doing our 239th episode. 239 episodes. And we only started the show at the end of last year. So thanks for being with us along the way.
00:00:23.580As we've all no doubt noticed, events are moving quickly in this great country of ours. And there is now underway an ever more massive political conflict of immense power and consequence. A conflict that grows sharper by the day and its rational resolution grows, it seems, more distant by the day as well.
00:00:44.500Our impaired puppet president and his hateful speech last Thursday still reverberating through the country as he slurred half of all Americans as fascist. Biden's anger mask his desperation, facing as he does an electorate who disapprove of him, who say the country is going in the wrong direction.
00:01:04.860And those MAGA Americans are outraged at Biden's hate and his lies, persistent and constant lies, and those of his attorney general, both of whom lied about their roles in the FBI raid of President Trump's Mar-a-Lago offices, and of course, also his son Barron's room and Melania's closet. Go figure.
00:01:27.740Hillary Clinton was thrilled with Biden's hateful remarks, by the way. She said Biden did a very important service to the country by calling Republicans semi-fascist and reminding everyone she's the one who called Trump supporters deplorables.
00:01:44.900And the man who wouldn't warn the American people that then-Vice President Biden was lying in the weeks before the 2020 election is talking up a storm now.
00:01:56.900The man who famously declared the FBI had spied on President Trump, now defending that corrupt agency and on a whirlwind, week-long commentary broadside against President Trump.
00:02:10.040A week ago, on the Mar-a-Lago raid, former Attorney General William Barr claimed President Trump had, as Barr put it, quote, jerked around the DOJ, then said he doubted Trump had declassified the documents, and if he had, it would have been an abuse of power.
00:02:30.480Then, two days later, Barr opined the judge's order to appoint a special master to oversee the Mar-a-Lago documents was, quote, wrong, while other attorneys were saying it should have been done and should have been done earlier.
00:02:46.520And then Barr declared yesterday he believes the DOJ is close to indicting President Trump.
00:03:09.000He is a great American, a great investigative reporter.
00:03:12.640He's a reporter for Real Clear Investigations, a media fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
00:03:19.640And, Paul, it's great to have you with us here.
00:03:21.880Welcome, and let's start with your take on the FBI's Mar-a-Lago raid.
00:03:27.440So, we found in our investigation that the FBI officials who planned and executed the search and seizure at Mar-a-Lago, they belong to the very same FBI counterintelligence division that conducted the investigation of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign for so-called colluding with Russia.
00:03:49.580And those that were involved in that are currently under investigation by special counsel John Durham.
00:03:56.780So, they really should have been recused from any additional Trump investigations to avoid the taint of prejudicial motivation.
00:04:09.320But they were not, in this case, in this counterintelligence, they call it a counterespionage investigation of Trump handling classified information in Mar-a-Lago.
00:07:00.000But I understand that Durham is getting the interview transcripts that the Office of Professional Responsibility has conducted with these agents and analysts and officials.
00:07:14.860And he's going over them as part of his investigation.
00:07:21.220But this stuff should have been done years ago.
00:07:24.020And the fact that it's still going on now and allowing these – by dragging out his investigation, Durham is allowing the dirty agents to regroup and start other investigations on Trump, like we're seeing right now in Mar-a-Lago, to try and justify the last one, which they came up embarrassingly short on any evidence.
00:07:44.820Yes, and this is preposterous, what is being permitted by Christopher Wray.
00:07:51.780And if, by the way, John Durham is the reason – his investigation is the reason that there has not been disciplinary action, in my opinion, taken against these agents who are dirty as they can be, it's an outrage.
00:08:04.520And someone needs to take a look at whatever regulation or convention they are following to come up with that argument.
00:08:10.220And Ray – Ray is an outright disaster as director.
00:08:20.100I can't think of any other motivation for what he's doing here.
00:08:24.080And as you look at Tim Tebow, pro bono representation from the law firm Morrison & Forrester, these agents are getting legal advice pro bono from some of the most expensive firms in Washington.
00:08:40.900And meanwhile, others who have been ensnared in January 6th and all of the nonsense that has been going on, they're having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.
00:08:53.640And this is a distinction of class here.
00:08:57.360I think most people don't think about it in this country, but there is a huge difference between Republicans and Democrats in the ability to deal with big law.
00:09:09.080Yeah, they – in Tebow's case, I'm told that they agreed to have him take an early retirement.
00:09:16.060As soon as he's out of the Bureau, he's untouchable in terms of Inspector General interviewing him and also the Office of Special Counsel, which is different than the Special Counsel's Office, which is, you know, Durham.
00:09:29.280There's something called the Office of Special Counsel, which looks into these issues like the Hatch Act and everything.
00:09:34.940But the Inspector General and that Office of Special Counsel cannot touch him now because they don't have any power to compel his testimony once he's a former employee.
00:09:48.480Only current employees can they compel to answer questions for their investigators.
00:09:54.100So this is how it works in Washington.
00:10:01.240I have to say, I think a lot of people listening to your voice right now, their heads are spinning because what we are hearing here is that the United States Department of Justice does not have the legal power, the investigative power, to investigate a dirty agent once he or she leaves the FBI.
00:10:28.140But it's just they can't compel his, you know, they can't compel his cooperation.
00:10:33.400And, you know, the Inspector General doesn't have subpoena power to, you know, make somebody that's outside the government come in and testify under oath.
00:10:43.980So, you know, they're very limited in what they can do to get to the bottom of these things, even if they're willing to.
00:10:51.040I have to say that this Department of Justice, there are also conventions about not intervening in elections with any action that they take, investigative or prosecutorial action that they can take within, what is it, 90 days of an election.
00:11:08.980And here we are, far less than that from an election, and we've got Joe Biden about to make a political speech.
00:11:17.640And meanwhile, these raids, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, all of the back and forth about what was or was not there.
00:12:05.020I mean, that photograph was planted for the express purpose of media consumption.
00:12:14.960You know, it was just pure optics to make it look like Trump was being reckless with classified documents and had them all spread over the floor, which is nonsense.
00:12:25.920That's not how they were discovered during the raid.
00:12:28.940The FBI agents took them out of the files and put through them around the floor like that, snapped a photograph, and they put it in this court exhibit, knowing that full well that the media would, you know, spread it all over TV.
00:12:48.160And that just shows how political this is.
00:12:52.460And I love the fact that, well, I don't love it, I shouldn't say it, I'm amused by it in some ways.
00:13:01.160The way the Washington Post is reporting on this story on Mar-a-Lago and the New York Times, of course, they convene Maggie Haberman and all of the crew there to spin up and gin up.
00:13:16.800It's, and I love the Drudge Report, they have now found that Donald Trump, I believe the headline was, is hoarding top secret documents.
00:13:29.980And the nonsense just keeps, I say it's nonsense because I believe it to be that or nonsense.
00:13:35.880It's just crazy the way the national media is just let around by the nose by the FBI and the Justice Department, isn't it?
00:13:43.640Yeah, they definitely got their marching orders and they're taking this to the hilt.
00:13:52.460You know, the Biden administration is basically trying to criminalize former presidents having access to classified information, which is bizarre since ex-presidents still get classified intelligence briefings.
00:14:05.980And, you know, they're set up with skiffs at their homes where they can read and store the nation's top secrets.
00:14:12.980So when will Attorney General Garland raid Bill Clinton's Chappaqua home in New York?
00:14:19.740And when will he raid Barack Obama's Calamara home in D.C. or his home in Chicago?
00:14:26.400Does Garland know for certain they don't have classified documents in their office files?
00:14:33.500So why are they singling out Trump as if, you know, the commander-in-chief who defeated ISIS can't be trusted with their national intelligence?
00:15:21.160And first, let's deal with the documents themselves.
00:15:25.260President Trump declassified those documents before he left office.
00:15:30.920That was never, ever executed by the folks who were in the chain of command to do so.
00:15:37.520And it was clear that the reason is that those documents contained a lot of embarrassing information for the intelligence agencies, as well as especially the Department of Justice and the FBI.
00:15:51.740Yeah, that's a real concern is that the FBI in this raid is a personal vested interest in seizing some of these documents that Trump had, basically using the raid to cover their tracks in their own Russiagate scandal.
00:16:15.540You know, they may be trying to deep six any evidence Trump might have kept on them.
00:16:21.900And that is a real possibility, you know, especially since the same counterintelligence division is running this operation down there, that they would want to make sure that those never come to public light, those documents.
00:16:43.100And, you know, Trump was earnestly trying to get a hold of them because he knew that it was a hoax and a witch hunt against him.
00:16:52.660So he was trying to gather up that that proof and they were worried about that.
00:16:57.640And another issue is this all came about as Trump was progressing through his his lawsuit.
00:17:06.880He had a RICO conspiracy case against the Department of Justice.
00:17:09.820And it might be why the Justice Department is so worried about a special master finding out, you know, what they exactly what they took from Trump, not only just exposing the search as a fishing exhibition.
00:17:23.820But, you know, they've already admitted errantly vacuum up attorney client privilege information, including Trump's correspondence with his attorneys, who are suing the Department of Justice in a RICO case for its role in leading the Russiagate persecution of Trump.
00:17:40.160So DOJ also has a vested interest in putting eyeballs on on, you know, Trump's legal strategy in that lawsuit, which are contained in those those 27 boxes that they confiscated.
00:17:54.820Did you ever imagine that the so-called national and I'll call it corporate media, the New York Times, the Washington Post, all of the broadcast networks and most of the cable networks are so corrupt that they would not deeply examine and explore the evidence before them
00:18:19.900and try to report and try to report earnestly, sincerely, honestly, let me try honestly again, what was going on here.
00:18:29.200Instead, they have taken they have taken a side and they persist and they and it's obvious that they're doing so under their the orders of their corporate masters or otherwise it wouldn't be happening.
00:18:41.760Well, you're right. The major media is corrupt and it all starts from that from that. Everything folds out from that corruption because the other agencies and government can't can't be corrupt elected officials, politicians and also bureaucrats if the media does their job and exposes that corruption.
00:19:03.540But they're not interested in exposing corruption on the on the on the Democrat side or the side that's in this case, the administrative state, which is from the get go, has been against Trump.
00:19:16.060They felt threatened by his anti-globalist, you know, foreign policy.
00:19:21.620And, you know, it creates a lot of cynicism among the public because it's become so blatantly obvious, this type of institutionalized corruption, that you can't have corruption this naked to the public eye and not, you know, not have anyone held accountable for it and still have a healthy constitutional republic.
00:19:44.960And that's what I'm most concerned about is the is really this this corruption just keeps piling higher and higher to where everybody can see it.
00:19:56.460And and they see that there's, you know, a two tier justice system, especially, you know, in the Trump era.
00:20:03.420And they get really jaundiced and jaded about, you know, trusting government and now the intelligence community and federal law enforcement.
00:20:13.580And the courts, quite frankly, as well. And that's just not healthy.
00:20:19.780That's that's just right. I mean, it's it's we're in a we're in a really bad situation if if the only the only person that's we can count on hoping get to the bottom of this is John Durham, who moves in geological seconds.
00:20:40.720I mean, this guy has already let the statute of limitations expire in the wiretap abuses that everybody saw was so obvious, even the FISA court has admitted it and invalidated at least two of those warrants.
00:20:53.360So unless he's building a conspiracy to defraud case against the FBI, I'm not holding my breath.
00:21:01.520He'll he'll hold the FBI accountable when those statute of limitations have already expired.
00:21:08.000And he doesn't have the budget or the manpower for a conspiracy case.
00:21:11.860He could barely handle the Sussman case. And, you know, he blew that.
00:21:15.840He either blew it or he constructed it brilliantly one or the other.
00:21:21.820Yeah, I mean, it's hurry up and wait with Durham.
00:21:29.960It's it's very troubling that he's operating on such a shoestring budget and with such a skeletal staff compared to Mueller, who was far more aggressive.
00:21:39.600I mean, Durham could be much more aggressive if he wanted to.
00:21:43.080He could ask for more money. He could ask for more office space.
00:21:46.320He could ask for bigger travel budget, more prosecutors, more investigators.
00:21:50.780But unlike Mueller, he hasn't, you know, and if Garland turns him down, he could make a stink about it.
00:21:57.140But he hasn't even tried. And, you know, he he's he's been dragging his feet even before COVID.
00:22:03.580You know, to be fair, COVID did slow him down because it shut down his grand juries.
00:22:08.540He's got two of them running, one in the Eastern District of Virginia and one in D.C.
00:22:14.040But he's just been dragging this on too long.
00:22:19.700And justice delayed is justice denied.
00:22:26.960Maybe he does. I mean, he he's an institutional guy.
00:22:30.580He's been with the Justice Department his whole life.
00:22:34.320And maybe he he understands that, you know, to get to the scandal is so bad and so deep that to get to the bottom of it, he'd have to burn down the FBI, you know, hypothetically to the ground in the Justice Department, which he loves.
00:22:48.920And, you know, he's he's been part of his entire career.
00:22:54.040But that might be what he's saying that it would take.
00:22:57.880I can't you know, this would destroy these institutions.
00:23:00.780And, you know, he's I think he's an institutionalist from from what I understand, like like Bill Barr was an institutionalist and they love and revere, you know, the Justice Department and the FBI.
00:23:12.220And, you know, the corruption is is so pervasive that, you know, that's what it would take.
00:23:23.660It would take a huge Herculean effort, huge budget, huge staff to get to the bottom.
00:23:30.340And it just doesn't look like he's interested in doing that.
00:23:55.840I believe Bill Barr is either complicit in a cover up of all of these sins that we know occurred from at least July of 2016 forward through six years of political persecution of this president.
00:24:11.520I believe he's either complicit or actually a principal in that cover up.
00:24:16.560He's the man who knew that Vice President Biden was lying in the second final debate of 2020 and refused, refused to alert the American people as the chief law enforcement officer of that fact,
00:24:31.680including the fact that the Hunter Biden laptop was a reality and contained severe and damaging evidence against Joe Biden, as well as his son, indeed, the Biden family.
00:24:48.560He did that while simultaneously dispersing FBI agents to various technology companies, social media companies, corporate media companies to bring down a cone of silence around the laptop and affect the election.
00:25:18.560And he is clearly in the same lane as Bill Barr.
00:25:25.680And you talked about them as institutionalists.
00:25:29.020They are protecting those who are corrupt.
00:25:34.060And there are very few people in this country who, as you suggested, aren't aware of the corruption, the pervasive corruption in our federal government, but particularly the Justice Department and the FBI.
00:26:08.200Well, you know, you're speaking of protecting corrupt officials and Bill Barr.
00:26:13.200So Bill Barr, people don't understand this.
00:26:16.360They don't go back very far in his bio.
00:26:20.220But he used to run the legal shop at Verizon.
00:26:23.460And he hired one, James Baker, as his deputy there at Verizon.
00:26:32.180And James Baker was Comey's top lawyer at the FBI.
00:26:38.460And Durham relied on James Baker, cut him a break, didn't investigate him in exchange for his testimony against his buddy Sussman in that trial.
00:26:52.000And so James Baker gets on the witness stand and makes it very clear, telegraphs it to the jury, that I'm a reluctant witness and I'm not going to give much.
00:27:07.000It was like pulling teeth when Durham's prosecutor was trying to get information out of Baker to nail Sussman.
00:27:17.080And so he wasn't a good witness, and yet, you know, Durham let him off the hook.
00:27:23.640And you have to wonder why there's a special deal for James Baker.
00:27:33.380And Bill Barr, of course, hired Durham.
00:27:35.960And something I didn't bring up before, to be fair to Durham, I've talked to some people that worked for him in Connecticut where he was the U.S. attorney.
00:27:48.420And they say that, you know, he doesn't like to have a big staff in office.
00:28:02.480One of the explanations was, I was like, why doesn't this guy do like Mueller and just hire everybody and have this, you know, ask for millions and millions of dollars and really do this right?
00:28:15.640There's special counsel, and he says he likes tight control.
00:28:20.240He likes a small staff that he can control.
00:28:30.780So that could be a possible, plausible explanation why he's still operating with such a shoestring budget and a skeletal staff.
00:28:38.720If he doesn't want, you know, to hire a lot of people and then, you know, they're constantly leaking, like, which is what happened with Mueller, there were so many leaks out of his, he didn't have control, much control at all over that investigation.
00:28:54.760But, so, I just wanted to throw that out there.
00:28:58.360No, I think that we appreciate, I know we appreciate that for the audience.
00:29:04.620I have to say, I went back over his resume carefully more than a few times.
00:29:10.060I've not come to this conclusion happily or easily that Bill Barr is absolutely the pivot point in who was elected president in 2020.
00:29:24.400I don't think there's any doubt, there's no doubt in my mind, I'll put it that way.
00:30:02.620Wait a minute, you can't say that and know that and believe that and then not do anything aggressive to hold people who did that.
00:30:10.680It's political espionage against the sitting president, the nominee for the Republican Party for president.
00:30:17.340And then the elected president-elect and then in the transition and then the sitting president.
00:30:23.260You can't say that and then not do enough to get to the bottom of one of the biggest scandals in our history.
00:30:29.740And he not only did get to the bottom of it, he didn't want to get to the bottom of it.
00:30:35.300He walked out on the president in the moment in which he was most critically needed and he left President Trump basically helpless in that moment legally.
00:31:13.980We have a government and I just want to say this because one of the things I know about you and respect mightily in addition to your investigative and repertorial talents is that you have a fair mind and a broad perspective when you go to a story.
00:31:33.080And it's one of the reasons you always dig up terrific material that no one else has.
00:31:38.940It's also why you constrain yourself to the to the to the evidence and the reality.
00:31:45.700You know, I that is my long winded way of extending a compliment to you about your your talent and your and your immense value to the to a body of public knowledge that should be much larger, but isn't no thanks to the corporate media.
00:32:03.080I want to I want to I want to turn to James Baker again.
00:32:30.740Yeah, well, Twitter kicked me off the day after Trump's home was raided and I was tweeting about the fact at the time and got a little pop up notice that you've been permanently suspended.
00:32:41.960And so, yeah, so I'm still locked in Twitter.
00:32:45.740Jail is one of their political prisoners.
00:32:49.040And but I'm on getter now under the account at Paul Sperry at Paul Sperry.
00:32:56.320If your listeners want to follow me there, I'm also going to get on true social.
00:33:00.900But, yeah, they didn't give me any reasons, just canceled my account without explanation, which, by the way, is a violation of their own rules because they're supposed to, quote, explain which policy you may have violated and which content was in violation.
00:33:18.420They didn't do that in my case because they know I didn't break any rules and they just don't like my fact based content because it cuts against their political narrative.
00:33:31.240And this is something that set that set down from the from the top.
00:33:48.620He wants to focus less on free speech and more on, quote, choosing who can be heard, who can be heard, especially in election years, apparently.
00:34:22.340And the Republican Party has talked big about breaking up big tech, big social media, demanding accountability.
00:34:30.980And I will I will give them some leeway here because they don't have now control, but they had control of the entire government under Trump and wasted it.
00:34:47.560And these are fools that who should never, ever be somehow they should be drummed out of the party forevermore, expunged from all public records.
00:34:57.320I don't know what else could be done to them, but they have put the entire Republican, my judgment, at risk.
00:35:03.280And and and I hate what they've done to you.
00:35:06.820I hate what they've done to the president of the United States.
00:35:09.580And we as a nation just keep accepting this.
00:35:12.860And I believe in the old adage, what you accept, you will get.
00:35:18.320And that's what is happening to this country.
00:35:21.420We have a middle class that is being crushed right now.
00:35:25.200And the middle class is where, first and foremost, I truly believe the American dream lives, it resides, it's it drives the pulse of this country.
00:35:36.540And to watch these fools and these knaves.
00:35:42.540And I'm talking about the rhino liberals of the Republican Party, as well as the Marxist dims of the of the Democrat Party.
00:37:05.000Pushing their agenda, pushing their agenda, pushing their agenda and covering up corruption or or or prosecuting.
00:37:15.900The other thing is, you know, something, you know, someone who has been in the media while you understand that investigations in Washington are driven.
00:38:03.480We always give our guests the last word.
00:38:07.220I would hope that you would give us your sense of where you think President Trump stands as well right now in this continuing assault against him
00:38:18.760and how you think the charges around the Mar-a-Lago raid will conclude.
00:38:27.900You you have the last word on the Great America show today.