CNN has a problem with veterans? Why? Why does it have a problem? Is it because they don t like them? Why do they have problems with them? And why is it that they don't want to talk about them?
00:01:08.160Are you really concerned about veterans?
00:01:10.340So if we don't want to talk about veterans now, you want to talk about everything else,
00:01:13.240I'd like to hear from CNN as the veteran cabinet secretary why CNN seems to have a problem with veterans.
00:01:20.240Well, Mr. Secretary, respectfully, my question was about whether or not you as a member of the cabinet use this.
00:01:26.360And respectfully, I'm conducting the investigation.
00:01:28.840And I do have a lot of questions for you on veterans affairs, but I don't think it would be unwarranted to ask if you as a member of the cabinet.
00:01:36.260If you want to continue this like this, that's fine.
00:01:40.580But there are VA employees who are working very hard.
00:01:43.620There are veterans who get their care from the VA, and they get their benefits from the VA.
00:01:47.500And it does me no good to speculate on something that I've already asked and answered.
00:01:51.140So I've asked and answered your question.
00:02:22.140I'm sorry for putting you through that two minutes of Caitlin Collins, CNN's – one of their lowest-rated shows.
00:02:28.140Folks, just to put into perspective on how bad CNN has fallen off, Fox News dominates the top 13 spots in all of cable news,
00:02:36.880their highest-rated show bringing in about 4.7 million viewers a night.
00:02:41.320Followed by about 4.2 million and then down to threes – into the three millions.
00:02:46.420One of their lowest-rated shows still doing 2 million people, and that's a show at like 5 o'clock in the morning.
00:02:52.700Caitlin Collins is barely pulling in a half a million people to watch her each and every night.
00:02:59.420This is a woman making millions of dollars who has an audience less than this podcast and the podcast of many other friends of mine.
00:03:06.180It's quite embarrassing that a multi-billion-dollar corporation, you can't garner an audience of 500,000 people.
00:03:14.840Now, it's not just that she's a Marxist and people are tuning out because MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, or Mark Cuban, as I like to call her, is still putting up 2 million people.
00:03:24.440She found 2 million Marxists to tune into her show each and every night.
00:03:29.400Lawrence O'Donnell, still doing over a million viewers.
00:03:34.500I mean, Ari Melber, still doing over a million viewers.
00:03:37.820Chris Hayes, the penguin-looking dude, still doing over a million viewers.
00:03:41.560Even Jen Psaki doing about a million viewers.
00:03:44.440Joy Reid, who was fired, was doing about a million viewers.
00:05:14.340This amount of money will be taken out of your paycheck this week and next week and the week following and the week following.
00:05:19.620We deal with it enough on a daily basis, being told what to do by our bosses.
00:05:25.080We don't need to tune in to Caitlin Collins each and every night for her to be telling us what we have to do.
00:05:33.640So if CNN wants to pay me a lot of money, I'll gladly bring this show over there and go be an editor-in-chief over there and teach them how to not piss off an audience.
00:05:47.640I did an executive producing for Lou for years.
00:06:59.740Dramatic new developments to report this evening.
00:07:03.120First, President Trump is declassifying top secret documents all related to Obamagate.
00:07:10.180That is the coordinated and years-long spying against a presidential candidate and ultimately the president of the United States and his administration, that of Donald J. Trump.
00:08:00.480This was an attempt to overthrow the president.
00:08:02.900This was an attempt to align the entire FBI with Russian intelligence objectives and missions.
00:08:12.480And this should result not in a discussion about, you know, the unseemliness of a sordidly politically corrupt officialdom of the FBI under President Obama.
00:08:24.640It should be about a sinister cabal operating in the intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the Justice Department to overthrow a president.
00:08:35.260And we have been talking about, we have not been talking about the wrong things, but our leadership in Washington has been talking about the wrong things and feeding us pablum when, in point of fact, they are refusing to bring these people to justice.
00:09:07.940Yeah, no, it's taken a very long time.
00:09:09.900And part of the reason is the FBI and the intelligence community are very good at obfuscating and hiding the truth, whether they redact things, claim they're classified, falsified documents, which they did in this case.
00:09:44.460So let me give you this scenario, because I swore this out in a court case, because I've been fighting for four years in court, spending money to try to get these documents the way President Trump intended them to be, which was to be fully available to the American public.
00:09:57.320So President Trump, he announced to me or told me on the 14th that he would be declassifying them.
00:10:06.160Then late on the night of the 19th, January 19th, the day before President Trump left office in 2021, the White House called me and said that they would give me an embargoed set of the documents and that I could make them public as soon as the president left office.
00:10:19.360It's like a 12 or 1 p.m. I think it was.
00:10:21.740And so a group of young staffers on my team stayed through the night, went to go pick up the documents and and they were going to scan them in.
00:10:31.740And when the embargo left to do it about an hour after that, the White House called back.
00:10:36.060And when you agree to embargo, you're stuck to the terms of the embargo and ask for the documents to be returned because there was a problem.
00:10:41.820They'd be getting back in the morning.
00:10:42.940We didn't get them back in the morning.
00:10:44.740Now, I was very fortunate, separate of the White House.
00:10:47.840I had a source in law enforcement who picked the top five or 10 things that were being declassified and they sent them to me in a separate envelope.
00:10:58.160And I was able that night on Lou and on Sean and the next morning to break some of the early documents that are probably the most important.
00:11:05.240I think of the things the president declassified, I probably got the most important ones.
00:11:09.280The Christopher Steele interview with the FBI a year later, where he acknowledged all the things we now know he acknowledged the work of Stefan Halper.
00:11:21.200And in fact, Stefan Halper's documents that I made public has become part of litigation because someone claims to have been smeared by him.
00:11:28.260And the case is pretty well made in these documents.
00:11:32.880There is one thing that I got a copy of that night that was not satisfying to me, and that is the fourth and final FISA warrant.
00:11:40.480So the one that extended it one more time into the summer of 2017.
00:11:48.020There are still significant redactions, even though the president ordered that document to be unredacted.
00:11:55.020And I believe in the redacted sections of that FISA warrant, there may be some additional details of methods and ways that they tried to spy on the president and his team while he was an officer, while he was during the transition.
00:12:11.560And we also think there may be some more duplicity in that document.
00:12:15.240It is a travesty that the FBI was allowed to continue to keep that document so redacted.
00:12:19.700And if you look at the president's new order right now, the one he just did, again, to try to force these out a second time, keeping in mind, the FBI and the Justice Department did not comply with his order.
00:12:30.880They did not make these documents public, nor would they give them to me in the four years of the Biden presidency, nor have they given to me.
00:12:38.580They could have gone into my lawsuit in the first 60 days and said, we're done fighting John Solomon.
00:12:43.800The president said, have them, and they haven't.
00:12:45.440But the president's order, even now, says that he will agree to whatever the FBI redactions, the FBI believes are necessary redactions.
00:12:54.520I think that that is a travesty because I think they're going to be trying to hide some stuff.
00:13:17.700Let us know what's behind those black marks, and we'll have a better sense for history of what the FBI did to weaponize itself against President Trump and his entire administration.
00:13:28.440Two questions for you, John, to follow up on that.
00:13:45.060John, now we hear him this week saying FISA-702 is an integral part to everything we do.
00:13:50.020Meanwhile, every national security person I've spoken to, John, on this show has told me we can live without ostensibly FISA-702 because the NSA is still collecting all this data that they say they're not collecting anyway.
00:14:04.460I spoke to Russ Tice about it yesterday.
00:14:11.660But my question is to you, why would Donald Trump, knowing what he knows and what he went through, John, the hell they put him through, the Russiagate, the peeing on a hotel room, everything, this whole nonsense that could have ruined his marriage, his life, his presidential aspirations, everything, why would he ever agree to any redactions?
00:14:30.440Because I think once you sit in the seat of responsibility and you understand the things that you must make sure can still happen for the American people, the next terror attack, the next big spy, the next big thing, you sometimes are willing to bend to the people who are in the intelligence establishment because they tell you we wouldn't have got this guy or that guy or this guy.
00:14:54.800And I think that that is what ends up happening.
00:15:11.540Go to a court and subpoena it and get a judicial review process.
00:15:14.940That would protect all of us and it would keep that urgent need that the president sometimes is told about.
00:15:21.980Many presidents have been told about it there.
00:15:25.020It is a simple constitutional protection.
00:15:27.420In fact, it is jaw dropping that Republican Congresses and Republican presidents haven't had the courage to do what the founding fathers intended, which is if you want to spy on American, get a darn warrant.
00:15:39.480Yeah, but John, we literally have no evidence to prove we have evidence to the contrary that 702 actually works.
00:15:48.640How many terrorist attacks have we seen on the home, the American soil, John, since 702 has been in place?
00:15:54.180We saw I'll name to San Bernardino off the top of my head in America, right?
00:16:14.220Yeah, listen, the man who oversaw that program for many years inside the FBI, Bassem Yosef, an FBI whistleblower, one of the most respected FBI whistleblowers in history, goes way back before, goes back to the early 2000s, said that it really wasn't that significant at all.
00:16:34.000Now, one of the things it can do is it can help you daisy chain and daisy link people together to figure out who is in somebody's circle, which the FBI claims it doesn't do that, right?
00:16:44.260Because daisy chaining would be a violation of the Constitution, except he says they do do it.
00:16:50.780There are no real significant cases recently where the FBI has been able to prove to Congress or to a court that Section 702 has actually thwarted a terror attack.
00:17:03.100It has allowed certain espionage activities to go on, and those activities could easily go on without a blank check to look at someone's phone data if you just meet the threshold of a warrant and go to a court and do it.
00:17:17.780Now, people say, what good's a warrant when the FISA warrants against the president were so corrupt?
00:17:36.760But we know some of the warrants he ended up approving had significant flaws.
00:17:40.960So there are, if you really want to fix this from a civil liberties perspective, you must change the culture of the FBI and the people who do it.
00:17:49.000You must change the culture of the judges who do it.
00:17:51.580And then you must impose what the founding fathers, if they were alive today, almost certainly would impose.
00:17:57.000You ain't looking at an American's phone data unless you can meet the threshold for a warrant.
00:18:01.640And it's an easy fix, but no one in Washington has had the courage since 9-11 to fix it.
00:18:15.700You can catch him each and every night there as well.
00:18:18.080When we come back, John, I want to take up the D.C. courts because it seems they're so rife with corruption and trouble, the FISA courts.
00:18:24.560And I want to go a little bit further into Cash Patel and try to see if you know what's going on in his mind right now, because I certainly don't.
00:18:31.440We're coming right back with John Solomon.
00:36:52.920For the next five years, you have the license to take any trend or argument.
00:36:56.480Here's the process you have to follow.
00:36:57.640And they could do it tomorrow, and they could rifle shot a law, but they don't do it.
00:37:01.360They sit there and say, oh, God, these damn judges.
00:37:03.160They could tomorrow declare that some of these judges not are impeachable.
00:37:09.120You don't have to impeach them because you're not going to get 67 votes in the Senate.
00:37:12.720But the Constitution doesn't say that.
00:37:14.780The Constitution says you get to be a judge for life as long as you're in good standing.
00:37:18.680Congress could just simply rule that these men are not in good standing and maybe fire them or defund them based on their conduct and their actions.
00:37:25.840They have allowed jurists for two decades now to go on junkets of all the people that should be above special interest influence.
00:37:36.560I mean, we kind of expect our politicians and members of Congress to be influenced by the money they raise.
00:37:41.540But judges are supposed to be in that impeachable, unimpeachable, unassailable thing.
00:37:47.360You've got Judge Boasberg and nine other Democratic judges, three Republican judges going to an all-expense-paid trip in Idaho,
00:37:54.000where all of the sponsors, the group, the group's CEO, and the faculty are all overtly anti-Trump, spewing anti-Trump rhetoric,
00:38:05.140and on the very issue that Judge Boasberg is actually ruling on, immigration.
00:38:11.280Is that the sort of – and Congress could fix this tomorrow.
00:38:14.220But when I asked Jim Jordan yesterday, he's like, oh, well, we'll look at it.
00:39:24.820They could, after saying they didn't want that to happen to the Supreme Court, right?
00:39:27.940At this point, though, John, it's like we're going to lose the presidency.
00:39:32.200Well, remember that the inferior courts are not subject to the United States Supreme Court when it comes to policy and pronouncements.
00:39:41.260The Supreme Court is in charge of the lower courts for discipline.
00:39:44.000But Congress was given the power to – you could tomorrow tell every federal judge in the land – and by the way, to Jim Jordan's credit, to Andy Biggs' credit, to a couple of other lawmakers – I'm going to draw blanks on their names out in California – and Senator Hawley.
00:40:02.200They're going to try to get this through Congress next week.
00:40:05.660Why should a single judge in a single blue area of a country be able to enjoin the whole rest of the country?
00:40:11.340You could take that power away tomorrow.
00:40:13.580And by the way, Jim Jordan has three bills coming to the floor.
00:40:18.860Chuck – or Josh Hawley is going to get it through the Senate.
00:40:22.940Congress could put handcuffs on these judges and say, you can stay in your job, but you're not enjoining the rest of the country with your political views.
00:40:29.920You can enjoin your district, and then you'll get overturned time and again by the Supreme Court.
00:40:35.580There have been more temporary restraining orders in the first 60 days of the Trump presidency than there were in the entire four years of Joe Biden in the last two years of Trump's first presidency.
00:41:58.860But there's just not enough of them who take the bull by the horns like Bob Dole or George Mitchell or Tip O'Neill did a decade ago when they realized we're Congress.
00:42:15.200But, John, before we wrap up here, I want to get your take on the whole – we haven't got a chance to talk about it.
00:42:20.380But just a little quick briefing on the signal gate, different reporting about how it happened, who's responsible for it.
00:42:29.060I'm kind of a little upset, and I discussed that on yesterday's show, that Mike Waltz was pointing the finger at everybody else but himself.
00:42:35.400What are you being told about how this happened?
00:42:37.740My reporting is pretty clear, which is – and by the way, we surfaced the memo.
00:42:42.420In December, before Joe Biden left the presidency, the Homeland Security Department told all national security officials to start using Signal regularly.
00:43:00.440That was just the latest warning to go do it.
00:43:03.040We're in the United States government.
00:43:04.520We have cell phones that can give you a cell phone that's secured up to the top secret level on the phone call.
00:43:09.300Why can't we have a chat system to do it?
00:43:11.180What happened is, if you've ever used Signal, is your whole Rolodex is in there, and you might be looking for John Solomon, but you misclicked by one, and you put Jim Smith on there, right?
00:43:23.920We blame the National Security Committee for being this stupid to realize that for 20 years, while we've all gotten used to chatting, they didn't create an encrypted chat for people on the most thing.
00:43:32.040And so we use a commercial thing, which, by the way, if there's no human error, I'm sure it's pretty well encrypted.
00:43:37.720But is that really the risk we want to take if there's not a chance?
00:43:41.200You could create an encryption tool tomorrow that allowed everybody to chat, and you'd only have the people who are authorized at the classified level they should be, and this would never have happened.
00:43:52.180I don't think there's anything more conspiratorial than that.
00:43:54.400The conspiracy is, once again, bureaucracy created an unnecessary security risk for us.
00:43:59.800And, by the way, this risk has been present since we knew Hillary Clinton started her private email, since we learned that Joe Biden had the pseudonyms in sending sensitive things to him.
00:44:41.260I think, and listen, there have been times where I accidentally put someone on a signal channel, like, oop, oop, oop, I caught it, because I always look at it.