In this episode: Hunter Biden refuses to back down on his accusation that Jeffrey Epstein introduced Donald Trump to the First Lady of the United States, Melania Trump. Special counsel Joe Biden gets indicted twice for having classified documents at Mar-A-Largo. Meanwhile, a man who threw a sandwich at a cop has been fired from Pam Bondi s DOJ. And the FBI director has uncovered a memo that appears to show top DOJ and FBI officials obstructing an investigation into allegations of corruption against Bill and Hillary Clinton.
00:01:15.620Hunter Biden is in a face-off with the first lady of the United States, Melania Trump.
00:01:23.220She is demanding that he apologize for saying that it was Jeffrey Epstein who introduced her to Donald Trump
00:01:31.600and suggesting she's going to sue him if he doesn't back down on that claim that he made in that very public YouTube interview with the show that calls itself Channel 5,
00:01:43.420I think, or Channel 4, whatever channel.
00:02:48.780I want you to listen to the story today.
00:02:50.040OK, we're going to go through this with John Sullivan.
00:02:51.460I want you to go through the story, listening and remembering all the reporting we've done here on this show that you guys were with us for on.
00:03:01.600The IRS and how their investigation into Hunter Biden was slow rolled to the point that most of the statutes of limitation expired.
00:03:11.700Remember, we found that out from those two whistleblowers.
00:03:14.980It was, I think, two years ago I was down here at the Jersey Shore and we were talking to those two whistleblowers who gave us their first interview and told us all about how the DOJ had slow rolled their investigation to the point where they all they all expired.
00:03:34.080The statutes of limitation against Hunter Biden for his tax evasion and his sketchy scheme overseas, taking all this money from, you know, Burisma and Ukraine and elsewhere.
00:03:48.000What Solomon is revealing today is the same story, different players.
00:03:52.920He's reporting now that the FBI director, Kash Patel, has just uncovered a memo that appears to show top DOJ and FBI officials obstructing an investigation into allegations of corruption against Bill and Hillary Clinton's family foundation, known as the Clinton Foundation.
00:04:12.280That back in 15 and 16, the FBI was actually interested in the Peter Schweitzer book, Clinton Cash, and actually said, you know what?
00:04:24.320There's something there there and we better start looking into it and have no less than three different field agents, agencies, part of the FBI looking into it.
00:04:33.140But they got shut down by Andrew McCabe, deputy director of the FBI under Obama.
00:04:40.820And Sally Yates, deputy AG under Loretta Lynch, Obama's top people at DOJ and FBI said, no, no, it's Hillary Clinton.
00:05:24.540Meanwhile, Donald Trump gets indicted twice, twice by Joe Biden's DOJ, special counsel, counsel Jack Smith, for allegedly having classified documents at Mar-a-Lago that he as president had the right to have.
00:05:42.760And for the January 6th nonsense on the Capitol.
00:05:50.740They rushed to throw the legal system at Donald Trump.
00:05:56.440And with Hillary Clinton time and time again, just like with Hunter Biden, those in power work together to protect their favorite Democrats.
00:06:07.640And now we're really getting the details of a general foundational story we did know.
00:06:16.180But as with so many of these reveals lately, we're getting names, we're getting specific titles and we're finding out exactly who was standing in the way of the wheels of justice turning against a dem.
00:06:29.560Now, former President Obama's deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, is even quoted in the Solomon release now as saying, shut it down.
00:06:38.940Sally Yates is a name we've heard many times over the years.
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00:08:22.560So people, I think, will become more familiar over the next few weeks as we continue to dig through what we now know and what we're about to learn,
00:08:31.820that March of 2016 is a moment of great peril for the Democratic Party.
00:08:37.460Donald Trump's essentially secured the nomination.
00:08:40.220They have a populist that looks like the Brexit movement in America, and they're mortified.
00:08:45.880Hillary Clinton is still trying to crank down her email scandal.
00:08:49.400And the Justice Department now knows two things have happened simultaneously.
00:08:54.460One, that three separate FBI offices, New York, Little Rock, and Washington Field Office, so two powerhouses and then Little Rock,
00:09:04.740have all predicated investigations looking at pay-to-play allegations against Hillary Clinton.
00:09:10.740Some of that predication was based on Peter Schweitzer's great book, Clinton Cash.
00:09:14.960Some of that predication was based on a couple of stories I wrote back in 2015 for the Washington Times.
00:09:22.200And so they have a confidential human source in one of those cases.
00:09:27.000They have some video and audio footage.
00:09:29.160And they believe they have a true predicated investigation looking at criminal pay-to-play.
00:09:34.400Basically, you pay the foundation, you get something from Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
00:09:39.300It's a mortal threat, way more mortal than the complicated email scandal, which you can always blame on negligence.
00:09:47.060And at the same time that's happening, it's very important to remember, and I'm going to show people these emails soon.
00:09:52.300These are emails that the Justice Department's had for a long time.
00:09:54.760Hunter Biden's emails and his records of his business partners have been subpoenaed, and Hunter Biden and his lawyers are panicked.
00:10:06.480They're going to discover that Hunter Biden was welching on his taxes.
00:10:09.500He was not paying taxes on Burisma, the money he had gotten in Ukraine.
00:10:14.480So I want to set that stage because March of 16 is a moment of calamity.
00:10:18.160March through May, there are multiple Democratic scandals that potentially put Donald Trump in a much better position to win the nomination because the Democratic Party is going to look like the party of corruption.
00:10:31.720And it's in that moment that Sally Yates steps into the void and says, shut it down.
00:10:39.320Donald Trump's on the campaign, Joe, chanting, lock her up.
00:10:43.900It turns out the FBI has some evidence that might lock her up if they can get through the official prosecution.
00:10:50.140And the answer back from Barack Obama's Justice Department is, shut it down.
00:10:55.860They form a protection racket around Hillary Clinton.
00:10:59.640And as we know from the IRS whistleblowers, eventually a protection racket around Hunter Biden.
00:11:05.620And then they pivot and they start to legitimize a false investigation against Donald Trump.
00:11:11.480That is the spring and summer of 2016.
00:11:14.800And there are just some remarkable dates that we all need to remember because they are going to be seminal to the conspiracy.
00:11:22.380The first is January 6, 2016, four years, or excuse me, January 6, 2017, four years before the January 6th that Democrats like to talk about.
00:11:32.780It's on that day that the Intelligence Committee assessments released, and it's the day before when Sally Yates is in a meeting with the president and the vice president, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, concocting how they can keep pursuing former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn when the FBI has just cleared him of any criminal wrongdoing.
00:11:52.500It is that January 5th and 6th that create the distrust that ultimately boils over on January 6, 2021.
00:11:59.920And then on July 5, 2016, the day that James Comey walks out and waves a magic wand without the legal authority to do so, and clears Hillary Clinton in the email scandal, that same day, Christopher Steele walks into the FBI with information that ultimately becomes the Steele dossier.
00:12:20.080Those two dates are not just symbolic.
00:12:22.940They are meaningful dates in the conspiracy.
00:12:25.820And in between those two dates, the FBI is pressing to open up a very serious criminal investigation.
00:12:32.800And that's when the Obama Justice Department decides we're going to shut it down.
00:12:38.800So this would have been James Comey at the top of that FBI whose three field offices were looking into Hillary Clinton.
00:12:47.020So, I mean, he presumably knew about it.
00:12:50.620And I guess at this point was OK with it, because according to this report, he was not the one to shut it down.
00:12:56.960It was his boss, Sally Yates, is effectively over him as the deputy attorney general.
00:13:03.120Yeah, let's keep in mind how these two departments work.
00:13:06.040The dirty work always falls down to the deputy, right?
00:13:08.440You never have the attorney general put her hands on it.
00:13:10.820You never have the FBI director with rear exception.
00:13:13.460And Comey actually violated that role.
00:13:14.980But that's what deputies exist for in these departments, to carry out the will of the boss and to have their fingerprints on the decision.
00:13:21.780So it's not an accident that it's Sally Yates and the deputy director at the time, Andrew McCabe, that are doing this.
00:13:30.240There's no chance, zero chance, that the attorney general and FBI director don't know of something this high.
00:13:37.060These are what are called politically sensitive investigations.
00:13:39.660The director always gets, as does the attorney general, they get advised when there's a politically sensitive figure who's now under criminal investigation.
00:13:47.040Now, we've got to go get that evidence still.
00:14:51.500Agency people get moved between agencies.
00:14:53.260So he comes from the Justice Department.
00:14:55.180He's working for the FBI, and he writes this memo down so that everybody has their story straight about why the FBI took a dive on Hillary Clinton.
00:15:04.960And the goal here is to show, hey, the agents in the field were doing their job, but political pressure on top was coming in.
00:15:11.960But he says in writing the memo, this is where I was trying to take it, but he says in writing the memo that they've been told to shut it down by Sally Yates.
00:15:18.700But he seems to say without explanation, like she didn't say, here's why.
00:15:23.620So, yeah, I think when we get to the bottom of this, the goal here was to say the FBI was a victim here.
00:15:30.060The mean old Justice Department kept us from doing this.
00:15:32.820And so when you read it, you see what needed to be chronicled, which is, you know, normally when an FBI agent has a criminal predicated investigation, you go to your local U.S. attorney, you get a grand jury started, you get subpoenas or search warrants, and you start finding out whether a crime should be prosecuted.
00:15:47.760What happens after the order from Sally Yates shut it down is the FBI goes and tries to get that normal cooperation.
00:15:55.880It happens every day, 30, 40 times a week between FBI agents and their affiliated U.S. attorney's office, and they find a common refrain.
00:16:31.240Everybody knew by that time that Andy McCabe's wife had run as a Democrat for a Virginia State Senate seat and had solicited financial help from Terry McAuliffe, the Virginia governor,
00:16:45.400and the longtime protege of the Clintons, the former chief fundraiser of the Clintons.
00:16:49.420He's the guy that presided over the 1990s Asia fundraising scandal that left such a dark mark over the Clinton presidency.
00:17:28.600At some point, this lawyer is asked to put together a chronology so that there is a record of exactly who said what when.
00:17:36.060And that's what this document represents.
00:17:37.620The interesting chronology shows that in March of 2016, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Arkansas informed the FBI's Little Rock investigators.
00:17:51.660Again, as you point out, there are FBI investigations in Washington, D.C., and New York, and in Little Rock, which is where the Clintons, of course, live for many years.
00:17:58.440So it shows that in March of 2016, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Arkansas informed the FBI's Little Rock investigators that then Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates ordered the federal prosecutors to shut it down, to, quote, shut it down.
00:18:14.860This is new per your reporting in the Cash Patel release.
00:18:18.940So that's March of 2016, Little Rock FBI is being told to shut it down.
00:18:24.000Then we get to August of 2016, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of New York purportedly said that they would not support the investigation into the Clinton Foundation, according to this timeline.
00:18:44.220In June of 2016, so in between the bad news to the Little Rock investigators that came in March, and the bad news unleashed by SDNY and EDNY in August of 2016, so in June of 2016 was the Bill Clinton-Loretta Lynch meeting on the tarmac.
00:19:09.280Everyone knew something happened on board that airplane where they just happened to meet.
00:19:16.500That was the story they wanted us to believe, that the planes just happened to land at the same place at the same time in Phoenix, and they claimed they did not discuss anything.
00:19:27.820They didn't discuss any DOJ investigation, nothing.
00:19:30.600But they never had problems again after that, according to this timeline, John, with the Clinton Foundation investigation.
00:19:41.380And listen, this is something I've been saying for a long time.
00:19:45.060And if you remember, four years ago, five years ago, I was on Fox and helping people understand the Uranium One investigation.
00:19:52.620The Uranium One investigation was one of the allegations that this set of corruption probes were predicated on, that a transaction was allowed to go, American and North American-owned uranium was allowed to go to Rosatom and Vladimir Putin's uranium agency around the time that large transfers of money went to the Clinton Foundation.
00:20:17.780And Hillary Clinton's State Department is one of the approval points in that thing.
00:20:21.680That's one of the predications that they were looking at at the time.
00:20:25.220That detail was in the FBI's hands, but it wasn't in the public's hands yet.
00:20:30.440And there's a confidential human source that is assisting that part of the investigation.
00:20:34.580You'll see in the timeline, there's a mention of a CHS, confidential human source.
00:20:38.720So that's going on, and it's heating up.
00:20:41.720And I've always argued that I don't believe the TARMAC meeting could have been about the email investigation because Hillary Clinton's lawyers knew by mid-June that the FBI was shutting down the email case, that it was going to be a recommendation of no prosecution.
00:20:58.340And they weren't worried about it anymore.
00:20:59.820I know that for certain as a reporter who was talking to Hillary Clinton's legal team.
00:21:04.500They knew in mid to late June that they were out of peril.
00:21:11.360They also knew that Little Rock was bubbling up on a corruption investigation.
00:21:17.000And I think the more likely thing that we all ought to be focusing on is, did that come up in the meeting?
00:21:24.240Was there any mention of the foundation?
00:21:25.680And two, was some of the concern about the emails on Hillary Clinton's servers not the classified information, but what might have been chronicled about what the secretary was dealing with that had relationships
00:21:39.660I think that that is a very significant question that the FBI was trying to get to the bottom of and didn't.
00:21:46.140And I'm going to remind you of one thing we learned from Tulsi.
00:21:48.380A few weeks ago, we learned that there are five thumb drives of evidence in the Hillary Clinton email investigation that were never looked at.
00:21:58.080That is the explosive annex that got released with the help of Chuck Grassley, with the help of the president.
00:22:02.980At my request, I made the request to the president.
00:22:06.020No one has ever exploited what is on those five thumb drives.
00:22:09.100And we ought to now all be pressing to get that information.
00:22:12.440I've already filed a Freedom of Information Act request.
00:22:16.440Maybe there's some evidence on those thumb drives that would relate either to classified documents or to the Clinton Foundation case.
00:22:24.760And I think that is a place now that if the Justice Department revives all of this information, that's a strong place that they're likely to start.
00:22:38.040They searched Barron Trump's personals down at Mar-a-Lago.
00:22:42.360They uncovered every stone in an effort to get Trump, this FBI, Biden's FBI and DOJ, and actually did bring criminal charges against him.
00:22:51.640The Democrats did in four different jurisdictions.
00:22:54.780But with this, at every turn, John, they worked to dismiss evidence to when they found it, simply look the other way.
00:23:01.640When they might have been getting close to indicting, been told no by the deputy attorney general or the attorney general herself, not interested.
00:23:11.480I mean, the double standard when it comes to a Clinton and a Biden on the one hand versus a man named Donald Trump on the other is shocking.
00:23:20.380And the dismissal of any evidence that downplayed their narrative on Putin's trying to help Trump.
00:23:28.420Like they they had so much telling them that that is bullshit.
00:23:31.780He actually didn't care who won the election.
00:23:34.480They worked so hard to dismiss the evidence that helped Trump and to play up the obvious false evidence like Christopher Steele dossier that would impugn Trump.
00:23:44.360But meanwhile, you've got three different FBI agents all driving toward the same conclusion, which is the sitting secretary of state is corrupt.
00:23:53.060She is doing pay to play. You can only get access to her as the secretary of state if you donate to her corrupt Clinton foundation and it gets shut down.
00:24:04.700It's the opposite. It's literally a 180 from what they did to Donald Trump.
00:24:09.620Yeah. Listen, the way you opened your show, there's no better description of what the conspiracy is.
00:24:14.340It's a conspiracy to protect potential Democrats from potential criminal prosecution and then to violate the civil liberties and privacy and reputations of innocent Republicans to create an alternate story to protect political interests, meaning what's going to happen in the election.
00:24:31.500That's what it is. It's not it's not more complicated.
00:24:34.340And I know people say, oh, a conspiracy case is going to be complicated.
00:24:37.900We protected Democrats. And the cycle is Hillary has two problems.
00:24:42.720Email, now corruption. We can prove that was active at the time.
00:24:46.600Hunter Biden's got corruption and taxes.
00:24:48.880And by the way, the first evidence of that comes in in March and March through May of 2016.
00:24:54.400And then 2019, it's Hunter Biden a lot more.
00:24:58.640And so we impeached the president and we have the government actually creating stories that I think we will prove were false.
00:25:03.720And then in 21, they find Joe Biden's classified documents at UPenn office in Washington and his garage.
00:25:10.320And they got to make Donald Trump look like he's the classified guy first before they can let the cat out of the bag that Joe Biden has the same problem.
00:25:27.220And then the violation of innocent people's civil liberties to create a political ruse.
00:25:32.820That is where I believe the grand conspiracy case is headed.
00:25:36.020I now believe that there are multiple grand juries that have begun work around this country in multiple jurisdictions outside of Washington where evidence is now being gathered.
00:26:18.620But there are multiple locations where pieces of this are being looked at.
00:26:22.180And maybe the grand jurors don't even know it's a grand conspiracy, just looking at some of the overt acts in one of these chapters of this sad story.
00:26:57.700And, you know, we won't know a lot about if the Justice Department does the right thing, unlike the Obama and Biden Justice Departments that leaked anything, the grand jury process will be unbelievably secret and will be masked from it because that's the way the process is supposed to work.
00:27:12.100In the meantime, we have an opportunity through the Freedom of Information Act and through our purchase as reporters to go out and try to get the story for the American people so they can understand why this is going on.
00:27:24.080The Democrats, who didn't care about going after a president when it was the Republican, are going to start crying, this is payback, this is retribution.
00:27:32.140We need Americans to understand it's not payback and retribution.
00:27:35.580There are legitimate legal questions here.
00:27:37.800I mean, all that comes to mind in response to that is, you know, as Socrates or Aristotle might have put it, suck it.
00:28:02.560What, I agree with you that if there's a grand conspiracy case brought, it's not going to be in Pennsylvania.
00:28:06.920It's probably going to be down in Florida, which, you know, we've had a lot of people kind of kick around and raise over and over in this context.
00:28:13.440The raid on Mar-a-Lago is part of this, which would give them jurisdiction down there.
00:28:16.540The odds of getting a better judge and a better jury much higher for Team Trump.
00:28:20.640But what are you hearing when it comes to the possible, possible names who might potentially be looking at an indictment here?
00:28:31.080Yeah, the only thing I know for sure is that there are multiple referrals.
00:28:34.600The first referrals came from the House Intelligence Committee in 19 and 20.
00:28:38.180They've been secret all this time, but I have confirmed as many as a dozen people referred at that moment in 19 and 20 in the aftermath of the Ukraine impeachment show and the Russia collusion unraveling.
00:28:52.240Then there are the ones from John Ratcliffe, and there are the ones from Tulsi Gabbard.
00:29:09.060So it wouldn't be surprising if those names are there.
00:29:11.400They have said on television they expect to be encountering the criminal justice system in some way, and they're lawyering up.
00:29:17.140So I think those are reasonable things.
00:29:19.500I think this starts much lower than the big names.
00:29:22.080And when you're rolling up the mob, you start with the capos and the street lieutenants.
00:29:25.860You don't go right to the Godfather, right?
00:29:27.340You don't go to John Gotti right away.
00:29:28.840So they're going to roll up people in the deep state and in these nonprofits and in some of these other places and then get them to testify upward.
00:29:37.880So the big guns are probably not going to face much consequence short term other than maybe a subpoena for the records.
00:29:43.740And I think that's, you know, if it's a traditional conspiracy case, like you pursue the mob and the cartels, that's how they normally work.
00:29:50.240And I think the Justice Department is going back to the way it used to do things.
00:31:02.020I mean, he's truly like an unsung hero.
00:31:04.020I mean, he's kind of some some Republicans know, but he really did get to the bottom of a lot of the nonsense.
00:31:08.900But he didn't release the report that the House Intel report that really the one that we've been discussing that has all these new juicy nuggets in it.
00:31:18.660That investigation seems to have continued even once the Democrats took power in the House and Adam Schiff, then a congressman, took over as chairman of the committee.
00:31:29.800It continued going and it wasn't completed until the fall of 2020 when the Democrats were still in control of the committee.
00:31:39.560So I don't I don't I don't understand why when it was finally done, it didn't get released.
00:31:45.740I can see why Adam Schiff didn't necessarily want to release it because it doesn't it wasn't good for his side and the Russiagate stuff.
00:31:51.960But why wouldn't a Republican have leaked it?
00:31:55.300Why would why what what I'm reading online is that it's the Republicans who sent it to the CIA and then the CIA didn't want to declassify it.
00:32:03.660And they put it in this safe at Langley.
00:32:05.820So why would the Republicans not have made sure this thing got leaked and made public in 2020?
00:32:12.860Why did it go underground for five years with all these revelations in it?
00:32:46.600And I think when history looks back over time, it is that intelligence apparatus under Gina Haspel that allowed some of the Ukraine things to go on that we now know to be bogus.
00:32:57.160It's that intelligence apparatus that slowed down Devin Nunes until he was in the minority.
00:33:02.480And then once you're in the minority, the only way you can force it out is by a vote of the committee.
00:33:06.840You're going to lose that vote because you don't have enough members.
00:33:09.540So the system, that steel curtain, I used to cover football and I was a sports writer early in my career.
00:33:15.420And everybody remembers the great Pittsburgh Steelers defense.
00:33:27.300And the secrets that could have exonerated him or informed the American people got trapped in that steel curtain until just a few short weeks ago.
00:33:36.560It is remarkable that they were able to keep things a secret for nine, six, seven, six years.
00:33:42.400And by the way, we're not done seeing some crazy secrets exposed.
00:33:47.440There's going to be more troubling things ahead than anything we've talked about this week.
00:34:01.800The Senate Intel Committee and its report.
00:34:05.500This is the Democrats favorite thing to point to.
00:34:08.920They say there is no scandal here whatsoever.
00:34:11.540And you need look no further than at Marco Rubio's Senate Intelligence Committee, which they claim verified all the things in that January intelligence community assessment.
00:35:35.200The same sort of mindset, which is, you know, there are Republicans who want to believe that the institutions we used to trust and they could still trust.
00:35:40.760And so they were believing the briefings they get from an Andy McCabe, a Pete Strzok, and a Bill Priestap inside the FBI.
00:35:46.960Obviously, those briefings were not nearly as complete as we would later learn.
00:35:52.180On the other side were the Devin Nuneses, which is, listen, I'm just a common sense guy.
00:36:05.380The largest group of institutionalists, the people who still wanted to believe the institutions would never mislead Congress, were on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
00:36:13.260Marco Rubio wants to believe in institutions.
00:37:23.280I mean, I've had my husband, Doug, on this show to promote his books.
00:37:28.720You know, his latest book was a big—bestseller was nonfiction.
00:37:32.420Even in that context, I disclosed to the audience, this is my husband.
00:37:35.300The audience must know if you have a bias toward the person you're bringing on.
00:37:40.100They must know that it's absolutely irresponsible to have him on to discuss Russiagate, a scandal in which he is caught up and have him opine on the scandal as an objective reporter who's got arm's length from the whole controversy.
00:37:55.160This is extremely corrupt, but that's not what I might want to ask you.
00:37:58.980She did ask him some questions about the Senate Intel Committee report, and actually it was the day before on his podcast, The Daily.
00:38:09.020Yes, his newspaper's podcast, that he tried to dismiss that House Intel Committee report, John, by saying, it's done by a bunch of partisan hacks.
00:38:17.680It was all these Republican partisan hacks.
00:38:21.360They differed from the Senate Intel Committee report.
00:38:23.600Kind of, like, dismissing it, like, what do you expect a bunch of MAGA faithful to write in assessing whether Trump was colluding with the Russians?
00:38:46.160I was taking a couple interns who had done a good job.
00:38:48.200We were just going to get a sandwich and shop for a little bit.
00:38:50.560And I was walking down the street, and one of the New York Times reporters, who I knew for a long time and respected, confronted me on the street and started screaming and yelling at me.
00:38:58.920He literally was trying to get into fisticuffs with me, screaming that I was ruining his reputation and that I didn't understand who his sources were, and I was wrong about Russia collusion, and I was ruining his reputation.
00:39:10.660And he literally was almost to the point of punching me.
00:39:13.020And I told him, I seriously suggest you should just walk away now.
00:39:26.560That passion I saw that day tells me something about the New York Times team that has done that reporting.
00:39:32.500And that is they're so emotionally invested in the stories that they wrote, that they won Pulitzer's on, that they can't separate themselves from the job of what the facts are.
00:39:42.120You just can't fall in love with a story.
00:39:45.980It's the ultimate blinders that journalists get when they make a mistake.
00:39:49.780You have to always be a skeptic, even when it's a trusted source.
00:39:53.420And I think history will look back at the Washington Post and the New York Times, much like Jeff Gerth has already done in the Columbia Journalism Review, and said good reporters, well-intentioned reporters, fell in love with the story and couldn't separate fact from fiction, couldn't see the motives of their sources.
00:40:10.760We now know the motives of their sources.
00:40:28.640I think history will look back at these teams and say, no matter what the Pulitzer Committee says, because I don't think anyone cares about the Pulitzer Committee anymore, their award system doesn't mean anything to anyone.
00:40:37.980People say, John, you should get a Pulitzer.
00:40:42.700But I think investigators, these investigative reporters fell in love with their sources and the storyline and couldn't see the facts from the fiction.
00:40:53.260And that is a problem that has existed in journalism for 10 or 15 years.
00:40:57.880Earlier generations of reporters have done great work at these institutions.
00:41:02.660They did do Pulitzer caliber work in the meeting we mean it by, but they got blinders.
00:41:07.200And I think when you see these defenses now, I mean, if you're still defending Russia collusion now, you're beyond delusional.
00:41:16.260And the American public has moved beyond you if you're trying to make some defense of it.
00:41:20.300The great journalists sometimes get it wrong.
00:41:24.060When you get it wrong, say so and move on.
00:41:26.680The other piece of it is, and I watched this happen to you, and I knew you back on the Fox News days and knew you to be a man of integrity and you're reporting to be very solid.
00:41:35.440But they tried and still try to paint you as a right wing lunatic, some sort of a nut job, far right, unreliable guy, because they have to.
00:41:45.960Because either they're right or you're right.
00:41:51.000And so they engage in the politics of personal destruction.
00:41:54.600You know, it has to be some fringy right wing lunatic.
00:41:57.460Right. And you've told us the other day about your, you know, long background at the AP and the Washington Times and other respectable, well, previously at least, respectable outlets.
00:42:16.220And, you know, to me, it turned out to be a blessing because I left a fractured industry that was misleading the public, and I tried to go do something that maybe would help fix it.
00:42:23.660And I hope before I hang up my spurs one day, people say, hey, people like Megan and John and all the others who went out on their own and started things, they helped fix the problem.
00:42:31.980They got the American people informed again.
00:42:34.820You said something, and I think you nailed it.
00:42:38.260The dynamic is either you're right or I'm right, and that's the personal nature of it that these reporters have looked at.
00:42:44.600And I've always asked, are the facts right?
00:43:14.400Your work is what mattered, and that was a great culture to grow up in.
00:43:17.640I think reporters have to stop worrying about their personalities and their social media followings and their stardom and who's going to assign them to the next book.
00:43:59.940I'm constantly saying, because obviously I'm a Trump supporter and they know that.
00:44:03.580But I'm constantly saying when we do our editorial for this show, for AM Update, we are not in the business of running cover for Donald Trump.
00:44:10.100If the facts are bad for Trump, that's going into our report.
00:44:20.280And then I'll offer my own particular take on the news, which I think the audience understands the difference between.
00:44:26.880But I would never sacrifice my credibility for him or any other politician.
00:44:30.320And when you go down that line, there's no coming back from it, John, as you know.
00:44:33.900Well, listen, I'm so grateful for your reporting, your honesty, and your commitment to truly intellectually stimulating, interesting reporting, no matter where it falls.
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00:45:56.000Amid President Trump's D.C. crime crackdown, an incident involving a Subway sandwich is making news and has led to the arrest of a DOJ employee who's now been fired.
00:46:16.060First of all, can you believe this crap with Solomon, what he's reporting, and like the day-to-day?
00:46:20.040I mean, the cover-up, we knew, of course, that the Obama administration and the Biden administration ran cover for Hillary Clinton and had no interest in Clinton Foundation corruption, which has been, yeah, the whole books have been written about it.
00:46:35.160But now we're getting really the details, like three FBI field offices had investigations into it, was shut down by the Deputy Attorney General, Sally Yates, under Loretta Lynch.
00:47:07.620Yeah, and that's a huge piece of this, as you covered toward the end of the interview there, that, you know, having people who—and I think a lot of times we talk about, you know, people like me who just, you know, run my mouth on my opinions every single day.
00:47:19.220I try to do the best to bring out the truth, of course, but, like, I'm not a reporter like John is.
00:47:22.740I think at times conservatives have sort of abandoned that world thinking, well, you know, all these big institutional, you know, places like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the LA Times, they don't even hire conservatives.
00:47:33.280They find out that you are even going to entertain the conservative perspective.
00:47:50.360People who actually care about journalism, people who care about the facts, going into that space and saying, no, we're just going to be – we're just going to be like dogs, attack dogs, going after this information and trying to find the truth and presenting it in a way, as John does.
00:48:18.280He's trying to give you – I mean, just the news is his website.
00:48:20.800He's trying to give you the actual news.
00:48:22.880And it's incredibly valuable to have people like that on our side because, you know, I think, you know, for the most part, the people who have those jobs at these big institutions are on the left.
00:48:34.500Occasionally we'll see little blips of good reporting from those places.
00:48:38.560But to have somebody who's looking at this on the daily basis.
00:48:44.080This is not something they would touch.
00:48:45.660And it really did cause serious damage.
00:48:47.640I mean, all this that was done to President Trump, Russia, Russia, Russia, the fake collusion stuff, really damaged his first term and undermined our entire foreign policy with and toward Russia.
00:48:58.620Trump commented on that yesterday when he was at the Kennedy Center, which he is now calling the Trump-Kennedy Center.
00:49:05.380Here he is on what Russiagate did to his first term.
01:32:52.460I mean, like, slavery has existed since the beginning of man, and it's a really terrible thing.
01:32:57.600We all recognize it's a real stain on our history, and it is something that we should cover.
01:33:02.560That's a really, really important thing that people understand about our country, largely because, number one, we were one of the very first.
01:33:11.300To rip ourselves out of that whole situation, thankfully, you know, we helped to lead the world out of that.
01:33:16.960The only country that's fought a war to end slavery.
01:33:56.800They wound up going in this situation to keep the original colonies together, you know, and eventually with a real, by the way, line to end it as soon as possible, which they eventually did.
01:34:09.180You know, I think it is, you don't look at slavery and say, oh, well, we should justify it.
01:34:25.640So this museum has become exactly what she was describing there.
01:34:32.240It becomes this bizarre sort of woke left-wing self-punishment where you go in there and just think about how bad you are when in reality we are the greatest nation that's ever been.
01:34:47.860The same thing that happens with capitalism where we sit here and we say, oh, well, there's this problem with capitalism and there's this problem.
01:34:52.700Of course there are problems with everything.
01:34:55.840We can sit here and look at the problems of capitalism and try to make it better, but we should also acknowledge it's ripped billions of people out of poverty around the world.
01:35:04.620It's one of the greatest things that humans have ever accomplished.
01:35:08.060It's happened within our lifetime, and nobody notices because we're complaining about, you know, what statue is in some park in Alabama.
01:35:17.760None of this – it doesn't make any sense the way that we handle these things, and I think what we should do is look at them with perspective, recognize that we've made mistakes, try to use those as examples of things to avoid forever, and learn the lesson of those things.
01:35:33.920And, Megan, one of the central lessons of slavery is we shouldn't judge people by the color of their skin.
01:35:39.480And for the last, you know, certainly since the George Floyd situation in prominence, the left has tried to recreate a situation in which that's the way we run our society.
01:35:49.480Everybody looks at each other and says, what skin color are you?
01:35:51.840Okay, now we can judge what you can do, what colleges you can get into, what jobs you can get.
01:35:56.000That was the sort of thing we were supposed to be running away from.
01:35:58.540They're trying to push us back, and I do think, at least since, I don't know, 2023 or so, we've made great progress moving the opposite direction, but there is still a lot of work to do, as that clip shows.
01:36:09.900Like, we went down, as I said, and we went to a bunch of the museums, and what you get over and over again is like, okay, you know, they lean in.
01:36:19.380They want to spend all the time on slavery and Jim Crow.
01:36:23.980Like, it's, there's an emphasis on the worst pieces of our past.
01:37:11.580And maybe, like, a corner is devoted to what some minority participated in or how they contributed.
01:37:17.740And try not to make the whole story about that because you feel the need to elevate or to center the conversation around some oppressed group.
01:38:56.380He slams Chicago PD, Rahm Emanuel, who was the mayor of Chicago at the time, as villains while denying his hate that he committed a hate crime hoax and mounting a comeback.
01:39:11.500Smollett names his, quote, villains as the two people who assaulted me.
01:39:16.960Do you mean the two men you paid to assault you?
01:39:19.640The Osandario brothers, Jussie, the Chicago Police Department.
01:39:24.300And if I may be so brave, the mayor, he says.
01:39:29.620He goes on to say, standby, flipping the page here.
01:39:36.000OK, this is from the Netflix documentary.
01:39:39.960He, when asked why potentially this potentially exculpatory evidence did not surface earlier, quote, to be honest with you, I don't really know.
01:39:48.660I'm not an investigative reporter or a detective.
01:39:50.920I can't sit and tell you exactly beat by beat what happened.
01:39:54.560I can only tell you what did not happen.
01:39:56.760And what did not happen is the story that's been out there for almost seven years.
01:40:00.360That somehow I would have even a reason to do something as egregious as this.
01:40:06.260Now, here is what actually happened per the two brothers who have gone on record with law enforcement and with the rest of the world as having been paid thirty five hundred dollars by Jussie Smollett to attack him in this hoax.