The Megyn Kelly Show - Fact-Checking the New York Times' ＂Daily＂ Podcast's Disinformation-Filled Russiagate Episode, with Michael Shellenberger and Aaron Mate

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00:01:01.620 Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM channel 111 every weekday at noon east.

00:01:13.040 Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show. When I woke up Wednesday morning and

00:01:18.420 checked my podcast feed, I saw the New York Times' The Daily Podcast, which I often listen to.

00:01:24.920 And they had finally gotten around to covering all of the Russiagate revelations that we've been

00:01:31.500 doing on this show for weeks. Host Michael Barbaro brought on the New York Times investigative

00:01:38.000 reporter Michael Schmidt. I thought this is going to be really interesting because he is the reporter

00:01:43.980 that we've learned James Comey used for leaks through his Columbia law professor friend. Comey used

00:01:52.660 his Columbia law professor friends to leak to Michael Schmidt. And I remembered that Schmidt won

00:01:58.180 a Pulitzer Prize for his Russiagate reporting. So I thought, okay, they've got a few things to

00:02:02.320 acknowledge up front. And then let's hear what he has to say about all this stuff. Of course,

00:02:07.520 shockingly, the Times did not acknowledge any of that in its episode. None of it.

00:02:13.940 That he is personally involved in the controversy, that he is part of it because the media acting like

00:02:21.600 lapdogs, taking what we now know was flimsy at best and let's face it, false intelligence,

00:02:29.320 and slapping it on the pages of their magazines and newspapers without checking in an effort to

00:02:35.060 smear Donald Trump is one of the biggest media scandals of all time. And I would think if you're

00:02:40.680 running the Times and the Daily, Schmidt is probably realistically the last person you would want to

00:02:46.100 platform as the expert on this, given the fact that he's personally coming under fire daily on the

00:02:53.000 podcasts and the websites that are actually bothering to cover this new scandal. But no,

00:02:59.340 they platformed him like he was truly a trustworthy, the trustworthy, one might say, expert on Wednesday,

00:03:06.060 and once again, misled their audience about everything on this scandal. Here he is on a different

00:03:16.380 broadcast. This is over on MSNBC. And he decided the podcast was just so good, he needed to go on MSNBC to

00:03:25.940 promote it. And he chose to do that on the show of his wife, Nicole Wallace, who's an MSNBC anchor,

00:03:34.520 who committed yet another sin of journalism by not acknowledging her relationship, i.e. her marriage

00:03:43.800 with her guest to her guest at any point.

00:03:48.780 Gabbard or CIA Director Radcliffe or Kash Patel, they go out and they make these massive claims

00:03:54.820 that they say truly unlock the Russia conspiracy. And, you know, they're hoping, apparently,

00:04:01.600 at least it looks like that, that their supporters aren't going to go and read the actual materials

00:04:06.960 that they're putting out. But when you read them and study them and look at them, they're not what

00:04:11.720 they claim to be. But at the same time, they're making massive claims. You know, Tulsi Gabbard making

00:04:18.360 claims of treasonous criminality by Obama and his intelligence community officials, but not doing that

00:04:24.160 based on anything that really moves the ball in terms of proving that conspiracy.

00:04:30.900 Okay, well, unfortunately for Mike Schmidt and Nicole Wallace, we did read all the documents

00:04:35.660 and so have our guests. And we're going to take a deep dive today to fact check everything he got

00:04:41.500 wrong on The Daily, which is the most watched podcast, news podcast in the country. I mean,

00:04:48.660 this is absolute negligence by The New York Times. Joining me now, Michael Schellenberger,

00:04:54.140 founder of the Public News Substack, and Aaron Maté, an independent journalist who covers the

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00:06:13.160 What are the new technologies that will change aviation?

00:06:17.280 Well, hydrogen would be one for sure if we got there. I mean, hydrogen is not just a alternative

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00:06:42.020 podcasts. Guys, welcome back. Good to be here. Thanks for having us, Megan. So let's start right

00:06:51.700 at the beginning. Mike Schmidt goes on The Daily, again, this is on August 13th, this Wednesday,

00:06:56.100 and tries to characterize the controversy while completely ignoring certain really important

00:07:07.060 facts. Let me just play this out for you and then we can react.

00:07:10.580 For the Trump administration, this is all about the original government investigation into Trump

00:07:16.620 and Russia, dating back to the 2016 campaign. I think we need to go back to that investigation,

00:07:22.220 which I know you covered very closely. Just remind us of the very basics of that investigation

00:07:28.040 and its conclusions and why the Trump administration remains so fixated on it.

00:07:34.380 In the aftermath of Trump winning the 2016 election, it was widely understood that Russia

00:07:40.880 had meddled in the campaign. Obama, faced with that reality, ordered his intelligence community

00:07:48.240 to conduct an assessment, essentially a determination to understand what Russia had done and why it had

00:07:56.940 done it. The intelligence community comes to a series of conclusions, which they lay out in a document

00:08:05.740 that was released in the final days of the Obama administration, just before Trump was about to take

00:08:12.860 over. And they find that Putin tried to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump while undermining America's

00:08:23.540 democracy.

00:08:25.060 Okay, guys, here's my own observation on this, and then I'll get you guys to weigh in.

00:08:31.840 Faced with the reality, faced with the reality that was widely understood that Russia had meddled in the

00:08:38.560 campaign, right? Like, already just assumes facts, not in evidence, right? Like, everyone knew that the

00:08:45.560 Russians had interfered and faced with this very difficult reality. Obama really had no choice but 0.74

00:08:51.100 to order an investigation, to order an assessment, a determination to understand what Russia had done,

00:08:57.680 which is not at all what actually went down. And then to talk about it as they reached a series of

00:09:03.440 conclusions and they lay them out in a document. No, it doesn't cover any of the infirmities

00:09:10.760 underlying those conclusions, nor the intentional manipulation, Aaron, that Obama did to try to make

00:09:19.920 sure this whole process reached a certain conclusion with, in particular, the before and after of what the

00:09:26.380 intel community we now know was about to tell him on Russia, then his involvement, then the complete change

00:09:32.080 in what was actually reported. None of that in Michael Schmidt's summary of what we're about to

00:09:37.200 hear. Correct. He's just following the Russiagate playbook when it comes to how the corporate media

00:09:42.800 covered this story of parroting a narrative while ignoring all the countervailing facts. And as is the

00:09:50.700 case here, there are plenty of new countervailing facts that he is just simply pretending don't exist.

00:09:55.460 If you read the recently declassified House intelligence report that reviewed the January

00:10:02.120 2017 intelligence assessment that was put out by James Clapper and John Brennan, they pointed out

00:10:07.840 that every single thing that Michael Schmidt said about Russian interference and the preference for

00:10:11.620 Trump was wrong. And it was wrong because Brennan and Clapper simply cherry-picked a very small amount

00:10:18.600 of intelligence and ignored all the other intelligence that undermined their narrative.

00:10:22.440 So for example, on the claim that Russia interfered to help Trump, the House intelligence report points

00:10:29.020 out that that was based on a fragment of one sentence which had an unclear meaning. Somebody said

00:10:35.000 that Putin was counting on Trump winning. And that came from a Kremlin official who had second-hand

00:10:41.460 hand access. So basically, that conclusion that underpinned the intelligence community assessment that Putin

00:10:46.440 wanted Trump to win and was trying to help him win was based on a fragment of a sentence that could have

00:10:51.800 been interpreted in multiple different ways. And that came from someone who was relaying hearsay.

00:10:56.440 And the intelligence community assessment, meanwhile, ignored all the other intelligence that they had

00:11:01.720 received, including that Putin had said very clearly he didn't care who won, because no matter who won

00:11:06.680 the election, he expected the same policy from Washington. So that's an example of Michael Schmidt and

00:11:12.400 all of his colleagues at the New York Times simply just ignoring the evidence that undermines their

00:11:16.840 conspiracy theory.

00:11:17.560 The complete absence of pointing out the chronology. December 8th, they were set, we now know, to receive

00:11:23.980 a presidential daily brief that, if anything, downplayed Russia's involvement. And then there

00:11:30.520 was this critical meeting with all the top intel officials that, per Obama's chief of staff, released

00:11:36.900 direction to Clapper. And we saw it in writing. The next day, they said, per the president's direction,

00:11:44.120 we're going this other route. They went an entirely different way. And the very next day, the news

00:11:50.200 media then ran, including Michael Schmidt's newspaper, with the new narrative, which was Russia tried to

00:11:56.200 help Trump. We are now starting to get a really clear picture in which what the Russiagate hoax was,

00:12:03.340 was basically a disinformation effort created in concert by the intelligence community, the CIA,

00:12:11.260 the FBI, most dramatically, with some concerns raised by the NSA, which are interesting, along with the

00:12:19.460 New York Times and the Washington Post, to create the perception that Donald Trump had committed treason

00:12:25.740 and was a puppet because he was controlled by Russia in a sex blackmail operation. That incredibly

00:12:33.180 outlandish conspiracy theory was promoted by the New York Times and the Washington Post, along with the CIA

00:12:40.980 and FBI over years. And so what you're seeing in the Michael Schmidt podcast is just a continuation

00:12:47.060 of that disinformation effort aimed at, first of all, we now know, achieving either impeachment

00:12:52.760 or criminal prosecution of Trump. And ultimately with the goal of not, of either removing him from

00:12:59.600 power or disabling his ability to govern and be reelected. If I can make a quick point about Michael

00:13:05.740 Schmidt, he has been a key actor in this disinformation campaign from the start. He authored, he co-authored

00:13:13.500 a report in the New York Times, February 14th, 2017. I can't believe the story is still up, but it speaks

00:13:20.400 to just the complete corruption of journalism during the Russiagate era. February 14th, 2017, the headline

00:13:25.800 in the New York Times was, Trump campaign had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence.

00:13:31.620 And what it says is that the first line that phone records intercepted phone calls to the member of

00:13:38.100 Donald Trump 2016 campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior

00:13:43.700 Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former

00:13:49.920 American officials. So Michael Schmidt and the New York Times were alleging very early on that the

00:13:55.300 Trump campaign was talking to senior Russian intelligence officials throughout the election.

00:14:00.040 OK, it's an extraordinary allegation. There's zero evidence to support it. They talk about phone

00:14:05.300 records, intercepted calls. Where are these calls? There's nothing. Even Jim Comey had later testified

00:14:12.860 that it wasn't true. Peter Strzok, the lead FBI agent on the Trump Russia probe, according to his

00:14:17.520 declassified notes, there was no evidence to support this. But Michael Schmidt and the New York Times

00:14:22.120 have never corrected this because they were part of this disinformation operation. And the fact that that

00:14:27.780 story is still up and the fact that people like him can still speak or pretend to speak with authority

00:14:32.820 on on the Russiagate story, it just underscores how there's been zero accountability so far,

00:14:38.640 so far for just this massive scam.

00:14:41.080 It to some extent, it makes me feel some empathy for readers of the New York Times and watchers of

00:14:46.940 MSNBC. I mean, at this point, they know what they're getting. So not too much empathy. But I'm just saying

00:14:50.820 that there is a level of trust between the Times and its readers. And they're they're truly being it if it

00:14:56.820 appears willfully misled by the Times and its reporters. And there's just no accountability

00:15:04.080 for the mistakes that they've made. And that mistake is a charitable word to none whatsoever.

00:15:08.380 They're they they want their audience to be deluded about this. And their audience is deluded about

00:15:13.340 this. OK, let's let's go through it because there's a lot of themselves a polluter like they gave

00:15:17.360 themselves a polluter for this. So what are you going to do in that situation? You just got to

00:15:20.140 down. Yeah, you can't you can't give it back. You don't want to give it back. All right. Here is the

00:15:24.780 next claim that we wanted to fact check number two. She releases a classified report that was 1.00

00:15:31.660 written by Tulsa House Republicans in Trump's first term that claims that Putin was not trying

00:15:40.880 to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton. So a report that takes real issue with this pretty central finding

00:15:49.820 of the Obama intelligence conclusion that Putin wants Trump to win. Correct. But it's really important

00:15:59.200 to note that this report was written by a bunch of hardened Trump partisans in the House and it stands

00:16:10.560 alone. No other serious entity that has looked at this question, including a massive bipartisan

00:16:21.200 investigation in the Senate, comes to the claim that these House Republicans did. OK, so, Michael,

00:16:28.160 it's partisan hacks who did the House intelligence report, which we just now got our hands on so it can be

00:16:34.720 dismissed. But Senate Intel report stellar, untouchable and 100 percent supports our findings.

00:16:43.360 So let's tout that one. We've seen the Senate Intel report touted over and over again by these

00:16:48.920 Russiagate hoaxers trying to defend themselves. Thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, look, I think I think

00:16:56.240 people should take the time to read that House report, the HIPC report. It's called HIPC after the

00:17:01.720 acronym, the House Committee on Intelligence, the Oversight Committee. It's devastating. I mean,

00:17:07.100 it goes through the full body of intelligence that was cherry picked essentially by Obama's CIA

00:17:14.260 director to create that intelligence community assessment. Schmidt's just being deliberately

00:17:19.400 deceptive. I don't know how else to say it. It's hard for me to believe that he's he honestly

00:17:23.460 thinks that after reading either the House report or the CIA tradecraft memo that Ratcliffe just released.

00:17:30.320 Mm hmm. The Senate Intel Committee, Aaron, acknowledged that it was limited in what it

00:17:38.240 could do. It acknowledged that its power to investigate did not include search warrants

00:17:43.280 or wiretaps and that it fell short of the FBI's abilities. They said that while the committee does

00:17:51.080 not describe the final result as a complete picture, we believe this volume provides the most comprehensive

00:17:57.560 description to date of what happened. So they they were saying they weren't saying everything

00:18:02.260 we're saying here is bullshit, but they were saying we acknowledge we've been limited in what 0.93

00:18:06.560 we are able to do. And since this was issued, you and others have pointed out there were other 0.95

00:18:13.040 deficiencies with the Senate Intel Committee report that is now being touted as the gold standard by people

00:18:18.820 like Schmidt. If the Senate Intel report is the gold standard, why does it exclude all the evidence

00:18:26.640 that the HIPSE report, the House Intelligence report uncovered? Why are we just learning about

00:18:31.140 all that evidence? Like, for example, the fact that the key judgment of Putin preferring Trump was based

00:18:36.960 on a fragment of a sentence that could be interpreted in five different ways. Why didn't the Senate

00:18:42.900 intelligence report tell us any of this stuff? It said the Senate intelligence report essentially was

00:18:48.420 a rubber stamp. If you speak to anybody in Washington who's familiar with how the Senate

00:18:52.800 Intel report was produced, it was Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat who was running the show. And he was

00:18:57.900 gung ho on the issue of Trump Russia collusion from the start. He had a lot riding on a report validating

00:19:04.760 it. And another thing happened where Senator Richard Burr, who was the Republican co-chair of the Senate

00:19:09.540 Intel Committee. He got sidelined because of some corruption allegations. Senator Marco Rubio,

00:19:15.420 who was then had to put his name on it as the Republican chair, he should answer, why did he go

00:19:20.320 on with Mark Warner? Because now we're learning from the HIPSE report that's just been declassified

00:19:24.860 that the Senate Intel Committee ignored key intelligence. We learned so many incredible

00:19:30.440 things from HIPSE. We should have learned that from Senate Intel if it was credible. So if you just

00:19:34.580 compare the two reports, if one report has all this evidence that the other report, the Senate Intel report,

00:19:39.540 doesn't address, it's pretty clear to me which one is more credible.

00:19:42.640 Yes. And that, so, but Michael Schmidt dismisses all of that by saying, oh, these are hard partisans.

00:19:47.600 These are a bunch of Trump affiliated hard partisans in the House. So he dismisses the House report,

00:19:52.800 but not the Senate report.

00:19:55.220 Well, look, even if that's true, even if these were all Trump partisans on the HIPSE report,

00:20:00.160 first of all, you also had Trump partisans in Senate Intel, but yet they missed so much of what HIPSE

00:20:05.320 produced. So that's a glaring fact right there. And second of all, look, even if they were all

00:20:11.420 Trump partisans and that was their aim, the fact is either the facts that they uncovered are true or

00:20:15.300 they're not. And no one's disputing the facts that they uncovered. No one's disputing that John Brennan

00:20:20.420 and James Clapper handpicked five people under Brennan's direction to write the January 2017 report.

00:20:26.840 No one's disputing that the key finding of Putin preferring Trump and aspiring to help him win was based on a

00:20:32.120 fragment of a sentence based on a Kremlin source who only had second access to Putin.

00:20:37.640 No one's disputing that John Brennan and James Clapper excluded all the intelligence they received,

00:20:42.660 including from sources who had direct access to Putin, from Putin saying that no matter who won

00:20:46.680 the election, he didn't care because he expected the same result.

00:20:49.680 Let's do the next claim. Stop three. 1.00

00:20:51.940 The report offers essentially a different opinion from what the Obama administration came to.

00:20:59.760 Essentially says the House intelligence. You guys said Putin wanted to do one thing.

00:21:04.660 We believe Putin didn't want to do that. But there's nothing in that report like an email from

00:21:14.100 Obama to his intelligence community saying, I don't care what the evidence shows.

00:21:19.600 We need to get Donald Trump. That proves or shows or raises even questions about a larger treasonous

00:21:29.400 conspiracy. Michael Schellenberger, thoughts on that one?

00:21:33.660 I mean, you know, we don't know too much more about Obama's role than we did before,

00:21:38.140 but we do know that on December 9th, he held that meeting to basically require with all of his

00:21:43.980 intelligence and security agency heads to to do that intelligence community assessment that would

00:21:49.780 come out in January 2017. And we also know that exact same day that the New York Times and Washington

00:21:55.020 Post had conversations with multiple sources, according to them, who reported that, in fact,

00:22:00.840 the Russians had helped and wanted to help Trump and help help Trump win the election.

00:22:06.280 So, you know, for an administration that was famously cracking down, supposedly, on leakers,

00:22:13.260 the Obama administration was part of creating this disinformation in early December.

00:22:20.040 Can you trace it to Obama? I mean, of course, it's like he's it's like they created he's creating a

00:22:25.140 steel man, like he's sort of saying there's no smoking gun. Well, there almost never is a smoking gun.

00:22:30.400 It's not even relevant because, you know, you we the Supreme Court already decided with Trump that you

00:22:35.200 can't prosecute a sitting president. So I think that it's all a distraction from the basic picture

00:22:42.580 here, which is that partisan actors in the intelligence community, in the mainstream news

00:22:47.780 media worked together to create a false perception. And you can argue and it's interesting to ask. It

00:22:55.920 may not be that important, but to what extent they knew what they were doing. I mean, I think from

00:22:59.640 obviously a legal perspective, it does matter. But that is what was happening over a long period of

00:23:05.040 time. And certainly the intelligence analysts who were involved in creating the intelligence

00:23:09.240 community assessment, they knew that something was wrong. And they did oppose putting the Steele

00:23:14.420 dossier in the ICA. And both the FBI and the director of the CIA, Brennan, were demanding it.

00:23:20.680 So, you know, so that's Obama's relationships, a little bit of a red herring.

00:23:25.420 So this is my problem with that statement, Aaron, that it is not just that the House Intel Committee

00:23:32.880 had a different opinion than what Obama's team had. It's that the House took a deep dive into the

00:23:41.620 conclusions that were offered by Obama's Intel team and found that they were utterly unsupported.

00:23:49.160 It wasn't just we see the very same evidence differently. It was you don't have the evidence

00:23:55.360 you claim that you have your key judgments like that Putin interfered to help Trump are totally

00:24:03.120 unsupported. You misled us in this document, the January 17 ICA, about how strongly you believe this

00:24:12.680 and about the evidence that you were basing these conclusions on.

00:24:16.140 Yes. And what they also point out is that Brennan's own analysts also disagreed. And Brennan simply

00:24:23.340 cherry picked the conclusions that he agreed with. My colleague at Real Clear Investigations, Paul

00:24:27.900 Sperry, years ago reported that Brennan personally overruled two senior experts when it comes to

00:24:33.960 Putin's intentions. And the HIPSE report confirms that. So it's not only that the HIPSE report looked at

00:24:39.820 all the underlying intelligence and just showed that there was nothing there to support Brennan's

00:24:44.960 conclusions, they also show more evidence that Brennan overruled his own people. So it's just

00:24:50.160 more evidence that this idea of an intelligence consensus is just such a lie, especially since we

00:24:54.900 also learned, as I discussed last time I was on with you, that in September 2016, the FBI and the NSA

00:25:01.720 were dissenting on the core Russiagate allegation that Russia hacked and leaked Democratic Party emails.

00:25:08.260 And now we know nearly nine years later, thanks to Tulsi Gabbard's declassification, that the FBI and the NSA

00:25:14.040 dissented from John Brennan and said, we have low confidence in that allegation. And more about that has come

00:25:20.220 out just in recent days, which I think we'll get to, but it just underscores me.

00:25:24.600 Can you speak to it now? Because we didn't cover it actually on the show this week, but it just came out that

00:25:30.500 Clapper was putting massive pressure on, on them to just get this done. He just, he was like, if we're

00:25:36.600 going to have to, you know, skip the normal protocols to get this done before Obama leaves office is what

00:25:43.000 he was really saying. Um, and Trump comes in, then that's what we're going to have to do.

00:25:49.180 It's an extraordinary, uh, release that just came out from Tulsi Gabbard. And I encourage people to read

00:25:53.520 it because unlike most Russiagate material, it's not very long. It's only two emails, but what it is,

00:25:57.780 it's December 22nd, uh, 2016, uh, as the intelligence, uh, officials putting out that

00:26:04.660 January, 2017 report on alleged Russian interference are rushing to finalize the report.

00:26:08.960 And Mike Rogers, the head of the NSA sends an email to Comey, Clapper and Brennan. And what does

00:26:14.860 he say? He says, Hey guys, uh, I have to relay some concerns I've gotten from my people, which is

00:26:19.960 that when it comes to the, the core issue of blaming Russia for hacking and leaking democratic party

00:26:26.620 emails, we're not being shown a sufficient amount of underlying intelligence. And we're not being

00:26:31.920 given a sufficient amount of time to reach a proper conclusion. And we want to be confident in our

00:26:36.900 conclusion. And then he goes on to say that, listen, if you're just going to put this out in the name of

00:26:40.760 the CIA and the FBI, that's fine. I'll withdraw my, uh, my objections, but if you want our name on it,

00:26:46.960 we need more access and we need more time. Uh, because we're just not confident in the underlying

00:26:52.840 intelligence. It's an extraordinary statement because at that very, because by that point,

00:26:56.720 this is December 22nd on December 9th, you had stories in the Washington post in their time

00:27:01.000 saying that the intelligence community has all agreed that Putin interfered in the election via

00:27:05.940 hacking and leaking to help Trump. And this is now a few weeks later, Mike Rogers of the NSA saying,

00:27:10.880 we have not been shown the intelligence that could help us reach that conclusion. So can you please

00:27:16.460 give us more time and more access? And what James Clapper says is basically, yes, we'll do our best,

00:27:22.220 but, uh, we may have to quote compromise on our normal quote unquote modalities. Uh, and he also

00:27:30.060 says, but it's really important that we're all on the same page. And he even says in the highest

00:27:34.420 tradition of quote, that's our story and we're sticking to it. So he's tacitly acknowledging

00:27:40.260 there that they are basically, uh, that they all need to be on the same page of a scam, but sorry,

00:27:46.060 Mike Rogers, the NSA, which is the premier intelligence agency that will be able to actually reach this

00:27:51.760 conclusion. And I've been putting this out for years that the NSA is the premier agency that

00:27:56.600 could tell us whether or not Russia hacked and leaked the DNC. Cause basically they can see,

00:28:00.280 and they can rewind the entire internet. And the fact that Mike Rogers is complaining there shows

00:28:05.060 that, that low confidence assertion assessment that the NSA and the FBI had back in September

00:28:10.580 had not changed in December. And that all this, this allegation of Russian hacking and leaking,

00:28:15.140 it didn't come from the NSA. It came from the CIA, came from John Brennan and his ally,

00:28:20.160 James Clapper, who were refusing to show the NSA, uh, the basis for that conclusion.

00:28:24.360 And now we know, having seen that house report, why they did not want to show the underlying evidence

00:28:31.360 to Mike Rogers at NSA, because it was quote, one scant, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a

00:28:37.900 sentence from one of the substandard reports, uh, which was the only classified information cited to

00:28:43.880 suggest Putin quote, aspired to help Trump win. It was flimsier than flimsy. And there's,

00:28:50.160 a reason that they were like, Holy shit, we're not going to show him anything. Just go along 0.99

00:28:54.360 to get along. Our story needs to be the same. Go ahead, Aaron.

00:28:57.600 Just to be clear. So that, that sentence fragment that was used for the conclusion that

00:29:02.620 Putin aspired to help Trump win. Uh, what Mike Rogers is complaining about in that email, uh,

00:29:07.840 is that he has not been shown the intelligence to blame Russia for the hack and leak. He's saying

00:29:13.220 that like, you have not shown our people. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Uh, and we don't know what that

00:29:18.980 basis is. All we know is that the FBI at that time was relying on CrowdStrike, a firm working for

00:29:24.620 Hillary Clinton, which had first blamed Russia for hacking the DNC. And we know from other intelligence

00:29:29.780 documents that Tulsi Gabbard has released, they were still relying on CrowdStrike. And we know that

00:29:34.500 back in September, the FBI and the NSA said they had low confidence in that allegation because they

00:29:39.860 were not shown the technical details. And this underscores that two months later, the FBI, the CIA

00:29:45.320 and James Clapper's office were still denying the NSA, the best placed intelligence agency to make this

00:29:51.620 judgment on whether Russia hacked and leaked the DNC. They were not showing them the information.

00:29:55.740 They were not showing them the internet intelligence. Incredible. Okay. Let's keep going. Um,

00:29:59.620 next one. Stop four. She is making this out like the smoking gun that Trump and his allies have been

00:30:06.500 searching for, for all these years. Nothing that she has released backs up her claim of a treasonous

00:30:13.540 conspiracy. But despite that, she sends a criminal referral to the justice department, essentially a

00:30:22.740 letter saying, Hey guys, you really need to conduct a criminal investigation into this.

00:30:30.100 No evidence of a conspiracy. This is kind of related to the one we just did, Michael, where it's like,

00:30:35.460 no, that we don't have a document saying let's all conspire to undermine the Trump presidency by saying

00:30:41.860 it was, it was only made possible thanks to Vladimir Putin. But you do have what we in the law would

00:30:48.200 refer to as a strong circumstantial case showing the series of events that strongly suggest that

00:30:55.880 there was a reversal in what they were going to say about Russia, that it happened at Obama's direction

00:31:01.000 and that it happened thanks to key players being willing to overlook crappy evidence to support their

00:31:07.880 theory and ignore evidence that undermined it. Yeah. I mean, I think that, I think it's just,

00:31:15.000 the reason it's so hard to prove a conspiracy is that everybody already knows what they're supposed

00:31:19.240 to do based on what their position is at any given time. And so I think that by him focusing on that,

00:31:27.880 I think that it's also been a focus of, of some Republicans. I think it's the wrong focus. I think

00:31:34.040 the focus really should be on things like intelligence community reform to make sure that the CIA doesn't

00:31:38.840 interfere in our democracy again. Well, I agree with Michael that a conspiracy case,

00:31:43.320 it just sounds like a tough thing to prove at this point, to bring criminal charges on the front.

00:31:47.080 And I think transparency and accountability is the best way forward as Tulsi Gabbard is doing.

00:31:52.440 The problem with transparency is that you need to have a room, like a minimally honest media

00:31:57.800 to report on it. And Michael Schmidt is underscoring that New York Times refuses

00:32:01.000 to report on all the facts that undermine their narrative. I mean, can we, the irony,

00:32:06.120 he's criticizing Tulsi Gabbard and the Trump administration for pushing conspiracy

00:32:10.360 allegations into the Justice Department without a basis. Does that sound like anything? That

00:32:14.920 sounds to me like the Russia investigation, which was based on the flimsiest tip about George

00:32:19.800 Papadopoulos, a low level Trump campaign volunteer, but based on nothing, they expanded that into a

00:32:25.160 sprawling counterintelligence investigation of first candidate Trump and then President Trump for

00:32:30.600 engaging in a conspiracy with Russia. Did Michael Schmidt ever say that this conspiracy investigation of

00:32:36.520 Trump is baseless and based on no evidence? No. He promoted it and he peddled it by putting out

00:32:42.120 false stories by the people behind the hoax. And I missed a crucial point when I was talking before

00:32:48.040 about this article that Michael Schmidt co-wrote in February 2017, this fake claim that the Trump

00:32:53.880 campaign had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence. So Michael Schmidt writes that in

00:32:58.200 February 2017. A few years later, he comes out with a book about Russiagate, as so many of these people did,

00:33:03.080 just trying to cash in on the Russiagate craze. His whole book is about Russiagate. Guess what

00:33:08.760 story Michael Schmidt doesn't even mention in his entire book? He doesn't mention his own story

00:33:13.880 claiming that the Trump campaign had senior had contacts with senior Russian intelligence officers.

00:33:19.400 How are you going to write a story claiming that the Trump campaign was talking to Russian spies and

00:33:24.120 then write a book and not even not even mention your own story because you know it's it's a lie.

00:33:29.560 Has he ever owned up to it? No, of course not. That's incredible. I don't know. I am more

00:33:34.360 bullish on showing a conspiracy legally and otherwise than you guys are. I mean, I I've tried

00:33:39.720 cases and I know how arguments are made in court and you would go in there and you would say,

00:33:45.800 let me take you back to December 8th, 2016, when the intelligence community was getting ready to

00:33:50.760 offer a presidential daily brief that if anything downplayed the role Russia had in the election that

00:33:55.960 the United States had just been through at that time, they looked at it. The FBI said it wasn't

00:34:02.040 going to join that intelligence assessment. And the next thing we knew, the Obama White House had

00:34:06.520 called together all of its top intel officials across the government and with the direction of

00:34:11.560 the chief of staff of President Barack Obama within 12 hours had completely reversed the direction they

00:34:18.520 were going on their Russian conclusions. And how do we know they had reversed? Because there's a memo that

00:34:23.480 says per the president's direction, we're going to do a new assessment. And within hours of that,

00:34:30.440 it hit the media. It hit the New York Times. It hit the Washington Post. They told us what the new

00:34:35.560 directive was. It was Putin interfered to help Trump. Surprise, surprise. Within 30 days, there was an

00:34:44.600 official intelligence community assessment saying exactly that. We'll show you the emails showing there was a

00:34:49.640 rush to get a rush to get it out before the new president, Donald Trump, took office. That's in writing.

00:34:54.680 You can see it right here from Clapper in emails. And all the while, these intelligence officials had been

00:35:00.520 warned, thanks to intelligence leaked to them by the Dutch, that Hillary Clinton had a plot to falsely tie Donald

00:35:08.120 Trump to the Russians. They knew it was coming when it came instead of having their hackles up and dismissing it.

00:35:14.600 Large portions of the government, the ones who were the most partisan, jumped on it, loved it, massaged it,

00:35:21.120 embellished it, and put it in writing and gave it to the New York Times. They undermined President Trump's first

00:35:27.060 term. They changed the relationship that the sitting president of the United States had with Russia. And he has said

00:35:34.240 that himself directly. And if that's not a conspiracy to undermine a sitting U.S. president, I don't know what it isn't,

00:35:41.720 what is one? So that's how I would make the case. Okay, let's keep going. SOT 5.

00:35:47.800 The head of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, puts out a report that also casts doubt on the 2016 intelligence

00:35:57.840 assessment. How so? The report doesn't dispute the central finding of the 2016 assessment,

00:36:07.640 but it takes issue with the tradecraft for how the report was produced. It says that the process was

00:36:16.480 rushed. It says that top officials were far too involved in it. And it says that there was pressure

00:36:23.720 on analysts to reach a conclusion. Thoughts on that one, Aaron?

00:36:28.720 I agree with the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Rick Crawford, I believe is his name,

00:36:33.200 where he called that report a whitewash. And I agree. I think that that Ratcliffe review treated

00:36:39.420 the CIA report with kid gloves. And it speaks to a problem that, you know, Cash Patel talked to me

00:36:44.780 about a few years ago when I interviewed him, where he just said that, you know, he was struggling to

00:36:48.900 release the HIPSE report during the first Trump term. But many people, including Trump appointees,

00:36:54.960 just did not want to embarrass the intelligence community. Because it's awkward. You're exposing here a

00:37:00.500 massive fraud at the highest levels of U.S. intelligence. And some people, even if they're

00:37:04.920 on the opposing side of the political aisle, just don't want to go there.

00:37:07.580 That key finding, that one in particular that Putin wanted to help Trump, was taken on by the CIA.

00:37:13.080 And in that CIA report, correct me if I'm wrong, they looked at that conclusion, which was central

00:37:18.800 to the ICA, and said, how on earth did you put that in there with, quote, high confidence? That's a lie.

00:37:24.560 You didn't have high confidence behind that. Yeah. And they also singled out John Brennan for

00:37:30.540 basically being biased and for trying to include the Steele dossier. But again, the HIPSE report has

00:37:36.240 the most facts in it, because it shows us all the underlying intelligence that went into this

00:37:41.860 assessment. And if you read that report, how can you possibly walk away defending the intelligence

00:37:46.840 community assessment when you find out all the things that we learned from HIPSE? So again,

00:37:52.200 you know, people will want to point to anything they can, but the information that is most

00:37:56.820 comprehensive that was released by the HIPSE report, because they want to hold on to the

00:38:00.360 narrative that Russia interfered to help Trump. When again, the most sweeping look at that was

00:38:05.100 conducted by HIPSE, which showed us the underlying intelligence. The underlying intelligence simply

00:38:08.860 didn't support it. So Smitsch says to the New York Times audience that Ratcliffe's current,

00:38:13.480 this is the current CIA director, Ratcliffe's report, looking back at that January 17 ICA,

00:38:18.460 does not dispute the central finding of the ICA. Well, I mean, the biggest finding of the ICA was

00:38:24.460 that Putin interfered to help Trump. That was the one they really wanted to help Trump. And it does,

00:38:29.860 it does dispute that. It says, how could you have possibly reached that with high confidence that

00:38:34.520 aspired judgment did not merit the high confidence level that the CIA and FBI attached to it? Unmentioned

00:38:41.800 by Michael Schmidt. Okay, let's keep going, because this is, I think, the big one that we've been

00:38:47.180 waiting to get to. As part of the assessment, the CIA had the dossier, remember that compilation of

00:38:55.820 unsubstantiated allegations dug up by a British spy about Trump's ties to Russia,

00:39:02.980 attached as an annex to the assessment. The assessment was not based on the dossier.

00:39:11.260 It didn't play a role in the conclusions. But what the report is essentially saying is that this

00:39:20.080 unsubstantiated document called the dossier, it should never have been attached in the first place.

00:39:26.820 And because it was attached, it casts some doubt on the entire claim.

00:39:31.900 This is a doozy, Aaron.

00:39:33.280 First of all, note the language he uses to describe the so-called dossier. He calls it

00:39:38.820 unsubstantiated. It's a collection of conspiracy fiction. It's a complete lie. Every FBI effort to

00:39:46.960 verify the dossier just kept leading to the fact that there's nothing here, that Christopher Steele is a

00:39:53.140 fraudster. And Schmidt waters that down by calling it unsubstantiated, as if it still might be true,

00:39:58.540 And doesn't call it the Steele dossier either.

00:40:01.800 Yeah, right. It's fiction. It's just complete fiction. It's conspiracy fantasy that Hillary

00:40:10.660 Clinton paid for, which I didn't hear him mention there, and that the FBI relied on. And it's just

00:40:15.720 a complete joke. So that's the first thing. And then also, he says that this was attached,

00:40:21.080 a summary of the Steele dossier was attached as an annex, but it wasn't in the main body. He's ignoring

00:40:26.100 the fact that now we know from the recent declassifications that actually there's a

00:40:32.500 footnote in the body of the intelligence community assessment, and it says, see annex,

00:40:38.760 but by which they mean, see the Steele dossier. So in trying to put forward this idea that Russia

00:40:43.960 was trying to help Trump, they reference in the body of the ICA, not just as an annex,

00:40:48.380 they have a footnote referring you to the annex, which means the Steele dossier is in the body

00:40:53.300 of the ICA. And let me just reiterate what Schmidt claimed. He said the assessment,

00:40:58.180 that intelligence community assessment, was not based on the dossier. It did not play a role

00:41:03.800 in the conclusions. And so first, we are disputing the basic premise there. It effectively is in the

00:41:11.860 assessment. It is referenced in a footnote. The footnote that supports Putin was trying to help

00:41:17.080 Trump says, look at the exhibit, look at the appendix, and specifically look at the dossier

00:41:22.820 that is in the body of the report as the proof of one of the most, or if not, it is the most

00:41:29.520 controversial piece of the assessment, which is Putin did this to help Trump get elected. Keep going.

00:41:34.640 Yeah. And according to these recent disclosures, John Brennan was pushing for the inclusion of the

00:41:39.420 dossier because as he told his counterparts, he said, it just rings true, which speaks to the fact

00:41:46.580 that John Brennan was attached to a conspiracy theory that Trump and Russia were in cahoots and

00:41:51.540 that Russia was trying to help Trump. And of course, Schmidt ignores that. And so if the director

00:41:56.600 of the CIA is campaigning for the Steele fiction to be included and is saying that it rings true to

00:42:02.600 him, does Michael Schmidt really want to argue that a report produced under Brennan's direction

00:42:06.880 isn't influenced by the Steele dossier, especially when it's referenced in the body of the report as

00:42:12.780 a footnote. So he's completely omitting the countervailing facts to undermine his narrative,

00:42:17.420 which is, again, it is the norm. All the analysts, all the Russia experts are like,

00:42:22.000 we can't include this. This is total garbage. Brennan's insisting on it. The FBI is insisting on it. 1.00

00:42:27.980 It's in the classified appendix, by the way, which at least 200 people get, but we know leaked

00:42:33.360 like crazy to all the journalists to create the perception that somehow this document was

00:42:37.460 legitimate. We know that that same fraudulent document, this fiction that Aaron describes

00:42:43.760 was used to get the wiretapping, the warrants for the wiretapping. I mean, it's this hugely

00:42:49.800 important document. So for Schmidt to sort of go, oh, it wasn't really important to the ICA.

00:42:54.980 It's just straight up gaslighting at this point.

00:42:57.520 The CIA assessment that we've been discussing that Ratcliffe released says the Steele dossier

00:43:05.220 was used to support the conclusion that Putin aspired to help Trump and reads as follows.

00:43:11.220 Ultimately, agency heads decided to include a two page summary of the dossier as an annex to the ICA

00:43:15.880 with a disclaimer that the material was not used to reach the analytic conclusions. However,

00:43:20.660 by placing a reference to the annex material in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting

00:43:25.240 bullet for the judgment that Putin aspired to help Trump win, the ICA implicitly elevated

00:43:30.060 unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical

00:43:34.860 integrity of the judgment. The House Intel report, the other, the HPSI that also just came out,

00:43:40.980 thanks to Tulsi, also states Brennan, then CIA director, refused to remove the dossier from the

00:43:46.660 ICA and said, doesn't it ring true? Contradicting public claims by Brennan that the dossier was not in

00:43:53.760 any way incorporated into the ICA. That's what Brennan wants us to believe. We've never incorporated

00:43:57.700 it in the ICA. It was a nothing burger to us. The dossier was referenced in the ICA main body text.

00:44:04.140 This is HPSI telling us the truth. It is referenced in there, as you just pointed out, Aaron,

00:44:08.980 and further detailed in a two page ICA annex. The ICA sourcing errors involving the dossier violated so

00:44:16.420 many intelligence community directives that the text would normally not have passed first line

00:44:21.100 supervisor review at CIA, FBI or other intelligence community agencies. Moreover, the dossier made

00:44:27.260 outlandish claims and was written in an amateurish conspiracy and political propaganda tone that

00:44:32.580 invited skepticism, if not ridicule over its content. Still sticking here with the HPSI conclusions.

00:44:38.200 Two senior CIA officers, one from Russia operations and the other from Russia analysts, argued with

00:44:44.260 Brennan that the dossier should not be included at all in the ICA because it failed to meet basic

00:44:49.580 tradecraft standards. According to a senior officer present at the meeting, that same officer said

00:44:54.980 Brennan refused to remove it. And when confronted with the dossiers, many flaws responded. Yes,

00:45:00.260 but doesn't it ring true? And then you get Michael Schmidt doing cleanup in aisle seven with

00:45:05.120 the assessment was not based on the dossier. It did not play a role in the conclusions. This is so

00:45:12.940 dishonest. It did play a role. It was an important role to support the most important conclusion.

00:45:19.300 And the fact that it was in there in any way in the annex or in that footnote that referenced the

00:45:25.660 annex was extremely controversial amongst the most seasoned Russia experts within the intelligence

00:45:32.480 community, including in the CIA itself. And the reason they were overruled is because the CIA director

00:45:40.700 said it smells true. Where was that in Michael Schmidt's reporting either in the newspaper or

00:45:49.560 sitting on the daily? And what's funny about all of this is if you were someone who was skeptical of

00:45:56.640 all these claims, you know, Russia interfered, Russia hacked the DNC, Trump-Russia collusion,

00:46:01.940 you were called a apologist for Russia, for Trump, a conspiracy theorist. And the line was,

00:46:08.320 you know, how dare, this was the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community. I mean,

00:46:11.700 this was done on serious work. And James Clapper and John Brennan would go on CNN and MSNBC where

00:46:17.060 they worked as on-air analysts and say, you know, this was robust intelligence. Well, now we're

00:46:21.980 getting, like the picture we're getting from all this declassification was that actually, this was

00:46:26.420 just the consensus of a few people, James Clapper, John Brennan, and a few of the partisans. And they

00:46:31.260 have all these people under them pushing back, including, we learned this week, Mike Rogers,

00:46:34.980 the head of the NSA, saying, you're not showing us the intelligence to reach your most important

00:46:39.420 conclusion that Russia hacked and leaked Democratic Party emails, which was the allegation that kicked

00:46:44.260 off Russiagate. When Donald Trump, at his July 2018 summit in Helsinki with Putin, said that he

00:46:51.940 actually, that Putin gave a pretty strong denial that Russia interfered. And he said, I have no reason

00:46:56.980 to doubt him. There was a national freak out. John Brennan said that Trump was nothing short

00:47:02.520 of treasonous, by the way, which is ironic for people not complaining about, you know, Tulsi Gabbard

00:47:08.260 accusing others of treason. Well, this is what John Brennan and everyone was saying about Trump for

00:47:11.140 years, including when Trump dared question the intelligence consensus. It turns out Trump and

00:47:15.700 everybody else who refused to take the word of John Brennan and James Clapper were actually agreeing

00:47:20.440 with all the lower level intelligence officials who Clapper and Brennan overruled.

00:47:26.040 It's, it's, it's just stunning. I mean, it's just, I'll tell you, I, I was one of those,

00:47:32.540 you know, right leaning people who had trust in these agencies for most of my reporting career.

00:47:38.720 I really did. Like I, I, it's stunning. It's still stunning to me to see the veil come down and see how

00:47:43.800 corrupt they were and what liars they were, what partisan hacks. Um, that's, that's a lesson well 0.93

00:47:49.180 learned. All right, here's the last one. And this is a doozy too. Uh, SOT 57.

00:47:54.000 The FBI director, Cash Patel, declassifies a piece of intelligence that he claims shows

00:48:02.160 that this conspiracy, it actually originated with Hillary Clinton.

00:48:09.220 That's how vindictive and vicious the former leadership structure here was. They withheld and

00:48:14.240 hid documentation and put it in rooms where people weren't supposed to look. And it's a good thing

00:48:19.020 we're here now to clean it up. And you're about to see a wave of transparency, but are you saying,

00:48:23.300 huh? And what evidence does Patel offer to support that claim?

00:48:27.700 An email between Clinton allies in which they claim that Clinton personally approved a plan to tie Trump

00:48:39.960 to Russia. Hmm. But what Patel doesn't say is that a previous special counsel that was appointed

00:48:49.460 by Trump's justice department to look into the Russia hoax determined that the email was likely a fake.

00:48:58.780 Wow. That Russian intelligence officials had taken a range of hacked emails and made them into a composite

00:49:07.320 that depicted Clinton as the originator of the conspiracy.

00:49:11.600 And presumably the FBI director, Cash Patel would have known that and yet still released it

00:49:18.020 and treated it as a smoking gun. Correct.

00:49:21.600 Amazing there. By the way, if you just listen to their express words,

00:49:24.600 you know, in, in a courtroom, you would object that this was improper impeachment of Cash Patel,

00:49:31.060 because first he says it was a fake. And then he says, actually, what they did was they took actual

00:49:36.680 emails they had hacked and created a composite. So it, so the ultimate email he's saying was fake,

00:49:41.900 but he's essentially admitting there, Aaron, that the underlying data was real and was from actual

00:49:48.760 hacked emails. They got, um, when they hacked these entities, like the Soros related entities

00:49:54.760 surrounding Hillary Clinton and the DNC, but your, your thoughts on, on this claim.

00:49:58.520 Yeah. Well, again, the irony, these people are complaining about relying on supposedly fake

00:50:03.120 information when they promoted the steel dossier, for example, which is a, which a collection of

00:50:07.560 conspiracy theories funded by Hillary Clinton. So it's just a bit rich for them to try to claim a high

00:50:12.580 ground here. You know, I've been cautious about these hacked emails. We're told they come from Russian

00:50:18.420 intelligence. Uh, I let's even take that on faith, although I'm not even sure if that's true, but I'm not

00:50:24.860 sure if I take all these emails on faith, you know, Durham is uncertain. He says, I don't know if these

00:50:29.220 are all genuine, if they're partly fake, fully fake. And I think that is, um, the line that, that,

00:50:36.000 that we should take. We don't know for sure if they're true or not, if they are true, it's more

00:50:39.860 evidence of what we already know. And that's my key point. We don't need these emails to know

00:50:44.600 exactly what happened, which was that Hillary Clinton framed Trump as a Russian, uh, agent. I mean,

00:50:49.900 it's beyond dispute months before these allegedly Russian emails, uh, were, uh, written the Hillary

00:50:57.720 Clinton campaign hired Christopher Steele, uh, via Fusion GPS. Christopher Steele put together a bunch

00:51:03.540 of fiction about Trump and Russia being cahoots, Trump being blackmailed by Putin. Christopher Steele

00:51:08.280 funneled his conspiracy theories into the FBI. He meets with an FBI agent in early July. It gets back

00:51:14.220 to the FBI. A few weeks later, the FBI opens up its Trump Russia investigation and uses the Steele

00:51:19.360 dossier as source material. We only learn, I believe in October, 2017, that's when the Hillary

00:51:24.780 Clinton campaign finally admitted that they were secretly funding the Steele dossier. There wasn't

00:51:29.740 a Clinton effort to frame Trump. And that's what the New York times cannot grapple with because they

00:51:34.460 were a part of peddling that conspiracy theory. And all Schmidt's doing here, by the way, the trick

00:51:38.980 he's pulling is he's pointing to a single part of that really large declassified annex and saying they

00:51:45.940 went to the Soros guy. He said it wasn't him. Even in that interview between the FBI and the

00:51:50.680 Soros guy, the Soros guy says that part, some of the emails did sound like him. Um, he didn't say

00:51:56.960 for sure that it wasn't him at all. So, you know, again, it's like, there's so much complexity here,

00:52:01.840 but the big picture remains the same, which is that Schmidt is creating straw men and dismissing them

00:52:07.700 as a way to dismiss this much larger body of evidence. And that really what it shows is just a huge

00:52:13.500 amount of information, uh, potential, potential criminal activity that the FBI decides not to

00:52:18.340 pursue. And instead, you basically creating and manipulating intelligence in order to paint Trump

00:52:24.680 as a Putin puppet in order to get the wiretaps in order to leak that to the media to create

00:52:29.160 disinformation. So everything would just sort of end up snowballing over time.

00:52:33.240 They were agenda driven from the start and they remain agenda driven guys. Thank you both so much.

00:52:39.300 This has been so clarifying, very helpful. And thanks to all of you for joining us today. And

00:52:43.820 this week we're back on Monday with Walter Kirk. See you then. Thanks for listening to the Megan

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The Megyn Kelly Show - August 15, 2025

Fact-Checking the New York Times' ＂Daily＂ Podcast's Disinformation-Filled Russiagate Episode, with Michael Shellenberger and Aaron Mate

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