Original subtitles

- President Carter fledged the utmost in cooperation

in the transition that will take place.

- I will always be grateful.

I can hardly believe it, but it's sinking

in now the enormity of what has taken place,

peaceful election, eventually a peaceful transfer of power.

- I accept tonight the responsibility

that you have given me to be the leader of this,

the greatest country in human history.

- I have a lot to be thankful for tonight.

I'm thankful for America and thankful

that we were able to resolve our electoral

differences in a peaceful way.

- This peaceful transfer of power is one of the hallmarks

of a true democracy.

- President Carter, President Bush Sr.

as well as the current president have all been very gracious

and offered to provide any help that they can

in this transition process.

We are now all rooting for success

in uniting and leading the country.

The peaceful transition of power

is one of the hallmarks of our democracy.

- Good afternoon, everyone.

I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions

the intelligence community incidentally

collected information about US citizens involved

in the Trump transition.

Details about US persons associated

with the incoming administration, details

with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value

were widely disseminated in intelligence

community reporting.

Third, I have confirmed that additional names

of Trump transition team members were unmasked.

And fourth and finally, I wanna be clear.

None of this surveillance was related to Russia

or the investigation of Russian activities

or of the Trump team.

- The only thing we had wrong is it was worse

than we thought.

Devin was the first 'cause he got to see information

first as then chair of the intelligence committee.

He sensed there was wrongdoing early on.

- He was a lone voice for a very long time.

We would not be where we are without Devin Nunez.

They started it right after,

in the 1st of December, 2016.

- It's becoming clear we have suffered a desecration

of our democracy not seen since Watergate.

- It was right after the election

and I thought, are they really gonna

go down this road, this Russia issue.

- This is part of a concerted Russian influence

operation

- Russian interference.

- They colluded, they helped, they were in on it.

- Vladimir Putin was the person who authorized

interference in our election.

- What Russia did was no different

than what they do all the time.

It was totally expected.

Right after the election, a couple of weeks,

then I realized like, wow, they're just really starting

to foment this.

And we really almost thought it was a joke.

Like those of us on the Republicans on the committee,

like really you're not gonna accept

that you lost this election.

We're really going to go into this.

- My hope is that the president-elect

is going to similarly be concerned with making sure

that we don't have potential foreign influence

in our election process.

- And then Obama and Brennan made it real

by creating what I call Obama's Dossier

which was this intelligence community assessment

which was the fastest any government agency

has ever done a report.

And of course they took just a few weeks and they said

oh yeah, the Russians were trying to help Trump.

You know, Obama really was

gonna stick it to the Russians

and he like kicked some people out of the country.

35 Russian diplomats in the US expelled,

just 72 hours to leave, closing two Russian government

compounds, rec centers allegedly used for spying

shut down as of noon Friday.

- We use the ways and means committee to hold

what is a pretty unusual public hearing

for the intelligence committee.

James Comey comes in.

Then he asks me to come back to the back room

and tells me that he's going to publicly

announce they're looking into the Trump campaign.

And I was like, wow, does he have new information?

Is there something new?

- I have been authorized by the Department of Justice

to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counter-intelligence

mission is investigating the Russian government's efforts

to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

- It blew up into a spectacle.

It gave the appearance that this was a real investigation

with real information, even though we had yet

to see what that real information was.

- I interviewed a number of extraordinary candidates

for this job, all with Sterling credentials.

But what gave me confidence that this was the right man

for the job was in talking to him a sense

that this is somebody who knows what's right

and what's wrong.

- The FBI's reputation for integrity is a gift

given to every new employee by those who went before.

No case, no source, no fear of embarrassment

is worth jeopardizing the gift of integrity.

- Comey has a great history

of fabricating crimes, entrapping innocent citizens

in crimes that otherwise would not be committed.

By leading the victim to believe that a truthful answer

to a question would be an admission to a crime.

Whereas in fact, it would not be an admission to a crime.

When the subject then lies he's bagged his quarry.

He did that with Martha Stewart.

He later did the same thing to Scouter Libby

through his special counsel that he appointed after

Fitz Gerald.

Later on they did the same thing with George Papadopoulos.

He did the same thing with Michael Flynn.

- Mike is one of nine children, blue collar background,

decided to enter the military and rose to the rank

as three star general.

A Lieutenant general in the army,

a man who put his life on the line for our country

on numerous occasions.

He was well versed in the secrets of our country.

- Before he became the director

of Defense Intelligence, was made responsible

for all intelligence collection in Afghanistan.

As the theater MI guy.

What Mike Flynn did was truly stunning.

He revolutionized the way we do intelligence

in theater in the battlefield.

He understood that when you're fighting groups

like Al Qaeda or ISIS, it is the rapidity

and the quality of immediately

exploitable intelligence that matters the most.

When you go in there on your raid

with your alpha team or the stuff you pick up

right there has got to be exploited now.

You don't put it in a bag.

You don't put it on a secure service,

sending it back to Langley or to Fort Meade,

and then sit on it for nine months

and then see if it's useful.

- When Donald Trump was elected president

of the United States, he flew to Washington DC

for a meeting with Barack Obama.

And in that meeting, Barack Obama told him unequivocally,

don't let anybody tell you who to hire

in your administration.

You must surround yourself with your own people,

except General Mike Flynn.

The president flew back to New York that night.

And I remember speaking to him very directly

and he said, "What job are we giving Mike Flynn?"

I said, any job you want, sir?

And then the offer was extended for Mike

to become the national security advisor.

- The Obama administration was after him

for defying them on Iran and on another questions.

You know they fired him from the DIA

and famously in their Oval Office meeting after the election

Obama said to incoming President-Elect Trump,

you know, there's basically two people

in the world that you can't trust.

One is Putin and the other is Mike Flynn.

I mean, give me a break.

- We talked about reforming the intelligence community

because the 17 sprawling agencies,

you know, they've gotten a lot of stuff wrong.

They were in the weapons of mass destruction

being the most obvious example.

- Every intelligence agency, every bureaucracy

is worried about being reformed.

So Flynn had been loud and clear

that he did not like the intelligence

that he was getting when he was in the field.

He did not get what he called actionable intelligence.

So he was gonna cut some nice cushy jobs at Langley.

- He was talking about going after people's budgets,

seeing who is wasteful, who is doing the job.

We we're gonna cut these institutions down to size

and see how it works.

So, they were terrified.

- And then there are probably reasons

why the intel bureaucracies are specifically resistant

to change because they really are unaccountable.

If you're on accountable for a long time,

you get used to being unaccountable

and accountability sounds bad.

Like you don't want to have to, if you haven't,

never answered to anybody you don't have to answer

to somebody.

- Especially when some of the things

you've been doing when exposed might make you look bad.

- As you know, when this attack happened,

the White House initially said it arose

out of a spontaneous protest over anti-Muslim video.

That turned out not to be true.

And the White House said they relied entirely

on CIA talking points.

The non-response

to Benghazi was a deliberate decision.

It wasn't an oversight.

And it was because there was an illegal covert

weapons program being run there.

The community writ large; the special forces community,

the counter-terrorism community,

the intelligence community was aware of what was going on.

Several members, even the leadership of the Republican party

were aware what was going on.

What you have was the bipartisan corruption.

And this bipartisan corruption was something

that I think Flynn was well aware.

Where the intelligence committee was no longer

necessarily servicing the country,

it was servicing the Obama regime itself.

- We haven't put any demands on them.

We have used this soft power approach.

Mike Flynn is viewed

as the consummate disruptor.

And now he was going to be in a position

to bring that disruption to the entire

national security community.

So he's moved up a level and his ability to impact

is now gonna be much more widespread.

And of course this absolutely terrifies

the Central Intelligence Agency.

It terrifies the FBI because somebody who knows

where all the secrets are is now gonna be

in a position to really harness that knowledge,

to disrupt things.

- He's the former director of the DIA.

He knew where the bodies were buried.

He knew the corruption.

He knew the lies.

He knew the perversion of the threat environment.

- He knew what was going on and he objected.

He knew about the machinations by the Obama administration

and the West generally to support terrorists in Syria

in their crazed effort to take out Assad.

Of course a lot of that was being organized out of Libya.

When he spoke up against the Obama

administration and said, look, just because

you've killed Osama Bin Laden

doesn't mean that you've stopped radical Islamic movements

and General Flynn predicted the rise of Islamic extremists.

- I'm done trying to convince our president

to actually define this enemy.

We know what it is.

It's radical Islamic terrorism.

They are vicious.

They're barbaric.

They are on the march. - They didn't like Mike Flynn.

Remember Barack Obama fired Mike Flynn

because he was a rattle riser.

Reason that Flynn had been fired

is because he was speaking the truth about ISIS.

The straw that broke the camel's back

was what's now been very well known

as this testimony that Flynn did.

It was the global threat testimony

where all of the heads of the intelligence agencies,

John Brendan, Jim Comey, all of the people

that later on would be part of the effort

to take Michael Flynn down and ultimately

take Trump down.

Flynn had been raising the alarm

about how the Obama administration

was not taking the necessary steps to protect

the American people from the growing Islamic threat.

And, Flynn was told before he went into that testimony

do not say anything about the fact that ISIS is resurgent.

He decided I'm not gonna lie.

You know, I need to be very, very honest

with the American people,

- They are increasingly adapting to an environment

that is actually benefiting them.

And that to me is a increasingly growing threat.

After that, Jim clapper calls Mike Vickers up

and Clapper tells Vickers, you need to fire Flynn.

Clapper had received this instruction directly

from Susan Rice at the request of Barack Obama.

In any event they tell him that you're gonna have

to retire early.

We need you to leave the Defense Intelligence Agency.

- Of all the people who came into the White House,

Mike Flynn was the most dangerous to the swamp.

He had to be taken out.

They knew he knew what the intelligence community was up to.

And he knew what Obama had done to undermine

our national security for eight years.

He knew why Obama did what he did with Iran.

$140 billion released a regime

that every Friday says destroy America,

that you're actually facilitating the rise

of the theocratic Uranian regime that's

taking our naval personnel hostage.

- President Obama negotiated the JCPOA,

the Iran nuclear deal.

It was fatally flawed on so many different levels.

So when you have somebody like a General Flynn

serving at the highest levels in the room,

making recommendations, weighing in on work product

and telling the other 97% of a story on a weak

flawed approach to a particular conflict that ends up

leading to increased resentment.

And I think there are people inside the West Wing

right up to president Obama who became anti-Michael Flynn

for all the wrong reasons.

It's a Chicago style politics approach

that was brought here from Illinois

into the White House for two terms.

And they were trying to kick a few people,

burn a few things down before they left office.

- The Obama administration earlier today

allowed the United Nations to pass a resolution

condemning Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem

and the West bank has, "A flagrant violation

of international law."

- It was a shift in US foreign policy

that was contradictory to the will of Congress.

It was contradictory to the will of the American people.

It made absolutely no sense, whatsoever.

It was really disgusting to watch it play

out the way it was.

It was an effort to kind of burn down

our relationship before checking out.

He expelled 35 diplomats in the United States.

It was a silly act,

unnecessarily provocative and it was grandstanding

to no purpose.

- For those who aren't familiar with it

a federal government provides resources

for the last two candidates to establish transition teams

to help their prospective presidential nominee

take over government should they win.

- There's nothing wrong or unusual

about an incoming transition team

talking to folks in other countries about foreign policy.

Obama did it as he should do it.

Flynn did what he should do

and he diffused what really was a hot mess.

Flynn's calls were intercepted

by the US intelligence community.

Secret transcripts show Flynn did discuss the sanctions

a potential violation of federal law

prohibiting private citizens from engaging in diplomacy.

- From the very beginning, this conversation

that General Flynn had with the Russian ambassador

was about a UN resolution that was coming up.

And if you read the transcript General Flynn

had a perfect phone call.

He was advocating for the United States.

It's exactly what you'd want someone to say.

Let's deescalate this.

Let's not try to make it worse than what it is.

- So you would want the incoming national security director

to be talking to his counterparts in important,

he didn't have to talk to, you know, whoever

that NSA equivalent is in certain countries

but the Russians, the Chinese, the Germans have

the, our allies and important players in geopolitical sense,

he needs to be talking to them.

He's doing his job.

And of course, you know, the intelligence agencies

are listening to Kislyak's conversation

that's kind of what they do.

- I believe that if anyone inside of the United States

government would be fully aware of US intelligence,

collection capabilities, tactics

procedures, it would be somebody like a Michael Flynn.

- Flynn has been in the intelligence world

therefore, he knew that every single phone call

on an open civilian phone is intercepted.

Therefore nobody could suspect that he was somehow

plotting because he wouldn't use the phone, would you?

But he didn't realize how determined they were.

They pretended not to know what everybody in the field knows

that when you telephone the Russian ambassador

you're not meeting him in a park at night,

you telephone him, you are basically telling the US system,

the intelligence people, what you want them to hear

what you're say.

- Rather than say, okay, there's a new president.

And let's just hand the files over

and do a peaceful transition.

They really wanted to mess with the incoming president

at a time when he was the most vulnerable,

which was right after the election

and his team was preparing.

And so this culminated with attacks on General Flynn.

When General Flynn was doing exactly

what Susan Rice and Samantha Power admitted

in house testimony that they were doing in their transition.

If you read the transcripts Susan Rice admits,

this is what she did.

Of course, she had a transition period.

Of course, they talked to other countries.

If you weren't talking to other countries,

you weren't doing your job.

You were preparing to take over the national security

apparatus of the greatest country in the world.

- Tensions get unnecessarily high

with a nuclear armed superpower.

You don't necessarily know where things are gonna go.

So it's probably for the best to try to keep things

on a low.

- In 2015, Putin had said some complimentary things

about then candidate, Donald Trump.

- Donald Trump,

After Vladimir Putin, praised Donald Trump

as, "Undoubtedly a bright and talented person."

When people call you brilliant

it's always good especially when the person

heads up Russia.

- Candidate Donald Trump responded

with saying nice things about him.

He has a total absolute understanding of who Putin is.

He knows he's a killer.

He knows he's an amoral man.

He's somebody we have to deal.

Putin maybe somebody you wouldn't want to deal

with personally but when I represent 320 million people

he has a nuclear weapon, I better get to know him.

But they saw that and they could exploit

those comments that Trump had made,

which really meant nothing.

They were less damaging than the comment

that President Obama had made

just a few years earlier when he told Medvedev

who was sort of Putin's flunky.

He said, tell Vladimir, when the election is over

I can go easier on him.

Wow.

Had Trump ever said that, they'd impeach him.

Right away.

The New York Times would have done an editorial

the next day and said impeach president,

wants to sell our a country.

- They had the picture of Donald Trump.

And in that picture, they will, they refuse to admit

that part of Donald Trump could be geopolitical.

Therefore, that of sinister explanations.

like his Putin's agent, he was bribed,

he was corrupted, he was blackmailed and whatever.

And that is how the FBI people were going to get him.

- You look at this White House now

and it's hard to imagine two FBI agents

sending up in the set room.

How did that happen?

- I sent them.

Something I probably wouldn't have done

or maybe gotten away with in a more organized investigation,

more organized administration in the George W. Bush

administration for example, or the Obama administration.

And in both of those administrations there was process

and so if the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House

itself to interview a senior official you would work

through the White House counsel and there'd be discussions

and approvals, and it would be there.

And I thought it's early enough,

let's just send a couple of guys over.

- James Comey and his band of thugs

at the FBI under his leadership,

McCabe, Strzok, Paige.

Comey bragged of this.

- Oh, I, I pulled that off.

I basically played a trick and got away with it.

If it hadn't been in a more experienced administration

I wouldn't have gotten away with it.

And the audience was,

oh, isn't it, how funny to set up an innocent man.

- James Comey knew the protocol from the FBI

was to call over the White House counsel

and request a meeting with the national security advisor

or any other senior staff.

Mike Flynn sat down with those two FBI agents.

They're then supposed to write what are called 302.

- A 302 is an FBI report of an interview.

They interviewed General Flynn,

just two days into his new term as national security advisor

for the newly inaugurated president.

And they did it in what was a complete ambush.

The day that Mike Flynn had the interview

with Pete Strzok and Joe Pientka

several members of the national security staff

including the Intelligence Program's office

were on Mike Flynn's calendar for briefing.

Ezra was part of that team that was gonna be briefing

Mike Flynn on that day.

Flynn had brought in

a young guy named Ezra Cohen to work

for him as he went about trying to reset

the intelligence community's focus.

He arrived at Flynn's office

and as he explained it, he's standing there and he's waiting

for the meeting to begin and the time is running over

and he turns to Flynn's assistant

and he says, "Who's the General in there with?"

And the assistant says, "The General,

he's in there for a FBI intelligence briefing."

This was very confusing to Ezra because in fact,

the intelligence briefing that was supposed

to be with the FBI was set up for the following day.

Ezra's waiting there and he starts getting

this incredible sinking feeling

knowing that Mike Flynn is meeting by himself

with two FBI agents.

Ezra immediately gets on the phone

and calls John Eisenberg, the White House

National Security Council legal advisor.

John Eisenberg is furious.

John races down to Mike Flynn's office.

And as he arrives, Pete Strzok and Joe Pientka

are leaving the interview.

Following day after the fateful Flynn interview

there was the scheduled intelligence briefing.

At the interview was General Flynn, K.T. McFarland,

Keith Kellog, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, John Eisenberg.

And from the FBI were Bill Priestap and Andy McCabe.

McCabe at the end of the meeting

goes to Flynn's desk and he says, "General,

do you mind if I have a word with you?"

Flynn says, "Sure, absolutely.

What's up, Andy?"

McCabe pulls out the draft interview notes

from the Flynn interview out of his lock back.

And he says to Flynn, waving it around,

I just wanna let you know, we've decided

there's nothing here and we're considering

this matter closed.

Of course, we know that this was a complete lie.

One of McCabe's many lies.

After McCabe left Flynn called back and the group

of NSC staffers that had been there,

pointed to the seat that McCabe was in and said,

"That is a very bad man and he's out to get me."

Two or three days before he resigned,

we got a phone call from the Washington Post

and a reporter has said that he had just re-interviewed

Mike Flynn and Mike Flynn made statements

about his phone call to the Russian ambassador,

said that he hadn't discussed sanctions.

But the Washington Post reporter says

but we have a transcript,

well they were read a transcript that says the opposite.

So we go into General Flynn's office

and he said, you know, I've gone over and over.

I can't remember which phone call

I had, what conversation in.

What really struck me was, wait a minute,

they're talking about a phone call

that would have been classified at the highest level.

It was so highly classified I didn't even know

that transcript existed much less was cleared to read it.

And yet somehow the Washington Post had a copy of it.

When the David Ignatius article came out of

the Washington Post, Mike Flynn was summoned by Mike Pence.

He gave us this indication that something wasn't right,

and what he was referring to was the fact

that Pence had bought into this assault

from David Ignatius.

- That story then broke.

Let me put it this way, it had an external effect

and an internal effect.

And the internal effect was a lot of people

were upset about it.

It was basically the chief of staff

and other various senior advisors were having

these conversations and they continued through the weekend.

So Flynn is really coming

under an enormous amount of pressure

from the vice president to explain this call from Kislyak.

It seemed very unusual that the vice president

would be taking this level of interest in this.

We now know that it was because he had come

under the influence of his chief of staff

who of course was compromised by Comey's inner circle.

- Informant] They're constantly

making Lieutenant-General Flynn

radioactive to a point where I'm sure

the vice president and president are saying to themselves,

how do we, how do we get this calmed down?

Maybe if we get rid of Flynn it will calm down.

- I could tell people were out to get him fired.

But I ran around and I started trying to talk

to anybody who would listen.

I was like, you can't do this. This is dumb.

This isn't, he doesn't deserve this.

And also I was trying to appeal to people's self interest

in saying, if you give the president's enemies

a scalp like this so early over something so trivial

you're not feeding the beast.

The beast doesn't get fat and happy and go to sleep.

It brays for more blood.

This will not turn this off.

This will make everything worse.

I can remember at about 6.30 that night

all of us, myself, K.T, General Flynn

and the two executive assistants all in his office.

We were urging him to try to see if he could just go

and see him.

Go to the residence and see the president.

And he wouldn't, he wouldn't try.

He's like, I'm not gonna go and,

you know, he has to make his own decision

and I'm gonna leave it to him and I will abide

by whatever his decision is.

My sense was always that the president was reluctant

to do it.

Really liked and still likes General Flynn.

Got along well in the campaign.

They clicked in a way that he didn't click

with any of his other small team of foreign policy advisors

and really felt the loss.

And you could almost tell he immediately regretted it.

And on Monday at like eight o'clock at night,

I think, it was when General Flynn resigned.

- We begin with a major shakeup inside

the Trump White House, national security advisor,

Michael Flynn, forced to resign

after what the administration is calling

an erosion of trust.

At issue, Flynn's call with the Russian ambassador

on the same day, president Obama

was imposing new sanctions on Russia

because it wasn't- - Once Flynn was gone,

there was nobody to ride herd

over what the operation that they had carried over

into the administration was going to do.

And so they got basically carte blanche.

And from there they began, they were spying

on the president, his family, his associates,

spying on the administration.

When Flynn left, literally within two days of that,

Ezra first discovered this enormous number of unmaskings

that had been done, over 300 of them.

At the end of January in 2017,

Ezra Cohen was asked to review a very, very benign policy

on how to unmask US persons' names.

Ezra asked one of his subordinates to get an example

of how the unmaskings had been kept track

of at the White House so that they could write this

into the policy.

When he came back the next day,

Ezra came to his office and he found

the phone book size stack of documents on his desk.

And he was told that this stack of documents

was the unmasking log from the Obama White House,

just for the past six months.

Ezra, after consulting with his staff

decided that the prudent thing to do would be

to notify the NSC legal advisor, John Eisenberg.

He came back to Ezra several days later

in early February, 2017 and asked him to retrieve

10 of the reports that had been unmasked by Susan Rice.

As the reports came off the printer,

they began to look at them in Ezra's office.

It immediately became clear that their worst fears

were coming true.

That the reports, the intelligence that Susan Rice

had unmasked, the names that she had unmasked

were the names of Trump campaign officials

and it dawned on them that effectively Susan Rice

in her capacity as Obama's national security advisor

was using her power and authority

to surreptitiously spy on and obtain non-public information

about the activities of her political rivals

in the Trump transition team.

Ezra's continuing

the mission after Flynn's departure,

that really broke the dam open.

After the brief the president in the front office,

there was probably a week or two

where they're just trying to get their heads around

what they were even looking at.

It was so shocking.

And they decided that they would engage

with Devin and say, "Hey, do you know anything about this?

What is going on here?"

Devin Nunez being the one person elected to political office

really stepped up to help, kind of peel the onion

open if you will.

- Good afternoon.

I know a lot of you are not from the US Congress

so I haven't had a chance to brief a lot of you

in the past but just in order to keep you all fully updated

on what's happening with this investigation.

Today, I briefed the president on the concerns

that I had about incidental collection

and how it relates to President-Elect Trump

and his transition team.

I mean, I knew it when I saw those,

one of those transcripts leaked.

I knew that we had a big problem on our hands.

In this very room luckily we had some Patriots

that came forward from the intelligence community

and said, look they were doing some really bad things

with unmaskings.

Well, you need to know about this

and essentially showed me how to go find it.

I'm not gonna get into too much of the unmasking

of my sources because there are patriots

and you know, to this day, nobody knows who they are

and I'm gonna keep it that way.

The morons in the press think they know who it is.

We're the House Intelligence Committee

we just deal with the 17 intelligence agencies.

We had, you know, people that were very skilled

in those areas, but we had no one that was really skilled

at the Department of Justice.

We gotta have somebody who can bust down the doors

at the FBI and DOJ and we don't have that.

- Kash Patel. - Kash Patel.

Kash Patel, or Kash as he's known

in Washington.

- Kash, I believe brought a very different energy

to that team.

As Jack Lang says, who's the communications director,

Jack says, you know, is really relatively sleepy committee.

We barely spoke to the press.

You know, they're pretty easy going.

They're mellow and here's Kash, man.

He's an ethnic New Yorker from Queens, New York.

Indian family who lived in Africa.

And he just brought an entirely new energy to that team.

- Kash was fundamental to gathering information

and pushing this.

He's got great instincts.

This is a guy who really understands the players.

Kash knows the intelligence community

like I know the State Department.

- When he came in to talk to me and started walking me

through like some of the problems that at DOJ

just kinda big picture problems and almost on the spot

I said, do you want a job?

- I told Devin.

I said, yeah, I'll do the, I'll take the job.

But I was so upset at the lack of internal accountability

at the DOJ and the FBI that I said

we have to, whatever we find we're putting out.

And I said look, if we find something that's bad,

we're putting it out and he goes deal.

I work closely with Trey Gowdy

who was on the committee at the time.

And, when I first met him, it was a memorable experience.

He goes, 'cause he had just come off Benghazi

and he said well, welcome to the Hill Kash.

This is where good investigations come to die.

So we both started laughing.

We honestly thought it would be an investigation

that almost no one would talk about.

- By the time March comes around,

we have no intelligence products whatsoever

to tie the Trump campaign to Russia.

All we have is this dossier that supposedly

they're looking into.

- So the Steele dossier, it would become

the central document for the investigation.

- And I remember reading it and as I'm driving home,

I get on the phone and call my best friend

in politics, Mark Meadows.

And I'm like, Mark, this stinks.

There's something going on.

- As soon as I heard about the Steele dossier

I downloaded a copy and looked at it and laughed.

- If I saw something like the Steele dossier,

immediately I'd put Steele under investigation.

I'd say, what the hell are you giving me this?

This is, you know, National Inquirer.

I heard about it in the newspaper

I said, "This is ridiculous that they would premise

an intelligence investigation on what is clearly

a piece of garbage."

- Everybody in this town, in the swamp

had that dossier, pretty much.

All the left wing reporters

and many high level reporters

at the highest media outlets were all shopped this dossier.

In fact, they started, you know, producing fake news stories

based off that dossier.

- A big part of that New York Times interview

they did with Trump focused on what's called the dossier.

- Do you think that The original pee tape dossier

will prove to be true?

Well, we know what he's talking about.

He's talking about Christopher

Steele's- - Christopher Steele's

dossier. - So when we went

in to be briefed, it's called the gang of eight briefing.

Around the first part of January of 2017.

They came to present this intelligence community assessment.

And at the end, they start talking about this information

about this dossier information.

Very clearly I ask, where did this come from?

These are pretty serious accusations

about the, anybody, right?

You know, pee tapes and prostitution

and Moscow hotel rooms, I mean, gosh,

and like, why haven't we seen this?

Right?

Like why haven't we, somebody should have had this.

You know, that was essentially the first time

they lied and misled us.

- So the Steele dossier was out for a couple of months

and I had read it a little bit, but I didn't focus on it

'cause I didn't realize it was going to be coming

to work and do this investigation.

So I was like, all right, whatever.

It's just another piece of the Russia banana show.

And I looked at it and I was like,

there's just no way this thing is accurate.

And Devin was like, "Well, how do we figure that out?"

And I said, easy.

Let's take a couple of quick things

that we can readily prove to be accurate

just using public sources.

You know, did person X travel to Prague on a certain day?

Great, let's go get the airline records.

This isn't hard.

Easy.

It's an international trip.

He was either there or not.

And if he wasn't there, where was he?

'Cause if he was in say Montana,

we'd go find the people that said he was in Montana

or a credit card statement or a hotel statement.

Then for some of the more outrageous

and salacious components of it,

the name of the hotel that Steele alleged

that President Trump had misbehaved,

there's no such room in that hotel in Russia, in Moscow.

But the author of the document we had found out

was an FBI source.

So I said, okay, if he's an FBI source

and I said, Devin he's getting paid.

We had to dig into his background a little bit

just to verify for ourselves.

Yeah, he's a career intelligence officer.

He's worked with the United States

and other partners around the country

and spent time in Russia so, it looks good on paper.

But when I found out that the Department of Justice is,

just because it looks good on paper

doesn't mean that person's legit.

And you know, the biggest example of that is James Comey.

- Christopher Steele is allegedly a former spy,

he's willing to do what his clients want him to do.

And his clients included Hillary Clinton

the Democratic National Committee.

And yes, the FBI.

He met with the FBI during the campaign at least 13 times.

The document show 11 of those times he was paid money.

Which agencies weren't involved in helping

either write or push out this dossier?

Now we know the State Department, for instance

Jonathan Winer, a key official

in the Kerry State Department who really

has nothing to do with Russia,

who looks to me to be, actually he confessed

to helping create part of what turned out to be the dossier.

He's not only talking to Christopher Steele

and is a close buddy and friend of his.

So, you know, in my view, the dossier

really was never Russia dis-info.

It was always Clinton dis-info.

And we can't underestimate how involved

the State Department was in pushing this dossier lie out.

Through our investigative process

we found out that a firm representing

Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS

was somehow involved in the matter.

- Following the money.

If we could follow the money we would openly figure out

who was paying Fusion GPS.

- I walked him through the investigation.

I said, this is why I think this happened.

This source of X.

We can prove it.

If we subpoena the bank.

And he's like you wanna subpoena a bank?

I said, Devin, give me one subpoena and if I'm wrong,

you can fire me.

He gave me the subpoena and we went after the bank.

It wasn't like we served the subpoena

and everybody went away.

Fusion GPS forced us into federal court,

into litigation over the subpoena itself.

And, that was when everybody was like,

we're on to something.

- Fusion GPS is a very, I mean they're very talented

at what they do.

They're a racketeering outfit.

They're essentially they make things up about people.

They spread it to the people in the press.

They get them to run the fake news stories

and then even worse then they find different ways

to feed it into the FBI.

- And all of these things sort of started coming together

in a very unusual fashion.

I said, Devin, we're following the money.

And I'm gonna tell you right now that

the DNC and Hillary paid for this.

It was 9:00 a.m. on a weekday

and he literally looks at me, he goes Kash,

"If you're gonna start drinking this morning

get out of my office."

It always goes back to the money.

And it's the easiest thing to follow

because you have to document it in some fashion

or you got to move it in some way.

We were able to pursue in to the judge's authority,

allow myself and one other colleague to visit banks'

attorneys and review in closed session the records.

And we were not allowed to disclose it

to anybody, what we reviewed.

And then finally on the eve of the ruling of the court

Fusion disclosed that Christopher Steele

had been paid by the DNC themselves.

There were names that would eventually come out

that were being paid by Fusion.

Names now that are public but at the time weren't.

Nellie Ohr, the wife of Bruce Ohr

was being paid by Fusion GPS;

we would come to learn to do Russian intelligence

information gathering and then submit it to the FBI.

We were able to figure out

that the attorneys Perkins Coie,

were the attorneys for the DNC.

Nellie had been working, Bruce's wife

had been working for Fusion GPS.

The folks that Perkins Coie paid $10 million to,

and then they took that 10 million

and paid Christopher Steele $168.000 to dig up dirt.

They paid Nellie Ohr, I think $50.000 to do her research

against the president and his daughter.

And they fed all of that directly

to the Bureau who then used it in the FISA

and in the investigation against the president.

So now you've connected the money and the people

and put the political party right

in the middle of your opponent.

It's outrageous.

- I've got to give good great credit to Devin Nunez

because he was willing to go the next step.

He was willing to look to where was the funding coming

from for the dossier.

To go the next step to find out

that this was a political document,

that it was funded by the Democratic Party itself

and Hillary Clinton's campaign.

We would not have known that if Devin Nunez

hadn't said, all right, look, we, you know,

if we're gonna do an, a true assessment

of the veracity of the information that we're getting,

we're not just gonna look at the conclusions.

We're gonna look at the substance behind those conclusions.

Look for biases, look for areas in which it's not accurate.

And then pursue those to determine what is the truth.

- If what was said in this dossier, the central thesis

of the dossier was Carter Page,

Trump campaign associate is a Russian, basically asset

and the critical mass in the dossier

and the Steele dossier was it said,

"Carter page went to Russia, met with these two guys,

Russian oligarchs."

And the Steele dossier said at that meeting

Carter Page, a member of the Trump campaign negotiated

an agreement whereby he would get 10 to 15% of Rosneft,

which is like the biggest gas firm in Russia,

in exchange for his cooperation to work

on behalf of the Russians to get better agreements

from the Americans when Donald Trump elected.

Now I told Devin I said, if that's true,

he's a Russian agent.

The FISA was righteous and a lot of people

are gonna have a lot of problems.

But I also said, if that's false, they're screwed.

If the Steele dossier were true

the Russians were gonna pay this guy $12 billion.

Like, okay, open up a bank account,

where's this guy gonna move his money.

Turns out they had nothing to back up their claims.

- Kash had gotten FISAs before.

So he knew they had done something really corrupt

in order to get that warrant.

- We were collecting our documents.

We're talking to the FBI, we're talking to DOJ.

And they told us.

They said, look there, you know, you guys

are charged with looking into Russian active measures.

You should know that this is how

we surveilled a certain individual

who we thought had ties to the Trump campaign.

And we were like what?

And then we went and read it and having done FISAs myself,

I was like this might be one of the worst documents

I've ever seen.

- The FISA warrant process has to be followed carefully.

And it matters because the warrants issued ex parte.

Here's what I mean.

Imagine you're being sued.

And you don't know you're being sued.

And you can't have a lawyer to defend you in court.

And then you found out you just lost a lawsuit.

There's not an American who has said

that's the most unfair process I've ever heard in my life.

And he would say that that's the FISA court process.

You're being essentially sued in court

and you're not allowed to have a lawyer.

And you're not allowed to even know that you're being sued.

You're not allowed to look at any of the information

being used against you and you just lost,

'cause now they have a FISA warrant

and they can just do whatever they want.

That goes against everyone's fundamental sense

of fairness as a person.

Now, the reason of course you don't tell

the person you're about to spy on them

is because you think they're a terrorist.

And if you tell them we're spying and you,

obviously they'll change.

The compromise of the deal with the devil

was supposed to be that in exchange

for not giving the person the due process rights

that go back to the Magna Carta,

that just go back to your Holy book of choice.

The idea that if you're accused,

you're allowed to face your accusers.

You have this in every major religious tradition.

The deal with the devil though is that

everything will be meticulously audited.

It will be reviewed.

Everything will be truthful.

Everything will be bulletproof.

That procedure, of course wasn't followed.

- We now know the dossier was used in the FISA.

So we had shredded the credibility of the dossier.

And then once we found out it was in the FISA

we couldn't tell anyone yet.

Once those two merged, I said, "Devin,

this is insane that this document was used

to go up on a surveillance warrant of an American citizen."

- The second part of that FISA is even worse.

And that is that they ran spies even

before they got a FISA warrant into the Trump campaign.

Governments paid, United States taxpayers

paying for spies to spy on a political campaign

you know, before you even get a FISA warrant

and then not only that, it's exculpatory evidence

that they don't even tell the court about.

- It was the first time they applied for the application

to spy on Americans, the FISA court judge said,

"It sounds like you wanna spy on political operatives."

And their application was denied.

- They knew Christopher Steele was leaking

to the State Department and the news media

'cause they had the State Department's documents.

That's derogatory information.

They didn't tell the court that.

They knew that Carter Page was an asset for the CIA,

not a stooge for the Russians.

They didn't the court that.

They knew that George Papadopoulos

and Carter Page had made statements of innocence,

not knowing they were being recorded by

the undercover informant Stefan Hopper.

They don't tell the court that even though

that's in the, it's in the book, it's in the manual

the FBI manual, but you got to do.

- So now they've begun this giant web

and if Carter Page or George Papadopoulos

had contacted me, Steven Bannon, Kellyanne Conway,

or anybody else within the campaign,

it's very likely that all of those people

were also being listened to.

That unmasking also occurred on literally the day

Donald Trump was sworn as the 45th president United States.

And they unmasked the Trump children

who clearly they were also listening to.

- I knew that I was unmasked.

That we were targeted.

It was sort of assumed that we were targeted.

I always say, hey, listen, I don't think

it would be any stretch of the imagination

to say that I, you know the son of the president

of the United States, duly elected

but as a civilian, as a citizen,

and as someone who worked on a campaign

was the number two target of the greatest hoax

ever perpetrated on the American people.

- So I'm generation X and some kind of significant meme

that surface before we call them memes

was six degrees of Kevin Bacon.

This is pre-social media.

The idea would be how many connections

would it take you to get to a world famous celebrity?

Well, the reason I bring up six degrees of Kevin Bacon

is because to spy on the Trump campaign

the FBI used the three jump rule.

- In these FISA warrants when you surveil one party

you have what is known as a two jump rule.

You not only get to spy on Carter Page,

but you get two jumps or as the Obama administration

would have it three jumps from Carter Page,

the surveilled person.

- You don't even need three jumps.

Two jumps gets you everywhere you wanna be

within the campaign as long as you have like a network nod.

- Having wiretapped Carter Page

you can now wiretap Steve Bannon.

Corey Lewandowski then talks to Trump,

you've got a third jump.

So now you're wiretapping everyone.

So that's what they were trying to do.

Figuring if they could get into the Trump campaign

somewhere, there would be a crime.

- January 17, the dossier comes out.

March-April, we start an investigation.

Summertime we're cranking on document production

and collating a list of witnesses we're gonna interview .

Fall hit the home run with the Fusion clowns

and figure out who paid for the dossier.

So now we're in September, October going into the holidays.

And we had finally also at this time started

interviewing witnesses.

And in December we got Andy McCabe.

When we asked Andy McCabe, could you have gotten

the FISA application against Carter Page

without the Steele dossier?

And he said, no.

And I think we ended up doing 65 interviews.

We hit everybody.

Former attorneys generals, you know,

Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates, Andy McCabe, James Comey.

You know, the central thesis was the Trump campaign

colluded with the Russian government to hijack the election.

Okay.

Let's find out.

So we came up with the three C questions

we were gonna ask every single witness.

Do you have any evidence or information

that the Trump campaign colluded, conspired or coordinated

with any member of the Russian government,

with any member of the Trump campaign or Trump presidency?

And all 65 witnesses under oath said no to every question.

We had to ask that because they were saying it

in the media that that happened.

So these principals were the ones who would have

to know that.

And if they answered yes, we'd have to report

that to the public.

And they couldn't just answer a simple question

of where's the dirt?

- Reviewing the evidence that I have,

I don't think you can conclude that at all.

- We had not one person claim

that they had, or had seen evidence

of Trump colluding with the Russians.

Not a single one of them could cite

any evidence whatsoever that they saw.

That's what was going on behind closed doors.

Then on TV, you go there and you see Schiff come out

and talking about how you know, more treason

has been revealed by Trump.

- All you have right now is a circumstantial case.

- Actually no, Chuck.

I can tell you that the case is more than that.

And I can't go into the particulars

but there is more than circumstantial evidence now.

- Then there was also the private world of people

that we would have to interview as well.

Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign.

The CrowdStrike thing was big deal.

Podesta is the head of the campaign or whatever his role was

had hired these this company to do a scrub

of their internal services, to be like who's in our stuff?

What happened?

How did this go down?

Which is a reasonable thing to do when you get hacked.

What's an unreasonable and made up thing to do

is then falsely tie it to the wrong person

or country or actor.

Normally what would happen in this type of hack

is the FBI would come in and have

our experts scrub the servers.

The DNC hired CrowdStrike and CrowdStrike

was in full control, and James Comey

has publicly admitted this, of what servers

the FBI had access to.

So the FBI was only given limited access,

whatever the DNC chose.

So those were the only servers

they were ever able to look at.

And this is why you have the disconnect that

they've been saying continuously

that the DNC was hacked.

It was Podesta's email that was hacked.

Nobody knows to this day what actually happened

because the FBI has never looked at the entirety

of the servers from the DNC and they can turn those over

at any time they wanted to, but they won't

because they know it won't be good for them.

Stunning announcement from the White House

today, President Trump fires FBI Director James Comey.

It's only the second time in history that a president

has fired the head of the Bureau.

- I think the insurance policy morphed over time.

I think initially the insurance policy was,

we're gonna do this investigation.

We're gonna get after the president,

we're gonna spy his campaign.

They did all that.

Donald Trump and the American people surprised all of them.

And president Trump wins.

When he wins the insurance policy becomes wow,

we gotta make sure they don't find out what we did.

And who better to find that out, Michael Flynn.

So they go after Michael Flynn.

Once they get him gone they think they're fine

until Jim Comey gets fired 'cause Jim Comey

was traveling into the next administration too.

When he gets fired then the insurance policy

morphs again and it becomes shazaam,

we've got to do something now.

We've lost Comey, we've lost our man.

So what does Comey do?

Leaks his memos to get a special counsel appointed

and who better than his best pal, Bob Mueller

to run it for two years.

That's how the insurance policy morphed over time.

- Robert Mueller is was mid-May, I think.

Wants his old job back.

He's out to pasture, clearly he's losing

his cognitive capacity

but he thinks, well his buddy's think that he can come back

to direct the FBI like he did before.

And why is that important?

Because if Mueller who's good buddies with Comey,

with Weissman, with all of these Trump hating

anti-American Democrat cabal operatives.

If they can get Bob their buddy back at the Hoover building,

he can just shred it all.

He can make all the evidence disappear.

Operation Crossfire Hurricane against Mike Flynn.

Everything else was just be deep sixed.

So Mueller is escorted to the White House

by Rod Rosenstein, his friend.

Rod Rosenstein, arch deep state swamp creature

is in fact running Donald Trump's Department of Justice

because Jeff's just removed himself.

President meets with Robert Mueller

out of professional courtesy.

Realizes within minutes

sorry, you can't even string a coherent sentence.

You don't represent Making America Great Again,

you're old school establishment,

you're past your sell by date.

Thank you very much.

No thanks.

Less than 24 hours later, the guy who's really running

the DOJ, Rod Rosenstein makes his friend Robert Mueller

the most powerful man in the world.

He makes him special counsel, special prosecutor

who has the power to bring down the president.

- Mueller should never take in the job.

He was compromised, he was conflicted

and it was the appointment arose,

it flowed from an illegal act by his friend,

James Comey that released those files.

It was part of a coup.

And when he came on board, he could have

known and should have known that there was nothing

to investigate, and he should have shut it down.

Instead he harassed the president for years.

And then they have this extraordinary raid,

at Manafort's home where they go in

and start taking pictures of his suits

to prove that he was buying expensive suits,

you know outside of his regular income,

it's completely absurd.

They're investigating Russia and they nail Manafort

on mortgage fraud and having expensive suits.

- They know that there's nothing there.

Comey and McCabe know that they have done bad things.

And the special counsel's investigation now

is a way of trying to cover their tracks.

And they've got their buddies in there

and they're trying their best to cover for them.

And hopefully they will get one wrong thing

so that they can make a splash

and all of their crimes will be forgotten.

- We were pretty careful 'cause we didn't want

to step over any lines and it ends up the corruption

is just far worse than even we could have imagined

and we imagined it was pretty bad.

When the newness memo came out,

we thought the whole thing's over.

This blows up.

It's the end of Mueller, it's the end of the investigation

and the investigators need to be investigated

- Before it was published,

they were all saying that Nunez is reckless.

This is extremely damaging to national security.

The FBI, the DOJ is going to suffer

all kinds of negative consequences.

Informants are gonna be outed.

Everybody's gonna die.

Nunez is killing everybody, it's the best way I can sum up

the narrative that they had going for him back then.

Then once the thing actually came out,

it was clear that the look, there's no national security

threats in people finding out that they used

the Steele dossier to get a warrant to spy on Carter Page.

So then at that point the narrative shifts

to it was a nothing burger.

There was nothing in this, all the hoopla over this,

you know, okay.

So they you know, they use these

unconfirmed allegations to spy on an American citizen.

What's the big deal?

Carter Page is a weird guy anyway.

And then you know, so I'm sure he deserved it.

You know what, what's the big deal?

We had information in there revealing that Comey

and McCabe had testified to us that the agents,

the FBI agents who interviewed Michael Flynn

did not think he was lying.

We had that in our report and it was redacted.

And at the time that our report came out,

Comey was going around on a book tour on the country

and saying that he didn't know anything about that.

How is it ethical to brief the president

of the United States on an unverifiable

and salacious dossier?

And how is it ethical leadership to not tell him

that his political opposition Hillary Clinton paid

for that?

- Shortly after that was when Schiff came out with his,

with his counter memo, the Schiff memo

in which he argued that everything in the memo

we said was false, that there were no problems whatsoever

in the FISA warrant on Carter Page,

nothing wrong with the dossier.

Everything's good.

The FBI and DOJ did everything right.

Nunez doesn't know what he's talking about.

He just made all this stuff up.

So they have these two dueling memos.

But when the Schiff memo came out,

I mean that was championed by the media

as the definitive debunking of the Nunez memo.

All this stuff that Schiff said is true

because Schiff said it.

- Devin Nunez was subject to such scorn

for saying the conclusions that we brought forth

in that report, which all proved to be true.

The Mueller investigation had to acknowledge them.

Today, the Department of Justice acknowledges them.

And they certainly contradict all of the national media

narrative that we all had to live with for over a year.

- After the IG report came out, I would have thought

there would be some kind of you know,

little media frenzy, you know, asking Schiff

if he stands by his memo.

- Look in the cameras and say they hacked

John Podesta's emails.

We know for a fact that Putin's government did that.

You can't, and you know you can't.

And you're hiding behind

- Weasel words. - I just said that-

- So they hacked John Podesta's-

- The Russians, I'm not gonna be specific

as to- - Oh because

you don't know it, that's why.

All right.

- He would constantly say, "I have seen evidence

of collusion and conspiracy," the questions we were asking.

We did it for a reason.

And we would go to him and his staff and said,

okay, are you seeing something we're not?

'Cause if you are, we'd like to know.

But he knew he could just say it on TV

on uncertain organizations.

And then he would, and then hide behind

well, it's all classified.

I can't get into it.

They went straight back to attacking us personally,

the media and the left.

So they were more attacks on Devin and me.

We would always say we're over the target

when the ass clowns in the media on the left,

we're just shelling us at the same time.

And we knew that was coming the second we hit send

and it came hard.

This story in the Bee came out when?

- The cocaine yachts prostitutes story?

The most absolutely outlandish stories about Devin

and it would be so ridiculous,

things that would absolutely defy belief.

He was dump farmer.

He's corrupt and we were seeing very early on

these accusations that he was a Putin stooge

which really stood out to us because the guy

his entire career, he's been a Russia Hawk.

And there was, you know, for example, a giant billboard on

on our main highway in the district back home.

You had analysts talking on MSNBC speculating whether

the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee

is is actually a Russian asset.

Some person filed the California equivalent

of the Freedom of Information Act against Devin's wife

who's an elementary school teacher

to get all of her work emails.

- You know, they started going after his family

and that's just absurd and totally off limits

and writing crazy things on social media and in articles.

- I was not just stalked by the fake and phony press,

they would hang out right outside this office

and follow me everywhere they went.

For best supporting actor

in working with the Trump administration

and going to meet with them on the investigation.

- I also had these big picture, fake news stories.

- This was going on both at the national level

in the pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times

and the local level back home.

- The media had gone wild.

They had been writing crazy stories

about everybody, including myself,

which was unheard of at the time

to write about a staffer, leak his name,

call him basically a genocidal dictator.

- Kash, they kind of portrayed as this sort

of machiavellian genius behind what the

hipsy Republicans were doing.

You know, a guy you know, nobody should be listening to.

- They knew that Kash was the one

that was giving us the roadmap.

- I remember a specific circumstance

where Rod Rosenstein was confronted

with the fact that he had signed renewal

for this FISA warrant.

And he turned to Kash Patel and said to Kash

that if this did not stop, if the criticism

of Rosenstein persisted, if the efforts to call him

to account for that signature were elevated

that it might be Kash himself that would

be subject of surveillance of our government.

- It used to be politicians launched grenades

at each other and that was considered warfare.

And fair enough, all fair.

You beat me, I beat you.

We run dirty ads and we can be,

but now we're getting down to destroying the reputations

of individual people.

- At its core this was an information operation,

an information warfare operation.

It was designed to get out a specific narrative.

And that narrative in this case was that Trump

is a traitor and he was colluding with the Russians.

- The bigger problem is they're reporting

that their same group of circus animals

is conducting is not true, it's not accurate

- You know, in having conversations

with reporters as they were continuing

to play this story out in the national media.

And we would explain to them that

if you go into a classified briefing

and you receive classified information

and you step out and you tell reporters

that information you have committed a crime.

If you go to that same classified briefing

and step out and lie about what happened,

you've not committed a crime.

So the reporters should be suspect.

They should question whether or not this person really

is committing a crime or whether

or not they're just spinning them

and giving them the information that

they want to have report it.

- I honestly think most at some point

would have said, you know, what, why bother?

You know, I just, you know just retire from Congress,

just go do something else, you know,

have a quiet life where, you know

I don't gotta to deal with this nonsense every single day

but that's just not Devin's nature.

His nature is when you're punched, always punch back.

And I think that was always his instinct

through this whole thing.

I mean, he can't be bullied and he can't be intimidated.

And at its root, that is what the whole media operation

against him was trying to achieve.

- Biggest misconception about Devin Nunez

is that the memo he released was a hoax.

When in fact, Adam Schiff's memo was a hoax.

They attack Devin Nunez for the Nunez Memo

based on what Adam Schiff says.

And if you're an honest person, you would say

well, how could you just say the Democrat wrote a memo,

the Republican wrote a memo, all politicians lie.

They're both probably full of shit.

I would be okay with that.

We know the Adam Schiff claimed

that he had evidence of Russia collusion

and he's never called off for any of that.

But if you're a Republican making those kinda

claims, you would never live them down.

The media's role in the Russia hoax is complex

because what we had suspected was proven

ironically of all places in the Mueller report.

the Mueller report showed how the information

laundering works.

Someone within the FBI leaked something

to Michael Isikoff or David Corn,

or someone at the Washington Post.

That person, the Washington Post writes an article

based on the leak.

And then the FBI goes and says, look, we have this story

about this thing, which means this thing must be true.

And then the FBI takes action on that.

And then the information goes back to the Washington Post.

That's how the information laundering cycle works.

Now, boom, number one story.

CNN is reporting that this dossier exists

and it contains scandalous information.

Who knows if it's true or not?

It's salacious.

There's a whole bigger truth thing.

Does Trump pee on prostitutes?

Well, I mean, how do you know that he didn't, right?

I can't say for certainty that he didn't.

Oh, so now people are like, oh, Trump peed on prostitutes.

I can't believe this.

It was all of course, a big hoax.

That's how you launder that information

and you get a document that is based

on fabrications into the news cycle.

- For me, going into your House Intelligence Committee

it's supposed to be sort of a closed door meeting.

I'm there voluntarily cooperating trying to help.

I believe I was in there for nine hours straight.

And I got it done.

It was about 7.30 at night.

I walk out the building, I finally get my phone back

you know, open up Twitter and I'm looking 11.30,

Don Jr. said this.

It's supposed to be you know, behind closed doors.

And literally at every bathroom break,

someone's leaking to CNN what's going on in the room.

Like, why would anyone voluntarily go in there

and try to work with them to get answers,

knowing that they have no intention

of trying to deal in good faith?

- We're entering into a new era of information warfare.

But the information warfare that most scares me

is the very tactics that our defense intelligence agency,

our CIA, our NSA have used for years

to create misinformation and propaganda.

The ability to create false reality

on social media and news organizations.

They've now been turned inward on the American people.

Somebody created a false illusion

of a sophisticated, extraordinary capabilities.

The idea that you're gonna take a document

that says Carter Page is a CIA asset

helping the American public and change it to say no,

he's a Russian stooge and fake a court with that,

fake the Congress with that.

That's how far the FBI went.

That is information warfare.

That's misinformation at the highest levels

and I don't think the American public

has come to grips with what the potential threshold

we just crossed.

- It's illegal to possess these stolen documents.

It's different for them media.

So everything you learned about this,

you're learning from us.

- When CNN says on air,

you the public are not allowed to look at these.

That's what we're here to do.

At some point, you got to say, wow,

you got some big balls to stand up

on national television and tell the entire world,

don't read this.

I'll read it to you.

I have personal friends who are reporters

or who are in like neoconservative

or neoliberal fields who genuinely still believe this stuff.

They still believe it because their jobs,

their livelihoods, their histories, their backgrounds

their resumes depend on them believing it.

You know, a lot of this will come down

to the supposed fact checkers and editors

in newsrooms whose names none of us know

off the top of our heads.

What role did they play in all of this?

Isn't their job to send the bad copy back to Chris Cillizza

and say you know, we can't really put this

up on the CNN website.

Well, why not?

Well, firstly, it's not news.

It's your opinion.

And secondly, it's a mental opinion.

It doesn't bear anything close to reality.

What are you doing?

Please, don't send me anything like this again.

You know,

- Police your own industry.

There should be real journalists

that stand up and say, this is a phony reporter.

This is an advocate.

Don't listen to this person.

- All those who perpetrated this false story

have sat in a bunker and refused to acknowledge

their wrongdoing, refuse to do what they ethically,

morally should have done, which is say, we got it wrong

and we're sorry, and we'll be better at it next time.

But instead we just moved on to another false scandal

and created Ukraine.

And we'll probably create another false scandal after that.

- Half the time when CNN has, oh, bombshell news,

it was about me.

And it was a lie.

These same people, right, that told Congress,

no, we didn't see anything.

They literally testified under oath,

the exact opposite, but there's no consequence.

We will go on TV day in and day out

and lie to the American people to their face.

And nothing's gonna happen to us.

Why did you fire Robert Mueller?

- Fake news, folks.

Fake news. - What's your message today?

- Typical New York Times fake stories.

Mr Trump?

- Go back to 2016.

Trump is Hitler.

Trump is Hitler.

Trump is Hitler.

Trump is evil.

Trump represents fascism.

Trump represents

the rise of the new Reich or something.

This was their narrative.

And this wasn't something that was just put out

on the internet or shouted by the Michael Moore's

and the Code Pink's of the world.

This was high level CNN, Washington Post,

you know, social justice crusader narratives

and language that was used in the highest levels

of America's media institutions.

- New York's Daily News ran this front page

earlier this week, "Trump is Hitler."

- And so then when Trump wins

and a massive upset, suddenly they have a big problem

because how in their walled garden

can they explain that a guy that they told

all of their people was the second coming of Hitler,

how could 62 million Americans vote for Hitler, right?

And so they have a big problem there.

How do you explain that away?

Are 62 million Americans Nazis, right?

No, that doesn't make any sense.

Like that that's a bridge too far.

Then they see the Russia collusion narrative

sitting right there in front of them

and say why don't we just say that he cheated?

So in their movie, Trump cheated

with the help of Vladimir Putin

and then that became the reason that America

elected the next Adolf Hitler.

And that it became useful for so many various interests.

Rachel Maddow uses it to gen up her ratings, right?

Because she says, we're gonna get them.

We're gonna catch them.

We're gonna uncover this.

- Well, unfortunately until this is released,

I can't comment on the underlying documents,

but I can say among the changes that I thought were notable-

- Instead of some,

you know, smoking gun that was always promised

it's on what's classified.

You can't see it, right?

That was the game they played until Rick Grennell

blew that one up.

Maybe these guys just actually believe

that collusion is real and they're operating in good faith.

In reality, that wasn't the goal.

The goal was never to prove collusion.

The goal was always indictments,

convictions and then impeachment.

And that was the goal from the very start of all of it.

FBI open the door.

This is exclusive CNN video.

This is what happened this morning before sunrise,

just before 6:00 a.m.

When Roger Stone, long time Trump associate

and adviser was taken into custody by the FBI.

- On the morning of January 25th,

25 heavily armed FBI agents in full SWAT gear

and brandishing a assault weapons,

arrived at my home at six o'clock in the morning

in 17 armored vehicles.

There was an FBI helicopter overhead.

I lived on a canal.

So there were two amphibious units that pulled up

to the dock with frog men who were also armed.

Then they dragged my wife out of the house

in her night clothing and bare feet.

So she could share my humiliation for the CNN cameras.

Now CNN's cameras, we know from the security footage

shows that the CNN camera showed up exactly 14 minutes

before the FBI.

This would make it the shortest journalistic stakeout

in American history.

I think as most people know I was targeted

for a political prosecution because of my longtime support

and friendship for the president.

Stone says he's been encouraging Donald Trump

to run for president since 1988.

- I would say that I would have a hell of a chance

of winning.

- Between his outspokenness, his national name

identification and his issue positions.

He could be a formidable candidate.

The indictment against me came up with nothing.

They pasted together a very flimsy indictment

for lying to Congress even though the misstatements

I made when I went voluntarily

to the House Intelligence Committee

were immaterial.

They had no underlying crimes.

It was a Soviet style show trial.

'Cause I have always said, the only thing worse than

being talked about is not being talked about.

- I was in Congress for 30 hours.

I was at the target because it would generate headlines.

I'm sure there's an element of stress on my father

that, hey, they're putting your kid through this.

I mean, don't forget, it wasn't like they were saying,

Hey, we wanna find out.

You had the former vice presidential candidate

of the United States for the Democrat Party Tim Kaine.

Schiff saying that I committed treason.

Treason is a crime punishable death.

- Can you imagine carrying that weight

and that burden as a president, knowing that

they're trying to go after your child

and thinking in some way, hey, look

they're going after my son because I'm president.

Do you ever think maybe at night you say to yourself,

gosh, is this worth it?

They're targeting my family and trying

to destroy them and going after your children

President Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr.

was back on Capitol Hill this week to talk about

his much discussed Trump Tower meeting

with a Russian lawyer who promised him

damaging political info during the 2016.

- And he's a father with, you know, five children

children having to hear about this from their friends,

listen to it, you know, in school,

see it in the paper, on television at night.

It's such a scary thing to see it.

And your heart breaks.

You know, when they tell you they wanna put you in prison

for life or treason punishable by death.

Can you imagine when you hear this or you see this about,

you know, your father?

- My biggest regret of the last four years

was not being more vocal about what they did

to General Flynn.

I just said, man, there must be something here

if this many people that ran these institutions,

I still believed, I still had faith

as an American in these institutions.

And it was the most misguided faith

I've ever had in anything in my life.

- Former National Security advisor, Michael Flynn

thought he would walk out of court free

after a sentencing hearing yesterday.

- A packed courtroom was stunned as Judge Emmett Sullivan

said, he could not hide his disgust

and his disdain for Flynn's crimes.

- At first, I thought he was trying to do everything

he could to get General Flynn to scream out,

"I'm not guilty!"

He threw out the word treason and he said

you arguably sold out your country

while you were in the White House.

I mean, it was just a breathtaking, excoriating dialogue.

I was stunned.

And he even paused after his tirade for an hour

while the media runs wild internationally

with calls of General Flynn having committed treason.

The pressure on a criminal defendant,

particularly in a federal case is beyond anybody's capacity

to comprehend unless you've been there.

They threatened to indict Michael Flynn, the son

if General Flynn did not immediately enter a guilty plea.

Young Michael Flynn had just had a baby.

He had a four month old little boy.

He had done nothing wrong.

He had been forced to sell his house to pay legal fees.

They threatened to indict him just around Thanksgiving

and to indict Michael too.

They just wanted to stop the pain for the whole family.

They were just broken and in many ways

and saw no other way out.

He should have never taken Flynn's guilty plea.

They knew he was not an agent of Russia.

They knew there was no collusion between General Flynn

and anybody with Russia.

We learned that they inserted

into the 302 statements that he never made

things they never asked him about to create

the purported false statements.

I've seen the FBI manipulate 302s before.

They had done the major changes the night of February 10,

after they had shown the purported transcripts

of the calls with Kislyak to Vice President Pence.

And then they went back that night and made changes.

It was done and altered until it was approved

by Andrew McCabe.

If this can happen to General Michael T. Flynn,

or imagine what they do to anybody

who has a single strike against them.

- There's so much happening in this country right now

that boggles the imagination.

And you're at the very center of it.

- If one person needs to apologize to the American people

for propelling this false narrative for 3 something years

it would be Adam Schiff.

- Adam Schiff is the modern day Joe McCarthy.

He would come out of an intelligence briefing,

he would say nothing there, and he'd go collusion.

You just gotta be willing to see it.

The willingness to see it is exactly what misinformation

and propaganda is.

If the facts are there and you still see it,

you're delusional.

- Transparency is not political.

And information is power.

And when individuals like the gang of eight

are the only ones to have the information

then they go on TV and they get to say

I can't tell you, but you have to trust me.

That trust has been broken because they lied to us.

- The best way to clean this whole mess up

is with some indictments.

That's what people felt during Watergate.

That's what we all should feel now,

if we have any sense of keeping our integrity as a country.

- You know I don't know why criminals engage

in criminal behavior.

I mean, we can all talk about that

till we're blue in the face.

The fact is they engage in seditious behavior

and they ought to be prosecuted about it.

I don't know who should go to jail.

I just want a regular serious investigation.

Heck, I just want someone to be questioned,

let alone prosecuted.

Why do you think that is?

- Because they don't wanna do anything.

They didn't wanna do anything.

You're asking the Justice Department

to investigate themselves, they're not gonna do it.

- Does anyone really believe that FBI lawyer

changed that document all on his own?

Somebody had to give him that instruction.

We know somebody gave the instruction to the FBI agent

not to close down Mike Flynn's case

when the law said you should close it down.

Now we have a dual justice system.

There's a Department of Justice for everyday Americans

who get punished and there's a Department of Just-us.

- The thing that they were investigating

the Trump campaign for colluding

with the Russians is what they themselves were doing.

Not just the Democratic Party and their operatives,

but also the FBI.

- The Inspector General's report

on the FISA abuse and the Russia investigation

was about the most damning IG report

in the history of the United States.

And it showed everything we had done and said was true.

There isn't any information 'cause if there actually was,

we would have heard about it by now.

And the reason there isn't any information

or evidence to suggest that Trump campaign

coordinated or conspire colluded with the Russian government

is because they did not.

- These guys have perpetrated the greatest crime

against the American people ever seen.

It was a coup d'etat.

It was the attempt to take over a duly elected president

for their own personal gain.

- They made an attempt to overthrow

the outcome of a presidential election.

That was an American coup.

You can't do with a coup d'etat that takes place in Africa,

or Latin America, where you seize the building

of the presidency and you say, I'm the president.

Some officials in the political police,

the secret police, they're the ones who control

the security machinery.

And they say, my God we have discovered

that the president is a foreign agent.

So we have to arrest him to save the country.

If the people in charge of guarding the state

choose to turn against the state, the state is defenseless.

- This is what third world security states do.

They spy on their political opponents like this.

They try to send them to jail.

They try to bankrupt them.

- Once you established this precedent that you know

the intel agencies oversee the presidency.

And if the American people make a mistake

by electing the wrong guy and it's up to them

to correct that mistake.

And the fact that people think like that in these agencies

I think poses a fundamental threat to democracy.

- To me, this really is the crime of the century

when you think about it.

When you think about all these different institutions

working in concert, colluding, all working towards

one goal; to take out the president of the United States.

- So I tried to say this was gonna be bad and warn people.

And I thought I had a good grasp of how bad

it was gonna be and I didn't.

If you had told me in December or January,

as the administration was coming in,

Flynn won't last a month because of an op

that the deep state is going to run against him,

I would have said it, come on, it's bad

but it's not that bad.

And then it happened.

So, goes to show you how good my judgment is.

- I would say the Russia-gate has been the most egregious,

malevolent abuse of everything that was supposed

to have been good about our government.

- It divided the country in ways that people can't imagine.

It's inspired massive violence.

It's given people who are bad faith actors

a license to do whatever they want

because they literally feel like they're fighting

Russian spies and Nazis and foreign bad actors.

If you are right wing and you're a reporter

or a politician, you will have your reputation destroyed.

That's if you're lucky.

If you're lucky, you'll only have your reputation smeared.

If you end up like other people you're gonna get framed

for crimes.

- I worry that that is the future of American politics.

Personal destruction at the candidate level

and the party level is one thing.

When it starts getting down to every everyday lives,

how do you get your reputation back after that?

The change in tactics now is anyone

who dare speak up and meet the enemy,

risks the possibility that they will have

a false reality launched against them

to destroy their reputation and to silence them.

And I think that can't be what our founding fathers

intended when they created this great democracy

in this great constitutional Republic.

- The most powerful organs of the state

are not merely corrupt but that they'd been weaponized

to go after perceived domestic enemies.

And that's very scary and bad.

It means we don't, we don't live in the United States

of America as it is any of us would like to understand it.

I don't live in that country anymore.

The realization of that is maybe the saddest thing

I've ever gone through in my life.

- It's not just that we're not the United States anymore.

It's what is your humanity?

What kind of a human being are you

if you are essentially a slave?

If you are run by intelligence services,

if you're run by the press, if these are the people

who dominate your public sphere.

If these are the people who make decisions

about how you live, about how your family lives,

about how your friends live,

these are the things that you have to contest all the time

if you wish to stay a free person and a free people.

- It's time for people to recognize

that they've got to stand up and push back

on the media, demand unbiased coverage,

out those people who are advocates and not real journalists.

And tell your neighbors, tell everybody in your social media

circle that we are the greatest country in the world,

that we have the greatest system.

We may not be perfect, but our system is perfect

and we know how to fix problems,

if we just follow the rules.

- If I were writing about the timeframe that we lived in,

that we're living in now I would say,

it wasn't supposed to happen.

They weren't supposed to know.

- You know, had Hillary Clinton won,

We wouldn't have known the different crimes and abuses

committed by rogue

law enforcement officials or dirty cops,

rogue intelligence officials as well.

That's true except you needed something else.

Had it not been for Congressman Nunez,

had he not been willing to do this,

and had he not had this particular team

with Kash Patel, with Jack Langer,

we would not have known what had happened.

- He stood up to the mob.

He didn't go along with the narrative.

He thought the narrative that the Trump people

had colluded with Russia was wrong

and he stood up and he said so

at a time when nobody else was willing to do that.

- History has already exonerated Devin Nunez

in many ways, because he stuck to the facts.

All right, it was an unpopular storyline,

but he was right

- Without Nunez we wouldn't know,

we might not know anything about it.

I mean, they basically have gotten away with it scot-free

which is sad 'cause the system doesn't work.

But at least it's been exposed.

And without him it wouldn't.

- Why is moral courage among members of Congress,

a type of moral courage that Devin Nunez has,

why is that rare?

Well, it's rare in Congress because it's rare in the world.

It's a rare trait to go against a mob.

Aristotle had called moral courage,

"the chief of all virtues,"

because if you don't have courage,

then you can't be honorable because sometimes

to be honorable and honest, you have to speak out

against lies.

You have to stand up to the truth.

- That's exactly right.

Every Republican Senator and member of Congress

should be saying, this is over.

We want every damn bit of evidence,

that every intelligence agency has

or it's maybe time to shut those agencies down.