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- [00:01]
Eli Lake
Hello listeners. We've got a real treat for you today. It is a discussion debate that I had with Josh Hammer, a really sharp center right pundit, journalist, lawyer who disagrees a little bit with me on the relevance of recently declassified documents from the Director of National Intelligence regarding Russiagate, something that I've written about for a long time. I think it's a great conversation. Now, I know that you are all also anticipating Restless the Making of modern Iran part two, where we get into the 1979 Islamic Revolution. And you will be getting it, but you will be getting it a week from today. But we didn't want to leave you hanging as we put the finishing touches on this terrific episode. If you want to get these live streams as they happen, make sure to subscribe to thefp.com and and here is my discussion debate with Josh Hammer.
- [01:00]
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- [01:59]
Eli Lake
Welcome viewers of the live stream from the Free Press. I'm Eli Lake and I am the host of Breaking History. And joining me today is political commenter, attorney and columnist and overall MAGA influencer, Josh Hammer. Earlier this month, the office of the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified more than 100 pages of documents that reveal how America's spies assessed Russian election interference in the final months of the 2016 election. Gabbard says that the new releases, quote, clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest levels of our government. Now she's recommended that the Justice Department investigate and prosecute this alleged conspiracy. Last week I published a piece for the Free Press with my take on the matter, namely that while Russiagate was a real scandal, it absolutely was. None of the evidence that Gabbard really produced proves her treasonous conspiracy accusation. Today the Free Press published two more points of view on the Russiagate revelations, including a piece from my guest, Josh Hammer. Josh argues that the documents Gabbard released are in fact revelatory and are damning for President Obama and his administration. So this morning we're going to debate what exactly does the DNI's newly released documents tell us about Russiagate? Is this a bombshell? Josh, thank you so much for joining me.
- [03:26]
Josh Hammer
Eli, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
- [03:29]
Eli Lake
So I want to start off with just saying that we both agree that Russiagate was a real scandal, it's a national embarrassment, and it had real and destructive long term effects on Trump's first presidency. So we're not really arguing that point. But let's talk about the document at the center of the DNI's claims, this intelligence community assessment, a report that was authored by the CIA, the FBI and the NSA, and it was released to the public on January 6, 2017. It said, we assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered and influenced campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US Democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and his Russian government developed a clear preference for President Elect Trump. We have higher confidence. We have. Sorry. We have high confidence in these judges, in these judgments. Gabbard now alleges that the ICA is not merely false, but it's crucially that Obama administration officials and Obama himself knew it was false at the time they compiled it. So let's talk about it. Is that generally a fair kind of encapsulation in your view of the scam?
- [04:47]
Josh Hammer
Yeah, I think that is an accurate Description of the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, what's known as an ICA in intelligence community jargon. I think, you know, what's relevant here is, among other things, where, where is this information coming from? Where, where is this broader narrative coming from? And what were the motivations that went into this seemingly rushed out the door memo that, that, that, that, that, that was published just two weeks prior to Donald Trump putting his hand on the Bible and taking the oath of office for the first time. So, you know, you know, Eli, those of us who lived through the 2016 election, which I guess is basically everyone other than some Young Gen Z viewers of the livestream there. I mean, you know, we recall that all throughout this election was this, this talking points from, from the corporate press, from, from Democratic elected officials, the DNC and so forth, that President Trump was a Russian agent. Indeed, going all the way back to the summer of 2016, Jim Comey and the FBI had already launched what was termed crossfire hurricane. The ongoing FBI investigation. This had, it had its origins and allegations of Carter page, among other 2016 Trump campaign staffers having closed ties. So, so all this was going on. I think the point that has been most specifically debated was the Venn diagram overlap and the connecting of the dots, the nexus, if you will, between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the infamous Steele dossier, that the campaign and the Democratic National Committee retained Fusion gps to bring in the discredited British spy Christopher Steele. This is the compromise, the P tape. I mean, that's how I led my essay for the Free Press, because I think a lot of folks, frankly have forgotten about just the sheer ludicrousness and the salac nature of a lot of these details. And just to briefly hammer home the point, no pun intended, for anyone who hasn't read my essay yet, which you obviously should, but the allegation was that Putin had personally incriminating information on Donald Trump, up to and including Trump retained prostitutes who would perform so called golden showers like a urination fetish, and that this was the tool by which the Kremlin was seeking to install Trump as effectively a Manchurian candidate.
- [07:00]
Eli Lake
We should stipulate that none of that was in the intelligence community assessment. There was an annex that was highly classified. Not even Congress got it. That was briefed personally by James Comey to President Elect Trump and President Obama. But that was not in the assessment. The assessment was mainly about the hack and leak campaign and trying to assess, you know, Russia's motivations for their election interference. So those are. I just want to point out that we learn about the pee tape and the Steele dossier after the Release of the January 6th Intelligence Community Assessment. You are correct that it was a talking point from the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was a hot story sort of in the political press, I would say in the fall of 2016, because I think Hillary Clinton's people were putting it out. There was an effort to brief reporters about this by Steele himself, but he was off the record or in background. Then finally, Steele gives an interview on background to David Horn of at the time, I think, Mother Jones of the Nation. And he publishes, you know, a veteran British spy has all this information, but that didn't that information and that storyline about Trump's cooperation or conspiracy or collusion with Russia was not part of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that was really just about what Russia done?
- [08:29]
Josh Hammer
Well, yes and no. I mean, I think what, what among other things, this latest revelation, this 2020 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report that the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, along with the CIA Director John Ratcliffe, that they have now decided to declassify this past Wednesday, I think it was this, this report issued by then Congressman Devin Nunes, who was really on top of this from the get go, I think does show that that the Steele dossier was reviewed and was considered as part of this get Rush, get out the door January 6, 2017 Intelligence Media Assessment. Now, it's true that they don't literally talk about the pee tape or anything deep.
- [09:08]
Eli Lake
Well, they don't even mention that Trump cooperated with Russia, which is the scandal part. I mean, I'm saying what they said, what the ica, the intelligence community assessment says is that Russia hacked and leaked Clinton. And it has that one line that I think is now correctly scrutinized, that one of the motivations for that was that over time the Kremlin had developed a preference for Trump, when in fact it looks like reading the declassified House Intelligence Committee report. And we should say it was just the Republicans, not it wasn't the entire committee because Adam Schiff was the ranking member and he of course, had a very, very different view and to his, to his great shame, in my view. But the information, I mean, I should say I think there is a scandal here that has been revealed. I wrote about this. I remember writing about the House Intelligence Republicans and their kind of view on this at the time. And then I wrote about it in a big essay for Commentary that came out right after Trump's presidency trying to sum up the entire scandal. John Brennan in his memoir talks a little bit about this, although he, he puts obviously a spin on it that is that actually has been demolished by the declassified report. The scandal, as I see it, is that by the end of 2017, the House Intelligence Committee that had reviewed the information knew all kinds of things that the rest of us at the time really didn't know. One of them was that the Steele dossier was total bunk and that senior CIA officials and analysts, handpicked by Brennan, we might add, correct, thought it was so like not such garbage that they didn't want it anywhere near the actual text of the they didn't want to reference it. They didn't want to deal with any of the allegations about Trump. They just thought it was garbage intelligence. It would have been nice to have known that at the end of 2017 until finally we learned the full details of it at the end of 2019. So there's two extra years when the. I mean, that. That, to me, is an enormous scandal. Because if that information had really gotten out there, and some of it is the problem with the House Intelligence Committee report, it's not a problem, but because it was only Republicans, because there was a moral panic in Washington, nobody really took it seriously, and they had to classify so much of it that you didn't see, like the actual messages from the senior CIA people. Right. But if that information had been out, Trump would have been spared all of this nonsense with Mueller and everything else. I'm. In my view, I mean, Comey played a particularly horrible role in all of this, in my view, because what he. He confirmed the existence of the investigation when they had every reason to have shut it down by the time he announced it. So that is what eventually leads to him being fired and then the appointment of Mueller. And we know the rest. But my point is that that is a scandal. Why didn't we know that at the end of 2017? Why didn't. And I think Devin Nunes did his best to try to put it out there, but there was as, again, such a moral panic. The press played such a terrible. Mainstream press played such a terrible role that we didn't have that information that was finally confirmed by Michael Horowitz at the end of 2019 in his Inspector General Review. But one of the other parts about what we found in the declassified is that everybody agreed the Russians did the hacking and the leaking. Now, I've read, and as somebody who's kind of a russiagate connoisseur at this point and somebody who's done a lot of work on it, there are people who are like former intelligence people. I'm thinking of Bill Binney. There's some journalists like Aaron Mate who have said, no, there isn't evidence that the Russians hacked those emails. That's one view. I don't think that's the view, obviously, of the intelligence community, because all of these documents that have been released confirm that. And then there's another view, which is that actually the release of the emails didn't really harm Clinton. I think that's wrong. I think they were absolutely devastating to Clinton because they exposed things that she tried to keep hidden, like your speeches, Goldman Sachs. But anyway. But to Try to get back just to sort of say you and I are in agreement, the Russians hacked Hillary in 2016. The Russia gave part of the scandal that was invented that was such a problem was saying that Trump was in on the interference from Russia. Is that fair?
- [13:40]
Josh Hammer
Yeah, I think that's part of it. The term Russiagate is kind of a broad term because in my view, it's really just, it's like scandal upon scandal upon scandal. I mean, you know, it's not just the email hacking, it's not just the compromise, the Steele dossier, the P tape. I mean, in my judgment, especially based on what we just saw from the DNI in the 2020 House Permit Intelligence reports, John Brennan's contemporaneous notes. By the way, again, this is my essay, which I encourage the viewers to read there. But in you haven't seen, one of, I think the most damning things, frankly, is that, Eli, you corruptly noted that these five fairly senior, I believe, veteran CIA analysts who are Brennan's handpicked agency staffers at Langley to help produce this January 6, 2017, intelligence community assessment there, they raised serious concerns to Brennan about the origin of a lot of this there. And they brought up the Steele dossier. And Brennan, according to some handwritten notes that Ratcliffe and Gabbard have now revealed, says, but doesn't it ring true? And you know, this is part of the broader scandal, right? This is my essay. I mean, this notion, doesn't it ring true? I mean, you know, when the political establishment, the intelligence community, the elites in general, and they tell you this, I mean, doesn't it ring true as kind of a catchphrase? I think for the reason that populist sentiment is on the rise across the.
- [15:01]
Eli Lake
Entire America, you're 100% right to zero in on that. Because when you have something that reads intelligence community assessment that was being, you know, inflated in its, you know, we learned earlier that there were. The analytical rigor is not quite there. The NSA only had moderate confidence in all these other kind of buzzwords and so forth. But you're right that that's supposed to be the considered judgment of people with access to secret information. And this is not supposed to be political. And what you have is the CIA director clearly pushing partisan generated garbage, bogus intelligence, and then saying it rings true.
- [15:41]
Josh Hammer
Sorry, let me just make a real quick point, though, because this is important. And, you know, it's not just that he's politicizing intelligence, Eli, to justify spying on a drug trafficker down in the Rio Grande Valley, whatever There he's talking politicizing intelligence about the then incoming President of the United States, who's rated, put his hand in the Bible in two weeks. I mean, that, that, that is a really, really big deal.
- [16:04]
Eli Lake
Yeah. And, and the leaking of things that should never be leaked, like, correct. The existence of the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign, which is supposed to be secret for a reason, because when you're in investigative phase, you may not turn up anything. Which, by the way, they didn't. And by the way, by the time that was leaked, we know from going through Horowitz and Durham, they knew there was nothing there. And the FBI also had the information that the allegations that were gathered in the Steele dossier were bogus. And they knew that because they had interviewed the main collector, the primary subsource, as he's known. So there are a whole series of problems which have been part of the Russiagate scandal. I want to get to this, though, because it seems like the one thing that I think you can say is that, and I didn't think this, by the way, from the first set of documents, I thought the first set of documents actually were. It's a little bit deceptive, because what she was releasing was declassified assessments from the intelligence community about Russia's ability to change vote tallies. That is a form of hacking, I suppose. But it's not the hacking that everybody was referring to, which was stealing the emails. So there was a little bit of a misdirection. So I, I, the first set of documents I thought was like, well, this is a little bit of a red herring. When we get to the actual House Intelligence Committee report that right there, I think it makes it clear that the judgment that the Russians wanted Trump to win or had a preference for Trump, it wasn't based solely on the Steele dossier. We should say that it was based also on other kind of partial, garbled intelligence. Some of it was, I think what they're referring to is the source, apparently, that the United States had in the Kremlin, who had a communication in which he said something that, as one of the, one of the analysts said could be read five different ways, but they took to have it mean that it meant that Putin had a preference now for Trump. Okay. So I'm perfectly willing to concede that that line that was in the assessment shouldn't have been there based on the sort of review of the trade graph. And it's extraordinary to me that the Senate Intelligence Committee report missed all of this, because I think that even though it was just the Republicans who put this out. I mean, first of all, let's just stipulate Adam Schiff is discredited on this topic for time immemorial. But they. That we finally see the receipts. And so in that respect, I'm like, all right, you know what? They've produced the evidence that these analysts picked by Brennan didn't agree largely or thought that these, that one conclusion, that one sentence was wrong. So I'm conceding that my point to you would be okay. But that's. That to me is just, it's, that's a minor thing given the rest of everything else of the scandal of Russia. Meaning if you're not going to challenge that the Russians hacked and leaked one person in the race, in a binary race, then that's kind of. I mean, wouldn't logic follow that that would benefit Trump? I mean, if you're denigrating Clinton with these leaks, then that's beneficial to Trump, even though trying to divine what the Russians were doing is a different matter. I think that's where you and I part ways.
- [19:33]
Josh Hammer
Yeah. What might be happening here is we might just be focusing on different parts of this broader scandal. I'm personally a little bit more interested in the January 6, 2017 intelligence community assessment, because to me, that is what lays the predicate for ultimately the Mueller special counsel probe and all the various hell that would follow. By the way, there are a lot of legitimate questions to ask about Comey. What did he know and when did he know it there?
- [19:58]
Eli Lake
Let's ask him. Because Comey. I agree. Comey is a villain in this whole thing.
- [20:02]
Josh Hammer
Yeah. But I guess, Eli, I would be curious, based on what you're saying now, is it your assessment, based on everything that you've read, written about this topic over the years, that Putin and the Russians did have a definitive preference for Trump in the 2016 election? Because that does seem to be contradicted by what we've seen here, the 2020 House Intelligence Report, among other things there, which is basically, they're trying to kind of get this notion out there that the Russian interest is really just to sow the seeds of discord and mistrust there, which is a very old tactic. This goes all the way back to the Soviet era, the 1960s and so forth there. But I'd be curious, I mean, is that your take, or do you think that Putin and the Kremlin really did have a direct preference to actually get Donald Trump elected?
- [20:44]
Eli Lake
Well, I wanna go back to something else you said earlier, and then I wanna answer that because I'm of the view that when there's new information, and there definitely is, in the declassified House intelligence report. So had I written my piece after that was released, I may have, I would have, I would have included saying this is, this is important to know, this is new information. But two points I actually don't think the intelligence community assessment was the thing that kicked everything off. What I think kicked it off was the leak of the briefing of the annex. That was the, the summarizing the Steele dossier, which then prompted buzzfeed to publish the Steele dossier. And then really what the key hinge moment is a few months later when James Comey goes before the House Intelligence Committee and testifies that there is an ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign. And to me that is far much, that's a much bigger scandal for a couple reasons. One, because of declassifications and also the work of Horowitz and John Dorham. What we now know is that by the time that Comey had said that there was no there there, meaning the Trump campaign, that the Crossfire hurricane was launched on an absolute paper thin pretext, it should not have been launched. There was no due diligence that was done. It was like a conversation about a conversation. And that is what Durham did that finally got released in 2023. But then there's this other thing which is that we knew, for example, that the lead agent that was investigating Michael Flynn, his first national security advisor, had said by the beginning of December, let's close the investigation. We know that there was a sort of junior chipmunk at the FBI that was about to close. It didn't fill out the electronic form properly. And that, you know, Strzok rushes down and realizes he doesn't, the case is still open, so they can keep it open. So they were clearly keeping open this investigation after their own investigators had said, we don't, we don't have it. And we, and I can go through chapter and verse for all other reasons, like they had sent, you know, planned undercover people, basically informants to record Carter Page and what he thought were innocuous conversations. And he says, no, the campaign hasn't done anything like that. You know what I'm saying? But he said it when he didn't know he was talking to an FBI agent. So there's like a series of evidence that I would say makes it very clear why was this investigation still going and why would you announce that it was ongoing? Which really created the fervor and I think that's why Trump fired Comey. At the time, Trump did a very bad job of explaining, like, all the reasons for firing him. So it looked like he was firing Comey.
- [23:41]
Josh Hammer
He fired him by Twitter, if I recall. Right.
- [23:43]
Eli Lake
Well, he did, but then, no, no, it started with Rod Rosenstein, who was the Deputy Attorney general, because already the moral panic of Russiagate had forced Jeff Sessions to.
- [23:55]
Josh Hammer
Recuse.
- [23:56]
Eli Lake
Recuse himself from the case. So he was. So Rosenstein was in charge of it. And Rosenstein fires Comey ostensibly for how he handled the Hillary Clinton investigation into her emails. And I actually think there's a kind of, there's a principled argument for that. But it was so obvious that he was, that, you know, the reason Trump wanted Comey Khan was because of this other stuff. Right. So it just, the whole thing looked like it smelled so bad. There were these selective leaks about meetings that were, that seemed important at the time. But if you really dug into them, like the Trump Tower meeting with the lawyer. I mean, I love this one because they always, you still hear it from the resistance side. They'll bring it up. And then you say, well, do you know what the opposition research, you know who produced the opposition research for that meeting? It was Fusion gps, the same people who gave us the Steele dossier. So, you know, if you're gonna, if you're gonna ding Donald Trump Jr. For 30 minute meeting that went nowhere for meeting with people offering this stuff, then why don't, why don't you have anything to say about the same people who were representing, by the way, according to the Democrats, a Russian national interest, which is this bank that was hit by Magnitsky sanctions. That's who the Democrats hired to do their opposition research. That's a much stronger connection. So anyway, I can. All that stuff to me is like a massive scandal. The part about the ica, I mean, I, again, I'm conceding that that sentence shouldn't have been in there because there were people who had access to the intelligence and said, we can't say that he had a preference for Trump. It was a preference to denigrate Hillary Clinton. On the other hand, and I'm not trying to talk around it, if you're denigrating and you're damaging one candidate in a binary choice election, you are by definition helping the other one. If that's your motivation, that's a separate question. But to me it's like a little bit of kind of angels on the head of a pin. Whereas there's all this other stuff to me that's much bigger deal. Why did Comey confirm an investigation in the Trump campaign when all of his top investigators were looking at it and they'd already gotten the subsource for the Steele dosset? They had zero evidence. Why would he confirm it when it should have been closed three months before he made that announcement? I'd like to know that. Who leaked the Michael Flynn stuff about his conversation with an ambassador, which was totally normal. We finally saw the transcript in 2020, was finally released, and if you read it, you're like, well, this, this total normal transition stuff, who leaked that and who decided to put that out there? And there were like, I don't know, seven bylines on the Washington Post story, and it was originally David Ignatius. Those are the unanswered questions that we still don't know. Whereas this one just strikes me as like, okay, they torqued up the conclusions of an assessment and they shouldn't have based it on that intelligence. But we, you know, we've confirmed that they still thought the Russians did the hacking and leaking, and they didn't say. They, they tell, you know, so that's, that's where I'm at on that.
- [27:01]
Josh Hammer
Yeah, but fair enough. I mean, I, that's, that's, it's all entirely reasonable. I think we're just, I think we're just reading the January 6, 2017 memo slightly differently at this point. I read it through a slightly more politically charged anti Trump animus. Now, look, Crossfire Hurricane again goes back all the way to summer 2016, but you've already conceded that it was started on extraordinarily flimsy grounds there. The Michael Flynn part and Jeff Sessions part. I'm happy you brought them up because it does kind of just shed a light on some of the inadvertent casualties, let's call it, of this scandal. I mean, Michael Flynn was 1000% a casualty of the Russia Gate hoax. Jeff Sessions made an unfortunate decision to recuse. I'm not necessarily one who's gonna beat him over the head of it. I happen to be a longstanding big fan of Jeff Sessions. I think he's a great American patriot. So I'm not gonna beat him up too badly. But that did ultimately cost him his job as Attorney General. You're totally right on comey. By the way, we all know why Trump and Rod Rosenstein fired him. That should have been done probably on day one. There's purportedly a congressional statute, Right. That locks in the FBI director. I think it's a 10 year term if I Remember the statute corre there, but putting on my lawyer hat. These statutes are all but assuredly unconstitutional. So if Trump wanted a pretty high profile, sexy constitutional challenge on day one of his presidency, that would have been a very nice way to do it. Actually is just try to just override the statute and assert articles clearly you.
- [28:31]
Eli Lake
Should have fired him on the first day. I mean, in retrospect. Absolutely. And Comey, by the way, I mean, I think I really like your point in your piece about if you want to know where the populist distrust in their anger is coming from, it starts with the Russia gate. I totally agree. Because Comey's duplicity, the fact that when he would be asked in congressional session and also in closed session and he wouldn't just say what he knew, which was we talked to the subsource and we can't confirm it and he's backing out of a lot of the story that's just lying. And we have to trust these institutions to be above the law. I mean, sorry, above politics, I should say. So we want them to be these referees that we can trust. We have to trust the intelligence community to tell us, okay, this is this great story. And he was clearly putting his thumb on the scale. Now we can analyze his motivations because maybe he felt guilty that he cost Hillary the election because he had to open that other investigation before. Who knows? But the bottom line is, is that you can't have an FBI director who is actively kind of undermining the elected president and lying to the American people in Congress about evidence that ended up not really being there. And they knew it at the time. And that's why I'm grateful for Horowitz and Dorham's work on that because that would have been memory hold had, you know, they not done their investigations.
- [30:07]
Josh Hammer
Yeah. You know, Eli, before we went on this live stream this morning, I was rewatching John Radcliffe's clip on the morning on the Sorry, not Moors of Maria, on Maria Bartiromo's Sunday Fox News show. I can't remember exactly Sunday morning futures. There it is. Anyway, and this was like two Sundays ago or no, sorry, it was this past Sunday and Ratcliffe was talking about how he's promising. I thought this because you mentioned John Durham, how Ratcliffe is planning to release here a new annex to the Durham report with previously declassified documents there. So that I think is another key point is that your essay, which is written before the Wednesday revelations, my essay, which came out this morning there we're all kind of doing this in real time. There's a very fluid situation. There's no real saying what's going to happen tomorrow, what's going to happen later today. For that matter. The one thing that I would have done a little differently, actually, if I were to kind of start this piece, this new essay over from scratch, I would have liked to have emphasized that it's not just Tulsi Gabbard, but also John Ratcliffe and others who are enthusiastically pushing this, because I do have, on a personal level, some of my own misgivings with Tulsi Gabbard, which are really neither here nor there. She had that kind of ludicrous video about the nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that I was. I was actually so disturbed. I was literally walking around the streets of Tel Aviv with my wife and baby daughters two days before the war with Iran started and someone text me this tweet. And I was so distraught that I had to immediately tweet about it. So whatever one's thoughts on Tulsi Gabbard may or may not be, it's not just her. It's also John Ratcliffe and others there that are saying that this is a really big deal. Now, having said that, another thing that I think is worth at least talking about a little bit here in our conversation, again, putting on my legal hat there. I've been very sober when it comes to trying to temper people's expectations as to what criminal referrals and possible fallout of all that might entail. There's been a lot of fiery talk here. You mentioned the language of treasonous conspiracy that the DNI and President Trump have both used. This is fiery and political language. It's intended to gin up and stir emotions there. I would not necessarily expect Barack Obama to be doing a perp walk and get a Fani Willis, Donald Trump style mugshot or anything like that anytime soon there. So I would encourage people to temper their expectations. But at a bare minimum, the reason why I've been really passionate about this since Gabbard and Ratcliffe and so forth started these revelations is because I really do view Russiagate. And this is kind of my 35,000 foot altitude, broader, higher point. I really do view Russiagate as the starting point of a series of cataclysmic events that have caused the American people to have historically low trust in the government and the intelligence community, the, quote, unquote, deep state, the ruling class, whatever you want to call it there. I mean, I personally can draw a pretty direct line from Russiagate to the Mueller probe to The Trump Zelensky impeachment to the COVID 19 lockdowns, the Hunter Biden laptop to the prosecution seeking solitary confinement for various J6ers, to the Twitter files and all of that there. And then obviously Democrats trying to run a mental patient for president last year and trying to cover it up for years. So there's the Russia gay. Really, in my view, was the start of all this. Russia gay was kind of the origins, if you will, the original sin of this bipartisan rise of just profoundly, profoundly, deeply, deeply distrustful conduct, whereby if you ask an American what he or she thinks, upon hearing a bit of news from the government, they're automatically inclined to say, no, I don't buy that. As opposed to the other way around. So if nothing else, the old kind of Louis Brandeis line from a century ago was this notion that sunlight is the best disinfectant infectant. If nothing else. I'm happy that we're starting to see some more declassifications, albeit for conduct that happened at this point, you know, eight and a half, nine years ago.
- [33:56]
Eli Lake
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- [34:41]
Eli Lake
Okay, so I agree with you, but this is where I really kind of part somebody. First of all, treason is the one crime, as you know, that is defined explicitly in the Constitution. This is not treason and I don't want senior government leaders or the president to be throwing that word around. And by the way, I'm, it's a bipartisan critique. There were a lot, there was a lot of treason rhetoric that was thrown around when it came to Trump in regards to this post, this, this, this fakery of Russiagate. So that's the first thing. And I don't like that. So I want to make that really clear. And I'm also, there's something that you wrote, you quoted Free Press contributor Abigail Schreier, who's done phenomenal work on youth, gender, medicine and the kind of therapy culture. And I'm a big fan of hers. But I disagree with her that the only way you stop this is if Republicans go just as hard against Democrats so they learn a lesson and they never do it again. And I understand the logic there. I actually think that that approach is how we kind of fall into a cycle of norm violations. What I'd like to get back to is something is I'd like to restore the norm that the Democrats violated, which is to they criminalized politics during Russiagate, they criminalized politics when during the Biden presidency, and they politicized intelligence as we are talking about today. I would like to get out of that cycle. And I don't.
- [36:17]
Josh Hammer
I share that goal, to be clear. I think we all share that goal.
- [36:19]
Eli Lake
I think the way that you get back is you sort of recognize. And I know I got a lot of grief from some of our commenters, the Free Press, where the last line of my piece was, Trump secured his own revenge. He won the election in 2024. At the end of the day, the frivolous lawsuits against him were not enough to keep him from the White House. And I think in part that was because a lot of normie Americans, not just the MAGA base, a lot of Americans who are not necessarily enthusiastically maga, among the things that they noticed was, wait a second, why is Alvin Bragg interfering in the national election with this trumped up nonsense about, you know, filing hush money in a certain way with the fec? It's not even his jurisdiction. Or, you know, why is the FBI rating mar a lago? You know, when there's a normal process where you could just request the documents and everything else like that. So I'd like to get back to that. And I don't really see like, well, what's the benefit of kind of doing this unless they can show me that. Again, I want to qualify that is that if there's intelligence that actually the intelligence community didn't think the Russians even hacked Hillary Clinton, well, that would be an enormous revelation. That would mean the entire thing was based on fakery or, you know, if we can get somebody dead to rights, like it turns out that Comey leaked the stuff about Flynn, for example, which was. Would have been highly classified intercepts. Well, there you go. I mean, I'm just saying, I don't know, what about statutes of limitations? But I'm saying if you get me something that's really prosecuted, that Horowitz and Dorham and others missed. Absolutely. Let's run with it. But this, I don't see how you're going to get anybody on like this, other than like, I hope, I think it does, again, chip away at the reputations of Obama, Brennan and others in that moment. That said, if we're being charitable, and certainly the other side wasn't charitable, I do think that the Democrats were legitimate. I don't know that they. I think that Obama probably really did think that the Russians had interfered in a way that they hadn't before in our politics, and he wanted to make sure the information was out. And I think he probably had in the back of his head, maybe it's true that Trump had cooperated. Where you have to kind of go back to that point where, again, that was such a massive shock to the system that Trump won, that I think it did send especially Democrats into a kind of, you know, frenzy. And they're just, you know what I'm saying. So that doesn't justify it. What I'm saying is I don't think that Obama knew deep down that there wasn't anything there with Trump and Putin and he just wanted to put this sort of lodestone on his presidency. I think he really believed that there was something really dastardly going on and that's why he ordered the assessment to me, like I think it was, you know, Brennan is much more guilty here of putting his thumb on the scale. But in that respect, and I'm no Obama fan, but I just think that you. I try to. I try to inhabit the point of view of people who I disagree with.
- [39:48]
Josh Hammer
Yeah, look, I, I think that Brennan Clapper have the most proverbial, not literal blood on their hands from, from, from this whole scandal, Brennan Clapper and Comey. But I do think that it is, that it is no small, no small. Announcements from the 2020. The declassified 2020 House Permanence Lechemia Intelligence report from Devin Nunes that Barack Obama directly ordered this report. By the way, that particular conclusion shared by the 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report as well, the bipartisan one from Marco Rubio and Senator Warner of Virginia. The 2020 Intelligence Committee report just disclaimed that Barack Obama had any political motivation. That's where the Devin Nunes report differs. They say that there actually was a political motivation here has been the theory for a very long time. A very long time. Excuse me. That has been put forward by a guy who I think is a mutual friend of ours, Lee Smith, who's Kind of my, kind of my one stop shop for all things Russiagate. I have yet to see something on Russiagate that Lee Smith was not ahead of the curve on, was not ultimately been proven prescient on. And my take on Barack Obama personally here is, look, Barack Obama is an ideological creature. He is a creature of the academy. He is a creature of ideology and dogma. And he is coming from an ideological starting place that thinks that Donald Trump, and frankly anyone right of center is kind of a retrograde troglodyte who seeks America ill. And he's going to be therefore naturally have a proclivity. He's going to be more favorably disposed towards believing things from the other side that corroborate his preexisting worldview. And then you kind of add to that the fact that that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who again is the head of the snake of the whole Steele dossier and Fusion gps and all that there. You know, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have quite a history, right? They ran against each other in 2008. Obama pulls the massive upset there. We know that Barack Obama essentially anointed Hillary Clinton as his would be successor, passing over his then Vice President Joe Biden, something that Biden has for about a decade now held a very long grudge against Barack. Now he has many other reasons to hold a grudge against Barack Obama after what we saw last summer, but neither here nor there for present purposes. But all that has to say for present purposes, that I do think that for all the reasons that I just said that Barack Obama did, whether explicitly or implicitly, really glom on to a lot of this Clinton campaign salacious sort of fare there. And that is corroborated in part by this John Brennan but doesn't it ring true narrative there? I really do think that it wasn't just email hacking there. I really do think that this broader narrative that Donald Trump potentially had compromise material there, that he might be an outright Manchurian Candidate there, I really do think that the recent revelations do seriously bolster that narrative in a very real way. By the way, a narrative I think that we're still confronting now many, many years later. I mean, not that I tune into MSNBC very frequently, but I'm pretty sure that the median average MSNBC host or viewer, many of them really do believe this still, that Donald Trump to this day is compromised by the Kremlin. Certainly many liberal family members of my own continue to believe this. I could tell you that from personal experience there. And I think one place where you and I Differ, Eli, maybe is just the role that this particular intelligence community assessment played in the ultimate firing of, call me the Mueller probe and all that there. Because without the Mueller probe, you really don't necessarily get the reason we have them on.
- [43:20]
Eli Lake
The reason you have the Mueller probe is because Trump fired Comey. And what Comey did, I think was he, he didn't understand who he was dealing with. But Trump, Comey thought is, all right, I just, I got my, you know, I got my insurance policy right here. Because if he announces there's an ongoing probe, he knows that if he's then fired, it looks like he's interfering in the investigation. That's what he was banking on. I remember writing a column saying Comey is now the most powerful man in Washington after he made that announcement. Because I didn't know who Trump was at that point. I didn't know that Trump would say, forget it, I'm going to fire this guy. I'm going to use my constitutional authority. Turned out that was one of the best things Trump did in his, his entire presidency on the first time around. But the point is, is that going by the old Washington rules, and I'll admit, I mean, listen, I think I was really early on calling out the bakery of Russiagate. I wrote a column defending Mike Flynn when he was forced to resign back in February of 2017. But I thought based on some of the things that Trump had said during the campaign, which seemed out of left field in terms of Russia, even though, as president, as you point out, he did many things in terms of policy that were very tough on Russia, tougher than Obama, we should say. But I thought maybe there was something there when I had totally incomplete information. Some of that was because at the time when I was writing for Bloomberg, yes, all these mainstream reporters were being kind of juiced up with various people in Clinton land playing up this stuff. Now, I, thank God, never dive headfirst into that. And I'm glad I didn't, you know, but I looked at people. Remember when he brought on Paul Manafort? Paul Manafort has a long history of supporting the Russian backed party in Ukraine. That was a fact.
- [45:13]
Josh Hammer
But Manafort goes back to like the Nixon era. I mean, this guy's been around Republican politics.
- [45:17]
Eli Lake
Absolutely. No, no, I agree with you. My point is, is that if you bring in somebody who kind of monetized his political career with people that were close to Russia, which is what he did because he represented Yanukovych and so forth, you know, that's, that's a little bit of a red flag. I had written about Manafort in the context of the McCain campaign because, you know, he played a sort of ancillary role. And I thought it was interesting that he kind of had this lobbying contract which he hadn't really disclosed in the Foreign Age Act. So there were things that could make you, if you had incomplete information, make it seem like the allegation was plausible. Which is why I think that if you look at it from end of 2016, I can understand why people at the time, and here I want to make a very huge exception for the FBI, which did have all the information. I can understand why some people would think that there was something to it, that the real villain for me is because the FBI had already interviewed the subsource of the Steele dossier, and they knew that by, like January, maybe end of January 2017. At that point, I'm like, wait a second, why did the FBI keep this information? Why did they try to. I mean, this was destroying Trump's presidency. It sucked all the oxygen out until his final year. And then he had Covid. So the whole thing was like. I think that was pretty dastardly.
- [46:45]
Josh Hammer
I mean, one could mean. One could argue the Crossfire hurricane, which was still ongoing at that time, should have ended at that exact time. Right? I mean, I mean, that would have been absolutely.
- [46:52]
Eli Lake
It should have ended. It should have ended. Should never have been open.
- [46:55]
Josh Hammer
Started, of course.
- [46:55]
Eli Lake
Yeah, it should never have been open the way it was. The amount of just BS that we were fed about the original. Remember, the original tip was George Papadopoulos was overheard in a wine bar in London saying he thought the Russians had something really big that you. You to open an investigation into it, into a major presidential campaign, the Republican nominee. Based on that, you know, an Australian ambassador says, oh, I heard this thing. And you know, he's talking about is very vague to not do any more work before you're going to take that step of having the FBI investigating a presidential campaign. Inexcusable. But it gets even worse as they collect more information and they realize there's nothing there and they don't share it with anybody. That, to me, is. That's been the main thing. But again, I try to look at it like, all right, if you didn't know any of that with the FBI, if you didn't know what the FBI knew, then maybe, then maybe, who knows? I mean, this was a shocking time. We knew that the one thing that's true, that remains a constant is the Russians hacked Hillary Clinton's emails and Leaked them to the Internet, and then they interfered in the election in that regard. Okay, so if we all agree on that, then, you know, if you didn't know what the FBI knew, then I can understand why somebody with limited information would have thought that what is inexcusable for the press, what's inexcusable for everybody else, is that as that information was coming out, nobody kind of changed their opinion. And that's where we're in the dire straits we're in now.
- [48:33]
Josh Hammer
Yeah, I think that's among the reasons that we're in the dire straits that. That we're in now. I mean, I continue to believe that the Russians did not necessarily have a super clear preference for Donald Trump in 2016 there. I do believe that their main interest was just in sowing the seeds of discord. By the way, that entire notion is also a little exaggerated, by the way, there was a lot of information because I married this presidential cycle so well, because it was so chaotic and Donald Trump come out of nowhere in the primary. And we all remember the New York Times meter showed Hillary on election night 98%, whatever the heck it was. So, I mean, it was a truly crazy election cycle.
- [49:08]
Eli Lake
The Russians thought Trillery was going to win like everybody else.
- [49:11]
Josh Hammer
Right, Exactly. But there was so much chatter about. There was this one account on Twitter, it was like ennesseegop, and it was not the Tennessee state Republican Party. It actually ends up being a Russian bot account, whatever. It had a few hundred thousand followers or something. So there's all this chatter about, oh, my God, how much money are the Russians pumping in to social media, whatever. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we now know that the amount of money that the Russian government put into Facebook ads was $30,000, which a little over 100,000, but.
- [49:42]
Eli Lake
I had to check that. But it was still a pittance. All of the other political spending that was, you know, blown way out of proportion that led social media companies, by the way, to begin layers and layers of censorship.
- [49:55]
Josh Hammer
That's right.
- [49:57]
Eli Lake
So you're right to point out that russiagate is kind of the origin story of all this stuff. I mean, I sometimes think that actually the prototype in some ways was how the Obama administration sold the Iran deal, where they got all their experts lined up ahead of time. They tried to make it seem like there was an organic, like, oh, yeah, of course, this terrible thing where we let the Iranians keep their nuclear program is a great deal for national security. But that was like a test run for how to play the press. And the press, that's the mainstream media and that's what's. And that kind of gets to it. It's like, I don't think that the like, you know, New York Times reporters who doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on Retrogate should be prosecuted. But I do think in some ways that they're already paying a reputational cost. Just look at the media landscape in 2025 and compare it to 2017, 2016. The New York Times doesn't have the authority, it doesn't set the political conversation in the way that it did. And the reason for that is because they've squandered their credibility with more than half the country at this point.
- [51:02]
Josh Hammer
Yeah. And by the way, you know, other people who have squandered their credibility are folks like John Brennan and Jim Clapper. And they've done so, among other reasons, for the infamous Hunter Biden laptop memo.
- [51:13]
Eli Lake
Well, that's. But that's another example of that. Right, exactly. Where it's like, trust us, where the intelligence community, we know things you don't know. And that's why we're.
- [51:20]
Josh Hammer
And doubling down on Russia, they said, was Russia at that time again too, they played the exact same card. I mean, they learned absolutely nothing between 2016, 2017 and 2020. Doubling down on Russia. We obviously now know that the Hunter Biden laptop was true. Among other reasons we know that it was verified is that special counsel David Weiss, representing the United States government introduced it as evidence at trial last summer while prosecuting.
- [51:44]
Eli Lake
We agree too much because I think the watchers of the livestream want us to disagree more. Let me end it on something else here, okay? And that is this. There is a precedent for losing faith in the intelligence community and how the intelligence community can bring it back. Now, you and I may disagree. I think it's important for the FBI and the CIA to have democratic legitimacy, meaning that people believe what they say when they say it. There's threats. We live in a dangerous world and we need to trust these institutions to not be politicized. Do we agree with that?
- [52:22]
Josh Hammer
Yeah, look, I mean a functioning, healthy republic has to have some trust in the basic decency and these somewhat non politicization of the entire government, but especially the intelligence community there for sure.
- [52:39]
Eli Lake
I think that there are some people who are in this kind of, who were like you and I, early Russia, gay critics who would say, no, I don't think. I think there's people on the libertarian side, I think like a Glenn Greenwald would say no, I actually don't think we should have a large FBI or a CIA or anything like that. I think that there is a kind of sense that there are some people. I think there was an element of the left that parted with the Democratic Party over this nonsense. I think those people would say, you know what? These institutions are rotten from the core and we don't need them. You and I are more on the center, right? And we would.
- [53:11]
Josh Hammer
Well, look, I mean, some of these agencies might have had so much corruption, mission creep, that maybe we should proverbially just knock the building down, start anew. But the notion that a country like the United States will not have a CIA like agency or an FBI, like federal law enforcement bureau is obviously ludicrous. I mean, you know, okay, so you.
- [53:29]
Eli Lake
And I are in agreement with that. I'm just saying that if Matt Taibbi, I don't know, but I don't want to speak for Taibi. If Glenn Greenwald was here, who was also an early critic of all the Rushgate stuff, he would. I don't think he would agree with that. But I don't want to speak for Glenn Greenwald. But anyway, I bring this up because 50 years ago, we had a similar situation coming off of the heels of the Watergate scandal, coming off of many revelations of everything from, like, the CIA being involved in, like, secret LSD experiments on Americans who were in prison or in mental institutions, their role in various coups that were denied for years, on and on and on. There was a list of scandals and the reputations of, particularly the CIA, but also the FBI involved in, you know, the. I would call, psychological political warfare against Martin Luther King, among others. Okay. All this stuff happened and it was able to. We were able to get through it through disclosure and sunshine, as you said. But we were able to do it because it was done in a bipartisan way in Congress. I don't know if we could do that now in Congress. And certainly Adam Schiff could not be part of that committee. But my point was that when you had Frank Church in the Senate, Barry Goldwater was on that committee, you had the hardcore conservatives and you had super liberals like a young Gary Hart, and everybody got a chance to sort of see this stuff. You also had a very cooperative CIA director in Bill Colby, the grandfather of Elbridge Colby, that that was how the country, the republic, was able to move on and the CIA was able to survive is that you had both political parties kind of acknowledging there's a problem here. Let's get to the bottom of it, let's do a report. And that had a lot of credibility when you only have one political party in charge of the executive branch releasing documents. But there isn't the adversarial counsel, if you will, in the room at that time. Right. That would say, wait a second, what about these documents or anything like this? This is the problem, by the way, with the January 6th committee. There were no, there was no one representing the MAGA Republicans on the committee. So there was impossible for us to know whether we were given a real picture or just a cherry picked version of things. Or for that matter, you could argue there's a problem with that judgment in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, it was cherry picked in such a way that we didn't have other people there letting us know that there were these dissents and so forth. Okay. So that's, I do agree that this is a huge problem and what we need to have is some sort of bipartisan buy in or a church committee like process to maybe get to the bottom of not just this but a lot of other things as well. But I don't see that happening. And I don't think what Tulsi Gabbard is doing with the, at the office of Director of National Intelligence is, is doing that. Especially when I think she's putting a lot of spin on the ball by over hyping the language like treasonous conspiracy.
- [56:20]
Josh Hammer
Yeah. So one thing that we should flag here is that a cynic might say, and you would have some reason for believing this. I don't necessarily believe it, but there's, I'm not saying there's no validity to it either is that a cynic might be forgiven for speculating that the entire point of this shock and awe campaign, or at least a large part of the shock and awe campaign from Gabbard and Ratcliffe administration there. That's very fiery language is at least in part to try to move on from the Epstein files scandal. Right. I mean I've heard that from some people there. It's not an unreasonable speculation. I happen to think that it's half true at best. Donald Trump has been personally adamant about justice for Russia Gate for a very long time. Given that he was the victim of this Tulsi Gabbard personally longstanding, maybe a little too friendly ties to Russia. She is not the person who you would say is not wholly necessarily disinclined to get to the bott bottom of Russiagate either. So I don't necessarily buy it. But one might be forgiven for saying that now I definitely don't think there's gonna be a true statesman like church committee or anything like that anytime soon. Most of that gets to structural problems with Congress, by the way, and just the entire problem with what congressmen and senators are actually doing up there on a day to day basis. Increasingly they're not necessarily there to actually form committees or to pass bills to actually achieve much of substance at all increasing. They're there to get their cable news hits and record their podcasts and things like that. And that's a whole nother conversation obviously. So I don't necessarily think that's gonna happen. I don't wanna discount the possibility that the Pam Bondi DOJ strike force, not. I was gonna say task, I think they're calling a strike force. They might be able to get some perjury prosecutions. That's basically my best sober realistic goal right now. John Brennan had it back and forth with then Congressman Matt GAETZ back in 2023. That looks really dicey at best when it comes to the January. I was watching the John Ratcliffe clip on the Maria Bartiromo show. He was talking about other testimony from potentially even Hillary Clinton. Actually that's within the five year statute of limitations when it comes to perjury. A lot of folks are talking about these other very large charges up to and including seditious conspiracy, AKA treason. And among the problems with that is that there's a five year statute of limitation. So you got the.
- [58:39]
Eli Lake
Also, I'm sorry but like, also it's a big charge. Trump precedent with the Supreme Court ordering an intelligence review, having the president do that, that, that's.
- [58:51]
Josh Hammer
Oh yeah, Obama's not getting touched. Obama is not getting touched because of that.
- [58:54]
Eli Lake
Let's just be clear. Like, and also, I don't think this is counting as like, you know, it's. You're not making war in collusion or on behalf of an enemy of the United States with this. It's a political dirty trick for sure.
- [59:07]
Josh Hammer
Yeah.
- [59:08]
Eli Lake
And again, I would say that Most of the 2017 assessment largely is focused on the main takeaway, that the Russians hacked Hillary Clinton's computers and the DNC computers. That's true. And that's confirmed by the documents that have been released. I mean, that's the one thing, the HIPC report, I'm sorry, the House Intelligence Committee report that says the tradecraft was correct in making that assessment that the Russians did the hacking and leaking. So the big thing that you know, which some people can disagree with, but that every so far all of these documents, which in many ways are damning about that. You know, the analysis behind the 2017 assessment also confirm what I think is the sort of the big takeaway of that document. Yeah, so, yeah. Okay, so you disagree with that or.
- [60:02]
Josh Hammer
No, no, look, I think that there are, we do agree on a lot and apologies to the viewers for the extent to which we agree. I think that there are at least two areas of disagreement. One is the extent to which three areas. One is the extent to which the broader Steele dossier narrative, the whole Clinton campaign operation, all that played in explicitly or implicitly into the January 6, 2017 ICA. I do place that emphasis on things like the John Brennan quotes, but doesn't it ring true and things like that. So that's one. Two is the connection between that and the perpetuation of Crossfire Hurricane, then ultimately the Mueller probe which gobbled up the presidency and then three, taking it back to the email hacking there, which another part of the multifaceted Russiagate scandal. I think the third area where you and I might disagree is, fine, let's concede for the sake of arguments that the Kremlin did hack Hillary Clinton's emails there. You know, I view that as part of just a long standing, just Russian operation just to try to sow discord there. And that seems to be what the Trump administration is saying as well. I don't really have any reason for thinking that this was done with any kind of intention necessarily to try to elect Donald Trump. But these are reasonable cases.
- [61:19]
Eli Lake
Again, my only caveat there is that like, I accept now because we didn't know. I didn't know when I wrote my original piece that there was such disagreement on that one line. And so sure, if these hand picked CIA analysts are like, well, I don't think we should have that line in there. Or like, I don't think this. And there's a whistleblower that we found out about this guy who was like, I don't, you know, I can't believe we had that in one line in the report. Okay, fine. But you know, at the end of the day, if you're saying it's true that the Russians hacked and leaked, which they are, then whether or not the motivation was discord or not, it also meant that you were of course advantaging Trump. And I can't believe that the Kremlin operators who dreamed all this up didn't know that they were going to be helping Hillary Clinton's opponent by airing all this dirty laundry. Of course they did. But at the same time. And it is important that there's analytical integrity to these documents. And if that's the case, then we need to confront that. And of course, it was kind of a rushed job. I also think that we disagree in that. I think given the shock to our political system, given that there was a lot of. I don't know that. I don't know if Obama knew what Comey knew that. Well, we kind of kicked the tires and our investigation hasn't turned anything up on this stuff. I mean, that's. By the way, another black box. We don't know what Comey was briefing Obama on the progress of this investigation. Perhaps Obama was in the dark because, you know, there should be a separation between the investigation and the president, and you don't want to politicize it. Maybe he did know. If he did know, then that actually makes Obama look a lot worse. Right. But what we do know is that Comey knew, and we know that Peter Strzok knew, and we knew that, you know, Lisa Page knew, and we knew that Andrew. What's his name? Weisman. No, not Weissman. Well, Weisman's another one of these bad guys anyway. But we knew a lot of people the FBI knew. We knew some people the Justice Department knew. So I judged them far more harshly. And I think we also disagree with. I'm not sure that pursuing legal action against the Anson regime, even though I'm in agreement with lots of people that it's a real scandal, and particularly the FBI people, have a lot to answer for of the former FBI people. But I. I just worry what that would mean eventually. I don't think that we're going to have 100 glorious years of Republican presidents. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I. I think that eventually we're going to get a Democratic president. And I worry that, you know, is this going to become the new norm? And are you going to see the next Democratic president saying, okay, let's start these investigations into all these Republicans, and we're going to see the partisans on the other side sort of gin it up and everything like that, and then we're just never going to get out of that cycle. And that is how republics die. And I would like to. I would like the American republic to live on.
- [64:21]
Josh Hammer
Well, look, I totally, totally agree with you on that. I have. Look, I say this as a lawyer, as someone who clerked on a federal appeals court. I speak at law schools. I mean, it brings me no pleasure to arrive at the conclusion that I have arrived at when it comes to this, but I genuinely do believe, believe, given where we are at right now and above all, given what, what Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and Jack Smith, to say nothing of Alvin Bragg and Fani Willis, but really just the federal government, to say nothing of what Biden, Garland, Smith did to Donald Trump there. I'm not claiming that trying to get Clapper or Brennan or Hillary Clinton on perjury charges is even remotely the equivalent of prosecuting Donald Trump on the Espionage act, for God's sake, on the Mar a Lago classified documents out there. I mean, it's frankly insulting. Try to compare the two there. But it is at least, it is at least a modicum of a punch back there. I mean, I view this frankly as kind of Game Theory 101. Right. I mean, if you want to, if you want to dissuade the other side from taking ever further escalatory action and try to get us back to something remotely resembling an equilibrium, you are going to have to start firing some punches back there. It's not merely enough to simply.
- [65:30]
Eli Lake
Don't you think the punch fired is winning the election? I mean, I don't know. My, my game theory and takeaway is that if you do this, they're going to say the same thing and they're going to say, well, we have to make sure that they never do this again, so we have to do our own thing. And until we get back to a point where we just don't do it. And I just think that Trump is in a strong position right now, despite the Epstein stuff. I don't think that that's this mortal threat to his presidency by any stretch. I think he's in a strong position. And I think the best revenge at this point is to have an incredibly successful presidency. And hopefully then at that point when, when and if there will be another Democratic president. One of the talking points that, you know, you, we can say in a few years or you can say in a few years is, hey, they had the opportunity to go after you, you know, your bast, the Onsen regime, and they didn't do it. And that's how we do things in America and we're not a banana republic. And, and the interlude where Democrats believe that it was the obligation of the federal, of federal prosecutors to take out their political opponent was an aberration and not a new norm. So I look at the same set of facts and I say you're not going to dissuade them. You're only going to, you're almost going to guarantee that they're going to come up with a similar kind of thing. And, you know, so that's why I would say, again, I'm for getting all the information out. Getting the unredacted PIPSI document is really important. I think it shows the venality which we knew before, but it kind of gives us much more detail about Brennan in particular. What was he thinking? He was trying to juice this whole thing and I think he thought he could get away with it because the press was totally on side and in a way that we hadn't seen until the Trump era. And that's another lesson for the media at this point, which by the way, has not absorbed any of these lessons. So there you go.
- [67:34]
Josh Hammer
No, none whatsoever. Look, I mean, just real briefly, maybe in closing, I'm kind of sensitive to the time here, but look, Eli, folks like you and I who do this for a living, who talk, right, and do live streams for a living there, I mean, it's very easy to obsess with stories like Russiagate, the Epstein files there, and I do think that Russiagate is actually a much, much, much bigger deal than this Jeffrey Epstein thing. But having said that there, when it comes to your point about what is the best thing the Trump administration could do, what is the best thing that the Republican Party could do? Gearing up for midterm election next year. Yeah, of course. I mean, focus on the bread and butter issues there, right? I mean, I mean, focus on the economy, crime, immigration, global stability. I mean, those are ultimately the things that the median voter who's actually going to the voting booth cares about there. I think the Russia gate is important, not necessarily for 2026 midterm or 2028 presidential ramifications. I view important one, just, frankly, just for good old fashioned retributive justice to the extent that statute of limitations don't bar that or preclude that as a possibility. And two, just as if not more important, this kind of game theory ex ante, forward looking perspective there, where you and I might just have a slightly different take on it, which is totally understandable.
- [68:42]
Eli Lake
Okay, well, listen, Josh, thank you so much for doing this. I thought it was a good conversation. I'm sorry it was not as fiery as you may have wanted. Next time maybe we'll get Dave Smith to go after Josh Hammer.
- [68:53]
Josh Hammer
Been there, done then.
- [68:54]
Eli Lake
Yeah, that was, that was excellent. If you guys haven't seen it, by the way, check out Josh Hammer's TP USA Turning Point usa. There was a panel on Trump foreign policy and I just thought Josh, you did a masterful job on that with Dave Smith. That was really good. All right. And with that, we're going to say goodbye. Thanks, everyone, for watching.