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(suspenseful music)
(thunder rumbles)
- 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.
(people shuffle and chatter)
- 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.
(ominous music)
- [Devin] 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.
- [Reporter] 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.
- [informant] 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.
- [Informant] 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.
- [Reporter] 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.
- [Informant] 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.
- [Informant] 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.
- [Informant] 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.
- [Reporter] 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.
(dramatic music)
- 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,
(Vladimir speaks in a foreign language)
- [Reporter] After Vladimir Putin, praised Donald Trump
as, "Undoubtedly a bright and talented person."
- [President Trump] 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.
(audience laughs)
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, (chuckles)
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.
- [Informant] 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.
- [Informant] 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.
- [Informant] 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."
- [Staff Member] 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.
- [Informant] 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.
- [Informant] 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.
- [Informant] 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.
- [Informant] 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.
- [Reporter] 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.
(suspenseful music)
- 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.
(dramatic music)
- 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.
(suspenseful music)
- 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.
(suspenseful drums)
- 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.
- [Reporter] 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.
(chuckles) 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.
- [Journalist] 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 - I,-
- 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.
- [Interviewer] This story in the Bee came out when?
- The cocaine yachts prostitutes story?
(women giggle)
(playful music)
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.
- [Fake Journalist] 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.
(clock ticks)
- 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, (chuckles)
- 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.
- [Journalist] Why did you fire Robert Mueller?
- Fake news, folks.
Fake news. - What's your message today?
- Typical New York Times fake stories.
- [Journalist] Mr Trump?
- Go back to 2016.
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.
(suspenseful music)
(door knocks)
- [FBI Agent] FBI open the door.
- [Reporter] 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.
- [Reporter] 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.
(suspenseful music)
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.
(people chatter angrily)
(crowd boos)
'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
- [Reporter] 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.
- [Interviewer] 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. (chuckles)
- 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.
(dramatic music)
(suspenseful music)