Jack - Episode 9 - Durham Bull

Episode Date: January 29, 2023

Allison and Andy go over: what Ken Cuccinelli's Jan. 6 deposition tells us about what information he could be telling Jack Smith’s grand jury; how Smith might get past Cuccinelli’s privilege concerns; Pence docs; how the Durham probe may have uncovered Trump crimes; plus a listener question, and moreDo you have questions?Click here: https://formfaca.de/sm/PTk_BSogJFollow the Podcast on Apple Podcasts:https://apple.co/3BoVRhNCheck out other MSW Media podcastshttps://mswmedia.com/shows/Follow AG on Twitter:Dr. Allison Gillhttps://twitter.com/allisongillhttps://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrotehttps://twitter.com/dailybeanspodAndrew McCabe isn’t on Twitter, but you can buy his bookThe Threathttps://www.amazon.com/Threat-Protects-America-Terror-Trump-ebook/dp/B07HFMYQPGWe would like to know more about our listeners. Please participate in this brief surveyhttp://survey.podtrac.com/start-survey.aspx?pubid=BffJOlI7qQcF&ver=shortThis Show is Available Ad-Free And Early For Patreon and Supercast Supporters at the Justice Enforcer level and above:https://dailybeans.supercast.techOrhttps://patreon.com/thedailybeans

I'm Greg Oliar. Four years ago, I stopped writing novels to report on the crimes of Donald Trump and his associates. In 2018, I wrote a best-selling book about it, Dirty Rubels. In 2019, I launched Proveil, a bi-weekly column about Trump and Putin, spies and mobsters, and so many traders! Trump may be gone, but the damage he wrought will take years to fully understand. Join me, and a revolving crew of contributors and guests, as we try to make sense of it all. This is Preveil. I signed in order appointing Jack Smith. And nobody knows you. And those who say Jack is a finesse. Mr. Smith is a veteran career prosecutor.

What law have I grew? The events leading up to and on January 6th. Classified documents and other presidential records. You understand what prison is. Send me to jail. Hello and welcome to episode nine of Jack. Podcasts about all things special counsel. I'm your host, Andy McCabe.

And I'm Allison Kill. There's a lot going on directly with the special counsel probe and peripherally as well, Andrew. We're going to cover it all today, including what Ken Cuchinelli might be telling the Jack Smith grand jury based on his January 6th committee deposition transcript, which I've gone through with a fine tooth comb, and what tools the Department of Justice has that the January 6th Committee doesn't have

to compel this testimony, when there's been a lot of behind-the-doors privilege fights. Nice, and we will also be discussing Trump crimes, but not the ones that you're thinking of. We're talking now about the ones that may have been investigated under the Durham Probe, right? Remember him? We're going to talk about how the PEDS documents impact the investigation and the two Trump documents found at the storage facility near Mar-a-Lago are not going to be a part of the Special Counsel Criminal Investigation.

But, before we get to all that, let's answer a listener question. Back to our now routine beginning of the show with a listener question. The questions continue to impress me. We get all kinds of topics that come in. A few of them hit on this question. So I'm going to lead off with Lee G, who is both an MD and a PhD, well done, Lee writes in and what was his second question. Regarding Trump, Biden and now Pence's documents scandals, it seems the legal distinction pivots on intent and response to possession.

If so, then why not simply charge for obstruction in Trump's case and not, if the fact support, in the Biden and Pence cases. Side note, obstruction charges left from Mueller seem to have been forgotten, just saying. Well, well pointed out, Lee, I don't think we've forgotten them, but seems like a lot of other people have moved on. Nevertheless, your question raises a number of really important issues that I think are helpful to remind folks of when we're sorting through the ever more confusing landscape of document cases.

Now we're on four of the three. So you are rightly that the document cases typically run, they come down to a question of intent. No matter what charge is you're looking at. So if you're looking at mishandling classified information, which of course requires that the information be classified, and then depending on what part of the statue is, it also requires either the taking of classified documents or the unlawful storage of classified or the

refusal to give the back, or as in the Trump case, we've also seen references to the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act doesn't require that the documents be classified. It simply requires that it be national defense information. Nevertheless, in all of these under all these different statutes, the standard or the requirement for intent is the same. It must be knowing and willful. So if you're talking about maybe removing classified documents, the act of removal, which you are alleged to have committed, must have been with knowledge and intent. So you must have known that you were taking them and you must have intended to take them. That's very different from something like Motive,

which is a question about why did you take the documents. Motive of course is not a requirement under any of these offenses, but intent absolutely is. So now let's apply this to these cases. What makes the Trump case so wildly different from seemingly both the Biden and Pence cases is that as he normally does, Trump seems to have painted himself into a corner here where he's almost basically admitted his intent at least in retaining these documents. So the public statements that he's made along the lines of, you know, these are mine. I don't have to give them back or

reportedly telling his staff to bargain with the national archives. I'll give you these things back if you declassify a bunch of Russia case documents, or even his somewhat nonsensical claims of having declassified. All of those statements basically eliminate his ability to argue in Advertance. And Advertance would be a defense to these charges because it's like, hey, I didn't know I had them. I didn't know I had taken them. Therefore, you didn't have the requisite intent to be guilty of any of these offenses. It seems now these investigations are ongoing. And so we have no idea where they will end up, but just by the information we have in the public record regarding President Biden and now also seems to be similar in the situation with

former vice president Pence. Both camps have said that their person, Biden or Pence, didn't know that they had the documents in their possession. In Pence's case, there seems to be some facts that support that. They were in the box that they originally packed in. The boxes were had remained sealed from the time that they left the vice presidents residents. So there are some facts to support his or his staff's claim that they didn't know what was in the box. And is a similar situation with President Biden. He's come out and said that he didn't even know. We had these things. He didn't know where they were. And he had, of course, no intention to take them out of the White House and take them either to his office or his residence. So that piece alone draws a huge distinction between the kind of legal footing on the Pence and Biden side versus the legal footing on the Trump side. And that's before you even get to the issue of cooperation.

Trump, of course, not only is he not cooperated, he's obstructed every effort by the archives and by DOJ to get that stuff back, which is why he ended up with a search warrant at his house. And the Biden and Pence situations, as soon as they discover the documents, they call the archives or the Department of Justice, had them appropriately recover those documents, and then have cooperated with things like

searches and that sort of stuff. That's really in a nutshell, some very significant differences in terms of the directions that these cases are likely to go. Yeah, and a couple of things. First, I want to address the, you know, the Mueller obstruction volume two thing. And we've talked a little bit about this before. Back in 2019, when Bill Barr, right after he was appointed, he came in and he had whipped up an office legal counsel memo with the paydag, dag, a callahan at the time, and some other guy over there at DOJ saying, if we could prosecute

a president, we would decline to prosecute in this instance. And they gave a bunch of really terrible reasons that made no factual sense within the law. But it was their prosecute trust, prosecutorial discretion. And that was the memo that they wrote, but it was their prosecutorial discretion. And that was the memo that they wrote, and that was their declination decision, even though you couldn't even hypothetical, like do a hypothetical about it because they weren't going to indict them anyway. So that's actually why the memo got out in the first place was there was an argument that it couldn't have been a deliberative process because you were doing a hypothetical situation

about things that don't exist. So that's why we were able to see that memo. But that is, that declination decision is something that could have made it difficult for Garland to come in and ignore that declination decision or overturn it or somehow reopen the case, but we're going to talk a little bit more about that when we talk later in the show about Durham and an investigation that happened that we didn't know about until this week as well, and that we haven't seen a declination decision on. But we'll talk about that a little bit later, Andrew, how difficult it is for a new

AG to come in and overturn a decl a declination decision from a previous attorney general without giving the DOJ a black eye. We'll talk a little bit about that. But with regard to these nonc, this particular, when you're, when you're talking about intent and you said his public statements like, will they're mine? I'm not giving them back. Okay, you know, that all that stuff goes against his own case that he, you know, he can't say I didn't know they were there. But another thing too is that they were arguing this in the 11th circuit is, and the 11th circuit agreed, Trump appointees on the 11th circuit agreed that the reason that they needed the non-classified documents back was because that is also evidence

to show possession or intent or ownership or that you knew that you had these documents because if you have these classified documents commingled in your desk that you use for work with more recent documents and your passports, let's say, then that is those non-classified documents are actually evidence that you possessed these classified documents that were mixed in with them and knew they were there. And that brings me to my third point, which is something we found out this week that Jack Smith is not going to be investigating. And those are those two classified documents that were marked secret that were found at

an off-site of Mar-a-Lago in a public storage facility by a couple of quote unquote private investigators that Donald Trump had hired to search his additional properties for classified documents pursuant to a court order by Chief Judge Barrel Howell, who was ahead of the grand juries over there at the DC Circuit. Now what Jack Smith has decided or the DOJ has decided, is that those two documents that were found in that sealed box are not going to be part of the criminal probe into Donald Trump

and his classified documents debacle. And the reason is because it's a lot like Pence's documents and probably Biden's documents. They've been in a sealed box this whole time. Donald Trump likely knew, didn't know they were there. They weren't comingled with more current documents in his desk or something that he's been using on a daily basis or at least a weekly, I don't know how often he does work. But anyway, in his, you know, they're often a storage facility and it taped up.

It depends on what you consider work as well. I mean, I could notice what that was. Remember when he was in the hospital, it was pretty much to find out of Mar-a-Lockup. Remember when he was at Walter Reed with a bunch of blank documents, like pretending to work? Okay.

So yeah, at his little tiny desk, but regardless, when those two documents were found, you and I, Andrew were like, that's probably not a crime. They probably been in there since they left Washington. You need to probably didn't even know they were there. You have to show, you know, that you willful intent, right? And so the announcement from the deach from from Jack Smith. And maybe that means that Jack Smith actually got the names of those two private investigators and interviewed him and has decided, this isn't

a crime. I don't know. Any of that is speculation, but they're not pursuing that as a crime. And again, that has to do with what you were just talking about, which our listener asked about, which is intent. Yeah. You know, he has so much to work with. There's no reason to infuse two more documents that were recovered under entirely different circumstances, which may have been, you know, non-nepharias. It just, as a strategic matter, is you're thinking about building this case, and in fact, they are building towards an indictment.

It's just a messy kind of side fact that doesn't add any bite or impact or significance to the case that you're bringing. There, as you know, there are so many things, there's so, you know, there's a million other aspects of these that we haven't gone into. We could spend the whole day talking about them, but like, I get asked a lot, does the question of quantity matter in these cases of, you know, mishandling cases or what have you. And technically it doesn't. It's, you know, it's the same offense if it's one document or if it's a hundred documents.

But practically it makes a big difference because you get back to trying to show intent. It's one thing to say I had a dozen or 20 or maybe even 30 documents scoralled away in boxes that were being stored in the closet of the conference room next to the office that I sometimes went to. That's kind of the Biden situation. It's very different to find several hundred documents in the office that you are occupying on a day-to-day basis, some of which are found in the top desk drawer. Documents in plain sight that you would have seen any time you open that drawer in all

the many, many times you've been in that office in the weeks and months and whatever year leading up to their seizure during the search warrant. So yeah, quantity does matter, and it can be relevant to this issue of intent. And I think it's even more relevant when we talk about obstruction, Andy, right? Because we found 100 plus documents after a subpoena was issued, and an attestation was signed,

saying we've handed over all the classified documents. And by the way, it wasn't classified, saying we've handed over all the classified documents. And by the way, it wasn't classified. It wasn't handed over all the classified documents. It was handed over all the documents with classified markings. So even if Donald Trump declassified them with that January 19th declassification memo for the Russian documents that he signed the day before he left office, or if he declassified them with his mind, irrelevant. The subpoena called for any documents with classified markings. And you know, you know, at that

point, you can't take a sharpie and demarc the classified documents. And think about the sequence. He had all his stuff. And then in January, since 15 boxes back. And at that point retained a boatload of classified. So that alone, we know from reporting that he was involved in the review of that material before it went back, that alone gives it makes puts the retention of classified in the context of a of an intentional decision to retain those things. Then they come down for the big beating. They're handed the infamous binder of that's all we have left. Reference of it now you have lawyers representing to the government. There are no more classified documents here.

This is it. This is the final package. It's one bread, well, the envelope full of stuff. And then later the search warrant, they find hundreds more. Like, so these are like multiple intentional acts of retention of classified mark documents. It's in a totally different way than the other two, which are really, honestly, I'm surprised that we haven't had many more former senior, senior executives from the former administration and you know any other administration to be perfectly honest calling up with the same problem.

Yeah, and in that vein, Andrew, the National Archives has now put out a statement, put out letters written a letter to former presidents and vice presidents saying, hey, you might want to search your homes and your offices. Let us know if you've got any outstanding classified material. And as we went over in the previous thing, you had said that they don't serialize these things and sign them out unless they're code word classified. So that is maybe something that this administration could do as kind of a moonshot. Maybe we could digitize our security apparatus. We did it with our health records for the government, maybe we could do it with our classified. But I think it should be addressed, and I think it would be a good time for it to be addressed

by this administration. But something else that came up, and I have a question in the reporting from Hugo Lowell at the Guardian, is talking about how perhaps Trump is indicating that by removing the document from its classified folder, that in effect declassifies it. It also might explain why there were so many empty classification folders that were found. And so I was wondering, and I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but does removing a classified document from its folder that's marked classified, declassified that document? Yes, but only if you wave your hands over it six times and snap your fingers while looking

to your left. No, obviously I'm being a little facetious here. hands over it six times and snap your fingers while looking to your left. No, obviously I'm being a little facetious here. The folder has no significance to the substance of the document. The document is classified by an OCA and in all likelihood, 90% I'm guessing here. The huge majority of classified documents that are out there, they're actually classified by virtue of what we call derivative classification. So, you've looked at a piece of raw intelligence that's been classified by an OCA, and then you write up an analysis about it.

Your references to that original piece of intelligence have to be at the same level, you have to classify your analysis at the same level. And anything you then put into that analysis, the overall document takes the highest classification that's in the document. Each paragraph is portioned marked, so each paragraph has an indicator of its classification level and the highest paragraph, that's what, you know, that's what the document becomes. And sometimes they're perforated, too, where you can remove a bit of it to make it not classified, but I don't think that that's what we're talking about here. No, not at all. Not at all. That's a specific thing called a classified tear mine, and it has to be like laid out in the classified portion of the document why you have a tear

mine and like who was supposed to get it. We would do those all the time for we'd have maybe case information and counterterrorism. And we wouldn't want to share it with a foreign partner. So you write up a communication to your Leagat. That's the FBI agent that works overseas in the location you want to share the information and it would have everything at all the appropriate classification levels and then at the bottom it would have a tear line which was like basically a watered down version of the information to get it to an unclassified level and that's

what the league app was approved to basically transmit to the foreign government. So these are not just like things that you can do in your head, you know, it's all, it's very methodical and there are very clear rules and processes on all these things, you know, which is why even these, even these alleged inadvertent mistakes by like the ones we're talking about with Pence and Biden, it's a bad thing, because they shouldn't be happening. It's sloppy, it's potentially a risk to national security. It has to be taken seriously. It cleaned up in the way that,

you know, the intelligence community knows how to do, but do people have to be charged criminal for every single one of these? No, I can tell you they don't. We get the FBI gets referrals every time there's a spill of classified information like this and the vast majority of them, you immediately investigate, you do a damage assessment to see if there's been damage to national security. And then you look into the, how did this happen and why did it happen and who's responsible, and the most cases don't end with criminal charges.

They might end with disciplinary actions and that person's agency where they work. You might even, if it's really bad, you might lose your access to classified over it, and that can negatively impact your career. But um, the app, it's people are human beings, they make mistakes and um, you know, you just got to deal with it. Yeah. And, and I mean, let's even say that like the pardon power, uh, which is very broad for a president, uh, we, we, you know, we had often asked the question during the Mueller investigation, but can you pardon with corrupt intent? And, you know, it had often asked the question during the Mueller investigation, but can you pardon with corrupt intent? And, you know, it seems so far.

Yeah, you can't like you, that's your presidential power. And I'm wondering if the same, I feel like we've seen that. And he has. And I think the same maybe goes goes for declassification, meaning now there are things that a president cannot declassify. We know that. But let's say that these are things that a president cannot declassify. We know that. But let's say that these are things that a president can declassify. It's important for us to know why he declassified these Russian documents, but I don't know

that that's necessarily a crime, even if he did it corruptly, but perhaps he did it so he could give it to people who shouldn't have access to it. We should need to know that. We should want to know that information. But again, I think those are more impeachable offenses. The real crime here is the obstruction and the concealment and destruction and possibly the 793 espionage. And that's I think what we're mainly looking at.

But, you know, because those three crimes, we have to remind people that were on that search warrant affidavit in August, August 8th of last year for Mar-a-Lago, do not require any of the documents to be classified. Misshandling of classified documents was not a crime on that affidavit. And so I think what they were mainly looking for is obstruction. And remember, 793 espionage carries a 10 year max, 15, 19 obstruction twice as long, 20 year max. And that's because often that cover up his worst in the crime. How long have we been saying that?

Yes, since 1973, I think. All right. Well, excellent questions that we get from our listeners, honestly, keep sending them into us at helloatmullersherote.com. Just put Jack in the subject line. Any final thoughts on this question before we take a break, Andrew? Then no, I think you hit it right. I mean, I, I, yes, the president has extraordinary authority to classify it or declassify it. All most everybody, there are those rare categories of like nuclear information and things that

he can't. But most everything else, the president is the absolute ultimate decider of what's classified and not classified. However, he loses all that authority the day he leaves office. So all this stuff that was supposedly done after Trump left office, he's just a regular Joe and he has to answer to the DOJ in the same way the rest of us would. Yeah, agreed. Alright, thanks for that. And again, thanks to Listener for sending in

that question. Again, you can send them into us at helloatmullarsherote.com, put Jack in the subject line. We're going to take a quick break and be right back. Stay with us. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,-seeking stressors, and creative debt ends. From recognizing when it was time to go, to navigating feelings of guilt and regret afterwards, we're here to cut off a gaslighting and get real about what it means to leave teaching. We've got insights from former teachers from all over the country who have seen it all. So get ready to be disturbed. Join us on Teacher Quit Talk to laugh through the pain

of the US education system. We'll see you there. So, Renato, do you still have your own podcast? We'll see you there. So Renato, do you still have your own podcast? Yeah, it's complicated. What's so complicated about a podcast? That's the name of the podcast, remember? Oh! Will you still be exploring topics that help us understand the week's news?

You bet, but we'll have a new name because we're going to be working together to explore complicated issues that are done in the news. Working together? Yeah, you're hosting it with me, remember? Oh, right. Wait, does that mean our podcast is going to have a steam op segment? Let's not get carried away, but we'll discuss hot new legal topics, so check out our new episode, coming soon to everywhere you get podcasts as well as YouTube. Everybody welcome back to episode nine of Jack, I am Alison Kill.

And today in this particular segment, we are going to talk about somebody who was spotted outside the prettyman courthouse in DC who had said they were talking to the grand jury. And this is Jack Smith's grand jury investigating the 2020 election. And that was Ken Kuchinelli. Tell me, tell us a little bit about Ken Kuchinelli, Andrew. Ken Kuchinelli is a, was kind of a rising star, I think, in the Republican Party, certainly in Virginia, had a pretty hotly contested shot at the governor's mansion, which I think he lost to McCullough,

if I have that right, of my Virginia politics is accurate. But he's a pretty, we're very, very conservative guy, kind of a bit of a carries himself as a bit of a tough guy. In any case, he took a high level position in DHS in the Trump administration. He was kind of on one of saying like, maybe the number two or three guy in DHS. And he was clearly there to kind of make sure

that the, you know, the Trump agenda at DHS was pushed forward. Yeah, I think he was the guy who wanted to rewrite the poem on the bottom of statue of the statue of Liberty about immigrants, uh, uh, saying, no, don't bring us your poor, not too poor, you know, or something. Assalamish, uh, Norway only or something like that. I don't know, but, um, Norway, it's we didn't only please. Yeah, I was, he's that guy. He's trying to push Stephen Miller, uh, Stephen Millars and, and Donald Trump's, uh, very,

uh, xenophobic agenda, uh, at, at DHS. Mm-hmm. And, uh, of course, DHS, I believe the secret service falls up under the Department of Homeland Security, uh, DHS founded off after 9-11, um, in response to 9-11 after the 9-11 commission was created. We had the DHS and the DNI, right? Somebody to sit atop all of the intelligence agencies to get everybody on the same page, which is now, that's an interesting, it's time, I think time to maybe revamp that. But anyhow, like every 20 years we should just go through and sort of clean up bureaucracies

and rearrange them, I think, because the rule books just get bigger and bigger over time. This is just an old government employee, co-venching about it. But they do. And DHS is a behemoth. Has been since day one. It's always been unruly hard to manage. And they have a lot of controversial, you know, missions. They've got the immigration and customs enforcement. They have customs and border protection. And of course, they also have the border patrol. And that puts

you right in the white hot center, all things immigration. And that's really, I think, in my recollection, that's what Kuchinelli was sent over there to kind of keep a watchful eye on. So yeah, he was a key player, really a White House plant in DHS to kind of mind this shop. Yeah.

And so he has, you know, testified before the January 6th Committee and now has been seen testifying before Jack Smith's grand jury. And so I was like, I was wondering like, what is it that he, what information would he have that Jack Smith would be interested in? And so what I did was I went through the January 6th, 150 page transcript of his, his deposition to the January 6th committee. And, and I pulled out everything that he claimed privilege on.

And the reason I did that is because those are the questions that the DOJ is going to be better equipped to get the answer to. And, or can you talk a little bit about some of the tools the Department of Justice has that the January 6th select committee would not have to get information from somebody who was either pleading the fifth, which he did not do, or was asserting executive privilege. Sure. So let's get the fifth out of the way first, even though he sounds like he didn't use it. If you are subpoenaed and a frontly grand jury,

of course you are sworn in and you have to tell the truth. If you say anything, if you make a false statement, that can be held against, you can be prosecuted for that. So it's common for people who think they might run into some sort of criminal trouble for in relation to the questions they've been asked to claim the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and using that to not answer the question you've been asked.

What the department can then do if they really, really want your answer is they can immunize you. They can grant you immunity from any sort of criminal liability that may result from answering the questions that they're asking you. And once they have done that, you can no longer refuse to answer the question. You have to answer the question. And if you refuse at that point, you know, you can be held in contempt. So that's how they can get past the fifth amendment if they're willing to sacrifice going after you. And that's something that doesn't happen a lot, but it's not, you know, completely unheard of either, typically when they're more interested

in someone else above you in the food chain who might be a more significant target. That makes sense, yeah, because we saw this sort of a pan out with the, pleading the fifth with Cosh Patel, right? Right. Because he went in, pled the fifth, presumably about document declassification, but we aren't exactly sure, but could have been intent. Or, you know, we learned recently that Donald Trump was very angry that he couldn't get everything to classified on January 19th, and that could have been what motivated him to

take these documents with him. But, you know, I think Meadows returned the bulk of them or ran back and returned the bulk of them to DOJ. I'm not sure. We, it's kind of unclear reporting at this point. But so, gosh, Patel blood the fifth, the, the DOJ, Jack Smith went to the judge and said, he can't plead the fifth. There's no, he's not going to, there's no way we could prosecute the answers to these questions.

The judge disagreed. And so they granted Kashbitell limited immunity. But that doesn't mean that the judge will always disagree if you argue with, argue to the court that the answer to this question could never lead to a criminal prosecution. Sometimes I haven't heard this happening. I've not seen it done yet or I don't know of an instance of where it's happened, but sometimes the judge will say, yeah, you can't plead the fifth right there. But anyway, that's all about the fifth, but let's go to that second piece about the privilege battles

because we know from public reporting that Jack Smith and the DOJ, Garland before Jack Smith was appointed, has been, have been fighting some privilege battles behind closed doors. They're still all sealed proceedings. Yeah, the really frustrating thing for me about these privilege claims is when they come up in the context of like a congressional interview or testimony, you, you really can't resolve them at the table. So if the witness brings, says, I'm not going to answer on the grounds of whatever privilege the committee or the whoever's

doing questionings kind of stuck with it. And I saw that in a very personal way when I was, um, wasn't subpoenaed, but I was requested to come in and testify in front of the House Intelligence Committee in December of 2017 and they had a lot of questions about, you know, the investigations, the Clinton email investigation, crossfire hurricane, things like that, and also about Jim Comey's interactions with Trump. And so I remember being under questioning from Adam Smith. And of course I had my Department of Justice Minder sitting on my right side. It's kind of like, you know, almost like being a tourist in North Korea. You don't really actually get to do what you want.

And being asked very directly by Congressman Schiff, what Jim Comey had told me about his conversation with Donald Trump. Now that's not privileged. Under any, there's no reasonable, I think, claim of privilege there because we're talking about a conversation between me and director Comey. It's not covered by executive privilege. And then, of course, the department refused to let me answer and claimed executive privilege. And, but of course, the department refused to let me answer and claimed executive privilege. And so the DOJ Minder, who was a lawyer named Scott Schools, got into a deep argument with Adam Schiff over this. And it was, it's very frustrating. I was happy

to tell the committee what I knew. And, but I was not being allowed to answer the question by DOJ. And Schiff was basically like, that's not privileged. And schools is like, well, we are maintaining that it is. And you know, that's where the conversation ended. And that was, I couldn't answer because my bosses are saying you may not. And so that's kind of the situation

that all these congressional committees are in. They don't have a lot of legal tools to be able to quickly kind of the situation that all these congressional committees, they don't have a lot of legal tools to be able to quickly kind of parse through that. It's different in the grand jury. You can stop the testimony. You can go to the judge to have these issues of privilege resolve.

Like, right then you just walk over to the judge if she's not busy or you set an appointment. I'm very curious as to the the mechanics of it like how it actually works let's say you're in the grand jury who's asking cutionnelly what he said with the president will go over some of these things in a minute and he says I I that's probably privileged what happens next so I have seen this I mean particularly happens frequently in in civil, like in the middle of a deposition, even lawyers will get the judge on the phone to arbitrate something like this. I haven't seen it in the many times I've been a foreign grand jury, you know, I didn't, it was me,

testifying it, I wasn't playing any prevalent, so I didn't, that didn't play out that way, but I think that's a possibility now in a super high profile case like this where they're going to make some elaborate claim of executive privilege. It's a sort of thing that the judge would probably tee up for some kind of emotion, let the witnesses attorney file a claim and then that DOJ would respond. And so the whole thing would take a couple of weeks to resolve. But the point is, like, this is what DOJ does. A lot of times, Andrew, what'll happen is, is that, you know, like somebody like Greg Jacob or Mark Short, it'll be like, yeah, I'm happy to tell you this. And then Trump will come in with a motion.

No, I am filing to black this and then we'll have to go through all the hearings and he's doing this pretty much every time somebody that's high profile wants to talk. And at least from the little bit of reporting that we're getting again, these are these are all still under seal. I know that the media is trying to get them CNN and Politico a filed request to have these things released and they will, I think, eventually be released, but not right now. And so, and you know, you said when you sat there with your DOJ Minder next to you, you were happy to answer these questions, but they said, no, there's privilege. And during this deposition, the one six committee deposition, Ken Cucinelli had said at all these

points when they, when he asserted privilege, they would ask, do you know the answer to the question? And he would say, yes. And he would say, if the privilege thing were figured out, would you tell us? Yeah, absolutely. I would tell you. But I'm not going to do that until, you know, and they're like, well, Biden here says there's no privilege. And he's like, yeah, I want to hear it from the former president too. And their legal team. So, and I know Herschemann also had said that they wanted these privilege fights, figured out before they just went in. But I, but I don't know how excited or happy to tell the committee.

Kuchinelli was actually about these things, you know, whereas I think maybe Pat Sipolloni probably was more, you know, I would love to tell you. I, Kuchinelli might have just been saying, oh, I'd love to tell you about it, you know, there's privilege. But I can't, I couldn't really tell because of the way he was sort of being a little bit not being able to recall a lot of things until they were presented to him. So. And to be clear, like, I don't want to be too flippant about it. The privilege is a real thing.

And people, witnesses will go in and claim executive privilege is a reason not to answer a question because oftentimes they would generally believe it is privilege, but even more broadly, they feel, and this I think you definitely could apply to the two paths, uh, simple, mony and filbin, they feel a duty to protect the office of the presidency and to, and particularly under questioning from Congress, they don't want to give up any ground and, and, you know, set, and, and as it's reset

the bar for executive privilege, lower than what it may have been. Their interest is in protecting the presidency and they don't want to be the witness who goes in and testifies to a bunch of stuff that then sets a new, more kind of intrusive precedent for Congress to come in the next time and say, well, you know, no, we get this kind of information. We can force you to answer these questions because people have answered them before. So there are some, there are legitimate motivations behind some of these fights, but you also particularly during the Trump administration, you saw them using it as a

gag, essentially, as a way of silencing witnesses from saying anything about anything they might have heard, second or third hand, that may be originated in the White House, which is a bit ridiculous. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And there were five things Andrew that I found in those 150 pages that he would not answer because of executive privilege. The first is that there's at least one email about the 2020 election or January 6th between Ken Kuchinelli and Mark Meadows that he would not produce to the committee, at least one. The second thing, he said Donald

asked him if the DHS could seize voting machines, but he wouldn't talk about the discussion any further because of the privileged concerns. But Trump asked him if D.H.S. could seize voting machines. He had discussions with the president about the former president about being named special counsel. Remember when Donald was trying to name somebody special counsel of the investigating election fraud, even though it would be the attorney general can do that? So there were discussions that he was going to be named special counsel of the investigating election fraud, even though all the attorney general can do that. So there were discussions that he was going to be named special counsel. He admits those discussions happened. He remembers them, but he will not give details.

Now, he also said he reached a conclusion about whether it would be appropriate to appoint a special counsel, but he would not share that conclusion because he said that was a recommendation he made to the president of the United States. And Kuchinelli had a conversation with Trump in the Oval Office on January 5th about the role of Congress in counting electoral votes and about the role of Vice President Mike Pence in counting electoral votes. He wouldn't say what his conclusions about what their roles were or were not, but he did have those discussions and he said they were covered by privilege and would not give details about the recommendations he made to the president in the Oful Office the day before the attack on the Capitol.

So those, I imagine, are some of the questions that the, you know, the Jack Smith grand jury that the, you know, the Jack Smith grand jury is going to want to know about. And of course, Andrew, we don't know if this appearance for the grand jury before the grand jury is his first or second or third. We don't know if the privilege issues have been settled or if today is the first day they're going to come up and then we'll need to be settled at a later date, those kinds of things we don't, well, I can't tell you because it's privileged. No, those are just things that we don't know at this point, but he was seen and he did talk to Jack Smith's grand jury. And those are the things that I imagine the Department of Justice will eventually successfully

get the answers to. I think they'll get some of them. I mean, I really do. I think this is an interesting array of questions. Some of them, you can see if the question calls for an answer that's a direct, you know, a conversation that the witness had with the president in the Oval Office in the course of their duties. Yadda Yadda, that's not a crazy

claim of privilege. However, if you're arguing against it, if you're on the Jack Smith team, there's all kinds of things that you could throw into that conversation to try to chip away at it. There's the crime. Fraud exception, that you could make the argument that they were you know if it was a conversation essentially about you know the appointment of fraud you know fraudulent electors that maybe that's not going to be covered by Prodigy. So there's also the the question of whether or not be current president has waived the privilege over those conversations or conversations involving those people because traditionally, and this is not a perfectly settled area of the law, but traditionally, it's been seen that the issue of executive privilege has to be asserted by the current president, as former president,

you don't get to assert it. Although there is some wiggle room in that, I think privileged scholars will say that the Supreme Court rulings in this area have kind of left open the question of what sort of authority does a former president have to protect his conversations with associates and counselors from his time there. But in any case, there'll be an interesting thing to watch. And if it does go into litigation, you know, we should, you know, we may get to, we may get to try to coin closely. Yeah. Looking forward to seeing that, how those privileged battles played out, I assume we

will get some answers to that. And there might be a new precedent set in the court about what a former president can assert exactly privileged over or maybe not. We will find out, I think, but we're going to take a quick break. We're going to come right back. We're going to end the show on a very interesting note with some breaking news about the Durham investigation. It's everything we thought and worse.

Andrew, and we'll get to it just right after this quick break. Stay with us. Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum And I had been following the Durham probe very closely, particularly the Dan Schenko indictment, the indictment of Mike Susman. And then even before that, we had Klein Smith, who was an FBI lawyer, plead guilty to changing some verbiage in an email when I guess that had to do with the Carter page, FISA warrant. But my assertion the entire time in the Durham probe was Durham's got nothing. They're traipsing all over the world,

spending your taxpayer dollars, trying to find crimes, trying to talk to Chris Steele, trying to talk to Miff Sud, trying to talk, you know, that's why they were in Italy. They went to Italy. They went to Australia to talk to Alexander Downer.

They went everywhere trying to discredit the investigation that you took part in. Crossfire hurricane, even as going as so far as to sue everyone who was part of it, only to be sanctioned for that for close to a million dollars. But now we've got some very interesting reporting on this Durham Pro. But in the at first I want to ask you about a couple of these things. Let's talk about how Durham, the first thing that really caught my attention. And you know, if anybody knows Inspector General Horowitz, you know Inspector General Horowitz. But he put out a whole Inspector General report on the opening of crossfire hurricane. And and he

his finding was that the FBI opened it properly. There was a tip from a foreign friend, which was Australia's Alexander Downer, who who said, Hey, this guy, Papadopoulos is roaming around the countryside saying that they're going to get some hacked Russian emails from Hillary's thing and all this dirt and stuff. So all of a sudden, I think it was July. It was within a couple of over a weekend, I think you opened this investigation based on that tip. And and Horowitz found it was open properly. There was no political influence in opening the investigation.

And John Durham lobbied Horowitz to omit that from his report. He said, can you not say that in your report? And that blows my mind. Yeah. So, you know, I don't even know where to start with this thing because it's been such a black cloud just kind of following all of us around for so many years now. We gotta be going to be close to like four years on this thing. And we will tie it to Jack Smith, I promise.

There is, it is, but it is relevant. So there's a, there's a car. A little stationary tail for all special councils here to look at the poor example set for you by John Durham and conduct yourself in a different way. But we'll get to that in a minute. So yeah, you're right. To kind of briefly summarize the history, it's 2016.

Well, 2015, right? Even the fall of 2014, we see all kinds of, we, the FBI, see all kinds of Russian, malign cyber activity. We know they're up to something, they're taking all kinds of things. We're watching it very closely because that's what we do, right? We watch the Russians. We're very concerned about their constant targeting in the United States. So as we're getting closer and closer to 2016, the activity is picking up.

It's picking up. We're watching it. Now we're into the campaign. It's we see, you know, the tipping point is when we see the Russians take information that they'd stolen from the DNC and literally weaponize it against a candidate for the presidency that being Hillary Clinton, like they dump all those emails, right? Right on the eve of the Democratic National Convention. So, this is really curious, you know, this is bad. What are the Russians doing?

It's the first time we've seen from kind of hostile cyberactivity, really like the weaponization of that information that's been stolen against, you know, in an effort to impact a political process. So it's with that concern that we've been here from a fall. I will just refer to them as a friendly foreign diplomat because I have, I've never acknowledged a public who that was, although many other people do. We hear from them that there was a conversation with this young man named George Papadopoulos months earlier, and May of 2016, that he said that he was working for the campaign and that the Russians had basically

offered to provide exactly this sort of assistance to the Trump campaign. So it's with that, that's the tipping point, right? Knowing that Papadopoulos made this comment to a very reliable, you know, a friend source, whatever. And then of course, that's exactly what seems to have happened. So that's what led us to open crossfire hurricane We open crossfire hurricane as the umbrella case and it consists of four cases against you know for individual cases against polymenephor

Carter page George Palpatopoulos and Now I'm forgetting the fourth one. Oh, Mike flant, how can I forget my flant? Good home, Mike. Yeah. That's how it starts. We don't, we, the team working this issue in the counterintelligence division that headquarters, they don't have really any knowledge

of what later becomes the crystal reporting. That reporting head come in, went to New York, bounced around for a while, never really landed at the right hands at headquarters. So people like Pete's dog, they'll pre-stap and others who were kind of central to this concern that we had about the Russians, and now we felt like we needed to open a case,

and they opened that case to the end of July. They didn't know about the details of the steal reporting at that point. And this has been a point of contention in every one of the seemingly 200 investigations of us and what we did. And from the beginning, we've said, like, yeah, no, we didn't, we didn't have that. We weren't thinking about the steal reporting when we opened the case because we don't really know about it. Right. about the steal reporting when we open the case because we don't really know about it. Two weeks later, we find out about it, and then of course it becomes a part of,

ultimately what becomes the CarPage Fies application of first one. Yeah, and so now we've got a special counsel. Well, I don't know if he was special counsel at the time. Yeah, he, I think he was special counsel at the time. It's telling the inspector general, hey, leave that out of your report. You found that it was open properly, leave that.

Let's give a modern day, I mean, that was only what, five years ago. But let's give a modern day or three years ago, but a Jack Smith hypothetical. That would be like Jack Smith going to the DOJ inspector general. Now, as we know, the Inspector General opened investigations into itself, the Department of Justice, not the IG, but the Department of Justice, with regard to what they did in response to the attack on the Capitol, or didn't do in response to the attack on the Capitol.

That investigation was opened on January 25th, and then on January 15th, there was an investigation into the DOJ's actions, like the Jeff Clark stuff, like what did you do with the electors and stuff like that? Those were opened within a couple of weeks of the attack on the Capitol. And then now, and we know in October of 2021, Merrick Garland said, whatever the IG recommends to me, I will do. Now, it seems as though the IG has finished their little wrap up because it appears

that the IG recommended or during the course of the Inspector General's investigation sees the phone of Jeffrey Clark, sees the phone of Johnny Smith, because it was in fact Inspector general officers who were there doing those things. Uh, but now let's say Jack Smith goes to the inspector general, let's say the inspector general finishes his report and he found out that actually Jeffrey Clark, uh, didn't do anything. He didn't even write those letters. Uh, he, you know, he that letter to Georgia and, you know, he, he, um, he was really, it was this guy Waldron that did it and he was just sort of there uh... he you know he that letter to george and you know he uh... he was really it was this guy walled in that did it and he was just

sort of there to hand it off to the president that would be like jack smith saying great can you not put that in the report because i really want to indict this jeffery carcola that would that would exactly be the equivalent of that can you imagine the heads that we would explode on the Jim Jordan subcommittee of the judiciary if they found that out? Yeah.

Let's go one step further. That'd be like the IG and your hypothetical saying, well, this is what I found. This is my conclusion based on the evidence I found. I'm putting it in my report. And then he puts the report out. And then Jack Smith going to the media and saying, I disagree with his conclusion.

And I disagree with, based on all this incredible evidence I've uncovered in my ongoing investigation. That's what John Durham did. When, when, talk about that too, because that's a really bad thing also, is talking about, is going to,

is all DOJ policy by talking about your investigation. That's right. So, there, um, yeah. So, no Harwoods report comes out. And it basically, two major conclusions. The one is that despite having reviewed millions of documents, millions of text messages, and literally I'm not like hyperbolicly saying millions, he concludes that there's no evidence that any of these decisions that we made in opening the case or, you know, different things that we did along this lines of the investigation were motivated by political bias. Despite all the crazy texts you've heard about between Pete and Lisa and everybody else, he concludes that those two didn't actually make any final decisions on any of this stuff.

And we had reasons, good reasons for doing the things we did. Now the second big conclusions about the Carter Page FISA, he found all kinds of mistakes with the Kevin Kleinsmith revelations, and that's another whole hornet's nest very different. But John Durham doesn't like the fact that Michael Horowitz essentially gave us a clean bill health on the politicization thing. And so he comes out immediately after both he and William Barr make public statements to the media that they disagree with the IG's conclusion and they suggest that I think in the case of Barr explicitly states that he disagrees with it based upon all this quote unquote evidence he's found in his investigation. A four years later, where are we?

Nowhere. Nowhere. He's brought two cases that don't have anything to do with how or why he's How crossfire hurricane was opened and still nothing and yet John Durham did exactly what you were absolutely not supposed to do when you were in charge of an ongoing investigation in the Department of Justice He basically talked about it to the media. He acknowledged it Which he was already publicly acknowledged

That's a big thing, but he basically kind of tried to throw shade on Michael Horowitz's conclusion by by referencing Oh having found all this evidence of criminal activity in my own investigation The same thing You know that's it then Horowitz of DOJ Vyld it me about the When ultimately led to me getting fired which Was bullshit for totally different reasons, but never nevertheless I can't go too far down this rabbit hole be here all night, but no, it's cool. We got to swear out of you though

And I'm excited about that. Yeah, that's that's a rare one John Durham Did not conduct himself, even according to DOJ policy, much less like an effective, capable, credible investigator. And this article in The New York Times, if you have time, I strongly suggest you read it. It lays out in great detail, basically the fact that William Barr and John Durham ginned up, ginned up, an illegitimate investigation for the purpose of exacting retribution on Donald Trump's perceived political enemies. He ginned up an investigation, no reason, and used it to go after people. He did exactly what he claimed he was trying to investigate us for.

He claimed he had to investigate whether the FBI ginned up Crossfire Hurricane for political reasons to go after Donald Trump. And he did that by gining up his own investigation and doing exactly exactly that. It is just the hypocrisy and quite frankly, the corruption involved in this thing. And then Adam Goldman and Willie Rashbaum and their colleagues at the time soon, amazing job of laying it out in detail at Menarkham. Savage and better. And let's talk about that because one of the main right-wing talking points was that the corrupt deep state FBI was using the steel dossier with Russian disinformation

to spy on me, spy on my campaign, and you get the Carter Page Fies of warrant when actually what was happening at that same time was that Durham was using Russian disinformation seeded in memos that we got from Dutch intelligence that said Hillary was trying to make up this whole Russian thing against her opponent, Donald Trump. They used that disinformation to get emails from a private citizen, somebody who worked for George Soros, right? Banardo? Yeah. So they were actually...

Yeah, it is a little bit uncomfortable for me to talk about because a lot of this stuff is, hey, it was, I assume it still is very highly classified. And the simple fact that the Times talks about it in their article doesn't necessarily, doesn't mean it's not a very highly classified. And the simple fact that the times talks about in their article doesn't necessarily mean it's not a lot better classified. But the Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset.

The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch are very upset. The Dutch and tried to access the private emails of a US citizen using what many people believed was likely kind of August Russian intelligence essentially. And he lost the judge said, no, that's You're not you're not there. And having having had his lawyer lose that fight even when in himself and re-argued it in person and lost again. So what you see I think across the arc of this investigation is like just an unrelenting focus on trying to prove the conclusion that they had the day they opened the investigation.

We bar and John Durham had decided before investigating anything that we had committed a crime, that we had been political and the work that we did, that we had intentionally targeted Donald Trump and gone after him with some level of like zeal that we didn't use against Hillary Clinton when she was in trouble or that we had been duped by a Clinton campaign that was hell bent on surreptitiously convincing the FBI to open a case on Trump. And none of that is true. It wasn't true when they dreamed it up and some some some night sitting alone in bars office drinking scotch together, which apparently that happened with some regularity as well It is not true today and I think you look at the performance of John Durham across the scope of this investigation And it bears that out like what has he brought to?

incredibly ill advised weak cases, both of which he lost a trial, gets Michael Sussman and against Dan Cchenko. I can't remember if it was a victor, Dan Cchenko, I don't remember his first name, but in any case, a whole thing is a constant. Yeah, people resigned. People resigned over that too. There was a lot of oiling going on inside in this investigation. And you know, but the final thing that I wanted to ask you about is that, and I was joking. I was joking when I tweeted out a couple of years ago. Wouldn't it be funny if Durham and Dited Trump, like if, if, during these investigations, Durham and Dited Trump.

He had no idea where, where the bridge and you were going. Yeah, because in October, when, October 2019, when Barr put Durham on the case as a US attorney to investigate the origins of the thing. Of the Russian investigation. He... Well, it all comes down to the infamous Sojourn in Italy, right? Yeah, and it does. And we talked about that because I knew that Miff Sud was going to be deposed in Italy. And I was like, they're going to go over there. They they they went to London to shake down steel. They went to they went to Australia to shake down Alexander

Downer. And they're going to Italy to see if they could shake down Mifsood. And so they get there. And so many very interesting things happen in Italy with Papadopolis and Simone his girl. We could talk for you and I could talk for days, but Simone Menciante, remember? But we... Oh, yeah. So I was like, oh my god, they're over there trying to shake this down. They're trying to get... They're trying to find anything they possibly can, which means they have nothing. And I tweeted that as well. But apparently Italy told But apparently Italy told gave a tip to bar and Durham about Donald Trump, some financial crime, that Donald Trump allegedly committed. And it was such a serious tip that they couldn't ignore it.

So bar had Durham investigated and then Durham didn't charge. We've got Merrick Garland just appointing a special counsel for everybody who has anything. And now we've got this totally secret crime that just kind of gets put on Durham's plate. And then of course, his brush under the carpet. And I'm wondering my question here, first two questions. First of all, and we only have a couple minutes left, but that was when he was a US attorney and not a special counsel, but he became a special counsel. I feel like there should be a declination, uh, you know, special counsel regs require you make a declination, uh, pronouncement, I guess, to Congress and some sort of report it should be in his report. That crime, he investigated it should be in his report. Either that or nothing before he was named special counsel in December 2020

should be in the report, but what abs. And then second, why is Merritt Garland letting this go on? Can't he fire this guy for cause now that we know all this has had we just found this out? He must have known this. I mean, telling that lobbying the IG to lie in a report by a mission, that seems like cause to fire a special counsel hanging out, having bourbon with the, I'm sorry. Yeah, and it's a good question. So this, this, this revelation is again, credit to the times, because this is the first time I think anyone has ever heard this. I don't know how they came across this fact that they went over and they were looking for dirt

on people, the FBI and the intelligence community. Me included. And what they came back with was heavily really concerning information about financial transactions involving Trump. And so at that point, what they should have done was handed that off to a competent US attorney's office to investigate it, or maybe given it to a new special counsel. But instead, they gave it to John Durham, who's remit, who's reason for being, had nothing to do with investigating Donald Trump for financial crimes. Now this is on his plate, but it's not just that.

It gets worse because shortly after he then gets grand jury authorization so that to the age he gives him the authority to go convene a grand jury to investigate this Trump information. And lo and behold, the media finds out about it, and they start publishing stories that saying, wow, it looks like Durham has a grand jury now, that must mean he has come up with some criminal information or evidence against people who are the subject of the Durham inquiry, i.e. FBI, CIA, what have you? Well Durham and Barr very cagely allowed the media to completely misrepresent that fact to the country. They were very comfortable with the whole country being misled about both the status of the Durham inquiry and the existence of apparently a Trump inquiry. So yeah, it's just, and here we are years later, there's still no Durham report. I've told

that people believe he's writing it when it will be ready, I guess, on the he knows. And maybe he'll address all this in his report. I hope so. It should include what he did to investigate Trump and why he decided that it was going nowhere. You know, something's telling me that after reading the article on the time yesterday, maybe he had to go back and add a few sections to his report, but we'll see. There's a noted lack of transparency about this aspect of what John Durham was doing, but you know what, I'll be waiting for that report to come out. I'll read it closely and I'll be happy to talk to all of our listeners about what's in there.

Well, I personally have emailed the Department of Justice and asked them to remove Durham for cause. I'm not even sure that this doesn't warrant an investigation for obstruction personally, but I mean, maybe I'm wishful thinking, I tend to do that. But you know, for those who think I never get mad at Merrick Garland or the Department of Justice. I'm pretty upset as to why he's John Durham is still. If if Garland knew all this, I don't understand why John Durham is still there and why he didn't come out, give us a press conference or something, address it. A Senate judiciary dems.

Call Merrick Garland and ask him about this. Please do something. So also that would be nice. Maybe call your reps or hit up the Senate judiciary and see if we can get old Merrick Garland to come in and answer, hey, you mind telling us why it's cool for one of the special councils that works for you to tell an inspector general to omit shit from his report.

We think that that's probably a bad thing and he should be fired for cause. Why haven't you done that? I'm just like to get these. I have questions, brother. Okay. That's all. Brand finished. You know, I still love our institutions, but I do have some very serious questions about that as I'm sure you do too, Andrew. Yeah. We have lots of questions, very few answers, but that's all right. It gives us plenty of things to talk about as we learn more. Yeah. And so the way that this ties in with Jack Smith is this is not how you act. Jack Smith, I don't think we need to tell you that.

But also I'm wondering if this little Trump crime from Italy could Jack pick that up as part of his investigation? I would like to know what I mean, that's a good one. It's hard to imagine how that would ever, it, look, it's hard to imagine how it would ever fit within John Durham's remit. And it's even harder to figure out how it would fall into Jack Smith's. But hey, let's, let's, you know, let's hear DOJ way in on that one. Yeah, agreed. Thank you all so much. Again, if you have a question for Andrew, you can send it into us at hello at mullersherote.com. Just put Jack in the subject line, and that will get over to us from our wonderful production team.

Thank you to patrons of quick show this week. We're going to go a little bit lighter. And here we are pushing the envelope once again. So I hope everyone's enjoyed it. I've certainly had fun going over all this stuff with you. Again, as always, Allison. And so, yeah, I'm Andrew McCabe. I'm Allison Gill.

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