Judging Freedom - Durham Report Only Makes GOP_s Job Harder - w Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ)

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

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You Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, June 22nd, 2023. It's about 545 in the afternoon here on the East Coast of the United States. Congressman Andy Biggs will be with us in just a moment. He's a member of the House Judiciary Committee, and they spent the day interrogating Prosecutor John Durham. Wasn't John Durham supposed to prove that everything the FBI did and Bob Mueller did was wrong and was politically motivated? What did he prove? Who did he indict? Right after this. When it comes to carrying valuables or even firearms in your vehicle, most people feel

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Thanks for having me, Judge. Good to be with you, as always. Of course. Thank you. So what is your take on the John Durham investigation? To me, the report was a ho-hum, and this guy got beaten up by the Republicans, I don't know if it was yesterday or today, whenever he appeared before you, in a way that would indicate an extreme lack of confidence and pleasure in what he did or failed to do. Yeah, Judge, you know, there's some takeaways there.

I think, I mean, obviously, most of it seemed like a reboot of the Mueller report and the Inspector General Horowitz's report. So when you had those, I mean, he did interview some pretty important people, Bill Priestap, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok. They could never find this professor, Joseph Misfood, who's the guy who probably started the whole thing. The things that I thought were salutary or good were, you know, he confirmed that it was Hillary Clinton's campaign that paid for the Steele dossier. There never was collusion. There would never there was nothing in that dossier that could be confirmed. We probably knew that. But I mean, I'll give him that, that that worked out OK.

But for me, he didn't he didn't go after the people that have weaponized the Department of Justice and the FBI. And that's the thing I just don't get. The only charge that actually stuck was Clinesmith, who was an attorney who basically committed perjury on a FISA warrant application. And that guy got off. He's so he's able to practice law right now in Washington, D.C. So in the end, there was some smoke there, but they didn't gin up the fire and really go after the people who are destroying the country. And he he indicted through this weapon. Two people indicted two people and prosecuted them for lying to the fbi and both were acquitted their lawyers basically said to the jury well wait a minute the fbi can lie to us but we can't lie to them and the jury accepted that so i don't know if they actually did lie to the fbi or

if this was a case of jury nullification but but what a waste i, and he also more or less and, you know, the feds do this validated the Mueller report. There's a lot of bad allegations against Donald Trump in the Mueller report, which were never prosecuted because he was the sitting president at the time. And Bill Barr promised that John Durham, a tough guy with a good reputation in Connecticut, that John Durham would get to the bottom of all this. And he didn't. And he slow walked it. So now it's too late for anybody in that whole world, you know, that whole mess to be indicted. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I mean, we were talking slow walk today. And did you did you toll some statutes of limitation over a period of time? Yeah, probably. It's probably so. But for me, I think there's just some amazing frustrations here because I remember, what, four years ago now, three years ago now, something like that. We talked about he was going to tell us who Joseph Misford was, and we were going to get to the bottom of this stuff. And, I mean, that's what Matt Gaetz was focused on.

And in the end, we don't know substantially more about anything than we did after we got the Mueller report. Well, here's one thing we know. We are $6.5 million poorer, the federal government, than before Durham started. Yeah, I will say this. I said this yesterday to Mr. Durham. I said, look, you are an institutionalist.

I get that. And that was the problem. He was an institutionalist. So where he could, I think he made some recommendations and he said there's problems within the institution, but he was not going to dismantle the institution, which I think needs to happen. I mean, he didn't make any comments on even FISA reform, which I think needs to happen. Yeah. I mean, he didn't make any comments on even FISA reform, which I think FISA needs to go away altogether. But at bare minimum, I would have expected him to say, you know what, the FBI has abused FISA so badly

that FBI should not have any FISA authority whatsoever. But we didn't get there. I want to talk to you about the FBI FISA Section 702 of FISA in a minute. You mentioned Matt Gaetz. Here he is at one of his best ruffles and flourishes. The entire Mueller team does a hard reset on their Apple phone in synchronization to wipe away evidence. Did you investigate that?

I've read that. Why didn evidence. Did you investigate that? I've read that. Why didn't, did you investigate it? Who gave the order on the Mueller team to wipe the phones? Yeah, that was not something that we were asked to look at and we didn't. No, that's not true, Mr. Durham. That is not true because I'm holding the document that authorizes your activity and it specifically says the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. It's imperative. Mr. Chairman, I seek unanimous consent to enter into the record the order that says that you're supposed to investigate these things. And so whether it's the Mueller team, Mifsud, how about Azra Turk? What's Azra Turk's real name? I'm not going to be disclosing the

names of FBI personnel that are otherwise unavailable. But an FBI, so the FBI sends somebody to go honeypot George Papadopoulos. Who gave the order to do that? I think that's beyond the scope of what's in the report. It's literally the scope of what your charging order is. Who put it in motion? We get after it was put in motion, the FBI did a bunch of wrong and corrupt things. Totally understand. We're trying to deal with that. But when you are part of the cover up, Mr. Durham, then it makes our job harder.

Boy, I don't always agree with him. And I don't know if he's a lawyer, but he's right on the mark. And that was a brilliant cross-examination. And Durham didn't answer a damn thing. Yeah. You know, Judge, first of all, he is a lawyer. And he was right on the money. The charging documents real clear. And one thing out of that exchange that we got that maybe we didn't fully get before is that Hester was that's that's some name of an FBI agent who actually was sent to lure George Papadopoulos in to entrap George Papadopoulos. By the way, George Papadopoulos, I've met the guy, I've talked to him multiple times. He's just an average guy that was shooting his mouth off.

That's really what you get. But they sent in this lady. But the question is, who sent her in? Right, right, right. Whoever sent her in is one of the political instigators and creators of this whole thing. That Durham didn't go there, didn't understand that that's where he's supposed to go, is beyond me. I can understand Bob Mueller not going there because he may have been behind this whole thing. So Durham's job is to investigate Mueller instead.

Oh, we weren't told to go there. We weren't told to go there. We didn't look there. Ah, but we ratify everything Bob Mueller concluded. Yeah. What a waste. It's just it was such a it was kind of a bittersweet thing. I mean, but the bottom line is, Judge, anybody who's objective looking at this says our Department of Justice and our FBI was weaponized somehow. Yes. Yes. We suspect we know who might have done it, but we're no clearer to knowing for certainty who did it, which means we're no closer to basically holding anybody accountable for abusing the DOJ and the FBI against American citizens without, I mean, as Durham says, there was absolutely no predicate whatsoever to do this.

Well, who did this then? Who did this? Here's committee chairman Jim Jordan right before Matt Gaetz. In the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the Mueller investigation, when the FBI interviewed Mr. Dolan, what did he have to say? To my knowledge, they didn't interview Mr. Dolan. They didn't interview this guy? Sourced for the dossier? Key information in the dossier? Buddies with the Clintons and they didn't talk to him? No. I mean, we report on that because even Christopher Steele in October 2016 identified Dolan as somebody that might have information. I find it interesting they didn't talk to him. Were there agents on the case who wanted to talk to Mr. Dolan as somebody that might have information. I find it interesting they didn't talk to him. Were there agents on the case who wanted to talk to Mr. Dolan, Mr. Durham?

Yes. What happened to analyst number one? She kept pushing to talk to Mr. Dolan. She was ultimately turned down. What happened to her the day that she was turned down and said, no, no, we're not talking to Dolan? What happened to her? At about the same time, she was assigned to a different project. They moved her. They said, we can't have this. We can't be looking into the Clinton's buddy,

a key source for the dossier. They reassigned her. I mean, it's crazy. They didn't talk to the key source. They kept key intelligence from the investigators. That's how bad this investigation was. What will the committee do with its displeasure over Durham's work and Durham's report? What can they do? What could the House do? You know, that's the issue is you can't, okay, so Durham is riding off into the sunset retiring, right? So that's really what he's closing out his career here. There's nothing really, I mean, you could impose the Holman rule if you really wanted to. What's the Holman rule? The Holman rule allows Congress to go in and basically reorganize a specific department within an agency so that you actually eliminate positions.

Like you could go in and you could say, okay, guess what, Mr. Durham? You know we're eliminating your position within DOJ. And you can do that. All right. I want to talk to you about that. We have to take a break. But when we come back, we'll talk about will Congress reorganize the DOJ? Will it continue to fund the FBI at the levels that it's been funding it, which is to give it more money every year?

Will it reenact Section 702 of the FISA Act? Everybody watching us now knows what that does, spying without search warrants, all that right after this. You want to feel safe in your vehicle. And for you, that means easy, rapid access to your firearm. But safety also means your items don't fall into the wrong hands. You don't have to choose between safety and convenience. The Headrest Safe keeps your firearm where you can access it and no one else can. Just order your Headrest Safe, install it yourself when it arrives, and enjoy peace of mind. It starts at theheadrestsafe.com. 702 of the FISA Act allows American agents, FBI, and others to spy without warrants on foreign persons who were physically

here or digitally here and their American communicants. When an American conversation is caught up, they put that in a database and then the FBI is supposed to get a search warrant to enter the database. They accidentally entered the database in 2022, 278,000 times. Okay. The abuse is outlandish. 702 is violative of the Constitution on its face. There's no distinction between Americans and foreigners with respect to the right to privacy. What are the chances that the House will let 702 die a natural death at Christmastime and not reenact it? Very small. I'm sad to say. Isn't Jim Jordan himself an opponent of 702? And as the chair of the Judiciary Committee,

can't he single-handedly keep it from coming to the House floor for a vote? Yes and no. I think he's kind of where I am, which I'd like to see 702 completely go away, right? So that's what needs to happen. And I'm working with Democrats because it has to go through my subcommittee that I chair. And Democrats are with me on that so far, so far. But they don't even think that they can get enough Democrats to supplement the Republicans so that we can go forward in a bipartisan way. Now, does Chairman Jordan want to eliminate 702 altogether? That I don't know. But I do know that he wants to pull FBI out and remove all authority for the FBI.

We are fighting, Judge, and I think you know this. We're fighting with our own party, the neocons, the Intel Committee, who say if you don't have 702, then what's going to happen is they're going to keep. They always say this. They're going to keep spying on you anyway. And I said, well, then it'd be be absolutely illegal more illegal than it is already then the set and the second thing is they they say oh we won't be safe but that's that's not true either neither one of those things is true and and um i think we need we need to toss it uh but we're fighting we're fighting our own people and and so that means that we have enough we have enough trouble getting it out of out of committee i think we could do okay

getting it out of judiciary committee and i think uh chairman jordan would be okay with that but we're he just came up told me that i'm going to be on a task force because you got some folks on a couple other committees that actually don't think like we do that are going to fight us on it. And so I'm going to go in there and try to fight those guys and see if we can change. Just keeping the FBI from going to FISA, that's not going to protect us at all. Other intelligence agencies will go to FISA. It's still a secret court. The judges are basically, I got a good friend on FISA, so he hates this. The judges are basically clerks. Oh, here's your application, granted, granted, granted. 99.96% of applications are granted. I mean, I heard applications for search

warrants for all the years I was on the bench. I didn't grant, nobody I even know or heard of granted a percentage that high. There's no scrutiny by the judiciary. There should be. Here's an idea for you in the FISA court. A position in the federal government called, I would love this job just because of its name, the defender of the Constitution. Somebody who appears before the FISA court every time the federal agents are there and challenges whatever they want to do. That doesn't happen. No, not at all. In theory, they've got this ombudsman thing, you know, and it doesn't work. It really doesn't work. It's a star chamber. And get this, Durham mentioned yesterday, as some of us were talking to him about that, he said, well, you know, the FISA court was really upset, and they wrote a sternly worded letter of condemnation about Clinesmithmith and the literally millions of illegal queries

of U.S. citizens. He wrote a stern letter. That's what he said was the remedy. That's not the remedy. The remedy is to let it pass an ignominious death. And if we can't do that, they're talking reforms. I talked to a member, Judge, who actually was wrongfully targeted. And I said, so you'll join me now, I hope. LaHood, right? I can't say any names, but I do. Well, one of the members has been open about him being targeted, but maybe this is somebody else. Maybe that's somebody else. And the individual said, Andy, you know, yes, but we got to have it. So let's let's talk about reforms. And I'm like, reforms.

The reason that you the reason that you can't just reform it is because there is no integrity anymore, right? You can't, and without that integrity, you're going to get overrun every time because you can't have the transparency you want. They'll say you can't have that transparency. And what makes a Fourth Amendment search warrant work is transparency and accountability. Correct. And the requirement of probable cause. If there's no requirement of probable cause, then these warrants are just general warrants. They're like fishing nets. Let's just throw it out there and gather this information and see what we come up with. I'll tell you a funny story. You know, this statute expires 702 every five years. Five years

ago, Trump was in the White House. Five years ago, I was one of the early morning hosts on Fox and Friends. I look in the camera and I go, Mr. President, he's not there. I'm talking to him because I know he's watching. The Congress just reenacted 702. 702 is the mindset that spied on you. Veto it. Two minutes later, he tweets, I'm vetoing 702. An hour later, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, they're all in the Oval Office. And someone else who was there tells me the following happened. Trump says, judge says it's unconstitutional. One of those three said, the judge is a literalist. He thinks the Constitution means what it says. We really need this. Trump sends me a message. They twisted my arm, and he signed it. He has vowed if he becomes president, he'll never, ever, ever sign this again.

Look, I know he's got a lot of faults, but occasionally understands what's going on, particularly with the deep state. And I know this is I'm making you laugh, but this is not a laughing matter. Does the intelligence community have dirt on members of Congress to the point where they will always reenact these statutes and always increase their spying budgets? You know, sometimes I think they might, but look, remember this. It's the same day you're doing that. Remember this. I was fighting against it like crazy five years ago, and then it passes, right? The same day it passes, what happens? They reveal that they've been spying and using these fiscal FISA warrants against members of Congress. Wow. And against Trump. And I'm like, see, they weren't even honest enough to tell us.

Justice Scalia told me that he knew the court was being spied on. He knew it. He didn't want to say, he told me this privately. He never said anything about it publicly. Yeah, I believe it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Congressman Biggs, I don't know how you do it. You are faithful to the Constitution in a sea of big government,

one party, pro-war, pro-welfare state, pro-national security state, pro-anything goes members of Congress. God bless you. Keep up the fight. Thank you for joining us. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano,

we're judging freedom. You want to feel safe in your vehicle. With access to your firearm, that's both secure and convenient. The Headrest Safe keeps your firearm where you can access it and no one else can. It starts at theheadrestsafe.com. Thank you.