Judging Freedom - Durnham Report Filing breakdown w/Roger Stone

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Special Counsel John Durham latest filing contains information that the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign effort to discover dirt on Donald Trump reached into protected White House communications and to a Trump NYC apartment. Mr. Trump & President Trump Was Indeed Spied On. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello there, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano on Judging Freedom. My guest today needs no introduction to all of you. He's been involved in national politics for 45 years, and he and I have been friends for 45 years. He's the inimitable Roger Stone. Roger, what a pleasure. I know you've been so busy lately, but thank you for taking the time to join us. I first learned about John Durham's filings on Friday evening from a text I received from you in the middle of the night when you got your hands on it. It was the night of the Super Bowl. I went to bed early. I didn't even

know who had won the Super Bowl, much less that this was going to be front page news on Monday morning. Of course, it was not front page news. It was on Fox News and Newsmax and InfoWars, but I didn't see it anywhere else. What is the significance of what the special counsel John Durham has discovered and revealed about what was happening to Mr. and later President Donald Trump in late 2016 and early 2017? Well, Judge, I learned about this in the middle of the night because much like Donald Trump, I don't get much sleep. And I send it to you because you were one of the very few public figures who actually predicted this, actually identified it at the time. Now, you will remember, just as a student of history, that when some private citizens who were most misguided broke into the Watergate and were associated with President Richard Nixon's re-election campaign to plant

bugs that never actually worked, that that would ultimately lead to the downfall and resignation of President Richard Nixon, who had the year before won the greatest landslide in American political history. What we have here is a far more serious scandal because what we have is the government using the full authority of the United States government at the direction of Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, who we know was in the room when this maneuver was approved, at the behest of Hillary Clinton, to surveil the Republican candidate for president, to spy on him. Nixon went down because they were trying to spy on the Democrats and McGovern. And then, incredibly, later on, spy on President

Donald Trump. So not only candidate Trump, but also President Donald Trump. That's an abuse of governmental power. It is the greatest single abuse of power in American history. This makes Watergate look like a milk-fed puppy when it comes to the scandal. Although, as you point out, you wouldn't know it by watching the New York Times or the Washington Post or any of the three networks, certainly by watching CNN or MSNBC. As a general rule, I don't get my news from CNN for the same reason I don't eat out of the toilet. It is extraordinary because we also now know, based on the public comments of former Director of National Information Radcliffe, that he informed the FBI Director and the CIA Director at the time, and that he also informed Prosecutor Durham, turning over a thousand pages. So what this really means is if you look at the three legs in the stool of Russian collusion,

which turns out to be exactly as Donald Trump called it, a hoax, they were spying on the president. They were surveilling him to try to find some Russian intelligence connection. There was none. The so-called Steele dossier, which was a fabrication that claimed misbehavior by Donald Trump with prostitutes in Moscow, a complete fabrication, was paid for by the same people who did this hacking, that would be Hillary Clinton, and compiled with the assistance of Russian intelligence. There's your actual Russian collusion in the 2020 election. And then, of course, the celebrated CrowdStrikes memo, which the judge in my particular case refused to give us, remain classified, but which we now know based on the testimony before the House Intelligence Committee of the Chief Executive of CrowdStrikes, who just

happened to be Robert Mueller's deputy when he was at the FBI, that there was never any proof of an online hack of the Democratic National Committee by the Russians or anyone else. So I, of course, was convicted of lying about to Congress, specifically about something that didn't happen, that I had no knowledge of, a kind of extraordinary leak last Friday in which they said that Mueller, the special counsel, declined to prosecute me for cyber crimes. But the reason he declined to prosecute me is because he had to quote his report exactly, quote, no factual evidence tying me to such crimes. But he probably had some political pressure trying to tie you to crimes that you never committed, crimes that you could not have

committed. And he succeeded in indicting you for lying about something that was so absurd and so immaterial, the indictment should have been quashed in its infancy. Fortunately, the President of the United States did the right thing by commuting your sentence and then pardoning you. But I think you make the great point, Roger. Watergate was the use of private money and private assets, private resources to do a very clumsy break-in and a very clumsy bugging job, which never succeeded. And there was never any proof that President Nixon knew about or approved this. It never made any political sense. He was leading in the polls in 49 states. He also knew that in a presidential campaign, there's nothing of value to be had at the

National Party headquarters, that the action, at least in those days, was at the presidential candidates' headquarters. But nonetheless, mostly because of the cover-up, it brought down his presidency. Now the question is very clear, and that is, will those who are engaged in this act of treason, who abuse their governmental power, will they be held accountable? Never mind those private operators who were paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign in order to perpetrate this hack. Right. Let me go back a little bit. I fully agree with what you said about Richard Nixon. I have been working below the radar screen with Jeff Shepard. I don't know if you're familiar with his work. He was the youngest member of the White House legal team who has unearthed documents proving definitively Nixon didn't know about the break-in and Nixon didn't know about the payoff until after each had happened.

Those documents weren't around in 1974 because I think he would have prevailed at an impeachment trial. But that's just speculation. It was a great, tremendous injustice when he was forced from office. Well, and in fact, to be absolutely clear, his counsel, John Dean, lied to him for 19 straight months, as Shepard proved, as I proved in my book, Richard Nixon, the rise and fall of Richard M. Nixon. And I have, with attribution, I have cited Jeff Shepard's terrific work in his previous book. By the way, Judge Sirica would have been removed from the bench if we knew the way he had conducted that trial. Well, Sirica would have been removed from the bench and probably prosecuted if we knew what he was doing with Leon Jaworski. But we discover this stuff definitively after they're dead. The rest of the material that, back to the present day, that John Durham has discovered, I fear might be too late as well because the statute of limitations for these crimes, and they're very, very serious federal crimes, is five years.

Now, it's going to depend upon how deep into 2017 the conspiracy went. One of the documents that I read this morning indicated that the conspirators gave up the ghost in January of 2017. So if you have an agreement to commit a crime and the crime is ongoing, we're not talking about pulling a trigger. We know when the crime was committed, when the trigger was pulled. But you have an ongoing crime. The statute of limitations starts when the crime ends. So the question is, when did they stop the computer hacking and when did they stop spying on by now President Donald Trump? Was it more than five years ago? John Durham is not stupid. He's not going to release this stuff unless he believes he has the evidence to back it up. Otherwise, it's just politics and it's just history. It's not indictable.

Well, but you have another question here. Put aside the private operators who conducted the hack at the behest of Hillary Clinton. Even if the statute of limitation there has run, if those in government knew about this or were a party to it, I don't believe there is a statute of limitations on treason. And this is treasonous activity. I don't think that Durham can charge treason because of its definition in the Constitution, waging war on the United States or providing aid and comfort to their enemies during wartime. We may hate the Russians. We may love the Russians, but we're not at war with them. So there's no enemy here for them to help. It is treason with a lowercase t, but not treason with an uppercase T. You are

right, however, there is no statute of limitations on treason. The other key point here, judges, you may have just touched on an explanation of the snail's pace of Mr. Durham's investigation. This is not rocket science, actually. He has bombshell revelations. I had, frankly, given up on him. I also believe structurally that he reports to the sitting attorney general, Merrick Garland, who would have to approve any prosecution that he would bring. So whether or not we have a two-tier justice system, whether it's just Roger Stone and Paul Manafort and Judge and General Michael Flynn, who get prosecuted for politically motivated and essentially fabricated crimes. To violate the False

Statements Act, your crime has to be material, has to be relevant, in essence has to cover some underlying crime. I was subjected to a Soviet-style show trial in which my first, fourth, and sixth amendment rights were trampled on, but no one seems to care. And you're right. President Trump recognized the political motivation of my indictment, the illegitimate nature of the investigation through which my indictment flowed, and the fact that I was not given a fair trial. Right. And the jury for woman is attacking me on Facebook and Twitter regarding the very case in which she is later selected as a juror. And the judge doesn't see anything wrong with that. Yeah, it is questionable to say the least. You got to make two statements. One is, I mean, what happened to you shouldn't have happened to anybody, but you were also subject to the most spectacular, spectacular, live, filmed,

over-the-top, heavy-handed arrest in the modern history of the United States of America when they went after Richard Speck after he slaughtered a half-dozen nurses in a dormitory in Chicago. They didn't do it with the firepower with which they went after you. You and I have talked about this. I've written about it. We talked about it when I was on Fox. You are very gracious the way you address these things.

And I also have to tell you, you hit on something that I have suspected for a long time, and I'm going to say it now. Why is Durham going at a snail's pace? He is not stupid. He knows what the statute of limitations is. Why does he come out with this stuff more than five years after it happened? Surely he knew about it six months ago, a year ago, when it was within the time period. Well, let me address the spectacular manner of my arrest. First of all, I was arrested at six of six in the morning when 29 heavily armed SWAT clad FBI agents who arrived in 17 armored vehicles with a government helicopter overhead and two amphibious units pulled up to the dock behind my house. The government argued that I had to be arrested in this manner because I was a flight

risk, yet three hours later they asked for no cash bond for my release, proving they never believed that I was a flight risk. At 6.06, I was arrested. At 6.11, a CNN correspondent sent a text of my indictment to my attorney. That indictment was sealed until 9.30 that morning. How could CNN have a sealed document? CNN claims they got it online. By checking the Wayback Machine, you can see that that's a lie. They accept an award for their exceptional and incisive investigative reporting. No, the initials of the man who wrote the indictment are in the metadata tags on the document sent to my lawyer. That would be Andrew Weissman. The leak of the timing to deliver a search or an arrest warrant is a felony. But we have a two-tiered

justice system in which you only get prosecuted if you are a supporter of President Donald Trump. You don't get prosecuted for prosecutorial misconduct or if you're a juror who lies about the circumstances of getting on the jury and lies about her bias. Yeah. So I don't know where all this is going to go, Roger. I mean, it's nice to have the truth come out. In my own case, it's nice to experience a little bit of vindication. I suspect there are a couple more legs of this still to come out, which will tie James Comey and John Brennan to the British GCHQ. But the point is not vindication of me. The point is vindication of Donald Trump. The point is that he predicted, in part on what I said, in part on what others said, that he would be vindicated because he knew that he had been

spied on. And that goes back to the fall of 16, may even go back earlier than that, where their goal was to wreck him as a candidate. And then he was spied on in the early days of his presidency, probably, probably until he fires Comey, which is now May of 17, which is fewer than five years ago. Trump was right. He suffered mightily because of the crimes of these people, and they might be free from prosecution, either because of who they are and the prosecutor dragged his feet, or because evidence was held back that should have been forthcoming? I'll let you summarize, Roger. Let's be clear. They're now trying to run the exact same

playbook regarding January 6th, and it's the same people. I'm sorry. I wasn't there. I wasn't on the Ellipse. I didn't march to the Capitol. I wasn't at the Capitol. I have no advanced knowledge or any contemporaneous knowledge of the illegal events at the Capitol. Anyone who claims or even implies that I knew about or was involved in any way in those, that's categorically false. It's also defamatory. That said, massive headlines when the House committee subpoenas both Alex Jones and I. I had to go before the committee to fulfill my legal obligations under the subpoena. I asserted my Fifth Amendment right, not because I did anything wrong, not because I had any particular knowledge of the subject, but because I have firsthand experience with the House Democrats ability to innocuous, immaterial, or irrelevant things you say and twist them into a crime.

So I fulfilled my obligations, but it is the same playbook. We know, for example, that the Capitol doors were open from the inside. You'll read that at the Gateway Pundit. You will not read it at the New York Times. So I see the same people trying to pull the same thing and to create the same, you know, relatively false narrative. Now, I denounce violence. I'm opposed to lawlessness. My entire career has been in elective politics. I like to win democratic elections, free, fair, transparent, democratic elections. But when you continue to characterize this as the deadliest attack on the United States, the only two deaths that I'm aware of are of unarmed women at the hands of Capitol Hill police officers who are now deified

and are held up as a model. I didn't understand that trespassing excuses one from first-degree murder, but that appears to be the case. Roger, always a pleasure, my man. Thank you. We'll talk again soon. All the best. God bless you. Great to be with you, Judge. Thank you.