The Chris Cuomo Project - Bill O'Reilly (Cuomo Extra)

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

In this special extra from NewsNation’s “Cuomo,” broadcaster and author Bill O’Reilly speaks with Chris about the investigation of classified documents found at former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, how gas prices may impact the 2022 midterm elections, and his latest book, “Killing the Legends: The Lethal Danger of Celebrity.” Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, welcome to another episode of the Chris Cuomo Project. This is an extra. It's Bill O'Reilly. Now, thank you. Spread the word. Subscribe. Follow. Think about the free agent gear.

Please consider buying some because remember, the money is not just going to go to me. It's going to go to worthy causes that we come up with together. So Bill O'Reilly, I'll tell you, people love him. People may not love him, but they listen. He's been doing this a long time and he's a student of the game. And he is talking about what's happening in politics, why he believes it is going to mean a lot in the midterm elections that are just a few weeks away, and his big ax, he's swinging at President Biden. Does he hit his mark? You decide. Bill O'Reilly. All right, we're fortunate to have the one and only Bill O'Reilly with us tonight.

He has a new book called Killing the Legends, The Lethal Danger of Celebrity, which is a really interesting look, not just at the men on the cover that you were just looking at, but circumstances and how their deaths came about and what that means, both that is common among all of them and also common to us. Bill, thank you for joining me. Congratulations on a new gig, Cuomo. Don't screw it up. All right.

I'm trying. Thank you. That's why I got you. How can I screw it up? So there's a little bit of breaking news coming out here that an employee of former President Trump says he was directed or they were directed to move boxes after the subpoena came in from one basement into the Mar-a-Lago residence. What matters to you about this? Is that Cassidy Hutchinson again? Is she the one that did it?

We do not know who it is. It's an anonymous source. We do not know who it is. We don't know who it is. Another anonymous source? How many does that make in the last six years? How many do you think? 35,000 anonymous sources? Look, all it is is BS, Cuomo, unless there's a cross-examination of it. So I mentioned Ms. Hutchinson, who said that somehow Donald Trump sat in the back of a

presidential limo and leaped across and grabbed a Secret Service agent in a fit of anger on January 6th. Well, okay, that's physically impossible if you know what a presidential limo looks like. And number two, why didn't the January 6th committee subpoena the two Secret Service agents in the car to get the story? Because the two Secret Service agents said it never happened. However, Cassidy Hutchinson was page one for a week. So forgive me if I don't take these anonymous anti-Trump stories seriously. Well, it's not all anonymous. If it's a cross-examination situation.

I got you. You definitely need cross-examination. You got to vet it. There's no question about it. We should be qualified in our understanding. It's about what the right questions are at this point. So the reporting is that it's a Trump employee who told the FBI about being directed by the former president to move boxes. So assuming this person is real and the testimony is real, to me, that seems like there are two big questions.

One is, can they prove, can they prove that they were told? Maybe he didn't want to trip over the boxes, Cuomo. And why did they move him? Maybe he wanted the boxes in another place. And why did they move him? Maybe they were blocking his view of his pool table. Who knows? This is ridiculous. It's ridiculous.

What would make it not ridiculous? The FBI and the Justice Department charging Donald Trump. That would make it not ridiculous. Are we going to see that? I don't know. And I'll cover it fairly if it happens. But all of this anonymous source garbage, I mean, how much more of this are we going to take seriously?

I'm not. I don't take it seriously. The only thing I'll push back on about that is you and I both know that in journalism, you don't have anonymous sources. You're almost never going to hear anything. I never use power. Cuomo, Cuomo, I might be the most successful journalist in the past couple of decades. I never use anonymous sources ever because it's not fair. Your greatness aside, would you at least stipulate that a lot of the major reporting that's come out in our country, people need protection from power. And if you didn't have

anonymous sources, you have to vet them, you have to corroborate. But the idea that you would never use them, then you would really rarely know what's happening around power because people wouldn't speak. I don't buy that at all. The Watergate is the best example of this kind of reportage. The Watergate situation, the best example of this reportage. And as you know, Ben Bradley, the editor of The Washington Post, had Woodward and Bernstein corroborate all the deep throat stuff. Right.

OK, that's how you do it. You don't say some Trump guy said, I moved the box into this room. It doesn't matter because it may or may not be true. Right. But I'm saying don't wave away every anonymous sources as if they're all equally lacking. You've got to corroborate obviously. Say again? There's a track record here. I just mentioned Cassidy Hutchinson. It was total bull. And how many days did we go through that?

I understand what you're saying, but I don't believe that one example proves that you should never use anonymous sources. I can give you 50 more. Russian collusion. Even if you gave me 50. Two years. You have to corroborate it. It's not an either or is what I'm saying to you.

It's a both. Is that you get an anonymous source, fine, if you trust it, and you corroborate it with things that you can expose and put out. That's the formula. Agreed? Cuomo, you got to put things into perspective. For six years, the anti-Trump press has tried to nail him on everything.

That is the truth. And Americans should, at this point, be skeptical. Well, Americans should always be skeptical, just not cynical without cause. And I think you're leaving out a key element here, which is the president made it easy to pursue him by what he did and by what people around him did. Well, I'm not going to argue that. Doesn't mean that they're crimes.

I'm not going to argue that. But he made it easy for people to want to look at. I would never argue that. All right, good. Then we agree. Look, Cuomo. Yes. We agree on that, but let me give you one real quick one. Please.

And you'll love this, Cuomo. You will love this. Thank you for talking. The reason my book, Killing the Legends, isn't number one is because Maggie Haberman's book, another hate Trump book, and she's written like 18 of them, is number one. Now, Trump gave her three interviews to a woman who has slashed him for six years. So you are absolutely correct when you say Trump makes it easy for these people to slash him. He does. How about that? I'm not disputing that. You know, if he had said things differently, if he had said less, he would have had less heat. Let me ask you one political question, then I want to get to the book. You feel fairly strongly that gas prices as, you know,

a refined petroleum product and the idea of oil prices are going to be a big deal in this election and that Biden's going to have to own the problem. Yes? Of course. Yes. But do you believe? What's the follow up? The follow up is, is that fair, given how complicated the analysis is about why oil prices are where they are, why gas prices are where they are, and what his ability is to make it any different? All right. All I know, Cuomo, and I'm a simple man, all right, is that gas prices were about 100 percent less in Trump's last year than they are in Biden's second year. And that inflation was running about one point three percent under Trump in his last year. And it's now hitting nine percent. So, yeah, you can make excuses, Biden, this Biden, that his first two

years, Joe Biden's has been a disaster for the American consumer. And there is no two sides to that story. It's not two sides. It's about, it's an assessment. Those things are both true. The question becomes the only one that matters, which is why? Inflation has also been trending back down. It's definitely over 8%.

In the last reading we saw, the question becomes why? Why were gas prices so low? Did you see the PPI today? I did. Did you see the PPI today? I did. Did you see the PPI today? It's not trending down. It's trending up. Now listen, Cuomo, you could argue all day long. I don't want to argue. I want to ask you something else. No, no. I'm just saying I want to put it into perspective, which is what you need. Chris Cuomo needs perspective. And I'm here to give it

to you. Thank you for that. All right. The Biden administration has been a disaster for the American consumer. That's a fact. Now, if you want to make an excuse, it's Putin's fault or there's a tsunami in Indonesia that caused it. That's fine. But you started the baseline. Americans are getting hurt financially, which is why the Republicans are going to take the House by a wide margin and may take the Senate. Well, we could do a little lunch on that. I think it's going to be very tight. But look, neither of us are paying. Of course, I'd pay anyway. All my money is spent. But here's what I'm saying about oil prices. Here's what I don't like about it as a quick analysis. OK, first of all, America doesn't set the market price. It's a world price. OK. And there are a lot of reasons that have to do with filling up stockholders pockets

for why they're not pumping oil. He's he's releasing reserves, but that's not going to make a big difference. You've got to remember the reason that the gas prices were so low under Trump was because there had been games played about lowering the price of oil and to deal with the shale oil situation that the Saudis don't like. And that now you have the Russians, yes, and OPEC plus and the other participants, including Venezuela. And it is nice to turn the screws to America. And you have the companies don't want to drill. Why? Because their shareholders have given them a clear message that the pandemic and what happened before it with the shale oil is very expensive for them. And they want the money instead of the drilling. So this is complicated. And to just say, just like you and me, but they're smart.

And they can get that something's not as simple as Biden bad because gas prices higher. I don't think it's that simple for people. The first day in office, the first day in office, Biden slapped dozens of regulations on the fossil fuel industry. Under Trump, we were a net exporter of energy. That means we had more than enough here. We were selling it overseas. Under Biden, we don't have enough here. We have to import from overseas.

Bill, simple man, simple man, simple analysis. We are on pace for a record year of extraction last year, with exception, I think, of one year. It's been going up every year under Biden's watch. And that caused oil and gas prices to rocket that one year of regulations and insanity because Cuomo, Biden somehow thinks windmills are going to run all the energy. That one year devastated the American consumer. And that's what it's all about. It wasn't just that. But look, at the end of the day, it is on his watch and he's going to have to deal with it. I just hope people understand

that the explanation is not as simple because sometimes we make it too simple in our politics. Let me ask you about something that when we look at this book, I've always appreciated the series. I'm probably three books into the series. I know you've done many. But this one helped me understand in relaying to the audience what Killing of the Legends is about. I didn't get, I'm about 65 pages in.

Ali, I don't understand how he goes with Lennon and Presley in terms of the self-destruction, the quiet period, and then the violence that takes his life. How does Ali fit into that? Within the context of what the book's about, please. Excellent question. This is cultural history. The first, this is the 12th killing book, the most successful nonfiction book series in history. All right. It's the first time that I've ever written about cultural history. These three icons, these three titans changed American culture, changed the way we all live to this day. Now, Ali fits in with Lenin and Presley because like them, he ceded his whole life, all his autonomy to the nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad and his son, Hermit Muhammad.

Now, Herbert Muhammad kept Ali in the ring against every medical advice far too long. And after Ali almost died in the thriller in Manila, and that's some of the finest writing I've ever done, putting you in that ring. After Joe Frazier almost killed him and Ali almost blinded Frazier, Ferdie Pacheco, the fight doctor, said, you can't fight for a year. Four months later, guess who was back in the ring? Because that's what the Nation of Islam wanted, because they were taking his money, just like Colonel Tom Parker was taking Elvis's money. So all three of these icons were crushed and destroyed by their fame, wealth, and notoriety. People around them who they trusted betrayed them. So it's a two-pronged book.

They were unbelievable culture movers, all three. But in the end, they were all destroyed by their fame and celebrity. And that happens to most celebrities celebrities and what's the lesson? That's what people should understand and understanding meaning what? Understanding that if you're a celebrity in America You're not a person anymore your commodity and you're likely to be betrayed by people very close to you for money And you can't even leave the house anymore because somebody will be recording you on this. And the emotional weight on famous people drives them crazy. Elvis Presley wanted to die. You don't take that amount of

narcotics if you want to live. He wanted to check out. Lennon became a heroin addict once he became cloistered with Yoko Ono. That's what broke up the Beatles, his hard drug use. And Ali would not say no, even though Ali knew his brain was being destroyed by being in the ring too much. They all ceded their autonomy. And that is the basis of Killing the Legends. Put up the cover of Killing the Legends to say goodbye to Bill O'Reilly. The book is on sale. You can get it everywhere. It's number one. And with good reason, one last question, Bill, when you held up your phone, just a quick question. Do you have a picture of yourself on the cover of your phone? No. You may think that I'm vain, glorious. Well, you did call yourself one of the most successful journalists in the last day. One of the greatest, something like that.

Would you dispute that? I would dispute whether or not it is good form to call yourself that. I would say that, but I'll still buy you lunch. Okay. That's fine. That's a matter of style. No, look, we all can't be humble like you Cuomo. There's a difference between being humble and being humbled. It's a little different. Uh, but Bill O'Reilly, I appreciate you. Thank you for coming on the show, especially here at the beginning lunches on me. Good luck with the book. Anytime. I told you Bill O'Reilly may be right, may be wrong, but never in doubt. And he does give you food for thought. And that's what the Chris Cuomo project is all about. So please subscribe. Don't forget to follow. Please think about getting that free agent merch. All the money is going into a kitty that we will collectively

crowdsource opportunities to give it away. All right. I'll see you next time.