The Dan Bongino Show - Interview With Tom Fitton (Ep 1165)

Episode Date: January 23, 2020

In this episode, I interview Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton. We discuss some explosive aspects of the Spygate case, the Clinton email scandal, and the impeachment fiasco.   Copyright Dan Bongino All Rights Reserved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

get ready to hear the truth about america on a show that's not immune to the facts with your host dan bongino welcome to dan bongino shows my interview show with i'm really excited about this interview i'm excited about all our interviews but this one uh is with tom fitton from judicial watch you've probably seen him on fox news many of you follow him on twitter he is at tom fitton f-i-I-T-T-O-N. As you know, I always record these intros afterwards because I want to let you know what's coming for you. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a terrific interview.

Tom hammers at one point a connection between Hillary Clinton, Spygate, the Ukrainian scandal in the State Department that, I have to be honest, was even a little bit underreported on my show, even though Spygate, Mueller, and Ukraine have been a big focus of our show for the last year. He hits that. He also talks about an update, me and him, about the Obama linkage to this entire thing that I think is going to surprise you. You're going to love this interview. It runs about 35, 40 minutes. You're going to really like it.

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at VinceroWatches.com forward slash Bongino, VinceroWatches.com forward slash Bongino, promo code Bongino. All right, folks, without further ado, my interview with Tom Fitton. You know, I put out a solicitation to my audience a while ago. I said, listen, if you have any ideas for great guests on the Dan Bongino interview series, I would love to hear them. And one of those people that was frequently mentioned in email correspondences is my good

friend Tom Fitton from Judicial Watch, a warrior for the cause of liberty and freedom. Tom, thank you for spending some time with us here today. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate all the work Judicial Watch does. Hey, Dan, I appreciate your leadership as well. Thank you for that. Oh, you got it. But now if you want to follow Tom, folks, he has a book out, by the way, Clean House, which I highly recommend you pick up. We'll link to it in the show notes for this. And he is at Tom Fitton, F-I-T-T-O-N on Twitter. Give him a follow. You will not regret it.

Some of his videos are absolutely priceless. I know a lot of you watch them already. So Tom, I have a lot I want to cover with you. So in the interest of time, let's get right to it here. So you were one of the first people, you and your organization to report on the goings on in Ukraine and the activities of Marie Yovanovitch, which the Democrats are trying to boomerang back on us,

which they always do. And this monitoring list and this crowd tangle. And I found this story fascinating that their ambassador to Ukraine under the Obama administration and for a period under the Trump administration seemed overly concerned with the communications of a lot of people, their social media. I was on that list as well. Can you give us an update on that? I follow you and I know you've been all over this story. What's going on with that and how serious was this? Well, it began, it looks like, back in March of last year when there was increasing pressure on

her politically because of her evidently anti-Trump activities at the Ukrainian embassy there. So our information is that she directed her staff to start monitoring people that evidently were criticizing her, given the nature of the list. You're on it. Sean Hannity's on it. Rudy Giuliani's on it. Donald Trump Jr.'s on it. He mentioned her around that time as well in his Twitter feed. And the problem is you can't have government officials, certainly in the embassy of Ukraine, start monitoring even public statements by Americans and start compiling records on them. It violates the Privacy Act, in addition to who knows how many other laws. And it was such a big project, Dan. They asked for help from the State Department here in D.C.,

and that's when they said, you can't do this. It's against the law. So we don't know if it stopped or not. We started asking questions under FOIA. We alerted people that this issue was out there. Certainly, she was questioned on it. She denied doing what we alleged, although she kind of admitted there was concern and they wanted to monitor what was going on.

So we've asked for the documents, and sure enough, the deep state State Department has ignored our requests. And so we've had to sue in federal court. And it's just really interesting. The State Department is slow rolling virtually anything that might help President Trump in his impeachment fight. Yeah, you know, what's fascinating about this case is there's this constant cry by the left that, oh, this deep state stuff, it's all a conspiracy theory. Yet the work you've done at Judicial Watch, which has been incredible, and a lot of others, John Solomon, Sarah Carter, Sean Hannity and others, we keep being proven right on this case.

And the actual deep staters claiming we're the conspiracy theorists keep face planting and looking foolish in the end. I'm just curious, how did you guys come across this monitoring list with Yovanovitch? Because I believe there was a lot going on in Ukraine and this is just the tip of the iceberg. But was this in just the course of one of the judicial watch foyers you guys do for government accountability? How did you come across this story? We had sources. So this was a source story. This is reporting, the sort of reporting that the media used to pretend to be interested in doing. And so we followed up with Freedom Information Act investigation. We know Congress has the same information. They asked questions

about it. So these documents are sitting right over there in the State Department. They could have been released back in October when we first asked for for it but of course now it's january and the nothing's still been released and in the meantime this ambassador is being promoted as a hero as opposed to someone who may have been involved in efforts to thwart the president's policies in ukraine and certainly the allegation is based on the reporting we have is that she was telling people to start monitoring Americans who may have been critical of her. And these were the search terms they wanted to tie the monitoring to. I think it was Giuliani, Biden, Soros, and of course, Yovanovitch. And they were using this CrowdTangle source. and CrowdTangle is the program that was being used.

It's not readily accessible to the public, at least in the professional version of it. And of course, you know, the source operation is involved in helping create the group that doles out permissions to use it. doles out permissions to use it. Do you have any information at Judicial Watch about the infamous do not prosecute information, whether it was a list, a letter, a statement? But John Solomon has some pretty extensive reporting on this involving George Kent and Marie Yovanovitch. And Solomon has been very well sourced in the beginning, I believe is yet to be proven wrong on just about anything involving this.

But this is a fascinating angle, too, because according to Solomon's reporting, some of the pressure applied by Yovanovitch and Kent in Ukraine from our embassy overseas on their soil was to lay off prosecutions of people who were connected to liberal mega donor George Soros through groups and through surrogate groups he had. That's kind of a big story. And the story, if true, a lot of evidence indicates that it is, that used to be the kind of scoop media folks used to relish. Now, again, you're called a conspiracy theorist for just exposing the truth. You guys have any information on that? Yeah, we've sued for records about it. Yanavich is denied saying, denied that she presented a list to anyone in the Ukrainian government. And the official said, look, you know, I don't know what the translation was, list or whatever.

All I know is she told me that I couldn't prosecute or I shouldn't be prosecuting these folks associated with the Soros group, for instance, and some others in Ukraine. And that's why we've asked for documents about that. And once again, the State Department slow rolling these documents. You know, what's happening now, Dan, is that you've got the State Department sitting on a mother load of documents that would expose that the president was right to be concerned about Ukraine. There was corruption there and they're slow rolling it on purpose. For instance, we asked for the Biden, for documents about the firing of Shokin at the admitted behest of Joe Biden. We've sued back last year about it. They told us they can't even finish searching for the documents until the end of January. This is what we're facing here. And the president, if I were him,

I'd order the State Department to stop with the gainsmanship and release the records immediately. And he's got to save himself in this regard, in my view, because relying on the agencies to do the right thing, that's not going to work. Now, for the audience, I know a lot of you are already familiar with the backstory. Forgive me, I jumped kind of right in with tom assuming all of you know the backstory here but really ukraine is there's a lot that happened in ukraine in the last election there are allegations of coordination between former dnc officials and key ukrainians in an effort to interfere in the 2016 election against donald trump of course many of you know about the allegations against joe biden as tom just indicated on tape pressuring for a prosecutor to be fired, who is in the prosecutors investigating a company, Burisma, his son is working for, for a very lucrative package to sit on a board.

I've hypothesized, Tom, for a while that the attacks, the current attacks on the president, they're all interrelated, these attacks. But the latest attacks are just as Tucker Carlson says often, you know, an effort to accuse the Republicans and the president of what the Democrats are actually doing themselves. And I believe this is all a myth, a fairy tale, these invented quid pro quo charges to distract from the Joe Biden, Biden family malfeasance and some of the malfeasance in Ukraine. And one of them, which I want to go to now is, you know, we already have, Tom, I know you followed Spygate extensively. Spygate, I believe, is connected to the Ukrainian scandal because one of the players in it, Nellie Orr, who was working for Fusion GPS, hired by Hillary Clinton to gin up information on Trump, largely which turned out to be false, has already admitted on the record that she got information from a Ukrainian parliamentarian. Now, he denies it, Leshenko, but she's never corrected her statement as far as I know. I mean, isn't that the very definition of foreign collusion or am I missing something? Oh, you're exactly right. And we have the documents Nellie Orr laundered through her

husband to the FBI and the Justice Department to try to get Trump, Ukraine appears 100 plus times in those documents. So Ukraine, people should remember, Ukraine was the fulcrum upon which Russiagate was used to try to take down President Trump. Manafort had these connections in Ukraine with pro-Russian forces. The anti-Russian forces in Ukraine hated that. And so they saw a political reason to collude with Trump's opponents, Hillary Clinton, to try to make Trump look bad by exposing Manafort. And then the Department of Justice and the FBI and Mueller to take out Trump further wanted to use the Ukraine connections that Manafort had, information supplied to them by the Ukrainian government in part, to take out Trump. So the idea that Ukraine had nothing to do with 2016 is fantasy. And the media was even pushing us.

We just got documents down. You wouldn't believe them, Dan. I've been calling you Don, I just realized. Everybody does it. It's the Bon Gino. It screws up everyone. I've only known you forever, but don't worry about it. Yeah, that's fine. So the associated i i make no apologies i do the same my kids so the associated press they have two reporters go over meet with um andrew weissman's gang

and weissman himself they give weissman the code to the storage locker, Paul Manafort. And they had the Ukraine ledger and the AP was pushing, literally the reporters were pushing for a prosecution, it looks like, of Manafort based on his Ukrainian connections. So you had the reporters pushing this Ukraine angle, you had the Ukrainians pushing the Ukraine angle. And then of course you had Hillary Clinton working directly with Ukrainians to go after Trump. But now we're not allowed to talk about Ukraine because it gets in the way of the impeachment narrative. And the fact that President Trump was asking the right questions and is being targeted for asking questions. In my view, this whole impeachment sham, the coup attack, whatever you want to call it, it also is an obstruction of justice because they

want to freeze the Justice Department from going after Biden, from going after Clinton, and the rest of those involved in the illicit spying on President Trump. And the fact they're getting the time of day in the Senate to me is just an outrage. Now, you know, Tom, I couldn't agree with you more on what I find particularly frustrating. I think your assessment at the end there about the freeze portion of what you said is absolutely accurate and very precise. And it's true what what they did work. And this is what I find frustrating.

I'm hoping it doesn't work over the long term. I'm hoping President Trump is reelected. Eventually, the truth comes out and justice is served. All we have is hope. I mean, we sound hyperbolic or dramatic, but, you know, I love the country and I'm just not willing to give up. But what they did in conjunction with the media, who is entirely abdicated their role, if it was not for organizations like Judicial Watch, excuse me, where you are now, JudicialWatch.org, folks, if you want to check them out, we would never have had the truth here because the media has shown a complete lack of, and not only a lack of, I'm being nice, a willingness to be, Tom, and correct me if you don't agree, to be part of the scandal, to actively advocate on behalf of the debunked conspiracy theories with no evidence, and then in turn refuting some of their own reporting i'll just give you two quick examples politico i know you know the story it's like beating a dead

horse but some of the audience may not politico's ken vogel already reported about over a year ago about the ukrainian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election anybody can go and look at that article now and yet the media acts like it doesn't exist and it's never been rescinded. And secondly, with regards to Spygate, it's interesting. If you go back and look at CNN, Jim Sciutto and Pamela Brown already wrote articles about the Obama administration's efforts to basically work with the United Kingdom and others to gather information about the Trump team. I mean, these are two textbook examples by liberal leaning outlets of foreign collusion.

And yet the media, Tom, acts like none of this exists anymore and just moves along and wipes their hands of it. It's amazing. Well, in many ways, they are co-conspirators. I talked about the Associated Press was actually activist in terms of trying to get Manafort and obviously Trump prosecuted and Trump embarrassed. To a degree, they knowingly published classified information, illegally leaked to them. They're co-conspirators. There is no exemption in the law, as best I can tell, for media publishing classified information. It's illegal for that to happen, too.

And so they're witnesses to these crimes in the in the least they're witnesses. And I really think the media these days to a degree, we should just understand their liberal advocacy groups that sometimes do journalism. And when it comes to reporting on the swamp, Judicial Watch does as much significant journalism as the New York Times and the Washington Post. In many ways, it's more honest. And certainly, we don't rely on illegal leaks to get the information. You know, and Tom, one of the things I think the general public doesn't know about your group, Judicial Watch, is it's not a partisan group. You guys have been going after government malfeasance and administrations that are Republican and Democrat for a long people don't understand that and when I first met you I kind of did uh some homework on what you guys have been you guys have been involved in government

malfeasance for a long time you know so this isn't about I know everybody associates that uh you guys with partisanship now only because it's the Trump era and they want to attack you but your group really is a government accountability group. It always has been. I'm not wrong in my assessment, right? I mean, the people can just look it up. No one sued the Trump administration, dare I say it, more than Judicial Watch. I mean, that's a fact. I mean, we're suing the Trump administration. We've complained about the lack of transparency by the agencies run by people that we all kind of like generally or personally. But when it comes to transparency and obeying the rule of law on the Freedom of Information Act, the Trump administration in many ways has been worse than the Obama administration.

And I'm sure the president's furious about it, but that's the reality. They're protecting Hillary Clinton. They're protecting the Obama gang. And right now, they're protecting Joe Biden and helping move along this impeachment effort, this seditious impeachment effort, this coup to remove the president. Tom, on that note, because I know the president's trying to get to the bottom of this, a lot of this stuff. I hate that term. It's so it's beyond cliched, hate that term. It's so it's beyond cliched, but I know he is. Do you, do you feel as I feel that this is really, I mean, this is the epitome of the deep state that he has entrenched bureaucrats.

Let's put skin on anybody can say deep state, but let's put skin on the bones here and talk about what it really is. I believe having worked in the government myself and having seen it sadly up, up close and personal, you have these bureaucrats that think their job is some kind of a sinecure, like it's like a fiefdom, and their department is their department, and they're going to run it, and they really don't care. And the president, although very powerful, obviously, he's the president of the United States, what I think people aren't aware of, and you better than anyone being at Judicial Watch, the president doesn't have the time to follow up on every single foyer you guys put in and every single department head of every single cabinet agency. He's relying on surrogates

in these agencies, the delegation of executive power to say, hey, get this out. Let's clean this mess up. But I guess what I'm asking you is, are these deep staters, are they slow walking all of this, just waiting for President Trump, hopefully to lose this election to celebrate and say, look, we got him. I mean, we're just going to ignore this guy hoping he gets, you know, he doesn't get reelected in 2020 and we're just going to wait him out. Yeah, there's that casual sedition, as I call it, everyday actions by members of the permanent government, the alt-government, as I call it. They see themselves as a government and waiting for their next friendly Democrat or leftist to come in.

But the leadership of the agencies needs to take ownership on this issue. They all know about this FOIA issue. They all know about this transparency issue. And they don't want to take the strong action necessary to confront the agency's slow rolling of it. These are political decisions by the leadership of the agencies not to follow the law and obstruct our efforts. I mean, we were in court less than, that was about three weeks ago, Dan, and there were six lawyers from the Justice Department and State Department in there defending Hillary Clinton, trying to shut down our case on the emails. This is a decision that, you know, Attorney General Barr needs to take ownership here. Secretary Pompeo needs to take ownership here.

Every time they talk and they make excellent presentations, you know, but we see the results on the ground. We're the rubber meets the road, And I'm not seeing much in the way of results. You know, on that topic, if we can kind of switch gears to that. So John Huber, the United States attorney who I don't know what he was supposed to be doing, investigating something seems to. Yeah, exactly. The audience is saying that, too. That's the problem. He was supposed to be investigating the government malfeasance and the Clinton probe and everything else seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. No one knows what he was doing. But there was recently a story that, oh, you know, don't worry, the Huber didn't the immunity deals. Do you think there's ever going to be any justice in this and a real sincere top to bottom review of what happened here in this email debacle with Hillary Clinton? Not unless the president directly intervenes and appoints a special counsel. I mean, one of the outrages of this Justice Department is its continued defense

of Hillary Clinton. It's non-investigation of the various issues that this Justice Department is its continued defense of Hillary Clinton. It's non-investigation of the various issues that have not only that not only arose during the Obama administration, but have continued to arise under the current administration. We found more evidence of criminal activity and they're defending her. That's no there's no no doubt that they have zero interest in relooking at this case, despite the public interest in making sure there's some accountability. And if I were the president, I'd just say, look, you know, I'm going to appoint a special counsel. You guys obviously are afraid to deal with the bureaucracy here. And we just need to we need to reassure the public there's a fair investigation here. And there's more and more evidence it was unfair and it was a rigged investigation.

And there's more and more evidence it was unfair and it was a rigged investigation. The same time they were protecting Hillary, they were bending over backwards to target Trump illegally. And you can't you can't understand the Russiagate scandal without understanding what was at stake for the Clintons and the whole gang there on the emails. And as I said, it was about it's about freezing the Justice Department. But also, you know, unfortunately, the Justice Department is happy to be frozen when it comes to Hillary Clinton. Yeah, I just realized I lost myself before I didn't follow up with the audience. That freezing part is right, folks. I mean, what I think what Tom is suggesting and what I agree with him on is this effort by the Democrats with their media allies to constantly counterattack and accuse the Republicans of what they're doing. In fact, because Republicans, some up on the Hill who don't have the guts to stand up, some do.

There are a lot with the cojones to do it. Some don't. They stop. Instead of looking into Ukraine, which we Tom and I discussed before, the Hillary email investigation where we have known malfeasance. Again, the degree of criminality be open to investigation we'll see if there is or isn't but it's stopped because they fall into this media trap of oh my gosh you'll be accused of being political or now you got to defend yourself against I guess it's the best way to say it is you know I box for a long time and they say the best defense in boxing is a good offense because when you're punching the other guy you don't have to worry about your defense. And this is what the Democrats do. And the fact that we have Republicans not willing to stand fast outside of the Devin Nunes and others, I think you're right, Tom. It freezes them in place and it's really disappointing.

I just want to double down on something you said there, because I agree that you can't understand Spygate, Russiagate, Collusiongate without understanding the Hillary email scandal. And one of the things that I've been talking about in my show often is, I don't really believe the Hillary email scandals about protecting Hillary. I never did.

The media is not really crazy about Hillary. I believe it's always been about protecting Obama. And therefore they have to protect Hillary. And the reason's always been about protecting Obama and therefore they have to protect Hillary. And the reason is Obama was one of the people emailing Hillary Clinton. And one of the things we know from our experience in government, mine specifically, is Barack Obama has a BlackBerry that had to have been whitelisted for Hillary Clinton's email. Somebody had to whitelist that email so he could get emails from her. I want to know who on the staff, Obama's staff, said it was okay for Barack Obama to email a Clinton dot whatever email and not a State Department dot US or whatever it is email.

Somebody had to say it, Barack Obama's high level staff. It's okay for you, the President of the United States, to email Hillary on her private server. There's no way around it. That's what I think they're really protecting with this guy. I don't think it's even about Hillary. I think it's about Obama. Well, I've always said it's about, it's a Hillary Clinton scandal. It's an FBI scandal. It's a DOJ scandal. It's a State Department scandal. And yes, it's Obama White House scandal. You don't need to speculate, Dan. We know there are 19 email communications because we are litigating the issue between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that have been completely withheld from us and the American

people. Many of those emails took place, were sent and received around what time frame? The Benghazi attack. Secondly, Judicial Watch recently obtained through discovery evidence that the Obama White House Counsel's Office directed the State Department to lie about Hillary Clinton's emails to a requester who was looking for her emails. So the Obama White House is implicated in this scandal. And you're exactly right. That's one. It helps explain why Hillary's protected, because they're not only protecting her, they're protecting themselves.

I mean, the court in our case in granting us discovery, he said, I want to know a few things here. I want to know, obviously, if Hillary Clinton used this to avoid FOIA, because this is a Benghazi case. We want to know. I want to know if the Justice Department and the State Department engaged in misconduct with the court here and trying to shut this case down before they told us about the emails. He wants to know if the emails are out there elsewhere. And fourthly, he wants to know, again, if Benghazi is one of the reasons they didn't want this information coming out. He's on to them. He's excoriating not the Justice Department of Obama, but this Justice Department that's still playing games in this area. I could go into detail after detail about the gamesmanship here. But your listeners would be outraged to learn.

Not only are they coming to court to protect Hillary, but they're colluding with her lawyers against judicial watch in this litigation. I mean, we're not just facing the Justice Department, State Department. They're on the same side as Hillary. I mean, it's like they have a joint defense agreement. We're talking to Tom Fitton. The president gets frustrated because I'm sure he knows about stuff like this. He just can't believe it either. No, I can only imagine what an outsider like President Trump coming into this inefficient

government morass of swamp rats, what he must be thinking when he's sitting in these rooms. It's got to be astonishing. We're talking to Tom Fitton. He is at Tom Fitton on Twitter, T-O-M-F-I-T-T-O-N. Please follow Tom. His videos are great. Judicialwatch.org as well. And his book is Clean House. So Tom, one other thing on the Hillary investigation. I didn't plan on asking a lot of questions on this, but your organization, you're fascinating. You're a library of knowledge on it. And if you don't recall the details on this, that's fine. Because I'm kind of wishy-washy on it too. But one of the things I always found fascinating about this

is I believe the Obama administration never claimed executive privilege on those emails. And again, if you don't remember the details, I'm kind of fuzzy on them too. But if I remember correctly, they didn't do that. that because if they did that they would have had a claim that the emails had classified information so they did some kind of like presidential end around am i do you remember this because i i'm just thinking of that as we talk about obama and hillary they're claiming what's called presidential communications privilege which is a subset of executive

privilege and that privilege can be asserted whether or not there's classified information. Okay. So communications between the president and his close advisors is, is covered by executive privilege generally. I don't know if it's covered here. Yeah. Yeah.

They didn't want to admit there was classified information. I specifically remember something about this on my show I covered a while ago, but let me move on. Cause I just got a couple more things for you. And. And I really appreciate it. You know, you're onto something here. We have testimony that the State Department was purposely underclassifying information in the Clinton email cache because for obvious reasons, the more classified information in there, the greater the pressure for a prosecution. So, you know, I've been doing this a long time and I remember reading a lot of Clinton emails

and wondering myself, why is it they're releasing this? This is typically classified. Sure enough, there were concerns internally that was purposeful to protect her. Yeah, which is fascinating given the foil effect and the contract contrast with the excuse me with the spy gate case where they're over classifying things like the price of a table remember the fbi table when andy mccabe they had to classify the price of the table and everybody was like wait what do you classify so really it's just fascinating it makes for a nice um segue so again i do appreciate your time but just on the spy Spygate case here. So Jim Comey, the level of Jim Comey malfeasance and misfeasance is just astounding. I mean,

we've had this story this week about him maybe getting duped by fake Russian intelligence, duped into giving a press conference, which may have altered the trajectory of the election. This is obviously a story nobody wants out there. As I covered on my show this week, I don't even think the Trump team wants it out there because nobody wants the story out there that Jim Comey's press conference may have altered the election. I don't believe it did. I mean, Hillary Clinton couldn't find Wisconsin. But one of the things we were read into by a really quality source a while ago was that Jim Comey absolutely no later than January of 2017, is briefed about interviews on Steele's subsources. Now, this has come out recently in the Horowitz Report as well. And my sources are telling me that he categorically knows, as of January of 2017, that the entire Spygate case is based on a hoax, which is false.

They've interviewed Steele's subsources. They know it's false. So I guess the question to you and kind of open-ended, I'll throw it out there, is what the hell were they doing, DOJ and FBI,

pushing for a special counsel, or DOJ, I should say, specifically Rosenstein, pushing for a special counsel with Bob Mueller? If everybody read in on this, pretty much already knows the case is a complete hoax,

that this Russian collusion thing is an Aesop's fable. Well, there's no, as Horowitz said, there's no reasonable explanation for what went on here. But what he refused to say is that there was a political effort to abuse this process to get Trump. I mean, Comey himself said, as he described it, then President-elect Trump in that spy operation against him when he went and ambushed him with the dossier, it was salacious and unverified. The documents we have that we obtained long before the IG report started talking about it shows that they were desperate to get ore because they had fired steel. They were using ore to get to steel. And what was that desperation flowing from? Because nothing was checking out.

They were desperate to try to prove the case that there was this Russia collusion. It wasn't checking out. That explains why they were using ore in such an extraordinary and improper role as the link to steel and people like Simpson and his wife Nellie, because it wasn't checking out. It didn't check out in 2016. They fired Steele. It still wasn't checking out, as the IG report highlighted, yet it was still being used falsely to try to remove the president from office and try to, as you point out, justify the appointment of a special counsel. It's all part of the coup.

You know, look, the special counsel, you have to remember who appointed special counsel, Rod Rosenstein. And he had a conversation, I call it the seven days in May in 2017. conversation, I call it the seven days in May in 2017. The president had fired Comey, and they went crazy. McCabe was angry. Rosenstein was angry. And they had a discussion. And what was three things in that discussion? It was all about removing the president. We're a wire on him. Let's try to catch him in the Oval Office through an illegal wire. Let's lawlessly invoke the 25th Amendment and go around and organize a coup against them, practically speaking. And let's appoint a special counsel to try to destroy them. They didn't say it like that, but that was the context.

Now, of those three things, what happened? The special counsel was appointed. It flowed out of this effort to overthrow the president. It wasn't a law enforcement action. Yeah, I mean, Tom, it's only the biggest political scandal in American history. And really, if not for the work of Judicial Watch, again, folks, JudicialWatch.org. If you want to check out more of Tom and his organization's work over there, please do. And at Tom Fitton is his Twitter handle.

I really without you guys and some of the other entrepreneurial reporters out there who decided to act like journalists, we'd be lost. other entrepreneurial reporters out there who decided to act like journalists, we'd be lost. And, you know, Tom, there've been a lot of terrible, I mean, a lot of terrible reporters on the left-leaning media that's done an awful job promoting conspiracy theories here, you know, Brian Stelter and that crowd. But there have been some on the left that have actually done their homework. I mean, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, a little bit of trouble this week, but even T.A. Franks a bit at the washington post who's kind of shown an interest there have been some who understand i think what's going on here but what i find the most interesting angle to this case is these were people reporters who supposedly years ago you know were supposed to be fighting for the little guy and the truth and against big

monopolies and government monoliths and you know this was the aaron brockovich crowd we're against the big corporations and now all of a sudden you have this monolithic intelligence enterprise being run by John Brennan. We know was up to six different degrees of malfeasance, whether it was the Iran deal, spying on the Senate. I mean, these are facts. These are not conspiracy theories that have been reported even by left-leaning outlets, and they don't seem to care. And one of the big angles of this that i i'd like to get your opinion on is one of the ongoing evergreen theories in my show based on a whole lot of evidence by the way is although the fbi continued the spying operation on trump after they

know unquestionably that the dossier is a hoax they know it no later than January 2017. I believe, and again, based on a solid pile of evidence, that the FBI was misled initially into starting this thing. And the reason I say that, and I'd love to hear your opinion, is Brennan has constantly lied to the American public saying he hadn't seen the dossier until December. Well, we know that's not true because Brennan briefs Harry Reid up in the U.S. Senate in August, which is obviously before December. And the information Harry Reid sends on to the FBI to spur them on to investigating the Trump team in this letter is only information that appeared in the dossier conveniently after Brennan's briefing. So two and two don't fit together. And I'll just throw one more point

on this again on my general theory that Brennan misled the FBI through Harry Reid to start this. When Lisa Page, in what I believe is a rare moment of honesty up on Capitol Hill, is questioned about the use of Christopher Steele by potentially the CIA and Brennan, by Mark Meadows, Page seems genuinely confused. I mean, she really seems shocked. No, no, that's not possible. Steele was our guy. And Meadows is like, well, you know, he was talking to multiple people. She's like, well, we don't know that. And she seems confused. Do you buy into that, that Brennan could have been the puppet master here and could have been using some of Steele's source network? And that's why he keeps lying about, I didn't see step back further. I think it's curious and we need to figure out who was operating prior to the opening Crossfire Hurricane. Because remember, Page was targeted for spying in April, I think, of 2015 or 16, just a month after it was announced, long before Crossfire Hurricane. I think it goes, I call it the self-licking ice cream cone. You say the FBI was fooled. I think they were using their own sources or variations of their sources, like Misfood. Who knows who he was working for, but he was probably a Western intelligence asset. I think there's credible information there. Also, I have to say, it does come back to Hillary. I see Sidney Blumenthal, Cody Scheer behind a lot of this. And it's just they're laundering and relaundering the information.

When you look at the dossier, it had a thousand fathers. You had it wandered through McCain. You had it laundered, as you point out, you've got the Brennan connections. You had it pushed indirectly through Halper. And obviously they were pushing it. Then on top of that, you had the State Department helping write portions of the dossier with Blumenthal, Scheer and Steele. Tom, can you just quickly explain to the audience who Blumenthal and Scheer are? Because some of them may not know, because this is an important point you're making here. Your point is that Hillary Clinton's fingerprints are on this, and Blumenthal, go ahead.

Yeah, this is a Blumenthal special. I'm convinced. I think when all the evidence comes out, you'll see a Blumenthal special here. Sidney Blumenthal is a Clinton associate. He worked in the Clinton White House, a disreputable figure that even President Obama didn't want with Hillary Clinton at the State Department. So you'll see in her emails that you have these secret communications with with Blumenthal that were so sensitive that when she forwarded them on, she made it clear she didn't want his name attached to the analyses he was providing. attached to the analyses he was providing. And it turns out he was involved with the Cary State Department in pushing this Russiagate smear along the lines that Steele had. I don't think it was coincidental that Blumenthal was pushing the same story, according to Jonathan Weiner, who worked

at the State Department and was like Steele's handler, practically speaking. He saw similarities between what Weiner was, what St Steal was saying and what Blumenthal was saying. That makes perfect sense because Steal was working for Clinton campaign and the DNC. They were all using the same sources. They were all using the same information. And it all comes back to the Clinton campaign brilliantly in the sense they got the attention they wanted, creating this information to justify protecturally the FBI targeting Trump. And of course, the FBI is more than willing to use this information, too, because Comey and McCabe and company hated Trump and were sympathetic to keeping Hillary in power or putting her back in power. Folks, that's absolutely critical.

or putting her back in power. Folks, that's a critical point. And another thing is you had President Obama involved in the campaign in a way that no incumbent president has been involved in a presidential campaign in 100 years. I want you to think back to recent history. Incumbent presidents weren't involved, practically speaking, in the political campaigns of their successors until Obama. in the political campaigns of their successors until Obama. So he had a lot of writing on keeping Hillary, putting Hillary in office. And so it helps explain the White House involvement. I want it that he wants to know everything. He was briefed on the dossier literally the day before

Comey went to target Trump with that false flag operation where he said he was going in there to brief him when in fact he was going in there to spy on him personally and directly. I tell you, it gets to so many angles to this case. That's a fascinating one that's left underreported in my show, not elsewhere, but the Blumenthal sheer angle. Those are consigliere's of Hillary Clinton, folks. I'm glad Tom brought that up because I haven't spoken about that in a long time. Tom, exit question. You've been very generous with your time here. Again, we're talking to Tom Fitton. He's at Tom Fitton, F-I-T-T-O-N, on Twitter. Follow him. Pick up his book, please. Clean House. It's really great. Amazon, Barnes & Noble. We'll put the link up and go to judicialwatch.org. So we've seen some breaking news about Halper, who is the spy. You

know, they love to play the euphemisms game, confidential humans or whatever. I don't really. He was a spy. It's obvious. Was spying for the FBI. And one of the stories Sarah Carter reported, and we've been covering for months now, Rowan Scarborough at The Washington Times has been all over this as well, is the Office of Net Assessments, which is an office within the Pentagon, apparently paid Halper upwards of a million dollars in contracts. You know, I ask you this, and it may be slightly rhetorical, but I'm just kind of looking for

your opinion on it. Do you think it's possible that U.S. taxpayer dollars were paying an intelligence asset, notably a spy, to spy on the opposition political campaign while the Obama administration was in power? Could this even have happened in the United States? Oh, sure. We sued for the documents. We represent a whistleblower who was complaining about Halper's contracts.

I mean, he thought something was up. Is it the one who's been attacked, by the way, and accused of all kinds of nonsense? Yeah, Mr. Lovinger, he had a security clearance pulled because he was asking the wrong questions, it looks like to us. But but look, the FBI was paying Steele in 2016. We got the document. This is what bothers me about the I.G. The I.G. whole process is such an abuse. They sat on this information for years, literally two years. The FBI met with Steele 13 times during the campaign. Our documents showed that they paid him 11 of those times.

Now we know the detail, tens of thousands of dollars. The FBI was paying Steele at the same time the Clinton campaign was paying Stee steel. It was a joint operation. So, I mean, yeah, your tax dollars were not only being used to spy on Trump, but they were also being used to pay the source that gave you the fraudulent information to spy

on Trump. I don't know, you know, what are we doing? And this is why the president's getting impeached because he started asking questions about it. He calls the Ukrainians up. What happened in 2016? What about the Clinton emails? What about Biden? And he gets impeached. Tom, I got to tell you, I've known you for a long time. I've never seen you this pissed off. This is great. I love this. Yeah, yeah. Well, it worked. We're 40 minutes in. This is an outrage.

He's being targeted. No, I agree with you, brother, 100%. Listen, it's a look squirrel thing. No, I know, it always has been. Tom, listen, thank you very much. I went a little over with you. You were just, you were fascinating on the Blumenfall stuff. Yeah, I appreciate it, buddy.

So thanks again. We'll be back. Hopefully you'll come back and visit us again sometime soon. Again, folks, Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch. Thanks it, buddy. So thanks again. We'll be back. Hopefully you'll come back and visit us again sometime soon. Again, folks, Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch. Thanks again, Tom. Have a great day. Appreciate your time. You're welcome. Thank you. All right, folks, as you heard, that was Tom Fitton again, JudicialWatch.org. He is at Tom Fitton on Twitter. Go check him out. Really a fascinating interview. I think the big takeaways from there are, that is, that's been an underreported component of even my show, as well as the Sidney Blumenthal angle.

You're always looking for a connection between Hillary Clinton and this scandal. Hillary Clinton's like right-hand guy, Sid Blumenthal was feeding Christopher Steele-like information into the State Department. It's that simple. It's not that I forget it. It's just, there's so much going on.

So that was a really great interview. I really appreciate your time, folks. Thanks again for tuning in. I will see you all tomorrow on Friday. Thanks again. Appreciate your time with this. Please spread this interview, share it on Reddit and subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Bongino. Take care. You just heard the Dan Bongino show. You can also get Dan's podcasts on iTunes or SoundCloud. And follow Dan on Twitter 24-7 at DBongino.