The Dan Bongino Show - The Obama Connection No One Is Talking About | Episode 95

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Vince deep dives into an astonishing detail inside the declassified Durham annex; Trump reconsiders recess appointments, and we explain what that could mean. Office of Special Counsel Launches Investigation Into Anti-Trump Prosecutor Jack Smith ⁠https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ex-trump-prosecutor-jack-smith-under-investigation-government-watchdog-office-special-counsel⁠ Jeanine Pirro Confirmed As Top Federal Prosecutor For The Nation’s Capital ⁠https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pirro-confirmed-d-c-u-s-attorney-amid-partisan-clash-dem-nominee-blockade-continues⁠ Sponsors: American Financing - American Financing.net/Vince Bon Charge - ⁠boncharge.com⁠ and use the code VINCE Blackout Coffee - BlackoutCoffee.com/Vince Jacked Up Fitness - Getjackedup.com Code: Vince Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everybody, welcome to Vince. As always, it is so good to be with you, the best damn audience in media. Nice to see you. Today from Florida. Yeah, I'm down in Florida. We're down in what Bongino built, the great Silverlock Studios all week long.

I had a fantastic week last week. Thank you for your patience with me as we got to take a nice break as a family, take a vacation. It was just, it was a great American vacation. We drove down to Georgia. We're doing a lot of driving. We drove down to Georgia. We were down in the Powder Springs, Atlanta area, visiting some great friends.

Did that for a few days. Then when visited my family on the west coast of Florida, that was a lot of fun. And now here, we're going to spend a lot of time here, spend a lot of time with you. Again, thank you very much, guys, for giving me the chance. You know what I learned a lot this week, actually, about the audience. And the thing I learned is that people were eager to see me come back, which I'm very grateful for.

Thank you for that. I was really encouraged and uplifted by that, all of the various words of affirmation. Also, the silver alerts and the amber alerts, everything that was going. Where the hell is Vince? Nobody tells me anything. Vince left?

Where is he? I'm here, don't worry. I'm back. And we got the radio show coming up today too. Jim is gonna be very grateful for that. Producer Jim is gonna be very grateful that I'm back in the saddle. Now we got a lot to get to.

So over the weekend, I must have read the Durham annex like 30 times straight through, 30 times. Now, for those of you who don't know, the Durham annex is the gigantic piece of classified information at the end of the Durham report that was finally released. So coming up, I'm gonna go through this with you.

I've got some details on it. Things I think you haven't heard anywhere else is my suspicion. And you're gonna be the most informed on this subject than any human could possibly be. That's ahead here on this edition of Vince. And let me start by asking you this though. What if you could delay your next two mortgage payments?

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Well, good, I'm here for the info too. And I'm here for you guys, thank you. All right, we've got the Durham report. We've got the Durham report, the classified annex. I need you to understand how crazy this thing is. I have been emphasizing a piece of footage to you that the rest of the media has completely forgotten about and I know you haven't because again we've talked about it a lot of times back in may the

deputy director of the FBI quick chat who is that anybody any guesses the deputy director of the FBI goes on the fox news channel and he announces something very provocative, very mysterious. It's that the FBI has discovered a room full of documents that were meant to be kept from Americans, from the proper and ethical leadership of the FBI. Yeah. So here's what we had. I'm gonna go back to May here. Here's Dan Bongino cut four. This is Dan Bongino on Fox talking about the room and the burn bags. Did you read the stuff that's coming out?

But does he still have loyalists in the building? Because when I hear the FBI director saying, you guys are finding boxes that are hidden. Okay, how does that happen in the bureau? Well, we were there a couple of weeks, and luckily there were a lot of people up there who grabbed us by the arm the minute we came in and said, thank you for being here.

You know, we need to talk. There are people there who are really horrified at what happened. And there was a room, and we found stuff, a lot of stuff. A hidden room. I wouldn't call it hidden, but hidden from us at least and not mentioned to us. And then we found stuff in there

and a lot of it's from the Comey era. And we are working our damn this right now to declassify. And just so you know, because I get the public, I totally understand people saying, well, do it now there the process is not all the information is ours to declassify some as other intelligence agencies it's not we literally can't do it once that gets done and that gets out there and you read some of the stuff we found that by the way was not processed through the normal procedure digitizing it putting in FBI records we found it in bags hiding under Jim Coney's FBI. You're gonna be stunned.

Well, we've learned a lot since then. We've learned a lot since then about what Dan is talking about. A lot. In fact, this weekend, as they released this Durham annex, a classified intelligence report attached to the end of that Durham report that was looking into the whole Trump-Russia collusion hoax to begin with. One of the details we've learned is that these documents that are just declassified were apparently in that room. One of the documents in the burn bags that were in that room was the Durham annex,

which this strikes me as completely crazy. Look, this look at this Fox News report, Patel found thousands of sensitive Trump Russia probe docs inside of burn bags in a secret room at the FBI. And this Fox report last week says that sources say that that multiple burn bags were found and filled with thousands of documents. sources telling Fox News Digital that one of the documents FBI officials found in a burn bag was the classified annex

to former special counsel John Durham's final report, which includes the underlying intelligence that he reviewed. I got a lot of questions about this, and hopefully one day I can get some answers directly from Dan on this subject. But one, are you telling me that the only copy of the classified Durham annex was inside of a burn bag, smuggled away to a room somewhere at the FBI that our chance of seeing the Durham annex

may have disappeared entirely if that burn bag was brought to its final destination, which is to burn the underlying documents. Also, a room full of burn bags. For those of you who have ever dealt with classified information, who've had to deal with this, who understand this system of how you how you use burn bags. It's pretty straightforward. In the government, if you work in a classified environment and you're handling classified paperwork,

at the conclusion of using that classified paperwork, you can't take it with you, you can't leave the building with it, you can't leave it next to your classic Corvette somewhere in a garage in Delaware, not allowed to do that. What you do is you take the document and then you insert it into either a classified grade shredding machine, something that the intelligence community is certified as good to go to destroy classified documents, or you put it in a burn bag and then every so often somebody comes around, the burn bag janitor comes around, collects

all the documents and then burns them all incinerates them Orwell style drops them into the memory hole and makes the documents go away burn bags that didn't happen here why is it that you had all these burn bags full of really important documents that were in a room somewhere and weren't destroyed and were kept. You know, I do think as Dan mentioned in that May clip, clearly these were documents that were attempted to be destroyed in order to prevent a future Trump administration or any decent person from seeing them, one. But two, it does

suggest that somebody on the inside wanted these documents to survive, even though they were about to be destroyed. And they kept them. And now they've been discovered and now they've been shared. Remember, when Dan said that in May, there was a lot of bitching and moaning, oh, stop telling us about things that you found, just release it. Why are we hearing this? And people were treating this like it was theater, like that it was nothing. It was just meant to be some sort of breadcrumb to kind of like keep people like vaguely interested. Oh yeah, no, we're doing something. And meanwhile, not really doing anything at all. Well, it turns out they

were doing something that Dura Manix that they found in those burn bags. Well, now it's been publicly released and the details are jaw-dropping. The details are jaw-dropping. Matt Taibbi had an excellent summary this weekend of kind of the top line items of what was in the Durham annex. But in this annex, he said that one, first and foremost, there are three elements here.

One, it establishes that Hillary and her team apparently hoped to deflect from her email scandal. By now you know that. In fact, that was in the public Durham report and the other problems that they had. So they tried to tie Trump to Putin during the 2016 election. Two, the American Intel community learned about this plan. And then three, rather than go after Hillary

and try and stop the corrupt practice that she was undertaking to try and destroy Trump, they helped Hillary advance this narrative that Trump was somehow connected to Putin in order to stagger the incoming Trump presidency. Those are the three major items here. And this declassified information really gives you the details.

So let me show you the actual document because in order to understand this, it's going to be really important for us to actually see the document. And this is called, this is the classified appendix. It's called the Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Rising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns. Again, this stuff was so classified that members of Congress who were investigating all of it didn't get to see it themselves.

I heard Trey Gowdy on television this weekend going, man, I really wish we had a chance to see this back then. I wish the FBI declassified this back then. I wish they handed this to us back then, but they didn't. So members of Congress didn't get to see this. No, this was only released because the Trump administration finally got a hold of it in a burn bag in a room at the FBI and released it. So what do they have? Well, if you advance to pages two and four of this

document, really quickly you begin, you start to see some of the pieces here. One, the Russians hacked a number of organizations in the United States, this annex says, including the Open Society Foundations, formerly known as the Soros Foundation. To be more specific, they hacked George Soros' operation. Now, why would this be useful if you're if you're the Russians? Well, the answer is because if you want an inside take on what the

Democrats are up to, where better to go than to sack than to hack George Soros? They hacked the Soros Foundation because they wanted the inside dirt on what was happening with Democrats. That's where they went. They had a source who throughout

this document is known as T1, who began sharing information with the FBI about what the Russians had learned. This is a really important detail to remember because as we go through this, especially with John Brennan, it's going to become super important to remember is this is what the Russians have gathered about Hillary Clinton's campaign. And a source with access to the Russian intel was giving it to the US intelligence community. That's how they knew all of this.

T1 shared this information with the FBI. The hacked emails that they obtained included a guy called Leonard Bonardo, who was the regional director for Eurasia at George Soros's operation, the Open Society Foundations. And boy, he's got some of the most interesting emails and documents in this. Another guy called Jeffrey Goldstein

is also hacked in these emails. The emails that they exchanged are with Debbie Wasserman Schultz. You remember her. She's the awful Democrat Congresswoman from Florida. She's also the former head of the Democrat National Committee who was pretty unceremoniously fired

going into the Democrat convention because the emails that were coming out from the DNC demonstrated that the DNC was rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton. So Debbie Wasserman Schultz gets fired going into the Democrat National Convention. But these emails are between her and these Soros people. How often have people told you

that Soros is uninvolved in Democrat politics? Why are you paying attention to Soros so much? Oh, you're an anti-Semite for even talking about George Soros, an anti-Semite. What are you even talking about? Well, George Soros is Jewish. What does that have to do with anything? That's what they do.

But George Soros, of course, is one of the biggest single contributors to American politics. So a normal person would say, hey, what influence is he trying to wield over our system? And it turns out a lot. So you get the head of the DNC communicating directly with top Soros officials and relaying her concerns about how crappy Hillary Clinton's campaign is. In fact, in a January 2016 memo, which the Russians put together, they found this. On January 12th of this year, during a confidential discussion with Jeffrey Goldstein, a representative of the Soros Foundation, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman

Schultz characterized the situation in her party in light of the growing scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton as follows. Information that was released to the media in just the last few days about the FBI investigating possible corruption relating to the Department of State under the leadership of Hillary Clinton and her preferential treatment of donors of the Clinton Foundation caused a significant negative reaction inside the party. At the same time, the leadership of the Democrat party had known about the information since June of 2015. In other words, they were already panicked

about how corrupt Hillary Clinton was dating back to 2015. According to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the FBI so far does not have persuasive evidence against Hillary because of the timely deletion of relevant data from her mail servers. You got that detail? So Debbie Wasserman Schultz is assuring George Soros World in January of 2016, don't worry about Hillary's emails. of 2016, don't worry about Hillary's emails. We deleted all the bad stuff. It's all gone. Because of the timely deletion of relevant data from mail servers. Now, what would be relevant to the FBI? Anything that's evidence of a crime. So all the criminality has been deleted from

Hillary's servers. Debbie Wasserman Schultz assures George Soros world. Remember finding out about this anywhere? No, it wasn't out there because this came out in this classified document this weekend. Obama, the document continues, Obama has no intention to darken the final part of his presidency and legacy by the scandal surrounding the main contender from the Democrat Party. To solve the problem, the president puts pressure on James Comey through Attorney General Lynch. However, so far without concrete results. All right. So that's what they claim about how this all got started and how Hillary deleted her emails and it was designed to prevent any criminality

from being captured by the FBI. In addition, this memo also says that Obama himself, this is where Obama's implicated, pay attention here, Obama himself sanctioned the use of all administrative levers to remove possibly negative effects from the FBI investigation of cases related to the Clinton Foundation and the email correspondence in the State Department. So Obama was a part of the cover up in order to

prevent Hillary from getting into trouble. Somebody had to clean up for Obama was doing it. Again, from Wasserman Schultz, the FBI doesn't possess any kind of direct evidence against Clinton because of their timely deletion from the email servers. Now here's another piece. Again, each of these items are very important and I realize there's a lot here. So if I'm confusing at all, let me know, Chad.

I don't wanna be, I wanna be super clear about what's in here. The political director of Hillary Clinton's staff So if I'm confusing at all, let me know, Chet. I don't want to be I want to be super clear about what's in here. The political director of Hillary Clinton's staff is a woman called Amanda, Amanda Renteria. She regularly received information from Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the plans and and intention of the FBI. You see what this says? So you've got a top Hillary Clinton official who's receiving secret information from the Attorney General of the United States. That's the allegation.

Now, let me pause on that one for a moment because I think it's probably worth giving you the conclusion of that story or at least according to this report. The FBI would question the Attorney General about this eventually. They would go on to talk, they actually, it wasn't quite a question, it was a briefing that they gave on August 10th of 2016. And so let me push forward to pages 19 to 21 in this annex. And that's where we find this intelligence. And it does not go that great

for the attorney general Loretta Lynch. Take a look here, page 19. They had a briefing on August 10th, 2016, Andrew McCabe, you remember him, deputy director of the FBI, fired for being a liar. And then another guy, Deputy General Counsel Anderson, also from the FBI, provided a defensive briefing to Attorney General Lynch regarding the T1 information. This is a way of saying, hey, we've got this information that says that Russia seems to think you are giving secret information to the Clinton campaign. You should probably know about the intel we've got this information that says that Russia seems to think you are giving secret information to the Clinton campaign.

You should probably know about the intel we've gathered. So they treated it like they were giving her a heads up. But what they were stunned by was her reaction to it. According to Anderson, Lynch denied knowing Renteria, that's the Hillary Clinton person, but did not deny or comment on the broader assertions in the reports concerning efforts to improperly influence the department's investigations. According to McCabe, Andy McCabe, in his interview with the Office of Inspector General, he said of Loretta Lynch, quote, she read the reports and I will probably never forget. She just finished reading them and said, okay.

I mean, like I expected more of a reaction than that said McCabe. Like I expected like, this is crazy. I never talked to that person, but she was absolutely stone-faced and she said nothing about the contents of the memos, which I don't know how to interpret. That said McCabe. In fact, going on here, he's not the only one who thought this. McCabe thought that her reaction was quote odd.

Anderson similarly told the Inspector General, she found it to be a quote little bit weird that the Attorney General didn't affirmatively disavow the content of the reports. And there were other officials throughout the FBI to include FBI General Counsel Baker, James Baker, who said he was greatly concerned. The FBI interviewed FBI General Counsel James Baker.

Baker told the office, based on the reports he received of the briefing for Loretta Lynch, he was, quote, greatly concerned about Lynch's reaction. Moreover, Baker, unlike his FBI colleagues, did not dismiss the credibility of the reports. In fact, Baker informed the office that following the defensive briefing of Lynch, he began to have concerns

about Loretta Lynch's potential bias due to one, her curious reaction to that information, which again, tells you everything. She is linking to the Hillary campaign and she's pretending like it's no big deal and she wants them to go away. Let's stop talking about this. And two, says James Baker,

Loretta Lynch's infamous interaction with former president Clinton on the tarmac in Phoenix. And of course you can't forget the fact that Loretta Lynch covered for Hillary when she forced James Comey, she tried to anyway, to refer to the investigation into Hillary's emails as a quote matter and not an investigation. Yeah.

Loretta Lynch heavily implicated in these declassified documents. That's a big deal. Okay, I've got more. I've got actually a mountain more. And this is, again, I'm trying to give you, I think, if we can, the clearest distillation of the value of this document right here

on this comeback episode of VINCE. Good to be with you today. All right, wanna thank our great sponsors. I've been using the Bone Charge infrared sauna blanket and red light face mask Alison uses that as my wife ever since they sent them to us and can't recommend them enough. I first turned to the sauna blanket to help with muscle recovery and detoxification is a total game changer. It's easy to use I can wrap myself up with that

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All right, so we got the Loretta Lynch component to all this. The Attorney General of the United States, the scummy, corrupt Attorney General of the United States. In these documents, the annex describes how Clinton's staff with quote, support from special services, I think that means the Intel community, is preparing scandalous revelations of business relations between Trump and the Russian mafia. That's what the document says. And then in in 2016, July of 2016, I want you to remember back to July of 2016. It is such an important month in the history of our

country for a million different reasons. But one of them fundamentally is that was the conclusion of the Hillary Clinton email investigation by the FBI and the opening of the Trump Russia collusion hoax investigation by the FBI. I remember that month really clearly because as an editor at the Daily Caller, we broke the news that Hillary Clinton was going to be interviewed by the FBI on July 2nd. It was a holiday weekend, Independence Day weekend. And on July 2nd, Hillary Clinton was going to be interviewed. That was a Saturday. And I remember when the Daily Caller reported it at the time,

when we reported it, the media was going crazy because they thought to themselves, how could the Daily Caller have this scoop? You're not real journalists. How would you even know that? Who would tell you that? This is the Obama administration. How could you possibly have that story? It's not going to happen. And sure enough, it did happen, actually. Hillary Clinton was interviewed by the FBI in a cushy little interview that they did on Saturday of July 2, 2016. July 4th, well,

that's when James Comey came out and exonerated her and said, Joe, she's not guilty of anything. She's just a little careless, but she's not guilty of anything. We can't prosecute her. She stole a lot of classified information, but no prosecution's coming. That's the end of that. So the FBI closed the invest, the mid-year exam investigation into Hillary Clinton. And then later that month, they opened the investigation into Hillary Clinton. And then later that month, they

opened the investigation into President Trump coming out of the Democrat Convention, coming out of this plan that the that Hillary Clinton's campaign cooked up to take down Trump, the FBI dutifully started the Trump Russia collusion hoax and began going after everybody in Trump's orbit. That all happened. And so if you go to pages six and seven of this document, I'll take you there, what you can see is that according to this

previously classified information, what they discovered is that they were getting more intel from their source who had access to it from Russia in July of 2016. And the memo stated that Clinton approved a plan proposed by one of her foreign policy advisors. Approved a plan proposed by one of her foreign policy advisors, Julianne Smith, plan proposed by one of her foreign policy advisors, Julianne Smith, to smear Donald Trump by magnifying the scandal tied to the intrusion by the Russian special services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican candidate. That was the plan. And it was cooked up by this woman, Julianne Smith, who was a part of Hillary's campaign.

They said the point of all of this, as you might imagine, was to, quote, divert the constituents attention from the investigation of Clinton's compromised electronic correspondence. They wanted that's you, that's the voter. They wanted the voters to be taken off the scent of Hillary Clinton's stolen classified emails in her private email server. So they cooked up a fake Trump Russia collusion hoax. That's what this is. That's exactly what this is. Now, I should tell you that everybody inside of Hillary's orbit has denied all of this. They act like none of this ever happened, actually. But the way they deny it is pretty interesting, actually. It's over the top. Let me go to pages 15 and 16 here. This is where the document captures the denials of a number of very important Hillary Clinton

officials, including the campaign chairman, John Podesta. Now I'm gonna call attention to something here that you may have seen, but I haven't seen others in media calling attention to this yet. The office interviewed Clinton herself and several former members of the Clinton campaign using the sensitive intelligence materials that have been declassified.

In reviewing the July, 2016 material, Clinton stated, quote, it looked like Russian disinformation to her. Now pay attention to the way each of her campaign figures responds. Campaign chairman, John Podesta stated, he had not seen the declassified materials before, and he characterized the information as ridiculous. Check this out.

Ridiculous is in quotes here. They're quoting him directly. They say he used the word ridiculous. Senior policy advisor, Jake Sullivan stated that he had not seen the declassified memo before and had no reaction to it other than to say, quote, that's ridiculous. In quotes.

What is Durham doing here? Watch, here we go again. Communications director Jennifer Palmieri stated that she had never seen the memorandum before, found its contents to be quote, ridiculous, and could not recall anything like this related to the campaign. So in three independent interviews with three top Hillary officials,

each one of them used the same exact adjective to describe why all of this scandalous stuff never happened. Ridiculous, they said. One after the other. How did that happen? Who put that together? Durham doesn't draw a broader conclusion here, not on paper. He doesn't write that down. He doesn't say, oh, I found it interesting that they all use the same phrasing. But the fact that John Durham quoted them, he didn't quote full passages from them. He quoted this one adjective over and over and over from each of them. It tells you a lot. It tells you that Durham believes that their answers were scripted, that they went in there with a plan, that they compared notes, and they agreed on a line of attack to survive scrutiny. Ridiculous, completely ridiculous.

Before we get to our great guests, I have one last thing I wanna share with you on this subject. We've got a lot we can do with this, so we'll do a lot of it in the coming days as well. John Brennan, the CIA director, is an important figure in all of this. And if anybody has criminal exposure here,

it certainly looks like he's the guy. He's now on the record lying multiple times, multiple times to obviously members of the media, it's not crime to do that, unless you're doing it to advance a continuing conspiracy, which he seems to have been doing. Additionally, he lied to Congress on multiple occasions about all of this. And John Brennan's role here is really interesting. On August 3rd of 2016, John Brennan briefed a whole bunch of people, Barack Obama and others.

Let me push forward to page 18 here because this is where this information is. John Brennan on August 3rd, here we go, fellas, we could pull this document up. During a meeting at the White House, CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama, Vice President Biden, DNI Clapper, FBI Director Comey and other US officials regarding Russian interference, as well as the intel that they received from the T1 source received concerning the reference plan by the Clinton campaign.

Brennan's handwritten notes stated, in part, were getting additional insight into Russian activities that cite alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on the 26th of July of a proposed plan from one of her foreign policy advisors, De vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming Russian interference by the Russian security services. Alright, so that's what's happening on August 3rd. What happened on August 4th the next day? Well, it was on that day that John Brennan reached out to his Russian counterpart, a guy by the name of Alexander Bortnikov. And in fact, I want to give credit to Hans Manke here, who posted this to X this weekend, about one of the most striking revelations

in all of this is that Brennan briefs Obama and says, look, Hillary's trying to cook up a fake Trump-Russia collusion, Oaks. And the reason we know this is because the Russians have intercepted communications from the Democrats. So then the next day, Brennan contacts his Russian intelligence counterpart and says, Hey, Bortnikov, knock it off. We know what you're doing. And of course, the Russians play stupid. What do you mean? What are we doing? He goes, Oh, we know that the Intel operation you're undertaking, we know you're meddling in the election. We know about all of this. And Bortnikov, here's the message.

And guess what happens? The Intel flow that we were getting from Russia that was detailing Hillary's attempt to rig the election drives up. Suddenly, Brennan tipped off the Russians that this intelligence was flowing to us. And he stopped it in its tracks. That's a really important piece here. So as you remember all of, as we go through all of this, try and keep some of these elements in mind. Because I think they're going to be useful as time moves forward.

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I love the trolls. All right. Let us see, man, we've got a million things to get to and who better to do that with than our next guest. Rachel Bovard joins us right now. She's the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute. Rachel, thank you so much for joining me today.

Hi there. Thanks for having me. Of course. And thank you for your patience as I was going through the Durham annex. I'm completely obsessed with the details of it because I do think it's giving us some meaningful information that we definitely didn't have before. What is your reaction to all of this declassification, what we're learning and your hope for accountability? Well, I think it's, you know, just trying to keep up with the Trump administration because, you know, I was very focused on the auto pen scandal. I was like, this is the biggest scandal that we've seen in 30 to 50

years. You know, we have to focus on this. And then then all of this information about Russiagate was declassified. And I think it really, you know, it's one of those moments where, you know, through COVID, everyone was like, I know I'm right, and everybody's wrong. But everybody around you, every institution around you and politician was gaslighting you that you were wrong. You were the crazy one. If you didn't believe all this stuff.

And it's the same feeling I have now with Russiagate. For years and years, we were told that people like Molly Hemingway didn't know what they were talking about. And you were just a complete Russian bot farm conspiracist if you believed anything that she was saying that it might not all be there. But when you looked at the story itself,

it was so insane that to believe it, you had to turn off the critical thinking part of your brain. And a lot of people did that. And again, every institution in America that you were supposed to trust, from the government to the intelligence agencies to the corporate media, was reinforcing this belief. And now all of this is coming out and it's it on one hand, it's it's great.

Right. On one hand, this is the kind of transparency that we are owed because all of this stuff was done in our name for starters. But two, it it really just reinforces this belief that, yes, the government was as bad as you thought they were. Yes, they were actually doing the thing that we all suspected. And, you know, we've got to be better than this. And our institutions have to be reformed and be accountable and be better than this,

because you cannot sustain long term a republic if this is the kind of backdoor dealing that our government agencies are going to do on behalf of one political party. Talk about sustaining the republic. I also like to restore it because I do think that in order for that to work, we're gonna have to hold people accountable. And I don't mean through public shaming or finger wagging. I think I heard Trey Gowdy on television,

I think it was this weekend. And he said, well, it's not just handcuffs. Sometimes it's just shaming people and letting them know that you know what they did. I think that's wrong, actually. I'd like to see handcuffs here. How important is it that we see someone cuffed and prosecuted for what they did to us?

I think there is nothing more important. And this has been my frustration with Congress as a body, right? When they talk about, oh, we're going to do all this oversight and we're going to release these documents and we're going to name and shame these players. That maybe worked 25 years ago. We are a post-shame nation in that regard. Every politician is going to keep doing this because they can sustain the shame game because they have a corporate media at their back. Unless we see people tried and held accountable,

and in orange jumpsuits and handcuffs, this is not going away. Because number one, the behavior will not be punished. But I think number two, you're also just removing this belief that people have in the government, that they will ever hold anyone accountable. So I think it's necessary and proper and just for this to happen for not just Congress, but every law enforcement agency to see this through. You know, James Clapper, it has been proved definitively that the man lied to Congress and manipulated about many other things besides Russiagate,

including mass surveillance, but he also manipulated intelligence. This should be tried in a court of law. And I think if all of these protagonists are just walking around in 20 years, getting standing ovations at rubber chicken Democratic Party dinners, we will have proved nothing

and we will have, I think demoralized half the country who just sees themselves getting punched in the face repeatedly and nothing will be done about it. There's implications for a conservative politics for sure. And I can smell it in the air, but I know what's gonna happen and perhaps you can too, which is that if conservatives get the sense that they're just going to perpetually be victimized by the government and there will be no accountability to prevent that, then why would you engage in the electoral

process? You will have people who are so dissuaded from being involved in politics say, look, I voted for Trump three times. I voted to break this system, and then the system won. Why would I try again? I think it's going to have a deep impact if the Trump administration can't fix things now. Yeah. No, I completely agree with that. It's going to demoralize an entire group of people. And I'm not just talking about conservatives or Republicans or independents. All those people voted for change. And if what they see is just, okay, well, we exposed them and then nothing happened,

that really does prevent people not just from participating, but the belief they have that they have agency in their own government, right, that their vote matters, that they have any say in these vast forces that control their lives. When that goes away, you've lost the social contract in some respect, everything that goes into building a sustainable government is starting to fade. But I think the important thing here is that, you know, Trump can do a lot of this, but Trump has to have partners and in Congress specifically. And this is why, you know, I opened with this AutoPen discussion. This has been my argument about that whole investigation that's going on. Investigations are fine, but Congress has the ability, specifically in the Oversight Committee, to hold people accountable, to grant them legislative immunity so they cannot plead the fifth,

and then to hold people in contempt of Congress if they don't comply and put them in jail. We know Congress has this power because they did it to us. Yes, they did. Liz Cheney did this to us. We are operating in a post-Steve Bannon and post-Peter Navarro going to jail world. Yes.

And so I think if that standard is not held to both sides by Congress, we are in, it's tough sledding ahead. Yeah, I, you know, some of this you can find out through reporting and reading and talking, others you can just feel, Congress is way behind Trump. They're not, they're not, they don't see this as the existential threat that the rest of us are detecting to our country.

And a lot of them are doing the go along to get along thing still. So let me ask you about what we saw this weekend, which is the president has hundreds of nominees that have still not been confirmed by the United States Senate. They're still waiting. And the reason for that, at least according to Republicans in the Senate, is that Democrats are obstructing the nomination process, that they're throwing up every procedural barrier possible. Chuck Schumer is demanding more federal government spending as a way to relieve the pressure. He's like, well, you give me more spending and I'll finally let your nominees through. No, that's insane. Why would we do that? You don't control anything. We control everything right now.

But the Senate just went into recess. They just went into recess and not a full recess. They went into a pro forma recess. And the only reason, unless you can correct me, Rachel, and give me some other better explanation, the only reason the Senate goes into quote pro forma recess is to prevent the president of the United States from making recess appointments.

Am I wrong about that? And why would you do that? Yeah, so there's a couple of things to unpack there. The first is that Democrats are obstructing in the Senate, that is for sure. But Republicans have the tools to overcome that obstruction. Republicans love to play this game of feigned helplessness. Oh, we can't do anything because of Democratic obstruction. Democrats are objecting to approving nominees by consent. Right? Basically this idea that they just agree to move up the timeline to get everybody done easily. Democrats are never going to do that because they're Democrats. Right? Right? So Republicans have the ability to put these nominees on the floor for a vote whenever they want.

John Thune controls this process. Democrats have no say in this process. And more than that, they've eliminated the filibuster. There is no 60-vote requirement to confirm these nominees anymore. Nominees are confirmed at simple majority or 51 votes. There are 53 Republican senators. The issue that many of us, including me, have is that, you know, we are at close to 150 nominees on the calendar.

At this point, just people waiting to be confirmed. The Senate works two and a half days a week. They don't show up for a full five-day work week. If they did, you could actually confirm some of these nominees pretty quickly. They're very easily done. You just have to stay in town and do it. But to your question about the pro forma is that's exactly what's happening here.

I will say John Thune went into pro forma session for the Senate after Mike Johnson did it first. So both the Republican House and the Republican Senate have set up pro forma sessions to block recess appointments. This is important. Let me dwell on this for a second. Both the House and the Senate have to both agree to go into an official recess, correct? Correct. Yeah. So the Constitution says that neither House can adjourn for more than three days without the consent of the other. So you have to have consent from both the House and the Senate to go into a longer adjournment of more than three days. Now, when it's a, you know, a split chamber, when there's one Democrat, one Republican held chamber,

this never, there's no long adjournment, right? There's no agreement. Here you have both Republicans in control. Let me show people what this looks like. This is John Thune, cut three. This is John Thune going into a pro forma recess, pro forma session, whatever. The whole point is to stop Trump

from getting his recess appointments. Look at this. May I ask unanimous consent that quorum call be suspended? Without objection. And I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, adjourn to then convene for pro forma session only with no business being conducted

on the following dates and times, Tuesday, August 5th at one, Friday, August 8th at 105, Tuesday, August 12th at 8 a.m., Friday, August 15th at 10 15 a.m. So every three days they have no business being conducted. You heard him say it there. We're in a pro forma session. I don't even know how this is constitutional. He's straight up saying in his declaration that no work is going to be done. We're just going to be gone. So but this is the

way it's been done. Now if, if I'm understanding the rationale here, assuming in any way that this is good faith, what Republicans are saying here, Rachel, is, well, we do this because if the shoe were on the other foot, we don't want the Democrats making recess appointments. So let's uphold this tradition so that Democrats uphold it too. Is that the logic here?

There's that logic. And then there's also just the reality that there are people within the Senate Republican Conference that don't support recess appointments. And it can be for reasons as simple as, I don't like the nominee. Or the second reason is they want to protect the Senate's institutional prerogative to vet and clear these nominees and vote for them on the floor.

And there's also the technical aspect of recess appointments that it doesn't fully do the job. There are temporary appointments that you'd have to come back and clear again later. You also can't do recess appointments for judicial nominees. It's only for civilian executive branch nominees. Because a judicial nominee is a lifetime appointment.

But these US attorneys, I think we only have one confirmed now. I think Jeanine Pirro. She's the only one. Jeanine Pirro was just confirmed as the U.S. attorney for D.C. And the only reason that could happen is because there are no senators to represent D.C. to block her. The rest of the country has these blue slips. I won't go into all the stupid details right now, but they got they got Jeanine Pirro through, but that's it. And he's got a ton. Everybody else is an acting interim U.S. attorney. We need this goes right back to what

we were talking about a moment ago, Rachel. You want handcuffs? You want prosecutions? You need U.S. attorneys who can both bring the charges and stay in the job long enough to see them through. attorneys who can both bring the charges and stay in the job long enough to see them through. This is what's been infuriating about this entire thing is that these Trump cannot execute on his mandate without these people, right? And the Senate has been wasting time considering appropriations bills that aren't going to pass the House, right? They're considering a military construction appropriations bill that's not going to pass the House, right? They're considering a military construction appropriations bill that's not going to pass the House because they stripped out all the pro life protections. So that's going nowhere. When instead, they could be approving these

nominees. These are two hour nominees. That means there's two hours of debate post closure. There's no filibuster. The only thing stopping the Senate Republicans from confirming these nominees is their work ethic. They don't want to stay through August. They don't want to work five days a week. Why don't they go into recess? This is killing me. Why not? Why not? Why is Mike Johnson playing this game? Why is John Thune playing this game? And the president, I don't know, he's being very nice to them. This weekend he posted on Truth Social that, fine, go on recess, go back to your home districts,

tell everybody how awful the Democrats are, that's fine. But my suspicion is, and maybe we'll hear more from the president on this soon, is he wants them to go into an authentic, real recess that lets him make these recess appointments. You're right, it's a temporary measure, but it's a pretty decent temporary measure. It gives you two years of having these people

in place to do the job. I don't know this for a fact, but I'm speculating that because if you remember when the House went out for their recess, they had adjourned very abruptly, right? Because Democrats were playing footsie with Epstein votes and it was making everyone very uncomfortable. If they were to go into a full recess, because, you know, if the Senate were to pass an adjournment resolution that recessed them for more than three days, the House would have to reconvene. Okay and the House would then have to approve that recessed adjournment. Yes. I suspect that Mike Johnson is worried

about that. He's worried about it for the same reason he adjourned the House abruptly at the end of July. He doesn't wanna have to deal with these Epstein votes because that's a reality he would have to face. Now, whether or because that's a reality he would have to face. Now, whether or not that's a good excuse, other people will have to judge, but I suspect that that's what's going on. A little part of it anyway.

I think it's an awful excuse. I mean, let the Democrats have their stupid show votes. The pressing need, as you pointed out, is this agenda. And if you want to see consequences, if you want to see the Trump agenda fulfilled, you have to have these nominees in place or else it's not gonna work. So we'll see.

So that means we don't have the Senate for a while and then they'll eventually come back and we'll be pissed at them when they do. Well, the last sort of coda to this is yes, they're coming back in September with no plan to confirm these nominees. That's what's like completely shocking about this. It's not only that they couldn't get it done before August,

they won't recess a point for the month, they're coming back and they're saying, oh, we're gonna keep doing these wasting time on appropriations bills that aren't gonna pass the House and we're gonna do the National Defense Authorization Act, which doesn't have to be passed until December. So they have no plan to address this backlog. And once they start moving to judicial nominees, these civilian nominees are going

to sit on the calendar for another year. So I really think it's a dumpster fire of a situation. And John Thune has no plan, as far as I can tell. And we need them to pass regular order appropriations bills. This is the thing we've been demanding. And so everything gets backed up again. And then we get to the point where we do another omnibus, continuing resolution garbage. It's like no end in sight. Everything gets backed up again. And then we get to the point where we do another omnibus,

continuing resolution garbage. It's like no end in sight. So I don't know, I just feel like we, if now's not the time to browbeat these guys in the submission, I don't know when is, because by next year, these midterms, what case is Congress gonna be able to make to the American people?

If they can't get Trump's nominees confirmed and like to actually get the agenda fulfilled, then how can they make advance a positive vision for why they deserve more power? You know, that means it's going to hurt the midterms if they can't get this done, Rachel. No, it is. And I think that that's just the unselfaware bubble that Congress lives in. They don't think this far ahead. They think in terms of their next vacation, as we're seeing here. But even more than that, you have Trump's nominees not being confirmed in the Senate.

But when you talk about even regular order appropriations bills, you are seeing bills come out of the House dealing with foreign operations and defense that is turning back on authorities that Trump turned off. Trump went in and defunded and eliminated programs from the National Endowment of Democracy to programs within USAID for all of the reasons that we all support. Well, House Republican appropriators went in and said, oh, well, we just disagree, and we're going to turn that authority back on and give the program money. So again, this is what I'm saying. Trump can only do so much. He needs willing partners in Congress.

And I think the more we overlook House and Senate Republicans who are literally out of step with the with Trump's agenda, it's to our detriment because they are not helping right now. It's suicidal. It's totally suicidal. Rachel Bovard, please keep the pressure on them. And thank you for your wisdom. Appreciate you today. Good to talk to you. Thanks, Vince. There's Rachel Bovard.

She's the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute. Appreciate her. And what I like about Rachel, she's got this really clear understanding of how the Congress operates, which, you know, can be Byzantine, hard to sort through, and she's good at it. So thank you again. Yeah, okay. So look, this this Congress thing is annoying to me. More than annoying, but I'm being I'm being subtle. Let I've got a couple of people here. I believe this is Mike Lee going into the weekend. Take a look. Cut one here. Mike Lee on social media actually posting this video. We've continued to have delay after delay. And we'd rather get

these people confirmed. Senate Republicans are ready, willing and able to stay and get that done. If they don't want to, though, we got another way around this. I've drafted an adjournment resolution, one that would allow President Trump to invoke his recess appointment power. So if this is the way the Democrats want to play, they might not like the result. Either way, we're good. We just want to get President Trump's nominees in place,

and we intend to do it. Mike Lee's right. Mike Lee's totally right. Go into recess. Go into a real recess. None of this pro forma recess horseshit that we see from John Thune. What is this guy doing?

Josh Hawley also had this to say over the weekend that now may be the time. Democrats are just filibustering everything. What choice do we have other than to let the president make his recess appointments? If he can do recess appointments, he gets everybody through, except for the lifetime appointments,

everybody through, all the political appointees, done. Wham bam, thank you ma'am. And then, you know, we could eventually get them confirmed by the Senate on some longer timetable, but it can happen now. Here's Josh Hawley recommending that. Trump is going to be the first president in history who has had every single nominee filibustered by the opposing party. That's where we're at right now. Every single nominee. You mentioned the judges. Trump's gotten five we're at right now. Every single nominee, you mentioned the judges. Trump's gotten five judges confirmed, maybe six. When the Democrats filibuster every single nominee,

I don't wanna hear any complaints when the president starts saying, we need to do recess appointments. Now you can't recess appoint judges, so we've gotta get those judges confirmed. These are lifetime appointments. This will be some of the president's biggest legacy makers. But all of these other positions, the cabinet, subcabinet,

the deputy assistant to this and that, the president needs that in order to make the government run. Democrats are filibustering all of them. And pretty soon we're gonna start talking about recess. I don't see what the option is, Steve. I mean, the pace that we're going right now. I mean, they wanna go on vacations. They want to go on recess.

They don't like being in Washington. They want to go home. Let them go, but go for real. Stop dragging your ass. Stop driving me crazy, hurting my country, which drives me crazy. It's great to be back with you. We got a big week planned, A big, big week here.

I'll be doing the show all week from Florida. It's gonna be wonderful. It is wonderful. It's nice seeing everybody. It's nice seeing Justin's smiling face, although he could use a Jack the Fitness Machine. It's nice seeing Guy's sad face. He's always so sad to see me.

And it's good to see you too. It's great to be with you here. We've got the big radio show coming come out today to 12 to 3 Eastern Time producer Jim is gonna be very excited to to Well did not have to host and produce the show What I can I can help them a little bit now it's gonna be it's gonna be great thanks for being with me as always