The Eric Metaxas Show - Byron York

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

Byron York, chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner and author of "Obsession," uses his powers as an investigative reporter to reveal what's behind the move to remove the president at all cost.

show. It's the show that Mark Twain once called Smartern, a Blue J, what can talk possum, and faster than naked fat man riding a bolt of lightning. So here's your plain spoken homespun host, Eric Mataxis. Folks, welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Yes, yes, it's a show, and I'm Eric Mataxis, the host. But here's the good news for you. I have guests. It's not just me. It's not one of those shows. I talk to people who've done their homework, even if I haven't done mine. I have to tell you, I'm so excited. I'm going to embed. my guest before he comes on camera by reading a fulsome endorsement of him and the book I'm holding in my hand. The book is obsession, and my friend Molly Hemingway has written the following. Listen,

Byron York isn't just one of a precious few reporters who've managed to crawl out of the D.C. swamp with his dignity and acute powers of observation intact. he's the best reporter, period. With obsession inside the Washington establishment's never-ending war on Trump, York has written an electric page Turner that reads like a thriller, only every word of it is true and meticulously reported. It will leave you sputtering, perhaps literally, with indignation over how the media, bureaucracy, and political establishment thwarted the will of the people and tried to undo a presidential election.

The author of obsession, Byron York, with us right now. Byron, welcome this program. Thank you so much. That's our friend, Molly Hemingway. I figured she... A fantastic thing she wrote. I was so, so grateful to her. Yes, an electric page turner, not merely a page turner. Anyone can write one of those, but an electric page turner. But in all seriousness, my default mode is to joke, but this is so serious what we're facing.

And so to have a reporter of your caliber focus his attentions and skills on what has happened in the last four plus years culminating in this book obsession. So tell us, I mean, some people are watching or listening now won't know who you are other than what we've just said. What is the headline here from your point of view, as somebody who's been in D.C. as an investigative reporter for a long time? Well, the reason I wrote the book was that nobody else had. And really, you actually couldn't write it until now.

because it's about the long effort to remove President Trump from office from the beginning until now. So if you want to know what the book's about, go to December 2019. Democrats in the House are rushing to impeach the president. They're racing to impeach him by Christmas. And a reporter asked Nancy Pelosi, you know, what's the hurry here? Why the rush? And she says, there's no rush. This has been going on for two and a half years since Mueller.

And I don't think any Democrats even noticed what she said, but Republicans really took notice. They said, wow, she's finally said it out loud. This impeachment, it's not about Ukraine. It's not about a phone call. It's a continuation of a long effort to remove President Trump from office. And that's what the book is about. Well, wording the will of the American people is evil. I'm old-fashioned enough to think that the will of the American people is what the greatest nation in the history of the world is all about. We the people are the government. So the idea that we would have finally established a bureaucracy, now we call it the deep state, that seems to think they know better than the American people. Buckley, of course, famously said he'd rather be governed by the, what is it, the first 300 names in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard.

I mean, isn't that what it boils down to? Isn't that what the founder's vision essentially boils down to compared at least to where we are today with the so-called deep state? Yes. And I mean, you have to remember that the 2016 election was the first that we know of, I guess. You had both major party candidates under investigation by the FBI. Now, you might ask yourself, well, gee, the candidates were really bad. Maybe they were all bad people. Now, I think what happened was the FBI should not, have been involved in politics to the degree that they were. And the book starts out. It's really the road to the Mueller investigation in the first chapter. And it's about James Comey. And in the transition, this is after Donald Trump has won the presidency, in the transition, a lot of his most trusted

people around him are strongly urging him to fire James Comey immediately. Rudy Giuliani said, he's going to turn on you. There's something wrong with this guy. And Chris Christie said, he's a loose cannon. And if you keep him after you become president, he'll become your loose canon. You know, these people were not offended on behalf of Hillary Clinton in the way that Comey handled the Clinton email case. But they thought it was erratic. They thought it was unprofessional. And they thought it would be a prediction of the kind of stuff that would happen if Comey remained FBI director after Trump was president.

Trump did not take their advice in what I think everybody could probably say was a mistake. He brought with him to the White House habits that he had used in decades in business. And one of those habits of mine was that he can bring people around. He can win them over. He can talk to them and with the sheer force of his personality, bring them over to his side. And he thought he could do that with Comey. And I think we can all agree that that was a failure. Well, isn't that because when you're dealing in reality, which is, you know, the free market, the world of business, people have self-interest and can be brought around.

But when you're dealing with the swamp, it's something that he had never seen before. You're suddenly dealing with people that are at their core bad actors. They actually don't care about the American people. They care about power. It does seem to me that that, if anything, could take him by surprise. that did take him by surprise. You know, I think maybe a slightly less accusatory way to say that is that you're absolutely right, that transactional point of view he has with people and bringing him around to his side

in a business negotiation does not work with ideologically motivated people. Now, the director of the FBI should not be ideologically motivated, but Trump has had some difficulty with people on all sides who are just deeply ideologically motivated. because they're just coming from a different place than he is. And the other thing, you're absolutely right, there was certainly a significant group in Washington. And by the way, you know, the book is subtitled inside the Washington establishment's never ending war on Trump.

It's not the Democrats never ending war on Trump. Because it was a group of the opposition party. There was a small but very vocal group of never Trump Republicans. there were people who were out of government, and there was the press. There was just kind of this whole group. And a number of them were very, very passionate in their opposition to Trump. It's somewhere in either in their own ideology or their belief that a Trump election would maybe threaten their own place, their standing, their influence, their clout.

But there was this extraordinary opposition to him that he could not negotiate. with. Well, I mean, it's always, I shouldn't say this always, but this often takes me back to Cincinnati and his plow, a story with which every American used to be familiar. But the idea that at the heart of our experiment in liberty is the idea that career politicians are anathema, that they will accrue power and will become the enemies of, those they're meant to serve. That to me is principally what he threatened, or at least it sounds like you were saying that. Yeah. And you know, you see this difference between the way Trump operates from the very beginning. It's not as if people couldn't have predicted it during the

campaign. He was not a politician. He didn't behave like one. So anyway, he doesn't fire Comey. Comey, meanwhile, starts writing secret memos on him immediately before he's even president. And when he finally fires Comey, now, by the way, Christy again, gives him advice on that and says, well, now, you know, since you didn't fire him at the start, if you fire him now in May of 2017, you know, it's going to look like you did it to impede the investigation. So there's just all hell is going to break loose. And it did. So you could kind of argue that Trump's two biggest mistakes in the first year were not firing Comey in January of 2017. Right.

And firing Comey in May of 2017. That said, then you have a Mueller investigation come. And so Trump has to, he's shocked, you know, when Mueller is appointed. So what does he do? He has to come around and figure out how to deal with him. Hang on. I'm sorry, Byron. We're going to go to a break. We'll be right back. The book is obsession. We'll be right back with Byron York. Folks, I'm talking to Byron New York, author of the brand new book obsession inside the Washington establishment's never-ending war on Trump. Byron, you were just making the case that once the Mueller investigation is unleashed, Trump has to figure out what to do. And it's an unusual way that he deals with it. First of all, Trump believes, first of all, he knows there's no collusion.

And remember Mueller's main assignment. is to investigate collusion, which is this theory that the Trump campaign and Russia conspired to fix the 2016 election. So how to deal with Mueller? He wants the investigation over very, very quickly. He believes it can be over quickly because it's just going to look into collusion and it's not going to find it. So with his lawyer, John Dowd, he comes up with this plan that you could call radical, cooperation. And in the first month, so in June of 2017, Mueller, Mueller has barely gotten an office. In the first month, the Trump team makes a proposal to Mueller, and their proposal is this. I, Donald Trump,

want this investigation to be over very, very quickly. You, Special Counsel Mueller, are going to need all sorts of information from me. You're going to need hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, and you're going to need the testimony of all these people around me in the White House. So most of that stuff will likely be covered by executive privilege. And as the president, I could block you. I could take you to court. We could be fighting about this for years. So here's my proposal.

I'll give you everything you want, everything, all the papers, all the testimony, talk to whoever you want as long as you want. I'll do all that provided you will promise to get. this investigation over quickly. And Mueller says in this meeting, I don't let any grass grow under me. And everybody takes that to mean, I'll get this done quickly. They shake hands. It's a handshake deal. Nobody ever wrote it down. Nobody ever signed it. They shake hands. And then Trump begins providing an extraordinary, unprecedented amount of cooperation that really we weren't hearing about at all at the time.

Well, there's so much here. First of all, it seems to me that Mueller, I mean, I have to say, in the beginning of this whole thing, you know, I talked to different people on this program like Ken Starr and others, and they seem to believe that Bob, you know, their old friend Bob, would somehow be fair. Yeah.

I think he revealed himself to be more serpent-like than fair. What do you suppose was going on? Because it doesn't make sense. You had people, Janine Piro and others, somehow believing that he would be fair. What do you think happened? Well, first of all, there was, you're right, there was bipartisan praise for Mueller when he was appointed. I mean, Republicans didn't want a special counsel, but if it had, they had to be one, they were happy with, Mueller and Democrats. And everyone talked about what a great FBI directory was, how straight down the

middle. He was a registered Republican, but absolutely straight down the middle, scrupulously fair, et cetera. And that became really important very early on when Mueller began to hire staff, and he hired a number of very partisan Democratic lawyers, including several who had made thousands and thousands of dollars in political contributions, every single bit of it to Democrats. Plus, Andrew Weissman, his Mueller's so-called pit bull, who not only gave a lot of money to Democrats, but he actually went to Hillary Clinton's election night event in New York. That was going to be the big celebration when Hillary Clinton broke the glass ceiling, and they were going to have all this confetti come down from the ceiling to represent a little

shards of glass and it was just going to be a huge night and everybody was very disappointed when it didn't work out. And Andrew Weissman was there. So the thing is, Trump raises objections about this. And said, wow, you know, you're investigating me and you've hired a bunch of partisan Democrats to do it. And everybody said, listen, Bob Mueller is straight down the middle. He will keep these people in line. He is absolutely fair. Yeah. So I'm just now getting to your question. So what happens? Fast forward to July 24th, 2019. Mueller testifies before the House and the Senate.

He has issued his report, failed to find collusion. Democrats are not really willing to accept his verdict and just give up. They still want to impeach the president based on Russia. But they think they'll need a big Watergate-style moment. They'll need a hearing that's televised all around the country in the world. and Robert Mueller will stand up in the House and he'll deliver a damning indictment of Donald Trump. And then the whole country will be in favor of removing the president. So it's a disaster.

And the disaster is basically Mueller's performance. He seems confused at times. He seems unable to handle some very basic questions at times. Excuse me for the timeline, Byron. I mean, this is after a long investigation. Exactly. which itself, you know, Sean Hannity every night was giving us the same information about these people whom he has hired cannot, should not be trusted. Turns out that that was correct.

Now, finally, he turns this thing in. I mean, but it's just an agony for the American people. It goes on and on and on. It's a big nothing, and then they decide to have the hearing. Right. So Mueller seems to be unable to deal with this. He seems to have suffered some sort of cognitive decline. And the interesting thing is, everybody notices it.

Everybody says it. But it wasn't a surprise to the Trump people. A year earlier, in April of 2018, they had a big meeting. Rudy Giuliani had just joined the Trump defense. And so they have a get-acquainted meeting. Giuliani and two other lawyers, Jane and Marty Raskin have also joined. And so they have a get-acquainted meeting with Mueller. And the conversation turns to the Justice Department opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

And as you know, that was a huge part of the case. I mean, absolutely huge part of the case and of the political debate. It's not an arcane doctrine. This is well known. And Mueller did not recall it in this meeting. He could not remember what they were talking about. And everybody is stunned. his staffers immediately cover for him. They say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know all about that,

and we'll, we're going to consider it, we'll be getting back to you. But afterward, the Trump people talked among themselves, like, what's going on? I mean, he didn't recall this policy, and the old Bob Mueller would have known all about it. I mean, there's no doubt about that, but he doesn't really know this. And so Mueller's staff limited access to him. That was the one and only time Rudy Giuliani ever saw Mueller in person. And they never talked to him on the phone. You call up Mueller's office and want to speak to Bob Mueller, and they never let you talk to him. And they say, oh, we'll take this to Bob. So, you know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out something is going on here. And so when they see Mueller finally on July 24th of 2019, after the report is out,

they say, wow, this was really bad. And the reason I started this story with hiring all the partisan Democrats is they immediately think he was supposed to be riding hurt on these people. Who has been in charge of this investigation all this time? And I have to tell you, I don't really know. And they didn't, they couldn't find out. They didn't really know. But you had this extraordinary set of circumstances with this group of very partisan investigators being led by, a man who had suffered some sort of cognitive decline.

Well, except, Iron, don't you wonder, now that you've said what you've said, it makes you wonder whether it was he who, in fact, hired the team or whether there was someone else doing that for him way back in the beginning, because it doesn't really make sense just from the optics that he would have hired a team like that. Yeah. I mean, there were people, I did discuss that very issue with some people who felt that it was just, this was kind of a Mueller way to hire. It was a lot of people from the Justice Department, and it was, it was the kind of, the kind of resumes that he would, that he would hire.

Although we had, I did have people tell me that they noticed a decline in Mueller before he was chosen to be special counsel. I interviewed one man named Chris Swecker, who was a top FBI official. And he said, and this is after September 11th, he said he was probably in two meetings a day with Mueller for two straight years. So he observed Mueller a lot. And he said he was absolutely super sharp. He was very detail oriented. It was like in law school, you didn't want to be called on with a question unless you knew it. And so he leaves the FBI. And he leaves the FBI. And in 2016, remember, this is about eight months before Mueller is appointed. Swecker is working in North Carolina, and he invites Mueller to come speak to a group that he is assembled.

And Mueller agrees, comes down. They have breakfast that morning for Swecker to tell Mueller, you know, what the group is going to be like, the event, et cetera. Excuse me, huge cliffhanger, folks will be right back with Byron York. Hi, folks. Trying Times. Just know they won't last. Trimtimes can be hard on our digestive track, so why not try LifeChangeTee at GetTheT.com. Life Change Tea is an herbal blend of tea that helps the digestive track and the colon cleanse from intruders.

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Friends, I'm talking to Byron York. The book is obsession. Byron, I just cut you off at a key moment. You're talking about Mueller and his, it seems rather obvious decline. Tell us about this moment. And Mueller has gone down to give a speech at the behest of one of his former employees, North Carolina, fall of 2016, eight or nine months before he's appointed special counsel.

And the man told me, you know, right when he had breakfast with Mueller, Mueller was slower. He seemed a little confused. He was just not the man that Chris Swecker had remembered. And he got through the event. He delivered his remarks. But Swecker definitely took notice. And you have to remember this is months beforehand. There's word that Bill Barr, the Attorney General, knew about there being issues with Mueller before the appointment.

Remember, Bill Barr was out of government at the time. He didn't have any role in that choice of Robert Mueller. So this was something that people around him actually knew about beforehand. And it's just, I mean, it's just mind-boggling to think that of an investigation this important, that the chief investigator was really not up to the job. And in the book, John Dow, the president's first lawyer and Rudy Giuliani, who came in after Dodd left, are friends, and they talked about it. And they would ask, you know, it really doesn't seem like Bob knows a lot about this case.

and he's been on it for a year. It's not super duper complicated. There's a few issues here, and he really doesn't seem to know. And they would kind of speculate to each other. Well, maybe Bob had pretty much kind of retired, and you really didn't want to come back and take this job, but he did out of a sense of responsibility or something. You know, they were kind of trying to make excuses for it until you couldn't make an excuse

after that meeting in April 2018, and Mueller didn't know about the Justice Department opinion about a sitting president not. being indicted. But it still didn't come out. It didn't come out into public until it couldn't be avoided and Mueller testified. Well, I guess my question is, you said earlier that no one had written a book quite like yours. I feel like so many books have been written about these things, generally speaking. What is new here? I mean, first of all, I have not heard this narrative about Mueller. I mean, I'm not enough of a Washington insider that I'm paying very close attention.

But, I mean, first of all, this is just bad news for America, but it's good news that we're getting this out. But what is the story in your book obsession that is particularly new to people who've been, you know, paying attention? Well, what we just talked about? Because there was news to you, I think. And I think it'll be news to a lot of people because it wasn't talked about before. The radical cooperation agreement that we talked about, the fight, you know, after Trump has agreed to cooperate, and Mueller begins his investigation by the fall of 2017, remember Mueller's appointed in May, by the fall, it's very clear to the Trump people that Mueller is not finding collusion. He hasn't. It's been a dry hole for him. And they want him to

keep his end of the bargain and shut down. So they have this meeting. It's on December 21st. And Mueller is there. And John Dowd says, look, you haven't found it. You know, we've given you everything you need. You haven't found it. It's time to shut this down. And by the way, I do have emails that the Trump people would send to the Mueller team, which they sent almost weekly, reminding them of some new example showing that the investigation was hindering the president's ability to govern, oftentimes in international affairs, because the president would get word that, you know, there was gossip inside this or that government. You know, is Trump going to stay president?

We don't know. We're hearing about this big investigation. and will they remove him? And, you know, this was driving Trump nuts. And he was constantly reminding Mueller that, look, this has a cost. What you're doing has a cost, and we should get it over quickly. So they have this meeting in December. And so the Trump team says, look, you didn't find it.

We gave everything. It's time for you to shut down. And they say, no, it's not, actually. We're not going to shut down. We're going to investigate allegations of a, obstruction of justice. And by the way, we're going to need to talk to the president. And boy, things go downhill from there. But this is December 2017. The Mueller report comes out in April 2019. The next year and a half is one long, bitter and sometimes stupid fight over whether

the president will testify. Well, so don't we have to wonder, I mean, now that you've said what you've said, which was, is news to me, who in fact was orchestrating this? Who was behind this? That to me is yet to be answered. I mean, we can guess. We know who some bad players were, but the idea of what you've just shared clearly doesn't just happen because somebody is a little bit out of it. There are people around him doing things. Who are those people? Well, Mueller could be, I mean, the choice of Mueller could easily be made, in my view, by people who were working on old memories of Mueller. Remember, Mueller was actually appointed by Rod Rosenstein, who was the deputy attorney general, who really, you know, I mean, Jeff Sessions, when Jeff Sessions appointed

Rosentine, he never knew, he didn't know Rosenstein. They didn't go. way back. Right. And so. I don't mean, I'm sorry, I don't mean how was he chosen, but once he's chosen, there are clearly people behind the scenes maneuvering

the whole thing along. We're going to go to a break, folks, talking to Byron York, the brand new book, Obsession. Get a copy. We'll be right back. Let's fly. Let's fly away. Come fly with me. Let's float.

I'm talking to Byron York. I neglected to say he's chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner and a Fox News contributor. I assumed you knew that. Byron, it just seems to me that there must be people who eventually coalesced around Mueller and his investigation to drag it along this way. That by the point that he says, oh, in fact, we're going to continue and we want the president to appear, that that wasn't Mueller. I think there's a confluence of interest that takes place. place here, which is the partisan Democrats that Mueller is hired want this thing to go on. And if they haven't found a collusion, they certainly believe they can get the president

on obstruction. And by the way, if they stretch it out for another year, maybe they'll find some collusion. Never can't tell. So there's clearly that interest. Then there, you know, the book is kind of a two-track book where you'll see what's going on in the Mueller investigation. And then things are happening on Capitol Hill at the same time. time because in our system, the way investigating the president has evolved is that a special

counsel has law enforcement powers, but he can't indict a president. The House of Representatives does not have law enforcement investigative powers, but they are authorized by the Constitution to begin the removal of a president. They work hand in glove. Yeah. And that's what Antonin's Galea said in the famous Morrison case in which he said that this independent counsel law, which all of his fellow justices were affirming, he said, you know, it smells like threatened impeachment. So on May the 17th, 2017, the day Mueller is appointed, most people don't remember, that's the day there's the first formal call on the floor of the House of Representatives for impeachment. So the other party pushing this along, not just

you know, partisan prosecutors inside Mueller's office. There's also the opposition party on Capitol Hill. Now, they're a minority at that point, but they're pushing the issue. They actually push to vote for it on impeachment in January, excuse me, in December of 2017, very early, and get about 60 Democrats to vote for impeachment for nothing. And that number goes up. And then in 2018, impeachment is a huge issue. so big that Nancy Pelosi comes up with a strategy for candidates, which is don't talk about impeachment in public, but plan for it in private. Everybody knew that Democrats were elected in that election. They were going to impeach the president. They thought it was going to be on the basis of what Mueller found. They thought it would be about Russia. Well, it didn't matter what it was.

they found something, a weird phone call, Trump being Trump. But I mean, you know, what shocks me the most is that even people like Peggy Noonan seemed to feel that the phone call with the Ukraine was way out of bounds. And I just don't know what world those folks live in. It's kind of like George Bush 41 world, some kind of, world, some kind of a bipartisan world where everyone behaves in a certain way. The big news, I think, for many Americans is the never-trumpers. Folks, you know, colleagues of yours at the National Review, just kind of a strange moment for many Americans to see that level of divide, the idea that

there were people ostensibly Republicans, but who hated this president every bit as much or were as disgusted by him as his fiercest Democrat detractors? Yeah, that was, I mean, there is, you know, when I talk about the Washington establishment, certainly there's a Democratic opposition party. But there was a small but very vocal group of Republican never-trumpers who most of them came to oppose the president in 2015 when he's a candidate in the Republican primary. And I think they're stunned when he wins the Republican primaries. And some of them actually came around.

They thought, well, if he's going to be the presidential candidate, I will support him over Hillary Clinton and the same as president. But a lot of them didn't. And they've been very, very vocal ever since. But here again, well, I don't want to attribute all of this to some mastermind. I mean, I think this is a bunch of things that come together at this time. And as far as the phone call is concerned, I mean, the striking thing about the phone call, the Trump-Zillinsky phone call, is that there are several people listening to it at the time, people in government. And there's only one person who thinks something wrong has happened on the phone call, who believes something wrong has happened. And that's Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman.

And Republicans on Capitol Hill came to believe. that it was through Lieutenant Colonel Vindman that we got a whistleblower. Well, again, there's so much bizarerness here. Let's cut to such chase as exists in this. What do you think is going to happen in the next months? Because, listen, this seems most Americans either get this or they don't. Do you think enough people get this to be discussed? by the desire to thwart the will of the American people in this election.

What do you suppose might happen? Well, I hope that they will be interested enough to find out what happened in this book. And the other thing to think about is the Durham report, John Durham, the U.S. Attorney. Oh, yeah, I forgot. I mean, seriously, we've heard about it, heard about it, heard about it. Do we have any clue when this might come out? No, we don't have a clue when it came out. A lot of people thought it might be out by Labor Day,

and Labor Day came and went, and it did not happen. I think there's a couple of things to remember about this. One, there's just the idea of finding out more of what happened. And I think that Durham will tell us more of what happened in the targeting of Trump beginning in the 2016 campaign. The other is indictments and punishments. I mean, there's certainly some people who want to see. people, you know, handcuffed and taken downtown for whatever role is outlined in the

Durham report. And I'm one of the ones who do not expect that to happen. I'd be very surprised if there are any high-level indictments as a result of this Durham report. Okay. I'm going to go, I'm going to weep silently while we go to a break. Folks, I'm talking to Byron York. The brand new book, a lot of stuff in here you wouldn't know. And that's why you should get it. It's called Obsession Inside the Washington Establishment. It's never ending war on Trump. Don't go away. Souls of Angel Head.

Hey there, folks. It's here. Kmetaxis show. I'm talking to Byron York. I assume you know him as a Fox News contributor. But, Byron, I've got to ask you, why do you think your book is called obsession inside the Washington Establishments, Never Ending War on Trump? Why do you suppose it took you, who Molly Hemingway, our mutual friend, considers the best reporter in D.C.?

Why would it take you when you think of so many people covering things like this to uncover this important nugget? I mean, that does seem patently strange. Well, a lot of people could have. I mean, as a matter of fact, we've just had two new books that are kind of apologies for Mueller come out. Jeffrey Tubin, the CNN analyst wrote a book. I think it came out in August. and then Michael Schmidt, the New York Times reporter, who I believe on a Pulitzer Prize for reporting some of these stories about Trump and Russia, has come out with a book. And the stuff that I've written about, the radical cooperation, the worries about Mueller's cognitive condition, all of that stuff, you know, it was there to be found. But these books argue that collusion is still real, that it was a thing, Trump is guilty of it. It's just that for a variety of circumstances, maybe Mueller couldn't find it.

It's because he was bound. I mean, listen, there is nothing more ridiculous than that. I mean, I think I even tweeted this morning that Stroke was saying something along these lines. And I thought, if you would give the American people, the open-hearted American people, a shred of evidence, perhaps we would be willing to listen. But how is it possible that you can give literally no evidence? I mean, this is not that there's evidence and people don't want to see it, literally nothing. And they continue pushing this. It seems to me that they are cynically playing the less informed members of the electorate,

that they are simply playing with their heads, assuming that those people won't pay enough attention to know that they're blowing smoke. And they're also, like in Peter Strz case, pleading their own case. But there has been, I think we're going to see this. Trump rush this stuff relitigated a long time. Peter Strzok certainly is doing it. Jeffrey Tovin did it. Michael Schmidt did it to say that we were all right to say that Trump was guilty of collusion. He was guilty of collusion. It's just that Mueller was just too much of a straight shooter. He was bound by, you know, the rules of evidence and legal charges. He didn't force Trump to testify when he should have. There were reasons. But,

We were right. I mean, most of this stuff is just self-justification. The fact is, and the fact that you can't get around, is that Mueller had all of the money he wanted, all of the time, he wanted, all of the staff he wanted, and most importantly, he had all of the powers of U.S. law enforcement to find this collusion, and he did not. If you read the report, it said he failed to establish that it ever took place. I think Trump's revenge should be after he wins his second term and both houses to do what Bloomberg did and figure out a way to get a third term so that we can really take the time to look into this. We need more time. I just cannot believe that we are where we are. I hope, Byron, that people who are really interested in what happened would read your book, again,

the title is obsession. It's brand new. A great publisher, Regnery, I happen to be familiar with them. It's important that we stay informed and that we understand what happened during this grievous chapter through which, unfortunately, we're still living. Byron York, thank you for your time and thank you for writing this important book obsession. Thanks a much. It was a pleasure being here. Thank you.