The Megyn Kelly Show - Fact-Checking the New York Times' "Daily" Podcast's Disinformation-Filled Russiagate Episode, with Michael Shellenberger and Aaron Mate

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Megyn Kelly gives a thorough fact-check of The New York Times' "The Daily" podcast episode focused on Russiagate this week, and reveals how it gets the story completely wrong. She's joined by Michael Shellenberger and Aaron Mate to discuss the way the podcast spreads disinformation about the reality of the Russiagate hoax, the way the New York Times has been emotionally invested in the Russiagate story since 2016, the collusion between intel agencies and the media, the way the New York Times distracts from the Russiagate hoax reality by focusing on President Obama personally, the tactics used by the press to smear Trump and his administration, the shocking gaslighting from the NYT "Daily" podcast about the Steele dossier, the host and guest's refusal to even say the word "Steele," the way the episode serves to misinform listeners and news consumers, and more.Maté- https://www.aaronmate.net/Shellenberger- https://www.public.news/Riverbend Ranch: Visit https://riverbendranch.com/ | Use promo code MEGYN for $20 off your first order.Grand Canyon University: https://GCU.edu

Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly show. When I woke up Wednesday morning and checked my podcast feed, I saw the New York Times' The Daily podcast, which I often listened to. And they had finally gotten around to covering all of the Russia Gate revelations. that we've been doing on this show for weeks. Host Michael Barbaro brought on the New York Times investigative reporter Michael Schmidt. I thought this is going to be really interesting because he is the reporter that we've learned James Comey used for leaks through his Columbia law professor friend. Comey used his Columbia law professor friends to leak to Michael Schmidt. And I remembered that Schmidt won a Pulitzer Prize for his Russigate reporting.

So I thought, okay, they've got a few things to acknowledge up front, and then let's hear what he has to say about all this stuff. Of course, shockingly, the Times did not acknowledge any of that in its episode, none of it, that he is personally involved in the controversy, that he is part of it because the media, acting like lap dogs, taking what we now know was flimsy at best and, let's face it, false intelligence, and slapping it on the pages of their magazines and newspapers without checking in an effort to smear Donald Trump is one of the biggest media scandals of all time. And I would think if you're running the Times and the daily, Schmidt is probably realistically the last person. You would want to platform as the expert on this, given the fact

that he's personally coming under fire daily on the podcasts and the websites that are actually bothering to cover this new scandal. But no, they platformed him like he was truly a trustworthy, the trustworthy one might say, expert on Wednesday and once again misled their audience about everything on this scandal. Here he is on a different broadcast. This is over on MSNBC and he decided the podcast was just so good he needed to go on MSNBC to promote it and he chose to do that on the show of his wife, Nicole Wallace, who's an MSNBC anchor, who committed yet another sin of journalism by not acknowledging her relationship, i.e. her marriage with her guest to her guest at any point.

Gabbard or CIA director Radcliffe or Cash Patel, they go out and they make these massive claims that they say truly unlock the Russia conspiracy. And, you know, they're hoping, apparently, at least it looks like that, that their supporters aren't going to go and read the actual materials that they're putting out. But when you read them and study them and look at them, they're not what they claim to be. But at the same time, they're making massive claims. You know, Tulsi Gabbard making claims of treasonous criminality by Obama and his intelligence community officials. But not doing that based on anything that really moves the ball in terms of proving that. conspiracy. Okay. Well, unfortunately for Mike Schmidt and Nicole Wallace, we did read all the

documents and so of our guests. And we're going to take a deep dive today to fact check everything he got wrong on the daily, which is the most watched podcast, news podcast in the country. I mean, this is absolute negligence by the New York Times. Joining me now, Michael Schellenberger, founder of the Public News Substack and Aaron Matte, an independent journalist who covers the Trump-Russia story for real clear investigations. I've been talking a lot about Riverbed Ranch lately because I love their stakes. Those Riverbend Ranch steaks are something else. River Bend Ranch has taken Black Angus beef to a whole new level.

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Thanks for having us, Megan. So let's start right at the beginning. Mike Schmidt goes on the daily. Again, this is on August 13th, this Wednesday. and tries to characterize the controversy while completely ignoring certain really important facts. Let me just play this out for you and then we can react.

For the Trump administration, this is all about the original government investigation into Trump and Russia, dating back to the 2016 campaign. I think we need to go back to that investigation, which I know you covered very closely, just remind us of the very basics of that investigation and its conclusions and why the Trump administration remains so fixated on it. In the aftermath of Trump winning the 2016 election,

it was widely understood that Russia had meddled in the campaign. Obama faced with that reality ordered his intelligence community to conduct an assessment, essentially a determination, to understand what Russia had done and why it had done it. The intelligence community comes to a series of conclusions, which they lay out in a document that was released in the final days of the Obama administration just before Trump was about to take over. And they find that Putin tried to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump while undermining America's democracy.

Okay, guys. Here's my own observation on this, and then I'll get you guys to weigh in. Faced with the reality, faced with the reality that was widely understood that Russia had meddled in the campaign, right?

Like, already just assumes facts not in evidence, right? Like everyone knew that the Russians had interfered and faced with this very difficult reality. Obama really had no choice but to order and inventing an investigation, to order and assessment, a determination to understand what Russia had done,

which is not at all what actually went down. And then to talk about it as they reached a series of conclusions and they lay them out in a document. No, it doesn't cover any of the infirmities underlying those conclusions, nor the intentional manipulation, Aaron, that Obama did to try to make sure this whole process reached a certain conclusion with in particular the before and after of what the intel community we now know was about to tell him on Russia, then his involvement, then the complete change in what was actually reported. None of that in Michael Schmidt's summary of what we're about to hear. Correct. He's just following the Russiagate playbook when it comes to how the corporate media covered this story of parroting a narrative while ignoring all the

countervailing facts. And as is the case here, there are plenty of new countervailing facts that he is simply pretending don't exist. If you read the recently classified House intelligence report that reviewed the January 2017 intelligence assessment that was put out by James Clapper and John Brennan, they pointed out that every single thing that Michael Schmidt said about Russian interference and the preference for Trump was wrong. And it was wrong because Brandon and Clapper simply cherry-picked a very small amount of intelligence and ignored all the other intelligence that undermined their narrative. So, for example, on the claim that Russia interfered to help Trump, the House Intelligence Report points out that that was based on a fragment

of one sentence, which had an unclear meeting. Somebody said that Putin was counting on Trump winning. And that came from a Kremlin official who had secondhand hand access. So basically, that conclusion, underpin the intelligence community assessment that Putin wanted Trump to win and was trying to help him win was based on a fragment of a sentence that could have been interpreted in multiple different ways and that came from someone who was relaying hearsay. And the intelligence community assessment, meanwhile, ignored all the other intelligence that they had received, including that Putin had said very clearly he didn't care who won because no matter who won the election, he expected the same policy from Washington. So that's an example of Michael

Schmidt and all of his colleagues at the New York Times, simply just ignoring the evidence that undermines their conspiracy theory. The complete absence of pointing out the chronology, December 8th, they were set, we now know, to receive a presidential daily brief that, if anything, downplayed Russia's involvement. And then there was this critical meeting with all the top intel officials that purred Obama's chief of staff released direction to Clapper. And we saw it In writing, the next day, they said, per the president's direction, we're going this other room. They went an entirely different way.

And the very next day, the news media then ran, including Michael Schmidt's newspaper, with the new narrative, which was Russia tried to help Trump. We are now starting to get a really clear picture in which what the Russiagate hoax was, was basically a disinformation effort created in concert by the intelligence community, the CIA, the FBI, most dramatically with some concerns raised by the NSA, which are interesting, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, to create the perception that Donald Trump had committed treason and was a puppet because he was controlled by Russia in a sex blackmail operation. that incredibly outlandish conspiracy theory was promoted by the New York Times and the Washington Post, along with the CIA and FBI over years. And so what you're seeing in the Michael Schmidt podcast

is just a continuation of that disinformation effort aimed at, first of all, we now know achieving either impeachment or criminal prosecution of Trump. And ultimately, with the goal of not, of either removing him from power or disabling his ability to govern and be reelected. If I can make a quick point about Michael Schmidt, he has been a key actor in this in this disinformation campaign from the start. He authored, he co-authored a report in the New York Times, February 14th, 2017. I can't believe the story is still up, but it speaks to just a complete corruption of journalism during the Russia era. February 14, 2017, the headline in the New York Times was Trump campaign had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence. What it says is the first

line that phone records, intercepted phone calls to the member of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials. So Michael Schmidt and the New Times were alleging very early on that the Trump campaign was talking to senior Russian intelligence officials throughout the election. Okay, it's an extraordinary allegation. There's zero evidence to support it. They talk about phone records, intercepted calls. Where are these calls? There's nothing. Even Jim, Jim Comey had it later testified that it wasn't true. Peter struck, the lead FBI agent on the Trump Russia probe, according to his declassified notes,

there was no evidence to support this. But Michael Schmidt and the New York Times have never corrected this because they were part of this disinformation operation. And the fact that that story is still up and the fact that people like him can still speak or pretend to speak with authority on the Russia Gate story, it just underscores how there's been zero accountability so far, so far for just this massive scam. To some extent, it makes me feel some empathy for readers of the New York Times and watchers of MSNBC. I mean, at this point, they know what they're getting, so not too much empathy. But I'm just saying there is a level of trust. between the Times and its readers.

And they're truly being, it appears willfully misled by the Times and its reporters. And there's just no accountability for the mistakes that they've made. And that mistake is a charitable word, too. None whatsoever. They want their audience to be deluded about this. And their audience is deluded about this. Okay, let's go through it because there's a lot to- They gave themselves a Pulitzer.

Like, they gave themselves a Pulitzer for this. So what are you going to do in that situation? You've got to keep going down. Yeah, you can't give it back. don't want to give it back. All right, here is the next claim that we wanted to fact check number two. She releases a classified report that was written by House Republicans in Trump's first term that claims that Putin was not trying to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton. So a report that takes real issue with this pretty central finding of the Obama intelligence

conclusion that Putin wants Trump to win. Correct, but it's really important to note that this report was written by a bunch of hardened Trump partisans in the House. And it stands alone. No other serious entity that has looked at this question, including a massive bipartisan. an investigation in the Senate comes to the claim that these House Republicans did. Okay. So, Michael, it's partisan hacks who did the House intelligence report, which we just now got our hands on, so it can be dismissed. But Senate Intel report, stellar, untouchable, and 100% supports our findings. So let's tout that one. We've seen the Senate Intel report

touted over and over again by these Russia gate hoaxers trying to do. defend themselves. Thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, look, I think people should take the time to read that House report. The HIPSI report, it's called HIPC after the acronym, the House Committee on Intelligence, the Oversight Committee. It's devastating. I mean, it goes through the full body of intelligence that was cherry-picked, essentially, by Obama's CIA director to create that intelligence community assessment. Schmidt's just being deliberately deceptive. I don't know how else to say it. It's hard for me to believe that he honestly thinks that after reading either the House report or the CIA Tradecraft memo that Ratcliffe just released.

The Senate Intel Committee, Aaron, acknowledged that it was limited in what it could do. It acknowledged that its power to investigate did not include search warrants or wiretaps and that it fell short of the FBI's abilities. They said while they, well, The committee does not describe the final result as a complete picture. We believe this volume provides the most comprehensive description to date of what happened. So they weren't saying everything we're saying here is bullshit, but they were saying we acknowledge we've been limited in what we are able to do. And since this was issued, you and others have pointed out there were other deficiencies

with the Senate Intel Committee report that is now being touted as the gold standard by people like Schmidt. If the Senate Intel report is the gold standard, why does it exclude all the evidence that the Hipsy report, the House Intelligence report, uncovered? Why are we just learning about all that evidence? Like, for example, the fact that the key judgment of Putin preferring Trump was based on a fragment of a sentence that could be interpreted in five different ways. Why didn't the Senate intelligence report tell us any of this stuff? It said the Senate intelligence report essentially was a rubber stamp. If you speak to anybody in Washington who's familiar with how the Senate Intel report was produced, it was Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat who was running the show.

And he was gung-ho on the issue of Trump-Russia collusion from the start. He had a lot riding on a report validating it. And another thing happened where Senator Richard Burr, who was the Republican co-chair of the Senate Intel Committee, he got sidelined because of some corruption allegations. Senator Marker Rubio, who was then, had to put his name on it as the Republican chair, He should answer. Why did he go on with Mark Warner? Because now we're learning from the HIPSI report that's just been classified that the Senate Intel Committee ignored key intelligence. We learned so many incredible things from HIPSI. We should have learned that from Senate Intel if it was credible. So if you just compare the two reports, if one report has all this evidence of the other report, the Senate Intel report, doesn't address. It's pretty clear to me which one is more credible. Yes. And so but Michael Schmidt dismisses all of that by saying, oh, these are hard partisans. These are a bunch of Trump affiliates. hard partisans in the House.

So he dismisses the House report, but not the Senate report. Well, look, even if that's true, even if these were all Trump partisans on the Hipsy report, first of all, you also had Trump partisans in Senate intel, but yet they miss so much of what Hipsy produced.

So that's a glaring fact right there. And second of all, look, even if they were all Trump partisans and that was their aim, the fact is either the facts that they uncovered are true or they're not. And no one's disputing the facts that they uncovered.

No one's disputing that John Brennan and James Clapper handpicked five people under Brennan's direction to write the January 2017 report. No one's disputing that the key finding of Putin preferring Trump and aspiring to help him win was based on a fragment of a sentence, based on a Kremlin source who only had second access to Putin. No one's disputing that John Brennan and James Clapper excluded all the intelligence they received, including from sources who had direct access to Putin, from Putin saying that no matter who won the election, he didn't care. because he expected the same result. Let's do the next claim, stop three. The report offers essentially a different opinion from what the Obama administration came to, essentially says,

the House Intelligence report. You guys said Putin wanted to do one thing. We believe Putin didn't want to do that. But there's nothing in that report, like an email from Obama to his intelligence community, saying, I don't care what the evidence shows we need to get Donald Trump that proves or shows or raises even questions about a larger treasonous conspiracy. Michael Schellenberger, thoughts on that one?

I mean, you know, we don't know too much more about Obama's role than we did before, but we do know that on December 9th, he held that meeting to basically require, with all of his intelligence and security agency heads to do, that intelligence community assessment that would come out in January 2017. And we also know that exact same day that the New York Times and Washington Post had conversations with multiple sources, according to them, who reported that, in fact, the Russians had wanted to help Trump and help Trump win the election. So, you know, for an administration that was famously cracking down supposedly on leakers, the Obama administration was part of creating this disinformation in early December, can you trace it to Obama? I mean, of course, it's like he's created, he's creating a steel man.

Like he's sort of saying, there's no smoking gun. Well, there almost never is a smoking gun. I mean, it's not even relevant because, you know, you, we, the Supreme Court already decided with Trump that you can't prosecute a sitting president. So I think that it's all a distraction from the basic picture here, which is that partisan actors in the intelligence community, in the mainstream news. media worked together to create a false perception. And you can argue, and it's interesting to ask, it may not be that important, but to what

extent they knew what they were doing, I mean, I think from obviously a legal perspective, it does matter. But that is what was happening over a long period of time. And certainly the intelligence analysts who were involved in creating the intelligence community assessment, they knew that something was wrong. And they did oppose putting the steel dossier in the ICA, and both the FBI and the FBI and the director of the CIA Brennan were demanding it. So, you know, I think the issue of Obama's relationships a little bit of a red herring. So this is my problem with that statement, Aaron,

that it is not just that the House Intel Committee had a different opinion than what Obama's team had. It's that the House took a deep dive into the conclusions that were offered by Obama's intel team and found that they were utterly unsupported. It wasn't just, we see the very same evidence differently. It was, you don't have the evidence you claim that you have. Your key judgments like that Putin interfered to help Trump are totally unsupported. You misled us in this document, the January 17 ICA, about how strongly you believed this and about the evidence. that you were basing these conclusions on. Yes, and what they also point out is that Brennan's own analysts also disagreed.

And Brennan simply cherry-picked the conclusions that he agreed with. My colleague at Real Clear Investigations, Paul Sperry, years ago reported that Brennan personally overruled two senior experts when it comes to Putin's intentions. And the HIPSI report confirms that. So it's not only that the Hipsy report looked at all the underlying intelligence and just showed that there was nothing there. to support Brennan's conclusions, they also show more evidence that Brennan overruled his own people.

So it's just more evidence that this idea of an intelligence consensus is just such a lie, especially since we also learned, as I discussed last time I was on with you, that in September 2016, the FBI and the NSA were dissenting on the core Russiagate allegation that Russia hacked and leaked Democratic Party emails. And now we know nearly nine years later,

thanks to Tulsi Gabbard's declassification, that the FBI and the NSA, dissented from John Brennan and said we have low confidence in that allegation. And more about that has come out just in recent days, which I think we'll get to. But can you speak to it now? Because we didn't cover it actually on the show this week. But it just came out that Clapper was putting massive pressure on them to just get this done. He was like if we're going to have to skip the normal protocols to get this done before Obama leaves office is what he was really saying.

and Trump comes in, then that's what we're going to have to do. It's an extraordinary release that just came out from Tulsa Gabbard. And I encourage people to read it because unlike most Russia gate material, it's not very long. It's only two emails. But what it is, is December 22nd, 2016, as the intelligence officials putting out that January 2017 report on alleged Russian interference are rushing to finalize the report. And Mike Rogers, the head of the NSA, sends an email to Comey, Clapper, and Brennan. And what does he say? He says, hey, guys, I have to relay some concerns I've gotten from my people, which is that when it comes to the core issue of blaming Russia for hacking and leaking Democratic Party emails, we're not being shown a sufficient amount of underlying intelligence. And we're not being given a sufficient amount of time to reach a proper conclusion. And we want to be confident in our conclusion. And then he goes on to say that, listen, if you're just going to put this out in the name of the CIA and the FBI, and that's fine. I'll withdraw my,

my objections. But if you want our name on it, we need more access and we need more time because we're just not confident in the underlying intelligence. It's an extraordinary statement because by that point, this is December 22nd, on December 9th, you had stories in the Washington Post in their time saying that the intelligence community has all agreed that Putin interfered in the election via hacking and leaking to help Trump. And this is now a few weeks later, Mike Rogers of the NSA saying, we have not been shown the intelligence that can help us reach that conclusion. So can you please give us more time and more access?

And what James Clapper says is basically, yes, we'll do our best, but we may have to, quote, compromise on our normal, quote, quote, modalities. And he also says, but it's really important that we're all on the same page. And he even says, in the highest tradition of, quote, that's our story and we're sticking to it. So he's tacitly acknowledging there. So crazy. That they are basically, that they all need to be on the same. page of a scam. But sorry, Mike Rogers, the NSA, which is the premier intelligence agency that

will be able to actually reach this conclusion. And I've been putting this out for years, that the NSA is the premier agency that could tell us whether or not Russia hacked and leaked the DNC. Because basically, they can see and they can rewind the entire internet. And the fact that Mike Rogers is complaining there shows that that low confidence assessment that the NSA and the FBI had back in September had not changed in December and that all this, this allegation of Russian hacking and leaking. It didn't come from the NSA. It came from the CIA,

came from John Brennan and his ally, James Clapper, who were refusing to show the NSA the basis for that conclusion. And now we know, having seen that House report, why they did not want to show the underlying evidence to Mike Rogers at NSA, because it was, quote, one scanned, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports,

which was the only classified information cited to suggest, as Putin, quote, aspired to help Trump win. It was flimsyer than flimsy. And there's a reason that they were like, holy shit, we're not going to show him anything. Just go along to get along. Our story needs to be the same. Go ahead, Aaron.

Just to be clear, so that sentence fragment, that was used for the conclusion that Putin aspired to help Trump win. What Mike Rogers is complaining about in that email is that he has not been shown the intelligence to blame Russia for the hack and leak. he's saying that like you have not shown our people yeah exactly exactly okay and we don't know what that basis is all we know is that the FBI at that time was relying on crowd strike

a firm working for Hillary Clinton which had first blame Russia for hacking the DNC and we know from other intelligence documents that Tulsi Gabbard has released they were still relying on crowd strike and we know that back in September the FBI and the NSA said they had low confidence in that allegation because they were not shown the technical details and this scores that two months later, the FB, the CIA and James Clapper's office were still denying the NSA the best placed intelligence agency to make this judgment on whether Russia hacked and linked the DNC, they were not showing them the information. They were not showing them the underwent intelligence. Incredible. Okay, let's keep going. Next one, stop four.

She is making this out like the smoking gun that Trump and his allies have been searching for for all these years. Nothing that she has released backs up her claim of a treasonous conspiracy. But despite that, she sends a criminal referral to the Justice Department, essentially a letter saying, hey, guys, you really need to conduct a criminal investigation into this. No evidence of a conspiracy. This is kind of related to the one we just did, Michael, where it's like, no, that we don't have a document saying, let's all conspire to undermine the Trump presidency by saying,

It was only made possible, thanks to Vladimir Putin. But you do have what we in the law would refer to as a strong circumstantial case showing the series of events that strongly suggest that there was a reversal in what they were going to say about Russia, that it happened at Obama's direction, and that it happened thanks to key players being willing to overlook crappy evidence to support their theory and ignore evidence that undermined it. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's just, the reason it's so hard to prove a conspiracy is that everybody already knows what they're supposed to do based on what their position is at any given time.

And so I think that by him focusing on that, I think that it's also been a focus of some Republicans. I think it's the wrong focus. I think the focus really should be on things like intelligence community reform to make sure that the CIA doesn't interfere in our democracy again. Well, I agree with Michael that a conspiracy case, it just sounds like a tough thing to prove at this point to bring criminal charges on the front. And I think transparency and accountability is the best way forward, as Tulsi Gabbard is doing. The problem with transparency is that you need to have a, like a minimally honest media to report on it. And Michael Schmidt is underscoring that New York Times refuses to report on all the facts that undermine their narrative. And can we, the irony, he's criticizing Tulsi Gabbard and the Trump administration for pushing conspiracy allegations.

into the Justice Department without a basis. Does that sound like anything? That sounds to me like the Russia investigation, which was based on the flimsyest tip about George Popidopoulos, a low-level Trump campaign volunteer. Based on nothing, they expanded that into a sprawling counterintelligence investigation, a first candidate Trump, and then President Trump,

for engaging in a conspiracy with Russia. Did Michael Schmidt ever say that this conspiracy investigation of Trump is baseless and based on no evidence? No, he promoted it. And he peddled it by putting out false stories by the people behind the hoax. And I missed a crucial point when I was talking before about this article that Michael Schmidt co-wrote in February 2017, this fake claim that the Trump campaign had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence. So Michael Schmidt writes that in February 2017.

A few years later, he comes out with a book about Russiagate, as so many of these people did, just trying to cash in on the Russiagate craze. His whole book is about Russiagate. Guess what story Michael Schmidt doesn't even mention. in his entire book. He doesn't mention his own story claiming that the Trump campaign had senior had contacts with senior Russian intelligence officers. How are you going to write a story claiming that the Trump campaign was talking to Russian spies? And they read a book on it. And not even not even mention your own story because you know it's a lie. Has he ever owned up to it?

No, of course not. That's incredible. I don't know. I am more bullish on showing a conspiracy legally and otherwise than you guys are. I mean, I've tried cases, and I know how arguments are made in court. And you would go in there, and you would say, let me take you back to December 8th, 2016, when the intelligence community was getting ready to offer a presidential daily brief, that if anything, downplayed the role Russia had in the election that the United States had just been through. At that time, they looked at it.

The FBI said it wasn't going to join that intelligence assessment. And the next thing we knew, the Obama White House, had called together all of its top intel officials across the government and with the direction of the chief of staff of President Barack Obama within 12 hours had completely reversed the direction they were going on their Russian conclusions. And how do we know they had reversed? Because there's a memo that says per the president's direction, we're going to do a new assessment. And within hours of that, it hit the media. It hit the New York Times. It hit the Washington Post. They told us what the new directive was.

It was Putin interfered to help Trump. Surprise, surprise. Within 30 days, there was an official intelligence community assessment saying exactly that. We'll show you the emails showing there was a rush to get it out before the new president, Donald Trump, took office. That's in writing. You can see it right here from Clapper in emails. And all the while, these intelligence officials had been warned, thanks to intelligence leaked to them by the Dutch. that Hillary Clinton had a plot to falsely tie Donald Trump to the Russians.

They knew it was coming when it came instead of having their hackles up and dismissing it. Large portions of the government, the ones who were the most partisan, jumped on it, loved it, massaged it, embellished it, and put it in writing and gave it to the New York Times. They undermine President Trump's first term. They changed the relationship that the sitting president of the United States had with Russia and he has said that himself directly. And if that's not a conspiracy to undermine a sitting U.S. president, I don't know what it isn't. What is one?

So that's how I would make the case. Okay, let's keep going. SOT five. The head of the CIA, John Radcliffe, puts out a report that also casts doubt on the 2016 intelligence assessment. How so? The report doesn't dispute. the central finding of the 2016 assessment. But it takes issue with the tradecraft for how the report was produced.

It says that the process was rushed. It says that top officials were far too involved in it. And it says that there was pressure on analysts to reach a conclusion. Thoughts on that one, Aaron? I agree with the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Rick Crawford, I believe is his name. where he called that report a whitewash, and I agree. I think that that Ratcliffe review treated the CIA report with Kigloves. And it speaks to a problem that, you know, Cash Patel talked to me about a few years ago when I interviewed him,

where he just said that, you know, he was struggling to release the Hipsy report during the first Trump term. But many people, including Trump appointees, just did not want to embarrass the intelligence community. Because it's awkward. You're exposing here a massive fraud at the highest levels of U.S. intelligence. And some people, even if they're on the opposing side of the political aisle, just don't want to go there. That key finding, that that one in particular that Putin wanted to help Trump was taken on by the CIA. And in that CIA report, correct me if I'm wrong, they looked at that conclusion, which was central to the ICA and said, how on earth did you put that in there with, quote, high confidence?

That's a lie. You didn't have high confidence behind that. Yeah. And they also singled out John Brennan for basically being biased and for trying to include include the Steele dossier, but again, the HIPSI report has the most facts in it because it shows us all the underlying intelligence that went into this assessment. And if you read that report, how can you possibly walk away defending the intelligence community assessment when you find out all the things that we learned from from HIPSI? So again, you know, people will want to point to

anything they can, but the information that is most comprehensive that was released by the Hipsy report because they want to hold on to the narrative that Russia interfered to help Trump. When again, The most sweeping look at that was conducted by HIPSI, which showed us the underlying intelligence. The underlying intelligence simply didn't support it. So Smitch says to the New York Times audience that Radcliffe's current, this is the current CIA director, Radcliffe's report, looking back at that January 17 ICA, does not dispute the central finding of the ICA. Well, I mean, the biggest finding of the ICA was that Putin interfered to help Trump. That was the one they really wanted to help Trump.

And it does. It does dispute that. It says, how could you have possibly reached that? with high confidence that aspired judgment did not merit the high confidence level that the cia and fbi attached to it unmentioned by michael schmidt um okay let's keep going because this is i think the big one that we've been waiting to get to as part of the assessment the cia had the dossier remember that compilation of unsubstantiated allegations dug up by a british spy about trump's ties to Russia, attached as an annex to the assessment.

The assessment was not based on the dossier. It didn't play a role in the conclusions. But what the report is essentially saying is that this unsubstantiated document called the dossier, it should never have been attached in the first place. And because it was attached, it cast some doubt on the entire. claim. This is a dozy, Aaron. First of all, note the language he uses to describe the so-called dossier. He calls it unsubstantiated. It's a collection of conspiracy fiction. It's a complete lie.

Every FBI effort to verify the dossier just kept leading to the fact that there's nothing here. That Christopher Steele is a fraudster. And Schmidt waters that down by calling it unsubstantiated as if it still might be true because he's cleaning on. And doesn't call it the steel dossier either. Yeah, right. It's fiction. It's just complete fiction. It's like it's conspiracy fantasy that Hillary Clinton paid for, which I didn't hear a mention there, and that the FBI relied on. And it's just a complete joke. So that's the first thing. And then also he says that this was attached, a summary of the still dossier was attached as an annex, but it wasn't in the main body. He's ignoring the fact that now we know from the recent declassifications that actually. Actually, there's a footnote in the body of the intelligence community assessment, and it says, see annex, by which they mean see the steel dossier. So in trying to put forward this idea that Russia was trying to help Trump, they reference in the body of the ICA, not just as an annex. They have a footnote referring you to the annex, which means the still de assay is in the body of the ICA.

And let me just reiterate what Schmidt claimed. He said the assessment, that intelligence community assessment, was not based on the dossier. It did not play a role in the conclusions. And so first, we are disputing the basic premise there. It effectively is in the assessment. It is referenced in a footnote. The footnote that supports Putin was trying to help Trump says, look at the exhibit, look at the appendix. And specifically, look at the dossier.

That is in the body of the report as the proof. of one of the most, or if not, it is the most controversial piece of the assessment, which is Putin did this to help Trump get elected. Keep going. Yeah, and according to these recent disclosures, John Brennan was pushing for the inclusion of the dossier because as he told his counterparts,

he said, it just rings true, which speaks the fact that John Brennan was attached to a conspiracy theory that Trump and Russia were in cahoots and that Russia was trying to help Trump. And of course, Schmidt ignores that. And so if the director, of the CIA is campaigning for the steel fiction to be included and is saying that it rings true to him, does Michael Schmidt really want to argue that a report produced under Brennan's direction

doesn't, isn't influenced by the steel dossier, especially when it's reference in the body of the report as a footnote. So he's completely omitting the countervailing facts to undermine his narrative, which is, again, it is the norm. All the analysts, all the Russia experts are like, we can't include this. This is total garbage. Brennan's insisting on the FBI's insist. on it. It's in the classified appendix, by the way, which at least 200 people get, but we know leaked like crazy to all the journalists to create the perception that somehow this document was legitimate. We know that that same fraudulent document, this fiction that Aaron describes was used to get the wire tapping, the warrants for the wire tapping. I mean, it's this hugely important

document. So for Schmidt to sort of go, oh, it wasn't really important to the ICA, it's just straight up gaslighting at this point? The CIA assessment that we've been discussing that Ratcliffe released says the steel dossier was used to support the conclusion that Putin aspired to help Trump and reads as follows. Ultimately, agency heads decided to include a two-page summary of the dossier as an annex to the ICA with a disclaimer that the material was not used to reach the analytic conclusions. However, by placing a reference to the annex material in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin aspired to to help Trump win, the ICA implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible

supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment. The House intel report, the other, the hipsy, that also just came out, thanks to Tulsi, also states Brennan, then CIA director, refused to remove the dossier from the ICA and said, doesn't it ring true? Contradicting public claims by Brennan that the dossier was not in any way incorporated into the ICA. That's what Brennan wants us to believe. We'd never incorporated in the ICA. It was a nothing burger to us. The dossier was referenced in the ICA main body text. This is Hipsy telling us the truth. It is referenced in there, as you just pointed out, Aaron, and further detailed in a two-page ICA annex. The ICA sourcing errors involving the dossier violated so many

intelligence community directives that the text would normally not have passed first-line supervisor review at CIA, FBI, or other intelligence community agencies. Moreover, the dossier made outlandish claims and was written in an amateurish conspiracy and political propaganda tone that invited skepticism, if not ridicule, over its content. Still sticking here with the hipsy conclusions. Two senior CIA officers, one from Russia operations and the other from Russia analysts argued with Brennan that the dossier should not be included at all in the ICA because it failed to meet basic tradecraft standards according to a senior officer present at the meeting that same officer said Brennan refused to remove it and when confronted

with the dossiers many flaws responded yes but doesn't it ring true and then you get Michael Schmidt doing cleanup in Isle 7 with the assessment was not based on the dossier it did not play a role in the conclusions. This is so dishonest. It did play a role. It was an important role to support the most important conclusion. And the fact that it was in there in any way in the annex or in that footnote that referenced the annex was extremely controversial amongst the most seasoned Russia experts within the intelligence community, including in the CIA itself. And the reason they were overruled is because the CIA director said it smells true. Where was that in Michael Schmidt's reporting either in the newspaper or sitting on the daily? And what's funny about all

this is if you were someone who was skeptical of all these claims, you know, Russia interfered, Russia hacked the DNC, Trump-Russia collusion, you were called a apologist for Russia, for Trump, a conspiracy theorist. And the line was, you know, how dare, this was the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community. I mean, this was done on serious work. And James Clapper and John Brennan would go on CNN and MSNBC where they worked as on-air analysts and say, you know,

this was robust intelligence. Well, now we're getting, like the picture we're getting from all this declassification was that actually this was just the consensus of a few people, James Clapper, John Brennan, and a few of the partisans. And they have all these people under them pushing back, including we learned this week, Rogers, the head of the NSA, saying you're not showing us the intelligence to reach your most important conclusion that Russia hacked and leaked Democratic Party emails, which was the

allegation that kicked off Russia gate. When Donald Trump at his July 2018 summit in Helsinki with Putin said that he actually gave a pretty strong denial that Russia interfered, and he said, I have no reason to doubt him. There was a national freak out. John Brennan said that Trump was nothing short of treasonous. by the way, which is ironic for people not complaining about, you know, Tulsi Gabbard accusing others of treason. Well, this is what John Brennan and everyone was saying about Trump for years,

including when Trump dared question the intelligence consensus. It turned out Trump and everybody else who refused to take the word of John Brennan and James Clapper were actually agreeing with all the lower level intelligence officials who Clapper and Brennan overruled. It's just stunning. I mean, it's just, I'll tell you, I was one of those, you know, right-leaning people who had trust in these agencies for most of my reporting career. I really did. Like, I, it's still stunning to me to see the veil come down and see how corrupt they were and what liars they were, what partisan hacks.

That's a lesson well learned. All right. Here's the last one, and this is a doozy too, SOP 57. The FBI director Cash Patel declassifies a piece of intelligence that he claims shows that this conspiracy, it actually originated with Hillary Clinton. That's how vindictive and vicious the former leadership structure here was. They withheld and hid documentation and put it in rooms where people weren't supposed to look. And it's a good thing we're here now to clean it up and you're about to see a wave of transparency.

Huh. And what evidence does Patel offer to support that claim? an email between Clinton allies in which they claim that Clinton personally approved a plan to tie Trump to Russia. But what Patel doesn't say is that a previous special counsel that was appointed by Trump's Justice Department to look into the Russia hoax determined that the email was likely. a fake. Wow. That Russian intelligence officials had taken a range of hacked emails and made them into a composite that depicted Clinton as the originator of the conspiracy. And presumably, the FBI director, Cash Patel, would have known that and yet still

released it and treated it as a smoking gun. Correct. Amazing there. By the way, if you just listen to their express words, you know, in a courtroom, you would object that this was improper impeachment of Cash Patel because first he says it was a fake and then he says actually what they did was they took actual emails they had hacked and created a composite so it so the ultimate email he's saying was fake but he's essentially admitting there Aaron that the underlying data was real and was from actual hacked emails they got when they hacked these entities like the Soros related entities surrounding Hillary Clinton and the DNC. But your thoughts on this claim? Well, again, the irony, these people are complaining

about relying on supposedly fake information when they promoted the Steele dossier, for example, which is a collection of conspiracy theories funded by Hillary Clinton. So it's just a bit rich for them to try to claim a high ground here. You know, I've been cautious about these hacked emails. We're told they come from Russian intelligence. Let's even take that on faith, although I'm not even sure if that's true. But I'm not sure if I take all these. emails on faith. You know, Durham is uncertain. He says, I don't know if these are all genuine, if they're partly fake, fully fake. And I think that is the line that we should take. We don't know for sure if they're true or not. If they are true, it's more evidence of what we already know.

And that's my key point. We don't need these emails to know exactly what happened, which was that Hillary Clinton framed Trump as a Russian agent. I mean, it's beyond dispute. months before these allegedly Russian emails were written, the Hillary Clinton campaign hired Christopher Steele via Fusion GPS. Christopher Steele put together a bunch of fiction about Trump and Russia being cahoots, Trump being blackmailed by Putin. Christopher Steele funneled his conspiracy theories into the FBI.

He meets with an FBI agent in early July. It gets back to the FBI. A few weeks later, the FBI opens up its Trump-Russia investigation and uses the Steele dossier as source material. We only learned, I believe, in October 2017, that's when the Hillary Clinton campaign finally admitted that they were secretly funding the Steele dossier. There wasn't a Clinton effort to frame Trump. And that's what the New York Times cannot grapple with because they were a part of peddling that conspiracy third. And all Schmitt's doing here, by the way, the trick he's pulling is he's pointing to a single part of that really large declassified annex and saying they went to the Soros guy.

He said it wasn't him. even in that interview between the FBI and the Soroskeye, the Soros guy says that some of the emails did sound like him. He didn't say for sure that it wasn't him at all. So, you know, again, it's like there's so much complexity here, but the big picture remains the same, which is that Schmidt is creating straw men and dismissing them as a way to dismiss this much larger body of evidence.

And that really what it shows is just a huge amount of information, potential criminal activity that the FBI decides, not to pursue. And instead, basically creating and manipulating intelligence in order to paint Trump as a Putin puppet in order to get the wiretaps, in order to leak that to the media to create disinformation. So everything would just sort of end up snowballing over time. They were agenda driven from the start, and they remain agenda driven. Guys, thank you both so much. This has been so clarifying, very helpful. And thanks to all of you for joining us today and this week. We're back on Monday with Walter Kerr. See you then.

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