The Megyn Kelly Show - The Reality of Biology, and Sussmann Found NOT Guilty, with Andrew Sullivan and Robert Gouveia | Ep. 332

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Andrew Sullivan, editor of The Weekly Dish and host of The Dishcast, to talk about how we can stop the next mass school shooter, the issues of guns and mental health and social media, the importance of fathers, the failures of the police in the Texas school shooting, Lia Thomas speaking out on trans athletes and female sports, the reality of biology, the outsized influence of LGBT activists vs. the average LGBT American, the stereotypes about boys and girls that have re-emerged in the trans cultural conversation, Sullivan's "ambush" on Jon Stewart's show, and more. Then Robert Gouveia, attorney and host of "Watching The Watchers," joins to discuss the breaking news of the not guilty verdict in the Robert Sussmann trial, what may happen next, the way the case against Sussmann fell apart, the screw-ups of and coziness within the FBI, how Hillary Clinton and her campaign tried to spin the media and the FBI, whether we'll see the full Durham report, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. I hope you all had a nice Memorial Day weekend, spending time with your family, with your friends, and hopefully taking some time to remember those who sacrificed for our country and the freedoms we hold so dearly. Spent a long time talking about it with my kids, trying to get them to understand what it means, what Memorial Day means and who we're honoring and why we're so lucky to live in this country. Didn't come easy and didn't come for free. And by the way, on that subject, it's always a busy weekend for everyone. So if you missed our Friday interview with Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer, I promise you it is well worth your time. I had so many friends come to me this weekend. We went to the Jersey

Shore and say that they listened to it on their ride down there or what have you. And he's just an incredible person with a spectacular story that just will move you to all sorts of places. So if you have a good drive ahead of you, we went long on that one. We played a version live on Sirius, but the podcast was a little longer because we didn't want to cut him short. Listen to it. Cue it up. Dakota Meyer from this past Friday. Okay. So now we are on Monday. And at this hour, we're waiting for verdicts in two big court cases. And I wonder which one you think is the bigger court case. I mean, I can tell you this weekend where I went, nobody was talking about anything

other than Amber Heard and Johnny Depp. But my one friend who's more conservative said, I've been following it all. I've been following the trial of Michael Sussman. So it really kind of depends. I've been following both because I'm in the news biz. And I have to say that that Sussman verdict could come down at any minute and has much larger implications for for politics, at least. And you could argue the country, then Amber and Johnny, though that one has larger cultural implications, too. Sussman is the former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer accused of walking into the FBI shortly before the 2016 election and trying to say, hey, you know, just as a concerned citizen, I want to let you know that something bad's happening. We appear to have unearthed a connection between this Russia bank, Alpha Bank and Trump.

It's not good. You guys should look into it. Same time they dropped that same oppo research, which had been totally manufactured to the New York Times. And they were trying to get the Times to publish it. And they thought they'd get a better shot at that if they could get the FBI to investigate it. And in the end, the only one they got to bite was Slate, that left wing,

totally uncredible rag that said, oh, we'd love to run with this. We would love to do it. Sure. They're embarrassed. So there was nothing to the story. But now there's an attempt at accountability to the guy who tried to peddle it to the FBI without disclosing he was there on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign. All right. It gets kind of complicated, but we've got a guy who's been neck deep in it. He's going to he and I will walk through it with you so you can accurately understand where this is going as we are on Verdict to Watch. The second verdict, as I mentioned, between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, he sued her for defamation. She's counterclaimed for the same. And that thing began with a bang and ended with one, too. The closing

arguments last week were amazing. They were gripping. They were. Oh, I'm just hearing Sussman verdicts in. Look at that. As if on cue. Not guilty. Wow. Not guilty. And can I tell you, not surprised. I was just reading this article out of the Boston Herald by Howie Carr, talking about the jurors who made it onto that jury. The judge was, I think, Barack Obama appointee whose wife is all tied up in Democrat firms involving Eric Holder. And it's a who's who of Democrat administrations obama um biden merrick garland you go down the list but that's the judge the jurors who are allowed on that jury openly said i donated to hillary clinton i donated to aoc i absolutely can't there was one guy who's conservative hates trump he's never trumper and on and on it went um so this was not

a jury poll that was in any way favorable to the prosecution and i'll tell you the other problem in that case i'll tell you that and we'll get into this more later but i'll tell you the other problem um the fbi was the one who had been lied to and they were in on it the fbi loved the lie the fbi was like great you got dirt on trump we love it let's open an investigation right he didn't give a damn whether Sussman disclosed that he was there on behalf of Hillary or just said he was a concerned citizen. Only John Durham, had one other guy who he testified on the stand. He's under investigation right now for withholding information that would have undermined the Russia Trump narrative. So the FBI is not exactly a sympathetic, a sympathetic victim here, if you will. And I'm using that term, that quote in quotes, that term in quotes, victim. Anyway, we'll get into all of this in just one second, but we're going to kick it off today in Uvalde, Texas, where there's disturbing new information about the shooter's actions leading

up to that awful day. And indeed, now we know there were more warning signs that it seemed that no one cared to flag. All right, so we're going to get into all that. And by the way, new developments today into the Supreme Court leaguer, the leaguer, the marshal, maybe getting a little closer to figuring out who it was. So joining me now is Andrew Sullivan. He's been on the program before. He's the founding editor and co-owner of The Weekly Dish, a hugely successful newsletter on Substack, and hosted the podcast The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan. Andrew, welcome. Great to have you here. So I won't put you on the spot and make you discuss Sussman because we do have a lawyer coming on has been following it very carefully. But I do want to talk about Uvalde, which is in the news very much. I know you've written about it yourself and the absolutely dreadful developments that have come out of there about the the blame lies with the police. The blame lies with the shooter, 100%. But what happened down there is absolutely extraordinary, and it's unforgivable, and

it's painful to even discuss, but it must be. Your thoughts? Well, like you, I almost don't know what to say when 19 children are gunned down. Every time I think about it, my heart sinks even lower. And I think that kind of numbness was bad enough. And then when you got the subsequent news that the cops seem to have completely bungled this and that those lives might have been saved. And then you also see the story of this incredibly troubled, obviously pathological kid, bullied, isolated, angry, threatening, lots and lots and lots of red flags right there.

Megan, I don't know what to say. I'm an immigrant to this country, So the gun situation here is for me, and for anybody outside the United States, pretty hard to understand. I mean, it's, you understand why? And this is the only sort of Western developed country that for hundreds of years had a completely open frontier. You can understand why with the Second Amendment that evolved, but then we're in a situation where the simple consequence of that is the massacre of children, and that will happen again and again and again. Honestly, I've given up. I don't think there's anything to be done. I've watched the politics of this. And I don't feel strong.

I'm not one of these immigrants who think that America's gun laws are without reason or without defense or without historical roots. But I don't know how much longer our collective consciences can allow something like an AR-15 in the hands of anyone, really. A machine gun that devastated these children's bodies to such an extent that the parents had to give DNA to recognize their children. It is unconscionable in any other place. I don't disagree with your feeling of futility. And I'm not a huge gun person. My audience knows it's an amendment. It's a right. I get that as a lawyer, but I'm not like a gun advocate, a second amendment advocate. However, every time I look into this, Andrew, it's not a machine gun.

An AR-15, it's a semi-automatic rifle, and it does the same amount of damage in the same amount of time as a semi-automatic handgun. That is 85% of what gets purchased over the counter today in America. I mean, if you go for self-protection and want to buy a gun, you're probably going to get like a Glock or a 9mm. And every time you pull the trigger, a bullet fires. That's what an AR-15 does too. It just looks scarier. It just looks scarier. But doesn't it have many more bullets?

No. This guy modified it. I think I'm pretty sure he modified it and the previous shooter modified it. But no, it can't fire faster or more bullets than a handgun. So I know it looks like- I'm happy to say I don't know the difference. But to me, that's the futility of the problem. It kind of goes to your original point. Because we have 330 million people here and we have 400 million guns and we're not getting rid of them. We are not we're not doing what Canada just did today and said

we're going to have an assault weapons ban. Kamala Harris said she wants one. It's not happening. And I love it because they said, well, Congress won't do anything. Well, you guys control Congress. We have a Democratic president. We have a Democratic House. We have a Democratic Senate. So don't make it sound like, oh, this inactive Congress, like your party is, does not have the will to do this because it's unpopular because guns are very popular in America. And I knew you as a, as a native Brit, don't get that. I mean, I just think I can get that. I can, I understand that, but what it means, what it means is that America is the only country that will massacre its own children on a regular basis. And America has to own that.

If it wants to own the Second Amendment, it has to own the massacre of children as a particularly American phenomenon. And I just think if that's what we're going to say, that's what we have to be. That's how we have to understand ourselves and our country. I'm an American citizen. I understand that being an American means to live in a country where children will be massacred on a regular basis. Well, listen, I find this deeply alarming too, but there have been massive shootings of children overseas

in other countries, perhaps not as regularly as we see here. And it's a problem we have to take a hard look at. But the thing is, we have a huge country. Our country's way bigger than virtually all the other countries that in which this has happened or where we look at to sort of see what's happening there. 330 million people are not easy to control. And we have lunacy. And we have red flags that we ignore. And I mean, both in connection with the selling of guns, and just in connection with policing ourselves, you know, like being a conservative citizen and calling up, you know, the authorities and saying, Hey, this guy's a problem. Like we saw with a buffalo shooter,

free tortured a cat to death. I mean, animal torture is always a precursor. I mean, like you can take it to the bank. Anyway, what do you make of- One of the things I would say is that I have been persuaded these red flag laws, partly because of David French's passionate support for them, seem like at least one way forward to try and catch psychopaths or just deeply troubled young men from doing this. And it's mainly young men. The other thing that's behind this, and if you look at this kid's past, no father. If you know present father, if, and you will find through all these cases and through a lot of not just mass murders, but regular shootings, which happen every day,

that it's young men without fathers that are doing this. And at some level, we have to also get the deeper cultural issues here, which is that men and boys, boys need dads. They really do. And some male role model to teach them what it is to be a man, which is not using an AR-15. It's not using one and only using something out of defense to protect your family or your children or your neighborhood. And there is a different kind of masculinity

than this kind of macho warrior ethic. And I think the absence of fatherhood is a hugely underappreciated phenomenon in our social ills. And this kid, not only did he not have a dad, he really didn't have much of a mom, according to the reports. The mom, according to the grandmother, was on drugs and was no longer even in the picture. He didn't get along with her. He was living with the grandmother. So, you know, he had dropped out of out of school. We saw a soundbite with his grandfather being like, oh, you can't tell him what to do. You know, kids today. It's like, no, you can. You can when they're a minor. You can force them to go to school or you can seek help and you can understand he's withdrawing from society

and you can monitor his online behavior and so on. And that was the news just over the weekend that he did. In addition to this timeline, we're now getting about what happened with the with the police. There is a social media app called Yubo, Y-O-Y-U-B-O. And I had never heard of this, but apparently it's based in Paris. And sure enough, Andrew, we heard from the FBI after the Buffalo shooting that the vast majority of school shooters or mass shooters do telegraph their intentions beforehand. And the news as we went into the Memorial Day weekend was, oh, he, you know, 30 minutes before he shot his grandmother, he was like, I'm going to shoot my grandma. Okay. I just shot my grandma. And then I'm going to go do a school shooting. And then it was over. No, it was

much more extensive than that. Um, he apparently went onto this website. He was telling girls on the website, he was going to rape them. He showed off a rifle he had purchased. He threatened to shoot up schools in live streams. And many of the users reported him. There was one woman, last name Robbins, 19 years old, said he verbally threatened to break down her door and rape and murder her after she rebuffed his sexual advances. She reported him to Yubo several times, she says, and blocked him, but continued seeing his live streams. Another girl, Hannah, 18, from Canada, said she reported him too to Yubo in early April after he threatened to shoot up her school and rape and kill her and her mother during one live stream session. Ubo, be it from the school that sees the dropout come, be it from his friends at Wendy's who said he was inappropriate there and making troubling remarks. There's just no way to capture it in

such a large country. And the other thing is that online, of course, you add the number of people with a million different avatars, a million different names, and a huge amount of anonymity. And I don't know what would be required for us to be able to find these things. But I'm sure it's doable at some level, and we should have better ways in which we can identify this, and social media companies should take responsibility. I mean, it's not Yubo's fault. It's no one's fault but the shooter. But if Yubo had been told of this and never did anything, just one call to the FBI would have helped.

Right. That's what we could have avoided. And that seems to be something that social media companies, again, so many major companies seem to think their only goal and their only motive is to make money. And it is to make money and to help please their shareholders. But we're also civic entities. We're all citizens. And I think it's a terrible thing that major companies do not feel in any way responsible for the social peace of their own societies. It's as if they exist in some weird world of cyberspace where they don't acknowledge that they also have responsibilities as well as rights. You're so right.

And you point out that it's almost always young men between the ages of, let's say, 15 if it's a school shooting and 22, you know, around there. And you can, it's different ethnicities. It's often white. In this case, it was somebody who was Latino and, you know, similar. But you can get a profile very easily of who the potential school shooters are. It's almost never, I can't even remember a case where it was a young girl or a woman. So there's a way of creating a profile in the same way, frankly, we did for the, you know,

radical Islamist terror attacks that the country was suffering for a long time after 9-11, the domestic terror attacks. And people can say it's inappropriate, but there's a profile, you know, and there's a reason like you're not going to suspect me of committing radical Islamist terror on the homeland or you of committing a school shooting. Right. You don't fit the profile. You've aged out and we're not doing it. Thank you, Megan. I'm aware of my gradual decrepitude, but yeah, no, I know. I'm like these schools, but you know what? Most of the actual just shootings in America are committed by men under 30. Yeah.

These are not, these are not women shooting people up. It's 90, I think over 90% male. And of course it's 90% happening among men whose testosterone levels are at their natural life peak, which is likely to reduce their inhibitions, increase their likelihood for anger, and especially if they're in conflict with others, lead to outbreak. These are things that we know. We can do all this stuff, but unless these boys, and that's what they are in so many circumstances, don't have someone in their lives who can tell them what's right and what's wrong, they are going to keep doing this. And that's our deeper problem. That's what's so disturbing is that your inability to stop it and you know it you know it's like in some of these cases sure we can red flag these guys maybe even involuntarily commit some of the worst ones but the bar for that is so high right now and no one's even considering lowering it you know that's one

thing i want i want it to be easier maybe beginnings of a shift on mental illness i think i can i mean i i do think that the way in which mental illness has combined with drug addiction, especially with meth, and to some extent with fentanyl now, and homelessness, we, I think, need to have a conversation again about whether it is a good thing for the mentally ill to be allowed to walk free everywhere and not to have some compulsory kind of uh care uh if not for their own sake then for the sake of the rest of the country i mean many of these shootings of people with serious you know really difficult mental challenges and uh and that's you know that's we did we started doing that in the 80s. It was Reagan, actually, that supported the deregulation of what we used to call committing. I don't know what the, in England it's called sectioning or something. They come up with some word, but it means involuntary, being involuntarily sent to a hospital where your mental health can be tackled. And I, for one, having looked around me and seen the city I grew up in and also in my own life, people with mental illness,

I think allowing people with mental illness to get sicker and sicker until their lives are being thrown away is not something I could do in good conscience with a family member or someone I had any, and I've had family members in such institutions and I, and they are, you know, they are incredibly important for helping people with, with serious mental illness. We have such a mass problem with it now because we don't have good facilities. We don't have, I've said before, loving facilities for let's say a mom or a grandma in this case that wanted to involuntarily commit with their 18-year-old son or grandson. There's no place right now that you would willingly put a loved child or grandchild. And we need one. And then we need to be, you know, the left wants to go after the Second Amendment rights. What about the Fourth Amendment rights? All right. The the freedom to be in to avoid involuntary searches and seizures or unreasonable searches and seizures. Right. That's that's why they can't just lock us up and throw away the key. Well, why don't we take a look at that? Because I think a little if we're going to ebb and flow on some of these rights,

that should be one on the table. I mean, what was this guy doing out and about after making these threats that were public and knowable? You know, shouldn't we be casting a wider net while Merrick Garland's so busy investigating parents as threats for not wearing masks at school board meetings, but he's doing nothing to coordinate, at least with the social media? You know, he wants to coordinate with the social media on disinformation, doesn't people putting out wrong covid info. But what about coordinating with social media companies on men who fit this profile, who are of the age, who have been reported repeatedly by people for making threats to shoot up schools, right? Like, what about that? The left won't even talk about that because civil liberties, other than the Second Amendment. They care about

civil liberties except for that one. There are civil liberties, I mean, big civil libertarians. But I do think that when you're dealing with people who are not fully able to consent to things, who aren't fully able to be in control of their own faculties, in which we can have good criteria for recognizing that and for helping them and thereby saving the community from the constant interactions that one has. I mean, you think of the subway in New York City

and so much of the people that are committing violence there or just disruption are clearly not mentally well, like the subway shooter not so long ago. And you must see it, right? I live in Washington, D.C., I'm now happily in Provincetown. But in Washington, it's everywhere on the streets. I mean, it's not as bad as in the West Coast, but it's right there. And my heart goes out to people in that situation.

And especially with meth, which is this terrifyingly potent drug, especially as it's been reformulated. It would make a sane person crazy. What it does to crazy people i know i'm not used supposed to use those words but you know what i'm saying yes of course when people do have flowing across the border at alarming rates which is another problem we refuse to take on i want i want i i would like some fortification the schools. I would like to see some of the leftover covid money directed in better ways, including security at the schools. Why wouldn't we have security at the schools? We have security at the football stadium.

Why don't we have it at the schools where our precious and most vulnerable are? Right. They can't defend themselves. The soft targets are attractive for a reason to these lunatics. And I feel like and by the way, another thing, just as an aside, is the media has to stop with the constant publication of the names and pictures of the shooters. I mean, look at Jordan Peterson. Look at Gavin DeBecker. There's so many people have done great writing on this. They want infamy and the media just proceeds to help without any thought for their role in it. But on the subject of the school, Andrew, the information that came out this weekend is chilling. Let me just give you a bit of the TikTok. This is via CBS, but everybody has it because they gave it. They finally, finally came out and gave the TikTok, which they'd been avoiding all last week. They lied. They misstated the facts. And now they've finally been forced to actually list it. 1127 a.m. An exterior door to the school was propped open by a teacher. One minute later, gunman's truck crashed into a ditch near the

school. Teacher runs into a room in the school to retrieve a phone and goes back to the open door. Two males from a nearby funeral home head to the scene of the crash. The gunman fires at them but doesn't hit them. 1130, this is minutes later, a person, apparently the teacher, calls 911 to report the crash and the armed gunman. 11.31, the gunman reaches the last row of vehicles of the school, begins shooting at the school. So as of 11.31 a.m., the gunman was shooting at the school. A school resource officer responds to the school from off campus, driving past the gunman, who's hunkered down behind a vehicle. One minute later, 11.32, multiple shots are fired at the school. 11.33, gunman enters's hunkered down behind a vehicle. One minute later, 1132, multiple shots are fired

at the school. 1133, gunman enters the school. He enters the school. So nothing happened with a school resource officer to stop him. He then begins shooting into room 111 or room 112. Apparently they were connected by a bathroom. He fired at least 100 rounds. So most of the damage we believe happened early, though we don't know that. 1135, three Uvalde police officers entered the school through the same door as the gunman. They suffered, quote, grazing wounds. I'd like to know more about that since they've been misleading us about and their police do not seem particularly brave. What's your grazing wound? Tell me more. Later, three additional police officers and a sheriff's deputy entered the school. By 1137 to 1144, another 16 rounds were fired off. By 1151, police sergeant, other law enforcement agents arrive.

1203 now. So we're 30 plus minutes into this. As many as 19 officers are in the school hallway. A student in room 112 called 911, whispering she was in room 12. Seven minutes later, 1210, she calls 911 again, saying multiple people are dead. Three minutes after that, 1213, she calls 911 again. Two minutes after that, members of a Border Patrol tactical unit arrive at the school. 1216, the student calls 911 again, saying eight to nine students were alive.

1219, another student calls 911. The call gets disconnected. 1221, the gunman fires again. The group of law enforcement officers and agents move down the hallway during a 911 call made at this time. You can hear the sound of three shots being fired. All cops are there. You got two dozen cops outside. He's still shooting people, or so it would seem. 1213, first student who had been calling 911 called again, staying on the line for 21 seconds. She told 911 he shot the door. 1243 and 1247, the student called 911 again, begging, please send the police now. This poor child. Can you imagine what she, I think, was thinking over the course of an hour as she knew the police were there and they didn't come in? She said she could hear the police next

door. 1250, the officers finally breached a locked door using what? TNT? Dynamite? No. Keys they got from the janitor that was accessible to them all along. Shots were heard, the gunman was killed, and then they rescued the remaining students. There's no excuse. If you are not willing to risk your life to save a bunch of single digit children who are being shot by a crazed gunman, you're in the wrong line of work if you're wearing a badge. Find something else to do. What are your thoughts on it? I can't put it better than that.

Although I am not going to be a judge of people in that situation, but it does seem to me to be just horrifying incompetence and cowardice let's call it what it is i want to go back to one detail you mentioned which was a hundred rounds how many bullets is that it's a hundred that's a hundred bullets hundred bullets yeah now you say a hundred bullets ability to shoot a hundred times is is a completely normal weapon for self-defense and i i don't believe it well it was modified i think i think it was modified but here's the thing even if it was sorry no one needs a hundred a gun that can shoot a hundred rounds like that in a civilized society no one no one for hunting

if you modify it no one for self-defense but if you might like we have laws in the books preventing murder that he didn't observe either you know he modified it to to have a greater capacity but let me just take you back to virginia tech and that shooting which i covered live i was there uh moments out the the day after it, um, he only used semi-automatic handguns. That's it. He just had a couple of them and they're very easy to reload quickly. You know, it's like, so you can blame it on the AR-15 and my, and I couldn't care less about an AR-15. Do I care whether people get to keep their AR-15s? Not really, but I understand that you could take away every single one of them. It's not going to change anything. You're gonna have

just as many school shootings and you're gonna have just as many dead it's those particular guns i can give you guns could be a potential problem here i can give you that this particular gun that's a comfort check that's the shoes at the airport getting rid of them is not going to stop this well that may be true too um then the question is simply what I said before, which is that we are the only country in the world where this thing happens. Really. I mean, there have been, I think, a couple of others elsewhere by a mile. So that's what America means. Own it. I think there's going to be accountability for these officers quite clearly. Yes, they will be. And the fact that they lied about it after the fact is even worse. Now we finally have the DOJ investigating. Originally, they said no. They want to investigate every police department. I mean, you have an altercation with a man in a car who happens to be African-American. Believe me, the DOJ is going to be investigating. This one took them a week before they finally said, okay, we'll look into it. Thanks. Okay. Terrific. We'll get to the bottom of all of it. We do appear to now know the name of the head officer who made the call to treat this as a hostage situation

instead of as an active shooter situation. And I have to say you're more generous than I am because unlike you, I am willing to judge. And that man's a coward. And I don't know how he looks himself in the mirror on a day like this. Now that we know, I mean, he definitely has blood on his hands. It's not his fault, but he could have done more to stop it. And he's going to have to deal with that from now until the day he passes. All right, standby. Andrew Sullivan is here to discuss so much more, including his recent testy exchange with Jon Stewart. My God, John Stewart was a nightmare. He's awful. Whatever you once thought of him,

he's just truly awful now. And what he did to Andrew was grossly unfair and an ambush, says Andrew. And also Leah Thomas is back in the news today giving an interview this morning that was it? It was to ABC and guess what? Sorry, not sorry. We'll tell you what you're saying. Don't go away.

OK, so, Andrew, let me kick it off with Leah Thomas, the transgender swimmer who's on the UPenn team, who's been breaking records and beating all the biological women. She's finally on camera giving an interview now to ABC News, sat down with Juju Chang and had some things to say about her right to swim in women's sports here. Soundbite one. The women who signed the letter anonymously said that they absolutely supported your right to transition, but they simply think it's unfair for you to compete against cisgendered women. You can't go halfway and be like,

I support trans women and trans people, but only to a certain point, where if you support trans women as women, and they've met all the, all the NCAA requirements. And then I don't know if you can really say something like that. Trans women are not a threat to women's sports. What do you make of it? Well, I, I want to say two things.

One is that I understand and appreciate the, the situation that Leah Thomas finds herself in. And I don't think this is a ploy or something fake. I think it's real. And I want to respect her and her rights in every single respect. And that means 99% of the situations I would support her in. There's just like 1% of a few small things like biology, which is incredibly important in something like sports, in which biology is central.

So similarly, I do think that there are questions in which women who've been abused and need to find shelter should have an option to have a shelter for their domestic abuse in a place where there are no people with penises. You can have shelters which have both trans women and women, but I think there should be some options for women who don't want to be in the presence of men. I would say that also for prison. Now, those aren't huge exceptions, Megan. They're just a small concession to reality. And look, I am and always felt myself to be a big supporter of trans rights. And you know what? We won. The Bostock decision granted transgender people every civil right under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If I'd been told that would happen 10 years ago, I wouldn't have believed it. It's happened. It

was an opinion signed by Neil Gorsuch. So it's over. All that's left is the cultural issue. And the cultural issue, in my view, has been co-opted by the radical left, which has taken hold of what was once the gay rights movement and turned it into something called the LGBTQIA++ movement, which is really an attempt not to grant civil rights to transgender people or to gay people, which has happened, but to destroy the sexual binary because they believe it's somehow oppressive. Now, I don't believe the sex binary is oppressive. In fact, I think it's kind of liberating in many ways. It's oppressive for the tiny proportion of people who have this is in fact a fact if we didn't have a sexual binary there would be no human beings it is integral to our reproductive strategy as a species there are no people who are both men and women uh there are a tiny number of people who

are intersex but normally you can tell whether they have gamete large or small gametes either they don't no one is born with the ability to have sperm and eggs, right? You can't reproduce yourself. We're not amoebas. We're humans. And so making this distinction should not offend transgender people. And you know what? It doesn't offend most transgender people.

The trouble is these activists seize control of these issues. They've used and abused us gays in trying to turn us into things we're not. You would think that every single gay person in America was a screaming leftist if you read the media. It is not true. It is not true. It is not true. It is not true. We as gay people are born everywhere in the United States randomly. That means in Texas and Oklahoma, just as much as in New York and California. And we have in the gay community, a large diversity of opinion. We have 30% voting for Trump. We've always had solid gay conservatives and liberals who are not party to this neo-Marxist claptrap. And the trouble is the intimidation of those of us who stick up for being gay or lesbian, who are same-sex attracted, not same-gender attracted, has rendered this debate skewed. I have to say, one good news about this was finally the New York Times ran Michael Powell's piece for Sunday,

which is the first time that newspaper has published anything approaching objectivity on this question. Previously, this has been pure propaganda. And look, there is and has to be a distinction between trans women and women. And women who have always been women, are biologically women, are chromosomally women, are functioning women, have had the experiences of a woman from childhood onwards, that distinction between that and someone who's biologically male with all the male nibbly bits, as it were, it's real. And it doesn't offend gay people. You get rid of same-sex attraction in favor of same-gender attraction, you've abolished homosexuality.

Radicalism of this attack on sex is not only an attack on the core women's rights, it's also an attack on gay people. by super woke lefty LGBTQIA, blah, R, W, X, Y, Z plus people that I should be attracted to someone who has a vagina. Now, the last person who told me that was a priest. And these people are Puritans. They're anti-gay, in my opinion. They certainly don't like gay men. And it's time for gay people to reclaim our movement, which we succeeded dramatically with. Why did we succeed? And I was obviously a central part of that in the 90s and 2000s, was because we talked civilly to people. We made our arguments.

I went out and talked to people. I disagreed. I went to evangelical churches, fundamentalist churches, Catholic institutions. I made the argument. And you know what? The great thing about America is if you make the argument and it makes sense, a majority of people will be fair-minded and we change the world.

And now this group of leftists is throwing so much of that goodwill away by being so viscerally hostile to so many people and to bring the debate also down to the children, which is the children should be left alone. Seriously. 100%. You have no right to indoctrinate my child with your weird views of biological sex and gender and so on. But to hear, you know, to hear Leah Thomas tell it, this is really, you know, you're really sort of stuck in the past and that she really doesn't,

she doesn't have any advantages over the biological women just because she's lived her entire life as a man, but for the last couple of years. Here was a question on, and listen for the term, legacy effects. Legacy effects. You mean the 20 years as a man, a legacy part? Listen. There is this concept of the legacy effects of testosterone and that that can't ever be zero. Should that eliminate or disqualify transgender women? I'm not a medical expert, but there is a lot of variation among cis female athletes. There are cis women who are very tall and very muscular and have more testosterone than another cis woman. And should that then also disqualify them?

Hmm. What do you think? The range of testosterone for women never overlaps with the range of testosterone for men, period. I recommend if people are not aware of the science of this, a terrific book by Carol Hoeven at Harvard, a brilliant professor at Harvard, well-loved but also isolated now on this, who's just, this is about reality. And bone structure, musculature, all these things,

the wave of testosterone in the womb, the wave of testosterone at puberty, these things dramatically, dramatically alter your perspective. That's why every human being can look at another human being and instantly tell they're a man or a woman, instantly, because that's what testosterone does to the body. And she is, look, she's this intelligent person. She knows this is not true. Yeah, that's right. She knows this is not true.

That's right. And happily in the Times this Sunday, it was stated as fact, this is not true. Yeah, there was an extraordinary piece. We include trans women, sure. But don't fool yourself in thinking you're going to protect women's sports. You're not. You're going to destroy it. Well, in the same way, once you actually enter the hospital and need medical care, the jig is up. You've got to disclose. They're going to find out. What's inside of you, what your body parts are,

actually does matter in a medical perspective. And it matters in a sports perspective too. They just dug up two people from Pompeii. They were liquefied in the eruption of Pompeii by Mount Vesuvius. They know from the bones what sex they were. Wow.

From the bones. Sex is implanted in every cell in our body. And the idea that it's some trivial element. Look, this is all a postmodern attempt to destroy biology, to destroy scientific reality. That's where this philosophy comes from. And it's a profoundly illiberal philosophy. It denies the centrality of reason to human debate and puts feelings at the front of them.

It believes that science itself is a function of white supremacy. I'm not kidding. It believes the Enlightenment was the beginning of darkness. It is deeply aiding. I went out, I studied political philosophy at Harvard. I have a PhD in stuff. I had to read this crap. And forgive me, but it's strange, it's weird, and it's taken, it's being indoctrinated into so many people who really should know better and everyone else is too cowed by fear because the weapon of saying you hate a certain group of people, that weapon, which is a lie, a massive lie. Now, some people, I've no doubt, are bigots towards people who are transgender. No question, it happens. But my view is the majority of people don't want to harm trans people. Of course we don't. We don't want to harm trans children. But we don't want to

get put, gender dysphoric children, children in a position of making decisions about their entire future lives without very, very, very careful mental health monitoring. them into this and no one can tell me it doesn't happen it happened in my son's school i witnessed this day after day when he would come home and tell me and i was probing once i heard the first story what they say today what they say today they were pushing it as though they wanted the boys in this all boys school to declare themselves girls this school no longer uses the cern the term sons or boys uh you just say your student your student this i mean this is one of the reasons we left um now wait i want to stand you by because there's so much more to get to including whether you learned that term nibbly bits while you were at harvard i'm sorry it just came into my head that phrase i'm just trying to think of something that wouldn't uh meat and two veg. How's that? You're meat and two veg. And to his credit. Sorry. So stand by. We'll come back right after a quick break.

More with Andrew and then we will come back after that with analysis of the Sussman not guilty verdict. John Durham's case against the HRC lawyer, Michael Sussman, fell apart and the jury saw it and he was found not guilty. Let's talk about Bill Maher. And I know you think this is sort of an important moment because he he's listened to he's the left listens to him. He has influence with, I think, large swaths of the left still, even though he's not he's not a woke leftist, but he's still a leftist. He hasn't abandoned his liberal principles. I think he considers himself a man without a party currently, like a lot, like a lot of people. Anyway, he took on this whole transgender insanity recently on his show. Here's a clip. Something about the human race is changing at a previously unprecedented rate. We have to at least discuss it. When things change this much, this fast, people are allowed to ask,

what's up with that? All the babies are in the wrong bodies? Because we're literally experimenting on children. Maybe that's why Sweden and Finland have stopped giving puberty blockers to kids. Because we just don't know much about the long-term effects. Although common sense should tell you that when you reverse the course of raging hormones, there's going to be problems. If this spike in trans children is all natural, why is it regional? Either Ohio is

shaming them or California is creating them. That's a great question. Well, I think it misses one other central point here, which is that not just regional, but why has there been over the last 10 years, a 5,000% increase in transgender identification among teenage girls, a group previously unheard of in this kind of study. And as you say, these kids are being taught essentially that if they're lucky, they're trans. If they want to be cool, they're trans.

Now, I want to just say one word about what this does to gay kids. You're a gay boy, right? And you may have some effeminate characteristics. And you were told you could be a girl underneath, that's who you really are, that's homophobia. That's the old smear. You're not really a boy, you're a girl. And you're putting that terrible idea into this boy's head

at an incredibly impressionable age. These 80% of children with gender dysphoria grow out of it and turn up to be gay. Underneath this is an attack on gay kids. And the gay rights movement has been so co-opted by postmodern queer and transgender ideology that they can't see this. And I'm telling you, just as there is a big outcry among parents about this confusion of children with, let's face it, postmodern queer theory. This is not reality. It's not biology. It's not biology. It's not what we know to be true about the tiny number of people who are transgender.

It is an attempt to end the sex binary. And in the process, it's driven by a lot of homophobia. And at some point, this LGBTQ movement has to split up. Well, that's so interesting to say that a very good friend of mine who's gay said early on, kind of laughingly, but he was serious. Why do we have to share a letter group with them? Like he didn't see the causes as perfectly aligned. He didn't like the activists who represent the trans community, if there is such a thing. And he saw what you're seeing, which is too often the things that we fought against, like, oh, my son likes pink. You know, now it's maybe he's

trans, right? We used to be like, okay, just because he's pink doesn't mean anything. He could be gay. He could be straight. It doesn't like, it doesn't mean anything. We sort of got to the point where we accepted that. And now suddenly we've gone back to where it means you're a girl. god for all the bookish boys and all the tomboyish girls out there yeah we're all humans that's much more important they create a spectrum from i'm not kidding on one end gi joe on the other end barbie what is this when why have we gone back to the worst stereotypes of men and women when the whole point of the gay rights movement was to say we can love other men and be men? Our ownership of our own sex is critical to being gay, but critical to being trans is disowning your sex. It's not just not alike.

It's directly opposite. Now, historically, transgender people were part of the umbrella, as it were, because they were protected. And most of us, and the vast majority of us, want to support trans rights. And we do. As I say, we have them. We've finally got the Civil Rights Act. You will never hear them mention this breakthrough. Why? Because they're not interested in civil rights. They're interested in transforming society on leftist grounds. They have co-opted us.

And we gay people have to say, you do not represent us. We want to protect gay kids from this indoctrination, as well as straight kids from this indoctrination. And we are defined by the ownership of our own sex. the worst thing that was said to me as a kid when i was at christmas with my mom and my grandma and i had a younger brother who's four years old my younger brother was bashing a truck up against the wall and i was sitting in the corner reading a book and my grandmother looked at my mother and looked at the two of us and she said to my mom, well, at least now you have a real boy. And do you know what that does to a kid?

Being told that you're not really a boy, there's something wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with a gay kid who's bookish or who likes things that are stereotypically feminine. There are plenty of gay kids who would not like that, but there are some who are. And again, this undermining of the self-esteem of gay children. How on earth did the gay rights movement get caught up in this? And a few of us are trying to speak out. We're smeared constantly because of it. We're going to get caught up in this. And a few of us are trying to speak out.

You know, we're smeared constantly because of it. We're called haters. We're called transphobes. There is nothing transphobic about Martina Navratilova. There is nothing transphobic about J.K. Rowling. That was a good bit of the New York Times piece you referenced where Martina, who I've sparred with online, but I got to give her this point. She's like, that's where you're going to go with me. I'm a TERF. I'm a trans exclusive, whatever, radical feminist. Okay. I mean, it's like she gets no credit for all of the work she's done as one of the first out lesbians in tennis and so on.

In that piece, a gay rights spokesperson told Michael Power not to quote Martina, not to platform any of these people. They also believe in distorting the news. That's right. All right. Now, speaking of distorting the news, why you went on his show, I do not. We're going to have to bring it up with your therapist because he's been unfair for a long, long time. And I guess maybe you wonder whether the new iteration of him is going to be more fair.

You know, like maybe people mellow in their older age. You know, I think people tend to be more reasonable and maybe even a little bit more conservative as they get older. Not Jon Stewart. Man, to say he is on board the woke train is to understate what we saw on that show. And I know you've described it as an ambush. It had the feel of an ambush where they had him to super, super far left woke people who are who hate white people. And then you satelliting in and, you know, sort of saying, well, I kind of like America and I don't really hate all white people. And I don't really think that the nation is white supremacist. And they treated you like David Duke has had shown up. It was insane. Here's just a

small clip of what you had to deal with there. I think you are not living in the planet most Americans are, which is why this kind of extremism, this anti-white extremism is losing popular support, is creating a backlash, is going to elect Republicans and undo a lot of the good you think you're doing. This is what happens when you don't talk about it. This is what happens when white people don't talk about it, is you have racist dog whistle tropes like this that actually perpetuate and perpetuate and perpetuate. And I did not come on this show to sit here and argue with another white man. That's one of the reasons that we don't even engage with white men at race to dinner.

So, you know, because quite honestly, if white men were going to do something about racism, you had 400 years. You could have done. Okay? Every single white person upholds these systems and structures of white supremacy. And we have got to talk about it. If I could finger snap, I would finger snap right now.

Let's remove it from the. You'd be finger snapping by calling me a racist, Tom. Let's. You're you've been doing a pretty good job with it yourself there. Disgusting. Your thoughts on it? Well, Megan, I did it. I was asked 24 hours before, and I did it as a favor.

And I was told I would just be one-on-one with John. So I was a kind of ambush. But leaving that aside, to go on a television show and to be attacked because of your race and your sex, a dismissal of an entire group of people based upon their race and their sex. The definition of that is bigotry. And he gave a platform for that kind of bigotry. This woman, by the way, she runs an organization in which women pay her $2, bucks to go to dinner to be told how racist they are. I love it.

I think those women get exactly what they deserve. I love it. I think she's doing the nation some good. Take their money and shame them because they're idiots and they deserve to be exploited. It's such a cheap and easy thing to do what they're doing. It's such an intellectually dumb thing to do what they're doing it is simply posturing the show was called and they kept this from me the trouble with white people do you think they do the trouble with jews the trouble with african-americans no it's as if they decided this one racial grouping is to be demonized, marginalized, and become a target of hate.

They have become everything they once said they opposed. They're racists, sexists, and they really, really despise this country. There is plenty to be ashamed of in this country. Let's not beat about the bush. The history of slavery and segregation is terrible. But the idea that's the only thing in America, that America's overcoming of that, you hear them say that no white people did anything for this, even though hundreds of thousands of white people gave their lives in a civil war for this, to see nothing of the

goodness of America as well as its obviously darkness? It's not a utopia. It's a place which is growing. And I came here, like so many others, and look at the footfall. We didn't come here to join a white supremacy. We came here to join the most multicultural, multiracial democratic experiment in the history of humankind. And the idea that these people can now turn around and say nothing has changed since the 19th century, it's so ludicrous that it was given an entire New York Times magazine to explain itself. I don't know what to do, Kelly, Megan. I just know reality.

And I had this difficult position of saying, no, we have to confront the history of racism and slavery. We really do. And insofar as more scholarship is being done on that, it's great. But don't distort that. Don't turn the promise of America into a lie. And don't undermine the principles of America in high schools and schools in order to cement the cultural revolution you want. Stay away and stand down. And at some point

we're going to have to do that. That's good advice for you on that show too. Do you think I'm going back on that, Megan? No, I know. And I hope others are watching because you are of the left. I am not of the left, Megan. Come on, I'm not. Well, you're watching because, you know, you are of the left. You know, it's like even I am not of the left. Well, you're not exactly. But I mean, I'm not a Republican. No, I know. But I am, broadly speaking, a conservative. I'm a moderate conservative. I'm an anti-Trump, pro-environment, pro-game heritage conservative. You know, if I'm not acceptable, who is? That's the point I was trying to make. And Jon

Stewart's not an honest broker. I mean, I've told the story before, but I called him. He called me. I said on the air that I didn't like him and that he wasn't an honest broker and that he hid behind the veil of, I'm a comedian, to offer a lot of bullshit without any accountability. And he called me at Fox. He called me and he was upset that I had called him all those things. And of course, I stood by every word and I told him why I thought that. And I said, I'll give you three examples off the top of my head of what you've done. And with respect to me, because those are the ones that were, you know, in my head when I was talking about, I know he's dishonest because he said things about me that I know are not true. And he had no answer for why he had misrepresented me so

badly on so many occasions. No, no answer at all. He just wanted to get views. That's it. It was just about building an audience. That's it. It was just about building an audience. And even on the phone call, he tried to hide behind the comedian trope, which I didn't accept. And that's just that's just who he is. Right. So I think people found something charming about his comedy routine on that show. And that legacy has stayed with him. He's done some good work for the veterans. No one would take that away from him. But he's a prick. I'm sorry, but he's a jerk. And you can see it in full scope with you. And one other word, that woman, the lady who gets, she's brilliant.

She's the star of the whole thing. How she gets these women to fork over $2,500. You and I would do it. Let's do it for $1,500. No, no, no, no. They'd have to pay me $2,500 to sit and be lectured by her. I mean, seriously. I'll do it for way cheaper. I can't imagine the levels of masochism of these people.

Well, listen, she said after calling you racist, after she said, because Stuart looks at her like, how are we supposed to talk to these people? How are we supposed to, like, talk to somebody who's got these crazy views? And she said, well, we have to hold them with grace and compassion after calling you a racist. But also the arrogance of this, the idea that I, that I, first of all, that I'm a Catholic, right? So I, the idea that I don't believe that every person is made in the image of God, regardless of anything, their race, their sex or anything, is so fundamental to my worldview that to be brought on

television accused of being a white supremacist like that by the oath. And there's different things with the guests. And the only condition I said, when I said, I just don't want to go on a show where I'm called a racist by the guests or by you. And they told me that would never happen. Wow.

And that's what, that's what happened. Oh, that's interesting. Cause he came out and said. And that's what happened. Oh, that's interesting, because he came out and said, I didn't ambush him. He made himself look bad, and my booker dealt with his high-maintenance shenanigans.

I wasn't like, you know me. You know how many shows I've been on over the years? I've been on more. You've been zero maintenance with us. The record on Bill Maher. I do this. I'm a pro. I would tell you if this was on the level.

It was not on the level. It was not on the level. It's uniquely not on the level. These people were liars and manipulators and they knew what they were doing and I was dumb enough to participate. But you know what? I'd rather participate and be made a fool of than run away from this. And there's something invigorating about, as Churchill said, being shot at but not being hit there's something incredibly exciting about that and so um well i would argue the bullet came back and hit him because i think people who are sort of hoping because he went on with colbert and he said the reasonable things about covid coming from a lab versus you know from an animal and he sounded like oh okay maybe he's

like you know gotten more attached to the earth uh saw in that segment. Wrong. He's the same old John Stewart. He's always been the one who, you know, took down Tucker in his younger years and so on. He went on there, you know, year after year bashing anybody who had to have a lean right, even a little just so he could get clicks or get applause from his audience and didn't care what he did to them. I mean, truly, I'd love to talk to Taylor Lorenz, who feels attacked when somebody sends out a tweet about her with what it was like when I was home breastfeeding my new baby and watching Jon Stewart completely rip me young in my career with total falsehoods. That's who he is. Okay, I stole the last word. Andrew Sullivan, always a pleasure. And I think you helped expose him. So you should wear it with a badge of honor. I do Megan. And it's, it's always an honor to come

chat with you. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, good. Let's do it again. One more thing that you, you didn't mention my, my collection, um, uh, which is out, out on a limb. It's a collection of my essays. A paperback is coming out very shortly, and the original book is out there for sale. I should have done that. My apologies. Out on a Limb, which embodies your life philosophy and that segment we just saw and everything. You don't care. They can say what they want.

You keep talking and writing, and we love it. I will. All the best. Okay. Up next, more on the Andrew Sussman, not the Andrew Sussman, Michael Sussman verdict. Not guilty. And we're going to be talking with somebody who's followed this very closely. We're getting reaction in. People are angry, angry. I said the case had collapsed. That was an Andrew McCarthy take on it, saying that was his take on Friday.

I'll read you some of the reaction that's breaking. Jonathan Turley, who we love, writes for The Hill. He came out and said, look, the Durham team was hit with limiting court orders in a jury that was hardly ideal. That is the understatement of the century. I'll give you the facts on this jury. But he says this reinforces the need for a special counsel report. We may not find out what happened with Hillary through the courts. We need Durham to issue a full throated report to give it all up. We'll come back with that. A verdict is in in the trial of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussman. He has been found not guilty. Sussman just gave a very brief statement about the verdict. Listen. I have a few thoughts to share now that the trial has ended. First, I told the truth to the FBI

and the jury clearly recognized that with their unanimous verdict today. I'm grateful to the members of the jury for their careful and thoughtful service. Despite being falsely accused, I'm relieved that justice ultimately prevailed in my case. As you can imagine, this has been a difficult year for my family and me. Special Prosecutor John Durham, who was appointed by Bill Barr, Trump's AG, before he left office, has also released a statement that which reads in part, quote, while we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury's decision and thank them for their service. Joining us now to discuss this not so surprising result is Robert Gouveia, criminal defense attorney and host of

Watching the Watchers. Robert followed this trial closely and is ready to discuss the aftermath. Welcome back to the show, Robert. Great to have you. Thanks, Megan. Great to be with you. Appreciate being on. So I was watching and listening to Andy McCarthy on his podcast on Friday, and he said the case had collapsed going into the verdicts. And the reason he said that was because late in the week, and I talked about this at the top of our show today, late in the week, it came out that the FBI, the ones that would supposedly been lied to by Michael Sussman. He went in there at Hillary's behest. He basically said, hey, I got a hot tip for you. Trump's been talking to some Russian bank called Alpha Bank. You should look into it. I swear I'm

not not here on behalf of anybody. Certainly not Hillary, who I represent. But she didn't ask me to come. I swear. Trust me. So that's that's what happened. But the FBI gave testimony in the case, a bunch of different people. And it came out that the FBI, in seeking its investigators, sicking its investigators on this, said to the investigators, we got a hot tip. We need you to investigate it. And the investigators, like any investigator, said, oh, who's the source? We need to know so we can figure out if it's credible. And the FBI honchos who got the investigators going didn't tell them that it was HRC's lawyer. They told them it came from justice. So the FBI's lying to the FBI to try to cover the fact that this is a Hillary

plant, this information. And even those investigators having been misled, they would have been really suspicious if they'd heard it came from HRC. But even having been misled, it took them about two minutes to say this is bullshit. This is a lie. There's no connection between Alpha Bank, this Russian bank and Trump. And why are you sending us on this wild goose chase? So the FBI looked terrible by the time this trial ended, which was only the latest in the reasons that the jury had or needed to say, we don't really want anything to do with this. They did. The FBI looked really bad. And this is something that the Sussman defense exploited throughout the entire trial. And it really created this unique dynamic in the trial,

because what we had was special counsel John Durham calling all of these witnesses. Many of them were FBI agents, but some of those people were, they may have been all of these witnesses. Many of them were FBI agents, but some of those people, they may have been in on it. They may have been in on this scheme. And so what we ended up seeing as the trial unfolded was this bifurcation, this two-tier system that existed within the FBI. You saw the higher up people on the seventh floor, they call it, the upper echelon decision makers at the FBI. And then you had some of the people that you were describing down sort of on the lower level, the actual analysts, the technical people who are unpacking all of the white papers

and the thumb drives. And they knew from the very beginning that this was something that sounded like it was sketchy, but they got instructions from upper level at the FBI to say, basically, you continue to investigate this. And they conducted what's called a close hold, meaning they kept a lot of this information close to the chest so that the lower level technical FBI analysts were not able to really see the full story. And a lot of this testimony came out at trial and the defense really used this, I thought really well. Obviously, they got a not guilty verdict. So they used it to their advantage by sort of making this about an FBI screw up. This isn't about Michael Sussman, according to them, lying to the FBI. This is about a good citizen who went down, delivered this document because he was so scared

about Trump and Putin and Russia and all that stuff. But that was all legitimate. They're saying the FBI screwed it up with all legitimate. They're saying the FBI screwed it up with their investigation. They didn't ask the appropriate questions. And so the defense throughout the entirety of the trial kept sort of doing that. And the government would call FBI witnesses. The defense called FBI witnesses. And every single one of them was like, yeah, we kind of could have done something a little bit better here. We really did kind of screw up the chain of command. We heard a lot of testimony about confidential human sources.

And the people who were creating some of these white papers that Sussman brought over were sort of known to the FBI. You know, they were confidential human sources, but their information that was working its way up the chain didn't get communicated around appropriately within the FBI. And so the defense just said said it's your fault. So basically, I mean, well, the way I see it is you have two sides that are in bed together, Sussman, Hillary's lawyer and the FBI. They all wanted the same thing. Stop Trump. Get Trump. They all wanted the same thing. I mean, the information that's come out shows that a supervisory agent overseeing the FBI's Trump Russia probe, Joe Pietka, sent a note to the FBI special agent, Curtis Hyde, saying people on the seventh floor to include director, meaning Comey, are fired up about this server, this one that's allegedly connected from Trump to Alpha Bank. That's in writing. Then he messaged Hyde, making sure that a case had been opened, quote, reach out and put tools on. It's not an option. We must do it. Jonathan Turley saying they basically sounded like unindicted co-conspirators, the FBI. So these guys are in there. Even Baker, who was the he was the lawyer for the FBI. He'd worked

with Sussman together a long time ago. He was there reluctantly. He's like, OK, he came in. Yes, he told me he wasn't there on behalf of any client. And then Durham's lawyer for the prosecutor said, yo, I know. And you wrote that in a text message explicitly. You had it in a text message he sent to you. Forgive me. That's what happened. And the text message sent to you the night before said, I'm coming over and I'm not coming on behalf of any client. And you didn't produce that to us, the prosecutors. That was an important document. Why didn't you produce that, Mr. Key witness Baker of the FBI? And Baker said, this is your investigation, not mine. Nobody was there to help Durham. Nobody, not the judge, not the jury, not the FBI agents, and certainly not Michael Sussman. You're exactly right. Every single person in there, it was a really weird thing to see because normally I'm a criminal defense attorney. Normally when we are representing clients, we see the prosecution and the police officers and all of their witnesses like BFFs, you know, best friends. They are in total sync.

The prosecutor asks a question. The police officer sort of, you know, ready, chomping at the bit to say the answer. But we didn't get a lot of that here. The witnesses were all sort of opposed, adversarial to the prosecution on both sides. And even in a lot of the trial testimony, you mentioned some of the text messages that were sort of being sent back and forth. They were almost friends. I mean, Michael Sussman and Jim Baker, Sussman met with Baker at the FBI. They sat down and they had that meeting back in September, 2016. But before that they were sending messages back and forth. You know, they were sort of, I would sort of joke that they go to the same cocktail parties, you know, the part of the same social circles. And before, during the actual meeting

and after the meeting, Sussman continued to engage with Jim Baker, sending him messages about him getting a new job over at Twitter saying, hey, Jim, congratulations on the new job. I know you're going over there. Jim responded and said, Sussman, I haven't even made this public yet. How do you know about all this? And so there's a sort of very interconnected web of nefariousness that is really, really pernicious. And I think that today was a disappointing verdict because we really wanted to see more of where this went. Yeah. I mean, because what they needed to prove was that this guy Sussman went into the FBI and that he and he lied by saying he was not there on behalf of a client when we all know he was really there to represent the HRC campaign,

which was his client. I mean, we knew that there's only splitting hairs. Like, was that meeting? Was that request on her behalf? And he said no. And Durham said yes. So that was one. Did he lie? And by the way, the jury hasn't told us why they found him not guilty.

But it was one of these two things. Either they found he didn't lie. And Baker, who was the main lawyer on the prosecution side, the main witness on the prosecution side, he was the FBI attorney, general counsel. And he was the one who said, yeah, he told me he was there not on behalf of anybody, but he was kind of sketchy on the stand a little. It was that text message that got produced late that really put the lie to assessment. And assessment was caught saying in a text, I'm coming over and I'm not representing anybody. Anyway, there were problems around that too, which I won't get into here.

Then the second question was, was it material? Was the lie material? And I think this is where this all comes in, that the FBI knew that Sussman represented Hillary. The FBI didn't give two dams, whether what he said, how he disclosed what he was there. They couldn't have given a shit. They loved to investigate this. They were like, yes, you can see the text messages. Let's do this thing. And Sussman's lawyer said everyone knew he represented Hillary. Mr. Sussman has Hillary for America and DNC tattooed on his forehead. And now the FBI so excited about this information that they don't even pass on to the investigators that came from Sussman, her lawyer, so excited about it that they instead said, oh, we got it from justice. Now they want to be like, oh, we were lied to and it misled us and we spent resources where we wouldn't have. Oh,

bullshit. I mean, I think I know the jury is biased towards Hillary, but I think even a fair jury could have said, oh, please spare me. We got better things to worry about. Yeah, I don't disagree with that. And there's there's a lot there. Michael Sussman worked for this law firm called Perkins Coie, which was a major law firm for Democratic campaigns for the last, I think, three election cycles. So Mark Elias was another lawyer who worked at that law firm. He represented Kerry, Obama. And so this was kind of just the latest iteration of the Democratic team. And the defense made a big point of that. They said, yeah, everybody knew who Michael Sussman was. Michael Sussman even had a badge to the FBI, to their headquarters.

He never worked at the FBI headquarters, but he was a national security lawyer. And he had all sorts of conferences that he did talking about all of these issues. And Sussman was actually somebody who also worked on the, quote, Hillary email hack. If you recall back during 2016, and I know you certainly do, Megan, but there was a lot of activity about Hillary's email saying that her campaign got hacked and it was the WikiLeaks saga and all of this stuff. Well, Sussman was one of these lawyers that was sort of appointed to deal with that. He was to run point with the FBI on a lot of that. And so one of the arguments that the defense made was that they knew him from that. There were these parallel things that were going on simultaneously. Hillary had the WikiLeaks Russia

hack, but there was another Russia story, which was this Trump alpha bank collusion story that was being run parallel. And so at Perkins coin, Michael Sussman was the person in charge of the Hillary WikiLeaks email saga. And then they just sort of said, well, you know, why don't you run point on this? And so he did send a text. I'm sorry. So they can let me ask you about that, because that's what's so infuriating about seeing Sussman come out there and be like, it's been a difficult year for me and my family. You foisted a lie on the FBI. You foisted it on The New York Times. You misled the country. And frankly, for the Democrat

listeners, he may have cost Hillary the election. I mean, he and Robbie Mook, the campaign manager and the testimony we heard in this trial showed these guys, this brain trust cost her the election. So you should be even more angry if you're a Democrat listening to that guy, because they came up with this cockamamie story that even the researchers they were asking to push it were like, no one's going to believe this bullshit. And they were like, we're doing it. It's going to be their October surprise. And they brought it to the New York Times, which didn't bite. The reporter there was pretty savvy and was like, I smell a rat. I'm not doing this. And so they went to the FBI because they thought that would make the media

take it seriously. Oh, the FBI is investigating. And still the New York Times was like, but that hack brag slate was like, we'll publish anything if it's bad for Trump. So they did it immediately thereafter. Hillary and Jake Sullivan, who's now the national security advisor to President Biden, but was then working for her, immediately tweeted out like, oh, now the FBI is involved. Oh, we definitely need to look into this. Trump, Russia,

Trump, Russia. That was her October surprise. It failed. And what ultimately happened was the FBI said to The New York Times, don't publish anything in case you are thinking about publishing until we look into this. And those FBI analysts are the heroes of anybody. The low guys on the totem pole who notwithstanding the bullshit being fed to them by the higher ups near Comey said, there's nothing here. This is bullshit. And there's nothing for us to pursue. And the New York Times did wind up running a story, but it was about her. It was about her and her emails and her server. And you remember then the Democrat meltdown that the New York Times would publish this and that Comey would announce it and all that. So the whole thing backfired. It did. Yeah, they were trying to feed sort of both sides. They wanted the media to run

with this story and they wanted the FBI to also run with to feed sort of both sides. They wanted the media to run with this story and they wanted the FBI to also run with the story so that both sides could kind of buttress each other. They wanted to take this idea that the New York Times or that the media pieces would run with this. They took it over to the FBI. They say, we've got this national security problem here. If Donald Trump is not caught and we don't sever this secret alpha bank communication chain, America's over. So they took that to the FBI and the FBI, they know, will act on this stuff, or they were presuming that they would act on it because if the media publishes it, well, what's going to happen is the Russians will take down that secret communications channel, and that's going to make the FBI's job a lot more difficult. So they fed it to the FBI,

sort of saying it's about to be published, do something with it. And then they took that same story that the FBI is investigating this and took it over to the media and said, look, the FBI is investigating this. You should write a story about it. And it all was this October surprise. There's a tweet that came out on October 31st back in 2016. I believe it was the 31st or the 30th. And it was Jake Sullivan. It was Hillary Clinton. And they put out a press release saying Donald Trump collusion with Alpha Bank. Now, a lot of that stuff didn't come into trial, but it was all part of this grand conspiracy. And I think that they really did want to try to get this stuff out there. When we were looking at a lot of the polls during the election season, everybody was saying Hillary was going to run away with this thing and it wasn't even going to be close. But they must have seen something a little bit differently. And they really rushed this story out. They published it. It didn't work out well for them, but it doesn't mean that the people who were behind it, the people who created these white papers and all of these dossiers, they were all fake and they were all not legitimate at all. And I've talked to a lot of

my friends and explained this to them and said, Hey, you know, remember that story back then, you know, five, six years ago, and explain to them that it was all illegitimate. The FBI looked at it, the actual analysts, the people who do this tech work, looked at it and said, there's nothing here. And they did it quickly, like within the afternoon, but it still percolated around the FBI, because I think a lot of people there wanted to see this happen. And remember, we're talking about a lot of the outgoing Obama people who were in the FBI because I think a lot of people there wanted to see this happen. And remember, we're talking about a lot of the outgoing Obama people who were in the FBI at that time. And so people like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the FBI lovers, we have Andy McCabe, all of these individuals were strongly anti-Trump and they're all up on that seventh floor. They're the people who make the decision about that close hold and about what to do with this information. And the reason I've been

so focused on this case is because I want to make sure that we sort of memorialize this stuff down so we can see who these people are, because Sussman just got acquitted. He's going to be out there back working at his law firm, getting involved in the next round of election litigation. Mark Elias, same story, right? He runs Democracy Docket now, and they're filing election litigation all over the country, motions to intervene and all sorts of stuff. So these same actors are still going to be around for the foreseeable future, probably engaging in a lot of these same types of activities in order to win elections. They started these lies. These are the guys who worked with her and Fusion GPS to start these lies that sent eventually the FBI on another track on a wild goose chase, but certainly the

nation on a wild goose chase for the first two plus years of the Trump presidency. So I don't give a damn how how hard his year has been. I couldn't care less. I want him on bended knee apologizing to me and to America for what he and his buddies put us through. And by the way, they didn't let in sort of the broad conspiracy with the Hillary campaign to the trial, but they did put Robbie Mook on the stand, who was her campaign manager, and he gave up the farm. He testified that it was Hillary Clinton who personally approved them going to the Times and and to the FBI and pushing this lie. So we knew that. But that brings us back to sort of your your

you're kind of saying the whole thing is swampy. It's swampy from beginning to end, involving all parties other than Durham. And that brings me to the jury. OK, so Robbie did testify to that. And Hillary Clinton has this around her neck like an albatross. This jury couldn't have cared less because, frankly, they're pretty swampy, too. The this there's a great piece by Howie Carr in the Boston Herald from not long ago, and he says in it, this is his description, talking about the jury. One juror acknowledged he'd contributed to Hillary's campaign. Another thought she had but couldn't remember.

Another's a former bartender who donated to AOC. Still another juror's husband worked on Hillary's 2008 campaign. Yet another one supports defunding the police. Yet they all got into the jury onto the jury. After the trial started, still another juror recalled that her daughter was on some private school crew team with Sussman's kid, with Sussman, the defendant's kid. The judge said not to worry about it and refused to excuse her. Who is the judge, you ask? His name is Christopher Casey Cooper, appointed by Obama after his service on the Obama 2008 transition team. After law school, again, this is the judge, he worked in the DOJ with the defendant. What a coincidence.

Later, the judge was also employed in the same law firm as Eric Holder, Obama's self-described wingman as attorney general. Judge Cooper is married to a lawyer named Amy Jeffress. In the Obama years, she worked as national security counselor to Eric Holder, Obama's self-described wingman as attorney general. Judge Cooper is married to a lawyer named Amy Jeffress. In the Obama years, she worked as national security counselor to Eric Holder. Now she's in private practice. This is, again, the judge's wife. And one of her clients is Lisa Page, the rabid Democrat lawyer who was fired from the FBI for her extramarital affair with a crooked G-man, her rabid hatred of Trump and her participation in another one of Hillary's disinformation campaigns. Would you care to guess who presided over the wedding of the Democrat Judge Cooper and his Democrat lawyer wife, Jeffress? Merrick Garland. My God, I can't. I can't even. It is. It's very, very swampy. And it made me nervous throughout the entire trial. And,

you know, it's, it's DC. So my understanding is, is, you know, I'm an Arizona boy, I'm across the whole country, but it's like 95% democratic every time they vote. And part of the void deer, when they were going through and trying to pick the jurors, there was one lady who said in there specifically, and she made it onto the final panel. I don't know if she was released before they, you know, they released some jurors before they get their final panel. But she said in her line of questioning, the prosecutor asked her, you marked on here you had a strong dislike of Trump. And she said, yeah, Donald Trump is the worst, blah, blah, blah. And he kind of just let her on the jury. We didn't see a lot of strong objections or using his strikes, any peremptories

or a lot of that type of stuff, or even real argument when a lot of these jurors came out and said things like that, that they were strongly biased against Donald Trump. And I don't know if that's because it's Washington, D.C., and you sort of have to deal with the jurors that you get. And if every single person comes on and they're all Democrats, then what can you do about that? You kind of have to play within the margins of those rules. There were several of them, like you listed, that were very, very consequential, in my opinion. This is a political trial. And so if somebody has strong political opinions, that's going to be consequential. And in a case like this, John Durham is not prosecuting Hillary Clinton per se, but kind of, he kind of is. And if he prosecutes and is successful against Michael Sussman, then the domino effect might happen. And that might spiral

into other potential Democrats, maybe all the way up to Hillary. And so now you have all of these Democrats on the jury there. And I'm wondering how they can sort of solve the cognitive dissonance that exists in their minds for them to change their vote as Democrats. We had people from the Peace Corps there. We had people who were almost almost every single person on the jury panel worked in D.C. Right. They all work for the Department of Treasury or some of these big bureaucracies. And so you kind of know how they're going to land. And if you now ask them a question, they're sitting in a jury box. They have to render a verdict and say, I have to find my own team guilty of something really bad. That is really misinformation. That's disinformation. I mean, all of the epithets they throw about everybody spreading misinformation and disinformation,

their team was doing it with these fake fusion GPS white papers and dossiers. And so now they have to sort of reconcile this in their minds and say, I have to vote guilty against my own team. I just wasn't sure that they'd be able to do that. It's a challenge. It's a challenge for any of these political cases getting getting tried in D.C. Just a couple of samplings. Curtis Hook tweets out Hunter Biden gets off the hook next. Just watch Governor Huckabee, O.J.

Sussman. I mean, Michael Sussman acquitteditted by HRC donor infested jury. I mean, not exactly an unfair way of putting it. And now back to Jonathan Turley, who tweets the limitations on this trial only reinforces the need for a special counsel report. That's the thing. Durham needs to write the summary report of what he found, what Hillary did, whether it can be indicted person to person or not. Am I right? And will we ever see that? Because we have a different attorney general now. Yeah, I hope so. I would love to see it. I'm not sure that we're going to see what exactly sort of I think we should see, but I do hope we get something out of John Durham. I know that

today they released a bunch of the exhibits. And so there's hundreds of other exhibits that we'll be able to comb through, including some of the actual FBI records and things that were not a part of the disclosure at the original outset of the case. A lot of this stuff was confidential. We're talking about FBI. Michael Sussman also met with the CIA. And so we didn't get to see a lot of the stuff that was sort of in the coffers before the trial started. But now we get to see some of that because it has closed and all of the exhibits are now public. So

we're going to go through those and see if there's other facets of this that may allow further prosecutions or allow some of this nefariousness to be ruled out. Yeah, but we need a special counsel's report because Durham's investigation has been much more wide ranging than just Michael Sussman. So he needs to give us the narrative give us the narrative, like, tell us what you found. He's been working for us. I think he will. And I think it'll leak if, for whatever reason, Merrick Garland sees fit not to share it with us. OK, before I let you go, I've got to ask you about this news on the SCOTUS leaker today.

CNN exclusively reporting that they are now, the officials are escalating their search for the source of the leaked draft of the Roe versus Wade allegedly being overturned opinion, taking steps to require law clerks to provide their cell phone records and sign affidavits. Some are so alarmed,

some clerks over the moves that they have reportedly begun exploring whether to hire outside counsel. The exact language of the affidavits or the intended scope of the cell phone search, not yet clear, not yet known if the court officials are asking employees who are part of the permanent staff or just the one-year law clerks for their phone records. My reaction to this was, what took them so long? They're just doing this now? So what do you make of where that stands, Robert, and whether these clerks will be forced to fork

over their cell phone data, et cetera? Yeah, it's sort of like, I think, you know, I don't have any kids, but you say to your kids, like, I give you this option to do this until you screw it up type of a thing. You get the freedom until they screw it up. And I think that's kind of the same thing that applies here. You know, there was this nice tradition in the Supreme Court where everybody was acting with respect and reverence for the entity. And that has obviously been evaporated. And so you can't really expect to have the same candid conversations in the Supreme Court anymore. And so if they got to change the rules, I think that's perfectly appropriate. And it has been interesting to

speculate. I don't know if there's been more on this, but on our channel on YouTube, we were sort of investigating a little bit who the leaker was and maybe where it came from, because people can start to piece these things together. You can see where some of these interns, who they work for, where they went to school, what their LinkedIn profiles say and all of that stuff. And so there was already speculation that this person had already been identified. But I certainly think that we need to maintain and have the ability of our institutions to work

and function appropriately without everything becoming political. And if the Supreme Court wants to take steps to stop that type of stuff from happening, I mean, you can't blame them for that. If it's taken the marshal this long to say, give me your cell phone records, I really continue to have very little faith in her.

I hope I'm going to be proven wrong. Robert, I do have faith in you. Thank you so much for your analysis and for coming on. What a day. We were just going to talk about Sussman and wound up, we got the verdict. Okay, we'll be right back with a special message involving Canadian Debbie and her brother.

Before we go, I want to take a moment to honor one of our best and bravest here in the New York area. And that happens to be the brother of our beloved Canadian Debbie. Before she was Canadian Debbie, she was New York City Debbie. And before that, she and her brother, Scott, were both Ohio Murphys. And they grew up in Ohio. That's why she makes sense. And that's why he went into law enforcement too. People from Ohio make sense. And he has been serving on the NYPD for 21 years. But today is his last day on the job. He started the police academy back in July of 2001. Think about that right before 9-11. He was part of the first academy to graduate post 9-11.

And what a time it was. Started out working in Precinct 9 down in the East Village in Manhattan, but he's been serving in the heart of Times Square pretty much ever since. Worked every New Year's Eve. Look, there's Canadian Debbie, for those of you watching on YouTube later. Working in Times Square pretty much every New Year's Eve, Canadian Debbie was there sometimes too, because we used to work the New Year's Eve shift back when I used to co-anchor that show with Bill Hemmer. So a great guy. These cops don't get enough recognition for the risks they take every day to keep us safe, right? Especially these days. And he served his full term. We'll get his full pension, I think, after 21 years. He looks a little bit like you, Deb,

and he deserves every bit. He's going to go work in woodworking, we think, back in Ohio, maybe start a customized woodworking business, just like Abby's brother works in woodworking and made me the most beautiful bowl for Christmas that she gave to me. Stradwick broke it. She's horrified. She's horrified. But I'm thinking maybe Scott Murphy can pick up where Stradwick left off. Anyway, thank you all for watching. Thank you for your service, Scott. And don't forget to tune in the rest of the week as we'll cover the Amber Heard Johnny Depp trial. We expect a verdict sometime soon. And Matt Walsh will be here on his new documentary, What is a Woman? Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.