SPECIAL: "Obamagate" DEEP-DIVE with Gen. Mike Flynn, Mike Benz and Paul Sperry

19:33Mike Benz:Yeah, that could be why we're seeing some results here. Finally, all this stuff has been bottled up, you know, by the past eight years. Not just by the media, but of course, administrations. And the dam is starting to break. Tables were finally starting to turn on the bad guys who conspired to do this, to kneecap Trump and frame him and try to cripple his presidency and his agenda. Yes.

20:12Vince:So the left is claiming that what Tulsi Gabbard has released is is old news. There's nothing to see here. It doesn't implicate Obama or John Brennan in anything at all. How do you view it?

20:25Mike Benz:Well, not at all. They're ignoring the key piece that's two things, actually three things. One, we found out that they put the dossier in the main body of the intelligence community assessment that Obama ordered after Trump's surprise victory over Hillary. They were all shocked and needed to do something to derail him. And so they came up with this intelligence, cooked it up, and laundered Hillary's political dirt in the form of this dossier and incorporated it into the actual analysis in the main body of the text of the classified version of the ICA. and they didn't even disclose that they had included in annex a summary of the dossier that came out in 2020.

21:18Mike Benz:But now we knew that. But now we know that, no, there was actually a bullet point supporting the most controversial conclusion that they had in the ICA, which was that Putin had aspired to intervene in the election directly personally to help trump uh beat beat hillary okay so that that was the most radioactive conclusion they had and it obviously wasn't supported enough with what they had in terms of other intelligence so they added the dossier to back it up in one of the four bullet points that they had in the in the text and they're all ignoring this when they go on tv now I noticed that Michael Isikoff was on last night, and he was debating Matt Taibbi.

22:14Mike Benz:And he says, no, you know, all he did was they put this in an annex, the dossier. B.S. Either he didn't read the documents that have been declassified or he's just being intellectually dishonest. He knows that now we know that it was actually as a supporting bullet point in the main text. text and that's just hugely scandalous new information the other thing we found out is that they changed the the level of confidence they had reversed it from low confidence in that conclusion to high confidence before and after the election after Trump won which is very convenient and then the other thing is they've got whistleblowers now that worked on this project who are coming out of the woodwork, as D.N.I.

23:07Mike Benz:Gabbard said. And they had one that's showing up in the document dump that you put out, the 114 pages, who was saying that he was pressured by his superiors to stay quiet because he had worked on the pre-election intelligence and said, no, we don't have any confidence that Putin did this. And he was pressured to change that conclusion. And then when he protested, he dissented. Then they took him off the thing and they kept telling him, listen, we have we have intelligence that but they wouldn't let him see it. And they should just trust us. So.

23:44Vince:So here's another piece about confidence. You mentioned low and high confidence. How confident was the intelligence community that the Russians had actually hacked Hillary Clinton's email?

23:55Mike Benz:They weren't confident, as it turns out, from these declassified documents at a high level at all. It started out they had a low confidence that Putin ordered any hacking and leak operation. And then that suddenly changed to, you know, they had high confidence, strong confidence in that after the election. And what they said in the declassified documents that they didn't have the technical evidence to link Putin to the hack and leak, the alleged hack and leak. and so that is now coming out and that's something else that everybody's ignoring that's in there because of course no one really reads this stuff they don't get right the time or the inclination or they're just corrupt and they won't go into the into the document um and really find this stuff uh but you know that's something that that the the dni should have yes highlighted i mean that's pretty explosive very um because now now you know the whole thing is being questioned i mean this ica that obama ordered told its community assessment on russia is looking more and more like a fraudulent document that they juiced and possibly falsified, you know, frame Trump is.

25:28Yes.

25:29Mike Benz:You know, that he's too compromised to government as president and lay the foundation for endless investigations, which they did cripple his agenda.

25:38Vince:So, Paul, there's been what Tulsi Gabbard released indicated that there was supposed to be a presidential daily brief to be delivered to Obama in early December that would make the claim that no, Russia didn't have any meaningful impact on the election. In other words, President Trump won at fair and square. It had nothing to do with the Russians. That presidential daily brief was blocked before it could get started. And a meeting was assembled at the White House where so much of this plot that you and I are talking about was schemed. I saw Mike Flynn say in the media just in the last few days that he believes that the reason the presidential daily brief was stopped was because as the incoming national security advisor, he would have been able to see it, that the presidential daily brief was stopped from happening in order to prevent the Trump team from seeing that evidence.

26:27Vince:Do you have any reporting or inclination to believe that that's what happened here?

26:32Mike Benz:So that was that PDB was December 8th, as I recall, and then Obama convened the meeting in the Situation Room on December 9th. to start manufacturing this ICA. And they blocked it. So they removed it from circulation on the 8th, and then they held the meeting on the 9th. Now, that would have been during the transition.

27:01Vince:Yes. And, yes, I think you have to share stuff like that with the transition team,

27:07Mike Benz:the national security team, for sure. Yes. But they were running an op against Flynn. Flynn, they were trying to, you know, sabotage him as national security advisor. That's the first person they really needed to go after because he has supervision over entire intelligence apparatus, law enforcement, counterintelligence. He could have gone in there and seen, you know, what they were doing against Trump. And he was pretty aggressive. So, you know, they actually had a meeting, I think it was in January 5th. And Obama was in that, Susan Rice, and she actually wrote a memo to file to kind of cut CYA what they did.

27:52Mike Benz:And Biden was in there. They were talking about the Logan Act, going after Flynn with the Logan Act because he was talking to the ambassador of Russia. And then they leaked some of the White House leaked that transcript to David Ignatius at The Washington Post. We still don't know who actually leaked it. There's some prime suspects in the White House. But that's that's what they were doing. They were going after Flynn.

28:22Vince:Yes, they were. Let me let me finish on one point with you, Paul Sperry, while we have you accountability. You've been telling us about the meetings that the Trump White House has been holding across the intelligence community to deal with all of this. How integrated is the Justice Department in all of these conversations?

28:39Mike Benz:Well, Justice Department officials, now this was at the senior staff level, like the principals, cabinet principals weren't at that meeting on that Sunday. It was a pretty urgent meeting. but you know Bondi wasn't Tulsi Gabbard wasn't actually there as I understand from her deputy but they had their senior staff organize this rollout this first rollout this is the first way they've got a lot more coming as I understand and DOJ was there DOJ officials people connected to the weaponization working group were there so yeah so this is important because especially with these whistleblowers these whistleblowers do depositions and if they do affidavits rather and then and then you know they do depositions with prosecutors and FBI investigators then turns into depositions these are things that they can present before a grand jury if they're going to prosecute a broader conspiracy case.

29:45Vince:Yeah, okay. Paul Sperry, thank you for all of your dogged reporting through the years. I appreciate you coming on today, and I hope I get a chance to talk to you again soon, sir.

29:54Mike Benz:Absolutely, my pleasure.

29:55Vince:Really nice to chat with you. There he is, Paul Sperry of Real Clear Investigations with, honestly, I think one of the best overviews we've heard yet of everything that's transpiring here. More ahead on The Vince Show. The Vince Show. Hey, do you think about aging... Do you think about it at all? The effect it has on you and your body? I've noticed as I get older, my energy goes down. And I kind of feel all the aches and the pains, you know, as you get a little bit older, they really start to become more and more apparent. And what you want to do, what I've been trying to do is figure out a ways to get my energy back.

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31:56Vince:to allege that it was the Russians who hand-delivered the election to him and that President Trump was a willing participant in that scheme. For more on what all of this tells us, I want to bring in Mike Benz now. He's the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. Mike, good to have you with us, sir.

32:15Paul Sperry:Hey, great to talk to you.

32:17Vince:Okay, so Tulsi Gabbard, you know, I don't usually hear a director of national intelligence refer to a treasonous conspiracy in the United States, But for her to say that, that seems like a big deal. Yeah.

32:28Paul Sperry:No, I mean, it's certainly what I think everyone is feeling. And when you look at what was revealed in these documents, the CIA and FBI assessed that there was effectively no Russian interference of any material degree. And then it looked like there was a secret meeting with President Obama and everyone was retasked to find a way to include Russian interference. And that's what gave rise to the three-year special prosecutor probe that ended up bankrupting or devastating a significant proportion of the White House and hamstringing the entire foreign policy apparatus of the Trump administration.

33:12Paul Sperry:I think that while, you know, treason is a big word, I would I would like to see I would like to see it articulated as is a way consistent with the crimes that that are with whatever charges are going to be brought by the Justice Department. it.

33:29Vince:Yeah, no, that that seems clear. If you've committed a crime, you should be prosecuted for it. The fact that it's over 10 years old is why everybody's talking about a conspiracy, because that opens up the statute of limitations to look at the whole sweep of events that have happened over the last decade, Mike.

33:45Paul Sperry:That's exactly right. You know, there's there are so many times where we have a conspiracy to cook intelligence in American history, whether that's the cooked intelligence that took us to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the cooked intelligence about Russian bounties on people's heads in Syria and beyond. But this was one of these cooked intelligence conspiracies that truly devastated the ability to administer U.S. foreign policy around Russia and Eurasia affairs that truly hamstrung the entirety of the Trump administration. And that cast a huge amount of doubt in the legitimacy of our election system.

34:34Paul Sperry:The same people who would later come back and effectively criminalize questioning the legitimacy of U.S. election infrastructure, like mail-in ballots and electronic voting machines, they were the original election deniers by effectively arguing that the Trump election wasn't legitimate And at some point, this will continue as long as intelligence officials believe that there's no penalty for doing it. And this has to be the last straw. John Brennan and Jake Sullivan and Comey and this whole network that were involved in cooking this intelligence, if there is not a criminal penalty for that, then there's going to be no reform.

35:17Paul Sperry:There needs to be an image that's seared into the intelligence world's minds that you can only push things so far because we give them power, and power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And when you think that you are untouchable, James Clapper openly lied to Congress about domestic bulk intelligence. And when a couple of years later, within the statute of limitations, the Snowden League showed that Clapper had lied to the American people's faces and he got away with perjury. Yes, that was that was one of those incredible moments where it's where everyone thought, OK, well, if they can get away with that, they can get away with anything.

35:54Paul Sperry:And then they got away with Russiagate. And if they're allowed to get away with it, then we need an image that burns in people's minds that that we can only push it so far or else we're going to end up like person X. Whoever that is, whether that's John Brennan or Barack Obama or whoever, there has to be justice.

36:13Vince:So what you're describing is the reason why so many people are pessimistic about the chances of any justice being had here, because we've been through it a million times and we've known so much and no one's held accountable. I want to find out from you, Mike, if you think that the cast that's working for President Trump now makes a difference, because Tulsi Gabbard is not holding any punches here. You do have Kash Patel and Dan Bongino at the top of the FBI. They've both written books on this subject. They're intimately familiar with the scandal that's involved here. Do you think it makes a difference that the president has a different and I think better team with him this time?

36:49Paul Sperry:Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, Director Gabbard herself at ODNI said, you know, when she was going through these, she was shocked that Durham missed it, that Durham didn't publish any of these. I think she felt a combination of confused and shocked that she was the one who discovered these documents, given that there was, you know, a special probe on it led by Durham. And none of these documents came out then while Trump, you know, was president the first time and actually under the gun of all this. But the fact is, when it comes to the criminal indictment side of this, you have the issue of if you bring an indictment and then a jury finds them innocent, you could see there being blowback about that.

37:37Paul Sperry:because you've got a fundamental problem of a D.C. jury in this case, which is that I think the defense that Obama and Brendan would make is that they believed at the time the credibility of the Steele dossier and that on the basis of the Steele dossier, they asked for a second draft, a rewrite of the intelligence community assessment to account for it, and that they would, given that I think that Democrats have a much, I want to say more favorable, but a much more acceptable or tolerant view of the legitimacy of the Steele dossier, that you could potentially have a D.C. jury where you have 95 percent Democrats, you know, ultimately acquit, you know, folks at the end of that process.

38:26Vince:Right.

38:26Paul Sperry:And this was this was the argument made by Robert Herr, by the way. Robert Herr, folks remember, this was the case of the Justice Department investigation of Biden having classified documents at his house at the same time that the Justice Department had brought criminal charges against Donald Trump for having classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. And so after the Justice Department indicted Donald Trump, it came out that Joe Biden had classified documents in his garage and at the Penn Biden Center and the like. And so everyone was saying, well, there's a two-tier justice system. You've arrested one president for something that the current president is guilty of.

39:12Paul Sperry:So why isn't the Justice Department arrest the current president? And Robert Herr, what he found and published, which was incredible, is he said, actually, yes, it's true. Biden did knowingly mishandle classified documents, but we're not going to bring charges because we believe a D.C. jury would look at this senile old man who presents himself in a gentle way and simply not find him criminally liable. So basically you had the Justice Department say he's guilty of the same crime, but we're not going to bring the criminal case. And that to me can no longer be the case. You can't determine whether or not to run someone through the gauntlet of the criminal justice system, where they're paying millions of dollars of lawyers fees and they are run through the press because the Justice Department has publicly said they have enough evidence to pursue a criminal indictment and simply not indict someone because you think a D.C.

40:13Paul Sperry:jury is going to, you know, is going to be rigged in their favor.

40:17Vince:But, you know, in the Justice Department that this has to be a practical consideration as they figure out a way to go forward. This is why we've heard a lot in the last week, Mike, that if they stretch this out into what they keep referring to as a grand conspiracy, they may be able to impanel this grand jury in Florida, not in D.C., because in Florida is where Jack Smith raided Mar-a-Lago. And the grand theory here is that was in furtherance of the conspiracy. You think that could work?

40:44Paul Sperry:Well, I defer to them. I certainly think that Florida would be a more equitable jurisdiction. You're talking about the, you know, for all the jury shopping that's been done by this same network in all of the malfeasance that they've effectuated from the January 6th prosecutions to the Russiagate terror. I think that if they were to get a taste of their own medicine that way in terms of having, you know, and having a bit of venue shopping in that way, as long as it's it's legally practicable, I think that that would be something that it would be karmic justice to pursue.

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43:08We'll be right back.