Tucker: Democrats were spying on Trump
Fox News host gives his take on the Durham probe on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
If you watch Donald Trump closely over his four years in office, and we did, it became pretty clear that the more outlandish the claim that Trump happened to be making, the more likely it was to be true.
Trump did tend to exaggerate at times, but it's mostly about topics that didn't matter. How big was the crowd at his 2016 inauguration? Who cares? But on the big things, on matters of civilizational importance, Trump told the truth bluntly, often when nobody else would.
The Iraq War was a mistake, Trump said. Illegal immigration is a disaster. China is taking over the world. Haiti is a pretty crappy place. Deafening hysteria followed every one of these demonstrably true statements.
At one point in early 2018, CNN and the Washington Post got so worked up trying to hide the obvious that they devoted blanket coverage to the claim that actually, Haiti is an awesome and fully functional country, a perfect spot for your next family vacation and, by the way, if you disagree with that, you're racist. That's what they told us.
WHITE HOUSE REFUSES TO ANSWER QUESTION ON DURHAM PROBE REVELATIONS
Then-President Trump declared "the biggest scandal was when they spied on my campaign," but the CBS News journalists dismissed the claim. (CBS 60 Minutes)
Three years later, they have dropped the POWs, at least on Haiti. Our leaders now consider Haiti so awful that just being from there qualifies you for asylum in the United States. With Trump gone, they can finally admit that. What was once a dangerous conspiracy theory is now just a sensible observation, especially when it justifies more immigration.
For four years, no dangerous conspiracy theory was considered more dangerous or more conspiratorial than the claim that Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign had spied on Donald Trump. The very idea that Hillary Clinton, of all people, had spied on anyone was preposterous. The media informed us only a lunatic would claim otherwise.
By making a charge like that, in fact, Trump was emboldening our enemies and degrading the public's confidence in our democratic system. So, it wasn't just a stupid opinion that Trump had, it was really a form of treason and yet, as usual, Trump kept saying it.
He did it again in one of his last sit-down interviews as president with Lesley Stahl of "60 Minutes."
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The biggest scandal was when they spied on my campaign. They spied on my campaign.
LESLEY STAHL: There's no real evidence of that.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Of course, there is.
LESLEY STAHL: No.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It's all over the place. Lesley,
LESLEY STAHL: Sir...
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They spied on my campaign and they got caught.
LESLEY STAHL: Can I say something? You know, this is "60 Minutes" and we can't put on things we can't verify.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But you won't put it on because it's bad for Biden. Look, let me tell you...
LESLEY STAHL: We can't put on things we can't verify.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Lesley, they spied on my campaign.
LESLEY STAHL: Well, we can't verify that.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It's been totally verified.
LESLEY STAHL: No
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It's been, just go down and get the papers. They spied on my campaign. They got caught.
LESLEY STAHL: No.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And then they went much further than that and they got caught. And you will see that, Lesley and you know that, but you just don't want to put it on the air.
LESLEY STAHL: No, as a matter of fact, I don't know that.
"No, as a matter of fact, we can’t verify that." This is CBS News. We don't air things we can't verify. Really, Lesley Stahl? Is that true? We still remember a CBS News piece from 2016 that claimed Donald Trump was secretly working with Vladimir Putin. So, the question is, how did CBS News verify those facts? Walk us through your reporting process.
In Oct. 2020, then-President Trump sat down with "60 Minutes" correspondent Lesley Stahl for an interview he later dubbed a "vicious attempted takeout." (CBS 60 Minutes)
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Well, as it turns out, that particular story, the reporting came from reading a piece on Slate.com, probably while standing in line at Starbucks. Slate alleged that the Trump campaign was coordinating with a Russian bank called Alfa Bank, using a hidden server in Trump Tower.
How did Slate.com know this? By consulting a "small, tightly-knit community of computer scientists."
These scientists, Slate insisted, we're totally nonpartisan. One of the sources explained, anonymously, "We wanted to defend both campaigns because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election."
So here you have just another unnamed computer scientist defending election integrity. Makes sense. Don't ask questions.
Jake Sullivan did not ask questions. Jake Sullivan takes Slate.com very seriously. At the time, Jake Sullivan was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign. He cited the Slate story as evidence that Trump was indeed colluding with Vladimir Putin.
"The secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump's ties to Russia," Sullivan said.
What a tool.
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"We can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia."
So, there was a bat phone in Trump Tower that rang directly in the Kremlin. Jake Sullivan stuck to that line for months. Here he is on CNN in March of 2017.
JAKE SULLIVAN: What we learned during the campaign was that very serious computer science experts, people who work closely with the United States government had uncovered this secret hotline between the Alfa Bank, the Russian bank and the Trump Organization. Now, of course, we didn't know for sure if, in fact, that were the case, but we knew that it should be investigated. And we knew that given how serious these computer scientists were, they weren't just making up crackpot theories. So, it wasn't surprising to learn that even as of last week, the FBI is still looking into this.
ANCHOR: Do you have any idea what they're what they're looking for?
JAKE SULLIVAN: I don't. Of course, I don't have a line into the FBI on this, but what I know, based on public reporting, is that there is a very unusual server activity between this Russian bank and the Trump Organization, which suggests contact that took place over the course of the campaign.
Oh, the secret hotline. These people are literally willing to say anything if it gives them power, but listen carefully to what Jake Sullivan said. "I don't have a line into the FBI on this." Everything I know is from "public reporting."
So you'll notice that Sullivan went out of his way to say that, what should have been a very clear sign that it was a lie and indeed it was a lie. In fact, the Hillary Clinton for President campaign was coordinating directly with the FBI.
A Clinton lawyer called Michael Sussmann had been feeding false claims about Trump and Russia, once again from that crack team of nonpartisan computer scientists to the General Counsel at the FBI, a man called James Baker.
But Sussmann didn't stop there. In February of 2017, after the election, Sussmann also met with the General Counsel at CIA. So at this point, you may be wondering about the identity of those nonpartisan computer scientists who dug up all this new information about Donald Trump's direct connection to Vladimir Putin.
Who are these people? We may not be shocked to learn they weren't nonpartisan. Once again, Jake Sullivan was lying to us. In fact, a pro-Hillary Clinton activist from South Africa called Rodney Joffe had put together a team of digital researchers. Oppo guys, we used to call them. Msost of them came from Georgia Tech.
In emails, Rodney Joffe explained why he was doing this. He wanted Hillary to win the presidency because Hillary Clinton had promised him a job as a top cybersecurity officer in the U.S. Government. So Joffe wanted to help Hillary win, he said that.
In order to do that, he gave his nonpartisan computer scientists a mission. Their job was to gather data they had access to, thanks to a Pentagon contract, in order to connect Donald Trump to Putin.
Now we know all this thanks to a new court filing from Special Counsel John Durham, who spent the last few years investigating the origins of the Russia hoax and is finally producing some material.
In the words of Durham's filing "Joffe tasked those researchers to mine internet data to establish 'an inference' and a 'narrative' tying then-candidate Trump to Russia."
So, this wasn't reporting, of course, they had a goal. They were trying to get Hillary elected president. The amazing thing is how they did it, where their data came from.
The filing says that Joffe and his computer scientists intercepted internet traffic, that is emails and presumably text messages, from "Trump Tower, Donald Trump's Central Park West apartment building and the Executive Office of the President of the United States."
In other words, Trump was right. This isn't a conspiracy theory. His claims were true. Democrats were spying on Donald Trump, not just as a candidate, but as president of the United States in the White House, as well as in his own home.
So, has anything like this ever happened in American history? Not that we know of, but Jeff Bezos doesn't think you should worry about it or even know that it happened.
Today's Washington Post informed it's brain-dead readership that while, "Trump is once again claiming that he was spied upon." That claim has been "debunked."
Oh, really? How has it been debunked?
Shut up. It just has.
But in fact, that claim has not been debunked. It has been verified. That claim is true. It actually happened and the way it happened tells you everything about why it has been so extraordinarily difficult to bring democracy back to the United States. A government contractor spied on a populist presidential candidate, then passed the information to his opponent's campaign, which gave it to the FBI and the news media, which distorted it to create the illusion of treason, which was then cited by the politician who paid for the whole thing as a reason not to vote for the guy she spied on.
Got it? It's a closed-loop. Everyone's got a role. Here's Hillary Clinton during the presidential debates:
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Putin, from everything I see, has no respect for this person.
HILLARY CLINTON: Well, that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, puppet. No puppet.
HILLARY CLINTON: It's pretty clear...
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You're the puppet.
HILLARY CLINTON: It's pretty clear you won't admit..
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, you're the puppet.
HILLARY CLINTON: that the Russians have engaged in cyber attacks against the United States of America that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do and that you continue to get help from him because he has a very clear favorite in this race.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton delivers a speech during a campaign rally at Northern Community College in Annandale, Washington on July 14, 2016. (Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
WHITE HOUSE REFUSES TO ANSWER QUESTION ON DURHAM PROBE REVELATIONS
So, if you're not all in with NATO, if you think it's a pointless boondoggle that endangers the United States, you, my friend, work for Vladimir Putin.
"You encouraged espionage," shrieked Hillary. At the very moment, she's doing precisely that. They always denounce you for their own sins, but she said Russia has engaged in cyberattacks on the United States and that's probably true in point of fact. But she was speaking about a specific "cyberattack."
She was talking about the Russians hacking the servers at the DNC. Democrats wasted three years of our lives telling us that, at an ever-increasing volume. Here's the interesting thing. It was not true. It has never been true. Vladimir Putin did not hack the DNC. There was never any evidence that the Russians hacked the DNC.
Instead, the DNC emails were very clearly stolen from within the building, most likely by a Bernie Sanders supporter who wanted to show the world how Bernie Sanders was being shafted by the very same corrupt forces in Washington that later shifted Donald Trump. That was very obvious to anyone who's paying attention at the time.
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What's interesting is that no one's been punished for it. Likely, no one ever will be. In fact, Jake Sullivan, the guy you just saw lying about those nonpartisan computer scientists, has not been indicted for what he did. Jake Sullivan has been promoted.
Jake Sullivan is now Joe Biden's national security adviser. He's still screaming about Russia. Only this time it's not to bring down a Republican opponent in the presidential race. He's screaming about Russia to bring the entire country to war with a nuclear-armed power.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the February 14, 2022, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."