Say What is the segment of Liberty Nation Radio where we unveil some of the most wacky, astonishing and damnable things uttered by politicians and the chattering class. Here is the latest episode:
Tim Donner: Imagine if it was someone on Fox News who got Hillary Clinton to admit that she deleted emails, or if someone on MSNBC got President Trump to admit he colluded with the Russians. Well, that was about what happened when Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence DNI James Clapper was induced to admit that one or more government spies were implanted inside the Trump campaign by, of all people, the left-wing host of the ABC daytime chat-up show The View, Joy Behar.
Joy Behar: Was the FBI spying on Trump’s campaign?
James Clapper
James Clapper: No, they were not. They were spying on, a term I don’t particularly like, but on what the Russians were doing. Trying to understand were the Russians infiltrating, trying to gain access, trying to gain leverage and influence…which is what they do.
Joy Behar: So, doesn’t he like that? He should be happy.
James Clapper: Well, he should be.
Tim Donner: Yes, President Trump should be happy that Obama intelligence assets infiltrated his campaign because according to those involved, they were trying to protect Trump. Yes, they were trying to protect him from Russian meddling in the election, but of course they said nothing to Trump himself, an obvious first step if you think there’s even a hint of danger. But Clapper had already effectively admitted that spies were placed in the campaign when he appeared on CNN and was asked about widespread reports that one Stefan Halper set up low-level Trump campaign operatives and began a process that lead to the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
James Clapper: This is hyperbole. They may have had someone who was talking to them in the campaign, but you know the focus here, and as it was with the intelligence community, is not on the campaign per se, but what the Russians were doing to try to instantiate themselves in the campaign or to influence or leverage it, so if there was someone that was observing that sort of thing, well, that’s a good thing.
Tim Donner: Here we have James Clapper, overseer of all the U.S. intelligence agencies under Obama, saying “Trump should be happy about spies being placed in his campaign.” That it’s “a good thing,” but no less a figure than Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, says the opposite.
Adam Schiff
Adam Schiff: This claim by the President, the suggestion by Giuliani that there is a political spy embedded in the Trump campaign, is nonsense.
Tim Donner: So, which is it? What Adam Schiff says, “The idea that there were spies embedded in the Trump campaign was nonsense,” or what James Clapper says, “That there were spies but they were placed in the Trump campaign to protect Trump.” The Democrats need to get their stories straight. As the President has called for an investigation, which his opponents say will damage the intelligence agencies, among them the woman Trump fired after she refused to defend his travel ban when she was a holdover from the Obama administration, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.
Sally Yates: The President has just taken his all-out assault on the rule of law to a new level, and this time he is ordering up an investigation of the investigators who are examining his own campaign. You know, that’s really shocking.
Tim Donner: Yes, she is shocked. Shocked that anyone would consider overseeing the work of the investigators as if they’re to be given carte blanche to do whatever they want. Where is that written? But here’s the thing, the Justice Department, in the person of the Inspector General, is being asked to investigate the Justice Department. How does that work? This is why a growing number of Congressional Republicans are calling for another special counsel to investigate what the FBI and related agencies actually did to the Trump campaign, with the investigation by Robert Mueller coming under increasing fire, and it’s not just Republicans who are worried. Former Democrat pollster and advisor to President Bill Clinton, Mark Penn, who lived through the Ken Starr special counsel investigation in the 1990’s, said on Fox News “That Mueller’s supposed counterintelligence investigation is based on a false premise.”
Mark Penn: There doesn’t seem to be a real concrete intelligence origin for this investigation, and without a foundation one wonders what did we spend an entire year on? What did we disrupt everyone who was in the campaign, everyone who was in the administration? I’ve seen in 1998, I spent a year fighting this thing with Ken Starr and I think this thing is just plain wrong and has got to be ended and stopped. We’ve really seen here people indicted for unrelated charges in order to flip on the President, so we’ve found people’s lives being totally disrupted and ruined in order to get the objective of get the President. Look, we get the President through elections.
Tim Donner: There you go. We kick people out of office at the ballot box. Not through investigations which target the man and then find the crime, but if you think Mueller’s investigation will soon be over consider that the Ken Starr investigation lasted for some seven years, and the average length of these special counsel investigations is over 900 days, almost three years, so don’t hold your breath.
