Breaking: Russia Hoax was an ACTUAL Hoax

Breaking news today on Sekulow. This Russia hoax was actually a hoax. We'll talk about that more today on Sekulow.

Live from Washington DC, Sekulow Live. I sit on the Intelligence Committee. I reviewed it carefully. And again, I could not see where these reports in the media were coming from. And we now have the Biden administration itself confirming that they only have low to moderate confidence. It's pretty low in terms of the Intelligence Community's assessments. Phone lines are open for your questions right now.

Call 1-800-684-3110. Joe Biden really owes Donald Trump an apology, as does Kamala Harris and every other Democrat that attacked him on the basis of unsubstantiated media reports. And now, your host, Jordan Sekulow. This is the headline. This is not from Fox News. This is from the Daily Beast.

Certainly not right-leaning at all. The US intel community walks back claim that Russians put bounties on American troops. It was a huge election time story that prompted cries of treason. But according to a newly disclosed assessment, Donald Trump might have been right to call it, quote, a hoax.

That is the Daily Beast. The same day the US State Department Secretary of State Blinken put sanctions on Russia, some on other issues that make sense, but cites this now confirmed hoax. They have low level intel, low to moderate confidence in the story. Now they're calling it a story that was told to them by a prisoner that was being captured by the Afghans, not by the US soldiers, but being held by Afghans that were loyal to the US. And this is very common for these prisoners to try and get out of prison, and they call it here, out of his cage, by saying, I was getting a bounty to try and carry out these attacks by the Russians, which is a typical thing in Afghanistan also because they don't like each other, the Afghans and the Russians. And so we now know that Joe Biden and the DNC and the intel community was allowing a story to be pushed that had such low confidence it was being called a story, not even a report, a story. And they used it to call Donald Trump treasonous.

Take a listen to Joe Biden back during a debate this summer by 12. He's Putin's puppy. He still refuses to even say anything to Putin about the bounty on the heads of American soldiers. Now, if Donald Trump got the briefing that they had low to moderate confidence in the story, why would he say anything to Putin about it?

You'd wait, of course. Now here's the thing. There's three lawyers that are on this radio broadcast right now that know about this Russia hoax.

And that is me, Jordan and Andy, the three of us. We know because we litigated it for three years with Bob Mueller. There was nothing in that Russia hoax. And now the intelligence committee saying, well, our report, which is now not a report, it was a story.

We have low confidence in it, low to moderate, which is no confidence in it. And they used it, Andy, as a ploy against the former President of the United States. Yes, it was used as a hammer to smash it over his head about this idea that he was aware that bounties were being paid to Russians to kill American military personnel. And it was used as a club to trundle President Trump with during the campaign by Biden repeatedly. And now we know and we knew at the time, as a matter of fact, as we did with all the stuff that Mueller came up with, that it was a hoax and a lie.

And it was charges that were just fabricated in order to discredit the President of the United States in the campaign. Now it's been shown to be the case. A hoax.

They're not even calling it now. Well, Jordan, as you just said, they're not even calling it an intelligence report now. No, confidence in the story. After all, it translated from the jargon of spy world. This is from the Daily Beast. That means the intelligence agencies have found the story is at best unproven and possibly untrue.

So at best, unproven. So if you were a competent President of the United States, there's no way you would be publicly or even privately attacking another world leader over this issue. There might be other reasons to go after Putin, but not this issue. But then they stuck it in the State Department the same day this comes out. Blinken says he uses it in his rationale for sanctions against Russia, the bounty issue, which they now discredited.

Right. And so what do you have now is a is the will anyone call them out on it? Well, we know someone who will. Rick Renell, former acting director of national intelligence, ambassador to Germany and a senior counsel to the ACLJ.

He'll be joining us in the next segment of the broadcast to talk about this, which is, again, hoax after hoax after hoax when it comes to Russia. Folks, we fought back against this narrative. We have to continue to fight back against this because we all get smeared with it.

If we don't, we'll be right back. At the American Center for Law and Justice, we're engaged in critical issues at home and abroad, whether it's defending religious freedom, protecting those who are persecuted for their faith. I'm covering corruption in the Washington bureaucracy and fighting to protect life in the courts and in Congress.

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Take part in our matching challenge today. You can make a difference in the work we do, protecting the constitutional and religious freedoms that are most important to you and your family. Give a gift today online at ACLJ.org. Only when a society can agree that the most vulnerable and voiceless deserve to be protected is there any hope for that culture to survive. And that's exactly what you are saying when you stand with the American Center for Law and Justice to defend the right to life. We've created a free, powerful publication offering a panoramic view of the ACLJ's battle for the unborn.

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Request your copy of Mission Life today online at ACLJ.org slash gift. I just want to read the headline again from the Daily Beast. It says so much coming from, again, no friend of President Trump's, no friend of the Conservatives' Daily Beast headline yesterday.

U.S. intel walks back claim that Russians put bounties on American troops. It was a huge election time story. This is all from the Daily Beast headline that prompted cries of treason. Those cries of treason, by the way, were aimed at Donald Trump. But accordingly to a new disclosed assessment, Donald Trump might have been right to call it a hoax.

Yeah. Of course, the whole Russia, everything in the Russia narrative with Mueller was a hoax. Then you have this report that's a hoax and low to moderate confidence. We find out what the low confidence is, is because it was somebody in an Afghan jail told the story. They're not calling a report, now they call a story. Rick Grenell is senior advisor to the American Center for Law and Justice, especially on national security and global affairs issues. And former acting director of National Intelligence, former ambassador to Germany.

Rick, your reaction to this? I mean, it's just so outrageous. You look at what I think the Daily Caller did a really good job of compiling all of the DC media types, conspiracy theories where they pushed this during an election. Let's be very clear. They were pushing this during an election. They also told us not to look at Hunter Biden's laptop because that was Russian disinformation. I think we've got to start looking at what the media has done to interfere in the 2020 election. We now have multiple stories that were lies that they pushed. And how about the fact that we had organizations like CBS News saying that they had confirmed additionally what this report said.

So they went out on a limb and said, we also can confirm this. This is once again using leaked anonymous information and pretending like it's some sort of an intelligence verified set of documents. It's partisan.

It's terrible. I was just going to follow up on the partisan aspect of it, Rick and Jordan, because the politics of this are unreal. Biden went and said, can we play that again where he says he needs to apologize? I'm not not excuse me that he the President. What he did was so wrong.

This is from Joe Biden himself on the campaign trail. He's Putin's puppy. He still refuses to even say anything to Putin about the bounty on the heads of American soldiers.

Thank God he didn't. I mean, I mean, you can't start going to Russia. Well, listen, there's enough trouble dealing with Russia as it is. We all know that.

You know it better than us. But the fact of the matter is, you don't go there and start something when you don't have evidence. Andy, we like evidence. The evidence was never it wasn't there on the Russia hoax.

It wasn't here on this one either, Andy. Evidence is a good thing to have, especially when you're making allegations of this nature, especially when you're in court, especially when you're conducting investigations. Mueller for two and a half years tortured Donald Trump with a lack of evidence.

It was absolute pure torture. There was no evidence whatsoever of any Russia collusion or Trump collusion with Russia or vice versa in connection with the election. There was no evidence whatsoever that the President who was in office had in any way colluded with the Russians to fix the election.

There was no evidence that the President knew that there was because there wasn't bounties being paid on the heads of Americans for their scalps if the Russians would would kill them. And this now has turned out to be a hoax. So everything Donald Trump said turned out to be true. And everything he said has turned out to be the case. And everything Biden said has turned out to be false and a lie and uncorroborated by any proof. Proof is what you've got to have. And that's what they lacked, horribly lacked. So Rick, I mean in the State Department release yesterday about holding Russia to account, they mentioned the solar wind intrusion, the hack.

Okay, we can accept that for now. But then they put in, the same day this report comes out, reports of bounties on U.S. soldiers and then of course interference of the 2020 election. But I'm reminded of this, Rick, that it was under Obama that Crimea was annexed and it's under Joe Biden that Russians are again lining up their troops and tanks to invade Ukraine. Because they weren't getting the lethal assistance from the United States under Obama that they received under Trump. Look, if you take what this executive order from Joe Biden says on Russia, if you take it at face value, then the only thing you can do is look at the Germans and say absolutely not, you will not build the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and feed the beast of Russia. You're not going to feed them money if this is such a crisis.

But yet that's not what the Biden administration has done. Not only have they not told the Germans in any unequivocal way to stop, they're not implementing sanctions on the companies that are doing the work on Nord Stream 2 and they stopped the rollback of troops and they've increased the troops. They're rewarding the Germans.

They're not punishing the Germans for this. This whole thing is politics. We've got so many people just jumping in and pretending like Russia is the crisis. Russia is a problem and it's worth saying constantly. Russia is a problem like they've always been. They push propaganda. But now we have a whole bunch of people pushing propaganda in Washington DC and giving the Chinese line, which is that Russia is the number one crisis.

Don't look at China. That's what the Democrats are giving us. The follow up on that is the reaction in Washington fan. What are we hearing on Capitol Hill on this?

It depends who you ask, Jay. Unfortunately the left in Washington DC doesn't start with evidence as you suggest they should. That's what intelligence is.

Intelligence is a form of evidence and you're supposed to act based on your confidence level in it. But that's not where the left in Washington DC starts. They always pick and choose when to take the threat of Russia seriously based on whether or not it fits their political agenda or their narrative, Jay. So I would tell you that the left in Washington DC is not going to have a dramatic response to this because if it doesn't fit their narrative they don't really care what the evidence says. Well here's according to officials with the Biden administration.

This is what they're saying, Rick. The reporting about the alleged bounties come from detainee reporting raising the specter that someone told their U.S. aligned Afghan jailers what they thought was necessary to get out of a cage. Specifically the official cited information and evidence of connections to criminal agents in Afghanistan and elements of the Russian government as sources for the intelligence community assessment.

So it came from one individual in jail who's trying to get out of jail. Now, you mentioned the situation with Germany. You know that intimately. You were also the acting director of national intelligence. The Secretary of State today used this bounty issue while the administration was getting out there, trying to get out of the story, getting out there that this never happened or the confidence level was low to moderate that this ever was an issue, yet he used it today justifying, there's a lot of reasons you could sanction Russia, but justifying those sanctions in part on this false story.

Let me be very clear. This is manipulating intelligence. When you take something and blow it out of proportion and you do it for partisan reasons and you manipulate the truth for partisan reasons, this is what undermines our credibility and intelligence officials. There is absolutely no way that these reporters who pushed the story confirmed this. They absolutely knew this wasn't an intelligence community assessment. We told them from official channels, this is not an intelligence community assessment.

Don't do this. I warned reporters specifically. I know John Radcliffe warned reporters specifically, and they did it anyway because it was an election. The New York Times had a headline. They ran those huge headlines on this. Do we have the headline to put up, guys?

Can we put that up on the screen? I want to talk about this New York Times headline because I went to a New York Times intelligence reporter yesterday, and I shared this headline with them from long ago, and I said, what are the consequences? And the response to me was, I'm not one of the four names on that story, and so I'm not going to get involved. New York Times headline from June 2020, Trump got written briefing in February on possible Russian bounties, and then the story goes, and he took no action against the Russians in light of this.

Not true, not true, not true. Read the four names, too, of the reporters so that we know exactly who did this and who manipulated intelligence. I say we name names.

Okay, do we have them? Charlie Savage, Eric Schmidt, Nicholas Fandos, and Adam Goldman. They manipulated intelligence. They didn't have sources, Jay. They did not have sources.

It all comes out now. It makes us look like, on the world stage, it makes us look like the amateur hour. Well, it's really who's trying to fix an election, who's really trying to evolve with election interference.

Of course, we find that it's the mainstream media. But, I mean, listen to Jen Psaki try to explain this. I'll get your thoughts, Rick, on this, because she got asked about it, and she did the dance. I will do it when we come back. So do it when we come back. So we got Rick for the next segment of the broadcast. I just, to me, Rick, as we've got about 30 seconds here until we come back with you.

We're going to take calls, 1-800-684-3110. This just, it put this in the bin of things that the mainstream media was doing to carry the weight for a very poorly run Biden campaign that people weren't excited about. So they had to come up with reasons to call the President treasonous, which they did. Yeah, everything they said about Trump, they were doing, this is really sad, because intelligence has been manipulated over and over and over. We have too many examples, and the Washington, D.C. media doesn't care.

Oh, boy. They encourage it, actually. I mean, this is such, it's negligence in reporting it. And this is salacious stuff.

Think about the headline there, guarantees on U.S. troops in place by Putin. Look, support the work of the ACLJ for exactly this reason. We get to the bottom of this. We have people like Rick Connell on our team, so we get to the bottom of this.

But this is an outrage. ACLJ, Donald, Rick's staying with us. We'll be up next time.

Stay tuned. Only when a society can agree that the most vulnerable and voiceless deserve to be protected is there any hope for that culture to survive. And that's exactly what you are saying when you stand with the American Center for Law and Justice to defend the right to life. We've created a free, powerful publication offering a panoramic view of the ACLJ's battle for the unborn.

It's called Mission Life. It will show you how you are personally impacting the pro-life battle through your support. And the publication includes a look at all major ACLJ pro-life cases. How we're fighting for the rights of pro-life activists. The ramifications of Roe v. Wade 40 years later. Play on parenthood's role in the abortion industry. And what Obamacare means to the pro-life movement. Discover the many ways your membership with the ACLJ is empowering the right to life. Request your free copy of Mission Life today online at ACLJ.org slash gift. At the American Center for Law and Justice, we're engaged in critical issues at home and abroad, whether it's defending religious freedom, protecting those who are persecuted for their faith, uncovering corruption in the Washington bureaucracy and fighting to protect life in the courts and in Congress. The ACLJ would not be able to do any of this without your support.

For that, we are grateful. Now there's an opportunity for you to help in a unique way. For a limited time, you can participate in the ACLJ's matching challenge. For every dollar you donate, it will be matched. A $10 gift becomes $20.

A $50 gift becomes $100. This is a critical time for the ACLJ. The work we do simply would not occur without your generous support. Take part in our matching challenge today. You can make a difference in the work we do, protecting the constitutional and religious freedoms that are most important to you and your family.

Give a gift today online at ACLJ.org. Welcome back to Sekulow. So, Jen Psaki got asked about this because Joe Biden was very critical of President Trump during the campaign. And then you had people using the word treason to describe President Trump's actions or inaction when it supposedly would involve this story about bounties on U.S. troops put in place by Russia. Which, at the time, raised a lot of questions like what time frame were they talking about?

Is this modern? Are we talking about the beginning of a war? A war that's been going on for 20 years? Who was President when this actually occurred? Is this still going on? Now we find out it was a guy who was imprisoned by the Afghans who were fighting with us, not by U.S. troops, who sung this tune to the Afghans.

And the intel community has never been able to confirm this. So Jen Psaki got asked about it, had to respond, and she did a typical Jen Psaki dance around it. Does the President have any regrets for how many times he attacked President Trump on the campaign about this issue?

There are several factors that contributed to the low to moderate confidence in the judgment, including the difficulty of the operating environment and, of course, the reliance on detainee reporting. At the same time, we still feel there are questions to be answered by the Russian government. Okay.

I'm going to say something because I'm going to break this thing down. First of all, she never answers the question, of course. And that was the reporter's question was, he attacked President Trump about this a lot.

Does the President have any regrets for that? She doesn't say, yeah, we probably shouldn't have done that or no, we still think. She says instead there are several factors that contribute to the low to moderate confidence in the judgment, then skip a couple, including reliance on detainee reporting. Someone trying to get out of a jail. I mean, Andy, you're a prosecutor. I mean, that's not a really helpful admission, a jailhouse confession. Jay, I have prosecuted a lot of cases or turned down the prosecution of a lot of cases where the only evidence that I had was the jailhouse snitch who came in and said, I heard Joe say that he did it and he hid the gun in the chicken house behind the farm where he killed his mother.

And so, you know, well, tell me more about it. Well, he said it. Is the gun there? Well, no, he's not there now, but he told us it was. Now, am I going to go to court on the evidence of a jailhouse snitch who says the defendant told him that the gun was hidden behind the chicken house without going to check out where the gun was? This is nonsense. This is jailhouse detainees and jailhouse snitches are notoriously unworthy of any belief.

And yet the United States government takes this and runs with it and slams President Trump needlessly with it, senselessly with it. Yeah. Yeah. And Rick, they wanted the President to confront Putin on this. It's it's really unbelievable. She didn't answer the question. She stuttered. She didn't really know how to respond. So she dropped back. And then I think that, you know, she revealed something that they didn't reveal before.

She called it low to moderate information. And that's not what they said last year. That's not what they said during the campaign.

They went with it and literally called it fact. And so now they're walking it back. And then they do the same old thing, which they always do on Russia, which is Russia has a lot of questions to answer. And so it's this Chinese line. This is what the what Beijing wants the Democrats to do is to focus on Russia, to get all of America and the American media to focus on Russia. Meanwhile, there is a crisis going on with China.

We have to be able to do both. Again, Russia is a problem. China is a crisis.

Yeah, I think that this is the thing. Russia. I mean, no one is trying to defend Rick actions by Russia right now. They're mounting more troops up on the border, though. I will say they tend to take that action under the Obama Biden world and they weren't taking that kind of action under the four years of President Trump. So now they're going to go back in and who knows, try invade different parts of Ukraine.

They're talking about storing nuclear weapons there. And yet the where we're supposed to be taking on this is that is the election interference by Russia in 2020 in an election where I mean, Joe Biden's in the White House. And yet that's where the sanctions are not on the fact that Russia is about to invade a sovereign country again. It's one of those things that when you look at all of the problems that we're having with Russia, Ukraine, Europe, NATO, there's so much to concentrate on. And yet we get this distraction strategy from the Biden team where they want to go back and talk about what the Russian propaganda machine is doing in elections.

And then you get all of these people spun up. Daniel Goldman, the Adam Schiff lawyer who was king conspiracy theory pusher is suddenly out there with a new conspiracy on Russia and saying, well, what about this? It's this distraction mentality. Well, they're missing the buildup of Russian troops. We already know that it was the Obama Biden strategy to allow Crimea. The Ukrainians know that. The Europeans know that. They know that this is a weak administration. The Germans don't have to pay their fair share to NATO.

They get to continue buying Russian gas while the Russians are doing a buildup in Europe. It's so outrageous. And yet we have an entire media that just falls for the Jen Psaki stuttering and not being able to answer the question and then giving us some sort of distraction again. It's so frustrating. She didn't want to answer the question because she can't answer the question.

Now, my question then is really in Washington, what are the senators that are speaking out going to do about this? Because talk is one thing, but action is something else. I agree with that, Jay. I mean, so far you've seen Tom Cotton draw the comparison to propping up the 2016 collusion theory leading up to the 2020 election.

But I would piggyback on what Rick just said. They need to move from just calling it a political agenda or a distraction and point out how dangerous this is, Jay. I mean, all of us have talked about how Russia is not a friend, how Russia is a bad actor. But look, when you run with low confidence intel, what does that do? It pulls resources, it pulls attention away from high confidence intel threats. Rick mentioned China. There are certainly others.

This is not just a freebie. This is not just a political issue. You're talking about dangerous threats to the United States. And I want to see U.S. senators pivot from distraction to talking about the dangerous threats that are going unaddressed because we're focusing on this. To me, Rick, I mean, kind of just as we got about a minute left here, to me the danger of this is that if the media knows, okay, we can put this story out and then, you know, nine months later maybe it comes out to be not true. But we got what we wanted in the election.

We got to smear the person we wanted to smear. And they're not being the one, they're not being taken off of Twitter. They're not being shut down. They're not being cancelled. Their Twitter account's still active. They're not being taken off Facebook or YouTube or anything like that. They have a kind of – it kind of just gives them more of a reason to keep it up.

Keep it up. Whatever kind of intel leaks they can use against the political party they don't like or politician they don't like, keep it up. And if it comes back that it wasn't true, oh, so what?

No, no consequences. Well, look, I think ACLJ Twitter account should repost that damaging Daily Caller video which shows the media last year hyping this story. And senators need to take action.

They need to ask Twitter to take all of those tweets and put a warning label on them that they're not true. We need to start demanding from Congress that big tech play fair. Yep, absolutely.

Rick, we appreciate it as always. It's a heartbreaking topic, an important one, and you're right. I mean, Russia's a problem. China is a problem in a whole different dimension. And the priorities here are just backwards. And then the Secretary of State today still using, after they've come out and said the bounty story, low confidence, still using it to justify the sanctions.

And there are a hundred other reasons they go to sanction the Russians, but nevertheless, that's where we are. Jordan? Yeah, support our work, folks. Second half hour coming up. Matching Challenge Month continues the month of April. Double the impact to your donation at ACLJ.org. Donate today.

We'll be right back. At the American Center for Law and Justice, we're engaged in critical issues at home and abroad. For a limited time, you can participate in the ACLJ's Matching Challenge. For every dollar you donate, it will be matched. A $10 gift becomes $20.

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We will fight for the right to live in freedom. Live from Washington, D.C., Sekulow Live. And now, your host, Jordan Sekulow. So if you're just joining us or if you caught kind of in the middle of our discussion with our senior advisor Rick Grenell on this breaking news, it happened yesterday afternoon after we were on the air. For the Daily Beast reporting, so again, not a conservative outlet, that the U.S. intel community walked back the claims that Russians put bounties on American troops. Remember that story?

Dominic, it was very big in the campaign. In fact, listen to what Adam Schiff had to say about Donald Trump and this bounty story. Take a listen. And what I find so inexplicable here is Americans reading this are outraged about what Russia may be doing. The one person who isn't outraged is Donald Trump, and his reaction is this is a hoax. And the only people he's angry at are not the Russians who may be paying these bounties, but he's mad that it's being reported.

And that, to me, is inexplicable. The Daily Beast is now calling what Adam Schiff said that, oh, the President was just trying to call it a hoax. The Daily Beast is now saying that the President was right to call it a hoax. That it was so unverified, there was so little evidence, low to moderate confidence. It came from an Afghan apprehended by another Afghan who was in Afghan prison, not being treated probably particularly well.

Trying to get out. So claiming that, oh, well, see, I can tell you something big. The Russians are paying us to carry out these attacks on U.S. troops.

So over years, I guess they were trying to figure out if this was credible or not, and they never could get to that conclusion. And yet they called the President treasonous. Treasonous.

Punishable by death. Yeah, when you say treason. Yeah, and that's what they were doing. But, Than, you said that you would think that Adam Schiff would have gotten the same intel briefing because he was on the intel committee. Chairman. I tell you what, I listen to that sound, Jay, and I wonder where Adam Schiff is today because it's very likely he got a briefing that was very similar to the one that President Trump got. Maybe a little bit different because as chairman of the House Intel Committee, and yet he came out and said action should have been taken based on low confidence. Jay, where's Adam Schiff today? Is he going to take that back today?

I sure haven't heard it yet. Of course not. Because, Andy, we know this from the beginning of the Mueller report to the end of the Mueller report. In months, they knew the Russia thing was fake. There was nothing to it. They absolutely did.

They absolutely did from the very beginning. I remember, and I'm not disclosing attorney client information, but sitting in there trying from Mueller and from his staff to get some idea of what it is that's the hoax, what's the problem here, what's the lies, what's the collusion, give me some evidence, give me a colonel, give me a morsel, give me some idea of what complicity that the President had with the Russians. Not ever once did we hear one credible piece of evidence of information. It was a hoax. It was fabricated. It was connived.

It was put together in order to discredit the President of the United States. There was nothing to support it. There was nothing. There is nothing.

And there's not going to be anything. And this report by the Daily Beast, no friend of conservatives, comes out to really substantiate the fact that the President was right when he called it a hoax then, and now they're trying to, as Jen Psaki, who was the biggest double talker I have ever heard, who will not answer the question. Basically, now they're admitting, when you come up with a jailhouse snitch and you take his evidence or her evidence and you run with it and you go to court with it, you get embarrassed, and that's exactly what they are today, embarrassed. We're going to get the statement from Kayleigh McEnany, and we're working on that one. We don't have it yet, but she warned the press, too, that this was a fake story and this was not verified, and they painted this, Jordan, to have the President confront Putin on this, on the jailhouse snitch. If this was true, the sanctions that you would impose, the actions that you would impose would be so severe that you could be on the brink of war, if this were to be true. There were bounties on U.S. troops?

Yes. But if you got the report that we have low to moderate confidence in this, you don't take that kind of action. No leader.

You'd be reckless. But who are the real reckless leaders? Who is Russia taking advantage of? They took advantage of Barack Obama. They annexed Crimea. They're taking advantage of Joe Biden right now by going back in, amassing 80,000 plus troops on the Ukrainian border. What's the U.S. doing? They're slapping sanctions on Russia for 2020. Election interference, their favorite thing. Doesn't matter who wins the election. It's still Russian election interference. And who are you not talking about?

Chinese, the Iranians, nuclear deals, things like that. We will come back with more. Take your questions, too. Give us a call. 1-800-684-3110 to talk to us on air.

That's 1-800-684-3110. At the American Center for Law and Justice, we're engaged in critical issues at home and abroad. Whether it's defending religious freedom, protecting those who are persecuted for their faith, uncovering corruption in the Washington bureaucracy, and fighting to protect life in the courts and in Congress, the ACLJ would not be able to do any of this without your support.

For that, we are grateful. Now there's an opportunity for you to help in a unique way. For a limited time, you can participate in the ACLJ's Matching Challenge. For every dollar you donate, it will be matched. A $10 gift becomes $20.

A $50 gift becomes $100. This is a critical time for the ACLJ. The work we do simply would not occur without your generous support.

Take part in our Matching Challenge today. You can make a difference in the work we do, protecting the constitutional and religious freedoms that are most important to you and your family. Give a gift today online at ACLJ.org. Only when a society can agree that the most vulnerable and voiceless deserve to be protected is there any hope for that culture to survive. And that's exactly what you are saying when you stand with the American Center for Law and Justice to defend the right to life. We've created a free, powerful publication offering a panoramic view of the ACLJ's battle for the unborn.

It's called Mission Life. It will show you how you are personally impacting the pro-life battle through your support. And the publication includes a look at all major ACLJ pro-life cases. How we're fighting for the rights of pro-life activists. The ramifications of Roe v. Wade 40 years later. Play on Parenthood's role in the abortion industry. And what Obamacare means to the pro-life movement. Discover the many ways your membership with the ACLJ is empowering the right to life. Request your free copy of Mission Life today online at ACLJ.org slash gift.

Welcome back to Sec Hill. We are taking your phone calls. 1-800-684-3110.

That's 1-800-684-3110. Also in the midst of this year, we've got the Mueller stuff coming back up again. Oh well, I guess they didn't get to it in their report, but there was shared information. And that shared information was the same Klimnik and publicly available polling data. Publicly available polling data.

You could read a newspaper. But the idea that the Secretary of State today would come out Andy and say we're putting these sanctions in Russia for all host reasons, many of which are legitimate. But put in there the bounty on Americans when their own agencies are getting out there that this was not true. Well, Jay, you know, I was reading what the sanctions were.

Big deal. The sanctions are for a hoax, okay? The sanctions are that you cannot buy sovereign Russian debt and ten people have to leave the United States who are Russian operatives. So we have really sanctioned Russia. Rick Grenell said Russia is a danger. China is a crisis.

Somebody at the State Department better heed his language. Yeah, let's go to the phones. James in Maine online. James, thanks for holding on.

You're on the air. It really strikes me funny that the lack of leadership by the Biden administration. They say all these things. They overreact to low quality intel. And they're all upset about these bounties or whatever they possibly are from the Soviets.

It's crazy. You've got to do something and have leadership. Well, look, I mean, they made choices. I mean, this administration is making choices.

Let's be clear about that. They are making choices. Now, the difficulty they have is information is coming out. And a lot of this information comes out because groups like ours, the American Center for Law and Justice, we're on top of it. We're filing FOIA requests. We're getting information.

We get that information. We've got something going on with FOIA right now. I'm telling you, the problem they have here is, and I think Fan said this, is that the briefing that the President got was probably similar, if not the same, that the briefing that was received by Adam Schiff. And despite the briefings, they still make these statements about the President acting treasonous, former President acting treasonous.

Fan? It was about a narrative and a political agenda. Look, there are typically about eight members of Congress that get essentially the same level briefings on this type of things.

House and Senate leadership and then the chairman and the ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees. Now, of course, the commander in chief gets additional intelligence briefings about operatives. But, Jay, on a threat level like this, I, you know, we'll go back and check into this.

And in fact, we might want to do a FOIA on this. But Adam Schiff very likely knew this information when he continued to put forward this narrative that it was a problem. He likely knew this was intelligence that you couldn't operate on, yet he chose to run with his narrative anyway. Yeah, listen to what Kelly McInerney said to the press when this report first started going.

Here's what she said. The President is briefed on verified intelligence. And again, I would just point you back to the absolutely irresponsible decision of The New York Times to falsely report that he was briefed on something that he, in fact, was not briefed on. It is inexcusable, the failed Russia reporting of The New York Times. And I think it's time that The New York Times and also The Washington Post hand back their Pulitzers. They wrote these reports short and then no accountability. They'll run a blow-the-fold mini-retraction, if that, or correction. They'll just make it out to be a news story about maybe they were misled or something like that.

The idea here, and I just want to kind of focus in on this. While conservative outlets across the country are being silenced, shut down, tried to be, in a sense, censored, that you're walking on eggshells. And let's be honest, a lot of you might be walking on eggshells with your own social media accounts. Can we say this?

Can we do this? The New York Times could outright lie about the President of the United States, leading to calls for treason, put stories out there that are this salacious. They take no responsibility. No one loses their job. And in fact, it is still an administration now in place that is still using this in their press releases and their statements. At the same time, it is out now that this wouldn't have been something the President would have likely gotten much information briefed on because it, again, was low to moderate confidence, which translates to, at best, unproven. You don't tell the President things that are unproven. And, you know, more likely, untrue. So you definitely don't waste the time with the President. Coming from a jailhouse confession. A random Afghan prison, Afghan insurgent who's being held by another Afghan.

Right. So Rachel Maddow wanted to add, this is again, all on the same days, July 2020. Take a listen to her, MSNBC. And now, you know, from this reporting in the New York Times, which has since been confirmed by the Wall Street Journal, that not only does the President know that Russia was paying for American soldiers' deaths, paying rewards for Americans dead. The President knows it. He's been told. And what he's done with that information since he was briefed on it in March is, well, what has he done?

All right. I'm going to break this down line by line. And now you know from this reporting in the New York Times, as if whatever the New York Times says or the Wall Street Journal says or the Washington Post says, it's got to be right. Which has since been confirmed by the Wall Street Journal.

So now, Andy, we have two sources. That not only does the President know that Russia was paying for American soldiers' deaths, paying rewards for Americans dead, the President knows it. He's been told it. And what has he done with the information since he was briefed on it in March?

Well, what has he done? So let's start with the President has been told and he knows that this bounty paying was taking place by the Russians, which now we know is low to moderate confidence, if that. Well, in the law that's called hearsay on hearsay or sand supporting sand. The Wall Street, the New York Times report said, which is hearsay, and what is their corroboration? The New York Times' corroboration is the Wall Street Journal, which is another hearsay source. And the President knows what? What a jailhouse snitch detainee who wants to get out of jail will say, look, it's a fundamental thing when you're a detainee, when you're in jail, you will say or do anything to get out of jail. And if it means making a statement that bounties were being paid by the Russians for killing American troops and personnel and military officers, they'll say it.

You can't count on that. You can't count on that evidence because it isn't evidence. It's hearsay on hearsay.

It's untrue declarations that have not been substantiated. And then you tag that onto the President and say, and the President knows it. And what's he done? Silence. What's he supposed to do? Go and confront Putin with something that is the result of a jailhouse snitch sitting in a detainment cage in Afghanistan?

I don't think so. I just think that what you all have to understand when we get this kind of information and then ultimately the truth, it validates, of course, the President's action. It validates the people who are surrounding the President. But it also goes to show you how far the media will go to undermine and take out political leaders they don't like. They will use bad intel. They'll get back up from Democrat elected officials who know it's bad intel. And from time and time again, we've told you Adam Schiff was just making it up as he went along.

He took anything he got from his intel brief. It's why people like Adam Schiff, it's why people like Swalwell don't deserve, they should no longer be receiving anything classified. And I'm not saying there's no Democrats that qualify to get that briefing.

That's part of the rules. But these people who have shown time and time again either poor judgment like Swalwell by having a fang fang around, or in the case of Adam Schiff, he got the same briefing that this was low to moderate confidence. And yet he's calling out the President.

Now he carefully says it. They might have, you know, he says in his statement, they might have been putting out bounties. Well, until you know that they were, you certainly don't take acts as serious acts as a President of the United States.

I think Will Haines, our producer, pointed this out and he's correct. And that is, you know, you've got to have some legitimate restraint when you're dealing with world leaders where you could start a conflict that will have global implications. And you don't start that over a unconfirmed story from a jailhouse niche, like you don't start a special counsel investigation from an unconfirmed, unverified dossier, but they did. So I think what Than said earlier is maybe we do get some kind of FOIA on this. Now, my concern here is that they will immediately come back with investigative privilege.

Well, they'll probably fight it. I do think it's worth pointing out, though, Jay. You noticed that this wasn't leaked during the Trump administration. They didn't leak the fact that the confidence was low to moderate because, you know, they were more interested in making the right decision than defending themselves in public. You're right. You know, Than brings up a very good point. They could have gotten it right out there.

And they didn't. But go ahead, Than. Well, I just want to underscore something that Jordan said because I think it deserves follow up as well. Members of Congress, even though they're elected, Jay, they have a duty. It is a moral duty. It is a fiduciary duty to handle intelligence correctly. It's not an automatic grant. When you mishandle it, you ought to lose the privilege to get it.

And there are several members of Congress that ought to lose that privilege right now. All right, folks. We come back.

Final segment. We'll take your phone calls. 1-800-684-3110. That's 1-800-684-3110.

Take your phone calls. And again, I just want to underscore, we cannot allow the media and elected Democrats, like Than said, to get away with calling our President at the time treasonous. When they knew full well that the information they were reporting was faulty, they knew that. And yet, they couldn't let it go. Like the Russia hoax. It's all been a hoax.

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I want to use this as an example. So, Jim Sciutto from CNN. Now this is a tweet he just sent out. Again, the most dangerous disinformation today isn't coming from Russia or China, but from within our own country and it's having real world effects. See, for instance, the bloated vaccine hesitancy rates among Republicans.

First of all, I have not seen any major Republican elected officials, including President Trump and his family. Ivanka Trump tweeted out the picture this week of her getting the vaccine. It is the CDC that has paused the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The beloved CDC that the Democrats loved, even under the Trump administration, because they would disagree with President Trump, who was rushing to get a vaccine at warp speed. So, I mean, yes, I know there's anti-vaxxers out there.

I know there's that community. That's not Republican. In fact, one of the leaders of that community is Robert Kennedy Jr.

He's the leader. He's like the number one anti-vaxx guy in the country with the most money behind him, certainly. And a lot of celebrities in Hollywood that buy into that as well. So, again, that's just an outright lie. But they're taking lie upon lie. And that's worse than Russia or China. Yeah, and that's worse than Russia or China. And they say that, that this is worse than Russia or China.

But you know what? This is, what's happening, I think, Andy, is in time... The Biden administration is crumbling in months.

They're having, exactly right, it's a fall apart. In other words, they've been in office 90 days, right? Has it been 100 yet? 101?

Okay, 100 days. All right, so they're in office, and now their intelligence apparatus, and look, Rick Grenell had to run one of these intelligence apparatuses. It's not an easy job. Their intelligence apparatus is saying one thing, that this was low to moderate credibility, while their State Department Secretary of State says we're giving Russia sanctions in part because of this.

Yeah, and I'm really impressed, as I said, with these horrible sanctions that they're giving. You can't buy Russian sovereign debt. Who wants it? I don't want it. You've got to send away ten people. Ten people have, ten whole people have to leave the United States. For what? Because of all the terrible things that the Russians did, based upon what a snitch told me, and the President was supposed to go, President Trump was supposed to take a snitch's information and go to Putin.

Remember this, and confront him with it, and say, what are you doing? You're killing our people. This is an act of war, and if you didn't do it, and because he didn't do it, he's a traitor. And then Jen Psaki says Russia has several other questions to answer. Can you name me one? Give me one. That's all I want today. One more question that the Russians have to answer about the bounty situation. I want to hear it.

Yeah, I mean, again, I think that this is what the problem here is. They just throw out innuendo. Not fact. Innuendo. Let's go to Mary in New York on Line 3. Hey, Mary.

Hi, thank you. Yeah, I'm concerned because the fake bounty is now showing up as false. The fake dossier finally showed up as false for how long after. The transcript from the Ukraine call, what Adam Schiff did on the public TV and what the national news said, was false. He didn't give the actual, he did his version of the transcript. Exactly.

Right. So how many times are we going to allow this? And, I mean, we're being sanctioned on Twitter, we're being sanctioned on Facebook.

They decide what could be on there, what can't be on there. So how is the main people who are only watching the national news on these public things, ABC and ABC, going to know that this is happening? You raised a really interesting point and that people forget because it seems like it was a lifetime ago. But Adam Schiff, rather than reading the transcript of the call with the Ukraine President, with President Trump, he did this parody. Why stick to the facts when you can make stuff up? Which I pointed out during that impeachment, I don't think we have that available, but I pointed that out in my opening defense. He made it up. It was words that never came out of Donald Trump's mouth.

They made a parody. And they used that as evidence. And that's the whole problem with all of this, is they're using it as evidence. Could you imagine if the President of the United States, including President Biden or President Obama, or President Trump or President Clinton, were gone to the Russians and say, we have evidence, Andy. We've got firm evidence from an Afghan detainee in an Afghan prison who says he heard that the Russians are paying members of the Taliban who they were in a war with to kill Americans with a bounty. I could see me going to a judge and saying, I think we should have a trial of a person.

What's it based on? What do you want the warrant based on? I want you to issue a warrant. Well, tell me what the evidence is. Well, I heard that a detainee who was a snitch in a jailhouse who wants to get out said that he heard that Americans were being targeted by Russians and paid bounties for being killed by Russians, for being killed, to be killed by Russians. And this is the bounty that's being paid.

And this is what I heard and what I know. That judge would laugh me. He would lock me up for contempt, in my opinion, if I went to him and asked for a warrant to be issued on that kind of stuff. Much less Biden now saying that the President should have confronted Putin with that information. And now the President issues this national emergency order today about Russia. But where's the national emergency about the border, which the Vice President who's in charge of this, Vice President Harris, not only hasn't gone to, but here's the quick breakdown for you.

This has happened in the last couple of weeks. Two Yemeni terrorists arrested, a 233% increase in fentanyl seizures over the same period last year. A two-year-old, three-year-old, and five-year-old tossed over the wall by smugglers. Ten-year-old boys found wandering alone near the border. Homicide suspect apprehended.

Three convicted sex offenders arrested. Where's Kamala Harris? Not at the border. Where's the national border emergency? Not issued.

No, I mean, absolutely not. Not only not issued, she's not going to the border. They're now shifting it to say it's now the DHS Secretary, Mayorkas, who is going to be in charge of the border border and that she's going to be dealing with the foreign relations. So she's going to go to Guatemala and Mexico to deal with the root cause. So she is, in effect, she doesn't want to see it, she doesn't want to own that because of what she said about Trump and the Trump administration, the kids in cages, and the horrible, you know, basically... And they're seizing land right now. Oh, right now they're seizing lands through imminent domain to build more border wall.

To fill in the gaps. Yeah, well, that's what they like to call it. But see, we can't let them get away with this. I mean, I'm glad they're filling in the gaps, but they cannot get away with this. They're building the wall.

Of course they are. Yeah, they're building the wall. They're counting on what Jordan said earlier.

They're counting on the clock to run out. Look, I would say as it comes to the national emergency at the border, it's not just that it's not issued, it's that it was canceled. Because remember, wasn't that many months ago there was a national emergency declared and what did the left in Washington, D.C. do when that declaration was made? They mocked, they scoffed, and Jay, they sued.

You know, though, I read, and I don't recall the source right now, but it was a, you know, I think it was a Democratic source or a left-leaning. It said, why don't we just eat crow? Because they said, wait, why don't we just eat crow and say Trump was right on the border and fix it? But they're not going to do that.

No, they're not going to ever do it. So they've got to make up a new way to describe it. So it's going to be, we are filling in some gaps, even though we're using eminent domain to take people's personal property to an effect, finish the wall that Donald Trump started that they hated so much. It was so racist, xenophobic, and un-American, and they're still on the Russia hoax. It's, again, we're talking April of 2021, and it's still Russian election interference.

Russian election interference is still something being sanctioned, which sanctions that were meaningless, while Russia is aligned on the Ukraine border once again, with over 80,000, ready to invade a sovereign country. We'll talk about all that again next week on Secular. Support the work of the ACLJ at ACLJ.org. Give a gift today online at ACLJ.org.