By Peter Barry Chowka

In the 1970s, based on evidence that I had uncovered during my work as an independent investigative journalist, I concluded that there was such a thing as fake news. The term “fake news” had not yet been invented. But the concept was very much in place and in practice, including at the highest levels of the nation’s news media. The fakery and obfuscation of the truth were most obvious not about politics – but about medicine and health care.

You might say that – in current events – there is always a story behind the commonly accepted one. That is, there exists a narrative that is closer to the truth and is factually more accurate than the dominant party line that is fed to the public through the mainstream news media. That may seem fairly obvious now, but it was not so readily apparent in earlier times before the Internet made it possible to instantly fact-check questionable news offered up by the Establishment.

During the first week of November 1977 – over 40 years ago as I write this now – I became involved in a story that significantly and forever raised my level of awareness about – and confirmed for me the existence of – what is now called fake news.

On November 3, 1977, a date forever burned into my memory because of what I would encounter and learn in the ensuing weeks, I traveled to Washington, D.C. My purpose was to do intensive research and conduct a series of interviews for the third article in a series that I was writing about the politics and economics of cancer. The series was titled “Cancer: A Metaphor for Modern Times.” My reporting took a close and unconventional look at the conduct of and the lack of progress in the nation’s so-called War on Cancer.

My first article in the series, subtitled “Probing the Medical-Pharmaceutical Complex,” was an overview of the cancer problem. At the time, cancer was the second leading cause of death in the United States, close behind coronary heart disease. More than half a million Americans a year were dying of cancer and that number, in spite of medical advances, was increasing.

My second article, “The Failure of Orthodox Medicine,” examined the shocking limitations in the much-hyped but largely unsuccessful conventional treatments for cancer – surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy drugs. In the third and fourth articles that I was planning, I intended to undertake a probing examination of the Deep State federal bureaucracies and the non-government, tax-exempt “charitable” organizations that were in charge of the cancer war, starting with the U.S. government’s National Cancer Institute.

The NCI was founded in 1937, one of several small disease-focused institutes that comprised the National Institutes of Health (NIH), located in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Bethesda, Maryland. In December 1971, the NCI suddenly went from relative obscurity to the forefront of media and public attention after the Congress passed bipartisan legislation that declared a war on cancer, promoted by the burgeoning U.S. Medical Establishment and with the help of high profile celebrities like the popular newspaper advice columnist Ann Landers. The legislation pumped billions of dollars into the new “War on Cancer.” Proponents compared it to the effort during the 1960s that resulted in Americans landing on the moon less than a decade after President John F. Kennedy promised the nation that we would travel there. The unprecedented, focused medical effort announced in the East Room of the White House in 1971 promised a cure for cancer in time for the Bicentennial on July 4, 1976. President Richard Nixon was an enthusiastic endorser of the National Cancer Act which started the cancer war. Nixon signed the act into law in that ceremony in the White House East Room on 12/23/71, touting it as a “Christmas present to the nation.”

By the mid-1970s, especially after the 1976 Bicentennial came and went with no cure for cancer in sight, questions about the War on Cancer – its costs and effectiveness – were starting to be asked, in the Congress and in the media. I was one of those who was asking the questions.

When I began my reporting, I discovered that the people in charge of the cancer war – many of them M.D.s – acted more like politicians, self-serving bureaucrats, and spin doctors rather than medical doctors or healers.

My first contact in the nation’s capital during that first week of November 1977 was Dean Burk, Ph.D. Dr. Burk was a renowned biochemist with an international reputation. He had been one of the founders of the NCI in 1937 and he had risen to the position of director of of its Cytochemistry (cell chemistry) Section. He retired in 1974 at age 70 but remained active – surprisingly not in conventional medicine, but in innovative areas of health care that questioned mainstream medicine and endorsed various natural treatments for cancer. He was also a critic of the mass fluoridation of public water supplies, claiming that the practice of dumping toxic chemicals into a community’s drinking water supposedly to prevent tooth decay increased the incidence of cancer by 18%. Dr. Burk impressed me as a very smart man and a deeply compassionate humanitarian who had dedicated his life to doing medical and scientific research that would help people.

After our first meeting, Dr. Burk and I became instant friends and we remained close until he passed away eleven years later in 1988.

In the fall of 1977, I had already done some reporting starting three years earlier on a fledgling program at the NCI that was tentatively exploring the potential role of diet in the cause and treatment of cancer. The program was unpopular within the huge NCI and NIH bureaucracies, which were dedicated to finding and testing toxic therapies for cancer and showed little interest in cancer prevention or non-toxic, more natural, and less harmful treatments. The larger context was that the entire American Medical Establishment had by that time long maintained a party line that diet and nutrition had absolutely nothing to do with health, including cancer. To claim otherwise immediately got one labeled as a quack or even a criminal.

At Dr. Burk’s home in NW Washington, D.C. soon after we met, we talked in his basement office. After he learned about my interest in diet and cancer, he showed me several dusty volumes of mainstream medical and scientific publications from 40, 50, and 60 years earlier that were focused on diet, nutrition, and cancer! Dr. Burk explained that this area of research had shown great promise in the first decades of the 20^th century and that for several decades afterwards it was a vigorous area of mainstream scientific inquiry.

Over four decades earlier, there were studies published in leading medical journals, conference proceedings, and books, for example by Dr. Michael Tannenbaum of Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, that showed that a diet low in calories (caloric restriction) and high in certain nutrients showed promise as a cancer preventive diet. With a small number of innovative researchers looking at the same areas of diet and cancer once again in the 1970s, Dr. Burk told me, “Peter, there is nothing new under the sun.” Needless to say, I was surprised if not shocked to learn about what Dr. Burk was saying and showing me.

So what happened to this early promising work on diet and cancer from the first decades of the 20^th century? The simple answer is that it went out of fashion during World War II when physicians and researchers observed that chemicals similar to certain biological weapons of war, particularly nitrogen mustard, might have a role in cancer treatment. Virtually overnight, the field of cancer chemotherapy – cytotoxic or cell-killing chemical therapy – was born. Chemotherapy would remain the most fashionable and widely used form of conventional cancer treatment well into the next century, the 21^stCentury, crowding out other, less harmful, and more promising approaches. After World War II and for succeeding decades, mainstream scientific interest in diet and cancer went to less than zero.

In November 1977 I also interviewed Gio Batta Gori, Ph.D., the director of the NCI’s Diet, Nutrition and Cancer Program.

It was pressure from some members of Congress, particularly Sens. George McGovern (D-SD) and Robert Dole (R-KS), who co-chaired a Senate Subcommittee on Nutrition that had held hearings on the subject of nutrition and cancer starting in 1974, who championed the effort to fund the NCI’s small diet and cancer program. In fact, it was legislation that originated in the McGovern-Dole subcommittee, subsequently passed by the Congress, that mandated the NCI to start a new diet and cancer research program in the first place.

I knew Sen. McGovern from 1972 when I worked on his campaign for president. In 1977, I interviewed both him and Sen. Dole, as well as Dr. Gori and several other NCI researchers, for my article.

It didn’t hurt chemotherapy’s popularity that it was extremely profitable to the nation’s pharmaceutical companies, which made billions of dollars from the sale of the drugs. Their lobbyists in turn influenced the Congress and the direction of national cancer research policy. Physicians themselves, especially oncologists, also often derived significant financial benefits from prescribing chemotherapy.

The article that was generated from my work in Washington, D.C. and Bethesda, Maryland in November 1977 was subsequently published as “The National Cancer Institute and the Fifty-Year Cover Up.” The fact is that, with the rise of chemotherapy and its dominance for decades, by 1977 about fifty years or more had been lost in the pursuit of a very promising option: the role of diet and nutrition in cancer prevention and treatment. Hence the title, “The Fifty-Year Cover Up.”

My article was well-received, widely quoted and cited, and frequently photocopied and republished, including in the official transcript of a 1978 United States Senate Subcommittee hearing on the NCI co-chaired by Senators McGovern and Dole (scan from original hearing transcript published by the U.S. Government Printing Office below).

As I look back now, it is my experiences as a gumshoe journalist and what I learned during this period of time four decades ago that enlightened me to the existence of what was and is, in effect, fake news – the Establishment’s insistence that diet had little or nothing to do with cancer and health. For the most part, the nation’s mainstream news media all during those years enthusiastically reflected that spin.

Five years later, in 1982, the highest levels of the U.S. medical Establishment undertook a profound shift virtually overnight with the publication of a report by the National Academy of Sciences, Diet, Nutrition and Cancer. This change was due to the fact that the powers-that-be recognized the growing  interest in diet and cancer on the part of both innovative researchers and the American people and they wanted to appear to get out in front of it. This sudden policy shift represented the beginning of a sea change that would continue, with fits and starts, right up to the present day and would see diet and nutrition established as important factors in health in general and in cancer in particular.

With the government behind the new effort, the bureaucratic Deep State mindset, reflecting the needs of Big Pharma, immediately came into play. New generations of doctors and researchers were co-opted and directed into fashionable and trendy new areas like chemoprevention – the isolation of anticancer factors from nutrients and other naturally-occurring substances that could be produced as drugs and prescribed and sold at high prices to cancer patients.

The question remains: How many millions of lives could have been saved if the medical Establishment had not effectively ignored or suppressed important and credible research and information on diet and cancer and nutrition and health – over the course of decades, starting in the 1940s or even earlier?

A possible answer to this question recently came to light – and right out of the center of scientific and medical officialdom. On October 3, 2017, the Centers for Disease Control – CDC – of the U.S. government released detailed scientific information that asserted, according to the title of a CDC press release, “Cancers Associated with Overweight and Obesity Make up 40 percent of Cancers Diagnosed in the United States.”

About 630,000 people in the U.S. were diagnosed with a cancer associated with overweight and obesity in 2014. . . In 2013-2014, about 2 out of 3 adults in the U.S. were overweight (defined as having a body mass index of 25-29.9 kg/m²) or had obesity (having a body mass index of 30 kg/m² and higher).

So, in the almost 100 years since the work of early diet and cancer pioneer Dr. Tannenbaum and other scientists who reported that cancer incidence is associated with being overweight, the word about diet and cancer is finally getting out – slowly. Meanwhile, the American way of of eating that has grown up around excessive caloric consumption since the end of World War II – the so-called fast-food culture – has resulted in two out of three American adults now being overweight or obese.

The official cancer survival statistics released by the federal government are massaged and manipulated but it is a credible assumption that around 50% of people who are diagnosed with cancer today will eventually die from the disease or from the deleterious impacts of the toxic treatments. (The NIH claims the “relative survival rate” for all cancers is 68% but that figure should be taken with a large grain of salt since there is also a much lower observed survival rate.) That translates to around 300,000 Americans a year who are dying from obesity-related cancers.

Over the past 40 years, the cumulative death toll might be 10 million or more Americans – who died prematurely because the information on cancer prevention that was first uncovered almost a century ago was never applied in modern medicine and was never made available to physicians, public health officials, or the public.

This is a public health death toll that is unprecedented in modern times, and it points to yet another “failure of orthodox medicine.”

My experience with deconstructing the medical spin and obfuscation around diet and cancer 40 years ago – getting closer to the truth despite a sea of fake news – was excellent training and preparation for reporting on other areas of modern life, particularly politics which, as we see today, is corrupted and dominated by lies and an unending stream of fake news.

Peter Barry Chowka has been a journalist and a writer for all of his life. In 1992, Peter was appointed by the National Institutes of Health to serve on two of the first program advisory panels of the new Office of Alternative Medicine. Peter has also written for the peer review Medline-indexed scientific literature, most recently an article about Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D. (1947-2015). To stay in touch with Peter’s latest reporting and weekly video commentaries on the Internet, follow him on Twitter @pchowka.

By Peter Barry Chowka

EXCLUSIVE. It was unconventional alright, and the media didn’t know what to make of it

A totally unique encounter between the President of the United States and the press took place outside of the White House on Friday morning, June 15. It immediately made news for being both a historic first and for what was said. At 8:25 A.M. E.T., President Trump strolled out of the West Wing and over to the Fox News camera position a hundred or so yards away on the North Lawn where Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy was doing live reports for his and his colleagues’ morning show that was being produced back at Fox News HQ in New York. The Secret Service kept the mob of White House press back as Doocy attached a lapel microphone to the president and then, standing next to him in the morning sun, proceeded to question Mr. Trump uninterruped for the next half hour. The rest of the press, one-upped and resentful of this exclusive accorded to Fox, was struggling to listen as they were corraled in a pack several yards away.

At 9 A.M. Doocy had to sign off when Fox & Friends ended, but the fun wasn’t quite over. President Trump casually strolled over to the press gaggle and proceeded to submit to a wide variety of questions shouted at him for the next twenty minutes. That encounter was broadcast live by CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. According to the instant analysis, nothing like it had ever been seen before in the entire history of the White House. President Trump was in classic form as he parried challenging, and sometimes disrespectful, questions from the same folks who have been giving his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, an especially hard time this week during the daily press briefings.

Reporting about the impromptu press conference immediately rose to the top of the daily news cycle. With approximately 95% of the mainstream media opposed to the president and his policies, the following headlines in the MSM were typical:

7 absolutely bonkers moments from Donald Trump’s impromptu White House lawn press conference – Salon

There’s an Elderly Man on the White House Lawn and He May Not Be Well – Esquire

Donald Trump’s Friday morning proves the massive danger of [the President] sitting down with Robert Mueller – CNN

I happened to be watching the whole thing as it was broadcast live and – being of sound and objective mind – I didn’t see what all the subsequent fuss was about.

In the interests of presenting the record as it happened, below are the transcripts of both parts of the Q and A: Donald Trump with Fox News’s Steve Doocy, in a transcript provided by Fox News, and the president with various members of the White House press corps immediately afterwards, in a transcript provided by the White House. This is a long read but I think the transcripts are interesting, informative, and entertaining.

PRESIDENT TRUMP ON FOX & FRIENDS 

June 15, 2018 8:30-9 A.M. E.T.

Transcript Source: Fox News (email)

Link to video of the entire Fox & Friends interview

STEVE DOOCY, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: The President of the United States is coming up the driveway in front of the west wing, and I’ve got a feeling this is going to be really noisy as everybody’s got a question.  And there is – oh good, Peter Doocy, who made a cameo earlier is bringing him this way.  That’s awesome.  Every single reporter here at the White House is now heading to the Fox booth.  All right.
Hi, Mr. President.  Mr. President.  Woah!  Over here.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES:  Democrats, you changed the…
DOOCY:  Oh, this is great.  You’ve got some excitement out on your lawn today.  Hello, Mr. President.
DOOCY:  What brings you here?
TRUMP:  Are we on already?
DOOCY:  We’re on.  We’re live.
TRUMP:  Wow, wow.  That’s good.
DOOCY:  We’re actually – we’re on every channel.
TRUMP:  We had a very exciting trip over here I have to say.
DOOCY:  No kidding.
TRUMP:  I was good.  It was good.  How are you?
DOOCY:  I’m doing OK.  I was here for the baseball game.  How about Steve Scalise last night?
TRUMP:  I think he’s great.  How about the play?
DOOCY:  Unbelievable.
TRUMP:  He’s a great guy.  Courageous.
DOOCY:  He couldn’t –
TRUMP:  Courageous.
DOOCY:  Right.
TRUMP:  Like you.
DOOCY:  Yes, sure.  Having you stop by live.  I got some questions.
TRUMP:  I was mugged by the media.
DOOCY:  They’ve got questions for you.  I’m hoping I can ask a lot of the questions.  They’ve got –
TRUMP:  Very nice people.
DOOCY:  You know, the IG report came out yesterday.  The FBI looked bad.
TRUMP:  Very bad.
DOOCY:  Your FBI.
TRUMP:  Well, no.  It was Comey having to do.  We’re talking about Comey not my FBI.  It was Comey.  The people in the FBI are incredible.  I would bet if you took a poll in the FBI I would win that poll by more than anybody’s ever won a poll.  But the top people were horrible.
You look at what happened.  They were plotting against my election.  Probably has never happened like that in terms of intelligence, in terms of anything else.  But they were actually plotting against my election.
DOOCY:  The headline right now –
TRUMP:  I’m actually proud, because I beat the Clinton dynasty.
DOOCY:  Right.
TRUMP:  I beat Bush dynasty, and now I guess hopefully I’m in the process of beating very dishonest intelligence.  Because what they did was incredible and a real insult to millions of people that voted in that election on both sides.
DOOCY:  The headline right now from the Wall Street Journal, DOJ Clinton report blasts Comey and agents defines no bias in conclusion.
TRUMP:  Well, the end result was wrong.   I mean there was total bias.  I mean when you look at Peter Strzok and what he said about me, when you look at Comey all his moves.  So I guess – you know it’s interesting it was a pretty good report and then I say that the IG blew it at the very end with that statement because when you read the report it was almost like Comey.
He goes point after point about how guilty Hillary is and then he said but we’re not going to do anything about it.  The report, the IG report was a horror show.  I thought that one sentence of conclusion was ridiculous.
DOOCY:  What about apparently the love birds talking about you, “we will stop it”?
TRUMP:  Yes, they said they will stop me.  While in the meantime the economy hit an all time high this morning.  Never been better.  Jobless rate the lowest – best in 44 years just came out.  We’re going to have some incredible things.  We’re just announcing very big tariffs today on China because China has been – look he’s my friend, President Xi, he’s a great man.
He’s a wonderful guy but at some point we have to straighten it out.  We lost $500 billion in trade deficits last year.  We can’t do that.
DOOCY:  Is the new tariff something like 25 percent on –
TRUMP:  It’s being announced right now as I speak.
DOOCY:  OK.  You can announce it.
TRUMP:  Maybe you have the first announcement.  You may –
DOOCY:  What do you know about your tariff?
TRUMP:  You might beat the Wall Street Journal, all right.  You just beat the Wall Street Journal by a lot.  Well, we’re just going to do $50 billion on $50 billion of high technology equipment and other things coming into the country because so much of our secrets, you know we have the great brain power in Silicon Valley and China and others steal those secrets.
And we’re going protect those secrets.  Those are crown jewels for this country.  And you know you read so much about China, you read so much about other countries, we have the great brainpower right in this country I’m proud to say.  And you’re certainly a member of that group.
DOOCY:  I’m an America.  What about the fact that there are a lot of people that say what’s he doing he’s going to start a trade war if he slaps 25 percent on $50 billion for China that’s going to be bad for Americans?
TRUMP:  No the trade war was started many years ago by them and the United States lost.
DOOCY:  So you’re saying we’re on the losing end of it?
TRUMP:  Well, no.  There is no trade war.  They’ve taken so much.  So last year $375 billion in trade deficit.  We had a 300 – with China.  We had overall over $800 billion over a period of years each year close to $800 billion in losses in trade.  Not going to happen anymore.  It’s not going to happen.  Can’t happen.
DOOCY:  A week ago you were up in – up in Canada and you met with the G7 people.
TRUMP:  I was.
DOOCY:  That didn’t end so well.
TRUMP:  Oh, it ended well for the United States, it ended well.
DOOCY:  Well, the world community thinks the United States is turning our back on them –
TRUMP:  No, no.
DOOCY:  But your opinion is that it’s you got elected to represent America and America needs help.
TRUMP:  We need protection.  Everybody is taking advantage of us.  The European Union made $151 billion on us last year.  The – if you look at – I told you about China.  You look at Japan, you look at South Korea, you look at somebody (ph) and we help these countries militarily on top of everything else.
I mean, at what point does it stop?  And when I left China it was absolutely a fantastic meeting.  We left, we hugged, we kissed.  Everybody was leaving and then I get onto Air Force One and the prime minister up there Trudeau didn’t think, I guess, that we have any televisions on Air Force One.  But they have, I think, 21 televisions or some ridiculous number –
DOOCY:  And so, you saw it and you hit the roof.
TRUMP:  Well, you have to understand, we’re hugging, we’re saying goodbye, everybody’s happy.  I made changes to the agreement because I wanted it to be much better for the United States.  I made changes.  We’re all happy and then he got up and started saying that he doesn’t want to be pushed around by the United States.  Well, they charge us almost 300 percent on dairy products.
DOOCY:  Right.
TRUMP:  So, we can’t do that.
DOOCY:  Have you heard from any of the G7 –
TRUMP:  Yes, the all called me to wish me happy birthday yesterday.
DOOCY:  Really?  And how was that?
TRUMP:  It was very –
DOOCY:  Not your birthday but the message from the other side.
TRUMP:  I took it very well.
DOOCY:  Right.
TRUMP:  No, they all called.  I mean I have great friendships.  The new prime minister of Italy is great.  Got to meet him.  Very strong on immigration.
DOOCY:  Right.
TRUMP:  Like I am, by the way.  It seems that strong on immigration wins now.
DOOCY:  Sure.  But this is –
TRUMP:  But the democrats by the way are very weak on immigration.  If you notice when I came over they were all saying about separating the families and that’s a democrat bill.  That’s democrats wanting to do that and they could solve it very easily by getting together.  But they think it’s a good election point.  I think it’s a horrible election point for them.
DOOCY:  Ultimately Congress has got to change the laws –
TRUMP:  They got to change the law.
DOOCY:  — but at the same time, Mr. President, people say look, you rip these families apart even though it is the law, it’s heartless.
TRUMP:  But that’s the law and that’s what the democrats gave us and we’re willing to change it today if they want to get in and negotiate but the just don’t want to negotiate.  They’re afraid of – they’re afraid of security for our country.  They’re afraid of a wall.  Although I must tell you most people now really – they want the wall.
They want to stop the drugs, they want to stop a lot of people from coming in that shouldn’t be here like MS-13.
DOOCY:  A lot of – I was up on Capitol Hill yesterday with Steve Scalise, they were having a leadership meeting.  It sounds like they were going to take a vote on a couple of different bills on immigration probably next week.  One of them, the Good Life bill, the other is something more moderate.  Would you sign either one of those?
TRUMP:  I’m looking at both of them.  I certainly wouldn’t sign the more –
DOOCY:  What does the bill have to have in it?
TRUMP:  I need a bill that gives this country tremendous border security.  I have to have that.  We have to get –
DOOCY:  Got to have the wall?  Does that mean the wall?
TRUMP:  We have to have the wall.  If we don’t have the wall there’s no bill.  We have to catch and release.  We catch a criminal, a real criminal, a rough tough criminal, we take his name and then we release him.  And we say please show up to court in a couple of months.
You know what the chances of getting him to court are?  Like zero.  OK.  It’s crazy.  Then we have the lottery program, right.  It’s called Lottery Visa (ph).
DOOCY:  Diversity Lottery Program.
TRUMP:  Yes, well lottery visa.
DOOCY:  OK.  One of the –
TRUMP:  OK, whatever.  They have 15 there.  Still – everyone of them has lottery.  Do you know what lottery is?  That’s when you pick names to come into the country.  Well when a country gives names, they’re not giving us their finest.  So we’re picking people, it’s not good.
We have to end that.  We have to end a couple of them and we are going to be so secure as a country. Now with all of that being said, we’re doing a great job.  ICE, we’re getting MS-13 out by the thousands.  But we shouldn’t have to be going into towns in Long Island and other places and getting them out.  You know it’s almost like we’re liberating towns. It’s incredible.
DOOCY:  You mentioned court.  Regarding a legal proceeding, you got Robert – the Mueller investigation.  I know we kind of touched on that a little while ago.  Rudy Giuliani is out this morning.  He said the investigation should go away.  Time to fold up the tent.  Or it’s time to investigate the investigators.  Are you on the same page?
TRUMP:  Look, we have 13 angry democrats.  There are – I call them 13 angry democrats and others work for Obama for eight years.  I mean they have no republicans, you have no – it’s a very unfair situation but the IG report totally exonerates.  I mean if you look at the results and if you look at the head investigator is saying we have to stop Trump from becoming president.
Well Trump became president and we have the best economy today we’ve ever had.  We have much greater border security than we ever would have had.  And when we do it – when we have the laws changed it will be like perfecto.
DOOCY:  Rudy says that you should not talk to a lawyer.
TRUMP:  A lot of people say that.  Look –
DOOCY:  Getting the IG report and stuff that’s going on.
TRUMP:  They’re getting people who say something a little bit off.  It is a nice day?  Well, you know no it’s not a great day.  Oops, you lied.  He goes you know got problems.
DOOCY:  What –
TRUMP:  People are afraid of that and I would like to talk but it seems to be very biased.
DOOCY:  One of – some of the texts and we’re not going to quote them were very –
TRUMP:  Vicious.
DOOCY:  Vicious regarding people who support you.
TRUMP:  Vicious.  I have the greatest supporters in the world.  By the way, they’re the smartest, they’re the hardest working.  They pay taxes.  They’re incredible.  They’re loyal.  I have the bikers, I have the construction workers.  I have them all.  I have – by the way I have the FBI.
You go into the FBI and take a poll of the real FBI, not the scum on top.  Not Comey and that group of people that are total thieves.
DOOCY:  Most of those are gone.
TRUMP:  Well, I don’t know how Peter Strzok is still working there to be honest with you.
DOOCY:  He’s working in HR.  This is –
TRUMP:  That’s even worse.
DOOCY:  Mr. President, this is your FBI.
TRUMP:  I know but do you know what I’ve done and you know this.  I’ve told you this.  I’m so involved, great new secretary of state, just – I have a fantastic relationship now with North Korea.  There were missiles being thrown about.
DOOCY:  Yes.
TRUMP:  People aren’t thinking about it anymore.  I said on the Department of Justice, I would stay uninvolved.  Now I may get involved at some point if it gets worse.  I say I’m staying uninvolved.  I’m letting this report go through.  I did nothing wrong.  There was no collusion.  There was no obstruction.  There was no one –
DOOCY:  But Mr. President I was on Capitol Hill yesterday and there are a number of congressional republicans who are, they are trying to get some documents from your Department of Justice, your FBI.
TRUMP:  I tried to stay involved.  I may not stay involved, again uninvolved.  Because they have to get the documents, look I think everybody –
DOOCY:  But your FBI is stonewalling.
TRUMP:  I think that road – rog —
DOOCY:  Rosenstein.
TRUMP:  Rosenstein thinks that you have to get the documents.  I really believe that.  I saw him yesterday.  He gave me a briefing.  It think that he believes you have to get the documents.
DOOCY:  What did he say regarding the IG reports?
TRUMP:  Well he wasn’t thrilled about it.  I mean you know you can’t be if you’re in there now.  But it really was talking about the past.  It’s not talking about us.  It’s talking about before us.  And it’s talking about the election.
What they did during the election was a disgrace.  It’s probably never happened in our country before.  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  What’s going to happen when we go further?  And there was total biased.  I mean total biased.
DOOCY:  From what you’ve seen so far should James Comey be locked up?
TRUMP:  Well look, I would never want to get involved in that.  Certainly he, they just seem like very criminal acts to me.  What he did was criminal.  What he did was a terrible thing to people.  What he did was so bad in terms of our constitution in terms of the wellbeing of our country.  What he did was horrible.
Should he be locked up?  Let somebody make a determination.  Look at all the dishonest things that crooked Hillary did.  Look at what’s gone on.  It’s very sad.
DOOCY:  Sounds like he was using a private e-mail too.
TRUMP:  He had a private e-mail.  That was of all the things, that wasn’t to me maybe the most interesting.  But it was probably the funniest.
DOOCY:  Because she got in big trouble for her private e-mail.  Oh, James Comey’s using one too.
TRUMP:  That was a little bit of a surprise I have to say.
DOOCY:  Yes.  From what we’ve seen though regarding the IG report it sounds like Comey made some bad judgments but nothing criminal.
TRUMP:  Well if you look at what happened — and don’t forget all of these people like Strake (ph), what he did was criminal.  Strzok and so many others.  McCabe is now —
DOOCY:  Do you need to bias the analysts?
TRUMP:  Oh, they all work for Comey.  And Comey knew everything that was going, then you think McCabe didn’t tell him everything?  McCabe told him everything.  And McCabe is up for criminal right now.
DOOCY:  And now he’s suing the Department of Justice.
TRUMP:  And he’s now suing.  And it’s a total mess, they’re all going against each other.  No I think Comey was the ringleader of this whole, you know den of thieves.  It was a den of thieves.
DOOCY:  Are you confidant that either through the congressional investigators or the IG report, or new management at the FBI things are going to work out?
TRUMP:  I think so, I think so.
DOOCY:  Things are cleaning up and we’ll get to the bottom of all that stuff?
TRUMP:  I do believe so.  I think its happening.  It’s happening slowly.  But it’s happening.  I think Christopher Wray’s a very different from Comey.  Which is what you need, you need different.  You need like the opposite.  And he’s moving step by step.  And you’re going to see a whole new very proud FBI.
I think that the Justice Department will end up being – it’s all going to happen.  It’s all going to work out.  But I tried to stay as much uninvolved as I can.
DOOCY:  You were very involved in going to Singapore, negotiating with Kim Jong-un.
TRUMP:  Right.
DOOCY:  When you finally met him and sat across the table from.  You know we’ve heard a lot of bad things about little rocket man.  And suddenly you guys seem to be best friends.
TRUMP:  We got along very well.  We had a good chemistry.  I don’t know if that’s supposed to be popular or politically correct to say.  But we really did.  We had good chemistry.  You haven’t had any rockets shot up in the air for seven months.
You haven’t had any research.  They just blew up their test site, they’re blowing up their engine test site for ballistic missiles.  He’s giving us back our great hero’s who died, as you know.
DOOCY:  Right.
TRUMP:  We’re getting their remains back.  And I’ve had so many people, so may parents, so many fathers, and daughters, and sons asking me please, please.
DOOCY:  Right.
TRUMP:  This is during the campaign and after.  I don’t have exactly a good relationship anyway.  During the meeting and we really did hit it off.  During the – you know good chemistry.
DOOCY:  You have since used some very friendly words regarding him.  And you’re taking some heat for that.
TRUMP:  Yes.  I mean that’s what it is.  I take heat.  But what am supposed to do?  Walk out and say terrible?  I mean I got along with him very well.  We have good chemistry.  I asked him the remains; I’d like to get them.  He said yes, we will do that.
They are already starting to produce the remains of these great young soldiers who were left in North Korea.  We’re getting the remains.  And nobody thought that was possible.
DOOCY:  The way you have described things, it sounds like you feel that he’s on the road to denuking.
TRUMP:  Oh, absolutely.  It’s in the agreement.  It says he will denuclearize.
DOOCY:  Right.  I know it’s kind of broad.
TRUMP:  You know it’s funny when you see the fake news.  Because – and you guy’s aren’t fake.  But I signed an agreement where we get everything.  Everything, but they say Trump lost because he agreed to meet.  Trump agreed to meet.
DOOCY:  Got the picture.
TRUMP:  No it’s a funny thing.  You got to watch CNN, what a fraud it is.  They go Trump is —
DOOCY:  Their listening they’re right behind you, right there.
TRUMP:  That’s fine.  Do you hear me?  Trump agreed to meet.  I say I agreed to meet.  Of course you got to agree to meet.  If you don’t agree to meet you know what you’re going to have?  You’re going to have nuclear war, that’s what you’re going to have.
I have a great relationship.  He gave us back our hostages.  I didn’t pay $1.8 billion.  I paid nothing.
DOOCY:  Right.
TRUMP:  But it was very smart that he did it.  He gave us back our hostages.  He’s giving us back the remains of probably 7,500 soldiers.
DOOCY:  Really?
TRUMP:  Yes.  There’s a tremendous number of soldiers.  Tremendous number of MIAs, you know folks that just never – they’ve never been found.
DOOCY:  It sounds like —
TRUMP:  And they, and by the way they know where many of these bodies are.
DOOCY:  What is the stage of the meetings now?  I know you —
TRUMP:  It’s great.  Mike Pompeo is just leaving there.  He was in South Korea.
DOOCY:  Any developments from (inaudible)?
TRUMP:  We’re getting along great with South Korea.  We’re getting along great with China.  Probably until this morning because we just did a tariff in China.  But that’s OK.  Because I have a wonderful relationship with President Xi, we’ll all work it out.  He understands it’s unfair.
DOOCY:  Right.
TRUMP:  They can’t believe they got away with it for so long Steve.
DOOCY:  Right.
TRUMP:  They can’t believe it.  I mean they got away with it for 25 years.  I’m not just blaming Obama.  I’m blaming many Presidents and leaders.
DOOCY:  At what point —
TRUMP:  It should have never happened.
DOOCY:  At what point do the sanctions come off of North Korea?
TRUMP:  When we can be sure there will be no more nuclear.
DOOCY:  How close are we to that?
TRUMP:  Very close.  We’re very close to getting it started.  He wants’ to do it, he wants to do something great with his country, he wants’ to make his country great.
DOOCY:  So you are saying that you’ll relieve the sanctions once what ever he’s going to do —
TRUMP:  Once we know —
DOOCY:  Is completely.  That stuff doesn’t work anymore.
TRUMP:  Once we know that it can’t happen.
DOOCY:  Right.
TRUMP:  And I’m telling you right now with the relationship I have it’s not going to happen.  Hey you haven’t had a rocket test in seven months.  I was with Prime Minister Abe, another good friend of mine from Japan.  I said when’s the last time you had a rocket flying over Japan?
He said it has not happened.  I said it won’t happen.  Don’t worry about.
DOOCY:  Are we close to seeing Mr. Kim here at the White House?
TRUMP:  It could happen.  I mean yes, I would have him.
DOOCY:  Did they talk about that –
(CROSSTALK)
TRUMP:  Yes.  I think it’s something that could happen.  Yes.  Hey, he’s the head of a country.  And I mean he is the strong head.  Don’t let anyone think anything different.  He speaks and his people sit up at attention.  I want my people to do the same.
DOOCY:  Well just before you met with him he cleaned house.  Three of his top Generals, some of the hardliners he’s fired.
TRUMP:  Yes that’s what I hear.
DOOCY:  Then you go over there.  And you got – you took some heat over saluting one of the Generals.
TRUMP:  I think he fired at least, OK when you say he fired.
DOOCY:  Three that we know of.
TRUMP:  I think maybe fired at least, fired maybe a nice word.  That’s right, I met a General.  He saluted me, I saluted him back.  And I guess their using that as another sound bite.  I mean, you know I think I’m being respectful to the General.
We are, we have a very good relationship with North Korea.  When I was talking to President Obama, he essentially was ready to go to war with North Korea.  He felt you almost had to go to war.  And I did ask him.  Have you spoken to him?  It was no.  I said do you think it would be a good thing to speak to him maybe?
DOOCY:  Right.
TRUMP:  OK.  Because if you go to war there your not talking about 100,000 lives, which is a lot, your talking about 30, 40, 50 million lives.  Seoul is 30 miles off the border.  They don’t even need nuclear weapons to take out Seoul.
And they have thousands of cannons.  They call them cannons, they have the big guns.  Thousands pointed right at Seoul.  We have a really great relationship for the first time ever.  No President’s ever had this.  So I get hit by these fakes back here.  Not all of them.  Some are phenomenal.  But I get hit.  Because I went there, I gave him credibility.  I think it’s great to give him credibility.  Here’s what we got, everything, point after point after point.
DOOCY:  One point, I think it was in the last week, 10 days.  Things are going faster in Washington, just saying.  But —
TRUMP:  We’re having a lot of fun right? So supposing Hillary instead of Trump, do you think it would be so exciting?  Your ratings would be way down, number one show in the morning folks.
DOOCY:  Well thank you.  I’ve heard you say the others in cable news.  That’s right.  It was with in the last —
TRUMP:  Actually also beyond cable news you’re doing pretty well.
DOOCY:  We’re doing OK.  Thanks for dropping by –
TRUMP:  I like ratings.
DOOCY:  All the others (inaudible).
TRUMP:  I study ratings, broadcasting.
DOOCY:  You had mentioned the NFL players and the — you know, some taking a knee.  And you would like to hear some of the stories of people who you should pardon.  And you mentioned professional ethics.  Have you heard from any of them?
TRUMP:  No.  I haven’t heard.  You know their all saying it has nothing to do with the flag.  It’s the way we’ve been treated and in the meantime their making $15 million a year.  Look I’m all for the athletes.  I think it’s great.  I love athletics, I love sports.
But they shouldn’t get the politics involved.  When you’re in a stadium and they broadcast that nationally you got to stand.  And you got to be proud.  And you got to have your hand up.  And you got to do everything that’s right.  And then go out and play really tough football.
And once you leave that stadium go and do what ever you want to do.  Run for office, or do what ever.  But I did say, you know I have this tremendous power of pardon.  And Kim Kardashian came in and there were woman 22 years in jail
DOOCY:  People can’t believe that you would be listening to Kim Kardashian.
TRUMP:  Well I did, I don’t know here and I met her and she was really nice I have to say and very capable but she came in and she said this is a very unfair situation, I looked at her and I agreed.
Twenty, she’s in there for 22 years she’s got another 20 years to serve, and you have drug dealers that are doing big stuff and they get a two month sentence, it was just unfair.  And I thought it was a beautiful scene when that woman left prison and ran over to — it looked like their grandkids, it was a couple of big strong guys.
DOOCY:  She’s (inaudible).
TRUMP:  Big strong guys, some wonderful women, they were all hugging and kissing and everyone’s crying.  To me that was a beautiful scene, well she thanked me but thank Kim because I wouldn’t have known about it.  And I told the NFL players indirectly, you have somebody that’s aggrieved, because they’re people are aggrieved, OK.  Let me know about it, I’ll look at it, if they’re aggrieved, I will pardon them I’ll get them out.
DOOCY:  I’m shocked you haven’t heard from a single one.
TRUMP:  I don’t think I’ve from one, maybe they’ve called the staff but I have not personally heard from one.
DOOCY:  Speaking of the staff…
TRUMP:  Because I don’t know if it’s a real issue, I don’t think it’s a real issue.
DOOCY:  Sarah Huckabee Sanders your press secretary, she’s – she took a lot of heat yesterday from the people behind you.
TRUMP:  Oh, she did?  I didn’t know that.
DOOCY:  Well she did, there was some suggestion that maybe she’d be leaving the White House.
TRUMP:  I don’t think so, you know look at a certain point everyone sort of leaves, you have to leave.  I’m sort of just standing like a ship, just keep going, bing, bing, but Sarah loves this job and she’s announced, not with me, I read that same report.
Somebody put it out, I think it was CBS when she said it’s a false report but it’s fake news.  But at some point I’m sure she’ll leave, like everybody leaves and we’ll get somebody else but Sarah’s done a fantastic job.  No I don’t think she’s leaving.
DOOCY:  What do you make of the…
TRUMP:  That she was very insulted that they came out and said that so I don’t think she’s leaving.
DOOCY:  What do you make of the back and forth between her and the press, because sometimes it gets loud.
TRUMP:  I think the press treats Sarah very unfairly, that White House correspondent…
DOOCY:  But I think some of them feel she’s not answering their questions so they’re going to ask it again and ask it a lot.
TRUMP:  Well I gave a press conference in Singapore that was like an hour and a half and that was like the biggest press group I’ve ever seen.  And I answered every single question, I’d answer anybodies question I guess that’s not supposed to be my job, I’m here with you today, you’re giving me a lot of interesting questions.
DOOCY:  Well thank you very much.
TRUMP:  But Steve, I think Sarah is really a good person and a nice person, very capable.  She’s got a lot of her father’s genes because her father is great.  Don’t forget he got up there on that debate stage and he said, nobody’s going to beat Trump.  And I even decided to — he was running and I even decided to wear a Trump tie.  And I said I love that guy, I loved him OK.
Mike, is a very talented guy and Sarah’s a very talented person, but they treat her very badly.  What they did Sarah at the White House correspondent, now the only difference I would have done, I would have walked out.  I thought she should have walked out instead of sitting there.  But you know…
DOOCY:  She took a high road.
TRUMP:  She took a very high road, sometimes you don’t take such a high road.
DOOCY:  We had Stewart Varney on our air alert…
TRUMP:  By the way, he is great.  I love Stewart.
DOOCY:  That little part, he’s going to be running everyday now.
TRUMP:  No I love him, and he’s right.  He knows what he’s talking about.
DOOCY:  Well he suggested that the next quarter, GDP, could be four percent.
TRUMP:  Well they’re predicting, the Atlanta Fed predicted 4.8 percent, I think that’s a lot.  When I got elected, I took this thing over it was 1.2 and each point is three trillion dollars and 10 million jobs.  You know a point people will see at home, oh it’s a .1, what difference does it make?
Well, it was 1.2 and it was going down. You probably saw this morning I put out, they would have raised your taxes instead of cut your taxes and they were going to put on more regulations.  The last thing we need is regulations. I actually think my regulation cutting had more of an impact on the economy than the tax cuts.
DOOCY:  When you were running you said for every regulation that we enact, I will cut two.
TRUMP: Right.
DOOCY:  But you didn’t cut two, you’re cutting a much bigger number.
TRUMP:  That’s right, 22, it turned out, 22.  And by the way you need regulation, I want the cleanest water in the world, I want the cleanest air in the world, I want that air to be so perfect, and our air now is better than it was two years ago.
With all of the talk and the nonsense, clean — crystal clean water, clean air, but I also want our companies to be competitive so they can go around the world and compete, and we were shutting down companies over the environment and they weren’t doing anything wrong, and that’s jobs.
DOOCY:  Right, but there are some who say, look the EPA is relaxing a lot of rules that are out there to protect people.
TRUMP:  Only rules that don’t mean anything or rules that are duplicatative.
DOOCY:  There’s a lot of those.
TRUMP:  Well not only that, I mean some of them you have nine different times you have to get the same thing approved by different agencies.  To build a highway in this country takes 19 years of approvals, I have it down to two years.  And you’ll get rejected if it’s wrong, if it’s environmentally bad.  But I have it down to two years. I want to get it down to one year.  And that’s indicative of everything else too.
A company comes in from China, from Japan they want to spend a tremendous amount of money on building a plant or something, right?  It takes them seven years to get a permit, and they don’t do it because it’s too long.  I have it down to one year and even faster, now if they’re wrong, we know immediately.  You don’t have to wait seven years, how about going through the press of seven years and getting rejected.
How about a highway that spends 19 years getting approved and then the last vote they get a three to two vote? No, that happens often times and they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the approval, not going to happen anymore.
DOOCY:  I saw a headline on Drudge I think this morning, unemployment at a 44 year low.
TRUMP:  Yes, yes, Drudge is great by the way, Matt Drudge is a great gentleman who really — I don’t know, he’s got an ability to capture the stories that people want to see.  But that was the number one story on Drudge.  Forty-four year low unemployment, and I saw that in very big letters actually, and I said “That makes me very proud.”
DOOCY:  Another story out there this past week is while you did meet with Kim Jong-un it sounds like you and Mr. Putin may be sitting down sometime soon, what can you tell us about that?
TRUMP:  We may, and it started because a reported shouted to me, should Putin be in the G7?  I said no, he should be in the G8, it used to be the G8 a few years ago, and I think President Obama didn’t like him or even though they gave advanced notice about the election to Obama, people forget about that.  You know Obama was told by the CIA or somebody, FBI, about Russia. He didn’t do anything about it.  How come he never gets blamed?  In September just before the election, my election, he should have done it, because maybe I would have won by more.
DOOCY:  Right.  Yesterday, a big day not only did the HE report come out but it was your birthday.
TRUMP:  That’s right.
DOOCY:  Get any good presents?
TRUMP:  I got a lot of good kisses, I got a lot of phone calls from people that I would never have gotten phone calls from.  I got phone calls from…
DOOCY:  Who’d you get the kisses from?
TRUMP:  From my beautiful wife, who’s really doing great, she’s doing great.  But and my kids.
DOOCY:  Speaking of your wife.
TRUMP:  Yes?
DOOCY:  We saw a story I think as you were heading to the chopper you said, she can’t fly for a month.
TRUMP:  One month, well the doctor said don’t fly for a month, but she’ll be able to very shortly.
DOOCY:  And she’s on the mend?
TRUMP:  Oh, she’s in great shape, she’s like perfect.  She – somebody said, did she have a face lift?  No, did she have this, did she have that?  I mean the speculation, even after the doctors gave a full – and these are White House doctors that give a really straight stuff, but no she’s doing fantastically well.
DOOCY:  We had your son Don Jr. on our show and he said he was not getting you anything for your birthday because you’ve got everything.
TRUMP:  Well I just want to have a successful country, I’ll be honest, I — this is so intensive.  We’ve done more, I don’t say this in a bragging way, actually some of the haters actually say this.  We’ve done more in 500 days, so now it’s 510 days, than any 500 day president first term by far.  And that’s what I want to do, I want to really – you know I got elected to make America great again, very simple.
Make America great again, and that’s what we’re doing and we are respected around the world.  You take a look at Iran, they’re not talking about Iran taking over the Middle East. I took that crazy deal that Obama gave them away.  Iran’s not looking to the Mediterranean anymore. You know they had to go through a lot of territory to get there.
They’re looking to survive, but I will tell you, some day soon they’re going to come back and they’re going to want to negotiate a deal and we’ll make a deal.  But they were nasty, they were very, very nasty, and it had to be stopped.  I took away the deal, and I think they’ve been treating America with much more respect and I have to say you don’t see the little boats circling our boats anymore, do you notice that?
Remember with Obama you had this beautiful disarray, you have this Annapolis captain on the boat and he’s sitting there and he’s like a boiler waiting to explode because he was giving orders and they were circling us with those boats right?  And he wanted to shoot the hell out of them — he wanted to – they were harassing our guys.  And he wanted to shoot the hell out of them and you don’t see that stuff anymore.  By the way when they captured our 10 sailors and made them get on their knees, you’re not going to see that anymore.
DOOCY:  All right hear the bells in the distance, we’re coming up on 9:00 in the east, how are you going to celebrate Father’s Day?
TRUMP:  Work, I’m going to work, I’m going to actually be calling North Korea, I’m going to be calling — I just have right now I have a call from your friend from France, Emmanuel.
DOOCY:  What are you going to tell him?
TRUMP:  I’m going to tell you have to treat us better on trade. European Union’s not treating us well on trade.  I love trade, you know trades always been my thing even 20 years ago when I’d be talking to you.  Trade was always my thing, it’s probably – I’m getting a lot of credit for what we’re doing foreign, but I think my best thing is going to be trade.  We have to straighten out our trade. You know we’re doing well despite our bad trade deals, after we do our trade deals, what till you see the numbers.
DOOCY:  Mr. President, I don’t think in the history – anybody ever know the sitting President come out on the North Lawn?
UNIDENIFIED PARTICIPANT:  Never.
DOOCY:  Never, never happen.
TRUMP:  Secret Service is thrilled, as I stand here, look at these guys they’re ready to..
DOOCY:  Yes.  I feel very secure.  You know what, he’s just –
TRUMP:  This is definitely your son.  By the way –
DOOCY:  It’s fine.  He’s not –
TRUMP:  – I looked at him – I look at him.  There’s no question that’s your son.
DOOCY:  That’s very kind of you.  All right, Mr. President, thank you very much.
TRUMP:  Thank you.
DOOCY:  Actually because you’re in – we’re in the golf business, right now we’re going to throw it to Bill Hemmer –
TRUMP:  Oh, so exciting.
DOOCY:  – who is reporting live from the U.S. Open.
TRUMP:  And Bill’s doing a good job, too.  He knows golf.
DOOCY:  There you go.
TRUMP:  I’ve been watching.  Good, Bill.  Do it.
END

After concluding his interview with Steve Doocy, President Trump walked over to where the White House press core was waiting several yards away on the driveway. For the next 20 minutes, he proceeded to answer their shouted, and occasionally ill-mannered, questions.

REMARKS BY PRESIDENT TRUMP IN PRESS GAGGLE, WHITE HOUSE NORTH LAWN & DRIVEWAY

June 15, 2018 9:03-9:21 A.M.

Transcript Source: The White House

Link to video of the President’s Q & A with the White House press

THE PRESIDENT:  No, I think that James Comey was (inaudible).  I think what he did was a disgrace.  I think he goes down as the worst FBI Director in history, by far.  There’s nobody close.  And I think I did the country a tremendous favor by firing him.
Q    (Inaudible.)
THE PRESIDENT:  No, I think — actually, if you take a look, when he totally exonerated her — because I call it “Comey Three.”  You had one, two, and then you had Comey three.  He totally exonerated her.  And if anything he’s saying is correct, what she did is they tried to pretend it didn’t happen.  I would have gone out there and I would have had the greatest news conference in history.  They tried to pretend the exoneration didn’t happen.
Now, the exoneration was incorrect because there’s no way they could have checked that number of emails in just a few days.  But if you remember, just before the election, he went out and he exonerated her and they didn’t even talk about it.  That was the greatest political mistake.
With all of that being said, I won Wisconsin, I won Michigan, I won states that a Republican hasn’t won in many, many decades, years.  She didn’t do a good job and you never gave me credit for doing a great job.  But the fact is, I did a great job.
Q    Mr. President, there was a Fox news report this week that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is pushing back and threatening to investigate the congressional investigators who just want documents.  Do you think that that is appropriate?
THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I hope that’s not so.  And I know they’re getting documents.  And I purposely — look, if you see what I’ve done with North Korea and with the State Department, Mike Pompeo, it’s running so well.  It’s — I have this running so well.  I have purposefully, because of this ridiculous witch hunt, I have said I’m going to stay away from the Justice Department until it’s completed.  So I wanted to stay away.  Now, that doesn’t mean I have to, because I don’t have to.  I can get involved.  But I don’t want you people to say that I’m interfering, that I’m doing anything.
I think that the report yesterday, maybe more importantly than anything, it totally exonerates me.  There was no collusion.  There was no obstruction.  And if you read the report, you’ll see that.
What you’ll really —
Q    On North Korea —
THE PRESIDENT:  Excuse me.  Wait, wait, wait.  What you’ll really see is you’ll see bias against me and millions and tens of millions of my followers.  That is really a disgrace.
And yet, if you go — and yet, if you look at the FBI, and you went in and you called the FBI — the real FBI — those guys love me, and I love them.
Q    Are you going to suspend Mueller?  Are you thinking of suspending Mueller?
THE PRESIDENT:  No, but I think that whole investigation now is — look, the problem with the Mueller investigation is everybody has got massive conflicts.  You have Weissmann who was at Hillary Clinton’s funeral, meaning, her party that turned into a funeral.  And they were screaming and crying and they were going crazy.  How can you have people like this?  So you have — I call them the “13 Angry Democrats.”  You have a tremendous animosity.
Now, here’s the good news: I did nothing wrong.  There was no collusion.  There was no obstruction.  The IG report yesterday went a long way to show that.  And I think that the Mueller investigation has been totally discredited.
Q    Mr. President, you have spoken so passionately about the circumstances that led to Otto Warmbier’s death.
THE PRESIDENT:  Yeah.
Q    In the same breath, you’re defending now Kim Jong Un’s human rights records.  How can you do that?
THE PRESIDENT:  You know why?  Because I don’t want to see a nuclear weapon destroy you or your family.  I don’t want to see —
Q    By the way, you declared the nuclear threat from North Korea is over.
THE PRESIDENT:  Excuse me.  Because I don’t want to see a nuclear weapon destroy you and your family.  I want to have a good relationship with North Korea.  I want to have a good relationship with many other countries.  And what I’ve done, if you remember, if you’re fair, which most of you aren’t — but if you’re fair, when I came in, people thought we were probably going to war with North Korea.  If we did —
Q    You say the threat is over.  Is it over?
THE PRESIDENT:  Quiet.  Quiet.  Quiet.  If we did, millions of people would have been killed.  I don’t mean like — you know, people are saying 100,000.  Seoul has 28 million people 30 miles off the border.  You would have had 30, 40, 50 million people killed.  Who knows what would have happened?
I came in; that was what I inherited.  I should have never inherited.  That should have been solved long before I got there.  I did a great job this week.  The fake news said, “Oh, you met.”  But the only thing they saw that I gave up — one broadcast said, “He gave up so much.”  You know what I gave up?  I met.  I met.  We had great chemistry.  He gave us a lot.  You haven’t had a missile test in seven months.  You haven’t had a firing.  You haven’t had a nuclear test in eight and a half months.  You haven’t had missiles flying over Japan.  He gave us the remains of our great heroes.  I have had so many people begging me — parents, and fathers, mothers, daughters, sons — wherever I went, “Could you please get the remains of my boy back?”  They’re giving them back.  Nobody thought that was possible.
Q    Sir —
THE PRESIDENT:  Wait, wait.  They’re doing so much.  And now we’re well on our way to denuclearization.  And the agreement says there will be total denuclearization.  Nobody wants to report that.
So the only thing I did was I met.  I got along with him great.  He is great.  We have a great chemistry together.  That’s a good thing, not a bad thing.
Q    How can Kim love his people if he’s killing them?
THE PRESIDENT:  I can’t speak to that.  I can only speak to the fact that we signed an incredible agreement.  It’s great.  And it’s going to be great for them, too.  Because now North Korea can develop and North Korea can become a great country economically.  It can become whatever they want.  But there won’t be nuclear weapons and they won’t be aimed at you and your families.
Q    Mr. President, why did you offer to halt the military exercises with South Korea?
THE PRESIDENT:  That was my offer.  Just so you understand.  Military —
Q    (Inaudible.)
THE PRESIDENT:  Okay, you want to hear?
Q    Yeah.
THE PRESIDENT:  Okay?  Military — I call them “war games.”  I hated them from the day I came in.  I said, why aren’t we being reimbursed?
Q    That’s North Korea’s term.  “War games.”
THE PRESIDENT:  That’s my term.
Q    They use it too.
THE PRESIDENT:  They might use it.  We pay for it.  We pay millions and millions of dollars for planes, and all of this.  It’s my term.  I said, I’d like to halt it because it’s bad to be negotiating and doing it.  It costs us a lot of money.  I saved lot of money.  That’s a good thing for us.
Okay, go ahead.
Q    What did you mean just now when you said you wished Americans would sit up at attention when you spoke —
THE PRESIDENT:  I’m kidding.  You don’t understand sarcasm.  Who are you with?
Wait, wait, who are you with?  Who are you with?
Q    CNN.
THE PRESIDENT:  You’re with CNN!  Hey, you are the worst.
Q    Mr. President —
Q    (Inaudible.)
THE PRESIDENT:  Wait, wait, we have time.
Q    So there’s some high-profile court cases going on.  You’ve got a former campaign manager, your former lawyer.  They’re all dealing with legal troubles.  Are you paying close attention —
THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I feel badly about a lot of them, because I think a lot of it is very unfair.  I mean, I look at some of them where they go back 12 years.  Like Manafort has nothing to do with our campaign.  But I feel so — I tell you, I feel a little badly about it.  They went back 12 years to get things that he did 12 years ago?
You know, Paul Manafort worked for me for a very short period of time.  He worked for Ronald Reagan.  He worked for Bob Dole.  He worked for John McCain, or his firm did.  He worked for many other Republicans.  He worked for me, what, for 49 days or something?  A very short period of time.
I feel badly for some people, because they’ve gone back 12 years to find things about somebody, and I don’t think it’s right.  I don’t think it’s right that they burst into a lawyer’s office on a weekend and early in the morning.  I never heard of that before.  I mean, could you imagine if they burst into Barack Obama’s lawyer’s office?  It would not be acceptable.  It would not be acceptable.  I mean, that’s really a terrible thing.
Now, I feel badly for a lot of those people.  I feel badly for General Flynn.  He’s lost his house.  He’s lost his life.  And some people say he lied, and some people say he didn’t lie.  I mean, really, it turned out maybe he didn’t lie.  So how can you do that?  How can you do that — because who has lied more than Comey?  I mean, Comey lied a tremendous amount.
Q    You say that you feel badly.  Is there any consideration at any point of a pardon for any of the people that you —
THE PRESIDENT:  I don’t want to talk about that.  No, I don’t want to talk about that.  They’ll (inaudible).  But look, I do want to see people treated fairly.  That’s what it’s all about.
I mentioned the other day — you saw what I did with the woman — she’s in jail for 23 years on charges where other people are out after three months.  I thought it was a very unfair.  It was brought to — and she had another 20 years left, okay?  She was 63 years old.
Q    What about those who don’t have a celebrity talking for them?
THE PRESIDENT:  What?
Q    What about all those folks who don’t have Kim Kardashian speaking on their behalf?
THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I’m looking at them too, if you don’t mind.  I’m looking at them too.
Q    Do you worry that Michael Cohen might flip?
THE PRESIDENT:  One second.
Q    Are you worried that Michael Cohen might flip?
THE PRESIDENT:  Look, I did nothing wrong.  You have to understand, this stuff would have come out a long time ago.  I did nothing wrong.  I don’t do anything wrong.
Q    Is Michael Cohen still your friend?
THE PRESIDENT:  It’s really nice.
Q    Is he still your friend?
THE PRESIDENT:  I always liked Michael Cohen.  I haven’t spoken to Michael in a long time.
Q    Is he still your lawyer?
THE PRESIDENT:  No, he’s not my lawyer anymore.  But I always liked Michael, and he’s a good person.  And I think he’s been —
Q    Are you worried he will cooperate?
THE PRESIDENT:  Excuse me, do you mind if I talk?
Q    I just want to know if you’re worried —
THE PRESIDENT:  You’re asking me a question; I’m trying to ask it.
Q    I just want to know if you’re worried if he’s going to cooperate with federal investigators.
THE PRESIDENT:  No, I’m not worried because I did nothing wrong.
Q    Got it.  Got it.
THE PRESIDENT:  Nothing wrong.
Q    Mr. President, did you tape that statement about Don Jr.?  Did you dictate the statement about Donald Trump, Jr.?
THE PRESIDENT:  Let’s not talk about it.  You know what that is?
Q    But can you tell us?
THE PRESIDENT:  It’s irrelevant.  It’s a statement to the New York Times — the phony, failing New York Times.
Q    Well, just to clear it up.  To clear it up.
THE PRESIDENT:  Just wait a minute.  Wait a minute.  That’s not a statement to a high tribunal of judges.
Q    Understood.
THE PRESIDENT:  That’s a statement to the phony New York Times.
In fact, frankly, he shouldn’t even speak to the New York Times because they only write phony stories anyway, although yesterday they wrote a nice story about what a (inaudible).
Q    Thank you, sir.  On the IG report, you’ve said twice now that it exonerated you and it proved there’s no collusion.  The IG report —
THE PRESIDENT:  Look, if you read the IG report, I’ve been totally exonerated.  As far as I’m concerned —
Q    It had nothing to do with collusion.  It had nothing to do with that.
THE PRESIDENT:  Take a little at it.  Take — no, take a look at the investigation.  Take a look at how it started.  Take a look at the horrible statements that Peter Strzok, the chief investigator, said.  And take a look at what he did with Hillary Clinton.  Take a look at —
Q    (Inaudible), sir, that has nothing to do with collusion.  Why are you lying about it, sir?
THE PRESIDENT:  I’ll tell you what — you’re asking me about Peter Strzok being fired.  I am amazed that Peter Strzok is still at the FBI, and so is everybody else that read that report.  And I’m not even talking about the report; I’m talking about long before the report.  Peter Strzok should have been fired a long time ago, and others should have been fired.
Q    Mr. President, are you going to fire Scott Pruitt?
THE PRESIDENT:  I’m looking at Scott, and Scott has done a fantastic job at EPA, but — you know, we’ll — we’ll make —
Q    You don’t see anything problems with his ethical —
THE PRESIDENT:  I’m not happy about certain things, I’ll be honest.
Q    Are you going to fire him?
THE PRESIDENT:  Excuse me.  Excuse me.  I’m not happy about certain things.  But he’s done a fantastic job running the EPA, which is very overriding.  But I am not happy about it.
Q    Do you think he’s used his position for private gain?
THE PRESIDENT:  I hope not.
Q    Mr. President, do you agree with children being taken away from (inaudible)?
THE PRESIDENT:  No, I hate it.  I hate the children being taken away.  The Democrats have to change their law.  That’s their law.  They will force —
Q    Sir, that’s your own policy.  That’s your own policy.  Why do you keep lying about it, sir?
THE PRESIDENT:  Quiet.  Quiet.  That’s the Democrats’ law.  We can change it tonight.  We can change it right now.  I will leave here —
Q    You’re the President.  You can change it right now.
THE PRESIDENT:  I will leave here — no, no.  You need their votes.  You need their votes.  The Democrats, all they have to do —
Q    Mr. President, you control both chambers of Congress.  The Republicans do.
THE PRESIDENT:  Excuse me.  By one vote?  We don’t need it.  You need 60 votes.
Q    (Inaudible.)
THE PRESIDENT:  Excuse me.  We have the one vote — excuse me.  We need a one-vote — we have a one-vote edge.  We need 60.  So we need 10 votes.  We can’t get them from the Democrats.
Q    What about executive action?
THE PRESIDENT:  Now, wait.  Wait.  You can’t do it through an executive order.
Q    On North Korea, sir.  On North Korea.
Q    Mr. President, why —
THE PRESIDENT:  Can we do one question at a time?  Wait.  One question at a time.
Q    (Inaudible.)
THE PRESIDENT:  The children can be taken care of quickly, beautifully, and immediately.  The Democrats forced that law upon our nation.  I hate it.  I hate to see separation of parents and children.  The Democrats can come to us as they actually are — in all fairness, we are talking to them — and they can change the whole border security.
We need a wall.  We need border security.  We got to get rid of catch-and-release.  You catch a criminal, you take his name, you release him, and he never shows up again.  He goes into our society, and then we end up getting him in a different way, oftentimes after he’s killed somebody.  We’ve got to change our laws.  The Democrats have control because we don’t have the votes.  The Republicans need — we need more Republicans, frankly.  And that’s why I think we’re going to do so well in the midterms.  That and because —
Q    Do you support the immigration compromise, Mr. President?
THE PRESIDENT:  Wait.  That and because we have the strongest economy in the history of our nation.  We have the best jobs numbers in the last 44 years.  Top of Drudge: “The best job numbers in 44 years.”
Q    But then, Mr. President — but then why did Jeff Sessions announce a zero-tolerance policy at the border on May 7th?  Is that not a Republican —
THE PRESIDENT:  Because he’s following the law.
Q    Is that not a Republican policy?
THE PRESIDENT:  No.
Q    Is that not a Republican policy?
THE PRESIDENT:  No.  He’s following laws.  He following a law that —
Q    But that was a direct order to —
THE PRESIDENT:  Can I answer your question, please?
Q    Yes.
THE PRESIDENT:  Okay?  You’re just asking me the same question over and over.  He’s following laws, very simply, that were given to us and forced upon us by the Democrats.
Q    That’s not true, sir.  That’s not true.
Q    But there’s no law that says families have to separated at the border.  There’s another way to go about it, Mr. President.
THE PRESIDENT:  The Democrats gave us the laws.  Now, I want the laws to be beautiful, humane, but strong.  I don’t want bad people coming in.  I don’t want drugs coming in.  And we can solve that problem in one meeting.  Tell the Democrats, your friends, to call me.
Q    Mr. President, at the end of the “Fox & Friends” interview, you said that you were going to spend Father’s Day weekend doing work, and you said that you were going to have a call with North Korea.  Who are you going to talk to in North Korea?
THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I’m going to speak to people in North Korea, and I’m going to speak to my people who are over in North Korea.  A lot of things are happening.
And I will tell you this: We now have a very good relationship with North Korea.  When I came into this job, it looked like war — not because of me, but because — if you remember the sit-down with Barack Obama, I think you will admit this, he said the biggest problem that the United States has, and by far the most dangerous problem — and he said to me — that we’ve ever had, because of nuclear, is North Korea.
Now, that was shortly before I entered office.  I have solved that problem.  Now, we’re getting it memorialized and all, but that problem is largely solved, and part of the reason is we signed, number one, a very good document.  But you know what?  More importantly than the document — more importantly than the document, I have a good relationship with Kim Jong Un.  That’s a very important thing.
I can now call him.  I can now say, “Well, we have a problem.”  I told him — I gave him a very direct number.  He can now call me if he has any difficulty.  I can call him.  We have communication.  It’s a very good thing.
People are shocked that this is the kind of — you know, they thought Trump was going to get in and he was going to start throwing bombs all over the place.  It’s actually the opposite.
But we’re building a military so strong — $716 billion next year; $700 [billion] this year.  We’re building a military so strong, nobody is going to mess with us.  But you know what?  I never want to have to use it.
Q    (Inaudible.)
Q    What’s the verification process?
THE PRESIDENT:  Quiet.
Q    You told Americans that they can sleep well at night, and you declared there’s no more nuclear threat.
Q    What’s verification process going to look like?
THE PRESIDENT:  We’re going to have a very strong verification process.
Q    What’s it’s going to look like?
THE PRESIDENT:  Now, if you read the agreement, which most of you didn’t, point after point after point he gave, including getting back our — the remains of our great heroes, okay?  Of our great, great heroes.  Which made — some people are crying in the streets they’re so happy.  Nobody thought we were going to get that.  Point after point.
All they said about me is, “You met.  He met.  It’s terrible you met.”  Of course I met.  Meeting is a good thing, not a bad thing.  By the way, it was good for the United States; it was good for them.
I spoke with China.  They are very happy.  Actually, they were much happier.  Now, they may not be as happy today because of what I’m doing with trade.  You probably heard that.  I assume it’s been announced by now.  But we’re putting tariffs on 50 billion dollars’ worth of technology and other things because we have to, because we’ve been treated very unfairly.
But China has been terrific.  President Xi has been terrific.  President Moon, everybody — we’re all working together because of me.
Q    How long will you give Kim Jong Un to follow through on denuclearization before you —
THE PRESIDENT:  Well, we’re working it as fast as possible.
Q    Is he coming to the White House soon?
Q    — before you put sanctions back on?
THE PRESIDENT:  We’re working it as fast as possible.
Q    Is he visiting the White House, Mr. Trump?
THE PRESIDENT:  We’re working that.  We’re working denuclearization as fast as possible.
Q    Are you planning to meet with Putin this summer?
THE PRESIDENT:  It’s possible that we’ll meet, yeah.  And I thought — you know, this all started because somebody — one of you — asked, “Should Putin be in the G7?”  I said, no, he should be in the G8.
A few years ago, Putin was in what was called the G8.  I think it’s better to have Russia in than to have Russia out, because just like North Korea, just like somebody else, it’s much better if we get along with them than if we don’t.
So it’s possible.  Just so you understand —
Q    Is Crimea part of Russia?  Do you —
THE PRESIDENT:  No, no.  President Obama lost Crimea, just so you understand.  This was long before I got there.  Just — I want to make it so the fake news prints it properly.  President Obama lost Crimea.
Q    So it’s his fault?
THE PRESIDENT:  Wait, wait.  That’s his fault.  Yeah, yeah, it’s his fault.  Yeah, it’s his fault.
Q    How is it not Putin’s fault, sir?
THE PRESIDENT:  The President — just so you understand —
Q    How is it not Putin’s fault, sir?  How is it not Putin’s fault?  He invaded them.
THE PRESIDENT:  Because — because Putin didn’t respect President Obama.  President Obama lost Crimea because President Putin didn’t respect President Obama, didn’t respect our country, and didn’t respect Ukraine.
But President Obama, not Trump — when it’s my fault, I’ll tell you.  But President Obama gave away that.  Now, President Obama, by not going across the red line in the sand that he drew — I went across it with the 59 missile hits.  But President Obama, when he didn’t go across the red line, what he gave away, nobody even knows.
But just to put it — one more time, President Obama gave away Crimea.  That should have never happened.
END

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture.  He is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.  Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.

By Peter Barry Chowka

On Special Report with Bret Baier on Thursday evening at 6 PM ET, House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) were interviewed by Bret Baier about their reaction to the Inspector General’s report on the FBI that was finally released earlier on Thursday. Shortly after the broadcast ended, Fox News provided a transcript of the segment.

The video of the Gowdy – Goodlatte – Baier interview can be watched here.

BRET BAIER, FOX NEWS HOST:  Let’s get reaction now from the chairmen of two major House committees looking into all of this.  Trey Gowdy is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and Bob Goodlatte chairs the House Judiciary Committee.

Gentlemen, thanks for being here.

Chairman Gowdy, first to you.  Just of broad overview, what strikes you about this report?  What hits you when you look at the 568 pages?

REP. TREY GOWDY (R-SC), CHAIRMAN, HOUSE OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM COMMITTEE:  Just what a dark day it is for the FBI and the DOJ, two institutions of our country desperately needs and we desperately have to be able to have confidence in them.  And this level of bias and animus, not only did they want to stop the Trump campaign, he wanted to stop the Trump presidency.  This is an FBI —

BAIER:  You’re talking about Peter Strzok.

GOWDY:  Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who was on Hillary Clinton’s investigation and arguably the lead Russia investigator not only wanted to stop his campaign, but once he wanted, got on the Mueller probe because he wanted to impeach him.  That is a level of animus and bias that everyone should reject.

And, Chris Wray, I’m sorry, you’re wrong.  Chris, there are consequences.  The consequences are that your fellow citizens question whether or not they can have confidence in the world’s premier law enforcement agency and that’s coming from someone who has defended them a lot throughout his career.  This was a bitterly disappointing report.

BAIER:  Chairman Goodlatte?

REP. BOB GOODLATTE (R-VA), CHAIRMAN, HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE:  Well, first of all, this report shows that there was special treatment given to Hillary Clinton in the investigation of her case.  There is not a standard procedures followed in investigating her, and there was special treatment given.  There is no doubt that this was not a proper process and the report shows time and time again how Director Comey and others made mistakes, errors in judgment, or deliberate.  People can draw their own conclusions.  But it was on improperly handled.

And as Trey said, you then put that up against how the investigation has been handled into the so-called Trump-Russia collusion, and you have contrast that is shocking in terms of how they handled one presidential campaign compared to another.  It’s got to be investigated further, changes have to be made.  I will compliment Director Wray on some of the personnel changes that have been made, I will compliment him on say that there are some sobering lessons learned from this.  We need to see changes made so that in 2020, we don’t see another presidential campaign handled like this.

BAIER:  So, when you hear Republicans and people that have been looking into this and say, this 568 pages is — there is just not a lot they are, or that Horowitz left something on the table, how do you respond to that?

GOODLATTE:  This is a very thorough investigation.  He takes minutia and examines each piece carefully, draws his conclusions, and I commend him.  I think it’s a well-done report.

Now, I never expected him to find every single thing as some critics have said, but he did find all kinds of irregularities there.  When you couple that with the Strzok page text, including this new one that has come out recently where part of it was redacted, by the way, and we only recently learned the whole sentence about how —

BAIER:  The second part —

GOODBLATTE:  — he was going to stop Donald Trump from being president of the United States.  That is improper for the FBI.  And quite frankly, this is the world’s premier law enforcement organization and it’s besmirching the reputation of tens of thousands of brave men and women who keep us safe, prevent terrorist attacks and fight crime every single day.  And a handful of people in the hierarchy of the organizations have caused serious damage.

BAIER:  All right.  Let’s put up the August 8th, 2016, that is the one where Page says Trump is never going to be president, right?  Right?  And Strzok texts back, that part was redacted in the documents you received.  No, no, he’s not.  We’ll stop it.

Here’s another part that we believe.  November 22nd, 2016, FBI attorney one, isn’t making rethink your commitment to the Trump administration?  I think that’s Lisa Page.  Attorney two, hell no, viva le resistance.  And we believe that’s Peter Strzok.

Let me play this sound bite, Congressman Gowdy, from Jim Comey, in his interview here in SPECIAL REPORT.  I asked about the Strzok-Page texts, and if he knew now what he knew then, what he would do.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMES COMEY, FORMER FBI DIRECTOR:  I’d have removed both of them from any contact with significant investigations —

BAIER:  So, shouldn’t their work —

COMEY:  — including, including those involving anybody connected to President Trump, but beyond that.  It’s such poor judgment.

BAIER:  So, shouldn’t their work product then be questioned?

COMEY:  Sure, it’s a reasonable to ask.  They were bad-mouthing everybody, including candidate Trump.

BAIER:  So, Peter Strzok interviews Hillary Clinton, deals with the Bleach Bit and of the server, and Cheryl Mills, all of that, interviews Michael Flynn and he’s integral in this whole case.

COMEY:  But he’s one of many other people involved in all the things you just ticked off.  When I saw the text, I was deeply disappointed in them, but I never saw any bias.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BAIER:  Any bias.

GOWDY:  Well, he’s not reading the same texts I’m reading.  I mean, Peter Strzok said that the vote should be 100 million to zero.  He can’t think of a single solitary American that should vote for Donald Trump to be president.  He said he’ll stop it as a candidate.  He talked about impeachment once he won.

Actually, Director Comey unwittingly just prove the point of the question you asked him on follow-up.  Would you have kept him on investigation had you known what you know now?  And he said no.  OK, why not?

Because bias is that insidious, that is that pervasive.  It colors your ability to do what we need the FBI to do, which is to be fair and fact-centric.  So, of course, you’re going to fire him the day you learn.

In my head, I go back.  When did you start working on the case?  That’s when you should have been fired.

So, whatever he did on either of these investigations, Bret, it has to be viewed through the prism that he can’t think of a single solitary person that should vote for this man to be president.

BAIER:  So, Strzok’s attorney says this was taken out of context.  It didn’t affect his decisions.  Some people say, what happens in the context of those texts, did they know something about the Russia information, and that’s what they are referring to?  Do you think that this changes at all in context, or in a vacuum, it’s just damning?

GOWDY:  It changes a lot going forward, because I don’t know how my fellow citizens are going to be able to have confidence — I mean, Russia did something to our country in 2016.  It was serious, it deserved to be investigated and it deserved to be investigated by a fair FBI agent who was not talking about impeaching the person that he was investigating.

His lawyer is just wrong, that by a state impact something.  He was so hyper-focused on Trump that he ignored at the Weiner-Abedin emails and it caused Jim Comey to have to send a letter a month later than he should have sent it.

The other point, Bret, is this: why is it our job to prove that Strzok’s is biased in his decision-making?  I got a better idea, Strzok, you come before Congress, you come before the American public and prove to us that your manifest animus towards Donald Trump did not affect your decision.

BAIER:  Let me ask one more question.  Hold on one second.  OK, go ahead.

GOODLATTE:  But Trey said — because Trey is exactly right, we have been requesting that he be produced as a witness for quite some time.  And if that agreement is not reached, we will shortly issue a subpoena for him to appear.

BAIER:  Speaking of that, there are also documents that you want that you still haven’t received.  I mean, this process is going on —

GOODLATTE:  We have set up a better process.  We’re making progress.  We actually have a room down at the Department of Justice where they are producing tens of thousands of documents and are investigators are producing those, identifying the ones that we want produced.  They are producing them.

So, we’re making progress in that regard, but we also have other documents they have not produced and that we are making progress on that.  We have meetings coming up shortly on how to get those additional documents requested, produced.  It’s — the American people have a right to know.  The Congress is their representatives, these documents have to be produced.  There is no reason not to produce them.

BAIER:  Chairman Gowdy, the last time you talked about the FBI inner workings, it was about this allegation of spygate and all of that.  You said at the time, that you thought that the president and others thought the FBI was doing what he was supposed to be doing.  In the context of this, and you are animated about what you’re learning out of this I.G. report.

Does it change your perspective of how this is all progress even when it comes to the Russia investigation?

GOWDY:  Bret, I’m animated because Russia tried to undermine the fundamentals of our democracy in 2016.  And I think anyone who heard what any law enforcement agency heard in summer of 2016, every one of my fellow citizens would say, you go find out whether that’s true or not.  You go find out whether or not a foreign, hostile country is going to mess with our election.

What my fellow citizens also expect is for the agent that does the follow-up to be free of taint and bias, like 99 percent of the FBI agents are.  It just so happens that the one picked to follow up and lead the Russian investigation has manifest animus and can think of a single person to vote for Donald Trump.  So, those two are inextricably intertwined.

Most of my fellow citizens would say, yes, I want to know what Russia was doing to us in 2016, but also want the person that’s finding out, is investigating it to be free of bias and free of taint.

BAIER:  And they would say, Mueller, fire that guy.

GOWDY:  And he did fire him.  And God only knows what damage he was done before Mueller fired him.  This is what’s so pervasive about bias, Bret, it doesn’t matter what Mueller comes up with.  Some people are going to believe that Strzok’s level of animus was so high that you can’t remove the taint.  That’s why bias is so destructive in a justice system.

BAIER:  Chairman Goodlatte, this is what I hear, on email, on Twitter, on Facebook, they hear us reporting on these 568 pages and they have been waiting for months and months.  And they hear what is coming out of it, who is going to pay for something that was done wrong in their mind.  And investigation after investigation, it seems like it comes to a head and then nothing happens.

GOODLATTE:  Absolutely.  Hundreds of classified emails, or handled improperly in violation of the law, and no one has been held accountable in that regard.  Now, we see that the whole process of that investigation was handled with extreme bias and a whole host of questionable actions, and people need to be held accountable.  Some of those people are no longer employed at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice, that’s a good thing.

But we’re going to continue to follow through until we’re sure that changes have been made so that these things can’t occur in the future and we don’t have a 2020 that looks anything at all like 2016 in terms of this kind of mishandling of investigations of the highest level of importance, when you’re talking about the two candidates for president of the United States.

So, Trey and I are going to have a joint hearing next Tuesday where we’ll have the inspector general and we’ll be able to go into this 560-page report and ask manifold questions.  The following week, we have already requested the deputy attorney general of the United States, Mr. Rosenstein, and the FBI Director Christopher Wray to come forward and talk to us and answer our questions based upon that report.

BAIER:  All right.  Other quick nuggets here, in this I.G. report, it says definitively that Hillary Clinton’s emails were hacked by foreign actors of some kind.

GOWDY:  Let me tell you why that’s important, because when —

BAIER:  Despite all the denials.  I mean, we went through all of the stages that it wasn’t happening.

GOWDY:  Well, we got a little window into that when Jim Comey — one of Jim Comey’s original memo drafts had that language in there and it was edited out.  Let me tell you why it’s important.  There are two reasons they cite for not prosecuting Hillary Clinton.  Number one, that she didn’t have specific general intent, and number two, she didn’t expose it to foreign actors.

We now know one of those reasons is bogus.  And had they done a good job of interviewing her, had they not made up their mind six weeks before they went to interview her, perhaps I could have found evidence of an intent to commit a crime.

But they didn’t look for it.  They made up their mind before they ever interviewed her about, but — that is really important that Horowitz, and others, some of our colleagues that unlocked the fact that those emails were exposed to foreign actors.

BAIER:  Most of the rank-and-file FBI agents thought, if I did this, I’d be prosecuted.  That’s in the I.G. report.

GOODLATTE:  Absolutely.  And we found other precedents where people were prosecuted for similar actions, contrary to what the FBI director concluded.

BAIER:  The Weiner investigation case was slow-walked?

GOWDY:  No question, because Peter Strzok was so obsessed with Donald Trump in the fall of 2016, they sat on emails, and by the time Comey got to ‘em and sent the letter, we were on the eve of an election.  But in September when they learned about this, he did nothing because he was hyper-focused on Trump.

GOODLATTE:  And if I were a Democrat or an independent or any American, I’d be concerned about how Director Comey handled that aspect of it, which is also criticized by the inspector general.  Why would you handle the way you release that information?

BAIER:  Let me play that sound bite.

GOODLATTE:  Days before —

BAIER:  Let me play that.

GOODLATTE:  — the election.

BAIER:  This is SOT 1 from Jim Comey.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BAIER:  Weeks went by without any action.

COMEY:  I do know that New York and FBI headquarters became aware that there may be a connection between Weiner’s laptop and the Clinton investigation, weeks before it was brought to me for decision.  I don’t know whether they could have moved faster, and why the delay.

BAIER:  So, was it the threat that the New York agents were going to leak that it existed really what drove you to the not concealed part?

COMEY:  I don’t know why there was — if there was a slow activity, why it was slow for those first couple of weeks.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BAIER:  There was at least one agent who says that he knows that they wouldn’t be prosecuted anyway.

GOWDY:  Well, I — a couple of points on what Director Comey said.  He used the word “index”, he didn’t properly index the fact that Huma Abedin was married to Anthony Weiner.  He may have be the only person in the western hemisphere that did not know they were married.  That’s one of his excuses.

It took a prosecutor or an agent from the Southern District of New York called into Washington specifically saying, what in the hell are you doing and what is taking so long?  That’s what finally got him to move.  McCabe wasn’t moving and Strzok wasn’t moving.

BAIER:  Some of Strzok and Page’s text messages may still be missing.  I.G. says that.

GOODLATTE:  We’ll keep looking for them.  He’s actually done a good job.  He’s the one who found the first big batch of missing text messages, and made those available back to the department, which made them available to us.

But yes, I think we have actually benefited in a multitude of ways from this investigation.  It’s filled and a piece of the puzzle but it also resulted in more information coming to us just in the last few days and weeks when you think about that.

BAIER:  All right, wrap this up.  Winner and loser in this I.G. report in your mind?

GOODLATTE:  Well, unfortunately, I think that Trey is right, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a whole is a loser and I hope that Christopher Wray is taking his sobering lesson to heart that he can do great things to restore the public’s trust in this very important organization, which we all should trust.  And I think 99 percent of the time, we should.  Absolutely.

GOWDY:  The winner is Michael Horowitz, because he proves that you can be fair, fact-centric and conduct a series of investigation.  The loser is every one of my fellow citizens who wants an FBI and a Department of Justice that they can believe in.  All of us have all lost when we have a department and a bureau that we cannot have confidence in.

BAIER:  Chairman Gowdy, Chairman Goodlatte, we appreciate your time and will continue to follow-up.

GOWDY:  Thanks.

GOODLATTE:  Thanks, Bret.

BAIER:  Thank you.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture.  He is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.  Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.

By Peter Barry Chowka

There are many angles to the ongoing Roseanne Barr controversy, but this one caught my attention: Last Tuesday afternoon, about twelve hours after Roseanne tweeted and quickly deleted her comments about Valerie Jarrett that almost instantly eviscerated her TV career, a Twitter user named Josh Cornett tweeted this:

BREAKING: According to sources ABC President Channing Dungey had a long conversation via phone with former First Lady Michelle Obama before deciding to cancel the Roseanne show. Michelle Obama was reportedly enraged and insisted an apology was inadequate……developing

The tweet’s sparse style was reminiscent of a headline or a tweet by Matt Drudge. It was slow to trend but around 9:32 PM PT Tuesday Roseanne retweeted someone who had retweeted Cornett’s tweet. The retweeter had added “This makes alot more sense then [sic] most things…” A few minutes later, Roseanne herself retweeted Cornett’s original tweet, and asked “is this true?”

During the next two days, Wednesday and Thursday, Cornett’s tweet, thanks to Roseanne retweeting it,  became a headline story around the world.  Fox News on Wednesday was one of the first MSM sources to report it and to include the essence of the tweet in the story’s headline:

Roseanne Barr says she may fight ABC firing, retweets claim Michelle Obama was behind ouster

Cornett’s tweet was one of many from Roseanne’s fans that she cited as the inspiration for her to challenge ABC’s decision after her initial apologies and mea culpas, which failed to save her show.

By Thursday, numerous U.S. media outlets as well as a number in the UK and Australia picked up on the story. The Daily Mail (London), for example, seized on Roseanne’s retweet of Cornett’s tweet in its lengthy, multi-media story that included a clip from a British TV show where the controversy was discussed at some length.

As one might imagine, close to 100% of the reporting on Roseanne Barr and her toxic tweet reflected  the “me too” school of journalism that currently dominates almost all reporting. Think: pack journalism and endlessly repeated words like “racist,” “conspiracy theory,” “unsourced,” and so on. Meanwhile, no one appears to have reached out to Cornett, the author of the tweet. He was simply the foil for the media to pile on Roseanne.

I reached out to Cornett. It wasn’t hard to do. His Twitter account displayed a “message” icon meaning he could be contacted by anyone on Twitter.

Early Thursday morning, I sent Cornett a direct message on Twitter. I asked him if he could clarify his unnamed source(s) for his tweet claiming that Michelle Obama had called ABC TV president Channing Dungey and demanded that Roseanne be fired. He replied a few hours later and, as I expected, he declined to identify a source.

Can’t tell you the source, but I stand by it and put my name on it. The Obamas’ ire directed at Roseanne dates back several days before the infamous “Tweet.” Apparently they were outraged about Roseanne ridiculing their Netflix deal and it snowballed from there. SEVERAL PHONE CALLS were made.

So, according to Cornett, the plot had thickened: “Several phone calls were made.” I asked if these additional phone calls came before or after Roseanne’s infamous May 29 tweet.

The majority of the calls were before the VJ [Valerie Jarrett] tweet, they were addressing concerns over Roseanne’s Netflix tweets. Can’t confirm to who or by who. . . word of these calls may have actually been the inspiration for Roseanne’s VJ tweets. Did VJ make the Netflix calls? The firing conversation was definitely between MO [Michelle Obama] and Channing.

I next asked Cornett for some biographical information about himself. There are a lot of people out there named “Josh Cornett” –  including one who works in the entertainment industry and has a single  credit at the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDb). Cornett replied to me on the record:

No IMDB lol, I’m an average hard working American, I’m in my 30’s, I’m an investor that was inspired to dive into politics by the sad absence of Christopher Hitchens and the frustrating existence of CNN!

A brief exchange about current political topics ensued, and it’s obvious that Cornett – as evidenced additionally by his prolific and skillful use of Twitter – is keeping up with the latest political developments. A week ago, he tweeted that former President Obama had called hip hop superstar Jay-Z and asked him to use his influence to dissuade other black rappers from having anything to do with President Trump – to prevent another rap icon like Kanye West from going over to the other side. That tweet by Cornett was picked up by the Drudge Report and was liked by Donald Trump, Jr.

I respected Cornett’s protection of the identity of his alleged source. Trying to get some further insight, I shared a possible hypothesis about what I think might be going on, based on my own past experience. I noted that from time to time I have had sources who were close to or inside power centers like executive offices and who saw and heard things and shared some of them with me with the understanding that I could never identify them. Cornett replied:

And yes, I have friends from my childhood that are very well placed and not always the most satisfied employees.

Am I able to vouch for or to confirm the validity and accuracy of Cornett’s tweet heard ‘round the world? No, of course not. At the same time, something about it has the ring of plausibility. Various theories have been floated about why and how ABC TV acted to cancel Roseanne after the actress’s offensive tweet. Some have speculated that there was already unease at the network at having created a monster #1 hit sitcom – bigger than could have been anticipated – that served as a magnet for pro-Trump audiences to glom on to. In a critical election year, far left of center Hollywood might deduce that this significant development in the popular culture could have unforeseen and unpredictable consequences for the future of the Trump Administration come November – consequences not especially favorable to the Democrat left.

Cornett’s citing an anonymous source or sources should not rule him out of consideration. After all, the leading lights of the mainstream media, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, to note only two, have based much of their ongoing critical reporting on President Trump on anonymous sources. Last August, Yashar Ali wrote a 900-word article in the Huffington Post alleging Fox News host Eric Bolling had tweeted something offensive. Ali claimed that his reporting was based on several anonymous sources but he did not identify or quote any of them. Yet that article was taken seriously and it led to Bolling (who maintained his innocence) leaving Fox News in September.

In her latest ascent to star status, Roseanne Barr herself was reportedly considered a loose cannon who was impossible to control. She has always been controversial, and a shock comedian. In  July 1990, for example, she angered mostly conservatives when she sang – or shrieked, horribly off key – the National Anthem at a Major League Baseball game while she grabbed her crotch, which she said was intended to mimic what many baseball players do when they’re on the playing field.

So what are we left with as this bizarre week draws to an end? No one who was mentioned in Cornett’s tweet has denied what he tweeted. That in itself doesn’t prove anything. The cancellation of Roseanne was awfully sudden – within a few hours of her offensive tweet. In its actions, ABC blew off a franchise that may have been worth close to $1 billion in advertising revenue. The question might be asked: Who else in 2018 America has the degree of cachet and influence to insist that that kind of decision be taken?

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture.  He is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.  Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka

By Peter Barry Chowka

The Cable News Wars of 2017 continue to rage on, with the Fox News Channel and MSNBC fighting it out for first place in prime time. When the ratings for the month of November came out at the end of the month, MSNBC appeared to be fine tuning – some might say fudging or even faking – the official numbers to try and claim a victory when they actually came in second to FNC in a critical metric.

In the latest ratings, the key prime time battleground was the 9 P.M. E.T. hour. Starting last spring, Rachel Maddow took MSNBC to first place in that time slot for the first time in 15 years. In the wake of FNC putting the weak show The Five on at 9 P.M. on May 1 (after Bill O’Reilly was fired less than two weeks earlier and the whole FNC prime time schedule had to be adjusted), that time slot was suddenly up for grabs.

Last September 25, FNC started introducing its new prime time schedule, returning The Five back to 5 P.M. and moving the channel’s #1 show, Hannity, back an hour to 9. In its first week at 9 P.M., Hannity immediately registered a strong first place showing.

One month later, Rachel Maddow was occasionally beating Hannity and FNC in the preferred demo – viewers between the ages of 25-54 who advertisers prefer because they think people 25-54 are more susceptible to purchasing the kinds of products and services that are advertised on television.

Coverage of the last month’s cable news ratings published on November 29 caught my eye. For example, Mark Joella wrote at Forbes:

Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity held onto his crown as King of Cable News, beating everyone in the November ratings period with an average audience of 3.2 million viewers, making Hannity the most-watched cable news show for the second straight month.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who led her network to record ratings in the third quarter, finished November in third place overall, with a total audience of 2.8 million viewers. Among the advertiser-coveted demographic of adults 25-54, Maddow finished in second place, with 634,000 viewers.

So, what then are we to make of another – completely different – analysis of the November cable news ratings? “Rachel Maddow Is #1 In The Demo Again As Fox News’ Hannity Gamble Shows Signs Of Slipping,” also published on November 29, but this time at Politicususa:

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is the top-rated show with viewers age 25-54 as the same older viewers who have always watched Hannity are the only thing keeping Fox News afloat.

While Hannity and Maddow are engaged in a battle for the lead in total viewers, it is the prized age 25-54 demo where MSNBC’s Maddow has a clear lead.

According to numbers sent to PoliticusUSA by MSNBC, “’The Rachel Maddow Show’ reclaimed the #1 title in the coveted A25-54 demographic across all of cable news as well as for the 9pm time period (including all specials) [emphasis added] for the month of November, according to Nielsen.”

Indeed, that is what the NBCUniversal news release, crowing about its channel MSNBC, also dated November 29, said. A close look at the release, however, reveals the critically important caveat “including all specials.” In order to claim #1 status in the demo for the Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC had to include other “special” programs not hosted by Maddow that aired in Maddow’s 9 P.M. time slot during the month of November! The inclusion of Maddow-free programs, on nights when Sean Hannity was hosting his program at FNC, is obviously an unfair comparison. It does not accurately measure the performance of Maddow vs. Hannity during the entire month.

This fact was taken note of by the reliably fair and obective A.J. Katz, analyzing the ratings on November 29 at TVNewser:

Sean Hannity [emphasis original] had the No. 1 show in cable news in total audience, and the second-most-watched show on all of cable for November, only ESPN’s behind Monday Night Football.

Hannity was also No. 1 in the key A25-54 demo for the month if one excludes special programming (639,000 vs. 634,000 for Rachel Maddow). But if one includes special programming, Hannity is No. 2 in the demo behind Maddow.

So, there it is: an unbiased analysis of the cable news ratings. No one else, other than Katz, seems to have taken any note of NBCUniversal’s fancy footwork with the monthly Nielsen ratings report.

Should we be surprised that MSNBC, a notorious fake news channel, fudges the ratings? What else is new? CNN, another fake news outlet, tried the same thing last summer, as I reported at American Thinker on August 26:

On Monday [August 21], MSNBC and FNC described their programming from 9:01 to 9:27 P.M. E.D.T. (or 9 to 9:30 P.M. in the case of MSNBC) as “Pres Address-Afghanistan” (FNC) and “MSNBC Special Coverage” (MSNBC), instead of The Five and The Rachel Maddow Show that normally air at 9 P.M. CNN, however, told Nielsen it was airing “Anderson Cooper 360,” even though, as with the other channels, President Trump was on CNN during that entire time. This means, in effect, that the ratings surge provided to CNN during that half hour by viewers tuning in to see President Donald J. Trump – ironically CNN’s nemesis – will be attributed to the lagging Anderson Cooper program!

Back to the present, the latest weekly ratings that came out on December 5^th were analyzed by Fox News in a press release:

According to Nielsen Media Research, FOX News Channel (FNC) topped all of basic cable in primetime and total day with P2+, averaging 2.5 million and 1.5 million total viewers, respectively. Additionally, last week, FNC crushed the cable news competition in primetime and total day with both total viewers and the A25-54 demo, with Hannity leading the way as the most-watched program in cable news in both categories (3,228,000 P2+; 628,000 A25-54). Additionally, Hannity’s telecast on Wednesday 11/29 ranked #5 for the week in all of basic cable, only behind football, The Walking Dead and Hallmark’s original Christmas movie.  Overall, FNC programs made up 10 of the top 20 programs in all of cable, including various presentations of The Story with Martha MacCallum, Tucker Carlson Tonight, Hannity and The Ingraham Angle.

 Fox News’s sister cable channel, the Fox Business Network, also had good news to report:

FOX Business Network (FBN) continued its winning streak over CNBC, crushing the network in Business Day viewers for the 26th consecutive week, according to Nielsen Media Research. During the historic financial news week of November 27th-December 1st, FBN’s Business Day coverage saw a 27 percent advantage over rival CNBC with 241,000 total viewers compared to CNBC’s 190,000.

As the Dow passed the momentous 24,000 mark on Thursday, November 30th, FBN’s Business Day coverage swept CNBC across the board. Averaging 269,000 total viewers, FBN’s Business Day delivered a 35 percent advantage over rival CNBC (200,000) and a 7 percent win in the A25-54 demo with 32,000 viewers compared to CNBC’s 30,000.

Additionally, FBN also dominated CNBC as the markets reacted to the breaking news surrounding former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. On Friday, December 1st, when the markets plunged over 300 points before steading to close down 41 points, FBN recorded 278,000 Business Day viewers to CNBC’s 210,000. Furthermore, FBN also outpaced CNBC in the demo with 41,000 viewers to 36,000.

Battles in the cable news war of attrition aren’t close to being over, so stay tuned for developments.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture. Peter’s latest video interview on The Hagmann Report on Dec. 1, 2017 can be watched here. Follow Peter on Twitter @pchowka.

By Peter Barry Chowka

On Tuesday, November 21, at 10:17 A.M. E.S.T., the press release went out from Fox News in New York:

FOX News Channel (FNC) has signed nationally syndicated radio talk show personality Mark Levin as host of Life, Liberty & Levin, a new weekend primetime program debuting in February 2018, announced Suzanne Scott, president of programming.

The addition of Levin, an iconic figure in the 21^st century conservative movement, to the Fox News regular lineup should please the channel’s core audience. Until recently, FNC’s commitment to a fair and balanced conservative viewpoint had appeared uncertain with the ignominious dumping of long-term popular “no-spin” host Bill O’Reilly last April, the firing of popular conservative host Eric Bolling in September, and the elevation to higher profile status of progressive hosts and contributors like Juan Williams, Sheppard Smith, Jessica Tarlov, and Marie Harf, among others.

One month ago, however, Fox News reinforced its M-F prime time schedule with the addition of Laura Ingraham’s show The Ingraham Angle at 10 P.M., capping what is now the strongest right of center prime time lineup in the channel’s 21 year history.

Levin’s new program is set to premiere in February in its time slot on Sundays at 10 P.M. E.S.T. He will continue to do his 3-hour daily nationally syndicated radio talk show which is rated #3 in the country, behind Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Levin, who turned 60 on September 27, also hosts a nightly online subscription-based television show LevinTVon CRTV, a channel that features programs hosted by conservatives Michelle Malkin, Deneen Borelli, and Stephen Crowder.

Levin is an attorney who served in the Reagan administration as chief of staff to Attorney General Edwin Meese.  He got his start in radio two decades ago by appearing as a guest legal analyst on Rush Limbaugh’s and Sean Hannity’s radio shows. Hannity nicknamed Levin “The Great One,” and still calls him that when he appears occasionally on Hannity’s TV program. In 2002, Levin was given a radio program of his own, weekends on WABC AM 770 in New York.  In 2003, he moved to the 6-9 P.M M-F slot on WABC, which at the time was Hannity’s flagship station, immediately following Hannity’s show. In 2006 The Mark Levin Show, which continues to air live at 6 P.M. E.S.T., went into national syndication.

Although Levin on the air can come across as acerbic and argumentative, he is a serious and articulate constitutional scholar and his legal and political expertise are reflected on his show. He has developed a large and dedicated audience. Levin is also the author of over half a dozen New York Times best selling non-fiction books. The most successful one, Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, was released in 2009 and became a #1 New York Times best seller for eleven weeks. It was rated #2 on Amazon.com’s list of the bestselling books of 2009.

The Nov. 21 Fox News announcement noted:

Life, Liberty & Levin will explore the fundamental values and principles undergirding American society, culture, politics, and current events, and their relevance to the nation’s future and everyday lives of citizens. The hour-long program will feature Levin’s lively in-depth and long-form interviews and powerful debate style with consequential guests covering history, philosophy, and economics. Levin will also capitalize on his extraordinary knowledge and compelling perspective as a constitutional lawyer to discuss the American founding, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution.

In making the announcement, [FNC president of programming Suzanne] Scott said, “Mark’s passion for the principles found in the Constitution and success in talk radio has made him a distinct figure in the media landscape. We look forward to adding this spirited program to our weekend lineup.”

Levin added, “I am honored to join FOX News, a network I have enjoyed appearing on as a guest for quite some time. As a proud citizen of the United States, I am delighted to share the significance of American values with such a wide audience and look forward to engaging with important guests about crucial topics.”

In taking note of the announcement of Levin joining FNC, most of the mainstream press saw it as Fox News reinforcing its perceived pro-Trump tilt. Politico, for example, noted:

“It’s clearly another step in Fox News Channel’s evolution to a more Trump-friendly series of programming,” said Dan Shelley, executive director of the Radio Television Digital News Association. “It’s right in their current wheelhouse.” . . .

The network has stuffed its lineup of opinion hosts with consistent cheerleaders for the president. Former mainstay Megyn Kelly was known for feuding with Trump, and even Bill O’Reilly — who was forced out by the network in April amid sexual harassment accusations — would break with him occasionally, but Fox’s current prime-time lineup of Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham rarely criticizes Trump, and goes to great lengths to defend him. Levin fits into that mold.

The 10 p.m. Sunday time slot is not a high-profile one, though it could lead to bigger things, according to Brian Wieser, a senior analyst at Pivotal Research.

“If someone is getting a Sunday 10 p.m. show, it’s safe to say that’s a trial run,” he said. If viewing levels build or the show develops well, he said, “then it can be given a time slot which is more likely to get greater viewing.”

Shelley also noted that the move locks in Levin — a highly established name in conservative media — from joining other competitors.

The MSM has a vested interest in spinning Fox News as a one-voice, pro-Trump propaganda mouthpiece. The reality is that progressive leftists are represented throughout the day on the channel.  And even in prime time, when conservative hosts rule the 8-11 P.M. time period, Democrat and other left of center guests are regularly heard, in fact every night without fail on Tucker Carlson’s show at 8 P.M. and also often on Hannity at 9 and The Ingraham Angle at 10. Levin himself was not initially pro-Trump and in fact he opposed Donald Trump’s candidacy until September 2016. Lately, Levin has been more sympathetic to the Trump administration, especially in the face of the Deep State’s overwhelming resistance to the Trump agenda, but not without criticizing it from time to time.

Peter Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture. Follow Peter on Twitter @pchowka  Peter’s latest interview on The Hagmann Report from Nov. 15, 2017 can be watched here.

By Peter Barry Chowka

Actually, it was a bit longer than 40 years ago that I first became aware that in current events there is always a story behind the commonly accepted story. That is, there is a story closer to the truth that is more accurate than the dominant party line that is fed to the public through the mainstream news media. That may seem fairly obvious now, but it was not so readily apparent in earlier times before the Internet made it possible to instantly fact check questionable news offered up by the Establishment.

During the first week of November1977 – exactly 40 years ago as I write this now – I became involved in a story that significantly and forever raised my level of awareness about – and confirmed for me the existence of – what is now called fake news.

On 11/3/77 I traveled to Washington, D.C. to do intensive research and a series of interviews for the third article in a series that I was writing about the politics and economics of cancer. The series was titled “Cancer: A Metaphor for Modern Times.” It took a close look at the conduct of and the lack of progress in the nation’s so-called War on Cancer.

My first article in the series, subtitled “Probing the Medical-Pharmaceutical Complex,” was an overview of the cancer problem. At the time, cancer was the second leading cause of death in the United States, close behind coronary heart disease. More than half a million Americans a year were dying of cancer and that number, in spite of medical advances, was increasing.

My second article, “The Failure of Orthodox Medicine,” examined the shocking limitations in the much-hyped but largely unsuccessful conventional treatments for cancer – surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy drugs. In the third and fourth articles that I was planning, I intended to undertake a probing examination of the federal bureaucracies and the non-government, tax-exempt “charitable” organizations that were in charge of the cancer war, starting with the National Cancer Institute.

The NCI was founded in 1937, one of several small disease-focused institutes that comprise the National Institutes of Health (NIH), located in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Bethesda, Maryland. In December 1971, the NCI suddenly went from relative obscurity to the forefront of media and public attention after the Congress passed bipartisan legislation that declared a war on cancer, promoted by the burgeoning U.S. Medical Establishment and with the help of high profile celebrities like the popular newspaper advice columnist Ann Landers. The legislation pumped billions of dollars into the new “War on Cancer.” Proponents compared it to the effort during the 1960s that resulted in Americans landing on the moon less than a decade after President John F. Kennedy promised the nation that we would travel there. The unprecedented, focused medical effort of 1971 promised a cure for cancer in time for the Bicentennial on July 4, 1976. President Richard Nixon was an enthusiastic endorser of the National Cancer Act which started the cancer war. Nixon signed the act into law in a public ceremony in the White House East Room on 12/23/71, touting it as a “Christmas present to the nation.”

By the mid-1970s, especially after the 1976 Bicentennial came and went with no cure for cancer in sight, questions about the War on Cancer – its costs and effectiveness – were starting to be asked, in the Congress and in the media. I was one of those who was asking the questions.

When I began my reporting, I discovered that the people in charge of the cancer war – many of them M.D.s – acted more like politicians, self-serving bureaucrats, and spin doctors rather than medical doctors or healers.

My first contact in D.C. during that first week of November 1977 was Dr. Dean Burk. A renowned biochemist with an international reputation, Dean Burk, Ph.D., had been one of the founders of the NCI in 1937 and he had risen to the position of head of its Cytochemistry (cell chemistry) Section. He retired in 1974 at age 70 but remained active – not in conventional medicine, but in innovative areas of health care that questioned mainstream medicine and endorsed various natural treatments for cancer. He was also a critic of the mass fluoridation of public water supplies, claiming that the practice of dumping toxic chemicals into a community’s drinking water supposedly to prevent tooth decay increased the incidence of cancer by 18%. Dr. Burk impressed me as a very smart man and a deeply compassionate humanitarian who had dedicated his life to doing medical and scientific research that would help people.

After our first meeting, Dr. Burk and I became instant friends and we remained close until he passed away eleven years later in 1988.

In the fall of 1977, I had already done some reporting starting three years earlier on a fledgling program at the NCI that was tentatively exploring the potential role of diet in the cause and treatment of cancer. The program was unpopular within the huge NCI and NIH bureaucracy, which was dedicated to finding and testing toxic therapies for cancer and showed little interest in cancer prevention or non-toxic treatments. The larger context was that the entire American Medical Establishment had by that time long maintained that diet and nutrition had absolutely nothing to do with health, including cancer. To claim otherwise immediately got one labeled a quack or a criminal.

At Dr. Burk’s home in NW Washington, D.C. soon after we met, I was surprised when, as we talked in his basement office and he learned about my interest in diet and cancer, he showed me several dusty volumes of mainstream medical and scientific publications from 40, 50, and 60 years earlier that were focused on diet, nutrition, and cancer! Dr. Burk explained that this area of research had shown great promise in the first decades of the 20^th century and for several decades afterwards it was a vigorous area of mainstream scientific inquiry.

There were published studies in leading medical journals, conference proceedings, and books, for example by Dr. Michael Tannenbaum of Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, that showed that a diet low in calories (caloric restriction) and high in certain nutrients showed promise as a cancer preventive diet. With a small number of innovative researchers looking at the same areas of diet and cancer once again in the 1970s, Dr. Burk told me, “Peter, there is nothing new under the sun.” Needless to say, I was surprised if not shocked to learn about what Dr. Burk was saying and showing me.

So what happened to this early promising work on diet and cancer from the first decades of the 20^th century? The simple answer is that it went out of fashion during World War II when physicians and researchers observed that chemicals similar to certain biological weapons of war, particularly nitrogen mustard, might have a role in cancer treatment. Virtually overnight, the field of cancer chemotherapy – cytotoxic or cell-killing chemical therapy – was born. Chemotherapy would remain the most fashionable and widely used form of conventional cancer treatment well into the next century, crowding out other, less harmful, more promising approaches. After World War II and for succeeding decades, mainstream scientific interest in diet and cancer went to less than zero.

In November 1977 I also interviewed Gio Batta Gori, Ph.D., the director of the NCI’s Diet, Nutrition and Cancer Program.

It was pressure from some members of Congress, particularly Sens. George McGovern (D-SD) and Robert Dole (R-KS), who co-chaired a Senate Subcommittee on Nutrition that had held hearings on the subject of nutrition and cancer starting in 1974, who championed the effort to fund the NCI’s small diet and cancer program. In fact, it was legislation that originated in the McGovern-Dole subcommittee, subsequently passed by the Congress, that mandated the NCI to start a new diet and cancer research program in the first place.

I knew Sen. McGovern from 1972 when I worked on his campaign for president. In 1977, I interviewed both him and Sen. Dole, as well as Dr. Gori and several other NCI researchers, for my article.

It didn’t hurt chemotherapy’s popularity that it was extremely profitable to the nation’s pharmaceutical companies, which made billions of dollars from the sale of the drugs. Their lobbyists in turn influenced the Congress and the direction of national cancer research policy. Physicians themselves, especially oncologists, also often derived significant financial benefits from prescribing chemotherapy.

The article that was generated from my work in D.C. in November 1977 was subsequently published as “The National Cancer Institute and the Fifty-Year Cover Up.” The fact is that, with the rise of chemotherapy and its dominance for decades, by 1977 about fifty years or more had been lost in the pursuit of a very promising option: the role of diet and nutrition in cancer prevention and treatment. Hence the title, “Fifty-year cover up.”

My article was well-received, widely quoted and cited, and frequently photocopied and republished, including in the official transcript of a 1978 United States Senate Subcommittee hearing on the NCI co-chaired by Senators McGovern and Dole (scan from original hearing transcript published by the U.S. Government Printing Office below).

As I look back now, it is my experiences as a gumshoe journalist and what I learned during this period of time four decades ago that enlightened me to the existence of what was and is, in effect, fake news – the Establishment’s insistence that diet had little or nothing to do with cancer and health. Five years later, in 1982, the highest levels of the U.S. medical Establishment undertook a profound shift virtually overnight with the publication of a report by the National Academy of Sciences, Diet, Nutrition and Cancer. This change was due to the fact that the powers-that-be recognized the growing  interest in diet and cancer and they wanted to appear to get out in front of it. This sudden policy shift represented the beginning of a sea change that would continue, with fits and starts, right up to the present day and would see diet and nutrition established as important factors in health in general and in cancer in particular.

With the government behind the new effort, the bureaucratic Deep State mindset, reflecting the needs of Big Pharma, immediately came into play. The new generation of doctors and researchers was co-opted and directed into fashionable and trendy new areas like chemoprevention – the isolation of anticancer factors from nutrients and other naturally-occurring substances that could be produced as drugs and prescribed and sold at high prices to cancer patients.

The question remains: How many millions of lives could have been saved if the medical Establishment had not effectively ignored or suppressed important and credible research and information on diet and cancer and nutrition and health – over the course of decades, starting in the 1940s or even earlier?

A possible answer to this question recently came to light – and right out of the center of scientific and medical officialdom. On October 3, 2017, the Centers for Disease Control – CDC – of the U.S. government released detailed scientific information that asserted, according to the title of a press release, “Cancers Associated with Overweight and Obesity Make up 40 percent of Cancers Diagnosed in the United States.”

About 630,000 people in the U.S. were diagnosed with a cancer associated with overweight and obesity in 2014. . . In 2013-2014, about 2 out of 3 adults in the U.S. were overweight (defined as having a body mass index of 25-29.9 kg/m²) or had obesity (having a body mass index of 30 kg/m² and higher).

So, in the almost 100 years since the work of early diet and cancer pioneer Dr. Tannenbaum and other scientists who reported that cancer incidence is associated with being overweight, the word about diet and cancer is finally getting out – slowly. Meanwhile, the American way of of eating that has grown up around excessive caloric consumption since the end of World War II – the so-called fast-food culture – has resulted in two out of three American adults now being overweight or obese.

The official cancer survival statistics released by the federal government are massaged and manipulated but it is a credible assumption that around 50% of people who are diagnosed with cancer today will eventually die from the disease or from the deleterious impacts of the toxic treatments. (The NIH claims the “relative survival rate” for all cancers is 68% but that figure should be taken with a large grain of salt.) That translates to around 300,000 Americans a year who are dying from obesity-related cancers. Over the past 40 years, the cumulative death toll might be 10 million or more Americans – who died prematurely because the information on cancer prevention that was first uncovered almost a century ago was never applied in modern medicine and was never made available to physicians, public health officials, or the public.

This is a public health death toll that is unprecedented in modern times, and it points to yet another “failure of orthodox medicine.”

My experience with deconstructing the medical spin and obfuscation around diet and cancer 40 years ago – getting closer to the truth despite a sea of fake news – was excellent training and preparation for reporting on other areas of modern life, particularly politics which, as we see today, is corrupted and dominated by lies and an unending stream of fake news.

Peter Barry Chowka has been a journalist and a writer for all of his life. In 1992, Peter was appointed by the National Institutes of Health to serve on two of the first program advisory panels of the new Office of Alternative Medicine. Peter has also written for the peer review Medline-indexed scientific literature, most recently an article about Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D. (1947-2015). To stay in touch with Peter’s latest reporting, follow him on Twitter @pchowka.

By Peter Barry Chowka

A new radical left campaign targeting Hannity’s advertisers is aiming a “kill shot” at the conservative host. Will it succeed?

On Friday, November 10, Sean Hannity reported on the fast moving story involving Alabama Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore. On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that Moore allegedly pursued inappropriate relationships in the late 1970s, when he was in his early 30s, with several teenage girls and had illegal sexual contact with one of them who was underage at the time.

Hannity’s telephone interview with Moore, broadcast live on his radio show and replayed later on his nightly Fox News Channel program, won more praise than might have been expected from a variety of analysts for asking Moore tough questions and for getting the former judge to go on the record in the first place. The interview represented Moore’s first spoken comments on the controversy since the story was first reported in the Post on Thursday.

Almost immediately, Hannity’s shows on Friday reignited efforts by enemies of his on the left, in particular Media Matters for America, to take him off the air via putting pressure on his sponsors to stop advertising on his show. Earlier attempts of this kind, including last May after Hannity reported on the unsolved murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, did not succeed.

But now, over the past weekend, according to Forbes, Deadline Hollywood, the Daily Caller, and hundreds if not thousands of other media outlets, this latest “kill shot” (as Hannity termed such efforts last May) aimed at the country’s #1 cable news host may be gaining traction.

CNBC reported on Sunday:

At least five companies said over the weekend that they will no longer advertise their products during Fox News’ “Hannity” television show. . . Keurig, Realtor.com, 23 and Me, Eloquii and Nature’s Bounty all pulled their ads from the television show, in response to Fox host Sean Hannity’s coverage of the sexual misconduct allegations against Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore.

Hannity, never one to support boycotts, has not specifically called for a boycott of the advertisers who are deserting him. Instead, he has posted tweets on his Twitter feed about his interest in what his fans and critics of the advertisers are doing.

He also announced to his Twitter followers on Sunday evening:

Deplorable friends, I am buying 500 coffee makers tomorrow to give away!! Details on radio and TV. Hint; best videos!!

Channces are these will not be Keurig coffee makers.

Media Matters for America (MMFA), the far left group founded by David Brock to attack conservative media, is behind the boycott Hannity campaign. In fact, Keurig tweeted a thank you to MMFA’s president, Angelo Carusone, for calling Hannity’s coverage of the Moore case to the company’s attention:

Angelo, thank you for your concern and for bringing this to our attention. We worked with our media partner and FOX news to stop our ad from airing during the Sean Hannity Show.

On his Twitter account, Hannity has tweeted a link to a Web site – registered to the domain angelocarusone dot com – that is titled and alleges “Angelo Carusone Exposed! Anti-Gay, Anti-Semitic and Racist.”

On Sunday, a counter campaign among Hannity’s supporters to boycott the boycotting advertisers – Keurig in particular – quickly took off on social media. As the work week starts today, the second large viral wave of coverage of this issue is mostly about the spread instigated by Hannity’s fans of boycotts of the advertisers who have ended sponsorship of his program.

The stakes in this emerging fight couldn’t be higher. Sean Hannity, and a handful of other high profile conservative hosts on Fox News, represent the last thin line in the mainstream media that is left standing against the almost universal fake news onslaught by the MSM aimed at taking down President Donald Trump. Last April, advertisers who deserted Fox News’ #1 program at the time, The O’Reilly Factor, after allegations of sexual harassment by host Bill O’Reilly resurfaced in the media, got the host of that program summarily fired in less than three weeks.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture. Follow Peter on Twitter @pchowka

By Peter Barry Chowka

In recent months, Sean Hannity, host of the #1 program on cable news and the #2 nationally syndicated political talk radio show, has been at the tip of the spear. Day in and day out, his programs nightly on Fox News and during the day on radio have featured some of the best original reporting and commentary – and debate – on the divisive and polarizing issues that have arisen since the election of Donald J. Trump as president one year ago. For his efforts in trying to give President Trump a fair hearing, Hannity has been targeted for destruction by Media Matters and other left wing individuals and groups.

With 20 hours a week on the air (radio and TV), Hannity rarely gives interviews on other programs. An exception was his first appearance at the start of Fox News host Jesse Watters’ weekly show Watters’ World on FNC last Saturday evening November 11.

Hannity’s interview with Watters was pre-recorded in Hannity’s studio at Fox News headquarters in New York City. It proved to be an interesting discussion of fake news and where, in Hannity’s view, we go from here. A partial transcript below starts with Hannity’s comment about the surprising victory of Donald Trump on November 8, 2016:

HANNITY: Nobody listened. . . But the people who are suffering listened.

Watters then played a montage of video clips from CNN, MSNBC, and the broadcast networks of mainstream media anchors and hosts weeping and wailing on the night of 11/8/16 when they realized that the unthinkable – the victory of Donald J. Trump – was actually happening.

HANNITY: This meltdown has gone on for a year. . . This is now bordering on a psychotic, collective breakdown by the left. They can’t handle how wrong they were. . .

There is a swamp. There are forces that are working every day that want this president out – no matter how they do it. You’ve got the Deep State, you’ve got the liberal media, you’ve got the Democrats, then you’ve got weak, timid, spineless Republicans and Never Trumpers. They want him out! They’ll do anything they can do to get this man out of office.

JESSE WATTERS: And they’re doing it day after day and I believe it’s because the Democrats are completely shut out of power so the media now is the tip of the spear. Trump has declared war on the media. Let’s look at the history going back a year of Trump vs. the press. Roll it!

At this point, another selection of video clips highlighting the media’s unfair and biased reporting on the administration of President Trump was shown.

WATTERS: Who do you think is winning? Right now the ratings and circulation are up with the media but credibility is way down.

HANNITY: I don’t think they’ll ever recover credibility-wise. The single greatest quality of Donald Trump is that he’s not going to take your lies, he’s not going to take your misinformation, he calls you out for what you are. This media bias thing – we conservatives have talked about for years – now you see it, day after day, night after night, newspaper article after newspaper article. I don’t see how they recover any credibility. . . I think people are hip to media bias. I said in 2007 that journalism is dead. It’s buried, it’s finished.

It’s sad because people deserve the truth. I definitely have a conservative view, because I feel that conservatism works. But you just have to look at the truth sometimes. They’re [the MSM] so ideological – everything is seen within the prism of this hatred that they have toward the president. It’s not good for the country.

Video of Sean Hannity’s segment on the November 11 Watters’ World can be streamed from here.

Peter Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture. Follow Peter on Twitter @pchowka

By Peter Barry Chowka

CNN, the venerable cable news channel now in its 38^th year, is a mess. While it masquerades as an objective news source, CNN’s coverage of President Trump and the Republicans is anything but fair and balanced. On Wednesday November 8, news reports suggested that CNN could hamper the mega billion dollar sale of its parent company Time Warner to AT&T unless Time Warner first divests itself of CNN and separates it from the proposed deal. And now, an attorney is promising to refile federal charges alleging CNN has systematically discriminated against more than 200 of its past and present employees who are African-American.

The legal case against CNN alleging racial discrimination was originally filed last December on behalf of two plaintiffs as part of a much larger class action involving as many as 175 CNN personnel. One of the primary plaintiffs, Celeslie Henley, worked at CNN for seven years but was fired, she alleged in the 2016 suit, after emailing CNN’s human resources department to complain about alleged discriminatory treatment by her employer.

The case that was filed last year, with the plaintiffs represented by Atlanta attorney Daniel R. Meachum, was thrown out of court this past July by Judge William Duffey, Jr. At the time, the judge cited technical problems with the suit. Attorney Meachum is now promising to correct the errors that he acknowledges and to refile the lawsuit before the end of this year. He said this week that he has another 30 plaintiffs to add to the suit for a total of 205.

At the very least, this development is an embarrassment to the news channel at a time when other problems are rearing their head. Not least is the situation with CNN’s ratings. Of the three American cable-satellite-Internet news outlets, CNN is usually third in the ratings behind Fox News and MSNBC.

The ratings from a typical day this past week – Wednesday November 8 – illustrate CNN’s dilemma. Screen shots of the two charts below, courtesy of TVNewser, show (top) the Nielsen cable TV news channel ratings in the so-called demo – the preferred demographic of viewers between the ages of 25-54 –  and (bottom) total viewers. On November 8, CNN was #3 according to both metrics.

The executive responsible for the channel’s scheduling, talent, and anti-Trump editorial spin that defines all of its reporting is CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker. Starting at NBC in 1986 as a 20-year old researcher, Zucker went on to have an impressive 24-year long career with the network, eventually rising to president and CEO of the company, NBC Universal. Along the way Zucker was credited with invigorating NBC’s Today Show and later on the network’s prime time schedule. But Zucker’s career at NBC floundered after his disastrous flubbing of the host transition of NBC’s crown jewel late night franchise when Jay Leno was ousted in favor of Conan O’Brien only to return a year later when O’Brien faltered. It was “one of the biggest debacles in television history,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Zucker’s career at NBC never recovered and he was asked to leave the company in 2010.

In 2012, less than two years after his ignominious departure from NBC, Zucker landed the top job at CNN. Curiously, despite his professional relationship with Donald Trump during the latter’s success over the course of a decade at NBC with his highly rated reality show The Apprentice, which Zucker reportedly green-lighted, Zucker turned CNN editorially against Trump when the billionaire real estate developer declared for president in 2015.

And now, two years later, CNN’s ratings are stuck in third place, CNN itself may be the fly in the ointment that prevents the completion of the $84 billion Time Warner/AT&T deal, and another big anti-discrimination lawsuit looms. How long can Zucker last? Will CNN keep to its far left of center bias or moderate its coverage? Stay tuned for developments.

Postscript: On November 9, Matt Drudge, who rarely posts anything on his Twitter account, tweeted:

Jeff Zucker out either way at CNN, primetime ratings abysmal. Feud with President Trump too personal and ridiculous…

Peter Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture. Follow Peter on Twitter @pchowka