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The arrival of the Chinese coronavirus has killed tens of thousands of Americans and put tens of millions more out of work. But the crisis has also forced to the center serious conversions about issues that matter to the future of the country. Issues like: the dangerous rise of Chinese global dominance, the porousness of our domestic borders, America’s crumbling infrastructure, and government corruption and incompetence.

Over the past two months, you may have asked yourself: Why weren’t we talking about these things before? They’re important. Good question.

There’s a simple answer to that. We didn’t have time to consider the fundamental health of America because we were busy talking about Russia. In Washington, Russia is all we talked about for three years. All normal business in the capital city came to a halt, as we embarked on a bizarre scavenger hunt in search of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spies.

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Even at the time, the whole thing seemed absurd. Now we know it was worse than absurd. This wasn’t history’s longest episode of mass hysteria. It was instead an elaborate and intentional hoax, staged by the most unscrupulous and power-mad political operatives this country has ever seen. Sound like an overstatement? How do we know that? Because they have admitted it.

On Thursday the House Intelligence Committee – chaired by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. – finally released 57 transcripts of testimony delivered to the committee behind closed doors during the Russia investigation. What do the transcripts reveal? We’re not going to ask you to trust us on this one, it’s too important. Instead, we’re going to quote from the transcripts directly:

Jim Clapper, President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, said: “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting or conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.” Compare that to his Twitter feed.

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Former Obama administration U.N. ambassador Samantha Power was asked by the committee if she had any evidence of collusion with the Russians. She replied this way: “I am not in possession of anything – I am not in possession and didn’t read or absorb information that came out of the intelligence community.”

Obama administration National Security Adviser Susan Rice said: “I don’t recall intelligence that I would consider evidence.” Amazing.

And here’s former Obama administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Asked if she saw evidence of Russian collusion, Lynch replied: “I do not recall that being briefed up to me.”

Notice Lynch’s word choice here: “I do not recall.” For three years, our entire political system revolved around the hunt for Russian spies. We were told again and again in order to justify this that collusion was the greatest crime ever committed in American history.

Yet the attorney general, a close friend of President Barack Obama’s, claims she “does not recall” if she ever received any evidence that any of it was true. If she’d been Roger Stone when she said that, she would have been charged with perjury on the spot. We’d be watching her sentencing right now.

Of course, Lynch probably thought the transcript of those remarks would never be made public.

That was clearly Evelyn Farkas’ assumption. Farkas is a former Defense Department official from the Obama administration. She became a fixture you may remember on cable television, as news outlets scrambled for puppets with legitimate-sounding resumes to push the Russia collusion narrative. Dumb people who would say anything. In those categories, Farkas delivered in spades. Here she was in March 2017 speaking on MSNBC:

“I was urging my former colleagues and frankly speaking the people on the Hill – it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people – get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration,” Farkas said. “Because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior people who left. So it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy that the Trump folks – if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff dealing with Russians – that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence.”

And Farkas added: “So I became very worried because not enough was coming out into the open and I knew there was more. We have very good intelligence on Russia. That’s why you have the leaking. People are worried.”

“We have very good intelligence on Russia,” Farkas claimed. “We knew what we knew.” But she didn’t know anything. Farkas was lying, as purely as a liar can lie. Once under oath behind closed doors, Farkas admitted that. “I didn’t know anything,” she said.

It was all lies, literally all of it, even the core claims about hacking that formed the basis of the entire story and the investigation that followed.

In 2016, during the campaign, someone stole information from the Democratic National Committee’s email server. It wound up online and embarrassed Hillary Clinton. Democrats quickly blamed the theft on Russian agents, and therefore Donald Trump, who was supposedly the pawn of the Russians.

In fact, there was never real evidence that that actually happened. The Democratic National Committee, as you may have read, never allowed federal investigators to inspect their email servers. That’s odd behavior for people who claim to be the victims of foreign espionage.

Instead, the party’s servers were inspected by a third-party company called CrowdStrike.

Adam Schiff’s committee interviewed the president of CrowdStrike Services and CSO Shawn Henry. Schiff questioned Henry directly. He asked if Henry knew when the Russians had stolen the data from the DNC servers.

Henry’s reply, which we’re seeing for the first time is this: “As it relates to the DNC, we have indicators that data was exfiltrated. We did not have concrete evidence.” Later, Henry admitted he only had only “circumstantial evidence” that the Russians were involved at all.

Adam Schiff heard those words directly, he heard them from the one person who would know for certain. Schiff knew there was nothing substantial at the core of the Russian collusion story. At the very center, it was hollow, it was a sham. But Schiff never suggested this in public. Instead, he did the opposite. He spent years on television telling you it was totally real, shut up.

Here are comments Schiff made on different occasions on several TV programs:

“So there’s clear evidence on the issue of collusion and this adds to that body of evidence.”

“There’s ample evidence of collusion in plain sight and that is true.”

“You can see evidence in plain sight on the issue of collusion. Pretty compelling evidence.”

“And there is significant evidence of collusion.”

“This is ample evidence and indeed there is of collusion of people in the Trump campaign with the Russians.”

“I think there’s plenty of evidence of collusion or conspiracy.”

“All of this is evidence of collusion.”

“There is significant evidence of collusion between the campaign and Russia.”

In case you weren’t counting during that montage, Adam Schiff said “evidence” nine times in that clip. Every single time was a lie. If you were following this closely at the time, you might have suspected this. Schiff never produced any of this so-called evidence. He just asserted its existence.

After a while, we noticed. We confronted Schiff about it when he came on this show. He never answered our question. Instead, he accused us of treason. Here is part of our exchange:

CARLSON Look right into the camera and say, "I know for a fact the government of Vladimir Putin was behind the hacks of John Podesta's email."

SCHIFF: Absolutely, the government of Vladimir Putin was behind the hacks of our institution and the dumping of information –

CARLSON: Of John Podesta's e-mail.

SCHIFF: Not only in the United States, but also in Europe –

CARLSON: OK, you're not – you know what? You're dodging.

SCHIFF: And Tucker you are –

CARLSON: Look and say, "I know they did John Podesta's e-mail. They hacked this."

SCHIFF: And I think that Ronald Reagan would be rolling over his grave.

CARLSON: You can't – Ronald Reagan.

SCHIFF: You're carrying water for the Kremlin –

CARLSON: I am not carrying water for – you're making – look, you're a sitting member of Congress on the Intel Committee ...

SCHIFF: Would you -- and the president-elect …

CARLSON: ... on the Intel Committee and you can't say they hacked –

SCHIFF: You're going to have to move your show to Russian television.

Adam Schiff is a sociopath. He will do or say anything to achieve power. He is unfit to hold office. He should resign. And not just Adam Schiff. The entire apparatus of official Washington has been exposed by these transcripts, as well as by the documents just released in the Michael Flynn case.

In November 2019, government attorney Brandon Van Grack defended the FBI’s decision to interrogate Flynn at the White House with no lawyer.

Van Grack said: “The FBI was engaged in a legitimate and significant investigation into whether individuals associated with the campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump were coordinating with the Russian government."

In that same filing, Van Grack wrote that Flynn’s phone call with the Russian ambassador was of paramount importance. “It was imperative that the FBI determine whether and why such communications with the Russian ambassador had occurred,” according to Van Grack.

Both of those statements from Van Grack, we now know conclusively, are lies. In its filing this week, the Justice Department revealed that in early January, the FBI had already known there was “no derogatory information” tying Michael Flynn to the Russian government.

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Nor did they need to know whether Flynn had spoken with Russian Ambassador to the U.S.  Sergey Kislyak. They knew he had. They were listening. They had a word-for-word transcript of the call.

In other words, Van Grack was lying in his filing. This is not only of importance to Donald Trump. This is important to every American, because things fall apart when high-level officials do things like this for political reasons. There’s a reason nobody trusts the government anymore.

And it’s not just Democrats who you should blame for the corrosion of our public life. The vast majority of the Russian collusion investigation, including the testimony you just heard, occurred during the first two years of this administration.

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At the time, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and every single committee. They had the power to expose this hoax and to shut it down. But they did not. We can only speculate why. Maybe they were too cowardly to tell the truth. Or maybe, deep down, a lot of them agreed with the aims of all of this.

Either way, it’ll be very interesting to hear Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina and so many other useless Senate Republicans – the total phonies who tell you they’re representing you but don’t – explain why they didn’t really do anything to stop the derailment of America while it was in progress.

Adapted from Tucker Carlson’s monologue from “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” on May 8, 2020.

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