This is a rush transcript from "Tucker Carlson Tonight," April 19, 2019. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
TUCKER CARLSON, HOST: Good evening and welcome to "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
This is a man called Andrew Cuomo. Mr. Cuomo is the Governor of the State of New York. New York is one of the most corrupt places in the English-speaking world. You can imagine the qualities you would need to possess in order to run a place like that.
Andrew Cuomo has those qualities and he figured he could ride them all the way to the White House, but that didn't happen. Instead another New Yorker became President. This enraged Andrew Cuomo. He's been mad ever since.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GOV. ANDREW CUOMO, D-N.Y.: The first year of President Trump's administration, we lost 40,000 people to gun deaths -- the highest number in 50 years.
New York will move forward, not by building a wall, my friends, but by building new bridges.
The unifier for the Democrats is their anger and fear at the Trump administration.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Like so many people who truly hate Donald Trump, Andrew Cuomo tumbled headlong into the rabbit warren of Russia conspiracy and in his defense, it did make a kind of sense. Trump is bad and orange, therefore, he is also a traitor who works for Putin.
Cuomo made that point on Twitter quote, "Trump is now aiding and abetting Vladimir Putin, a Russian dictator and trying to cover up Russia's interference in our elections," end quote.
"Aiding and abetting, a cover-up. Call the police. Russians are here." Andrew Cuomo appeared to believe all of this and many people did. Imagine how those people must have felt yesterday.
For more than two years, they waited for their prosecutor God to deliver them from their Orange Babylon. When the day finally came, the joke was on them. It was all a hoax. There was no collusion.
Andrew Cuomo and a lot of people like Andrew Cuomo suddenly looked pretty stupid. Luckily, Andrew Cuomo knows people. New York is like that. His little brother works at CNN. That's not really surprising, actually. Lots of people at CNN have close ties to the Democratic Party including the guy who runs the place, Jeff Zucker. Zucker has often said that he may run himself for office as a Democrat. So if you want to know what Democratic Party functionaries are thinking, just flip on CNN.
Well last night, pretty much everyone on CNN seemed upset by the Mueller report. Andrew Cuomo's little brother looked especially agitated. He'd heard people criticizing CNN. He doesn't like that. It shouldn't be allowed.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: I'm not going to let people say that you know CNN or the media or whatever have been creating a false narrative. This report is plenty of proof that the questions that have been asked repeatedly were legit and that the answers we were getting consistently were not -- especially once you get past the line of, "Hey are you a felon?" Once you move past that, the things they did, the meetings they had, the explanations they gave were wrong consistently.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So you got that? I'm not going to let people say CNN was wrong. I won't allow that. To which you might understandably respond, "Who cares what you think, pal? Just because you're the governor's little brother doesn't mean you get to tell me what to say. Buzz off. Get over yourself."
Well, okay, you could say that. We're not telling you not to say that. You could ignore his orders entirely if you wanted to. It's up to you. It's your life, but before you make any hasty decisions, we thought you ought to see this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CUOMO: You guys who are asking for the fitness tips, I'll give you one. The key to this is make sure that the dumbbells are going to trail next to your body like this as you go up and down. If you see me coming like that, I'm not doing the exercise right. All right.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Whoa. Okay, now ask yourself again, do you really want to criticize CNN? Does that seem like a smart move? This is New York. When the Governor's little brother suggests that you do something, it's wise to pay close attention, if you know what's good for you.
So repeat after me, CNN was never wrong. CNN got it right. CNN is the most trusted name in news. Good. The Governor's brother likes it better when you talk that way. If only everyone was so obedient. Because let's be honest, not everybody is that obedient. Some people are still going to point out that CNN did strictly speaking get the biggest story of the decade completely and utterly and flamboyantly wrong. People will say that no matter how many barbells its anchors lift, because it's undeniably true.
And it wasn't just CNN. Virtually the entire news media did the same thing. This was failure on an unprecedented scale. The Russia hoax wasn't simply part of what the media covered, often it was all they covered for years. The numbers are remarkable.
Over the first 60 days of 2018, just to pick it almost at random, the evening news shows that the broadcast networks spent more than twice as much time talking about the Russia hoax as any other topic. Print -- even more profound.
Since the 2016 election, to give you just one measure, more than a 150,000 Americans have died from drug overdose. That's far more than the number of Americans killed during the entire Second World War in the Pacific. Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Taroa, Iwo Jima -- those battles took fewer American lives than opioids did over an even shorter period, and yet somehow, "The New York Times" barely noticed any of this.
During the same period that this number -- 150,000 people were dying, "The New York Times" wrote more than twice as many stories about the Mueller investigation. That mattered more to them. At "The Washington Post," the ratio is even starker.
Last year, Jeff Bezos' newspaper ran 4,319 articles about the Russia investigation. At the same time, it ran only a little more than a thousand that even mentioned the opioid crisis. America's shrinking middle class? About a total of a 119 mentions. They just didn't care and they weren't pretending otherwise, they don't care.
Cable news was as you know, even worse -- all Russia, all the time for years to the exclusion of everything else including obviously the truth. Relentless, repetitive, calculatingly dishonest -- the very definition of propaganda. That's what they did and now they can't stop. They've been doing it too long.
Watch them test drive their new talking point. See if you can identify which word the DNC has told them to use.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PAMELA BROWN, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: The report contains a potentially damning list of ways the President tried to quote, "influence" the investigation.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Arguing that the Mueller report is far more damning.
CARL BERNSTEIN, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: And it's not pretty. It is an ugly damning piece of business.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I agree with him that it's absolutely damning.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Democrats say the report is damning.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The report from the Special Counsel is more damning than all of those reports.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Far more damning to the President than the Attorney General initially indicated.
DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: But it's still very damning.
CUOMO: Oh absolutely.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: "Very damning," says Don Lemon. "Absolutely," agrees the Governor's little brother and they are right. It is damning.
Chris Hahn is a radio host and former aide to Senator Chuck Schumer and he joins us tonight. So, Chris, we've had many debates over the past couple of years about whether Trump is actually a Russian agent and et cetera et cetera, but I think now that this is over, we can take three steps back and ask this question that I just asked myself, too, honestly. What have we missed during the time that we've been focused on this story or hoax?
CHRIS HAHN, RADIO SHOW HOST: What have we missed? Not much. First, I've got to say, I think you and Chris Cuomo need to hug it out.
CARLSON: I'm not mad. I'm not mad. Look, I'm not mad at Chris Cuomo. I'm being sincere though. A 150,000 Americans die of drug ODs and nobody mentions it. And "The Washington Post" writes almost four times as many stories about Robert Mueller as 150,000 people are dying?
HAHN: I got it.
CARLSON: What the hell?
HAHN: I got it. Robert Mueller was charged with investigating Russia's interference with the election. The report did find that Russia interfered with the election and Donald Trump was named in that report as someone who tried to stop that report from coming out, so the points you made were, you know, damning.
CARLSON: But do you think -- okay, but do you think, looking back that the American news media and the leadership of this country, the smart people, all the cool kids who went to HBS, who worked at McKenzie and who sort of set the tone for the rest of us. Do you think that maybe we emphasized this story to the exclusion of other things that mattered like the death of 150,000 fellow Americans, like the destruction of our middle class, like the degradation of our military, like China's rise. Like maybe there were other things going on that we missed, do you think? Or no?
HAHN: I think that the media can walk and chew gum at the same time and there's lots of places people can get their news.
CARLSON: But they didn't.
HAHN: I also think that it's very important to understand when there is a foreign government trying to influence our election and a President who is obstructing justice which this report to me says he did.
CARLSON: Okay, so you think that the Mueller investigation which whatever else you're going to say about it didn't show criminal collusion between the President and his campaign and the Russian government, the predictions were wrong on that.
HAHN: That's correct.
CARLSON: That's correct. So whatever you think about it, you think that was worth three times or four times as much coverage as the death of 150,000 people by drug OD? You really think that?
HAHN: Well, no look. Look, obviously I think drug ODs are very important, but I think this is very important as well and I think that while it did not show criminal collusion, it did show a campaign that was very open to accepting help from a foreign government and really enjoyed getting that help and was aware of that help.
So you know, it was something we should be concerned at as Americans. I want to know right now what the President and the Attorney General are going to do to protect us from this happening again. They haven't said that once ...
CARLSON: I can literally --
HAHN: ... and I want the media to get to the bottom of it.
CARLSON: It's all a joke. It's all a sad, sad joke as the country literally falls apart and we're talking about stuff that means nothing, and by the way I've participated in it too and I feel bad about it, but hopefully this will be the last day. Chris Hanh, thank you so much.
HAHN: Thank you. Happy Easter.
CARLSON: The Mueller report exposed a lot of things, but one of the things it exposed was just how lousy the reporting, how flimsy and stupid and dishonest the reporting by a lot of our supposedly oppressive news outlets has been. They want to pretend it didn't happen, but it did happen and we're going to bring you the details on what we know about how it happened.
Also there's breaking creepy porn lawyer news. It's all ahead as our Mueller aftermath special continues tonight.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: Welcome back to our special report on the aftermath of the Mueller investigation. Just days before the current President's inauguration, a cat blog in Brooklyn called BuzzFeed published the Trump dossier. It's something that a lot of people had heard about in the media, but no one had printed and once it came out, you could see why. It was full of salacious and grotesque allegations none of them had been verified.
So we asked BuzzFeed's Ben Smith to come on our show and defend why would you run something like this? Here's what he said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BEN SMITH, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, BUZZFEED: This document that is being fought over that -- and by the way everybody except the public in a certain sense has seen, we've seen and we don't have any special powers. Well, at what point does the audience say, you know, we can we can see this, too and we can deal with the fact that it is clearly labeled as unverified, that it's clearly labeled that some things in it aren't true, which is what we did.
CARLSON: I kind of get it. I mean, so what you're saying is because famous people are gossiping about it and because other news organizations - -
SMITH: Famous people, the President of the United States, the president- elect and the Intelligence Agencies. We're just not talking garden variety famous people.
CARLSON: A famous person, I believe you, trust me, they gossip too, and by the way, let me just note.
SMITH: It's not gossip. Official briefing, a document that by the way is a public document subject to the Freedom of Information Law.
CARLSON: Well, actually, in some sense, it's gossip because it's unverified and the difference between what you did what Drudge did was what Drudge reported turned out to be true whereas it looks like what you reported is not true.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: "It's not gossip, it's an official briefing," as much as we appreciate him coming on the show, bogus. The Mueller report has revealed that the Trump dossier was what we thought it was from day one, a lie.
Some of the lies may actually have come from Russia just for the sake of causing chaos in this country because irony knows no bounds in this story. BuzzFeed probably knew that but didn't care, so earlier this year, they said they had succeeded where thousands of other reporters had failed. They said they had seen documents proving that the President had ordered his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. That would be obstruction of justice. Hands down, that would be an impeachable offense.
But it didn't happen either. The Mueller report debunked that, too. What is going on here exactly?
Michael Tracey is an independent journalist. He joins us tonight. Michael Tracey, I don't want to pile on BuzzFeed because I don't think they're the only offender here, but that one story they ran because it was so vigorously defended by their editor-in-chief including twice on this show is worth thinking about. I mean, do we know conclusively that it was wrong now? As of right now?
MICHAEL TRACEY, INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST; As pitiful as it sounds, Tucker, BuzzFeed, I think actually does deserve some credit for acknowledging after four months after it became totally untenable that the story could in any way be perceived as accurate. They finally came out within the past 24 hours or so and declared essentially that had been retracted.
I think, yes, we do know now with almost absolute certainty that the story was not true because Robert Mueller came out and said quoting Michael Cohen that he had not been directed by Donald Trump to lie to Congress.
In fact, Mueller added that Cohen had been instructed by Donald Trump to cooperate so not only had the core thesis of the story been undermined, the total opposite had been proven true according to Mueller at least who was supposed to be this savior figure that everybody in the media elite was trusting to propound the absolute truth as to the genesis of all this.
But I think the thing that's really crucial to bear in mind about the broader Trump-Russia saga and the media's relationship, too is that Trump Russia has come more to resemble an article of religious faith than a set of journalistic political or legal claims.
CARLSON: Right.
TRACEY: In the religious faith, by definition is just not falsifiable, meaning countervailing evidence can never undermine the core premise upon which believers rest their faith and so it goes for Trump-Russia. I mean, you have people at "The Washington Post," at "GQ" magazine, all of these people who are slobbering over one another now after the Mueller report and congratulating one another on how wonderful of a job they did in covering the Trump-Russia saga. It's mind-boggling and I almost don't even know how to react to them at this point because they're not amenable to reason anymore. It's almost like they're in a church and chanting these excerpts from their holy text.
CARLSON: So let me just ask you because you may know the answer to this. There's a guy called Jonathan Chait who works at "New York Magazine" who I've known for a long time, not a genius, but a workaday journalist wrote a story suggesting that Trump had been a Russian agent for decades and there was a company by this graphic that was so complex, it looks like a maze. Was that real? Was he being serious and did anybody else at "New York Magazine" say, "That's a little demented, John, maybe pull back."
TRACEY: Not only was he being serious, he later claimed after the Barr letter was issued on March 24th basically saying that there was no collusion, Jonathan Chait wrote another follow-up piece for the "New York Magazine" website proclaiming, "Hey, I was right about that cover story published in July of 2018 asserting that Donald Trump had been colluding with Russia not just in the 2016 election, but since 1987." So for decades prior.
CARLSON: It's sick. These are people -- I mean, and you're absolutely right. This is a species of religious faith and they must be deprogrammed. Michael Tracey, thank you for the clarity of your coverage of this issue for years and for all the crap you've taken for being clear on it. Appreciate it.
TRACEY: Thanks, Tucker.
CARLSON: Last night in this show, Dana Perino warned that Democrats may be getting this wrong. Now, CNN is of course obsessed with Robert Mueller and Russia, but our voters, do they care? Fox correspondent, David Spunt has looked into this question and joins us tonight -- David.
DAVID SPUNT, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Tucker. Good evening. With the latest news, Elizabeth Warren is calling on the impeachment of President Trump. She announced it just a few hours ago, but it's a mixed bag as far as what we're seeing from other 2020 candidates reacting to the 448-page report.
Last night on this show, Dana Perino had this warning for candidates, "Don't base your entire campaign on the Mueller report." Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DANA PERINO, FOX NEWS HOST: It doesn't mean that you can't think it is an important story or that you might want to get to the bottom of the origins of the investigation or if you're a Democrat, looking at this and saying, "Look at all of these people walking right up to the line of obstruction." You can think all of that, it's still -- it's not going to win you an election.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SPUNT: And some of those candidates like Bernie Sanders agree with Dana Perino. Here's Senator Bernie Sanders Monday night at the Fox News Town Hall.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: If we spend all of our time attacking Trump, you know what? Democrat are going to lose.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SPUNT: Look at these screen grabs after the Mueller report release. Beto O'Rourke and Kirsten Gillibrand -- while they believe the mother report is an important story, they recognized potential voters don't have it at the top of their list. Still that hasn't stopped some candidates from focusing more heavily on the Mueller report.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. ERIC SWALWELL (D-CA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I believe the Attorney General should resign and it's now Congress' job to hold the President responsible and investigate this Mueller report and hear first from Mueller.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SPUNT: "Attorney General Barr has made it clear that he is not impartial when it comes to the investigation. Now that we have the report, we should hear from Robert Mueller himself ..." this is from Amy Klobuchar, " ... in public hearings. Our democracy demands it." Kamala Harris, senator from California says, "Americans deserve the unvarnished truth. We need Special Counsel Mueller to testify publicly in Congress," and Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey, "The American people deserve the truth, not spin from a Trump appointee. Release Mueller's full report now."
Now, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar are all senators, Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee where Mueller may end up testifying. Booker went on to tweet today about the issues affecting voters and when asked if President Trump should be impeached, he said flat-out, "no." Tucker.
CARLSON: David Spunt. Thanks. Amazing, actually. Bryan Dean Wright is a Democrat, a former CIA officer and he joins us tonight. So Brian, we're actually not that far away from the presidential election. Every member the House, a third of the Senate, lots of Governors -- as of right now Russia, is the most important issue apparently to Democratic leaders given what they say.
If they were to run on that, on the Mueller findings, what would happen, do you think?
BRYAN DEAN WRIGHT, FORMER CIA OPS OFFICER: Well I think we're about to find out because I think many of them, if they aren't going to, the TV networks and newspapers, and in fact the Democratic base that participates in the primary, they're going to demand the answers about it. They would want to talk about it.
Look, we spent $30 million over the past couple of years, turned the country upside down and now, we have this wonderful answer which is our President is not the traitor and so, instead of being able to move forward where Democrats are focused on this sort of fool's gold -- at least some of our nominees or prospective nominees are -- because of this reason. Of the media, of the primary voters wanting it, right? It's the catnip.
But really what's the argument now? Now that collusion is gone, what's the argument for obstruction? It's really, okay, maybe Trump wasn't a Russian traitor, but he was awful cranky for the past two years and he did some naughty things. So he should just kept his mouth shut and took it in the chin while the media tore him down, called him a traitor. Former FBI and CIA directors insisted he was a traitor and engaged in treasonous activity.
That doesn't sell to independent voters. That doesn't sell to Republican voters and it certainly doesn't sell to people like me.
So if in fact, we get this same garbage that we've gotten for the past two years, an inability to move on because the media won't allow it, right, they're making way too much money on this, too many clicks and advertisers feeding this garbage. Then we're going to have a serious problem in 2020 not as Democrats, but in fact as a country because, Tucker, we're not going to be talking about the things that most people care about. How do we reduce the cost of healthcare? How do we make sure that we have a thoughtful immigration policy that stops these thousands of folks coming over?
I mean that's the stuff that most of us want to talk about, right, and as a part of that, we can say, "Look, Trump has done some great things. Democrats acknowledge that. Let's talk about China, hold them into account or NATO holding them to account," but is Trump fundamentally the kind of leader we need?
All right, so we can come to an agreement or disagreement on that, but that's I think the kind of conversation this country wants to have, not more of this collusion stuff, well it's there even though Mueller didn't find it or hey, you know actually obstruction is really important even though there's no underlying crime, even though it's a hoax, right?
CARLSON: It doesn't improve a single life. It doesn't make a single American happier, more prosperous or safer. It's bizarre. Bryan, great to see you tonight.
WRIGHT: That's correct.
CARLSON: Thank you for that.
WRIGHT: Pleasure.
CARLSON: Well, almost from day one, the leaders of the American Intelligence Community were all in on the Russia conspiracy. What does that say about them? We'll investigate as our Mueller aftermath special continues tonight. We will also have an update from creepy porn lawyer's world. Stay tuned.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: Welcome back to our special report on the Mueller aftermath. Ever since 9/11, Americans have given more power and more money to our many intelligence agencies. They cannot monitor your communications or spy on you. There is very little oversight for any of it. They just have to see you as a threat.
This requires a great deal of trust from the public. Do they deserve our trust? Well, not always it turns out.
Senior intelligence officials equaled or exceeded clueless journalists, in some cases, in their willingness to believe the Russia story.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOHN BRENNAN, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: This is nothing short of treasonous because it is a betrayal of the nation. He is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
JAMES CLAPPER, FORMER DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: Is there influence, whether witting or unwitting, by the Russians over President Trump and you know, in the intervening year and a half or so, you know, his behavior hasn't done much, at least in my mind to allay that concern.
JAMES COMEY, FORMER FBI DIRECTOR: I don't know whether the current President of the United States with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013, it's possible, but I don't know.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: The people you just watched, pretty recently led the most powerful agencies in the Federal government. How did they get those jobs? John Gentry spent more than a decade at CIA. He has thought a lot about this question and he joins us tonight. Mr. Gentry, thanks very much for coming on.
JOHN GENTRY, FORMER CIA ANALYST: Thank you.
CARLSON: So you just saw the man who most recently ran CIA, saying that because he didn't like the President's public press conference with the Russian leader, the President had committed quote "treason." That seems so reckless to me that my first thought was how did the guy like that wind up running the CIA?
GENTRY: Well, of course he was he was appointed by President Carter -- President Obama, excuse me -- and was approved. He was a White House person who the President liked. It's the President's prerogative, too, to name people like him.
CARLSON: So CIA and also the FBI and NSA, Military Intelligence -- all of these agencies are filled with smart and serious people. What do they think as they watch this guy define the agency's reputation through his cable news hysteria?
GENTRY: Well this is a fundamentally new phenomenon. For many, many, many years the culture at CIA and elsewhere in the Intelligence Community was that current and former officials kept their personal political views at home. So they were expected to have political opinions, but they kept them at home.
And former senior officials who wrote memoirs wrote them in relatively objective kinds of ways even when they had very, very difficult relationships with Presidents so there were over time lots and lots and lots of examples of difficult relationships.
Usually, the intelligence people said, "We're subservient here. We work for the President. We're going to bite our tongues. We're going to try to make this work."
So in 2016 though, you had a fundamentally different situation. You had a case where senior officials said, "I believe that Mr. Trump is wrong on issues and I'm going public to criticize him." So a fundamentally new phenomenon.
CARLSON: But that's an attack on democracy by definition because CIA, every person in the Executive Branch serves at the pleasure of the one person who is elected by voters. You can't operate independently.
GENTRY: Well, this is potentially a deep state situation. It's a term that's being used now for the first time in the U.S. political context. You talk about Turkey and Thailand --
CARLSON: Do you think it's accurate?
GENTRY: Well, I think it's a question that we should be thinking about. I don't have a firm view on it yet, but we are to the point where we ought to be thinking about it.
CARLSON: So wouldn't -- if you were running CIA, wouldn't you be afraid that Congress would clip your wings? I mean, if Democrats take over, why would they want an agency that's shown itself to be willing to try to overthrow a President? Why would they want an agency like that to continue to exist?
GENTRY: Well much of the IC, CIA in particularly now has evolved into generally speaking, a left-leaning organization and so I think, an open question is does the Democratic Party want to go back to the roots of having a thoroughly objective Intelligence Community?
CARLSON: So it gives them more power. So basically, once you politicize these agencies, how long before they so completely politicize the United States military? That there's no part, there's no power center in American life that's not controlled by the left?
GENTRY: Well, I don't know. That's a good question, but I'm not sure I have an answer to that one.
CARLSON: When did this happen? When you worked at CIA, was it a left organization?
GENTRY: When I was there in the 1980s, there were probably a majority of liberals, I think that's probably the case, but the ethic was that once politics stayed at home and one was expected to be objective in the workforce and there was a process that we call the review process, which was designed to excise political bias as well as incompetence basically. Well over time, that culture pretty clearly has changed.
CARLSON: Clearly. Last question, does it -- since you know how much power these agencies have, does it make you nervous that they're so politicized?
GENTRY: Well, my main concern about the politicization at this point is that because it's so critical for effective intelligence to enjoy the trust of senior decision makers that the fairly overt politicization by both senior leaders and also apparently a number of people in the workforce as evidenced by comments by some of the leaders as well as leaks and so on that these people are damaging the trust of Presidents and of the people. So what that means in essence is that we've got the potential for self- inflicted trust-related damage.
CARLSON: Yes, I mean it's going to be a long time before, as an observer, I could ever trust these people. Mr. Gentry, thank you for that.
GENTRY: Thank you.
CARLSON: That's really interesting and sad. Michael Caputo is a former adviser to the Trump campaign. He was one of those directly harmed by the Russia investigation which as we learned yesterday turned out to be hollow at its core and he joins us tonight.
Since we've spoken to you, Michael, throughout the duration of this hoax, I can't resist asking you now that the book has been published, what your final reaction is to it all?
MICHAEL CAPUTO, FORMER ADVISER TO DONALD TRUMP: I can only think of one word to describe the Mueller report and that's mischievous. I really think the Democratic probe Clinton bias comes out in this report if we had 13 out of the 19 prosecutors there, very strongly in support of Hillary Clinton you'd know that just by reading these pages.
You know, I was on Page 61 of this report where they recounted a Russian named Henry Greenberg giving me a call and offering me dirt on Hillary Clinton. They went through this whole escapade and said it had nothing to do with Russian interference, but nowhere in that one page of the report did they mention that Henry Greenberg had been an FBI informant for 17 years. They somehow missed that fact in that report.
And other things were hinky about the page on me and I've got to believe as somebody who is kind of marginal in this investigation, can you imagine the mischief they were up to with some of the star players?
CARLSON: How could -- if you just rewind -- how could they not mention that? He was on the payroll of the FBI, but they just don't include that in the report, are you sure?
CAPUTO: Absolutely. I mean, it's at democraticdossier.com. When I interacted with the guy and then I saw how curious the Mueller team reacted when we talked about it, in my interrogation, I hired a private investigator to look into this guy and he found sworn affidavits in Federal court in California where this guy came up as a 17-year FBI informant.
He spent ten years in jail in Russia, three years in jail in the United States for gun crimes and he was only here on FBI informant visas and I actually have copies of 14 of those FBI informant visas up at democratdossier.com including the name and telephone number of his FBI handler, but for some reason that just went -- you know, slipped through the fingers of the Mueller investigation.
CARLSON: That is so rotten and it's the kind of thing that if we didn't hear from you, you would have no idea and so I'm so glad that you added that to the record.
CAPUTO: Absolutely.
CARLSON: And I hope this is a kind of permanent record because that deserves to be known. Michael, thank you very much.
CAPUTO: That's what Mr. Gentry is talking about, right? That's what Mr. Gentry is talking about.
CARLSON: Exactly. No, it's totally right.
CAPUTO: Absolutely.
CARLSON: And we should be nervous about this and he needs to earn our trust back.
CAPUTO: We really should.
CARLSON: Yes.
CAPUTO: Absolutely.
CARLSON: Thank you very much. Good to see you.
CAPUTO: Investigate the investigators.
CARLSON: Amen. Well, CNN didn't just invite creepy porn lawyer on its air like every day, they also tried to convince viewers that CPL was a Russia expert. They'd like you to forget that. We haven't forgotten though. As our special continues, we'll show you what we remember.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: Well, today, the creepy porn lawyer is best known for getting arrested for smacking women, for shaking down big companies, for stealing millions from his own disabled clients. Back in the good old days and it seems like an eternity ago, but it was really just less than a year, he was a different person entirely. He was CNN's star guest. CNN let him come on all the time as much as he wanted, 65 times in less than two months.
Officially, he was just a creepy lawyer for a troubled woman he turned out to be taking advantage of, but CNN made him much more than that. They made him into a Russia expert. True. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MICHAEL AVENATTI, LAWYER: It's ridiculous, Chris, as to why the President would not want to get to the bottom of the Russian collusion situation unless he knows he is guilty.
How do you think he's going to handle someone like myself for Bob Mueller asking questions? It would be an absolute disaster for him and he knows it.
Donald Trump does not want to sit down and have to answer any questions under oath and if I was in his shoes, I probably wouldn't want to do that either in light of the facts and the evidence.
I think that this shows that the President has significant potential criminal liability for felonies associated with campaign finance violations as well as potential money laundering violations.
Mr. Trump will not serve out his term, no way, no how. He will be forced to ultimately resign.
Why am I on CNN so much and why are you giving him so much airtime? Well, guess what? This is why.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Because he knows a lot about Russia and campaign finance reform. And no one ever said, "Wait a second, son, you don't know anything about Russia or campaign finance reform. And by the way, you're stealing millions from some guy in a wheelchair who got a settlement that you're taking from him without his knowledge." No one ever said anything like that because he was saying exactly what they wanted him to say. So they let him say anything and he did.
And they never told their viewers that really, you should not take this guy's word as valuable on subjects he clearly knows nothing about.
So from the point of view of normal people, CPL was an obvious fraud from day one, but in the end, his behavior was less shameful than that of ordinary reporters on CNN. Because they have inherent credibility and for years, they built up a fantasy world for their viewers, letting them believe that impeachment and indictments and a treason conviction were almost here, just around the corner for the big orange tyrant.
They gave each other Pulitzers and other fake prizes honoring their commitment to the First Amendment even as they made other people who didn't agree with them, "Shut up. Take that man off the internet." "Oh thank you for my First Amendment prize." They are so corrupt.
Now, the Mueller report has among other things exposed their work for the travesty at what it was and their response to it? No. Nothing to see here. CNN is quite pleased with itself.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: The other thing this report did is that it really corroborated a lot of the good journalism that was done and when you go back and you look at this report and you look, you're like, "All of these stories that were fake news, well Mueller shows that this was actually going on."
BERNSTEIN: This report already is the connective tissue that explains everything we almost we've been reporting over the past two years.
JIM ACOSTA, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Time and again in this Mueller report, reporting for major news outlets is confirmed in this Mueller report as being accurate. Time and again ...
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes, a little defensive, but for good reason. Joe Concha writes about media for "The Hill" and he joins us tonight. So Joe, if you got a call tonight from Jeff Zucker saying, "Hey, Joe I want you to go on air right now and deny that the sun will come up tomorrow." Wouldn't you say, "You know, I just -- it's going to hurt my credibility to do that. I mean, I want to do your bidding Mr. Zucker, but I can't say every dumb thing you tell me to say because no one will believe me anymore." Why does nobody do that?
JOE CONCHA, MEDIA REPORTER, "THE HILL": I think I'd say I have an Easter egg hunt that I really have to get to, Tucker, if that were to happen. Yes, look Pulitzers were won as you said, right, and the Pulitzer Board described the reporting this way and this is Pulitzers around reporting around Russia collusion, okay, "Deeply sourced relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect transition team and his eventual administration."
Pulitzers for what the Mueller report said -- and remember, Robert Mueller is sainted. We have to believe everything that is in that report. We were told that for two years. There is no collusion in there; therefore, these prizes are null and void.
CARLSON: But the fact that nobody is saying that so you'd think long-term even CNN and they're kind of day traders about this stuff, they just think in the moment, but like some smart person would say, "Wait a second, we're devaluing our own currency so completely that nobody is going to watch us anymore or read our papers or care about a Pulitzer -- a Pulitzer. Nobody is going to even care how it's pronounced if we don't act with some integrity and correct our own mistakes." Is nobody saying that?
CONCHA: Nobody is saying that, Tucker, because there's a 2020 election that will serve as a lifeline here to bring people back to watch the news. If we didn't have an election, then this would be like the 2008 financial crisis. Everything would go off a cliff in terms of ratings, in terms of clicks and we're already seeing it at CNN.
Just yesterday, when the Mueller report drops, two years -- all of that highly anticipated talk around what's going to be in that report and they couldn't even average 1.2 million viewers. That is so hard to do.
It was nearly a third of what this network got for instance, not to taut Fox's horn because, yes, you should be getting viewership like that.
CARLSON: Yes, I am sure.
CONCHA: But a day like that where so little people relatively are tuning in, that tells you something. And by the way, when I saw those clips you just played where they said all those reporters there, whether it was Acosta or anybody else saying that the reporting was proven out.
You explain to me how the BuzzFeed story, Tucker that Michael Cohen was ordered to lie to Congress by President Trump, was that proven out? I'm curious. And has Ben Smith from BuzzFeed apologized for that report? That the Mueller report has now completely and totally debunked? No, of course not and that's the whole problem here in the end, Tucker. Contrition and the complete lack of it for all the things that were wrong.
Let's face it. What the whole ball game was, it was collusion between Trump and Russia and that was the reporting, the primary part of it and that's what everybody got wrong. Forget about everything else, that was the whole ball game.
CARLSON: That's totally right. Michael Cohen went to Prague and when it turns out he didn't, you know what McClatchy said today? Well, his phone was sighted there. Anyway, Joe, great to see you tonight.
CONCHA: Happy Easter.
CARLSON: Happy Easter to you on a happy note, exactly. Happy Easter. Thank you. We're going to end this Easter week with a bang or rather a blast. It is time for Dan Bongino's news explosion. Nobody has paid closer attention to the details of the Mueller report, and Dan has the top takeaways from that explosion of news. After the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CARLSON: It's Friday and that means it's time for Dan Bongino's News Explosion. This week, the theme of course, the Mueller report. Our favorite former New York City cop and Secret Service agent is here to give us his top three exposive takeaways from the report and as you listen to what Dan Bongino says, see if you catch him using the word "um" or "hmm" or pausing at all. No. He is the most complete sentence speaker you will ever meet in your entire life.
DAN BONGINO, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Thank you.
CARLSON: Dan Bongino.
BONGINO: Gosh and no prompter either. I don't even put notes on my hands or anything. This is all au natural, buddy. Natural. All right, so here are my three stories. Before we get to the Mueller stuff story, number three, I've got go back to CPL, buddy Avenatti. Franken-CNN, a creation of CNN. You know, the more we find out about this guy, the more creepy he becomes. It's amazing.
Tucker, has there ever been a less impressive human being on cable news opining on a wider breadth of topics --
CARLSON: And that's saying a lot as you know.
BONGINO: Tucker, he was on the show called "Reliable Sources" with George Costanza. That's the funniest part of this whole thing. Like, listen Brian Stelter, change the title of the show after Avenatti. Those clips aren't going anywhere. We saw them. They're out there forever. This show -- it's not "Reliable Sources." Now, it's "Unreliable Sources."
CARLSON: It has got to be, at best.
BONGINO: You can't go back to that. That ship has sailed.
CARLSON: All right, story number two, getting back to the Mueller report. The critical, critical take away. It's not what was in the Mueller report that fascinated me and I'm through about 90 percent of it, just have got to get to the GRU stuff. It's what's not in it.
Now, Tucker, we've all been told by the brilliant academics and media people out there that as you know, are much smarter than you and I.
CARLSON: Way smarter.
BONGINO: We are the great unwashed and the dumb ones. They have told us that Mueller was this demigod it was going to expose Russian collusion, right? But what he conveniently leaves out of it is that some of the people who made that Trump Tower meeting happen, the Russians were in fact connected to Hillary Clinton through Fusion GPS, the company she paid and personal relationships already acknowledged in the media.
I thought we were investigating Russian collusion? I'm not sure that's what Mueller was doing. I think what he was doing, to quote, Mark Levin this morning, he was writing an op-ed for $30 million.
CARLSON: Let me ask you one question?
BONGINO: Yes?
CARLSON: Do you think what you just said explains the puzzling fact that we haven't heard -- I don't think we've heard from Hillary Clinton on the release of the Mueller report?
BONGINO: Tucker, they -- she has a lot to hide. Rinat Akhmetshin who was the Russian intel connected allegedly -- the individual who showed up for the Russian Trump Tower meeting and the Russian lawyer both had ties to Clinton and business ties to Fusion GPS. This is documented fact. Anybody can look it up on the inter-web out there to make a joke of it. You can check it out yourself.
But again, nowhere in the Mueller report are those relationships mentioned. It's basically a Jack Ryan story told to make you believe Trump colluded with the Russians so they can get a roadmap for impeachment. That's what it is. Well, yes, which is incredible.
Story number one is -- listen, how did the media -- how did they blow this? The American media was completely humiliated, Tucker. They got the story totally backwards from the start. They told us collusion was real and the spy scandal was fake. We were all conspiracy theorists.
The story was actually the spying scandal is very real and collusion was fake and one quick thing and I know we're running out of time here, but I find that ironic that they keep patting themselves on the back for getting minor details of the story right. It's like going to a bank robbery reporting on a bank robbery that never happened and then celebrating that you got the call over the car the guy left in right and patting yourself on the back like Jim Acosta. Good job, Jim. Great job. A bank robbery that never happened. Great reporting."
CARLSON: And I would say -- by the way, this show actually did get it right from day one and we haven't patted ourselves in the back a single time and we're not going to now. Dan Bongino, you're the best and I hope you have a great Easter weekend.
BONGINO: You, too, buddy. Thanks.
CARLSON: Thank you. We're out of time. 8:00 p.m., Monday, we'll be back. The show that is the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink. Easter is on Sunday. Have the best weekend with the ones you love. Good night from Washington.
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