Tucker: Two years of Russia hysteria is over

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Tucker: Two years of Russia hysteria is over

Redacted Mueller report is released and confirms no proof of collusion or conspiracy.

This is a rush transcript from "Tucker Carlson Tonight," April 18, 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 the day the left has fantasized about vividly since shortly after the Presidential Inauguration. NPR once interviewed terminally ill liberals who stayed alive by dreaming about the Mueller report. They wanted to see it delivered to Congress. They wanted to gloat over what happened next.

Now that day has come and yet, Donald Trump is still a free man, still the President, still tweeting. It seems strikingly cheerful in fact. The angriest people in Washington tonight aren't at the White House, they're at CNN.

Suddenly every CNN panel seems to have about 75 people on it and they're all scowling. They're mad about the Mueller report. Who would have expected that?

We'll have a lot more tonight on why that is and what's going on, but first, Fox chief national correspondent Ed Henry joins us with more on what the report actually says -- Ed.

ED HENRY, FOX NEWS CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Tucker, good to see you. As soon as this report was released, Rudy Giuliani texted me that this was quote-unquote "a knockout blow" aimed at critics of President Trump who after 22 months and $25 million in taxpayer money, saw their narrative that the President may be an agent of Russia come apart.

Attorney General William Barr making it clear again just as he did in that letter to Congress last month, the Special Counsel found no collusion by any Americans with Russia specifically declaring while Russia did try to interfere in the 0216 presidential election, they did not get help from candidate Trump or his aides. That despite Congressman Adam Schiff, other Democrats repeatedly claiming they had evidence, not just allegations of collusion, but evidence that Robert Mueller never found in Volume 1 of his report.

Now, Volume 2 of this report is more damaging to the President. He lists 10 instances where the President acted in a way that raised questions about obstruction; allegations the President urged White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller. Of course, he refused and later the President allegedly tried to tamper with Don McGahn's testimony though the President took no action to fire him or move forward on tampering.

Giuliani added, the President had the White House turn over about a million pages of documents and never invoked executive privilege, so there's not a single thing according to Giuliani that was actually obstructed.

William Barr added the President was just blowing off steam about what he believed was a hoax of an investigation to start with, though Adam Schiff is suggesting he and other Democrats are going to just keep on investigating the President.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WILLIAM BARR, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: After nearly two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, hundreds of warrants and witness interviews, the Special Counsel confirmed that the Russian government sponsored efforts to illegally interfere with the 2016 presidential election, but did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those efforts.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA): The report outlines multiple attempts by the President to mislead the country to interfere with the investigation, to make false statements to the American people. These actions had a material impact on the investigation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HENRY: But the Mueller report dealt another blow to Schiff and other presidential critics like BuzzFeed. The final report from Mueller declares that contrary to that January report in BuzzFeed that CNN and others used to say there could be impeachment of the President, the President did not direct Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. That was a BuzzFeed report shot down by Mueller's team at the time, and now in the final report, they're saying not true -- Tucker.

CARLSON: Kind of weird. They told us that they had seen the documents. We're going to need to get to bottom of that, Ed. Thank you.

HENRY: You're welcome. Thanks.

CARLSON: So after two long years, here we are. It's hard to believe that any of it actually happened. Looking back, it was two years of unremitting, never diminishing hysteria about Russia. It was a continuous wave of panic and superstition over unseen Slovak interference all stoked by the very people we're told are the most rational in our society.

For two years, our capital city became a kind of massive CNN panel, a living monument to ignorant and dishonesty where the loudest and the dumbest invariably got the most attention.

We just lived through two full years of that screaming, threatening, surveillance, character assassination, loyalty tests, wild allegations of treason and spying and betrayal from officeholders. Innocent people find themselves afraid to go to dinner, scared to send text messages or talk on the phone.

For two years we lived in an all-pervasive cult of personality. Our leaders worshiped a 74-year-old Federal prosecutor who almost never spoke in public. He alone was good, they told us; only they could interpret his will.

It was all thoroughly bizarre -- demented really, though -- nobody said so at the time. They were too afraid. It seems like a dream now, which actually it was. None of it was real. Nobody colluded with Vladimir Putin. Nobody changed vote totals or met secretly in Prague or had a pee tape, whatever that is. There was never a Russia conspiracy.

Hillary Clinton wasn't robbed of her rightful position by Julian Assange or Roger Stone or anyone else. Hillary lost the election because she was an entitled boor who didn't run on anything. In the end, that's what Robert Mueller proved.

The news anchors couldn't handle that. They couldn't handle that conclusion. It was too far from what they promised their audiences for so long. They were too invested in the lies.

When the report arrived in Congress this morning, they found themselves reduced to huffing and sputtering. They couldn't admit what was in the report. Well, they told us, "Robert Mueller didn't exonerate President Trump." Okay, I mean that may be true, but only theologically. Mueller doesn't have the power to absolve sin, only God can.

But in every other sense, Mueller's report was exculpatory. If dozens of Federal prosecutors spent two years trying to charge you with a crime and then found they couldn't, it would mean there wasn't any real evidence you did it, and that's what happened here.

You may not like Donald Trump, but that's what we just learned from the Mueller report. You would have to be a mindless partisan to deny it.

A lot of news anchors turn out to be mindless partisans. When the facts contravene the interests of their party, they deny the facts, then they attack anyone who persists in stating the obvious out loud.

So suddenly the very same people who lied to you for two years about Russia are demanding that under no circumstances are you allowed to believe anything that the Attorney General Bill Barr might say. Sure Barr may look like a conventional Republican, he was a Jeb Bush donor and everything and he does appear to be a close personal friend of Robert Mueller's, but that's why he's so tricky. It's all a ruse. In fact, Barr is a Putin's stooge like all the rest.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: If you look at his behavior, it is not that of a geriatric, it is that of a partisan.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC ANCHOR: This looks like an inside job.

ELIE MYSTAL, EDITOR, ABOVE THE LAW: We shouldn't take anything that Barr says tomorrow as anything other than performative coonery.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Is Barr the President's new fixer? The answer to that seems to be, yes.

NICOLE WALLACE, MSNBC ANCHOR: But he becomes the first Cabinet Secretary to plunge into the deep end of Trump's conspiracy pool.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So it was an inside job. That's the reigning assumption in Washington. Somehow, the Attorney General is preventing Robert Mueller from concluding that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin and from telling the rest of us about it.

How was Barr doing that? Well, it's not clear how he is doing that, but they are no less certain that he is doing that. Michelle Goldberg of the "New York Times" announced today that Barr's press comments this morning marked America's transformation into a quote "authoritarian junta." Her colleague at the "New York Times," Maggie Haberman suggested that Trump might be a Nazi because the White House played a song from "The Sound of Music," which by the way is an anti-Nazi musical, but it's still Germanic sounding and therefore suspicious.

These are hysterical children. They should not be in journalism, but they are. In fact, they run journalism and they have no plans on giving up their power. The Mueller report is probably the single most humiliating thing that has ever happened to the White House Press Corps in the history of this country.

So how did reporters in Washington respond today when it finally came out? Well, they did what they do best. They celebrated themselves. Over on CNN, former Obama official, now posing as a reporter, Jim Sciutto bragged that the Mueller report had quote "debunked all of Donald Trump's unfair attacks on the media." At Jeff Bezos' newspaper, a guy called Philip Bump was telling us that quote, "The vast amount of reporting on Russia was accurate." Even they don't really believe this. They know they lied.

As we told you a minute ago, BuzzFeed claimed its reporters had seen personally with their own eyes evidence that Michael Cohen have been instructed by Donald Trump himself to perjure himself. This was going to be grounds for impeachment.

The editor of BuzzFeed defended that story even after the Mueller investigation took the unusual step of publicly saying it wasn't true. BuzzFeed went all-in and they defended it. They'd seen it with our own eyes. He told us that on this set, on this show and now there's no question about it. It's over. It's done. It was a lie. That and so much more -- all lies.

So what happens now that we know those were lies? What do we do with -- I don't know? John Brennan and James Clapper? The two of them used to run our most powerful intelligence agencies. For the past couple of years, they've gotten a lot richer than they've ever been from yapping about Russia on television. The only problem -- all lies.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LAWRENCE O'DONNELL, MSNBC HOST: What makes you believe that he has more indictments?

JOHN BRENNAN, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Because he hasn't addressed the issues related to criminal conspiracy, as well as any individuals.

O'DONNELL: Criminal conspiracy involving the Russian influence?

BRENNAN: The Russians, yes, yes.

JAMES CLAPPER, FORMER DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: Is their influence whether witting or unwitting by the 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.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So do Clapper and Brennan get to keep their cable television contracts? Probably. In decadent societies, the guilty aren't punished, only the unpopular are punished. Over on the other channels, they're still talking about Trump tonight, of course. They're not talking about themselves or their failures. The line they're quoting most is from today's report.

It was apparently Trump's response when he first learned there was going to be a Special Counsel investigation into Russia. "Oh God," he said, "This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I'm effed."

Well, as it turns out, Trump was wrong on the specifics. He didn't get indicted. Mueller didn't drive him from office. It wasn't the end of his presidency, strictly speaking. But as usual, Trump's instincts were clearer. In fact, they were dead-on. In the ways that matter most, the Russia hoax did end his presidency in some sense. It's certainly sabotaged it.

Mueller's investigation ended critical momentum from the 2016 election almost immediately. Momentum that every incoming President uses to get your program enacted, to make good on the promises you just made to voters. Trump didn't have that, thanks to Russia.

Lawmakers including a shamefully large number of Republicans who we really should name, but we're out of time, but we will at some point, they were all much happier to talk about Russia than about changing the status quo in Washington -- something they were benefiting from, but which Trump ran against.

And so they did talk about Russia endlessly. The result, an election that should have realigned our political process and changed this country had almost no effect. Two years later, virtually nothing has changed. Millions are still flooding over our border from the third world. They're encouraged by an army of nonprofits that instruct them to subvert and mock our laws.

The opioid epidemic rages on as horrifying and horrible and destructive as ever. Suicides are up. Our troops are still bogged down in Syria and Afghanistan and many other places. Goldman Sachs still controls our economy. Tech companies are still spying on you, crushing your freedom of speech. You can still have your life ruined for supporting the wrong candidate in public or for believing there are two genders.

Most ominous of all and most often ignored, Americans are dying younger and having fewer children. None of this was ever resolved, none of it was ever talked about. The Russia investigation didn't destroy Trump, but it did a lot to destroy this country.

Brit Hume is Fox News senior political correspondent and he joins us tonight. So Brit, this comes out. How can the rest of us act like our assumptions for the past two years or their assumptions in the last two years were ratified or right? I mean, why doesn't the entire city of Washington stop and ask itself, how are we so wrong?

BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, that can be attributed to the partisan divide that you see across the country and very much in Washington.

There are some of us such as those of us here at Fox News who don't have any of this collusion dog-doo all over our shoes and never did. And so you know, we look at this and we think to ourselves, well, yes, I guess we sort of sized that up properly. We didn't buy into that. We didn't make a hero out of Michael Avenatti and have him on our air a couple of hundred times and talk about what a serious presidential candidate he was.

We didn't spin every story that came along to suggest that it pointed in the direction of the collusion that was talked about endlessly. We didn't do any of that. So there's a big segment of us, there's a big segment of our audience that didn't buy into that stuff either, so none of us tonight has anything, but regrets that this took up as much of our time and as much of our political air as it did as you point out.

But watch this happen now, Tucker. The collusion narrative is dead. Some will still cling to it, but they look increasingly ridiculous, but a new narrative has now arrived in the form of the fact that Trump was not absolved of obstruction of justice. Never mind the fact that he would have been obstructing an investigation into a crime that had not occurred -- that is the coordination collusion conspiracy charge that was bandied about for so long and never mind the fact that his White House, despite his continuing protests on the air, on Twitter and elsewhere against the Mueller investigation. The White House cooperated massively -- vast numbers of documents, none that I know was ever denied Mueller. Witness testimony including his White House Counsel.

Now, we're hearing today that the President isn't declaring executive privilege -- asserting executive privilege over this. He didn't assert executive privilege during the investigation which is why we know what we know about Don McGahn because he allowed his White House Counsel -- his White House Counsel to testify.

So we have all this information and it does emerge from the from the Mueller report that he did tell Don McGahn to get - to go to the Justice Department and get rid of Mueller. McGahn didn't do it. Trump pushed back. McGahn still didn't do it. McGahn was ready to quit. He didn't. He stayed on six months longer and left in apparently in good standing. Trump thereby was saved from one of his worst and most foolish impulses by his staff, something that has happened before.

But the bottom line is, the investigation proceeded to its conclusion and the investigator was unable to assert that Trump had indeed committed the crime of obstruction of justice and that is where we are.

But believe me, the episodes that are cited in this report that relate to obstruction of justice, we're going to hear about them from now until Election Day and possibly beyond.

CARLSON: In 30 seconds, I can't resist asking this question, if the President is not allowed to fire an Executive Branch employee, then I mean, the basic principle of democracy is inoperative, right, which is that elected officials get to run the government? I mean, how do we get to a place where we are not allowed to fire an independent counsel?

HUME: Well, broadly speaking, your point is well-taken. You can't infer obstruction of justice from the mere firing of a subordinate, so it all gets down to a question of intent and if you're doing so for the expressed purpose of undermining or torpedoing an investigation, I think an obstruction of justice narrative could be created.

The fact of the matter is however, for all his ranting and raving and his fuming inside the White House about the people who are investigating him for something he knew he didn't do, nobody got fired, except for James Comey and you'll find in this report that the James Comey matter is passed over in and has little significance in the final conclusion. So that's where we are.

CARLSON: Amazing. Brit Hume, what a summation. Thank you.

HUME: You bet.

CARLSON: As you just heard, collusion was in the end, a total bust, but after years of lying, nobody can tell the truth anymore, so instead CNN went into full denial mode. The governor's brother promised viewers that the bad orange man could still be removed, this time for obstruction of justice.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CUOMO: Special Counsel Bob Mueller did not exonerate the President on obstruction. There's a lot of stink. There's a lot of wrongdoing here -- on this and on what they call collusion. Collusion is not a crime. It's a behavior and there was a lot of bad behavior.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Congressman Adam Schiff of Burbank is still the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee even though he has demonstrable instability. He has shown it on this show. He is prone to believing wild and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. When people disagree with him, he accuses them of treason. He is dangerous.

But today, he had no apologies for slandering his fellow Americans. Instead, he is promising to broaden the witch hunt.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SCHIFF: The Attorney General's actions would make the President above the law, it would make the President such that he cannot commit the crime of obstruction of justice. That was not Special Counsel's view. If the Special Counsel, as he made clear had found evidence exonerating the President, he would have said so. He did not. He left that issue to the Congress of the United States and we will need to consider it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Andrew McCarthy is a contributing editor over at "National Review" and a former chief assistant U.S. Attorney and he joins us tonight. Andy, thanks very much for coming on.

So you're a former prosecutor. You're a detail man. Assess the claim that the President is vulnerable on obstruction -- on perjury for obstruction of justice?

ANDREW MCCARTHY, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, "NATIONAL REVIEW": Well, Tucker, he is vulnerable in the sense that Congress does not need a penal offence to impeach. The definition of a high crime and misdemeanor does not have to be a crime that's in the Federal Penal Code that prosecutors like I used to be would prove in court.

So I think what their strategy will be in looking at this in Congress and we're talking again about Schiff and those characters will be that even though we don't need a crime, we're in a situation where the prosecutor actually said that he couldn't say that a crime didn't happen here, and that's why I think it was really outrageous for the Special Counsel not to do the one thing that he was arguably needed to do which was render a prosecutorial judgement about whether there was obstruction or not.

He said that he wasn't in the business of making a traditional binary prosecutorial judgment. You know that quaint old-fashioned stuff where you say we either have enough evidence to charge or we don't. He instead decided -- well ...

CARLSON: But hold on, but isn't it demonstrable? I mean, if he had enough evidence to charge, wouldn't he have done so or said so?

MCCARTHY: Yes, implicitly that's right, but it's going to be -- see the real danger here Tucker is what he has done, Mueller by not saying that the fact that I am not bringing charges means I don't have a case is that he has basically undermined the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof.

The burden of proof is not on President Trump to show that he did not obstruct justice. It's on the prosecutor to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did and by not resolving that, he essentially signals to Congress that they still have a potential obstruction case and puts the burden on the President to try to prove that he's innocent, which is not the way it's supposed to work.

CARLSON: No, I mean we've gotten into such a third-world crazy land at this point. Andrew McCarthy, thank you for clarifying that. Appreciate it. Good to see you.

MCCARTHY: Thanks, Tucker.

CARLSON: Much more tonight on the Mueller report. This, we hope will be the last night we ever address anything related to Russia and the Russian hoax, certainly. But rather than honestly confronting its manifold failures, the press is denouncing the Attorney General as a liar. Trump's Baghdad Bob, Joseph Goebbels -- whatever. We'll tell you what they're saying. We'll tell you if it's true, after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARR: I'm not sure what your basis is for saying that I'm being generous to the President.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You face an unprecedented situation. It just seems like there's a lot of effort to say -- to go out of your way to acknowledge how --

BARR: Well, is there another precedent for it?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No, but it's something --

BARR: Okay, so unprecedented is inaccurate description, isn't it?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.

BARR: Okay.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Depending on how early you got up this morning, you could have heard the Attorney General denounced by the cable news mob as a lying propagandist before even said anything.

Now, the Mueller report is out and it has essentially vindicated what he wrote in a summary a month ago, but it doesn't matter. Congressman and presidential candidate, now, Eric Swalwell of California says that Barr must resign. The crowd demands its sacrifice.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. ERIC SWALWELL (D-CA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: You can be the Attorney General of the United States and represent all of us or you can represent Donald Trump. You can't do both and because Attorney General Barr wants to represent Donald Trump, I think he should resign.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Kimberley Strassel writes for "Wall Street Journal" editorial board and she joins us tonight. Kim, thanks a lot for coming on. How would you assess the response to the Attorney General's role in all of this?

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Well, look the reason that so many critics of Donald Trump are mad is because Bill Bar is actually for the first time in a long time, we have an Attorney General who is representing the United States and I would have to tell you, Tucker, I would be cringing right now to think about what things would look like if Bill Bar were not in town.

You know, for starters, he actually is requiring some accountability for those that may have started all of this. Something that didn't happen up until now, and in fact, they fought for years to make sure it didn't happen both by inspiring a Special Counsel probe and then getting Jeff Sessions to recuse himself.

But now, think about what actually happened today. The Attorney General has been talking about the fact that we do not convene grand juries and go down this road for the purpose of putting out innuendo and in fact, that's sort of what Mueller did today. He had his Jim Comey moment, right? Remember the infamous press conference in July 2016 where he berated Hillary Clinton, but didn't bring charges?

CARLSON: Very well.

STRASSEL: Well, that that's the second half of the Mueller report -- the collusion report. It is him admitting up front that he cannot bring charges against a sitting President, but then engaging in 200 pages of a mental exercise about what such a prosecution would look like.

Bill Barr was the grown-up and said, "Okay, but I'm making the decision, no obstruction charges are being brought.

CARLSON: So I mean, as a practical matter, moving forward, apart from what seems to be a remote possibility of impeachment, this is over. Or am I missing something?

STRASSEL: No, it's over and look, I think that that's the other thing that's highly disturbing about that second half of the Mueller report is you look at the beginning section of it and he actually says, look we're putting all of this out there because Congress still has the authority to act on this if they want.

He is basically saying, here's all your breadcrumbs in case you want to pursue impeachment. But you're absolutely correct. From a legal perspective, from a charging perspective, this is over. It's now in the political realm and Democrats are going to have to make the decision if they want to go down the road of trying to bring some sort of charges were even the Special Counsel after two years would not go.

CARLSON: It's hard to see them doing it, but we're going to ask one in just a minute. Kimberley Strassel, thanks very much. Great to see you.

STRASSEL: Thank you.

CARLSON: So imagine putting together an eight-person cable news panel where all eight people have exactly the same view. That's called CNN. Watch a panel where every single person is mad in the same way about the Attorney General of the United States. Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LAURA COATES, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: It was excessive and suspicious to be pounding the table and pounding over to American people's head.

This person spent an inordinate amount of time talking about -- I mean, the Oprah moment of the feelings of the President of the United States. He's got to be kidding me.

CARRIE CORDERO, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: I have to say, the Attorney General had an opportunity this morning to rise above the politics and he blew it. That was completely inappropriate for the Attorney General.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: And Jeffrey, why are you chuckling?

TOOBIN: Well, it's just -- if this isn't obstruction of justice, I'd like to see what is obstruction of justice.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Glenn Greenwald is co-founder at "The Intercept" and joins us tonight. Glenn, where is the diversity in general?

GLENN GREENWALD, CO-FOUNDER, "THE INTERCEPT": I mean, this is one of the problems I think that allowed the media to just go so far off the rails is that especially those two cable networks, but also even newspapers pretty much prohibited dissent from ever being heard, so they constantly fed each other these conspiracy theories and told each other that they were on the right track every time they advanced it further and never really had to confront anybody who questioned or challenged them in any way.

I've spent the last two years debating everyone I can find who had different views than I had on this whole saga because I wanted to make certain that the things I was saying were scrutinized and subjected to critical rigor and that's exactly what they avoided and that's the reason why they went so far off the rails.

Like I said the first time I saw you -- when I went to your show is when you had Adam Schiff on your set for 12 minutes and you and he went back and forth and debated. That's what those other networks have refused to do and that's why they're in such a bubble where they have no idea what's going on in the world.

CARLSON: So I think after today, the focus -- my focus would shift naturally to how do you fix this? I mean, you need a functioning media even if I don't agree with the people in it or don't like them or don't like who they vote for, you still need like adults covering news and keeping the powerful under a close eye. How do we fix this? They are so discredited and broken and unwilling to admit it. What do you do now with the American media?

GREENWALD: It's really interesting. I mean, after the Iraq War when the media helped the Bush administration convince the country to go to war based on false claims about the weapons program of Saddam Hussein, there was at least some self-reflection, some introspection, some journalistic assessment about mistakes that were made and attempts to reform. Here, I don't see any of that.

If you listen to the media discourse outside of a few circles, they've just put collusion and conspiracy and all of those conspiracy theories they've spent the last three years endorsing, just flushed it down the toilet like they don't even exist and just seamlessly shifted to obstruction and then they're conflating them to claim essentially that they were right all along and that is really the alarming thing.

I think that in a lot of ways, Donald Trump broke the brains of a lot of people particularly people in the media who believe that telling lies, inventing conspiracy theories, being journalistically reckless -- it's all justified to stop this unparalleled menace and that's a good thing for an activist to think and a really bad thing for a journalist to think.

CARLSON: So you don't sound hopeful that it can be repaired.

GREENWALD: Well, I mean, you were talking just now about impeachment. Already, Adam Schiff and Steny Hoyer have both said that they don't intend to pursue impeachment charges. They think that tells you all you need to know about their assessment of the political value here. They know that they've been discredited and so I think that if Democrats on the Hill know that this whole thing has collapsed as a hoax, hopefully the media allies of theirs will come to that same realization and start to have at least a little bit of shame about what they've done to their credibility and hopefully -- I'm hopeful that that will happen, though I don't necessarily think it's inevitable.

CARLSON: You never grow unless you're ashamed. I've never learned to anything except through failure and shame, and so I think that's a human truth, so I hope they do. Glenn Greenwald, thank you. You were right. You have nothing to be ashamed of in this case.

GREENWALD: Thanks, Tucker.

CARLSON: Thanks. Well, how are the candidates running for the Democratic nomination in 2020 reacting to the implosion of their conspiracy theory? Well, not well to say the least. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: The Democratic Party, you may have noticed is having a primary for the 20-20 election, but its candidates are focused on rerunning the election of 2016 and that means a lot of talk about Russia. Just like CNN, they opened the day by denouncing the Attorney General.

Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted this quote, "It's a disgrace to see an Attorney General acting as if he is the personal attorney and publicist for the President of the United States." Even before the Mueller report came out, they knew it wouldn't be enough.

Senator Amy Klobuchar tweeted this, quote, "We want to hear from Director Mueller himself." They're mad at him, I guess, too.

After the report dropped, before she could have plausibly read it, Kamala Harris issued her demands. She said, "Congress needs to see the full unredacted Mueller report and all of the investigation's underlying evidence and Special Counsel Robert Mueller must testify publicly before Congress." Wow, they're mad.

One Democrat though stood out, Mike Gravel of Alaska who was the United States senator during the Vietnam War, an older man tweeted this, quote, "While the press worries about palace intrigue and what an American idiot told a Russian idiot, rural communities across the country don't have clean water, a quasi-fascist militia harassed 300 migrants and 40 percent of people can't spend $400.00 in an emergency."

Guess which candidate has no shot of winning the nomination in the modern Democratic Party? The one who has tangible concerns about tangible things.

Dana Perino hosts the "Daily Briefing" with Dana Perino and she joins us tonight. Dana, will there be someone other than Mike Gravel who pivots off of this and says, you know, "The average person is not affected by Russia actually. This is all a sideshow. Here's my agenda."

DANA PERINO, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Well, they would be smart, too, right because right now, 2020 Democrats -- I think there are 24 of them, I think -- they're all in a pack, okay, and no one has been able to break out of that and they're a little bit beholden to whoever is in power in Congress right now, so at this point is Jerry Nadler.

And even though as your previous guest said, Steny Hoyer, the Minority Speaker or whatever the one below Speaker Pelosi, he's basically said, "We're not going to do impeachment." So they're trying to signal, "Everybody stand down." But none of the candidates today said that.

But imagine if one of them were to be able to say, "Stop, enough. Yes, we know that this happened. We have this report, but I want to win on the merits. I want to win in the Electoral College. I'm going to beat him on healthcare, on the economy, et cetera, you name it," and to be able to change the storyline a little bit and to be able to break away, it might be the way to do that.

Right now, all of them are fundraising off of the issue of Russia. But remember, every election that any American has ever voted for is not because of looking back. Americans always want to look forward. It's in our nature. That's why you had hope in change in 2008. It didn't really mean anything, but did it matter? So you can't really run on 2016 Russia collusion.

And besides, I do think you're going to see a strong scrutiny about -- all of the Russia collusion stuff was supposedly happening during President Obama's administration and it didn't end. And so there's going to be some accountability there.

If I were the Democrats, I would try to find a way to move on, but of course you know why we've got to move on. Remember that whole thing?

CARLSON: I do. I remember it. I was there. It was 1998 and it was an anti-impeachment organization started by the left that made some valid points and now of course, they're pushing impeachment on Trump.

PERINO: Right, how ironic.

CARLSON: It does sound like there's a profound misalignment between what Democratic donors want, the nine billionaires who fund the party and what Democratic voters want. So Tom Steyer is pushing impeachment, but like their average Democrats are like, "I just want you for healthcare."

PERINO: Well, not only that because we saw that last week in all of the polls that showed that the Democratic Party is not actually as progressive as Twitter would have you believe and you know, this week at "The Five," we got to leave New York. We got to go to Nashville, Tennessee. We were out and about for just a day. It was so refreshing and you realize that there's a reason that the numbers on Mueller, the investigation and Russia collusion et cetera, they've never changed. Despite all of this, nothing has changed in the way people look at it.

It is not high in their list of concerns. But it doesn't mean that you can't think of it as 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.

CARLSON: No.

PERINO: I'm really interested and I'm hoping to get to talk about the issues coming up.

CARLSON: Yes, I mean I'll just admit, from the first day I thought Russia was stupid, boring, ludicrous. I've never found it compelling at all. I don't understand why people do, but hopefully this is the last day we're talking about it. Dana Perino, thank you.

PERINO: Well, maybe like one more day tomorrow.

CARLSON: One more day, okay, one more day.

PERINO: Okay.

CARLSON: Good to see you.

PERINO: Bye.

CARLSON: Luis Miranda is a former DNC Communications Director. He believed that Donald Trump was an agent of Putin. He came on the show to say it. What does he believe now? Luis Miranda joins us tonight. Luis, thanks a lot for coming on.

LUIS MIRANDA, FORMER DNC COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR: Thanks, Tucker.

CARLSON: So now that the report is out and you're one of the people who said that you thought that he was an agent of Putin, do you still think that he colluded? Do you still think that?

MIRANDA: Well, the last time I was here, I made very clear that I think that he plays up to dictators around the world not just Putin in a way that's really ugly and that doesn't make any sense for America to be standing on a stage deferring to Vladimir Putin instead of to your own intelligence agencies.

CARLSON: Well, I mean, it depends. I mean our Intel agencies are not that impressive sometimes. I mean, they missed the fall of the Soviet Union. They missed 9/11. I mean, I don't -- we don't have to worship our own Intel agencies actually.

MIRANDA: Neither are these dictators. We also don't have to worship foreign dictators.

CARLSON: No, we don't. But some of them we make common cause with. Roosevelt made a common cause with Stalin. That's how we won the Second World War. We are very close to a bunch of dictators around the world because it helps our interest. So demoralizing is a little dumb, I would say. But the question is, is Trump an agent of Putin? That was your claim, do you still think it?

MIRANDA: I think that one of the problems that you see with the Mueller report is that there were a lot of contacts with the Russians and that what Attorney General Barr presented doesn't line up with the actual text of the Mueller report. That made it very clear that all of the extensive contacts that people in the campaign had with the Russians, that they had with WikiLeaks, and even in his own comments, Barr walked right up to the line pointing out that while the campaign talked to WikiLeaks, it appears to have even coordinated with them because WikiLeaks didn't itself carry out the hack. That's why there was no crime on the collusion side.

CARLSON: Okay, so this is --

MIRANDA: However --

CARLSON: Wait, now I'm starting to feel sad, I'm starting to feel a little pity because this is obviously demented and maybe you'll feel that maybe your head will clear in a couple of days, but I'm just wondering, can you win on that? Do people -- does anybody care?

MIRANDA: I don't think it matters at this point. To be honest, this is part of what we need to do to restore trust and faith in the American democracy is to stop acting just looking at the next election and that's been plaguing our democracy for years and so --

CARLSON: But if you accuse someone of treason and it turns out he didn't commit it, shouldn't you apologize to restore our faith?

MIRANDA: He walked right up to the line of coordinating with the Russians and with WikiLeaks ...

CARLSON: I don't think anybody said --

MIRANDA: ... and on obstruction of justice, Robert Mueller makes a very compelling case that there was in fact obstruction. What he argues is that he, because of the OLC memo does not have the authority to indict.

CARLSON: I got it.

MIRANDA: And as a result, it is something that Congress has to take up. Now, you have --

CARLSON: But Democratic office holders accused the President of quote, "treason." Shouldn't they apologize for that? Treason. Treason -- that's what they said. Treason.

MIRANDA: I think that anyone who collaborates with WikiLeaks and with the Russians to try to manipulate an election or to be supportive of them, there were moments in which the Mueller report shows ...

CARLSON: Okay, if we can't even admit that.

MIRANDA: ... that Donald Trump publicly called for go find Hillary Clinton's e-mails and right away the Russians deployed ...

CARLSON: This was a joke in a middle of a freaking campaign --

MIRANDA: ... a dozen attempts to try to attack the Hillary Clinton e- mails.

CARLSON: It's time for a vacation.

MIRANDA: The other thing is, the report has a lot in there.

CARLSON: A lot of treason. Okay, Luis, thank you very much.

MIRANDA: Thanks, Tucker.

CARLSON: Good to see you. Well, the investigation is over, will we investigate how we got the investigation in the first place? A recent report says that the DOJ's Inspector General is preparing to present his findings on that question. How will those findings reflect on the former British intelligence agent and Trump dossier author, Christopher Steele? Are other investigations needed?

Francey Hakes is a former DOJ official and she joins us tonight. Francey, thanks very much for coming on. Are we going to find out how we got to this in the first place?

FRANCEY HAKES, FORMER DOJ OFFICIAL: I hope so, Tucker. I sincerely hope so. I think our democracy needs it. I listened to your last guest refuse to apologize for calling the President of the United States a traitor, which is what many, many people did. They certainly owe him an apology.

But more important than any apology, which he's never going to get from people like that, more importantly than that, we need to find out what happened.

You're talking about a small cabal of people who used the levers of American power, who used the covert surveillance power of this country against American citizens and it looks very much like they did so based purely on partisan animus and that concerns me as a former prosecutor.

I love the Department of Justice. I respect the FBI deeply. I'm proud of the time I served at the Department of Justice, but I'm very worried about what a few people, by the way, whose names we still don't know yet. The prosecutors who signed those FISA warrants against Carter Page and the renewals. Who are they?

CARLSON: How could we have secret hearings in a democracy? I know this is all Patriot Act 9/11 insanity, but why do we continue to have secret proceedings in a free country?

HAKES: Well, I can say having done FISA warrants myself and having practiced in front of that secret court that there are reasons for that. There's classified information. There's reasons we can't let the American public know that we are -- I can't use real examples -- that we are, well, I'll use an example everyone knows. That is we were clearly intercepting the Russian Ambassador's calls and that's how we knew what Mike Flynn was saying to him. That's been made public.

So we can't tell the public that. We can't tell our enemies that. We can't tell the targets of the warrant.

CARLSON: I don't think we should spy on Americans secretly and authorize that in some secret forum. I just think -- you know, if it's our country, then it's our country. It doesn't belong to some creepy bureaucrat.

HAKES: No, but that's why the FISA Act requires more than just you think they're an agent of a foreign power for an American citizen. You have to also show they're committing a crime.

CARLSON: No, that's right and they never did with a bunch of these.

HAKES: They alleged it, but they never showed it.

CARLSON: Francey Hakes, thank you very much.

HAKES: Thanks, Tucker.

CARLSON: Good to see you. Well, it turns out that virtually everyone in Washington was completely wrong about Russia embarrassingly. How did that happen and how can they start to get things right for the sake of our country? J.D. Vance and Mark Steyn straight ahead on that question.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CARLSON: Remember the kid who sat in the front row of your eighth grade class go like this, "Oh, whoa. Call on me. Call on me." He lives in Washington now and so does everybody like him from every eighth grade class in America. They all live in Washington. They're the smartest people in the world and they were all totally convinced that Donald Trump was a quisling, a traitor. He sold out America to serve Vladimir Putin, and they were all ludicrously wrong just like they've been wrong about everything -- the border, Libya, the whole country in 2016.

The smart people turn out to be dumb. Why is that? Is there something wrong with our system? J.D. Vance has thought a lot about this. He's the author of a terrific book, "Hillbilly Elegy," and he joins us tonight. J.D., thanks a lot for coming on. This is a much broader question and maybe it requires more than five minutes to answer, but why do you the most impressive people in our society keep turning out to be not impressive at all?

J.D. VANCE, AUTHOR, "HILLBILLY ELEGY": Yes, it's a really important question, Tucker and just to give some context to this, if you think about the past 20 or so years of American history, in the late 90s, everybody knew that free trade with China would make our country more prosperous. It would make the Chinese more democratic. In 2003, everybody knew that Iraq had WMDs. In 2007, everybody knew that our economy was solid and that there wasn't a financial crisis on the horizon and of course, as you mentioned in 2016, everybody knew that Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump in the election.

And the problem is, people don't know and so I think that it does suggest something much deeper and much more systemic about the way elites create and then enforce conventional wisdom.

You know, I'm wrong all the time. I'm sure that you make mistakes, but there's a difference between making mistakes and being wrong about something and then being wrong, but offering no contrition, no reflection on why you were wrong and importantly, facing no consequences.

So part of the answer to your question, why do these people so consistently keep being wrong is that there's no consequences when they're wrong.

CARLSON: That's right.

VANCE: The same people who are on TV. They're collecting fat paychecks for saying the same things even when they are consistently wrong about the big issues.

CARLSON: The system doesn't police itself and there's something with the way that we create our leadership class that isn't working, so if we lost every engagement we were in as in the military -- the U.S. military lost every engagement. We would say, we need to take a hard look at the service academies. They're not producing the right kind of leaders, but we're not taking a hard look at ineffective service academies for our financial and cultural leaders, why aren't we?

VANCE: Yes, well, I think the reason of course is that the people who support those academies as you call them are the people who call the shots, so there is a self-policing mechanism that's really, really not working here.

You know, when I think about this, I think that this fundamentally operates through social networks. You know, you work your entire life, if you're one of those front row kids who is always raising his or her hand, you make it to Harvard, you make it to Yale, you make it to Stanford and once you get there, you find that you're rewarded for saying certain things and saying them in a particular way. These institutions tend to turn people into automatons and that's how you make it through them, that's how you ultimately succeed.

And of course, if you succeed, then you go on to elite law schools, you go on to work at McKenzie or Goldman Sachs. So there's just a real reward for being part of this system and working the system successfully.

The problem, of course, is not the people who are part of the system and are succeeding in it. The problem is for the people and the rest of the country who are supposed to be served by their conventional wisdom. If you look at our society, you've got people who serve in the military, people who work and pay their taxes, people who raise families and they all have a job in our society. They all have a role in our social compact.

Well, the role of our elites fundamentally is to be right about some of the big issues to make sure that we stay ahead of some of these critical questions that preserve our leadership positions that make it so that the Chinese don't catch us and ultimately overtake us and they're so consistently wrong and until they face consequences, I don't think anything's going to change. That can only be done ultimately through democracy, I think, but luckily, we still get to vote.

CARLSON: No, you're right. Dad is an alcoholic. The family is out of control. I mean that's basically what's happening. J.D. Vance, one of the smartest. Thank you. It's been a remarkable day. We'd like to wrap it up with a bow. Only one man can do that, you know who he is, Mark Steyn. And we're happy to have him join us right now. Mark Steyn, you've watched the whole expanse -- two and a half years of this. What's your conclusion?

MARK STEYN, AUTHOR AND COLUMNIST: Well, actually to be honest, the most startling thing on this show tonight, Tucker is that "New York Times" reporters are so stupid they think that "Edelweiss" from "The Sound of Music" is a Nazi song.

If you believe that which you mentioned about 58 minutes ago. If you know, if you just float around in the flotsam and jetsam of the shallows of your own myopia long enough, then the whole Russia collusion thing makes sense.

To me, this report is fascinating. It's written in a kind of pseudo legalese way. They've thrown everything in there, although they don't have a theory of the case, so hookers in a Moscow hotel and Trump wanting to build a building there were all somehow part of a grand theory of the case they never explained.

And the most revealing thing to me is on Page 1 of the report, we all want to know how this thing got started and they claim it is George Papadopoulos being fingered by my old pal, Alexander Downer, the Australian High Commissioner to the U.K. I've known him on and off for 15 years.

The fact is, to put it in Andy McCarthy terms, not only do they not have anything beyond a reasonable doubt, not only does it not meet the civil standard of a preponderance of the evidence, they had no probable cause for launching this thing.

CARLSON: Exactly.

STEYN: And that ought to disturb every single -- they have a nobody. George Papadopoulos having a setup drink in a London wine bar and on the basis of that, they destroy Carter Page's life, George Papadopoulos' life. This is disgraceful and the idea of the government investigating its political opposition, that's Venezuela. If it moves to Washington, we're all in big trouble.

CARLSON: Totally wrecks an entire term of the presidency and overturn the will of voters that you're absolutely right.

STEYN: Yes, absolutely.

CARLSON: On a pretext that was false.

STEYN: You were dead on right about that, Tucker.

CARLSON: It's so depressing that I'm hoping we can ignore it forever after because it's -- bumming me right now, Mark Steyn. Great to see you tonight. And thank you for that summation.

STEYN: A real deal we need to borrow, Tucker. Thanks a lot.

CARLSON: As always, great to see you. Thank you. Out of time tonight. We'll be back tomorrow night 8:00 p.m. A brand new world without Russia. This will still and will always be the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink. So we will see you in our post-Russia world tomorrow night. But in the meantime, we're going to bring you over to New York City, Sean Hannity.

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