Jerry Dunleavy
Appearances
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
That is a great question, Vince. So, Part of the problem here is that President Trump sought to declassify a lot of these records near the end of his presidency, his first term, back in January of 2021. And he was thwarted by his own Justice Department and FBI at the last minute. So that effort to declassify these crossfire hurricane records was blocked by his own DOJ. And then, of course, you
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
Then, of course, you had four years of the Biden DOJ.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
Look, I think that some DOJ and FBI officials took advantage of the fact that that it was the final moments of Trump's first term. They took advantage of that fact to throw up some last minute roadblocks to make sure these documents four years ago.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
Yeah, so Trump made his declassification order again last month, essentially saying, you know, that thing I tried to do January 19th, January 20th, 2021. Kash Patel, the new director of the FBI, handed those documents over to Congress, the House Judiciary Committee and others. And we at Just the News got our hands on those documents pretty quickly.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
And then we made them public ourselves so that everybody can read them.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
So one thing that I will say is that we did learn some new information. However, some things are still redacted that I think probably shouldn't be. That being said, we did learn some new interesting facts here. Stefan Halper, who was one of the FBI's confidential human sources, whom the FBI used to go after the Trump campaign in 2016.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
So everybody knows about Christopher Steele and the Steele dossier and how the FBI used that baseless nonsense to target the Trump campaign to obtain FISA warrants and even used it in the intelligence community assessment on Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Not many people know about Stefan Halper. So he was an FBI confidential human source.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
And the FBI used him in 2016 to, they wired him up to approach members of the Trump campaign to try to get them to say something that the FBI could then use to advance their investigations.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
But one of the things that we learned here is that Stefan Helper, when he met with the FBI, made some allegations about Mike Flynn and an event that Flynn had been at back in 2014 when he was Obama's director of the DIA. Yes. And Halper basically made these claims that Mike Flynn left this meeting with, you know, someone maybe connected to the Russians. Yes. All this stuff.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
So we have new information about how there was no evidence of that. The FBI knew there was no evidence of that. However, the FBI used that as part of their justification to investigate Mike Flynn. Now, this investigation of Mike Flynn never turned up anything. One of the FBI agents leading the investigation of Mike Flynn said there's nothing to any of this. And yet the FBI kept this going.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
In fact, Peter Strzok stopped the Flynn investigation from closing right at the last second. So that the FBI could then go and interview him for a perjury trap early in the Trump administration. But what we learned now about the FBI's review of Stefan Halper is that in 2017, after all of this nonsense and all of this stuff on Flynn came up short, the FBI did a validation review.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
Stefan Halper as a confidential human source and recommended that he continue being used. That Stefan Halper is great. He's a great source. He's given us incredible information. Despite the fact that he found nothing, the FBI recommended continuing to use him.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
We also found buried in these documents that the FBI over decades gave this guy $1.2 million, including close to $100,000 in this relevant time period, this 2016 and early 2017 time.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
Yes, Mike Flynn had become quite unpopular during the Obama admin because of problems he saw inside of the IC. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, look, these claims that Stefan Helper made, basically what the FBI was doing was looking for any thin reed that they could to open up investigations on people until they could maybe get something. And that's...
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
This claim from Stefan Halper was one of the very thin reads that the FBI used. And the FBI agents who were looking into this, one of them was an FBI agent named William Barnett. And he looked into this, concluded there's no there there. He can't.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
all this, uh, pollution clue, uh, and said that there was sort of a get Trump operation within, within the FBI to the stuff on Flynn, but they kept the investigation on Flynn open long enough. And then as you know, Comey kind of, uh, sort of, generated this surprise interview of Flynn early in the Trump admin that they essentially used as a, you know, a perjury trap.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
They were thinking about going after the Logan. Yes, they tried to perjury trap him. And and as as as information later came out, it even turned out that that some of the stuff that they were claiming that Flynn had had said and therefore lied about actually really said that. And so, you know, this was all just sort of an effort to use whatever they were throwing against the wall.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
Yeah. So the Steele dossier, for which they never were able to corroborate anything of substance, from it. I mean the deep. The only information in the dossier that had anything factual about it was stuff that Steele clearly just pulled from public sources.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
Right. Correct. It was full of massive problems just on a cursory read of it. And the FBI was never able to substantiate a single actual substantive thing. These claims that he was making of conspiracy between Trump and the Russians. There was no there was no there was nothing to it.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
The FBI knew it at the time when they got the dossier, as they deployed the dossier to use in FISA warrants, as they continued to use the dossier into 2017, as they brought on Steele's main source, Igor Danchenko, and kept him on for years and paid him huge sums of money.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
And they knew it when Comey tried to use the dossier in the intelligence community assessment of Russia's alleged meddling in the 2016 election. Comey wanted to put the dossier in the body of this intelligence community assessment. He got pushback from NSA Director Mike Rogers, and the compromise that they came to was including the dossier in an annex to the Intelligence Community Assessment.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
Now, another thing about Mike Rogers that we found in these documents is we found the interview that Mike Rogers did with Mueller's team. And something key about that is he was asked directly about a Washington Post story from May 2017, a Washington Post story that was among the Washington Post stories that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
A Pulitzer Prize, by the way, that Trump is suing the Pulitzer board for defamation over. Mike Rogers is asked about that Washington Post story a month after the Washington Post story was published. And Mike Rogers says that it was bunk. And Mike Rogers would know because this was a story that was about a phone call that Trump had with Rogers.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
And Rogers basically said this entire, the crux of this story about what Trump told me, about what Trump told me to do, the story is not true. And so that's a Pulitzer Prize winning story that we now know the main subject of, shot down.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
I agree. I think that I think that Admiral Rogers has more to share and maybe I mean, hopefully one day he he does. One thing that I will note about about him is so he pushed back on including the dossier in the intelligence community assessment. He shot down this Trump Russia collusion, Washington Post story, this Pulitzer Prize winning story.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
And one thing that he also did to the intelligence community assessment that came out in January 2017, about 2016, the Russian Russia's alleged meddling in that election.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
A series of conclusions about what the what the intelligence community believed the Russians had done. And one of the conclusions that the other intelligence agencies came to was that they were. very certain about why Putin had done what he did and that he did it because he wanted Trump to win. But the NSA under Mike Rogers was not as certain about that.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
They diverged from the rest of the IC, from John Brennan and from James Comey. The NSA was not as certain about why Putin had done some of the things that he had done in 2016. And I think that that actually makes sense when you look at
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
all of this stuff together, you look at the potential that the Steele dossier was not just a sort of a democratic playbook, but also had Russian disinformation injected into it to hurt Trump. Funded by Hillary Clinton. And potentially there have been a lot of revelations about the potential that Russian disinformation may have also been injected into the dossier.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
I mean, Chris Steele was working for a, you know, a Russian oligarch at the exact same time as he was putting the dossier together. And so, yeah, Admiral Rogers and the NSA, they were not they were not as certain about sort of Putin's intentions in 2016 as the rest of the idea.
The Dan Bongino Show
Another Assassination Attempt? | Episode 21
Good to talk to you and congrats on the show, Vince. We're all very excited.