Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) to the newsmaker line to give his analysis of the Durham report indicating Hillary Clinton’s campaign spied on sitting president Donald Trump. Towards the end of the segment, Hagerty gave an analysis of the tensions between Russia and Ukraine.
Leahy: We are joined now on our newsmaker line by United States senator from Tennessee, Bill Hagerty, a friend of the program. Welcome. Senator Hagerty.
Hagerty: Good morning to you, Mike.
Leahy: I have to say this. You are the most punctual man in America. You always call at 7:30 on the dot. And, I mean, I don’t know how you manage that with all the things you’ve got going on.
Hagerty: Managing four children, I think, teaches a parent to keep everything running on schedule. And I’ve got a great wife that keeps it moving, too.
Leahy: Fantastic. So, big news in Washington, the Durham report. Special Counsel Durham, looking into the Russia hoax, filed court documents on Friday that, in essence, implicated the Clinton campaign and possibly spying on the Trump campaign and on the Trump administration during the first few months of that. What’s your reaction to that? Where does this lead?
Hagerty: I think it’s just shocking. This is well beyond Watergate. When you think of what’s happened here, it basically says that a political active like Hillary Clinton can spy on the White House, the most secure complex in the world. If she can do it, what does that say to her adversaries?
What message does that give to Putin and Russia or to the Chinese? The fact that they had political actors abusing their authority and power going into the White House is terrible.
On a personal basis, I was in Trump Tower with President Trump during the transition period when we were being spied on. The notion that they were in there doing that, collecting information on us, trying to create a ‘narrative,’ as they said, of a Russia hoax that they wanted to use to somehow undermine our viability as an administration was absolutely terrible. But I saw it with Barack Obama.
Obama certainly had the intelligence that Russia was doing whatever they were doing. He didn’t mention it when he thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win. But after Donald Trump won, that’s when he basically makes the move to make Russian diplomats depart the country.
Remember, he ejected a number of Russian diplomats. He made this false claim of Russian inclusion. He was looking at the same information that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was uncovering, I must presume.
And he was doing all of this as a concerted effort, obviously, with the Hillary campaign to try to undermine and undercut the credibility of Donald Trump and to turn the public sentiment against him and make him a not-credible president.
Leahy: Senator Hagerty, Crom Carmichael is in-studio and he has a question for you.
Carmichael: Senator, when you were in on the transition team in Trump Tower, do you think they were actually listening in on your conversations?
Hagerty: It’s hard to know. The information that we got from the Durham report is that they were tapped into our servers and we had computers there.
Were they tracking our email traffic? Were they somehow listening to telephone conversations? We don’t have enough data at this point yet to know the spying at any level. It’s so beyond the pale.
Carmichael: Do you think Durham, with the track that he’s on, do you think he’ll be able to get to the bottom of these questions?
Hagerty: We certainly will. If the Democrats won’t do it by the time November comes around and we take control of the House and Senate, I think we’ll have a much greater ability because we’ll have oversight authority then to come in and find out much more about what’s happened here.
But the inference here that the Clinton campaign would be able to spy on us, to spy on our information, to continue that even into the White House, I think that’s the most offensive aspect of this, Crom.
That they actually carried this over into a sitting president. Now it’s not President-elect Trump, it’s President Trump. And they’re spying on him and, again, trying to create information that would be undermining his authority. This is, as I say, well beyond Watergate. People are going to have to answer for this, and in a very serious way.
Leahy: Senator Hagerty, our friend at Just the News, John Solomon, has this latest report headline: “Durham Revelations Put Biden’s National Security Adviser in Uneasy Light.”
Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser for Joe Biden, testified in 2017 it was “absurd to suggest the Clinton campaign spread fake Russian information.” But court evidence says otherwise. Can Jake Sullivan effectively serve as national security adviser with these court documents?
Hagerty: John Solomon does a great job with his research, and this is a revelation that shouldn’t be hard for us to imagine, since Sullivan was deeply involved in the Clinton campaign and was a communications person – it’s interesting, they put a person with communications expertise in charge of the National Security Council right now because it’s all about the narrative with these folks. You look at what trouble they’ve got America into ever since the Biden team took over.
We have a terrible situation happening with Russia and Ukraine right now. They’ve created a disaster with Iran. There’s no productive discussion coming out of the meetings in Vienna. They’ve got China in a much worse posture vis-á-vis Taiwan.
North Korea’s ramped back up again. And most embarrassing of all, the complete collapse and surrender there in Afghanistan. So, Jake Sullivan, I think, would be warranted to step down just based on that.
But now the evidence is turning back in his direction. If he actually had a hand in the spying that was taking place, when at all costs, I think, is their mantra, this looks very damning.
And I think, again, Durham needs to step it up. We need to get more daylight into what’s happened here. But I think that it looks very bad for our national security.
Leahy: Senator Hagerty, let’s ask this very specific question about National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. In light of these new revelations from Special Counsel Durham, are you calling today for National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to resign?
Hagerty: No, I’m not doing that because I haven’t gone through the revelations yet. But I think this is something I want to take a very hard look at. And what you’re asking is a very relevant question, and that is whether we should.
But I think, as I said before, just based on performance, before this illicit activity came to the surface, based on performance, America is in the worst spot we’ve seen in our lifetime from a national security standpoint, and nobody is taking responsibility for it.
I observed many months ago that after Afghanistan fell; you had the British foreign minister step down to take responsibility. You had the Dutch foreign minister step down to take responsibility for Afghanistan.
The only person that’s been held responsible for Afghanistan here is a Marine Lieutenant Colonel who suggested that somebody at the top should be responsible. He was thrown in the brig.
None of the leaders of this debacle in Afghanistan have taken responsibility for it yet. I think that is something that America has noticed and has been extremely disappointed.
Leahy: Senator Hagerty, you served as ambassador to Japan under President Donald Trump. You know a lot about high-level foreign diplomacy. I’m trying to understand what actually is going on in Ukraine and with Russia.
It seems to me a little bit like the Biden administration is almost trying to, I don’t know, rev up the possibility of a Russian invasion. It seems a little odd. What’s your take on that? How far off am I in that view from 30,000 feet?
Hagerty: I’m going to give you two aspects. One is context. If you look at what’s happened, it’s been months that this has been going on, that you’ve seen Vladimir Putin step things up in the Ukraine area.
What’s led to this begins back in January of 2021. That’s when Biden took office. The first thing he did was wage war on the oil and gas industry, driving prices immediately through the roof. In the energy sector, Russia is the number two producer of energy in the world.
What he did was immediately create a windfall for Vladimir Putin that has been used to fund all types of malign activity. Then look specifically at the relationship he’s had with Joe Biden, Putin’s been dealt with a face card in every negotiation with Joe Biden, whether it was the extension of the SALT Treaty that was basically held back by the Trump administration so that Trump could get more of Russia’s nuclear arsenal under the tent in this agreement to make it more effective.
Biden came in and gave him a five-year extension and got nothing for it. Then I think it was terrible when we found out that Russian hackers attacked our own colonial pipeline, which caused gas prices to spike yet again in America. What did we do to Vladimir Putin?
What do we do to the Russians for that? Absolutely nothing. What happened was Joe Biden took a list of 16 industries that he identified as critical industries in America and asked Vladimir Putin not to attack them.
I wonder, did he look down that list and say, “Well, gee, I haven’t even thought about number 15 – let’s put that on our attack list, too.” What does it say about the other industries that weren’t on the list?
And probably the most difficult is the fact that Congress sanctioned the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. We had a congressionally mandated sanction. Biden came in and waived that, and in doing so, he’s made Ukraine much more vulnerable and he’s put Putin in a position, now they’ve completed that pipeline, he’s put Putin in a position to control the flow of energy now into Western Europe.
So Putin’s been dealt with a face card at every turn. And then back to Afghanistan, witnessing our feckless behavior there and our withdrawal there, the fact that we didn’t stand up, I think that it just emboldened Putin to step forward now and say this is the window to do what I want to do. What about Biden’s messaging right now? That’s the other part of the question.
Why would Biden be suggesting that Putin is going to invade now? I think that they’re very concerned that Putin is going to try to create subterfuge within Ukraine. He’s going to try to create a pretext through misinformation that he has had to step in to protect Russian interest in Ukraine.
I think Biden has also seen Ukrainian President Zelensky do the same thing. They’re getting out ahead of this and they’re predicting that Putin is going to invade.
I think they’re trying to put a hole in that story that Putin is stepping in to save the interest of Russia and Russian-speaking people in Ukraine. They’re trying to make that story not work right now.
Leahy: Senator Bill Hagerty, how illuminating that is. That is an outstanding analysis of the Biden administration’s failures in foreign policy. Thanks so much for joining us. Next time you’re in Nashville, please come in the studio with us.
Hagerty: I look forward to it. All the best.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Tell Haggerty and Blackburn to risk their own lives over there, not the lives of our soldiers and young people just so these warmongers can brag to their pals about how tough they are!