Ed Klein, author and former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow for a full hour on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about his new book, All Out War: The Plot to Destroy Trump.
Klein said, “We’ve never seen anything like” the effort to destroy Trump’s presidency.
“Historians will tell you that maybe the Jefferson-Adams presidential election back in the early, early eighteenth century might be as dirty as what’s going on now, but in our memory, there’s been nothing like it. Even the Watergate episode and the anti-Nixon hurricane that came from the press is nothing like what Donald Trump is facing,” he said.
“The reason I think that is the case is that Donald Trump is getting attacked from all sides, not just from the so-called ‘loyal opposition,’ the Democrats,” he postulated. “He’s also getting attacked from many Republicans, as you know, and the media simultaneously. And then there is this underground operation that’s taking place throughout the country, fueled by former Obama and Clinton advisers and hangers-on. He’s getting it from all sides, and it’s been dirty, and it’s been disrespectful of the office of the presidency as well as of the president himself.”
Klein said All Out War includes “a secret FBI report that I’ve reproduced in full – it’s never been seen before – in which FBI agents infiltrated, undercover meetings of the Deep State in church basements in Washington, DC, and reported to the director of the FBI.”
“What they saw were these rogue elements in the federal bureaucracy meeting in these church basements and being instructed by union organizers and community organizers and other left-wing groups in how to obstruct the president’s agenda – by, for instance, losing files on purpose, deleting files from their computer, slow-walking regulations, leaking to the press, and doing everything they can to bollox up, obstruct, and reverse the orders that are coming down from the executive branch to do what they’re actually paid to do. They’re doing just the opposite,” Klein charged.
Another topic covered in Klein’s book is “unmasking,” which he described as a key element in the plot to destroy Trump, which began during his candidacy.
“I begin this new book by describing a dinner that took place on December 16, 2016, about six weeks after Donald Trump won the election, but, of course, before he was inaugurated – a dinner in the family quarters of the White House attended by Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, their consigliere, their guru Valerie Jarrett, who is always there, a couple of guests, one of whom was my source. And they invited Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser to come and make a proposal,” Klein recounted.
“Her proposal was to unmask, meaning to reveal the names of Donald Trump aides who had been inadvertently picked up in electronic intercepts by the National Security Agency,” he continued. “Now, these names by law are supposed to be redacted, blacked out, hidden from view because the Americans are not the object of these intercepts. It’s the foreigners who are the objects. The Americans are supposed to be protected, but if you get a court order, then you can unmask or reveal these names.”
“That’s what Susan Rice asked the president to agree to, to not only unmask these names so they are public, but then to distribute them on a lower classification level to hundreds, if not thousands, of members of the intelligence community – as you know, there are 16 or 17 different agencies in the intelligence community – with the purpose of making sure that, inevitably, these names would be leaked to the mainstream media,” he charged.
“The president, Obama, agreed to this. It happened. That is the beginning, really, of this fairytale story – I call it a fairytale because it’s untrue – that there was some kind of collusion between the Trump people and Trump himself and the Russians. That is where the plot originated,” said Klein.
Klein said there was a “huge amount of resistance in the establishment Republican Party to Donald Trump when he was running in the primaries,” which led to the initial contact between a Republican donor and the now-infamous opposition research firm Fusion GPS, beginning a process that culminated in what Marlow colorfully referred to as the “pee pee dossier” of gossip compiled in Russia by former British spy Christopher Steele.
As Klein recounted, Fusion GPS approached the Clinton campaign after Trump won the GOP primary and Republican sponsorship for its work was withdrawn. Among the worst aspects of the dossier story, in Klein’s view, is that “Hillary Clinton knew about this, approved it, gave her stamp of approval to it personally, and understood that the cost of this dossier was going to be hidden from the federal agency that monitors campaign financing.”
“Instead of admitting that they used money in their campaign to dig up dirt in Russia, they laundered this money by sending the money to their law firm, which, in turn, then paid for it,” he said. “Not only is there disinformation about Donald Trump, but there’s illegality in the very process of having put together this dossier.”
Klein accused the mainstream media of giving President Obama a pass “time and time and time again” on stories that would make his White House look bad, most especially when it came to his unusually powerful adviser Valerie Jarrett.
“To what degree was the Obama administration not really run solely by the elected President of the United States, Barack Obama, but run by what I would call a triumvirate of Obama, Michelle Obama, and Valerie Jarrett?” he asked.
“When I say this, people in the mainstream media roll their eyes and say, ‘Oh, there he goes again.’ But the fact of the matter is, even Hillary Clinton – who, of course, you don’t point to very often as the source of truth and righteousness – will admit that when she talked to Obama and made a proposal about, let’s say, she had a plan for an agenda in Asia, and Obama would nod and nod, and she would say, ‘Well, here’s what I think we ought to do, Mr. President’ – they met once a week for lunch, Hillary and Obama – and he would say, ‘Okay, that’s great. Let’s do it.’”
“Then evening came. He would go upstairs to the family quarters, but he wouldn’t be the only one in the West Wing who went upstairs,” Klein continued. “Valerie Jarrett, who was a senior adviser and was feared throughout the entire administration because of her closeness to Michelle, she would also go upstairs to the family quarters and have dinner with them every single night.”
“And then after dinner, Barack Obama would go off to his study in the family quarters and watch either ESPN basketball or football games or play video games like a teenager. And Michelle and Valerie Jarrett would open a bottle of wine – and this, I have it on very good sources that that’s what they did – and they would talk about policy, personnel, decision-making, foreign policy, etc. The next morning, lo and behold, Barack Obama would go downstairs to the Oval Office and tell Hillary Clinton either personally or by phone that he had changed his mind. And the reason he had changed his mind is because those two women, Michelle and Valerie Jarrett, changed his mind,” he said.
“So this was not an administration that was really run by the President of the United States at all. And yet if you look in the clips, as we used to call them – of course they’re no longer physical clips, but they are digital clips – you Google Valerie Jarrett, you’re not going to find the truth about how hugely important she was in shaping that administration,” Klein asserted.
Marlow asked if Klein saw a political future for Michelle Obama.
“There was a moment in which she was toying, Michelle was toying, with the idea of running for an open Senate seat, if it came open in Illinois, where, of course, she came from. She came from Chicago, as we all know,” Klein replied. “She decided not to. According to my sources in the Obama inner circles, she has absolutely no interest in running for public office for a lot of reasons.”
“One is that they’re very rich now,” he noted. “They’ve just gotten a $65 million advance from Simon and Schuster to write books, the former president and Michelle. She wants to travel with Valerie Jarrett. She loves giving speeches because she’s wildly popular among the Democratic base.”
“But most important of all, Michelle Obama for all her toughness, and she is – this is not necessarily a bad thing – a tough woman. She’s a tough person – has very thin skin as well. She does not want to put herself out there on the political hustings, running for office, and face the avalanche of criticism that will come her way,” he said.
Klein said the Democratic leadership believes their party should not be “concentrating on nullifying the election and trying to impeach Donald Trump” because impeachment could not move forward while Republicans control the House of Representatives, and they do not want to invest time, energy, and funding in a political daydream. He warned that calculus might change if the Democrats do well in the 2018 midterm elections.
“Those who are in favor of impeaching the president or getting rid of him somehow are getting a lot of support from people like George Soros and Tom Steyer, the environmentalist, who is now spending $20 million of his own money so far on TV ads specifically asking for people to join a petition to impeach the president,” Klein observed.
“So there’s a split in the Democratic Party about this. However, whether the establishment, like Pelosi or Schumer, like it or not, the base of the party is absolutely, insanely, obsessively focusing on deposing this president. We know it’s true because there are organizations like, for instance, Indivisible – which your listeners may or may not have heard of, an online organization that has 6,000 chapters throughout the United States purposely focused on doing this very thing,” he pointed out.
“So the base of the party has no interest other than saying, ‘No, no, no to Donald Trump. Let’s get rid of him,’ whereas it’s not realistic. However, if they win the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, if the Democrats take over the House, there’s no question in my mind – or anyone’s mind, for that matter – that one of the first things they do will be to try and impeach Donald Trump,” Klein warned.
Klein agreed with Marlow’s assessment that some elements of the left-wing “Resistance” are willing to use violence, but those who warn of potential political violence in the next few election cycles are dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.” He cited an FBI report quoted in his book that concerned “violent cells hidden with the protection of the academic community throughout the United States.”
“Some of these violent groups, mostly from the Oakland area, have traveled to Europe as recently as the past summer, during the G20 industrialized nations summit meeting, taken part in violent protests in Hamburg, Germany, and then met with representatives from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda,” he charged. “Some went to Syria, met with jihadists who taught bomb-making instructions, toxic chemical use, and then returned to the United States.”
“According to the FBI – this is not you, me, but this is the FBI – they flatly state to the director of the FBI, this is the greatest threat to law enforcement since the 1970s and the Weather Underground – which, of course, set off bombs and murdered people,” he cautioned.
“It was Henry Kissinger – I don’t know how you feel about Henry Kissinger, but certainly you have to say, at least, that the man was brilliant in many ways – it was he who pointed out during the Vietnam War experience, when we had students rioting all over the United States, was that his great fear was that this is going to take hold, and the United States was going to descend into this kind of low-grade civil war,” Klein recalled.
“I think there has been nothing like that since the Vietnam War, but I think we are, if not quite there, we’re certainly on the verge of that kind of All Out physical violent conflict in this country. This is what scares the heck out of me, and that’s really one of the reasons I wrote this book, All Out War, because I think it’s the last thing in the world we want in this country. We have to be knowledgeable about these threats in order to stop them,” he advised.
In response to a caller who asked if the Obama administration’s unmasking of Trump officials was intended to delay the establishment of the incoming administration and weaken the new presidency, Klein said he knows for a fact that “on Barack Obama’s schedule on the 8th of November, 2016, he was to meet with ‘President-elect Hillary Clinton’ to begin the transition.”
“They had actually set a date to talk about that. So two days before that date, of course, they were shocked sitting in the family quarters to see that Hillary had lost. I think that shock propelled them to undermine and delegitimize the incoming president,” said Klein.
“Whether they actually thought they could do anything about it – now, as you know, there was an effort for a recount, and there was also an effort to get the electors to vote against their legal obligation. In both cases, those efforts to undo the democratic elective process were supported by the Hillary people and by the Obama people. So it isn’t a conspiracy thought to think that there was an effort to undo the election results,” he judged.
“It’s my view that, in fact, the Democrats are so obsessed, and I would say nutty, on this whole question of impeachment that despite the fact that it’s so hard to impeach a president in the Senate, where you need two-thirds of the vote in the Senate to do so, that they would go ahead and do it anyway if they got control of the House,” Klein said in response to another caller, who wondered if Democrats would actually proceed with such a motion.
Klein warned an impeachment drive after the midterm election would “throw our entire democratic process and our whole government into turmoil.”
“The reason I wrote this book All Out War: The Plot to Destroy Trump is to inform people what is at stake so they are knowledgeable and can do something about it,” he said. “They can actually take action. They can call their congresspeople. They can vote in the right direction. They can show up at meetings when their congressmen and senators come home and do town halls, things like that, but they need the information, and the information is in the pages of this book.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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