Steve Hayes says the Durham probe is a 'bad development' for the Clintons

let's bring in our panel kimberly strassel member of the editorial board at the wall street journal steve hayes editor of the dispatch and harold ford jr former tennessee congressman ceo of empowerment and inclusion capital i would venture a guest kimberly you're not going to see this topic discussed on other channels and other places but your thoughts on this development what it means big picture yeah you already see other channels dismissing this and suggesting that this house somehow shows that durham has coming up short without much much as they predicted but the reality is this is kind of an important deal because let's not forget that the dnc and hillary clinton used this law firm to essentially hide the payments that they were making to fusion gps in this opposition research and so what you essentially have is an indictment of an operative here of the clinton campaign being indicted for going to the fbi uh lying to them in an effort to manipulate the fbi into investigating a rival campaign i think if this was flipped on its head and this was republicans who did this it'd be front pages everywhere but it should be treated as an important moment yeah steve where do we think this is going for a lot of these investigations there is for people who follow it frustration that it never ends up in anything is this something yeah we need to know more i mean certainly this is something um it's never a good idea to lie to the fbi it's certainly not a good idea to lie to the fbi in an effort to conceal the fact that you're working with a political campaign that may have been feeding bad information to the u.s government we'll see where this goes obviously his attorneys have put out a statement saying that this is wrong that he hasn't committed a crime i'm very interested to learn to see if we we see from john durham something that attempts to put this puzzle piece in a broader picture so that we could properly understand it but the story itself is certainly not a good development for the justice department for for michael sussman for the clinton campaign harold we're told that durham as the way he operates is very deliberate sometimes it takes time sometimes it takes years uh that's obviously not satisfying for the for the trump folks who wanted it to happen before the election but politically the upside for the biden folks perhaps is the merrick garland attorney general is letting this go forward it doesn't seem like they're stepping in the way of any of this it appears it appears that way thanks for having me on i don't i don't disagree with anything that's been said and don't know much that i can add other other than to just echo that this is a serious charge i've heard those on our network a little earlier perhaps even a few days ago say that they didn't think that mr durham would bring just this charge that he was probably angling for something else but this is the charge that he has brought we'll see the defense from mr sussman and um we'll let it go from there but i would imagine to your point bret that the attorney general is is not is allowing this to proceed with without any uh any interference i want to turn to afghanistan and these questions about who made the final decision was president biden kind of out on a limb on this decision about the exit and how it happened uh take a listen to the white house briefing today did the president hear specifically the recommendation from the commander on the ground in afghanistan that he feared that a full withdrawal would be devastating and should not happen he was provided a range of advice is it's crystal clear that 2500 troops would not have been sustainable on the ground it would have been either increased troops on the ground or withdraw troops on the ground he was not going to send thousands and thousands more troops to fight a war the afghans did not want to fight themselves but kimberly that's the straw man is the that wasn't the offer and uh from everything we're getting about general miller the commander on the ground and what he recommended and perhaps what other military advisers were recommending uh it was something short of that yeah i mean the disconnect here all along is that president biden has been blaming the military for decisions that were made there and we're saying hey this was the best advice and i was just doing what they told me to do it's on them if it went wrong but the reality is and and this you know puts it in better context is that the president is always in charge of setting the mission um and essentially what the military is saying is that within the parameters he had given us we didn't have any choice we had to make that there weren't any options now we told him you could do it this way instead and he said no that won't fit with the mission and so that's where we got where we got it's on biden it's it's and he made the call yeah and obviously that hearing we will get to september 28th with chairman of the joint chiefs mark milley uh steve this will be a major question but as will obviously the woodward costa book and all the allegations there yeah i think we can bet on a number of questions about the woodward costa book and the firestorm or the past 36 hours on this question look the us military leadership on the ground in afghanistan made plenty of mistakes and i think gave plenty of bad advice over the years they downplayed the the existence of al qaeda in country they whitewashed some of the taliban they did that in public settings they did that certainly in private settings but i think kimberly is right this is ultimately joe biden's call and there were certainly intelligence assessments that said to the president if you withdraw u.s troops if you reduce the american presence on the ground in afghanistan it will have negative effects on what's happening there and will will hurt our ability certainly to collect more intelligence so that's on joe biden

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Keywords: baier, bret baier, bret baier special report, fnc, fox news, fox news baier, fox news bret baier, fox news channel, fox news media, fox news network, fox news special report, fox news special report with bret baier, special report, special report baier, special report bret baier, special report fox news, special report today, special report with bret baier, us, us news, john durham, donald trump, clinton, clinton scandal, political scandal, bill clinton, justice department, FN

Id: eHoxeKYpByw

Length: 6min 2sec (362 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021