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WikiLeaks; Four African-Americans Charged with Hate Crime for Torturing
White Man with Special Needs; Hacking by Russians and Others; Repeal and
Replace Obamacare - Part 1>
Russia; Elections; Government; Obamacare; Insurance>
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SEAN HANNITY, FOX NEWS HOST (voice-over): Tonight, America's top intelligence official testifies that Russian hacking did not influence the election.
JAMES CLAPPER, DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: They did not change any vote tallies or anything of that sort.
HANNITY: Laura Ingraham is here with reaction.
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT-ELECT: We're getting rid of "Obama care." It is a total disaster!
HANNITY: Then, congressional Republicans are moving quickly to finally repeal and replace "Obama care" while Democrats dust off their tired old fear tactics.
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY), MINORITY LEADER: Make America sick again.
HANNITY: Austan Goolsbee, Ari Fleischer, Michael Cohen all weigh in.
JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS: (INAUDIBLE) about power.
HANNITY: And more of our exclusive interview, with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
All of that, plus Senator Ted Cruz and Michelle Malkin are all here tonight.
"Hannity" starts right here, right now.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HANNITY: And welcome to "Hannity." So America's top intelligence official goes to Capitol Hill and testifies that Russian hacking did not influence the election, which, by the way, completely shatters the Democrats and their latest attempt to try and undermine President-elect Donald Trump.
Now, this is information I'm about to give you, I promise you, you will not hear in the corrupt liberal media. By the way, I hope Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham -- I hope they're paying very close attention tonight because that's tonight's "Opening Monologue."
The director of national intelligence, James Clapper -- he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier today and was asked about a major post-election Democratic talking point, the claim that Russian hacking handed the election to Donald Trump. And here's what Clapper said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAMES CLAPPER, DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: They did not change any vote tallies or anything of that sort.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, I'm just...
CLAPPER: And we had no way of gauging the impact that -- certainly, the intelligence community can't gauge the impact that it had on the choices that the electors made. There's no way for us to gauge that. Whether or not that constitutes an act of war, I think is a very heavy policy call that I don't believe the intelligence community should make. But it's certainly -- would carry, in my view, great gravity.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HANNITY: All right, let me explain what this means. Everything that you have been hearing from the president, from Hillary Clinton, from her campaign, from the Democratic Party about hacking determining the outcome of this election is not true.
Now, here's what is true. Now, did the Russians hack into our voting machines? No, they did not. Did WikiLeaks, though -- did they reveal how corrupt the liberal news media is and that how they colluded with the Clinton campaign? Yes, that's true. Did WikiLeaks reveal how some DNC staffers made anti-Semitic, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, sexist comments? Yes, that was revealed. Did WikiLeaks reveal that the DNC tried to discredit Bernie Sanders and rig the primary for Hillary Clinton? Yes, that's true. That was revealed, too.
So this isn't about Julian Assange, this is all just another excuse by the Democrats as to why Hillary Clinton lost the election and an attempt to delegitimize Donald Trump's presidency and his victory.
Now, we do know that when Assange was 16 years old, he hacked into NASA. He hacked into the Department of Defense! We have known about WikiLeaks now for 10 years. Now, this group has been publishing classified government information that clearly shows that this country, the United States America, has major cyber security problems.
Now, tonight, we're going to play more of our exclusive interview with Julian Assange where he's going to explain why he what he does. Here's a quick previews.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS FOUNDER: Why are we interested in publishing information? (INAUDIBLE) because people can do things with power. They can do very bad things with power. If they're incompetent, they can do dangerous things.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HANNITY: Now, we're going to play the rest of that exchange later tonight, but first, I have said this for years. Cybersecurity needs to be beefed up very quickly. Why? We can't have Russia, North Korea, China, Iran, other foreign adversaries hacking into our government systems!
So what has the Obama administration done in the past eight years to stop this? Well, let's take a look at all the government agencies. Now, most of you do not know this. It's not being reported by the media. But let's look at the government agencies that have been hacked into since President Obama took office.
Now, since 2009, look at this. Hackers have attacked the U.S. electrical grid. They've attacked the Pentagon's Joint Strike Fighter project. They have attacked NASA. They've attacked the Department of Energy, the Federal Election Commission networks, even the U.S. Postal Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That's been hacked.
Look at this. The White House has been hacked since Obama's been president! The State Department has been hacked. The Department of Defense has been hacked. The IRS has been hacked, and at the Office of Personnel Management -- all have been hacked.
Now, President Obama -- by the way, and John McCain and Lindsey Graham and the Democrats -- if they were all serious about hacking, then would they have not done something about this while all of this has been happening? Did you even hear about this before?
Now, let's take, for example, China. They hacked the Office of Personal Management. This was 2015. They got sensitive information on over 21 million people in America, and that information means those people's information was compromised. And then the CIA -- at the time, they thought the breach was so serious that they removed agency officers that were stationed in China as a precautionary measure.
But the president never spoke about it publicly, not one time. No diplomats were removed, no sanctions. Now, we also had Edward Snowden. He was leaking all kinds of classified government information, not to mention the major revelations over the years from WikiLeaks.
Look at all this sensitive information that was exposed by WikiLeaks in years earlier, years prior. By the way, have Democrats, John McCain, Lindsey Graham -- in all this time, have they done anything? We'll put it back up on the screen. Have they done anything to stop stuff like this that we put on the screen from happening? No, they haven't done anything.
So let me put this all into perspective. There's a big difference between a political party being hacked and sensitive U.S. government information that is being stolen that exposes secrets and potentially is putting American lives at risk. Now, the only thing the DNC and the Podesta leaks exposed was the truth about the Democrats being corrupt. It confirmed everything that many of us already suspected!
So here's my message to the sore loser left. You can complain all you want about this, but the fact is, this has been going on for eight years and even before that. And President Obama, John McCain, Lindsey Graham did nothing about it. So if Hillary Clinton and the Democrats want to complain, want to blame people, maybe they should blame Barack Obama.
Now, I don't think the Democrats are being sincere. I think what they're trying to do is score cheap political points. For example, listen to what Democratic senator Claire McCaskill said at today's hearing. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. CLAIRE MCCASKILL (D), MISSOURI: The notion that the elected -- the soon elected leader of this country would put Julian Assange on a pedestal compared to the men and women of the intelligence community and the military that is so deeply embedded in the intelligence community -- I think it should bring about a hue and cry. No whether you're Republican or a Democrat, there should be howls. And mark my words, if the roles were reversed, there would be howls from the Republican side of the aisle.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HANNITY: Now, of course, President-elect Trump saw this new takedown attempt coming, and before the hearing, he tweeted, quote, "The dishonest media likes saying that I'm in agreement with Julian Assange. Wrong. I simply state what he states. It is for the people to make up their own minds as to the truth. The media lies to make it look like I'm against intelligence, when in fact, I am a big fan."
Now, as the president-elect's own team said, well, Mr. Trump has every right to be skeptical about what's been coming out about the election hacking, and today's hearing proves that Donald Trump was right to push back against the left's untrue claims.
Now, also tonight, just to remind you viewers of what WikiLeaks did, in fact, reveal during the 2016 election, we're going to put up on the screen again, full screens, on the side of your screen so you can be reminded of what we did learn from WikiLeaks as this eight-year period of doing nothing to stop cyber attacks was going on.
Here with reaction, editor-in-chief of Lifezette, FOX News contributor, nationally syndicated talk show host Laura Ingraham. Laura, the amazing thing about this -- we've known about this! Every government agency has been hacked! Not a peep out of Obama, nothing done to fix the problem. John McCain being all sanctimonious, Lindsey Graham all sanctimonious -- and I'm thinking, You guys have been there all this time. You've known about every agency being hacked. Why didn't they do anything then?
LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX CONTRIBUTOR: Well, I think it was a very inconvenient truth, Sean, that you aptly pointed out in your monologue, that for the last eight years plus, the United States has been exceedingly vulnerable to cyber attacks from a variety of sources, some state-sponsored, some not. Some are attacks by, you know, one-off hackers, you know, having a joyride through the internet.
But the bottom line is both Democrats and Republicans do agree that we need an entire revamp, and Trump is going to do this, I believe -- an entire revamp to our approach to cyber security. And that really was -- as many senators tried to point out today, that was supposed to be the focus of the hearings today.
The Russia, you know, deal took up a lot of it, but the focus is supposed to be what are we going to do about the future of our cybersecurity efforts? What has been done thus far, and what can we do to stop it? And I think as far as I heard from a lot of the witness testimony, the government testimony, they're still trying to play catchup on a lot of this stuff. That's the biggest scandal here, when, as you pointed out, China took 20 million personnel files, including mine. I got a note from...
HANNITY: By the way, I want a copy -- if the Chinese are watching tonight, I'd like a copy of Laura's files, please.
INGRAHAM: Oh, good!
(LAUGHTER)
INGRAHAM: All my -- all my personal information!
HANNITY: Are all your big secrets in there?
INGRAHAM: It's so exciting. But you know, they -- so they have all this on everybody. And some liberals are pointing out, Well, China didn't use this information. And I think we can answer, Well, how do we know? I mean, it could be used as in the future. Might be being held in abeyance for a future -- so you're right, they didn't take any of this seriously when it was happening from other state sponsors, and it was -- it was basically admitted today that there's no sense that this affected the outcome of the election.
Was Russia perhaps involved through, you know, layers of other hacking helpers? You know, apparently, the report was delivered to the president today. More specifics were in that. A declassified version will be released to the public. And Donald Trump will get his report tomorrow. He'll get his briefing tomorrow.
HANNITY: All right, let me ask you this. Let's compare because I'll just give -- I'll just give WikiLeaks leaks up to 2012. So they had all these years to fix this. For example, the operating procedures for Camp Delta, for Gitmo. They released the classified video of a series of attacks in Baghdad. Remember two reporters for Reuters were killed. The Afghanistan war logs were released. The Iraqi war logs were released. Diplomatic cables were released. The WikiLeaks released the Gitmo files. They released the Syria files.
And then four years later, the DNC files. Nobody cared about that. Why do they care about the DNC, which is not even a government agency?
INGRAHAM: Well, obviously, the broader effort here is to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of Trump's electoral victory. And this will be done both through this story, as long as they can keep it alive, and through other means and I think efforts by the left over the next four years. This is not going to stop with this story. And I don't have any view about whether the Russians were involved. I -- I -- who knows? I mean, the intelligence agencies say unequivocally...
HANNITY: I don't know, either.
INGRAHAM: ... that they think it -- think it was.
HANNITY: But why don't they show us the evidence? Congress has been requesting the evidence. They won't even go to the hearing with it. Julian Assange is adamant saying no.
INGRAHAM: Right. And The Hill today reported very different from The New York Times. The Hill reported that they were very light on any evidence backing up their claim...
HANNITY: Right!
INGRAHAM: ... that Russia -- well, what the DNI is saying, Sean, is that, Well, be have to be very careful about releasing methods and sources. We're going to declassify as much as we can, but we have to be careful because of the sensitive nature of all this.
HANNITY: Well, where was this urgency when NASA was hacked, the White House was hacked...
INGRAHAM: Right.
HANNITY: ... the State Department was hacked...
INGRAHAM: Well, that was all embarrassing...
HANNITY: ... the Department of Defense was hacked?
INGRAHAM: Sean, you nailed it, though. That was embarrassing to the Democrats. Now they think is embarrassing to Trump, or -- embarrassing to his victory or again, you know...
HANNITY: So this is political.
INGRAHAM: ... slighting his victory.
HANNITY: This is all political.
INGRAHAM: Oh, I think -- I think...
HANNITY: It's not about -- shouldn't they have fixed cybersecurity eight years ago, ten years ago?
INGRAHAM: I -- well, I think the -- the -- even the way that Hillary went about, of course, storing her e-mails -- I mean, there -- if this was so important that people not use private e-mails, e-mail servers, then why didn't they move to seize that computer early on of Hillary's?
HANNITY: Yes.
HANNITY: I mean -- I mean, if this was really a serious issue, they could've done a lot more in the beginning of that investigation. But again, it was inconvenient for the Democrats. I have no doubt that we have other countries who are adversaries who want to muck around in our system.
HANNITY: North Korea, Iran, China...
INGRAHAM: No doubt.
INGRAHAM: ... and even Russia. I believe all that's true.
INGRAHAM: No doubt.
HANNITY: By the way, I'm willing to pay the Chinese huge amounts of money to get your file.
INGRAHAM: OK. It's probably pretty boring. But it does have my, you know, phone numbers, old places of...
HANNITY: Wow.
INGRAHAM: ... of residence, you know, all that stuff you could use to get I guess passwords, and I don't know, just dig up old, like, pranks I did in college or something. I don't know.
HANNITY: Well, that became a big issue, if you run for president, you're going to be Mitt Romney (INAUDIBLE) whatever is there, so...
INGRAHAM: Good point.
HANNITY: All right.
INGRAHAM: Good point.
HANNITY: Laura, good to see you. Thank you.
INGRAHAM: Good to be with you.
HANNITY: Happy new year, by the way.
INGRAHAM: Happy year.
HANNITY: And up next tonight right here on "Hannity"...
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: We will repeal the disaster known as "Obama care" and create new health care, all sorts of reforms that work for you and your family.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HANNITY: So President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to repeal and replace "Obama care." How exactly is he going to do that? Well, he's calling out Senator Chuck Schumer for standing in the way. Up next, we'll get reaction from Ari Fleischer, Austan Goolsbee and Michael Cohen.
And also later tonight, Senator Ted Cruz and Michelle Malkin -- they'll be with us and much, much more straight ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(NEWSBREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: We will repeal the disaster known as "Obama care" and create new health care, all sorts of reforms that work for you and your family.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HANNITY: All right, that was President-elect Trump on his thank-you tour promising to repeal and replace "Obama care." Now, this morning, Donald Trump tweeted, "The Democrats lead by head clown Chuck Schumer know how bad "Obama care" is, and what a mess they are in. Instead of working to fix it, they do the typical political thing and blame. The fact is, `Obama care' was a lie from the beginning -- keep your doctor, keep your plan. It's time for Republicans and Democrats to get together and come up with a health care plan that really works, much less expensive and far better."
And it's a good thing, by the way, that he is not backing down because the numbers are grim. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the increase in health care costs for employer-sponsored benefits since 2008, Obama's elected, is now $5,462. That is a 43 percent increase.
And as we told you last night, this year, "Obama care" premiums are increasing by 25 percent on average. Premiums on average for a family of four making $60,000 a year -- well, that's going to spike by 43.6 percent. And by the way, deductibles for the same group, they're skyrocketing by 22.9 percent. By the way, if you live in Arizona, it's a 116 percent increase this year alone.
Here with reaction, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, former Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, and from the Trump organization, Michael Cohen is with us.
Ari, this was a promise Republicans made. If you are paying over $5,500 more a year, and this year along, you're going to see increases on average of 30 percent or higher, how do you justify that based on the plan that was supposed to keep your doctor, keep your plan and save $2,500 per family per year?
ARI FLEISCHER, FMR. WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Yes, this is a really, Sean, ultimate example of government largesse and government failure. It's an example of how you can spend trillions of dollars in subsidized something, so at least somebody gets some level of insurance that they didn't have before.
But it's just not worth it to society. It's not worth it to those who had their premiums hiked so they could pay more, to people who such high deductibles their insurance is worthless to begin with.
It's vital Republicans act on what they said they would do and repeal it. They have to do it. They also have to replace it, and Sean, I would Republicans need to replace it in 2017. The worst thing for Republicans will be if they repeal it and then years go by before they replace...
HANNITY: Well, Paul Ryan said this year.
FLEISCHER: Republicans promised both, they need to deliver both.
HANNITY: And they have nine different individual plans with some similarities, health savings accounts. Donald Trump talked at length to me about it. That increases competition, affordability. It also includes bringing it job to job, buying across state lines.
You know, Austan, you are pretty honest guy, but you always spin. Obama said...
(CROSSTALK)
AUSTAN GOOLSBEE, FMR. OBAMA ECONOMIC ADVISER: ... no spin.
HANNITY: Hang on. Keep your doctor, keep your plan, save on average $2,500 a year. Now, why do I know you so well that you're going to say Well, even though it went up $5,400 or $5,500 a family, it still is a savings. Why do I expect that to come out of that liberal wonderful mouth of yours?
GOOLSBEE: OK, it will -- it will, but first, for anybody that went to MIT, the MIT alumni magazine -- they had an article in which, Sean, you're quoted saying very nice things about me. Your viewers are going to be very upset when they read...
(LAUGHTER)
HANNITY: I love you personally! I really do!
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: You're just wrong, but I love you.
GOOLSBEE: But I will say this. Sean, what did not observe in the numbers that you quoted -- and unfortunately, for Donald Trump, he's going to have to deal with the same problem Obama's dealt with, is those prices that are up 40 percent in the last eight years -- you failed to mention that that's the slowest rate of increase of health care prices in the last half- century.
HANNITY: OK, but millions...
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: Millions lost their plan...
GOOLSBEE: But now Donald Trump is about to own everything everyone hates about the health system.
HANNITY: All right, that's the Democratic talking point.
GOOLSBEE: Because he's going to make a change!
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: Well, Michael...
MICHAEL COHEN, TRUMP ORGANIZATION: I don't even know where this man is coming from. In all honesty, at the end of the day, there's, what, 18 million people joined "Obama care"? Of course, after spending $1.8 or $2 trillion...
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: ... keep redoing it.
COHEN: Right, and to some Canadian company as opposed to using our tech geniuses in this country. Let me tell you the difference, Sean. Donald Trump is a -- a -- he's gentleman who knows how to get things done. It's going to be like Trump rink, where he went ahead and...
HANNITY: This is the Wollman rink in Central Park.
COHEN: That's correct -- where he went ahead and it was a failing item for a long time. He came in. He fixed it. He knows what to do.
HANNITY: Wait a minute. (INAUDIBLE) under budget...
COHEN: Ahead of schedule...
HANNITY: Ahead of schedule.
COHEN: And it's an absolute success. And he's going to do the same sort of things for this country exactly the way he did for his Trump Organization.
HANNITY: Well, let me -- Ari, I've always like competition. In other words, if you have the ability, if you live New York, to buy in Alabama or buy in Mississippi and you buy a catastrophic plan with a medium deductible and you're young and you have a heart attack or God forbid cancer or a bad accident, you'll be covered. But you don't need the care that an elderly person would and they're also being covered on the back end, right, through Medicaid and Medicare.
FLEISCHER: And you had all kinds of other benefits that were mandatory that people didn't need that was part of their premiums, which is why they're so expensive and their deductibles were so high.
Look, so much of it didn't work, Sean, because it was all moving in the direction of government control as opposed to what we always knows works, which is competition and much more free market. And what I think Donald Trump campaign bring to Washington is so needed from the outsider's perspective is that business sensibility about things that work and things that don't.
And when you always say, What can the government do first to do first to have a government run it, it won't work. When you say, What can be done to maximize the efficiencies of the private sector and deliver a quality product, that's what a private sector leader can do, and that's the Republican task now in Congress, is to follow it up and do that.
HANNITY: All right, by the way, I'm going to say good-buy to Ari...
GOOLSBEE: You guys better hope that he can do it.
HANNITY: Hang on a second. But Ari's got to leave, and he's a good friend and I'm -- it was my fault that was late a little earlier tonight. Ari, we appreciate it. Say -- send our best to you daughter.
Let me -- let me ask Austan this quick question. What did I possibly say that was nice about you? And was it a night that I was drinking? Was it New Year's Eve? What did I say?
(LAUGHTER)
GOOLSBEE: I don't know. You were drinking or something! You said that I was one of your favorites.
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: You should used believe in the free market more.
GOOLSBEE: I got a football from you that says -- I got a football from you that you signed and it says I'm a great American. I'm never giving that thing away!
HANNITY: OK. Yes, it's worth a fortune. Of course. But the reality -- why don't you -- look, you've got to understand there's not one economic statistic you can point which (ph) say we're better off. Millions more in poverty, on food stamps, lowest home ownership rate in 51 years, doubling...
GOOLSBEE: Sean...
HANNITY: ... of the national debt!
GOOLSBEE: I can give you one. You said I can't -- I'll name one.
HANNITY: What?
FLEISCHER: Longest string of private sector job growth in the history of United States.
HANNITY: All right, but...
COHEN: I don't even know again...
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: ... you extrapolate out one particular section and forget the rest of it, I can make anything look good.
COHEN: I mean, it just doesn't make any sense -- look, Donald Trump is the world's greatest deal maker. He's going to come in again with this "Obama care." It's -- he's going to be disruptive. He's going to bring in competition. Competition is going to lower the cost for everybody. You're not going to see these skyrocketing premiums. He knows what to do...
(CROSSTALK)
GOOLSBEE: I want that to be true. I'm not -- I'm not out to get...
HANNITY: Of course we...
(CROSSTALK)
COHEN: Who wouldn't want it to be true?
(CROSSTALK)
COHEN: ... everybody wants to see America...
HANNITY: So repeat after me.
COHEN: ... become great!
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: Austan, you want Trump to succeed where Obama failed.
GOOLSBEE: My point is this. Look, my point is this. Donald Trump, you remember, Sean, he came on the show during the campaign. And you asked him, What are you going to replace "Obama care" with? And his answer was, Something fabulous.
(CROSSTALK)
COHEN: Tell me, why are you expecting him to do this now? He's going to do it when he takes office! They're working on it. You don't even want to give the man a chance...
(CROSSTALK)
GOOLSBEE: I want to give him a chance, but...
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: He also said health savings accounts.
GOOLSBEE: Then give him the chance!
HANNITY: All right, guys. Good to see you both.
When we come back, President-elect Trump -- he promised to drain the swamp, and now this week, Texas senator Ted Cruz -- he introduced a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on lawmakers. Senator Cruz joins us next to explain.
