Exclusive: Breitbart.com unveils unedited video of Obama and radical professor

This is a rush transcript from "Hannity," March 7, 2012. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

SEAN HANNITY, HOST: And tonight, in a "Hannity" exclusive, we reveal the video that by their very own admission, friends of Barack Obama have been keeping under lock and key. Now, the existence of this footage has been the subject of widespread speculation on the Internet for many months, and the rumor mill kicked into high gear at CPAC in February when Andrew Breitbart said this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, FEB. 10)

ANDREW BREITBART: I've got videos, by the way. This election we are going to vet him. I have videos. I've got videos. This election, we are going to vet him from his college days to show you --

(CHEERING)

Why -- to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008. The videos are going to come out. The narrative is going to come out.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HANNITY: Now sadly, our friend and colleague Andrew Breitbart is not here tonight to help us unveil this video. But thanks to his hard work, we are able to show you the following. Let's go back to 1991 when Barack Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review. Now during that same year, Obama spoke at a protest in support of a controversial professor name Derrick Bell.

Now in a moment, we will dig deeper into some of the late Professor Bell's controversial views. But first, let's take a look at a very rare piece of video. Now, this is an edited portion of the future president's introduction of Bell that was released by BuzzFeed.com earlier today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP/WGBH, 1991)

BARACK OBAMA: And I remember that the black law students had organized an orientation for the first year students. And one of the persons who spoke at that orientation was Professor Bell. And I remember him sauntering up to the front, and not giving us a lecture but engaging us in a conversation. And speaking the truth, and telling us that he (INAUDIBLE) to learn of this place that I've carried with me ever since.

Now how did this one man do all this? How has he accomplished all this? He hasn't done it simply by his good looks and easy charm, although he has both in ample measure.

(LAUGHTER)

He hasn't done it simply because of the excellence of his scholarship, although his scholarship has opened up new vistas and new horizons, and changed the standards of what legal writing is about.

(APPLAUSE)

Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HANNITY: Now what the edited version of the video did not show that you that seconds later, Barack Obama embraced Bell before turning the microphone over to the controversial professor. However, that footage was intentionally covered up according to a close confidant of the president, and that's Harvard Professor Charles Ogletree.

But in this next video discovered by Andrew Breitbart and his team, you'll see Ogletree playing an extended version of the 1991 protest during one of his lectures in 2011 at Harvard University. Let's watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.

(APPLAUSE)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HANNITY: Now that hug and the president's association with a radical professor like Bell is no doubt going to become a hot topic in coming days. However, what is most disturbing about this footage from Ogletree's lecture is that he openly admits hiding this video during the 2008 election, apparently in order to protect his friend, Barack Obama. Take a look at this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLES OGLETREE, HARVARD PROFESSOR: Now, what makes this so interesting when you think about it, of course, we hid this throughout the 2008 campaign -- I don't care if they find it now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HANNITY: So why did Charles Ogletree believe that this footage would embarrass candidate Obama so gravely that he chose to suppress the tape during the 2008 election? What was he intending to hide from voters?

Now here with some answers are two men who helped uncovered this video. Ben Shapiro is the editor at large at Breitbart.com and Joel Pollak, he is Breitbart.com's editor in chief.

Gentleman, welcome to "Hannity."

JOEL POLLAK, BREITBART.COM EDITOR IN CHIEF: Thanks for having us.

BEN SHAPIRO, BREITBART.COM EDITOR: Thanks.

HANNITY: All right. Joel, let me begin with you. There is a lot to this. It gets very complicated. But I think it's easy to explain. We have what was said by -- by then student Barack Obama. We have who he was associating with, controversial association again, radical, I would even argue. We will get to that. And then we have the issue of the effort to suppress this video from the American people, that deals with Mr. Ogletree, Professor Ogletree and the media and what culpability they have. Let's start at the beginning here. Joel, we will start with you. Why won't you tell the background of the story and explain it in your own words?

POLLAK: Well, the real background is that Barack Obama participated in his protest and in other events that there exists evidence of and this was hidden for a long time, not just by Charles Ogletree, but within the archive of WGBH, which refused even to respond when we ask for access to it. What's happening here is the protest, and it's not about faculty diversity on campus. This is about Derrick Bell who was going to take a voluntary unpaid leave of absence to protest a tenure decision and to make sure that there was more racial diversity on campus and so on.

But Derrick Bell was a radical, Derrick Bell was the Jeremiah Wright of academia. He had some crazy views. In fact, just two months before this speech was given, Derrick Bell gave a controversial speech in Chicago where he said that America remains a racist country and the civil rights movement essentially was a sham because white supremacy remains the system and we've got to transform that system radically in order to get rid of racism.

And so, those views were well known at the time. And this was not about diversity, which is a noble and good cause. This was about radical ideology, racial ideology. And when Barack Obama says, open your hearts and open your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell and calls him an inspiration and talks about his scholarship, he's talking about some very radical things -- so radical that later on, Derrick Bell got into serious trouble when he wrote an essay, a fictional story called "Space Traders," positing that Americans, white Americans would sell black Americans to space aliens in order to pay out the national debt and that Jews would stand by and let it happen. This is a kind of background Derrick Bell had.

HANNITY: But wasn't that also in the form of, did you believe those were his views? Because as I understood, that was in a book, but it was -- these were characters that were making the statements, is that correct?

POLLAK: It certainly is, his view of the civil rights struggle. He writes a futuristic science fiction story about race, but it's really telling the story of the civil rights struggle. He thinks that basically white people sold blacks out and then Jews who pretended to be helpful to black people during the civil rights struggle backed away when they saw it was no longer in their self-interest. That's what he believes about the civil rights struggle. And he believed it when he was teaching at Harvard Law School and Obama embraced him. And he believed it several years afterwards. And he had fights, by the way, with other black faculty members at Harvard who said that some of Bell's views were so extreme that they were very problematic.

So, this is not about racial diversity, it's not about gender diversity. Derrick Bell was the Jeremiah Wright of academia and Barack Obama embraced him and endorsed his views.

HANNITY: Right. Ben, let me go to you on this question. We'll get to the media side of it. We have another segment that we're going to follow up with here as it relates to the media because I think this is an entirely separate issue.

One of the things that I tried to do in 2007 and 2008 -- and I know that it was Eric Rush who broke the story about Jeremiah Wright. We followed it. We investigated black liberation theology. We looked into Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. The media only asked -- you know, in light of all the questions, Republican candidates are being asked now in their vetting process -- he was asked one time about Bill Ayers, an unrepentant terrorist, whom he had many associations with, boards, speeches, started his political career in his house. So, what are we to gain from this, looking at a controversial professor, he's a little younger here. Is it more controversial that he hung out with Ayers and Dohrn later in life and Jeremiah Wright? Or is this just a bigger picture, a broader pattern that --

SHAPIRO: I think there is something different in kind here, right? I mean, if you look at Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, they associated with one another, they talked with one another. But we don't really know what they said to one another, we don't really know how they felt about one another. Obama has made a living basically distancing himself from people like Ayers and Dohrn and Jeremiah Wright and thrown them under the bus and so forth. Here, this is a clean bust. Right? He is not just saying, you know, I was just sitting in the pews. He wasn't just saying, you know, I just served on a board with him. He's saying open your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.

So, if you're going to open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell, well, if you wanted us to do that, now we actually have to look and what are the words of Professor Derrick Bell. And again, it's not 20 years ago. It's important to recognize that Derrick Bell and Barack Obama remained associates for the rest of Derrick Bell's life. He just died about a year ago. And Derrick Bell was writing op-eds in defense of Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 election cycle.

HANNITY: Yes, this does raised questions because President Obama did promised that he would be the most transparent president in American history. We had this issue, if we remember back in the 2008 campaign with the Los Angeles Times, and they had this video in which Barack Obama lavished praise on Rashid Khalidi, who was a former mouthpiece of Yasser Arafat. That was never released by the L.A. Times.

So, as we look at this tape and we look at this -- yes, open your hearts and minds to Derrick Bell in this particular case. And we will get into more of his background here. What are people to grab from this more than anything else? Is it that Barack Obama -- seems to always gravitate towards the most radical people?

SHAPIRO: There is no question about that. There is no question about that. The other thing that, you know, we are going to talk about, obviously, is the fact that the media cover up here was very real. Ogletree's cover up here was very real. And the fact is that, you know, what Andrew Breitbart stood for in his life was turning people into citizen journalists. It was the idea that we were not going to allow the elite media to decide what was a story and what was not a story. We weren't going to rely on them to vet the candidates. He said in that speech he played earlier, Sean, that our job is to vet the president of the United States. That was Andrew's job, that's our job, that's everybody's job.

And I think what is so important, honestly, what is amazing about this video in particular is this was seriously open to anyone. This was not hidden. We were actually able to find -- it was hidden by them, but it wasn't hidden from the media. If the media had really wanted to do the leg work, they could have found this stuff. They could have tracked down, you know, just what was this association with Derrick Bell. Meanwhile, they are checking, you know, Sarah Palin's random e-mails.

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