'Tucker Carlson Tonight' on Russia collusion narrative

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Jesse Watters reveals the birth of the Russia collusion narrative

Jesse Watters discusses how the media latched on to the Russia collusion narrative on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'

This is a rush transcript of "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on November 4, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

JESSE WATTERS, FOX NEWS CHANNEL HOST: Good evening and welcome to TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT. I'm Jesse Watters, in for Tucker.

The left is still in a complete meltdown over Glenn Youngkin's win in Virginia. They are accusing anybody who voted for him of being a tiki-torch carrying white supremacist. More on that in a minute.

But first, Donald Trump officially became the Republican nominee for President in mid-July of 2016. Just days later, a Russian national living in this country made a claim that would upend Donald Trump's candidacy and eventually his presidency. It's a claim that changed the course of U.S. politics for the next four years.

A Russian national, a man named Igor Danchenko said he had just received a phone call proving that Donald Trump's campaign was conspiring with the Russian government. The phone call supposedly came from a U.S. citizen who was serving as President of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.

That alleged phone call became the central piece of evidence in the Steele dossier written by British ex-spy Christopher Steele. That dossier in turn was a key piece of evidence in the F.B.I.'s warrant applications to spy on the Trump Campaign.

The government leaked information on those supposedly secret warrant applications to the media and the Russian collusion narrative began.

In January, BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier online. BuzzFeed's editor justified publishing the document by saying the F.B.I. was supposedly taking it seriously.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BENJAMIN SMITH, THEN EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, BUZZFEED NEWS: This document that is being fought over that -- and that by the way everybody except the public in a certain sense has seen, we've seen, you know and we don't have any special powers.

The point is, does the audience say, you know we can see this too, and we can deal with the fact that it is clearly labeled as unverified, that it's clearly labeled that some things in it aren't true, which is what we did.

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS CHANNEL HOST, TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT: I kind of get it. I mean, so what you're saying is because famous people are gossiping about it, and because other --

SMITH: Famous people and the President of the United States, the President-elect and the Intelligence Agencies.

CARLSON: Sure. A famous person.

SMITH: We are not just talking garden variety famous people.

CARLSON: I believe you. Trust me, they gossip, too and by the way, let me just note --

SMITH: Not gossip. Official briefing, a document that by the way is a public document subject to the Freedom of Information law.

CARLSON: Well, actually, in some sense, it is gossip because it's unverified and the difference between what you did and what "Drudge" did was what "Drudge" reported turned out to be true, whereas it looks like what you reported is not true.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WATTERS: There were obvious red flags with the dossier from the very beginning. For one thing, Christopher Steele was working for an opposition research firm called Fusion GPS, which was funded by the Hillary Clinton Campaign and the dossier made several obviously false claims. For example, it stated that the Trump campaign was working with hackers in the Russian Consulate in Miami. But there is no Russian Consulate in Miami.

But for partisan reasons, media personalities overlooked all of that. They insisted the dossier was reliable.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The allegations in this Christopher Steele dossier -- and you went through the timeline very well a few moments ago -- are stunning.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There actually substantial portions of what was in the Steele dossier, which was a raw Intelligence document that have indeed checked out.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR AND NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Based on our own reporting and word from numerous official sources, the dossier in fact is far from bogus.

RICK WILSON, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: I think we're going to actually have to stop calling it the infamous dossier, increasingly it's the accurate dossier.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WATTERS: Today, thanks to an indictment from U.S. Attorney John Durham, we learned the truth. It turns out that there was no late July 26 phone call to Igor Danchenko about Russian collusion. Igor Danchenko wasn't speaking to the head of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce about Donald Trump or about anything at all. Instead, according to today's indictment, the source of much of Danchenko's information was a Democratic Party operative and a former Hillary Clinton adviser.

We can identify that Clinton adviser tonight. His name is Charles Dolan. In other words, Hillary Clinton's team wasn't just funding the Steele dossier, they were effectively writing it, too.

Dolan by the way has extensive connections to Russia, closer connections than anybody on Donald Trump's team had from 2006 to 2014. For example, Dolan did PR work on behalf of the Russian government and a Russian energy company.

According to Durham's indictment in August 2016, Danchenko told Dolan that he was working on quote, "A project against Trump," unquote. Dolan responded by saying, he had just received dirt on Paul Manafort who was Donald Trump's Campaign Manager at the time from a quote, "G.O.P. friend."

It was all a lie.

According to today's indictment, quote: "Dolan later acknowledged to the F.B.I. that he never met with a G.O.P. friend in relation to this information that he passed to Danchenko, but rather fabricated the fact of the meeting and his communications with Danchenko.

Throughout 2016, Dolan and other political operatives continued to feed Danchenko more lies about the Trump Campaign. The indictment states for example that one of Danchenko's sources believed the ex-Clinton aide would quote, "Take me to the State Department if Hillary wins."

Danchenko himself also lied about traveling to the Moscow Hotel in the summer of 2016, a trip where he supposedly gathered information about the infamous pee tape. Danchenko lied about all of this to the F.B.I. He never told them he was working for a former Hillary Clinton aide, so the big question is, how did Danchenko's lies and all of his bogus conversations with these sources get into the Steele dossier who connected Danchenko to Christopher Steele?

Well, the indictment says that a member of the National Security Council named Fiona Hill first introduced Danchenko to Steele. If that name sounds familiar, it's because Fiona Hill was one of the Democratic Party's witnesses against Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial. Now, she has popped up again as one of the key figures behind the Steele dossier.

That's either an incredible coincidence or a sign that our National Security establishment is even more corrupt than we thought it was. But it gets worse.

The F.B.I. it turns out knew for years that Danchenko's sourcing was garbage. They included his claims in search warrant applications against the Trump Campaign, regardless; declassified footnotes from a D.O.J. Inspector General report revealed that the F.B.I. suspected Chris Steele's dossier was a part of an elaborate Russian disinformation campaign.

One of the footnotes said the bureau, quote: "Did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele's reporting and assessed that the reference subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations." That subset referred to the activities of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen who Steele's dossier claimed to have traveled to Prague to meet with Russian agents.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller couldn't find anything to support that claim and Cohen denied it. It was totally made up. Durham's indictment today makes it even more clear that the F.B.I. knew the dossier was a scam.

According to today's indictment, June 2017, F.B.I. agents interviewed Danchenko in Virginia. Agents asked Danchenko about his contacts with the Clinton aide, Charles Dolan. Danchenko lied and said he didn't talk to Dolan. The F.B.I. agent documented at the time he knew it was a lie, but nothing happened.

The F.B.I. didn't prosecute Danchenko. Robert Mueller didn't even mention any of this in his report, until today, until John Durham's indictment, no one in the government did a thing.

Now Danchenko faces five Federal charges including lying to the F.B.I. to hide his conversations with Dolan. And this could just be the beginning. We're learning a lot about the collusion hoax very quickly.

Weeks ago, John Durham indicted a D.N.C. lawyer named Michael Sussman for lying to the F.B.I. about a secret channel of communications between the Trump organization and a Russian bank. Durham has also secured a guilty plea from an ex-F.B.I. attorney who lied about the Trump campaign's ties to Russia.

Now, we're learning that Hillary Clinton allies gave information to a Hillary Clinton contractor and laundered it -- all of it into the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice.

More than four years after that fabricated July 26th phone call, some of these criminals are finally going to jail.

Kim Strassel is a columnist with "The Wall Street Journal" and she joins us. It's like we've been reporting for years, but finally have it. All of the arrows, Kimberley, turn right back and point at the Clinton Campaign.

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CONTRIBUTOR: Yes, that's right, Jesse. You know, and if you think about it, we should have called it the Clinton dossier all along, but again, it took five years and that's one of the remarkable things about this, and to really put it in perspective, you've got to go back and remember that origin story, the one that you played those clips of.

We were told and it lasted for almost a year that we had this really credible former Russia or former British Intelligence agent who had provided credible information to the U.S. government before and out of the goodness of his heart, after he stumbled across this information on Trump and Russia collusion, he brought it to us. No. This was one of the biggest political cons in U.S. history, one that five years on, we're only starting to get the real facts about, and I'm still waiting for everyone's apology who kept it going for all those years.

WATTERS: I think you'll be waiting for a long time, Kimberley.

So, if I'm John Durham and I'm prosecuting this hoax. This Russian, Danchenko seems more like a middleman. He seems like the kind of guy you can lean on and flip, reduces sentence that he's looking at and have him spill about who was really behind this thing and I'm honestly sure it is going to be a name in the Clinton Campaign that you and I are quite familiar with. Am I wrong?

STRASSEL: Well, we honestly don't know, okay. But what is really clear, especially from these last two indictments, the enormous range of individuals that were involved in this from people at the law firm representing the Clinton Campaign to folks that were activists out in the Clinton campaign, to these operatives at Fusion GPS, to folks that were working within the government, I mean this was a really sprawling affair, and he has been laying that out in the course of indictments, which I would note are much more fulsome than they would have to be.

He seems to want to get this information out. He is building a story so that people can understand what really happened, but he has left out there in a long trail of people that he could potentially go after and bring into this, and we'll have to just see where it goes next.

WATTERS: We'll keep following it. Thank you so much, Kimberley. We appreciate it.

STRASSEL: Thank you.

WATTERS: Steven Miller was inside the White House during Russia-gate. He is a former senior White House adviser and he joins us with his reaction.

Stephen, you must remember back in the day, all your colleagues wasting hours with depositions and spending countless dollars on lawyers and handing over all their devices. It turns out, they were being framed by their own countrymen and by their own government for being traitors. What was that like?

STEPHEN MILLER, FORMER WHITE HOUSE ADVISER: Well, you're correct, Jesse. They were framed. They were framed by an unelected aristocracy known as the Deep State and most importantly of all, that Deep State was trying to overthrow the elected President of the United States, Donald Trump, and this indictment brings it right to the doorstep of Hillary Clinton. It brings it right to the doorstep of the Clinton Campaign and the Democratic Party.

And I hope that Durham will investigate those links and I hope he will take Hillary Clinton for hours of questioning and I hope that when Republicans, if they do take back the majority, will call Hillary and her senior aides up to Capitol Hill to decode this because this was a theft from the American people.

They elected their President. His time, his energy, and that of his staffers were stolen, thousands upon thousands of hours were stolen by rogue bureaucrats working in our Intelligence Services in the F.B.I. and across the government to impose their will, over the will of the American people.

I am enraged and I hope all decent Americans are enraged at these discoveries.

WATTERS: And you're a pretty even keeled guy, Miller. I know you, and I've never seen you this fired up.

MILLER: I am.

WATTERS: And I think the audience would agree that the anger is justified. You talk about all these bureaucrats in the Deep State.

Fiona Hill, Miller, remember? She was involved in the impeachment and now, she is involved in putting two and two together with the Russia hoax and the dossier. It just goes to show you forget about the Republicans taking back the House. Next time, Republicans get in the White House. They have to clean house because there's these sinister careerists that are doing everything they can to subvert the will of the American people.

MILLER: It is existential, Jesse, for the survival of our democracy that the Deep State be cleaned out. It is a constitutional crisis that the President of the United States cannot fire at will government bureaucrats including those working against the administration working against the country.

You have a situation here where you have the Deep State, the D.N.C. colluding with Russia to overthrow the Trump presidency, and yet, because of our unconstitutional civil service laws, you can't even fire these people. It is a threat to American democracy.

If this was happening in a foreign country, the State Department would say that it was a failed state.

WATTERS: We have a picture of this Charles Dolan guy, the one that gave the lies to the Russian to put in the dossier. Here he is with Joe Biden, we believe. So we know Joe is involved in the Flynn takedown, and now look who he's talking to there. Charles Dolan, the guy that spread lies into the dossier with this Russian double agent.

It's like, you know --

MILLER: Yes, and he was the --

WATTERS: Will he will be asked about this, Stephen?

MILLER: Yes, I hope he is. I mean, certainly Peter Doocy would. But this guy that you're referring to according to reports, he is as close as it gets with the Clinton family and the Clinton administration. He was the State Director for the Clinton Campaign in the '90s.

So you have a close confidante of Hillary feeding information to a Russian citizen to target the duly elected President of the United States. If I put this into a spy novel and I hand it to my publisher, they would say this is too incredible it could never happen in America, it's not believable. And yet, it happened in America to us before our very eyes.

WATTERS: It sure did. Well hopefully, Peter Doocy is watching and maybe he could hit Jen Psaki or whoever is up at the podium right between the eyes with this one.

Stephen Miller, thank you so much.

MILLER: Thank you.

WATTERS: The left in the media keep claiming that critical race theory isn't real and they've attacked anybody opposed to it as a racist. One educator took to social media today, made a viral video debunking those claims. That's straight ahead.

Don't forget during the break, you can unlock and stream all Tucker Carlson shows including "Patriot Purge," free for 90 days only at tuckercarlson.com.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WATTERS: After Glenn Youngkin's shocking win in Virginia, the left hasn't engaged in any reflection whatsoever. Instead, they're accusing Virginia voters, the people, who just elected an African-American Lieutenant Governor of being racists.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: And when he pushes talking points that are meant to flirt with and stoke white backlash, he does so in a coded way, with dog whistles about education.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The racial animus that is teeming um with the dog whistle messaging.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Racial language and dog whistles, quite frankly.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: Some of it was dog whistle.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.

KEILAR: Right. Some of it was uh dog whistle racism.

JUANITA TOLLIVER, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Horrible racist dog whistles from the G.O.P.

VAN JONES, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Dog whistling on education. I think all the CRT stuff is trumped up dog whistling.

NICOLLE WALLACE, MSNBC HOST: What rose to sort of the national conversation was the dog whistle.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WATTERS: Notice they keep referring to dog whistles, but they never even say what they're talking about.

Shelby Steele is the writer of the documentary "What Killed Michael Brown" and he joins us with reaction. All right, so Shelby, why won't they define and defend exactly what CRT is?

SHELBY STEELE, HOOVER INSTITUTION: Because they have no way to do it and they know that it's it is in opposition to the America's commitment to a racial harmony that's gone on now for 60 to 70 years. The Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights victories, equality in the sense of as individuals, all of that -- that classic liberalism, they see as infringing on their power.

If they can suspend that liberalism, then they have the power to dictate what goes on. You saw Terry McAuliffe talking about one high school that had 80 percent white teachers. We needed to change that. We needed to go in, disregard their rights, and cut that down to 50 percent.

Well, it's that kind of cold inhuman calculation as a pretext for racial harmony that is extremely destructive, and the reaction to it that we've seen in this current election is by my life, is a wonderful thing. It is a return to the classic view of racial harmony based on our connection and appreciation of each other as individuals rather than strictly members of a race, members of a nationality, and ethnicity and so forth.

So these are all very divisive ways of thinking.

WATTERS: Such a brilliant point that you made. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, that was all about a colorblind society, that was about judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character; and this is against everything that that was about.

This is about, you're not born equal. People are born racist. People are born oppressed. And as you said, that framework gives the left a pretext to seize power and then re-engineer society. Move people up, pull people down, rework the entire system and it just takes away what is in our founding document that all men are created equal.

STEELE: Absolutely. That's burdensome as far as they're concerned. They truly are offended by that, by this idea that it should be treated as individuals. They have, over the last -- since the 60s gained enormous power, the power of the American left really is grounded in race and the idea of America as a victimizing oppressive nation and that they then cast themselves as our redeemers and they're going to lift us out of this shame.

And as such, they need the power to socially engineer without worrying about whether they're being civilized or not.

WATTERS: You're right. They're preying on white guilt and I think for the first time in a long time, the race card backfired. It didn't work. Thank God for that.

STEELE: That's right.

WATTERS: Shelby Steele, thank you.

STEELE: Thank you.

WATTERS: Tony Kinnett is the Science Coordinator at the Indianapolis Public Schools District in Indiana and he's also the founder of Chalkboard Review. You may have seen his video making the rounds on the internet today.

In the video, Kinnett responds to claims from Democrats that critical race theory isn't taught in schools. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TONY KINNETT, SCIENCE COORDINATOR, INDIANAPOLIS PUBLIC SCHOOLS DISTRICT: We do have critical race theory in how we teach. We tell our teachers to treat students differently based on color. We tell our students that every problem is a result of white men and that everything Western civilization builds is racist. Capitalism is a tool of white supremacy.

Those are straight out of Kimberle Crenshaw's main points -- verbatim -- in "Critical Race Theory: The Writings that Formed the Movement." This is in Math, History, Science, English, the Arts, and it is not slowing down.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WATTERS: Tony Kinnett joins us now so. You're saying, the dodge is, yes, they don't have CRT 101 after Math class, but what they do have is the entire CRT infused in every single course, in every single classroom throughout the curriculum, is that right?

KINNETT: Absolutely. There is this very clever trick that a lot of administrators will pull. In education, there are two things that consist of learning. We have curriculum, which is what the students are learning, and then we have pedagogy, which is how it's taught.

So we can officially tell parents, we are not teaching critical race theory. It's not in the Indiana academic standards, but all of a sudden, the classroom door shuts and the teacher starts teaching through a lens of this race essentialism that pits students against each other based on their color.

WATTERS: So give some advice to parents out there, perhaps they don't know if CRT is in the school that their kids are going to. How would they go about discovering it and if it is infected in the school district there where they live, what's their next step?

KINNETT: Well, the first thing you should really be doing is talking to your kid's teachers. So many of my parents had great conversations with me weekly on what was going on not just inside my classroom, but inside the school. There is this very interesting myth by the left that all of the teachers are on the left and the right believes it.

A lot of teachers really just want to go in and teach and they are happy to have discussions with parents. However, if you find that a teacher is being uncooperative, they are teaching things that really shouldn't be taught in a classroom, they are treating your kid different based on a color, you have a responsibility to go to the principal, then to the superintendent. And if that doesn't work, you really should look into electing a much better School Board that's going to serve your community based on merit, not on color.

WATTERS: What kind of damage to the child's brain does something like CRT do?

KINNETT: Oh it's horrific. You get into high school courses where a teacher will open things up for discussion and we see this in English classes a lot. They'll talk about a piece of poetry, they'll talk about something that a writer has brought to bear, and then the teacher will portray it through a societal lens like critical race theory and then provide this Orwellian two minutes of hate and the students will be expected to talk about things in the essay or in cases in like Manhattan, students will be expected to say things from home that were brought up in a very racist way and all of the students are expected to participate in this, to chip in a little bit of progressive ideology.

And it gets really sketchy really quickly for a kid that doesn't buy into the rest of the stuff.

WATTERS: And they don't do this in Math, do they? They can't bring CRT into Math, can they?

KINNETT: Oh they sure can. They sure can. Ethno-mathematics is a huge thing that's coming to Indianapolis Public Schools. We just had a very large meeting about it and there's actually a program that's being developed with Indiana University that would analyze how a teacher teaches, analyze the scores of the students, and then determine how racist a teacher is in teaching that Math course.

WATTERS: Ethno-mathematics. I haven't heard that one before. Thank you so much, Tony.

KINNETT: Oh, it's catchy.

WATTERS: That was -- that was eye opening. We appreciate it.

KINNETT: Thank you.

WATTERS: Lieutenant Commander Thomas Caldwell was wrongfully arrested and jailed after the events of January 6th, even though he never entered the Capitol. Thomas and his wife, Sharon join us next to share part of their story.

And during the break, you can unlock and stream all Tucker Carlson shows including "Patriot purge free for 90 days only at tuckercarlson.com.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WATTERS: We have been showing you previews all week of the new series of episodes of "Tucker Carlson Originals" called "Patriot Purge." It's a documentary that tells the truth about what happened on January 6th. All three episodes of "Patriot Purge" are now available to stream. You can watch for free at tuckercarlson.com. You can also watch brand new episodes of "Tucker Carlson Today" featuring interviews that tie it all together.

In one of those interviews, Tucker spoke to a Navy vet, Lieutenant Commander Thomas Caldwell and his wife, Sharon.

Thomas Caldwell never entered the Capitol on January 6th, but became a political prisoner anyway, and here is a part of that conversation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: So you didn't get bonded out. So how long did you spend in jail?

LT. COM. THOMAS CALDWELL (RET), U.S. NAVY: Well, it was 53 days altogether, 49 in solitary confinement. I think their solitary confinement cells were too crowded so that's why they didn't put me in there initially, but that's a long, long time especially in solitary confinement.

And I'll tell you what, I could tell you a lot about that if you're interested. It's -- it was really, really bad.

CARLSON: Well tell it -- actually tell us something about it. I mean, I don't think most of our viewers have been in solitary confinement on false charges in their own country, so it's an unusual experience.

CALDWELL: I certainly hope that nobody ever has to go through that, but I tell people that I went to hell. It was hell.

Now, if you ask somebody, Tucker, what is hell? And people will say, well, there's fire and there's this and there's that. Okay, I get that.

Here is what hell really is, okay. Hell is isolation.

Now there was no river of fire for me, okay, but I was isolated and ice cold air blowing on me 24 hours a day. I couldn't stop shivering from the whole time I was in there, and part of the thing about being in solitary confinement is, it's supposed to be punishment. Well, what the heck had I done? I hadn't even been to trial for anything, but I was put in what amounts to a super max with the most hardened criminals that they had in that particular facility.

But there was really -- it was kind of a situation where you were off kilter. You didn't know if it was day or night. You didn't know what time it was.

Now this prison that I was put in, this is not a happy little prison like on "Andy of Mayberry" where Otis the drunk would come in, let himself into the cell, sleep it off. Aunt Bee brings him breakfast in the morning and he goes home. No, this was a concrete box. It was -- it was a coffin.

I was in a concrete coffin with a huge steel door and I was absolutely alone.

What hell is, is isolation, and it is hopelessness and you know, sometimes, it's definitely quiet in hell. But sometimes it's very, very loud. There is life in a manner of speaking going on around you, but you don't have any interface with people and people are herd animals.

And so one of the things that you want to do is you want to be around people. One of the problems with this COVID lockdown is people get tremendous anxiety when they're separated from their family and everything that they know, and we know that people commit suicide and this and the other thing. This is terrible. This is terrible stuff.

And don't think for a minute that people who are locked up in that hell don't think about those things.

I shared with Sharon the other day, one of the other things about this hell that I was in, is you think about the anguish of the other people that are in the same situation that you are in, and in the middle of the night or the middle of the day, you could hear screams -- screams echoing down the passageway of people that were either hurt or they were in anguish or something and it was -- it was actually absolutely, absolutely horrible.

WATTERS: That was powerful right there. You can watch Tucker's full interview with the Caldwell's right now on FOX Nation. And by the way, Tucker has got a brand new store up on tuckercarlson.com where you can get everything from Tucker hunting and fishing gear like tactical boxes to new Tucker Carlson t-shirts. I got some stuff and much more, so go check it out, tuckercarlson.com and just click on the shop.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WATTERS: It's been reported that the White House is planning to give $450,000.00 to migrants who tried to enter this country illegally. There seems to be some confusion in the Biden administration about that plan.

FOX's Trace Gallagher has the story -- Trace.

TRACE GALLAGHER, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CORRESPONDENT: Jesse, the White House is trying to polish up another communications breakdown and working to convince us the President knew all about this plan. So listen to the exchange and decide for yourself if the President appears to be up to speed. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PETER DOOCY, FOX NEWS CHANNEL WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: There were reports that were surfacing that your administration is planning to pay illegal immigrants who are separated from their families at the border up to $450,000.00 each, possibly a million dollars per family. Do you think that that might incentivize more people to come over illegally?

JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: If you guys keep sending that garbage out, yes. But it's not true.

DOOCY: So this is a garbage report.

BIDEN: Yes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GALLAGHER: Garbage tends to indicate a falsehood, but the White House says the President is aware of the plan, not only that, he supports it. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE, WHITE HOUSE DEPUTY PRESS SECRETARY: The President is perfectly comfortable with the Department of Justice settling with the individuals and families who are currently in litigation with the U.S. government.

You know, D.O.J. can obviously speak more to that process.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GALLAGHER: But even the liberal ACLU says it appears the President may not have been fully briefed on the plan and then reminds him he campaigned on it quoting here: "We respectfully remind President Biden that he called these actions criminal in a debate with then President Trump and campaigned on remedying and rectifying the lawlessness of the Trump administration."

By the way, lawyers for the separated families reportedly say the settlement deal is nearly a done deal, which might be news to the President -- Jesse.

WATTERS: I think it is, Trace. Thank you.

Matt Walsh is the host of "The Matt Walsh Show" and he joins us with reaction. You'd think, Matt, that paying illegal immigrants reparations to the tune of about a mil per family might be something you might want to tell the Commander-in-Chief before, you know, he takes questions from the press, right?

MATT WALSH, HOST, "THE MATT WALSH SHOW": You would think so. I mean, there is no better illustration of the fact that we have a barely sentient figurehead in office than this and look, he doesn't even have a head, it's really just a figure -- a figurehead without the head.

I mean, we talk about -- we hear so much about this and that as being an attack on democracy and you know, the right somehow is undermining our institutions. Well, how about the fact that you know, we don't actually know who is running the country, and the guy that we have in office, there could be a plan like this, this significant and this harmful. He says it is garbage and he is right about that, it is a garbage plan -- that he doesn't even know about.

I would think that that is a pretty significant attack on our institution.

WATTERS: Yes, this isn't like designating a sea turtle in South Florida for an endangered species list. This is pretty big and would enrage the entire country rightfully, if it was ever put into action. Do you know how much money 450 G's is? We give people -- families whose sons were killed in action a hundred thousand dollars, so this is over four times what we give people's families that were lost sons serving in the U.S. military.

I don't even know how they come up with a number like that.

WALSH: That's a really good way to put it into perspective. Another way of putting it into perspective is that the Biden administration just announced that starting on January 4th, they are going to start charging businesses $140,000.00 a pop per violation for employees who aren't vaccinated.

So they're going to start taking money from American businesses and American families and putting businesses out of business destroying businesses left and right, while they're handing $450,000.00 to illegals. By the way, is there going to be a litmus test to make sure they're vaccinated at least before they get these payments? Something tells me, probably not.

WATTERS: Yes, so if you have $600.00 in your bank account, they're going to look at that. But if you're an illegal with nothing in your bank account, they're going to put $450,000.00 in there for breaking the law because that's what they did when they came here illegally.

I've got some more numbers here. This is unbelievable. The kind of money that we're talking about for this reparations for illegals program this could put 78,000 homeless people in a home for an entire year.

WALSH: Well, they don't -- but the homeless people are -- if we're talking about Americans, they don't care about Americans. I mean, it really is as simple as that.

The fact that this is going to obviously encourage more -- I can't think of a plan that would more directly encourage illegals to come. You come across, you get $450,000.00. But that is -- that's a feature, not a bug. That's what they're trying to do to undermine our country and undermine our sovereignty. It's a direct assault again on our country.

WATTERS: Just handing out winning lottery tickets for whoever crosses the border fastest. Unbelievable.

Matt, thank you very much. We'll be watching "The Matt Walsh Show" around the corner.

WALSH: Thanks a lot.

WATTERS: Studies show a new COVID drug could reduce hospitalizations and deaths by half. It's already approved in the U.K., but why not here? A Democrat whistleblower may have helped delay its approval, that's next.

And don't forget, right now, you can unlock and stream all Tucker Carlson shows including "Patriot Purge" for free for 90 days. Just go to tuckercarlson.com.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WATTERS: Merck's new COVID treatment pill supposedly reduces the risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19 by half. The pill is approved in the U.K., but not in the United States. It could have been released here by now, but a career official in the Department of Health and Human Services named Rick Bright opposed the pill's development.

Democrats hailed Rick Bright as a hero and a whistleblower, so what's the truth?

Eric Hargan is the former Deputy Secretary of Health And Human Services and he joins us. So why did they block the development of this pill under Trump?

ERIC HARGAN, FORMER DEPUTY SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: Well, Jesse, you know this was obviously a scientific and technical misjudgment on the part of the staff in rejecting the approval of the funds to advance the development of this drug.

I mean, that's a grave enough problem right there, because you know, we could have had this drug months ago. And as you say, it could have reduced hospitalization and death by, you know up to 50 percent.

So it's a shame that we didn't have this drug months ago, which if the money had been committed earlier could have advanced this. You saw what happened on Warp Speed.

WATTERS: Yes, so we could have warped speed this pill and I think yesterday, there was like 1,800 deaths in this country, still from COVID. Are you saying that this whistleblower, this Rick character, was he instrumental in slowing the development down or blocking funding for political purposes?

HARGAN: Well, you look back, his boss, Dr. Kadlec, I think was right in his estimation of the promise of this life-saving drug. And you know, Dr. Bright and at least, Dr. Bright turned this down. It is my understanding that's what the record says.

And so, Dr. Bright, would have to take primary responsibility for what happened here, unfortunately, and you know, you look -- it is at least a misjudgment because you see that Merck and Ridgeback, those two companies, just a couple of months later decided to fund this drug out of their own money, and it is successful now in the U.K. and probably on the brink of authorization here in the United States.

So at the very least, that was an error in judgment. That's bad enough, but if you look beyond that, you know hopefully we're not seeing here an example of politicized science where, you know someone for political reasons decides to take sort of a jab at a particular project.

I hope that's not what happened here because that's very dangerous for both science and for democracy.

WATTERS: I agree and some of the reporting suggests that it was political. This was around the time Donald Trump was touting the potential benefits of hydroxychloroquine, pills, anything, any remedy at the time because we were scrambling and the reporting suggests that this bright guy didn't want to give Donald Trump any credit, didn't want to give him a talking point that you know we had some action in the realm of pills, in the realm of -- what this would really be would be a magic pill, essentially, cutting hospitalizations and deaths by half just by taking a pill. This is not a vaccine.

Why would he, try to, in your opinion deny a potentially life-saving treatment? Would he do that just to deny the President of the United States a political talking point or a win?

HARGAN: You know, we've got to hope that any investigation into this finds out that that's not the case, that this was just a simple case of a technical and scientific failure, that, you know they looked at the data and they thought that, you know this isn't something that they could fund.

WATTERS: Well there's been a lot of technical and scientific failures that keep piling up and it looks political to me, not all of them, but a lot of them do look political.

Eric Hargan, thank you very much. We're going to continue to follow how this plays out.

HARGAN: Thank you, Jesse.

WATTERS: That's about all for us tonight. All three episodes of Tucker's blockbuster investigation into the real events of January 6 are available right now on FOX Nation. The series is called "Patriot Purge" and you can get 90 days free access right now, "Patriot Purge" and all Tucker shows exclusively at tuckercarlson.com.

Sean Hannity is next.

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