 Here is the smoking gun. Here's the smoking gun. He didn't even wasn't behind closed doors. It was open. That Trump invited and demanded that Russia collude. And Eli, in your wonderful most recent episode of The Re-Education, you talk about how a great journalist like Jonathan Rauch points to this or says, Trump on occasions openly invited the Russians to meddle in the election. This is the clip that we're talking about. Let's run this thing. What do I have to get involved with Putin for? I have nothing to do with Putin. I've never spoken to him. I don't know anything about him other than he will respect me. He doesn't respect our president. And if it is Russia, which is probably not, nobody knows who it is. But if it is Russia, it's really bad for a different reason because it shows how little respect they have for our country when they would hack into a major party and get everything. But it would be interesting to see, I will tell you this, Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Was that collusion? The dead two rights. Get him in an orange jumpsuit, frock march him out. That's it, where's the Justice Department? We've cracked the code. Really, really? Have you never seen this guy before? I mean, it's just like, he's a nightclub comedian who happened to be like, this is all like his pattern in some ways. And it seems to me, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I interpreted that as saying, I don't have anything to do with the Russians. By the way, that was wrong. When he said that, his fixer, Mike Cohen, was trying to arrange a deal that never happened to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Okay. And then he says, it would be really bad if it was the Russians, because it shows how little respect, which is true, it does show how little respect they have to the United States. And then he's then talking about the missing emails that was the kind of prevailing narrative at the time, which was, well, what if she deleted all these emails and they didn't charge the attack or anybody else and like, it's not unfair and, you know, locked her up. And what was in those emails that was so, you know, there must have been something so devastating that they got rid of them, which also is not clear, right? Well, it's, yeah, it's like that, if you want to, that's a little bit of an innuendo kind of attack too. On the other hand, again, I look at it as a matter of sort of double standards. If somebody in the Trump campaign, even if it was a junior, junior, junior chipmunk, like a George Papadopoulos had deleted information that was opinioned by Congress, you really think everybody would be like, oh, who cares? What, that's not a big deal. I didn't do it for corrupt reasons. So, but anyway, that's what he was getting at. He was like, well, you know, you can find them. And we now know because of the Mueller report that there really was Trump was obsessed with finding those emails. So he contracted people to, you know, he asked Mike Flynn to go find them. And I think there were people who were willing to go try to get them from anyone, but that is not, and it doesn't have anything to do with what the Russians actually did. They hacked the DNC and they hacked John Podesta and they gave, it was separate emails. They're both emails, but it's different things. And again, I don't think I'll ever convince David from or Jonathan Rauch or Lawfare, you know, Ben Wittes. I'm probably never gonna convince them that this is like, what is this? Like, how is that count of anything? But they, I mean, it was certainly said we also know. I mean, listen, when this started and people thought that Trump was gonna get nailed by Mueller, so for the, nobody said in those first two and a half years of the Trump years, like, hey, they already got him. I mean, look what he said in July 27th, you know, 2016, it's right there on tape. Why don't we have to do any more investigating? That's collusion, everybody. No, they thought that we're gonna find, but, you know, was described in the Steele dossier, well-developed conspiracy and like Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen and Prague and all this other stuff. None of it true. The way that Trump himself has reacted to the Durham report is worth talking about a little bit, I think, because he has a certain manner that he likes to frame things. We all remember, you know, hoax, witch hunts, crime of the century or the terms that he generally throws out there. And he was recently on Dan Bongino's show reacting to the Durham report. So let's just play that clip and I'm curious to hear your thoughts, Eli, as to what Trump had to say. This was a coup and if I didn't fire, tell me, probably you wouldn't have made it. I wouldn't have made it. This great administration that did so much wouldn't have made it because, call me, this was a whole coup. They were ready to go in. If I didn't fire, call me. He would have walked in with Stroke and Page and this one and McCabe. And they would have said, sir, I'm sorry, but the Russia thing, I said, what Russia thing? Can you imagine if you would have been taken out of office as something that you never even heard about? These are bad people. These are sick people. Was this an attempted coup? You know, that's over the top. I don't like, I mean, it's not a coup in the sense of there wasn't like a general who got a group of officers to storm the White House, but it was certainly an outrageous kind of interference. As I said, in the presidential transition, the FBI leadership's actions. I mean, remember, in March of 2017, again, the FBI has zero evidence at this point. Comey tells the House Intelligence Committee there's an ongoing investigation in Trump's campaign having to do with Russia, confirming, by the way, stories that were already leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post and everybody else. Why would he do that? He mentions the investigation in 2016 initially in July in order to say he's not charging Clinton, also highly unusual. But why would he then bring up this in an open-ended investigation when, again, the FBI had nothing with the exception of the Steele dossier, which was disinformation. So, and the FBI, by the way, at that point knew that Denchenko was walking away from it. You can go through the list of all of the problems. They offered Steele a million dollars we could corroborate and he couldn't. So all of that information is somewhere. The CIA looked at it and said they thought it was junk and shouldn't be included in the intelligence assessment. So it's Comey out there who then says, I need to confirm this and everything like that. And by the way, it was such a moment, such a Watergate-like, you know, West Wing drama moment. The FBI director is announcing an ongoing investigation into the sitting president, Holy Tahiti, and it confirms so many of the priors of people who still bitter about Trump winning that election that we sort of stopped and we didn't really capture or examine like, what the hell is the FBI director doing? Why would he make that announcement? And now we know there was no reason for him to make that announcement. We now know that what he said was, I mean, why would you say that? That it should have pretty much been closed at that point. So I wouldn't call it a coup, but I don't have much sympathy. And even though at the time, you know, Trump couldn't have screwed up more about how he ended up, how he fired Comey and bragging to, you know, the Russian ambassador, the Russian foreign minister in the White House the next day about how he was crazy and everything like that. All really, that was bad, but probably one of the best things that Trump did was getting rid of Jim Comey. That was an excerpt from Reason's live stream with Eli Lake dissecting the Durham report. If you wanna watch the whole conversation, go here. If you wanna watch another excerpt, go here and tune in next Thursday at 1 PM Eastern time, because Zach Weismiller and I here will be back here with a great guest. Thanks for watching.