>> It's so interesting that people are critical of the president's decisions, of our intelligence
community's decisions, our generals' decisions.
>> They want details.
>> General Tate has said, well, they can't have it.
Everything can't be made public.
>> That is Ainsley Earhardt unironically defending US intelligence when it comes comes to the
so-called intel that they're sighting to justify Trump's escalation of war with Iran.
Now he did that by assassinating Iran's top military commander.
And it's amazing because, as we all know through the Russia investigation and now the impeachment
investigation, Donald Trump has accused the intelligence community of being part of the
so-called deep state over and over again.
He doesn't trust the intelligence community.
Even when they do provide evidence to indicate that he has obstructed justice and done all
sorts of nefarious things.
But nonetheless, let's hear what Fox and Friends had to say in its full context.
>> It's so interesting that people are critical of the president's decisions, of our intelligence
communities' decisions, our generals' decisions.
>> They want details.
>> General Tate has said, well they can't have it.
Everything can't be made public.
We heard Pompeo over the weekend saying everything that we have the intelligence community has.
He said, I ran the CIA at one point.
We can't release everything.
We can't release all of our intelligence information.
We'll release as much as we can, but you just have to trust us, basically.
And General Tate has said it makes us more safe.
He agreed with killing this general, this evil terrorist.
He says it goes to show how ridiculous our divide is that they support Soleimani over
the president's decision.
It counters everything that I learned as a soldier.
>> Just keep in mind, if you're going to be critical of the president for not hitting
Iran after they took out our drone and not hitting Iran after they rocketed the Saudi
oil bases and not going after Iran after they were mining the Gulf.
You can also be critical of the president when he does take action in that area.
>> When they were trying to take out our embassy.
>> Yeah, they go, wow, how could the president let our embassy get breached and not do anything?
Well he does something and these same people are going, my God, how could the president
do something?
>> Sure.
>> Who is that person that had those two positions?
>> So I am going to go through a timeline of what happened with US-Iranian relations
under the Trump Administration.
Because the way that this is all being portrayed in the mainstream, not in all cases, there
has been some good reporting, certainly not on Fox.
But the way that it's mostly being portrayed is Iran's the aggressor.
Iran's the threat.
Well, Trump had to do it.
He's protecting the American people.
That's the narrative that they want the American people to believe in order to garner support
for yet another disastrous endless war.
But if you look at the timeline under the Trump administration our government has been
the aggressor.
And it's actually kind of astonishing how much restraint the Iranians have had in response
to Trump, and I'm gonna prove that to you in just a second.
But, John, I wanted to get your commentary on that ridiculous exchange.
>> They're idiots and their job is to be idiots.
>> No one supports Soleimani.
Let's just be clear about that, right?
So don't buy into the fake narrative that they're setting up where if you criticize
Trump's actions that means you're a Soleimani fan.
You have a Soleimani poster in your bedroom.
You go to Soleimani rock concerts.
No, no, everyone acknowledges he's a bad guy.
The question is, what is the best strategic move in order to stabilize the region, to
keep American troops abroad safe, to keep diplomatic employees abroad safe?
What is the right way to go about it?
So for instance, Jeffrey Epstein.
Jeffrey Epstein was a terrible person, right?
But it is against the law to do an extra judicial killing of Jeffrey Epstein, right?
He has to have his day in court.
You get it, there's due process, yada yada.
So if I make that argument it doesn't mean that I like Jeffery Epstein.
It means that you can't break the law and you can't just unilaterally decide to do things.
There are consequences to that, namely deteriorating our justice system if that kind of action
stands.
>> Yeah.
>> Right?
So, yeah.
>> And also, if you're watching this and you're a Trump fan you can't watch that and think,
they have been consistent in what they think about the trustworthiness of the intelligence
apparatus in America.
That they've been saying, they're all lying to you.
They're all part of this embedded multi-decade deep state.
But now they say that they had something and I don't want anymore information, I'm good.
How could you possibly question them?
First of all, there's not a deep state the way that they've been saying that there is.
But if there was a deep state, if there was a long-standing, across multiple administrations,
continuing policy it would be pushing us into war.
That's the only thing consistent through all of these administrations, and that's what
it's doing now.
And to get you to bow your head to it, it's telling you that you're un-American if you
don't support that drive to war.
>> Right, just like Iraq.
Just like what happened in the lead up to Iraq.
>> If there was a deep state, that's what it would be doing.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> But no, the only thing the deep state does is occasionally pop up to spit in the eye
of Donald Trump and that's it.
>> Look, there is a deep state in the cont and people should be skeptical of the intelligence
community, especially when it comes to US-backed coups, which just happened in Bolivia, for
instance.
The intelligence community tried to convince the United States that Iraq had weapons of
mass destruction.
So should you be skeptical of the intelligence community?
Absolutely, when it came to the Russia investigation, they had to show their work.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah, exactly.
>> And let's be clear, the intelligence community didn't say we needed to go after Soleimani.
>> Exactly.
>> Pompeo said they said that.
>> That's right.
>> Trump said they said that sort of.
>> And they have not provided- >> And then when you ask follow up questions
they evade it away.
>> Yeah.
>> It's not like we've released this 300 page Inspector General analysis of all the intelligence
leading up to the bombing of Qasem Soleimani.
That doesn't exist.
It would be like if in the run up to Iraq, Colin Powell, he didn't have any of his charts
or his satellite photos.
>> He's just like, I heard something, it's bad, let's go in there.
That's as casual as the lie has been.
And Fox is lying to you pretending that they find it to be convincing.
>> Right, and so I wanna go through the timeline of what's happened with Iran under the Trump
administration.
Because every time you hear this argument that Iran is the aggressor, understand that
that is not the case.
Now I'm gonna start this off by saying the obvious, which is in 2015 one of the best
things that Obama was able to accomplish was the Iran nuclear deal, and it wasn't just
between United States and Iran.
It was between the United States, Iran, Russia, China, and European countries, right?
And so they were ways to check in to make sure that Iran was no longer enriching its
uranium.
They were ways to prove that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.
It was the best deal to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon.
Donald Trump gets elected and what does he do?
So let's start with May 8th of 2018, Trump withdraws from the Joint Comprehensive Plan
of Action.
That is the Iran nuclear deal, right?
So once you do that you're basically telling you Iran we've pulled out.
This deal doesn't exist anymore.
If you want, you can go ahead and enrich your uranium, right?
And that's essentially what they ended up doing, but there's more detail.
So let's go further.
August 7th, 2018, Trump announces first round of sanctions against Iran.
November 5th, 2018, Trump announces second round of sanctions against Iran.
April 8, 2019, Trump administration designates Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign
terrorist organization, something that's unprecedented and does what?
Further devolves or further deteriorates the relationship between the United States and
Iran and makes it incredibly difficult to renegotiate a nuclear deal, which is what
Trump claimed he wanted.
Let's go further.
By the way, who's the aggressor so far?
May 5th, 2019, John Bolton announced the US was sending an aircraft carrier strike group
and Air Force bombers to the Middle East against Iran.
May 8th of 2019, Iran announces it is preparing to increase enriched uranium production.
Trump implements sanctions against Iran's steel and mining sectors, okay?
So look, at this point what's amazing, Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal on May
8th of 2019.
It wasn't until a year later that Iran was like, okay, I mean, we've been trying to comply
with this even though the United States pulled out.
But at this point, I mean, these sanctions are crippling us.
The other countries that were part of this deal have been coerced by the United States
government to stop doing business with us, and so we're left with no choice.
Let's go to May 14th of 2019.
Because remember, the United States is engaged in all sorts of nefarious actions abroad.
Yemen's Houthi rebels allegedly attack major oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia.
US blamed Iran for the attack but Tehran denies involvement.
We talked about this story.
The US government has still failed to provide any evidence to show that Iran was behind
that oil tanker attack, right?
And as we know, the United States is assisting Saudi Arabia in the Saudi led coalition in
Yemen, which is leading to a genocide of the Yemeni people.
Let's give you more.
June 13th of 2019, US accuses Iran of attacking Japanese and Norwegian oil tankers while Japanese
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Iran.
Iran denied involvement.
Again, there's been no proof of what the US has accused Iran of.
June 17th of 2019, Pentagon deploys 1,000 additional troops to the Middle East.
Iran said it was 10 days from surpassing the limit set by the nuclear deal, that Trump
pulled out of, on its stockpile of low-enriched uranium.
Again, I mean, I know this is super detailed.
And by the way, there's a bunch of other stuff like little sanctions here and there that
I haven't even included in the timeline.
But where is the aggression coming from, guys?
Let's take responsibility for what our government is doing.
There's only so many times you can punch someone in the face before expecting them to punch
back.
June 20th of 2019, US drone shot down by Iran.
Iran said that the drone was flying in Iranian airspace while the US claimed it was flying
over international waters.
June 21, 2019, Trump calls off an airstrike against Iran, okay?
So he had called for an airstrike and then ten minutes before it was supposed to happen
he called it off.
June 22nd of 2019, Iran responds to US threats by ordering the execution of a US military
contractor who is convicted of spying for the CIA.
By the way, no one in the US press talks about that story.
June 29th of 2019, US deploys F-22 stealth fighters to defend American forces and interests.
And the list goes on and on.
On December 27, a rocket attack on an Iraqi military base in and Kirkuk killed a US contractor
and wounded several US service members and Iraqi personnel.
The US-led coalition against ISIL did not specify who might be responsible, but US officials
later blamed Kataib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia, for the attack.
Two days later, on December 29, the US military carried out defensive strikes on sites in
Iraq and Syria belonging to Kataib Hezbollah that Washington said were in retaliation for
the killing of a US contractor.
Iraqi security and militia sources said at least 25 fighters were killed and 55 others
wounded.
Following that attack, that was when protesters stormed the US embassy in Iraq.
And the way the media reports it makes it seem like the story or the timeline starts
right there.
They attacked our US embassy.
Yeah, but why, why?
People don't just randomly attack embassies, okay?
So we need to think about how our actions lead to these types of repercussions.
It's about strategy, okay?
It's not saying or making excuses for the bad actors abroad.
It's about thinking about the best way to de-escalate the situation.
And Trump has consistently done the opposite, mostly because he can't handle Obama's legacy
and he wants to destroy it in any way he can.
He thought he could negotiate a better nuclear deal.
If this the way he goes about negotiating deals, he's a terrible deal maker.
But we already knew that by the six bankruptcies that he went through.
>> Yeah, and as you go through the timeline I just think about if you were trying to have
a war between our countries, this is kind of how you would do it.
You'd bring in John Bolton along the way, a guy who has no qualifications outside of
pushing for literally every war someone can imagine.
And also right wing media has been pushing for it too.
If you recall, when they shot down that drone Fox and Friends talked about it like they'd
murdered R2-D2.
Like it was this iconic person in American history that they dared to shoot down instead
of a drone.
It's a valuable piece of military equipment but that's it.
Nobody was killed.
But they have been trying to push for this from the very beginning.
We were lucky that we didn't have this same sort of situation six months ago.
>> Yeah, I mean, Trump calling off that airstrike was a big deal, right?
But at that point Iran knew.
>> I hate every reference to that.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Because he ordered the airstrike.
>> I know.
>> Like I don't give a damn that he called it off.
>> Exactly.
>> He ordered it.
>> That was the point I was about to make.
>> Yes.
>> The fact that he ordered it in the first place led to an escalation of tensions between
the United States and Iran.
So calling it off was important sand I'm glad he did, right?
Cuz the situation today would have been even worse that it already is.
But my point is, he doesn't think about his actions before he actually carries them out.
>> Yeah.
>> And what he has done has not led to the possibility of a better nuclear deal with
Iran.
It's done the exact opposite.
All right, and that's why we talk about strategy.
That's the reason why we're talking about strategy.
That's the important part of the story, not differentiating between good guys and bad
guys.
Because remember, Donald Trump went on an international tour touting his love affair
with Kim Jong-Un, who has his own people in gulags right now.
He murders his own people on a regular basis.
>> Yeah.
>> All right.
>> You don't even have to go that far.
He loves MBS.
>> Exactly, a man who killed a US resident, ordered the killing of a US resident and a
Washington Post reporter.
Donald Trump tried to help MBS cover up for that.
>> Yep.
>> It's unbelievable.