Last week as the Mueller Report was about to drop, Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution and the National Review Institute was interviewed by The Epoch Times as part of their American Thought Leaders series. He offered his thoughts on the Mueller investigation, the Trump presidency, and much more.

Hanson takes us back to the earliest whispers of Russia and walks us through the maddening series of attempts to prevent Trump from becoming president, even after he won the election. You may have forgotten some of the crazier details, such as the effort to get copies of the Steele dossier to members of the Electoral College.

Hanson has forgotten nothing, and his analysis cuts like a knife despite his cool demeanor.

Hanson begins by summarizing how things got started.

The Epoch Times provides a transcript:

I think we’re gonna get the Mueller report today or tomorrow. But if you were to summarize the Mueller investigation, there’s a lot of ways to look at it, but I think the best is that there were people within the United States government–the director of the FBI, James Comey; the director of the CIA, John Brennan; the director of National Intelligence, James Clapper; the deputy director; and an array of others; and then NSC and the DOJ who felt A: that Hillary Clinton was going to win. They had followed the analytics and the polls–90 percent surety. But they felt as an insurance policy that Donald Trump for a variety of reasons–culturally, politically, socially–was unacceptable as president. And the very thought that he could be president was so foreign and disruptive that they felt they had a higher duty, a higher loyalty to stop that. So what did they do? They started to surveil his campaign, and they put informants we know into his campaign.

Hanson suggests that when Trump won, actors in this conspiracy decided their only way out was to go deeper:

Then when Trump did the unthinkable, he won both in anger at that fact but also as a preemptive defense of their behavior. You see, because you’ve got to remember the dialectic would have been “President Clinton, look at all I did for you. I should be rewarded. I went beyond the call of duty.” And now the mentality went “My gosh, I’ve got legal exposure. So we’ve got to press further.” So then it was a methodology of getting more FISA requests and disrupting the transition. And then finally the act that resulted in the Mueller commission, and then to dethrone. And then finally the larger context of this was when he was elected there was an effort to sue three states for the voting machines and nullify the election. There was a sustained effort to give the Steele dossier to the electors and to persuade the electors not to vote according to their constitutional mandates.

He eventually calls this what it was. An attempted coup:

This is in addition to the Stormy Daniels psychodrama, the Michael Cohen, the tax returns–so there’s been a sustained effort not to wait until 2020, but to remove the president of the United States under the idea that we are so moral and anointed unelected officials, we have a duty to somebody higher than the American people. And boil that down and it was a coup attempt to destroy the presidency before its tenure had expired.

And that’s just the first ten minutes. The full interview lasts 49 minutes, and I highly recommend watching the whole thing. If you prefer, you can read the entire transcript here.

Featured image via YouTube.



