Sekulow

Logan Sekulow: Newly declassified documents show the FBI probed whether President Trump was a Russian agent. Welcome to Sekulow. We've made it to a Thursday, everybody. It's August 6th, 2026. We have a packed show. Mike Pompeo is joining us. My dad, Jay Sekulow, is joining us. Will Haynes is in the studio, and I'm Logan Sekulow. Phone lines are open for you at 1-800-684-3110. We're covering a breaking news item that has not necessarily taken over the press, but I feel like it should be. That is, of course, the President of the United States. We find out through a newly declassified report again, as the President and this administration are declassifying a lot of what happened over the last few years. Declassified documents showed the FBI specifically was probing President Trump on whether he was an active Russian agent or was being controlled by Russia. Will, when did they decide to do this?
Will Haynes: This was in the time period after President Trump was inaugurated and after he fired James Comey. This is a document from the Federal Bureau of Investigation dated May 16th, 2017. So we're at over nine years ago and we're just now finding this from the White House. It says at the direction of the assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, the FBI is opening a full investigation based on an articulable factual basis that reasonably indicates that President Donald J. Trump may be or has been unwittingly or wittingly involved in activities for or on the behalf of the government of the Russian Federation, which may constitute violations of federal criminal law or threats to the national security of the United States. It goes on to say the goal of the investigation is to determine if President Trump is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with the Russian Federation in a manner constituting a threat to the national security of the United States. They are saying we, the FBI, are investigating whether President Trump, the sitting President at this time mind you, is or was controlled by Russia. This is at the time period after he fired Comey. We knew they started the Mueller probe. That was all supposed to be about obstruction because they were looking into Russia collusion. They were looking into the campaign, but it was supposed to be about an obstruction of justice charge if they got to it. This is saying, no, not just that, but also was he an agent controlled by Russia?
Logan Sekulow: Directly. Phone lines are open for you. What do you think about this? No surprise but all surprise at the same time. The fact that it was happening this abruptly, this clearly, that they were doing these actions. It wasn't even kept really hidden, but we just had declassified documents. This was happening internally. I want to hear from you at 1-800-684-3110. I also encourage you to go to aclj.org right now and support the work of the ACLJ. We are in the middle of our impact match now, just a few days into the month of August where all your donations are doubled today. If you like this show and you like to support the work that we're doing here on the legal side, I encourage you to support the work at aclj.org. My dad, Jay Sekulow, is going to be joining us in the next segment. Then we're going to be joined later on by Mike Pompeo. If you like all the work that we're doing here, I encourage you to support the work at aclj.org during these special months where we're able to offer specifically the ability to donate and have your donation matched so it becomes twice as valuable to the organization and to the work that we're doing here. You give $10 and it unlocks a pledge of $10. You give $1,000 and it unlocks a pledge of $1,000, making it $2,000. Be a part of it today at the impact match here at ACLJ. Phone lines are open for you once again at 1-800-684-3110. If there was someone at the gut involved and knew a lot about what was happening in the world of President Trump and, of course, what happened in the world of the Russia collusion scandals, it would be my dad, Jay Sekulow. He's going to be joining us in just a minute. Welcome back to Sekulow. My dad, Jay Sekulow, will be joining us in just a moment. We're about to connect with him and I do want to hear from you at 1-800-684-3110. Before we get to him, though, a lot of people are just joining us right now. Will, let's restate the facts of what's happening. A lot of people may have seen the title saying there was an FBI declassified document that showcased that after James Comey was fired, the FBI decided they needed to take a good look at President Trump. They needed to decide whether they thought he was essentially accusing by doing this, controlled by Russia, working with Russia, or was a Russian agent. We heard a lot of these claims thrown out there by people on the left. We heard of these claims being thrown out there by people like a Tulsi Gabbard, who was a Democrat at the time. What we didn't know is that the FBI was actively pursuing this and this wasn't just political talking points.
Will Haynes: That's right. Now it makes a lot of sense if someone like an Adam Schiff or other congressmen that seemed to always have the inside scoop if things were being leaked to them by people within the intelligence community. That's what was so concerning is that you see now in this new operation name, we always get how many names do they have. This one is Oxford Comma, spelled O-X-F-E-R-D. I wonder if they thought the University of Oxford may get litigious if they directly named it that, but here's the issue. We knew that the special counsel probe was to look into things about the election as well as if there was obstruction. We know that firsthand, but we didn't know until today that the FBI had this Oxford Comma investigation that directly was looking at if President Trump was controlled by Russia. We have your dad joining us now to talk about this.
Jay Sekulow: There are probably very few people in the world who understood what the inside of all of this looked like at the time, but even this is surprising for even those of the people that were on the inside. I will tell you why they called it Oxford Comma, and that's because one of the quote sources during the Mueller probe was a professor at Oxford that was saying there was Russian involvement. All of that ended up being not true. When Comey denied that there was an ongoing investigation of the President, which was also not true, this one looked like a sub-investigation under Crossfire Hurricane but was related to the termination of James Comey as the FBI director, which by the way, the President has the full authority to do because the FBI director works for the President. This was another attempt to target the President of the United States, labeling him basically an enemy of the United States and an asset of the Russian government. This was being kept offline, which meant that it was only available to be reviewed by a very few agents hoping nobody would find it. Of course, fortunately it was declassified and now we know what we've got. These agencies are totally out of control and that's why at the ACLJ we have a government accountability project that even now is very busy.
Will Haynes: That's what's so concerning to many of our audience is that we know that Tulsi Gabbard declassified a lot while she was the Director of National Intelligence. She called it a treasonous coup that was going on and that was mainly related to the election intelligence community assessment. You see this and you see that the FBI was trying to build a case that the sitting President was a foreign agent. You wonder how did it take over nine years, but we're approaching 10 years, for them to uncover this. We know there's been a lot of reform at the FBI and the DOJ and that's needed, but I think documents like this prove that that work has to continue and be ongoing of reforming these agencies.
Jay Sekulow: This is the problem we had with the IRS. It was almost an institution incapable of self-correction. We were able to self-correct a lot of it by getting not only monetary damages in one case but a permanent injunction in another. It may take that here with the FBI. This is very disheartening in the sense that there were FBI agents doing this knowing that it was a sitting President duly elected by the citizens of the United States. The FBI director gets fired and they decide to target then the President who fired him. Think about that for a moment. That's why we fight back so aggressively and why we have a government accountability project even with an administration that might be considered friendly, because there are deep state activists that don't stop.
Will Haynes: Even that term deep state has become so commonplace because of everything we've seen. But just hearing you repeat what exactly happened here, the fact that the President, who is the chief executive of the country who was elected by the people, fired someone who works for him. Then what did the others within that department decide to do? Investigate whether that person was a foreign asset. If you even take out the names here because they're so loaded because of the history being President Trump and James Comey, the facts of that story no one would believe you if you told someone here's what happened in the United States with any other names. That's why once again it is so shocking to read this, that this is the angle they choose to pursue against a sitting President who is their boss.
Jay Sekulow: That's exactly right, Will. The danger here is again, it was Oxford Comma because they were utilizing an Oxford professor to get information that supposedly was about the President. None of that was true and if anybody knows it, it would be me since I handled it for the President. This is showing the depth that these agencies were going to to undermine a duly elected President of the United States.
Logan Sekulow: I guess the next step people are asking obviously is there anything that can be done? What happens here? Of course, exposing the truth is a big part of this, but then what does President Trump or his team or the American people, what do they do?
Jay Sekulow: I'll tell you what we're going to do. You start with the Freedom of Information Act. This has been declassified now, so the problem with the Freedom of Information Act request or lawsuit before would have been they would have said ongoing criminal investigation or ongoing national security investigation. Now they can't say that it's been declassified. We ask for a series of documents, they'll say no, and off to court we go and we get it. Then you turn it over to the Department of Justice for prosecution.
Will Haynes: That's what's so important for people to realize here and that's what we do each and every day with our government accountability project is that once something gets declassified, it almost opens up the pathway for groups like ours to dig deeper. That's exactly what we can do here now. We have these memos uncovered. Now you know there's email communication. There is all sorts of other situations and things that are put down on paper that were probably placed in a burn bag but never actually got destroyed that we can start to target through the Freedom of Information Act practice here at the ACLJ. I think that's exactly what our team should be looking at right now.
Jay Sekulow: That's definitely the next move here. That's what we're going to authorize and that's how we proceed. It takes time, we will get justice. We've got to fight back and that's why we encourage people to join the ACLJ as an ACLJ champion or support the work each and every month at the ACLJ or when you can because it makes a huge difference as we fight back on all these issues. Declassifying here gives us an easier step to proceed, but we still have to litigate.
Logan Sekulow: Before we let you go, Dad, a lot of people are chiming in and it is during one of these special months right now where donations are matched. You were part of helping launch this program early on when you were able to get a bunch of ACLJ supporters together and say, hey, we'll pledge to support if others support. Why are these months so important to our supporters, whether they're new supporters or long-time?
Jay Sekulow: Because it sets up our budgets for the year and going actually now into next year. These times we do these matching challenges, we have donors that agree to, some of them are ACLJ champions that agree to match other donations that come in. It effectively means if you donate $50, the ACLJ is getting $100 and if you multiply that times a lot of people, it makes a huge difference. We've had a great start this month, Logan and Will. Keep up the great work and I want to thank all of the donors that continue to support the work of the ACLJ. It's not slowing down, especially right now with this new declassification order.
Logan Sekulow: All right, thanks, Dad, for joining us. Again, that's Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel here at the ACLJ. If you want to support the work of the ACLJ, this is a great month as he said to do it during our impact match. You're going to see a QR code on your screen if you're watching or you can go to aclj.org directly. If you are watching, you can just scan that QR code with your phone. It'll take you directly to the link that you need to donate. We appreciate it. We want you to do it right now if you can. That being said, in the next segment, I'm going to take a lot of calls. If you want to call in, this is a good time to do it. We got a few lines open at 1-800-684-3110. Following that will be the half-hour break. We'll bring up special guest Secretary Mike Pompeo joining us and then I'm going to take your calls again. Go ahead and get on hold if you can at 1-800-684-3110. We're going to continue talking about this topic but we've got others to cover. We're going to talk about sort of these interesting candidates that are coming out of these states like Michigan. We're going to talk about that with Secretary Pompeo. We're going to break down a lot more as well, including some of the ACLJ work that you need to get to be a part of as well. If you want to join us, I'll tell you the phone number one more time. 1-800-684-3110. Let's get your feedback as well. You'll hear from some of the most powerful, most important voices in the room, but that most important one is always yours because you guys help direct what we do here at the ACLJ. We'll be right back with more. Stay tuned on Sekulow. Welcome back to Sekulow. Phone lines have lit up. It's going to take us a second to get through all of them, so stay on hold if you're on hold. Give us a moment to get you guys all set up in our system so we can get you on the air. But I did want to address the big comments that are coming in. We're talking about this, okay, now what? We just talked about it with my dad, what the ACLJ team, what can we do? I also wanted you to see and know a bit more about the work of the ACLJ in terms of cases and situations like this where we are able to activate our team to go look at really what's going on and expose a lot, and this just came in moments ago.
Will Haynes: Once again, as we mentioned that once that memo is declassified, that gives us a door to walk through with a FOIA request, with that entire practice at the ACLJ to try and find out more information. You know that someone didn't just write that without there being communication surrounding it. Even in some pushback, you see how little pushback there was and you're able to then bring that to light to the Congress to maybe make legislation that can put in safeguards, to bring it to the Department of Justice to show here's potential criminal activity that took place under the United States. There's a lot of different avenues you can take. But here's one example of how recently doing just that has brought something new to light. This has not been talked about yet on aclj.org or on social media or even on this show, but we got a new production on our FOIA trying to get more information about the FBI targeting what they called radical traditional Catholics. Remember, they had a memo that they originally said originated out of Richmond, Virginia, and that's it. Christopher Wray testified to that before Congress. Our FOIA uncovered that was not true. It actually was in coordination with West Coast field offices and they were trying to make this a nationwide program where the FBI could send assets into churches to spy on churches. Big violation of the First Amendment. Because of the way the FBI took source material from a third-party NGO, a non-government agency, and used that immediately to verify their own biases, that's what set off this entire situation. You start thinking about it. Okay, maybe we could get there. We filed the FOIA, we found this out. Someone within the General Counsel's office pushed back, raising a concern to the Directorate of Intelligence at the FBI. This is within the FBI, internal documents. When they're saying we're going forward with this, maybe we need to check with our General Counsel, make sure this is legal. The General Counsel pushed back and says it seems that some of our folks may be equating a third-party organization with another government organization and perhaps we need to remind the workforce about non-governmental organizations. Effectively saying you're running in wanting to do an entire covert operation in churches, which are protected by the First Amendment, with no real allegation of criminal activity, much less nefarious activity. There's no real reason for this and you're just taking the word of an NGO on this. You're not even doing real investigative work and there's no alleged crime. You're just wanting to spy on these people. The lawyers at the FBI were like, we need to remember these NGOs are not the government. Here's what the left has been trying to do. Effectively make NGOs, especially left NGOs, a part of the government apparatus for so long. That's why they got so upset about defunding of USAID and all of these programs that were just sending cash to NGOs that did their bidding around the world and gave them that layer of protection. That's exactly what we're seeing here. We're seeing that the FBI was using a leftist NGO for their purposes to do things that would violate constitutional rights of American citizens. The lawyers were raising red flags about that. We just found this and that is why work like this, we're going to do the exact same thing when it comes to this investigation of whether or not President Trump was a Russian asset.
Logan Sekulow: And what they uncovered, if you will. What was the result of this investigation? What did they decide? What was the conclusion? We'll break all that down as well as more is uncovered because I find that to be very interesting. Did they find that, of course, nothing could be further from the truth? Probably. Or did they come up with some political way of getting around this saying, oh we did our search, it was inconclusive. We'll find out, we'll get some more data and more info on that. I want to take a phone call. Let's go to Annie who's calling from Florida, who is watching on the Salem News Channel. Go ahead, Annie.
Annie: I'm blowing up. This is a Cuban American from New York living in Miami. Okay, it's the apparatus that has been as recent as 1997. There have been unions. They have their leaders targeting, recruiting the youth with the regional addresses. I don't want to say exactly from where.
Logan Sekulow: I want to just give our people who understand, because maybe they didn't see your phone screen called into then maybe moved on to a topic here. You're talking a lot about the communist creep that is clearly happening across the country and how it's really infecting not only the Democrat party but a lot of people right now. If someone like you, who was raised in New York but comes from a Cuban American household, you understand. I spent a lot of time in Florida. I have a lot of friends whose parents or they're second-generation Americans or first-generation Americans, families that fled a lot of these same kind of things and now they are seeing it creep into their country.
Annie: Communism has gone into China. Since 1959, I haven't been back to Cuba because my parents sent us twice during the school vacation. My grandfather would write letters. I learned writing and speaking everything, grammar perfect in Spanish as well as in English with regions. So I could read my grandfather writing one time he said, "Do not trust the Chinese. Period." He said that. Now communism has gotten into history into China. We have anything that is communism, it's horrible.
Logan Sekulow: Well, and I think Annie, to that point is exactly as well what is concerning here. One, you're seeing how far left the party is going, that they are openly saying that their framework is Cuba, is the revolution of Cuba. You had people campaigning with Al-Sayed that are saying Mao is an icon. These are people that aren't being shy about it. Then I think you can also make the parallel when you have government apparatuses that are willing to fly in the face of our constitutional protections and do things like, let's see if our leader is an asset of a foreign adversary. That sounds very Soviet. Starting to investigate people that you using the apparatus of the state to investigate your political enemies. When you have the two of those, the popular revolution happening within the Democrat party and the leftists, and then you have the state apparatus that are the technocrats and the oligarchy in some sense, that's a very dangerous position to be in. Hey, we'll be back in just a minute here. If you don't get us through your full hour if you're listening on terrestrial radio, find us broadcasting live each and every day, 12:00 to 1:00 PM Eastern time. That's at aclj.org, YouTube, Rumble, Facebook. Of course, archived like podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts, we're there. Just search Sekulow, search ACLJ, it'll pop right up. The easiest probably just go to aclj.org or download the ACLJ app. With that being said, we got a few lines open. We're going to have Secretary Pompeo joining us on the next segment, but now is the time. Give us a call. Be a part of the team. Support the work of the ACLJ all right now at aclj.org during this impact match. I encourage you, scan the QR code if you see it, go to aclj.org. This is our short break, less than a minute. We'll be right back, but do us a favor. Go to aclj.org today.