as to basically shift the argument and become the champion of election integrity, which nobody could disagree with. Basically it's a high ground maneuver.

Have I told you that the high ground maneuver wins every argument? It's the one that always wins. And as soon as you hear it you're like, "Oh, okay, damn it. The argument's over." That's the high ground. The high ground is not whether the election was rigged or not rigged. That's the low ground. The high ground is what Hannity showed him. The high ground is I'm going to lead a national effort to make sure that the next time this happens we're all comfortable with the outcome. National hero, right?

Trump could have easily transformed this from maybe the biggest stain on his presidency. Not maybe the biggest stain on his presidency. He could have easily taken Hannity's advice and turned it into, "All right, well I guess we'll never know what happened in 2020. I have my suspicions." And people would say, "Okay, that's fair. You have your suspicions and it's fair that we'll never know. Yeah, okay. Not everything was audited. Can't get into the technology part of it especially." He would have been a national hero.

And probably when the next election rolled around, unless people thought he rigged the election, I suppose they'd spin it that way, people would say, "All right, let's run this movie again and we'll see if the election reform actually changes the outcome. Let's see who gets 81 million votes this time with election reform." Now even if he lost it would still be legendary because people wanted election reform as the basic most fundamental thing to protect the republic.

So the fact that there's a story that Hannity was giving advice to Mark Meadows to give to Trump, the story should have been why wasn't Trump listening to it? That would have been the better story. Because this is damn good advice in my opinion. It's damn good advice.

Maria Bartiromo was getting some similar kind of pushback because apparently she shared some of the questions that she was going to ask the president after January 6 with Mark Meadows, I guess. And here's the first thing you should know about that. That's not unusual. It's not unusual for an interview guest to get questions in advance because it's more about the topic and it's more about preparing somebody to have a good show.

I can tell you that in many cases when I'm interviewed on politics I get the questions in advance. And you know that there's nothing unusual about that. The reason you do it is to make the show snappy. What you don't want is a show where somebody asks a question and then the guest says, "Uh, you know, I hadn't really thought about that." You don't want that. So you want to say, "I'm going to ask you some tough questions," or not, but you tell them what they're going to be and then the person has thought about it and they give a good quick response as short as possible. It's good for the audience. It's good for the show. But it's also good for the interviewee. Everybody looks good.

Now here's the question in this case. Is Maria Bartiromo an opinion person like Hannity? Where I think Hannity is perfectly transparent that he's an opinion person. He's friends with the president. They talk a lot. Perfectly transparent. But do you see Maria Bartiromo as opinion or news? Just to see what your opinion of her is. Some say news, some say opinion. Okay, that's the problem. Both. Yeah, see that's the problem. Because now this one gets a little more murky.

But apparently she didn't use exactly the questions that she broadcast. Because I don't know if you're aware of this, but even when the person asking the question has a set of questions that are on their notes, that's mostly just so they don't forget a question or don't have any questions left. But they kind of ask what they think is a good question when they actually get there. So somebody like Maria Bartiromo isn't going to ask the exact question. It's just an indication she's going to be in that area basically. And that's what happened. She asked some versions of the questions.

So I don't think there's anything wrong with that necessarily. And I wouldn't be bothered. And I'm being consistent here. Because when Chris Cuomo was accused of softball treatment of his brother the governor, if you recall, I also defended Chris Cuomo because it's transparent. As long as it's transparent. I don't know if there's a higher standard. If you know it's his brother, are you going to be surprised if a brother gave a brother advice in any context? That should have been the least surprising news and shouldn't have affected anybody really.

So I just want to be consistent. People should be able to talk to anybody they want and get news, get advice from anybody they want. Like as soon as you make, "Oh this one can't talk to this one," unless you've told us. Now anybody can talk to anybody about anything. That's my standard. And they don't necessarily have to tell you. Y