Welcome to the No Spin News, I'm Monica Crowley in today for Bill O'Reilly. But fear not, you don't have to suffer any Bill O'Reilly withdrawal symptoms because we're fortunate to have Bill O'Reilly joining us on the line in a little bit with his insights and his take on the historic Trump Putin summit which took place today in Helsinki, Finland. 

But first, we've got a lot of news to get to all swirling around today's historic talks between the U.S. and Russian presidents. In 1993, former President Richard Nixon went to Russia to meet with the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin. He then went on to St. Petersburg to meet with the mayor of that city a man named Anatoly Sobchak who was known at the time to be something of a kingmaker in Russia. The word was that Mayor Sobchak was going to anoint Boris Yeltsin's successor. Hearing that President Nixon decided to make this side trip to St. Petersburg to meet with Mayor Sobchak. In that meeting between Nixon and Sobchak sat two very junior aides. One of them was me, yours truly. I was there as President Nixon's junior aide there to take some notes and on the other side of the table the other junior aide to Mayor Sobchak was Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin is now running Russia and I am here guest hosting the No Spin News. So obviously we went in very different directions. 

Today another American president sat down with Vladimir Putin to see what, if anything, they could work on in terms of areas of mutual interest to try to define a new constructive relationship between our two countries. So, what happened? Well there were two meetings today, the first between the two presidents, them alone for two hours with only a translator present and then later a larger bilateral meeting that had the president of course but also the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the National Security Adviser John Bolton and the U.S. ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman. Then the president's held a press conference and we'll talk about that in just a moment.

A couple of thoughts on all of this. First, a U.S. president has got to have the latitude to sit down and have these kinds of conversations with his fellow heads of state including and in particular America's enemies so he can in fact discuss the tough issues. So disregard all of the Trump haters who have been saying that after the latest wave of indictments of these Russians, Russian military intelligence officers who were allegedly involved in intervening in the 2016 election. Disregard all of that. The American president has got to have a free hand to sit down with heads of state and discuss and have these uncomfortable conversations. In their discussions today, we heard that they discussed Syria, Iran, North Korea nuclear proliferation, Crimea, Ukraine, trade and yes Russian election meddling in 2016 and beyond. We don't know what was said exactly between these two men in their private two-hour conversation. But we do have an overall sense of the substance and the tone. They were both asked about Russian interference and since that's the hot topic here in America, let's begin with that. 

Vladimir Putin when he was asked in the press conference about Russian interference. Here's how he replied.

"Once again Trump has mentioned the issue of the so-called interference of Russia in the American elections and I had to reiterate the things I said several times including our personal context that the Russian state has never interfered is not going to interfere in the internal American affairs including election approaches." 

When President Trump was asked about Russian interference and the possibility of collusion between his campaign and the Russians here's how he replied. 

"There was no collusion. I didn't know the president. There was nobody to collude with. There was no collusion with the campaign and every time you hear all of these, you know, 12 and 14 stuff that has nothing to do and frankly, they admit, these are not people involved in the campaign but to the average reader out there they're saying well maybe that does but it doesn't. And even the people involved, some perhaps told me stories although in one case the FBI said there was no lie, there was no lie. Somebody else said there was. We ran a brilliant campaign and that's why I am president. Thank you." 

Mic drop. And then an Associated Press reporter asked the president, well you're standing right next to President Putin, what would you tell him about interfering both two years ago and in the future. President Trump replied this way. 

"Would you now with the whole world watching tell President Putin what you denounced what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?"

"So let me just say that we have two thoughts. You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven't they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I've been wondering that, I've been asking that for months and months and I've been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know where is the server and what is the server saying. With that being said, all I can do is ask the question, my people came to me and they came to me and some others they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin, he just said it's not Russia. I will say this I don't see any reason why it would be that I really do want to see the server.". 

Well, you know how much I support President Trump but if you have any sense of history and depth of knowledge you know that the Russians and the Soviets before them have been trying to scramble Western elections including in the U.S. for decades certainly since the advent of the Cold War. I know the president has his reasons but when President Putin says the Russian state did not get involved in U.S. elections in 2016, well of course he was lying. He's KGB trained, he's a professional liar. 

It is also though by the same token impossible to separate out this summit from the ongoing Russia probe here in the U.S. and that's exactly what the president's enemies set out to do in the beginning when they established this Russia collusion lie. It was all designed to create this cloud over President Trump to do two things, one to undermine his candidacy and then two once he became president to establish this illusion of illegitimacy and also to so cripple him that he wouldn't be able to govern effectively and his agenda would be essentially dead in the water. They've had some success on that as you can see even in the fallout or you know sort of the conversation leading up to this summit and now the fallout from it as well. But we also now know that the Mueller investigation has been hopelessly compromised.

There was no collusion and believe me given the sieve that is Washington D.C. how we know everything about everything, we would certainly know by now if there were some collusion and Mueller would certainly have or his team would have leaked something so there is no collusion. But what we do know is that whatever corruption existed happened on the Hillary Clinton DNC, FBI side with the tangled web of the Clinton campaign, fusion GPS, Christopher Steel, the FBI, the use of informants. the phony smeared dossier, the electronic surveillance of Trump's associates via a FISA warrants and on and on. And then there's this Peter Strzok, the former FBI head of counter intelligence Strzok was not some schmo deep in the bowels of the FBI, he was the central figure in all of these investigations the Hillary server and the investigation, the Russia investigation, he led the interview of Trump's first National Security Adviser General Michael Flynn. He was the key player and now we know thanks to all of his exposed text with this lover another key FBI official, attorney Lisa Page, we now know of his extreme anti Trump bias. That bias literally taints the entire thing. 

Bill wrote a superb piece on this, it's a great column. Go to BillOReilly.com and please read it and check it out because it's an extremely important point going forward. 

So the question is this and this still lingers, is Donald Trump somehow soft on Russia? That's what his enemies decided to lay as a backdrop during the campaign. That's what they continue to pound on him as president. Is it true? Well when you look at the record so far he's been extremely tough on the Russians, more so than Barack Obama ever was. 

This administration has reinforced brutal sanctions on Russian individuals and Russian entities including four separate times just this year. Three Russian facilities have been closed, up to 60 Russians have been thrown out of US so far, he's approved the transfer of lethal weapons to the Ukrainian forces, something that Vladimir Putin staunchly opposed and he has in fact denounced the annexation of Crimea, something that Barack Obama also refused to do. So when Democrats scream that Trump is somehow soft on Russia keep those things in mind. Also, keep in mind that if the Democrats were truly concerned about Russia, why did Mrs. Clinton approve the sale of 20 percent of our uranium to the Russians for cash. That's the Uranium One scandal. 

Why did Barack Obama promise Moscow greater flexibility after his re-election in 2012? Why did Obama do precisely zero after the DNC was hacked and he was notified during the 2016 campaign by the FBI of ongoing Russian active measures he did nothing until well after the election. And why did Obama mock candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 when Romney was trying to tell everybody that the Russians were our biggest state sponsor enemy. Final thought on this, to understand exactly what is happening here you've got to understand both men. Donald Trump, is obviously a man from the business world. Everything with him is transactional as it is with business. There's a deal to be made for Trump with almost everything, he is about the art of the deal. He is not an ideologue, which of course is driving both sides crazy but that's also something that he has in common with Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin is not an ideologue either. In that way, he is unlike every other former Soviet and Russian leader. They were all doctrinaire communist ideologues, Putin is not. Putin instead is a Russian nationalist he once said not too long ago that the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Think about that for a second now. Not World War I, not World War II, the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's why he feels that it's his mission to reconstitute not the Soviet Union but Mother Russia. And that's why he has gone into Crimea and Georgia and eastern Ukraine. That's why he continues to menace the Baltic states. That's why he is extorting Eastern and now Western Europe on energy. And that's why he's now back in the Middle East. So will the business transactional guy get the Russian nationalist to change his behavior? We'll see at the end of their presser Vladimir Putin gave Donald Trump a World Cup soccer ball. Watch. 

"Speaking of the heavenly ball in our court in Syria, President Trump has just mentioned that we've successfully concluded the World Cup. Speaking of the football actually, Mr. President, I'll give this ball to you and now the ball is in your court." 

Well Senator Lindsey Graham then tweeted after that. Let's hope that that soccer ball is not equipped with a listening device. As we go forward on that point, President Trump would do well to keep in mind President Reagan's famous dictum, 'trust but verify'.

Let's now turn to the host of this program Bill O'Reilly, who has some well-deserved time off in Galway, Ireland. Bill welcome to your own show. Your thoughts on the summit today, what did you see? 

"Well first of all I thought you did a very comprehensive job in laying out what happened in a non-hysterical way. I want to fill in a few blanks and as you said I'm here in Galway city. I'm going to be in Ireland all week and I'll be reporting all week. So Monica and I will be talking tomorrow and on Wednesday and Thursday I'll be doing the No Spin News solo. And I have some very interesting stuff to tell you about my trip here in Ireland. But anyway, let's get back to the summit between Putin and Trump. First of all, when Donald Trump said the server OK what he and he did not do it well, all right, nobody knows what he's talking about except people like Monica and I who cover this stuff. What he is insinuating there, is that the Russian hackers and he knows that military people associated with Vladimir Putin hacked into Democrats involved with the Hillary Clinton campaign, he knows that. OK. He won't say it but he knows it because that's true. That's what they're being indicted for. So everybody should understand, these Russian military people intelligence people who did report to Vladimir Putin hacked into John Podesta's e-mail and others, DNC to get information and then they were going to use that information in a variety of ways to disrupt the election. So everybody should know that that's a fact. And Trump admitted it today by saying obliquely, I want to see the server. What server? Hillary Clinton's server.

“So Trump is trying to insinuate that the hackers the Russian hackers got into Hillary Clinton's email and therefore when Hillary Clinton told the FBI no nothing was compromised and Comey said nothing was compromised, that was a lie. That's a big headline, no one has pointed out. That is huge, as Trump would say. OK That's what Trump is insinuating he wants to see the server Hillary Clinton's server to see if there was a hack from the Russians and to see why the FBI didn't look at the server and all of that. So that is very important for everybody to understand. Now as far as Putin himself is concerned, Putin is a liar as you pointed out, Putin is a killer, as I pointed out to Trump's face in my interview with him, Super Bowl Sunday 2017. All right. So Putin is a villain and everybody knows he's a villain, every fair minded person and yes he's a Russian nationalist and he's trying to build up Russia but he's also trying to tear down the United States so that we have to emphasize that, it's not just about building up Mother Russia it's about harming the United States and Western Europe. That's what he wants to do, he's a disruptor. So Putin gets out there with Trump and they don't really accomplish much that we can report on because we don't know what the private conversations were and what we do know is that predictably, Putin denies everything. That's what he always does. I didn't do anything, we didn't do anything, didn't happen. So where do you go from there? Where do you go? You look at him and you go yes he did and then what do you have? You got chaos. As you pointed out, Monica, Trump wants a deal. He wants to basically lower tensions between the two countries, he wants to get Russia back into the economic flow, get them part of the G7, they'd be the G8 again, so that Russia has a stake and stops all of the disruptions and then he wants a nuclear deal to deemphasize nukes in both countries. That's pretty much what the end game is. I get nowhere insulting Putin calling him a liar, I get nowhere. OK. So that's Trump's side. 

“Then what happened in this was before the fact, I knew this was going to happen, the narrative that was put out by CNN almost immediately, CNN works in concert with the Democratic Party. So they speak, they exchange information and I mean it's well known that their operatives and Democrat operatives are friendly. So, even before they met in Helsinki, the narrative was they have something on Trump, they being Russia, has something on Trump. Now, we've heard it before but almost immediately after the joint press conference, John Brennan works for CNN, former CIA chief hates Trump more than anybody, I think, in the country comes out and says that. All right. And then it starts, the drum starts, bang bang bang bang bang bang bang. They have something on Trump, they have something on tape, they have this, they have that. No proof of it. OK. But that's it, then Schumer says the same thing, then Pelosi says the same thing, exactly the same no deviation, Trump is being blackmailed, Putin owns Trump. You know so I'm watching, and I go OK so that's your assertion, do you have anything to back that up? No. As you pointed out if there was anything like that, it would have leaked out a long time ago from Mueller or any senator or congress Intel person if there was any sign that Russia was blackmailing Trump that would have come out with something attached to it, not just a hollow opinion. 

“Now, I can't say with 100 percent certainty that Putin doesn't have something on Trump, I don't know. But I have, I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that there has been not a shred of evidence. So how irresponsible is it for television network CNN and others picked it up as well, and the Democratic Party chieftains to go out and say, Putin has got something on Trump. You know I mean come on. It gets to be to the point where that's defamation. All right. I mean you know Trump isn't going to sue them but it's certainly defamatory, unless you can prove it and it's destructive to the country because people believe it. The Trump haters believe it, so terribly destructive, terribly unfair. But that was going to be the narrative no matter what happened. And then we we have the hysteria you know, Trump could be impeached, I even saw that somebody was running around saying that. So, summing up, Trump tries to deflect it onto Hillary Clinton, tries to raise questions that the Russians who hacked, hacked her. I don't think Donald Trump has any proof of that. He's doing almost the same thing that his opponents are doing. But he has a point where the FBI didn't even look at the main server. I mean c'mon. So that was not established clearly, I am establishing it clearly tonight. All in all, nothing really accomplished that I can see from this meeting with Putin other than Trump gets a soccer ball. I would have said if I were Trump thanks for the soccer ball, can you give me Robert Kraft's Super Bowl ring back.". 

Yes apparently, he stole the Super Bowl ring from Bob Kraft, right? 

"Putin stole the ring from the owner of the New England Patriots. You know say look I'll trade you for the ball back for the ring. So anyway, that's pretty much where we are. We covered everything, do you think we missed anything?" 

No in fact I just have one or two questions for you Bill while I've got you on the line. First, a comment, I so appreciate your raising his point about the server. I mean obviously in the course of that answer, Trump said he was still rather skeptical that the Russians actually did what a lot of intelligence agencies and SA1 say that they did. We can debate that but your point about his raising the issue of the Hillary server is that he is insinuating that perhaps the Russians did compromise that server and that they did gain entry and I just, I think it's an important point because... 

"That is enormous, if that's true then Hillary Clinton should have been indicted."

Well that's right and you'll recall Bill, last week I know you were covering the Peter Strzok hearing on Capitol Hill one of the things that came out that wasn't really covered was the fact that, in fact and that server was penetrated by a quote unquote foreign entity. So there's a lot more to learn on this server and maybe President Trump knows a lot more than he is letting on. The question that I have... 

"One more clarification on that because you hit on on an interesting point that I didn't discuss. Look, if Donald Trump believes that the Russians penetrated Hillary Clinton's private, not private, server in her basement OK which she had set up illegally, she should not have set that up. All right. If he really believes that, then he can, all right, call for very specifically, the FBI to go back and get the server and he should. The second thing is you're right, he's too soft on Putin. When I had my conversation with him and people should Google that, O'Reilly Trump Super Bowl interview. When I had my conversation with him I told him you know I said, look you're almost legitimizing this thug. I know you got to neutralize him. I know you have to deal with him just like you have to deal with the North Korean gangster but you don't want to really put him in a positive light. Keep it neutral. But this is the way he does things, Trump. So you are right he wants the deal and he feels it is the best way to get the deal. Final point and then you can ask me anything else you want, in my column on BillOReilly.com. I tell everybody how Putin has won this. He's the big winner in this Russian interference on the 2016 election. Not only did he get into the fabric of the election but he destroyed the FBI. He put a cloud over his in place in the United States. He's annihilated the free press in America because nobody believes it anymore. I mean Putin is just dancing over there. He won an enormous victory in all of this."

Well as you say he is a disrupter and what's interesting Bill is so was President Trump, in a different way. So you have these two disrupters coming together and you're absolutely right about Putin's objectives, which is to cause chaos and disruption across the western world including among the NATO allies, including here in the United States. And we can argue he's had some enormous success in doing so. All right Bill, we're going to let you go back to your vacation. We're going to talk to you tomorrow about the fallout from this summit and have a good night there in Ireland and have a pint for me your fellow Irish Gal. 

"All right Monica, thanks for filling in." 

Pleasure. Bill thank you so much. 

All right well we went long with Bill, in that interview as you can tell so I just want to remind you that his brand new book "Killing the SS: the hunt for the worst war criminals in history" is out on September 18th. There it is. I can't wait to get a copy, I'm a World War II fanatic, so I am definitely going to get my own inscribed copy from Bill. Also, you will get a free gift when you preorder at BillOReilly.com. Also, keep in mind that half, I couldn't believe it, well I can believe this but we're in a new world now, half of all Premium Members are now watching the No Spin News on our TV apps. So check out our TV apps on Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV and more, you see them all up there. It's beyond my technical capability. I'm still watching on the big screen. 

I am Monica Crowley in today for Bill O'Reilly. Thank you so much for joining us here in the No Spin News. I will be back behind this desk again tomorrow, we'll talk to Bill again about the fallout from the summit and range of other issues. So I hope to see you then. Thank you.