Dan Proft welcomed Cornell Law professor William Jacobson to discuss two headline-grabbing stories: new developments in the Russiagate saga and the Trump administration’s high-stakes standoff with elite universities.
The segment opened with Proft detailing fresh disclosures tied to the 2016 Russia investigation. Newly released notes, first reported by The Federalist, suggest a senior intelligence official was pressured by a James Clapper associate to endorse the Obama-era intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference, even without seeing the underlying evidence. The notes also describe the official being told that signing off on conclusions he didn’t support would be key to securing a promotion.
Adding to the intrigue, former Trump administration official Kash Patel told Fox News that a trove of sensitive documents—including the classified annex to the John Durham report—was discovered in FBI “burn bags” in a secure room. That annex, which contains the underlying intelligence Durham reviewed, is expected to be declassified and transmitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee for eventual public release.
Jacobson, who founded LegalInsurrection.com, said the unfolding revelations reinforce just how deeply the public was misled during the Russia-collusion frenzy. “It was a psychological campaign against the electorate,” he said, noting that even skeptics of the narrative were left with lingering doubts during years of leaks and media amplification. He argued that if investigators can build provable cases that officials like James Comey, John Brennan, or Clapper lied under oath or to federal investigators, the Justice Department must pursue charges—even if they fall short of the more grandiose conspiracy theories circulating in political media.
“Think of Martha Stewart,” Jacobson said. “She went to jail for lying to the government. These people misled the nation. If there’s evidence of perjury or false statements, they should be held accountable.”
The conversation then pivoted to the Trump administration’s ongoing battles with the Ivy League over campus discrimination and research funding. Columbia and Brown recently agreed to multimillion-dollar settlements to resolve federal complaints and restore access to lucrative research grants. Northwestern and Harvard, by contrast, have resisted settlements, with some faculty arguing that capitulating to the administration would harm their reputations.
Jacobson acknowledged that the agreements mark a significant win for federal oversight, but he warned that they stop short of addressing academia’s deeper structural issues. He argued that faculty hiring practices at elite universities have produced ideological monocultures—especially in the humanities and social sciences—where conservatives are virtually absent.
“Harvard’s own survey says only 3% of its faculty identify as conservative,” Jacobson noted. “That’s one-tenth the share of conservatives in the general public. These schools have destroyed their own academic freedom by hiring only people who share the same left-wing worldview.”
He criticized arguments from faculty who claim that hiring openly conservative scholars is equivalent to racial quotas or political litmus tests. Fostering viewpoint diversity, he said, is essential to restoring genuine academic freedom and is not comparable to race-based preferences that courts have found unconstitutional.
Proft closed the segment by observing that elite universities are happy to rely on federal money but resist the strings that come with it. Jacobson agreed, saying that real change on campus will require both policy enforcement and a cultural reckoning in higher education.