GLENN: Can we start here? Can we start here?

Let’s agree on the premise first. Okay? On the premise of what we’re doing.

We have to, as citizens, now figure out whether or not we should look at this and discuss this or not.

And here are the two sides: One side will say — and break it down in classic logic.

The president gets the best intelligence. Right?

PAT: Yes. Although, it’s not always accurate.

GLENN: Right. Hang on just a second. The first premise is the president gets the best intelligence. This was given to the president. Therefore, this is the best information. Now, there have been people who are making that — look, they didn’t make this up. This was given to the president. You don’t believe the president’s briefings? That’s the first side. They’ll immediately accept it because, this is credible information. It’s coming from those four guys.

But that’s false. Because of what Pat said. The middle sentence is incorrect or incomplete. “This was given to the president.”

The middle sentence should be, “This was given to the president, but a lot of the stuff he’s getting lately has been politicized, and sometimes it’s incorrect.”

PAT: Just ask him about weapons of mass destruction.

GLENN: Exactly right. Okay?

So the other side will tell you, the president gets the best intelligence. Yeah, but it’s all politicized now. Therefore, we have to dismiss it.

No. No. Both of those are wrong. Logic will tell us, the president most times, or the president gets the best intelligence available to him. What is given to the president is sometimes wrong. Therefore, we must not dismiss or accept, but instead, investigate.

So this is up to us now. Because it’s been dropped into the laps of the American people.

So let’s logically, dispassionately look at what we have, and not accept or dismiss anything. Anybody who says, “I’m not listening,” you’re a fool. Anybody who says, “I’m not listening to you trying to excuse it all,” you’re a fool. “I’m not listening to you because you’re talking about Donald Trump,” you’re a fool.

Because let’s take it from the Trump side: This is Donald Trump’s birther problem now. This will forever be the — the birth certificate of Barack Obama. From here on out, the left will use this information to try to discredit. And they will say in — in all kinds of fake news, “Well, yes, he’s — he’s proved that’s wrong. But I’ve got better sources. And let me show you. I’m going to be making a statement about some better sources that will show you he’s lying.”

And it will be used against Donald Trump from here on out. So you better build a strong case, based on logic, not on fear, not on anger, not on blind loyalty. Because they — the other side will build it that way.

PAT: And we’re talking about the president of the United States. Both sides, always, to themselves and to the country — to dig into this and to investigate.

GLENN: We were never birthers. But I will tell you that there were many people around us that were passionate about Barack Obama’s birth certificate at the very beginning. Passionate.

PAT: Uh-huh.

GLENN: And we dispassionately investigated. We did our own homework. We were never birthers. We dismissed it. I’m sorry. At first, we took this approach. Not on the air. But internally, we took this approach: Neither dismiss it, nor accept it. It’s out there. Let’s do our homework and find out whether or not it’s credible or not. We found it to be completely uncredible. So we dismissed it.

Let’s do the same thing here because I guarantee you, this is going to be his birth certificate problem.

STU: Yeah, or at least part one of it. Who knows how many things are going to come out like this.

JEFFY: No kidding.

GLENN: There’s two things he has going against him: How do you cry foul that you can’t believe a source, when you were the one accepting the National Enquirer? When you were the one who said, “I have additional information on his birth certificate,” and he never produced it?

STU: Right. I mean, this is —

GLENN: You’re not going to gather a lot of sympathy from the people who don’t like you.

STU: Right.

GLENN: There’s no fairness points coming your way, unless they really are trying to be better people.

STU: And, look, we look at this, and we try to look at it, as you point out, soberly, dispassionately, and look at the information.

GLENN: Fairly.

STU: Right now, what we know, as far as these reports go — and we haven’t really talked about what’s in the report.

GLENN: Yes. We’ll do that next.

STU: It’s almost important to look at it the way it’s presented, which is I think fair — the journalistically correct way is the way that Tapper’s team did it.

GLENN: And, by the way, what we clipped from that was, who was on Tapper’s team?

STU: Carl Bernstein.

GLENN: It was the cream of the crop of journalists. That doesn’t mean anything to a lot of people, but it is the best we have.

STU: Right. But, I mean, if you want to find out how to report a story, a good place to start is to see how Jake Tapper reported it. You’re going to be on the right side of that about 99 percent of the time.

GLENN: Yes. Yes. I agree.

PAT: Uh-huh.

STU: And so — you see there — I think what happened with the Buzzfeed part of this is they all — all these media organizations have had this information since what — they believe, since August.

And my initial inclination on the story like this is they would never do — look at this, they’re just trying to take down a Republican president. They would never do this to the other side. They could have released this information before the election. They had it.

GLENN: In fact, Harry Reid was demanding it.

STU: Yes. So they could have done this before the election. The CNN report, I think, breaks every — but they’re not the only people with this information. CNN reports it, and then Buzzfeed says, “Well, we have this. Let’s get our piece of this story out there and try to claim as much as the reporting as we can.”

GLENN: Correct.

STU: Did they step over the line? Probably. But I understand their motivation there. I understand —

GLENN: I actually — the Buzzfeed story — I hate to give this the — because I didn’t know CNN broke this. I thought CNN — I thought the events were reversed.

PAT: Were reversed.

STU: Right.

GLENN: I thought CNN came out and did that. And I was like, “Okay. Well, that’s the credible way of presenting.”

STU: Right.

PAT: Is Buzzfeed the only one reporting the most salacious stuff?

STU: They release the actual documents. Inside the documents, it says things about prostitutes. We can get into in a little bit. And also financial connections.

PAT: But CNN didn’t even go into that.

STU: They didn’t even mention it. And so that —

GLENN: Well, they did say “the most salacious personal parts.” They’re not even talking about that.

STU: No.

GLENN: I mean, it is the other parts of this that are equally disturbing. I will tell you, that the personal parts are almost irrelevant to me. You know, because you’ve either made up your mind about who Donald Trump is as a man one way or another.

STU: Right. But this is about whether he’s compromised as a president.

GLENN: Correct. Correct. So the sex — this part of it doesn’t matter, except, is he compromised as a president?

But the first part of it is bad enough to be compromised as a president.

STU: And a lot of the debate today is about, oh — people are saying, “He didn’t do that. He’s innocent. He didn’t have all these prostitutes in Moscow.” We’ll get into the details into why that’s not important. It’s not important. I will also say, I don’t think there’s any reason to even entertain the idea that those things are true. At this point, there is such limited information —

GLENN: Except for this: I want everyone in the audience to make up their mind right now.

PAT: If it is true, does it matter?

GLENN: Does it matter? Does it matter?

PAT: It’s the Bill Clinton situation.

GLENN: Yeah. This is going to drag on for months, if not years.

PAT: If it’s true, does it matter? Do you care about this guy’s character at all?

GLENN: Yeah. Is there anything in this story that matters?

STU: If it were true.

GLENN: If it’s true.

STU: I don’t think it’s true, and I don’t think there’s any reason to think it is at this point.

PAT: Yeah, I don’t —

GLENN: I agree. At this point, there’s not.

STU: But there’s other reasons why it’s important information. And we can get into that.