Ben Shapiro argues the federal government obstructed justice by shielding Hillary Clinton from prosecution for mishandling classified information on her private server, contrasting her lenient treatment with a soldier's probation for similar negligence. He accuses President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch of coordinating with James Comey to protect Clinton, while criticizing Donald Trump for false bribery claims and outdated remarks about Saddam Hussein that the media ignored until politically convenient. Shapiro also condemns a German rape victim who lied about attackers' ethnicity to avoid refugee backlash as "suicidal leftism" and urges caution regarding Alton Sterling's shooting in Baton Rouge, citing his criminal record before labeling it a racial lynching. Ultimately, the episode suggests systemic bias protects the "ruling family" while selectively attacking political opponents and ignoring evidence in high-profile cases. [Automatically generated summary]
On Monday, America celebrated the 240th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, which condemned King George III for, quote, obstructing the administration of justice.
On Tuesday, the American left celebrated as the federal government obstructed the administration of justice on behalf of its ruling family, the Clintons.
Last week, the Attorney General of the United States met with former President Bill Clinton, whose wife and foundation were both under FBI investigation, and they both insisted that nothing bad happened, nothing untoward.
Days later, the New York Times reported that Hillary Clinton might offer Lynch a position in her administration.
Over the holiday weekend, the Obama administration announced that Obama would fly to North Carolina with Clinton aboard Air Force One in order to campaign with her.
Americans would, in part, foot the bill for the travel.
On Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey called a supposedly impromptu press conference to announce his findings in the investigation of Hillary's private email server.
He began by announcing nobody knew what he was about to say, which seems slightly implausible given that Obama was preparing to go on stage with Clinton at the time.
Is it even within the realm of imagination that Obama would stand next to Clinton hours after Comey announced the intent to prosecute her?
What, the FBI would just come and grab her and carry her bodily off the stage?
Of course not.
Then, Comey proceeded to lay out all the reasons why Hillary should have been indicted.
She set up multiple private email servers, all of which were vulnerable to hack.
She didn't set them up in order to use one mobile device, as she has so often stated.
She transmitted and received highly classified material.
Her team deleted emails that could have contained relevant and classified information.
She knew classified information was crossing her server.
He concluded that Clinton's team was, quote, extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.
This was all criminal activity.
But Clinton is a member of the royal family.
So, said Comey, she was innocent.
The divine right of kings rules.
Comey tried to say, He wouldn't recommend prosecution because she didn't have the requisite intent.
But the law doesn't require intent.
It requires gross negligence under 18 U.S.C.
793-F.
In fact, even the level of intent required to charge under statutes like 18 U.S.C.
1924 and 18 U.S.C.
798 was clearly met.
The intent to place classified information in a non-approved, non-classified place.
Nonetheless, Hillary would be allowed to roam free and become president.
To be clear, said Comey, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences.
To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions.
But that is not what we are deciding right now.
One rule for the peons, one for the potentates.
This is the legacy of Woodrow Wilson, finally achieved after a century of long waiting.
The big man, or woman, unanswerable to the law, approved by the population without regard to equality under the law, we now elect our dictators.
And they don't answer to us, except maybe once every four years.
The common folk, on the other hand, we find ourselves on the wrong side of the government gun every single day.
Tyranny doesn't start with the jackboots.
It begins with the notion that a different law applies to the powerful than to the powerless.
Under Barack Obama, tyranny has become a way of life.
Ronald Reagan always said freedom was one generation away from extinction.
Looks like we finally found the generation.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
You tend to demonize people because you don't care about your feelings.
We have so much to get to in the next 11 minutes or so, and then you'll have to go to Daily Wire for the rest to subscribe, and you'll have to go to SoundCloud to download, and iTunes to download.
But this is what we call, or Andrew Klavan calls, this show is the chainsaw of reality, and we are here to smash all of your dreams and make your life miserable.
So, why don't we jump right in?
So it turns out that Hillary is a massive criminal, but FBI Director James Comey, as we discussed at length yesterday, doesn't care.
Hillary is a liar, a pathological liar.
She lied and lied and lied over and over and over.
She did it with intent.
She put all this stuff on her server to hide it.
She had her people destroy things to destroy things.
We still don't know what she destroyed, even though Comey pretended that he did.
Now, watch this video.
Here is a video of Hillary Clinton and her statements in the past about her emails, her email server, versus what James Comey had to say yesterday, the FBI director.
Hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.
Just to give you an example of another case in which somebody was sentenced for actual criminal behavior like this, there is a soldier who was deployed in Afghanistan 2007-2008 as a regional engineer, and he admitted to downloading classified briefings and digital records onto his personal electronic divisors.
He brought them back to the United States when his deployment ended.
An FBI search of the guy's home turned up classified materials, But didn't show any intent to distribute, right?
Sounds exactly like Hillary Clinton, except that she actually sent out these emails.
This guy got two years of probation and a $7,500 fine, right?
Hillary Clinton, nothing.
Nothing, nada, nothing.
Everything is great.
Everything is grand.
We're supposed to pretend that this all goes away.
The Republicans are talking about now calling James Comey in front of Congress, calling Loretta Lynch in front of Congress.
It's worthless.
They'll just go up there and they'll say we're using our prosecutorial discretion.
It's not about the corruption of Comey and the corruption of Lynch, although that's obviously part of the story.
It's about the fact that the entire system is biased.
Now, Donald Trump is accusing the Clinton administration, well, the Clinton, the would-be Clinton administration of coordinating with the Obamas and the Obamas of coordinating with Loretta Lynch and James Comey.
I don't think that has to happen explicitly.
See, you work in a company, right?
And at that company, you sort of know what it is that your bosses want to hear.
So if your boss spends all day saying that he wants a certain type of memo, you craft the memo to fit that.
And this is, historically speaking, this is sort of like what happened with Henry II during the killing of Archbishop Thomas Beckett.
You know, the idea was, that Henry II, he says, "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" And the Knights go, "Hey, I know somebody "who will rid you of that troublesome priest." And they go and they kill Thomas Beckett.
That's how it works in government too.
When Obama says she's innocent, she didn't do anything wrong, Comey takes the hint.
There doesn't have to be a formal meeting.
Nonetheless, the Republicans are slamming Hillary Clinton over the emails.
Here's a new Republican video that's now come out and it's pretty effective. - There is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.
Yeah, because it's basically the same material as we just saw in the reason.com video that we showed before.
Obviously, the juxtaposition shows that Hillary is an egregious, egregious liar.
So President Obama knows all this, but he doesn't care because, as my friend Dennis Prager is fond of saying, truth is not a left-wing value.
The left doesn't care about truth.
They care about equality.
They care about fairness.
They don't care about truth.
Truth is completely worthless to them.
All they care about is domination.
All they care about is domination.
So President Obama lands on the airliner on Air Force One with Hillary Clinton as all of this is going on.
And then he stumps with her.
Now notice something about the visual here.
The President of the United States is standing behind a seal that says President of the United States.
He never does this when he's campaigning because even Obama sometimes recognizes that his office is separate from the politicking.
Obviously no more.
He brings Hillary along with him, and he speaks on her behalf.
By the end of this, Hillary would be standing behind that podium with the President of the United States seal on it.
Creating the optic that she's already the President of the United States, which is exactly what Obama wants to create.
Here's President Obama saying, if you're voting your pocketbook, you should vote for Hillary Clinton.
unidentified
Look, I just want to be clear.
Not everybody votes on the economy.
I understand.
There are other issues.
But if your concern is who's going to look out for working families, if you're voting your pocketbook, if you're asking who's actually going to stand up for the guy on the construction site, or the guy in the factory, or the woman who's cleaning a hotel room, or somebody who's really working hard, the working family,
Okay, so this is where Obama does his campaign routine.
This is what he loves to do.
It's what he lives for.
And there's Hillary cackling like a crazy old grandmother over there looking like Marie Barone from Everybody Loves Raymond in the background.
And Obama goes into his full campaign voice and he starts dropping his G's because that means that he's one of the people, right?
He starts dropping his G's.
Like, the woman is working in that hotel room.
She's not working.
She's working in that hotel room.
And that's not all he had to say.
Then he dropped this unbelievable line, literally five seconds after James Comey finishes saying that Hillary's the most corrupt heretic ever to occupy the State Department.
President Obama says nobody's ever been more qualified than Hillary Clinton.
unidentified
She's seen the consequences of things working well and things not working well.
And you got the cheering crowds, and everybody's really excited.
There's never been anyone more qualified to go to prison than Hillary Clinton as a candidate in this race.
But she's more qualified than, for example, General Dwight Eisenhower, who led the effort in World War II.
Really?
Is that true?
She's more qualified than George Washington, who founded the country, essentially?
She's more qualified than James Madison who wrote the Constitution?
Yeah, I'm sure.
I'm sure that she's more qualified than any of those people.
If you are a stupid person.
If you are a stupid person, this makes perfect sense.
The Republicans, naturally, are fighting mad about all of this.
And they should be fighting mad about all of this.
Here's Paul Ryan saying that this is ridiculous.
You know, under any other circumstances, this person would be barred from having security clearance.
unidentified
She grossly was negligent.
She mishandled classified information, and now she wants to be Commander-in-Chief.
Here's the other thing.
You know, when I was Mitt Romney's running mate, I got classified briefings every week by the CIA, by National Intelligence.
Very sensitive information, which you get as a candidate once the convention occurs.
Comey said, short of prosecution, some kind of administration action should occur, bringing consequences.
I think the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence, should block her access to classified information, given how recklessly she handled this during the presidential campaign.
If she becomes president, that's one thing, but I don't think she should get classified information, and I think the DNI should block it, given how recklessly she handled this from the start.
Okay, weak T from Paul Ryan there, but that's what Paul Ryan does.
Like, I don't mind Paul Ryan too much.
I think that he does stupid things like amnesty and TARP.
But, Paul Ryan as the advocate, as the prosecutor, does that look like the face of a prosecutor to you?
Or does that look like the face of a mildly irritated Muppet?
I mean, really.
Like, if you're gonna go after Hillary, you really have to go after Hillary here.
Now's the time.
Now's the time to attack Hillary, because she's wide open.
And Comey left her wide open.
In fact, there was even a theory being put forward by Ala Pundit over at Hot Air that Comey knew that this whole thing was politicized, so he dropped this announcement specifically to show, look how political this is.
We all know she's guilty, but I'm being forbidden by my higher-ups to do this.
Maybe that happened, maybe it didn't.
But the bottom line is, now is the time to attack.
Not on these kind of weak-kneed, well, she shouldn't receive classified briefings.
It is a very consequential act to indict a person who is the presumptive nominee of either one of the two political parties.
if I do this.
Cruz said this.
He said this decision threatens the rule of law.
This decision really destroys the possibility of rule of law.
Rudy Giuliani, who used to work with James Comey, he said he thinks it's unthinkable, unthinkable not to have a prosecution here.
unidentified
It is a very consequential act to indict a person who is the presumptive nominee of either one of the two political parties.
I don't know if the weight of that maybe affected judgment, but when I listened to him, I was sure he was going to come to the conclusion either that they were prosecutable offenses or he was not going to come to a conclusion at all and leave it up to the attorney general.
When he came to the conclusion that no reasonable prosecutor could bring this case, I found that statement to be completely indefensible.
A lot of reasonable prosecutors would bring this case.
In fact, I think You would be unreasonable not to bring this case at least under 18 U.S.C.
18 USC section 793 subparagraph F. - Right, and that's 100% true. - Which again, is not an issue.
It doesn't require intent, it requires gross negligence.
Now, just to spend a moment on this intent point, because Hillary and Obama and Comey all placed heavy emphasis on intent.
Here's what Comey said yesterday.
He said, "Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges.
There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent.
All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information, or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct, or indications of loyalty to the United States, or efforts to obstruct justice." We do not see those things here.
Okay, first of all, as I mentioned yesterday, gross negligence is the standard under 793F, but that's not the only law here.
When Comey says Hillary didn't evidence intentional and willful mishandling of classified information, of course she did!
When you build a server and put classified information on it and then have your lawyers scrub it, that is intentional and willful mishandling of classified information.
It is intent.
Okay, it doesn't have to mean that there's intentionality with regards to she wants the Russians to read it, but there's intent, obviously, to do something with classified info.
Same thing with vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct.
Same thing with efforts to obstruct justice.
There's two types of intent in law.
There's specific intent and there's basic intent.
Okay, basic intent, general intent.
General intent is like I'm standing on an overpass above a crowd and I have a brick.
I didn't have an intent necessarily to kill one person, but I had a general intent to drop the brick knowing that something bad would happen.
I would be prosecuted for first-degree murder.
Right?
That's usually what law requires.
Usually law requires a general intent.
The intent required here is the intent to do the bad act, not the intent to give the documents to the Russians.
But of course, Comey shifts the law in order to let Hillary off the hook because that's what they do.
We have to stop here, unfortunately, with the live feed, but go to DailyWired.com if you want to see the rest and if you want to subscribe.
Also, you can go to SoundCloud or iTunes and listen to us.
This will be up in a little while and you can download the entire show.
We have so much more to get to that you're going to want to be a part of.
We're going to talk about Donald Trump.
We're going to play a little bit of Good Trump, Bad Trump.
We're going to talk about what Donald Trump had to say about all of this.
We're also going to do things I like, things I hate, and we'll talk about the Alright, so, continuing along these lines, you've got Giuliani, you've got Paul Ryan, they're all condemning Hillary for a reason, they're condemning Comey for a reason.
So the question is, what's the fallout?
Does this really matter?
So we'll see you there.
All right, so continuing along these lines, you've got Giuliani, you've got Paul Ryan, they're all condemning Hillary for a reason.
They're condemning Comey for a reason.
So the question is, what's the fallout?
Does this really matter?
So I think for a week or so, you're gonna see the media crack on Hillary.
For a week or so, the media is going to say, oh, it's really terrible what you did.
Then they're going to shift, as quickly as possible, away from Hillary Clinton and toward Donald Trump.
So for the moment, they're going to pretend like they're objective about this.
Wolf Blitzer over on CNN, he said yesterday, this is a major slap to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
unidentified
There were some emails that were there that were at that top level, above top secret.
When he says that that information was there, it was potentially available for foreign hostile powers, or for anyone for that matter, to go into those private servers and compromise that kind of information, that is a severe, severe slap.
That the way Hillary Clinton was running that server while she was Secretary of State for four years, and her aides were obviously very well aware that all of this information was on this private server.
So when she says that no information was marked, classified, when it was sent or received, she may be precise in those words, but he says anyone reading that information should have known it was secret, top secret, or even a secure compartmented information, which is even more sensitive.
So the media will pretend to care about this, but I want to pay attention, okay?
Pay attention.
What the media is going to do over the next 24 hours is they're going to shift the narrative away.
So already we've seen a couple attempts to shift the narrative away.
We'll get to Trump in a second.
They've tried to shift the narrative this morning with President Obama announcing he would leave 8,400 troops in Afghanistan.
He's going out there trying to drop any headline, anything, to get Hillary out of the news.
That's one.
Two, Hillary's campaigning right now in Atlantic City.
She's standing outside a defunct Trump casino and saying that this demonstrates that he's a bad business person.
I agree.
He's not the world's best business person.
I think that Trump should probably fly to Benghazi right now and stand outside the gutted embassy and do a speech talking about how Hillary Clinton is an utter and complete garbage show.
But the media are looking for an excuse to swivel away from this.
So remember during the entire primaries, There are many of us, including me, who got the feeling, well, Trump really knows how to play the media.
I mean, the man just knows how to play the media, right?
He has them over his knee, and he's doing what he wants with them, and they're repeating all of his lines, and they're doing all the things that he wants them to do, and all the rest of this.
Well, now it turns out that actually that was all just play.
Like, there are people like me also saying, guys, this is the primaries.
They want Trump.
They like the ratings.
They like Trump.
They want to see him become the nominee, and then they will open up their guns.
Well, that's happening, and Trump is making it easy.
So, time for a little bit of Good Trump, Bad Trump.
As always, we begin with Good Trump.
Yes.
So, Good Trump.
He comes out and he starts ripping on Hillary over the email scandal.
And I have to say, Trump is at his best when you don't have to understand specifics to make the attack.
One of his problems on this email server scandal is he doesn't really understand what's going on because it's a little too complex for him.
But he says stuff nonetheless and it's not bad stuff.
So here is Donald Trump saying that Bernie Sanders has now lost the FBI primary.
Okay, so again, everything Trump says is a kernel of truth wrapped in an enormous mile radius chaff of garbage.
So I love that he says he's the only person in human history who's ever said the government is rigged.
Yes, you're the only person who said that, Donald.
Going all the way back to FDR talking about malefactors of great wealth.
I'm sure you're the only person in the history of the country who's talked about the system being rigged.
You're the only person.
But what he says there about Bernie losing the FBI primary, it's funny.
He does his shtick.
I mean, he's a comedian.
He's a comedian.
And what he says there is exactly right.
And he says that Clinton's decision was a miscarriage of justice.
Congratulations to him for getting the point right and also for using a three-syllable word, miscarriage.
Good for him.
So here is Donald Trump on that.
unidentified
I believe that what happened over the last four or five days has been a total miscarriage in justice, and I really believe that what happened is shocking, and it's certainly shocking to legal scholars, and I watch them and talk to them all the time.
They can't believe what happened.
Do you believe... And whether it's General Petraeus or others that have suffered grave consequences for what they did, Bill, I think it's a great miscarriage of justice.
Media have been going nuts on Trump for saying this.
So the media have been going nuts on Trump for saying this.
I don't know why.
I mean, he's wrong that Hillary herself said that she would put Lynch forward.
But there was a report in The New York Times from a close conference of Hillary saying exactly that.
So he's basically correct that Hillary Clinton may have, according to The New York Times, offered essentially a bribe to Loretta Lynch to move forward as sort of a backup, just in case James Comey came out the wrong way against her.
And finally, Trump sums up.
He says Obama and Clinton, this is like a carnival act.
Okay, so as you see, he's saying exactly the same thing now that he was saying back in December.
The media didn't care back in December.
They didn't care at all.
Dave Weigel over at the Washington Post, who's of the left, he wrote today, "By consistently covering Trump's argument over time and by following up on it, media outlets did their job to inform voters.
That was why Tuesday night's collective Captain Raynaud moment, like from Casablanca, I'm shocked to find gambling has been going on here, was so strange and so demonstrative of why many media consumers are skeptical of what they're hearing." Instead of a debate on the facts, should Hussein have been removed?
Did he kill terrorists?
There was a manufactured outrage straight from a rival campaign.
In other words, Hillary said all of a sudden, Hillary jumped on this, he's pro-Saddam Hussein line.
But he's been using this line for a year.
He's been using the line for a year, and they ignored it.
They didn't pay attention to it.
They actually used it as a club to hit Jeb Bush with, if you recall.
So why all of a sudden are they attacking Trump?
And the answer is they're attacking Trump because they need a better news cycle, and Trump provided it to them.
And he did provide it to them, and you're seeing the media jump on the bandwagon, and Republicans struggling to answer because Trump's been saying stupid stuff for a year, and he got away with a lot of the stupid stuff for a year, and now they're gonna hit him on everything.
Now Donald Trump is just They're playing whack-a-mole with Donald Trump.
So here's Paul Ryan, he's on Megyn Kelly's show last night, and Megyn Kelly asks him some very awkward questions, and you'll see Paul Ryan, who always comes off to me slightly awkward, turn full Michael Scott here from the office.
unidentified
Last question.
Tonight at a rally, Donald Trump said Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, but he was very, very good at killing terrorists, in response to which many people came out and started to go through the litany of very, very bad things that Saddam Hussein has done.
Any thoughts from you on the praise he had for Hussein?
He was one of the 20th century's most evil people.
He was up there, and he committed mass genocide against his own people using chemical weapons.
The fact that we have to say this in an open campaign now demonstrates just how bad this campaign has become.
Reince Priebus!
He's on TV yesterday, and now he's being asked about Donald Trump and his Jewish star tweet.
By the way, I thought the best commentary on this came courtesy of the KKK's David Duke, who said, wait a second, you're saying this is a sheriff's star?
I missed that one!
Here's Reince Priebus trying to downplay that particular controversy.
unidentified
The guy that did this tweet talked about it.
He went through every step of how he picked out the star from the from Microsoft.
I think it's called Microsoft Paint and picked out the star, realized obviously very quickly that it was not a smart idea, went back and changed it to a circle.
I mean, I think that they sort of, you know, owned this and changed it.
But, you know, you obviously don't want to see things like that, mistakes like that happen in the future.
But I think they they figured it out and they fixed it.
Trump dragging Hillary into the mud is the best thing for Hillary.
What if that's the best thing for Hillary?
What if that's where Hillary is most comfortable?
Hillary pretends she's most comfortable talking policy, but what if, you know, and I have this kind of conception also through most of the campaign, what if actually Hillary Clinton is most comfortable slinging mud and knifing people?
What if that's what she's most comfortable with?
What if she's just been waiting for an opportunity in her political career to unleash nasty Hillary?
Because we know she's nasty.
What if she's just been waiting until she can stand in front of Atlantic City casinos and call Trump a conman and a liar and suggest that he's fleeced people?
It's really interesting because, you know, they play Eastwood as the hero in the preview and they play Hackman as sort of the villain, but that's not really how the movie goes.
Everybody's both a hero and a villain.
It's a really interesting film all about how legends get made.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
Okay, so there's this activist This is an amazing story, and it's from Mediaite.
A German rape victim admitted in an interview with Der Spiegel she lied about her rapists ethnicities because she wanted to avoid sparking a backlash against refugees.
You getting this?
In January, Celine Gorin was attacked by three men in the city of Mannheim and forced to perform a sex act.
Gorin, who works as a refugee activist and a spokeswoman of the left-wing organization Solid, told police her attackers spoke German and were a mixed group of foreigners and locals.
Twelve hours later, she returned to the police, admitted she lied.
Her attackers were all foreigners.
They were speaking Arabic and Farsi.
Why did she lie?
She said she wanted to avoid the controversy caused when a group of migrants sexually assaulted and robbed over a hundred people on New Year's Eve in Cologne.
She said, what really hurts me is that it is a fact that the sexist, over-the-line incident that happened to me will inevitably lead to more aggression and racism.
You getting this?
So she lied about the people who raped her because she didn't want it to cast dispersions on the group to which those people belong.
That's... This is suicidal leftism.
In a nutshell, this is suicidal leftism.
They'll bomb buildings, they'll shoot people in a nightclub, they'll rape women, but we can't name who the people are because we're afraid that it'll lead all of these crazy reactionary right-wing rednecks to go out and start killing Muslims in the streets.
Is it just possible that maybe we should be worried about a group of people, not Muslims generally, but a group of people who we can't vet?
You know, a group of people who have no concept of women's rights?
Should we maybe worry about that a little bit more than the average Swiss national?
I mean, this is nutty stuff.
You're willing to let the rapist get off because you don't want people to have misperceptions about the larger group?
This is, it's amazing, but this is the left in a nutshell.
The left is willing to allow the bad guys to get away with it because they think, in essence, they think that we're really the bad guys, right?
The people who rape this woman, they're not the bad guys.
The real bad guys are the people who post on internet forums about the people who rape these women and happen to be Muslim.
It's, it's amazing.
It's amazing.
Okay.
So, another thing that I hate.
So, the big news story of the day, and it's starting to gain a little bit of steam now, is this Alton Sterling shooting.
Alton Sterling is a fellow who lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and he was selling CDs.
37-year-old man, fatally shot by police on video after selling CDs.
And this is according to the New York Daily News.
He was nice.
He wasn't a bad guy.
A friend and customer, Darian Gardner, told The Advocate, after Sterling's brutal death, he was respectable.
So, we'll show you the video.
It really isn't graphic.
You really don't see much.
But, basically what happens is that the police take this guy down.
He's resisting arrest.
They tried to tase him.
Apparently, an anonymous 911 caller said Sterling was carrying a gun and threatened someone before he was killed outside the Triple S food mart.
A store owner named Abdullah Muflahi said he never saw Sterling get into a confrontation.
Apparently, he had started carrying a weapon after a friend was mugged.
This is according to the store owner.
So the police tackle him, and we'll watch the tape in a second.
The police tackle him, and they're on top of him, and then they start calling gun, and you see them shoot him.
Now, it is worth noting here that Sterling was a registered sex offender after a 2000 conviction for carnal knowledge of a juvenile.
Okay, it means that he raped a kid, presumably, or had sex with a kid.
That's what carnal knowledge of a juvenile means.
The circumstances of the case were not immediately clear.
He was released for his offense in October 2004.
He'd been arrested for aggravated battery, criminal damage to property, unauthorized and domestic abuse battery, unauthorized entry, domestic abuse battery.
He was sentenced to five years in prison in 2009 for marijuana possession and carrying an illegal weapon with a controlled dangerous substance.
He was on probation when he died.
He would not have been allowed to carry a gun.
So those are all the circumstances that we know.
That's from the New York Daily News, not from me, it's from the New York Daily News.
Okay, so now you know about Alton Sterling.
So here is the tape, and then we'll tell you what the reaction has been.
So you can't see this, it's somebody shooting through a car window, basically, so it's... it's...
You're hearing them yell, get on the ground, get on the ground.
Right, they shoot back up, and here are the cops.
They're tackling the guy, right, because he gets up.
He's resisting arrest.
They tackle him again.
Now you've got two officers on top of him.
You can't see his arms in this tape.
Right, you can't see the guy's arms.
And then, you're gonna see that one of the officers goes for his gun.
One thing you cannot see is his hands in this tape.
Right, Mathis?
Could you see his hands here?
You can't see his hands.
There's no way to see his hands in this tape because his hands are behind the car, so there's no way to tell what he's doing with his hands.
And if he goes for the gun with his hands, and his hands are free, and if he gets his hands on the gun, Then presumably he could shoot one of the cops, right?
So there's no way to tell.
So, if I'm... This does not look like, you know, it doesn't look like, based on this evidence only, that this is a racially motivated killing based on this evidence.
Maybe it is!
Maybe there's another angle that shows that they just faked it, that they shouted gun.
By the way, he did have a gun on him, apparently, and they took a gun out of his pocket.
This is what one of the witnesses claims.
Now, witness testimony in this stuff is really tough because people have their biases.
Remember, in the Michael Brown case, there's witness testimony.
The original witness testimony was In this tape, all you can see is what you can see.
I can't make conclusions based on what I can't see.
I can't see the guy's hands.
And it turned out not to be true at all.
In this tape, all you can see is what you can see.
I can't make conclusions based on what I can't see.
I can't see the guy's hands.
All I can see are the cops shouting gun and then shooting him.
That's all that I can see.
And I think that's all that anybody can see.
That's not stopping the left-wing press from turning this into, it's a lynching, he wasn't doing anything wrong, they shot him at point-blank range for no reason.
I don't know if it was for no reason.
Maybe it was, if I see an angle where he's not going for a gun and he's lying there docile.
You know, his hands are nowhere near his pockets, and he's not going for a gun, then yeah, this is a really bad kill, and they're going to jail, and they should go to jail.
But if all we have here is this, that's not enough to convict anybody.
And it's certainly not enough to suggest that these guys are just out there to do a racial killing, that this is just a racial lynching, just like all the other supposed racial lynchings in America.
By the way, if you were gonna go out and presumably just kill a black guy for fun, you wouldn't do it in a crowded area surrounded by other black people with cell phone cameras, I would assume.
But, again, maybe other tape comes out.
Now, there have been a couple suspicious things about this that have been reported.
I don't know if they're true yet, so we'll tell you what the rumors are, and then we'll see if they turn out to be true.
One is that they both had body cams on them, but because they were tackling the guy, the body cams stopped operating, which would be unfortunate.
If it turns out that's not true, I'm sure the tape will come out.
Apparently, also, there was some footage from different angles at the store, and the rumor was that the cops had gone in and taken the entire cameras, Instead of releasing the footage, if that's true, obviously that's a problem too.
That's obstruction of justice, as well as presumably obstruction of justice over a first degree murder.
So, we'll find out if all of that's true, but just based on this tape, and that's all anybody's seen so far, just based on this tape, it's too early.
It's too early.
You have to reserve your judgment, right?
You have to reserve your judgment.
And you especially have to reserve your judgment based on the fact that the guy was resisting arrest, did have a gun in his pocket, had a prior history of run-ins with the cops, Right, so you have to reserve judgment.
That's all.
I'm not saying the officers are innocent.
I'm not saying they're guilty.
You have to reserve judgment.
I don't know why this is so tough.
The left has a problem with reserving judgment.
So they'll reserve judgment about Hillary Clinton after all the facts are out, after all the facts are out, but before any of the facts are out in this case, they're already saying that these officers are guilty, and they should go to prison for life, and there are marches in the streets, and I'm sure President Obama will comment today about this is just another incident with racist police departments, etc., etc.
Because this is what the left does.
It doesn't matter if the evidence isn't out there.
And when I ask for evidence, that's not a bad thing.
Evidence is a good thing.
Evidence is a useful thing.
So we said, we'll be the jury.
So that's the jury perspective.
The guy on the ground's perspective?
Okay, so a couple of things about that.
Folks, for the love of God, don't resist arrest.
You resist arrest, all you're doing is putting yourself in an escalated situation.
You're putting yourself in a higher probability situation of something bad happening to you via the cops.
That doesn't mean that if you didn't grab for his gun, the cops didn't do something terribly wrong, obviously.
It does mean that, you know, for the sake of everybody, let's all not resist arrest.
Let's do that.
Now from the perspective of the cops.
Let's say, let's take it both ways.
One, if the guy didn't go for his gun and both cops just started shooting him, obviously terrible kill, they're going to jail, and they should go to jail.
Second, if you're in the cop mindset, and you've got a guy where you tase him and he doesn't go down, and then he resists arrest, and he doesn't go down, and then you tackle him, and he's still struggling against you, and then he starts to reach for a gun, you're not going to sit around waiting to see whether you go home that night.
If you reach for a gun, he's getting shot, and he's getting shot for good reason.
And the idea that these cops are working in a heavily black area like Baton Rouge, Louisiana, specifically because they want to target black people, it's a weird way to go about doing it.
It's a weird way to go about doing it.
So we'll see what it looks like when all the evidence is in, but people aren't waiting.
They're already broadcasting all of the incendiary footage on the news.
Alton Sterling's, who is this, his son?
Alton Sterling's son, I guess he had five kids, and he, and the son is obviously very upset that his dad got shot.
unidentified
With that being said, the individuals involved in his murder Took away a man with children who depended upon their daddy on a daily basis.
My son is not the youngest.
He is the oldest of his siblings.
He is 15 years old.
He had to watch this.
As this was put all over the outlet and everything that was possible to be shown.
And some may know Alton.
Sold CDs and was doing just that.
Not bothering anyone.
I had the consent of the store owners as well.
And then the event that recorded during the two officers.
Now if we could reflect on the measure of a man, it should not be judged on his past.
Okay, so she's saying don't pay attention to his criminal record.
All that's fine.
I mean, the incident is what the incident is, and his prior criminal history really doesn't matter very much.
Except that when the officers approach him, presumably they're going to be a little more wary knowing that he has a criminal history.
Heartbreaking footage, obviously, of the kid.
You see the guy there next to her wearing the Trayvon Martin hoodie, and I have to say that this generalized attempt to make every situation into a racist killing, even after the Trayvon Martin jury came back and said this was not a racial killing, Trayvon Martin was pounding this guy's head against the pavement, it's unfortunate.
It's unfortunate because We should all have sympathy for the relatives of people who are killed wrongfully, obviously.
I mean, you can't watch that footage and not be heartbroken for the kid.
I mean, it's just awful, awful, awful all the way through.
But we don't know yet what happened.
We don't know yet what happened.
And it's a mistake to believe everything that's said by everybody on TV about these circumstances.
For example, Alton Sterling's aunt, right?
Here's what she had to say about the situation.
unidentified
That there was an anonymous person who called 911 And said that there was a guy selling CDs, who we believe to be your nephew, who had threatened him with a gun.
Did your nephew have a gun?
No, my nephew would never have a gun because of his situation.
Meaning what?
He would never have a gun.
But what does that mean?
It means that he was kind of in a little trouble with the law.
He would never have a gun.
He was on probation.
But he was taken off.
But in the state of Louisiana, he cannot carry a weapon.
Because of his previous incident, he cannot carry a weapon.
And his previous incident, does he have a history of violence?
Michael Brown, who had strong-armed a store five minutes beforehand.
People were calling him a gentle giant.
They're doing this routine now with this fellow.
He never would have had a gun.
How does she know that?
She doesn't know that, and it turns out that he did have a gun on him.
It turns out that he did have a gun on him.
So don't believe all of the witness testimony that you hear yet, not until there's verifiable proof, not until all the witnesses have come out, because immediately... See, people know, you know, witnesses know, that the media will descend on you during one of these shooting incidents, and they know the story that is going to Push a particular point of view politically and in the media.
And there are people who are willing to reflect that.
Maybe they're telling the truth.
Maybe they are.
We'll see.
But don't buy everything first order.
And that's what we're watching.
We're watching Sally Cohn do this routine.
We're watching Amy Schumer coming out and suggesting that it's a bad shoot immediately without any of the evidence in at this point.
When she says that he was a gentle giant, the man was convicted for domestic abuse batteries.
There's that.
He was previously arrested for aggravated battery, which isn't just You know, battery.
That's like bad battery.
That's like you beat someone up in a serious way.
So all I'm saying is, the tendency of the media is to immediately jump on these stories and turn them into the biggest racial deal in the world.
It's more important at this point to actually wait for all the facts to come out, and then we can make a judgment.
Then maybe I'm with you.
Then maybe I'm protesting with you.
But until I get all the facts, I can't protest anything, because I just don't know.
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