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Feb. 16, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show

16:12

Ep. 254 - Is The Intelligence Community Its Own Government?

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	On Wednesday, hyped up on rumors of Russian connections with the Trump administration, CNN commentator Sally Cohn took to Twitter with her proposed solution to the turmoil shaking Washington, D.C.
	Here's what it looked like.
	She wrote, straightforward from here.
	One, impeach Trump and Pence.
	Two, constitutional crisis.
	Three, call special election.
	Four, Ryan versus Clinton.
	Five, President Clinton.
	It's good to dream, Sally.
	It's good to dream.
	First off, there's no evidence yet of any high crimes and misdemeanors necessary to begin an impeachment.
	And then there's also a problem about impeachment because Republicans control both houses of Congress.
	And then there's something called the line of succession.
	If Trump and Pence actually were impeached under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, as prescribed by the U.S.
	Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, Paul Ryan would then become president.
	So there's no constitutional crisis.
	As Cohn sort of suggests.
	And then how about that special election?
	Well, I guess you'd need an act of Congress, because that's not in the Constitution.
	Well, Republicans control both houses of Congress, so there's that as well.
	And then, continuing on, Cohn suggests that the race would be Paul Ryan versus Hillary Clinton.
	Neither side of that equation is actually guaranteed.
	Finally, Cohn suggests Hillary would undoubtedly win the election, which is kind of silly, given she just lost to the most unpopular presidential candidate in modern American history.
	But it is good to know that Sally Cohn has an active imagination and that she's still dreaming of President Hillary, no doubt alongside President Hillary.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Everybody's losing their mind.
	It's wild.
	So we will have a special surprise in just a moment here on The Ben Shapiro Show for our cultural correspondent, or Andrew Klavan's cultural correspondent, Michael Molls.
	He'll be showing up here to annoy us in just a few moments.
	But first, we have to say thank you to our advertisers over at Helix Sleep.
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	So I have to clean up a little bit of unfinished business, unfortunately.
	So I've paid off a lot of bets over the last election because I was foolish enough to give odds.
	Never give odds.
	It's always a mistake.
	So I gave a bunch of odds, and I'd actually forgotten that I made a bet with Michael Mulls since I apparently decided to lose money to everyone in the office.
	I've already given small amounts of money to Jonathan Hay, I've given Larger amounts of money to Michael Medved and David Bowes.
	I gave amounts of money to Jeremy Boring, or at least I will, maybe.
	But Michael, I've been holding out on mainly because it's fun.
	So I'm actually signing him the check.
	Come on here, Michael, and congratulations.
	Here is your check.
	$400 from Michael Mills.
	I gave him 4 to 1 odds for $100.
	And I'm going to write here in the data line, for ignoring data, And then I'm going to just hand this over to you.
	We'll take a picture for the cameras.
	This is really incredible.
	There we go.
	Thank you.
	Absolutely.
	No!
	Absolutely.
	Well, I guess I won't be having lunch today, but, well, it was nice.
	It was good to see you, Michael.
	Well, Lester, thanks for having me.
	Here's the actual check.
	Here's the actual check.
	And, um...
	No, wait, no, but I...
	Go.
	Go.
	Just go.
	Good to see you.
	Good to see you, Michael.
	Always a pleasure.
	We have to get out of here.
	All right.
	Now, in other news, everything continues to be crazy over in Washington, D.C., and it continues to be crazy because everyone has decided to go absolutely insane.
	Nobody is telling you the truth, okay?
	This is the running theme of the show today, is that no one is telling you the truth.
	Everybody tells you half the story, but not the other half of the story.
	So if you're on the right, then what you're generally hearing today is about intelligence leaks and how terrible they are.
	And intelligence leaks are bad, right?
	I mean, and we'll talk about that in just a second.
	And if you're on the left, all you're hearing about is how Michael Flynn is a secret agent of the Russians from Russia with love, right?
	That's all you're hearing is that Moscow is now in control of the government.
	Nothing about the leaks.
	So we're going to talk about all those things because we are not afraid of saying all the true things.
	So we'll say all the true things on today's show.
	We begin today with the media losing their gourds.
	The media have lost their mind.
	They have no concept of anything remotely approaching the appropriate.
	They have no concept of anything remotely, remotely approaching.
	The reasonable.
	And so, they've all gone crazy, and they're suggesting that Mike Flynn, the national security advisor being ousted, is the biggest story in the history of mankind, ever since Jesus apparently rose from the dead, or apparently since Moses received the tablets at Sinai, or since the creation of Earth.
	This is the biggest news that has ever happened, right, depending on your religion.
	This is the biggest news that has ever happened in the history of man.
	And so here's a little montage of people From the media losing their minds, this is Chuck Todd from NBC News and Thomas Friedman, who has the brainpower of a slightly overused hairdryer, and Dan Rather, talking about how this Mike Flynn thing is just the- it's not just big, it's the biggest.
	It's not just the biggest, it's huge.
	So here they are.
	Welcome to MTP Daily and welcome to day one of what is arguably the biggest presidential scandal involving a foreign government since Iran-Contra.
	Take a breath.
	Hyperbole aside, folks, hunker down, because this is a Class 5 political hurricane that's hitting Washington.
	All this hour, we're going to dive into every angle of this breaking story as the White House scrambles to contain the fallout.
	Today, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that President Trump knew for weeks that his National Security Advisor Michael Flynn had misled the Vice President and, apparently, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, among other White House officials, about discussions he had with Russia.
	It's the biggest thing since Iran-Contra.
	No.
	No, it's not.
	It really isn't.
	Maybe the evidence eventually will get there, but no, no it's not.
	Right now, all we know is that Mike Flynn didn't tell Mike Pence that he had talked to the Russian ambassador about something.
	That's the whole story.
	I mean, literally, as far as we know, that is the entire thing.
	We don't know anything more than that.
	Those are all the verified facts thus far.
	And I don't even think that's fireable, as I discussed yesterday.
	And we'll talk about sort of the theories of why Flynn was even fired, because it seems really questionable to fire him based on sort of all the right-wing theories of what's going on here.
	So Chuck Todd says the biggest since Iran-Contra.
	That's sort of ignoring things like Benghazi.
	It's sort of ignoring things like Barack Obama lying to the American people and Congress and everyone about the Iran deal until it was already done and Ben Rhodes bragging about it in the press.
	It's sort of ignoring the weapons of mass destruction debacle under George W. Bush.
	It's sort of ignoring the Chinagate scandal under President Clinton.
	There have been a lot of real problems in foreign policy for a long time.
	If you just want to restrict it to scandals involving foreign governments, then it seems to me that in 2012, Barack Obama sang openly on a hot mic that he wanted flexibility from the Russian government for his re-election campaign.
	That's just as bad.
	That's really not good.
	Okay, so, but Chuck Todd's the worst in Tehran.
	Then there's Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who, as they say, has the stunning brainpower of an overused hairdryer.
	Here's Thomas Friedman.
	It gets Joe to two other issues.
	The first is, we have never taken seriously, from the very beginning, Russia hacked our election.
	That was a 9-11 scale event.
	They attacked the core of our very democracy.
	That was a Pearl Harbor scale event.
	Can you imagine if Hillary Clinton, you know, were where Trump was?
	What the right would be doing on this issue?
	Okay, so stop it there.
	So Friedman says, can you imagine what the right would be doing if the situation were reversed?
	Well, can you imagine what the left would be doing if the situation were reversed?
	They'd be saying Hillary, of course, was going to win anyway because Trump was so unpopular.
	They'd be saying exactly the same thing that a lot of people on the right are saying today.
	Show us the evidence, no smoking gun, etc.
	But the idea that this is akin to 9-11 is akin to Pearl Harbor.
	It's an attack on our very institutions of government!
	Okay, again, you're gonna have to show me the people who died, okay?
	If you're gonna compare something to, you know, actual physical attacks in which thousands of Americans die, you're gonna have to show me the actual Americans who die, as opposed to just saying that leaked documents released by WikiLeaks, which is bad, okay?
	I was against WikiLeaks all the way through the election cycle.
	Saying that that is equivalent to 9-11 or Pearl Harbor is so over the top, it's insane.
	And then there's Dan Rather.
	Dan Rather is the father of fake news.
	Dan Rather is the guy who went out there with a false document about how George W. Bush won AWOL from the military back in the 1970s, and then he was fired for it.
	And now, I don't know if the media has a death wish, or if they're just suicidal, or they're sadomasochistic.
	I don't know what the story here is.
	The media keep trotting out Dan Rather as though he has something relevant to say on the nature of truth.
	And here is Dan Rather talking about, well actually here, so Dan Rather, I guess he just said this.
	It's a Facebook quote.
	quote so a Dan Rather said on Facebook he said Watergate is the biggest political scandal of my lifetime until maybe now it was the closest we came to a debilitating constitutional crisis until maybe now the Russia scandal is somewhere around a five or a six on the 10 scale of Armageddon but it is cascading in intensity seemingly by the hour and Dan you're gonna have to calm down You're going to have to calm down.
	Really, why are the media so hot and bothered?
	Why are the media so up in arms over this whole thing?
	Because the media get to celebrate themselves.
	They get to pleasure themselves on camera.
	Brian Stelter over at CNN, he says, you know who this is really a big moment for?
	This isn't a big moment for the American people.
	It's not really a big moment for, you know, it's a big moment for us.
	Aren't we grand?
	with Michael Flynn.
	So that's even harder.
	This was right in plain sight for a while.
	And by the way, a big moment for investigative journalism.
	This has been a story led by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the CNNs of the world.
	If it weren't for journalists digging, digging, digging into this, we wouldn't know about it.
	So when you hear about anonymous sources, when you hear about leaks from the White House or from the government, this is what that's so important for.
	And we're seeing something else, because this isn't a pat on the back.
	This is the job.
	The media is going to do its job.
	Journalists will always do its job.
	It doesn't matter whether they're liked or not.
	It's not a popularity contest.
	But what are we seeing here in real time?
	Okay, they break the story.
	Flynn resigns.
	He says in his letter, basically, I own this, okay?
	This wasn't some political trap set by the media.
	He owned it.
	Okay, walking brick, Chris Cuomo is the person you're hearing at the very end there, that we're always going to do our job.
	Really?
	Where were you for the last eight years?
	Where were you under Barack Obama?
	I don't remember you trying to force out Lois Lerner in the same way that you tried to force out Mike Flynn.
	And this brings up a real issue for the country.
	And here's the conservative take on this whole thing.
	This brings up a real issue for the country.
	But the issue for the country is less about Trump and Russia than it is about the fact that we now have collusion between the intelligence community and the media in order to undercut Trump.
	And it really is a problem.
	Regardless whether you like Trump or you don't like Trump, it is not a good thing when the intelligence community is acting as a shadow government, intervening in elections.
	You know, James Comey writing letters in the middle of elections, the left hated it.
	Now you've got the intelligence community leaking off the record like a sieve.
	I mean, it's not even a leak anymore, it's now a gushing flood of information coming out to the media, and it's all being delightfully overplayed by the media.
	I'll give you two examples just over the last 12 hours.
	So on Tuesday night, the New York Times ran with this headline, quote, Trump campaign aides had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence.
	That's a pretty damning piece, right?
	I mean, the idea is that they must have colluded with Russian intelligence to affect the election or shape policy.
	They were talking.
	They were in coordination all the way with Russian intelligence.
	And this was used as sort of the counter to the fact that Sean Spicer had said that nobody talked with Russia before the election because, again, the Trump administration is not competent at communications.
	Clip 10, Sean Spicer says that we've never talked with the Russians, and here's the New York Times piece saying different.
	Now, today, can you still say definitively that nobody on the Trump campaign, not even General Flynn, had any contact with the Russians before the election?
	My understanding is that what General Flynn has now expressed is that during the transition period, well, we were very clear that during the transition period, he did speak with the ambassador...
	I'm talking about during the campaign.
	I don't have any, there's nothing that would conclude me that anything different has changed with respect to that time period.
	Okay, so there he says that we've had no contact during the campaign, and then the New York Times runs a piece saying there were contacts during the campaign, looks shady, looks like a cover-up.
	But, as James Barrett notes over at Daily Wire, by the third paragraph of their 1,300-word article, the Times admits that they said so far they'd seen no evidence of cooperation between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
	So, Spicer isn't telling the truth there, that Trump people weren't talking to the Russians, but there was no evidence of cooperation, and the New York Times acknowledges there's no evidence for any collusion with the Russians regarding the election, and then later in the article, the team of writers acknowledged that the contact that did allegedly take place between Trump's associates and Russian intelligence could have been done unwittingly.
	So it's possible that Spicer isn't actually lying, he just doesn't know the answer, meaning, we talked to people who are from Russia, were they working for the Russian government?
	I don't know.
	And then CNN ran, here's a second story, CNN runs another story today, and their headline is, Trump aides were in constant touch with senior Russian officials during campaign.
	And so you get an idea, if you're reading that headline, the impression that you take away is there's coordination.
	Definite coordination.
	The piece quotes multiple current and former intelligence, law enforcement, and administration officials.
	So the leaks aplenty.
	But then CNN reports, quote, officials emphasize that communications between campaign staff and representatives of foreign government are not unusual.
	So if they're not unusual, what the hell are we talking about here?
	Presumably, what they're really asking Spicer is, were there any covert coordinations, were there any covert communications between Trump team and Russian team, but CNN can't say there was, and New York Times can't say there was, but the headlines seem to suggest there was.
	I mean, that's media malpractice.
	Why isn't the headline, no evidence of coordination, Ari Fleischer pointed this out, why is there no headline that says, no evidence of coordination between Russian government and Trump campaign?
	And why is the intelligence community leaking all this stuff anonymously?
	So Trump has been up in arms over this.
	He's been tweeting incessantly about the intelligence community leaking and saying it's really inappropriate.
	There is one problem with how Trump is doing this, and that is that Trump is saying these leaks are wildly inappropriate, and then he's also saying fake news.
	Okay, either the leaks are true or the leaks are false.
	You can't really say both the leaks are illegal, and they're really damaging, and they're really terrible, and also, they're false.
	If they're false, just say they're false, right?
	Just say it's a bunch of crap, and people in the media... I mean, Trump is familiar with tweeting in all capital letters fake news.
	But the real story here is not even about the media so much as it is about the intel community.
	So, this is what people have been referring to as the deep state, meaning the bureaucracy that is entrenched.
	in power and isn't moving.
	Do they have an agenda to stop Donald Trump?
	If so, why is that agenda present?
	And we'll talk about that when we continue over at DailyWire.com.
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