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March 3, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
18:02
Ep. 263 - Can Oprah Be President?
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In yet another indicator that the mainstream media is rife with corruption and conflicts of interest, CNN has now hired Laura Jarrett, daughter of Valerie Jarrett, to cover President Trump's Department of Justice.
As The Blaze reports, CNN touted Jarrett's background defending companies and individuals in government investigations brought by the Justice Department.
Valerie Jarrett wasn't just President Obama's top advisor.
She's also personally close to the Obamas, to the extent that she's reportedly moving in with them in their new Washington, D.C.
digs.
Jarrett called Trump's election a punch in the stomach, soul-crushing.
According to Vanity Fair, Laura Jarrett is dedicated to, quote, promoting civil rights and social equality for women and minorities.
So she's probably going to be completely objective about the Trump administration, you'd think, right?
Look, this is nothing new from the mainstream media Democratic Party complex.
Ben Rhodes, the national security advisor to President Obama who actively lied to the entire media about the Iran deal, is brother to David Rhodes, president of CBS.
ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman, she's the wife of Jake Harney, former Obama press secretary.
George Stephanopoulos, ABC News' leading anchor, he's a former Clinton staffer.
Ben Sherwood, president of Disney-ABC television group, is brother to former Obama special assistant Elizabeth Sherwood Randall.
The media claim that such relationships have no bearing on coverage.
Maybe.
Or maybe.
People with close relationships to those in power tend to favor those people in their coverage.
After all, that's the entire basis of the rumors about President Trump's conflicts of interest with regard to his businesses, which are now supposedly run by his kids.
Their relationship makes him more likely to act in corrupt fashion to benefit those businesses.
Why wouldn't that same logic apply to the media?
There's nothing wrong with assigning Valerie Jarrett's kid to cover the DOJ, but there is something wrong with pretending objectivity when it is clearer every single day that such objectivity is a figment of the media's imagination.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, lots to talk about today.
We'll start with everything going on with Jeff Sessions in just a moment.
But before we do that, we have to say thank you to our advertisers over at Wink.
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Okay, so we begin the day with the story of the day.
And the story of the day is supposedly, supposedly that Jeff Sessions is the most nefarious character that ever was.
So the Attorney General for the Trump administration.
is supposedly this guy who is just awful, awful, awful.
Why is he so awful?
Because he met with the Russkies.
He met with the Russkies, just like everybody else in the Trump administration.
Apparently he met with the evil, evil, evil Russkies.
And that means that he has to be stopped, right?
I mean, the fact is that the Russkies have been trying to get the Trump administration in their pocket.
And now here comes Jeff Sessions trying to explain, you know, trying to work the back room, basically.
Here is the problem with all of that, okay?
So there are a bunch of problems with this particular set of nonsense.
I'll go through the entire story from the beginning because it's a little bit confusing.
So here it is.
He's the latest figure to come under heavy fire.
Here's what you need to know.
He testified back in January, I guess, that he hadn't met with the Russians when he was just a senator.
He was not yet AG.
And it was unclear whether he testified he hadn't met the Russians in his capacity as somebody on the Trump campaign or whether he hadn't met the Russians in his capacity at all.
What he said, Al Franken asked Sessions what he would do if he learned of communications with the Russians from the Trump campaign, and Sessions said, I've been called a surrogate a time or two in that campaign.
I did not have communications with the Russians.
So is that a denial of any contact, or is it a denial of contact as a surrogate?
Not really clear.
Because he could say, look, as a senator, yeah, I met with the Russian ambassador, but we didn't discuss the campaign, so it didn't have anything to do with Trump.
Senator Pat Leahy asked Sessions in writing, quote, Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after Election Day?
And Sessions said no.
And Sessions issued a statement saying he did not meet with any Russian officials now to discuss issues of the campaign.
So now he's changing his story a little bit.
So this sort of back and forth has really hurt Sessions because it now turns out that Sessions met twice.
That Sessions met with the Russians two times.
So what does that mean?
Did anything nefarious happen?
No evidence that anything nefarious happened.
He could have met with them.
He's on the Armed Services Committee.
He could have met with them to talk about that sort of stuff.
Is it possible he talked to them about the campaign?
Sure.
But the problem is that now that he testified in front of Congress that he didn't, Or at least he didn't in a certain capacity, and the language is a little bit vague.
There are a lot of people calling for his recusal.
There are a bunch of people in the Senate who have said that they don't routinely meet with the Russians.
20 lawmakers from the Armed Services Committee told The Washington Post they didn't meet with the Russian ambassador last year.
But a bunch of senators have also said it's not out of the realm of possibility or out of the realm of normalcy for senators to meet with the Russian ambassador.
You know, Claire McCaskill, who has said that Sessions should resign for perjury, she said she's never met with the Russian ambassador.
And then it turns out she met with him in 2013.
So a lot of these senators have met with the Russian ambassador.
This looks like a lot of smoke and no fire.
It doesn't even look like real smoke.
It's just like a bunch of crap, honestly.
It looks like a smear job out to get Sessions the day after Donald Trump goes on his triumphant tour because he gave a good speech to the joint session of Congress.
So all the Democrats are universally calling for his resignation.
And this is where the Democrats are really, really stupid.
So they don't have the capacity to just in moderate fashion say something obvious like maybe he should recuse himself.
And that would be one thing.
You could say, OK, look, whether he did something good or bad or not, it doesn't really matter.
Now people are going to think no matter what he does, it's corrupt, so he should recuse himself.
That's a fair argument.
It's a fair argument.
I don't think it's a great argument, but it's a fair argument.
But instead, they're saying he should resign.
So you have people like Nancy Pelosi saying, after lying under oath to Congress about his communications with the Russians, the Attorney General must resign.
And then she was joined in that call by Elizabeth Warren, among others.
Listen, Eric Holder, the Obama Attorney General, he didn't resign despite a scandal-plagued career ranging from Fast and Furious to overseeing journalists and attempting to prosecute journalists.
He was actually held in contempt of Congress and he didn't resign.
Loretta Lynch, as you recall, the Attorney General under President Obama after Holder, she refused to recuse herself from the investigation of Hillary Clinton.
She said she wasn't going to interfere unless it went the way she didn't want, in which case she would interfere.
So for Democrats to suddenly say that Sessions has to recuse himself based on he once met with the Russian ambassador is really over the top.
But saying that he should resign is super duper duper over the top.
Trump says it's a partisan hit job and he's basically right.
The White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she says this is the latest attack against the Trump administration by partisan Democrats.
Here's my deal.
General Sessions met with the ambassador in an official capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is entirely consistent with his testimony.
It's no surprise Senator Al Franken is pushing the story immediately following President Trump's successful address to the nation.
Here's my deal.
Okay, folks, here's my deal.
I am always going to call balls and strikes.
I'm always going to call balls and strikes no matter who's at bat.
Because that's all that matters is the balls and the strikes.
What is right and what is wrong.
Not the person at bat.
If Trump's at bat, I'm going to call balls and strikes.
If the Democrats are at bat, I'm going to call balls and strikes.
Okay, so this one is a ball.
I'm sorry, this is not a major story.
There's no evidence that Sessions is deliberately lying about meeting with the Russian ambassador for some nefarious reason.
Should he recuse himself is the second question.
And that second question is basically, Is he so compromised at this point that any investigation he does will be compromised?
That's possible.
That is possible.
And there are good arguments both ways.
On the one hand, there's that argument.
On the other hand, there's the argument that if anybody can basically be prevented from doing their job by a media and a Democratic Party that insists that every minor problem is a major problem, then nothing's ever going to get done.
If you're accusing yourself over, I once met the Russian ambassador at my office, then what won't you recuse yourself over?
What can you actually do?
That's a serious problem for the Trump administration.
It looks in all likelihood like Sessions will just recuse himself on this thing.
That doesn't mean there will be a special prosecutor, by the way.
It just means that his deputy will end up prosecuting this thing.
And his deputy presumably would probably act the same way that he would because his deputy will be appointed in coordination with President Trump by him.
So the idea that he is going to somehow not be able to have control over the investigation is just not true ever.
As an example, the Deputy Attorney General for Loretta Lynch was that lady who refused to prosecute Donald Trump's executive order and ended up being fired.
So the Deputy Attorney General ends up looking a lot like the Attorney General under whom they serve.
But here's my bottom line.
This thing looks way overblown.
Even for people like me who are suspicious of Donald Trump's relations with the Russians, because there's a lot of smoke, a lot of smoke, but we haven't seen any real fire yet.
Even for somebody like me who looks at Paul Manafort and says, that's kind of weird, and looks at Donald Trump constantly praising Putin and says, well, that's kind of weird, and looks at the fact that Michael Flynn was so warm with Vladimir Putin and said, that's kind of weird.
Even for me, this is a nothing burger of a story.
And again, Balls and strikes are all that matters.
I'm not going to rip Trump for doing something I don't think is particularly wrong.
That said, it's pretty clear that the Democrats are losing their minds.
And they're particularly losing their minds over this moment with Karen Owens.
And I want to talk about this briefly because we ran a story a couple of days ago in which we talked about the Democrats not standing up for Karen Owens.
And people took that to mean that we were saying that they had never stood up for Karen Owens.
We never claimed that they never stood up for Karen Owens.
What we said, as I said on the podcast yesterday, was that the Democrats stood at the beginning and then they sat down.
And then they sat down.
And when people say, well, they sat down, it's not a big deal, then why is it that in all the pictures you can see that half the room is sitting and half the room is standing?
If it wasn't coordinated, if it wasn't a matter of partisanship, then why is it that half the room is standing and half the room is sitting?
Why wouldn't it just be a bunch of randos who are kind of standing and sitting together?
Why wouldn't some Republicans have sit and some Democrats sit?
Everybody just got tired and bored and so they sat down.
But that's not what it looks like.
You can see the pictures.
Half the room is sitting, half the room is standing during the second ovation.
Not the initial ovation.
Everybody stands for the initial ovation.
Here's what I actually wrote, okay?
Democrats initially stood for the widow, but then they sat.
Trump didn't.
Okay, so I was very clear about this.
Nonetheless, Snopes and PolitiFact, instead of ranking as half true or totally true the claim that Democrats sat down for the video, they said that it was completely false.
Which, um, I have pictures.
And so does Benny Johnson.
Benny Johnson is the guy who initially reported this from IJ Review, and he tweeted out pictures of Keith Ellison and Debbie Wasserman Schultz sitting down in the middle of the second ovation.
And you can see it in his picture.
I mean, I'm looking at the picture right now, right before me, and he's not the only one.
I mean, they're sitting down, an entire body of the Democratic Party is sitting down.
Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi, by the end, are sitting down, which is exactly what we wrote in the piece.
But again, PolitiFact and Snopes and the rest of these fact-checkers are lefties, and so they feel the need to overreach because they're desperate to disprove the idea that Democrats Made a boo-boo by not standing up the whole time, which they obviously should have.
Okay, that's just one indicator of how the Democrats are overplaying their hand.
But they're losing their minds in general because any time Trump does something good and isn't a universal crap show, they begin to go crazy.
So Michael Moore, you know, again, going off on this whole Karen Owens thing, he's suggesting that Donald Trump used the seal widow.
So here's what he had to say.
Of course, and that's why she's there.
As a sort of a f-you to the people who are criticizing him for this.
And this poor woman, this widow who has lost her husband, she is in desperate grief right now.
She's in love with her husband still.
And in love with her husband.
And what did you think of that?
And to use that as just put another notch on his belt.
And what's he thinking about?
My ratings!
Okay, and so Moore is very upset.
Okay, as I said yesterday, two things can be true at once.
One can be that Trump wanted to honor her.
The second can be that Donald Trump was using her as a political prop.
Okay, I'm just gonna be perfectly frank about this.
Politicians use people as political props all the time.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton stood in front of the flag-draped coffins from Benghazi and lied to the families of Benghazi for political gain.
Barack Obama in 2014 invited a wounded warrior to the State of the Union.
Did he do so because he was so respectful of the troops or did he do so as a political prop?
And the answer is, maybe both.
Right?
It can be both.
You know, Barack Obama, he did the same, he's done the same routine multiple times.
Hillary Clinton trotted out Kaiser Kahn, right?
Gold Star family, and this became a major issue in the campaign.
She trotted out Kaiser Kahn to rip into Donald Trump over Kaiser Kahn's son being killed in Iraq.
Great.
And Kaiser Con rips into Trump.
Was that Hillary Clinton using them as a prop?
It's really funny.
Every time somebody on the right brings out a family member of somebody who's been slain in the line of duty, then they're a political prop, according to the Democrats.
So when Republicans talk about Pat Smith, who's the mother of Sean Smith, who was killed in Benghazi, then she was just a political prop.
But every time the Democrats tried out a Cindy Sheehan or every time they tried out the Jersey girls from 9-11, these are heroes who cannot be questioned under any circumstances.
Here is the reality.
Politicians will always use people who are suffering.
They'll always use victims as a little bit of political theater.
They'll always do that.
That doesn't change.
That doesn't change the fact that this woman wanted to be there.
And I thought Mary Catherine Hamm of CNN had the exact right take on this, which was Ryan Owens' widow, Karen Owens, she has every right to be there.
She has every right to feel the applause of the entire nation showered down upon her in thanks.
And one day she'll be able to show her kids the tape of when their father was cheered by the entire nation at a State of the Union address.
So, you know, the Democrats are losing their minds over this.
Jake Tapper at CNN, who's reporting I generally like, he also went after Trump because Trump at one point apparently had said about the Yemen raid, they lost Ryan, meaning the military, meaning the generals, and Jake Tapper objected to this, meaning you authorized the raid, why don't you say we lost Ryan, why do you make it about they?
It's nitpicky.
They lost Ryan.
Quote, they lost Ryan.
But they didn't lose him.
We did.
We all did, as a nation.
And one might think that the commander-in-chief who signed off on that raid would also think in terms of we lost Ryan.
Accountability and responsibility, these are important principles.
Okay, so this is a little bit of an overstate by Tapper.
Let's see what comes out about this Yemen raid, whether there was actual intelligence gathered.
There's a lot of controversy over that, but trying to say that Trump is somehow disrespecting the memory of this guy, I think that's an overstatement.
Mike Pence, I think, hits this right on the head.
He says all of this is a great disservice to the family.
Doesn't that make you angry?
You seem like a calm guy.
That made me angry.
Doesn't that make you angry?
It does a great disservice to a great American family.
And I think that that's totally fair.
I mean, ripping her... And there are people who ripped her, saying that she was used and she allowed herself to be used.
Again, it's her choice to be there.
If you're going to rip Trump for using her...
Then you have to show that he used her and didn't honor her, and I'm not sure that that happened.
I think that's, again, a wild overstatement by desperate Democrats.
How desperate are the Democrats at this point?
They're so desperate that they're thinking toward 2020, and they're looking at their field, and they're realizing that their field is barren.
There is nothing there, right?
Their field is just totally empty.
So the question becomes, okay, well, if their field is totally empty, who will they go for?
They have an idea.
Their idea.
Oprah Winfrey, oh yes, here she goes.
Have you ever thought that given the popularity you have, we haven't broken the glass ceiling yet for women, that you could actually run for president and actually be elected?
I actually never thought that that was, I never considered the question even a possibility.
I just thought, oh, oh.
Right, because it's clear that you don't need government experience to be elected President of the United States.
That's what I thought.
I thought, "Oh gee, I don't have the experience.
I don't know enough.
I don't know." And now I'm thinking, "Oh." All right.
Oh, okay.
Okay, so now they're talking about Oprah's going to run for president.
And you knew that this is the lesson the Democrats were going to take away.
They're not going to take away the lesson that they failed to appeal to blue-collar people.
They're not going to take away the lesson that they had the world's crappiest candidate in Hillary Clinton.
Because here's the reality.
If Joe Biden runs in that election cycle, very high probability that Joe Biden is president of the United States right now.
They're not going to take away the right lessons from this.
Instead, they're going to take away Donald Trump as a celebrity, and now we need our own celebrity.
Because this is how political parties think, because political parties are parties of groupthink and stupidity.
So, it'll be Tom Hanks or Oprah Winfrey, and the Democrats are over the moon about this.
And we'll get to Chris Matthews, I'll be like, Stay!
Stay by Oprah!
We'll get to that in a second.
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