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March 7, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
21:02
Ep. 264 - Did Democrats Get Another Scalp?
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For the past two weeks, the Trump administration has been slammed for its supposedly tepid response to anti-Semitic attacks on cemeteries and threats to Jewish community centers.
Trump himself was smashed over and over for suggesting that the threats might be coming from left-wing provocateurs attempting to cast a shadow on his administration.
He was widely mocked for such an assertion, Pretty much everyone on the left assumed that the JCC threats had to be coming from Trump supporters, including The Intercept, a left-wing publication that headlined just two days ago, Trump can't accept his allies are targeting Jews, so he blames his opponents.
It now turns out that the culprit, at one point, worked for The Intercept.
On Friday, a Missouri man named Juan Thompson was arrested for making multiple threats to JCCs across the country in order to harass his ex-girlfriend.
Thompson is suspected of being a copycat, of hearing about the JCC phone calls, and then conducting his own campaign of phone terrorism.
According to the FBI, Thompson dated a Jewish woman.
After their relationship ended, he sent defamatory emails and faxes to her employer.
He then stalked her.
After that, he made, quote, at least eight JCC threats nationwide as part of his campaign against his ex-girlfriend.
He then tried to blame the woman in order to have her prosecuted.
He tweeted, quote, So, here's what we know about Thompson.
So here's what we know about Thompson.
He's a left-wing reporter who made up material while working at The Intercept.
He was fired in February 2016 for fabricating quotes in his stories and creating, quote, fake email accounts that he used to impersonate people, one of which was a Gmail account in the name of the editor-in-chief of the publication.
He says he voted for Bernie Sanders.
Thompson, who is black, tweeted just two weeks ago that Trump was attempting to, quote, remove black people from the South Side of Chicago.
Naturally, folks on the right are triumphantly pointing out the irony.
The guy behind the JCC threats isn't a Trump backer, but a left-wing fake news guy who hates Trump, who for weeks the left stated this had to be an outgrowth of Trumpian anti-Semitism.
But let's be fair for a second.
The guy sounds like a complete nutjob, not just a left-winger gone awry.
According to the FBI, this was all designed to act out some sort of personal vendetta against an old girlfriend who was Jewish.
The Jews were only involved insofar as they could be used as a tool against her.
It doesn't make the guy's conduct any less egregious or anti-Semitic, but it doesn't really seem to connect to an ideology so much as a desire to hurt somebody he knew by using anti-Semitism.
Furthermore, there's still another suspect out there.
Dozens of JCCs have been called, and this terrorist was a copycat.
But.
But.
This is evidence that while the left-wing media constantly accuses the right of jumping to conclusions about terrorism and ignoring right-wing terror involvement, the left has a major blind spot for its own extremists.
And you just know that Trump's Twitter feed this morning will be totally epic.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so we'll talk a little bit more about that story.
I also want to talk about these Yemen raids and what we know about them, and why exactly it's ridiculous the way that the Democrats are treating this whole thing.
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Okay, so...
I want to start off today talking a little bit about the fact that the Democrats have gone crazy over this Yemen raid.
So a lot of that are upset over what happened the other night with Donald Trump and his speech to a joint session of Congress was that moment with Kerry Owens, who's the wife of the Karen Owens, the wife of Ryan Owens, who's the Navy SEAL, who was killed in this Yemen raid.
And the left has been saying that it's just terrible.
Donald Trump used her, he brought her out there and he used her.
And I got a bunch of questions about this, people who were saying that it's just ridiculous he did use her, or is it bad that he used her?
Here's my view of politicians, just to be clear about this, my view of politicians using victims to promote their political agenda.
It's bad.
I don't like it.
I don't know that's what Trump was doing with Karen Owens.
If he was doing it in order to get the Yemen issue off the table, yeah, that's kind of yucky.
At the same time, what it really was was him honoring a vet.
And if the issue was we need to draw closer to our vets, then I'm all for it.
So, it's not quite the same thing as bringing out the victim of gun violence issue, like Piers Morgan did, in order to claim that everyone who disagrees with you on gun violence is some sort of evil person who wants people to get shot.
It's more, here's the widow of a hero, let's pay her tribute.
That's not the same thing in my mind, whatsoever.
But I want to talk about the Democrats' reaction to the Yemen raid, because it really is telling.
So here's what you need to know about the Yemen raid.
Let's go through what actually happened.
We haven't talked at length about this, so I'm going to lay out the timeline.
This is according to the Washington Post.
So on November 7th of last year, CENTCOM, U.S.
Central Command, told the Pentagon about a plan to raid al-Qaeda in Yemen.
The Defense Department approved the plan December 19th, while Obama was still president, and the Obama administration apparently took a look at it.
Then, once Trump was president, he was briefed, and Defense Secretary Mattis recommended support for the raid.
Trump was briefed a bunch of times.
He finally authorized the raid January 26th through 27th.
On January 28th, the raid happened.
Apparently it went wrong.
Al Qaeda apparently knew the Americans were coming and attacked from a building upon which American forces had to call in an airstrike.
So they were using the building as a front, basically hiding behind women and children, because that's what terrorists do.
And we called in an airstrike, took out the building, and killed a bunch of civilians.
When our soldiers were in trouble, we also tried to send in an MV-22 Osprey aircraft, which is like a $75 million aircraft.
And it ended up crashing, and we had to destroy the aircraft so the enemy didn't get a hold of it.
The Washington Post reported that 14 militants were killed, terrorists were killed, as were Owens and numerous civilians.
The dead included the eight-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, who is the cleric that we droned under President Obama a few years ago.
Several female terrorists ran to planned fighting positions to open fire on the SEALs, according to U.S.
military officials.
Trump was in the White House during the raid, and he was tweeting during the raid.
So, what's the great objection over this whole thing?
What is the grand objection?
So, there are two objections.
One is there's an objection saying that Trump never should have greenlit the raid, that it was a risky raid, he did it in order to show that he was macho.
I haven't really seen the evidence of that.
Mattis approved it.
It seems to me that if Mattis approves it, it's totally fair for Trump to rely on the judgment of a guy who should know much better than he should, General Mattis, who has been doing this sort of stuff his entire life.
And then there is the second problem.
And this is where the left says, this mission was a disaster and it was a giant failure.
This is the part I object to.
So I guess the idea here is that if Trump could have just roamed the site a la Obama and not risked American lives, that would have been better.
And that would have been better specifically because no intelligence was found.
So there's now a controversy over whether we found usable, verifiable intel at this place or not.
So apparently the SEALs went in, they grabbed hard drives, they grabbed laptops, they grabbed cell phones, and there's now an argument from leakers versus the administration.
The administration says there's intel that we can use, and the leakers say there is no intel that we can use.
But here's my question.
Why should that matter?
How are the SEALs supposed to know what intel is?
How's the Defense Department supposed to know what intel is on the phones or the computer?
They don't have the phone or the computer.
If they could have hacked them, they would have hacked them.
Right?
So, they collected the materials, and somebody died in the line of duty.
I don't understand why this is, why if the mission went bad, that is somehow a referendum on the president.
And I don't like this in general.
I really don't like this in general.
Because the idea seems to be that if somebody is part of a mission that fails, somehow their life was wasted, or somehow that's the fault of the president that the mission failed.
That's a pretty dangerous standard, and to be fair, I think President Trump, when he was just Donald Trump, promulgated this.
He's the sort of fellow who ripped the Bush administration and sort of implied that we had wasted thousands of lives in Iraq, which is really gross, because here's the truth.
In a war on terror, in any war, there will be missions that are successful and there will be missions that are unsuccessful.
You're not of more value because you were part of a mission that was unsuccessful than if you were part of a mission that was successful.
If you died at the first battle of Bull Run as a Union soldier, that didn't make your life any less valuable than if you died as a Union soldier at the second battle of Bull Run, which the Union won.
It's very, it's silly to try and say that if a mission goes bad, or a battle goes bad, the people who are in the bad mission are somehow less valuable, or they wasted their lives, or the botch was definitely the fault of the President of the United States, as though every mission is going to be successful.
War isn't science, and not every operation is going to go as planned.
Now, a lot of people on the left are saying, well, you know, Trump isn't getting the sort of flack over the Yemen raid that Obama got over Benghazi.
Right, and he shouldn't.
Because those are two completely different things.
Okay, and I'll tell you why.
There were a lot of military missions under Obama that went wrong.
There were missions where SEALs got killed.
And you really didn't hear the American people, or the people on the right, making too big an issue of it, because we understand, in a war, there are going to be some missions that go wrong, that are badly planned, badly coordinated, or where the crap just hits the fan.
But that's not what happened in Benghazi.
In Benghazi, it wasn't a mission.
Benghazi was an ambassador sitting there requesting help for months and months and months, didn't get it, and then things went bad.
That's not the same thing as a military mission where we don't have all the information.
They had every bit of information.
It wasn't a military attack.
It wasn't an attack intended to go after the bad guys.
It was literally a guy sitting in an office in Benghazi, and he was attacked by a bunch of terrorists.
And the Obama administration should have known that that was going to happen and done something to protect him or withdraw him ASAP.
That's their fault.
So equating Benghazi with the Yemen raid is really illogical and quite foolish, but it just demonstrates the extent to which the left is going to go in order to push this agenda.
And it's really, I think, incredible the extent to which they'll go in order to push their agenda.
The latest example of this is the attempt to go after Jeff Sessions.
So as I said yesterday, I talked about the Jeff Sessions issue.
Attorney General Sessions has now recused himself from any investigation of Trump-Russia connections or connections between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
And the Democrats are saying it's not enough for him to recuse, he should resign.
So I want to go through how this broke down, because the truth is, he should recuse, he should not resign.
And it is very silly for the Democrats to claim this.
And also, the Trump administration really has to get their comms office in order.
They do need to get their communications office in order, because it just looks messy.
And that feeling of chaos is not helpful.
So here's how all this started.
Flashback to January of this year, Al Franken, senator from Minnesota, he asks Jeff Sessions during his confirmation hearings, Did you have talks with the Russians?
And here's what Sessions says.
These documents also allegedly say, quote, there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.
And if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?
Senator Franken, I'm not aware of any of those activities.
I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I did not have communications with the Russians.
And I'm unable to comment on it.
Okay, so people take this, there's two ways to read this exchange.
One is that Sessions is saying, as a campaign surrogate, I did not have contact with the Russians.
And the other is, I didn't have contact with the Russians and I was a campaign surrogate.
And those are both plausible readings.
It seems to me that the question was, do you know if anyone from the Trump campaign had contact with the Russians?
And he is saying, I never had contact with the Russians.
And then it turns out that he had two meetings with the ambassador, a guy named Sergey Kislyak.
Which is just the typical Russian ambassador name.
He's, by the way, Sergey Kislyak is getting more attention this week than he will up to the week that Putin murders him.
But in any case, Stuart Smalley asked Sandy Griffith about this.
And, you know, this becomes a big issue because the idea now is that somehow Sessions has something to hide, somehow he's working with the Russians to do something nefarious.
Now, I think that that is wildly exaggerated.
I don't think there's a lot of evidence that Sessions was doing anything nefarious.
There are lots of senators who have met But that's not really the issue.
The issue is whether he lied about it.
It's whether he covered it up.
Whether there was anything to cover up is another issue.
But just like in po- It seems everything in politics now boils down to, if you're not totally transparent and forthright at the very beginning, then you get smacked.
Which is why it seems to me if you can't identify any wrongdoing, but all you can identify is that somebody, you know, misheard the question or answered wrong or even if he lied, you know, if he lied, I guess that's perjury and he should resign.
But if it just looks like what it is, which is he answered the question as I was a campaign surrogate for Trump and I didn't have any meetings with the Russians and he never thought, well, I'm a senator and I had a meeting with the Russian ambassador.
That seems to me, okay, recuse because it gives a scalp to the Democrats, I suppose, but the truth is that it looks mildly compromised.
So recuse, let your deputy do all the work.
What's the big deal?
But don't resign.
But the left has to play this over the top.
So Chuck Schumer says it's not enough for Sessions to recuse himself.
The Senate minority leader says that Sessions should resign.
For weeks, I have said that Attorney General Sessions needs to recuse himself from any investigation into contacts between the President and his associates on the campaign and transition and Russia.
For weeks, I made clear that I believe Attorney General Sessions' close relationship with the Trump campaign requires That he recused himself from the executive branch investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Okay, and so this is over the top, obviously, because Democrats feel like there's blood in the water.
Now, part of the problem here is how the Trump administration handled this.
So, what they should have said is, Sessions should have answered more specifically.
He didn't do anything wrong, but to avoid the appearance of impropriety, he's going to recuse himself.
That's the way you handle this.
Instead, what you end up with, because this is always the way it works with the Trump administration, they need to get their common office in order.
Instead, what you get is this mass confusion before Sessions recuses himself.
So Trump comes out, he says, we have total confidence in Sessions, and he shouldn't recuse himself.
Mr. President, do you still have confidence in the Attorney General?
Total.
Thank you.
Thank you, guys.
Mr. President, should Sessions refuse himself from investigations into your campaign in Russia?
I don't think so at all.
When did you first learn that Sessions spoke to the Russian ambassador?
Did you know during the campaign?
I don't think he should do that at all.
When were you aware that he spoke to the Russian ambassador?
I wasn't aware at all.
Mr. President, do you think he should have spoken truthfully about whether he had spoken to the ambassador?
He probably did.
Yeah, Trump's pretty grumpy about all this, and I think he has a right to be grumpy about all this, because it's really silly.
It's really silly, okay?
Every senator has met with Kislyak, or Russian members of the administration.
Obama, I guess, had Kislyak into the White House like 22 times.
So, again, there's no underlying problem here, but Should Sessions have answered that he never ever spoke with anybody from Russia?
Clearly not.
Could he have misremembered?
Sure.
Is it a big deal?
No.
But again, Trump says he shouldn't recuse himself.
And then Paul Ryan says that Sessions should not recuse himself.
Well, okay, two questions.
First, I would just refer to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
I checked the transcript and all of that, so I can't speak to what the Judiciary Committee transcript is.
Frankly, I haven't read that.
Should he recuse himself?
I think he answered that question this morning, which is, if he himself is the subject of an investigation, of course he would.
But if he's not, I don't see any purpose or reason to doing this.
And so that's the answer.
And it's the consistent answer.
Ted Cruz, and he said the same thing.
There's a lot of political theater.
And he's right.
So there's good grounds here.
If you're going to say don't recuse yourself, and everybody's immediately going to say don't recuse yourself, then don't recuse yourself.
The problem is that Sessions then recused himself, which makes it look like there is something more going on.
It's just stupid politics.
They should have come out yesterday morning, and as a body, they should have said exactly what I said, right?
They should have said, he didn't do anything wrong.
But he misremembered and that gives the appearance of impropriety.
He's gonna recuse himself just so that everything looks perfectly clean.
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Okay, so Sessions, all this happens and then Sessions finally recuses himself.
So you have the entire Trump administration.
Again, the confusion is the part that I think is frustrating to people.
They all say he shouldn't recuse himself.
Not gonna recuse himself.
And then Sessions comes out and he says, yeah, I guess I'll recuse myself.
And my staff recommended recusal.
They said that since I had involvement with the campaign, I should not be involved in any campaign investigation.
I have studied the rules and considered their comments and evaluation.
I believe those recommendations are right and just.
Therefore, I have recused myself in the matters that deal with The Trump campaign.
The exact language of that retusal is in the press release that we will give to you.
Okay, so again, the whole thing looks shadier than it is just because when you botch communications it matters.
Somebody needs to get that White House communications in order.
They really need to get this crap in order because, again, the more they do this the more amateuresque it looks and that's just a problem.
It's a problem.
It's going to dog them.
Also, I would like to see a full investigation so that we can get all of this behind us.
It's either true or it's not true.
If it's not true, then I'd like this cloud to dissipate, and if it is true, I'd like to know it, and I think we have a right to know it.
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We're going to talk about more today, including the Democratic narrative about Trump, how they're trying to destroy Trump, the Republican counter-narrative, And then shockingly, the media actually sort of got it right a little bit yesterday, which we'll talk about too.
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