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March 29, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show

18:51

Ep. 277 - Real Controversies, and Fake Controversies

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	When California lost Senator Barbara Boxer, it looked as though the title for stupidest woman in the U.S.
	Senate had been lost too.
	But thanks to the election of Kamala Harris to fill her role, California has retained its title holder.
	On Friday, Harris tweeted, Judge Gorsuch has consistently valued narrow legalisms over real lives.
	I cannot support his nomination.
	And there was an op-ed to back this adic contention up.
	In it, Harris argued that Gorsuch, a man so qualified that literally not one Democrat cast a vote against him for his federal appellate court position, was unqualified to be on the Supreme Court.
	Why?
	Because the court, quote, has the power to do enormous good, and Gorsuch wouldn't do such good.
	What good would he forgo as a result of being, you know, like, a judge?
	According to Harris, he would have voted to strike down laws forcing teachers to pay union dues.
	Because that's a violation of their First Amendment rights, among other obvious legal issues.
	But Harris says that because Gorsuch might take a look at that stupid old Constitution, he cannot be confirmed.
	She writes, as U.S. senators, we have an obligation to also examine a nominee's legal approach and ask whether he or she considers the impact of those decisions on our society and the daily lives of our people.
	Say, wouldn't it be awesome if we had some sort of like independently elected branch to make public policy?
	Wouldn't that be awesome?
	But according to Harris, judges should fulfill the mandate of Thurgood Marshall, who said, quote, you do what you think is right and let the law catch up, which coincidentally is also something that every dictator ever has said.
	But never mind.
	Harris knows what is right for America.
	Judges who openly ignore legalism in order to apply her standards of morality.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Okay, so we are going to get to all of the hubbub over Devin Nunes, the head of the House Intelligence Community, and the supposed scandal surrounding him visiting the White House.
	We are going to get to Donald Trump's decision to reach out to Democrats rather than reaching out to conservatives.
	We're going to get to some good Trump and some bad Trump.
	We'll do good Trump, bad Trump today, which is always exciting.
	Plus, we'll deconstruct the culture.
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	Okay, so the big scandal of the day is a fake controversy, and that is Devin Nunez, he's the head of the House Intelligence Committee, he went over to the White House apparently, and there he met with some intelligence official who told him all of the information that he broke last week.
	Now, if you recall, last week, Devin Nunes went out and did a press conference where he said that Donald Trump's team was surveilled.
	Now, he said that they weren't wiretapped.
	He said that what happened is that basically the intelligence officials were wiretapping all of these diplomats from foreign countries.
	And those people had members of the Trump transition team on the other line, as you would imagine they would.
	And then that information was disseminated in an irresponsible and or criminal way.
	So the dissemination of the information was really the question, not the gathering of the information.
	And that's an important distinction.
	A lot of people on Team Trump have been saying that the intelligence community illegally gathered information.
	There's no evidence of that whatsoever.
	Did they illegally disseminate information?
	There, there's actually a fair bit of evidence that they illegally disseminated information about, for example, former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn.
	But Democrats, in the search for scandal, have been looking somewhere else.
	So what they say, the case that they are making now, is that basically Trump was engaged in some sort of nefarious activity with Russia.
	And now they're trying to cover it up.
	So today, the Washington Post says, quote, The Trump administration sought to block former acting Attorney General Sally Yates from testifying to Congress in the House investigation into links between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.
	According to a series of letters reviewed by the Washington Post, Yates was notified earlier this month by the Justice Department that the administration considers a great deal of her possible testimony to be barred from discussion in a congressional hearing because the topics are covered by the presidential communication privilege.
	Now, as you recall, Barack Obama also asserted the presidential communication privilege when he was attempting to defend his Attorney General, Eric Holder, from contempt of Congress under Republicans.
	Yates was supposed to testify before the House Intelligence Committee this week, defying the Trump administration, and then Devin Nunes mysteriously cancelled the hearing at which he would testify.
	He now says that she will testify next week.
	So the media immediately leapt to their some sort of horrible cover-up in progress, and they said that that cover-up is worse because last week, before Nunes announced all of this stuff about the intelligence community disseminating information wrongly, They the Nunez went over to the White House.
	So what he says is he went to the White House in order to use a secure computer so that he could look at intelligence information.
	Lackland Markey over the Daily Beast.
	He says this is kind of shady.
	The House Intel Committee has its own secure servers.
	There's no need to use the one at the White House.
	But what Nunez says is that the information was not available at Congress.
	It was only available to the executive branch.
	That's where the information was.
	And that as chair of the House Intel Committee, he's able to see such material without reporting it back to his colleagues.
	He hasn't revealed what intelligence official actually communicated the information to him, and then he went back to the White House and told Trump about it.
	Now that's the part that's a little bit shady.
	The idea that he went and he talked to this intelligence official, and then he didn't tell any of his committee members, and then he went and told Trump.
	Well, if that were the case, then why didn't the intelligence official just go tell Trump?
	So people are latching on to this, and they're saying, well, this is obviously some sort of cover-up.
	Obviously, Núñez was fed something by the White House, and then he went and updated Trump on the feeding, and then he went out there and parroted the Trump line.
	But there's not a ton of evidence that that is true.
	There are basically two theories about what Núñez is doing here.
	Theory number one is the conspiratorial one, that Núñez knows that there is something nefarious that Trump was doing with Russia.
	And now he's out there attempting to misdirect at the behest of the White House, which is why he visited the White House both before and after he went out and announced all of this stuff.
	And this has led to a tremendous breakdown in the House Intelligence Committee.
	They've canceled all their hearings for this week because people can't get along.
	But here's a counterfactual.
	Here's another possibility.
	Let's imagine for a second that Obama intelligence community members are widely dispersing information illegally, which is probably true.
	And let's assume that Nunes found out about this from some sort of intelligence community whistleblower who didn't want to go directly to Trump because he'd because he doesn't trust Trump.
	Also very plausible because Trump has a big mouth.
	Trump says whatever comes to his mind, and he wouldn't want Trump to get him in trouble.
	So instead, he uses Nunez as his cover.
	He calls up Nunez.
	He says, listen, it's your job to figure out how to disseminate this information, but I thought you ought to know you're the one on the oversight committee.
	So you come and you see me right now.
	Nunez goes to the White House to speak to that person because it's an executive branch agency.
	And then he doesn't allow the Yates testimony, or at least the White House fights the Yates testimony, not because they think that Yates has something that they need to keep hidden, but because Yates is just going to go out there and be a political Which, again, is not implausible because, after all, Yates is a political hack.
	She was fired, if you recall, by the Trump administration for refusing to defend Trump's travel ban in court when she was acting Attorney General.
	Both of those theories are plausible, but the media is only covering one of those theories, and the Democrats are only pushing one of those theories, and that is the Nunes-Trump cover-up theory.
	And, again, the big question in all of that is, where's the scandal?
	If there's going to be a cover-up, you assume something had to be done that was wrong.
	So far, the only thing I know that was done that was wrong in any of this Is that there were intelligence officials who worked for Obama who are leaking a bunch of information to the press and leaking a bunch of information to the rest of the intelligence community and unmasking people.
	That's the only thing I know was done wrong here.
	I don't know anything was done wrong between the Trump team and Russia.
	You know, you can suspect whatever you want, but there's no evidence.
	I don't know that anything was done in terms of coordination with WikiLeaks.
	I don't know that.
	Neither do you.
	Neither does anybody else.
	Again, what's funny about this is that among all the leaks that have happened from the intelligence community to the press, the one thing that hasn't been leaked is actual definitive information that says that Trump was connected to Russia.
	Still, none of that.
	There's all this smoke, but there's no fire.
	And so it's just as plausible as the cover-up theory that basically this is an incompetently handled, just normal order of business routine from Devin Nunes and President Trump.
	So here is Nunes explaining why he went to the White House grounds in the first place.
	The Congress has not been given this information, these documents.
	And that's the problem.
	So because this is executive branch, it was distributed widely through the executive branch.
	This was from November, December, and January.
	And these were reports, just let me reiterate, this had nothing to do with Russia, nothing to do with the Russia investigation.
	There is no way Okay, so he sort of says that I'm not going to be able to transmit that to the House Intelligence Committee.
	The House Intel Democrats are saying, well, what the hell?
	Why are you getting to see it and I don't get to see it?
	Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, he says that Paul Ryan should immediately fire Nunes, basically.
	If Speaker Ryan wants the House to have a credible investigation, he needs to replace Chairman Nunes.
	And then, that is followed up on immediately by Mark Warner, who's a senator from Virginia, and he says that basically Nunes has to go.
	I am totally mystified by what Mr. Nunes has said.
	And I've talked to my chairman, Richard Burr.
	He doesn't know.
	I've talked to Democrats, Republicans on the committee.
	I think it's fairly mystifying, if not outrageous, that he's Okay, and finally, you have Nunes responding.
	I guess I'm being told that it's not pronounced Nunes, even though everybody pronounced it that way.
	It's actually pronounced Nunes.
	I have no idea whether that's true.
	In any case, Devin Nunes, he says that Democrats actually just want him out because he's effective.
	Effective at what?
	Nobody really understands.
	Yeah, well I'm sure that the Democrats do want me to quit because they know that I'm quite effective at getting to the bottom of things.
	Well, let's hope so, Congressman.
	Okay, so he says that he's effective at getting to the bottom of things.
	I doubt that's why Democrats want him to quit.
	I think the Democrats want him to quit because, one, it would look like he's guilty, and, two, because he will act as a shield for Trump in this.
	I mean, just to be perfectly honest with you, whenever you have a member of the party of the president who's investigating the president himself, it is very rare that you get an honest and credible investigation.
	Very difficult to get an honest, credible investigation of the president when the person who's leading the investigation was on the Trump transition team.
	Which Devin Nunes or Nunez was.
	So I think that it is perfectly fair to say the media is overblowing this case and this is a fake scandal and that we don't even know what's going on yet.
	And it is also perfectly fair to say that if you actually want a credible investigation that is going to be listened to by the vast majority of Americans, you can't have somebody who's on Trump's transition team leading the investigation into Trump.
	It's just not going to work that way.
	But all of this is leading the left to lose their minds and they're absolutely going crazy.
	So Senator Chris Coons of Connecticut, He says that the GOP, for example, on Judge Gorsuch, they should never, ever, ever use what they call the nuclear option.
	They should let the filibuster stand and let Gorsuch go down to defeat him.
	It's just insane.
	It's insane.
	All right, well, so then the Republicans are going to pass it using the so-called nuclear option.
	Almost certainly.
	And I think this is tragic.
	And in talking to friends on both sides of the aisle, we've got a lot of senators concerned about where we're headed.
	Okay, again, the only reason they're talking about using the nuclear option is because they are talking about filibustering a Supreme Court nominee, which has never been done before, as far as I'm aware.
	So, again, this is Democrats losing their minds because they don't know what to do with Gorsuch.
	They don't know what to do with Trump.
	They're very frustrated.
	I understand some of the frustration, but some of that is just endemic to not being in the party in power.
	Bernie Sanders is back, and he says that he hopes that the GOP does not change the rules when it comes to approving Supreme Court nominees.
	What concerns me is that right now we have a rule that says appropriately, I think, that for a Supreme Court justice, a lifetime term, one of the most important positions in the United States government, that it should require 60 votes because that would make it bipartisan.
	And I think that that's where that's not what the Constitution says.
	It doesn't say that it requires 60 votes.
	It says that it requires 51 votes.
	It's the Democrats who are insisting on 60 votes.
	And of course, the Democrats nuked the filibuster along with Harry Reid long ago.
	So the idea that it's no longer on the table, that you can't do that.
	That's just absolute nonsense.
	How crazy are the Democrats going at this point?
	There's now a report that's out that Chuck Schumer actually started ranting at somebody who voted for Donald Trump at a restaurant in New York last night, a According to multiple witnesses, this is over at Daily Wire, as well as the victim of the ugly episode, the leading Democrat in the Senate, New York's own Chuck Schumer, lost it at a swanky Manhattan restaurant on Sunday after he learned that a well-connected woman had voted for Trump.
	After making a scene inside by declaring she voted for Trump, Schumer allegedly followed the woman and her well-known Democrat husband outside, repeatedly screaming, he's a liar.
	Apparently this happened in an Upper West Side restaurant, and apparently it was the Democrat Joseph Califano, a junior member of the Board of Directors at CBS, who served as the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under Jimmy Carter.
	So he was very upset that Califano's wife had voted for Trump, and so he actually started berating her in front of the crowd.
	That's how crazy Democrats are going, just to prove how nuts they are.
	Chris Matthews, you know what I'm saying?
	Guy comes out of a show, he comes on the air, he says, you want to vote for Trump?
	Jared?
	These people?
	They're just like Saddam Hussein's kids!
	Ah! - You know, we kid, I kid about everything, but Uday and Kuse working for Saddam Hussein, you couldn't go to a restaurant and have eye contact with one of those guys that are getting killed.
	These people are really powerful.
	Imagine getting into a fight in the office with Jared or Ivanka.
	- Well, that's the thing. - They have enormous power, and they're always gonna be there. - This is what I worry about for other people in the White House, Ivanka Trump has been described as her father's eyes and ears on the ground.
	That's a little scary.
	If you're just a regular White House staffer who maybe wants to offer advice that criticizes the president, this is a person who loyalty is the number one trait that Trump cares about.
	You remember that time that Chris Matthews over at MSNBC, you remember when Chris Matthews, Remember, he said, Chelsea Clinton.
	And she works with Hillary Clinton.
	You just know, you know, that if you look at Hillary Clinton cross-eyed, you look at Chelsea cross-eyed, Hillary will jump on you and tear your throat out like a dog right in the jugular.
	Because it's just like Saddam Hussein.
	It's just like, it's like Ciano with Mussolini.
	Ah!
	He's gonna shoot his own son-in-law, but only later.
	Until then, he's his ally.
	I mean, like, How much are they losing their minds when he's comparing Ivanka Trump, who is, by the way, Jewish, comparing her to Uday and Qusay Hussein, who were literally mass murderers who had rape rooms.
	This is how insane the left has gone.
	They've lost all connection with reality.
	So whatever problems we have here over on the right, the left is certainly not taking advantage of them because they are just awful.
	They don't even know how to handle any of this.
	Well, we're going to talk some good Trump, bad Trump after this, plus what's happening in the wake of Trumpcare going down.
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	Okay, so, I think we're going to do a little bit of good Trump, bad Trump.
	But first, you're going to have to go over to DailyWire.com and become a subscriber if you want to watch it live.
	Plus, we're going to deconstruct some culture.
	Talk Beauty and the Beast, actually.
	So, you're going to want to go over to DailyWire.com right now.
	$8 a month will buy you a subscription to DailyWire.com.
	Plus, if you get an annual subscription, then you get a free signed copy Of Michael J. Knowles, Ph.D.
	His best-selling book, Reasons to Vote Democrat, a comprehensive guide, as I say, incredibly thorough.
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	More importantly, it's worth getting a free signed copy and sending it to all of your annoying Democrat family members, because it's hilarious.
	Dailywire.com, $8 a month, get two subscription, annual subscription, you get Knowles' book.
	Plus, I keep saying there will be a Shapiro store.
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	In any case, go over to dailywire.com and check it out.
	Or listen later at iTunes and SoundCloud.

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