According to the Daily Beast today, first daughter Ivanka Trump secretly met with Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards in January.
The story does not make clear whether the meeting took place before or after Trump's inauguration, but Ivanka is Trump's most trusted advisor along with her husband Jared Kushner, and she's a moving force behind much of the action in his administration.
According to the Daily Beast, quote, the purpose of the meeting, from Cecile's point of view, was to make sure that Ivanka fully understood what Planned Parenthood does, how it is funded, and why it would be a terrible idea for Planned Parenthood to be removed from being able to see Medicaid patients, said Dawn Lugins, an executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The main thing that Cecile was doing was explaining that the money doesn't actually go to abortions, we get reimbursed the same way a hospital does.
We're clearing up misinformation about how this works, unquote.
Richards now says that Ivanka is part of the problem since she hasn't openly sounded off on her father's opposition to funding Planned Parenthood.
According to Richards, quote, anyone who works in this White House is responsible for addressing why women are in the crosshairs of basically every single policy we've seen in this administration.
It's worth noting that just yesterday, Ivanka told Gayle King on CBS This Morning that she sounds off against her father's policies all the time, behind closed doors.
Quote, I would say not to conflate lack of public denouncement with silence, she explained.
So, is Ivanka still stumping for Planned Parenthood behind closed doors?
Trump has made clear he's willing to use Planned Parenthood as a cudgel to motivate Republicans, but he also spent months talking about all the non-abortion great work Planned Parenthood does, which accounts for a minute fraction of their revenue.
Trump may have shifted his position for politics, but Ivanka probably hasn't.
She's a career leftist on a variety of issues, from climate change to abortion to same-sex marriage.
Her speech at the Republican National Convention was an ode to government-sponsored childcare.
As Stephen Miller of Heat Street pointed out, Ivanka has donated thousands of dollars to prominent Democrat candidates, including Harry Reid, Andrew Cuomo, Eleanor Holmes Nolten, Kirsten Gillibrand, Gavin Newsom, Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, Eliot Spitzer, Hillary Clinton's Senate, and 2008 presidential campaign, and just recently to New Democrat star Senator Kamala Harris.
In the interest of fairness, she did donate to McCain and Romney 2012, But according to sources, contributions to Republicans make up less than 10% of her overall donations.
Ivanka was not even able to vote for her father in the GOP primary, as she did not switch her party affiliation by the deadline.
Ivanka is the person closest to Trump's heart in this administration.
An administration filled with people with little political background, but who compete to demonstrate their loyalty to the president.
Ivanka will not be Trumped in this regard.
That means she may have her father's ear, even on issues upon which they disagree.
And that is not a good thing.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So today's an extremely busy news day.
We're going to get to Nunes.
Devin Nunes has now been recused.
He's recused himself from the Russia investigation on the House Intelligence Committee.
We'll tell you what that means.
Steve Bannon is out at the National Security Council.
So a lot of turmoil happening inside the Republican caucus.
Plus, President Trump is making open overtures now to the left, which is not a good thing.
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Okay, so the big news of the day is that Devin Nunes, or Devin Nunes, I guess it's pronounced.
There's been a big debate in political circles.
How do you pronounce this guy's last name?
So Nunes, I think, is how it's actually pronounced.
Devin Nunes, who is the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, he announced on Thursday he has recused himself from the committee's investigation into Russia's alleged meddling in the 2016 election.
Now, this poses a problem for the Trump administration, because the Trump administration basically funneled all of the information about Susan Rice unmasking members of the Trump team and the Trump transition team.
They funneled all that to Nunes by bringing him to the White House, and then he didn't update his House Intelligence Committee Friends and foes.
And then he went back to the White House to update Trump.
So it looked like Nunes was working for Trump.
That was really what this came down to.
The reason that he is recusing himself is because the House Ethics Committee has now put him under investigation.
Now, to be clear, they're not investigating him because they're saying he's a tool of the White House.
They're investigating him because anytime somebody allegedly leaks classified information, they are investigated by law.
Nunes has explained in a statement that he is not recusing himself because he did anything wrong.
He says, several left-wing activist groups have filed accusations against me at the Office of Congressional Ethics.
The charges are entirely false and politically motivated and are being leveled just as the American people are beginning to learn the truth about the improper unmasking of the identities of U.S.
citizens and other abuses of power.
Despite the baselessness of the charges, I believe it is in the best interest of the House Intelligence Committee and the Congress For me to have Representative Mike Conway, with assistance from Representatives Trey Gowdy and Tom Rooney, temporarily take charge of committee's Russia investigation while the House Ethics Committee looks into the matter.
I will continue to fulfill all my other responsibilities as committee chairman.
And the ranking Republican and Democratic members of the Ethics Committee issued a statement.
They said, the committee is aware of public allegations that Representative Devin Nunes may have made unauthorized disclosures of classified information in violation of House rules, law, regulations, and other standards of conduct.
The committee, pursuant to Rule 18A, is investigating and gathering more information regarding these allegations.
So, all of the leading Republicans from Trump to Ryan have expressed confidence in Nunes.
What's amazing about all of this is that I actually think Nunes is doing the right thing here.
I said a while ago I thought that Nunes should recuse himself after there were questions about whether he was working for Trump, mainly because it overshadows the actual scandal here, which is Susan Rice unmasking Trump officials and then disseminating that information widely to the Obama team.
Does it mean that Devin Nunes did something terribly wrong?
No, it doesn't mean that Devin Nunes did something terribly wrong.
The headlines are just not going to be good.
The question here was basically, would it be better for Nunes to stick it out through the House Ethics Committee and muddy the waters, or would it be better for him to step aside and hand it over to people like Gowdy and Conaway and allow them to pursue the leaks investigation about Susan Rice and Mike Flynn?
Clearly I think for Trump it is better for Nunes to take the bullet on this one and step to the side.
So I think that Devin Nunes did make the right call here.
Don't pay attention to everybody who's saying this is obvious proof that he did something deeply wrong.
That's not right.
The House rules command.
It's not even it's not even a just a possibility.
It's an actual command.
The House rules say that And if there's an allegation brought against you of leaking classified information, they must investigate.
They have to investigate and they have to open an inquiry by law.
So it's not like they found something credible and then went after Nunes.
They were forced to by the rules of the committee.
So don't pay attention.
It's a bit of a nothing burger.
Don't pay attention to everybody who's making a huge deal out of Nunes stepping away, not proof that he did anything wrong or that he was specifically working for Trump.
I thought that he should... My feeling was that after he went to the White House and learned all this stuff, he should have updated the members of the House Intelligence Committee before running back to Trump's report.
It was that second trip to the White House that looked particularly bad.
And I wish he hadn't done that, but I don't know that he actually did anything wrong here, and I think it's premature to say that he did.
Okay, in other news that surrounds Trump, Trump has done an interview with the New York Times, and in this interview with the New York Times, he is now saying that he wants to do a great infrastructure plan.
And on that side, I will say, we're going to have, I believe, tremendous Democrat support.
So basically he's looking for Democrat support for a trillion dollar infrastructure plan and there were questions about whether a lot of this money was going to come from public-private projects.
So out here in Los Angeles, we have public-private projects at places like the Grove and the Americana.
There's basically a lot of stadiums are public-private projects.
Places where people invest their private dollars and those are matched by a certain amount of government money.
Still not my favorite thing, but better than just pure public investment.
Trump says he doesn't even want public-private projects anymore because he can borrow money more easily and he knows what to do with your money better than you know what to do with your money.
He says we may take that trillion and we may also in addition use public-private but we're talking about an investment of a trillion dollars.
He explicitly said That it's not going to be 200, 300 billion dollars of public money and the rest private.
It will be a trillion dollars of public money.
And he said the reason for that is because he can borrow money so cheap.
Well this was exactly what Steve Bannon had been saying for a while was going to be Trump's plan.
So the idea that Steve Bannon's influence with the administration is over, I don't think that's right.
I also think that it's not just Bannon's idea.
Donald Trump made his name in life building really big things with other people's money.
That's what he's done his entire life.
Build really big things with other people's money.
He's not going to stop doing that now that he has trillions of dollars at his disposal.
And there are a lot of people on the right who seem okay with this sort of infrastructure spending.
You weren't okay with it when it was Obama.
When Obama was spending 800 billion dollars on random crap, It was bad.
It was called a stimulus plan and we said it's a waste of money.
This also is a waste of money.
The fact is that everybody talks about the interstate highway system as though it's going to cost a trillion dollars to fix up the interstate highway system.
It doesn't cost a trillion dollars to fix up the interstate highway system.
Plus, it is worthwhile noting that states and localities have an interest in maintaining the interstate highway system since it carries all sorts of goods and products and services through their towns.
One of the great myths, by the way, of American politics is that the Eisenhower interstate highway system was some sort of magnificent creation that never would have happened if it hadn't been for the intervention of the federal government.
It's just not true.
People drove long before the 1950s.
This was a car country going back to the 1920s.
The interstate highway system cost a lot of money.
It drove right through towns.
It destroyed a lot of businesses.
If you ever see the movie Cars, you know, the Pixar movie Cars, remember the whole movie is set In this little town called Radiator Springs, which is off of Route 66.
And as you recall, Route 66 is basically abandoned.
Well, Route 66 used to be one of the thoroughfares of American commerce.
Right?
Nat King Cole had a whole song about get your kicks on Route 66.
Route 66 was an actual thing.
What happened is that the federal government built the I-40.
The I-40 bypassed Route 66.
All of these people who'd spent their life savings and all their time and money putting routes down around Route 66 All of them were left behind and destroyed.
So when you talk about forgotten people, there are a lot of people who are forgotten because of the interstate highway system, or whose houses were completely bulldozed by the interstate highway system.
The case I'm making is not there shouldn't be an interstate highway system, it's that states have an interest in connecting their state highway systems, and most of it should have been absorbed at the local and state level.
So when people say we need lots of infrastructure spending now because it was so great back in the 50s, it wasn't that great back in the 50s, it isn't that great now.
And when Trump does this routine, what he really wants is to build big spectacular things.
He doesn't actually want to fix up the roads and bridges that matter, per se.
He just wants to build big stuff so that he can stamp the big T on it and then say that he built something, which is what a lot of these folks want to do.
Obama wanted to do it.
Obviously, FDR made his name doing this.
It's not good policy.
There's another poll, by the way, as long as I'm going to get all the bad Trump news out of the way at the beginning, there's another poll that's out today that says that 40% of Trump supporters would back a single-payer health care system, which just demonstrates what folks like me have been saying all along and the great damage that Trump could do, and he hasn't done it yet, but the great damage that it is possible for him to do is the soul-sucking of the Republican Party into a big government Nationalist party as opposed to a small government patriotic party, which is not quite the same thing.
Well, all of that said, the big story of the day is we'll get to the Republican chaos in a second, but the big story of the day is what is going to happen in Syria.
So if you've been watching the pictures that are coming out of Syria, Obviously, they are horrifying.
We talked about this a little bit yesterday.
There are all these pictures of dead children who have been gassed to death by the Bashar Assad regime.
And that comes just a few days after the Trump administration came out and said Assad would remain in power.
I said, that's not a coincidence.
If it had happened under Obama, I would have said the exact same thing.
I have a very simple standard when it comes to what I expect from my politicians.
And that is, you know, your word matters and what you say has credibility.
And it turns out that in foreign policy particularly, it matters when you say things, so...
The fact that Trump's people said Assad will stay in power and then three days later he's gassing children, I don't think that's any sort of major coincidence.
A survivor of a 2013 Syria chemical attack, he was on CNN and he was talking about what he thinks Trump should do.
If I may just say a few words directly to President Trump, if you'll just give me the chance.
Please.
Mr. President, Mr. President, please, please, in the name of every woman and child and elder, who got killed by the Assad regime.
Please come in and help us.
Don't make the same mistakes that President Obama did.
You criticized Obama for failing to punish and act when Assad crossed the red lines.
Now is the moment of truth.
Now you should show the world that those days are over.
We can't just keep living in this unprecedented crimes against humanity.
We just can't keep living like this.
I would personally love to come to the United States and meet you and tell you my personal story.
You know, obviously the media is happy to put this sort of stuff on TV because they're saying, you know, Trump should do something.
There are two questions here.
One, whose fault is all of this?
And two, Excuse me, what should President Trump do right now?
Those are the two big questions.
It's pretty clear that this is Obama's fault.
It's pretty clear that this started under Obama, that it was Obama who was saying for years and years and years that we had disarmed the Assad regime.
He proclaimed himself a massive political genius for having drawn a red line, then backed away from the red line after Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against his own people.
And then he said that he had disarmed Assad and left Assad in power while Assad continued to gas folks.
John McCain correctly says this is Obama's legacy.
He is obviously, as we all are, appalled.
Could I make two points?
One, this is the legacy of Barack Obama.
The last time this happened, Barack Obama said they'd crossed a red line, called me and Lindsey Graham down to the White House and did nothing.
One thing worse than doing nothing is saying you're going to do something as the most powerful leader on earth and doing nothing.
So this is a legacy of Barack Obama, and it's been going on now for the intervening four years.
So what we need to do, we need to stop Bashar Assad's planes from flying, and we can do that easily.
You have been bringing this issue up to the forefront.
I know it's been a great frustration for you.
I gotta go, but just very quickly, are safe zones viable?
Let me mention again, Barack Obama had an opportunity to stop this, and would have long ago, and he took a hike, and that's a terrible legacy.
Okay, and McCain is exactly right.
And listen, McCain is no friend of Trump, so when he says this is on Obama, you can trust that Senator McCain is exactly right on this.
This certainly is on Obama.
But, that doesn't answer what we should do now.
I'm going to discuss that in just a second, but first, I want to say thank you to our advertisers over at CISO.
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So, the question is, what exactly should the United States do in Syria now that we've seen all of these terrible images coming out of Syria?
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