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May 11, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
18:41
Ep. 301 - Comey's Gone, And The Russians Are Coming! Or Are They?
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According to ABC News, President Trump will sign an executive order today to investigate voter fraud.
The executive order would create a commission staffed by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach to investigate election integrity.
ABC News reports, quote, the commission, which will include Republicans and Democrats, will be tasked with studying vulnerabilities in U.S.
voting systems and potential effects on improper voting, fraudulent voter registrations, and fraudulent voting, according to one official with knowledge of the announcement.
This is a fine notion.
Voter fraud is indeed a serious problem that threatens election integrity, despite Democratic claims to the contrary.
More specifically, the possibility of widespread voter fraud remains a problem, even though evidence of actual fraudulent ballots being cast is relatively scanty.
As the Daily Wire has reported, in 2012, the Pew Research Center found the following.
There were almost 24 million active voter registrations in the United States, either invalid or inaccurate.
Almost 2 million dead Americans were still on the active voting list.
12 million voter records were riddled with incorrect addresses or other errors.
Almost 2.75 million voters were registered in over one state.
And it does not take widespread voter fraud to shift an election.
The passage of Obamacare, which relied on the replacement of Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota with Al Franken, rested on a 312 vote recount margin in favor of Franken.
According to the Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, quote, at least 341 convicted felons voted in Minneapolis's Hennepin County, the state's largest.
Another 52 voted illegally in St.
Paul's Ramsey County, the state's second largest.
Dan McGrath, head of Minnesota Majority, says the only conclusive matches were included in the group's totals.
The number of felons voting in those two counties alone exceeds Mr. Franken's victory margin.
The same held true in 2004's Washington State gubernatorial election, with Democrat Christine Gregoire defeating Republican Dino Rossi by 129 votes.
Some 1,400 felons voted illegally in that election, at least 55,000 ballots were enhanced, and the Secretary of State certified election results in at least five counties where more votes were cast than there were voters, according to Bob Williams of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation.
A single vote cast illegally means someone else's vote has been canceled out.
So it's about time we looked at voter fraud.
With that said, the media will now attempt to quash any real investigation into voter fraud based on President Trump's wild overstatement of voter fraud during the 2016 election cycle.
Trump announced after his Electoral College victory in 2016 he'd actually won the popular vote too, except for 3 million votes cast illegally for Hillary.
He said, quote, you can never find, you know, there are going to be, no matter what numbers we come up with, there are going to be lots of people that did things we're not going to find out about.
That's what Trump said in January, but we'll find out because we need a better system where that can't happen.
That means that Trump's rhetoric will once again smear a good cause and allow the media to reopen an idiotic conversation with Trump about whether he believes he won the popular vote, and because Trump is pathologically incapable of avoiding a perceived slight, he'll take the bait.
Get ready for two more weeks of talk about how Trump was actually jobbed in the popular vote, even though we should be focusing on the real necessity of voter ID and cleansing voter rolls.
In order to draw Democrats Trump is apparently including language about voter suppression, too, even though there's no proof of voter suppression across the country whatsoever.
That will get Democrats on board and allow them to propagandize about how voter ID actually prevents people from voting.
So, bottom line, it's good that Trump is looking at voter fraud.
It's too bad that Donald Trump is the one who's actually doing it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, it's You're in Town, USA, because the leaks are everywhere!
They're everywhere!
Everything has opened up, the skies have opened, the leaks are pouring down, and now we have many theories as to why FBI Director James Comey was actually fired, but most of the evidence seems to support, you guessed it, my theory from yesterday as to why it is that James Comey was fired.
We'll talk about all of that in just one second, but first we want to say thank you to our sponsors over at PolicyGenius.com.
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Obviously, the news of the day continues to be the fallout from the firing of FBI Director James Comey, and now we have leaks aplenty.
So there are really two big stories that came out, maybe three, that have come out full of leaks about Trump firing Comey.
And one thing is absolutely clear.
The original explanation for why the administration fired Comey just doesn't hold any water.
So the original explanation was, you know, this Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein, he showed up 14 days ago, and then he decided, you know, Comey had to go.
So he wrote us a memo, unprompted, in which he said that Comey had to go and we took his advice and we fired James Comey.
That's horse manure.
Everyone knew it was horse manure from the first day.
The problem with rolling out a bad story is now it makes people believe the worst.
When you say something that isn't true, it makes people immediately jump to the worst possible conclusion, as opposed to the more realistic but not so great conclusion, which is probably what actually happened.
So, it's pretty clear now that Ron Rosenstein...
Was not the guy behind the firing.
There have been multiple reports that Trump basically had decided to fire Comey last week.
And then he called Ron Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions into his office and said, come up with some sort of letter that's a pretext for firing him.
And Rosenstein did what a good soldier is supposed to do.
He wrote this letter.
Apparently there was a report yesterday that the DOJ is now denying that Rosenstein actually threatened to resign yesterday because he was so ticked off that the Trump White House seemed to be blaming him for Comey's ouster.
Bottom line, this was handled about as badly as you can handle any issue like this.
I was listening to Dana Perino and Chris Steyerwald's podcast, which is worth listening to.
And Dana, who knows a hell of a lot about White House communications, she was saying the people she feels bad for in all of this are the members of the White House communications staff.
We're given about half an hour notice that this was happening, maybe.
And then we're forced to scramble.
And then Trump gets pissed off when they don't have a good cover story, which is his fault because he was the one who forced them to scramble.
But the real question remains, why exactly was he fired?
So the story from the White House continues to be he was fired because he did a bad job.
So here is Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who's supposed to be good at this, right?
She's supposed to be better than Sean Spicer is.
There were rumors yesterday that Trump hates how Sean Spicer has handled this, so he's thinking about firing Spicer too.
Everybody is basically on the hook with Trump.
If you do something he doesn't like, he'll fire you.
All he demands is loyalty, which is one of the stories we'll talk about.
There's a story that James Comey was fired because he refused to guarantee Trump his personal loyalty.
In any case, here is Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Making an insane case as to why James Comey was fired.
I think also having a letter like the one that he received and having that conversation that outlined the basic atrocities in circumventing the chain of command in the Department of Justice.
Any person of legal mind and authority None of this makes any sense.
First of all, you don't use the word atrocities about legal errors, okay?
Atrocity is, like, for... Atrocity is for, like, the Holocaust or My Lai or Syria, gassing people.
part of the Justice Department for 30 years.
None of this makes any sense.
First of all, you don't use the word atrocities about legal errors.
OK, atrocity is like for atrocity is for like the Holocaust or my lie or Syria gassing people.
Atrocity is not.
He went out in public and said something about about Hillary Clinton and Loretta Lynch like I'm sorry, that doesn't rise to the level of atrocity, that's just silly.
The case that she's making is Comey's bad at his job.
Yes, Comey was bad at his job.
Guess who's been saying that for a year?
Hmm?
That's right, it was me.
So, I've been saying for a year James Comey is absolutely crappy at his job, but the question isn't why he was fired, the question is why he was fired now.
And the answer clearly is not something that happened last July, so that story has no veracity whatsoever.
Jake Tapper presents another story, so now you've got a bunch of anonymous sources leaking.
And here's the thing to know about anonymous sources.
They're anonymous!
We don't know who they are, and we don't know what their agenda is, and we don't know whether they have any specialized knowledge as to why Comey was fired.
We don't know whether they're speaking from personal knowledge of what's actually going on in the investigation, or whether they're speaking based on speculation at the FBI.
You know, anonymous sources are useful, and you have to use them in journalism because A lot of people are afraid of speaking with their name on the record because they're afraid that they're going to get fired for it.
So anonymous sources are common use.
But the problem is when you have a thousand anonymous sources coming forward, you sort of have to take everything with a grain of salt until further information is confirmed.
The media is not doing that.
Jake Tapper yesterday reported what an anonymous source had said about why Comey was fired.
Now if this is true, then Trump will be impeached, okay?
But if it's not true, then where is it even coming from?
There are two reasons why President Trump fired Comey.
One, Comey's refusal to provide the president with any sort of assurance of personal loyalty.
And two, the fact that the FBI's investigation into possible Trump team collusion with Russia in the 2016 election, that that's still not only an active investigation, it's actually accelerating.
So basically, the theory here is that Comey wouldn't provide Trump with his assurance of personal loyalty.
You could see some of that in Trump's letter, right?
The idea that Comey had told him that he was off the hook three times, but that he wouldn't go out publicly and say that Trump was off the hook three times, or even one time.
So that is actually, there's some veracity to that.
Second claim is the one that matters, and that's the one Democrats are hopping on today.
This is the Democrats coming out and saying that the decision to fire Comey is really about obstructing the Russia investigation.
Now, here's the part that's crazy about this.
There's an entire FBI out there that's still doing the investigation.
There's no evidence whatsoever that the investigation will actually be quashed.
In fact, what Trump has now done is he's brought more focus to the investigation, not less focus to the investigation, either through incompetence or stupidity or because he didn't care.
But whatever the bottom line is, More people now care about the Trump-Russia investigation than cared about it two days ago.
So the idea that he killed the investigation is just silly towns.
Now, there's a lot of call for a special prosecutor.
Special prosecutor, I think, is a bad idea.
The reason a special prosecutor is a bad idea is because once you put a special prosecutor on a case, the special prosecutor will stay there and dig and dig and dig.
Until they find something, whether or not it is really related to the key components of the story.
So, Kenneth Starr will continue to dig on Clinton until he comes up with Lewinsky.
And Patrick Fitzgerald will continue to dig on the Valerie Plame scandal until he comes up with Scooter Libby, who's not even involved in the Valerie Plame scandal.
You put a special prosecutor on this thing...
And that person will just dig and dig and dig and dig until they come up with something that is not even related and just cast a cloud of suspicion over everything.
The best possible outcome here is for Trump to appoint somebody at the FBI who's considered sort of bipartisan, who isn't going to be just a Trump lackey.
If he appoints Chris Christie or Rudy Giuliani, people are going to scream bloody murder as well they ought.
If you appoint somebody like Mike Lee was suggesting, Merrick Garland, who as you recall was Barack Obama's last Supreme Court nomination.
If you appoint somebody who has credibility with Democrats, it's going to be very hard for Democrats to make the claim that this was all a giant cover-up, a crazy attempt by Trump to kill the Russia investigation.
But Democrats are out over their skis today.
They're trying to push for impeachment without any sort of evidence.
Here's Richard Blumenthal, a guy that Trump is now calling, I guess he's saying that he accused him of lying about his war service, which is true, but Richard Blumenthal has become sort of the bete noire for Trump, and here he is, Senator from Connecticut, talking to Anderson Cooper.
It is a looming constitutional crisis because it involves a potential confrontation, as did Watergate, between the president and other branches of government.
And it may well produce another United States versus Nixon on a subpoena that went to the United States Supreme Court.
It may well produce impeachment proceedings, although we're very far from that possibility.
And right now, the president has not been charged.
And there is a investigation underway which should be given the kind of integrity and independence that it deserves.
Because he's way out over his skis here, talking about Nixon, talking about impeachment.
This is not like Watergate.
Okay, in Watergate, Richard Nixon fired the special prosecutor who'd been set up in order to investigate Watergate.
And then the Attorney General, he basically said to the Attorney General, you fire this guy.
And the Attorney General said, no, I'm not going to fire this guy.
And then he went to the Deputy Attorney General and said, you fire this guy.
And he said, I'm not going to fire this guy.
So Nixon fired all three of them.
And the bottom line is that this is not like that, right?
I mean, the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General both recommended that Comey be fired.
Again, this is not obstructing the investigation by any evidence that I can tell.
Yet the Democrats are still going nuts over this.
Cory Booker, who has presidential ambitions, He's going crazier than anybody else I've seen.
Senator from New Jersey.
Great screenshot there, guys.
He's saying that the Russians are coming.
Donald Trump clearly has not taken this seriously.
In what should be a Paul Revere moment for our country, where people are talking about the Russians are coming.
They're intending not only to attack this past election, but intending to continue this behavior.
What will our response be?
And right now it's been wholly unsatisfactory from this administration.
Okay, so this still leaves out the question.
Again, he has no answers as to what exactly he suspects is going on or what evidence he has that any of this is happening.
Basically, the Democrats are making, hey, while the sun shines, they see that this is an opportunity to bash Trump, and so they're going to go ahead and do it.
I will say that there are basically a few different stories today as to why it is that Trump fired Comey.
And all of them agree with my theory yesterday.
So my theory yesterday, to restate, was that Trump fired Comey because he was pissed at Comey.
That simple.
He wasn't angry at Comey because Comey wasn't coming out and just saying that Trump was innocent in the Russia investigation, even if other people were still under investigation, like NSA Michael Flynn and former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
So he's ticked at Comey for not doing that.
It now appears that he was also ticked to Comey because Comey was not taking his wiretapping crap seriously and he wasn't investigating leaks or whatever and so he felt that was a misuse of resources and he wants an FBI director who's going to who's going to try and track down all of his conspiracy theories about the Obama administration again should the FBI be spending time on finding out who leaked The name Michael Flynn to the press?
Absolutely they should.
And so I don't think that's completely unfair.
But for Trump to get angry at Comey because Comey was not paying attention to his stupid wiretapping allegations, that's absurd because they were stupid wiretapping allegations.
But that's exactly what the Washington Post is reporting.
Quote, Trump had long questioned Comey's loyalty and judgment and was infuriated by what he viewed as the director's lack of action in recent weeks on leaks from within the federal government.
By last weekend, he had made up his mind.
Comey had to go.
The president had already decided to fire Comey, according to this person.
But in the meeting, several White House officials said Trump gave Sessions and Rosenstein a directive to explain in writing the case against Comey.
The president had already desired to fire Comey, according to this person.
And bottom line is they decided that they were going to come up with this pretext for firing Comey.
But what actually pissed off Trump?
One, Comey was on TV too much.
Two, Comey refused to say that Trump was innocent.
Three, Comey wouldn't provide his personal loyalty guarantee to President Trump, which is just insane.
The FBI director should never be forced to provide a personal loyalty guarantee to any president.
That is not his job.
Again, all of this reflects badly on Trump.
None of it suggests that Trump is actually in the pay of the Russians or in collusion with the Russians.
Now, with that said, there's a media report from the Wall Street Journal that really is kind of a bombshell.
It says, in the weeks before Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, a federal investigation into potential collusion between Trump associates and the Russian government was heating up as Mr. Comey became increasingly occupied with the probe.
Mr. Comey started receiving daily instead of weekly updates on the investigation, beginning at least three weeks ago, according to people with knowledge of the matter and progress of the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe.
Mr. Comey was concerned by information showing possible evidence of collusion, according to these people.
So this would be the biggest bombshell, of course, is the idea that there's actually something dirty going on and Trump covered it up.
All we have is this anonymous source saying that Comey was concerned about that, but we don't have any evidence that that was actually happening.
There's also a report from McClatchy today that the FBI led probe into whether Russian influence operations helped put Trump and the White House on a knife's edge and could easily veer in either of two distinct directions.
One possibility is investigators will feel galvanized by Trump's abrupt firing of FBI Director Comey.
And burrow even deeper into the probe.
Or, with the FBI temporarily rudderless, Trump loyalists in the Justice Department could put the brakes on the investigation in multiple ways.
So, all of this does not speak well of the way that this was done.
Again, none of it provides evidence that all of this was done.
There is a bigger problem here, by the way.
And the bigger problem comes in that same Washington Post piece.
This deep, long piece about why Trump fired Comey.
And it was buried down in the piece.
And it's actually a big story.
It says, quote, Many employees of the FBI said they were furious about the firing.
Saying the circumstances of Comey's dismissal did more damage to the FBI's independence than anything Comey did in his three plus years in the job.
One intelligence official who works on Russian espionage matters said they were more determined than ever to pursue such cases.
Another said Comey's firing and the subsequent comments from the White House are attacks that won't soon be forgotten.
Trump had quote essentially declared war on a lot of people at the FBI one official said.
I think there will be a concerted effort to respond over time in kind.
This is dangerous.
When the intelligence community, Trump's been saying this for a long time and he's actually right about it, when the intelligence community decides that it is their job to take down Trump because they don't like what Trump is doing, that is dangerous and that is a problem.
And the fact is that two things can be true at once.
One, Trump handled the Comey firing absolutely badly.
It looks really a lot worse than it probably is.
And two, the intelligence community does not have the wherewithal To begin saying that we're now going to oust Trump because we don't like what he did to Comey.
Okay, that's dangerous.
That is a branch, that is a coup, that is an attempt inside government to get rid of the sitting president of the United States, and that is unacceptable under all of these circumstances.
Well, I want to talk more about this.
I want to talk about the fallout and why this actually matters for the Republicans.
Why shouldn't Republicans just blow it off, say this is overblown, say this is silly, this is just Democrats talking too much.
Why Republicans should take this seriously.
Over at dailywire.com.
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