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May 17, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
21:28
Ep. 304 - Democrats Cry Impeachment, But Is It All A Setup?
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Mother's Day marks an awkward time of year for those on the hard left.
First, there are those who deny the value of motherhood.
Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood tweeted, By this presumably she meant abortion.
Planned Parenthood performs hundreds of thousands of abortions every year.
But there is one thing that says I love you mom more than providing abortion care.
Babies who aren't aborted.
It turns out that in order for the Appalachian mother to have any meaning, children must actually be part of the process.
Then there are those people on the left who believe that childbearing and childrearing aren't central to the female mission.
That checking accounts receivable is more socially and individually rewarding.
In this category, we could put Ivanka Trump, who tweeted about the wage gap on Mother's Day, even though the only true reason for the difference in overall earnings between men and women is attributable to motherhood.
It turns out that it may be worth families foregoing mom doing extra work at the office if she can spend more time at home with the kids.
There's nothing wrong with that.
In fact, it's worth celebrating.
But the fun, or lack thereof, doesn't stop there for the radical left.
We still haven't dealt with the cisgender nature of Mother's Day.
How could we suggest that women have anything special to celebrate when men can be women?
After all, Dove has run an ad with a transgender woman explaining what motherhood means to him.
A columnist for the Toronto Star, Emma Teitel, wrote this week that Mother's Day should be ditched in favor of Guardian's Day, since, quote, An exclusionary.
And a drag for non-binary parents who don't identify with a single gender.
Tytel says, quote, But we're still not done.
be a mom, a dad, a non-binary parent, a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, a pet owner, or why the heck not, somebody who takes really good care of his houseplants.
But we're still not done.
How about gay couples?
What about children with two daddies?
One Canadian school has reportedly ditched Mother's Day and Father's Day because they are not sufficiently inclusive.
The administration announced via letter, quote, In an effort to celebrate diversity, inclusivity, and also nurture our students who are part of non-traditional families, we've decided to encourage those celebrations to take place at home.
So, we've already done away with apple pie, far too much sugar for those growing kitties, and now we're doing away with motherhood.
Do we have any values in common anymore?
Fortunately, most Americans still reject this stupidity.
Mothers are still mothers.
Motherhood still has inherent and beautiful value.
My wife's a doctor, which means she does the most important work there is, but she believes her most important role is as a mother to our two children.
And she's right.
It's amazing that our society has become so jaded about the value of motherhood, we're willing to overthrow it in favor of gender and sexual sensitivity, as well as increasing women's hours in the workplace.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Another day in more chaos.
You certainly picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue around here.
We'll get to all of that in just a second, but first, I want to say thank you to our advertisers over at Blue Apron.
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Okay, so, there are two narratives that have now been building up over the last 24 hours.
We really need to do two shows a day now because the news is breaking so fast and so furious.
So, yesterday, late in the afternoon, the New York Times breaks a piece That essentially claims that Donald Trump said to outgoing FBI director, fired FBI director James Comey back in February that he wanted him to shut down the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
This is according to the New York Times, and it's kind of a bombshell for reasons that we'll talk about.
So, it says, President Trump, this is the New York Times reporting, and before everyone goes, oh, New York Times, fake news, fake news.
Okay, it was confirmed by a bunch of other mainstream media outlets.
You don't get to say fake news until something is shown to be fake news.
Okay, let's just, simple rule.
You don't get to say fake news until the evidence, the preponderance of the evidence shows that it is fake news.
Okay, I don't have to, it doesn't have to be beyond a reasonable doubt, preponderance of the evidence.
Okay, so let's put this fake news label aside, just because the New York Times reported it doesn't mean that we get to pretend that nobody, that everything they say is a lie.
Everything they say is biased, but not everything they say is a lie, and you'll see that in this piece.
So it says, President Trump asked FBI Director James Comey to shut down the federal investigation into Mr. Trump's former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo Mr. Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.
I hope you can let this go," the president told Mr. Comey, according to the memo.
The documentation of Mr. Trump's request is the clearest evidence that the president has tried to directly influence the Justice Department and FBI investigation into links between Mr. Trump's associates and Russia.
Late Tuesday, Representative Jason Chaffetz, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, demanded that the FBI turn over all, quote, memoranda, notes, summaries, and recordings of discussions between Mr. Trump and Mr. Comey.
Such documents, Mr. Chaffetz wrote, would, quote, raise questions as to whether the president attempted to influence or impede the FBI.
Mr. Comey wrote the memo detailing his conversation with the president immediately after the meeting, which took place the day after Mr. Flynn resigned, according to two people who read the memo.
It was part of a paper trail Mr. Comey created documenting what he perceived as the president's improper efforts to influence a continuing investigation, and FBI agent's contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations.
Apparently he shared the existence of the memo with senior FBI officials and close associates.
The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo, which is unclassified, but one of Mr. Comey's associates read parts of it to a Times reporter.
So apparently he said, I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go to letting Flynn go.
Trump told Comey he's a good guy.
I hope you can let this go.
Trump told Comey Flynn had done nothing wrong, according to the memo.
So.
There are a couple problems with this.
One is, we haven't seen the memo yet.
So people who are saying, well, this is awful, awful, awful.
Again, let's see the memo first.
That's number one.
Number two, do I believe that the memo is real?
Yeah, I do.
Because I think that Comey probably created the memo specifically to create a bureaucratic paper trail.
This is what career bureaucrats like James Comey do.
And I think that this is Comey's revenge on Trump.
So two narratives have been generated by this.
Narrative number one is coming from the left.
Narrative number two is coming from the right.
And they are not mutually exclusive.
Okay, so narrative number one coming from the left is Trump is incompetent, Trump's a buffoon, or Trump is nefarious and evil and impeachable.
And the case that they're making, basically, is that here is the chain of events.
If you're a leftist, and you're watching this, or you're a member of the mainstream media, and you're watching all of this unfold, here is the logic that you are using in your head.
And we're going to go through it and explain why it's flawed, but here is what you think if you're on the left.
Well, here's what you think from the chain of events.
Lots of rumors in the election cycle about Trump being in cahoots with Russia.
Trump's very nice to Russia the whole time.
Then, over the objections of pretty much everybody right and left, he appoints National Security Advisor Mike Flynn to that position, to National Security Advisor, despite the fact that it's pretty widely known that Flynn has some nefarious ties with the Russians.
That's all confirmed.
That's all known.
Then Flynn ends up being fired for reasons that remain sort of unclear.
He ends up being fired by the Trump administration.
Trump says it's because Flynn lied to Mike Pence about a phone call that he had with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador.
But that's not super credible.
We still don't really know why Mike Flynn was fired by Trump.
It may have just been Trump got sick of him.
He was tired of the controversy and decided to off him.
Here again is the chain of events from the left.
Trump is quote-unquote in cahoots with Russia.
This is their background.
And if you're starting with that background, which by the way there's no proof of, if you're starting with that background idea, then the rest of this all looks like obstruction of justice.
So it looks like he appointed Flynn.
Flynn has to be fired because Flynn is dirty.
And then the day after, Trump goes to James Comey and says, I need you to stop your investigation or I hope that you can see your way clear to stopping this investigation into Flynn.
And then Comey doesn't stop the investigation into Flynn.
And then Trump fires him two months later.
Right.
That's what the chain of events looks like.
It looks like February.
There's this conversation.
And by May, Flynn is gone and Trump is firing Comey.
And then Trump is lying about why he fired Comey.
He's sending out people to say that it's all because of the Hillary investigation that Comey botched.
And then he goes on national TV and he says, well, really, I was kind of getting sick of all this Russia stuff.
And so he had to fire James Comey.
So if all those things were true, then it looks like obstruction of justice.
It looks like Trump was trying to fire the FBI director in order to get him to stop the investigation into contacts between members of Trump's team like Mike Flynn and the Russians.
And that's why this is such a big deal.
Such a bombshell report.
And this is the case that the left is trying to make.
And they've jumped on this with both feet today.
So Sally Yates, who, as you remember, was the deputy attorney general who, well, actually, the acting attorney general at this time, who warned President Trump about Mike Flynn's, quote unquote, nefarious ties with the Russians.
She was on TV yesterday saying that Mike Flynn was a national security threat.
And we felt like it was a national security threat.
Absolutely.
OK, so she says that Flynn was a national security threat, obviously.
And so the Democrats have jumped on this to basically say Flynn was a national security threat, Trump wanted to kill the investigation, he told Comey he wanted the investigation killed, and then he fired Comey.
So obstruction of justice.
And here is every Democrat and media member in the world using that phrase, obstruction of justice.
The reason they're saying obstruction of justice is because obstruction of justice is quote-unquote impeachable.
Right?
Obstruction of justice is a high crime or misdemeanor.
It looks like the president's doing something bad, and that means that Congress has the grounds to impeach.
Now, we'll talk about whether Congress would do that in any case in a second.
The answer is no.
But the Democrats are trying to make the case for impeachment, not because they think he's going to get impeached, but because they want to make it a 2018 issue.
So here's all these Democrats saying obstruction of justice this and obstruction of justice that.
Trump asked Comey, according to news reports, you just mentioned it, to stop the investigation of General Flynn, which is kind of the definition of what obstruction of justice is.
Allegation that the president may have engaged in some interference or obstruction of the investigation.
I think we know enough now, there's been enough alleged publicly, to want to bring the Director back to testify, ideally in open session, either before our committee or the Judiciary Committee, but he should come back to the Congress and share what he knows in terms of the President's conversations with him.
Okay, so bottom line is that if you're a Democrat and you already think Trump is guilty, now you think Trump is more guilty and you think it's obstruction of justice.
Now, before everybody on the right goes, well, they're crazy because there's no actual fire here, which is true.
There's no actual fire here.
Before everybody on the right goes crazy, let's imagine that the situation reversed and Barack Obama There have been rumors about him colluding with the Russians during the 2012 election, and then, after that, there was an investigation into his associates and their ties to Russia, and then he told the FBI director, it would be great if you dropped this, and then he fired the FBI director.
You think the right might be crying bloody murder?
They would.
So, before we suggest that this is utterly uncredible, outside the bounds of reason, the reason I'm saying this, folks, is because I think it's important we're able to have a conversation about what's true and false, instead of immediately leaping to the partisan battle line.
So, this is why the Democrats are making this claim.
Nancy Pelosi is saying this, too.
She says that Trump is unfit for office.
There are many facets to this as, you know, is the president, is he fit to be president of the United States when he would do such a thing?
You know, there's other takes on it.
But I've almost over 20 years of experience as the top Democrat on intelligence or as in the leadership of the Gang of Eight.
And this is a this is a dedication.
You really have to Read your stuff.
Know your stuff.
She's hard to watch and she's terrible because obviously when she says unfit for office the first thing we all think is you're Nancy Pelosi.
You don't get to talk about unfit for office.
But there are very few Republicans who are out there defending Trump yesterday because there's not enough information to defend him yet.
So Brett Baier on Fox News last night he said we kept trying to find Republicans to come on and defend Trump on this Comey stuff and we got nothing.
We've tried tonight to get Republicans to come out and talk to us, and there are not Republicans willing to go on camera tonight, as of yet, and we'll see if that changes.
Okay, so, narrative number one is the narrative from the left, and that is Trump is fundamentally unfit for office, and that is either true because he is purposefully obstructing justice, or because he's stupid enough to say things that look like obstruction of justice.
Now, My own take on this is, number one, there is no fire as to the Trump-Russia stuff.
There's no evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia.
There's not even evidence of collusion between Trump's campaign team and Russia at this point, and this is wildly overblown, obviously.
Beyond that, if Trump did say to Comey, if you could see your way clear to dropping this, that'd be great.
Does that necessarily constitute obstruction of justice?
Not really, because Trump says lots of dumb things.
I mean, Trump says lots of silly things all the time, and he's very casual in his language, and this is sort of the problem with Trump, is you don't know when to take him seriously and when not to take him seriously.
Which leads to narrative number two, and this is the narrative from the right.
So the narrative from the left today is Trump obstructed justice, and now it's impeachable.
Narrative from the right is this is all a witch hunt.
There's nothing here.
Everybody is out to get Trump.
And this is all crazy towns.
This is all part of a broader effort by the intelligence community to take down Trump.
This is all part of a broader effort by the media to take down Trump.
This is all part of a broader effort by the Democrats to take down Trump.
And again, these two narratives are now at war with one another.
So, backing that narrative yesterday was H.R.
McMaster, the National Security Advisor.
He says that the people who leaked the story, another story from last week, that President Trump had given intelligence information, classified information, to the Russians in this meeting, just offhand, he said that the leak of that information is really what's dangerous, not Trump giving it to the Russians.
I think the real issue, and I think what I'd like to see really debated more, is that our national security has been put at risk by those violating confidentiality, and those releasing information to the press that could be used, connected with other information available, to make American citizens and others more vulnerable.
People on the right are very upset with the leaks.
People are saying that this is totally inappropriate because of the leaks.
That's what's really dangerous here.
It's the effort to get Trump that's dangerous from inside his own administration.
It is not Trump himself who is dangerous, and this is all just a manufactured case against Trump.
And there's a lot of truth to this, okay?
Like, for example, on the Comey thing.
If what Trump said to Comey was in fact obstruction of justice, why didn't Comey just quit?
The most self-righteous man in America is James Comey.
The most self-flattering man in America is James Comey, except for President Trump.
Why wouldn't he just quit?
Why wouldn't he walk out of the Oval Office and say to the press, guys, I had to leave because Trump clearly wants to obstruct justice on this Mike Flynn thing, and I can't be around to be part of that obstruction of justice.
Why didn't he at least announce it?
Why didn't he at least say anything?
This is the argument that's being made from the right.
And there's a lot of truth to this.
There's a lot of truth to this.
So again, we have these dueling narratives.
And we're going to talk in a second about which of the dueling narratives is more important, which one is right, and what the impact is going to be on politics for the next couple of years, because Republicans have a conundrum on their hands.
Democrats can just keep campaigning against Trump, but Republicans have a conundrum on their hands.
We'll talk about all of that in just a second.
But first, I want to say thank you to our friends over at MyPatriotSupply.
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Okay, so as part of the Trump is a victim of a hit that's out to get him, Tucker Carlson was pushing that last night.
He says this whole Comey-Flynn bombshell is not really a bombshell.
It's just another media hit job.
Be skeptical, says the retired Navy SEAL.
Be quiet, screams the 33-year-old news anchor, clapping her hands in rage.
How dare you question the authorities, in this case, the news media.
Quote, you cannot attack the stellar reporters of CNN, she says, as if this settles the debate.
Now, a lot of cable panels have unfolded like this recently, and that is a shame, because as we noted earlier, the world is a very complicated place, Washington especially.
What you think is happening often really isn't happening.
Okay, so again, I think there's some truth to this.
The media are out to get Trump.
There's no question that that's true.
Dana Bash, right, who's on the left, she says the deep state is out to get Trump, and that's pretty clear from this New York Times report.
And if you just take a step back, Wolf, just in the past 24 hours, Right or wrong, what this president has done in his first hundred plus days, even before he came into office, is pick fights with the intelligence community and now the law enforcement community.
Particularly the way, never mind that he fired James Comey, but the way in which he did it, not giving him the respect of actually telling him in person or at least not having him find out from cable news.
And so We know that this is, you know, they talk about the deep state.
Well, this, these are communities that are, that have a lot of loyalty within and know how to get back, even if you're the president of the United States.
Look how excited Dana Bash is about all this.
And you can see that the pundits are just overjoyed with all of this, which is why the right reacts to the media by saying, you guys are totally full of crap.
There's nothing here.
Here's an entire montage of pundits just saying impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment.
They're obviously very excited about this story and they want impeachment.
If these allegations, Senator, are true, are we getting closer and closer to the possibility of yet another impeachment process?
Reluctantly, Wolf, I have to say yes, simply because obstruction of justice is such a serious offense.
And I say it with sadness.
We already nailed down the fact he fired the guy afterwards for not playing ball with him.
There's a lot of evidence here.
It seems it would take a reasonable person in the direction of perhaps wanting more information.
But clearly we're on the trail there to an impeachment.
I think we're in impeachment territory for the first time.
Well, I think that the obstruction of justice was the number one charge against Nixon that brought him down.
Obstruction of justice was the number one charge against Bill Clinton, which led to his indictment in the House that he won in the Senate.
And I think I'm a lapse lawyer.
I cannot tell you whether it meets all the legal definitions, but I can tell you from a lay point of view, it looks like he was trying to impede the investigation.
He was using his power to do that, and when James Comey didn't go along with him, when he wasn't his boy, he fired him, which I think is also relevant to the question of what he was trying to do.
You've got to identify and lay out for the American public Everything that he has done, these firings, these obstruction of justice, etc, etc.
And in the final analysis, Maxine Waters was right.
You gotta impeach him.
I know.
The entire Democratic Party.
So that was Wolf Blitzer, Chris Matthews, David Gergen, and Maxine Waters, also Angus King, senator from Maine, all saying that we are growing close to impeachment.
So does this sound like a produced narrative?
Does this sound like everybody's on the same page in the Democratic Party?
It does.
And that's why there are people on the right who are saying this sounds like a conspiracy to take down President Trump.
And there is truth to that.
So I'm going to talk in a minute about what's true and what's false and where we stand in the Republican Party as far as Trump in just a second.
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