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June 7, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
22:07
Ep. 314 - The Left Frets Over Comey, The Right Frets Over Radical Islam
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There are certain clarifying moments in political discourse, moments that demonstrate just where the various parties stand.
Never has the gap been so obvious as this last week.
On Friday, the left declared the world was in imminent peril.
The problem?
President Trump pulled out of the altogether meaningless Paris Climate Accord, a worldwide agreement requesting non-binding commitments from signatories about future carbon emissions cuts.
The hysteria was palpable.
Suddenly, debunked weather prognosticator Al Gore found himself in prime television slots jabbering about the end of the world.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
She gabbled about how Trump was dishonoring God.
No word on her abortion-on-demand position from the Holy One, Blessed Be He.
The Huffington Post ran a headline showing the world in flames.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, released a statement bemoaning Trump's decision.
Meanwhile, the right shrugged.
It pointed out the agreement didn't really do much anyway.
It didn't bind China and India to any serious commitments.
The Senate had not passed any enabling legislation.
Perhaps non-governmental alternatives should be considered before diving headlong into empowerment of the regulatory state to fight a rising temperature over the next century.
On Saturday, a group of Islamic terrorists dropped a van into a crowd on London Bridge and then jumped out of the vehicle and started stabbing people in surrounding establishments.
ISIS claimed responsibility.
The right immediately labeled the attacks yet another example of Islamic extremism on the march, linking them with the Manchester terror attack.
President Trump took to Twitter to denounce the terror attacks and call for an end to politically correct policies, as well as to stump for his travel ban.
Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic complained about leftist multiculturalism creating room for Islamic terror growth.
Meanwhile, the left shrugged.
Sally Cohn tweeted about the glories of political correctness.
Paul Krugman compared being killed in a terrorist attack to being killed by a drunk driver.
Democrats complained about President Trump's attacks on Khan, who is busy urging Londoners to stay calm after panicking about global warming just a few days ago.
What explains this gap between left and right?
The left believes that human beings are inherently good, and that only environment defines whether they will act in evil fashion.
That's why Senator Bernie Sanders articulated in 2016 That global warming was the spur to terrorism.
It's why the Obama administration routinely suggested that poverty causes terrorism.
External circumstances dictate the morality of individual actors.
That's also why the left argues we shouldn't hold people responsible for their actions as a general rule.
Instead, we should reshape society.
The right, on the other hand, believes that human beings are capable of evil all on their own.
That's why they see the rise of radical Islam as more of a problem than global warming.
Good people won't kill each other just because the world is getting warmer.
They will if they begin to believe evil ideologies or support those who do.
The gap is not bridgeable.
It goes to the nature of humanity and our perception of that nature.
But it's requiring a greater and greater strain these days to blame anybody but individual human beings in free Western societies for their own descent into evil.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All right, tons to get to today.
I want to talk about what we really should be talking about, and then I want to talk about what the media is instead talking about.
of course, these Comey hearings.
And then NSA head Mike Rogers is in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, as well as Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, both of them testifying right now.
We'll get to all of that and bring you the latest updates.
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Okay, so, let's start with what people should be talking about today.
What people should be talking about today is there is a global threat of Islamic terror.
There's an Islamic terror attack in Canada over the weekend, everybody ignored it.
There's an Islamic terror attack ISIS Actually is now basically at war with Iran, and Iran is now blaming Saudi Arabia.
So the chances of a Middle Eastern conflagration are growing exponentially.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is in the middle of a firefight, a political firefight anyway, with the nation of Qatar.
Qatar is a backdoor terror supporter, and they have been for a long time, and now Saudi Arabia is posing itself in opposition to them.
Things are shaping up for what could actually turn into a hot conflict in the Middle East between Iran and Saudi Arabia, or Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Things could get very ugly very quickly over there.
And meanwhile, all of that is resulting in an increase in terror abroad.
ISIS is trying to demonstrate that it still has muscle, so there have been terrorist attacks, as I say, in Britain, in Toronto, there's one in the Philippines, and the London mayor was asked by the, I think it's by Piers Morgan actually, What exactly he's doing to stop terrorism and basically said we can't do much.
Mayor of this capital city, where are they?
I can't follow 400 people.
What I can do is make sure the policies, because what we can do though is make sure the resources for the police and the experts to follow these people.
Why can't you instruct the police?
Why can't you call Cressida Dick right now and say every one of those people has come back from a war zone who's in London.
I want them followed.
And he has no answer for that.
He starts to kind of futz about.
The answer is that he can, but he won't, because the fact is we are deploying our law enforcement resources in the West in exactly the wrong way.
We have used politically correct ways of doing it.
You know, people wonder why it is that the intelligence community has these blanket surveillance tools they use for all Americans.
One of the reasons is political correctness.
If we weren't politically correct, then we'd be using all of our law enforcement resources at the hottest spots.
We still are using a disproportionate amount, but we have to pretend that we're not, so instead we decide it's more important to surveil everyone equally, and so we have these giant metadata programs instead of focusing in on, say, people who are coming back from Syria, or people who are going to Wahhabi-funded mosques, Saudi-funded mosques.
It's a huge mistake.
Meanwhile, Democrats, of course, are not focusing on the threat of Islamic terror at all.
They are trying to continue to play identity politics.
They're trying to say that Republicans are evil and terrible, not because Republicans are bad at protecting you from terrorism.
They're evil and terrible because they're racist and sexist and bigoted and homophobic.
So Andrew Cuomo, who's the governor of New York, who should theoretically be spending a lot of his time focused on the terror threat to places like New York City.
Instead, he's spending his time preparing for a 2020 run by going around Saying that President Trump hates immigrants and just wants to deport people, so he should deport Andrew Cuomo.
You want to deport immigrants?
Start with me, because I'm an immigrant.
Well, if only we could, Andrew Cuomo, but you're an American citizen, so we cannot do that, nor should we.
But it is tempting.
The fact is that the Democrats are seeking to avoid the real discussion, which is, what do we do about radical Islamic terror?
What they are really wanting to focus on is, of course, these hearings that are happening on the Hill right now.
So there are a bunch of breaking pieces of news last night surrounding James Comey, the former FBI director and President Trump.
And the big question from all of this, because today, as I said, we have the National Security Advisor, the head of the National Security Agency, rather, Mike Rogers, testifying on the Hill.
There were reports that Rogers had been asked by Trump to pressure Comey to drop the Trump-Russia investigation into Flynn.
There was also a report that Trump had asked Dan Coates, who's the head of the director of national intelligence, to pressure Comey to back off of Mike Flynn, the former national security advisor.
And those reports were all coming out in the last couple of weeks.
They are testifying today on the Hill.
You also have the, you have Comey himself is testifying on the Hill tomorrow.
So I want to bring you all the updates about this.
But the only question that matters here, the only question that really matters is did President Trump in any way attempt to hamper the investigation into Trump campaign Russia connections?
That's the big question in all of this.
Did he attempt to do that?
Did he attempt to pressure Coates?
Did he attempt to pressure Rogers?
Did he attempt to pressure Jeff Sessions?
Did he attempt to pressure Comey before he fired him?
Was any of this designed to actually shut down the investigation?
Now, if you're on the left, You gotta be saying, well, sure, of course.
I mean, it looks like now, according to these reports, he asked Coats to tell Comey to back off.
He asked Rogers to tell Comey to back off.
He asked Coats to disown the Russian dossier we talked about several months ago, this intelligence dossier about Trump and Russia, much of which turned out to be false, and Coats refused to do it.
He fired Comey.
If you're on the left, You have to be saying well yeah I mean there's pressure everywhere and to be fair if the situation were reversed if you had Barack Obama and Barack Obama's IRS head were being investigated and she went up and she testified that Barack Obama did not put any pressure and he had some secret conversations with her in their reports that he had asked her to target 501c3 charities and The question was, did he pressure you to push 501c3 charities that were conservative out the back door?
We would all be saying, well, why would we trust her answer?
That's what the left is saying today.
But again, no evidence, no evidence of any of this, no evidence of serious pressure being brought.
Everyone has testified now.
According to Rogers today, he just testified moments ago that he has not felt pressure from the Trump administration to do anything illegal.
Coats said basically the same thing.
They're giving a little bit shifty answers in some areas.
They're saying Things like, I feel it's inappropriate to answer, I don't know if I legally can answer.
But regardless of that, there's still no evidence that Trump actually pressured.
So there's two ways of reading Trump's behavior in all of this.
And I want to go through what the reports are about Trump's behavior, and then I'll explain the two reads on the behavior.
So, The Washington Post reported last night, this is all in prep run-up for the Comey hearing.
The Comey hearing tomorrow is what Democrats are looking forward to.
I really think that Comey's going to come forward and Comey is going to say the following.
He's going to get up and he's going to say, President Trump met with me.
He asked me to kill the Trump-Russia investigation.
I refused to do so.
He fired me.
That's the narrative Democrats are hoping for.
That's not the narrative they're likely to get.
But in preparation for that narrative, the bars in D.C.
are opening up tomorrow, apparently, and they're putting the Comey hearings on TV.
CBS is broadcasting it in network time, which, as I mentioned yesterday, is just insane.
Would they have broadcast Lois Lerner's testimony on Network Time?
Would they have broadcast Eric Holder's testimony on Network Time?
Would they have broadcast Hillary Clinton's Benghazi testimony on Network Time?
Of course not.
This is evidence of tremendous, tremendous media bias.
But the media are all hot and bothered about this, so they're leaking incessantly about Comey and about Coates and about Rogers and about all of this.
So, here's the Washington Post report last night.
They say, quote, The president complained.
He met with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and DNI Dan Coats.
They attended a briefing at the White House.
He pulled them aside and told everybody else to leave.
And then, quote, the president started complaining about the FBI investigation and Comey's handling of it, said officials familiar with the account Coats gave to associates.
Two days earlier, Comey had confirmed in a congressional hearing the Bureau was probing whether Trump's campaign coordinated with Russia during the 2016 race.
After the encounter, Coats discussed the conversation with other officials and decided that intervening with Comey, as Trump had suggested, would be inappropriate.
According to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters.
So I'm not sure where the illegality lies.
The president can say anything he wants, but it's not obstruction of justice unless he actively does something to obstruct justice.
And if I went to Dan Coats and I said, Dan, I'd appreciate if you dropped this investigation, it wouldn't mean anything.
If the president does it, it doesn't really mean anything either.
Maybe it's a backdoor sort of pressure, but it's not obvious that that is pressure rising to the level of obstruction of justice.
Is it just possible that Trump is so annoyed with the Trump-Russia investigation because he himself knows that he's innocent that he's saying off-the-cuff silly things to people?
My theory is that that's what best fits with the evidence.
Not that Trump is some sort of mastermind attempting in Nixonian fashion to quash the investigation, but that Trump is so frustrated with Comey and with the Trump-Russia investigation that he's angry at everyone.
There's a report today that he's angry at Jeff Sessions.
Jeff Sessions, of course, is his Attorney General and one of the more solid populist nationalists in the administration.
If you are somebody who likes Trump's agenda, Jeff Sessions is your man.
I mean, Jeff Sessions is the guy who is anti-immigration.
Jeff Sessions is the guy who is in favor of harsher restrictions on immigration and harsher enforcement of crime.
Jeff Sessions is somebody you want to see stay, in other words, if you are a fan of Trump.
But now there's tension between Trump and Sessions, apparently.
According to ABC News, Justice Department spokesperson Sarah Isker Flores would not comment when asked by ABC News if Sessions had threatened or offered to resign.
Additionally, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer yesterday would not confirm whether Trump still has confidence in Sessions, saying, I said I have not had a discussion with him on the question.
I don't.
If I haven't had a discussion about a subject, I tend not to speak about it, which is a pretty weird way of answering a question about whether the president has confidence in his own attorney general.
Sort of this language that was being mirrored by Sean Spicer before Comey was fired.
So clearly there's tension between Sessions and Trump.
So in other words, Trump is angry at everyone.
That the Trump-Russia investigation won't just die, not because he's guilty, but because Trump thinks he's innocent.
Trump says, I didn't do anything.
I know I didn't do anything.
And that's really plausible, that Trump didn't do anything.
Even if Manafort, even if Manafort, Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, did something.
Even if Carter Page, his former foreign policy advisor, did something.
Even if Mike Flynn did something.
That is not evidence that Trump himself did something.
And you can sense that Trump has a divide in his own mind between the Trump campaign and Trump himself.
And by the way, if you're Mike Flynn and you were cutting some sort of corrupt deal with the Russians, or Paul Manafort and you were cutting some sort of corrupt deal with the Russians, the last person you would tell is Donald Trump for two reasons.
One, Trump would likely fire you.
And two, even if Trump didn't fire you, you're now making him privy, well, three reasons.
Two, you're making him privy to information that could get him impeached if he ever was discovered to have been involved in this.
And three, if you tell Trump there's a good shot that Trump will say something dumb about it on national TV and get everybody in trouble.
So the reality here is that Trump probably is innocent, Trump probably is irritated, and Trump probably is going around saying to everyone he can find, can you please stop this because it's annoying me.
That, I think, is the account that best fits with the evidence, but that's not what Democrats are saying.
I'm going to get to that in just a second, the over-the-skis nature of this, the Democrats really pushing a narrative that doesn't exist, a narrative that is far over the top, and they're going to continue pushing it And it's up to Trump how to tamp that down.
There's a way for him to do it.
We'll talk about that in a second.
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Okay, so the fact is that the Democrats are trying to overread the situations.
The Democrats are going with the Trump was colluding, now Trump is covering it up.
And you can see the people who they are trotting out to say things like this.
So the first person they're trotting out is James Clapper.
James Clapper was the Director of National Intelligence under Barack Obama.
He was appointed by Obama.
And Clapper is not an honest person.
He's the person who lied in front of Congress when he said that People were not being surveilled, essentially, by the National Security Agency.
That was not true.
Now James Clapper was doing a speech to the National Press Club in Australia, and here is what he had to say about the Trump administration.
The subsequent actions sharing a sense of intelligence with the Russians and compromising its source reflect either ignorance or disrespect, and either is very problematic.
Similarly, the whole episode with the firing of Jim Comey, a distinguished public servant, in part from the egregious, inexcusable manner in which it was conducted, reflect complete disregard for the independence and autonomy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, our premier law enforcement organization.
I have to say- So pause it right there for a second.
When he says that it reflects a lack of respect for the autonomy of the FBI, what he is implying there is that Trump is invading the autonomy of the FBI, meaning that he is attempting to cram down his view of the Trump-Russia investigation on the FBI.
No evidence has been provided of that.
Trump has every right to fire James Comey, who was, is, and will be an incompetent, bloviating blowhard.
Here is James Clapper continuing.
You know that I think, uh, Okay, that's insane.
Watergate does not pale in comparison for two reasons.
One, there was an underlying crime in Watergate.
Okay, that's insane.
Watergate does not pale in comparison for two reasons.
One, there was an underlying crime in Watergate.
We know there was a break-in at the Watergate Hotel.
We know that it was subordinates of President Nixon who conducted that break-in.
And we know that President Nixon attempted to cover it up, obstruct justice, and fire people.
Here, we don't know that there was an underlying crime.
Here, we don't know that Trump was actually trying to obstruct when he fired Comey.
And there's been, by all the available actual evidence that we've seen, no one can provide a shred of evidence, other than accusations, that there's been an actual attempt to shut down the investigation.
In fact, the people who are key, people like Rob Rosenstein, people like Rogers, people like DNI Coats, all of these people have said there is no actual intervention into the Trump-Russia investigation, so how can he sit there and claim this is worse than Watergate?
How can he claim that?
He can't, because it's a political hack.
But, again, I just want to point out that if you're on the left, what you need in order to keep this thing alive is you need more smoke.
So, the left will push its smoke.
But what you really need if you're the left is you need Trump to continue to fulminate.
You need Trump to continue to get angry and tweet things, because the more Trump tweets, the more he fulminates, the more he acts out, the more he asks people to shut down investigations, the more he tells people, can you please leave this alone?
The more irritated Trump gets, the more volatile he gets.
The more volatile he gets, the more he tends to say, Innately not smart things to people about an investigation that may not be obstruction of justice, but they give hints of obstruction of justice if you are a member of the left.
So the best thing that Trump can do right now is to take it easy.
That'd be the best thing that Trump can do.
I'm going to talk about what exactly Trump can do to tamp all this down.
He's, I think, starting to do some of this, but he's going to need to not live tweet Comey's testimony tomorrow to do the rest.
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