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July 11, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
23:11
The Russian Connection | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 336
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President Trump's support base is not going to erode anytime soon.
While the media fulminated over Donald Trump Jr.' 's reported meeting with then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and a Russian-connected lawyer in June 2016, and while they mocked President Trump's overtures to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, They largely ignored the importance of one image and one image only for Trump's followers.
The image came on Saturday when President Trump approached Marine One at the Andrews Air Force Base.
A strong wind had knocked the hat off the head of a Marine standing closest to the staircase onto the helicopter.
Because the Marine could not move, he was standing at attention.
Trump retrieved the hat and put it back on the Marine's head.
The hat blew off again.
And again, Trump went and retrieved the hat.
This may have seemed like a big nothing to the left, but it means a lot to people on the right, who feel the Obama White House routinely ignored the dignity of our troops.
President Obama bragged openly about using troops as a photo-op.
He forced a Marine to hold an umbrella over him as he gave a statement in the rain outside the White House.
He planted friendly troops at pre-screened events.
And of course, Obama's Veterans Affairs Administration was a full-scale disaster.
The same weekend Trump helped this Marine with his hat, we found out that 500 VA officials had been fired by the Trump administration for malfeasance.
And herein lies the point.
Because our politics have become so little about policy and so much about intent, Trump's most ardent supporters are never going to abandon him.
Whether they believe that he's actually making America great again, they think he wants to make America great again, and they think Obama didn't want to make America great again.
In that assessment, they're 100% correct.
But that also means that the media's attempts to play Trump as a nefarious Russian stooge manipulating the system to his own benefit, that's going to fall on deaf ears.
Trump is seen by his supporters as a reaction to the America last attitude of his predecessors.
Supporters are not going to believe that Trump's America first attitude is secretly Trump first.
Video like the Marine One tape reinforced that Trump's support believes that stuff.
So long as Trump continues to demonstrate his obvious reverence for American symbols, it will be very very difficult for the left to carve into his base.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Alrighty, so, welcome to our new studios, gang!
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In any case, We have lots coming up on today's show.
I want to talk about, obviously, the hubbub surrounding Donald Trump Jr.
I want to talk about Trump and Putin.
I also want to show you the tape of Trump doing this with the Marines hat, because I think that it actually does speak to why so many conservatives really like Trump.
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Okay, so a lot going on over the weekend.
I will play you the tape of me on Dana Perino's show on Fox News that happened on Friday evening before Sabbath for me, and I was debating a member of CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations.
We'll play that a little bit later.
I also do want to get to the Linda Sarsour column in the Washington Post, which is just absurd.
But we start today with all of the hubbub over Donald Trump Jr.
So yesterday, late yesterday, there's a story that breaks in the New York Times, and what it says is that President Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.
The meeting was also attended by the president's campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in confidential government documents described to the New York Times.
So, okay, Trump Jr., then makes a statement after this story breaks.
And he originally had said there were no meetings with the Russians.
Then he said, well, we did have a meeting with some Russian gal, but it was really more about...
adoption policy than it was about anything else.
And then finally, he released a statement late yesterday in which he said, the reason that we met with this random Russian lawyer is because she promised that she had some dirt on Hillary Clinton.
He actually admitted that.
So here is his statement, Donald Trump Jr.'s statement that he provided to ABC News late yesterday.
Quote, I was asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign.
I was not told her name prior to the meeting.
I asked Jared and Paul to attend, but told them nothing of the substance.
We had a meeting in June 2016.
After pleasantries were exchanged, the woman stated she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms.
Clinton.
Her statements were vague, ambiguous, and made no sense.
No details or supporting information was provided or even offered.
It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.
She then changed subjects and began discussing the adoption of Russian children and mentioned the Magnitsky Act.
That is an anti-Russian, it's a Russian sanctions act.
It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.
I interrupted and advised her my father was not an elected official but a private citizen and that her comments and concerns were better addressed if and when he held public office.
The meeting lasted approximately 20 to 30 minutes.
Okay, so lots of open questions about this meeting.
And there are some legit questions to be asked about this meeting.
First of all, what you need to understand about this lawyer they met with is that the lawyer is very close with the Russian government.
So according to the Washington Post today, they talk about who this lady is, and essentially she worked closely with somebody they worked with during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant.
According to the Washington Post, Trump Jr.
did not name the acquaintance who fixed up the interview, but in an interview Sunday, Rob Goldstone, a music publicist friendly with Trump Jr., told the Post that he had arranged the meeting at the request of a Russian client and had attended it along with this woman whose name was Veselnitskaya.
Veselnitskaya.
Okay, so her client role, okay, this woman Veselnitskaya, her client role includes Individuals and companies close to the Kremlin.
She's for the past several years basically been a lobbyist for the Russian government on the Magnitsky Act.
Magnitsky Act is a sanction series intended to rebuke Russia for human rights abuses according to the Post.
The acts are named for Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died under mysterious circumstances.
in a Moscow prison.
So basically the story is that somebody who Trump Jr. knew from the 2000 Miss Universe pageant approached him, said, I know this lady, Veselnitskaya, and she has some information about Hillary Clinton that you're going to want to know.
And Trump Jr. dragged Manafort and Jared Kushner into the meeting and nothing came of it, right?
That's sort of the most innocent version of the story.
Now, there are a couple questions.
One, did Trump Jr.
know that this Veselnitskaya character was actually connected to the Russian government?
Like, where did he get information about her?
We don't know that yet.
We just don't know.
And one of the reasons that we don't know any of that is because nobody has been very forthcoming about it, right?
We don't know if she's just a private citizen who's tight with the Russian government.
We don't know if Trump Jr.
knew anything about her.
He says he didn't even know her name, right?
He says, I was not told her name prior to the meeting, which begs the question, why would you drag the three top officials in the Trump campaign at that time into a meeting two days after Trump had secured the nomination, essentially?
With a rando, right?
If I wanted to get a meeting with Trump Jr.
and Manafort and Jared Kushner, presumably it would be difficult for me to get that meeting.
Like, you have to make a pitch.
So what was the pitch?
The left is suggesting the pitch was somebody came to Trump Jr.
and said, listen, there's this lady who basically represents the Russian government.
The Russian government has dirt.
And this is the fulfillment of all the lefty dreams, right?
The fulfillment of all the lefty dreams is that Trump Jr.
got Manafort and Kushner in a room, all of them, to hear dirt from the Russian government on Hillary Clinton.
That is not perfectly drawn yet, right?
There is no evidence that that is the case yet because, again, we don't know, number one, how close she is with the Russian government, this lawyer, and number two, what they were told.
We just don't know, right?
We'd have to actually get their emails or their texts.
We'd have to get the phone call material leading up to the meeting.
To know how bad any of this really is.
But the left of course thinks this is a massive, massive bombshell.
And they're playing it as such.
CNN is running with it.
Of course CNN is running with it.
Because CNN only gets ratings whenever they talk about Trump-Russia and they have something new to report.
So Michael Walsh over at the New York Post, a guy whose work I think is pretty hit or miss, he has a critique of this particular story.
And he says, so what?
He says, who wouldn't meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign?
He says, just as the Russian collusion fantasy, a resentful smear cooked up in the immediate aftermath of Clinton's stunning defeat last fall, was finally fading from the fever swamps of the resistance and its media mouthpieces, along comes the time with a pair of journalistic nothing-burgers.
And he says that this is a nothing-burger because no campaign in its right mind would turn down an offer of information on their opponent.
This is what OPPO research is all about.
You can bet Hillary wouldn't have hung up on the person who claimed to have dirt on the Donald.
That's probably true, but we would have cried bloody murder, right?
If the Russians had approached Hillary Clinton and said, we have dirt on Donald Trump, and she had met with the Russians, we would have said, okay, this is insane because obviously that's the quid, so what's the pro quo?
Right?
If you're handing information from the Russians, what is the pro quo?
And, you know, Sean Hannity came out last night and he was tweeting about how the Clintons did all these corrupt things and there were no consequences.
Right, and we all cried about it.
We said it was terrible.
So we can't have a different standard when it comes to President Trump.
So I don't really buy Michael Walsh's defense here.
You know, again, I think the best defense here is just ignorance.
As always, the best defense here is ignorance, which is why lawyers always tell people your first rule on the stand is, I don't recall.
But we don't know enough for this to really go anyplace yet, but the media is going to overplay it.
It's fascinating the way that the Republicans are treating this.
So Reince Priebus, who's the White House Chief of Staff, he was on TV yesterday, and he made the, he promoted the theory, which had been pushed on a website called Circa, that Russian operatives set up the meeting as basically a sting for Donald Trump Jr.
and Manafort and Kushner.
Here is Reince Priebus making that case.
On the January 8th edition of Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Priebus point blank, Does he accept that the Russians were behind this hacking campaign?
Yes or no?
Well, sure.
I mean, he's not denying that entities in Russia were behind this particular hacking campaign.
However, the incoming White House Chief of Staff then seemed to place at least some of the blame on the Democrats, saying, "We have the DNC as a sitting duck.
If the DNC allows any foreign entity into their system, well, voila, now you have the biggest dissemination of emails that we've ever seen in the history of America." Priebus was then pressed about who was really to blame, and he admitted, "The primary actor is the foreign entity that's perpetrating the crime to begin with, no doubt about it." In the past, Trump has expressed skepticism about Russian hacking claims, at one point saying, it's a very hard thing to prove, while later calling it a political witch hunt.
Okay, but then Pribis went on to repeat the Circa statement, and that's the important part.
The Circa statement was basically that Russian operatives set up this meeting with Trump Jr.
and Manafort and Kushner, In order to set up a sting.
The problem is if that were true, why exactly wouldn't they just reveal that, right?
If they actually wanted to get Trump, wouldn't they reveal that somewhere during the campaign or now?
The Kremlin is now denying that this meeting ever took place.
Is this more smoke but no fire?
I think it is.
I think it's more smoke but no fire, yet again, I don't know why exactly top Trump campaign officials would be meeting with a Russian lawyer for a non-nefarious purpose here, but I'm not going to buy Michael Walsh's routine either where he says, who wouldn't meet with an OPPO researcher claiming to have ties with the Russian government, even if that were true?
In 2000, Al Gore, who is no paragon of morality, in 2000 somebody leaked the Bush briefing book, the Bush debate briefing book, to Al Gore.
And Al Gore's people promptly called the FBI.
Okay, so, it's not true that everybody's engaged in this sort of stuff.
Now, again, are the media getting ahead of themselves?
Of course.
Are they treating a meeting that had no actual outcome as the beginning and end of all things?
Yes.
I mean, even if all of this is true, what we have here is a meeting that was failed, right?
It's not an actual quid pro quo if there was not even a quid, right?
If they didn't actually give any information to the Trump campaign, Then there's no information.
The media is treating this as though a second step is guaranteed.
That basically the meeting happened, Trump Jr.
and Manafort may not have gotten anything, but then that's where the coordination began.
But there's no evidence this is where the coordination began.
Maybe it was a one-off.
Maybe it was the Russians trying to make a contact in order to muddy the waters.
We just don't know.
And so everybody is going, you know, over the top about a report, I think, that has very little substance to it as of yet.
Well, meanwhile, you know, President Trump isn't doing himself any favors with all of the Russia stuff.
So over the weekend, there was a lot of talk about what exactly Trump had said in his meeting with Vladimir Putin.
So you recall late last week, Trump met at the G20 with the Russian dictator.
And coming out of the meeting, President Trump essentially said that he had gotten along well with Putin, that Putin, he had brought up the election hacking stuff to Putin.
and that Putin had denied it, and then he said, we're going to move forward together.
He sent out a series of tweets on Sunday that threw his entire administration into a bit of turmoil.
So it started off, I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election.
He vehemently denied it.
I've already given my opinion.
Okay, so to start with that, he's already given his opinion.
So again, his opinion is apparently that there was some Russian hacking, but it also might have been the Chinese and a 400-pound guy in a bed somewhere.
So kind of unclear what he means by that.
that.
Then he says, we negotiated a ceasefire in parts of Syria, which will save lives.
Now it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia.
But he didn't stop there.
He continued, Putin and I discussed forming an impenetrable cybersecurity unit so that election hacking and many other negative things will be guarded.
Okay, so this is the tweet that got everybody going was, okay, if Trump really believed that the Russians were behind the election involvement and interference, why is he forming a cybersecurity unit with them?
This is like Marsha Clark says to O.J. Simpson, you're guilty of murdering your ex-wife.
And he says, no, no, no, no, I never did it.
And she says, you know what?
I'm going to form a joint task force with you, O.J. Simpson, to go and track down the person who actually murdered your ex-wife.
You know, a lot of people who were making fun of this yesterday, as well, they should, because the idea of forming a cybersecurity unit with the people who are basically attempting to hack democratic institutions is really quite crazy.
And then Trump continues along these lines.
He says, and safe, quote, Questions were asked about why the CIA and FBI had to ask the DNC 13 times for their server and were rejected.
Still don't.
And then he continues, haven't.
Fake news said 17 intel agencies when actually four.
Had to apologize.
Why did Obama do nothing when he had info before election?
So all of this is, if he's attempting to say, I took election hacking super seriously, and then I put the screws to Putin, this little tweet storm is not exactly assuring people.
It's not making people feel very reassured about all of this.
So, you know, he rips Obama, he rips the fake news.
As for Putin, he says, I've already said what I'm going to say, and we're going to form a cybersecurity unit.
Okay, well, there's a bunch of fallout, and then later that evening, like 12 hours later, Trump comes back with his final tweet, right?
Twelve hours later, he comes back.
Sanctions were not discussed.
Well, he continues, sorry, along these lines.
He says, sanctions were not discussed in my meeting with President Putin.
Nothing will be done until the Ukrainian and Syrian problems are solved.
So I'm not getting rid of any of the sanctions, but I'm not increasing the sanctions.
Okay, so the cybersecurity thing is what got people all hot and bothered.
Later in the day, he came back and he said, the fact that President Putin and I discussed a cybersecurity unit doesn't mean I think it can happen.
It can't, but a ceasefire can and did.
Okay, well, I'm glad that he's coming to the right conclusion about cybersecurity, but he sent all of his people out all day talking about how he was actually going to form a cybersecurity unit.
Just shows that there's a bit of confusion at the top with regard to what President Trump actually believes about all of this.
And it isn't reassuring to people.
If you are trying to promote an image of yourself as a guy who is independent of Russia, this is not the way to do it.
But I'll tell you what I think is actually really going on.
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So, if Trump is trying to show... So the media are basically trying to claim that Trump is a traitor.
They have been ever since Hillary Clinton was defeated and even before that.
They're trying to claim that Putin was Trump's puppet master, and Trump was the puppet.
And now, President Trump should be drawn distance.
And in Poland, he started to do that, right?
He gave a great speech in which he talked about Western civilization, and he talked about the importance of standing up to Russia in Ukraine, and he called out Russia on Syria, and then he has a meeting with Putin, and it basically looks like he got rolled.
It looks like he came out, and the only things that happened were he comes out and rips his own intelligence community, he rips the media, he rips the Democrats, and then he's pretty kind to Putin.
He says, we'll sign a ceasefire.
And then he says, we'll have a cyber security unit where we cooperate.
And then finally, he says, well, we won't have a cyber security unit because that's kind of dumb.
It doesn't mean I think it can happen.
It can't really happen, but we can have a ceasefire so we can still be best friends, of course.
These sort of mixed signals do not assure.
Now, what I actually think, I want to show you a little bit more of the mixed signals, but then I want to tell you what I think is actually happening here.
First, on the mixed signals, Corey Lewandowski, who of course is still close to President Trump, there's talk about him re-entering the White House.
He's a former campaign manager for Trump.
He says, listen, the Russians say they didn't hack, and so that's basically the end of the story.
What we saw yesterday, and what's been reported yesterday, is that the president took this issue directly to Vladimir Putin, questioned him if they were involved in meddling in the elections in any way, shape, or form.
And from what we're hearing, the Russians have denied this.
But this is the type of president that takes a problem, delivers it directly to the person who has the solution for it, and pressed him very tough to find out if Russia had anything to do with the outcome of the U.S.
election.
And from what Vladimir Putin has said, the answer is no.
Okay, so that's mixed signals, right?
So even while Trump is saying, I pushed Putin very tough, Lewandowski says, well, Putin denied it, so I guess we're done here.
I guess we're done here.
Nikki Haley, UN ambassador, she was on the Sunday shows and she says precisely the opposite.
Everyone knows Russia meddled.
You know, what I understand is that President Trump let them know that, look, we know you did this and cut it out.
And President Putin is never going to admit that they did it.
And so they have to come back and they have to defend themselves.
This is Russia trying to save face.
And they can't.
They can't.
Everybody knows that Russia meddled in our elections.
Everybody knows that they're not just meddling in the United States elections.
They're doing this across multiple continents.
And they're doing this in a way that they're trying to cause chaos within the countries.
You wouldn't deny that, so I guess it's not a big deal, right?
I mean, again, these mixed signals are not useful to the Trump administration.
If you want them to get past all of this smoke and fire garbage, then they need to stop sending mixed signals this way.
Again, Trump said that at the beginning of the day, he said, we trust the Russians and we want to do a cybersecurity unit with them.
And then Nikki Haley goes on TV and she says, we won't ever trust Russia.
It doesn't mean we ever trust Russia.
We can't trust Russia and we won't ever trust Russia.
But you keep those that you don't trust closer so that you can always keep an eye on them and keep them in check.
And I think that's what we're trying to do with Russia right now.
Well, no, not so much.
That's not actually what's going on.
What's happening is actually some discombobulation in policy.
This is like the guy who robbed your house proposing a working group on burglary.
It's they who did this.
of Obama, but while Obama was trotting around being an idiot, Ash Carter was actually trying to take care of defense.
He says that this idea of a cybersecurity unit is really dumb. - This is like the guy who robbed your house proposing a working group on burglary.
It's they who did this. - So was it a mistake for the Trump administration to buy it? - Well, I don't think they can buy or we should, that can, it's fine to talk to the Russians It's never a problem talking to people.
It's a matter of what you say.
Okay, so the bottom line is that this vagary is not paying off for President Trump now.
Do I think that something deeply nefarious is going on?
I don't.
And I'll explain what I actually think is going on inside Trump's head and what I think is happening inside the administration.
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