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Nov. 15, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:28
How Prevalent Is Sexual Harassment? | Ep. 418
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From Congress to Huffington Post, sexual harassment is everywhere.
The bottom falls out for Roy Moore, or does it really?
And Jeff Sessions heads to the Hill.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
This is a jam-packed show for you today.
We are going to give you the very latest on Roy Moore.
That is heating up because it now appears that a lot of his media supporters are moving away from him.
But Roy Moore isn't going anywhere, and he is not sinking in the polls.
The latest poll has Roy Moore up 49-43.
There's the real possibility the guy about We'll end up being elected to the United States Senate, which, of course, puts the Republican Party in a very interesting position.
We'll discuss all of that.
Plus, I want to get to Jeff Sessions on the Hill, should there be a special counsel for Hillary.
Shep Smith went after some folks on the right for talking about Uranium One, so I want to let you know what's true and what's false about Uranium One.
We'll get to all of those things.
But first, we say thank you to our sponsors over at Helix.
I'm on the road.
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I was on Outnumbered earlier today, as well as Fox & Friends.
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Okay, so.
We begin today with a general observation.
Sexual harassment is apparently everywhere.
This is sort of a shocking story that went completely under the radar yesterday.
But there is a Democratic woman named Jackie Speier.
She's a Congresswoman on the Hill.
And she, in an interview yesterday on MSNBC, she said there are two members of the House who have been hit with serious sexual harassment allegations.
She says the House, over the past several years, has paid out $15 million in sexual harassment claims.
That's your taxpayer dollars and mine paying off Now, we do know that there's about $15 million that has been paid out by the House on behalf of harassers in the last 10 to 15 years.
$15 million has been paid out over sexual harassment claims, so obviously more than one member of Congress.
Do you know how many over time that is?
I know that some of them are former members now.
I don't really know.
Okay, that's a lot of money.
That's a serious amount of money.
And if we're all going to go nuts over Bill O'Reilly's alleged $32 million settlement on sexual harassment, $15 million is a lot of money.
This is why Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, has now come out and said that we need to have mandatory harassment training in Congress.
First of all, I'm shocked that they didn't have mandatory harassment training before.
Like, pretty much every major company that I've worked at Has had to have some sort of form of HR training, including you watch a sexual harassment tape, one of these dumb tapes from the 80s where they show you that you're not allowed to grab a woman's butt, which you should have known since you're not a jerk.
But in any case, Paul Ryan comes out, he says, we need mandatory harassment training.
It is, today's hearing was another important step in our efforts to combat sexual harassment and ensure a safe workplace.
I want to especially thank my colleagues who shared their stories.
Going forward, the House will adopt a policy of mandatory anti-harassment and anti-discrimination training for all members and staff.
Our goal is not only to raise awareness, but also make abundantly clear that harassment in any form has no place in this institution.
So, I'm not a general fan of anti-harassment training.
I don't think that harassers stop harassing because of this.
Harassers stop harassing when they feel there are consequences.
Mark Levin has suggested that Speaker Ryan and Senator Mitch McConnell should step down from their positions if they've been covering up sexual harassment.
I think that's a little bit much.
But I do think that they should be coming forward with names.
And naming and shaming sexual harassers, if the allegations are credible, seems to me the best way of going about alleviating this particular problem rather than paying out my money and yours from our wallets so that some sexually predatorial Congressperson can get his rocks off.
It's not just in Congress.
This is one of the worst-kept secrets in Congress, by the way, is the amount of drunken lechery that happens in Congress.
It's really quite astonishing.
It's been true for pretty much centuries at this point.
Also, the fallout in Hollywood continues.
More sexual harassment in Hollywood.
So Jon Stewart comes out and he says, "I was just stunned, stunned to learn about the revelations about Louis C.K." Here's the estimable Jon Leibowitz.
Stunned?
I think.
You know, you give your friends a benefit of the doubt.
I tried to think of it in terms of, you know, I've had friends who have compulsions and who have done things, gambling or drinking or drugs, and we've lost some of them.
Some of them have died.
And you always find yourself back to a moment of, did I miss something?
Could I have done more or the thing?
And in this situation, I think we all could have.
We all could have is a way of saying, I couldn't have, you could have.
The answer is yes, Jon Stewart, you probably could have, considering that you were asked this specific question in 2016 and shied away from answering it.
Meanwhile, there are certain harassers in Hollywood who are continuing to get away with it.
George Takei, as you recall, he made a statement on Howard Stern's show in which he openly admitted to grabbing men by their penises, men who were skittish.
to encourage them in their proclivities.
And here was his original audio.
I want to play that, and then I want to show you what he said in his statement, and people are letting him off the hook for this.
Did you ever grab anyone by the c*** against their will?
Uh-oh.
Oh, no.
Well, they were different times.
You never sexually harassed anyone.
Bay boner.
Have you?
Oh my goodness!
You've got such a beautiful hair!
It's some people that are kind of, um, um, skittish.
Right.
Or maybe, um, uh, afraid.
And you're trying to persuade.
But, you know... Do we need to call the police?
The answer is yes, you need to call the police.
Here was George Takei's statement that came out on Monday.
Well, first of all, it didn't sound like that was your Star Trek days.
It sounds like it's a pretty consistent question.
Out of context, I agree that the joke was distasteful, and I'm very sorry he and I made fun out of a serious matter.
For decades I have played the part of a naughty gay grandpa when I visit Howard's show, a caricature I now regret.
But I want to be clear, I have never forced myself upon someone during a date.
Sometimes my dates were the initiator, sometimes I was.
It was always by mutual consent.
I see now that it has come across poorly in the awkward sketch.
That is not a sketch.
You heard the audio yourself, but George Takei will get away with it.
He, like Kevin Spacey, is choosing to live as a gay man, I guess, and so he'll get away with it.
Meanwhile, there's a story from the Huffington Post that sexual harassment was tolerated on a routine basis over at Huffington Post.
This is from Gizmodo.
What they say is, Arianna Huffington's history with a former managing editor whose transfer to launch HuffPost India was later revealed to be the result of an HR investigation into whether he had sexually harassed multiple young women in the New York office shows that Huffington wasn't overly concerned with sexual harassment in the office.
Ismodo recently revisited those allegations.
They not only independently confirmed that the investigation was indeed the reason for that managing editor's transfer, but that Huffington knew about his actions before they were reported to HR, according to a former employee.
Erin Kranz, the woman who wrote this piece called Melanie, Erin Kranz, she says, by turning a blind eye, she bore ultimate responsibility for any issues that arose under her leadership.
According to the report, Huffington ensured the elevation of a guy named Jimmy Soni, who was then managing editor of the website.
And it was common knowledge around the newsroom, and Huffington knew about it, that he was sexually harassing the help.
Vice, there's a story about Vice today being hit with serious allegations of sexual harassment.
So this is to say, sexual harassment apparently is out of control.
And the question is, why are we just noticing this now?
So there are two theories as to why we are just noticing this now.
Theory number one is the David Frum theory.
This is the optimistic theory of human nature, which is, Everyone's been sexually harassing for decades, and only now do we care because we're better than they were a decade ago.
Right?
We didn't care about Bill Clinton a decade ago.
We care about Bill Clinton now.
That's because we're better now.
And then there's theory number two.
Theory number two is that bad men have always sexually harassed women, but that people only care about it now, particularly on the left, because they're trying to get Donald Trump and Roy Moore.
I think that this is the correct theory.
I don't think that the left really cares very much about sexual harassment.
I think the left has been covering up their lack of care about sexual harassment for years.
They use a changing sexual standard to basically allow them to let people off the hook they want to let off the hook, and to put on the hook people they want to put on the hook.
So right now they want to put Roy Moore and Donald Trump on the hook, and therefore they're going to pretend to take sexual harassment super seriously.
When it's Anthony Weiner or Bill Clinton, then it's a completely different story.
is because there's a piece in Vox.com from an ex-Gribble columnist named Matt Iglesias.
He wrote about a 2,000-word essay about why Bill Clinton should have resigned from office in 1998.
Now, I checked my calendar this morning.
It turns out it's not 1998.
It's 2017, so he's 19 years late to the party.
Iglesias admits that at the time he wanted Clinton to stay, he said he was glad to see Clinton prevail and regarded the whole sordid matter as primarily the fault of congressional Republicans' excessive scandal-mongering.
But he admits, I think we got it wrong.
What we should have talked about was men abusing their social and economic power over younger and less powerful women.
So he doesn't talk about Wanya Broderick.
He doesn't talk about Kathleen Willey.
He talks specifically about Monica Lewinsky.
And here's what he says, quote.
Excuse me.
It was far from the most egregious case of workplace sexual misconduct in American history.
But it was unusually high profile, the facts were not in dispute, the perpetrator had a lot of nominal feminist ideological commitments, and political leaders who shared those commitments had the power to force him from office.
Had he resigned in shame, we all might have made a collective cultural and political decision that a person caught leveraging power over women in inappropriate ways ought to be fired.
Instead, we lost nearly two decades.
Yes.
Yes, we did.
So where are you on Bob Menendez, Matt?
Well, it turns out that he doesn't want Bob Menendez to step down.
And if he had this choice now, he really wouldn't want Clinton to step down anyway.
He says the reason that Clinton should have stepped down Is because he abused power relationships.
This is my favorite part of his little article.
He says, "Republicans shouldn't have bothered going after Bill Clinton for perjury.
Instead, they should have used the feminist line that Monica Lewinsky was cuddled into her affair.
They should have said that Clinton's seduction of Lewinsky was, quote, "morally bankrupt and contributing in a meaningful way to a serious social problem that disadvantages millions of women throughout their lives." I was there in 1998, and I recall that at the time, the left was suggesting that Monica Lewinsky was a slut who was propositioning Bill, not a victimized innocent pressured by the most powerful man on Earth.
If the right had suggested that she was an innocent proposition by the most powerful man on Earth and this was sexual harassment, the left would then accuse the right of depriving Monica Lewinsky of her agency and being sexist.
This is the beautiful thing about being part of the left.
You can always find an excuse to attack the people you want to attack.
And the proof is in the pudding, because Iglesias says the real reason that Clinton should have been dumped in 1998 is because Al Gore was vice president and nothing would have changed.
And he says now it's worthwhile dumping Bill over, but it wouldn't have been worthwhile last year.
He says now that Hillary is out of electoral politics and has emerged as a bigger, drawing, more important political force than her husband, there's no excuse for Democrats not to look back on these events with more objectivity.
You wonder why so many Republicans are backing Roy Moore?
It's because they're using precisely the mirror negative of this, the Polaroid negative of this particular argument.
Matt Iglesias is basically saying that Bob Menendez shouldn't step down because the current governor is Chris Christie.
If he waits a few months and he steps down, then the governor will be a Democrat and then everything will be great.
He says that Bill Clinton should have stepped down because Al Gore was the vice president.
So, in other words, he doesn't really care about sexual harassment.
Or at least, he cares about sexual harassment up to the point it means political sacrifice.
Then, he shies away.
And then he wonders why people in Alabama are backing Roy Moore, why there are so many Republicans who are willing to back Roy Moore, even thinking that these allegations are correct, or at least credible.
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Okay, so, with this as background, the fact that sexual harassment is now obviously commonplace all over the place, and the fact the media are paying attention for political motivations, we have to ask ourselves a question.
Okay, we as conservatives have to ask ourselves a question.
Should it matter?
Should it matter?
Now, we've been asking this question for the last several days.
I've suggested that it absolutely should matter whether Roy Moore was molesting 14 or 16-year-olds or whether there are credible allegations that he is doing so.
But there are a lot of people who are saying, listen, the left is politically motivated.
If this were a leftist, they wouldn't be doing the same thing.
The Washington Post might not have even reported this story if it were about Doug Jones as opposed to Roy Moore.
So why should we deprive ourselves of a Senate seat in order to show the world what gentlemen we are?
Which is a fine and solid question.
There are basically three ways that this can go from here, okay?
And two of those ways don't involve depriving yourself of the Senate seat.
Way number one is the worst.
That is, Moore stays on the ballot and splits votes, and Doug Jones ends up in the Senate.
That is, politically speaking, for the Republicans, the worst, because when they have 51 votes in the Senate, it's very difficult for them to pass legislation with 52, let alone 51.
It means that Lisa Murkowski and John McCain, or Susan Collins and John McCain, two senators, can basically stymie the rest of the Republican agenda for the next couple of years, at the very least.
That's a possibility.
And so people are shying away from that possibility.
So that leaves two other possibilities.
One is a write-in campaign.
The problem with a write-in campaign is that Moore says he's not going.
He's now Jennifer Holliday in Dreamgirls.
He's telling you he's not going.
He's just not going to.
He's going to cling on there with his fingernails.
He will not leave.
He's repeating this.
And he's looking at the polls and saying, why should I leave?
I'm raising more money than I ever had.
He raised like $250,000 yesterday, which is sort of a sad commentary on the nature of our reactionary politics that Roy Moore is raising way more money in the aftermath of child sex allegations than he was before that.
But people hate the media just that much, and they think it's a political hit just that much.
So, he stays in.
They split the vote.
Doug Jones wins.
Possibility number two is that there is a write-in candidacy for Jeff Sessions.
Jeff Sessions would be the best pick.
He won 96% of the vote in the last Alabama Senate race.
You put Luther Strange in the write-in, it's not gonna help.
Put Luther Strange in the write-in, and that's going to be a serious problem, because Luther Strange couldn't even win a primary against Roy Moore.
There have been people suggesting that Richard Burr, who is the current senator of Alabama, should step down and then run for the open seat as a write-in candidate, and then his seat will come up for the first special election.
That's a possibility, too.
In other words, using some sort of machination to prevent Moore from being elected.
That would be the best, but the most plausible solution, the most plausible outcome here is that Moore actually gets elected, that Moore stays in, Moore wins the election, And then Republicans in Congress have to decide, they have to make a decision.
Are they going to seat him or are they not?
The case for seating him is the people of Alabama have spoken, they heard the allegations, they didn't trust them, not our problem.
The case for not seating him is credible allegations of child molestation.
I am in the camp that says that if he is elected, you should not seat him.
The reason I say this is because like the founders, I am not a Democrat, I am a Republican.
That means with small d and small r. I'm not somebody who believes that the will of the people in its purest form must always be done.
I think that the exercise of independent judgment by legislators is important, which is why I think character is important in legislators.
I'm a believer that the Electoral College was created specifically to prevent dictatorship.
I'm a believer that the institutions of our government were created with the knowledge that there should be people who, every once in a while, have to do the right thing, even in spite of their constituents.
This to me seems like a pretty clear-cut case of that, especially because in the Matt Iglesias math, the governor of Alabama is a Republican who will then appoint a Republican to fill the seat, at least until the next special election.
So, it's interesting to see where everybody is coming down on all of this, and it's also interesting to see just how much dirty tricks are being used in Alabama.
I'm not just talking about You know, quote-unquote, dirty tricks against Roy Moore.
You know, a credible allegation is a credible allegation.
But by people who are associated, presumably, with Moore.
So, we don't know who sent this fake robocall.
But there was a fake robocall that was going around Alabama.
And this fake robocall was from a guy who characterizes himself as Lenny Bernstein.
From the Washington Post, offering money to people to make false allegations against Roy Moore.
The suspicion is, of course, that this is someone who's associated with the Roy Moore campaign, and that this is somebody who's attempting to convince people that all of the allegations are false and that the Washington Post paid people off.
Here's what it sounded like.
I love they used a Jewish name for it.
Really, a nice dog whistle there.
Here is the audio.
I'm Bernie Bernstein.
I'm a reporter for the Washington Post.
I'm calling to find out if anyone at this address is a female between the ages of 54 to 57 years old willing to make damaging remarks about Candidate Roy Moore for a reward of between $5,000 and $7,000.
We will not be fully investigating these claims.
However, we will make a written report.
I can be reached by email lbernstein at washingtonpost.com.
Thank you.
LBernstein and WashingtonPost.com.
The purpose of this, of course, is not to actually gather information.
LBernstein and WashingtonPost.com apparently doesn't exist.
The purpose is to issue robot calls to make people think that this is what the Washington Post was doing.
Really, really gross stuff.
Very, very unpleasant stuff.
So, that's happening.
So, as all of this happens, even the conservatives and media have broken down into two groups.
Sean Hannity, who's obviously signaling from the White House, last night on his program, you know, Sean talks regularly with President Trump.
They are very close.
Apparently, they speak nearly every night.
And Sean basically laid the wood to Moore.
He said, listen, you have 24 hours to figure out a good way to rebut these allegations, or you should get out of the race.
Between this interview that I did and the inconsistent answers, between him saying, I never knew this girl, and then that yearbook comes out, For me, the judge has 24 hours.
You must immediately and fully come up with a satisfactory explanation for your inconsistencies that I just showed.
You must remove any doubt.
If you can't do this, then Judge Moore needs to get out of this race.
Okay, so that was seen as an ultimatum from the White House.
Trump, of course, has remained utterly immovable and silent on this issue, which is amazing.
It's amazing, because Trump is the person who could help solve all of this.
If Trump jumped in with both feet and said, more needs to get out, and then all of a sudden the polls showed that Moore's base was completely eroding, then you might actually get a write-in candidacy that would be worthwhile, because write-in candidacies are tough.
But Trump staying out of this race is a real problem.
Trump has continued to maintain silence.
I hope he doesn't.
I think Trump should know better than that.
It's not just Hannity.
Tucker Carlson, who... I didn't watch his show earlier this week, so I don't know if he was inclined to doubt the allegations, but whatever he was doing earlier this week, now Tucker says that Moore, who's been hiding behind Christianity, he's been hiding behind his faith, saying, you know, they're out to get me, just like Jesus, kind of thing.
Carlson says that's nonsense.
Roy Moore has every right to protest his innocence, and maybe he is innocent.
What he's not allowed to do is drag God into all of this.
God is not accused of trolling for teenagers in shopping malls.
This is not about Christianity, it's about Roy Moore, and it discredits Christianity when Christians allow Moore to use his faith as a shield.
It's offensive to real believers.
And this, of course, is exactly correct.
Good for Tucker Carlson.
So it looks like the bottom is falling out a little bit for Roy Moore, except in his home state.
So he does have some media defenders.
You know, Rush Limbaugh was suggesting on his show that a search and destroy mission against Roy Moore is really Mitch McConnell's doing.
It's really about Mitch McConnell, that all these people are jumping on board because they hate Roy Moore.
Listen.
I had not said that you should not vote for Roy Moore.
I was very uncomfortable with Roy Moore.
I had criticized Roy Moore, but I had not openly stated—I think I said that if I were in Alabama, I wouldn't vote for him, but I also said very similar to what—before any of these allegations came out—very similar to what I had said about Donald Trump, which is, you know, I certainly understand voting for Roy Moore to prevent a Democrat from taking the seat.
But after these allegations, the idea that this is really about McConnell anymore, that it's all people of bad faith who are seeking to take down Roy Moore, it doesn't really hold.
But Russia's trying to—Russia was trying to push that yesterday.
Annan has been very upfront about the objective he has, and that's to get Mitch McConnell out of the Senate.
And so I don't think—even if all we had was one allegation against Judge Moore, this was going to be it for Judge Moore.
Didn't matter because this is now being used to send a message to Bannon and his group that you think you're going to get rid of me.
Well, take a look at what's going to happen every time you try.
Okay, that's not really true.
So, Bannon wants to make it about that.
Bannon wants to make it about it's me versus McConnell.
But it really is not about him versus McConnell at all.
At this point, it's just about the truth or falsity of the allegations.
Bannon, by the way, continues to stick by Moore.
The reason he continues to stick by Moore is because he stapled himself to Moore's leg as Moore won the primaries and then tried to claim credit.
He was the dog that had stapled himself to the chicken's leg to cross the road and then claimed credit for giving the chicken a ride.
That's not actually what happened in this particular case, but it's a seductive way of moving attention off of the actual allegations and toward the politics of the situation.
Okay, so before I go any further and talk about people in Alabama who are continuing to support Roy Moore, including Mo Brooks, the representative from Alabama, First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at the USCCA.
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Okay, so it's not just Rush who's basically trying to cast this in political terms.
Mo Brooks made what I thought was maybe the most intellectually honest argument here.
He basically said, listen, it doesn't really matter what Roy Moore has done or not done.
At least he's not Doug Jones and he's not gonna vote for abortion.
He said, "I believe the Democrats will do great damage to our country." He says, I believe the Democrats will do damage to our country on a myriad of issues.
And he's sprinting away from the reporter.
So obviously, not questions that Mo Brooks would like to answer.
Bad candidates who refuse to get out.
Roy Moore is refusing to get out because he believes he can win.
And the polls show that he can win.
And this demonstrates why the voters need to stop thinking in binary terms in terms of personalities.
Binary terms in moral terms are good.
Binary terms in terms of personality are not good.
So, it's not a binary choice between Steve Bannon and Mitch McConnell.
It's not a binary choice between Roy Moore and Doug Jones, especially not now.
If you went through support from Roy Moore, you could easily get a writing candidate and you could fix this problem in a much more smooth way.
But people don't want to make the binary moral choice, so instead they've swiveled to binary personality choices.
You know, do I like Doug Jones or do I like Roy Moore?
Do I like Steve Bannon or do I like Mitch McConnell?
There's only one binary choice here.
Do you think it is important enough not to have an alleged child molester sitting in the Senate to not vote for him and vote for someone else?
And I'm not talking about voting for Doug Jones.
I'm talking about voting for a write-in candidate.
Or do you hate the media so much, and you suspect the media so much, and you think the whole thing's rigged, that you're willing to take the risk that you're putting somebody in the Senate who is an utter piece of human debris?
So, you know, these are questions that I think we all ought to ask ourselves in all honesty.
Well, that's not even close to all the news that we have to get to today.
We're also going to get to Jeff Sessions on the Hill in just a moment.
But for that, you're going to have to go over and subscribe.
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So meanwhile, Jeff Sessions was on the Hill.
The Attorney General was on the Hill yesterday to answer questions about a variety of issues ranging from leaks inside the Trump administration to the possibility of setting up a special counsel for Hillary Clinton.
Now, I want to start this discussion about the special counsel for Hillary Clinton by discussing what exactly the special counsel will be for.
So there are two separate questions that have really come up in the context of why we might need a special counsel.
And it really is more why we need an investigation, not necessarily a special counsel.
So those are two separate questions, too.
So number one question.
Do we need a special counsel?
Number two question, for what?
So we'll answer the second question first.
What is the for what?
Why would you need a special counsel?
So, why would you need an investigation?
So the reason that you would need an investigation into Hillary Clinton is because Hillary Clinton hired Fusion GPS, a Russian connected firm, in order to dig up dirt on Donald Trump.
And then it appears that that material was used as the basis for a FISA request from the FBI.
There are questions as to whether the FBI actually continued to pay for this dossier, some of which has been discredited.
And so the question is really whether Hillary Clinton did anything illegal in using a Russian-connected source in order to promote a hit on Donald Trump.
We don't know the answers to that.
I think there's some unfilled gaps in that suspicion.
I think that we'd have to figure out that Hillary, number one, knew that she was getting information directly from the Russian government, or that she paid the Russian government for that information.
There was some exchange that actually took place, or didn't take place, some sort of favor that was being done.
We'd have to find out what the story is there.
That is story number one.
Story number two is the Uranium One scandal.
So, the left has been going crazy.
Why are we even talking about Uranium One?
So, one of the people who spent some time, quote-unquote, debunking the Uranium One scandal yesterday was Shep Smith.
Shep Smith, of course, is a left-leaning host on Fox News, and he spent a significant amount of time on his show yesterday debunking what he thought was the foolishness of looking at the Uranium One scandal to begin with.
Here was his description.
Uranium One is the name of a South Africa-based mining company.
Back in 2007, it merged with Eurasia Energy, based in Canada.
And in 2010, the mining arm of the Russian nuclear agency Rosatom bought controlling interest in the company.
Among other places, that mining company had operations in Wyoming that amounted to what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's, or the NRC, said was at the time about 20% of uranium production capacity in the U.S.
Today, the NRC says it's about 10%.
Now, here's the accusation.
Nine people involved in the deal made donations to the Clinton Foundation totaling more than $140 million.
In exchange, Secretary of State Clinton approved the sale to the Russians.
A quid pro quo.
Okay, and then Shepard Smith would go on to debunk this, right?
Shepard Smith would say, well, she didn't approve the sale to the Russians, it was approved by a bunch of agencies, and it wasn't $140 million, and one of the people who was accused of giving all this money to Hillary Clinton had left Rosatom by the time this happened.
All of this is true.
But it's not the whole story.
So I'm going to tell you the whole story of what exactly happened with Uranium One.
This is not according to me.
This is according to leftist sources like PolitiFact and the New York Times.
So here is what we know.
There's a guy named Frank Giustra.
Okay, Frank Giustra was a close confidant of the Clintons.
He owned that company that you heard Shep Smith mention there called Eurasia.
It was sold to Uranium One in 2007.
Giustra says he divested his personal stake in the company at that time, but his shareholders owned 60% of the company, and there's no way to confirm the truth of his claim.
In 2010, Rosatom tried to buy 51% of the company.
This rose to the level of the government because this looked like a security problem, not because they were going to ship all of the uranium from the United States to Russia and make nukes, but because it actually deprived the United States of a strategic nuclear asset that was required for our military because we had a uranium shortage.
In 2013, Russia bought the entirety of Uranium One with the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, CFIUS, as well as the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commissions and Utah agencies.
The State Department had to sign off because the State Department was part of the CFIUS.
Hillary claims she had nothing to do with green-lighting this.
She didn't stop it from going through.
So, again, the accusation that Justra had divested himself at this point, so all of his donations to the Clinton Foundation had nothing to do with Uranium One, and in reality, it was just about $4 million that was donated to the Clinton Foundation from people associated with Uranium One.
This is a little simplistic.
So, here's the full story.
This is courtesy of the New York Times in a 2015 piece.
They report that Uranium One, its acquisition actually sort of began in 2005 when Justra still owned the company, quote, with Mr. Clinton at his side.
According to the Times, the two men had flown aboard Mr. Justra's private jet to Almaty, Kazakhstan, where they dined with the authoritarian president Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Mr. Clinton handed the Kazakh president a propaganda coup when he expressed support for Nazarbayev's bid to head an international elections monitoring group undercutting American foreign policy and criticism of Kazakhstan's poor human rights record by, among others, his wife, who was then a senator.
Within days of the visit, Justra's fledgling company, Eurasia Energy, signed a preliminary deal giving it stakes in three uranium mines controlled by the state-run uranium agency Kazatomprom.
Okay, so now Eurasia, which is Justra's company, owns a bunch of assets in Kazakhstan.
This, by the way, is one of the reasons the Russians wanted to buy the company, this U.S.-based company.
They wanted to buy the company because they didn't just want the holdings in the United States, they really more wanted the holdings in Kazakhstan.
Eurasia, this company in 2007, merged with Uranium One.
At that point, that was when Justra says that he divested himself, but the new company was controlled by Eurasia investors, including a guy named Ian Telfer, a Canadian who became chairman.
Juster made about 45 million bucks off the deal, and he sold his stake, but he had given a bunch of money to the Clintons.
So that in itself is an element of corruption, although Hillary's not yet Secretary of State.
Uranium One, this is all according to the New York Times, right?
Not according to me.
Uranium One began to snap up companies with the assets in the United States.
In April 2007, it bought uranium mills in Utah, it bought in Wyoming, it bought in Texas.
And then the Times published an article showing the 2005 trips linked to the Kazakhstan mining deal between the Clintons and Uranium One and JSTRA.
JSTRA had donated $31.3 million to Clinton's foundation.
Okay, and the Clintons were still involved after JSTRA dropped out.
So the idea here from Shep Smith and some people on the left is once JSTRA was gone, what are you whining about?
Here is the answer.
Mr. Telfer, right, who's the new head of Uranium One, gave undisclosed donations of somewhere between $1.3 million and $5.6 million in contributions.
They were reported from a constellation of people with ties to Uranium One or Eurasia.
Without those assets, the Russians would have had no interest in the deal, the Kazakh assets, they would have had no interest in the deals.
And it wasn't just that.
It wasn't just that.
Apparently, early on in the Obama administration, it looked like Uranium One was not going to be able to get what they needed from Kazakhstan.
And so they went to the Clintons and said, can you help?
And whether Hillary had anything to do with it or not, the State Department intervened.
Amid this influx of Uranium One connected money, Bill Clinton was invited to speak in Moscow in June 2010, the same month Rosatom struck its deal for a majority stake in Uranium One.
It was his single highest fee.
It was a half a million dollar fee for Bill Clinton, paid by Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank with ties to the Kremlin.
Okay, so it is not at all clear that Hillary had nothing to do with this.
It is not at all clear that Uranium One was completely clean.
You know, I think that the most stretched allegation is the idea that Uranium One was greenlit by Hillary Clinton personally, but the idea that they intervened in 2009-2010, the State Department intervened a little bit to help with Kazakh issues for Uranium One, that's not out of bounds.
It's weird that the entire Obama administration would sign off on all of this knowing that Uranium One donations were going to the Clinton Foundation.
All of this is worthy of investigation.
So that's answer number one.
Yes.
This is worthy of investigation.
No, it's not quite as clear-cut as Shep Smith wanted to make it.
Okay.
Question number two.
So, this is a different question.
Special counsel suggests that the people who are in charge of investigating, namely Jeff Sessions, he's not capable of doing a full investigation.
Remember, Those are people that we hire, right?
Jeff Sessions is a guy we already pay to do these investigations.
The reason we have a special counsel now is because of Donald Trump.
Okay, Jeff Sessions originally recused himself because he testified wrongly that he had never met with anybody from Russia.
This, of course, was not true.
And so he recused himself in the Russia investigation.
The reason Rod Rosenstein recused himself and appointed a special counsel is because Trump tried to use Rod Rosenstein as a rationale for firing James Comey.
That forced Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel.
So now you're saying that on the Hillary stuff, Sessions isn't capable of investigating.
I don't really see why.
And you say on the Hillary stuff that Rosenstein isn't capable of investigating.
I don't really see why.
So I'm not sure why a special counsel is necessary as opposed to a normal DOJ investigation.
So Sessions has just been batted about by both sides in Congress.
The Democrats are bashing Sessions about by suggesting he's dishonest, that he lied about his Russian ties.
I find that very hard to believe.
And then, the people on the right are bashing him about for not appointing a special counsel, as Donald Trump obviously wants to quote-unquote, lock her up.
My sympathies are largely with Jeff Sessions here.
So we'll start with Jeff Sessions talking to Ted Lieu, the egregiously bad California congressperson.
He's currently running against a guy that I have endorsed in his race.
And Ted Lieu went after Sessions and said that he was basically a liar about Russia.
Here was Sessions' response yesterday on the Hill.
I won't repeat it, Mr. Chairman.
But I hope the Congressman knows, and I hope all of you know, that my answer to that question, I did not meet with the Russians, was explicitly responding to the shocking suggestion that I, as a surrogate, was meeting on a continuing basis with Russian officials, and the implication was to impact the campaign in some sort of nefarious way.
And all I did was meet in my office with the ambassador, which we didn't discuss anything like that.
So I just want to say I appreciate the congressman's right.
I guess he can say it's free speech.
He can't be sued here.
So that's just my response.
So basically, there's Sessions saying, you know, if I could sue you, I would, but there is a parliamentary immunity, so you can sue whatever you want on the floor of Congress.
Sessions then was asked by Trey Gowdy and Jim Jordan from Ohio why he was not setting up a Hillary special counsel.
Again, I don't think Sessions is doing the wrong thing here.
I think that Just because Eric Holder politicized the Department of Justice and used it as a political weapon on behalf of Barack Obama, just because he called himself Obama's wingman and then went out and acted like it, doesn't mean that the DOJ can afford to have every Attorney General be used as a baton by the administration.
And I think Sessions is saying something true here.
Here he was asked why he's not setting up a special counsel for Hillary, and here was his answer.
Well, Mr. Comey is no longer the director of the FBI.
Thank goodness.
We have an excellent man of integrity and ability in Chris Wray, and I think he's going to do an outstanding job, and I'm very happy about that.
He's not here today, Attorney General, especially if you are, and I'm asking for a special counsel.
The time of the gentleman has expired.
And I would say looks like there's not enough basis to appoint a special counsel.
Okay, and that is the proper legal standard.
Jeff Sessions is just doing his job.
He takes an enormous amount of crap for it.
But Sessions on this particular issue, while the Democrats are ripping him for being unfair, Sessions is the one who basically appointed the special counsel, you know, to investigate the 2016 election.
And it was Sessions who right now is saying, listen, I need a legal standard in order for me to meet that legal standard.
By the way, it's not like Sessions isn't doing his job.
I mean, Sessions said yesterday that they are in full investigation mode against 27 separate leaks outside of the Trump administration.
Here's what he had to say on that.
We had about nine open investigations of classified leaks in the last three years.
We have 27 investigations open today.
We intend to get to the bottom of these leaks.
I think it has reached epidemic proportions.
It cannot be allowed to continue, and we will do our best effort to ensure that it does not continue.
You know, this is one of the things that people don't get about the Trump administration.
You saw a bunch of Democrats who are going around saying, Trump should be impeached.
Bob Corker today.
We should remove the ability for Trump to launch nuclear weapons.
Outside of what Trump says, and the fact that no major legislation has been passed, when Trump leaves his department heads alone, What they do is within, not only within the normal bounds of political conduct, it is typically quite good.
Jeff Sessions has been fine as the Attorney General, and all the crap he's had to take in order to do that is, I think, a foolish mistake on the part of people on the right and the left.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So things that I like this week, I've been encouraged by Andrew Klavan and by Michael Knowles, the ex-Gribble Michael Knowles, It is a supremely pretentious book, but it does have a lot of interesting things to say about what it is that makes poetry reach us and how human language has changed over time and really how human
understanding of the world has changed over time and has simultaneously enriched the variety of language while undercutting the innate richness of each word.
So the sort of idea, the sort of thesis behind poetic diction is that a long time ago, when you look at words like ruach in the Bible, ruach means both wind and spirit.
And so we have two words for that, right?
We have wind and spirit.
When you read old ancient books, And you read the word ruach, it has a different sense, right?
A sense of richness to it that neither wind nor spirit really does justice to because it includes both.
The reason for that, says Barfield, is because people perceived more meaning to be associated with the physical world than they necessarily perceived to be associated with the physical world today.
And so we've been more specific with our language, but that also, that specificity means that when we read the word Wind now.
It doesn't have the same impact as when we read older poetry.
When you read Homer, it feels replete with a certain meaning that modern poetry just can't match, and that's because the language itself of the time was richer in content, if not in variety.
So that's sort of the basic idea.
It's an interesting book.
I think that it has some really good insights about how language is used and how the use of it evolves over time.
Okay.
Time for some things that I hate.
All right, so thing that I hate, number one.
So Joe Biden obviously wants to run for president again.
I will be curious to see if there's any widespread media investigation of allegations that have been made by former Secret Service agents that he mistreated female Secret Service agents.
Those have been alleged in a couple of places that I've seen.
All of these allegations, I believe, should be hunted down and researched to the fullest extent.
But Biden obviously wants to run for president again.
He's making the rounds.
He thinks he would have won last time.
There's a poll out today that shows that Biden would beat Donald Trump if the election were held today 46 to 34, something along those lines.
In a sort of normal Democrat versus Trump election, it would be something like 48 to 34.
In any case, Biden is making the rounds.
And he was asked specifically about the shooting in Texas, that recent church shooting in Texas.
And he was asked, why would you want to remove the gun from the hands of the guy who stopped the church shooter, right?
The Stephen Williford, the NRA former gun instructor hero, who shot the bad guy.
And here was Biden's response, which is truly insane.
Well, first of all, the kind of gun being carried, it shouldn't be carried.
Assault weapons are... I wrote the first, the last serious gun control law that was written, it was law for ten years, and it outlawed assault weapons, and it outlawed weapons with magazines that had a whole lot of bullets, and so you could kill a whole lot of people a lot more quickly, number one.
Number two, it's just rational to say certain people shouldn't have guns.
Now the fact that some people with guns are legally able to acquire a gun, and they turn out to be crazy after the fact, that's life.
There's nothing you can do about that.
But we can save a lot of lives, and we've stopped tens of thousands of people from getting guns who shouldn't have guns.
Well, including presumably the guy who shot the bad guys.
So Joe Biden knows less about guns than virtually anyone else.
I mean, this is a guy who said that you should shoot through the front door of your house with a shotgun, or you should go out on your balcony and you should blow a couple rounds.
He's ridiculous.
But you wonder why people think that the Democrats are gun grabbers?
It's because of this.
The question that preceded this answer was specifically about Whether the shooter of the bad guy should have had a gun, and that was Biden's specific answer.
Pretty amazing.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So, Shannon Sharp, who has become a frequent contributor to Things I Hate, so I appreciate his presence, over on Fox Sports 1, he says he's praising Colin Kaepernick.
So, Colin Kaepernick was named the GQ Person of the Year, or Citizen of the Year, which makes perfect sense, since he didn't vote, he doesn't speak publicly, he doesn't have much to say.
And he wore socks that had cops depicted as pigs.
Obviously, that is the citizen of the year.
But Shannon Sharpe says that Kaepernick will go down in history as a mythical civil rights figure.
Maybe Colin Kaepernick will never get the respect that he deserves for what he did.
But I believe, when it's all said and done, and history is written 30, 40 years from now, Colin Kaepernick will be looked upon as some of these mythical figures of the Dr. Kings, the Muhammad Ali's, and the Rosa Parks.
Okay, first of all, to compare Colin Kaepernick to Martin Luther King is utterly, abjectly insane.
Martin Luther King not only provided a message that inspired millions of people, it was a uniting message.
To compare him to Rosa Parks is also insane.
Rosa Parks helped organize with the NAACP the legal pretext for ending legalized segregation in the United States.
Nothing like that is occurring.
To compare to Muhammad Ali, however, is a little bit different.
Comparing him to Muhammad Ali actually is not too far off, because if you go back and you look at what Muhammad Ali was saying during the 60s and the early 70s, a lot of it was quite extreme, a lot of it was quite anti-American, and there's been a rewriting of Muhammad Ali's history.
So is it possible that 30 years from now the left will have rewritten Colin Kaepernick into some sort of gentleman hero?
It's certainly a possibility, but that would just demonstrate that history can be rewritten in a myriad of false ways.
Okay, so I was going to do some Bible talk this week, but I actually did some extra Bible talk in last week's mailbag.
So if you want Bible talk, go back and listen to that.
But we have to break so that I can get on a plane and come back home and do my show from the studio tomorrow.
Thanks again to the folks over at Fox News for allowing me to use the studio.
I really appreciate it.
And we will see you tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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