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Jan. 25, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
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Is Trump About To Collapse On Immigration? | Ep. 461
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President Trump says he's ready for citizenship for Dreamers, the Mueller investigation heats up, and should bosses ever date their secretaries?
We'll discuss it.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So it's wild confusion, mass hysteria, cats living with dogs, the end of the world as we know it, apparently all of this about the Mueller investigation.
I'm going to try and unpack everything that's going on here because I think you're hearing a lot of stuff that's not true from the right, you're hearing a lot of stuff that's not true from the left.
Basically both sides have preconceived notions of how this narrative is supposed to go and they're shifting the facts in order to meet those narrative notions.
We're going to get into all of that.
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Okay, so before I begin with all the negative news of the day, I just want to make a nice note because I don't normally do this.
I'm not big on the emotions.
I'm not big on the niceties.
Today is actually a really nice day.
Number one, we get to broadcast from the beautiful studios here at The Blaze.
So it's very kind of Glenn Beck and team to allow us to use their studio.
So that's awesome.
But also, I had an experience this morning.
I was up very, very early after my UConn speech last night, which went great.
It was really fun.
There were 500 people who showed up, packed house.
We would have had another 500, 600 people if they'd allowed in the general public, which they should have, and if they had not warned students that they required counseling, if I even showed up on campus.
But the event was just great.
And I woke up early this morning.
I get on the plane, and during liftoff, you can't be on the Internet.
Well, not being on the Internet for me is sort of like it must be for a crack cocaine addict So I'm sitting there desperately trying to reload things on the phone.
The phone won't connect to anything.
And then I realized, hey, there's other stuff on my phone too.
And so I sat there and I listened to Bach, which I downloaded.
And I watched videos of my kids on my iPhone, on a plane, taking off at 400 miles an hour, taking me from Connecticut to Dallas.
And I just thought to myself, what a phenomenal world we live in.
I mean, really, it's amazing.
We tend to overlook all of this because we're used to it, because this is the civilization in which we live.
We take for granted Western civilization.
We take for granted the fact that we live in modernity.
The fact that if you have a cold, you have the flu, you just run down to a store and get medicine.
We take all this stuff for granted.
This stuff is the painstaking labor of Literally millions of people over hundreds of generations.
That's what's brought us to this point.
And that's just, I think we should sit back and marvel a little bit at that.
That this is the culture, the culture brought us here.
I know that there are atheists out there who say it has nothing to do with culture, it has nothing to do with Judeo-Christian values, it has nothing to do with old-fashioned Greek reason and purpose-driven telos.
That's nonsense, okay?
It's all part of a whole.
The reason that you're able to sit on a plane and listen to Bach, right?
The music of Bach, a religious man, on your iPhone, hundreds of years after Bach died.
The reason that you're able to sit on a plane that takes you across the country in two hours, three hours, in a journey that used to take you weeks.
This is all because of free market capitalism.
It's all because of innovation.
It's all because there were people who felt driven to change the world because, yes, there was a religion that was dictating that it was important for them to change the world to make it better for other people.
So, all of this is worth appreciating.
So, That was all the light stuff.
Now we get to all the crappy stuff.
So here we go.
Let's just jump right in into the Mueller investigation and what's going on with the FBI.
So I want to start off by talking about where the right wing's head is at, because yesterday I talked a little bit about some people on the right who are suggesting that the FBI is thoroughly corrupt.
The FBI has been thoroughly corrupt for years.
There was even an implication by a man I greatly admire, Rush Limbaugh, that I thought was completely wrong.
The intelligence community somehow bamboozled George W. Bush on the Iraq War because I guess we're just anti-FBI now.
Again, I thought that that was silly.
I think that the conspiracy theories, however, are coming from a certain place.
The place they are coming from is the place where we now know that the FBI was basically complicit with the Obama DOJ in making sure that Hillary Clinton was never prosecuted.
Andy McCarthy, who's a pretty level-headed fellow, former federal prosecutor, assistant U.S. attorney.
He writes for National Review, and he has a column over at National Review that is really devastating with regard to the FBI and the DOJ and their collusion to prevent Hillary Clinton from being prosecuted.
And so here is the timeline that Andy McCarthy lays forth, because it's pretty astonishing.
Now, the reason the Obama administration protected Hillary Clinton is because if it turned out that Hillary Clinton was prosecuted for putting a bunch of emails, classified emails, on a public server, on a server that was available to, I mean, it was a private server, but it was available to be hacked.
The reason that this was troublesome to the Obama administration is, of course, Obama had been emailing with Hillary on this private server, and he knew that she was not using a government email address.
So he was implicated in all of this.
So here's the timeline, as laid out by Annie McCarthy, and it's pretty damning.
Two days after the New York Times broke the scandal about Hillary Clinton in March 2015, John Podesta, who was then an advisor to the president and head of Hillary's campaign, emailed Clinton confidant and top State Department aide Cheryl Mills to tell her that the email exchanges between Obama and Clinton should never be disclosed, but instead held because of executive privilege, because they didn't want anybody to know but instead held because of executive privilege, because they didn't want anybody to know that Obama had known that Hillary was using Three days after that, Obama went on national TV and he lied openly, saying that he'd only learned about Hillary's use of private email, quote, the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.
That was not true.
But this set off a series of panic-based reactions among Clinton and Obama's aides.
Clinton campaign secretary Josh Sherwin emailed former White House director of communications Jen Palmieri, and he wrote, Jen, you probably have more on this, but it looks like the POTUS said he just found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it on the news.
And then Cheryl Mills emailed John Podesta saying, quote, we need to clean this up.
He has emails from her.
They do not say state.gov.
So what did Obama do?
Well, he had his email communications with Hillary Clinton sealed.
So he used the dubious presidential records privilege according to McCarthy.
The White House insisted that it had nothing to do with the content of the emails.
It was just to vindicate the principle of confidentiality, right?
They just wanted to keep things confidential for no reason.
For no reason, but it's important to keep things confidential.
That, of course, was nonsense.
They're trying to protect Obama from the implication that he knew that Hillary was misusing classified information.
And then, of course, eventually the FBI let Hillary Clinton off, that Clinton had not intended to harm national security.
In August 2017, a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray from Senator Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham said, quote, according to unredacted portions of the transcripts, it appears that in April or early May of 2016, Mr. Comey had already decided he would issue a statement exonerating Secretary Clinton.
This was long before the FBI agents finished their work.
Mr. Comey even circulated an early draft statement to select members of senior FBI leadership.
The outcome of an investigation should not be prejudged while FBI agents are still hard at work trying to gather the facts.
And then, of course, a few weeks after all of that went down, Bill Clinton met with Loretta Lynch on a tarmac in Phoenix, Arizona for a private meeting.
McCarthy writes, quote, on July 1st, amid intense public criticism of her meeting with Bill Clinton, Attorney General Lynch piously announced she would accept whatever recommendations the FBI director and career prosecutors made about charging Clinton.
But of course she already knew at this time that the FBI was going to let all of this go.
Lisa Page, who is the paramour working at the FBI of Peter Strzok, also at the FBI and working on the Hillary investigation, texted Strzok, quote, this is a purposeful leak following the airplane snafu since Lynch already knows that no charges will be brought.
Finally, on July 5th, Comey held the press conference that started with him saying, quote, I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government.
They do not know what I am about to say.
That line from Comey was added after Lynch and Clinton met on the tarmac, and Strzok acknowledged this in a text-to-page on July 1st.
Lynch, timing not great, but whatever.
Wonder if that's why the coordination language added.
So in other words, it was very obvious that the FBI and the DOJ were coordinating to let Hillary Clinton off the hook before she was even interviewed.
All of this is devastating to the credibility of the FBI.
So when you wonder why it seems that there are so many people on the right who are out over their skis with regard to the FBI's investigation into President Trump and Trump-Russia collusion, the answer is their credibility has already been called into serious question because Obama already politicized the FBI.
Once the FBI has been politicized, it is fair game to say, was it politicized in order to get President Trump?
Because maybe it wasn't just politicized in order to defend Hillary Clinton and President Obama.
Maybe it was politicized in order to target President Trump.
So, now we have this narrative that's been set in the minds of people on the right.
The FBI is corrupt.
It was out to get Trump, and that's why something evil and terrible is happening right here.
On the other side, you have a narrative that's already been set in their minds.
Hillary Clinton never, under any normal circumstances, could have lost to President Trump.
That means that President Trump only won because Hillary Clinton was shafted by the Russians.
Therefore, Trump-Russia collusion must be real, and the FBI must be absolutely pure in every possible way.
Bob Mueller, pure.
Lisa Page, and struck.
Well, you know, if not pure, then at least they're trying to do the right thing.
And so you have these counter narratives and they're both based on what people wish were happening as opposed to what is actually happening.
So in just a second, I'm going to talk about what is actually happening and President Trump and President Trump saying that now he wants to testify in front of Robert Mueller and why that is a terrible idea.
We'll get to all that in just a second.
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Okay, so back to the Mueller investigation.
So yesterday, President Trump was asked about testifying in front of Robert Mueller.
I'm never sure how to pronounce his name.
I believe it's Mueller.
The question has come up because Mueller apparently wants to interview Trump himself.
The reason he wants to interview Trump is not on Trump-Russia collusion.
This is where Trump has it wrong.
Trump thinks that Mueller wants to ask him, did you cooperate with the Russians?
And then Trump thinks, well I'll say no, and then everything will be hunky-dory.
That's not what Mueller wants at all.
In just the same way that the FBI did not actually want Flynn to testify about Trump-Russia collusion, they just wanted to catch Flynn in a perjury trap.
They just wanted to catch him in a lying-to-the-FBI trap, an obstruction trap.
That's what Mueller is doing now.
He's trying to set up a pattern, or at least he's trying to find a pattern, whereby President Trump was personally involved in attempting to stifle the investigation into Trump-Russia collusion, even if the collusion never took place.
So understand, an obstruction charge does not mean there was an underlying crime.
You could obstruct justice without an underlying crime actually taking place.
This is sort of what happened with Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton obstructed justice and was involved in perjury with regard to an affair that he had.
Not even with regard to an underlying crime like sexual harassment.
It was with regard to an affair.
He tried to obstruct justice and committed perjury and lied to the public about all of this.
That was good enough to get him impeached in the House.
Mueller is moving down the same path right now.
Regardless of Trump-Russia collusion, the idea is that Trump, whether he thinks he's innocent or not, it doesn't matter, if he is trying to pressure people into exonerating him without proper cause, and then he's firing people, the idea is that this is collusion.
I mean, that this is obstruction, rather.
Now, as I said yesterday, it's not actually legal obstruction.
Okay, legal obstruction is a very specific thing.
And we talked about all the statutes yesterday, so if you missed it, go back and listen to yesterday's show.
If you're talking about the generalized perception of obstruction, which could end in an impeachment charge by Democrats if they win back the House in 2018, that's what Mueller is setting up for, and that's why he wants to talk to Trump.
And that's why what Trump said yesterday is so foolish.
He was asked by the media, would you talk to Robert Mueller?
And here's what he had to say.
But I would love to do it.
Did you do it under oath, Mr. President?
Who said that?
I said that.
Did you do it under oath?
Oh, you said it.
You say a lot.
Did Hillary do it under oath?
I think you have an idea.
Don't you have an idea?
Wait, wait, wait.
Do you not have an idea?
Do you really not have an idea?
I'll give you an idea.
She didn't do it under oath.
But I would do it under oath.
Listen, but I would do it.
And you know she didn't do it under oath, right?
If you didn't do it, if you didn't know about Hillary...
Okay, so here's one of the problems for President Trump.
He's always trying to outdo Hillary Clinton.
So he says, well, yeah, she talked to the FBI, but she didn't do it under oath.
I'll do it under oath.
Okay, a couple of things here.
One, lying to the FBI is a crime whether you're under oath or not.
You don't actually have to be under oath.
If you lie to the FBI, this is now considered obstruction, and you can be charged.
This is what happened to Mike Flynn.
He was not under oath when he lied to the FBI.
They are charging him with obstruction of justice anyway, and he could do up to five years in a federal pen for that, right?
So Trump should not go in front of Mueller.
The reason you shouldn't go in front of Mueller is you may have noticed that our president is rather fond of mailing off.
He's rather fond of making grandiose claims.
He's rather fond of saying things that may not be wholly true.
Well, if you step off the beaten path with Robert Mueller, you are going to get smacked.
Bill Clinton is a lawyer, and a pretty smart lawyer at that.
Bill Clinton got caught in obstruction charges by Ken Starr.
And Bill Clinton was very careful.
I mean, Bill Clinton was so careful that in that testimony in front of a grand jury, he was asked whether he is having an affair with Monica Lewinsky, and he said it depends on what the definition of is is, right?
Because he was trying to parse is.
He was saying, right now, I am not, but maybe before I did.
This was made fun of, obviously, but that was good lawyering by Bill Clinton.
Didn't matter.
He still ended up in an obstruction of justice charge.
The same thing has basically, could happen here with President Trump.
No lawyer worth his salt will allow Trump to get in a room with Mueller.
Trump should not get into a room with Mueller.
And that is not a defense of Trump being innocent on any of this stuff.
That's just saying if I were Trump's lawyer, there is no way in hell I allow President Trump to be in a room with a lawyer or without a lawyer.
I say to Robert Mueller, you submit to us written questions, and then we'll answer your written questions as we see fit.
That's what Trump should be doing.
Now, is it good for Trump to say he's willing to meet and that his lawyers are just stopping him?
Probably.
I think that it's probably good for Trump to say that.
But if Trump is taking this seriously and he actually wants to meet with Mueller, that would be ridiculous.
That would be a mistake.
I mean, you can see how this would be a mistake.
So he was asked yesterday by the press if he had asked Andrew McCabe, then the deputy FBI director, he was at that point the interim acting FBI director.
He supposedly asked McCabe who he voted for.
And Trump says this in front of the media about McCabe and asking him who he voted for. - Did you ask McCabe who he voted for?
Did you ask him that?
I don't think so.
No.
You don't think you did?
No, I don't think I did.
You did not.
I don't know what's the big deal with that, because I would ask you, who did you vote for?
I don't think it's a big deal, but I don't remember that.
I saw that this morning.
I don't remember asking him that question.
Okay, I don't remember asking him that question, and no, I didn't are two different answers.
So you could actually be charged with obstruction, theoretically, if you said, no, I didn't ask him that question, and then Andrew McCabe said, yes, you absolutely did ask me that question, and then Trump says, well, I don't remember.
Right, the original answer can be used in an obstruction charge.
This is part of the problem.
Because Trump talks a lot, he can get himself in serious trouble with the lawyers very, very easily.
No lawyer, including Joe Pesci and my cousin Vinny with the full-on clown velvet suit, would allow President Trump to get in a room with Robert Mueller.
It would be the height of stupidity to do this.
Now, as I say, and I said yesterday, I think we are on the verge of what could be a constitutional crisis.
If Robert Mueller decides to not indict Trump, because he can't really indict Trump for obstruction of justice, but simply to say, I see a case for obstruction of justice here, it could lead to a serious crisis where the right says, listen, it's not obstruction, you can't be impeached on a non-crime, and the left says, All this stuff looks a lot like sort of commonplace obstruction, and there are no limits in the Constitution for what you can be impeached about.
And so you'll have the right defending bad behavior, and you'll have the left trying to condemn somebody or convict somebody based on non-criminal behavior.
Alan Dershowitz points this out yesterday.
Dershowitz is a more practiced lawyer than I am, but he and I come to the same conclusions on this one.
What do you think the investigation is now?
The investigative part, is it near the end?
Well, I worry that it's going toward obstruction of justice, and that would create a constitutional crisis.
The president were to be charged with obstruction for simply exercising his constitutional authority, firing Comey, telling Comey not to investigate Flint.
Those are all within the president's constitutional authority.
Okay, so Dershowitz is correct about this, and it could create a serious problem.
Now, with all of this floating around, as I say, there are two narratives that have been created.
Narrative number one, Mueller must get Trump because Trump is guilty of something, and if all he can get him on is obstruction of justice, then he is the righteous guy.
He's the knight in the shining armor on the white horse, riding in the deus ex machina, who's going to take Trump out of office.
This is the narrative from the left.
The narrative on the right is that the FBI and Mueller and all of them are corrupt, that they are thoroughly shot through with corruption, that they are all out to get President Trump.
Now, the leading edge of the spear here is, of course, Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
And he has come forward with this four-page memo that supposedly summarizes all of the problems with FISA warrants and an intel gathering in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.
The suggestion being that all of this investigation has been corrupt from the very beginning.
One of the suggestions in the document, presumably, is that the FISA warrant that was originally gathered on Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page was gathered based on the so-called Steele dossier, the Fusion GPS dossier that was funded by Democrats and may have been filled with Russian disinformation.
The idea is that Basically the DOJ and the FBI worked based on bad information to try and investigate Trump because the FBI is corrupt.
And this goes back to what I was saying earlier, the right believes that the FBI is corrupt and was corrupted by Obama because when it came to Hillary Clinton, they were.
So now Nunes is trying to put forth this memo.
And the DOJ is trying to get Nunes not to put forth the memo.
So what exactly is in the memo?
Well, we don't know yet until it's made public, but there's a problem.
The memo itself is a secondary concern.
It's written by a Republican.
The real question is, what is the underlying material undergirding the memo?
What is the classified material on which the memo is based?
And the DOJ is saying, and this is the stunning thing, the DOJ's Stephen Boyd sent a letter to Devin Nunes, and that letter says in it, that Devin Nunez has not even seen the classified documents to which he is referring in the memo.
So in other words, he's creating unverified conclusions and then putting them out there for public consumption.
Here's what the DOJ is saying, quote, The committee's memorandum contains highly classified material provided by the department to the committee in a secure facility.
We believe it would be extraordinarily reckless for the committee to disclose such information publicly without giving the department and the FBI the opportunity to review the memorandum and to advise the HPSCI of the risk of harm to national security.
for the committee to disclose such information publicly without giving the department and the FBI the opportunity to review the memorandum and to advise the HPSCI of the risk of harm to national security.
And this is the sentence that matters.
And this is the sentence that matters.
Indeed, we do not understand why the committee would possibly seek to disclose classified and law enforcement sensitive information without first consulting the relevant members of the intelligence community.
Seeking committee approval of public release would require that HPSCI committee members to vote on a staff-drafted memorandum that purports to be based on classified source materials that neither you nor most of them have ever seen.
You understand that last part of that sentence?
The last part is the DOJ saying, you're writing a memo suggesting that FISA warrants are bad.
You're writing a memo suggesting the intel community is doing all these things wrong.
You haven't even seen the underlying document.
Which suggests that maybe, if that's true, that means that Republicans are basically slandering the FBI in an attempt to defend President Trump because they think that the FBI is corrupt and they're looking for evidence to back that contention.
So what we have from the right is the allegation that the FBI is filled with corruption from top to bottom, and what we have from the left is the contention that the Republicans are basically making this up in order to defend President Trump.
And on that line you have Dianne Feinstein, the senator from California, and Adam Schiff, who are putting together an alternative memo, an alternative memo that supposedly says the investigation is doing just fine, that everything is just great.
Now, the Republicans did themselves some real damage here.
And I'll explain why they did themselves some real damage to their narrative in just a second.
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Okay, so back to our story.
The Republicans are trying to make the case that the FBI is corrupt.
And one of the ways they're making the case that the FBI is corrupt is they are saying the FBI deleted a bunch of text messages between Peter Strzok, this guy who's involved in exonerating Hillary Clinton, and Lisa Page, his paramorable.
Both Page and Strzok were married at the time, so these are just classy people all the way through.
In any case, they were sending texts to each other.
Thousands of text messages to each other.
Something like 50,000 text messages they sent to each other over the course of the last year.
Which is just insane, by the way.
I'm not sure I've ever sent 50,000 text messages to anyone.
in my entire life.
So these people were addicted to text messages.
And then, of course, it turns out that a lot of the text messages went missing.
And that batch of text messages that went missing included, apparently, some text messages from Struck to Page and Page to Struck that were deleted between December 2016 and May of 2017, which is a very crucial period in the life of the Trump-Russia probe and investigation.
It involves the firing of Mike Flynn and the firing of James Comey and the investigation of Mike Flynn, right?
That's a crucial period where you'd really want those text messages.
So people on the right immediately jump to, this is some sort of evil conspiracy.
Why are only those text messages missing?
Well, it turns out there was a major glitch that affected virtually all FBI phones.
So the original reports that it was a glitch that affected just these specific emails was not really true.
In any case, they should be able to recover those.
They're working on recovering those now.
So before we jump to conspiracy inside the FBI to get rid of all the crucial text messages, we should wait to see if they can recover them.
Then, there is one thing that I just, I can't believe Republicans did this because it's intensely stupid.
And what this was, is that Republicans decided that they were going to make a big deal out of the secret society text.
So what was the secret society text?
We talked about it a little bit yesterday.
This was the allegation by Ron Johnson, Senator from Wisconsin, that there was a text message from Strzok to Page, or Page to Strzok, talking about a secret society within the FBI.
A secret society within the FBI that was going to take down Trump.
And we'd already had a message from Strzok to Page talking about an insurance policy against Trump becoming president.
That one's actually suspicious.
But the Secret Society, this line was repeated all over Fox News, it was repeated all over conservative talk radio.
The creation of a secret, nefarious society.
And the way that Republicans saw the Secret Society was like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
They thought that they were meeting down in some deep, dank cave and people were ripping people's hearts out.
Basically, when Peter Strzok and Lisa Page talked Secret Society at the FBI, it looked something like this.
Oh, no! no!
And that's what was happening at the Secret Society, right?
Was Kali Ma, was happening at the Secret Society.
Now, what it turns out is that the Secret Society really wasn't that.
It looked a little bit more like this in reality.
That was The Secret Society.
It was actually Revenge of the Nerds.
It was not, in fact, Kali Ma.
It was just Revenge of the Nerds.
Also, that guy can't play violin.
That is a very poor imitation of someone playing violin.
In any case, it turns out the Secret Society texts were a bunch of nothing.
And Republicans made themselves look really foolish here.
Trey Gowdy, who's a very good congressman, Republican from South Carolina, here's what he had to say about the Secret Society texts yesterday.
It's right after they're lamenting the fact that Trump won North Carolina and that he won Florida and they're really disappointed in the way the election turned out and then about an inch down from that is a conversation about perhaps this is Should be the first meeting of the secret society and then about two texts down they say let's talk about it with Andy.
I don't know if that's Andy McCabe and I'm not going to allege that it is, but it's eerily similar to what they said about the insurance policy.
By saying it right now you kind of are.
You're throwing it out into the ether.
Okay, so it's all about the Secret Society.
The Secret Society is something that we really have to be worried about.
Ooh, the Secret Society.
Well, unfortunately, we now have the actual text of the Secret Society text.
Okay, here's what it says.
Are you even going to give out your calendars?
Page wrote to Strzok in a text obtained by ABC.
Seems kind of depressing.
Maybe it should just be the first meeting of the Secret Society.
That's a joke, folks.
I text with my friends all the time and we talk about meeting of the protocols of the elders of Zion at our local synagogue.
Making fun of the idea.
The secret society is not an actual secret society.
They're not getting together to defeat President Trump.
Now that doesn't mean that there wasn't nefarious activity inside the FBI.
But when you go out on a limb, by using the phrase secret society over and over and over, and it turns out that it was likely a joke, you just make yourself look stupid.
You just make yourself look bad.
Speaking of looking bad, Representative Matt Gaetz is an American attorney and politician who's been the U.S.
Representative for Florida's first congressional district since 2017, according to Dr. Wikipedia.
And he was on with Chris Cuomo last night on CNN trying to make the case that there's corruption in the FBI.
Guys, if you're going to make the case that there's corruption in the FBI, please do a better job than this.
This is clip 14.
Because when you're making Chris Cuomo look good, you're doing something deeply wrong.
Here it is.
You say that this is the biggest coincidence since the immaculate conception.
What are you talking about?
The immaculate conception is not how Jesus was born.
It was the conception that's the nature of the immaculate conception.
No, it wasn't.
It was Mary's conception.
It was the mother's conception without original sin.
It was not the conception of Jesus.
Facts matter, Congressman.
If you're gonna make an analogy, at least know what you're talking about, because you gotta have a basis for these things.
You only know what you show.
You gotta release that memo, it's gotta have the facts, and you better figure out what this secret society is before you say that there's a shadow organization within the FBI.
Chris Cuomo may be thick as a block of wood, but at least he knows his Catholic catechism from Sunday school.
The bottom line is this.
If you're going to make serious allegations, then you should be able to support them, or wait for the evidence to come out.
So here's my suggestion on all of this.
Let's just wait for all the evidence to come out.
Is that so tough?
Could we do that?
How about just, like, wait for some evidence?
I know, I know.
I know we want to jump to conclusions, and we want to determine that the FBI was out to get Trump, or we want to determine that the FBI is completely clean and the Republicans are out to slander the FBI.
Don't worry.
We're going to find out what the story is.
Either there's going to be something here, or there's not going to be something here.
Either it's going to turn out that there was, in fact, a FISA application put on based on bad sources, or it's not.
And by the way, President Trump should release that FISA application.
I want all of this stuff released as soon as possible.
More public light is necessary now.
We need to see all of this material.
It is imperative that we see as much of this material as possible.
If we do not see this material, then the trust in our institutions is going to continue to decline in rather marked ways.
Which is going to be a continuing disturbing thing.
So please, how about we just wait for the evidence to come out?
Because it turns out a lot of propositions can be true at once.
It can be true that there are corrupt people inside the FBI, but that the FBI investigation may not be fully corrupted.
It can be true that there's no Trump-Russia collusion, but that obstruction took place.
Or that obstruction didn't take place, but Trump acted in ways that were bad.
It can be true that Hillary Clinton was exonerated by the FBI in corrupt fashion, but that the investigation into Trump is still legitimate.
Or it could be true vice versa.
We don't know.
We don't know.
We just don't know.
Okay?
And until we know, I'm going to hold off on saying that we know.
I'm not going to jump into this is worse than Watergate until we know whether it's worse than Watergate.
I'm not going to suggest that missing text messages, which may be recovered, are worse than 18 minutes of tape that are missing in the Watergate tapes, because I don't know.
You don't know.
Anyone who's telling you they know is lying to you.
No one knows anything at this point, which is why I'm trying to bring you all the news and sift through it and bring you what I think is actually happening.
And where I think this is going.
In the end, I'm not sure any of this goes anywhere.
It seems like much ado about nothing to me on all sides.
The FBI probably is not thoroughly corrupt.
Trump probably did not collude with Russia.
There probably was no obstruction of justice and this is all a giant waste of time and energy.
If so, we have a reason to be pissed, but that's a different reason to be pissed than everybody is pissed off right now.
So in just a second, I'm going to discuss whether President Trump has betrayed conservatives on immigration because there are some folks saying he has done so.
I'm going to defend President Trump from those charges because I don't think that's exactly correct.
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All righty, so another big news.
There are a lot of people who are very hot and bothered about President Trump's statements on immigration.
So let's talk about what President Trump had to say about immigration.
I'm going to play you the clip of Trump talking to the press about an immigration deal that he thinks he's going to make with Democrats.
This is clip 15.
Trump talking about immigration with the press yesterday.
We want great border security.
We want to do a great job with DACA.
I think it's our issue.
I think it's a better issue for the Republicans and for the Democrats.
Do you want citizenship for DREAMers?
We're going to morph into it.
It's going to happen at some point in the future.
What does that mean?
Over a period of 10 to 12 years, somebody does a great job.
They've worked hard.
It gives incentive to do a great job, but they've worked hard.
They've done terrifically, whether they have a little company or whether they work or whatever they're doing, if they do a great job, I think it's a nice thing to have the incentive of, after a period of years, being able to become a citizen.
The Press: How many years, Mr. President?
We're looking at 10 or 12.
The Press: 10 or 12 years?
The Press: If there's no grant by March 5th, are you going to protect them?
Are you going to extend the deadline?
The President: Yeah, I might do that.
I might do that.
I'm not guaranteeing it because I don't want to do -- you know, I want to put a little bit of a -- but I certainly have the right to do that if I want.
The Press: What do you mean, Chain migration, we're gonna create a standard that's a good standard so that not everybody can, you know, not everybody that you ever met can come into the country.
Okay, so people are super, super angry.
How dare Trump say all of this?
This is obviously Trump going back on his campaign promises.
Now, lest you forget, Trump made a lot of promises during the campaign.
And a lot of those promises conflicted with one another.
We're going to take care of everybody.
It'll be an act of, I mean, he said a week ago, we're going to have a bill of love.
Trump says lots of stuff all the time.
But the truth is, These dreamers are not going anywhere.
Let's be frank about this.
They're not going to be mass deported.
The idea that Trump was saying that during the campaign was always asinine.
People who believed that Trump was going to mass deport 800,000 people who were brought in here as children are fooling themselves.
It was never going to happen, and anyone who believed that was getting bamboozled.
As I was saying consistently during the campaign, because it wasn't true.
Trump was never going to throw all these people out.
He's not going to throw their parents out.
He's not going to deport 8 million illegal immigrants, as much as Ann Coulter would have wanted it.
It was never going to happen.
Breitbart, to its credit I will suggest, actually came out against Trump yesterday.
Because now that Bannon isn't there, I guess they don't have to lick Trump all the time.
So now they actually came out with a headline.
Here's what the headline said at Breitbart.
And, of course, these were his biggest sycophants, right?
They say, Immigration shock.
Amnesty Don suggests citizenship for illegal aliens.
So they're saying, Amnesty Don now.
Now, is Trump really talking about an amnesty?
Well, he is talking about an amnesty in the sense that these people will get citizenship after 10 to 12 years, but again, That's the direction this was going to move anyway.
So the real question is, what does he get in return for that?
It was a foregone conclusion that these people were not going to be deported.
And when Trump says that he may reinstate DACA in March, what he's really saying is, I may just leave them here regardless of whether we come to any agreement.
What he's pushing for is what he's already said he's pushing for.
OK, what he is actually pushing for Is an end to chain migration, except for parents who may or may not receive citizenship, according to Trump, we have no idea.
$25 billion for building the border wall, for 800 miles of the border wall, so not an entire border wall along 2,000 miles or anything like that, but $25 billion for building the border wall, and an end to the diversity visa lottery.
I thought that this was pretty much the deal that a lot of conservatives wanted.
And now he's being accused of a great betrayal on all of this because he's talking citizenship after 10-12 years for illegal immigrant children.
Now the parents should not get citizenship.
If they do get citizenship, it should be done based on a need basis.
My view on the Dreamers, by the way, is the same as with their parents.
We get to determine who enters the country and who does not.
Practically speaking, nobody's going to deport these kids or these young adults now.
It's not going to happen.
So they were always going to get citizenship.
Trump was always going to do it.
I'm sorry to break it to you, Anne.
That's just the way it was going to go.
All of that said, if Trump can get in return for that, an end to chain migration, money for the border wall, an end to the diversity visa lottery, those are pretty substantial steps in the right direction.
Those are pretty good steps.
In the right direction.
So this isn't really a bad deal unless Trump gives full amnesty to parents who have actually illegally crossed the border on a blanket basis, because then you're not talking about just the kids, you're talking about all of their parents and all of their relatives and all the rest of it.
That's something that we obviously need to prevent.
If you came across the border illegally, you should not be getting citizenship.
If you do get citizenship, it should be because you went to the back of the line and you waited just like everybody else, and we evaluated you using the same standards we would for legal immigrants.
But this idea that Trump has somehow betrayed the trust of his base, I don't really see that too much.
Now Trump did make a boo-boo in this interview.
You heard him at the very end say that he may reinstate DACA.
You heard him say that.
He said at one point that he may actually just leave people here.
He may reinstitute President Obama's executive amnesty.
That's a bad negotiation tactic.
Dirty little secret about Trump.
He's crappy at negotiation.
For all the talk about how great he is about dealmaking, he's not a great dealmaker.
The last time he tried to make a deal, he caved directly to Schumer and Pelosi and left Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell with their pants around their feet.
The fact is that he's not good at negotiation.
His opening bargain is basically, what do you want?
Maybe I can give it to you.
It's not a really good open negotiating stance.
He needs to pretend, at the very least, that he's going to deport a lot of people in order to force Democrats to the table.
Democrats feel no need to come to the table.
Instead, they believe that they can simply pillory Trump, and two things will happen.
Either Trump will listen to them, in which case they'll get what they want, or Trump won't listen to them, in which case they can continue to pillory him.
This is what Chuck Schumer was doing yesterday.
Here's the Senate Minority Leader suggesting that the Tea Party and Donald Trump, by extension, are just horribly anti-immigrant.
Well, first, the hard right has always opposed immigration.
Donald Trump ran on an anti-immigration platform.
The Tea Party's one of their fundamental values is anti-immigrant, which is horrible, disgusting, but that's who they are.
Okay, this is nonsense.
The Tea Party's value is not anti-immigrant.
The Tea Party was about government spending.
I'm not anti-immigrant.
I'm libertarian on immigration, actually, if there's no welfare state and if we're not talking about people voting.
The fact is that there's a wide variety of opinion within the Republican Party about immigration.
But the Democrats want to pillory Trump as such.
Trump's done a good job, I think, of avoiding that.
But when he says that there's no stick, right, I'm just going to reinstate DACA if Democrats don't do anything, Democrats win either way.
Either Trump doesn't reinstate DACA, in which case they get videos of him deporting people, or Trump does reinstate DACA, in which case they say, we got Trump to surrender without him gaining anything in the bargain.
Now that said, it is pretty obvious Democrats don't want to solve the problem and DREAMers are beginning to wake up to this.
A lot of illegal immigrant children are beginning to wake up to the fact that Democrats aren't actually interested in helping them here, they just want a posture on it.
Here's an angry DREAMer to Democrats saying, listen, we've been waiting for 17 years.
Why are you making us wait longer than this?
When there's a Republican president, a Republican Senate, a Republican House that are quite recalcitrant against DREAMers, you're not going to get it all at once.
For DACA recipients, the uncertainty is unsettling.
We've waited 17 years already.
We shouldn't be waiting any longer.
Okay, so they are getting pressure from their left.
I'm not sure it's enough for them to overcome the left's joy when Trump loses.
This is the nice thing about being on the left.
If you can do something that hurts Trump, then your base will forgive you for doing something that also hurts them.
This is a sad truth of politics.
Hurting your enemy is sometimes more important than pleasing your base with policies they actually like.
If we all worried about pleasing our base with policies that we actually like, we might actually get somewhere.
But politics is, unfortunately, a binary system.
If Chuck Schumer can slap Trump across the head, enough of his base will be happy for that.
They'll ignore the fact that the Dreamers will still end up in limbo.
Okay, one other quick note that I want to make.
So, Caitlin Collins is a commentator on CNN.
And Jake Tapper played an element from his show The Lead, in which Caitlin Collins suggests that men at work should never be dating women at work.
What I've said all along is that the left has no consistent standard as to what is appropriate in male-female relationships, and so now they're trying to backtrack and create this rather repressive and Victorian new standard as to how dating is supposed to go.
Here's Caitlin Collins doing that yesterday and being cheered for her trouble.
Why releasing this letter clears things up?
It doesn't.
It actually makes them worse.
It makes them look even more embarrassing and creepy and whatever.
And let this just be a message to all of the grown men out there that the younger women who work for you do not want to date you.
They do not want to be your soulmate.
They do not want to go to ice cream with you.
They do not want to be your partner.
And when they start dating someone else, you cannot get angry with them for that and try to pay them money to cover it up.
That is just a lesson.
I should not have to say that to people.
I'm a 25-year-old woman.
I shouldn't have to say that to anyone, that when a woman goes to work, they don't want to date their boss.
Okay, so let me be clear about this.
This is true for the vast majority of women who go to work.
It is not nearly true for all women who go to work.
The idea that women don't date their bosses at work is belied by most of human history.
If it were not for bosses marrying their secretaries in the 1950s, an entire generation of people would not exist.
How many people in this audience have met their wives at work?
How many men were in a position of superiority, in terms of the hierarchy at a company, over the people that they eventually married?
A lot.
Okay, just because a hierarchy exists doesn't mean that the woman is being forced to date the guy.
What we want to avoid is the man using pressure to date a woman.
But the idea that every woman may never be asked out on a date by her boss, that of course is asinine.
And to this effect, I will bring to your attention one Jimmy A. Kimmel.
I don't actually know his middle initial.
I will bring to your attention one Jimmy Kimmel.
Okay, Jimmy Kimmel is currently married to a woman named Molly McNearney.
Okay, Jimmy Kimmel was her boss.
She started on his show 10 years ago as a writer's assistant and rose through the ranks, and Jimmy eventually started dating her.
Right?
Eventually they started dating, and then they got married, and now they have a kid together.
She says, when I first met him, he insulted me.
The executive producer brought me into his office and said, this is Molly, she's my new assistant.
Jimmy barely looked up from his desk until my EP said she competes in triathlons.
And then Jimmy looked up at me and said, that is really stupid.
What a waste of time.
That was probably the first and only thing he said to me the entire first year of working there.
And then Glamour Magazine asks Jimmy Kimmel's wife, did you have any inclination early on this was a guy you'd eventually marry?
And Molly says, Jimmy gets a little insulted when I say this, but I never once thought of him that way or looked at him in that way.
I really didn't.
I had worked for him so long, and I was in a relationship, and he was in a relationship, so it never occurred to me.
And that's Workplace 101.
You don't date your boss.
Except for how she married him.
And it says, when did things turn romantic?
Four years ago.
All the writers would socialize after the show, and we'd just hang out more and more.
We really liked each other as friends, and then it kind of turned.
He cooked for me, and that was it.
It sealed the deal.
And she says, at one of our writers' meetings, because Jimmy is always thinking about food, he asked us what our five favorite foods were.
I listed mine, which were pizza, gnocchi pasta, a BLT, crab claws, and a cheeseburger.
Shortly after, he had invited me to his house, and I was very nervous.
I mean, this is my boss.
I was thinking, I gotta be careful here.
He opens the door, and the whole house smelled delicious.
I walked in and there was a pizza, a BLT, crab claws, cheeseburger, and gnocchi.
He had made them all from scratch.
I couldn't believe it, and I realized how incredibly thoughtful and generous he really was.
So, let me say something here.
If Jimmy Kimmel had invited this woman over, and she had not been into it, and had not wanted to marry him, the entire Me Too movement would be claiming that Jimmy Kimmel was responsible for sexual harassment and abuse of power.
She went there and married him, so now this is a great romantic story that gets retold in Glamour magazine.
My suggestion here is that there is no rational standard that is being held to.
It is not the end of the world if a boss invites a subordinate to a date.
It is the end of the world if the boss offers consequences for the subordinate not taking him up on the date.
Right?
It is exploitation if it's exploitation.
But it is not inherently exploitation for a boss to be asking a woman on a date.
And it just demonstrates that when you have a lack of moral foundation, you end up creating this bizarre set of rules that is more Victorian than I am.
It's nearly impossible to be more Victorian than I am on sex.
Yet somehow the left has accomplished this magnificent feat.
So that is where we are now.
Well, tomorrow I'll have a lot more to talk about.
Burger King has now joined the left-wing resistance and is actually putting out ads against net neutrality.
We'll talk about that tomorrow.
Plus, I have some thoughts on the Larry Nassar trial, but we will have to get to that tomorrow, so stick around for that.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
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