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Feb. 1, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

53:19

Memo Fight 2018! | Ep. 466

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	Memo Fight 2018.
	The Republicans take on the FBI in the Royal Rumble.
	Plus, Mika Brzezinski throws Michael Wolff off the set of Morning Joe.
	And Republicans should read books, and I will show you an example why.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	We'll bring you the latest on MemoGate 2018.
	MemoFight.
	It's the most exciting rumble in the history of American politics.
	Everybody's going to just show up from the side of the stage and just club each other with reams of paper.
	It'll be so exciting.
	Devin Nunes versus Adam Schiff.
	Face-off!
	Nancy Pelosi versus Paul Ryan.
	Pounding to the mat.
	It's going to be incredible.
	We'll discuss all of those things first.
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	Okay, so, again, MemoGate!
	I'm just excited to say MemoFight and MemoGate, and it's all so exciting.
	In truth, none of it is all that exciting.
	I'm going to try and break down what's happening here, because if it seems like all is chaos and confusion, if it feels like the Ouroboros of confusion and chaos has taken over your life—I've been hanging out with Jordan Peterson too much—then you need to We're going to try and break down and separate out all of the various strands of what's going on in the FBI scandal, and who's to blame, and who is lying.
	Okay, so first, let's begin with this.
	The FBI is basically asking you to trust them.
	And the Republicans are asking you to trust them.
	And the Democrats are asking you to trust the FBI.
	And President Trump is asking you to trust the Republicans.
	And you don't know who to trust, because the truth is, we don't have all the information.
	What we do know is a couple of things.
	There are a few different strains here.
	Strain number one, the FBI, in all likelihood, acted corruptly in allowing Hillary Clinton to get away with storing classified information on a private, unsecured email server.
	OK, that was FBI malfeasance and it was probably planned by the Obama administration in coordination with the DOJ and the FBI.
	There's pretty solid evidence to that effect.
	I talked about it a few days ago on the show.
	If you go back about a week and listen to my show in which I discuss Andrew McCarthy's piece over at National Review laying out the case that there was essentially coordination between the Obama team in the White House and the FBI to let Hillary Clinton off the hook specifically because Hillary was illegally storing classified information on her server and using a private email address And Obama was emailing her at that email address, meaning he knew that she was using a private email address for classified material, which was not in fact legal.
	That piece by McCarthy is pretty damning and pretty telling about what the FBI was doing.
	And now we know, according to The Wall Street Journal, this is breaking news yesterday, top FBI officials were aware for at least a month before alerting Congress that emails potentially related to an investigation of Hillary Clinton had emerged during a key stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, according to text messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
	So, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had learned about the thousands of emails by September 28, 2016.
	Director James Comey informed Congress on October 28, 11 days before the presidential elections.
	But Mr. Comey said nothing.
	Comey later said nothing about how early he had known about those emails.
	So, he went a month without hearing about those things.
	So, Democrats are complaining that Comey sandbagged Hillary Clinton.
	In all likelihood, what happened here is that Comey felt it was necessary because they'd actually gone through, they'd reviewed a lot of these emails, and they were seeing some stuff they didn't like.
	But that took them a month to announce to Congress.
	So, when people talk about corruption inside the FBI, when they talk about the gaming of the FBI by the Obama administration, there's some pretty good evidence for that.
	And so, it's hard to trust the FBI when the FBI says, don't release this four-page memo about Trump-Russia collusion.
	Now, Devin Nunes, the House Intelligence Committee, He's put together a four-page memo, this much-valleyhood memo, from the House Intelligence Committee that details intelligence malfeasance not just in the Hillary Clinton investigation, but also supposedly in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.
	And this has been seen now by a lot of conservatives as sort of the last great hope to save Trump from the Mueller investigation.
	This, I think, is an oversell.
	We know that the FBI was acting in bad faith on Hillary Clinton.
	We don't know that the FBI was acting in bad faith on the Trump-Russia collusion stuff.
	And one of the weird things about this whole memo routine, as I've said, is Trump can declassify all of the underlying materials that the memo supposedly contemplates.
	He can do that right now, but he hasn't.
	Instead, he's allowing the Republicans to charge around with this four-page memo, talking about how this memo is the smoking gun that shows that the investigation into Trump himself has been corrupted and ruined from the very outset.
	Well, the FBI has now responded to the House Intelligence Committee's vote to release the memo by expressing grave concern over the memo's accuracy.
	So, the FBI released a statement on Wednesday.
	They said they had, quote-unquote, grave concerns about the accuracy.
	of a top secret House Intelligence Committee memo alleging anti-Trump bias within the Justice Department, challenging President Trump's pledge to release it.
	But a few hours after the public rebuke by the top U.S.
	law enforcement agency, a Trump administration official said the memo was likely to be released today, on Thursday.
	The FBI said in a statement, quote, the FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it.
	As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy.
	So, the FBI released this statement.
	Presumably, you would figure Christopher Wray, Trump's own appointee at the FBI, had reviewed the statement before it went out.
	So, even he doesn't think this memo should be released, and it compromises national security.
	So, now the question is this.
	Do you believe the House committee?
	Do you believe the Republicans on the House committee who say, we need to get this information out there, the FBI acted correctly?
	Or do you believe the FBI, saying that it's dangerous to release this memo, and in fact, the memo skews the fact?
	Which one do you believe?
	Now, it's almost impossible to tell who to believe because we haven't seen the memo.
	We haven't actually seen the underlying memo, and more than that, we haven't seen any of the underlying materials in the memo.
	So we're fighting, everyone's fighting right now over a memo that none of us have seen.
	We've heard second-hand accounts.
	So this is basically an argument from authority on all sides.
	It's the worst kind of argument.
	The worst kind of argument is the argument from authority, the one that says, you know, Dr. So-and-so said X, therefore X is true.
	No, that's not a convincing argument.
	Devin Nunes said X, therefore X is true is no more convincing argument than Adam Schiff said X, therefore X is true, or Trump said X, therefore X is true, or the FBI said X, therefore X is true.
	If you don't know what X is, it's impossible for you to independently judge whether X is true or not.
	And I don't trust any of these people enough to know whether I believe their account of what's actually in the memo or what happened on Trump-Russia collusion or any of the rest of it.
	My own personal supposition is that the memo's materials about Hillary Clinton are probably pretty damning.
	The memo's materials about the Trump campaign and FBI investigation into the Trump campaign would probably be less so.
	The allegation, presumably Nunes sort of, Nunes said this yesterday, The allegation is that the FBI utilized the Steele dossier, which was the OPPO research dossier gathered by Fusion GPS, a Democratic OPPO intelligence firm, at the behest of Hillary Clinton, that the FBI got a hold of that OPPO research file and used it to open a FISA warrant on Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy advisor, and that's what launched the entire Trump-Russia collusion probe.
	And so Republicans are saying that's corrupt.
	You used Democratic research, basically funneled by Russia, to open the Trump-Russia probe in the first place.
	But I'm not sure that there's a huge case for that.
	I would probably think that they based their original FISA application on more than just the dossier.
	If they based it on just the dossier, that's a problem.
	But even then, there was a FISA warrant out for Carter Page tapping his phone since 2014.
	So Carter Page has been on the FBI's radar long before President Trump was an issue and long before he was on Trump's campaign.
	So, in any case, just because the FBI did stuff wrong in the Clinton investigation doesn't necessarily mean they did anything wrong in the Trump-Russia investigation.
	And Republicans, by tying the two together, by suggesting the FBI screwed up the Clinton investigation, therefore they're out to get Trump?
	Saying that is a jump.
	It's a logical leap.
	And it makes Republicans look like they're actually trying to take down the FBI in order to protect Trump, as opposed to looking at the facts on the ground.
	Now, Democrats, on the other hand, have been saying that the FBI is clean all the way through.
	So they look like partisan hacks as well.
	So the Republicans look like partisan hacks by tying together what we know about FBI malfeasance on Hillary and what we don't know about FBI malfeasance on Trump.
	And the Democrats look like hacks by saying the FBI is clean and pure as the driven snow and has been all along.
	So, again, this leaves us with the who-do-you-trust scenario.
	Now, the Trump administration is now telling Major Garrett over at CBS News that the memo is not going to be approved today, that it will instead be sent back to House Intelligence Committee tomorrow with redactions from the White House based on internal consultations with the FBI and other agencies.
	So the FBI gave advice, and the Trump administration will take that advice and strike out some of the language.
	And then the White House will not release the memo, but send it back to the committee for it to release on its own timetable, meaning that they would vote again to release the memo and then Trump wouldn't say anything.
	And then after five days, it would come out, which means that we drag this into next week.
	I'll explain what that means politically.
	And I will also go through the battle that has ensued over the memo in just a second.
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	Okay, so.
	Let's get back to Memo Fight 2018.
	I'm going to use this voice all day long.
	Memo Fight 2018.
	So now we know, according to Major Garrett, that the White House will not, in fact, release the memo today.
	The memo will be released presumably next week.
	Then next week, we'll find out what exactly is in the memo.
	And as I say, I think that it's overblown on pretty much every side, but you can see the two sides battling it out.
	So Representative Mark Meadows, member of the Freedom Caucus, representative from, I believe, North Carolina, he comes out, he says, Devin Nunes, who is the head of the House Intelligence Committee, he has a duty to inform Congress about abuses, and that's why the memo was written.
	Chairman Nunes has an obligation, an obligation to inform Congress when there has been FISA abuses.
	And so all he's doing is following on his constitutional duty to let us know about that.
	Okay, so that is the Republican attempt to justify the memo.
	And then the Democrats say, don't release the memo.
	Now, when the Democrats say don't release the memo, it makes Republicans, who have become somewhat conspiratorial on this, think, well, there must be something in it they don't want seen.
	Why wouldn't they want to release the memo?
	We're not going to take Democrats in good faith when Democrats say we want to protect the intelligence community.
	There is a certain irony to the Democrats yelling and screaming about protecting the FBI when they spent years under Bush ripping the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community up and down all the time, all over.
	Suddenly, the FBI are their best friends.
	But this is the attack the Democrats are going to take.
	Joe Manchin, Democrat from West Virginia, Senator, he says don't release the memo.
	Would you say that the President is wrong to release that memo?
	I would definitely say, Mr. President, please don't do that.
	That is wrong.
	It is absolutely wrong.
	First of all, he won't even reveal his sources.
	Devin Nunes, okay?
	This is a man that was sanctioned by his own committee members that he couldn't be on the Russian probe.
	This is a person who basically kind of shoots from the hip.
	And I said, Nunes has neutered the credibility of this Intelligence Committee on the House.
	The Senate Intelligence Committee is the only thing that we have left that can put confidence into the system and also into the investigation.
	Nunes, to recall, Nunes back in April went and visited the White House, and there he saw documents that he said suggested that members of the Obama administration had unmasked members of the Trump administration in FISA warrant situations.
	So, unmasking is a process whereby when officials first get reads on wiretaps that are between foreign agents, foreign people who are wiretapping American citizens, the names of the American citizens are hidden to protect their privacy.
	The members of the administration can ask for those names to be unmasked.
	Susan Rice presumably did that with Mike Flynn, the former national security advisor, when he was talking with members of the Russian government or members of the Turkish government.
	And Devin Nunes said that this was a misuse of her authority.
	And then he was sort of forced to recuse himself.
	He didn't technically recuse himself, but he sort of recused himself from the Russia investigation.
	But he maintained that he was going to continue looking into FBI malfeasance with regard to, for example, obstruction of justice, as well as the Hillary investigation.
	So all this gets rather complicated.
	But suffice it to say that Nunes is a controversial character and Democrats are seizing on that.
	Adam Schiff, Democrat from California, he's been leading the charge every day that Trump-Russia collusion is real.
	He goes on CNN routinely.
	It's like he has an office staked out there at CNN.
	He has his own green room just labeled with his name, Adam Schiff.
	And he has been saying every day Trump-Russia collusion is real.
	Now he says that to release this memo would smear the FBI.
	Sadly, we can fully expect that the President of the United States will not put the national interest over his own personal interest.
	But it is a sad day indeed when that is also true of our own committee, because today this committee voted to put the President's personal interest, perhaps their own political interest, above the national interest in denying themselves even the ability to hear from the Department and the FBI.
	And that is, I think, a deeply regrettable state of affairs.
	But it does show how, in my view, when you have a deeply flawed person in the Oval Office, that flaw can infect the whole of government, and today, tragically, it infected our committee.
	So Schiff is gifted at making it sound like partisan talking points are not in fact partisan talking points, but this is in fact a partisan talking point.
	We don't know whether the memo smears the FBI because we haven't seen the memo, and we don't know whether the FBI is defending itself by trying to keep the memo hidden.
	We just don't know.
	Democrats, of course, are suggesting that the only reason the Republicans want to release the memo is to kill the Mueller investigation.
	Now, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has suggested that the memo is important because it reveals FBI abuses in the Hillary investigation, but this isn't necessarily an attempt to stop the Mueller investigation.
	And I think that's an important distinction.
	If Republicans were making that distinction day in and day out, they'd have a lot more credibility on this issue.
	They are not making that distinction.
	They are making it sound as though if the FBI did the wrong thing on Hillary Clinton, that means we have to stop the Mueller investigation.
	That makes it look like they are wielding their evidence of failure by the FBI in the Hillary investigation in order to protect Trump from his own collusion or from his own potential criminality.
	That's exactly what Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat, said about the Republican attempts to release this memo.
	But you're saying this morning that there is dangerous classified information that should not be released.
	Absolutely.
	And why are the Republicans going to release him?
	Because the president wants to pursue this idea that somehow the dossier was related, that the dossier is representative of why this whole investigation began.
	OK, so this is the Democratic take on all this.
	Now, the Democrats have been trying really hard to stop the memo from coming out.
	So last night, Adam Schiff came out and he said that the memo should not be released because the version of the memo that was approved by the House Intelligence Committee was not the version of the memo that was sent to the White House.
	He said that Devin Nunes actually changed the memo itself and then sent it to the White House.
	So he released a letter.
	And he tweeted out, breaking, So Trump is attempting to prevent the stalemate here by just sending the memo back to the House Intelligence Committee, essentially.
	the White House, change is not approved by the committee.
	White House therefore reviewing a document the committee has not approved for release.
	So Trump is attempting to prevent the stalemate here by just sending the memo back to the House Intelligence Committee, essentially.
	Nunes responded by slapping at Schiff and suggesting that instead, quote, and this is what Nunes says, his spokesperson, quote, in its increasingly strange attempt to thwart publication of the memo, the committee minority is now complaining about minor edits to the memo, including grammatical fixes and two edits requested by the FBI and by the minority themselves.
	And then they continued by suggesting, and so Schiff had said that Nunes made substantive changes, but Nunes' spokesperson says, quote, the vote to release the memo was absolutely procedurally sound and in accordance with House and committee rules to suggest otherwise is a bizarre distraction from the abuses detailed in the memo.
	So all of this, I understand, is really confusing.
	It's really confusing.
	But here's the bottom line.
	Republicans either want this memo out because they want to discredit the FBI with regard to the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton, or they want this memo out because they think it's going to end the Mueller investigation.
	If the latter, we must see evidence.
	If the latter, we must see evidence.
	Otherwise, it's just a cover-up attempt.
	Meanwhile, if the memo comes out and it does show evidence of these things, and Democrats were trying to cover up the memo, then that is, too, a partisan hack attempt to protect the FBI so that the FBI can continue its investigation into Trump.
	And if it turns out there's evidence of FBI malfeasance on Trump-Russia collusion, and the FBI was using national security as an excuse to shut down public knowledge of that fact, then that would demonstrate a certain level of corruption inside the FBI as well.
	So, bottom line is this.
	Either somebody's lying, or everybody's lying.
	There's no situation in which nobody is lying.
	Either the Republicans are lying when they say that the FBI has been compromised, and they are just trying to cover for Trump, or the Democrats are lying when they say the FBI is crystal clean, crystal clear, and therefore, any attempt to shut down any investigation is an attempt to protect Trump.
	So somebody is lying here.
	Or it's possible everybody's a little bit lying.
	It's possible that Republicans are telling the truth about the FBI and Hillary, but lying about the FBI and Trump-Russia.
	It's possible that Democrats are telling the truth about the FBI and Trump-Russia, but lying about the FBI and Hillary.
	It's possible that Trump doesn't know what's going on.
	It's possible Trump knows fully what's going on and thinks that this is going to be an excuse for him to fire the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein or to get rid of people inside the FBI who are involved in the Mueller investigation.
	We just don't know yet.
	So as I've been saying now for a couple of weeks, it is imperative that we sit and wait for the answer.
	This is not something where we can just jump to particular conclusions, especially not having seen the underlying documents and not having seen the underlying classified material.
	It does make me suspicious, by the way, that the White House is sending the memo back with FBI changes.
	And not just releasing it.
	That's suspicious simply because I think that what it looks like is the White House doesn't want to have its fingerprints on this thing.
	But the White House is going to have its fingerprints on this thing no matter what.
	The media, I think, are rightly going to assume that the Trump administration was coordinating with the Republican House Intelligence Committee in coming up with this memo.
	I'd be shocked if there was no coordination.
	Again, if you just reverse the situation, pretend that these were Democrats doing this, I'd be just as suspicious.
	So I'm trying to be a little bit objective here.
	If the Democrats—if Hillary Clinton were under investigation by the FBI for collusion with a foreign country or for obstruction of justice, and then the Democrats came up with a four-page memo suggesting that the intelligence community was responsible for—the deep state was out to get Hillary Clinton, I would think the same thing Democrats are thinking today.
	This smells.
	This smells.
	So, that means the burden on Republicans to come out with some actual evidence here is pretty high, particularly when you have all the Republicans rushing to the microphones to explain that this memo is going to change everything, that it's going to change everything.
	Well, in just a second, I'm going to explain a couple more scandals that are brewing.
	Yes, believe it or not, more scandals brewing, because it just never stops.
	It just doesn't stop.
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	OK, other scandals a-brewin'.
	So, one of the other scandals that broke late last night is that Mark Corallo, who is a former Trump legal spokesperson, is planning on telling Robert Mueller, according to the New York Times, about a previously undisclosed conference call, which led him to believe that Hope Hicks, who's a special aide to the President of the United States, was going to obstruct justice.
	Oh no.
	So here is what the New York Times says.
	Quote, Quote, Hicks said during the call that emails written by Donald Trump Jr.
	before the Trump Tower meeting, in which the younger Mr. Trump said he was eager to receive political dirt about Mrs. Clinton from the Russians, quote, will never get out.
	That left Mr. Corallo with concerns that Ms.
	Hicks could be contemplating obstructing justice, the people said.
	In a statement on Wednesday, a lawyer for Ms.
	Hicks strongly denied Mr. Corallo's allegations.
	So, she is denying.
	She is suggesting that this is untrue.
	Even if the allegation is true, that she said it would never get out, that's not an implication necessarily.
	I mean, this would be the legal defense by her lawyer.
	It's not necessarily meaning I'm going to destroy the documents.
	It just might be nobody's ever going to discover that these emails exist, right?
	How are they going to know?
	It was a closed loop.
	But with all of that said, they obviously did come out.
	And if it turns out that the Trump administration knew about the emails from Trump Jr.
	to a Russian-connected lawyer offering Russian help in the election, and that the Trump administration then was complicit in destroying materials, Then you do fall foul of obstruction laws.
	Obstruction actually requires destruction of documents under one of the statutory frameworks, and that means that if the Trump administration tried to destroy materials, that could very well be obstruction.
	Trump may not be complicit in that, but if Hope Hicks gets rolled up into that, then you could see Hope Hicks getting rolled up and Donald Trump Jr.
	getting rolled up.
	Things could get very ugly very quickly.
	In other words, if this story is true, Hope Hicks is denying it, so we'll see how that plays out.
	Meanwhile, there's another story coming out.
	I mean, so many leaks.
	A new report from CNN.
	Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was essentially asked if he was loyal to the president when the DOJ official visited the White House last month to seek assistance from the president.
	Rosenstein had gone there to ask if Trump could help him stave off document demands from House Intel Committee Chair Devin Nunes.
	First of all, I don't know why Rosenstein was asking that.
	Why not just hand the documents over to Nunes?
	But the president apparently, according to CNN, had other priorities ahead of a key appearance by Rosenstein on the Hill.
	Trump wanted to know where the special counsel's Russia investigation was heading.
	And he wanted to know whether Rosenstein was, quote-unquote, on my team.
	OK, so that's not a giant surprise.
	Presumably, he had asked James Comey if he was loyal to Trump.
	And of all of the things that Trump has said, this is the one that I find maybe least objectionable, just because, not to do a little bit of whataboutism, but here's some whataboutism.
	Eric Holder was the attorney general for Barack Obama and went around openly calling himself Barack Obama's wingman.
	So the idea that the FBI deputy director is somehow completely separate Sorry, not Deputy Director for the FBI, but that the DOJ Assistant Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, is somehow not supposed to be loyal to the President of the United States.
	If that were true, I would like to hear where the Democrats were when Eric Holder was pledging loyalty openly, on camera, to Barack Obama.
	I'd like to know where everybody's ire was then.
	So, there's going to be an attempt here to suggest that Trump was asking for loyalty tests because he's trying to quash the Mueller investigation again.
	In order to show obstruction, you actually have to show an attempted obstruction.
	Asking people whether they are loyal is not an attempted obstruction.
	Firing people who work for you is not an attempted obstruction.
	An attempted obstruction is when you actually are, number one, attempting to obstruct the investigation.
	So if he would tell Mueller that the investigation must find him innocent or he will be fired, that would be obstruction.
	Or if he destroyed documents, that would be obstruction.
	If he fires Mueller, it's not even clear that's obstruction because he does have the statutory authority to do that.
	Is that criminal obstruction?
	Maybe not.
	It's probably impeachable, but it's not necessarily criminal obstruction.
	Okay, so that's another piece of news on the scandal front.
	Furthermore, you can see that the FBI is trying to restore its own credibility after all of the accusations of bias in the Hillary Clinton probe.
	According to CNN, emails obtained by CNN show that Peter Strzok, the FBI agent at the center of a Capitol Hill storm, played a key role in a controversial FBI decision that upended Hillary Clinton's campaigns just days before the 2016 election.
	The letter to Congress by then FBI Director James Comey announcing the Bureau was investigating newly discovered Clinton emails.
	So apparently Strzok drafted the original draft of the letter that Comey ended up sending to Congress that ended up probably affecting the outcome of the election.
	So that is a new piece of information.
	And the idea here is to sort of rehabilitate Strzok.
	The idea is that Strzok wasn't corrupt.
	Strzok wasn't out to save Hillary Clinton.
	He wrote the letter that reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton.
	But that does not tell the whole story, because it's also true that Strzok had expressed his doubts about whether the investigation should go forward or the importance of the new emails that were found.
	You know, he did work for Comey, so if Comey wanted that letter drafted, he had to draft the letter.
	I mean, that's sort of his job.
	The real problem for Strzok is the text messages exchanged between him and his lover, Lisa Page, showing that Strzok was openly talking about how Hillary Clinton needed to be let off the hook because she might be president at some point.
	OK, so with all of this in the wind, one of the worst things that can happen to the country right now is the level of vitriol to which this has now risen.
	Because we're talking about the destruction of the FBI as a credible institution.
	We're talking about the destruction of both political parties as credible institutions.
	And everybody needs to turn down the rhetoric a little bit.
	Unfortunately, they're just turning it up.
	Steve King from Iowa, a Republican from Iowa, he says that, again, the Nunes memo is earth-shaking.
	It is worse than Watergate.
	We are about to find out that the entire deep state was out to get Trump.
	We're going to have a Congress that does oversight.
	We can't accept the FBI or the DOJ or any other branch of government from closing the gate in front of us and saying, sorry, you can't look at this because it's classified.
	Then what I saw and what I believe happened could go on in perpetuity and we become a banana republic.
	This is earth-shaking.
	And it does go deeper than Watergate.
	And that memo doesn't answer at all by any means.
	How is it deeper than Watergate?
	And how is it deeper?
	Because the FBI and the DOJ, by the information that I have observed and the testimony that I have analyzed from listening to and questioning multiple members of the FBI and the DOJ, tells me that the FBI and DOJ have been weaponized.
	OK, so that's a pretty strong allegation by Steve King, of course.
	And then on the other side, you have Phil Mudd, the national security analyst for CNN, and he loses it about the Nunes memo.
	So again, the rhetoric here is so hot and it's so high, and the reality is nobody's seen the memo.
	Nobody knows what they're talking about.
	Steve King may have read the memo, but Steve King is also a partisan Republican.
	So that means you haven't seen it.
	I haven't seen it.
	So we have no basis for judgment.
	All we have are these people who we either trust or we don't trust.
	Here's Phil Mudd presenting the opposite point of view and going nuts over the Nunes memo.
	Give me a break.
	I'm going to break the camera here in a moment, Aaron.
	Have you ever worked in Washington, D.C.?
	I've worked at the highest levels of the FBI, the CIA.
	I've worked on the National Security Council and the White House.
	In the midst of the highest profile investigation of political corruption we've seen since the 1970s, in the midst of a precedent of cooperation, Between the Congress, including Devin Nunes in the White House, do you think it was a secret that congressional officials were preparing a memo of this import and nobody knew at the White House?
	You've got to be kidding me.
	I'm going to tell you the moon's made of green cheese.
	I'm not saying there was cooperation.
	I'm not saying there was collusion.
	I'm saying in that small town of Washington, DC, That to suggest that nobody at the White House knew that congressional staffers were discussing a memo of this import, that's ridiculous.
	It's not about whether Devin Nunes coordinated, it's whether somebody knew over a cup of coffee and talked about it, and to tell me they didn't is just stupid.
	OK, so everybody is going nuts over this stuff.
	We will find out.
	We'll find out by next week.
	Let's put it this way.
	If the memo turns out to be a giant nothing, the blowback will be very intense.
	If the memo turns out to be a nothing, and it turns out that the Trump administration was attempting to set up the memo as a way to take down the Mueller investigation, there will be intense blowback, and it will be deserved.
	If the Republicans decide that they went forward with a memo that was an attempt to take down the Mueller investigation, or if they mouth off the way they have been for the past few weeks, it's such a mistake.
	You know, in business and in life, there's a simple rule that allows you to lead a happier life.
	Under promise, over deliver.
	Right?
	Just say what the memo is.
	This is what Paul Ryan, I think, was rightly trying to do.
	The memo is about FBI malfeasance in the Hillary Clinton investigation and other FBI malfeasance.
	And when you see the memo, you'll know whether it's important or not.
	And let it speak for itself.
	But instead, everybody pitches what they're doing.
	And that means that if they pitch more than they can deliver, there's going to be a lot of disappointment.
	And disappointment in politics is absolute poison.
	Okay, well, in just a second, we will get to some things I like and some things that I hate, and also an amazing segment on MSNBC.
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	All righty.
	So, in other news, the media are beginning to realize that they may be out over their skis on the Michael Wolff books.
	So, Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury has turned out to be a load of trash, which we said, essentially, at the time.
	It is a very juicy load of trash, but it is trash nonetheless.
	And so, Michael Wolff, the author of Fire and Fury, which has now sold something like 2 million copies, is promoted at the Grammys by Hillary Clinton.
	It's been promoted by every major media outlet.
	It was treated as a serious work, even though it was completely fictionalized in parts, and it was basically as told by Steve Bannon.
	Even Saturday Night Live, I think, rightly mocked Michael Wolff as sort of a Steve Bannon tool in writing Fire and Fury.
	Well, Michael Wolff appears on MSNBC this morning—this is earlier this morning—and Wolff had implied over the last couple of weeks that Nikki Haley was having an affair with President Trump.
	Like, this was the actual implication, which is just ridiculous.
	There's no evidence of that whatsoever.
	And finally, finally, Mika Brzezinski has had enough, and here's how that goes.
	Wait, are you suggesting that the language is not ambiguous in any way in the things that you've said and the way you've stated it?
	Are you kidding?
	You're on the set of Morning Joe.
	We don't BS here.
	Read me the language.
	Are you kidding me?
	I'm not reading you anything.
	If you don't get it, if you don't get what we're talking about, I'm sorry.
	This is awkward.
	You're here on the set with us, but we're done.
	Michael Wolff, thank you.
	We're going to go to break now.
	So Brzezinski throws him off the set because it's sexist.
	Everything about Nikki Haley is sexist, but implying that Trump is a crazy person, all of that was totally in bounds, and the spirit of it was true.
	Mika Brzezinski two weeks ago said that Michael Wolff's book has problems, but the spirit of the book is true.
	This is the problem with building up crazy people like Michael Wolff?
	The problem with building up bad sources like Michael Wolff?
	OK, the reality is that Michael Wolff is a smear merchant.
	He always was a smear merchant.
	And one of the funniest things of the day is watching Michael Wolff go after—he is.
	He's now going after Mika Brzezinski.
	He's actually tweeting out.
	He tweeted out earlier today, quote, Let me repeat, Nikki Haley has chosen to vociferously deny something she was not accused of.
	And she said, My bad, the president is right about Mika.
	And now remember, the president of the United States had said that Mika was a liar and that she had come to him with a bloody face and he didn't want her at his event because her face was bloody.
	Trump went after Mika Hart.
	Now Michael Wolff, who was built up by Mika Brzezinski, is very, very angry.
	He says, the last time I was on Morning Joe off camera, Joe and Mika eager to gossip about who Trump might be sleeping with.
	He said it would really be hard to gossip more eagerly off camera than Mika and Joe gossip.
	So, this snake in the grass, this is the problem of letting a snake into your house.
	Eventually, he's going to bite you, and that's exactly what happened to Mika Brzezinski.
	So, Mika's getting all sorts of plaudits.
	She did the right thing here, obviously.
	But, why was it that for literally weeks, Mika and the rest of the media were building up Michael Wolff?
	And this just shows, you know, there are two types of bias in the media.
	Bias number one in the media is the notion that you can bias a story.
	That a story comes through and you read it in the most ridiculous possible sense, in the most anti-conservative possible sense.
	That's one form of bias.
	The other form of bias is to have on a series of guests Who will all do that for you?
	So having Michael Wolff on MSNBC is one example of this.
	Another example of this, Ellen DeGeneres just had on Michelle Obama.
	Why is Michelle Obama on with Ellen DeGeneres?
	Why is she relevant?
	The answer is she's not, right?
	She's not launching a new program.
	She's not doing anything important.
	She's just doing her first interview since she left the White House.
	But here's what Michelle Obama said, and this came out this morning, quote, people are afraid, but then there are people who feel good about the direction of the country.
	So, I mean, that's what makes this country complicated, because it's made up of so many different people from different backgrounds.
	And that's what she told DeGeneres when asked what advice she would give to people who find the world to be a scary place right now.
	She said, I would just encourage your viewers, the country, to do the things we do every day, to love each other, to take care of each other, to show empathy.
	And you can't do that only when people make you feel good or safe.
	You know, we do have a lot in common.
	That's what it means to lead with hope and not fear.
	I would just encourage your viewers, the country, to do the things we do every day, to love each other, to take care of each other, to show empathy.
	And you can't do that only when people make you feel good or safe.
	We've got to do it all across the board.
	We have to be an open-hearted nation.
	That's who we are.
	So, this is another form of bias to have on Michelle Obama to just lecture us pap about empathy.
	By the way, I've said many times before, empathy in politics is poison.
	Sympathy is useful.
	Empathy is wrong.
	The reason empathy is wrong is because when you put yourself in somebody's shoes, you're immediately taking yourself out of everyone else's shoes.
	If you have empathy for one person, that means that you are feeling what that person is feeling, but you're not feeling what the other 300 million people in the country are feeling.
	Making policy should not be based on empathy.
	And it is telling, the sort of language Michelle Obama uses, where the good things that we do, we show empathy, we care for each other.
	Those are not good things that we do.
	Those may be good things that we feel, but the good things that we do actually have to have good benefits, right?
	I mean, if you're going to do something good, you have to benefit somebody.
	But it's all intent and no delivery for so many folks on the left.
	But this is just another form of bias.
	Another form of bias.
	Jimmy Kimmel.
	had on, directly after the State of the Union address, the guys from Pod Save America.
	And he had on all of these folks from a left-wing podcast, all former Obama staffers, by the way.
	And I listen to Pod Save America.
	I find it amusing, and I think sometimes they have interesting insights.
	I like to hear a different perspective.
	But the idea that—would Jimmy Kimmel ever have me on?
	Ever?
	In a million years?
	Our listenership is about the same size as Pod Save America's, by the way, because we broadcast more often.
	So we have the same number of listeners in aggregate that Pod Save America does.
	Would they even in a million years consider having me on to talk about State of the Union on Jimmy Kimmel?
	The answer, of course, is no.
	But they'll have on people who are just as partisan—I'd say more partisan than I am.
	I mean, I'll hit Trump when I think he's wrong.
	The Pod Save America guys, I think they actually have a shrine to Barack Obama, and every so often they open up the curtains and they light candles in front of that shrine.
	It's pretty insane.
	They were on Jimmy Kimmel the night of the State of the Union address to analyze Trump's State of the Union address.
	Again, bias inaction.
	And then, you know, Kimmel demonstrates his own bias because he decides that it's time for him to push again.
	I don't know who died and made Jimmy Kimmel the moral authority in the country.
	I mean, the guy who used to have women grab his shorts and tell him what was in his pants on The Man Show.
	Honestly, I feel bad saying all this stuff.
	Like, I've hit Jimmy Kimmel so many times, but it's his own damn fault.
	I mean, he feels like a nice person.
	And I know a lot of people who know Jimmy Kimmel.
	He's a really nice, genuine fellow.
	And I feel like he'd be a good guy to hang out with.
	But this idea that he knows anything about politics or that he's a moral authority is really ridiculous.
	He can have his opinion.
	But once he gives his opinion, then I get to knock him for his opinion, because his opinion is just wrong in many of these cases, because it's not based on the facts.
	So in any case, he does a shtick about how Dreamers ought to be let in the country, and Obama was nice, and Trump is cruel.
	Never mind the fact that Trump is about to let in three times as many dreamers as Obama ever was.
	He's about to legalize that many dreamers.
	So, Kimmel decides that he's going to do this routine where he has a bunch of people who oppose DACA meet a dreamer family.
	He's going to have a bunch of people who oppose DACA meet a dreamer family.
	And this is how, again, talk about bias in the media, this is it in spades.
	This is Esmeralda, and this is her daughter, Rose.
	And, uh, Esmeralda came here.
	How old were you when you came to this country?
	I was two.
	You were two years old.
	Parents brought you here from where?
	Mexico City.
	From Mexico City.
	Yes.
	You have a baby now.
	Yes.
	And you are a DACA recipient.
	You signed up.
	You did a background check.
	Yes.
	You were fingerprinted.
	You have a job?
	Yes.
	You pay taxes?
	Yes.
	You go to nursing school?
	Yes.
	How many of you think it would be right for Esmeralda to be sent back to Mexico, a country that she's never known?
	OK.
	And the idea here is to show how mean these guys are.
	And of course, two of the people who are there are wearing Trump hats, right?
	One is wearing a hat that says, make California great again.
	And another one is wearing a hat that says, make America great again.
	And, of course, it's two white guys who kind of look slovenly.
	And this is the idea, that it's a bunch of racists who want to do this, and then a woman who's raising her hand as well.
	There's a black woman in the audience who's not raising her hand, and two other women.
	So the females are the moral voices in this panel.
	Now, you can point out that there are Dreamers who—listen, would I send Esmerelda back?
	I wouldn't.
	I mean, so long as she's of benefit to the American society.
	But you can be in favor of a policy and still know that there are sympathetic people who may be hurt by the policy.
	And that happens all the time.
	I'm in favor, for example, of getting rid of Obamacare.
	Are there people who benefit from Obamacare?
	Clearly there are some people who benefit from Obamacare.
	Am I in favor of getting rid of Obamacare?
	I am.
	And the reason I'm in favor of getting rid of Obamacare is because I think that over the broad swath of human beings, it will be better for America to get rid of Obamacare than to maintain Obamacare.
	But this is the way the media biases the cases.
	Like, would they ever do this with a bunch of people from sanctuary cities?
	Like, would Jimmy Kimmel ever have a bunch of left-wing activists from San Francisco sit there and talk to the families that Donald Trump mentioned during the State of the Union address?
	Ever?
	Would that ever happen?
	Would he ever just have the two families—remember, there are the two black families whose daughters were murdered by an illegal immigrant?
	Would he ever have those families confront people who are fans of Sanctuary Cities?
	Of course not.
	Of course not.
	This sort of media bias is what frustrates so many people on the right.
	And it's what, I think, wrongly allows them to engage in reactionary politics where they say that all news is fake news or deride anything the media ever say.
	But when members of the media do this routine, particularly members of the cultural media do this, It makes us all nuts.
	And it should make us all nuts.
	Because it's sad to say, but Jimmy Fallon, who's the most apolitical of the hosts, has fallen in the ratings specifically because he is the most apolitical of the hosts.
	Because left-wingers are now tuning into Jimmy Kimmel to get their feel-good moment for their leftist politics in a way that they are not for Jimmy Fallon.
	I'm not a fan of either Kimmel or Fallon.
	In fact, I think Kimmel is funnier than Fallon.
	But I think that apolitical comedy is Is going by the wayside here, and that's simply too bad.
	So again, I think this is just more evidence of a media that's biased.
	They set up situations deliberately in order to achieve certain results.
	I talked about this a little bit on Dave Rubin's show with Jordan Peterson yesterday.
	What the media do in order to gain results, and that's why people like me, people like Jordan, people like Sam Harris, we may all disagree on politics, but if we refuse to accept the bait that the media are presenting, if we refuse to acknowledge the situation that the media are putting us in in order to try and drive us to a certain conclusion, we're seen as outliers.
	And this is, I think, why there are so many people who listen to us.
	The media setup routine is getting old, and I think most people know it.
	Okay, time for a couple of things I like, and then some things that I hate.
	Let's do a thing I like.
	So we're doing Bach this week.
	One of the great pieces of music of all time, of course, the St.
	Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach.
	One of the wonderful things about Bach is Bach was a deeply, deeply religious guy, and that comes through in his music.
	One of the things that is fascinating, again, I just read this Brahms biography.
	I'm now in the middle of that Bach biography that I told you about.
	One of the things that's fascinating is that Bach thought that there was a system to music.
	He thought that there was a natural ear to music, that your ear resonates to certain melodies and certain harmonies, which obviously is true.
	And he also felt that there are certain rhythms and counterpoints that your ear is attracted to.
	In other words, there are certain natural laws of music that you can divine using your reason.
	If this sounds very familiar, it's because this was basically the idea of the Founding Fathers, that natural law, natural rights were things that you could derive from nature, There are self-evident truths in government, and there are self-evident truths when it comes to music.
	And Bach felt this, Brahms felt this, Beethoven felt this, Mozart felt this, all the greatest musicians in history felt this.
	Because we moved away from that notion that there's an objective musical truth out there that can be discovered and accessed, and toward the idea that all music is subjective, music has gotten significantly worse.
	It is impossible to listen to St.
	Matthew's Passion and then listen to pop music and think that there is no objective difference between the two.
	There is a very large objective difference between the two, and anybody who doesn't believe that, anybody who thinks all art is equivalent, that all art is of equal quality or equal genius or equal beauty, those people are fools.
	Again, here's St.
	Matthew Passion by Bach.
	ORCHESTRA PLAYS
	It's just an amazing piece.
	It's very long.
	It's a couple of hours, St.
	Matthew Passion, but it's an incredible piece of music.
	Okay, time from the sublime to the ridiculous.
	Time to do some things that I hate.
	So...
	Thing that I hate, number one.
	Numero uno.
	So, Tommy Lahren, who was ousted from Blaze after she went on The View and talked about why pro-life people were basically stupid, and now she is on Sean Hannity's show, where she gives her final thoughts, which I think is an apt description of her segment, Final Thoughts.
	So I think she, in any case, Tommy, I think Tommy's a nice person.
	I've met Tommy.
	I think that You know, maybe she's trying, but this is not good.
	Okay, so Tommy was giving her response to Joe Kennedy's response to the State of the Union address, and here is what she came up with.
	If you haven't yet had the displeasure of watching that little little response to President Trump's State of the Union, I suggest you take some Pepto-Bismol or some Midol or whatever you need to do to get through it because it was pathetic and it was embarrassing.
	Oh my God.
	OK, so she's going after him, she calls him a limp bleep, and then she also said something about how he was a ginger or something.
	I mean, this idea that Tommy Lahren is some sort of thought leader for conservatives should be humiliating to conservatives.
	I'm sorry, Tommy Lahren is not a thought leader for conservatives.
	Tommy Lahren is a pretty woman, a beautiful woman, who says things.
	I mean, that's it.
	That's it.
	And she says inflammatory things, and if people resonate to that, it's because people have a short attention span.
	But Tommy has bragged about not reading books.
	One of the reasons you need to read books is so that you have a better response to Joe Kennedy than just that he is a limp bleep ginger.
	You need some actual content as to why you think that he's wrong.
	Otherwise, we're not having arguments.
	We're just insulting each other.
	And it's just, I hate this kind of stuff.
	I really, really do.
	I think that, you know, listen, I'll drop insulting language every so often, but nothing of that magnitude.
	And I attempt to support my arguments not with insults, but with actual data.
	Conservatives, if you're a young conservative and you're looking for somebody to look up to, I'm not saying you have to look up to me.
	You don't.
	There are plenty of people to look up to.
	All I'm saying is that You should probably steer away from the people who do this kind of stuff.
	Just read a book.
	It's just—it's not worthwhile.
	Okay, other things that I hate.
	So, apparently, there was an immigrant group that decided to watch Trump's State of the Union address, and to demonstrate their cultural sensitivity, I guess, they decided to throw shoes at the wall.
	This is what it looked like.
	It's so funny, you see, 'cause they're throwing shoes.
	You get it?
	Because they're, like, throwing shoes.
	Now, what's funny about the throwing shoes thing is this is not an American thing, the throwing shoes thing.
	I mean, like, there's no history of Americans throwing shoes at the wall when people speak.
	The last time I remember somebody throwing a shoe was actually when George W. Bush was in Iraq and in the middle of a press conference, a guy threw a shoe at him and Bush ducked out of the way.
	You remember that?
	But this is, I think, Demonstrative of the level of vitriol and anger that people hold against Trump and his policies.
	Imagine if Republicans did this.
	There'd be talk, when Obama was president, there'd be talk of they're promoting violence, they're promoting assassination, they're promoting actual physical harm toward the President of the United States.
	People do this against Trump, and suddenly it's totally fine.
	So vitriol exists on all sides, but it's only called out on one, and that's one of the places where I have a serious, serious problem.
	Okay, final thing that I hate.
	So, there's a great article by Katherine Kirsten over at Weekly Standard describing the social justice factory in the city of Edina.
	So, Edina, Minnesota, has a public school district, and these public schools have now been unraveling academic rigor.
	Why?
	Because they're actually mandating that students read books like children, small children, read books like A is for Activist.
	This is for tiny kids, like kids who are third graders.
	A is for activist.
	T, by the way, in that book is for trans, which is something you definitely want to be teaching seven-year-olds about.
	And then they make posters with gay rights flags, and they make posters with police brutality and Black Lives Matter.
	Apparently, according to the Weekly Standard, the shift began in 2013, when Adina school leaders adopted the All-for-All Strategy Plan, a sweeping initiative that reordered the district's mission from academic excellence for all students to racial equity.
	Equity does not mean equality or fairness.
	It means racial identity politics, an ideology that blames minority students' academic challenges on institutional racial bias, repudiates Martin Luther King's colorblind ideal, and focuses on uprooting white privilege.
	So what did it do?
	It mandated that henceforth, all teaching and learning experiences would be viewed through the lens of racial equity, and that only racially conscious teachers and administrators should be hired.
	District leaders assured parents this would reduce ADINA's racial achievement gap, which they attributed to barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings.
	Absolute nonsense, by the way.
	That if you teach people about Black Lives Matter, it closes the racial gap.
	There's no evidence of this whatsoever.
	So now, they start teaching kids about white privilege in kindergarten.
	So K-2 students participate in the melanin project.
	Students trace their hands, color them to reflect their skin tone, and place the cutouts on a poster reading, stop thinking your skin color is better than everyone else's.
	Everyone is special.
	And then they have racially conscious elementary school principal who runs a blog for the school's community, and they put up pictures of protesters holding a banner proclaiming gay marriages are right.
	I mean, this is just ridiculous.
	Oh, happy, happy day.
	How about, like, learning to read?
	How about that?
	and composition course required.
	It says, quote, by the end of the year, you have learned how to apply Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, and psychoanalytical lenses to literature.
	Oh, happy, happy day.
	How about, like, learning to read?
	How about that?
	And we're making kids useless before they even have a chance to become useful.
	It's pretty amazing.
	You wonder why the homeschooling movement is gaining steam.
	This is one of the reasons that the homeschooling movement is gaining steam.
	By the way, here's the data.
	Four years into Adina's school's equity crusade, black students' test scores continue to disappoint.
	There's been about a single positive point of data.
	Black student reading scores for all grades have increased from 45.5% proficiency in 2014 to 46.4% proficiency in 2017.
	So, just marginally, right?
	Black students on track for success in reading decreased from 48% in 2014 to 44% in 2017.
	Math scores decreased from 50% proficiency in 2014 to 47% proficiency in 2017.
	Black students on track for success in math decreased from 51% in 2014 to 44% in 2017.
	Thank you.
	And in reading, in 10th grade at Adena, from 52% in 2014 to 40% in 2017.
	So, well done everyone.
	Valuing the stupidity of identity politics above the glory of learning, this is what you end up with.
	No shock, parents are pulling their kids out of school.
	If my kid were in that district, I'd pull my kid out of those schools as well.
	All righty, well we will be back here tomorrow, presumably with more on MemoGate 2018.
	The fight continues.
	We'll be back here with all the updates.

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