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April 10, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

47:52

The Great Raid | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 514

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	The FBI raids the offices of President Trump's lawyer, Trump considers war in Syria, and the left rushes to Teddy Kennedy's defense.
	It's a busy news day.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	So many things to get to.
	Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of news.
	And we'll have full analysis of all of it.
	I will give you the full legal breakdown and everything going on with President Trump's personal lawyer, whose offices, hotel, home, were all raided by the FBI last night.
	What that means.
	Is it a witch hunt, as President Trump says?
	We'll get to all of those things first.
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	Okay, so President Trump's lawyer is now being investigated.
	This is the latest news.
	President Trump's lawyer is, of course, Michael Cohen.
	You will remember Michael Cohen from such stellar TV performances as What Polls and also Confused Look on TV.
	Michael Cohen is not the world's best lawyer.
	President Trump's been using him for a long time.
	When we say that he's Trump's personal lawyer, what that really means is that he has been involved for a long time in being Sort of Trump's bagman, to a certain extent.
	He's his fixer.
	He's a self-described fixer.
	In fact, Michael Cohen has compared himself to Trump's Tom Hagen.
	Tom Hagen, of course, being the character from the Godfather movies, who is the personal lawyer for the Corleone family.
	Now, one of the problems here is that Michael Cohen is not supremely competent.
	And the other problem is that Michael Cohen has been cleaning up Trump's messes for so long that he may have gotten a little bit casual about it.
	So here is the story.
	The FBI apparently raided Michael Cohen's office yesterday, and the raid included documents that were that were regarding Cohen's self-stated $130,000 payment to Trump one night stand Stormy Daniels.
	So now we have a scandal, a real scandal brewing.
	Over Stormy Daniels.
	So what exactly happened here?
	Well, back in 2006, as you'll recall, President Trump allegedly shtooped Stormy Daniels.
	That is probable.
	I cannot imagine that that is not true.
	It is really unlikely that Trump did not shtoop Stormy Daniels, given all the surrounding available evidence and Trump's record with women and all the rest of it.
	OK, fine.
	So that's who Trump is.
	If people had known about that, nobody would have cared because Trump has shtooped everything from here to Miami.
	I mean, that is really not a giant shock in any significant way.
	But, for some odd reason, about 10 days before the election, it looked like Stormy Daniels was going to talk to the press, and Trump's team, or at least Michael Cohen, was afraid that Trump would somehow be implicated and people would not like Trump if they found out that Trump was having an affair, which, by the way, is an insane thought.
	No one was going to shift their vote based on Trump having an affair with a porn star 10 years prior.
	Everyone had assumed, I think, that Trump had been doing that sort of thing all the time.
	Anyway, Cohen signed a $130,000 check to Stormy Daniels to shut her up, and they signed a settlement agreement.
	And the settlement agreement was run through an LLC, and that settlement agreement used a bunch of pseudonyms.
	So there's a pseudonym for Stormy Daniels, there's a pseudonym for President Trump, and this document was signed.
	Stormy Daniels, of course, is now complaining, and she's saying that the document wasn't actually formalized, and that it's not actually binding, but in any case, Michael Cohn is fighting that in court and suggesting that it is binding and that Stormy Daniels is supposed to shut up about all the details of her affair with Trump or he will sue her.
	In any case, what exactly went wrong here?
	Well, according to the Washington Post, Cohn is under federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud, and campaign finance violations, according to three people with knowledge of the case.
	So the story here is that that $130,000 that Cohn paid to Stormy Daniels, he has claimed that Trump had no knowledge of it.
	Which means that this could be a campaign finance problem.
	It could be an in-kind contribution.
	The sort of precedent for this being an in-kind contribution would be the John Edwards case.
	You remember John Edwards.
	John Edwards was the vice presidential candidate with John Kerry, and then he was a frontrunner for a short period of time in the 2008 presidential election.
	Well, in the middle of that presidential election, it was about to come out that John Edwards had had an affair while he was married to his cancer-ridden wife, and he was having this affair with a woman named Rielle Hunter, and he impregnated her with a baby.
	And he had all of his donors get together and give Real Hunter about a million dollars to shut up for the duration of the election cycle.
	This constituted campaign finance violation and in-kind contribution by his people.
	And John Edwards actually went to trial.
	He was tried on six counts, including conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws.
	He was acquitted on one of those counts.
	The jury hung on the other five counts.
	And in the end, the DOJ dropped the case.
	This case is very, very similar.
	This looks like what the DOJ is after here and what the lawyers are after, what the prosecutors are after, is the possibility that Michael Cohen was instructed by President Trump to pay Stormy Daniels and that this constituted an in-kind contribution that Trump conspired with Michael Cohen to evade campaign finance laws by allowing this in-kind contribution to his campaign from Michael Cohen, which was then not reported to the FEC.
	That's the entire crux of the matter here.
	So this comes out late yesterday that Trump's attorney, his offices have now been raided by the FBI.
	And President Trump responds with the kind of language that we've become accustomed to hearing from President Trump.
	He's very passionate about this.
	He's very upset about this.
	And he says some things that I think are true and some things that I think are exaggerated.
	Here was President Trump's response.
	And it's a disgrace.
	It's frankly a real disgrace.
	It's an attack on our country in a true sense.
	Okay, so he says it's an attack on our country.
	That sort of language I don't appreciate from the president given the fact that there are actually attacks on our country that take place on a pretty regular basis.
	It is not in fact an attack on the United States if the president of the United States does something wrong and then is then investigated for it.
	It is an attack, perhaps, on the presidency.
	Or an attack on Trump himself.
	And this is where we get into some really dicey territory.
	Because the real question here is what basis did the FBI really have to go after Trump's personal attorney?
	It is unprecedented.
	It is unprecedented.
	There is such a thing as attorney-client privilege.
	If I'm somebody's attorney, I'm a lawyer, if I'm somebody's lawyer, and we are corresponding about a particular issue that does not involve me as a lawyer helping the client break the law, then all of that is privileged material.
	And it's very difficult to overcome that presumption of privilege for law enforcement.
	Law enforcement actually has to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to seize documents from a lawyer's office.
	They have to jump through a lot of hoops because we don't actually want the government jumping in and looking at everything a lawyer says to their client.
	That'd be insane.
	If the government could do that, then they could presumably win every case, they could disbar lawyers on a regular basis, they could go after clients for saying things that aren't even legally challengeable in a certain sense because they're just running through case theory, for example.
	The reason attorney-client privilege exists is because there has to be a level of confidentiality between a lawyer and a client, just like there's a level of confidentiality between doctors and patients.
	So you have to overcome a serious presumption here.
	So Trump is saying this is an attack on him.
	It may very well be, but we're not going to know that until we find out what exactly the FBI was looking for.
	At this point, we still don't know exactly what the FBI was looking for.
	So when Trump says it's an attack on the country, I don't think Trump is the country, but it certainly is an attack on President Trump.
	And it may well be an unfair attack on President Trump, as I'll discuss in just a moment.
	Now, President Trump also is very angry at his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, because again, The way this worked is apparently the Mueller investigation referred out the information that led to the warrant to the U.S.
	District of Southern, the Southern District of New York.
	So this, this investigation that ended with the raid on Michael Cohen's offices actually had very little to do in the end with the Mueller investigation.
	It was tossed off.
	to the U.S.
	District Attorney in the Southern District of New York.
	So this is a second investigation, right?
	This is a second investigation that we are talking about right now.
	And Trump is saying, well, if Jeff Sessions were really my wingman, he would have stopped all of this.
	If Jeff Sessions really cared what happened to me, he never would have accused himself in the first place.
	He would have done exactly what Eric Holder did, and he would have stopped any investigation into my administration.
	And Trump isn't exactly wrong about this.
	The fact is that Eric Holder did play that role for Barack Obama.
	Now, should Jeff Sessions play that role?
	Well, not in terms of being an honest attorney general.
	Eric Holder was a corrupt attorney general.
	I'm old enough to remember when we all said that.
	But I guess the idea on the right is that we're supposed to imitate the left, because if we don't imitate the left, then we're going to fall prey to the predations of people like Robert Mueller.
	I find this a problematic idea that because the left sins, we are therefore also allowed to sin or therefore our sins are good.
	So here's Trump going after Jeff Sessions, suggesting Sessions shouldn't have recused himself.
	Remember, Sessions recused himself in the Russia matter.
	He did not actually recuse himself in the Michael Cohen matter.
	So theoretically, he could reestablish his authority here and fire the U.S.
	District Attorney in the Southern District of New York, for example, or order a stop to that investigation.
	That's a possibility.
	Sessions hasn't said anything so far, and Trump is mad that Sessions recused himself in the Russia investigation, which led to the appointment eventually of Robert Mueller, the special investigator, which led eventually to him referring out to the U.S.
	SDNY, the Southern District of New York, this Cone Raid.
	Here's Trump going after Jeff Sessions yesterday.
	They find no collusion, and then they go from there and they say, well, let's keep going.
	And they raid an office of a personal attorney early in the morning.
	And I think it's a disgrace.
	So we'll be talking about it more.
	But this is the most conflicted group of people I've ever seen.
	The Attorney General made a terrible mistake when he did this and when he recused himself, or he should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself.
	And we would have put a different Attorney General in.
	So he made what I consider to be a very terrible mistake for the country.
	So obviously Trump is very, very frustrated about all of this.
	So let's go through some of the facts here and some of the legalities.
	And then I want to get to what Trump is going to do next year because this could have some pretty significant ramifications in a couple of different ways.
	So first of all, attorney-client privilege does not actually apply if you are violating law with your attorney.
	As I say, attorney-client privilege is really, really strong.
	But if I'm Mathis's lawyer and Mathis comes to me and he says, you know what, let's do a drug deal together.
	Let's go out and buy some cocaine and then let's sell it on the street.
	This is not covered by attorney-client privilege because now I am complicit in a crime.
	This is what we call the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege.
	If I were to claim that our communications were privileged for the purpose of covering up a crime, that does not hold.
	That privilege simply does not hold.
	Also, it is worth noting that the raid on Cohen's office was in fact cleared by a judge as well as the Department of Justice.
	So, for all the talk, President Trump suggested attorney-client privilege is dead, and he suggested that this was a break-in.
	He said the FBI broke into Cohen's office.
	The evidence to support that is just not there, legally speaking.
	There was a process that was undergone, even if President Trump doesn't like the results of that process.
	And I'll get to all of that.
	I'll explain why it is that the raid was legal in just a second, at least presumably legal in just a second.
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	All right, so Trump suggests that the raid on Cohen's office by the FBI is in fact illegal.
	He called it a break-in, but the evidence is not there for that yet.
	So we'll find out what the basis was for the raid, but suffice it to say that the process for actually doing one of these raids on an attorney's office is pretty significant.
	Ken White is a lawyer on Twitter.
	He's a lawyer and he's also on Twitter.
	And he points out that the law is actually pretty strict regarding seizing documents that could be covered by attorney-client privilege.
	Prosecutors actually have to show that there is no alternative to such a document seizure.
	White writes, quote, The U.S.
	Attorney's Manual requires such a search warrant to be approved by the U.S.
	Attorney, the head of the office, a presidential appointee, and requires consultation with the criminal division in the U.S.
	Department of Justice.
	This is not a couple of rogue assistant U.S.
	attorneys sneaking in a warrant.
	In this case, the U.S.
	Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, widely regarded within itself as being the most important and prestigious U.S.
	Attorney's Office in the country, secured the search warrants for the FBI.
	Assuming this report is correct, that means a very mainstream U.S.
	Attorney's Office, not just Mueller, thought there was enough for a search warrant here.
	And a Magistrate Judge also had to green light the warrant as well.
	So Cohen's office is arguing that he's cooperating with the authorities.
	One of the barriers to getting one of these warrants is that You have to show that there's no other way of obtaining the documents.
	Cohen is saying, I would have just handed you whatever documents you wanted.
	I've been fully cooperative.
	The FBI apparently went to the DOJ and they said they haven't been cooperative.
	The DOJ agreed, the magistrate judge agreed, and they went forward with the warrant.
	I will say this.
	The chances that the warrant is really weak, like supremely weak, I think are pretty low.
	The reason being, this is going to be the most scrutinized warrant in the history of American politics.
	Maybe right here, while we are looking at a warrant to go after the President's personal lawyer and uncover all the documents between that lawyer and the President of the United States, the burden is going to be really high.
	Unless the magistrate judge is a complete political hack, and my understanding is, The magistrate judge in this particular case might have been a Trump appointee.
	Certainly, the U.S.
	District Attorney's Office in Southern District of New York, the person who runs that office is a Trump appointee.
	We're finding out this morning that the U.S.
	Attorney's Office there is run by a guy who was actually a Trump donor, but he apparently recused himself from the case because he said that he was biased in the case because he was a Trump supporter.
	So Trump can't be happy with that recusal either.
	But in the end, all the information is going to come out.
	Neither this is going to look like, as President Trump says, another witch hunt.
	In which case, he'll be absolutely right to be angry.
	He will be absolutely justified in firing Sessions, in firing the U.S.
	District Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
	If this really is a weak warrant, and this is the FBI just fishing around for information on President Trump, there's going to be hell to pay.
	I mean, things will get really, really nasty, really, really quickly.
	So in just a second, I'm going to give you a little bit more information on what exactly is going on in this raid, what the FBI may be hoping to uncover, and how exactly the documents are going to be handled.
	Let's start with how the documents are going to be handled.
	So, here again is Ken White, who's a lawyer, and he does this sort of litigation on a routine basis.
	He says, quote, the process might involve a judge reviewing the materials to separate out what is privileged or what might fall within an exception to the privilege or I'll set up a dirty team that does the review, but is insulated from the clean team running the investigation.
	In other words, if you're running the investigation, you don't get to see the documents until lawyers have already reviewed it to ensure that attorney client privilege is not violated.
	Another option is a special master, which is the name for a person who is appointed simply to distinguish documents you're allowed to use from documents you're not allowed to use.
	That'd be an experienced and qualified third party attorney to do the review.
	But if the FBI has all of the communications between Michael Cohen and Trump on hand, then there's probably gonna be a lot of interesting stuff there.
	Because if it turns out that Michael Cohen pays off Trump's paramours, which he obviously did with Stormy Daniels, he admits to that, then what else did Michael Cohen do for President Trump?
	Eric Erickson, who is a critic of President Trump's, but I would say mainstream Republican, Eric Erickson said that he pointed out there were a lot of rumors during the campaign that Trump had actually paid off women who had had abortions, for example.
	Would that come up in Michael Cohen's documents?
	And if so, would that actually be privileged or would not be privileged?
	Presumably, even if it came up, it would still be privileged, considering the fact that When considering the fact that nothing necessarily illegal went on.
	You're allowed to sign a settlement contract with a woman who had an abortion to keep her quiet.
	But if that were to break in the public sphere, then that obviously would undercut a lot of Trump's support base.
	Again, all of that is speculation, but suffice it to say that when you are Putting your dirty fingers into the offices of the personal fixer for the President of the United States, you may be able to find some stuff that is really, really gross.
	So all of this is really troubling.
	Now, here's something worth pointing out.
	A lot of people on the right are livid today because they say the FBI never treated Hillary Clinton this way.
	This is 100% true.
	It is 100% true.
	There is no question that the treatment of Donald Trump here is absolutely disparate to the treatment of Hillary Clinton.
	The treatment by the FBI of Donald Trump is they're going after everything.
	They're searching for everything.
	And even if you think this warrant is legit, which it may very well be, even if you think that a campaign finance law was broken here, which maybe it was, Is there any question that the treatment of Hillary Clinton was wildly, wildly kind and the treatment of Donald Trump has been wildly unkind at best?
	There's no question there's a wild disparity between Hillary Clinton's treatment and Donald Trump's treatment.
	Remember all the way back to the time when the FBI was investigating Hillary Clinton's missing emails.
	They were investigating her server because she had set up a private server in her house and she had classified emails flowing through that private server which exposed them to the possibility of foreign hack.
	And the FBI treated Hillary Clinton with kid gloves.
	They had basically cleared her by the time they interviewed her.
	They added an element to the crime in order to exonerate her.
	They said she had to have intent.
	To pass off classified documents, it couldn't just be accidental, except the law doesn't require intent.
	That's what James Comey, the former FBI director, he actually changed the law in order to help exonerate Hillary Clinton.
	Loretta Lynch, of course, met with Hillary Clinton's husband on a plane on a tarmac in the middle of the investigation, and she still doesn't have any good answers about this.
	So Loretta Lynch was interviewed by Lester Holt, and Holt asked her about her meeting on the tarmac with Bill Clinton, and you can hear she's still obfuscating the issue.
	It was still 107 degrees outside, and I was told that he wanted to come on the plane and say hello.
	Did a part of you go, oh, no, no, no, no, no, turn him around?
	You know, at first my thought was, you know, I speak to people all the time, people in public life, people not in public life.
	Right, but his wife was under investigation by the Justice Department.
	Did you have any moment where you said, Mr. President, this is probably not appropriate or this is going to look bad?
	Well, I will say that in the course of the conversation, we spoke and it seemed like we were going to say, hello, hi, how are you, and move on.
	OK, so she obfuscates every question.
	She says there is nothing wrong here, but then she doesn't explain what exactly happened on the plane.
	All of this was deeply suspicious.
	It was so suspicious that it is what led James Comey, he said in his own testimony, to basically take over the investigation from Loretta Lynch and then announce on his own what he thought the actual outcome of the investigation should be in order to shield Loretta Lynch from accusations of corruption.
	So there's no question that Hillary Clinton was treated with absolute kid gloves.
	And by the way, I have more evidence that she was treated with kid gloves, which I will present to you in just one second.
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	Okay, so back to the differential treatment between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump by the FBI.
	Hey, so Andrew McCarthy of National Review points this out.
	In the middle of the investigation, Hillary Clinton was interviewed by the FBI.
	And the Justice Department allowed Hillary Clinton to be accompanied at this interview by Cheryl Mills.
	Cheryl Mills was Hillary Clinton's not only close friend, but personal fixer.
	Cheryl Mills basically was to Hillary Clinton what Michael Cohen was to Donald Trump.
	And they allowed Cheryl Mills, who was a former employee at the State Department, to sit in with Hillary Clinton during her interviews, even though she was a subject of the investigation.
	This is what Andrew McCarthy over at National Review wrote at the time.
	The reason that the Justice Department was allowing Cheryl Mills, a witness, if not a subject of the investigation, to invoke attorney-client privilege on behalf of Mrs. Clinton in order to thwart the FBI's attempt to inquire into the procedure used to produce Clinton's emails to the State Department.
	Okay, so let me clarify that in case you missed it.
	Not only did they allow Cheryl Mills to sit in on an interview with Hillary Clinton, they allowed Cheryl Mills to claim attorney-client privilege in her communications with Hillary Clinton about the emails themselves, even though she was possibly complicit in the hiding of those emails and the setting up of the private server.
	So it's like, so here, they're saying no attorney-client privilege attaches to Michael Cohen, because the crime-fraud exception, but Cheryl Mills, who's literally under investigation at the same time, in the same way as Michael Cohen, or at least in a similar way, she was allowed to sit in on meetings with Hillary Clinton, and they were allowed to use, and they were allowed to claim attorney-client privilege.
	McCarthy writes, Mills was a participant in that procedure and it is the procedure in which we now know well over 30,000 emails were attempted to be destroyed, including several thousand that contained government related business.
	There is no way Mills should have been permitted to participate as a lawyer in the process of producing Clinton's emails to the State Department nearly two years after they both left.
	I thought it was astonishing that the Justice Department indulged her attorney-client privilege claim, which frustrated the FBI's ability to question her on a key aspect of the investigation, but it is simply unbelievable to find her turning up at Mrs. Clinton's interview, participating in the capacity of a lawyer under circumstances where Clinton was being investigated over matters in which Mills participated as a non-lawyer government official.
	So again, Trump is absolutely right to be angry at the fact that the FBI treated Hillary Clinton with kid gloves, that the DOJ treated Hillary Clinton with kid gloves.
	He's absolutely right about that.
	Now, the question is, should his own DOJ and FBI treat Donald Trump with kid gloves?
	Now, this is a serious question philosophically on the right.
	It really is.
	And I'm not making light of it in any way.
	On the one side, you have people who are saying, listen, The left cheats.
	They do.
	The left used the DOJ as a personal shield for Barack Obama.
	Eric Holder, when he was brought up on contempt charges, Barack Obama stepped in and declared executive privilege to prevent Holder from having to hand over documents.
	Eric Holder described himself as Barack Obama's wingman.
	Loretta Lynch played exactly the same role for Barack Obama and also for Hillary Clinton.
	James Comey obviously was biased in favor of Hillary Clinton in a wide variety of ways, although he ended up, close to the election, revealing something in order to proclaim his own honesty in front of Congress.
	He revealed that Hillary might still be under investigation, or at least her emails had come up on Anthony Weiner's computer.
	Despite all of that, his original attempt to exonerate Hillary Clinton was highly biased in the extreme, and he never should have done it.
	And so a lot of people who are on the right are saying, well, listen, why should Trump be pure as the driven snow when it comes to his law enforcement agencies?
	Why can't we just have Jeff Sessions step in and defend him?
	Why doesn't he fire Rod Rosenstein?
	In fact, why doesn't he fire Robert Mueller?
	You know, if the situation is that the DOJ is supposed to protect the president, as the left claims about Obama, then why shouldn't Trump do the same thing?
	And Trump himself seems to be thinking a little bit along these lines.
	So Trump suggested that he may fire Mueller.
	He was asked about this and he says, well, we'll have to see what happens with regard to Robert Mueller.
	Why don't I just fire Mueller?
	Well, I think it's a disgrace what's going on.
	We'll see what happens.
	But I think it's really a sad situation when you look at what happened.
	And many people have said you should fire him.
	Again, they found nothing.
	So we'll see what happens.
	I think it's disgraceful and so does a lot of other people.
	This is a pure and simple witch hunt.
	Thank you very much.
	So he's obviously considering the possibility of firing Mueller.
	Now, a lot of people, I was watching CNN yesterday because I was at the gym and I couldn't turn the channel.
	And CNN was giddy over this.
	So CNN was doing two things that were pretty amazing to watch.
	First, they were suggesting that this obviously means Trump is going to fire Mueller.
	Like, oh, listen to the language he's now using with Mueller.
	He's been using that language about Mueller for literally months at this point.
	It's the sort of language that President Trump uses on a fairly routine basis.
	So that's not a shock.
	Second, they kept saying, look how mad Trump is.
	He's so mad.
	He can't fire Mueller, but he's so mad.
	You could see how they were reveling in the anger.
	They're very excited about how angry President Trump was because they're hoping that Trump fires Mueller and this precipitates an impeachment.
	But should Trump fire Mueller?
	There are people who are encouraging him to do so.
	Lou Dobbs said last night on Fox News that he would fire Mueller if he had the opportunity to do so.
	I mean, immediately we recall the pre-dawn raid of Manafort's home, and even though he'd been cooperating with the special counsel.
	This is now a man that has to be brought under control, it would seem to me.
	Frankly, I can't imagine because, you know, each of us has to come to terms with our own heart and conscience.
	I would fire the SOB in three seconds.
	I know you would.
	So, you know, all of the people who Trump is watching on TV are telling him to fire Mueller.
	It would be a mistake for him to fire Mueller.
	If he fired Mueller, then it would let the ball roll on all of the impeachment that the Democrats want to do.
	He's going to have to let this thing play out.
	But now there is some serious danger and the danger is coming from a different direction than the Mueller investigation.
	The danger is coming via the Stormy Daniels stuff.
	So if you are a fan of President Trump's and you think that Trump needs to stay in office, Under any imaginable circumstances.
	And also if you think that all of this is indeed an extenuated witch hunt.
	At this point we are far from Russian collusion.
	Remember this whole thing started with accusations that Trump had colluded with Russia.
	There's not a shred of evidence to suggest that there was active collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
	There really is not much there at all.
	I don't want to say shred of evidence.
	There's not much there at all.
	If you say, what does this have to do with collusion?
	The answer is nothing.
	If you say, what does this have to do with obstruction of justice?
	The answer is nothing.
	Now we're on a campaign finance reform scandal that is absolutely separate from the Mueller investigation entirely.
	And so maybe you're saying, listen, Trump has to defend himself.
	He should fire whomever he has to fire because Obama would obviously do the exact same thing the media would defend for him.
	That's the argument on one part of the right.
	The argument on the other part of the right is that just because Barack Obama did something bad doesn't mean that we also get to do something bad.
	That just because Barack Obama turned the FBI and the DOJ into his personal playthings doesn't mean that Donald Trump should do the same.
	And in fact, we should stand up against any president who wants to turn the DOJ and the FBI into their personal plaything.
	I think conservatives are going to be forced to make a choice on which way this goes.
	That choice doesn't have to be made yet.
	And the reason the choice doesn't have to be made yet is because we don't know yet what the FBI is looking for.
	We don't know yet what the FBI knows.
	We don't know yet what the DOJ knows.
	And as Jesse Isinger of ProPublica writes, a note of caution on the Michael Cohen news, the FBI screws up a lot.
	It messed up a raid on Benjamin Way.
	Case got thrown out.
	FBI raided David Yannick's hedge fund, which I'm convinced was an abuse.
	So before we jump to the conclusion that Trump is in serious, serious trouble, we're going to have to hear more about what happens next and what exactly they found.
	But if the pedal hits the metal, there are going to be a lot of people on the conservative side of the aisle, and I think not entirely unjustifiably, who will say, listen, Trump should fire who he has to fire.
	Obama certainly would.
	He would get away with it.
	And we can't play by Marcus of Queensbury rules.
	And then I think there will be other people, and I probably count myself in this camp, who will say, listen, You don't get to pervert the system of justice just because the left perverts the system of justice.
	And by the way, it is not a great thing that the President of the United States, if this turns out to be the case, was having his lawyer pay $130,000 to a porn star to shut her up 10 days before the election and skirting campaign finance laws in order to do so.
	Now, I will also say that there's going to be a strong part of me that suggests that Campaign finance reform violations are stupid in and of themselves.
	I think campaign finance reform laws are dumb.
	If you think that the base is going to abandon Trump over this sort of thing, I think that's mistaken.
	I don't think Trump's base is going anywhere on this.
	I don't think that there are a lot of conservatives in the country who are going to say Trump definitely deserves to leave office over a campaign finance violation about him having an affair.
	I just don't think you're gonna get a lot of play on the right for that, even if, legally speaking, maybe you should.
	Okay, so, I do want to discuss the situation in Syria, because while we're all talking about Michael Cohen, war may be breaking out in Syria, we'll talk about that in just a second, but first, you're gonna have to subscribe.
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	All righty, so, meanwhile, while all this is going on, war may be imminent in Syria.
	Trump yesterday was, before he spoke about the Michael Cohen thing with the press, he was actually at a meeting with all of his military bigwigs, and he told the press, big decisions may be coming soon on Syria.
	I'd like to begin by condemning the heinous attack on innocent Syrians with banned chemical weapons.
	It was an atrocious attack.
	It was horrible.
	You don't see Things like that, as bad as the news is around the world, you just don't see those images.
	We are studying that situation extremely closely.
	We are meeting with our military and everybody else.
	And we'll be making some major decisions over the next 24 to 48 hours.
	OK, so we will find out exactly what exactly this means.
	Obviously, the language coming out of the Trump administration is extraordinarily militant.
	Nikki Haley, who's the U.N.
	ambassador, the U.S.
	ambassador to the U.N., she says, listen, only monsters use chemical weapons.
	Who does this?
	Only a monster does this.
	Only a monster targets civilians and then ensures that there are no ambulances to transfer the wounded.
	No hospitals to save their lives.
	No doctors or medicine to ease their pain.
	I could hold up pictures of all of this killing and suffering for the council to see.
	But what would be the point?
	The monster who was responsible for these attacks has no conscience.
	Not even to be shocked by pictures of dead children.
	OK, General Mattis, of course, the head of the Department of Defense, our Defense Secretary, he says that he's not going to rule out anything, including possible U.S.
	military action.
	It seems like the chances of U.S.
	military action are extremely high.
	The president has indeed canceled the trip to South America that was already planned, and he's going to stay in Washington, D.C., which suggests that there are going to be some bombs flying over Damascus in the near future.
	Here's Mattis talking about it.
	The first thing we have to look at is why are chemical weapons still being used at all when Russia was the framework here in Tor of removing all the chemical weapons.
	And so working with our allies and partners from NATO to Qatar and elsewhere, we are going to address this issue.
	Can you rule out taking action, launching airstrikes against Assad, Mr. Secretary?
	I don't rule out anything right now.
	Okay, so this does raise one question.
	All the language coming out from the Trump administration has basically been about the morality of what's happening in Syria.
	We can all agree what's been happening in Syria is truly egregious, but there's one serious question.
	We talked about it a lot yesterday, particularly whether the United States actually has interests in Syria.
	Now, I made the case yesterday that we do have interest in Syria to the extent that we should be attempting to protect civilians from Assad's predations and we should be attempting to curb Iranian influence and Russian influence in Syria in order to protect against the Iranian caliphate that is going to threaten a third world war if a Sunni-Shia war breaks out in the Middle East and Israel gets caught up in the middle as well as Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
	That's our interest, is preserving some sort of stability there, which Russia obviously has no intent on doing and playing a counterbalancing act to Russia as well as Iran.
	Tucker Carlson makes a pretty strong counter case last night on Fox News.
	Here he is talking about whether Assad was even behind the chemical attack in Syria and what is our interest there anyway.
	All the geniuses tell us that Assad killed those children, but do they really know that?
	Of course they don't really know that.
	They're making it up.
	They have no real idea what happened.
	Actually, both sides in the Syrian civil war possess chemical weapons.
	How would it benefit Assad using chlorine gas last weekend?
	Well, it wouldn't.
	Assad's forces had been winning the war in Syria.
	The administration just announced its plans to pull American troops out of Syria, having vanquished ISIS.
	That's good news for Assad.
	And about the only thing he could do to reverse it and to hurt himself would be to use poison gas against children.
	Well, he did it anyway, they tell us.
	He's that evil.
	Okay, so Carlson is making a suggestion that's also been made by a lot of Russian sources, which is that Assad wasn't behind the chemical attacks at all.
	And it is worth noting that there were some allegations that there's no actual evidence that Assad was behind chemical attacks in April 2017 either, that maybe that was something that happened because of Syrian rebels.
	We're attempting to get a propaganda win or all the rest of it.
	Now, I'm skeptical that Assad was not behind this simply because this is a large scale chemical attack.
	Assad perpetrated large scale chemical attacks in Damascus in 2013 in front of the world press and didn't seem to care.
	And Obama, of course, didn't seem to care very much about it either.
	But the fact that that Carlson is calling this into question, what he's really saying here is what is our interest in Syria?
	And I think that's a question that ought to be debated at the congressional level.
	For all of my talk about how we ought to get involved at a certain level in Syria, and I've talked about minimizing American presence on the ground, using others to do it, using the Israeli Air Force as our proxy, using the American Air Force, this really does need to go through Congress.
	In the end, I think that Congress is the branch that declares war, and obviously this is indeed another undeclared war.
	Another undeclared war.
	And so for all the talk about about what Trump should or should not do, unless it provides an immediate threat to the United States, I am with Rand Paul and Justin Amash in the sense that I think the Congress ought to be voting on this stuff.
	OK, so meanwhile, the left is fighting mad, like very, very angry.
	Over the fact that there is a movie that is out about Teddy Kennedy.
	So, Chappaquiddick is out.
	It did really well at the box office over the weekend.
	So, good for all of you who saw it.
	I was encouraging all of you to see it, not just because they're an advertiser on the program, but because the movie is actually quite good.
	The movie made $5.8 million at the box office over the weekend.
	The budget on Chappaquiddick was not high, if I get my numbers right.
	But the reality is... So, the box office, I guess, was $6.2 million.
	And what was the budget?
	It looks like the budget, I guess, is not public at this point, but it was relatively low.
	So, let's see, the studio spent $16 million on P&A, that's promotion and advertisement, and the distribution rights were acquired for $4 million, so it needs to make back globally maybe $20, $25 million to break even.
	It will easily do that.
	It overperformed at the box office last weekend, and one of the reasons that it overperformed is because the movie itself is very good.
	Well, the left is very angry at the movie, though.
	Because it's very critical of Teddy Kennedy, who left a woman to die at the bottom of a river inside a car that he escaped.
	Okay, let's be real about this.
	Teddy Kennedy drove off a bridge with a woman in the car.
	He then escaped the car, let her die either of suffocation or of drowning, and then swam to shore, went to sleep for 12 hours, and called the cops.
	So...
	There are a bunch of people.
	It's amazing.
	There's so many people on the left who are now coming out and saying, how dare anyone question the credibility of Teddy Kennedy?
	How dare anyone make an issue out of Teddy Kennedy?
	It's just it's just insane.
	I mean, you'd have to be totally crazy to really think there was some sort of conspiracy here, as the movie posits.
	Well, the movie doesn't actually posit that Teddy Kennedy even had an affair with Mary Jo Kopechni.
	It doesn't posit, for example, That she was pregnant, which is one of the popular theories about Mary Jo Kopechny.
	What the movie does posit is that he may or may not have been drinking that night, and that he is a douchebag.
	Right?
	I mean, that's basically the contention of the movie, is that Teddy Kennedy was a bad human being.
	Which is exactly correct.
	Right?
	So there are two pieces in the last couple of days talking about this.
	One from the New York Times, in which Teddy biographer Neil Gabler said that Chappaquiddick was too harsh on Senator Kennedy.
	And they say, this is the tweet from the New York Times opinion page, ready?
	Ted Kennedy was a real man living out a real life.
	His political opponents could and did distort that life for their advantage.
	But just how many liberties can an artist or entertainer take when deploying a biographical subject?
	And now the reality is the Chappaquiddick sticks to the facts pretty damn closely.
	Like, so closely that they don't even take the risk of making any of the allegations about him being drunk, which I think pretty clearly he was.
	Teddy Kennedy was a lifelong drunk.
	Teddy Kennedy One of the reasons maybe you swim away from a car and go to sleep is that all the alcohol in your blood goes out of your system because whether or not you intended for the woman to be left in the car, if a woman dies in a car that you are driving while you are drunk, that is DUI manslaughter and you go to jail for a long, long time.
	Teddy Kennedy did not report the thing until the next day when all of the alcohol presumably was out of his bloodstream.
	But according to Neil Gabler, the real victim of the Chappaquiddick movie is Ted Kennedy.
	Quote, "Ted Kennedy has not passed into the public domain in this sense, so one tampers with his life at the peril of turning it into a tawdry melodrama.
	This is especially true of the Kennedy family, who remain politically active and divisive." So Teddy Kennedy isn't in the public domain?
	I have my favorite part of this article from the New York Times is where the author of the article declares that Teddy Kennedy immediately and forever after felt deep remorse and responsibility for the accident.
	It haunted him.
	He did.
	He felt such remorse, such deep, deep remorse that In the mid-1980s, early 1990s, he actually sexually assaulted a waitress.
	I mean, that's how much remorse he felt about his treatment of women.
	And this is described by Michael Kelly in GQ.
	Gavilio is a 103-pound waitress, a woman who was at a club that Kennedy was frequenting with a senator named Chris Dodd, who was also a Democrat.
	This is a direct quote.
	Kennedy grabs the 5'3", 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table.
	She lands on her back, scattering crystal plates and cutlery and lit candles.
	Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken.
	Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who's sprawled in a chair.
	With Gaviglio on Dodd's lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair.
	As he is doing this, Lowe enters the room, Lowe is another waitress.
	She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers.
	Startled, Kennedy leaps up.
	He laughs.
	Yes, clearly Ted Kennedy learned his lesson.
	Vox.com has another article today talking about Teddy Kennedy and how he really was a good guy and people ought to stop picking on him.
	The same people who defended Teddy Kennedy say that Donald Trump should be impeached because he had an affair with a porn star and then paid a bunch of money to her to shut up and they say campaign finance is really what ought to take him down.
	Spare me your moral indignation, folks on the left, unless you are really really into campaign finance reform.
	You're the folks who upheld Teddy Kennedy for years and years and years and years.
	OK, so in just a second, we'll get to some things I like and then some things that I hate.
	And we'll do a Federalist paper since we didn't do one yesterday.
	So time for some things I like.
	So the thing that I like today.
	We've been doing some musicals that you may not have heard of.
	One of them is called Once on this Island.
	This one, I think, came out in 1991.
	And it's about a, it's sort of a mythical take on a young peasant girl living in, I'm trying to remember which island she's on.
	But in any case, it's about her pursuing a guy.
	It's sort of a Cinderella story that goes wrong.
	But the music is really glorious.
	And it's really, it's not a fun ending, but it's a fun musical.
	So check out Once on this Island here.
	And here's what one of the opening numbers sounds like.
	We dance to their ever-changing moods.
	We know the gods are happy when their green things grow.
	They're angry when their rebirth starts to overflow.
	And since we never know which way, then winds will blow.
	We dance to the air.
	We dance to the water.
	The gods awake and we take no chance.
	Our hearts hear their song.
	Our feet move along.
	And to the music of the gods, we dance.
	Okay, so the guy who wrote the music to this is Stephen Flaherty's.
	Stephen Flaherty also wrote the score to Ragtime, and it takes place in French Antilles in the Caribbean.
	I think there's a revival on Broadway right now, so if you're in New York, go see the revival because I've heard that it is pretty good.
	Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	So Jack Dorsey is the head of Twitter and apparently he has now been getting personally involved, personally involved in banning people from Twitter.
	So we've been talking for a long time on this program about how social media is being used by the left in order to suck people in and then to censor what they see.
	Well, apparently, Jack Dorsey is doing exactly that.
	Apparently, he is now getting involved.
	He has started banning people on the basis of personal choice.
	And that is really not a good thing.
	Apparently, his direct approach is a welcome change to some people who are on the inside of the company.
	But now he is being like down to the individual, like saying which people should be banned and which people should not.
	Well, if that's the case, then perhaps we should blame Jack Dorsey that, for example, Louis Farrakhan is still verified on Twitter, but Richard Spencer is not.
	The leftist priorities of Jack Dorsey are very much in evidence.
	He actually tweeted out the other day in an article.
	That was pretty shocking about why the left should not tolerate the right.
	So the fact that all of these social media companies are run by folks on the left, they say that their companies are unbiased.
	They are not unbiased in the slightest, and people should be aware of that when they're using Twitter.
	Obviously, the bans are being extended over time to a variety of people, and that's true on YouTube.
	Which has been sued now by Prager University for demonetizing them.
	It's extended obviously to Facebook, which I've sounded off on in detail here on this program.
	It's true of Twitter as well.
	Okay, so time for a quick Federalist paper since we didn't do one yesterday.
	So we're on Federalist number 23.
	We're about a quarter of the way through the Federalist papers.
	And Alexander Hamilton wrote this particular Federalist paper.
	And the goal of this Federalist paper is to explain what exactly the Constitution, the new Constitution, will do that the Articles of Confederation did not.
	And Federalist 23 talks specifically about the purposes of government.
	He says, quote, the principal purposes to be answered by union are the common defense of the members, the preservation of the public peace, as well against internal convulsions as external attacks, the regulation of commerce with other nations in between the states, the superintendents of our intercourse, political and commercial with foreign countries.
	That's it.
	Those are all the things.
	So for all the talk about how the federal government is supposed to regulate how much water you have in your toilet, and the federal government is supposed to be involved in criminal fact-finding, and the federal government is supposed to be involved in every area of your life, and we need thousands and thousands of pages of federal regulations released every year.
	The fact is that, as the founders thought, there are very few actual Goals for government.
	Common defense.
	Preservation against insurrection.
	Regulation of commerce with foreign nations, i.e.
	no internal tariffs and no external tariffs unless approved by the federal government.
	That's it.
	Those are all the things.
	And yet somehow the federal government has grown to be super important in our daily lives.
	And that's a demonstration of the fact that we have moved away from the founding vision.
	The case for a powerful federal government is reliant on the areas in which the federal government is actually sovereign and sacrosanct.
	Okay?
	And those areas have to be pretty small, otherwise you're granting the federal government tremendous power over expanding areas of American life.
	That's what the Anti-Federalists said.
	And over time, they ended up being right as the federal government continued to grow and grow and grow, beyond the bounds that anyone, Federalist or Anti-Federalist, ever would have comprehended.
	Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest, because there's always breaking news.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
	Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
	Edited by Alex Zingaro.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

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