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April 12, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:39
Crisis Point | Ep. 516
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Speaker of the House Paul Ryan steps down, the Trump probe pushes the president toward precipitous action, and James Comey's book is a-comin'.
We'll have all of it.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So we do have a lot to get to today, and we'll get to all of it in just a second.
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Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is now out.
And what's been fascinating to see is how the left and how the media have reacted to Paul Ryan leaving.
So for a long time, they were looking at Paul Ryan as though he was the future of the party.
He was the alternative to Trump.
And there are a lot of people who are who are thinking that this was a Trump-Ryan battle.
That was the battle that really mattered.
Now, listen, President Trump won the presidency and that battle Ended in a certain way with a rapprochement, which is that President Trump was going to be the attitude of the party and Paul Ryan was going to be the idea man of the party.
And that's essentially how things worked for the first year.
Because let's be real, most of Trump's sort of heretical priorities, you know, the things like trade wars or infrastructure plans, those things didn't go anywhere with Paul Ryan in the House.
The stuff that actually did move Were some regulatory reform measures, were the tax cuts, the attempt to restructure entitlements in the tax bill.
All of that was Paul Ryan stuff.
So what you actually got was Paul Ryan type governance in many areas and Donald Trump style rhetoric.
That was the sort of agreement that Republicans came to.
But with Ryan out, now what you're seeing is an attempt to recast this entire battle as a battle between Ryan and Trump, even though Ryan was actually pushing a lot of Trump's priorities and Trump was signing a lot of Ryan's priorities.
That doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
And this misread, I think, is an attempt to paint everyone in the Republican Party as sort of beholden to everything bad about Trump.
See, this is the goal of the left now.
So the left tried to do this in 2016 by calling everybody a deplorable who supported President Trump.
Now what they're attempting to do is they're attempting to say that anyone who even tangentially worked with President Trump actually made a Faustian bargain with President Trump.
This is the tenor of the media coverage.
And I don't think that that's correct.
I don't think it's a Faustian bargain at all to say, listen, I don't like President Trump's character.
I don't like what he's been doing on character.
But I like a lot of his policy.
That doesn't seem like a Faustian bargain at all.
That seems like normal politics on a pretty daily basis in Washington, D.C., where everybody sucks and where the politics is what matters in the end.
The policy is what's supposed to matter in the end.
But Paul Ryan was asked about this by Jake Tapper.
Tapper on CNN said to Ryan, you know, did you make a Faustian bargain with President Trump?
I'm really proud of the accomplishments we have here.
And so I don't see this as some Faustian bargain, devil's bargain, or whatever it is you call it.
I see it as the country said, go fix these problems.
You guys get the majority in the House.
You get the majority in the Senate.
Here's the presidency.
Now go do something with it.
That's what we're doing.
That's not devil's bargain.
That's actually doing what the people in this country asked us to do and keeping our word.
And I'm very proud of that fact.
I mean, I'm wondering what exactly the media mean when they say things like devil's bargain.
Do they mean that Paul Ryan has not been critical of Trump on character grounds?
Because that's not true.
Do they mean that Paul Ryan has sometimes soft-pedaled those character criticisms in order to get policy done?
Maybe that's true.
But he's also working with a Republican.
He's working with a president in his own party.
And he has to keep his eye on the prize when it comes to policymaking, which, after all, is his job as Speaker of the House.
Tapper continued to push Ryan on this on CNN yesterday, saying, does Trump embarrass you?
I know after the Access Hollywood tape came out in October 2016, Mr. Trump was asked not to appear at an event for you.
Now it's back in the news in a major way.
This must bother you, Access Hollywood, Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal at a certain point.
It must be embarrassing.
I didn't even read the article.
I mean, I'm obviously familiar with what you're talking about.
So we're pretty focused on just getting our work done here.
And so this is something that I'll let you guys speculate about.
Right now, I'm busy trying to get things done in Congress.
We've got a big agenda here.
And so that's kind of where my focus is.
And I don't really have much punditry to offer you on this.
And look, I just think the way the President ought to handle this is compartmentalize it and focus on doing your job.
We've got issues with Syria.
We've got a Bentley's budget memo we're passing this week.
We've got a lot to do, and that's what I'm focused on.
So here's what's hilarious about this.
Basically, if you're Paul Ryan and you're just a guy who's trying to get an agenda through, you're just trying to get some things done, you're getting ripped by the right as somebody who's not sufficiently supportive of President Trump, even while you're pushing President Trump's agenda, and you're being ripped by the left for not going out there and ripping Trump every day.
Well, for Paul Ryan and for a lot of other Congress people who I'm talking to in Congress, Trump is not the top of their priority list.
They weren't elected 10, 15, 20 years ago to be beholden to Trump, nor were they elected 10, 20, 30 years ago in order for them to shift their entire schedule of their day around reacting in the media to what President Trump does, either negative or positive.
And so, you know, when Paul Ryan says, listen, I'm gonna keep my nose to the grindstone and do what I'm supposed to do, he gets ripped on both sides.
It's pretty astonishing.
It's pretty astonishing.
And I think Meghan McCain made a really good point yesterday.
So Meghan McCain obviously is John McCain's daughter.
And yesterday on The View, there are a bunch of people who are all the left was cheering Paul Ryan.
Oh, it's just so great that Paul Ryan is out because Paul Ryan is a shill and Paul Ryan hasn't stood up to Trump and all the rest of this stuff.
All these same Democrats who never stood up to Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton, one iota, and now it's about Paul Ryan who didn't stand up to Trump, even though during the election cycle, Paul Ryan actually did stand up to then-candidate Trump in the middle of the election cycle and disinvited him from a particular event after the Access Hollywood tape and told all the members of his Republican caucus that he wasn't going to be openly campaigning for Trump up till the election.
Right, but this was not enough for the folks on the left.
They say that, you know, they're really happy that Ryan is going.
And Meghan McCain makes a good point.
She says, listen, if Ryan is not sufficient for you in terms of his sort of tenor, then why exactly wouldn't people vote for President Trump?
This is the problem, though.
What do you want?
If Paul Ryan isn't good enough and people... I want them all out.
But that's not what...
We shouldn't want that.
We live in a democracy.
We should want two healthy parties debating against each other.
But if Paul Ryan is the greatest sin, this is how we got Trump.
Because if Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney and people like this are the worst kind of politicians, then you deserve Trump.
Because he's not.
He's a truly decent man that was trying to fight for democracy and conservative ideals.
And now what's going to be left, I have no idea.
Okay, good for Meghan McCain.
This is exactly right.
What Meghan McCain is saying here is exactly right.
You know, the left sits around and they wonder, how did we get Trump?
How did we get Trump?
By calling Paul Ryan the worst.
By calling Mitt Romney the worst.
By suggesting that people who were decent were actually bad.
And then you know what the right did?
They said, well maybe it was their decency that lost them the election.
Maybe what we need is an indecent man who punches in order to win an election.
And then Trump won on exactly that basis.
And then you're wondering why the right has resonated to President Trump?
You're seeing this sort of coverage across the spectrum from folks on the left.
Tim Alberta, who actually used to work at National Review, so he's not a left-winger, but he writes now for Politico, and he has a whole article called, The Tragedy of Paul Ryan.
He began as a Jack Kemp conservative.
He ended as Donald Trump's man on Capitol Hill.
That's not remotely true.
He was not Donald Trump's man on Capitol Hill.
He was trying to push against a lot of Trumpian priorities.
It was Paul Ryan who was attempting to end around Mitch McConnell and get some actual things done.
Now again, I'm not a huge advocate of Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House.
I don't think Paul Ryan was the best Speaker of the House in the world.
I don't think that he was the worst Speaker of the House in the world.
I think he was better than John Boehner.
I think he was worse than Newt Gingrich.
And I think he's somewhere in the middle.
But this newfound attempt to paint Ryan leaving as anything but Ryan leaving because he doesn't want to be blamed for a blue wave that is not his fault is, I think, revisionist history on both sides.
On the left, they're saying Paul Ryan is leaving because Trump has taken over the party.
On the right, they're saying Paul Ryan is leaving because Trump has taken over the party.
I don't think any of that is true.
I mean, that's why President Trump was praising Paul Ryan yesterday, because in President Trump's view, correctly, Paul Ryan was an ally in helping him push some of his political priorities.
But here's the article from Tim Alberta at Politico.
He says,
This is a political obituary of Ryan's own writing.
His silence in the face of Trump's indignities and his observance of the exquisite presidential leadership, a line that will live in infamy, Would be less remarkable had he not first established himself as one of Congress's good guys, someone whose sense of principle and decency informed his objections to Trump's candidacy in the first place.
Indeed, the Speaker's habit of turning a blind eye to the President's behavior is relevant and revelatory because it was not always so.
There was hardly a tougher Trump critic during the 2016 campaign than Ryan, who felt duty-bound to combat the candidate's dark rhetoric and the party's nativist drift.
Yet there has hardly been anyone softer on Trump since Election Day than Ryan, who felt duty-bound to deliver on the policy promises made to voters, and decided that doing so meant ignoring the ad hominem and savaging of private citizens, the hush money paid to porn stars, the attacks on private companies, the attempts to delegitimize institutions, and the innumerable other acts for which Barack Obama would have been impaled by the right.
This was Paul's deal with the devil, a phrase used by several of the speaker's confidants in the days following Trump's shocking triumph.
So again, the idea here from some of these folks is that presumably, I guess, the idea is that that Paul Ryan should have been out front all the time, spending his time ripping on President Trump.
This is this would have pleased a lot of the folks on the left.
Now, listen, I'm in the business of political commentating.
This is what I do for a living.
And so one of the things I'm able to do is when I think Trump has done something wrong, I will rip him for it.
And when I think President Trump does something right, I will praise him to the skies.
This is something that I am able to do.
But I also am not in the position of having to negotiate with President Trump over policy.
So to pretend that Paul Ryan's sole job was to comment on President Trump's doings day in and day out is to ignore the role of the legislature in the process.
I think if Paul Ryan committed any great sin, it was not standing up to Trump and McConnell on policy, not even on Trump's character.
Listen, would I prefer that all Republicans played the same fiddle that I'm playing?
Sure.
I would prefer that when Donald Trump does something bad, all Republicans say that's bad, and when Donald Trump does something good, all Republicans say that's good, and that would include legislators.
But these are the people who also have to negotiate with Trump, and there is a bit of practicality that has to take place here with regard to how you get policy done that you have promised your own constituents.
This may be the last time in our modern history that Republicans run all the branches of government.
And you expect him, Paul Ryan, to blow that on a daily basis by talking about Donald Trump's dumb tweets when everybody already knows Donald Trump's tweets are dumb?
Again, the media are really driving people toward Trump because a bunch of people on the right are simply going to respond to all of this by saying very simply, listen, you don't like Paul Ryan?
We'll give you somebody who really doesn't care what you think.
We'll give you Donald Trump.
Okay, so before I go any further on this, and I want to get into the continuation of the probe into President Trump, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Tommy John.
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OK, so again, I think that the focus on Paul Ryan from the left has been Paul Ryan is a bad guy because he didn't spend enough time ripping Trump up and down.
And then if you watch Fox News and some of the commentators on Fox News, the problem with Paul Ryan is that he wasn't sufficiently obsequious to Donald Trump.
He should have spent all of his time kissing Trump's ass more.
Well, again, talking to the legislatures, talking to the legislators, I can tell you this.
There are a lot of legislators who don't like President Trump much personally, but they are keeping it under wraps for a couple of reasons.
One, because they think that it is counterproductive to rip into a president they have to negotiate with.
And number two, because they already figured that it is well known that President Trump has some character flaws that are pretty serious, and them mouthing off about it only allows the media to use them as a tool against the Republican Party more generally.
That's why I think it's very important to draw distinction in our minds in the conservative movement between our legislators and our thought leaders.
These are not the same people.
Now, this is a broader conversation that I think needs to be had.
Who are the thought leaders inside the Republican Party?
Who are the thought leaders inside the conservative movement?
Ever since the days of Woodrow Wilson, there's been an idea that the president is the thought leader of the country.
Barack Obama was the thought leader.
George W. Bush was the thought leader.
Bill Clinton was the thought leader.
Ronald Reagan was the thought leader.
But the reality is that the way that the founders drew up the Constitution, that the folks who were running all of our lawmaking were not supposed to be the quote-unquote thought leaders, they were supposed to be the implementers subject to the public will.
And that meant that thought leaders were really supposed to exist, in many cases, outside of government.
And many of the great thought leaders in American history were people who never served as president, who barely served in legislatures.
Alexander Hamilton was somebody who never became president, obviously.
He served inside a couple of administrations.
But he was not somebody who was going to be president of the United States.
Benjamin Franklin, another great thought leader.
There are many great thought leaders in American history, and those thought leaders Have been as important or more important than people who are in positions of power.
Looking to people whose job it is to write and rewrite legislation as the people who are going to speak to principle, I think is largely a mistake.
And it's a mistake also for the base.
The reason it's a mistake for the base is because when you listen to people like Paul Ryan talk, Or Mitch McConnell talk.
And they talk about philosophy.
Their philosophy sounds a lot like yours in the base.
Their philosophy sounds a lot like mine.
This is why when I interviewed Paul Ryan a couple of weeks ago, and he and I talked conservative philosophy, he sounds exactly like me with regard to spending priorities.
And then a week later, he's pushing into law a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending package, with which I assume he totally disagrees.
Why?
Because legislators have two jobs.
One is to talk about ideas, but the more important job is for them to actually get legislation done.
It is our job to have the ideas and to hold people responsible for those ideas.
So don't look to politicians for being your thought leaders.
Don't look to politicians to be the character advocates.
Don't look to politicians to be these guys because they just won't be.
I wish they would be.
I wish that everyone in politics spent all their days talking about principle and worrying about principle.
And then openly stating when they were straying from principle in order to make legislative gambits.
But that's not how this works.
That's not how this works.
And blaming Paul Ryan for how the system works I think is a mistake and also leads us to some pretty stupid conclusions about the kind of politicians that we should be electing instead of the kind of politicians who can get things done and then it's up to us to toss them out if they don't get those things done or if they don't reflect our own ideology.
Okay, meanwhile...
President Trump's really, really angry.
He continues to be very, very upset about this FBI probe.
And we are now finding out what exactly the FBI was looking for when it raided Michael Cohen's office.
Michael Cohen, of course, was President Trump's personal lawyer, and the personal office of Michael Cohen was raided by the FBI.
Apparently, one of the things that they were looking for were documents related to the Access Hollywood tape.
So what exactly does Michael Cohen have to do with the Access Hollywood tape?
As you recall, in the late days of the election, There is a tape that was broken from Access Hollywood in which President Trump was caught on a hot mic talking with Billy Bush and speaking about how he was a found fan of grabbing women by the genitals and how if famous people grabbed women by the genitals, they were totally fine with this.
And of course, this is a big hubbub and Donald Trump dropped.
8 to 10 points in the polls, and everybody assumes his electoral chances were over, including me, right?
All of this was a big hubbub at the time, but what does it have to do with Michael Cohen?
What does that have to do with President Trump's lawyer?
Well, the suggestion is now being made, and if this is really all this is going to be, honestly, if the FBI raided Michael Cohen on this basis, if the FBI raided Michael Cohen based on only the Stormy Daniels stuff, This is really weak tea.
But here's what the suggestion is.
The suggestion was made by Adam Schiff, the representative from, actually, I believe, my district.
He made that suggestion.
He said, quote, You'll recall that the timeline that day was the Access Hollywood tapes were released at like 3.56 p.m.
and 4.30 p.m.
WikiLeaks dropped all of the Podesta emails.
And so I guess the suggestion is now being made by Adam Schiff that Michael Cohen called up the Russians and said, listen, guys, I know you're going to release the Podesta emails anyway, but it'd be great if you could accelerate that release so that we can have a counter-narrative.
I find that exceedingly hard to believe.
Now, it's quite possible that they're looking for evidence that Michael Cohen has spent a lot of time paying off various paramours and bad stories for Donald Trump.
There's another story like that from The New Yorker today.
The New Yorker printed a story that says that the National Enquirer paid $30,000 to a doorman of Donald Trump's who was trying to sell a story that said that Donald Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock in the late 80s.
No one knows who that child would be.
We can all speculate.
And I guess we could do some fun speculation and just pray and hope that it wasn't Justin Bieber.
But what we also know is that the National Enquirer had actually done this to Stormy Daniels before, I believe.
Or was it... There's another Playboy bunny?
There was somebody else that the National Enquirer had paid for a story.
Karen McDougal, maybe?
And then dropped the story and quashed the story.
And so there was suggestion that this was also an in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign.
If all that we've got here is in-kind contributions to the Trump campaign, I don't think that's enough for impeachment.
I just don't.
I think campaign finance violations are a big nothing when it comes to the American public imagination.
Very few people care about campaign finance violations.
People assume that there is a lot of corruption with regard to how campaign finance is done.
And again, the Obama administration took in $2 million in 2008 of illegal campaign contributions, and they ended up paying a $400,000 fine by 2012.
There was no suggestion that Obama should have been impeached over all of that.
But again, this investigation is certainly a thorn in the side of President Trump.
Steve Bannon is suddenly back, right?
You remember Sloppy Steve, and President Trump ousted him to my great enjoyment.
And Steve Bannon, who was the former White House chief strategist, who then went Well, now Bannon is back and he's trying to weasel his way back into Trump's good graces by doing what he does best, giving unbelievably crappy advice.
According to the Washington Post, Steve Bannon has called up Trump and he's pitching a plan to West Wing aides to try and end the special counsel probe, to end Robert Mueller's probe.
The first step would be to fire Rod Rosenstein.
Rod Rosenstein, of course, is the deputy attorney general who actually recused himself and appointed the special counsel.
He still has the jurisdiction to fire Robert Mueller.
But Rosenstein has been blamed for a lot of stuff by President Trump.
So step one would be firing Rod Rosenstein.
Step two would be stop cooperating with Mueller.
And step three would be invoking executive privilege so that previous White House staffer interviews with Mueller become null and void, according to Bannon.
So Bannon told the Washington Post, quote, the president wasn't fully briefed by his lawyers on the implications of not invoking executive privilege.
It was a strategic mistake to turn over everything without due process.
An executive privilege should be exerted immediately and retroactively.
Okay, well, that is not a possibility.
Executive privilege only applies when you apply it.
You can't retroactively apply executive privilege.
You don't get to just declare willy-nilly executive privilege on stuff that's already been turned over to the FBI.
At least that's a difficult legal case.
So Bannon is trying to get Trump to fire Rod Rosenstein, which would end in presumably the firing of Mueller eventually.
I'll explain why this is all a bad idea in just a second.
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Okay, so again, Steve Bannon is trying to get the president's fire Rod Rosenstein That would be a disastrous idea.
And not only that, there are other folks in the Republican Party who are doing the same.
Newt Gingrich, I think, made just an asinine statement yesterday.
He was talking about this FBI raid on Michael Cohen's offices.
Now, you may not like the FBI raid on Michael Cohen's office.
Alan Dershowitz certainly doesn't.
And I think that there's some logistical reasons why you wouldn't like that raid.
Well, we haven't seen the warrant.
We don't know exactly what they were looking for.
This seems overbroad.
We have to carefully protect attorney-client privilege.
One of the most amazing things that I saw yesterday, this is really funny, is the New York Times saying, if Trump's innocent, why would he care about attorney-client privilege?
Okay, that's like saying, if you don't have anything to hide, why don't you just let the police search your house every day?
If you don't have anything to hide, why don't you just make your walls of glass?
Maybe because you actually like your privacy.
Maybe because there's stuff that Trump has done with Cohen that's not illegal, but that's embarrassing.
There are plenty of reasons why you would like attorney-client privilege if you're President Trump, even if you're not trying to cover up a crime.
The New York Times, however, doesn't accept that.
Again, Alan Dershowitz has said that he thinks that this search was overbroad, that since we don't know the basis of the search or what they're looking for, it seems like a wild jump to allow the FBI to raid the offices of Michael Cohen, who's the president's lawyer.
I know that there are other talk show hosts who have been suggesting That it may not in fact even be a campaign finance violation if the president of the United States and Michael Cohen were to pay off Stormy Daniels.
So what exactly would be the underlying crime?
Nonetheless, what Newt Gingrich says here is so crazy that it's not good for President Trump's case.
Here's what Newt Gingrich said about the FBI search.
We're supposed to have the rule of law.
It ain't the rule of law when they kick in your door at 3 o'clock in the morning, and you're faced with armed men, and you have had no reason to be told you're going to have that kind of treatment.
That's Stalin.
That's the Gestapo in Germany.
That shouldn't be the American FBI.
OK, so no, it is not the Gestapo.
No, it is not Stalin-esque.
This is ridiculous.
There is a full warrant process that was gone through.
It went to a magistrate judge, went to the U.S.
District Attorney in the Southern District of New York, who was a Republican.
So again, all of this is overstated.
Now, does this mean that Mueller hasn't exceeded his brief here?
I think Mueller pretty clearly has exceeded his brief in some ways.
Do I think that this violation of attorney-client privilege is a wonderful idea?
I'm not going to know that until I see more evidence.
I'm happy to wait for more evidence instead of jumping to conclusions about where this is going.
But one thing is clear, with all of the hubbub over it, with all of the lack of information, it's pretty obvious that President Trump is getting more and more agitated about this.
And you can see that the media are goading him.
You can actually see this.
If you watch CNN, the media are goading President Trump.
Over and over and over, they're goading President Trump.
Wolf Blitzer yesterday was spending most of the day talking about, the President is probably in the Oval Office, fulminating right now.
The President is probably in the West Wing, just angry and tweeting right now.
And then they would have full panel conversations on how angry Trump was, which of course is designed to make Trump angrier because the media would love nothing better than for President Trump to fire Robert Mueller.
Whoopi Goldberg sort of let the cat out of the bag here.
She explained, We're sitting around pontificating about something that hasn't happened, that's going on a lot of unnamed sources, so I don't think that we should get too far ahead of our skis.
I do think everything you're saying about what would happen if he does fire Mueller, I've said, Lindsey Graham has said it's political suicide.
I 100% think there would be, I think there would actually be rioting in Washington, D.C.
I think it would be at levels we haven't seen.
Now that would be fun to watch, I have to say.
Yeah, I mean, but I think it would take levels that we can't comprehend since the Nixon era.
Okay, so she says that she would love it, right?
That Whoopi is looking forward to the riots.
The left wants this.
They want the excuse to impeach President Trump.
They want the excuse to say that this is full-scale obstruction of justice.
And that's another reason why they've been pushing, for example, the James Comey book, which is coming out now.
Lindsey Graham gets this, right?
Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, he says to President Trump, please do not Do not fire Mueller.
If you fire Mueller, it's just going to backfire on you.
It's a big mistake.
Lindsey Graham is exactly correct about this.
Even if you hate the Mueller investigation, even if you think the Mueller investigation sucks, even if you think that it's all a sham, even if you think they've got nothing on collusion, I think they have nothing on collusion, even if you think that there's no evidence of criminal activity yet, and I've seen no evidence of actual criminal activity yet, even if you believe all of that, firing Mueller is a big mistake, as Lindsey Graham says.
Mr. President, you're watching.
I think you're going to be fine unless you screw this up.
Let the process play out.
I don't believe you colluded with the Russians, but Mueller will soon tell us.
The Cohen situation, I am convinced, has got nothing to do with Russia.
I think they're trying to squeeze Michael Cohen in order to—and there's obviously all kinds of correspondence that would have related to President Trump in the time even before he was running that would be in that office.
And the president seems incensed about it, based on what he's writing.
I understand the president feel like they're getting out of bounds here, but I want to tell you this.
If Mueller was trying to squeeze Cohen, Mueller would have done it.
This is something unconnected to Russia.
I'm 100% convinced of that.
And we'll see what Mueller finds.
Let him do his job.
Okay, so, you know, I think that Lindsey Graham is totally right about this.
But again, the media are now in the business of trying to goad President Trump into making a presidency-ending mistake by firing Robert Mueller.
One of the other ways they're doing this is by pushing James Comey's book.
So, let's start with this.
James Comey, the former FBI director, is indeed a grandstander.
President Trump called him a grandstander.
President Trump suggested that he was in it for the attention.
James Comey, it's pretty clear, is exactly that.
He should have been fired after he went out front and said that Hillary Clinton did not violate the law, even when she did.
That was completely inappropriate.
It was completely inappropriate for him to do a full press conference laying out all the reasons that Hillary Clinton had committed criminal violations and then to recommend to the DOJ in order to cover for then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
And say that she shouldn't be prosecuted anyway.
Then he came back about a few days before the election and he issued a letter about how he had reopened the Hillary email investigation, essentially.
And then a couple days later, he shut it down again.
So again, well done, James Comey.
And then Trump should have fired him when he first came into office and said, listen, this guy's incompetent.
This guy obviously loves the limelight.
He loves being out front.
You know, this is absurd.
Instead, President Trump kept him around in some sort of misguided bid for, I guess, bipartisanship.
And then he kept going to James Comey, and he kept saying, listen, you know, FBI director, can you just say that I'm not under investigation?
And Comey kept saying, you're not under investigation, but I'm not going to say it.
And the reason I'm not going to say it is because if you do fall under investigation, then I'll have to announce it.
And Trump said, OK, fine, so do that.
Like, fine, but just say I'm not under investigation right now.
Like, why is that so tough?
Comey wouldn't do it, so Trump fired him.
Totally within his purview.
James Comey himself testified before Congress that his investigation was not impeded in any way by President Trump, that President Trump did not act well, that President Trump had asked him about loyalty, that President Trump had suggested that he drop the investigation of Mike Flynn, but at no point had Trump actually exerted pressure on Comey to do anything.
He said a couple of things, but that does not necessarily amount to exerting pressure, especially when he's the President of the United States, and he can actually do a lot of stuff within the purview of his executive power in order to quash an investigation if he wants to.
Well, Comey waits a full year, a full year after his firing, and now he's coming out with this book.
All about how honorable and duty-bound he is.
And now he'll answer all the questions.
So we've been told that he's answering.
He was with, for an hour, with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News.
And that's where he's launching his book.
And we're supposed to believe that he is some sort of great honorable figure who's now going to answer all the questions.
Well, he was in front of Congress and didn't answer like half their questions.
So now all of a sudden he's a great honorable figure?
And of course, the media are truly well and good excited about this.
I mean, they are just, they're sweating bullets with excitement over how wonderful this is going to be.
I'll show you just how excited they are in just a second.
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So the media are very pumped up, of course, about James Comey.
And James Comey, there are clips now coming out from his interview with George Stephanopoulos.
First of all, every time I mention George Stephanopoulos, I'm going to say former Hillary Clinton chief of staff, George Stephanopoulos.
And George Stephanopoulos acting as a lead anchor on a major news network is just insane.
It is insipid.
It's the equivalent of having Karl Rove anchor coverage on some tell-all book from the Obama administration.
It's just ridiculous.
But here's George Stephanopoulos interviewing James Comey and Comey doing his righteous indignation routine.
How strange is it for you to sit here and compare the president to a mob boss?
The things that you know but haven't said that could damage President Trump.
And to those who say you should have brought Hillary Clinton before a grand jury?
The exclusive interview everyone will be talking about.
Was President Trump obstructing justice?
Should Donald Trump be impeached?
Stephanopoulos.
Comey.
This Sunday night at a special time.
10, 9 central on ABC.
So much honor.
So much higher loyalty.
You can see George—I mean, I love that promo, especially because all you have are cutaway shots of Comey.
Comey doesn't say a word anywhere in there.
He apparently calls Trump a mob-like figure, a mob boss figure.
Well, again, I don't think that that's wildly unpredictable, given the fact that President Trump's own lawyer has suggested he is Tom Hagen, right?
I mean, Michael Cohen has said that he's Tom Hagen to Donald Trump's Michael Corleone, so that's not exactly a shock in any real sense.
But the media are very excited about Comey because what they're hoping is that, again, Donald Trump gets so angry over Comey that he just gets mad the next day and fires Mueller for no reason at all.
The reality is that James Comey, there's so much politics going on and so little of honor going on, it's pretty insane.
The media are also hot and bothered by the news that the RNC is going after James Comey in advance of the release of this book.
So, according to CNN, the battle plan against Comey, obtained by CNN, calls for branding the nation's former top law enforcement official as Lion Comey through a website, digital advertising, and talking points to be sent to Republicans across the country before his memoir is released next week.
The White House signed off on the plan, which is being overseen by the RNC.
The chairwoman of the RNC, Ronna Romney McDaniel, has said, quote, Comey is a liar and a leaker, and his misconduct led both Republicans and Democrats to call for his firing.
If Comey wants the spotlight back on, and will make sure the American people understand why he has no one to blame but himself, For his complete lack of credibility.
And they have actually opened up a site.
It is called WhyInComey.com.
They've been using Trump's appellation for James Comey.
And it has quotes from Democrats testifying how James Comey was unfit for office, as well as explanations for why Trump's firing of Comey was not obstruction of justice.
Now, the media, of course, are treating this as a scandal.
How dare the RNC attack Comey?
Well, maybe the RNC is attacking Comey because Comey is He waited a year so he could get a massive book advance and then go on a publicity tour to talk about how much Trump sucks.
Maybe that's why they're attacking Comey.
Is that really any sort of shock?
And again, Comey deserves pretty much every bit of it.
Comey has been wildly dishonorable throughout a lot of this process.
That doesn't mean that Trump was smart to fire him.
He wasn't.
It doesn't mean that Trump was smart in how he fired him.
He fired him, and then he went on TV two days later and suggested that the reason that he fired James Comey was because he didn't like how James Comey had been asking about the Russia investigation, and he used Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, as cover for the firing of James Comey, requiring Rod Rosenstein to appoint Robert Mueller in the first place.
So if Trump had never fired Comey, none of this ever happened.
That said, does James Comey deserve the criticism?
You bet your ass he deserves the criticism.
James Comey is, in fact, a grandstander.
That said, is it smart strategy of the RNC to be parroting Trump's branding of Lyin' Comey?
No, it makes it look political.
What they really should do is they should just say, listen, James Comey's credibility on these issues has been called into question.
James Comey is somebody who likes the limelight.
James Comey is somebody who wants to be in front of the cameras.
James Comey could have said all of this a year ago when it was most relevant.
He waited a year to speak it because he wanted his money.
And now he's here for the money.
He's here for the publicity, and he's here for the money.
And that is not unfair by any stretch of the imagination.
I want to see a reporter ask Comey that.
Why is it that he wouldn't answer these questions for a year, but suddenly you want to go around talking about how James Comey is the king of honor?
That doesn't make a lot of sense.
I said that Newt Gingrich had said something absurd earlier in the show, but Gingrich said something that's obviously true as well.
He said Comey is in it for the cash.
I think that's pretty clear at this point.
The objective reality is Comey's off grandstanding and making money, but the truth is that he didn't do his job in the Bush administration.
He colluded with Schumer to embarrass President Bush.
The truth is he appointed a special counsel in the Bush administration who ran wild.
And the truth is he failed to prosecute the people in the Clinton campaign.
And I think we ought to take this as a chance to educate the country about Comey.
Okay, and I think that that is exactly right.
Again, all these battles can be fought, but these should be fought by proxy.
These should not be done by the President of the United States himself.
He'd be better off being above the fray and dealing with serious issues that we are dealing with right now, like the situation in Syria.
There are people who are going to speak out on his behalf when he deserves it.
And right now, you know, it is fair to say that this Comey attempt by the media is an area where the President deserves a certain amount of defense, a certain rational, reasonable defense.
Trotting out the Lion Comey line, I think, is counterproductive.
Okay, meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg was appearing on the Hill yesterday, and he got himself in a bit of hot water.
Steve Scalise, who's the House Majority Whip.
Maybe the next Speaker of the House.
He grilled Zuckerberg on Zuckerberg's anti-conservative bias over at Facebook.
I think it's well worth the watch.
Who develops the algorithm?
I wrote algorithms before, and you can determine whether or not you want to write an algorithm to sort data, to compartmentalize data, but you can also put a bias in if that's the directive.
Was there a directive to put a bias in?
And first, are you aware of this bias that many people have looked at and analyzed and seen?
Congressman, this is a really important question.
There is absolutely no directive in any of the changes that we make to have a bias in anything that we do.
To the contrary, our goal is to be a platform for all ideas.
Okay, well that there is nonsense.
Obviously the way that you bias your algorithms is going to determine which sort of news sources are benefited and which ones are not.
And the way that it is, the proxy for politics in the new algorithm is established media.
So CNN, NBC, New York Times, these are all being benefited by the new algorithm changes over at Facebook.
And Zuckerberg is fibbing when he says that that has nothing to do with politics.
Okay.
Meanwhile, today actually marks Holocaust Remembrance Day.
So this is Yom HaShoah.
It's the day in Israel that they do something that's pretty amazing.
I think that we should probably do it in the United States on Memorial Day as well.
They actually, there's a certain time of the day where the siren goes off and everyone in the country, literally everyone in the country, stops their cars.
Everybody steps out of their cars and there is about a minute of silence across the entire country in honor of the Holocaust.
That seems to me something we should do in the United States with regard to our fallen soldiers.
There's a poll out that really is shocking on Holocaust Memorial Day, and that is a poll from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
According to this poll, fully 41% of Americans do not know what Auschwitz was, including two-thirds of millennials.
Approximately 22% of millennials had not heard of the Holocaust.
41% of millennials thought two million or fewer Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.
That is a shocking, shocking number.
These are shocking numbers.
Four out of ten, four out of ten Americans don't know what Auschwitz was.
Two-thirds of millennials, two-thirds of people aged 18 to 34 don't know what the killing chambers were in Auschwitz.
This is, it's amazing stuff.
And again, one-fifth of all millennials have not even heard of the Holocaust.
You talk about deficits in our education system.
You want to know why millennials don't know enough about politics?
Why millennials are willing to go along with the identity politics and race-baiting of the left?
You want to know why millennials are so fine going along with the socialism that's being promulgated by the media?
Well, it's because they don't know anything about the Soviet Union.
They don't know anything about actual Nazi Germany, other than people they don't like are to be called Nazis.
They don't know anything about any of these issues.
The way history is taught in our public schools and in our private schools is through the Howard Zinn lens.
You want to talk about a certain level of egocentricity.
Egocentricity runs rampant through Howard Zinn.
Why?
Because his entire take on history is that America is responsible for virtually everything bad.
And the way that American students should learn is by learning what America has done that's wrong.
Now, I think that part of a well-rounded education is understanding what Americans have done right and what we have done wrong.
What America has done right and what we have done wrong.
If you want to look at the actual learning of history, you have to look at world history, and you have to look at the alternatives to America.
You have to look at what has happened in other countries, when other systems of thought have been embraced.
The Holocaust was not something that happened in a vacuum.
The Holocaust happened because it was subject to a particularly virulent strain of a nasty nationalist ideology combined with a big government ideology that suggested that a fascist central government ought to bind the German people together in a sort of romantic unity.
There's a sort of Weltanschauung that dominated in Germany.
And that the government was the font head of all of this.
That Hitler was the father figure.
And that he was the great leader.
And that all of the German people were going to unite behind Adolf Hitler and recognize their own Aryan superiority.
And then they were going to unite in order to make Germany great again by having Germany essentially run from the top down.
And eventually this culminates, obviously, in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Now, the question is, where does this fit into our modern political context?
Well, it should tell us a few things.
It should tell us about the dangers of a centralized government that disarms people and then determines that some people are subjected to different rules because of their race.
It should tell us that identity politics is really negative and really dangerous, and that judging people by their race and ethnicity ends poorly.
It should tell us that romantic nationalism is not the same as patriotism, that if you are a patriot, you believe in America because of our ideals and our creed.
You don't believe in America just because of the people who are here.
And you certainly don't believe in America because of ethnic solidarity.
These are the lessons of the Holocaust, but you're not going to learn those lessons if you don't know anything about it.
And you're certainly not going to know anything about the Middle East if you don't know anything about the Holocaust.
You're going to give a lot of credibility and credence to groups that openly call for a second Holocaust.
I'm talking about Hamas and Hezbollah, both of which have been praised by Jeremy Corbyn, the leading figure in the Labour Party in Britain, the possible next Prime Minister of that country.
You're not going to know why Israel exists if you don't understand the threat of anti-Semitism in Europe.
They're going to give a lot more credence to the Iran deal if you don't recognize the possibility of a second Holocaust.
This is something that happened, folks.
This was not a myth.
A few years back in 2011 or 2010, I wrote a memoir for helping out a fellow who had survived the Holocaust.
And this memoir was about his survival at Auschwitz.
He was actually a cousin of Elie Wiesel.
And I can tell you, this was a real thing that happened, okay?
And if students don't know about it, that is a shonda, right?
It is a shame.
It is a disgrace to our education system.
And it's something that needs to be immediately corrected by an education system that is failing us on virtually every level.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I like, and then a couple of things that I hate.
So, let's begin with a thing that I like.
So, I've been doing kind of little-known musicals.
Well, I'm straying from that today.
I'm doing a well-known musical.
This is one that your high school probably produced, but I was re-listening to it the other day, and the lyrics particularly to this musical are just great.
Guys and Dolls, the movie version.
Is not bad.
It's a little long.
Marlon Brando can't sing, which is a serious problem because the actual main part should be able to sing, right?
Skye Masterson should be able to sing in it.
But the lyrics are so clever in Guys and Dolls, it's really worth the listen.
Here is, of course, one of the famous numbers from it called Fugue for Tin Horns.
Three guys who are talking about betting on horse racing.
Three guys who are talking about betting on horse racing.
This guy says the horse can do, if he says the horse can do, can do, can do.
I pickin' Valentine, cause on the mornin' line, the guy's got him bigger than five to nine.
But make it epitaph, he wins it by a half, according to this here in the telegraph.
For for a Vera fight, I hear his foot's all right.
Of course it ought to be, he's a big red last night.
I know it's Valentine to fight.
It's a really fun, light musical, and it's worth watching.
Tomorrow, I'll probably do another musical by Frank Lesser.
This one's by Frank Lesser.
I'll probably do another one tomorrow by Frank Lesser, which I will tell you about then, because he wrote, like, three or four really good musicals.
So, I believe I've done How to Succeed in Business without really trying before, but there's another one that people don't know that much about that was a relatively big hit on Broadway.
We'll do that tomorrow.
Okay, other things that I like.
I just have to mention this.
This happened on Wheel of Fortune last night.
This is just This is so terrible.
So there's this guy on Wheel of Fortune, and he has all of the letters, literally all of the letters are filled in, okay?
There's no way to get this wrong.
He has every letter filled in.
He gets it wrong anyway.
He gets it wrong anyway because what the puzzle says is flamenco dance lessons.
Flamenco dance lessons.
The guy wildly mispronounces it, and they do not give him the answer.
He gets it wrong, and he loses because he cannot read.
Okay, on Wheel of Fortune.
So here it is.
All right, carefully.
What's up there?
Flamingo dance lessons.
Sorry.
Explain.
Ashley, it's your turn.
I'll solve?
Yeah.
Flamingo dance lessons.
Yeah, that's it.
And we're going to... There we go.
She's got it.
To explain what we all heard was, and I know you didn't mean to say it, but you gave us a G instead of a C. But we're gonna, we'll look at things and make sure we did things correctly during our commercial, but that's the way it's been heard everywhere.
You get the thousand dollars.
We will take a break.
Look at the guy's face.
You just look at Johnny's face.
Johnny's like, what just, what?
What just happened now?
Pretty amazing stuff.
And Ashley's like, Ashley can't believe it either.
These are the two contestants.
Pat Sajak can't believe that just happened.
So well done, everybody involved.
Yeah, we may need to revitalize our education system for a second reason, namely learning how to read because wow, just the thing, just the thing.
Okay, so other things that, time for a couple of things that I hate.
All right, so yesterday, President Trump signed a bill into law against sex trafficking.
This is not a thing I hate, this is a thing I like very much.
Here's what it looked like when President Trump did this yesterday.
You'll see a couple of the women actually dancing as he signs the bill, because it's rather important to have laws on the books against sex trafficking of women and children.
HR 1865, Mr. President.
They are so excited, and this is landmark legislation that is truly, as the leader said, going to save lives, and it already is.
I received a text message from the Manhattan D.A.
last night that said we have already shut down 87%.
87% of the online sex trafficking ads out there.
Well, I want to thank everybody.
This is my great honor, and I will say the political people around the desk of every one of them, Democrat and Republican, have worked very hard.
Okay, so this is obviously a good thing.
Well, there is a problem, however, and that's that the Women's March is very upset about it.
So you ask, why would the Women's March be in favor of a site that involves itself in sex trafficking?
Why would that possibly be?
The answer is because the Women's March is also standing up for prostitution.
So they tweeted out on April 7th, the shutting down of Backpage is an absolute crisis for sex workers who rely on the site to safely get in touch with clients.
Sex workers' rights are women's rights.
Okay then.
In the coming days, we'll be sharing more about sex workers' rights to uplift this critical issue.
We're all still learning, and as always, we have listened to the voices of those most impacted.
Hashtag sex work is work.
Well, but I assume that the Women's Marchers would also think that men who engage in prostitution are disgusting pieces of human filth, which is a proposition with which I generally agree.
So that's a weird statement.
And you're in favor of prostitution, but you think the men who engage in it are disgusting.
Got it.
Also worth noting, Backpage itself is directly linked, according to critics, with sex trafficking and sexual abuse of children.
Senator Rob Portman said, it is a positive step forward in our efforts to hold accountable sex traffickers that sell women and children online.
Claire McCaskill, who's a Democrat, She said, State and local law enforcement need this bill to enable them to take swift action against websites that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking of children online.
So the Women's March, why exactly would they be defending this?
Because the Women's March defends the worst things on earth.
The leaders of the Women's March have defended Louis Farrakhan.
The leaders of the Women's March have been involved with Planned Parenthood.
Is it any shock that they're defending Backpage.com because they haven't done the sufficient research at best?
Again, it's pretty astonishing that they would go so far as to defend a site that apparently is involved in child sex trafficking, but I guess that we're supposed to believe that only Trump voters are deplorable.
Okay, well we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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