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May 17, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:04
How the Media Are Turning America Trumpy | Ep. 541
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President Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, says Robert Mueller is not going to indict President Trump, but Robert Mueller is still digging, Michael Cohen finds himself on the wrong end of leaks again, and the media lie about President Trump and immigration.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So today is the day, folks.
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Before I get into the news, and there's a lot of news to get into today.
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All right.
So the news of the day is that the media are just garbage.
I'm sorry.
I've been railing against the use of the term fake news for years on this program when it does not apply.
When President Trump says that it's fake news, for example, that the media are misreporting his crowd size, that's not fake news.
But this week, I have to tell you, it's an amazing thing.
I'm getting notes from people, I'm getting texts from people, people who did not vote for Trump in the last election, who are now telling me, they're turning me into a Trumpkin.
The media are turning me into a huge Donald Trump fan.
Why?
Because the great arbiters of truth and decency, these wonderful arbiters of all that is good in the world, it turns out they are abjectly lying about issues ranging from Hamas to now MS-13.
So the Democratic new playbook, I guess, for 2018 is defend Hamas, defend MS-13, and rip on the NRA.
That's the new playbook from the Democrats, and the media are parroting that every step of the way.
What am I so hot and bothered about today?
Well, we'll get to the Hamas coverage in just a second, but here's what I'm really hot and bothered about today.
President Trump yesterday was doing an event with a bunch of sheriffs from all over the country, and one of the sheriffs mentioned MS-13.
And President Trump responded in this way.
Here's clip three.
We have people coming into the country, trying to come in.
We're stopping a lot of them.
But we're taking people out of the country.
You wouldn't believe how bad these people are.
These aren't people.
These are animals.
And we're taking him out of the country at a level and at a rate that's never happened before.
Okay, so here is the reality.
What Trump was specifically, specifically talking about was MS-13.
Because the line that led up to this was a sheriff saying, we can't actually deport MS-13 people.
The line leading up to this, there's a sheriff named Mims who said, thank you, there could be an MS-13 member I know about.
If they don't reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it.
And then Trump responded to the MS-13 reference by saying, So how did the media cover this?
He's specifically talking about MS-13.
It is obvious that he's talking about MS-13.
It is clear that he's talking about MS-13.
These are animals.
So how did the media cover this?
He's specifically talking about MS-13.
It is obvious that he's talking about MS-13.
It is clear that he's talking about MS-13.
MS-13's actual tagline, I mean, this is their actual marketing line to their own members, is rape, steal, control.
These are not good people.
They are, in fact, as close to animals as you'll find in human beings.
So how do the media report this?
Let me show you how the media report this.
Here's the New York Times.
This is what they tweeted out.
No, he didn't.
He did not lash out at all illegal immigrants.
He lashed out at MS-13, and they are animals.
calling those trying to breach the country's borders animals.
No, he didn't.
He did not lash out at all illegal immigrants.
He lashed out at MS-13, and they are animals.
There have been several stories in the last couple of years about MS-13 members literally ripping hearts out of bodies while the people are still alive, beheading their political enemies, bringing drugs into the country.
MS-13 are some of the worst people on planet Earth.
If the...
Descriptor, animal, does not apply to MS-13.
It legitimately applies to no one.
And yet the media are trying to play it as though Trump is not talking about MS-13.
Instead, Trump was talking about illegal immigrants at large.
Now listen, Trump has said some bad stuff about illegal immigration generally.
He's been overbroad in his language.
That's not what happened here.
What happened right here was that he was ripping on MS-13.
And the media decided to deliberately take him out of context.
And it wasn't just the New York Times.
It was C-SPAN.
It was CNN.
It was the New York Times.
It was the Washington Post.
They all decided To report this as though Trump was talking about illegal immigrants more broadly.
They were lying.
They were lying.
And these lies have been very typical of the media this entire week.
This entire week we've heard from the media that innocents were killed on the border between Gaza and Israel.
Except for the fact that Hamas admitted yesterday that 50 of the 62 people killed were Hamas members and another three were members of Islamic Jihad.
So 53 out of the 62 people killed were active terrorists who worked for active terrorist groups designated as such by the State Department.
And the media covered it as though this was all Trump's fault.
That evil, evil Trump.
And Hamas.
Bunch of innocent folks.
And now it's MS-13.
Like, really?
This is the train you want to jump on, media?
You hate Trump so much that you're going to deliberately take him out of context?
And then you wonder why we don't trust the media?
And one of the great myths about President Trump is that people on the right don't like the media because Trump doesn't like the media.
Nonsense.
People on the right like Trump because Trump doesn't like the media.
Okay?
We didn't like the media a long time ago.
As I said at CPAC, My entire career, we've spent thinking the media are totally full of it.
I remember my parents cancelling their subscriptions to Los Angeles Times in the mid-90s over their coverage of Israel.
The media has always been egregiously bad, but this last week has been just an incredible demonstration of how bad they are.
And this is why.
You wonder why people are resonating to President Trump?
You wonder why?
Because Trump will take a stand like MS-13 are a bunch of animals.
Or like Hamas is bad.
And when they put people in front, when they put terrorists behind human shields in an attempt to get people killed for the cameras, that's bad.
And he's right about both those things.
And the media, because they hate Trump so much, decided to side with Hamas and side with MS-13.
And then we're supposed to side with the media?
We're supposed to believe the media's narrative about Trump?
We're supposed to believe what the media have to say about truth and honor and how they're just firefighters running to the fire?
They have no agenda.
They're objective.
They're truthful.
Bull bleep, okay?
That is nonsense.
And everybody knows that's nonsense.
Members of the media, you want to regain your credibility?
You wonder why the American people don't trust you?
Because you don't deserve their trust.
Because you are not acting in trustworthy fashion.
Because you are acting, in many cases, as fake news, and in many other cases, as biased news.
This is really egregious stuff.
This is what's going to put people into Trump's camp.
Because this week, I gotta tell you, I was thinking about President Trump and what he did with regard to Jerusalem and what he's been saying about MS-13, and then I've been watching the media, and I gotta tell you, if the media want me to make a decision between Trump and Hamas, that's not much of a choice.
That's not much of a choice.
I've been very critical of President Trump's character.
But you can't lie about the guy to get him, members of the media, you idiots.
You can't lie about him.
You can't fib about him.
You can't manipulate events on the ground.
You can't ignore the truth about what's happening all over the world simply in order to slap at President Trump.
If you do, it's just going to drive people into Trump's camp.
I was talking to a top member of the Trump administration, this was a few months ago, and I was discussing, you know, how is Trump going to win the votes necessary in order to win re-election?
Like, do you have a plan for this?
Because George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 by 500,000 votes, and then he won by about 1.5 million votes against John Kerry, but he had to pick up about 10 to 11 million votes between 2000 and 2004 in order to win re-election, because the electorate expands every year.
Well, President Trump lost the popular vote this year, or this election cycle, by about 2.5 million votes.
That means that he's going to have to make up probably 12 million votes in order for him to win re-election.
So I said to this member of the Trump administration, how do you plan on winning 12 million additional votes?
How do you plan on bringing a bunch of people over?
There wasn't a great answer.
So part of it is going to be good policy, obviously, but part of it is going to be shifting definitions of Trump.
Well, one of the ways that you can shift the definition of Trump is not by shifting who Trump is, but by the media making themselves so much worse than they already were that you feel like you're being forced to choose between the media and Democrats who are lying on a routine basis and defending the worst people on the planet and President Trump.
There's a case that was made during the last election cycle that it was a binary choice between Hillary Clinton and President Trump.
This was not a logical case that I agreed with.
I thought there was a third choice, and it was to stay home.
But the worse the Democrats get, the worse the media get, the more it looks like a binary choice.
And the better Trump governs, the more it looks like a binary choice.
You want to push people into Trump's camp, guys, you are doing an excellent job of it.
Speaking of doing an excellent job of pushing people into Trump's camp, there's a person named Juanita Scarlett.
Well, you know, Scarlett went to a party at Don Lemon's house, OK?
And Don Lemon had at his house Errol Lewis, who's a commentator at CNN, and Margaret Hoover, who's another commentator at CNN.
And Don Lemon is a reporter at CNN.
And guess who was over at Don Lemon's house?
And they all took a selfie together.
It was Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels.
There they are just grinning right there.
Look at that.
The objective journalist grinning with Michael Avenatti.
Now, imagine for a second that, say, Michael Cohen had been invited to Sean Hannity's house.
You think people might have gone nuts?
They did, okay?
There was that entire week where all we could talk about was the fact that Michael Cohen and Sean Hannity had been discussing issues.
But somehow, Michael Avenatti going to Don Lemon's house and hanging out there, right?
That's not a problem at all.
And then you wonder why we think the media are not objective?
You wonder why so many people are turning to President Trump and saying, not interested in inciting against Trump and with the media?
It's just, it's insanity.
It's total insanity.
And if the media wish to keep alienating people, maybe they do.
Maybe that's their goal.
Maybe their goal is to make President Trump president for another term.
They could do it.
They could make it happen.
All they have to do is continue being who they are.
I wrote a column earlier this week about comedy in culture and how the right-wing's response to comedy is not for us to generate our own comedians, it's to elect Trump.
Because Trump's a giant middle finger to the entire comedic establishment.
You make a bunch of jokes about Trump, you make a bunch of jokes about us, well screw you, we'll elect that guy!
Well, the same thing is true of the media.
Remember, in 2012, Newt Gingrich nearly won the Republican nomination based simply on ripping on an anchor at one of his debates.
That's how much we despise the media.
And we don't despise the media for no reason.
We despise the media because since 2001, when Bias came out by Bernard Goldberg, There has been a 20-year campaign by the right against bias in the media, and the media's response has not been to try and moderate, to try and hire some people who are conservative, to try and hire some people who might balance things out.
Their goal has not been to strip out their own opinions.
It's been to exacerbate the involvement of their own opinions.
Now, maybe it helps their ratings.
Maybe it's good for CNN.
Maybe it's good for MSNBC.
But that just demonstrates once and for all that they care more about ratings than they do about truth.
Nowhere has that been truer than with regard to the situation along the border in Gaza.
I'm going to talk about that in just one second.
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OK, so speaking of the media coverage on the Gaza border, there is a piece today From Kinley Tirpaz.
Kinley Tirpaz is a founder and CEO of the Kibbutz Hadati Educational Network in Israel, and he has a report at Times of Israel on what actually happened on the border with Gaza.
So he says, he says, It was a tremendous supreme effort from our side to prevent in every possible way Palestinian deaths and injuries.
Of course, the primary mission was to prevent hundreds of thousands of Gazans from infiltrating into our territory.
That kind of invasion would be perilous, mortally dangerous to the nearby communities, would permit terrorists disguised as civilians to enter our kibbutz and mashav communities, and would leave us with no choice but to target every single infiltrator.
That's why our soldiers were directed to prevent infiltration in a variety of ways, using live ammunition only as a last resort.
The IDF employs many creative means of reducing friction with Gazans and uses numerous methods, most of which are not made public, to prevent them from reaching the fence.
In addition, over the past few weeks, there have been serious efforts to save the lives of children and civilians who have been pushed to the front lines by Hamas, or trying to hide behind them in order to infiltrate and attack Israel.
When there is no alternative and live ammunition must be used to stop those who storm the fence, the soldiers make heroic and sometimes dangerous efforts not to kill and to only injure those on the other side, which is why you see so many leg wounds on the side of Hamas.
The IDF stationed senior commanders at every confrontation point to ensure that every shot is approved and backed up by a responsible figure with proper authority.
Every staging area has an especially large number of troops in order to make sure that soldiers are not put in life-threatening situations where they will have no choice but to fire indiscriminately.
A situation where thousands of people rush you is frightening, even terrifying.
It is extremely difficult to show restraint, and it requires calm, mature professionalism.
62 dead is an enormous number, but I can testify from first-hand experience, every bullet, every hit is carefully reported, documented, and investigated in Excel spreadsheets.
Literally.
I was there.
I saw it with my own eyes.
So, again, the media are reporting this as though it was an indiscriminate killfest over at the Gaza border, even while Hamas is admitting it was not an indiscriminate killfest over at the Gaza border.
And the Israelis didn't have much of a choice here.
Why do you want everybody to just run through the border?
Then you have to mow down hundreds of people?
Mow down hundreds of people?
But the media have covered it as though this is all Israel's fault.
And the media know.
The media know exactly what they are doing.
There's no doubt that the media know exactly what they're saying.
By the way, speaking of the media malfeasance, the AP has now deleted its tweet from Wednesday on Trump's Animals comments about immigrants because it wasn't made clear he was speaking after a comment about gang members.
So now the media are going to have to walk back all of this in real time.
They're going to have to walk back all of this in real time.
Again, not shocking.
But look how the Democrats played this up when it first came out.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, He tweeted out, when all of our great, great grandparents came to America, they weren't animals.
And these people aren't either.
Supposedly referring to illegal immigrants.
When my great, great grandparents came to America, they didn't join gangs and cut the hearts out of living human beings.
I'm pretty sure Chuck Schumer's didn't either.
But the media malfeasance here is falling right into President Trump's hands.
So I guess I should be happy about it.
I guess I should be happy.
It's making Republicans more popular.
But I'm more unhappy about untruth than I am happy about the effect of the untruth, even if they cut in my favor.
OK, meanwhile, there's a lot of news today breaking in the Mueller case, a lot of a lot of discussion about what's going on with Robert Mueller.
Rudy Giuliani, who is Trump's new lawyer, he was on Laura Ingraham's show last night, and he said that Robert Mueller has now announced that he will not, in fact, indict President Trump.
Uh, if they subpoena us, challenge the subpoena.
The same reason they can't indict him constitutionally.
Which Mueller agreed today.
He's gonna abide by no indictment of the president.
Right.
But I don't think they agree to the process question, which is the same reason they can't indict him, they can't issue a subpoena to him.
And remember, Clinton So legally speaking, it is true that the president could be indicted by Robert Mueller.
Probably Robert Mueller said, look, I'd rather leave this to the political process as opposed to a criminal indictment, if in fact he has anything.
This doesn't mean that President Trump is off the hook with regard to Robert Mueller.
Rudy Giuliani says, listen, there's no collusion.
There's no evidence of collusion.
But he does say, well, there's kind of evidence that there is intent to collude, but that is not the same thing as collusion, which is, of course, exactly what I said on yesterday's show.
Their inability to reach a conclusion that is obvious and their unwillingness to recognize the damage this does to our country all over the world.
There's no reason for this investigation.
There never was a good reason for in the first place.
This was engineered by Comey with the with the with the report, not the report, the interview thing that he wrote that he should have never revealed.
So now I want to go through the the full news about what Robert Mueller is doing, because there's a lot of news that broke yesterday on this.
Well, the news begins with the Senate Intel report.
So President Trump's son, Donald Jr., was responsible for setting up a meeting with a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower.
Presidents of this meeting supposedly were Jared Kushner.
I believe Paul Manafort was present at the meeting, if I'm not mistaken.
And other members, top members of the Trump administration.
Apparently Kushner got up and left after about five minutes.
And there were other people who were there who also left, realizing the thing was a boondoggle.
But the original pitch by the Russian lawyer and her advocate, who was a friend of the Trump family, was that she was going to give them information about Hillary Clinton.
And Donald Trump Jr.
had written that they were very excited about that.
And the email exchange with this guy, who had been pitching the Russian lawyer, suggested that the Russian government was supportive of President Trump in the election cycle, and Trump Jr.
expressed his enthusiasm for that.
Well, the Senate interviewed Donald Jr., then they released hundreds of pages of interview transcript yesterday.
The Associated Press reports on it.
They say, questioned intently by a Senate committee, President Donald Trump's son struck a firmly unapologetic tone, deflected many queries, and said he didn't think there was anything wrong with meeting a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in hopes of election season dirt on Hillary Clinton, according to transcripts released on Wednesday.
Trump Jr.
speaking in a closed door interview last year with the Senate Judiciary Committee said he did not give much thought to the idea that the June 9, 2016 meeting was part of a Russian government effort to help his father in the presidential race.
He said, I don't know that it alarmed me, but like I said, I don't know, and I don't know that I was all that focused on it at the time.
The committee released about 2,500 pages of interview transcripts and other documents tied to the New York meeting, which Trump Jr.
attended.
The transcripts also show some new details, and they show how the meeting was arranged and efforts afterward to mitigate the political damage from the meeting itself.
The transcripts also reflect an aggressive Russian outreach to Trump before and after the New York meeting, including an effort to arrange a follow-up get-together that November with a member of the transition team.
The follow-up never happened, however.
Rob Goldstone, who is the fixer-upper, he promised Trump Jr.
very interesting information from a well-connected Russian lawyer, including documents that would incriminate Hillary Clinton.
And Trump Jr.
responded via email, if it's what you say, I love it.
That came out last year.
Throughout the private Senate interview, Trump Jr.
said he didn't recall if he had talked with his father about it.
There was apparently a call in the call log several days before the meeting took place with a caller with a blocked number.
Trump Jr.
said he didn't recall who the person was and didn't know if his father used the blocked number.
I have to imagine that Mueller is going to find out whether that is the case or not.
In any case, there is no actual information that suggests that information passed hands between the Trump campaign and the Russian government or that there was open coordination or covert coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
However, however, If he had this information, if this information was available to Robert Mueller or to James Comey or to anybody else, it would not be out of line to launch an investigation based on this information.
And there's a lot of talk today about witch hunt, witch hunt, witch hunt.
I agree.
There's been no actual evidence presented to date of serious collusion between the Trump campaign and everybody else.
But that's not the same thing as saying the investigation itself was initiated for bad reasons or that it's been conducted in the wrong way.
I'll explain what I mean in just a second, because I think that we have to stick to the facts as much as we possibly can when it comes to this Mueller investigation.
And I want to break it down for you in just a moment.
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Okay, so, as I say, a bunch of stories released from the sort of Mueller investigation.
One was the Senate Intel investigation of Donald Trump, or interview with Donald Trump.
And this was supposedly, this demonstrated, obviously, that Donald Trump Jr.
Was interacting with agents of Russia, maybe in an attempt to collude, but there's no actual evidence of collusion.
Then there was this other big story, and this is the one where a lot of folks on the right, I think, are misreading the situation.
Okay, this story is from the New York Times.
It says, "Codename Crossfire Hurricane: The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation." Now, remember the going theory here is that the FBI under President Obama was interested in undermining the Trump campaign during the campaign by investigating and then presumably putting out information to undermine President Trump during the campaign.
This is the going theory, is that this was all trumped up, it was all put together on kind of spit and glue, that they just decided they were gonna get Trump in the middle of the election cycle, that they worked to let Hillary Clinton off the hook, and then they worked to go after President Trump with nothing to verify it, they worked to target his campaign.
He was wiretapped, in the words of President Trump, that he was targeted.
Now, even if President Trump was quote-unquote wiretapped, he was not wiretapped at Trump Tower, but even if there was surveillance of particular members of the Trump campaign, like Carter Page, that does not necessarily demonstrate that surveillance was inappropriate or that anything wrong happened with the surveillance.
Well, the story from the New York Times yesterday has a lot of people on the right saying that there is something deeply nefarious that was going on at the FBI during the campaign.
The biggest question that I have about this is if you really believe that the FBI and the CIA and the DOJ were all working very hard to try and discredit the Trump campaign and to put out information that Trump was in thrall to Russia, then why didn't any of this information come out during the campaign?
You were there.
I was there.
If they wanted to sink Trump during the campaign, wouldn't it have been useful for them to say that Paul Manafort was under investigation, like, from the very first day?
Wouldn't it have been useful for them to say that we suspect that there is collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government?
Wouldn't that be, like, a useful thing to have put out there on a routine basis?
Because it's consumed the news cycle ever since.
But most of this stuff broke after Trump was actually elected.
So if you were inside the quote-unquote deep state and you wanted to take down Trump during the election cycle, why wouldn't you put it out early?
Now, the theory is that they didn't put this out early because it was an insurance policy in case Trump became president and they thought Hillary was going to win anyway.
That makes no sense.
That doesn't make any sense.
It's not that this was an insurance policy in case Trump became president.
That's silly.
Instead, what it sounds a lot more like is if, in the theory of the right, these were arsonists.
They were trying to set a fire.
So if you're trying to set a fire, why wait till the guy's elected president to set the fire?
Why not set the fire in the middle of the campaign?
That's question number one.
Question number two is, can you point to any actual nefarious activity that you would have objected to if Hillary Clinton had been the target of it?
So I have a very simple rule that I've been using for years.
Put the shoe on the other foot.
So I'm going to read this story, and for a second, I want you to assume that it's about Hillary Clinton and not Donald Trump, and then think, are you angry that this investigation was going on in the first place?
Because I don't want to impugn people's motives or honor based on partisan concerns.
So here it is from the New York Times.
Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia in the summer of 2016, the FBI dispatched a pair of agents to London on a mission so secretive that all but a handful of officials were kept in the dark.
Their assignment, which has not been previously reported, was to meet the Australian ambassador who had evidence that one of Donald Trump's advisors knew in advance about Russian election meddling.
After tense deliberations between Washington and Canberra, top Australian officials broke with diplomatic protocol and allowed the ambassador, Alexander Downer, to sit for an FBI interview to describe his meeting with the campaign advisor, George Papadopoulos.
The agent summarized their highly unusual interview and sent word to Washington on August 2nd, 2016, two days after the investigation was open.
The report helped provide the foundation for a case that, a year ago Thursday, became the special counsel investigation.
But at the time, a small group of FBI officials knew it by its codename, Crossfire Hurricane.
The name was a reference to the Rolling Stones lyric, I was born a crossfire hurricane, because obviously now everybody was under investigation, so it was CROSSFIRE HURRICANE.
Well, days after they closed their investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, agents began scrutinizing the campaign of her Republican rival.
The two cases have become inextricably linked in one of the most consequential periods in the history of the FBI.
All of those questions, I think, are perfectly legit.
is expected to release the findings of its length through the review of the FBI's conduct in the Clinton case, and the results are sure to renew debate over James Comey and the FBI.
All of those questions, I think, are perfectly legit.
But here's what people are really worried about.
Okay, those decisions stand in contrast to the FBI's handling of Crossfire Hurricane.
Not only did agents in that case fall back to their typical policy of silence, but interviews with a dozen current and former government officials and a review of documents show that the FBI was even more circumspect in that case than has been previously known.
Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.
Agents considered, then rejected, interviewing key Trump associates, which might have sped up the investigation, but risked revealing the existence of the case.
Top officials quickly became convinced that they would not solve the case before Election Day, which made them only more hesitant to act.
When agents did take bold investigative steps, like interviewing the ambassador, they were shrouded in secrecy.
Fearful of leaks?
They kept details from political appointees across the street at the DOJ, so they weren't telling the DOJ.
Fearful that all this stuff was going to leak.
The facts, had they leaked, might have devastated the Trump campaign.
Trump's future national security adviser, Mike Flynn, was under investigation, as was Paul Manafort.
One adviser appeared to have Russian intelligence contact.
That would be Papadopoulos.
Another was suspected of being a Russian agent himself.
That would be Carter Page.
The FBI faces a lot of criticism, but here is the actual story, buried deep in this New York Times piece.
Crossfire Hurricane spawned a case that has brought charges against former Trump officials and more than a dozen Russians, but in the final months of 2016 agents faced great uncertainty about facts and how to respond.
So Crossfire Hurricane began exactly 100 days before the presidential election.
But if agents were eager to investigate Mr. Trump's campaign, as Trump has suggested, the messages do not reveal it.
I cannot believe we are seriously looking at these allegations and the pervasive connections," Struck wrote.
This is Peter Struck, who is one of the FBI agents who is anti-Trump, soon after returning from London.
The mood in early meetings was anxious, former officials recalled.
Agents had just closed the Clinton investigation they braced for months of Republican-led hearings over why she was not charged.
Crossfire Hurricane was built around the same core of agents and analysts who investigated Mrs. Clinton.
None was eager to re-enter presidential politics, former officials said, especially when the agents did not know what would come of the Australian information.
So the FBI investigated four unidentified Trump campaign aides in the early months.
They were Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos.
Flynn had been paid $45,000 by the Russian government's media arm, the BRT, for a 2015 speech and dined with Vladimir Putin.
Manafort, of course, has deep and abiding ties with the Russian government via Ukraine.
Carter Page was well known to the FBI because he'd been previously recruited by Russian spies.
And then there was Papadopoulos.
The young, inexperienced campaign aide whose wine-fueled conversation with the Australian ambassador set off the investigation.
Before hacked Democratic emails appeared online, he had seemed to know that Russia had political dirt on Mrs. Clinton.
So, if you recall, Papadopoulos had apparently dined with a London professor who was an agent of Moscow, who said that he had access to all these emails, and then Papadopoulos was talking to the Australian ambassador, and he said, by the way, I know that the Russians have these emails.
And so the Australian ambassador called up the FBI and they said, um, guys, Russia's interfering in your election.
And then the FBI went over and interviewed this guy.
So, does it sound like the FBI has done anything wrong in investigating these people?
Are you looking at all the information?
Looking at what they knew at the time?
Let's say that it had been Hillary Clinton and a top campaign aide to Hillary Clinton.
Let's say that Hillary Clinton's future national security adviser had been paid by Russia Today.
Let's say that Hillary Clinton's campaign chair had been deep in bed with Vladimir Putin.
Let's say that a low-level foreign policy staffer had been working with the Russians to bring across material about Donald Trump.
Would you have said the FBI ought to investigate that?
Of course you would have said the FBI ought to investigate that because The FBI ought to investigate that, right?
I mean, they didn't do anything wrong in launching the investigation, as far as I can tell.
Even if you believe that they used shoddy information to go after Carter Page, that is a slightly different contention than saying that the entire investigation never should have been launched and was a witch hunt from the very beginning.
Okay, now, what exactly did they do?
Apparently, they said that they had embedded an informant deep in this piece.
It says, The FBI obtained phone records and other documents using national security letters, a secret type of subpoena, officials said.
And at least one government informant met several times with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, current and former officials said.
This has become a politically contentious point, with Mr. Trump's allies questioning whether the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign or trying to entrap campaign officials.
But the real question again is, were they not aggressive enough?
Were they too aggressive?
I understand the sort of right-wing talking point that the FBI was out to get Trump, but it doesn't wash for me.
You know, Kimberly Strassel makes the strongest case over at the Wall Street Journal.
She says a few important points on that new New York Times hurricane crossfire piece.
A story that, by the way, all of us following knew this had to be coming.
This is the DOJ-FBI leakers attempt to get out in front of the facts that Devin Nunes is forcing out to make it not sound so bad.
Don't buy it.
It's bad.
The biggest takeaway, government sources admit that, indeed, the Obama, DOJ, and FBI spied on the Trump campaign.
Spied, because she's saying they hadn't informed it.
NYT slips in confirmation far down in its story and makes it out like it isn't a big deal.
It is a very big deal.
In self-serving desire to get a sympathetic story about its actions, DOJ, FBI leakers are willing to provide yet more details about that top-secret source, namely that the spying was aimed at Page and Papadopoulos.
Making it all more certain that they will be outed, which is on them.
DOJ and the FBI have shredded what little credibility they have in claiming they cannot comply with Devin Nunes' subpoena.
So Devin Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, he subpoenaed the DOJ and the FBI for all the information about the Trump campaign investigation, basically, and they've not been turning any of this over, saying that it's dangerous for them to turn it over.
They should turn it over.
This is a congressional oversight committee.
If it gets leaked, that's on the congressional oversight committee, but The oversight committee exists for a reason.
Kimberly Strassel continues, "Back in December, the New York Times assured us it was Papadopoulos' downer convo that inspired FBI to launch counterintelligence operation on July 31st, 2016." That would be the conversation between Papadopoulos, the low-level foreign policy advisor, and the Australian ambassador.
This was convenient since it diminished However, now New York Times tells us FBI did not debrief Downer until August 2nd.
And Nunes said no official intelligence from allies was delivered to FBI about that conversation prior to July 31st.
So how did the FBI get those details?
And what really did inspire the CI investigation?
Okay, so now the implication that she is drawing is that the real reason that the investigation was launched was not this meeting between the Australian ambassador and George Papadopoulos, that it was not Papadopoulos that launched the Russia collusion investigation, that what originally launched it was the politically motivated dossier that had been paid for by Fusion GPS at the behest of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
That still does not answer the question as to whether everything in that dossier is false.
That has still not been confirmed.
For people who say the dossier is all lies, all untruths, there's a bunch of stuff in there that is probably untrue.
There's some stuff in there that is probably not untrue.
And it's a mistake to simply dismiss facts because it's more convenient for the narrative to do so.
Finally, Kimberly Strassel says, So he says that she's basically suggesting that there are a bunch of people who are involved in this nefarious plan to take out Trump.
I am not seeing the evidence that there are a lot of people involved in a nefarious plan to take out President Trump.
Now, I will tell you in one second, What the nefarious plan actually was.
Like, where it actually got nefarious.
I don't think it got nefarious during the campaign.
I do think it got nefarious after the campaign.
I'll explain in just a second.
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All righty.
So as I say, I am not fully convinced that this New York Times story about Hurricane Crossfire is this damning indictment of the FBI or the CIA.
And the FBI and CIA launched this investigation on zero grounds.
And it was always a witch hunt designed to take down President Trump internationally.
In the same way I don't believe the Russia collusion story, I also don't believe the FBI collusion story, that the FBI was colluding to take down Trump.
I just don't buy it.
Now, the DOJ is a different story, right?
This is why I think it's important to know who in the DOJ knew what, when.
Because Loretta Lynch's DOJ was corrupt through and through, just as Eric Holder's DOJ was corrupt through and through.
The Obama DOJ was just the most icely of law enforcement.
It was a wretched hive of scum and villainy, the Obama DOJ.
It was just a garbage place.
That's a different story than the FBI and CIA should they have launched an investigation again.
If Hillary Clinton had been surrounded by a bunch of people who appeared to be trying to do business with the Russians, and then Chelsea Clinton had had a meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Donald Trump, we'd all be like, uh, yeah, I'm glad there's an investigation going on.
So, I don't buy the investigation was launched under, for prurient, nonsensical reasons.
I don't buy that.
Now, here's where it does get dirty.
I think after the election happened, that a bunch of deep staters, meaning Obama holdovers, inside the FBI and CIA decided, you know, it'd be awesome.
It'd be great to undermine Trump's presidency by leaking out all of this information.
Now, the excuse that they used for leaking is that Trump was going to come in.
He was going to shut down the investigation and destroy the possibility of us uncovering all this collusion.
Yeah, I think the reality is more like there are a bunch of people who are ticked that Hillary had lost.
They did not expect Hillary to lose.
They could not believe that this dunder-headed Trump was president, and they were going to undermine him from day one by leaking a bunch of information that really was not criminal.
It was not criminal for Michael Flynn to be talking to the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.
That was not a criminal act.
When he lied to the FBI, that was criminal, but It is not criminal for him to be on the phone with Sergey Kislyak about sanctions against Israel, for example.
That's silly.
But that's all the stuff that was leaking.
I do think there are Obama holdovers who are leaking that sort of stuff.
And I think that it is Obama holdovers who are now leaking a lot of the stuff with regard to Michael Cohen.
I want to discuss in just a second.
the situation with Michael Cohen, because there are a bunch of scurrilous leaks about Cohen that are coming out that I don't know why in the world they would be breaking, except for relatively nefarious reasons.
So here's the story.
Today, it turns out that there's a long article by Ronan Farrell over at The New Yorker about the Michael Cohen financial files.
So there's a couple of stories about Michael Cohen that have come out in the last 24 hours.
One is from the Washington Post, says a California man who says he served as a translator last year for Michael Cohen and a South Korean aerospace firm that paid Cohen's company 150 grand said Tuesday that FBI agents recently interviewed him.
Mark Coe said in an email to the Washington Post, he spoke with the FBI about the arrangement a few weeks ago.
Coe declined to provide details about investigators inquiries, said he was unsure whether the agents were part of the probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller.
So apparently Cohen was trying to go after South Korean cash and now there's a story from The Intercept, which is very anti-Trump outlet, saying in the blink of a Michael Avenatti tweet, Ahmed Al-Rumahi has suddenly found himself Internet famous.
It began on Sunday evening when the attorney for adult film star Stormy Daniels posted a screenshot of video footage from Trump's tower lobby recorded on December 12, 2016.
Viral speculation followed, with online detectives identifying al-Rumaihi, the former head of a $100 billion wing of the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, in the image, And linking him to a Qatar-Russia deal to sell a portion of the oil company Rosneft, which had been referenced in the Steele dossier.
From there, Slate took over, headlining a piece.
Michael Cohen's meeting with Michael Flynn and a Qatari diplomat might be the key to unlocking the Steele dossier, the suggestion being that Qatar was trying to bribe Michael Cohen to broker basically a business deal for the sale of Rosneft.
Apparently, al-Rumaihi said that Cohen asked him for an upfront fee of $1 million for his services in the midst of their conversation about a potential Qatari investment in U.S.
infrastructure.
The question is, how's Michael Avenetti getting all this stuff?
Right.
How is it that all of these news outlets are obtaining the financial records of Michael Cohen?
And according to Ronan Farrow, the answer is that somehow people were afraid that these documents were going to be destroyed.
Now, this was the same excuse that was being used with regard to the leaks about the Mueller investigation before.
It was the Mueller investigation.
Well, it was just the FBI investigation into Russian collusion.
The excuse for leaks was, Trump's going to come in.
He's going to destroy all the documents.
Trump's going to come in.
He's going to shut down James Comey and the FBI.
Trump's going to come in.
And all this is going to come to a screeching halt.
So we've got to leak this stuff.
We've got to preserve the information and distribute it.
Well, now they're doing the same thing with regard to Michael Cohen's financial records.
There's only one problem.
There's not really a threat that Michael Cohen's financial records are disappearing.
Benjamin Wittes, who's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and the editor of Lawfare Blog, he is not a Trump acolyte.
He says, quote, I've been thinking about this New Yorker story on financial records missing from a government database.
I don't want to rain on anybody's parade here, but color me at least a little bit skeptical.
Assume for a moment that some records of Cohen's transactions are in fact missing.
That doesn't mean the transactions themselves have disappeared.
Only the Treasury Department's record of the back reports on the transactions are gone from the database.
So when Bob Mueller, or the SDNY, the Southern District of New York, subpoenas the bank, as they surely have done already, for the records of all of Cohen's transactions, those transaction records will still be there and they'll be turned over.
Moreover, the bank surely still has records of the transactions themselves.
So I doubt very much there's a material loss to Mueller or the SDNY in any pending investigation, even if there has been, in fact, some data loss within the government.
Moreover, were such a data loss to be discovered, and the destruction were intentional and malicious, that would be traceable, and that would be prosecutable, presumably.
So, this excuse that is being used to go after Michael Cohen is obviously an excuse as well.
So this is why I say, it's not that there's no corruption.
It's that the corruption is not where you're looking for the corruption.
The corruption is in the leaks.
The corruption is in distributing information to the press that should not be in the hands of the press.
The corruption is in the post-election attempt to destroy Donald Trump by leaking a bunch of information that has not been confirmed, that has not been verified, and that has not been traced to any sort of real collusion.
That's the real problem here, not the investigation itself.
So the investigation itself, I think, was probably generated along correct lines.
We'll see how it was how it was pursued.
It is possible that prosecutors were overzealous in how they pursued it with regard to, for example, the Carter Page FISA warrant.
We'll find that out.
So Devin Nunes believes he believes that the going theories that the FBI and the CIA were basically working to go after the Trump campaign in malicious fashion by garnering warrants on scurrilous bases in order to discredit.
Well, the Carter Page FISA warrant came about after the election.
Maybe there's a possibility of that.
That's not the same thing as saying the investigation itself was launched in nasty fashion or for no reason at all.
It's not the same thing as saying the entire investigation is inherently tainted.
That's a different argument.
And I think we ought to be very specific about these arguments so that we can be as factual as possible.
None of this, of course, means that actual collusion took place.
There was intent to collude on the part of Donald Trump Jr., pretty clearly.
But that is not the same thing as a crime, because collusion itself has a statutory definition that includes conspiracy, and the conspiracy just doesn't exist here.
There's no information changing hands, there's no impact on the election, and therefore there's not a lot to say about it other than an attempt to discredit Trump and his victory in the first place.
Okay, meanwhile, the Democrats continue to struggle for air.
So their generic ballot lead is now down to 4.7% in the latest RealClearPolitics poll average.
This is because the Democrats have staked everything on the Russia investigation.
What's amazing about the Democrats is how dumb they are.
So after Trump was elected, if the Democrats had any brains at all, what they could have done is they could have come around and said, hey, you know, Mr. President, you seem like a pretty swell guy.
You gave a lot of money to us in the past, and we feel like we can work with you.
You're a good guy and a gork guy.
We can get some deals done.
Here, look, let's just do some nationalized health care.
Just a little bit.
Let's do some nationalized health care.
The chance of the Trump sign that would have been about 53%, OK, because Trump is not an ideological conservative.
He's governed as a conservative.
One of the reasons he has governed as a conservative is because the Democrats have decided that he is Satan and he must be destroyed from without.
Well, they have nothing else to offer other than we hate Trump and Russia and Michael Avenetti and Stormy Daniels.
Stormy Daniels, by the way, who is making a literal bare ass of herself.
I mean, she is she's literally going to go to a There's apparently a statue of President Trump naked in Seattle or something, and she's going to go do a lap dance with the naked statue of Trump.
I can't imagine why people aren't taking the Stormy Daniels stuff seriously.
It seems to me that she's a very serious person deserving of nothing but intellectual respect.
And also, yeah, she's gonna go spank a naked statue with a magazine.
But other than that, I think totally, yes.
Michael Avenetti?
Sure, he's threatening journalists online who are merely reporting on him, but I think that he's a real legit figure.
These are all real legit people.
The Democrats have staked their entire fortune and their political fate on Michael Avenetti and Stormy Daniels.
Good luck with that.
Well, they don't really have much choice because their alternative is to say things like Keith Ellison.
So Keith Ellison, who is almost the head of the DNC, Democratic representative from Minnesota, he actually made the case yesterday we ought to regulate employer pay.
So we have a booming economy, incomes are rising, like in real terms they're rising, the economy is reaching historic heights, and Keith Ellison's solution is we should use the government to force employers to pay particular wages on the upper end and the lower end.
Yeah, I can't imagine why people don't trust Democrats to run the government.
I mean, this is not a big secret to shareholders.
It's not a big secret to boards of directors.
Don't you need direct government intervention?
Are you favoring the government actually regulating the relationship between CEO pays and the average worker?
I think it's a very good idea and I think we should start talking about it.
Okay, so great.
I'm glad the Democrats are coming out of the woodwork.
Well done, guys.
Just keep going.
Keep going.
It's amazing.
They're so far to the left that they don't even understand.
They're blowing their greatest opportunity for a re-entry to power that they've had in quite a while.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things I hate and then a quick Bible review.
So things I like.
So yesterday or Sunday, I believe, Tom Wolfe died, the novelist Tom Wolfe.
There's another really terrible death today, Richard Pipes, who's a terrific historian of Russia.
I'll recommend one of his books tomorrow on the show probably.
But Tom Wolfe was, of course, one of the great nonfiction journalists of the 20th century.
He's also a very good novelist.
His first huge book was Bonfire to the Vanities.
As I said yesterday, the first half of this book is just tremendous.
The second half of the book kind of bogs down a little bit.
But the first half, you read it as a conservative, like, wow, this is a gutsy book.
I mean, the book begins with a kind of yuppie leftist liberal character driving into a heavily black area and being so afraid of crime that he promptly runs over a black guy near his car and then he hit and runs him.
And the book begins with an attempted race riot by an Al Sharpton character.
It's an intense book.
It's an intense book.
Go check out Bonfire of the Vanities.
Tom Wolfe was always a great social satirist, and this obviously is evident in Bonfire of the Vanities, so check that out.
Okay, other things that I like.
One of the things that is obvious about the Trump administration's decision to move the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem is that this should actually facilitate peace because it may take off the table an area of contention that should not be an area of contention.
Is that Israel is not going to stop existing.
Israel is not going to give up Jerusalem.
Bibi Netanyahu makes that point yesterday on Vice.
Vice, of course, their coverage of Israel has been absolutely egregiously awful.
But here's Bibi Netanyahu making what is a very fine point on Vice.
Because a peace that's based on lies will crash on the rocks of Middle East reality.
And it's time to tell the Palestinians, abandon your fantasy of destroying Israel.
Abandon the fantasy that you will conquer Jerusalem.
Abandon the fantasy that says Israel will disappear.
It will not.
Good.
Well, he's exactly right.
The left would prefer a false peace based on false promises than they would a real peace based on realities on the ground because then they don't get to paint their false moral picture of what's actually happening in the Middle East.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So good news.
The Democrats can't call Hamas terrorists.
They say that it was a bunch of innocent people shot on the border, even after Hamas suggested that it was not.
It was a bunch of Hamas terrorists.
They won't call MS-13 terrorists or animals.
They'll say that MS-13, they're just a bunch of natural illegal immigrants, I guess.
I mean, I don't know how else to take their interpretation of President Trump's comments.
And now, Debbie Wasserman Schultz has labeled the real terrorists.
She did an interview with the Huffington Post, and she says, quote, Good job, Democrats.
Well done.
So, just to get this straight, Hamas, not terrorists.
MS-13, not animals.
nation.
They've done everything they can to perpetuate the culture of violence that we have in our country with the spread of assault weapons across the nation.
Good job, Democrats.
Well done.
So just to get this straight, Hamas, not terrorists.
MS-13, not animals.
NRA members, terrorists.
No, you're not alienating the American public at all.
You're not alienating the American public at all when you say that law-abiding gun owners are the real terrorists, but Hamas terrorists who use babies as human shields are not terrorists.
By the way, there's that story about an eight-month-old baby that died in the crossfire in Gaza or died after being exposed to tear gas.
And the question I asked yesterday is why that baby was anywhere near the tear gas in the first place.
He takes a baby to a protest where you know that it's a riot, essentially.
Who does that?
Beyond that, there's a doctor who's now reporting the baby actually died of a pre-existing medical condition.
So it had nothing to do with the tear gas in the first place.
It didn't stop the media from reporting it.
They buried it in paragraph 15, I believe, of a New York Times report yesterday.
So well done, media, all the way through.
Yes, you want to talk about political polarization?
It started before Trump.
It will last after Trump.
The left is pushing it in a really heavy way.
It ain't just Trump who's the creator of the sort of political polarization we're seeing.
OK, so it's a Thursday, which means that I'm going to do a little bit of Bible talk.
Normally I do that on Wednesday, but I'm a day late.
Tough deal with it.
So we're going through the Bible.
Last week, We did the first chapter of Joshua, so I'm going through it chapter by chapter because we've already gone through the five books of Moses.
We did that, I think, last year.
So now we're going through the story of Joshua.
So Joshua 2 is the story of Rahab.
Rahab was the whore that was in Jericho, and Joshua and the Jews invade the land, and when they get to Jericho, which is a walled city, Joshua and some of his other spies Well, some of the spies love Joshua.
They go into Rahab's whorehouse, essentially, and people are looking for them, and she advises them on how they can get into the city, and she says, now that I've advised you on how to get in the city, and how I'm going to hide you, and she hides them, then I'm going to need your protection.
And here's what it says.
This is Joshua 2, 8.
The reason that I read this is because it's actually a really bad description of why you ought to believe in God.
There's this, you know, the reason that she is saying that people are believing in God is because God is demonstrating his mastery through human beings.
It is a bad reason to believe in God.
However, it is also a very common reason to believe in God.
And putting the fear of God in someone is not just a phrase.
Putting the fear of God in someone requires Western civilization to stand up for itself.
It is not just enough for you to say, my principles are my principles and I stand here on my principles.
When you are fighting evil people, you have to protect yourself.
When you are fighting evil people, you have to demonstrate that you are capable of winning.
That is why what Israel is doing, it's why what America does in the world, it matters.
It matters on a military level.
Truthful propositions are not self-evident.
And for the vast majority of people over the vast majority of history, they've not been self-evident.
That does not mean you should be an aggressor.
It does mean that if you strongly defend your own values, Either rhetorically or if you're put under threat physically, people are more likely to believe that what you're saying is true.
OK, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest and with the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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