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June 5, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:29
Sit, Eagle, Sit | Ep. 553
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The White House cancels the Philadelphia Eagles, Paul Manafort allegedly gets caught witness tampering, and President Trump talks about pardoning himself.
We'll talk about all of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All right, so we have a lot to get to today.
We will be talking about President Trump disinviting the Philadelphia Eagles and why that is a silly move.
We will also be talking about Miss America 2.0.
Better than ever, except for how it's worse in every possible way.
I'll explain what I mean by that in just a second.
First, I want to make a couple announcements.
We've decided to honor Father's Day this year with a special live stream on Tuesday, June 12th, 7 p.m.
Eastern.
DailyWire God King Jeremy Boren will host a roundtable discussion with me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Clavin, and Michael Knowles.
We'll discuss what fatherhood means, why fathers matter, how fatherhood will stand up against an increasingly anti-males culture, and we'll smoke cigars and ignore the fact that we have wives and children.
Subscribers will be able to answer, well, send and write in live questions, okay?
Just send in questions, we'll answer them.
And that is Tuesday, June 12th, 7 p.m.
Eastern, 4 p.m.
Pacific.
You can find our special live stream on Facebook and YouTube, so do not miss it.
Alrighty, so.
In just a second, I want to get to the president and football and all the rest of it.
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All you have to do is go to Skillshare.com Okay, we begin today with a controversy of the day, the President of the United States disinviting the Philadelphia Eagles.
So here is sort of the back story.
The Philadelphia Eagles win the Super Bowl in shocking fashion over the New England Patriots, and then a bunch of the players say they don't want to come to the White House.
I have said for a long time, and I know there's been an issue since Trump became president, and there are a lot of sports teams where people don't want to show up whenever they're invited to the White House.
What I've said for a long time is I think White House invitations to sports teams are stupid.
I don't like the ceremonial aspect of the White House all that much.
I think that it smacks of monarchism.
I don't like the idea of some king-like figure who sits around and gives out magical awards to people as though He is the great leader of the United States, as opposed to a constitutional official elected to do a particular job.
So I'm not a big fan of sports teams visiting the White House in the first place, but it's been a thing since Ronald Reagan.
And Donald Trump invites the Philadelphia Eagles to show up.
And a bunch of them decide, you know what, not a big fan of President Trump, don't want to show up.
This is not the first time this has happened.
I remember Tim Thomas, who was on the NHL Stanley Cup winning Boston Bruins back during the Obama administration, decided that he didn't want to go to the White House and the left made a huge deal out of it.
How could he do such a thing?
And I was on Tim Thomas's side.
If I don't feel like showing up to the White House to receive an award from Jimmy Carter or something, I'm not going to show up to the White House to receive an award from Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama.
Then I don't see a problem with that.
Well, a lot of the Eagles are not fans of President Trump, which is not particularly shocking, given the political breakdown of the NFL.
Most of the players in the NFL vote Democrat.
Most of the players in the NFL are not big fans of President Trump.
So apparently a bunch of them didn't want to show up.
There are, you know, dozens and dozens of NFL players on the Philadelphia Eagles.
And that list had been whittled down to about 10 who actually wanted to show up.
And there was a report that it was all the way down to like three and a mascot.
That was embarrassing for the president.
So the president then canceled.
But the president didn't just cancel the event.
The president then put out a statement about canceling the event.
And here is what he said.
He said, quote, the Philadelphia Eagles are unable to come to the White House with their full team to be celebrated tomorrow.
They disagree with their president because he insists that they proudly stand for the national anthem hand on heart in honor of the great men and women of our military and the people of our country.
The Eagles wanted to send a smaller delegation, but the 1,000 fans planning to attend the event deserve better.
These fans are still invited to the White House to be part of a different type of ceremony, one that will honor our great country, pay tribute to the heroes who fight to protect it, and loudly and proudly play the national anthem.
I will be there at 3 p.m.
with the United States Marine Band and the United States Army Chorus to celebrate America.
OK, so there are a bunch of things that are wrong with this statement.
So first of all, I love the self-centeredness of the statement is really quite astonishing.
They disagree with their president because he insists that they probably stand for the national anthem.
I love the speaking of himself in third person that he because Donald Trump is their president.
He also tweeted out about this as well.
And here's what President Trump tweeted, same sort of message.
"The Philadelphia Eagles football team "was invited to the White House.
"Unfortunately, only a small number of players "decided to come and we canceled the event.
"Staying in the locker room for the playing "of our national anthem is as disrespectful "to our country as kneeling.
"Sorry." Okay, well, here's the problem.
Nobody in the Eagles kneels for the national anthem.
No one on the Philadelphia Eagles that entire season knelt for the National Anthem.
There was one player who didn't preseason, he was cut.
No one on the Philadelphia Eagles actually knelt for the National Anthem or attempted to dishonor the National Anthem.
But the President of the United States is attempting to jump on this culture war again, this kneeling for the National Anthem routine, again and again, because he thinks he's going to get a political win out of it when, in effect, All that happened here is that a bunch of eagles didn't want to show up and President Trump decided to respond essentially by slandering the Philadelphia Eagles.
This is one of the drawbacks of having President Trump be who he is character-wise.
Listen, I said yesterday on Fox News, and I stand by this, President Trump, in terms of governance, Has governed more conservatively than any president of my lifetime through his first 500 days.
The President of the United States has given us all sorts of wins if you are a conservative.
He's given us Justice Gorsuch who's turned out to be a great justice.
He has given us a bunch of appellate court appointees who have been just terrific.
He's given us regulatory reform.
He's given us tax cuts.
He's given us a move of the embassy to Jerusalem.
He's given us a lot of wins as the President of the United States.
But one area where the president continues to befuddle is his approach to these issues.
Now, I know that there are a lot of folks in the Trump base who will be angry at me for saying that the president is blowing it on issues like this.
They think that every time the president mentions the national anthem, it's a big win for him.
But here is the problem.
If you actually like the National Anthem, if you like the idea of unifying American symbols, what you can't do is slander people with regard to how they approach the National Anthem by telling lies about them for your own personal grandisement.
If you really do respect the National Anthem, then you can't say people aren't standing who are standing.
You can't do that just out of a fit of personal pique.
It's worthless.
Not only is it worthless, it's counterproductive.
And it shows that the president isn't really all that upset about the National Anthem stuff.
He's more upset about the fact that the Eagles wouldn't visit the White House and come and see him and pay homage to him.
That's a big problem for me.
If you truly care about the symbolism of unifying American symbols like the American flag or the National Anthem, you shouldn't be using them as wedge issues.
Now, I objected when NFL players did it.
I object to NFL players kneeling.
I think it's stupid that so many on the left are fine with NFL players kneeling for the National Anthem.
I think that is a cultural totem to which we all should pay a certain amount of respect.
But the president is doing no better when he decides that he's going to take players out of context.
Unfortunately, This actually ended up being an issue on Fox News.
So Fox News actually did a segment last night talking about all of this, and the producers cut a bunch of pictures.
So Shannon Bream was doing the segment, and a bunch of people who were producing decided they would put a bunch of pictures of the Philadelphia Eagles kneeling.
There's only one problem.
All the pictures of them kneeling are them praying.
It's not actually for the national anthem.
So here's what it looked like on Fox News.
New tonight, the president announcing the Philadelphia Eagles will not be visiting the White House tomorrow to celebrate their Super Bowl victory due to the national anthem controversy.
The Eagles, who won Super Bowl 52, apparently wanted to send a smaller group of players.
A handful did not plan to attend, but it appears the president said no thanks.
Now, the president says he's still going to host a different event.
Okay, so in any case, you can see, actually, when you watch this thing and don't just hear it, you can actually see that Fox is flashing a bunch of pictures of people kneeling for the National Anthem.
That, of course, is not true, and Fox had to retract that today, which is what they should do.
They got it wrong, and they acknowledged that they got it wrong, that it was wrong to slander these players, saying that they knelt for the National Anthem.
All of this drove Zach Ertz, who's a player on the Philadelphia Eagles, to tweet out about it.
He tweeted, quote, this can't be serious.
Praying before games with my teammates well before the anthem is being used for your propaganda.
Just sad.
I feel like you guys should have to be better than this.
And of course, I think exactly correctly, the Fox News apologized for all of this.
Torrey Smith, who's a wide receiver on the Philadelphia Eagle, also came out and bashed President Trump.
He responded by saying, simply because Trump insists folks stand for the anthem, the president continues to spread the false narrative that players are anti-military.
And then Philadelphia's mayor, Jim Kenney, issued a statement.
He said, the Eagles call the birthplace of our democracy home, so it's no surprise that this team embodies everything that makes our country and our city great.
Their athletic accomplishments on the field led to a historic victory this year.
Fans all across the country rallied behind them because we like to root for the underdog, and we feel joy when we see the underdogs finally win.
I'm equally proud of the Eagles' activism off the field.
These are players who stand up for the causes they believe in and who contribute in meaningful ways to their community.
They represent the diversity of our nation, a nation in which we are free to express our opinions.
Disinviting them from the White House only proves that our president is not a true patriot, but a fragile egomaniac obsessed with crowd size and afraid of the embarrassment of throwing a party to which no one wants to attend.
City Hall is always open for celebration.
The Philadelphia Eagles.
So what should President Trump have done here?
And they said, it has been incredibly thrilling to celebrate our first Super Bowl championship.
Watching the entire Eagles community come together has been an inspiration.
We are truly grateful for support we have received.
And we are looking forward to continuing our preparations for the 2018 season.
So what should President Trump have done here?
He should have just swallowed hard and had the players who wanted to come.
He should have said, listen, I wish that more people were going to come to the people's house to experience the glory of our democracy and come see the White House in person, which is a really cool experience no matter who the president is.
I wish more of them were doing that.
I feel bad that so many people feel polarized by our politics.
And my invitation stands.
They're free to come whenever they want to come.
It would've been fine.
It would've been fine.
But the president reacted in thin-skinned fashion, and it made him look foolish.
He shouldn't have done this, and he certainly shouldn't have lied about the members of the Philadelphia Eagles kneeling for all of this.
In other news, I will say the NFL Players Association responded the stupidest way available also, and this is the reactionary time in which we live.
Trump reacts to NFL players by doing something dumb, then NFL players react to President Trump doing something dumb by doing something even more dumb.
So the NFL Players Association put out a statement, they said, Our union is disappointed in the decision by the White House to disinvite players from the Philadelphia Eagles from being recognized and celebrated by all Americans for their accomplishment.
This decision by the White House has led to the cancellation of several player-led community service events for young people in the Washington, D.C.
area.
NFL players love their country, support our troops, give back to their communities, and strive to make America a better place.
Well, I don't understand why you had to cancel the player-led community service events.
The Players Association's got some money in its coffers.
If they really want to help out a bunch of community members in the Washington, D.C.
area, those players can still go and do this.
And in fact, if they wanted to show up the president, that's exactly what they would do.
They would say, the president disinvited us from the White House.
We weren't going to go to the White House anyway, but we still want to help out the community members in Washington, D.C.
But because the world of politics revolves purely and simply around President Trump, that means that everything Trump does is the black hole around which the entire universe of politics revolves.
And that's really stupid.
It also means the president should be more careful about the stuff that he says.
Because this sort of stuff does have an impact on how Americans think about President Trump.
I have a column up in National Review today all about why Democrats are losing, why Democrats are unable to get it together.
And one of the reasons is because Democrats have been fighting culture wars that they are losing.
Well, when the president decides to go too far in the culture wars, it doesn't help him, it only hurts him, and it only hurts the causes that he is pushing.
Again, if you believe in the National Anthem, believe people should stand for it, you cannot lie about people who are standing for the National Anthem, kneeling for the National Anthem, for your own personal political gain.
Okay, I have a little more to say on this, but first, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at My Patriot Supply.
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Okay, so.
What should the president do with regard to the fact that so many cultural figures dislike him?
The president should simply point out that cultural figures dislike him.
Here is the nice thing about where the president sits in the pop culture sphere.
I've made this point over the past couple of weeks with regard to Samantha Bee and the rest of the culture.
And the fact that the media are insane over President Trump to the point where they're speculating about missing Melania Trump.
Honestly, Melania Trump had a kidney surgery like three weeks ago.
And the entire media since then has been speculating about where Melania Trump went.
There's a theory she'd been abducted by aliens.
There's a theory that President Trump was secretly beating her in the basement of the White House or some such nonsense.
Everyone on the left has lost their mind to the extent that Trump could simply sit back and point at them and laugh.
So if the Philadelphia Eagles decide not to come, again, the president could have said, listen, that makes me sad, I wish they would come, but they're not coming, and it would have been a good unifying moment for the country, but I guess that's on them.
And the president could have done that.
Instead, he decided to play right in their hands, because President Trump is a counterpuncher.
It's a pathological thing with the president.
This is just his personality, and he cannot avoid the feeling that he needs to hit somebody back if he feels hit.
The president is thin-skinned, and he likes to hit back.
That hitting back is a good thing when it comes to some issues, but when it comes to issues like this, where we really should be getting together and having a communal feeling together around things like football, it is not a particularly useful thing.
Again, I went to the Super Bowl last year, and when I went to the Super Bowl, I have to say, the feeling of community in the building was astonishing.
It was astonishing.
I can honestly say the only time I felt something like it is when you go to a synagogue or a church event.
The feeling that everybody is there for one common purpose, to watch football, to enjoy each other's company, to be in out of the cold, honestly, whereas in Minnesota, waving the American flag, enjoying the patriotic aspects of the national anthem and the Blue Angels flyover and all the rest of it.
And all of that stuff should be unifying.
The president should have gone forward with the event.
He should have said to the NFL players, I'm sorry that you guys didn't come.
You really would have enjoyed it.
I think it would have been good for the country for you to show up and we could have talked about some issues that you guys are having.
You know, reaching out with an open hand is not a sign of weakness, Mr. President.
Reaching out with an open hand to people who are disdaining you sometimes looks like strength.
Sometimes it looks like you're going above and beyond the call of duty.
And I think that President Trump could stand to do that a little bit more.
And I hope that he does.
I hope that in the future the President of the United States decides that he is going to reach out to people on the other side of the aisle who have a pathological dislike for him.
And in doing so, maybe open some hearts and open some minds rather than lying about the members of the Philadelphia Eagles, which I just think is a huge mistake.
OK, so meanwhile, speaking of other stupid news, the Miss America competition has now decided that they are no longer going to be having a swimsuit competition.
So Gretchen Carlson, who's on the board over there, she's a former Miss America herself, I believe.
And she, of course, was the subject of a Me Too scandal because Roger Ailes had allegedly sexually harassed her.
Well, Gretchen Carlson comes forward and she says, We are now going to do a Miss America 2.0 makeover.
Oh yeah!
So we are no longer a pageant.
We are a competition.
We will no longer judge our candidates on their outward physical appearance.
That's huge.
That's huge.
And that means that we will no longer have a swimsuit competition.
And so we're no longer judging women when they come out in their chosen attire, their evening wear.
Whatever they choose to do, it's going to be what comes out of their mouth that we're interested in when they talk about their social impact initiatives.
Oh, that's really what it's going to be about.
So Miss America 2.0 is actually going to be like the Kennedy Center honors.
And Madeleine Albright will be your Miss America 2018 because we're no longer taking physical appearance into account.
Hillary Clinton finally has a shot at being beloved by America.
She can be Miss America 2018 if she so chooses.
She can walk out wearing a giant trench coat and she can be awarded this because physical appearance no longer counts.
Okay, so here's why this is so dumb.
Am I upset about this, by the way?
No, I'm not upset about this.
In fact, I think the Miss America competition was always stupid, right?
I'm the guy who, when I was a teenager, used to unsubscribe from the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated because I thought it was basically softcore pornography, right?
I mean, the fact is that when you are looking at the Victoria's Secret catalog, when they have these Victoria's Secret models on the runway, people are not watching the Victoria's Secret fashion show for the fashion.
Okay, if those were 400 pound women walking down the runway with Victoria's Secret fashion on, the ratings would be nil.
It's an excuse for dudes to watch scantily clad, beautiful women walk around, and then they can always say to their wives, well, I was just watching because I really love the fashion aspect.
By the way, women, if you are taken in by this, your boy's lying to you, okay?
He's not watching the Victoria's Secret fashion show because he's mostly interested in the new styles of bra and panties that are coming out.
He's thinking about what happens when those bra and panties are not part of the show at all, okay?
That's just the way that men work.
Note to women all over the world.
The same thing was true of the Miss America pageant.
So, as a religious person and an advocate of modesty for both men and women, I'm perfectly happy with there being no swimsuit competition in the Miss America pageant.
I also will acknowledge that the Miss America competition was always about the swimsuit competition, okay?
There's a reason that Miss America features a bunch of beautiful women and not a bunch of plus-size models.
It's not because she wasn't a charitable human being.
It's because the Miss America pageant was not about that.
And here's the part that I find puzzling.
So, I understand my own perspective on this.
I'm a religious person.
I think it's stupid to judge women by their bodies.
That doesn't mean that when you're entering a relationship, sexual attraction isn't important.
It's deeply important.
It's not to say that I don't think that people of all sexes should stay in shape.
I think that they should, to the best of their ability.
It is to say, however, that I've always been an advocate for modesty, because I think that if you want, if women want to be treated as more than pieces of meat by men, then it behooves them to understand how men think, and men tend to see scantily clad women in sexual ways.
That's just the way that men think, that is nature, that is the way it works.
So, that means that if you put on a little bit more clothing, men are more likely to see you as a proper businesswoman, as opposed to if you walk into the office wearing a bra and panties, just telling you.
Okay, men are not thinking about your capacity for social media marketing at that point.
But here's where I find the argument to the left kind of weird.
So I've heard from the left that a woman wearing a bathing suit is actually empowering, that scantily clad women are empowering, that in fact Stormy Daniels is an example of female empowerment because she chooses to be a porn star and have sex with randos on camera.
I've heard that this is the essence of female empowerment and that if you say that acting immodestly is not female empowerment, it actually is degradation and it is catering to the worst instincts of men.
And the most lewd instincts of men.
If you say that, then you are anti-feminist.
You're anti-female.
But now I'm hearing that it's anti-feminist to allow the swimsuit competition to go forward.
But I was under the impression that all these women consented to be part of the swimsuit competition.
That this was something they wanted to do.
That the leadership of the Miss America pageant wasn't down in the dressing room whipping the girls to get in their bathing suits.
That the girls all chose to be part of this.
You can't have it both ways, ladies.
If you are going to suggest that it is female empowerment to get unclad whenever you please, then you can't then claim that you have done something feminist by telling women that they should no longer wear bathing suits and there shouldn't be a competition for bathing suits or anything like that.
Maybe what they should have done is they should have said, listen, this is a consensual competition.
We can go for it however we want.
Just in the future, we're gonna do evening gowns instead of bathing suits.
By the way, it's a lie.
The idea that they're going to award this to Madeleine Albright or Janet Napolitano or anybody else who is not of the most beautiful ilk is just silly.
It's ridiculous.
Rosie O'Donnell ain't winning the Miss America 2.0.
It's not happening.
It's gonna be a beautiful woman from California Who would look good in a bathing suit, or an evening gown, or in anything else.
And anything else they say to you about this is a lie, but it's all just silliness.
It's all just silliness and demonstrates the internal contradictions inside the radical feminist movement.
Okay, meanwhile, in other news, the situation with Robert Mueller is heating up.
And that situation is not particularly good for Paul Manafort.
So I'm going to get to that in just a second.
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Okay, so the latest news in the Mueller-gate situation is that Robert Mueller, the special investigator, is now accusing Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, of attempted witness tampering.
So, here is the story from ABC News.
Special counsel Robert Mueller is seeking to revoke the bail of President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort for allegedly tampering with witnesses in the year-long probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, according to a court filing on Monday night.
Attorneys with the special counsel have accused Manafort of, quote, attempting to tamper with potential witnesses while awaiting his trial, which thereby, quote, has violated the conditions of his release.
So, in other words, Paul Manafort has on an ankle bracelet, and he's under constant surveillance, and he's trying to tamper with witnesses anyway.
Gotta admire the dude's commitment to criminality.
My goodness.
In February, within days of Mueller's filing a 32-count superseding indictment against Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman allegedly contacted two individuals who worked with him on a lobbying scheme to aid his Kremlin-backed Ukrainian clients.
The two individuals were a member of the Habsburg Group, described by Mueller in February superseding indictment of Manafort as a group of former senior European politicians to take positions favorable to Ukraine, including by lobbying in the United States.
So he was reaching out to some of his European friends.
Mueller's team is asking that the Washington, D.C. federal court revoke Manafort's current $10 million bail and is asking that the court promptly schedule the hearing called for by the statute to determine Manafort's release status.
Now, what's weird about this, of course, is that the day before all of this broke, President Trump was tweeting about Paul Manafort with no obvious reason to do so.
He tweeted out, quote, as only one of two people left who could become president, why wouldn't the FBI or Department of Justice have told me that they were secretly investigating Paul Manafort on charges that were 10 years old and had previously been dropped during my campaign?
Should have told me.
Paul Manafort came into the campaign very late and was with us for a very short period of time.
He represented Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, and many others over the years.
But we should have been told that Comey and the boys were doing a number on him and he wouldn't have been hired.
OK, well, to be fair, everyone on the right who knew who Paul Manafort was, was warning President Trump not to hire him as his campaign manager at about the time that he was hired.
Now, I guess the idea here is that the DOJ or the FBI should have told Trump about Manafort.
But remember, the DOJ and the FBI were suspicious that members of the Trump campaign, other members of the Trump campaign, were participating in Russian collusion.
And it doesn't seem completely out of bounds to me for the FBI or the DOJ to simply say, well, why would we tell President Trump about all of this?
We suspect that President Trump might be more of a window than a wall when it comes to stopping information that could help us capture these guys.
Which brings us to some big questions that I still have about the Spygate scandal.
So, yesterday, a guy whose show I really enjoy, Dan Bongino, he responded to a show that I did on Thursday all about Spygate 2018.
These, of course, are the allegations that the Trump campaign was spied on by the FBI at the behest of the Obama DOJ and the Hillary campaign in order to take down Trump's campaign somehow during the election.
And I expressed three questions during the show on Thursday.
Question number one was why didn't Hillary or the FBI or the DOJ release the most damaging information about the Trump campaign if this was in fact a setup and a hit?
The most damaging information that happened during the Trump campaign was the Donald Trump Jr.
meeting at Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya and the emails that were sent by Donald Trump Jr.
to a Russian connected agent that the Trump family had worked with before in which Trump Jr. expressed his willingness to hear information from the Russian government about Hillary Clinton.
Why didn't we hear about that until after the election?
If this was a setup, why didn't we hear about that?
Why didn't we hear about George Papadopoulos who's apparently going around bragging to the Australian ambassador that he had met up with a Russian source who's going to provide him information on Hillary Clinton's emails.
We didn't hear any of that stuff until after the election.
The only thing that we heard is that there was an investigation going on We heard that in the late stages of the campaign, but the actual headline from the New York Times was, investigation took place and nothing was found, basically.
This is late October.
I think it was October 30th was the New York Times story.
So that was question number one.
Why didn't Hillary and the FBI release the most damaging information?
During the campaign.
So we already knew about Paul Manafort for years.
The idea that there were leaks about Paul Manafort, I find utterly unconvincing.
Paul Manafort, again, for years had been suspected of being a Kremlin agent.
That had been going back long before the 2016 elections.
That was question number one.
Question number two is why didn't the FBI target other members of Team Trump?
So if Spygate is a thing, if the FBI was in fact targeting the entire Trump team, if they suspected the entire Trump team of collusion to the extent that they were wiretapping Trump, as Trump claimed in Trump Tower in that tweet from January 2017, if that was the case, then why were the only people who were targeted inside the Trump campaign people who actually had pretty solid ties with the Kremlin?
OK, those people would be the people that I mentioned before, Robert Gates and Paul Manafort and Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, several of whom have already pled guilty to lying to the FBI or to other charges related to this particular investigation.
So Dan Bongino responded that when I asked this question, I was ignoring that Trump Jr.
and Trump had actually been targeted.
The Trump Jr.
targeting, he suggests, was the Natalia Veselnitskaya meeting was being run by Fusion GPS, which had been hired by Hillary to gather dirt on the Trump campaign.
And therefore, this was some sort of set up by Hillary Clinton.
I think Dan admits, rightly, that there is not evidence to suggest that Hillary Clinton was behind the setup of the Trump Tower meeting.
Again, there is no evidence to suggest that.
There's certainly no evidence to suggest the FBI was behind the setup of the Trump Tower meeting.
Now, is it suspicious that Fusion GPS was involved with the Trump Tower meeting?
Yes, it is suspicious.
Is that enough for me to go all the way and say that Trump Jr.
is being targeted?
Not really.
Not really.
It's hard for me to go all the way without that evidence.
I'm happy to hear more evidence, but I'm not willing to go all the way with all of that.
There's no evidence the FBI, particularly, or the DOJ used this meeting to target Trump Jr.
Now, Bongino's claimed that all of this was designed in order so that they could use the two hop rules so that they could get information on Donald Trump.
I haven't seen the information they got on Trump, if that's the case at this point, so maybe when the evidence comes out, that's what they were doing, then we can talk about it.
Bongino also claims that Donald Trump was targeted by the Steele dossier.
So the Steele dossier obviously is originally funded by the Washington Free Beacon.
That's a misstatement.
The Steele dossier was not funded by the Washington Free Beacon.
An OPPO research file was started, funded by the Washington Free Beacon.
Later on, the Hillary campaign picked up the OPPO research file from Fusion GPS and then went out and hired Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS did, using the Hillary Clinton camp as sort of the funders, and Steele put together this dossier.
It is false to say that we know that everything in the dossier is false.
Okay, we do not know everything in the dossier is false.
We know a lot of things in the dossier are BS.
I've said for a long time, I think a lot of the stuff there is BS.
We don't know that everything in the dossier is false.
Steele has been a source that was used by the FBI multiple times to suggest that the FBI was targeting President Trump because they used Christopher Steele as a source.
You'd then have to rule out every investigation Christopher Steele ever did.
Also, that would bring us to our third question, right?
And our third question here, well, I want to get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so I have a little bit more on Spygate and the associated issues, but first you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com.
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So as I say, I had three questions about Spygate.
Question number one was, why didn't the worst stuff come out during the campaign?
Question number two is, why didn't the FBI target other members of Team Trump?
Dan Bongino had been upset with my analysis of this issue, or at least he had challenged my analysis of this issue.
And I enjoyed Dan's show, so I felt like it was worthwhile responding to some of his responses.
One of the things that he claims and what Spygate is all about is that there was a spy targeting Team Trump.
The guy's name is Stephen Halper.
Stephen Halper has worked with a bunch of Republican administrations in the past.
He was apparently asked by the FBI to meet with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos after Papadopoulos bragged to the Australian High Commissioner to Great Britain Alexander Alexander Downer about Hillary's emails and after Carter Page organized a visit to Moscow that was greenlit by By the Trump campaign.
The fact that he was asked to do so before there was a formal opening of an investigation into Trump-Russia collusion doesn't mean an awful lot.
And to claim that he's a spy?
Okay, you want to call it a spy?
You want to call it an informant?
I don't really care about the language.
It's what he did that counts.
What he did is he approached Carter Page and he offered him like a couple of thousand bucks to write an essay.
And that was pretty much the extent of it from what I can tell.
That doesn't sound to me like a mole inside the Trump campaign in the way that is being made out.
Okay, finally, third question.
Why doesn't Trump just declassify all this material?
And this is the big one.
Why doesn't President Trump, if the Carter Page FISA warrant was badly gotten, as Devin Nunes has claimed, why doesn't Trump just declassify it?
If, in fact, the FBI was spying on Trump in nefarious fashion, there'd be documentation to show that.
Why doesn't Trump just reveal all that stuff?
So Dan has a theory, and Dan's theory is that Trump doesn't do this because this would somehow interfere with or prejudice ongoing leak investigations.
But these two issues are unrelated.
As a lawyer, illegal leaks are still illegal even if the president makes the underlying material unclassified post hoc.
So if I leak classified material and it's classified today, and five years from now the president declassifies that material, I was still breaking the law when I leaked the classified material, so declassifying it doesn't change anything.
Trump could easily declassify the Carter Page FISA warrant, for example, without disrupting any ongoing investigation.
He hasn't, and he should.
We've heard so much about it.
At some point, why don't we just hear the rest of it?
We keep hearing the DOJ isn't being forthcoming with the House Intelligence Committee.
That is true, and that is fair.
And that's why I think Trump should just go over their head and declassify this stuff.
Like, as someone who wants to get to the truth, if the DOJ is in fact stonewalling, and that's Trump's complaint, not mine, right?
Trump is saying the DOJ is stonewalling.
Well, if he's stonewalling, then why not just go over their head and declassify?
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
And the idea that there is some sort of, you know, ongoing investigation.
That's why Trump doesn't declassify.
I'd have to see, again, more evidence.
Maybe that's true, but I'd have to see more evidence of it.
I don't think it's as crystal clear as Dan is suggesting.
Finally, there were two other issues that have been surrounding Spygate that are worth pointing out.
First, Trey Gowdy said last week he didn't believe the Spygate narrative.
He said, quote, I think the FBI, if they were at the table this morning, they would tell you that Russia was the target and Russia's intentions were our country were the target.
The fact that two people who are loosely connected to the Trump campaign may have been involved doesn't diminish the fact that Russia was the target and not the campaign.
OK, this was, in fact, the line that the Trump administration was using for months.
Then they flipped and they said that the Trump campaign itself was targeted.
What they originally said is, we're not guilty.
Originally, this was a counterintelligence investigation that was aimed at the Russians.
And the fact is that President Trump is not a target.
In fact, that's why Trump probably fired James Comey.
As he went to Comey, he said, let's just say I'm not a target.
And Comey wouldn't.
And Trump rightly said, well, why won't you?
And Comey said, well, because I think it would be a bad idea.
And Trump fired him out of frustration.
And now they're saying that Trump was targeted by the FBI and that he really was the target of the investigation.
Well, you can't have it both ways.
Either he was the target of the investigation or he was not the target of the investigation.
I guess the happy medium would be he was the target of the investigation and the evidence just didn't arrive to indict him.
But again, I'd have to see more evidence that he was the target, Trump specifically, as opposed to particular members of the Trump campaign amid the broad suspicion of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.
Which, again, wouldn't end with the indictment of particular officials.
There's no Trump campaign to indict.
You can't actually do a criminal indictment against the quote-unquote Trump campaign.
You can only indict people who knew about things and committed crimes.
Okay, finally, when Bongino said that I got it wrong when I said Trump had openly stated, or literally stated, that he had fired James Comey over Russia, here is what Donald Trump said about firing James Comey.
And in fact, when I decided to just do it, i.e.
fire Comey, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.
I never claimed that Trump fired Comey to obstruct the Russia investigation.
In fact, I've been saying since the day Comey was fired that he did not do that.
I wrote an article that day saying that Comey was fired because he refused to clear Trump in the Russia investigation when Trump obviously wasn't under investigation.
But for Trump to claim that Comey's firing had nothing to do with the Russia case, which is what he claimed on Twitter, that is just not true.
That's just not, no.
With all of that said, there are serious questions to be asked about the Mueller investigation.
What's the scope of the investigation?
Why hasn't it been restricted to the issues at hand, i.e.
Trump-Russia collusion?
Why were members of the Obama holdover team leaking like sieves criminally after the election?
Why hasn't the DOJ turned over documentation to the House Intelligence Committee?
Why did the DOJ struggle so hard to avoid turning over information that really could have been declassified?
Why did James Comey keep contemporaneous notes about Trump but not Obama?
Why did he leak information to his friends outside the government?
I'm not saying that it's impossible that the FBI and DOJ combined to target Trump during the election cycle as quote-unquote insurance against Trump winning, although I'm still wondering how that insurance was supposed to work if they never revealed the information.
But I'm open to the argument.
I just need to see more information.
And I haven't seen the evidence quite yet.
So when the evidence presents itself, I am happy to change my mind on all of this.
Well, this has led to a real break sort of inside the conservative movement.
Rudy Giuliani has been ripping up and down Trey Gowdy over the last couple of days.
Here's Rudy Giuliani, the president's lawyer on these matters, talking to Chris Cuomo on CNN about it.
And they said there was no wrongdoing.
Gaudi and Nunes are not somebody's lawyer.
I don't know the last time they practiced criminal law.
So don't tell me -- I like both of them, but they're not the lawyers.
They don't have the awesome responsibility of representing somebody who is being treated in a way that you wouldn't treat a common criminal.
So don't tell me, Gaudi and Nunes.
I've got like more experience than the two of them by 10.
Okay, so he's angry at both Gowdy and Nunes, right?
Not just Trey Gowdy.
He's also angry at Devin Nunes because Devin Nunes has suggested that Trey Gowdy may not be entirely wrong.
So if the idea here is that That Rudy Giuliani has the most experience and therefore he knows what's buying.
Looks like Trey Gowdy was a prosecutor.
He was a federal prosecutor.
And Trey Gowdy does know what he is talking about.
There's a rumor, not a rumor, there was a report going around from Molly Hemingway over at the Federalist saying, well, Trey Gowdy hasn't seen the underlying documents, so how can he clear the FBI?
Trey Gowdy has seen precisely the same documents that Devin Nunes has, and he's come to some opposite conclusions, which suggests an honest difference of opinion.
Not that Trey Gowdy has been somehow picked up by the deep state and turned Remember, just months ago, he was ripping on James Comey with the same alacrity as President Trump.
Okay.
Meanwhile, President Trump has been talking about pardoning himself again.
I want to talk about that.
So, President Trump, he came out the other day and he said, I have the power to pardon myself.
This is, at best, unclear.
So, the constitutional pardon power is laid forth in Article 2 of the Constitution of the United States.
There's Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1.
So the president shall have the power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.
In other words, the president can't pardon himself after he's impeached and convicted in the Senate.
So you can't pardon somebody who has been convicted in the Senate.
You can pardon somebody who was about to be impeached.
That's what happened to Richard Nixon with Gerald Ford.
According to the Heritage Foundation, the power to pardon is one of the least limited powers granted to the president in the Constitution.
The only limits mentioned in the Constitution are the pardons that are limited to offenses against the United States, and they cannot affect an impeachment process.
A reprieve is a commutation or lessening of a sentence already imposed.
A pardon completely wipes out the legal effects of a conviction.
The presidential power to pardon was derived from the Royal English prerogative of kings.
This is why I don't like the pardon power all that much.
It's not clear how far the pardons can go.
Pardons have been used for broader public policy purposes of ensuring peace and tranquility.
In the case of uprisings, which is what happened after the Shays Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, for example...
And the scope of the pardon power, according to Heritage, remains quite broad, almost plenary.
Justice Stephen Field wrote in 1867, if granted before conviction, it prevents any of the penalties and disabilities consequent upon conviction from attaching thereto.
It says, the possibility of a president pardoning himself for a crime is not precluded by the explicit language of the Constitution, but a broader reading of the Constitution and the general principles of the traditions of the United States might lead to the conclusion that a self-pardon is constitutionally impermissible.
It would seem to violate the principle that a man should not be a judge in his own case, that the rule of law is supreme, and the United States is a nation of laws, not men, and that the president is not above the law.
This is Courtney James Pfiffner, professor of public policy at George Mason University, writing for Heritage.
That's probably my reason.
The president doesn't have the constitutional power to pardon himself because it puts him above checks and balances that are inherent.
Now, you could make the counter-argument.
You could say the president can pardon himself, but he could still be impeached.
So, in reality, the checks and balances still exist.
I think it's a dicey case at best.
Alan Dershowitz, who's been very warm toward the Trump administration legally, he says he doesn't think that President Trump has the power to pardon himself.
Look, I disagree with a great deal of what has gone on today from the White House.
I don't think that a president necessarily has the power to pardon himself.
I wrote a column today in The Hill, I wrote one a year ago, in which I said nobody knows the answer to that question.
It's clearly on a blank slate.
Nobody should be saying either that a president clearly has the power to pardon himself or a president doesn't have the power.
We just don't know the answer to that question.
We will probably never find it out.
And that's exactly right.
This is the real question, is why Trump is even talking about this in the first place.
He doesn't need to pardon himself.
It's stupid to talk about pardoning yourself if you're not going to do it, particularly because it just makes you look suspicious.
Now, I know that President Trump likes to mouth off on Twitter.
That's his thing.
But I'm not sure why this is useful to him.
Chuck Grassley, who, again, has supported President Trump pretty heavily in the Senate, he says maybe Trump needs a new lawyer if he's being told this stuff.
If I were President of the United States, and I had a lawyer that told me I could pardon myself, I think I'd hire a new lawyer.
And this is part of the problem for President Trump, is that he's so inconsistent in his public face on this stuff.
If he just presented a public face, which is, I'm innocent, do your worst, there's really not a problem here, see what you're gonna see.
And then he said, but I gotta say, the scope of this investigation is beyond any sort of limitation at this point.
And we need investigations into leaking.
I'd be with him 100% of the way here, but it's all the confused language coming out from the White House that is really not useful.
So, for example, the White House has given a bunch of different stories, all of them conflicting, about who drafted the statement in the aftermath of the Trump Jr.
Trump Tower story.
There's a statement that was put out by Trump Jr.
At the time, talking about how the meeting really was about Russian adoptions.
And there was originally a denial from the White House that President Trump had anything to do with that statement.
Then it was admitted that President Trump in fact essentially drafted the statement.
Here's Rudy Giuliani being asked about it on CNN.
You think Jay Sekulow lied?
Maybe he just got it wrong like I've gotten.
I got a few things wrong at the beginning of the investigation.
Meaning my knowledge.
This is a complex investigation.
First week or so I got a few things wrong.
And then it was clarified in a letter.
And that's the final position.
You can make a mistake.
And then if you don't, if you don't, if you want to, you can say it's a lie.
But it was a mistake.
I swear to God, it was a mistake. - Okay, so if they're swearing it's a mistake, that's fine.
But then it's very difficult to tell when a mistake is being made, when a fib is being made, because if the mistakes all lean in one direction, you start to think somebody is fibbing to you.
Again, I don't think any of this stacks up to a hill of beans in the end.
I don't think any of this ends up being anything.
I don't think Trump is indicted.
I don't think anybody whose key around him is indicted other than the people we've already heard.
I haven't seen the evidence of any of that stuff.
The point I'm making here is that the president ought to be focusing on bigger things and the distractions of the Mueller investigation are not particularly helpful to his administration.
He should be avoiding them himself and blowing them up bigger than they are.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things I hate.
So, thing I like.
So, Bill Bryson is a very popular writer.
I picked up one of his books.
I've never read any of his stuff.
He wrote a series of columns called I'm a Stranger, Hear Myself, all about how he had been in Britain for 20 years and then he came back and lived in New Hampshire.
And it's a very charming, funny book all about sort of experiencing life in America anew.
Bryson leans to the left on a bunch of issues, but that really shouldn't inhibit your enjoyment of the book at all.
America's an amazing place.
It's an amazing place.
A lot of people who are in America and don't appreciate how great America is have spent very little time in other countries.
They're talking about countries in which they've spent not a lot of time.
There's a reason everybody is clamoring to get into the United States.
It's because America is the dream.
New Hampshire, where Bill Bryson lives, that is the dream.
And he basically acknowledges as much, even though he tends toward the left side of the aisle on a lot of key issues.
So check that out.
I'm a Stranger Here by Bill Bryson.
Really worth the read and a lot of fun to read.
Okay, time for some quick things that I hate.
As we discussed yesterday, Bill Clinton has been making the rounds, and the fact that Bill Clinton is still considered a respected voice in left-wing circles is just insane.
So you remember during the last campaign, Kirsten Gillibrand, who's the senator from New York, originally she said that she thinks that President Clinton should have resigned after the Lewinsky scandal and after he was caught in a perjury trap.
Well, Clinton has now responded to Kirsten Gillibrand, and he says, well, you know, not really.
I shouldn't resign.
She's living in a different context.
Well, I just disagree with her.
I mean, I think, you know, just you have to really ignore what the context was.
But, you know, she's living in a different context and she did it for different reasons.
But I just disagree with her.
He's so gross.
What is the different context?
It's exactly the same context.
It is bad to sexually harass the help.
It's bad to use your leverage as President of the United States to shtoop 19-year-old girls working for you.
It's a bad idea.
It makes you a bad person.
When you're married, particularly, it makes you a bad person.
So, no.
Bill Clinton still doing this routine.
The hilarious part about this is the media's sudden awareness, their sudden awakening to the fact that Bill Clinton is despicable.
Here's Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC talking about Bill Clinton.
It has been for decades an unbelievable double standard that the Clintons have used and abused, where nobody is allowed to go there on this issue.
And in the age of Me Too, women are supposed to go there.
And men, by the way.
We're supposed to be able to say what the difference is between right and wrong.
And when you have done something wrong, you are supposed to own it and not talk about facts, distorted facts and obstructed facts.
My God, he sounded like Trump.
I love that this just hit them.
I love that this just hit them.
Like, it just hit Mika and Joe, who pumped Trump during the primaries.
It just hit them that Trump is kind of like Clinton.
Right!
Yeah, we knew that, guys.
We're pretty much aware of that, like the whole campaign.
We're pretty much aware that Trump and Clinton used to be buddy-buddy.
And we've been on top of this thing for, I don't know, 20 years?
And now you're claiming that, oh my God, I'm just so shocked by Bill Clinton.
My goodness.
My goodness.
It's like Claude Rains in Casablanca.
I'm shocked, shocked to find there's gambling going on here.
Hero winning, sir.
Thank you very much.
Right?
I mean, it's that feel.
It's just absurd.
But, you know, this is why the left can't get a grip on anything.
Suddenly their eyes have been awakened.
They've been opened by Trump.
Until, of course, the next Democrat is up for election, and it turns out that Democrat was stepping in turns and lying about it.
Then we'll just go right back to, why are Republicans so snooty?
Why can't Republicans just accept that we have new social standards in the United States?
That's the way the left operates, unfortunately, and Democrats have operated.
I hate this kind of partisanship.
Okay.
Time for a quick Federalist paper.
We didn't do one yesterday.
So Federalist 31, Alexander Hamilton writing.
He's still defending general taxation by the federal government and talking about the argument that we should not be just trying to go to the states and asking them for money.
That instead the states should actually, we can go over the head of the state governments and we can tax citizens directly.
So he says, as theory and practice conspire to prove that the power of procuring revenue is unavailable when exercised over the states in their collective capacities, the federal government must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation in the ordinary modes.
What he's saying here is that under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government gained money simply by going to the states and asking for levies.
And the states basically said, go screw yourself.
And then they didn't have any money.
So he said, well, if the states are going to be a burden here, then we just have to go around the states.
Otherwise, we can't have a functional federal government.
And then he says, in the end, this is an important line, he says, we have to rely on the people in the end to maintain the balance between the states and the federal government.
He says, the moment we launch into conjectures about the usurpations of the federal government, We get into an unfathomable abyss and fairly put ourselves out of the reach of all reasoning.
So what he's saying here is everybody is complaining that the federal government might usurp all tax money and leave the states bereft, but if we imagine worst-case scenario, we're never gonna be able to do anything here.
His imagination may range at pleasure till it gets bewildered amidst the labyrinths of an enchanted castle and knows not on which side to turn to extricate itself from the perplexities into which it has so rashly adventured.
Whatever may be the limits or modifications of the powers of the Union, it is easy to imagine an endless train of possible dangers, and by indulging in excess of jealousy and timidity, we may bring ourselves to a state of absolute skepticism and irresolution.
He says, listen, we have to make a call here, and we're going to have to determine exactly how the checks and balances work.
Now...
The truth is that the federal taxation power was just fine up until the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which allowed the income tax.
Up until then, the federal government was not an overweening institution that was dedicated to sucking as much money as possible out of your pockets.
It was really at the beginning of the 20th century that all of that changed.
So Hamilton's critique of the Anti-Federalists was right.
The anti-federalist critique of Hamilton ended up being right in the long run because the reality is the federal government did usurp an enormous amount of revenue and they continue to do so on a daily basis all across the country.
Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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