Michael Cohen's testimony gives everyone what they want, Rashida Tlaib goes off the rails, and President Trump's North Korea gambit comes apart.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
We have a lot of breaking news on the North Korea front.
We're going to get to that in just one second.
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All right, so the president's gambit in North Korea is an utter giant shambolic failure.
It's a giant fail.
I have been very critical of the president's strategy on North Korea, but I was willing to withhold judgment.
My feeling was, if the president wants to try his sycophancy for denuclearization negotiation tactic, if he wants to pretend that he can flatter Kim Jong-un into giving up his nuclear weapons, which again, makes no sense.
The only reason Kim Jong-un is even a player on the world stage is because of his nuclear weapons.
But if Trump thinks that he can flatter him into something, if he thinks that he can grant him world credibility by meeting with him and conferring America's imprimatur of quasi-approval upon him, if he thinks he can get him to denuclearize, well, that's a high-risk, high-reward strategy, because if it works, Then the President wins the Nobel Peace Prize.
But if it doesn't work, then the United States has just sunk down to the level of the North Korean dictatorship diplomatically by sitting in a room with one of the worst people on planet Earth, a man who is keeping millions of people in a giant gulag, a person who has executed legitimately tens of thousands of people, a person who kills his relatives with anti-aircraft guns and anthrax at airports.
The President of the United States sat down with that guy not once, but twice.
And again, if this was all part of some grand plan, fine.
It turns out, today, it was not part of a grand plan.
And I'm going to show you how this whole thing fell apart, how it was never properly planned, and how the President of the United States made the United States look foolish in this entire endeavor, and continues to do so today in his talk about Kim Jong-un.
The bottom line is this.
Negotiation takes place between people who are seeking some sort of common interest.
The United States does not have a common interest with the Kim regime.
Now, is it possible that negotiators could find such a common interest?
Perhaps, but that would require actual diplomatic initiative.
That would require pre-negotiations.
That would require that Kim Jong-un had already signed off on some stuff before President Trump ever got in a room with him.
What you don't do is send the President of the United States around like a used car salesman trying to pawn off a bad lemon on some unsuspecting schmuck.
That's not what the President of the United States is there to do.
We have an entire diplomatic corps that is there to ensure that at the end of a summit like this, that something gets signed that looks like a concession by the North Koreans, or that looks like a deal, or that looks like anything.
The president didn't even get an empty pledge from the North Koreans this time.
He walked away from the table.
Now, the president is right to walk away from the table.
My point is he shouldn't have been at the table in the first place.
You don't come to the table with the worst dictatorship on planet Earth simply because you want a photo op.
You better have a plan.
Because otherwise, you just took the most powerful, most moral country in the history of the world and put it on an equal photo op playing field with one of the worst people on planet Earth.
Here's how things went down.
According to the New York Times today, President Trump and Kim Jong-un, North Korea's leader, abruptly ended their second summit meeting on Thursday after talks collapsed, with the two leaders failing to agree on any steps toward nuclear disarmament or measures to ease tensions on the Korean peninsula.
Sometimes you just have to walk, Mr. Trump said at an afternoon news conference in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam.
That's true.
Sometimes you do just have to walk.
The question is why you had walked into Vietnam in the first place without any sort of pre-negotiations.
Again, I bashed President Obama back when he was Senator Obama in 2008 for saying he wanted to meet with the Iranians and the Cubans without precondition.
You think I'm not going to do the same thing with regard to North Korea and President Trump?
Especially when the president confers all sorts of beautiful words upon a piece of human debris like Kim Jong-un.
The president of the United States went to Vietnam and suggested that Kim Jong-un, unlike, you know, many spoiled billionaire's kids, he was really a normal guy.
And then they issued a statement yesterday.
The United States issued a statement talking about President Trump's special relationship with Kim.
Hey, you don't have to hug the dictator to negotiate with the dictator.
You don't have to do that.
But here's the problem.
The president has a personal negotiation strategy.
He's been using it in business for years.
And that strategy is essentially blustering threats, followed by the possibility of a warm, cordial embrace.
The president thinks he can flatter people into doing what he wants, and if he doesn't get that, then he tries to threaten them into doing what he wants.
Well, that's not a strategy.
That is just a wild vacillation from one point to the other.
Remember, two years ago, the president of the United States was threatening little Kim Jong-un with the biggest nuclear button in the world, and now he's calling him his best friend.
Does that seem like a strategy to you, or does that just seem like wild flailing about?
I'll tell you, after what I saw today from the president, it seems like wild flailing about.
According to Trump, he said Kim had offered to dismantle the North's most important nuclear facility if the United States lifted the sanctions on his nation, but he would not commit to do the same for other elements of its weapons program.
Mr. Trump said that was a deal-breaker.
He said it was about the sanctions.
Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, but we couldn't do that.
Well, that's something that you should have known walking in, is it not?
I mean, this is why, again, we have an entire State Department that is designed to do these things.
But I want you to see how people moved from Trump is a genius for engaging in the negotiation to Trump is a genius for walking away in the space of 48 hours.
It's wildly inconsistent.
Not only is it wildly inconsistent, again, I point you to the fact that if Barack Obama did this, people on the right would lose their bleep.
They would lose their minds.
And they should, because the President of the United States represents not only the people living in the United States today, he represents the Constitution of the United States, he represents the American mission, he represents liberty.
It was one of the most shameful things about the Obama presidency, the fact that President Obama was constantly trying to make common cause with the Iranian mullahs, for example.
It was gross.
Well, the same thing is true when the President of the United States does this.
Now, again, I think all of this was true before he walked away.
The reason I'm angry is not because he walked away.
That's the right thing.
I'm glad he walked away.
He should walk away.
The United States is not in a position to make concessions to an evil gulag master.
Something straight out Austin Powers over here.
We're not in that position.
So the President is correct to walk away.
The question is, I was assured that there was a strategy here.
I was assured that there was a broader strategy here.
What is the broader strategy?
Is there no broader strategy?
I was assured by the president that the threat of a nuclear North Korea had completely been taken off the table.
He said that on Twitter.
That we shouldn't worry about it anymore.
Okay, so what's the plan?
So what's the plan?
Was there ever a plan?
And for people who say, well, you know, it's just talking.
It's just talking.
You know, it's not just talking when the president of the United States creates an image of the United States as a place willing to overlook the most brutal human rights violations on the planet in exchange for nothing, in exchange for literally nothing.
Apparently, there was a meeting that was scheduled today.
The premature end to the negotiations leaves the unusual rapprochement between the United States and North Korea that has unfolded for most of a year at a deadlock, with the North retaining both its nuclear arsenal and facilities believed to be producing additional fissile material for warheads.
It also represents a major setback at a difficult political moment for Trump, who has long presented himself as a tough negotiator capable of bringing adversaries into a deal and had made North Korea the signature diplomatic initiative of his presidency.
And here I will point out that the President's history of negotiation as President of the United States has been rather poor.
It has been rather poor.
On every budget deal, he has caved to the Democrats.
He's undercut his own party to do so.
In negotiations with North Korea, he comes away with nothing after spending an enormous amount of his own political capital and the political capital of the United States on these foolhardy negotiations.
Now I'm going to show you how this unfolded.
So, as of yesterday, President Trump was still talking up all this stuff.
He said, listen, we're having great meetings.
We had dinner.
It was fabulous.
We're sitting next to each other.
We're best friends.
So we're going to have a very busy day tomorrow, and we'll probably have a pretty quick dinner.
And a lot of things are going to be solved, I hope, and I think it'll lead to wonderful, it'll lead to really a wonderful situation along the way.
And our relationship is a very special relationship.
A special relationship.
That's a phrase usually reserved for the United States' relations with Great Britain.
The special relationship between the U.S.
and Great Britain was the hallmark of World War II.
Now he's saying that he has a very special relationship with a guy who literally strapped his uncle to an anti-aircraft gun and blew him in half.
Who literally took his brother-in-law and had him anthraxed at a public airport.
But we have a special relationship.
Now, maybe you're so cynical about politics or America's moral standing in the world that you think it doesn't matter what the president says.
After all, who really cares?
Does it really make much of a difference?
The answer is yes.
It legitimizes Kim Jong-un in his own country.
It legitimizes Kim Jong-un around the world.
It makes it look like Kim Jong-un outplayed the president of the United States.
That's what it looks like right here.
And Kim Jong-un knew what he was playing at.
He said yesterday, I have a feeling that good results are going to come from this.
Why?
Because his real hope is that he was going to be able to sucker Trump into removing the sanctions.
That's why, again, the president is absolutely correct to walk away from the negotiations.
The question is why he was at the table in the first place without any of these things being discussed.
It's not like this was a minor ancillary issue that killed the deal.
This was the central issue of the deal.
The central issue was, what is North Korea going to do in exchange for removing sanctions, and it better be total denuclearization.
That was the entire premise of these negotiations.
And when we say that, what I love is the ridiculous line that it's some sort of massive win for the United States to sit down with a tin-pot dictator like Kim Jong-un.
Really?
The president of the United States can sit down with anyone on earth that he wants.
When the most prominent recent guest to North Korea from America was Dennis Rodman, I'm going to go with Kim Jong-un's social book is not exactly full up.
It's not a big win for the United States to sit down with a piece of garbage like Kim Jong-un.
Anyway, here was Kim Jong-un saying that he had a feeling that good results were going to come out of this.
Chairman Kim, are you confident?
Thank you.
How are you?
Well, it's too early to tell.
How are you?
But I wouldn't say that I'm pessimistic.
From what I feel right now, I do have a feeling that good results will come out.
OK, so that is, you know, again, his good result was that he thought he was going to roll Trump.
Now, Trump wasn't fully rolled.
Good for him.
But again, if he had been fully rolled, I'm sure there would be people praising him today for that, too.
OK, we're going to talk in a second about how this thing ended, how it went down and how the defense went from Trump is a brilliant negotiator to Trump has has all the the cojones in the world for walking away from this.
He has cojones for walking in and he has cojones for walking out.
Well, then you have now created an untestable and unverifiable thesis.
Okay, if the hypothesis is that it's good for him to walk in because something good will result, and then nothing good results, so it's good for him to walk out, which was it?
We'll get to that in just one second, and I'll explain really why I'm so ticked this morning, because I am.
I'm upset.
I will explain in a second why I'm so ticked.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so President Trump meets with Kim and everything is going swimmingly.
Everything is going just great.
And Republicans are saying, well, it's going so great over there and that's why Democrats scheduled the Michael Cohen hearing because it's just terrible.
They wanted to distract from President Trump over in Vietnam because things are just going so awesome over there.
And then you got Kim saying, listen, I'm ready to denuclearize.
I'm prepared to denuclearize.
Now what he means by denuclearize, obviously, is that the United States pulls all of its troops out of South Korea and the entire continent becomes free of American influence.
That's what Kim meant by denuclearize.
So when he says this, understand that he is lying.
At least if you think denuclearize means he stops his nuclear program.
But here was Kim making the overture that is not real.
If I'm not willing to do that, I won't be here right now.
If I'm not willing to do that, I won't be here right now.
I'm not sure you're the best answer you've ever heard.
Are you ready to take concrete steps to the world's life or not quite yet?
That is what we are discussing right now. - Okay, so that would be Kim Jong-un and his sister basically saying, yeah, this is what we're discussing.
And they have no intention of handing over their nuclear weapons.
The minute the Kim family hands over the nuclear weapons, they get deposed in North Korea.
Everybody knows this.
This is obvious to anyone who's watching this.
But that doesn't stop President Trump's fans from praising his brilliance in negotiation early on in this thing.
And as I say, I was willing to withhold judgment.
Not moral judgment, because again, the United States should not be granting this sort of legitimacy to an evil dictator.
I wasn't willing to suspend judgment when it came to the president flattering Kim Jong-un to the skies and talking about his beautiful pen pal relationship with him.
People saying today that it's just like Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev.
Two differences.
One, Gorbachev represented a nation that was an existential threat to the United States and that ruled over half of Eastern Europe.
And also, President Reagan never downplayed the evil of the evil empire.
He was constantly talking about the evil of the Soviet Union.
Constantly.
President Trump has taken the opposite tack, which is to sort of pretend that it's not all that evil over there for purposes of trying to flatter the Kim regime into doing what he wants.
Okay, so President Trump is doing these negotiations and supposedly everything is going swimmingly.
Everything is going great.
Newt Gingrich, who's obviously a major fan of the president, he goes on Fox News and he says, this is just, it's fantastic stuff.
Look, Kim Jong-un, he's opening up to the world.
Look at him, he's just opening up.
Everybody watching tonight, if you see Kim Jong-un answering questions off the cuff to the news media, you're seeing a historic change that every person in North Korea is going to pick up on.
I mean, it is an enormous moment because he's coming out of a shell of total control into a world where he's now trying to interact with Trump in a way that makes him more normal.
And I think there's a real piece of this of trying to become normal.
Oh, well, that's what's happening here.
He's becoming normal.
Now, I heard the same exact bullcrap about the Iranian regime when Barack Obama was trying to hand over the store to them.
Oh, they're moderates now.
They're normalizing.
That's what they're doing.
They're becoming normal, don't you see?
Well, everybody's in the streets chanting death to America.
Okay, so there's all this buildup.
Oh, the brilliant negotiation tactic of going to a place and being with a person in the same place at the same time.
Wow!
And saying nice things about that person.
What a diplomatic initiative.
What incredible... Now, As I said, if the result had been something of any substance, or if there had been a plan, then I would concede this was out of the box.
It was weird, but it worked.
That's not what happened.
And not only did the president walk away from the table, as he should have, because North Korea never intended on giving anything up.
Not only that, but then Trump did something, and this is what has really set me off today.
What has really set me off today is President Trump was asked about Otto Warmbier.
Now, you'll remember the case of Otto Warmbier.
He was an American college student.
He visited North Korea, and he took a poster off the wall, supposedly.
The North Korean regime took hold of him and literally beat him to death.
They beat him into a coma, they made him a vegetable, and then they shipped him back to the United States.
You'll remember it was a major issue because one Donald J. Trump spoke about Otto Warmbier and had his parents to the State of the Union address just a couple of years ago.
Now here's the President of the United States, the most moral power on the face of the earth and in human history, talking about how he trusts Kim Jong-un that Otto Warmbier was not actually murdered.
Otto Warmbier, something bad happened to him.
But I mean, I trust this Kim guy over here, the one who murders his relatives with anti-aircraft guns.
It just wasn't to his advantage to allow that to happen.
Those prisons are rough.
They're rough places.
And bad things happened.
But I really don't believe that he was... He... I don't believe he knew about it.
Did he say... Did he tell you that he did not... Did Kim Jong-un tell you... He felt badly about it.
I did speak to him.
He felt very badly.
But he knew the case very well.
But he knew it later.
You know, you got a lot of people.
Big country.
A lot of people.
And in those prisons and those camps, you have a lot of people.
And some really bad things happened to Otto.
Some really, really bad things.
Why are you- But he tells me, he tells me that he didn't know about it.
And I will take him at his word.
Okay, absolute, sheer, unmitigated moral garbage right there.
I will take him at his word?
How many American citizens does he think North Korea was holding?
He was holding an American citizen.
Everybody knew about it.
Kim Jong-un certainly knew about it.
This guy was beat to death, beat to death.
And now he's going to take Kim Jong-un, an evil piece of garbage, at his word?
That's what the president of the United States is.
And don't tell me the alternative is nuclear war.
If the alternative were nuclear war, don't you think we would have been at nuclear war with North Korea sometime over the past 20 years?
They've had nuclear weapons for a solid 15 years at this point.
I've been told over and over this is the same exact tactic.
You heard about Iran.
Well, if you don't go for President Obama's deal, that means you want war with the Iranians.
No, it absolutely does not.
I am not suggesting that war with the North Koreans is the solution.
I am suggesting that the solution is not the president of the United States going out there and saying that he trusts a man who had an American murdered.
And Trump does this all the time.
He does this all the time.
And I know there are a bunch of people out there who say, well, that's real politique, you know.
I'm so dark and cynical about it.
Because politics is house of cards.
There's no moral component to politics.
You know, so if Trump is praising Putin because it's advantageous, or if he's praising Kim Jong-un because it's advantageous, Well, what's the big deal?
I mean, don't we all know that politics is dirty pool and people... It's the scene from The Godfather where Michael Corleone is walking around with Kay and he's explaining how he's just like a senator because senators have people killed too.
This kind of faux sophistication about politics.
Well, you know, we're pretty bad too.
Trump has done that routine with Vladimir Putin for years.
He said that he took Vladimir Putin at his word that he didn't interfere in the 2016 election.
He said that while Vladimir Putin has had his political opponents killed, we here in the United States have done some of that stuff too.
And now he's extending that to North Korea.
There's no excuse for this.
None.
There's none.
I mean, imagine you're the Wombier family, and you're sitting home, and Trump brought you to the State of the Union address two years ago.
Not ten years ago.
Two years ago.
And made your son a national issue.
And now he's standing there saying, well, you know, the regime that murdered him seemed like nice people.
Seemed like good guys.
We got a good relationship.
If you were doing that for some effect, at least you could point to the effect.
If you're doing it to no effect, then you just look like a tool.
President Trump says that this wasn't a walk away like you get up and walk out.
He said, no, this was very friendly.
We shook hands.
There's a warmth we have.
And I hope that stays.
International negotiations are not won or lost based on personal relationships.
This is a myth of history.
It wasn't that the Cold War ended because President Trump, because President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev became friends.
The Cold War ended because every incentive aligned against Mikhail Gorbachev, because Gorbachev made the mistake of believing that if he allowed a few of the fringe nations around the edges of the Soviet Union to leave, then the others would not leave, and that he would be saving money in the process.
This is well documented inside the Soviet archives.
He didn't do it because he was personal friends with Reagan.
He was like, you know what?
Communism is bad now.
I guess we're done.
Gorbachev never expected the Soviet Union to collapse.
Negotiations do not take place simply out of love between the participants.
This is true in business.
It's true in life.
It is certainly true in international politics, where you are representing an entire nation and or a dictatorship that has to be preserved at all costs, including the cost of murdering many of its own citizens.
There's no excuse for the president's behavior here.
None.
None.
The only excuse would have been if he had somehow done all this crap and for some odd reason it had worked and Kim Jong-un had committed to denuclearization with verifiability.
He committed to none of those things and he still got out of the president that they are besties and also Otto Warmbier, maybe, you know, maybe it was just sort of an accident in one of those crazy prison camps.
So, apparently, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, he said that officials had worked through the previous night and into the morning to come up with terms acceptable to both leaders.
He said, when you are dealing with a country that is of the nature of North Korea, it is often the case that only the most senior leaders have the capacity to make those important decisions.
He said, we'll each need to regroup a little bit.
There was no statement from the Kim regime.
So, giant moral fail.
Giant moral fail.
Now, maybe this all results in something good down the line, but at this very moment, if I have to judge at this very moment, and I will judge the president on moral grounds here, no excuse.
Just no excuse for that.
None.
I do not have the capacity to speak in defense of a president who is saying that Otto Warmbier was, that the family of Otto Warmbier should apparently be trusted less than Kim Jong-un.
I just don't know how to even remotely justify that or explain it.
It just, it doesn't hold.
In a second, We're gonna get to the Cohen hearings, which, as it turns out, didn't do a lot of damage to the president.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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Okay, so the other big story of the day, of course, is the fallout from Michael Cohen's testimony.
Michael Cohen was the president's personal fixer.
And Cohen's testimony, all you can really say about it is that it gave pretty much everybody what they want.
For the Republicans, it gave them good case that the president did not actually involve himself in illegal activity.
That the Trump-Russia collusion stuff, there's no evidence to it.
And that the Trump campaign finance stuff, there's no evidence to that either.
So on a legal side, Republicans win.
On an image-making side, probably Democrats win.
So everybody goes home happy, except for Michael Cohen, who goes to jail sad, I assume.
So, on the legal side, Cohen said a bunch of things that actually cut in favor of President Trump.
So, let's begin with the argument that President Trump colluded with the Russians in 2016 and with WikiLeaks.
So, Cohen says that Trump talked with Roger Stone about WikiLeaks.
Now, the problem for Trump is what he said to the Mueller investigation.
So, he has written testimony.
If he was asked specifically about whether he talked to Roger Stone about WikiLeaks, Then, presumably, this could maybe be a problem.
Then it's Michael Cohen saying that he did talk to Roger Stone, Trump saying he didn't talk to Roger Stone.
But here's the point.
If you put aside the answers he gave to Mueller, if Trump talked to Roger Stone about WikiLeaks in the way that Michael Cohen says he did, there is no collusion and no violation of law.
Here's what Cohen said.
Based on your experience with the President and knowledge of his relationship with Mr. Stone, do you have reason to believe that the President explicitly or implicitly authorized Mr. Stone to make contact with Wikileaks and to indicate the campaign's interest in the strategic release of these illegally hacked materials?
I'm not aware of that.
Was Mr. Stone a free agent reporting back to the President what he had done, or was he an agent of the campaign acting on behalf of the President and with his apparent authority?
No, he was a free agent.
He frequently reached out to Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump was very happy to take his calls.
Okay, so he was a free agent, not working for Trump, and Trump took his calls, and then when Stone told him that WikiLeaks was going to release stuff on Hillary, Trump was like, oh, great.
Okay, that's not collusion.
That's Trump being informed of a fact, and then Trump saying good.
That is not Trump colluding, that is not him actively participating.
That's not legal liability.
Other evidence that there's no legal liability when it comes to the collusion stuff.
Michael Cohen, who is as close to the president as anybody, according to his own testimony, he was asked, do you have any evidence that the president colluded with Russia?
And Cohen says, no, not at all, actually.
The questions have been raised about whether I know of direct evidence that Mr. Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia.
I do not.
And I want to be clear.
But I have my suspicions.
OK, so he has his suspicions, but who cares about Michael Cohen's suspicions?
I mean, the guy's a legitimate fraudster who's going to jail for a taxi medallion scheme for perjury.
Who cares about his suspicions?
He doesn't have any evidence.
That's all that matters.
Then he was asked, have you been to Prague?
So this is only important because the Steele dossier, which has been the linchpin of the argument that President Trump was colluding with the Russians, had a claim that Michael Cohen had traveled to Prague to negotiate with the Russians on behalf of Campaign Trump.
Have you ever been to Prague?
I've never been to Prague.
Never have.
I've never been to the Czech Republic.
Okay, so in order, Cohen has now debunked the idea that Trump was colluding with WikiLeaks, that collusion generally was happening, and that he personally was involved in anything the Steele dossier talked about, demonstrating once again that the Steele dossier was basically just a mash-up of garbage that Christopher Steele was trying to dump onto the Hillary Clinton campaign via Perkins Coie, and that that was eventually moved to Fusion GPS.
That's Cohen debunking half of the Democratic talking points for the last three years.
And then it gets worse because Michael Cohen talks about the payoff deal that Trump had with Stormy Daniels.
Now his suggestion is that he paid off Stormy Daniels at Trump's direction.
As I mentioned yesterday, there are two elements required in order for Trump to violate a campaign finance law.
One, the payment to Stormy Daniels must have been seen as a campaign contribution, meaning that if Trump had a long history of paying off women to shut up, that's not actually evidence in favor of the campaign finance violation.
That's evidence against the idea that there was a campaign finance violation.
A campaign expenditure is an expenditure that takes place only in the context of a campaign.
That's why if I eat lunch on the campaign, I can't charge that to the campaign.
Because I'm going to eat lunch normally.
If, however, I'm flying to Iowa for the campaign, then I wouldn't be flying to Iowa if it weren't for the campaign.
That's campaign expenditure.
Well, if I pay off women on a regular basis, then me paying off this woman this time is probably also not a campaign expenditure.
So that was question number one.
Is it a campaign expenditure?
Question number two.
Did Trump know that he was violating campaign election law and trying to end around disclosure requirements by using Cohen as a cutout?
And the answer, if Cohen does this on a regular basis, is no.
Because if he's been using Cohen as a cutout for 10 years, what's the claim that he did it specifically this time to avoid law?
Here's Cohen basically admitting that there's no legal liability even in the campaign finance case.
Catch and kill is a method that exists when you're working with a news outlet, in this specific case it was AMI, National Enquirer, David Pecker, Dylan Howard and others, where they would contact me or Mr. Trump or someone and state that there's a story that's ...percolating out there that you may be interested in.
And then what you do is you contact that individual and you purchase the rights to that story from them.
These catch-and-kill scenarios existed between David Pecker and Mr. Trump long before I started working for him in 2007.
Okay, so this has been going on for years and years and years and years.
Therefore, this is probably not a campaign expenditure.
And then he says, yeah, I was personally involved in killing a couple of these stories.
Like, for example, there was a story about a love child.
That turned out to be nonsense.
I was involved in killing that story.
There's a story about Trump hitting Melania in an elevator.
That didn't happen.
And I tried to track that down.
It didn't happen either.
Again, none of this cuts in favor of Democrats.
Is there a love child?
There is not, to the best of my knowledge.
So you would pay off someone to It wasn't me, ma'am.
It was AMI.
It was David Pecker.
So he paid off someone about a love child that doesn't exist.
Correct.
It was about $15,000.
Okay, so again, if there's a long history of paying off people, then this particular payoff is not a campaign finance violation.
Now, it doesn't mean it's not embarrassing.
It doesn't mean the president doesn't do embarrassing stuff.
He does.
He does embarrassing, immoral stuff.
That does not make it illegal.
Immoral, embarrassing stuff is not grounds for impeachment.
Impeachment is about high crimes and misdemeanors.
Now, in a second, We're going to get to the only real attempt to try and catch Trump in serious legal violation, and then we'll get to the stuff that was bad for President Trump, just in terms of the headlines, in one second.
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So the only real attempt to get Cohen to implicate Trump in illegal activity in any serious way was actually made by AOC.
So Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who for some reason has been giving a plumb spot on the House Oversight Committee, she actually did a pretty good job of trying to tie down Michael Cohen to a story that could result in at least the capacity for the Democrats to try and grab Trump's tax records.
She asked if Trump tried to commit fraud, and then Cohen says yes, and that provides the impetus for Democrats to now try to subpoena Trump's tax Tax records.
So here's Michael Cohen giving these answers.
In October 2018, the New York Times revealed that quote, President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents.
He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents' real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing his tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.
Mr. Cohen, do you know whether that specific report is accurate?
I don't.
And would it help for the committee to obtain federal and state tax returns from the president and his company to address that discrepancy?
I believe so.
Okay, so that is her basically just saying that's what we're going to do.
Now, Cohen didn't give any basis for them to actually subpoena the records because he says he doesn't know, but she's going to do that anyway.
So this is just the beginning of the investigations, not the end.
Meanwhile, so on the legal side, Republicans can easily say Michael Cohen provided no additional evidence of any illegal activity that harms President Trump.
On the bad headlines side, there's going to be a round about headlines, because whenever one of your members of your inner circle turns on you, and then talks crap about you, and the media don't like you, that's going to be a headline.
So, Michael Cohen, you know, basically just bad-mouthed the president yesterday.
He called him a racist, he called him a bigot, he called him a sexist, and all the rest.
But here's the problem even for that.
Like, I really don't think that the Cohen testimony hurts Trump in any serious way.
After about a week.
And the reason is because Cohen is innately not believable and also dislikable.
So Cohen is not only a convicted perjurer who's going to go to jail, Cohen also has an unfortunate habit of seeing himself as the hero.
It's like that clip from The Office with Michael Scott talking about, am I saying I'm a hero?
Yes.
I mean, that's essentially Michael Cohen.
Michael Cohen, his closing statement yesterday was so ridiculously Cringeworthy.
Here is Michael Cohen explaining that he hoped that his truth will help heal America.
First of all, the minute anybody says my truth, you know they're lying.
First of all, I want to say thank you all for being here today.
I am humbled.
I am thankful to Chairman Cummings for giving me the opportunity today to tell my truth.
And I hope that, as Chairman Cummings said, it helps in order to heal America.
And I thank you all again and have a good day.
Okay, if anybody truly thinks that this is helping to heal America, you got another thing coming, man.
I mean, it's just silliness.
And the Democrats' attempt to paint Michael Cohen as some sort of redeemed hero was similarly cringeworthy.
Elijah Cummings, who's the chairman of the House Oversight Committee under the new Democratic Congress, he says, listen, we're better than this.
We can be redeemed because Michael Cohen can be redeemed.
Michael Cohen, he's changed his life here.
Yeah, if anybody believes that, I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
You come saying I have made my mistakes, but now I want to change my life.
If we, as a nation, did not give people an opportunity after they made mistakes to change their lives, a whole lot of people would not do very well.
We're better than this.
We are so much, we really are.
As a country, we are so much better than this.
No, we're not.
Sorry to break it to you, we're not.
That's why we're here.
The reason that we're here is because we're not better than this.
The opposing candidate in the last election cycle was Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt woman in the history of modern American politics.
So no, we are not better than this.
The last president of the United States was involved in innumerable scandals.
The only difference is that the media didn't care about those scandals.
We're not better than this.
American politics has been like this for a very long time.
It's just that now the mask is off because President Trump is very obvious, and also because the Democrats are very obvious and the media are very obvious.
Now, the worst moment of the entire day actually had nothing to do with Michael Cohen.
It had to do with Rashida Tlaib.
So Rashida Tlaib is just a vile human being.
She's a nasty, nasty person.
And you can tell she's a nasty person.
Not just because she's an open anti-Semite, but also because the Congresswoman from Michigan does stuff like this.
So, yesterday, Mark Meadows brought in Lynn Patton from the White House, with whom he is friends, and he said, and she's also close with Trump, to sort of rebut the allegation that President Trump was a racist.
Now, as I say, I think this is dumb.
I don't think it's racist.
I do not think it is a racist thing to say, you know, here's another black person who knows the President, she says he's not a racist.
I think it's a bad argument.
I think it's a stupid argument because not everyone of any race is going to have the same opinion about any person.
So I think this is a dumb argument.
So I think this is racist?
Of course not.
But here is Mark Meadows doing it.
I guess what I'm saying is, is I've talked to, to the president over 300 times.
I've not heard one time a racist comment out of, out of his mouth in private.
So how do you reconcile it?
Do you have proof of those conversations?
But I would ask, so why would you ask me a question?
Do you have proof?
Do you have proof?
Yes or no?
I do.
Oh, where's the proof?
Ask Miss Patton how many people who are black Okay, so is that a silly gambit?
Yes, it's a silly gambit.
But does it make Mark Meadows a racist?
The answer, of course, is no.
But according to Rashida Tlaib, it does make him a racist.
So in a second, I'm going to play you, Rashida Tlaib, going after Mark Meadows and suggesting he's a racist.
This is so out of bounds that even Elijah Cummings had to step in.
So this does explain a difference right now between the modern, new-fangled Democratic Party and maybe some of the older members of the Democratic Party.
Mark Meadows and Elijah Cummings are really good friends.
They've been good friends for many, many years.
The new members of the Democratic Party, however, have been deeply ensconced in the idea that every Republican down deep is a vicious, evil racist.
So here's Rashida Tlaib calling Mark Meadows a racist for the crime of having said, here's a black friend of the President of the United States who's not a racist.
Just to make a note, Mr. Chairman, just because someone has a person of color, a black person working for them, does not mean they aren't racist.
And it is insensitive.
The fact that someone would actually use a prop, a black woman, in this chamber, in this committee, is alone racist in itself.
Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Meadows, wait a minute.
I've defended you about- Mr. Meadows!
Mr. Meadows!
I'm the chair.
Yes sir, you are.
Thank you.
I will clear this up.
Now Ms.
Tlaib, I want to make sure I understand.
You did not, you were not intending to call Mr. Meadows a racist, is that right?
No, Mr. Chairman, I do not call Mr. Meadows a racist.
I am trying as a person of color, Mr. Chairman, just to express myself and how I felt at that moment.
I listened very carefully to Ms.
Tlaib.
And I think, and I'm not going to put words in her mouth, but I think she said that she was not calling you a racist.
So there's Cummings trying to quell that controversy.
Now, the truth is that Tlaib was, of course, calling Meadows a racist, because Tlaib and half the Democratic Party are constantly calling Republicans racist at the drop of a hat.
This is why Republicans don't take seriously accusations of racism, in some cases to their own detriment, because Democrats are willing to call everything racist.
Cummings at least has the wherewithal to say, hey, that's not right.
I mean, let's not go there.
But does Tlaib actually believe that Meadows is a racist?
Sure.
Because why not?
The New Democratic Party believes that anyone who doesn't agree with their agenda is inherently and innately racist and racially bigoted.
And it's pretty gross.
Good for Elijah Cummings for at least stepping in and shutting that down.
In other news, it is important to note here that I mentioned yesterday that Matt Gaetz, who is the Republican congressperson from Florida who basically threatened Michael Cohen before his testimony, He has now tweeted out, I've personally apologized to Michael Cohen, referencing his private family in the public square.
Regardless of disagreements, family members should be off limits from attacks from representatives, senators, and presidents, including myself.
Let's leave the Cohen family alone.
He said that after Bar Association initiated actual investigation into him in the state of Florida.
There are reports today that Goetz was on the phone with President Trump and Trump had basically suggested that he do this thing with Michael Cohen in the first place, which Again, is a is a thug tactic and has no place in American politics.
I mean, it's just it's a mob.
It's a mob tactic.
All of this is extraordinarily ugly.
What's the final impact of it?
Nothing.
I mean, really, because nothing matters anymore.
I think that that's that's sort of the theme is that very few things matter.
If we are a people of principle, then a lot of this should matter.
We should be able to say that President Trump engaged in immoral activity, but that's not illegal activity.
And illegal activity is necessary for an impeachment.
On North Korea, we should be able to say, the president, his statements are immoral.
Immoral.
And you may agree with the president on policy, you may like the president, you may back the president, but immoral is immoral.
We should be able to hold all of these thoughts simultaneously.
Unfortunately, because nothing matters and everything is stupid, people want to get rid of their cognitive dissonance by suggesting that there are good guys and bad guys in American politics.
There are very few good guys, and there are a lot of people who are mediocre, and there are a significant number of bad guys.
That's the actual breakdown of good guys, bad guys, and people in between in American politics.
Okay, meanwhile, speaking of corruption, it's not restricted to the United States, and it would be Silly to suggest that America is more corrupt and more dirty than any of the other nations of the West.
Like, people have not paid attention to this, but Justin Trudeau in Canada is in serious trouble.
Handsome Bernie.
Up north.
That guy's got some real problems.
According to Bloomberg, Justin Trudeau is facing the most explosive crisis of his administration After his former Attorney General detailed a months-long campaign by the Canadian Prime Minister's office to quietly end a legal problem for an iconic Quebec construction firm.
In dramatic testimony that lasted nearly four hours, Jody Wilson-Raybould broke her silence with a detailed account of efforts by Trudeau and top aides to persuade her to step in and end prosecution of SNC-Lavalin Group Inc.
She argues it amounted to interference in the judicial system.
She concedes it wasn't illegal.
Trudeau says he was trying to prevent job losses in his home province of Quebec by interfering in the judicial system.
The former attorney general says, Wilson-Raybould, who quit the cabinet this month, also said she faced veiled threats about what might happen if she refused to order an out-of-court settlement.
Her testimony shook the core of Justin Trudeau's team, naming him, his finance chief, and his most senior aides.
Conservative leaders have been trying to unseat Trudeau, and they're calling for his resignation.
In the polls, suddenly the Conservative Party is surging in Canada, thanks to all of this.
That's not the only corruption that is being charged.
There's corruption charges now issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Attorney General of the State of Israel announced on Thursday his office had indicted Netanyahu on corruption charges after a two-year investigation.
There are apparently one count of bribery and two counts of fraud and breach of trust.
The most serious allegation against Bibi involves his relationship with Shaul Elevich, the controlling shareholder of an Israeli telecom company called Bizek.
Bezek.
Police recommended an indictment in the case based on evidence collected that confidants of Netanyahu promoted regulatory changes worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Bezek.
In exchange, they believe Netanyahu used his connections with Elevich to receive positive press coverage on Bezek's popular subsidiary news site, Walla.
So the idea is that he traded favors for positive news coverage.
Police have said that their investigation concluded that Netanyahu and Elevich engaged in a bribe-based relationship.
That is the most serious charge.
The other charges against him are a lot less serious.
The conclusions are published 39 days prior to a general election, so people have no idea how this is going to impact the vote.
Bibi is actually, his Likud party is running second to a unity party created by the sort of center-right and center-left in Israel, with the indictment coming down.
There's great uncertainty as to what happens in Israel next.
So when we talk about corruption in the United States, recognize that corruption in government is sort of endemic to government.
The good news is that in Western democracies, people try to do something about it, as opposed to in North Korea, where you just kill everyone who asks a question.
All righty.
So time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
All right.
Things I like.
You have to love Chuck Schumer.
Chuck Schumer is the Senate minority leader.
And he's stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Why?
Because the base of his party is extraordinarily extreme, and the mainstream of his party knows that if the base takes control, they have a real problem on their hands.
So he's got the base of his party clamoring for a vote on this Green New Deal.
The Green New Deal resolution is a bag of crap.
It's just horse manure.
Or cow manure.
Or cow farts.
Whatever you please.
It's just a terrible proposal.
It contains all sorts of nonsensical resolutions about solving climate change in 10 years.
It puts all these pie-in-the-sky proposals out there.
Nothing policy-oriented.
And Mitch McConnell...
The Senate Majority Leader said, you know what?
Let's vote on this thing.
Let's get Democrats on record.
Are they really willing to embrace this sort of nonsense?
Here is Chuck Schumer gamely trying to say that it is Republicans' fault that a bill that Democrats proposed could make it to the floor for a vote.
I heard Leader McConnell knocking the Green New Deal.
I would ask the leader, and we're going to keep asking him, and every Republican in this chamber, what they would do About climate change.
About global warming.
Until Leader McConnell and his Republican majority answer those questions, the games they're playing here will have no meaning.
This is not a debate.
It's a diversion.
It's a sham.
Okay, so what?
It's a diversion and a sham to bring up your proposal for a vote?
I demand a vote!
It's super important!
Okay, here's your vote.
This is a sham!
Why are you telling me to vote?
Pick one.
Pick one, guys.
So that's really funny.
So, well done Senate Majority Leader McConnell for allowing Democrats to humiliate themselves.
This one definitely falls under the old aphorism that you give people enough rope to hang themselves.
And that's basically what the Democratic Party is doing right now.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, thing that I hate, number one.
So, Senator Ed Markey, I love this.
So, Senator Ed Markey, this ties right in.
He is one of the co-sponsors of the Green New Deal.
He's talking about, he says, listen, young people know it's time for a revolution, a revolution in this country.
Here's Senator Markey.
Republicans may think that the Green New Deal is just a resolution, but it's a revolution.
It's a revolution.
Young people want a green energy revolution in our country.
They know we can do this.
They know that all of these new technologies can be invented.
All these new technologies can be deployed.
Oh my goodness.
Okay, so sorry, we can stop him there.
Young people know that we can invent stuff that nobody knows what the hell they're talking about.
Young people know that we can manufacture diamonds from horse crap.
Young people know that if we just wish hard enough, then money will pour from the skies like God's mana.
That's what young people know.
I also love it when senators do this wordplay.
It's always really awkward.
Like, this resolution isn't a resolution, it's a revolution.
You see what I did right there?
Just switch the S for the V. You see that?
Yeah, clever, huh?
Resolution, revolution, re-lo-lution.
Just keep switching the letter out.
Pretty great.
Ed Markey does this.
I love that he's like, young people know how vital this is.
And then McConnell's like, vote on it.
Like, no!
Stop that!
How?
No!
No!
Because the revolution will not require you to vote, apparently.
It'll just require you to say silly things.
Okay, other things that I hate today.
So this one, if you're eating breakfast, now is not the time to do so, if you are a subscriber and you can see this.
There is a woman who has now smeared herself with menstrual blood, saying that she wanted to show that periods are both beautiful and powerful.
First of all, super transphobic.
What about women who don't have periods?
And what about men who do have periods?
Has anyone thought of those people?
Second of all, this look worked way better in Braveheart.
Worked way better in Braveheart.
Also, I don't think that those words mean what she thinks they mean.
Beautiful and powerful.
Now, I'm just gonna put this out there.
Bodily fluids.
Not the best.
Just no matter from which orifice.
Bodily fluids.
Smearing them on yourself.
Not great.
Not great, Bob.
So not sure why exactly this is, why somebody would do this, unless they're a crazy person.
Well, this person is a crazy person.
Her name is Dimitra Nix, 26, although I don't want to assume her sex, because obviously we can't do that anymore.
She's a sex coach.
So I get, maybe that's what, maybe that's what this is.
Maybe this was like, maybe it is a Braveheart motivational tactic.
She's a sex coach.
So she smears herself with menstrual blood and then she's like, do it!
Do it now!
Own it!
So, she's trying to end the stigma and shame around periods.
All she is succeeding in doing is having people back away slowly into the bushes, like Homer Simpson.
She says that she regularly posts these photos to her Instagram page.
She lives in LA, California, because my city is intensely stupid.
She had her first period age 12, just like most young women, I know.
Shocking.
But was ashamed of it, and thought it was disgusting.
She would try and hide her period from boyfriends, worried about bleeding through her clothes.
Well, first of all, shouldn't we all be worried about bleeding through our clothes from wherever?
Like, that's not sanitary as a general rule.
She said, I was simultaneously embarrassed and fascinated by my period.
I felt apologetic about it a lot and tried to hide it from boyfriends.
Our society teaches us that periods are dirty and inconvenient.
Well, they're not clean and convenient from what I hear from women.
I mean, I've never heard a woman who was like, you know what?
My period came, it was so clean and so convenient for me.
It was just great.
Ads about menstrual products talk about smelling fresh or making us cleaner, implying that our body's natural functions are gross.
If she doesn't think our body's natural functions are gross, she should smear poop on herself and walk around.
Like really, when my son doesn't want his diaper changed, you know what I say to him?
It's time to change your diaper, because you have gross poopoo.
I know, deep thoughts here on a Thursday.
But we have reduced adults to dumber than our smallest children.
There are very few parents who have never had the experience of walking into a room and seeing your child with their diaper around their ankles looking at their own poop.
And you thought, well, that's a dumb thing because kids are dumb.
When you're in your mid-twenties and you're still doing this with the stuff coming out of your body, let me suggest that you may have a problem larger than the societal feelings about periods.
Unbelievable.
And again, supremely transphobic.
Really, really transphobic and terrible.
Very cisgender.
Alrighty.
I have to stop there because I need to go vomit.
So I will be back a little bit later.
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