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July 22, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:02:40
Double Standards Are The Only Standards | Ep. 822
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Time Text
Democrats go back to defending Al Franken, the media continue to push Republicans to declare President Trump racist, and Iran escalates.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, man, I hope you had a wonderful weekend, a news-packed weekend, as it turns out.
We begin this morning with this insane contention from the New Yorker and Jane Mayer.
So Jane Mayer, you'll recall, is the reporter from the New Yorker who went after Brett Kavanaugh.
She reported the story of Deborah Ramirez, who is apparently Drunk as a skunk and claimed that Kavanaugh when he was back in college flashed himself to her and it took her days on end to think about it and then determine that it actually was Brett Kavanaugh.
There were no other witnesses.
Nobody else could say that it was Brett Kavanaugh.
Jane Mayer reported this with a straight face over at the New Yorker because Brett Kavanaugh is a bad, bad, bad man.
Well, now Jane Mayer is out there trying to rehabilitate Al Franken.
Now, what's so fascinating about this is that there was a question with regard to the left.
And this question, I think, is deeply important as to whether the left abides, many in the media left particularly, abide by their own principles.
This becomes very important when it comes to assessing how American parties and politicians and how Americans themselves are reacting to one another.
See, here's the thing.
If you want to set a common standard within a circle of trust, it's not very difficult.
You go to your church and you say, listen, all of us were against X.
And you're all invested in being against X because you know you share this group of common principles.
But that changes if, for example, you're in a sporting event.
So let's take the example of a sporting event because politics has now become more like sports and less like us as a common group trying to find some future together.
In a sporting event, let's say that you're a player in a sporting event and the guy on the other side is cheating.
So, you have two choices.
One is you can be as honest as the day is long.
You can say, well, you know, that guy's going to cheat, but I'm going to play the game the right way.
Now, that is indeed the right thing to do.
It also heightens the chances that you're going to lose, because presumably the person wouldn't be cheating unless it was heightening their chances of winning.
So what you end up with in sports when it comes to cheating is a sort of prisoner's dilemma.
So for folks who don't know what a prisoner's dilemma is, a little bit of basic game theory for you.
So the prisoner's dilemma is based on a situation in which the police arrest a couple of suspects in a crime.
And they say to suspect number one, here's the deal.
If you rat on your friend, we let you off, we convict your friend.
If you do not rat on your friend, and your friend rats on you, you're gonna go to jail for 10 years, and your friend goes free.
If neither of you rat, then you're both gonna go to jail for 2 years.
If both of you rat, then you end up both going to jail for like 5 years.
Right?
So, it's a little bit complex, right?
So, you have to think of the stakes here.
Are you gonna rat on your friend or are you not gonna rat on your friend?
So, if you trust your friend, you don't rat.
Because if neither of you rat, then you're both gonna go to jail for maybe a couple of years.
But that is better, presumably, than every other scenario, except for the scenario where you rat and your friend doesn't.
Right?
So the best option here is for you to cheat.
Just on a personal level, the best option is for you to rat out your friend, and your friend, that sucker, doesn't rat on you.
And he ends up with the entire 10-year sentence, and you go free.
But, if you rat on each other, you end up with 5 years.
So the question becomes, how much do you trust your partner in crime?
Well, when it comes to politics, where it's adversarial from the outset, or in the sporting event that I'm talking about, where it's adversarial from the outset, the other guy cheats and your best option is not going to be to allow him to cheat and you don't cheat.
That is the equivalent in the prisoner's dilemma of the other guy ratting on you and you saying nothing and you going to jail for 10 years.
Well, in politics, when it comes to standards and upholding standards, the moral right thing to do is to uphold the standard.
But politics, of course, are not just about doing the moral right thing.
Unfortunately, politics are very often about winning and achieving a higher goal and achieving a secondary goal and wielding power.
And so the question becomes, are you going to allow the other side to not abide by a standard while you stand there abiding by the standard?
Or are you also going to say, listen, I'm not giving you guys an inch.
I'll just lie.
I'll just pretend that I uphold the standard when I don't the same way that you pretend you uphold the standard when you don't.
The only way that you can have a political situation in which both sides condemn something bad is when there's an agreed upon set of rules and punishments for violating the rules.
However, if there is a feeling by either side that the rules can be violated with impunity, By the other side, then you're not going to abide by the rules.
Because why would you?
Then you're the sucker in this prisoner's dilemma.
You're the sucker in this game.
And that is what we are seeing right now in American politics, is people on both the right and the left, but mostly on the left, lying about the standards that they actually uphold when it comes to behavior by politicians particularly.
When it comes to rhetoric, when it comes to the standards that we should share as Americans, the way that it works is that if somebody on the left does something very bad, then the left simply looks past it, just right past it.
And then if somebody on the right does something bad, then suddenly the standard kicks in full force, and they are very much in favor of the standard, and they are standing for the standard.
How dare you not stand for the standard?
And so what a lot of conservatives are doing is they are responding, a lot of Republicans, they're responding by saying, you're cheating.
So I'm going to cheat.
You don't hold your standard.
And I'm not going to pretend you hold your standard.
So why should I abide by that standard either and then lose in the process?
Now, all of this makes American politics uglier.
And the only way to solve this is to rebuild a system of trust whereby both sides end up condemning folks within their midst.
The problem is it's going to be very difficult to do that because the stakes are now so high politically.
As the parties move, the right to the right and the left to the left, as both of these parties expose this gap in the middle of American politics, what you end up with is the argument that in the end does it really matter if we violate our standards so long as we do something more important for the broad span of the American public?
Isn't it more important that we get things done even if it means that we Bend the rules a little bit.
We'll see how this plays out in just a second with regard to Jane Mayer and Al Franken.
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Okay, so the Jane Mayer example.
Today, she has a long piece in The New Yorker called The Case of Al Franken.
Now, to review how we got to the point where Al Franken resigned from the Senate, you have to understand that there was an open debate as to whether Democrats were being sincere in their condemnation of Al Franken.
So in the late 1990s, the entire Democratic Party bent over backwards for Bill Clinton, who was sexually harassing the help and who was sexually abusing, allegedly, a variety of women.
Many women came forward with serious sexual allegations ranging from Juanita Broderick to Kathleen Willey to Paula Jones.
All of them backed by some level of evidence, and the Democratic Party basically looked the other way.
The Democratic Party and members of the media, they said as long as he is giving us what we want politically, we are not going to undercut the President of the United States, even if it turns out that he committed perjury and was mistreating women dramatically over the course of his career.
And the right originally took the stance.
OK, well, we're condemning that.
And now we are going to and now we're going to uphold our standard.
Right.
This is what George W. Bush ran as.
George W. Bush ran with the idea that he was going to restore honor and dignity to the Oval Office.
It's why Al Gore didn't campaign openly with Bill Clinton in 2000, because the Republican Party was saying, listen, Here's Clinton, and he's a hound, and he's terrible to women, and he's a liar, and we need to restore some sort of integrity to the Oval Office.
Okay, fine.
So the Republican Party, at this point, has not defected.
It's called defecting in The Prisoner's Dilemma when you decide that you're going to rat on your friend.
So the right has not yet defected.
The left has already defected.
And so far so good, because it turns out George W. Bush wins the election.
Then, in 2008, the left wins the presidency.
And not only do they win the presidency, but they begin to excuse every sort of behavior that they can find, not with regard to sexual harassment per se, but with regard to, for example, Racial issues, any sort of any sort of racial issue, they decide they're going to play up to the hilt and this becomes a serious issue.
We'll get to that in just a second.
But when it comes to the sexual assault sort of stuff in 2008, the Democrats win in 2012, the Democrats win and Republicans are getting increasingly frustrated.
They feel that they've been given a non-fair shake by the media, that they've never been given credit for doing the right thing, that they've been called bitter clingers and deplorables.
They feel that in 2012, Mitt Romney was mislabeled and maligned as a sexist and a racist.
And so we get to 2016, and the Republicans finally say, you know what?
Now we're going to cheat.
Because as it turns out, we can't win the honorable way.
You guys defected back in 1998, so now we're going to defect.
And if Donald Trump has said or done bad things with women, well, we're just going to look the other way on that.
And so now you have that prisoner's dilemma where everybody ends up with five years in prison because now both sides are defecting.
Both sides have said that the standard doesn't matter.
And this is when the Democratic Party decides that they're going to make a move.
And the question is whether this move is a sincere attempt to rebuild American trust or whether they are once again using the standard in an attempt to re-implement a standard they originally broke in order to go get Republicans.
So now you have a situation where the Democratic Party has Al Franken on its hands.
And they don't like Donald Trump.
They think that Donald Trump is very bad.
But it's a little bit too late for them to put this genie back in the bottle because Bill Clinton, everybody, and Hillary Clinton had just been their nominee in 2016.
And she, of course, had not only looked the other way, but ardently defended Bill Clinton in the face of all the MeToo sort of allegations against Bill Clinton.
So the Democratic Party decides that they are going to reinstitute the standard.
Now they're going to be the party of morality and decency.
And so in the pursuit of portraying themselves as such, they decide that they are going to oust Al Franken.
So there are a bunch of allegations against Al Franken.
Most of them, none of them are of violent sexual assault, but there's an allegation that he was mimicking grabbing, groping a woman, Leanne Tweeden, aboard a flight, a military flight.
And there's a picture of him doing it.
There are allegations by a vast bevy of women who say that Al Franken on campaign stops was gripping them by the ass in the middle of the campaign stop.
And Al Franken is forced to resign and leading the charge on that is Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.
So Kirsten Gillibrand says Al Franken should go and a bunch of other Democratic senators say Al Franken should go.
Now, the reason that they say that they think Al Franken should go, the question is, are they doing this sincerely because they have realized during the Me Too moment that this stuff is very, very bad?
Or is this all Democrats trying to now reestablish a standard after Republicans have supposedly defected.
Right now, are they trying to reestablish the standard against their own side just so they can go after Republicans?
Now, the motivation for that doesn't end up mattering all that much in the practical sphere if Democrats hold to it.
It's actually a good thing, right?
If Democrats decide what we're going to do now is we're going to shame Republicans into acting better and into condemning their own.
By condemning our own, that's actually not a bad thing.
For the American public discourse, it's actually quite a good thing when people condemn bad activity on their own side.
But now it appears, as Jane Mayer points out at the New Yorker, that none of this was real in the first place.
And you wonder why Republicans are not interested in going back to the old rules.
You wonder why Republicans are willing to look the other way when President Trump does bad stuff or when there are allegations that President Trump has mistreated people.
It's because they don't trust that the Democrats are still not cheating.
Democrats keep saying, no, we're reestablishing the rules.
We're being decent again.
We're not ratting on you anymore in the prisoner's dilemma.
Now we're trying to rebuild that circle of trust so we have the same principles.
And then, as soon as it becomes politically convenient, then all of a sudden, right, after throwing Bill Clinton a little bit under the bus, and after throwing Al Franken under the bus, it's only been a couple of years, after that, they come back and they say, you know what?
See, we were kind of lying, right?
It was all a ruse.
So here's Jane Mayer in The New Yorker talking about Al Franken.
She says, Last month in Minneapolis, I climbed the stairs of a row house to find Al Franken, Minnesota's disgraced former senator, wandering around in jeans and stocking feet.
It was a sunny day, but the shades were mostly drawn.
Takeout containers of hummus and carrot sticks were set out on the kitchen table.
His wife, Frannie Bryson, was stuck in their apartment in Washington, D.C.
with a cold.
He had evidently done the best he could to be hospitable, but the place felt like a kind of man cave where someone hides out from the world.
Which is more or less what Franken has been doing since he resigned in December 2017 amid accusations of sexual impropriety.
And she talks about what a terrible life Al Franken has.
He was talked up as a possible challenger to Donald Trump in 2020.
He was an effective critic of the Trump administration.
But then she says, as it turns out, Franken's only role in the 2020 presidential campaign has been as a figure of controversy.
On June 4th, Pete Buttigieg was widely criticized on social media for saying he would not have pressured Franken to resign, as had virtually all his Democratic rivals who were then in the Senate, without first learning more about the alleged incident.
At the same time, the presidential candidacy of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand had been plagued by questions about her role as the first of three dozen Democratic senators to demand Franken's resignation.
Gillibrand has cast herself as a feminist champion of zero tolerance towards sexual impropriety.
But Democratic donors sympathetic to Franken have stunted her fundraising, and Gillibrand says tried to intimidate her into silence.
Hey, so all of this is a buildup to the Democrats violating their newfound standards.
So remember, the Democrats, the question was, were they doing this sincerely?
Were they throwing Al Franken out of the Senate because they suddenly had had a change of heart and they sincerely wanted to set a standard whereby male impropriety was going to be punished?
Or was this all a fake just to get Donald Trump or to get, for example, Brett Kavanaugh?
The Jane Mayer piece is pretty damn good evidence that it was all fake and an attempt to just get Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh.
Why?
Well, Jane Mayer, number one, wrote all of these hit pieces, as I said, on Justice Kavanaugh, suggesting without any real evidence that he had sexually harassed a woman or abused a woman by exposing himself to her back in college, even though there were no witnesses.
Well, now she's got a full piece in The New Yorker talking about how Al Franken is the real victim and how the accusations against him are really evidenceless.
The reason this is important is because, again, it goes to the heart of the mistrust that is seething, that is tearing away at the core of our politics.
Republicans are rightly pointing at Jane Mayer, and rightly pointing at Democrats, who five minutes ago were the ones who ousted Al Franken and saying, yeah, you guys were full of it.
It was all a lie.
You didn't want to oust Al Franken.
All you really wanted to do was trade Al Franken.
You were trading a knight for a queen.
All you were trying to do was oust Al Franken so you could then use your newfound political principles in order to go after Donald Trump.
And that's what you're really trying to do, and Jane Mayer provides solid evidence of that.
She writes, This reticence reflects the cultural moment in an era when women's accusations of sexual discrimination and harassment are finally being taken seriously.
After years of belittlement and dismissal, some see it as offensive to subject accusers to scrutiny, believe women has become a credo of the MeToo movement.
Sounds here like Jane Mayer is suddenly realizing the downsides of all of this after helping to purvey a bunch of lies about Brett Kavanaugh.
At his house, Franken said he understood that in such an atmosphere, the public might not be eager to hear his grievances.
Holding his head in his hands, he said, I don't think people who have been sexually assaulted and those kind of things want to hear from people who have been me too that they're victims.
Yet he added being on the losing side of the Me Too movement, which he fervently supports, has led him to spend time thinking about such matters as due process, proportionality of punishment and the consequences of Internet fueled outrage.
Oh, how odd.
Oh, how odd that Democrats who found themselves on the wrong side of their own standards are now thinking about the downsides of the standards they propagated against Republicans.
Again, you want to know why there's mistrust?
It's because of stuff like this.
If you really wanted us to believe that you were sincere about your feelings on this, you would be condemning people on your own side.
But you're not, are you?
You're not.
You're not telling the truth about people on your own side.
And then you expect Republicans are going to play dead with you.
And this isn't just with regard to matters of sex.
I mean, this entire New Yorker piece goes on, and Jane Mayer suggests that there is no evidence of any of the accusations, and that the evidence is weak.
Hilarious that she wasn't willing to do that with Brett Kavanaugh.
It feels a little strange.
Feels a little bit like a double standard.
But double standards are now the only standards, obviously.
And this is not just true in the area of sexual relations.
This is also true in the area of race.
So the same prisoner's dilemma applies.
We should all be able to condemn racist incidents.
We should all be able to condemn people who are racist.
We should all be able to say, what just happened here was a racist thing, and it was really bad.
So, for example, when Walter Scott, a black man, was shot in the back by a police officer in South Carolina, and then the police officer allegedly planted a gun on Walter Scott's body, this appeared to be not only an instance of police brutality, but also of police racism, and pretty much everybody was on board with that.
When Steve King said something in defense of white nationalism, he was censured by his own Republican colleagues in the House and people like me maxed out to his opponents in the Republican primaries.
The likelihood that he emerges from those primaries is now very low.
You're supposed to condemn people on your own side when they do bad things.
But again, there's a feeling that Democrats have cheated on this, that Republicans are doing their best to root out some of this stuff inside their own party, but they're not going to condemn President Trump so long as the Democratic Party refuses to call out bigotry in its own midst.
And when the Democratic Party is meanwhile pushing out hoaxes like Jussie Smollett, we have people on the left who are pushing out hoaxes like Jussie Smollett or people who are suggesting that non-racial shootings like the Ferguson killing of Michael Brown, that that is an actual racist shooting.
It feels like a malleable standard that is only wielded to the benefit of one side.
And so a lot of folks on the right are going, well, I'm not going, I just don't trust you to uphold any sort of standard.
So I'm not going to give you honest answers about your standard.
I don't answer to you.
I don't answer to you has maybe become the sort of modern day Battle cry of politics.
I don't answer to you.
Because what we all used to answer to was not each other, but to a moral standard, or at least that was the idea.
Maybe it was never true, but it certainly is not true now.
Certainly when it comes to issues of race, and there's a feeling among Republicans and among conservatives, we're not going to answer to people who suggest that planting cauliflower in New York City is colonialist.
We're not going to answer to people who suggest that it is a pure form of racism to use the phrase Western civilization.
We are not going to answer to people who Do not even acknowledge the anti-Semitism of folks ranging from Al Sharpton to Louis Farrakhan.
We're not going to answer to people who continue to defend Ilhan Omar as the best among us, even though Ilhan Omar is a bigot and a raging anti-Semite, and Ayanna Pressley has spouted racism, and AOC rips into the country regularly.
We're just not going to answer to you.
Well, the latest example of this happened over the weekend.
So apparently there's a story that ran wild over the course of Saturday, Friday night and Saturday.
There's a woman named Erica Thomas, and she's a black member of Georgia's House of Representatives.
According to the New York Times, she said she'd been the target of verbal harassment and had been told, go back where you came from at a grocery store near Atlanta on Friday.
In a video she posted to her Facebook account, she suggested that a white man had confronted her for having too many items in the express checkout lane at a Publix grocery store in Mableton, Georgia.
Here's what it sounded like when she talked about it.
I'm at the grocery store and I'm in the 10 aisle, the aisle that says 10 items or less.
Yes, I have 15 items, but I'm not much pregnant and I can't stand up for long.
This white man comes up to me and says, he says, you lazy son of a.
You need to go back where you came from.
But I couldn't.
I couldn't get anything out.
I could just tell him, please leave me alone, please.
And my child is just sitting right there.
And then, Mama, why would he call you that?
Why would he do that?
I can't even explain to her why he has so much hate in his heart.
Okay, so in a second, I'm going to explain what happened from here.
Suffice it to say, it went viral, and mainly it went viral because of that one line, go back where you came from.
Why?
Because that echoes what President Trump had suggested about the squad, the so-called squad.
So the idea is that this is creating a viral wave of racism across the country, where white people are telling black people, go back where you came from.
And that is the premise of this entire story.
As we will see, that is not where this story ends up.
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Okay, so.
That was her accusation, Erica Thomas, this Georgia representative.
She said she was shocked that a white man had confronted her for having too many items in the Express checkout line.
She said, people are getting really out of control with this, with this white privilege.
People need to see the hate that is going on in the country.
The hate is real.
She said she was scared to go out of the store because she thought the man was going to follow her or take out a gun.
You just never know.
And then the man comes out of the woodwork and he explains himself.
As it turns out, he is not white.
He is Cuban.
He is not a Republican.
He is a Democrat.
And he never actually said this.
I said, ma'am, not to be rude, my exact first words, pointing at the sign, which shows it on the surveillance camera, which I've seen already, pointing at the sign, 10 items or less.
She berates me after that.
I don't remember exactly what she said.
She said a few words.
I stated, well, you're selfish little B-I-T-C-H.
I did say that.
That's all I said after that, and I walked out in public.
Her words, stating on Twitter in her video, stating I told her she needs to go back where she came from, are untrue.
I am Cuban.
I am not white.
Okay, and he's a Democrat, as it turns out.
So she was blatantly lying.
And then she backed down from her own statement.
So she was interviewed about this.
She said, well, I don't really remember what he said exactly.
He might not have said go back home, which of course is the entire headline.
The entire headline.
Like if somebody curses somebody out in a Publix checkout line, that is not a racial incident.
That's somebody being a jerk, no question.
That is not a racist incident at all.
And if the guy is telling the truth and he said, ma'am, you know, you're in the express line, you got 15 items.
And she responded by yelling at him, and she was the one who initiated the conflict.
So we don't actually know the answer to that at this point, but she herself has now admitted that he never said, go back where you came from, which again, is the key to the story, considering the Democrats are pushing a line right now that President Trump's hatred and supposed bigotry and xenophobia, that this is causing a vast wave of outcry across the United States.
Again, no evidence that this guy's even a Republican.
Apparently he's a Cuban Democrat, but here she is acknowledging that she didn't tell the truth.
He said, go back, you know, those types of words.
I don't want to say he said, go back to your country or go back to where you came from.
But he was making those types of references is what I remember.
OK, so there she is backing off her original tear filled explanation of what happened.
So, the guy who was apparently involved in the incident, his name is Sparks.
He told the station, the local station, that the episode had started after he decided to say something about the number of items in her cart on the way out of the store.
Thomas said in her Facebook video she had between 15 and 20 items in her cart in the express lane.
Sparks said he was buying three items.
Sparks denied being racist, said he was Cuban.
He said he acknowledged she had called her lazy, but said that had been the worst of his comments.
He said, this woman, Ms.
Thomas, is playing the victim for political purposes because she's a state legislator.
I'm a Democrat.
I will vote Democrat for the rest of my life.
So call me whatever you want to believe.
For her political purposes, make it black, white, brown, whatever.
It's untrue.
Ms.
Thomas is a Democrat.
Records about Sparks' party registration were not immediately available on Sunday.
So this is buried at the end of a piece from the New York Times that is labeled, quote, the hate is real.
Black Georgia lawmaker says she was berated at supermarket.
So there's the New York Times putting out, again, what appears to be a mythical story, a hate hoax.
In the New York Times, at the top of the article, she openly acknowledges that she didn't say that he didn't say what she originally said he said.
But nonetheless, we were supposed to run with the story.
Why?
Because there's part of a narrative that is being built by the media that the country is endemically racist and cruel and horrible and getting worse because President Trump says bad things on Twitter.
OK, so this is all the lead up to and part of the background noise To the hubbub over President Trump's comments.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so the backdrop to all of this is that Republicans have basically thrown up their middle finger.
Trump was that middle finger in 2016.
And now when Democrats say, well, we're going to hold you to the standard of calling out racism.
Why won't you call this stuff out?
Republicans say you won't call it out in your own party.
You are willing to play along with hate hoaxes.
You are willing to pretend that Justice Millett's story was anything more than highly non-credible from the start.
You are willing to run a story in The New York Times called The Hate Is Real about a woman who apparently backed down from her own commentary.
So are we going to abide by your standards of racism?
This ties back into what I was saying last week, right?
Last week, I said, When Republicans said they agreed with Trump's tweet, I really don't believe that Republicans overall agreed with Trump's tweet.
I think they were answering pollsters who they think are going to use their poll results as a way to club Trump.
I think that they have decided, many Republicans have decided, they don't abide by the standards that are held by the media.
They have decided that the media are liars, that the media themselves don't abide by these standards, that Democrats are changing and morphing the standards of racism to meet circumstance.
They won't condemn it in their own party.
When Ayanna Pressley, again, it is amazing.
Not one question the entire week about Ayanna Pressley saying, black people can only be black if they agree with her, gay people can only be gay if they agree with her, Muslim people can only be Muslim if they agree with Ilhan Omar, for example.
No blowback on that.
We still have yet to hear.
It's incredible.
Ilhan Omar, last week, proposed a fully anti-Semitic resolution comparing boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning from the state of Israel to boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning Nazi Germany, 1933 to 1941.
She was not asked one single question of which I am aware about this the entire week.
Neither was Nancy Pelosi.
And Nancy Pelosi, one month beforehand, had stood up at AIPAC and said that BDS was anti-Semitic.
Now, one question.
And then you wonder why folks on the right are unwilling to go out of their way to condemn Trump.
Not because they're making a moral stand in favor of what Trump said, but because they don't trust you, and they're not going to engage in the losing side of the prisoner's dilemma, where you set the standard, where you don't hold your own side to account, and then you demand that everybody else hold their side to account.
Now, is that the moral thing to do?
No, it isn't.
The moral thing to do would be to condemn bad stuff wherever you see it.
I tried to do that on the show.
Last week I condemned President Trump's tweets.
I condemned the chant at the rally in pretty strong language if you go back and listen to it.
But that does not mean that I don't understand why so many Republican legislators are not willing to go along with the media.
Particularly because the media, again, do play this double standard game.
It is also true that the media have expanded the definition of racism to meet whatever they want it to meet on a variety of bases.
There's so many situations in which the media calls something racist that is not, in fact, racist.
So, Liz Cheney was appearing on Face the Nation.
And while she was on Face the Nation, basically the whole weekend was dedicated to the Sunday News anchors trying to tar and feather Republicans for not sufficiently condemning Trump.
By the way, all these Republicans know that the next move would then be for these people to ask why they remain Republicans, why they don't vote for Joe Biden, if Trump is so bad, why they don't vote for impeachment.
And so they're just heading off the media at the pass and they're saying, no, I don't actually agree with your assessment of the case.
It is also true that there's real controversy over whether what Trump said was racist or just xenophobic.
And that does make a difference.
Xenophobic is bad.
Racist is sort of the killer app in American politics right now.
If somebody is seen as fully racist, The way that Steve King is now seen, he is done.
If somebody is seen as trafficking in xenophobia, then that is not the killer app because the truth is that there is a fine line between xenophobia and simple unwillingness to admit particular immigrants from particular cultures that don't necessarily get along with the United States.
Meaning that the left has conflated those two.
It's not really a fine line, but the left has crossed that line and conflated those two.
So, xenophobia is the idea that all foreigners are bad.
Just because you're a foreigner, you're bad.
It's bad, it's stupid, it's ridiculous.
I mean, frankly, I'm a libertarian on immigration, were it not for welfare and cultural concerns.
And then there's what the media do, which is they label everything they don't like on immigration xenophobic.
We'll get to that in a second too, because as it turns out, that may play into the democratic agenda and why they're falling apart a little bit.
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Okay, so Liz Cheney appearing on the Sunday shows and Face the Nation immediately starts browbeating her about why she won't condemn President Trump as racist.
Why won't you just do it?
Now, I don't remember, again, a single question to the Democrats about the Ilhan Omar BDS resolution over the weekend.
If there was one, please make me aware because I was not aware of any of that.
Not a single question to Ayanna Pressley, and they were interviewed last weekend by CBS.
Not a single question to her about her racist comments.
But here, Liz Cheney, why won't you just condemn the President of the United States for our viewing pleasure?
Why doesn't the President, as a matter of principle, say unequivocally that non-white Americans are just as American as anyone else?
Why doesn't he put this to rest?
Well, I think you've heard him say that the chant was inappropriate.
We've all said the chant was inappropriate.
I think the news media— He said they were patriotic.
Very patriotic.
I think the news media really wants to make this about race.
You just did it.
This isn't about race.
It's not about gender.
It's not about religion.
These members of the House of Representatives, more, it's not just these four, it's also some of the candidates who are running for president on the Democratic side, fundamentally believe in policies that are dangerous for this nation.
OK, and what Liz Cheney is saying there is effectively correct.
I mean, Donald Trump did come out later in the week and at least disown the send her back chants and say that he didn't like them.
So at least he scores one point there.
OK, but that's not going to stop the media.
So Don Lemon, he's again going off.
Trump showed his true colors.
This is what the president is racist.
The president is terrible.
Don Lemon has got nothing to say when, of course, the shoe is on the other foot.
You can tell who is honest and who is not by what they say when the shoe is on the other foot.
And Don Lemon has never been honest about this stuff, and that's why Republicans are responding by saying that these people can go stuff it.
Well, today the President of the United States Showing his true colors after yesterday's failed attempt to convince you that he didn't like that send her back chant.
The president doubling and tripling down on his slurs against the congresswomen and seeming to lose track of how many there are going from four to three because he doesn't like their politics.
Okay, so if he doesn't like their politics, then he's allowed to not like their politics.
But apparently it's all about... Don Lemon does not get to be the man who polices racism.
He doesn't.
Again, last week, I played it on the show.
Don Lemon was talking about the wonders of John McCain back in 2008.
He was calling John McCain a hateful racist.
The New York Times has a piece today.
It's very similar.
The New York Times has a piece called, Trump Sets the Terms on Racial Division.
Do Democrats know what to do?
Weird, because for a long time it was Barack Obama in the White House who was suggesting that Trayvon Martin could have been his son, who was suggesting that the community in Ferguson, people would never have made up these stories about a police officer.
It was the President of the United States who was attacking Dallas police officers all over the country, and the police system is endemically racist.
And yet it was Trump who set the terms on racial division only?
Again, this is not whataboutism because I think that it's very bad when Trump does this sort of stuff.
I condemned it last week.
I will continue to condemn it when he does things that I disagree with morally.
But it is a natural feature of American politics that there's a reactionary side, which means that if the left refuses to be honest with its own side, the right is not going to simply abide by standards the left refuses to hold.
Meanwhile, speaking of the left refusing to hold by its own standards, best story of the weekend, Bernie Sanders.
had to respond to complaints from his staff that he was not paying his staff $15 an hour minimum wage.
Now, Sanders has been pushing for a federally mandated $15 minimum wage, and he wasn't paying his own staffers that.
So here is what Bernie Sanders did.
This is magical.
It really is fantastic.
Amid a pay war, this is according to Newsweek, within his own 2020 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders will limit the amount of time his organizers can work to guarantee that no one is making less than $15 per hour.
A wage the senator has demanded should be the federal minimum.
Wait, wait.
Did Bernie Sanders just discover economics?
Did Bernie Sanders just discover that, like, the money doesn't grow on trees?
And that if you pay people $15 an hour, they have to work fewer hours to have the same wage base that you're paying right now?
Did Bernie Sanders just discover reality?
That's gonna be very scary for him.
He wakes up in the morning, opens the window, and there's reality.
He's like, oh!
What is this?
I can't just pay people a billion dollars an hour?
I'm at my own campaign?
I will limit their working hours?
You mean I will have them lose working hours to save money on my own campaign?
Do business owners do this?
Wait a second.
And then there's a heavenly voice that descends on Bernie Sanders and suddenly he starts voting like Paul Ryan.
I mean, it's just unbelievable.
It's unbelievable.
By the way, it's not just Bernie Sanders.
Who is now acknowledging that his agenda is completely unworkable in terms of his own reality.
Cory Booker, over the weekend, made the signally true admission that Medicare for All won't pass and is a complete waste of time to push.
So here is Mr. Potato Head, Cory Booker, always bringing his angry eyes here on CNN.
So Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, they would do Medicare for All at the beginning.
They'd get in the White House and that would be what they would do.
For you, the answer is no?
Dana, you and I both know that even if we had 60 votes in the Senate right now, all the Democrats in the Senate wouldn't even support that.
This is about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
We're dealing with a country right now that needs a lot more good.
So is Medicare for All unrealistic?
No, look, Medicare for all is what we should be going for.
But the first step getting there has to be showing that we can create a public option.
So yes, it's unrealistic is what he's saying.
So it's funny to watch Democrats discover that their entire platform is unrealistic.
By the way, this is apparently also true on immigration.
A new Democratic think tank study is warning the Democratic Party that their immigration platform is a complete fail.
So according to the Daily Beast's new article, they say, quote, faced with combating the Trump administration's hardline immigration agenda in the arena of public opinion, Democrats have largely pointed to reports of horrific detention centers, spiking in custody deaths of undocumented immigrants, and President Trump's increasingly brazen attempts to undermine the legal immigration system.
But a new report from an influential liberal think tank provided to the Daily Beast posits that the party's decision to cede the rule of law ground to Republicans Yeah, you think?
the false dichotomy of America as either a nation of immigrants or a nation of laws, making the party and its candidates appear soft on enforcement and potentially weakening future attempts for humanitarian-focused immigration reform.
Yeah, you think?
You think that if you guys got too radical that the American public might, in fact, reject you?
So all the Democrats are left with in the end is virtue signaling.
They have unworkable policy.
They have no standards by which to hold anybody.
So instead, they just do this pathetic virtue signaling.
So here's a great example.
Here's today's pathetic virtue signaling from the Democrats.
According to NBC News, three Democratic candidates have now added their preferred pronouns to their Twitter page.
Now this is a perfect example of something that does nothing when it comes to public policy, has nothing to do with the political conversation, and is an absolute pandering move in order to gain press like this.
Like, everybody knows that Elizabeth Warren is a woman.
And everybody knows her position on transgenderism and on the so-called Equality Act.
But in order for her to pander and for her to virtue signal, she is going to put up on her Twitter page her preferred pronouns.
And it's not just her.
And wait, I'm sure, by the way, this will definitely win her Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
Absolutely, this is the key issue.
I know that those Michigan steel workers are very concerned about Elizabeth Warren's preferred pronouns.
According to John Paul Brammer over at NBC News, Elizabeth Warren's bio on her official presidential campaign Twitter page is touting a new addition, her pronouns.
Earlier this month, her bio was updated to U.S.
Senator, former teacher, and candidate for president, wife, mom, grandmother, and Okie.
She, hers.
Official campaign account.
So she's just going to continue to propagate this nonsense whereby you can't tell somebody sex by their actual sex.
We have to ask them what sex they are, even though we know perfectly well what sex they are.
NBC News- She gets exactly what she's going for from NBC News, by the way.
NBC News writes, quote, Not just on the surface, also in reality.
But!
The inclusion of she-hers on a frontrunner candidate's social media profile is no small feat in the eyes of LGBTQ advocates.
Among the LGBTQ community and its allies, including pronouns in social media profiles has become increasingly common practice in order to avoid misgendering and to indicate solidarity with transgender and non-binary people.
Oh, isn't that nice?
So the Democrats have no actual policy to run on.
Instead, they just have an attitude.
And the attitude is unearned moral superiority.
And they're going to continue to push that from here to the end.
That's all this is about.
Democrats want to establish unearned moral superiority, even though they don't actually abide by any of the standards they purport to abide by.
It's amazing.
The same people.
So exactly the same folks in the Democratic Party, like precisely the Venn diagram is a circle.
Exactly the same people who are going to put Transgender and gender pronouns in their Twitter biographies are the same people who will suggest that Christians are not actually Christians.
They're secretly brutal racists and that they are using Christianity in order to hide their brutal racism and brutal bigotry and brutal homophobia.
So we're supposed to take everybody's evidence-free assessment of their own sex and gender at face value to the point where we put it on presidential profile candidates and anybody who disagrees is a bigot.
And at the same time, if somebody says I'm a Christian and therefore I hold that certain types of behavior are sin, or I am a scientist and therefore I hold that male is male and female is female, really that's just a cover for bigotry.
In the end, when you boil this whole double standard thing down, what you get to is that the left has been doubting the right's motives and calling the right's motives into question for years and years and years and years.
And now the right doesn't trust the left and their motives.
And so nobody trusts anybody's motives.
And so it turns into just this this crap fight where the right is not going to answer questions from the left, honestly.
The left is not going to answer questions from the right, honestly.
The left is going to posture as morally superior on the basis of apparently nothing.
And the right is then going to say, well, fine, if you guys want to posture as morally superior, then we're just going to do what we want to do anyway, because you don't Because you treat us poorly.
That is the underlying dynamic of American politics.
It's why Trump won in 2016.
It's why right now he is certainly a 50-50 shot to win the White House again in 2020.
Okay, meanwhile, quick update on the situation over in Iran.
So the situation with regard to Iran is becoming more and more volatile day by day.
There is a, the newest story is that the Iranians have declared that they have 17 CIA spies.
Now, usually when they declare they have a CIA spy, that is a lie.
Usually they're just making that up.
They arrest some sort of civilian who happens to be from the West, or a political dissident, and they call them a CIA spy, and then they execute them.
But they are upping the ante, obviously.
Also, over the weekend, the Iranian Navy hijacked a British tanker.
There's actual video of it.
It looked like this.
You can see the Iranian Navy.
They've got their helicopters over the tanker.
And the British tanker couldn't stop them.
Apparently, they tried to stop it.
According to The Sun, dramatic footage shows a balaclava-clad Iranian commando hijacking a British oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz.
Video released today captures the moment Tehran troops abseil onto the Stena Impero with 23 crew on board last night.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard launched a gunboat and helicopter right on its tanker, which is registered in the UK, claiming it had turned off its tracker and ignored warnings.
Which, of course, is a lie.
Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt said that the ship has been seized in Omani waters in clear contravention of international law.
Another vessel, the Mestar, was also intercepted and forced toward Iranian territory in what appeared to be a coordinated strike.
So what exactly are the Iranians doing?
The Iranians are attempting to force the Europeans and the left in America to push President Trump to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, whereby the Iranians continue to reap the benefits of monetary involvement in the world economy.
They can use it for terrorism, they can use it for ballistic missiles, and they can develop nuclear weapons up to a sort of set point.
That set point is basically a point of stasis.
So the Iran nuclear deal was not really a dismantling of the Iranian nuclear program, such that it would be difficult for them to restart the program.
It was a delay of their completion of the program.
And so the Iranians have said that they are reversing that, and now they are growing more and more militant in an attempt to basically force the West back to the table in all of this.
Javad Zarif, the foreign minister, was on with CNN's Fareed Zakaria.
That's basically what he said, although he said it in the most untrue possible way, because he is, of course, the Iranian foreign minister.
We defend our territory.
The United States drone entered Iranian territory, entered Iranian airspace.
It was shot down because even without entering Iranian airspace, it could spy over our entire territory.
We will not tolerate foreigners coming 6,000 miles from their shores to our shores and threatening our national sovereignty and stability.
Do you, as a result, think there could be a war between the United States and Iran?
Well, I can tell you that we will never start a war.
We've never started a war.
We will never start a war.
We will defend ourselves, and anybody who starts a war with Iran will not be the one who acts.
Okay, effectively Iran has already started a war.
And by the way, Iran's never starting a war would include, you know, violating international law by involving itself in international conflict in Yemen, funding Hezbollah, funding Hamas, funding terrorist groups in Argentina to bomb Jewish synagogues.
The Iranians are desperately attempting to break the sanctions.
That's what's happening right here.
And so the question is, who's going to break first?
And whether the Iranians really want to come back to the table.
Because the biggest problem here is that the United States actually has not hardened its own defenses in the region.
So the ultimate, the ultimate threat of war, which Iran would obviously lose, the Iranians feel that they can do this with a certain level of impunity and get what they want out of negotiations because the United States is not sufficiently prepared to take the sacrifices of a war.
Which, again, I don't want to fight a war.
Trump doesn't want to fight a war.
Nobody wants to fight a war.
No one's interested in all of this.
But that's why the Iranians are thrashing around.
The best policy at this point would be to flag some of these tankers in the Gulf of Oman and in the Straits of Hormuz.
They should flag the tankers American and then they should defend those tankers with American ships.
And if the Iranians fire on those tankers then America should just blow their ships out of the water and it should be contained conflict.
It shouldn't be something where it escalates.
And I don't think Iran would want to escalate it because beyond a certain point you start killing American troops and then we do have to Okay, time for some things I like, then some things that I hate.
At that point, then the Iranian regime is in trouble.
They don't want that.
Keeping this to a low-level conflict is manageable and also keeps Iran hand in.
It is true that their funding of terrorist groups has dropped precipitously because their economic collapse has been foreordained by the sanctions placed by the United States.
Okay, time for some things I like, then some things that I hate.
So things that I like today.
Over the weekend, I read a great book on tennis called Levels of the Game.
This is an older book by John McPhee, and it traces the tennis match between a player named Grebner and Arthur Ashe, one of the great American tennis players in history.
It really is more of an investigation of the two men than it is an investigation of tennis, but it's beautifully written.
It is well worth reading.
If you're a tennis fan at all, you should go pick it up.
John McPhee, Levels of the Game.
Okay, other things that I like.
Megan McCain wrote a beautiful column over the weekend, I think it came out on Friday, all about she just suffered from a miscarriage.
And full disclosure, I'm friends with Megan.
So this was obviously, it's got to be heartbreaking for her.
She wrote what I think is a truly great and useful piece about what it felt like to have a miscarriage, how it made her more pro-life than ever, how she understood that it was a baby.
How losing the baby not only did not change her opinion on abortion, but it strengthened her opinion on abortion.
She says, We deserve the opportunity to speak openly of them, to share what they were, and to mourn.
More important, they deserve to be spoken of, shared, and mourned.
These children, shockingly small, shockingly helpless, entirely the work of our love and our humanity.
Our children, we who mourn, are their mothers.
You can't put it better than that.
So well done, Meghan McCain, and I'm glad that she obviously turned what is a tragic situation into a cause for both inspiration and humanity.
It's a great column, you should check it out over at the New York Times.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
All righty, so Robert Mueller is set to testify this week.
Ooh, everybody's so excited, yeah?
Hey, Robert Mueller's gonna testify.
So, don't we already have like a 428-page report on what Robert Mueller thinks on all of this?
Didn't he give a very cryptic nine-minute press conference in which he explained exactly what he thought of all of this?
Apparently that's not enough.
Apparently Democrats are still holding out hope that Robert Mueller is finally going to spill the beans on Trump secretly.
He's been holding a card in abeyance.
The card that he has been holding back is the card that finally ends with the impeachment of President Trump.
That apparently is what Adam Schiff is saying.
He's saying Trump should be indicted.
Maybe he'll have to leave office and then we'll indict him.
Funny how Schiff moved from we should impeach him to we'll indict him after he leaves office.
If he really thinks Trump is indictable, why is he not pushing for impeachment?
That would be the open question.
Here is Adam Schiff, or as President Trump calls him, oddly and strangely, Pencil Neck.
Here is a pencil neck shift, according to President Trump.
From Bob Mueller that he felt, and the Justice Department feels bound by this Office of Legal Counsel opinion, that you can't indict a sitting president.
But he is a essentially unindicted co-conspirator.
He's been identified as Individual 1, as the person who directed Michael Cohen to commit this fraudulent campaign scheme.
He is not above the law.
He may have a temporary reprieve while he occupies that office.
But I think the Justice Department will have to seriously consider reopening the case, if that's what it requires, and indicting him when he leaves office.
Oh, well, is that what's going to happen?
So why are you not calling for impeachment?
If it's so clear cut, if it turns out that the president is going to be prosecuted by the SDNY, quietly last week, by the way, the SDNY did drop certain charges against Trump and the state of New York dropped certain charges against the Trump organization.
Why exactly are they so confident after years of pitching into the narrative that Trump was going to fall when the Mueller report came out?
The Mueller report comes out, nothing happens, and suddenly they're back doing the same routine they were doing two weeks ago.
Or eight weeks ago, rather.
Here's Jerry Nadler doing the same thing.
Jerry Nadler from New York.
He says, well, the Mueller report shows that Trump is impeachable.
Really?
So where's your motion to impeach?
Where is it?
I'm missing it.
Here's Chris Wallace asking him this.
Follow up with what you just said.
He's violated the law six ways from Sunday.
If he weren't the president, he'd be indicted.
You've read the 448-page report.
Do you believe the president is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, the marker for impeachment by the House?
I think there is very substantial, well the report presents very substantial evidence that the president is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and we have to present, or let Mueller present those facts to the American people and then see where we go from there because the administration must be held accountable and no president can be above the law.
OK, so there is nothing in the Mueller report that suggests that he believes that a prosecutable crime, prosecutable crime occurred.
Now, lots of activity may have occurred that was gross or yucky or nefarious.
We went through it at the time.
I mean, I read every page of the report.
I summarized it for you on three or four separate days when the report came out.
There was nothing in there that was actually prosecutable.
Now, what Mueller did is something that is pretty weaselly, actually.
Instead of him simply saying, I don't recommend prosecution because it's not prosecutable, instead he handed the report to William Barr, who said exactly that.
And then Mueller went out and did a presser in which he said, if we could have exonerated the president, then we would have.
It wasn't your job to exonerate the president.
It was your job to determine whether he was prosecutable.
That was not a good act of prosecution by Mueller.
Mueller knows better.
What that report basically suggested is that Mueller wants Congress to impeach Trump, but he doesn't believe that President Trump could be convicted in a court of law.
That's really what the Mueller report said.
And it wasn't really about the DOJ not being able to prosecute President Trump, despite the Democrats trying to paint it that way.
Unless William Barr was lying openly, which would be cause for great concern for me and others, obviously.
Unless the Attorney General was lying openly, Bob Mueller told him explicitly that he was not failing to recommend prosecution.
Simply because of the DOJ regulations.
So Jerry Nadler said that the point of Mueller's testimony was so the American people could quote, hear directly from him about what his investigation found.
He says quote, the president and the attorney general and others have spent the last few months systematically lying to the American people about what the investigation found.
They've said that it contained no, that it found no collusion, that it found no obstruction, that it exonerated the president.
All three of those statements are absolute lies.
Well, no.
The first one did find no collusion.
It certainly found no conspiracy or any prosecutable crime.
On obstruction, the question is whether the president fulminating to his advisors about how much he hated Robert Mueller and wanted him to go, or fulminating about Jeff Sessions and talking about firing him, whether, number one, it can be obstruction to fire a member of the executive branch, if that constitutes obstruction in and of itself.
Probably not, on a technical level.
Or two, Whether him fulminating about it and then not doing it even constitutes obstruction.
As far as it exonerating the president, I said at the time that the report did not exonerate the president on obstruction.
It did not exonerate the president with regard to his behavior inside the administration, but that does not mean it's prosecutable.
So lots of charges are investigated by the police, and they are not found to be exonerating, but they are not prosecutable.
Asked about questions Republicans lawmakers plan to ask, Nadler said if Republicans want to talk about the irrelevancy of the Russia probe's origins, let them waste their time.
He says what's before the American people now is the conduct of this president and what Mueller found about the conduct of this president and where we go from here.
So Democrats still holding out that last desperate hope that perhaps Mueller will save them from the consequences of three years of declaring that all of this is going to come to a head and end with Trump's impeachment.
Not going to happen.
Meanwhile, in what is, I think, more shocking news, Real Clear Investigations has a piece today talking about Inspector General Michael Horowitz's upcoming report.
So Michael Horowitz has an upcoming report on the origins of the Russia story.
And Real Clear Investigations does some interesting stuff.
Paul Sperry is the reporter over there.
He talks about what exactly Horowitz is going to find.
Here's what he says.
He says,
Sources tell RealClearInvestigations that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will soon file a report with evidence indicating that Comey was misleading the president.
Even as he repeatedly assured Trump that he was not a target, the former director was secretly trying to build a conspiracy case against the president while at times acting as an investigative agent.
Two U.S.
officials, this is according again to RealClearInvestigations, two U.S.
officials briefed on the inspector general's investigation.
Of possible FBI misconduct, said that Comey was essentially running a covert op against the president, starting with a private defensive briefing he gave Trump just weeks before his inauguration.
They said that Horowitz has examined high-level FBI text messages and other communications indicating that Comey was actually conducting a counterintelligence assessment of Trump during that January 2017 meeting in New York.
Now, the difference between counterintelligence assessments and criminal assessments Is that if it were criminal, then you'd actually have to have warrants for all of this that are different from FISA warrants.
You'd actually have to show evidence of criminality.
Counterintelligence just means that you suspect that the Russians are interfering and that as part of that chain, you're now investigating the people on the other side.
And that's a lower bar that Comey would have to clear.
In addition to taking notes of his meetings and phone calls with Trump to the official FBI case file, Comey had an agent inside the White House who reported back to FBI headquarters about Trump and his aides, according to other officials familiar with the matter.
Apparently he was using, what, a spy inside the White House reporting back to the FBI about the incoming president and his aides?
Based on what evidence, exactly?
I mean, having the head of the FBI investigating the elected president of the United States, the president-elect, that's pretty ugly stuff, obviously, especially if you don't come up with goods.
Although Comey took many actions on his own, he was not working in isolation.
One focus of Horowitz's inquiry is the private January 6th, 2017 briefing that Comey gave the president-elect in New York about material in the Democratic-commissioned dossier compiled by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
Reports of that meeting were used days later by BuzzFeed, CNN, and other outlets as a news hook for reporting on the dossier's lascivious and unsubstantiated claims.
So there were accusations by, among others, Molly Hemingway over at the Federalist at the time, that the reason that Comey briefed Trump on the dossier was specifically so that CNN could then report that Comey had briefed Trump on the dossier, and then you could see BuzzFeed go, oh, well, what was the dossier that he was briefed on?
Here it is.
Pee tape!
It basically was an excuse set up by Comey and other members of the FBI in order to create a rationale for BuzzFeed to run the dossier in the first place.
Now, again, there are a few links in that chain that have yet to be substantiated.
Communications, for example, between Comey or members of the FBI and members of the press.
That has yet to be substantiated, but this has always been a weird, outstanding question.
Why exactly would Comey brief Trump on the dossier that was unsubstantiated and had no impact on the actual investigation, according to Democrats, right?
The Steele dossier supposedly was not the basis really for FISA warrants or for the opening of the investigation in the first place, because if it were, then it would look kind of nefarious that Hillary Clinton's campaign created the dossier with Christopher Steele, then handed it over to Barack Obama's FBI, which initiated an investigation against her political opponent in the 2016 campaign, right?
That starts to look an awful lot like a conspiracy between the Obama, DOJ, and FBI and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
And it starts to look really, really bad.
So there are a lot of open questions here.
Comey's meeting with Trump took place one day after the FBI director met in the Oval Office with President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to discuss how to brief Trump A meeting attended by the NSA's Susan Rice, Homeland Security Secretary Jay Johnson, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who would soon go work for CNN.
Comey denied having a counterintelligence case file open on Trump, though he qualified the denial by adding this was true only in the literal sense.
He also twice denied investigating Trump under oath in congressional testimony.
So, depending on what Horowitz finds, there could be a perjury charge here.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who has written extensively on all of this, said that just because the president's name was not put on a file or a surveillance warrant does not mean that the Comey FBI was not investigating him.
They were hoping to surveil him incidentally and they were trying to make a case on him, said McCarthy.
The real reason Comey did not want to repeat publicly the assurance he made to Trump privately is that the assurance was misleading.
The FBI strung Trump along, telling him he was not a subject while structuring the investigation in accordance with the reality that Trump was actually the main suspect.
This, of course, is disputed by other folks.
Former FBI counterintelligence agent and lawyer Mark Walks said that the FBI lacked legal grounds to treat Trump as a suspect.
They had no probable cause.
They were scrambling to come up with anything to hang a hat on, but they'd found nothing.
So it's unclear why exactly this investigation became such a massive, massive thing, given the slim read upon which it was originally based, apparently.
And that remains the subject of Michael Horowitz's investigation.
So Comey's conduct is clearly going to come up for all sorts of controversy, according to Paul Sperry over real clear investigations.
At the time, Comey was personally scrutinizing the president during meetings in the White House and phone conversations from the FBI.
He had an agent inside the White House working on the Russia investigation.
He reported back to FBI headquarters about Trump and his aides.
The agent was named Anthony Ferrante.
He specialized in cybercrime.
He left the White House at around the same time Comey was fired and soon joined a security consulting firm where he contracted with BuzzFeed to lead the news site's efforts to verify the Steele dossier in connection with the defamation lawsuit.
Knowledgeable sources inside the Trump White House say that Comey carved out an extraordinary new position for Ferrante, which allowed for him to remain on reserve status at the FBI while working in the White House as a cybersecurity advisor.
I think this report was supposed to drop July, so we should find out in very short order what exactly Michael Horowitz has to say about the initiation of the Russia investigation, which of course is the other side of the coin in terms of the Mueller investigation.
Why did this thing start?
Why were so many resources placed into it?
Was it nefariously begun with an attempt to get President Trump because he was Hillary Clinton's Chief antagonist and opponent in 2016.
So we'll bring you all of the developments there as this continues.
Alrighty, so we'll be back here a little bit later today.
We'll have two additional hours of programming, and if you don't get that, then go to dailywire.com, subscribe, you can get that every single day, or we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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At every level of society, people are being silenced and controlled by corporate leftist overseers.
That's why when Trump speaks and acts without fear, and sometimes without thinking, it sounds to us like freedom.
That's what this administration is about, and that's what the next election will be about too.
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