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July 25, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:10:23

Mueller: Endgame | Ep. 825

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	The Mueller saga finally ends, but will it ever really end?
	Plus, the wild story of a Harvard Law professor, a lesbian con artist, and a transgender roommate.
	It's not really a joke.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	A lot to get to today.
	So let's jump right in before we get to the aftermath of the Robert Mueller hearing yesterday, which was basically a disaster for Democrats.
	And the way you could tell it was a disaster for Democrats is folks in the media insisting that it definitely was not a disaster for Democrats.
	They weren't suggesting it was a win, but it definitely wasn't as big a disaster as everybody's saying.
	Yeah, it kind of was.
	We'll get to that in just a second.
	First, Jeffrey Epstein is now on suicide watch after he was found with neck injuries in jail.
	This, of course, sends Clinton body count trending on Twitter, because that's always how this works.
	Whenever somebody close to the Clintons dies, everybody on the right immediately assumes the Clintons did it because everyone is a little crazy.
	In any case, the New York Post reports convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has been placed on suicide watch after being found sprawled out and injured in his federal jail cell, law enforcement sources said Thursday.
	Epstein was nearly unconscious in his cell Tuesday at Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center with injuries to his neck.
	He is, of course, being held at the jail without bail pending trial on child sex trafficking charges.
	He was rushed to a nearby hospital.
	By Thursday, he was back at the jail and on suicide watch, according to sources.
	Investigators say that they don't think that this was him being attacked.
	They instead think that he may have injured himself on purpose or as a ploy so that he'd get transferred out of jail because he doesn't like the conditions.
	Over there.
	Of course, he is facing up to 45 years in prison.
	We will look for more information as it comes out, but so far, all we know is that Jeffrey Epstein is one of the world's worst human beings.
	And because we know that he is one of the world's worst human beings, it is highly doubtful that he was actually attempting to commit suicide, and given the conditions of the jail, it's pretty doubtful that somebody tried to injure him while he was in the jail.
	I mean, he is one of the most highly publicized people in American public life at this point.
	Okay, now, to the fallout from the Mueller hearing yesterday.
	Well, if you missed the Mueller hearing yesterday, There were no fireworks.
	It was a fizzle.
	It was a lot of buildup and no payoff.
	A lot of foreplay and no payoff.
	It was really not good for Democrats because the whole thing was built up as an optic routine.
	It was not built up as a content.
	It was not all about the content that Mueller was going to provide.
	Instead, it was just going to be, solid man of the law sits there and tells you all the ways that Donald Trump is bad.
	That's not how it turned out.
	It turned out that Mueller looked uncertain.
	It turned out he didn't know his own report particularly well.
	It turned out that every time he gave the Democrats a win with one of his lines, he immediately pulled back from that win.
	And this was a mistake for Democrats.
	It was a big mistake for Democrats.
	There was a lot of talk early on.
	Jerry Nadler, I remember, very early after the Mueller report was released.
	448 page report.
	You can read the whole thing.
	It's not non-public.
	After that came out, Jerry Nadler suggested maybe we won't call Mueller to testify.
	And I was wondering out loud at the time, why would he not?
	Maybe it's because Mueller just wouldn't be that good a witness.
	Maybe it's because Mueller is not going to say anything more than he already said in the report.
	But due to external pressure, due to the fact that there were so many people dreaming of the day when Donald Trump would be frogmarched out of the White House by Robert Mueller and his 73-year-old six-pack, All the Krasenstein brothers who were patting themselves on the back, getting the massage oils ready.
	None of this was real.
	But Democrats decided to go for it anyway, and it really backfired on them in a fairly significant way.
	If they wanted to push forward with impeachment, they should not have had Mueller testify.
	They should have just taken his report.
	They should have said, listen, the report provides us the evidence that we need to begin impeachment proceedings.
	The president can't be prosecuted because of the OLC, the Office of Legal Counsel.
	Ruling that sitting presidents can't be prosecuted, but we are here to make sure that no one is above the law.
	Democrats could have done that.
	Nancy Pelosi didn't want to because it's pretty unpopular.
	And most Democrats weren't going to vote for it.
	In fact, they held an impeachment vote basically a week ago, and only 95 Democrats voted in favor.
	A majority of Democrats voted again.
	So impeachment is basically DOA.
	They were hoping to breathe some life back into it with the Mueller hearing.
	That is not what happened.
	We'll go through it in just one second.
	And then we'll get to the insane fallout from the Mueller hearing and the spin the media are trying to put upon it.
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	Okay, so let's recap what exactly Robert Mueller said yesterday.
	So Robert Mueller gave a couple of moments to the Democrats, but none of them were particularly telling.
	So moment number one, he said that he did not totally exonerate Trump.
	Now, no one who actually read the report or followed the media coverage thought Trump was totally exonerated on the question of obstruction.
	Nobody thought that.
	In fact, there were polls of Americans and Americans were asked, do you think Trump is exonerated?
	And a majority of Americans said no.
	So Mueller is rebutting a point that nobody actually believed in the first place.
	Democrats were touting this.
	Well, look at that.
	It's a stinging rebuke to Trump.
	Wait a second.
	You're telling me that President Trump mischaracterizes what other people say sometimes?
	No, no, that can't be true.
	Am I supposed to be shocked by this?
	Here's Representative Jerry Nadler, who is spilling out this question as though it's a revelation.
	The president has repeatedly claimed That your report found there was no obstruction and that it completely and totally exonerated him.
	But that is not what your report said, is it?
	Correct.
	That is not what the report said.
	So the report did not conclude that he did not commit obstruction of justice.
	Is that correct?
	That is correct.
	And what about total exoneration?
	Did you actually totally exonerate the president?
	No.
	Now, in fact, Your report expressly states that it does not exonerate the president.
	It does.
	Wow, and then Trump said he was exonerated.
	Boom!
	Done!
	Impeach!
	Yeah, we all know.
	We all know.
	Donald Trump says stuff that's not true a lot.
	You know, like, ever since he's been in American public life for the last 70-odd years.
	So, yeah, that's not going to do it.
	OK, how about this approach?
	How about Trump could be charged with obstruction after he leaves office?
	So now you hear Democrats trying to trot out the argument that Donald Trump would be prosecuted by Robert Mueller after he leaves office.
	So this is them hoping against hope and then them saying, OK, well, if he can't be prosecuted while he's in office, at least he can be impeached.
	But that's not what Mueller is saying.
	Mueller is making a basic statement of law, which is true.
	Trump could be prosecuted after he leaves office.
	He cannot be prosecuted while he is in office.
	That does not mean he should be prosecuted.
	It's just a statement of the law.
	The Democrats were treating this as, again, another revelation, but it's not a revelation.
	Could you charge the president with a crime after he left office?
	Yes.
	You believe that he committed, you could charge the president of the United States with obstruction of justice after he left office?
	Yes.
	Well, well, I mean, case closed, except for the question is not whether you can charge the president after he leaves office.
	The question is, should you charge the president after he leaves office?
	OK, then there was an actual seeming bombshell at the time.
	Ted Lieu was questioning Robert Mueller and he asked him, Basically, the reason that you didn't prosecute Trump is because of the OLC opinion, right?
	There's an Office of Legal Counsel opinion from the Department of Justice that says you cannot prosecute a sitting president federally because he's the head of the federal executive branch.
	And Mueller seems to say that the only reason he wouldn't prosecute Trump is because of the OLC opinion, right?
	This is the moment, the big moment.
	And Democrats were over the moon about this.
	This was the headline at all the major websites, at least for about five minutes, as we'll see.
	So here is Robert Mueller actually giving Democrats a win.
	Was there sufficient evidence to convict President Trump or anyone else with obstruction of justice?
	We did not make that calculation.
	How could you not have made the calculation with the regulations?
	Because the OLC opinion, the OLC opinion, Office of Legal Counsel, indicates that we cannot indict a sitting president.
	So one of the tools that a prosecutor would use is not there.
	You were actually unable to conclude the president did not commit obstruction of justice.
	Is that correct?
	Okay, so Democrats jumped on this.
	This means that if it weren't for the OLC opinion, then Mueller would have got him.
	See, they keep trying to make excuses as to why Mueller didn't actually do it.
	Mueller has told you why he didn't do it.
	that a president, a sitting president, cannot be indicted.
	Okay, so Democrats jumped on this.
	This means that if it weren't for the OLC opinion, then Mueller would have got him.
	See, they keep trying to make excuses as to why Mueller didn't actually do it.
	Mueller has told you why he didn't do it.
	He said he did not even reach the borderline question of whether Trump should be prosecuted because the OLC opinion said, and said he couldn't be prosecuted.
	So he just didn't even answer the question.
	So here is Mueller walking back that talking point now.
	He comes back for his testimony, second half of the day, and he then walks back the one win Democrats have, which is the OLC opinion question.
	Now, before we go to questions, I want to add one correction to my testimony this morning.
	I want to go back to one thing that was said this morning by Mr. Liu, who said, and I quote, you didn't charge the president because of the OLC opinion.
	and That is not the correct way to say it.
	As we say in the report, and as I said at the opening, we did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime.
	Okay, so he walks that back, too.
	So now Democrats have nothing.
	And every time they try to push Mueller into saying that he would have indicted Trump if it weren't for the OLC opinion, they fail, as you'll see in just one second.
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	Okay, so, another attempt by Democrats to go after Trump via Mueller, and Mueller shoots that one down.
	So, Hakeem Jeffries.
	Democratic congressperson from New York, widely considered the future of House leadership.
	He tries to get Mueller to basically accede to his analysis that Trump committed obstruction of justice.
	He puts up a chart and then he says, here are the elements of obstruction of justice.
	And Trump fulfilled all of them.
	Isn't that true, sir?
	And Mueller is like, uh, not really.
	I'm not going to say I like mystery.
	The investigation found substantial evidence That when the president ordered Don McGahn to fire the special counsel and then lie about it, Donald Trump 1.
	Committed an obstructive act.
	2.
	Connected to an official proceeding.
	3.
	Did so with corrupt intent.
	Those are the elements of obstruction of justice.
	This is the United States of America.
	No one is above the law.
	No one.
	The president must be held accountable one way or the other.
	Let me just say, if I might, I don't subscribe necessarily to the way you analyze that.
	I'm not saying it's out of the ballpark, but I'm not supportive of that analytical charge.
	Ouch.
	Ouch.
	So his green checkmarks avail him not, and suddenly there's Robert Mueller shooting him down.
	And this was the story of the Democrats' day.
	What they really wanted from Mueller, the only key headline they wanted from Mueller, is Mueller saying, listen, I think that he did criminal stuff, and I can't prosecute him, but you can.
	Now the ball of honesty and truth is in your court, Democrats.
	Take it up and run with it.
	That's what they were hoping for.
	And it didn't happen anyway, shape or form.
	Not only that, Mueller actually provided some fodder for the other side.
	So Republican goals, when it came to this particular hearing, were twofold.
	Goal number one, show that Mueller was not actually in charge of his own investigation.
	Because Mueller's an honest guy, but the idea from a lot of Republicans is that there was some motivation to how this thing was written.
	It was written in biased and slanted fashion in order to provide a supposed roadmap to impeachment and that maybe Mueller wasn't actually in charge of his own report.
	That was point number one that Republicans were trying to make.
	Point number two that they were trying to make was that the report itself was fundamentally flawed because it came at it from the wrong angle.
	The report did not attempt to convict Trump.
	It basically said, we can't exonerate Trump.
	Well, the job of the report was not to exonerate the person at issue.
	The job of the report was to provide evidence for a possible prosecution if a prosecution was on the table.
	But a prosecution apparently wasn't on the table.
	So what the hell was this about in the first place?
	So that was the twofold goal.
	One, Mueller wasn't really in charge of the report.
	Two, the report itself was fundamentally flawed.
	And I think there might have been kind of a third point too, which is that all the talk about Trump obstructing justice, Mueller didn't get stopped anywhere in here, right?
	Trump did not step in.
	He did not curtail Mueller's investigation.
	He did not fire Mueller.
	He did not do anything to hinder or obstruct the investigation in any real or severe way.
	He may have jabbered about it to aides, may have suggested to aides that it be done, but it never actually got done.
	So maybe there were three points.
	Those were the three, right?
	Trump did not obstruct because he didn't stop you, Robert Mueller.
	Two, you weren't even in charge of this thing.
	It was all of your Democrat friends.
	And three, The report itself was fundamentally flawed.
	So, as we'll see in just a second, the Republicans were able to make basically all of these points.
	So, on point number one.
	Point number one was that the report itself did not establish what it sought to establish with regard to President Trump.
	Namely, obstruction, because he didn't curtail or hinder the actual investigation.
	And two, because the investigation didn't establish a conspiracy with Russia.
	So, here's Robert Mueller being asked whether His investigation was curtailed or hindered?
	At any time of the investigation, was your investigation curtailed or stopped?
	Or hindered?
	No.
	That's a no.
	End of story.
	No.
	Okay, and there's a lot of answers like that from Robert Mueller yesterday.
	Very curt, very clipped.
	And then he was asked, did your investigation establish conspiracy?
	The answer again, nope.
	The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign Conspired with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
	Okay, so that again goes to the Republicans' point.
	You didn't establish what you were trying to establish.
	Then they get on to point number two, which is you weren't really in charge of this investigation, were you?
	And Mueller appeared hesitant.
	He appeared tentative.
	He appeared as though he didn't know his own report.
	As I said yesterday on the program, he appeared like the kid in your class in third grade who was supposed to have done a book report on Bridge to Terabithia and didn't actually do the book report, but a parent did.
	And then they came in and the teacher was like, so what happened in Bridge to Terabithia?
	And the kid was like, well, I know there was a bridge, And a place called Terabithia.
	There's a lot of that from Robert Mueller.
	So he was asked about Fusion GPS.
	Now, anyone who has followed this entire unfolding scandal knows that Fusion GPS is a key player.
	Fusion GPS was the group that went out there and compiled the Steele dossier, which may have been Russian disinformation that was then funneled upward to Hillary Clinton's law firm, and from there, it was funneled to the FBI.
	And Robert Mueller is asked about Fusion GPS, and he says he has no clue what the hell anybody's talking about.
	When you talk about the firm that produced the steel reporting, the name of the firm that produced that was Fusion GPS.
	Is that correct?
	I'm not familiar with that.
	It was.
	It's not a trick question.
	It was Fusion GPS.
	Now, Fusion GPS produced the opposition research document widely known as the Steele dossier, and the owner of Fusion GPA was someone named Glenn Simpson.
	Are you familiar with him?
	This is outside my purview.
	Absolutely not, outside his purview.
	He just doesn't know his own report.
	And it's pretty clear he didn't know his own report.
	Okay, then there was point number three the Republicans were trying to establish, which is that the entire angle of the report is wrong.
	And when Democrats focus in on Trump being exonerated, the report is designed to provide evidence sufficient to prosecute or sufficient to impeach.
	It's not Mueller's job to exonerate Trump.
	It's his job to prosecute Trump.
	It's not a prosecutor's job to ever exonerate somebody.
	That'd be the defense attorney's job or the person's job themselves.
	But it's really not anybody's job because in the United States you have to be proved to have committed a crime.
	Proof of exoneration is not necessary.
	So here's Mueller being asked that question and admitting he doesn't know of any other case where the DOJ has quote-unquote exonerated somebody.
	Can you give me an example other than Donald Trump where the Justice Department determined that an investigated person was not exonerated because their innocence was not conclusively determined?
	I cannot, but this is a unique situation.
	Okay, well, you can't.
	Time is short.
	I've got five minutes.
	Let's just leave it at you can't find it because I'll tell you why.
	It doesn't exist.
	It was not the special counsel's job to conclusively determine Donald Trump's innocence or to exonerate him.
	Because the bedrock principle of our justice system is a presumption of innocence.
	It exists for everyone.
	Everyone is entitled to it, including sitting presidents.
	Okay, so this is a bad day for Mueller.
	He looked bad.
	He looked like he was stumbling.
	The optics were bad.
	Now, a lot of people in the media are saying, why are you looking at the optics?
	Because Democrats explicitly admitted in the run-up to this that this was all for optics.
	The only reason to even have this hearing was that you could have that image of Clint Eastwood circa 1971 standing there growling down the president.
	That's what they were hoping for from Mueller.
	They didn't get any of that.
	And now they're like, why are you looking at the optics, man?
	Why don't you just look at the substance?
	Well, we already have the substance.
	That's why we're not looking at the substance anymore, because we all analyzed the substance.
	I read large swaths of the report on air.
	No, this was about the optics, and the optics did not cut in favor of the Democrats.
	Well, President Trump knew that.
	President Trump reacted to Mueller's testimony with glee and short-wing.
	The Democrats lost so big today.
	Their party is in shambles right now.
	They've got the squad leading their party.
	They are a mess.
	This was a devastating day for the Democrats.
	This whole thing has been Honestly, it's been collusion.
	It's been collusion with the media.
	It's been collusion with other countries.
	This has been a disaster for the Democrats, and I think we're going to win bigger than ever.
	OK, so, you know, that is not an unfair analysis by the president of what the effect will be.
	Although, again, I don't know that there will be any effect.
	I think most people have moved past this, but Democrats won't let go.
	Democrats are not going to let go of this.
	So you have Eric Swalwell, the congressperson from California, who is suggesting, guys, this is only the beginning.
	It's only the beginning.
	Now, Eric Swalwell, as we know, knows things about things that are supposed to begin and then end quickly, like his presidential campaign, which lasted approximately 37.2 seconds.
	in which he proposed that we nuke all gun owners.
	In any case, here is Eric Swalwell explaining this is only Act 1.
	And this became the Democratic talking point.
	We're not going to let go of this.
	Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi in the back room is saying, "Guys, we need to let go of this." Here's Eric Swalwell.
	Where do we go from here, Congressman?
	I think success is that the American people will view this as volume one.
	I'm sorry, that the American people will view this as Act 1, not Act 3.
	And as they heard names today like Manafort and Kalemnick and Gates, they will want to know, well, let's hear more about that.
	And that those witnesses will start to come forward.
	I think we should have an impeachment inquiry, and those are the next witnesses we need to hear from.
	No, no, I'm pretty sure everybody's like, nah, dude, not interested.
	And then Adam Schiff, pencil neck Schiff, according to President Trump, he gets up and he says, Mueller did live up to my expectations.
	Again, this is a guy who suggested for two years that he had deep, nefarious intel suggesting that President Trump was was compromised.
	Here's Adam Schiff trying to play this off as a win.
	I do think that Robert Mueller lived up to expectations, at least mine.
	He stuck to his report.
	That's what he said he was going to do.
	So I didn't go into the hearing expecting new facts.
	The halting nature of his answers made questioning him a challenge.
	You know, as a former prosecutor, it meant that, you know, you take each witness as they come, and it meant it wasn't easy to get him to tell a narrative.
	But what's more important than the style we saw of the witnesses, the substance.
	And the substance, I think, was just devastating.
	Okay, this was a dog and pony show.
	Everybody knew it was a dog and pony show.
	The dog and pony show was bad.
	And so it turns to, but don't you love dogs and ponies anyway?
	Adam Schiff really trying to make a diamond out of a piece of coal here.
	It's pretty wild.
	We'll get to the rest of the Democratic response in just one second.
	You can see that everybody is beside themselves.
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	Okay, so the Democrats are sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place.
	You spend two years telling your voters that President Trump will be ridden out of town on a rail because of Mueller.
	Mueller shows up, and it turns out that he is Not solid.
	It turns out that he is wavering.
	It turns out that he doesn't know his own report.
	Republicans were basically able to establish that he was not familiar with his own stuff, which means that it kind of felt like this was politically motivated.
	And we're about to find out in the next month whether this investigation was properly initiated and conducted.
	The Inspector General of the DOJ, Michael Horowitz, is about to bring out a report about the beginnings of the Trump-Russia investigation.
	I'm sure that will be fascinating stuff.
	His report, certainly, on the Hillary investigation was fascinating reading and pretty damning for a lot of the folks involved in all of this.
	Well, Democrats are not going to let go of this, and that includes the people who are most closely tied to it.
	So, Andrew McCabe, who was fired from the FBI for lying to the FBI.
	He lost his pension over it.
	And that was because he lied to the FBI about whether he had spoken to the press with the permission of James Comey about Hillary Clinton's investigation.
	Well now, Andrew McCabe is back on television suggesting it's time for Congress to pursue impeachment.
	Based on what?
	He really can't explain.
	Not based on anything Mueller said that we didn't already know for sure.
	From my own experience at the very beginnings of this investigation, we confronted some very hard choices, choices that we knew would have negative repercussions on our organization and on us personally, and we made those choices anyway because it was our job and our duty to do so.
	I feel strongly that that's the same position Congress is in now, and they should step up to the plate and do their job.
	It doesn't mean that the president will be removed from office This has become the talking point.
	from office or will be impeached, but it is absolutely clear to me that the time has come for Congress to pursue a dedicated impeachment inquiry. - Okay, this has become the talking point.
	People who are very invested in this thing are not going to let it go.
	And that's good for Trump, He can say, listen, you petty jerks.
	There was a full investigation.
	There was no recommendation of prosecution.
	Mueller himself would not even answer whether he would prosecute me.
	Why in the world are we still doing this routine?
	If you don't like me so much, you can beat me at the ballot box.
	By the way, Trump is beatable.
	And for all the talk about the Democrats being in chaos, which is true, right now Trump is underwater in Ohio by four percentage points, according to various polls, including Morning Consult.
	He's underwater in Iowa.
	You know, he could still win those states.
	He's expected to win those states, in fact, against a Democrat.
	Those are just his popularity ratings.
	Still, Trump is vulnerable, and yet Democrats don't seem to want to run against Trump.
	They seem to want to impeach him, or at least talk about impeaching him, for the purposes of smearing him as a Russian cat's paw, even though that all fell apart.
	The other folks who were invested in this, members of the media, deeply invested, CNN, every day, breaking news, Wolf Blitzer, we have a brand new piece of news.
	I work out every day and unfortunately the gym that I attend very often has CNN on.
	And so I am well aware of the chyrons that CNN runs every single day.
	And the chyrons for two years were about breaking news, bombshell new report.
	Trump's presidency over, the Russia scandal explodes, and then it turns out that the thing is a complete waste of time, pretty much.
	And CNN ain't gonna let that go because it makes them look bad.
	So here on CNN were folks yesterday trying to say, listen, listen, listen.
	Just because Bob Mueller appeared to be old and dithering doesn't mean that the underlying content isn't important.
	Guys, you were building this up because you thought that Bob Mueller was gonna walk in like Tom Cruise in the Top Gun 2 trailer and just own it.
	And that is not the way this worked.
	Here is CNN trying to reverse course quickly.
	Back it up!
	Back it up!
	The idea that his written answers were not truthful is news, and having lived through the Clinton period where, you know, very much most of what they focused on was the fact that in a deposition, he wasn't completely honest, and that was enough to impeach him.
	I think there's going to be, as the dust settles, the people who matter, as we talked about yesterday.
	Partisans have made up their mind.
	It's the people in the middle.
	This was news to them yesterday.
	And as it sinks in, I think the Trump people will be a little more sanguine.
	I don't think the president will be.
	But this was not a win yesterday.
	No, it wasn't.
	It wasn't.
	It wasn't.
	OK, morning, Joe.
	They're doing the same routine.
	Mueller gave Democrats everything that they could possibly need.
	Now it's time for them to move forward.
	It'll be amazing to see if the Democrats somehow push their legislators into trying an impeachment attempt over a report that did not give them what they wanted.
	Good luck with that, guys.
	If you think that's not going to backfire on you, that people aren't tired of this, I welcome you to try.
	Really, go for it.
	Do it.
	Here is MSNBC also trying to play this off as a victory for Democrats.
	Well, Miki, you know, some people will talk about optics.
	Optics don't really matter here.
	The Democrats get all the facts they needed.
	Yeah.
	But the president of the United States acted inappropriately.
	They should either start an impeachment inquiry or they should leave it for good.
	But you know what?
	If they don't start an impeachment inquiry, given all we learned yesterday, then obviously nothing justifies an impeachment inquiry.
	And the Democrats not starting that inquiry will be proving Donald Trump right.
	OK, so Joe Scarborough, what he's saying there is not totally false, right?
	He's been saying you guys need to put your money where your mouth is.
	But anybody trying to play this off, you can see the disappointment on Mika's face.
	There are a lot of folks in the media who are very, very disappointed, among them Jimmy Kimmel, the Pope of late night comedy, as Guy Benson calls him.
	And here he is being thoroughly unfunny.
	Well, Going after Republicans for doing what you would expect Republicans to do, namely call into question how exactly the report was done.
	Because there were serious questions to be asked about the nature of the report.
	Like, what was Robert Mueller doing if he knew he couldn't prosecute?
	Why was this report not ended with a recommendation one way or the other?
	Why didn't Robert Mueller know his own report?
	Here's Jimmy Kimmel trying to make excuses.
	It really was something watching them defend this.
	Normally when people fall on their knees for Trump like that, he pays them a thousand, one hundred thirty thousand dollars afterwards in hush money.
	Wow.
	You know, again, you can try this all night long, but in the end, you're going to run up against the stark reality.
	It was a bad day for Democrats.
	And this is what Chris Wallace says.
	So Chris Wallace somehow ended up on Stephen Colbert's show last night.
	It didn't go great for Stephen Colbert.
	So here's Chris Wallace explaining to Stephen Colbert that despite Colbert's best hopes and dreams, this thing did not go great.
	This has been a disaster for the Democrats and a disaster for the reputation of Robert Mueller.
	Now, you said that at 10.07 this morning, an hour and a half into a six-hour series of hearings.
	So is Fox News' motto, we report and decide before the thing's over?
	There was a break in the hearing.
	Yes.
	We were asked for our reaction.
	And let me simply say, nothing in your monologue disproved that description.
	In what way was it a disaster?
	I don't understand.
	Yes, you did.
	Chris Wallace is the best.
	Okay, come on.
	You gotta love Chris Wallace.
	That is fantastic stuff.
	Owning, owning Stephen Colbert right there.
	Ow, you can see Stephen Colbert feel the pain.
	It goes directly to his small heart.
	It's just fantastic.
	Chris Wallace just provided more comedy on Colbert's show than Colbert has provided in years.
	That was fantastic.
	Fan-tastic.
	You know what?
	Play it again.
	That was great.
	I gotta watch it again.
	Watch as Stephen Colbert collapses in on himself like a dying star.
	Fantastic.
	This has been a disaster for the Democrats and a disaster for the reputation of Robert Mueller.
	Now, you said that at 10.07 this morning, an hour and a half into a six-hour series of hearings.
	So as Fox News motto, we report and decide before the thing's over.
	There was a break in the hearing.
	Yes.
	We were asked for our reaction.
	And let me simply say, nothing in your monologue disproved that description.
	In what way was it a disaster?
	I don't understand.
	Yes, you do.
	Oh, glorious, because of course he does.
	Of course he does.
	You couldn't watch that thing yesterday without understanding exactly what Chris Wallace was saying.
	Good for Chris Wallace for not taking that.
	Let me explain to you, like a small child, why it was a disaster.
	You watched it.
	You knew.
	And I love Stephen Colbert's routine there.
	Well, you didn't wait until all the facts were in, sir.
	Is that really newsy of you?
	Is that really news?
	Yeah, tell me about news, Stephen Colbert.
	Tell me about how news should be done.
	And if that's your best excuse, well, you said it early.
	You said it early.
	Yeah, did anything change?
	No, it didn't.
	Good for Chris Wallace, man.
	That is solid, solid stuff.
	We'll get to the Democratic presidential candidates reacting to this, and of course, saying what they have to say, which is impeach him.
	In just one second.
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	Okay, we're gonna get to the more democratic response to Mueller, and then we have to get to The governor of Puerto Rico, who apparently is resigning.
	I know we don't want to pay too much attention to Puerto Rico until there's big news.
	There is big news out of Puerto Rico today.
	We'll get to that.
	We'll get to all of it in just one second.
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	So as I say, for Democrats, it's in for a penny, in for a pound.
	So the media invested in the narrative that Bob Mueller got him.
	Not true.
	They did not.
	And then you've got people who are members of the intel community who didn't like Trump and were in a running gun battle with Trump for years.
	And they want Trump out.
	And so it's Robert Mueller.
	He wasn't as bad as you thought, guys.
	Was he really that bad?
	I mean, like, really?
	They've all now become the stage mother whose child bombed in the second act.
	This is what they've become.
	Oh, there's my kid.
	He's so cute.
	He's out there.
	Oh, that wasn't that wasn't.
	Oh, that's you were OK, right?
	Like that wasn't that bad.
	That was the entire story of yesterday.
	And then you've got the Democratic presidential candidates.
	Now, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren will not vote for impeachment because it's never coming up in the Senate.
	It's never even coming up in the House.
	They're never going to have to stand there and really fight for the impeachment of President Trump because Why would they have to?
	They're in a Senate controlled by Republicans.
	It's dead on arrival.
	But they're going to go out there and because they're running against Trump, they're going to claim that he is impeachable, that he should be impeached, that he's committed impeachable offenses.
	Here is Kamala Harris yesterday suggesting, don't worry, guys, there are outlined incidents of obstruction.
	Really?
	I mean, it's good.
	We this is impeachable stuff.
	Do you think Kamala Harris really believes this?
	Do you think she believes anything she says?
	I think there's a reason that she has regressed back to the mean.
	And as we'll see in a second, Joe Biden may be starting to find his sea legs, but Kamala Harris regressing back to the mean in stylish fashion.
	Here she is.
	I am very clear that there are outlined incidents of obstruction of justice.
	And no matter what this current attorney general and the president of the United States try to say, the American people are smart enough to know what is and what is not truth.
	Okay, sure, go for it.
	And then Elizabeth Warren does the same thing.
	We should impeach!
	We should impeach!
	It is very weird, these presidential campaigns where everybody appears on the same set one after another.
	It's kind of bizarre.
	It's also bizarre to me that people find Elizabeth Warren charismatic.
	She is deeply uncharismatic, as far as I am concerned.
	She's not magnetic in any way.
	She sort of seems like she's scolding you all the time.
	I think Kamala Harris is significantly more magnetic a personality than Elizabeth Warren is.
	And just in terms of sheer political skill, Pete Buttigieg has them both beat, although he's going nowhere in this race.
	Anyway, here's Elizabeth Warren also calling for impeachment.
	We have to make clear, no one is above the law, not even the President of the United States.
	It is time to bring impeachment charges against him.
	In my view, some things are above politics.
	And one of them is our constitutional responsibilities to do what is right.
	And the responsibility of the Congress of the United States of America, when a president breaks the law, is to bring impeachment charges against that president.
	You know, one of the things I'm finding off-putting about Warren is that if you could deepfake Beto O'Rourke and Elizabeth Warren, they have the same mannerisms.
	They've got the same arm motions, they have the same cadence.
	It's kind of fascinating.
	In any case, when she says that she believes that some things are above partisan politics, that is false.
	Elizabeth Warren believes no things are above partisan politics.
	That is just untrue.
	So Democrats, you want to run on this?
	All you.
	But I don't think Americans are interested in this in any real way.
	In fact, I know Americans are not interested in this because there's poll data.
	Americans want you to move on.
	Americans already believe what they're going to believe about Trump.
	There is no great takeaway from this.
	It's not as though this raised awareness about what Trump is.
	Everybody sort of has an opinion on it already.
	I'll tell you what does change minds is new information.
	So no new information has been provided with regard to President Trump.
	However, every day there seems to be new information about the leading lights of the Democratic Party.
	So, to take an example, Ilhan Omar, who President Trump desperately wants to run against.
	He wishes that Ilhan Omar were the Democratic nominee.
	But it's okay, they're promoting her anyway.
	There is a clip that has been circulating from 2018 in which Representative Ilhan Omar declares that Americans should be more fearful of white men than jihadist terrorists and that basically white men should be racially profiled.
	She was appearing with Mehdi Hassan on Al Jazeera.
	Al Jazeera, of course, is a Qatari front.
	Qatar is a terror-supporting government.
	In any case, here she is explaining.
	I mean, if this is your Democratic Party, this is what Trump wants to run against.
	You heard him say it earlier.
	He said, this is the party of Ilhan Omar.
	This is what he wants to run against.
	If Democrats want to run on impeachment and Trump runs on Ilhan Omar as the face of the Democratic Party, enjoy yourselves, Democrats.
	It's going to be a long another four years of Donald Trump.
	Here is Ilhan Omar saying something silly.
	A lot of conservatives in particular would say that the rise in Islamophobia is a result not of hate, but of fear, a legitimate fear they say, of quote-unquote jihadist terrorism, whether it's Fort Hood or San Bernardino or the recent truck attack in New York.
	What do you say to them?
	I would say our country should be more fearful of white men across our country because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country.
	We should be profiling, monitoring, and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men.
	Okay, good luck with this pitch.
	Good luck with this particular pitch.
	There are a couple of problems with that pitch.
	Number one, if you go back to September 11th, there's no question that jihadists have caused more deaths than white supremacist terrorists.
	I'll assume that's what she means.
	If she's talking about sheer numbers of deaths, then white men certainly have not caused the sheer majority of deaths in the United States.
	If she's talking about terrorism, which is giving her sort of the benefit of the doubt, but that's fine.
	I think that's probably accurate.
	If she's talking about white supremacist terrorism, yes, it has caused deaths.
	It is controversial as to whether it has caused most of the deaths in the United States because that's a matter of classification.
	Very often the classification systems take anybody who is white and who commits a terrorist act and then lumps them together as white supremacists, which is not fully accurate, but the point is taken that white supremacists cause a lot of deaths.
	I mean, I know because they've targeted me, right?
	They're really evil, but...
	As a proportion of the U.S.
	population, white supremacists compared to the white male population of the United States is a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction.
	It is certainly a much smaller fraction than jihadists compared to, for example, the broader Islamic population of the United States.
	Now, I don't think that you should label all Muslims because some radical Muslims are terrorists in the United States.
	I don't think that's an excuse for labeling all Muslims.
	But the point that she's making, that you should, that's what she should say, right?
	She should say what I just said, which is, why would you paint all Muslims with broad strokes when it is a small minority of Muslims who are being radicalized?
	Islamophobia is never justified.
	It's an easy answer.
	Instead, she goes to, we should profile white men because they're the real danger.
	Good luck with that message, Democrats.
	Enjoy yourselves.
	Okay, meanwhile, in other news, the governor of Puerto Rico has announced that he is going to resign.
	His name is Ricardo Rosselló, and he is resigning because he got caught up in a scandal Where a bunch of his text messages to other members of his government were revealed.
	And they were pretty ugly.
	They used all sorts of nasty language about other members of the government.
	Particularly at the local level.
	Now, the governor of Puerto Rico is a Democrat.
	He's been at war with other members of the government who are also Democrats, also members of his party.
	He's been accused of corruption before.
	A couple members of his administration were just indicted a couple of weeks ago, and so now he is stepping down.
	According to the New York Times, the people of Puerto Rico knew him first as Ricky, the handsome boy who moved into the governor's residence when he was just 13.
	His father was the governor.
	Ricardo Rosselló grew up as a child of privilege and historic La Fortezella, a palatial 16th century mansion with heavy drapes and thick wooden doors just steps from the Caribbean Sea.
	Now the governor himself, Rossello lives in the same colonial fortress of his youth with a family of his own, but the estate has turned into a cage, guarded by police officers in riot gear and ringed by protesters who want him gone.
	It took just two weeks for his administration to reach the point of collapse, undermined by a popular uprising that the governor initially thought he could withstand.
	Yet Rosello misread the anger brewing among his people after years of economic stagnation and broken promises.
	Well, the reason for the economic stagnation and broken promises is because Puerto Rico's economy has been incredibly weak.
	They've spent much more money than they ever had.
	According to CNN, Puerto Rico has about a $70 billion debt, about 40% of its residents live in poverty, and the median household income in 2017 was just under $20,000.
	That's not the low-income households, it's the median household income.
	In the United States, it's well above $50,000.
	Part of the problem stems from a U.S.
	law back in 1920.
	According to CNN, the Jones Act requires all goods ferried between the U.S.
	ports to be carried on ships built, owned, and operated by Americans.
	By the way, I do oppose the Jones Act, but really what this is about is the wild overspending of the Puerto Rican government.
	Things got really bad in 2015 when Puerto Rico defaulted on its monthly debt for the first time.
	In 2017, Puerto Rico filed for bankruptcy.
	Which is a vicious cycle because as the economy gets worse, more Puerto Ricans leave.
	The government has less tax money, so they end up trying to raise taxes in order to grab money back and pay things off or take austerity measures, which are unpopular.
	This is what happens when you get into an overspending cycle.
	And then there's the hurricane that hit the island.
	In 2017, killing somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 people, also wiping out power for months.
	There were serious allegations of mishandling of that by everybody from state to local authorities.
	The hurricane cost an estimated $95 billion in total damage.
	And then meanwhile, There are people in Rosello's administration who are being indicted for wasting taxpayer money on their friends, lavishing their friends with government contracts.
	And then it turns out that a couple of weeks ago, about 900 pages of leaked chats from the governor's private telegram messenger group ended up on the Puerto Rico Center for Investigative Journalism.
	Apparently, Rosello and 11 of his top aides and cabinet members exchanged profanity-laced, homophobic, misogynistic messages about fellow politicians.
	Now, there's a Trump angle to all of this, which is that many of the people who are attacking Rosello are angry at him because they felt that he was bending over backwards to cater to Trump.
	But what choice did he have?
	His state is literally bankrupt.
	Puerto Rico is literally bankrupt.
	They went bankrupt in 2017.
	And when a disaster hits, he has to beg the United States for help.
	He has to beg the U.S.
	federal government for help.
	And so what are you gonna do?
	Rip on him?
	Because he's treating... I mean, it's like Chris Christie treating Barack Obama nicely.
	Except that Chris Christie didn't need to treat him nicely to get what he wanted.
	Well, Trump is the kind of guy who needs a little bit of flattering to get what he wants.
	In one message, Puerto Rico's then-chief fiscal officer, Cristian Sobrino-Vega, wrote he was salivating to shoot San Juan mayor, Carmen Yulis Cruz, a frequent critic of the governor and of President Trump.
	The governor responded, you'd be doing me a grand favor.
	Of course, that's a joke, and everybody knows that's a joke.
	Sobrino-Vega also made crude remarks about a Puerto Rican pop star, saying, nothing says patriarchal oppression like Ricky Martin.
	Ricky Martin is such a male chauvinist that he bleeps men because women don't measure up.
	Pure patriarchy.
	And of course, this means brutality and terribleness.
	Okay, well, all of these people Seems pretty terrible at their jobs.
	But this is one of the consequences of a fiscal crisis.
	The reason this has brought irrelevance is not merely because one of the reasons that Puerto Rico is having trouble becoming a United States, right?
	Every year there's a proposal to incorporate Puerto Rico into the United States.
	One of the problems is that means the federal government would have to inherit all of that debt.
	But it does raise the question of what happens when this problem comes to the United States.
	I don't mean Puerto Rico.
	I mean the debt crisis.
	Because the fact is that Puerto Rico declared bankruptcy on a municipal level.
	The United States is running a 22 trillion dollar debt.
	22 trillion dollars.
	And today, President Trump endorsed another two year budget deal that blows out the budget to the tune of a trillion dollars in deficit for the next two years.
	The Republican Study Committee came out, they said this is a bad deal, but Trump wants to get past the election.
	When you keep kicking the can down the road, you end up with unworkable alternatives.
	And Democrats want to raise the spending anyway, so they don't care about the national debt.
	They don't care about the fact that debt eventually ends where Puerto Rico ended up, in a place where you now have to take austerity measures and cut benefits to your citizens, who don't like it, and then elect governments that don't have the power to do anything because they can't borrow anymore because they're bankrupt.
	And then they have to take austerity measures, and then they don't like it, and then it creates enormous amounts of turmoil.
	Now, we can keep kicking the can down the road federally.
	Puerto Rico has not been able to keep kicking the can down the road, and so now they're eating their own.
	Again, this is a Democratic politician in Puerto Rico who's being ousted by fellow Democrats, many of whom are further to the left.
	And it's just going to get uglier over there.
	So bad news for the sitting governor of Puerto Rico.
	What he really should do at this point, were I him, were I he, if I were he, I would immediately release a yearbook photo of myself in blackface.
	Because as we know, if you're a democratic governor in blackface, then you survive any scandal.
	And we know that from Virginia.
	So it's about time for Ricardo Rosselló to do all of that over in Puerto Rico.
	But again, the wages of debt are political suicide.
	That's where we are going.
	And as a country, we ought to heed the warning that we see in Puerto Rico.
	Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
	So, things that I like today.
	So Boris Johnson has now taken over as Prime Minister of Great Britain.
	And he is vowing that he is going to exit the EU come rain or shine in October.
	So either there will be a deal or there will be no deal.
	But if there's no deal, Brexit is happening anyway.
	It's pretty clear at this point that Parliament doesn't actually have the power to stop that.
	Theresa May didn't want Brexit to happen.
	She wanted to avoid a no-deal Brexit.
	Johnson is coming in with a mandate for no-deal Brexit.
	So he's basically now got a lot of the power.
	This is what he said yesterday.
	The doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters, they are going to get it wrong again.
	The people who bet against Britain are going to lose their shirts because we're going to restore trust in our democracy.
	And we're going to fulfil the repeated promises of Parliament to the people.
	Okay, well, it's going to be very contentious for the next couple of months.
	I was watching a question session with the Prime Minister today and it's a lot of shouting and a lot of yelling.
	I will say the Brits have that part right.
	That part's a lot more fun.
	It's funny, when the United States began, there's a lot of question as to the decorum of the United States.
	How would you title the president?
	And John Adams had this long, flowing title he wanted for the presidency.
	It was like his excellency, his majesty, the president of the United States.
	And instead, it just became Mr. President.
	Well, unfortunately, we formalized the presidency more than the Brits formalized their prime ministership.
	I think that we could use a little less formality at this point.
	Again, it lets off the steam.
	Other things that I like today.
	So, environmental activists decided that they were going to glue themselves, super glue themselves, to U.S.
	Capitol walls in a call for action on climate change.
	Now, what exactly is that action?
	I talked at length yesterday on my radio show about the fact that there are not really a lot of great solutions for climate change.
	The fact is China and India have no interest in really doing serious work on climate change.
	If you're a third world country, You're mostly interested in making sure that your citizens aren't dying of starvation and that means the use of carbon-based fuels.
	There are no alternative energies that are anywhere close to as efficient as carbon-based fuels.
	Cap-and-trade has been an enormous failure in Europe.
	There's talk about carbon taxes that would just be, it wouldn't be a cap-and-trade system, it would just be a system of taxation on each ton of carbon emissions and then you do what you're going to do.
	But again, that Relies heavily on the development of an alternative energy source that is competitive with other countries in the world.
	And the real question becomes how much are people willing to pay additionally for energy in a political arena where people feel their government doesn't have their own interests at heart.
	In any case, it's much easier to go and just claim that nobody cares about the problem than to actually come up with some practical solutions for it.
	Like for example, deregulating nuclear energy.
	Yesterday, a group of environmental activists took a novel approach to calling for congressional action on climate change.
	They superglued themselves to the wall of a Capitol tunnel.
	Some of the protesters were draped in bright yellow police tape, others wearing placards reading, due to climate emergency, Congress is shut down until sufficient action is taken to address the crisis.
	A group of activists had used gorilla glue to fasten their hands to the door jams of a tunnel connecting the Capitol Hill to the House office buildings.
	According to a participant, about 15 other people were helping.
	The video was posted online by Extinction Rebellion, a group that organized the demonstration.
	Here is what it sounded like.
	People are just going right underneath them.
	So they're really not obstructing very much here.
	Ow!
	Ow!
	I mean, like, you did superglue yourself there, dude.
	I mean, it's not like you woke up and somebody had superglued you to the wall, and you put yourself in this particular position.
	Ow!
	Oh!
	Because, can I tell you something?
	Climate action on a global scale, with the help of China, India, and Russia, that's not gonna happen.
	Just because you superglued yourself to a window.
	You're just superglued to a window.
	You're aware of that.
	Are you not?
	Apparently not.
	So, useless—OW!
	Useless action.
	That's definitely going to get things done.
	It was not immediately clear, according to the Washington Post, how the demonstrators were removed from the Capitol walls, and whether anyone was injured in the process.
	One protester may have had her hand ripped from the wall by an unidentified person trying to get through the doorway.
	Because people still have jobs to do.
	Some members of the group were carrying acetone solution, which can dissolve glue.
	So at least they came prepared to, you know, leave without any further problems.
	Although the protesters attracted attention, they were less than successful in blocking the Capitol passageways, according to the Washington Post.
	Staff members, reporters, police officers, and lawmakers could be seen ducking under the activists' outstretched arms to make their way past them.
	If you respect the climate emergency, you will go around.
	One of the super-glued protesters can be heard saying in the video, as a steady stream of seemingly unfazed Capitol denizens passed below his arm and through the tunnel.
	I guess not, another protester replied.
	Okay, well-deserved, well-deserved.
	So, again, stupid protests are some of my favorite protests.
	Whether it's PETA having themselves branded like cattle to do what?
	Just like, now you have a brand on you.
	Which is gross and weird.
	Or whether it is people super-gluing themselves a la A Christmas Story.
	Double dog dare.
	That's a take right there.
	It's a move.
	I'm not going to say it's a smart move.
	I'm not going to say it's going to achieve anything.
	In fact, I'm going to say the opposite.
	I'm going to say it's pretty stupid and it doesn't achieve anything and everybody's kind of annoyed and we laugh at you when people stretch your hand skin that is connected to the window that you put there yourself because you're an idiot.
	How about this?
	How about practical action, less moral posturing?
	Unfortunately, this has become, when it comes to climate change, huge swaths to the left.
	Just them sitting there and screaming in agony about climate change without anything remotely resembling a proper solution.
	Well, well done.
	Well done, protesters, for proving once and for all that you really have nothing to do here except yell and scream and pretend that you have ideas.
	Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	So honestly, I don't know whether to put this in things I hate or things I love, because this story is just phenomenal.
	So The Cut has a long piece today.
	It's New York Magazine.
	A piece called The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge.
	A Harvard Law professor who teaches a class on judgment wouldn't seem like an obvious mark, would he?
	The piece is by Kara Balinek.
	What's wonderful about this is social justice warrior sensibilities coming back to eat alive a Harvard Law professor.
	Now, I never took a class from Bruce Hay.
	Bruce Hay was always perceived as one of the more bizarre professors at Harvard Law School.
	He proved himself so in this story.
	This story is both glorious and horrifying in virtually every way.
	Quote, it was just supposed to have been a quick Saturday morning errand to buy picture hooks.
	On March 7th, 2015, Harvard Law Professor Bruce Hay, then 52, was in Tags Hardware in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near his home, when a young woman with long reddish-brown hair approached him to ask where she could find batteries.
	It was still very much winter, and once the woman got his attention, he saw that underneath her dark woolen coat and perfectly tied scarf, she was wearing a dress and a chic pair of boots, hardly typical weekend errand attire in the New England college town.
	When he directed her to another part of the store, she changed the subject.
	By the way, you're very attractive, he remembers her saying.
	Okay, so first of all, dudes, note.
	If you're out at a hardware store, and a hot lady comes up to you, and she just says to you, randomly, by the way, you're very attractive, look for your wallet.
	This is not going to go well.
	This has never happened in real life.
	This only happens in, apparently, pornography movies, so I have been told.
	Apparently, this professor did not know this, and so he immediately was like, I am attractive.
	Wow.
	Sorry, I'm married, he responded impulsively.
	It wasn't exactly true.
	Hay has been legally divorced since 1999, but he lives with his ex-wife, Jennifer Zaks, an assistant U.S.
	attorney in Boston, and their two young children.
	The woman quickly apologized, Hay recalls.
	I didn't mean to bother you, she said.
	I'm just here on business for a few days.
	I don't really know anybody.
	Okay, at this point, once somebody says that, like, still the radar's not going up.
	The wisest and brightest and most elite among us, Bruce Hay, how does that not send your antennae spiraling?
	Right?
	How?
	How?
	How's your antennae not up?
	She starts with, you're very attractive, and then she goes to, I'm alone in the city for a couple of days.
	Hey, really?
	This is not how real life works, man.
	Hey, a Francophile noticed the woman had a French-sounding accent and asked if she spoke the language.
	She told him her name was Maria Pia Schumann, that she was born in France, but her father was the American songwriter Mort Schumann, and that she was in town from Paris en route to New York.
	Schumann gave Hey her email address.
	The professor wasn't accustomed to picking up women in random places, let alone getting picked up by them.
	That's because no man has ever been picked up alone in a random place by a woman.
	Maybe it's happened, but it is a rare occasion.
	Hey, he was intrigued.
	No, kidding.
	Since moving back in with his ex-wife in 2004, he says, their relationship had been mostly platonic, and the two had an understanding that if either of them wanted to see other people, they'd have to move out.
	By casual flings, he believed, fell under a tacit don't ask, don't tell policy.
	By email, Hay and Schumann arranged to have coffee that afternoon, where they bonded over losing parents too young.
	She was now 32, an accountant with young children.
	Hey told says she told him she had two toddlers she was co-parenting with an ex-wife who lived in London.
	File under friendship, Hey thought, because she's a lesbian.
	Schumann also told him about the friend she was staying with, Misha Hader, a brilliant trans woman pursuing a doctorate in physics at Harvard who was struggling with crippling depression.
	Hey, who also battled depression, listened with particular interest.
	After a couple of hours, Schumann said, I've really enjoyed this, but I have to leave town in a couple of days.
	I hope we can see each other before then.
	They went to dinner that night and again the next.
	At the end of the second evening, Schumann asked him to join her for breakfast the following morning.
	I was smitten, Hay says.
	I wasn't sure what the Maria Pia thing was going to be.
	That's the truthful answer because one of the first things out of her mouth was that she had just divorced a woman in England.
	He didn't mind that a physical relationship was probably off the table.
	He was taking antidepressants, which often hampered his ability to enjoy sex anyway.
	Then, on the day Schumann told him she was leaving for New York on her way back to Europe, he says, she invited him to her room at the Taj Hotel in Boston, started kissing him, and led him to her bed.
	Hay drove Schumann to the airport early that evening.
	So again, at some point you might find this story suspicious, right?
	She picks you up in a hardware store.
	You have dinner a few times.
	She says she's a lesbian and now she's having sex with you.
	At some point you might be like, this is weird, but not if you're in Harvard, man.
	Hay drove Schumann to the airport early that evening.
	For the next few weeks, she traveled to London and Paris.
	She called and texted him daily.
	102 calls that month, according to phone records.
	A few times, he asked if she would FaceTime or Skype with him.
	She refused.
	He found her resistance strange, but he didn't press the issue.
	By this point, she had begun declaring her love for him.
	She told me she never got involved with men and I was this big exception, he says.
	Oh my goodness.
	It seems odd she would express such feelings for him after a few days together, but while he dismissed her intensity as a folly of youth, there was a part of him that entertained the possibility she was serious.
	Why not be open to it, he wondered.
	It had been years since he'd felt such a profound connection.
	So if you can sense that this story is going to go the wrong way, This is correct.
	A few weeks later, she texted to say she was returning to Cambridge and wanted to see him.
	They met the next day at the Sheraton Commander and had sex.
	Almost as soon as it was over, Shuman's mood shifted.
	She became dour than angry, telling him she couldn't abide his keeping their relationship a secret, nor what he says she referred to as his continued attachment to Zacks.
	She demanded he leave her.
	He was confounded.
	He wasn't about to leave his partner of 28 years for a woman he'd slept with twice.
	He got up, dressed, and left.
	Later that day, Shuman contacted him to say she was open to discussing pursuing a relationship.
	When Hay demurred, she told him she didn't see any point in staying in touch.
	But they did stay in touch.
	Over the next four years, the law professor would be drawn into a campaign of fraud, extortion, and false accusations.
	At one point, Hay's family would be left suddenly homeless.
	At another, owing to what his lawyer has described as the weaponization of the university's Title IX machinery against Hay, he would find himself indefinitely suspended from his job, accrue over $300,000 in legal bills, with no end to litigation in sight.
	This is where the story goes from the weirdly pornographic to the merely politically delicious.
	Whether Schumann knew it when she met him, she'd found the perfect mark in Brussais, an authority on civil procedure who'd spent much of his life in the ivory tower.
	Though he leans left, he briefly clerked for Antonin Scalia, because Scalia always had a left-leaning clerk he could argue with.
	He joined the Harvard Law faculty in 1992.
	A close friend calls him the quintessential absent-minded professor who tends to lose things, phones, and laptops, and to miss social cues.
	I have friends who took his classes.
	They said he was pretty weird.
	Hay has a tight-knit circle of friends, many of whom are women, and though their relationships are non-sexual, the intensity, he tells me, has been a continual source of conflict with Zacks.
	Jennifer says my women friends have always had ulterior motives.
	My response has been that my best friends have been women for my entire life.
	He and Zacks first met at Harvard Law in 1987.
	They married two years later.
	They had a son together before separating.
	Then he moved back in and they had two more children together.
	And then things got weird.
	Six weeks after they broke off contact, Schumann called Hay to tell him she was pregnant with his baby.
	She hadn't had sex with another man in the past year, she said.
	Hay was stunned.
	He hadn't even ejaculated during either of their encounters, a side effect of his medication.
	But he understood that pregnancy was possible, if rare, without orgasm.
	Schumann said she was weighing whether to terminate the pregnancy, then quickly followed up by saying she'd made the decision to carry the term.
	She was due in January.
	Hayes says she didn't bring up money.
	He was more surprised when he learned that Schumann would be relocating to Cambridge that summer.
	She told him in June she had purchased a three-bedroom Mansard Victorian, now valued at $1.9 million, on a side street in the Radcliffe neighborhood less than a mile from his house, and had brought her children over from London.
	Maria Pia made it sound as though she had scarcely ever been to Cambridge, she says.
	She said she didn't know the area very well, didn't really know anybody.
	Schumann explained she'd purchased the apartment as an investment and as a place for Hayter, that's her graduate student trans woman friend, to live while she finished her grad work.
	She and Hayter, she told Hay, had been best friends since they met as physics students their first year at Imperial College in London.
	Later in a conversation that summer, Schumann revealed that she and Hayter were raising the children together.
	Good luck to those kids, man.
	The unfolding revelations did little to put off Hay, who says he was determined to take full responsibility for my actions.
	Throughout the summer, he and Schumann got together once or twice and discussed rekindling their romance, but she told him it was contingent on him telling Zaks about the affair and the baby, which he wasn't willing to do.
	They hadn't been sexually involved since their encounter at the Sheridan Commander in April, but Schumann could be effusive.
	Okay, to make a longer story short, it turns out this baby, probably not his, but he wasn't willing to say so because he thought, hey, she's a lesbian, and it's politically incorrect to suggest maybe she's had sex with other men.
	Thank you.
	Hayter, the trans woman, often loomed large in their conversations.
	Even as Schumann demanded more of Hay's time, she was cagey about letting Hay meet the woman she called her soul sister.
	When Hay asked about her, he says, Schumann responded that Hayter was depressed and wasn't up for meeting new people.
	Finally, they met.
	Schumann had told him, That hater was weary of her physics program and wanted to get more involved in trans activism and write about trans issues.
	I thought maybe I could help her, calls Hay.
	She'd been described to me as this very exceptional person, but downtrodden, treated unfairly by family and by the world, by her body.
	By the time I met Misha, I had a protective feeling for her.
	Their bond appeared instantaneous.
	We had similar political views, he said.
	She told me a lot about the trans world.
	I'd known nothing about it.
	Soon they were getting coffee almost daily, talking for hours, sometimes meeting at a coffee shop near Harvard.
	Hayter regularly texted and emailed Hay articles and stats about trans women being brutalized and murdered by men.
	Her communications were often punctuated with a kind of fixated anxiety about being persecuted for being trans.
	Hay believed he'd identified a kindred spirit, so he was sensitive to her emotional state.
	They confided in each other about their depression and suicidal thoughts.
	Hay had been molested as a teenager.
	He told Hayter about the experience.
	Hay was struggling with drinking.
	He insists his friendship was more familial than romantic.
	A month after their first coffee, Hayter texted Hay to say, I'm so happy we met.
	You're wonderful and stimulating company.
	Behind his back, though, the women mocked Hay.
	In a text message to Hayter that they provided, Schumann refers to him as effing desperado.
	By then, Hayter rarely saw Schumann anymore.
	Still, they began discussing the possibility that Hay would move in with them.
	So then the family relationship would be Hay, Schumann, a lesbian, a trans woman, and Bruce Hay.
	He said his relationship with the women could be intoxicating.
	He said that they were nearly perfect people who were bright and kind and sweet and socially conscious.
	It turns out that, um, no.
	So Hay used his publishing connections to help Hayter pursue her writing.
	He tried to get this person's, this man, I mean it's a biological man, this person's writing posted on the Guardian and the Huffington Post.
	Hay accompanied Hayter to Phoenix to consult about gender affirmation surgery in the spring.
	On January 14th, 2016, Hayter called Hay to tell him that Schumann had given birth to a baby boy.
	Hay had asked to be present for the baby's birth, but Schumann refused.
	Hay asked to meet the newborn, but again, Schumann refused.
	The woman also told Hay, because he'd failed to separate from Zacks, they listed Hayter's name, not his, as the other parents on the little boy's birth certificate.
	While he was in Paris, the woman's calls and texts intensified, taking on an increasingly combative tone.
	At one point, Hayter told Hay she was going to get euthanasia, Hey, meanwhile, Zax had become suspicious, and Zax took all of this as an enormous betrayal.
	Zax told Hay it was highly unlikely he got Schumann pregnant.
	Jennifer suggested I was ignoring the evidence because I wanted to believe the child was mine.
	Perhaps she was right.
	Zacks pushed Hay to for a paternity test.
	Hay wouldn't have it.
	Here's the key.
	Not only did he trust Schumann, he felt it would have been insulting for a heterosexual cisgender man to question a professed lesbian as to whether she had had sex with other men.
	He believed her when she said her sexual relationship with him was an exception.
	Hay met the baby for the first time.
	He said, I never doubted he was my son.
	Schumann told him she was being treated for recurrence of cancer.
	Again, the diagnosis was fishy.
	Hay began to entertain doubts about the woman.
	It all got very weird, obviously, even weirder.
	Throughout the summer, the women suggested that Hay disentangle from Zacks.
	And then here's what ends up happening, because the story is really long, because it's The New Yorker.
	Here's what ends up happening.
	It turns out that they defraud him out of his house.
	The women returned to his house before Christmas.
	Zacks again called the cops.
	She started calling the cops on them.
	The next day, the women sent texts to Hay, calling him a rapist who needed to be reported to authorities.
	He started receiving texts from an unknown number.
	You will not get away with rape.
	Still, he kept hanging out with them.
	And then, they stopped by.
	They asked him to sign a document.
	He didn't read the document, and he ended up signing over the deed to his house.
	He signed over the deed to his house, allegedly.
	And not only that, he then got involved in a Title IX scandal, because he was accused by these women, or by a woman and a trans woman, of sexual harassment.
	And he ended up losing his job.
	Okay, it turns out that when you blind yourself to truths, because you're trying to be too politically incorrect, there are some bad effects of that.
	Things tend to get rather hairy and awful.
	Bruce Hayman, Well, blinded by reality.
	My goodness.
	That's some solid stuff, is it not?
	Okay, I think we can all acknowledge at this point that if you get scammed by a lesbian and a transgender woman, into giving up your home, then you probably shouldn't be teaching law at Harvard.
	Is that fair?
	Is that fair?
	You probably shouldn't be teaching justice and law.
	You might not be like the best source for students.
	The summary, according to National Review, is that Hay says she began making hysterical demands, got him to sign a sheaf of papers he didn't read.
	He said that since she was an accountant, she knew best.
	And on a thin pretext, gave him a check for $3,000, which he then cashed.
	It turns out he had signed over his $3.5 million house to her and her trans buddy for lease at a nominal rate, the check framed as a security deposit.
	The woman and trans friend first moved all the stuff out of the house, charged the expenses to his credit card, which he had given them access to.
	His ex-wife saw a lot of this coming and had arranged to have the house put in her name only, so that made the lease invalid, but he incurred some $300,000 worth of legal bills, and then the woman who seduced him charged him with sexual abuse, and he was suspended automatically under the Title IX policy.
	Well, Bruce Hay.
	Yeah.
	Sad story of Bruce Hay right there.
	Suffice it to say, perhaps you should examine the realities about you instead of falling prey to two of the oldest tricks in the book.
	Trick number one, you're a very attractive man at a hardware store.
	Trick number two, here are me and all my social justice warrior friends who want to be your best friends and raise children with you.
	And also, you're a rapist.
	So.
	We've been a fond farewell to that story.
	My goodness, that's a wild story.
	We'll see you here later today for two additional hours.
	We have some great guests today on the program.
	Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is stopping by.
	We'll also be having on Representative Lee Zeldin of the House to talk about the Mueller hearing yesterday.
	It's a lot of good stuff coming up.
	Go subscribe so you can be part of it.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	You're listening to The Ben Shapiro Show.
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