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Sept. 20, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:18
Release The Secret Weapon! | Ep. 865
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Democrats go all in on an unspecified whistleblower claim against President Trump.
New polls give Elizabeth Warren the momentum.
And we checked the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty.
Well, we now have the brewing of a scandal inside the Trump administration that could really be trouble for President Trump.
I mean, let's just be honest about this.
We're going to be as straightforward in our analysis as we possibly can of this whistleblower scandal.
Now, right now, we don't even know what the whistleblower was blowing a whistle about.
But we have some vague indicators.
So today we are going to involve ourselves in some rank speculation.
We're going to evaluate what are the possibilities here and what impact that would have on President Trump, on the 2020 election, on the possibility of impeachment.
So we'll lay out a bunch of possibilities.
One of them may be true.
None of them may be true.
But because this is what is in the news, I'm just prefacing this with speculation aplenty is about to happen here.
So we'll give you all the information that's been reported and then we'll talk about the possibilities.
All of this began, this whole whistleblower story began, with a whistleblower inside the intelligence community apparently filing a whistleblower complaint with his higher-ups inside the intelligence community.
The inspector general of the intelligence community then deemed that this was urgent, which would mean that this whistleblower complaint could be reported to Congress.
However, at that point, the head of the Director of the National Intelligence, the DNI, he stepped in.
He said, well, no, actually, I've talked to the DOJ.
We're not going to turn over this complaint because the complaint does not meet the requirements of being turned over to Congress.
This led the Democrats to accuse the Trump administration of a cover up because they're saying we want to see what the whistleblower complaint Actually says it has also led to an extraordinary amount of speculation about what exactly was in the whistleblower complaint.
Now, from the very fact that we now know that the whistleblower complaint existed, it was only a matter of time until we started getting a slow leak as to what was actually in the whistleblower complaint.
So what we have here is something very similar to what was happening during the Trump Russia investigation.
Democrats going out front suggesting that President Trump was engaged in deeply nefarious activity and that his own administration is covering it up.
So very much the same way they claimed that Trump was engaged in Trump-Russia collusion and then that there was obstruction to cover that up.
Adam Schiff, who it turned out was full of crap on the Trump-Russia stuff, he's now playing the same game with this whistleblower complaint.
Adam Schiff, the congressperson from out here in California, he suggested yesterday There is no privilege that covers whether the White House is involved in trying to stifle a whistleblower complaint.
He apparently doesn't know what's in the whistleblower complaint, but he's accusing them of a cover up anyway.
There is no privilege that covers whether the White House is involved in trying to stifle a whistleblower complaint.
And I should say that even if you could make a culpable claim of privilege over the subject matter of the complaint, given that it involves something that the IG has already found to be serious and credible and evidence of wrongdoing of one kind or another, there is no privilege that covers that.
There is no privilege to conceal that.
There is no privilege to be corrupt.
Okay, well, obviously, executive privilege can be asserted on executive claims, and there can be disputes inside the executive branch as to what sort of privilege can be asserted.
Okay, so again, all of this started with this whistleblower complaint.
Yesterday, Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris, Greg Miller, and Carol Leenig, right, so four different people at the Washington Post on one report, which means they think it's big, They say whistleblower complaint about President Trump involves Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the matter.
So first of all, we have to point out, two people familiar with the matter is extraordinarily vague sourcing.
We always have to take everything that is anonymously sourced like this with a grain of salt.
Now, a lot of the time, it ends up being true.
Contrary to popular opinion on some parts of the right, just because an anonymous source is involved, it doesn't mean that the reporting isn't true.
But it does mean that we have to wait and see whether that ends up being confirmed over time.
So, the Washington Post says, a whistleblower complaint about President Trump made by an intelligence official centers on Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the matter, which has set off a struggle between Congress and the executive branch.
The complaint involved communications with a foreign leader and a promise that Trump made, which was apparently so alarming that a U.S.
intelligence official who had worked at the White House went to the inspector general of the intelligence community, two former U.S.
officials said.
Two and a half weeks before the complaint was filed, President Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who's a comedian and political newcomer who was elected in a landslide in May.
That call is already under investigation by House Democrats, who are examining whether President Trump and his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, sought to manipulate the Ukrainian government into helping Trump's re-election campaign.
Lawmakers have demanded a full transcript and a list of participants on the call.
A White House spokesman declined to comment.
The Democrats' investigation was launched earlier this month before revelations that an intelligence official had lodged a complaint with the Inspector General.
The Washington Post first reported on Wednesday that the complaint had to do with a quote-unquote promise that Trump made when communicating with a foreign leader.
So all this news story is adding that the foreign leader was Ukrainian.
On Thursday, the Inspector General testified behind closed doors to members of the House Intelligence Committee about the whistleblower's complaint.
Over the course of three hours, Michael Atkinson, who is the Inspector General, repeatedly declined to discuss with members the content of the complaint, saying he was not authorized to do so.
So that's why I say Adam Schiff still does not know what exactly is in the complaint, but he's speculating that a cover-up is taking place without knowing the underlying material, which is exactly what Democrats did about the Mueller report.
Oh, it's a cover-up.
They're trying to shut down the Mueller report.
No evidence of that.
We don't know what the underlying material is here yet.
So, depending on that, maybe it's a cover-up, maybe it's not.
But that's obviously beyond the scope of the information that Adam Schiff has.
But Adam Schiff has never been a person who's going to hold back from jumping both feet on whatever political landmine is in front of him.
Okay, we'll get to more exploration of what exactly is in that intelligence complaint in just one second.
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Okay, so Michael Atkinson, who is, again, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, wouldn't tell the Democrats what exactly is going on here.
He and the members spent much of their time discussing the process Atkinson followed, the statute governing his investigation of the complaint, and the nature of what an urgent concern constitutes that he believed This complaint represented, according to a person familiar with the briefing, who again is reporting anonymously, the person said he was being excruciatingly careful about the language he used, which is what he's supposed to do since he is a lawyer.
Atkinson made clear he disagreed with the lawyer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who had contradicted the Inspector General.
And found that the whistleblower complaint did not meet the statutory definition of an urgent concern because it involved a matter not under the DNI's jurisdiction.
Okay, in other words, it seems like what the battle is here is that somebody in the intelligence community saw Trump personally do something bad or heard, saw a readout, said, okay, Trump is doing something bad.
And the DNI said, well, that's not in our purview.
The president of the United States has wide latitude to do bad things on foreign policy that you may not like.
And it's not within the purview of the intelligence community.
Intelligence community purview would be stuff where Trump is dumping classified information publicly, for example, or privately, or he's making some sort of deal with somebody else's intelligence community.
But maybe that's not what's going on here.
Again, we still don't know what the underlying complaint is.
Schiff says we can't get an answer to a question about whether the White House is involved in preventing this information from coming to Congress.
We're determined to do everything we can to determine what this urgent concern is.
So now we are arguing over the nature of a complaint where we don't know anything.
Now, for his part, Trump has denied doing anything improper.
On Thursday morning, he tweeted, And then he said, I wouldn't do so anyway, but that's a very Trumpian way of dealing with a scandal.
It's like, you think I'm stupid?
If I were gonna commit a crime, you think I'd do it in front of you?
those from another country itself.
Knowing all of this, is anybody dumb enough to believe I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on such a potentially heavily populated call?
And then he said, I wouldn't do so anyway.
But that's a very Trumpian way of dealing with a scandal.
He's like, you think I'm stupid?
If I'm going to commit a crime, you think I'd do it in front of you?
Which is always, you know, very, very Trumpy.
And I'm laughing about that just because it's Trumpy, not because it's good, because it turns out that it isn't.
Okay, So what exactly was in this particular complaint?
So what Democrats suspect is that President Trump basically was making a deal with the head of Ukraine to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden.
And that in return, he was going to release military aid to the Ukrainians.
Now, if that accusation ends up being true, that's definitely impeachable.
If it turns out that President Trump went to the Ukrainian government and said, we will give you whatever it is, $250 million in aid, we'll give you $250 million in American aid if you investigate my domestic political opponent, that is clearly impeachable stuff.
Put the shoe on the other foot.
If Barack Obama had not just pledged flexibility to the Russians, but he had said to them, I'm going to spend taxpayer dollars on you if you go investigate Mitt Romney.
Impeachable.
I mean, there's a quid pro quo there.
It does violate, obviously, campaign finance restrictions and all this.
Now, that is not the same thing as asking the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden without any sort of pro quo.
Maybe there's a quid, but there's no pro quo.
And if the quid pro quo doesn't take place, then it's bad.
It's not something in which the American government should be engaged.
It's not something the president should be doing or any campaign should be doing, but it actually happens to be somewhat common, unfortunately.
So let's start from the beginning here.
Why exactly would It'd be that Trump was asking the Ukrainians to investigate Joe Biden.
You have to go back to a story by Kenneth Vogel and Julia Mendel over at the New York Times, May of 2019.
And that story is about Hunter Biden and about Joseph Biden when he was vice president.
Here's the story.
It was a foreign policy role Joseph R. Biden Jr.
enthusiastically embraced during his vice presidency, browbeating Ukraine's notoriously corrupt government to clean up its act.
One of his most memorable performances came on a trip to Kiev in March 2016, when he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S.
loan guarantees if Ukraine's leaders did not dismiss the country's top prosecutor, who had been accused of turning a blind eye to corruption in his own office and among the political elite.
The pressure campaign worked.
The prosecutor general, long a target of criticism from other Western nations and international lenders, was soon voted out by the Ukrainian parliament.
Now, that in and of itself would not have been a problem, right, if Biden was just pressuring Ukraine to get rid of somebody who is widely perceived as corrupt.
However, however, this prosecutor was apparently also looking into Joe Biden's son at the time.
Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden, according to the New York Times, Mr. Biden's younger son, who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.
Hunter Biden was a Yale-educated lawyer who had served on the boards of Amtrak and a number of non-profit organizations and think tanks, but lacked any experience in Ukraine, and just months earlier had been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine.
He'd be paid as much as $50,000 per month in some months for his work for the company, which is called Burisma Holdings.
The broad outlines of how Biden's roles intersected in Ukraine have been known for some time.
The former VP's campaign said he had always acted to carry out U.S.
policy without regard to any activities of his son, that he had never discussed the matter with Hunter Biden, and that he learned of his son's role with the Ukrainian energy company from news reports.
But new details about Hunter Biden's involvement and a decision this year by the current Ukrainian prosecutor general to reverse himself and reopen an investigation into Burisma This is according to the New York Times.
into the spotlight just as the senior Mr. Biden is beginning his 2020 presidential campaign.
This is according to the New York Times, right?
It's not a right-wing source.
They show how Hunter Biden and his American business partners were part of a broad effort by Burisma, this Ukrainian organization, to bring in well-connected Democrats during a period when the company was facing investigations backed not just by domestic Ukrainian forces, but by officials in the Obama administration.
Hunter Biden's work for Burisma prompted concerns among State Department officials at the time that the connection could complicate VP Biden's diplomacy in Ukraine, according to former officials.
Hunter Biden was one of many politically prominent Americans.
Both major parties made money in Ukraine over the last decade.
And of course, that would include people like Paul Manafort.
Okay, so the story back in May of 2019, and this had been investigated before.
Was that Joe Biden perhaps was pressuring Ukraine to fire a prosecutor to let his son off, right?
That is the allegation.
Yet to be backed by complete evidence, Biden would say, I was just pressuring them to boot out this particular prosecutor because he's a bad prosecutor.
I threatened to withhold a billion dollars in U.S.
loan guarantees so we get rid of this guy.
Biden's critics say the only reason you want to get rid of this guy is because he was investigating your son at the time.
So the Trump administration and the Trump campaign has been going around and those are not identical.
It's really the Trump campaign.
Rudy Giuliani had obviously been going over to the Ukrainians and asking them to investigate what was going on here.
He was going over there and saying, okay, is it true that Joe Biden was withholding loan guarantees because he wanted to let his son off the hook?
If so, that would be impeachable, right?
If that had been known while Joe Biden was vice president, and that Joe Biden was using American loan guarantees in order to assure his son's safety from foreign prosecution, that would be an impeachable offense, right?
That would again be a quid pro quo.
So Giuliani, it's been known for at this point, probably over a year, that Giuliani was heading over to Ukraine to solicit that sort of information from the Ukrainian government.
So he was on TV last night on CNN with Chris Cuomo and things got wild because he both accepted and denied allegations that he was asking the Ukrainian government to look into Joe Biden.
- Did you ask the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden?
- No, actually I didn't.
I asked the Ukraine to investigate the allegations that there was interference in the election of 2016 by the Ukrainians for the benefit of Hillary Clinton, for which there already is a court finding... You never asked anything about Hunter Biden.
You never asked anything about Joe Biden and his role with the prosecutors.
The only thing I asked about Joe Biden is to get to the bottom of how it was that Lutsenko, who was appointed, dismissed the case against Antac.
So you did ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden?
Of course I did!
You just said you didn't!
No, I didn't ask him to look into Joe Biden.
I asked him to look into the allegations that related to my client, which tangentially involved Joe Biden in a massive bribery scheme.
Okay, so there's Rudy Giuliani being absolutely unclear, but the baseline is what I'm saying, right?
So the basic idea is what I'm saying, that Giuliani was deployed as lawyer for the Trump campaign and for President Trump personally to Ukraine to go ask the Ukrainians to look into the Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scenario.
And now that in and of itself is not criminal.
It's not great, but it's not criminal.
Okay, in a second I'm going to talk about why that's not criminal.
We'll get to that in- or not impeachable, not criminal, not a crime.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so, question number one.
Did Joe Biden engage in an act of bribery with American tax dollars?
If so, he should have been impeached in 2016.
Question number two, is it criminal for Trump's lawyer to go over to Ukraine and ask the Ukrainians to look into that thing?
And then question number three, if there is a quid pro quo between Trump and the Ukrainian government, is that criminal and impeachable?
So the answer to question number one, if Joe Biden did in fact predicate American loan guarantees upon the firing of a prosecutor for purposes of letting his son Hunter off the hook, Not only is that impeachable, it should disqualify him from the presidential race.
And that would bear further scrutiny.
Is that criminal?
And the answer there is no.
Okay, so Eugene Volokh, I've cited this piece before.
Ukraine and talked with the Ukrainians about investigating Joe and Hunter Biden, that whole thing.
Is that criminal?
And the answer there is no.
Okay, so Eugene Volokh, I've cited this piece before.
He had a piece in July of 2017 called, Can It Be a Crime to Do Opposition Research by Asking Foreigners for Information?
Eugene Volokh, of course, is a professor over at the UCLA School He's been a guest on my radio show, and he is an expert on First Amendment concerns.
And he says in this piece, he gives an example.
He says, say, in summer 2016, a top Hillary Clinton staffer gets a message.
A Miss Universe contestant, Miss Slovakia, says Donald Trump had sexually harassed her.
Would you like to get her story?
And the staffer says, I'd love to, and indeed gets the information, which she then uses in the campaign.
Did the staffer and the Miss Universe contestant just commit a crime?
He says, according to some analysis, yes, but he finds that analysis not particularly compelling.
He says it's not particularly compelling because it would violate basic free speech problems.
He says it would make opposition research on much possible foreign misconduct virtually impossible.
Say that Clinton's campaign heard rumors that the construction of a Trump resort in Turkey might have involved some shenanigans.
It's likely impossible to effectively follow up on that without soliciting some valuable information from foreign nationals, such as foreign government officials who are hypothetically or allegedly bribed, or rivals who may have a motive to provide information.
Or say that Bernie Sanders' campaign heard rumors of some misconduct by Hillary Clinton on her trips abroad.
It wouldn't be allowed to ask any foreigners about that.
So, in other words, receiving information or even soliciting information from foreigners does not actually amount to a campaign finance violation.
Now, it's one thing if you're involved in actual crime, right?
Like if you are working with a foreign party to hack an American citizen.
Hacking is a crime.
Now you're involved in collusion that is an actual crime.
So if the Trump campaign had worked with Russia to hack Hillary's emails, that would have been a crime.
But if the Trump campaign even just received emails from the Russian government, it's ugly, it's bad, it's not a crime, according to Eugene Volokh.
And I think that that is probably right.
He says this whole controversy at that time was arising as to Donald Trump Jr.' 's willingness to get unspecified information that came from the Russian government.
But he says that it shouldn't be made a crime for anybody to accept that information or even to solicit more.
That was his tentative thinking on the matter, Eugene Volokh, and I think that that is a pretty strong case, legally speaking.
And one of the ways you know that this is a pretty strong case, legally speaking, is that nobody has actually attempted to talk about the prosecution of the DNC, which did exactly this with regard to the Ukrainian government back in 2016.
Politico reported Kenneth Vogel and David Stern back in January of 2017.
That the Ukrainian government, members of the Ukrainian government were actually working with the Hillary Clinton campaign to gather information on Donald Trump.
So this is not the first time that somebody has gone to the Ukrainian government and sought information on a political opponent domestically in the United States.
That story in Politico said Donald Trump wasn't the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office.
They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter only to back away after the election.
And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisors.
This is all Politico, right?
This was reported in January of 2017.
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort, and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Ukrainian efforts actually had a major impact on the race, helping to force Manafort's resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump's campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine's foe in the East, Russia.
Now, Politico tries to suggest this was far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia's alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails, but the fact is that people were working at the Ukrainian embassy with people from the DNC to gather information on Donald Trump and Russia and then to disseminate it.
Politico's investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another's elections.
According to Politico.com, Ukraine has traditionally enjoyed strong relations with U.S.
administrations.
Its officials worry that could change under Trump, whose team has privately expressed sentiments ranging from ambivalence to deep skepticism about Petro Poroshenko's regime.
He's the former leader of Ukraine at the time.
Poroshenko had signed contracts with the Trump administration, but revelations about Ukraine's anti-Trump efforts could further set back those efforts.
Again, this is as of 2017.
So in other words, there was in fact coordination between a woman named Alexandra Chalupa, Who is a veteran Democratic operative who was working for the DNC.
And she was working with the U.S.
Embassy in Ukraine and working with the Ukrainian Embassy in the United States to gather information about Palmano Fort.
She apparently occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
Chalupa herself said this.
In January 2016, months before Manafort had taken any role in Trump's campaign, Chalupa told a senior DNC official, and when it came to Trump's campaign, I felt there was a Russia connection.
And then she helped with Ukraine to gather data on Paul Manafort.
She said she shared her concern with Ukraine's ambassador to the United States and one of his top aides during a March 2016 meeting at the Ukrainian embassy.
According to someone briefed on the meeting, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States said that Manafort was on his radar But as Manafort became a part of the Trump campaign, Chalupa started taking meetings at the embassy, gathering information about Manafort and all the rest.
So, was that criminal?
The answer is no, that wasn't criminal.
And it is, in fact, exactly parallel to what we are talking about.
When it comes to Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine gathering information about Joe Biden.
It may be ugly.
It may not be something that you like.
But it is not, in fact, illegal.
Second, we will get to the possibility of illegality.
And here you have to start speculating.
Everything I've said so far is not really speculation.
Everything that I've suggested so far is reported data.
Now we're going to get into the realm of speculation.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so.
And what exactly was the promise?
Here's where we get into the realm of speculation.
So, so far, just to recap where we are in this story, we have information that a whistleblower inside the intelligence community made a complaint to the inspector general of the intelligence community.
The inspector general deemed it urgent.
That would make it open and available to Congress.
The head of the DNI then stepped in and said, this is not urgent.
It doesn't meet the criteria because this is not within our purview.
And the Trump administration has now talked about asserting executive privilege.
Okay, so according to the Associated Press, President Donald Trump repeatedly defended himself Friday against an intelligence whistleblower's potentially explosive complaint, including an allegation of wrongdoing in a reported conversation Trump had with a foreign leader.
The complaint, which the administration has refused to let Congress see, remains shrouded in mystery, but is serious and urgent according to the government's intelligence watchdog.
Trump insists he did nothing wrong.
He declared on Friday the complaint was made by a partisan whistleblower, though he later said he did not know the identity of the person.
Well, I mean, you don't have to know the identity of the person to feel that you are being targeted in partisan fashion, if in fact there is no reason to treat this as urgent.
He chided reporters for asking about it, said the complaint was just another political hack job.
He said, I have conversations with many leaders.
It's always appropriate, always appropriate, at the highest level, always appropriate.
And anything I do, I fight for this country.
Some of the whistleblowers' allegations appear to center on Ukraine.
Trump was asked if he knew if the whistleblowers' complaint centered on a July 25th phone call with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy, The president responded, I really don't know.
He continued to insist any phone call he made with that head of state was perfectly fine and respectful, and then he berated reporters for asking about it.
So what exactly do reporters suspect?
What do Democrats suspect here?
Well, all of the speculation is revolving around an article in the UK Independent, or at least the information that is covered by this article from two days ago in Kiev, Kim Samgupta reporting.
Ukraine's new president, Vladimir Zelensky, was fulsome in expressing his gratitude to Donald Trump for the military aid package, because they've now received a military aid package worth about $250 million.
The former professional comedian insisted his relationship with the former reality TV star was very good and that he was sure we will all have a meeting in the White House.
But the $250 million of arms for Ukrainian forces, which are confronting Russian-backed separatists, has been enmeshed in a bitter battle between the U.S.
president and his opponents over accusations that he has tried to manipulate it for underhanded political reasons.
The Trump administration had in fact suspended the Ukrainian Security Assistance Initiative, agreeing to unblock it only after rising bipartisan clamor from Congress.
The ostensible reason for the holdup was to ensure that it tallied with U.S.
interests.
The real reason, critics claim, was to pressure the Ukrainian government to target Joe Biden through an investigation into corrupt allegations against his son.
So this would be the exact parallel of was Joe Biden holding back American loans in order to get Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who is targeting his son.
So this would be the other side of that.
This would be Donald Trump threatening to hold back $250 million in American aid unless Ukraine targeted an investigation on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.
Both of those would be a quid pro quo.
Both of those would be illegal.
Both of those would be impeachable.
So Democrats are, of course, investigating.
Now this is still speculation.
That entire story is based on speculation.
had pressured the Ukrainian authorities to drop an investigation into Burisma, an energy company operating in the country on which his son Hunter was a board member.
So Democrats are, of course, investigating.
Now, this is still speculation, right?
That entire story is based on speculation.
And it sort of depends on how Trump worded this whole thing.
And President Trump is clumsy about his words.
President Trump is constantly calling on everybody to investigate everybody, right?
He was saying the DOJ should investigate Netflix for their deal with Obama.
So, does he even know what he's talking about?
Is always a solid defense for President Trump.
In fact, that was his biggest defense, really, during the Mueller investigation, was, yeah, he was saying that he didn't want Mueller there, yeah, he was saying that maybe he should fire Mueller, but that was just the president mouthing off.
So was this just the president mouthing off?
Was the mouthing off serious?
Was it connected to actual United States taxpayer dollars?
According to The Independent, there have been claims that Trump had refused to meet Mr. Zelensky after his election this year, and that U.S.
officials have warned this would continue to be the case unless the Ukrainian authorities reopened the Burisma files.
That would be the investigation on Joe and Hunter Biden.
So that is all the speculation that is fit to print today.
That is the speculation.
And this is what is causing the allegations of cover-up.
So according to Adam Schiff, the reason that there's a cover-up is because Trump was engaged in a quid pro quo deal to use the Ukrainian government as a tool to investigate his most dangerous American political opponent.
And that would be a violation of law and probably impeachable.
If he was just gathering information from the Ukrainian government, not impeachable, not illegal.
Bad!
Not impeachable, not illegal.
If in fact there's a quid pro quo, then you're talking about illegality.
So we just don't have enough information now to know what went on, what happened, what was said.
Presumably this stuff is going to break at some point.
But what will be the impact on American domestic politics going forward?
We'll talk about that.
In just one moment.
First, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Daily Wire subscriber.
Ooh.
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A leftist tears, hot or cold Tumblr, and a super cute small human child.
In the picture, baby Gunnar is fast asleep in his striped onesie while snuggled up to the world's greatest beverage vessel, looking as content as can be because, oh my god, that baby is cute.
Wow.
Look at the cheeks on that baby.
Here's the thing.
You know, while I am a cold and inhumane robot, I love babies.
I love children.
They're the best.
And man, that is a lucky baby.
And that Leftist Tears Tumblr is lucky, too.
I mean, come on.
Snuggling with that baby?
That's amazing!
The caption reads, The only thing better than mother's milk is Leftist Tears.
Hashtag Leftist Tears Tumblr.
You, sir, are clearly a wonderful and wise father who cares about the future of his child.
Thanks for the fantastic picture.
Congrats to Jaron and his wife Susan.
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That's gonna be a lady killer right there.
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So ironically, one of the impacts of this whole, this whole miasmatic, bizarro world situation in which Trump is now being accused of engaging in a quid pro quo, the evidence bizarro world situation in which Trump is now being accused of engaging in a quid And in which he's being accused of engaging in a cover up, the evidence isn't there for that yet either. - Sure.
One of the weird things that could happen here is that the person most damaged could be, in fact, Joe Biden.
Why?
Because if it turns out that what ends up at the center of the news from all of this is, again, the Joe Biden-Hunter Biden-Ukraine connection, And that President Trump's comeback to, you know, you guys keep talking about my quid pro quo.
Why aren't you ever talking about slow Joes?
Sleepy Joes, quid pro quo.
If that's how Trump treats this.
Then he could sully Biden as corrupt, which is what he did with Hillary Clinton, and rightly so.
Who would that benefit?
It would benefit Elizabeth Warren, of course, because Elizabeth Warren would be like, I agree.
Joe Biden never should have engaged in these kinds of conflicts of interest.
He's part of the problem.
She can continue her fight as the anti-corruption crusader, which would be very, very good for her.
So ironically, the attacks on Trump may end up backfiring on Biden.
So it may be that by highlighting the Trump-Ukraine connection, which is truly about the investigation of Joe Biden, it ends up raising to public profile once again the Joe Biden story.
Just as the focus on Donald Trump in the last election cycle ended with Trump wheeling and pivoting and hitting Hillary Clinton's emails over and over and over to the point where it hurt Hillary a lot more than it hurt Trump.
Well, you can see exactly the same thing happen right here, where Trump gets clocked for the Ukraine connection to his campaign.
And then he says, well, the only reason we are investigating is because of Sleepy Joe.
And then Joe's over there saying, well, I'm not corrupt, he's corrupt.
And Trump's saying, no, I'm not corrupt, he's corrupt.
And Elizabeth Warren over here saying, they're both corrupt, they're both corrupt.
And everybody sort of throws up their hands and says, well, you know, at least she's not corrupt.
It actually does benefit in a bizarre way, Elizabeth Warren, which could in fact benefit Trump.
Because if you believe that Elizabeth Warren runs weaker against Trump than Joe Biden does, then knocking Uncle Joe out of the box with allegations about corruption could mean a Trump vs. Warren race instead of a Trump vs. Biden race.
Now, let's be real about this.
Trump has some heavy work to do before he is competitive, truly competitive, in this presidential race.
Right now in the polling data, Fox News polling, okay so this is not Left-wing public policy center polling.
Okay, this is Fox News polling.
Trump is lagging pretty far behind nearly every candidate.
Trump has managed to slightly close the gaps with Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, but he is still trailing Joe Biden by 14 points, according to that Fox News poll.
For Biden, the news is not only that he's crushing Trump head-to-head, according to Mediaite, he leads by an even greater margin in a head-to-head matchup with the surgeon Warren.
If the Democratic primary were between those two, 53% said they'd support Biden to 37% for Warren.
So maybe as the field winnows, it actually doesn't move over to Elizabeth Warren.
Maybe it does move over to Joe Biden.
However, if you look at the numbers for President Trump, it is not great.
He loses to every single Democrat against whom he is running.
Now, again, these polls are 14 months out.
It is important to mention here that the polls 14 months out actually have not been completely non-predictive.
They're pretty close to the reality in 2008, 2012, and 2016.
But if you look at these polls, if Trump is going to pick an opponent, then presumably the opponent that he would want to pick is somebody like Elizabeth Warren.
And Democrats know this, by the way.
42% of Democrats, according to this Fox News poll, say that the candidate most likely to beat Donald Trump is Joe Biden.
17% say Bernie Sanders.
Only 12% say Elizabeth Warren.
Most Democrats, by the way, say that they are mostly interested in the candidate who is most likely to beat Trump.
They're not as interested in the candidate who they most like, period.
So that gives Joe Biden an advantage.
But if Biden is suddenly perceived as vulnerable, if it appears that in a face-to-face against Trump, he's going to suffer, then that patina disappears.
His entire campaign right now is riding on the idea that he is going to beat Trump easily.
Well, if that starts to fade, then Elizabeth Warren can make the case, well, Trump is gonna clock him on corruption.
He can't clock me on corruption.
That's not a terrible case for her.
It really is not.
So if you look at the matchup, here's the matchup.
Okay, so according to, again, this is a Fox News poll, Biden would beat Trump today if the election were held at 52 to 38, which is brutal.
According to Elizabeth Warren, much, much, much closer, 46 to 40 in favor of Elizabeth Warren.
Against Kamala Harris, 42 to 40, which means in all likelihood Trump wins.
Against Bernie Sanders, 48 to 40, So that means that Elizabeth Warren runs the weakest, but she could be the beneficiary of this whole shebang.
In the first place.
Now all of that is barring actual evidence that Trump engaged in a taxpayer-funded quid pro quo.
And it is super irritating that Trump, if Trump was sloppy about his verbiage on this call with the Ukrainian president, if in fact he just decided to be big-mouthed and to say things that could be interpreted one of two ways, it's irritating for Republicans for sure.
Why?
Because we just went through a two-year investigation.
Basically about presidential sloppiness.
The entire obstruction of justice, second section of the Mueller report, in my opinion is about Trump mouthing off a lot and people interpreting it one of two credible ways.
Do we really want to do that again?
Is that really what the country needs?
Again?
That is the question for President Trump.
However, is this in the end going to damage Trump?
Well, barring some sort of real bombshell, the answer is no.
Meanwhile, the 2020 Democratic candidates are, of course, going at it right now.
The guns are starting to open up on Elizabeth Warren just a little bit because she is unrealistic in all of her promises.
The rap on Warren—there hasn't been a serious rap on Warren other than she's a phony, but that is a rap on Warren.
And it goes to the Pocahontas thing, right?
She claimed that she was Native American for literally decades.
It turns out that she's as Native American as I am.
And Elizabeth Warren continues to dissemble about her own policy agenda.
So people keep saying she has a plan.
She has a plan.
Yes, but her plans make no sense.
Her plans are completely idiotic.
So yesterday, for example, she was asked about her Medicare for All plan, and she simply lied.
She said, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
I'm old enough to remember when Barack Obama said that, and it was a lie then.
It's a lie now.
Here's Elizabeth Warren lying.
I understand you like your doctor, you like your nurse, you probably like your physical therapist if you have to have one.
You may like your pharmacist a lot.
What Medicare for All is about is making sure you're going to get access to all of that.
The idea behind this is every doctor, every nurse, every pharmacy is going to be covered.
Okay, that is not correct.
If you like your doctor, you will not be able to keep your doctor because your doctor may retire.
Your doctor may not want to engage in the business of dealing with Medicare for all.
I mean, what she's now talking about is cramming down on doctors Medicare payments by eliminating private health care insurance.
If she doesn't think that means that people drop out of the medical field, she's out of her mind.
She's really out of her mind.
Already, in the United States, there's a tremendous lack of primary care doctors.
My wife is a primary care doctor, but part of the reason for that is because, thank God, with our combined income, she doesn't need to be working as a specialist.
If you're a medical student right now, You are told this in medical school by those who know, is that your best option for becoming wealthy and earning back all the money that you just spent on a medical education is going into one of the so-called road fields.
Radiology, ophthalmology, anesthesiology, and dermatology.
Why?
Because you're dealing more with private insurance than you are with Medicaid or Medicare.
So unless she is willing to talk about radically raising the reimbursement rates for Medicare, which spends something like 80% on the dollar versus insurance companies, You're going to see your doctor disappear.
He may not take Medicare.
And is she actually going to be able to outlaw all private health insurance in the country?
Is she going to get rid of Medicare Advantage, which allows people to pick supplemental health insurance?
This is a bunch of nonsense.
This is a bunch of nonsense.
And she's getting called out for it.
So Pete Buttigieg, who has instead proposed sort of the Joe Biden plan, you know, Medicare for all who want it, meaning that you should be able to opt into Medicare if you want Medicare.
But if you want private health insurance, you should be able to keep it.
There are problems with the public option, which is what that is called, namely that the federal government either will underfund the public option, in which case nobody will go to it, and then the only people who will be on it are super sick, costing taxpayers inordinate amounts of dollars, or that it will be so heavily subsidized that people will drop out of private insurance All together, thus creating the same exact problems as Medicare for All.
In any case, Pete Buttigieg, he correctly points out to Jake Tapper that Elizabeth Warren's answers on healthcare are deeply evasive.
Warren is known for being straightforward and was extremely evasive when asked that question.
And we've seen that repeatedly.
I think that if you are proud of your plan and it's the right plan, you should defend it in straightforward terms.
And I think it's puzzling that when everybody knows, the answer to that question of whether her plan and Senator Sanders' plan will raise middle class taxes is yes.
Why you wouldn't just say so and then explain why you think that's the better way forward?
This is correct.
He is correct.
Points to Pete Buttigieg.
And again, I think this will start to take a toll on Elizabeth Warren.
I'm shocked that nobody has hit her so far on being a deeply dishonest politician, which she obviously and eminently is.
Okay, meanwhile, north of the border, controversy continues to engulf Justin Trudeau, or as we like to call him here at the show, Handsome Bernie Sanders.
Melissa Gismondi, who is a columnist over at the New York Times, she has a piece today called, The Downfall of Canada's Dreamy Boyfriend.
Which is hilarious to me.
And Justin Trudeau, I talked about this yesterday.
Do I think that people's lives and careers should be ruined?
Because you discovered a picture from 20 years ago in which they were wearing dark makeup.
And they didn't necessarily intend to be racist, but it was a racist incident.
Or at least it was a racial incident.
It was a stereotypical incident.
Does that mean that you should toss them out of office now?
Does it mean you should ruin their career?
The answer is no.
I think that's bad for the country.
I think it's bad for the culture.
I think it is a lack of forgiveness and a lack of charitable Charitable interpretation of people's behavior.
There's a concept in Judaism called Dam L'chaf Skhus, meaning that you should attempt to see everybody's behavior in the best possible light as opposed to the worst.
In the political world, obviously, that does not apply.
I will say that if anybody deserves this, on a sort of cosmic level, it is Justin Trudeau, who has made a career out of being a complete asshat with regard to his own chiding of people for not being woke enough.
He's been the woke prince in the woke kingdom of Canada.
I mean, for example, there was this little incident that happened just a couple of years ago, in which a person asked him a question about mankind, and he chided her for not using the word humankind.
It was absolute absurdity.
We came here today to ask you to also look into the policies that religious charitable organizations have in our legislation so that it can also be changed because maternal love is the love that's going to change the future of mankind.
So we'd like you to look into that.
We would like to say people kind, not necessarily mankind because it's more inclusive.
There we go, exactly.
Oh my god.
People kind.
It's more im- Mankind means people kind, you stupid ass.
Okay, but this is who Justin Trudeau is.
So he really does deserve what he is getting on a cosmic, cosmic level.
And he deserves it also because he has engaged in this whole intersectionality woke off.
So again, he deser- like yesterday, even during his apology, he did the abject apology routine.
He says, we must recognize intersectionality.
Intersectionality is super duper important.
Really what he should say is, We have to recognize when people do things that violate others' sense of propriety, when people do things that are inherently offensive.
But honestly, I apologized already for all of this.
I didn't mean to offend anybody.
I know better now because we all know better now.
Let's move on.
Instead, he doubles down on the standard.
Well, if you're going to double down on the standard, then we're going to hold you to the standard.
So here's Justin Trudeau talking about the idiocy that is intersectionality.
We've taken many concrete actions to fight against racism, to fight against intolerance, to fight against anti-black racism specifically, to recognize unconscious bias and systemic discrimination that exists in Canada and elsewhere, to work to overcome and recognize intersectionalities that people live with in a way that So many of us simply cannot understand or appreciate the microaggressions and the challenges being faced.
Live by the intersectional sword, die by the intersectional sword.
I mean really, the microaggressions that people live with?
This seems like a microaggression right here.
Like this picture right here of him dressed up in brownface as Aladdin in 2001.
That seems like a little bit microaggressory.
Also, the video of him dressed in blackface with an afro.
Also, the other picture of him dressed in blackface with an afro.
It's a little microaggressory.
So again, does Beidou on a cosmic level deserve what he is getting?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You know, when he's walking around doing what he did yesterday, I acknowledge I come from privilege.
Okay, well, you asked for it, buddy.
It's coming around to clock you right in the side of the head like a cow getting ready for the McDonald's burger, but enjoy.
I've always acknowledged that I come from a place of privilege, but I now need to acknowledge that that comes with a massive blind spot.
I have dedicated my leadership and my service to Canada to try and counter intolerance and racism everywhere I can.
Wanting to do good and wanting to do better simply isn't good enough, and you need to take responsibility for mistakes that hurt people who thought I was an ally.
See, if you're a good person, maybe what Justin Trudeau would do here, if you were a better person, I should say, maybe he's a good person, I don't know.
If you were a better person, a more generous person, what he would do here is he would recognize that the problems that he is currently facing are problems created by a worldview that he embraces.
A worldview that suggests that everything offensive means that the person who offended, whether with intent or without intent, needs to be wrecked and ruined and dragged through the mud.
Instead, he's going to do this Maoist struggle session where he gets to uphold the standard Well, retaining his office and not losing his power.
That is hypocrisy.
If you're upholding the standard because it doesn't apply to you, right?
Anybody else this happened to, Justin Trudeau would call for their head, but it's Justin Trudeau, so he's not resigning.
Then that makes you a hypocrite.
Hypocrisy isn't, there's a standard and I didn't live up to the standard, and now I ought to be punished because I didn't live up to the standard.
That's not hypocrisy.
And it's also not hypocrisy to say the standard itself is a wrong standard and an ungenerous, bad standard for society.
That's not hypocrisy either.
It is hypocrisy for Justin Trudeau, who would stand there and call for the resignation of any official in his government who is found to have done this, To stand there and then say, no, I think I'm gonna stick right here, guys.
I'm gonna maintain my power.
But hey, I acknowledged my white privilege.
I acknowledged my white privilege.
Okay, now speaking of the stupidity of intersectionality, I just wanna point something out.
So Justin Trudeau getting raked over the coals today because 20, 30 years ago, he was dressed in blackface and brownface.
Also yesterday, Al Sharpton went and testified in front of Congress.
And he was asked by Matt Goetz, the Republican of Florida, about his history of anti-white and anti-Semitic remarks.
And the Democrats started to boo Matt Goetz for bringing this up.
So in other words, depending on where you rank on the intersectional privilege hierarchy, you get to be as awful as you want to be.
I mean, Al Sharpton still is Sean MSNBC.
And if anybody brings that up, you get booed.
Here's Matt Goetz going after Sharpton.
Mr. Scarborough's resolution began by saying, whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton has referred to members of the Jewish faith as blood-sucking Jews and Jew bastards.
Is that true or did you not say those things?
They are patently untrue.
I never said that.
Have you ever referred to members of the Jewish faith as white interlopers or diamond merchants?
No, sir.
I referred to one in Harlem, an individual who I didn't even know was Jewish, as an interloper, and said I should never refer to his race.
Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton led a protest in the Crown Heights neighborhood and marched next to a protester with a sign that read, the white man is the devil.
I have no recollection of that.
I've marched in many things where there were signs that I did or did not agree with.
OK, so Al Sharpton continues to maintain his position of privilege and power based on this intersectional hierarchy, which means the entire standard is corrupt, because it turns out the entire standard is indeed corrupt.
OK, time for a quick thing I like and then a thing that I hate.
So things that I like today.
So I was in New York, as you all know.
I was recording from there.
We had a roast over at Commentary magazine, which was they roasted me and it was Pretty funny, I will say.
I was roasted by a number of prominent political figures and I got to roast them back.
But while I was there, my sister and I actually went and saw the musical Dear Evan Hansen, which had been highly recommended.
It's really fascinating.
It's a fascinating musical.
So I think that it's well-crafted.
Some of the music, it's kind of a pop rock musical.
I mean, that's the method and the mode in which it is written.
But that's okay because it's a modern musical.
The basic premise of the show is that there is this kid named Evan Hansen who is dealing with some sort of unspecified anxiety disorder.
And he goes to school and he's writing a note to his therapist.
He's supposed to write these letters to himself about why it's gonna be a great day.
He writes a note to himself about why his day is actually gonna be crappy and terrible, and then he signs it to himself, he prints it out, and another kid picks up the note and puts it in his pocket for a variety of reasons, and that kid ends up killing himself.
And so when they find the kid's body, they find Evan Hansen's note on this kid Connor's body, and they think that it was a suicide note from Connor to Evan Hansen.
And Evan Hansen is drawn into this kid's family because they are devastated, of course, and he starts making up this fake history about how he and Connor were best friends originally to make the family feel better, but then increasingly because he wants to be part of the family.
It's really a fascinating premise for the musical.
Here's a little bit of one of the key numbers in the musical.
This was performed at the Tony Awards a couple of years ago.
Step out, step out of the sun if you keep getting burned.
Step out, step out of the sun because you've learned, because you've learned.
On the outside, always looking in the mirror, you'd better be more than I'm always living, cause I'm tap, tap, tapping on the glass.
It's a really interesting musical.
One of the things that makes it interesting, it is very involved with the impact of social media.
So, through a variety of circumstances, he ends up becoming the social media star based on all the lies that he is told.
Now, one of the main issues that I have with the musical, and it's not really giving too much away, is that the comeuppance that he receives is not consonant with the crime that he commits.
You don't actually even really learn why what he did was kind of morally wrong.
This is, I know, a famous critique of the musical by a lot of people.
The first act, though, is really fantastic.
The second act, I think, is weaker because they're not really sure what they want to say in the second act.
But it's really a fascinating musical about lying and the consequences of lying and the wages of social media in which everybody is virtue signaling and then virtue ripping people down.
There's a lot that's pretty interesting about the musical.
So if you're ever in New York or if you see it on the national tour, I think it's worth seeing.
Dear Evan Hansen, go check that out.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
All righty, so PewDiePie is the second most popular content creator on YouTube.
And full disclosure, I've appeared in a PewDiePie video.
Next meme.
Okay, but PewDiePie was ripped up and down the other day because people were accusing him of wearing a German Iron Cross in a video where he announced that he was retracting a donation to the Anti-Defamation League.
Now, the reason he was retracting the donation to the ADL is because the ADL is indeed politically biased in pretty significant ways, but He was ripped for supposedly signaling to Nazis.
And he said, this is crazy.
He says, there's a brand called Vetements, which is a streetwear brand founded by Georgian designer Demna Vassalia.
He says, some people took this sweater as a way for me to symbolize to Nazis that I'm a Nazi.
That cross, people were very sure that it was a Nazi cross, and people started attacking me because of it.
Nevermind the fact it's Georgian characters literally right next to it, which is true.
He says, I don't know the Iron Cross.
I think I heard something about it, but I don't know about these things.
I don't care about these tiny Nazi references.
It's just crazy.
The cross in Georgia is a very important symbol.
It's literally used in their flag.
The brand I was wearing, Vetements, is anything but a Nazi brand.
I've spoken about the brand before.
I really liked the brand.
Okay, the fact is that the so-called Iron Cross here, okay, that it was used by the Nazis, but it didn't originate with the Nazis.
And it's not as overtly Nazi as, for example, the swastika.
I mean, the fact is that there are a bevy of brands that use that particular symbol, right?
Vacheron Constantin is a famous watch brand, and they use the Maltese cross, which looks a lot like the Iron Cross.
Okay, and that, I mean, basically identical.
I mean, so it's really silly.
Do you really think that PewDiePie's a Nazi, guys?
Or are you just trying to go after PewDiePie because you don't like him and he's popular?
One of the things that we see is that in our social media age, is that you only rip people down when they become successful.
So at no point did anybody call PewDiePie a Nazi.
Then he became famous and rich, and then it was, oh, he's a Nazi.
And it's the same thing that you're seeing with Justin Trudeau.
For years, these pictures could have come out.
They didn't.
Same thing with Ralph Northam.
Same thing with Kyle Kashuv, right?
The minute that he became successful and people started paying attention to him and he was admitted to Harvard, then all of a sudden all the bad stuff came out about him.
This is the height of irritating stupidity.
It really, really is.
If you're going to target people, folks, why don't you target them based on reality, not based on your sick, twisted fantasy that everybody is secretly a Nazi who you don't particularly like?
It's ridiculous.
OK, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
If you don't wish to subscribe, which you should, then have yourself a wonderful weekend.
We'll be back here on Monday to recap all of it for you.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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