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Sept. 23, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:29
The Ukraine Problem | Ep. 866
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President Trump defends himself from allegations he pressured Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, Democrats ramp up their attacks, a quarrel over impeachment, and Elizabeth Warren surges in Iowa.
Straight from our brand new Ben Shapiro Show studios, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
That's right, folks.
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Okay, so the big story of the day is the continued fallout from the whistleblower report that has not yet been revealed.
Remember, we still don't know what's in this whistleblower report, so to recapitulate for folks who may not have been following this story with all of its requisite gravity, So, here is the story.
The story is that there was a whistleblower inside the intelligence community, informed the Inspector General of the intelligence community that there was some sort of urgent violation that had taken place.
If this violation had been deemed urgent, it would have had to be reported to Congress.
So, the inspector general says, you're right, it is urgent, and then declares that this is going to go to Congress.
At this point, the director of national intelligence, the acting director of national intelligence steps in and he says, well, hold up just a second.
This isn't urgent under the applicable law.
Because under the applicable law, typically, for a whistleblower complaint to be deemed urgent, it has to deal with actual intelligence.
It can't just be that the intelligence community heard about something criminal that's bad that's going on, that doesn't actually have to do with the intelligence community, and then reported it to the inspector general, and then reported it to Congress.
Instead, it has to deal with the actual intelligence community.
Well, supposedly, this report didn't have to do with the intel community at all.
It had to do with President Trump on the phone with Ukraine.
So, the Democrats immediately shift to, this is a cover-up, Obviously, Trump is trying to hide something.
And then we get a kind of slow leak about the information that was in this whistleblower report.
So what was in the whistleblower report?
Well, the whistleblower report, all that we know so far is that President Trump had conversations with the president of Ukraine and supposedly in those conversations, the president of the United States Repeatedly suggested that the Ukrainian government investigate Joe Biden.
Why?
Well, because Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, father and son relationship, they have a nexus with Ukraine.
Hunter Biden was made the CEO or a board member of some organization in Ukraine called Burisma.
In Ukraine, at the same time that Joe Biden was pressuring the Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was overseeing the Hunter Biden case.
So the scandal, which started to break maybe earlier this year, last year, that scandal was supposedly that Joe Biden had personally attempted to hold up $1 billion in loan guarantees to Ukraine until Ukraine fired a prosecutor.
That prosecutor was overseeing Hunter Biden's possible investigation at the time.
So now President Trump comes along and he's apparently telling the Ukrainian president, you know, it'd be great, Zelensky, it'd be great if you just investigate Joe Biden because, I mean, did anyone really invest?
Now, look, the Trump campaign has four months been attempting to push the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden.
And this is not a secret.
Rudy Giuliani has been going over there for a year.
Trying to investigate himself, trying to cooperate with government sources in Ukraine to find out whether, in fact, Hunter Biden was under investigation by this prosecutor and whether Joe Biden exerted his authority in order to hold back American taxpayer dollars to get the prosecutor ousted to protect his son, Hunter.
And there are all sorts of serious questions to be asked about Joe Biden's relationship with Hunter Biden, because as it turns out, Hunter Biden has led a rather dissolute life, and Hunter Biden has taken serious advantage of the fact that his dad happens to be Joe Biden.
He's gotten a series of cush positions in which he has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, basically because daddy was a senator and then a vice president.
So we're going to get into those allegations in just a second.
Well, President Trump over the weekend came out and he said, yeah, you know, I did talk with Ukrainians about Joe Biden, but that is not a big deal.
According to The New York Times, President Trump acknowledged on Sunday he raised corruption accusations against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
during a phone call with Ukraine's leader.
A stunning admission, according to The New York Times, as pressure mounted on Democrats to impeach Trump over allegations he leans on a foreign government to help damage a political rival.
In public and in private, many Democrats said the evidence that has emerged in recent days indicating that Mr. Trump pushed the Ukrainian government to investigate Mr. Biden and his administration's stonewalling of attempts by Congress to learn more or changing their calculations about whether to charge him with articles of impeachment.
The influential chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who has resisted such action, said the House might now have crossed the Rubicon in light of the new disclosures.
So that would be Adam Schiff, who came out and said, the Rubicon may have been crossed.
We may now have to look at impeaching President Trump over all of this.
So here is Adam Schiff saying as much.
You know I have been very reluctant to go down the path of impeachment, but if the president is essentially withholding military aid at the same time that he is trying to browbeat a foreign leader into doing something illicit, that is providing dirt on his opponent during a presidential campaign, then he may force us to go down this road.
I have spoken with a number of my colleagues over the last week, and this seems different in kind, and we may very well have crossed the Rubicon here.
Okay, well, the Rubicon that he is noting is something that has not been shown yet.
So as I explained last Friday, when this whole thing came up, and last Thursday, if President Trump engaged in an actual quid pro quo, if he did what he's accusing Joe Biden of doing, if he said to the Ukrainians, $250 million in military aid is not forthcoming unless you investigate Joe Biden, that is using American taxpayer dollars for a campaign quid pro quo, that is obviously a violation of law, it is a violation of bribery statute, and President Trump should be impeached.
Really, a quid pro quo with a foreign government to investigate your political rival is, in fact, a violation of law and impeachable.
If, however, this is just Donald Trump getting on the phone and saying to the Koreans, you know, it'd be great if you guys really investigate Joe Biden.
You know, that'd be great.
Is that impeachable?
Well, that is not what Adam Schiff is saying right there.
Adam Schiff is saying, no, not so much.
Adam Schiff himself is saying the quid pro quo has to be there.
Well, why?
Because President Trump has a rather bad habit of mouthing off, as you may have noticed.
Because he is a man named Donald Trump, who does very Donald Trump-like things, as it turns out.
Well, Jim Garrity has a piece over at National Review in which he talks about this, and he's correct.
He says, "Donald Trump believes that just about everyone "he doesn't like must be corrupt or engaged in law-breaking "of some manner and should be investigated." Earlier this week, he tweeted out, "Look at the Obama book deal "or the ridiculous Netflix deal.
"Then look at all the deals made by the Dems in Congress, "the Congressional Slush Fund, and lastly, the IG reports.
"Take a look at them.
"Those investigations would be over fast." So he wanted like Obama's book deal investigated.
He wanted his Netflix deal investigated.
Trump indicated that law enforcement should investigate the Clintons over Jeffrey Epstein.
He called for an investigation of corrupt government in Baltimore.
He suggested that Elijah Cummings should investigate himself.
He called on law enforcement to subpoena all records having to do with the Clinton Foundation.
This is all since July.
President Trump is constantly asking people for investigations, mainly because he's been subjected to a lot of investigations, and so he's like, well, turnabout is fair play.
He's twice called on the FEC and the FCC to investigate whether Saturday Night Live is colluding with the Democratic Party.
So, Jim Garrity's point over at National Review, he says, It's reasonable to worry about the politicization of law enforcement at a moment like this, but so far there's not much evidence for it.
He said, what's more, Trump speaks constantly as if he's convinced that some sort of colossal, ruinous scandal is lurking behind each one of his foes, and all of them could be ruined if federal investigators could look just hard enough.
So it shouldn't be the least bit surprising that Trump and allies like Rudy Giuliani believe that Hunter Biden's work for a giant gas company in Ukraine must be not merely unsavory or created the appearance of a conflict of interest, but somewhere along the line, the Bidens must have broken the law.
Should the President of the United States repeatedly call for law enforcement investigations of his political enemies based upon rumors, media reports, and his own theories?
No, of course not.
But Donald Trump does a lot of those kinds of things.
Does this enter a different area if the President is promising X to foreign officials in exchange for an investigation?
Well, it depends on the specifics, says Jim Garrity.
He says, that insert Trump foe here is a real crook.
Everybody knows it.
Everybody's saying so.
If you guys caught him and nailed him to the wall, I'd be thrilled.
It's probably just Trump being Trump.
Honestly, like if you had to ballpark what Trump said in this conversation, do you think it was more along the lines of, you know, we got this $250 million in aid and maybe it's forthcoming and maybe it's not.
I don't know.
But if you just investigate Joe Biden, it's forthcoming.
Do you think it's that or do you think that it's, do you think the conversation went something like this?
Zelensky, who's the head of Ukraine, going, and Trump going, and Zelensky being like, and Trump being like, and Zelensky being like, and Trump being like, I mean, like, which sounds more like Trump?
we're not doing that and trump being like but it'd be great if you did and zolensky being like well no and trumping oh okay how's everything else going i mean like which sounds more like trump and a lot of this has to do with whether you see president trump as a serious thinker like a person who thinks through the things he says or a guy who just says stuff you know It's very difficult to square the sort of 4D chess President Trump that so many people have in their heads on the right, and the 4D chess Trump that so many people on the left have in their heads, right?
They simultaneously will claim that he's an idiot and a mastermind.
With who Trump is in reality, which is a guy who says lots of stuff.
As I have said before, President Trump's tombstone one day will eventually read, Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States.
He said a lot of crap, right?
That is what President Trump does.
And frankly, I think that President Trump would say the same thing to, like, Emmanuel Macron.
I think he'd get on the phone with the Prime Minister of France, and Macron would be like, Mr. President, how are you?
And Trump would be like, can you investigate Joe Biden?
And Macron would be like, I don't know what you're talking about.
And Trump would be like, well, I don't know, you're French.
Right, we're not Ukrainian.
But you all sound the same to me.
Like, the chances that Donald Trump was seriously offering a quid pro quo to the Ukrainians, hey, that would take forethought.
So color me a little bit skeptical of all that.
Nonetheless, this is driving the narrative today.
Nancy Pelosi has issued a letter to her colleagues in the House basically suggesting that impeachment may be on the table in the near future.
It says, Dear Colleague, On Thursday, Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph McGuire will appear before the House Intelligence Committee in an open hearing.
At that time, we expect him to obey the law and turn over the whistleblower's full complaint to the committee.
We also expect that he will establish a path for the whistleblower to speak directly to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees as required by law.
The Intelligence Community Inspector General, who was appointed by President Trump, has determined that the complaint is both of urgent concern and credible, and its disclosure relates to one of the most significant and important of the Director of National Intelligence's responsibilities to the American people.
The administration's blocking of acting DNI McGuire from providing Congress with the whistleblower complaint calls upon him to violate the federal statute, which unequivocally states that the DNI shall provide Congress this information.
Well, it also has conditions under which the information is to be provided, including that it has to deal with the intelligence community, not with the president.
The administration is endangering our national security and having a chilling effect on any future whistleblower who sees wrongdoing.
We must be sure that the president and his administration are always conducting our national security and foreign policy in the best interest of the American people, not the president's personal or political interest.
Okay, well, okay, that Sure, it would be great if Congress did that.
You know what else would be great?
If Barack Obama had not pledged flexibility to the Russians in the run-up to the 2012 election.
It would have been great if Teddy Kennedy back in the 1980s had not been working with the Russian government to undermine Ronald Reagan.
It would have been fantastic if Hillary Clinton had not been working with, yes, the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on President Trump.
To pretend that the area of foreign policy is where all of the honor of the American people still resides.
Yeah, not so much.
Not so much.
I mean, I'm old enough to remember when Nancy Pelosi was traveling to the Middle East to undercut George W. Bush's foreign policy, so.
Anyway, she says, I'm calling on Republicans to join us in insisting that the acting DNI obey the law as we seek the truth to protect the American people and our Constitution.
This violation is about national security.
If the administration persists in blocking this whistleblower from disclosing to Congress a serious possible breach of constitutional duties by the president, they'll be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness, which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation immediately.
Thank you for your patriotism.
Best regards, Nancy.
So a couple of things.
One, I honestly think that we should find out what exactly the whistleblower is complaining about.
So I think the Republicans probably should work with Nancy Pelosi to pry loose this whistleblower complaint if If the Trump administration provides no clarity on what happened here.
But, there are a couple of details that are being left out of a lot of the reporting here, and we do need to mention them.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so a couple of details about this whistleblower complaint.
Because remember, we still don't actually know what Trump said in the conversation.
So all of this is speculation.
We do know that Trump said something about Joe Biden to the Ukrainian president.
The Ukrainian president then came out and said, No, I didn't initiate an investigation.
So this sounds a lot like the second half of the Mueller report, honestly.
So the second half of the Mueller report was Donald Trump saying to everyone in earshot, this Mueller guy's annoying.
Can we get rid of him?
And everybody going, nope.
And Trump going, all right.
And then just sort of moving on with his life for the next month.
And then he comes back and he's like, you know who annoys me?
Robert Mueller.
And they're going, well, leave him alone, Mr. President.
All right.
And he just sort of moves on for another month.
This sounds exactly like that.
He says to Zelensky, can you go investigate Joe Biden?
And Zelensky's like, no, Mr. President, I'm not doing it.
And Trump's like, OK.
And he just sort of moves on.
There's another problem is that the whistleblower here, we thought, I mean, if you'd read those reports on Thursday and Friday, it sounds like the whistleblower was listening in on the phone call with Donald Trump and Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.
As it turns out, not so much.
According to CNN, the whistleblower didn't have direct knowledge of the communications.
Didn't have direct knowledge of the communications.
Instead, the whistleblower's concerns came in part from learning information that was not obtained during the course of their work.
Okay, well, then how is he making an intelligence whistleblower claim?
He didn't gain the intelligence through the intelligence process, nor does it have to do with intelligence sources and methods.
Those details have apparently played a role in the administration's determination that the complaint didn't fit the reporting requirements under the intelligence whistleblower law.
The official said, it's hard to know the potential exposure faced by the president.
So we still, like, that's kind of amazing, right?
That would have been a detail that we should have known.
Because originally on Wednesday, when the Washington Post broke this report, they referenced a promise Trump allegedly made to Ukraine.
But nowhere beyond that have we actually heard what the promise was.
Instead, we've heard a lot of Trump solicitation.
Right?
In the same way that Trump publicly solicited Vladimir Putin to put Hillary Clinton's emails out there.
I mean, that was not really, like, a secret.
He went out on the campaign trail and was like, Vlad, if you got the emails, break them.
Do it.
Love it.
Live it.
Okay, but, so, is this anything new?
Now, is it bad?
Of course it's bad!
The President of the United States should not be calling on foreign leaders to investigate his political opponents.
Yes, that's a bad thing.
Also, as I have mentioned, among the other bad things that presidents have done, but that are not impeachable, Barack Obama caught on tape, pledging the Russians flexibility in the lead up to the 2012 election.
Hillary Clinton working openly with the DNC and members of the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on President Trump.
So lots of bad stuff happens here and all of it is worthy of condemnation.
The question here is whether something criminal happened that is worthy of impeachment.
Okay, so President Trump has now responded to all of this.
He said, we'll consider releasing some details of the phone calls.
He said the conversation, by the way, was absolutely perfect.
This is clip one.
As far as my conversation was perfect, it was a perfect conversation.
It was it couldn't have been any better.
But we'll make a determination about how to release it, releasing it, saying what we said.
It was an absolutely perfect conversation.
Perfect 10 conversation.
Like a 19-year-old model.
A beautiful, perfect, unbelievable conversation.
It wasn't just a good conversation, guys.
It was the best conversation.
The greatest of all conversations.
I mean, like, Socrates Versus Socrates versus his various interlocutors.
Not even close.
Donald Trump with Zelensky.
The perfect conversation.
The greatest.
And then President Trump says, I don't want to hurt Biden.
OK, this is where you start going, OK, Mr. President, let's let's not go too thick on the on the peanut butter here.
There's President Trump.
Vice President Biden did a terrible thing the way he put it.
I'm not looking to hold him to anything.
I'm not looking to hurt him with respect to his son.
Joe's got a lot of problems.
Joe's got enough problems without that.
But what he said was a terrible thing.
There was no pressure.
That was not pressure.
I know when I give pressure.
And that was not pressure.
Okay, so, President Trump then went on a rampage on Twitter explaining all of this.
of this.
He said, now the fake news media says I pressured the Ukrainian president at least eight times during my telephone call with him.
I'm going to read this in straight voice.
Say, I can't do Trump voice for the next eight paragraphs.
I mean, this is a five paragraph essay.
He says this supposedly comes from a so-called whistleblower who they say doesn't even have a firsthand account of what was said.
More Democrat crooked media con.
Breaking news.
The Ukrainian government just said they weren't pressured at all during the nice call.
Sleepy Joe Biden, on the other hand, forced a tough prosecutor out from investigating his son's company by threat of not giving big dollars to Ukraine.
That's the real story.
Now that the Democrats and the fake news media have gone bust on every other of their witch hunt schemes, they're trying to start one just as ridiculous as the others, called the Ukraine Witch Hunt, while at the same time trying to protect sleepy Joe Biden.
Will fail again.
The fake news media and their partner, the Democratic Party.
I mean, I told you this thing's a book.
The fake news media and their partner, the Democratic Party.
Want to stay as far away as possible from the Joe Biden demand that the Ukrainian government fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son or they won't get a very large amount of U.S.
money.
So they fabricate a story about me and a perfectly fine and routine conversation I had with the new president of Ukraine.
Nothing was said that was in any way wrong.
But Biden's demand, on the other hand, was a complete and total disaster.
The fake news knows this, but don't want to report.
The Radical Left Democrats and their fake news media partners, headed up by Little Adam Schiff and batting 0 for 21 against me, are at it again.
They think I may have had a dicey conversation with a certain foreign leader based on a highly partisan whistleblower statement.
Strange that with so many other people hearing or knowing of the perfectly fine and respectful conversation that they would not have also come forward.
Do you know the reason why they did not?
Because there was nothing said wrong.
It was pitch perfect!
Another fake news story out there.
It never ends.
Virtually anytime I speak on the phone to a foreign leader, I understand that there may be people listening from various U.S.
agencies, not to mention those from the other country itself.
No problem.
Knowing all of this, is anyone dumb enough to believe I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on such a potentially heavily populated call?
I would only do what is right anyway and only do good for the U.S.
And then later he made more remarks about all of this.
He said the problem is when you're speaking to foreign leaders, you don't want foreign leaders to feel they shouldn't be speaking openly and good.
You have to be talking to people.
And the same thing for an American president.
You want them to be able to express themselves without knowing that not every single word is going to be out and going all over the world.
Now, this is fair.
OK, this particular critique that Trump is making is absolutely fair.
The president of the United States has a lot of conversations that are not meant for public scrutiny.
A lot of conversations with foreign leaders in which highly classified stuff is said.
You do want him to be able to have open conversations without whistleblowers going and seeing a political problem and then reporting that to the legislative branch because the president is indeed the commander-in-chief.
So all of that happens to be true.
And having whistleblowers who are making complaints that have nothing to do with the intelligence community, which is the actual maybe problem here, is a serious problem.
But To go to the core of it, President Trump is basically saying, I did nothing wrong.
There was no quid pro quo.
Rudy Giuliani then said the same thing.
Giuliani went on Twitter.
He said, whistleblower story like Kavanaugh's story is blowing up.
Now no mention of money or quid pro quo.
So appropriate conduct.
Now we must look at Biden family pattern of corruption of selling his public offices for five decades.
Pattern of corruption enabled by swamp.
Okay, so the Republican Trump administration position is Trump didn't do anything wrong.
The person who did something wrong here is Joe Biden.
And Joe Biden is just sitting there like, what did I do, man?
Why am I even part of this story?
And the answer is you're part of the story because your relations with your son, Hunter, Are a problem for your campaign.
Like a real problem.
According to the Washington Post this morning, 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, Jim Garrity says if the discussion is about Ukraine, it probably revolves around the Trump campaign's interest in what Hunter Biden did for Ukrainian companies in the tail end of the Obama administration.
And Garrity says, when the Obama campaign was vetting Joe Biden to be vice president in the summer of 2008, one of the most sensitive issues they examined was the relationship between the senator and his family connection to a large Delaware bank called MBNA.
The bank was the largest donor to Biden's campaigns over his career.
Hunter hired Hunter Biden in 1996, made Hunter a vice president by 1998 when he was 28 years old.
Hunter departed to do a short stint in the Department of Commerce, but he kept a $100,000 a year retainer from the bank.
After returning to the private sector as a lawyer in Washington working for a lobbying firm, the Bidens insist that Hunter's lobbying work never crossed paths with his father's work in the Senate.
But during this time, Joe voted in favor of a bankruptcy reform bill that MBNA and other banks supported, and that many Democrats, including then-Senator Barack Obama, opposed.
Elizabeth Warren will probably at some point jump in here.
When you're the son of a famous senator or VP, doors keep opening for you.
By 2014, Hunter Biden had been a bank vice president, lawyer, partner at a mergers and acquisitions firm, attempted to purchase a hedge fund, founded two consulting firms, and shortly after his father started his second term as VP, joined the U.S.
Naval Reserve.
That ended badly.
He was discharged after about a year for failing a drug test.
We'll get to more of Hunter Biden and why this could, in fact, this scandal could, in fact, blow back on Joe Biden and make Elizabeth Warren the nominee.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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OK, so back to Hunter Biden.
So this whole subject of investigation that Trump wants and of controversy that started all this stuff is Hunter Biden's relationship with Joe.
Hunter has had a very checkered life and a very checkered career, and he relied heavily on his dad's help.
Returning to the investment world, writes Jim Garrity, Biden's business partners included Jonathan Lee, who ran a Chinese private equity firm, Bohai Capital.
In April 2014, at age 44, Hunter Biden joined the board of directors for Burisma Holdings, the largest non-governmental-run natural gas company in Ukraine.
Not everyone in the Obama administration was comfortable with Hunter's new business partners, according to The New Yorker.
Quote, Hunter's meeting with Lee and his relationship with BHR attracted little attention at the time.
But some of Biden's advisers were worried that Hunter, by meeting with a business associate during his father's visit, would expose the VP to criticism.
The former senior White House aide said that Hunter's behavior invited questions about whether he was leveraging access for his benefit, which just wasn't done in that White House.
Optics really mattered, and that seemed to be cutting it pretty close, even if nothing nefarious was going on.
Apparently, several members of Biden's staff said that they had been too intimidated to talk to Joe Biden about all of this.
Everyone who worked for him has been screamed at.
A former advisor told me.
Others said they were wary of hurting his feelings.
One business associate told me that Biden, during difficult conversations about his family, got deeply melancholy, which to me is more painful than if someone yelled and screamed at me.
It's like you've hurt him terribly.
That was always my fear, that I'd be really touching a very fragile part of him.
At the very least, Hunter's business dealings created the appearance of a conflict of interest.
And that was true also with regard to Ukraine.
There is a perception that Hunter was on the loose, potentially undermining his father's message when he took a role at Burisma.
In a 2018 appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations, Biden described the time he threatened to withhold foreign aid from the Ukrainian government unless they fired a prosecutor named Viktor Shokin.
The argument from the Obama administration is that Shokin was resisting reform efforts But one of the problems is that he was preparing a corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, which was Hunter Biden's company, right?
Hunter Biden was on the board of directors.
So all of this could come back just in time to truly bite Joe Biden directly on the butt.
And that could be a real problem.
Meanwhile, Democrats are, of course, ramping up impeachment talk.
They are getting very frustrated.
Many of the more Shall we say enthusiastic members of the Democratic Party have been pushing for impeachment for a while, and now they're really ramping up their game.
You saw Adam Schiff already saying, well, if there's a quid pro quo, maybe we'll talk impeachment.
Well, very unlikely they uncover a quid pro quo.
You see, Nancy Pelosi suggests that we are entering a grave new era of lawlessness, which, again, is not calling for impeachment, but is Drawing closer to it.
You've got Elizabeth Warren, who is the odds-on favorite to become the next Democratic nominee at this point.
We'll get to polling in a second.
Here she is yesterday calling for impeachment of President Trump over these allegations.
Congress failed to act, and now Donald Trump has shown that he believes he is above the law.
He has solicited another foreign government to attack our election system.
It is time for us to call out this illegal behavior and start impeachment proceedings right now.
Now, of course, the impeachment goes nowhere because you'd actually have to have proof of a crime in order to get a majority.
Well, you need 60 votes in the in the Senate in order to actually oust the president from office.
So likely an impeachment vote succeeds in the House, but does not succeed in the Senate of the United States.
But Democrats at this point are starting to warm up to all of this as we get closer to 2020.
They're making the calculation there won't be blowback if the story is bad enough.
And unlike the Trump-Russia allegations, Where there was some smoke, but no fire in the end, as it turned out.
Here, they can say that the conversation itself is really the problem, that there's something very bad.
And there is something bad about going to a foreign government and asking them to investigate your political opponent.
Now, as I've said, in the past, there are lots of various candidates, particularly Democrats, who have gone to foreign sources for information on their opponents, have made offers to try and undercut Republican presidents.
Now, that's nothing new, but this The question for Democrats is politically whether this appears to be serious enough that they finally have the momentum to go after President Trump on impeachment on all of this.
AOC, she tweeted out that, like ripping into fellow Democrats, the question is how long Nancy Pelosi can withstand the internal pressure.
AOC tweeted out, at this point, the bigger national scandal isn't the president's law-breaking behavior.
It is the Democratic Party's refusal to impeach him for it.
And you're starting to see this exact line gain momentum.
Now, as I say, the Democrats have yet to make a case that Trump actually did something illegal here.
And we'll see Renato Mariotti, legal affairs columnist for Politico, trying to stretch and twist and turn to get to why this is impeachable, even though it's not criminal.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Alrighty, we're going to get into the case that Democrats are making on impeachment, even though no criminality has yet been uncovered, and we don't even know the details.
of the whistleblower complaint at this point.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Okay, so the Democrats are trying to broaden out the quid pro quo allegation into a Trump did something impeachable allegation.
And obviously impeachment is not an actual legal standard.
High crimes and misdemeanors is not a legal standard, meaning that let's say that you impeach the president for sneezing.
You can do that.
And that's not challengeable in the Supreme Court.
So, Democrats can impeach Trump for whatever they want, but if they actually hope to have a shot of ousting him from office and leaving Vice President Pence as the President of the United States, presumably the only way to do that would be to actually uncover a crime.
Well, Democrats have not yet done that.
Renato Mariotti is the legal affairs columnist for Politico magazine, former federal prosecutor, and he has a piece today in Politico titled, Trump didn't bribe Ukraine, it's actually worse than that.
And here is where things start to get dicey for the Democrats.
If they are just saying that Trump behaved badly, then you have to start putting that into the context of, what have other presidents done to behave badly but was not impeachable?
And this is where it gets dicey.
So he says reports that Trump pressured Ukrainian president Vlad the Mirza Lensky to investigate the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has prompted a flurry of speculation that Trump, by withholding military aid, has committed bribery or extortion.
This is wrong and even counterproductive to efforts to hold Trump accountable.
If what Trump is accused of doing is true, it is a kind of corrupt conduct that the criminal system is not equipped to handle.
Labeling his behavior with criminal terms such as bribery and extortion not only misunderstands the statutory language, it gives Trump and his supporters ammunition with which to defend themselves, making impeachment harder to achieve.
He says the impulse to label this as a potential crime is flawed legally and even strategically, even if true.
This is not a case that would end up in a criminal proceeding, even if Trump were no longer in office.
So he says, you know, presidents push foreign governments to take official acts all the time.
The Constitution contemplates the president will interact with foreign leaders and use his or her power to persuade them to do things that help the United States.
What is abhorrent about the alleged conduct here is not that Trump is pushing a foreign government to do something, but rather that he might have used his presidential power to get a foreign government to help him win the next election.
This is self-serving and corrupt, but it is difficult to think of this alleged activity as extortion.
He says it's hard to construe the alleged conduct as a threat against Ukraine in the manner contemplated by the extortion statute.
This is not to say there aren't crimes on the books that better match what Trump is alleged to have done.
So maybe it's a campaign finance crime.
But he says what Trump is alleged to have done is not a garden variety crime.
It's worse.
This, again, is a columnist named Renato Mariotti, who is the legal correspondent for Politico.
He says what Trump is alleged to have done is not garden variety crime, it's worse.
It involved misusing $250 million in aid appropriated by Congress for his benefit.
Okay, now you are accusing him of doing something you don't have a record of him doing.
And he says that this is not a criminal justice system issue, that it really is just a Trump behaving badly issue.
He says, labeling Trump's alleged conduct bribery or extortion cheapens what is alleged to have occurred and does not capture what makes it wrongful.
It's not a crime.
He invited a foreign nation to influence the 2020 presidential elections on the heels of a nearly three-year investigation.
Now, here's where it gets dicey for Democrats.
If what you are suggesting, Renato Mariotti, is that inviting foreign governments to affect the American election, is something deeply, deeply, deeply wrong, and I generally agree it is, then you do get into the Barack Obama saying to the Russians in the run-up to 2012 that he would have greater flexibility up to the election if they would back off a little bit.
That is obviously requesting official action from the Russians that would benefit Barack Obama electorally.
And as a vague rule, that sort of stuff does happen all the time.
Leaders, Democrat and Republican, look for foreign policy wins that they can get from their friends in the lead-up to an election.
That's fairly regular.
What's different here is that he's specifically asking for an investigation into a political rival.
But the investigation never took place and apparently wasn't even taken seriously by the Ukrainian president.
So take example, Philippe Raines, who is a long held to be sort of a hard-nosed, cutting, biting, brutal kind of hard-nosed political agent for Hillary Clinton.
He was Hillary Clinton's hatchet man for a long time.
He was on Fox News.
He said, well, your heads would explode if Hillary did anything like this.
There is no reason for Joe Biden's name to come up in that conversation once, twice, eight times.
Whether it's promising, threatening, quid pro quo, demanding, whatever it is, that is crossing the line.
And yes, there is a problem with that.
And let's just say for a moment Hillary Clinton had won and Donald Trump was challenging her again next year, and we were talking about Hillary Clinton talking to a foreign leader to help her find dirt on one of the Trump kids, your heads would be exploding.
Okay, there's only one problem, which is that she literally did that in 2016.
So she wasn't the president at the time, she literally, and the DNC, literally coordinated with the Ukrainian embassy to try and dig up dirt on Donald Trump.
Politico reported that in 2017.
We talked about it at extensive length last week, so if you missed last week's podcast, Hillary Clinton did do that.
And it wasn't criminal.
It was bad.
It wasn't criminal.
In the same way that Donald Trump requesting that Vladimir Putin release Hillary Clinton's emails was bad but not criminal.
Lots of stuff's been happening, folks.
That's bad but not criminal.
Jake Tapper did sort of the same thing.
And Jake's a good reporter, but he went after Steve Mnuchin.
He said, what if Democrats tried this sort of stuff?
For instance, President Obama had pressured a foreign leader, Putin, or the President of Ukraine, anyone, and said, I want you to look into Donald Trump Jr., or I want you to look into Eric Trump.
International businessmen, both of them.
Would you not find that inappropriate?
Again, I'm not going to speculate on that.
What I do find is inappropriate is the fact that Vice President Biden, at the time, son, did very significant business dealings in Ukraine.
I, for one, find that to be concerning.
And to me, that's the issue perhaps that should be further investigated.
Okay, so the Trump campaign is going to keep pressing in on the Hunter Biden thing.
Now, they are pursuing a strategy that you've seen Scott Adams, who's the Dilbert creator and sort of the Trump whisperer.
He suggested that Trump often does this and meshes himself in scandals where the headline that ends up being elevated from the scandal is actually deleterious to Democrats.
So the Trump-Russia stuff ended up elevating Hillary's email scandal, for example.
So he would say that this whole conversation ends up really hurting Joe Biden most.
And I think there is a lot of truth to that.
But to go back to the point that if Obama asked a foreign leader to investigate Donald Trump Jr., The allegation by Andy McCarthy and others in the Republican camp is that the Obama administration literally coordinated to try and raise dirt about Donald Trump and Russia in the middle of the 2016 election.
And that the entire Trump-Russia election conspiracy theory was being pumped by Hillary Clinton, funneled through Hillary Clinton's campaign and Fusion GPS to the FBI, who then, under the auspices of people like Loretta Lynch, investigated the thing.
And that is the allegation from the right.
So we don't have to speculate about the right's reaction.
It would be bad.
And the left's reaction is similarly bad.
And is any of it criminal?
Not really, but it does underscore how dirty things have gotten, generally speaking.
Now, who is the big beneficiary from all of this?
It isn't really Donald Trump, right?
Donald Trump is going to, there's going to be impeachment talk and Ukraine talk.
It's certainly not Joe Biden, who is now going to be dragged into the center of this kicking and screaming.
I mean, the man already doesn't know where he is, people.
He's already— Why are you taking me away from the early bird dinner at Denny's?
Where are we now?
Are we in Ukraine?
The person who's going to benefit from all of this is Elizabeth Warren, who does have the momentum.
Right now, there's a poll out from the Des Moines Register, CNN, and Mediacom, and it shows that Warren has pulled into a slight lead in Iowa.
According to that poll, She now holds a two percentage point lead with 22% of likely Democratic caucus goers saying she is their first choice for president.
This is her first lead.
Former VP Biden, who has led each of the register's three previous 2020 cycle polls, follows her at 20%.
Bernie Sanders has fallen to third place with 11%.
She's drawing a lot of support from Bernie.
This is why I've been saying for a while that this is going to get fun.
At some point, Bernie Sanders must open up his socialist guns on Elizabeth Warren and point out that she is wildly, wildly disingenuous.
The president of Seltzer and Company, which conducted the poll, said, This is a major, first major shakeup.
It's the first time we've had someone other than Joe Biden at the top of the leaderboard.
Pete Buttigieg follows the three leaders as the favorite of 9% of poll respondents.
He's really running for vice president at this point.
The race is far from settled.
Just one in five likely Democratic caucus goers say their minds are made up.
63% say they could still be persuaded to support a different candidate.
But there's no question that the momentum right now is with Elizabeth Warren.
If you look at the other state polls, So Joe Biden nationally has a pretty wide lead.
He still has a 10 point lead nationally.
He's at about 30% according to the RealClearPolitics poll average.
Elizabeth Warren is about 20%.
But if you look at Iowa, Warren has pulled into about a three point lead in the RealClearPolitics poll average.
And the latest polls from New Hampshire are still not particularly recent.
The latest polls from New Hampshire were taken September 6th to September 11th, so about two weeks ago before a lot of the surge.
And in that latest poll, Biden was up on Sanders just one and Warren just six.
So there is a good shot that by this point, the next poll will show that Warren is indeed up in New Hampshire as well, would be my prediction.
He's only up slightly in Nevada too.
It's South Carolina where Joe Biden really has his Has his advantage.
But if you look at the elections calendar, it may be too late for him by then, because they remember the Democrats in the aftermath of all the hubbub about about Bernie Sanders being jobbed during the presidential campaign in 2016.
They front loaded all of their caucuses.
You've got the Iowa caucus happening February 3rd, 2020, the New Hampshire, the New Hampshire primary happening on February 11th, 2020.
You have the Nevada presidential caucuses on Saturday.
Saturday, February 22nd.
And then you have South Carolina happening at the 29th.
So maybe, maybe if Joe Biden is lucky, if you're, if you're forecasting this, and again, we're months away, so a lot could happen.
You could have, you could have Elizabeth Warren win Iowa, win New Hampshire.
You could have Biden come back and win Nevada and South Carolina.
And then you get Super Tuesday and Super Tuesday I don't know that Biden has enough momentum to run away with things.
He probably wins the southern states.
He probably wins Alabama.
He wins Arkansas.
Elizabeth Warren probably wins California.
She probably wins Colorado.
She probably wins Maine.
She certainly wins Massachusetts.
She probably wins Minnesota.
She probably wins Oklahoma.
So it's going to be, it's going to be neck and neck.
I mean, Biden is really suffering.
And the fact is that as this story about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden takes the front pages over, that is going to be very bad because Elizabeth Warren's entire schtick, of course, is that this was the swamp.
Like now would be a great time for Elizabeth Warren to start attacking Joe Biden about that MBNA bank deal that Hunter Biden was part of.
Again, she's been anti the banking industry.
She's got the enthusiasm.
The media love her, love her.
So Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, by the way, who are also simultaneously campaigning over the weekend in the same place.
So they decided to go join the picket line alongside striking General Motors worker in Detroit.
Joe Biden went to a GM assembly plant in Kansas City, Kansas, because there's nothing that the American people like better than strikes.
The Democratic presidential candidates, according to the New York Times, have been chasing labor support all summer.
Now, as the UAW, one of the nation's largest unions, stages a strike that has drawn words of support from President Trump, Democrats are seizing the moment to align themselves with workers in public in dramatic ways.
Senator Elizabeth Warren walking the picket line.
Joe Biden doing it as well.
Bernie Sanders is planning to join striking workers in Detroit on Wednesday.
So they're all campaigning for the same workers and they're making the case.
I mean, Elizabeth Warren is stopping by to make the case that she is going to make a play for the white working class vote, which is really an area where she is lagging.
And she's got basically all of the college educated Democratic voters want to vote for Elizabeth Warren.
A lot of the white blue collar workers want to vote for Joe Biden.
And a lot of the black folks in the United States, black voters want to want to vote for Joe Biden.
She's trying to carve into that right now.
And she may be successful in doing that.
And I think that If Trump's goal with this Ukraine stuff was to tear down Joe Biden right now, which makes sense because he runs steadier against Elizabeth Warren than Joe Biden, he may achieve his goal whether or not the Democrats want it.
OK, meanwhile, Washington, D.C.
may be shut down by climate rebels.
Ooh, they're going to bring the city to a standstill.
Now, once again, do they have any actual program?
Of course not.
Of course not.
Their goal is just to suggest that if you don't That if you criticize them, you don't care about climate change.
Which is supremely irritating.
I mean, there are these climate change activists, these youth climate strikers.
Like, what are they striking from?
Going to school?
Guess what?
You weren't being paid to go to school.
You striking from your own education is a problem for you, but it's not particularly smart.
But again, we're going to pretend that this is all just an act of true bravery that changes the world.
Yada, yada, yada.
Anyway, they're out there striking from, again, you can't really strike from school because you're not paid to go to school.
The schools don't lose based on you not being there.
And in fact, many of the schools incentivized kids to come to this sort of thing, where they just spouted their emotions and were supposed to take seriously emotions if they come from 17-year-olds.
So here are some of the climate change activists admitting that they have a paralyzing fear of the future, which makes sense considering they are the freest, most prosperous young people in the history of humanity.
I am here to speak for the trees.
I'd like to acknowledge my privilege and my background.
I am here for the people who are suffering and dying because of our country's decisions.
And we are not here to talk about our sacrifices and our doom and gloom and nonexistence.
We are here to create!
We do not have time to be polite.
This is a revolution.
We are creating this movement every day because every day of inaction drives more action from us!
Holy.
Okay, so, um, first of all, if my child acts like that, they get a timeout.
When my five-year-old acts like this, she gets a time out.
Screaming into a microphone.
I don't even know what you want.
I don't even know what you want.
What do you want?
Okay, you want the earth to not be as warm.
What would you like us to do about this?
This is my big problem.
And Barack Obama, of course, incentivizes all this sort of nonsense because this is the kind of president he was as well.
Well, he tweeted out, One challenge will define the future for today's young generation more dramatically than any other.
Climate change.
The millions of young people worldwide who have organized and joined today's climate strike demand action to protect our planet, and they deserve it. - What do they deserve?
Demanding action.
Like, what does that mean?
My daughter demands action from me every morning, and I don't know what she wants if she just comes in and says, I demand action!
It's like, what do you want from me?
Would you like to get dressed?
Do you want me to get you some food?
Like, what are we talking about here?
And I'm sorry, but that is not political activism.
That's just you screaming at things.
See, the thing is, when you take a politically active stance, normally you have to have a program attached to it.
When I speak at the March for Life, I'm pretty sure I know what the March for Life folks want.
They want more legislation to stop abortion.
They would like to defund Planned Parenthood.
They have a specific program.
You gotta have a specific program, folks, if you want people to take you seriously.
But of course, none of these people have a specific program.
The whole goal here is to morally castigate people who point this out.
So you have Bill Nye, the supposed science guy, saying, well, you know, it's time for a change.
Listen, dude, just because you, like, did cool science experiments with baking soda back when I was 11 does not mean that you are proposing anything doable.
And that bow tie is getting old.
So are you.
Greetings everyone, Bill Nye here.
Thank you students for getting out there and calling attention to climate change and the big changes that we need to make to address it.
Now, we built this remarkable society with this remarkable infrastructure because of our use of fossil fuels.
And so to the fossil fuel industry, I say, thank you for your service.
But it's time to make big changes.
And the students are reminding us of that today.
We can do this, everybody!
We can change the world!
Okay, what is do this and change the world?
We can do it, yeah!
Yeah!
My favorite part is we built this entire beautiful, wonderful society where I get to wear bow ties on TV for money.
We built that on fossil fuels, so thanks for that.
Also, we're gonna just totally destroy that, and I have no program.
Well done, everyone.
You've changed the world today by saying nothing and just making people angrier for no apparent reason, when there should be at least an attempt, it seems to me, to come up with some sort of workable solution.
It is such a point of irritation when people do this sort of stuff.
Screaming at the moon doesn't get things done.
It just does not.
Okay, time for some things that I like and then some things that I hate.
So things that I like.
Carl Marlantes is a terrific novelist.
He wrote a book called Matterhorn about the Vietnam War and about what it was like to fight in the Vietnam War a few years back, and it is one of the finest books on the Vietnam War ever written.
It really is terrific.
He has a great new book called Deep River that hasn't gotten the sort of attention that it should have received about a Finnish family that moves over It's really a well-written book.
I really love Marlant's writing.
I think that he is a terrific, evocative writer.
He doesn't try to hide the ball in his writing.
His word choice is beautiful.
If you're into good novels, then Deep River is one that I would recommend.
Even though I disagree with some of the politics in it, it is well worth the read.
Go check it out.
Deep River by Karl Marlantis.
Okay, other things that I like.
I like that the comedic community is beginning to come around to the fact that cancel culture is going to clock them directly in the face.
So Sarah Silverman, who is as woke as it is possible to be, while still being a very, very white-slash-Jewish person, she says that the hostless shows that shows like the Emmys are really terrible because cancel culture is dumb.
Cut us off at the knees.
There isn't even a host anymore in these shows.
They don't want comedians to talk.
Did you offer to step in?
No, nobody wants to do it either.
I mean, it's thankless.
Absolutely correct.
And then, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel.
Get up on stage and, I mean, I can't believe, this is like the Pope and the Anti-Pope of leftism.
I guess there's like a papal schism in comedy right here.
Take your side.
Which one of these woke comedians would you prefer?
Both of them start mocking the hostless shows.
It's like, guys, you're part of the problem.
If you don't like the hostless shows, then maybe you shouldn't participate in the cancel culture that is involved in destroying people.
But I do like the fact that they're criticizing it at least.
Well, well, well.
How's the old no host thing going?
What a dumb idea.
What a joke.
So stupid.
You know what has a host?
Applebee's has a host.
Yeah.
They have food too.
We would have brought food.
Yeah.
And now you guys are gonna starve to death.
You know who the real victims are here?
It's us.
Hosting is the only thing we know how to do.
I'm sorry, but this show sucks.
Okay, and not only does it suck, I mean, they're trying to make a joke out of it and sort of play both sides of this joke, but the show did suck, the Emmys, and the ratings were down dramatically, because as it turns out, woke culture is garbage.
Woke-skulled culture is just the worst.
It's the worst.
Cancel culture is garbage.
And even the left in comedy is starting to look around going, okay, when are they coming for me?
First they came for everybody else, and I laughed, and I went along with it, and now they're coming for me.
Feeding the alligator only means that they get eaten last.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so Michelle Williams was on at the Emmys, where she was wearing a very, very expensive dress and winning an Emmy, as it turns out, and complaining about how she doesn't get paid enough.
She gets paid millions of dollars to be in pictures.
She's particularly complaining because when they reshot All the Money in the World, because they had to write Kevin Spacey out of history, and then they replaced him with Christopher Plummer and did a lot of the reshoot, She got paid like $1,000 for the reshoot, and Mark Wahlberg got paid like $1.5 million for the reshoot.
That's because he has a good agent and her agent is crap.
But instead of firing her agent, she decided to rail against the industry.
I want to say thank you so much to FX and to Fox 21 Studios for supporting me completely and for paying me equally.
Because they understood that when you put value into a person, it empowers that person to get in touch with their own inherent value.
And then where do they put that value?
They put it into their work.
And so the next time a woman, and especially a woman of color, because she stands to make 52 cents on the dollar compared to her white male counterpart, tells you what she needs in order to do her job, listen to her. - Okay, well, you know what Michelle Williams could do?
She could just give up her jobs to women of color.
Because it turns out that women of color can play like three quarters of the parts that she plays.
I don't see her giving that up.
Also, she should talk to her agent if she doesn't like what she got paid.
And I'm sorry, making Michelle Williams the face of pay inequality?
The woman's worth probably 20 million dollars.
No.
No.
And that statistic that she is citing, 52 cents on the dollar, is a crap statistic.
It has always been a crap statistic.
It doesn't adjust for number of hours worked, for job type, for educational level, for years in the workforce, for job level.
It doesn't adjust for any of that.
The fact that we are supposed to listen to lectures from Michelle Williams about equal pay Yeah.
Take it up.
Take it up with CAA.
Take it up with CAA.
Alrighty.
We'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content and all the updates you will ever need.
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