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Sept. 26, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

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Whistleblower Comes Up Empty | Ep. 869

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	The long-awaited whistleblower report is declassified and released, but does it help Democrats in their impeachment efforts?
	Plus, Trump fires back.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	The whistleblower report that was so scrutinized and examined and talked about in the past few days, finally it has been released to the public, a declassified version, which means very mild redactions, in the whistleblower report.
	Now, remember, this whistleblower report was basically the inception of the entire Ukraine scandal.
	So the whistleblower report was filed with the inspector general of the intelligence community by a member of the intelligence community back on September 9th.
	The Congress was notified about it on September 9th.
	On September 11th, President Trump restored aid to Ukraine.
	And the whistleblower report was seen as sort of the be-all end-all in terms of the beginning of the examination of President Trump's activities with regard to Ukraine.
	So as always, I want to recap in 30 seconds what exactly we are talking about, because this stuff gets very complex.
	In 2016, Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States, was presiding over the withholding of $1 billion in loan guarantees to Ukraine.
	He was doing so explicitly saying he wanted a certain prosecutor named Viktor Shokin fired in Ukraine because he was widely perceived to be corrupt.
	Now at the same time, Shokin was allegedly investigating a company on which on whose board Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden was sitting.
	There have been reports since that perhaps that investigation had already been basically put down and was no longer active.
	Nonetheless, this raised a lot of hackles and suspicions, especially in Trump world and with President Trump specifically.
	So President Trump then deployed Rudy Giuliani in the aftermath of the election to Ukraine to investigate what exactly went on with Hunter Biden and Joe Biden in Ukraine, among other issues, including his suspicion that the hack of the DNC may not have been Russian after all.
	That CrowdStrike, the company that was hired to examine Hillary Clinton's servers, was in fact a Ukrainian proxy company and all this, a bit of a conspiracy theory.
	Okay, so that was the lead up to July.
	In July, President Trump withdrew aid from Ukraine.
	He did not really explain why he was withdrawing aid from Ukraine.
	Everybody was sort of puzzled.
	A week later, he held a call with the president of Ukraine.
	The transcript of that call was the subject of yesterday's show and the subject of tremendous speculation and hubbub.
	Was President Trump pressuring Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden by withholding military aid from them in a time when they are effectively at war with Russian proxy groups in Ukraine?
	Was he withholding the sort of aid necessary to protect the people of Ukraine in order to advance his own domestic political agenda?
	That was the accusation.
	The transcripts came out yesterday, and the transcript basically showed that while President Trump was having conversations with Ukraine about aid, he was also having conversations about ways that he thought that Ukraine could clean up its corrupt act, what kind of cases were being investigated.
	There was no clear quid pro quo, but if you were inclined to believe that Trump was pushing a quid pro quo, then the transcript certainly does not disabuse you of that notion.
	On the other hand, if you think that the transcript definitely proves that Trump was in fact pressuring Ukraine specifically to investigate Joe Biden using American taxpayer dollars as the lever, well, that is not exactly proved by the transcript either.
	The member of the intelligence community got wind, second-hand, of this phone call, and then he reported it up the ladder to the Inspector General of the intelligence community, who proceeded to report the existence of this whistleblower report to Congress.
	Well, this led the Congress to say, OK, hand over the whistleblower report.
	So the Trump administration originally said, OK, well, here's the transcript.
	We'll just give you the transcript.
	But we won't give you the whistleblower report, which led people to think, OK, well, what's in the whistleblower report?
	They don't want you to see.
	Well, now the Trump administration has turned over the whistleblower report and has declassified the whistleblower report.
	So now we know what's in there.
	And as it turns out, the Democrats Who are sort of counting on as late as yesterday, we're counting on the whistleblower report going way above and beyond what the transcript said.
	If they believe the transcript was not enough for impeachment, maybe the whistleblower report would point them in the right direction or would be the other shoe to drop.
	Well, it turns out none of that is true.
	It turns out that the whistleblower report is effectively a lot of hearsay.
	The whistleblower report is secondhand reported by somebody in the intelligence community.
	It mentions a few different issues, none of which are nearly as sort of suspicious as even the transcript of the original telephone call.
	In fact, the whistleblower report seems to be milder in many ways and less harmful to the Trump administration, to President Trump personally, than the actual transcript of the phone call that the Trump administration released yesterday.
	So now we have a copy of the whistleblower complaint, this much-ballyhooed whistleblower complaint.
	And the Republicans had been urging its public release.
	Democrats actually seem to be a little bit less interested in public release.
	And now we see why.
	Because the whistleblower report, it turns out, kind of a nothing burger.
	Kind of.
	Only because we already have the transcript.
	We know what Trump said.
	So this looks like a summary of a document that we already have.
	Right, we now have more information at our disposal because the transcript has been made available than the whistleblowers did when he wrote the report.
	So the whistleblower report reads very speculatively.
	Whereas the transcript is the transcript, and we went through it word-for-word yesterday on the podcast and the radio show.
	You can go back and listen to those if you want, like a word-for-word analysis of what exactly went down.
	My read on that transcript of the phone call is that Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, clearly was attempting to broker some sort of deal to restore military aid, and President Trump was talking in a completely different direction.
	Which, again, is not unique to conversations with President Trump.
	He does this a lot.
	You're talking to him about X, and he's talking to you about Y, and he does not listen, and so there's no actual meeting of the minds in the middle of the conversation, and that appears to be the case in that conversation, like many of the conversations in which Trump engages.
	Well, now we have the whistleblower complaint, and we're gonna go through it for you, because information first here on the show, and then we'll get to opinion.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	Okay, so now to the actual text of the whistleblower complaint, because we're gonna provide you all the information.
	You're an adult.
	You can make your own decisions on what you think the information means, but I'm gonna provide you the information.
	I'll give you some analysis along the way.
	So here is the whistleblower report.
	Dear Chairman Burr and Chairman Schiff, I am reporting an urgent concern in accordance with the procedures outlined in 50 U.S.
	Code 3033.
	This letter is unclassified when separated from the attachment.
	In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S.
	government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S.
	election.
	This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President's main domestic political rivals.
	The president's personal lawyer, Mr. Rudy Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort.
	Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.
	Now again, because this is based on secondhand information, it now appears that Attorney General Barr was not really involved in this particular investigation.
	The reason, presumably, that the whistleblower is saying this is because he had a second-hand report that Trump mentioned Attorney General Barr and Rudy Giuliani in his conversation with Zelensky, but as we now know, Barr really had nothing to do with anything.
	That's just Trump mouthing off, because the way Trump thinks, the way his brain works, is he goes, Giuliani's my lawyer.
	You know who else is my lawyer?
	William Barr.
	You should talk to both of them.
	Well, one of them's the Attorney General.
	One of them is Trump's personal attorney.
	Their missions do not match.
	So remember, the whistleblower knows less.
	This is very important.
	The whistleblower knew less when writing this complaint than you and I now know about what happened in that conversation with Zelensky.
	Because you and I have gone through the transcript of the conversation.
	The whistleblower had no access to that transcript, and so was operating off second-hand sources.
	So what's more important, the primary or the secondary sources?
	Obviously the answer is the primary sources.
	Okay, so there are a few wrinkles here that will add some fire to the Democratic investigation, a little bit, at least give them some areas where they can push in the investigation.
	So the whistleblower complaint says, over the past four months, more than a half a dozen U.S.
	officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort.
	The information provided herein was relayed to me in the course of official interagency business.
	It is routine for U.S.
	officials with responsibility for a particular regional or functional portfolio to share such information with one another in order to inform policymaking and analysis.
	In other words, this guy's saying, I'm not a political hack out there to get Trump.
	People are just sort of coming to me with all the information.
	That's important because Trump has suggested that this whistleblower is in fact a political hack who favors Joe Biden.
	And the inspector general himself said that there may be political bias at work here.
	And by the way, important to note here, the whistleblower himself wants to be able to testify in front of Congress, but his lawyers, according to the New York Times, are saying that he hopes to remain anonymous.
	Good luck with that.
	Good luck with that.
	You've just put forth one of the most bombshell political documents in modern political history that could lead to the impeachment of the President of the United States for the third time in American history, and you want to remain anonymous?
	Good luck.
	Good luck, dude.
	He says, I was not, I mean this is on page one, the whistleblower, I was not a direct witness to most of the events described.
	However, I found my colleague's accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another.
	In addition, a variety of information consistent with these private accounts has been reported publicly.
	So again, he knows less than you do.
	When he writes this report, he doesn't know as much about the transcript.
	You know more.
	You've heard it.
	You've read it.
	He says, I am deeply concerned that the actions described below constitute a serious or flagrant problem, abuse or violation of law or executive order that does not include differences of opinions concerning public policy matters consistent with the definition of an urgent concern under the law.
	I am therefore fulfilling my duty to report this information through proper legal channels to the relevant authorities.
	Now, this is the right thing to do.
	I mean, it is.
	If you're suspicious that something is going on, reporting it up the chain is the right thing to do.
	Leaking it to the media would be the wrong thing to do.
	There is something to the notion that there are members of the intelligence community who despise Trump and have been consistently leaking material that would supposedly damage him for the past three years, going all the way back to the campaign, but moving forward through the investigation of Trump-Russia ties.
	And there is a belief that the intelligence community basically that maybe this whistleblower far from being super duper honest as we have been told by people including Joseph Maguire who is the president's own appointee as acting director of national intelligence maybe the whistleblower really doesn't like Trump and the whistleblower is seeking to as as they say who the president and do that because He has access to information.
	However that works, he didn't do the wrong thing by leaking it to the press, right?
	You gotta give him credit for that, right?
	He did report it up the chain.
	He used common sense protocols.
	He did everything by the book.
	And for all the people who are out there like, well, this is just like Edward Snowden said it would be.
	If you reported up the chain, nothing happens.
	Actually, if you reported up the chain, as opposed to, you know, running to Russia like Edward Snowden did, you know what happens?
	This, like an impeachment inquiry.
	Anyway, he says, I'm also concerned that these actions pose risks to U.S.
	national security and undermine the U.S.
	government's efforts to deter and counter foreign interference in U.S.
	elections.
	To the best of my knowledge, the entirety of the statement is unclassified.
	Okay, now he gets to the meat of the matter.
	So he says, the July 25th presidential phone call.
	Now, here's the thing.
	Again, we've read the transcript.
	So we can analyze how true to form this whistleblower's complaints are against the content of the transcript itself.
	He says, early in the morning of 25th of July, the president spoke by telephone with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.
	I do not know which side initiated the call.
	This was the first publicly acknowledged call between the two leaders since a brief congratulatory call after Zelensky won the presidency on April 21st.
	Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the president used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests.
	Namely, he sought to pressure the Ukrainian leader to take actions to help the president's 2020 re-election bid.
	Now that's interpretation.
	It is.
	The Biden part probably is designed to advance his personal interests, you could say.
	It is also possible the president was just listing off stuff he thought was corrupt in Ukraine.
	Which is also how the president's mind works.
	You don't know.
	You can be suspicious, but again, if you're going to impeach, you need more than just you're suspicious.
	According to the White House officials who had direct knowledge of the call, the president pressured Mr. Zelensky to enter Aliyah, initiate or continue an investigation into the activities of former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son Hunter, assist in purportedly uncovering allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S.
	presidential election actually originated in Ukraine, with a specific request that the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the DNC and examined by the U.S.
	cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which initially reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC's networks in 2016, and meet or speak with two people the president named explicitly as his personal envoys on these matters, Giuliani and Barr, to whom the president referred multiple times in tandem.
	Okay, so, couple of things.
	One, it is important to distinguish between these various requests.
	So, to start, the whistleblower's complaint, at least factually, I'm not saying his interpretation, but factually this is accurate, right?
	We've read the transcript, this is a fair representation of the phone call, although it is adding a patina of opinion, which is that Trump pressured Zelensky, as opposed to Trump requested that Zelensky do X and didn't overtly connect it to military aid.
	Also, The question is whether Trump is requesting this stuff because it helps Trump, or because it is in the interest of the United States to find out what exactly happened with things like CrowdStrike, at least in Trump's mind.
	Okay.
	The President also praised Ukraine's Prosecutor General, Mr. Yuri Lutsenko, and suggested that Zelensky might want to keep him in his position.
	Note, starting in March 2019, Mr. Lutsenko made a series of public allegations, many of which he later walked back, about the Biden family's activities in Ukraine.
	Ukrainian officials purported involvement in the 2016 U.S.
	election and the activities of the U.S.
	embassy in Kiev.
	The White House officials who told me this information, says the whistleblower, were deeply disturbed by what had transpired in the phone call.
	They told me there was already a discussion ongoing with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood, in the officials' retelling, that they had witnessed the president abuse his office for personal gain.
	Now, this is weird, okay?
	This is the part of the complaint that I frankly do not understand so much.
	People are treating it as a bombshell that Trump, quote-unquote, hid the conversation.
	The president has the power of classification and declassification.
	Normally, transcripts of foreign leaders are not revealed to anyone because that does violate the president's unitary power of the executive plenary power over foreign policy.
	Trump actually violated presidential principle in releasing the transcript.
	He would have been fully within his rights, really, to say, I'm not releasing the transcript because, hey, I'm the president of the United States.
	None of your beeswax.
	So the complaint seems to be that the White House officials sort of hid it within particular executive channels where they wouldn't normally hide it, maybe out of fear that it would be leaked by unflattering members of the intelligence community.
	Were such fears truly Unbased?
	Considering that the intelligence community then took second-hand accounts of those conversations and spun it into a whistleblower report?
	It doesn't seem to me like those suspicions are wildly off the mark.
	Now, does that mean that Trump didn't engage in underlying activity that's bad?
	No.
	Does it mean that we still need more answers about the underlying activity and whether Trump was in fact utilizing taxpayer dollars to benefit himself?
	Yeah, we do need more information about that, but the specific complaint, which is that Trump took this conversation and then sort of hid it in a safe somewhere, He's the president.
	That's within his power.
	I'm kind of confused as to why that would be, in and of itself, a violation.
	He could have ordered the transcript of the conversation fully destroyed, and that would have been within his power.
	They're classified.
	He didn't have to declassify them.
	He did.
	He turned them over.
	In just a second, we'll get to the rest of the whistleblower report and then we'll get to the big hearing that is happening today with Joseph Maguire, who's the acting head of the National Intelligence Services.
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	Okay, so the whistleblower complaint continues.
	They say the Ukrainian side was the first to publicly acknowledge the phone call.
	On the evening of July 25th, a readout was posted on the website of the Ukrainian president that contained the following line.
	It's translated.
	Donald Trump expressed his conviction that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve Ukraine's image and complete the investigation of corruption cases that have held back cooperation between Ukraine and the United States.
	Now, I'm not sure why that's super suspicious.
	The Obama administration pressured Ukraine to investigate Paul Manafort.
	That was legitimate.
	Paul Manafort was a suspicious character.
	So, that in and of itself should not raise the hackles of the whistleblower in the absence of this other information.
	Now, what the whistleblower report does do is set the predicate for further investigation, meaning he's saying there are a bunch of people who know about this stuff and you should go ask them questions.
	The whistleblower says, based on my understanding, there are approximately a dozen White House officials who listened to the call, a mixture of policy officials and duty officers in the White House Situation Room, as is customary.
	The officials I spoke with told me that participation in the call had not been restricted in advance because everyone expected it would be a routine call with a foreign leader.
	Which again goes to President Trump's tweet saying, it was a routine call with a foreign leader.
	You think I'd be stupid enough to offer a quid pro quo in front of 20 witnesses?
	And then he names some names.
	He says that a State Department official, a guy named T. Ulrich Breckbuhl, listened in on the call.
	He said, I was not the only non-White House official to receive a readout of the call.
	Multiple State Department and Intel community officials were also briefed on the contents of the call.
	Okay, that is section one of the whistleblower report.
	Then, he says there were efforts to restrict access to records related to the call.
	He said, I learned from multiple U.S.
	officials that senior White House officials had intervened to, quote-unquote, lock down all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript.
	Now, this is sort of a moot point because, again, the White House just spilled it out there.
	Trump just said, OK, boom, enjoy.
	So it's kind of like it's hard to call it a cover-up when it's now available to you and to me and to everybody.
	And then there is Section 3 ongoing concerns.
	So the idea here is that members of the Ukrainian government basically believed that they had to pursue investigations beneficial to Trump in order to get aid.
	Now, their perception is not necessarily the reality that Trump pressured.
	Meaning that we may have a he said he said situation here in which the Ukrainian government believed that Trump wanted a quid pro quo and Trump didn't actually want a quid pro quo.
	That is quite plausible.
	And when you read that Zelensky conversation, you kind of get that impression.
	Zelensky is there going, what can I do for you, Mr. President?
	What do I have to do to get military aid?
	And Trump's like, you know, there's like a bunch of things that I think you should do just generally.
	And then Zelensky is like, so I get military aid?
	And Trump's like, you know who's awesome?
	Giuliani.
	Like that's how the transcript reads.
	But this whistleblower says, I learned from multiple U.S.
	officials that on or about August 2nd, Giuliani reportedly traveled to Madrid to meet with one of President Zelensky's advisors.
	U.S.
	officials characterized this meeting, not reported publicly at the time, as a direct follow up to the president's call with Mr. Zelensky about the cases they had discussed.
	Again.
	It is not a violation of law for Giuliani to meet with members of the Ukrainian government to gather information relevant, yes, to the 2020 campaign.
	It is a violation of law if the president is withholding military aid based on the unwillingness of Ukraine to do so.
	The whistleblower complaint says, on July 26th, the day after the call, the U.S.
	Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker visited Kiev and met with Zelensky and a variety of Ukrainian political figures.
	Ambassador Volker was accompanied in his meetings by U.S.
	Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.
	Based on multiple readouts of these meetings recounted to me by various U.S.
	officials, Ambassadors Volker and Sondland reportedly provided advice to the Ukrainian leadership about how to navigate the demands the President had made of Zelensky.
	Okay, again, this does not go to quid pro quo.
	Maybe he made the demands, and the demands were broader than merely the things he brought up.
	And the Obama administration made a bunch of anti-corruption demands.
	Joe Biden made specific anti-corruption demands of the Ukraine.
	Fire this prosecutor or you don't get aid.
	The question is whether this was done to benefit Trump politically, and whether it was done to target his domestic political opponents.
	And then the rest of the whistleblower complaint is basically just a bunch of reports on public recorded stuff.
	I mean, it's a bunch of references to articles from Bloomberg and Fox News and The Hill, talking about how various characters did various things.
	I mean, literally, he's just recounting stories from the New York Times.
	And he's saying, these stories make me suspicious.
	Okay, so, he floats this thing up the chain, and after floating this thing up, there's about one paragraph here, maybe two paragraphs that are redacted in the appendix.
	And, you know, there's really not too much else here.
	I'm kind of stunned that there's not much more than this.
	And you can see the media playing it up, like, that the big story here is that Trump urged that the transcript be locked down, but the transcript's now available to everybody.
	So again, this is sort of like when there were big stories about how Trump was going to fire Mueller, and then he never fired Mueller.
	How Trump was engaged in a cover-up, and then there was not really a cover-up.
	There are a few other details in the complaint, right?
	right.
	He says, I learned from U.S. officials that on or around May 14th, the president instructed Vice President Pence to cancel his planned trip to Ukraine to attend Zelensky's inauguration.
	Rick Perry led the delegation instead.
	According to officials, it was made clear to them the president did not want to meet with Zelensky until he saw how Zelensky chose to act in office.
	Okay, again, this is all vague.
	This is all incredibly, incredibly vague.
	And then there is the Inspector General letter, which conveys this to Congress and says, I find this at least urgent, and you should take a look at it.
	And that is where things stood.
	And then the Office of the Director of National Intelligence They said, well, this doesn't really raise to the level of urgent since it has nothing to do with the intelligence community.
	So we don't have to convey this over and that's what started off this whole firestorm.
	Now in a second, I want to get to the Ukrainian perception versus the Trumpian perception and the big hearing that's happening today with Joseph Maguire, the acting director of National Intelligence.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so.
	There was a story that came out today talking about how an advisor to Ukraine suggested that Biden was key to all of this.
	His name is Sergey Leshenko, and he told ABC News that after Zelensky's election, they wanted to speak with Trump.
	But there's ABC News.
	This issue was raised many times.
	discussion with american officials ukrainian officials came to recognize a precondition to any executive correspondence the advisor said it was clear that president trump will only have communications if they will discuss the biden case said sergey lishenko an anti-corruption advocate and former member of ukraine's parliament who know who now acts as an advisor to zelensky this issue was raised many times i know that ukrainian officials understood lishenko also talked about rudy juliani's push for a biden investigation and said he believes
	then prosecutor general luri litsenko invented the investigations that juliani pushed as part of an effort to keep Okay, so was Ukraine trying to make guarantees to Trump to get aid?
	Or was Trump trying to push Ukraine?
	Or is it possible that Ukraine was taking away from all the conversations that Trump wanted a quid pro quo but Trump never actually asked for a quid pro quo?
	There's one dot that has to be connected here and nobody has connected it.
	The whistleblower report doesn't do it.
	There's a lot of speculation here.
	So basically, where things currently stand is that unless the Democrats can uncover somebody who can say, just without a doubt, that President Trump informed me he is withholding aid to Ukraine unless the Ukrainians investigate his chief political rival Joe Biden.
	Not just Trump is withholding aid from Ukraine until they fix up their corruption problems or investigate a myriad of topics.
	Or even investigate the 2016 election, which is relevant to the United States broadly, not just with regard to Trump.
	It has to be with regard to Biden.
	So there's a very specific thing that has to be fulfilled in order for a quid pro quo to have happened and impeachment to really be justified.
	Without that, there's just not enough.
	There's just not enough.
	Now, the Washington Post got a report wrong yesterday, apparently.
	And this is one of the problems here, is there was all this smoke before any of this had been revealed.
	Trump mentioning Biden eight times on a phone call according to the transcript.
	He mentioned him three times.
	Talk about Trump openly engaging in a promise with the Ukrainians.
	No such promise is made.
	Right?
	All of that.
	All that media overreach cuts in Trump's favor.
	There was another one of these stories yesterday.
	The Washington Post reported that the acting director of national intelligence threatened to resign over concerns that the White House might attempt to force him to stonewall Congress in his testimony.
	The official said that Joseph Maguire warned the White House he was not willing to withhold information from Congress, where he is scheduled to testify in open and closed hearings on Thursday.
	But Maguire denies this.
	He issued a statement.
	He said, At no time have I considered resigning my position since assuming this role on August 16, 2019.
	I have never quit anything in my life.
	I'm not going to start now.
	I am committed to leading the intelligence community to address the diverse and complex threats facing our nation.
	The White House also said, This is actually not true.
	The Washington Post says they stand by their story.
	Okay, so with that controversy brewing and with the credibility of the media always in a significant amount of question, Joseph McGuire appears before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday.
	And McGuire, I think rightly, says that he did not deem the complaint as urgent under the definition of legal statute.
	But when President Trump says this was just a partisan hack job, he says, no, you know, I have no evidence of that.
	The Whistleblower Act did in good faith.
	I want to stress that I believe that the whistleblower and the Inspector General have acted in good faith throughout.
	out.
	I have every reason to believe that they have done everything by the book and followed the law.
	Respecting the privileged nature of the information and patiently waiting while the executive privilege issues were resolved.
	Okay, so that is, I mean, he's basically saying we followed procedures, right?
	And the procedures were followed, and that's fine.
	Now we see the interpretations.
	So, in a second, we'll get to the Democratic interpretation, and then we'll get to the Republican interpretation of all of these events, and where exactly we are, where exactly things stand, because President Trump Is really going to war.
	We'll get to all of that in just one moment.
	First, let's talk about the difficulty of creating healthy habits.
	So, it is very difficult to change your lifestyle.
	It's very difficult to change it.
	Diet, it sounds like a quick fix and then you end up on a diet for like three weeks and you feel good and then you get bored and you stop doing it.
	Or you go to the gym and you're like, oh, it's the new year, I'm going to the gym, I'm gonna stay in shape this year.
	And three weeks later, you're sitting on your couch eating potato chips while watching TV.
	Well, the fact is, you do need to change your habits.
	Wouldn't it be great if there were an app that helped you change those habits?
	Good news, there is.
	It's called Noom, and it really is fantastic.
	I've been using it myself to get in better... Listen, I was already in good shape, but to get in magnificent, godlike, Apollo-esque shape.
	Specific goals are achievable with Noom.
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	Noom changes habits.
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	OK, so.
	President Trump is fighting back today.
	So President Trump went on Twitter and in all capital letters, which means that he is very serious.
	He tweeted out, the Democrats are trying to destroy the Republican Party and all that it stands for.
	Stick together, play their game and fight hard, Republicans.
	Our country is at stake.
	OK, and then he the press secretary gave a statement today about the declassified whistleblower report saying nothing has changed with the release of this complaint, which is nothing more than a collection of third hand accounts of events and cobbled together press clippings, all of which show nothing improper.
	The president took the extraordinary and transparent step of releasing the full unredacted declassified transcript of his call with President Zelensky, which forms the heart of the complaint, as well as the complaint itself.
	That's because he has nothing to hide.
	The White House will continue to push back on the hysteria.
	And that is fair, right?
	Remember, I've been saying for this entire week that basically there are three cases that could be put forth for impeachment and two of them are insufficient.
	One is that the case could be that Trump is covering things up.
	There's no evidence of a cover-up.
	None.
	He's now revealed everything.
	So where's the cover-up?
	Two, would be that the transcript itself, the mere attempt to garner information from the Ukrainians amounted to some sort of campaign finance violation.
	That is very, very weak sauce.
	Hillary Clinton worked with the Ukrainians back in 2016 to gather information on Trump.
	The Obama administration pressured the Ukrainians to prosecute Paul Manafort, basically.
	And then there's three, which is the quid pro quo, and that has yet to be proved.
	In a second, we're going to get to how we are now watching the same set of facts in two completely different worlds of interpretation.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, you have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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	Okay, now to the two narratives that are coming out of the various camps.
	So, you got the Democratic narrative, and this is the one being pushed by Adam Schiff, who, again, has very, very little credibility.
	This is a person who was so far out over his skis, he was no longer connected with them during the Trump-Russia hearings.
	And he was out there every day on CNN.
	He had set up a pup tent outside the Green Room at CNN.
	I mean, he was living on the streets of San Francisco.
	I mean, like he really was like living on the street outside the CNN headquarters so that he could be there at a moment's notice.
	He spent more time in the CNN green room than he did in Congress.
	And pretty much everything he said turned out not to be true.
	Well, now he is suggesting that everything he is now saying is true.
	Right.
	This is clear, convincing evidence.
	So here is Adam Schiff getting out over his skis again, suggesting that we now have graphic evidence the president betrayed his oath of office.
	Yesterday, we were presented with the most graphic evidence yet that the president of the United States has betrayed his oath of office.
	Betrayed his oath to defend our national security and betrayed his oath to defend our constitution.
	For yesterday, we were presented with a record of a call between the President of the United States and the President of Ukraine, in which the President, our President, sacrificed our national security and our Constitution Okay, so, again, that is the part that has not actually yet been proved.
	Right, he says that he sacrificed our national security and our constitution for his personal political benefit is a conclusion driven from a read of the transcript alone.
	They haven't connected that dot.
	Okay, the transcript does not have an explicit quid pro quo.
	Now, as I said yesterday, there is a plausible read of it in which it's Trump pressuring Ukraine.
	There's also a plausible read of it in which it's Trump not pressuring Ukraine.
	But at no point does Trump say anywhere in the document, by the way, if you do X, Y, and Z, military aid's back on the table.
	Like, he doesn't say that anywhere in the conversation.
	That's not a thing that happens.
	And this has led to the Republican interpretation, which is Devin Nunes saying, Devin Nunes, the Republican from California and President Trump's favorite Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, he accused Democrats of trying to obtain every possible thing about Donald Trump.
	And he put this into the context of Democrats digging deep on the Steele dossier and Trump-Russia.
	He basically says, listen, you guys have had I'm trying to find a clean way to say this.
	You guys have had a very strong desire to get President Trump impeached since the very beginning, and now this is just the latest iteration of a story we've already seen before.
	Ukrainian official Sergei Lashchenko was a source for Nellie Orr, wife of Department of Justice official Bruce Orr, as she worked on the anti-Trump operation conducted by Fusion GPS and funded by the Democrats.
	And of course, Democrats on this very committee negotiated with people who they thought were Ukrainians in order to obtain nude pictures of Trump.
	Okay, I believe that that is a reference to a prank phone call that Adam Schiff was engaged in.
	So, Nunes is basically saying, listen, you guys have been going after Trump since the beginning, and you got nothing, and you still got nothing.
	So those are the two competing strains over all of this.
	Now, the Democrats do have a bit of a pickle on their hands, and that is that a majority of the House does now support the impeachment inquiry.
	That was going to be obvious as soon as Nancy Pelosi endorsed this thing.
	As soon as Nancy Pelosi endorsed this thing, it was pretty obvious that impeachment was going to happen.
	If you had to put your money down, you say that impeachment happens in the House and nothing happens in the Senate.
	Why?
	Well, Nancy Pelosi cannot afford to announce an impeachment inquiry and then say, oh, by the way, we're not impeaching him.
	I mean, that is going to be a very rough Move for her.
	If she puts impeachment on the table and then says, well, we couldn't come up with anything, so I guess he's okay.
	Okay, that is not a thing that's going to happen.
	Once she says the I word, it's now happening.
	Democrats are going to vote to impeach Trump.
	It's a foregone conclusion.
	The question is whether that is justified and whether Republicans in the Senate will join or whether anything in the House will join except for Justin Amash, who now considers himself an independent.
	The problem is that there's not a lot of suggestion that in the polling data that Americans actually want impeachment.
	There's an article from the New York Times saying for many Democratic voters around the country, the prospect of an explosive impeachment battle in Washington left them nervous.
	Republicans were mostly unmoved.
	So there's not a lot of public approval for impeachment at this point.
	There's not a lot of poll data on impeachment, but there's a story yesterday, it was a new poll, it said the majority of Americans were against the impeachment and removal of President Trump.
	That was from Quinnipiac University.
	4% of Republicans and 73% of Democrats support impeachment.
	However, overall, the majority of Americans do not support impeachment.
	The overall numbers, 57% no, 37% yes.
	Now of course Democrats want Trump impeached because they're Democrats.
	But overall, this is not a winning issue for Democrats, especially if they don't have a smoking gun.
	So, Democrats are really running a bit of a risky game here.
	Now, what they feel is like, okay, fine, so people don't support impeachment, so we impeach, what's the big deal?
	He doesn't get removed from office, and then Elizabeth Warren runs on the basis of him being corrupt and wins.
	So they're banking on Trump having an underlying popularity problem in a way that Bill Clinton did not.
	Bill Clinton was a pretty popular president until the impeachment hearings began.
	He was less popular afterward, but still pretty popular, and his popularity actually increased as the impeachment hearings went on, and as Democrats successfully, if falsely, argued that the whole thing was about sex.
	But Trump, they feel, is not Clinton.
	Trump does not have anything like the underlying approval ratings that Bill Clinton did.
	And so what you're starting to see is the Democrats make excuses for why they're going to impeach Trump even without a quid pro quo.
	They're shifting the standard pretty dramatically here.
	So, top House Democrats, for example, put out a statement saying no quid pro quo is required to betray our country.
	It's a statement from Schiff, Gerald Nadler, Elijah Cummings, and Elliot Engel.
	They called the transcript an unambiguous, damning, shocking abuse of the office of the presidency for personal political gain.
	Again, it's hard to say that Barack Obama in 2012 pledged the Russians flexibility in relation to the upcoming election.
	That was bad.
	Was it impeachable?
	Probably not, because maybe Obama wanted flexibility for the Russians from a sort of defensive standpoint, because he thought it'd be good for the country.
	Personal political benefit and the country's interests are not necessarily completely, completely separate is the problem.
	The statement continued, let us be clear, no quid pro quo is required to betray our country.
	Trump asked a foreign government to interfere in our elections.
	That is betrayal enough.
	Again, pretty solid info, according to John Solomon of The Hill, that the Obama administration was pressuring the Ukrainians to investigate Paul Manafort, who ended up being Trump's campaign manager.
	Plus, Hillary Clinton was working with the Ukrainians to gather dirt on Trump and Manafort.
	Nonetheless, you're seeing the Democrats shift their standard because they know that they now have to impeach, they've gone too far not to impeach, and they don't have the goods.
	So instead, they're shifting the standard.
	So you got Neal Katyal, the acting Solicitor General in the Obama administration, has a piece in the New York Times today called, Trump doesn't need to commit a crime to be kicked out of office.
	So this went from Trump definitely committed a crime, to what he did is bad but not criminal, to It doesn't have to be criminal at all.
	We can impeach him for any reason whatsoever.
	Katyal says, the potential criminality of the president's conduct is not the full picture.
	Our founders deliberately drafted the Constitution's impeachment clause to ensure the potential grounds for impeachment would cover more than criminal activity.
	He says, this is brazen conduct.
	It took place the day after Robert Mueller testified in Congress, perhaps when Trump felt liberated from the shadow of the Russia investigation.
	He says to make matters worse, before the call record of that conversation was released on Wednesday, Trump pointed to it as exculpatory evidence, which makes you wonder what will be revealed about other calls or contacts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
	But the bottom line is this, Democrats are now shifting the goalposts.
	The goalposts have now moved.
	AOC.
	is making accusations that she can't back up, right?
	AOC was on Chris Cuomo's show, not Fredo's show on CNN, and she says, without evidence, that Trump was actively withholding aid in order to achieve personal political benefit.
	That is the dot that has not yet been connected.
	What we are talking about here is the president essentially participating in what looks like a series of events that looks like extortion, withholding aid to an ally, and then quote-unquote asking for a favor to essentially benefit yourself politically, not in the interest of the United States of America, but in the interest of your own re-election.
	Okay, so the Democrats are shifting the standard.
	Now, President Trump is responding in a couple of ways.
	First of all, he did a press conference with the Ukrainian President Zelensky.
	Zelensky came out and said there was no pressure.
	That's a pretty strong talking point for Trump, because if Zelensky says there was pressure, then Trump, at the very least, has a problem.
	Zelensky says there was no pressure.
	Now, to be fair, Zelensky's trying to get military aid from Trump still, so if you are a Democrat, you're saying, of course he says that!
	He's in the room with Trump!
	What else is he gonna say?
	Here's Zelensky, though, saying there was no pressure.
	President Zelensky, have you felt any pressure from President Trump to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden?
	I think you read everything.
	So I think you read text.
	We had, I think, good phone call.
	It was normal.
	We spoke about many things.
	So I think, and you read it, that nobody pushed me.
	Yes.
	In other words, no pressure.
	Okay, and there's Trump filling in the gap.
	You can see Trump is super irritated by all of this, obviously.
	He doesn't think that he pressured the Ukrainians for this stuff, at the very least.
	When Trump then came out yesterday, he said, I fully support transparency.
	Which, by the way, again, he has now revealed two documents he did not have to reveal.
	The whistleblower memo and the full transcript of the call.
	We were going to do this anyway, but I've informed them, all of the House members, that I fully support transparency on the so-called Whistleblower information, even though it was supposedly secondhand information, which is sort of interesting.
	And other things have come out about the whistleblower that are also maybe even more interesting.
	But also insist on transparency from Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, on the millions of dollars that have been quickly and easily taken out of Ukraine and China.
	By the way, Joe Biden is hardest hit in all of this.
	Trump will likely survive this entire attempt.
	Joe Biden will not.
	His candidacy is basically over.
	He was asked yesterday while leaving a car about Hunter Biden.
	There are new allegations, by the way, that other members of Biden's family routinely try to take advantage.
	of the fact that they are related to Biden to get special benefits.
	There's a I think it's his brother who was trying to join a company having to with cancer research, who was promising members of the company that Biden's cancer moonshot would go to fund that research.
	Anyway, here's Biden walking away from a car while not answering any questions about the Hunter Biden stuff.
	Mr. Biden, Mr. Biden, can you can you respond to criticism that you and your son should not been working in Ukraine at the same time?
	You just keep on walking.
	Keep on walking.
	Meanwhile, President Trump says, listen, there was no quid pro quo.
	You know, whatever you guys say, there was no quid pro quo.
	He said this yesterday from the UN.
	I didn't do it.
	You take a look at that call.
	It was perfect.
	I didn't do it.
	There was no quid pro quo.
	But there was with Biden and there was with these senators.
	And they threatened.
	They said, you do this, you do that.
	We're not going to give you votes.
	That's that's the real deal.
	Okay, now what he's saying there is actually true.
	So it is true that back in May, there were several Democratic senators, including Bob Menendez of New Jersey, and I believe Dick Durbin, who wrote a letter openly saying that if Ukraine didn't investigate the Manafort-Trump connection, and connections that Trump may have had with Ukraine and Russia, that if they didn't do that, that maybe they would withhold aid from Ukraine.
	So Mark Thiessen reported on this yesterday in the Washington Post.
	So what he's saying there is absolutely 100% true.
	Now, one of the problems here is that a lot of the things that President Trump talks about being worried about with regard to corruption are stories that have not really been substantiated.
	That is where Democrats are honing in on, right?
	There's a vulnerability here, right?
	So Trump is saying, if I am withholding aid from Ukraine, it's over corruption stuff, right?
	He said this.
	He said it was over corruption stuff.
	But what Trump perceives as corruption stuff may, in fact, not really be corruption stuff.
	It may be stuff that Trump has sort of heard about in the ether, and now he's channeling it into the general box of corruption.
	So, for example, he mentions CrowdStrike in that call to Zelensky.
	That is a reference to a company called CrowdStrike, which is an intelligence data firm.
	And Hillary Clinton, the DNC, they turned over their servers to CrowdStrike as opposed to the FBI in the middle of an investigation so that those servers could be looked at and audited to see who exactly had been hacking into the servers.
	And CrowdStrike came up with the idea that it was the Russians.
	And Trump has always been suspicious of that idea.
	So he mentions to the Ukrainians that maybe CrowdStrike is a Ukrainian-owned company, and that maybe the real DNC servers are still out there in Ukraine.
	And maybe it wasn't the Russians after all who hacked the whole thing.
	Now, Trump may see that as, why won't Ukraine investigate that?
	It's corrupt.
	In reality, there's not a lot of support for it.
	This is why Trump yesterday makes the sort of bizarre statement that Hillary's deleted emails might still be in Ukraine.
	I don't know where he's getting this from or why people think that information is particularly credible, but that doesn't go to Trump's personal political benefit alone.
	If he actually believes that there was a Ukrainian proxy company that was actually hacking the DNC's emails, as opposed to the Russians, that does have some pretty significant national security ramifications for the United States, not just personal ramifications for Trump.
	Do you believe that the emails from Hillary Clinton, do you believe that they are in Ukraine?
	I think they could be.
	You mean the 30,000 that she deleted?
	Yes.
	Yeah, I think they could very well.
	Boy, that was a nice question.
	I like that question.
	Because frankly, I think that one of the great crimes committed is Hillary Clinton deleting 33,000 emails after Congress sends her a subpoena.
	Think of that.
	Okay, so again, I don't know what he's referring to here, but that in and of itself, the fact that President Trump believes a lot of things that he reads on InfoWars, that does not necessarily mean that he is acting out of concert with the interests of the United States.
	It means that he perceives the interests of the United States differently, maybe based on factual incorrectness, but not necessarily for his political benefit.
	So there is that.
	And meanwhile, Mike Pence was making the case that President Trump has never threatened aid to Ukraine.
	He also said President Trump has stood strong with Ukraine.
	That is a point that is worth noting.
	I mean, the Trump administration support for Ukraine has been significantly stronger than the Obama administration support was.
	That still doesn't answer the two outstanding questions I have from yesterday.
	And by the way, if Trump doesn't answer those questions, That doesn't mean he's impeachable, because the burden of proof is on the prosecution.
	But, it would be good to have answers to why did Trump cut off the aid, and also, why was the State Department sending Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine?
	Like, that's a weird thing.
	Rudy being in Ukraine, I get.
	Rudy being sent by the State Department, I don't get so much.
	But in any case, here's Mike Pence saying that Trump stood strong with Ukraine.
	That is effectively true.
	The United States of America has stood strong with Ukraine ever since the Russian military overran Crimea and has been underwriting a savage war in the Donbas province of Ukraine.
	Different from the last administration, we've actually been providing defensive weapons.
	The Obama administration was sending them blankets and pillows.
	But this president said, nope, we're going to stand for the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of Ukraine.
	We've provided them with weapons, the ability to defend themselves.
	Okay, that part is certainly true.
	So, here is where things currently stand.
	In synopsis.
	We have the transcript.
	The transcript is a Rorschach test.
	If you think Trump was offering a quid pro quo, it looks like a quid pro quo.
	If you think he wasn't, it doesn't.
	It really is just a referendum on your own mind.
	Less a referendum on the transcript of the phone call.
	Two, we have no additional evidence from the whistleblower report that suggests that Trump was withholding aid in order to get Biden.
	We don't.
	There are a few witnesses that are suggested.
	Those people will be questioned.
	But right now, if you're the Democrats, you gotta feel like you went out a little bit far on this limb before all the information was in.
	Opening the impeachment inquiry.
	Trump will likely be impeached by the House, but if all they've got is what they've got right now, there will be no removal by the Senate or even a competitive attempt to remove Trump via the Senate.
	Okay, time for a thing I like and then a thing that I hate.
	So, things that I like.
	Sometimes cute things happen on TV, and Ellen's show featured this child drummer, really, really cute kid, whose hero is Lenny Kravitz, and it led to this extremely adorable moment where this little talented kid is playing the drums, and suddenly his hero walks out on stage, which is a cool thing.
	What's up?
	What's up?
	You are amazing.
	Thanks.
	You know, I'm a big fan.
	Yeah.
	I've been watching you.
	Thanks.
	He didn't know you.
	You didn't even know that Lenny was here, did you?
	No.
	We kept it very quiet, so this is a big surprise.
	Thanks, Lenny.
	Okay, that is cute stuff right there.
	Kids are awesome.
	They really are.
	They're just great.
	And Ellen's good at what she does.
	I mean, not my cup of tea politically, but she's good at what she does.
	That is a fun moment.
	Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	So it is now incumbent, apparently, on every corporation to virtue signal its way through the world, so Mattel has decided that they are now going to launch gender-inclusive Barbies.
	Because that's what the kids are demanding, of course.
	I have three younger sisters.
	I have a daughter.
	This is dumb.
	I'm waiting to see.
	Where's the vast outcry and desire for gender-neutral toys?
	In primates, in primates, female primates, like monkeys, female monkeys will play with dolls and male monkeys will turn them into weapons.
	There are differences between male and female and this idiotic post-feminist attempt, it actually undercuts feminism, the post-feminist attempt to suggest that gender is completely malleable or that gender neutrality is a thing.
	Or that gendered attributes are completely disconnected from biology is completely insane.
	It's completely insane.
	Now, is there an actual demand?
	They're a company, they can do what they want.
	Do I think these things are gonna sell off the shelves?
	I think there are gonna be some woke parents who feel like better people for doing this sort of stuff, but it's actually been a problem.
	They did it in Norway, and these sorts of toys aren't selling off the shelves, and by the way, aren't impacting the gender gap, which remains very wide in the Nordic countries, specifically because when it turns out that women live not in poverty, Then many of them will opt for careers that they would rather do as opposed to careers that pay better.
	I mean, really, there's a bigger gender gap in places like there are more... I think the statistic is that there's a bigger gender gap in Norway than there is in Albania.
	And that's because when you live in a country with poverty, women have to get the best job they can that pays the most.
	When you live in a country that does not have poverty, then women get to pick and choose whatever kind of jobs they want that actually in some weird ways leads to a significant gender gap.
	Look, Mattel can do what it wants to do.
	It's a corporation.
	Enjoy.
	But, is this really about selling dolls or is this really about just free earned media from a media that is pushing the absolute lie that gender is completely disconnected from sex and that little girls everywhere are desperate to play with dolls that they can't tell if they're boys or girls?
	Come on, this is just absolute silly towns.
	Apparently, Mattel put out a statement.
	They said, we see this line as an opportunity for us to open up a dialogue around what dolls are for and who dolls are for.
	We kind of know they're mostly for girls.
	I mean, I hate to break that to you statistically, dolls are mostly for girls.
	And trucks are mostly for boys.
	That doesn't mean that girls can't play with trucks and boys can't play with dolls.
	My daughter, when she was like two, super into trucks.
	You know what she's into right now?
	Because she's five?
	Dolls.
	Because kids get more gendered as they get older.
	Their gender attributes that are natural and good and distinct, they'll start to manifest more clearly as kids get older.
	I love this.
	Mattel says, Really?
	If you really want to go for it, Mattel?
	If you really want to pretend that boys and girls want to play with the same dolls and that girls are desperate for gender inclusivity, you should, as a way of fighting back against gender stereotypes, get rid of female dolls entirely.
	They should all be gender- I mean, they don't have genitals.
	They should all be Okay, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
	I'm sure there will be updates, so stick around for that.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	What grand and glorious world we are creating for our children and massive confusion and stupidity.
	Okay, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
	I'm sure there will be updates, so stick around for that.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
	Directed by Mike Joyner.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
	Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
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	Edited by Adam Siavitz.
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	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2019.

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