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Oct. 3, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:56
Who Gives A Schiff? | Ep. 872
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New developments arise in the connection between the Trump whistleblower and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, the State Department Inspector General opens up another mess, and President Trump goes off in front of the head of Finland.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
I mean, I do have to say, you have to feel a little bit bad for the foreign leaders who sit there while President Trump goes off because, man, when President Trump does these press conferences and goes off on the press and then goes off on the Democrats and you when President Trump does these press conferences and goes off on the press and then goes off on the Democrats and you are like the president of Finland or the prime minister of Finland and you are sitting there looking like you just It's pretty spectacular stuff.
Well, a lot breaking in the news.
First, I think that it's important to make a note that Andrew McCarthy makes today over at The Hill.
He, of course, is a legal correspondent for National Review, and he gives some important information about the background of this whole impeachment inquiry, and that is that so far, it is basically kabuki theater, meaning it's not an official impeachment inquiry.
For all the talk about it's an impeachment inquiry, and we're supposed to put all of our focus into impeachment, nothing has actually fundamentally changed.
Here's what Andy McCarthy writes today.
He says, There is no impeachment inquiry.
There are no subpoenas.
You are not to be faulted if you think a formal inquest is underway and that legal process has been issued.
The misimpression is completely understandable if you've been taking in media coverage, in particular, reporting on a haughty September 27th letter from House Democrats presuming to direct Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on pain of citation for obstruction to cooperate in their demands to depose State Department officials and review various records.
The letter is signed by not one, but three committee chairmen.
Remember your elementary math, though.
Zero is still zero, even when multiplied by three.
What is portrayed as an impeachment inquiry is actually just a made-for-cable TV political soap opera.
The House of Representatives is not conducting a formal impeachment inquiry.
To the contrary, says Andy McCarthy, Congressional Democrats are conducting the 2020 political campaign.
The House has not voted as a body to authorize an impeachment inquiry.
What we have here are partisan theatrics.
Preceding, under the ipsedixit of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it raises the profile but not the legitimacy of the same impeachment inquiry.
And there are no subpoenas.
As Secretary Pompeo observed in his fittingly tart response on Tuesday, what the committee chairman issued was merely a letter.
It's huffing and puffing notwithstanding, the letter is nothing more than an informal request for voluntary cooperation.
Legally, it has no compulsive power.
If anything, it is rife with legal deficiencies.
Andy McCarthy is pointing out here that all of the talk of impeachment inquiry, Democrats haven't actually utilized the power that they have in Congress in order to subpoena members of the executive branch.
Why?
Well, because then it would get litigated in the courts.
Because that's the way this stuff works.
You subpoena somebody in the White House, the White House says no, and then it ends up in court and the court hashes it out.
But that leads to delay.
Instead, what the Democrats are doing is they are issuing fake subpoenas, basically, requests for people to show up.
If the White House says, hold up a second, they then accuse the White House of obstruction.
So this appears to be manufactured.
I mentioned this yesterday.
The Democrats are now using a wide variety of theories in order to justify their push for impeachment.
As it turns out that the quid pro quo arrangement, supposedly evident from the Trump-Ukrainian President Zelensky's phone call, falls apart.
As it turns out, that allegation doesn't make any sense.
In the absence of any information that the Ukrainian leadership believed that the president was withholding military aid.
As that becomes clear, the Democrats are now shifting the narrative on impeachment.
Maybe the impeachment is not about quid pro quo after all.
Maybe it's about President Trump mouthing off.
Maybe it's about President Trump yelling at the whistleblower.
Maybe it's about obstruction of justice.
Well, what if the Democrats basically boxed themselves in here?
What if Nancy Pelosi went off half-cocked because she believed that it was important to get her base on board because she couldn't hold them back any longer?
Because Nancy Pelosi isn't actually in control of this process.
Remember, earlier this year, Nancy Pelosi tried to take out the squad.
Earlier this year, Nancy Pelosi tried to marginalize the radicals in her base.
And President Trump basically prohibited her from doing that by attacking the radicals in her base, forcing her to rally around them.
Well, that meant that Nancy Pelosi is now subject to their whims.
And that means, ironically, that President Trump unifying Nancy Pelosi with the radicals in her base led to this faux impeachment inquiry.
Well, Zandy McCarthy writes, Standing committees do have subpoena power, so why not use it?
Well, because subpoenas get litigated in court, when the people or agencies on the receiving end object.
Democrats want to have an impeachment show, um, inquiry on television.
They don't want to defend its bona fides in court.
And they certainly don't want to defend their letter threatening obstruction.
The Democrats' media scribes note the chairman's admonition that any failure by Pompeo to comply shall, quote, constitute evidence of obstruction of the House's impeachment inquiry.
What a crock.
As McCarthy points out, in criminal proceedings, prosecutors constantly demand information, and defense presumptively resists, and then it ends up in court.
He says Congressional Democrats know all of this.
Many of them are lawyers.
They're issuing partisan letters that pose legally offensive threats rather than subpoenas because this is a show, not an impeachment inquiry.
Subpoenas don't require chest beating about obstruction.
Everyone knows they're compulsory, but everyone also knows they may be held up in court.
So what this really looks like overall is the Democrats Basically trying to drum up something, something upon which they can get Trump in the public mind.
And that became eminently clear when it became clear that the whistleblower in this particular case was probably coordinated with Adam Schiff's office before the whistleblower complaint was even elevated to the level of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community.
We'll get to that bombshell story in just a moment.
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Okay, so as I say, if this whole thing feels like it is being drummed up, that's because increasingly the evidence is that it was kind of drummed up.
That is the increasing evidence.
So, let me give you the breaking news.
The breaking news here...
Broke yesterday afternoon.
Adam Schiff, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, the chairman, Democrat, who was one of the leading voices in the Trump-Mueller saga.
He'd go out there on CNN every single day.
He had a pup tent outside the CNN green room.
And he'd go out there every single day and declare that just around the riverbend, like Pocahontas, just around the riverbend lay the great revelation that President Trump was in fact a Russian-speaking steward of Vladimir Putin.
Right, Schiff would go on national TV and he'd basically suggest that Donald Trump was Tom, was Kevin Costner from No Way Out.
That he was secretly a plant.
Okay, well it turns out all that was nonsense.
Well now Adam Schiff has moved on to his next allegation.
He's like just moving this thing gradually west.
He started off in Russia, now he's moved to Ukraine.
Eventually we'll get to France.
I mean, it really is absurd.
Now, this does not mean that the whistleblower complaint has no merit, we don't know yet.
But, the fact that the whistleblower was coordinating with Schiff's office to begin with does raise some suspicions, particularly because the whistleblower complaint was incredibly well written.
I mean, just as a piece of writing.
Mwah!
An A+.
A+, really good piece of legal writing.
This led people to suspect.
Wait a second.
CIA officers do not write like that.
That sounds like somebody has vetted this thing.
This sounds like a lawyer helped draft this thing.
Well, now, as it turns out, the Democratic head of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, learned about the outlines of a CIA officer's concerns that President Trump had abused his power before the officer filed a whistleblower complaint, according to a spokesman and current and former American officials, according to the New York Times.
The early account by the future whistleblower shows how determined he was to make known his allegations Well, I mean, it shows a little bit more than that.
I love how the New York Times is trying to suggest that the real story here is that the whistleblower was so determined to get out his story, he went to Adam Schiff.
administration initially blocked lawmakers from seeing it well i mean it shows a little more than that i love how the new york times is trying to trying to suggest that the real story here is that the whistleblower was so determined to get out his story he went to adam schiff and the real story is that the whistleblower was coordinating with schiff's office to get the information out there without going through the proper channels right the Because here is what happened.
According to Schiff's own aide, the CIA officer approached a House Intelligence Committee aide with his concerns.
And the House Intelligence Committee said what he was supposed to say.
He said, go get a lawyer, and elevated up the chain.
He then proceeded to report the entire story up to Adam Schiff.
And Adam Schiff, being a dunce, decided to tweet out the entire story on August 28th on Twitter.
I was suggesting last week that it was pretty obvious that Schiff had coordinated with the whistleblower because he was actually tweeting out the allegations of the whistleblower complaint a full two weeks before Congress was informed of the presence of the whistleblower complaint, which makes it look a lot more like a coordinated hit between Schiff's office and a partisan whistleblower than it does like a whistleblower with good information who is deeply concerned about his country and simply elevating it up the chain.
Now, two things can be true at once.
One, it can be a partisan hit.
Two, there can be truth to it, but we are still waiting on the truth to it.
I'm not seeing all of the evidence yet that there was a quid pro quo.
I'm not seeing evidence of criminal activity, and neither are the Democrats, which is why the Democrats are basically thrashing up against the box of impeachment, sort of like that weird alien creature in the Jake Gyllenhaal movie, Life.
What we are watching right now is the Democrats searching for another impeachment strategy, given the fact that the whistleblower complaints and the call do not match up with a quid pro quo story.
And this looks even worse when it appears again that the entire whistleblower complaint was coordinated with Schiff's office.
Now, President Trump has jumped into the middle of this.
Now, President Trump gave what can only be described as an epically chaotic press conference yesterday in front of the Prime Minister of Finland, who just looked like he wanted to dig a hole in the ground and lie in it because, again, you basically become window dressing to the Trump show.
You show up and suddenly you're playing the tree in a Christmas carol.
In any case, President Trump went after Adam Schiff.
He said, Schiff probably helped the whistleblower write the complaint.
Schiff may have learned some of what the whistleblower knew prior to the complaint.
Well, I think it's a scandal that he knew before.
I'd go a step further.
I think he probably helped write it.
Okay?
That's what the word is.
And I think it's — I give a lot of respect for the New York Times for putting it out.
Just happened as I'm walking up here, they handed it to me.
And I said to Mike, I said, whoa, that's something.
That's big stuff.
That's a big story.
He knew long before, and he helped write it, too.
It's a scam.
Okay, so did Schiff actually help write it or did he merely refer to a lawyer and then he was playing an inside-outside game?
Now, Trump doesn't actually have to make the allegation that Schiff wrote it in order to do damage to Schiff.
If it appears that Adam Schiff was effectively pushing the notion that the whistleblower complaint existed and he knew about it beforehand and the whistleblower was elevating it up the chain and then if there was any holdup, Schiff was going to push from the outside.
That's bad enough.
Schiff is now responding via the Daily Beast.
He had previously denied that his staff had any contact with the whistleblower.
He was on MSNBC just last week, explaining, he said, we had no contact with the whistleblower.
If by we he means he, that may be true.
If by we he means his staff, that's absolutely a lie.
Apparently, he told the Daily Beast that his staff had contact with the whistleblower.
He said he did not know definitively at the time if the complaint had been authored by the same whistleblower who had approached his staff, but he acknowledged he should have been more clear.
Now, that is him lying.
Oh, I'm sure it was just a second whistleblower.
Yeah, that's probably it.
That's the ticket.
Schiff told the outlet, we try not to confirm when people have come in.
I was really thinking along the lines of wanting him to come in and testify.
I regret that I wasn't much more clear.
Oh, that's it.
And then, of course, Schiff went after Trump.
He said, oh, well, his behavior at this press conference is alarming.
Americans have to be worried about the stability of our president, given the enormously erratic and dangerous swings we have seen him take in the last few days.
It is alarming.
Well, now this is just pure gaslighting.
Like, Trump is going to accuse Trump, basically, of being a traitor.
And then if Trump gets mad about it, then he's like, ah, you mad, bro?
You mad, bro?
We should impeach you for being mad.
It's like, we're going to impeach you over the Ukraine stuff.
And Trump says, well, that's a bunch of crap.
You're like, ah, how dare you get mad?
Obviously, you're unstable.
We should impeach you for that.
And then Trump's like, well, that doesn't make any sense.
Well, you're confused, Mr. President.
That's why you should be impeached.
Now, Trump went heavy after Schiff yesterday, and again, this will be a fruitful line of attack because Schiff is indeed pathologically dishonest about this stuff.
I mean, again, he spent two full years going on cable television promising vast revelations about Trump and Russia that never materialized.
And now it turns out that he was lying on national television when he said that his staff had no contact with the whistleblower.
I mean, this looks a lot more and more everyday like a produced hit.
Now again, for the 1,000th time, two things can be true at once.
One, it could be a coordinated partisan hit.
Two, there could be legitimacy to it.
We don't know yet.
The evidence is not there yet.
Here's President Trump going after Schiff over Schiff basically fabricating the contents of the Ukraine transcript.
Schiff did a hearing where he basically made up a story in his own head about Trump threatening the president of Ukraine.
And Trump went after him.
He said, like, Adam Schiff is calling me unstable.
This is a guy who basically had a mental breakdown in public.
Schiff went up and he got, as the chairman of the committee, got up and related a call that didn't take place.
He made up the language.
Hard to believe.
Nobody's ever seen this.
I think he had some kind of a mental breakdown.
But he went up to the microphone and he read a statement from the President of the United States, as if I were on the call, because what happened is when he looked at the sheet, which was an exact transcript of my call, done by very talented people that do this, exact, word for word, He said, wow, he didn't do anything wrong.
So he made it up.
OK, so Trump going after Schiff, and he went after Schiff even harder yesterday.
He suggested he has now pinned a nickname on Adam Schiff, not just Little Adam Schiff or Pencil Neck Adam Schiff.
He's got a new one.
For Adam Schiff.
We'll get to President Trump's new nickname for Adam Schiff in just one moment.
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Okay, so President Trump now has a new nickname for Adam Schiff.
He's calling him Shifty Schiff, which you could sort of see coming.
But if the shoe fits, here's President Trump going after Adam Schiff.
And I will just recommend that if you can actually see this show, if you're a subscriber at Daily Wire and you're watching this show, keep an eye on the Prime Minister of Finland, who is just doing a consistent gym from the office.
Finland is the happiest country in the world.
Finland is a happy country.
What can you learn from Finland?
Well, if you get rid of Pelosi and you get rid of Shifty Schiff.
We have actually discussed about that.
Finland is a happy country.
He's a happy leader, too.
If you just get rid of Shifty Schiff, everybody will be happy.
The best part of that clip is where Trump leans over and sort of taps the Finnish president on the knee, and the Finnish president gives him the wave off, which is pretty spectacular.
Come on guys, this is high comedy.
It is.
Okay, and the reason it's high comedy is because in the end it's going to amount to nothing.
The Democrats may in fact impeach Trump over apparently nothing in the House.
I really have my doubts that Nancy Pelosi publicly, quote unquote, launches an impeachment inquiry, even if she didn't change anything legally, without carrying it all the way to fruition.
It's just not something that's going to happen, but...
Is that going to make a difference in the election?
Not if they've got nothing better than this.
They may have overplayed their hand pretty dramatically in the hopes that Trump would shoot himself in the foot.
By the way, Trump, you know, he was talking about the whistleblower.
The Democrats have trotted out another line about Trump and impeachment, that Trump is attacking the whistleblower.
Trump said, well, if the whistleblower is legitimate, of course he should be protected.
If he's coordinating outside the bounds of law, then he should not be protected.
I think a whistleblower should be protected, if the whistleblower's legitimate.
But when the whistleblower makes a big report on the conversation I had with a president of Ukraine, and it was a great conversation.
We talked mostly about congratulations on your win.
We talked about corruption, and we're really referring mostly to 2016, because what the Democrats did in 2016 was corrupt.
Okay, so again, I think that Trump's complaints about the whistleblower, given the coordination between the whistleblower and Schiff, while Trump's language is never He's never modulated correctly.
His basic point, which is that he's suspicious about the whistleblower and the relationship with the Democrats.
Given that New York Times report, hard to argue with them on that.
Meanwhile, a bizarre situation over on the Hill yesterday.
The State Department Inspector General, whose name is Linick, he decided to show up on the Hill and talk with Democrats And Republicans.
The State Department Inspector General was supposed to deliver a packet of documents and people on the Hill were suspecting he was going to stop by and show evidence that the Trump administration had been pressuring people inside the State Department to do his personal political bidding.
Instead, they walked out with a packet of old news reports about Joe Biden, which is weird.
According to James Barrett writing over at Daily Wire, a media-hyped urgent meeting between Democratic-led House committees and the State Department Inspector General on Wednesday turned out to be a big disappointment for those hoping it would offer incriminating documents related to the Democrats' impeachment effort.
Instead of evidence of retaliation against State Department officials cooperating with House Democrats, as Reuters and others reported ahead of the meeting, Inspector General Steve Linick ended up presenting the Democrats with months-old reports about Democrats' alleged collusion with Ukraine.
Which Democrats are decrying as hallucinatory and propagandistic.
The information presented at the meeting, Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin told reporters on Wednesday, feels like a completely irrelevant distraction from the work at hand.
So Democrats were expecting some sort of damning material on Trump.
And as it turns out, what ended up coming back was a bunch of old media reports about Democrats working with Ukraine to affect the 2016 election.
Very unfortunate for Democrats.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
Okay, so yesterday, I gotta tell you.
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Why was yesterday not a great day for me physically?
Well, because it was a fast day.
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Okay, so...
What exactly happened in this meeting?
Well, according to CBS, in a briefing on Capitol Hill, the State Department Inspector General gave attendees a packet of hallucinatory propagandistic materials and articles about Ukraine, Biden, Giuliani, Trump hotels, and other matters that were sent to the Secretary of State several months ago, according to Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin and congressional aides.
The cover sheet of the documents, which was written in calligraphy, claims to have been sent from the White House, CBS reports, but nobody really knows who sent the materials.
It later turned out that Rudy Giuliani said, it was me.
So, Rudy, I mean, come on, like, this is worthy of informing Congress about that Rudy Giuliani sends weird Zodiac letter love notes to the State Department?
By the way, what that does tend to show is that the Trump administration was not going to the State Department and saying, top down, we want you to go investigate all this stuff.
You had Rudy Giuliani, from the outside, as part of the Trump campaign, sending a letter to the State Department and saying, you know what, you should investigate all this stuff.
Now, if the State Department initiated an investigation on that grounds, is that cause for great concern?
Here is Rudy Giuliani talking.
So, anyway, Rudy Giuliani, you know, when he talks about all this, he's always weird about it.
He acknowledged that he had sent this entire package to the State Department, and his idea was that he was going to inform them of stuff that they should check out.
CNN reported that it was indeed Giuliani who turned over the documents.
He told CNN Wednesday evening that some of the documents provided to Congress by the State Department's IG had originated with him.
He apparently gave the documents to the White House, which then passed them to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Pompeo then gave the documents to a subordinate, who provided them to the legal counsel at the State Department.
And the documents were ultimately given to the Inspector General.
Giuliani said that in late March, he had rooted what he called an outline of allegations against Biden, as well as Marie Yovanovitch, who is the ambassador to Ukraine from the United States, to Pompeo's office.
He said he had also sent details of his interviews from earlier in the year with the incumbent and former top prosecutors in Ukraine, who helped provide him with the information in his outline.
Giuliani said he received a phone call shortly thereafter from Pompeo, who told Giuliani he'd be referring the documents for investigation.
Giuliani told CNN, they told me they were going to investigate it.
Now again, that is not Corruption, per se.
I mean, it depends on whether in fact they were doing this for campaign purposes or whether they were actually investigating corruption in Ukraine.
And it looks very much like, frankly, the attempt by the Hillary Clinton campaign to root information from Fusion GPS to the Obama-era FBI.
In other words, funneling information into an administration which is then checked out does not amount to an actual violation of law.
It may be politically partisan, but that does not amount to an actual violation of law.
So, this is all a little bit strange.
Again, it's not a violation of law, it's just Rudy Giuliani being a weirdo and then his information being passed around.
The Democrats were very disappointed yesterday, in other words.
They were looking forward to some sort of testimony about how Trump was pressuring people internally to do his bidding, and that is not exactly what happened.
Nonetheless, the Democrats are trying to play this up, suggesting that there are troubling questions about apparent efforts inside and outside the Trump administration to target specific officials, including Joe Biden's son and Marie Yovanovitch.
There is this weird thing that is breaking out in the media today, specifically with regard to the control of the executive branch.
There's a whole article in the New York Times about how the executive branch and career officers in the State Department, they feel under threat by the Trump administration.
Well, last I checked, the Trump administration is in charge of its own State Department.
So, as long as that is the case, there's not really a legal problem there.
Now, again, you can say all of this is inappropriate.
You can say that the State Department should not become the go-between for Rudy Giuliani and the Trump administration.
You can say that this is misuse of public resources, but then you're going to get into the dicey question of how often public resources are misused for campaign-leveraged issues.
Again, Hillary Clinton's campaign was obviously leveraging information to Obama's FBI with regard to, for example, the Steele dossier.
So that is not whataboutism, that is what is the standard for impeachable offenses or crime.
And so far, not a lot of evidence of crime, a lot of evidence of ugly, swampy politics, but not a lot of evidence of crime.
Meanwhile, the media are trying to drag Mike Pence into this.
So there's a report from the Washington Post today that President Trump repeatedly involved Vice President Pence in efforts to exert pressure on the leader of Ukraine at a time when the President was using other channels to solicit information he hoped would be damaging to a Democratic rival, according to current and former U.S.
officials.
But Pence wasn't aware of any of this.
So the attempt to rope Pence into this scandal is not exactly going to meet with tons of success.
Trump instructed Pence not to attend the inauguration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in May, an event White House officials had pushed to put on the VP's calendar when Ukraine's new leader was seeking recognition and support from Washington.
Months later, the president used Pence to tell Zelensky that U.S.
aid was still being withheld while demanding more aggressive action on corruption, officials said.
Now again, we know that the Vice President of the United States in the last administration was pressuring the Ukrainians with $1 billion in American loan guarantees to get rid of corruption.
Withholding the VP's attendance at a particular event to push against corruption doesn't seem like anything supremely out of the box.
At the time, following Trump's July 25th phone call with Zelensky, the Ukrainians probably understood action on corruption to include the investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, according to the Washington Post.
But that is speculation, right?
So it is possible that if they had not investigated Joe and Hunter Biden, but they investigated other corruption, that Pence goes to the thing.
So now they're trying to downgrade the quid pro quo from $400 million in military aid to Vice President Pence didn't go to an event for Zelensky.
That's a lot weaker.
Officials close to Pence insist he was unaware of Trump's efforts to press Zelensky for damaging information about Biden and his son, who had served on the board of an obscure Ukrainian gas company when his father was overseeing U.S.
policy on Ukraine.
Pence's activities occurred amid several indications of the President's hidden agenda.
Among them were the abrupt removal of the U.S.
Ambassador to Kyiv, the visible efforts by the President's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to insert himself in the U.S.-Ukraine relationship, as well as alarms being raised inside the White House even before the emergence of an extraordinary whistleblower complaint about President Trump's conduct, according to the Washington Post.
Perhaps most significantly, one of Pence's top advisors was on the July 25th call, and the VP should have had access to the transcript within hours.
Right, but why exactly would Pence, like, spend lots of time perusing a transcript of the President of Ukraine?
I have my doubts that that is what Vice President Pence does with his day.
So now they're trying to rope Pence into this.
Why?
Because the suggestion is if they can impeach Trump, then they can also impeach Pence.
And if they can impeach Pence, then guess who becomes President of the United States?
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Good luck with that.
Now again, all of this also rests on a basic assumption, which is that it is illegitimate to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.
That nothing untoward happened with regard to Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.
I think we should just focus on he's the issue.
He says, no one has ever asserted I did anything wrong on Ukraine.
Well, no, actually, there are a fair number of people who have their suspicions that you did something wrong on Ukraine, including the other Democratic presidential candidates who continue to maintain that they will not answer questions about whether they would have allowed their VP's kids to do business in countries where the VP was presiding over foreign policy.
Here's Biden trying to shy away from all of this.
I think we should just focus on he's the issue.
Nobody has ever asserted that I did anything wrong except he and what's that fellow's name?
Rudy Hootie.
OK, so there is Biden trying to deny all of this.
President Trump, for his part, is going hard at Biden, basically saying, listen, there is nothing wrong with me asking about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden in the generalized context of corruption in Ukraine, particularly as has to do with the 2016 election.
Because Rudy Giuliani is making the claim that the 2016 election was actually impacted by Ukrainian, not Russian, influence.
I mean, there is a story out today specifically about a Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, the one who is now at the center of the Joe Biden allegations.
He's the one that Joe Biden wanted fired.
Shokin apparently has told a variety of people, including John Solomon of the Hill, that he was basically pressured to drop the Joe Biden case while he was prosecutor.
So if that's the case, then all of this is back on, right?
Fox News reported this yesterday.
According to Fox News, the fired prosecutor at the center of the Ukraine controversy said during a private interview with the president's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, earlier this year that he was told to back off an investigation involving Burisma.
That is the company that was linked to Joe Biden's son, according to details of that interview that were handed over to Congress by the State Department's inspector general on Wednesday.
So Giuliani was basically taking notes.
He sent them to the State Department.
Why don't you, if you're talking about corruption, you should probably investigate this whole Joe Biden-Victor Shokin thing.
That was some of the documents that were turned over by the State Department Inspector General in all of this.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
Is the Biden issue still a live issue?
If so, that also casts a different light on Trump mentioning Biden in that call with Zelensky.
Again, there's no quid pro quo in that call, given that the Ukrainians didn't know military aid was even being withheld.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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Okay, we'll get to more of Joe Biden.
And is there a there there?
Maybe.
Maybe.
Certainly the Democrats do not want to talk about whether there is a there there.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, good news for another Kingdom fans.
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It's really a lot of fun.
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This week, we sat down with my friend Megan McCain, and it really is a spectacular episode.
Here's a little bit of what it sounds like.
There just really isn't a lot of compromise, so I just thought if I'm gonna do this job this way, I just have to 100% not care what anybody thinks, but really not care what the left thinks.
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Not to talk up my own interviews, but this is a fantastic interview.
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Go check it out this Sunday.
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So what is fascinating about the whole Ukraine Joe Biden thing is how hard the media are working to pretend that nothing untoward happened, not only with Joe Biden, but also with the 2016 campaign.
It was Politico that first reported in 2017 that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC had been openly coordinating with the Ukrainian embassy to dig up information on Paul Manafort that they could use against the Trump campaign and that the Obama administration was involved as well.
In that effort, right?
All of that has been reported over the past couple of years.
Now we're supposed to pretend that all of the Ukrainian influence in the election was basically on the up-and-up.
So we were supposed to, let's just be straight, we were supposed to focus on Russian interference in the election up through 2019 until the Mueller report ended.
And then as soon as the Mueller report ended, we are no longer supposed to focus on Ukrainian influence.
And now we're supposed to focus on Trump trying to influence Ukraine.
So we shift our focus to Ukraine, but again, The theory of the media and the Democrats seems to be that Trump is this god-like figure where he speaks things into existence.
So Trump says Russia, and suddenly the story is Russia for three years.
Then Trump says Ukraine, and the story is Trump and Ukraine.
But at no point are we allowed to look at Ukraine, not with regard to Trump using Ukraine, but with regard to Trump being targeted by forces within Ukraine.
And the opposite is true also.
We're not supposed to look at Russia when Barack Obama was president.
We're only supposed to do it when Donald Trump talks about Russia.
And so, all the world revolves around getting Donald Trump, right?
You may notice there's a pattern to all of this.
Like, listen to this report from the Washington Post.
Quote.
Rewrite the history of the 2016 election?
Well, I mean, again, Politico did report that the Hillary Clinton campaign was digging up dirt with the Ukrainian embassy on Trump's campaign manager.
And that was Politico.
Manifest.
The relationship with Giuliani, which Giuliani acknowledged in an interview this week with the Washington Post, stems from a shared interest in a narrative that undermines the rationale for the special counsel investigation.
That inquiry led to Manafort's imprisonment on tax and financial fraud allegations related to his work in Kiev for the political party of former President Viktor Yanukovych.
Apparently, a bunch of different Republicans have jumped into the fray.
This is not just a Giuliani thing anymore.
Senator Chuck Schumer, who's chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Senator Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, have announced their renewal of an inquiry into any coordination between Ukraine and Democratic Party officials.
Which, again, makes some sense.
Now, President Trump has been mocking Joe Biden on this.
There are basically two stories with regard to Ukraine, and we shouldn't conflate them.
One is Joe Biden attempting to influence the interior politics of Ukraine by withholding loans.
And at the same time, the prosecutor he was targeting, who he may or may not have been targeting for good reasons.
I mean, the EU, the IMF, the World Bank, they all didn't like this prosecutor.
But that prosecutor was apparently presiding over an investigation into Biden's son.
That's story number one.
And then story number two is Hillary Clinton and the DNC and the Obama administration.
Coordinating with the Ukrainian embassy to dig up dirt on Trump's team during the 2016 election, right?
Those are two separate stories.
And President Trump has been going hard after Biden.
Yesterday, he tweeted what is one of the funniest tweets of his presidency.
He tweeted out, look at the picture, and used a Nickelback video to do so.
Twitter has now pulled it down for copyright infringement, which is just ridiculous.
It's obviously satire.
It's a clip of Joe Biden explaining that he's never spoken to his own son about overseas business dealings, juxtaposed with a picture of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and a Ukrainian gas official all golfing together.
Have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?
I've never spoken to my son about his overseas men's assailants.
Okay, that's pretty spectacular.
Taylor.
but That is some grade-A presidential tweet trolling.
Trump didn't bother with the Nickelback references yesterday in the presser.
He just said Biden and his son are stone-cold crooked.
Now, let's be real about this.
Hunter Biden probably is stone-cold crooked.
I don't know about Joe.
When you are a famous person, there are lots of hangers-on who probably try to use your name to get access in high places.
The fact is that Hunter Biden, who is basically a failure in everything he has ever tried, was getting paid $50,000 a month to be on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
You can't imagine it's because of his expertise in oil and natural gas.
It probably has a lot more to do with the fact his daddy was VP of the United States.
Is that on Joe Biden?
I mean, not really.
Lots of people are sympathetic toward their own kids.
President Trump is sympathetic toward his own kids.
With that said, does that exonerate Joe Biden?
Not really.
Here's Trump going after them.
What did you want about Biden?
What did you want him to look into on Biden?
Look, Biden and his son.
are stone cold, crooked.
And you know it.
His son walks out with millions of dollars.
The kid knows nothing.
You know it.
And so do we.
Go ahead.
Ask a question.
The question, sir, was what did you want President Zelensky to do about Vice President Biden and his son Hunter?
Are you talking to me?
You talking to me?
I'm walking here.
You talking?
Okay.
In any case, the Democrats are trying to downplay all of this, obviously.
So John Brennan, who is the head of the CIA while he was in the Obama administration, and who proceeded to spend two years, again, claiming that there would be undisclosed information linking President Trump to Vladimir Putin, demonstrating that he was, in fact, a traitor.
Now he's like, I don't want to look at the 2016 election anymore.
Why are we even looking at the 2016 election?
So just to get this straight, for two long years, All the Democrats wanted to talk about was corruption in the 2016 election.
Now, when Trump raises the question about whether there was Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election, again, based on published reports in places like Politico, John Brennan's like, ah, we probably shouldn't, should we look into that?
Nah, nothing to see here.
Nothing to see here.
Pay no attention to the John Brennan behind the curtain.
I remember William Barr, you know, when he was testifying in front of Congress, he said he didn't understand the predication of the counterintelligence investigation that was launched into Russia's interference in the 2016 election.
I don't understand the predication of this worldwide effort to try to uncover dirt, either real or imagined, that would discredit that investigation in 2016 into Russian interference.
You know, on one hand, the Obama administration is crucified for not doing enough.
And now they're looking for what we might have done in order to try to understand better and to prevent the Russian interference.
Well, no.
I mean, John Brennan contradicts himself seven ways from Sunday in this clip alone, right?
He says, you know, William Barr went out there and he said, why are we investigating Russia?
Well, why are we investigating Ukraine?
Well, you wanted Russia investigated.
So actually the hypocrisy here is you.
You wanted to interfere certain foreign investigation.
You wanted to investigate certain foreign interference into the election, but not other foreign interference in the election.
He says, well, we were criticized for not doing enough, and now they're saying that we did too much.
Well, no, they're wondering if you launched an investigation under false auspices, then that would make a difference.
If you're talking about the use of public dollars for electioneering, it seems to me that if it turns out that the Trump-Russia investigation was launched on false premises in order to get Trump, that makes a difference.
And if it turns out that the Obama administration or the Hillary campaign were coordinating with the Ukrainians, that seems like that would be impactful as well, especially if you want to prevent future interference in elections.
John Solomon, who's been reporting on this incessantly from the Hill.
Again, people keep saying that John Solomon's reporting on this has been debunked.
I've seen no evidence that his reporting on this has been debunked.
He says that a Ukrainian court has already found that leaked documents affected the 2016 election from Ukraine.
What about the evidence Ukraine meddled in our election?
They say, no, no, that didn't happen.
Did that happen?
Yeah, it did.
A Ukrainian court has ruled in December of last year that a senior law enforcement official and a parliamentary member intentionally leaked documents about Paul Manafort and Donald Trump in an effort to intervene in the U.S.
election.
That is an official ruling of a Ukrainian court.
OK, so that much is true.
So, again, all of this is a mess.
Basically, you've got the White House investigating Ukraine, and the State Department investigating Ukraine, and then you've got the Congress investigating the White House for investigating Ukraine.
It's all a mess.
Is any of it impeachable?
Does any of this have to do with impeachment?
It seems like we're pretty far afield, right?
That's funny.
I was talking to my mom, who kind of follows this stuff.
Yeah, I would say peripherally.
And she follows it closely enough that she sort of knows what's going on, but she's not in the weeds on this.
And maybe over the weekend, she was asking me, so what's the deal with this impeachment stuff?
And I started to try and explain it to her.
I got about a paragraph in and she said, sounds like bullcrap.
And I feel like that's how most Americans are going to respond.
Because this started off with a very clear allegation that Trump was engaged in a quid pro quo with the Ukrainian government.
That Trump was basically paying off the Ukrainian government to investigate his domestic political opponents.
And now, we've got, did Ukraine interfere in the 2016 election?
What was Rudy Giuliani doing in Ukraine?
Did the Democrats coordinate with the whistleblower?
Is there any criminal activity?
If there is no quid pro quo, maybe there's a secondary quid pro quo with Mike Pence, but Pence didn't know about it.
It's all very, very complicated.
The more complicated this gets, the harder I sell it is to the American public.
Now it's funny, I got a question.
You know, to let you behind the stages of what happens here at the Daily Wire.
I got a question from a member of the media the other day about the impeachment effort.
And it was from somebody on the left, obviously.
And this person said, well, you know, what I don't understand is Republicans who are sticking by Trump.
Why don't they just say, well, you know, so fine, we get President Pence.
Like, what would be the big deal?
A couple of things.
One, people should not be impeached over non-criminal behavior.
Seems like a pretty obvious one, like the truth actually matters.
And two, the fact is that Republicans rightly see this, I think, based on the current evidence, as a smear against Republicans generally.
And this reporter was asking me, you know, I get the theory that Republicans sort of see Trump as their avatar, and so an attack on Trump is an attack on them.
And I said, well, no, you're getting this wrong.
You've got the polarity reversed.
Republican voters feel like they've been attacked by the media.
We feel like we have been attacked by the powers that be.
We feel like the Democratic Party has been targeting us as bitter clingers who cling to our God and our guns.
We feel like we've been targeted for years.
And then Trump gets elected and you throw exactly the same accusations, but you put on top of it a bunch of politically motivated accusations that he's a traitor.
And so it's not that Trump is somehow like the tip of the spear.
It's that Trump is, in fact, the attacks on Trump are so similar to the attacks on conservatives generally.
The conservatives see attacks on Trump and they say, well, that is an attack on me because if Trump weren't here, they'd still be attacking me the same way.
And they're right about this.
The reason that Trump is popular in Republican circles is because the left is consistently attacking him and because Trump is aggressive.
Trump's aggressive instinct, his willingness to fight back, is indeed what endears him to the Republican base.
It's why he's the president right now.
So for all the talk that, you know, listen, I'll talk about how I think he's not focused enough in his pushback, how I think he's scattershot, how I think that he's wild on Twitter.
The fact is that his aggressive instinct is the reason that he is popular among Republicans.
Now look at Nancy Pelosi.
Nancy Pelosi hands out subpoenas like, you know, she has to approve it.
about Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats getting very aggressive.
And he says, listen, Paul Ryan never did this.
Now, look at Nancy Pelosi.
Nancy Pelosi hands out subpoenas like, you know, she has to approve it.
She hands out subpoenas like they're cookies.
You want a subpoena?
Here you go, take them, like they're cookies.
Paul Ryan would never give anybody a subpoena.
No, let's talk about it.
That's a big thing to give a subpoena.
Let's talk about it.
Two weeks later, they're still talking.
They wanted subpoenas to investigate the corrupt Democrats and the corrupt people on the other side.
Paul Ryan would not give subpoenas.
Okay, so his idea here is that Republicans have always played by the rules, and Democrats never play by the rules, so I'm not gonna play by the rules.
That does endear Trump, because the fact is that Democrats don't play by the rules.
And every story that comes out about Adam Schiff coordinating with whistleblowers makes this seem less like an honest attempt to get to the bottom of a violation of law, and much more like an attempt to get President Trump.
Meanwhile, the Democrats, it is amazing, just as proof of the sort of hypocrisy here, Hillary Clinton continues to maintain that she won the 2016 election.
She came out yesterday and said that President Trump is an illegitimate president.
That was her line.
She also suggested that she lost in 2016 because she was too serious, not because she was a garbage candidate.
Here she was on The View.
I'm a serious person but I'm also a fun person but I think I probably came across as too serious and too, you know, I really believed that my job, especially as a woman and the first woman to go as far as I did, that I had to Help people feel good about a woman in the Oval Office, a woman Commander-in-Chief.
And so I may have over-corrected a little bit because sometimes people say, oh why can't you be like that or why weren't you like that?
Okay, so again, Hillary Clinton trying to claim that she lost because she wasn't fun enough?
Yeah, lady, when you look up not fun, the opposite of fun, in the antonym dictionary, my goodness, Hillary Clinton definitely comes up on that list.
Pretty astonishing.
By the way, the Democrats continue to push forward this impeachment stuff largely because they are having trouble seeing how any of their candidates are a walk away to defeat Trump.
Kamala Harris, who again, has become Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, boiling rabbits for attention.
She says that we should bring Mike Pence before Congress now.
That's how far afield we've gone.
Over Chris Matthews, I'm gonna be safe.
Get up in the morning, come to the show, come in here, question Kamala Harris, she laughs all weird.
Then I kinda roll away on this chair.
Ah!
I drink a little, I come back in the next morning, go Kamala Harris, go!
You're raising a very important point, which is that the Vice President has a lot to answer to.
And he also should be brought before the United States Congress to speak about what exactly was his involvement and what, if any, solicitations were made by the President to have the Vice President engage in unethical conduct.
Yeah, and this is just, it's getting too far afield at this point.
Too far afield.
And Trump is fighting back with everything, including the kitchen sink.
In breaking news, according to the Associated Press, President Trump said in remarks to reporters outside the White House, quote, China should start an investigation into the Bidens.
So now it's not just Ukraine.
Here's the thing about Trump.
He's not hiding the ball.
Okay, for all the talk about Trump, you know, secretly behind the scenes, manipulating things, this is a dude who does not hide the ball.
Ever.
Ever.
I mean, just everything is right out there.
He's not hiding anything.
This is a guy who, I mean, the way that he met Melania Trump is he was at an event where she was with another dude and he just walked up to her and gave her his phone number.
I mean, that is what Trump is in a nutshell.
Trump is not a manipulative player from behind the scenes.
He doesn't have a plan.
He just says it.
So he said it about China today.
So the Democrats will undoubtedly claim that this is now impeachable too, even though it's just Trump mouthing off.
He said China should start an investigation into the Bidens.
He said he had not directly asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to investigate Biden and his son Hunter.
He said it's certainly something we could start thinking about.
Trump and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have tried to raise suspicions about Hunter Biden's business dealings in China, leaning on the writings of conservative author Peter Schweitzer.
By the way, if there's one author who's made a huge difference in the course of American elections, it would be Schweitzer, who's very instrumental in Hillary and emailgate and all the rest of it, and the corruption inside the Hillary Clinton State Department and the Clinton Foundation.
Trump is not hiding the ball here.
So basically this is turned back into the miasma of fighting.
None of it sounds impeachable.
All of it is confusing and chaotic.
And that is why this effort in the end is going to go nowhere, I think.
Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So this was just an unbelievable thing.
Botham Jean is this accountant, black accountant, who was horrifically and tragically killed, murdered, by a police officer off-duty named Amber Geiger.
She walked into an apartment she thought was hers.
She saw Botham Jean in there and she shot him to death.
Well, yesterday she was sentenced to 10 years in prison, which seems like an appropriate sentence for What probably was manslaughter but was convicted as first-degree murder?
Brant Jean was Botham Jean's brother and I mean you want to talk about a person with absolute class?
You want to talk about a person with just integrity and decency?
This is an amazing amazing thing.
Here he is at the sentencing hearing asking if he can give the woman who killed his brother a hug.
I mean it's just it's an unbelievable thing.
I mean I I wish, you know, I hope that, God forbid, in a similar circumstance, I would have this kind of moral quality.
It's an incredible, incredible thing.
Here's Brant Jean.
I forgive you.
I know if you go to God and ask Him, He will forgive you.
I don't even want you to go to jail.
I want the best for you, because I know that's exactly what both of them would want you to do.
And the best would be, give your life to Christ.
I don't know if this is possible, but can I give her a hug, please?
I mean, that's just, man.
Well, what a human being of quality.
What a human being of quality.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so the federal government apparently has dramatically expanded its exposure to risky mortgages.
It's as though we don't learn anything ever in this country.
So according to the Washington Post, the federal government has dramatically expanded its exposure to risky mortgages as federal officials over the past four years took steps that cleared the way for companies to issue loans that many borrowers may not be able to repay.
Because it turns out that we have in this country a very conflicting set of principles.
Principle number one, you should pay back what you owe.
Principle number two, if you can't buy a house, that's our fault and we should pick up the risk.
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Housing Administration are now guaranteeing almost $7 trillion in mortgage-related debt.
The federal government should have nothing to do with guaranteeing mortgages.
Nothing.
It should be completely on banks to guarantee mortgages.
Why I should be on the hook for you not paying your mortgage is ridiculous and vice versa.
If I can't pay my mortgage, that is a me problem.
And if you can't pay your mortgage, that is a you problem.
And the fact that people don't seem to understand this and they want the federal government to boost home ownership by guaranteeing loans is insane.
It's insane.
It's how we ended up in the subprime crisis in the first place in 2007-2008.
Apparently, that $7 trillion in mortgage-related debt is 33% more than before the housing crisis.
So, the housing crisis was in large part caused by a belief by the federal government that sponsoring Subprime mortgages that were going to default would turn out fine because real estate values would continue to rise, so lending companies, banks, they'd be able to foreclose on the property and still not lose money, which means that the federal government would never have to backstop this stuff.
Then the real estate market crashes, people are getting foreclosed upon, and guess who has to step in?
Their solution to that is, let's get more into the federal lending business.
These entities, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the FHA, are run or backstopped by the U.S.
government, so a large increase in loan defaults could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
The risk is a direct result of pressure from the lending industry, consumer groups, and political appointees who clamored for the government to intervene when home ownership rates fell several years ago.
Starting in the Obama administration, numerous government officials obliged, mistakenly expecting that the private market ultimately would take over.
Why would it take over?
Why exactly would the private market take over for loans that they were never going to be able to support in the first place?
In 2019, according to data from the Urban Institute, there is now more government-backed housing debt than in any other point in American history.
Taxpayers are shouldering much of the risk.
A growing number of homeowners face debt payments that amount to nearly half of their monthly income, a threshold many experts consider too steep.
The basic rule used to be don't spend more than 20% on your mortgage of what you make in monthly income.
Now it's like 33%.
Spending 50% means you have a high likelihood of defaulting.
Roughly 30% of the loans Fannie Mae guaranteed last year exceeded that level.
Up from 14% in 2016.
Okay, that's insane.
And again, that is driven by the idea that government is the solution to all ills.
It is not.
It makes things worse.
It makes things worse.
And that's only going to become clear when the real estate market tanks.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
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Edited by Adam Sajevitz.
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Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
It seems President Trump is getting sick and tired of being lied about 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The press can't understand it.
What's the big deal, they say?
Isn't that what we always do to Republican presidents?
Hilarity ensues on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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