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Oct. 10, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:38
A Real Constitutional Crisis | Ep. 876
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The Trump administration pledges to stonewall Congress, Hillary Clinton signals some interest in 2020, and the Turks begin their attack on the Kurds.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Okay, we've got a ton to get to today, and I take off 25 hours, guys, just to do some atoning, just to get right with God, and the world explodes because that's the way things work.
Okay, so, the latest, an impeachment case, 2019.
Over the past 25, 36 hours, Basically, the White House has now pledged they're going to stonewall Congress.
This is not a good strategy.
It's not.
Now, I know there are a lot of folks on the right who are cheering this, a lot of folks on the conservative side who are saying, this is exactly what the White House should be doing, given the political nature of this impeachment inquiry.
And there is truth to the fact that the White House Should be pushing back on some of the subpoenas that the White House should be pushing back on Congress's power to do some of the stuff that they are doing.
However, to simply state that they are going to in blanket fashion sort of stonewall Congress is a mistake.
The reason it's a mistake is because it goes one of a couple of ways.
One, All of this goes to the courts, and the courts actually rule against the Trump administration, in which case they have to turn over all of this stuff anyway, and now there is impetus for an impeachment move because of so-called obstruction, because the White House is attempting to prevent information from being disseminated.
Obstruction was used as an impeachment grounds for both Clinton and Nixon.
So, that's possibility number one.
Possibility number two.
It goes to the courts, and the courts simply decline to answer the question.
They say this falls under what they call the political question doctrine, meaning that when the branches are hashing things out between themselves, it is really not the business of the judiciary to step in and do anything about it.
Well, that then throws it back on Congress.
And Congress, in order to defend its own prerogatives, to get information, because Congress does have the constitutional power to impeach.
Congress does have the constitutional power to investigate under Article I and Article II of the Constitution.
With all of that said, Congress will then be led to get its sort of spine up a little bit, get its back up, and say to the executive branch, listen, even if we're Republicans, we are not going to let the executive branch simply decline to work with Congress in any way, in any investigation, because that sets a precedent that is undoable once a Democrat is in office again.
And then possibility number three is that the White House stonewalls and gets away with it.
The problem there is that once that strategy is on the table and has been successfully used, it is now used by presumably every president.
And that means that the presidency, no matter which party the presidency is being held by, The president can now get away with anything.
Okay, so, with that said, the White House's basic statement, which is that Congress needs to be specific about what exactly it is calling for, what Congress is actually doing legally speaking, that part is true.
But the White House basically saying we're not cooperating under nearly any circumstances.
It depends how you read the White House's letter, but if that is what they're actually claiming, that's a massive overreach and it's a bad move strategically.
It's gonna be much easier to show that the White House is stonewalling and therefore engaged in a cover-up.
Then to show that the White House actually involved itself in criminally impeachable behavior in the first place.
As I've been saying for a couple of weeks now, it is always easier to get a president for a cover-up than it is to get a president for a crime.
It was easier to get Richard Nixon for the cover-up of Watergate than it was to get Richard Nixon for Watergate itself.
It was easier to get President Clinton for obstruction of justice than it was to get President Clinton for any of the underlying crimes, including perjury, by the way.
And so, The Trump White House should just take note of that fact when they decide how far to stonewall Congress.
Okay, we're going to get to exactly what the White House did.
Are they actually stonewalling Congress, or are they actually not?
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so here is the actual story.
According to the Washington Post, the White House on Tuesday said it would not cooperate with the House's impeachment inquiry of President Trump, arguing that the probe, quote, violates the Constitution, the rule of law, and every past precedent in an escalating standoff with an unbound Congress.
In a scathing eight-page letter, the White House said the inquiry into the Ukraine scandal was without merit, complained that the president has been denied his due process rights, and argued that Democrats were intent on overturning the results of the 2016 election and influencing the 2020 contest.
Okay, so as I say, there are a couple of angles to this letter.
We're going to go through the letter today.
Now, does that make it constitutionally illegitimate?
Of course not.
The House has the unilateral power of impeachment.
This entire thing is politically illegitimate.
Now, does that make it constitutionally illegitimate?
Of course not.
The House has the unilateral power of impeachment.
It does not make it constitutionally ridiculous for the House to launch an impeachment inquiry, even along the lines that are weak.
The White House is also pointing out some shortcomings in the way that the Democrats are approaching this thing legally.
They're pointing out the Democrats have not actually voted as a full House to open an impeachment inquiry, which would give them some additional powers.
Also, they have not really abided by precedent in terms of using their subpoena power and allowing the minority to subpoena witnesses as well.
That part happens to be true.
The question is whether the letter is an overreach, what the letter is designed to do, And whether the letter is setting the groundwork for the possibility of a full-scale stonewall by the Trump administration.
Now the reason that there is suspicion that this may be setting the precedent for a full-scale stonewall, no matter what Congress does, is because the Trump administration did intervene over the past couple of days And prevented Gordon Sondland, President Trump's ambassador to the European Union, from testifying on Tuesday morning before House committees.
House Democrats then issued a subpoena to Gordon Sondland in the impeachment inquiry.
He had bowed to a State Department order to skip a deposition earlier in the day.
Now, Gordon Sondland, as you know, is the, as I say, Trump's ambassador to the EU.
He was on that text message exchange with Kurt Volker, who was the special envoy to Ukraine, as well as with Bill Taylor, who happened to be the special Replacement for the ambassador to Ukraine.
They're on this text exchange all about basically whether the Trump administration was pressuring Ukraine to prosecute Joe Biden.
In order to receive military aid.
And there was a disagreement among these officials on this text message exchange.
And so Sondland's testimony presumably would be important in determining exactly what he was told by the Trump White House.
The Trump State Department stepped in and they said, we're not going to let him testify.
They didn't really make clear under what conditions this was.
Democrats had requested that he testify.
Now they've issued a formal subpoena.
They presumably could hold him in contempt.
They could also hold the State Department in contempt.
Democrats have subpoenaed Sondland for his testimony and documents that they share being withheld by the State Department.
The subpoena demands those documents be turned over by October 14th.
And they say that Sondland must sit for a deposition on October 16th before three congressional panels, which means before the end of next week.
The three Democrats who lead the various committees that are doing this investigation, Schiff, Cummings, and Engel, they said, we consider this interference to be obstruction of the impeachment inquiry.
Now, they can consider whatever they want to be obstruction.
It's not obstruction until there's a court order that says that you have to show up for the subpoena under the conditions specified by Congress, and then the person doesn't show up.
Then you get into obstruction of justice issues.
It is not mere obstruction simply to say, I'm not showing up for a subpoena, and then it gets thrown into the court.
In fact, that sort of negotiation happens all the time with regard to subpoenas.
Somebody is subpoenaed.
They say no.
It goes to court.
The court rules.
But that's why it has to be a formal subpoena.
That is the grounds for the lawsuit itself.
The State Department has not responded to requests for comments at this point, but President Trump, never one to shy away from trigger, immediately went on Twitter and explained why Sunland was not going to be showing up.
He tweeted out, But unfortunately, he would be testifying before a totally compromised kangaroo court, where Republicans' rights have been taken away and true facts are not allowed out for the public to see.
Importantly, Ambassador Sondland's tweet, which few reports stated, quote, That says it all.
believe you are incorrect about President Trump's intentions.
The president has been crystal clear.
No quid pro quos of any kind.
That says it all.
So he's happy with that particular text message from Sondland that was to Bill Taylor, the replacement for the ambassador to Ukraine.
And he doesn't want Sondland testifying.
Notice that he is basically saying, under no circumstances do I want Sondland testifying.
Not, there's going to be a negotiation about what documents are turned over.
And this is what's leading to the grand suspicion on the part of Democrats and on the part of the media that the White House is going to engage in an overall stonewalling effort.
Well, that obviously was bolstered by the letter that was sent by Pat Cipollone, who happens to be the Who happens to be the president's attorney in this particular case.
He sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi, Engel, Schiff, and Cummings.
And it's a fairly long letter, but it's worth going through simply because there's so much controversy over it.
And we try to bring you the information as always first, and then we make the judgment.
So here's what the letter says.
Quote, I write on behalf of President Donald J. Trump in response to your numerous legally unsupportable demands made as part of what you have labeled contrary to the Constitution of the United States and all past bipartisan precedent as an impeachment inquiry.
As you know, you have designed and implemented your inquiry in a manner that violates fundamental fairness and constitutionally mandated due process.
Well, not yet.
Not yet.
Okay, so to make a due process claim, you have to claim that the process has not been due.
Now normally, that usually arises at the Senate The Senate criminal hearing part of the process, right?
There's the impeachment inquiry.
That's the House investigating and the House coming up with whether they believe they should impeach.
And then when you get to the Senate, there's an actual trial.
At the trial, there has to be a certain level of due process.
Presumably, the Supreme Court could step in and say due process has not actually been followed here.
Now, where he is right, Cipollone, is that when he says that there are certain things the Democrats are doing that have never been done before, that is true.
There are a couple of things specifically.
One, They've made clear that they are not going to allow the minority to issue subpoenas.
That is different.
Two, they keep claiming this is an impeachment inquiry when they have not actually voted in favor of an impeachment inquiry.
Basically, they had these ongoing investigations going in the various committees.
Nancy Pelosi got up and said impeachment inquiry, and everybody is now treating it like it's an official act of Congress, like Congress is now undergoing an impeachment inquiry.
That's not true.
Okay, I should have to vote for that in order for there to be an official impeachment inquiry for whatever that's worth.
Okay, we can get to the rest of Cipollone's letter in just one second.
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Okay, so, Cipollone's letter continues.
He says, Well, right now, they're just doing an investigation.
So, it's not clear that those rights actually obtain.
Well, right now, they're just doing an investigation.
So it's not clear that those rights actually obtain.
Those rights would obtain in a Senate trial.
But when it comes to an impeachment inquiry, that's just like every other inquiry that happens on the House level.
It's not clear that the House can't set its own rules, for example.
Cipollone says you have conducted your proceedings in secret.
You have violated civil liberties and the separation of powers by threatening executive branch officials claiming you will seek to punish those who exercise fundamental constitutional rights and prerogatives.
OK, now that last part where basically they've threatened to hold people in contempt for not obeying their requests.
Those are empty threats.
That's not a violation of the Constitution.
That is them being legally idiotic and attempting to push a false narrative, which is that if you negotiate with them over the terms of your testimony, that you are somehow going to be held in contempt.
That is not something that they actually have the power to do.
In order to have a contempt holding, you have to first issue a legally binding subpoena, for example.
Never before in our history has the House of Representatives under the control of either political party taken the American people down the dangerous path you seem determined to pursue.
This letter is written more as a political document, obviously, than it is as a legal document.
Cipollone says, put simply, you seek to overturn the results of the 2016 election and deprive the American people of the president they have freely chosen.
Many Democrats now apparently view impeachment not only as a means to undo the Democratic results of the last election, but as a strategy to influence the next election, which is barely more than a year away.
As one member of Congress explained, he is concerned that if we don't impeach the president, he will get reelected.
That would be Representative Al Green on MSNBC.
Your highly partisan and unconstitutional effort threatens grave and lasting damage to our democratic institutions, to our systems of free elections, and to the American people.
It's a perfectly fine political argument.
Completely has nothing to do with legality, right?
Just from a legal standpoint, this is not part of a legal document.
This is a political argument, an argument with which I generally agree, by the way, but a political argument nonetheless.
Cipollone's the lawyer.
He says, for his part, President Trump took the unprecedented step of providing the public transparency by declassifying and releasing the record of his call with Zelensky of Ukraine.
And then it says the record clearly established the call.
the call was completely appropriate and that there is no basis for your inquiry.
The fact there was nothing wrong with the call was also powerfully confirmed by Chairman Schiff's decision to create a false version of the call and read it to the American people at a congressional hearing without disclosing that he was simply making it all up.
Now, again, Schiff made a fool of himself, right?
But I don't really think that that is what Schiff was doing.
I mean, to be, I'm trying to be fair to everybody here because the fact is that while I think that Schiff is a real snake in the grass when it comes to his proceedings, I think that the pretend outrage at him faking a conversation in a clearly made up way and pretending that everybody thought that was real.
I don't really buy that particular line of argument.
In addition, information has recently come to light to Cipollone that the whistleblower had contact with Chairman Schiff's office before filing the complaint.
That, of course, is true.
For these reasons, President Trump and his administration reject your baseless unconstitutional efforts to overturn the democratic process.
Your unprecedented actions have left the president with no choice.
In order to fulfill his duties to the American people, the Constitution, the executive branch, and all future occupants of the office of the presidency, President Trump and his administration cannot participate in your partisan and unconstitutional inquiry under these circumstances.
Okay, the key phrase there is under these circumstances.
Because if those circumstances can be rectified, if the House votes for an impeachment inquiry, if the House allows minority rights to the minority party, then will the Trump administration cooperate?
If so, the letter's fine.
If not, the letter is going to run up very quickly into the Democrats and maybe some Republican members of the House.
Suggesting that the Trump administration is engaging in at least a cover-up and what could be a constitutional crisis.
A constitutional crisis, as Noah Feldman, law professor at Harvard, correctly suggests, a constitutional crisis is where the branches go up against one another and there is no clear solution as to what happens next.
So the legislative branch subpoenas everybody in the executive branch.
The executive branch, instead of turning down some, accepting others, and going through the court, simply says, no, under no circumstances are we going to cooperate under any circum... That is what you would call a constitutional crisis, presumably.
Although, even there, there is a procedure, right?
The judiciary would weigh in.
Presumably, if the House was offended enough by the executive, the House could impeach the executive.
Okay, so, is this letter actually a blanket attempt to say we're not participating under any circumstances, or is it a conditional letter?
Is the letter saying, listen, Under the current circumstances, where you are clearly manipulating the process, true.
Under these circumstances, where you're clearly being partisan hacks who have no interest in a fair process, kinda true.
If, under these circumstances, where you pretend you have an impeachment inquiry, and the House hasn't even voted for one, which is true, we're not going to participate.
That, at least, is part of a negotiation.
If it's just, listen, we don't like the basis for the inquiry.
We think the basis for the inquiry is wrong.
So, no.
That is a constitutional crisis and that is not going to end well for the Trump administration.
Okay, so the letter continues.
They say your inquiry is constitutionally invalid and violates basic due process rights and the separation of powers.
So they say that in the history of our nation the House of Representatives has never attempted to launch an impeachment inquiry against the president without a majority of the House taking political accountability for that decision by voting to authorize such a dramatic constitutional step.
That's not really true.
In the Andrew Johnson impeachment, I don't believe the House actually formally voted to open impeachment inquiry.
They just voted for impeachment.
Here, House leadership claims to have initiated the gravest inter-branch conflict contemplated in our Constitution by means of nothing more than a press conference at which the Speaker of the House simply announced an official impeachment inquiry.
Your contrived process is unprecedented.
Okay, that part is true.
That part is true.
The committee's inquiry also suffers from a separate fatal defect.
Despite Speaker Pelosi's commitment to treat the president with fairness, the committees have not established any procedures affording the president even the most basic protections demanded by due process under the Constitution and by fundamental fairness.
Now, the House does have unilateral power over how the impeachment inquiry is run.
It is a separate branch of government.
It does not have to actually engage in the sorts of negotiation with the White House that the White House is claiming that it has to.
So this part, I don't really see the legal basis for.
The House has sole power over how it sets up the impeachment inquiry.
Again, they can vote for impeachment without an inquiry.
They could vote for impeachment today.
So they don't actually have to have quote-unquote due process.
It's at the Senate trial that presumably you have to have some form of due process.
They say these due process rights are not a matter of discretion for the committees to dispense with at will.
To the contrary, they're constitutional requirements.
The Supreme Court has recognized that due process protections apply to all congressional investigations.
Well, it's not quite as simple as that.
The cases that they are citing are not quite.
Now, they may be right that the president shouldn't be treated unfairly this way.
applies to impeachment proceedings.
Yes, in the Senate, in the Senate.
The right to cross-examine witnesses, call witnesses, present evidence, dates back 150 years again in the Senate.
That seems to be more true than in the House.
Now, they may be right that the president shouldn't be treated unfairly this way.
And they may be right that the Democrats should simply allow some of this stuff to happen.
But is this a blanket stonewall or is it conditional?
Again, that is the big question here, and it's not quite clear from this letter.
They say, to comply with the Constitution's demands, appropriate procedures would include, at a minimum, the right to see all evidence, to present evidence, to call witnesses, to have counsel present at all hearings, to cross-examine all witnesses, to make objections relating to examination of witnesses, or the admissibility of testimony and evidence, and to respond to evidence and testimony.
Okay, again, that all makes sense at a trial.
It doesn't make sense in the context of a House inquiry.
So as I say, the legal basis for this letter are fairly weak.
Fairly weak.
And then they talk about the Congress resorting to threats and intimidation against executive branch witnesses.
Again, that is inappropriate.
That does not fatally mean that there can't be an impeachment inquiry or that the White House can ignore all subpoenas, for example.
Then the letter gets into basically a political argument saying that the impeachment inquiry is seeking to reverse the election of 2016 and influence the election of 2020.
Again, a political argument with which I agree, but has virtually nothing to do with legality.
And then they say there's no legitimate basis for the impeachment inquiry.
So that again suggests that no matter what Congress does, they are not going to cooperate because they find the basis not legit.
Well, if that were the case, Nixon could have just stonewalled, right?
He would have just said, listen, I find this whole thing non-legit.
It would have been Al Pacino and injustice for all.
You're out of order, this entire court is out of order.
Yeah, that doesn't work.
That doesn't work in actual legal proceedings.
The letter concludes, for the foregoing reasons, the president cannot allow your constitutionally illegitimate proceedings to distract him and those in the executive branch from their work on behalf of the American people.
The president has a country to lead.
The American people elected him to do this job.
He remains focused on fulfilling his promises to the American people, etc., etc., etc.
They say, we hope that in light of the many deficiencies we have identified in your proceedings, you will abandon the current invalid efforts to pursue an impeachment inquiry and join the president in focusing on the goals that matter to the American people.
Okay, so does this mean that this is a full-scale stonewall?
Answer?
We don't know yet.
We don't know yet.
If it turns into a full-scale Stonewall, this is not going to go great for the Trump administration.
It's not.
If it's just a political ploy by Cipollone and Trump, if it's just, we want these things and if you give us those things we'll cooperate, Then, alright, that's not bad.
But if this turns into, we're not cooperating with Congress, I still believe in the Constitution.
The Congress does have the power of inquiry.
If this were Barack Obama saying, I'm not going to cooperate under any circumstances because I deny your power to investigate, that would be a constitutional violation the Supreme Court is likely to find that way.
It's not going to go the way Trump thinks if this is a pure, full-on stone.
And again, we don't know whether it is or not because the letter is not clear on that.
Okay, in just a second, We're going to talk a little bit more about this whistleblower because now it turns out that there are some serious questions about the nature identity of the whistleblower and the whistleblower's report.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so...
Meanwhile, there is some news about the whistleblower that should be disquieting, because as I have said, several things can be true at once, as I'm fine of saying.
One, bad idea for the Trump administration to completely stonewall the investigation.
It has not ended well for Clinton.
It didn't end well for Nixon.
It's just not a smart strategy.
Two, this can be a highly partisan inquiry that obviously smacks of an attempt to take down Trump without proper evidence.
I mean, that so far seems to be the case.
Three, it can turn out the whistleblower was manipulating things from the inside with the help of Adam Schiff from the outside.
It now seems that there is some news about the whistleblower.
This would explain why the Democrats, excuse me, have been so eager to prevent the identity of the whistleblower from becoming known.
According to Byron York reporting for the Washington Examiner, the whistleblower apparently not only has political bias, but the political bias is that the whistleblower apparently, according to the Inspector General of the intelligence community, had a professional relationship with one of the Democratic candidates.
Okay, that is not good news, right, for the Democrats.
According to a person with knowledge, what Atkinson said was that the whistleblower self-disclosed that he was a registered Democrat and that he had a prior working relationship with the current 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.
Apparently, the inspector general did not identify the Democratic candidate with whom the whistleblower had a connection.
It's unclear what the working or professional relationship between the two was.
Now, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and do some rank speculation.
Could be completely wrong.
I'm gonna say it's probably Joe Biden.
I'm going to say that probably what happened here is that this whistleblower had a relationship with Joe Biden.
We know he was in the White House working on Ukraine issues.
So, is it possible that this whistleblower had a relationship with Joe Biden, knew the situation in Ukraine, and when Joe Biden's name got brought up in the context of Ukraine immediately jumped to the conclusion that there was an investigation into Joe Biden that was the basis of all of this?
And he wasn't going to have that because he knows Joe Biden and Joe Biden is a good man?
That seems quite possible.
And if so, that certainly colors the whistleblower's memo.
The original whistleblower memo that apparently raised hackles is now being reported by CBS News.
CBS News has learned the full contents of what appears to be a memo written by the whistleblower one day after President Trump spoke with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July.
The memo, dated July 26, is based on a conversation the whistleblower had with an unnamed White House official who listened to the call.
So again, leakiest White House of all time.
Apparently, according to the memo, the White House official described the contents of the call as crazy, frightening, and completely lacking in substance related to national security.
The whistleblower said the official was visibly shaken by what had transpired and seemed keen to inform a trusted colleague within the U.S.
national security apparatus about the call.
Okay, what made him call this guy?
What made him call this guy?
Is it possible that the person on the call is from the White House, is a White House staffer who's a holdover from the Obama administration, was friendly with Team Biden, called up another person who was friendly with Team Biden, and that person filed a whistleblower complaint?
Again, rank speculation.
Could be completely wrong.
I'm gonna guess that is not completely wrong.
So I'm sure we'll find out more in the future.
If that turns out to be the case, then it certainly casts a lot of doubt on the motives of the whistleblower.
Now, does that mean that Trump is innocent of all manipulation in Ukraine?
We've read the transcript.
We've seen text messages.
There will be additional evidence presented.
But it does make this look a lot more like a partisan hit on behalf of Joe Biden than it does like an attempt to root out and ferret out corruption inside the White House.
Now, one thing is pretty clear.
A lot of the diplomats who are involved in the Ukraine situation were at the very least disquieted by the activity in the Trump administration.
From that text message conversation between Kurt Volker, the special envoy to the Ukraine, and Bill Taylor, who is the interim ambassador to Ukraine, and Gordon Sondland, who is the EU ambassador, there's obviously a lot of disquiet about this.
And now, there are reports from the New York Times That members of the State Department were at least a little perturbed about the way in which aid to Ukraine was restored.
Brad Friedan, who is the State Department's Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary overseeing issues in Europe and Eurasia, apparently wrote in a September 12th email the day after the restoration of Ukrainian aid, quote, A wonderful thing to write in an email exchange where people are worried.
He said the National Security Council would not publicly announce that $141 million in State Department assistance was being restored after being held up in what the White House described as a normal review, which is weird, by the way.
I will say it is weird.
Right?
It's weird to say that you went through a normal review process and then you greenlit the aid, but we're not going to announce it publicly.
Like, why?
Why the attempt to keep quiet?
According to one of these emails, which is presumably to Bill Taylor, it says, Bill, in terms of public messaging, the National Security Council is deliberately treating both the hold and its lifting as administrative matters.
There won't be a public announcement on this end.
My advice is to keep your public messaging low key as well.
Along the lines of OMB has completed its administrative review of security assistance for Ukraine and our assistance will continue as before, which, again, starts to look at least a little bit suspicious.
So, more details, I'm sure, will be forthcoming, as always, because we're at the beginning of this process, not at the end of this process.
And lots of things can be true at once.
Democrats can be manipulating the process.
They can be being unfair to President Trump.
This could have been pushed by a partisan whistleblower.
And it could be that there was malfeasance inside the Trump White House.
All of those things could be possible at once.
We're gonna keep an eye on it.
And again, I'm one of these people who is fond of the phrase, I don't know.
You know why I'm fond of that phrase?
You know, you should be fond of that phrase too, because you don't know.
The only people who know what actually happened in this whole policy situation are Trump and his immediate aides.
Those are the only people who know.
Okay, so if you are suggesting that you know full-scale Trump is totally innocent, everything is totally above board and fine, you don't know that.
If you're a Democrat and you're suggesting that you know for a fact that Trump was only out to get Biden, you certainly don't know that based on the available evidence at this point.
We're gonna find out.
And the stonewalling is actually more of a danger to Trump's future as president than is the inquiry itself.
I feel like this the same way that I do about the Mueller inquiry, right?
During Mueller, there were a lot of people on the right who were urging Trump, fire Mueller, end the investigation, just stop this thing.
And I kept saying, nope, let it go.
Let it go all the way out, because in the end, Mueller's likely to find nothing.
And if you stop it, then it starts to look like obstruction.
It starts to look like you're afraid of what Mueller is going to find.
Well, the same thing holds true here.
Don't stop the investigation.
Listen, the Democrats are gonna blow this thing anyway, so you may as well give them enough rope to hang themselves, because they certainly will hang themselves almost no matter what you do.
Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get to the situation in Turkey, which has become quite grave quite quickly, because it turns out when the President of the United States signals to a dictatorial foreign power they can go in and murder a bunch of people who helped us out fighting ISIS, Guess what?
The Turks move.
We'll get into that in just one second.
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Alrighty, we'll get to more of that in just a second, but you're actually going to have to go over to dailywire.com in order to subscribe to see the rest of the show today.
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It was a blast.
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Trump signaled that he was withdrawing some 50 US troops.
He said he was withdrawing them from Syria altogether.
That's not true.
He's apparently just withdrawing them from the area where Turkey wants to invade and kill a bunch of Kurds.
And that is...
Foolhardy at best.
And now you're hearing a lot of arguments today from people, including President Trump.
We can't be part of these forever wars, forever wars, forever wars.
This wasn't a forever war.
It was 50 troops in one place.
And here's the thing.
There's very, there are very few things that are certain in American foreign policy.
One thing that is absolutely certain in American foreign policy, where American boots disappear, things get worse.
And when American troops are present, Things are not as bad.
When you remove American troops, things get worse.
So the question becomes, not how many lives are you going to sacrifice for the Kurds, but how many Kurdish lives are you willing to sacrifice so that our soldiers don't have to stand in this particular place?
Because you know how many American soldiers were killed by the Turks over the past several years?
The answer is zero.
The answer is, you know why?
Because the Turks don't want to go to war with us, man.
There's this like there's this bizarre notion on the isolationist sort of Pat Buchanan, right?
Tucker Carlson sometimes says stuff like this, where he'll say, why should our boys die for X, X being a foreign country?
Well, that's not the question.
The question is, why shouldn't we stand there so that people don't attack that foreign country?
And that's not true in every circumstance, you have to calculate the risk.
And you have to calculate the threat.
I mean, there are certain places where if you put troops, that is basically an invitation for an attack on American troops.
And there are other places where if you put troops, you know, full scale, the Turks are not going to go into this area.
Because if they kill an American troop, we are going to then proceed to devastate their economy, for example.
So pulling out of that area is actually an invitation to escalation of war.
And more than that, when you pull out, like, I'm old enough to remember when Republicans understood that Barack Obama pulling out of Iraq led to the rise of ISIS in the first place.
And now, Donald Trump is saying, why don't we just pull out of this area where they're holding like 15,000 to 20,000 ISIS soldiers?
We'll pull out of that area.
The Kurds who are defending those ISIS prisons are going to be under attack by the Turks.
Do you really think that the Turks are going to go in there and stomp out ISIS?
They didn't before.
The fact is that the Turks kind of have an interest in ISIS being there.
It gives them an excuse to go in and kill as many members of the PKK, the sort of communist Kurdish party insurgency, and by the way, non-PKK members, right?
Just Kurdish nationalists who don't want to be murdered by ISIS.
It gives the Turks an excuse to go into Syria in the first place.
It gives Bashar Assad an excuse to go after Syrian dissidents.
It gives Iran an excuse to be in the region.
This was the problem with ISIS.
The reason ISIS was able to fester and become a huge problem is because nobody in the region, except for maybe the Kurds, actually had an interest in killing the members of ISIS, and that's why the United States had to go in.
It's not like we pull out and now everybody takes care of their own business.
We were in there because people weren't taking care of their own business or because their interests didn't align with ours in this particular part of the world.
So President Trump is making what I think is a deeply empty argument when he's like, well, we have to just put, we're ending wars, ending wars.
You know who used to say that?
I'm old enough to remember.
Barack Obama, right?
This was his thing.
I'm gonna end the war in Afghanistan.
I'm gonna end the war in Iraq.
Yeah, it turns out that sometimes you ending the war means another war gets started and we have our troops back in there in five seconds, which is exactly what happened in Iraq, right?
Obama pulls out the troops, ISIS rises, guess who has to go back in?
You know what would have helped?
Not pulling out the troops.
And when you're talking about a very low level of troop presence, And pretty much zero risk from the Turks toward American troops.
Do not follow the BS argument that the Turks were going to go in and start wiping out American troops alongside the Kurds.
That is not a thing that was going to happen.
Anyway, President Trump tweeted out that he had moved some 50 troops He tweeted out, Okay, well, I thought that you were championing the fact that we defeated ISIS.
USA should never have been in Middle East, moved our 50 soldiers out.
Turkey must take over captured ISIS fighters that Europe refused to have returned.
The stupid endless wars for us are ending.
Okay, well, I thought that you were championing the fact that we defeated ISIS.
So should we have just left them there?
Like really, if the argument is we should never have been there, one of Trump's signal achievements is destroying ISIS, Stan.
It's destroying the caliphate.
But now he's arguing that we should never have been there in the first place.
Okay, well, we weren't in Afghanistan, and then Afghanistan turned over to the Taliban, and then we got 9-11.
So it turns out that when we don't fight terrorists overseas, sometimes they come here, and then they kill us.
And ISIS was doing that on a fairly regular basis.
This is what we call the ultimate strawman argument from President Trump.
Lindsey Graham rightly went after Trump over all of this.
He says that Trump shamelessly abandoned them, which is strong language from Lindsey Graham, who's been a very, very strong ally of President Trump throughout his presidency.
Graham said, pray for our Kurdish allies who have been shamelessly abandoned by the Trump administration.
This move ensures the reemergence of ISIS.
Fair.
Fair.
And there's really no rationale for it other than Trump probably got somebody in his ear saying, keep the campaign promise, pull out the troops.
Barack Obama did the exact same thing.
Turkey, by the way, immediately moved within 24 hours to start killing as many Kurds as humanly possible.
According to the Washington Post, Turkey's government launched a long-expected offensive into northeastern Syria on Wednesday, with airstrikes and shelling targeting Syrian Kurdish fighters who have played a central role in aiding the U.S.-led battle against the Islamic State militant group.
The operation, with some ground forces crossing the border later, came just days after President Trump's startling announcement that the United States would not stand in Turkey's way, bringing sharp rebukes from even the president's Republican allies.
The Turkish foray threatened a further fracture of war-shattered Syria as Ankara, the capital of Turkey, moved to create a safe zone after failing to agree on its size and nature during negotiations with the United States.
Turkey's goal is to push the Syrian Kurds, considered enemies by Turkey, from the border region, and apparently civilians are already being killed in this foray.
Now, one of the arguments that Trump put out today, he said, well, what have the Kurds ever done for us?
He says, well, you know, they've only been defending their own sovereign territory.
They weren't there at Normandy, right?
They weren't there in other foreign wars.
Yeah, well, here's the reality.
Most nations have not been.
I mean, in World War II, we went to help the Brits.
In World War I, we went to help the Brits.
When was the last time the Brits had helped us in a war?
That wasn't a thing.
Okay, the fact is that sometimes the U.S.' 's interests are involved.
The U.S.
does have an interest in preventing the rise of ISIS again, do we not?
The U.S.
does have an interest in ensuring that American allies are not abandoned, especially when the cost is minimal.
I mean, we're not talking about sacrificing thousands of troops for the freedom of the Kurds.
That would be a legit argument about whether we should do that.
And I think a strong argument made that we shouldn't.
But if you're talking about sacrificing no troops just to have people standing there so the Turks don't go in and murder thousands of people, it seems like a pretty strong argument to leave the troops there.
Sergio Gore, who is the, he's one of the press people for Rand Paul, who's an isolationist.
He says, it's expected that some in the GOP who took us into these endless quagmires in the Middle East are unhappy about ending wars, but where is the left?
The silence is resounding.
Silence is not always golden.
Donald Trump is doing the right thing and should have bipartisan support.
I know Sergio, Sergio's wrong on this.
President Trump says, true, should have never been there in the first place.
Again, should have never been where in the first place?
Like, I don't know what the first place means.
Are we talking about like going all the way back to the time of T.E.
Lawrence?
It turns out the West has been present in the Middle East for quite a long time.
And again, we weren't really present in Afghanistan after the late 1980s.
It did not redound to our benefit, particularly.
So, again, bad policy from President Trump.
Meanwhile, the 2020 race is getting weird.
Hillary Clinton is popping up her head again.
This all happened because Hillary Clinton did an interview with Judy Woodruff in which she explained that if she ran, she would beat President Trump again.
Of course, she won the popular vote, but she did not beat President Trump, which is why she's not sitting in the Oval Office right now.
So here is Hillary Clinton explaining that, yes, she could be Trump again.
By the way, the polls do not show this.
It truly is remarkable how obsessed he remains with me.
But this latest tweet is so typical of him.
Nothing has been more examined and looked at than my emails.
We all know that.
So he's either lying or delusional or both.
There was no subpoena, as he says in a tweet this morning.
So maybe there does need to be a rematch.
I mean, obviously, I can beat him again.
Okay, and then apparently she tried to claim that she was joking, but would Hillary love to get back in?
No doubt.
No doubt she would.
And the Democratic field is extraordinarily weak.
Trump tweeted at Hillary, of course, because he can't resist.
He loves the fact that he—as do we all.
He said, I think the crooked Hillary Clinton should enter the race and try and steal it away from uber-left Elizabeth Warren.
Only one condition.
The crooked one must explain all of her high crimes and misdemeanors, including how and why she deleted 30,000 emails after getting C subpoena.
C would be congressional subpoena.
I do love that he calls her the crooked one.
The crooked one.
And then Hillary Clinton tweeted back, don't tempt me, do your job.
Man, Hillary Clinton jumping back in finally might make this thing fun again.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is out there suggesting that Trump should be impeached.
This, of course, because one thing is true.
Joe Biden certainly does not want his son, his own conduct in Ukraine, made the center of attention.
Again, here is Joe Biden going after Trump.
With his words and his actions, President Trump has indicted himself by obstructing justice, refusing to comply with the congressional inquiry.
He's already convicted himself.
MR.
In full view of the world and the American people, Donald Trump has violated his oath of office, betrayed this nation, and committed impeachable acts.
To preserve our Constitution, our democracy, our basic integrity, He should be impeached.
Okay, he still has not actually explained on what basis.
When he says obstruction, not yet.
Maybe, maybe that'll happen, but not yet, as we've been discussing all day.
By the way, I do love that Joe Biden continues to engage in this myth-making about how there were no scandals in the Obama administration.
There's another line that Joe Biden dropped yesterday.
He said that one of the things he's proud of is that there were no scandals.
Yeah, I was there.
There were lots of them, dude.
The only thing I'm proudest of is Barack and me.
I've never been a scandal.
Okay, Peter Schweitzer has a piece in the New York Times today.
The Biden campaign is super pissed off about it.
The piece is called, What Hunter Biden Did Was Legal, and That's the Problem.
And Peter Schweitzer, who has written a bunch of books about corruption inside Washington, is really a terrific researcher.
He suggests that the Washington Corrupt Practices Act is necessary to stop political families from self-dealing.
He says, as Vice President, Joe Biden served as point person on American policy toward China and Ukraine.
In both instances, his son, Hunter, a businessman, landed deals he was apparently unqualified to score, save for one thing, his father.
And then he describes the fact that in December 2013, Joe and Hunter Biden flew aboard Air Force Two to China.
Less than two weeks after the trip, Hunter's firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, which he founded with two other businessmen in June 2013, finalized a deal to open a fund, BHR Partners.
Thus far, the firm has invested about $2.1 billion, according to its website.
In trying to disprove a link between the father's powerful position and the son's surprising success, Hunter Biden's lawyers claim he didn't take an equity stake in BHR Partners until after Biden left office.
But he took a board seat when it was founded in December 2013.
At the same time, his business partner was a vice chairman.
With the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, Joe Biden became point person in Ukraine, too.
That same year, Hunter Biden landed a board position with the Ukrainian energy giant Burisma Holdings.
Despite having no background in energy or Ukraine, he was paid as much as $50,000 a month, according to financial records.
Why would someone with so little experience be able to command such enormous payments?
It's pretty obvious his daddy was Joe Biden.
So when he says no scandals, what he really means is please don't investigate me.
Please, please don't investigate me.
And as it turns out, the other Democrats are going to have some problems too.
So it came out just a couple of days ago that Elizabeth Warren apparently has been issuing statements that are not consistent about why she was fired in 1971 from a job as a teacher.
It turns out she was not fired.
She said she was fired because she was pregnant.
It turns out not so much.
Here's a clip in 2007 in which Warren herself basically acknowledges that she left the job voluntarily.
I worked, it was in a public school system, but I worked with the children with disabilities.
And I did that for a year.
And then that summer, I actually didn't have the education courses, so I was on an emergency certificate, it was called.
And I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, I don't think this is going to work out for me.
Okay, I don't think this is going to work out for me.
Now, she's been claiming simultaneously that she was actually let go because she was pregnant.
I am woman, hear me be victimized is her sort of campaign point.
Now she's sort of sticking with the story.
It doesn't matter that the records show that she resigned.
It doesn't matter that they offered unanimously to extend Warren a second year contract with that emergency certificate in place.
She's still gonna stick with this story because she has to keep pretending she's a victim.
This sort of stuff will come back to bite Elizabeth Warren directly in the ass, right?
This is exactly what she did with the Pocahontas nonsense.
She's trying to claim a mantle of victimhood because she needs it in the Democratic primaries, but...
She's putting herself in for a world of hurt because if she's lying about victimology, she's had a pretty privileged life in the United States.
If she's lying about victimology, that is not something that's going to run down to her benefit.
She's sticking by her story, however.
Here is Elizabeth Warren yesterday saying that, no, no, no, no, no.
After all, she was fired because she was pregnant.
When I was first hired, I didn't have all of the right courses for a permanent certificate.
But I was hired, so it was called an emergency certificate, a one year.
But I'd already been renewed.
They gave me the job and said, you're hired for the next year.
It's yours, kid.
And when they discovered I was pregnant, they said, oops, it doesn't matter much what the term is.
But let's be clear.
I was sick.
Six months pregnant.
It was my first job.
I was 22 years old.
And the job that was mine, that I'd been hired for for the next year, was taken away when they knew I was pregnant.
Okay, there is no evidence for this.
There's no evidence for this, other than her own account.
Again, the actual documents, according to the Washington Free Beacon, suggest that she resigned and that her resignation was accepted with regret.
So, I'm sure this will not be the end of that particular...
Investigation for Elizabeth Warren.
Nonetheless, she is the frontrunner and she's not stacking up all that well against President Trump by poll data, so we'll see how all of this works for her as time goes on.
Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then a thing that I hate.
So, things that I like.
Today, let's do another movie that I had to watch on my 13-hour journey to Israel.
So, they had a lot of movies that were available for viewing.
One of these was the movie Yesterday, and this is a pretty charming movie by Danny Boyle.
The basic premise of the movie is that there is a guy who is sort of a pub singer, and he's completely unsuccessful.
And then there is basically a major power outage.
When the power goes back on all over the world, a bunch of things are missing from everybody's memory, including the Beatles.
The Beatles just don't exist.
So nobody actually is aware of the Beatles' music, except for this guy.
This guy somehow knows the Beatles' music, and so he starts playing their songs and becomes, of course, a rock legend.
Here's a little bit of the trailer.
This was my last gig.
If it hasn't happened by now, it's like a miracle.
Miracles happen.
What happened?
Electricity flicked off all over the world.
Cheese!
Yesterday... Ellie bought you a present.
...all my troubles seemed so far away.
Why did you write that?
I didn't write it.
Paul McCartney wrote it.
The Beatles.
Why did you write that?
I didn't write it.
Paul McCartney wrote it.
The Beatles.
Who?
The movie is quite charming.
Now, I will freely admit, I'm not a Beatles fan.
I've said before, I think they're the most overrated band in history.
They could write a hook.
I mean, there's no question they could write a hook, but the movie is cute and does show sort of the power of music and there's a sort of moving moment at the end where you discover that the world is Somehow, in some ways better, because the Beatles music was brought about later in time.
It's sort of an interesting flick, and the premise of it is interesting as well.
At the very least, it's fun and charming.
Go check it out, yesterday, by the director of Slumdog Millionaire.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so, over Yom Kippur, there were a bevy of anti-Semitic incidents, as we have become used to.
So, in the United States, there was apparently a fire set on the grounds of a synagogue in Brooklyn, which has become sort of rote, frankly.
We've seen a bunch of these sorts of attacks in New York.
This Brooklyn synagogue was apparently, again, somebody set a fire right there on the front steps during Yom Kippur.
According to the police, New York City has seen a massive surge in hate crimes.
Many of them have been targeting Jews.
Also, Over in Yom Kippur, there was an attack on a shoal in Germany.
The attack on the shoal in Germany was by a white supremacist who livestreamed this thing on Amazon.
It was hideous, obviously.
According to the UK Daily Mail, a gunman in a German synagogue ranted about feminism, immigration, and the Holocaust before he shot two people dead in a live-streamed anti-Semitic rampage on Judaism's holiest day.
The shooter killed a man and a woman, threw a grenade into a Jewish cemetery, and left explosives near the synagogue in hell after failing to force his way inside while worshipers prayed on Yom Kippur.
The suspect, named by Bild as a 27- I don't name terrorists, and I don't name mass shooters.
He was, not to glorify him, he was later arrested after trying to flee in a taxi, according to German media.
The German government offered deep sympathy and said it was an anti-Semitic attack, possibly motivated by right-wing extremism.
He was wearing military fatigues and a helmet camera, and he shot a woman dead in the street after she confronted him outside the synagogue where about 80 people were praying.
Now, I happen to be in Israel right now.
And I will just note that many of the same people who claim that Israel is the rationale for anti-Semitism, the reason people hate Jews is because of Israel, because Israel is so cruel and terrible, and because of how they treat the Palestinians and all of this.
These are the same people where if Israel didn't exist they would still be shooting Jews, there would just be no place for Jews to go.
The fact is that thousands of Jews every year are leaving Europe and good for them because Europe is becoming a hellhole for Jews.
Everybody knows this.
The Wall Street Journal has reported on it.
The New York Times has reported on it.
It is not safe for Jews in places like France.
It is increasingly not safe for Jews in places like Sweden, places like Germany, places like Great Britain.
People are leaving en masse and the place they're going is to the State of Israel because the State of Israel is still a safe haven for the Jewish people.
And the same people who are claiming that it's only Israel's presence that is causing anti-Semitism seem to forget that The Jews were killed in the millions when Israel didn't exist, specifically because no country would take in the Jews and because the Jews had no place to go.
The British Empire was banning the Jews from entering the nascent state of Israel before it was the state of Israel, from entering British Palestine during the actual Holocaust itself.
So for all the talk about why Israel is bad, why it shouldn't exist, why Israel is terrible and horrible and all this, the reason that Israel exists is because of stuff like this.
It's because Jews have been the victims of anti-Semitism, will continue to be the victims of anti-Semitism, and so long as people keep maintaining the absolute stupid fiction that if Israel didn't exist, everybody would be nice to the- you know how historically ignorant you'd have to be to actually believe this?
That if Israel didn't exist, everyone would be nice to the Jews?
Within living memory, three-quarters of the Jewish population on planet Earth was slaughtered, so I'm gonna go no on that.
I'm gonna go no- and the state of Israel wasn't there then.
No on that.
It's absurdity at the highest level.
Israel is not the cause of anti-Semitism.
Israel is a place where people are fleeing anti-Semitism, and that continues to be the truth, certainly in Europe.
Okay, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content, a lot more news that we'll be breaking, I'm sure.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.
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