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Jan. 30, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:33
Decision Day Approaches | Ep. 943
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Impeachment lawyers take questions from Republicans and Democrats, Alan Dershowitz finds himself under fire after explaining the nature of impeachable activity, and Republicans mull more witnesses.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Okay, so tomorrow is decision day.
Big Friday vote expected on whether Republicans will allow further witnesses.
It is up in the air as to how this goes.
I mean, it's absolutely unclear.
According to the New York Post, President Trump's impeachment defense team expects a Friday cliffhanger when senators vote on whether to call witnesses in Trump's trial.
If Democrats find four Republicans to vote for witnesses, the trial could stretch until March.
If they fail, Trump would likely be acquitted.
Now, I think that's a bit of an exaggeration.
I think that if the Republicans decide to allow witnesses, then basically they allow like two witnesses.
I think it's probably John Bolton, maybe Mick Mulvaney, and that's it.
I think they say, everybody who already testified, we already have their testimony, we don't need to hear from Gordon Sumlund again.
It might be Hunter Biden, and John Bolton, and Mick Mulvaney, and that's it.
So no, I don't think this is going to stretch for another month, just to hash out all of the witness activity.
Trump confidant Mark Meadows told the New York Post he doesn't believe there will be clarity on the outcome until Friday of this week.
Right now, there are basically three senators who are fairly certain to vote in favor of more witnesses.
That would be Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, that would be Mitt Romney of Utah, and that would be Susan Collins of Maine.
Some Republican senators, according to the New York Post, were optimistic after the McConnell-Murkowski talk, which followed a conference meeting of senators on Tuesday, when McConnell said he didn't yet have the votes to block witnesses.
Murkowski was tight-lipped after meeting with McConnell, telling reporters, I had a meeting with Leader McConnell, but I'm not going to talk to you about it.
She said, I've been talking with the folks in the cloakroom about what the universe is to see how we can supplement that with regard to witnesses.
Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi told the New York Post that the feeling among Republicans was, quote unquote, pretty good.
He said, obviously, we need to make a decision at this point whether to drag the foregone conclusion out for another four to six weeks.
We know what the outcome is.
It's just a question of how long it's going to last.
It's Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama.
Now, here is the here's the problem.
I mean, seriously, if you all believe the same thing that I believe, I said this yesterday on the show.
If you believe that the impeachment outcome is a foregone conclusion because John Bolton is not going to get up and testify, he's just not going to get up and testify that President Trump said explicitly to him, I want you condition Ukraine aid on them making up information about Joe Biden for purposes of 2020, which is the only thing that would be impeachable here.
If that's not the case, then why not get all of this out in the open now?
Because otherwise, it's just going to leak, right?
We're just going to have more leaks, and then it's not just going to implicate Trump.
Like, look, attacks on Trump.
Trump is Teflon.
More than Teflon, Trump is kind of a mud monster, in the sense that if you throw more mud at him, he's already made of mud.
So who cares?
He's made of mud.
Look, there's more mud on him.
Whatever.
That's how everybody has treated Trump since the beginning, and rightly so, because nothing is new in the world of Trumpdom.
Everything is baked into that cake.
There is sugar, there is caramel, and there's dog poop.
Like, everything is in that cake.
Everything.
So that's not going to hurt Trump, but it could hurt incumbent senators in purple states.
This is what I was talking about yesterday.
If you're worried about anything beyond Trump, and you should be, because the Republicans are vulnerable in the Senate.
They have a very slim majority in the Senate.
If Trump is re-elected and he doesn't have the Senate and he doesn't have the House, nothing is getting done.
If Trump is not re-elected and the Republicans lose the Senate and the Republicans don't retake the House, then you have a world of hurt.
You got President Bernie Sanders with a congressional majority.
I mean, God bless him.
That would just be the worst of all available worlds.
That means that the prudent move here is to hedge your bets to the extent that you can.
And that would presumably mean allowing a couple of witnesses to be called, including Hunter Biden, who would in fact be damaging to Joe Biden.
And then you move on because Trump is not getting impeached, or removed at least, over any of this.
Senator Tom Tillis of North Carolina angrily denied reports that he told fellow Republicans on Tuesday night that extending Trump's trial would hurt vulnerable GOP incumbents.
He said, whoever went out of that meeting and whoever informed the press was either misled, lying, or an imbecile.
I didn't say that.
I've been very firm on this.
I have no problem whatsoever with voting no on witnesses.
Four Republicans, including Murkowski, have expressed interest in possibly hearing from witnesses.
Retiring Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said he intended to make up his mind after we've heard the questions and the answers to the questions on Thursday.
Mitt Romney, of course, has been the clearest in saying that he is interested in hearing from some of the witnesses.
Now, the Trump team is basically saying that they're trying to make a split case, and I'm not sure it's a great case.
On the one hand, they're saying that we don't need to hear from witnesses.
On the other hand, they're saying that the Democrats don't have enough information because they didn't hear from witnesses.
That's kind of a weird take, right?
What you want to say is the Democrats came with all they could.
They didn't call witnesses because they knew there was not going to be anything there.
And why would we call more witnesses when the Democrats say that they present a complete case?
Right.
Instead, the Republicans are making a slightly different case, which is less well articulated.
And that case is that the Democrats didn't do their job.
If they had done their job and heard from witnesses, then we wouldn't have to do this whole shebang at all.
But the implication is that the Democrats' failure was not that they did a complete report and just didn't end up with the goods.
Their failure was that they didn't even do a complete report, which sort of suggests that, okay, well, now you could do a complete report, right?
I mean, you could have more witnesses.
Patrick Philbin, who's one of the lawyers for President Trump, said as much yesterday in the closing arguments that basically yesterday was a day when the impeachment managers for the House, that'd be the Democrats, like Schiff, and the Trump team, that would be Patrick Philbin and Alan Dershowitz, were asked questions via the Chief Justice by the Senators.
The Senators submitted written questions to the Chief Justice.
By the way, Can I just say, we should always do this?
Like, every congressional hearing should be this.
There should be just one person who's delegated to ask the questions, because otherwise you end up with this insane grandstanding.
I will say the process yesterday was so much better, just because you had senators who couldn't stand there and grandstand for five minutes before getting to a question mark.
I do a lot of Q&As publicly, there's nothing more irritating than when someone takes the mic, tells you their life story, and never hits a question mark.
Well, they didn't do that yesterday, and at least the process was a little more fun.
Anyway, Patrick Philbin made the case yesterday that no one goes to trial without hearing from the witnesses first.
Why didn't the Democrats call the witnesses if it was so all-fire important?
Again, the argument is not fantastic.
There's a better way to articulate it, but that's the argument anyway.
House managers try to present it as if it's just a simple question.
How can you have a trial without witnesses?
But in real litigation, no one goes to trial without doing discovery.
No one goes to trial without having heard from the witnesses first.
You don't show up at trial and then start trying Okay, the argument that it's bad for the Senate to call witnesses is not a very good argument.
for trying to run things in such an upside down way would be very grave for this body as an institution.
OK, the argument that it's bad for the Senate to call witnesses is not a very good argument.
The argument he should be making is Democrats say that they had a complete case and their case just is insufficient.
So we agree with them.
This is their complete case.
Their complete case is insufficient.
That is the best possible case for not having witnesses.
We're going to get to more on the witnesses in just one second.
Then we'll get to an attack on Alan Dershowitz that is utterly, utterly unearned.
I mean, truly unearned.
People deliberately taking Alan Dershowitz out of context to pretend they don't understand what he's talking about.
We'll get to all of that in just one second.
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OK, so Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, is out there slamming John Bolton.
And this, again, is bad strategy.
The best strategy with regards to we don't want to hear from John Bolton is he has nothing new to say.
And even if what he says is true, it doesn't make any difference, right?
That's the best strategy for not calling the witness.
If your case is the witness is a damn liar and everything that the witness says is a lie and violates national Well, then the question is, why don't you call him as a witness and then just cross-examine him?
Right?
This is bad legal tactics.
But Rudy Giuliani, he used to be a good prosecutor.
It's been a while since he was a prosecutor.
So here is Rudy Giuliani going after John Bolton with a hatchet.
It's the only conclusion I can come to, and it's a harsh one, and I feel very bad about it.
He's a backstabber.
He never said to me, I've got a problem with what you are doing in Ukraine.
Never once.
Never winked.
Never sent me a little note.
That's classic backstabber.
So I feel I got a slump character here.
I find his testimony about the president pretty close to incredible.
Close to incredible.
Okay, so now he's calling him a liar and a backstabber, but don't call him as a witness, guys.
Don't call him as a witness.
That's a very hard case to make.
Now, people on the right are trotting out.
I'm trying to be as fair-minded as I can about this, and I've said a thousand times, I don't think Trump did anything impeachable here.
Bad but not impeachable has been my standard since the very beginning.
I don't think that he did something great here, but I also don't think he did anything impeachable here.
Okay, but People on the right are trying to trot out this old clip of John Bolton talking about President Trump's calls with Vladimir Zelensky, who's the president of Ukraine.
And they're saying, well, if John Bolton hadn't had a problem with this, why didn't he say so at the time?
I mean, he did an interview where he talked about Trump's calls with Zelensky.
And the answer is, yes, you say something different publicly about the company you work for than you say privately behind the scenes to your boss.
These things are not mutually exclusive.
Are we really going to treat it as though everything anyone says publicly about the place where they work is a reflection of what they're actually saying inside the house?
I mean, that's silliness.
Anyway, here's that clip of Bolton that people are trotting out as the proof positive that Bolton is now lying.
I will be meeting President Zelensky.
He and President Trump have already spoken twice.
The President called to congratulate President Zelensky on his election and then on his success in the parliamentary election.
They were very warm and cordial calls.
We're hoping that they'll be able to meet in Warsaw and have a few minutes together.
Okay, so that last line right there, we're hoping they're going to be able to meet in Warsaw, that can easily be read as John Bolton trying to telegraph to the President and meet with him in Warsaw, right?
Because this is what people in the Trump administration do.
They go on TV specifically in order to get President Trump to pay attention to them.
This is not a joke.
This is a thing that happens on a regular basis in this White House.
If you want the President to take you seriously, you go on TV, he watches you on TV, and he takes you more seriously.
This is well-known in all of the halls of power in Washington, D.C.
It's not me spilling the beans.
It's just a reality.
Okay, so people trotting that out.
And then Mark Meadows, who again, I like.
Congressman Meadows from North Carolina.
He was saying to GOP senators, Americans are paying attention to your vote, so you should be very careful how you vote on the prospect of more witnesses.
I mean, I think that's true, but I don't think that Americans who are in red states particularly care about this.
I mean, when I say they don't care, I mean, they don't want more witnesses, but Americans in purple states, like Mark Meadows doesn't have to worry about his district, but Susan Collins certainly has to worry about her seat in Maine.
Here's Mark Meadows.
This is the most consequential vote that any senator will take, perhaps other than sending troops into harm's way.
And so the American people are going to be looking at this and they're going to say, well, did you vote with the president that I voted for or against him?
And that's why it'll have repercussions.
It's nothing that will happen here on Capitol Hill, but it really will be the voters because they are paying attention to this one vote.
They may have tuned out on the hearings.
They may not be viewing, but they are tuning in to how their senator is going to vote on this particular issue.
I mean, that's true.
And again, that's OK for some of the senators in real red states.
It's more of a problem for some of the senators who are not in those states.
OK, so some of the people who have come under serious fire from the right side of the aisle.
Or people like Mitt Romney.
So Romney submitted a series of questions yesterday that were answered on the floor of the Senate by both the White House counsel and the House managers on the Democratic side.
And for all of the people who are ripping Romney up and down, the questions that he asked yesterday are basically the correct questions in this particular case.
So the questions that Romney asked were these.
One, this is to the White House counsel.
Given that Rudy Giuliani's May 10th, 2019 letter to President Zelensky asserted he was acting with the knowledge and consent of President Trump, what did President Trump specifically task Giuliani to do in Ukraine?
Okay, this is the basic question of the case, right?
Was Giuliani there to dig up dirt about Hunter and Joe Biden for prospects of 2020?
Or was he there to dig up stuff about 2016?
It is perfectly obvious he was there to dig up stuff about 2016.
He was in Ukraine in 2018 before Joe Biden had even announced that he was going to be running for the presidency.
That didn't happen until 2019.
So it is pretty obvious that that was not about Hunter and Joe Biden, Giuliani's original deployment to Ukraine.
The second question that Romney asked was, if evidence indicates President Trump had multiple purposes, some in the national interest, some political, for holding up the security assistance, is it the House manager's position that the presence of any political purpose should be grounds for removing a president for abuse of power?
Okay, now this is the big question, right?
And it's the question I've been asking since the very start.
I've offered two different theories.
One was the Trump was planning to go after Joe Biden theory, and one is the miasma of corruption theory.
The miasma of corruption theory is that Trump was concerned about some legitimate things, and also, if it happened to knock Joe Biden, well, whatever.
That was the miasma of corruption thing.
He was concerned about 2016.
He was concerned about everything from CrowdStrike to Ukrainian corruption to American funding of Ukraine.
He was concerned about everything from Burisma to the record of Ukraine and fighting corruption overall.
Because he mentions all of these things, right?
Every single one of those things gets mentioned in that phone call with Zelensky, the transcript of which is now public, right?
Or at least the memo of which is now public.
So, the question being asked is, let's say that a president has dual purposes.
Good for Romney, because this has been the question I've been asking all along, every day.
Literally every day for months.
Let's say the president has dual purposes.
One is, he wants to be more stingy with regards to Ukrainian aid, because he doesn't like foreign aid generally, and he's worried about corruption.
And the second is, that it's going to help his re-election prospects if he withholds the foreign aid and somehow gets investigations started against a bunch of Democrats.
But, it's legit to get those investigations started because it's also in America's interest to find out what happened in 2016 and whether there was indeed anything corrupt going on.
Right, let's say that there's a dual purpose to what's going on.
Is that enough to impeach?
And the answer, of course, is no, that's not enough to impeach.
Because the problem is, that then creates the principle that literally anything a president does is impeachable.
Because there is not a president who has ever lived, who is not looking with one eye toward re-election in their first term.
Not one.
Everything Barack Obama did in his first term.
was, at best, directed toward two purposes.
One, what he thought was in the national interest, and two, at re-election.
Because you're a politician, that's what politicians do.
Are we just gonna pretend that politicians are truly altruistic public servants who never have an eye on re-election at all?
Of course, everything they do is designated for a couple of purposes.
It's only corruption when you cut against the national interest deliberately for your own private purposes, right?
Then, you have something that's impeachable, something that's removable, right?
When you're talking about something where it's a dual-purpose thing, Right where it serves both your political interest and also what you believe to be the national interest of the country.
And it's not just that you believe it to be the national interest of the country, but there can be a fair case made that the American people should believe it to be in the national interest of the country.
Then that obviously is not impeachable.
That's the question that Mitt Romney is asking.
And this is where the left is going after Alan Dershowitz today.
The left is going after Dershowitz.
Dershowitz is, of course, acting as attorney for Trump in this case.
We'll get to the attacks on Dershowitz in just a moment.
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Okay, so Alan Dershowitz comes under fire specifically because he seeks to answer the question that Mitt Romney is asking, which is, if the evidence indicates that Trump had multiple purposes, Some in the national interest, some political, for holding up security assistance.
Is it the House manager's position that the presence of any political purpose should be grounds for removing a president for abuse of power?
Okay, so here's Alan Dershowitz suggesting that activity that helps the president and helps the country is fine.
Now the media are reading this as though Dershowitz is saying that any action you take in your own re-elected interest Is fine.
That, of course, is not what Dershowitz is saying, because that would be an idiotic case.
You'd have to be, like, a complete dunderhead to believe that, like, because that basically says, OK, if the president goes and just kills Joe Biden, but he believes that it's in his own electoral interest to do so, well, then that's OK.
It's at least not impeachable.
Of course, nobody believes that.
It would be saying that that Nixon's crimes during Watergate would have been fine because, after all, it was in his own re-elective interest.
Dershowitz isn't making that case.
Dershowitz is saying something that is perfectly obvious, and everybody in the media is pretending they don't understand it because everybody in the media is corrupt.
Or at least a huge number of people in the media are corrupt.
We'll get to the media a little bit later on in the program because they truly are awful.
But what Dershowitz is trying to say here, fairly obviously since he has said it on this program, is that if a president both has a public purpose for what he is doing and also has an eye toward re-election, that is not impeachable because if it were impeachable, then presidents would never be able to do anything.
So here is Dershowitz and what he actually had to say yesterday.
Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest.
And mostly you're right.
Your election is in the public interest.
And if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.
Okay, so the way that people are reading that is that Dershowitz is saying that if you do something that is only in your own re-elective interest because you believe that you're better a candidate and so you can do what you want, that would be an overbroad and ridiculous argument, obviously.
That'd be an insane argument.
It'd be patently crazy.
Okay, but what Dershowitz is actually saying, I believe strongly since he has said this before, is that if you do something that you believe is in the national interest and it is in your re-elective interest, then the fact that it is also in your re-elective interest does not make it impeachable.
Because everybody has their eye toward re-election.
Right?
That, like, clearly and obviously.
Okay, now, the Democrats immediately jump on this and they're saying, well, now Trump is making a full-on dictatorial argument.
And, by the way, it would be true, right?
If Dershowitz were actually saying that your wish to be re-elected allows you to do anything in pursuit of re-election, yes, that would be a dictatorial argument.
But that's not what Dershowitz is actually saying.
Okay, so Adam Schiff goes on national TV and says, this gives us carte blanche to cheat, right?
This is giving Trump carte blanche to cheat because he could then just go do whatever he wants in pursuit of his own re-election.
All quid pro quos are fine.
It's carte blanche.
Is that really what we're prepared to say with respect to this president's conduct or the next?
Because if we are, then the next president of the United States can ask for an investigation of you.
They can ask for help in their next election from any foreign power.
Okay, now Schiff steps right in it here.
The reason he steps right in it, he says the next president can do anything.
The next president could like, you know, for example, just you know, use a foreign source to initiate an investigation against a political opponent.
And if they thought it was in their reelective interest, it would be it'd be totally it would be totally OK under the standard currently articulated.
So Jay Sekulow, who's the counsel for the White House, he gets up and says, I'm like, have you not been watching for the past several years when the Obama FBI and DOJ initiated an investigation into Donald Trump based on Trump's garbage from the Russians?
Like, were you not aware of that?
The Department of Justice and the FBI engaged in an investigation of the candidate for president of the United States when they started their operation called Crossfire Hurricane.
He said it would be targeting a rival.
Well, that's what that did.
He said it would be calling for foreign assistance in that.
This was in 2016 against a rival campaign.
So, we don't have to do hypotheticals.
That's precisely the situation.
He had left one nuts over this, but of course what Sekulow is saying is essentially true.
And when people say, well, it wasn't an investigation into Trump personally.
Well, it kind of was.
Okay, let's be real about this.
It was initiated as an investigation into Carter Page, and it quickly became an investigation into the entire Trump campaign, which is why the Trump campaign was not notified that Carter Page was being investigated and Paul Manafort was being investigated until much, much later.
Okay, so anyway, the Democrats decide that they are going to move with this basic notion that Alan Dershowitz is a dictator.
Civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz is an actual dictator who wants the president to be able to get off scot-free for anything he does, so long as he can claim that it's in his re-elective interest.
Gloria Borger on CNN says, well, under this standard, couldn't you arrest your political opponents?
I mean, the answer is yes, but that's not Dershowitz's standard.
Maybe he was trying to appeal to narcissism of politicians.
I have absolutely no idea what he was trying to do.
But he effectively said, if you believe you should be president, then you can do anything you want to make yourself President, because you will believe that is in the national interest.
So my question would be, can you arrest an opponent of yours?
I mean, you know, the story you can ask questions like that ad infinitum.
It is a ridiculous argument.
I'm not a lawyer.
So, OK, stipulate that.
Stipulate that?
Well, I mean, why don't we stipulate that everybody is deliberately misunderstanding what Dershowitz is saying because you have to assume a baseline level of intelligence on Dershowitz's part.
He's not an idiot.
Nobody is going to make the actual overt case that the president can do anything he wants on behalf of his own re-election.
That's ridiculous.
But of course, this is what the media run with because they're trying to portray Trump as a dictator.
So trying to suggest that Alan Dershowitz is stumping on behalf of dictatorship is a pretty rich vein to mine.
Joe Lockhart on CNN doing the same thing, suggesting this is Hitlerian.
It's Mussolini.
It's like Hitler.
Go, Joe Lockhart, go!
Having worked in about a dozen campaigns, there is always the sense that, boy, if we win, it's better for the country.
But that doesn't give you license to commit crimes or to do things that are unethical.
So it was absurd.
And what I thought when I was watching it was, this is un-American.
This is what you hear from Stalin.
This is what you hear from Mussolini, what you hear from Hitler, from all the authoritarian people who rationalized You know, in some cases genocide, based on what was in the public interest.
Okay, so if you think that this is truly just about, if you think that they're interpreting Dershowitz correctly, then I ask what Dershowitz is talking about in the next clip.
Okay, so Dershowitz then asks, he would go on to ask, was it impeachable when Obama didn't bomb Syria because he believed that it would hurt his electoral chances?
The point being that foreign policy is quite malleable and that if you do something that you believe is in the national interest and it includes your reelection interest, then that's answerable.
That's okay, right?
Here's Alan Dershowitz.
The left wing of your party is really going to give you a hard time if you start selling lethal weapons and getting into a lethal war, potentially, with Russia.
Would anybody here suggest that was impeachable?
Or let's assume President Obama said, I promised to bomb Syria if they had chemical weapons, but I'm now told by my pollsters that bombing Syria would hurt my electoral chances.
Certainly not impeachable at all.
The point that he's making is that if it's not a crime in the essence of it, if it's not a crime in the essence of it, if the president has plenty of discretion in a particular area, and politics plays into the use of the discretion, that's not impeachable.
He's making the argument I'm making.
If you do something and you believe that it could go either way, it's in the national interest, and the national interest could go either way, and also you have an eye toward re-election, that's not impeachable.
And that, of course, is true.
Now, the left has also been going nuts over Patrick Philbin, one of the president's attorneys, yesterday, making the perfectly obvious point that it is not a campaign finance violation to accept information from a foreign source.
Now, I've talked at length about this before.
Eugene Volokh, over at UCLA School of Law, wrote a long piece about this, probably now three to four years ago, regarding the use of information from a foreign source in a campaign, and pointed out this is not a campaign finance violation because that is not a quote-unquote thing of value under campaign finance law.
But when the president's lawyer says this, it's a big deal, apparently.
Mere information is not something that would violate the campaign finance laws.
And if there is credible information, credible information of wrongdoing by someone who's running for a public office, it's not campaign interference for credible information about wrongdoing to be brought to light, if it's credible information.
So I think that the idea that any information that happens to come from overseas Okay, and what he's saying there is, again, uncontroversial, but it was played as controversial today because everything was played as controversial.
There was a study out today showing that 100% of the media coverage of Team Trump in this has been negative.
Not 99%, 100% of the media coverage from the mainstream media, non-Fox News, has been negative.
95% has been positive for Democrats, which is not any shock at all, even though the Democrats have been fibbing throughout this process.
So Adam Schiff yesterday, he did a couple of things where he just overtly lied.
So in one, he characterized Trump's conversation with Zelensky, and he again lied about what Trump said.
He did this before when he made up his whole, like, I'm a mafioso conversation with Trump.
You remember this?
He did a whole spiel in the House where he suggested that Trump had gotten on the line and said, I want you to do me a favor.
Go out there and do what I want and I won't break down your house, right?
That whole thing?
Well, he did the same thing yesterday again because he actually changed the language.
If you read the Zelensky call, Trump says, we'd like you to do us a favor, meaning he believes it's in the national interest, right?
And then Schiff said, no, no, no, it's do me a favor.
OK, well, no, if you change the language from do us to do me a favor, that's actually a distinction with a difference.
It makes a difference.
OK, then Schiff claims yesterday that he hasn't had that his staff has had no contact with the whistleblower, which, of course, is an overt lie.
I mean, the fact is that his staff coordinated with the whistleblower.
We already have testimony to that effect.
First of all, I don't know who the whistleblower is.
I haven't met them or communicated with them in any way.
The committee staff did not write the complaint or coach the whistleblower what to put in the complaint.
The committee staff did not see the complaint before it was submitted to the Inspector General.
Okay, just gonna point out that his staff overtly coordinated with the whistleblower.
Like, we know that.
That is not a speculation.
We had an open hearing with the active director on September 26, more than three weeks after the legal deadline by which the committee should have received the complaint.
Okay, just going to point out that his staff overtly coordinated with the whistleblower.
Like, we know that that is not a speculation.
That is a fact, right?
We know that because Schiff's staff has actually said as much, right?
Schiff has said that his own staff coordinated with the whistleblowers.
That, of course, is absolute, inherent nonsense.
I mean, it's just absolute silly towns.
Meanwhile, the Democrats, who are desperate for witnesses, they're desperate for witnesses except for Hunter Biden, of course.
Hakeem Jeffries says, there's no reason we should ever call Hunter Biden.
Why should we have Hunter Biden?
Hunter Biden's not relevant here, even though he is at the center of the entire thing, right?
If Trump had never asked about Hunter Biden, we would not be talking about any of this, would we?
Really, if he'd been asking about CrowdStrike, if he'd been asking about all of the crazy conspiracy theories he was asking about in Ukraine, but he never mentioned Hunter Biden, we wouldn't be talking about any of this.
So yes, Hunter Biden is relevant, because it matters whether or not Hunter Biden did something corrupt that prompted the question in the first place.
Well, it's my view that Hunter Biden is not a relevant witness, but I have great respect for Joe Manchin and for all of the senators on both sides of the aisle.
And ultimately, they, in the first instance, will make this decision in terms of the witnesses that should be called.
Although, as Senator Manchin indicated, I do believe that Chief Justice John Roberts should be the ultimate arbiter and referee in terms of deciding relevance.
So now the Democrats are trying to kick it over to Roberts.
They can blame Roberts, a Bush appointee, obviously, if it turns out that he allows Hunter Biden to be brought in testimony.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are trying to claim, with regard to Hunter Biden, that unless Donald Trump asked about Hunter Biden and Burisma before Biden announced his investigation, then he's only doing this for his re-election prospect.
Okay, first of all, That take sort of ignores the timeline, which is that Rudy Giuliani was wandering around Ukraine in the middle of 2018, according to the Whistleblower Report, right?
I mean, so, like, he was wandering around there, gathering information on Burisma, apparently, in 2018.
So, first of all, that's pretty obvious.
Second of all, even if Donald Trump only asked about Hunter Biden once it became clear that Joe was actually running for president, that again does not mean that's directed toward 2020.
It means that maybe it's a little bit more relevant whether the guy who just declared for president was engaged in corruption in 2016 than it was five minutes ago.
It does elevate.
Nobody was asking about Donald Trump's associations with Russia until he declared he was running for the presidency.
So is it then illegitimate for the DOJ to look into him because he had declared that he was running for the presidency?
It's a very weird take.
Alan Dershowitz deconstructed that one yesterday on the floor.
Let's assume hypothetically that the president was in his second term.
And he said to himself, you know, Joe Biden's running for president.
I really should now get concerned about whether his son is corrupt.
Because he's not only a candidate, and he's not running against me, I'm finished with my term, but he could be the president of the United States.
And if he's the president of the United States and he has a corrupt son, the fact that he's announced his candidacy is a very good reason for upping the interest in his son.
If he wasn't running for president, he's a has-been.
He's the former vice president of the United States.
Okay, big deal.
But if he's running for president, that's an enormous big deal.
Okay, so as we move forward, people are asking like, okay, so it's perfectly obvious to everybody in the media that they are right and everybody else is wrong, right?
You got Don Lemon on TV laughing at all the hick roob Trump supporters and all the rest of this.
And then they wonder, why is it that so many Americans are just ignoring the media's take on this?
And the answer is because As always, this is not really about Republican vs. Democrat, this is about Trump vs. the media.
As always, everything boils down to Trump vs. the media, because the filter you are seeing things through, unless you are sitting there and actually watching the wall-to-wall testimony, in this case, which nobody has done, I haven't even done it, I've been watching it pretty steadily, but even I have not done it, then the filter that you are hearing is the filter of the media, and most people just don't trust the media on either side.
We're gonna get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so the breakdown on impeachment is puzzling to the media.
They don't understand why, after 100% negative media coverage, the American public is still split 50-50.
And the answer to that is because nobody trusts the media.
I know there's a constant refrain from the right, and I know that the left believes that this is because of Trump.
It is not because of Trump.
The media had lost all credibility before Trump came on the scene.
You don't remember back in 20, it would have been 2012, when Newt Gingrich was running for president, and Newt Gingrich bashed the moderator, I believe it was John Harwood, in one of the debate exchanges, and he immediately soared to the top of the Republican polls.
People have hated the mainstream media for decades in the Republican Party.
They do so with a reason, and the mainstream media prove every day why we shouldn't trust them when it comes to analysis of ongoing issues.
Perfect example.
So you remember that just a couple of days ago, Don Lemon went on air and was laughing hysterically as Wajahat Ali and Rick Wilson made nasty jokes about Trump supporters, suggesting that they were toothless Rube Hicks who didn't know how to read a map.
Well, then Don Lemon went on TV last night to apologize and simply forgot the part where he was going to apologize.
And one final note that I have for you, because this is personally important to me to address this, okay?
Anyone, ask anyone who knows me, they'll tell you.
I don't believe in belittling people.
Belittling anyone for who they are, for what they believe, or where they're from.
During an interview on Saturday night, one of my guests said something that made me laugh.
And while in the moment, I found that joke humorous.
And I didn't catch everything that was said.
Just to make this perfectly clear, I was laughing at the joke.
And not at any group of people.
Okay, but the joke was about a group of people, so you're gonna have to explain that one.
Don't worry, no apology necessary.
By the way, I do find it funny.
Don Lemon should just own it, right?
The fact that Don Lemon clings to this ridiculous notion that he is some sort of objective journalist, it's absolute silliness.
It's funny, I remember, I was covering the RNC back in 2012, and one of the sort of big-name reporters from the 1980s was walking around.
I think it was Sam Donaldson, Sam Donaldson.
I remember because of the eyebrows and Sam Donaldson was walking around at the at the RNC in Tampa in beautiful Tampa and we and I came across him and I started asking him at the time he was hosting a political show for I believe it was ABC News and I asked him so you're overtly political now and he said yes And I said, and you're overtly a Democrat now.
And he said, yes.
And I said, well, were you all, did you always hold these political views?
And he said, yes.
And I said, so why didn't you just say that for 30 years?
And he got very agitated.
He got very agitated and he got right up in my face.
And he said, are you saying that you're better than I am?
And I said, well, yeah, I kind of am.
I mean, because like, I just say that I'm a conservative and I don't lie about it.
Like, I just, I will tell you exactly that.
I don't pretend for 30 years that I'm an objective voice of truth and then go on the air and spout exactly the same kind of crap I do when I'm an opinion host.
This is the problem for places like CNN and also the self-centeredness of the media.
The self-centeredness is truly astonishing.
There's a great and by great I mean ridiculous piece in the New York Times today by a guy named Charlie Warzel.
He's an opinion writer at large for the New York Times and it's called, What Will You Do When The Culture War Comes For You?
Newsrooms still aren't ready for the trolls, and this is all about how sad it is to be a reporter.
The culture war will come for us all.
On Sunday, it came for Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez.
Nine people were killed in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, California that morning, including the basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna.
The news rocketed around social media, where mourners shared their heartbreak at the news.
As is common with major breaking news, some reports were inaccurate or false, layering anxiety on top of grief.
Into the mix, Ms.
Sonmez tweeted the link to a 2016 article from the Daily Beast about a young woman's accusation that Mr. Bryant had raped her in Colorado.
Criminal charges against him were dropped in 2004, and a civil suit was settled out of court.
The tweet highlighted the fact that Mr. Bryant's legacy is fraught and complicated, and attracted the attention of fans as well as trolls, who bombarded her inbox with abuse and posted her home address online.
All of which is completely unjustified.
Misanma has then posted a selection of the threats she received, without obscuring the names of people who had sent her hate mail.
She slept in a hotel on Sunday night, fearing for her safety at home.
We don't know all the details, but it seems that the post's managing and executive editors were not pleased.
They chastised her over the email, they placed her on administrative leave, while the organization reviewed whether she had violated the company's social media guidelines.
Their reasoning on Monday was the tweets displayed poor judgment that undermined the work of her colleagues.
The post then reversed her suspension on Tuesday, roughly 36 hours after the initial tweets, stating that senior managers had concluded that Ms.
Sonmez's tweets didn't violate company policy.
This, of course, was obvious to almost everyone but the post's higher-ups.
It was impossible to imagine how posting a link to a story by a different publication on Twitter could undermine the work of colleagues, just as it was impossible to imagine which colleagues would have felt undermined.
There remains a glaring question.
Did the executive editor, Marty Baron, inquire about Ms.
Sonmez's safety when he emailed her to criticize her tweets?
What, beyond a reflux for online civility, led The Post to determine the reporter was hurting this institution by discussing a part of Mr. Bryant's legacy that appeared in The Post's own newspapers?
Okay, so, here's the thing.
This article is right that The Washington Post should not have suspended Ms.
Journalist.
They should know.
The cancel culture is stupid.
It is idiotic.
The fact that people didn't like what this person tweeted does not mean that she should have been removed from her job at the Washington Post for tweeting in, I would say, at least ill-timed fashion, an article about Kobe Bryant's rape case from 2004.
But the lack, the utter lack of understanding that what the media do every day is cancel culture is astonishing.
So it's only bad when it hits a reporter.
But let's just be real about this.
The New York Times has come for the Covington Catholic kids.
The New York Times has come for shows like mine.
The folks over at Media Matters who are in cahoots with the mainstream media, they have like their own little kind of retweet circle where they try to gin up outrage at particular outrages of the day and gin up outrage at advertisers.
They've been doing this for years.
And only when it hits the media do the media suddenly get upset about it.
They don't care when it's a normal citizen.
They don't care when they're digging up all the crap on Joe the Plumber from 2008.
Then that's perfect.
That's us journalisming, guys.
But if you guys object to any of our journalists saying X, Y, or Z, and then you email the editors at our newspaper, then that's cancel culture, and it's very, very bad.
The utter blind spot that the media have to their own incompetence and to what they do every day is truly amazing and truly horrifying.
And it's one of the reasons why the American people do not believe that the media stand for them.
They don't believe that the media stand for the truth.
They believe that the media stand for the media and that the media are in it for the glory, that the media are in it for the clicks, and that the media are in it for the money.
And the media do not have a consistent standard when it comes to even things like cancel culture.
I have a pretty consistent standard.
I've defended people right, left, and center who have been subjected to cancel culture.
I think it's garbage.
But people on the left, they don't have this standard, and people in the media don't have this standard.
And this sort of self-pitying attitude with regard to the media all over is just, it's off-putting in the extreme.
And the whole take that you've gotten from the media during the Trump era, for now years, that Trump is uniquely brutal to the media.
Barack Obama arrested journalists.
Okay, he wiretapped journalists.
James Rosen was wiretapped.
The AP was wiretapped.
The notion that journalists have it extremely rough because Mike Pompeo said a mean thing to a journalist from NPR is just absurd.
It's just ridiculous.
The back and forth between journalists and their subjects has been a thing for quite a long time, and if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.
And yet the New York Times prints another piece from Mary Louise Kelly, the co-host of NPR's All Things Considered, because Mike Pompeo was a meanie to her.
Very, very mean.
She writes, ask journalists why they do the job they do and you'll hear a range of answers.
Here's mine.
Not every day, but on The Best Ones, we get to put questions to powerful people and hold them to account.
This is both a privilege and a responsibility.
I would love just one question from NPR to Bernie Sanders about whether he believes private property is a right.
The reason we don't trust you guys is when you say you put questions to powerful people and hold them to account, you only mean one side of the aisle and only when it benefits you politically.
So no, you don't get any sort of special exemption in the rough and tumble of American politics.
By the way, Mike Pompeo put out his own comment with regard to his tête-à-tête with Mary Louise Kelly, because it turns out that she approached Pompeo, and Pompeo got mad at her, and Pompeo suggested that she didn't know where Ukraine was on a map, The irrelevant portion of the interview was Kelly said, how do you stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon?
And Pompeo said, we'll stop them.
And she said, how sanctions?
And he said, we'll stop them.
Okay.
And then she talked about how the, how the Iranians were blustering.
And then he apparently called her a liar during another exchange and challenged her to find Ukraine on an unmarked map.
And this was apparently very, very bad, very, very bad and very, very mean.
Pompeo says that Kelly first lied in setting up our interview.
He says, I agreed to come on your show today to talk about Iran.
And then she said, no, no, you came on to talk about Ukraine.
And then he shouted at her a little bit, and this is very mean and very bad, and how dare anybody do any sort of thing.
Okay, so Pompeo released a statement.
He said, look, go back and take a look.
There's a lot of history with NPR and Mike Pompeo in Iran.
It goes back to 2015.
2015, where NPR lied.
They took money from plowshares and were part of the Ben Rhodes echo chamber, and they ultimately had to go on air and say, yup, it's true, we took money from plowshares and didn't disclose it after enormous pressure from Congressman Pompeo.
So there's a lot of history there.
So I took a leap of faith with Mary Louise, invited her to the State Department back in December.
We had a great conversation.
She asked me if I'd do her the favor of granting her an interview.
I said, sure, there's a lot of history to fix.
Let's talk about Iran.
She agreed that we would talk about Iran, and we set up an interview.
I hope she finds peace.
Okay, but here's the bottom line.
Whatever the kind of details of this silly dust-up, the fact that members of the media are writing in other media outlets about how victimized they are as members of the media because it's so rough for them, it's the reason why the credibility of the media has been in the toilet for years at this point, and Trump has been able to take advantage of that.
So you guys, if you'd like to restore your credibility, you could do something very simple.
You could stop being awful at your jobs.
Dude, stop being completely, thoroughgoingly awful at your jobs.
And if you're gonna be on the left, just announce you're on the left.
Because guess what?
I don't criticize MSNBC for being biased.
I've never done it.
On the air.
I don't criticize them for being on the left.
There are, like, I'll criticize what they say, I'll make fun of Chris Matthews, I'll do whatever they say, but I never go on and I'm like, I can't believe the bias in MSNBC.
They say who they are, good.
I criticize CNN, I criticize NPR, I criticize the New York Times.
You guys want your credibility back?
You're gonna have to earn it.
In a second, we're gonna get to things I like and things that I hate.
So, let's do a thing I like.
Okay, so thing that I like.
So, I'm into watching stupid 1990s action films with my wife at this point.
And it is indeed a fun thing to do.
So, because there is a new Bad Boys movie that is coming out, there's a new Bad Boys movie coming out and I haven't seen it yet.
I've never even seen the original Bad Boys.
But I will say that Michael Bay, because Michael Bay is Michael Bay, and he was the first person to be Michael Bay, and so many people ripped off Michael Bay, He has now become sort of an unappreciated commodity.
The fact is, he's made some of his best films in the recent past.
Like, 13 Hours is actually a very good film, and the critics savaged it because they don't like that Michael Bay is probably a Republican.
He's probably at least a little bit right-wing, so they don't like that.
Okay, so Michael Bay, his first movie was Bad Boys, which of course has become this major franchise now with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence.
So I went back and watched it with my wife, and it is delightfully stupid.
It is truly a pleasure of idiocy.
And it's exactly what you would think it is, right?
It is...
Guns, and cursing, and jokes, and scantily clad women.
All the things that have made America great historically.
Anyway, here's a little bit of the trailer for Bad Boys.
I did this in preparation for taking my- My wife's also a huge Will Smith fan, so here's a little bit of the trailer for Bad Boys.
It's so Michael Bay.
day it was the perfect crime but for miami detectives marcus burnett and mike lowry buenos dias mi amor so it it's a very very silly movie obviously and And yet, that is the glory of it.
If you want to watch a better Michael Bay movie, The Rock is actually an actively good Michael Bay movie.
It's got all the Michael Bay silliness, but perfected to the heights of Michael Bay.
In any case...
Michael Bay is, like, I kind of feel bad because Michael Bay's new stuff is actually better than his old stuff, but because he's Michael Bay, he's been sort of discounted.
Anyway, if you want to go back and watch, like, my wife and I, we've been on this jag lately because, honestly, my kids are wiping me out.
And you gotta watch something dumb at night to kind of, like, bring you back a little bit.
So check out Bad Boys if you're looking for something dumb to watch at night.
It is definitely rated R. So if you're not up for rated R movies, then it's not for you.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so a couple of quick things that I hate.
So number one, this is an absurd story.
So according to Jessica Contrera over at the Washington Post, on Friday, President Trump is expected to attend a White House summit organized by his daughter Ivanka on human trafficking, an issue he frequently invokes as a top priority.
But some of the country's most prominent anti-trafficking organizations and advocates won't be there.
They've decided to boycott the event.
That group includes Polaris, the non-profit organization that runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline, and the leader of the Freedom Network USA, the country's largest anti-trafficking coalition.
Their decision comes after months of anguish over what they describe as an act of public deception.
They say that although the president frequently invokes human trafficking, his administration is actively endangering a significant portion of trafficking victims, immigrants.
So in other words, they don't like Trump's policies on illegal immigration, so they're not going to show up to fight human trafficking from the White House.
This is the height of stupidity.
It is incredibly dumb because these two things actively do not have all that much to do with each other.
In fact, if they do have something to do with each other, then the thing that should be happening is you should explain how the policy against illegal immigration does not actually help stop the coyotes who are engaged in human trafficking across the border.
But because everybody has connected the two policies in their mind, they're boycotting the invitations.
Three of the groups told the Washington Post they fear backlash over their decision, so they cited conflicts with other events.
And this is what they're doing now.
They fear backlash from their lefty base.
And even though Ivanka Trump is trying to work hard on human trafficking, they are not going to stand up to their lefty base.
And on the other hand, they fear backlash from the right, and so they're citing conflict.
Trump repeatedly brings up human trafficking when discussing immigration policy.
In 2018, he became the first sitting president to attend a meeting of the Federal Trafficking Task Force since its creation in 2000.
Ivanka Trump has advocated anti-trafficking legislation, including a law intended to strengthen prosecutors' ability to go after websites that host advertisements for commercial sex.
She wrote about these efforts and others in a 2018 op-ed in the Washington Post.
But now, people are boycotting this because they don't like Trump's immigration position.
Which, again, is just pretty wild stuff.
It's pretty wild stuff.
But perfectly typical for this moment in time.
Okay, one other thing that I hate.
So yesterday, I did a long bit on the history of the Middle East.
And there's a map going around that is complete idiocy.
It has no relation to reality.
So I figure I will just debunk this here online.
Majid Nawaz, who is a Muslim commentator In Britain actually debunked this yesterday, but I figured that I will walk you through this since you've probably seen this online.
So if you can't see the map, you should subscribe so you can see things like this.
If you can't see the map, basically it shows historic Palestine, and then it shows the entire thing in Greed, the entire state of Israel in Greed.
Then it shows 1947 UN partition plan and the Arab areas in Green.
Then it shows the 1967 Borders, the pre-1967 borders, right?
Because after 1967, then Israel had control of the entire land of Israel as currently constituted.
And they show that, and then they show these are the border lines endorsed by the PLO in 1988 as a historic compromise for peace, right?
And then it shows basically the pre-1967 borders.
And then it shows Trump's projected plan and how much control it would actually give to the Palestinians in terms of the areas that they would control.
Okay, so these maps are just a mess.
They are a complete mess.
I'll explain why they are a complete mess moving from early to late.
First, it shows a map of quote-unquote historic Palestine all green.
It was never Arab territory.
Ever.
Okay, it was never an independent state.
There was no historic Palestine state.
It did not exist.
It was a territory of the British Mandate at the time of the Balfour Declaration.
Before that, it was just a part of the Ottoman Empire.
There never was a quote-unquote independent historic Palestine that was Arab-owned.
Okay, that is not a thing that has ever happened.
So this map is just a fantasy.
It doesn't exist.
Okay, and there is no way to explain this map as saying this was quote-unquote Arab populated because there were Jews there too.
So this is obviously not a population map.
The map is a complete fiction.
The idea is that there was a legal status of an independent Palestine that was Arab.
Never has been the case in human history.
Okay, next map.
So then they move forward to the 1947 UN partition plan.
And it does depict the 1947 UN partition plan.
Then it says 44% of historic Palestine.
Okay, this neglects the fact that the original Balfour Declaration, number one, included Jordan as part of the Jewish state.
That was then sliced off.
And then another 44% was sliced off for another state for the Arabs.
And then this also neglects to mention that you know who rejected this plan?
You know, they're acting as though this was the plan that had been accepted and then the Israelis overran it.
This plan was accepted by the Jews.
The Jews accepted this UN partition plan.
You know who didn't accept this UN partition plan?
The Arabs who then launched the 1947-48 War of Independence and proceeded to get their asses kicked.
So that would be a them problem.
That would be a your fault problem if you are a member of an Arab government and then you decided to launch a war without accepting a deal.
You don't get to whine about the deal that was on the table that you rejected.
Okay, that's a your fault problem.
The entire refugee problem with regard to the Palestinians would not exist if the Arabs had simply accepted this deal that was on the table that the Israelis did accept.
By the way, you can see those borders are absolute nonsense.
I mean, those borders are insane for the integrity of any Jewish state.
Completely crazy.
Like, no way to make that workable.
Basically, Israel is in three separate parts there.
It's completely wild.
Okay, so, they show that map, and this is supposed to show the Palestinian territory shrunk.
It did not shrink because it didn't exist before.
And beyond that, it didn't shrink because they didn't accept it!
Right?
It was completely not accepted.
Okay, now to the next map.
So they move forward to the pre-67 borders.
They say, Okay, a couple of things about this.
One, this is pre-67 war, so when they say 1967, they mean pre-1967, really.
Okay, and then they say 22% historic Palestine.
for peace.
Okay, a couple of things about this.
One, this is pre-67 war.
So when they say 1967, they mean pre-1967, really.
Okay, and then they say 22% historic Palestine.
First of all, they owned all of this territory.
The Arabs controlled all of this territory prior to 1967.
So what happened in 1967?
You may be asking yourself.
Oh, that's right.
Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia launched another war of extermination against the Jews, and then they proceeded to lose that territory.
So they had that territory, and then they lost that territory.
So you're whining about the fact that you lost territory that you had, and then you launched an attack.
Beyond that, it is just a lie that these border lines were endorsed by the PLO in 1988.
If this had been endorsed by the PLO, we'd already have a peace deal.
It would already be over.
They were endorsed as the starting point for negotiations, but they did not acknowledge that there were already a lot of Jews living in that area.
You can see that the map includes Jerusalem.
You can see the map includes Jerusalem in the green area.
That was never agreed to by the Jews.
There was never any negotiation in which Jews were going to either split up or give up Jerusalem, the holiest city in Judaism.
Not going to happen.
And a city that had been split prior to 1967, and in which Jews were not allowed to any of the holy sites, Hey, that was never going to happen.
Beyond that, the notion that this was the border endorsed by the Palestinians is complete and abject crap.
The reason it's complete and abject crap is because one of their other demands is the so-called right of return, which would have swamped the state of Israel with an additional 5 million Palestinians as of now.
Which means they never accepted the territorial deal.
See, this is the great lie.
They keep saying, well, it's arguments over territory.
It is not arguments over territory.
You know how we know it's not arguments over territory?
Because you know who offered this exact map?
With a few land swaps.
Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008.
You know what the Palestinians did?
When offered this map with half of Jerusalem.
You know what they did?
They walked away from the table without a counteroffer and launched a wave of violence.
So this map is crap too.
So three of the four maps we've gone through are now crap.
Finally, we get to the Trump plan.
Okay, so they show the Trump projected plan.
And here it shows 15% of historic Palestine and they show the green areas as the parts that would be the Palestinian state.
Okay, well now they've actually changed the metric that they are using for explaining which territory is held by the Palestinians.
Because before, if you go back to the 67 map, Right, if you go back to the 67 map, they are showing territory that is not population-based, right?
They're just kind of drawing a line.
You'll notice that the next map, the Trump plan, is population-based, meaning these are the areas that are actively controlled by the Palestinians.
They weren't actively controlled by the Palestinians post-67, even in 1988, right?
None of those areas included any of the highways and byways and the Jewish settlements that were gonna be carved out.
So now they're using a completely different metric.
They're using the land that would actually be controlled by the Palestinians in a peace deal.
The pre-67 borders, that was never endorsed by anybody, and it was never going to be the final status negotiations.
So that map is going around.
It is complete abject crap from beginning to end.
People who tout that, number one, believe you're an ignoramus, and so you don't know what they're doing.
And number two, are propagandists, because this is perfect propaganda.
It is absolute propaganda.
The goal of it is to show how Palestinian territory has shrunk over and over and over and over and over.
Again, there was no independent state of Palestine in this area, did not exist.
Two, the 67 and 47 borders were rejected by the Palestinians, not by the Jews.
And third, they are shifting the standard by which they draw the border for 2020.
Okay, so that's just the fact of it.
By the way, you could draw this exact opposite map, but actually be realistic about the amount of land that was promised to the Jews originally, right?
It could show the amount of land promised to the Jews in 1917, including all of Jordan, and you can watch it get sliced off, right?
Because it was sliced off in the British White Papers from the 1930s.
And then you can watch the 1947 borders appear.
And the difference is, in those maps, Israel accepted every single one of those deals in order to have an independent Jewish state.
The bottom line of this conflict, there has never been a deal, nor will there ever be a deal, so long as the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian people do not change their opinion about the existence of the state of Israel.
Israel has accepted every serious peace deal put before it, since before the inception of the state, the Arabs have never accepted a single one.
Not one.
That's the problem.
And so anybody who suggests that the people who continue to walk away from deals are the innocents in all of this, and the people who continue to propose deals, and then unilaterally withdraw from territory, That's because you are determined to be ignorant or you just have a problem with Jews.
Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content or we'll be back here tomorrow for your listening and viewing pleasure.
You're listening to The Ben Shapiro Show.
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CNN's Don Lemon makes an awkward on-air apology for mocking half of his fellow countrymen as ignorant, illiterate rubes.
The only problem with his apology is that he never actually apologized.
We will examine why being a leftist means never having to say you're sorry.
Then, the fate of impeachment comes down to a nail-biter.
We take a look at the stakes.
The Iowa caucuses are just four days away.
And finally, the mailbag.
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