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Aug. 16, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:40
The DOJ And FBI Are Endangering The Country | Ep. 1556
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Speculation about the FBI's search on Mar-a-Lago continues as Donald Trump asks how he can bring down the heat.
Rudy Giuliani finds himself in the crosshairs in Georgia.
And the Biden administration seeks a deal with Iran as Iran continues to try to murder its opponents abroad.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Protect your online privacy today at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
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Well, I'm glad to be back here in the United States.
Unfortunately, in my absence, it seems as though things have gotten a lot worse here, largely because of the weaponization of the FBI and DOJ.
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Well, I'm glad to be back here in the United States.
Unfortunately, in my absence, it seems as though things have gotten a lot worse here, largely because of the weaponization of the FBI and DOJ.
And it's hard for me at this point to read what is going on with the FBI and DOJ and see it as anything other than weaponization.
The reason I say this is because they've now released the search warrant on Donald Trump's of residents at Mar-a-Lago.
They've released some of the underlying legal materials.
Merrick Garland has then emerged to explain in front of the cameras that he, in fact, ordered the code red.
It was he who signed off on this FBI search on Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago property.
And here is the problem.
We still don't know what exactly they are looking for.
And we're learning every day about more stuff that they took from Donald Trump.
Here's the thing.
If you are going to search the residence of the former president of the United States and the probable next nominee for the opposing political party, you'd best have an incredibly clear and convincing case as to why you are doing so.
You can't just do so as a deep sea fishing expedition.
And that's what this appears to be.
Now, you might be able to find something with the fishing expedition.
What you find better be absolutely outsized.
You cannot go on a deep-sea fishing expedition here and come up with a minnow and then say, ah, it was all justified because we came up with this minnow right here.
You see this tiny little fish?
We came up with this.
Sure, we weaponized the DOJ and the FBI to go after our political opponents.
And what we came up with was this small fish.
No, you're going to have to come up with Moby Dick here.
You're going to have to come up with an actual white whale spouting oil.
I mean, that is really what we're going to have to come up with here.
And that is not in evidence so far.
Every other minute, it seems, we are learning that they took something else from Mar-a-Lago, according to the UK Daily Mail.
The Justice Department is hit back at Donald Trump's claim the FBI stole his passports during the raid on his Mar-a-Lago mansion.
An insider told CBS the agency does not have the documents, but added whatever was seized that was not on the warrant will, in fact, be returned.
It comes after the former president on Monday claimed his passports were taken, which would mean that he could not leave the country.
And this led to all sorts of speculation.
Of course, on the left, the way that this works is the minute you find out what sort of documents they seized, Then they go, oh, well, obviously he's guilty.
If they took his passports, it means they don't want him to flee.
Donald Trump is a flight risk from the United States.
Yeah, sure.
Or they seized secret classified documents.
Probably it was the nuclear launch codes and he was about to hand them over to the Russians or to the Saudis because, you know, Jared Kushner has some sort of money deal with the Saudis.
The speculation on the left is always and forever that whatever people are searching for on Donald Trump, they must have something.
They must have something.
And here's the thing.
If you are a rational human being and you watch the FBI and DOJ go after Donald Trump while he was president for four years over Russiagate, You start to wonder if they really do have something, or is it just true that everyone is incompetent all the time?
And so the combination of incompetence and gradual malevolence on the part of some people in the FBI and DOJ has some really dire consequences.
As I said when this news first broke, in order for you to raid, and you know, you can say it's a raid, you can say it's a search, it doesn't really matter.
In order to search the residence of the former President of the United States and current leader of the opposition to the President of the United States, in order to search his residence, You have to have high institutional trust in the so-called nonpartisan aspects of the American government.
You have to trust that the FBI actually is not politicized.
You have to trust the DOJ is not politicized.
But it's hard to think of a time in modern American history when there's been less trust in these institutions.
And so what you are doing is you are staking The possibility of faith in the institutions on a claim that appears to be slim as a reed.
And I say this because I've now looked at the search warrant and it cites three separate parts of the United States legal code.
It cites 18 U.S.
Code 793, that's the Espionage Act, talking about the gathering, transmitting, or losing of defense information.
And particularly, it is talking about important classified information.
It cites also U.S.
Code 18, Section 2071, concealment, removal, or mutilation generally of materials, and it cites also 18 U.S.
Code 1519.
Which is about the destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations and bankruptcy.
So we were originally told that the search on Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago property was about classified documents he still had in his possession.
And this raised a bunch of questions.
It raised question number one.
Were these actually classified documents?
Because the President has plenary power to declassify documents while he is still in office.
So if the day before he took all of this stuff to his residence, he said just out loud, this stuff is now declassified.
It is totally unclear, legally speaking, whether he has to go through any sort of procedure to declassify.
Because again, the power to declassify lies in the President of the United States.
And there's no actual procedure for declassification.
It doesn't say by statute or under the Constitution that he has to Sign some sort of form saying this stuff is declassified.
He can basically just do a Michael Scott, perhaps walk into the middle of the off, say, I hereby declare bankruptcy.
I declare that this is declassified and now all of it is declassified.
So he's now said, by the way, that this is what he did.
And Donald Trump is sort of a defense mechanism here.
He has said that this is precisely what he did.
Apparently, a statement was put out to John Solomon, a reporter at Just the News, in which Donald Trump says this, quote, as we can all relate to everyone ends up having to bring home their work from time to time.
American presidents are no different. President Trump, in order to prepare the work the next day, often took documents, including classified documents to the residence. He had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.
The power to classify and declassify documents rests solely with the President of the United States.
The idea that some paper-pushing bureaucrat with classification authority delegated by the President needs to approve the declassification is absurd.
So the claim here is no one can tell the president that stuff is actually still classified if he declares it declassified.
Maybe he's doing this post-hoc.
Maybe he didn't actually say at the time it's declassified.
But it's going to be very hard to prove that in a court of law.
And again, when it comes to classification and declassification, generally speaking, these are not statutes like the Espionage Act that have significant criminal penalties attached.
They've largely been used with regard, well, the Espionage Act does.
Rather, when you talk about, for example, the presidential archives, Anything having to do with the National Archives and the taking home of materials that belong in the National Archives, that's not stuff that really has criminal penalties attached.
The Espionage Act does.
But the Espionage Act also suggests that you have to have some level of intent, generally speaking, or gross negligence in order to be charged under the Espionage Act, which is exactly why Hillary Clinton was not.
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And so what exactly is the DOJ and the FBI doing here?
This is the major question.
So Andy McCarthy over at National Review, he has a good breakdown.
And here's what he says.
He says, we can see the investigation is far broader than just the mishandling of classified information.
Remember, this was the original case.
The original case was he has classified information at his residence.
And as I say, this raises a number of questions.
Number one, the president of the United States can declassify.
Number two, If this classified information was so all-fired important, why are they going to get it by claiming that the National Archives is missing it using the non-criminal statute?
And then they released the search warrant.
It says, oh, no, no, it's not just the National Archives stuff.
It's also the Espionage Act stuff.
It's also these other aspects of American law.
But what this really looks like in the end, as Andy McCarthy explains, is grab every paper you can find at Mar-a-Lago because maybe we'll come up with something.
Here's what Andy McCarthy says.
While the Espionage Act offense relates to defense secrets, the other two offenses are not limited to classified information.
Section 2071 relates to the removal or concealment of any government record, not just classified information.
Section 1519 applies to any item at all.
It need not be a government record, for the point is to protect government investigations, not government property.
And then it looks like the search warrant prioritizes classified information crimes, but less so than it first appears.
One of the subsections of the attachment to the search warrant authorizes agents to seize documents marked classified, but the license is much, much broader.
The warrant allows seizures of not only containers in which classified documents are found, along with their other contents, even if they're not classified, but also of other containers found proximate to the first containers.
Again, regardless of whether the contents are classified.
So, if the agent's found a box.
And inside that box, there was a low-level classified document, and that was stored next to 10 other containers of non-classified documents.
The warrant would allow the FBI to simply grab all of those things.
And the warrant also permits the seizure of communications in any form regarding classified information.
So, in other words, if I write a note, and I make reference to classified information, but don't actually state the specified classified information, that could also have been grabbed by the FBI.
And all of this precedes one of the subsections that Anne McCarthy correctly says is really elastic.
This permits the seizure of any government and or presidential records created throughout the four years of Trump's presidency.
This has nothing to do with classified information.
It's mainly designed to use the criminal law, the search warrant, to enforce the Presidential Records Act, which again, as I say, is not a criminal statute.
The National Archives, Presidential Records Act stuff, that is not criminal statute.
So maybe they can get away with this sort of search warrant, but to pretend that this is a very specific, targeted, laser-like approach to finding specific documents that are a national security threat, that is not what this looks like in any way, shape, or form.
It is far broader than that, and that raises serious political questions.
But it seems like the strategy by the DOJ and the FBI here is basically throw everything against the wall, see what sticks, toss a bunch of lines in the deep sea, hope to come up with a really big fish.
And so, when people say this looks like political targeting, it does.
It looks like an action in search of a crime.
It looks very much like the AG of New York State, Letitia James, targeting Trump.
I mean, she said this when she went into New York's AG office.
She said, Donald Trump is the target, now we just have to find the crime.
When you have prosecutors, investigative agencies, the Attorney General of the United States, the DOJ, saying, we want this guy, and so we are now going to put in place procedures to get this guy, and then later we'll see if we came up with a crime, That's the sort of stuff that scares the living hell out of Americans and it should scare the living hell out of Americans.
You're supposed to identify the crime first.
The search warrant does not specify what the crime was.
And when Merrick Garland goes out there and he says, how dare anyone attack the FBI?
Listen, I'm not blaming the FBI agents.
I don't think it's right to reveal, for example, the names of the FBI agents.
It's not their fault.
They're the ones who are being given orders by the higher ups at the FBI to go do their jobs.
And that sort of stuff should remain confidential.
However, when we're talking about the institutional credibility of the FBI, that has been shredded, absolutely shredded.
And this does nothing to prop it up.
I'm sorry, the media is just fawning benevolent Suck upage to Merrick Garland, who literally just went on TV last week and was like, and whining about, well, you know, everybody's very mean to the FBI.
Here I am.
I did it.
You should trust us.
Why?
Trust is earned.
Show me what you've done to earn that trust.
Truly.
And particularly with regard to Donald Trump, because again, you guys went after Donald Trump for four long years.
And as somebody who's open to the idea that you guys were good at your jobs and that eventually you would show evidence, and then you showed no evidence, you got to the end of it, you got to nothing, it was just a big nothing burger that took tens of millions of dollars, four years of time, endless media coverage, ripping away at Trump personally and the Trump administration, generally undermining his presidency, you have for four long years.
And as somebody who at the beginning was open to the idea that maybe at the root of this, there would be something, when you keep doing it over and over, I'm far less sanguine about the possibility that you actually have something on Donald Trump.
This feels much more like you're going to keep digging and keep digging and keep digging, and you're going to keep assuring us, like Adam shifted for four years, that you actually have the underlying evidence.
Show it to us!
Show it!
Show me the evidence that he did something wrong, and that is why you are activating the search warrant.
And when you say he did something wrong, don't give me that he took a classified document home to Mar-a-Lago and stored it in a box somewhere.
And when people, by the way, compare that to Hillary Clinton and storing emails on her server, I'd like to point out two things.
One, Hillary Clinton never had the power of declassification.
Number two, if you're talking about the possibility of somebody grabbing a classified document and using it to their own advantage, which is more dangerous?
Just on a pure level, taking home what appears to be printed sheets of paper in a box or having an email address that is not protected by the U.S.
government and that is hackable by foreign operations.
How do you hack Donald Trump's closet?
Just going to point out right here, there is no way, unless you actually have an agent inside Mar-a-Lago, searching through the boxes, because they didn't seize any digital materials so far as we are aware, right?
They seized boxes of papers.
A box of papers sitting in Donald Trump's third bedroom somewhere, like 58 bedrooms in Mar-a-Lago.
That box of papers is significantly less dangerous to national security than classified materials being trafficked online, which is what Hillary Clinton was doing.
So if you're talking about, as the media are talking, well, it was espionage.
Now you have to prove that Donald Trump was, what, going to take the nuclear codes and send them to Vladimir Putin?
This is all part of the broader conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is actually a traitor to the country, rather than a guy who's incredibly sloppy and egocentric about the way that he does his job, or his post job, as the case may be.
And without the actual evidence, I'm not sure exactly why we are supposed to believe the FBI and the DOJ.
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And so the real rap on Donald Trump that the media are now coming up with is that he's not explaining himself.
Well, he hasn't explained himself properly.
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And so the real rap on Donald Trump that the media are now coming up with is that he's not explaining himself.
Well, he hasn't explained himself properly.
So the New York Times has a piece today on the front page titled Trump's shifting explanations follow a familiar playbook.
The former president and his allies have often given conflicting defenses of his retention of classified documents without addressing why he had kept them.
Okay, well, it's your job to explain where the crime is that is so dire that it requires the FBI and DOJ to search his residence and perhaps then arrest him and prosecute him.
That is your job.
It is not his job to explain why the documents are at his house.
As it turns out, again, he has the plenary power as the President of the United States to take stuff home and also to declassify the stuff.
So maybe you're going to bring that in court.
Maybe you're going to say, well, he didn't really do that.
There's no evidence.
You're going to have to prove that.
But again, the burden of proof for the media is always on Trump.
We make an accusation about Russiagate and now it's Trump's job for four years to explain why he wasn't involved in Russiagate.
We never actually have to prove that he was involved.
We'll just sit over here and say, well, you know, we have the secret.
We have a secret.
And later we'll tell you the secret.
Well, it turns out you didn't have the secret.
You had nothing.
But if the media just treat it as though Trump has to explain away everything, and Trump is particularly bad at explaining himself when it comes to this sort of stuff, because again, he engages in all sorts of sloppy and weird activity, to put it at the very mildest.
Well, but the burden isn't on him.
The burden is on you.
In this country, when you are going to be searched by the police, they have to not get a rote warrant signed typically by some rubber stamping judge, particularly if you're a prominent figure with political implications.
You kind of need more than that.
And yet the New York Times is like, well, you know, he isn't explaining himself very well.
I don't even know what the charge is yet.
How is he supposed to explain himself?
Like what?
Explain to himself about what?
You haven't charged him with anything.
In order for him to bring a defense, you have to know what the prosecution is saying about him, don't you?
Here's the New York Times quote.
First, he said he was working and cooperating with government agents who he claimed had inappropriately entered his home.
Then, when the government revealed the FBI during its search had recovered nearly a dozen sets of documents that were not classified, he suggested the agents had planted evidence.
Finally, his aides claimed he had a standing order to declassify documents that left the Oval Office for his residence and that some of the material was protected by attorney-client and executive privilege.
Those are the ever-shifting explanations that former President Donald Trump and his aides have given regarding what the FBI agents found last week in a search of his residence in Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
Mr. Trump and his allies have cast the search as a partisan assault, while amplifying conflicting arguments about his handling of sensitive documents and failing to answer a question at the center of the federal investigation.
Why was he keeping documents, some still marked classified, at an unsecured Florida resort when officials had sought for a year to retrieve them?
Okay, well, here's the hilarious thing about that.
Why was Hillary Clinton keeping lots of classified documents on her personal server and then hit it with bleach bit as soon as she was subpoenaed?
Why?
You know, they never wanted to answer that question.
Because, again, the point was that you have to prove the criminality.
In fact, the FBI came up with the explanation that Hillary Clinton had not acted in criminal ways.
She was just really, really sloppy.
But apparently that explanation no longer suffices for Trump.
So there's two issues here.
Did Trump break the law?
And the answer is, maybe.
We don't know.
Did Hillary Clinton break the law?
It appeared to me, yeah.
Did that mean that she was going to go to jail?
Apparently not.
Does it mean that Donald Trump is going to go to jail?
Well, it can't.
They haven't hit him with a criminal charger yet.
And if the idea is that you have to treat similarly situated people similarly, and Trump has available to him defenses that Hillary Clinton never did, the burden of proof is on you.
The often contradictory and unsupported defenses perpetuated by Trump and his team since the FBI search follow a familiar pattern and playbook of the former president.
He's used it over the decades, but most visibly when he was faced with the investigation into whether his campaign in 2016 conspired with Russians and during his first impeachment trial.
In both instances, he claimed victimization and mixed some facts with a blizzard of misleading statements or falsehoods.
The funny thing here is that the New York Times, this is such a perfect example.
So the New York Times says, right, Donald Trump uses this pattern of obfuscation and confusion and sloppiness to cover up what he did with Russia.
So shouldn't at this point you be asking yourself, so what did he do with Russia?
Because the answer was nothing.
And in the end, the answer was nothing.
I've always said that you try to attribute to stupidity everything you can without attributing it to malice when it comes to politics.
When it comes to Trump's defenses of himself, I think that is particularly true.
It is very difficult not to read malice into what the FBI and DOJ are doing without knowing what exactly, again, maybe they'll come up with the white whale here, but it better be a damned white whale because otherwise all they have done is continue to undermine trust in an institution that already is lacking it in extraordinary and severe ways.
And I'm not made sanguine by the fact that people like Peter Strzok are now appearing on mainstream television and mourning Joe to defend the FBI.
Peter Strzok is, you'll remember, the FBI agent who was married and with his married lover was exchanging messages before the 2016 election talking about how they had insurance against Trump in the form of Russiagate materials.
And eventually he had to leave the FBI in a state of disgrace, but now he's being brought back to talk about the veracity of the institution of the FBI.
I'm not sure you could pick somebody who I have less faith to talk about the institutional trust in the FBI than Peter Strzok.
And now MSNBC is trotting him out.
Why?
Because for people on the left who watch MSNBC, Peter Strzok is a valuable figure.
In other words, they trust the FBI when the FBI does the work of the left.
So Peter Strzok is still somebody they have respect for.
So here's disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok, who's at the top of Hurricane Crossfire, which was the investigation into Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and all the rest of it.
Here he is on MSNBC talking about why we should trust the FBI.
It's not that the FBI is targeting any one side or the other.
What you see is the FBI going out on a day-in-day-out basis, objectively investigating allegations of law.
It just so happens that the only thing that tends to come up in the right-wing ecosphere, whether in the media or on the Hill or from President Trump, are those things where they take a personal affront because it directly impacts them.
There's absolute silence when the FBI is investigating former Secretary Clinton.
There's absolute silence when the FBI is doing things that isn't targeting them.
So I think this is a one-sided narrative that has been developed and amplified, particularly by President Trump, going back to 2015 and 2016.
I mean, it's just amazing.
Of all the people you're trotting out to try to rectify faith in the institution of the... Peter Strzok?
This one?
This is who you bring out?
Seriously?
And then Strzok says, you know, he really should be held accountable for holding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
It's very important that he be held accountable for that.
Peter Strzok was one of the key agents overseeing Hillary Clinton's server.
Did she end up Doing any sort of jail time for that?
Of course not!
The answer is no.
But here's Peter Strzok saying that Trump should be punished as Hillary Clinton apparently was not.
Donald Trump, he has spent the entirety of his adult life living on the margins of the law, pushing up to the edge, seeing what he can get away with, and then taking a step or two beyond that.
When we look at what he did over the course of his administration, but certainly right now, the things that were at Mar-a-Lago, whether withheld initially from the National Archives, whether later withheld from the FBI, there comes a point where no man is above the law.
There comes a point that there are things that you do if you are holding these highly, highly classified documents.
These things that if they fell into the hands of an unauthorized party, let alone a Russian intelligence officer, a Chinese intelligence officer, would cause massive damage to the national security.
And if you hold on to that, after countless requests through the National Archives, through the FBI, you should be held accountable for that.
I mean, just to point out here, when Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted, James Comey said, in the exact same statement, James Comey said that there was a high probability that somebody had gotten access to the classified information on her server.
So, again, the double standard here is very telling.
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Now, the media's response to all of this is, well, there's got to be something.
It always comes back to this.
There's got to be something because they're just so all fired mad that Trump was ever president.
They're very, very upset at the possibility that Trump could be president again.
That's a political question, not a legal one.
And so they tried out Sam Donaldson of all humans to talk about, well, they've got him this time.
They sure got him this time.
It's Lucy and the football over here.
Here's Sam Donaldson talking about how this is now they've got now they for sure they totally they're going to get him this time.
I thought about Capone.
Now Al Capone was a great big gangster in the 1920s and 30s.
Bootlegged millions of gallons of whiskey.
That was illegal.
But more than that, a lot of credible evidence that he had ordered the murder of many people.
But they never brought him to justice on that.
But wait a moment.
The IRS discovered that Al Capone was cheating on his income taxes.
And so, they brought him to justice on that.
He went to prison.
That's where he died.
If the Attorney General cannot bring himself because of lack of evidence or belief that the country is not ready to bring a president on charges of insurrection or obstruction of justice, how about violation of laws which keep this country safe, like the Espionage Act?
If there's credible evidence, I think more of the American public would say, well, yeah, he shouldn't have done that.
Let's see what the jury of his peers provides for.
Jim Acosta just sitting there, nodding along to a man, the only man in America with thicker eyebrows than I have, Sam Donaldson.
By the way, Sam Donaldson at one point was a quote-unquote objective news reporter for ABC News.
He is now on the air calling for the President of the United States to be prosecuted on the basis of what we don't know.
So really, well done.
Well done, everybody.
So Donald Trump, for his part, he's saying he wants to bring down the tensions.
The left is reading his comments as an insincere way of ratcheting up tensions.
The right is reading Donald Trump's comments as an attempt to actually settle the waters here.
Here's what Trump actually said.
He did an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital on Monday morning.
And he said he had his representatives reach out to the DOJ to offer to help amid outrage over the FBI's unprecedented raid on his private residence last week.
He said the country is in a very dangerous position.
There's tremendous anger, like I've never seen before, over all of the scams in this new one, years of scams and witch hunts, and now this.
If there's anything we can do to help, I and my people would certainly be willing to do that.
There's never been a time like this where law enforcement has been used to break into the house of a former president of the United States, and there's tremendous anger in the country at a level that has never been seen before other than during very perilous times.
He said that his team has not yet heard from the Justice Department on whether they will accept his offer for help.
He said, I think they would want the same thing.
I've never seen anything like this.
I think it's a very dangerous time for our country.
I'll do whatever I can to help the country.
And then he reflected on the quote, years of fake witch hunts and phony Russia, Russia, Russia schemes and scams.
He said, nothing happens to those people who perpetuate that.
Nothing happens with them.
And then they break into a president's house, a sneak attack where it was totally, no one ever thought a thing like this would happen.
And he told Fox News the FBI agents break in and take whatever they want to take.
He said the FBI agents told his team at Mar-a-Lago to turn off the camera and said no one can go through the rooms.
Trump said they could take anything they want and put anything they want in, right?
So he's now claiming they planted evidence, which again, there's no evidence of that and it's typically a Trumpian flourish.
He went on to suggest the FBI could have planted anything they wanted during the raid.
And that's because, honestly, Trump reads memes online, and we're like, sure, why not that?
So people are so angry at what is taking place, whatever we can do to help, because the temperature has to be brought down in the country.
If it isn't, terrible things are going to happen.
So again, I see the plausible read on the left, that what he's actually saying here is, if you don't stop this, terrible things are going to happen.
But on the other side, maybe it's plausible that Donald Trump actually doesn't want the terrible things to happen, and he wants the FBI and DOJ to explain themselves and settle whatever it is they want to settle, so that he's not in any legal danger.
Well, whatever the case may be, the tensions in the country have been ratcheted up.
And here's the thing.
Merrick Garland had to know this was going to happen, right?
And the FBI had to know that this was going to happen.
That when you raid the house of the former president of the United States and the likeliest nominee for 2024, when that sort of thing happens, people are going to get rather upset, which is just another reason why you better have the damned goods.
I'm not talking about if he committed a crime, don't prosecute him.
Or if he did something truly egregious, don't investigate him.
I'm talking about why can't you explain what in the world you are doing?
I'm sorry, Merrick Garland getting on my TV and telling me to trust him is not going to work.
This is a person who tried to weaponize the DOJ to go after parents in Virginia.
This is a person who's weaponized the DOJ to go after police departments all over the country on the basis of no evidence suggesting they are systemically racist.
Why would I trust Merrick Garland?
I don't know why I'm supposed to trust the FBI, given the fact that, again, high-ranking public officials in the FBI were the people who were at the head of Russiagate in the first place.
So they had to know this.
That doesn't mean they're to blame for people who then act insane and threaten FBI agents or threaten FBI offices.
It does mean that, of course, the tensions are rising.
Trump isn't wrong about that when he says that Americans are pissed.
Well, yeah, I mean, I was in Israel when this broke.
I can't tell you the number of calls I received from people in the United States who said that suddenly they were extraordinarily worried about the workings of law enforcement.
I'm not talking about people on the right.
I'm talking about people in the center.
Some people on the left saying, I mean, this is unprecedented.
We can pretend this is precedented.
It is not.
The only time that I can remember a person in power using his authority to go after the political opposition in the middle of a campaign, which we're always in the middle of a campaign now, is Watergate, right?
I mean, that's when Richard Nixon had the Watergate Hotel bug.
He wasn't using the FBI and DOJ for that.
The fact that the FBI and DOJ are Investigating the house of the former president of the United States.
And then they say, trust us, trust you.
What in the world are you talking about?
And then they say that the threat level is like nothing that they've ever.
I'm sure that's right.
And there is no justification for threats of violence or violence.
It is not the FBI agent's fault that they are doing their job.
It is the fault of Merrick Garland and the head of the FBI if they signed off on something that had very little predicate so far as we know.
Their lack of transparency is utterly unhelpful.
The fact that you don't get your dominoes in a row on this sort of thing is totally insane to me.
If you're gonna make a major move like this, shouldn't you be out there explaining what exactly you are doing?
Merrick Garland didn't bother to do that.
So yes, I would imagine that tensions in the country are going up.
Again, I don't blame politicians for people attacking other people unless they actually call for those attacks to happen.
I don't blame Donald Trump when a violent Trump supporter attacks a Cincinnati FBI office.
I don't blame Barack Obama when Dallas police officers get shot in the middle of Black Lives Matter in 2015-2016.
I don't blame Bernie Sanders for a Bernie Sanders supporter attempting to shoot up Congress people.
I don't even blame the Biden administration for somebody attempting to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh.
I don't blame anybody for that sort of stuff.
Unless you call for violence, you're not guilty of the violence yourself.
However, if you raise the temperature, you're raising the temperature and pretending that Merrick Garland didn't know that when he raised the temperature.
Are they really that ignorant at the FBI and DOJ?
Did they really believe that they would be able to put out a search warrant on the former president and then suggest that no big deal, nothing is happening here, we're just doing a normal investigation?
Is that really what they thought?
And well, this has resulted, of course, in the FBI doing this sort of passive-aggressive routine where they do something incredibly aggressive and then when people get angry about the aggressive thing, they complain about the threat levels.
Again, totally fair to complain about the threat levels, but just recognize that that is part and parcel of raising the temperature in the United States.
There's a difference between explanation and justification.
There's no justification for people getting violent or threatening violence.
But to pretend that there is no relationship between doing an unprecedented thing and getting an unprecedented response is silly.
Here's Andrew McCabe, former FBI member, close to the head of the FBI actually, suggesting that the threat level is higher than he has ever seen it.
How do you describe the threat level right now against the FBI?
Unprecedented.
Never seen anything like this in my 21 years with the Bureau.
You know, it's not completely crazy for individuals in the FBI to be subject of threats as a result of cases they're working, but this is a first time I've ever seen a broadside.
All FBI personnel are considered a part of this reporting.
It's just terrifying.
And by the way, Andrew McCabe, again, they're trotting him out to talk about this.
The former FBI officials they keep trotting out are all people who have left in disgrace.
Andrew McCabe was fired one day before his scheduled retirement.
He was fired because he was leaking material without the permission of James Comey.
He was the deputy director of the FBI at the time.
He was leaking material to the Wall Street Journal about the investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
These are the people they are trotting out to talk about the institutional veracity of the FBI.
Now, here's the thing.
We have seen nothing remotely like this reaction, for example, to investigations into, say, Rudy Giuliani.
So right now, it is being reported by the New York Times that legal pressures on Donald Trump and his closest allies intensified further on Monday as prosecutors informed his former personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, that Giuliani was a target in a wide-ranging criminal investigation into election interference in Georgia.
The notification came on the same day a federal judge rejected efforts by another key Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham, to avoid giving testimony before the special grand jury hearing evidence in the case in Atlanta.
One of Giuliani's lawyers said in an interview he was notified on Monday his client was a target.
That doesn't mean the person is going to be indicted.
It usually means the prosecutors believe an indictment is possible based on the evidence they've seen up to that point.
Giuliani, who is Trump's personal lawyer, spearheaded efforts to keep Trump in power, emerged in recent weeks as a central figure in the inquiry being conducted by Fannie Willis, the District Attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, which encompasses most of Atlanta.
Earlier this summer, prosecutors questioned witnesses before the special grand jury about Giuliani's appearances before state legislative panels in December 2020, when he spent hours peddling false conspiracy theories about secret suitcases of Democratic ballots and corrupted voting machines.
Giuliani is scheduled to appear before the special grand jury on Wednesday at a downtown Atlanta courthouse.
His lawyer says that Giuliani will probably invoke attorney-client privilege if he is asked about dealings with Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, the rejection of Senator Graham's effort to avoid testifying came in a written order from a federal district court judge in Atlanta.
Graham is now scheduled to testify on August 23rd.
So apparently prosecutors want Graham's testimony for a number of reasons.
Among them are two phone calls Graham placed just after the 2020 election to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State, in which Graham inquired about ways to help Trump by invalidating certain mail-in votes.
So here's the thing.
The difference here between, for example, Free speech and just sounding off about the election and attempt to obstruct justice.
There's an intent component.
If people knew that the election was lost and they just started making stuff up, then you could in fact have an obstruction of justice case.
You could have attempts to suborn perjury.
You could have attempts to Prevent the counting of votes, attempts to suborn voter fraud, all the rest of it.
Those could be actual charges.
You're not seeing people get all hot and bothered about that because, again, the evidence is still coming.
But shouldn't you get all of your ducks in a row before you raid Donald Trump?
I mean, isn't that the big thing?
What's happening right now is all these investigations seem to be sort of convening on Trump at the same time.
But the last step there is if you're a prosecutor, forget all of your political priors here, right, left, doesn't matter.
If you're a prosecutor, the way that you typically do this, and I've worked in a prosecutor's office, I've worked with prosecutors before, If you are a prosecutor, what you typically do is you get all the ducks in a row before you knock down that final door.
Knocking down the final door first is a very weird thing to do.
As you may have noticed, law enforcement is kind of a problem right now.
Sometimes law enforcement, they're trying to do their job, sometimes they just do the wrong thing.
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Meanwhile, speaking of other Trump members of the team who are in possible legal peril, according to the New York Times, a senior executive at Donald Trump's family business who is charged with participating in a years-long tax scheme is nearing a deal with Manhattan prosecutors but will not cooperate with the broader investigation into Mr. Trump, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
If it becomes final, a plea deal for the executive, Allen Weisselberg, would bring prosecutors no closer to indicting the former president but would nonetheless brand one of his trusted lieutenants a felon.
I love the way that the New York Times reports that.
So he's not going to turn on Trump.
He's not going to give any evidence on Trump.
But, well, you know, one of Donald Trump's employees and friends is now a felon.
So I guess that reflects on Trump in some way.
Once again, guys, Lucy and the football.
On Monday, Weisselberg's lawyers and prosecutors met with the judge overseeing the case.
According to a court database, the judge scheduled a hearing for Thursday, a possible indication that a deal has been reached and a plea could be entered by then.
While Weisselberg, 75, is facing financial penalties as well as up to 15 years in prison.
A plea deal would avoid a high-profile trial and spare him a lengthy sentence.
And again, the terms of his deals are not clear, including whether he had made additional concessions to prosecutors in order to receive it.
But there is no evidence that he is going to be testifying against Trump or that he's going to be turning on Trump in any way, shape, or form here.
The notion that Trump is about to go down, which is what the left is continuously promoting here, whether it is via Rudy Giuliani's case in Georgia, or whether it is the Trump search, or whether it is Weisselberg.
When you guys have the goods, let us know.
When you have the goods, let us know.
But what you can't do is not have the goods and then tell us to trust you because, again, the trust does not exist.
Speaking of the trust not existing, it is fun to watch as the media suddenly realize that the so-called Inflation Reduction Act passed by the Democrats does not, in fact, reduce inflation.
This is just one aspect of the unbelievable stupidity of our media, who are in fact partisan hacks.
The Democrats called a thing an Inflation Reduction Act.
It has nothing to do with inflation.
It is hundreds of billions of dollars spent on green boondoggle nonsense, raising your taxes, and hiring thousands of additional FBI, IRS agents in order to come after tons of people and audit them and make their life an actual misery.
That is the goal of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
Having nothing to do with inflation.
And for weeks, we kept hearing, why are the Republicans voting against the Inflation Reduction Act?
Why are they doing that?
Don't they want to reduce inflation?
Well now, apparently, now that it's passed, it's okay for them to admit the truth.
This is a typical pattern in the media.
They lie for a while about a thing.
And then, after the thing is over, they report on how the thing that they said was a lie, and they say, see how honest we are?
Now we're honest.
Yeah, you covered it, like, well after it was important to cover it.
That's called covering your ass, guys.
Anyway, CBS News is now reporting, quote, The Inflation Reduction Act is aimed at tackling a host of problems, from climate change to catching tax cheats.
There's one issue it may not solve.
Reducing inflation.
Oh, you think?
Oh, you think?
That is the conclusion of the Penn-Wharton Budget Model, a group of economists and data scientists at University of Pennsylvania who analyze public policies to predict their economic and fiscal impact.
Its analysis, published on Friday, comes as inflation remains near a 40-year high, crimping the budgets of consumers and businesses alike.
The Inflation Reduction Act would invest nearly $400 billion in energy security and climate change proposals aimed at reducing carbon emissions by approximately 40% by 2030.
But the impact on inflation is statistically indistinguishable from zero, the Penn-Wharton budget model said on Friday.
Well, it would have been amazing if you guys had reported that like when there was an actual debate happening over the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
John Carl over at ABC News, again, now he's allowed to say it, he asked a White House spokesperson over the weekend, isn't Inflation Reduction Act Orwellian since it doesn't actually reduce inflation?
It's called the Inflation Reduction Act.
But the Congressional Budget Office, which is nonpartisan, said that there would be a negligible impact on inflation this year and barely impact inflation at all next year.
I mean, isn't it almost Orwellian?
How can you call it Inflation Reduction Act when the nonpartisan experts say it's not going to bring inflation down?
So I appreciate that.
I appreciate the question.
We've actually addressed this, the CBO.
It was the top line number.
There's more in there that shows that it will have the money.
No, no.
Man, I will say that the Biden administration getting rid of Jen Psaki or Jen Psaki retiring and being replaced with Karine Jean-Pierre.
Wow.
Giant fail.
Giant fail.
Karine Jean-Pierre is extraordinarily untalented at trying to explain the fibs that her boss tells.
Meanwhile, Jamie Raskin, Democrat from Maryland, he was asked how inflation will be lowered by the Inflation Reduction Act.
And he's like, um, I don't know.
As soon as the act goes into effect, I hope that all of the provisions will begin to work.
I know that those who've been blaming President Biden for the inflation going up are now giving President Biden all the credit for inflation going down.
So we're moving things in the right direction already.
And what parts of the bill do you think will quickly work on that specifically?
Next question.
Next question.
This giant ass bill worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
You have any like thing in there that's going to reduce?
Nope.
Well, you know, next, next question.
This administration and the compliance of the media is what they rely upon in order to push forward all of their points.
And then again, only later do you find out just how bad things are.
Which is, for example, what you're about to see with regard to the Iran deal.
So, over the course of the last few days, Iran has continued its campaign to literally murder all of its opponents.
Now remember, the entire media has been absolutely apoplectic for several years at this point over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, who's a guy who wrote a couple of pieces for the Washington Post and also happened to be a Muslim Brotherhood-aligned thinker.
He was apparently a U.S.
visa holder.
He was killed by the Saudi government in Bonesaw.
I mean, it's really egregious and gruesome.
And this was supposed to be the predicate for all of American foreign policy with regard to Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, Iran is literally attempting to murder high-level American officials, as well as some of their longstanding political opponents.
And the Biden administration continues to negotiate with them about giving them billions of dollars and giving them a free pathway to a nuclear bomb.
Apparently, over the course of the last few days, in case you missed it, Salman Rushdie, the famous author of the Satanic Verses, he was stabbed up to 10 times at an event in New York.
The person who stabbed him, a 25-year-old, was apparently, according to the UK Independent, communicating with members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
That's the IRGC in Iran.
So he was communicating with them.
Salman Rushdie has had a fatwa on his head for decades based on his book, The Satanic Verses, which talks about verses supposedly excised from the Quran.
And finally, they stabbed him to the point where he lost an eye.
And he was communicating openly with the IRGC, which is an aspect of the Iranian government.
One of the things Iran has been attempting to push in its nuclear negotiations with the United States is the delisting of the IRGC from international terrorism organization lists.
So the Biden administration is listening on that.
Meanwhile, the IRGC is literally telling people, if you could just go stab this elderly author in the face, that would be amazing and wonderful.
Iran, for its part, blamed Salman Rushdie and its political opponents for Rushdie's stabbing.
According to Reuters, Iran's foreign ministry said on Monday, no one had the right to level accusations against Tehran over Friday's attack on Salman Rushdie.
Only he and his supporters were worthy of reproach and condemnation for denigrating the world's Muslims.
Which is a hell of a take.
So it's his fault that he got stabbed in the face because he pissed us off.
And so we had to stab him in the face.
Meanwhile, of course, the Biden administration continues to negotiate with the Iranians.
We've been told incessantly by the media that an Iran deal is necessary.
It's the only way to moderate this regime.
By the way, the Iranian state media is openly now calling for the assassination of Donald Trump, as well as the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
And that comes shortly after there was the arrest of a of a person associated with the Iranian government who's plotting to murder John Bolton, the former National Security Advisor to Trump.
So, I guess we'll find out a year from now that the Iran deal is really bad, after the Biden administration signs it.
Because again, that is the pattern.
The Biden administration does a thing, and then we find out well after the fact that the thing was bad.
The Inflation Reduction Act, or what is happening right now with the Iran deal.
And also, by the way, it has been one year since Afghanistan.
Well, if you want to hear me talk about that, you're actually going to have to go listen to the rest of the show over at dailywireplus.com.
We'll be getting into the one-year anniversary of Afghanistan, plus Kamala Harris making one of the dumbest statements I've ever heard in my entire life.
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