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Aug. 23, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
42:10
Goodbye To Dr. Fauci, And Don’t Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out | Ep. 1560
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Dr. Fauci announces he will leave his job in December.
Democrats hold out new hope for retaining the Senate in November.
And President Trump files a lawsuit over the FBI search of his home.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash Ben will get to all the news in just one moment.
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As you can hear, my voice is pretty much out this morning, but I'm here soldiering through with you, bringing you the news.
So, Dr. Anthony Fauci is out.
Well, not now.
Like, as of December.
He's going to stick around just long enough so it doesn't look like he's bailing and running for the exits just before the Republicans take Congress.
I think the assumption here is that he believes the Republicans are going to take Congress in November, and he's going to find himself back up Under some sort of investigation, come January when the Republicans actually take over the House, he's going to find himself back in front of a committee investigating his activities during this time, including the funding of gain-of-function research in Wuhan, his email activities, and all the rest.
He put out a statement.
His statement says this, quote, I'm announcing today I will be stepping down from the positions of Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, as well as my position of Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden.
I'll be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career.
The next chapter is presumably like a $20 million autobiography paid for by Simon & Schuster or HarperCollins or something.
A payment.
Just a boatload of money.
And then seven people will actually buy it.
And those seven people will all be working for the Democratic Party.
It has been the honor of a lifetime to have led the NIAID, an extraordinary institution for so many years and through so many scientific and public health challenges.
As Fauci, I'm very proud of our many accomplishments.
I have worked with and learned from countless talented and dedicated people in my own laboratory, at NIAID, at NIH and beyond.
To them I express my abiding respect and gratitude.
Then he talks about all the presidents that he has served under, etc, etc.
He says, while I'm moving on from my current positions, I'm not retiring.
After more than 50 years of government service, I plan to pursue the next phase of my career while I still have so much energy and passion for my field.
I want to use what I have learned as NIAID director to continue to advance science and public health and to inspire and mentor the next generation of scientific leaders as they help prepare the world to face future infectious disease threats.
Because he's done an unbelievable job of this.
He's going to prepare the next generation to be just as crappy at this as he was.
This is the same guy who really blew it during the HIV-AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, suggesting that it was very easily transmitted, that it had very little to do with sexual contact, that anyone could get it.
And then, obviously, he's presided over two administrations that combined a total of more than 1 million deaths in the United States from COVID.
So by any metric, This guy is just a giant failure.
Plus, he presided for 50 years over the distribution of enormous sums of money into medical research.
So, it'll be really fun to go through, over the next few years, all of the places he put that money, including into gain-of-function research all over the world, and money that may have been funneled by the Chinese government into the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which may or may not have helped actually create COVID-19, because all that money is fungible.
Over the coming months, I will continue to put my full effort, passion, and commitment into my current responsibilities, as well as help prepare the Institute for a leadership transition, says Dr. Fauci.
NIAID conducts and supports research at NIH throughout the United States and worldwide to study the causes of infection and immune-mediated diseases, et cetera, et cetera.
I'm proud to have been part of this important work and look forward to helping continue to do so in the future.
So, Anthony Fauci is out.
That was accompanied by an interview that he did with the Washington Post, where he talked about what a wonderful person he is.
I mean, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a humble public servant who just happens to find himself on the cover of InTouch magazine and InStyle, and the same day that he releases his news about leaving NIAID, he also does a really, really self-serving interview with the Washington Post, in which he talks about how wonderful, what a great job he did.
He suggested that he really stood up to Donald Trump.
That was what he really did.
Quote, he said, it was one of the most important challenges we have had to face.
And I believe my team and I, and let the history be the judge of that, have made a major contribution.
We didn't do it alone.
We played a major role in the development of the vaccines that have now saved millions of lives.
What major role did Dr. Fauci play in actually developing the vaccines?
Pfizer developed the vaccines.
Moderna developed the vaccines.
He suggested, of course, that his real contribution was standing up to the President of the United States, Donald Trump, at the time.
He spoke about how it was very difficult to become the villain.
Fauci said he's not concerned with potential investigations.
He says, there's nothing I can't defend.
I can respect disagreement.
There's a big difference between disagreement and investigating somebody for doing something terrible.
And, of course, he says that really it's all Trump's fault.
It's not just that he screwed things up.
It was really that Donald Trump did it.
He said, I was put in a very unusual circumstance where the country was scared.
They really wanted someone who was steady and honest and showed integrity and stuck with facts.
And I became the symbol of that.
There's that trademark Anthony Fauci humility.
And when you become a symbol for a certain segment of people, the people against that become a villain to them.
See, he was a symbol of steadiness.
Honesty, integrity, sticking with the facts, according to Dr. Fauci.
And that was what he was a symbol of.
Well, if you look at Dr. Fauci and you think this guy is not somebody who should be in charge of the country, remember that people just like Dr. Fauci are also in charge of our economy, which means you probably should think about diversifying outside of your usual sources of investment.
And the simple fact of the matter is, You've got a bunch of people at the Federal Reserve, and they're controlling how much money is put into the economy of a bunch of idiot legislators who are deciding how much money gets spent.
Instead, why not at least diversify a little bit into something that has never been worth zero?
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According to Dr. Fauci, there's been an actual Fauci effect wherein people have gone into the medical field just because he's so good at this.
People watched him on TV and they said, this person who is wrong about pretty much every area of COVID, this guy, that's why I'm going into the industry.
Here's Dr. Fauci bragging about Dr. Fauci, because if there's one person who loves Dr. Fauci, it is Dr. Fauci.
It's called the Fauci effect, which is sort of like, you know, as Trust me, I don't get excited about that.
I mean, it's nice, but... People go to medical school now, people are interested in science, not because of me, because most people don't know me, who I am.
My friends know me, my wife knows me, but people don't know me.
It's what I symbolize.
And what I symbolize in a...
In an era of the normalization of untruths and lies and all the things you're seeing going on in society from January 6th to everything else that goes on, people are craving for consistency, for integrity, for truth, and for people caring about people.
Man, does Anthony Fauci love Anthony Fauci.
That dude just loves that guy.
You can tell that.
You can see in his documentaries.
Hulu did a documentary on him at one point.
And there was a picture of Anthony Fauci on the office wall of Anthony Fauci.
Now, as a person who is relatively well-known, I can assure you this.
My office does not include a giant portrait of me.
Because this is the Mark of a true douchebag.
I mean, just to put it absolutely bluntly.
If you have a giant portrait of you sitting behind you, There are only two reasons for that.
One, you're the dictator of a small communist country, or two, you are a douchebag.
Those are the only two possible reasons for that to be the case.
It also happens to be the case that Dr. Fauci was wrong on, like, everything along the way here.
So, very early on, he was really suggesting shutting the country down.
And then later he denied it, but unfortunately, all this stuff lives on video for Dr. Fauci.
He admitted, just a few months back, that yeah, he did recommend shutting the country down.
What was the most crucial decision you had to make during the pandemic, and what was the critical thought process that took you through it?
Yeah, the most crucial... It was a decision to make a recommendation to the president.
It wasn't my decision that I could implement.
And when it became clear that when we had community spread, in the country with a few cases of community spread.
This was way before there was a major explosion like we saw in the Northeastern Corridor driven by New York City metropolitan area.
I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.
And that was a very difficult decision because I knew it would have serious economic consequences, which it did.
But there was no way to stop the explosive spread that we knew would occur if we didn't do that.
By the way, you didn't stop the explosive spread, as it turns out.
The spread was never stopped, actually.
The only thing that actually broke the vectors of the virus was the vaccine, in terms of bringing down the deadliness of the disease, particularly among those who are highly, highly vulnerable.
What should have been done from the very outset, and it was very clear that this was the case, June, certainly May, June of 2020, is that people who are the most healthy, the youngest cohort, should have gone back to work.
People who are really vulnerable should have stayed at home.
Kids should have gone back to school.
That was very obvious even by summer of 2020.
But at that time, it was Anthony Fauci who was recommending that states remain closed.
Here he was in July 2020 ripping on states that were quote unquote reopening.
There are some governors and mayors that did it perfectly correctly.
They stayed exactly, they wanted to open up So they went through the guidelines of opening up their state.
But what happened is that many of the citizenry said, you know, well, I'm either going to be locked down or I'm going to let it all rip.
And, and you could see from just looking documented on TV and in the papers of still photos of people at bars and at congregations, which are a perfect setup, particularly if you don't have a mask.
Then there are some times when, despite the, um, The guidelines and the recommendations to open up carefully and prudently, some states skipped over those and just opened up too quickly.
Okay, and then it's worthwhile noting here that Anthony Fauci flip-flopped on masks about 27 different times here.
He started off at the very beginning of the pandemic, suggesting via email that masks were actually wildly ineffective.
He actually was caught on email saying this when all of his emails were released, saying that masks would not stop the spread.
Quote, masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected.
Rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection, the typical mask you buy in the drugstore is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material.
It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keeping out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.
Mr. Sylvia Burwell is working for the Trump administration at the time.
I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low-risk location.
Your instincts are correct.
Money is best spent on medical countermeasures such as diagnostics and vaccines.
This is in February of 2020.
Masks aren't really effective.
And then, of course, he flipped and masks were the most effective.
So, I mean, as of today, like last week, he's still telling you to wear masks despite the fact that there is zero data.
I mean, there are literally zero studies.
They do not exist showing that masks are effective in stopping the spread of Omicron unless you're talking about, like, N95s that are strapped to your face as though you are in some sort of medical unit.
Okay, which no one is wearing a mask like that.
But here's Anthony Fauci still promoting this stuff.
If you are in a zone or a county, state or a city that has a very high level of dynamic of viral circulation, the CDC would recommend strongly that you wear a mask in a congregate indoor setting.
And that would include schools, places of work, Anything that brings people together in a closed environment, that is good public health practice.
So he's still doing this.
He's still doing this.
Now, he's been allowed to get away with this because the media have been incredibly warm for Dr. Fauci since the beginning.
They posited him as sort of rival to President Trump.
And let's be fair about this.
President Trump is to blame for appointing Dr. Fauci to this position.
The simple fact of the matter is that he made Dr. Fauci significantly more famous because he put him out front.
And then he started arguing with the guy he had put out front.
What he should have done is taken control of the situation, President Trump.
And he should have said, listen, here's the way I want to do this.
Because in the end, when you shut down the economy, when you tell businesses to shut down, when you tell everybody to follow Dr. Fauci, that's a political decision.
That is not just a medical decision.
The question as to whether there's a medical basis for what you are doing and that it's balanced properly with economic considerations, that is politics.
And so it was a mistake by Trump to put Fauci out front.
That said, Fauci then proceeded to do a terrible job.
And again, this repeated itself over and over and over again.
He's not been honest, for example, about the fact that he supported gain-of-function research.
Like throughout his entire career, gain-of-function research is where you actually increase the functionality of a virus in order to see if you can counter the virus.
And he has backed this for a very long time.
Then he tried to obscure the fact that he had backed gain-of-function research by saying that when you are creating a virus in a lab that only applies to animals and then it transmits to humans, that's not technically gain-of-function research.
Gain-of-function research is within a species.
It's not cross-species.
Okay, well, that is obfuscating without really clarifying.
Here is Dr. Fauci avoiding answers about funding gain-of-function research.
How do you know they didn't lie to you?
Excuse me, sir?
How do you know they didn't lie to you and use the money for gain-of-function research anyway?
Well, we've seen the results of the experiments that were done and that were published and that the viruses that they studied are on public databases now.
So none of that was gain-of-function, so... How do you know they didn't do the research and not put it on their website?
There's no way of guaranteeing that.
There's no way of guaranteeing that.
And of course, in his arguments with Rand Paul, Rand Paul was saying, why do you back gain-of-function research?
And Fauci was saying, well, gain-of-function research isn't the sort of stuff that created COVID-19, if it was indeed created in a lab.
But it really, on a generic level, it really, really did.
As the Wall Street Journal points out today, Dr. Fauci refused even to consider that the novel coronavirus had originated in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
This may have been because the NIH had provided grant money to the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, which helped fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.
In a semantic battle with Republicans, Dr. Fauci denied the NIH funded such research.
At his refusal even to consider the possibility the virus started in a Wuhan lab showed Fauci was as much a politician as a scientist.
Worse, and this really is bad, Dr. Fauci smeared the few brave scientists who opposed blanket lockdowns and endorsed a strategy of focused protection on the elderly and those at high risk.
This was the message of the great Barrington Declaration authors, and emails later surfaced showing that Fauci worked with others in government to deride that alternative, so it never got a truly fair public hearing.
NIH Director Francis Collins wrote to Fauci, It's easy to criticize, but they're really criticizing science because I represent science.
That's dangerous, Dr. Fauci said last November.
That is how Dr. Fauci has treated his entire career.
And he's still on record saying that forcing kids to get vaccinated to go back to school was just a wonderful idea.
There were no countervailing concerns whatsoever.
Here's Dr. Fauci doing that.
I believe that mandating vaccines for children to appear in school is a good idea.
And remember, Jake, this is not something new.
We have mandates in many places in schools, particularly public schools, that if in fact you want a child to come in, we've done this for decades and decades, requiring polio, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis.
So this would not be something new, requiring vaccinations for children to come to school.
Has there been a thing where Dr. Fauci wasn't at some point wrong during this pandemic?
Listen, I have a lot of sympathy for people who are in positions of public power when unforeseen circumstances occur.
But this is the entire thing.
You are the head of infectious diseases for the entire United States.
This is not supposed to be the way that it works.
You're not supposed to blow it eight ways from Sunday and then become a national hero just because people hate Trump.
And that's really what happened with Fauci.
Fauci blew this job.
Everyone knows he blew this job.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky at the CDC, she has blown this job.
She's done a terrible job.
How many bureaucratic idiots have to be in charge of these massive three, four, five-letter agencies before we realize that perhaps the bureaucracy is not good at its job, that the elites blow it time and time again, and then we are told to trust them because, for example, they're anti a politician that the media don't like.
So, Dr. Fauci, good riddance, and I look forward to seeing you when you are next talking with Senator Rand Paul, except this time he's the head of some sort of investigative committee.
Democrats are beginning to think that they may be able to pull their irons out of the fire when it comes to this 2022 midterm election.
They're looking at the equality of the Senate candidates on the right side of the aisle, and they're believing they may be able to retain control of the Senate.
The current statistics suggest that they're not totally wrong in this.
538 says there's a better than average chance that the Democrats retain control of the Senate.
This is, after all, a bad year for Republicans who are defending seats.
There are a lot of Republican seats that are up for defense.
And a lot of the vulnerable seats for Republicans have turned out to be seats where they've run candidates who are not extraordinarily strong.
That said, the polls are really not showing these vast gaps that the media are projecting.
So, for example, in Pennsylvania, there's a lot of talk about how John Fetterman is beating the hell out of Dr. Oz, up 18, 20 points.
That's not right.
The latest poll has Fetterman up about four points over Dr. Oz, and Fetterman is stuck at 48%.
That race is going to get closer before this election is over, especially as people discover that John Fetterman is a socialist Uncle Fester.
Who is a complete, lifelong, useless person who has somehow been thrust into a position of power in Pennsylvania and believes the same thing that Bernie Sanders does.
He's a bad candidate.
John Fetterman.
Forget about candidate equality on the right side.
John Fetterman is a crap candidate.
When people realize that Raphael Warnock in Georgia basically sneaked through last time because Donald Trump made him sneak through last time, and that Raphael Warnock has a bunch of vulnerabilities on his record, there's going to be a lot of focus on him and not just on Herschel Walker in Georgia.
In Arizona, more fraught race, Blake Masters versus Mark Kelly.
Blake Masters, I think, is going to run a stronger race than people think.
There was a lot of concern about J.D.
Vance in Ohio.
Those concerns are already being alleviated.
J.D.
Vance in the latest polls is up five over Tim Ryan in Ohio.
So, you know, I think that the Democrats are getting a little bit over their skis if they believe that they are going to be able to definitely retain the Senate.
The Senate is currently split 50-50.
It looks like a toss-up because of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and Arizona.
But the Republicans look like they may have the upper hand in Nevada with Adam Laxalt.
It looks like the Republicans may, in fact, run strong in New Hampshire.
So Democrats are counting their chickens a little bit before they are hatched right here.
And that's particularly true because the overall polling for the Democrats right now is just terrible.
One of the reasons the Democrats are overconfident is they think you forgot about inflation and high interest rates.
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A new NBC poll shows that nearly three quarters of Americans think the United States is headed in the wrong direction under Joe Biden.
That sort of status is not survivable.
If 75% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track under Joe Biden, he's going to bear the brunt of that.
There's just no two ways about that.
The party in power gets smacked in the face, if those are your poll stats.
According to the UK Daily Mail, a whopping 74% of Americans say the country is on the wrong track.
Just 21% feel the nation is headed in the right direction, according to a new survey from NBC News.
More than half of respondents, 58%, feel more worried that America's best years may already be behind us.
Only 35% think the best years are yet to come.
And this makes sense.
I mean, if you look at the trajectory of the United States, you had $30 trillion national debt.
The United States seems to be cutting back on its military at precisely the time it needs to build up its military.
The United States economy seems to be put under the thumb of idiot regulators and bad legislators.
It seems that we are falling apart socially because we can't even agree on what a man or a woman is.
So, yeah, I mean, I just wonder why so many people feel negative and pessimistic about the future of the country.
And slow old Joe Biden, who's been having a great resurgence, according to the Democrats, by basically being in hiding for the last time.
And Ron Klain is bragging about it.
Ron Klain is chief of staff.
He's like, yeah, I negotiated that last deal.
Joe Biden was off sleeping in the corner.
I negotiated it.
Do Americans feel real sanguine about this?
And here's the thing.
As we find out the increased consequences of the policies that are being pursued by the Democrats, it's going to be really, really bad.
So, for example, the Democrats are currently bragging about this Inflation Reduction Act, which is not reducing inflation.
It's not designed to reduce inflation.
Now they're just renaming it and calling it the climate law, which is kind of amazing branding.
So, for example, the New York Times has a headline today.
It's called Democrats Designed the Climate Law to be a Game Changer.
Here's how.
When I first read that headline, I thought, what climate law?
Are we talking about the Inflation Reduction Act?
You know, the one that you guys named, and then insisted that, I guess, if you oppose the act, you're in favor of inflation?
Well, now they've just jettisoned the name all together.
Now it's a Climate Act.
And so what exactly is in it?
As you find out, once you actually read it, what's in it is giving regulators the power to destroy the energy industry in the United States.
So just a couple of months ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency was not granted the power under the Clean Air and Water Act and weren't granted that power under that act to regulate carbon emissions because carbon is not, in fact, a pollutant under that act.
So what did Congress do on a 51-50 vote with Kamala Harris as the decider?
What exactly did they just do in this Inflation Reduction Act?
They gave the power to the EPA.
They gave it explicitly to the EPA to regulate carbon emissions.
So now, we've got a bunch of bureaucrats, Anthony Fauci-like bureaucrats, deciding how factories are supposed to be run.
According to Lisa Friedman at the New York Times, quote, When the Supreme Court restricted the ability of the EPA to fight climate change this year, the reason it gave was that Congress had never granted the agency the broad authority to shift America away from burning fossil fuels.
Now it has.
Throughout the landmark climate law passed this month is language written specifically to address the Supreme Court's justification for reining in the EPA.
A ruling that was one of the court's most consequential of the term.
The new law amends the Clean Air Act, the country's bedrock air quality legislation, to define carbon dioxide produced by burning of fossil fuels as an air pollutant.
That language explicitly gives the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gases and to use its power to push the adoption of wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources.
Senator Tom Carper, Delaware Democrat, said, quote, The language, we think, makes it pretty clear that greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
With the new law, he added, there are no ifs, ands, or buts that Congress has told federal agencies to tackle carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping emissions from power plants, automobiles, and oil wells.
This month, in the hours before the bill passed the Senate, Republicans waged a last-minute, mostly unsuccessful, predawn battle to remove that language.
Later that day, the Senate approved the Climate and Tax Bill by a vote of 51 to 50 along party lines.
Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote.
It's buried in there, said Senator Ted Cruz.
The Democrats are trying to overturn the Supreme Court's West Virginia versus EPA victory.
So, it now looks as though the EPA is going to have the ability to basically regulate carbon emissions again, just via the regulatory process.
Democrats are shoving that through.
And then somehow Democrats believe this is going to be a win for them as the energy costs keep going up on a systemic level, not based on Putin's gas tax or whatever nonsense Joe Biden is pushing on a systemic level.
As you have the EPA cracking down on carbon emissions.
Americans are going to pay the price for that.
An NBC News poll shows that the economy is still the top issue for Democrats, despite the fact that they keep suggesting that the real top issue is democracy or whatnot.
So there is a This NBC News poll goes through the sort of top issues, and one of the top issues, supposedly, is the state of our democracy.
The combined threats to our democracy.
Okay, so threats to democracy, 21%.
Say that's the most important issue facing the country.
Now, is that really what people believe?
So first of all, You can read that two ways, right?
Threats to democracy.
They've changed the actual wording of the poll from NBC News.
It used to be election integrity.
It used to be voter fraud, election integrity, right?
It used to be something that was clearly a left-wing issue.
Threats to democracy.
If you ask Republicans right now, is our democracy threatened?
I think most Republicans would probably say yes, because they believe that the FBI raid on Donald Trump's house, for example, is a threat to democracy.
So that answer is just really Too vague to be telescoped into support for Democrats.
But the next two issues are cost of living, jobs and the economy.
Combined, 30%.
That is still the top issue for most people.
Cost of living and jobs and the economy.
Okay?
After that comes immigration and the situation of the board.
That's now at 13%.
So you're now at 43%.
And again, you figure that threats to democracy split about half-half.
They're talking about over 50% of Americans for whom the top issue is not anything remotely what Democrats want it to be.
Then you get to some Democrat issues, right?
You get climate change, guns, abortion.
Those are like a combined 26% of the population that cares about those.
Coronavirus is still at 6%.
But the reality is that the issues that Americans care most about, these are ones Democrats are not doing particularly well on.
And this is the point that Henry Olson makes today over at the Washington Post.
He's pointing out that if you look at the generic congressional ballot right now, Republicans are still up.
But not just that.
If Democrats believe that bad candidate quality is going to somehow save them, that is not the history of electoral politics in the United States.
He says our elections are increasingly partisan with voters first choosing which party they back and then voting for its candidates up and down the ticket.
I went back to 2014 and compared the exit poll results for the incumbent president's job approval in those four elections to the vote share received by incumbent senators from the president's party.
The results should make Democrats tempered their expectations.
In 2014, longtime Democratic senators ran as much as nine points ahead of Obama's job approval in their state.
Most still lost, despite significantly outrunning the president.
No Democrat in a contested race ran more than 5 points ahead of Obama's job approval rating in 2016.
Partisanship increased even more in the Trump era.
9 Republican candidates in the 16 most contested Senate races in 2018 and 2020 ran within just 2 points of Trump's job approval.
Another 4 ran within 3 or 4 points.
Only 2 GOP nominees ran 10 or more points ahead or behind Trump's job approval.
These data strongly suggest the fate of this year's Democratic Senate nominees is tied to the president's job approval.
The party Senate candidates likely will run a couple of points ahead of that figure.
It may even run five points ahead of it.
That's of scant comfort when Biden's national job approval is languishing around 41%.
Also, dramatically, state polls have been exaggerating Democratic strength in recent elections.
The 538 final projections in 2020 for closed states all overestimated Democrats' performance when compared with the actual results.
Most of the errors were large, including by 2.3% in Arizona and 7.7% in Wisconsin.
The sort of optimism that is being justified by the Democrats here, in other words, is just too much.
And Donald Trump is actually seeing another surge.
So what Democrats are sort of hoping is that Donald Trump jumps into the fray right before the election.
They're hoping that Donald Trump decides that he's going to announce his electoral prospects for 2024 before the election.
And it's enough to make one think that that FBI raid on his house is almost specifically designed by Joe Biden to get him to do so.
Because again, Democrats believe the more people think about Trump, the more they vote for Democrats.
So they're perfectly happy to have Donald Trump at the center of the news.
Donald Trump has now filed a lawsuit against the FBI for the raid on his home.
According to the Wall Street Journal, former President Trump filed a lawsuit Monday seeking the appointment of a special master to review the materials seized by the FBI during a search of his Mar-a-Lago home.
He asked a judge to order investigators to immediately stop examining the items.
Trump is also seeking a more detailed inventory of the items taken from his private club in Florida earlier this year.
It's kind of fascinating that he wants the government to stop going through the documents in the first place.
I'm not sure what the legal basis would be for suggesting that the FBI can't go through the documents that it's already seized.
The lawsuit alleges the decision to raid at Mar-a-Lago a mere 90 days before the 2022 midterms involved political calculations aimed at diminishing the leading voice in the Republican Party, President Trump.
A special master is a third party, usually a retired judge, who reviews evidence to determine whether it is protected by attorney-client privilege, executive privilege, or similar legal doctrines.
Trump's lawyers wrote the appointment of a special master as the only appropriate action, and the U.S.
should be ordered to cease review of the seized materials immediately.
Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said the August 8th search warrant at Mar-a-Lago was authorized by a federal court.
The department is aware of the evening's motion.
The U.S.
will file its response in court.
Investigators have already set up what is known as a filter team, a separate group of agents and lawyers to review the materials and to determine whether any of them are protected by such privileges before they are provided to the investigators.
The DOJ already contacted Trump's legal team to return one active and two expired passports that were found in containers seized during the search, according to officials.
Now, there is another piece to this puzzle, and that is, I have to say, the DOJ and the FBI, it is amazing how leaky they are.
I mean, suspicious how leaky they are.
For a supposedly apolitical group of people, they seem to be extraordinarily political when it comes to what they choose to leak to the media.
So now we have details in the New York Times about what exactly was in those classified documents that apparently Trump was hiding in his basement or something.
Well, Trump has filed a lawsuit against the FBI for the search on Mar-a-Lago.
How did he know that happened?
Well, because they served him a warrant.
But if somebody were to break into your house, would they serve you a warrant?
Probably not.
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Alrighty, so, meanwhile, the FBI and the DOJ, these supposedly apolitical branches, they are leaking like sieves to the New York Times, according to Maggie Haberman, Jody Cancer, Adam Goldman, and Ben Protest over at the New York Times, the initial batch of documents retrieved by the National Archives from former President Trump in January included more than 150 marked as classified, a number that ignited intense concern at the DOJ and helped trigger the criminal investigation that led FBI agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago this month, seeking to recover more, multiple people briefed on the matter said.
In total, the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Trump since he left office, the People said.
That first batch of documents returned in January, another set provided by Mr. Trump's aides to the DOJ in June, and the material seized by the FBI in the search this month.
The previously unreported volume of the sensitive material found in the former president's possession in January helps explain why the Justice Department moved so urgently to hunt down any further classified materials he might have.
By the way, by urgently, I assume you mean not taking seven months?
I may not be an expert in chronology, but it seems like if you return documents in January, and then you realize in January that he's got a bunch of classified stuff, and you wait until, you know, late July, August, to actually raid him, that seems like a rather large delay for a national security emergency on the basis of a non-criminal violation of the Presidential Records Act.
The extent to which such a large number of highly sensitive documents remained at Mar-a-Lago for months, even as the department sought the return of all material that should have been left in government custody when Trump left office, according to the New York Times, suggested to officials the former president or his aides had been cavalier in handling it, not fully forthcoming with investigators or both.
Wait, you mean Donald Trump was cavalier with the rules?
My God!
I mean, next you're going to tell me that Rosie O'Donnell is a lesbian.
I mean, I just don't know what to think anymore.
Donald Trump cavalier with the rules?
Probably we should lock him up.
Probably that's the solution, guys.
It's totally apolitical.
The specific nature of the sensitive material Trump took from the White House remains unclear, but the 15 boxes Mr. Trump turned over to the archives in January, nearly a year after he left office, included documents from the CIA, NSA, and FBI spanning a variety of topics of national security interest.
Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021, according to multiple people briefed on his efforts before turning them over.
The highly sensitive nature of some of the material in the boxes prompted archives officials to refer the matter to the DOJ.
Aides to Mr. Trump turned over a few dozen additional sensitive documents during a visit to Mar-a-Lago by DOJ officials in early June.
At the conclusion of the search this month, officials left with 26 boxes.
One set of boxes had the highest level of classification, top secret, sensitive, compartmented information.
Even after the extraordinary decision by the FBI to execute a search warrant, investigators have sought additional surveillance footage from the club.
Apparently, they are worried that people were sort of going in and out of the area where the boxes were, including Trump himself, kind of sorting out what he wanted to hand over and what he did not want to hand over.
Among the items they knew were missing were Trump's original letters from North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, and they know Barack Obama had left Trump before he left office.
Wait, so we're going to arrest him based on, like, documents that we know exist and aren't actually top secret because they were published at the time?
That's the stuff?
Really?
Apparently, the surveillance video from inside Mar-a-Lago showed that there were people who were sort of going in and out of the area.
On June 22nd, the DOJ subpoenaed the Trump Organization for Mar-a-Lago security footage that included a well-trafficked hallway outside the storage area.
The club had surveillance footage going back 60 days for some areas of the property.
While much of the video showed hours of club employees walking through the busy corridor, some of it raised concerns.
It revealed people moving boxes in and out, and in some cases appearing to change the containers some documents were held in.
The footage also showed other parts of the property.
Federal officials have indicated their initial goal had been to secure any classified documents that Trump was holding at Mar-a-Lago.
A combination of witness interviews and initial security footage led DOJ to begin drafting a request for a search warrant.
Well, this still raises the question as to the broadness, the depth of the search warrant.
David Rivkin and Lee Casey have a piece at the Wall Street Journal talking about the depth of the search warrant today.
They say, was the FBI justified in searching Trump's residence in Mar-a-Lago?
The judge who issued the warrant for Mar-a-Lago has signaled he is likely to release a redacted version of the affidavit.
But the warrant itself suggests the answer is likely no.
The FBI had no legally valid cause for the raid.
The warrant authorized the FBI to seize all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed.
These three criminal statutes all address the possession and handling of materials that contain national security info, public records, or material relevant to an investigation.
The materials to be seized included any government and or presidential records at all during Trump's term of office.
Virtually all the materials are likely to fall within this category.
Federal law gives Trump a right of access to them.
His possession of them is entirely consistent with that right.
Trump's documents are also covered by a specific statute.
It's long been the Supreme Court position that where there is no clear intention otherwise a specific statute will not be controlled or nullified by a general one.
The former president's rights under the PRA trump any application of the laws the FBI warrants cites.
The Presidential Records Act dramatically changed the rules regarding ownership and treatment of presidential documents.
Presidents from George Washington through Jimmy Carter treated the White House papers as their personal property.
Neither Congress nor the courts disputed that.
In Nixon versus the United States, the U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held Nixon had a right to compensation for his presidential papers.
The PRA established a unique statutory scheme balancing the needs of government, former presidents, and history.
The law declares presidential records public property.
The PRA lays out detailed requirements for how the archivist is to administer the records, handle privileged claims, make the record public, etc.
But the PRA does not address the process by which a former president's records are physically to be turned over to the archivist.
The bottom line here is that even if the government has an interest in how classified materials are kept, it appears the FBI was initially satisfied with the installation of an additional lock on the relevant Mar-a-Lago storage room.
If that was insufficient, the Bureau should have sought a less intrusive judicial remedy and a search warrant.
But the bottom line here is that it seems as though they decided to go completely off the deep end for a particular reason, and that is they are searching for some document that we have not yet heard about, right?
There's another shoe that's going to drop here.
And pretending this is all about the mishandling of classified information is obviously a misdirect.
This is not about the handling of classified information.
This is largely about trying to find something that links Donald Trump to January 6th.
That is what this is about.
There's no other reason why the search warrant would be this broad.
If it were just about classified documents, then presumably the warrant would be about classified documents.
That's not what the warrant said.
It said any presidential records at all during this time.
Anybody, by the way, who's attempting to compare what happened with Donald Trump to what happened with Hillary Clinton neglects the simple fact that Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State, not the President of the United States.
She would not have the ability to unilaterally declassify material in the same way the President of the United States does.
She would not have access to records in the same way the President of the United States does.
Doesn't mean Trump didn't do anything wrong, doesn't mean he didn't mishandle classified documents.
It does mean that if we're going to activate something like this, it's got to be on a stronger basis than, we need the letter that Kim Jong-un wrote to Donald Trump.
I'm sorry, that's not going to cut it.
And then you wonder why so many people who are on the Republican side of the aisle are looking at our elite institutions staffed with career bureaucrats and thinking, maybe I don't trust these people.
Maybe we should not give this much power to this many people.
As Rich Lowry points out at the New York Times today, if you compared this to what would happen if a Democrat, former president, were raided by a Republican president, there's no question how badly this would go in the media.
But it's Trump, so everything and anything is apparently okay when Trump is the one with the target painted on his back.
Alrighty folks, we've reached the end of the show.
We'll be back here tomorrow with much more.
Hopefully my voice is better by then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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