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Sept. 1, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

44:34

Joe Biden Is Healing America's Soul By Calling You A Terrorist | Ep. 1566

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	Joe Biden plans his big unity speech directed at the soul of the nation.
	The DOJ looks like it's preparing obstruction of justice charges against former President Donald Trump.
	And Democrat electoral plans rely on acting offended.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Well, tonight, Joe Biden is going to speak to you about your soul.
	Because if there's one man in American politics who knows what your soul needs to heal, it is this geriatric dotard who can't speak two straight sentences without fumbling all over himself.
	A person who apparently believes that the half of the country that did not vote for him is akin to stochastic terrorists.
	According to Voice of America, quote, in a primetime televised speech Thursday evening in Philadelphia, U.S.
	President Joe Biden is to speak about what White House officials characterize as a battle for the soul of the nation.
	Now, this is the same routine that he did during the campaign.
	Which means he's still running against Donald Trump, right?
	During the 2020 campaign, the idea was he is about light and about unity and about friendship and about apple pie.
	And Donald Trump is an evil orange man.
	And in order to reclaim the soul of the nation, you have to elect him.
	Well, he got elected and apparently the soul of the nation is still broken because people are looking at him and saying, you're a terrible president.
	But this means that he just needs to lecture you some more about the soul of the nation.
	Because when I think about my moral exemplars, I think about career politicians who are venal, and corrupt and bloviating and do really stupid things and abandoned 38 million people to the predations of 8th century barbarians and who promote transing the children.
	Those are the people I think of as my moral exemplars when they lecture me about the healing of my soul and the soul of my nation.
	According to VOA, in the address outside Independence Hall, Where the country's Declaration of Independence was debated and adopted, and the Constitution was written by the Founding Fathers, the 46th United States President will discuss how our rights and freedoms are still under attack, and he will make clear who is fighting for those rights, fighting for those freedoms, and fighting for our democracy, according to the White House.
	Now, first of all, there's something particularly galling about this President standing outside Independence Hall Where the Declaration of Independence was debated and adopted in opposition to overweening centralized power.
	This president of the United States was radically expanded the centralized power of the federal government up to and including the single largest executive order in terms of spending in the history of the United States.
	Half a trillion dollars simply on a political whim in order to prop up his political allies.
	This man standing outside the hall where the Constitution was written, a Constitution that he does not seem to like very much because it provides constraints on the things that he wants to do.
	A Constitution he believes should be replaced with a wide variety of regulatory clauses from a centralized administrative government trumping the actual provisions of the Constitution.
	But he's now going to pretend that he's speaking on behalf of the Declaration and the Constitution, which of course he is not.
	And he's going to make clear that he is on the side of the angels and his enemies are on the side of the devils.
	According to VOA, Dartmouth professor of government Brendan Nyhan predicts Biden will use the speech to rally his party in advance of the midterm election that Democrats fear could go quite poorly for their side.
	But he's also calling for Americans to reject the anti-democratic forces that have challenged the political system in this country.
	And this is the main message that you can expect from Joe Biden tonight.
	Everyone who voted for his opponent in 2020 is effectively I don't want to get ahead of the President's speech.
	aisle is somebody who opposes democracy.
	So lest you think I'm exaggerating, Corine Jean-Pierre, the absolutely incompetent White House press secretary who took over for Jen Psaki, she was asked about what Joe Biden is going to speak about.
	And she explained that he's going to talk about the threat to our democracy, which amounts to basically the Republican Party.
	I don't want to get ahead of the president's speech.
	It's not a good thing to do, as you know.
	But you know, the president thinks that there is an extremist threat to our democracy.
	The president has been clear, as he can be, on that particular piece when we talk about a democracy, when we talk about our freedoms.
	The way that he sees is the MAGA Republicans are the most energized part of the Republican Party.
	This is an extreme threat to our democracy, to our freedom, to our rights.
	They just don't respect the rule of law.
	So, you know who Karine Jean-Pierre sounds a lot like when she talks about half of her fellow Americans?
	She sounds a lot like George W. Bush in 2001 talking about Al Qaeda.
	Here is George W. Bush in 2001 talking about Al Qaeda.
	See if you can spot the difference.
	Americans are asking, why do they hate us?
	They hate what they see right here in this chamber.
	A democratically elected government.
	Their leaders are self-appointed.
	They hate our freedoms.
	Our freedom of religion.
	Our freedom of speech.
	Our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.
	Well, it's almost as though Corine Jean-Pierre in the year 2022 sounds exactly like George W. Bush talking about people who murdered 3,000 Americans on 9-11.
	And again, this is not a shock considering that in the immediate aftermath of January 6th, the immediate move of the Democratic Party and the media were to label every single Republican in the country complicit in January 6th and to simultaneously claim that January 6th was akin to September 11th in terms of its goals, its aims, and its actual practices.
	So, it's not a great shock that you are seeing The unity president basically say that everyone who's on the other side of the political aisle is a threat to democracy.
	What's particularly galling about this is that once again, the president of the United States has very little respect for the system of government that he actually is supposed to be running.
	He doesn't like the checks and balances.
	He thinks they're bad.
	He thinks that he should be able to do whatever he wants from the executive office of the presidency.
	This president does not care about the rule of law.
	He believes that he can get away with anything, that the executive authority of the office just allows him to do whatever he wants.
	And then he threatens you with that power.
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	The president of the United States does not care very much about the rule of law.
	His party does not care very much about the rule of law.
	A lot of people are sitting out there and it turns out that what they are objecting to is what they see as the perversion of the rule of law by Democrats.
	What they're objecting to is what they see as the perversion of the democratic system of government by outside forces, including intervention from, for example, the FBI telling big tech companies to shut down stories in advance of elections.
	They don't like very much the illegal, and these were illegal, changes to the voting rules that were made in 2020.
	Even people like me, who don't believe that Donald Trump outright won the 2020 election, that he doesn't have the proof that voter fraud was the big decider.
	Even people like me are very wary of a lot of the moves that have been made in the past several years to undermine the faith in democratic institutions from the left side of the aisle.
	For example, the full-scale, full-throated support of giant protest movements predicated on a lie in 2020 that turns the most damaging riots in American history.
	These are things that I think trouble a lot of people.
	Does that make you akin to Al Qaeda?
	Does it make you a threat to democracy?
	Does it make you a threat to democracy if you oppose Joe Biden's agenda?
	What exactly makes you the threat to democracy?
	When Joe Biden says he's going to heal the soul of the nation, what this really means is he's going to excise half of the nation.
	This is my great fear.
	When he first took office, he gave an inaugural address in which he talked about unity.
	He used that word many, many times.
	He talked about how we were going to unite as a country.
	We're going to finally come together.
	And I said at the time, by unity, does he mean we're going to agree to disagree and we're going to move forward together on what we do share?
	Or does he mean everyone who disagrees with me is violating my concept of unity and therefore must be purged?
	Because you can unify a country through purges.
	It does happen.
	And when you have a radicalized left that openly calls for this sort of stuff, are you wondering why people are feeling a little disquieted at the sort of language that is being used by the president against his fellow American citizens?
	And again, remember, he's not even directing this.
	During the campaign, the idea from Joe Biden is that he was directing it at Donald Trump.
	But Donald Trump's no longer in office, right?
	Donald Trump isn't the candidate on the other side of the aisle.
	Donald Trump's not on a ballot.
	So who's he directing it at?
	And you can hear it from Corine Jean-Pierre.
	They're directing it at the people who voted that way.
	That's a that's a whole different thing.
	It's a whole different thing.
	Understand that they are attempting to broaden out their critique of Donald Trump as a bad man for the soul of democracy, the Satan on the shoulder of the United States.
	The devil whispering into our ear.
	They're trying to broaden out that critique of Trump personally, which is bad enough.
	They're trying to broaden that out to any American who disagrees with them.
	And they name names, right?
	They say, you know, the threat of violence that's coming from the MAGA Republicans, the extremist threat.
	By the way, these extreme threats range from people like me going to podcast movement and literally existing to people who point out that children's hospitals should not be performing double mastectomies on minors, right?
	Those are all threats to the democracy, according to people like Corine Jean-Pierre.
	Because you know who else is a threat?
	You know who's a violent threat?
	Ron DeSantis is a violent threat.
	How do you know that Ron DeSantis... What makes Ron DeSantis a violent threat?
	Well, the fact that Ron DeSantis made a joke about chucking Anthony Fauci across a river.
	This is what makes him a violent threat, according to Karine Jean-Pierre in the White House.
	Just last week, you had Governor Ron DeSantis suggested that Dr. Fauci should be physically assaulted.
	And former President Trump has done the same many, many times.
	Look, and many of your colleagues have actually talked about and reported on this dangerous trend that we're seeing.
	And, for example, the New York Times headline from this month, as right-wing rhetoric escalates, so do threats and violence.
	And so these are things that we have to call out.
	It's everybody.
	It's Ron DeSantis.
	It's you.
	It's people who go to school board meetings.
	All those people are a threat to democracy.
	All those people are a threat to the soul of the nation, according to Joe Biden.
	Again, this is nothing new in sort of the recesses of recent Democratic memory.
	Barack Obama suggested that all of his political opponents were bitter clingers.
	Hillary Clinton suggested all of her political opponents were a basket of deplorables.
	But now you have the White House basically suggesting that if you're a threat to democracy, what are you supposed to do?
	If someone's a true threat to the democratic process of the United States, the only solution is to eliminate them.
	It also doesn't help when you have Joe Biden going around the country suggesting that anybody who's in favor of owning a gun under the Second Amendment, I mean, they don't really need a gun to resist the government.
	After all, the government can just eviscerate them with an F-15.
	These are not the sort of rhetorical flourishes that you use when you care about your fellow Americans or about unity.
	These are the sort of rhetorical flourishes you use when you are attempting to divide the country and label everyone who opposes you the actual physical enemy.
	If you're talking about driving up violent rhetoric, it's hard to get more violent than suggesting that the people who oppose you are utterly opposed to rights, democracy, decency, and that those people might just be hit by an F-15 every once in a while.
	And this is a radical escalation in the rhetoric coming from this White House.
	Karine Jean-Pierre, speaking about Americans this way, it's not exactly the smartest thing.
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	And at the same exact time that this is happening, of course, you do have the FBI and the DOJ investigating President Trump.
	And after four long years of our intelligence services and our DOJ investigating the actual president of the United States on the false basis that he must have been colluding with the Russians to twist the 2016 election, a lot of people are, I think correctly, very, very suspicious of the FBI being weaponized on behalf of the current administration to go against the guy that they are now attempting to, number one, elevate in the headlines prior to the election, and number two, Hope to either make the nominee or to indict.
	Those are the various choices they're putting in front of the American people.
	A lot of people are wondering, how are you talking about democracy again when it seems as though you are perfectly willing to avoid any democratic accountability on any score?
	Which raises the question of what happens next with regard to the FBI and the DOJ and Donald Trump.
	So it seems pretty obvious at this point by apparently all legal analysis that the DOJ is very likely to try and push an indictment of Donald Trump at this point.
	According to Bloomberg, they're going to wait until after midterm elections to do this.
	Which of course means that he's going to hover over the midterm elections, which may be the point here.
	According to Bloomberg, federal prosecutors are likely to wait until after the November election to announce any charges against Trump if they determine he broke laws, according to people familiar.
	The unprecedented prospect of bringing charges against a former U.S.
	president is creating intense scrutiny of the Justice Department in the aftermath of its search of his home in Mar-a-Lago.
	A separate DOJ probe is focused on his effort to overturn the 2020 election, which he lost to President Biden.
	Under longstanding department policy, prosecutors are barred from taking investigative steps or filing charges for the purpose of affecting an election or helping a candidate or party traditionally 60 days before an election.
	This year, that would be September 10th, which makes it unlikely anything would be announced until after November 8th.
	Now, of course, the department has ignored that policy in recent years, most notably when FBI Director James Comey revealed the FBI was reopening a probe into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server just days before the 2016 presidential election.
	And in 2020, former AG William Barr announced in the weeks before the presidential election, department officials could make public announcements and take overt investigative steps with regard to voter fraud cases.
	This time around, the impact of any criminal case against Trump would likely be significant.
	He isn't on the ballot in November, but of course he has endorsed a bunch of candidates.
	And of course, Democrats hope that he is top of mind when people go into the voting booth.
	This is very obvious from the way that they are treating President Trump.
	It's why Joe Biden is giving a speech that is going to be directed almost specifically against President Trump.
	Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, a lot of people are looking and saying, wait a second, do we believe the FBI when they say that this was such a vital national security interest that they had to raid Mar-a-Lago and indict the former president of the United States?
	A person who had plenary power as president of the United States to declassify anything while he was president of the United States?
	So originally, the sort of suspicion was, there's no way that the FBI and the DOJ are going to indict Donald Trump over he's mishandling classified documents.
	That would be kind of wild.
	That the former president of the United States, while he was president, had plenary power to declassify, whether he made that claim or not.
	The simple fact is, when he was president of the United States, he could theoretically just wave his hand over the papers and say, all of this stuff is declassified.
	And Trump has sort of sporadically made that defense of himself.
	But beyond that, the idea that the thing that is going to bring down the chief political rival to the current president of the United States is mishandling classified material, not any underlying traitorous behavior, not any underlying serious intent to do a damaging crime to the United States of America, mishandling of classified documentation.
	A lot of people are looking at that going, wait a second.
	That seems highly political.
	Because here's one thing we know.
	We know that the Justice Department and the FBI set an actual standard when it came to mishandling classified information.
	So let's assume for a second.
	That all of Donald Trump's kind of supposed defenses are pretexts.
	That he didn't actually declassify any of these documents.
	That he did what they're accusing him of doing.
	That he actually brought home the classified documents, he stacked them in his closet, and then when the National Archives asked for them, he didn't turn them over.
	Let's assume all of that is true.
	James Comey set an actual standard for what it would take to prosecute a public official for mishandling classified documentation.
	Because you will remember that Hillary Clinton was using her private email address for classified documents, and putting those things on the email address means that they're online.
	And you'll recall that she then, when she was asked to turn over her servers, she actually erased the servers.
	She used a program called BleachBit to essentially get rid of all of those emails.
	You'll also remember that many of those emails then popped up on an outside computer, Anthony Weiner's computer, along with whatever pornography he had been sending his lady friends.
	So not exactly a wonderful storage of classified materials from Hillary Clinton.
	She claimed, of course, she didn't know declassification protocols or that these documents were classified.
	That was very likely to be untrue, considering she'd been in government for a very, very long time and that she'd been the Secretary of State.
	But James Comey decided, you know what?
	That's not the standard for prosecution.
	That may be the standard under the law, that's not the standard for prosecution.
	So he said a couple of things that are relevant to what's happening now with Donald Trump.
	Because if you're talking about the perception of a democracy working in the United States, one of the elements of that is equal protection of the laws.
	Equal application of the laws, non-selective prosecution when it comes to prosecuting high public officials and former presidents of the United States for mishandling classified documents.
	And none of this means that Donald Trump didn't handle his classified documents sloppily.
	It does mean that that apparently is not the criminal standard, according to James Comey.
	James Comey said two things of relevance in this press conference where he announced that Hillary would not be prosecuted.
	This is back during summer of 2016.
	He said one, there is a very high probability that America's enemies actually did gain control of many classified information secrets from Hillary Clinton's computer.
	And two, that wasn't enough to indict her.
	Even that wasn't enough to indict her.
	Here was James Comey at the time.
	Looking back at our investigations into the mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts.
	All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information, or vast quantities of information exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct, or indications of disloyalty to the United States, or efforts to obstruct justice.
	We do not see those things here.
	Okay, so he just ignored, by the way, the quote-unquote effort to obstruct justice.
	Among the things that he ignored there was Hillary Clinton bleach bidding her servers.
	I mean, that seems like a pretty good effort to not turn over the evidence of what exactly you were storing on your computer, but apparently that wasn't enough.
	And as I say, James Comey even went on to say that there was a good probability that a lot of the classified information Hillary Clinton was storing actually got out to, say, the Chinese or the Russians.
	We did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton's personal email domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was hacked successfully.
	But given the nature of the system, and of the actors potentially involved, we assess we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence.
	We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.
	We also assess that Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent.
	She also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.
	Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account.
	That was not enough to indict her.
	Okay, now, what are the chances that somebody actually gained access to the classified information in Donald Trump's closet, under his mattress?
	Do you think it's better or worse than Hillary Clinton exposing classified information on an email server?
	I mean, the answer is pretty obvious, but that was not enough to indict her.
	So, again, the standard that has to be applied here, if you actually wish for people to have any sort of faith in the institution, has to be even.
	Well, when you think about the double standard that is being applied by the FBI, right?
	James Comey let Hillary off the hook because lack of intent, but we really don't need to prove that Donald Trump was doing anything super duper nefarious.
	There was no nefarious reason he was doing this stuff in order to indict him.
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	So I'll go back and I will tell you again.
	Here was James Comey's statement.
	He said that all of the cases prosecuted like this have to involve a combination of, OK, one of these factors is not enough.
	It has to involve a combination of clearly intentional and willfully mishandling of classified information or vast quantities of material exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct that you were doing it because you intentionally wanted to expose this stuff or indications of disloyalty.
	None of these exist for President Trump.
	Even if you were to say that there was intentional and willful mishandling of classified information, that would not be enough, according to James Comey.
	Or efforts to obstruct justice.
	And remember, it has to be beyond the kind of stuff that Hillary did.
	Because you could easily say that under Hillary's behavioral standard, there was a combination of any clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information and an effort to obstruct justice.
	But they didn't do it by Hillary.
	Okay, so does this mean that Donald Trump acted in model fashion with regard to classified documents?
	No.
	But it does mean that when Americans think about the way that our democracy works, if the leading political contender for the presidency of the United States on the Democratic side of the aisle was exonerated by the FBI in 2016 for behavior that looks extraordinarily similar to the stuff that Donald Trump, the leading presidential candidate on the right side of the aisle, at least by polling data right now, if that behavior looks the same, the Democrat gets exonerated, the Republican gets indicted, A lot of people are going to start thinking, well, maybe our democratic system of government is not working particularly well.
	And as it now looks like, all of the factors seem stacked in favor of the DOJ actually inciting Trump, which is going to bring things to a head pretty damned quickly here, which is why Merrick Garland really, just for the sake of the democracy, got to be incredibly careful.
	If you're going to bring a case like this, it better be bulletproof.
	You're going to have to demonstrate not just that Donald Trump did the things you're accusing him of doing, but that they radically differ from the things that allowed Hillary Clinton to get away with it back in 2016.
	Because right now, the sense that I am getting is that they are basically going to indict him on the suspicion that he has bad intentions under the Comey standard.
	So Andrew McCarthy over at National Review has a good rundown on why he thinks that it is now very likely that Trump will be charged with obstruction of justice.
	So his rundown says this, he says, Former President Donald Trump is facing the very serious prospect of being indicted for obstruction of justice and causing false statements to be made to the government.
	That's the upshot of a court submission filed by the DOJ on Tuesday night in response to the Trump camp's belated motion for the appointment of a special master to review materials seized three weeks ago from the former president's Mar-a-Lago estate.
	By the way, the timing here should be noted.
	Remember, the January 6th committee started making extraordinarily loud noises.
	And like a week later, Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago was raided by the FBI.
	With Merrick Garland saying that he ordered the code red.
	As I said at the time, January 6th committee was unlikely to actually bring forward criminal evidence.
	What they were likely to do is ratchet up the tension on Merrick Garland to do something.
	And so Merrick Garland did something.
	And now the incentive structure is stacked in such a way that if Merrick Garland does not actually move forward with indictment of Donald Trump, he and Joe Biden are going to pay the price from their own base.
	Which means that, yes, there is a political component, and pretending there is not is just willfully shutting your eyes to the actual politics of the situation.
	According to Andrew McCarthy, last week, when an extensively redacted version of the affidavit supporting the Mar-a-Lago search warrant was released, I opined that perhaps the most overlooked sentence in the document was this one, quote, The government's Tuesday night court filing bears that out.
	The submission also illustrates that while the affidavit remains substantially under wraps, we already know the gist of it.
	So originally, when this happened, a lot of people like me and Andy McCarthy, a lot of people were saying, this can't just be about classified document mishandling, can it?
	They must, I mean, they wouldn't do it over that.
	Well, maybe they would.
	Maybe they were doing this because they will get him on anything they can get him on.
	According to Annie McCarthy, prosecutors begin with a factual recitation that substantially echoes a letter written by archivist Deborah Seidel Wall to Trump's counsel covering events from the time Trump left office on January 20th, 2021 through May 10th, the date of Wall's letter.
	We already knew that after Wall's letter, there followed an initial grand jury subpoena for classified documents served May 11th.
	A meeting at Mar-a-Lago on June 3rd, which contrary to Trump's public depiction of an amicable negotiation session between his lawyers and DOJ officials, was actually compliance, or as it turns out, non-compliance, with a grand jury subpoena in an active criminal investigation, and also a second grand jury subpoena served June 22nd, from Mar-a-Lago surveillance video.
	Those events dovetailed with the FBI's interviews of Mar-a-Lago employees and Trump's post-presidency staffers, as well as the Bureau's review of the surveillance video.
	In combination, he's convinced the government of what it already suspected at the time of the June 3rd meeting.
	Trump was lying about how much classified information he was hoarding, and about where he was hoarding it.
	Consequently, even without the new submission, we already knew the DOJ believed the unprecedented execution of a court-authorized search warrant at the home of a former American president was fully justified because A, the government exhausted other options after not just 18 months of trying to reason with Trump, but especially his flouting of a grand jury subpoena.
	B, there was a high likelihood Trump was continuing to direct the movement concealment and perhaps destruction of classified documents.
	Which, as Trump's camp June 3rd machination showed, the former president had no intention of surrendering to the government, and c.) there was a vital need for U.S.
	intelligence agencies to reacquire any highly classified intelligence that had been mishandled and was still being mishandled.
	The new DOJ submission fills in some salient gaps.
	First, Trump never actually made a claim of declassification.
	The claims of declassification have been made all inside the last month or so.
	So at the time, when they were saying, turn over the documents, he didn't just say, listen, I declassified all these.
	I waved my hand over the boxes that were declassified.
	Get out of here.
	Which is what he should have done.
	Which may speak to the fact that, as always, Donald Trump's lawyers are crap.
	This has been a problem that has plagued him throughout his political career is that the people who surround him are generally second raters.
	And this is particularly apparently true of his legal team.
	Second, the DOJ document that was filed shows an implied admission that nothing was ever declassified because the June 3rd Mar-a-Lago meeting occurred pursuant to a grand jury subpoena which demanded the surrender of any and all documents or writings in the custody or control of Donald Trump or his office bearing classified markings.
	The subpoena instructed that in lieu of a personal appearance by Trump's records custodian, the documents could be surrendered to the FBI.
	And they did surrender some documents to the FBI.
	At no point did they actually just say all of this stuff was declassified.
	Also, we found out from this new DOJ document that the government has witnesses to talk about how exactly the documents were stored and that they were stored safely.
	They're also gonna go after Trump for supposed false statements because Trump's representatives at June 3rd meeting said, quote, based upon the information that has been provided to me, I am authorized to certify on behalf of the office of Donald Trump, A, a diligent search was conducted of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Florida, B, the search was conducted after receipt of the subpoena in order to locate any and all documents responsive to the subpoena, C, any and all responsive documents accompany this certification, and D, no copy, written notation, or reproduction of any kind was retained as to any responsive document.
	So combined with the fact that they didn't actually claim that this stuff was declassified, the idea here would be that they basically had Trump's lawyers lying, right?
	That's what the DOJ is going to try and claim.
	They're going to try to claim that Trump's lawyers lied when they said that they turned over all classified documents and Trump retained no classified documents, which presumably is why they have that famous photo that they've been releasing now, this famous photo that shows classified document cover pages on the floor at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago in the closet.
	That's the idea here is that Trump's lawyers said that he had turned everything over.
	He obviously has not turned everything over.
	This means that they were lying.
	Apparently, the signatory on that document was Trump's lawyer, Christina Bob.
	The statement itself could be false, but that doesn't mean that Bob knew she was lying, right?
	Because she could have just been told that by Trump.
	Also, it is possible that there is a break in the chain of communication, which presumably would be the defense, in which Trump says, listen, I said, I knew that stuff I had was declassified.
	And I told my lady that I gave over all the classified information.
	And she said that.
	Right.
	So theoretically, that could be the defense.
	And there's no hard and fast standard, constitutionally speaking, as to what constitutes a declassification protocol, because Congress can't actually set rules for the executive branch of the United States when it comes to classification or declassification.
	That's going to have to be decided by the Supreme Court.
	Well, whatever the rationale here, it's going to come down to quote-unquote obstructive conduct, as Andy McCarthy says.
	He says, in his court filing, government explicitly describes the Trump's team behavior in response to the grand jury June 3rd subpoena as obstructive conduct.
	It is also implicit the FBI has located one or more witnesses with knowledge of Mar-a-Lago's layout and the former president's routine.
	The submission says, quote, in particular, The government developed evidence that a search limited to the storage room would not have uncovered all the classified documents at the premises.
	The government also developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the storage room, and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government's investigation.
	Okay, well, all of this is going to remain suspect in the minds of a huge swath of Americans, unless what you can actually prove is that he was attempting to hide documents for a nefarious purpose.
	It is all going to end up going back to intent, politically speaking.
	Forget about the legality, because legally speaking, Hillary Clinton was guilty and she should have been indicted.
	But there was an intent element that was added to the crime by James Comey.
	That was a legal change that James Comey just read into the law that does not exist.
	The intent to hide documents, the intent to misstore classified documents was not enough, according to James Comey, because Hillary Clinton clearly fulfilled those conditions.
	And she didn't have declassification power the way that Trump did.
	So in order for the American people to believe that equal justice has been done, there has to be an element that Trump did that Hillary Clinton did not do.
	So what that means is that you are going to have to show, for example, that Donald Trump had nefarious intent.
	And that's why you're seeing people on the left go over their skis on this.
	So for example, John Brennan, the despicable and somebody who really should have been indicted for lying to Congress, John Brennan, former head of the CIA, John Brennan, he says clearly Trump has nefarious intent.
	Well, not so clear.
	What was the nefarious intent?
	Here's John Brennan.
	The types of things that he's doing, it reminds me of some individual U.S.
	government officials who were recruited by foreign intelligence services, who did their utmost to conceal their activities, to conceal the documents that they might have taken and stolen from the U.S.
	government.
	And so therefore, it's clearly that he had nefarious intentions, which is why I think it's so important that the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the intelligence community get to the bottom of this, because there's nothing short of our national security that is at stake.
	John Brennan.
	That guy, by the way, sicked the America's National Intelligence Agencies on members of Congress and then lied about it in front of Congress.
	And that's what they bring on.
	If we're talking about shoring up the feeling of faith in our democracy and institutions, bring John Brennan on MSNBC to talk about shoring up that faith is pretty rich.
	Donald Trump, for his part, released a couple of truth social truths.
	That's what they're called.
	They're not called tweets.
	He released those yesterday.
	Said first, terrible the way the FBI during the raid of Mar-a-Lago threw documents haphazardly all over the floor, perhaps pretending it was me that did it.
	And then started taking pictures of them for the public to see.
	Thought they wanted to keep them secret.
	Lucky, I declassified.
	Okay, so now he's claiming that he declassified.
	It's gonna be very difficult to prove that he didn't declassify.
	Again, the government's gonna say, well, you never claimed declassification before.
	He can say, right, well, I claimed that I gave you all the classified material, so by the very nature of that, I'm claiming that I declassified all the other stuff, so I wouldn't have kept classified material.
	Then he makes the point that, you know, they were talking in the aftermath of the original raid, that he was keeping nuclear secrets.
	Because here's the thing.
	They have to come up with a reason why this is so damned important that they're going to put the former president of the United States in jail.
	That's what they have to figure out.
	There's only a couple of things that could be there.
	One is, the classified material that Donald Trump kept is so unbelievably dangerous, so incredibly, incredibly volatile, that were it to be discovered by anyone, up to and including the maid, that this would amount to a serious breach of American national security.
	That's what they would have to show, right?
	And so that's why they were talking in the original sort of version of this about how Donald Trump had the nuclear codes in his closet, had the nuclear football locked in Melania's shoebox or something.
	And as Trump points out, well, no, I noticed that that word nuclear disappeared.
	He's right.
	Second, they would have to show some sort of nefarious intent.
	So that's why everybody thought when this first broke that the next step was going to be showing either that Donald Trump was doing something traitorous.
	You saw Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert and all the rest suggesting that the next shoe to drop was going to be that Donald Trump sold nuclear secrets to the Saudis.
	This was an actual accusation that was made, speculative accusation made by members of the left.
	No proof of that.
	And then third, there was the speculative accusation that the smoking gun was going to be found on January 6th.
	The document in which Donald Trump actually drew out a map of the Capitol building with a big sharpie arrow saying to the Proud Boys, go here.
	And that's what was classified and he kept that around.
	He didn't destroy it, he kept it around for no reason.
	None of that has materialized.
	Here's the thing.
	If people wish for you to trust the DOJ, if Merrick Garland wants you to trust the DOJ, he's going to have to come up with more than just Donald Trump was sloppy with documents.
	Otherwise, he is just being blind.
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	Alright, so.
	If the idea behind the Attorney General and the DOJ and the FBI all targeting Trump is that he has some sort of nefarious intent.
	Something, either the classified materials were so dangerous they can't be allowed to keep them, or two, Donald Trump was about to sell classified materials to the Saudis, or three, Donald Trump is hiding the secret January 6th smoking gun.
	I have an alternative theory of Trump's behavior.
	I'm just going to run it by you here.
	Trump likes documents.
	That's the theory.
	Trump looked at his document and said, I like that document.
	It has Kim Jong-un writing me a love letter.
	I love it.
	I want it in my closet.
	And the National Archives is like, that's a classified document, sir.
	You need to turn that.
	He's like, I don't want to.
	It's pretty.
	And I like it.
	And I want it.
	Now I ask you, which of the scenarios that I just drew out for you is the most plausible?
	Knowing Donald Trump.
	Watching Donald Trump for years.
	The pattern of Donald Trump's behavior is that he does things on impulse because he wants to do them.
	And then everyone attributes to those things the most nefarious organized intent possible.
	And it always turns out not to be true.
	So that doesn't mean that Trump did a smart thing in keeping these documents if in fact he violated classification rules.
	It doesn't mean he wasn't being sloppy.
	It doesn't mean he wasn't being a hoarder.
	It doesn't mean any of that stuff.
	But, if you are going to show Americans that it is so all-fired important to put Donald Trump in jail over this thing, you're gonna have to show one of the alternative theories of the case that wasn't just Donald Trump saying to his people, you know what, I like these documents, I want them in a box in my closet, I don't like the National Archives, they can screw off.
	You're gonna have to show more than that.
	I'm sorry, you're going to have to do that.
	Because most Americans are not willing to put the former President of the United States in jail over that.
	In the same way that they were not willing to put Bill Clinton in jail over stealing all the White House silverware on his way out the door.
	Which he actually did.
	Bill and Hillary Clinton just wrecked the White House and took everything out of it.
	They were like stripping the lamps when they left.
	And nobody was like, oh, put that guy in jail.
	Say, oh, what a jerk.
	But, again, you're gonna have to show actual danger here in order to justify what exactly is happening, and they're not doing that.
	And so, when you have people question what the FBI is doing, when you have people question the DOJ, when they question the rule of law, maybe one of the reasons they're questioning the rule of law is because the current president of the United States does not seem to have a lot of care about the rule of law, and he seems really, really determined to paint all of his political opponents as people who ought to be targeted by law enforcement.
	Which means that what's happening to Trump is of a piece with a broader agenda.
	This is what a lot of Americans think.
	A lot of Americans looked at what happened with the FBI and they said, maybe the reason they're doing that is because that's how they see me.
	And it doesn't help when you then say it out loud.
	When Donald Trump, when Joe Biden goes out there and he says, it's not just Donald Trump.
	It's everybody.
	It's a whole, it's the extreme ultra super duper mega pooper scooper agenda.
	It's a King Maga, King Mc-Mc-McMaga guy.
	And all of his followers.
	It's all you!
	All you people who don't like it.
	When I say that a boy's a girl and a girl's a boy.
	When you say that stuff with Corn Pop.
	When you say that, you know, it's you!
	Maybe we think you're about to target all of us.
	And then you keep saying it.
	And then you go out and you say things like, You know, what do you need a gun for?
	I mean, after all, After all, we're not your enemy.
	And if we were your enemy, we would just hit you with some napalm anyway.
	And you, what are you going to do?
	Fight us with an F-15?
	You're going to dogfight us?
	I'm going to unleash the nuclear arsenal on you.
	Be my friend.
	I'm healing the soul of America by threatening you with F-15s.
	Joe Biden, unity candidate, speaking in front of Independence Hall tonight.
	I'm sure that, I'm sure Americans will unify.
	By the way, this is a president with 38% approval rating according to Reuters.
	So it turns out 62% of Americans don't like the guy very much.
	So there is that.
	Okay, meanwhile, the congressional races seem to be narrowing.
	It's fascinating to watch.
	I think that the Democrats had the momentum maybe a week ago, maybe even two weeks ago.
	But as Joe Biden becomes center stage again, he's making the same mistake that Donald Trump made in 2018.
	It's kind of amazing.
	So in 2018, you'll recall, the Democrats were leading pretty significantly on the generic ballot, and then it tended to narrow a little bit toward the election, and then it blew out again.
	What happened is that the Kavanaugh hearings happened.
	It really mobilized the Republican base.
	And then Donald Trump wanted to be the center of attention.
	And so he started talking about immigration, which was a serious issue, but it also moved the eye off the ball of the most pressing issue to most Americans at the time, which was the targeting of Brett Kavanaugh and the false allegations of rape that were made against him by Democrats with no evidence.
	And so it hurt Republicans, right?
	Donald Trump was like, I can't not be the center of attention.
	Let's talk about me.
	And Democrats are like, yes, let's talk about you.
	And then it went really bad, badly for Republicans.
	Well, until five seconds ago, everybody was talking about Trump.
	And now Joe Biden's like, I need to go and go and talk a lot.
	People love me.
	They love when I talk and, and words come out of my face, McHole.
	And it's not going well for the Democrats.
	And there are a series of ads that have been coming out in Florida, and they are all just attempts to tie, for example, Val Demings, who's running against Marco Rubio, to Joe Biden.
	Pretty much every Republican ad from here to the election is going to be tying Democrats to Joe Biden.
	And races that you haven't heard of are getting real close.
	For example, Right now, Senator Michael Bennet in Colorado.
	No one is talking about the Colorado race.
	No one.
	He is now in a dogfight for re-election, according to a fresh GOP poll.
	The survey conducted for the Republican Attorney General's Association shows that Bennet is up over Republican challenger Joe O'Day, who's a good candidate, 48 to 47 with 5% undecided.
	O'Day is a prized Republican candidate who's positioned himself as a centrist, which, by the way, is the smart thing to do in a general election.
	And right now, by the way, that's a state Joe Biden won by double digits nearly two years ago.
	Boosting O'Day was his strength in Independence.
	He trails Bennett by only 4 points, 49-44 with that crucial voting block.
	And if that's the way that that election is moving right now, wait a couple of months.
	So Colorado is starting to move toward competitiveness.
	Meanwhile, Look out for it.
	Pennsylvania seems to be moving a little bit more competitive as well as it turns out that John Fetterman in Pennsylvania is not with us.
	I mean, not sentient.
	John Fetterman had a crippling stroke and he is out on the campaign trail and he still looks like he had a crippling stroke.
	So if you are looking at the effects of Joe Biden reappearing on the political scene, they're going to have rather dire effects for the Democrats.
	All right, guys, the rest of the show is continuing now, including my analysis of what's happening with John Fetterman and Dr. Oz.
	Plus, we still have to get to China's foreign policy.
	China is about to get very aggressive because their economy is in serious trouble.

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