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Dec. 20, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:42
The January 6 Committee Wants Trump Prosecuted | Ep. 1634
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The January 6th committee refers Donald Trump to the Department of Justice for criminal charging, the White House struggles for immigration answers as Title 42 wanes, and Democrats prep more spending as tax revenue declines.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Well, it was a predictable ending.
The January 6th committee was formulated and created specifically in order to recommend criminal charges for President Donald Trump.
And now they've done so.
So anybody who's pretending as though any other conclusion was possible is out of their mind.
The entire basis for the January 6th committee is that Donald Trump had done something criminal and they were going to justify sending a recommendation over to the Department of Justice for charging.
Now, as we'll discuss momentarily, Their recommendations mean absolutely nothing.
This is essentially the same as if you sent an interagency memo to another department in your actual company.
It would make no difference whatsoever.
It has all of the legal force of a Christmas card greeting.
That's pretty much all this is for, but it is a PR move.
It was something that was going to happen, and it allows Democrats and the complicit Republicans to raise up the issue of January 6th yet again, going into the 2024 election.
That is the entire purpose of the January 6th committee.
So, with much ballyhoo and with much attention, the January 6th committee decided to recommend several criminal charges for former President Donald Trump, as well as other members of Trump's immediate circle.
The January 6th committee announced that yesterday.
Here's what it sounded like.
The judge concluded that both former President Donald Trump and John Eastman likely violated two federal criminal statutes.
This is the starting point for our analysis today.
The first criminal statute we invoke for referral, therefore, is Title 18, Section 1512C.
We believe that the evidence described by my colleagues today, and assembled throughout our hearings, warrants a criminal referral of former President Donald J. Trump, John Eastman, and others for violations of this statute.
Now we're going to get into the specifics of the statutes that they are citing, and we'll see why the statutory citations they make are actually insufficient in terms of a prosecution based on the available evidence right now.
But again, the entire purpose of the January 6th committee, this is why Republicans are so angry at people like Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney, who became sort of the front for the committee.
The whole reason that Republicans are angry at the committee is because they felt like this was a setup from the very start.
Nobody's opinion has actually changed on what happened on January 6th.
There's a very small coterie of people who are pro-January 6th.
I mean a very small coterie of people.
And then, there's a huge swath of Americans who don't like what happened on January 6th.
They think what happened on January 6th involves criminal activity by the people who actually committed criminal activity.
And there are a lot of people, like me, who believe that Donald Trump's activity between the election and January 6th was egregious and wrong.
And also, he's not guilty of incitement to violence because we're very specific in how we think of incitement to violence.
When the president of the United States actually says at a rally in front of the Capitol building or near the Capitol building that people should peacefully protest and then people do not peacefully protest, well...
You know, you can blame him again for raising the temperature, but what you can't do is suggest that he was telling people to break into the Capitol building to hang Mike Pence because he was not, in fact, doing that.
So, the report that has been issued says that it has made these specific findings with regard to the evidence.
This is a direct quote from the introduction to this report.
It's 154 pages because, again, the theory when it comes to congressional committees, very often, is fifth grade essay theory.
The longer you write it, the more seriously we're supposed to take it.
So here's what they actually say.
say quote, beginning election night and continuing through January 6th and thereafter, President Donald Trump purposefully disseminated false allegations of fraud related to the 2020 presidential election in order to aid his effort to overturn the election and for purposes of soliciting contributions.
These false claims provoked his supporters to violence on January 6th.
That last sentence is unsubstantiated again.
When you say that someone provoked somebody else to violence based on claims of say voter fraud, then the question becomes, okay, did the entire Democratic Party take the blame for the mass riots in 2020 based on their false claims of systemic police racism targeting black people for no reason.
you Because that's essentially the claim that they're making.
They're saying that if you make a false claim and then people act violently based on the false claim, you are to blame for the violence.
That is unsubstantiated at best.
And again, those sorts of false claims are made routinely.
And Senator Raphael Warnock in Georgia is still maintaining that electoral suppression is an issue in Georgia after he won a Senate seat.
K2, knowing that he and his supporters had lost dozens of election lawsuits, despite his own senior advisors refuting his election fraud claims and urging him to concede his election loss, Donald Trump refused to accept the lawful result of the 2020 election.
Rather than honor his constitutional obligation to quote, take care that the laws be faithfully executed, President Trump instead plotted to overturn the election outcome. Now, this gets into the area of free speech. Let's say that Trump didn't believe that he actually lost the election, which by the way, the available evidence suggests that Donald Trump is able to convince himself of nearly anything, including the idea that NFTs are an amazing play in this economy.
So the fact that President Trump had convinced himself that he won the election, and then he says, well, let's come up with a way where I can substantiate that I won the election.
That's not necessarily illegal.
Again, it could be wrong, but it's not necessarily illegal.
Despite knowing such an action would be illegal and that no state had or would submit an altered electoral state, Donald Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes during Congress' joint session on January 6th.
Now again, knowing such action would be illegal is the question, legally speaking here.
Because if Donald Trump had a lawyer, say John Eastman, who was advising him that there might be a legal theory that he could pursue, It's not illegal to try to pursue that legal theory.
This sort of stuff happens in our courts literally all the time.
People pursue novel legal theories in our courts when it comes to our jurisprudence on a regular basis.
Does that make it illegal for them to do so?
Not necessarily.
According to the committee, Donald Trump sought to corrupt the U.S.
Department of Justice by attempting to enlist department officials to make purposely false statements and thereby aid his effort to overturn the presidential election.
After that effort failed, Donald Trump offered the position of acting attorney general to Jeff Clark, knowing Clark intended to disseminate false information aimed at overturning the election.
Okay, so more on this in just one moment.
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Now, again, All of this comes down to Donald Trump's state of mind.
And as I've said over and over again, I've said the obvious thing about Donald Trump.
Donald Trump, when it comes to intent crimes, is a very difficult man to pin down.
The reason being, Donald Trump does not have intent to do things.
Donald Trump act and react in the moment.
Has he ever enacted a long-term plan for anything?
Everything is seat of the pants for Donald Trump.
And so, if he went to members of the Department of Justice, he said, I just want you guys to say there was electoral fraud.
Is that because he actually believes there was electoral fraud?
That's the question.
Or is he doing it despite knowing that there was no electoral fraud?
And just because, here's the thing about Trump, just because he was told by Bill Barr that there was no electoral fraud doesn't mean that he believes Bill Barr.
This is the problem in trying to nail down Trump on this sort of stuff.
The committee says without any evidentiary basis and contrary to state and federal law, Donald Trump unlawfully pressured state officials and legislators to change the results of the election in their states.
Now again, this comes down to his state of mind.
I keep going back to intent because when it comes to these crimes, they all have elements.
We can all agree, or many of us can agree, that Donald Trump did things wrong, things that were bad.
That does not mean criminal activity.
So when it says change the results of the election in their states, according to whose perception?
According to our perception, he was attempting to change the election outcome in these states.
But according to Donald Trump's perception, maybe he was attempting to justify what he saw as the true result of the election in these states.
And it continues along these lines.
So the Washington Post has several takeaways from the committee report.
So the first is what is actually in the four criminal referrals.
There are four charges that they've brought forth.
The first is 18 U.S.
Code 1512C.
That is obstruction of an official proceeding.
So that particular code section is dedicated to the idea that Donald Trump was attempting to obstruct the counting of the votes.
The law punishes, quote, whoever corruptly alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record document or other object or otherwise obstructs influence or impedes by any official proceeding.
This is one of the two offenses the committee included in John Eastman's referral.
Again, the idea here is that Donald Trump may be attempting to get people to change their testimony.
Now, what evidence is going to come forth showing that he was exerting serious pressure?
And what kind of pressure is necessary to sustain an obstruction charge?
That's the one that's going to be the most troublesome for Trump.
Then you get to the ones that are very difficult to sustain, like at all.
The obstruction charge is going to be the one that, if the DOJ goes after Trump, is the one most likely to stick.
The other three are going to be very difficult because obstruction, again, is a different crime than the actual underlying crime.
The actual underlying crime suggesting that Trump was guilty of insurrection or that Trump was guilty of attempting to foment the overthrow of the Republic or any of that kind of stuff.
The obstruction charge can be as simple as he gets on the phone with Brad Raffensperger and says, I'm going to make your life a living hell unless you do X.
And X happens to be a thing that is not legal.
Unless you change your testimony if you called up one of the witnesses.
Now, we still have no evidence that I'm aware of that suggests that Trump directly called a witness and told the witness not to testify truthfully.
It's very difficult to sustain any of these convictions.
Criminal prosecution is not the easiest game in town, which is why the DOJ is taking its time with this sort of thing, and also why a congressional committee staffed by Donald Trump's opponents isn't exactly the most viable source of referral for criminal charges.
Charge 2 is conspiracy to defraud the United States.
It's a broadly written statute, according to the Wall Street Journal, prohibiting agreement to obstruct a lawful function of the government by deceitful or dishonest means.
In March, a federal judge said that Trump, his post-election conduct may have violated this law, as well as the obstruction statute described above.
Now, again, obstruct a lawful function of the government by deceitful or dishonest means, that's very broadly written.
And what does that boil down to specifically?
Is that an intent fraud?
It seems like an intent crime.
It seems as though Donald Trump would have to intend to obstruct the election, which means that he would have to have known that what he was doing was wrong, which is always a difficult thing for Trump.
Then there is charge three, conspiracy to make a false statement, This prohibits making false statements to the government.
The committee suggested that by submitting a false slate of presidential electors, Trump and his allies may have engaged in a conspiracy to violate the statute.
But again, that is suggesting that you can't have an alternative legal theory whereby Donald Trump thought that these elections had been stolen from him, rightly or wrongly, and had suggested the possibility of an alternative slate of electors, which has in fact happened in American history before.
So that statute does not seem to apply in this particular case.
And finally, the biggie, right, this is the one that they're hanging all of their hats on, is insurrection.
This statute makes it a crime to assist or engage in, quote, any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws.
Now, the Justice Department has not brought an insurrection charge in any of the criminal prosecutions of the people who actually went into the Capitol building shouting, hang my pants.
So the idea you're going to hang this around Trump's neck is just silly.
You're not going to be able to get an insurrection charge against the former president of the United States, who in fact did leave office legally.
So these sorts of charges, I think it's very unlikely the DOJ is going to be able to uphold any of those, except perhaps the obstruction one.
And even that will be very dicey.
Now, the DOJ may do it anyway.
The DOJ may do it for obviously political purposes, because it's a win-win for the Biden administration and the Democrats.
What the 2022 election showed is that this entire debacle is a win-win for the Democrats.
Let's say that they go after Trump, and let's say that they lose.
Let's say that Trump is actually quote-unquote vindicated.
They believe that Trump is the weakest candidate to run against.
And they do that based on the fact that he lost in 2020, he lost two Senate seats in 2021, and his candidates got their asses kicked in 2022.
So if you're the Democrats, what you're thinking is, let's elevate this issue.
Either we get Trump, in which case we take him off the board and we take the wind out of the sails of his supporters, or we don't get Trump, in which case Trump is elevated against his possible Republican opponents, and we think his Republican opponents are stronger.
We fear them more than we fear Trump.
So it's a win-win for them to go forward with this sort of activity.
So what are the big takeaways from the report other than the criminal charges?
According to the Washington Post, the committee has repeatedly pointed to Trump not only being negligent on January 6th, but perhaps also approving of the violence on that day.
The final report adds some details on that front.
Specifically, it says that longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks texted a campaign aide during the riot that, on January 4th and 5th, she had said Trump should preemptively call on those attending the speech on the Ellipse to be peaceful.
And now the problem is that Trump rejecting that does not necessarily mean he's in favor of violence.
Very often, somebody will encourage you to tweet out that you want people to be peaceful.
Something like that.
And you'll say, well, I don't really want to tweet that.
And the reason I don't want to tweet that is because I don't want to make the suggestion that my supporters are inherently violent.
I'm giving the other side what it wants.
So there's some pretty good political reasons why you wouldn't tweet out, stay peaceful when you come to the protest, because the implication would be that if I don't say that, I know these people are going to be violent.
And then I sort of accept all responsibility for their violence.
In fact, by the way, that's exactly what happened with Trump.
He did the speech.
He said, stay peaceful.
They went and they rioted anyway, and then they blamed Trump for it.
So it wouldn't have actually worked, even if he had tweeted that out.
The committee played video Monday of White House advisor Kellyanne Conway recounting a conversation with Trump the day after January 6th.
Conway says she called the situation terrible and crazy, and Trump responded, no, these people are upset.
They're very upset.
Now again, is that wrong?
Yes.
Is that gross in my view?
Yes.
Does that mean that Donald Trump is guilty for the violence?
Not particularly.
Again, Kamala Harris, the current vice president of the United States, was bailing out rioters during the riots of 2020.
The report also shows new details on hundreds of weapons that were apparently present.
There are 242 canisters of pepper spray, 269 knives or blades, 18 brass knuckles, 18 tasers, 6 pieces of body armor, 3 gas masks, 30 batons or blunt instruments, 17 miscellaneous items like scissors, needles, or screwdrivers.
Those are the people who went through the magnetometer.
The report adds thousands of others purposefully remained outside the magnetometers or left their packs outside.
The report said that there were maybe six cases where people were observed carrying guns, which by the way shows this is not an organized physical insurrection.
Because the weapons of use in insurrections are not screwdrivers, the weapons of use in insurrections typically happen to be firearms.
There are very few of those among the thousands of people at the rally, maybe a hundred thousand people at the rally, by some estimates.
And there were very few of them, I'm not even aware of any, that actually got into the Capitol building in terms of guns.
The report also suggests that there's evidence that Trump was waived off the voting machine conspiracy theory, that he was told that the voting machines were really not the problem, and he didn't believe it.
Now again, this goes to, I keep going back to Trump's state of mind because when you talk about criminal referrals, crime requires intent.
These are not negligence crimes.
These are not strict liability crimes.
These are intent crimes.
Intent requires intent.
So that means you have to look into the brain of Donald Trump, which is an interesting place to say the least.
And so how do you come up with a full intent crime from Trump's myriad activities over the course of the several months from November 4th to January 6th?
The report also talks about Giuliani, Rudy Giuliani, and many of the baseless, kind of crazy allegations that he was putting out there.
There was one colorful incident involving Trump campaign manager, Bill Stepien, who said he literally locked his door to keep out Trump allies who wanted to press forward with stolen election claims, but Giuliani still tried the door.
Stepien said, I had my assistant lock the door.
I told her don't let anyone in.
And you know, sure enough, you know, Mayor Giuliani tried to get in my office.
He ordered her to unlock the door.
She didn't do that.
She's smart about that.
A Trump campaign spokesperson named Tim Murtaugh had suggested Giuliani might be disbarred over his outrageous lies.
Now, I'm not aware they actually made a criminal referral of Rudy Giuliani.
They're criminally referring Trump for listening to Rudy Giuliani, but Giuliani's the one who's the lawyer.
The report says nothing about the secret service claim that was made by Cassidy Hutchinson, who was an assistant.
She had suggested that Trump was in the beast and was telling the secret service members to take him to the front of the rally and they refused and he reached over and started throttling the guy in the front of the secret service car.
There's no evidence that that is the case, not from this report.
There are some suggestions of obstruction of justice.
Again, I say this is the toughest one for Trump.
It is the easiest one to prosecute.
As Zoe Lofgren, the Democrat of California, said during the hearing on Monday, one lawyer told a witness, the witness could, in certain circumstances, tell the committee she didn't recall facts when she actually did recall them.
The lawyer also did not disclose who was paying for the lawyer's representation, despite questions from the client seeking that information.
In another case, Lofgren said a client was offered potential employment that would make her, quote, financially very comfortable, as they did if her testimony approached by entities that were apparently linked to Trump and his associates.
These offers were withdrawn or didn't materialize as reports of the content of her testimony circulated.
The witness believed this was an effort to affect her testimony.
But again, That's a lot of dots that have yet to be connected, including dots specifically to Donald Trump.
So what does any of this mean?
The answer is it doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot.
It's a lot of PR for the people who are on the January 6th committee, and it's an attempt to elevate the entire situation.
Liz Cheney gets her final moments in the sun before she recedes from public life because she lost her primary in her state by something like 40 points.
Here is Liz Cheney in her final hurrah.
In the eyes of many in the world, this every four year ceremony that we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.
Every president in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority, except one.
At the beginning of our investigation, we understood that tens of millions of Americans had been persuaded by President Trump that the 2020 election was stolen by overwhelming fraud.
And we also knew this was flatly false.
Okay, so Liz Cheney getting in her final PR hits.
Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat.
He does the same thing.
And this is all a PR operation.
Now the question as to whether it's a successful PR operation we'll take up in just one second.
Here is Representative Bennie Thompson.
That faith in our system is the foundation of American democracy.
If the faith is broken, so is our democracy.
Donald Trump broke that faith.
He lost the 2020 election and knew it.
But he chose to try to stay in office through a multi-part scheme to overturn the results and block the transfer of power.
In the end, he summoned a mob to Washington, and knowingly they were armed and angry, pointed them to the Capitol and told them to fight like hell.
So again, the entire premise here, and this is the thing that I think that the Democrats know, it's a win-win for them.
It's a win-win for them because if this helps Trump, Democrats believe it helps them.
If it hurts Trump, Democrats believe that it hurts the entire Republican Party.
So it's a win-win for them to elevate this issue.
They believe that it really helped them in 2022 by evidence.
It did.
The sort of election The country's at stake, democracy's at stake, language from Joe Biden helped them in 2022.
The more of that they can do from here until 2024, the better.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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He did so on Truth Social.
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So Donald Trump has responded.
He did so on Truth Social.
He wrote, the fake charges made by the highly partisan unselect committee of January 6th have already been submitted, prosecuted, and tried in the form of impeachment hoax number two.
I won convincingly.
Double jeopardy, anyone?
Well, that's not how double jeopardy works.
I mean, he wasn't criminally charged by the House.
I mean, the House doesn't have the power for criminal prosecution.
They can't jail anyone, for example.
Donald Trump continues, the people understand that the Democratic Bureau of Investigation, the DBI, are out to keep me from running for president because they know I'll win.
And this whole business of prosecuting me is just like the impeachment was, a partisan attempt to sideline me and the Republican Party.
Now that part, again, is not untrue.
The lack of faith that has now been exposed in our institutions, ranging from the FBI, which did spend several years attempting to discredit Donald Trump's presidency, and then spent the election cycle apparently pressuring social media to take down opposition information that hurt Hunter Biden.
When Donald Trump says that the so-called deep state was after him, he is not wrong about that.
Donald Trump then put out a full statement on the January 6th committee referral, quote, That was obviously later in the afternoon.
Think of it.
after me, people who love freedom rally around me. It strengthens me. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Americans know I pushed for 20,000 troops to prevent violence on January 6th, that I went on television and told everyone to go home.
That was obviously later in the afternoon. Think of it. The radical left Democrats, communists, spied on my campaign, lied to the FISA court, lied to Congress, allowed an invasion of our country on the southern border, embarrassed us in Afghanistan, gave away our energy independence, killed us on job losing regulations, wouldn't use the 10,000 plus soldiers I recommended for January 6th, refused to look into election fraud, the reason for January 6th, rigged and stole the 2020 election, allowed ballot stuffing, FBI, Facebook, Twitter, and Biden crime.
Continued from previous tr- I'm the one that the corrupt and partisan unselect committee goes after, a two-tiered justice system.
By the way, whatever happened with the massive crimes committed by Joe and Hunter Biden?
They're right there, documented and 100% certain.
Also, where's the prosecutor from Delaware?
What happened to him?
Is he friends with the Ukrainian prosecutor who didn't prosecute after Biden held up the billions in payment to Ukraine?
I did nothing wrong.
Capitalist.
Again.
Is any of this going to help Trump?
I don't think it'll help Trump, but it definitely helps Democrats to have this at the top of the news, which is specifically the reason why the media are making a big deal out of the January 6th committee.
Is there a reason to make a big deal out of the January 6th committee?
Probably not.
The DOJ is not even going to look at this report.
There's nothing in the report the DOJ couldn't uncover on its own.
But the media made a huge deal out of this yesterday.
It was the top of every newscast.
It was the top of every major news website.
And again, the media have an interest in pretending that this is a bipartisan committee.
So here's CNN's Jim Sciutto making that case yesterday.
I get the symbolic argument, and they are, because the DOJ has its own investigation here, and they're going to decide whether to indict or not to indict based on what they find.
That said, this is a committee.
It's bipartisan.
I know many Republicans don't look at it that way, but you have two prominent Republicans serving as vice chairs, Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.
They're going to make criminal referrals right up to insurrection, including against the sitting president and current candidate for 2024.
The entire CNN panel was duly stunned.
Again, they have to pretend to be stunned because for literally four years they kept saying that Trump was going to be ousted from office based on a Russian collusion hoax.
I remember, I'd be working out in the gym every day and they, for some odd reason, had CNN on the television.
And every day it would be like, Wolf Blitzer breaking news!
The Russian collusion scandal grows!
And then it was nothing.
So of course they have to play everything, every sort of bombshell as a bombshell.
There have been no bombshells here, okay?
Everything that we found out on January 6th was still true two years later.
Nothing has changed.
Nothing has been uncovered here that is truly astonishing or stunning.
It's all stuff that was done right out in the open.
It was stunning when it was happening.
And we hear CNN and their panel being astonished by the criminal referrals that were a foregone conclusion because that was literally the reason they formed this committee in the first place.
In Congress, the House like committee also recommending that Donald Trump be charged with conspiracy to make false statements as well as conspiracy to defraud the United States of America.
And Jamie Gangel, not to put too fine a point on it, but this has never happened before.
Correct.
It has never happened before that a bipartisan committee in the House of Representatives has said to the Justice Department, we think this former president committed crimes.
Here is the evidence.
Please go prosecute.
Absolutely.
Historic.
Has never happened before.
So?
You mean like so?
It's never happened.
Yeah, lots of things haven't happened before.
They happen every day.
The question is whether this has any real impact.
So legally speaking, the answer is no.
The New York Times admits that the House Select Committee laying out an ambitious roadmap for the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump and several of his allies on Monday, those recommendations don't have to be taken up by the DOJ.
It remains unclear just how closely the special counsel's office in charge of the DOJ will follow the path mapped out by the committee or whether Trump and others will face any criminal charges at all.
In presenting the committee's findings, Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, who by the way voted against the certification of the election in 2016, said he did not want the foot soldiers who stormed the Capitol on January 6th to go to jail while the masterminds and ringleaders get a free pass.
However, as for the Justice Department's efforts, not much is publicly known about any specific charges the special counsel, Jack Smith, might be considering in a criminal prosecution the department is under no obligation to adopt the committee's conclusions or to follow its recommendations.
The notion that the special counsel is sitting there just waiting for something to happen is not true.
So, on a criminal level, this is going nowhere.
On a PR level, it does elevate the issue, once again, and that is exactly what Democrats are looking for.
Because again, Democrats are doing a crap job in terms of the actual governance, and so they have to come up with something for you to talk about other than their very, very bad governance.
Speaking of which, Title 42 was about to expire.
Chief Justice John Roberts halted a lower court decision that would have lifted the CDC's Title 42 public health authority at the U.S.-Mexico border in days, is ready to be Done away with in days.
A bunch of Republican governors had sued to stop Title 42 from being removed, specifically saying, if you do that, there's no backup plan in place.
We're going to just get this amazing flood at the border, as John Binder over at Breitbart reporting.
Last month, a federal judge struck down Title 42, the CDC authority first imposed by former President Trump in 2020 that allowed Border Patrol agents to quickly return illegal aliens back to their native countries after arriving at the border.
Rather than appealing the decision, President Biden's administration asked the court for five weeks to end Title 42, ensuring the authority would be lifted on December 21st.
Biden's DOJ is now appealing the decision, but they're not seeking to keep Title 42 in place.
Meanwhile, Republican AGs from 19 states asked the Supreme Court to preserve Title 42 because they say, guys, if we were to leave Title 42, there's going to be a flood at the border.
Now, the Biden administration, again, they're a mess on this.
So Corinne Jean-Pierre, world's most untalented press secretary, yesterday, she refused to even answer whether the White House wants to end Title 42 or keep it in place.
So look, we remained under a court order to lift Title 42.
He should be asking for an extension because we're at this point where you've got a deadline and a crisis.
Is that within the president's authority to do that?
So look, we remain, we remained under a court order to lift title 42.
That is a court order.
That is a court order that is telling us to lift title 42 and we're going to comply because we follow the rule of law.
But the administration sought to lift it.
But it is a court order.
It was started by you guys.
It was a court order that has been provided to us and so now we have to comply.
Well, I mean, you guys can decide whether to appeal, you guys can come up with a backup policy, but you have no backup policy.
The White House is taking the extraordinary position of, we will leave the border open and then pretend the border is not open, and then if you mention the border is open, it's your fault.
That is the position of this White House.
Here's Corinne Jean-Pierre, world's most untalented press secretary again.
What is the White House's message to somebody who may see this somewhere in the Western Hemisphere and think, after Wednesday it's going to be easier to get into the United States?
So look, first I want to say the President of Ecuador has been a very good partner to us on this very issue, so I want to make that very, very clear.
But again, I stated this to Steve, and I'll say this again, the fact that the removal of Title 42 is happening in just a day or two doesn't mean that the border is open.
It just doesn't mean that.
Okay, then explain how it's closed.
She cannot because they're already... I mean, in El Paso, they're declaring a state of emergency.
That town is Democrat.
According to the Wall Street Journal, with the deterrent policy ending, the administration is racing to put together a combination of policies aimed at staving off what is expected to be an unprecedented increase in illegal border crossings once the policy lifts, a prospect that could quickly overwhelm the border patrol cities near the southern border and non-profit shelters.
Some border cities have already seen surges of migrants in anticipation of Title 42 ending.
See, this is what we call defining deviancy down.
So instead of saying that it is illegal immigration when you cross the border illegally, we'll just make it much, much easier for you to cross the border, and then it won't be illegal when you do it.
See how fun that is?
It's really, really easy.
You fix illegal immigration by declaring that there's no such thing as illegal immigration anymore.
illegal immigration when you cross the border illegally, we'll just make it much, much easier for you to cross the border, and then it won't be illegal when you do it.
See how fun that is?
It's really, really easy.
You fix illegal immigration by declaring that there's no such thing as illegal immigration anymore.
It's just people crossing the border legally.
Awesome!
A key deterrence measure would be an updated version of a short-lived Trump-era policy known as the transit ban.
That ban would target migrants who cross the border illegally, subjecting them to quick deportation unless they can pass a tougher initial asylum screening according to people familiar with the plans.
For migrants of some nationalities, the administration is planning to offer an alternative path into the United States, allowing them to apply through an online portal for permission to fly to the United States where they can live on temporary humanitarian grounds and apply for asylum.
So we're going to make it easier for people to apply from abroad, and then we'll allow them to fly here while they await their actual asylum hearing.
Great!
We'll open an entirely new portal for people to illegally immigrate.
Awesome!
Some migrants will also be permitted to apply for asylum at legal land border crossings, but the administration will likely require them to register for an appointment in advance by filling out their information on a mobile app called CBP-1.
According to people familiar with the administration's thinking, it couldn't be determined how many migrants would be permitted to enter the United States using either pathway.
This is an absurdity.
But this administration is wildly incompetent.
And so that absurdity is going to become worse and worse as Title 42 is relieved.
Prepare for a wave at the border and the Biden administration continue claiming against all available evidence that everything is just fine at the border.
Meanwhile, bad democratic policy is not relegated to the border.
On the economy, we are now preparing to spend trillions more dollars.
It's more in just one moment.
First, the situation in Ukraine continues to be quite terrible for the people on the ground.
Winter is setting in.
The Russian bombardment has not stopped.
This is why my friends at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews are really active in Ukraine right now.
They've been working in Israel, Ukraine, and the former Soviet Union for more than 30 years.
They've never seen hunger and suffering like is currently happening in Ukraine.
One reason I'm asking for your help.
For example, Norman is an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor.
He's been blind since birth and lives in a Jewish old age home in Odessa, Ukraine.
Because of the infrastructure destruction that's happened over there, Norman has been without heat or clean water for months.
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews has supplied blankets, food, and other essentials to help Norman survive through the winter.
They urgently need your help to continue getting Norman the supplies he needs.
In this season of giving, please consider donating to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
They're on the ground providing generators, building wells, providing medicine and food boxes in this dire situation.
Just 45 bucks can ensure warmth, food, and clean water to Jewish kids and the elderly in need.
And right now, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews has a special matching challenge where your donation through the end of 2022 will double in impact.
Your tax-deductible gift will be multiplied twice to help provide twice the winter necessities and save lives.
Head on over to ben4thefellowship.org or TechShapiro to 41444.
That's ben4thefellowship.org or TechShapiro to 41444.
Also, We are just days away from Christmas.
You can't hide from the truth any longer.
You still don't have gifts for everyone on your list.
You've been a bad little boy or girl.
It's time to fix that.
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Okay, well, as we say, the January 6th committee, everything Trump related, is an attempt by Democrats to Redirect from their failing policy.
It's also an attempt to redirect from the fact that the president of the United States is Is a vegetable.
I mean, he just he's no longer sentient.
Now.
The evidence I'm about to show you is not really of him being non sentient.
It's just that he's a congenital liar.
Joe Biden has been a congenital liar literally his entire career and is a person who had to drop out of a presidential campaign for plagiarism.
That's not something that happens too often.
Well, this is this is a perfect example of Joe Biden's lying face at work.
Joe Biden has this habit.
I've mentioned it before.
Anytime he tells a story in which he In which his dad says something about Joey, whatever follows after Joey is a lie.
Every.
Single.
Time.
Without doubt.
Anytime he says, Joey, my dad said, Joey.
Whatever comes next is not true.
So here's a perfect example of that rule at work.
My dad, when I got elected Vice President, he said, Joey, Uncle Frank fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
He was not feeling very well now, not because of the Battle of the Bulge, but he said, and he won the Purple Heart.
He never received it.
He never got it.
Do you think you could help him get it?
We'll surprise him.
So he got on the Purple Heart.
He had won it in the Battle of the Bulge.
Okay, that was one very long word, I think.
That's where the sign language translator for Joe Biden is like, I don't know, man.
That's like a super, mashed potatoes in the face.
But there's one, there's some problems.
The story is not true.
According to factcheck.org, a left-wing fact-checking website, Frank Biden, who served in the army during World War II, died in 1999.
Not when Joe Biden was Vice President.
In 1999, Joe Biden was Senator then.
Also, Biden said he got the Purple Heart for his uncle at the urging of his father.
But Biden's dad died in 2002.
Joe Biden was still in the Senate at that point.
So, pretty much none of that was true.
The White House couldn't find any support for the President's story.
They asked the White House if this incident had happened, and if so, when.
The White House didn't answer any of the questions.
Also, Joe Biden suggested that his uncle had joined the army in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.
That's not true.
Apparently, Frank Biden joined the army on July 17th, 1941, months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Also, there's no record that Frank Biden was ever awarded a Purple Heart, either while he was alive or posthumously.
So that's again, every time this is one of the problems with Biden is that we can now attribute everything to his encroaching senility, but this is not just him being senile.
This is him lying like his entire life.
He does this all the time.
He tells stories that are not true, and then they become embedded in his memory, and then he just keeps telling the story.
My favorite example, as you all know, is the example of Joe Biden's father telling him about homosexuals in, like, 1950s Delaware or Scranton, Pennsylvania.
I was on the street with my father in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
I was maybe seven.
It was in 1951.
There were two men.
My father looked at them.
Joey?
Joey?
You see those two men in assless chaps dancing to YMCA and then banging it out like jackrabbits?
Joey?
That's what love looks like, Joey.
Joe Biden, man.
Well, that guy has a 43% approval rating, so of course he has to redirect away from his failures.
One of the other Democratic failures, aside from immigration, is obviously when it comes to spending.
When the spending continues to come fast and furious, this is not just a failure on the part of Democrats, of course.
Republicans, who are cowardly in the Senate, are apparently going forward with a massive spending boondoggle as well.
All of this is going to come into direct conflict with the fact that the United States, despite the fact we blew more money into the economy than any time in human history, now sees declining tax revenue.
It turns out that in the absence of actual innovation, in the absence of actual economic growth, that fake economic growth brought about by loose monetary policy does not bring in the kind of tax revenue that you wish.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the federal and state governments have had a good pandemic, enjoying the gusher of tax revenue and federal largesse, but those fat years are about to end and the political class in most places is not ready for it.
The latest evidence came this month in the Federal Revenue News for October and November, the first two months of the 2023 fiscal year.
Revenues rose only 1% in contrast to a 21% increase in fiscal year 2022.
Individual taxes rose 4%.
Corporate tax revenue fell 6%.
Other revenue fell 21%.
State revenues are also headed for an adjustment.
California now faces a $25 billion deficit.
The New York State Comptroller is warning about potential deficits as federal pandemic aid winds down and tax revenue falls.
All of this was predictable, says the Wall Street Journal, since the good times were kept afloat by easy money and a highly progressive tax code.
Federal tax receipts as a share of GDP hit a near record 19.6% in fiscal 2022.
Congress felt like it would never end.
Well, it does.
And this is before any recession in 2023.
But is that going to stop the Republicans and Democrats from spending endless oodles of cash?
Of course not!
Congress has now revealed its $1.7 trillion deal to fund the government through next year.
Goody goody gumdrops, the bill that is now being presented at the Senate level is over 4,000 pages long.
The Senators are supposed to pass this thing before Friday.
Not a single one of them will have read this bill.
No one will know what's in the bill.
We'll find out what's in the bill when the bills come due.
According to the Washington Post, Democratic and Republican negotiators early on Tuesday unveiled a roughly $1.7 trillion deal to fund the U.S.
government through most of 2023, setting up a last-minute sprint on Capitol Hill to approve the sprawling package and avert a potential shutdown.
Now, the question here is not really why the Democrats would go along with this.
They're willing to spend $8 trillion.
I don't care.
The real question is why Republicans are going along with this.
Why not attempt to stop the bill?
Why not attempt to filibuster the bill?
Why not attempt to do something to prevent this bill from passage, considering that Republicans will take over the House in about a month here?
That's all you have to do is just stop.
But they're not.
And one of the reasons they're not is because Mitch McConnell doesn't trust the House leadership to be able to get its bleep together when it comes to other spending proposals.
He thinks that they will move toward government shutdowns.
He thinks it'll all be posturing.
It'll damage the Republican Party.
So he would rather work with the Democrats in the Senate than he would work with his own Republican Party.
That's what it comes down to.
That's how little faith McConnell has in his own party.
And listen, I get where McConnell's coming from.
The Republican Party is essentially the most isley of idiots.
But that does not mean that you make a deal with the people you know are wrong, who are the Democrats.
The measure is 4,155 pages.
It is longer than the entirety of the Bible by a long shot.
It includes funding for key elements of Joe Biden's economic agenda, new boosts to defense programs, and an additional $45 billion in emergency military and economic assistance for Ukraine.
So we've now moved beyond military assistance.
We're now shoring up the Ukrainian economy, which is, of course, what has to happen in the middle of a war.
$45 billion.
I mean, the amount of money that we are now expending in Ukraine is extraordinary.
And again, I'm very much in favor of funding Ukraine so that Ukraine can stop the Russians.
We've spent no blood over there.
I'd rather spend money than blood over there if we have to choose.
With that said, is there any off-ramp in Ukraine, like at any point here?
Has Joe Biden considered an off-ramp in Ukraine?
Shouldn't there be something?
Or are we just going to continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in Ukraine?
Democrats did not achieve all of the increases to domestic spending they initially sought.
But the two parties' leaders did agree to stitch onto the measure a wide array of long-simmering installed bills, recognizing the omnibus marks their final major legislative opening before Congress resets in the new year.
Lawmakers appended proposals to improve pandemic readiness, extend some Medicaid benefits, help Americans save for retirement, ban TikTok on government devices, and change the way the country counts presidential electoral votes.
Democrats and Republicans could not find compromises on other outstanding fiscal and economic debates, particularly around a package of tax credits that might have aided low-income families with children while preserving tax breaks for businesses, a slew of thorny issues that now await lawmakers in a tough political environment next year.
Lawmakers have until the end of Friday to approve the package or else federal funds are set to run out, bringing key agencies and programs to a halt.
Basically, McConnell has now given all the cards to the Democrats, because Democrats can now claim that the Republicans are ready to go, except for a few intransigent- All he had to do was pass the CR, a continuing resolution.
The House GOP, correctly, is bucking against this.
Chip Roy has written a letter to the Senate GOP saying, We urge you to take all steps necessary to stop the soon to be finalized omnibus spending bill negotiated with Democrats. At the very least, due respect for Americans who elected us would call for not passing a lame duck spending bill just days before the members fly home for Christmas and two weeks before a new Republican majority is sworn in.
Senate Republicans have the 41 votes necessary to stop this and should do so now.
Show the Americans who elected you they weren't wrong in doing so.
They're also threatening to whip opposition to any legislative priority of the Senators who vote for this bill, including the Republican leader, saying that they will oppose any rule, any consent request, suspension, voice vote, or roll call of any such Senate bill, and will do everything in our power to thwart even the smallest legislative and policy efforts of those Senators.
So, again, well done to the Republican Party.
A circular firing squad over there, rooted in apparent extraordinary incompetence.
But the spending never ends.
No matter what, the spending must go forward.
All righty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We will be getting into the FBI actively working with Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop information.
Plus, we'll be taking your calls.
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