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Jan. 20, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

46:48

How Steven Crowder Betrayed His Friends | Ep. 1651

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	We discuss conservative comedian Steven Crowder's attacks on Jeremy Boring and the Daily Wire, a runaway girl is kept from her parents because they supposedly misgendered her and the cost is horrific, and Joe Biden says he has no regerts about storing classified documents in his garage.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Bench Bureau Show.
	Well, folks, I'm sure many of you have seen the controversy that has broken out between our former friend Stephen Crowder and those of us here at The Daily Wire.
	And it makes me sick to my stomach.
	I know that my business partner, Jeremy Boring, has made him sick to his stomach as well, because we had always considered Stephen a friend.
	I was Stephen's first lawyer.
	I helped negotiate his contract with Fox News.
	It's going all the way back.
	There's got to be at least over a decade.
	And Stephen and I had always been very friendly.
	I know Jeremy was even friendlier with Stephen, had counseled him in very rough times.
	I had personally attempted to intervene when Stephen was demonetized in June 2019 on YouTube.
	I actually sounded off so loudly that the people at YouTube reached out to me and Susan Wojcicki, the head of YouTube, got on the phone with me and I reamed her out over demonetizing Stephen.
	And I hope it made a difference.
	Now, look, I think that Stephen is an incredibly talented comedian.
	I also think that what he is doing to my friend Jeremy Boring right now is one of the most disgusting things I have ever seen in politics.
	It really is one of the ugliest things I've ever seen.
	In order to understand what's happening, I think you have to understand a couple of things.
	So, for those who missed the story, basically, we offered Stephen a term sheet, a non-binding term sheet.
	A non-binding term sheet is exactly what it sounds like.
	It is a list of terms for a proposed negotiation for a contract.
	And then negotiation happens, then you come to a final contract.
	That is what a non-binding term sheet is.
	His agent had solicited us to make him an offer.
	This is when he was in his closing days with The Blaze.
	And so we sent him over a non-binding term sheet for $50 million over the course of four years with an additional two-year option at $25 million.
	That is, as it sounds like, a lot of money, but we thought that Steven is worth it because Steven is, again, an incredibly talented guy with a very, very large following.
	And, um, If you want to hear the actual terms of the term sheet, all you have to do is go to the description on this particular video or head on over to YouTube and you can see my business partner, Jeremy Boring, read the terms word for word.
	Stephen's original video in which he attacked us.
	So this week, this week, Stephen attacked Jeremy Boring and attacked the Daily Wire and suggested that we had essentially offered him an enslavement contract that would have robbed him of all of his freedom and made him subject to the whims of big tech and all the rest of this kind of bullsh**.
	And it's just not true.
	Jeremy, unlike Steven, read the entire text of the term sheet on the air and goes through it piece by piece and explains exactly how it works.
	And in short, all the contract says is we are offering you this gigantic sum of money.
	And if you start to lose money for the company and for yourself because you lose YouTube, for example, then we both lose money.
	So you lose some money because this is typically how contracts work on this show.
	For example, if I lose advertisers and the revenue of the show goes down and I lose revenue personally because the revenue of the show has gone down.
	So again, if you want the details, the legalistic details of all this, You can check out Jeremy's video it is absolutely comprehensive and irrefutable because again he reveals, I've never seen anybody else do this, he reveals literally the entirety of the of the what was supposed to be confidential term sheet that Stephen decided to partially leak for his own benefit.
	And this is the part that's really ugly.
	Okay so the part that's really ugly is the betrayal of friendship.
	So last night Stephen Crowder In response to Jeremy reading the entire term sheet and saying, somehow Stephen misconstrued this and is using this to attack us and launch a website called Stop Big Con as though we are in the pocket of big tech.
	We are in the pocket of big tech.
	We who have invested literally tens of millions of dollars building alternatives to big tech.
	We who put up people like Matt Walsh and Candace Owens and my show.
	We who have been attacked by Facebook and have been attacked in the legacy media all the time and who are routinely demonetized.
	Well, yes.
	Nailed it.
	We were in the pocket of Big Tech.
	This was Steven's line of attack.
	And supposedly, this line of attack came from that term sheet, right?
	The idea was that the term sheet was doing the work of Big Tech because the term sheet suggested that if he got demonetized from YouTube and we both lost money, that he would also lose money.
	What he apparently wanted us to do was continue to pay him extraordinary sums of money even if the show was losing money, which is called a charity.
	It is not called a business.
	The hardest thing to do in the conservative movement or anywhere else is to 1.
	Run a successful business and 2.
	Make a difference.
	We here at DailyWare do both things.
	In fact, we tried to generate a profit so we can continue to make a difference.
	It turns out when you lose money, you don't actually have the wherewithal or the resources in order to do things like spend enormous quantities of money making What is a Woman by Matt Walsh or making The Greatest Lie Ever Sold by Candace Owens or funding the investigative reporters who shift the Virginia gubernatorial race by uncovering what happens in Loudoun County.
	Or put out good information each and every day to rebut the evils of the Biden administration or spend the millions of dollars it takes to sue the Biden administration to stop the OSHA vax mandate or any of that kind of stuff.
	They cost money.
	And in order to make that money, you have to run a business.
	You can't run a charity for your hosts.
	That apparently is what Stephen wanted.
	But Stephen decides that this is supposedly his story is that he was so offended by the term sheet he just had to speak out.
	He had to stand up for the little guy, right?
	OK, there is there a bunch of problems with this.
	I was willing to stay silent on all of this, generally speaking, and not get into the weeds, and not get into Stephen's personal conduct, until the point when he personally recorded a phone call with my best friend Jeremy Boring, and then proceeded to release that publicly.
	That is disgusting.
	It is disgusting, and it is vile, on a pure human level.
	Jeremy, again, has gone out of his way for Stephen more times than I can count.
	He's counseled Stephen personally.
	And Steven decided, in premeditated fashion, that he was going to tape his friend and then release it to grow his email list.
	It is that simple.
	And I'll show you the timeline here because the case here is that, again, this term sheet that he got, he was so offended by it, he just had to speak up.
	He couldn't be held back any longer.
	He had to speak up on behalf of the little guy.
	I'm going to read you the timeline of what happened during this negotiation and when he decided to tape his friend, his supposed friend, Jeremy Boring.
	So here is the timeline here.
	October 5th, 2022 is when we sent Stephen this supposedly evil term sheet.
	So evil.
	So you would imagine that if the term sheet was that evil, October 6th he couldn't have held back.
	How could you guys do this?
	October 5th is when we sent him this term sheet offering him 50 million dollars over four years plus a two-year extension for 25 mil.
	You know, basketball player type money.
	On November 2nd, Steven called up Jeremy and said, I want $30 million a year and a bunch of changes to the term sheet.
	I'm not going to redline the term sheet.
	I'm not going to edit the term sheet.
	I just want you to send me a brand new offer.
	On November 6th, four days later, remember, this is after he's already sounded off.
	He's got the term sheet.
	He's had it for a month.
	November 6th was election night.
	You'll recall, if you're a Daily Wire fan, Steven Crowder appeared on our election night coverage.
	Everything was very friendly.
	Everything was very chummy.
	Everything was great.
	November 14th or thereabouts, we decided that we couldn't meet his demand.
	That his demands were not rational in business terms, that he wanted too much money, and all the rest of it.
	So we let him know, you know, no hard feelings.
	We're still friends, just like we do in every contract negotiation.
	As Tim Poole said on his show last night, you know, we've had contract negotiations with Tim, and we disagreed, and we went our separate ways, and we still like Tim, Tim still likes us, and all the rest.
	Okay.
	So November 14th or thereabouts, we told Steven that we couldn't meet his demands.
	Fast forward another month.
	December 12th, he registered the site StopBigCon.
	Hey, that's when he registered it.
	Remember, October 5th is when he received the terms.
	November 14th is when we said we could not meet his demands.
	December 12th is when he registered StopBigCon because he knew that three days later, he was going to be announcing that he was leaving The Blaze, he needed a plan, and attacking us was the plan.
	December 15th, he announced he was leaving The Blaze.
	A month after that, he texted Jeremy in friendly fashion to ask if they could talk.
	On January 9th, he called Jeremy and proceeded to tape him.
	Without permission, without Jeremy's knowledge, he proceeded to tape a person who was supposedly his friend.
	And remember, this is all based on the passion of the upset that he had over a term sheet that was submitted to him on October 5th.
	It is a month.
	It's actually 36 days after.
	So January 17th is when he launches Stop Big Con.
	So just to get this straight, just to get the timeline straight, because this is what we would call a premeditated move in an attempt to grow your email list.
	This means 104 days elapsed between when Steven Crowder received the term sheet that we submitted to him and when he launched StopBigCon.
	104 days.
	And it means that 36 days elapsed between when he decided to attack DailyWire and Jeremy by purchasing StopBigCon and when he called Jeremy to tape him.
	So that means well over three months elapsed again between him who received this egregiously evil term sheet, which, by the way, is not egregiously evil.
	The term sheet is perfectly legitimate.
	It was the basis for further negotiation.
	There have been moves on both sides, but there's nothing wrong with saying to a person who produces a show.
	One, you have to produce a certain number of shows.
	And if you don't, we're not going to pay you for the shows that you don't produce.
	And two, if your show begins to lose money, you also lose money.
	This is how business works.
	This is how the media works.
	This is how capitalism works.
	We are not communists.
	We do not pay people in order to not generate revenue.
	We cannot run a business.
	And keep it functional and employ 300 people and have the money to spend on all the wonderful projects that we like to do.
	On the $100 million we're going to spend on kids content.
	On the suing of Joe Biden's administration.
	We can't do any of that stuff unless we are a profitable company.
	We don't pay people just for the fun of it.
	So, that means this is totally premeditated.
	It is an attempt to grow an email list by deliberately misconstruing terms of a perfectly legitimate non-binding term sheet for a person that we, I personally and Jeremy, have gone out of our way to help multiple, multiple times.
	A person who then claims that we are the big shills for YouTube.
	Right?
	We're the ones who are shilling for big tech.
	So what's his claim on that?
	His claim is that we're shilling for big tech by saying that if you get banned from YouTube and we lose money because of that, then you also lose money.
	Well, I noticed that someone else makes the vast bulk of his living via the exposure he receives on YouTube, and his name is Steven Crowder.
	Steven has a bigger following on YouTube than I do.
	He has a massive following on YouTube.
	He's a YouTube superstar.
	He has six million followers on YouTube.
	He doesn't want to be banned on YouTube.
	By the way, he doesn't have to be demonetized in order to in order to continue.
	The demonetization does not mean that he doesn't indirectly make money on YouTube.
	The exposure he receives on YouTube allows him to push people to Mug Club.
	He knows this.
	This is why he has a pissed off YouTube segment, which is smart.
	He does the same thing on his show that I do on my show.
	Exactly the same thing.
	You will hear me on the show when I discuss COVID.
	Say, I'm about to say a bunch of things I can't say on YouTube.
	So head on over to Daily Wire Plus and subscribe and hear the rest of it.
	Steven does the same thing.
	He says, he says, I'm going to have my piss off YouTube segment in which he avoids saying the things that will get him permanently banned on YouTube, but directs people to his site.
	So is he a show for big tech?
	Is he a show for big tech?
	Because if you were really not a show for big tech, apparently he would just say whatever he wants any day.
	He would just say it any day.
	And if they knock him off, they knock him off.
	But he's not doing that because he's not a moron.
	Steven's not a moron.
	He apparently is just a bad person who tapes his friends and then releases the tapes for personal gain.
	I'm personally insulted by Steven's behavior here.
	I'm more insulted.
	It has nothing to do with me because he hasn't actually said anything about me.
	It has to do with you don't get to attack my best friend and suggest that my best friend is some sort of shill for big tech when we spend every day, literally every day in this business attempting to fight big tech and to win.
	When you spend every day trying to bring good content to people who can't get it in a lot of other ways and build a business.
	Who go out of our way to make offers to people for tens of millions of dollars so they can continue to provide the content that you want.
	Tens of millions of dollars to people like Steven Crowder.
	I don't see a lot of other people walking across the table to make this offer to Steven Crowder.
	The easiest thing to do in our particular industry is to attack your friends and make money off of that.
	The hardest thing to do in our industry is to win at business and to win against the left, and those two things are simultaneous.
	Because if you lose money, you can't keep operating and fight the agenda of the left.
	It makes me nauseous to be talking about this, honestly.
	It makes me sick to be talking about this.
	I'm sad for Stephen that he feels the necessity to plan for months apparently to attack his friends to try to grow an email list in the most cynical possible fashion and tape his friends on the phone and then release that public.
	Who does that?
	Who does that?
	Is that something you do?
	I'm going to just ask you on a personal level.
	Have you ever done that?
	Have you ever taped your friends?
	Is that a thing that you do?
	You text your friend just so you can set them up on tape.
	And then you selectively release parts of the tape to try to make them look bad.
	It fails, by the way.
	And you lie about the terms that you are offered in order to grow your email list and look like the truest conservative in all the land.
	The man who's truly standing up while, by the way, not being banned from YouTube.
	He explicitly says on his show that he does not say things on YouTube so he will not be banned on YouTube.
	But when we say the same thing to him, apparently it's super bad.
	Or alternatively, this is one of the all-time planned attacks for monetization I have ever seen.
	And doing it by attacking a person like Jeremy, who's been extremely kind to Steven, is just vile at the highest possible level.
	It's personally Repulsive.
	It's absolutely repulsive.
	We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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	Alrighty, now on to regular news.
	So let's talk for a second about this horrific story out in Maryland.
	One of the things we do here at Daily Wire is we fund investigative reporters.
	Our best investigative reporter right now is Luke Rosiak.
	Luke does an amazing job.
	It was Luke who uncovered the sexual assault of a minor by a person who identified as a member of the opposite gender in a bathroom in Loudoun County and the denial of Loudoun County School District that anything bad had happened.
	And it totally shifted the Virginia governor's race.
	Well, now Luke has another story.
	And this story is just, it's just gut-wrenching.
	So here is the story.
	Apparently, the state of Maryland refused to give a Virginia runaway back to her parents because her parents quote unquote misgendered her.
	And then she was sex trafficked, according to the mom.
	These are the wages.
	of a state that values gender ideology nonsense over the actual safety of children.
	Here's what Luke reports, quote, A 14-year-old transgender runaway from Virginia endured a six-month nightmare that saw her twice fall into the hands of sex traffickers, the second time after Baltimore bureaucrats refused to return her to her home state because they accused her adoptive parents of misgendering her, according to records reviewed by the Daily Wire.
	The child, identified in legal documents as Sage, was adopted by her biological grandmother, Michelle Blair, after the death of her father.
	Long troubled, Sage began identifying as a male named Draco and ran away from their rural home in late August of 2021, only to end up on the mean streets of Baltimore, where authorities rescued her from a convicted sex offender, according to records.
	So she ran away from home.
	She ended up in Maryland.
	She was in the home of a convicted sex offender, and the authority found her.
	But instead of taking her back to her parents, instead they decided to put her in an inner city group home.
	Why?
	Well, because they said that her adoptive blood relative parents didn't sufficiently recognize her transgender identity.
	So they'd rather put her in essentially an orphanage in Baltimore with random people rather than with her adoptive parents, who apparently are close relatives, because her close relatives refuse to acknowledge that a boy can become a girl or a girl can become a boy.
	It is not possible to return the child to that home, said Judge Robert B. Kershaw after an impassioned plea from Baltimore Assistant Public Defender Anissa Khan.
	Instead, the judge turned Sage over to the Baltimore City Department of Juvenile Services, quote, for placement in a hardware-secure therapeutic facility, which makes reasonable accommodation for respondents' expressed male gender and desire to live as a trans male.
	Remember, this is a 14-year-old child.
	This is a child.
	That meant housing the girl just rescued from a sex offender with some of Baltimore's most troubled biological males.
	After months in Maryland institutions, Sage bolted, only to resurface in Texas, where she once again had been allegedly trafficked to pedophiles, according to records.
	Unlike their counterparts in Maryland, Texas officials returned her to her parents, according to an ethics complaint that was filed by the parents against the public defender.
	Khan allegedly told the girl to lie about being abused by her parents, seemingly in order to create a legal precedent allowing states other than where a teen lives to refuse to return a runaway teen if transgender issues are in play.
	So again, just to be clear about what happened here.
	The accusation is that the Baltimore assistant public defender, Anisa Khan, encouraged this very troubled 14-year-old girl, who is now identifying as a boy, to claim abuse at the hands of her adoptive close relative parents so that she would not be returned to those people mainly because they say that she's actually a girl and not a boy.
	Being the subject of an interstate tug-of-war driven by an ideological leftist bureaucracy was a new kind of exploitation for SAGE, who had become accustomed to evil men seeking to use them for profit or gratification.
	Her grandmother recounted for police how the cruel spiral began for the child she still hopes to raise.
	I went to wake up my daughter, Blair said, describing the morning of August 25th, 2021 in an Appomattox County Sheriff's Office report.
	She was gone.
	The window screen had been cut open.
	I immediately looked everywhere and they drove to the Appomattox Sheriff to report Sage missing.
	Sage would later reveal she sneaked out to meet someone she thought was a 16-year-old boy who liked skateboarding, but the person was in fact a sex offender who had been grooming her online and took her to Washington and then to Baltimore, according to Michelle.
	A frantic search that included the Sheriff's Office, FBI, Virginia State Police, and U.S.
	Marshals ended one week later, when Sage was found in Baltimore with Kenneth Fisher, a 36-year-old convicted sex offender.
	In the weeks she'd been missing, Sage experienced untold horror at his hands.
	Blair would later write in a victim impact statement, quote, When Sage was delivered to this man, he told my daughter she was now part of his family.
	Sage replied she was only 14 years old and please don't rape me, to which Kenneth Fisher immediately took her into his bedroom and violently raped her.
	He enjoyed strangling her, but not quite to death.
	This sick man trafficked her to so many men that Sage lost count.
	Fisher is now being housed in jail, but he was not the last adult to exploit Sage, because after Sage was found, Blair drove all night to pick her up.
	But the city of Baltimore said she was being held in jail as a defendant, apparently for running away.
	Her court-appointed lawyer was Khan, whose LinkedIn page says, quote, defense attorneys become the heroes of justice, as they were called to stand in the gap between the coercive power of the state and the relatively limited power of the indigent accused, who were and are still disproportionately black and Latinx.
	It was Khan who persuaded Judge Kershaw not to return Sage to her home in Virginia after her 72-year-old grandfather, overcome by emotion, accidentally called her she.
	Ironically, Blair is a longtime court-appointed child advocate, ordinarily making her an ideal trusted parent.
	But the Maryland Juvenile Court maintained her home was abusive, even after a local Virginia agency's investigation found no such mistreatment.
	Blair believes Khan was intent on making her daughter a poster child in the fight for trans rights above parental rights, no matter the cost.
	A week after ruling that Sage could not be sent back to Virginia, Kershaw received a form asserting Blair's right of custody and the obligation of the state of Maryland to turn her over under the Interstate Compact on juveniles, the ICJ.
	Kershaw rejected it on a technicality.
	Kershaw, careful to use Sage's preferred masculine pronoun and new name, also faulted the petition for failing to, quote, state the circumstances of Draco's running away or his location at the time the application was made.
	Kershaw ordered Sage fitted with a GPS monitor and sent to an institution called the Children's Home.
	But it seems that Draco then ran away again, Sage ran away again, and found herself in Texas, where she was then trafficked to a bunch of pedophiles.
	So, the trans agenda taking precedence over any interest of the child.
	Absolutely horrifying story.
	Good on Luke for reporting it.
	If this is a systemic problem across the country, Kids being removed from their parents because the parents refuse to go along with the predations of gender ideology.
	We are in a world of trouble, and so are our children.
	Just a horrifying story.
	That's the kind of work that we're doing over at Daily Wire, uncovering that sort of stuff.
	So good on Luke Rosiak, our investigative reporter, for uncovering another bombshell.
	Just horrifying, horrifying stuff.
	Okay, meanwhile, the big entertainment story of the day is that Alec Baldwin is going to be charged with involuntary manslaughter in the shooting of the cinematographer of a film called Rust.
	You'll remember this was a big controversy at the time.
	Apparently Alec Baldwin had pointed the gun, he's a Western of some sort, he pointed the gun at a camera, and then he had shot the gun, and there was live ammo in the gun, and he ended up killing the cinematographer.
	The New York Times reports, for more than a year, the actor Alec Baldwin has tried to defend himself against the suggestion he bore responsibility for the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of Rust, a low budget Western he was filming on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
	He told detectives he had been assured the gun he was rehearsing with that day did not contain live ammo, sat down for an extensive TV interview, sought indemnification for financial liability in the case, and then sued crew members on the film, claiming they were the ones responsible for handing him a loaded gun.
	But on Thursday, prosecutors said they would charge him with two counts of involuntary manslaughter in the killing of the cinematographer.
	Alina Hutchins, 42, saying they believed he had a duty to ensure the revolver was safe to handle.
	Andrew Arrebs, special prosecutor appointed by Santa Fe County's district attorney to help handle the case, said, quote, We're trying to make definitely clear that everybody's equal under the law, including A-listers like Alec Baldwin.
	We also want to make sure the safety of the film industry is addressed and things like this don't happen again.
	The film's armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, loaded the gun that day and was responsible for weapons on the set, will also be charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter.
	The film's first assistant director, Dave Halls, who handed Baldwin the gun, agreed to a plea deal on the charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon.
	So a lot of people were pretty surprised by this because they said, well, hold up, Baldwin was handed a loaded gun and he had no reason to believe that there was actually live ammo in the gun.
	SAG-AFTRA, a union that represents film, TV, and radio workers, said that the death of this particular cinematographer was a preventable tragedy, but it was not a failure of duty or a criminal act on the part of any performer.
	So, here are some of the prosecutors talking about Baldwin.
	Originally, you'll remember that Baldwin claimed he didn't even pull the trigger, that the trigger sort of pulled itself.
	And some of the prosecutors were like, well, that's not true.
	I didn't pull the trigger.
	So you never pulled the trigger?
	No, no, no, no.
	I would never point a gun at anyone and pull a trigger at them.
	Never.
	The Santa Fe County District Attorney and Special Prosecutor telling Judge Jeanine that Baldwin isn't being truthful and they say Hutchins would be alive if he had done his job.
	We definitely believe he pulled the trigger.
	The FBI lab report confirms that, so definitely the trigger was pulled.
	Well, I mean, clearly the trigger was pulled. Guns don't fire themselves, contrary to popular opinion.
	The DA, Mary Carmack-Altweese, said that Baldwin should have checked the gun and the projectiles and that that's why this is effectively his responsibility.
	But if you have an actor with what he or she thinks is a prop gun, not a real gun, is that actual negligence if it turns out that that gun can actually shoot? It's more than that.
	Every person that handles a gun has a duty to make sure that if they are going to handle that gun, point it at someone and pull the trigger, that it is not going to fire a projectile and kill someone.
	And this is really about justice for Helena Hutchins.
	We've talked to many actors, A-list and otherwise, that have said that they always check their guns or they have someone check it in front of them.
	Okay, now obviously there are other actors who suggest that's not in fact the case.
	The statute in New Mexico is relatively vague and it depends on sort of what you consider his legal duty.
	According to the New Mexico statute on involuntary manslaughter, they say that involuntary manslaughter consists of a lawful act, commission of a lawful act, which might produce death in an unlawful manner or without due caution and circumspection.
	So the question is, is this without due caution and circumspection?
	What the prosecutors presumably are going to have to prove is that there is a duty for Baldwin to actually check the loading of the gun.
	And so somebody else was responsible for it, or is he responsible for it?
	Privately, a police report said he had lamented to a detective that if, quote, your name becomes associated with something, nobody wants to work with you anymore.
	Nobody.
	Obviously, we'll see how this trial falls out.
	I don't actually know the answer as to, on set, who's responsible for ensuring that the guns that you use are actually unloaded.
	I actually kind of find it somewhat hard to believe, actually, that actors are to be tasked with determining whether the guns they are being handed are loaded or not.
	I mean, that seems like an extra dramatic responsibility on the part of whomever the advisor to the film is, the person who's doing the technical advising, who actually makes sure that the guns are supposedly unloaded.
	Baldwin says himself that it's not the practice for actors to check their own guns.
	But we'll keep an eye on that developing story because it obviously is of some interest.
	Alec Baldwin's lawyers, for their part, say they're confident they'll win because, again, the idea is that he's not responsible for checking the ammo.
	You're responsible, on a personal level by the way, for checking your own ammo, but apparently Alec Baldwin is not.
	I don't know the answer to this on a set.
	I just don't.
	Meanwhile...
	Speaking of people who are claiming accident, but this time actually don't actually get to claim accident, that would be Joe Biden.
	So Joe Biden came out yesterday and he said that he has no regerts, none, about his handling of classified documents, which is kind of shocking considering the classified documents were found in his possession, in his garage, in his office, in the Penn Biden Center for Chinese Donations.
	Here is Joe Biden yesterday claiming that he has nothing.
	There's no regerts, man.
	He's going to get a neck tattoo that says just that.
	As we found a handful of documents that were filed in the wrong place, we immediately turned them over to the Archives and the Justice Department.
	We're fully cooperating and looking forward to getting this resolved quickly.
	I think you're going to find there's nothing there.
	I have no regrets.
	I'm following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do.
	It's exactly what we're doing.
	There's no there there.
	Thank you.
	Well, I mean, there is a there there.
	In fact, there are classified documents there.
	And the question is how they got there.
	And the other question is how they got found.
	Because typically, again, when you are moving boxes from one place to another, you don't typically open like all your boxes of documents.
	When especially you're like a low level worker, you're a mover, you're called to the place to move out of the Penn Biden Center for Chinese Grift and to move those boxes, presumably to Joe Biden's Corvette garage or something.
	You don't typically like is like the College hunks for hire checking out the classified information in the boxes?
	And the answer is no, it was Joe Biden's lawyers who were going through the boxes.
	So the question is, do you hire lawyers when you're moving?
	I've never hired lawyers when I'm moving.
	It's not a thing that I typically do because their hourly rates are extraordinarily high.
	But that is how they uncovered all these documents in the first place.
	Meanwhile, CNN doing its best to cover for Joe Biden.
	Well, you know, this kind of stuff happens all the time.
	And really what it is, it's a problem of overclassification.
	Oh, so when a Democrat does it, it's over classification.
	When Donald Trump does it, it's because he is evil and selling the nuclear codes to Vladimir Putin.
	Here is CNN trying to talk Joe Biden's way out of this.
	Katie, this has been a big question, of course, not just in light of what happened with Trump's documents, but also now with Biden.
	Is it an accepted thing?
	How common is this?
	What has your reporting found?
	Yeah, Caitlin, this kind of classified spillage happens almost literally every day.
	And most of the time, it's completely accidental.
	An employee accidentally takes home a classified document in a briefcase.
	Well, I mean, whoopsie.
	And this must have been a big whoopsie at three separate locations.
	And they're searching through it like five years later, since Joe Biden left office in 2017.
	So, yeah, that's weird.
	That's weird.
	I'm noticing a shocking lack of confidence, actually, as it turns out, by the investigators in many of these cases.
	Remember, the DOJ did not send lawyers to go oversee the searching of the documents, even after they knew that Joe Biden had classified documents in his house.
	They're like, yeah, Joe, just lawyers will handle that.
	It'll be fine.
	Why not?
	They're doing an amazing job.
	And meanwhile, speaking of people who are doing an amazing job, the Supreme Court says it still has not identified the person who leaked the draft abortion opinion in Roe versus Wade.
	I'm sorry.
	That is bull.
	Like, maybe the Supreme Court is unable to find that out, but who exactly is on the job over there?
	Inspector Clouseau?
	The Supreme Court staff is not large.
	It's not like you have thousands of people working for the Supreme Court.
	Some of the most coveted positions in all of the legal profession are clerkships under a Supreme Court justice.
	And usually it's like four, five, six clerks per justice.
	And even a very small cadre of people.
	It cannot be this hard to find out who leaks this stuff to Politico.
	Nonetheless, the Supreme Court announced on Thursday that an internal investigation had failed to identify who leaked a draft of the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.
	In a 20-page report, the court-martial, Gail Curley, who oversaw the inquiry, said that investigators had conducted 126 formal interviews of 97 employees, all of whom had denied being the source of the leak.
	But several employees acknowledged that they had told their spouses or partners about the draft opinion and the vote count in violation of the court's confidentiality rules, the report said.
	The investigation did not determine that any of those discussions led to a copy of the draft opinion becoming public, however.
	Investigators also found no forensic evidence of who may have leaked the opinion in examining the court's computer devices, networks, printers, and available call and text logs, the report said.
	The finding raised the possibility no one will be held to account for one of the most stunning breaches of secrecy in the Supreme Court's history.
	The leak left the court in a state of mutual suspicion about whether a clerk or even a justice betrayed its code of silence about rulings before they were announced.
	The inconclusive report comes as opinion polls have shown weakened trust in the court and all of the rest of this sort of stuff.
	I find it absolutely hard to believe that if the full power of American law enforcement were unleashed on this particular case, it would be impossible to find who among the 97 people who were interviewed.
	I mean, this is basically just an Agatha Christie mystery.
	It's a closed box mystery.
	One of these 97 people Or a spouse leaked this.
	So who is it?
	This doesn't seem like it should take this long to figure out.
	But apparently it does.
	Either that or somebody knows and they're not revealing it for a very good reason.
	I love that the left is trying to claim that Samuel Alito leaked it.
	Yeah, that would make perfect sense.
	It makes perfect sense that Samuel Alito would leak his own draft opinion in order to drive extraordinary ire and outrage prior to the vote being actually done.
	Yes, makes perfect sense.
	You nailed it, guys.
	It is far more likely that it's a left-wing law clerk.
	And by the way, I think eventually we will find out, once the statute of limitations has closed, we will find out who this was, and this person will then be fetted as a hero by the left.
	for attempting to stop this great predation of allowing states to legislate on the issue of abortion.
	Meanwhile, the Ukraine situation gets more and more dire, and it seems like there's no end in sight.
	We'll get to that in a moment.
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	Okay.
	Meanwhile, the situation over in Ukraine continues to devolve and there's no off-ramp here.
	There has to be some sort of off-ramp here, guys.
	Otherwise, this is just going to continue ad infinitum.
	And I'm not seeing any off-ramp here from the Biden administration.
	I understand the strategy, which is keep ratcheting up the pressure on the Russians until they come to the table.
	The question is, what are you offering the Russians so that they should come to the table?
	You have to offer something.
	Virtually every conflict in human history has ended with some sort of negotiation.
	Very few of them end with the total defeat of one side or another.
	This happens to be one where negotiation is going to be the outcome because Russia is not going to disappear as a state, nor is Ukraine going to march into Moscow.
	So the question is, what happens next?
	Well, on the one hand, you obviously want to maintain pressures that the Russians don't feel that they can continue to push without counterpressure.
	On the other hand, there has to be some sort of backdoor negotiation happening with Putin and his team, because if this continues to ramp up and Russia really believes that they are going to lose everything, That's when the nukes may come out.
	That is when Vladimir Putin decides to mobilize 2 million people and just flood the zone.
	Or maybe he decides to fire a missile over into NATO territory in order to try and break NATO proper.
	And basically dare you come back at me over the border.
	War is a fluid situation, and the longer it lasts, the more opportunities you have for a major screw-up.
	You'll recall that just a few months ago, there was a situation in which a missile fired by Ukraine of Russian-make ended up hitting Poland, and there was talk for like a brief hot second that maybe it was Russia that it hit Poland, maybe we're all going nuclear war, right?
	You remember that for five seconds?
	And it turned out that it was actually Ukraine attempting to hit Russia and missing and instead hitting Poland?
	I mean, that sort of stuff happens in war.
	So, we all have an interest at this point in facilitating an end to this conflict.
	I understand why the Ukrainian people have no interest in doing that.
	They're saying, listen, we got invaded and we're pushing back as much as we want to.
	Don't tie our hands.
	I get it.
	I also understand that the United States, and I'm an American, has achieved its interests already.
	The interests the United States was seeking to achieve are one, the crippling of the Russian military for stepping over its boundaries.
	Done.
	Two, the prevention of Russia from invading another sovereign country.
	Done.
	Three, the realignment of Ukraine with the West.
	Done.
	Four, the realignment of Europe away from Russia and more toward the United States.
	Done.
	Five, the warning of China that if they attempt something similar with Taiwan, there will be dire economic and possibly military consequences.
	All of those goals have now been achieved.
	So the question becomes, what is America's further interest in continuing without end to facilitate this thing?
	According to the New York Times, however, the new U.S.
	aid is being provided.
	The attempt is to break through the Russian defenses.
	The U.S.
	plans to send Ukraine 90 Stryker armored combat vehicles as part of a roughly $2.5 billion shipment of arms and equipment that is expected to be announced at a meeting of allies in Germany on Friday, according to the DoD.
	The decision to send Strykers for the first time and possibly deliver them within weeks comes just days after Britain committed to sending Ukraine 14 Challenger battle tanks and the United States, France and Germany agreed to send dozens of armored infantry fighting vehicles, including 50 Bradley fighting vehicles.
	The U.S.
	announcement came one week after the Biden administration announced another $3 billion package of military assistance that will include Bradleys, which officials said would be especially helpful to Ukrainian units fighting Russian forces in the Donbass region of the country's east.
	Western officials fear Ukraine has only a narrow window before an anticipated Russian springtime offensive.
	They've been working quickly to give Kiev sophisticated weapons they had earlier held out on sending because of concerns of provoking Moscow.
	On Wednesday, Colin Kahl, U.S.
	Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, told reporters Ukraine needed more mechanized infantry and armored personnel carriers to punch through heavily fortified Russian defenses.
	He said the Russians are really digging in.
	They're digging in, they're digging trenches, they're putting in dragons, teeth-laying mines.
	To enable Ukrainians to break through, the emphasis has been shifted to enabling them to combine fire and maneuver in a way that will prove to be more effective.
	The United States has been also helping Ukraine target Crimea.
	Now, Crimea, it's been sort of a foregone conclusion since 2014 was going to stay Russian.
	The reason being that Russia had brought extraordinary resources into Crimea to sort of solidify it as a Russian province.
	So now the talk is allowing Ukraine to go into Crimea.
	Again, there has to be an off-ramp here.
	Guys, I'm all for ratcheting up the pressure, but there has to be... Yes, the stick.
	Where's the carrot?
	Is there a carrot?
	There must be a carrot, otherwise it will be only stick.
	When it is only stick, that means the other side is going to respond in kind, obviously.
	According to the New York Times, for years, the United States has insisted that Crimea is still part of Ukraine, but the Biden administration has held to a hard line since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, refusing to provide Kiev with the weapons it needs to target the Crimean peninsula, which Russia has been using as a base for launching devastating strikes.
	Now that line is starting to soften.
	After months of discussions with Ukrainian officials, the Biden administration has finally started to concede a key that may need the power to strike the Russian sanctuary, even if such a move increases the risk of escalation, according to several U.S.
	officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
	White House officials insist there's no change in position, because they say we always said that Crimea is part of Ukraine, but yeah, there's a change in position when you are now saying that you should provide Ukraine the military resources to go back into Crimea.
	The Biden administration has come to believe that if the Ukrainian military can show Russia its control of Crimea can be threatened, that actually strengthening keeps position in any future negotiations.
	Okay, so where are the negotiations?
	Now listen, it could be possible that Putin is the one who's refusing to negotiate.
	That's fine, but somebody should say that.
	And so somebody should actually say, I'm not, that's not what I'm hearing.
	Somebody at the White House should say Vladimir Putin has been utterly unwilling to negotiate on any terms at all, but if he's willing to negotiate at a certain point, you might want to actually negotiate instead of Putin with his back to the wall is announcing another mobilization round.
	The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov announced on Tuesday, the Putin will deliver a speech in St.
	Petersburg to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Soviet forces breaking the Nazi siege of Leningrad.
	And apparently he is going to announce another mass mobilization.
	We have to 1.5 million men mobilized under arms by the Russian government.
	Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger is shifting his view on Ukraine and its NATO bid.
	Originally, you'll recall that he was not in favor of Ukraine joining NATO because he said that that would essentially provoke Russian action.
	Now he's saying Ukraine should join NATO essentially to deter the Russians from further acts of aggression.
	And again, I think there's truth to that.
	Or maybe that's a negotiating position.
	Maybe you go to Russia and you say, listen, Ukraine will not formally join NATO, but they do have a mutual defense guarantee with us and we are going to continue to ship them the weaponry they need to deter a future attack.
	Maybe that's a negotiation point.
	So Putin can go back to his people and say, Ukraine will never be a part of NATO.
	Like there has to be some wit.
	Again, in a negotiation, everybody has to feel as though they lost a little bit and everybody has to feel as though they gained a little bit.
	But it appears that none of that is on the table.
	And this is going to just kind of simmer for the West at a relatively mid-level range of attention, up until the point where something goes dramatically wrong.
	Now, speaking of things that are going dramatically wrong, the situation on our southern border continues to be an absolute disaster area.
	Alejandro Mayorkas, our awful Department of Homeland Security Secretary, he admits that we now need FEMA to help address issues with illegal immigration on the southern border.
	FEMA is providing emergency food and shelter program funds to help cities around the country recover or defray the costs of non-citizen arrivals.
	CBP and ICE are working closely with cities to share information and coordinate the disposition of non-citizens in immigration enforcement proceedings.
	Okay, so, obviously this administration, it's been a disaster area.
	Mayorkas says we have a comprehensive strategy.
	They do not have a comprehensive strategy or anything remotely close to it.
	Here's Mayorkas.
	We're executing a comprehensive strategy to secure our borders and build a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system.
	Working within a broken system, in desperate need of legislative reform, two weeks ago, we announced new lawful pathways for non-citizens seeking relief in the United States, accompanied by a consequence regime for those who do not avail themselves of those processes.
	Okay, so their new policy is nonsense.
	It is not going to be effective in any way, shape or form.
	It basically allows you to apply online to immigrate illegally.
	It's not going to stop the flood across the border.
	Everybody knows this.
	So meanwhile, this is the dumb game that we play.
	Create an unworkable border policy and then say, what if we just legalize everybody?
	So now you got, again, once every couple of years, you get the bipartisan group of senators who decide they're going to solve immigration by amnestying 10 million people.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, this is now, you know, happening again.
	This is one of the reasons why, at least, thank God, the Republicans took the House, even if it's by a slim margin.
	This thing is DOA in the House of Representatives.
	But the Senate is attempting to cram something through.
	Quote, a bipartisan group of senators is pushing ahead in the new Congress with efforts to reach an agreement on border security and immigration policy after talks ran out of time last year.
	We're committed to finding lasting solutions to this crisis, said Kirsten Sinema, the senator from Arizona, who co-hosted a trip with Senator John Cornyn.
	Kirsten Sinema, who chairs the Homeland Security Border Committee, is pushing for a deal that combines a path to citizenship for about 2 million people who were brought to the United States illegally as children, these would be the dreamers, in exchange for changes to how the asylum system at the border functions.
	That would probably include expanding detention of asylum-seeking migrants and an extension of Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that allows illegal border crossers to be quickly turned back to Mexico.
	So in other words, she is basically proposing a short-term fix, but a permanent solution for the two million so-called dreamers.
	How about no?
	How about we figure out what to do with the people here once we have plugged the giant leak in the boat?
	I'm amused that they keep saying, well, you know, the water in the boat, we'll just leave, like, the water's here.
	We'll leave the water in the boat.
	That obviously has to stay.
	Also, we will, in exchange for us leaving the water at the bottom of this boat, we will also, like, temporarily put a piece of duct tape on the boat.
	It'll come loose in, like, a minute.
	But at least we'll know that this water is permanently in the boat.
	Like, that's not how any of this should work.
	You should figure out how to stop the leak before you figure out what to do with the people who are already here.
	Otherwise, you're just facilitating more leaking.
	Which is exactly what happens.
	Again, every couple of years you get a gang of 8 or a gang of 12 and they try to figure out immigration.
	The reality is that the American people agree on immigration.
	What they want is two separate bills.
	One for border security, in which we actually solidify the border.
	And the second, we figure out what to do with the people here.
	And it seems to me a proper solution on that one would go something like this.
	Are the people who are here illegally of benefit to the United States or are they not?
	When they came in, their status, that is almost totally irrelevant.
	The question is, you got here, you skipped a line, you ended up here.
	Now, is it good for the United States that you are here?
	And the answer for some will be yes, and the answer for others will be no.
	That is what sovereign countries get to do.
	They get to pick and choose who enters the sovereign country.
	But apparently that is a bridge too far.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We'll be talking with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about all things China, Russia, and the Trump administration.
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