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June 26, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:23
A Failed Rebellion In Russia?!
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So no one knows what the hell is going on in Russia.
Like, really, no one knows what the hell is going on.
So, there is a group, it is called the Wagner Group, and the Wagner Group is run by a former Putin ally named Yevgeny Prigozhin.
They're a group of mercenaries, like 50,000 strong at minimum, and they have embedded themselves with the Russian military all over the place, and they have sort of an independent mercenary body all over the continent of Africa.
Well, over the weekend, there was a move that was made by the head of the Wagner group, Prigozhin.
He claimed originally that the Russian military had attacked the Wagner group, and then he said, we are going to march on Moscow.
Which is wild stuff, and everyone freaked out.
For a brief moment in time, there was this very weird moment where the entire media, which recognized that the Wagner Group is indeed a human rights violating, essentially, terror group sponsored by Russia, They suddenly flipped because Purgosian was marching against Putin and suddenly these became the good guys for a hot second, which is really absurd on its face because Purgosian is one of the worst people in the world.
Vladimir Putin also one of the worst people in the world.
None of these people are wonderful people.
They're all murderers.
They're all thugs.
Purgosian is a person who began his career being convicted of a wide variety of crimes up to and including the trafficking of minor women.
And then he worked his way up from being a person who ran a hot dog stand to being the chief caterer to the Russian government, which is basically just a crony job from Putin to Prigozhin.
And Putin was very happy to have the Wagner group doing a lot of the dirty work that even the Russian military was not willing to do.
Well, suddenly Prigozhin turned on him and it looked for a minute as though there was going to be a full-on civil war in Russia over the weekend.
According to the Washington Post, for the moment, things now appear to be calming down as the forces answering to Prigozhin, the Wagner group chief, have halted their march toward Moscow and turned around.
The development came after an agreement between Prigozhin and Putin was brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, according to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.
Criminal charges had previously been brought, like almost immediately, started against Prigozhin.
They had suggested that treason was in the offing.
So according to the Washington Post, Prigozhin had been a fervent supporter of Russia's war in Ukraine, which makes sense since he was making a lot of money off of it.
He was in charge of the Russian private military contractor known as the Wagner Group.
Prigozhin had played a central role in the war, first by deploying his mercenaries on the front lines and later by recruiting heavily from prisons to bolster Moscow's depleted forces.
He led the onslaught in Bakhmut, which culminated in Putin declaring the city under Russian control.
That was the first significant territorial gain since last summer.
He also was the financier of the so-called Internet Research Agency, which was the Russian troll farm that Democrats blamed for overturning the supposed Hillary pro-result of the 2016 election.
So there's a lot of question over how all of this began.
Apparently, Purgoshin was very angry because Viktor Shoigu, who is the military defense chief over in the Kremlin, was doing a really crappy job, as evidenced by the fact that Russia was getting its ass kicked all around Ukraine by a much smaller country with more advanced military weaponry, it should be said.
Ukraine, because it is funded by NATO and because its weapons are from NATO, their military was actually significantly more technologically advanced than the Russian military, which in some cases was apparently using World War II-era weaponry.
Prokhorin accused Russian generals of stonewalling ammunition requests and as a result blamed them for his fighters dying in heaps in Ukraine.
Now, it turns out that may not be in fact the case.
It may be that he was getting the ammo and then he was just stockpiling it in case he decided to actually march on Moscow.
Again, Shoigu is in direct conflict with Prokhorin.
Shoygu recently decreed that he wanted the Wagner Group to be formally admitted into the Russian military and absorbed by the Russian military, and Prigozhin said that the Wagner Group would not sign.
Meanwhile, there was a call by Prigozhin to actually use the firing squad on Valery Gerasimov, who is the chief of the Russian General Staff.
Prigozhin was angry because Gerasimov was made overall commander of the war in Ukraine.
So, he said he took control of the main Russian military command base in the southern region of Rostov and then told two Russian military commanders he would blockade Rostov and send his forces to Moscow unless he could directly confront Shoiguru and Gerasimov.
And then he called for Russians to join Wagner against Shoigu and Gerasimov.
He accused the pair of lying about the war in Ukraine and undercounting the casualties.
He said, it's not a military coup, it is a march of justice.
This was his original claim.
and a video started emerging of Wagner mercenaries taking over a Russian city as
essentially Pugosian declared that he was in open rebellion against Putin.
You can see the Wagner group, which is military, armed military uniforms, taking over this Russian city.
The original kind of take was that Putin was going to put this thing down with force, that this was going to be knocked to the ground with prejudice.
But instead, Putin cut a deal.
Apparently, he wanted to avoid outright bloodshed between the Russian military and the Wagner group.
In fact, there was talk that he actually called in another sort of mercenary group, this time from Chechnya, in order to put down the Wagner group, which would have been a real problem for Putin.
If he had to call in the Chechenians in order to fight this thing, that makes him look unbelievably weak.
The agreement from Prigoshin's forces to turn around was brokered by the Belarusian president, who was trying to keep, presumably, the entire country from falling into a complete civil war and chaos.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are in a sort of celebration mode.
Vladimir Zelensky said in an evening address on Saturday, the events in Russia show, quote, the bosses of Russia do not control anything.
And that has been sort of the general take, is that this is just a demonstration of how weak Putin is internally.
Now, that may very well be true, is that Putin is weaker internally than he has been any time during his 23 year rule.
of the Kremlin.
With that said, what comes next is anybody's guess, because chaos in a nuclear-armed nation with something like 2,500 nuclear warheads, and with a lot of weapons floating around, and lying right next to Europe, that could be a disaster all on its own.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, so.
All of this is somewhat reminiscent of a failed coup attempt back in 1991.
And it's important to sort of know your Russian history because very often things that start off as coup attempts actually turn out to be counter-coups.
So that's essentially what happened in 1991.
Basically, you will remember if you know your history, Mikhail Gorbachev declared that the Soviet Union was essentially going to break up.
And in 1991, Gorbachev was actually placed under house arrest in his home in Crimea.
And the heads of the KGB, Interior Ministry, and the Armed Forces, together with his Vice President, Prime Minister, and a bunch of other Communist Party officials, tried to roll back the political and economic reforms and to stop the signing of the so-called Union Treaty, which would have essentially dissolved the Soviet Union by handing a bunch of authority back to the republics.
They declared themselves the State Committee on the State of Emergency.
This is according, of course, to the Center for European Reform.
And then as soon as this happened, there was a second coup, because while Gorbachev was being held incommunicado, that's when Boris Yeltsin, who was a very wild and drunken character, but he was the president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which was the biggest Soviet republic, He coordinated a resistance to the first coup.
This is when he rode in on the tanks and essentially put down the coup.
But in putting down the coup, he also essentially deposed Gorbachev and became leader of the country.
So you just never know what's going to happen when situations like this arise.
And chaos inside Russia is not anything that I think anyone should be rooting for simply because you don't know the outcome.
People say, well, it's got to be better than Putin.
Well, let me introduce you to Russian history where whatever was supposed to be better is generally worse.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Fighters from the Wagner paramilitary group led by Prigozhin seized on Saturday two Russian cities they were rolling toward Moscow for that confrontation, but the agreement and tentative truce staved off the possibility that anger over the handling of the war in Ukraine could spark an actual civil war.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the very sight of armed men in Russian cities calling for the removal of Moscow's military command shows how a war that was meant to achieve regime change in Ukraine could actually threaten the regime in Russia by harnessing deep anger over the failures of the country's political and military leadership.
Constantine Sonin, a professor at the University of Chicago said, quote, Putin's biggest miscalculation is he started a war based on a completely inadequate understanding about the world, about his army, about Ukraine.
He kept making miscalculations every day by not stopping the war.
All the fighters who took part in the uprising are supposed to be amnestied, but it's unclear what's actually going to happen with the Wagner group more broadly at this point.
I mean, number one, this could be the first of many plots.
If it turns out that you can lead a plot against Putin and your basic punishment is everybody who was with you gets pardoned and you get sent to Belarus, I assume with a very large check.
I would assume that Pugosian didn't just go away because he decided to be a nice guy that day.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, it is absolutely unclear what happens next.
Putin and his top generals would have had time to prepare.
If the march had continued all the way into Moscow, and presumably, Purgosian would have lost.
But this does lead to the question of what happens if somebody from inside the Kremlin, not somebody from outside the Kremlin, somebody from inside the Kremlin attempts to topple Putin and he has the help of somebody like Purgosian from the outside.
Colin Clarke writing for the Sufan Group, an intelligence and security consulting group in New York City, writing for Politico.
He points out that this doesn't just have ramifications for Russia.
Internally, it also has some pretty significant ramifications for the Wagner Group.
Before the Wagner offensive was called off, he says Putin turned to Chechen strongman Ramshan Kadyrov for assistance, with the latter dispatching his own mercenaries to help quell the rebellion.
That Chechen forces had to come to the rescue of the Kremlin is ironic in its own right, but it also signals something more troubling for the longer-term prospects of Putin's rule.
Even with the Wagner uprising temporarily quelled, the brazen nature of the assault will probably lead to problems elsewhere, both at home in Russia, but also for its sphere of influence around the world.
So what exactly is going to happen with the Wagner Group?
Well now, the Wagner Group has been, in some cases, integrated into the Russian military.
And Prigozhin himself has been exiled to Belarus.
So what exactly is going to happen in Africa?
Now that could be a net positive for the West.
It's a real opportunity for the West.
The Wagner Group has been Putin's arm in Syria, for example.
It's been Putin's arm in Africa.
As this columnist for Politico points out, Wagner's presence in Africa and the Middle East is supposed to catch 22 for the countries where it operates.
Although its forces are invited into stabilized, fragile states, its actions usually invite further instability.
If Wagner withdraws, there's a serious threat to some of the regimes that depend on it for security and protection.
So theoretically, this could broaden the Western sphere of influence and it could end up being of net benefit, even though the Wagner group, which was supposed to be Putin's opposition, is going to end up essentially being crushed in its attempts here.
But it's almost impossible to read what is happening here from the outside.
By the way, there's heavy Russian sentiment on behalf of Prigozhin.
In fact, Prigozhin was being fist-bumped on his way out of Moscow.
Civilians were fist-bumping him because they were happy that he was at least fighting against the continuation of the Ukraine war.
Here's some of that footage.
I mean, he's like literally fist-bumping people on his way out of Moscow.
Woooo!
So a lot of proponents of the Ukraine war are pointing out that this sort of pressure is what is causing the chaos inside of Russia.
It's this sort of pressure that is causing the chaos inside of Russia and therefore the war in Ukraine should continue.
That is one way to read it.
That is a perfectly logical way to read this.
Another way to read this that is also perfectly logical is you don't know what's happening in a nuclear-armed state and that's not great.
The best available situation would be an off-ramp so that the war stops, Ukraine maintains the vast majority of its gains, and maybe even more than that, and things go back to status quo ante.
Because is Purgosian... If he had won, let's put it this way, if Purgosian had won and taken over, would things have gotten wildly better?
Again, Purgosian himself is one of the scariest people alive.
I mean, he is a lifelong criminal, an oligarch, who is now loaded thanks to Vladimir Putin.
According to CBS News, his work running a catering company with Kremlin contacts earned him the name Putin Chef, but he long denied any connection to the Wagner Group, then he admitted to being its founder last year.
Progozhin is currently wanted by the FBI for conspiracy to defraud the United States.
There's a $250,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.
So, it's a mess over there and we're going to have to see what comes next over there as well, obviously.
Okay, meanwhile, there's a mess on the home front with regards to the Biden administration.
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Okay, closer to home, chaos has now broken out inside the White House over the whistleblower allegations that not only was Hunter working with Joe, but that he literally sent a text to a Chinese magnate telling him to send him money now because Joe was sitting next to him.
This is a July 30th, 2017 WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to Henry Hsiao.
And, um, the text, as we talked about last week, is insane.
The text says, quote, I am sitting here with my father.
We would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.
Tell the director I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight.
And Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows, and my ability to forever hold a grudge, that you will regret not following my direction.
I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.
Well, that's not good because again, you'll recall that Joe Biden has spent years denying that he knew anything whatsoever about Hunter Biden's business arrangements, which of course was obviously false.
I mean, he was squaring Hunter around on Air Force Two.
Hunter was flying to China with Joe Biden in order to cut these deals in China.
So obviously that was untrue.
Hunter's attorney attempting to cover for Joe says that this has nothing to do with Joe Biden.
Chris Clark, released a statement in which he said that the text was, well, Hunter was addicted to hard drugs.
And so all of the words were solely his own and not connected to President Joe Biden.
Quote, after an extensive five long year investigation conducted by the DOJ concluded this week, it resulted in my client taking responsibility for two instances of misdemeanor failure to file tax payments, as well as a firearm charge, which would be subject to a pretrial diversion agreement.
As an attorney, throughout this entire matter, I can say any suggestion the investigation was not thorough or cut corners or cut my client any slack is preposterous and deeply irresponsible.
What would you imagine Hunter Biden's lawyer is going to say?
So the DOJ investigation covered a period which was a time of turmoil and addiction
for my client.
I do love the fact that there is this beautiful situation for Hunter Biden where he gets to
One, he fills out a form that says he's able to own a gun because he is not addicted to drugs.
This is a gun felony.
He's essentially let off the hook for this because he was on drugs.
Then the drugs are now an excuse for a text that is obviously perfectly legible, makes perfect sense, in which he is invoking his father, the former vice president of the United States, sitting next to him to create a pressure campaign to have $5.1 million wired to him.
But it's all the drugs.
It's all the drugs are a hell of an excuse.
According to his lawyer, however, any verifiable words or actions of my clients in the midst of a horrible addiction are solely his own and have no connection to anyone in his family, which is weird because Joe Biden, we know, was in Delaware at the time in the house with Hunter when all of this was happening.
There are literally pictures contemporaneously of both of them at the house the same day.
Biased and politically motivated selective elites have plagued this matter for years.
They're not only irresponsible, they are illegal.
A close examination of the document released yet publicly yesterday by a very biased individual raises serious questions over whether it is what he claims it to be.
It is dangerously misleading to make any conclusions or inferences based on this document, says Hunter Biden's attorney.
Then the White House put out a statement as well.
Quote, as we have said many times before, the president was not in business with his son.
Wow, that is a shift in language, is it not?
Notice how careful that language is.
The president was not in business with his son.
Wait, hold up.
First you said he knew literally nothing about anything that Hunter was doing with his business.
That's a pretty dramatic shift, is it not?
If I say I know nothing about what goes on at this company, and then I go to, well, I'm not running the company.
That's a fairly dramatic shift.
I mean, that basically says that you were lying before.
You perfectly knew what Hunter was doing.
Now you're just saying that you were not in business.
But even that is vague.
What does it mean to be in business with his son?
Does that mean that they had a formal business arrangement worked out?
Or does it mean that he was just sitting there informally while Hunter was picking up bags of cash?
That is really lawyerly language.
As we have said many times before, the president was not in business with his son.
That's really technical, right?
Like, I'm in business with my business partners.
I'm in business with our advertisers, their contracts.
Am I, like, in business with various friends and family members that I see, like, every single day?
And where we will occasionally, you know, go out and buy dinner?
Or even where we have, like, small business arrangements.
Is that in business with people?
Technically, we would inform an LLC, for example.
If I pay somebody for something on Zelle, are we in business together?
Not clear that that's the case.
As we've also said many times before, the Justice Department makes decisions in its criminal investigations independently.
In this case, the White House has not been involved, says the White House.
As the president has said, he loves his son and is proud of him, accepting responsibility for his actions and is proud of what he is doing to rebuild his life.
Well, originally he said he was proud of him because he's just an amazing person.
Now it's that he's proud that he's rebuilding his life and all of that.
So this broke out into the open when reporters actually shockingly started doing their job on Friday.
So Corinne Jean-Pierre was asked repeatedly over Hunter Biden's text message, and she gets very, very, very angry about it.
Curly wouldn't answer James's question, though.
Are you going to answer the question?
Not a reasonable question to ask when the President of the United States was involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of coercive conversation for business dealings by his son.
Is that something, if he wasn't, then maybe you should tell us.
So here's the thing, and I appreciate the question.
I believe my colleague at the White House Counsel has answered this question already, has dealt with this, has made it very clear.
I just don't have anything to share outside of what my colleagues have shared, and so I would refer you to him and the DOJ.
Just not going to comment from here.
What I can tell you is I know that my colleague has dealt with this.
He addressed this at the White House Council.
I just don't have anything else to share.
I just answered the question.
I just answered the question.
Stephen, Stephen, I just answered the question.
I just said, I just, this isn't, it's not up to you how I answer the question.
Wow.
Wow.
It's a very simple question, and she is avoiding it.
She avoided it, by the way, for solidly four minutes.
And she's not the only one who avoided it, and so did John Kirby, the national security spokesperson.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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Okay, so it wasn't just Karine Jean-Pierre trying to avoid questions about Hunter Biden's Amazingly dispositive texts.
I mean, if those texts are in any way legitimate, that means that not only is Joe Biden lying when he says he didn't know what was going on with the business, he's lying now when he says they weren't in business together.
In any case, James Rosen of Newsmax, a recent guest on the program, he asked John Kirby of the National Security Spokesperson's Office about Hunter's texts, and Kirby gets very, very upset.
A July 2017 WhatsApp message sent by Hunter Biden to Henry Zhao, a Chinese Communist Party official.
Which stated, in its entirety, and I quote, I am sitting here with my father, and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.
Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now, before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight.
And Z, if I get a call or a text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me, and every person he knows, and my ability to forever hold a grudge, that you will regret not following my direction. I am
sitting here waiting for the call with my father." So just a couple of questions about this. First,
does this not undermine the president's claim during the 2020 campaign and the reaffirmations
of that claim by his two press secretaries since then that he never once discussed
his son's overseas business dealings with him? No, and I'm not going to comment further on this.
James, James, let me just, let me save you some, let me save, let me save, let me save
you some breath if you're going to ask about this. I'm,
I am not addressing, I don't, I know you do, more than I'd like you to have.
I am not going to address this issue from this podium.
I'm just not going to do it.
He says there that James Rosen has more breath than he would like him to have, so I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.
Exactly.
Meanwhile, you're apparently not even supposed to ask questions about Hunter Biden, given that Hunter Biden is a routine guest with the president all around the world.
He's literally flying with him on a routine basis at this point.
He showed up at a state dinner the other night with the Indian delegation, and a reporter asked about it, and Kareem Jean-Pierre got very, very mad.
The President invited his son, Hunter, to the state dinner last night.
I'm wondering if you could take us into the thinking and decision-making of why the President decided to invite him.
I'm just not going to get into family discussion, personal family discussion.
As you know, Hunter is his son.
I'm just not going to get into it.
Let me ask you this.
If Hunter Biden wasn't the President's son, would he have invited someone who had just reached a plea agreement with federal prosecutors two days earlier?
Well, a couple of things.
Again, that's his son.
He's a family member.
It is not uncommon for family members to attend.
This is gaslighting in the highest order.
It is not natural for the President of the United States, in the midst of suspicions of corruption, to invite not only Hunter but also his brother James, both of whom are involved in this shakedown routine with foreign sources pouring money into them because they are associated with Joe.
It is not normal to have those people to the White House.
I mean, Hunter, this week, pled guilty to misdemeanor charges and had to take a diversion program to gun charge.
And Joe's got him right there.
So there are only a couple of things that could be going on there.
One is, Joe really does not care what you think.
He does not care.
He is willing to be as overt about all of this, as blatant as possible, because like most politicians, he's stupid enough to believe he'll never get caught.
That's possibility number one.
The other possibility, and again, these are not mutually exclusive, is that Joe is physically dependent on Hunter at this point, which may very well be the case.
I mean, we know that just a few months ago, when Joe was in Ireland, this is back in May, Hunter was sleeping in a cot in Joe's room.
Which suggests that essentially, Hunter is now responsible for his father's physical care.
So you have a situation in which one of the most corrupt, disgusting people in American politics, Hunter Biden, is not only at his father's side, he's providing him direct physical care while there are corruption allegations that are a-brewing about Hunter and Joe.
Is that a good thing?
It's amazing to watch the media immediately shift into defense mode here, by the way.
Here, for example, is MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuaid dismissing this text as absolutely meaningless.
Who cares?
Barbara, the whistleblower testimony, though, is from two IRS agents who say that the DOJ and other government officials improperly interfered in their Hunter Biden investigation, giving Hunter Biden preferential treatment.
There's been a lot of pushback against that.
It was a Trump appointee.
A U.S.
attorney was held over.
It was kept outside of DOJ.
But what do you think about that?
And we have not verified it.
It's based on a WhatsApp.
We don't know the verification of that.
We don't know whether Hunter was exaggerating when he talked to someone, if it was he, if it's authentic, when he said, my father's here with me.
And it was when Joe Biden was not in office, in between the vice presidency and the presidency.
Yes, I read that statement and I find it to be awfully flimsy on which to build any sort of an investigation.
It just simply is some sort of puffery by Barbara Biden.
Okay, can we point out here that an entire Trump-Russia investigation was initiated on the basis of George Papadopoulos, a low-level Trump campaign official, saying a rumored thing to an Australian official abroad?
An entire campaign, a four year long campaign to destroy Donald Trump and his presidency.
That campaign was launched by a single stray comment from George Papadopoulos, not a text from Donald Trump Jr.
Not a text from Donald Trump Jr.
mentioning his father and corruption.
I mean, if you're talking about the pretext for an investigation, this is not flimsy in the way that, say, the Steele dossier was flimsy.
It's a direct text from Hunter Biden implicating his father in corruption.
I don't know how else to put it.
That's what this is.
And yet, they're out in force defending it.
It's amazing.
Nick Kristof has an entire piece of the New York Times titled, The Real Lesson from the Hunter Biden Saga.
What do you think the real lesson is?
I would think the real lesson is, don't let your son trot around the earth as a kept boy, essentially, picking up bags of cash from some of the most nefarious people on the planet while you are still politically involved.
Don't do that.
That would be the good lesson here.
But that's actually not the lesson Nick Kristof is going to put forward.
The lesson he's going to put forward is that Joe Biden is an amazing person.
While the federal investigation appears to be ongoing, for now I see no clear evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden himself.
But the president does offer the country a fine model of the love and support that people with
addictions need. Oh, Joe, oh, just can you see the amazing thing here? I mean, sure. Weird amounts of
money were making their way into the pockets of the entire Biden family, including Joe, like
unexplained sums of cash.
But the real thing here is that Joe just, he demonstrates love for Hunter.
He loves Hunter so much.
By the way, Hunter's illegitimate child, he doesn't love so much.
Hunter actually cut a deal with the stripper that he impregnated with his illegitimate child to never use the Biden last name for the child.
Which, by the way, can you imagine the cruelty of that?
You sire a child and then you say the one thing that would actually create a linkage and maybe the thing you've lived off of your entire life.
Hunter Biden has lived off his daddy's name the entire life.
The Biden family name is the cash in the Biden family.
So what is Hunter Biden's first move after he knocks up a stripper?
His first move is, when that baby is born, I want to strip that baby of the Biden name.
So the Biden name can't be on the birth certificate.
It's like an amazing, amazing thing.
That was cut last week, by the way.
But according to Nick Kristof, it's all because they're just wonderful people.
When Biden was vice president and trailed by Secret Service agents, he once tracked Hunter down when he was on a bender and refused to leave until his son committed to entering treatment.
Biden then gave his son a tight hug and promised to return to make sure he followed through.
Dad saved me, Hunter wrote in his memoir, Beautiful Things, adding, left on my own.
I'm certain I would not have survived.
On another occasion, the Biden family staged an intervention.
Hunter stormed out of the house.
Biden ran down the driveway after his son.
He grabbed me, swung me around, hugged me, Hunter wrote.
He held me tight in the dark and cried for the longest time.
Now, all of that may very well be true, but it's also true that your way of apparently helping your son is to enable him to the tune of millions of dollars using your name.
And apparently, if you believe any of Hunter Biden's text messages, I mean, there's stuff that was found on that laptop in which he openly suggests that he has been providing for the entire Biden family via these payoffs for years.
That should be the takeaway for the American people.
The takeaway for the American people isn't what a nice dad Joe is.
That may very well be true.
But the takeaway for the American people is, Daddy may very well be involved in a serious high-level corruption snafu, completely of his own making, like picking up bags of cash and Hunter using his name overtly with his knowledge.
That's wild.
That, by the way, is not the only allegation that exploded over the weekend.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Friday, That the Hunter Biden prosecutor was not stymied in any way.
The whistleblower, a guy named Gary Shapley of the IRS, had suggested that over and over again, the attorneys were interested in indicting Hunter Biden in a wide variety of cases, including felony cases, and that the AG's offices stepped in and basically stopped it.
Here's Merrick Garland denying.
As I said at the outset, Mr. Weiss, who was appointed by President Trump as the U.S.
Attorney in Delaware and assigned this matter during the previous administration, would be permitted to continue his investigation and to make a decision to prosecute Any way in which he wanted to and in any district in which he wanted to.
Mr. Weiss has since sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee confirming that he had that authority.
I don't know how it would be possible for anybody to block him from bringing a prosecution given that he has this authority.
And he was never told no?
I'm saying he was given complete authority to make all decisions on his own.
Well, this was responded to by Gary Shapley.
His attorney put out a letter saying, quote, in October 7th, 2022 meeting at the Delaware US Attorney's Office, US
Attorney David Weiss told six witnesses he did not have authority to
charge in other districts and had thus requested special counsel status.
Those six witnesses include Baltimore FBI Special Agent in Charge Tom Sabacinski, Assistant Special Agent in Charge
Raisha Hawley, IRS Assistant Special Agent in Charge Gary Shapley, Special Agent in Charge Darrell Weldon, who also
independently and contemporaneously corroborated Mr. Shapley's account in an email, now public as Exhibit 10,
following page 148 of his testimony transcript.
Mr. Shapley would have no insight into why Mr. Weiss would make these statements at the October 7, 2022 meeting if they were false.
That Mr. White made these statements is easily corroborated.
It is up to him and the DOJ to reconcile the evidence of his October 7, 2022 statements with contrary statements by Weiss and the AG to Congress.
So in other words, either Garland lied or Weiss was lying to his own people when he said he sought special counsel status and then was rejected by the AG.
This is not going away.
And Corinne Jean-Pierre yelling at reporters is not going to make any of it go away.
What will be fascinating to see is if reporters demonstrate an ounce of the curiosity they did for just a moment in time on Friday.
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Okay, meanwhile.
So the Democrats have won some pretty heady victories in the abortion arena since the overthrow of Roe v. Wade.
Republicans have won some victories in very red states, but there have been states like Kansas that enshrined abortion into the Constitution.
Michigan enshrined abortion in their Constitution as a reaction to the snapback law that took place in Kansas or in Michigan.
These snapback laws, as a matter of public policy, were a bad political move.
Not because they don't achieve something that I think is totally worthwhile, which is the protection of all human life from conception onward, but because they are not calibrated to actually achieve long-standing victory.
Instead, what you end up with is a snapback law that goes into place and bans all the abortion in, say, Kansas, and then the left immediately jumps into the fray and passes a constitutional amendment In reaction to that, when what would have been better off is steadily and slowly pushing back the deadline for abortion from 12 weeks to 10 weeks to eight weeks to six weeks.
Because there have been plenty of states that have done that successfully, including Georgia and now Florida as well.
Well, Democrats are very excited about talking Roe versus Wade because they think it means they don't have to talk about generally mutilating kids.
So in the one year anniversary, they trotted out Kamala Harris, the world's least charming and talented politician, in order to explain what's so important about the overthrow of Roe versus Wade.
So that day, the day that the Supreme Court took a constitutional right from the women of America, I was outraged.
In fact, the first person I called was my husband, because I could just let it all out with him.
And my first thoughts really were about our daughter, my niece, my baby nieces, my goddaughters, and what this all might mean.
And for our daughter, she is going to know fewer constitutional rights than my mother-in-law.
And so I think we all, at that moment, understood how dire it would be.
One year later, the majority of Americans are with us.
From so-called red states to blue states, from Kentucky to California, when this issue was on the ballot in the midterms, the people voted in favor of allowing Women to have the choice about what happens to their body.
So going forward, let's not throw up our hands.
Let's roll up our sleeves.
President Biden and I will not stop fighting.
Okay, so this is what they're going to try to run on come 2024.
Now, the Republican response has been to set forth what appeared to be pretty popular abortion restrictions.
So Mike Pence, who's the most pro-life of the candidates running, at least in terms of his rhetoric, he's called for a federal 15-week abortion ban.
That is going to be fairly plausible.
Most Americans are perfectly fine with banning abortion at 15 weeks, including in blue states, by the way.
So, the actual sort of, if you took the average American view of abortion, the average American view of abortion is something like, everything beyond 12 weeks should be banned, everything before 12 weeks, conditioned.
Right?
That really is sort of the average American view now.
The average doesn't make any sense because you have wildly disparate views ranging from mine saying that abortion is a form of killing from the point of conception all the way up to the far left view that abortion should be allowed all the way through point of birth and maybe beyond.
So that spectrum of opinion, you can't really average it because people have discrete opinions within that entire broad spectrum.
However, Democrats are going to run on the idea that Republicans want to ban all abortions nationally.
There's not a single Republican candidate who has posited that abortion on a national level can be banned.
Even Mike Pence, again, very pro-life.
He is proposing what I think is a smart policy, a 15-week abortion ban on the national, federal level.
And he's doing that because he knows that's acceptable to the broad range of the American public.
And when asked about it, what he'll say is, I'm in favor of protecting life from the very outset, but the American people can agree on 15 weeks.
And at the state level, there are going to be states that go way beyond that.
That is a perfectly appropriate position for Republicans.
State Republicans are going to have to figure out what line they take on the national level on this, because Democrats are going to run hard into the teeth of the abortion debate.
It's something they love.
That is when they're not attempting to undermine the Supreme Court entirely.
This is their latest big mission.
They've been trying to undermine the Supreme Court by first going after Clarence Thomas with false charges that he was essentially being bribed by a guy named Harlan Crow because he was friends with him to change his opinion in case it was a lie.
Then they tried to claim that Samuel Alito was being bribed by Paul Singer or something and that is a bunch of nonsense.
Now they're attempting to claim That actually Amy Coney Barrett is corrupt because she sold her house after she won her spot on the Supreme Court.
She sold her home to a recently hired Notre Dame professor who's assuming a leadership role at the Religious Liberty Initiative.
She, a Notre Dame professor, sold her house to another Notre Dame professor.
And this apparently was considered super, super bad by the left.
They're attempting to undermine the credibility of the Supreme Court as a whole as an electoral tool.
Whenever you hear the left talk about how it's the right that's undermining institutions, understand the left does not care about institutions unless it can weaponize those institutions for its own game.
They have no actual interest in preserving the credibility of institutions at all.
These are just tools they can wield at their disposal or destroy if need be.
Alrighty, in just a second, we'll get to some things I like and some things I hate first.
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Alrighty, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So things that I like today.
What's really funny right now is watching as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle just flame out.
It's really, really entertaining.
So they've been basically booted from Spotify because it turns out that they were a hoax and they had nothing to provide to the audience whatsoever other than sort of woke grievance mongering.
Well, now people are speaking out about how useless they were.
The Wall Street Journal has a long piece titled, Harry and Meghan produce a Hollywood flop themselves.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle had been out of the UK for nearly two years when they began work on a project they believed could transform them from former royals to Hollywood power players.
The subject of endless rumors and gossip, the couple felt qualified to tackle the thorny topic of misinformation.
Oh, these woke idiots.
Misinformation.
Misinformation from Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.
Meghan Markle claimed she'd never heard of Prince Harry when she started dating him.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
A documentary would cement Harry and Meghan as serious creative types and help shed their reputation as exiles from the House of Windsor trading family dirt for eyeballs.
A team assembled to the job at the pair's LA-based production company, Archwell, had questions for H&M as the Sussexes are known to their employees.
Would the misinformation project be a feature film or a series?
Who would host it?
Would it be historical or contemporary?
Would Harry or Meghan appear in it?
Would Meghan discuss her bitter history with the British tabloids?
And if not, who would want to watch?
The couple had few answers.
According to people familiar with the inner workings of Arshwell and Harry and Meghan's deal with streamers, the misinformation documentary soon met the fate of other Arshwell projects and faded away.
Well, yeah, because their basic idea was what if we just say slogans, right?
What if we just go to the In This House We lawn sign and just read the slogans but do it on film?
After all, this is what they've been rewarded for their entire life.
So why the hell not?
If you just nailed the woke nostrums, why couldn't that be a 90-minute documentary?
And they're like, well, guys, there's no market for that.
Like, well, we don't really have anything else.
Prince Harry and Meghan's Hollywood foray is looking like a flop.
They arrived in SoCal three years ago with Duke and Duchess titles and plans to capitalize on a cash-rich streaming business desperate for star power to lure subscribers.
They got a $100 million deal at Netflix.
They got a $20 million deal at Spotify.
They have led to more cancellations and rejections than actual produced shows.
So Prince Harry's memoir Spare became a bestseller, and then they had their garbage six-part documentary talking about how terrible their life is, and that was at least somewhat popular.
But then, they had a graveyard of projects, including an animated children's show called Pearl, canceled by Netflix, as well as at least two TV ideas that the streaming service rejected within the past year, people familiar with their project said.
Netflix is unlikely to renew the couple's deal, which runs through 2025.
The Spotify pact, meanwhile, produced a podcast, Archetypes, about these stereotypes that hold women back.
A second season was discussed, but eventually nixed.
And Bill Simmons points out that, like, behind closed doors, it was even more of a bleep show than it was publicly.
People who have worked with the pair say their Sussex-upon-sunset outpost was undermined by their inexperience as producer and trouble finding material consistent with their brand.
Well, I mean, that shouldn't be too hard.
Finding woke winers to create material?
That's like all of Hollywood.
But they say that the real problem is that they have no talent.
That would be the real problem.
When they struck deals with Netflix and Spotify in 2020, streaming services were booming.
Executives were rushing to secure content and feed consumer demand at any cost.
The Sussexes joined Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai, and others who fielded offers in Hollywood with few guidelines on what would come next.
And then it turns out that nope, it just completely fell apart.
The article goes on and on about their failures of projects, but basically, they had no plans.
Now, the Obamas have a similar deal.
The American form of royalty, Barack and Michelle Obama, they also have deals at Netflix and Spotify.
They have made movies like Leave the World Behind starring Julia Roberts, which I know you know, I know you saw it.
Oh wait, you didn't see it?
Because no one's heard of it.
Also, Kevin Hart's Fatherhood and a child-oriented show, Waffles and Mokie, and documentaries including American Factory.
Has anyone watched any of these things?
Like, are these things even out yet?
No one knows.
But the Obamas are not allowed to fail.
We don't care if Harry and Meghan fail.
So we will allow them to fail.
So what happens next for them?
Well, they're pretty screwed.
Because they've basically exiled themselves from their family.
They no longer have any dirt to spill.
And their first animated show was supposed to be about powerful women of history called Pearl.
It was created with the help of David Furnish, who knew the royal family through his husband, Elton John.
When the couple left the palace and signed the Netflix deal, Pearl was the first show announced, and then Netflix canceled it.
Executives decided no one would care if the show they were watching had been produced by a duchess.
So Harry and Meghan have burned it out, so not to be cynical, but look for the divorce proceeding sometime in the fairly near future.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Hey, so we spoke about President Obama a little bit earlier, and he's having a lot of fun being a celebrity and making tens of millions of dollars for hanging out with his friends over at Netflix.
We did a sit-down interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour in Greece.
Where he said he doesn't like the obscene inequality in the coverage of the missing Titanic sub, as opposed to the sinking of a migrant ship off the coast of Greece last week.
Now, I also pointed out, obviously, that there has been a discrepancy in coverage.
But I do not think that it is because of the so-called wealth gap that this is happening.
I think it's generally because we tend to follow whatever is sort of the shiny object of the day.
And it turns out that there's something fascinating about the horror story that happened last week.
But Barack Obama says, no, this is about income inequality.
It's about the poor.
It's about us ignoring the poor, he said from his palatial estate in Martha's Vineyard.
Now we have 24 hour coverage.
And I understand it, of this submarine, this submersible, that tragically is right now lost at the bottom of the sea.
At the same time, right here, just off the coast of Greece, we had 700 people dead, 700 migrants who were apparently being smuggled into here.
It's made news, but it's not dominating in the same way.
And in some ways it's indicative of the degree to which people's life chances have grown so disparate.
It's very hard to sustain a democracy when you have such massive concentrations of wealth.
Oh, communism is the answer to this.
If only we were communists and we distributed all the income, he said, from, um, from his, atop his giant pile of cash earned from making crap movies for Netflix that nobody has ever watched.
Barack Obama complaining about the gap between the elites and everybody else is really, really rich.
It's really rich.
I mean, literally rich.
That dude is wealthy.
And that dude is way wealthier than he was when he went into the White House.
There's something deeply perverse about becoming rich by becoming a politician.
Like, really perverse about it.
Barack Obama's net worth right now is, uh, what?
Let's check it out.
His net worth is, according to best estimates including Business Insider, $70 million.
Barack Obama.
Barack Obama's net worth in 2006, which is just about before he started his presidential run, was $799,000.
So just to be clear, he went from a net worth of $800,000 in 2006 to a net worth of $70 million in 2023, based solely on his access to political power and the media making him a star, and now he's complaining about income inequality.
Oh, it's so tiresome.
You know, he could give that money to charity right now.
He could.
He could go back to living the lifestyle of the less rich and less famous than he lived before, but he's kind of enjoying it, isn't he?
Alrighty, folks.
Coming up, we're going to get into the vaunted Ben Shapiro show at Mailbag, so stick around for that.
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