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Aug. 11, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:31
Biden Bribes The Iranian Ayatollahs
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So, Joe Biden has found a new group of people to bribe.
So this is now, I guess, how we do business.
If you have a WNBA player, who is not really famous because, you know, she's a WNBA player, who goes to Russia and brings with her drugs.
And then she gets arrested and she is stuck in jail.
Yes, unjustly.
We're like, what could we trade to get her back?
And the answer is the merchant of death, which again, bad trade.
Like White Sox GM level trading right there.
Like merchant to death for Britney Griner.
Well, now we have a similar type of trade.
Iran apparently has released from prison five Americans, but has placed them under house arrest and actually being fully released and not being sent back to the United States.
They're just under house arrest in Tehran, which sounds like a real party.
It's like being stuck in a house in Tehran.
What exactly do we have to do to get them out of jail and into house arrest, which again is like its own sort of prison, in Tehran?
All we had to do was give them access to six billion dollars in oil revenue for quote-unquote humanitarian purposes.
By humanitarian purposes, Iran means, you know, terrorism and nuclear development.
A statement from the National Security Council spokesperson Adrian Watson says, quote, We have received confirmation that Iran has released from prison five Americans who were unjustly detained and has placed them on house arrest.
While this is an encouraging step, these U.S.
citizens, Sayemak Namazi, Murad Tabaz, Ahmed Shargi, and two Americans who at this time wished to remain private, should never have been detained in the first place.
We will continue to monitor their condition as closely as possible.
Of course, we will not rest until they are all back home in the United States.
Until that time, negotiations for their eventual release remain ongoing and are delicate.
We will therefore have little in the way of details to provide about the state of their house arrest or about our efforts to secure their freedom.
So, just to do the math for you, for those who aren't that good at math, that is 1.2 billion dollars per hostage.
So, you think maybe Iran is going to think about taking some hostages in the future?
How about Russia?
So far, the trading strategy here appears to be like Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees from the Boston Red Sox level of trading strategy here.
This is egregious.
It's egregious.
Iran is a terror state.
We just gave them $6 billion.
Now, to be fair, at least it wasn't, you know, $150 billion on the upper end or $50 billion on the lower end of cash in pallets sent to Iran when Barack Obama was president basically to cut a crappy nuclear deal so that he could have a legacy in the Middle East.
And again, to be fair, he wasn't trading Taliban terrorists for Bo Bergdahl, a deserter.
That ain't good.
I mean, if you wish to incentivize terrorist states to take American hostages, very difficult to think of a better way to do that than by giving 1.2 billion with a B dollars to get these people released from jail to house arrest in Tehran.
What, is it going to take another billion and a half bucks to get them released from house arrest back to the United States?
Or is this the precursor to the long-awaited Biden move toward an Iran deal?
Is Joe Biden going to use this as the predicate to argue that now relations are actually warming, they are thawing with the Iranian Ayatollahs?
We should remember at this point that the Iranians are directly responsible for hundreds of American deaths in Iraq.
It was Iranian-backed force that killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq.
Iran is the most nefarious force in the Middle East.
Whether we're talking about backing the Houthis in Yemen, whether we're talking about backing Hezbollah, a mass terrorist group in Lebanon, which could lead to a war between Israel and Lebanon in the very, very near future.
Whether we're talking about Iran backing Hamas and shipping them rockets.
Iran backing Syria.
Every bad thing happening in the Middle East right now can be laid basically at the doorstep of the Iranians.
So the thing you don't want to do is give them access to billions of dollars in capital.
So Joe Biden gave them access to billions of dollars in capital, which Again, that dude, not good at the presidenting.
Listen, trying to get American hostages out of terrible regimes is a great thing to do, but 1.2 billion dollars a person?
That is not the correct price.
It turns out that actually, sticks can be very effective as well.
Not just carrots, but the Biden administration has offered no such stick in the past.
I mean, the Reagan administration was able to free the Iranian hostages by basically being incredibly threatening toward the Iranian regime.
It turns out a fantastic way to incentivize people to take hostages is to pay them billions of dollars for hostages.
Is this going to be the predicate to an even warmer move by Joe Biden toward an Iran deal?
So we should remember at this point.
That Joe Biden, his chief negotiator with regard to Iran was a man named Robert Malley.
Robert Malley was recently removed in terms of his security clearance.
His security clearance was literally removed because he was suspected of trafficking in classified information.
Robert Malley has been a longtime critic of the state of Israel.
He's been a longtime peacenik with regard to the Iranian Ayatollahs.
It goes all the way back to the Obama administration.
Robert Malley is one of Obama's guys.
Malley, just last month, He had his security clearance removed, leading a group of Republican senators to urge the State Department's internal watchdog to investigate the suspension of Malley's security clearance, ratcheting up scrutiny of the administration's handling of the incident.
Malley was Joe Biden's top Iran envoy, and he was helming the administration's efforts to restore a nuclear deal with Iran when his security clearance was quietly suspended sometime this spring.
He was then put on unpaid leave in late June, following media reports that his clearance had been suspended.
This administration bends over so far backward to try and draw some sort of Iran deal up that now they are sending negotiators who can't even get security clearance, and they are clearing billions of dollars in cash to the Ayatollahs.
Simultaneously, they're attempting to force the state of Israel to make concessions to Iranian-backed terror groups like, for example, Hamas.
The latest attempt by Joe Biden to draw peace in the Middle East is a supposed Saudi-Israeli normalization deal.
Now, the Saudis are perfectly willing to normalize relations with Israel.
They've been wanting to do so since the Trump administration.
That's the reason why the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, all these countries that have very friendly relations with the Saudis have normalized relations with the Israelis already.
Saudi clearly wanted to do that.
I've seen public officials from Saudi Arabia directly talk about this.
What was the holdup?
The holdup is that Joe Biden basically pressures on the Saudis not to do it unless Israel made concessions to the Palestinians.
The Palestinians happen to be governed by terror groups.
The Palestinian Authority is a longtime terror group.
Islamic Jihad is an actual terror group.
Hamas is clearly a terror group backed by Iran.
Right now, Joe Biden's game with regard to the Saudis and the Israelis is to try to box Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, in by essentially offering the carrot of a Saudi peace deal and the stick that the Saudi peace deal will be removed unless Bibi Netanyahu makes overt concessions to a group of people who are likely to use all of those concessions as launching pads for terrorism.
According to Axios, Prime Minister Netanyahu is seeking a security agreement with the United States focused on deterring Iran in the context of that mega deal that the Biden administration is trying to reach with Saudi Arabia and Israel.
A formal agreement would give the U.S.
security guarantees to Israel at a time when Iran continues to advance its nuclear program.
But presumably, the thaw with Iran is just another way of attempting to pressure Bibi into taking some sort of deal with the Saudis that would amount to concessions to the Palestinians.
Now again, the Saudis don't care about that.
Realistically speaking, this idea that the Saudis are like desperately involved in Palestinian peace negotiations is nonsense.
They don't care.
The reality is that economics trumps everything right now in the Middle East because all of these kingdoms are dependent on prosperity for their people.
These are not democracies.
They do not have the democratic support of their people.
The reason that they get to stay in power is because they enrich their people through economic growth.
If the economic growth collapses, they also collapse.
They have a strong interest in creating economic ties with the strongest economic power in the region, which actually is Israel.
It's Biden that's standing in the way of all of that.
So we'll see how all of this develops and we'll keep an eye on it, obviously.
Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the latest developments in the Hunter Biden case, where the House Oversight Committee is preparing to issue subpoenas to both Hunter and Joe first.
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Okay, so meanwhile, we have the House Oversight and Accountability Committee now announcing that they are going to subpoena the Biden family.
Here is James Comer, Republican of Kentucky and the head of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, who said this today.
Are you going to subpoena Hunter Biden?
They had Don Jr.
under oath during the Trump administration, and they asked him all sorts of questions about what we understood at the end of the day to be a lie about Russia collusion.
Yeah, this is always going to end with the Bidens coming in front of the committee.
We are going to subpoena the family.
I mean, we're putting the case together to win in court.
Obviously, with all the opposition and obstruction we're getting from the Biden attorneys now, we know that this is going to end up in court when we subpoena the Bidens.
So we're putting together a case, and I think we've done that very well.
Now, will they actually pay attention to the subpoena?
Probably not.
I mean, there are a bunch of people who have not in the past.
Obviously, Steve Bannon didn't pay attention to a subpoena.
He ended up in contempt.
Eric Holder, when he was Attorney General, didn't pay attention to a subpoena.
He ended up in contempt.
Now, being held in contempt by Congress at this point has very little consequence, but the fact that the House Oversight and Accountability Committee is now attempting to actually subpoena the Bidens means that this is getting more and more serious.
Comer says, we want to talk to three or four more associates first.
We've been communicating with a couple of them.
He says we're trying to bring them in like we did Devin Archer for Transcribed Interview.
If they don't come in voluntarily, they will, in fact, be subpoenaed.
He said it'll be very difficult to get information from Joe Biden through subpoenas because, of course, anytime you try to subpoena the President of the United States, the President tends to ignore all of that.
But Comer correctly points out, the thing that I've been pointing out for literally a couple of years at this point, Since the Hunter Biden laptop, the single most damning piece of information that we have with regard to how the money flowed in the Biden White House and with regard to Joe Biden as Vice President, Hunter Biden, all the rest of this, the single most damning piece of evidence is a text message sent from Hunter Biden to his daughter talking about how he paid half of his dad's bills.
Now, here's the thing.
Hunter and Joe could have commingled funds very easily.
Basically, Joe's defense here is that the money didn't formally enter my personal bank account, but if I pay for dinner with my father, Then he benefits.
And that happens, like, all the time.
I go out to dinner with my dad, and I'll pay for dinner.
So he benefits from my income.
Well, if Hunter is basically signing checks for all of Joe's expenses, obviously he benefited.
Here is James Comer saying that, um, the most damning piece of information is Hunter literally saying that he pays Joe's bills.
Why are they blocking us from more bank record, Rob?
If the president's done nothing wrong, then they should allow us to see their personal bank record.
I mean, you've seen the emails that showed that Hunter Biden was complaining to his daughter that he had to give half of his income to his father.
That's pretty damning evidence.
When his income, 100%, came from our adversaries around the world for influence peddling, for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
So, you know, he is right about all of that, obviously.
And the juxtaposition between the DOJ basically attempting to cut a sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden and the DOJ simultaneously going after President Trump is going to have some pretty major ramifications for the 2024 race.
Representative Dan Musa, Republican of Pennsylvania, he points out the juxtaposition and how awkward it is for the Biden administration.
How do you see that in terms of this coincidence that something happens in terms of evidence coming out on Hunter Biden the next day, another attack on Donald Trump?
I think it's pretty obvious.
And the American people, I think, are waking up to it.
I mean, doing everything they can to suppress their own malfeance activities and hide their own accounts and to desperately try to keep the Biden family out of jail.
Meanwhile, they're completely focused on indicting that their number one opponent in a political Okay, well, he is right about that.
He also points out, of course, that Joe Biden has lied repeatedly during this entire debacle.
I mean, Joe Biden literally said that Hunter received no Chinese money.
He said that in an open debate in 2020, he said that he never benefited.
He said that Hunter really never benefited from even using his name.
He said he had nothing to do with Hunter's business.
All of these things were untrue.
Here is Representative Muser pointing out that Joe Biden is a liar.
But first, let's talk about these new findings from the House Oversight Committee.
How do you see all of this?
Well, it's pretty ugly.
It's pretty clear that Joe Biden lied.
And why did he lie?
Because he knew the business that was taking place.
He knew a lot about the business.
I mean, he informed his son that he was in the clear.
In the clear for what, Joe?
And why were you lying?
Because you, without pronouncing it, I mean, you must have known that there were some shady dealings taking place.
Okay, well, here is the thing.
The White House is immediately retreating to its final position in their Mott and Bailey argument.
Their Mott was, Joe Biden knows nothing about any of the businesses, and their Bailey is, you know, the thing they retreat to is, Joe Biden's just such a wonderful father, and they can't actually show that the money flowed directly to Joe.
Here is the White House spokesperson for Oversight and Investigations, Ian Samskel.
Comer and his fellow extreme Republicans in Congress are now admitting they haven't uncovered any proof of involvement or wrongdoing by President Biden.
Well, I mean, they proved involvement.
Devin Archer literally testified to it.
They simply will continue to spread innuendo and lies as they pursue a baseless impeachment stunt to attack the president.
Well, I'm sorry to break it to you guys.
You opened this door.
It was you.
It was you.
You impeached President Trump, not once, but twice.
And you did so largely on the predicate that Donald Trump was a Russian agent, which was all innuendo and lies.
It was not true.
It was completely baseless.
You made his entire presidency about a giant lie pursued by the Mueller investigation.
And you trotted out congressperson after congressperson to say that the smoking gun was just behind the next door.
And it wasn't.
So congratulations.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
I said it at the time, as soon as they impeached Trump the first time.
Every president from here on out is likely to be impeached.
As long as the House is of the opposing party, it is very likely that person is going to be impeached.
Now, in this case, it may well be deserved.
But even if it weren't, it doesn't matter because this is the way this is going to go.
Now, here's the thing.
If Joe Biden really starts to go down for this, if the evidence continues to mount, it's not too late for Democrats to get out.
That remains a very real possibility.
Elizabeth Warren is starting to show a little bit of a crack in the dam.
She's the senator from Massachusetts who used to have presidential aspirations of her own, and then it turned out she wasn't Native American.
Well, now Elizabeth Warren says she is worried about influence peddlers on all sides, which is an interesting answer.
People close to Joe Biden, or people close to Donald Trump, but I'm talking about Joe Biden, making tens of millions of dollars because of their closeness to him.
That can't be something that you like.
That can't be something that you're comfortable with as a phenomena.
Look, I always worry about the influence peddlers in Washington, regardless of party affiliation.
One of the things, as you know, I've spent a lot of my time in Congress working on is how we bring just more ethics and more oversight in general to everything that we do in government.
Look, we've got a United States Supreme Court.
Where people take gifts and don't even report them, even though the law requires them to report.
Yeah, we'll get to that in just a second, because the Democrats are now swiveling to Clark Clarence Thomas.
This is the way that this whole stupid game works.
So there she's starting to show a little bit of discomfort with defending Joe Biden.
As I say, if things start to get real bad for Joe, they could throw the old man overboard.
And unfortunately, he can't swim.
They don't care, but they're going to swivel over to Clarence Thomas.
That is their next predictable move.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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Meanwhile, the Democrats are attempting to swivel the corruption talk over to Clarence Thomas.
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Okay, meanwhile, the Democrats are attempting to swivel the corruption talk over to Clarence
Thomas. So ProPublica has basically been putting out ridiculous hit piece after ridiculous hit
piece about Clarence Thomas, the suggestion being that he is some sort of corrupt politician.
Clarence Thomas has a lot of friends who are very rich.
They take him on vacation.
Okay, now I've just got to point out here, this is not rare at all.
Like, it really is not rare.
People go on junkets all the time.
Unless there is some sort of connection that can be shown between the people who are basically taking Clarence Thomas on vacations with them, or letting him use their beach house, and an actual case of controversy in front of Clarence Thomas, this is not a corruption problem.
That's not the way this works.
See, here's the thing.
When Joe Biden was Vice President of the United States, he was presiding over Ukraine policy.
Hunter Biden was put on the board of a Ukrainian company.
You can see the nexus.
Okay, when Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, he had influence on China policy.
Certainly the Chinese thought so, which is presumably why they were wooing Hunter Biden.
You can see the nexus.
If, however, there is a Supreme Court justice And he has a rich friend, and his rich friend says, would you like to spend the night on my boat?
And the Supreme Court Justice goes and spends the night on the boat.
And the rich friend has no business before the court, never has had any business before the court, will not have any business before the court.
Where exactly is the corruption as opposed to, you know, somebody just going on vacation with a friend?
Well, ProPublica is not making that distinction.
They have an entire article today talking about how Clarence Thomas had 38 vacations Wow, 38.
Well, that sounds, you know, wild, except for we are talking over the course of 30 years.
Sounds like a vacation per year.
During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine.
Well, yeah, he's a Supreme Court Justice.
I mean, name a poor Supreme Court Justice.
Quick, go.
A cadre of industry titans and ultra-wealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into premium suites at sporting events, and sent their private jets to fetch him, including on more than one occasion in his hire, 737.
Okay, I'm just going to point out that as a person who traffics in economically elite circles, this sort of stuff is not uncommon.
Like, at all.
I've spent time in luxury sports suites, and I'm not a Supreme Court Justice.
I've traveled on private jets, and I'm not a Supreme Court Justice.
And unless they can prove some sort of actual corruption, even allege some actual corruption here, Clarence Thomas going to a sports game with a rich friend does not amount to corruption.
Like clockwork, Thomas's leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence.
Wait, you mean that his friends agree with him on politics?
That's crazy!
Hell, no.
Be still my beating heart, ProPublica.
But this, of course, is being used as an excuse to try and get rid of Clarence Thomas.
Because Clarence Thomas is the most influential justice of my lifetime.
He has been incredibly influential in a wide variety of ways.
It was Scalia, up until Scalia's untimely death, obviously.
But they're really just angry at Clarence Thomas because he's a conservative black man, and that you're not allowed to be.
An originalist black man on the Supreme Court, not allowed to do this.
The real animus here is about his politics, which is why a Supreme Court analyst for CNN, Joan Biskupic, is talking about Clarence Thomas controlling our lives, which is weird since he's one of nine justices.
Whose dime are they on?
Remember, they work for us.
The best part of being a Supreme Court Justice is they set the law of the land for all of us.
Clarence Thomas was one of only five votes that rolled back Roe v. Wade.
Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion expanding the Second Amendment and gun rights.
Clarence Thomas is controlling so much of our lives.
I think he should answer to the American public.
Okay, um, by answer to the American public, you can try impeaching him anytime you want.
You're just gonna have to find some actual criminal grounds, which you don't have at all.
But none of that matters.
Again, the way that this works is when Democrats go after a political opponent, you don't need an excuse.
You just do it.
When Republicans go after a political opponent, even if there is good evidence that the person is corrupt, we pretend it's not happening.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, so.
Speaking of corruption that we're all going to ignore, apparently it's just okay now that the January 6th committee deleted all of its records.
Like, what the hell?
Is there any institution in America at this point that is not utterly incompetent and or corrupt?
According to Fox News, the House Select Committee that investigated the Capitol riot on January 6th failed to adequately preserve documents, data, and video depositions, including communications it had with the Biden White House that are still missing, according to the Republican lawmaker overseeing the GOP investigation into the committee's work.
This is nuts.
Okay, the J6 committee, the most highly touted congressional committee since the 9-11 commission.
This committee deleted all of its records.
Now, normally that wouldn't make a huge difference because presumably there are other records of, for example, the footage, right?
The police have...
That sort of footage.
The Senate has that sort of footage.
However, how about the communications with the White House?
What sort of coordination, political coordination, was going on between the J6 committee and the Biden White House?
What sort of political considerations were going into the questioning that was happening?
How much was the White House running the show?
The now disbanded J6 committee, which was run by Democrats and included only two GOP members, has also failed to provide any evidence.
It looked into Capitol Hill security failures the day of the riot, according to Representative Barry Loudermilk, Republican of Georgia.
He's chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight for the Committee on House Administration.
Loudermilk said his staff has had difficulty gathering all the information it needs to investigate Representative Bennie Thompson's handling of that J6 investigation.
He says, part of our task as this oversight subcommittee is to actually address the security failures.
Look into how did it happen?
How are these people able to get into the Capitol?
He said the documents they obtained came over in boxes, completely unorganized, no table of contents index, nothing of an index at all.
He says, and then we realized that there is really nothing there from the blue team at all.
That's the group within the J6 committee that was directed to investigate security failures at the Capitol.
So they ignored the actual part that would have mattered about J6 in terms of preventing a future J6.
Namely, why was there like zero cops at the Capitol building on a day where everyone knew that things were going to get ugly?
That's a real question.
Where were the security plans?
Why was it that a few hundred rioters could storm what should be one of the most secure buildings on the face of the earth on a day when the election for the president was being certified?
It still beggars the imagination.
I put aside whatever the evils of people breaking into the building were, and those were substantial if you're attacking cops, obviously.
But, like, why were there seven cops?
Where were Capitol Police?
Where was everyone?
Like, this is the thing Congress should be investigating, and apparently they didn't even bother.
According to Loudermilk.
He said the blue team was essentially shut down by the committee in order to focus on placing blame on Trump.
He said we've got lots of depositions, we've got lots of subpoenas, we've got video, other documents provided through subpoenas by individuals.
We're not seeing anything from the blue team as far as reports on the investigation they did looking into the actual breach itself.
We also didn't have any videos of all the depositions.
That's an amazing, amazing thing.
So they destroyed, presumably, whatever records they had or they're just not turning any of that stuff over there.
Loudermilk said he came across a letter that was not turned over to his committee from Thompson to White House Special Counsel Richard Sauber and the DHS discussing an agreement made between the J6 committee and the executive branch to interview personnel whose names were later redacted.
So, apparently the J6 committee knew certain staffers at the White House and those staffers testified and then they just refused to turn any of that stuff over.
So this is really dicey sort of stuff.
If you're a fan of transparency, you should be pretty upset about all of this.
President Trump, for his part, was upset about all this.
Here was President Trump today about it.
I totally dispute that election.
I think it's ridiculous what happened.
And that they allowed that to happen.
And that the media doesn't want anybody to talk about it.
But now we can.
And we did something yesterday.
You know, now that we have the subpoena power, because we now have subpoena power, all of a sudden the J6 committee, the unselects I call them, everything was deleted and destroyed.
The documents.
Everything was deleted and destroyed.
That's a criminal act.
It is insane.
It is a really, really crazy thing.
For sure.
For sure.
Okay, meanwhile, we are now learning that the prosecution, Jack Smith, going up against Donald Trump, actually sought and obtained a search warrant for Donald Trump's Twitter account.
What they wanted were drafts of his tweets, apparently.
According to Politico, Jack Smith did obtain a search warrant for Trump's Twitter account earlier this year.
Twitter's initial resistance to complying with the January 17th warrant resulted in a federal judge holding the company in contempt and levying a $350,000 fine.
A federal court of appeals upheld that fine last month in a sealed opinion.
On Wednesday, the court unsealed a redacted version of that opinion, revealing details of the secret court battle for the first time.
What exactly was Smith seeking from Trump's account?
Apparently, he was looking for drafts of the tweets.
Obtaining data from Twitter might have revealed patterns about Trump's use of the account, whether others had access to it, and whether there were any draft statements that were unsent.
Now, that's really weird, right?
I mean, like, what would be in the draft statements that would be of relevance to Jack Smith?
Like, Trump was going to send a draft saying, I know the election was lost by me, but riot anyway.
Like, that was going to be in the draft statements or something?
By the way, the fact that he didn't send it would be a pretty quick and obvious defense to anything that might be found in the drafts anyway.
Twitter complained that the order violated the First Amendment.
The U.S.
District Court judge said no and forced Twitter to turn over the records.
By the way, one of the things about this particular attempt to obtain Trump's Twitter records is that one of the federal judges who was overseeing the prosecution apparently suggested in a footnote that they had reason to believe that Trump would, quote, flee from prosecution So the same district court judge was saying they need to check his Twitter account was also saying that they thought that Trump might actually abscond, like leave, like free, he's one of, he is literally the most famous person on the planet.
Where would he flee to?
What evidence could you suggest that would suggest that Donald Trump is going to flee prosecution here?
I mean, again, more and more, this case looks like just a kangaroo court.
It's really absurd.
Meanwhile, you have members of the media who are very excited about the fact that Donald Trump's Twitter history is going to be searched, including his drafts.
Here is a reporter from Reuters, Jeff Mason, saying there's got to be tons there in Trump's Twitter drafts.
There are a lot more things that could be in those records that we wouldn't see publicly.
Drafts, and I know from my reporting covering him the entire time he was in the White House, they would draft tweets, he would say tweets, he would give tweet ideas to his staff and they would put them together.
So there's got to be a wealth of knowledge there alone.
There are direct messages, a bunch of stuff like that that could be useful.
Okay, well, just because you think a thing is useful, maybe.
That's called a fishing expedition, and it's pretty absurd that it's come this far.
Meanwhile, President Trump is not going to participate in the first debate, you would imagine.
He says he's not going to sign any sort of RNC loyalty pledge ahead of the first debate.
The RNC has said that everyone does have to sign a pledge that they will vote for whoever the Republican candidate is and support that Republican candidate.
Trump said, I'm not signing the pledge.
Why would I sign a pledge if there are people on there I wouldn't have?
He told Eric Bolling he could name three or four of the GOP challengers he would not support for president.
And he specifically criticized Chris Christie, which you can see, and Asa Hutchinson.
And then he added, of course, Ron DeSantis, because that's the way this dumb nonsense works.
But bottom line is that the idea that he was ever going to participate in the debate, I think, is foolhardy.
He's up a lot in the polls.
There's not a lot of logic suggesting that he needs to jump into the debate for any particular reason.
I will say that's going to be used against him by Joe Biden.
So all the people who are voting for Trump in the hopes that there will be a Biden-Trump debate, I'm predicting it right now.
There will be no Trump-Biden debate.
It's not going to happen.
Joe Biden will not debate President Trump.
He's not going to do it.
Joe Biden is simply going to say, I don't debate, I don't debate insurrectionism, convicted rapists.
And then the media will go, what a hero.
What a hero that Joe Biden.
And Joe Biden will say, and then they'll all cheer.
And the lights will slowly dim as the music rises.
That's the way this idiocy is going to go.
Now, what does that mean for the rest of the Republican field?
Well, basically, it means it's a grab pot.
It means they're all going to be in that pot together, clawing each other down in the middle of that debate.
Presumably, Ron DeSantis will be the chief target of all the other candidates on the stage.
And Trump's just going to sit out here enjoying himself, which, again, is, in fact, the smart strategy.
OK, in just one second, we are going to get to Rand Paul going after Anthony Fauci, referring him, actually, for prosecution.
We'll get to that in just one second first.
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Also, Candace Owens has now wrapped the 10-part series, Convicting a Murderer.
You're not going to want to miss it.
It's one of our most ambitious projects yet here at Daily Wire+.
You might think you're familiar with the Stephen Avery case and everything that happened in Manitoba County.
This is especially true if you watch Making a Murderer on Netflix, but it turns out the filmmaker is kind of fibbed.
Coming soon, Candace Owens will unveil the shocking parts of every story that were omitted in the Netflix series.
We are excited to present Convicting a Murderer, the trailer.
Check it out.
This is a collect call from an inmate at the Calumet County Jail.
The man served 18 years in prison until DNA evidence cleared his name.
The Two Rivers man was convicted of sexual assault in 1985, but exonerated with DNA evidence in 2003.
So this is the infamous Avery lot.
Now, two years later, he again finds himself tied to a police investigation.
Accused of murdering Teresa Hallbuck on the Avery property.
Stephen Avery's 16-year-old nephew admitted his involvement in the rape and murder of Teresa Hallbuck.
The car is discovered just around the bend.
It was just this worldwide phenomenon.
I think they framed this guy.
I think he intended to crush the vehicle, but ran out of time.
Avery thinks the 36 million dollar lawsuit he filed is why he's being targeted in this investigation.
Netflix made millions of dollars from making a murderer.
But the filmmakers left out very important details.
Mountains of evidence that you have not yet seen.
The blood vial.
The most egregious manipulation from the movie.
Interrogations.
That's when he started beating me because I told him that he's sick.
Cell phones.
And I saw melted plastic parts of a cell phone.
Interviews.
Her arms were pinned behind her head.
They made Steven Avery look like a victim.
Do you believe your brother is guilty?
I don't know if I'm a suspect.
I'm getting sick and tired of media deception.
Evidence piling up.
Why would they omit so many different things?
Why are you editing my testimony?
I am not going to make the same mistake that the filmmakers did.
Rearranging the testimony.
They delete a portion of it at the end.
How could they claim to care about the truth?
They all know that Stephen Avery committed this crime.
911, what is your emergency?
The evidence forces me to conclude that you are the most dangerous individual ever
to set foot in this courtroom.
you To get the rest of that story, you have to watch Convicting a Murderer coming to you September.
This 10-part series is exclusive to DailyWire+.
Join right now at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Get 25% off your new annual membership so you can watch Convicting a Murderer when it premieres.
Trust me, you're not going to want to miss it.
Okay, meanwhile, Rand Paul is now referring Anthony Fauci to the DOJ.
He is suggesting that Anthony Fauci actually committed perjury before Congress when he suggested that he was not involved in gain-of-function research.
Here's Rand Paul going after it.
What would turn the tables for you?
What evidence do you have?
Well, you know, I don't think there's ever been a clearer case of perjury in the history of government testimony.
And I don't say that lightly.
He said adamantly that the government never funded this gain-of-function research.
We now have the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, has admitted that the funding came from the NIH.
We have the acting director, Tabak, of the NIH admitting it in writing that it came from the NIH.
But now we have really the smoking gun, and that is Fauci in private saying the opposite of what he was saying in public.
I mean, that is right.
So Anthony Fauci, as it turns out, was saying the opposite in private.
The Free Press has a fantastic piece by David Zweig about this.
On April 17, 2020, with much of the country still in some form of lockdown and news of overwhelmed hospitals dominating the headlines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then a member of the President's Coronavirus Task Force, was asked a question toward the end of a White House press briefing.
Was there a possibility the novel virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China?
There was a study recently, Fauci said, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at sequences there, and sequences in bats as they evolve, and the mutations it took to get where it is now is totally consistent with jump of a species from an animal to a human, so it wasn't from a lab.
Fauci maintained this for a very, very long time.
But, Fauci had an incentive to arrive at that conclusion, because the Wuhan Institute of Virology was known for doing high-risk virology research, studying and manipulating coronaviruses, and Fauci had funded such research at the WIV.
Last month, a trove of explosive emails and other documents were released by the House Select Subcommittee on COVID.
These revealed evidence of Fauci's and other officials' behind-the-scenes involvement with scientists and journalists demonstrating their efforts to quash the lab leak theory entirely.
The recently disclosed private communications first reported by Public and Racket lay bare that the highly qualified authors of that paper actually had extensive uncertainty about the virus being the result of a natural event at all.
Apparently, a month just before that paper was published, Christian Anderson, one of the paper's authors,
wrote a Slack message to his colleagues saying, quote, the lab escape version of this
is so frigging likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work
and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.
And then another co-author wrote on Slack, quote, it's not crackpot to suggest this could have happened
given the gain of function research we know is happening.
So Fauci then intervened and he basically got them to write a paper saying that it was very unlikely.
And then he went and he lied and said he hadn't funded gain of function research in the first place.
And he tried to redefine gain of function research to mean gain of function within a species,
not cross species.
Thank you.
So, should he be tried for perjury on this one?
I mean, it's pretty obvious that he should.
Is Merrick Garland's DOJ going to take that one up?
Yeah, no, they're too busy going after everything that Donald Trump does, obviously.
Meanwhile, the left, which it turns out was wrong on so many aspects of COVID, they just keep doubling down and creating fantasy scenarios where control is justified.
So, Sam Harris, a person with whom I've been friendly, and I've had him on my show, he's had me on his show, it's been a little while since we talked.
Sam Harris did an interview that's gone viral, in which he talks about government control.
And in order for him to justify government control during the pandemic, he basically had to make the case that if COVID had been capable of killing everybody on Earth, we would have been okay with government force.
Well, I mean, maybe?
But also, that wasn't the case.
So I failed to... Yes, and if aliens were attacking Earth, then martial law might be necessary.
I don't understand what that has to do with the price of tea in China, as they say.
Here is Sam Harris.
You know, but dial up the deadliness of the pathogen, you know.
Give us something like, you know, airborne Ebola that incubates for a month.
You don't know you have it and you walk around spreading it and it's got, you know, a 75% fatality rate and it's mostly killing kids.
No one gets to make that choice anymore.
I mean, then literally the cops come in and vaccinate you and I would say that all of us would agree to that.
The moment, again, that you turn up the lethality on the pathogen, you turn up the effectiveness of the vaccine, you turn down the risk of the vaccine.
Give me a truly safe vaccine where there's not even one documented case of vaccine injury, right?
So then you just have to be completely crazy to be worried about being vaccinated in that kind of
environment, then it's just a no-brainer.
Then we just don't tolerate a diversity of opinion because the stakes are too high. It's
a full-on emergency. Bodies of kids are being stacked up in parks, right?
There's so many of them, we don't know what to do with them.
We've got these mobile morgues, and we have a vaccine that actually works, and then we've got RFK Jr.
saying, you know, maybe you don't want to get the jab on Rogan's podcast, right?
That's the world I've been worried about ever since COVID.
Well, I mean, so I assume the argument that he's actually making here, to sort of steel man his argument, is that he's worried that vaccine skepticism is going to mean that if we ever do get a virus like this, then the reaction is going to be a lot of skepticism.
But number one, that's the fault of the institutions.
And to be fair, it's the fault of people like Sam Harris, who were promoting a lot of government interventionism along these lines.
The reality is that if you looked at the stats, what you saw is that wherever the virus got incredibly prevalent, people actually voluntarily took the vaccine more during those time periods than when the virus was not prevalent, which is precisely what you would expect.
Same thing with masks.
People, in other words, take prophylactic measures as they see fit in order to prevent themselves from getting really severe versions of the virus.
This is why elderly people took the vaccine at a far higher rate than people who are 20.
And that should have been the case, by the way.
But, I mean, of course, if we're talking about airborne Ebola killing 75% of people that it touched, and mostly killing kids, I mean, I wouldn't hesitate to get a vax at that point, would you?
Like, why would anybody?
And yes, I mean, a full-blown emergency is different.
That is the whole point.
The point here is that the government treated this as a full-blown emergency for three long years in many places in the United States and across the world.
When it wasn't.
So I don't understand how the government's failures here are somehow justified by a completely speculative hypothetical scenario.
I mean, I can make those up too.
It's very easy to make those up.
What if the government lied that there was no COVID at all?
Wouldn't that justify no government interventionism and suggest that they were actually lying to you?
I mean, there are hypotheticals all across the board.
It's not hard to do a hypothetical.
I'm just confused as to why Sam Harris thinks that justifies what the government did here.
Okay, meanwhile, In what has been a bizarrely hilarious and yet controversial case.
Something happened the other day in Montgomery, Alabama that is now being called the Alabama Tea Party Brawl.
Or the Alabama Sweet Tea Party, I have seen.
So apparently what happened is that it was a Saturday evening on Montgomery's riverfront and a black riverboat co-captain was attacked by a group of white people as other black people rushed to his defense.
Here is a video of what exactly happened.
This is a riverboat captain trying to park his riverboat here.
Somebody comes to him and actually hits him.
A white guy is coming and hitting the black guy.
The black guy throws his hat.
Presumably saying that he wants to go.
And these other white people are walking alongside the white guy, and they're trying to pull the black guy off, and then other white people run in and tackle the black guy, at which point a bunch of nearby black people, they got the hat signal, and they run in to intervene.
One black guy jumps in the water and swims across the The reason this was treated with some humor is because everyone understood that the white guys here were actually doing the wrong thing.
They were the ones who arrested.
And nobody actually got, you know, seriously injured in all of this.
As of Tuesday, warrants were issued against three men who were on the pontoon boat.
Richard Roberts, 48, two counts of third-degree assault.
Alan Todd, 23, one count of third-degree assault.
And Zachary Chase Sims-Shipman, 25, one count of third-degree assault.
All are misdemeanors.
The three charged were white men on board a pontoon boat that prevented the riverboat from docking for nearly an hour.
So it sounds like they were being jerks.
Here was the Montgomery police chief announcing the prosecutions.
The police department didn't have the luxury of the videos that we all have seen now.
Now that we have more information, again, more charges are pending.
The videos certainly paint a vivid picture.
After the initial altercation, members of the crew and community jumping in to defend the riverboat's co-captain, Damien Pickett.
As you can see from this new footage, the fight quickly escalates.
At one point, a man even swinging a folding chair.
WWE got it.
In police custody this morning, Richard Roberts, two other men, Alan Todd and Zachary Shipman
are expected to turn themselves in.
All of them facing misdemeanor assault charges.
Okay, so this is a bizarre story with a happy ending.
It seems like the people who are engaging in assault are going to jail.
Now, the police say this is not racially motivated, so maybe it's just a bunch of drunk people being drunk and attacking other people.
But the media can quickly turn this into a racial story, so that's what Charles Blow is doing over at the New York Times.
He says, the Alabama Sweet Tea Party, that was one nickname people gave to a brawl this past Saturday on Montgomery, Alabama Riverfront Dock, captured in viral videos after a group of white people attacked Damien Pickett.
In some obvious ways, the whole episode is sad.
The situation should never have descended into violence.
The people who were asked to move their boat so the riverboat could dock should have simply complied.
But in other ways, many black people in particular saw it as an unfortunate but practically unavoidable response to what can feel like an unending stream of incidents in which black people are publicly victimized with no one willing or able to intervene or render aid.
Black people coming to the defense of that black man wasn't just a specific thing that happened at one time and place.
It was also a departure in some ways from the most memorable images in a history that centuries of black targeted brutality which traces the journey of black people in this land that became the United States.
So leave it to Charles Blow to turn this into a referendum on all of America's racial history as opposed to some drunk jackasses attacking a black guy and getting their asses kicked for the benefit and going to jail.
By the way, would Charles Blow be writing the reverse if this had been a group of black people attacking a white riverboat captain?
I have serious, serious doubts that there'd be anything like this level of societal analysis from Charles Blow.
Sometimes, dumb people and criminals and bad people do bad, dumb, criminal things.
And the race isn't actually the main issue in all this, which is why, again, white people and black people were mainly happy that the perpetrators were arrested regardless of race.
Okay, time for some quick things I like.
So, things that I like today.
Again, there's something amusing about the immigration policy pursued by Democrats coming home to roost.
New York Mayor Eric Adams, you know, he's one of the people who's like, we need a sanctuary city here.
Haven't you ever seen the statute of liberty?
And the poem on the side about, you know, the huddled masses yearning to be free?
Well, now he's like, guys, can you please declare a state of emergency here in New York?
Like, please, please, please?
He doesn't say Joe Biden's name here, because he wouldn't want to do that, even though it's Joe Biden's fault.
Here was Eric Adams acknowledging the obvious, which is illegal immigration is overwhelming a lot of cities.
The immigration system in this nation is broken.
It has been broken for decades.
We're also asking the federal government to declare a state of emergency.
This will allow federal funds to be allocated quickly to help address the urgent challenges we face.
Even Chuck Todd over on MSNBC was like, oh, well, I guess that Greg Abbott was right when he said that the Democrats were going to turn on each other over illegal immigration.
New York City's growing humanitarian crisis, the shelter system slammed by an influx of migrants.
New calls for federal help.
I guess Greg Abbott was right.
He said once he got blue cities to deal with this, that they would be very upset at the federal government.
Oh, that's sad.
Oh, that's sad.
You mean the blue cities have to deal with the actual consequences of bad blue policy?
Oh, how tragic.
How sad.
Alrighty, guys.
The rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be joined on the line by Riley Gaines.
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