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July 22, 2025 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:46
Hunter Biden MELTS DOWN…On Democrats!
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Alrighty, folks, a lot coming up on today's show.
Hunter Biden, crack addict, former crack addict, but it appears something is still ripping through his system because he just did a wild three-hour interview.
What does that say about the Democratic Party?
Plus, we'll get to Stephen Colbert, the fallout from his firing, and a couple of actually quite important criminal cases.
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Okay, so the big story of the day is Hunter Biden.
He's back.
Now, why does that matter?
There are a couple of reasons it matters.
One is that Hunter Biden is a stand-in for his father.
When Hunter talks, Hunter is speaking for Joe Biden.
And when he speaks for Joe Biden, he is speaking for, believe it or not, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party in some interesting and weird ways.
And so what he has to say about politics is sort of relevant.
Also, Hunter Biden's exposure of the entire left for the fraud that it is because of his father is quite incredible.
And it is worthwhile to remember that Hunter Biden, along with Joe Biden, was part of that inner coterie of people surrounding Joe who knew that Joe was unhealthy, mentally unwell, and all the rest, and who left him in place because they were essentially playing at the presidency.
This is something that Jake Tapper and Alex Thampson have reported in their book Original Sin, talking about who was the actual president of the United States for several years.
When you listen to Hunter, you should understand Hunter Biden was at least partially the actual president of the United States for several years, and so that makes this interview important.
So we begin this interview, discussing this interview, with his thoughts on the election.
So first he says, the reason that his dad completely collapsed as a human during that debate with Donald Trump, the most famous debate now in modern American history, the reason for that is because he says that his father was on ambient.
I know exactly what happened in that debate.
He flew around the world, basically, the mileage that he could have flown around the world three times.
He's 81 years old.
He's tired.
Give him ambient to be able to sleep.
He gets up on the stage and he looks like he's a deer in the headlights.
And it feeds into every story that anybody wants to tell.
So it was the ambient.
It was not that his father was not sentient.
So first of all, who gives an 81-year-old man ambient on a flight knowing what the predictable results of that will be hours later?
I mean, there's just certain materials that you take when you fly.
If you take too much melatonin, you can be zonked the next day.
Ambient will absolutely, so they gave him to that like the day before or the night before the debate.
First of all, if that's true, it shows that his advisors were in some way sandbagging him.
But beyond that, it's obviously not true that that is the reason why Joe Biden has been in a state of collapse for several years at this point.
Hunter admits that Nancy Pelosi is the person who drove Biden out of the race.
Here he was.
You know who did not want Kamala Harris to be president and did not want her to be the nominee?
Nancy Pelosi didn't want her to be.
None of Nancy Pelosi's people wanted her to be.
They wanted an open convention.
They wanted a floor fight.
They wanted a, I don't know what the hell they wanted, but they wanted to be the ones to anoint whoever they were going to anoint to become the next president of the United States.
Who do you think that would have been?
I don't know.
I really don't know.
I don't have any idea.
All I know is that they definitely did not want Kamala Harris.
And again, which undermined her, which undermined the campaign.
I think Hunter trying to defend Kamala right there, saying it wasn't her fault that she lost.
It was Pelosi who drove Biden out of the race.
He also took some side swipes at people like George Clooney and David Axelrod and the Pods of America bros, basically saying all of these people, they threw Joe Biden out of the race.
They shouldn't have.
Okay, so a lot of this is defensive play from Hunter, who, again, was the actual president, along with Jill probably, of the country for several years.
And predictably, he's pissed about it.
And you know what George Clooney did?
Because he sat down, I guess, because he was given the blessing by the Obama team or the Obama people and whoever else and David Axelrod and whoever the f ⁇ else is to go, okay, yeah, you know what?
We are going to insert our judgment over yours.
We, me, and James Carville, who hasn't run a race in 40 years, and David Axelrod, who had one success in his political life, and that was Barack Obama.
And that was because of Barack Obama, not because of David Axelrod.
And David Plough, and all of these guys, and the Pod Save America guys, who were junior speechwriters on Barack Obama's Senate staff, who have been dining out on the relationship with him for years, making millions of dollars.
The Anita Dunns of the world, who's made $40, $50 million off of the Democratic Party.
Kim and everybody around him.
I don't have to be nice.
Number one, I agree with Quentin Tarantino.
George Clooney is not a fucking actor.
He is a like, I don't know what he is.
He's a brand.
And by the way, and God bless him.
You know what?
He supposedly treats his friends really well.
You know what I mean?
Buys them things.
And he's got a really great place in Lake Como.
And he's great friends with Barack Obama.
You, what do you have to do with anything?
Why do I have to listen to you?
What right do you have to step on a man who's given 52 years of his life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full-page ad in the New York Times to undermine the president at a time in which, by the way, what do people care about the most?
So I'm just going to point out here that Hunter Biden would make a better 2028 candidate than Joe Biden made a 2024 candidate.
I'm here for him dunking on all of his erstwhile Democratic friends.
Hunter, of course, took the opportunity also to defend himself against charges that, for example, his art business was a scam on behalf of the Biden family, which it pretty clearly was.
No one buys Hunter Biden finger paintings these days for 500 grand a pop.
Do you know how many stories the New York Times wrote about my art?
How many?
I don't know, like a dozen?
To what end?
I mean, really, to what end?
I mean, at the time that They were writing about my art.
Jared Kushner was in Saudi Arabia after being the head of the Middle Eastern policy group for the White House and covering for the leader of Saudi Arabia in the murder of Khashoggi, collecting $2.1 billion investment.
When he was doing that, and they were selling golden sneakers and Bibles to people off their donor list, the New York Times was still writing stories about the legitimacy of me deciding that I wanted to be a painter or not.
Well, I mean, there was an election going on, as you may have noticed.
And the fact is that the president of the United States, many people suspected, was the beneficiary of these sort of strange coincidences around the sales of your pseudo-art.
More from this insane interview with Hunter Biden in just a moment.
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Hunter Biden also suggested that he was totally qualified to be on Burisma's board.
Again, one of the kind of seamy realities about the last election cycle is some of it was about Joe Biden's age.
A lot of it was about a widespread perception, correct, of the Biden family's absolutely deep and abiding corruption.
Here is Hunter now denying that he had been put on the board of Burisma for any political reason, which of course is absolutely ridiculous.
He had no experience in the energy sector.
He couldn't point out Ukraine on a map, and suddenly he was on the board of a Ukrainian energy firm.
A lot of it had to do with money.
100%.
You know, I had an organization that was willing to pay me for a service that I was 100% qualified to do.
I went to Yale Law School.
I served on dozens of boards before this.
I was an expert in corporate governance.
I have an encyclopedia knowledge of the region.
I had served on a major infrastructure company's board and had done work in global aid relief throughout the entire world and had an enormous list of connections of my own.
And I was qualified to be on that board.
So actually, he was doing it, you know, because he was really good at it.
It had nothing to do with his last name being Biden.
By the way, that's a reversal for Hunter, who openly admitted a few years ago that he would not have been on the Burisma board except for the fact that his last name was Biden.
The last part of this particular interview, the sort of Hunter Biden defending himself, that got amusing when he started making the argument that crack is somehow safer than alcohol, which is a hell of an argument here.
Does crack cocaine make you act any differently?
No.
Is it safer than alcohol?
Probably.
People think of crack as being dirty.
It's the exact opposite.
When you make crack, what you're doing is you're burning off all the impurities so that it could bind with the sodium bicarbonate, which makes it smokable.
I think this is the prelude to Hunter Biden's version of Breaking Bad, where he actually goes and starts distributing.
Again, I love that he's making this argument.
But put all this aside.
Put the Biden administration aside for a second and put aside the inherent corruption, the fact that Joe Biden was dead for several years and that his family was essentially running the government.
Put all of that aside.
If you see Hunter as a stand-in for the sort of Joe Biden moderate wing of the Democratic Party, things start to get kind of interesting because Hunter Biden also spoke here about policy.
And there are two particular issues where Hunter Biden put specific focus.
And those two issues were on illegal immigration and Israel.
And these are the issues where Democrats are completely at odds with the American people, but they will not let it go.
They are more likely to let go of the trans issue than they are to let go of illegal immigration, open borders, as well as the sort of new thing of the moment, which is the idea that Israel is the great victimizer in the Middle East and the Palestinians are the great victims in the Middle East, including Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Islamic Jihad, and all the rest.
And this is sort of fascinating because if you're trying to figure out the direction of the Democratic Party, if you're trying to get out the divining rod and determine which direction the Democratic Party is going to move into, the sort of more moderate side or the more radical side, you have to understand the moderates are already caving to the radicals.
They're already caving to the radicals.
They may separate off from the trans stuff because it's been so wildly unsuccessful for them.
But the root cause of the Democratic Party is a belief that America is a great victimizer in the world.
America's allies are great victimizers in the world.
And therefore, America ought not have borders.
And also, America, her foreign policy should essentially be to abandon any strong ally as long as it is beneficial to the Democratic Party to do so.
There's a sort of third worldism that is set in the Democratic Party.
I don't mean in the radical wing of the Democratic Party, I mean in the mainstream Joe Biden wing, because Hunter Biden, remember, was Joe Biden's brain, at least the part of it that was semifunctional.
So here was Hunter Biden going off on President Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration.
You might be like all these Democrats say, you have to talk about and realize that people are really upset about illegal immigration.
You.
How do you think your hotel room gets cleaned?
How do you think you got food on your table?
Who do you think washes your dishes?
Who do you think does your garden?
Who do you think is here by the sheer just grit and will that they figured out a way to get here because they thought that they could give themselves and their family a better chance?
And he's somehow convinced all of us that these people are criminals.
White men in America are 45 more times likely to commit a violent crime than an immigrant.
So he actually concludes that statement that white men are more likely to commit crimes than immigrants by suggesting that we should actually force El Salvador to send back illegal immigrants, which is funny since the ones we're sending to El Salvador are by and large people with actual criminal records.
These guys think that we need to run away from all values in order for us to lead.
I say, f ⁇ you.
How are we getting those people back from El Salvador?
Because I'll tell you what, if I became president in two years from now or four years from now or three years from now, I would pick up the phone and call the president of El Salvador and say, you either send them back or I'm going to invade.
It's a fucking crime what they're doing.
He's a dictator thug.
Bukeli or Trump.
Both.
Now, again, the reason this is important is because Hunter was Joe Biden's partially functioning brain during the administration.
This is the Democratic Party perspective on illegal immigration.
America ought to be an open borders country because unfettered immigration without any sort of real security, without any sort of concern about cultural assimilation, is an effective good.
That is something the Democratic Party deeply believes.
And as we start discussing 2028 candidates, understand there will not be a Democrat on the stage who significantly calls for border security.
It will not be a thing.
It's not just with regard to immigration.
The Democratic Party also realizes that the energy in its party is very much on the side of third worldism, the sort of Zoran Mamdani belief that the third world has been victimized by America and her allies, and therefore the third world must have her revenge.
So for example, Hunter Biden was talking about the dramatic increase in anti-Semitism under his father's administration, which is certainly a thing that happened.
And he says the real reason for that is because of the Israelis.
The Israelis created the anti-Semitism.
So in other words, after Hamas murdered 1,200 Jews in Israel and took 250 hostage, a couple of dozen of whom are still being held hostage after a year and a half, that it's Israel's fault that the anti-Semitism broke out.
I think it's probably the most prescient thing that's been written about this in at least many months.
Tom Friedman wrote a thing is that the worst thing that's happened to the Jewish people is the Israeli government, Jewish people globally, the threats to their lives, the anti-Semitism that it has generated.
The worst thing that's happened to the Jewish people is the Israeli government, according to Hunter Biden.
And then he brags about how his father tried to hamstring Israel in its pursuit of getting back its hostages and ending Hamas, an actual, honest to God, American State Department-designated terrorist group in the Gaza Strip.
He took away the bunker-busting bombs from the Israelis.
He tried to curtail Netanyahu's thing.
He forced Netanyahu to open up shipping lanes and aid lanes at the Robot Crossing to be able to get food aid in.
He put pressure over and over and over again.
And now, by the way, that is not even remotely happening.
What is happening is they were bombing food lines.
There's no one in there to be able to record it.
The World Food Program, the UNHCR, none of the aid organizations are able to make it in.
Doctors Without Borders no longer can make it in.
There have been more journalists killed at this war in Gaza than in any other war combined.
And nobody's doing anything about it.
I mean, this is propaganda on behalf of Hamas, we should point out here, because the reality is that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the GHF, which has been actually facilitating the entry of aid into Gaza, as we'll discuss a little later on in the show, has been denying Hamas access to the food, which is why Hamas is shooting people and then attempting to insinuate itself among the population in order to shoot at Israeli soldiers who then respond.
That is the real thing that's been happening in the Gaza Strip.
But again, these are the parts of the Democratic base that the Democrats are trying to woo.
It is very important to them, illegal immigration and third worldism.
There is no systemic immunity for the Democratic Party against their radical base.
It does not exist.
So if you think they're going to nominate somebody who's quasi-moderate in 2028, wrong you are.
It is not going to happen.
This is a party that is an empty vessel that has no direction forward.
The supposed moderates in its own coalition are completely unable to argue their way out of a paper bag against the so-called progressives in their coalition.
So James Carville, his solution, James Carville, is basically that the Democratic Party ought to ignore its own agenda and simply just rip on Trump.
That's the only way to somehow appeal to moderates in America, according to James Carville.
Quote, constipated, leaderless, confused, a cracked out clown car, divided.
These are words I hear my fellow Democrats using to describe our party as of late.
The truth is, they're not wrong.
The Democratic Party is in shambles.
Zorin Mamdani's victory in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary wasn't an isolated event.
It represents an undeniable fissure in our political soul.
We are divided along generational lines.
Candidates like Mr. Mamdani are impatient for an economic future that folks my age are skeptical can be delivered.
We are divided along ideological lines.
A party that is historically allegiance to the state of Israel is at odds with a growing faction that will not look past the abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.
From Medicare for all purists to Affordable Care Act reformists, the list goes on and on.
The Democratic Party is steamrolling toward a civilized civil war.
It's necessary to have it.
It's even more necessary, says James Carville, to delay it.
Basically, hope for a savior.
Quote, the only thing that can save us now is an actual savior, because a savior, because a new party can be delivered only by a person.
See Barack Obama in 2008 and Bill Clinton in 1992.
No new party or candidate has a chance to break through until November 2026.
Until then, we must run unified in opposition to the Republicans and gain as many House seats as possible.
So that's his plan.
His plan is: yeah, there's a civil war, and you can hear.
James Carville, supposed moderate, is already caving to Zoran Mamdani and the progressives.
This is the biggest problem for the Democratic Party.
Hunter Biden, again, is a supposed representative of the moderate Joe Biden wing of the Democratic Party.
And there are zero issues in which he can argue against the far left of his party.
It just doesn't exist.
And so no matter how many Democrats emerge from the woodwork to try and argue against this, they keep getting shouted down.
Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, he's trying to dissociate from the momdonification of the Democratic Party.
He says the mayor of New York isn't the leader of the party or anything.
What do you make of his candidacy?
Well, look, the mayor of New York has never, never, ever been the leader of the Democratic Party.
What we need to focus on is the message.
I was listening to Senator McCormick.
They just voted for a budget the Republicans did that added $3.5 trillion to the debt.
The Democratic Party, again, has no systemic immunity to any of this.
And this is why, for example, AOC is actually in quite good shape to be a Democratic nominee in 2028.
I'm telling you, they're selling her short.
Anybody who's telling you AOC is not a serious candidate is just wrong about this.
Now, again, she is going to continue to stump for open borders.
The biggest question for Democrats is not a question of candidates.
It's a question of how well the country is doing.
If the economy continues to do really well under President Trump, Democrats are going to have a very difficult time going forward.
If the economy were to sink, AOC is incredibly well placed.
And even her insane open borders perspective is going to be swallowed by a large percentage of the population seeking revenge against a Trump Republican party if the economy goes the other way.
And that's just the way economics works in the United States.
Whichever is the party in power, if the economy goes south, gets blamed for it.
Here is AOC, who is mirroring exactly what you heard Hunter Biden saying about illegal immigration just a moment ago.
There are consequences to ripping up law-abiding, dutiful, undocumented people from their country.
There are consequences.
Now, AOC has been attempting, as you can see from her policy, to moderate in certain particular ways to keep one foot in sort of every camp.
She doesn't want to be labeled with the full-scale Zorin Mamdani, Ilhan Omar, anti-Semite brush.
And so instead, what she's doing is one time she cried when they refunded Iron Dome in Israel.
This week, she voted against cutting U.S. funding for Israel completely.
There was a bill that was on the floor to completely cut the funding.
She voted against it.
And her office in Westchester Square in the East Bronx was splattered in red paint and adorned with a sign reading AOC funds genocide in Gaza.
But this, again, is a problem for the Democratic Party, is that in the end, they are not going to be able to repel the far left.
They're turning into a far left party.
No one's going to stop it.
And Hunter Biden and Joe Biden are a perfect example of this.
They were the decaying brand of a supposedly moderate Democratic Party that will not and does not have the stones to actually fend off the far left brand of the Democratic Party that is the direction the Democratic Party is going to move.
And that's the most interesting thing about what Hunter Biden has to say.
All of these sort of revenge tactics on former Democrats and Democratic advisors.
I'm here for that.
It's fun.
But the most interesting thing about Hunter Biden and what he's saying is that he's saying the quiet part out loud.
Joe Biden wanted open borders.
Joe Biden likes third worldism.
And that was the supposed moderate in the Democratic Party.
Already coming up, Stephen Colbert is on his way out and he's quite bitter about it.
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Okay, meanwhile, the fallout from the Stephen Colbert firing continues.
Stephen Colbert shed extremely salty tears yesterday.
He's on CBS.
And the only way you're going to hear about it is on this show because no one actually watches Stephen Colbert's show.
And he launched into the person who's been paying him $15, $20 million a year.
Over the weekend, somebody at CBS followed up their gracious press release with a gracious anonymous leak saying, They pulled the plug on our show because of losses pegged between $40 million and $50 million a year.
$40 million is a big number.
I could see us losing $24 million, but where would Paramount have possibly spent the other $16 million?
Oh yeah!
Oh...
Oh yeah!
I did that.
I'll play.
I'll try like that.
Still, that's still a lot of money.
I mean, where does the late show rank?
Jim, what other companies lost that kind of money last year?
Red Lobster?
Damn it.
I told them we should stop offering the audience unlimited shrimp.
Maya, Maya, take it away.
Take it away.
There's no laugh anywhere inside anywhere there.
And they're still wondering why Stephen Colbert was canceled.
I love the fact that he can't even deny that his show lost that much money.
He has to somehow just yell at his employer for paying a settlement with President Trump over the 60 minutes botchery with Kamala Harris.
Colbert then spends some time telling President Trump to go F himself, which of course is exactly how Stephen Colbert brought himself to this point.
He turned into late night televangelism for left-wing nonsense.
That is how.
There has yet to be a, it is a Sahara desert of laughs over at the Stephen Colbert show, which is why he was canceled.
Here are some more, not laugh lines.
With those numbers, I got to say, it makes sense we'd be canceled.
I get it, guys.
And thanks again.
Okay.
Thanks again to the network.
In a completely unrelated story, on Friday, Donald Trump posted, I absolutely love that Colbert got fired.
His talent was even less than his ratings.
Thank you.
How, how, how?
How dare you, sir?
Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism?
Go f*** yourself.
Anyway.
Bye.
Thank you.
God, he is so funny.
He is so funny.
He is so unfunny.
It's amazing how unfunny he is.
That guy held down a late night slot for several years in real life.
That's crazy.
Well, one of the people who was very upset about this was, of course, Stephen Colbert's original mentor, Jon Stewart.
I'm old enough to remember when Stephen Colbert was funny.
And the answer is when he was a correspondent for Jon Stewart.
And then he stopped being funny.
Well, Jon Stewart was very upset about this as well.
He came to defend his friend.
I will note again that one of the funniest things about Jon Stewart is his age.
So Jon Stewart is currently 62 years old, and he's still cosplaying as a cynical 33-year-old.
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And the answer is you became hectoring scolds.
That is the reason why the failure is occurring is the hectoring scolding.
There's nothing funny or interesting about any of this.
You can blame that on Donald Trump, but the reality is you guys got in your own heads over Donald Trump and there was nothing you could do about it.
And all the humor left your body the minute that that happened.
Okay, meanwhile, with the Democrats in disarray, they are trying to hone in again on the Epstein case.
They just keep honing in on the Epstein case as though there is tons more to find.
And so Democrats have been trying to force votes on Epstein in the House.
The House Republicans keep saying, listen, just give the DOJ time or the AG time to release what it is that they can.
This idea that Congress has to pass some sort of resolution to pry the Epstein files free.
First of all, an enormous number of the Epstein files are under court seal.
So you actually have to apply for a court release.
Second of all, there are FBI procedures and protocols before you simply release stuff into the public arena.
The Democrats know this.
The Democrats don't care about the Epstein stuff.
They don't care about this at all.
It is a completely cynical play by the Democrats.
This is the point that Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is making.
We need the administration to have the space to do what it is doing.
So no vote on this resolution.
Again, the reason that Speaker Johnson is doing this is basically he is saying that the administration is going to release what it is going to release.
The idea there's some sort of massive cover-up is a botchery.
Again, that botchery should be laid at the hands of Pam Bondi, the attorney general, who went out there and claimed that there was all this material that led to a particular conclusion and then dropped the news that actually that conclusion was wrong and the material did not lead there in the first place.
Representative Ralph Norman, a members of the House Rules Committee, is accusing Democrats of grandstanding and says Republicans refuse to give the minority party an endless microphone.
Steve Scalise, who is the House majority whip, he says at the end of the day, Democrats are yelling and screaming.
They spent four years covering up for Epstein.
And you know, at least President Trump in the court is right now trying to get documents released.
I really think you're going to see hopefully a lot unsealed from that.
And then we've got some other options as well.
In fact, if you're worried about the Trump administration not taking the Epstein file stuff seriously, then why is the Deputy AG seeking a meeting with Ghelain Maxwell, according to Axios?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced today he is seeking a meeting with Ghelaine Maxwell.
Blanche said in a social media post, Pamboni instructed him to contact Maxwell's team, which he has done.
He intends to meet with Maxwell soon.
He said, no one is above the law.
No lead is off limits.
Now, remember, the FBI and the DOJ, they have already reviewed all of this material.
It is highly unlikely that Ghelaine Maxwell is going to say anything now that she hasn't said before, at least that has any sort of credibility.
Now, she is a sex criminal.
We should remember this.
And so it is quite plausible that she is now going to start offering all sorts of unspecified or unverifiable allegations in order to muddy the waters.
This is one of the problems with talking to criminals.
They tend to be criminals.
However, is it worthwhile to talk with her?
Sure.
I mean, first of all, I assume there were many interviews with Ghalain Maxwell before her trial.
Blanche said in a statement, the Department of Justice does not shy away from uncomfortable truths, nor from the responsibility to pursue justice Wherever the fact may lead.
Blanche added that the FBI and DOJ's joint statement sent earlier this month regarding Epstein, quote, remains as accurate today as when it was written.
He said, President Trump has told us to release all credible evidence.
If Ghelaine Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and DOJ will hear what she has to say.
Her attorney, of course, has said that the discussions are underway and that Ghelane will always testify truthfully and added, we are grateful to President Trump for his commitment to uncovering the truth in this case.
Now, again, Maxwell is trying to wiggle her way free of all of the charges that were filed against her.
She was found guilty in 2021 of sex trafficking and other charges.
Is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence in the state of Florida.
There have even been calls to free her.
And Glae Maxwell knows this.
Glae Maxwell for sure knows that if she can offer enough sort of bait, it's possible that there will be people who call for her release, that she will be the great heroine of the story somehow, despite having been Epstein's girlfriend who was convicted of sex trafficking on behalf of Epstein.
And criminals are very good at succoring people, and this is just another example of that.
Okay, so Democrats, of course, are pushing this incredibly hard.
What's fascinating is which Republicans are also pushing this incredibly hard?
Because the question there is, what is the agenda?
Do they actually believe Trump is complicit in a cover-up?
If so, they should just say so out loud.
This is the part that nobody will ask them.
Do they think Donald Trump is covering the Epstein stuff up?
If they think Donald Trump is covering the Epstein stuff up, will someone not ask them?
I'm asking right now.
I'm asking Marjorie Taylor Green and Thomas Massey, if you think Donald Trump is covering up the Epstein stuff, what is it that you think he is covering up and why?
Can you please just explain it?
Seriously, you're the ones making the claim a cover-up is going on of such utter epic proportions that there must be a congressional resolution to pry the files out of these hands.
Thomas Massey was walking onto the House floor with a binder labeled the Epstein files phase two and the bill number of a resolution he is co-sponsoring with Gadfly Rokana, who's attempting to get in from he's attempting to get attention, obviously, for a 2028 run.
Massey said the Epstein bill resolution is non-binding, so it's kind of fake.
The resolution I have with Kana would be binding on the president.
So what is it that he thinks that Trump is hiding?
And why, if you are a loyal Trumpist Republican, somebody who believes the president ought to succeed, are you doing this?
Why are you fostering a conspiracy theory about Trump?
Forget about Epstein, a conspiracy theory about a Trump cover-up that Democrats are currently pushing for political gain.
That is the thing that is happening right now.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is doing the same thing.
She put out a tweet.
If you tell the base of people who support you of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich, powerful, elite, evil cabals, you must take down every enemy of the people.
If not, the base will turn and there's no going back.
Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfied.
They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.
Okay, fine.
So why do you think he's not giving you the so-called steak dinner, Representative Green?
Really?
Like, what is your theory of the case?
I would love to hear your theory of the case.
Hey, let's be clear again on what pseudo-MAGA is doing here.
I'm calling him pseudo-mAGA because Trump is the decider of MAGA.
He is the person who created MAGA.
He's the builder of MAGA.
He's the definer of MAGA.
Pseudo-MAGA are people who claim to speak on behalf of the MAGA movement, who represent a tiny sliver of the people who voted for Donald Trump.
What are they actually attempting to do?
What they are actually attempting to do, again, is seize control of the supposed MAGA movement from the only person who founded it and created it, Donald J. Trump.
That is what is happening right now.
They don't like Trump's policy in the Middle East.
They don't like Trump's policy on Ukraine.
They don't like some of Trump's domestic policy.
And so what they are attempting to do is shift allegiances away from Trump and to some sort of bizarre agglomeration of isolationism and gigantic government subsidization scheme.
I mean, Massey is on the isolationist side.
He's not on the giant government spending side.
Green seems to be on the side of both.
But whatever the case is, there's clearly an attempt to attack Trump here.
Why the attacks on Trump?
That's the question I'm asking.
Go after Epstein all you want.
That's fine.
But you are accusing Trump of a cover-up.
So if you're accusing Trump of a cover-up, the question is, why are you, what's the theory?
Or is it a cynical play to attempt to drive down Trump's favorables and seize control of the movement that he built?
Because that's what it looks a lot like.
That's my theory of why you are doing what you are doing.
Because I don't believe you that you are doing this in the name of quote unquote transparency.
Because if you were doing this in the name of quote unquote transparency, then presumably when House Republicans were in control, because they've been in control of the House for a bit here, you would have been fostering resolutions on the release of Epstein files under Joe Biden, which I don't recall you doing.
Beyond that, again, why are you, the argument you're making is that Trump and team are covering up the Epstein stuff.
If you are joining, if you find yourself on the same side as Rokana on this issue, I'm just wondering why exactly we should consider you loyal members of MAGA, if this is indeed about supposed loyalty to MAGA, which is what Taylor Green is making it all about.
All righty, in just one second, I want to get into a couple of major criminal cases that are actually quite fascinating because they underscore why MAGA is popular and why there is a feeling abroad in the United States that there's a movement to free criminals from prison.
Alrighty, meanwhile, a couple of stories about criminal cases that really underscore why the MAGA movement exists.
So a federal judge has now sentenced former Louisville, Kentucky police detective Brett Hankison to nearly three years in prison for his role in the botched 2020 raid during which Breonna Taylor was fatally shot.
This is according to the Wall Street Journal.
Hankison was convicted in 2024 of civil rights abuse after blindly firing 10 shots through Taylor's home during the raid.
His shots did not strike Taylor.
They did not strike any of the neighbors.
He had faced a maximum of life in prison.
Okay, so the Justice Department under President Trump asked for a one-day prison sentence, basically saying this conviction is bull and he never should have been convicted in the first place.
Instead, the U.S. District Court Judge, Rebecca Grady Jennings, sentenced him to 33 months.
Now, again, that is less than the guidelines sentencing range, but it is a reflection of how insane, insane our criminal justice system became in the aftermath of Black Lives Matter summer that Hankison was ever convicted in the first place.
For those who don't remember the Breonna Taylor case, basically the Breonna Taylor case was about a 26-year-old emergency medical technician who was in an apartment with her boyfriend.
And her boyfriend believed the police were intruders because there was a no-knock warrant that was issued.
They did, in fact, knock at the door because there was suspicion that drug activity was going on from this apartment.
They knocked.
The boyfriend fired a shot with a handgun through the door, hitting one of the officers in the leg.
And then the police responded by firing more than 30 rounds, several of which hit and killed Taylor.
Hankison did not fire any of the shots that killed Breonna Taylor.
Did not fire any of those shots.
So what was the conviction on the basis of?
Well, actually, he was indicted on state charges for felony, want, and endangerment in 2020 and was acquitted.
And the federal government, under Joe Biden, brought a civil rights violation case against this police officer, Brett Hankin, under Section 242 of Title 18, which is depriving a person of their rights under the color of law.
Okay, now, typically you have to willfully do that.
That is like if you arrest somebody while you're a cop and you know that that person is innocent and you arrest them and then you abuse them, that is a civil rights violation under section 242 of Title 18.
There has to be a willfulness component here.
The DOJ's original statements on the conviction of Brett Hankin suggested, according to Attorney General Merrick Garland, today, Brett Hankison was found guilty by a jury of his peers for willfully depriving Breonna Taylor of her constitutional rights.
His use of deadly force was unlawful and put Ms. Taylor in harm's way.
This verdict is an important step toward accountability for the violation of Breonna Taylor's civil rights, but justice for the loss of Ms. Taylor is a task that exceeds human capacity.
So I asked our friends over at Perplexity, our friends and sponsors, aside from Brett Hankin, are there any other prior cases of 18 USD 242 being used to convict a police officer for recklessly firing at a suspect during a situation in which officers were lawfully present and being fired upon at the time?
And Perplexity notes that courts have recognized reckless disregard of a constitutional right, which is the question here, can meet the willingness requirement in some context, but this is not always uniformly applied.
And then it cites several cases, Perplexity, in which there was no actual use of 18 U.S. Code 242 to prosecute.
And that includes, for example, the Amadou Diallo case, in which officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed individual believing he was threat.
Prosecutors concluded there was insufficient evidence of specific intent to violate rights.
So no civil rights violation there.
Kenned State shooting, where National Guardsmen fired into the crowd after being surrounded and pelted with rocks.
The court found that there was no willful intent necessary to fulfill 18 U.S. Code 242.
In U.S. v.
Bradley, an officer fired at a fleeing suspect after a misunderstood traffic incident.
And a conviction under 242 was upheld on the theory of reckless disregard of rights.
But that situation did not include the officers being fired upon.
In fact, says Perplexity, a review of available legal analyses and commentaries reveal that prior to cases like Brett Hankinson's, it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for federal prosecutors to secure a 242 conviction against an officer for recklessly firing at a suspect during an incident where officers were lawfully president, officers were themselves under fire, and the conviction was based on reckless gunfire, not sexual misconduct, theft, or anything else.
There appeared to be no documented cases, none, before Brett Hankin, where an officer was convicted under 18 U.S. Code 242, specifically for recklessly firing at a suspect during a lawful police operation where officers were actively being fired upon.
Okay, that's how insane this case was.
So again, according to the evidence at the trial, officers knocked on Taylor's doors.
There's a no-knock warrant, but they knocked.
There's a major contention at the trial originally that there was no knock.
There was a knock.
They knocked on the door.
They announced themselves as the cops.
No one answered the door.
The officers saw no indication anyone in the home was awake or heard the announcement because there was no response.
They rammed the door open.
Taylor's boyfriend, believing that there were intruders, even though they had clearly announced themselves, fired his handgun at the officers and then they fired back.
And when they fired back, he had put Breonna Taylor in harm's way and Breonna Taylor was killed.
Hankison, who was convicted, was not one of the officers who fired from the doorway.
He fired separately from the side of the building through a sliding glass door and a bedroom window, both of which were covered with closed blinds and curtains.
Evidence shows that many of the shots passed through Taylor's apartment and didn't hit anybody else.
So this person ended up being convicted by the Joe Biden DOJ.
It's an absurd case, an absurd case.
I've never even heard of a case in which an officer was convicted of a civil rights violation for firing during an actual firefight with a suspect in which officers were lawfully present and the alleged victims in the neighboring apartments were not hit.
Where is the willfulness component of this?
And the answer is it didn't exist, but it reminds you of exactly how insane our entire law enforcement system went in the aftermath of Black Lives Summer, which is why MAGA existed.
It is why the second phase of MAGA existed.
It was because of stuff like that.
Meanwhile, the left's dedication to letting truly awful criminals out of prison continues apace.
One of the big stories that is breaking today is that a man who was convicted in the murder of a six-year-old first grader named Eton Pats is now going to have to be retried or released according to an appeals court.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a New York federal appellate court overturned the conviction of the man found guilty in the 1979 kidnapping and killing of six-year-old Eton Pats, bringing back to the spotlight a case that drew national attention and changed the way missing children cases are handled.
Pedro Hernandez, the former Bodega store worker, he was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
Why?
Well, in 2017, he confessed to police.
He lured Eton into the store's basement, strangled him, and disposed of the body back in 1979.
The reason this was such a big case at the time is because this is the first child ever to appear on those missing milk cartons.
On Monday, a three-judge panel for the second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the jury from Hernandez's child received instructions that would have unquestionably impacted its deliberations.
So what exactly happened?
Well, the story is this.
Eton, a first grader, disappeared while walking alone for the first time to his school bus stop in the Manhattan neighborhood of Soho on the morning of May 25th, 1979, and he was never found.
He became one of the first missing kids to appear on a mill carton.
May 25th, which is when he was abducted, is now known as National Missing Children's Day.
Three decades later, in 2012, police arrived at the New Jersey home of Hernandez following a tip from his own brother-in-law.
Hernandez confessed to police after about seven hours of questioning without being given his Miranda warnings, which informed suspects about their rights, such as the right to a lawyer.
According to Monday's ruling, immediately afterwards, Hernandez signed a Miranda waiver and detectives asked him to, quote, tell us again exactly what you just told us before.
So Hernandez's defense lawyers argued he had given a false confession and it was because of the police, his mental illness, his low IQ.
During questioning, he took his medication, including a fentanyl patch.
He told the police he'd been diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar, other mental illnesses.
His first trial was in 2015, mistrial.
Second trial ended in February 2017 with unanimous guilty verdict on charges of murder and kidnapping.
So, what was the issue here?
Well, the issue was that during the second trial, the jury sent the judge a few different notes focused on the confessions.
In the third one, the jury asked, if it found Hernandez's confession without the Miranda warning was not voluntary, would later confessions have to be disregarded?
The judge told the jury the answer is no.
And so that is wrong.
That is wrong as a matter of law.
However, the basic question here is whether Hernandez was pressured into his original confession or whether he was just talking to the cops.
This has happened in prior cases and the Supreme Court has ruled on this.
If the cops come to your house and you confess to a crime and they haven't read you your Miranda rights yet, and then they read you your Miranda rights and then you reconfess to the crime.
If you did the original confession voluntarily, that's not a problem.
So that was the question in this particular case.
The notion that he was compelled to testify to the cops without his Miranda warnings, and then later they read him the Miranda warnings and had him re-up.
And that was one of the issues in the trial, but it's not clear that the jury actually found that that's what was going on.
Beyond that, we should point out that the original Miranda ruling is deeply flawed.
The original Miranda ruling, which suggests that the only way to enforce the Fifth Amendment is to let criminals out of prison for having done crimes, is wrong.
There are many other ways you can punish officers for failing to take account of the rights of suspects, but letting criminals wander the streets because the officers did a bad job questioning the suspect turns out is a terrible idea.
One way that you could do this would be to, for example, fire officers who are found to have committed violations of the law in their questioning, to fine police departments.
There are lots of things you could do.
Miranda is a very, very badly decided decision by the Supreme Court.
But even putting that aside, the bottom line is that it is this sort of case that leads people to believe in the law and order aspect of the MAGA platform, which is very real.
Again, it's insane this person is going to be released onto the streets, presumably, barring some sort of serious retrial.
Meanwhile, another law enforcement news, the Trump administration on Monday released more than 230,000 pages of documents on the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
This had been one of the pledges of President Trump during the campaign was to release a lot of information on, for example, the RFK assassination, the JFK assassination, MLK, and also Epstein.
And the big issue with Epstein is that there are still people who are alive and kicking who are presumably mentioned in the Epstein files without criminal evidence that they actually did anything criminally wrong.
That is one of the things the FBI has to go through in determining what it can release, what it should release, and all the rest.
The same thing really does not apply to the MLK assassination.
Apparently, the family of MLK actually did not want some of the files released because they make MLK look not wonderful because a lot of those files are not specifically about the assassination.
They're about MLK's personal life, which, as biographers have noted, was quite troubled.
Attorney General Pambondi said the American people deserve answers after the horrific assassination of one of our nation's great leaders.
President Trump signed an executive order in January to release the documents.
Unlike the JFK documents, Dr. King's files had never been digitized, and they sat collecting dust in facilities across the federal government for decades, according to Tulsi Gabbard's office.
Among the files, the office said, were pages related to King's assassin, James Earl Ray, including that Ray's former cellmate stated he discussed an alleged assassination plot with Ray.
King's two surviving children, Martin Luther King Jr.
III and Bernice A. King, asked those looking through the documents to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family's continued grief.
Again, the thing they're concerned about is that the FBI, which again was being run by J. Edgar Hoover at the time, had, quote, worked to discredit, dismantle, and destroy their father's reputation.
Again, they have a theory that Ray was not the person who shot their father.
All the evidence suggests that Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr.
That is what the evidence suggests.
The administration clearly is attempting to release as much as it can.
And yes, of course, this has to do with a recommitment to transparency from the Trump administration in the aftermath of the Epstein hubbub.
There's no question that that's one of the things that is happening here.
But to suggest that this is some sort of fundamental failure by the Trump administration, that they don't have to go through different procedures and protocols with regard to a half-century old file as opposed to stuff that is currently ongoing with living people, that, of course, is incredibly silly.
And meanwhile, remember that time that we were told that the Trump administration was going to leech the military in L.A. fascists to take over President Trump declaring himself emperor and all the rest?
Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, hundreds of Marines who were deployed to L.A. last month during protests over immigration enforcement will now withdraw from the city, according to the Pentagon.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegset has directed the redeployment of around 700 Marines from L.A., according to Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell.
So, so much for the idea that the federal government is taking over L.A., which was, of course, the big complaint of everybody ranging from Governor Gavin Newsom to Senator Alex Padilla of Los Angeles and California.
The federal government said it deployed hundreds of Marines to L.A. to protect federal buildings in June.
They have now withdrawn those Marines.
Karen Bass then declared victory as though she was some sort of guerrilla insurgent, quote, L.A. stands with our troops, which is why we are glad they are leaving.
Weird take, hot take.
The Pentagon estimated their deployment would cost at least $134 million.
And again, they were put there in order to defend ICE facilities from outside attack from rioters, which wouldn't have been necessary except for all of the insanity of a left wing dedicated to the proposition that open borders are the way America ought to do business.
And meanwhile, in the Senate, John Thune is sort of stuck because Congress would like to adjourn.
They would like to get to their summer recess.
They want to go back, talk with their constituents, and also, yes, go on summer vacation.
President Trump is saying you guys should stay in session until you actually approve some of my nominees.
Senate Majority Leader Thune presumably would like to push that forward.
He said, we're thinking about it.
That's what he told Axios on Monday about President Trump's call to cancel all or part of the August break.
He says we want to get as many noms through the pipeline as we can.
But he said people are accustomed to going back.
This is the time of year when they go back and interact with their constituents and talk about some of the things that we've gotten done.
So again, leadership would like for there to be an adjournment, obviously.
President Trump would like for his nominees to get through.
Democrats have been holding up those nominees in extraordinary ways.
And meanwhile, in Democratic Party news, we were talking a little bit earlier about the 2028 nomination process.
There are a lot of Democrats, and when I say a lot, I mean seven, who are very interested in Pete Buttigieg, who's a 2028 nominee.
I fail to understand precisely why.
Aside from being a gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana, where he wasn't particularly good at his job, then running for president where he got shellacked, and then becoming a terrible Secretary of Transportation, what are his sterling credentials that make people so interested in Pete Budigej?
Well, now there's a story from the New York Post that certainly throws a crimp into his plans for a presidential run in 2028.
According to the New York Post, former Transportation Secretary Pete Budigej failed to replace outdated air traffic control systems while in office.
Instead, his agency shelled out tens of billions of dollars on a DEI agenda, according to federal spending records and airline industry insiders.
In one meeting, Budijej told industry executives air traffic control upgrades would just allow them to fly more planes.
And so why would that be in his interest?
That's a weird take.
Why would it be in the interest of the Department of Transportation to facilitate the flying of more planes?
I feel like that's the actual job.
But apparently, Buttigej didn't think that was the job.
What his department was really interested in was handing out hundreds of diversity, equity, and inclusion grants, totaling more than $80 billion over four years, at least half of the DOT's entire budget for a typical fiscal year.
That's insane.
That's totally crazy.
He was definitely pushing an agenda, an air industry official said, noting that the transportation secretary had little to no interest and took definitely zero action toward air traffic control modernization.
So basically, instead of spending any money on the stuff that you're supposed to do at the DOT, he yelled at the airlines, didn't visit rec sites, and spent all of the money on DEI nonsense.
The air industry official said at first, the DOT and he were reluctant to say there was an air traffic controller shortage or that the shortage had anything to do with flight delays or flight cancellations.
Now, spokesperson for Butigej rejects the claims and points to increased air traffic controller hiring and software changes.
But as everyone knows, things did not get markedly better under Secretary Budijej.
The DOT's Bureau of Transportation statistics show most flight cancellations, 54.3% were caused by weather.
One-third, 34.7%, were attributable to air carriers.
10% were due to failures in the national aviation system.
80% of flights were on time.
7% of the delays were due to air carriers.
7% late arriving aircraft.
5% to the aviation system.
So, you know, he's trying to argue that actually he spent the money correctly, that it actually went to facilitate the hiring at the FAA and all of the rest.
However, in an urgent letter to Butigej's DOT in April 2024, according to the Post, Air Industry Trade Association officials warned at the current rate of their hiring, it could take as long as 90 years for the FAA to reach its targeted staffing levels in some of the critical New York air traffic control centers.
At the same time, the focus of the department under Budijej also shifted, with roughly 400 DEI-related grants approved, according to review of federal spending between 2021 and 2024.
Just 60 grants for diversity, equity, or inclusion initiatives were approved during the previous administration.
So 60 grants compared to 400 grants under Budijej.
Biden's $1.2 trillion infrastructure law in 2021 provided a lot of the funding.
But again, the spending was out of control.
So Budijedge would yell at the airlines while simultaneously spending billions of dollars on DEI initiatives.
This is what you're going to run, Democrats, this right here?
It's a strange move.
Cotton, we'll see how it works out for them.
All righty, folks, the show continues for our members right now.
We will hop into the mailbag and take some of your questions.
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