Summary:
In this episode I address liberalism’s never-ending love affair with victimhood and identity politics. This will not end well because this is a nihilistic approach.
I also address the collapsing origin story for the Trump investigation.
News Picks.
Today’s edition of liberal myth-busting.
The London to Langley spy ring.
Canada and Mexico announce retaliatory tariffs.
Was the spy working the Trump team for information while simultaneously speaking to the press?
Black unemployment hits record lows as the economy continues to grow.
Homeschooling is surging.
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Get ready to hear the truth about America with your host, Dan Bongino.
Alright, welcome to the Dan Bongino Show.
Producer Joe, how are you today?
It's Friday!
I'm doing well, thank you.
Thank the Lord.
We love Fridays.
Long work weeks here.
We are just debating before the show what the appropriate level or quantity and quality of beep is.
We do the show and someone, once in a blue moon, is a cuss word in there.
And I like the traditional, beep, beep.
Joe sometimes messes with the beeps, which is all right.
Hey, do what you want.
You're the producer.
But the interesting conversations that happen before the show.
All right, listen.
Hey, it's good to see you today, by the way.
I can see you.
It's good to see you.
Yeah, thank you.
Finally.
I know, this thing has been a mess.
I got a new system coming in on Monday since the show is growing so much, so hopefully the quality will only get better for the show.
Yeah.
I saw a piece of the Wall Street Journal today, which is just interesting that identity politics, it's fascinating to me because identity politics, the left's Racist, phobophobic, istophobic, phobophodebeer, racist, misogynist, homophobe, trans-a-phobe, islamophobe, you know, how everybody's a phobophobic, istophobe something, is now consuming itself, which is what we predicted on this show forever.
So I want to get to that story.
I also want to get to another just incredible I mean it, Joe.
Incredible piece.
I guess sometimes I can maybe be a little hyperbolic on the show.
You know, you got to excite people, but I'm not in this case.
Kim Strassel has been doing incredible work at the Wall Street Journal.
Amazing.
Another piece on how paragraph one of this case keeps changing, this Russia case, and how now there's a palpable panic going on right now, because now the real story is coming out.
So it's a good piece.
There's some real explosive stuff in there, and I want to get to that too.
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All right.
First, there's an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today by a guy in Portland, Oregon, which is a, I've been out there, which is a great place, a cool city, but is a, no question, is a bastion of liberalism.
Liberalism everywhere, liberalism dominates the city, and it's about food trucks.
Now, You may say, what the hell does food trucks have to do with identity politics?
This story is probably going to upset you, but prove this show, I think, illuminating at the same time, because this is something we predicted a long time ago, that identity politics is a road to nowhere.
Identity politics is fascination with group identity, not individuality.
You will be identified, identity politics, by the characteristics of your group.
Physical, ethnic, whatever they may be.
The Democrats insist on characterizing you by collective identity.
Collective identity is dangerous.
It has always been dangerous.
Collective identity has been an excuse for tyrants to exterminate people.
It has been an excuse for people who are racist to engage in racist behavior.
Collective identity, the fact that you, Joe, are identified not by the characteristics of Joe Armacost, but by the color of your skin, by a religion or by something else, group identity is racist by its very nature.
It's not less racist because Joe has less melanin in his skin.
I gotta be me, man.
Everybody should, but you can't be because Democrats are now obsessed with identity politics and you have to be something else.
You have to be your ethnicity, your religion.
That's the whole essence of identity politics.
Now, an ongoing theme and thread of this program has always been Identity politics is a road to nowhere because the endless search for new victims in an effort to fill the void left by upsetting the people who are upset by identity politics will always create new victims and eventually you're going to run out of people and you're going to have to start consuming yourself.
Yep.
I know that was complicated.
I promise I'll explain it.
Alright, I always count on Joe as the audience ombudsman here.
Folks, this is a critical point, and I'll get to the food trucks thing.
It'll all make sense.
I'm not forgetting where we are here, but I have to establish the premise first.
Identity politics and the left's search for identity politics is rooted in the fact that they have no ideas that are popular on a large enough scale to win political races and to obtain political power.
Okay, so the left's ideas, their platform, their, you know, whatever it may be, their minimum wage, their tax platform, they're not ideas that are popular in large enough numbers that they can get elected to office to take control of national politics, which is their goal.
They want power.
They want collective power.
They want to consolidate power within the state.
They don't have a bevy of ideas that can do that.
And you may say, well, why not just change your ideas?
They can't change their ideas!
If they change their ideas to tax cuts, individual control of healthcare, and individual control of education, the whole liberal status platform disappears!
Because they don't control education, they don't control healthcare, and they don't control taxes!
Please tell me this makes sense!
Their platform is to take power away from you, and to convince you that it's good for you.
They can't change their platform.
They need your money, they need your healthcare, they need your kids in the education system.
Period.
So if they can't change their platform, what can you change?
You can change your strategy.
If you can't run on a platform, give us your money, give us your kids, give us your health care, which you can't because these are not ideas that are popular enough to sell them on their merits.
You have to change your strategic approach.
You change your strategic approach by saying, okay, if we can't run ideas, what can we run on?
We can run on division.
In other words, simply stated, as I've said before, if I can't get you to vote for my ideas, at a minimum I can get you to vote against my opponent.
Hmm.
How do we do that?
We claim our opponents, the Republicans, the Conservatives, and the Libertarians, hate blank.
They hate minorities, immigrants, Muslims, women.
This is the very root of identity politics.
It is no more complicated than this.
It is a strategy to hide your agenda, to obtain political power by hiding your agenda, but getting you to vote against the other guy, not for you, because your ideas aren't popular.
But you have to constantly fill in that blank.
Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians hate blank.
Now, you may say, well, I don't get how this is a losing strategy.
Well, by claiming Republicans hate blank and constantly filling in new blanks.
Transgender people, homosexual people, Muslims, whatever it may be.
They're constantly filling in the blank.
What happens, show?
People who identify with generally conservative and libertarian values, and even who are marginally Republican, of course are going to be offended by being called a istaphobic phobophobe.
Wait, I'm not a racist or a misogynist.
People are going to get pissed off.
I know Joe well.
If I were to sit here, I know where Joe goes to church and stuff.
If I were to sit here and call Joe a racist, he'd be pretty damn pissed.
Yeah, I would.
It's probably not a worst darn thing you could, and hence the extremely negative reaction of my passion in talking about this by conservatives.
When you say dumb, maybe that was a buzzer moment for, you know, for about them like that.
Oh, you guys are all racist.
No, you're an idiot.
And by alienating those people, you're going to engender a passion.
They are going to advocate strongly against you and do their thing to get you out of office.
The reason identity politics is such an abysmal atrocious failure and why it desperately needs new victims is because this endless search for new people to claim a racist is alienating so many people that you better start replacing the ranks of voters quick with other new victims because you're running out of victims to overcome the people you just called racist.
Makes sense?
Yeah, liberals are never happy.
Never happy.
Never!
And that's the reason.
They are never—it is—Rush says it right.
This is the angriest group of zeros you've ever met in your life.
Bingo!
And they feed and thrive off division, off hatred, off lying.
I'm sorry, folks.
Again, I'm not talking about all Democrats.
I would not stigmatize you.
You can't sit here and rant about identity politics and then blame the Democrats.
You're doing the same thing.
There are good people out there in the Democrats.
The radical left, there aren't.
If you subscribe to an ideology that disingenuously labels people as racist when they're not, and other things, homophobic and otherwise, you are just a straight-up evil person.
I'm sorry.
You identify with an ideology like that.
It would be no different than someone identifying with Nazism.
No, you're a loser.
I'm sorry.
You're a moral disgrace.
There's no like, well, I identify with fascism and Nazism, but I'm really a good guy.
No, you're not.
Okay.
Thank you.
Have a nice day.
You're not.
Period.
Let's move on.
You are a loser.
Identifying with an ideology that collectively identifies people as racist as well, without in any way evaluating what their character is made of and knowing nothing about them, is immoral and unethical.
Now.
Understand this.
Their marriage and their allegiance to identity politics, again, is alienating such an enormous swath of the population.
They have to go seek new voters and in seeking new voters they have to find new groups to fill in the blanks with.
It's an endless, I put this in capital letters, that it's an endless search in liberal land for new victims.
They need victimhood.
That's why they thrive off the higher education system.
Everybody in the higher education system is a victim.
Everybody.
They find new ways to tell you in college how crappy your life is.
They need new victims to fill in the blanks.
To overcome the loss in voters from alienating everybody else.
So what's happening in Portland?
I've read the story, I wasn't surprised, but I'm still just astonished that they don't see the futility of this strategy.
Apparently there's a bunch of food trucks that park on streets in Portland and these food trucks used to be a cornucopia of, you know, beautiful diversity, real diversity in food choices.
I don't mean diversity in a liberal way, I mean an actual diversity in food choices.
Spanish food, you know, ethnic foods from all over the world.
Asian food.
Well, Joe, we can't have that.
So apparently in 2016, a food establishment opened up called Saffron Colonial, which sold some old school British dishes.
Well, of course, the social justice warriors and the snowflakes had a meltdown saying, oh my gosh, food from that era?
You're, of course, condoning colonialism.
What are you talking about?
So they bombarded the place with negative reviews.
They boycotted the place.
Yeah.
I know.
You're tilting your head in confusion here.
Of course it's not going to make sense to you, Joe, because you're a normal person.
But yeah, so they have a force to change the name away from Saffron Colonial because they sold food from the classic food from the old British Empire.
God forbid you did that.
You may say, oh, all right, well, that's not that.
Oh, no, it goes on.
In 2017, two women were selling burritos Burritos.
Yeah.
I love burritos, by the way.
By the way, Chick-fil-A sells the best burrito, breakfast burrito.
I enjoy it.
I love their breakfast burrito.
I think their breakfast burrito is better than their chicken sandwiches.
The chicken burrito, the breakfast burrito is awesome.
Well, I mean, social justice warriors, of course, are probably going to have a meltdown about all this because two women were selling burritos, Joe, and apparently they were Stealing culture away from people of color.
Stealing their culture by selling burritos.
Oh my gosh.
Oh, do we live in the dumbest of times?
That people can be so stupid.
Yeah, I know, I know, I know.
You know, I'm Italian and my wife makes pasta.
My wife is Colombian.
From the country Columbia for liberals, not Columbia, South Carolina.
You're so identified with identity politics, you may not understand the difference, okay?
She's from actual Columbia, like South America Columbia, okay?
She makes pasta.
Is that stealing my Italian culture too?
But wait, Joe, I'm only 50% Italian.
I'm actually Irish and German too.
So, am I stealing it?
Can I cook pasta?
I mean, it was an Italian dish, right?
I mean, are we allowed to do that?
Do you realize how dumb this is?
In this endless search for new victims, what do you do?
You enrage people so much by, look, you're a victim.
There's a woman stealing your burritos!
It's a burrito theft!
Their culture's going down the drain!
It's circling the drain now!
These two women are burrito thieves!
Shifty!
Go get Adam Schiff on this!
Yo, Shifty!
It's time for Shifty.
Get Adam Schiff!
They're doing what?
They're stealing for Shifty!
They're stealing burritos!
Are you kidding me?
But do you understand, ladies and gentlemen, again, in the endless search for new victims, this is what happens.
The endless search for new victims needs new targets.
And these targets, even in a liberal city like Portland, where two female business owners start a burrito truck, they could have been the most liberal people in the world, they don't even know their politics.
The point is, you, it will eat itself.
Because you endlessly need new victims, and then by getting new victims, those victims automatically generate new targets.
Why?
Because, Joe, if you're a victim, you're a victim of something, right?
Joe, you can't be a victim of nothing.
If you're a victim, you're a victim of a crime.
You're a victim of an errant baseball that hits you in the head when you're hitting in a game, you get hit by a pitch.
You have to be a victim of something.
And this search for victims requires a hunt for new targets.
And this hunt for new targets has apparently, according to the piece in the Wall Street Journal, this is a quote, the new targets are, Joe, according to an email that went around, white-owned businesses that hamper the ability for people of color to run successful businesses of their own.
Yeah, I know, I know.
The stupid is spreading like a virus.
So now it doesn't matter if... Now, keep in mind, Joe, this is where victims... You may say, all right, well, they're not really hunting for new victims.
Their traditional targets have always been the white male patriarchy, according to critical theory.
No, no, no, no, no.
Yeah, that's what you'd say if you weren't thinking this thing through.
But think this through now.
This is Portland, Joe.
What if you're white and you're gay?
What do you do now?
Wait, I thought if you were gay the Republicans hated you, but now the liberals hate you because you own a burrito stand.
Yeah.
Joe, right, this is not a conflict or what?
I can see you and you're like thinking this through, like what do we do?
You know, it reminds me, I'm sorry, you gotta use this Joe, it may be a little off color but it's still funny.
There was this, for men who've ever gone into a public bathroom, there's the urinal game, You know, you never stand next to another guy if you don't have to.
There was a game one time, it went around online, and it was kind of funny.
It was like, which one do you use to avoid, like, infringing on someone else's space?
And it had all these scenarios.
What do you do now?
What do you do now?
So you're now attacking a white, but now even worse, let me add another victim category.
Again, you've been told you're a victim.
I don't believe this, but you've been told you're a victim by liberal critical theory.
So now if you're gay, they're your great protectors, the liberals.
They're not, but that's what they say.
But now the same liberals turn on you if you're white and gay and you own a food truck.
Because you can't serve burritos.
What if you're white and gay and you're a woman?
Then what the hell happens?
Now you have the conflict of, to use a reverse conflict of visions.
Thomas Sowell's really great book, by the way.
But let's steal it for, this is a conflict of liberal visions.
His book is about conservatism.
Versus liberalism.
But now it's a conflict of liberal visions.
Wait, I thought if you were a woman, they were your great protectors.
Apparently not Ivanka Trump, though.
She was called a nasty term by this horrible, atrocious comedian.
And they don't protect her, of course.
But again, you've been told that if you're a woman, vote for them, they're the great protectors.
But you're not!
So do you understand, I'm gonna wrap this up on this then, this is why it is a, you're walking off a cliff like lemmings.
There is no end to this.
There's no end to this.
Soon it'll be a conflict between black and hispanic voters who vote liberal.
I mean what, illegal immigration is primarily hurting a lot of minority communities.
Yes sir.
Where there's still some significant elasticity in that job market.
How do you fight that one?
You can't because you've judged people by collective identity you've already lost!
This is a road to nowhere.
Your endless search for new victims is going to eventually find victims you told you were the protector of in the past.
You're gay.
Vote for us.
We'll protect you.
But hey, I'm gay.
Now I'm the target of a social justice warrior crew because I'm at a burrito stand.
I'm not saying the women who own this burrito stand were gay.
I'm just suggesting to you this endless search for new victims based strictly on collective identity.
It's a black hole.
It is a black hole.
Nothing escapes from it.
And it eventually will collapse.
And I say that on a Friday because this is a bad news story with a happy ending to it.
The happy ending is this is a nihilistic, destructive, there is no possible way this is going to be a generational ideology.
Is none!
It can't mathematically work.
Your whole strategy is destroying people and you cannot replace your victims and targets fast enough to replace the people you've destroyed, hence the generation of the Trump era.
You know, it's over.
Portland, Oregon, liberal capital of the universe, is now eating itself, pun intended, alive at the food truck business.
Unbelievable.
Okay, I got a lot of other stories to get through today, so let me move on to some other stuff.
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Jobs News.
I'll get to that in a second.
All right.
Kimberly Strassel's piece.
Folks, paragraph one keeps changing over and over and over again.
Paragraph one.
Now, for those regular listeners, you know what I mean?
For those just joining in today, whenever you are a federal agent or a police investigator, you will write a report on a case.
In that report, there is always a paragraph one.
I wrote, gosh, tons of reports.
I couldn't even tell you how many reports I wrote in my time with the Secret Service and with the NYPD.
And the NYPD, they used to start funny.
They used to start at TPO, at time and place of occurrence.
But in the Secret Service, you were free to write however you wanted.
What is the opening paragraph?
I think back to one of my biggest cases and the opening paragraph was this simple.
It said, at such and such a date, I received a call from a bank fraud investigator.
Let's call him Bill.
It's not his real name.
But he said, this is a real case.
And he said to me, hey, I have a suspicious charge at a Home Depot on Long Island.
I've used this example many times.
That paragraph one of that case described I don't want to be dramatic.
It sounds like I'm engaging in puffery.
I'm not.
It was one of the biggest financial fraud cases we had seen in the Northeast.
All on a simple phone call from a bank fraud investigator about an actual crime.
It was a guy in Home Depot.
They had on videotape who had bought items with a stolen credit card that wasn't his.
How do we know?
Because the credit card holder said, hey, that's not me on the video.
It's simple as that.
I've never really told you what happened in this case, but it spiraled into an utter monstrosity.
I had never seen anything like this thing in my life.
They had developed algorithms to steal credit cards and were testing them.
It was an incredibly complicated case.
I had a wonderful experience working with the FBI on it.
Terrorism nexus.
There was a nexus to untaxed cigarettes in Detroit.
People couriering money overseas to finance terrorism.
Every angle this case took had a new and more fascinating angle.
And I don't mean that in a good way, but just like eye-opening.
Like, my gosh, is this thing ever going to end?
We wound up wrapping it up.
But folks, when you read that case report to this day, I still remember the case number.
It still exists in the Melville office of the United States Secret Service.
Paragraph 1 still reads, on such and such a date, Bank Fraud Investigator Bill called Dan Bongino, me, and said this.
The problem with this case... I'm desperately... From 628 on, we've gotten into the fine, fine weeds of this.
We've explained to you in, I think, unprecedented fashion.
I don't think anybody's dug as deeply into a case as we have on this one, at least on a conservative talk radio show.
There are other shows like Serial that do this all the time, but this is a politics show.
But we've gotten into the fine weeds.
In the last few days, I've been trying to pull it out to 30,000 feet and to keep you focused on what really matters here.
What really matters here is the scandal is not that... Don't make no mistake.
The scandal here is not that the Trump team was spied on.
You may be shocked they said that.
It's not.
The scandal here is not that the Trump team was investigated.
You may be even surprised by that.
It's not.
That's not the scandal.
The scandal here is nobody can tell you why!
That's the scandal!
Let me tell you something.
If I found out Barack Obama, George Bush, or Donald Trump was legitimately, Joe, legitimately a pawn of Vladimir Putin, or Xi, or anybody else, You're darn right we'd want the incoming president is a fake, is a Russian plant, is a spy.
What's he going to do?
Start a nuclear war intentionally with a Russian enemy to benefit the Russians?
I'd want to know that.
The scandal is not that they were spied on.
The scandal is nobody can explain why.
And the FBI and the DOJ absolutely, resolutely refuse to expose to Congressional oversight what Paragraph 1 says.
What does it say?
They won't tell us!
Now, Strassel has a piece today about how speculation about what Paragraph 1 says, because nobody, listen to me, nobody knows I hate to whip out Ren and Stimpy two days in a row, but where they go, nobody knows.
Nobody knows!
Nobody knows!
Nobody will tell us!
Now it is the press, the Pravda media, is desperate to cover up For the scandal that happened here, a spying and a counterintelligence investigation, for no publicly good or exposed reason whatsoever at this point that we know about, the Pravda media is desperate to cover up for it because it was Obama's administration that did it.
Those are just the facts.
That's not open for dispute, okay?
If you're a liberal, you can stop listening now.
Because this part bothers you.
The facts.
But Strassel says, you know, it's interesting that the New York Times provided some air cover here in December of last year, December of 2017, with this piece again suggesting, and this is different angles in this stuff, that Papadopoulos, this low-level Trump team member, it all started, paragraph one, according to the New York Times, should read, that Papadopoulos met in a bar With this Australian diplomat in London and said, hey, the Russians have dirt on Hillary.
The New York Times, I want to be crystal clear, has suggested based on leaks that this is what paragraph one reads.
Now, on first reading of that story in December, I knew this thing was garbage, but a lot of liberals jumped and said, look, Joe, look, you see, all you conservatives are whining, but we were really investigating a serious threat.
This Trump team member spoke out to an Australian diplomat and said that they had dirt on Hillary.
Therefore, Trump's a Russian spy.
Thanks for playing.
Hold on there, Bubba Louie.
Yeah, you're darn right.
Well, what happened?
Well, Downer gave an interview recently, which Strassel covers in her piece, and there are some fascinating pieces in this.
The original story, Joe, that the New York Times wrote in December was very vague on very specific details.
Now, before we get to those details, I want to explain to you how this should have worked.
If this was a legitimate national security threat to the United States, in other words, George Papadopoulos was a Russian hack or was working on behalf of a Russian hack, a Russian spy, a Russian cutout, and was trying to get information from a foreign government about a presidential candidate.
Then that information should have been passed through, I can't say this term enough, official channels.
Why do we have official intelligence channels?
Please, please, please remember this.
Take a mental note.
We have official intelligence channels because it is critical that we vet information through trained intelligence people of experience in the sphere to make sure we don't start a nuclear war based on an unofficial channel, based on some kind of political leanings.
In other words, we have professional intelligence entities in these five eyes countries we cooperate
with - the UK, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, the United States.
We have professional channels where we vet info so that we don't have a guy in Australia who tells his buddy in the State Department that the Russians are going to engage in a first strike nuclear strike on Monday and that Trump doesn't get wind of it through unofficial channels and then launch a nuclear strike on Sunday to prevent a nuclear strike on Monday that was never We're gonna happen.
We vet information through professionally trained intelligence official channels to hopefully stop information from getting to the president's desk that is going to deeply impact national economic, health care, financial, and potential war policy to prevent crap information from getting from his desk.
This is not a mystery!
This is the way it has always been done.
You have an intelligence tip, you pass it through.
Now, Strassel walks through how this should have worked.
Here's how it should have worked.
If Downer, this Australian diplomat, who alleges that he spoke to Papadopoulos and Papadopoulos told him that the Russians had dirt on Hillary.
If they really believe that there was some collusion with the Russians going on to taint an election, Downer was supposed to give that information, Joe, to who?
The Australian intelligence entities.
Yep.
Which then do what, Joe?
Vet it themselves.
And then pass it to their American counterparts in the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies in the United States, which then do what?
Vet it themselves.
Again.
To make sure it's not crap information.
Yet, as Devin Nunes so aptly pointed out in his interview with Maria Bartiromo a few weeks ago, none of that official information exists in paragraph one or anywhere else.
Now, you should be asking yourself, because you're astute listeners, what the hell happened to the information if it wasn't passed through official channels?
Oh, it was passed through unofficial intelligence channels.
The State Department, maybe?
Now, Strassel throws out a name I have not heard before.
I always say, remember the names?
I have a new one for you to add to your list.
The Charge, one of the diplomats we had in our Australian embassy, was a woman by the name of Dibble.
I think it's Elizabeth Dibble.
Apparently, this information may have been passed to her.
in the State Department rather than passed from Downer to their intelligence agencies first.
Now, I just explained to you the likelihood of why that was.
If they passed it through official intelligence channels, Australian intelligence, US intelligence, it would have been vetted and they would have said, this is garbage.
So you got a dude in a bar who said that the Russians may have information on Hillary and you think that's an actual tip?
Everybody knew that!
You'd have to investigate everybody in America and all over the world.
Also, folks, another interesting component of this that probably would have been vetted as well and determined to be crap.
That's an official term.
We need an acronym for that.
Crap.
We need to work on that.
Also, someone would have asked the question, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Isn't the allegation that the Russians hacked the DNC?
So if this guy came to the bar and said the Russians had information on Hillary, the allegation's not about Hillary's emails.
The allegation of Russian collusion was that they hacked the DNC.
Why?
Why?
Wait, wait.
Why?
Time out.
Tio.
Why?
I don't know if you see where I'm going with this.
Um, I'm not.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
I can tell.
And I bet some other people.
This is an absolutely critical point.
I don't think you're going to hear anyone else.
Anywhere else.
Hillary's team with their makeshift bathroom server up in their house in Chappaqua, a private server outside of the government system, which was not authorized.
Hillary was supposed to conduct official business on her state.gov account.
Oh, she didn't have one?
No.
She only dealt with a private server that was not secured.
It was not a government system.
Hillary could never admit publicly before the election that her private server, that she insisted there was no exchange of classified information, she could never admit and survive politically if they had to admit that her server was hacked by the Russians.
You see how they needed the story always to be about the DNC?
You know, listen, people would be angry it was the DNC.
But the DNC, Joe, is a hard to define entity.
Like, what is that?
The DNC?
You know, oh, the Democrats?
You can't pin it on one person.
You know, when you want to pin collective blame on people, that's an identity politics thing, ironically.
But when you want to pin collective blame on people, the blame is dispersed almost uniformly.
If Hillary admitted and said, hey, my server was hacked and the Russians hacked it and Donald Trump was involved, the first question would have been, well, why was your server hacked?
Well, because I had it in a bathroom in Chapel Grove.
Wait, what?
They couldn't say that.
That's why the stories don't marry up.
That's why the story could not have been passed through the official channel.
Because if the story was passed through the official channel, hey, I met this, this is Downer talking, I met this cat Papadopoulos in a bar and he said, the Russians have dirt on Hillary.
The first priority of American intelligence and the FBI would have been like, really?
Well, how'd they get the information on Hillary?
Oh, she had a bogus server of, not a real server, but with a private server set up in her house.
We better investigate that would have crushed her.
They had to keep the focus on the DNC emails.
But that's not what was said to Downer in the bar!
Guys, ladies, I know this is overwhelming, a lot of this stuff.
But you have been hosed.
You have been bamboozled.
You are getting lied to.
You are being worked.
You are being screwed over so badly by your government that is lying to you right now that they can't even get major details right.
Forget about the minor details.
You just told us this whole case is about the Russians hacking the DNC and working with Trump to get that information out there to hurt the Democrats.
But now you're telling us that a guy showed up in a bar and said the Russians have dirt on Hillary.
They meant nothing was said at all about the DNC.
Matter of fact, Joe, Downer even admits in this new Australian interview which Strassel covers in the piece, Downer says in the piece that Papadopoulos said nothing about Trump being involved at all.
So wait, wait, folks.
Let me get this straight.
Dude.
I know.
You want to like head me desk.
Yeah.
Your whole story is that the Russians hacked the Democrat National Committee and stole their emails and then worked with the Trump team to collude to get those emails out there to win an election.
Yet the Downer meet, there's no mention about DNC emails at all.
And even worse, Downer just gives an interview and says there was no mention of Trump knowing about it either.
Do you understand now why they're hiding paragraph one?
Because they told us in the New York Times interview that paragraph one said, this is all due to Papadopoulos and this meeting about the emails.
But that's not what paragraph one says.
There was no mention of DNC emails.
There was no mention of Trump.
Folks, you are being worked.
Big time.
Now, in that New York Times piece, again, they're very, very delicate with the language, back from December, as Strassel points out.
They say, oh, the information made it to American counterparts, Joe.
Who?
How?
Joe, don't you think that's important?
Yeah, I'd like to know who, yeah!
Yeah, of course you want to know who, because the way this was supposed to be done, Is it supposed to be passed through Australian intelligence to American intelligence?
That's not what happened.
But the New York Times is very delicate.
They say, oh, they're American counterparts.
Who?
In the State Department?
That is not an intelligence entity.
It's a diplomatic entity.
As someone pointed out to me in email, by the way, they do have a small intelligence bureau, but that's not their focus.
The State Department is a diplomatic entity.
The Central Intelligence Agency is an intelligence gathering entity.
The State Department is not a place to conduct intelligence activities.
It's not!
It's a place to conduct diplomatic, and in this case, political activities that benefited the Clintons.
Why?
Because Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State and had all her little bootlicking butt kissers in there.
So if they passed the information unofficially to the State Department, they knew the information, however bogus and ridiculous.
Hey, they had a conversation about dirt on Hillary.
Well, was it about the DNC emails?
Because we're about to tell the public the Russians hacked the DNC.
No, it's not about that.
Well, is it about Trump?
No, it's not about that either.
There was no conversation about Trump.
So why are we doing this?
Because it's the State Department and we know you'll fluff this up and get it to the FBI, right?
Because if we pass it through the CIA, they're gonna laugh at us.
Oh, believe me, Brennan had a role later on in the dossier.
But Brennan himself knew as well that they had to avoid the hierarchy of the Central Intelligence Agency because someone was gonna pick up what colossal BS this was.
They also say in the New York Times piece that it was passed to American counterparts and it quote, reached the FBI.
How did that happen?
New York Times folks, don't you think this is important?
Now, one of the other allegations when it was passed to the Australian ambassador of the United States, a guy named Joe Hockey, Kimberly Strassel sources saying that did not happen.
Folks, nothing they're telling you about it, nothing they're telling you about this case is true.
Nothing!
Paragraph one, I'm telling you, reads this.
The Clinton team and the Obama administration needed to spy on the Trump team for tactical reasons.
To do so, they generated fake information from Fusion GPS, fake information from the Russians, and they handed it off to get a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump team.
That's the story.
That is why the Bureau is desperately, desperately hiding this, what Paragraph 1 reads.
Because it's all BS.
There is no credible crime or counterintelligence information heavy enough to warrant what happened in this case.
The details are missing.
The details are critical here.
All right.
I got a couple other things I want to get to on this too.
It's important stuff.
Let me get through this and then I got another tidbit I missed yesterday because yesterday's show was so busy.
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Okay, just a quick note I missed on yesterday's show.
So, as I've frequently stated, this was a setup the whole time.
Paragraph one is that Clinton and the Obama team needed to set up Trump.
They wanted tactical information on him, so they spied on him.
One of the setups was the meeting at Trump Tower between Don Trump Jr., a now Russian, former person associated deeply with Russian intelligence, a guy named Rinat Admokshin, and a lawyer working with a company hired by Fusion GPS, which was hired by Hillary.
So let me get this straight.
A lawyer who's working with a company hired by Hillary to get negative intel on Trump shows up on Trump Tower to talk to John Jr.
in an obvious attempt to entrap him.
She shows up with another Russian with deep connections to Russian intel whose lawyer, Oh, the lawyer conveniently is a friend of the Clintons.
Oh, gee, I wonder how that happened.
So two people with ties, by proxy to the Clintons, show up with Don Trump Jr.
But this little beauty came out the other day.
Heads up to a source of mine.
Joe, a translator was at that meeting, too.
I knew the translator was there, but the guy's name was Sama Charnoff.
That was his last name.
He was a contractor.
And this interpreter had done work with who before?
Oh, the State Department with Hillary Clinton.
Crazy how that happens.
It's unbelievable.
So three people are at the meeting who all have suspect... You know what?
I don't want to oversell that.
They have ties to Hillary Clinton.
The interpreter could possibly be innocent.
I'm just telling you again that the scenarios here for entrapment are thick.
One guy's lawyer is a Clinton friend, the other one is working for a company working for the Clintons, and the other one was an interpreter who had worked with the State Department with Hillary Clinton.
Unbelievable.
And then we find out yesterday, another great piece of Chuck Ross I have in the show notes today, which please check out at Bongino.com, that the spy in the case, this Stefan Halper, who had been spying on the Trump team, For the FBI looking for information on the Trump team.
Now we find out, Joe, he was talking to the media too.
So there's a great piece by Chuck Ross where an FBI agent with expertise in this Spoke to Chuck Ross in the piece and the FBI agent says, Joe, what, why do you think you don't want a spy, an informant?
Why do you think you wouldn't want him talking to the press?
And it was, it was, it's very simple, but it's a genius way to put it to, you know, to get people who don't understand this sphere in space to understand it.
Well, you think, Joe, if you're a spy working for me trying to get information on WCBM where you work, and if we're going to use that case later to build a counterintelligence or criminal case in the case of the Mueller probe against you, duh, duh, duh.
You think it'd be a bad idea to talk to the press?
Possibly.
Why?
It's a bad idea.
It's a bad idea because why?
The press reports later will be used to confirm the information the spy, who's clandestine, provided.
He's right.
Which creates what?
A circular feedback loop of stupidity.
Hey look, Joe the spy must be right with his information about CBM.
Why?
Because I read it in the Baltimore Sun.
But who provided it to the Baltimore Sun?
Oh, Joe did.
You're using Joe's information to confirm Joe?
I thought this is great!
Like Chuck Ross writes this in a piece of the Daily Caller.
It's beautiful!
That the fact that the spy was talking to the press shows you that they had nothing and they were trying to develop circular stupid loops.
You started stupid.
It's like people say, He did a 360 degree turn.
Uh, no, he didn't.
That's being back at day one.
It's 180 degrees.
It's like when guys used to say to me in the Secret Service, I say this all the time because I thought it was funny.
They don't understand the difference between a time difference and a time change.
You can only have a 12 hour time change, okay?
That's the most.
Because you start going in the other direction.
12 hours, the opposite side of the earth.
If it's 12 noon here and 12 midnight, that's as far as it goes.
You can't have more than that.
There's a 17 hour time change.
What?
No, dude, there isn't.
There is not a 17 hour time change.
There's a difference here.
That's like saying there's a 24 hour time change.
Yeah.
No, there's a 24 hour time change.
What do you mean?
It's the same time?
Oh, I used to hate that.
I know it's stupid, but when you travel like I did, and you're in different countries three and four times a month, you want to know what the hour difference is between where I was on Northeast time, and because you want to know how difficult it's going to be to acclimate.
Because it takes, for those of you who travel, you know this.
When you travel overseas, it takes about one day for each time zone you cross, about a day per hour.
So if the time difference is nine hours, it's going to take you about a week before you're fully acclimated, which is good to know in the Secret Service.
Because if the President's only five days out, and it's going to take you a week to acclimate, you better speed up the process and do something.
Stay awake for a full day or what?
So by saying, oh, it's a, it's a, it's a 15 hour time shift.
No, it's not.
You're going three hours in the other direction.
It's closer to an eight or nine hour time difference.
It's, I don't know.
I'm sorry.
I don't mean to waste your time, but it's just, when you travel a lot, you know what I'm talking about.
It used to drive me crazy.
I'd ask the advanced guys on the ground.
Hey, uh, time difference.
I need to know.
And they'd be like 17 hours.
Why are you talking about dude?
No.
No!
Yeah, 24 hours.
The time change between New York and D.C.
is 24 hours.
Jeez.
All right, I wasted too much time on that.
Okay, Jobs Report came out today.
Some interesting stuff going on here with this that I do want to get out there.
News of the day on a Friday.
This is super good news.
Excellent good news.
Terrific, superb good news.
Job numbers just came out for the month.
223,000 jobs created, which is over 30,000 more jobs than anticipated by predictions, and those predictions were high.
Folks, this is incredible news, and I'll tell you why it's good news.
The predictions for jobs added, Joe, was 190,000, and the reason they put a ceiling on that of 190,000 was, the theory is, listen, unemployment is now below 4%.
We're in the threes now, which is a spectacular number.
But that puts a natural limit, by the way, on the amount of hiring that can occur.
Well, why is that, Joe?
Because if everybody has a job...
It's harder to find people to employ in your job.
It's just, it shrinks the pool of unemployed people.
This isn't hard.
I'm not trying to be like overly philosophical about it.
This is pretty simple stuff.
When unemployment's low, the pool of unemployed people you can attract to your job is lower too.
It's harder to find them.
Simple as that.
So one of the reasons they'd come in at 190,000, which is a good number, but not a great number, is they said, well, listen, we're not going to hire any more than that because there's just not enough people to hire.
Well, you must be saying to yourself, Dan, how the heck did the number come in then at 223?
You're saying it doesn't make sense.
By the way, April was revised up, too, by 15,000 jobs.
So the economy is motoring along right now.
What happened, folks, and this is the really good news here.
Is people who are out of the workforce, who are not counted in that unemployment number, people who had given up looking for a job, they are not counted.
In other words, if Joe and I are unemployed for say two or three years, and because of that frustration sets in and we are no longer looking, we don't go on job interviews, we go on disability, whatever it may be, we are not counted in that unemployed number.
We are underemployed, we are not in fact employed, but we're not counted in the official statistic.
That has to be, just based on the pure numerics here, that has to be where these new employees are coming from.
Because based on the predictions, if they were to come from people for looking for a job only, we would have capped out at about 190.
What I'm telling you is the number was higher because the economy is so good and wages are starting to hum a little bit, a little bit, not a lot, but enough, that they're starting to pull people off the sidelines now who are not even looking for work.
Now, that is a good thing for moral reasons.
Number one, work is purifying for the soul, but outside of the morals of it, which is obvious, which are obvious, there's a double benefit show economically here.
Unemployed people, you know, they may have been looking for a job.
They may have been frictional, like they're out of one job.
It'll be a few weeks before they find another one.
They're not a net drain on society.
Right, right.
Economically, I'm not talking about morals.
Don't get into like leftist nonsense here.
We're not, you know, we're not to get into that at all.
I'm talking about economics, but there's a plus and a minus here.
But when you are out of the workforce completely, but able to work, And you're on, say, either you're on disability, maybe you are disabled, maybe you're not.
But if you're on extended unemployment or other things, other people, this is just pure math, are paying those bills.
As these people move out of the, I don't want to work anymore at all, maybe I'll go back to a job.
The benefits are incredible.
One, you get people back to work, which is good for them.
But secondly, the people who are working and paying for people who are not working are not paying for those people to not work.
And now the people who are not working are working to pay for the people left.
This is a quadruple quintuple win.
I understand what I'm saying.
It's really important.
You have to dig.
I'm trying to give you a part of these numbers you may not hear on TV here.
They come in with a, oh, it's going to be about $190,000, which is good.
It came in at $223,000.
The reasons for the $190,000 were there's just not enough people left to hire.
You tracking, Joe?
And they were right.
Except they didn't factor in the people who said, I don't want to be hired.
Those are the people out of the workforce.
Those people who were net takers on the economy, they were taking money out of the economy, whether it was unemployment, whether it was disability, whether it was whatever it may be, those people are now entering the workforce again to fill in those gaps and are now becoming taxpayers instead of tax takers.
This is a huge win.
Another big number.
First quarter of the year!
This is not an economics class and I'm not trying to be your guru here or anything, but this is a number you should always keep your eye on.
And Lewis Woodhill over at Real Clear Markets does really great work on this.
There's a number called fixed non-residential investment.
It's an overly complicated term for investing in your factories and business, basically.
Non-residential meaning not housing related, right?
Fixed non-residential investment is companies buying computers, companies buying machinery for their new factories.
Investment's what drives the economy because it makes factories and people more productive.
They have newer computers, they have better machinery, they can produce better stuff, and they can make more money.
If fixed non-residential investment stalls, which it did dramatically under the Obama years, we're all in trouble.
Because we're going to be making the same crap stuff for the same crap time for the same crap wages.
Fixed non-residential investment in the first quarter is tracking at 9.2% growth.
That is phenomenal.
That is incredible.
That is a huge number, which portends to me, not only in the future, Not only are we going through robust job growth now, but that investment is going to pay massive dividends, and we may be looking at four and potentially five percent growth two, three years ahead.
This is very, very, very good news for a Friday.
One other thing.
Black unemployment.
Historic lows.
Thank God.
5.9 percent.
5.9 percent.
Now, as pointed out to me today in an email I received, not only is black unemployment under Trump down to 5.9 percent.
Those are real numbers, by the way, liberals.
I know your identity politics, you know, everybody is an isthophobic phobic.
That's your thing.
I'm just telling you the real world.
There are our citizens, black Americans, Hispanic Americans, immigrants, Muslims, women.
These are our citizens.
Black Americans have benefited exceptionally from these policies.
5.9 percent, record low.
But here's the kicker, Joe.
The gap between black unemployment and white unemployment, which is 3.5%, is the lowest it's been in decades.
I thought you were all about equality.
Until it actually happens, right, Libs?
You big, phony frauds.
Didn't happen under Obama.
It happened here.
Now, I will say this.
I know it's going to aggravate some people, and that's fine.
I love my audience, and I'm only here for the truth, and you're free to disagree.
I got an email proactively this morning about it.
The trade war is going to have to be resolved soon, somehow.
It's going to have to be.
If these are tactical maneuvers, then there has to be some kind of an out to this.
There has to be.
Because even now, steel people in the United States, based on the tariff with Canada that was just imposed, even steel workers in the United States are starting to say, hey man, we have to dial this back a little bit.
You don't believe me?
Read their own comments today.
It took an hour, but I knew you'd get it.
I know.
And I get it.
I read your emails.
I understand.
I'm telling you, just based on the Steelworkers' own comments, their exports to Canada are significant.
This is going to sting.
If this is a tactic and it's a ploy to reduce ag subsidies, to reduce foreign tariffs, to reduce disparities based on foreign tariffs, If it's a tactic, let's play it out then.
But let's get it done, quick.
Because make no mistake, this is going to put a damper if it doesn't end soon.
All right, folks, I appreciate you all tuning in.
Thank you very much.
Please go to Bongino.com, subscribe to my email list there.
And if you wouldn't mind, please follow the show and subscribe.
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Go to iTunes, you can subscribe to the podcast.
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Thanks for listening, and I welcome, of course, your emails on the topic.
You know the show is for you, but again, I'm only here for the truth, and I'm not going to ever lie to you, so that matters to me.
All right, folks.
Thanks a lot.
I'll see you all on Monday.
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