Ep. 323 skewers Hillary Clinton’s erratic 2016 loss excuses—blaming Comey, Russians, Satan—while mocking media overreactions to Trump’s "Khafifi" tweet as they ignore bigger issues. Legal scholar Floyd Abrams defends First Amendment absolutism against Espionage Act abuses, clashing with progressive critiques of free speech. Clinton’s Russian collusion theories mirror Alex Jones-style conspiracies, from WTC collapse claims to her "vast right-wing conspiracy" delusions about Bill’s impeachment. The episode pivots to Morning Joe’s anti-Trump paranoia—like Kislyak blackmail fantasies—and frames economic growth as Trump’s ultimate rebuttal to media hysteria. [Automatically generated summary]
Hillary Clinton has finally taken personal responsibility for all the things that caused her to lose the election through no fault of her own.
In various interviews and speeches, Mrs. Clinton has blamed her loss on James Comey, the Russians, the Democrat Party, voter suppression, the media, the weather, a guy at a gas station who gave her directions to Arizona when she asked the way to Wisconsin, and the fact that Satan promised he would make her president if she would give him her immortal soul and then lied to her and pulled the prize away at the last minute.
Actually, I'm not sure that last one is really a very good excuse.
Anyway, according to a report on the website Axios, Hillary's friends say she is, quote, seething with rage and haunted by her loss.
Now, far be it from me to revel in Mrs. Clinton's personal pain, or celebrate her agonizing comeuppance, or dance around the room singing a happy, happy song at the news that she's suffering.
Nor would I ever wear a red clown nose and make funny faces in the bathroom mirror upon hearing that she had been plunged into a personal hell because her lifelong corruption failed to pay off.
That would be wrong, especially wearing the clown nose, which never happened.
Or if it did, I regret it.
In any case, Clinton's rage has apparently left her a bit confused.
For instance, in a recent commencement speech at her alma mater Wellesley University, Mrs. Clinton said she was as furious about the election of Donald Trump as she had been furious at Richard Nixon when he was impeached.
But in fact, Richard Nixon wasn't impeached.
That was Mrs. Clinton's husband, Bill.
So which one of these two presidents is she actually furious at?
It's hard to tell, especially since Mrs. Clinton made the speech while wearing a beret that looked remarkably similar to the beret once worn by Bill Clinton's mistress, Monica Lewinsky.
Although maybe that was a gesture of thanks to Ms. Lewinsky for taking care of Bill's personal needs, leaving Mrs. Clinton more free time in which to plot her lifelong run for the presidency, which ultimately failed, leaving her furious and miserable, which is not something I would revel in or celebrate or sing happy, happy songs over.
Mrs. Clinton's estrangement from the facts was further on display in an interview she gave to New York magazine in which she claimed to have beaten both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
While it is true that with all the power of the Democrat Party machine conspiring to help her, Mrs. Clinton was able to eke out a primary victory over the 75-year-old communist Sanders, the evidence suggests she actually lost to Trump in the presidential election, the evidence being the fact that Trump is president and she's not.
In short, Mrs. Clinton has still not come to terms with what we like to call reality because it's reality.
Perhaps this explains her seething rage and unhappiness, which in turn would explain why I was wearing a red clown nose.
If I had been, which of course, I wasn't.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Shipshape, hipsy-topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Because we want to sing Oh, hooray Despite the constant negative threat, we should add that to the opening permanently.
Stamps. Com Solutions00:02:55
What's the name of the guy who did this?
Rob Deemer composed, put President Trump's Khafifi tweet to music.
Play it again.
That was great.
Despite the constant negative threat, God, I love the internet.
All right.
Floyd Abrams is here.
Floyd Abrams is a titan of First Amendment law.
He has gone to the Supreme Court on cases that include major, major First Amendment cases, including the Pentagon Papers and Citizens United.
So he has been hated by both the left and the right, which is what we like to hear.
That's a friend, a friend of the show, is a man who stands up for the First Amendment, no matter who is talking.
And we will get to him as soon as he calls in.
We're going to have it's going to be a little bit of a technical show.
Hopefully, we're going to get through because he has something called a telephone, which doesn't actually operate on our 21st century equipment.
So we'll have to see if we can do it.
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You know, I have this thing about predicting the future.
Coverage Crisis00:15:38
I always feel that when you're listening to a commentator predicting the future, more than two minutes out or what's going to happen immediately as a result of something, an action being taken.
First, I have to stop before I get going.
I have to say hello to Lindsay Boring.
You're back.
Our love, Lindsay, and Will will say hello to you too.
Will we don't really care that much about you, but we love Lindsay and she lives on in our mailbag woohoo.
She is always woo-hoo.
We want you to record a new one that says woohoo Khafifi.
That's the new one.
Exactly.
You know, so I don't believe in predicting the future because I just think you just don't know.
I mean, people say, well, in four years, we're in the midterm elections, this is going to happen.
You know, there could be all kinds of things that affect the midterm election.
But if I had to guess, I actually believe that yesterday marks a kind of turning point in the division between the electorate and the elites.
And by elites, I just mean these people who think themselves elite.
I don't mean people like me who drink Chardonnay and eat pre-cheese and are actually elite people because we're just better than everybody else.
I mean these people who think they're better than everybody else in the press.
They have gone insane.
Their slow reaction time to Kathy Griffin's disgusting thing with Trump's head, but also just their absolute blithe, they're now blithering.
They are blithering and they don't care because economically it's feasible to them to do it because all you have to do is win one half of the audience and you've got a big audience.
And that was actually something that Fox News taught them, right?
Fox News went to this audience that nobody had spoken to.
All these people out in the middle of America, all these people who may be a little bit older, a little bit more conservative, didn't care about the things that the press cared about, the people in LA and New York cared about.
They didn't know they were there.
They still don't know where they're there.
I just, I mean, I know this is a silly thing to talk about, but this Khaifi thing, right?
It's President Trump sent out a tweet and he said, we're doing well despite all the negative press, Khaifi.
Probably meant coverage, but he misspelled it.
And he just left it there.
And then he said in the morning, you know, who knows what Khafifi is, who can tell what Khaifi is.
I just want you to listen to this because this is one of the most incredible pieces of tape I've heard.
Here is Katie Turer at MSNBC discussing the all-important Khaifi.
This is a montage of her discussing the all-important Khaifi tweet, okay?
If something like that can stay on Twitter for six hours, what does that say about who controls the information coming out of the White House?
And what if somebody hacked into Twitter and posted a message that could have global implications, saying something like, Donald Trump is, or I'm going to launch nuclear weapons?
Is it really concerning about the chain of events that something like that could set off?
Yes, this is precisely the thing that keeps me up at night, literally.
Since Trump is inaugurating, literally, I am afraid that Donald Trump will tweet something that will launch us into a war or a potential conflict that we won't be able to get out of.
Talk to me about the security concerns, the implications of what it means that Donald Trump has a way to communicate with America and the world that is not monitored, that is not checked.
What if his account gets hacked?
Just say, what if his account gets hacked?
And somebody puts a message saying that we are aiming nukes at North Korea.
Is there anybody that can go in there and say, oh my God, no, take it down?
Is anybody monitoring this account after hours in the middle of the night?
How does something like this stay up?
From Khaifi to nuclear war.
That is the progression in the mind of the giants of the media industry at MSNBC.
And if you think it is just Katie Tour being insane, here is a cut of the press corps hammering Sean Spicer on this all-important Khafifi issue.
Listen to this.
Do you think people should be concerned that the president posted somewhat of an incoherent tweet last night and that it then stayed up for hours?
No.
Why did it stay up so long?
Is no one watching this?
Now, I think the president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant.
Blake, Sean Spicer, wait a minute.
Blake, Co-Fefi, what does Cole Fetti mean?
What does he mean?
Blake.
What is Cofee?
I don't want to go to Paris.
No, but it's not himself.
Blake.
Is it this point with the technique?
Is it this point with terrorist?
Is it fully removed?
Is it fully removed?
And then they make fun of Sean Spicer because he said a few people know what it means.
He was like making fun.
He's trolling them and they're giving him a hard time.
And this is what they're shouting at the press secretary about.
And then when President Trump says he may cancel his daily press briefings, it's like, oh my God, the First Amendment will suffer because nobody will know how Khafifi stood up there.
You know, there's a guy who has a blog, his name is Fred Reed, and his blog is called Fred on Everything.
And he wrote a piece called Notes of a Reformed News Weasel: Understanding the Vacuity, Understanding the Vacuity of the News.
Just listen to this paragraph.
He says, ask journalists when they were last in a truck stop on an interstate, when they were last in Boone, North Carolina, or Barstow, California, or any of thousands of such towns across the country.
Ask whether they were in the military, whether they have ever talked to a cop or an ambulance crewman or a fireman.
Ask whether they have a Mexican friend, when they last ate in a restaurant where a majority of the customers were black, whether they know an enlisted man or anyone in the armed service, whether they have hitchhiked overnight, baited a hook, hunted or fired a rifle, whether they have ever worked washing dishes, harvesting crops, driving a delivery truck, whether they have a blue-collar friend, know what the Texas two-step is, have been in a biker bar.
I have to say, I fulfill many of these.
I actually do.
Now, look at how much they write about each other for each other.
Look at the endless coverage of what Maddow said about what Hannity thought about O'Reilly's harassment of soft porn star Megan and how much she might make at CNN.
Ask how much time they spend comparing ratings.
They are fascinated by themselves.
They don't know America and they don't much like it.
I mean, that is so accurate.
And what is so astonishing is the lack of self-knowledge.
So all of this stuff has played into what is now obviously Hillary Clinton going insane.
I mean, Hillary Clinton is, you know, this is, you know, I say these things kind of comically because I don't know these people, so I don't know they're going insane.
But if Al Gore didn't go nuts, remember the last three Republicans who lost all thought that they were cheated out of the election, right?
And Al Gore had the best case.
I mean, it was so narrow, and it finally had to be decided in the Supreme Court.
And at one point, the election was conceded, and then they took the concession back and all this stuff.
If Al Gore didn't go insane after that, I mean, if that's not what insanity looked like with the speeches he made, that big beard he grew like David Letterman now has, you know, and the way he started talking about climate change like it was this terrible disaster.
And he just went insane.
And now I think Hillary Clinton has followed suit.
You know, I think she has gone nuts.
So one of the things that happened, I guess it was still this week or it was partly last week, was this news story, this anonymous news story, about Jared Kushner theoretically, was he trying to establish some kind of back channel with the Russians, which wouldn't even be a news story if it were a news story, if it were real.
But he was talking to a Russian banker and possibly the banker suggested they establish a back channel.
There's no evidence has ever happened.
And Andy McCarthy, the great National Review writer who used to be a federal prosecutor, pointed out that this destroys the whole idea that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians, because if they were colluding with the Russians, this happened, this back channel thing happened during the transition.
If they were colluding with the Russians, then they would have already had a back channel, right?
So here's Andy McCarthy explaining this, like the prosecutor is.
There's no there there as far as the collusion conspiracy is concerned.
But I think the thing that happened this weekend that's really important that people miss because they're so giddy about this story about Kushner is it blew up the collusion conspiracy.
Because if there had actually been a collusion conspiracy, there would already be back channels to Russia.
There'd be no reason for Kushner in December, weeks after the election, to need to set up a back channel to Russia had there been one during the campaign.
So I know for the moment they're loving the story, but I think it's kind of exploded the story that they've been telling us for six months.
So there's Andy McCarthy noticing what no one else has noticed.
And I'm going to talk about how that plays into Hillary Clinton's latest debacle of an interview.
But I want to pause and we have Floyd Abrams on the line.
And while our technology is actually working, this connection between an actual telephone and our up-to-date system that can't handle telephones.
Floyd Abrams is the author of a book that I just thought was terrific, The Soul of the First Amendment.
I recommend it to everybody.
It's really short.
You can read it in a couple hours, but it is just incredibly illuminating.
He is a titan in defending the First Amendment in the Supreme Court.
As I said before, he worked the Pentagon Papers case and Citizens United, so he has gotten flack from the left and the right, and that's what we like to hear.
We like to hear a man who stands up for free speech no matter who's doing it.
Mr. Abrams, are you there?
I am there.
It's good to be on.
Thank you.
I'm really happy to have you.
I loved your book.
It really was an eye-opener.
I'd like to actually talk about the book a little bit.
Some of the stuff that really surprised me.
First of all, some of the history angle, the fact that the First Amendment, there were people among the founders who argued against the First Amendment because they thought we didn't need it.
Isn't that right?
Exactly.
Alexander Hamilton was one of the leaders who basically was against a Bill of Rights at all.
And basically, he said, well, why do we have to write down all these things the government can't do?
For one thing, we're going to forget some things.
We're not going to list all of them.
We never empowered this new federal government to do these things.
Why do we have to say they can't do them?
And it was Jefferson and some of the people who were more cherry and more concerned about this area.
Jefferson said, I'm astonished, astonished to find that people in this country should be contented to live under a system which takes away freedom of religion and freedom of the press, and that a Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth.
I mean, over time, it seems that that was the much wiser argument.
It sure was, and we'd be a very different country, you know, if we had simply relied on the proposition that, well, since the Constitution doesn't say that the federal government can't take your rights away, therefore they can't.
You know, the idea, I mean, the idea of writing it down, first of all, making it part of the document, and making it law, you know, not an essay, not a poem, not aspirational, but law enforceable by the courts, was itself an enormous achievement.
And at the same time, you write about the fact that the First Amendment essentially lay latent for a long time, and it's like nobody referred to it.
That's right.
That's right.
I mean, for the entire 19th century, there weren't any cases.
I mean, there were situations of free speech being limited.
I mean, abolitionists were put in jail in some places in the South because of what they said.
President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, and some northern editors were jailed, but no one ever really got around to making a serious constitutional challenge to what was happening.
And it really wasn't into the second half of the 20th century when most of our First Amendment law really started to be fleshed out.
And it shows how revolutionary it was that almost nobody thought to say you can't do that because of the First Amendment.
It shows how abolitionists are the consciousness.
Absolutely.
And if you think, yeah, go on.
What changed?
When did this really start to change and why?
I think it really changed with World War I and the opposition to it by socialists and anarchists, including Eugene Debs, who ran for president, got like three million votes and wound up in jail because he gave a speech saying basically that it's a bad war.
And basically he went to jail on the theory that if you say things like that, fewer people are going to enlist.
That's going to be bad for the war effort.
And those are the cases which started with the very great dissenting opinions of Justice Holmes and Justice Brandeis.
But we're already into the 1920s when we talk about those opinions.
And it really wasn't till, as I said, the mid-20th century.
And in particular, I would say the classic case was the 1964 case of New York Times against Sullivan.
That's a case in which a southern white jury rendered a very big libel judgment against the Times for an advertisement, actually, about Dr. Martin Luther King's treatment while he was in prison.
And it was a time when enormous judgments were being entered by Southern juries against what I'll call the national press for their coverage of events in the South.
And the Supreme Court wound up saying that as regards public people, public figures, public officials, that they couldn't recover in a libel case unless the language was not only false, but known to be false or suspected to be false by the people who have articulated them.
And that was a big deal.
And then the Pentagon Papers case, it was just seven years later.
And that was another very big deal, which really solidified the proposition that the government, even in the course of the war, the War in Vietnam was on, can't go to court except in the most extraordinary circumstances and get an injunction, a prior restraint against the press publishing material.
So we're talking really, you know, we're talking three-quarters of the way into the 20th century.
Now, did you, I know you worked on the Pentagon Papers case.
Did you actually argue that before the Supreme Court?
Professor Alexander Bickel from Yale Law School argued it, and I was co-counsel with him, but he was one that argued it.
So then you got flack on that.
Arguing Free Speech Cases00:09:36
Obviously, the Republicans, the conservatives were not happy about that.
But then you back around and you did Citizens United, which we've never ceased to hear from, from Hillary Clinton.
You were also on that case.
Right.
And I was one of the two people who argued that case.
I represented Senator McConnell in that case.
See, I think they're both on the same side.
You know, the conservatives, including some people at my law firm, who said, how does it feel to represent traitors when we were representing the New York Times?
And a lot of my friends on the left during Citizens United, who were saying, you know, how can you?
How can you possibly defend a big corporation spending lots of money about who's elected?
And from my perspective, they were both really clear cases in which you really have to allow the speech.
And if you don't allow the speech, you're cutting back on core, absolutely central First Amendment principles.
So here was the part of your book that actually shocked me.
I think it will shock a lot of people, especially a lot of younger people in my audience who have been living essentially at the high watermark of free speech.
Right now, it's very, I don't know what you would say that would get you arrested in this country.
But you talk about, I know that in the old days it was a lot of times conservatives who were fighting against free speech to things they thought were pornographic and so forth.
But right now on the left, there seems to be this theory that essentially would make the First Amendment disappear.
And you talk about Justice Breyer specifically writing about this theory.
Can you explain what this theory is?
You know, what Justice Breyer was saying is, look, the First Amendment is not just an individual right, that it exists to assure that the government actually represents the views of the people by being sure that the people can speak out, et cetera.
And my view is that while that sounds attractive, and indeed, one of the results of living in a society in which people can speak out is that, you know, we hope, at least now and then, Congress represents the actual view of the public.
But I think it's very dangerous to start talking about the First Amendment as being focused on making the government work better or be more responsive.
The First Amendment is a limit on the government.
It exists to be sure that the government doesn't overstep the bounds into areas of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press.
And the way I view it and the way a number of people on the Supreme Court viewed it, the very notion of saying that the core, at the center of the First Amendment, is making sure that government is genuinely representative of the views of the public has it all wrong.
The purpose of the First Amendment is to avoid censorship by the government of views, most of all, about the government.
Right, because otherwise the government would be deciding what was good for the government.
I mean, absolutely.
Absolutely.
How many justices on the Supreme Court do you think are sympathetic to Breyer's argument?
Well, four of them signed on to that opinion.
As to whether they all would really do so in a later case, it's hard to say.
I mean, I don't really think, for example, Justice Kagan is really prepared to go that far, although she did join an opinion which expressed that view.
But it could be as many as four.
So it's possible that if Scalio had not been replaced with a conservative, the First Amendment would have completely changed its meaning, basically.
It's possible.
Well, yes, it's possible.
That's possible.
I mean, you know, and as you've said, and I've said, it's certainly possible that a case like Citizens United would have been reversed.
See, and to me, the notion that, you know, here a conservative group made a movie denouncing Hillary Clinton in 2008 when she was the likely Democratic candidate, an hour-long, that they wanted to put on pay-for-view.
And the idea that that could be criminal if it went on television or cable or satellite within 60 days of an election or 30 days of a primary seemed to me antithetical to what the First Amendment is most about, which is allowing criticism of government officials or people who seek to be president, no less.
I mean, the New York Times actually attacked you for this, right?
They attacked you for a minute.
They sure did.
Yes, yes.
A longtime client.
That's right.
You're older.
Yeah, yeah.
No, no, that's, I mean, from the point of view of liberal America, campaign finance is written into law as if it were the Constitution.
Sort of anything goes if Congress passes it.
And again, to me, that simply ignores core heart principles of the First Amendment itself.
Well, let me ask you a final question.
You know, looking into the immediate future, I mean, I've heard Donald Trump say some things about libel laws that sent a chill up my spine.
But what are the things you fear most in terms of the First Amendment?
I would say most of all, two areas.
One is an expansive use of the Espionage Act so that it could rope in journalists.
I mean, the Espionage Act was written literally 100 years ago, 1917.
During World War I, it's phrased very broadly, and there are very few cases under it, indeed, none involving journalists as such.
So, you know, while I think that what I'll call my side, the journalist side, the First Amendment side would win if the administration were to come down hard on journalists under this law, you can't be sure of that because the language of that is very broad.
The other thing I'm most concerned about is on college campuses where you know all about that.
And remember, the First Amendment only applies when we're talking about the government, you know, state schools, et cetera.
Private schools are allowed to do what they want about inviting, not inviting, loading the dice when they invite speakers, et cetera.
But not state schools.
I mean, they're bound by the First Amendment, and they're not allowed in effect to ban Ann Coulter because of her views.
And that's one of the things that has been going on in one way or another, either by university administrations or by students, making it impossible for certain views.
And in this case, they do tend to be conservative views from being heard on campus.
Wow.
Floyd Abrams, you are a hero to my people.
I really appreciate your coming on and your book, The Soul of the First Amendment.
Absolutely terrific.
Thank you very much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
So that is a guy who argued both the Pentagon papers and he didn't argue the Pentagon papers.
He worked on that, but he argued Citizens United.
That's what you like to hear, right?
You like to hear a guy who stands up for anybody who's talking.
But this is one of the things that if you You heard as we've been going along, you all know if you've been listening that when Donald Trump first started running, I was appalled.
And if you heard me soften a little bit toward Donald Trump, this is one of the reasons reading this book when I realized we dodged a bullet.
These guys are literally arguing that what the First Amendment means is that speech should be free if it helps make the government better.
So who's going to decide that?
The government.
And what Mr. Abrams is saying is that no, the First Amendment says Get out, government.
You cannot stop us from saying what we want to say.
And, you know, it is a shame.
It is a shame that our media has gone so crazy that they've almost made it so that the First Amendment, they're embarrassing the First Amendment, but still, still, they have the right to say what they say as long as I have the right to come on and make fools of them as they make fools of themselves.
So let's go back for a minute to this thing that I'm talking about today about how I feel that yesterday was a kind of turning point where I think people are going to see, you know, these guys think that nobody can see them and they think there is nobody who matters who sees them.
They don't care if they see them out in Ohio.
You know, they think as long as they can win that state by two votes on election day, they don't care.
But I think that they have covered themselves in so much shame.
Vladimir Putin's Influence00:09:58
And this thing that they're doing with this Russia conspiracy, which I now really believe is a complete boondoggle.
I thought what Andy McCarthy said was right.
But here is Hillary.
Listen to this.
I mean, this is a woman who I think is having mental difficulties.
This is an interview she gave to sympathetic interviewers where she started talking.
Here's a note that tells you, this is from Fox and Friends.
They put it out today.
Everything, Clinton, these are the things that Hillary Clinton has blamed for her election loss, okay?
I'm just reading this off the page.
The FBI, James Comey, the Russians, Vladimir Putin, anti-American forces, low-information voters, everyone who assumed she'd win, bad polling numbers, Obama for winning two terms, people wanting change, misogynists, suburban women, the New York Times, television executives, cable news, Netflix, Democrats not making the right documentaries, Facebook, Twitter, WikiLeaks, fake news, content farms in Macedonia, the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party.
These are the people she has blamed.
There's only one person missing from that list, as far as I can tell.
It's Hillary Clinton.
Now, here she is talking about this conspiracy.
And if she doesn't sound like Alex Jones to you, this is the, how did the Russians know how to wrongfoot her like this?
How did they know what messages to deliver?
Who told them?
Who told them?
Who were they coordinating with or colluding with?
Because the Russians historically, in the last couple of decades and then increasingly, you know, are launching cyber attacks.
And they are stealing vast amounts of information.
And a lot of the information they've stolen, they've used for internal purposes to affect markets, to affect the intelligence services, et cetera.
So this was different because they went public and they were conveying this weaponized information and the content of it.
And they were running, you know, there's all these stories about, you know, guys over in Macedonia who are running these fake news sites.
And, you know, I've seen them now and you sit there and it looks like a sort of low-level CNN operation.
Or a fake newspaper.
Or a fake news.
Like Denver Guardian.
Like a fake newspaper.
And so the Russians, in my opinion, and based on the Intel and counter-intel people I've talked to, could not have known how best to weaponize that information unless they had been guided.
What I love about this, all conspiracy theories are like this.
I'm a very anti-conspiracy theory, but they always have this.
How is it possible, you know, that the steel in the World Trade Center could melt just because heat, strong enough to melt steel, was in the pot.
How does it make any sense?
I mean, how is it possible that Seth Rich just happened, you know, like Antonin Scalia just happened to die during the election just because he was an old man with heart problems.
That doesn't make any sense.
So she's saying, how is it possible the Russians could possibly have known what information to put out?
As if anything is secret in this country.
Is there anything secret?
I mean, is there any, even our intelligence services don't keep secrets anymore.
So like, well, how could they not have known?
How would they not have known?
Anybody would have known.
If Donald Trump people knew how to, his campaign people knew how to put out information, then the Russians knew.
There are no secrets in this country.
It's ridiculous.
But the thing is, I really do believe that the woman is cracking, but people crack along their fault lines.
We all crack when stress makes us crack.
We all crack along things, cracks that are already there, old scars and things like this.
And she has always been like this.
Play Clip 9.
Here she is over time.
We can see it.
The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.
Do you still believe there's a vast right-wing conspiracy?
Don't you?
I'm asking you.
Yeah, it's gotten even better funded.
You know, they brought in some new multi-billionaires to pump the money in.
And look, these guys play for keeps.
So in the first cut, she's talking about this vast right conspiracy trying to make people think that her husband is cheating on her.
So now she has new information, right?
She knows her husband.
Let's say she didn't know before, which she did, but let's pretend she didn't.
So now she knows her husband was cheating on her.
She knows there's no vast right wing conspiracy.
It's, you know, decades later, and she's still talking about it.
So this is obviously an idea fix, you know, the thing that is stuck in her mind.
And as she cracks, it's becoming more and more like, how could they possibly have known, you know, what the voters wanted to hear?
But the thing about it is, is she's not going insane alone.
The entire left is going nuts with her.
I mean, this thing that's going on on Morning Joe is almost like a soap opera.
The two of them, you know, she is the, Mika is an old Democrat hand, and Joe used to be a Republican.
I don't know what he is now, but they fall in love and they get married, and suddenly something is happening behind closed doors with these two.
It's become a folly adieu.
You know, they've gone nuts together because suddenly their show is this anti-Trump fest.
And it's not just an anti-Trump fest.
It's this conspiracy stuff.
Listen to them talking about, they're putting together different things that Donald Trump has done that might be viewed as favorable to the Russians, like taking off some of the old restrictions that Obama put in.
And obviously, every new administration that comes in tries to make friends with the Russians and then only later turns around and says, huh, there's a knife in my back with Vladimir Putin's name on it.
Every administration has done this.
Bush did it.
Obama did it.
Now Trump may be doing it.
He seems a little bit tougher because he's got McMaster and Madison there telling him not to do it.
But still, he's trying to make you that we do have things that we have to talk to the Russians about.
This is their interpretation of that phenomenon.
It kind of makes it hard to believe that Putin doesn't have anything on Trump.
I mean, it just, there's no, there seems to be no guardrails here.
And think about the timing.
Again, Steve, Willie, we're talking about the poor timing of this decision, especially where we are right now in the investigation.
Think about the fact, again, you always have to put this in context.
You have Donald Trump in the Oval Office with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Kislyak, and the foreign minister, Lavrov.
And that picture took place the day after James Comey was fired.
When the Russian story really exploded, then he goes in, he reveals classified information, he doesn't let U.S. reporters in the room, and you can go on and on.
They make these decisions time and time again in a way that makes it appear that they're hostages, that he's Vladimir Putin's hostage.
Why did they have that meeting in the Oval Office?
Because Putin told Trump he needed that meeting.
Well, it all fits together, doesn't it?
It all comes together.
We got it now.
You know, I hate to say this, but that's actually unpatriotic.
It is actually unpatriotic to go on the air on a major show like that and say that the president of the United States is being held hostage or that Vladimir Putin has something on him if you don't have any evidence and they don't have any evidence.
Because, you know, obviously, the president is going to have to make, you know, gestures toward Putin.
He's going to have to talk to him.
He's going to have to sit down and talk to him.
And now you're making it seem like if he does that, he's somehow a bad guy.
He's somehow conspiring.
That kind of, you know, if he pays any attention to you, which hopefully he won't because he knows all about the bad press gaffify, you know, he won't pay any attention to it.
But if he did pay attention to it, it would really be hobbling to our foreign policy.
Here's the thing.
Here's why I say that this could be a turning point.
And I really, it's something I sense.
It's something at least I'm feeling, and I think there are a lot of people feeling it.
You know, Nina Turner is a Democrat strategist.
Like all Democrat strategists, she goes out into the country and she talks to people.
What are they talking about?
And the other day she's on, I believe it was, was it MSNBC or CNN?
I'm not sure.
And I think she's talking to Dana Bash.
And here's the question she's asked about its CNN.
So here's the question she has asked about the Russian conspiracy.
How's this playing in Ohio?
No one in Ohio is asking about Russia.
I mean, we have to deal with this.
We definitely have to deal with this.
It's on the minds of the American people.
But if you want to know what people in Ohio, they want to know about jobs.
They want to know about their children.
Yeah, and that's the thing that Trump knows about.
And by the way, there are some predictions now that the growth is going to go up higher than 3%.
Now, many of you have never seen the contrast between an Obama or Jimmy Carter economy and a Reagan or hopefully a Trump economy.
You've never seen it change from nothing to 3 plus percent.
I can tell you, I lived through it, it's like laughing gas.
It's as if the entire country is doused with laughing gas.
If that happens, these guys can be talking about Russia.
They can be running around chasing Vladimir Putin up and down the halls of MSNBC and CNN and looking for him in their trash baskets and where is he hiding in the broom closet.
Donald Trump will win states that don't even exist.
He'll win like the 57 states that Obama talked about.
You will not believe what a country looks like when it goes from eight years of 1.5% growth to 3.5% growth.
And I know a lot of experts say, oh, that's never going to happen.
They said that when Reagan came in, too.
It can happen.
I mean, obviously, the Republicans have got to get out of their own way and start passing some of these tax cuts and things like this.
But already some of the stuff that Trump is doing with pulling back the regulations has helped.
They are talking about him getting out of the Paris Accord.
Now, that's kind of, it's kind of a phony accord.
We'll have to talk.
Talks About Bob00:02:36
I'm not going to talk about that until he actually does it.
They keep saying he's going to do it, but I'm not sure because it's so hard to tell what's true in the news nowadays.
But look, if nothing else, if you take nothing else away from this, remember what Floyd Abrams said.
There are four judges.
There may be as many as four judges on the Supreme Court who believe that they should be in control of your First Amendment rights, that the government should decide when what you're saying is good for the government.
That's what essentially Justice Breyer's theory is, that the government should decide when what you say should be covered by the First Amendment.
There are four.
There would have been five if Donald Trump had not been elected.
As far as I'm concerned, I kiss his funny red hair because, you know, for all his flaws and he's an erratic guy, and I hope he's going to learn to do some of this stuff better.
I hope he's going to learn to work the Congress better.
But that is a bullet the size of Big Bertha.
You know, that is a big shell that we dodged by not electing Hillary Clinton, who's obviously a loon, and by electing Donald Trump, who does seem to be learning the trade.
All right, we got to go.
And the Clavenless weekend is already upon us.
Man, that happened fast.
But we will leave you with this little, here's a little piece of pure joy that we leave you because we know for the next three days, all is bleakness and darkness.
Although I have to say that Shapiro will be back, because of the Jewish holidays, he's lost two days, but he'll come back and do a Friday show, and that'll cheer you up.
This will cheer you up.
Here is Connie Boswell, one of the most forgotten and most brilliant jazz singers in American history.
She was just wonderful, and she sang with Bing Crosby.
And Bing Crosby, you know, before he started doing the bubba stuff, he was one of the great jazz singers too, singing one of my favorite Bobby Mercer songs, Bob White.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin show Survivors Gather Here Monday.
I was talking to the Whipper Will.
He says you got a corny drill.
Bob White.
I'm going to swing tonight.
I was talking to the mocking bird.
He says you are the worst he's heard.
Bob White?
I'm going to swing tonight.
Even the owl tells me a foul singing those volumes.