Andrew Clavin mocks Mueller’s evasive report, where Democrats like Harris and Nadler seized on obstruction claims despite Barr’s summary dismissing collusion, while Pelosi’s surreal analogies exposed impeachment’s flimsy foundation. Contrasting Comey’s self-serving Clinton email handling with Taylor Swift’s feminist deflection, he praises motherhood as undervalued before pivoting to John Gans’ critique of the 1947 NSC—a bloated, unaccountable bureaucracy where Trump’s chaos risks miscalculations like Iran escalation. Gans demands Senate-confirmed advisors to curb its power, but Clavin ends by framing ABC’s Trebek prayer edits as proof of media bias against faith, tying it to Democrats’ push for impeachment over Trump’s alleged bigotry—all while exposing their hypocrisy in weaponizing institutions. [Automatically generated summary]
Washington is in an uproar and all a buzz and in a buzzing uproar, an uproarious, buzzing roar of buzziness about Robert Mueller's latest statement on the Mueller Report.
Mueller said, quote, I come before you today to clarify my report by making vague accusations and contradictory statements until even the things we thought we knew become uncertain and the things that were uncertain become entirely incomprehensible, unquote.
Mueller then refused to take questions, saying that could only confuse matters because he himself didn't understand what he just said.
Democrats on the campaign trail reacted to the statement immediately.
Kamala Harris told reporters, quote, Mueller's latest statement makes it absolutely imperative that we continue to distract people from the fact our policies will destroy the country, unquote.
Joe Biden chimed in by telling a 10-year-old girl, my God, but you're beautiful and you smell so nice.
Let me touch you, unquote.
And Beto O'Rourke repeatedly shouted, hello, is anybody there into an empty auditorium.
In the House of Representatives, Congressman Jerry Nadler addressed a group of trolls who were carrying the great battering ram Grand to the Kingdom of Gondor, saying, quote, before Mueller clarified his report, rendering it incomprehensible, we might have gone ahead with impeachment and thus torn our party and our country asunder.
But after his statement, that's still the plan.
Now fly, fly, my fellow trolls, and do not return until you have laid waste to Minas Tirith, unquote.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reacted to the Mueller statement by saying, quote, until now, I have tried to silence the voices calling for impeachment because those voices were disembodied and seemed to come from everywhere at once, making me think I might have imagined them like that time I woke up in Sacramento married to an enormous stuffed panda because I thought I heard him propose to me when that was really coming from the toaster, unquote.
Pelosi then refused to take questions because it worked for Mueller and he didn't make any sense either.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
One of the wonderful things about listening to this show for all of you is you get to hear tomorrow's news today because I tell you what's going to happen next.
And then it does happen because I'm always right about everything.
As I told you after hearing Robert Mueller say whatever the hell he said yesterday by emphasizing that he didn't exonerate Donald Trump and that he felt he was barred from prosecuting the president and that the remedy for presidential lawbreaking is with Congress, i.e. impeachment, he increased the pressure on the Democrats to impeach without changing the political equation even one tiny little bit.
Democrats' Impeachment Dilemma00:15:11
Because in order to impeach, the Democrats still have to stop the country's business cold in order to make the argument that Trump didn't obstruct an investigation into something that never happened, but oh, he sure wanted to, and it might have happened, so the election no longer counts.
Then if they actually did decide to impeach on that logic, it would be tossed out of Congress in approximately the time it takes Mitch McConnell to say get this garbage out of Congress.
So once again, Ah James Comey, an investigator, opens his fat mouth when he shouldn't, hoping to get at Donald Trump, and instead he blows up the Democrats.
Maybe they should appoint a special counsel to investigate how Trump keeps getting them to do that.
And what does Taylor Swift have to do with it?
Nothing, but I want to talk about her too.
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Thank you for all the fan mail I got yesterday on the opening.
I got all this fan mail on the opening over the fact that I named a character Dr. Geraldo von Zippeti Noodle.
And that just for some reason cracked a lot of people up.
It reminded me of a long time ago when I was a young writer on the way up.
I was a liberal.
I was working for the most radical paper in, I was freelancing for the most radical paper in New York called The Village Voice, which closed after I left it, of course.
But I would write these satirical pieces, and one day an editor called me up and said, I don't get this satire.
It's just a bunch of funny names.
And I said, no, no, you don't understand.
They're funny names.
But she wouldn't listen to me.
Anyway, yesterday, you know, you remember James Comey.
Yesterday in his Washington Post op-ed, he made the case that he couldn't have been conspiring against Trump.
One of his reasons was because his blabber mouth appearance after the Hillary Clinton investigation where he came out and said, oh, she was guilty, but she didn't intend to do it, so she's not guilty.
So we're not going to prosecute her, which was none of his business.
It wasn't his role to say it.
And he said, well, I had to say it because Loretta Lynch had no credibility because she met with Bill Clinton, blah, And he said, you know, then when, because of his screw-up, he had to say publicly that he was reopening the email investigation right before the election, he screwed Hillary over and Hillary lost votes over that.
And I think that did contribute to her losing the election.
So his argument was if I were out to get Donald Trump, why would I blow up Hillary Clinton?
And the reason was you're an egotistical incompetent.
That was the reason.
I think his calculation was he thought that he was going to be made to look bad because Hillary was obviously guilty and Loretta Lynch was going to scotch the investigation.
She was going to throw, she had already made the decision.
She was not going to do anything about this.
There was no way.
There was no way the Obama Justice Department was going to prosecute Hillary Clinton no matter how guilty she was.
I think Comey thought that was going to make him look bad.
And, you know, his sanctimonious idea of himself as the angel of our protection was going to go down the drain.
So he thought he was going to come forward and explain that he really did get her and he was going to slap her around.
And then he was going to say, yes, but she didn't intend to do it.
And that was not part of the law, by the way.
She didn't have to intentionally release classified information to be guilty, but he just decided he was going to throw that in.
And so by smarmily self-serving himself, I mean, he's now become this kind of smarmy figure who goes around.
Everyone's embarrassed by him, I think.
But Trump has this magic power to get people to do stuff that blows them up.
He's done it again and again, starting with Marco Rubio making all these jokes about his fingers and Jeb Bush trying to make himself look like an active guy because he called him low energy Jeb.
I mean, he just has a way of getting people to blow themselves up by trying to sink to what they think is his level.
So Mueller essentially did this.
I think Mueller, you know, it took me a while to kind of get through.
It was very confusing what Mueller said and what he did, especially when compared to his report.
But the money shot was this.
It was when he said basically that he couldn't do anything, but Congress should.
In other words, that he was confirming the Democrats in their narrative that he had given them a blueprint for impeachment.
Let's listen to that again.
We had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.
We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.
The introduction to the volume two of our report explains that decision.
It explains that under long-standing department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office.
That is unconstitutional.
Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that too is prohibited.
The special counsel's office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy.
Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider.
So this is a big deal because the time, remember the New York Times when A.G. Barr came out and gave his letter about the report saying that it exonerated Trump on collusion and they, the DOJ, Barr and Rod Rosenstein, were not going to prosecute on obstruction.
And the Times said this is terrible because he seized the narrative because this is all that matters to the Democrats and the New York Times.
But I repeat myself, right?
This is all one group trying to set the narrative because they believe that narrative is reality.
And they think, of course, it is reality to the extent if they can get you to buy their narrative, you will vote the way they want you to.
And they have been furious that A.G. Barr seized the narrative saying essentially that Trump was not guilty, which is obviously what the report did say.
The report did say that there was no evidence.
We found no evidence of collusion.
And then it went on into this whole obstruction thing.
So he's doing it to take back the narrative.
I just can't find any other conclusion you can make.
And then he stuck the Democrats in this terrible position.
And this was Mueller after his statement.
What have I done?
Okay, maybe that wasn't Mueller, but that's, I think, what he was thinking.
Because now, now you remember, I pointed out there are a couple of things.
In the report, it says, he says the report is my statement.
In his statement, he said, the report is my statement, which raises the question why you're making the statement.
All the same, the report is a statement that said they found, they identified no evidence of collusion.
And in his statement, he had this confusing thing where he said, we didn't disprove a wider conspiracy or whatever.
But in the report, it says no evidence of collusion.
Trump is absolutely right about this.
But then he says that if it had not been for what is called the OLC, I think it's the Office of Legal Counsel, their statement that you can't prosecute the president in office, that he kind of suggests that he would have prosecuted, but he didn't because he couldn't.
And here, this is from Fox News.
They played what I talked about yesterday, the disparity between the way Barr said it when he was testifying in Congress and what Mueller said at his statement.
Special Counsel Mueller stated three times to us in that meeting in response to our questioning that he emphatically was not saying that but for the OLC opinion, he would have found obstruction.
Under long-standing department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office.
Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider.
So today, the DOJ and Mueller's office, the special counsel's office, released a joint statement that said this.
The Attorney General has previously stated that the special counsel repeatedly affirmed that he was not saying that but for the OLC opinion, he would have found the president obstructed justice.
The special counsel's report and his statement today made clear that the office concluded it would not reach a determination one way or the other about whether the president committed a crime.
There is no conflict between these statements.
So that clarifies that.
It sounds to me like a conflict, but what, you know, I never went to law school, so I guess I can't really understand gobbledygook when people are contradicting each other.
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So Trump unleashed on the mall this morning with a flurry of tweets.
He says the greatest presidential harassment in history after spending $40 million over two dark years with unlimited access, people, resources, and cooperation, all true.
Highly conflicted Robert Mueller would have brought charges if he had anything, but there were no charges to bring.
That anything is all caps.
And Trump then said, Russia, Russia, Russia, this is all tweets.
Russia, Russia, Russia, that's all you heard at the beginning of this witch hunt hoax.
And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected.
It was a crime that didn't exist.
Some people made fun of him for saying I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected, as if it was admitting Russia got elected.
But he follows that by saying it was a crime that didn't exist.
He says, so now the Dems and their partner, the fake news media, say he fought back against this phony crime that didn't exist, this horrendous false accusation, and he shouldn't fight back.
He should just sit back and take it.
Could this be obstruction?
No, Mueller didn't find obstruction either.
Presidential harassment.
So Shapiro made the excellent point, an excellent point, I thought, that if there was no way he could charge Trump, if there was no way Mueller could charge Trump because the OLC didn't allow it, because the Department of Justice guidelines didn't allow it, why did he spend 20 million of our dollars investigated in the first place?
I mean, you investigate, you know, when you investigate espionage, you investigate to see if anything went on, but when you investigate a crime, you have to believe that there was a crime committed and you're trying to find proof of that crime.
If there was no point in finding proof of that crime, why do it?
Why did he spend all this time?
There is this real sense that I'm getting that Mueller is another one of these guys who hates Donald Trump.
And Rush Limbaugh made an also excellent point of saying when Comey came out talking about Clinton, he said she didn't intend to commit a crime.
That was a crime that didn't need intent to actually be committed, right?
She did the thing that she was not supposed to do.
That's all the law says that she had to do to be guilty of that crime.
But now they're saying, well, Trump intended to obstruct justice, even though he didn't.
He clearly cooperated with the entire investigation.
So why is it a crime to intend something but not do it?
But it's not a crime to do something because you didn't intend it.
It makes absolutely no sense.
So all of this, again, all of this just makes the whole Mueller thing look like a political hit.
It does make it look, it makes Trump look better.
And this idea that Mueller was pushing the Congress toward impeachment, it's very hard to avoid that.
And of course, the impeachment drums are, in fact, growing, both in the media and in the Democrat Party.
But I repeat myself, Jerry Nadler, this is his reaction to this statement yesterday.
Although Department of Justice policy prevented the special counsel from bringing criminal charges against the president, the special counsel has clearly demonstrated that President Trump is lying.
He is lying about the special counsel's findings, lying about the testimony of key witnesses in the special counsel's report, and above all, lying in saying that the special counsel found no obstruction and no collusion.
In his statement this morning, Special Counsel Mueller reaffirmed his report.
It found substantial evidence that Russia attacked our political system, that the Trump campaign benefited from Russian interference, that Trump and those around him repeatedly welcomed Russia's support, and that throughout the subsequent investigation, Trump sought to obstruct Mueller time and time again.
Special Counsel Mueller today repeated three central points, which are critical for the American people.
One, the special counsel did not exonerate the president of the United States of obstruction of justice.
Two, obstruction of justice, of which special counsel Mueller found substantial evidence, is a serious crime that strikes at the core of our justice system.
Three, the Constitution points to Congress to take action to hold the president accountable for his misconduct.
So, I mean, this is like a train that is really gathering steam.
Special Counsel's Warning00:10:25
The Atlantic Monthly now has their cover is just the word impeach.
You know, obviously the press is picking this up.
And Pelosi, she still knows.
Look, they're still saying that Trump tried to obstruct, intended to obstruct, but never obstructed an investigation into a crime he didn't commit.
That is their logic.
There is no logic there.
They'll be a laughingstock.
Now, look, I can't make predictions.
Maybe Trump is so toxic, maybe people hate him so much.
Whatever happens, they'll just grab hold of it.
But Pelosi seems to know, she's still playing down the pressure she's under to impeach.
I'm very proud of our House Democrats.
They've been very, shall we say, conscientious about how they breached their decisions.
And I think it's like 35 of them out of 238, or maybe it's 38 of them out of 238 have said that they wanted to be outspoken on impeachment.
And many of them are reflecting their views as well as those of their constituents.
Many constituents want to impeach the president.
But we want to do what is right and what gets results, what gets results.
And we have to remember.
So, yes, there are some, and the press makes more of a fuss about the 38 than the 200 who are over half of the Congress, after half of the Democrats and the House sit on one of these six committees.
So they're all on a path of finding more information.
So this is her narrative that 38 out of the 238 Democrats in Congress are pushing for impeachment.
And of course, those are the 38 in blue districts, so they don't have to worry about moderates coming up and saying, hey, you know, why are you wasting time?
Why aren't you dealing with health care, immigration, whatever they want you to deal with?
But all the rest of them, she is saying, don't.
And the press makes a big deal out of this, so because the press is on the left of Pelosi, not on the left policy-wise, simply on the left, wisdom-wise, because Pelosi is a wise old coot, and she knows exactly how this stuff works.
And she's trying to keep control over a very, very active caucus in which all the energy is on the left.
And if you don't think, I mean, even before Mueller's statement, if you do not think the impeachment energy is irrational and constant on the left, take a look at what Al Green had to say about it.
I'm so in love with...
Not that Al Green, the guy from Texas.
We need to have this discussion about race, the race question.
I think that we need to go beyond talking.
We have to make it an action item.
We have a president who has infused bigotry into policy.
It hurts my heart when I see that picture of that baby crying, being separated from her parents.
I think that this would not happen but for the fact that these are people of color.
I also believe that the president, having said that there were some very fine people among the bigots, the racists, the homophobes, the xenophobes, Islamophobes in Charlottesville, where a woman lost her life fighting bigotry.
I think all of these things, when combined, would cause us to conclude that these are impeachable offenses.
Unfortunately, however, he is a beneficial bigot, meaning he benefits a good many people.
And I unfortunately have to tell you that I'm so saddened when I see people who have built their reputations fighting bigotry, allowing this to persist to the extent that it has.
I'm not going to be a party to this.
I do believe he can be impeached for his bigotry, and he should be.
I mean, that's lunacy.
That's actual lunacy.
So that's what Pelosi is hearing.
First of all, he goes through that, you know, saying the Charlottesville people were fine people, which has now been utterly debunked.
So that's not true.
He says that Trump is Trump's hard line on immigration is about race, which is unprovable.
I mean, how would you know if that's what is in his heart?
But it could just be about the rule of law.
That's what I think it's about.
He says that Trump is a bigot, but he's a beneficial bigot.
In fact, a lot of people, black people, people of color, are being benefited by his policies.
So he's a bigot, but he keeps helping.
I mean, this is a guy who succeeds at everything, Donald Trump.
The one thing he's failed at is being a racist.
I mean, it doesn't make any sense, but he wants to impeach him because he doesn't like him.
And it breaks his heart.
Don Lemon was saying this the other day.
It's wrong to vote for a good economy when the guy is a bad guy.
You know, it's absurd.
And that is what Pelosi is dealing with.
And that is the fire that the inflammatory material that Mueller was torturing yesterday.
Trump is blessed in his enemies above all.
The left has truly, truly lost its way.
And the funny thing is, is, you know, I have friends who are on the left.
I have friends who are liberals.
And my problem with the left is never about what they're complaining about.
It is always about their solution.
You know, they talk about racism.
There's racism.
I'm against racism.
I think racism is a human evil.
I understand that.
I want women to have more choices in life.
I want them to be able to, you know, do whatever it is they want to do.
But every single time, what the left does, every single time, is they identify an oppressor and then they adopt the oppressor's values, right?
They say, you know, oh, you know, there's racism and that's a bad thing.
So we're going to be racist except we're going to support the other races who were oppressed.
Instead of saying the racism stops now, we can't fix the past.
It ends now.
That was the old way.
That was the old liberalism.
Hey, e pluribus unum, we're all one.
That's it.
Racism is over.
It was bad stuff.
We're sorry.
On we go.
You know, that's the only thing that works.
I understand that it's unfair.
I understand that it leaves the past unfixed because the past is unfixable.
That's why the past is tragic.
But to adopt the actual ideas, thinking, well, you know, there was racism here on the right.
So now if we can have a little racism here on the left, it's all going to balance out.
All the racism always goes in one side of the scale because the devil don't care who does the hating as long as the hating gets done.
Feminism is the same way.
And as always, let me point out: it is not that I want fewer choices for women.
I want women as men to do whatever they want to do.
It's that what I object to about feminists is they have adopted male, they've identified males as the oppressors, which I don't believe, I don't agree with that, but they identify males as the oppressors, and then they adopt male values, saying to women, if you don't live up to male values, you are not strong.
You always see that women in movies now, they're always standing like men with their hands on their hips looking.
And I think like, you know, men are stronger than women.
You know, if you're going to do that, you're just going to be a second-rate man.
And so that you do not have women saying, no, we want our values to have the kind of respect that men's values have traditionally had, which would be a very valid point to make.
Which brings me to Taylor Swift.
You know, I don't like pop music.
I'm not a big fan of pop music, but I do listen to it.
And of the people I like, I really liked the early Taylor Swift.
I thought she had a really nice take on kind of high school romance.
Teardrops on my guitar, nice songs, a couple songs.
Then she went into that pop stuff, which was a calculated move.
Not as interested in her many, many, many affairs and getting dumped by people.
But still, she does produce these songs like Getting Back Together and Shake It Off that are just, they're earworms.
You know, they get stuck in your head.
She's obviously got some kind of talent and all this stuff.
So she was asked by a German interviewer if she'd like to be a mother someday.
She's about to turn 30.
And she refused to answer.
And she said it's sexist.
She said, I really do not think men are asked that question when they turn 30, so I'm not going to answer that now.
Now, everything is wrong with that statement, right?
Men aren't asked that question because they don't become mothers.
Children don't need mothers, don't need fathers in the same way, in the same intense way in their early years that they need mothers present in the house with them.
They do not need the father like that.
The way they need mothers, you can tell by the way bodies are built and what they are meant to do.
I know this is hard to understand, but women aren't shaped like that just so you can stare at them.
They actually do have a function which has to do with the care and nurturing of children, right?
And then she went on to say later that her next, she posted on Instagram that her next album was going to be political.
And I thought to myself, oh boy, I can't wait because everybody cares so much what Taylor Swift has to say about politics.
I don't care at all what Taylor Swift has to say about politics.
But this is basically her feeling that she's not important unless she is engaged in the traditionally male, in the old days, the traditionally male world of politics, and if she takes herself away from the traditionally female world of motherhood.
I'm sorry, but that is just ass backwards.
I mean, millennials have now stopped, virtually stopped reproducing.
And it's amazing.
All the people, even on the right, everybody's saying, well, it's the economy.
You know, millennials were coming up in the Obama economy and they couldn't afford children, so they waited too long, and now they're not even producing enough people to feed into Social Security and to develop a working class.
And it's all about the economy.
Well, baloney.
I mean, baloney is about the economy.
When you tell women that you're nothing if you stay home and take care of your children, that you're only something if you lean in, if you're working all the time, if you adopt male values, why should they?
I mean, women, I think, are more subject to social pressure than men are, somewhat.
And I think when you tell them that, it takes them a long time before they found out, oops, I made a mistake.
Even the idea, even the idea that you should have a career first and then a child is a male idea because men are built for that.
Women, their time runs out.
Why not develop another idea of a career where you have your babies first and stay home and take care of them as they need and then go on to have a career later?
I mean, that makes a lot more sense.
So in other words, what I'm saying is instead of arguing for that we women should now be able to live by male principles, why not argue that female principles should be elevated in our society, which I think they should.
Opposite of Abortion00:02:30
There's a clip going around on Twitter that I saw that is incredibly touching.
We haven't got time to play the whole thing.
It's like eight minutes long, but you can find it.
It's on America Got Talent.
And a young man shows up with his mom, and the kid's name is Cody Lee.
And he has got, he's blind.
He was born with optic nerve hypoplasia.
And they gave him a life-saving surgery when he was five days old.
And he now has also this kind of autism that makes it very hard for him to communicate.
And his mom found out that he loved music and trained him up.
And so he shows up on America's Got Talent, clearly afflicted, clearly with troubles, but with this enormous talent that his mom has cultivated.
His mom is named Tina.
So here, we put it together briefly.
There's a longer clip, but just to take a look at it for a minute.
I'm Cody.
Hi, Cody.
Cody Lee.
How old are you?
I am 22 years old.
Cody is blind and autistic.
Wow.
We found out that he loved music really early on.
He listened and his eyes just went huge.
And he started singing.
And that's when I just, I was in tears because that's when I realized, oh my gosh, he's an entertainer.
So.
I've been to so many places in my life and time.
I sung a lot of songs and I made some bedrooms.
I've liked to have my live and stages.
10,000 people watching.
Yeah.
We're alone now.
And I'm singing this song to you.
So what you're watching there, folks, is the opposite of an abortion.
That's the opposite of an abortion, right?
And if you watch, obviously if you're listening, you can't see it.
You've watched the mom's face.
Look, the kid gets the applause.
The kid gets the applause.
That's the way of the world.
But there ought to be a Nobel Prize for motherhood.
In fact, as far as I'm concerned, that's the only thing there ought to be a Nobel Prize for.
National Security Decisions00:10:10
I get it.
You do not get the rewards of the world.
You don't get money for being a mom.
You don't get the applause.
The kid gets the applause.
The thing that you produce gets the applause.
But if that's not the most important job on earth, I don't know what is.
And I just think it is sick what feminists have done.
And this is why when I say Trump is blessed in his enemies, he's blessed because they have lost their way because they adopt the values of the people they identify as the oppressors.
There is living proof.
I know it's just a pop TV show, but it's important.
And if you could see your face, you would understand that that is living proof that that's the job.
That's the thing that people do that matters.
And instead of saying, you know, what feminists should have said was screw male values, let's elevate female values, but they always do the wrong thing.
And that is why every time they take an aim shot at Trump, it flashes back and hits them in the head.
We're going to stay on so you can hear our guests, but please go to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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John Gans is the Director of Communications and Research at Perry Worldhouse, the University of Pennsylvania's Global Policy Institute.
And he's a fellow at the German Marshall, he's a fellow at the German Marshall Fund and a former chief speechwriter at the Pentagon.
He's got a new book called White House Warriors, How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War, White House Warriors by John Gans.
John, are you there?
Yeah, absolutely.
How are you?
I'm great.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
I want to start.
I want to start with something very basic because a lot of times guys who know a lot don't understand how little people know.
Explain to us what the National Security Council is and how it came to be.
So it's a good question and it's a question I get a lot.
So it sort of tells you how opaque our government is.
Sort of one of the most important parts of it is so hard to understand.
But the National Security Council was created in 1947, actually.
It was created because Franklin Roosevelt didn't need a National Security Council to win World War II.
You know, he kind of did things on his own, worked with advisors and close friends and a few military officials he liked, dealt with Winston Churchill, and basically tried to win the war by himself and kept everybody else in the dark.
But government didn't like that.
And as government grew, as the war sort of went on, and to a degree as the atomic weapons were used, government basically said, we got to figure out a way to do this better than just an old man working in the Oval Office making decisions of huge consequence by himself.
And so they came up with an idea.
They said, let's get everybody who's working on national security.
They didn't define national security, but they figured State Department, Defense Department, the military, the president, the vice president, a few others in a room to talk about these decisions and make it a formal sort of requirement that that's how we make decisions.
And so it was basically a forum and an opportunity to get all these smart people in a room.
But Congress said, okay, well, if you're going to have that many big names in a room, big people in a room, you're going to need somebody to make sure they show up on time.
You're going to need somebody to make sure that they know what they're talking about when they come to the table.
And you're going to need somebody to make sure we know what they said when they made decisions.
So they created a staff, a very small staff, in 1947, basically to do secretarial work, to keep minutes, to write agendas, and to schedule meetings.
But out of that little humble administrative beginning grew an institution in Washington that's known as the National Security Council, which is actually the staff, which is now 400-something people and works in the executive office building next to the White House and is run by the National Security Advisor, a position that didn't exist in 1947.
So does this, you seem to feel that this has gotten out of hand.
I mean, that this is a dangerous thing to have these guys making the decisions behind the scenes.
Well, what I would say is that I would say that as I tell people, and I always get this in Washington, and I'm in Washington right now, and I always get in Washington, everybody says, well, when I was on the National Security staff, we were really thoughtful.
And I sort of say, well, look at the sum total of decisions.
And I actually look at staffers in the book, White House Warriors, from Truman to Trump, right?
I look at somebody in almost every administration and in every war that America's fought since then.
And what you actually see is the track record is It's not a sterling record of decision-making in war, in part because empowering a bunch of people who are behind the scenes, aren't exposed to Congress, aren't exposed to the public, aren't on the battlefield in the diplomatic negotiations to help have so much power over decisions doesn't lead to the best decisions at the end of the day.
And so, what I say is, is that that much unaccountable problem is a problem.
That much unaccountable power is a problem on its own.
But the actual impact is really in terms of how Washington works and how America fights its wars, has been a really negative one for the country.
Wow.
So, I mean, now you're looking, we've had Iran in the news and North Korea.
You've got John Bolton in there, a guy I respect, but he's a guy when his toilet gets clogged up, he summons a B-2 bomber in instead of a plumber.
I mean, he's a very hawkish guy.
But on the other hand, you have a president who goes out in front of people and says, Yeah, I'm not listening to them.
He said it about North Korea.
They say their missile launches are a provocation.
I say it's nothing.
And they were making war-like noises about Iran, and Trump was saying, No, I don't want to go to war.
Well, first, let's start with this.
Do you feel that Trump and his National Security Council are at odds?
They certainly aren't working well together.
I mean, it's hard to really see, and this has been hard.
Listen, as I always try to explain to people, Donald Trump was a very unconventional pick.
I mean, everybody sort of accepts that as true.
But just putting Donald Trump into a presidency was basically a collision between such an unconventional person who never served in government, never worked in the military, never served in the military in the classic sense of understanding, had no experience in Washington into a system that has existed for 70 years of making decisions and thinking about things and thinking about the world and a bureaucracy that has strong opinions and isn't easy to deal with,
even with presidents who've worked in Washington for years, right?
And it's been a collision between those two forces, and it hasn't been easy.
And there have been moments of peace, but most of it has been pretty chaotic.
So I would say less more of just a breakdown and chaos than really at odds, because I think generally speaking, the president only cares about a few issues.
He cares about the big stuff and kind of seems to let, and from what I talk to people in government, seems to let a lot of the little stuff go to other people.
But what you have right now is more chaos, less really sort of critical analysis of what the issues are and where the priorities should be.
And you also have a situation where there's really no precedent where a president is publicly saying that the national security advisor not only doesn't speak for me, but is on the wrong page with me.
That might have happened in history.
I like to say the working in government and national security, it's not that different than every other job, right?
There are days where you hate your boss.
There are days where you like your boss.
There are days where you hate your coworkers.
There's days where you are looking at other jobs.
I'm sure there's people at the White House right now who are looking at other jobs online, right?
That's just the way it goes.
But those are great days.
So there's always days of people getting on the wrong foot.
But I can't think of a precedent where the president was actively saying that the national security advisor is speaking, is not speaking for me.
So looking at these two situations, North Korea and Iran, let's start with Iran.
Are you concerned that the disconnect between Trump and Pompeo, the apparent disconnect between Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton is going to drag us into some kind of engagement?
Or do you think the opposite is more likely?
Well, I think when a president says he's not very interested in a war, I think that generally makes it harder to fight a war.
I think the American people are pretty hesitant about a war, another war.
I mean, there's one thing the United States knows about for the past 20 years, and one thing, you know, America's pretty divided, but I think most Americans would agree that another Middle East war is probably not in our strategic, economic, and political interest.
And I think that generally speaking, the military is pretty cool on another war in the Middle East.
That said, the challenge you have right now is that you have this breakdown in Washington, and it's those people who are interpreting all of the signals from the Middle East, right?
And so we've sent- When you say those people, you mean the whole- Bolton, Pompeo, Trump, right?
We're sending a lot of, there's a lot of reaction and counterreaction with Ron.
We send, you know, an aircraft carrier, they load missiles onto a boat.
You know, we remove troops from personnel from Iraq.
They do something else.
So all of these little actions and counterreactions have to be interpreted, and we have to make decisions.
And when you have people who aren't on the same page, have people who are disagreeing openly in public and in the press, you worry that less that the breakdown is going to drag us into war and just something's going to get misinterpreted, a miscalculation is going to be made, a question's not going to be asked, and an idea is not going to be proposed.
And I think that's what you have in Washington right now.
And as I make sure everybody knows, and as this book demonstrates, even when these breakdowns happen with the big people and the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State at present, there's been times where everybody's disagreed in the past, right?
That's happened.
I talk about in the book the Reagan administration had, but, you know, as iconic as his policymaking is on the Cold War, his administration was very chaotic as well.
But the business of national security doesn't go away.
So somewhere there's somebody trying to fill the gap and trying to make a decision without upsetting people.
And that generally leads to problems.
Let me ask you, I need a quick answer because I'm running out of time.
We're talking to John Gans, the author of White House Warriors, how the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War.
Let me ask you quickly, is there a reform you'd like to see, a specific reform in the National Security Council?
Yeah, generally right now, the National Security Advisor, none of the National Security Council staff are subject to Senate or congressional confirmation.
And I'd like to see them basically be reviewed and approved by Congress to try and open it up and connect it better to the American people.
Because right now, it's too secretive for as powerful it is at a time when people are worried about a deep state and everything else.
Alex Trebek's Battle00:04:11
Thanks very much.
John Gans, author of White House Warriors.
Thanks for coming on.
I hope to talk to you again.
Absolutely.
Thanks so much.
Let me end the week.
The week is already over.
I guess it was a short week.
Let me end with a final reflection.
I've got to show you a great catch from our friends at MRC Newsbusters.
Alex Trebek, you know, of Jeopardy Fame is suffering with pancreatic cancer, battling a very tough cancer to beat, obviously.
And Trebek's one of those guys like Pat Sajak, who has just become part of the American consciousness in a completely benign and beneficent way.
It's just kind of a nice character to have around.
So a lot of people rooting for him and praying for him as he fights this thing.
So listen carefully.
This is from, as I say, it's from MRC Newsbusters.
The way this was reported on ABC and then the other two news networks.
And ABC obviously is the Jeopardy network, so Trebek is their guy.
Listen carefully to the ABC report.
Tonight, Alex Trebek, three months after revealing his battle with stage four pancreatic cancer, now saying doctors believe he is in near remission.
We remember he vowed to fight it.
With the help of your prayers also, I plan to beat the low survival rate statistics for this disease.
Trebek now telling People magazine, the doctors said they hadn't seen this kind of positive result in their memory.
Some of the tumors have already shrunk by more than 50%.
He adds, it's kind of mind-boggling.
I've already gone from where I was to this.
The doctors are so excited, just beside themselves with joy.
And Trebek, again, thanked the millions who have sent good wishes.
I told the doctors this has to be more than just chemo.
I've had a couple million people out there who have expressed their good thoughts, their positive energy, and their prayers.
The doctor said it could very well be an important part of this.
No doubt it is, and we're always rooting for Alex here.
Good job, ABC.
Very straightforward report.
Listen carefully to see what's missing from the reports from CBS and NBC.
Trebek announced his diagnosis in March.
I plan to beat the low survival rate statistics for this disease.
The five-year survival rate for stage four pancreatic cancer is less than three percent.
The 78-year-old has continued to work while undergoing chemo.
Thank you for your continuing messages of encouragement and support.
He tells people, I've got a couple million people out there who have expressed their good thoughts.
I told the doctors this has to be more than just the chemo.
For Trebek, that support is part of the answer.
There was some encouraging news today from Alex Trebek.
The host of Jeopardy says his doctors tell him that his stage four pancreatic cancer is in, quote, near remission.
In an interview with People magazine, Trebek calls the prognosis mind-boggling, but says he has several more rounds of chemotherapy to go before he's declared to be in full remission.
Yep, they edited out the prayers.
They just completely took out the prayers, which obviously meant a lot to Trebek and that he felt had helped him very much.
You know, yesterday during the mailbag, I said that God is not like Tinkerbell.
He doesn't go away when you stop believing in him.
But you do.
You go away.
When you stop believing in God, you lose the entire logic behind your rights, behind your soul, behind your conscience.
All of the logic of that goes away when you stop believing.
And that is why, I mean, they don't know they're doing it.
Obviously, there's nobody at CBS rubbing his hands together, NBC, saying, oh, we're going to get rid of God.
It's an instinct they have because they know that God is opposed to what they want, which is power to make decisions over you, which is to take away your conscience, take away your agency.
God is an enemy of the left because he gets in the way of their plans.
But as I say, when you stop believing in him, he doesn't go away.
You do.
And that is their ultimate goal, to get rid of you, the you of you, who demands rights, who is endowed with rights, who has the right to make decisions according to your own conscience.
Anyway, let us join our prayers to those of millions of others for Alex Trebek.
I hope he beats this thing.
It would indeed be a miracle.
For the rest of you, you're screwed.
God's Opposition00:00:57
It's the Clavenless weekend.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Robert Mueller issues his farewell address and Democrats move toward impeachment.