Attorney General William Barr has released the Mueller Report with relatively few redactions and gives a highly entertaining press conference on the details of its release. We will analyze the relevant sections and what it means for President Trump, the media, and 2020. Date: 04-18-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Edelweiss, Edelweiss, every... | |
| Oh, hello there. | |
| Oh, I'm sorry. | |
| It was just such a lovely day. | |
| Birds chirping. | |
| Attorney General William Barr has released the Mueller report with relatively few redactions, and he gave a highly entertaining press conference this morning at about 6.30 a.m. | |
| Pacific. | |
| We will go through the good, the bad, and the ugly of all of the relevant sections of the report, what it means for President Trump, what it means for the media, what it means for 2020. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| I had Edelweiss in my head because apparently that's what was being played at the White House Just a beautiful sunshine day because obviously the White House is presenting this report as fully exonerating President Trump and totally condemning the media and the Democrats who have been pushing this story for two years. | |
| There's good stuff in the report. | |
| There's bad stuff in the report. | |
| There's stuff in the report that doesn't reflect well on President Trump. | |
| But all in all, they are right. | |
| All in all, this is a really, really good day for President Trump. | |
| We will get into why that is. | |
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| Anything in the news today? | |
| I guess so. | |
| I guess there is. | |
| They were playing the song Edelweiss at the White House and Maggie Haberman of the Democrat Party, I mean of the media, I mean of the New York Times or whatever she writes for, she said they were playing Edelweiss. | |
| Do they know what that song means? | |
| She's trying to call Trump a Nazi because Edelweiss comes from The Sound of Music. | |
| What she forgets is that it was sung by people opposing the Nazis in The Sound of Music. | |
| That exemplifies how the media have gotten this story wrong from the very beginning. | |
| And that is why the day began, before they released the redacted report, the day began with Attorney General William Barr giving a press conference on the report... | |
| Why they're releasing the report, why certain parts of the report have been redacted, and taking reporters' questions. | |
| The main takeaway here, the main takeaway from this whole press conference is that Attorney General William Barr has an IQ at least twice that of every reporter in that room combined. | |
| It was dizzying and distressing to look at how stupid the reporters came off and how well William Barr came off. | |
| This guy is no joke. | |
| The media are now trying to present him as some sort of hack, private lawyer for President Trump. | |
| Can't do that with William Barr. | |
| William Barr was the Attorney General in 1991. | |
| William Barr has been around a long time. | |
| He's a very smart guy. | |
| He's a very serious guy. | |
| He's a very well-respected guy. | |
| That really came through in this press conference. | |
| It actually reminded me a lot of Antonin Scalia, the way that he would listen to questions, the way he could identify instantly where these reporters were going, and the way he just clobbered them with the answer. | |
| So the left has been going after William Barr for a couple of weeks now. | |
| The question that Is, to be asked, is, is the summary that William Barr gave of the Mueller report a fair assessment or an unfair assessment? | |
| Is the assessment that he gave basically correct when he released his four-page report a couple weeks ago, or is he covering up and spinning and trying to fix the media for Donald Trump? | |
| Here is Attorney General Barr's main takeaway. | |
| Counsel found no evidence That any American, including anyone associated with the Trump campaign, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government or the IRA in this illegal scheme. | |
| Indeed, as the report states, quote, the investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. person knowingly or intentionally coordinated with the IRA's interference operation, unquote. | |
| Put another way, the special counsel found no collusion by any Americans in IRA's illegal activities. | |
| No collusion. | |
| He makes a point of simplifying this for people. | |
| The special counsel found no collusion. | |
| Now, we've known this for a while. | |
| I think even the sophisticated Democrats in the media have known there's no collusion. | |
| Van Jones, a very sophisticated left-winger, said a year ago, over a year ago, the Russia thing is a nothing burger. | |
| So then the question comes down to, was there obstruction? | |
| So there's no collusion. | |
| It's not as though President Trump was working with Vladimir Putin to fix the 2016 election. | |
| But even though there was no collusion, was there obstruction? | |
| So once the Mueller investigation began, did President Trump try to obstruct the investigation? | |
| Now, it's a perfectly legitimate question to ask, how can you obstruct an investigation when there's no underlying crime? | |
| If I haven't committed a crime, how can I be said to try to obstruct an investigation into a crime that never happened? | |
| That's a fair question. | |
| Arguments on both sides, which we'll get to in a Did President Trump behave in some crooked way to fix this investigation, to fix the conclusions here, to work with Barr, to work with Mueller, to work with any of these things? | |
| Did he obstruct justice? | |
| Now, the mainstream media are furious today, and Democrats are furious because William Barr and the DOJ briefed the White House on the report. | |
| So this is now their big takeaway and they're saying this is the evidence of some corruption here in the Trump administration and the DOJ. | |
| Because the attorney general briefed the president's team before releasing it to Congress and before giving this press conference and before releasing it to the press. | |
| William Barr clears up this question, which all of the news media have been going on and prattling on about for hours, changing. | |
| Chuck Todd said it was evidence that Trump colluded with the Attorney General. | |
| William Barr gives the very simple explanation of why the White House was briefed on this report. | |
| Following my March 29th letter, the Office of the White House Counsel requested the opportunity to review the redacted version of the report. | |
| In order to advise the President on the potential invocation of privilege, which is consistent with long-standing practice. | |
| Following that review, the President confirmed that in the interest of transparency and full disclosure to the American people, he would not assert privilege over the Special Counsel's report. | |
| Accordingly, the public report I am releasing today Contains redactions only for the four categories that I previously outlined, and no material has been redacted based on executive privilege. | |
| Very important that he makes this point, because they say, well, you briefed the White House. | |
| They're going to cook this up. | |
| They're going to interfere with its release. | |
| No, he says. | |
| The president is fully within his rights to exercise executive privilege And determine what goes out, what doesn't go out. | |
| He's fully within his rights to do that, and therefore he has to see, or I suppose his team has to see the redacted version of the report before it goes out. | |
| So just definitionally, he's got to see it. | |
| William Barr sends it over to them, and they do not make any additional redactions. | |
| So the White House has not interfered in this report. | |
| The White House being briefed on this did not result in any additional redactions, any changes to the report whatsoever. | |
| Now, the thing to remember here, the thing you've got to always keep in mind, is that the mainstream media are not that intelligent. | |
| I don't even mean this just to beat up on the media, but they're just not that intelligent. | |
| The reason you sometimes think they're very intelligent is because they wear suits and they have nice ties and they speak really seriously into a camera. | |
| They're not. | |
| They're not really that smart. | |
| And you see this in the exchanges that the reporters are having with William Barr. | |
| So this one reporter goes on for probably a whole minute trying to basically make the case that Barr has acted improperly and that this is a crooked press conference and she's trying to go after him, obviously. | |
| She can't stand President Trump. | |
| And just look at how swiftly William Barr takes her down. | |
| Listen to this. | |
| And here you have remarks that are quite generous to the president, including acknowledging his feelings and his emotions. | |
| So what do you say to people on both sides of the aisle who are concerned that you are trying to protect the president? | |
| Well, actually, the statements about his sincere beliefs are recognized in the report that there was substantial evidence for that. | |
| So I'm not sure what your basis is for saying that I am being generous to the president. | |
| You face an unprecedented situation. | |
| It just seems like there's a lot of effort to go out of your Well, is there another precedent for it? | |
| No, but it's unusual. | |
| Okay, so unprecedented is an accurate description, isn't it? | |
| Yes. | |
| What do you say to people who are concerned that you're trying to protect the president? | |
| Eric? | |
| Just absolutely devastating. | |
| Well, you're being really, really generous to the president. | |
| How am I doing that? | |
| Okay, well, you're saying this is unprecedented. | |
| Is it precedented? | |
| No. | |
| Then I guess it's unprecedented, isn't it? | |
| Yeah, but I don't like you! | |
| Really, there are a lot of exchanges that go on in this press conference just like that. | |
| It basically... | |
| It sums up the forces of reality, the people who are analyzing this document, and the media who have cooked up a narrative for two years. | |
| You are watching that narrative collapse in real time. | |
| It is extraordinarily enjoyable. | |
| And we haven't even gotten to the report yet. | |
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| They're very angry that William Barr is handily explaining all of the totally proper procedure that's gone on here with the release of this report. | |
| So they pin their hopes on Mueller. | |
| You saw the t-shirts. | |
| It's Mueller time. | |
| The left has been building up Bob Mueller for a long time now. | |
| And so one reporter asks, why is Bob Mueller not here giving this press conference? | |
| And William Barr clears up this very important point. | |
| There's a lot of public interest in the absence of the special counsel and members of his team. | |
| Was he invited to join you up on the podium? | |
| Why is he not here? | |
| This is his report, obviously, that you're talking about today. | |
| No, it's not. | |
| It's a report he did for me as the Attorney General. | |
| He is required under the regulation to provide me with a confidential report. | |
| I'm here to discuss my response to that report and my decision, entirely discretionary, to make it public, since these reports are not supposed to be made public. | |
| Boom. | |
| Perfect answer. | |
| What the media have been trying to do is to establish this very dubious legal idea that the special counsel is above everybody else. | |
| This is the problem with the special counsel. | |
| Why on earth is some random lawyer who gets picked suddenly the most powerful person on the face of the earth, more powerful than the President of the United States? | |
| The media have been trying to build this up because they don't like that Donald Trump was elected. | |
| They don't like that Donald Trump's appointees are now running the government. | |
| So that reporter says, look, this is Bob Mueller's report. | |
| How come Bob Mueller's not here? | |
| And Attorney General William Barr says, no, no, that's my report. | |
| It's not his report. | |
| It's my report. | |
| He did it for me because I am the Attorney General and some randomly appointed special counsel is not allowed to be the most important political figure on the face of the earth. | |
| Now, this brings up another question, too, because... | |
| There is some discrepancy between the Mueller report and the way that Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein are talking about it, which we'll get to in one second. | |
| This last gasp, though, the last gasp of these reporters who really, really want to convince everybody that this is just a bunch of spin, this is a bunch of PR, this is a show. | |
| They actually just ask this to Barr straight out, and Barr gives them a straight answer. | |
| Propriety for you to come out and sort of what appears to be sort of spinning the report before the public gets a chance to read it? | |
| No. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| That's what he's saying. | |
| So it's not improper. | |
| It's obviously proper. | |
| If he hadn't given this press conference, the left would be screaming that he hadn't given this press conference. | |
| So now let's get to the report itself. | |
| The reason I open up with this is because there isn't very much new in the report. | |
| I haven't made it through all 400 pages yet or 380 pages or whatever it is. | |
| I've probably gotten through about 100 pages. | |
| You really don't need to read the whole thing because only certain sections of it are relevant to these questions at hand. | |
| Did the president commit a crime? | |
| Did the president obstruct justice? | |
| Did senior members of his campaign obstruct justice? | |
| So you actually can get basically all the information you need with about 100 pages of it. | |
| And the main takeaway here... | |
| We don't learn anything new that we didn't already know about President Trump or that we didn't already strongly suspect that he was doing. | |
| We knew that President Trump didn't like the special counsel. | |
| We knew that President Trump wanted to shut down the special counsel. | |
| We knew that President Trump wasn't as familiar as lifelong politicians with the way that government works. | |
| We know that he behaved like a real estate developer in New York rather than as a lifelong politician. | |
| We knew all of these things. | |
| I think the Mueller report tells us more about the Mueller investigation than it tells us about President Trump's conduct. | |
| Anybody out there who's telling you this is a bombshell, this is explosive, this is amazing, ask that person what new conclusion can they reach? | |
| What's the news? | |
| All of the fake news, all of the mainstream media, cable news, they're trying to spin this as some shocking development. | |
| Ask them to pinpoint exactly what This is from the special counsel's report. | |
| According to notes written by Hunt, when Sessions told the president that a special counsel had been appointed, the president slumped back in his chair and said, Oh my God, this is terrible. | |
| This is the end of my presidency. | |
| I'm effed. | |
| Now this is the line that you're going to see flying around the internet. | |
| A lot of people tweeting this saying, this is not something an innocent man would say. | |
| This, he was hiding something. | |
| He committed a crime. | |
| What you have to ask yourself is, if that's evidence that he committed a crime, how come the special counsel couldn't find that he committed a crime? | |
| If that line, I'm effed, if that's evidence that President Trump committed a crime, how come we had an investigation for two years that concluded he didn't commit any crime with the Russian government during the 2016 election? | |
| Now, You might say, what the left would say is, well, maybe the crime he committed was obstruction. | |
| Right. | |
| Okay, maybe. | |
| But he said this when the special counsel was appointed. | |
| This is before obstruction could have taken place. | |
| So what is this actually referring to? | |
| What the hacks want you to think is that this is referring to some action he took during the campaign. | |
| Actually, Bob Mueller himself explains later in the report what this means. | |
| He says, That's why he's effed. | |
| That's why it's the end of his presidency. | |
| That's why he reacted that way. | |
| Don't take my word for it. | |
| Don't take Donald Trump's word for it. | |
| Take Bob Mueller's word for it. | |
| He puts that in that same paragraph in the special counsel report. | |
| Which the left doesn't want you to read. | |
| What he's pointing out is that once the independent counsel or the special counsel gets appointed, everything becomes about the special counsel. | |
| It stalls all of your plans, stalls your legislative agenda. | |
| It gets the media constantly talking against you. | |
| It drops your approval numbers. | |
| It does ruin your presidency. | |
| We saw this happen during the administration of Bill Clinton. | |
| That's what he's pointing to. | |
| Anybody telling you otherwise is lying. | |
| Now, What about the report? | |
| There are some redactions. | |
| These redactions, by the way, are for very limited reasons. | |
| Most of it is for personal privacy. | |
| You're not allowed to release information about people who were investigated, but ultimately not indicted, because that's obviously not fair to them. | |
| They were not indicted. | |
| They did not have any accusations in a court of law. | |
| They didn't have the opportunity to defend themselves or to clear their names. | |
| So you can't just... | |
| against them without giving them the opportunity to defend themselves. | |
| The other reasons are harm to ongoing matters. | |
| This is another big one that you see throughout the report. | |
| So a lot of these things are still being investigated, so they can't release information that is going to damage that. | |
| Okay, five sections here of the report. | |
| There's a section on the special counsel investigation, the investigation itself. | |
| There's a section on the social media campaign that Russia ran to try to sow discord in the United States. | |
| We know a lot about that. | |
| We've talked about that a lot. | |
| There's a section on Russian hacking and dumping, the Russian government directing the hacking of the DNC and of Hillary Clinton, and the document dumps with regard to WikiLeaks. | |
| Then the fourth section, which is on the Russian government contact with the Trump campaign, And finally, on prosecution and declination decisions. | |
| Only three of those sections matter to what we're talking about today. | |
| We don't care really about what the Russians did themselves. | |
| What we care about is the investigation. | |
| We care about any relations that the Trump campaign had with Russia. | |
| And we care about who got prosecuted and who the special counsel declined to prosecute. | |
| And we're never going to agree on anything. | |
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| So those are the only really relevant sections of the Mueller report that we care about. | |
| So, we know the investigation at this point. | |
| We've talked about the investigation itself ad nauseum. | |
| Section 4, Russian government contact with the Trump campaign. | |
| The office identified multiple contacts, links, in the words of the appointment office, between Trump campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government. | |
| Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | |
| based on the available information, the investigation did not establish coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. | |
| In other words, no collusion. | |
| Section five, this gets to specifically obstruction here. | |
| The office determined that certain individuals associated with the campaign lied to investigators about campaign contacts with Russia and have taken other actions to interfere with the investigation. | |
| So we're now talking about obstruction of justice. | |
| The takeaway here is that people in politics behaved like people in politics. | |
| Don't let anybody tell you that everyone behaved beautifully here, nobody did anything wrong, everyone did totally the upright moral thing. | |
| That's not what happened. | |
| These campaign guys behaved like campaign guys in some cases. | |
| These guys lied in some cases. | |
| In some cases, the charges were totally overblown. | |
| However, that's not really the point. | |
| The point is, was there a crime? | |
| What crime was committed? | |
| How was this crime derived, uncovered, contrived, whatever? | |
| What does it mean in the broad scope of Russian interference? | |
| Here's a good example of this. | |
| It's George Papadopoulos, campaign official who lied to investigators. | |
| He spoke to an intelligence asset. | |
| He said he met the intelligence asset. | |
| Because the guy said that he had dirt on Hillary Clinton. | |
| And George Papadopoulos said that he met with him before he started working for the Trump campaign. | |
| Now, it turns out he met with him after he learned he was going to work with the Trump campaign. | |
| Investigators asked him about this. | |
| He asked him, why would somebody approach you with dirt on Hillary Clinton if you weren't working for the Trump campaign? | |
| And George Papadopoulos said it was a very strange coincidence. | |
| So this is not good lying. | |
| This is pretty bad lying. | |
| It's pretty obvious lying. | |
| This raises other questions. | |
| Why did that asset, Joseph Mifsud, approach George Papadopoulos when he was already working for the Trump campaign? | |
| Why did that happen? | |
| Was there maybe something going on behind the scenes that we don't know about with the intelligence agencies and the Obama administration? | |
| I don't know. | |
| There are going to have to be other investigations to figure that out. | |
| But it is the case. | |
| Guys like George Papadopoulos did lie to investigators. | |
| That's in there. | |
| Now, how about Michael Flynn? | |
| Michael Flynn made two false statements. | |
| He told investigators that he did not ask the Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak, to refrain from escalating tensions in response to the U.S. imposition of sanctions on Russia. | |
| But he did ask Kislyak to do that. | |
| Who cares? | |
| Who cares? | |
| The other false statement he made was he asked the Russian ambassador to vote against a resolution submitted by Egypt to condemn Israel. | |
| And he said he didn't ask him to do that, and he did. | |
| Who cares? | |
| That seems a lot less fair to get Michael Flynn on that than George Papadopoulos. | |
| George Papadopoulos, it looks like they got him pretty much dead to rights. | |
| He lied to them. | |
| They pushed him. | |
| He lied some more. | |
| Michael Flynn, it looks like a setup. | |
| Just to show you the difference between how different members of the campaign were treated. | |
| When we talk about this as a witch hunt, to see which parts of the witch hunt, which parts are not. | |
| Obviously, what we care about is President Trump. | |
| So, why didn't they go after President Trump? | |
| One... | |
| Bob Mueller says there are lots of problems with prosecuting a sitting president. | |
| And he says specifically, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. | |
| Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment. | |
| So in other words... | |
| If they could totally exonerate the president of obstruction of justice, they would have. | |
| They couldn't totally exonerate him. | |
| Okay? | |
| That's in there. | |
| Also, they couldn't go after him. | |
| They couldn't find any crime that he committed. | |
| So accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him. | |
| So what's going to happen? | |
| The guys on the left are going to say, it does not exonerate him. | |
| And the guys on the right are going to say... | |
| It does not conclude that he committed a crime. | |
| So let's dig in. | |
| What did Trump do? | |
| What did he actually do? | |
| He told the White House counsel to stop Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself. | |
| He told the White House counsel to stop what started the chain events that led to the special counsel investigation. | |
| Then he complained that his AG wasn't helping him out, and then he asked Sessions to unrecuse himself. | |
| We already knew that. | |
| We already knew that. | |
| We saw that play out on Twitter. | |
| Then when the investigation was announced, President Trump asked the Director of National Intelligence and the heads of the CIA and the NSA what they could do to publicly dispel the collusion narrative. | |
| Now, is that obstruction? | |
| No. | |
| It's not obstruction because the collusion narrative was false. | |
| Now, if Trump had actually conspired with the Russian government and he called his intelligence agencies and he said, go out there and lie for me, that would certainly be obstruction. | |
| But in this case, what it sounds like is President Trump called up the agencies and said, hey, you guys know I didn't do this. | |
| Go out there and tell them I didn't do this. | |
| Now, was that proper for him to do? | |
| Was that professional for him to do? | |
| Was that presidential for him to do? | |
| Who cares? | |
| I don't know. | |
| I guess maybe it is, maybe it isn't. | |
| Maybe he wasn't as well-practiced as lifelong politicians. | |
| But that's not obstruction. | |
| He also asked James Comey to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation after James Comey said the FBI was not investigating him personally. | |
| So, same thing. | |
| Add the FBI to the CIA, the NSA, and the DNI. He just asked James Comey, then head of the FBI, Hey, James Comey, you know that I didn't collude with the Russians. | |
| Can't you tell people that? | |
| You're going to take out a sitting president for that? | |
| He then referred to the appointment of the special counsel as the end of his presidency. | |
| But then Bob Mueller explains why he did that. | |
| Did that because special counsels in general disturb presidencies. | |
| Then he asked Sessions to resign. | |
| Sessions submitted a letter of resignation. | |
| He did not accept it at first. | |
| Then he did. | |
| Again, we saw that play out on Twitter. | |
| Then he told Don McGahn, the White House counsel, that special counsel Bob Mueller had conflicts of interest and he should be removed. | |
| This is one that the left is really focusing on. | |
| But Don McGahn, the White House counsel, didn't follow the orders and then nothing happened. | |
| So you have Trump complaining to the White House counsel and saying that the special counsel should be removed. | |
| Don McGahn does not remove the special counsel. | |
| Even if he had removed the special counsel, I don't think that's grounds even to say that Trump should be impeached for obstruction. | |
| But it didn't happen. | |
| Then he asked Corey Lewandowski to tell Jeff Sessions to say the investigation was unfair to the President of the United States. | |
| Lewandowski didn't do that because he didn't want it on the record, because he didn't want to end up in this report like he ended up anyway. | |
| Then he edited a press statement for his son, Donald Trump Jr., to delete a line that the Trump Tower meeting, the famous Trump Tower meeting with Russians, might involve information helpful to his campaign. | |
| This one, I think, is probably the one that gets closest to obstruction because he's there kind of working with his son to work on the press and present this Trump Tower meeting as something different. | |
| But again, there was no Russian conspiracy. | |
| So regardless of the Trump Tower meeting, regardless of the emails, regardless of the press statement, it amounts to nothing. | |
| He then pressured Don McGahn, the White House counsel, to deny media reports that he asked him to get the special counsel removed. | |
| Which, by the way, the White House counsel did not do. | |
| Even if he had, I don't think that really amounts to that much. | |
| He asked Michael Flynn's legal team to give him a heads up on information that implicated him. | |
| He praised Paul Manafort. | |
| He praised, and then he attacked Michael Cohen. | |
| We saw all of this play out on Twitter. | |
| This is the big defense. | |
| If you're obstructing justice, you do it in secret. | |
| You don't do it in public. | |
| Can you name one other example of a president obstructing justice in public like that? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| Bob Mueller, by the way, makes this point in the report. | |
| He says several features distinguish this from typical obstruction cases. | |
| Some of the actions, like firing FBI Director James Comey totally within his authority as president, Also, there's no underlying crime. | |
| Also, the Twitter of it all, they took place in public view. | |
| It's going to be very hard for the left to twist this report into some awful indictment of the president. | |
| What is the takeaway? | |
| Nothing new. | |
| We know that President Trump is a real estate developer from New York. | |
| We know he pressures and bullies people like business executives do. | |
| We know that he pressures and bullies people like he does in public, on the campaign trail, even to members of his own administration. | |
| We know that there's no Russian collusion. | |
| And, as, this is an important point, as William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein point out, He is exonerated on obstruction of justice. | |
| Bob Mueller submits the report, not to the American people, not to Congress, not to the President, to the Attorney General. | |
| Then it is up to the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General to determine whether or not he is to be Gone after whether or not he's committed a crime or whether or not there isn't evidence that he's committed a crime. | |
| It is not for the Attorney General to say, well, here's the report, make up your own decision. | |
| No, it's up to the Attorney General to make that decision. | |
| He and the Deputy Attorney General both concluded no obstruction of justice. | |
| Our long national nightmare is over. | |
| The Russian collusion narrative is over. | |
| The Mueller investigation is over. | |
| Two years... | |
| For nothing. | |
| To find out that Donald Trump is a tough-talking guy who pressures his subordinates, which we already knew. | |
| We got a lot of mailbag to get to. | |
| I also have to tell you something, folks. | |
| My college speaking tour just got 10 schools longer. | |
| We announced yesterday a partnership with the Young America's Foundation. | |
| Not only are we not going to cancel the speaking tour because of that ridiculous leftist assailant at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, we are going to turn it up into high gear. | |
| If you would like to have the tour stop by your school, go through the Young America's Foundation, put in a request through them. | |
| We are going to make college campuses great again. | |
| Go to dailywire.com. | |
| You know everything you get. | |
| You get the Leftist Tears Tumblr. | |
| You've never needed it more than today. | |
| We'll be right back with the mailbag. | |
| Ran a little late, but one of the bigger news days of the year, so we got to get through all of that Mueller report, especially as we lap up those leftist so we got to get through all of that Mueller report, Just as good as I remember them. | |
| First question from Mary. | |
| Hey, Michael. | |
| Would you talk about your stance on body positivity movement? | |
| The body positivity movement we see in the media and the culture? | |
| Yes. | |
| This is... | |
| I saw this the other night. | |
| There was a student at one of the schools I spoke at who wore a shirt that said, fat... | |
| Like, she was proud that she's fat. | |
| And you see all of the body positivity movements in all its various forms. | |
| This is sad because, as with virtually all positivity movements, nobody who says, I'm positive, I'm positive, I'm positive, I'm just so happy, actually is. | |
| That's always hiding some amount of shame or discontentment or negativity. | |
| Now, what's the answer to this? | |
| The answer to this is not to think less of yourself. | |
| The answer is to think of yourself less. | |
| Obviously, it's not healthy to be really overweight. | |
| It's not evil to be really overweight, but it's not healthy, so if you can fix it, fix it. | |
| We all have things about ourselves that we want to improve. | |
| That's one aspect of it. | |
| I have plenty of things about myself that I want to improve. | |
| It doesn't mean that I hate myself all the time. | |
| But the key is, think of yourself less. | |
| It's not all about you. | |
| You don't have to be proud of everything. | |
| Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. | |
| Only the left could turn the queen of all sins into the greatest possible virtue, pride. | |
| You don't need to be proud of your body. | |
| You should be humble. | |
| You shouldn't hate your body either. | |
| You should be humble. | |
| Humble, grateful, move on with your life. | |
| There are many more interesting things in the world than your own body weight. | |
| Move on. | |
| It's a big world out there. | |
| Go enjoy it. | |
| From Antonio. | |
| Hi, Michael. | |
| Why do so many ex-leftists hesitate to call themselves conservatives? | |
| Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson, for example. | |
| Thanks, Antonio. | |
| Because they're not conservatives. | |
| That's actually the reason. | |
| What we're seeing now is not just a binary between leftists and conservatives. | |
| We're seeing another category, which is liberals. | |
| So I happen to know Jordan and Dave, and I don't think they're conservatives. | |
| Dave just invited me on his show, so maybe we can actually talk about this question. | |
| But Dave is a liberal. | |
| He's a classical liberal, he says. | |
| And in American political speak, we like to say that classical liberals and conservatives are the same thing. | |
| They're not. | |
| They're not the same thing. | |
| Friedrich Hayek, who's a An economic hero of many conservatives and libertarians famously wrote an essay where he said, Why I'm not a conservative? | |
| Because he's not. | |
| He's something a little different. | |
| Liberals and conservatives are different. | |
| What happens in this particular moment, however, is that the far left is pushing things that both liberals and conservatives disagree with. | |
| The far left has turned strongly against freedom, strongly against liberty. | |
| So classical liberals like Dave Rubin, who says, I believe in free speech. | |
| I believe in the exchange of ideas. | |
| They partner up with conservatives like me, who I don't exalt freedom, liberty, some abstract right to that as though it's the be all and end all of society, as though it's the very end of politics. | |
| I like tradition. | |
| I like veneration. | |
| I like virtue. | |
| I like the good. | |
| I like prescription. | |
| I like all of those things that probably Dave is a little more skeptical of. | |
| But the classical liberals and the conservatives now are teaming up because we've got this urgent totalitarian enemy that is trying to shut down all discourse in the United States, which is the left. | |
| So I think it's actually very honest of them not to call themselves conservatives, and I'm glad that we can have allies in this battle against censorship and against relativism and against all of those pernicious ideologies, those destructive ideologies that are coming from the left and are going after liberals and conservatives alike. | |
| From Anonymous. | |
| Hi, Michael. | |
| I'm in a really big dilemma with my future mother-in-law. | |
| I've been with my wonderful fiancé for almost four years. | |
| Ever since I met him, his mother has had an issue with me. | |
| She makes offhand comments like, He won't love anyone like his mother. | |
| We are not hosting a wedding reception because we're paying for everything. | |
| When we told her, she flipped out. | |
| She said many horrific things to me that I would never say to anyone. | |
| She called me the B word, ding dong, etc. | |
| She even mentioned my family in a nasty way. | |
| My fiancé went upstairs and started to cry. | |
| Out of respect for him, I kept my mouth shut and took it. | |
| What should I do? | |
| Should I just forget it? | |
| Thank you. | |
| No, your fiancé should grow a pair. | |
| Pardon my graphic language. | |
| Are you kidding me? | |
| His mother speaks to you like that? | |
| Gets nasty about your family and he goes upstairs and cries? | |
| What's the matter with him? | |
| Clearly there's some weird mommy issue going on here. | |
| He'll never love a woman like he loves his mother. | |
| I mean, that's sick. | |
| That is really weird. | |
| I've seen these kinds of relationships sometimes, and they're really sick. | |
| Doesn't mean you have to cut off contact altogether, but you need to make clear. | |
| You're the wife. | |
| You're the most important woman in his world. | |
| It's not even close. | |
| It's not even like a close second. | |
| You need to make that clear, and he needs to man up and accept that, and put his foot down. | |
| To abandon your fiancé there while your mother is yelling profanities and insulting her family? | |
| Give me a break. | |
| Not only does the mother-in-law need to apologize, I don't know that she will, probably sounds like she won't, your fiancé needs to apologize. | |
| Then he needs to man up and those problems are going to be a lot easier to deal with if it's clear who's the man, who's in charge, and who the most important woman in his life is. | |
| From Michael. | |
| Michael, you recently spoke mockingly and derisively of the value of celebration of life ceremonies. | |
| But what about the wishes of the deceased and those who expressly say that they want a celebratory event as opposed to a much more somber church service? | |
| Do their wishes count for nothing? | |
| Why do you believe the wishes of the event organizers should hold primacy over those of the deceased? | |
| Thank you, Michael. | |
| First of all, the wishes of the deceased don't really count for anything because they're dead. | |
| But neither really do the wishes of the event organizers, as you call them. | |
| What you're really referring to are the loved ones and the family of the deceased. | |
| Because we're not just talking about preferences. | |
| The whole conversation about, oh, I prefer this, I prefer this, is actually what got us into this mess in the first place. | |
| When someone dies, that's a sad thing. | |
| Even if they lived to be 100 years old, even if they lived a good life, yes, you can take solace that they lived a good life. | |
| You can take solace that they're no longer in pain. | |
| But you'll miss them. | |
| It's sad when they go. | |
| You grieve for them. | |
| This is natural. | |
| Even Jesus grieves when his friend Lazarus dies, even though he's going to raise Lazarus from the dead. | |
| To pretend that a funeral is some giddy, happy ceremony, like the one in that magazine article where there are hot dog carts and Jerry Seinfeld is doing comedy sets, it's not true. | |
| You're trying too hard. | |
| You're trying to convince yourself of something that isn't true. | |
| And moreover, what are you celebrating? | |
| Because when people have these celebration of life ceremonies that aren't funerals, in my experience, I know people who have done them, and I've read about others, the people who hold them tend to be atheists. | |
| They tend to be irreligious. | |
| They tend to think that there's no life after death, and when you die, you just turn to worm food, and ultimately there's not a whole lot of meaning in the world, and it's all just kind of an accident, but hey, you had a good time. | |
| You're not celebrating anything. | |
| That's the most depressing thing I've ever heard. | |
| And a funeral, which you call somber, is not a depressing event. | |
| It's actually encouraging. | |
| It's inspiring. | |
| Because we're sad that we're losing our loved one. | |
| But when you have a funeral and you believe in the resurrection, you know that they are in a better place. | |
| You know that they are seeing their maker face to face. | |
| You have hope that they're living an everlasting life. | |
| That's hope. | |
| That's a celebration. | |
| But you're not going to be able to reach that joy if you just pretend that everything is happy-happy and death isn't death. | |
| And that you're going to celebrate something that ultimately you don't believe has any hope. | |
| Dante, when he writes the Divine Comedy, in order to get up to heaven, in order to see the love that moves the sun and the other stars, he has to go down through hell. | |
| He has to come out the other side and then ascend up through purgatory and up to paradise. | |
| In our culture, we want everything to be really nice all the time. | |
| We don't have to want to deal with any of the inconvenient tragic facts of life. | |
| But mortality is a tragic fact. | |
| It's not happy, happy, joy, joy. | |
| It's a tragic fact. | |
| And there happens to be a happy ending. | |
| It happens to actually turn out to be a comedy. | |
| But it's a comedy. | |
| It has a happy ending. | |
| Because of this true hope that lives within us. | |
| And that's the hope that you're going to see in a church, looking at your maker face to face, not eating hot dogs and watching a comedian do a set at some frivolous celebration of life. | |
| From Tom, what is the best way for a beta male to become an alpha male? | |
| Especially in terms of relationships. | |
| First step, stop using those terms. | |
| Those terms are so stupid. | |
| It's just this issue of, if you're just talking about manliness and alpha male and masculinity all the time, probably you don't exhibit a whole lot of it. | |
| If you've got to talk about it, if you've got to say it, probably you don't exhibit a whole lot of it. | |
| How to be a man. | |
| I don't know. | |
| You could go, I mean, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, I guess. | |
| But how to be a man, you, first of all, should be a gentleman. | |
| If you're asking specifically with regards to relationships and women, alpha male type wannabe idiots do this all the time. | |
| They try to be really boastful and they peacock and they try to be big jerks. | |
| That's not how to be a man. | |
| First, try to be a gentleman. | |
| A gentleman puts people at ease. | |
| That's all a gentleman does. | |
| So when you're on a date, ask questions. | |
| And don't just ask questions. | |
| Be interested in what she's saying. | |
| Like women. | |
| Love women. | |
| That's the first step. | |
| Then be confident. | |
| Then don't feel that you have to prove yourself. | |
| Don't try to work out all these little tricks. | |
| Don't try to scheme. | |
| Don't try to get one over. | |
| That's very unmanly stuff. | |
| There's a good book on this called Manliness by Harvey Mansfield. | |
| It's worth reading. | |
| And whenever you hear people going on to you about alpha and beta, just ignore what they have to say. | |
| That's going to be probably the most helpful advice on your journey to become a man. | |
| Good luck, son. | |
| Godspeed. | |
| All right, that's our show. | |
| So much more to get to, but what can you do? | |
| You've got to read a 400-page report first thing in the morning. | |
| Go over to dailywire.com. | |
| We have got some more stuff coming up today, but in the meantime, have a good weekend, and I will see you on Monday. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner. | |
| Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. | |
| Senior producer, Jonathan Hay. | |
| Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover. | |
| And our technical producer is Austin Stevens. | |
| Edited by Danny D'Amico. | |
| Audio is mixed by Dylan Case. | |
| Hair and makeup is by Jesua Ulvera. | |
| And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan. | |
| The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production. | |
| Copyright Daily Wire 2019. | |
| Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, the Mueller Report is here. | |
| It's finally been released. | |
| It's the day that everyone's been waiting for. | |
| Well, some people have been waiting for it anyway. | |
| Nobody has read the whole thing yet because it's 448 pages long, but why are we talking about it then? | |
| What can we say? | |
| Well, I think that there are a few basic takeaways that we can ascertain already. | |
| And they are not takeaways that the left is necessarily going to like. | |
| So we'll talk about that. | |
| Also some other topics, including the fact that Bernie Sanders, the socialist, is, it turns out, pretty stingy when it comes to his own charitable giving. | |
| What does that tell us? |