House Democrats launch a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump, the President celebrates, and one of Trump's Republican primary challengers calls for the President's execution. Date: 09-25-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| House Democrats launch a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump, charging him with betraying his oath of office and national security by colluding with a foreign power. | |
| This sounds familiar. | |
| I don't... | |
| This worked very well for Democrats last time, so I'm sure this will work just as well again. | |
| But as President Trump comes under fire for asking Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, Another letter comes out from last year, Senate Democrats wrote it, asking Ukraine to investigate President Trump. | |
| Huh. | |
| But that's two years after then-Vice President Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating his son for corruption, all of which leaves Democrats with a tough political case to make. | |
| They want to impeach President Trump for acting like a Democrat. | |
| We will examine the fallout. | |
| Then, with clowns to the left of Trump, we take a look at the jokers on the right, one of whom has called for the president to be executed on national television. | |
| All that and more. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show. | |
| Before we get started today, and there is obviously a lot going on, Democrats make an official formal move toward impeachment, using that word impeachment. | |
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| So some big news out today. | |
| The House Democrats are opening an official, super-duper, official formal impeachment inquiry. | |
| Doesn't mean they're voting on impeachment, but they're using the word official and the word formal, and they're using the word impeachment. | |
| From Nancy Pelosi's lips for the first time, she's been holding off on impeachment. | |
| She's been pushing back on impeachment. | |
| Now she says they're taking steps toward it. | |
| Now they're trying to make it sound bigger than it is because it's not like they're actually voting on impeachment right now, but they are taking steps in that direction and that is a big change. | |
| Here is Nancy Pelosi's announcement. | |
| They asked Benjamin Franklin, what do we have, a republic or a monarchy? | |
| Franklin replied, a republic if you can keep it. | |
| Stop it there. | |
| Before we get to what she's actually saying, I have to just point out that Benjamin Franklin said, we have a republic if you can keep it, and Nancy Pelosi pretty much replied that we can't keep it, so we're going to try for the third time to remove the sitting president who was duly elected by the American people. | |
| I love when Democrats invoke the Founding Fathers. | |
| They despise the Founding Fathers. | |
| They hate everything they stand for. | |
| They call them white, racist, men, sexist, bigoted, idiots, awful, terrible people, except when they want to use one or two quotes. | |
| And the best part is they use the quotes about how we need to protect our republic, while at the same time they are completely undermining our republican form of government. | |
| But Pelosi, she doesn't just stop there with quotes of Benjamin Franklin. | |
| She goes on to invoke the Constitution. | |
| You know, that document she loves so much. | |
| Our responsibility is to keep it. | |
| Our Republican door is because of the wisdom of our Constitution, enshrined in three co-equal branches of government, serving as checks and balances on each other. | |
| Our wonderful Constitution that we love so much, our wonderful checks and balances, which is why we've outsourced all legislative power to the federal administrative state and to the Supreme Court, and why we love the Constitution so much. | |
| That's why we have repeatedly infringed on your Second Amendment rights. | |
| We basically don't even acknowledge your Second Amendment rights. | |
| It's why we're infringing on your First Amendment rights. | |
| It's why we constantly infringe on your ninth and 10th amendment rights. | |
| And it's why we've invented a completely fictitious constitutional right to redefine marriage at the federal level and to kill babies in the womb. | |
| Because we love the constitution so much, that's why we ignore all of the rights and structures of the constitution and why we completely rewrite it without going through the formal process of rewriting it and invent rights that don't exist. | |
| Because we love the constitution so much because we're the left, because we're the democratic party. | |
| Bring up the founding fathers and the Constitution. | |
| Two things that you hold in such high esteem and that I'm sure would hold you in such high esteem. | |
| She then finally gets to the meat of the announcement, and she gets to the horrible, terrible, nefarious actions undertaken by the president that call for impeachment. | |
| The actions taken to date by the President have seriously violated the Constitution, especially when the President says, Article 2 says, I can do whatever I want. | |
| For the past several months, we have been investigating in our committees and litigating in the courts, so the House can gather all the relevant facts and consider whether to exercise its full Article I powers, including a constitutional power of the utmost gravity approval of articles of impeachment. | |
| It is a constitutional power of the utmost gravity, which is why we have been clamoring to use it since before Donald Trump even got elected, or once he was elected but wasn't sworn into office, and we've been doing it for the past three years. | |
| We take it with such seriousness and such gravity that we already... | |
| We clamored to impeach him for a scandal that didn't really exist, which is colluding with Russia that we found out wasn't true because of the Bob Mueller investigation for two years. | |
| And then we talked about doing it because he slept with a porn star and paid her off, and they said it was a campaign finance violation. | |
| And even though Barack Obama committed egregious campaign finance violations, we were going to impeach Trump for it. | |
| And then we're going to do it because of a phone call that President Trump allegedly had with the Ukraine. | |
| Well, actually, he did have the phone call, but because of the allegations from the phone call, we'll get to that in just a second. | |
| And so we're taking it really super-duper serious. | |
| So we're going to then, with such gravity, we're going to exercise our impeachment powers. | |
| By the way, the phone call happened in late July. | |
| This came out in August, late August, there was some trouble. | |
| September, there was some trouble. | |
| So it isn't that they've been following these very formal, serious grave processes for years and years. | |
| You just got a phone call that you think you can use to impeach him two months ago. | |
| That's the gravity. | |
| But then she gets even more specific. | |
| It's not just that he makes a comment here and there, not just that he had a phone call with Ukraine. | |
| She gets really specific. | |
| What did Trump do to justify impeachment? | |
| And this week, the President has admitted to asking the President of Ukraine to take actions which would benefit him politically. | |
| The actions of the Trump presidency revealed dishonorable fact of the President's betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security, and betrayal of the integrity of our elections. | |
| Therefore, today, I'm announcing the House of Representatives moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry. | |
| Alright, it's official. | |
| It's official because President Trump... | |
| Was using the government to try to benefit himself politically? | |
| Well, we'll get into the actual allegations here. | |
| We'll get into the phone call. | |
| We'll get into some other unfortunate news for Democrats that have come up after the transcript of that phone call came out. | |
| But I just want to address impeachment generally before we get into it. | |
| Generally speaking, I'm against impeachment. | |
| I mean, I support impeachment as a provision of the Constitution. | |
| I like that there is the possibility of impeachment to hold the president accountable. | |
| But I think impeachment should be reserved for the rarest and rarest of circumstances, and it should entail crimes committed by the president that rise to a very, very, very high level. | |
| And in recent times, it has been incredibly overused. | |
| I don't think it should have been used against President Johnson in the 19th century. | |
| I don't think it should have been used against Richard Nixon or threatened against Richard Nixon in the 1970s. | |
| It was used against Bill Clinton, actually largely because of Democrat overreach on the Nixon impeachment threats. | |
| President Nixon was elected and then he was reelected with an overwhelming majority of Americans. | |
| Democrats never got over it, so they found that he didn't tape a door correctly and they went after him for that. | |
| Other presidents, past presidents, past Democrat presidents had done many, many worse things, but they didn't invoke impeachment. | |
| They went after Nixon for impeachment because they couldn't bear the thought that he was reelected. | |
| Because of that overreach, you started this really ugly process of hyper-partisanship and hyper-politicization. | |
| You saw this then in the Bork confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court under President Trump. | |
| That was run by Democrats. | |
| You saw that in what they did to Clarence Thomas. | |
| That assault was run by Democrats. | |
| And so after these repeated abuses of power by Democrats in the government, you had the Clinton impeachment, which basically said, we're not going to unilaterally surrender. | |
| And let you guys run roughshod over our republic. | |
| Even then, I see the argument for the Clinton impeachment. | |
| And the guy did commit a crime. | |
| Even then, it was politically disastrous for Democrats. | |
| And it should not be used against President Trump for any of the alleged misdeeds that they're bringing up. | |
| Now, the trouble is, in Washington, D.C., you could indict a ham sandwich. | |
| This is true in D.C., this is true in New York, this is true in Los Angeles. | |
| You can always find some little infraction, especially because our federal code is so convoluted now, especially because half of us are committing crimes on a weekly basis that we probably don't even know are crimes. | |
| The question is, does what the president has done rise to the level of impeachment? | |
| We will analyze it. | |
| I don't think there's a very good case for that whatsoever. | |
| Impeachment should be reserved for moments of genuine national crisis, for truly high crimes and misdemeanors. | |
| So, do Trump's actions rise to that level? | |
| We will see. | |
| He released a transcript of the phone call that Democrats want to impeach him over. | |
| It's five pages long. | |
| I've read the whole phone call. | |
| I was against the release of that phone call from the start because I think it's bad for statecraft. | |
| I think it's bad for the office of the presidency, regardless of what party holds that office. | |
| I think foreign leaders should feel as though they have some, at least relative degree of privacy and discretion when they're on that phone call. | |
| And unfortunately, that has now been obliterated. | |
| I think it was a bad move to release it. | |
| Politically, I think it's good for Trump to release it. | |
| So it's out there. | |
| What does it say? | |
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| So what's the transcript say? | |
| 30,000 foot view. | |
| The phone call is nothing. | |
| It's nothing. | |
| I'm not saying it's not interesting. | |
| I'm not saying there isn't some President Trump wants something and Ukraine wants something, but that's politics. | |
| I mean, that's the whole point of these phone calls is one country wants something, another country wants another thing. | |
| Countries are led by politicians. | |
| Politicians have interests. | |
| There is a difference between using statecraft to advance your personal interests and using statecraft to advance legal interest or even political interest or certainly national interest. | |
| We'll get into that distinction too. | |
| But I'm just saying, not from the perspective of the nitty-gritty of this law and this code and this action and this regulation, I'm just saying, politically speaking, this transcript is nothing. | |
| But it gets even better than that because it highlights actions taken by Democrats, multiple actions over the last three years that are not merely the same, not merely just as bad, but actually significantly worse. | |
| So let's get into it. | |
| Broadly speaking, you can read the transcript yourself. | |
| It's about five pages long, I think. | |
| It opens with the two presidents flattering each other. | |
| So Trump says, oh, congratulations on your election. | |
| That's so great. | |
| And then the Ukrainian leader says, oh yeah, we learned a lot from you. | |
| We used your tactics. | |
| We love talking to you. | |
| So it's nice, friendly, friendly. | |
| President Trump then brings up election interference in 2016. | |
| He brings up the firing of the prosecutor. | |
| In 2016, the prosecutor who was looking into corruption by Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son, and he mentions the relationship of the Obama White House and Joe Biden to that. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And then he brings up the Mueller investigation. | |
| All perfectly reasonable aspects of statecraft. | |
| It's reasonable because the 2016 angle relates to the American election. | |
| It relates not just to the Obama White House, but it relates to Joe Biden, who's a prospective candidate, major leading politician. | |
| The reason this is important is because it now appears there was some election interference from both Ukraine and Russia. | |
| Obviously, Ukraine and Russia are at war with one another. | |
| Russia's invading and annexing parts of Ukraine. | |
| So this is a hotly contested political situation. | |
| The American election is the most important election in the world. | |
| Everybody's involved. | |
| Everybody's trying to push it in the interest of their own nation. | |
| So it stands to reason and it makes perfect sense that while Russia is trying to push the election one way, Ukraine might be trying to push the election another way. | |
| That's for another day. | |
| You could talk about that for hours. | |
| Then on the phone call, Ukraine brings up Rudy Giuliani. | |
| This is very, very important because what we were told in all of the media, early media reports that I told you were going to be BS, is that Trump mentioned that Ukraine should talk to Rudy Giuliani. | |
| Rudy Giuliani is the president's personal lawyer. | |
| He's not the White House counsel. | |
| So this was the smoking gun that the media were looking for. | |
| If Trump instructed the Ukraine, brings up Rudy Giuliani and says, you've got to talk to him, then this looks like a campaign matter. | |
| This looks like a personal matter. | |
| This does not look like a matter of statecraft, and so it looks corrupt. | |
| But what we see from the transcript is it's Ukraine that brings up Rudy Giuliani. | |
| They say, we love Rudy Giuliani, we want to talk to him, we want to meet him. | |
| That is key. | |
| By the way, when they bring up Giuliani, Trump says, oh yeah, he's a nice guy. | |
| He's a really great guy. | |
| So most of what he's talking about with Giuliani is just the kind of absent-minded flattery that the president heaps on a lot of people. | |
| Then Ukraine says they will look into the prosecutor issue, which they should. | |
| I mean, the Ukrainian leader more or less implies that the prosecutor who was involved in letting Joe Biden's son off the hook was politically motivated, might have had a little more going on, which anybody with two brain cells to rub together knows that this is true. | |
| Why else would Joe Biden go in and threaten to withhold a billion dollars in USA to Ukraine as they're fighting a war with Russia if there wasn't something serious on the line there for Joe Biden? | |
| He even bragged about it at the Council on Foreign Relations. | |
| So the Ukraine leader says, okay, we're going to look into this. | |
| He even says that the new prosecutor is better and he'll make sure that the prosecutor under, under his watch will be, will be much better. | |
| Then Trump says he'll have Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr call. | |
| It was requested that Giuliani call by the Ukrainian leader, so checks out. | |
| Importantly here, though, if Trump is saying, good, I'll have Bill Barr call, then you're involving the DOJ in this whole event, in this whole phone call, in this whole investigation. | |
| Importantly, Attorney General Barr did not call, and there's no evidence he was directed to call. | |
| So it does seem like you get a lot, this kind of Idle chatter from President Trump. | |
| Yeah, yeah, we'll do that. | |
| We'll do that. | |
| Don't worry. | |
| It'll happen. | |
| Fine. | |
| Kimberly Strassel, who is an excellent journalist and writes for the Wall Street Journal, she summed it up well on Twitter. | |
| She pointed out the only ask that actually occurred in this phone call from Trump to Ukraine is that Ukraine look into the interference in American affairs, the relationship between Ukraine and the United States in 2016. | |
| Perfectly legitimate ask. | |
| Then, What people are not getting from this transcript, because it's not included in the transcript, is the phone call that we're talking about was on July 25th. | |
| At this point, the inspector general referred this to the DOJ, referred this ask on looking into Joe Biden's son, to the DOJ as a possible campaign finance violation. | |
| Trump using the government to advance his own campaign. | |
| The DOJ already looked into this. | |
| It's not like this is a totally new issue. | |
| This happened two months ago. | |
| The DOJ looked into it and what the DOJ concluded, quote, all relevant components of the department agreed with this legal conclusion that there was no violation. | |
| Already been looked into. | |
| IG already sent it over. | |
| You're good. | |
| Worse yet, Speaking of the Inspector General, the Inspector General, who referred this matter over to the DOJ, found that the so-called whistleblower who leaked information about this phone call in the first place had, quote, some indicia, some sign of an arguable political bias on the part of the complainant in favor of a rival political candidate. | |
| Hmm. | |
| This is pretty interesting. | |
| So the whistleblower, code word for leaker, the leaker here, had a bias in favor of a political rival of President Trump. | |
| Is it Hillary Clinton or is it Joe Biden perhaps? | |
| That's pretty interesting. | |
| If you had that bias, then what you're really looking at is not President Trump colluding with the Ukraine, it's the DOJ colluding with the Democrats again. | |
| Or not the DOJ, the intelligence community colluding with the Democrats again, which they already were doing in 2016. | |
| So the more things change, the more things stay the same. | |
| So then the story of Trump's alleged corruption, again, you look a little more deeply, they're using it and trying to turn it into a Trump scandal when really it is a left-wing scandal. | |
| But it gets so much worse than this. | |
| So much worse for the left, so much better for us. | |
| What this means is that the Democrats are impeaching President Trump for something brought up by a partisan Trump opponent that has already been cleared by the DOJ. Here is President Trump's reaction to the whole thing. | |
| There's no pressure whatsoever. | |
| And if you take a look at the Democrats, they went down to see the President of Ukraine, and they asked him for all sorts of things, and don't go with the Republicans, and stay with us, like it's a political war. | |
| They shouldn't have done that. | |
| That should be an impeachable event, I guess, based on what you're saying. | |
| The Democrats just came out. | |
| They went down there. | |
| There are a group of people, some of whom I was dealing with on the gun issue, and they went down, put tremendous pressure on Ukraine. | |
| The President himself just came out with a statement saying there was absolutely no pressure put on him, and there wasn't. | |
| What I do want to see is I want to see other countries helping Ukraine also, not just us. | |
| As usual, the United States helps and nobody else is there. | |
| So I want to see other countries help. | |
| President. | |
| It's the single greatest witch hunt in American history, probably in history, but in American history. | |
| It's a disgraceful thing. | |
| The letter was a great letter, meaning the letter revealing the call. | |
| That was done at the insistence of myself and other people that read it. | |
| It was a friendly letter. | |
| There was no pressure. | |
| The way you had that built up, that call, it was going to be the call from hell. | |
| It turned out to be a nothing call. | |
| Alright, I love this response. | |
| There's a lot to get into in this response. | |
| I would like to correct the president on one bit, though. | |
| He did say one thing in this reaction that is untrue. | |
| He said that what he is experiencing is the greatest witch hunt in history. | |
| And that is not true. | |
| Actual witch hunts are the greatest witch hunts in history. | |
| The Salem witch hunts and witch trials are probably... | |
| I just say they're greater because they involve actual witches... | |
| Or I guess at least allegations of witchcraft. | |
| So anyway, that's just sort of a technicality, I would say. | |
| The Salem witch hunts, greater witch hunts than this one. | |
| This one's pretty close, though, and everything else the guy said was completely correct. | |
| What you heard in the very beginning of that clip is he said Democrats were making demands of Ukraine. | |
| They shouldn't have done it. | |
| By the premises of the left on my impeachment inquiry... | |
| The Senate Democrats also committed an impeachable offense. | |
| And it's funny because he mentions that right off the bat. | |
| He comes out there with it and then he kind of lets it trail off and talks about all these other things and said the left bought into the media's idea that this was a call from hell and then it was a big disappointment and the Democrats shouldn't have overplayed their hand and now it's going to work to my political benefit. | |
| The most interesting thing in the whole statement... | |
| He said the Democrats made demands of Ukraine that by the very logic of the impeachment inquiry against me are impeachable offenses against them. | |
| So what did they do? | |
| We just learned. | |
| This is how much better it gets. | |
| We learned that Senate Democrats asked Ukraine to investigate President Trump. | |
| They made the same ask of Ukraine for their political opponent That they are alleging President Trump made of his political opponent. | |
| Except their political opponent is the President of the United States. | |
| So their matter was strictly political. | |
| Or rather, President Trump's matter is strictly political. | |
| What President Trump is alleging of Joe Biden, for instance, is that the matter was both political and nepotistic. | |
| It involved his own son. | |
| And then the Senate Democrats come and make the same political charge against Trump. | |
| I have the letter. | |
| Printed out the letter. | |
| It's a beautiful letter. | |
| Huge, great, lovely letter. | |
| My gosh, I'm just getting so excited. | |
| Even Trump's vocabulary is seeping in because Christmas came early for President Trump today. | |
| May 4th, 2018 is when the letter is dated. | |
| This is a letter from Senate Democrats to the general prosecutor of Ukraine, Yuri Lutsenko. | |
| Dear Mr. | |
| Prosecutor General, we are writing to express great concern about reports that your office has taken steps to impede cooperation with the investigation of the United States Special Counsel Robert Mueller. | |
| So you remember this was about the Mueller investigation, which turned out to be, boop, absolutely nothing. | |
| But at the time, Ukraine was important because Ukraine did have a role in the 2016 election and because Ukraine had a long history with Paul Manafort, who was President Trump's campaign chief for a short bit of time. | |
| Okay, the letter goes on and they're all worried about the Mueller investigation. | |
| If they had known it would come to nothing, they probably wouldn't have even sent the letter because the letter's kind of incriminating for them. | |
| Here's the key to the letter. | |
| We respectfully request that you reply to this letter answering the following questions. | |
| Has your office taken any steps to restrict cooperation with the investigation by special counsel? | |
| If so, why? | |
| Did any individual from the Trump administration or anyone acting on its behalf encourage Ukrainian government or law enforcement officials not to cooperate with the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller? | |
| Was the Mueller probe raised in any way during discussions between your government and US officials, including around the meetings of President Trump and Poroshenko, In New York in 2017, signed Bob Menendez, who federal prosecutors think paid underage prostitutes repeatedly, Pat Leahy, U.S. Senator, and Dick Durbin, U.S. Senator, all major Democrats. | |
| The key here... | |
| Number one is interesting, but number two and three. | |
| Because in number two and three, what the Senate Democrats are asking is that the Ukraine government investigate their political opponents. | |
| Exactly the same thing that they are now trying to impeach President Trump over. | |
| I don't really understand the logic of impeachment. | |
| I have a few thoughts on it, which we'll get to in a little bit. | |
| But maybe I'm just trying to put logic on people who do not have a great capacity for logic. | |
| They apparently don't realize that by issuing this impeachment inquiry, they are implicating themselves in a crime. | |
| If what Trump did is a crime, then what they did is a crime. | |
| And it's not like they can hide the crime. | |
| They put it on paper. | |
| They put it in a letter that I managed to get. | |
| That was sent over a year ago. | |
| Absolutely mind-boggling. | |
| Stupidity and incompetence. | |
| Now look, the impeachment inquiry is being launched by the House. | |
| I bet if it were to be launched by, I bet if the Senate had the ability to launch it, they probably wouldn't have launched it because it looks pretty bad. | |
| Now the left is trying to downplay all this stuff, all the Biden investigation, all of the equivalents, all the pointing out the parallels between the Democrats and the Republicans here. | |
| It isn't working. | |
| We'll get to that in a second. | |
| Then we'll get to a whole lot more. | |
| We'll get to President Trump's reaction to all this. | |
| And we'll get, most importantly, to what this means for 2020, plus a poem that I just discovered. | |
| I think is going to be perfect. | |
| Christmas came early for President Trump with this impeachment inquiry, and I think I've got the perfect Christmas card that he can send out. | |
| We'll get to all that in a second, but first, you've got to go to dailywire.com and check out our new website. | |
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| Ten bucks a month, hundred dollars for an annual membership. | |
| You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Matt Wall show, you get to ask questions in the mailbag coming up tomorrow, and I'm sure they're going to be great. | |
| I can't wait for the mailbag tomorrow. | |
| You can ask questions backstage. | |
| You can get another kingdom. | |
| You get everything, and you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr. | |
| Ooh, how important that is. | |
| That's going to be all the more important every day this impeachment inquiry goes on. | |
| Get the Tumblr. | |
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| The best part of this whole thing is that what Trump and the Senate Democrats did, both of them, The best part of this whole thing is that what Trump and the Senate Democrats did, both of them, because what they did is about the same, Trump and the Senate Democrats, but it's not nearly as bad as what Biden did. | |
| What Biden did for his own son and for his own prospective presidential campaign while Biden was the sitting VP. | |
| You know what he did. | |
| He already admitted it. | |
| He went in, threatened to withhold USAID from Ukraine at a crucial time for Ukraine if they didn't fire the prosecutor who was looking into his crook, drug, drug addled, degenerate son, Hunter Biden. | |
| And he pushed the issue. | |
| He got the prosecutor fired and then it completely unprecedented. | |
| He insisted on approving the new prosecutor in a foreign country, in the Ukraine. | |
| Here's Biden, in classic Biden fashion, accidentally admitting to all of it. | |
| I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kyiv, and I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. | |
| And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against a state prosecutor, and they didn't. | |
| So they said they were walking out to press conference and said, no, we're not going to give you the billion dollars. | |
| They said, you have no authority. | |
| You're not the president. | |
| The president said, I said, call him. | |
| I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting a billion dollars. | |
| I said, you're not getting a billion? | |
| I'm going to be leaving here, and I think it was, what, six hours? | |
| I looked, I said, I'm leaving in six hours. | |
| If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money. | |
| Oh, son of a bitch. | |
| Got fired. | |
| And they put in place someone who was solid. | |
| Someone who was really solid, who was going to excuse the actions of my degenerate, crooked, drug-addled son. | |
| So the left is trying to downplay all this Biden stuff right now, because Biden is still, arguably, the Democratic frontrunner, but it isn't working. | |
| Watch this exchange. | |
| This is such a beautiful exchange to highlight Democratic leftist media bias on NBC and... | |
| How they're doing the classic Democrat strategy of saying this is old news, this has been investigated, don't worry about it, stop bringing it up, and Republican Senator Joe Kennedy ain't having any of it. | |
| Here is the exchange. | |
| You do realize, Senator, that a lot of people have attempted to look into this and they haven't found a there there to look into it. | |
| Who? | |
| Who has? | |
| And that's the point here. | |
| You brought up the FBI. Who's looked into it, Chuck? | |
| Apparently the Ukrainian government. | |
| Apparently every mainstream Ukrainian journalist. | |
| Plenty of people here. | |
| We've all looked into it. | |
| I'm sorry that you do realize. | |
| Has MSNBC looked into it? | |
| You do realize you're looking for an outcome, not the facts. | |
| That's what you keep telling me. | |
| There have been four or five different entities that have found nothing here. | |
| Who? | |
| I just told you. | |
| And they're not good enough for you. | |
| They're not good enough for you. | |
| Wait, you said Ukraine. | |
| I said Ukrainian journalists have. | |
| The Ukrainian government has. | |
| Apparently, if the FBI has been contacted, the FBI can't seem to open an investigation either because they haven't found enough. | |
| Do you know that they haven't opened an investigation? | |
| Myself, we've looked into it. | |
| The New York Times has looked into it. | |
| Look, maybe you're right. | |
| Maybe there's magical missing information here. | |
| But at some point, do you not accept... | |
| All of these entities looking into it to have found the answer? | |
| So this is what they do. | |
| This is what they do. | |
| They say, we have on tape Joe Biden admitting to this crooked deal, and we have a lot of other documents to show it. | |
| Then what the left-wing media says is there's no, no, people looked into it. | |
| That was a while ago. | |
| People looked into it, and it's cool. | |
| Who looked into it? | |
| That's what Senator Kennedy's asking. | |
| Who looked into it? | |
| You? | |
| You guys are total crooks. | |
| You're totally in the tank for the left and for Joe Biden. | |
| Yeah, no, we looked into it. | |
| We looked into it. | |
| It's no big deal. | |
| Well, who else looked into it? | |
| Oh, like, I don't know, like five or six entities or something. | |
| It's probably like a hundred entities. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Can you name them? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And, you know, Chuck Todd can't name them, so he uses the word apparently because he doesn't want to get caught in the lies. | |
| He goes, apparently, Ukraine looked into it. | |
| Oh, the handpicked prosecutor that Joe Biden threatened to withhold a billion dollars in aid from Ukraine if they didn't pick. | |
| That person looked into it and they cleared Joe Biden. | |
| Okay, it's great. | |
| Beautiful. | |
| That's terrific. | |
| Well, who else looked into it? | |
| I don't know. | |
| The FBI probably. | |
| And then Kennedy asks, did the FBI look into it? | |
| And Chuck Todd can't see. | |
| He's like, I don't know. | |
| I was just talking. | |
| I'm just a guy who talks on TV. I don't know any facts. | |
| And who else? | |
| Who else looked at it? | |
| Yeah, we like looked or something. | |
| I don't know. | |
| So they got nothing. | |
| They haven't looked into it at all. | |
| It was totally brushed under the rug. | |
| They thought they were going to get away with it, and now they can't. | |
| You know how you know, by the way, that they know this? | |
| Joe Biden can't answer any questions for it. | |
| Here's Biden. | |
| We know who Donald Trump is. | |
| It's time to let the world know who we are. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| You told voters an option? | |
| All the reporters, do you have any Ukraine? | |
| Are you going to talk about Ukraine? | |
| Nope, you just walk in right past them. | |
| This shows us an important lesson about the left and how to handle them. | |
| The left does bad things, sometimes heinous things. | |
| They abuse government power, they try to overturn elections, they have a national policy of killing babies, and they exploit children. | |
| Then, when you call them out for it, They conflate calling them out for the crime itself. | |
| So they conflate when they do something bad and then you call them out for it. | |
| They say that's the same thing. | |
| It's morally equivalent, but they're not. | |
| So when you call them out for abusing their power with a foreign country for political advantage, they accuse you of doing that by the very fact of calling them out for it. | |
| But there's no moral equivalence. | |
| There's no equivalence between what Biden did And what Trump did, trying to bring Biden to justice for what Biden did. | |
| Those are not the same thing. | |
| Those are the opposite, actually. | |
| When you call out the left for exploiting little children, especially vulnerable children, for political advantage, they accuse you of exploiting vulnerable children. | |
| There is no moral equivalence between those two things, between what the left does to children and calling out the left for what they do to children. | |
| Trump owes the left no apology at all for this call. | |
| Conservatives owe the left no apology at all for calling out their disgusting behavior, which they have undertaken on a whole slew of issues all around the globe recently and for a long time. | |
| The lesson of the Trump era is to stand firm and the left will shatter. | |
| And the serious conservatives have learned that lesson. | |
| It's a good lesson to learn. | |
| You can watch them shatter. | |
| Joe Biden walks away. | |
| He just, they say, hey, what about Ukraine? | |
| Just one simple question. | |
| What about Ukraine? | |
| He walks away. | |
| He's walking away from his campaign, is what he's doing. | |
| You ask them that one, you just stand a little firm. | |
| They fall apart. | |
| So what's Trump's reaction? | |
| Trump is celebrating this. | |
| Trump released an ad based on this impeachment inquiry. | |
| The ad begins and says, Democrats have one goal. | |
| They've always had one goal. | |
| The one goal is impeachment. | |
| Here's the ad. | |
| We begin impeachment proceedings now. | |
| And we've got to impeach him and get rid of him. | |
| My sole focus right now is to make sure that he's not the president next term. | |
| We're going to go in there, we're going to impeach the mother. | |
| We're going to launch an Article III impeachment. | |
| In the question of impeachment, it's about time. | |
| Nadler is, I hope he's not following the rules. | |
| Congress should take the steps towards impeachment. | |
| We're going to have to prosecute this. | |
| We're going to have to do it. | |
| We're going to have to impeach. | |
| The impeachment is still on the table. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| It's always on the table. | |
| We cannot accept a second term for Donald Trump. | |
| If we don't impeach this president, he will get reelected. | |
| It's time to stop this nonsense. | |
| Yeah! | |
| They think they're going to win. | |
| Did you see the one man? | |
| He said, it's the only way we're going to beat him in 2020. | |
| They have to do this. | |
| The only way they... | |
| Well, that's a compliment, I guess. | |
| But think of what he said. | |
| It's the only way they're going to beat me. | |
| And actually, it's working the other way because now we have our best poll numbers that we've ever had. | |
| It's crazy. | |
| Nobody is happier than Trump about this impeachment inquiry. | |
| This is Christmas come early for President Trump. | |
| And nobody is less happy than Joe Biden. | |
| I mean, this is really bad for Joe Biden. | |
| That's why he's not answering a lot of questions on it. | |
| I assume it's going to be pretty bad for Senate Democrats, too, which is why they're pretty quiet on it. | |
| It's really just the House Democrats who are very happy about this. | |
| And the House Democrats are happy about it because they don't really have that much to lose and... | |
| Their careers are ahead of them. | |
| They're not really in this fight right now anyway. | |
| It's a bad look. | |
| How's Joe Biden taking it? | |
| Big winner is Elizabeth Warren. | |
| Biden is tanking in the early state polls. | |
| He's now down in Iowa. | |
| He's down in New Hampshire. | |
| He's even down 18 points in South Carolina since May. | |
| 18 points. | |
| Very bad news. | |
| Very bad news. | |
| Because Biden's whole argument is electability. | |
| So the minute you lose Iowa, first caucus state, that electability argument pretty much falls apart. | |
| Maybe you could try to drag it along until New Hampshire. | |
| Maybe different candidates win Iowa and New Hampshire. | |
| He's falling down in New Hampshire, too. | |
| Now, what Biden is going to try to do if he loses Iowa and New Hampshire is he's going to try to say, look, that doesn't matter. | |
| What matters is I'm the only candidate with black support who's a serious candidate. | |
| Bernie Sanders doesn't have any. | |
| Elizabeth Warren doesn't have any. | |
| So if they win Iowa and New Hampshire, it doesn't matter because the Democratic candidate simply cannot win. | |
| It is not mathematically possible for the Democratic candidate to win if they don't do very, very well among black voters. | |
| And so Biden is going to say, forget about it until we get to South Carolina. | |
| South Carolina is the first state that really has a sizable number of black voters, especially in the Democratic primaries. | |
| So that's where I'm going to win. | |
| Except he's down there too. | |
| He had such overwhelming support that he's dropping and he's still doing okay, but down 18 points since May. | |
| Very bad. | |
| South Carolina is the firewall. | |
| If he keeps dropping there, the electability argument is completely dead and the Biden campaign is completely dead, if it isn't already. | |
| Because turning away from those Biden polls and those early primary state polls, looking at the national polls, which again, it's too early to look at national polls, but they do tell you a little bit about momentum. | |
| Warren is up for the first time in a national poll, in the Quinnipiac poll. | |
| She's up on Joe Biden. | |
| She's at like 27. | |
| He's at like 25. | |
| She's also tied with Joe Biden in another poll, the YouGov poll. | |
| I don't think these are outliers. | |
| I mean, first of all, you don't really have two outliers like this on the heels of each other. | |
| And they're both reputable polls, QPAC and YouGov. | |
| So the momentum appears to be in Warren's direction. | |
| And Biden's hurt has not even really begun. | |
| I mean, we're just starting to talk now about this Ukraine-Biden issue. | |
| We're just starting to talk now about Hunter Biden, which left-wing magazines have worried is going to tank Biden's campaign since the very beginning, months and months ago. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Ukraine scandal. | |
| How about when the impeachment inquiry, if it does go anywhere, starts bringing up all of Biden's past issues? | |
| I wondered why they're bringing this up now, because they'll get like two news cycles out of this, two weeks of news cycles probably out of this impeachment thing, but it's going to fall apart. | |
| What Trump said in that phone call is not an impeachable offense. | |
| It's not even close. | |
| So why wouldn't they wait until closer to the general election to bring up impeachment? | |
| And then you just get all the negative news and maybe it pushes the election one way or another, but it doesn't, you don't get to the punchline, which is Democrats don't have anything. | |
| I think the reason for it is, I don't know, More about Joe Biden. | |
| I think they've given up on Joe Biden. | |
| The only person who really stands to lose here is Joe Biden. | |
| House Democrats have already shot their credibility. | |
| That's done. | |
| So if they lose again, you know, they are the boy that cried wolf again and again and again. | |
| Joe Biden, though, nothing is certain in politics, but this almost certainly destroys his campaign. | |
| I think they've given up on him. | |
| And this is one easy way to take him out, and you don't have to worry about holding off on impeachment because of Joe Biden because they don't have faith in him in the first place. | |
| Turning from the people on the left of Donald Trump to another person on the left of Donald Trump, but who is ostensibly on the right, just take a look. | |
| The anti-Trump Republican candidates for president, the primary opponents, appeared on MSNBC, of course, to discuss their campaigns. | |
| We are told by the benevolent betters of the erstwhile conservative movement that Donald Trump is not a real conservative. | |
| We hear this from a small group of people. | |
| They say Trump's not a real conservative. | |
| Sure, he's had more conservative policy than any president pretty much in history. | |
| And sure, he's advanced our agenda much better than any of our past presidents in recent history. | |
| But he's not a real conservative, and so that's why we need to vote for someone else. | |
| And the candidates they've put up are pretty weak candidates. | |
| One term congressman and a radio host who is Trumpier than Trump. | |
| If the whole argument is don't vote for Trump, you know, Joe Walsh has said some pretty incendiary things and he's admitted to saying racist things on Twitter. | |
| His words, not mine. | |
| You've got Bill Weld, who's a liberal Republican. | |
| I think he was governor in the early 90s of Massachusetts. | |
| That was the last time anybody ever thought of him. | |
| And you've got Mark Sanford, who abandoned his office as governor of South Carolina to flee to Argentina with his mistress, then lied about it for a couple weeks, and then finally came back, left office, and actually got re-elected to Congress. | |
| These are the guys. | |
| These are the jokers. | |
| These are the guys that we're told they're the true conservatives. | |
| Capital T, capital C, trademark over the S. True conservatives. | |
| Well, here's one of the true conservatives who's going to restore the rule of law and dignity and integrity to our politics, Bill Weld, calling on national television for the execution of the sitting president. | |
| Talk about pressuring a foreign country to interfere with and control a U.S. election. | |
| It couldn't be clearer. | |
| And that's not just undermining democratic institutions. | |
| That is treason. | |
| It's treason, pure and simple. | |
| And the penalty for treason under the U.S. code is death. | |
| That's the only penalty. | |
| The penalty under the Constitution is removal from office. | |
| And that might look like a pretty good alternative to the president if he could work out a plea deal. | |
| Those are the serious guys. | |
| What we're coming to realize is everybody criticizes Donald Trump because he speaks loud and he says things that are sometimes hyperbolic and he's not polite and he's kind of a bore and so they don't like him because of that. | |
| He's not mature. | |
| He's degrading the office of the president. | |
| Any of the people running against him Would degrade the office of the president far more than he does. | |
| Any of them. | |
| Joe Biden is a crook who doesn't believe in anything. | |
| Who's a cynic. | |
| Who used state power to threaten to withhold military aid to help his crook degenerate son in Ukraine. | |
| That guy is... | |
| That's supposed to be the integrity guy? | |
| Bill Weld calling for... | |
| The president to be executed? | |
| Mark Sanford? | |
| I actually have to put in a word for Joe Walsh here. | |
| I'm not endorsing Joe Walsh. | |
| I don't think Joe Walsh should be president. | |
| I don't think he's going to win. | |
| But in Joe Walsh's defense, whatever you think about him, at least he didn't abandon his office to flee to Argentina with his mistress or call for the president to be executed. | |
| It's like a pretty good... | |
| Joe Walsh is by far the most mature guy of all the people challenging Trump for the presidency. | |
| But of all of them, all of them taken together, President Trump Appears to be the most mature. | |
| Appears to have the most dignity. | |
| Now, you might say that's a sad thing. | |
| Maybe it is a sad thing for the country, but it's a reflection of the country. | |
| And as H.L. Mencken said, democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and they deserve to get it good and hard. | |
| Someone once asked, what do you think of President Trump? | |
| Compared to whom? | |
| Compared to whom? | |
| Elections are about choices. | |
| President Trump is looking pretty good right now. | |
| He got this early Christmas present from House Democrats on impeachment. | |
| And it reminded me, I just want to close on this poem, because it reminded me of... | |
| Of Hilaire Belloc, who's one of the great Catholic writers. | |
| Hilaire Belloc wrote this little poem in his Christmas cards. | |
| And because Christmas came early to President Trump, I think that he should have these Christmas cards printed up and he should mail them out. | |
| I think I might borrow this Christmas card and mail it out when Christmas comes around as well. | |
| The poem goes like this. | |
| Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel. | |
| A Catholic tale have I to tell, and a Christian song have I to sing while all the bells in a rundle ring. | |
| I pray good beef and I pray good beer this holy night of all the year, but I pay detestable drink for them that give no honor in Bethlehem to Bethlehem. | |
| May all good fellows that here agree drink Audit Ale in heaven with me. | |
| And may all my enemies go to hell. | |
| Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel. | |
| May all my enemies go to hell. | |
| Noel, Noel. | |
| I think that's a pretty good lesson that we've learned from the news cycles, particularly today's. | |
| That's our show. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| We've got a Backstage Live coming up tonight. | |
| So tune in. | |
| It's going to be a whole lot of fun. | |
| In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| See you then. | |
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| The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner. | |
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| Senior producer, Jonathan Hay. | |
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| Copyright Daily Wire 2019. | |
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