Bernie comes out on top, Biden and Warren collapse, and Bloomberg lurks in the shadows waiting to buy the nomination. But the biggest winner of all in the New Hampshire presidential primaries was Donald Trump. Don’t take my word for it. We look past the top line numbers to the hidden lessons of last night’s vote. Then, Jussie Smollett’s attacker is finally brought to justice, and an injustice is corrected in the sentencing of GOP operative Roger Stone for the unforgivable crime of working for Donald Trump.
Check out The Cold War: What We Saw, a new podcast written and presented by Bill Whittle at https://www.dailywire.com/coldwar. In Part 1 we peel back the layers of mystery cloaking the Terror state run by the Kremlin, and watch as America takes its first small steps onto the stage of world leadership.
If you like The Michael Knowles Show, become a member TODAY with promo code: KNOWLES and enjoy the exclusive benefits for 10% off at https://www.dailywire.com/Knowles
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Biden and Warren collapse and Bloomberg lurks in the shadows waiting to buy the Democratic nomination.
But the biggest winner of all in the New Hampshire presidential primaries was Donald Trump.
Don't take my word for it.
We look past the top line numbers to the hidden lessons of last night's vote.
Then, Jussie Smollett's attacker is finally brought to justice.
About time.
And an injustice is corrected in the sentencing of GOP operative Roger Stone for the unforgivable crime of working for President Trump.
All that and more.
more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles show.
Hoo boy do we have a lot to get to out of New Hampshire last night.
I feel we could do seven or eight hours on New Hampshire, but we don't have that much time, so we've got to get to it.
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Lots of news out of New Hampshire last night.
The final count.
Who knows if it's really the final camp?
They change these things all the time.
Bernie is on top.
Bernie Sanders, followed by Pete Buttigieg, followed by Amy Klobuchar, who got a ton of momentum coming out of Iowa and out of the last debate, followed by poor Elizabeth Warren, followed pathetically by Joe Biden, who is only slightly above Tom Steyer, a guy whose name you probably haven't heard of and you might remember him from his silly ties from the debates, followed by Tulsi Gabbard, who's currently suing Hillary Clinton.
So not a good place for Biden.
And that doesn't even tell the whole story.
Obviously, all those people got some votes, but all we really care about are the delegates because determined by the number of votes you get in the primary, you then get a certain number of delegates and the delegates are what you bring with you to the convention to figure out who the nominee is going to be.
By the delegate count, Bernie and Pete Buttigieg probably are going to get the same number Looks like they both got nine delegates.
And Amy Klobuchar is getting six delegates.
And then Elizabeth Warren, zero delegates.
Biden, zero delegates.
Steyer, Tulsi, zero delegates, right?
So these things can change as the final numbers come in.
Let's get to a deeper level of analysis than that.
That's like the top line analysis, right?
On the top level, Bernie Sanders won.
And his supporters are radicals.
And that is scary.
Right?
That's the top line.
Bernie voters are on another level.
Bernie campaign supporters are on another level.
Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union, okay?
When it looked like Bernie won, his supporters all came out in New Hampshire and they chanted...
About how a whole other world is possible.
We are unstoppable.
Another world is possible.
This is what leftist radicals chant all the time.
They chanted it at Occupy Wall Street.
They chanted it at all of the radical movements that we've seen in recent years.
And that's a scary thing because...
It's telling you that they are these utopians, these revolutionaries, these radicals.
Another world is not possible.
We're not going to overturn human nature.
We're not going to go back to the Garden of Eden.
We're not going to have heaven on earth.
It's just not going to happen.
And when people try to pursue those goals through politics, usually that leads to widespread human suffering.
So, that's very scary.
Also scary is that Bernie's campaign volunteers want to throw all of us into gulags.
What are we going to do with them?
Gulag.
Liberals get the f***ing wall first.
What are we going to do with those people that resist the change?
Because that's a big deal.
Well, I'll tell you what.
In Cuba, what do they do to reactionaries?
They shot him on the beach.
Do you want to fight against the revolution?
You're going to die for it.
There it is.
That's a guy who works for the Bernie Sanders campaign and apparently still works for the Bernie Sanders campaign.
James O'Keefe released that video of the guy saying, yeah, they're getting the gulag, they're getting the wall, and apparently he still works for them.
So that's pretty scary that a campaign of that kind of radicalism won.
Okay.
The good news is that this probably finished off the other radical who was in the race, which is Elizabeth Warren.
Liz Warren needed to do well in New Hampshire.
Liz Warren is from Massachusetts.
Massachusetts candidates need to do well in New At this point, probably Liz Warren is running a zombie campaign, and Trump took the opportunity to spike the football.
Of all the tweets he sent out yesterday, he sent out a lot of really funny tweets.
This is my favorite one.
Quote, Elizabeth Warren, sometimes referred to as Pocahontas, is having a really bad night.
I think she is sending signals that she wants out.
Calling for unity is her way of getting there, going home, and having a nice cold beer with her husband.
Referring to that really cringe-inducing social media video where Liz Warren pretended to be a regular old gal and she had what I assume was her first sip of beer ever.
And then she very awkwardly hugged her husband and said, thank you for being here in their own home.
Everything about it was very, very bizarre.
and of course Trump is just absolutely rubbing salt into that wound.
He's saying that Liz Warren is sometimes referred to as Pocahontas, mostly by him.
And he's got these little puns in here.
She's sending signals like she's sending smoke signals.
And it's just a really, really funny way of enjoying the last days of her campaign.
The other good news for people who are worried about the socialist ascendancy in America here, who are looking at the rise of Bernie in 2016 and now in 2020 in these states and saying, oh my gosh, one of the two major political parties in the US is actually embracing socialist.
This is so scary.
Young people are embracing socialism.
How did we get to this point?
The other good news is that the fake moderate, he's not really a moderate, but at least he's running right now as a moderate, Pete Buttigieg, We're good to go.
The other good news about that, that you've now got this radical and this fake moderate who are pretty much tied.
The good news about that is that fake moderate Pete Buttigieg has a 0% chance of beating Donald Trump in November.
0%.
Not 10%, not 5%, a 0% chance.
Pete Buttigieg is a small town mayor.
He has zero accomplishments.
He's never done anything.
He has, crucially, a bad reputation on racial issues, which will kill you in any party, but certainly in the identity politics-obsessed Democratic Party today, having any whiff of a bad reputation on race politics, not very good.
And this is the politically incorrect thing to say.
His sexual preferences are going to hurt him, if not make him unelectable as a Democrat in 2020.
You're not supposed to point that out, and yet it's true.
Don't take my word for it.
Even the New York Times.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Okay.
It's politically incorrect to say this.
You're not allowed to say it, except even the New York Times admits it.
Pete Buttigieg's sexual preferences are going to hurt him, specifically within the Democratic Party.
Now, that seems odd, doesn't it?
Because the Democratic Party seems so progressive on sexual questions.
Yes and no.
What the New York Times pointed out in October is, quote, as Pete Buttigieg courts black voters, his sexuality is a hurdle for some.
Because historically, specifically among black voters, The sexual revolutionary politics, the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s, which includes homosexuality, is not particularly popular.
The Buttigieg campaign acknowledged this too, circulated a memo saying that homosexuality was going to hurt him in South Carolina.
The reason it's going to hurt him in South Carolina is because...
It's because he's the only candidate who does well with black voters.
Regardless of your feelings on this matter, That is what it means politically.
And so, he's got a number of flaws.
If he had a huge name, if he had a huge list of accomplishments, maybe that would be able to overcome some of those other political flaws.
But, right now, probably not the case.
So, for the candidates who still have a pulse, the leading moderate candidate has fundamental political flaws.
Buttigieg is such a weak, moderate frontrunner that Amy Klobuchar...
In New Hampshire jumped to third place simply by not being completely insane.
Which is high praise in the 2020 Democratic primary.
Simply by saying on the debate stage that maybe we shouldn't kill all the babies.
Simply by saying on the debate stage, maybe, maybe the Democratic nominee shouldn't be an open avowed socialist.
Simply by doing that, she jumped from nothing to third place.
Amy Klobuchar, if you just look at her and listen to her, is a terrible retail candidate.
She's awkward on the campaign trail.
She's stiff.
She repeats the same awkward jokes.
She's not a good candidate, okay?
Somebody like a Barack Obama or a Ronald Reagan, these really great campaigners, she is not.
And yet, she's jumping up that moderate lane.
The reason she's spiking up is because Buttigieg just doesn't have it.
So who's going to stop Bernie?
The only person left in the New Hampshire field who can stop Bernie is Joe Biden.
But the Biden campaign collapsed last night.
The Biden campaign came in fifth.
Humiliating.
He didn't need to win New Hampshire, but he needed a second or at least a third place finish.
And he came in fifth.
Absolutely pathetic.
His campaign is trying to spin it.
Probably right now, it's over.
Here is Joe Biden trying to protest, trying to explain why his absolutely empty campaign is still going to hobble along.
We just heard from the first two of 50 states.
Two of them.
Not all the nation.
Not half the nation.
Not a quarter of the nation.
Not ten percent.
Two.
Two.
Now where I come from, that's the opening bell.
Not the closing bell.
So when you hear all these pundits and experts, cable TV talkers, talked about the race, tell them, it ain't over, man.
We're just getting started.
It ain't over, man.
Who are you trying to convince Joe Biden?
This is the telltale sign of a weak campaign is when they go out there and say, hey, look, we just heard from two random states, okay?
Look, just two random states.
Oh, you mean the two, perhaps the two most important states to determining who the party nominee is going to be?
Iowa and New Hampshire?
I mean, not the only two important states to determine that, but two very important ones.
So, the radical is winning and And the moderates are too weak to stop him.
And the only guy out here who might win the general election got clobbered the hardest.
This is just terrible news for the Democratic Party.
But it's great news for the secret moderate, who all the Democratic elites are rallying behind now, and that is Mike Bloomberg.
Mike Bloomberg wasn't on the ballot in New Hampshire.
He got into the race too late to do that.
I don't think he's going to be on the ballot in Nevada or South Carolina.
So the first four states, the really important ones, he's not even going to be there.
But Mike Bloomberg has infinite money.
He has all of the money.
He's already spent three or four hundred million dollars This guy is now laying low and waiting,
and because of the flaws of every single moderate, so-called moderate candidate in the race, Buttigieg, Biden, Klobuchar, because of that, he has a chance to enter the race late.
But Mike Bloomberg can't beat Trump.
You can't do it.
If given the choice between two New York billionaires, you got one New York billionaire who is a soda-stealing, gun-grabbing, Chardonnay-sipping, cigarette-stopping nanny state scold, and a successful, funny TV host, who are you going to pick?
Who are Americans going to want to see for the next season of the White House?
It's probably going to be President Trump.
The other reason, it's actually two more reasons why Trump beats Bloomberg.
The two reasons are, one, Bloomberg will be viewed by the progressive base as having stolen the election, regardless of what really happens.
You saw the progressives get their election stolen in 2016 through Bernie Sanders.
You're seeing it happen again now in Iowa and New Hampshire.
So they're going to see Bloomberg as this guy parachuting in, stealing the election from him.
The second reason that Bloomberg doesn't beat Trump is that Bloomberg cannot convincingly make the case that Trump is scary or dangerous.
And I'll show you how.
Trump actually, he sent out a tweet where he gave Mike Bloomberg his new mean nickname called Mini Mike.
And that's what everyone's focusing on.
They're not focusing on the second part of the tweet, which is a photo of Trump and Bloomberg on the golf course.
And that's actually the whole tweet, really.
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The other reason, it's this twofold reason why Bloomberg doesn't beat Trump.
And you need both of them at the same time.
One is Bloomberg is just going to be viewed so suspiciously as having stolen it from the progressives.
But two, he can't make the case that Trump is scary.
Trump sends out this tweet.
It says, quote, Hitter.
I love the syntax, the grammar.
It doesn't seem grammatical, but it does work in a tweet.
He's a short ball hitter, meaning when he golfs.
But he's also saying he's short.
Very short.
Tiny clubhead speed.
Keep America great.
So the tweet is just unsubtly calling Mike Bloomberg short.
And Mike Bloomberg is very short.
I've been in rooms and at events with Mike Bloomberg.
They're saying on the internet that he's 5'8 or 5'10 or something.
Not even close.
Not even close.
Like, he's a petite man.
Much smaller than people even realize right now.
So, that's the tweet, right?
The tweet is that he's short.
The genius of this tweet is not calling him short.
President Trump does this.
He makes fun of people and their physical attributes.
And it works.
It's distasteful.
We don't like it.
But it totally, totally works.
Okay?
And maybe that's just where we are in 2020.
That's not the genius, though.
Giving him a nickname, okay, he was obviously going to do that.
The genius of the tweet is showing that Mike Bloomberg and President Trump have golfed together.
I think on multiple occasions.
The genius of the tweet is showing that Mike Bloomberg doesn't really think Trump is scary.
Mike Bloomberg was palling around with Trump just a little while ago.
It's actually one of the reasons that Hillary Clinton couldn't really make the case that Trump is so scary is because Hillary Clinton went to his wedding.
It's that they kind of palled around.
She asked him for donations.
It totally blunted the attack that Trump is Hitler, Trump is a Nazi, Trump is a fascist.
Well, if he's a fascist, why are you playing golf with him?
Why are you going to his wedding?
It's one of the real advantages to having this celebrity guy, this pop culture figure, In running for your nomination is everyone knows him.
We all know him, the voters.
And even the people who are running against him have palled around with him before.
So I think it's a really smart way to keep getting that in there.
It's like, look, I know these people.
All right, they're all BSing you right now that I'm such a scary guy.
So that pretty much damages all of the candidates who were in New Hampshire and even a candidate who wasn't in New Hampshire.
Who won?
Bernie did fine but he effectively tied with Buttigieg.
Buttigieg, Warren and Klobuchar can't win a general election.
Joe Biden can't win the primary.
Bloomberg, I strongly suspect, cannot rally that progressive Bernie base around him or beat Trump.
So it looks pretty good.
Looks like President Trump did very well in New Hampshire.
But you don't need to take my word for it.
Obviously, look, I think the President's doing a good job.
I support him.
So I want to make sure that I'm not just looking at this through the lens of my preferences or wishful thinking.
But you can look at the exit polls, and it all seems to back this up.
Okay, the numbers from the exit polling showed that turnout was down from 2016.
Like, in some cases, significantly down.
But Trump won in 2016.
So the way that Democrats win this time is for turnout to be way up and enthusiasm to be way up.
And all those people who stayed home in 2016 because they hated Hillary Clinton, they're going to turn out to the polls this time, right?
Because they hate Trump so much.
Except that's not what we're seeing.
If this is a referendum on Donald Trump, Donald Trump's going to win.
The Democrats are less excited this time than they were last time according to the exit polls.
That ends the election if that keeps up.
Even worse for Democrats.
Even worse.
Turnout is especially down among young voters.
So one of the arguments you hear from people Who say that Trump isn't going to get re-elected or they're Democrats and they don't like Trump.
They'll say, look, the reason Trump's going to lose this time is because all the young people are going to turn out.
There's going to be so many more young voters this year just in terms of voter eligibility and enthusiasm to go vote that Trump's going to get clobbered.
Well, that doesn't seem to be what's borne out by the exit polls.
What the exit polls are showing is not only are there not more young voters this time, there are fewer voters.
They're actually less interested in this election than they were last time.
In 2016, young voters made up 19% of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote.
That's down to 11% this year.
It's a major cut.
It's a major reduction.
Adding to that, you've got some polls showing President Trump making inroads with black and Hispanic voters, and it's not just one or two polls.
It's Three polls, four polls, showing big inroads with black voters especially.
Who knows if those polls are right or not?
But if he makes any inroads with them, then the Democratic Party is in a bad place.
The Democratic Party needs to have a lock, especially in the black vote, but they need to do very, very well with Hispanics as well in order to win.
And it looks like all the numbers are going the other direction.
So what are the takeaways from New Hampshire?
Weak frontrunner and division among the moderate wing.
Moderate wing.
Lower voter enthusiasm, lower youth enthusiasm, and a possible loss of critical minority support.
Those are all bad headlines.
For Democrats coming out of New Hampshire, all great headlines for Trump and Republicans.
MSNBC accidentally showed some evidence of this, that 2020 might not be going the way they wanted.
They accidentally showed it when they were in New Hampshire.
They were trying to interview all these Democratic primary voters.
So they actually forgot that there was a Republican primary.
You forget it because the incumbent is going to win the primary.
But they're out there talking.
They say, oh, hey, which of these fun candidates, Bernie or Klobuchar, which one did you vote for, sir?
And they didn't like his answer.
We have a voter out here.
Sir, you were watching, so you're going to be on television now.
Can you tell us who you voted for?
Donald John Trump.
You voted for Donald John Trump?
Yeah.
Look at that.
Bernie Sanders is not appealing to you?
The whole ideology would be destructive to the country.
It's anti-growth.
It's anti-family.
It's anti-American.
And as a Roman Catholic, it's anti-life.
Anti-life.
Oh, man, that guy totally...
Nailed them.
And I loved the look on her face.
You voted for Trump?
What?
Excuse me?
What was that?
This opens up the second side of New Hampshire, which nobody's talking about, which is there was a New Hampshire Republican primary.
We all knew who was going to win that one.
I mean, it's sort of like the election of Saddam Hussein.
The question is, is he going to get 99% of the vote or, you know, 89% of the vote is still going to win by a landslide.
The Republican side actually shows us something because it shows historic popularity.
Like, truly historic popularity.
We'll get to that in a second.
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The Republican victory here is not being covered in the news because there's really only one candidate.
But it's big.
You know, Trump technically had primary candidates in the Republican Party.
It's just nobody remembers them because they never had a shot.
On the Republican side of the New Hampshire primary, Donald Trump outperformed all of his predecessors.
All of them.
In terms of numbers, he had performed his predecessors in terms of the share of the vote.
Last night, when there were about 54% of precincts reporting, so just over half of the votes were in, President Trump had already received more raw votes than Barack Obama, George Bush, and Ronald Reagan in their re-election campaigns in New Hampshire.
Half the vote Was in and he had gotten more votes.
Now, Bill Clinton had also done pretty well in his re-election campaign.
But by the time 62% of the vote was in, Trump beat Bill Clinton in terms of raw votes.
He likely beat the voting percentages of the last three incumbent presidents who won re-election.
That is a big number.
It shows enthusiasm, right?
You had a night where democratic enthusiasm was down, key constituencies among the Democrats enthusiasm were down and enthusiasm to go to a poll that you don't need to go to, right?
The president is the incumbent, he's going to win the primary.
Enthusiasm to go to even that primary poll, way up.
I mean, you see it at these rallies.
You look at a Joe Biden rally, he's got like five people at it and half of them are asleep.
You look at a Trump rally, it's stadiums full of people.
And I know that that's not data, right?
Those are just anecdotes because it's one event here, one event there, one event there.
But you just look at the enthusiasm.
Maybe you can't measure that, but you can see it.
It's real.
That's what we saw last night in New Hampshire.
So it was a big night for Bernie in that it showed that there was this committed progressive base.
He did win the state.
But The division among the Democrats, and then further division among the moderates, and then the total suppression of enthusiasm compared with Trump, gives the state, I think, gives the night to President Trump.
There was a really sad moment, too, last night.
Andrew Yang dropped out of the race.
Another one bites the dust.
Another candidate dropped out, too, actually, Senator Michael Bennett, who none of you knew was even running, so that doesn't matter.
But Andrew Yang dropped out.
He was a kind of interesting candidate, at least on Twitter.
At least he made people interested on the Internet.
Some conservatives are lamenting the end of his campaign.
I am not.
I think he proposed one of the worst, most destructive, most degrading ideas that any candidate has floated in the entire race.
That would be the thousand dollars a month, the universal basic income.
We'll get to why that is a horrible, horrible idea.
First, we got to go and say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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It's now number five on Apple Podcasts.
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Andrew Yang dropped out.
The Yang gang is over.
We knew it would happen.
It was inevitable.
He was a sort of amusing candidate.
But I wanted to take a moment to stomp on the grave of the Yang campaign because I think some conservatives are taking their amusement with the Yang campaign too far.
Or their pleasure that he's a sort of nice-seeming guy too far.
He might be a nice guy.
I don't know Andrew Yang.
I don't particularly care if he's a nice guy.
What he was proposing as a candidate was one of the worst ideas that any candidate was floating in the race.
His idea, the only actual idea that his campaign had, was to buy votes.
It was to pay people $1,000 a month, pay everybody $1,000 a month, buy their vote, and that's it.
It's so insidious.
It's such a wicked, anti-American, anti-human, and degrading idea that I just want to stomp it out.
It's called the universal basic income.
There are different versions of this.
He called his the freedom dividend.
The idea being, we're a really rich country, so let's take money from some people and give everyone $1,000 a month.
Now, the good version, or the better version of this proposal, is that you're going to eliminate the entire welfare state.
All the entitlement programs are gone, and then you're going to pay people $1,000 a month, and then that'll be really good.
You'll save money, people get to choose how to spend their money, and everybody wins, right?
No, everybody doesn't win, everybody loses.
First of all, the numbers don't work.
You can't actually eliminate the welfare state, And offset that by paying people $1,000 a month.
Even if you could, it's politically impossible.
Because the whole point of the welfare state is that we're not going to have people dying in the streets in a civilized country.
So you give everybody $1,000 a month.
We know that the poor will always be with us.
We know that people will always make irresponsible decisions with their money, at least some portion of people.
And so some people are going to blow through that thousand dollars a month.
Then what?
They're going to need more assistance.
Are we going to tell them, tough luck, too bad?
Live on the street, hope you do well?
No, nobody's going to do that.
Only in the wildest fever dreams of libertarian teenagers does anybody actually say...
Sorry, buster, you're out of luck.
So what you would really get is you pay everybody $1,000 a month and you still have the welfare and entitlement state.
Politically, it's impossible to change that.
Even if you could, it would still be a wicked, evil, degrading, destructive system because you are then making welfare dependence out of every single American.
You are getting every single American hooked on the government dole.
You are...
Degrading them, you are making those people unable to stand on their own two feet.
It'd be like getting them hooked on a drug.
You're just slowly getting them hooked on that drug.
And the government, as Ronald Reagan said very rightly, the government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.
When the government is giving you a lot of money, that's not just a gift outright.
That's not just a wonderful grace or manna from heaven.
That is a means of political control.
Because once you get comfortable with that 12 grand a year, then you're not going to want to lose it.
When the government starts making demands of you in exchange for that 12 grand a year, you're going to have to do them.
A horrible idea.
I hope it's an idea that is dead.
I hope it never comes back.
And I'm very glad that the Andrew Yang campaign is over, even though I will miss the memes.
The memes were very funny.
When Andrew Yang dropped out, he made a very nice statement.
Doesn't cover up for this terrible idea he had.
Michael Bennett also dropped out, but nobody knows, so that's fine.
There was some good news before we go.
I have to talk about some good news for our criminal justice system.
Moving away from 2020 politics into the nuts and bolts of law and order.
Finally, after months and months of investigations, of great crack police work, We have caught Jussie Smollett's attacker.
We caught him.
Jussie Smollett's attacker is being brought to justice.
And of course, Jussie Smollett's attacker is Jussie Smollett.
Jussie Smollett is that actor from that show who pretended to get attacked in Chicago in the And the Trump supporters came up behind him and beat him up and put a noose around his neck and said, this is MAGA country.
Because nothing says MAGA country like the south side of Chicago.
And nothing about this made any sense.
For some reason, he still had the noose around his neck when the cops got there later.
And for some reason, he was holding his subway sandwich the entire time.
So Smollett...
Oh, then it turned out that it was actually Smollett's friends and trainers who he had paid off to stage the attack.
And it turned out that they were Nigerian men.
So probably not white supremacists.
Trouble with this whole case is it just got swept under the rug.
It looked like there were political favors called in.
Jussie Smollett was a favorite of certain prominent Democratic politicians, and it was just going to go away.
Luckily, a special Cook County grand jury handed down a new indictment on Tuesday.
This was after a six-month investigation by special prosecutor Dan Webb.
The special prosecutor said in a statement that Smollett had filed four false police reports claiming that he was the victim of a hate crime.
And that is certainly what happened.
Quote, the grand jury's investigation revealed that Smollett planned and participated in a staged hate crime attack and thereafter made numerous false statements to Chicago Police Department officers on multiple occasions reporting a heinous hate crime that he in fact knew had not occurred.
I'm very glad he's being brought to justice.
It's very important.
You know, in any criminal justice system, you need to have...
Justice.
We don't think about that anymore.
We think that the whole purpose of the criminal justice system is to rehabilitate people.
It's like therapy, basically.
It's just another form of therapy that involves handcuffs.
Or we think that the secondary purpose of the criminal justice system is to deter crime.
Also a worthwhile goal.
But the primary purpose is justice.
Justice involves some punishment.
Not excessive punishment.
I don't want to lock away Jussie Smollett and throw away the key.
I don't think he should get capital punishment, right?
That would be so excessive.
That wouldn't be justice.
But likewise, he should not get off the hook.
Justice is the key.
And we forget this.
In the Federalist Papers, you know, I'm going to be covering the Federalist Papers on the book club show, the show that I have at PragerU.
That's going to be coming up in a little bit.
I was just rereading them.
And The Federalist Papers, the people who designed our Constitution, made it very clear that the end of government is justice.
It's not unfettered individual liberty.
It's not equality.
It's not redistributing everybody's property.
It's justice.
So what is justice?
Well, it's giving to everybody what they deserve.
It's a tricky balance.
In this case, justice had been too lenient.
Okay, that was why it was an injustice.
And now, luckily, we're coming back to something that is more reasonable.
There's another case in our criminal justice system that was in the other direction.
Roger Stone, a longtime GOP operative, he's kind of fashioned this image for himself as a dirty trickster.
That's kind of his media personality.
But he's a GOP political consultant.
He's worked on a zillion campaigns.
He worked for Richard Nixon.
He worked for Ronald Reagan.
Worked for a lot of other candidates.
Roger Stone, longtime advisor to Donald Trump, longtime friend of Donald Trump.
So when Donald Trump runs for president, Stone is involved in the early stages, although Trump ended up firing Stone early on.
He felt that Stone was just trying to get attention and he was more of a media figure than a real political operative at the national level.
That was the statement Trump gave, so he fired him.
Because Stone has this reputation, this public persona, and because he had committed the unforgivable crime of working for Donald Trump at any point, Roger Stone gets brought in by the Mueller investigation, that hoax, that sham, that found nothing, and he gets charged for lying to Congress, for making false statements.
Not charged with selling the country to Russia, not charged with treason, not charged with bribery, not charged with Really serious crimes charged with lying to Congress and witness tampering and obstruction of a proceeding.
So look, these are real offenses, but they're not high crimes and misdemeanors, right?
So the prosecutors who were going after Roger Stone, who maybe had some political views of their own that were opposed to Roger Stone, they wanted to sentence this 70-year-old man to nine years in prison.
Because he worked for Trump, then he got caught up in this bogus, hoax, criminal investigation.
When I say criminal investigation, I mean it was a crime that the damn investigation happened in the first place.
This Mueller investigation, this Russia hoax, he gets caught up in that because he worked for Trump, and then he makes false statements during that investigation, and then they want to throw him in jail for nine years, which is effectively the rest of his life, right?
When you're 70 years old and you're going to prison for nine years, That's it.
Not a whole lot after that because they don't like him.
I mean, that's really what this was about.
So that's what the prosecutors wanted to do.
The DOJ intervened.
They said, this is ridiculous.
What are you talking about?
Nine years in prison?
No way.
So they said, you've got to reduce that sentencing, what you're asking for.
And four prosecutors quit.
And it's being portrayed in the mainstream media is that these prosecutors are the great defenders of law and order.
Those prosecutors, good, I'm glad they quit.
If any other prosecutors agree with them, they should quit too.
Because that would have been a miscarriage of justice to throw Roger Stone in the clink for nine years.
For the rest of his life, you're effectively sentencing him to life in prison because of your bureaucratic hoax investigation that got him caught up in it and then he made false statements.
I'm not saying Roger Stone should get off the hook completely.
He did commit some offenses here.
He did make these false statements.
The only way he should get off the hook completely is if he gets a presidential pardon.
I'm not saying the prosecutor should totally drop everything, but nine years is excessive.
Justice requires some Balance.
Justice requires understanding what people really deserve.
Not being too harsh and excessive, but not being too lenient either.
Also in The Federalist, I was reading one of the great lines of the whole Federalist papers, you know, the key document to understanding our Constitution.
In it, the author writes, nothing can be, I'm paraphrasing, but roughly it says, nothing can be more foolish than Then founding our politics on arithmetical principles, meaning you can't just have a completely hard and fast scientific rule when we're talking about politics and government.
It just requires too much understanding for that kind of rigid ideological precision.
And in this case, if you stick to some rigid, the max sentence you can get for the guy, it's just as clearly unjust.
And the DOJ recognized that.
I think the whole Trump administration has kind of been realizing that.
And I think it's terrific.
Harsher sentence for Smollett, a lighter sentence for Roger Stone.
Make sure justice is served in both.
But make sure it's justice and not just political revenge.
Before we get out of here...
I've got to drive the point home about New Hampshire.
Because I just want to make sure that I'm not overstating the case here, that it was such a bad night for Democrats.
But I realized I'm not.
Not just because of the exit polling.
Not just because of that Trump voter that MSNBC accidentally found.
Not just because of the relative voter enthusiasm.
But also on MSNBC, Chris Matthews.
He came out and he said what I think a lot of Democrats are thinking, which is, if this is how it all keeps up, Democrats are not going to win in 2020.
They're regular center-left Democrats who are not angry about the rich.
They just want to be secure in their own economy and their own lives and see their kids once in a while.
If that's the case, Trump is going to be tough to beat.
So I don't know.
I think in either case, I think it's going to be tough to beat Trump.
I don't know whether the Democratic Party has ideologically shifted as far to the progressive side as Bernie believes, I think, it will.
And I think that's the big question.
You heard it from Chris Matthews, you heard it from New Hampshire voters, and you heard it here first.
Be sure to come back tomorrow.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you then.
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