The Trump administration pledges to stonewall Congress, Hillary Clinton signals some interest in 2020, and the Turks begin their attack on the Kurds. Ben Shapiro explains why the White House should not be so hard on Congress, and why they are actually stonewalling. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by Express VPN. Protect your online privacy today at ExpressVPN.org/ProtectYourOnline Privacy. Ben Shapiro is a writer, comedian, and podcaster. He is the host of the podcast and is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard, and has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, CBS, and NPR. His new book, is out now, and is available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. If you don't already have an Amazon Prime membership, you can get 20% off for a limited time, but you'll have to pay a small monthly fee of $99.99, plus you'll get access to all of the latest and greatest streaming services, including Amazon Prime, Vimeo, and other major podcasting services. You can get a free 7-day Prime membership trial when you sign up for Prime membership when you place an order of $59.99 starting on January 1st, 2020. It starts on September 1st! You'll get 7GB and 7GB for the rest of the month, plus 3 months of Vimeo membership for free! Subscribe to my podcasting, unlimited access to my entire episodes, and access to the entire podcast library, and all my social media platforms. I'm giving away to my listeners get a discount code . I'll be giving you access to some of my subscribers get a chance to win a FREE trial, and I'll get an ad-free version of the show, too! The offer starts on October 31st, 2019. Thanks for listening to the show! and my ad-only version of my show? if you like the show and review my podcast, I'll give you an ad discount code: at least $5 stars and get 5 stars and a FREE VIP membership offer, too get $5 VIP access, and you get a VIP discount when you enter the offer gets me a discount of $50 or more, and get an additional $5/month to win $50/day and get VIP access to VIP access gets $5,000 VIP access? Thanks!
00:00:00.000The Trump administration pledges to stonewall Congress, Hillary Clinton signals some interest in 2020, and the Turks begin their attack on the Kurds.
00:00:08.000The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
00:00:18.000Protect your online privacy today at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
00:00:22.000Okay, we've got a ton to get to today, and I take off 25 hours, guys, just to do some atoning, just to get right with God, and the world explodes because that's the way things work.
00:00:31.000Okay, so, the latest, an impeachment case, 2019.
00:00:34.000Over the past 25, 36 hours, Basically, the White House has now pledged they're going to stonewall Congress.
00:00:43.000Now, I know there are a lot of folks on the right who are cheering this, a lot of folks on the conservative side who are saying, this is exactly what the White House should be doing, given the political nature of this impeachment inquiry.
00:00:53.000And there is truth to the fact that the White House Should be pushing back on some of the subpoenas that the White House should be pushing back on Congress's power to do some of the stuff that they are doing.
00:01:02.000However, to simply state that they are going to in blanket fashion sort of stonewall Congress is a mistake.
00:01:07.000The reason it's a mistake is because it goes one of a couple of ways.
00:01:10.000One, All of this goes to the courts, and the courts actually rule against the Trump administration, in which case they have to turn over all of this stuff anyway, and now there is impetus for an impeachment move because of so-called obstruction, because the White House is attempting to prevent information from being disseminated.
00:01:27.000Obstruction was used as an impeachment grounds for both Clinton and Nixon.
00:01:33.000It goes to the courts, and the courts simply decline to answer the question.
00:01:36.000They say this falls under what they call the political question doctrine, meaning that when the branches are hashing things out between themselves, it is really not the business of the judiciary to step in and do anything about it.
00:01:46.000Well, that then throws it back on Congress.
00:01:48.000And Congress, in order to defend its own prerogatives, to get information, because Congress does have the constitutional power to impeach.
00:01:54.000Congress does have the constitutional power to investigate under Article I and Article II of the Constitution.
00:02:00.000With all of that said, Congress will then be led to get its sort of spine up a little bit, get its back up, and say to the executive branch, listen, even if we're Republicans, we are not going to let the executive branch simply decline to work with Congress in any way, in any investigation, because that sets a precedent that is undoable once a Democrat is in office again.
00:02:19.000And then possibility number three is that the White House stonewalls and gets away with it.
00:02:22.000The problem there is that once that strategy is on the table and has been successfully used, it is now used by presumably every president.
00:02:29.000And that means that the presidency, no matter which party the presidency is being held by, The president can now get away with anything.
00:02:36.000Okay, so, with that said, the White House's basic statement, which is that Congress needs to be specific about what exactly it is calling for, what Congress is actually doing legally speaking, that part is true.
00:02:48.000But the White House basically saying we're not cooperating under nearly any circumstances.
00:02:51.000It depends how you read the White House's letter, but if that is what they're actually claiming, that's a massive overreach and it's a bad move strategically.
00:02:58.000It's gonna be much easier to show that the White House is stonewalling and therefore engaged in a cover-up.
00:03:03.000Then to show that the White House actually involved itself in criminally impeachable behavior in the first place.
00:03:09.000As I've been saying for a couple of weeks now, it is always easier to get a president for a cover-up than it is to get a president for a crime.
00:03:15.000It was easier to get Richard Nixon for the cover-up of Watergate than it was to get Richard Nixon for Watergate itself.
00:03:20.000It was easier to get President Clinton for obstruction of justice than it was to get President Clinton for any of the underlying crimes, including perjury, by the way.
00:03:29.000And so, The Trump White House should just take note of that fact when they decide how far to stonewall Congress.
00:03:34.000Okay, we're going to get to exactly what the White House did.
00:03:37.000Are they actually stonewalling Congress, or are they actually not?
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00:04:51.000According to the Washington Post, the White House on Tuesday said it would not cooperate with the House's impeachment inquiry of President Trump, arguing that the probe, quote, violates the Constitution, the rule of law, and every past precedent in an escalating standoff with an unbound Congress.
00:05:05.000In a scathing eight-page letter, the White House said the inquiry into the Ukraine scandal was without merit, complained that the president has been denied his due process rights, and argued that Democrats were intent on overturning the results of the 2016 election and influencing the 2020 contest.
00:05:18.000Okay, so as I say, there are a couple of angles to this letter.
00:05:20.000We're going to go through the letter today.
00:05:22.000Now, does that make it constitutionally illegitimate?
00:05:25.000The House has the unilateral power of impeachment.
00:05:33.000The House has the unilateral power of impeachment.
00:05:35.000It does not make it constitutionally ridiculous for the House to launch an impeachment inquiry, even along the lines that are weak.
00:05:43.000The White House is also pointing out some shortcomings in the way that the Democrats are approaching this thing legally.
00:05:47.000They're pointing out the Democrats have not actually voted as a full House to open an impeachment inquiry, which would give them some additional powers.
00:05:54.000Also, they have not really abided by precedent in terms of using their subpoena power and allowing the minority to subpoena witnesses as well.
00:06:03.000The question is whether the letter is an overreach, what the letter is designed to do, And whether the letter is setting the groundwork for the possibility of a full-scale stonewall by the Trump administration.
00:06:14.000Now the reason that there is suspicion that this may be setting the precedent for a full-scale stonewall, no matter what Congress does, is because the Trump administration did intervene over the past couple of days And prevented Gordon Sondland, President Trump's ambassador to the European Union, from testifying on Tuesday morning before House committees.
00:06:34.000House Democrats then issued a subpoena to Gordon Sondland in the impeachment inquiry.
00:06:38.000He had bowed to a State Department order to skip a deposition earlier in the day.
00:06:42.000Now, Gordon Sondland, as you know, is the, as I say, Trump's ambassador to the EU.
00:06:46.000He was on that text message exchange with Kurt Volker, who was the special envoy to Ukraine, as well as with Bill Taylor, who happened to be the special Replacement for the ambassador to Ukraine.
00:06:58.000They're on this text exchange all about basically whether the Trump administration was pressuring Ukraine to prosecute Joe Biden.
00:07:27.000They presumably could hold him in contempt.
00:07:29.000They could also hold the State Department in contempt.
00:07:32.000Democrats have subpoenaed Sondland for his testimony and documents that they share being withheld by the State Department.
00:07:37.000The subpoena demands those documents be turned over by October 14th.
00:07:40.000And they say that Sondland must sit for a deposition on October 16th before three congressional panels, which means before the end of next week.
00:07:48.000The three Democrats who lead the various committees that are doing this investigation, Schiff, Cummings, and Engel, they said, we consider this interference to be obstruction of the impeachment inquiry.
00:07:56.000Now, they can consider whatever they want to be obstruction.
00:07:59.000It's not obstruction until there's a court order that says that you have to show up for the subpoena under the conditions specified by Congress, and then the person doesn't show up.
00:08:07.000Then you get into obstruction of justice issues.
00:08:09.000It is not mere obstruction simply to say, I'm not showing up for a subpoena, and then it gets thrown into the court.
00:08:13.000In fact, that sort of negotiation happens all the time with regard to subpoenas.
00:08:21.000But that's why it has to be a formal subpoena.
00:08:23.000That is the grounds for the lawsuit itself.
00:08:25.000The State Department has not responded to requests for comments at this point, but President Trump, never one to shy away from trigger, immediately went on Twitter and explained why Sunland was not going to be showing up.
00:08:35.000He tweeted out, But unfortunately, he would be testifying before a totally compromised kangaroo court, where Republicans' rights have been taken away and true facts are not allowed out for the public to see.
00:08:48.000Importantly, Ambassador Sondland's tweet, which few reports stated, quote, That says it all.
00:08:51.000believe you are incorrect about President Trump's intentions.
00:08:58.000So he's happy with that particular text message from Sondland that was to Bill Taylor, the replacement for the ambassador to Ukraine.
00:09:06.000And he doesn't want Sondland testifying.
00:09:08.000Notice that he is basically saying, under no circumstances do I want Sondland testifying.
00:09:12.000Not, there's going to be a negotiation about what documents are turned over.
00:09:15.000And this is what's leading to the grand suspicion on the part of Democrats and on the part of the media that the White House is going to engage in an overall stonewalling effort.
00:09:23.000Well, that obviously was bolstered by the letter that was sent by Pat Cipollone, who happens to be the Who happens to be the president's attorney in this particular case.
00:09:36.000He sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi, Engel, Schiff, and Cummings.
00:09:40.000And it's a fairly long letter, but it's worth going through simply because there's so much controversy over it.
00:09:44.000And we try to bring you the information as always first, and then we make the judgment.
00:09:49.000Quote, I write on behalf of President Donald J. Trump in response to your numerous legally unsupportable demands made as part of what you have labeled contrary to the Constitution of the United States and all past bipartisan precedent as an impeachment inquiry.
00:10:00.000As you know, you have designed and implemented your inquiry in a manner that violates fundamental fairness and constitutionally mandated due process.
00:10:24.000That's the House investigating and the House coming up with whether they believe they should impeach.
00:10:28.000And then when you get to the Senate, there's an actual trial.
00:10:30.000At the trial, there has to be a certain level of due process.
00:10:32.000Presumably, the Supreme Court could step in and say due process has not actually been followed here.
00:10:36.000Now, where he is right, Cipollone, is that when he says that there are certain things the Democrats are doing that have never been done before, that is true.
00:10:43.000There are a couple of things specifically.
00:10:45.000One, They've made clear that they are not going to allow the minority to issue subpoenas.
00:10:51.000Two, they keep claiming this is an impeachment inquiry when they have not actually voted in favor of an impeachment inquiry.
00:10:56.000Basically, they had these ongoing investigations going in the various committees.
00:11:00.000Nancy Pelosi got up and said impeachment inquiry, and everybody is now treating it like it's an official act of Congress, like Congress is now undergoing an impeachment inquiry.
00:11:20.000I mean, they have all sorts of great services, but do you really want to take all that crap you have to ship and schlep it in the back of your car there, and then you wait in line, and then you have to Just wait to get the parking ticket out front, which is what has happened to me at least the last time I went to the post office.
00:11:34.000And that was the last time I went to the post office.
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00:12:37.000Okay, so, Cipollone's letter continues.
00:12:39.000He says, Well, right now, they're just doing an investigation.
00:12:41.000So, it's not clear that those rights actually obtain.
00:12:43.000Well, right now, they're just doing an investigation.
00:12:53.000So it's not clear that those rights actually obtain.
00:12:56.000Those rights would obtain in a Senate trial.
00:12:58.000But when it comes to an impeachment inquiry, that's just like every other inquiry that happens on the House level.
00:13:03.000It's not clear that the House can't set its own rules, for example.
00:13:07.000Cipollone says you have conducted your proceedings in secret.
00:13:09.000You have violated civil liberties and the separation of powers by threatening executive branch officials claiming you will seek to punish those who exercise fundamental constitutional rights and prerogatives.
00:13:18.000OK, now that last part where basically they've threatened to hold people in contempt for not obeying their requests.
00:13:24.000That's not a violation of the Constitution.
00:13:26.000That is them being legally idiotic and attempting to push a false narrative, which is that if you negotiate with them over the terms of your testimony, that you are somehow going to be held in contempt.
00:13:36.000That is not something that they actually have the power to do.
00:13:39.000In order to have a contempt holding, you have to first issue a legally binding subpoena, for example.
00:13:46.000Never before in our history has the House of Representatives under the control of either political party taken the American people down the dangerous path you seem determined to pursue.
00:13:52.000This letter is written more as a political document, obviously, than it is as a legal document.
00:13:57.000Cipollone says, put simply, you seek to overturn the results of the 2016 election and deprive the American people of the president they have freely chosen.
00:14:04.000Many Democrats now apparently view impeachment not only as a means to undo the Democratic results of the last election, but as a strategy to influence the next election, which is barely more than a year away.
00:14:13.000As one member of Congress explained, he is concerned that if we don't impeach the president, he will get reelected.
00:14:17.000That would be Representative Al Green on MSNBC.
00:14:20.000Your highly partisan and unconstitutional effort threatens grave and lasting damage to our democratic institutions, to our systems of free elections, and to the American people.
00:14:27.000It's a perfectly fine political argument.
00:14:30.000Completely has nothing to do with legality, right?
00:14:32.000Just from a legal standpoint, this is not part of a legal document.
00:14:35.000This is a political argument, an argument with which I generally agree, by the way, but a political argument nonetheless.
00:14:42.000He says, for his part, President Trump took the unprecedented step of providing the public transparency by declassifying and releasing the record of his call with Zelensky of Ukraine.
00:14:50.000And then it says the record clearly established the call.
00:14:53.000the call was completely appropriate and that there is no basis for your inquiry.
00:14:56.000The fact there was nothing wrong with the call was also powerfully confirmed by Chairman Schiff's decision to create a false version of the call and read it to the American people at a congressional hearing without disclosing that he was simply making it all up.
00:15:06.000Now, again, Schiff made a fool of himself, right?
00:15:09.000But I don't really think that that is what Schiff was doing.
00:15:12.000I mean, to be, I'm trying to be fair to everybody here because the fact is that while I think that Schiff is a real snake in the grass when it comes to his proceedings, I think that the pretend outrage at him faking a conversation in a clearly made up way and pretending that everybody thought that was real.
00:15:28.000I don't really buy that particular line of argument.
00:15:31.000In addition, information has recently come to light to Cipollone that the whistleblower had contact with Chairman Schiff's office before filing the complaint.
00:15:39.000For these reasons, President Trump and his administration reject your baseless unconstitutional efforts to overturn the democratic process.
00:15:45.000Your unprecedented actions have left the president with no choice.
00:15:47.000In order to fulfill his duties to the American people, the Constitution, the executive branch, and all future occupants of the office of the presidency, President Trump and his administration cannot participate in your partisan and unconstitutional inquiry under these circumstances.
00:16:00.000Okay, the key phrase there is under these circumstances.
00:16:03.000Because if those circumstances can be rectified, if the House votes for an impeachment inquiry, if the House allows minority rights to the minority party, then will the Trump administration cooperate?
00:16:15.000If not, the letter is going to run up very quickly into the Democrats and maybe some Republican members of the House.
00:16:21.000Suggesting that the Trump administration is engaging in at least a cover-up and what could be a constitutional crisis.
00:16:27.000A constitutional crisis, as Noah Feldman, law professor at Harvard, correctly suggests, a constitutional crisis is where the branches go up against one another and there is no clear solution as to what happens next.
00:16:39.000So the legislative branch subpoenas everybody in the executive branch.
00:16:42.000The executive branch, instead of turning down some, accepting others, and going through the court, simply says, no, under no circumstances are we going to cooperate under any circum... That is what you would call a constitutional crisis, presumably.
00:16:53.000Although, even there, there is a procedure, right?
00:16:57.000Presumably, if the House was offended enough by the executive, the House could impeach the executive.
00:17:01.000Okay, so, is this letter actually a blanket attempt to say we're not participating under any circumstances, or is it a conditional letter?
00:17:09.000Is the letter saying, listen, Under the current circumstances, where you are clearly manipulating the process, true.
00:17:14.000Under these circumstances, where you're clearly being partisan hacks who have no interest in a fair process, kinda true.
00:17:20.000If, under these circumstances, where you pretend you have an impeachment inquiry, and the House hasn't even voted for one, which is true, we're not going to participate.
00:17:28.000That, at least, is part of a negotiation.
00:17:30.000If it's just, listen, we don't like the basis for the inquiry.
00:17:33.000We think the basis for the inquiry is wrong.
00:17:42.000They say your inquiry is constitutionally invalid and violates basic due process rights and the separation of powers.
00:17:49.000So they say that in the history of our nation the House of Representatives has never attempted to launch an impeachment inquiry against the president without a majority of the House taking political accountability for that decision by voting to authorize such a dramatic constitutional step.
00:18:10.000Here, House leadership claims to have initiated the gravest inter-branch conflict contemplated in our Constitution by means of nothing more than a press conference at which the Speaker of the House simply announced an official impeachment inquiry.
00:18:20.000Your contrived process is unprecedented.
00:18:23.000The committee's inquiry also suffers from a separate fatal defect.
00:18:27.000Despite Speaker Pelosi's commitment to treat the president with fairness, the committees have not established any procedures affording the president even the most basic protections demanded by due process under the Constitution and by fundamental fairness.
00:18:39.000Now, the House does have unilateral power over how the impeachment inquiry is run.
00:18:44.000It is a separate branch of government.
00:18:46.000It does not have to actually engage in the sorts of negotiation with the White House that the White House is claiming that it has to.
00:18:54.000So this part, I don't really see the legal basis for.
00:18:56.000The House has sole power over how it sets up the impeachment inquiry.
00:19:00.000Again, they can vote for impeachment without an inquiry.
00:19:01.000They could vote for impeachment today.
00:19:03.000So they don't actually have to have quote-unquote due process.
00:19:05.000It's at the Senate trial that presumably you have to have some form of due process.
00:19:09.000They say these due process rights are not a matter of discretion for the committees to dispense with at will.
00:19:13.000To the contrary, they're constitutional requirements.
00:19:15.000The Supreme Court has recognized that due process protections apply to all congressional investigations.
00:19:20.000Well, it's not quite as simple as that.
00:19:23.000The cases that they are citing are not quite.
00:19:26.000Now, they may be right that the president shouldn't be treated unfairly this way.
00:19:32.000The right to cross-examine witnesses, call witnesses, present evidence, dates back 150 years again in the Senate.
00:19:38.000That seems to be more true than in the House.
00:19:40.000Now, they may be right that the president shouldn't be treated unfairly this way.
00:19:43.000And they may be right that the Democrats should simply allow some of this stuff to happen.
00:19:47.000But is this a blanket stonewall or is it conditional?
00:19:50.000Again, that is the big question here, and it's not quite clear from this letter.
00:19:54.000They say, to comply with the Constitution's demands, appropriate procedures would include, at a minimum, the right to see all evidence, to present evidence, to call witnesses, to have counsel present at all hearings, to cross-examine all witnesses, to make objections relating to examination of witnesses, or the admissibility of testimony and evidence, and to respond to evidence and testimony.
00:20:11.000Okay, again, that all makes sense at a trial.
00:20:13.000It doesn't make sense in the context of a House inquiry.
00:20:17.000So as I say, the legal basis for this letter are fairly weak.
00:20:22.000And then they talk about the Congress resorting to threats and intimidation against executive branch witnesses.
00:20:29.000That does not fatally mean that there can't be an impeachment inquiry or that the White House can ignore all subpoenas, for example.
00:20:36.000Then the letter gets into basically a political argument saying that the impeachment inquiry is seeking to reverse the election of 2016 and influence the election of 2020.
00:20:45.000Again, a political argument with which I agree, but has virtually nothing to do with legality.
00:20:50.000And then they say there's no legitimate basis for the impeachment inquiry.
00:20:52.000So that again suggests that no matter what Congress does, they are not going to cooperate because they find the basis not legit.
00:21:00.000Well, if that were the case, Nixon could have just stonewalled, right?
00:21:02.000He would have just said, listen, I find this whole thing non-legit.
00:21:05.000It would have been Al Pacino and injustice for all.
00:21:07.000You're out of order, this entire court is out of order.
00:21:11.000That doesn't work in actual legal proceedings.
00:21:14.000The letter concludes, for the foregoing reasons, the president cannot allow your constitutionally illegitimate proceedings to distract him and those in the executive branch from their work on behalf of the American people.
00:21:24.000The American people elected him to do this job.
00:21:26.000He remains focused on fulfilling his promises to the American people, etc., etc., etc.
00:21:30.000They say, we hope that in light of the many deficiencies we have identified in your proceedings, you will abandon the current invalid efforts to pursue an impeachment inquiry and join the president in focusing on the goals that matter to the American people.
00:21:41.000Okay, so does this mean that this is a full-scale stonewall?
00:21:51.000If it's just a political ploy by Cipollone and Trump, if it's just, we want these things and if you give us those things we'll cooperate, Then, alright, that's not bad.
00:22:00.000But if this turns into, we're not cooperating with Congress, I still believe in the Constitution.
00:22:04.000The Congress does have the power of inquiry.
00:22:06.000If this were Barack Obama saying, I'm not going to cooperate under any circumstances because I deny your power to investigate, that would be a constitutional violation the Supreme Court is likely to find that way.
00:22:14.000It's not going to go the way Trump thinks if this is a pure, full-on stone.
00:22:18.000And again, we don't know whether it is or not because the letter is not clear on that.
00:22:21.000Okay, in just a second, We're going to talk a little bit more about this whistleblower because now it turns out that there are some serious questions about the nature identity of the whistleblower and the whistleblower's report.
00:24:00.000Meanwhile, there is some news about the whistleblower that should be disquieting, because as I have said, several things can be true at once, as I'm fine of saying.
00:24:09.000One, bad idea for the Trump administration to completely stonewall the investigation.
00:24:17.000Two, this can be a highly partisan inquiry that obviously smacks of an attempt to take down Trump without proper evidence.
00:24:25.000I mean, that so far seems to be the case.
00:24:28.000Three, it can turn out the whistleblower was manipulating things from the inside with the help of Adam Schiff from the outside.
00:24:33.000It now seems that there is some news about the whistleblower.
00:24:35.000This would explain why the Democrats, excuse me, have been so eager to prevent the identity of the whistleblower from becoming known.
00:24:43.000According to Byron York reporting for the Washington Examiner, the whistleblower apparently not only has political bias, but the political bias is that the whistleblower apparently, according to the Inspector General of the intelligence community, had a professional relationship with one of the Democratic candidates.
00:25:01.000Okay, that is not good news, right, for the Democrats.
00:25:05.000According to a person with knowledge, what Atkinson said was that the whistleblower self-disclosed that he was a registered Democrat and that he had a prior working relationship with the current 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.
00:25:16.000Apparently, the inspector general did not identify the Democratic candidate with whom the whistleblower had a connection.
00:25:21.000It's unclear what the working or professional relationship between the two was.
00:25:25.000Now, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and do some rank speculation.
00:25:28.000I'm gonna say it's probably Joe Biden.
00:25:30.000I'm going to say that probably what happened here is that this whistleblower had a relationship with Joe Biden.
00:25:34.000We know he was in the White House working on Ukraine issues.
00:25:37.000So, is it possible that this whistleblower had a relationship with Joe Biden, knew the situation in Ukraine, and when Joe Biden's name got brought up in the context of Ukraine immediately jumped to the conclusion that there was an investigation into Joe Biden that was the basis of all of this?
00:25:50.000And he wasn't going to have that because he knows Joe Biden and Joe Biden is a good man?
00:25:56.000And if so, that certainly colors the whistleblower's memo.
00:26:00.000The original whistleblower memo that apparently raised hackles is now being reported by CBS News.
00:26:04.000CBS News has learned the full contents of what appears to be a memo written by the whistleblower one day after President Trump spoke with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July.
00:26:14.000The memo, dated July 26, is based on a conversation the whistleblower had with an unnamed White House official who listened to the call.
00:26:19.000So again, leakiest White House of all time.
00:26:23.000Apparently, according to the memo, the White House official described the contents of the call as crazy, frightening, and completely lacking in substance related to national security.
00:26:31.000The whistleblower said the official was visibly shaken by what had transpired and seemed keen to inform a trusted colleague within the U.S.
00:26:36.000national security apparatus about the call.
00:26:42.000Is it possible that the person on the call is from the White House, is a White House staffer who's a holdover from the Obama administration, was friendly with Team Biden, called up another person who was friendly with Team Biden, and that person filed a whistleblower complaint?
00:27:12.000There will be additional evidence presented.
00:27:14.000But it does make this look a lot more like a partisan hit on behalf of Joe Biden than it does like an attempt to root out and ferret out corruption inside the White House.
00:27:24.000A lot of the diplomats who are involved in the Ukraine situation were at the very least disquieted by the activity in the Trump administration.
00:27:31.000From that text message conversation between Kurt Volker, the special envoy to the Ukraine, and Bill Taylor, who is the interim ambassador to Ukraine, and Gordon Sondland, who is the EU ambassador, there's obviously a lot of disquiet about this.
00:27:45.000And now, there are reports from the New York Times That members of the State Department were at least a little perturbed about the way in which aid to Ukraine was restored.
00:27:55.000Brad Friedan, who is the State Department's Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary overseeing issues in Europe and Eurasia, apparently wrote in a September 12th email the day after the restoration of Ukrainian aid, quote, A wonderful thing to write in an email exchange where people are worried.
00:28:13.000He said the National Security Council would not publicly announce that $141 million in State Department assistance was being restored after being held up in what the White House described as a normal review, which is weird, by the way.
00:28:26.000It's weird to say that you went through a normal review process and then you greenlit the aid, but we're not going to announce it publicly.
00:28:36.000According to one of these emails, which is presumably to Bill Taylor, it says, Bill, in terms of public messaging, the National Security Council is deliberately treating both the hold and its lifting as administrative matters.
00:28:46.000There won't be a public announcement on this end.
00:28:47.000My advice is to keep your public messaging low key as well.
00:28:50.000Along the lines of OMB has completed its administrative review of security assistance for Ukraine and our assistance will continue as before, which, again, starts to look at least a little bit suspicious.
00:29:00.000So, more details, I'm sure, will be forthcoming, as always, because we're at the beginning of this process, not at the end of this process.
00:29:07.000And lots of things can be true at once.
00:29:08.000Democrats can be manipulating the process.
00:29:10.000They can be being unfair to President Trump.
00:29:12.000This could have been pushed by a partisan whistleblower.
00:29:14.000And it could be that there was malfeasance inside the Trump White House.
00:29:17.000All of those things could be possible at once.
00:29:37.000Okay, so if you are suggesting that you know full-scale Trump is totally innocent, everything is totally above board and fine, you don't know that.
00:29:43.000If you're a Democrat and you're suggesting that you know for a fact that Trump was only out to get Biden, you certainly don't know that based on the available evidence at this point.
00:30:20.000Listen, the Democrats are gonna blow this thing anyway, so you may as well give them enough rope to hang themselves, because they certainly will hang themselves almost no matter what you do.
00:30:27.000Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get to the situation in Turkey, which has become quite grave quite quickly, because it turns out when the President of the United States signals to a dictatorial foreign power they can go in and murder a bunch of people who helped us out fighting ISIS, Guess what?
00:30:41.000We'll get into that in just one second.
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00:30:47.000You know, like, you make a couple bad decisions, all of a sudden you're paying 20% interest rates every single month, and you're stuck in credit card debt forever, and it's hard to get out.
00:30:55.000Well, this is why you may need to check out LendingClub.com.
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00:31:43.000Get the problem solved at LendingClub.com slash Ben.
00:31:47.000Alrighty, we'll get to more of that in just a second, but you're actually going to have to go over to dailywire.com in order to subscribe to see the rest of the show today.
00:31:55.000Plus, when you subscribe, you get all sorts of goodies.
00:31:57.000Not only do you get the greatest of all beverage vessels, of course, but you also get special access to our Sunday special, right?
00:32:03.000You get that on Saturday, and you get all of the material behind the paywall.
00:32:06.000This week's Sunday special is Neil deGrasse Tyson.
00:32:38.000You're going to want to see it, for sure.
00:32:40.000So go check that out over at DailyWire.
00:32:41.000Also, note, the DailyWire's long-awaited app is finally here, and it really is first rate.
00:32:46.000If you're a subscriber, you can access all of our content, including articles, shows, and more, straight from the app, including the Sunday special.
00:32:52.000All Access subscribers also get our new and exclusive discussion features, where you can interact directly with people like me and our other hosts.
00:33:00.000Like, why would you want to interact directly with moles?
00:33:56.000There's very, there are very few things that are certain in American foreign policy.
00:34:01.000One thing that is absolutely certain in American foreign policy, where American boots disappear, things get worse.
00:34:07.000And when American troops are present, Things are not as bad.
00:34:10.000When you remove American troops, things get worse.
00:34:12.000So the question becomes, not how many lives are you going to sacrifice for the Kurds, but how many Kurdish lives are you willing to sacrifice so that our soldiers don't have to stand in this particular place?
00:34:21.000Because you know how many American soldiers were killed by the Turks over the past several years?
00:34:49.000I mean, there are certain places where if you put troops, that is basically an invitation for an attack on American troops.
00:34:54.000And there are other places where if you put troops, you know, full scale, the Turks are not going to go into this area.
00:34:59.000Because if they kill an American troop, we are going to then proceed to devastate their economy, for example.
00:35:04.000So pulling out of that area is actually an invitation to escalation of war.
00:35:08.000And more than that, when you pull out, like, I'm old enough to remember when Republicans understood that Barack Obama pulling out of Iraq led to the rise of ISIS in the first place.
00:35:15.000And now, Donald Trump is saying, why don't we just pull out of this area where they're holding like 15,000 to 20,000 ISIS soldiers?
00:35:32.000The fact is that the Turks kind of have an interest in ISIS being there.
00:35:34.000It gives them an excuse to go in and kill as many members of the PKK, the sort of communist Kurdish party insurgency, and by the way, non-PKK members, right?
00:35:43.000Just Kurdish nationalists who don't want to be murdered by ISIS.
00:35:46.000It gives the Turks an excuse to go into Syria in the first place.
00:35:49.000It gives Bashar Assad an excuse to go after Syrian dissidents.
00:35:52.000It gives Iran an excuse to be in the region.
00:35:55.000The reason ISIS was able to fester and become a huge problem is because nobody in the region, except for maybe the Kurds, actually had an interest in killing the members of ISIS, and that's why the United States had to go in.
00:36:06.000It's not like we pull out and now everybody takes care of their own business.
00:36:09.000We were in there because people weren't taking care of their own business or because their interests didn't align with ours in this particular part of the world.
00:36:16.000So President Trump is making what I think is a deeply empty argument when he's like, well, we have to just put, we're ending wars, ending wars.
00:36:31.000Yeah, it turns out that sometimes you ending the war means another war gets started and we have our troops back in there in five seconds, which is exactly what happened in Iraq, right?
00:36:41.000Obama pulls out the troops, ISIS rises, guess who has to go back in?
00:36:47.000And when you're talking about a very low level of troop presence, And pretty much zero risk from the Turks toward American troops.
00:36:54.000Do not follow the BS argument that the Turks were going to go in and start wiping out American troops alongside the Kurds.
00:37:00.000That is not a thing that was going to happen.
00:37:03.000Anyway, President Trump tweeted out that he had moved some 50 troops He tweeted out, Okay, well, I thought that you were championing the fact that we defeated ISIS.
00:37:11.000USA should never have been in Middle East, moved our 50 soldiers out.
00:37:14.000Turkey must take over captured ISIS fighters that Europe refused to have returned.
00:37:17.000The stupid endless wars for us are ending.
00:37:19.000Okay, well, I thought that you were championing the fact that we defeated ISIS.
00:37:23.000So should we have just left them there?
00:37:25.000Like really, if the argument is we should never have been there, one of Trump's signal achievements is destroying ISIS, Stan.
00:37:33.000But now he's arguing that we should never have been there in the first place.
00:37:37.000Okay, well, we weren't in Afghanistan, and then Afghanistan turned over to the Taliban, and then we got 9-11.
00:37:42.000So it turns out that when we don't fight terrorists overseas, sometimes they come here, and then they kill us.
00:37:48.000And ISIS was doing that on a fairly regular basis.
00:37:51.000This is what we call the ultimate strawman argument from President Trump.
00:37:57.000Lindsey Graham rightly went after Trump over all of this.
00:38:00.000He says that Trump shamelessly abandoned them, which is strong language from Lindsey Graham, who's been a very, very strong ally of President Trump throughout his presidency.
00:38:09.000Graham said, pray for our Kurdish allies who have been shamelessly abandoned by the Trump administration.
00:38:13.000This move ensures the reemergence of ISIS.
00:38:17.000And there's really no rationale for it other than Trump probably got somebody in his ear saying, keep the campaign promise, pull out the troops.
00:38:23.000Barack Obama did the exact same thing.
00:38:25.000Turkey, by the way, immediately moved within 24 hours to start killing as many Kurds as humanly possible.
00:38:29.000According to the Washington Post, Turkey's government launched a long-expected offensive into northeastern Syria on Wednesday, with airstrikes and shelling targeting Syrian Kurdish fighters who have played a central role in aiding the U.S.-led battle against the Islamic State militant group.
00:38:43.000The operation, with some ground forces crossing the border later, came just days after President Trump's startling announcement that the United States would not stand in Turkey's way, bringing sharp rebukes from even the president's Republican allies.
00:38:54.000The Turkish foray threatened a further fracture of war-shattered Syria as Ankara, the capital of Turkey, moved to create a safe zone after failing to agree on its size and nature during negotiations with the United States.
00:39:05.000Turkey's goal is to push the Syrian Kurds, considered enemies by Turkey, from the border region, and apparently civilians are already being killed in this foray.
00:39:12.000Now, one of the arguments that Trump put out today, he said, well, what have the Kurds ever done for us?
00:39:16.000He says, well, you know, they've only been defending their own sovereign territory.
00:39:19.000They weren't there at Normandy, right?
00:39:20.000They weren't there in other foreign wars.
00:39:41.000does have an interest in ensuring that American allies are not abandoned, especially when the cost is minimal.
00:39:46.000I mean, we're not talking about sacrificing thousands of troops for the freedom of the Kurds.
00:39:51.000That would be a legit argument about whether we should do that.
00:39:54.000And I think a strong argument made that we shouldn't.
00:39:56.000But if you're talking about sacrificing no troops just to have people standing there so the Turks don't go in and murder thousands of people, it seems like a pretty strong argument to leave the troops there.
00:40:10.000Sergio Gore, who is the, he's one of the press people for Rand Paul, who's an isolationist.
00:40:14.000He says, it's expected that some in the GOP who took us into these endless quagmires in the Middle East are unhappy about ending wars, but where is the left?
00:40:37.000It turns out the West has been present in the Middle East for quite a long time.
00:40:41.000And again, we weren't really present in Afghanistan after the late 1980s.
00:40:44.000It did not redound to our benefit, particularly.
00:40:46.000So, again, bad policy from President Trump.
00:40:49.000Meanwhile, the 2020 race is getting weird.
00:40:52.000Hillary Clinton is popping up her head again.
00:40:55.000This all happened because Hillary Clinton did an interview with Judy Woodruff in which she explained that if she ran, she would beat President Trump again.
00:41:03.000Of course, she won the popular vote, but she did not beat President Trump, which is why she's not sitting in the Oval Office right now.
00:41:08.000So here is Hillary Clinton explaining that, yes, she could be Trump again.
00:41:12.000By the way, the polls do not show this.
00:41:14.000It truly is remarkable how obsessed he remains with me.
00:41:17.000But this latest tweet is so typical of him.
00:41:23.000Nothing has been more examined and looked at than my emails.
00:42:02.000The crooked one must explain all of her high crimes and misdemeanors, including how and why she deleted 30,000 emails after getting C subpoena.
00:42:14.000And then Hillary Clinton tweeted back, don't tempt me, do your job.
00:42:18.000Man, Hillary Clinton jumping back in finally might make this thing fun again.
00:42:23.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden is out there suggesting that Trump should be impeached.
00:42:27.000This, of course, because one thing is true.
00:42:30.000Joe Biden certainly does not want his son, his own conduct in Ukraine, made the center of attention.
00:42:34.000Again, here is Joe Biden going after Trump.
00:42:37.000With his words and his actions, President Trump has indicted himself by obstructing justice, refusing to comply with the congressional inquiry.
00:42:53.000In full view of the world and the American people, Donald Trump has violated his oath of office, betrayed this nation, and committed impeachable acts.
00:43:04.000To preserve our Constitution, our democracy, our basic integrity, He should be impeached.
00:43:11.000Okay, he still has not actually explained on what basis.
00:43:39.000Okay, Peter Schweitzer has a piece in the New York Times today.
00:43:42.000The Biden campaign is super pissed off about it.
00:43:45.000The piece is called, What Hunter Biden Did Was Legal, and That's the Problem.
00:43:48.000And Peter Schweitzer, who has written a bunch of books about corruption inside Washington, is really a terrific researcher.
00:43:55.000He suggests that the Washington Corrupt Practices Act is necessary to stop political families from self-dealing.
00:44:02.000He says, as Vice President, Joe Biden served as point person on American policy toward China and Ukraine.
00:44:07.000In both instances, his son, Hunter, a businessman, landed deals he was apparently unqualified to score, save for one thing, his father.
00:44:13.000And then he describes the fact that in December 2013, Joe and Hunter Biden flew aboard Air Force Two to China.
00:44:18.000Less than two weeks after the trip, Hunter's firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, which he founded with two other businessmen in June 2013, finalized a deal to open a fund, BHR Partners.
00:44:27.000Thus far, the firm has invested about $2.1 billion, according to its website.
00:44:31.000In trying to disprove a link between the father's powerful position and the son's surprising success, Hunter Biden's lawyers claim he didn't take an equity stake in BHR Partners until after Biden left office.
00:44:41.000But he took a board seat when it was founded in December 2013.
00:44:44.000At the same time, his business partner was a vice chairman.
00:44:47.000With the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, Joe Biden became point person in Ukraine, too.
00:44:51.000That same year, Hunter Biden landed a board position with the Ukrainian energy giant Burisma Holdings.
00:44:56.000Despite having no background in energy or Ukraine, he was paid as much as $50,000 a month, according to financial records.
00:45:03.000Why would someone with so little experience be able to command such enormous payments?
00:45:07.000It's pretty obvious his daddy was Joe Biden.
00:45:10.000So when he says no scandals, what he really means is please don't investigate me.
00:45:16.000And as it turns out, the other Democrats are going to have some problems too.
00:45:19.000So it came out just a couple of days ago that Elizabeth Warren apparently has been issuing statements that are not consistent about why she was fired in 1971 from a job as a teacher.
00:45:50.000And then that summer, I actually didn't have the education courses, so I was on an emergency certificate, it was called.
00:45:58.000And I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, I don't think this is going to work out for me.
00:46:07.000Okay, I don't think this is going to work out for me.
00:46:09.000Now, she's been claiming simultaneously that she was actually let go because she was pregnant.
00:46:12.000I am woman, hear me be victimized is her sort of campaign point.
00:46:16.000Now she's sort of sticking with the story.
00:46:18.000It doesn't matter that the records show that she resigned.
00:46:21.000It doesn't matter that they offered unanimously to extend Warren a second year contract with that emergency certificate in place.
00:46:28.000She's still gonna stick with this story because she has to keep pretending she's a victim.
00:46:31.000This sort of stuff will come back to bite Elizabeth Warren directly in the ass, right?
00:46:35.000This is exactly what she did with the Pocahontas nonsense.
00:46:37.000She's trying to claim a mantle of victimhood because she needs it in the Democratic primaries, but...
00:46:42.000She's putting herself in for a world of hurt because if she's lying about victimology, she's had a pretty privileged life in the United States.
00:46:47.000If she's lying about victimology, that is not something that's going to run down to her benefit.
00:47:41.000There's no evidence for this, other than her own account.
00:47:43.000Again, the actual documents, according to the Washington Free Beacon, suggest that she resigned and that her resignation was accepted with regret.
00:47:52.000So, I'm sure this will not be the end of that particular...
00:47:58.000Nonetheless, she is the frontrunner and she's not stacking up all that well against President Trump by poll data, so we'll see how all of this works for her as time goes on.
00:48:08.000Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then a thing that I hate.
00:49:54.000I mean, there's no question they could write a hook, but the movie is cute and does show sort of the power of music and there's a sort of moving moment at the end where you discover that the world is Somehow, in some ways better, because the Beatles music was brought about later in time.
00:50:12.000It's sort of an interesting flick, and the premise of it is interesting as well.
00:50:17.000At the very least, it's fun and charming.
00:50:18.000Go check it out, yesterday, by the director of Slumdog Millionaire.
00:50:22.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:50:24.000Okay, so, over Yom Kippur, there were a bevy of anti-Semitic incidents, as we have become used to.
00:50:32.000So, in the United States, there was apparently a fire set on the grounds of a synagogue in Brooklyn, which has become sort of rote, frankly.
00:50:44.000We've seen a bunch of these sorts of attacks in New York.
00:50:47.000This Brooklyn synagogue was apparently, again, somebody set a fire right there on the front steps during Yom Kippur.
00:50:56.000According to the police, New York City has seen a massive surge in hate crimes.
00:51:00.000Many of them have been targeting Jews.
00:51:02.000Also, Over in Yom Kippur, there was an attack on a shoal in Germany.
00:51:07.000The attack on the shoal in Germany was by a white supremacist who livestreamed this thing on Amazon.
00:51:15.000According to the UK Daily Mail, a gunman in a German synagogue ranted about feminism, immigration, and the Holocaust before he shot two people dead in a live-streamed anti-Semitic rampage on Judaism's holiest day.
00:51:24.000The shooter killed a man and a woman, threw a grenade into a Jewish cemetery, and left explosives near the synagogue in hell after failing to force his way inside while worshipers prayed on Yom Kippur.
00:51:33.000The suspect, named by Bild as a 27- I don't name terrorists, and I don't name mass shooters.
00:51:38.000He was, not to glorify him, he was later arrested after trying to flee in a taxi, according to German media.
00:51:45.000The German government offered deep sympathy and said it was an anti-Semitic attack, possibly motivated by right-wing extremism.
00:51:51.000He was wearing military fatigues and a helmet camera, and he shot a woman dead in the street after she confronted him outside the synagogue where about 80 people were praying.
00:51:57.000Now, I happen to be in Israel right now.
00:52:00.000And I will just note that many of the same people who claim that Israel is the rationale for anti-Semitism, the reason people hate Jews is because of Israel, because Israel is so cruel and terrible, and because of how they treat the Palestinians and all of this.
00:52:13.000These are the same people where if Israel didn't exist they would still be shooting Jews, there would just be no place for Jews to go.
00:52:18.000The fact is that thousands of Jews every year are leaving Europe and good for them because Europe is becoming a hellhole for Jews.
00:52:24.000The Wall Street Journal has reported on it.
00:52:26.000The New York Times has reported on it.
00:52:27.000It is not safe for Jews in places like France.
00:52:29.000It is increasingly not safe for Jews in places like Sweden, places like Germany, places like Great Britain.
00:52:34.000People are leaving en masse and the place they're going is to the State of Israel because the State of Israel is still a safe haven for the Jewish people.
00:52:40.000And the same people who are claiming that it's only Israel's presence that is causing anti-Semitism seem to forget that The Jews were killed in the millions when Israel didn't exist, specifically because no country would take in the Jews and because the Jews had no place to go.
00:52:52.000The British Empire was banning the Jews from entering the nascent state of Israel before it was the state of Israel, from entering British Palestine during the actual Holocaust itself.
00:53:02.000So for all the talk about why Israel is bad, why it shouldn't exist, why Israel is terrible and horrible and all this, the reason that Israel exists is because of stuff like this.
00:53:10.000It's because Jews have been the victims of anti-Semitism, will continue to be the victims of anti-Semitism, and so long as people keep maintaining the absolute stupid fiction that if Israel didn't exist, everybody would be nice to the- you know how historically ignorant you'd have to be to actually believe this?
00:53:26.000That if Israel didn't exist, everyone would be nice to the Jews?
00:53:29.000Within living memory, three-quarters of the Jewish population on planet Earth was slaughtered, so I'm gonna go no on that.
00:53:34.000I'm gonna go no- and the state of Israel wasn't there then.
00:54:26.000Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
00:54:29.000You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
00:54:35.000But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.