In yet another indicator that the mainstream media is rife with corruption and conflicts of interest, CNN has now hired Laura Jarrett, daughter of Valerie Jarrett, to cover President Trump's Department of Justice, as The Blaze reports. According to Vanity Fair, Laura Jarrett is dedicated to, " ... promoting civil rights and social equality for women and minorities." So she's probably going to be completely objective about the Trump administration, right? Well, not exactly. The media claim that such relationships have no bearing on their coverage, but there is something wrong with pretending objectivity when it is clearer every single day that such objectivity is a figment of the media's imagination. Today's After Show Was Hosted By: Alex Blumberg, Senior Editor, The Weekly Standard, and Editor-in-Chief, Ben Shapiro. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. The album art for this episode was done by Micah Vellian and Haley Shaw, and the music for the episode was written and performed by Mark Phillips, and produced by Bobby Lord, and was edited by Matthew Boll, and additional selections were done by Matthew Keyser, and Matt Knost. Additional engineering and mastering assistance was provided by Matthew McConaughey, and Matthew Kuchins, and Ben Koppel, and Bobby Lord. Thank you to Rachel Ward for his excellent mixing and mastering skills, and to our excellent sound design, and our thanks to our sponsors, and thanks to all of our supporters, and everyone who helped us out on this week's effort to make this episode a beautiful listenable listening experience. Thank you so much to everyone who submitted their support and review and review, and all of your support and effort is worth it, and we really appreciate it, it really really is a lot of effort, and it really means it's worth it. - Thank you, you really really really gets it out there, really really good, it's really really, really, we really really can do it, too much of it, thanks really, good, really can really, and you really can say it, good it really, Thank you really, thanks, good n it, thank you, and really, truly, and good luck, good night, good morning, and thank you... - The Eighty-five Centuries, Good Morning, Thank You, Good Night, and Thank You Again, Again, Thanks, Thank Me, Again Again, and Again, & More, and Eff Effie, -- -- Thank You & Effie & Thank You... -- -- -
00:00:00.000In yet another indicator that the mainstream media is rife with corruption and conflicts of interest, CNN has now hired Laura Jarrett, daughter of Valerie Jarrett, to cover President Trump's Department of Justice.
00:00:10.000As The Blaze reports, CNN touted Jarrett's background defending companies and individuals in government investigations brought by the Justice Department.
00:00:17.000Valerie Jarrett wasn't just President Obama's top advisor.
00:00:19.000She's also personally close to the Obamas, to the extent that she's reportedly moving in with them in their new Washington, D.C.
00:00:25.000Jarrett called Trump's election a punch in the stomach, soul-crushing.
00:00:29.000According to Vanity Fair, Laura Jarrett is dedicated to, quote, promoting civil rights and social equality for women and minorities.
00:00:35.000So she's probably going to be completely objective about the Trump administration, you'd think, right?
00:00:39.000Look, this is nothing new from the mainstream media Democratic Party complex.
00:00:42.000Ben Rhodes, the national security advisor to President Obama who actively lied to the entire media about the Iran deal, is brother to David Rhodes, president of CBS.
00:00:50.000ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman, she's the wife of Jake Harney, former Obama press secretary.
00:00:54.000George Stephanopoulos, ABC News' leading anchor, he's a former Clinton staffer.
00:00:58.000Ben Sherwood, president of Disney-ABC television group, is brother to former Obama special assistant Elizabeth Sherwood Randall.
00:01:04.000The media claim that such relationships have no bearing on coverage.
00:01:08.000People with close relationships to those in power tend to favor those people in their coverage.
00:01:13.000After all, that's the entire basis of the rumors about President Trump's conflicts of interest with regard to his businesses, which are now supposedly run by his kids.
00:01:20.000Their relationship makes him more likely to act in corrupt fashion to benefit those businesses.
00:01:25.000Why wouldn't that same logic apply to the media?
00:01:27.000There's nothing wrong with assigning Valerie Jarrett's kid to cover the DOJ, but there is something wrong with pretending objectivity when it is clearer every single day that such objectivity is a figment of the media's imagination.
00:01:47.000We'll start with everything going on with Jeff Sessions in just a moment.
00:01:50.000But before we do that, we have to say thank you to our advertisers over at Wink.
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00:04:15.000And it was unclear whether he testified he hadn't met the Russians in his capacity as somebody on the Trump campaign or whether he hadn't met the Russians in his capacity at all.
00:04:23.000What he said, Al Franken asked Sessions what he would do if he learned of communications with the Russians from the Trump campaign, and Sessions said, I've been called a surrogate a time or two in that campaign.
00:04:31.000I did not have communications with the Russians.
00:04:33.000So is that a denial of any contact, or is it a denial of contact as a surrogate?
00:04:39.000Because he could say, look, as a senator, yeah, I met with the Russian ambassador, but we didn't discuss the campaign, so it didn't have anything to do with Trump.
00:04:45.000Senator Pat Leahy asked Sessions in writing, quote, Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after Election Day?
00:05:21.000But the problem is that now that he testified in front of Congress that he didn't,
00:05:25.000Or at least he didn't in a certain capacity, and the language is a little bit vague.
00:05:27.000There are a lot of people calling for his recusal.
00:05:30.000There are a bunch of people in the Senate who have said that they don't routinely meet with the Russians.
00:05:34.000Twenty lawmakers from the Armed Services Committee told the Washington Post they didn't meet with the Russian ambassador last year, but a bunch of senators have also said it's not out of the realm of possibility or out of the realm of normalcy.
00:06:31.000I don't think it's a great argument, but it's a fair argument.
00:06:34.000But instead, they're saying he should resign.
00:06:35.000So you have people like Nancy Pelosi saying, after lying under oath to Congress about his communications with the Russians, the Attorney General must resign.
00:06:43.000And then she was joined in that call by Elizabeth Warren, among others.
00:06:46.000Listen, Eric Holder, the Obama Attorney General, he didn't resign despite a scandal-plagued career ranging from Fast and Furious to overseeing journalists and attempting to prosecute journalists.
00:06:57.000He was actually held in contempt of Congress and he didn't resign.
00:07:00.000Loretta Lynch, as you recall, the Attorney General under President Obama after Holder, she refused to recuse herself from the investigation of Hillary Clinton.
00:07:08.000She said she wasn't going to interfere unless it went the way she didn't want, in which case she would interfere.
00:07:12.000So for Democrats to suddenly say that Sessions has to recuse himself based on he once met with the Russian ambassador is really over the top.
00:07:19.000But saying that he should resign is super duper duper over the top.
00:07:22.000Trump says it's a partisan hit job and he's basically right.
00:07:24.000The White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she says this is the latest attack against the Trump administration by partisan Democrats.
00:08:19.000And there are good arguments both ways.
00:08:21.000On the one hand, there's that argument.
00:08:22.000On the other hand, there's the argument that if anybody can basically be prevented from doing their job by a media and a Democratic Party that insists that every minor problem is a major problem, then nothing's ever going to get done.
00:08:34.000If you're accusing yourself over, I once met the Russian ambassador at my office, then what won't you recuse yourself over?
00:09:04.000Not be able to have control over the investigation is just not true.
00:09:07.000As an example, the Deputy Attorney General for Loretta Lynch was that lady who refused to prosecute Donald Trump's executive order and ended up being fired.
00:09:14.000So the Deputy Attorney General ends up looking a lot like the Attorney General under whom they serve.
00:09:22.000Even for people like me who are suspicious of Donald Trump's relations with the Russians, because there's a lot of smoke, a lot of smoke, but we haven't seen any real fire yet.
00:09:30.000Even for somebody like me who looks at Paul Manafort and says, that's kind of weird, and looks at Donald Trump constantly praising Putin and says, well, that's kind of weird, and looks at the fact that Michael Flynn was so warm with Vladimir Putin and said, that's kind of weird.
00:09:40.000Even for me, this is a nothing burger of a story.
00:09:44.000Balls and strikes are all that matters.
00:09:45.000I'm not going to rip Trump for doing something I don't think is particularly wrong.
00:09:48.000That said, it's pretty clear that the Democrats are losing their minds.
00:09:51.000And they're particularly losing their minds over this moment with Karen Owens.
00:09:55.000And I want to talk about this briefly because we ran a story a couple of days ago in which we talked about the Democrats not standing up for Karen Owens.
00:10:03.000And people took that to mean that we were saying that they had never stood up for Karen Owens.
00:10:06.000We never claimed that they never stood up for Karen Owens.
00:10:08.000What we said, as I said on the podcast yesterday, was that the Democrats stood at the beginning and then they sat down.
00:10:14.000And when people say, well, they sat down, it's not a big deal, then why is it that in all the pictures you can see that half the room is sitting and half the room is standing?
00:10:21.000If it wasn't coordinated, if it wasn't a matter of partisanship, then why is it that half the room is standing and half the room is sitting?
00:10:27.000Why wouldn't it just be a bunch of randos who are kind of standing and sitting together?
00:10:30.000Why wouldn't some Republicans have sit and some Democrats sit?
00:10:32.000Everybody just got tired and bored and so they sat down.
00:10:49.000Nonetheless, Snopes and PolitiFact, instead of ranking as half true or totally true the claim that Democrats sat down for the video, they said that it was completely false.
00:11:02.000Benny Johnson is the guy who initially reported this from IJ Review, and he tweeted out pictures of Keith Ellison and Debbie Wasserman Schultz sitting down in the middle of the second ovation.
00:11:14.000I mean, I'm looking at the picture right now, right before me, and he's not the only one.
00:11:17.000I mean, they're sitting down, an entire body of the Democratic Party is sitting down.
00:11:20.000Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi, by the end, are sitting down, which is exactly what we wrote in the piece.
00:11:25.000But again, PolitiFact and Snopes and the rest of these fact-checkers are lefties, and so they feel the need to overreach because they're desperate to disprove the idea that Democrats
00:11:34.000Made a boo-boo by not standing up the whole time, which they obviously should have.
00:11:37.000Okay, that's just one indicator of how the Democrats are overplaying their hand.
00:11:41.000But they're losing their minds in general because any time Trump does something good and isn't a universal crap show, they begin to go crazy.
00:11:48.000So Michael Moore, you know, again, going off on this whole Karen Owens thing, he's suggesting that Donald Trump used the seal widow.
00:12:19.000Okay, as I said yesterday, two things can be true at once.
00:12:22.000One can be that Trump wanted to honor her.
00:12:24.000The second can be that Donald Trump was using her as a political prop.
00:12:28.000Okay, I'm just gonna be perfectly frank about this.
00:12:29.000Politicians use people as political props all the time.
00:12:32.000Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton stood in front of the flag-draped coffins from Benghazi and lied to the families of Benghazi for political gain.
00:12:39.000Barack Obama in 2014 invited a wounded warrior to the State of the Union.
00:12:42.000Did he do so because he was so respectful of the troops or did he do so as a political prop?
00:13:10.000Every time somebody on the right brings out a family member of somebody who's been slain in the line of duty, then they're a political prop, according to the Democrats.
00:13:18.000So when Republicans talk about Pat Smith, who's the mother of Sean Smith, who was killed in Benghazi, then she was just a political prop.
00:13:23.000But every time the Democrats tried out a Cindy Sheehan,
00:13:47.000This woman wanted to be there, and I thought Mary Catherine Hamm of CNN had the exact right take on this, which was, you know, Ryan Owens' widow, Karen Owens, she has every right to be there, she has every right to feel the applause of the entire nation shower down upon her in thanks, and one day she'll be able to show her kids the tape of when their father was cheered by the entire nation at a State of the Union address.
00:14:06.000So, you know, the Democrats are losing their minds over this.
00:14:09.000Jake Tapper at CNN, who's reporting I generally like, he also went after Trump because Trump at one point apparently had said about the Yemen raid, they lost Ryan, meaning the military, meaning the generals, and Jake Tapper objected to this, meaning you authorized the raid, why don't you say we lost Ryan, why do you make it about they?
00:14:39.000And one might think that the commander-in-chief who signed off on that raid would also think in terms of we lost Ryan.
00:14:47.000Accountability and responsibility, these are important principles.
00:14:51.000Okay, so this is a little bit of an overstate by Tapper.
00:14:56.000Let's see what comes out about this Yemen raid, whether there was actual intelligence gathered.
00:14:59.000There's a lot of controversy over that, but trying to say that Trump is somehow disrespecting the memory of this guy, I think that's an overstatement.
00:15:07.000Mike Pence, I think, hits this right on the head.
00:15:08.000He says all of this is a great disservice to the family.
00:15:30.000If you're going to rip Trump for using her...
00:15:33.000Then you have to show that he used her and didn't honor her, and I'm not sure that that happened.
00:15:37.000I think that's, again, a wild overstatement by desperate Democrats.
00:15:40.000How desperate are the Democrats at this point?
00:15:42.000They're so desperate that they're thinking toward 2020, and they're looking at their field, and they're realizing that their field is barren.
00:16:04.000Have you ever thought that given the popularity you have, we haven't broken the glass ceiling yet for women, that you could actually run for president and actually be elected?
00:17:44.000You can also watch Clavin's show live, where you're going to have, right now we're giving away free copies of the DVD of The Arroyo, which is the fictional film set on the southern border, about the drug cartels taking over the southern border and using it for illegal immigration and such.
00:17:58.000It's a very good film, and you can check it out over our Facebook page as well, but if you want a copy of it,