Trump's EU Ambassador Gordon Sumlin revises his testimony in a big way, and we analyze the results of last night's off-year elections. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers Use the promo code: CRIMINALS at checkout to receive 10% off your first pack! Thanks to Pale Fire and Mossy Creek for sponsoring this episode, and thanks to our sponsor, ExpressVPN for sponsoring our next sponsor, VaynerMentors. If you haven t gotten a VPN yet, you can get a free one by going to vp.co/getavr and entering the offer code: VGPODCAST. Vp.CO/VCROMPODCAST is a Vt. based podcast that covers politics, policy, and politics-related news. It was created in response to the Blackface scandal that broke out in the wake of the Michael Bloomberg scandal in the late 1980s and the subsequent investigation by the New York Times into the use of blackface in Michael Bloomberg s yearbook. It's a must-listen episode for anyone with an interest in race and identity politics and related matters related to race, identity, and identity. The show is now available on all major podcast directories, including Audible, Podcoin, and The Huffington Post. It is also available on Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your news and information is available, including your chance to be heard on the show. This episode is also transcribed and posted on Audible.org or your favorite podcasting app, by The Daily Mail, and other good listening options. Please rate and review the show by clicking here. Thank you for listening and sharing it on your podcasting service. Thanks for listening to the show? I really really appreciate it! - Ben Shapiro - Thank you, Ben Shapiro, and I hope you enjoy this episode? - The Best of Ben Shapiro and I really do appreciate it, too much so much so that he s got it out there on the rest of it too much of it really does it really is really good, really can do it so much out there too much, really really does that s really good and I ll send it out that s not just that good of a good thing, really is that really good of it, really means it s not good enough, really just really good so much etc.
00:00:00.000Trump, EU Ambassador Gordon Sumlin revises his testimony in a big way, Republicans play defense, and we analyze the results of last night's off-year elections.
00:01:13.000But it is a bad thing for Republicans.
00:01:15.000Virginia was much worse for Republicans.
00:01:17.000Virginia, the entire state has now turned blue.
00:01:19.000The state legislature in Virginia is now completely run by Democrats.
00:01:22.000It had narrowly divided between Republicans and Democrats before.
00:01:26.000All of this should have Republicans feeling quite nervous because if you're going to take away one message from the election results last night, it is that Republicans continue to do fine in rural areas.
00:01:36.000But if they underperform at all in those rural areas, they are toast.
00:01:40.000In the suburbs, they're experiencing significant Losses.
00:01:43.000And those losses are in large part due to a perception of the Republican Party that is censored on President Trump.
00:01:50.000And I'll prove this to you with some numbers in just a second.
00:01:53.000First, let me explain what exactly happened last night.
00:01:55.000Well, according to the Washington Post, Democrats gained control of both houses of the Virginia General Assembly on Tuesday, tapping strength in the suburbs to consolidate power for the first time in a generation and deliver a rebuke to President Trump.
00:02:07.000Several results were still close after polls closed on the most expensive and most watched Virginia legislative races in years.
00:02:13.000But Democrats flipped at least two seats in the State Senate and at least five in the House of Delegates to take majorities in both of those houses.
00:02:19.000Officials reported unusually high turnout in an election that served as an opening salvo in next year's presidential showdown, a test of Democratic defiance and Republican resolve in the era of Trump.
00:02:27.000Now remember, this should have been a bad year for Democrats.
00:02:33.000The governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, was caught up in a scandal in which he was apparently either wearing blackface or a KKK outfit, one of the two, in his medical school yearbook from the 1980s, and had been caught on tape talking about the killing of babies after they are born.
00:02:46.000And then the lieutenant governor had been caught up in a sexual assault scandal.
00:02:50.000And then the third in line, in the Virginia chain of command, had been caught up in his own blackface issue.
00:02:57.000This was supposed to be a bad year for Democrats.
00:03:12.000Senators, a majority of its congressional delegation, all three statewide office holders are now Democrats.
00:03:17.000The state was carried by Democrats in the past three presidential elections.
00:03:20.000Republicans have not won a statewide contest in Virginia since 2009.
00:03:24.000The last Republican in the Northern Virginia delegation, Delegate Tim Hugo, lost to Democrat Dan Helmer.
00:03:30.000National Democratic organizations and interest groups, according to the Washington Post, carpeted the state with money, boosting suburban legislative races to the spending level of congressional elections.
00:03:39.000They've been spending out the wazoo, particularly with regard to the suburbs.
00:03:43.000And of course, Democratic Governor Ralph Northam is fine.
00:03:47.000He is poised to be one of the most consequential Virginia governors in recent times, according to the Washington Post.
00:03:52.000He promises to work with the new Democratic majority to enact gun control, push forward LGBTQ agenda, and fight climate change.
00:04:02.000Northam said, Virginia is officially blue.
00:04:05.000Which is interesting because his face is officially white, but apparently it depends on sort of how he decides to dress that day.
00:04:10.000Republicans, who when Trump was elected had a seemingly insurmountable majority in the House of Delegates, lost footholds in several suburban districts.
00:04:16.000They struggled to separate themselves from the unpopular president and to take moderate positions on gun control and a Medicaid expansion after years of voting against them in the General Assembly.
00:04:24.000Terry McAuliffe said they're not only losing Virginia, they're losing America.
00:04:27.000He said, I think Donald Trump was humiliated tonight.
00:05:00.000I don't think that if Trump had set foot in Northern Virginia, suddenly Republicans would be winning sweeping victories in the suburbs of Virginia.
00:05:06.000With that said, Trump at least has that defense to offer, right?
00:05:09.000I wasn't called upon, I didn't enter, so how are you going to blame me about all this?
00:05:12.000But it is true that Trump's suburban numbers have been consistently bad since 2016.
00:05:16.0002018 was a wipeout in the suburbs for Republicans.
00:05:19.000We'll give you more on the results of the election in Virginia plus the election in Kentucky.
00:05:24.000And some good news, some sort of bright spots for Republicans, even though this was in fact a very blue night for Democrats nearly across the board.
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00:07:39.000A cyclist who was fired after flipping the bird at President Trump's motorcade has now been elected to local office in Virginia.
00:07:45.000It was a bad night in Virginia for Republicans.
00:07:47.000Julie Briskman, whose one-handed salute, according to the AFP, was captured in an AFP photograph that went viral, beat the Republican incumbent to a seat on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors in state elections that saw Trump's Republican Party suffer a series of stinging defeats.
00:07:59.000The single mother of two teens lost her job as a marketing analyst for a U.S.
00:08:02.000government and military subcontractor after the snapshot of her gesture spread across media and the internet in 2017, but she then ran for office.
00:08:09.000She ran for local office on the Democratic ticket, and she celebrated her victory in a tweet that linked to a copy of the image.
00:08:15.000And she said, so proud that we were able to hashtag Flip Loudon.
00:08:18.000So, exciting stuff for the Democrats over in Virginia.
00:08:22.000Meanwhile, over in Kentucky, it was a bad night for Matt Bevin, as I mentioned early on.
00:08:27.000So, Matt Bevin, lost his gubernatorial seat.
00:08:30.000Now, again, that's really not on Trump.
00:08:32.000Okay, this one, like in Virginia, you can say that's sort of on Trump because the suburbs didn't come in for Trump and then they weren't going to come in for Trump.
00:08:39.000In Kentucky, a large part of this was on Matt Bevin himself.
00:08:42.000Matt Bevin was running a 20-point personal popularity deficit as of like three weeks ago.
00:08:48.000For most of his tenure, he has been literally the most unpopular governor in America.
00:08:52.000So him losing is really more on him than it is on Trump.
00:08:54.000Trump came in, rallied the base, and this actually became a much closer election than a lot of people expected it to be maybe three or four weeks ago.
00:09:01.000By the time of the election, because of Trump's intervention, Bevin was favored in the odds to win by like two to one odds, but he ended up losing anyway.
00:09:37.000According to the New York Times, Democrats in Kentucky, Governor Matt Bevin, a deeply unpopular Republican, refused to concede the election to his Democratic challenger, Attorney General Andy Beshear.
00:09:47.000With 100% of the precincts counted, Beshear was ahead by approximately 5,100 votes.
00:09:51.000Beshear presented himself as the winner, telling supporters he expected Bevin to, quote, honor the election that was held tonight, which is funny.
00:09:57.000Probably Bevin should just walk around for the next several years claiming that he's the actual legitimate governor of Kentucky.
00:10:02.000You know, like Stacey Abrams in Georgia.
00:10:04.000Bashir said tonight, voters in Kentucky sent a message loud and clear for everyone to hear.
00:10:08.000It's a message that says our elections don't have to be about right versus left.
00:10:11.000They're still about right versus wrong.
00:10:12.000Now, Bashir did run on a moderate platform.
00:10:15.000Many of the Democrats in Virginia were running on a more moderate platform.
00:10:18.000So, this should be a lesson to Democrats.
00:10:21.000Just run against Trump and be moderate, and you'll probably do okay, particularly in the suburbs.
00:10:25.000Democrats at the national level are taking the wrong lesson.
00:10:27.000So everybody is taking the wrong lesson, I think, as per our usual arrangement.
00:10:31.000Republicans are going to take from this, we need more cowbell, right, more Trump.
00:10:34.000And Democrats are going to take away from this, we need more progressive leftism that is anti-Trump, as opposed to more moderate candidates like Beshear in Kentucky, who was not campaigning as a radical in the same way that the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are.
00:10:48.000Bevin's troubles, however, were not a drag on other Republicans.
00:10:51.000They captured every other statewide race in Kentucky.
00:10:54.000So Kentucky voters were not really rejecting the Republican Party, per se.
00:11:00.000Daniel Cameron, in a historic win, handily won the Attorney General's race.
00:11:04.000He became the first black Black Americans who claim the office and the first Republican to do so in over 70 years.
00:11:11.000So it's a major victory for Republicans there.
00:11:13.000Republicans also captured the governor's mansion in Mississippi as Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves defeated Attorney General Jim Hood by about five percentage points in an open seat race that illustrated the enduring conservatism of the Deep South according to the New York Times.
00:11:24.000I do love that they talk about the quote-unquote enduring conservatism of the Deep South.
00:11:27.000Deep South voted Democrat routinely up until maybe the past 25 years.
00:11:31.000The final governorship Up for grabs in these off-year elections is in Louisiana, Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, is facing re-election a week from Saturday.
00:11:39.000In New Jersey, Republicans were actually on the cusp of their first legislative gains in nearly a decade.
00:11:43.000With final results still being tallied late on Tuesday, Republicans looked likely to pick up two seats in the Assembly and one in the Senate, powered largely by a surge along the southern part of the state where Trump won easily in 2016 despite Democrats' local advantage.
00:11:57.000In Pennsylvania, The news is worse for Republicans.
00:12:00.000Democrats are poised to gain control of local government in a bunch of suburban Philadelphia counties that were Republican strongholds.
00:12:05.000In other words, the red areas are getting redder, the blue areas are getting bluer, and the purple areas are getting bluer.
00:12:25.000That if you're hoping to win back the suburbs as a Republican, what you really need to be focused in on is more policy, more the Democrats are radical, more their agenda stinks.
00:12:33.000And less on personal loyalty to Trump, for example.
00:12:37.000It doesn't mean that you shouldn't back the president, right?
00:12:39.000It does mean that Trump is not popular in the suburbs and hanging on his coattails on the suburbs was a fail in 2018.
00:12:45.000It's likely to be a fail in 2020 as well.
00:12:50.000Who does the national political correspondence for NBC News and MSNBC.
00:12:54.000He was analyzing some of the numbers in Kentucky and what it showed is that Trump in 2016 won about 68% of Boone County, 60% of Kenton County, and 59% of Campbell County.
00:13:07.000Those were Cincinnati suburb counties.
00:13:10.000How exactly did these various candidates fare in those districts?
00:13:13.000Bevin underperformed Trump dramatically in every one of those districts.
00:13:19.000The other Republicans actually performed basically the same as Trump.
00:13:23.000Some of them even outperformed Trump in those in those districts.
00:13:27.000So it's also worthwhile noting that in even more liberal suburban areas, there were some moves to curb the extraordinarily leftward slant of the Democratic Party.
00:13:37.000Daniel Horowitz points out a conservative review That suburban voters electing Democrats aren't actually all that radical.
00:13:44.000And he points to what just happened in Tucson.
00:13:46.000Tucson had a Proposition 205, which was an effort to make the city a sanctuary for illegal aliens.
00:13:50.000It went down in flames last night by a margin of 71% to 29%, despite backing from the ACLU and other special interest groups.
00:13:58.000Horowitz says despite Republicans facing increasing problems in the suburbs, a trend highlighted last night by the GOP slaughter in Virginia's state and local elections, it's clear much of it is a backlash against Trump's personality, the GOP's dysfunction and lack of vision, and the absence of a bold contrast highlighting the radical nature of Democrats.
00:14:13.000It's not Trump's perceived policies that are getting rejected.
00:14:20.000It voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, yet even in that area, more than 70% of voters said they did not want police prevented from inquiring about immigration status so the criminals can be turned over to ICE.
00:14:32.000Corwood says this is the same reason why Montgomery County, Maryland, after much scrutiny of its sanctuary policies, is beginning to change its tune and reverse sanctuary policies despite being a county Hillary won by 55 points.
00:14:42.000Corwood says the moral of the story is that the GOP brand is tarnished for reasons that have nothing to do with the core agenda Democrats are seeking to implement.
00:14:48.000For example, a radical sheriff and prosecutor who opposed ICE won their respective races in Prince William County, Virginia.
00:14:54.000But did they really win because of those views?
00:14:56.000Or did they win despite those views because the GOP brand is so incredibly damaged?
00:15:06.000I mean, he points out that there are areas where Republicans are not Seen as off-putting and they're wildly popular.
00:15:14.000For example, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has governed in very conservative fashion, has a 72% voter approval rating today.
00:15:21.000And that number is 82% among Hispanics, despite the fact that he has aggressively pushed anti-sanctuary legislation and is pushing mandatory e-verify as well.
00:15:31.000Washington state voters last night rejected affirmative action.
00:15:34.000Washington state is about as dark blue as it gets.
00:15:37.000So, this is... Meanwhile, in Texas, by a margin of 75 to 25, Horowitz points out, voters passed a constitutional amendment banning a state income tax, a measure that will now require two-thirds support in both houses of the legislature to even levy a 1% income tax.
00:15:53.000So, is that really about the Republican agenda, or the Democratic agenda, or is it about personality foibles?
00:15:59.000I mean, it seems that it's much more about personality foibles.
00:16:03.000Again, a perfect example, Daniel Cameron, the guy who historically just won the Attorney General slot, the black Attorney General Republican of the state of Kentucky.
00:16:11.000He said that he was willing to work across the lines.
00:16:13.000He said that he has pledged his support to conservative policies, but he does not appear to be a radical.
00:16:20.000He's only 33 years old, so he is a rising star for sure.
00:16:24.000You know, the fact that he wins in very handy fashion suggests that, again, personality matters an awful lot.
00:16:31.000Matters an awful lot when it comes to politics.
00:16:34.000And it suggests that President Trump is gonna have to minimize the Trumpiness of his campaign if he wishes to win a sweeping victory come 2020.
00:16:41.000I'll give you some more evidence of this from Pennsylvania in just one second.
00:16:44.000First, let me tell you about this brand new thing I've got in my house.
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00:17:37.000Like, they'll actually send you a photo of the portrait, and then if you don't like how the portrait is turning out, then you can correct it.
00:17:43.000And if it turns out that you don't actually like it, then you don't have to take it.
00:18:20.000Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, again, bad night for the Republicans.
00:18:24.000According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Outside Pennsylvania, voter unrest with President Trump and the Republican Party he has taken over helped deliver victories for Democrats in Kentucky, where they narrowly took governorship, and Virginia, where they seized complete control of the state.
00:18:36.000The political forces that shaped last year's midterm elections showed no signs of abating Tuesday.
00:18:40.000Voters turned on Republicans and establishment Democrats alike in races from Philadelphia and Scranton to the suburbs of Delaware and Chester counties.
00:18:47.000Locally, Democrats will now hold all five seats on the Delaware County Council, a Republican stronghold since the Civil War.
00:18:53.000They also assumed a majority on the legislative body in Chester County.
00:18:56.000In Bucks County, Democrats captured the Board of Commissioners for the first time since 1983.
00:18:59.000Now, again, to be fair to President Trump, it is possible that because his name is not on the ballot, a lot of his voters didn't get out.
00:19:09.000And Democrats continue to be extremely excited about voting because Trump isn't on the ballot until he's on the ballot and the only way they can take their revenge is to get out and vote today.
00:19:18.000So maybe these numbers uptick once Trump is on the ballot.
00:19:21.000However, we've been, we, I mean conservatives, Republicans, have been significantly underperforming in the suburbs since 2018.
00:19:52.000But overall, Trump is alienating the very voters he needs to bring him victory in the suburbs And he needs to help revive state-level support for him.
00:20:00.000Now, again, a lot of people are going to say, well, you know, Barack Obama lost a bunch of state seats also during his election campaign, right?
00:20:13.000Off-year elections are usually bad for the party in power.
00:20:16.000The problem is that these may be permanent.
00:20:21.000We're not going to know the answers to whether these are permanent shifts, if this is shifting the country in a permanent direction, until President Trump is actually on the ballot again.
00:20:30.000In 2012, the forecast was that Barack Obama was in some trouble, given how many seats he had lost across the country.
00:20:36.000And then he won in 2012, in large part because he ran a very strong and a very concerted campaign.
00:21:21.000Well, speaking of all of that, this brings us to impeachment gate 2019.
00:21:25.000So the great benefit that President Trump has in 2020 that doesn't appear on the ballot in any of these off-year elections is the fact that Democrats are going to be On the ballot, and those Democrats are insanely radical.
00:22:56.000This is no way to bring the country together.
00:22:58.000This is no way for this party to beat Donald Trump.
00:23:00.000He says, there are a lot of ways to fix our healthcare system and to make our tax system fair, to address the challenge of climate change.
00:23:05.000I believe I've proposed the most progressive transformational ideas in the campaign and I can get them done.
00:23:10.000And he talks about all of his various plans.
00:23:13.000He says, I learned a long time ago, if you question someone's motivations rather than your judgment, you get than their judgment, you get nowhere.
00:23:19.000It's hard to get past go if you start off by saying the other person is in the pocket of special interests or is corrupt.
00:23:36.000And that's Trump's big advantage, is that if Democrats take the wrong lesson and run a radical campaign, Trump could easily win.
00:23:42.000But Trump would actually have to make a campaign about the Democrats' radicalism.
00:23:45.000Now, as we'll see, the Democrats are incredibly vulnerable on the score, which is why they're focusing in, as I've been saying now for weeks, on impeachment centrally.
00:23:53.000Make Democratic policies the issues, Democrats lose.
00:23:56.000Okay, we'll get to more of this in just one second.
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00:25:08.000Okay, so, speaking of the radicalism of Elizabeth Warren, I just have to bring you this hilarious and ironic and wonderful story about Senator Warren.
00:25:15.000So, Elizabeth Warren is now very, very angry at Twitter.
00:25:19.000I mean, weren't we told five seconds ago that she's very happy with Twitter because Twitter banned political ads, right?
00:25:35.000And I said at the time, that's a crackdown on basic free speech notions.
00:25:38.000Anybody should be able to run any ad that they want, and then we can fact-check those ads, and we can point out that they're wrong and that they're stupid.
00:25:44.000In fact, if you had the policy that every ad had to be fact-checked, half of the most effective political ads in American history would never have run.
00:25:52.000The Daisy ad of 1964, which is complete crap, that Barry Goldwater was going to get us into the nuclear war, never would have run.
00:25:58.000Hey, the ad that came from the anti-Mitt Romney super PAC in 2012, all about how Romney gave some lady cancer, right?
00:26:19.000So this is a perfect, hilarious, wonderful example of Elizabeth Warren learning the lesson of the monkey's paw.
00:26:25.000If you've ever read that short story, it's about a guy who gets three wishes, and then every one of his wishes ends up with precisely the opposite result of what he wanted, because he did not specifically say what he wanted.
00:26:37.000Really took a shot in the grill here from Twitter.
00:26:39.000Elizabeth Warren is proving to be an equal opportunist when it comes to taking on social media companies, says CNBC.
00:26:56.000Or she's just a flaming hot hypocrite.
00:26:58.000On Tuesday, Warren, who's running for president, slammed Twitter's new ad policy that bans political ads, which is weird since she's been ripping on Facebook, suggesting they should ban political ads.
00:27:07.000In a series of tweets on Tuesday, the Massachusetts Democrat attacked the company for blocking organizations that are fighting climate change from running ads on the social network, while allowing ads from companies like Exxon on the same topic.
00:27:18.000Oh, you mean that when you ban political ads, you end up banning ads that you like, Elizabeth Warren?
00:27:22.000Who could have predicted such a thing?
00:27:23.000Aside from every sentient human being with a working prefrontal cortex, who could have possibly imagined that something like this would happen?
00:27:30.000Her criticism comes a week after Twitter said it would no longer allow ads on its service, a policy that blocks ads from politicians, ads that refer to an election or candidate, or ads related to politically sensitive issues.
00:27:40.000Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey then responded to Warren with a tweet, basically kowtowing to her.
00:27:45.000He said, we haven't announced our new rules yet.
00:28:30.000It seems more that he's actually cutting into Warren's and Sanders's numbers because Biden is not actually fading in the national polling.
00:28:36.000Buttigieg is just rising in the national polling.
00:28:39.000Pete Buttigieg went after Elizabeth Warren yesterday again.
00:28:41.000It's not the only issue, but it's certainly a major issue.
00:28:44.000I get questions about it everywhere I go.
00:28:46.000And what I'm hearing from Iowans and from voters across the country is there really is a desire to do much more to build way past what we were able to do with the Affordable Care Act.
00:28:55.000But people also want to be able to make their own decision on whether to leave their private plan or not.
00:29:01.000Okay, so Buttigieg, again, getting a bit of a boost from attacking Elizabeth Warren.
00:29:05.000And look, the entire American business Establishment is afraid of Elizabeth Warren for good reason, because she does demonize success, because she does see America's successful businesses as targets for her rapacious tax schemes.
00:29:17.000So Jamie Dimon, who is the JP Morgan chairman and CEO, he launched into Elizabeth Warren yesterday saying that she vilifies successful people, which of course is true.
00:29:56.000And if people have very specific things that we should do different, then we should think about doing them different.
00:30:00.000Okay, so again, these Democratic candidates are vulnerable on a variety of scores because they've taken too much away from these state and local elections over the past few years.
00:30:09.000They think that Animus for Trump means that people are willing to embrace the most radical policies at the national level, and that simply isn't true.
00:30:16.000The smarter Democrats are saying, OK, well, that means that what we really should be doing is not focusing on our policies, which kind of suck and nobody likes.
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00:32:20.000The big breaking news and impeachment game 2019 in just moments.
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00:33:54.000I'm not going to start commenting on all of these episodes that occur on a daily basis that are unfolding over in the House, but to say that it seems to me they still are not providing the same kind of basic due process rights that were provided both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.
00:34:13.000They can't even get the process right.
00:34:16.000So beyond that, we'll wait until we get it here.
00:34:21.000It looks to me like they're hell-bent to do it and that we will end up in an impeachment trial at some point.
00:34:27.000Okay, so, you know, again, I think that the Democrats are doing this for political reasons, but every bad headline is another brick in the wall they're building against President Trump.
00:34:35.000So, the latest bad headline for the Trump team is Gordon Sondland, who is Trump's EU ambassador, who basically, look, the ambassador positions are basically Kush patronage jobs that you get for being an ally with the president.
00:35:06.000That's what happened with Gordon Sondland.
00:35:07.000Give a bunch of money to the Trump campaign, and then he ends up with no experience being the EU ambassador and gets roped into this thing Where he is now worried about having committed perjury in front of Congress.
00:35:17.000So yesterday, he revised his testimony.
00:35:20.000He had testified before that he did not think there was a quid pro quo that went on between the Trump administration and the Ukrainian government for Ukraine to pursue investigations into a variety of topics, including the 2016 elections, Burisma, and Hunter and Joe Biden.
00:35:33.000Well, Gordon Sondland came back yesterday and he revised his testimony.
00:35:36.000So according to the Washington Post, in a significant revision to his testimony, the U.S.
00:35:40.000ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, now says he told a Ukrainian official that security assistance to the country would be likely to resume only if the authorities in Kiev opened investigations requested by President Trump that could be damaging to former Vice President Joe Biden.
00:35:54.000In a supplemental declaration, Sunlin wrote, I now recall speaking individually with a Ukrainian individual and in that conversation saying that resumption of U.S.
00:36:01.000aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks.
00:36:07.000So he suddenly remembers all of this happening.
00:36:10.000Sunlin's new statement adds to testimony by other national security officials that described an effort directed by Trump No, that was just me quoting Trump.
00:36:17.000He said that was just me quoting Trump.
00:36:18.000nearly $400 million in security assistance to investigations that could politically benefit President Trump.
00:36:23.000Sondland, a Trump donor turned diplomat, had been seen as a loyalist, and he had said originally that Trump was just trying to combat corruption.
00:36:30.000He had asserted in a previously released text message that Trump didn't seek quid pro quos of any kind.
00:36:34.000Sondland said, well, no, that was just me quoting Trump.
00:36:36.000And he said, that was just me quoting Trump.
00:36:39.000Really, I think it was kind of a quid pro quo.
00:36:41.000Now, the White House released a statement on this They said that the transcripts of Sondland's new testimony show there's even less evidence for this illegitimate impeachment sham than previously thought.
00:36:50.000White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham says, quote, Ambassador Sondland squarely states he did not know and still does not know when, why, or by whom the aid was suspended.
00:36:58.000He said he presumed there was a link to the aid, but cannot identify any solid source for that assumption.
00:37:03.000So the White House continues to trot out a defense saying there was no quid pro quo.
00:37:08.000The problem is, saying there was no quid pro quo is now in direct contravention of testimony from Ambassador Sondland, Kurt Volker, the special envoy, Bill Taylor, the charge d'affaires in Ukraine.
00:37:19.000Marie Yovanovitch the ambassador to Ukraine and there's a widespread perception inside the State Department and virtually throughout the diplomatic corps that there was a quid pro quo that happened between the White House and Ukraine and Trump keeps saying there was no there was no Quid pro quo, you know I could say there was a quid pro quo and the quid pro quo is fine but I'm going to say there's no quid pro quo.
00:37:39.000The problem is that's a bad defense tactic because the fact is it's pretty obvious from the transcript and it's also pretty obvious now from everybody's testimony that there was in fact some sort of quid pro quo going on.
00:37:47.000The question as always was going to be was the quid pro quo illegal?
00:37:52.000Now, it could be based on false information, the quid pro quo.
00:37:55.000It could be based on the president receiving bad information from Rudy Giuliani and people feeding bad information to Rudy Giuliani.
00:38:01.000And it could still be not impeachable, or it could be dumb.
00:38:12.000Andy McCarthy, who's been very pro-Trump throughout the administration.
00:38:15.000Andy McCarthy, the lawyer who writes over at National Review, former prosecutor at the Southern District of New York.
00:38:22.000He said also, you know, relying on this no-quid-pro-quo defense is a fool's errand.
00:38:26.000What Trump should just say is, okay, yes, of course, I was pressuring Ukraine.
00:38:30.000I was pressuring Ukraine for legitimate investigations into what happened in 2016, and that includes any sort of corruption that occurred in Ukraine with regard to Hunter Biden.
00:38:40.000And frankly, that would be a basically fine argument.
00:38:44.000It's very, very difficult to prove intent.
00:38:46.000The fact is that then the Democrats would have to prove not that a quid pro quo happened, but that the intent for the quid pro quo was to get Biden looking forward to 2020 as opposed to looking into everything Trump associated with corruption circa 2016.
00:39:33.000Okay, that just sounds like you have no defense.
00:39:35.000That sounds like you are covering your eyes and your ears and pretending that you don't know what's going on, but we all know sort of what was going on.
00:39:43.000The fact is, again, that there is an actual response to all of this.
00:39:47.000It is the response that I have been laying out for weeks at this point.
00:39:50.000And, by the way, there's also a good response that says, yeah, of course we asked Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden because there's some pretty good information that Hunter Biden was involved in something nefarious.
00:39:59.000Ed Morrissey reporting over at Hot Air.
00:40:01.000Does the appearance of Hunter Biden's name in State Department email traffic show corrupt influence on U.S.
00:40:06.000Emails dug up by John Solomon in his reporting on influence peddling then and now suggest that the timing of Joe Biden's infamous intervention in Ukraine might be even more suspect than in his look before.
00:40:16.000Biden insists, nay brag, that he threatened to withhold a billion dollars in aid in March 2016 unless Petro Poroshenko fired Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
00:40:24.000Biden claims he did that because Shokin had not aggressively prosecuted corruption, including that at Burisma.
00:40:29.000However, the new emails show that Hunter's name was being tossed around the State Department a month earlier as the firm pled that Shokin was being too tough.
00:40:37.000According to Solomon's reporting, during that February 2016 contact, a U.S.
00:40:40.000Representative for Burisma Holdings sought a meeting with Undersecretary of State Catherine Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the Ukrainian firm where Hunter Biden worked as a board member, according to memos obtained under a FOIA lawsuit.
00:40:52.000Just three weeks before Burisma's overture to state, Ukrainian authorities raided the home of the oligarch who owned the gas firm and employed Hunter Biden, a signal the long-running corruption probe was escalating in the middle of the U.S.
00:41:03.000Hunter Biden's name, in fact, was specifically invoked by the Burisma representative as a reason the State Department should help, according to a series of email exchanges among U.S.
00:41:11.000officials trying to arrange the meeting.
00:41:13.000The subject line for the email exchanges read simply, Burisma.
00:41:17.000According to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, the email shows that the meeting was for the purpose of getting Ukraine to back off on its corruption probe of Burisma.
00:41:23.000The email argued that Burisma had been unfairly targeted by Shokin without evidence and outside of due process.
00:41:28.000It also noted very pointedly that two high-profile U.S.
00:41:30.000citizens worked with Burisma and named Hunter Biden explicitly.
00:41:35.000As Morrissey points out, he says that last sentence sounds like the meeting was a fait accompli, as well it might since it concerned the VP's son.
00:41:41.000However, whether and when the meeting took place has not been established, but clearly State was informed that Hunter's name was in play and that Burisma was unhappy with Shoken.
00:41:49.000This was no low-level contact either, the people involved were senior officials in the Obama administration.
00:41:54.000That discussion took place February 24, 2016.
00:41:57.000Exactly one week later, Hunter Biden's business partner and fellow Burisma board member Devon Archer dropped by to see Secretary of State John Kerry at the State Department's C Street offices.
00:42:06.000Archer was a college roommate of Kerry's stepson, so it could have been a coincidence, but it's never been explored.
00:42:12.000Less than a month later, Biden went to Ukraine and demanded Shokin's firing.
00:42:24.000At the very least, these emails undermine the idea that Shokin wasn't being tough enough on Burisma and that no one in the Obama administration connected the dots between Hunter Biden, his dad, and Burisma.
00:42:33.000It stinks of corruption and interference for personal or familial gain, although one didn't need to go to Ukraine to find evidence for it.
00:42:40.000Okay, so in other words, Trump has a pretty solid defense here.
00:43:54.000And then as soon as it became clear that the whistleblower was probably a partisan hack on behalf of Joe Biden, then it was, oh, we don't need to hear from the whistleblower anymore.
00:44:01.000So I'm of the opinion that the whistleblower is basically irrelevant once the claims of his complaint are made public.
00:44:08.000But, is it fair for Republicans to point out Democratic hypocrisy right here?
00:44:23.000Keeping a whistleblower's name confidential is usually designed to prevent their firing in the private sector.
00:44:29.000Or a private contractor with the United States government.
00:44:33.000There are regulations in place that prevent the firing of a whistleblower.
00:44:36.000The Inspector General of a particular department is prevented from speaking the name aloud of the whistleblower, but there's nothing that prevents Rand Paul from doing it.
00:44:43.000This is the point that Rand Paul, who's been pushing to out the whistleblower, made yesterday when he was in a tête-à -tête with the media.
00:44:48.000I know it's illegal to out a whistleblower.
00:44:50.000Actually, you see, you got that wrong too.
00:44:53.000Here's the thing is, the whistleblower statute protects the whistleblower from having his name revealed by the Inspector General.
00:45:00.000Even the New York Times admits that no one else is under any legal obligation.
00:45:04.000The other point, and you need to be very careful if you really are interested in the news, is that the whistleblower actually is a material witness Completely separate from being the whistleblower because he worked for Joe Biden.
00:45:17.000He worked for Joe Biden at the same time Hunter Biden was receiving $50,000 a month.
00:45:21.000Okay, so Rand Paul is actually making...
00:45:24.000A pretty solid case as to why we ought to know who the whistleblower is, which is why I covered it on the show.
00:45:29.000The fact is that if the situation were reversed and this were a Republican whistleblower in a Democratic administration, this would have been plastered all over the front pages of every newspaper immediately if it turned out that the person was a partisan hack on behalf of the Republicans.
00:45:44.000I mean, the media are so invested in Trump being pushed out of office.
00:45:48.000They're so invested in hatred of Trump.
00:46:06.000They're publishing a graphic, non-fiction book centered on special counsel Robert Mueller's obstruction of justice inquiry.
00:46:11.000I mean, I suppose they couldn't do it on the Kenneth Starr Report, because then it just would have been pornography.
00:46:15.000The Mueller Report illustrated is drawn directly from Volume 2 of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report.
00:46:19.000Of course, they're not going to do it on Volume 1 because Volume 1 didn't uncover anything.
00:46:23.000Volume 1 was about the Trump-Russia collusion nonsense.
00:46:27.000Volume 2 is about the so-called obstruction of justice.
00:46:30.000According to the Washington Post pumping this thing, the book provides a unique graphic depiction of the report's most scrutinized passages and pivotal moments, all contextualized with the Post's original reporting.
00:46:40.000The Mueller Report Illustrated offers a fly-on-the-wall account of life in the White House, told through the accounts of men and women who at one time served the president.
00:48:35.000I mean, what didn't make it into Moby Dick is actually creepier and more terrifying than what did make it into Moby Dick.
00:48:41.000It's, for example, after the Essex was, it was, in fact, stoven by a white whale, a giant white whale, that's the basis of Moby Dick, but then the men were basically stranded at sea for like three months, and they had to resort to, as you would think, some pretty awful, awful things.
00:49:11.000Again, wildly underrated by critics and well worth watching.
00:49:13.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:49:18.000So YouTube, a lot of the big tech companies are now censoring content, and it's pretty obvious that they're censoring content on the basis of political persuasion.
00:49:25.000The latest and creepiest example is that YouTube has now banned a video from Dr. Michelle Critella, a pediatrician with many years of experience, the executive director of the American College of Pediatricians.
00:49:36.000There was a video that Daily Signal published in 2017, so it's two years old.
00:49:52.000What was the hate speech that this evil doctor had to say?
00:49:55.000And here's what she had to say that got it banned from YouTube.
00:49:59.000According to most mainstream medical organizations, if you want to cut off a healthy arm or a healthy leg, you're mentally ill.
00:50:07.000But, if you want to cut off healthy breasts or a penis, you're transgender.
00:50:14.000Okay, well, sorry, that happens to be a true statement.
00:50:19.000Okay, now it may be stated in a way that's very blunt, but that happens to be a true statement.
00:50:24.000Okay, if you if you according to most mainstream medical organizations again It's the text of what she says according to most mainstream medical Organizations if you want to cut off a healthy arm or a healthy leg You're mentally ill if you want to cut off healthy breasts or penis is what she says you are transgender And they don't classify transgender as a mental illness which is what the juxtaposition means this is Again, I fail to see what is non-factual about this statement.
00:50:48.000You may think that there is a moral difference between cutting off your genitals and cutting off your arm.
00:50:52.000You're gonna have to explain why that is, but the statement itself is not non-factual.
00:50:57.000But apparently, this is now hate speech.
00:50:59.000So, according to the Daily Signal, which is a Heritage Foundation outlet, over the past few months, the Daily Signal worked with YouTube to try to reach a resolution.
00:51:05.000Ultimately, we were told the only way we could get the video back on YouTube was to delete the previously mentioned sentence.
00:51:12.000Censor the doctor's words or have no video on the world's biggest video platform.
00:51:16.000This should horrify every YouTube user and anyone who values the importance of a public square featuring a variety of perspectives.
00:51:22.000Critella's words are no doubt controversial, says the Daily Signal.
00:51:24.000She's no stranger to criticism, neither is the Daily Signal.
00:51:27.000We welcome debate, but we don't want to be censored.
00:51:31.000They say, we believe transgender individuals, any individuals struggling with gender identity issues, should be treated with love and respect, but we also believe that on a topic where medical treatments have such serious ramifications, from infertility to permanent alteration of body parts, it's worth having a robust, fact-driven discussion.
00:51:45.000She's making a point in that sentence that may be not popular, but remains true.
00:51:48.000There is no society-wide push right now to allow patients suffering from body integrity identity disorder to amputate limbs.
00:51:55.000Furthermore, just this May, the World Health Organization removed transgenderism from its list of mental disorders, moving it to a section about sexual health.
00:52:03.000But as of July, Critella's sentence, amputation of body parts is different depending on the body parts in question, is apparently so outrageous YouTube can't even allow it on the platform.
00:52:14.000Like, if YouTube doesn't like it, then you know what?
00:52:16.000There are a thousand videos on YouTube of people trying to explain why it is more beneficial to people to cut off their genitals than it is for them to cut off a different body part.
00:52:24.000I mean, there are lots of videos from the left about this sort of thing.
00:52:26.000The fact that YouTube is banning it outright demonstrates that they're putting their thumb On the scales when it comes to contentious social issues that are very much open for debate.
00:52:36.000And by the way, where the science tends not to favor the left very much.
00:52:39.000Okay, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.