The left celebrates as federal prosecutors talk about inciting President Trump. President Trump swivels and clocks James Comey. And the White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, is out. We'll get to all of it in just one second. First, we have to talk about the best gift you can give this holiday season: Mancrates! Second, we discuss the Southern District of New York's recommended sentencing for Michael Cohen in light of his testimony regarding President Trump s campaign and payoffs to women, including former paramour Stormy Daniels. And get that special holiday deal! Ben Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show on Fox News Radio and host of the conservative podcast, The Weekly Standard. He is also a regular contributor to The Daily Caller and the Weekly Standard, and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, Confessions: The Secret Life of a Secret Service Agent, is out now. is available for pre-order. It's also available for purchase on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. You can get a copy of the book for free, and a limited edition hardcover copy of it for $99.99. If you don't already have a copy, you can get it for free on Amazon, Best Fiends or Barnes & Noble, or wherever else you get your hardback copy of The New Yorker or other good books are available, you'll get 20% off starting at $99 and 25% off, they'll get 10% off the price of $99, plus shipping starts at $49.99, seven months, shipping starts start after they receive $99 or $99 gets you get a maximum of $49,99,99 get two months, plus they get $5,99 a pop and they get an ad free, two months get $4,99 gets two months of VIP access, they also get two of them, they get a promo code, they will get the book and two of your choice, they can get all of that, and they'll also get it all will get a course and two weeks of the service is free, they're also get the course will they get all that they'll receive $4 of the course they're all they say they'll have a course in training and they can access all they're working for $4 will get $24,99 and they also receive all of this, plus all they get the promo code is $5 and a $5 promo is $4 and a promo is also they can receive $5 will get, they receive two of these things will get all they can they get, plus an ad is also receive two times they get in for free.
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00:02:22.000This one concerned the Southern District of New York's recommended sentencing for Michael Cohen in light of his testimony regarding President Trump's campaign and payoffs to women, including former paramour Stormy Daniels.
00:02:33.000The president's bad taste in women has finally caught up with him.
00:02:38.000The SDNY investigation is all about campaign finance reform.
00:02:41.000The Mueller investigation is all about Trump-Russia links.
00:02:45.000As you might guess, the campaign finance stuff has more legs than the Trump-Russia stuff, at least as this point.
00:02:50.000So here's what we can take away from the SDNY, Southern District of New York, filing against Michael Cohen.
00:02:57.000First, they don't like Michael Cohen very much.
00:03:00.000This memo is written like a prosecutorial argument.
00:03:02.000It's written like a prosecuting document.
00:03:04.000As Andrew McCarthy points out, that is not atypical for this sort of filing.
00:03:07.000According to the filing, Cohen committed four distinct federal crimes over a period of several years.
00:03:12.000He was motivated to do so by personal greed and repeatedly used his power and influence for deceptive ends.
00:03:18.000They refused to call him a cooperating witness, meaning they didn't really want to mitigate his sentence.
00:03:21.000They want a sentence that reflects a modest downward variance from a statutory period of between 51 and 63 months.
00:03:27.000So that means they want to put him away for three to four years in federal prison at minimum.
00:03:32.000They're going after Cohen for illegal campaign contributions.
00:03:34.000Here's where things get dicey for President Trump.
00:03:37.000The wages of Stormy Daniels for Michael Cohen are jail.
00:03:40.000The SDNY is accusing Michael Cohen of having a campaign email address and of advising the campaigns.
00:03:45.000They're saying that basically he worked for the campaign without formally working for the campaign.
00:03:49.000They claim that Cohen, quote, played a central role in two similar schemes to purchase the rights to stories, each from women who claim to have had an affair with individual one, individual one would be Trump, so as to suppress the stories and thereby prevent them from influencing the election.
00:04:02.000If you recall, what happened is that President Trump Saw that there were a couple of stories that were gonna break, one from Karen McDougal, a former paramour, and one from Stormy Daniels, a former paramour, and he then instructed, according to Michael Cohen, he instructed Michael Cohen to go pay off the National Enquirer to go buy these stories from these women and then bury them.
00:04:19.000Now, this sort of arrangement had existed apparently for a long time between President Trump and the National Enquirer, which is something that we're gonna get back to in just a second.
00:04:26.000The SDNY says that this was a campaign finance issue.
00:04:30.000Why do they say this is a campaign finance issue?
00:04:32.000Because they say basically, This was a campaign expenditure.
00:04:35.000It was an expenditure designed to prevent these stories from coming out in the middle of the campaign and thereby impacting the campaign itself.
00:04:42.000And so President Trump instructed Michael Cohen to make these payments and then did not report them to the Federal Elections Commission.
00:04:48.000And this constitutes a federal crime, not only on the part of Michael Cohen, but on the part of President Trump.
00:04:53.000Now, there are a couple of problems with this legal theory.
00:04:56.000Problem number one with this legal theory, that would mean that President Trump had to know he was violating campaign law.
00:05:00.000The actual standard for intent in campaign finance law that bears criminal penalties is extremely high.
00:05:06.000And number two, it is unclear whether it is actually a campaign expenditure to pay hush money to a woman.
00:05:11.000Because let's say that he were running a campaign, and then the campaign had actually paid hush money to a woman.
00:05:18.000Unclear whether you can really claim as a campaign expenditure paying hush money to a woman in your circle, or whether that would constitute an illegal campaign donation or an illegal campaign expenditure.
00:05:29.000Well, if it's illegal to use campaign money to pay off a woman, then the only other way to pay off a woman would be to not do it as campaign money, which is what happened here.
00:05:36.000That's the case that's been made by many, including a former FEC commissioner.
00:05:39.000We'll get back to that in just a second.
00:06:02.000He was made subject to a civil suit, which is not quite the same thing in the Paula Jones case.
00:06:06.000A criminal indictment of a sitting president provides serious constitutional problems because you could then have a state prosecuting a president, putting the president behind bars anytime you don't like the president.
00:06:15.000You could have a malicious prosecution for a state crime in any state in the union, and then that could be used to lock up a president.
00:06:22.000So typically speaking, constitutional scholars have suggested that presidents are immune to criminal prosecution and that the proper measure for going after a president is impeachment.
00:06:31.000And then there are folks who suggest that President Trump would then be prosecuted theoretically after he left office.
00:06:36.000But all of this is speculating as to what happens as to this investigation itself.
00:06:42.000What is not real speculation at this point is that the SDNY is gearing up for a criminal incitement of President Trump that will either be leveraged after he leaves office or they will attempt to cram down even while he's president.
00:06:51.000The SDNY says that Cohen, quote, acted with the intent to influence the 2016 presidential election, that he coordinated with campaign members, and that he acted in coordination with and at the direction of individual one.
00:07:02.000It's that last language that matters to President Trump.
00:07:04.000The SDNY is claiming that Michael Cohen only acted because President Trump instructed him to break the law.
00:07:09.000The SDNY is essentially accusing Trump of ordering a violation of campaign finance law.
00:07:14.000Cohen also did not talk to the SDNY about ancillary matters, so this is all that they are giving him that really matters.
00:07:19.000Now, I want to get to Andy McCarthy has a piece in National Review all about the takeaway from the sentencing memorandum.
00:07:27.000He comes to the same conclusion I do, which that the SDNY is likely to indict President Trump.
00:07:34.000And remember, Andy McCarthy has been very pro the president in terms of his legal reasoning.
00:07:39.000This is not coming from somebody who wants to quote unquote get the president.
00:07:42.000He says prosecutors would not have done this if the president was not on their radar screen.
00:07:46.000Indeed, if the president was not implicated, I suspect they would not have prosecuted Cohen for campaign finance violations at all.
00:07:52.000Those charges had a negligible impact on the jail time Cohen faces, which is driven by the more serious offenses of tax and financial institution fraud involving millions of dollars.
00:08:01.000Moreover, Campaign finance infractions are often settled by payment of an administrative fine, not turned into felony prosecutions.
00:08:07.000To be sure, federal prosecutors in New York City have charged them as felonies before, most notably against Dinesh D'Souza.
00:08:12.000In marked contrast, though, when it was discovered that Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign was guilty of violations involving nearly $2 million, the Obama Justice Department decided not to prosecute and said they fined him like 400 grand.
00:08:24.000Nevertheless, the sentencing memo in Cohen's case reads like an ode to campaign finance laws.
00:08:31.000He says, Thus, the argument goes, even if the hush money payments vastly exceeded Cohen's legal ceiling, Trump himself could have made them legally.
00:09:01.000To begin with, The campaign finance laws do not just prescribe limits on spending, they mandate disclosure.
00:09:06.000And this is what I was saying earlier about the fact that President Trump, if he worked out with Michael Cohen how to pay off Stormy Daniels and then didn't inform the Federal Elections Commission, that in and of itself could have been the crime.
00:09:16.000The sentencing memo for Cohen argues that the hush money payments were not merely unreported.
00:09:20.000It states that Cohen and the Trump organization, the president's company, went to great lengths to conceal them by fraudulent bookkeeping.
00:09:26.000Equally significant, Cohen was not charged with merely making illegal donations, says Andy McCarthy.
00:09:31.000He was charged in the first campaign finance count with causing a company to make illegal donations.
00:09:36.000This would be the offense centering not on Stormy Daniels, but on former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
00:09:42.000Prosecutors have already given immunity to a bunch of American media executives, National Enquirer executives.
00:09:46.000Presumably they're doing that in order to get them to testify against President Trump.
00:09:54.000He suggests that Trump may have a solid defense here.
00:09:59.000He says that there are a couple of ways that the president could defend himself.
00:10:03.000First, campaign finance violations have a high proof threshold for intent, as I was saying earlier.
00:10:07.000President Trump could argue that because there was no spending limit on his contributions, he did not think about the campaign finance implications, much less willfully violate them.
00:10:14.000There is, furthermore, a significant question about whether hush money payments qualify as in-kind campaign contributions.
00:10:20.000There's nothing illegal, per se, in making a nondisclosure agreement.
00:10:23.000The criminal law comes into play only if the nondisclosure payment is deemed a donation for purposes of influencing a political campaign.
00:10:30.000And so Trump could claim, I think rightly, that he's been making payoffs like this his entire career.
00:10:34.000So this is not having to do with the election.
00:10:36.000Whether or not there was an election, he was going to attempt to pay off the National Enquirer to silence Stormy Daniels and to silence Karen McDougal.
00:10:42.000So it has nothing to do with the election.
00:10:44.000So the payment is not a donation if it was made for an expense that was independent of the campaign.
00:10:49.000That is money that would have had to be paid, even if there were no campaign.
00:10:53.000There are other salient issues as well.
00:10:55.000Justice Department guidance says a sitting president can't be indicted.
00:10:58.000If President Trump were to be reelected in 2020, he would not be out until 2024.
00:11:02.000And then the statute of limitations would have elapsed.
00:11:05.000But the bottom line is that the president is now in peril of indictment.
00:11:08.000Again, that doesn't mean that he actually will be criminally indicted.
00:11:11.000It doesn't mean that if he's indicted, he actually has to face down a trial.
00:11:16.000It could provide the hook for the left to hang its hat upon when it comes to impeachment.
00:11:20.000Adam Schiff, again, a man who puts up his pup tent outside all of the green rooms in Washington, D.C., was on Face the Nation over the weekend.
00:11:27.000He's incoming chief, probably, of the House Intelligence and Oversight Committee.
00:11:31.000He says that President Trump now faces the prospect of jail time.
00:11:35.000There's a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office, the Justice Department may indict him.
00:11:42.000That he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time.
00:11:47.000Okay, so he's making this case, and this is, in a way, actually cutting against Democrats' political interests, because the more they push this, the more they say that the president is facing jail time, the more it becomes incumbent on them to file impeachment charges against the president as soon as they enter office.
00:12:01.000And as we'll see, the Democrats are already implying they're going to do so.
00:12:03.000Now, what will be the political blowback for all of that?
00:12:07.000Typical kind of conventional wisdom holds that when you try to impeach a president and fail, the president gains in strength going into his next election.
00:12:14.000I'm not sure that's the case, but I'll explain that in just one second.
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00:13:31.000All right, so the Democrats are painting themselves into a corner because now, if they believe President Trump has committed a criminal offense, they're almost forced to file impeachment charges in the House against President Trump.
00:13:43.000So here is Representative Gerald Nadler.
00:13:45.000He is making exactly that case over the weekend to Jake Tapper on CNN.
00:13:49.000Certainly they'd be impeachable offenses because even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office.
00:14:22.000Well, because Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to it, and because they named the president individual one, which I don't think they would have done in any way, shape, or form.
00:14:32.000They weren't required to reference the president, but they did so, and I have to assume that that is on the basis of significant and material corroborating evidence that they have collected.
00:14:42.000OK, so suffice it to say that if these crimes had been committed by a Democrat while President Obama was in office, let's say President Obama had done all of this, would President Obama be facing jail time from his own Justice Department?
00:14:52.000No, because President Obama's Justice Department was his wingman.
00:14:55.000For people who are saying that this just proves how corrupt the Trump administration is, remember, Trump's DOJ has been allowed to go through with full investigations.
00:15:02.000Obama's DOJ was basically protecting him every step of the way.
00:15:07.000For those who say that there is no indictment possible here, remember that John Edwards was indicted.
00:15:10.000The former presidential candidate for the Democrats was indicted on similar charges.
00:15:14.000It's difficult to prove these charges.
00:15:16.000It's very difficult to suggest the president is going to go to jail because he paid hush money to a woman.
00:15:23.000Again, John Edwards, the difference in that case particularly, is that John Edwards' own people were willing to stand up for him.
00:15:28.000In this particular case, the Mueller investigation, the SDNY, I've cracked down on Michael Cohen to the extent that he's broken.
00:15:34.000Turning witnesses against President Trump is the key to getting President Trump indicted.
00:15:39.000Is he protected from indictment past the election?
00:15:42.000I think that it's difficult to read the Justice Department guidelines and say President Trump is going to jail while still elected president of the United States.
00:15:48.000With that said, does this provide the impetus for an impeachment?
00:15:53.000In a second, we'll discuss what that means for the Democrats.
00:15:56.000As I say, typical conventional wisdom holds that the Democrats would be worse off if they impeach President Trump than if they just sort of sit there and fulminate about him.
00:16:04.000It's still two years away from the election.
00:16:08.000The next election only happens in November of 2020, which is a long time.
00:16:12.000If we've learned anything during the Trump era, it's that every day lasts a thousand years.
00:16:16.000So if the Democrats were to try and drag this out all the way through November of 2020, I'm not sure that they could keep people's enthusiasm up that long on this particular issue, especially because our perceptions of President Trump are already set.
00:16:29.000Politically speaking, we all assume President Trump pays hush money to women.
00:16:43.000So the question really becomes, do Democrats really believe that they can make political hay out of this for a long period of time?
00:16:49.000And I'm not sure that the answer is yes.
00:16:50.000And it looks like they are over their skis if they start pushing for impeachment on the basis of what amounts to a campaign finance violation about him paying off women when he's been doing that for 20 years and when the criminal indictment is hanging over his head.
00:17:02.000President Trump basically tweets that out over the weekend.
00:17:05.000Here's what President Trump had to say.
00:17:07.000He said, totally clears the president.
00:17:37.000Now, remember, all of this began not with campaign finance violations, which are the more dangerous path for President Trump.
00:17:44.000All of this began with the accusation that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government in order to affect and impact the outcome of the 2016 election and was instrumental in the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta's emails.
00:17:58.000Nothing in the Mueller investigation proves it.
00:18:00.000The Mueller investigation filed a sentencing memo against Michael Cohen on Friday, and here's what you need to know about that sentencing memo, because there were two sentencing memos about Cohen, one from the SDNY, that one's damaging to Trump, one from the Mueller investigation, that one not so much.
00:18:14.000So here's what the Mueller investigation memo, which was supposed to be the big fish, here's what they say.
00:18:18.000They say, That Cohen's crime was serious and he withheld material information to the investigators of the Russia interference in the 2016 U.S.
00:18:28.000They say that he lied in deliberate and premeditated fashion and all that began in a written submission.
00:18:33.000Mueller is focusing in on Cohen's lies about business that President Trump did with Moscow.
00:18:37.000According to the sentencing memo, Cohen quote, lied to Congress about a business project, the Moscow Project, that he worked on during the 2016 presidential campaign while working for Trump Company and for President Trump personally.
00:18:48.000The goal of such lies was allegedly to minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual One, President Trump, and to give the false impression that the Moscow Project had ended before the Iowa caucus and the first presidential primaries in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations being conducted by Congress and the SEO.
00:19:04.000So, Cohen's lies were obscured by the fact that the Moscow project was a lucrative business opportunity that sought and likely required the assistance of the Russian government.
00:19:12.000If the project was completed, the company could have received hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian sources in licensing fees and other revenues.
00:19:19.000Mellor says Cohen worked on the project and discussed it with Trump well into the campaign, and adds that Cohen, during the campaign, had a substantive telephone call about the project with an assistant to the press secretary for the president of Russia.
00:19:30.000Cohen is not being charged for doing business with Russia.
00:19:33.000He's being charged for lying to Mueller about doing business with Russia.
00:19:36.000President Trump lied about doing business with Russia during the campaign, or at least lied about the idea that he had never done business with Russia during the campaign.
00:19:48.000So the real question is, what's criminal?
00:19:49.000If Mueller's investigation were to move toward a criminal indictment of the president, it would have to be along the lines that he instructed Michael Cohen to lie to the authorities.
00:19:57.000It would have to be that he Suborn perjury, basically.
00:20:02.000That would have to be the argument here, because there's nothing illegal about doing business with the Russians.
00:20:05.000There's nothing illegal about doing business with the Russians during the campaign.
00:20:08.000There's nothing illegal about lying to the American people about doing business with the Russians during the campaign, even though it's politically terrible.
00:20:17.000According to the sentencing memo, the only crime here would have to be President Trump telling Cohen to shut his face when he talked to Mueller or lie when he talked to Mueller.
00:20:25.000And that's sort of what the memo is saying.
00:20:27.000They say the defendant provided information about attempts by other Russian nationals to reach the campaign.
00:20:31.000They said in November 2015, Cohen received the contact information for and spoke with a Russian national who claimed to be a trusted person in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign political synergy and synergy on a governmental level.
00:20:44.000It seems like The allegation here is going to be from Mueller that Trump suborned perjury, but there is no actual claim of that in this sentencing memo.
00:20:52.000So bottom line, the Cohen investigation in New York, dangerous to the president.
00:20:56.000The Mueller investigation so far, not so dangerous to the president.
00:20:59.000Now, how has the president dealt with all this?
00:21:01.000The president has swung and clocked James Comey, former FBI director, because we have a controversy over there.
00:21:06.000And that controversy is justified as well.
00:21:08.000We'll get to the Comey controversy in just one second, plus the rest of the White House chaos.
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00:23:29.000James Comey came out over the weekend and he said if Trump weren't the president, he'd be in jeopardy of being charged.
00:23:34.000This is what the former FBI director, so he says that.
00:23:38.000And then it turns out that James Comey testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee and 235 pages of transcript.
00:23:47.000It turns out he doesn't know and he doesn't remember at all anything about dozens of questions concerning key details in the Russia probe.
00:23:54.000So the accusation made about James Comey and the FBI is that the original genesis of the Russia probe was a bunch of Obama Democrats and Hillary Clinton's campaign coordinating to launch an investigation of President Trump and his relationships with the Russians.
00:24:09.000And then on the basis of faulty, flawed evidence that Comey knew was faulty and flawed, they decided to continue that investigation forthwith and extend it into a FISA warrant for Carter Page.
00:24:19.000So James Comey was asked about all of this and it turns out he remembers nothing.
00:24:23.000So after writing his book, Hired Loyalty or whatever it was, after writing that book where he remembered every detail, where he testified in open session of Congress that he remembered specifically every detail, kept contemporaneous memos, suddenly he can't remember.
00:24:39.000Whether he knew, for example, that the Steele dossier, which was used as the basis for the FISA warrants against Carter Page, a former Trump foreign policy aide, he can't remember at all whether he even knew that the Christopher Steele dossier existed.
00:24:50.000He can't remember in the slightest whether that dossier had been investigated or whether that dossier he knew was faulty.
00:25:04.000According to Fox News, the former bureau boss frustrated GOP lawmakers during Friday's session, in large part because his lawyers urged him not to answer numerous questions.
00:25:12.000Comey's expected to return later in the month for another round, though blasted Republicans on his way out for what he called a desperate attempt to find anything that can be used to attack the institutions of justice investigating this president.
00:25:21.000Now, a couple of things can be true in all of this, and in fact, I think are true.
00:25:26.000Number one, Comey is a schmuck who is politically driven.
00:25:29.000Two, President Trump's behavior with regard to Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, Could be a campaign finance violation.
00:25:36.000It could certainly be a campaign finance violation.
00:25:54.000He says Comey insisted in the interview that we never investigated the Trump campaign for political purposes, but the transcript shows he claimed ignorance or memory lapses in response to questions concerning key details and events in the Russia investigation.
00:26:07.000Which some GOP lawmakers continue to claim was improperly conducted.
00:26:11.000The transcript reveals lawmakers frustration with his lack of specifics.
00:26:15.000Asked if he recalled who drafted the FBI's initiation document for the July 2016 Russia investigation, Comey said, I do not.
00:26:21.000He again claimed not to know when asked about the involvement in that initiation of Peter Strzok.
00:26:25.000Whose anti-Trump texts later got him removed from the special counsel's probe.
00:26:28.000When asked if the FBI had any evidence that anyone in the Trump campaign conspired to hack the DNC server, Comey gave a lengthy answer referring to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation as to why he couldn't answer.
00:26:39.000He says, I don't think that the FBI and Special Counsel want me answering that question that may relate to their investigation of Russian interference during 2016, and I worry that would cross the line.
00:26:47.000When pressed further by Trey Gowdy, Representative Gowdy of South Carolina, about what factual predicate the Bureau had to launch a counterintelligence investigation, Comey again claimed that answering the question would be a slope that would ask him to reveal what the FBI did or didn't know about Russian activity as it relates to the 2016 election.
00:27:03.000Gowdy asked, you can't tell us or you won't tell us?
00:27:05.000And Comey said, probably a combination of both.
00:27:08.000Yeah, all of this is deeply suspicious and does lend credence to the idea that James Comey and the FBI were being politically maneuvered by Democrats, by the Obama administration, in an attempt to target President Trump, or at least in an attempt to investigate President Trump.
00:27:23.000Maybe not in an attempt to destroy his electoral prospects, because remember, none of this stuff leaked until basically after the election, but in an attempt to see if there was anything perverse about President Trump's campaign.
00:27:34.000Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, he says Comey couldn't remember anything, which is weird.
00:27:39.000245 times he says, don't remember, don't recall, don't know.
00:27:42.000What I'm, what was most, I guess, the biggest takeaway for me was the don't know part.
00:27:46.000Didn't know that Christopher Steele was terminated for talking to the press.
00:27:50.000Didn't know he had talked to the press.
00:27:52.000Didn't know they continued to work with Christopher Steele after he had been terminated and continued to get his information.
00:28:24.000Probably with the FBI having a black eye over its treatment of the Russia investigation.
00:28:28.000They already have a black eye over their treatment of the Hillary investigation.
00:28:31.000Probably with the Trump administration, Trump campaign, having a black eye over his hush money payoffs to women he was having adultery with.
00:28:38.000And probably with the Mueller investigation, I think, coming up with far less than the left thinks that they are going to come up with.
00:28:43.000Although that is still yet to be seen.
00:28:45.000With all of that said, this is leading to a fair bit of chaos inside the White House.
00:28:49.000Nick Ayers was Basically tapped to be the guy who's going to take over for Chief of Staff John Kelly when Kelly was ousted.
00:28:55.000It's been rumored for a long time that John Kelly, who was the current Chief of Staff, was going to be leaving in the very near future.
00:29:14.000And Nick Ayers, who was Vice President Mike Pence's Chief of Staff, was rumored and expected to be the new Chief of Staff, which would have at least created a certain level of solidarity in the upper levels of the administration, because Ayers is very close with all of the other teams.
00:29:27.000He's close with the foreign policy team, he's close with Pence's team, he's close with Kushner's team, he's close with all of these various teams.
00:29:32.000Well, Ayers had been tapped, and then over the weekend, he was untapped, which is not great news for the administration, because Ayers would have been a very solid pick.
00:29:39.000According to Bloomberg, When the president tweets that Ayers had not been the pick, that I do not think is true.
00:29:45.000He declared it fake news that top vice presidential aide Nick Ayers had been certain to get the job before withdrawing.
00:29:50.000Ayers tweeted out, thank you, President Trump, vice president and my great colleagues for the honor to serve our nation at the White House.
00:29:57.000I will be departing at the end of the year, but we'll work with the MAGA team to advance the cause.
00:30:01.000He's supposed to take over the super PAC for President Trump's team.
00:30:04.000When the president tweets that Ayers had not been the pick, that I do not think is true.
00:31:18.000It's a graphic novel series told from the perspective of special operations soldiers hunting ISIS in Yemen.
00:31:23.000And it's all about the political machinations that are happening in Yemen.
00:31:27.000The art of it is just spectacular and beautiful.
00:31:30.000It is incredibly, incredibly beautiful and brutal and brutal.
00:31:34.000The story steps into the event horizon of a failed state ruthlessly reshaped by civil war, radical Islamic terrorists, foreign powers, and private military companies, each pushing the regional conflict to their own desired end state.
00:32:21.000You can learn all about other Black Powder Red Earth projects the creators are building to include a video game, an animated series, a tabletop war game.
00:32:28.000All this stuff is great and really educational as well.
00:32:31.000This is definitely not a book for kids.
00:32:33.000Again, it does have graphic violence and graphic language, but...
00:32:49.000I mean, the art is spectacularly good.
00:32:53.000Also, we're going to get to more of the news, and I have a lot to say about a variety of social justice warrior issues, social media insanity.
00:33:09.000You get the rest of Andrew Klavan's show live on video, and the rest of Michael Moulse's Excalibur show live on video, and all the rest of that.
00:33:16.000I know what you really want is more me.
00:33:19.000And coming up in 2019, the Ben Shapiro radio show is extending to three hours.
00:34:12.000I personally am working like a dog, like a dog, working these fingers to the bone to bring you the best possible content behind that paywall.
00:34:22.000So go check it out right now over to dailywire.com, $9.99 a month and for $99 a year, you get all of those great things.
00:36:12.000It was a refusal to take a writ of certiorari on a on an abortion case.
00:36:17.000According to National Review, the Supreme Court on Monday declined to review lower court rulings that prevented pro-life activists in two states from ending public financing for Planned Parenthood.
00:36:26.000So there was a case that was going to be appealed to the Supreme Court about whether states could ban funding public funding for Planned Parenthood.
00:36:34.000The cases pertain to whether a Medicaid recipient who relies on Planned Parenthood for health services has a right to challenge her state's decision to defund the organization.
00:36:42.000To date, state courts in Kansas and Louisiana have found that states violate federal law by depriving Planned Parenthood affiliates of Medicaid funding solely because they provide abortion.
00:36:50.000The idea is that all of these federal programs can fund Planned Parenthood, and because they have not prevented the funding of Planned Parenthood, states can't step in and prevent the federal government from funding Planned Parenthood on the Medicaid level, even if the state is contributing.
00:37:04.000This would be a right political issue.
00:37:18.000Well, all of the leftists on the court and John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh.
00:37:23.000Who could have foreseen that Brett Kavanaugh would not be nearly as conservative as a lot of his proponents were suggesting?
00:37:30.000Who could have suggested that Brett Kavanaugh might not in fact be the pro-life warrior on the Supreme Court that all the people on the left thought he was to the extent that they accused him of rape?
00:37:40.000Who could have foreseen that Brett Kavanaugh would be a moderate on the court creating a new swing bloc with John Roberts?
00:37:52.000So, I think this is an early indicator that, and not a good indicator, that Brett Kavanaugh is going to be another moderate on the court, which is not exactly what folks need.
00:38:01.000We need an originalist perspective on the court.
00:38:02.000We don't need another, let's let all the branches get along with each other by perverting the Constitution.
00:38:08.000Clarence Thomas argued that while the cases do tangentially relate to the question of abortion, That issue is the more basic question of an individual Medicaid recipient's relationship to her state government.
00:38:18.000He said, it is true that these particular cases arose after several states alleged that Planned Parenthood affiliates had, among other things, engaged in the illegal sale of fetal organs and fraudulent billing practices, and thus removed Planned Parenthood as a state Medicaid provider.
00:38:30.000But these cases are not about abortion rights.
00:38:31.000They're about private rights of action under the Medicaid Act.
00:38:34.000Resolving the question presented here would not even affect Planned Parenthood's ability to challenge states' decisions.
00:38:39.000This of course is correct, but that didn't stop Kavanaugh from preventing this case from being heard.
00:38:43.000All it takes to get a Supreme Court writ of certiorari heard is four justices voting in favor of hearing the case.
00:38:49.000Kavanaugh voted against hearing the case, not a great early indicator from new Justice Kavanaugh on how he will rule in future cases, not only concerning abortion, but considering hot-button political and federalism issues.
00:39:01.000Okay, meanwhile, Speaking of hot button political issues, I gotta tell you this story about how out of control the media are.
00:39:10.000So the social media networks right now are completely out of control.
00:39:40.000Gleason wrote, the Oklahoma quarterback's memorable night also helped resurface social media's memory of several homophobic tweets more than six years old.
00:39:47.000When Murray was 15 years old, he tweeted at his friends via his since verified Twitter account using an anti-gay slur to defame them.
00:39:54.000So Gleason later updated his piece to include Murray's apology.
00:40:02.000Honestly, there is no journalist in America who should be being paid to dig up tweets from a 14-year-old right after that person wins the Heisman Trophy.
00:40:11.000Basically, you do something prominent in American life, you do something successful in American life, and suddenly the trolls come out of the woodwork.
00:40:17.000And what I love most about that USA Today article from the schmuck Gleeson, what I love the most about it is the way that it is phrased.
00:40:24.000The quarterback's memorable night also helped resurface, passive tense, social media's memory, social media doesn't have a memory, of several homophobic tweets more than six years old.
00:40:33.000Now what happened is Gleason actively went and searched out the F word with regard to gay people, and then he found some tweets from this kid when the kid was 14, and now we're going to destroy people over what they say when they are 14.
00:40:43.000And this is the way social media works now.
00:41:02.000In just a second, I'm going to explain to you...
00:41:04.000How social media have basically become the new Puritans, even while they push a new standard of radical leftism.
00:41:10.000So social media have basically decided they are the new arbiters of morality.
00:41:14.000The social media networks are going to decide the new morality.
00:41:17.000Now, for those of us who are religious, the basic idea is that God sets forth a morality and then he judges us with both justice and, thank God, with mercy.
00:41:25.000But the new God of social media has no mercy.
00:41:28.000He is a god of justice alone or she or Z is a god of justice alone.
00:41:34.000OK, and that god of justice alone has a set of rules that are arbitrarily applied and randomly applied and randomly changed.
00:41:41.000And that means that Heisman winning quarterbacks can be analyzed for their tweets from four or five years ago, that Kevin Hart can be destroyed on the basis of tweets that he sent back in 2010.
00:41:53.000Then we can now go back into anyone's social media history and, like God, look back into what you thought 10 years ago and then destroy you over it.
00:42:00.000And we're now extending it forward where thought crimes that were committed outside the purview of particular social media companies can end with banning.
00:42:07.000So over the weekend, Patreon, which is a major service that is designed to allow people to basically have people give them money for a particular service.
00:42:15.000You know, we have a subscription service over at The Daily Wire, but there are lots of people who offer special services to their customers via Patreon.
00:42:22.000Well, social media company Patreon decided they were going to ban a series of people I'm not a fan of some of these people.
00:42:28.000So these people include Milo Yiannopoulos, who I think is a terrible human being, and James Alsup, who is a far, they call him a far-right political commentator.
00:42:40.000Patreon also banned Carl Benjamin, known as Sargon of Akkad, who is not like Milo and not like James Alsup.
00:42:49.000The bottom line is they shouldn't be banning any of these people.
00:42:52.000If you don't like these people, then maybe you should just explain why they're wrong and tell people not to give them money for their services.
00:42:58.000But Patreon has now banned them without any clear standard of why the ban happened in the first place.
00:43:02.000This comes after Alex Jones was banned from Twitter forever.
00:43:06.000After Apple and Spotify removed his podcast.
00:43:07.000Again, I don't have to agree with any of these people to recognize that social media has no standards, and they are unevenly applying those standards as much as they could possibly want.
00:43:16.000Because listen, there will come a point where Patreon bans me.
00:43:19.000I'm not on Patreon, but if I were, they would ban me.
00:43:21.000Where Patreon or Facebook or Twitter come after me, or they come after Jordan Peterson, or they come after Dave Rubin, or they come after Mark Levin, or they come after Sean Hannity, or they come after everyone who they disagree with on any level.
00:43:32.000That's the way these social media companies are working.
00:43:43.000The basic premise of the show is that there's a guy who's trying to start a media company in Silicon Valley, but one of the main stars of the show is a guy who's pretty obviously based on the heads of Google, a guy named Gavin Belson.
00:43:56.000That's the character on Silicon Valley.
00:43:57.000And Gavin Belson is a self-aggrandizing, new-agey, Jerk who pretends that he is soft and cuddly when in reality he's the harshest, most terrible person.
00:44:09.000And he spends all of his time trying to force his business down on everyone.
00:44:15.000He basically says that his job is to not do evil in the same way that Google's job is not to do evil, except that all he does throughout the show is do evil.
00:44:21.000But he pretends that he's actually spiritual and enlightened.
00:44:24.000I need to show you this clip from Silicon Valley to explain how it is that social media works in Silicon Valley.
00:46:00.000I also wore my Apple Watch and Aura Ring, both in airplane mode.
00:46:03.000My best meditations always had the least variation in heart rate.
00:46:06.000When I wasn't focused, it would jump around a lot.
00:46:08.000Here's a night of sleep on the tenth night.
00:46:09.000My resting heart rate was consistently below 40.
00:46:13.000Vipassana is not for everyone, but if any of this resonates with you in even the slightest, I'd encourage you to give it a try.
00:46:19.000Okay, so the reason that I bring this up is because this is what Silicon Valley is in the end.
00:46:22.000It's a bunch of self-aggrandizing, radical leftist jerks who spend their days pretending to like meditation so they can virtue signal to all their friends while banning people who disagree with them politically.
00:46:31.000That's what Silicon Valley has become.
00:46:33.000And we're supposed to take these people seriously as our moral arbiters?
00:47:34.000People who who pretend that the founders were not deep thinkers on a variety of issues but were really just protecting their own sort of property and interests ought to read this book in a lot more history.
00:47:43.000Now the fact is that the founders were in fact deep thinkers with eternal ideas and even if they were men bound by their time they were also people who are thinking beyond the bounds of their time and it's our job to determine what in their thought was eternal and what was bound by the limitations of the time in which they lived.
00:48:01.000If you did not see the Miami Dolphins New England Patriots game last night, I'm going to show you the last seven seconds of this game because it was one of the best things I've ever seen in NFL football.
00:48:49.000So I had to show that to you because when there's a great sports play, I just can't resist.
00:48:52.000Okay, with all of that happiness put aside, time for some things I really hate.
00:49:00.000It's a worse story of the day, obviously.
00:49:02.000On Sunday, seven Israelis were wounded in a drive-by shooting near the town of Ofrah, which is approximately 13 miles north of Jerusalem.
00:49:07.000This is going to Frank Camp over at Daily Wire.
00:49:09.000One of the critically wounded is a 21-year-old pregnant female.
00:49:12.000Following the violent attack, the woman was taken to Shariat Zedek Hospital, where doctors successfully delivered her baby.
00:49:16.000The baby is currently in critical condition, and the woman is also in critical but stable condition.
00:49:21.000Her husband was lightly wounded as well.
00:49:23.000The Times of Israel spoke with a surgeon, Dr. Alon Schwartz, who said the woman had lost a lot of blood as a result of the gunshot wound to her stomach.
00:49:30.000According to an IDF spokesperson quoted by Aruz Sheva, which is a right-wing Israeli news outlet, following the previous report regarding the shooting attack adjacent to the Ofra Junction, shots were fired from a passing Palestinian vehicle toward Israeli civilians who were standing at the bus station.
00:49:43.000IDF troops who were present nearby responded by firing toward the suspect vehicle, which fled.
00:50:15.000is a collection of garbage run countries.
00:50:19.000Countries run by people who are sheer garbage.
00:50:22.000And those people refuse to even vote to condemn an open terrorist group that celebrates when a pregnant woman is shot in the stomach and her baby is barely delivered alive.
00:50:40.000passes a resolution, you can fairly guarantee that 95% of the time, it's a resolution predicated toward forwarding evil, not toward preventing it.
00:50:47.000So spare me all of your nonsense about U.N.
00:50:49.000resolutions condemning Israel, or the U.N.
00:50:51.000doesn't like us enough, the United States.
00:50:53.000We have to be more friendly with the U.N.
00:50:55.000How about we look at the constituency of the UN and look at the fact that they won't condemn actual terrorists?
00:50:59.000And then maybe we consider whether or not we ought to take our cues from countries like Syria, countries like Yemen, whether we ought to take our cues from the Russians.
00:51:09.000The same people who are complaining that President Trump is in league with the Russians are happy to endorse Russian foreign policy at every prospect at the United Nations.
00:51:18.000The same people who complain that the Trump administration is too close to the Saudis, they're happy to take the cues from the Saudis at the UN, and they complain when the United States doesn't do it enough.
00:51:27.000The UN, as I've said before, I am not in favor of eminent domain and overuse of it.
00:51:31.000I'm not in favor of the idea that in the United States you should be able to take private property, transfer it to another party for purposes of increasing tax revenue, as the Supreme Court decided in Kelo v. New London.
00:52:00.000If she wouldn't say so many stupid things, I wouldn't have to talk about her saying so many stupid things.
00:52:03.000You think I want to talk about this woman?
00:52:04.000I don't want to talk about this woman.
00:52:06.000And every time I talk about her, I get from the left-wing media, oh, you're obsessed with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
00:52:11.000No, as you know from listening to the show, I'm obsessed with stupidity in all of its forms.
00:52:15.000Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez showed up on Hanukkah, at a liberal synagogue, of course, because she is an advocate of boycott, divestment, and sanctions and anti-Semitic policy directed at the elimination of the Jewish state.
00:52:27.000She showed up to explain that sure, she may be in league with anti-Semites like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
00:52:33.000Sure, she may be good friends with Linda Sarsour.
00:52:36.000But at least way back when, she's part Jewish.
00:52:38.000You know, it's not just Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who's done this.
00:52:49.000And then Hillary Clinton, I remember, at one point in the early 2000s when she was running for office in New York, she was like, I'm part Jewish, too.
00:53:31.000Any Jew who's taken in by the, I have a relative who's Jewish argument, It's no better an argument than when people accuse somebody of racism and they're like, well, one time I was friends with a black guy.
00:53:41.000At least when somebody says I was friends with a black guy, that has to do with their behavior.
00:53:45.000I had a great-great-great-great-great-grandmother who once shtooped a Jew is not exactly a great argument for why you're a pro-Jewish politician or a pro-Israel politician or anything of the like.
00:53:54.000I hate that sort of politics with a burning, fiery passion.
00:53:58.000Other things that I hate today, there's a high school teacher Who has now been fired for failing to use a transgender student's preferred pronoun.
00:54:08.000A Virginia high school teacher was fired because he wouldn't use a preferred pronoun of a female student who claimed that she was now a male.
00:54:14.000The unanimous decision from the five members of the West Point School Board to fire Peter Vlaming, a French teacher at the West Point High School, which has roughly 265 students, followed a four-hour hearing.
00:54:22.000The board only discussed the case for an hour before rendering their decision.
00:54:25.000Richmond.com reports that Vlaming, who's 47, had taught at the high school for almost seven years and had taught the student in the 2017-2018 school year when the student still identified as female.
00:54:35.000Over the summer of 2018, the girl decided she was a boy.
00:54:37.000This school year, Vlaming addressed the girl by the new name she had chosen, but would not use the girl's preferred new pronoun because it conflicted with Vlaming's Christian faith.
00:54:45.000Now, He didn't go out of his way to call the girl a girl.
00:54:49.000He didn't go out of his way to say she every time he talked about her.
00:54:52.000Instead, he attempted to avoid using any sort of gender pronouns at all because he didn't want to use biologically incorrect pronouns.
00:54:59.000And he was fired for this, because he was insensitive apparently.
00:55:02.000Apparently it's insensitive if you refuse to use biologically incorrect pronouns, even if you are attempting to not use any pronouns at all.
00:55:09.000Even if you're trying to be sensitive enough not to offend the student by using no gender pronouns at all, now, if you refuse to use the gender pronouns that somebody wants used, now you will be fired for it.
00:55:20.000The student claimed she felt singled out.
00:55:23.000But the only reference to Vlaming actively calling the girl by the female pronoun rather than her name, according to witnesses, came on Halloween when the student was using a VR headset.
00:55:31.000As the student was about to bump into a wall, Vlaming told students to stop her.
00:55:34.000That incident prompted a discussion with administrators.
00:55:37.000So if you accidentally get it wrong while you're trying to be sensitive, you will be fired.
00:55:42.000Okay, this is a serious First Amendment issue.
00:55:44.000Can school districts force you to use biologically incorrect pronouns to refer to students?
00:55:49.000Is that something that we can do in a First Amendment-loving society?
00:55:52.000Can state schools force you to do these things under the rubric of anti-discrimination?
00:55:56.000It's why I've always been very skeptical of a lot of the anti-discrimination laws pushed by the left.
00:56:00.000I think that they are Trojan horses for an attempt to cram down force on people's use of free speech.
00:56:09.000West Point High School Principal Jonathan Hockman testified he had instructed Vlaming to use the student's new pronoun and said, I can't think of a worse way to treat a child than what was happening.
00:56:17.000Really, you can't think of any worse way to treat the child than using gender non-binary pronouns?
00:56:24.000I can think of a lot of worse ways to treat a child.
00:56:27.000I think those ways generally would include very often people humoring the mental illness of people when they are small and then encouraging them to sterilize themselves through hormone treatment.
00:56:40.000I think that's usually a bad thing also.
00:56:42.000West Point School Superintendent Laura Abel stated that discrimination then leads to a hostile learning environment.
00:57:00.000The teacher was going out of his way not to offend the student and accidentally used the biologically correct pronoun once and now is being fired for it.
00:57:07.000This is where our country is going and it's going to get uglier and uglier because the left demands that you be forced to care.