The Republicans take on the FBI in the Royal Rumble! Plus, Mika Brzezinski throws Michael Wolff off the set of Morning Joe, and Republicans should read books. I'm Ben Shapiro, and I'll show you why. This is The Ben Shapiro Show, where we'll bring you the latest on MemoGate, 2018, and everything else going on in the world of politics, law enforcement, and public opinion. Today's episode is all about what's going on with the FBI and what's happening with the DOJ and the DOJ, and who's to blame and who is lying in the latest installment of the biggest political scandal of our time. It's the most exciting rumble in the history of American politics, and we're here to break it all down! Subscribe to the show to stay up to date on all things Memogate and all things related to it! Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code BONUS at checkout to receive $50 off your first set of sheets at BullandBranch. Use promo code BenShawneezeys to get 50% off your First Set of Sheets! Use that code BenShapiro to get $50 OFF your first box of sheets! Ben Shapiro is a big fan of B&B! You don't have to be a subscriber to get a discount code! to save $50! at the checkout! and get 10% off of your first pack! when you place your first order! Want to sponsor the show? Click here to become a supporter of the show and get 20% off the entire show with discount code Ben and receive $10 or more? at $50 at Ben and Ben is a discount of $50? Ben will give you a maximum of $99 and you get $10, and get an additional $50 discount when you sign up for a year of Ben will get $25, and Ben will get a chance to win $5, and he'll get $15, and a VIP discount when he reviews the show gets the VIP discount? And he'll also gets $50, and gets an ad discount and Ben gets a discount on his first episode only gets the show that starts shipping that starts at $99, and they also gets a FREE PROMO code and he also gets an extra $50 gets you an ad on the show starts in two weeks!
00:00:42.000We'll discuss all of those things first.
00:00:44.000I don't want to put you to sleep with a bull and branch yet, because the fact is, if you need to relax, folks, then you need to sleep well.
00:00:50.000I am not somebody who tends to sleep well, particularly when I'm on the road, but when I'm at home, I do sleep well, and that's because of bull and branch sheets.
00:00:56.000They are the best sheets in the business.
00:00:58.000Bull and branch sheets will cost you like a thousand bucks in the store, this kind of quality of sheet.
00:01:02.000Bull and branch sheets, though, are only a couple of hundred dollars.
00:01:51.000I'm just excited to say MemoFight and MemoGate, and it's all so exciting.
00:01:56.000In truth, none of it is all that exciting.
00:01:58.000I'm going to try and break down what's happening here, because if it seems like all is chaos and confusion, if it feels like the Ouroboros of confusion and chaos has taken over your life—I've been hanging out with Jordan Peterson too much—then you need to
00:02:09.000We're going to try and break down and separate out all of the various strands of what's going on in the FBI scandal, and who's to blame, and who is lying.
00:02:18.000Okay, so first, let's begin with this.
00:02:20.000The FBI is basically asking you to trust them.
00:02:23.000And the Republicans are asking you to trust them.
00:02:25.000And the Democrats are asking you to trust the FBI.
00:02:27.000And President Trump is asking you to trust the Republicans.
00:02:30.000And you don't know who to trust, because the truth is, we don't have all the information.
00:02:34.000What we do know is a couple of things.
00:02:35.000There are a few different strains here.
00:02:36.000Strain number one, the FBI, in all likelihood, acted corruptly in allowing Hillary Clinton to get away with storing classified information on a private, unsecured email server.
00:02:46.000OK, that was FBI malfeasance and it was probably planned by the Obama administration in coordination with the DOJ and the FBI.
00:02:52.000There's pretty solid evidence to that effect.
00:02:54.000I talked about it a few days ago on the show.
00:02:56.000If you go back about a week and listen to my show in which I discuss Andrew McCarthy's piece over at National Review laying out the case that there was essentially coordination between the Obama team in the White House and the FBI to let Hillary Clinton off the hook specifically because Hillary was illegally storing classified information on her server and using a private email address
00:03:13.000And Obama was emailing her at that email address, meaning he knew that she was using a private email address for classified material, which was not in fact legal.
00:03:21.000That piece by McCarthy is pretty damning and pretty telling about what the FBI was doing.
00:03:26.000And now we know, according to The Wall Street Journal, this is breaking news yesterday, top FBI officials were aware for at least a month before alerting Congress that emails potentially related to an investigation of Hillary Clinton had emerged during a key stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, according to text messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
00:03:44.000So, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had learned about the thousands of emails by September 28, 2016.
00:03:49.000Director James Comey informed Congress on October 28, 11 days before the presidential elections.
00:03:57.000Comey later said nothing about how early he had known about those emails.
00:04:00.000So, he went a month without hearing about those things.
00:04:02.000So, Democrats are complaining that Comey sandbagged Hillary Clinton.
00:04:04.000In all likelihood, what happened here is that Comey felt it was necessary because they'd actually gone through, they'd reviewed a lot of these emails, and they were seeing some stuff they didn't like.
00:04:12.000But that took them a month to announce to Congress.
00:04:15.000So, when people talk about corruption inside the FBI, when they talk about the gaming of the FBI by the Obama administration, there's some pretty good evidence for that.
00:04:23.000And so, it's hard to trust the FBI when the FBI says, don't release this four-page memo about Trump-Russia collusion.
00:04:28.000Now, Devin Nunes, the House Intelligence Committee,
00:04:32.000He's put together a four-page memo, this much-valleyhood memo, from the House Intelligence Committee that details intelligence malfeasance not just in the Hillary Clinton investigation, but also supposedly in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.
00:04:44.000And this has been seen now by a lot of conservatives as sort of the last great hope to save Trump from the Mueller investigation.
00:04:53.000We know that the FBI was acting in bad faith on Hillary Clinton.
00:04:56.000We don't know that the FBI was acting in bad faith on the Trump-Russia collusion stuff.
00:05:00.000And one of the weird things about this whole memo routine, as I've said, is Trump can declassify all of the underlying materials that the memo supposedly contemplates.
00:05:08.000He can do that right now, but he hasn't.
00:05:10.000Instead, he's allowing the Republicans to charge around with this four-page memo, talking about how this memo is the smoking gun that shows that the investigation into Trump himself has been corrupted and ruined from the very outset.
00:05:20.000Well, the FBI has now responded to the House Intelligence Committee's vote to release the memo by expressing grave concern over the memo's accuracy.
00:05:29.000So, the FBI released a statement on Wednesday.
00:05:31.000They said they had, quote-unquote, grave concerns about the accuracy.
00:05:34.000of a top secret House Intelligence Committee memo alleging anti-Trump bias within the Justice Department, challenging President Trump's pledge to release it.
00:05:42.000But a few hours after the public rebuke by the top U.S.
00:05:45.000law enforcement agency, a Trump administration official said the memo was likely to be released today, on Thursday.
00:05:50.000The FBI said in a statement, quote, the FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it.
00:05:56.000As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy.
00:06:57.000Devin Nunes said X, therefore X is true is no more convincing argument than Adam Schiff said X, therefore X is true, or Trump said X, therefore X is true, or the FBI said X, therefore X is true.
00:07:06.000If you don't know what X is, it's impossible for you to independently judge whether X is true or not.
00:07:11.000And I don't trust any of these people enough to know whether I believe their account of what's actually in the memo or what happened on Trump-Russia collusion or any of the rest of it.
00:07:21.000My own personal supposition is that the memo's materials about Hillary Clinton are probably pretty damning.
00:07:27.000The memo's materials about the Trump campaign and FBI investigation into the Trump campaign would probably be less so.
00:07:32.000The allegation, presumably Nunes sort of, Nunes said this yesterday,
00:07:36.000The allegation is that the FBI utilized the Steele dossier, which was the OPPO research dossier gathered by Fusion GPS, a Democratic OPPO intelligence firm, at the behest of Hillary Clinton, that the FBI got a hold of that OPPO research file and used it to open a FISA warrant on Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy advisor, and that's what launched the entire Trump-Russia collusion probe.
00:07:56.000And so Republicans are saying that's corrupt.
00:07:57.000You used Democratic research, basically funneled by Russia, to open the Trump-Russia probe in the first place.
00:08:04.000But I'm not sure that there's a huge case for that.
00:08:07.000I would probably think that they based their original FISA application on more than just the dossier.
00:08:13.000If they based it on just the dossier, that's a problem.
00:08:15.000But even then, there was a FISA warrant out for Carter Page tapping his phone since 2014.
00:08:21.000So Carter Page has been on the FBI's radar long before President Trump was an issue and long before he was on Trump's campaign.
00:08:29.000So, in any case, just because the FBI did stuff wrong in the Clinton investigation doesn't necessarily mean they did anything wrong in the Trump-Russia investigation.
00:08:35.000And Republicans, by tying the two together, by suggesting the FBI screwed up the Clinton investigation, therefore they're out to get Trump?
00:08:45.000And it makes Republicans look like they're actually trying to take down the FBI in order to protect Trump, as opposed to looking at the facts on the ground.
00:08:51.000Now, Democrats, on the other hand, have been saying that the FBI is clean all the way through.
00:08:54.000So they look like partisan hacks as well.
00:08:56.000So the Republicans look like partisan hacks by tying together what we know about FBI malfeasance on Hillary and what we don't know about FBI malfeasance on Trump.
00:09:03.000And the Democrats look like hacks by saying the FBI is clean and pure as the driven snow and has been all along.
00:09:11.000So, again, this leaves us with the who-do-you-trust scenario.
00:09:14.000Now, the Trump administration is now telling Major Garrett over at CBS News that the memo is not going to be approved today, that it will instead be sent back to House Intelligence Committee tomorrow with redactions from the White House based on internal consultations with the FBI and other agencies.
00:09:29.000So the FBI gave advice, and the Trump administration will take that advice and strike out some of the language.
00:09:34.000And then the White House will not release the memo, but send it back to the committee for its release on its own timetable, meaning that they would vote again
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00:11:56.000So now we know, according to Major Garrett, that the White House will not, in fact, release the memo today.
00:12:01.000The memo will be released presumably next week.
00:12:05.000Then next week, we'll find out what exactly is in the memo.
00:12:10.000And as I say, I think that it's overblown on pretty much every side, but you can see the two sides battling it out.
00:12:14.000So Representative Mark Meadows, member of the Freedom Caucus, representative from, I believe, North Carolina, he comes out, he says, Devin Nunes, who is the head of the House Intelligence Committee, he has a duty to inform Congress about abuses, and that's why the memo was written.
00:12:26.000Chairman Nunes has an obligation, an obligation to inform Congress when there has been FISA abuses.
00:12:34.000And so all he's doing is following on his constitutional duty to let us know about that.
00:12:40.000Okay, so that is the Republican attempt to justify the memo.
00:12:44.000And then the Democrats say, don't release the memo.
00:12:46.000Now, when the Democrats say don't release the memo, it makes Republicans, who have become somewhat conspiratorial on this, think, well, there must be something in it they don't want seen.
00:12:53.000Why wouldn't they want to release the memo?
00:12:54.000We're not going to take Democrats in good faith when Democrats say we want to protect the intelligence community.
00:12:58.000There is a certain irony to the Democrats yelling and screaming about protecting the FBI when they spent years under Bush ripping the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community up and down all the time, all over.
00:13:09.000Suddenly, the FBI are their best friends.
00:13:12.000But this is the attack the Democrats are going to take.
00:13:14.000Joe Manchin, Democrat from West Virginia, Senator, he says don't release the memo.
00:13:17.000Would you say that the President is wrong to release that memo?
00:13:20.000I would definitely say, Mr. President, please don't do that.
00:13:31.000This is a man that was sanctioned by his own committee members that he couldn't be on the Russian probe.
00:13:37.000This is a person who basically kind of shoots from the hip.
00:13:40.000And I said, Nunes has neutered the credibility of this Intelligence Committee on the House.
00:13:47.000The Senate Intelligence Committee is the only thing that we have left that can put confidence into the system and also into the investigation.
00:13:55.000Nunes, to recall, Nunes back in April went and visited the White House, and there he saw documents that he said suggested that members of the Obama administration had unmasked members of the Trump administration in FISA warrant situations.
00:14:06.000So, unmasking is a process whereby when officials first get reads on wiretaps that are between foreign agents, foreign people who are wiretapping American citizens, the names of the American citizens are hidden to protect their privacy.
00:14:20.000The members of the administration can ask for those names to be unmasked.
00:14:23.000Susan Rice presumably did that with Mike Flynn, the former national security advisor, when he was talking with members of the Russian government or members of the Turkish government.
00:14:32.000And Devin Nunes said that this was a misuse of her authority.
00:14:35.000And then he was sort of forced to recuse himself.
00:14:38.000He didn't technically recuse himself, but he sort of recused himself from the Russia investigation.
00:14:41.000But he maintained that he was going to continue looking into FBI malfeasance with regard to, for example, obstruction of justice, as well as the Hillary investigation.
00:15:03.000It's like he has an office staked out there at CNN.
00:15:05.000He has his own green room just labeled with his name, Adam Schiff.
00:15:08.000And he has been saying every day Trump-Russia collusion is real.
00:15:10.000Now he says that to release this memo would smear the FBI.
00:15:14.000Sadly, we can fully expect that the President of the United States will not put the national interest over his own personal interest.
00:15:22.000But it is a sad day indeed when that is also true of our own committee, because today this committee voted to put the President's personal interest, perhaps their own political interest, above the national interest in denying themselves even the ability to hear from the Department and the FBI.
00:15:41.000And that is, I think, a deeply regrettable state of affairs.
00:15:45.000But it does show how, in my view, when you have a deeply flawed person in the Oval Office, that flaw can infect the whole of government, and today, tragically, it infected our committee.
00:15:57.000So Schiff is gifted at making it sound like partisan talking points are not in fact partisan talking points, but this is in fact a partisan talking point.
00:16:03.000We don't know whether the memo smears the FBI because we haven't seen the memo, and we don't know whether the FBI is defending itself by trying to keep the memo hidden.
00:16:11.000Democrats, of course, are suggesting that the only reason the Republicans want to release the memo is to kill the Mueller investigation.
00:16:16.000Now, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has suggested that the memo is important because it reveals FBI abuses in the Hillary investigation, but this isn't necessarily an attempt to stop the Mueller investigation.
00:16:29.000And I think that's an important distinction.
00:16:30.000If Republicans were making that distinction day in and day out, they'd have a lot more credibility on this issue.
00:16:36.000They are making it sound as though if the FBI did the wrong thing on Hillary Clinton, that means we have to stop the Mueller investigation.
00:16:41.000That makes it look like they are wielding their evidence of failure by the FBI in the Hillary investigation in order to protect Trump from his own collusion or from his own potential criminality.
00:16:51.000That's exactly what Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat, said about the Republican attempts to release this memo.
00:16:58.000But you're saying this morning that there is dangerous classified information that should not be released.
00:17:04.000And why are the Republicans going to release him?
00:17:05.000Because the president wants to pursue this idea that somehow the dossier was related, that the dossier is representative of why this whole investigation began.
00:17:19.000OK, so this is the Democratic take on all this.
00:17:22.000Now, the Democrats have been trying really hard to stop the memo from coming out.
00:17:25.000So last night, Adam Schiff came out and he said that the memo should not be released because the version of the memo that was approved by the House Intelligence Committee was not the version of the memo that was sent to the White House.
00:17:35.000He said that Devin Nunes actually changed the memo itself and then sent it to the White House.
00:17:41.000And he tweeted out, breaking, So Trump is attempting to prevent the stalemate here by just sending the memo back to the House Intelligence Committee, essentially.
00:17:46.000Nunes responded by slapping at Schiff and suggesting that instead, quote, and this is what Nunes says, his spokesperson, quote,
00:18:37.000Republicans either want this memo out because they want to discredit the FBI with regard to the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton, or they want this memo out because they think it's going to end the Mueller investigation.
00:18:49.000Otherwise, it's just a cover-up attempt.
00:18:52.000Meanwhile, if the memo comes out and it does show evidence of these things, and Democrats were trying to cover up the memo, then that is, too, a partisan hack attempt to protect the FBI so that the FBI can continue its investigation into Trump.
00:19:04.000And if it turns out there's evidence of FBI malfeasance on Trump-Russia collusion, and the FBI was using national security as an excuse to shut down public knowledge of that fact, then that would demonstrate a certain level of corruption inside the FBI as well.
00:19:20.000Either somebody's lying, or everybody's lying.
00:19:23.000There's no situation in which nobody is lying.
00:19:25.000Either the Republicans are lying when they say that the FBI has been compromised, and they are just trying to cover for Trump, or the Democrats are lying when they say the FBI is crystal clean, crystal clear, and therefore, any attempt to shut down any investigation is an attempt to protect Trump.
00:19:41.000Or it's possible everybody's a little bit lying.
00:19:42.000It's possible that Republicans are telling the truth about the FBI and Hillary, but lying about the FBI and Trump-Russia.
00:19:48.000It's possible that Democrats are telling the truth about the FBI and Trump-Russia, but lying about the FBI and Hillary.
00:19:54.000It's possible that Trump doesn't know what's going on.
00:19:56.000It's possible Trump knows fully what's going on and thinks that this is going to be an excuse for him to fire the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein or to get rid of people inside the FBI who are involved in the Mueller investigation.
00:20:08.000So as I've been saying now for a couple of weeks, it is imperative that we sit and wait for the answer.
00:20:14.000This is not something where we can just jump to particular conclusions, especially not having seen the underlying documents and not having seen the underlying classified material.
00:20:23.000It does make me suspicious, by the way, that the White House is sending the memo back with FBI changes.
00:20:30.000That's suspicious simply because I think that what it looks like is the White House doesn't want to have its fingerprints on this thing.
00:20:37.000But the White House is going to have its fingerprints on this thing no matter what.
00:20:39.000The media, I think, are rightly going to assume that the Trump administration was coordinating with the Republican House Intelligence Committee in coming up with this memo.
00:20:47.000I'd be shocked if there was no coordination.
00:20:49.000Again, if you just reverse the situation, pretend that these were Democrats doing this, I'd be just as suspicious.
00:20:54.000So I'm trying to be a little bit objective here.
00:20:57.000If the Democrats—if Hillary Clinton were under investigation by the FBI for collusion with a foreign country or for obstruction of justice, and then the Democrats came up with a four-page memo suggesting that the intelligence community was responsible for—the deep state was out to get Hillary Clinton,
00:21:12.000I would think the same thing Democrats are thinking today.
00:21:16.000So, that means the burden on Republicans to come out with some actual evidence here is pretty high, particularly when you have all the Republicans rushing to the microphones to explain that this memo is going to change everything, that it's going to change everything.
00:21:27.000Well, in just a second, I'm going to explain a couple more scandals that are brewing.
00:21:31.000Yes, believe it or not, more scandals brewing, because it just never stops.
00:22:14.000And that is because of Dollar Shave Club and me using their products.
00:22:18.000I use Dollar Shave Club for pretty much everything.
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00:23:22.000So, one of the other scandals that broke late last night is that Mark Corallo, who is a former Trump legal spokesperson, is planning on telling Robert Mueller, according to the New York Times, about a previously undisclosed conference call, which led him to believe that Hope Hicks, who's a special aide to the President of the United States, was going to obstruct justice.
00:23:41.000So here is what the New York Times says.
00:23:53.000Mr. Corallo planned to tell investigators that Ms.
00:23:56.000Hicks said during the call that emails written by Donald Trump Jr.
00:23:59.000before the Trump Tower meeting, in which the younger Mr. Trump said he was eager to receive political dirt about Mrs. Clinton from the Russians, quote, will never get out.
00:24:06.000That left Mr. Corallo with concerns that Ms.
00:24:08.000Hicks could be contemplating obstructing justice, the people said.
00:24:11.000In a statement on Wednesday, a lawyer for Ms.
00:24:13.000Hicks strongly denied Mr. Corallo's allegations.
00:24:34.000But with all of that said, they obviously did come out.
00:24:37.000And if it turns out that the Trump administration knew about the emails from Trump Jr.
00:24:41.000to a Russian-connected lawyer offering Russian help in the election, and that the Trump administration then was complicit in destroying materials,
00:24:51.000Then you do fall foul of obstruction laws.
00:24:53.000Obstruction actually requires destruction of documents under one of the statutory frameworks, and that means that if the Trump administration tried to destroy materials, that could very well be obstruction.
00:25:03.000Trump may not be complicit in that, but if Hope Hicks gets rolled up into that, then you could see Hope Hicks getting rolled up and Donald Trump Jr.
00:25:22.000Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was essentially asked if he was loyal to the president when the DOJ official visited the White House last month to seek assistance from the president.
00:25:30.000Rosenstein had gone there to ask if Trump could help him stave off document demands from House Intel Committee Chair Devin Nunes.
00:25:36.000First of all, I don't know why Rosenstein was asking that.
00:25:38.000Why not just hand the documents over to Nunes?
00:25:40.000But the president apparently, according to CNN, had other priorities ahead of a key appearance by Rosenstein on the Hill.
00:25:46.000Trump wanted to know where the special counsel's Russia investigation was heading.
00:25:49.000And he wanted to know whether Rosenstein was, quote-unquote, on my team.
00:25:55.000Presumably, he had asked James Comey if he was loyal to Trump.
00:26:00.000And of all of the things that Trump has said, this is the one that I find maybe least objectionable, just because, not to do a little bit of whataboutism, but here's some whataboutism.
00:26:07.000Eric Holder was the attorney general for Barack Obama and went around openly calling himself Barack Obama's wingman.
00:26:12.000So the idea that the FBI deputy director is somehow completely separate
00:26:17.000Sorry, not Deputy Director for the FBI, but that the DOJ Assistant Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, is somehow not supposed to be loyal to the President of the United States.
00:26:29.000If that were true, I would like to hear where the Democrats were when Eric Holder was pledging loyalty openly, on camera, to Barack Obama.
00:26:37.000I'd like to know where everybody's ire was then.
00:26:40.000So, there's going to be an attempt here to suggest that Trump was asking for loyalty tests because he's trying to quash the Mueller investigation again.
00:26:45.000In order to show obstruction, you actually have to show an attempted obstruction.
00:26:49.000Asking people whether they are loyal is not an attempted obstruction.
00:26:52.000Firing people who work for you is not an attempted obstruction.
00:26:55.000An attempted obstruction is when you actually are, number one, attempting to obstruct the investigation.
00:27:00.000So if he would tell Mueller that the investigation must find him innocent or he will be fired, that would be obstruction.
00:27:06.000Or if he destroyed documents, that would be obstruction.
00:27:08.000If he fires Mueller, it's not even clear that's obstruction because he does have the statutory authority to do that.
00:27:15.000It's probably impeachable, but it's not necessarily criminal obstruction.
00:27:19.000Okay, so that's another piece of news on the scandal front.
00:27:22.000Furthermore, you can see that the FBI is trying to restore its own credibility after all of the accusations of bias in the Hillary Clinton probe.
00:27:28.000According to CNN, emails obtained by CNN show that Peter Strzok, the FBI agent at the center of the Capitol Hill storm, played a key role in a controversial FBI decision that upended Hillary Clinton's campaigns just days before the 2016 election.
00:27:58.000Right, so that is, you know, that is a new piece of information.
00:28:00.000And the idea here is to sort of rehabilitate Strzok.
00:28:02.000The idea is that Strzok wasn't corrupt.
00:28:04.000Strzok wasn't out to save Hillary Clinton.
00:28:06.000He wrote the letter that reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton.
00:28:09.000But that does not tell the whole story, because it's also true that Strzok had expressed his doubts about whether the investigation should go forward or the importance of the new emails that were found.
00:28:19.000You know, he did work for Comey, so if Comey wanted that letter drafted, he had to draft the letter.
00:28:23.000The real problem for Strzok is the text messages exchanged between him and his lover, Lisa Page, showing that Strzok was openly talking about how Hillary Clinton needed to be let off the hook because she might be president at some point.
00:28:35.000OK, so with all of this in the wind, one of the worst things that can happen to the country right now
00:28:40.000is the level of vitriol to which this has now risen.
00:28:43.000Because we're talking about the destruction of the FBI as a credible institution.
00:28:47.000We're talking about the destruction of both political parties as credible institutions.
00:28:51.000And everybody needs to turn down the rhetoric a little bit.
00:28:53.000Unfortunately, they're just turning it up.
00:28:55.000Steve King from Iowa, a Republican from Iowa, he says that, again, the Nunes memo is earth-shaking.
00:29:02.000We are about to find out that the entire deep state was out to get Trump.
00:29:05.000We're going to have a Congress that does oversight.
00:29:07.000We can't accept the FBI or the DOJ or any other branch of government from closing the gate in front of us and saying, sorry, you can't look at this because it's classified.
00:29:17.000Then what I saw and what I believe happened could go on in perpetuity and we become a banana republic.
00:29:35.000Because the FBI and the DOJ, by the information that I have observed and the testimony that I have analyzed from listening to and questioning multiple members of the FBI and the DOJ, tells me that the FBI and DOJ have been weaponized.
00:29:55.000OK, so that's a pretty strong allegation by Steve King, of course.
00:29:59.000And then on the other side, you have Phil Mudd, the national security analyst for CNN, and he loses it about the Nunes memo.
00:30:04.000So again, the rhetoric here is so hot and it's so high, and the reality is nobody's seen the memo.
00:30:09.000Nobody knows what they're talking about.
00:30:10.000Steve King may have read the memo, but Steve King is also a partisan Republican.
00:30:24.000I'm going to break the camera here in a moment, Aaron.
00:30:26.000Have you ever worked in Washington, D.C.?
00:30:28.000I've worked at the highest levels of the FBI, the CIA.
00:30:30.000I've worked on the National Security Council and the White House.
00:30:33.000In the midst of the highest profile investigation of political corruption we've seen since the 1970s, in the midst of a precedent of cooperation,
00:30:42.000Between the Congress, including Devin Nunes in the White House, do you think it was a secret that congressional officials were preparing a memo of this import and nobody knew at the White House?
00:31:00.000I'm saying in that small town of Washington, DC,
00:31:03.000That to suggest that nobody at the White House knew that congressional staffers were discussing a memo of this import, that's ridiculous.
00:31:11.000It's not about whether Devin Nunes coordinated, it's whether somebody knew over a cup of coffee and talked about it, and to tell me they didn't is just stupid.
00:31:19.000OK, so everybody is going nuts over this stuff.
00:31:25.000If the memo turns out to be a giant nothing, the blowback will be very intense.
00:31:29.000If the memo turns out to be a nothing, and it turns out that the Trump administration was attempting to set up the memo as a way to take down the Mueller investigation, there will be intense blowback, and it will be deserved.
00:31:38.000If the Republicans decide that they went forward with a memo that was an attempt to take down the Mueller investigation, or if they mouth off the way they have been for the past few weeks, it's such a mistake.
00:31:47.000You know, in business and in life, there's a simple rule that allows you to lead a happier life.
00:32:42.000And if you get the annual subscription, you also get this, the very greatest in all beverage vessels, the Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumbler.
00:32:57.000If you just want to listen later, go over to SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, any of the podcast apps will have our podcast.
00:33:05.000Because, of course, we are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:33:14.000All righty, so, in other news, the media are beginning to realize that they may be out over their skis on the Michael Wolff book.
00:33:22.000So, Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury has turned out to be a load of trash, which we said, essentially, at the time.
00:33:28.000It is a very juicy load of trash, but it is trash nonetheless.
00:33:31.000And so, Michael Wolff, the author of Fire and Fury, which has now sold something like 2 million copies, is promoted at the Grammys by Hillary Clinton.
00:33:37.000It's been promoted by every major media outlet.
00:33:40.000It was treated as a serious work, even though it was completely fictionalized in parts, and it was basically as told by Steve Bannon.
00:33:47.000Even Saturday Night Live, I think, rightly mocked Michael Wolff as sort of a Steve Bannon tool in writing Fire and Fury.
00:33:54.000Well, Michael Wolff appears on MSNBC this morning—this is earlier this morning—and Wolff had implied over the last couple of weeks that Nikki Haley was having an affair with President Trump.
00:34:04.000Like, this was the actual implication, which is just ridiculous.
00:34:08.000There's no evidence of that whatsoever.
00:34:09.000And finally, finally, Mika Brzezinski has had enough, and here's how that goes.
00:34:13.000Wait, are you suggesting that the language is not ambiguous in any way in the things that you've said and the way you've stated it?
00:34:42.000So Brzezinski throws him off the set because it's sexist.
00:34:44.000Everything about Nikki Haley is sexist, but implying that Trump is a crazy person, all of that was totally in bounds, and the spirit of it was true.
00:34:50.000Mika Brzezinski two weeks ago said that Michael Wolff's book has problems, but the spirit of the book is true.
00:34:56.000This is the problem with building up crazy people like Michael Wolff?
00:34:59.000The problem with building up bad sources like Michael Wolff?
00:35:01.000OK, the reality is that Michael Wolff is a smear merchant.
00:35:12.000He's actually tweeting out—he tweeted out earlier today, quote,
00:35:24.000Now remember, the President of the United States said that Mika was a liar and that she had come to him with a bloody face and he didn't want her at his event because her face was bloody.
00:36:42.000She's just doing her first interview since she left the White House.
00:36:44.000But here's what Michelle Obama said, and this came out this morning, quote,
00:36:56.000And that's what she told DeGeneres when asked what advice she would give to people who find the world to be a scary place right now.
00:37:01.000She said, I would just encourage your viewers, the country, to do the things we do every day, to love each other, to take care of each other, to show empathy.
00:37:06.000And you can't do that only when people make you feel good or safe.
00:37:09.000We've got to do it all across the board.
00:37:38.000The reason empathy is wrong is because when you put yourself in somebody's shoes, you're immediately taking yourself out of everyone else's shoes.
00:37:44.000If you have empathy for one person, that means that you are feeling what that person is feeling, but you're not feeling what the other 300 million people in the country are feeling.
00:37:51.000Making policy should not be based on empathy.
00:37:53.000And it is telling, the sort of language Michelle Obama uses, where the good things that we do, we show empathy, we care for each other.
00:38:57.000I think they actually have a shrine to Barack Obama, and every so often they open up the curtains and they light candles in front of that shrine.
00:39:45.000But once he gives his opinion, then I get to knock him for his opinion, because his opinion is just wrong in many of these cases, because it's not based on the facts.
00:39:51.000So in any case, he does a shtick about how
00:39:57.000Dreamers ought to be let in the country, and Obama was nice, and Trump is cruel.
00:40:01.000Never mind the fact that Trump is about to let in three times as many dreamers as Obama ever was.
00:40:05.000He's about to legalize that many dreamers.
00:40:07.000So, Kimmel decides that he's going to do this routine where he has a bunch of people who oppose DACA meet a dreamer family.
00:40:13.000He's going to have a bunch of people who oppose DACA meet a dreamer family.
00:40:15.000And this is how, again, talk about bias in the media, this is it in spades.
00:40:19.000This is Esmeralda, and this is her daughter, Rose.
00:41:46.000And the reason I'm in favor of getting rid of Obamacare is because I think that over the broad swath of human beings, it will be better for America to get rid of Obamacare than to maintain Obamacare.
00:41:55.000But this is the way the media biases the cases.
00:41:57.000Like, would they ever do this with a bunch of people from sanctuary cities?
00:42:00.000Like, would Jimmy Kimmel ever have a bunch of left-wing activists from San Francisco sit there and talk to the families that Donald Trump mentioned during the State of the Union address?
00:42:10.000Would he ever just have the two families—remember, there are the two black families whose daughters were murdered by an illegal immigrant?
00:42:17.000Would he ever have those families confront people who are fans of Sanctuary Cities?
00:42:22.000This sort of media bias is what frustrates so many people on the right.
00:42:24.000And it's what, I think, wrongly allows them to engage in reactionary politics where they say that all news is fake news or deride anything the media ever say.
00:42:33.000But when members of the media do this routine, particularly members of the cultural media do this,
00:42:40.000Because it's sad to say, but Jimmy Fallon, who's the most apolitical of the hosts, has fallen in the ratings specifically because he is the most apolitical of the hosts.
00:42:47.000Because left-wingers are now tuning into Jimmy Kimmel to get their feel-good moment for their leftist politics in a way that they are not for Jimmy Fallon.
00:42:54.000I'm not a fan of either Kimmel or Fallon.
00:42:56.000In fact, I think Kimmel is funnier than Fallon.
00:43:02.000Is going by the wayside here, and that's simply too bad.
00:43:05.000So again, I think this is just more evidence of a media that's biased.
00:43:11.000They set up situations deliberately in order to achieve certain results.
00:43:14.000I talked about this a little bit on Dave Rubin's show with Jordan Peterson yesterday.
00:43:18.000What the media do in order to gain results, and that's why people like me, people like Jordan, people like Sam Harris, we may all disagree on politics, but if we refuse to accept the bait that the media are presenting, if we refuse to acknowledge the situation that the media are putting us in in order to try and drive us to a certain conclusion, we're seen as outliers.
00:43:36.000And this is, I think, why there are so many people who listen to us.
00:43:39.000The media setup routine is getting old, and I think most people know it.
00:43:42.000Okay, time for a couple of things I like, and then some things that I hate.
00:44:32.000It's because this was basically the idea of the founding fathers, that natural law, natural rights were things that you could derive from nature, right?
00:44:38.000There are self-evident truths in government, and there are self-evident truths when it comes to music.
00:44:41.000And Bach felt this, Brahms felt this, Beethoven felt this, Mozart felt this, all the greatest musicians in history felt this.
00:44:47.000Because we moved away from that notion that there's an objective musical truth out there that can be discovered and accessed, and toward the idea that all music is subjective, music has gotten significantly worse.
00:44:58.000Matthew's Passion and then listen to pop music and think that there is no objective difference between the two.
00:45:03.000There is a very large objective difference between the two, and anybody who doesn't believe that, anybody who thinks all art is equivalent, that all art is of equal quality or equal genius or equal beauty, those people are fools.
00:46:18.000So, Tommy Lahren, who was ousted from Blaze after she went on The View and talked about why pro-life people were basically stupid, and now she is on Sean Hannity's show, where she gives her final thoughts, which I think is an apt description of her segment, Final Thoughts.
00:46:33.000So I think she, in any case, Tommy, I think Tommy's a nice person.
00:46:39.000You know, maybe she's trying, but this is not good.
00:46:43.000Okay, so Tommy was giving her response to Joe Kennedy's response to the State of the Union address, and here is what she came up with.
00:46:53.000If you haven't yet had the displeasure of watching that little little response to President Trump's State of the Union, I suggest you take some Pepto-Bismol or some Midol or whatever you need to do to get through it because it was pathetic and it was embarrassing.
00:48:22.000So, apparently, there was an immigrant group that decided to watch Trump's State of the Union address, and to demonstrate their cultural sensitivity, I guess, they decided to throw shoes at the wall.
00:48:54.000Now, what's funny about the throwing shoes thing is this is not an American thing, the throwing shoes thing.
00:48:57.000I mean, like, there's no history of Americans throwing shoes at the wall when people speak.
00:49:03.000The last time I remember somebody throwing a shoe was actually when George W. Bush was in Iraq and in the middle of a press conference, a guy threw a shoe at him and Bush ducked out of the way.
00:49:20.000There'd be talk, when Obama was president, there'd be talk of they're promoting violence, they're promoting assassination, they're promoting actual physical harm toward the President of the United States.
00:49:29.000People do this against Trump, and suddenly it's totally fine.
00:49:32.000So vitriol exists on all sides, but it's only called out on one, and that's one of the places where I have a serious, serious problem.
00:50:08.000T, by the way, in that book is for trans, which is something you definitely want to be teaching seven-year-olds about.
00:50:14.000And then they make posters with gay rights flags, and they make posters with police brutality and Black Lives Matter.
00:50:22.000Apparently, according to the Weekly Standard, the shift began in 2013, when Adina school leaders adopted the All-for-All Strategy Plan, a sweeping initiative that reordered the district's mission from academic excellence for all students to racial equity.
00:50:35.000Equity does not mean equality or fairness.
00:50:37.000It means racial identity politics, an ideology that blames minority students' academic challenges on institutional racial bias, repudiates Martin Luther King's colorblind ideal, and focuses on uprooting white privilege.
00:50:49.000It mandated that henceforth, all teaching and learning experiences would be viewed through the lens of racial equity, and that only racially conscious teachers and administrators should be hired.
00:50:58.000District leaders assured parents this would reduce ADINA's racial achievement gap, which they attributed to barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings.
00:51:07.000That if you teach people about Black Lives Matter, it closes the racial gap.
00:51:09.000There's no evidence of this whatsoever.
00:51:11.000So now, they start teaching kids about white privilege in kindergarten.
00:51:15.000So K-2 students participate in the melanin project.
00:51:19.000Students trace their hands, color them to reflect their skin tone, and place the cutouts on a poster reading, stop thinking your skin color is better than everyone else's.
00:51:27.000And then they have racially conscious elementary school principal who runs a blog for the school's community, and they put up pictures of protesters holding a banner proclaiming gay marriages are right.