Robert Mueller testifies on the Hill, the media defends Ilhan Omar, and the Justice Department targets Big Tech. Ben Shapiro breaks it all down and explains why the Democrats were asleep by the end of the first inning and why they don t have a chance to learn anything from this hearing. Plus, a new piece from Bloomberg on the high stakes Mueller hearing, and why the media should have been paying attention to it all along. Thanks to our sponsor, Caff Monster Energy. Caff is a high-end Monster Energy drink with twice the caffeine and twice the calories and is available in Vanilla, Mocha, and Salted Caramel. Caff has been a long-time friend of mine and I think you'll agree that it's one of the best blended drinks in the entire world. Enjoy this mashup of the biggest news of the day: Robert Mueller's testimony before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committee, and how the media reacted to it, and what it meant for the country and the country at large. Subscribe to my new podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, wherever you get your coffee. I hope you enjoy it. Tweet me and let me know what you thought of it! Timestamps: 4:30 - What did you think of it? 5:00 - Is it any good? 6:15 - What do you think? 7:10 - Is this a good drink? 8:00 9:00 Is it a good cup of coffee? 11: What are you looking forward to the hearing? 14: Is it going to be a good one? 15:20 - How do you feel about the hearing process? 16: What would you like to hear from Mueller? 17:40 - What are your thoughts on the evidence? 18:15 19:10 21:30 22:40 Is it possible for me to learn from this testimony? 23:00 Do you think it's a good thing? 25:00 Can I trust him? 26:20 27:00 What do I have any idea what he's going to do next? 29:00 Are you excited? 32: Is he a good guy? 35:00 Does he have a problem? 36:00 If you don't know anything else? 37:00 Would you like me to do my homework?
00:00:43.000The Democrats had to bring Robert Mueller in because they wanted to grill him.
00:00:47.000And they wanted to demonstrate that in reality, despite the fact that Robert Mueller had said he was not hindered in his investigation, despite the fact that the investigation, in fact, found no collusion with the Russians, despite the fact that the obstruction charges were not sufficient to bring a prosecution and that Robert Mueller had begged off.
00:01:04.000The Democrats were under the weird assumption that Robert Mueller was going to show up and he was going to say, guys, time for me to drop the pretense and drop the pretense right now.
00:02:56.000As far as instructing Don McGahn to create a document for the press, that was not a crime, right?
00:03:01.000I mean, that probably was not a crime, at least not sufficient to charge, according to none other than Robert Mueller, in any case.
00:03:07.000The media had really built this thing up.
00:03:10.000There's a piece by Bloomberg talking about, in high stakes Mueller hearing, there are big risks for everyone.
00:03:14.000They say, Robert Mueller has vowed he won't go beyond what he's already written about Russia, Donald Trump, and obstruction of justice when he testifies on Wednesday.
00:03:21.000But there's a lot at stake in how much or how little he brings to life the dry specifics of his 448 page report.
00:03:28.000Wow, it was going to be supremely exciting.
00:03:30.000And Democrats were hoping that Americans would tune in.
00:03:32.000Well, if they did, they were asleep by the end of the first inning.
00:03:36.000If this is a baseball game, they were out by the end of the first inning.
00:03:39.000Representative David Cicilline, he says, this is Congress saying no one is above the law.
00:03:43.000Here's Chris Cuomo getting super excited with David Cicilline.
00:03:47.000Well, you're not going to learn anything tomorrow that you don't know already.
00:03:50.000The Democrats aren't going to learn if they've done their homework.
00:03:52.000But our responsibility is also to be sure that the American people understand.
00:03:59.000This investigation was conducted on their behalf.
00:04:01.000It's important that the person who led the investigation report to the American people about his findings, about the evidence that he uncovered.
00:04:08.000And then it will be incumbent on Congress to hold him accountable.
00:04:11.000In fact, Mr. Mueller, in the very final paragraphs of the report, It says this is Congress's responsibility to demonstrate that no one is above the law, including the president.
00:04:20.000So Mueller's performance was going to be the big thing.
00:04:22.000Now, it's worthwhile reviewing what the Mueller report actually found.
00:04:25.000So there were several key claims in the Mueller report.
00:04:27.000The first is that the Trump-Russia collusion claims were farcically overblown, like really, really overblown.
00:04:34.000There are certainly members of the Trump team who acted suspiciously, including President Trump, who continued to tell the American public no work was occurring on the Trump Tower Moscow deal during the 2016 campaign, which, of course, Was not true.
00:04:45.000But the Mueller report makes it clear that all of this was really, really exaggerated.
00:04:49.000There's a quote from the Mueller report.
00:04:51.000Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally for information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
00:05:11.000The Mueller report also never really referred to the Steele dossier, which apparently was the basis of a lot of the investigation in the first place.
00:05:19.000The Mueller report revealed that when it came to obstruction of justice, that they had no real clear definition sufficient to prosecute the president or recommend prosecution.
00:05:28.000It found that Trump acted perversely in a lot of ways, this report.
00:05:32.000It found that he was threatening to fire people.
00:05:34.000He was trying to push his White House counsel, Don McGahn, to lie to the press regarding Trump's desire to fire James Comey.
00:05:40.000And there's a lot of ugly stuff in the report, but there is nothing that rises to the level of criminally prosecutable behavior.
00:05:46.000Trump's team basically stopped him from violating the law time and time again.
00:05:51.000What the report mostly reveals when it comes to obstruction is that Trump was just ticked off at his own DOJ and at his own FBI because he felt he was being unjustly persecuted by them.
00:06:01.000The real takeaway from the Mueller report was, here is a bunch of information.
00:06:05.000If Congress wants to go forward with it, if Congress wants to impeach, then that is a Congress problem.
00:06:09.000Congress tried to throw this back in Mueller's lap today.
00:06:11.000They tried to basically get Mueller to testify that Trump should be impeached.
00:06:48.000I don't think it's going to change public opinion.
00:06:51.000Having been involved in the Clinton impeachment, if the public's not with you, you'll pay a price.
00:06:56.000And I don't think anything Mueller can say that's going to change anybody's mind.
00:07:00.000Now, again, in the run up to this, there was a lot of talk about maybe the Trump administration was going to restrict what Mueller could testify about.
00:07:06.000There's a lot of talk about a particular letter sent from the DOJ to Robert Mueller that basically said, stick to the report.
00:07:14.000As it turns out, William Barr, the attorney general, says that Mueller actually requested the letter so that he could point to the letter when it came time for him to testify.
00:07:23.000You know, at his press conference, Bob had said that he intended to stick with the public report and not go beyond that.
00:07:31.000And in conversations with the department, his staff was reiterating that that was their position.
00:07:39.000And they asked us for guidance in writing to explain or to tell them what our position was.
00:07:55.000In a second we are going to get to the punchline because it turns out that the punchline didn't exactly match the buildup first.
00:08:01.000Nowadays there are a lot of different types of cars on the road and there's no way that the local auto parts store is going to supply you or stock everything that you actually need.
00:08:08.000There's no reason why you should wait in line to find the right part that's probably overpriced or get the wrong part that is overpriced anyway.
00:08:14.000You can do it all with the convenience of Rock Auto.
00:08:17.000The internet was made for this sort of stuff, guys.
00:09:37.000Now all he's got is 448 pages of incredibly damaging evidence that the president committed 10 separate instances of obstruction of justice and that at one point he said, and I quote, Okay, well, again, they're so excited.
00:09:58.000Now, imagine that you're Robert Mueller.
00:09:59.000Imagine that you spend two years working on this report.
00:10:01.000Or, as it turns out, that you spend two years chain-smoking cigars out back while your team writes your report, as it appears is what actually happened.
00:10:10.000And then, you walk off America's stage Into the sunset, having done your work.
00:10:16.000And then they call you back in and they're like, tell us what, tell us, tell us what you said.
00:10:20.000And you're like, God, don't you people know how to read?
00:10:23.000That's pretty much how this went, except that Robert Mueller was not the steadfast, thorough, Solid public servant that the people thought he was.
00:10:32.000He looked pretty precarious out there.
00:10:33.000And this was the critique from both right and left.
00:10:35.000David Axelrod was saying he looked old.
00:10:39.000He looked like he didn't really know what was going on, which did raise the question as to how much of this report he actually wrote.
00:10:44.000This was a serious question because there was a claim by President Trump that it was actually Mueller's team that did most of the writing.
00:10:51.000Mueller's deputy, a guy named Andrew Weisberg was a Hillary Clinton I mean, who's at Hillary Clinton's election headquarters the night that the election actually happened.
00:11:09.000And so there's claims today that given how dicey Mueller was on the stand here, how dicey he was in his testimony, that maybe he wasn't actually in control of this report in the first place.
00:11:17.000That would explain why you got that bizarre letter from Mueller's team to William Barr Suggesting that he did not fully elucidate the findings of the report or that there had been some sort of cover-up.
00:11:29.000Mueller doesn't look like he's in control of the report.
00:11:31.000He didn't look like he was in control of himself.
00:11:33.000It was not a good showing for Robert Mueller, who I think, again, is a good man.
00:13:34.000It was his job to determine whether there was a prosecutable offense.
00:13:38.000And this became obvious in clip 16 when Representative Ratcliffe, he said to Mueller, you know, you say you didn't exonerate the president.
00:13:45.000Who said it's your job to exonerate the president?
00:13:46.000Can you think of another instance in which a prosecutor's job is to exonerate anybody?
00:13:51.000Can you give me an example other than Donald Trump where the Justice Department determined that an investigated person was not exonerated because their innocence was not conclusively determined?
00:14:02.000I cannot, but this is a unique situation.
00:14:30.000And so that's the takeaway from the Republicans.
00:14:32.000So the takeaway from Democrats is he wasn't exonerated, maybe out there.
00:14:35.000Lurking somewhere like the X-Files is the actual damning material and then John Ratcliffe from Texas there He says, um, dude, that's not your job.
00:14:44.000You're not in the exoneration people business That's for defense counsel during a prosecution.
00:14:48.000Your job is to determine whether there is evidence sufficient to prosecute And Mueller basically admits, yeah, I guess that's kind of right.
00:15:01.000He opened his performance by suggesting, for example, that he could not speak about the The beginnings of the investigation.
00:15:09.000He suggested that he couldn't speak about the Steele dossier, so there were key topics that were left off the table, which immediately makes this much less interesting.
00:15:16.000He suggested in the middle of this hearing he didn't know what Fusion GPS was, which, again, was the company that was hired by Hillary Clinton's law firm to create the Steele dossier.
00:15:25.000It was really a bad performance for Robert Mueller and not a good performance in favor of Democrats.
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00:17:05.000Is it true the evidence gathered during your investigation did not establish that the president was involved in the underlying crime related to Russian election interference as stated in volume 1 page 7?
00:17:14.000Representative Collins asks him about this.
00:17:17.000Again, this does not cut against the president.
00:17:20.000Is it true the evidence gathered during your investigation did not establish that the president was involved in the underlying crime related to Russian election interference as stated in volume one, page seven?
00:17:30.000We found insufficient evidence of the president's culpability.
00:18:23.000He probably reads the final report and then gives his sign off on it.
00:18:26.000But in no way is Mueller the expert on his own report.
00:18:29.000And that is obvious because he keeps getting caught off guard when people ask him specific questions about his own report.
00:18:36.000And again, he started off this thing by saying that he was not going to comment on some of the most confusing aspects of the report, such as, for example, why Fusion GPS is basically not mentioned.
00:18:45.000I mean, that was an intelligence gathering group hired by Hillary Clinton's law firm in order to go get the Steele dossier, which was used as the basis for much of the investigation.
00:18:55.000How was that not within the FBI's purview?
00:18:57.000How about the beginning of the investigation?
00:18:59.000He says, well that was before my time and not within my purview.
00:19:02.000Well, the entire investigation was about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
00:19:06.000So wouldn't you want to know how the investigation was initiated?
00:19:08.000Considering that the Republicans have been accusing the investigation of being initiated off the basis of Russian interference in collusion basically with Hillary Clinton's campaign.
00:19:19.000So you took a bunch of key issues off the table from the very beginning.
00:19:21.000Here is Doug Collins forcing Mueller to stumble on collusion and conspiracy, and pointing out that when you say that you're unclear on collusion but there's no conspiracy, you're really saying no collusion.
00:19:32.000Although your report states collusion is not a specific offense, and you said that this morning, or a term of art in federal criminal law, conspiracy is.
00:19:41.000In the colloquial context, are collusion and conspiracy essentially synonymous terms?
00:19:47.000You're going to have to repeat that for me.
00:19:50.000Collusion is not a specific offense or a term of art in the federal criminal law.
00:21:02.000Now, what Democrats are trying to latch onto is this suggestion that, in reality, Mueller wants Trump prosecuted after Trump leaves office.
00:21:11.000And they're hanging that coat on a very, very slender hook, okay?
00:21:16.000And that is an exchange in which Robert Mueller is asked specifically if President Trump could be prosecuted after he leaves office.
00:21:58.000That doesn't answer the question as to whether I should be charged today.
00:22:01.000As a matter of law, of course the president can be charged after he leaves office for crimes committed while he is president of the United States.
00:22:08.000However, that was not the question that Mueller was asked and had he been asked that question, presumably he would not have answered the question properly.
00:22:14.000Again, the Democrats are really attempting to spin this into something that it is not because the answer is this has been a giant nothing burger and Mueller does not acquit himself well.
00:22:22.000Mueller said that the investigation did not establish Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia.
00:22:58.000Is there anybody who has been following this thing for two years who doesn't know what Fusion GPS is?
00:23:03.000And yet Mueller, Clip 22, When you talk about the firm that produced the steel reporting, the name of the firm that produced that was Fusion GPS.
00:23:57.000Again, the entire investigation was about Russian interference in the election.
00:24:01.000If Fusion GPS was funneled Russian disinformation via Christopher Steele and that became a part of the investigation, how exactly is that outside the purview of his investigation?
00:25:43.000Frankly, I think you've both been very kind.
00:25:46.000I think this has been a disaster for the Democrats, and I think it's been a disaster for the reputation of Robert Mueller.
00:25:53.000He has seemed very uncertain with his brief.
00:25:56.000He doesn't seem to know things that are in the report.
00:26:00.000He's been attacked a number of times, and you would think that almost anybody else would have defended his own integrity and the integrity of the investigation.
00:26:13.000So Democrats who have been trying desperately to continue to push the Russia stuff, desperately trying to push the obstruction stuff, it's just going to fall apart on them.
00:26:22.000It's absolutely going to fall apart on them, and it should fall apart on them.
00:26:25.000It was a mistake for them to call Mueller.
00:26:26.000Mueller was never going to give them what they wanted.
00:26:29.000The best that he was going to do was repeat some of the more incendiary reports from the report.
00:26:34.000But everybody had that out there, and Democrats can cut ads on that stuff anytime, or give speeches on it at any time.
00:26:45.000It basically looked like when your parent wrote your book report for you in third grade and you went in there and your teacher was like, so tell us what happened in Bridge to Terabithia.
00:27:01.000Bad, bad showing for Robert Mueller and worse showing for Democrats who thought that this was going to be the moment, finally the moment, when President Trump went down.
00:27:12.000Now, the testimony is going to continue to be a news story, but I don't think that this is actually going to be news.
00:27:20.000I don't think anyone cares about this, frankly.
00:27:21.000I think that this was over the moment that the report came out and there was no recommendation of prosecution.
00:27:26.000There's no place for Democrats to go from there.
00:27:28.000If Democrats want to impeach on this basis, I don't think the American people are for it.
00:27:31.000I don't think that the polls show that the American people are for it.
00:27:34.000And bringing Robert Mueller up there, hoping that he was going to open some other can of worms or point to the shadowy man in the back and say, ah, deep throat, here he is.
00:28:14.000It's because she says routinely anti-semitic things.
00:28:16.000It's because she says things like some people did something on 9-11.
00:28:20.000It's because her sneering tone of voice when she describes the United States is extraordinarily off-putting.
00:28:26.000It's because she treats, I mean, she literally said legislative bodies in the United States are more interested in treating dogs decently than humans.
00:28:35.000There's a reason folks are not real fond of Ilhan Omar.
00:28:38.000President Trump has decided he's going to make her his bait noir in all of this.
00:28:42.000So you're speaking at Turning Point USA, great organization, and here is President Trump making this point.
00:29:55.000They're out there in force defending Ilhan Omar.
00:29:57.000In one of the great gaslighting articles I've ever seen, there's a BuzzFeed contributor named Chase Madar, who wrote a piece called, Just like hippies spitting on Vietnam vets, or welfare queens sipping champagne, Omar's antisemitism has become a structural support beam for American politics.
00:30:16.000And then he says, well she never actually said anything that was antisemitic.
00:30:20.000So then why did she apologize under pressure from Nancy Pelosi and other top members of the House Caucus just a couple of months ago for her anti-Semitic remarks?
00:30:28.000And then, like two weeks later, she went right back to the anti-Semitism.
00:30:31.000Why was her first move, since national prominence hit her again, why was her first move to sponsor a resolution comparing Israel to the Nazis from 1933 to 1941?
00:30:42.000She's not an anti-Semite, though, according to the press.
00:30:44.000This is all, everything, According to the press, everything Trump says is wrong.
00:30:48.000So even when he says something right, they treat it as though it is wrong.
00:30:51.000Our indubitably wonderful fact-checkers and decent people in the media, don't worry.
00:30:56.000They're here just to tell you the truth.
00:31:28.000The host is Bill Whittle, author, pilot, NASA enthusiast.
00:31:31.000He knows more about NASA than pretty much anybody that I've ever heard of.
00:31:34.000He tells you the story of the journey of getting to the moon and what happened when we got there and how things almost went horribly wrong.
00:31:40.000All four episodes are available right now.
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00:31:51.000They include tons of amazing space, historical footage.
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00:33:51.000Okay, there's a columnist who says the rabidly anti-Semitic comments that Omar never made, along with the equally fictitious Jew hatred of her allies in the so-called squad, have swiftly become a load-bearing myth in U.S.
00:34:31.000So either this BuzzFeed columnist fell and hit his head and ended up in an alternative reality like sliding doors, or We all did.
00:34:39.000Because I'm living in the reality where Rashida Tlaib yesterday said this on the house floor.
00:34:44.000So I can't stand by and watch this attack on our freedom of speech and the right to boycott the racist policies of the government and the state of Israel.
00:34:54.000Americans of conscience have a long and proud history of participating in boycotts specifically to advocate for human rights abroad.
00:35:03.000Americans boycotted Nazi Germany in response to dehumanization, imprisonment, and genocide of Jewish people.
00:35:10.000Okay, and the media are out defending this, in force today.
00:35:12.000Dana Milbank, columnist over at the Washington Post, has a piece called, Ilhan Omar, quintessentially American.
00:35:54.000She wrote a letter in support of people attempting to join ISIS to a judge in which she suggested that those are people who are just angry because of their socioeconomic status and that they should be let off the hook because they are just pursuing change by other means.
00:36:19.000She's one of four non-white Congresswomen, the Squad, who Trump proposes should go back to the countries from which they came, even though three were born in the United States.
00:36:26.000By the way, Little side note, both Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have told people to go back where they came from in the past few years on Twitter.
00:36:35.000That does not justify what the president says, but let's just say that these women have not been shy in their own rhetoric about people they... Rashida Tlaib in 2015 told Trump that he should be deported.
00:37:08.000The Minneapolis Star Tribune has been investigating that, and there's fairly good evidence that she committed some sort of immigration fraud with this dude.
00:37:12.000on this show condemned in very harsh terms and of Trump's unsubstantiated suggestion that she once married her own brother.
00:37:20.000The Minneapolis Star Tribune has been investigating that and there's fairly good evidence that she committed some sort of immigration fraud with this dude.
00:37:27.000She certainly committed marital fraud when she filed her tax returns.
00:37:31.000the stage Tuesday at the Muslim Caucus Education Collective Conference in Washington, Trump tweeted about America hating anti-Semite representative Omar, who along with the others in the squad is a nightmare for America.
00:37:40.000For Trump's racist base, Omar has it all.
00:37:47.000Because that same base, by the way, despises Nancy Pelosi.
00:37:50.000But Dana Milbank says, Omar, he admits.
00:37:53.000This is the part where they admit, well, you know, she's not, she might have a few problems, but in the end, isn't she more American than you?
00:38:00.000Dana Milbank says, Omar previously heard her cause when her criticism of Israel crossed into anti-semitism, displaying the same sort of prejudice that is often directed at Muslims.
00:38:08.000I even love the phraseology there, right?
00:38:10.000That the real problem with what Ilhan Omar said about Jews is that it really mimics what people say about Muslims.
00:38:15.000Not that it's bad in and of itself, but that, you know, just as people say this stuff about Muslims, she kind of, she slipped into it.
00:38:25.000She may revert again, says Dana Milbank, but the woman I saw Tuesday represented American values far better than the bigoted demagogue who has made her his bete noir.
00:39:05.000Not a word from Nancy Pelosi, she's still not been asked about it.
00:39:07.000But, presumably foreseeing that she might be asked about it, Nancy Pelosi then sponsored an anti-BDS resolution on the House floor.
00:39:15.000And this anti-BDS resolution basically said BDS is a bad idea.
00:39:18.000It was a non-binding resolution that opposes the boycott movement against Israel, a measure that won broad bipartisan support, but faced pushback from some high-profile progressives.
00:39:26.000Let me note here, Let me note here the headline from CNN.
00:39:29.000So, House approves resolution opposing Israel boycott movement in divisive vote.
00:39:35.000Can you imagine any other vote that goes 398 to 17 that is called divisive?
00:39:57.000Because members of the squad were on the side of the 17.
00:40:01.000The resolution was introduced in March, not long after Democrats faced a bruising internal debate over how to handle comments and tweets by Representative Ilhan Omar that were criticized as being anti-Semitic.
00:40:10.000Now, notice again how CNN characterizes this.
00:40:13.000So when Ilhan Omar says something anti-Semitic, it's that they were criticized as being anti-Semitic.
00:40:17.000But when Trump says something that is criticized as being racist, they just say racist, straight out, right, in the headline.
00:40:23.000So it's always Ilhan Omar, controversial figure, Donald Trump, racist.
00:40:27.000The way they cover this stuff is wildly inconsistent, of course.
00:40:31.000The resolution supports a two-state solution, argues that BDS movement is an effort to delegitimize Israel, which is true, of course, and urges Israelis and Palestinians to return to direct negotiations.
00:40:42.000Omar, as well as Rashida Tlaib, have been openly supportive of the BDS movement and critical of the resolution.
00:40:47.000AOC also voted against the resolution.
00:40:50.000By the way, AOC's quote on this is astonishingly bad.
00:40:54.000So AOC was asked about why she voted against a resolution to condemn BDS.
00:41:37.000And meanwhile, in other big news, the Justice Department is now looking at going after big tech.
00:41:42.000According to Brent Kendall over at the Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department is opening a broad antitrust review into whether dominant technology firms are unlawfully stifling competition.
00:41:52.000Adding a new Washington threat for companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple.
00:41:56.000The review is geared toward examining the practices of online platforms that dominate internet search, social media, and retail services.
00:42:03.000The department said, confirming the review shortly after the Wall Street Journal reported it.
00:42:06.000The new antitrust inquiry under AG Barr could ratchet up the already considerable regulatory pressures facing the top U.S.
00:42:14.000Now, as I've said before, I am not in favor of regulating big tech unless they've actually violated the law.
00:42:19.000But the big problem for big tech is that they've been utterly non-transparent in many cases to what they are doing.
00:42:23.000This is particularly true of the social media platforms.
00:42:26.000Basically, people see data points and then they assume that the data points are representative of broader trends inside these various companies.
00:42:34.000And this leads them to be angry and feel like they are out of control and feel like they were lied to because, for example, if you use Google and you think that Google is going to provide you with some sort of unbiased result, and then it turns out that behind the scenes Google is manipulating the algorithm and not making clear to you what exactly they are doing, then it makes you feel like you are being taken advantage of.
00:42:52.000And lack of transparency also doesn't really allow for the sort of competition that you'd want because suspicion alone is really not a great basis to form a company.
00:43:00.000Like if Google were to just say, listen, You want your left-leaning search results?
00:43:03.000You come to us, and people would start going to DuckDuckGo, and they would actually get less biased results.
00:43:17.000I think putting the government in charge of stuff is a really bad idea, but...
00:43:20.000The drive for this is stemming directly from your lack of transparency.
00:43:24.000And you need to be transparent with the American people.
00:43:26.000And you have not been transparent on everything from privacy to how you make decisions on who gets banned and who gets demonetized.
00:43:33.000And if you're not going to be transparent, people are going to take their suspicions and they are going to suggest that that actually is the governing fact.
00:43:40.000Now, using antitrust to go after these companies seems to me a massive mistake.
00:43:46.000The reason being, particularly with Amazon, for example, What exactly did Amazon do wrong that they have violated antitrust?
00:43:54.000So there are two models of antitrust and they're in conflict.
00:43:57.000Model one of antitrust law was sort of the pre-Robert Bork model.
00:44:00.000So Robert Bork wrote a very famous book called The Antitrust Paradox.
00:44:04.000The Antitrust Paradox posited that antitrust laws were designed for consumer benefit.
00:44:08.000That the reason you break up a company is because the company is anti-competitive and is harming consumers.
00:44:13.000So for example, you have two companies and they would be in competition with one another, lowering price, but they decide to make a regional split.
00:44:21.000And you take the Western United States and we take the Eastern United States and we will collude to keep prices up, right?
00:44:26.000That would be anti-competitive and thus would be subject to antitrust in the Robert Bork view.
00:44:30.000However, you have one company that is providing you with wonderful services and that those services are really good and there are no competitors because it's just a good business.
00:44:49.000How do you decide that Walmart shouldn't be broken up, but Amazon should?
00:44:52.000How do you decide that big firms that you like should not be broken up, but big firms that you don't should not be broken up?
00:44:59.000Is it like a dollar cutoff or a market percentage cutoff?
00:45:02.000How do you decide if a company decides to purchase, vertically integrate its own business?
00:45:07.000Is this monopolistic now just because they wanted to save money by not having to outsource their labor?
00:45:12.000Most companies at some point will do some sort of vertical integration with an independent company that they were once doing business with.
00:45:19.000So, for example, we here at Daily Wire bought a marketing firm that we were doing business with.
00:45:30.000That is us growing our business in the most efficient way.
00:45:33.000And a lot of places do this sort of stuff.
00:45:35.000The problem with the model that is being used to go after a lot of these tech companies is it's extraordinarily vague.
00:45:40.000You have to find the wrongdoing before you start accusing antitrust.
00:45:43.000So, to take an example of the vagueness, Andrew Ross Sorkin over on CNBC is interviewing Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, and Mnuchin is talking about Amazon, and here's what he has to say.
00:45:54.000Justice said yesterday that they're going to look into some of the big tech companies that were at the White House yesterday, in fact, and consider the antitrust issues that are involved.
00:46:05.000Do you believe that they are hurting competition?
00:46:10.000I think, as you know, if you look at Amazon, although there's certain benefits to it, they've destroyed the retail industry across the United States, so there's no question they've limited competition.
00:46:21.000There's areas where they've really hurt small businesses.
00:46:25.000So I don't think this is a one-size-fits-all, and I don't have an opinion going in other than I think it's absolutely right that the Attorney General is looking into these issues.
00:46:36.000You think I'm a little bit off base when I say that the government shouldn't be in charge of these issues?
00:46:40.000That is the vaguest, stupidest standard I've ever heard.
00:46:43.000Of course Amazon has hurt the retail industry.
00:47:53.000You need to tell us what you are doing.
00:47:55.000That doesn't mean you have to give away proprietary algorithms.
00:47:57.000It does mean we need to know the inputs.
00:47:59.000We need to know what are the factors you are using to decide whether or not to downgrade news.
00:48:04.000When you say, at Facebook for example, that we need trusted sources, how are you deciding what a trusted source looks like?
00:48:11.000Is that decided by the same people who like CNN and the New York Times?
00:48:13.000Because then you're taking the endemic mistrust of the media and you're filtering it up to Facebook.
00:48:18.000We didn't trust CNN or the New York Times.
00:48:20.000Now you're calling them trusted sources and benefiting them.
00:48:22.000What do you think we are going to think of you?
00:48:25.000Do we feel like that is a restraint of trade in the sense that you're downplaying particular companies without actually telling them that's happening and there are no rivals in the market?
00:48:35.000So more transparency from big tech is the solution to this.
00:48:39.000Government pressure for more transparency, voluntary transparency seems good.
00:48:44.000The sort of arbitrary nature of antitrust law being used to target businesses that are not liked on one side of the political eye or another, I think it's a huge, huge, huge mistake.
00:48:52.000Wait till Elizabeth Warren is in charge, guys.
00:48:54.000And then you'll see how much you enjoy this routine.
00:48:56.000Okay, time for some things that I like.
00:50:17.000Today is the day in which all secrets are revealed.
00:50:21.000We learned earlier today that Robert Mueller basically had nothing.
00:50:25.000He suggested at one point during his testimony that he did not indict Trump because of the OLC opinion that you can't indict a sitting president.
00:50:33.000But then he also suggested that principles of fairness The principles of fairness were involved.
00:50:38.000In other words, there are no real big talking points for the Democrats coming out of that hearing.
00:50:49.000So there was a day of that secret revealed.
00:50:51.000It is also a day in which the story of State Representative Erica Thomas completely comes apart.
00:50:57.000So you'll recall State Representative Erica Thomas of Georgia.
00:51:00.000Just a few days ago, she claimed over the weekend that she was at a Publix grocery store and she was in the checkout line.
00:51:05.000And she was in the express checkout line with 15 to 20 items.
00:51:08.000And a man said to her, Ma'am, you are in the express checkout line and you have too many items.
00:51:14.000And she apparently, according to the dude, started screaming at him, at which point he called her lazy.
00:51:20.000And then she claims that he told her to go back where she came from.
00:51:24.000Deliberately evoking the words of President Trump with regard to the squad, and deliberately evoking the chants of the crowd with regard to Ilhan Omar.
00:51:36.000The pitch for the story was that Trumpian racism and xenophobia is broadly crossing the country, and here is an example of it hitting somebody in their everyday life.
00:51:44.000She's just an innocent woman at the grocery store, and this evil white Republican And then she comes up and starts quoting Trump at her while wearing a MAGA hat and carrying a Subway sandwich or something.
00:51:57.000The guy who she confronted, who confronted her, was apparently a Cuban Democrat.
00:52:02.000Not only that, he fully denied that she ever said that.
00:52:04.000And then she came out and said, yeah, he might not have said, go back where you came from.
00:52:07.000I might have just sort of made that up.
00:52:09.000Well now, there's witness testimony as to what exactly happened in this case.
00:52:14.000This is according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
00:52:16.000A witness to a heated grocery store encounter between state rep Erica Thomas and a man she accused of uttering racist comments told authorities she didn't hear him make those remarks, according to a Cobb County police report.
00:52:26.000A Publix employee told a Cobb County officer that she witnessed part of the conversation and heard Thomas continually tell Eric Sparks to, quote, go back where you came from, but did not hear Sparks utter those words to Thomas.
00:52:40.000So in other words, it sounds like she completely made this up, and not only did she make it up, she's the one who said this to the guy, right?
00:52:47.000So, she claims this white man came and said, go back where you came from, and then she's weeping, in the video she's crying, because how could this sort of racism and bigotry exist in America?
00:52:57.000And then a woman was like, uh, actually lady, you said that to him.
00:53:01.000So you got this right, but like, not at all.
00:53:06.000Sparks admitted calling the Democrat an expletive during the run-in, saying he was upset she was at an express aisle in the grocery store with too many items, but he said he didn't tell her to go back where she came from.
00:53:15.000Thomas' attorney, Gerald Griggs, said the officer's report shows the case needs additional investigation.
00:54:09.000He said he wasn't surprised the cop authorities decided not to file charges.
00:54:13.000He said the police report speaks for itself.
00:54:15.000He says, everyone that knows me knows I'm anti-hate, anti-bigot, anti-racism.
00:54:18.000Sadly, too much of media isn't fact-checking items, or they're just taking the word of a politician when they do a live Facebook or a Twitter post.
00:54:32.000According to Amanda Prestigiacomo over at DailyWire.com, Senator Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign has been hit with an unfair labor practice complaint, according to the National Labor Relations Board.
00:54:43.000It turns out that he is a vicious, brutal capitalist.
00:54:46.000Turns out that Bernie Sanders, as I've said before, Marx in the streets, Hayek in the sheets, baby.
00:54:52.000That guy is ready to crack down on his labor force when he needs more work from them for the same pay.
00:54:57.000The complaint was filed on July 19th by an individual in Indiana who claims that the Sanders campaign took part in illegal employee interrogation and retaliation against staffers.
00:55:08.000According to Bloomberg Law, a copy of the charge has not yet been made public, but the agency's July 22nd docket lists five potential violations of the National Labor Relations Act.
00:55:20.000One, concerted activities, retaliation, discharge, discharge, discipline, repudiation, mediation of contract, and interrogation, including polling.
00:55:29.000The complaint is just more embarrassing news for the self-identified democratic socialist.
00:55:33.000Over the weekend, of course, Bernie Sanders had to cut staffers hours to accommodate his routinely advocated $15 minimum wage.
00:55:40.000He also scolded some on his campaign for going to the press to discuss the internal negotiations.
00:55:56.000I'm pleased to see that Bernie Sanders is learning that his own employees may not, in fact, be the best employees, and that Bernie Sanders has been relegated to now treating them in vicious, capitalist, terrible, terrible ways.
00:56:12.000I will say, it would not surprise me at all if it turns out that one of these staffers is just basically a member of another campaign in disguise, and this is an attempt to take down Sanders.
00:56:21.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:56:24.000Now at the same time that Democrats like Bernie Sanders Bill de Blasio is pitching a new bill of rights for employees that would outlaw firing them.
00:56:41.000Here is Bill de Blasio with his crazy plans as he strangles a groundhog under the table.
00:56:46.000Giant weird Bill de Blasio, unpopular in his own town, now campaigning for president on the basis of being a weirdo.
00:57:15.000Right now in America, there's no guarantee of time off, no matter how much you work.
00:57:20.000Every other industrialized country in the world guarantees paid vacation days, but this one?
00:57:24.000My proposal is minimum two weeks paid vacation for every American worker.
00:57:27.000We're going to put that into law in New York this year.
00:57:30.000Okay, so you are going to have a right to a voice on the job, so apparently you can completely humiliate your employer and say whatever you want in the workplace, which is going to work until somebody says something conservative, at which point they're fired.
00:57:43.000There will be a right to paid time off, which, again, is a right against an employer that you bargained with to take the job.
00:57:48.000What if you don't want to take the paid time off?
00:57:49.000Or what if the employer can't hire as many people, specifically because now he has to pay you to take vacation?
00:57:55.000But most of all, the idea that an employer is supposed to tell the government why they're firing an employee You wanna gum up the labor market?
00:58:02.000You wanna make it so that people are less likely to hire people they find risky?
00:58:07.000Really, the predictable result of this is that people are less likely to hire the marginal employee.
00:58:11.000So you're only going to hire the employee that you think is guaranteed to do the job.
00:58:15.000So the people who are gonna be hurt the hardest by this, the hurt the most, are people who have a bad record of employment, people who probably, I would guess, just based on statistics, are minorities.
00:58:27.000Because if you hire somebody who is a minority and then they claim that you're firing them 'cause of racism and you say, "Well, no, I'm just firing you 'cause you're a bad employee." It's a lot harder to do that than presumably if you hire a white employee and you fire him because he's doing a bad job.
00:59:48.000Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
00:59:51.000Robert Mueller is testifying before the House Judiciary Committee today, and earlier this morning, a Volkswagen pulled into the Capitol Rotunda, and onlookers watched with delight and wonder as all 235 congressional Democrats poured out of the car until Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler finally emerged, wearing a baggy polka dot outfit, gigantic shoes, white makeup, and a fright wig, and announced to reporters that he did not want the hearing to turn into some kind of circus.
01:00:16.000We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show.