The White House cancels the Philadelphia Eagles, Paul Managans gets caught in a witness tampering scandal, and President Trump talks about pardoning himself. We ll talk about all of it on today s episode of The Ben Shapiro Show. Today s episode features: - President Trump's decision to cancel the Eagles' visit to the White House. - Miss America 2.0 is better than ever, except for how it's worse than ever in every possible way. - A special Father's Day Live Stream on Tuesday, June 12, 7 PM ET. - A roundtable discussion with me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Clavin, and Michael Knowles to discuss Fatherhood and Fatherhood in the 21st century, and why it matters more than ever than it does in the past. And, of course, a special Father s Day live stream to honor Fatherhood Day on June 12th. You can watch it live on Dailywire, and subscribe to the DailyWire Podcast on your favorite streaming platform so you don't miss it! You'll get access to all the latest news and updates, plus access to special Fatherhood events happening around the country! You get two months of Skillshare for just 99 cents. That's right, you get 2 months of skillshare for 99 cents! You can get unlimited access to over 20,000 courses and a bunch of other awesome courses for 99% 99% of what you need to be learning and thriving! Want to upgrade your skills and grow your resume better? That's $99, you can get a 2-month free trial with Skillshare? You can go to Skillshare. That s right, they've got it. You get TWO months of skills and you get it, you're gonna be learning, you'll get it for 99, 99 cents, and you'll be getting it, right there, right now! And you can ask questions, you won't have to be better than that, right? - That s not just learning, they're gonna make it, they'll be able to help you, right here, right to keep it, I'm gonna help you learn and you can do it, and they'll get a whole bunch of stuff like that, you have it, too, right, I'll even better, right you'll learn, right they'll have to make it...you'll get that, she's got it, she'll be helping me, right she'll say it, y'all?
00:00:00.000The White House cancels the Philadelphia Eagles, Paul Manafort allegedly gets caught witness tampering, and President Trump talks about pardoning himself.
00:00:36.000DailyWire God King Jeremy Boren will host a roundtable discussion with me,
00:00:39.000Ben Shapiro, Andrew Clavin, and Michael Knowles.
00:00:42.000We'll discuss what fatherhood means, why fathers matter, how fatherhood will stand up against an increasingly anti-males culture, and we'll smoke cigars and ignore the fact that we have wives and children.
00:00:49.000Subscribers will be able to answer, well, send and write in live questions, okay?
00:00:54.000Just send in questions, we'll answer them.
00:00:56.000And that is Tuesday, June 12th, 7 p.m.
00:02:27.000The Philadelphia Eagles win the Super Bowl in shocking fashion over the New England Patriots, and then a bunch of the players say they don't want to come to the White House.
00:02:34.000I have said for a long time, and I know there's been an issue since Trump became president, and there are a lot of sports teams where people don't want to show up whenever they're invited to the White House.
00:02:44.000What I've said for a long time is I think White House invitations to sports teams are stupid.
00:02:47.000I don't like the ceremonial aspect of the White House all that much.
00:02:51.000I don't like the idea of some king-like figure who sits around and gives out magical awards to people as though
00:02:57.000He is the great leader of the United States, as opposed to a constitutional official elected to do a particular job.
00:03:02.000So I'm not a big fan of sports teams visiting the White House in the first place, but it's been a thing since Ronald Reagan.
00:03:08.000And Donald Trump invites the Philadelphia Eagles to show up.
00:03:11.000And a bunch of them decide, you know what, not a big fan of President Trump, don't want to show up.
00:03:14.000This is not the first time this has happened.
00:03:16.000I remember Tim Thomas, who was on the NHL Stanley Cup winning Boston Bruins back during the Obama administration, decided that he didn't want to go to the White House and the left made a huge deal out of it.
00:03:28.000If I don't feel like showing up to the White House to receive an award from Jimmy Carter or something, I'm not going to show up to the White House to receive an award from Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama.
00:04:08.000He said, quote, the Philadelphia Eagles are unable to come to the White House with their full team to be celebrated tomorrow.
00:04:13.000They disagree with their president because he insists that they proudly stand for the national anthem hand on heart in honor of the great men and women of our military and the people of our country.
00:04:23.000The Eagles wanted to send a smaller delegation, but the 1,000 fans planning to attend the event deserve better.
00:04:28.000These fans are still invited to the White House to be part of a different type of ceremony, one that will honor our great country, pay tribute to the heroes who fight to protect it, and loudly and proudly play the national anthem.
00:05:22.000Nobody on the Eagles kneels for the National Anthem.
00:05:24.000No one on the Philadelphia Eagles that entire season knelt for the National Anthem.
00:05:27.000There was one player who didn't preseason, he was cut.
00:05:30.000No one on the Philadelphia Eagles actually knelt for the National Anthem or attempted to dishonor the National Anthem.
00:05:35.000But the President of the United States is attempting to jump on this culture war again, this kneeling for the National Anthem routine, again and again, because he thinks he's going to get a political win out of it when, in effect,
00:05:45.000All that happened here is that a bunch of eagles didn't want to show up and President Trump decided to respond essentially by slandering the Philadelphia Eagles.
00:05:51.000This is one of the drawbacks of having President Trump be who he is character-wise.
00:05:55.000Listen, I said yesterday on Fox News, and I stand by this, President Trump, in terms of governance,
00:06:01.000Has governed more conservatively than any president of my lifetime through his first 500 days.
00:06:05.000The President of the United States has given us all sorts of wins if you are a conservative.
00:06:08.000He's given us Justice Gorsuch who's turned out to be a great justice.
00:06:11.000He has given us a bunch of appellate court appointees who have been just terrific.
00:06:17.000He's given us a move of the embassy to Jerusalem.
00:06:19.000He's given us a lot of wins as the President of the United States.
00:06:21.000But one area where the president continues to befuddle is his approach to these issues.
00:06:26.000Now, I know that there are a lot of folks in the Trump base who will be angry at me for saying that the president is blowing it on issues like this.
00:06:32.000They think that every time the president mentions the national anthem, it's a big win for him.
00:06:37.000If you actually like the National Anthem, if you like the idea of unifying American symbols, what you can't do is slander people with regard to how they approach the National Anthem by telling lies about them for your own personal grandisement.
00:06:49.000If you really do respect the National Anthem, then you can't say people aren't standing who are standing.
00:06:55.000You can't do that just out of a fit of personal pique.
00:07:10.000If you truly care about the symbolism of unifying American symbols like the American flag or the National Anthem, you shouldn't be using them as wedge issues.
00:07:17.000Now, I objected when NFL players did it.
00:07:38.000This actually ended up being an issue on Fox News.
00:07:40.000So Fox News actually did a segment last night talking about all of this, and the producers cut a bunch of pictures.
00:07:46.000So Shannon Bream was doing the segment, and a bunch of people who were producing decided they would put a bunch of pictures of the Philadelphia Eagles kneeling.
00:07:56.000All the pictures of them kneeling are them praying.
00:07:58.000It's not actually for the national anthem.
00:08:00.000So here's what it looked like on Fox News.
00:08:02.000New tonight, the president announcing the Philadelphia Eagles will not be visiting the White House tomorrow to celebrate their Super Bowl victory due to the national anthem controversy.
00:08:11.000The Eagles, who won Super Bowl 52, apparently wanted to send a smaller group of players.
00:08:17.000A handful did not plan to attend, but it appears the president said no thanks.
00:08:21.000Now, the president says he's still going to host a different event.
00:08:23.000Okay, so in any case, you can see, actually, when you watch this thing and don't just hear it, you can actually see that Fox is flashing a bunch of pictures of people kneeling for the National Anthem.
00:08:32.000That, of course, is not true, and Fox had to retract that today, which is what they should do.
00:08:36.000They got it wrong, and they acknowledged that they got it wrong, that it was wrong to slander these players, saying that they knelt for the National Anthem.
00:08:41.000All of this drove Zach Ertz, who's a player on the Philadelphia Eagles, to tweet out about it.
00:09:29.000And we feel joy when we see the underdogs finally win.
00:09:31.000I'm equally proud of the Eagles' activism off the field.
00:09:34.000These are players who stand up for the causes they believe in and who contribute in meaningful ways to their community.
00:09:38.000They represent the diversity of our nation, a nation in which we are free to express our opinions.
00:09:42.000Disinviting them from the White House only proves that our president is not a true patriot, but a fragile egomaniac obsessed with crowd size and afraid of the embarrassment of throwing a party to which no one wants to attend.
00:09:50.000City Hall is always open for celebration.
00:09:54.000So what should President Trump have done here?
00:09:55.000He should have just swallowed hard and had the players who wanted to come.
00:10:11.000He should have said, listen, I wish that more people were going to come to the People's House to experience the glory of our democracy and come see the White House in person, which is a really cool experience, no matter who the president is.
00:10:28.000But the president reacted in thin-skinned fashion, and it made him look foolish.
00:10:32.000He shouldn't have done this, and he certainly shouldn't have lied about the members of the Philadelphia Eagles kneeling for all of this.
00:10:38.000In other news, I will say the NFL Players Association responded the stupidest way available also, and this is the reactionary time in which we live.
00:10:45.000Trump reacts to NFL players by doing something dumb, then NFL players react to President Trump doing something dumb by doing something even more dumb.
00:10:51.000So the NFL Players Association put out a statement, they said,
00:10:54.000Our union is disappointed in the decision by the White House to disinvite players from the Philadelphia Eagles from being recognized and celebrated by all Americans for their accomplishment.
00:11:02.000This decision by the White House has led to the cancellation of several player-led community service events for young people in the Washington, D.C.
00:11:08.000NFL players love their country, support our troops, give back to their communities, and strive to make America a better place.
00:11:14.000Well, I don't understand why you had to cancel the player-led community service events.
00:11:18.000The Players Association's got some money in its coffers.
00:11:20.000If they really want to help out a bunch of community members in the Washington, D.C.
00:11:23.000area, those players can still go and do this.
00:11:25.000And in fact, if they wanted to show up the president, that's exactly what they would do.
00:11:28.000They would say, the president disinvited us from the White House.
00:11:30.000We weren't going to go to the White House anyway, but we still want to help out the community members in Washington, D.C.
00:11:35.000But because the world of politics revolves purely and simply around President Trump, that means that everything Trump does is the black hole around which the entire universe of politics revolves.
00:11:47.000It also means the president should be more careful about the stuff that he says.
00:11:50.000Because this sort of stuff does have an impact on how Americans think about President Trump.
00:11:54.000I have a column up in National Review today all about why Democrats are losing, why Democrats are unable to get it together.
00:11:59.000And one of the reasons is because Democrats have been fighting culture wars that they are losing.
00:12:03.000Well, when the president decides to go too far in the culture wars, it doesn't help him, it only hurts him, and it only hurts the causes that he is pushing.
00:12:10.000Again, if you believe in the National Anthem, believe people should stand for it, you cannot lie about people who are standing for the National Anthem, kneeling for the National Anthem, for your own personal political gain.
00:12:19.000Okay, I have a little more to say on this, but first, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at My Patriot Supply.
00:12:25.000FEMA now estimates that most Americans have no plan for an emergency.
00:12:28.000And the truth is that if an emergency happens, I live in California, there's an earthquake, FEMA may not be able to get to you for at least 48, 72 hours.
00:12:35.000Well, that is why the best time to prepare is now.
00:12:56.000Again, you spend 99 bucks, you stick it in the closet, you don't have to worry about it, it lasts for 25 years in storage, and that means you're no longer gonna have to worry if there's a natural disaster, there's a riot outside, you just gotta hunker down for a little while, then you just have the food in the closet and you're the person who is smart enough to think of it years ago.
00:13:11.000I mean, I've noticed that people around the office are legitimately, we have to actually get another emergency food supply because
00:13:16.000We don't starve the people here, but apparently they've been going through the pantry and taking out the cans of emergency food supply and eating them now.
00:13:44.000What should the president do with regard to the fact that so many cultural figures dislike him?
00:13:48.000The president should simply point out that cultural figures dislike him.
00:13:51.000Here is the nice thing about where the president sits in the pop culture sphere.
00:13:54.000I've made this point over the past couple of weeks with regard to Samantha Bee and the rest of the culture.
00:13:59.000And the fact that the media are insane over President Trump to the point where they're speculating about missing Melania Trump.
00:14:06.000Honestly, Melania Trump had a kidney surgery like three weeks ago.
00:14:09.000And the entire media since then has been speculating about where Melania Trump went.
00:14:12.000There's a theory she'd been abducted by aliens.
00:14:14.000There's a theory that President Trump was secretly beating her in the basement of the White House or some such nonsense.
00:14:20.000Everyone on the left has lost their mind to the extent that Trump could simply sit back and point at them and laugh.
00:14:25.000So if the Philadelphia Eagles decide not to come, again, the president could have said, listen, that makes me sad, I wish they would come, but they're not coming, and it would have been a good unifying moment for the country, but I guess that's on them.
00:14:34.000And the president could have done that.
00:14:35.000Instead, he decided to play right in their hands, because President Trump is a counterpuncher.
00:14:39.000It's a pathological thing with the president.
00:14:41.000This is just his personality, and he cannot avoid the feeling that he needs to hit somebody back if he feels hit.
00:14:47.000The president is thin-skinned, and he likes to hit back.
00:14:49.000That hitting back is a good thing when it comes to some issues, but when it comes to issues like this, where we really should be getting together and having a communal feeling together around things like football, it is not a particularly useful thing.
00:15:01.000Again, I went to the Super Bowl last year, and when I went to the Super Bowl, I have to say, the feeling of community in the building was astonishing.
00:15:08.000I can honestly say the only time I felt something like it is when you go to a synagogue or a church event.
00:15:12.000The feeling that everybody is there for one common purpose, to watch football, to enjoy each other's company, to be in out of the cold, honestly, whereas in Minnesota, waving the American flag, enjoying the patriotic aspects of the national anthem and the Blue Angels flyover and all the rest of it.
00:15:27.000And all of that stuff should be unifying.
00:15:29.000The president should have gone forward with the event.
00:15:31.000He should have said to the NFL players, I'm sorry that you guys didn't come.
00:15:53.000I hope that in the future the President of the United States decides that he is going to reach out to people on the other side of the aisle who have a pathological dislike for him.
00:16:01.000And in doing so, maybe open some hearts and open some minds rather than lying about the members of the Philadelphia Eagles, which I just think is a huge mistake.
00:16:09.000OK, so meanwhile, speaking of other stupid news, the Miss America competition has now decided that they are no longer going to be having a swimsuit competition.
00:16:17.000So Gretchen Carlson, who's on the board over there, she's a former Miss America herself, I believe.
00:16:21.000And she, of course, was the subject of a Me Too scandal because Roger Ailes had allegedly sexually harassed her.
00:16:27.000Well, Gretchen Carlson comes forward and she says,
00:16:30.000We are now going to do a Miss America 2.0 makeover.
00:16:44.000And that means that we will no longer have a swimsuit competition.
00:16:47.000And so we're no longer judging women when they come out in their chosen attire, their evening wear.
00:16:53.000Whatever they choose to do, it's going to be what comes out of their mouth that we're interested in when they talk about their social impact initiatives.
00:16:59.000Oh, that's really what it's going to be about.
00:17:01.000So Miss America 2.0 is actually going to be like the Kennedy Center honors.
00:17:05.000And Madeleine Albright will be your Miss America 2018 because we're no longer taking physical appearance into account.
00:17:09.000Hillary Clinton finally has a shot at being beloved by America.
00:17:12.000She can be Miss America 2018 if she so chooses.
00:17:15.000She can walk out wearing a giant trench coat and she can be awarded this because physical appearance no longer counts.
00:17:25.000I think the Miss America competition was always stupid, right?
00:17:27.000I'm the guy who, when I was a teenager, used to unsubscribe from the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated because I thought it was basically softcore pornography, right?
00:17:34.000I mean, the fact is that when you are looking at the Victoria's Secret catalog, when they have these Victoria's Secret models on the runway, people are not watching the Victoria's Secret fashion show for the fashion.
00:17:43.000Okay, if those were 400 pound women walking down the runway with Victoria's Secret fashion on, the ratings would be nil.
00:17:48.000It's an excuse for dudes to watch scantily clad, beautiful women walk around, and then they can always say to their wives, well, I was just watching because I really love the fashion aspect.
00:17:56.000By the way, women, if you are taken in by this, your boy's lying to you, okay?
00:17:59.000He's not watching the Victoria's Secret fashion show because he's mostly interested in the new styles of bra and panties that are coming out.
00:18:06.000He's thinking about what happens when those bra and panties are not part of the show at all, okay?
00:18:13.000The same thing was true of the Miss America pageant.
00:18:14.000So, as a religious person and an advocate of modesty for both men and women, I'm perfectly happy with there being no swimsuit competition in the Miss America pageant.
00:18:23.000I also will acknowledge that the Miss America competition was always about the swimsuit competition, okay?
00:18:27.000There's a reason that Miss America features a bunch of beautiful women and not a bunch of plus-size models.
00:18:35.000It's not because she wasn't a charitable human being.
00:18:41.000It's because the Miss America pageant was not about that.
00:18:44.000And here's the part that I find puzzling.
00:18:46.000So, I understand my own perspective on this.
00:18:56.000It's not to say that I don't think that people of all sexes should stay in shape.
00:18:59.000I think that they should, to the best of their ability.
00:19:01.000It is to say, however, that I've always been an advocate for modesty, because I think that if you want, if women want to be treated as more than pieces of meat by men, then it behooves them to understand how men think, and men tend to see scantily clad women in sexual ways.
00:19:14.000That's just the way that men think, that is nature, that is the way it works.
00:19:17.000So, that means that if you put on a little bit more clothing, men are more likely to see you as a proper businesswoman, as opposed to if you walk into the office wearing a bra and panties, just telling you.
00:19:25.000Okay, men are not thinking about your capacity for social media marketing at that point.
00:19:30.000But here's where I find the argument to the left kind of weird.
00:19:34.000So I've heard from the left that a woman wearing a bathing suit is actually empowering, that scantily clad women are empowering, that in fact Stormy Daniels is an example of female empowerment because she chooses to be a porn star and have sex with randos on camera.
00:19:45.000I've heard that this is the essence of female empowerment and that if you say that acting immodestly is not female empowerment, it actually is degradation and it is catering to the worst instincts of men.
00:20:22.000If you are going to suggest that it is female empowerment to get unclad whenever you please, then you can't then claim that you have done something feminist by telling women that they should no longer wear bathing suits and there shouldn't be a competition for bathing suits or anything like that.
00:20:35.000Maybe what they should have done is they should have said, listen, this is a consensual competition.
00:20:45.000The idea that they're going to award this to Madeleine Albright or Janet Napolitano or anybody else who is not of the most beautiful ilk is just silly.
00:21:32.000I do, and that's why some of the best journalism that's been happening over the last couple of years has been happening in magazines.
00:21:37.000The New Yorker has done wonderful work in exposing the MeToo scandal.
00:21:40.000Ronan Farrow doing amazing work over there.
00:21:42.000There are a lot of good articles over at The Atlantic, even though I'm not a big fan of how Jeffrey Goldberg has run the place.
00:21:46.000There are a lot of worthwhile, interesting articles over at The Atlantic.
00:21:49.000People, Cosmo, Entertainment Weekly, there's a lot of interesting, good, interesting, just fascinating stuff happening in the magazine space right now, which is why you need texture.
00:22:11.000Instead of you having to spend $4.99 a month for each one of these magazines and spend hundreds of dollars to subscribe to 200 of them, you get full subscriptions to all of them with just one low price.
00:22:21.000Start your seven-day free trial right now at texture.com slash ben.
00:22:38.000Texture.com slash ben to start that free trial.
00:22:40.000Okay, so the latest news in the Mueller-gate situation is that Robert Mueller, the special investigator, is now accusing Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, of attempted witness tampering.
00:22:53.000Special counsel Robert Mueller is seeking to revoke the bail of President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort for allegedly tampering with witnesses in the year-long probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, according to a court filing on Monday night.
00:23:06.000Attorneys with the special counsel have accused Manafort of, quote, attempting to tamper with potential witnesses while awaiting his trial, which thereby, quote, has violated the conditions of his release.
00:23:25.000In February, within days of Mueller's filing a 32-count superseding indictment against Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman allegedly contacted two individuals who worked with him on a lobbying scheme to aid his Kremlin-backed Ukrainian clients.
00:23:36.000The two individuals were a member of the Habsburg Group, described by Mueller in February's superseding indictment of Manafort as a group of former senior European politicians
00:24:09.000He tweeted out, quote, Okay, well to be fair,
00:24:32.000Everyone on the right who knew who Paul Manafort was, was warning President Trump not to hire him as his campaign manager at about the time that he was hired.
00:24:39.000Now, I guess the idea here is that the DOJ or the FBI should have told Trump about Manafort.
00:24:43.000But remember, the DOJ and the FBI were suspicious that members of the Trump campaign, other members of the Trump campaign, were participating in Russian collusion.
00:24:50.000And it doesn't seem completely out of bounds to me for the FBI or the DOJ to simply say, well, why would we tell President Trump about all of this?
00:24:58.000We suspect that President Trump might be more of a window than a wall when it comes to stopping information that could help us capture these guys.
00:25:06.000Which brings us to some big questions that I still have about the Spygate scandal.
00:25:09.000So, yesterday, a guy whose show I really enjoy, Dan Bongino, he responded to a show that I did on Thursday all about Spygate 2018.
00:25:16.000These, of course, are the allegations that the Trump campaign was spied on by the FBI at the behest of the Obama DOJ and the Hillary campaign in order to take down Trump's campaign somehow during the election.
00:25:26.000And I expressed three questions during the show on Thursday.
00:25:29.000Question number one was why didn't Hillary or the FBI or the DOJ release the most damaging information about the Trump campaign if this was in fact a setup and a hit?
00:25:37.000The most damaging information that happened during the Trump campaign was the Donald Trump Jr.
00:25:41.000meeting at Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya and the emails that were sent by Donald Trump Jr.
00:26:12.000The only thing that we heard is that there was an investigation going on.
00:26:15.000We heard that in the late stages of the campaign, but the actual headline from the New York Times was, investigation took place and nothing was found, basically.
00:26:44.000Question number two is why didn't the FBI target other members of Team Trump?
00:26:48.000So if Spygate is a thing, if the FBI was in fact targeting the entire Trump team, if they suspected the entire Trump team of collusion to the extent that they were wiretapping Trump, as Trump claimed in Trump Tower in that tweet from January 2017, if that was the case, then why were the only people who were targeted inside the Trump campaign people who actually had pretty solid ties with the Kremlin?
00:27:10.000OK, those people would be the people that I mentioned before, Robert Gates and Paul Manafort and Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, several of whom have already pled guilty to lying to the FBI or to other charges related to this particular investigation.
00:27:25.000So Dan Bongino responded that when I asked this question, I was ignoring that Trump Jr.
00:27:32.000targeting, he suggests, was the Natalia Veselnitskaya meeting was being run by Fusion GPS, which had been hired by Hillary to gather dirt on the Trump campaign.
00:27:40.000And therefore, this was some sort of set up by Hillary Clinton.
00:27:43.000I think Dan admits, rightly, that there is not evidence to suggest that Hillary Clinton was behind the setup of the Trump Tower meeting.
00:27:51.000Again, there is no evidence to suggest that.
00:27:52.000There's certainly no evidence to suggest the FBI was behind the setup of the Trump Tower meeting.
00:27:56.000Now, is it suspicious that Fusion GPS was involved with the Trump Tower meeting?
00:28:06.000It's hard for me to go all the way without that evidence.
00:28:07.000I'm happy to hear more evidence, but I'm not willing to go all the way with all of that.
00:28:12.000There's no evidence the FBI, particularly, or the DOJ used this meeting to target Trump Jr.
00:28:16.000Now, Bongino's claimed that all of this was designed in order so that they could use the two hop rules so that they could get information on Donald Trump.
00:28:23.000I haven't seen the information they got on Trump, if that's the case at this point, so maybe when the evidence comes out, that's what they were doing, then we can talk about it.
00:28:30.000Bongino also claims that Donald Trump was targeted by the Steele dossier.
00:28:33.000So the Steele dossier obviously is originally funded by the Washington Free Beacon.
00:28:42.000The Steele dossier was not funded by the Washington Free Beacon.
00:28:44.000An OPPO research file was started, funded by the Washington Free Beacon.
00:28:48.000Later on, the Hillary campaign picked up the OPPO research file from Fusion GPS and then went out and hired Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS did, using the Hillary Clinton camp as sort of the funders, and Steele put together this dossier.
00:28:59.000It is false to say that we know that everything in the dossier is false.
00:29:02.000Okay, we do not know everything in the dossier is false.
00:29:04.000We know a lot of things in the dossier are BS.
00:29:06.000I've said for a long time, I think a lot of the stuff there is BS.
00:29:08.000We don't know that everything in the dossier is false.
00:29:10.000Steele has been a source that was used by the FBI multiple times to suggest that the FBI was targeting President Trump because they used Christopher Steele as a source.
00:29:18.000You'd then have to rule out every investigation Christopher Steele ever did.
00:29:22.000Also, that would bring us to our third question, right?
00:29:25.000And our third question here, well, I want to get to that in just one second.
00:29:28.000First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors.
00:30:47.000Okay, so I have a little bit more on Spygate and the associated issues, but first you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com.
00:30:53.000So for $9.99 a month, you get the rest of this show live, the rest of Clayton's show live, the rest of Noel's show live.
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00:31:01.000And, by the way, there is more great news for podcast listeners.
00:31:04.000The Ben Shapiro Show, along with our other Daily Wire podcasts, is now available on Amazon Alexa and the Google Home device, so your home can be filled with the rich, supple tones of my voice with a simple voice command.
00:31:13.000Ah, the mellifluous joy of this voice.
00:31:26.000Google doesn't need to be added by a user, but you have to speak very clearly for her to understand, as though you are in a foreign country and you are an American.
00:31:32.000And if you speak louder, then suddenly they will understand what you're talking about.
00:31:35.000You have to say, OK Google, talk to Ben Shapiro Show.
00:32:56.000Stephen Halper has worked with a bunch of Republican administrations in the past.
00:32:59.000He was apparently asked by the FBI to meet with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos after Papadopoulos bragged to the Australian High Commissioner to Great Britain Alexander Alexander Downer about Hillary's emails and after Carter Page organized a visit to Moscow that was greenlit by
00:33:13.000The fact that he was asked to do so before there was a formal opening of an investigation into Trump-Russia collusion doesn't mean an awful lot.
00:33:39.000Why doesn't President Trump, if the Carter Page FISA warrant was badly gotten, as Devin Nunes has claimed, why doesn't Trump just declassify it?
00:33:47.000If, in fact, the FBI was spying on Trump in nefarious fashion, there'd be documentation to show that.
00:33:52.000Why doesn't Trump just reveal all that stuff?
00:33:54.000So Dan has a theory, and Dan's theory is that Trump doesn't do this because this would somehow interfere with or prejudice ongoing leak investigations.
00:34:02.000As a lawyer, illegal leaks are still illegal even if the president makes the underlying material unclassified post hoc.
00:34:09.000So if I leak classified material and it's classified today, and five years from now the president declassifies that material, I was still breaking the law when I leaked the classified material, so declassifying it doesn't change anything.
00:34:20.000Trump could easily declassify the Carter Page FISA warrant, for example, without disrupting any ongoing investigation.
00:35:54.000Either he was the target of the investigation or he was not the target of the investigation.
00:35:58.000I guess the happy medium would be he was the target of the investigation and the evidence just didn't arrive to indict him.
00:36:03.000But again, I'd have to see more evidence that he was the target, Trump specifically, as opposed to particular members of the Trump campaign amid the broad suspicion of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.
00:36:13.000Which, again, wouldn't end with the indictment of particular officials.
00:36:18.000You can't actually do a criminal indictment against the quote-unquote Trump campaign.
00:36:21.000You can only indict people who knew about things and committed crimes.
00:36:24.000Okay, finally, when Bongino said that I got it wrong when I said Trump had openly stated, or literally stated, that he had fired James Comey over Russia, here is what Donald Trump said about firing James Comey.
00:36:34.000And in fact, when I decided to just do it, i.e.
00:36:36.000fire Comey, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.
00:36:41.000I never claimed that Trump fired Comey to obstruct the Russia investigation.
00:36:45.000In fact, I've been saying since the day Comey was fired that he did not do that.
00:36:48.000I wrote an article that day saying that Comey was fired because he refused to clear Trump in the Russia investigation when Trump obviously wasn't under investigation.
00:36:56.000But for Trump to claim that Comey's firing had nothing to do with the Russia case, which is what he claimed on Twitter, that is just not true.
00:37:12.000Why were members of the Obama holdover team leaking like sieves criminally after the election?
00:37:16.000Why hasn't the DOJ turned over documentation to the House Intelligence Committee?
00:37:20.000Why did the DOJ struggle so hard to avoid turning over information that really could have been declassified?
00:37:24.000Why did James Comey keep contemporaneous notes about Trump but not Obama?
00:37:27.000Why did he leak information to his friends outside the government?
00:37:30.000I'm not saying that it's impossible that the FBI and DOJ combined to target Trump during the election cycle as quote-unquote insurance against Trump winning, although I'm still wondering how that insurance was supposed to work if they never revealed the information.
00:38:47.000And Trey Gowdy does know what he is talking about.
00:38:49.000There's a rumor, not a rumor, there was a report going around from Molly Hemingway over at the Federalist saying, well, Trey Gowdy hasn't seen the underlying documents, so how can he clear the FBI?
00:38:58.000Trey Gowdy has seen precisely the same documents that Devin Nunes has, and he's come to some opposite conclusions, which suggests an honest difference of opinion.
00:39:05.000Not that Trey Gowdy has been somehow picked up by the deep state and turned
00:39:09.000Remember, just months ago, he was ripping on James Comey with the same alacrity as President Trump.
00:39:38.000So the president shall have the power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.
00:39:43.000In other words, the president can't pardon himself after he's impeached and convicted in the Senate.
00:39:47.000So you can't pardon somebody who has been convicted in the Senate.
00:39:50.000You can pardon somebody who was about to be impeached.
00:39:52.000That's what happened to Richard Nixon with Gerald Ford.
00:39:55.000According to the Heritage Foundation, the power to pardon is one of the least limited powers granted to the president in the Constitution.
00:40:00.000The only limits mentioned in the Constitution are the pardons that are limited to offenses against the United States, and they cannot affect an impeachment process.
00:40:06.000This is why I don't like the pardon power all that much.
00:40:22.000Pardons have been used for broader public policy purposes of ensuring peace and tranquility in the case of uprisings, which is what happened after the Shays Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, for example.
00:40:31.000And the scope of the pardon power, according to Heritage, remains quite broad, almost plenary.
00:40:44.000It says, the possibility of a president pardoning himself for a crime is not precluded by the explicit language of the Constitution, but a broader reading of the Constitution and the general principles of the traditions of the United States might lead to the conclusion that a self-pardon is constitutionally impermissible.
00:40:57.000It would seem to violate the principle that a man should not be a judge in his own case, that the rule of law is supreme, and the United States is a nation of laws, not men, and that the president is not above the law.
00:41:05.000This is Courtney James Pfiffner, professor of public policy at George Mason University, writing for Heritage.
00:41:26.000Alan Dershowitz, who's been very warm toward the Trump administration legally, he says he doesn't think that President Trump has the power to pardon himself.
00:41:32.000Look, I disagree with a great deal of what has gone on today from the White House.
00:41:36.000I don't think that a president necessarily has the power to pardon himself.
00:41:39.000I wrote a column today in The Hill, I wrote one a year ago, in which I said nobody knows the answer to that question.
00:42:14.000But I'm not sure why this is useful to him.
00:42:16.000Chuck Grassley, who, again, has supported President Trump pretty heavily in the Senate, he says maybe Trump needs a new lawyer if he's being told this stuff.
00:42:23.000If I were President of the United States, and I had a lawyer that told me I could pardon myself, I think I'd hire a new lawyer.
00:42:31.000And this is part of the problem for President Trump, is that he's so inconsistent in his public face on this stuff.
00:42:36.000If he just presented a public face, which is, I'm innocent, do your worst, there's really not a problem here, see what you're gonna see.
00:42:42.000And then he said, but I gotta say, the scope of this investigation is beyond any sort of limitation at this point.
00:42:48.000And we need investigations into leaking.
00:42:51.000I'd be with him 100% of the way here, but it's all the confused language coming out from the White House that is really not useful.
00:42:56.000So, for example, the White House has given a bunch of different stories, all of them conflicting, about who drafted the statement in the aftermath of the Trump Jr.
00:44:07.000I don't think anybody whose key around him is indicted other than the people we've already heard.
00:44:11.000I haven't seen the evidence of any of that stuff.
00:44:13.000The point I'm making here is that the president ought to be focusing on bigger things and the distractions of the Mueller investigation are not particularly helpful to his administration.
00:44:21.000He should be avoiding them himself and blowing them up bigger than they are.
00:44:24.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things I hate.
00:44:31.000He wrote a series of columns called I'm a Stranger, Hear Myself, all about how he had been in Britain for 20 years and then he came back and lived in New Hampshire.
00:44:38.000And it's a very charming, funny book all about sort of experiencing life in America anew.
00:44:43.000Bryson leans to the left on a bunch of issues, but that really shouldn't inhibit your enjoyment of the book at all.
00:45:14.000Really worth the read and a lot of fun to read.
00:45:16.000Okay, time for some quick things that I hate.
00:45:22.000As we discussed yesterday, Bill Clinton has been making the rounds, and the fact that Bill Clinton is still considered a respected voice in left-wing circles is just insane.
00:45:29.000So you remember during the last campaign, Kirsten Gillibrand, who's the senator from New York, originally she said that she thinks that President Clinton should have resigned after the Lewinsky scandal and after he was caught in a perjury trap.
00:45:39.000Well, Clinton has now responded to Kirsten Gillibrand, and he says, well, you know, not really.
00:46:24.000Bill Clinton still doing this routine.
00:46:26.000The hilarious part about this is the media's sudden awareness, their sudden awakening to the fact that Bill Clinton is despicable.
00:46:32.000Here's Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC talking about Bill Clinton.
00:46:35.000It has been for decades an unbelievable double standard that the Clintons have used and abused, where nobody is allowed to go there on this issue.
00:46:45.000And in the age of Me Too, women are supposed to go there.
00:47:59.000So Federalist 31, Alexander Hamilton writing.
00:48:02.000He's still defending general taxation by the federal government and talking about the argument that we should not be just trying to go to the states and asking them for money.
00:48:09.000That instead the states should actually, we can go over the head of the state governments and we can tax citizens directly.
00:48:14.000So he says, as theory and practice conspire to prove that the power of procuring revenue is unavailable when exercised over the states in their collective capacities, the federal government must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation in the ordinary modes.
00:48:27.000What he's saying here is that under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government gained money simply by going to the states and asking for levies.
00:48:34.000And the states basically said, go screw yourself.
00:48:37.000So he said, well, if the states are going to be a burden here, then we just have to go around the states.
00:48:41.000Otherwise, we can't have a functional federal government.
00:48:43.000And then he says, in the end, this is an important line, he says, we have to rely on the people in the end to maintain the balance between the states and the federal government.
00:48:49.000He says, the moment we launch into conjectures about the usurpations of the federal government,
00:48:53.000We get into an unfathomable abyss and fairly put ourselves out of the reach of all reasoning.
00:48:57.000So what he's saying here is everybody is complaining that the federal government might usurp all tax money and leave the states bereft, but if we imagine worst-case scenario, we're never gonna be able to do anything here.
00:49:07.000His imagination may range at pleasure till it gets bewildered amidst the labyrinths of an enchanted castle and knows not on which side to turn to extricate itself from the perplexities into which it has so rashly adventured.
00:49:17.000Whatever may be the limits or modifications of the powers of the Union, it is easy to imagine an endless train of possible dangers, and by indulging in excess of jealousy and timidity, we may bring ourselves to a state of absolute skepticism and irresolution.
00:49:28.000He says, listen, we have to make a call here, and we're going to have to determine exactly how the checks and balances work.
00:49:33.000The truth is that the federal taxation power was just fine up until the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which allowed the income tax.
00:49:41.000Up until then, the federal government was not an overweening institution that was dedicated to sucking as much money as possible out of your pockets.
00:49:48.000It was really at the beginning of the 20th century that all of that changed.
00:49:51.000So Hamilton's critique of the Anti-Federalists was right.
00:49:54.000The anti-federalist critique of Hamilton ended up being right in the long run because the reality is the federal government did usurp an enormous amount of revenue and they continue to do so on a daily basis all across the country.
00:50:04.000Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.