It's Omarosa versus President Trump, plus the alt-right anniversary rally fizzles, and Antifa continues to threaten public safety, plus updates from the FBI. Lots and lots of stuff going on. It's a busy weekend filled with joy and weirdness, including a woman who thinks James Bond shouldn't be a Black person, and a man who thinks President Trump should be locked up in the White House's Situation Room. Ben Shapiro's take on it all on this weekend's episode of The Ben Shapiro Show on CBS Radio's "The Weekly Standard" and the New York Times' "Meet the Press." Subscribe to the "Daily Wire" and get immediate access to all the latest breaking news and analysis from CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and other major news outlets. Use the promo code: "ELISSA" for 20% off your first month with discount promo code "UPLEVEL" at checkout to receive $10 OFF your first purchase of a BONUS Box of Gold or Silver! To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.co/OurAdvertisers and get 10% off their entire purchase when you place an order of $50 or more! If you like what you get, you'll get 20% OFF your total retail price of $99 or more with discount code: CHECKOUT at CHEERS. at CHGOLD.COM/BENCHOLD.CHEERS at CHECK OUT $10, and get a FREE FIVE-day shipping offer when you enter the offer starts on 10% OFF $99, $25, $50, $55, $75, $60, $100, and $75 OFF + $99 gets you get a VIP discount when you buy a VIP 4-day VIP membership when you become a VIP membership starts, and they get 5 VIP membership offer starts at $99 get an additional $49, VIP 4 DAY OFF + they get $5, VIP access to CHEARDER PRICING $4 VIPREPCARMS AND VIPREPRICING IS A FRIEND gets $5 VIPREVIEW AND VIP FREE? and they also get $25 OFF OFF $5 OFF THE FASTESTIMORY 4 DAY TO BUY A VOTING PRACTICALLY VIP PROMOTION AND VIP PRODUCER IS PROGRAMMING IS PRICED TO CHECKED!
00:00:00.000It's Omarosa versus President Trump, plus the alt-right anniversary rally fizzles and Antifa continues to threaten public safety, plus updates from the FBI.
00:00:25.000First, I want to mention to you that inflation is a real possibility.
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00:02:13.000John Kelly, then the chief of staff, he said that he was firing her, and she got mad, and then she went and talked to Trump, and then Trump, because he is always afraid of actually firing people, so the dirty little secret about Trump, he doesn't like firing people.
00:02:23.000He actually likes his subordinates to fire people, or he likes for them to quit.
00:02:26.000So she went to John Kelly, and John Kelly said, you can leave, and then she went to Trump and Trump said, I don't know anything about this, and she has both of them on tape.
00:02:33.000Well, she was on Meet the Press over the weekend talking about how she was taping inside the Situation Room, which is not great, and here's what she had to say.
00:02:40.000They take me into the Situation Room, the doors are locked, they tell me I can't leave, and they start to threaten me, put fear in me.
00:02:50.000The question is, why not have the meeting in the Chief of Staff's office?
00:02:54.000Why put me in the Situation Room, lock the door, and tell me over and over again, as they'll hear, well, they'll hear his part, that I couldn't leave, that I couldn't consult an attorney, that I couldn't talk to my husband who was sitting outside of the door.
00:03:28.000This does raise some questions about the White House's staffing choices.
00:03:31.000Like, why would they do this in the first place?
00:03:33.000I had heard repeatedly that the president chooses only the best people, chooses one of his first hires, so not quite the best people.
00:03:39.000The White House released a statement that CNN reported on.
00:03:41.000Here was CNN reporting on the White House response to Omarosa.
00:03:45.000We just got a statement from Sarah Sanders, the White House Press Secretary, and it reads,
00:04:05.000Okay, so the White House obviously smacking back hard at Omarosa, and then Ronna McDaniel, Romney McDaniel, she came forward, she's the GOP chairwoman, and she tweeted out, And the answer is nobody, which is why she shouldn't have been hired in the first place.
00:04:24.000Anybody who doesn't know differently has never had any experience with Omarosa Manigault.
00:04:27.000There's a story out today about how Omarosa actually tried, when she was getting married, to invade the White House with her photographer in her wedding dress and go take wedding photos in the Rose Garden.
00:04:36.000At the White House, which is not what the White House is for.
00:04:40.000The president of the United States, of course, would not take this lying down.
00:04:44.000I mean, listen, this is what this is what we bargained for, right?
00:04:47.000I mean, we're getting a lot of the good policy.
00:04:49.000It comes with the downside of this reality TV show.
00:04:52.000So the president tweeted out three things this morning about Omarosa Manigault.
00:04:56.000And basically it is the godfather one, two and three.
00:06:06.000Whenever the president says that sort of stuff, whenever he says, they begged me, they came and they begged me on their knees, that just means that they asked for a job and he said yes.
00:07:24.000Because she only said great things about me.
00:07:28.000That was legitimately his hiring criteria.
00:07:30.000She was making, by the way, $180,000 in taxpayer money at the White House for saying nice things about him while he was saying that she was the worst employee ever.
00:07:40.000And also, a window into the mind of the commander-in-chief.
00:07:44.000And when people say that Trump is nice to Putin because he's in bed with Putin, or he's nice to Kim Jong-un because he's in bed with Kim Jong-un,
00:07:51.000No, he's nice to them because when they say nice things about them, he likes them.
00:09:42.000She won't get a job ever again unless she begs with tears in her eyes.
00:09:47.000Listen, I know a lot of people are going to be frustrated because they say, well, why can't you just focus on the good stuff the president is doing?
00:09:57.000But if the president gets credit for all of his staffers doing good stuff, he also gets the blame when his staffer ends up being Omarosa, a person he never should have hired in the first place.
00:10:06.000He does get the blame when he hires Steve Bannon, a person he never should have hired in the first place.
00:10:10.000He does get the blame when he hires Rex Tillerson, a person he never should have hired in the first place.
00:10:14.000When you're the boss, you get the blame and the credit for what your employees do.
00:10:18.000And the president of the United States hired Omarosa Manigault because she was on a reality TV show with him.
00:10:23.000And because, let's face it, the president of the United States wanted more black faces around him because he wanted to be able to say to the media he had a more diverse administration.
00:10:37.000The president hired her based on an affirmative action calculation.
00:10:40.000I know that's politically incorrect to say, but that is why he hired her in the first place.
00:10:43.000That is what the president was doing here.
00:10:45.000OK, so he gets the blame when it turns out that she is exactly the type of feces storm that everybody knew that she was in the first place.
00:10:53.000And of course, she brought a recording device into the skiff.
00:11:04.000In order to violate the law, you actually have to show intent to
00:11:07.000Communicate all of this stuff to outside intelligence agencies or something like that.
00:11:12.000She's not going to go to jail for any of this.
00:11:14.000But the president does have to get better with his staffing.
00:11:16.000Thankfully, I think the president's staff has gotten a lot better.
00:11:19.000I know a lot of folks in the administration, they seem to be an upgrade over the people who were originally in the administration.
00:11:24.000But come on, if we can't have a little bit of lighthearted fun with the fact the president hired Omarosa Manigault to be part of the administration, then tweeted about how terrible she was, except she was nice to him.
00:11:32.000I don't know what we can have fun with these days.
00:11:34.000Okay, in a minute, I'm going to get to the actual alt-right rally that happened over the weekend, Antifa, the media malfeasance.
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00:12:50.000Putting all the Omarosa stuff aside, it was a weekend of covering stupidity.
00:12:54.000So, does Omarosa deserve all of this media coverage?
00:12:57.000No, of course she doesn't deserve all of this media coverage.
00:12:59.000You know what else didn't deserve a lot of media coverage over the weekend?
00:13:02.000This alt-right rally that started off in Charlottesville, Virginia near the University of Virginia and then transferred its way over to Washington, D.C.
00:13:08.000Now, the reason it got a lot of coverage is because last year, of course, that alt-right rally drew several hundred people
00:13:14.000And it devolved into violence when Antifa showed up and there were a bunch of pitched battles in the streets between some Antifa members and some members of the alt-right neo-Nazi rally.
00:13:23.000And then that bled over into an alt-right piece of human debris, crashing his car into members of a left-wing rally, some of whom were Antifa, many of whom were not.
00:13:33.000In any case, that became national news, not only because of the killing, but also because the president of the United States then got up there and said that there were good people on both sides, which I think was eminently untrue.
00:14:15.000The last time this few losers got this much media attention was the Fyre Festival.
00:14:20.000Really, it was like a Magic the Gathering.
00:14:23.000It was like a Magic the Gathering tournament for racists.
00:14:26.000It was like five people, all of whom took time off from watching pornography, anime pornography, in their grandmother's spare bedroom, and then went over to a rally, and it was like 10 of them, 15 of them.
00:14:41.000Jason Kessler, who is the leader of all of this, he got all the media attention he could possibly want.
00:14:48.000He was confronted at the Unite the Right 2 rally, and he was asked why they were celebrating Heather Heyer's murder, and it did not go particularly well for him.
00:16:05.000The president went on national TV, pretended he didn't know who the KKK was, made coochie faces with Steve Bannon over at Breitbart, pretended that folks in the alt-right were wonderful, nice people, and
00:16:53.000I remain a chief target of the alt-right today because I am highly critical of racists no matter what form they come in.
00:16:58.000The alt-right is not actually conservative.
00:16:59.000They're a bunch of idiot racists who believe that a big government that is run to the benefit of white people is the best kind of government.
00:17:15.000Then you separate it off and the question becomes why are the media covering it now?
00:17:17.000Well, the reason the media are covering it now is not because they think this is still a relevant part of the Trump base.
00:17:22.000The reason they're covering it now is because they hope that it is a relevant part of the Trump base so they can suggest that the president is still in league with the alt-right.
00:17:31.000And that's why last week, as I played on the show, CNN did a full report, like a full seven, eight minute report on one neo-Nazi in the middle of a rural town in Pennsylvania, where the rest of the town thought the guy's an idiot, but this guy's a crazy person.
00:17:43.000So they went out and reported on him because he was a neo-Nazi who liked Trump.
00:17:46.000And that made it politically relevant.
00:17:48.000The problem is the media won't cover stuff that actually is politically relevant.
00:17:51.000So the fact is, the left has embraced Antifa more than the right has embraced the alt-right.
00:17:56.000The alt-right has basically become so toxic at this point that 20 people showed up where hundreds of people showed up last year.
00:18:02.000Now, you'd imagine that if the alt-right was a swelling, burgeoning crowd, then you would have seen thousands of people in the streets.
00:18:08.000Instead, what you saw was 25 guys who were losers, and everybody else running scared from those people.
00:18:55.000This sort of stuff has to be excised by the conservatives, because if we don't excise this stuff, then we will rightly be lumped in with that stuff.
00:19:02.000In the same way that the left is being lumped in with the Democratic Socialists because they've embraced it.
00:19:06.000The difference is that most people on the right, when asked about the alt-right, will condemn the alt-right.
00:19:10.000Most people on the left will not condemn the Democratic Socialists or even Antifa.
00:19:13.000A lot of people on the left will just ignore Antifa.
00:19:15.000And this is a point of real hot-button contention.
00:19:18.000Over the weekend, I was reading a book called Bad News about the situation in Rwanda.
00:19:23.000And it talks a little bit about the Rwandan genocide and, you know, still a much forgotten genocide despite the focus that was brought on it in the 1990s.
00:19:32.000800,000 people murdered within the span of three months by their neighbors.
00:19:36.000And it was seriously, the government just saying to people, go out and kill your neighbor.
00:19:39.000And people would just go get machetes and they would kill their neighbor.
00:19:41.000And it occurred to me that one of the reasons for this, maybe the chief reason, is that institutional loyalty combined with polarization is a very, very dangerous thing.
00:19:50.000If you are loyal to an institution, and then people you feel are attacking that institution, and it becomes more and more polarized, you are more and more likely to embrace terrible things, to say terrible things, and to do terrible things.
00:20:02.000And this is true for both the alt-right and conservatives who embrace the alt-right, and Antifa on the left, which is embraced by the left.
00:20:08.000If you believe that your opponent is the font of all evil and is constantly attacking you, you're more likely to become reactionary and polarized and to engage in immoral behavior.
00:20:17.000And that's why it's incumbent on people on the right to say that we are not going to not only associate with the alt-right, we are going to excise them.
00:21:06.000So, the same weekend that the alt-right was able to muster a grand total of 20 doofuses, racist pieces of crap, to go rally in Charlottesville and then head over to Washington, D.C., Antifa gathered hundreds of people.
00:21:18.000And these folks were chanting radical stuff, and the media were just not reporting this.
00:21:22.000The mainstream media were just not reporting what Antifa were doing over the weekend.
00:21:26.000There was a little bit of reporting, but not much.
00:21:30.000But first, let's talk about your coffee.
00:21:31.000You know, the stuff that you are putting in your face right now.
00:21:34.000The reality is that coffee is probably weak, and it's probably from one of those awful corporate brands where they care about bathroom reform policy, and they think you shouldn't have to buy anything if you sit in the restaurant because they've been pressured by left-wingers.
00:22:45.000While the media were focused laser-like on Jason Kessler and his band of ne'er-do-wells, Antifa was showing up in the hundreds and actually harassing people.
00:22:52.000So here were protesters and here's what they were chanting.
00:22:54.000You won't see this reported anywhere except for right-wing media.
00:22:57.000Protesters were chanting legitimately, no border, no wall, no USA at all.
00:23:24.000And the fact is that these people are garbage and they're spouting garbage, and yet the media treat them as though they're just anti-fascist.
00:23:31.000They actually take them at face value.
00:23:32.000And you wonder why folks don't take the media seriously with all this stuff?
00:23:35.000You wonder why we think the media are a bunch of liars when it comes to their coverage of these issues.
00:23:40.000They'll spend all their time talking about the dangers of the alt-right and none of their time talking about Antifa.
00:23:45.000It's because they are warm toward Antifa's cause in the same way that even today, if you say the word Soviet Union, people don't shudder in the same way that you say Nazi.
00:23:53.000That's because the media in the United States decided to treat the Nazis and the Soviet Union disparately.
00:23:57.000The Nazis should be treated like the sheer human garbage that they were and are.
00:24:04.000Hardcore communists killed more people than the Nazis, and yet we treat communism as though it is still a valued way of life, something that we ought to think about.
00:24:12.000We treat people who are communists, like Antifa, as though they are purporting to speak for something worthwhile.
00:24:19.000Okay, here are these protests over the weekend again, shouting, all cops are racist, while being protected by cops, by the way.
00:24:37.000So there they are, marching down the street, hundreds of them, shouting, all cops are racist, while being protected by the cops.
00:24:44.000All class acts, according to the media.
00:24:45.000These are just anti-fascist protesters, don't you understand?
00:24:48.000These are like the young men storming the beaches of Normandy.
00:24:51.000Literally, over the last year, we've seen that argument in the pages of the Washington Post, that these are the young people.
00:24:56.000It's just like Normandy, because anti-fascists were the people storming the beaches of Normandy, and anti-fascists now are, like, storming the beaches of Normandy, except what they're actually doing is attacking all the police officers protecting them from the predations of alt-right idiots.
00:25:10.000The cops standing around them, they are all racist.
00:26:16.000And then Antifa cut an ABC News cable.
00:26:18.000So ABC News was filming, and these Antifa members slapped down the camera, and then they proceeded to cut the sound cable, right, which is actual property damage.
00:26:43.000Struggling with the camera, and then they actually cut the sound cord on this thing.
00:26:48.000The idea that progressives deserve more kudos from the media simply because of their political point of view is just disgusting.
00:26:55.000Benny Johnson over at Daily Caller, he went out in the middle of a progressive protest in one of these Antifa protests in front of the White House, and he started asking these folks what they would do to Trump if Trump were in front of them.
00:27:41.000All these people talking about killing the President of the United States, torturing the President of the United States.
00:27:45.000Don't worry, media, this isn't worth covering.
00:27:47.000The stuff that's really worth covering is those 20 idiots led by Jason Kessler who couldn't even fill a train car from Charlottesville to Washington, D.C.
00:27:53.000That's where you need to put all of your attention.
00:27:55.000And now look at how the Washington Post covered this, okay?
00:27:57.000So the Washington Post did cover all of the conflict between Antifa and the police, but here's how they covered it.
00:28:02.000This is legitimately what they tweeted.
00:28:04.000Confusion over an enormous police presence turned into anger Saturday night in Charlottesville, as hundreds of protesters marched through the streets, growing angry at police and calling for an end to white supremacy.
00:28:14.000The police were there to protect all of the protesters, and then the protesters started shouting about how all the cops were racist.
00:28:20.000But listen to how the Washington Post frames this.
00:28:22.000They framed it as these evil fascist police trying to shut down the protest, and then it turned into anger because the police were the aggressors.
00:28:39.000And the Washington Post continued along these lines, right?
00:28:41.000I mean, the Washington Post had an entire tweet thread talking about exactly this.
00:28:46.000And they also added, Just a year ago, those outright fascists were there, being terrible people, but now you have these peaceful Antifa crowds who all they do is attack cops and try to attack media members, that's all.
00:29:07.000Many protesters called the police's actions on Saturday a provocation, another symbol of the over-policing of America, and started chanting at the officers who were holding shields and wearing helmets.
00:31:15.000There would be less appeal to racial division.
00:31:18.000I guarantee it, because what Murdoch did through Fox News and the New York Post, among others, is to create a dynamic where that stuff could come out in the open.
00:31:27.000We saw it in New York City for years and years, where race was infused into the dialogue in a very negative way, and it was a sort of an apocalyptic vision was created of the notion of
00:31:38.000Going back to a time of crime and decay and always putting that through a lens of people of color as the villains.
00:31:47.000Okay, look at these firefighters like Brian Stelter rushing to the defense of the media right there.
00:31:51.000Did you see how angry Brian Stelter was as a government official basically suggested that the press was responsible for everything bad happening in America?
00:31:58.000Did you see the feel the anger rolling off of Brian Stelter's bald head?
00:32:05.000Because Brian Stelter is holding the media to a double standard.
00:32:07.000When it's Rupert Murdoch or Fox News, then it's okay for politicians to bash them.
00:32:11.000But when it's CNN, CNN must never, ever be bashed.
00:32:14.000It is very bad when the President of the United States says CNN sucks and CNN is fake news.
00:32:18.000But it is fine when Bill de Blasio, who's an awful, awful commie mayor of New York, when he comes forward and he says that the New York Post is terrible for America, Rupert Murdoch is terrible for America, then, of course, not a problem at all.
00:32:30.000And then you wonder why Trump's anti-media message resonates.
00:32:33.000It resonates because for legitimately my entire life, the media have been this bad.
00:32:36.000The same media that cover for Antifa, the same media that suggest that we ought not be worried in the slightest about left-wing violence, we should only be worried about right-wing violence, even though left-wing violence happens against police officers at these rallies from Antifa on a routine basis.
00:32:49.000Those same media members are fine with attacks from politicians on right-wing media sources, or even mildly moderate media sources.
00:32:57.000Yeah, maybe we shouldn't trust the media.
00:33:25.000And then I've talked about the fact that Antifa has infiltrated the left.
00:33:27.000Is Corey Stewart the future of the GOP and is Al Sharpton the future of the left?
00:33:31.000It sort of seems like that could be the future of both parties, unless reasonable people stand up and say no.
00:33:37.000I'm going to explain that in just a second, but here is Corey Stewart versus Al Sharpton.
00:33:41.000Is this the future of American politics right here on MSNBC?
00:33:44.000There are Americans of every single race, of every single religion, of every single ethnicity, that are struggling with the same things.
00:33:52.000And as long as we continue to divide Americans by race, and you've made a career out of dividing people by race, you've been a race hustler your entire career, you've made a lot of money at it, you haven't even bothered to pay your taxes at it, and all you do is divide Americans by race, and frankly people are tired of it.
00:34:11.000Okay, what Corey Stewart is saying about Al Sharpton is 100% correct.
00:34:15.000But Al Sharpton could say the same thing about Corey Stewart, right?
00:34:17.000Corey Stewart, who's from Minnesota, has proclaimed that he is for the Southern legacy and these Confederate memorials have to be maintained.
00:34:22.000Now, there's a case for maintaining Confederate memorials as a lesson from the past.
00:34:25.000I think it's Condoleezza Rice's case, which is that we shouldn't obliterate history just because history is uncomfortable for us.
00:34:31.000When we see statues of people who are controversial or bad, we should look at them and we should remember.
00:34:36.000We should teach our kids based on this fact that those statues were erected in the first place.
00:34:40.000Corey Stewart, his campaign has been a real problem.
00:34:43.000Rick Shafton, who runs communications for Stewart, has said really terrible stuff in the past about black folks and black neighborhoods and all the rest.
00:34:53.000Corey Stewart has suggested that the South's legacy is fighting the Civil War, which is just awful.
00:34:58.000The Civil War was a very, very bad war fought on behalf of slavery.
00:35:02.000OK, but the fact that the right some people on the right have embraced Corey Stewart because they hate the left so much and a lot of people on the left have embraced Al Sharpton because they hate the right so much.
00:35:10.000That is a recipe for disaster in the country.
00:35:12.000The left should be called on to disavow people like Al Sharpton, who's continuously been a major player in the Democratic Party.
00:35:18.000for 30 years after claiming race hoax after race hoax and people on the right should be disavowing Corey Stewart and that whole wing of the Republican Party because this cannot be the future of the two-party system.
00:35:28.000If it is, then what we are going to see is going to be a nation that gets uglier and uglier.
00:35:33.000And I understand people want to vote for one side to stop the other side.
00:35:36.000But if we don't have some intellectual honesty from both sides, then this is the future.
00:35:40.000The future is going to be an increased polarization due to loyalty to institutions, and then those institutions become even more polarized, even more reactionary, and even more dangerous.
00:36:12.000Okay, Peter Strzok, you'll recall, is the FBI counterintelligence agent who came under withering criticism because he had been texting with his lover, Lisa Page, about how terrible President Trump was, and then he texted that he was going to stop President Trump from becoming president, and it only took 1,000 years for him to be fired.
00:36:28.000According to Strzok's lawyer, Eitan Goldman,
00:36:30.000An internal disciplinary review had recommended Strzok's demotion and a 60-day suspension, but Goldman said Monday the deputy director of the FBI overruled that determination and decided to fire him.
00:36:40.000The decision to fire Special Agent Strzok is not only a departure from typical bureau practice, but also contradicts Director Wray's testimony to Congress and his assurances that the FBI intended to follow its regular process.
00:36:52.000In this and all other personnel matters, said Strzok's lawyer.
00:36:55.000The reality is that Strzok should have been fired long ago, obviously.
00:36:59.000In the Inspector General review, Michael Horowitz's review over at the Department of Justice found that Peter Strzok could not have been trusted to actually handle the Hillary Clinton investigation or the Russia investigation, and that his decisions may have been biased by his bias against President Trump.
00:37:13.000And that had real ramifications for both investigations.
00:37:16.000Strzok should have been fired long ago.
00:37:18.000The fact that he continued to maintain his innocence throughout all of this was always seriously questionable.
00:37:24.000Now, we are still awaiting the Inspector General report on the Russia investigation and how much personal bias impacted the procedure in the investigation.
00:37:33.000But there are serious questions to be asked.
00:37:34.000Another one of those serious questions comes courtesy of John Solomon over at The Hill.
00:37:39.000Who has a long piece today talking about the relationship between Fusion GPS and a guy named Bruce Orr, who was working for the FBI at the time.
00:37:52.000In a memory stick quietly exchanged in a coffee shop, an admission of a Hail Mary leak, an unmistakable effort to push the Russia investigation closer to Donald Trump's inner circle with uncorroborated tales, these are just some of the highlights from the day that Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign, met secretly with a top Justice Department official right after Trump won the 2016 election.
00:38:12.000All of it was captured in the official's handwritten notes, a contemporaneous record that intelligence professionals tell me exposes the flaws plaguing the early Russia collusion case.
00:38:20.000For example, Glenn Simpson, who you'll recall was working for Fusion GPS, that was the firm that was hired to do OPPO on Trump, by Hillary Clinton, told then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr during a December 10, 2016 meeting in a Washington coffee shop that he believed Trump's longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, was a go-between from Russia to the Trump campaign.
00:38:38.000Now, Bruce Ohr's wife actually worked for the Fusion GPS firm.
00:38:44.000Simpson allegedly acknowledged most of the information from Fusion GPS and British intelligence operative Christopher Steele did not come from sources inside Moscow.
00:38:53.000They said there was a Russian source in the United States who'd been providing them the information.
00:38:56.000That makes it very suspect as to whether that information was reliable in any way.
00:39:00.000Still, Fusion GPS was funneling all of this information over to Bruce Ohr over at the FBI.
00:39:06.000Congressional investigators, according to John Solomon, are now scouring all of Bruce Ohr's notes for evidence that Simpson and Steele had influence over the Russia probe even after Steele was dismissed as an FBI informant in November 2016.
00:39:18.000Investigators want to know if any players in the Russia probe gave Congress false testimony.
00:39:22.000One notation that stands out is Simpson's account that he asked Steele to talk with Mother Jones reporter David Korn about the muckraking on Trump and Russia in the final days of the election.
00:39:31.000At the time, Steele was still working as an FBI source.
00:39:34.000So, apparently, the idea here is that Fusion GPS leaked all this information to David Corn, and that story was intended to blow Trump up before the election.
00:39:59.000And this is still the open question in all of this.
00:40:02.000What exactly was the impact of the bias against President Trump inside the FBI as they pursued their investigation in the Russia investigation?
00:40:10.000The Russia investigation allegedly, even according to Devin Nunes, was the House Intelligence Committee chairman.
00:40:16.000Even that was initiated based on George Papadopoulos, but it is unclear how much that investigation was infiltrated by people who did not like Trump and were attempting to use that investigation to quote-unquote get Trump either before or after the election.
00:40:28.000There are serious questions that still have to be asked about all of that and President Trump isn't wrong to be deeply frustrated with all of that.
00:40:34.000He just tweeted out this morning, Agent Peter Strzok was just fired from the FBI.
00:40:38.000Finally, the list of bad players in the FBI and DOJ gets longer and longer.
00:40:41.000Based on the fact that Strzok was in charge of the witch hunt, will it be dropped?
00:41:32.000The qualification I have is that it's endorsed by Noam Chomsky, which always makes me think twice about the book.
00:41:36.000I think what the book does really well is it does show you how dictatorships run.
00:41:40.000It does show you the threat to journalists, particularly in dictatorships, and the danger of dictatorships in turning a population into a subject population willing to do the will of the dictator.
00:41:49.000That said, I don't know enough about Rwandan politics, to be honest with you, to tell you whether there are any viable alternatives to the Kagame regime in Rwanda, which has been highly successful at boosting the economy while at the same time suppressing public dissent.
00:42:02.000In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, there are a lot of folks who think maybe dictatorship is almost necessary because democracy would break down immediately into civil war again.
00:42:10.000I don't know enough about Rwanda to give you a straight answer on that.
00:42:13.000All I can tell you is the book does provide a window into how people think.
00:42:17.000The most interesting part of this book
00:42:19.000Because there's a section where Kagame basically orders a bunch of people inside Rwanda to take down the thatched roof huts that they have.
00:42:26.000They don't have modern roofing in Rwanda because it's a very poor country still.
00:42:30.000And all these people basically dismantle the roofs on their own homes without any sort of replacement for them.
00:42:35.000And when asked about it by Sundaram, the author of this book, they say, listen, we were told to do so and we have to modernize the country, so of course we would take down our own roofs.
00:42:43.000Once you have people who are willing to do stuff that does not benefit them, and actually is highly damaging, simply because someone told them to do it, you have a population that is in serious danger of reverting to violence at the drop of a hat.
00:43:08.000When you start thinking of yourself as a member of a collective as opposed to a member of an individual, you start to say OK to things you never would have said OK to before.
00:43:42.000You know, the fact that this guy is willing to undertake that, I mean, good for him, but holy moly, sometimes you just have to admire the skill.
00:43:50.000Look at that, that's real speed right there.
00:43:52.000How you survive that is beyond me, but professionals are professionals.
00:43:57.000I mean, Bodhi from Point Break signals his approval.
00:44:45.000OK, well, if that's our politics, then no wonder that President Trump, who is routinely dishonest about things, no wonder that the American public just discount the dishonesty.
00:44:53.000They say he's honest about the big things.
00:44:54.000Who cares if he's dishonest about the small things?
00:45:43.000Any of the powers transferred to the general government are unnecessary or improper, meaning is the government grabbing more power than it needs?
00:45:50.000And second, whether it could be dangerous to give this kind of power to the federal government.
00:45:55.000He says it's pretty clear that all the powers delegated to the federal government
00:47:29.000He says, a power to destroy the freedom of the press, the trial by jury, or even to regulate the course of dissents or the forms of conveyances must be very singularly expressed by the terms to raise money for the general welfare.
00:47:40.000He explicitly points out an argument people on the left use.
00:47:42.000They say, well, look, the Constitution says the government has the power to provide for the general welfare.
00:47:50.000What color can this objection have when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon?
00:48:00.000In other words, when it says to raise money for the general welfare and then it lists
00:48:04.000All of the things you can do with that clause, that is a comprehensive list.
00:48:10.000It doesn't mean that the general rule overrides the specifics.
00:48:13.000It means the specifics govern the general.
00:48:15.000And this is true in its basic principle of constitutional interpretation.
00:48:31.000The same thing is true in contractual negotiation and contractual interpretation, and it's true when it comes to the Constitution.
00:48:38.000If the Constitution says the government has the power to provide for the general welfare, and then lists for pages all the stuff the government can do, it's all the stuff the government can do that matters, it is not that motivating clause to provide for the general welfare.
00:48:51.000As Madison says, for what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted
00:48:55.000If these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power.
00:48:58.000And that, of course, is exactly right.
00:48:59.000And this is why originalism is correct when it comes to constitutional interpretation.
00:49:03.000Just as you would read a contract literally by looking at the specific terms, you have to look at the Constitution and read it literally by looking at the specific terms.
00:49:11.000Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest.