The fallout continues for Michael Cohen and Paul Managel, New York opens another line of investigation into President Trump, and President Trump leaps into the South Africa situation. On today's show, Ben Shapiro talks about: - The latest on Michael Cohen's plea deal - Is it legal to give campaign employees a bonus just before the election? - Why Bradley Smith argues it's not a campaign expenditure - And much more! Links From This Episode: All Previous Podcast Episodes Free Training From The Daily Beast Leave Us a Review On Apple Podcasts Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel Learn more about your ad choices. What's your favorite piece of media you've been watching on Netflix? Which celebrity or show are you watching the most TV show you're watching most of the time on Netflix or other major network you're getting the most of your favorite streaming service? What currency are you spending the most on right now and why? Is it safe to own a piece of gold or silver? Which precious metal is the best investment you can buy right now? And what s your best piece of advice you can give to your friends and family about the future of the world's greatest gold and silver in the 21st century? Answer all these questions and more on today's episode of the Ben Shapiro Show! Subscribe to our new show on The Ben Shapiro Podcast and more! Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, "The Best Thing I'm Gonna Do It?" Subscribe on iTunes! Subscribe on Podchaser? Subscribe on Spare Someplace Great Podcasts by clicking here to Learn More About Meghan Kaspor and I'll Be Quiet About It's Greatness And I'll Hear More Like That On This And Other Things That He's Gotta Have It Like That And More? Subscribe On It's Good Gotta Be More Than That And I'm Not Gotta Say That's Not That And That's Good By Meals And More And More Gotta Hear It And I Can Say It's Also That's Gave It & I'll Gave Me A Review On That & More And I Will Also Get It And A Few Other Things Like That & I Say That And A Fave It And More & More Gee Is That And So Much More And A Review It's Gee And A He's Also A Review And A More Gasp And A Shapepie And A Q & A And A Beeeeeee Is That & A F His Story And A Thank It's A F He's A Geeepie & A Q And A So Much And A Sepepie Is That Sepeee & A His Story & A He Sells It & A Bepie Gee R His Feeeeee And A His A Ride And A That's A SQ His Story & A So It's That's It's Not A Soup And A Gotta A FQ & A & A A Ride Is That Gee Ride Is Also A F R A B His A F Ride And Such And A Kep And A A S His Story?
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00:01:37.000We are still living in the aftermath of all the revelations about Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen.
00:01:41.000And we begin today with the sort of latest updates on the Michael Cohen situation.
00:01:45.000Because Michael Cohen, it turns out, is the greater threat to the President of the United States than is Paul Manafort.
00:01:50.000To recap, Michael Cohen pled guilty to campaign finance violations.
00:01:54.000And he suggested that the president had informed him and told him to commit these campaign finance violations.
00:02:00.000He'd instructed him to create all these shell corporations and avoid going through normal disclosure routes in order to pay off two separate women, Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, with whom he had once had sex just before the election in order to impact the election.
00:03:05.000And he ended up basically getting off.
00:03:07.000Well, that's sort of the case that Bradley Smith is making.
00:03:10.000He is saying, under the theory that then-candidate Donald Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen violated campaign finance laws by arranging hush money payments to women accusing Trump of affairs, the answer would seem to be yes to the question of whether a business owner running for political office deciding to pay bonuses to his employees would be a campaign expenditure.
00:03:28.000He says that that's a problem, that we can't equate everything with a campaign expenditure.
00:03:32.000Everything you do in your own interest or that influences a campaign can't be a campaign expenditure.
00:03:36.000You decide to give your employees a bonus just before the election, that's not necessarily a campaign expenditure because maybe you would have given that bonus to your employees in the absence of the campaign anyway.
00:03:46.000Bradley Smith says, The problem is that almost anything a candidate does can be interpreted as intended to influence an election, from buying a good watch,
00:04:08.000So, he's making the case that basically this is not a campaign expenditure, this is a personal expenditure by the President of the United States.
00:04:28.000The test under FEC rules is the so-called irrespective test.
00:04:32.000The irrespective test says, would this expenditure have been made irrespective of whether the campaign was happening?
00:04:37.000And as I've argued, I think that there's a plausible case Trump could say, I would have made this expenditure anyway, because he has a long history of pressuring women to stay silent and paying women off to stay silent.
00:04:45.000Back in 2011, he basically threatened to sue In Touch magazine for printing an interview with Stormy Daniels.
00:04:51.000And they backed off and did not print the interview with Stormy Daniels about her affair with then reality television producer and star Donald Trump.
00:05:01.000There's a secondary case here, and that's the case being made over at Politico by a bunch of legal experts.
00:05:06.000They say that Cohen's admission that he violated campaign finance law while acting at Trump's direction is far from rock-solid proof that the president is also guilty, even if Cohen is being entirely truthful, some lawyers say.
00:05:16.000The fact that Cohen did something illegal doesn't mean Trump did anything illegal, said Jan Barron.
00:05:23.000Cohen said in court on Tuesday that he acted at Trump's direction and violated federal election laws by arranging the payout to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress, in the days before the 2016 election to keep her silent about what she said was an affair with Trump a decade earlier.
00:05:36.000Andrew Gruhl, however, a University of Iowa law professor, he says, So in other words, if Trump called up Michael Cohen,
00:05:58.000And he said, dude, I'd like for you to make this go away.
00:06:00.000And Michael Cohen says, don't worry, I'll take care of it.
00:06:02.000That is not Trump being complicit in a campaign finance violation, because he assumes that Cohen knows all the legal requirements.
00:06:08.000If, however, Trump says to Michael Cohen, listen, I need you to make this go away, and it doesn't matter if you violate campaign finance law, or I know that we should shield this from public scrutiny by using a bunch of shell corporations, and let's say Cohen has them on tape saying all of that stuff, then it looks more like a criminal campaign finance violation.
00:06:26.000Cohen said under oath, the most damaging information that the president of the United States committed a crime and covered it up.
00:06:31.000But that is not actually indicative that the president has criminal intent.
00:06:35.000So this one lawyer, Jan Barron says, in order to prove criminal intent, you have to point to evidence that the actors knew or had reason to know that what they were doing was illegal.
00:07:00.000Defense number two, even if it was a campaign expenditure, I didn't know the rules because I have people whose job it is to know that stuff and I didn't order anyone knowingly to violate campaign finance laws because why the hell would I do that?
00:07:12.000So ignorance and sluttiness are the president's two defenses and both are quite plausible because the president gets around and has for a long time and has paid women to shut up for apparently a long time and because the president is not exactly a legal expert despite his own belief that he is.
00:07:26.000President Trump is actually a terrible legal client because he thinks he knows more than his lawyers, which is always the first mark of a bad legal client.
00:07:32.000In fact, if God could have come up with a bad legal client in the laboratory before putting him on earth, he'd look a lot like Donald Trump, who just will not let his lawyers do their job.
00:08:24.000Team and Miss Giuliani have admitted that the money was paid.
00:08:28.000Number two, there is physical and electronic evidence that the money was paid to Miss Daniels from the Trump conduit, who was Mr. Cohen, and it's all documented.
00:08:42.000Okay, but that doesn't answer the question.
00:08:44.000Okay, we know that the money was passed along.
00:08:46.000The question is whether Trump had intent to avoid campaign finance law, and that is not actually documented, is what Lanny Davis seems to be saying.
00:08:53.000So, just because the money passed hands, which we all assume happened, and just because Trump told Cohen to solve the problem, which we all assume happened, doesn't mean that Trump actually had intent to violate campaign finance law.
00:09:02.000Now, the great irony of this situation is that Hillary Clinton was allowed to get away with
00:09:07.000Creating a private server and then destroying information on the private server, supposedly because she didn't have intent.
00:09:13.000She actually did have intent to destroy information and violate the law.
00:09:16.000But Trump probably didn't have intent here.
00:09:18.000And so by the same standard, he should probably not be criminally liable unless they have actual evidence that he knew that the law was being violated.
00:09:28.000It also doesn't help that Michael Cohen happens to be
00:09:30.000A particularly sleazy liar, and everybody sort of knows it.
00:09:33.000The newfound respect for Michael Cohen's honesty is sort of astonishing from folks on the left.
00:09:37.000And you can see that folks on the left even really don't believe Michael Cohen.
00:09:40.000They think he's a liar and a screwball.
00:09:42.000Lanny Davis was on national television yesterday on NBC News, and he actually said that they'd opened a legal defense fund for Michael Cohen.
00:09:49.000He asked people to contribute, and the audience started laughing at him.
00:09:54.000But could I just take one opportunity to remind everyone that Michael Cohen has suffered a tragic and difficult experience with his family.
00:10:02.000He's without resources and we've set up a website called MichaelCohenTruth.com that we're hoping that he will get some help from the American people so he can continue to tell the truth.
00:10:16.000The audience, they don't know if you're ready to donate, Lanny, but we did check before we went to air.
00:10:23.000And honestly, that's the appropriate response.
00:10:24.000By the way, his legal defense fund has raised like $150,000.
00:10:57.000I mean, he's certainly more jeopardy than he was two days ago, but that's not, it's not indicative that this is sort of an open and shut case.
00:11:04.000Bret Stephens of the New York Times has a whole thing today about how Trump should immediately be impeached.
00:11:08.000The evidence isn't quite there yet of criminal action.
00:11:11.000We all knew that Trump is a man who lacks character in a lot of particular areas, but that's not the same thing quite as criminal activity.
00:11:19.000We'll get to the White House's response to all of this in just a second, plus some Paul Manafort updates.
00:11:23.000But first, let's talk about the possibility of a natural disaster or, God forbid, some sort of situation that prevents you from having access to the grocery store.
00:11:32.000It's important that you have some sort of emergency food supply available in your house.
00:11:35.000I mean, the government recommends that you ought to have some emergency food in your house, that you should have water in your house, and you ought to
00:11:41.000Pay attention to that, because you ought to be prepared.
00:11:42.000And you can trust MyPatriotSupply for that food storage.
00:11:45.000So you'll be ready for earthquakes, hurricanes, long-term power outages, and more.
00:11:48.000Hawaii's about to get hit by a hurricane, apparently.
00:11:50.000And, uh, you know, you hope that the folks there are prepared for it.
00:12:54.000The president is not known for his veracity on a wide variety of issues.
00:12:57.000He may be at root a truth teller on some matters political.
00:13:00.000I think that's true, but he also likes to fib a fair bit.
00:13:04.000And so when Sarah Sanders got up, Sarah Huckabee Sanders yesterday at the White House, when she got up,
00:13:08.000When she was asked whether Trump is lying, she got very offended and it didn't play all that great.
00:13:14.000I'm here today and say the president has never lied to the American people because so many people now look back at that tape of him on Air Force One saying he knew nothing about these payments, when in fact we now know he knew everything about these payments.
00:14:04.000That's not his best defense, but Sanders said repeatedly that Trump can't be indicted.
00:14:08.000Again, he can't be indicted probably because he's president of the United States, but that's not a case that he's not guilty of a crime.
00:14:13.000There are a bunch of other cases he's not guilty of a crime, but the statement that he can't be indicted, that's like saying, well, I was acquitted on a murder charge and then it turns out I actually murdered the person.
00:14:26.000I can't be tried again because of double jeopardy.
00:14:43.000You might assume, well, maybe he's a little bit guilty.
00:14:45.000Here is Sarah Huckabee Sanders, though, saying the president is innocent because he can't be indicted, which is, again, legally not tenable.
00:14:51.000As the president said, we've stated many times, he did nothing wrong.
00:15:16.000There are no charges against him because he's the President of the United States and you cannot, under federal law, have a federal law enforcement agency indict a sitting President of the United States.
00:15:39.000We're gonna get to President Trump's response to all of this in just one second, because he's been very prolific on Twitter, and then he did a very long interview this morning on Fox and Friends as well, and he talked to Ainsley Earhardt yesterday.
00:15:50.000But, the update on Paul Manafort is that a lot of people on the right have been saying that Paul Manafort was railroaded, and the case that they're making is that because he was acquitted, or because the jury hanged, he wasn't acquitted, the jury
00:16:02.000The jury hung on ten separate charges.
00:16:04.000That just means that he was innocent of those charges and the whole thing is some sort of witch hunt.
00:17:13.000And when people say, you know, if the special counsel dug into you, he would find something, my answer would be, well, it depends on what he finds.
00:17:20.000If he finds that I was actively taking money from a foreign government in order to manipulate the American political process, which is sort of what Manafort was doing prior to the election, had nothing to do with Trump, then that's a crime.
00:17:35.000You know, there's not to say that the government should be able to go through everybody's books at will, but he was convicted of eight federal felonies and would have been convicted of another ten if there hadn't been one holdout on the jury.
00:17:43.000So, let's reserve the witch hunt language for actual witch hunts.
00:17:47.000Let's not reserve the witch hunt language for when there's actually a lady running around in an actual witch's hat riding a broom and casting curses by killing cats.
00:18:18.000Ari Fleischer tweeted out and he said,
00:18:40.000I think so far Ari Fleischer is basically correct.
00:18:42.000So all the talk about Paul Manafort, it amounts to nothing.
00:18:45.000I'm just puzzled as to why the president continues to defend him.
00:18:48.000Meanwhile, the state of New York is looking at going after President Trump as well.
00:18:51.000This poses a significant serious difficulty for the president because the president can be indicted on state charges.
00:18:56.000So if you commit a murder as president of the United States, there is nothing in the Constitution that forbids a state prosecutor from bringing you up on violation of state law.
00:19:05.000The reason the president can be indicted under federal law is because the president controls the federal executive branch, but the president does not control state law, which is why the president can't, for example, pardon state crimes.
00:19:14.000He can't pardon a state murderer, for example.
00:19:17.000Well, New York state investigators have now subpoenaed Michael Cohen, the president's former personal lawyer, according to state officials, as part of a probe into the Donald J. Trump Foundation.
00:19:25.000They have a lot of evidence that the Donald J. Trump Foundation was basically being used as a pass-through for Trump to pay personal expenses.
00:19:34.000The tax department in New York doesn't have the jurisdiction to pursue criminal charges, but if it discovered information valuable to the investigation of the Trump Foundation, it would then be referred to the New York State Attorney General.
00:19:45.000I have very little doubt that the New York Attorney General would have very little trouble trying to pursue a criminal investigation into President Trump.
00:19:51.000Barbara Underwood hates President Trump with a passion of a thousand burning suns.
00:19:55.000So what you could see is a state prosecution against the President, and he is not, in fact, immune to state prosecution
00:20:02.000So, this is a continuing serious problem for the president.
00:20:07.000It's, you know, it would be great if we didn't have to deal with any of this stuff.
00:20:11.000We'll have to deal with the charges as they come and evaluate them as they come.
00:20:13.000Now, in a second, we're going to get to the president's response to all of this, some of which is good, some of which is bad, most of which is kind of bad.
00:20:20.000But we'll get to that in just a second.
00:21:40.000For that special discount, go check it out right now.
00:21:42.000Okay, so, President Trump has responded to all this in a variety of ways.
00:21:48.000So yesterday, he was on with Ainsley Earhart over at Fox News, and he said, So remember, this is a guy who said that he didn't even know about the Stormy Daniels payoff.
00:21:57.000Now he's saying that he paid for Stormy Daniels.
00:22:00.000The case in favor of him saying this is that he doesn't think he violated federal finance law.
00:22:05.000He didn't know it was a violation of federal finance law.
00:22:07.000He still doesn't know it was a violation of federal finance law, so how can you say he had intent to violate federal finance law?
00:22:14.000The uncharitable reading is that he just admitted to a federal crime, because if he personally paid for a campaign expenditure and admitted to it, then he just admitted to a federal crime on national television.
00:22:23.000This is why you should let your lawyers do the talking, Mr. President.
00:22:26.000Here is the President of the United States talking to Ainsley Earhart.
00:22:54.000In fact, my first question when I heard about it was, did they come out of the campaign?
00:22:59.000Okay, so this is not a smart line of attack, because if in fact he knew that the money was going to be used to pay off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal in violation of federal campaign finance law, then him saying, I signed it personally, is in fact the crime.
00:23:14.000If it's a campaign expenditure, it's supposed to come from campaign funding.
00:23:17.000And if he wants to spend on his own behalf, he's supposed to report it.
00:23:21.000And the president also decided that it would be worthwhile to tweet out about Michael Cohen again today.
00:23:27.000So he tweeted out, So fact check, three quarters true, half true.
00:23:39.000So it is true that if he had not won, none of this would be an issue.
00:23:42.000It is also true that the media are very pissed that he won.
00:23:45.000It is not really super true that the only thing he did wrong was to win the election.
00:23:51.000It turns out that shipping women, not your wife, and then paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars to shut up in advance of an election
00:24:29.000He comes out and he says that when people flip, flipping ought to be illegal, right?
00:24:34.000So getting somebody to testify in exchange for a due sentence, that should be illegal.
00:24:39.000Well, for a law and order guy, that's a real weird statement because every drug ring that has ever been rolled up has been rolled up on the basis of people pleading to lesser crimes in order for them to get some sort of advantage and then testify against their buddies.
00:24:52.000Every single, every single RICO case, every single drug case,
00:24:58.000Half of criminal cases are based on flipping people so that you can move up the chain, right?
00:25:02.000Flipping people is a long honored tradition, and the reason for that is because if you couldn't flip people, if you couldn't offer them a reduced sentence, or protection, or some sort of concession, why wouldn't they just go by Omerta?
00:25:12.000Why wouldn't they just keep silent in order to maintain loyalty with the folks who they are afraid will kill them in prison?
00:25:18.000Or in order to maintain loyalty with the folks who are going to pay their family while they stay in jail for a longer period of time.
00:25:23.000Here's President Trump, though, saying that flipping people ought to be illegal.
00:27:27.000I think the reason that it would ding the market is because the markets fear a Democratic takeover of the House, Senate, and presidency, and a massive upswing in regulation that would dampen the ability to invest.
00:27:36.000If people were afraid that Elizabeth Warren was going to be the next president with a Democratic Congress, then that might ding the market.
00:27:43.000But again, his strongest case here is, I didn't do anything wrong.
00:27:47.000He should just come out and say, I don't know the law, I didn't know the law, to pretend I'm some sort of campaign finance expert is silly.
00:27:53.000There's such ample defenses available to him, but this is where the president's ego gets in the way of his own success.
00:27:59.000Now, the president loves him some president.
00:28:01.000I mean, Donald Trump is a big fan of Donald Trump.
00:28:04.000And because he's a big fan of Donald Trump, he's never able to admit to things that we all know are true.
00:28:09.000Like the fact that he goes around sleeping with porn stars and paying them off.
00:29:22.000Yes, many other people who work for you and or in Congress and want to get things done with you.
00:29:27.000Listen, I've been very positive about the president's policy.
00:29:29.000I've given him an A- when it comes to his executive policy.
00:29:32.000I have given him like a C plus when it comes to legislative policy, maybe a B minus.
00:29:36.000And when it comes to rhetoric, he's a dear enough.
00:29:38.000I mean, that's just the way that it is.
00:29:40.000And people may disagree with that, although I can assure you there are a lot of folks in the administration who basically agree with that assessment.
00:29:46.000But the fact that the president gives himself an A plus...
00:29:51.000Anybody who gets too over their skis on ego, who never reflects for a second and thinks, maybe there's something I'm bad at.
00:29:57.000One of the worst things you can do in life is overestimate your own skill set or suggest that you have a skill set where you have none.
00:30:03.000And there's certain things I'm just bad at, okay?
00:30:05.000I'm not the world's most athletic human.
00:30:08.000I'm good at math, but I'm not great at math, right?
00:30:10.000There are certain things I just don't know a lot about.
00:30:13.000If I don't admit that stuff, you get yourself in real trouble, and that's particularly true when you are talking about matters legal.
00:30:19.000There are lawyers, for a reason, who go to law school and spend years practicing.
00:30:22.000It is not a coincidence that President Trump has fired basically every lawyer he's ever worked with.
00:30:27.000At a certain point, when you look at a client, and every one of their lawyers has failed, you have to think, maybe it's not the lawyers, maybe it's the client.
00:30:34.000So the President of the United States making real trouble for himself.
00:30:38.000We'll get to some more of his comments in just a second.
00:30:40.000First, let's talk about Bravo Company Manufacturing.
00:30:43.000When the founders crafted the Constitution, the first thing they did was to make sacred the rights of the individual to share their ideas without limitation by the government.
00:30:50.000And to protect that, they created the Second Amendment, the second enumerated right, the right of the population to protect that speech and their rights with force.
00:30:58.000And that is why I am a big Second Amendment supporter.
00:31:01.000The same thing holds true for the folks at Bravo Company Manufacturing.
00:31:04.000Bravo Company Manufacturing was started in a garage by a Marine vet more than two decades ago to build professional-grade product that meets combat standards.
00:31:11.000BCM believes the same level of protection should be provided to every American as long as you are a law-abiding citizen who wants to protect your rights.
00:31:24.000It's about, will this thing function if, God forbid, there's somebody in your house trying to hurt you?
00:31:28.000Or if you are in the midst of a tyrannical government rise, which I know folks on the left like to discount this until Donald Trump is president, but one of the reasons we don't have a tyrannical government is particularly the threat of a population that is armed.
00:33:30.000Paul Manafort was convicted of a bunch of stuff that had nothing to do with Trump.
00:33:33.000Now, the cynical reason he'd protect Paul Manafort is because he's afraid that if he doesn't talk about how Paul Manafort is great, Paul Manafort flips too.
00:33:40.000But the non-cynical reason is that he just thinks anybody in his orbit who's targeted is targeted unfairly.
00:33:47.000The president is not his own best advocate here.
00:33:49.000I know that a lot of his fans think that he's always his own best advocate, but that is just not true, and it's not true on matters with regard to law.
00:33:55.000So, you know, I would hope that the president would kind of leave off here and let his lawyers do the rest.
00:34:02.000Meanwhile, the media are just champing at the bit over this.
00:34:05.000Chuck Todd, over at NBC, you know, doing some real journalism-ing, being very objective here.
00:34:10.000He says that Paul Ryan should drop impeachment papers, because I remember when all of the members of the media were calling on Democrats
00:34:16.000to go along with impeachment of President Clinton for committing actual perjury while he was President of the United States.
00:34:22.000Oh, no, wait, that didn't happen at all.
00:34:23.000I also don't remember calls for impeachment of President Obama over the IRS scandal or Benghazi or the Fast and Furious scandal or any of the other scandals that occurred during the Obama administration.
00:34:34.000You want to read about all those scandals?
00:34:45.000I think he actually could do the party a favor.
00:34:48.000And if you just start the procedure in the House Judiciary Committee, you give some home, you give some place for Republicans getting nervous to say, hey, you know what?
00:34:58.000Let's start an investigation and we'll go from there.
00:35:00.000Okay, how about everybody just saying we won't obstruct the investigation?
00:35:03.000There's already an investigation going on.
00:35:05.000The Mueller investigation continues, and Republicans have already said that if it's obstructed, it's going to be a problem.
00:35:11.000The same thing holds true with regard to the SDNY investigation, I assume.
00:35:15.000But the idea that Republicans are going to start impeachment proceedings based on the information that we have now, it's a little early, Chuck Todd.
00:35:21.000Also, let's be real about what impeachment is.
00:35:28.000That's not how it was originally conceived.
00:35:29.000The founders thought that impeachment was going to be a legal remedy, that Congress would use impeachment in order to check the executive branch.
00:35:35.000In reality, impeachment has been used extraordinarily sparingly.
00:35:38.000People in politics tend to want elections to provide the referendum on the sitting president of the United States.
00:35:43.000They don't tend to want to oust people, even for legal violations, because they'd rather have the people take it on their own backs to get rid of a particular president.
00:35:50.000There have only been three impeachment proceedings in America's history with regard to presidents.
00:35:54.000One was Andrew Johnson, impeached in the House, not convicted in the Senate.
00:35:57.000Bill Clinton, impeached in the House, not convicted in the Senate.
00:35:59.000And Richard Nixon, impeachment proceedings never really got started because Nixon knew he would be impeached and he resigned.
00:36:05.000The sudden shift toward we have to have a bipartisan view of impeachment is kind of ridiculous, coming from the same media that thought it was absolutely absurd for Republicans to try to impeach President Clinton back in 1998.
00:36:16.000Elizabeth Warren, though, understands this is where the heart of the base is.
00:36:19.000She is probably one of the frontrunners for the 2020 nomination among Democrats, and she said on CNN that she's not nervous to bring up the topic of impeachment.
00:36:59.000Kamala Harris, who's our ex-Gribble senator, I've been using that word a lot because there's a lot of ex-Gribble people lately, but Kamala Harris, who's our ex-Gribble senator here in the state of California, she came out and she says, you know, because Trump is now basically an unindicted co-conspirator, which he is not, right?
00:37:14.000I mean, that's an actual legal term that is not used in the indictment of Michael Cohen.
00:37:17.000Because he's an unincited co-conspirator, says Kamala Harris, we should not move forward on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.
00:37:32.000It would be Mike Pence, who would then move full-scale forward on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.
00:37:36.000So this is just stupidity, but it demonstrates that the real force behind impeachment has much more to do with obstructing the president's agenda than with legal ire at the president's mis-action here.
00:37:49.000Even before this happened, there was no question that the process was horribly flawed.
00:37:55.000A court of the United States of America has accepted a guilty plea from someone who was the lawyer for the President of the United States.
00:38:04.000And that person, in pleading guilty, basically made very clear that it was the then candidate, and now the President of the United States, who directed him to commit a crime.
00:38:18.000Yeah, I love the faux seriousness from Kamala Harris, who is one of the worst attorney generals in the history of the state of California, refusing to enforce the law.
00:38:26.000Enforcing the law where it wasn't appropriate.
00:38:28.000And now she's, of course, a senator who's going to use this sort of supposed legal ire to go after President Trump.
00:38:34.000There's a fair bit of hypocrisy on this.
00:38:36.000They're going to hold a Brett Kavanaugh over Trump.
00:38:46.000Meanwhile, the president is getting himself in, I think, hot water from the left, but I don't think appropriately, because yesterday he tweeted out that he wanted to look into the situation in South Africa regarding land seizures.
00:38:58.000So for folks who have not been following the situation in South Africa, because we don't tend to follow foreign policy that much in the United States,
00:39:04.000What's been happening is that the South African government, which is dominated by the left, has decided that they want to seize the land of white farmers in recompense for apartheid.
00:39:14.000Apartheid ended in 1994, I believe, under Nelson Mandela.
00:39:20.000It had started to collapse already in the late 80s, and then it was formally ended in 94 by Mandela.
00:39:25.000In any case, I don't want to get the history of that wrong, so I'm actually going to look that up right now.
00:39:32.000So, in any case, the South African government decides, yeah, that's right, in April 27th, 1994 is when it was formally ended.
00:39:39.000In any case, the President of the United States is commenting on the fact that the South African government now wants to seize land that is owned by white folks in South Africa and redistribute it.
00:39:50.000It's particularly bad policy because it is undermining the rule of law.
00:39:55.000And the real problems in South Africa have very little to do with white land ownership.
00:39:59.000And they have a lot more to do with the fact that rule of law has collapsed in South Africa.
00:40:02.000The crime rates are extraordinarily high.
00:40:04.000They have an unemployment rate of 28%.
00:40:05.000They have significantly high inflation.
00:40:07.000They have water crisis that's been ongoing for years at this point.
00:40:10.000This is a distraction from the government of South Africa to the people of South Africa on a racial basis.
00:40:15.000And it is true that apartheid was evil and it has carried over into land ownership today.
00:40:23.000But the idea that you can just seize property from white landowners and not undermine the rule of law, which undermines foreign investment and the capacity to trust in your ability to own private property in South Africa, is of course very silly.
00:40:33.000So Trump tweeted out, I've asked Secretary of State Pompeo
00:40:37.000So he was watching Fox News last night and he decided this was going to drive policy.
00:40:39.000He's not wrong about the land expropriations.
00:40:41.000The left, which is going nuts over this, suggesting that this is racial.
00:40:57.000The United States, if it were the reverse, if it were black landowners who were having their land seized by white people, the president would certainly have a right to intervene, and the same is true here.
00:41:06.000There's already been talk about the United States government getting active on the international stage over all of this, the Cato Institute.
00:41:12.000...has issued a statement regarding the dire consequences awaiting South Africa should due process fail land expropriation without compensation.
00:41:19.000What's happening there is the government is not even saying that they're going to pay people for their land.
00:41:22.000They're basically just grabbing land without even recompense, which is a crazy, crazy policy.
00:41:27.000Here is some audio of the leader of South Africa, the Prime Minister of South Africa, his name is Ramaphosa, talking about this land expropriation.
00:41:41.000On Tuesday, South Africans, through their publicly elected representatives in Parliament,
00:42:39.000But to remove land from people without actually paying them on the governmental level, especially when it wouldn't cost all that much money to pay them off and make them leave,
00:42:46.000To do that undermines rule of law in South Africa, and the president isn't wrong to point that out.
00:42:51.000Now, there's been a lot of focus on so-called farm murders in South Africa.
00:42:55.000A lot of these farms are owned by white folks, and the murder rate on these farms is high.
00:42:59.000But the murder rate across South Africa is particularly high.
00:43:01.000The statistics are very much in doubt as to whether there is a higher rate of targeted killing of whites in South Africa than blacks in South Africa, the most violent areas of South Africa.
00:43:10.000Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
00:44:39.000Other things that I like, so the President of the United States has been making an issue out of the Mollie Tibbetts case.
00:44:44.000The Mollie Tibbetts case, 20-year-old Iowan girl who was abducted and murdered by an illegal immigrant, and President Trump issued comments yesterday.
00:44:51.000A lot of folks were saying that President Trump was doing this to distract from all the Cohen stuff.
00:44:55.000The reality is that Trump would have done this in any case, right?
00:44:57.000I mean, he did this during the campaign.
00:44:59.000Mollie Tibbetts, an incredible young woman, is now permanently separated from her family.
00:45:03.000A person came in from Mexico, illegally, and killed her.
00:45:43.000To the family of Mollie Tibbetts, all I can say is God bless you.
00:45:48.000This is why if President Trump would just leave to his lawyers the rest of this stuff and he campaigned on this stuff, he'd actually be doing much better in the polls.
00:45:54.000And I think that he'd be doing well, especially when you contrast this with the sort of idiocy of a lot of folks on the left.
00:46:00.000Simone Sanders is a commentator over at CNN.
00:46:02.000Here's what she had to tweet on the Mollie Tibbetts matter.
00:46:03.000She tweeted, Mollie Tibbetts was murdered because she told a man to leave her alone while she was jogging.
00:46:08.000Her murderer happens to be undocumented.
00:46:38.000If Simone Sanders has a good answer as to how to stop toxic masculinity, like men from killing women in general, that is better than don't let evil men into the country illegally.
00:47:18.000Okay, meanwhile, some things that I hate.
00:47:24.000Speaking of the attempt to undermine basic truths, there's this video that I've now been made aware of.
00:47:31.000It's a video that is promoted at, of all places, the Huffington Post, because this is the repository for all stupidity in the United States.
00:47:37.000It's a video of a trans man, which is to say, a woman who believes that she is a man.
00:47:43.000Her name is Cass Bliss, and she detailed at Huffington Post what it's like to get your period when you're not a woman.
00:47:49.000Which, as a man, I would say, is pretty weird, because you need a uterus, which makes you a woman.
00:47:54.000Bliss is a non-binary trans educator, and she first went viral with her Bleeding Well Trans campaign in 2017 to prove the biologically impossible claim that men have periods, too.
00:48:04.000She recently created a music video discussing the struggles of having your period while not identifying as a woman in a quest for menstrual equity.
00:48:11.000So here is the song, cut by a woman who believes she is a man who says that men have periods.
00:49:50.000There's an article about Blair White, who's a trans woman, meaning a man who believes that he is a woman, or who feels like a woman on the inside, or whatever.
00:50:10.000If by anti the trans community you mean I am not going to suggest that you are a member of the sex to which you claim membership, then okay.
00:50:18.000If you mean that I don't want you to have all the rights of a normal human being in the United States, then of course that's not true.
00:50:23.000Of course I think that trans people should be able to do anything that non-trans people should be able to do in the United States, but no one in the United States gets to redefine objective biological terms and then expect me to go along with that because that's not a thing that is going to happen.
00:50:38.000I guess, again, just this idea that you are anti a person because you're anti a perspective is a conflation that is intellectually dishonest.
00:50:47.000So Jimmy Kimmel has now made clear for the 175th time that he doesn't want to appeal to Trump fans.
00:50:52.000He says, I don't think that world exists anymore.
00:50:55.000He says that he is not going to bother.
00:50:58.000With trying to appease all of these folks.
00:51:01.000He says, I don't think you can look at things in that way.
00:51:05.000He says that the world doesn't exist anymore where he can appeal to a wide variety of people.
00:51:11.000He was interviewed by the Daily Beast.
00:51:12.000The Daily Beast said, In terms of the effect of politics on your own ratings, I know you've said if people who disagreed with you don't want to watch, you don't particularly care.
00:51:32.000I also think one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a performer is trying to guess what your audience wants.
00:51:36.000I think you need to do what you think is right and hope that works out.
00:51:38.000While I agree with that, I also think that what the audience expects from a comedian is to be funny and not to be a crusader for their politics.
00:51:45.000That is not the same thing as if you just want to be a political person who happens to be funny.
00:52:03.000But if you're going to be a comedian, theoretically, you should be making comedy about everybody, which is not what folks like Jimmy Kimmel are doing.
00:52:09.000It's alienating a lot of the audience, and it's causing that audience to react politically to cultural flashpoints like Kimmel.
00:52:15.000Alrighty, we will be back here tomorrow with all the latest updates and the mailbag.