Trump defends himself from allegations he pressured Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, while Democrats ramp up their attacks, a quarrel over impeachment, and Elizabeth Warren surges in Iowa straight from our brand new Ben Shapiro Show Studios. Today's special guest is none other than Ben Shapiro, host of the now-defunct show "The Weekly Standard" on Fox News Channel's "The FiveThirtyEight" and host of "The Daily Wire's" "America's Most Influential Person" podcast, Ben Shapiro! Ben Shapiro is a regular contributor to Fox News and Fox Business, and is one of the most influential people in American politics. He is also the host and founder of the Conspiracy Theories podcast, which he describes as "The People's Guide to the Deep State." He's also the author of the best-selling book "The Devil Next Door" and has been featured on CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, CBS and the New York Times, and many other media outlets. If you haven't checked out Ben Shapiro's show, you're missing out! Subscribe to his new show on Apple Podcasts and listen to his other shows wherever you get your news and information. You won't want to miss it! Check out his newest book, "The Dark Side of Politics" out now! The Dark Side Of Politics, out now on Amazon Prime and Vimeo! It's a must-listen book! Watch it on all of the major podcast directories, including The Hill, The Hill Street Journal, NPR, USA Today, USA TODAY, and The Hill. The Hill Watch, and the Hill Watchlistings, wherever else you get it's available. Get your own copy of the book recommendations and much more! Learn more about what's going on in the world's most influential books, including our most influential podcast, including the best new podcast on the best podcast on all things going on right now. including our newest podcast and watchable podcast? and get a discount promo code: CRITICY! FREE PRICING SPECIAL OFFERING HERE! Connect with Ben Shapiro on FB and get 20% off your first purchase of a copy of The Dark Lord's newest issue of The Devil's Advocate's newest novel, CRITICS Journalist's newest book The Devil s Guide to The Devil Is Real? Subscribe for a chance to receive $200 and receive $50 off a VIP discount code FREE FASTEST PRODUCING ONLY $200 OFF THE FIRST PLACE TO BUY A SUBSCRIBE AND MORE!
00:00:00.000President Trump defends himself from allegations he pressured Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, Democrats ramp up their attacks, a quarrel over impeachment, and Elizabeth Warren surges in Iowa.
00:00:09.000Straight from our brand new Ben Shapiro Show studios, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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00:01:57.000Okay, so the big story of the day is the continued fallout from the whistleblower report that has not yet been revealed.
00:02:11.000Remember, we still don't know what's in this whistleblower report, so to recapitulate for folks who may not have been following this story with all of its requisite gravity, So, here is the story.
00:02:20.000The story is that there was a whistleblower inside the intelligence community, informed the Inspector General of the intelligence community that there was some sort of urgent violation that had taken place.
00:02:30.000If this violation had been deemed urgent, it would have had to be reported to Congress.
00:02:35.000So, the inspector general says, you're right, it is urgent, and then declares that this is going to go to Congress.
00:02:41.000At this point, the director of national intelligence, the acting director of national intelligence steps in and he says, well, hold up just a second.
00:02:47.000This isn't urgent under the applicable law.
00:02:50.000Because under the applicable law, typically, for a whistleblower complaint to be deemed urgent, it has to deal with actual intelligence.
00:02:56.000It can't just be that the intelligence community heard about something criminal that's bad that's going on, that doesn't actually have to do with the intelligence community, and then reported it to the inspector general, and then reported it to Congress.
00:03:07.000Instead, it has to deal with the actual intelligence community.
00:03:10.000Well, supposedly, this report didn't have to do with the intel community at all.
00:03:14.000It had to do with President Trump on the phone with Ukraine.
00:03:16.000So, the Democrats immediately shift to, this is a cover-up, Obviously, Trump is trying to hide something.
00:03:21.000And then we get a kind of slow leak about the information that was in this whistleblower report.
00:03:26.000So what was in the whistleblower report?
00:03:28.000Well, the whistleblower report, all that we know so far is that President Trump had conversations with the president of Ukraine and supposedly in those conversations, the president of the United States Repeatedly suggested that the Ukrainian government investigate Joe Biden.
00:03:43.000Well, because Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, father and son relationship, they have a nexus with Ukraine.
00:03:48.000Hunter Biden was made the CEO or a board member of some organization in Ukraine called Burisma.
00:03:56.000In Ukraine, at the same time that Joe Biden was pressuring the Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was overseeing the Hunter Biden case.
00:04:05.000So the scandal, which started to break maybe earlier this year, last year, that scandal was supposedly that Joe Biden had personally attempted to hold up $1 billion in loan guarantees to Ukraine until Ukraine fired a prosecutor.
00:04:18.000That prosecutor was overseeing Hunter Biden's possible investigation at the time.
00:04:23.000So now President Trump comes along and he's apparently telling the Ukrainian president, you know, it'd be great, Zelensky, it'd be great if you just investigate Joe Biden because, I mean, did anyone really invest?
00:04:32.000Now, look, the Trump campaign has four months been attempting to push the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden.
00:04:39.000Rudy Giuliani has been going over there for a year.
00:04:42.000Trying to investigate himself, trying to cooperate with government sources in Ukraine to find out whether, in fact, Hunter Biden was under investigation by this prosecutor and whether Joe Biden exerted his authority in order to hold back American taxpayer dollars to get the prosecutor ousted to protect his son, Hunter.
00:04:57.000And there are all sorts of serious questions to be asked about Joe Biden's relationship with Hunter Biden, because as it turns out, Hunter Biden has led a rather dissolute life, and Hunter Biden has taken serious advantage of the fact that his dad happens to be Joe Biden.
00:05:10.000He's gotten a series of cush positions in which he has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, basically because daddy was a senator and then a vice president.
00:05:17.000So we're going to get into those allegations in just a second.
00:05:20.000Well, President Trump over the weekend came out and he said, yeah, you know, I did talk with Ukrainians about Joe Biden, but that is not a big deal.
00:05:29.000According to The New York Times, President Trump acknowledged on Sunday he raised corruption accusations against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
00:05:36.000during a phone call with Ukraine's leader.
00:05:37.000A stunning admission, according to The New York Times, as pressure mounted on Democrats to impeach Trump over allegations he leans on a foreign government to help damage a political rival.
00:05:46.000In public and in private, many Democrats said the evidence that has emerged in recent days indicating that Mr. Trump pushed the Ukrainian government to investigate Mr. Biden and his administration's stonewalling of attempts by Congress to learn more or changing their calculations about whether to charge him with articles of impeachment.
00:06:02.000The influential chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who has resisted such action, said the House might now have crossed the Rubicon in light of the new disclosures.
00:06:09.000So that would be Adam Schiff, who came out and said, the Rubicon may have been crossed.
00:06:13.000We may now have to look at impeaching President Trump over all of this.
00:06:16.000So here is Adam Schiff saying as much.
00:06:19.000You know I have been very reluctant to go down the path of impeachment, but if the president is essentially withholding military aid at the same time that he is trying to browbeat a foreign leader into doing something illicit, that is providing dirt on his opponent during a presidential campaign, then he may force us to go down this road.
00:06:38.000I have spoken with a number of my colleagues over the last week, and this seems different in kind, and we may very well have crossed the Rubicon here.
00:06:47.000Okay, well, the Rubicon that he is noting is something that has not been shown yet.
00:06:50.000So as I explained last Friday, when this whole thing came up, and last Thursday, if President Trump engaged in an actual quid pro quo, if he did what he's accusing Joe Biden of doing, if he said to the Ukrainians, $250 million in military aid is not forthcoming unless you investigate Joe Biden, that is using American taxpayer dollars for a campaign quid pro quo, that is obviously a violation of law, it is a violation of bribery statute, and President Trump should be impeached.
00:07:15.000Really, a quid pro quo with a foreign government to investigate your political rival is, in fact, a violation of law and impeachable.
00:07:23.000If, however, this is just Donald Trump getting on the phone and saying to the Koreans, you know, it'd be great if you guys really investigate Joe Biden.
00:07:41.000Because President Trump has a rather bad habit of mouthing off, as you may have noticed.
00:07:45.000Because he is a man named Donald Trump, who does very Donald Trump-like things, as it turns out.
00:07:49.000Well, Jim Garrity has a piece over at National Review in which he talks about this, and he's correct.
00:07:54.000He says, "Donald Trump believes that just about everyone "he doesn't like must be corrupt or engaged in law-breaking "of some manner and should be investigated." Earlier this week, he tweeted out, "Look at the Obama book deal "or the ridiculous Netflix deal.
00:08:05.000"Then look at all the deals made by the Dems in Congress, "the Congressional Slush Fund, and lastly, the IG reports.
00:08:36.000President Trump is constantly asking people for investigations, mainly because he's been subjected to a lot of investigations, and so he's like, well, turnabout is fair play.
00:08:45.000He's twice called on the FEC and the FCC to investigate whether Saturday Night Live is colluding with the Democratic Party.
00:08:53.000So, Jim Garrity's point over at National Review, he says, It's reasonable to worry about the politicization of law enforcement at a moment like this, but so far there's not much evidence for it.
00:09:06.000He said, what's more, Trump speaks constantly as if he's convinced that some sort of colossal, ruinous scandal is lurking behind each one of his foes, and all of them could be ruined if federal investigators could look just hard enough.
00:09:16.000So it shouldn't be the least bit surprising that Trump and allies like Rudy Giuliani believe that Hunter Biden's work for a giant gas company in Ukraine must be not merely unsavory or created the appearance of a conflict of interest, but somewhere along the line, the Bidens must have broken the law.
00:09:30.000Should the President of the United States repeatedly call for law enforcement investigations of his political enemies based upon rumors, media reports, and his own theories?
00:09:59.000Honestly, like if you had to ballpark what Trump said in this conversation, do you think it was more along the lines of, you know, we got this $250 million in aid and maybe it's forthcoming and maybe it's not.
00:10:11.000But if you just investigate Joe Biden, it's forthcoming.
00:10:14.000Do you think it's that or do you think that it's, do you think the conversation went something like this?
00:10:18.000Zelensky, who's the head of Ukraine, going, and Trump going, and Zelensky being like, and Trump being like, and Zelensky being like, and Trump being like, I mean, like, which sounds more like Trump?
00:10:28.000we're not doing that and trump being like but it'd be great if you did and zolensky being like well no and trumping oh okay how's everything else going i mean like which sounds more like trump and a lot of this has to do with whether you see president trump as a serious thinker like a person who thinks through the things he says or a guy who just says stuff you know It's very difficult to square the sort of 4D chess President Trump that so many people have in their heads on the right, and the 4D chess Trump that so many people on the left have in their heads, right?
00:10:57.000They simultaneously will claim that he's an idiot and a mastermind.
00:11:00.000With who Trump is in reality, which is a guy who says lots of stuff.
00:11:04.000As I have said before, President Trump's tombstone one day will eventually read, Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States.
00:11:36.000Like, the chances that Donald Trump was seriously offering a quid pro quo to the Ukrainians, hey, that would take forethought.
00:11:43.000So color me a little bit skeptical of all that.
00:11:47.000Nonetheless, this is driving the narrative today.
00:11:50.000Nancy Pelosi has issued a letter to her colleagues in the House basically suggesting that impeachment may be on the table in the near future.
00:12:00.000It says, Dear Colleague, On Thursday, Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph McGuire will appear before the House Intelligence Committee in an open hearing.
00:12:07.000At that time, we expect him to obey the law and turn over the whistleblower's full complaint to the committee.
00:12:11.000We also expect that he will establish a path for the whistleblower to speak directly to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees as required by law.
00:12:18.000The Intelligence Community Inspector General, who was appointed by President Trump, has determined that the complaint is both of urgent concern and credible, and its disclosure relates to one of the most significant and important of the Director of National Intelligence's responsibilities to the American people.
00:12:32.000The administration's blocking of acting DNI McGuire from providing Congress with the whistleblower complaint calls upon him to violate the federal statute, which unequivocally states that the DNI shall provide Congress this information.
00:12:44.000Well, it also has conditions under which the information is to be provided, including that it has to deal with the intelligence community, not with the president.
00:12:50.000The administration is endangering our national security and having a chilling effect on any future whistleblower who sees wrongdoing.
00:12:57.000We must be sure that the president and his administration are always conducting our national security and foreign policy in the best interest of the American people, not the president's personal or political interest.
00:13:06.000Okay, well, okay, that Sure, it would be great if Congress did that.
00:13:12.000If Barack Obama had not pledged flexibility to the Russians in the run-up to the 2012 election.
00:13:15.000It would have been great if Teddy Kennedy back in the 1980s had not been working with the Russian government to undermine Ronald Reagan.
00:13:20.000It would have been fantastic if Hillary Clinton had not been working with, yes, the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on President Trump.
00:13:26.000To pretend that the area of foreign policy is where all of the honor of the American people still resides.
00:13:36.000I mean, I'm old enough to remember when Nancy Pelosi was traveling to the Middle East to undercut George W. Bush's foreign policy, so.
00:13:43.000Anyway, she says, I'm calling on Republicans to join us in insisting that the acting DNI obey the law as we seek the truth to protect the American people and our Constitution.
00:13:50.000This violation is about national security.
00:13:53.000If the administration persists in blocking this whistleblower from disclosing to Congress a serious possible breach of constitutional duties by the president, they'll be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness, which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation immediately.
00:14:09.000One, I honestly think that we should find out what exactly the whistleblower is complaining about.
00:14:14.000So I think the Republicans probably should work with Nancy Pelosi to pry loose this whistleblower complaint if If the Trump administration provides no clarity on what happened here.
00:14:24.000But, there are a couple of details that are being left out of a lot of the reporting here, and we do need to mention them.
00:14:32.000First, let's talk about your sleep quality.
00:14:34.000So, the fact is that you've done all the right things.
00:14:36.000You've got a good mattress, and you've made sure that your room is dark, and it's the right temperature, but you're still having trouble sleeping.
00:14:41.000Maybe the reason is because you bought sheets from the local gas station, and they're garbage.
00:16:30.000There's another problem is that the whistleblower here, we thought, I mean, if you'd read those reports on Thursday and Friday, it sounds like the whistleblower was listening in on the phone call with Donald Trump and Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.
00:16:44.000According to CNN, the whistleblower didn't have direct knowledge of the communications.
00:16:49.000Didn't have direct knowledge of the communications.
00:16:51.000Instead, the whistleblower's concerns came in part from learning information that was not obtained during the course of their work.
00:16:57.000Okay, well, then how is he making an intelligence whistleblower claim?
00:17:02.000He didn't gain the intelligence through the intelligence process, nor does it have to do with intelligence sources and methods.
00:17:09.000Those details have apparently played a role in the administration's determination that the complaint didn't fit the reporting requirements under the intelligence whistleblower law.
00:17:17.000The official said, it's hard to know the potential exposure faced by the president.
00:17:22.000So we still, like, that's kind of amazing, right?
00:17:24.000That would have been a detail that we should have known.
00:17:26.000Because originally on Wednesday, when the Washington Post broke this report, they referenced a promise Trump allegedly made to Ukraine.
00:17:33.000But nowhere beyond that have we actually heard what the promise was.
00:17:36.000Instead, we've heard a lot of Trump solicitation.
00:18:02.000Also, as I have mentioned, among the other bad things that presidents have done, but that are not impeachable, Barack Obama caught on tape, pledging the Russians flexibility in the lead up to the 2012 election.
00:18:13.000Hillary Clinton working openly with the DNC and members of the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on President Trump.
00:18:21.000So lots of bad stuff happens here and all of it is worthy of condemnation.
00:18:24.000The question here is whether something criminal happened that is worthy of impeachment.
00:18:28.000Okay, so President Trump has now responded to all of this.
00:18:30.000He said, we'll consider releasing some details of the phone calls.
00:18:35.000He said the conversation, by the way, was absolutely perfect.
00:20:15.000The Ukrainian government just said they weren't pressured at all during the nice call.
00:20:18.000Sleepy Joe Biden, on the other hand, forced a tough prosecutor out from investigating his son's company by threat of not giving big dollars to Ukraine.
00:20:26.000Now that the Democrats and the fake news media have gone bust on every other of their witch hunt schemes, they're trying to start one just as ridiculous as the others, called the Ukraine Witch Hunt, while at the same time trying to protect sleepy Joe Biden.
00:20:38.000The fake news media and their partner, the Democratic Party.
00:20:40.000I mean, I told you this thing's a book.
00:20:41.000The fake news media and their partner, the Democratic Party.
00:20:44.000Want to stay as far away as possible from the Joe Biden demand that the Ukrainian government fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son or they won't get a very large amount of U.S.
00:20:53.000So they fabricate a story about me and a perfectly fine and routine conversation I had with the new president of Ukraine.
00:20:58.000Nothing was said that was in any way wrong.
00:21:00.000But Biden's demand, on the other hand, was a complete and total disaster.
00:21:03.000The fake news knows this, but don't want to report.
00:21:05.000The Radical Left Democrats and their fake news media partners, headed up by Little Adam Schiff and batting 0 for 21 against me, are at it again.
00:21:12.000They think I may have had a dicey conversation with a certain foreign leader based on a highly partisan whistleblower statement.
00:21:18.000Strange that with so many other people hearing or knowing of the perfectly fine and respectful conversation that they would not have also come forward.
00:21:24.000Do you know the reason why they did not?
00:21:39.000Knowing all of this, is anyone dumb enough to believe I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on such a potentially heavily populated call?
00:21:45.000I would only do what is right anyway and only do good for the U.S.
00:21:49.000And then later he made more remarks about all of this.
00:21:52.000He said the problem is when you're speaking to foreign leaders, you don't want foreign leaders to feel they shouldn't be speaking openly and good.
00:22:06.000OK, this particular critique that Trump is making is absolutely fair.
00:22:09.000The president of the United States has a lot of conversations that are not meant for public scrutiny.
00:22:14.000A lot of conversations with foreign leaders in which highly classified stuff is said.
00:22:18.000You do want him to be able to have open conversations without whistleblowers going and seeing a political problem and then reporting that to the legislative branch because the president is indeed the commander-in-chief.
00:22:32.000And having whistleblowers who are making complaints that have nothing to do with the intelligence community, which is the actual maybe problem here, is a serious problem.
00:22:40.000But To go to the core of it, President Trump is basically saying, I did nothing wrong.
00:23:26.000According to the Washington Post this morning, a whistleblower complaint about President Trump made by an intelligence official centers on Ukraine.
00:23:33.000According to two people familiar with the matter, which has set off a struggle between Congress and the executive branch, Jim Garrity says if the discussion is about Ukraine, it probably revolves around the Trump campaign's interest in what Hunter Biden did for Ukrainian companies in the tail end of the Obama administration.
00:23:47.000And Garrity says, when the Obama campaign was vetting Joe Biden to be vice president in the summer of 2008, one of the most sensitive issues they examined was the relationship between the senator and his family connection to a large Delaware bank called MBNA.
00:24:00.000The bank was the largest donor to Biden's campaigns over his career.
00:24:03.000Hunter hired Hunter Biden in 1996, made Hunter a vice president by 1998 when he was 28 years old.
00:24:09.000Hunter departed to do a short stint in the Department of Commerce, but he kept a $100,000 a year retainer from the bank.
00:24:14.000After returning to the private sector as a lawyer in Washington working for a lobbying firm, the Bidens insist that Hunter's lobbying work never crossed paths with his father's work in the Senate.
00:24:23.000But during this time, Joe voted in favor of a bankruptcy reform bill that MBNA and other banks supported, and that many Democrats, including then-Senator Barack Obama, opposed.
00:24:32.000Elizabeth Warren will probably at some point jump in here.
00:24:35.000When you're the son of a famous senator or VP, doors keep opening for you.
00:24:38.000By 2014, Hunter Biden had been a bank vice president, lawyer, partner at a mergers and acquisitions firm, attempted to purchase a hedge fund, founded two consulting firms, and shortly after his father started his second term as VP, joined the U.S.
00:24:51.000He was discharged after about a year for failing a drug test.
00:24:54.000We'll get to more of Hunter Biden and why this could, in fact, this scandal could, in fact, blow back on Joe Biden and make Elizabeth Warren the nominee.
00:25:02.000Look around you on the road right now.
00:25:03.000What you are seeing is a myriad of cars.
00:25:06.000And ask yourself, if your car broke and you went to an auto parts store, would they have the exact part that you are looking for?
00:25:11.000The fact is that you might wait in line at this auto parts store, get to the front, and then you get a generic part that doesn't actually do what you need it to do, and it's overpriced at that.
00:25:18.000This is why you should be using something called the Intrawebs.
00:26:13.000So this whole subject of investigation that Trump wants and of controversy that started all this stuff is Hunter Biden's relationship with Joe.
00:26:22.000Hunter has had a very checkered life and a very checkered career, and he relied heavily on his dad's help.
00:26:27.000Returning to the investment world, writes Jim Garrity, Biden's business partners included Jonathan Lee, who ran a Chinese private equity firm, Bohai Capital.
00:26:34.000In April 2014, at age 44, Hunter Biden joined the board of directors for Burisma Holdings, the largest non-governmental-run natural gas company in Ukraine.
00:26:43.000Not everyone in the Obama administration was comfortable with Hunter's new business partners, according to The New Yorker.
00:26:47.000Quote, Hunter's meeting with Lee and his relationship with BHR attracted little attention at the time.
00:26:52.000But some of Biden's advisers were worried that Hunter, by meeting with a business associate during his father's visit, would expose the VP to criticism.
00:26:58.000The former senior White House aide said that Hunter's behavior invited questions about whether he was leveraging access for his benefit, which just wasn't done in that White House.
00:27:07.000Optics really mattered, and that seemed to be cutting it pretty close, even if nothing nefarious was going on.
00:27:12.000Apparently, several members of Biden's staff said that they had been too intimidated to talk to Joe Biden about all of this.
00:27:17.000Everyone who worked for him has been screamed at.
00:27:21.000Others said they were wary of hurting his feelings.
00:27:23.000One business associate told me that Biden, during difficult conversations about his family, got deeply melancholy, which to me is more painful than if someone yelled and screamed at me.
00:27:32.000That was always my fear, that I'd be really touching a very fragile part of him.
00:27:37.000At the very least, Hunter's business dealings created the appearance of a conflict of interest.
00:27:42.000And that was true also with regard to Ukraine.
00:27:45.000There is a perception that Hunter was on the loose, potentially undermining his father's message when he took a role at Burisma.
00:27:52.000In a 2018 appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations, Biden described the time he threatened to withhold foreign aid from the Ukrainian government unless they fired a prosecutor named Viktor Shokin.
00:28:01.000The argument from the Obama administration is that Shokin was resisting reform efforts But one of the problems is that he was preparing a corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, which was Hunter Biden's company, right?
00:28:13.000Hunter Biden was on the board of directors.
00:28:15.000So all of this could come back just in time to truly bite Joe Biden directly on the butt.
00:28:28.000Many of the more Shall we say enthusiastic members of the Democratic Party have been pushing for impeachment for a while, and now they're really ramping up their game.
00:28:37.000You saw Adam Schiff already saying, well, if there's a quid pro quo, maybe we'll talk impeachment.
00:28:40.000Well, very unlikely they uncover a quid pro quo.
00:28:42.000You see, Nancy Pelosi suggests that we are entering a grave new era of lawlessness, which, again, is not calling for impeachment, but is Drawing closer to it.
00:28:50.000You've got Elizabeth Warren, who is the odds-on favorite to become the next Democratic nominee at this point.
00:28:57.000Here she is yesterday calling for impeachment of President Trump over these allegations.
00:29:01.000Congress failed to act, and now Donald Trump has shown that he believes he is above the law.
00:29:12.000He has solicited another foreign government to attack our election system.
00:29:20.000It is time for us to call out this illegal behavior and start impeachment proceedings right now.
00:29:27.000Now, of course, the impeachment goes nowhere because you'd actually have to have proof of a crime in order to get a majority.
00:29:31.000Well, you need 60 votes in the in the Senate in order to actually oust the president from office.
00:29:36.000So likely an impeachment vote succeeds in the House, but does not succeed in the Senate of the United States.
00:29:41.000But Democrats at this point are starting to warm up to all of this as we get closer to 2020.
00:29:44.000They're making the calculation there won't be blowback if the story is bad enough.
00:29:49.000And unlike the Trump-Russia allegations, Where there was some smoke, but no fire in the end, as it turned out.
00:29:55.000Here, they can say that the conversation itself is really the problem, that there's something very bad.
00:29:58.000And there is something bad about going to a foreign government and asking them to investigate your political opponent.
00:30:03.000Now, as I've said, in the past, there are lots of various candidates, particularly Democrats, who have gone to foreign sources for information on their opponents, have made offers to try and undercut Republican presidents.
00:30:15.000Now, that's nothing new, but this The question for Democrats is politically whether this appears to be serious enough that they finally have the momentum to go after President Trump on impeachment on all of this.
00:30:27.000AOC, she tweeted out that, like ripping into fellow Democrats, the question is how long Nancy Pelosi can withstand the internal pressure.
00:30:33.000AOC tweeted out, at this point, the bigger national scandal isn't the president's law-breaking behavior.
00:30:37.000It is the Democratic Party's refusal to impeach him for it.
00:30:40.000And you're starting to see this exact line gain momentum.
00:30:44.000Now, as I say, the Democrats have yet to make a case that Trump actually did something illegal here.
00:30:49.000And we'll see Renato Mariotti, legal affairs columnist for Politico, trying to stretch and twist and turn to get to why this is impeachable, even though it's not criminal.
00:30:59.000First, let's talk about the fact that when you go to a business gathering, One of the easy ways to make an impression is your business card.
00:31:05.000But you probably have that old business card that you got from the Kinkos like 20 years ago when Kinkos was a serious thing.
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00:32:19.000Alrighty, we're going to get into the case that Democrats are making on impeachment, even though no criminality has yet been uncovered, and we don't even know the details.
00:32:26.000of the whistleblower complaint at this point.
00:33:44.000And that's not challengeable in the Supreme Court.
00:33:47.000So, Democrats can impeach Trump for whatever they want, but if they actually hope to have a shot of ousting him from office and leaving Vice President Pence as the President of the United States, presumably the only way to do that would be to actually uncover a crime.
00:33:58.000Well, Democrats have not yet done that.
00:34:00.000Renato Mariotti is the legal affairs columnist for Politico magazine, former federal prosecutor, and he has a piece today in Politico titled, Trump didn't bribe Ukraine, it's actually worse than that.
00:34:10.000And here is where things start to get dicey for the Democrats.
00:34:12.000If they are just saying that Trump behaved badly, then you have to start putting that into the context of, what have other presidents done to behave badly but was not impeachable?
00:34:23.000So he says reports that Trump pressured Ukrainian president Vlad the Mirza Lensky to investigate the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has prompted a flurry of speculation that Trump, by withholding military aid, has committed bribery or extortion.
00:34:35.000This is wrong and even counterproductive to efforts to hold Trump accountable.
00:34:40.000If what Trump is accused of doing is true, it is a kind of corrupt conduct that the criminal system is not equipped to handle.
00:34:45.000Labeling his behavior with criminal terms such as bribery and extortion not only misunderstands the statutory language, it gives Trump and his supporters ammunition with which to defend themselves, making impeachment harder to achieve.
00:34:56.000He says the impulse to label this as a potential crime is flawed legally and even strategically, even if true.
00:35:01.000This is not a case that would end up in a criminal proceeding, even if Trump were no longer in office.
00:35:07.000So he says, you know, presidents push foreign governments to take official acts all the time.
00:35:11.000The Constitution contemplates the president will interact with foreign leaders and use his or her power to persuade them to do things that help the United States.
00:35:17.000What is abhorrent about the alleged conduct here is not that Trump is pushing a foreign government to do something, but rather that he might have used his presidential power to get a foreign government to help him win the next election.
00:35:27.000This is self-serving and corrupt, but it is difficult to think of this alleged activity as extortion.
00:35:32.000He says it's hard to construe the alleged conduct as a threat against Ukraine in the manner contemplated by the extortion statute.
00:35:38.000This is not to say there aren't crimes on the books that better match what Trump is alleged to have done.
00:35:41.000So maybe it's a campaign finance crime.
00:35:44.000But he says what Trump is alleged to have done is not a garden variety crime.
00:35:48.000This, again, is a columnist named Renato Mariotti, who is the legal correspondent for Politico.
00:35:54.000He says what Trump is alleged to have done is not garden variety crime, it's worse.
00:35:57.000It involved misusing $250 million in aid appropriated by Congress for his benefit.
00:36:01.000Okay, now you are accusing him of doing something you don't have a record of him doing.
00:36:06.000And he says that this is not a criminal justice system issue, that it really is just a Trump behaving badly issue.
00:36:13.000He says, labeling Trump's alleged conduct bribery or extortion cheapens what is alleged to have occurred and does not capture what makes it wrongful.
00:36:20.000He invited a foreign nation to influence the 2020 presidential elections on the heels of a nearly three-year investigation.
00:36:25.000Now, here's where it gets dicey for Democrats.
00:36:27.000If what you are suggesting, Renato Mariotti, is that inviting foreign governments to affect the American election, is something deeply, deeply, deeply wrong, and I generally agree it is, then you do get into the Barack Obama saying to the Russians in the run-up to 2012 that he would have greater flexibility up to the election if they would back off a little bit.
00:36:46.000That is obviously requesting official action from the Russians that would benefit Barack Obama electorally.
00:36:52.000And as a vague rule, that sort of stuff does happen all the time.
00:36:57.000Leaders, Democrat and Republican, look for foreign policy wins that they can get from their friends in the lead-up to an election.
00:37:04.000What's different here is that he's specifically asking for an investigation into a political rival.
00:37:08.000But the investigation never took place and apparently wasn't even taken seriously by the Ukrainian president.
00:37:14.000So take example, Philippe Raines, who is a long held to be sort of a hard-nosed, cutting, biting, brutal kind of hard-nosed political agent for Hillary Clinton.
00:37:26.000He was Hillary Clinton's hatchet man for a long time.
00:37:29.000He said, well, your heads would explode if Hillary did anything like this.
00:37:32.000There is no reason for Joe Biden's name to come up in that conversation once, twice, eight times.
00:37:38.000Whether it's promising, threatening, quid pro quo, demanding, whatever it is, that is crossing the line.
00:37:45.000And yes, there is a problem with that.
00:37:48.000And let's just say for a moment Hillary Clinton had won and Donald Trump was challenging her again next year, and we were talking about Hillary Clinton talking to a foreign leader to help her find dirt on one of the Trump kids, your heads would be exploding.
00:38:01.000Okay, there's only one problem, which is that she literally did that in 2016.
00:38:04.000So she wasn't the president at the time, she literally, and the DNC, literally coordinated with the Ukrainian embassy to try and dig up dirt on Donald Trump.
00:38:30.000Jake Tapper did sort of the same thing.
00:38:32.000And Jake's a good reporter, but he went after Steve Mnuchin.
00:38:34.000He said, what if Democrats tried this sort of stuff?
00:38:38.000For instance, President Obama had pressured a foreign leader, Putin, or the President of Ukraine, anyone, and said, I want you to look into Donald Trump Jr., or I want you to look into Eric Trump.
00:38:50.000International businessmen, both of them.
00:38:52.000Would you not find that inappropriate?
00:38:55.000Again, I'm not going to speculate on that.
00:38:57.000What I do find is inappropriate is the fact that Vice President Biden, at the time, son, did very significant business dealings in Ukraine.
00:39:06.000I, for one, find that to be concerning.
00:39:09.000And to me, that's the issue perhaps that should be further investigated.
00:39:12.000Okay, so the Trump campaign is going to keep pressing in on the Hunter Biden thing.
00:39:15.000Now, they are pursuing a strategy that you've seen Scott Adams, who's the Dilbert creator and sort of the Trump whisperer.
00:39:23.000He suggested that Trump often does this and meshes himself in scandals where the headline that ends up being elevated from the scandal is actually deleterious to Democrats.
00:39:32.000So the Trump-Russia stuff ended up elevating Hillary's email scandal, for example.
00:39:35.000So he would say that this whole conversation ends up really hurting Joe Biden most.
00:39:39.000And I think there is a lot of truth to that.
00:39:40.000But to go back to the point that if Obama asked a foreign leader to investigate Donald Trump Jr., The allegation by Andy McCarthy and others in the Republican camp is that the Obama administration literally coordinated to try and raise dirt about Donald Trump and Russia in the middle of the 2016 election.
00:39:55.000And that the entire Trump-Russia election conspiracy theory was being pumped by Hillary Clinton, funneled through Hillary Clinton's campaign and Fusion GPS to the FBI, who then, under the auspices of people like Loretta Lynch, investigated the thing.
00:40:11.000And that is the allegation from the right.
00:40:13.000So we don't have to speculate about the right's reaction.
00:40:44.000The person who's going to benefit from all of this is Elizabeth Warren, who does have the momentum.
00:40:48.000Right now, there's a poll out from the Des Moines Register, CNN, and Mediacom, and it shows that Warren has pulled into a slight lead in Iowa.
00:40:55.000According to that poll, She now holds a two percentage point lead with 22% of likely Democratic caucus goers saying she is their first choice for president.
00:42:05.000But if you look at Iowa, Warren has pulled into about a three point lead in the RealClearPolitics poll average.
00:42:11.000And the latest polls from New Hampshire are still not particularly recent.
00:42:15.000The latest polls from New Hampshire were taken September 6th to September 11th, so about two weeks ago before a lot of the surge.
00:42:23.000And in that latest poll, Biden was up on Sanders just one and Warren just six.
00:42:28.000So there is a good shot that by this point, the next poll will show that Warren is indeed up in New Hampshire as well, would be my prediction.
00:42:39.000It's South Carolina where Joe Biden really has his Has his advantage.
00:42:45.000But if you look at the elections calendar, it may be too late for him by then, because they remember the Democrats in the aftermath of all the hubbub about about Bernie Sanders being jobbed during the presidential campaign in 2016.
00:42:58.000They front loaded all of their caucuses.
00:43:00.000You've got the Iowa caucus happening February 3rd, 2020, the New Hampshire, the New Hampshire primary happening on February 11th, 2020.
00:43:07.000You have the Nevada presidential caucuses on Saturday.
00:43:54.000And the fact is that as this story about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden takes the front pages over, that is going to be very bad because Elizabeth Warren's entire schtick, of course, is that this was the swamp.
00:44:04.000Like now would be a great time for Elizabeth Warren to start attacking Joe Biden about that MBNA bank deal that Hunter Biden was part of.
00:44:12.000Again, she's been anti the banking industry.
00:44:20.000So Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, by the way, who are also simultaneously campaigning over the weekend in the same place.
00:44:27.000So they decided to go join the picket line alongside striking General Motors worker in Detroit.
00:44:33.000Joe Biden went to a GM assembly plant in Kansas City, Kansas, because there's nothing that the American people like better than strikes.
00:44:40.000The Democratic presidential candidates, according to the New York Times, have been chasing labor support all summer.
00:44:45.000Now, as the UAW, one of the nation's largest unions, stages a strike that has drawn words of support from President Trump, Democrats are seizing the moment to align themselves with workers in public in dramatic ways.
00:44:54.000Senator Elizabeth Warren walking the picket line.
00:44:58.000Bernie Sanders is planning to join striking workers in Detroit on Wednesday.
00:45:03.000So they're all campaigning for the same workers and they're making the case.
00:45:07.000I mean, Elizabeth Warren is stopping by to make the case that she is going to make a play for the white working class vote, which is really an area where she is lagging.
00:45:14.000And she's got basically all of the college educated Democratic voters want to vote for Elizabeth Warren.
00:45:18.000A lot of the white blue collar workers want to vote for Joe Biden.
00:45:21.000And a lot of the black folks in the United States, black voters want to want to vote for Joe Biden.
00:45:25.000She's trying to carve into that right now.
00:45:27.000And she may be successful in doing that.
00:45:29.000And I think that If Trump's goal with this Ukraine stuff was to tear down Joe Biden right now, which makes sense because he runs steadier against Elizabeth Warren than Joe Biden, he may achieve his goal whether or not the Democrats want it.
00:46:20.000Anyway, they're out there striking from, again, you can't really strike from school because you're not paid to go to school.
00:46:26.000The schools don't lose based on you not being there.
00:46:29.000And in fact, many of the schools incentivized kids to come to this sort of thing, where they just spouted their emotions and were supposed to take seriously emotions if they come from 17-year-olds.
00:46:37.000So here are some of the climate change activists admitting that they have a paralyzing fear of the future, which makes sense considering they are the freest, most prosperous young people in the history of humanity.
00:47:52.000The millions of young people worldwide who have organized and joined today's climate strike demand action to protect our planet, and they deserve it. - What do they deserve?
00:48:35.000You gotta have a specific program, folks, if you want people to take you seriously.
00:48:39.000But of course, none of these people have a specific program.
00:48:41.000The whole goal here is to morally castigate people who point this out.
00:48:45.000So you have Bill Nye, the supposed science guy, saying, well, you know, it's time for a change.
00:48:50.000Listen, dude, just because you, like, did cool science experiments with baking soda back when I was 11 does not mean that you are proposing anything doable.
00:49:49.000You've changed the world today by saying nothing and just making people angrier for no apparent reason, when there should be at least an attempt, it seems to me, to come up with some sort of workable solution.
00:49:59.000It is such a point of irritation when people do this sort of stuff.
00:50:01.000Screaming at the moon doesn't get things done.
00:50:09.000Carl Marlantes is a terrific novelist.
00:50:11.000He wrote a book called Matterhorn about the Vietnam War and about what it was like to fight in the Vietnam War a few years back, and it is one of the finest books on the Vietnam War ever written.
00:50:20.000He has a great new book called Deep River that hasn't gotten the sort of attention that it should have received about a Finnish family that moves over It's really a well-written book.
00:50:58.000I like that the comedic community is beginning to come around to the fact that cancel culture is going to clock them directly in the face.
00:51:02.000So Sarah Silverman, who is as woke as it is possible to be, while still being a very, very white-slash-Jewish person, she says that the hostless shows that shows like the Emmys are really terrible because cancel culture is dumb.
00:52:32.000Okay, and not only does it suck, I mean, they're trying to make a joke out of it and sort of play both sides of this joke, but the show did suck, the Emmys, and the ratings were down dramatically, because as it turns out, woke culture is garbage.
00:52:43.000Woke-skulled culture is just the worst.
00:52:48.000And even the left in comedy is starting to look around going, okay, when are they coming for me?
00:52:53.000First they came for everybody else, and I laughed, and I went along with it, and now they're coming for me.
00:52:56.000Feeding the alligator only means that they get eaten last.
00:52:58.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:53:04.000Okay, so Michelle Williams was on at the Emmys, where she was wearing a very, very expensive dress and winning an Emmy, as it turns out, and complaining about how she doesn't get paid enough.
00:53:13.000She gets paid millions of dollars to be in pictures.
00:53:15.000She's particularly complaining because when they reshot All the Money in the World, because they had to write Kevin Spacey out of history, and then they replaced him with Christopher Plummer and did a lot of the reshoot, She got paid like $1,000 for the reshoot, and Mark Wahlberg got paid like $1.5 million for the reshoot.
00:53:31.000That's because he has a good agent and her agent is crap.
00:53:33.000But instead of firing her agent, she decided to rail against the industry.
00:53:36.000I want to say thank you so much to FX and to Fox 21 Studios for supporting me completely and for paying me equally.
00:53:44.000Because they understood that when you put value into a person, it empowers that person to get in touch with their own inherent value.
00:53:53.000And then where do they put that value?
00:53:56.000And so the next time a woman, and especially a woman of color, because she stands to make 52 cents on the dollar compared to her white male counterpart, tells you what she needs in order to do her job, listen to her. - Okay, well, you know what Michelle Williams could do?
00:54:12.000She could just give up her jobs to women of color.
00:54:14.000Because it turns out that women of color can play like three quarters of the parts that she plays.