New developments arise in the connection between the Trump whistleblower and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, the State Department Inspector General opens up another mess, and President Trump goes off in front of the head of Finland. Ben Shapiro explains why impeachment is not about quid pro quo, it's about obstruction of justice, and why Nancy Pelosi is now in control of the process. (A special thanks to our sponsor, Caff Monster Energy Drink, for sponsoring this episode.) Also, a reminder that impeachment is a political stunt, not a real investigation. And that the White House has no power to subpoena anyone in the executive branch, other than to issue subpoenas and get things litigated in the courts, which is what happens when a White House says no to a subpoena and it gets thrown in court, and the court says no, and then it ends up in court and the whole thing gets thrown into chaos, and that s what impeachment is all about, right? Well, maybe it s not about obstruction, but about something else, because maybe impeachment is really about obstruction after all. And maybe it's not even about impeachment after all, and it's all about obstruction at all. Ben Shapiro breaks it all down, and explains why the Democrats have no choice but to go all in on President Trump and try to impeach the president and bring him to the impeachment process. . And maybe impeachment isn't about impeachment, it s about impeachment. impeachment after all impeachment is about obstruction and obstruction and impeachment or maybe impeachment or something else. and maybe not ? in which case, impeachment is just a whole lot more than impeachment and it s really is about impeachment, and maybe ! What do we all agree on? and what s going to happen what s really going on here? And what s the difference between impeachment and impeachment? in this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show? What s the deal with impeachment and what is it really about is that s really impeachment ? and is it impeachment really about ? And at all? or not impeachment And why it s all about impeachment and all of this really of course this is not this and What s going on with impeachment? And that s not even the right and does it really matter?
00:00:00.000New developments arise in the connection between the Trump whistleblower and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, the State Department Inspector General opens up another mess, and President Trump goes off in front of the head of Finland.
00:00:12.000I mean, I do have to say, you have to feel a little bit bad for the foreign leaders who sit there while President Trump goes off because, man, when President Trump does these press conferences and goes off on the press and then goes off on the Democrats and you when President Trump does these press conferences and goes off on the press and then goes off on the Democrats and you are like the president of Finland or the prime minister of Finland and you are sitting there looking like you just It's pretty spectacular stuff.
00:00:42.000First, I think that it's important to make a note that Andrew McCarthy makes today over at The Hill.
00:00:46.000He, of course, is a legal correspondent for National Review, and he gives some important information about the background of this whole impeachment inquiry, and that is that so far, it is basically kabuki theater, meaning it's not an official impeachment inquiry.
00:00:59.000For all the talk about it's an impeachment inquiry, and we're supposed to put all of our focus into impeachment, nothing has actually fundamentally changed.
00:01:05.000Here's what Andy McCarthy writes today.
00:01:08.000He says, There is no impeachment inquiry.
00:01:12.000You are not to be faulted if you think a formal inquest is underway and that legal process has been issued.
00:01:16.000The misimpression is completely understandable if you've been taking in media coverage, in particular, reporting on a haughty September 27th letter from House Democrats presuming to direct Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on pain of citation for obstruction to cooperate in their demands to depose State Department officials and review various records.
00:01:33.000The letter is signed by not one, but three committee chairmen.
00:01:35.000Remember your elementary math, though.
00:01:37.000Zero is still zero, even when multiplied by three.
00:01:40.000What is portrayed as an impeachment inquiry is actually just a made-for-cable TV political soap opera.
00:01:45.000The House of Representatives is not conducting a formal impeachment inquiry.
00:01:48.000To the contrary, says Andy McCarthy, Congressional Democrats are conducting the 2020 political campaign.
00:01:53.000The House has not voted as a body to authorize an impeachment inquiry.
00:01:57.000What we have here are partisan theatrics.
00:01:59.000Preceding, under the ipsedixit of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it raises the profile but not the legitimacy of the same impeachment inquiry.
00:02:20.000If anything, it is rife with legal deficiencies.
00:02:23.000Andy McCarthy is pointing out here that all of the talk of impeachment inquiry, Democrats haven't actually utilized the power that they have in Congress in order to subpoena members of the executive branch.
00:02:33.000Well, because then it would get litigated in the courts.
00:02:55.000The Democrats are now using a wide variety of theories in order to justify their push for impeachment.
00:03:00.000As it turns out that the quid pro quo arrangement, supposedly evident from the Trump-Ukrainian President Zelensky's phone call, falls apart.
00:03:07.000As it turns out, that allegation doesn't make any sense.
00:03:10.000In the absence of any information that the Ukrainian leadership believed that the president was withholding military aid.
00:03:17.000As that becomes clear, the Democrats are now shifting the narrative on impeachment.
00:03:20.000Maybe the impeachment is not about quid pro quo after all.
00:03:23.000Maybe it's about President Trump mouthing off.
00:03:25.000Maybe it's about President Trump yelling at the whistleblower.
00:03:27.000Maybe it's about obstruction of justice.
00:03:29.000Well, what if the Democrats basically boxed themselves in here?
00:03:32.000What if Nancy Pelosi went off half-cocked because she believed that it was important to get her base on board because she couldn't hold them back any longer?
00:03:39.000Because Nancy Pelosi isn't actually in control of this process.
00:03:42.000Remember, earlier this year, Nancy Pelosi tried to take out the squad.
00:03:46.000Earlier this year, Nancy Pelosi tried to marginalize the radicals in her base.
00:03:51.000And President Trump basically prohibited her from doing that by attacking the radicals in her base, forcing her to rally around them.
00:03:57.000Well, that meant that Nancy Pelosi is now subject to their whims.
00:04:01.000And that means, ironically, that President Trump unifying Nancy Pelosi with the radicals in her base led to this faux impeachment inquiry.
00:04:08.000Well, Zandy McCarthy writes, Standing committees do have subpoena power, so why not use it?
00:04:12.000Well, because subpoenas get litigated in court, when the people or agencies on the receiving end object.
00:04:17.000Democrats want to have an impeachment show, um, inquiry on television.
00:04:20.000They don't want to defend its bona fides in court.
00:04:23.000And they certainly don't want to defend their letter threatening obstruction.
00:04:26.000The Democrats' media scribes note the chairman's admonition that any failure by Pompeo to comply shall, quote, constitute evidence of obstruction of the House's impeachment inquiry.
00:04:35.000As McCarthy points out, in criminal proceedings, prosecutors constantly demand information, and defense presumptively resists, and then it ends up in court.
00:04:45.000He says Congressional Democrats know all of this.
00:04:48.000They're issuing partisan letters that pose legally offensive threats rather than subpoenas because this is a show, not an impeachment inquiry.
00:04:55.000Subpoenas don't require chest beating about obstruction.
00:04:57.000Everyone knows they're compulsory, but everyone also knows they may be held up in court.
00:05:01.000So what this really looks like overall is the Democrats Basically trying to drum up something, something upon which they can get Trump in the public mind.
00:05:11.000And that became eminently clear when it became clear that the whistleblower in this particular case was probably coordinated with Adam Schiff's office before the whistleblower complaint was even elevated to the level of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community.
00:05:22.000We'll get to that bombshell story in just a moment.
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00:06:45.000Okay, so as I say, if this whole thing feels like it is being drummed up, that's because increasingly the evidence is that it was kind of drummed up.
00:06:59.000Adam Schiff, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, the chairman, Democrat, who was one of the leading voices in the Trump-Mueller saga.
00:07:07.000He'd go out there on CNN every single day.
00:07:10.000He had a pup tent outside the CNN green room.
00:07:11.000And he'd go out there every single day and declare that just around the riverbend, like Pocahontas, just around the riverbend lay the great revelation that President Trump was in fact a Russian-speaking steward of Vladimir Putin.
00:07:24.000Right, Schiff would go on national TV and he'd basically suggest that Donald Trump was Tom, was Kevin Costner from No Way Out.
00:07:47.000Now, this does not mean that the whistleblower complaint has no merit, we don't know yet.
00:07:51.000But, the fact that the whistleblower was coordinating with Schiff's office to begin with does raise some suspicions, particularly because the whistleblower complaint was incredibly well written.
00:08:10.000That sounds like somebody has vetted this thing.
00:08:12.000This sounds like a lawyer helped draft this thing.
00:08:14.000Well, now, as it turns out, the Democratic head of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, learned about the outlines of a CIA officer's concerns that President Trump had abused his power before the officer filed a whistleblower complaint, according to a spokesman and current and former American officials, according to the New York Times.
00:08:30.000The early account by the future whistleblower shows how determined he was to make known his allegations Well, I mean, it shows a little bit more than that.
00:08:36.000I love how the New York Times is trying to suggest that the real story here is that the whistleblower was so determined to get out his story, he went to Adam Schiff.
00:08:42.000administration initially blocked lawmakers from seeing it well i mean it shows a little more than that i love how the new york times is trying to trying to suggest that the real story here is that the whistleblower was so determined to get out his story he went to adam schiff and the real story is that the whistleblower was coordinating with schiff's office to get the information out there without going through the proper channels right the Because here is what happened.
00:09:04.000According to Schiff's own aide, the CIA officer approached a House Intelligence Committee aide with his concerns.
00:09:10.000And the House Intelligence Committee said what he was supposed to say.
00:09:13.000He said, go get a lawyer, and elevated up the chain.
00:09:16.000He then proceeded to report the entire story up to Adam Schiff.
00:09:20.000And Adam Schiff, being a dunce, decided to tweet out the entire story on August 28th on Twitter.
00:09:26.000I was suggesting last week that it was pretty obvious that Schiff had coordinated with the whistleblower because he was actually tweeting out the allegations of the whistleblower complaint a full two weeks before Congress was informed of the presence of the whistleblower complaint, which makes it look a lot more like a coordinated hit between Schiff's office and a partisan whistleblower than it does like a whistleblower with good information who is deeply concerned about his country and simply elevating it up the chain.
00:09:50.000Two, there can be truth to it, but we are still waiting on the truth to it.
00:09:54.000I'm not seeing all of the evidence yet that there was a quid pro quo.
00:09:59.000I'm not seeing evidence of criminal activity, and neither are the Democrats, which is why the Democrats are basically thrashing up against the box of impeachment, sort of like that weird alien creature in the Jake Gyllenhaal movie, Life.
00:10:12.000What we are watching right now is the Democrats searching for another impeachment strategy, given the fact that the whistleblower complaints and the call do not match up with a quid pro quo story.
00:10:22.000And this looks even worse when it appears again that the entire whistleblower complaint was coordinated with Schiff's office.
00:10:28.000Now, President Trump has jumped into the middle of this.
00:10:31.000Now, President Trump gave what can only be described as an epically chaotic press conference yesterday in front of the Prime Minister of Finland, who just looked like he wanted to dig a hole in the ground and lie in it because, again, you basically become window dressing to the Trump show.
00:10:48.000You show up and suddenly you're playing the tree in a Christmas carol.
00:10:50.000In any case, President Trump went after Adam Schiff.
00:10:53.000He said, Schiff probably helped the whistleblower write the complaint.
00:10:56.000Schiff may have learned some of what the whistleblower knew prior to the complaint.
00:11:00.000Well, I think it's a scandal that he knew before.
00:11:25.000Okay, so did Schiff actually help write it or did he merely refer to a lawyer and then he was playing an inside-outside game?
00:11:31.000Now, Trump doesn't actually have to make the allegation that Schiff wrote it in order to do damage to Schiff.
00:11:37.000If it appears that Adam Schiff was effectively pushing the notion that the whistleblower complaint existed and he knew about it beforehand and the whistleblower was elevating it up the chain and then if there was any holdup, Schiff was going to push from the outside.
00:11:52.000Schiff is now responding via the Daily Beast.
00:11:55.000He had previously denied that his staff had any contact with the whistleblower.
00:11:58.000He was on MSNBC just last week, explaining, he said, we had no contact with the whistleblower.
00:12:03.000If by we he means he, that may be true.
00:12:06.000If by we he means his staff, that's absolutely a lie.
00:12:09.000Apparently, he told the Daily Beast that his staff had contact with the whistleblower.
00:12:14.000He said he did not know definitively at the time if the complaint had been authored by the same whistleblower who had approached his staff, but he acknowledged he should have been more clear.
00:12:37.000And then, of course, Schiff went after Trump.
00:12:38.000He said, oh, well, his behavior at this press conference is alarming.
00:12:42.000Americans have to be worried about the stability of our president, given the enormously erratic and dangerous swings we have seen him take in the last few days.
00:13:12.000Now, Trump went heavy after Schiff yesterday, and again, this will be a fruitful line of attack because Schiff is indeed pathologically dishonest about this stuff.
00:13:19.000I mean, again, he spent two full years going on cable television promising vast revelations about Trump and Russia that never materialized.
00:13:28.000And now it turns out that he was lying on national television when he said that his staff had no contact with the whistleblower.
00:13:34.000I mean, this looks a lot more and more everyday like a produced hit.
00:13:37.000Now again, for the 1,000th time, two things can be true at once.
00:13:40.000One, it could be a coordinated partisan hit.
00:14:15.000I think he had some kind of a mental breakdown.
00:14:17.000But he went up to the microphone and he read a statement from the President of the United States, as if I were on the call, because what happened is when he looked at the sheet, which was an exact transcript of my call, done by very talented people that do this, exact, word for word, He said, wow, he didn't do anything wrong.
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00:16:09.000Okay, so President Trump now has a new nickname for Adam Schiff.
00:16:13.000He's calling him Shifty Schiff, which you could sort of see coming.
00:16:16.000But if the shoe fits, here's President Trump going after Adam Schiff.
00:16:20.000And I will just recommend that if you can actually see this show, if you're a subscriber at Daily Wire and you're watching this show, keep an eye on the Prime Minister of Finland, who is just doing a consistent gym from the office.
00:16:31.000Finland is the happiest country in the world.
00:16:46.000If you just get rid of Shifty Schiff, everybody will be happy.
00:16:50.000The best part of that clip is where Trump leans over and sort of taps the Finnish president on the knee, and the Finnish president gives him the wave off, which is pretty spectacular.
00:17:07.000The Democrats may in fact impeach Trump over apparently nothing in the House.
00:17:11.000I really have my doubts that Nancy Pelosi publicly, quote unquote, launches an impeachment inquiry, even if she didn't change anything legally, without carrying it all the way to fruition.
00:17:18.000It's just not something that's going to happen, but...
00:17:21.000Is that going to make a difference in the election?
00:17:24.000Not if they've got nothing better than this.
00:17:26.000They may have overplayed their hand pretty dramatically in the hopes that Trump would shoot himself in the foot.
00:17:31.000By the way, Trump, you know, he was talking about the whistleblower.
00:17:34.000The Democrats have trotted out another line about Trump and impeachment, that Trump is attacking the whistleblower.
00:17:39.000Trump said, well, if the whistleblower is legitimate, of course he should be protected.
00:17:42.000If he's coordinating outside the bounds of law, then he should not be protected.
00:17:45.000I think a whistleblower should be protected, if the whistleblower's legitimate.
00:17:50.000But when the whistleblower makes a big report on the conversation I had with a president of Ukraine, and it was a great conversation.
00:18:01.000We talked mostly about congratulations on your win.
00:18:05.000We talked about corruption, and we're really referring mostly to 2016, because what the Democrats did in 2016 was corrupt.
00:18:13.000Okay, so again, I think that Trump's complaints about the whistleblower, given the coordination between the whistleblower and Schiff, while Trump's language is never He's never modulated correctly.
00:18:24.000His basic point, which is that he's suspicious about the whistleblower and the relationship with the Democrats.
00:18:29.000Given that New York Times report, hard to argue with them on that.
00:18:32.000Meanwhile, a bizarre situation over on the Hill yesterday.
00:18:36.000The State Department Inspector General, whose name is Linick, he decided to show up on the Hill and talk with Democrats And Republicans.
00:18:45.000The State Department Inspector General was supposed to deliver a packet of documents and people on the Hill were suspecting he was going to stop by and show evidence that the Trump administration had been pressuring people inside the State Department to do his personal political bidding.
00:18:58.000Instead, they walked out with a packet of old news reports about Joe Biden, which is weird.
00:19:03.000According to James Barrett writing over at Daily Wire, a media-hyped urgent meeting between Democratic-led House committees and the State Department Inspector General on Wednesday turned out to be a big disappointment for those hoping it would offer incriminating documents related to the Democrats' impeachment effort.
00:19:17.000Instead of evidence of retaliation against State Department officials cooperating with House Democrats, as Reuters and others reported ahead of the meeting, Inspector General Steve Linick ended up presenting the Democrats with months-old reports about Democrats' alleged collusion with Ukraine.
00:19:31.000Which Democrats are decrying as hallucinatory and propagandistic.
00:19:35.000The information presented at the meeting, Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin told reporters on Wednesday, feels like a completely irrelevant distraction from the work at hand.
00:19:44.000So Democrats were expecting some sort of damning material on Trump.
00:19:47.000And as it turns out, what ended up coming back was a bunch of old media reports about Democrats working with Ukraine to affect the 2016 election.
00:20:14.000I sure could have used a liquid IV infusion at that point.
00:20:17.000It's not kosher, but I promise you that Michael Moles, the ex-Scribble, and Andrew Clavin, who only stays alive basically thanks to liquid IV, they were badgering me yesterday that I should have just hooked up that liquid.
00:21:31.000What exactly happened in this meeting?
00:21:32.000Well, according to CBS, in a briefing on Capitol Hill, the State Department Inspector General gave attendees a packet of hallucinatory propagandistic materials and articles about Ukraine, Biden, Giuliani, Trump hotels, and other matters that were sent to the Secretary of State several months ago, according to Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin and congressional aides.
00:21:50.000The cover sheet of the documents, which was written in calligraphy, claims to have been sent from the White House, CBS reports, but nobody really knows who sent the materials.
00:21:57.000It later turned out that Rudy Giuliani said, it was me.
00:22:00.000So, Rudy, I mean, come on, like, this is worthy of informing Congress about that Rudy Giuliani sends weird Zodiac letter love notes to the State Department?
00:22:10.000By the way, what that does tend to show is that the Trump administration was not going to the State Department and saying, top down, we want you to go investigate all this stuff.
00:22:17.000You had Rudy Giuliani, from the outside, as part of the Trump campaign, sending a letter to the State Department and saying, you know what, you should investigate all this stuff.
00:22:25.000Now, if the State Department initiated an investigation on that grounds, is that cause for great concern?
00:22:32.000So, anyway, Rudy Giuliani, you know, when he talks about all this, he's always weird about it.
00:22:39.000He acknowledged that he had sent this entire package to the State Department, and his idea was that he was going to inform them of stuff that they should check out.
00:22:47.000CNN reported that it was indeed Giuliani who turned over the documents.
00:22:53.000He told CNN Wednesday evening that some of the documents provided to Congress by the State Department's IG had originated with him.
00:22:59.000He apparently gave the documents to the White House, which then passed them to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to a source familiar with the matter.
00:23:06.000Pompeo then gave the documents to a subordinate, who provided them to the legal counsel at the State Department.
00:23:10.000And the documents were ultimately given to the Inspector General.
00:23:13.000Giuliani said that in late March, he had rooted what he called an outline of allegations against Biden, as well as Marie Yovanovitch, who is the ambassador to Ukraine from the United States, to Pompeo's office.
00:23:23.000He said he had also sent details of his interviews from earlier in the year with the incumbent and former top prosecutors in Ukraine, who helped provide him with the information in his outline.
00:23:31.000Giuliani said he received a phone call shortly thereafter from Pompeo, who told Giuliani he'd be referring the documents for investigation.
00:23:38.000Giuliani told CNN, they told me they were going to investigate it.
00:23:41.000Now again, that is not Corruption, per se.
00:23:45.000I mean, it depends on whether in fact they were doing this for campaign purposes or whether they were actually investigating corruption in Ukraine.
00:23:51.000And it looks very much like, frankly, the attempt by the Hillary Clinton campaign to root information from Fusion GPS to the Obama-era FBI.
00:24:02.000In other words, funneling information into an administration which is then checked out does not amount to an actual violation of law.
00:24:09.000It may be politically partisan, but that does not amount to an actual violation of law.
00:24:18.000Again, it's not a violation of law, it's just Rudy Giuliani being a weirdo and then his information being passed around.
00:24:26.000The Democrats were very disappointed yesterday, in other words.
00:24:28.000They were looking forward to some sort of testimony about how Trump was pressuring people internally to do his bidding, and that is not exactly what happened.
00:24:36.000Nonetheless, the Democrats are trying to play this up, suggesting that there are troubling questions about apparent efforts inside and outside the Trump administration to target specific officials, including Joe Biden's son and Marie Yovanovitch.
00:24:47.000There is this weird thing that is breaking out in the media today, specifically with regard to the control of the executive branch.
00:24:53.000There's a whole article in the New York Times about how the executive branch and career officers in the State Department, they feel under threat by the Trump administration.
00:25:03.000Well, last I checked, the Trump administration is in charge of its own State Department.
00:25:07.000So, as long as that is the case, there's not really a legal problem there.
00:25:11.000Now, again, you can say all of this is inappropriate.
00:25:14.000You can say that the State Department should not become the go-between for Rudy Giuliani and the Trump administration.
00:25:20.000You can say that this is misuse of public resources, but then you're going to get into the dicey question of how often public resources are misused for campaign-leveraged issues.
00:25:32.000Again, Hillary Clinton's campaign was obviously leveraging information to Obama's FBI with regard to, for example, the Steele dossier.
00:25:40.000So that is not whataboutism, that is what is the standard for impeachable offenses or crime.
00:25:44.000And so far, not a lot of evidence of crime, a lot of evidence of ugly, swampy politics, but not a lot of evidence of crime.
00:25:53.000Meanwhile, the media are trying to drag Mike Pence into this.
00:25:58.000So there's a report from the Washington Post today that President Trump repeatedly involved Vice President Pence in efforts to exert pressure on the leader of Ukraine at a time when the President was using other channels to solicit information he hoped would be damaging to a Democratic rival, according to current and former U.S.
00:26:14.000But Pence wasn't aware of any of this.
00:26:16.000So the attempt to rope Pence into this scandal is not exactly going to meet with tons of success.
00:26:21.000Trump instructed Pence not to attend the inauguration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in May, an event White House officials had pushed to put on the VP's calendar when Ukraine's new leader was seeking recognition and support from Washington.
00:26:33.000Months later, the president used Pence to tell Zelensky that U.S.
00:26:36.000aid was still being withheld while demanding more aggressive action on corruption, officials said.
00:26:40.000Now again, we know that the Vice President of the United States in the last administration was pressuring the Ukrainians with $1 billion in American loan guarantees to get rid of corruption.
00:26:48.000Withholding the VP's attendance at a particular event to push against corruption doesn't seem like anything supremely out of the box.
00:26:57.000At the time, following Trump's July 25th phone call with Zelensky, the Ukrainians probably understood action on corruption to include the investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, according to the Washington Post.
00:27:09.000So it is possible that if they had not investigated Joe and Hunter Biden, but they investigated other corruption, that Pence goes to the thing.
00:27:15.000So now they're trying to downgrade the quid pro quo from $400 million in military aid to Vice President Pence didn't go to an event for Zelensky.
00:27:26.000Officials close to Pence insist he was unaware of Trump's efforts to press Zelensky for damaging information about Biden and his son, who had served on the board of an obscure Ukrainian gas company when his father was overseeing U.S.
00:27:38.000Pence's activities occurred amid several indications of the President's hidden agenda.
00:27:42.000Among them were the abrupt removal of the U.S.
00:27:44.000Ambassador to Kyiv, the visible efforts by the President's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to insert himself in the U.S.-Ukraine relationship, as well as alarms being raised inside the White House even before the emergence of an extraordinary whistleblower complaint about President Trump's conduct, according to the Washington Post.
00:28:00.000Perhaps most significantly, one of Pence's top advisors was on the July 25th call, and the VP should have had access to the transcript within hours.
00:28:07.000Right, but why exactly would Pence, like, spend lots of time perusing a transcript of the President of Ukraine?
00:28:13.000I have my doubts that that is what Vice President Pence does with his day.
00:28:17.000So now they're trying to rope Pence into this.
00:28:19.000Because the suggestion is if they can impeach Trump, then they can also impeach Pence.
00:28:30.000Now again, all of this also rests on a basic assumption, which is that it is illegitimate to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.
00:28:36.000That nothing untoward happened with regard to Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.
00:28:42.000I think we should just focus on he's the issue.
00:28:44.000He says, no one has ever asserted I did anything wrong on Ukraine.
00:28:46.000Well, no, actually, there are a fair number of people who have their suspicions that you did something wrong on Ukraine, including the other Democratic presidential candidates who continue to maintain that they will not answer questions about whether they would have allowed their VP's kids to do business in countries where the VP was presiding over foreign policy.
00:29:02.000Here's Biden trying to shy away from all of this.
00:29:04.000I think we should just focus on he's the issue.
00:29:07.000Nobody has ever asserted that I did anything wrong except he and what's that fellow's name?
00:29:14.000OK, so there is Biden trying to deny all of this.
00:29:19.000President Trump, for his part, is going hard at Biden, basically saying, listen, there is nothing wrong with me asking about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden in the generalized context of corruption in Ukraine, particularly as has to do with the 2016 election.
00:29:32.000Because Rudy Giuliani is making the claim that the 2016 election was actually impacted by Ukrainian, not Russian, influence.
00:29:41.000I mean, there is a story out today specifically about a Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, the one who is now at the center of the Joe Biden allegations.
00:29:49.000He's the one that Joe Biden wanted fired.
00:29:51.000Shokin apparently has told a variety of people, including John Solomon of the Hill, that he was basically pressured to drop the Joe Biden case while he was prosecutor.
00:30:07.000So if that's the case, then all of this is back on, right?
00:30:13.000According to Fox News, the fired prosecutor at the center of the Ukraine controversy said during a private interview with the president's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, earlier this year that he was told to back off an investigation involving Burisma.
00:30:26.000That is the company that was linked to Joe Biden's son, according to details of that interview that were handed over to Congress by the State Department's inspector general on Wednesday.
00:30:34.000So Giuliani was basically taking notes.
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00:32:07.000Right now, for our listeners, you can try SoClean risk-free for 30 nights.
00:32:49.000Also, if you're a subscriber, you know you get special access to our Sunday special, including material behind the paywall.
00:32:54.000You get our Sunday special on Saturday.
00:32:56.000This week, we sat down with my friend Megan McCain, and it really is a spectacular episode.
00:33:01.000Here's a little bit of what it sounds like.
00:33:05.000There just really isn't a lot of compromise, so I just thought if I'm gonna do this job this way, I just have to 100% not care what anybody thinks, but really not care what the left thinks.
00:33:15.000But what I have in return is so much better, because I think that I feel gratitude in the fact that I can represent so many people who are voiceless in the mainstream media.
00:33:27.000Not to talk up my own interviews, but this is a fantastic interview.
00:33:30.000Megan McCain is a great guest, and we go over everything from her dad and his legacy to what it's like to be the only conservative really on The View every day.
00:34:02.000It was Tzom Gedalia yesterday, which is another one of the fasts about the destruction of the Jerusalem.
00:34:08.000We have another fast day next week when I won't be able to use the leftist tears hot or cold tumbler, but that is why I'm drinking copiously from it today to replenish my precious bodily fluids.
00:34:23.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:34:26.000So what is fascinating about the whole Ukraine Joe Biden thing is how hard the media are working to pretend that nothing untoward happened, not only with Joe Biden, but also with the 2016 campaign.
00:34:45.000It was Politico that first reported in 2017 that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC had been openly coordinating with the Ukrainian embassy to dig up information on Paul Manafort that they could use against the Trump campaign and that the Obama administration was involved as well.
00:34:59.000All of that has been reported over the past couple of years.
00:35:02.000Now we're supposed to pretend that all of the Ukrainian influence in the election was basically on the up-and-up.
00:35:08.000So we were supposed to, let's just be straight, we were supposed to focus on Russian interference in the election up through 2019 until the Mueller report ended.
00:35:17.000And then as soon as the Mueller report ended, we are no longer supposed to focus on Ukrainian influence.
00:35:22.000And now we're supposed to focus on Trump trying to influence Ukraine.
00:35:24.000So we shift our focus to Ukraine, but again, The theory of the media and the Democrats seems to be that Trump is this god-like figure where he speaks things into existence.
00:35:34.000So Trump says Russia, and suddenly the story is Russia for three years.
00:35:37.000Then Trump says Ukraine, and the story is Trump and Ukraine.
00:35:39.000But at no point are we allowed to look at Ukraine, not with regard to Trump using Ukraine, but with regard to Trump being targeted by forces within Ukraine.
00:36:04.000Rewrite the history of the 2016 election?
00:36:05.000Well, I mean, again, Politico did report that the Hillary Clinton campaign was digging up dirt with the Ukrainian embassy on Trump's campaign manager.
00:36:35.000The relationship with Giuliani, which Giuliani acknowledged in an interview this week with the Washington Post, stems from a shared interest in a narrative that undermines the rationale for the special counsel investigation.
00:36:44.000That inquiry led to Manafort's imprisonment on tax and financial fraud allegations related to his work in Kiev for the political party of former President Viktor Yanukovych.
00:36:53.000Apparently, a bunch of different Republicans have jumped into the fray.
00:36:56.000This is not just a Giuliani thing anymore.
00:36:58.000Senator Chuck Schumer, who's chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Senator Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, have announced their renewal of an inquiry into any coordination between Ukraine and Democratic Party officials.
00:38:03.000It's a clip of Joe Biden explaining that he's never spoken to his own son about overseas business dealings, juxtaposed with a picture of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and a Ukrainian gas official all golfing together.
00:38:15.000Have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?
00:38:18.000I've never spoken to my son about his overseas men's assailants.
00:38:53.000When you are a famous person, there are lots of hangers-on who probably try to use your name to get access in high places.
00:38:59.000The fact is that Hunter Biden, who is basically a failure in everything he has ever tried, was getting paid $50,000 a month to be on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
00:39:08.000You can't imagine it's because of his expertise in oil and natural gas.
00:39:11.000It probably has a lot more to do with the fact his daddy was VP of the United States.
00:39:58.000So John Brennan, who is the head of the CIA while he was in the Obama administration, and who proceeded to spend two years, again, claiming that there would be undisclosed information linking President Trump to Vladimir Putin, demonstrating that he was, in fact, a traitor.
00:40:12.000Now he's like, I don't want to look at the 2016 election anymore.
00:40:14.000Why are we even looking at the 2016 election?
00:40:16.000So just to get this straight, for two long years, All the Democrats wanted to talk about was corruption in the 2016 election.
00:40:21.000Now, when Trump raises the question about whether there was Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election, again, based on published reports in places like Politico, John Brennan's like, ah, we probably shouldn't, should we look into that?
00:40:35.000Pay no attention to the John Brennan behind the curtain.
00:40:38.000I remember William Barr, you know, when he was testifying in front of Congress, he said he didn't understand the predication of the counterintelligence investigation that was launched into Russia's interference in the 2016 election.
00:40:49.000I don't understand the predication of this worldwide effort to try to uncover dirt, either real or imagined, that would discredit that investigation in 2016 into Russian interference.
00:41:01.000You know, on one hand, the Obama administration is crucified for not doing enough.
00:41:06.000And now they're looking for what we might have done in order to try to understand better and to prevent the Russian interference.
00:41:25.000So actually the hypocrisy here is you.
00:41:27.000You wanted to interfere certain foreign investigation.
00:41:30.000You wanted to investigate certain foreign interference into the election, but not other foreign interference in the election.
00:41:36.000He says, well, we were criticized for not doing enough, and now they're saying that we did too much.
00:41:41.000Well, no, they're wondering if you launched an investigation under false auspices, then that would make a difference.
00:41:49.000If you're talking about the use of public dollars for electioneering, it seems to me that if it turns out that the Trump-Russia investigation was launched on false premises in order to get Trump, that makes a difference.
00:41:59.000And if it turns out that the Obama administration or the Hillary campaign were coordinating with the Ukrainians, that seems like that would be impactful as well, especially if you want to prevent future interference in elections.
00:42:10.000John Solomon, who's been reporting on this incessantly from the Hill.
00:42:13.000Again, people keep saying that John Solomon's reporting on this has been debunked.
00:42:16.000I've seen no evidence that his reporting on this has been debunked.
00:42:19.000He says that a Ukrainian court has already found that leaked documents affected the 2016 election from Ukraine.
00:42:25.000What about the evidence Ukraine meddled in our election?
00:42:32.000A Ukrainian court has ruled in December of last year that a senior law enforcement official and a parliamentary member intentionally leaked documents about Paul Manafort and Donald Trump in an effort to intervene in the U.S.
00:42:45.000That is an official ruling of a Ukrainian court.
00:42:52.000Basically, you've got the White House investigating Ukraine, and the State Department investigating Ukraine, and then you've got the Congress investigating the White House for investigating Ukraine.
00:44:20.000One, people should not be impeached over non-criminal behavior.
00:44:23.000Seems like a pretty obvious one, like the truth actually matters.
00:44:26.000And two, the fact is that Republicans rightly see this, I think, based on the current evidence, as a smear against Republicans generally.
00:44:36.000And this reporter was asking me, you know, I get the theory that Republicans sort of see Trump as their avatar, and so an attack on Trump is an attack on them.
00:44:45.000And I said, well, no, you're getting this wrong.
00:44:48.000Republican voters feel like they've been attacked by the media.
00:44:51.000We feel like we have been attacked by the powers that be.
00:44:54.000We feel like the Democratic Party has been targeting us as bitter clingers who cling to our God and our guns.
00:45:00.000We feel like we've been targeted for years.
00:45:02.000And then Trump gets elected and you throw exactly the same accusations, but you put on top of it a bunch of politically motivated accusations that he's a traitor.
00:45:10.000And so it's not that Trump is somehow like the tip of the spear.
00:45:14.000It's that Trump is, in fact, the attacks on Trump are so similar to the attacks on conservatives generally.
00:45:20.000The conservatives see attacks on Trump and they say, well, that is an attack on me because if Trump weren't here, they'd still be attacking me the same way.
00:45:27.000The reason that Trump is popular in Republican circles is because the left is consistently attacking him and because Trump is aggressive.
00:45:34.000Trump's aggressive instinct, his willingness to fight back, is indeed what endears him to the Republican base.
00:45:38.000It's why he's the president right now.
00:45:40.000So for all the talk that, you know, listen, I'll talk about how I think he's not focused enough in his pushback, how I think he's scattershot, how I think that he's wild on Twitter.
00:45:49.000The fact is that his aggressive instinct is the reason that he is popular among Republicans.
00:46:32.000Okay, so his idea here is that Republicans have always played by the rules, and Democrats never play by the rules, so I'm not gonna play by the rules.
00:46:38.000That does endear Trump, because the fact is that Democrats don't play by the rules.
00:46:42.000And every story that comes out about Adam Schiff coordinating with whistleblowers makes this seem less like an honest attempt to get to the bottom of a violation of law, and much more like an attempt to get President Trump.
00:46:53.000Meanwhile, the Democrats, it is amazing, just as proof of the sort of hypocrisy here, Hillary Clinton continues to maintain that she won the 2016 election.
00:47:03.000She came out yesterday and said that President Trump is an illegitimate president.
00:47:12.000I'm a serious person but I'm also a fun person but I think I probably came across as too serious and too, you know, I really believed that my job, especially as a woman and the first woman to go as far as I did, that I had to Help people feel good about a woman in the Oval Office, a woman Commander-in-Chief.
00:47:36.000And so I may have over-corrected a little bit because sometimes people say, oh why can't you be like that or why weren't you like that?
00:47:44.000Okay, so again, Hillary Clinton trying to claim that she lost because she wasn't fun enough?
00:47:49.000Yeah, lady, when you look up not fun, the opposite of fun, in the antonym dictionary, my goodness, Hillary Clinton definitely comes up on that list.
00:48:01.000By the way, the Democrats continue to push forward this impeachment stuff largely because they are having trouble seeing how any of their candidates are a walk away to defeat Trump.
00:48:08.000Kamala Harris, who again, has become Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, boiling rabbits for attention.
00:48:13.000She says that we should bring Mike Pence before Congress now.
00:48:26.000I drink a little, I come back in the next morning, go Kamala Harris, go!
00:48:29.000You're raising a very important point, which is that the Vice President has a lot to answer to.
00:48:35.000And he also should be brought before the United States Congress to speak about what exactly was his involvement and what, if any, solicitations were made by the President to have the Vice President engage in unethical conduct.
00:48:53.000Yeah, and this is just, it's getting too far afield at this point.
00:48:56.000And Trump is fighting back with everything, including the kitchen sink.
00:48:59.000In breaking news, according to the Associated Press, President Trump said in remarks to reporters outside the White House, quote, China should start an investigation into the Bidens.
00:49:22.000This is a guy who, I mean, the way that he met Melania Trump is he was at an event where she was with another dude and he just walked up to her and gave her his phone number.
00:49:30.000I mean, that is what Trump is in a nutshell.
00:49:33.000Trump is not a manipulative player from behind the scenes.
00:49:40.000So the Democrats will undoubtedly claim that this is now impeachable too, even though it's just Trump mouthing off.
00:49:45.000He said China should start an investigation into the Bidens.
00:49:48.000He said he had not directly asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to investigate Biden and his son Hunter.
00:49:53.000He said it's certainly something we could start thinking about.
00:49:56.000Trump and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have tried to raise suspicions about Hunter Biden's business dealings in China, leaning on the writings of conservative author Peter Schweitzer.
00:50:03.000By the way, if there's one author who's made a huge difference in the course of American elections, it would be Schweitzer, who's very instrumental in Hillary and emailgate and all the rest of it, and the corruption inside the Hillary Clinton State Department and the Clinton Foundation.
00:50:35.000So this was just an unbelievable thing.
00:50:38.000Botham Jean is this accountant, black accountant, who was horrifically and tragically killed, murdered, by a police officer off-duty named Amber Geiger.
00:50:48.000She walked into an apartment she thought was hers.
00:50:49.000She saw Botham Jean in there and she shot him to death.
00:50:52.000Well, yesterday she was sentenced to 10 years in prison, which seems like an appropriate sentence for What probably was manslaughter but was convicted as first-degree murder?
00:51:00.000Brant Jean was Botham Jean's brother and I mean you want to talk about a person with absolute class?
00:51:07.000You want to talk about a person with just integrity and decency?
00:52:06.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:52:11.000Okay, so the federal government apparently has dramatically expanded its exposure to risky mortgages.
00:52:16.000It's as though we don't learn anything ever in this country.
00:52:19.000So according to the Washington Post, the federal government has dramatically expanded its exposure to risky mortgages as federal officials over the past four years took steps that cleared the way for companies to issue loans that many borrowers may not be able to repay.
00:52:30.000Because it turns out that we have in this country a very conflicting set of principles.
00:52:35.000Principle number one, you should pay back what you owe.
00:52:38.000Principle number two, if you can't buy a house, that's our fault and we should pick up the risk.
00:52:42.000Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Housing Administration are now guaranteeing almost $7 trillion in mortgage-related debt.
00:52:49.000The federal government should have nothing to do with guaranteeing mortgages.
00:52:52.000It should be completely on banks to guarantee mortgages.
00:52:55.000Why I should be on the hook for you not paying your mortgage is ridiculous and vice versa.
00:52:58.000If I can't pay my mortgage, that is a me problem.
00:53:00.000And if you can't pay your mortgage, that is a you problem.
00:53:03.000And the fact that people don't seem to understand this and they want the federal government to boost home ownership by guaranteeing loans is insane.
00:53:10.000It's how we ended up in the subprime crisis in the first place in 2007-2008.
00:53:16.000Apparently, that $7 trillion in mortgage-related debt is 33% more than before the housing crisis.
00:53:21.000So, the housing crisis was in large part caused by a belief by the federal government that sponsoring Subprime mortgages that were going to default would turn out fine because real estate values would continue to rise, so lending companies, banks, they'd be able to foreclose on the property and still not lose money, which means that the federal government would never have to backstop this stuff.
00:53:40.000Then the real estate market crashes, people are getting foreclosed upon, and guess who has to step in?
00:53:44.000Their solution to that is, let's get more into the federal lending business.
00:53:48.000These entities, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the FHA, are run or backstopped by the U.S.
00:53:52.000government, so a large increase in loan defaults could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
00:53:57.000The risk is a direct result of pressure from the lending industry, consumer groups, and political appointees who clamored for the government to intervene when home ownership rates fell several years ago.
00:54:06.000Starting in the Obama administration, numerous government officials obliged, mistakenly expecting that the private market ultimately would take over.
00:54:14.000Why exactly would the private market take over for loans that they were never going to be able to support in the first place?
00:54:20.000In 2019, according to data from the Urban Institute, there is now more government-backed housing debt than in any other point in American history.
00:54:28.000Taxpayers are shouldering much of the risk.
00:54:30.000A growing number of homeowners face debt payments that amount to nearly half of their monthly income, a threshold many experts consider too steep.
00:54:37.000The basic rule used to be don't spend more than 20% on your mortgage of what you make in monthly income.