After a jam-packed week of not good news for the White House, there is more not very good news on the way. Michael Cohen is making the rounds on ABC News and George Stephanopoulos, while preparing to go to jail, and also preparing to sell a memoir that he will write while in jail. Meanwhile, Democrats prepare for impeachment, new investigations are launched against President Trump, and we answer your questions in the mailbag. Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review of the show! Thanks to our sponsor, LendingClub, for making loans easy and affordable for millions of people all across the U.S. and around the world. Lending Club is the number one peer-to-peer lending platform with over $35B in loans issued. Since 2007, LancingClub has helped millions of Americans regain control of their finances with affordable fixed-rate personal loans no trips to a bank, no high-interest credit cards. Check your rate in minutes and borrow up to $40, up to 40 Grand! All loans made by WebBank, a WebBank Member FDIC Equal Housing Listed Company, are made in as little as a few days! Check it out at Lendingclub.com/BenShapiro. All you have to do is go to WebBank and get the terms that are right for you! If you're approved, your loan is automatically deposited into your bank account in a couple of days, you'll be able to pay it back in minutes, and you'll have a fixed rate in 40% down to 40% faster than you're paying 40% of the interest you're getting a fixed monthly payment. That's 40% cheaper than you'd be better than the average credit card! Ben Shapiro's Rate in minutes! - Ben Shapiro: Check your Rate In Minutes: Check Your Rate In minutes and a 5% Interest Rate in Minutes and 40% Checking Club: Check It Out! "Check Your Rate in Seconds" - Ben Shapiro: Check That Rate in the Mailbag: $5,000, $25, $20, $19, $50, $15, $45, $55, $60, $75, $99, $100, $85, $95, $150, & More! - Ben's Rate-In Minutes: $19.00, & a Free Keynote Presentation?
00:00:12.000We will get to your questions in the mailbag a little bit later on.
00:00:15.000It has been a jam-packed week of not very good news for the White House.
00:00:18.000There is more not very good news for the White House on the way.
00:00:20.000Unfortunately, today we'll talk about all of that.
00:00:22.000But we begin today by reminding you that it is simply not responsible for you to rack up the credit card debt, And then never pay it off or have a plan for doing so, which is why you should consolidate your credit card debt and get a lower rate and make sure that you can pay it off so you're not paying it off until you're dead.
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00:01:14.000And if you're racking up those credit card debts for Christmas and you have no plan to pay them off, Remember that the interest rates on those credit cards can run 20, 25, 30 percent.
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00:01:31.000OK, we begin today with Michael Cohen.
00:01:33.000So Michael Cohen is making the rounds.
00:01:35.000He is now preparing to go to jail and also he's preparing, presumably, to sell a memoir that he will then write while he is in jail.
00:01:42.000So when he gets out, he has some sort of revenue coming out.
00:01:46.000It's amazing to see how the press treat Michael Cohen versus the way the press treated, for example, Linda Tripp way back when in 1998, 1999.
00:01:54.000So Linda Tripp, if you'll recall, was the woman who recorded phone calls with Monica Lewinsky in which Lewinsky described being pressured by the Clinton administration to change her testimony regarding her affair with Bill Clinton.
00:02:06.000And then Linda Tripp revealed these recordings and the press treated her as just a pariah.
00:02:15.000Well, now Michael Cohen is making the rounds.
00:02:17.000He is on ABC News exclusively with George Stephanopoulos, the very objective news journalist, George Stephanopoulos, who once wept, who once said that he and Hillary Clinton cried and held each other after the 1992 election, and is now an objective, very objective, super objective news reporter for ABC News.
00:02:33.000Michael Cohen appears, and everybody still sees Michael Cohen as a sleazy character, but now he's being given the Royal treatment in the sense that he's got the goods on President Trump and therefore must be treated with a certain baseline level of respect.
00:02:46.000Amazing how that changes based on which party the president belongs to.
00:02:50.000Well, Michael Cohen had some words to say.
00:02:52.000Here is some of what he told George Stephanopoulos in this new interview.
00:02:56.000country has never been more divisive and one of the hopes that I have out of the punishment that I've received as well as the cooperation that I have given, I will be remembered in history as helping to bring this country back together.
00:03:15.000Yeah, good luck with that, Michael Cohen.
00:03:17.000I have a serious problem with the idea that Michael Cohen, the president's fixer, who did not believe any of the polls during 2016, that that guy is going to bring the country back together.
00:03:27.000But Democrats seem to be sort of okay with this idea because whoever takes down Trump will bring the country back together.
00:03:32.000I have a new piece out in Newsweek today talking specifically about this giant lie that has been promulgated that President Trump is the great divider-in-chief, as though we didn't have divisions before President Trump.
00:03:42.000Every poll shows we were divided more during the Obama administration by the end than we were at the beginning on a variety of categories including race, class, and religion.
00:03:50.000All of that happened under President Obama.
00:03:52.000That division was the cause of President Trump's election.
00:03:54.000Trump is more a result of division than a cause of division.
00:03:57.000That doesn't mean that President Trump is a unifying guy.
00:04:00.000But, to pretend that President Trump is the sole cause of our division, and that therefore the curative for that is Michael Cohen coming in from the wings and spouting stuff about President Trump, it's just silly, and it's the media lying to you by proxy.
00:04:13.000That wasn't all Michael Cohen had to say.
00:04:15.000He also explained that he never had lied, which is weird since he actually just played guilty to lying, so there's that.
00:04:20.000What do you say to people, and you know there are a lot of people who would be watching, who are going to be thinking, but wait a second, he lied for so long, why should we believe him now?
00:04:45.000Um, well, I mean, you just sort of pled guilty to the whole perjury thing, so there's that.
00:04:50.000When people say that you're a liar, maybe it's because you pled guilty in court to lying and are now going to go to jail for three years because of it, so probably it's that.
00:04:58.000In any case, the really material part of what Michael Cohen had to say was in the rest of the interview.
00:05:03.000He was asked specifically whether President Trump knew that it was wrong to pay off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, or try to pay off Karen McDougal during the campaign, as part of the campaign.
00:05:14.000According to the New York Times, the comments were Mr. Cohen's first since he was sentenced to three years in prison by a federal judge on Wednesday.
00:05:19.000He pled guilty to helping to arrange payments to the two women, a violation of campaign finance law, and for lying to Congress about the duration of deliberations about a proposed Trump Tower meeting in Moscow.
00:05:30.000On Thursday, President Trump and one of his personal attorneys, Rudy Giuliani, said the president was not to be blamed for the campaign finance crimes because he trusted Cohen to know the law.
00:06:15.000I never directed him to do anything incorrect or wrong.
00:06:18.000Now, this is President Trump's chief line of defense.
00:06:20.000So, to recap the charges that are now going to be brought against President Trump, probably by the Southern District of New York, there are three separate charges, or really two and a half, that are going to be brought against President Trump.
00:06:31.000The first is campaign finance violation.
00:06:33.000The case here, just to recap, because I know this stuff gets complicated, so we need to recapitulate, the case here is that President Trump worked with Cohen And pushed Cohen to pay off his former lovers in the midst of an election cycle after hearing via the National Enquirer that Stormy Daniels was looking to tell her story.
00:06:47.000The alleged crime here would be that the Daniels hush money was supposedly a campaign expenditure given that the expenditure would not have existed irrespective of the candidate's election campaign, meaning that Trump wouldn't have paid off Stormy Daniels if it wasn't the middle of an election cycle.
00:07:00.000So how do we know that Trump would not have just paid off Daniels anyway?
00:07:03.000Well, American Media Incorporated, the parent company for the National Enquirer, has now admitted that it paid former Trump paramour Karen McDougal 150 grand in concert with a candidate's presidential campaign, and in order to ensure that McDougal did not publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before the 2016 presidential election, AMI further admitted that its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman's story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.
00:07:28.000Cohen has specifically said that the payoffs were made at President Trump's direction.
00:07:31.000President Trump's defense would be, listen, I told Michael Cohen that this thing should go away.
00:07:38.000And that's what you're hearing President Trump express on Fox News right there, is that if the law was broken, that's Michael Cohen's fault.
00:07:47.000In order for you to violate campaign finance law, it's one of these weird areas of law where you have to have willfully done so, meaning that you have to know that you are actually violating the law when you violated the law.
00:07:57.000You can't have done it by accident, negligence.
00:09:40.000If you say that the lawyer who you say you relied on to get things done was just doing low-level work for you, mostly PR, it is very difficult to then claim that he was an expert lawyer you relied on for legal advice in ensuring that you were compliant with campaign finance law.
00:09:54.000The president should not have said this stuff.
00:09:55.000The president is not his own best lawyer.
00:09:57.000It turns out that in every criminal circumstance, Your lawyer is your own best lawyer.
00:10:02.000This is why when you see people representing themselves on TV in criminal cases, every lawyer says, that's stupid.
00:10:08.000The key here is that you should really be quiet.
00:10:10.000Now, it also puts President Trump's lawyers in the difficult position of then having to figure out what to say next, particularly as new information emerges.
00:10:19.000So according to NBC News, President Trump was the third person in the room in August 2015 when his lawyer Michael Cohen and the National Enquirer publisher David Pecker discussed ways Pecker could help counter negative stories about Trump's relationships with women according to NBC News.
00:10:32.000This undercuts the case that Trump normally would make that he would have spent money no matter what the election status.
00:10:39.000As part of a non-prosecution agreement disclosed Wednesday by federal prosecutors, American Media Inc., the Inquirer's parent company admitted that Pecker offered to help deal with negative stories about the presidential candidate's relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided. assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could Trump was first identified as attending the meeting by the Wall Street Journal, so this undercuts Trump's case that he was ignorant of the campaign stuff and that it had nothing to do with the campaign.
00:11:07.000Now, in a second, we're going to get to how exactly President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani is dealing with this.
00:11:13.000Suffice it to say that his line of defense is not particularly good.
00:11:16.000Now, we will get to whether any of this is really prosecutable.
00:11:19.000We'll get to whether any of this is impeachable.
00:11:21.000We'll get to the insane number of other investigations Democrats are leaking, which actually Which actually undercuts their message that they are deeply concerned about the law and makes it seem more like a witch hunt, as President Trump has said.
00:11:32.000We'll get to all of that in just one second.
00:11:34.000First, let's talk about this particular blazer.
00:12:51.000OK, so Rudy Giuliani trying to come back In the wake of President Trump saying things and Michael Cohen saying things and basically everybody gearing up for the possibility of the Southern District of New York dropping an indictment on President Trump for campaign violations as well as suborning perjury.
00:13:07.000Those would probably be the charges or obstruction of justice.
00:13:34.000Not a big crime is actually not a standard in law.
00:13:37.000And we are now actually, legally speaking, of the Fifth Avenue defense.
00:13:42.000Remember that President Trump said during the campaign he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn't lose a single vote?
00:13:47.000And now apparently the mayor who's responsible for the implementation of broken windows theory in New York, which curbed crime in New York based on prosecuting small crimes, is now saying that small crimes don't matter so long as those small crimes are small enough and they aren't murders.
00:13:59.000So I guess the idea is that anything short of murdering somebody is really not a particularly big deal.
00:14:13.000Everybody assumes that campaign finance is crap anyway.
00:14:15.000Nobody really thought any differently.
00:14:17.000Nobody thinks that President Trump doesn't pay off women to keep them silent.
00:14:20.000Nobody thinks that President Trump isn't who President Trump is.
00:14:24.000See, this is the thing about being President Trump, and this is why, and this will become relevant in a second when I discuss Democrats' attempts at impeachment, which is coming next.
00:14:33.000None of this changes your picture of President Trump.
00:14:35.000I don't know if there's anyone in the country who thought that President Trump isn't the kind of guy who would pay off women he slept with.
00:14:41.000Like, is there anyone who thought that?
00:14:43.000Is there anybody in the country who thought that President Trump was deeply concerned about the intricacies of campaign violations, campaign finance violations?
00:14:50.000That he was sitting there going, well, gotta make sure that nobody spends $2,700.
00:14:53.000Gotta make sure that nobody violates these particular campaign promises.
00:14:57.000President Trump has been Donald Trump his entire life, as it turns out.
00:15:02.000And the New York real estate business is indeed very dirty, as you heard Michael Cohen say.
00:15:05.000Because that doesn't change the image of who President Trump is, it doesn't actually change how his administration works.
00:15:11.000And so the idea that he can't proceed as President of the United States because of these crimes, well, that's just not true.
00:15:21.000This is where the rubber really meets the road.
00:15:23.000Because the next step here is going to be Democrats pushing for impeachment.
00:15:26.000You can already hear them boxing themselves in.
00:15:28.000Democrats may not want to push for impeachment.
00:15:31.000Democrats may want to maintain this controversy up until the 2020 election, but they've basically forced themselves to move on impeachment because they're now accusing President Trump openly of criminality, which means the responsibility is on them and the House to push for impeachment.
00:15:45.000So let's talk about that a little bit.
00:15:46.000Eric Swalwell is a congressional Democrat, and he says that President Trump presides over a criminal presidency, right?
00:15:52.000This is the Democrats boxing themselves in to attempting some sort of impeachment before the 2020 election.
00:15:57.000You are now seeing more evidence than ever that Donald Trump was associated with a criminal campaign, a criminal transition, and presides today, very likely, over a criminal presidency.
00:16:08.000And you've seen people in his orbit who are either under investigation, have pled guilty, or are serving prison time because of their association with one or all three of those different entities.
00:16:20.000Well, if the Democrats keep screaming criminality, they're going to have to push for impeachment.
00:16:23.000But the question is, could they credibly impeach President Trump in the House?
00:16:28.000And Democrats today who are saying, well, let's push for impeachment now.
00:16:39.000You can separate the question of presidential decency and presidential class into B.C.
00:16:47.000and A.C., before Clinton and after Clinton.
00:16:50.000Because before Clinton, there was basically a bipartisan consensus.
00:16:52.000If you committed a crime, you were going to be ousted.
00:16:54.000This is what happened to Richard Nixon.
00:16:55.000Republicans supported his impeachment, even though they were members of his own party.
00:16:59.000That's why he resigned in the first place.
00:17:01.000But when it came to Bill Clinton, not a single Democrat, not one in the Senate, supported his impeachment on charges that look extraordinarily like the sort of allegations that are now being made by President Trump.
00:17:12.000Clinton was impeached on obstruction and perjury based on his testimony and pressure on others regarding their testimony on Monica Lewinsky.
00:17:29.000These crimes don't really go to his efficacy.
00:17:32.000Well, those same arguments now apply to President Trump.
00:17:34.000And in fact, President Trump would not have been successful in his presidential primary run if it had not been for a widespread perception that morality no longer mattered in politics, a perception that springs directly from the Clinton years.
00:17:47.000Now, we're going to hear from Democrats that this is different.
00:17:50.000They're going to say the campaign finance thing is different.
00:17:53.000Clinton didn't violate purposefully campaign finance law, except for the fact that during his actual campaign in 1996, there was solid evidence that the Chinese government was trying to funnel money into his campaign.
00:18:04.000So there are serious campaign finance violations with regard to Clinton.
00:18:09.000And by the way, it's not even clear, as Rudy Giuliani sort of says here, it's not even clear that hush money payments can even fall under the rubric of campaign expenditures, particularly because President Trump could have been spending years paying off all of these women.
00:18:22.000He obstructed justice about ancillary matters.
00:18:24.000That's really what people are talking about with regard to President Trump.
00:18:28.000Now, the Democrats are going to say, well, Republicans are hypocrites because Republicans voted for the impeachment of Clinton in 1998 and 1999, which, by the way, is not even completely true.
00:18:36.000A bunch of Republicans voted against A conviction in the Senate.
00:18:40.000It was a Republican Senate that acquitted President Clinton in 1999.
00:18:44.000But the hue and cry by the media is going to be that Republicans are hypocrites.
00:18:47.000They voted to impeach Clinton, and now they're not voting to impeach President Trump.
00:18:53.000The reality on the ground has now changed.
00:18:55.000Once one group of people violates the rules, you have obliterated the rules.
00:18:58.000Our country exists on an unspoken set of assumptions about things that we hold in common.
00:19:03.000As we have seen in virtually every area of American life, we no longer hold very many things in common.
00:19:07.000One of the things that we clearly do not hold in common and did not hold in common was our perspective of what the presidency should be.
00:19:13.000Once the Democrats violated the rules, the Republicans said, listen, we are not going to hamper ourselves by continuing to apply rules with regard to character and morality in the presidency when Democrats are pretty clearly not interested in any of that sort of stuff.
00:19:24.000We're not going to be held to account by Democrats for doing this sort of stuff.
00:19:27.000Now, do I think that in an ideal world, Republicans would still uphold that standard?
00:19:34.000And the idea that Republicans are going to unilaterally disarm in the face of Democrats who now say, oh, we want to reconstitute the standard.
00:19:41.000Let's reconstitute the standard of class in office.
00:19:45.000We all know that you're not telling the truth.
00:19:47.000That if you got rid of President Trump on suborning perjury and obstruction of justice after defending Bill Clinton, we don't actually think that next time a Democrat does this stuff, you are going to support their impeachment.
00:19:58.000We think that you're only holding this standard for President Trump because you're a bunch of partisan hacks.
00:20:02.000And that being the case, we're not going to help reinstitute a standard for us that does not apply to you.
00:20:07.000There has to be a collective, mutually assured destruction that takes place.
00:20:11.000That mutually assured destruction has not been achieved.
00:20:13.000And that's why I think Republicans are not going to move against President Trump, nor do I think that they probably should, politically speaking, move against President Trump.
00:20:21.000Most likely scenario here is he's impeached by a Democratic House sometime in the next two years, and then he runs for re-election because he's under threat of indictment by the Southern District of New York.
00:20:30.000That is the most likely scenario in all of this.
00:20:32.000Now, President Trump has complained about all of this being a witch hunt, and there's some evidence to support him, and I want to talk about that in just a second.
00:20:39.000But first, let's talk about how you can make your watch look better.
00:20:51.000Well that is the style of movement watches.
00:20:54.000Movement watches, they're not designed to tell you how many steps you're taking in a day or how many calories you're going to lose or anything like that.
00:20:59.000They're designed to tell you the time in a minimalist fashion that looks expensive but doesn't cost you a ton of money.
00:21:05.000Movement is a really amazing success story, actually.
00:21:07.000They're a bunch of ground-up entrepreneurs who started this thing essentially from a garage, and now they've sold 2 million watches worldwide.
00:21:14.000And Movement watches are all about looking good without spending a billion dollars.
00:21:17.000Movement watches start at just 95 bucks.
00:21:18.000You're looking at 400 bucks for the same quality from a traditional brand.
00:21:57.000Okay, so President Trump claims that this is all a big witch hunt.
00:22:02.000And to be honest with you, it looks like a little bit of a witch hunt when every single aspect of President Trump's life is being picked apart.
00:22:09.000We talked about the fact that the newly elected Attorney General in the state of New York has already said that she's going to go after members of Trump's family.
00:22:16.000She's not even going to go looking for crime.
00:22:18.000She's going to look at members of the Trump family for having committed crime, which is the definition Of selective prosecution.
00:22:24.000If you're looking at someone and you are attempting to dig down on them just to uncover a crime they committed, as opposed to finding a crime and then linking it with the actual perpetrator, this is the definition of bad law enforcement.
00:22:35.000And yet this is what so many people on the left are doing.
00:22:38.000The latest example of this is apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, federal prosecutors in Manhattan are now investigating whether President Trump's 2017 inaugural committee misspent some of the record $107 million it raised from donations, people familiar with the matter said.
00:22:52.000The criminal probe by the Manhattan U.S.
00:22:54.000Attorney's Office, which is in its early stages, also is examining whether some of the committee's top donors gave money in exchange for access to the incoming Trump administration, policy concessions, or to influence official administration positions, some of the people said.
00:23:06.000Giving money in exchange for political favors could run afoul of federal corruption laws.
00:23:16.000And he said, I myself have engaged in this corruption.
00:23:19.000I was at- Hillary Clinton came to my wedding.
00:23:21.000I paid the Clintons so that Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton would come to my wedding.
00:23:25.000I would get politicians in here all the time begging me, begging me to give them money.
00:23:30.000And I'd say, okay, what can you do for me?
00:23:32.000I mean, Bill- Donald Trump said this stuff during the campaign.
00:23:36.000Is anyone really under the impression, the weird misimpression, that people who donate to inaugural committees don't expect anything in return?
00:23:43.000Are we all under this weird misimpression that people just decide, oh, I like Barack Obama so much I'm going to dump a million bucks into his inauguration?
00:23:49.000Or does it mean that you're going to get an ambassadorship to the Bahamas?
00:23:54.000But now we're having federal prosecutors look at the inauguration committee without presumably any evidence that anything is happening so far.
00:24:03.000The inaugural committee hasn't been asked for records or been contacted by prosecutors, according to a lawyer close to the matter, who said, we are not aware of any evidence the investigation the journal is reporting actually exists.
00:24:12.000But that's not stopping, apparently, the investigation from moving forward.
00:24:16.000Federal prosecutors have asked Rick Gates, a former campaign aide who served as the inaugural committee's deputy chairman, about the fund spending and its donors, according to people familiar with the matter.
00:24:24.000So basically, they're going to now dig through every element of Trump's life in an attempt to get him.
00:24:28.000It does make it seem a lot like a witch hunt when everybody is hunting for witches.
00:24:32.000It's possible they come up with some witches in the witch hunt, but that doesn't change the motivating factors underneath all of this.
00:24:38.000And that's why if President Trump is successfully able to convey that all of this is, in fact, a big effort to get him, even if he's guilty of some of it, then maybe it doesn't hurt him quite as much as people think come 2020.
00:24:51.000Especially when the media continue to give credibility to just randos who make any allegation about the president under any circumstances.
00:24:58.000Like Mediaite today has a big piece about a former staffer on The Apprentice and current stand-up comic named Noel Kassler who claims that Donald Trump was a speed freak who snorted crushed up Adderall.
00:25:09.000That's not the most credible sourcing and it's not the most credible story considering that Donald Trump is a teetotaler because his brother was an alcoholic and apparently has gone around for years to young people and told them not to do drugs and not to do alcohol.
00:25:22.000Nonetheless, this guy who worked on The Apprentice said that he worked on some of Trump's beauty pageants during the 1990s, in which President Trump would offer girls to come up to his hotel room again, unless there's criminal activity alleged.
00:25:35.000I'm not sure what exactly the revelation is there, but the point is that no matter what the allegations are against President Trump, substantiated or not, they'll get heavy play from all the people who want to see him go.
00:25:46.000Nancy Pelosi saying, we're going to go after his tax returns yesterday.
00:25:49.000If President Trump could get Democrats somehow to convey that it doesn't matter, they can go after every aspect of his life and he's the victim in all of this, then he could successfully run for reelection, at least on the basis that this is a group of vindictive jerks who are trying to come after him.
00:26:03.000Nancy Pelosi looking pretty vindictive right here.
00:26:05.000Yes, there is popular demand for the Congress to request the president's tax returns.
00:26:15.000They will have their path as we go forward.
00:26:19.000I'm sure the White House will resist and so Question is, how do we go, where do we go from there?
00:26:27.000So now they're going to go after his tax returns.
00:26:28.000Okay, enough, we don't have to hear from this person.
00:26:30.000I mean, again, this idea that tax returns are also on the table, everything's on, we all know what the real motivating factor here is.
00:26:37.000Joy Behar, who is sort of the id of the democratic brain, she basically spills it.
00:26:41.000She says, listen, anybody who likes Trump, anybody who supports Trump, Trump himself, family members, they should all go to jail.
00:26:48.000It's so funny to hear all these people who are very angry at people shouting, lock her up, about Hillary Clinton, who committed federal crimes in concealing and keeping on private servers classified information.
00:26:58.000All these same people who are livid about lock her up are saying, lock everybody up.
00:27:01.000I don't like Joy Behar conveying the sort of emotional, emotional bursting forth that Democrats would really like to see here.
00:27:10.000He has nothing to lose by speaking against truth to power about Trump.
00:27:14.000Why does he say he should follow his Twitter?
00:27:16.000Even if he commits a crime, it's okay.
00:27:17.000I think there's more that's gone on behind the scenes.
00:27:23.000But he also won a Grammy, interestingly.
00:27:25.000Okay, so Orrin Hatch needs to go to jail because he's nice to President Trump.
00:27:30.000There are a lot of folks in this country who are fans of President Trump, and if they get the feeling that all of this is a setup, it's going to be a problem for Democrats.
00:27:37.000And meanwhile, in other Trump world news, the ongoing search for chief of staff continues.
00:27:42.000Apparently two of the top candidates are Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, who is responsible for a vast swath of policy inside the Trump administration, from criminal justice reform to Middle Eastern policy.
00:27:52.000He's been under a lot of fire recently for his relationship with Mohammed bin Salman, who is the De facto king of Saudi Arabia.
00:28:00.000Kushner, of course, is Ivanka Trump's husband and is very close with President Trump personally.
00:28:05.000There's been talk that he might be up for chief of staff.
00:28:07.000I think that would be a very bad move for the Trump administration.
00:28:10.000Jared already has an enormous amount of power over the policy in the Trump administration.
00:28:19.000I don't like the idea that you're related to the president, therefore you get a position in high politics.
00:28:23.000But let's not pretend that this is unique to President Trump.
00:28:25.000This isn't whataboutism, because again, I don't think it's right that this is happening on the Republican side of the aisle, but nepotism is a bipartisan feature.
00:28:32.000Bobby Kennedy became Attorney General because his brother was President of the United States at the time, which is an insane thing that was allowed to happen.
00:28:38.000To have your... Like, I can appoint a family member to be the person overseeing the Justice Department that's supposed to oversee me.
00:28:46.000And then Teddy Kennedy ran for Senate on the back of his brother.
00:28:48.000And then you have the Clintons, obviously, and Hillary Clinton running on the back of being married to the president and then running for president on the back of being married to a former president.
00:28:56.000It turns out that nepotism is a bipartisan problem in the United States.
00:29:21.000He should just appoint himself Chief of Staff, have a scheduler who's out front in his office, he can bring back the lady from the Trump Organization, make her the scheduler, and then just run the thing like he wants to run the thing as a family business.
00:29:34.000The other person who they are discussing is Chris Christie, which is just beyond insane.
00:29:38.000Bringing in Chris Christie, the corruption-ridden former New Jersey governor, who most famously was sent to go get hamburgers for President Trump on the campaign trail.
00:29:52.000President Trump can't find anyone else in the United States who wants to go get him a Diet Coke and a burger.
00:29:57.000He's got to bring in Chris Christie just to serially humiliate him on national television?
00:30:01.000You remember when Chris Christie became part of the Trump campaign and every other Trump rally was Trump pointing over to Christie and going, Look at the lovable fat man over here.
00:30:15.000And I was like, I guess it'll be entertaining for a couple of years, but how that doesn't create more turmoil in the executive branches beyond me, because Chris, he has his own priorities.
00:30:22.000He's at odds with a lot of current members of the administration.
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00:34:17.000All right, so worst media story of the day.
00:34:25.000This is just media malfeasance at an extraordinarily high level.
00:34:28.000So the Washington Post is blasting out this headline.
00:34:35.000Now, if I were to just read that headline, I would think that a seven-year-old girl was taken into Border Patrol custody, and she was totally fine.
00:34:43.000Right, that she was healthy and happy and bouncing off the walls.
00:34:47.000And then the cruel Border Patrol agents allowed her to die of dehydration and exhaustion.
00:34:52.000That, of course, is not what happened.
00:34:54.000When you read the article, what you see is that a seven-year-old girl from Guatemala died of dehydration and shock after she was taken into Border Patrol custody last week for crossing from Mexico into the U.S.
00:35:03.000illegally with her father and a large group of migrants.
00:35:06.000Along a remote span of the New Mexico desert, U.S.
00:35:09.000Customs and Border Protection said on Thursday, according to CBP reports, the girl and her father were taken into custody about 10 p.m.
00:35:15.000December 6th, south of Lordsburg, New Mexico, as part of a group of 163 people who approached U.S.
00:35:22.000More than eight hours later, the child began having seizures at 6.25 a.m., CBP records show.
00:35:27.000Emergency responders who arrived soon after measured her body temperature at 105.7 degrees, and according to a statement from CBP, she reportedly had not eaten So whose fault is it that this girl, this poor child, died of dehydration?
00:35:42.000Probably her father, who brought her along on a thousands mile journey and didn't feed her or give her water.
00:35:49.000And the CBB agents who took her into custody, we don't know what they did in the eight hours between when they got her and when she started having seizures.
00:35:55.000We don't even know if they were able to review her health.
00:35:58.000There were 163 people who they knew nothing about, who they gathered into a place and then started processing.
00:36:04.000And eight hours later, the girl was already dying.
00:36:06.000After a helicopter flight to Providence Children's Hospital in El Paso, the child went into cardiac arrest and was revived, according to the agency, but the child did not recover and died at the hospital less than 24 hours after being transported.
00:36:18.000The father remains in El Paso awaiting a meeting with Guatemalan consular officials, according to the CBP.
00:36:22.000The agency is investigating the incident to ensure appropriate policies were followed.
00:36:26.000Food and water are typically provided to migrants in Border Patrol custody, and it wasn't immediately clear Thursday if the girl received provisions and a medical exam before the onset of seizures.
00:36:34.000Because here's one of the things about dying of dehydration.
00:36:37.000If you don't drink for many days, and then you're given a little bit of water, that may not help you.
00:36:44.000It may not be enough just to give somebody a little bit of water.
00:36:47.000This idea that if you give somebody a cup of water after they haven't had a drink for five days, suddenly they will be saved from dehydration, it is just not the case.
00:36:56.000According to spokesman Andrew Meehan, Border Patrol agents took every possible step to save the child's life under the most trying of circumstances.
00:37:02.000As fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, we empathize with the loss of any child.
00:37:05.000Naturally, the ACLU blamed the CBP for all of this.
00:37:09.000This is obviously the fault of the parents.
00:37:12.000If you cross a giant desert without feeding your child, and then you arrive at a place, and within eight hours the kid is having seizures, You're the parent.
00:37:23.000The agency said it was expecting an autopsy on the child, but results would not be available for several weeks.
00:37:27.000An initial diagnosis by physicians at Providence Hospital listed the cause of death as septic shock, fever, and dehydration.
00:37:34.000Again, dehydration is not just, you didn't drink for 12 hours, or you didn't drink for 24 hours.
00:37:39.000If you die of dehydration, you have not had a drink for a very long time, then it's quite possible that if you try to give somebody water after they are this dehydrated, they start throwing it up anyway.
00:37:49.000Just stupid bad media coverage because this is the way the media try to push a particular narrative.
00:37:55.000Now, speaking of bad media stories, I am sad to see that the Weekly Standard has now been shut down.
00:38:01.000The Weekly Standard has been sort of an institutional tentpole in the conservative movement for some 23 years.
00:38:08.000It was shut down by Clarity Media Group.
00:38:10.000The announcement came after the magazine's editor, Stephen Hayes, met privately with Ryan McKibben, who's the chairman of the Weekly Standard's publisher, Media DC, McKibben said in a press release, There's a lot of really talented writers over at The Weekly Standard.
00:38:19.000has provided a valued and important perspective on political, literary, and cultural issues of the day.
00:38:23.000The magazine has been home to some of the industry's most dedicated and talented staff.
00:38:27.000I thank them for their hardworking contributions, not just to the publication, but the field of journalism.
00:38:31.000There's a lot of really talented writers over at The Weekly Standard.
00:38:35.000I hope to work with some of them in the future, and I'm sad to see them go.
00:38:39.000Employees were told they would be paid through the end of the year, and that afterward they'd receive severance, which would range in scale.
00:38:45.000To receive severance, employees would need to sign an NDA, however.
00:38:48.000Employees were also told to clear out their desks by the end of the day, and they said their email addresses were already being in the process of being shut off, which is pretty amazing.
00:38:56.000The editor of the Weekly Standard basically said the reason they're being shut down is because they were anti-Trump.
00:39:01.000It's not just that the Weekly Standard was anti-Trump.
00:39:03.000is that the Weekly Standard started to reflect the preferences of Bill Kristol, who seems to have lost his mind a little bit over President Trump.
00:39:11.000Bill Kristol, who I've respected as a thinker for a very long time, the fact that he decided to tell people to vote for, I believe he told people to vote for Democrats in the last election cycle, and that he's sort of taken the max boot position on Trump, which is anything Trump does is bad, that's not likely to win you a lot of friends and admirers or readers.
00:39:28.000And that's too bad because there's so many talented writers over there.
00:39:30.000I'm sure they will all get jobs and I will work to help them get jobs at other outlets because, again, I don't like to see talented people go without work.
00:39:43.000Okay, so, Stephen says, if Justice Ginsburg were to die before the midterm election at basically the same chronological time as Justice Scalia did, should the Republicans proceed with confirming a new justice before the election or not?
00:39:53.000The answer is, of course Republicans should proceed with confirming a new justice.
00:39:56.000They should not wait until after the presidential election.
00:39:59.000The actual rationale for not voting on Merrick Garland was not that it was the middle of a presidential cycle.
00:40:03.000The actual rationale for not voting on Merrick Garland is because Merrick Garland did not have the votes in the Senate to be approved.
00:40:10.000It was always, in my opinion, a very stupid maneuver to suggest that Merrick Garland should get a vote if Hillary Clinton had been elected.
00:40:17.000Like, I don't think it's the responsibility of the Senate to greenlight any judge it does not want to greenlight.
00:40:21.000That's the way that our constitutional system works.
00:40:24.000Michael says, hey, Ben, I have two questions.
00:40:25.000I think only you might have the answers.
00:40:27.000Question one, is it true you said Michael Knowles is an essential employee?
00:40:30.000Question two, could it ever be possible that he could be one day?
00:41:12.000Because the question is, what does it mean to be created in God's image or likeness?
00:41:15.000In my opinion, and in the view of a lot of biblical commentators, what this actually means is that you are created with an independent creative capacity that does not belong to animals.
00:41:23.000You have the ability to transform the world, to make independent, free-willed choices, and that is being made in the image of God.
00:41:31.000It's not that God has two nostrils and two hands and two feet.
00:41:34.000That's not what it means when it says God created mankind in our image.
00:41:37.000And the general view of natural law scholars, ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Maimonides, is that God can use whatever natural processes he wishes in order for him to accomplish his goals.
00:41:48.000And so when the Bible describes the creation of the universe, then that could Very easily in sort of scientific parlance, be described as the natural processes of the universe.
00:41:57.000The question is, what stood behind that process?
00:41:59.000What made that process happen the way that process was made to happen?
00:42:13.000Kevin says, Kevin, Kevin, why did you want to be a lawyer and why did you stop?
00:42:17.000So, OK, I have a lot of great stories about my law firm interview process.
00:42:22.000So I had the, as far as I know, the most unsuccessful Law firm interview process for anyone who graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, maybe in their history.
00:42:32.000So the way that it works at Harvard Law School is that when you graduate or when you're getting ready to graduate, all these law firms come and they recruit you because you're a Harvard Law graduate, which means you're special.
00:42:41.000So they all come to the Charles Hotel and they roll out the red carpet and you interview them, basically.
00:42:45.000They interview you and you also interview them to see what sort of firm you'd like to work for.
00:42:49.000So I registered for some 32 interviews.
00:42:54.000Now, this was not because of my grades.
00:42:56.000This is because, specifically on my resume, I had a bunch of my books.
00:42:59.000And my books included titles like Brainwashed, how universities indoctrinate America's youth, and Porn Generation, how social liberalism is destroying our future.
00:43:08.000Titles like that are not apt to win you admirers in legal circles where everybody is a far leftist.
00:43:12.000And so I would have interview experiences where I remember I walked into one interview with a major law firm called Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which has outlets all over the country.
00:43:21.000I believe this was the Orange County branch, maybe.
00:43:24.000In any case, I walk into the interview, before I can even sit down, the guy doesn't even shake my hand, he doesn't even say hello, I walk into the room, before I can sit down, the partner behind the desk says, it's always been my contention that conservatives and religious people in general have a Freudian fear of sex.
00:43:41.000And I looked at him and I thought, well, I'm not getting this job.
00:43:45.000So I said, that is the stupidest effing thing I have ever heard in my entire life.
00:43:51.000But there were a lot of experiences that were just like that.
00:43:54.000I mean, I interviewed one time at Kirkland Ellis, another first-rate law firm.
00:43:57.000I had a lot of friends who worked for Kirkland Ellis.
00:43:59.000And they called me back for a callback in Los Angeles.
00:44:02.000And they decided, when they do these callbacks, they're trying to recruit you.
00:44:05.000And so what they do is they put you with people they think you'll get along with, people who will talk about how great the firm is.
00:44:10.000So they decide, you know what would be great?
00:44:11.000We'll put Shapiro with a couple of other Jewish Harvard Law graduates.
00:44:16.000This is pretty much the worst thing you can do, because if you are a Jewish person who is not Orthodox, chances are that you're extraordinarily liberal.
00:44:23.000And as it turns out, that's exactly right.
00:44:24.000One of these people was a radical environmentalist, and another of them was a feminist lawyer.
00:44:29.000So we're all out, and then they say, OK, well, let's all go to lunch together.
00:44:38.000You need to go to a kosher restaurant.
00:44:39.000The only kosher restaurant in downtown LA at the time was a greasy falafel shop.
00:44:43.000So there we are in our expensive suits at a greasy falafel shop, chowing down on falafel, and the girl, the woman, happens to be a lesbian.
00:44:55.000And the guy who's sitting next to her, we're all talking, he reaches into his pocket and he pulls out an old column that I've written.
00:45:01.000Because I've had a syndicated column at this point for like six years.
00:45:04.000He pulls out a column that I've written.
00:45:06.000He starts reading to me from my own column.
00:45:09.000And then he says, and then he says, do you agree with this?
00:45:22.000And she was very upset about this because she assumed that, I guess, because she was a lesbian, I would now change my entire worldview on same-sex marriage.
00:45:31.000It's a personal insult to members of the left if you don't change your entire worldview based on their personal life experiences, which is a pretty shocking thing.
00:45:37.000In any case, those interviews went poorly.
00:45:38.000The one that went the worst, though, and this is me getting to the answer, the one that went the worst was I was specifically asked by, at one point, By one of these firms, why I wanted to work in corporate law, why I wanted to be a corporate attorney.
00:45:52.000And I looked at the interview and I said, for the money.
00:45:56.000Which is the obvious and honest answer to anyone who wants to practice corporate law, right?
00:46:00.000You're not going to corporate law for the love of the law, and anybody who says they are is a liar, okay?
00:46:05.000The reason you're going there is because the partners are making a couple million bucks a year.
00:46:08.000The notion that you are going from Harvard Law School, where you study how to be Atticus Finch, and you say about legal theory, and you study about originalism versus legal realism, and it's all about ideas, and then you go to a law firm, where you sit in a room, And you review page numbers and commas and missing paragraph indents for 2,200 billable hours a year.
00:46:30.000The idea that you are doing this for the pure enjoyment of Blackstone's commentaries is insane.
00:46:35.000So anyway, he said, why are you doing this?
00:47:42.000Because five minutes of my time is not five minutes of my time.
00:47:45.000It's the 15 minutes in preparation for the five minutes of my time and then the 15 minutes afterward getting back into my work.
00:47:49.000There is no such thing as a five minute block of your time.
00:47:52.000Even a person asking you a question for 30 seconds requires you to be wrenched out of your work and then it takes you another 10 minutes to get back into your work.
00:47:58.000So you really do need to have undivided blocks of time where you simply are not bothered if you want to write.
00:48:03.000And that's true whether you're writing nonfiction or fiction.
00:48:05.000Obviously, I write a lot more nonfiction than fiction.
00:48:07.000Terry says, Hey Ben, I've been living in California since the military stationed me here six years ago.
00:48:12.000At first, I loved the state because I was young and saw myself as more of a liberal.
00:48:14.000But as I grew older and more educated, I definitely find myself firmly on the conservative side of the fence.
00:48:19.000I recently decided I want to move away from California to find a state with lower taxes and more job opportunities.
00:48:23.000Do you have any recommendations for cities that are potentially worth moving to?
00:49:03.000Cory says, my economics teacher tried to argue that America's monotheism and capitalism have failed and we should adopt some Chinese policy.
00:49:12.000Centralized planning works in the short run in the sense that it directs capital toward a particular goal and that goal can be successful in the short run.
00:49:19.000It does not work in the long run because the bottom line is that the collective wisdom of the crowd when it comes to the products and services to be created Much stronger, much more versatile, much more durable than anything directed top-down.
00:49:32.000It is amazing to watch as people make the same economic errors over and over.
00:49:35.000Back in the 1920s and 1930s, there were a lot of folks in the West who said, wow, look at the growth rates in Stalin's Russia.
00:49:43.000And then all of that collapsed, right?
00:49:46.000And it turns out that all of that was fake.
00:49:48.000When you keep your people in a state of abject misery for 30 years and then give them gradual gains and turns out they're happier because of the gradual gains, that does not mean that people in China are living a lifestyle anything comparable to the lifestyle of the United States.
00:50:02.000The United States is still the world driver of the economy.
00:50:04.000If the United States economy We're to go into recession, the entire world goes into recession.
00:50:08.000The same thing is not necessarily true of the Chinese economy, which has experienced several serious economic shocks in the past several years.
00:50:14.000And that has had some impact, but certainly not tremendous global impact in the same way that the United States economy has.
00:50:19.000It's just monotheism and capitalism haven't worked.
00:50:22.000Have you seen a chart of GDP per capita since the advent of free markets in the early 19th century?
00:52:14.000Or the entire crowd singing Bohemian Rhapsody on Christmas, which is a weird call.
00:52:19.000In any case, here is a little bit of Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring, some of the most beautiful music ever composed by an actually talented human.
00:53:16.000So, last night, last night, it's like 10.30 p.m., and it's time to go to sleep.
00:53:24.000But I need to go to the kitchen for something.
00:53:26.000And in our house, our bedroom is on one side of the house, and our kitchen is on the other side of the house, and in between is kind of the den area where the kids like to play.
00:53:50.000Anyway, they decided to leave out their little chairs and their little toys, so I'm walking blithely along, happily walking along.
00:53:56.000I get a bottle of water from the kitchen, and boom!
00:53:58.000I bruise the living hell out of my shin, and I go flying, head over heels, over this chair like Dick Van Dyke over the Ottoman in the original Dick Van Dyke show.
00:54:07.000I mean, I just go flying, and I clock Living hell out of my leg.
00:54:11.000I mean, I just destroy my knee, I destroy my shin, and fall directly from the chair onto my son's digger.
00:54:19.000He has like a, my son has like, you know, like a digger that you would see at a construction site.
00:55:48.000And this continues for a solid, I kid you not, 15 minutes of her laughing as I hobble around the house as though I've been wounded in some sort of crucial battle.
00:55:59.000And finally, things calm down and I put an ice pack on my leg.
00:56:06.000And as we're about to fall asleep, I hear her giggling and laughing because my wife loves it when I get hurt.
00:56:15.000And I don't know if this is I'll have to talk to some more of the women in the office.
00:56:18.000I don't know if there's a woman thing because my mom has the same thing with my father.
00:56:21.000Like if my dad clocks himself, my mom thinks it's the funniest thing that she's ever seen.
00:56:25.000And, you know, if I were really, really hurt, like deeply hurt, like hospital hurt, then I assume that my wife would not be quite as pleased with the situation.
00:56:33.000But when I clock myself and it really hurts, but I'm not dying, my wife thinks it's the funniest thing that has ever happened.
00:56:40.000So things I hate, this one goes out to you, sweetheart.
00:56:49.000Okay, final thing that I hate as we approach Christmas, we now get the wisdom of a bunch of people who have no relationship with religion or traditional Judeo-Christian values about whether particular Christian figures like the Pope are homophobic.
00:57:05.000So Jenny Hagel, who is a writer for Seth Meyers, I guess, did an entire monologue the other night about how Pope Francis is a homophobe because Pope Francis believes that homosexuality is a sin, which has been part of Judeo-Christian canon for Approximately 3,000 years.
00:57:20.000But here is Jenny Hagel finally explaining the real reason this has all been done is because the Pope, Pope Francis, is a brutal homophobe.
00:57:33.000If you're not Catholic, you're probably thinking, why should I care about this?
00:57:37.000And if you are Catholic, you're probably thinking, what's the latest I can leave my house and still get to Mass on time?
00:57:44.000But we should all care about this because the Pope is a world leader who's giving people permission to be prejudiced.
00:57:50.000Hey, so much humoring from the humorists.
00:57:52.000What I love is people who are politically driven comedians who have an agenda not being funny at all and just calling the Pope a homophobe on the basis that they disagree about the status of particular behavior and whether it is, in fact, a sin or not.
00:58:04.000She's going to have to name me the policies that the Pope has pushed that are in favor of cracking down on gay people and victimizing gay people.
00:58:12.000In fact, most of the Pope's statements on this have been very soft.
00:58:17.000Now we have to, in the great battle between secularism and religion, secularism must emerge victorious and label everyone who disagrees an evil human being.
00:58:25.000Well done, Seth Meyers and his writers.
00:58:27.000OK, well, we will be back here on Monday with all of the latest.
00:58:30.000One more week until we go on Christmas break, and then there will be a whole new year of fun.
00:58:35.000But we are not quite to the end of the year yet.
00:58:36.000So get ready, buckle up, because next week I have a feeling is going to be a crazy one, just like every other week.