Trump and Pelosi snipe at each other, Julian Assange faces charges, and we check in on the mailbag. Ben Shapiro's take on the crazy fight between President Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and why impeachment is inevitable in the long-term, no matter what happens between now and the mid-term elections in 2020. Also, a new mattress company is making eco-friendly, all-natural options, and there's still time to get a discount on your own! Subscribe to our new show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, and Share to stay up to date with the latest episodes of The Ben Shapiro Show on all major podcasting platforms. You can also join our FB group, and join the conversation by using the hashtag on that hashtag , and find us on Insta if you like the show and want to become a Friend of the ! Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your fellow podcasting friends! Happy listening, and Happy Listening, and God Blessings, Ben and Jerry! - The Shapiro Family - Yours Truly, Cheers, PJ & Sarah "The Ben Shapiro Podcast" - Sarah, Jon & Sarah "The Daily Mailbag" -- Jon Sorrentino Caitlyn's Book Recommendation: Julian Assange's Ecologist Journalist and Journalist, The Daily Mail's "Julian Assange's Journalist" -- The New York Times' "The White House Correspondent's Guide to the White House"? The White House Declassified Memoirs" by Julian Assange, Julian's Confused by Julian's "Assange's Confession? And Julian's Fears of Julian's Departure from Julian's Leveson the Watergate Papers? And much, Much More! And so much more! -- The Mailbag, including "The Dark Side of Watergate? -- Check it out! and much, much more. -- Subscribe to the Daily Mail, Subscribe to see the Mailbag Subscribe and Subscribe to The Ben's Workplace? Subscribe and Share it on Instapod, Subscribe on iTunes and Subscribe on It's Podcasts, Subscribe on Podchronicity? and Subscribe for a Chance to See What's Good, Learn more Like It's Great, Subscribe To The Final Draft? & Subscribe on Podcasts?
00:01:28.000Alrighty, so we begin today with the crazy fight between President Trump and Nancy Pelosi.
00:01:33.000So we, as we've been discussing for the past several days, Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat strategy for 2020 is to make Donald Trump appear to be a crazy person.
00:01:43.000And Nancy Pelosi is basically a suicide bomber doing this.
00:01:48.000I mean, I don't mean literally, obviously.
00:01:50.000I mean, politically speaking, Nancy Pelosi is basically strapped on the crazy vest.
00:01:53.000And she says, "If I act crazy, it will get Trump to act crazy.
00:01:57.000I'm only elected by the people of San Francisco.
00:01:59.000President Trump is elected by the people of the United States.
00:02:01.000And that means people in San Francisco don't care if I'm crazy, but people broadly across the United States do care if Trump is crazy." So in a crazy fight, Trump is always going to lose because the referendum is gonna be on Trump as president of the United States.
00:02:14.000Everybody understands what Nancy Pelosi is at this point.
00:02:18.000And it doesn't matter because again, she's elected by crazy people in San Francisco.
00:02:22.000Donald Trump has to win a majority of the voters of the United States, at least in the Electoral College.
00:02:27.000It's hard to do that when people widely perceive you as being volatile.
00:02:30.000Nancy Pelosi knows that, and that is why she has been basically jabbing at President Trump over and over and over again, saying that he's engaged in a cover-up, saying that he's unstable and all this sort of stuff.
00:02:41.000President Trump, because he's a counterpuncher, has a natural tendency to then engage in precisely the reverse sort of behavior, which is to rip on his political opponents and also to get supremely defensive about his own mental status.
00:02:54.000So, Nancy Pelosi said yesterday that President Trump wants us to impeach him.
00:02:59.000This is what she says, that President Trump is a crazy person, he's getting nothing done, and he wants us to impeach him in order to save himself.
00:03:05.000Here is the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, jabbing at Trump, deliberately, deliberately poking at Trump in an attempt to get Trump to fire back at her in the most volatile possible fashion.
00:03:15.000You said in private, you suggested it today, that the president wants, on some level, to be impeached.
00:03:41.000That was what disappointed him, because he didn't see this rush to impeachment coming out of our caucus in our 9 o'clock meeting, which he thought was called specifically for him.
00:03:51.000OK, so then President Trump fired back.
00:03:54.000So with Nancy Pelosi jabbing at him over and over and over, President Trump fired back yesterday repeatedly.
00:04:00.000So first, Trump ripped crying Chuck and crazy Nancy.
00:04:04.000He did this in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, flanked by farmers who he was giving a sort of bailout to in the aftermath of his Chinese trade war.
00:04:13.000Here's President Trump ripping into Crying Chuck and Crazy Nancy.
00:04:15.000Again, as I've been saying for days, I have a lot of sympathy on an emotional level for President Trump, who's being slapped around by Democrats, who's being unfairly treated by Democrats.
00:04:25.000I really do think that these investigations are not directed toward criminal activity.
00:04:29.000They're directed toward getting under Trump's skin.
00:04:31.000Democrats have successfully done that, and that's why the president should not allow them to do it.
00:05:24.000The question is, is this strategically smart for the president to get down in the mud with Nancy Pelosi and have a crazy fight when, again, he is the one who's going to be up for presidential re-election?
00:05:34.000And then it gets worse because President Trump then calls up his own aides, people who work for him, to testify that he did not throw a tantrum.
00:05:41.000Well, if you're trying not to appear volatile, probably the worst way to do that is to get your own employees.
00:05:46.000Come on over here, Bob, and tell them I'm not volatile.
00:06:40.000I mean, really, Mr. President, if you do not want to appear volatile, if you don't want to appear like a crazy person, probably what you shouldn't do is appeal to all the people who work for you to testify as to what a great dude you are.
00:06:53.000Let's say that somebody called me volatile.
00:06:54.000You know what I probably wouldn't do is call in my producers.
00:06:58.000I wouldn't call in Nick and both Mike's.
00:07:01.000I wouldn't call in my producers and then say, guys, tell them I'm not volatile.
00:07:20.000But if the rip on you is that you're volatile and then you proceed to show that you're volatile by calling on Mercedes Schlapp, who works for you, and Kellyanne Conway, who shills for you on television to testify as to your innate genius.
00:08:29.000Even though unions are in favor of it, farmers, manufacturers, everybody just about is in favor of it.
00:08:34.000Okay, so, and then he concludes this little riff, which went on for many, many minutes in the middle of this press conference with the farmers standing behind going, oh my god.
00:09:34.000And I was against certain things, but if you look and you take a look back, you'll see all of the things that you're talking about and all of the things that you're asking about, I was against at that time.
00:09:52.000Okay, and obviously he's saying that a little bit tongue-in-cheek because the president is a stand-up comedian, but that then opens the door to Nancy Pelosi doing this.
00:09:59.000So Nancy Pelosi then tweets at the president about the extremely stable genius line.
00:10:04.000She says, Now, this is supremely cynical from Nancy Pelosi.
00:10:14.000She's not interested in working with Trump on anything.
00:10:17.000Her entire goal here is to drag Trump into this fight, to get under his skin, to make him crazy.
00:10:31.000And then as soon as Trump comes back at her and says that she's a mess, then it's, well, I was happy to work with him.
00:10:37.000But then he decided that he wasn't going to work with me.
00:10:40.000That routine from Nancy Pelosi, it's really galling and it's really perturbing.
00:10:44.000But with all of that said, is it smart for President Trump to jump into a personal catfight with Nancy Pelosi?
00:10:52.000Here's the thing, the image that he needs to propagate from now until Election Day is of, if not an extremely stable genius, an extremely stable person, or at least a stable person, right?
00:11:05.000That would be, that would, that, the entire Democratic pitch is Trump is too crazy.
00:11:45.000And the Democratic Party had followed him so far down the chute that Woodrow Wilson's wife effectively governed the country as president of the United States in the middle of Woodrow Wilson's senility as of 1919.
00:11:56.000And so Republicans said, okay, we just want normal.
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00:15:14.000Okay, that three things, thinks she's holding up two fingers at a time.
00:15:17.000So Trump tweets that out, the media go crazy.
00:15:19.000I will point out the media have been saying that Trump is a nutcase who can't speak English for years, and he's the president of the United States, whether they like it or not.
00:15:39.000Meanwhile, the president is fighting back against the Allegations that have been made that the FBI and CIA and the Obama administration were targeting him.
00:15:48.000He is now attempting to declassify a bevy of materials.
00:15:51.000Now, I've been saying for years that the president should declassify as much as humanly possible.
00:15:55.000I'm amazed by Democrats who today are claiming that it's a cover up when the president declassifies material.
00:16:01.000So just to review, when the president says that William Barr, the attorney general, has to keep certain things classified because the federal rules of criminal evidence require that grand jury information not be released into the public, That's a cover-up.
00:16:13.000So if the president uses classification properly, that's a cover-up.
00:16:16.000Also, if the president declassifies, that is a cover-up.
00:16:20.000Now, the argument from the left is, well, he's only selectively declassifying.
00:16:23.000Yeah, except he made the entire Mueller report, which he could have remained classified.
00:17:23.000So is the complaint that Trump is keeping things secret or that he is making things open?
00:17:27.000The Washington Post reports today, President Trump has granted Attorney General William Barr full and complete authority to declassify government secrets, issuing a memorandum late on Thursday that orders U.S.
00:17:37.000intelligence agencies to cooperate promptly with Barr's audit of the investigation into Russia's election interference in 2016.
00:17:43.000Now, the reason that Trump is issuing that order is because Trump suspects And it may be right that there are members of the FBI and the CIA who are going to attempt not to comply with his orders, not to comply with Attorney General Barr, and to throw stonewalls in the, to stonewall Barr in this particular investigation.
00:18:01.000The president has long suspected that there are institutional forces working against him inside the intelligence community, the so-called deep state.
00:18:08.000And there were, in fact, those forces working against him during the 2016 campaign.
00:18:11.000I mean, this is not under controversy.
00:18:12.000Peter Strzok was openly texting his mistress, Lisa Page, about setting up insurance programs against Trump being elected and talking about how Trump would never become president and all of the rest of this.
00:18:21.000I mean, it was so bad that the inspector general of the DOJ, Michael Horowitz, chided Strzok and Strzok ended up being fired.
00:18:28.000According to the Post, the president's move gives Barr broad powers to unveil carefully guarded intelligence secrets about the Russia investigation.
00:18:35.000Now again, I think this is a good strategy.
00:18:36.000General requested to allow him to quickly carry out his review, according to the memo.
00:18:40.000The White House said today's action will ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred and the actions that were taken during the last presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions.
00:18:50.000Now, again, I think this is a good strategy.
00:18:53.000I think the president should have done this a long time ago.
00:18:55.000There were a lot of complaints that the FISA warrant against Carter Page was unjustified, that it was based solely on the Steele dossier, that it was basically concocted by Trump's enemies to go after people who worked with Trump And I've been saying for years on this program, OK, so why doesn't the president just declassify that?
00:19:42.000About what exactly went down during the Trump-Russia investigation.
00:19:46.000And those questions are not illegitimate in the way that so many Democrats seem to be suggesting that they are.
00:19:55.000Conservative lawmakers have insisted to friends in the administration that declassifying documents will help Trump protect his presidency and further distance himself from any political fallout from the Russia investigation.
00:20:04.000The move is likely to further anger Democrats who have said that Barr is using his position as the nation's top law enforcement official to aggressively protect the president and attack his critics.
00:20:12.000Again, declassifying material that we've been talking about for three years seems to me a much better strategy than allowing selective leaks of those materials from Congress From members of the intelligence community.
00:20:25.000Remember, Andrew McCabe, for example, lost his pension and his job with the FBI because he was leaking material to, I believe it was the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
00:20:36.000That material happened to be about Hillary Clinton and the FBI's ongoing investigation.
00:20:40.000Nonetheless, if it comes to selective leaks being made by so-called members of the deep state versus broad declassification of materials that we've been talking about for years, I'm very much in favor of Trump declassifying a lot of this stuff.
00:20:55.000Now, is Trump right to be suspicious about the handling of the Trump-Russia collusion case?
00:21:01.000I think there are certainly questions to be asked at this point.
00:21:03.000Aaron Klein has a really interesting piece over at Breitbart.
00:21:06.000Aaron is a good reporter, and he has a piece talking about William Barr's statements last week.
00:21:11.000So last week, William Barr appeared on TV, and there he explained that what was interesting is that this investigation was handled at the very senior level of these various departments.
00:21:22.000It wasn't handled sort of in ordinary fashion.
00:21:25.000The thing that's interesting about this is that this was handled at a very senior level of these departments.
00:21:31.000It wasn't handled in the ordinary way that investigations or counterintelligence activities are conducted.
00:21:38.000It was sort of an ad hoc small group and most of these people are no longer with the FBI or the CIA or the other agencies involved.
00:21:46.000I think there's a misconception out there that we know a lot about what happened.
00:21:51.000The fact of the matter is Bob Mueller did not look As Aaron Klein points out, there was a report from the Washington Post back in June of 2017 specifically talking about how this investigation was carried out.
00:22:05.000In a second, I want to talk a little bit about some of the questions that are legit about the investigation, the Trump-Russia investigation.
00:22:10.000Again, I am skeptical of the claims that this thing was initiated totally in bad faith.
00:22:14.000My considered take, based on the evidence at this point, is that it may have been initiated in good faith, and then it quickly morphed into a bad faith effort that may not have been completely conscious.
00:22:23.000It was people who were simply looking for evidence that confirmed their prior biases against President Trump, and that's how that investigation seemed to proceed.
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00:23:50.000So why exactly would President Trump and William Barr be suspicious of the way in which the Trump-Mueller investigation was pursued?
00:23:58.000I think one of the reasons they'd be suspicious is because, as Barr says, this thing was pursued at the top levels of the Obama administration.
00:24:06.000Aaron Klein over at the Washington, over at Breitbart, points out a Washington Post article published in June 2017.
00:24:13.000According to that report, CIA Director John Brennan convened a secret task force at CIA headquarters composed of several dozen analysts and officers from the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI.
00:24:23.000Apparently the unit was so secretive it functioned as a quote-unquote sealed compartment, hidden even from the rest of the U.S.
00:24:30.000The unit reported to top officials, the newspaper documented.
00:24:33.000They worked exclusively for two groups of customers, officials said.
00:24:36.000The first was Obama and fewer than 14 senior officials in government.
00:24:39.000The second was a team of operations specialists at the CIA, NSA, and FBI who took direction from the task force on where to aim their subsequent efforts to collect more intelligence on Russia.
00:24:49.000The number of Obama administration officials, says Aaron Klein, who are allowed access to the Russian intelligence was also highly limited.
00:24:55.000At first, only four senior officials were involved.
00:24:57.000John Brennan, the Director of Intelligence James Clapper, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and then FBI Director James Comey.
00:25:04.000Their aides were all barred from attending the initial meetings and gradually that circle widened to include Biden.
00:25:10.000Agendas were sent to cabinet secretaries and they arrived in envelopes that subordinates were not supposed to open.
00:25:15.000This is not according to Breitbart, this is according to the Washington Post.
00:25:18.000Does all of this make you at least a little suspicious?
00:25:20.000I think it's not unreasonable to be suspicious.
00:25:21.000That's why declassification would be useful.
00:25:23.000The more we see, the better at this point.
00:25:24.000during meetings so that aides were not able to see what exactly was going on behind closed doors.
00:25:29.000Does all of this make you at least a little suspicious?
00:25:32.000I think it's not unreasonable to be suspicious.
00:25:33.000That's why declassification would be useful.
00:25:35.000The more we see, the better at this point.
00:25:38.000And meanwhile, in other news, Theresa May, the prime minister of Britain, is now officially making it clear that she has resigned.
00:25:47.000She's making way for a new prime minister after she failed to shepherd through Brexit.
00:25:53.000For folks who don't remember the whole Brexit controversy, basically, the people of Great Britain voted that they no longer wish to be part of the European Union.
00:25:59.000They were sick of the regulations from unelected bureaucrats at the EU level.
00:26:02.000They were sick of all of the industrial regulations, the immigration regulations that were coming down from Brussels.
00:26:08.000These were people they had not voted for.
00:26:13.000And then the politicians in Britain got scared of the EU because the EU said, OK, well, if you leave, we're not going to make a deal with you on trade.
00:26:21.000If you leave, then we are basically going to blackmail you.
00:26:23.000And the politicians in Britain said, well, we're scared of that, so we're not going to leave, basically.
00:26:29.000And they kept proposing deal after deal after deal.
00:26:31.000They kept being rejected deal after deal after deal.
00:26:34.000May finally turned in the keys to the car.
00:26:36.000She basically said, "I can't do this anymore.
00:26:40.000I am capable of pushing at this point." Here she was today explaining why she's leaving. - It is and will always remain a matter of deep regret to me that I have not been able to deliver Brexit.
00:26:51.000It will be for my successor to seek a way forward that honors the result of the referendum.
00:26:58.000I will shortly leave the job that it has been the honour of my life to hold.
00:27:04.000The second female Prime Minister, but certainly not the last.
00:27:09.000I do so with no ill will, but with enormous and enduring gratitude to have had the opportunity to serve the country I love.
00:27:21.000Yes, obviously she's pretty upset about everything that's been going on.
00:27:24.000She was trying to negotiate a deal, like in her defense, she was trying to negotiate a deal that allowed Britain to keep a lot of the trade benefits of being part of the EU without keeping some of the regulations.
00:27:33.000And she presented a deal that was insufficient.
00:27:42.000Because in new polls, the Brexit party, which did not exist until five minutes ago, led by Nigel Farage, has become sort of an American fixture in media, thanks to the popularity of Brexit.
00:27:51.000Nigel Farage is now leading in the polls.
00:27:53.000His party is getting more voters combined than Conservative and Labour.
00:27:57.000Which is an amazing, amazing statement right now.
00:28:00.000Now, is he going to end up being prime minister?
00:28:02.000Probably the Conservative Party is now going to nominate somebody to put forward somebody at the top of their list, like Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London, who is this very colorful figure, almost a Trump-like figure at the head of their party, who will likely be the next prime minister.
00:28:16.000He's the Anzan favorite in betting markets to be the next prime minister of Britain.
00:28:20.000His sole job will be to deliver Brexit.
00:28:23.000If that's a clean Brexit, it's a so-called no-deal Brexit, then it's a no-deal Brexit, meaning they don't make a pre-existing arrangement with the EU, they just say we're out.
00:28:30.000Now I think that what May was trying to mitigate against was leaving, and then there were some economic consequences to that because the EU tries to punish the UK for leaving.
00:28:40.000And at that point, the Conservative Party pays the price for having implemented Brexit.
00:28:44.000But it's obvious that her own party wants it.
00:28:49.000The people of Britain want this, and they are sick of being told by their political class not to move forward with this.
00:28:54.000We spoke yesterday on our radio show with Douglas Carswell, who is the founder of Vote Leave and a former member of the UK Independent Party, and he discussed the fact That all of this was eventually going to lead to the people of Britain getting what they wanted.
00:29:09.000And the Remainers, who are much of the political class, are simply not up for it.
00:29:13.000Carswell, by the way, is not a trade restrictionist.
00:29:15.000So there's been a lot of lying press about what exactly Brexit is designed to do.
00:29:19.000That Brexit is designed to basically erect a wall around Britain or something like that.
00:29:23.000I know many of the leaders of the Brexit movement, including people like Daniel Hannan, who was pushing to eliminate his own job.
00:29:30.000He was a member of the EU Parliament and he was pushing to eliminate his own job.
00:29:34.000And he's been saying for a long time he's a free trader.
00:29:37.000But having a free trade relationship with the EU does not require you to accept Brussels' determination on who gets to live in Britain, for example.
00:29:48.000May said she said that she said, quote, I believe it was right to persevere even when the odds against success seemed high.
00:29:53.000It is and will always be a matter of deep regret.
00:29:56.000I have not been able to deliver Brexit.
00:29:59.000So she now joins a series of conservative prime ministers who have fallen over the question of Britain's relationship with Europe.
00:30:04.000David Cameron, John Major, Margaret Thatcher.
00:30:06.000All of them were ousted in part because they could not get their party to agree on how closely tied Britain and the continent should be, according to the Washington Post.
00:30:13.000May had spent two years negotiating in secret a Brexit withdrawal deal with the EU, only to see it rejected three times by the House of Commons.
00:30:20.000Many of her own conservatives refused to support her.
00:30:22.000Earlier this week, she was still vowing to push on, offering a tweaked version of her Brexit plan.
00:30:26.000It was rejected so swiftly and resoundingly by so many lawmakers, including members of her own cabinet, it became clear that she was going to be ushered out Very, very soon.
00:30:35.000Now, there are a bunch of people who are jockeying for position inside the, inside the Conservative Party.
00:30:40.000As I say, Boris Johnson, who once said that his chances of being Prime Minister are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, is the current favorite in opinion polls and betting markets to become the next British Prime Minister.
00:30:51.000On Friday, Johnson came forward and complimented May on a very dignified statement.
00:30:55.000He tweeted his thanks to her for her stoical service and said it was now time to follow her dreams to come together and deliver Brexit.
00:31:03.000Nicola Sturgeon is a leader of the Scottish National Party and added that Johnson was some form of hypocrite.
00:31:11.000Johnson is popular with the conservative grassroots.
00:31:12.000He served two terms as mayor of London, which traditionally votes Labour, proving he has some cross-party appeal.
00:31:17.000He lost support in some circles after the 2016 referendum.
00:31:21.000He put himself forward as the face of the Brexit campaign.
00:31:23.000He served as foreign secretary under May, but he had already left.
00:31:26.000Anybody who is still basically in this cabinet is not going to be prime minister anymore.
00:31:29.000Other possible contenders, former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab, environmental secretary Michael Gove.
00:31:35.000Raab is sort of the outsider pick to be prime minister if it is not Boris Johnson.
00:31:39.000Any lawmaker can put their name forward as long as they have the backing of two conservative members of parliament.
00:31:45.000So it'll be interesting to see where they go from here.
00:31:47.000It is obvious, though, that the people of Britain have effectively rejected and conservative party members have effectively rejected the idea of some sort of soft deal with the EU, which hopes to govern them from above.
00:32:07.000So in a second, we're going to get to The news that Julian Assange is now being prosecuted under the Espionage Act, we'll talk about the complications inherent in that sort of prosecution first.
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00:34:02.000If you annualize that monthly subscription, You get this Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumbler, which is magnificent.
00:34:37.000So, meanwhile, in other news, the DOJ is now accusing Julian Assange of violating the Espionage Act, According to Politico, the Justice Department has hit WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with Espionage Act charges, escalating a legal fight against the high-profile activist, alarming press freedom activists.
00:34:51.000The DOJ had previously only indicted Assange on a single count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.
00:34:57.000Thursday's revelation of the additional 18 charges filed in the Eastern District of Virginia means that Assange could face significantly more prison time if found guilty.
00:35:05.000The alleged Espionage Act violations relate to Assange's complicity with Chelsea Manning, Bradley Manning, a former U.S.
00:35:11.000Army soldier who was convicted in July 2013 of violating the Espionage Act after she, He shuttled troves of classified government information to Wikileaks.
00:35:21.000Officials said that Assange solicited the information from and then brazenly published details that put the government's human sources at risk.
00:35:26.000Now, the original charges suggested that Assange was working with Manning to actually hack the government.
00:35:35.000And that charge may or may not have been sustainable.
00:35:38.000Now they are charging him under the Espionage Act.
00:35:40.000Now traditionally the Espionage Act has been used against government officials like Manning because if you are a traitor to the United States who decides to hack into classified information and then reveal it to the public, you're violating public trust.
00:35:52.000You're not allowed to treat classified material that way unless you happen to be Hillary Clinton.
00:35:55.000But Under the Espionage Act, it's been pretty controversial whether you can prosecute a quote-unquote journalist for publishing that material.
00:36:02.000So, for example, in the Pentagon Papers case, the Pentagon Papers case surrounded the release of the Pentagon Papers, which were these secret studies about Vietnam, by the New York Times.
00:36:12.000The Supreme Court rejected the government's attempts to prevent the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing a leaked copy of a top-secret study of the Vietnam War.
00:36:22.000It simply said that the government had not met its heavy burden of justifying a prior restraint on publication.
00:36:26.000So in other words, they couldn't say preemptively that the New York Times and Washington Post could not publish.
00:36:31.000However, the court did say that you might be able to punish somebody after the fact for having published.
00:36:37.000Prior restraints require a greater burden of proof than punishment after the fact.
00:36:41.000Also, you have to ask, what kind of classified material is being published?
00:36:46.000Is it classified material that does damage to the United States in terms of PR, or does it actually put human beings at risk?
00:36:54.000So, for example, Justice Potter Stewart, who wrote a concurring opinion in that case, he said he was convinced that the executive is correct with respect to some of the documents involved, but I cannot say that disclosure of any of them will surely result in direct, immediate, and irreparable damage to our nation or its people.
00:37:07.000Well, that's not the case with a lot of the documents that were promoted by WikiLeaks.
00:37:10.000They included actual material sources of intelligence, the names of people who are cooperating with Americans in Afghanistan, in Iraq.
00:37:19.000The State Department begged Assange not to release that stuff.
00:37:21.000Assange went ahead and released that stuff anyway.
00:37:24.000Now, one thing that's always been very fuzzy is, does this mean that the press have some sort of different rights than any other normal human being?
00:37:31.000Like, freedom of the press under the First Amendment is not a suggestion that you get a badge that says journalist on it and now you have extra rights.
00:37:39.000Freedom of the press means that the government cannot stop you from printing things.
00:37:42.000However, can the government stop you from revealing classified information that endangers American soldiers overseas?
00:37:52.000Otherwise, they couldn't really prosecute anybody for even hacking into America's documents and then revealing them.
00:37:57.000Why there should be a journalistic exception to this rule is beyond me.
00:38:03.000The government should in fact have to prove that the material that they seek to restrict is presenting a serious danger because otherwise you can't have any government oversight at all.
00:38:14.000You can't have whistleblowers, you can't have leakers, you can't have any of that stuff.
00:38:17.000So this does present a serious constitutional issue.
00:38:20.000One of the issues also is whether Julian Assange is entitled to those protections given the fact that Julian Assange may in fact be basically a Russian front.
00:38:26.000If Julian Assange is a Russian front, then this is not just a matter of a quote-unquote journalist revealing information, then it's a matter of an enemy party revealing information about the United States directed at damaging the United States.
00:38:39.000It raises all sorts of kind of fascinating legal issues.
00:38:42.000There's a really interesting piece from a few years back from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press about WikiLeaks.
00:38:48.000And in that piece, they basically suggest that journalists have never been successfully prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
00:38:54.000So the question is going to be whether Assange changes that precedent.
00:38:58.000Whether he can be successfully prosecuted under the act.
00:39:02.000Barack Obama, by the way, repeatedly invoked the Espionage Act in order to prosecute people.
00:39:06.000He prosecuted something like seven people under the Espionage Act.
00:39:35.000when President Trump was praising WikiLeaks.
00:39:37.000So this is not personal animus that Trump has against Julian Assange or anything like that, or personal animus for the DOJ against WikiLeaks.
00:39:43.000WikiLeaks has been an extraordinarily dangerous player in this space for a decade at this point.
00:39:49.000Alrighty, it's time for some mailbag because it is a Friday, so let's jump.
00:39:55.000I'm a 17-year-old high school student at a school that is about 99% leftist, not liberal, in Los Angeles.
00:40:01.000I've been listening to you almost every day for about a year and wanted to say thank you for everything you do.
00:40:04.000My question is, I just gave a full pro-life statement to my high school newspaper, and I'm wondering if you have any advice on how I can weather the storm I'm sure to receive from classmates, friends, and even teachers that will call me all sorts of names and attack my character.
00:40:15.000Well, I mean, this is a character-building exercise, dude.
00:40:17.000I gotta say, you know, as somebody who's been in the public eye since I was basically 17 years old your age, You think that you've grown a thick skin, and then you realize every five minutes that you need to grow another layer of skin.
00:40:29.000I mean, at this point, I basically look like The Thing, in terms of personality, from The Fantastic Four.
00:40:35.000I mean, you just grow layers and layers of thicker and thicker skin until you look like a rock human.
00:40:40.000That's effectively what you have to do here.
00:40:42.000You're gonna take hits, but that is what being in the arena is all about.
00:40:47.000I would say don't go out of your way to insult anybody.
00:40:50.000It's not a rule that I've always kept myself, but Most of my regrets happen to be insulting people that I look back and I say, well, that's probably not something I should have done.
00:40:57.000It's something I've been trying to work on myself.
00:40:59.000So if I have advice to young people, it is only speak when you are particularly sure of what you are saying.
00:41:05.000Make sure that you are double sure of what you are saying, because the fact is that we now live in a media environment where anything you say publicly when you are 16, or privately as it turns out, when you are 16 or 17 years old, can be used against you by your political opponents.
00:41:17.000So you just have to be extraordinarily careful.
00:41:19.000And also, try to cultivate a level of character that you wish that your opponents had.
00:41:23.000So, try not to engage in character attacks.
00:42:18.000Well, the truth is that the vision of modern science, the idea of hypothesis and hypothesis being rejected by evidence, that sort of science, experimental science, is unique to the West.
00:42:28.000There's a difference between technological progress, which does exist in a vast number of civilizations, and that technological progress is generally linked to the human need to overcome the environment around them.
00:42:39.000There's a difference between that and the pure idea of exploring science for its own sake, which then has technical applications later.
00:42:45.000That is something that seems fairly unique to the West, which is why you see thinkers in the West, like Isaac Newton, who are trying to figure out general rules of the universe.
00:42:56.000In a way that very few people were doing in other civilizations.
00:42:59.000That doesn't mean that every other person in every other civilization was incapable of doing this.
00:43:03.000Obviously, there were strides in science and mathematics particularly in the Indian world, as in like India, in the Indian world in the first millennium.
00:43:14.000But the great expanse of science was deeply wedded to, historically speaking, the Judeo-Christian belief that in order to investigate God, you had to investigate God's universe.
00:43:27.000And that was tied to a Greek natural law evidentiary-based position that the way to discover natural rules was to look at the evidence.
00:43:49.000The question is, why is it that the West came up with this idea of science, this generalized idea of science, which was then used to create tremendous technological change far beyond what you get if you were just in a field and you needed to figure out how to make a plow work better, for example.
00:44:04.000There is a difference between generalized science and technological and kind of incremental technological change.
00:44:14.000Michael says, Ben, what do you think of the post-Keynesian argument that says government deficit spending, as long as we're not at full employment, is a net positive on the economy?
00:44:22.000That it's putting more money into the economy than it's taking out, while surpluses are a net drain, since the government is taxing more out than it is spending back in.
00:44:29.000Well, I don't believe in government surpluses as a general rule.
00:44:31.000I don't think that the government should be taking in money unless they intend on using that surplus for something useful.
00:44:37.000A government surplus is effectively the government confiscating wealth from people that they do not use, and that seems to me a confiscation that is unjustified.
00:44:47.000As far as the post-Keynesian argument, the general argument that government deficit spending is inherently a good, that widespread government deficit spending is inherently a good, it's good until it's not.
00:44:57.000It's just like credit card spending is good until it's not.
00:45:00.000It's great, you can buy all sorts of stuff, and then the credit card bill comes in, and then things go to hell in a handbasket.
00:45:05.000Right now, the United States is riding on the fact that we are the most powerful economy in the world and in world history, that there are no near rivals for it, and thus the dollar remains strong, people continue to invest in our bonds, and all of the rest.
00:45:17.000That's true, so long as we don't radically regulate our economy, raise taxes, engage in Green New Deal-type silliness.
00:45:24.000But there will come a point where people are going to recognize that $21 trillion in debt ain't getting paid off anytime soon.
00:45:29.000And when that happens, then we're cruising for a bruising.
00:45:31.000Joshua says, First of all, thank you so much for your service.
00:45:50.000Well, criminal law, I mean, there are some pretty good criminal law textbooks that are out there.
00:45:54.000I would say in terms of constitutional law, some of my favorite books on constitutional law include A Matter of Interpretation by Justice Scalia, a very slim volume that sort of explains constitutional theory.
00:46:03.000I disagree with him about stare decisis, but his general take on how to read constitutional text is correct.
00:46:09.000I think that you should check out Robert Bork's The Tempting of America, which is a really nice history of the court and what exactly the court has done throughout American history.
00:46:18.000Mark Levin has a really good simplified version, I think, of Bork's book called Men in Black from maybe 15 or 20 years ago that's a pretty good synopsis of court All that stuff is pretty good and then obviously read the basics, the Federalist Papers, read the Constitution itself.
00:46:33.000The Heritage Foundation has a wonderful guide to the Constitution with case references and everything.
00:46:40.000I'd recommend going and picking that up from Amazon.
00:46:43.000Why isn't making adoption more affordable at the top of most Republican policies?
00:46:46.000I know Alabama, where I live, is kicking butt at adoption in the state right now.
00:46:49.000My wife and I have looked into ourselves a few times.
00:46:51.000The financial side can be pretty daunting.
00:46:53.000Generally, I'm in favor of government being involved in it as little as possible, but can it be considered conservative to think that tax dollars should go toward taking care of orphans and putting them in a loving home?
00:47:01.000Trying to reconcile my feelings on adoption with my small government feelings.
00:47:06.000So as far as making adoption simpler, yes, regulations on adoption should be largely relieved.
00:47:13.000It should be easier for people to adopt.
00:47:17.000As far as tax incentives being driven toward adoption, I think that tax rates generally should be lowered.
00:47:26.000As far as tax incentives being driven toward adoption, As a libertarian, I'm not generally in favor of the government quote-unquote promoting policy via tax dollars.
00:47:32.000With that said, you know, we do have a tax system that right now has to care for people who cannot take care of themselves.
00:47:38.000And that going toward the taking care of orphans and then shifting them toward adoptive homes seems like a not terrible idea to me.
00:48:09.000Also, do you think if Edward Snowden changed his name and sex like Manning's, you think he would have gotten a pardon from Obama too?
00:48:13.000Well, apparently that was the pattern because there was no reason for Chelsea Manning to actually be pardoned.
00:48:17.000Chelsea Manning was not in any way contrite about having hacked U.S.
00:48:22.000classified materials and then exposed it to WikiLeaks.
00:48:24.000Chelsea Manning should still be sitting in jail, obviously.
00:48:27.000When it comes to Edward Snowden, I think two things can be true at once.
00:48:31.000One, some of the information we got from Edward Snowden was important for the public to know.
00:48:35.000And two, Edward Snowden is not a hero.
00:48:37.000Edward Snowden was pretty obviously working with the Russian government, and Edward Snowden Which is why he tried to take refuge in Russia.
00:48:44.000And Edward Snowden, I do not think is a good guy.
00:48:46.000So, good people can sometimes, bad people can sometimes give you material that you need.
00:49:00.000I don't think it's heroism to hack America's classified documents and hand them over in bulk to people who do not care about America's national security.
00:49:08.000At the same time, I'm glad some of that stuff is available to the American public so we know the extent of the government's surveillance upon us.
00:49:13.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:49:23.000I was only made aware of this recently.
00:49:25.000Sonny Bunch, who I will admit is my favorite movie reviewer, he said that Olympus Has Fallen was a great movie, which is to say that it was going to be retrograde and politically incorrect and all the rest.
00:51:25.000It's like you just continue to carve into the onion and there are more layers of delusion beneath the layers of delusion.
00:51:29.000Here's Stacey Abrams, a woman who is being thought of as a possible VP contender on the basis of losing a Georgia gubernatorial race, talking about how she's the actual governor of Georgia and how she won.
00:51:41.000For those of us who are in this coalition of new and engaged, who are in this pursuit of progress, we have to recognize that the internal threat we face is a fear of who we are.
00:51:52.000The notion of identity politics has been peddled for the last 10 years and it's been used as a dog whistle to say that we shouldn't pay too much attention to the new voices coming into progress.
00:52:03.000I would argue that identity politics is exactly who we are, and it's exactly how we won.
00:52:08.000By centering communities in Georgia, we not only increased voter participation, we brought new folks to the process.
00:52:15.000Identity politics isn't just who we are, it's how we won?
00:52:21.000Second of all, identity politics is not who we are.
00:52:24.000If you're a rational human being, you try to get beyond the identity politics, you try to get beyond the notion that you are just what your group identity says that you are, that you are not merely a person who is quote-unquote Born a Jew, ethnically, or born black, in the case of Stacey Abrams, then instead you're supposed to find a set of ideas that you wish to espouse and then have discussions about those ideas with others.
00:52:47.000This is the basis of a republic, particularly a multi-ethnic republic.
00:52:51.000If you're going to have a multi-ethnic republic in which everybody sort of reverts back to their own innate genetic identity, and that's the only argument that you can make, you can't have a republic.
00:53:01.000So, layers of delusion from Stacey Abrams.
00:53:03.000The fact that she's been so widely praised by the media is Absolutely astonishing to me.
00:53:07.000She may be a good speaker, but she is also at this point engaged in tremendous levels of delusion.
00:53:23.000He left his home in California in 1998 to study Arabic in Yemen.
00:53:27.000He then went to Pakistan in 2000, and then he went to Afghanistan, and he served as a Taliban volunteer in Al-Qaeda training camp.
00:53:33.000And then, he was held at a prison near Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan, where an uprising claimed the first U.S.
00:53:39.000casualty of war, a 32-year-old CIA officer named Johnny Michael Spann.
00:53:43.000Spann was killed after questioning Lind, although the government didn't offer evidence that Lind had participated in the revolted trial.
00:53:48.000He pled guilty to charges of providing support to the Taliban and carrying a rifle and a grenade.
00:53:53.000Now, in days past, this person would have been put up against a wall and shot for treason.
00:53:58.000Now, he gets put in jail, taken care of for 20 years, and then let out despite the fact that according to the National Counterterrorism Center, Lind had quote, continued to advocate for global jihad and to write and translate violent extremist texts.
00:54:28.000The good news is that eventually he'll end up as a professor at a major American university, because that's pretty much all it takes these days is to hate America with a deep and abiding passion.
00:54:36.000Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of Ben Shapiro Show, or we'll see you here on Monday, and have a wonderful weekend.