The Ben Shapiro Show - Donald Trump’s Dreams Come True | Ep. 745

00:00:00.000 Fallout from the Mueller Report continues.

00:00:02.000 Michael Avenatti faces down handcuffs, but not the kind that he likes.

00:00:05.000 And Vice President Pence heads to AIPAC.

00:00:07.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:08.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:14.000 So, there's a lot of news to get to today.

00:00:15.000 There's some breaking news about Jussie Smollett that we will try to get to if time permits it.

00:00:20.000 Lots and lots of stuff happening right this very instant.

00:00:22.000 But before we get to any of that, let's talk about the fact that our federal government is out of control.

00:00:26.000 It's been out of control for a very long time.

00:00:29.000 And it's been out of control because the federal government has essentially been restructured to run roughshod over the checks and balances that were inherent in the Constitution of the United States.

00:00:36.000 And this is why I am a big believer in calling a convention of states where we the people can propose amendments to the Constitution to protect the Constitution itself from the predations of the federal government.

00:00:46.000 That means overreach by the executive branch.

00:00:48.000 It means overreach by the legislative branch.

00:00:50.000 It means the legislative branch kicking too much power to the executive, and the executive kicking too much power to the judiciary.

00:00:55.000 It means Congress threatening to undo the power of the judiciary.

00:00:59.000 It's time to protect the Constitution.

00:01:00.000 That's why I'm a fan of the Convention of States.

00:01:02.000 Can you imagine the look on the faces of members of the federal government when they realize their power has been limited, and that suddenly they have to go back to the original founding bargain of a limited government?

00:01:12.000 Well, this is what a Convention of States can help make happen.

00:01:14.000 In fact, a Convention of States may be the only way to get the job done.

00:01:17.000 There are already 3.8 million people with us on this, more every day, so join me and my friend Mark Meckler.

00:01:22.000 Go to conventionofstates.com slash ben to sign the petition today.

00:01:25.000 That is conventionofstates.com slash ben.

00:01:28.000 Let's re-enshrine the Constitution at the center of American life.

00:01:31.000 conventionofstates.com slash ben.

00:01:33.000 Go sign the petition today and join Mark Meckler and me to help restore constitutional checks and balances.

00:01:38.000 conventionofstates.com All right, so, yesterday, I was not here for our afternoon show, for the additional two hours of the show.

00:01:46.000 We kicked it over to the excorable Michael Molls, who had himself a field day, I am told.

00:01:50.000 I'll tell you how my day went.

00:01:51.000 So, I had an endoscopy scheduled for a while, and it just turned out that it fell yesterday.

00:01:57.000 And so, they gave me some propofol, and they put me under to do this endoscopy.

00:02:01.000 And when I woke up, I saw that Michael Avenatti was being prosecuted, and the icebergs in Greenland were growing.

00:02:07.000 And I thought to myself, am I still under sedation?

00:02:10.000 And did I somehow end up in President Trump's fever dream?

00:02:13.000 What exactly happened here?

00:02:15.000 Because, um, wow, like every 20 minutes there was a piece of news that was breaking for President Trump in favor of President Trump.

00:02:23.000 Most of yesterday, of course, was consumed with the reaction to the William Barr Attorney General report on the Mueller report.

00:02:29.000 It was a four page summation that we read on the podcast yesterday all about what exactly Mueller had found.

00:02:36.000 And it is necessary at this point to point out that the reactions of the people who had overzealously suggested what was in the report are astonishing to watch.

00:02:45.000 It is astonishing to watch as people double down on the confirmation bias that got them here in the first place.

00:02:51.000 And this is unfortunately a typical typical human tendency.

00:02:53.000 You are called out on something that debunks your original position.

00:02:57.000 And instead of you starting to reconsider based on the evidence or take the evidence into account, instead, what you do is you simply double down on your original perception of the issue and you look for excuses as to why this is all somebody else's fault.

00:03:09.000 Now, this does not mean that it is not hilarious because it is indeed hilarious.

00:03:13.000 The most hilarious story of the day comes courtesy of The New York Times.

00:03:16.000 Here's the headline, quote, disappointed fans of Mueller rethink the pedestal they built for him.

00:03:21.000 It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at this.

00:03:24.000 Quote, this is by Astey Herndon and Richard Fawcett.

00:03:27.000 The The sense of mourning started to take hold over the weekend, after Attorney General William P. Barr said that Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, had not found coordination between President Trump's campaign and the Russian government's election interference in 2016.

00:03:42.000 Over the nearly two years of the Mueller investigation, a segment of liberals and activists built up fervent hopes that it would bring Mr. Trump down.

00:03:48.000 They elevated Mr. Mueller, a former FBI director, into an anti-Trump cultural icon, complete with T-shirts, scented candles, and holiday-themed songs like, For some of them, the report felt like a betrayal.

00:04:01.000 To many others, it was a disappointment.

00:04:03.000 That's a hell of a range of emotional responses there.

00:04:06.000 I mean, from betrayal all the way to disappointment.

00:04:08.000 My goodness.

00:04:09.000 I was hoping the truth would come out, said Sean Foster, a 45-year-old music video and television producer in Nashville.

00:04:15.000 Mr. Foster had taken to wearing a yellow pin showing the top of the special prosecutor's head rising like a shark from the sea.

00:04:22.000 Mr. Foster said he was wearing the pin on Sunday when Mr. Barr's summary of the report came out.

00:04:27.000 It's definitely embarrassing, he said.

00:04:28.000 It's a drag knowing there are people out there who are gloating.

00:04:31.000 Well, yeah.

00:04:33.000 Also, we've all been laughing at you the whole time, dude.

00:04:35.000 Like, it's not just now.

00:04:36.000 Like, the whole time we've been laughing at you.

00:04:39.000 Now, there are some of us who, daily, wear funny hats on top of our head because we want to be reminded of the providence of God in the universe.

00:04:46.000 There are some of us Who wear shirts that proclaim political messages, you know, general political messages.

00:04:51.000 And then there are some of us who elevated a person that we did not know anything about and who is just a prosecutor into a national icon in the fervent hope that he would be the deus ex machina who ended the Trump presidency.

00:05:03.000 It's just wonderful.

00:05:05.000 Jennifer Taub, a Vermont law school professor who had become known for punchy anti-Trump columns with titles like, yes, collusion, now what, said, there are definitely people who thought that Mueller would save us.

00:05:15.000 And Mueller looked back at them and he said, No.

00:05:19.000 It's just...

00:05:21.000 Pretty amazing.

00:05:22.000 The media malfeasance here, of course, has been absolutely egregious.

00:05:25.000 Now, are the media admitting to their malfeasance?

00:05:27.000 Of course they are not.

00:05:28.000 How many articles since May 2017 have been published about Russia and Trump slash Mueller?

00:05:33.000 Since May 2017, this is according to Axios, 533,000 web articles have been published about Trump and Russia, generating 245 million interactions.

00:05:44.000 So the media did all of the election interference that the Russians didn't do in 2016, apparently.

00:05:50.000 It's all according to Newswhip.

00:05:51.000 And on the networks alone, the networks alone gave 2,284 minutes to the Russia probe, according to Newsbusters.

00:05:59.000 And that's just the networks, right?

00:06:00.000 Those are the people who have like an hour a night to give you the network news.

00:06:03.000 If you go to cable, then you are talking presumably in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of minutes, because that's been basically CNN's main programming for the last couple of years.

00:06:13.000 And it's not just that they have been programming this stuff up the wazoo.

00:06:17.000 It's also that they've been breaking false bombshells for legitimately years on end.

00:06:21.000 The Daily Caller has a really good piece about this by Amber Athey, their White House correspondent, pointing out all of the ways in which the media botched this story.

00:06:28.000 You'll recall that CNN accused Don Jr.

00:06:31.000 of WikiLeaks collusion.

00:06:32.000 She writes, last December, CNN's Manu Raju reported that WikiLeaks emailed Donald Trump Jr.

00:06:36.000 to give him access to stolen documents a full 10 days before they were released to the public.

00:06:41.000 And then it turns out their sources gave them the wrong date.

00:06:43.000 Don Jr.

00:06:44.000 received an email with access to the stolen documents after they'd been released publicly.

00:06:48.000 Remember that ABC tanked the stock market with fake Mike Flynn news.

00:06:52.000 ABC was forced to suspend Brian Ross after he falsely reported that former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was prepared to testify that then-candidate Donald Trump ordered him to make contact with the Russians.

00:07:03.000 The stock market dropped a few hundred points at the news, but the news turned out to be fake.

00:07:07.000 Now, here's the thing.

00:07:08.000 You could say this is all just the media getting it wrong.

00:07:10.000 Listen, over at Daily Wire, we've had to retract headlines before.

00:07:13.000 We've gotten stories wrong.

00:07:14.000 We publish legitimately 50 to 70 stories a day, and you do that over the course of several years, and you're talking about thousands and thousands of stories.

00:07:21.000 The question is, in what direction do all the mistakes get made?

00:07:24.000 So at our site, we're a conservative site.

00:07:26.000 We openly acknowledge we're a conservative site.

00:07:28.000 CNN, ABC, these are outlets that pretend to be objective.

00:07:32.000 And yet, oddly, every error they ever make cuts in one direction and one direction only.

00:07:37.000 How strange.

00:07:39.000 You remember that CNN reported that the Mooch was under investigation. 1.00

00:07:43.000 And the Mooch got an apology from CNN because the Mooch was not under investigation. 1.00

00:07:47.000 First of all, the Mooch was in the administration for a grand total of 32 seconds. 1.00

00:07:52.000 I'm not sure what he would have done in those 32 seconds to earn an investigation other than being the greatest guest star in the history of Trump the television show.

00:08:01.000 Bloomberg suggested that Deutsche Bank was being zeroed in on by Robert Mueller.

00:08:06.000 Jeff Sessions Jeff Sessions, it was reported, had botched protocol.

00:08:11.000 CNN said that.

00:08:12.000 That he had botched protocol when he didn't list meetings he had with the Russian ambassador on security clearance forms.

00:08:17.000 But Sessions met with them when he was in the Senate.

00:08:19.000 I mean, story after story after story.

00:08:25.000 And yet, do the media feel really contrite today?

00:08:27.000 Of course they don't.

00:08:27.000 I mean, people won Pulitzer Prizes for this stuff, guys.

00:08:30.000 People in the media won Pulitzer Prizes.

00:08:32.000 The Washington Post and the New York Times won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for their national reporting of President Trump's alleged collusion with Russia.

00:08:41.000 They received the award, this is Town Hall reporting, for quote, deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect's transition team, and his eventual administration.

00:08:59.000 Deeply sourced?

00:09:00.000 Well, not so much.

00:09:02.000 Not so much, because it turns out that half their stories were sourced incorrectly.

00:09:08.000 There was an article, for example, they published on Jared Kushner.

00:09:11.000 The report talked about Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort, Paul Manafort, meeting with a lawyer connected to the Kremlin.

00:09:17.000 In reality, they met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, who is with Fusion GPS, the group behind the fake dossier.

00:09:25.000 The Washington Post did the same thing.

00:09:27.000 You'll remember it was the Washington Post reporting that Jeff Sessions had met with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, proving, proving that collusion was on the menu.

00:09:34.000 It turns out that Sessions met with Kislyak because he sat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

00:09:40.000 And the media's malfeasance can be summed up in this one clip from Chris Matthews over at Harbaugh.

00:09:45.000 Remember, Chris Matthews, coming into the show, rolling in here.

00:09:50.000 In the middle of the Mueller investigation, Chris Matthews comes out there, comes into the show, rolls on in there, and he says, you know what?

00:09:56.000 I like to think of an aquatic metaphor.

00:09:57.000 I was at the aquarium the other day, with my wife Kathleen.

00:10:01.000 We were at the aquarium, and I'd had too much to drink, as per my usual arrangement.

00:10:06.000 I started thinking, there's a starfish, there's a clam, it's a Mueller and Trump, go!

00:10:11.000 Watching Mueller and Trump go at it, I'm reminded of biology lab back in my sophomore year at LaSalle College High School.

00:10:18.000 Remember the starfish and the clam?

00:10:20.000 I know we dissected one or the other, definitely the starfish.

00:10:23.000 Mueller reminds me of the starfish, which gets itself tight on the clam and uses all its stuff to weaken and pry open the clam.

00:10:30.000 Now, this is a battle to the death as far as the clam is concerned.

00:10:33.000 If the starfish is able to open him even a little bit, he can get him open all the way.

00:10:38.000 And that's it, of course, for the clam.

00:10:40.000 He's the starfish's lunch.

00:10:43.000 The Starfish and the Clam.

00:10:44.000 This is how the media relentlessly reported, with deeply sourced reporting, on Trump and Russia and Mao.

00:10:50.000 The Starfish and the Clam, guys!

00:10:52.000 Just like high school biology class.

00:10:54.000 I failed, by the way.

00:10:55.000 It was sad.

00:10:56.000 But it's okay, now I'm here.

00:10:58.000 I run in here in my funny chair, my weird hair.

00:11:01.000 Yeah.

00:11:03.000 Well done, media.

00:11:04.000 So in a second, we will show you how the media are so apologetic about their mistakes.

00:11:08.000 You know, they feel really bad.

00:11:09.000 That's the nice thing, is that they have really learned their lesson.

00:11:14.000 Yeah, not so much.

00:11:14.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:12:19.000 Now, as I say, one of the beautiful things about the media is that when they make a mistake, they are happy to acknowledge it.

00:12:24.000 They're really good about acknowledging the mistakes that they've made.

00:12:26.000 So, for example, people like Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN, who came out and said, no, actually, we did great.

00:12:34.000 CNN President Jeff Zucker, quote, we are not investigators, we are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did.

00:12:42.000 Oh, is that what you did?

00:12:44.000 That was... Now I get it.

00:12:45.000 That's all you were doing.

00:12:46.000 You were just reporting the facts as you knew them.

00:12:48.000 Never mind there's an entire section of the CNN website called CNN Investigates.

00:12:52.000 No, they don't do any investigations.

00:12:53.000 They're just there to report the facts as they know them, like the fact that Trump was a Russian cat's paw. 0.57

00:12:59.000 And it's not just Jeff Zucker who is defending the media's behavior in all of this.

00:13:04.000 It's so funny.

00:13:04.000 You remember after 2016, the New York Times ran an editorial in which they said, yeah, we sort of got this whole thing wrong.

00:13:11.000 Our coverage?

00:13:12.000 We sort of missed a few things.

00:13:14.000 Well, now self-reflection has become taboo in the media.

00:13:17.000 And so it's, no, we did, guys, we did great.

00:13:20.000 We did great.

00:13:21.000 You know, it's not that we got a 900 on our SATs.

00:13:23.000 It's that the test is biased.

00:13:25.000 That's what happened here.

00:13:26.000 So the New York Times writes today, After Mueller Report, News Media Leaders Defend Their Work.

00:13:31.000 By Amy Chozik.

00:13:32.000 There have been tipping points and bombshells, walls closing in and turning points, and there have been so, so many declarations of the beginning of the end that comedian John Oliver had a recurring satirical We Got Him segment on his late night HBO show, complete with jubilant marching band and sequined majorettes celebrating President Trump's downfall.

00:13:48.000 But in the swirl of reporting and speculation about the 45th president, nothing has held viewers on the edge of their seats quite like the special counsel, Robert Mueller III, and his investigation into possible ties between Mr. Trump's 2016 campaign and Russian agents.

00:14:01.000 The storyline had it all.

00:14:02.000 Cold War-era intrigue, allegations of shadowy meetings in Moscow, and all of the rest.

00:14:07.000 The news media got it wrong, obviously, but are they feeling bad about any of this?

00:14:12.000 No, no, no, no, no. 0.97

00:14:14.000 That's silly.

00:14:15.000 Zucker said in an email, a sitting president's own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation.

00:14:20.000 That's not enormous because the media says so.

00:14:22.000 That's enormous because it's unprecedented.

00:14:24.000 Well, except if the media coverage helped drive the investigation in the first place.

00:14:28.000 Bill Gruskin, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, where all good journalists go, said, Mueller and Barr need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

00:14:36.000 Do we file charges or don't we?

00:14:38.000 Journalists don't have that standard.

00:14:39.000 In other words, Pulitzer Prize winning reports of alleged wrongdoing do not need to provide evidence of criminality in order to be factual, newsworthy and relevant to readers.

00:14:48.000 That's not really the question.

00:14:50.000 The question is whether you blew all of this out of proportion and suggested that around every corner lay the end of the Trump presidency.

00:14:55.000 Martin Barron, executive editor of The Washington Post, said, quote, the special counsel investigation documented, as we reported, extensive Russian interference in the 2016 election and widespread deceit on the part of certain advisers to the president about Russian contacts and other matters.

00:15:09.000 Our job is to bring facts to light.

00:15:11.000 And yet, strangely, it seems as though your entire narrative is that the president was about to be impeached.

00:15:15.000 How strange.

00:15:15.000 See, there are two types of bias.

00:15:16.000 There's bias in how you cover a story, and then there is selection bias in what you choose to cover.

00:15:20.000 to determine whether or not there is illegality.

00:15:22.000 That's right, it isn't.

00:15:23.000 And yet strangely, it seems as though your entire narrative is that the president was about to be impeached.

00:15:28.000 How strange.

00:15:29.000 See, there are two types of bias.

00:15:30.000 There's bias in how you cover a story, and then there is selection bias in what you choose to cover.

00:15:35.000 And the media demonstrated both here.

00:15:37.000 I'm gonna show you case in point, Chris Cuomo over at CNN.

00:15:40.000 So, case in point, Chris Cuomo over at CNN.

00:15:44.000 Here's a flashback.

00:15:45.000 This is a month ago.

00:15:47.000 He said that President Trump would certainly be under pressure after the Mueller report.

00:15:50.000 This was not editorializing, this was objective newsification.

00:15:53.000 Journalism-ing at the highest level.

00:15:55.000 Chris Cuomo journalism-ing all over everyone.

00:15:58.000 This block of wood, the less smart of the Cuomo brothers, which is a hell of a statement.

00:16:02.000 Here he was a month ago, saying that President Trump would be, dun dun dun dun dun dun, under pressure.

00:16:07.000 This is going to be an especially chaotic time.

00:16:10.000 This president will be under pressure, in all likelihood, like he's never been before.

00:16:14.000 Not because he's going to be removed in cuffs, but because, almost certainly, he's not going to like things in the report.

00:16:20.000 But get ready.

00:16:20.000 A storm is coming.

00:16:21.000 Expect the president and his allies to throw everything they have at you, to make as much noise as possible, to distract and obfuscate.

00:16:28.000 And expect those who seek advantage in any negative information to spin it fast and hard as well.

00:16:34.000 Okay, well, spinning fast and hard is actually Chris Cuomo's main job at CNN.

00:16:38.000 Yesterday, Rudy Giuliani called him out on this.

00:16:40.000 He said, maybe you should apologize for your coverage.

00:16:42.000 And Chris Cuomo's like, me?

00:16:45.000 Me?

00:16:46.000 I'm great.

00:16:46.000 I'm the best journalist you've ever seen.

00:16:48.000 I've journalized all over everyone.

00:16:51.000 Everywhere. 0.97

00:16:51.000 Here's Chris Cuomo defending his dumbiness. 0.97

00:16:55.000 You guys, on this network, have tortured this man for two years with collusion, and nobody's apologized.

00:17:01.000 First of all, before we talk about obstruction, apologize for the overreaction and collusion.

00:17:06.000 Not a chance.

00:17:06.000 Well, of course you're not.

00:17:07.000 Not a chance, and I'll tell you why.

00:17:08.000 Of course you're not, because you're not being fair.

00:17:09.000 No, please.

00:17:10.000 You know better than that, or you wouldn't be here.

00:17:11.000 No, I don't know better.

00:17:12.000 I am outraged by the behavior of these networks.

00:17:14.000 Okay.

00:17:14.000 Collusion, collusion, collusion, collusion, collusion, collusion.

00:17:18.000 No collusion, Chris.

00:17:19.000 No collusion.

00:17:20.000 Here's my case.

00:17:20.000 Apologize.

00:17:21.000 Never.

00:17:22.000 Here's my case.

00:17:22.000 Never?

00:17:23.000 Never.

00:17:23.000 I didn't do anything wrong.

00:17:24.000 These questions are real.

00:17:25.000 They needed to be regarded as such, and they needed to be investigated.

00:17:29.000 Oh, well.

00:17:30.000 Oh, well.

00:17:31.000 Chris Cuomo's got nothing to apologize for, guys.

00:17:32.000 Nothing.

00:17:33.000 Their total coverage over at CNN has... If you watch CNN, you could have come down on either side of the issue.

00:17:38.000 Either Trump was a traitor, or he was also a traitor. 0.95

00:17:41.000 Those were the two sides of the issue that you could have come down on if you regularly watch CNN. 0.99

00:17:44.000 I know, because it was on at the gym all the time while I was working out.

00:17:48.000 So it's not like I've never watched CNN, okay?

00:17:50.000 I watched CNN for two years do this routine, and yet the media, are they going to take an introspective look, and maybe, maybe, whether they ought to have provided a couple of different perspectives, Maybe whether they ought to have taken a breath before they reported that the president was probably in league with Vladimir Putin.

00:18:06.000 Maybe they should have stopped acting so overwhelmingly excited every time they appeared on TV with a new piece of bombshell breaking news.

00:18:15.000 Maybe?

00:18:15.000 No, no, no.

00:18:15.000 They're not going to do any of those things.

00:18:17.000 The best example of confirmation bias at work was on The View yesterday, because the members of The View, like Joy Behar, are the bumper sticker version of CNN.

00:18:27.000 They're the sort of people who do wear Mueller pins around the office.

00:18:31.000 Here was Joy Behar beside herself yesterday.

00:18:33.000 She couldn't deal with the fact that the Mueller report had not been everything that she had hoped that it would be.

00:18:38.000 I have questions about obstruction.

00:18:39.000 Why did he keep his conversations with Putin secret?

00:18:45.000 Those are like little questions that sound like obstruction to me.

00:18:49.000 So I don't buy that he's completely exonerated the way he just said.

00:18:54.000 He says he's completely exonerated.

00:18:56.000 But the Republican Party are bashing him up on that.

00:18:58.000 I'm reluctant to talk about it at all because, you know, we don't know anything.

00:19:03.000 And we have not seen this report.

00:19:05.000 So I think everybody needs to pump the brakes when we talk about this being a huge victory for this administration.

00:19:12.000 Guys, we don't know anything.

00:19:13.000 Like, two days ago, we knew everything. 1.00

00:19:15.000 We knew that Trump was a traitor. 0.96

00:19:16.000 Now, we don't know anything. 0.99

00:19:17.000 We gotta hold up, guys.

00:19:18.000 We gotta hold up.

00:19:18.000 You remember, they did the exact same thing with Jussie Smollett.

00:19:20.000 As soon as Jussie Smollett came out with his story, it was, you know, this is evidence of American racism.

00:19:25.000 Deep-seated, brutal American racism.

00:19:27.000 Same thing with Covington High School.

00:19:28.000 This is evidence of deep-seated, brutal American racism.

00:19:31.000 And then the facts started to leak out.

00:19:32.000 It was, you know, we gotta, you know, let's wait a minute.

00:19:35.000 Let's wait.

00:19:36.000 Let's hold up.

00:19:37.000 Let's make up our minds after we see all the evidence.

00:19:40.000 It's always interesting to see when people say, let's wait for the evidence and when people are willing to jump beyond the evidence at hand.

00:19:46.000 Always very interesting because it is a good way of revealing bias.

00:19:50.000 Every human being has a has a.

00:19:52.000 Tendency toward this stuff, but the media are overwhelmingly biased in one direction now I will say that the media's bias is not any shock to me I think that the the greatest shock to me is the continuing malfeasance I mean true malfeasance of High-ranking members of the intelligence community is severely disquieting to me.

00:20:10.000 That so many high-ranking members of the Obama intelligence community, these are people who are supposed to be tasked with protecting us from terrorism, protecting us from threats foreign and domestic, that these folks are so politically biased that they went on television night after night proclaiming that the elected president of the United States is a traitor and that he would be proved to be that these folks are so politically biased that they went on television night after night proclaiming I mean, John Brennan, the former head of the CIA under Barack Obama, he was head of the CIA when the Trump-Russia investigation was initiated.

00:20:38.000 He was on MSNBC last night after spending legitimately two years proclaiming that he had secret knowledge that President Trump had committed some nefarious act of treason.

00:20:47.000 He was on MSNBC last night.

00:20:49.000 He said, Oh, well, you know, my mistake, I guess.

00:20:52.000 I mean, like, I just, you know, I guess I thought that there was more than there actually was.

00:20:56.000 Oh, well.

00:20:57.000 I don't know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected that there was more than there actually was.

00:21:03.000 And I am relieved that it's been determined that there was not a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government over our election.

00:21:12.000 I think that is good news for the country.

00:21:13.000 I still point to things that were done publicly or efforts to try to have conversations with the Russians that were inappropriate.

00:21:21.000 But I'm not all that surprised that the high bar of criminal conspiracy was not met.

00:21:28.000 Whoopsie doodle.

00:21:28.000 You know, I've spent the last couple of years suggesting from my perch at the top of one of America's foremost intelligence agencies, using the expertise that comes along with that position, proclaiming that the president is a traitor to the United States.

00:21:40.000 I guess I just got a little out ahead of myself.

00:21:42.000 You know, it's understandable, really, to call the president, the elected president, a traitor.

00:21:46.000 You know, we were investigating him during the campaign on the basis of scanty to no evidence.

00:21:51.000 But sure, you know, everybody makes mistakes, guys.

00:21:54.000 It's not just John Brennan.

00:21:55.000 A former FBI official named Chuck Rosenberg was on Meet the Press, and he said that Mueller's decision not to come to a conclusion on obstruction, quote, strikes me as a little bit curious because, quote, prosecutors get paid to make determinations and recommendations.

00:22:09.000 Or perhaps he didn't have the evidence to determine whether or not obstruction took place.

00:22:13.000 But now we've got a former FBI official using the expertise of his position to proclaim that maybe something nefarious is going on there.

00:22:19.000 And it doesn't stop there.

00:22:22.000 I don't know how we are supposed to trust our intelligence community when they are so obviously and thoroughly politicized.

00:22:27.000 I'm talking to top-level people.

00:22:29.000 It's funny, at every major American institution, there are the low-level people who actually do a lot of the day-to-day work.

00:22:34.000 Those are the ones who are trying to track down crime, stop terrorism.

00:22:37.000 And then there are the political officials who are appointed, and they are supposed to be granted this patina of expertise and legitimacy.

00:22:44.000 Well, they have blown it.

00:22:45.000 I mean, absolutely blown it.

00:22:46.000 I will show you more evidence of that momentarily.

00:22:49.000 First, let's talk about how you can hire better.

00:22:51.000 You shouldn't hire somebody like John Brennan or James Clapper.

00:22:53.000 You should hire somebody competent.

00:22:54.000 And that's why you ought to have ZipRecruiter. 0.80

00:22:56.000 Hiring is challenging.

00:22:57.000 There's one place you can go where hiring is simple, fast, and smart.

00:23:00.000 It's a place where growing businesses connect to qualified candidates.

00:23:03.000 That place?

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00:23:06.000 ZipRecruiter sends your job to over 100 of the web's leading job boards, but they don't stop there.

00:23:10.000 With their powerful matching technology, ZipRecruiter scans thousands of resumes to find people with the right experience and then invites them to apply to your job.

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00:23:23.000 ZipRecruiter is so effective that 80% of employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site within the very first day.

00:23:30.000 And right now, my listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive web address, ziprecruiter.com slash dailywire.

00:23:37.000 That is ZipRecruiter.com slash D-A-I-L-Y-W-I-R-E.

00:23:41.000 ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire.

00:23:43.000 ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way to hire. 0.73

00:23:45.000 Don't hire duds, like apparently our intelligence community heads were.

00:23:49.000 Instead, go hire somebody competent.

00:23:51.000 Go to ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire and try it out for free.

00:23:54.000 ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire.

00:23:56.000 Okay, so it is not just John Brennan, of course.

00:23:58.000 It is also James Clapper, the former head, the former director of national intelligence under Barack Obama, who has spent two years proclaiming loudly and proudly That doom was impending for President Trump.

00:24:09.000 That we were moments away from the end of the Trump administration.

00:24:13.000 Well, here he was yesterday saying, no regerts.

00:24:16.000 No regerts, guys.

00:24:17.000 Here he was.

00:24:18.000 Do you regret anything you have said in terms of raising questions about the president's behavior or some of the things the president has done or said?

00:24:28.000 No, I don't.

00:24:29.000 And I have put that in writing in my book as well.

00:24:34.000 I have concerns, as do others, and I have tried to be factual and temperate and moderate about it, but I do have concerns, and no, I don't have any regrets.

00:24:48.000 He has been—no regrets.

00:24:49.000 He's getting a tattoo right across his neck that says, no regrets.

00:24:53.000 Good stuff there from James Clapper.

00:24:54.000 I'm a fan of a lot of folks at the FBI.

00:24:56.000 I have friends who are in the FBI.

00:24:58.000 I'm a fan of a lot of folks at the CIA.

00:24:59.000 Thank you.

00:25:23.000 And we were supposed to pretend that they were not political when they were Obama administration appointees.

00:25:27.000 And when they were working for Obama, they were absolutely apolitical.

00:25:30.000 They were not politicizing the intelligence agencies they headed.

00:25:33.000 And then they spend the next two years just spouting absolute bullcrap on national TV, and then they don't apologize for it.

00:25:39.000 No, you know, we were just misinformed. 0.58

00:25:41.000 We were just misinformed.

00:25:43.000 The Democrats have been doing the same routine now.

00:25:45.000 Many of the Democrats are trying to kind of quietly brush past this.

00:25:49.000 You're seeing Nancy Pelosi say, listen, I think that we're done here, right?

00:25:51.000 There's no more to see here.

00:25:53.000 Many of the Democratic 2020 candidates are just remaining silent on this entire issue.

00:25:58.000 Meanwhile, their backup plan is to proclaim that they don't have the full Mueller report, so they can't make a judgment on any of this stuff.

00:26:04.000 Six Democratic committee chairs in the House, according to NBC News, Sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr on Monday requesting that he submit the full report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation to Congress by April 2nd, which would be the beginning of next week.

00:26:18.000 They say his summary is not sufficient for Congress.

00:26:21.000 That's true, but he's going to have to redact presumably some material from thousands of pages under federal criminal regulations.

00:26:27.000 There's criminal procedure, federal civil procedure rules.

00:26:30.000 Again, under criminal procedure, federal procedure rules.

00:26:33.000 6E is the one that was cited by William Barr in his letter.

00:26:38.000 He has to redact information because otherwise it's illegal.

00:26:41.000 Otherwise, he could be committing a criminal violation.

00:26:43.000 And so the Republicans voted down a proposal to force him to release the entire report forthwith.

00:26:48.000 He's going to release this stuff.

00:26:49.000 It's going to confirm all the stuff that we already know.

00:26:51.000 It'll talk about the Trump Tower meeting.

00:26:53.000 It'll talk about connections between Mike Flynn and members of the Russian government when he was the incoming NSA.

00:26:58.000 It'll be all the stuff that we already know.

00:27:00.000 And then it will be the conclusions that Barr has laid forth.

00:27:03.000 This thing is over, okay?

00:27:05.000 Unless there is some buried bombshell that I think Mueller probably would have leaked by now, considering how much play this has gotten.

00:27:12.000 This thing is over, and Democrats can't accept it. 0.98

00:27:15.000 The dumbest senator in the Democratic caucus is Maisie Hirono from Hawaii, who's proved herself to be absolutely feckless and terrible over the past few years. 1.00

00:27:22.000 She says, you know who's happy today? 0.99

00:27:24.000 Vladimir Putin is happy today, because pooty-poot, he's got his man in the White House, and Mueller missed it.

00:27:29.000 How does she know?

00:27:30.000 Because she's Maisie Hirono, gumshoe sleuth. 0.77

00:27:32.000 She's Encyclopedia Brown of the Senate.

00:27:35.000 Just because there was not enough evidence for a criminal charge of conspiracy does not mean that this very cozy relationship that Donald Trump has with Vladimir Putin, who, by the way, must be really happy that this came about, that this kind of cozy relationship that is not good for our country and that is not transparent, will continue.

00:27:56.000 Okay, yeah, I'm sure that's it.

00:27:57.000 I'm sure that Vladimir Putin is secretly now working with Trump.

00:28:01.000 That's what it is.

00:28:02.000 The doubling down is really astonishing.

00:28:04.000 Sheldon Whitehouse, the senator from Delaware, he said the same thing.

00:28:07.000 He says, you know, Mueller just didn't have enough power.

00:28:10.000 That's the real problem here is Mueller didn't have enough power.

00:28:13.000 Do you think it makes sense for Bob Mueller, who spends two years trying to discern the truth and the justice here, to turn it over to a guy who just got appointed Attorney General to make a ruling on, the final ruling on the issue of obstruction of justice?

00:28:28.000 No, because the whole purpose of special counsel is to have somebody make prosecutive decisions outside of politics.

00:28:35.000 So to take the prosecutive decision and hand it back to the top political appointee in the office defeats the whole purpose of being special counsel.

00:28:43.000 Oh, is that what it is?

00:28:45.000 Sheldon Whitehouse, by the way, from Rhode Island, not Delaware. 1.00

00:28:47.000 There he is on Chris Matthews making that idiotic point. 0.99

00:28:50.000 And no, the DOJ is charged with prosecution. 0.99

00:28:53.000 Mueller gets to decide whether he feels that there is enough evidence to warrant a prosecution.

00:28:58.000 or not.

00:28:59.000 He said he didn't really have a judgment when it came to obstruction of justice because Trump had said a lot of things.

00:29:03.000 And then the AG has to decide whether to prosecute or not.

00:29:06.000 That's normally the way that this works. 0.93

00:29:08.000 The legal imbecility of Sheldon Whitehouse's comments there, pretty obvious.

00:29:13.000 Elizabeth Warren, who has just become, like, again, I knew Senator Warren when she was a professor at Harvard Law School. 0.97

00:29:20.000 I'm not sure.

00:29:20.000 I'm not Not well, but we'd had a couple of interactions.

00:29:22.000 Everybody at the law school knew about her.

00:29:24.000 She was actually an interesting person back then.

00:29:27.000 Now she has basically just become Bernie Sanders with Native American background.

00:29:30.000 So here she was explaining that the real problem here is Attorney General Barr on Stephen Colbert, who hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, I mean, he's just looking hopefully into Elizabeth Warren's eyes as they lock eyes and dream of the day that Robert Mueller comes back They're like the kid at the end of Shane, crying plaintively out to the planes.

00:29:49.000 Shane, come back!

00:29:50.000 Robert, come back!

00:29:51.000 Here is Colbert and Warren's wing-nat routine.

00:29:54.000 Do you trust Barr's judgment on obstruction here?

00:29:57.000 No.

00:30:02.000 No!

00:30:02.000 And you shouldn't have to ask me if I trust it.

00:30:05.000 We should see the whole report.

00:30:07.000 When we see the whole report, we'll know what the basis is for the decision.

00:30:12.000 Yeah, there's still hope, guys.

00:30:13.000 We're going to impeach him based on obstruction.

00:30:15.000 But the entire Democratic leadership, Pelosi, Schumer, they're like, yeah, we're probably not going to do any of that stuff.

00:30:21.000 Now, are any of the Democrats backing down from their overwrought points?

00:30:23.000 No.

00:30:24.000 Cory McBooker, Spartacus McFace over here, he was asked whether he would correct his claims that there was Trump-Russia collusion.

00:30:31.000 He says, me?

00:30:32.000 Correct claims?

00:30:33.000 No.

00:30:34.000 No.

00:30:36.000 Real collusion going on, you said.

00:30:38.000 Do you now have to revise that to say not chargeable collusion?

00:30:42.000 Again, when I have an attorney general, who in my opinion is suspect, filtering a report that I have not seen, I'm not willing to conclude anything yet based upon a letter that he wrote.

00:30:54.000 OK, so that's, you know, he's not going to retract anything.

00:30:58.000 Not at all.

00:30:59.000 Now, Team Trump has reacted to all of this, and they've reacted with the proper outrage.

00:31:03.000 Kellyanne Conway called on Adam Schiff, who has set up an actual pup tent inside the CNN headquarters.

00:31:08.000 He's now been forced to evict like a homeless person under Rudy Giuliani in Times Square.

00:31:12.000 Adam Schiff is now living on the streets once more, walking around with a sign that says the end is near.

00:31:18.000 Collusion, collusion.

00:31:19.000 So Kellyanne Conway says about Adam Schiff, yeah, that guy should resign from the Intelligence Committee.

00:31:23.000 He's a joke.

00:31:23.000 This is correct.

00:31:25.000 Then you have Adam Schiff.

00:31:27.000 Talk about an oxymoron.

00:31:28.000 This man heads the Intelligence Committee in the House.

00:31:31.000 He said, quote, he believed that the scandal was of a size and a scope probably bigger than Watergate and that there's plenty of evidence of collusion.

00:31:39.000 He ought to resign today.

00:31:41.000 You're saying that we did not win fairly and squarely?

00:31:45.000 You, in fact, running around, jutting your jaw out and saying, I'm worried about the effect on the institutions.

00:31:50.000 You were disparaging the institutions.

00:31:52.000 You were demeaning and deriding our great democracy, the presidency of the United States.

00:31:57.000 Adam Schiff should resign.

00:31:58.000 She is correct about this.

00:32:00.000 And as you know, I've been very critical of Kellyanne Conway for being an over-the-top lackey for the Trump administration. 0.93

00:32:05.000 Well, she is not wrong on this one. 0.52

00:32:06.000 In a second, we're going to talk about how Trump's stay got even better.

00:32:08.000 There was a cherry on top of the ice cream that was provided by a man named Michael Avenatti, who's turned out to be just the best thing that ever happened to Donald Trump.

00:32:17.000 We'll talk about it in just one second.

00:32:18.000 First, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.

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00:33:36.000 We're the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.

00:33:40.000 So President Trump's winning was not done yesterday.

00:33:48.000 You know, President Trump promised winning.

00:33:49.000 Winning until it hurt.

00:33:50.000 Winning so much winning that we would beg him to stop the winning.

00:33:53.000 Well, yesterday was his winningest day.

00:33:55.000 Now, I do have to note that when we say it was his winningest day, not politically, right?

00:34:00.000 Not in terms of conservative priorities, but in terms of the schadenfreude of watching the entire left collapse in on itself like a dying star.

00:34:07.000 Yesterday was pretty spectacular.

00:34:09.000 So, the truth is, Trump was elected to spit in the eye of the radical left.

00:34:13.000 And he has done that repeatedly.

00:34:15.000 And that's been very satisfying for a lot of members of his base.

00:34:17.000 If you're a member of Trump's base, yesterday was pretty much the best day you've had since your first child was born.

00:34:22.000 It was pretty spectacular, because not only was Trump cleared on the collusion stuff, not only did the media have to look themselves in the mirror and then ignore what they saw, but also Michael Avenatti, a man championed as a possible 2020 candidate, you know, the lawyer, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels.

00:34:38.000 He was a fighter.

00:34:39.000 Hashtag basta!

00:34:41.000 Michael Avenatti, a man who appeared on The View and said that he wanted to see President Trump marched out in handcuffs. 0.96

00:34:47.000 Not only that, he said his sexual fantasies included handcuffs always.

00:34:52.000 Here's what he had to say on The View. 0.94

00:34:53.000 All of my sexual fantasies involve handcuffs. 0.93

00:34:56.000 Oh! 1.00

00:34:57.000 McCain, who looks like she's just gonna vomit all over him.

00:35:01.000 The proper response there from Meghan McCain. 0.99

00:35:04.000 It turns out that he's going to enjoy his sexual fantasies for a while here. 0.94

00:35:09.000 Because they are frog marching somebody out and it ain't Trump. 0.92

00:35:11.000 It's Michael Avenatti.

00:35:13.000 Best story of the day.

00:35:14.000 So good.

00:35:17.000 He was arrested because he tried to extort Nike.

00:35:22.000 Stand for something, even if it means going to jail for extortion.

00:35:26.000 Solid stuff there.

00:35:27.000 A federal magistrate judge in New York ordered Avenatti released on $300,000 bond in cases alleging that he embezzled money from a client and tried to extort millions of dollars from Nike.

00:35:38.000 And then he claims, no, no, no, he was just standing up with the people.

00:35:41.000 Also implicated, just to make this even better, was Mark Garagos.

00:35:44.000 Mark Garagos, the celebrity attorney for Jussie Smollett, was named as a co-conspirator in a case accusing lawyer Michael Avenatti of trying to extort Nike.

00:35:52.000 Both of these guys were CNN contributors.

00:35:54.000 So remember when the media didn't have anything to apologize for?

00:35:57.000 Avenatti appeared 59 times in one month, during one period, a couple of, like a year ago.

00:36:03.000 There was a picture of him with Don Lemon, Celebrate yucking it up, and Chris Cuomo, and the whole gang over at CNN.

00:36:09.000 Michael Avenatti was the guy.

00:36:10.000 He was gonna fight President Trump to the end.

00:36:15.000 And now, Michael Avenatti is probably going to jail. 1.00

00:36:18.000 He's probably going to jail because he's an idiot. 1.00

00:36:20.000 It turns out, honestly, I didn't come up with this, but it is the best description. 1.00

00:36:25.000 Michael Avenatti is the Jacob Wool of Michael Cohen's.

00:36:28.000 It's just spectacular. 0.96

00:36:30.000 Michael Avenatti turns out to be the most incompetent doofus maybe in legal history. 0.95

00:36:35.000 So here's what he tried to do. 0.97

00:36:36.000 He tried to go to Nike and then blackmail them with information about how a representative of Nike had been paying off recruits to use their shoes or something.

00:36:46.000 But he was not quite that discreet about it.

00:36:49.000 First, he went to them.

00:36:50.000 He went to Nike and he said that he represented an AAU coach whose team had previously had a contractual relationship with Nike, but whose contract Nike had recently decided not to renew.

00:36:59.000 According to Avenatti, his client had evidence that one or more Nike employees had authorized and funded payments to the families of top high school basketball players and their families and attempted to conceal those payments, similar to conduct involving a rival company that had recently been the subject of a criminal prosecution.

00:37:15.000 Avenatti said he planned to hold a press conference the following day to publicize the asserted misconduct at Nike.

00:37:21.000 He said he had approached Nike now because he knew that the NCAA tournament was about to begin, and he knew that their quarterly earnings call was scheduled for March 21st, thus maximizing the potential financial and reputational damage his press conference could cause to Nike.

00:37:35.000 He said that he would let it go if Nike paid his client 1.5 million dollars and then hire Avenatti to conduct an internal investigation of Nike with the provision that if Nike hired another firm to conduct such an internal investigation, Nike would still be required to pay Avenatti at least twice the fees of any other firm hired.

00:37:54.000 So, then the attorney for Nike called up the cops.

00:37:58.000 And they said, OK, let's have a meeting.

00:37:59.000 Let's have a meeting.

00:38:01.000 So Avenatti showed up to the meeting and then repeated all of this in front of law enforcement, apparently.

00:38:07.000 This is the allegation.

00:38:09.000 And this is what he did. 1.00

00:38:10.000 He's such a he's such an idiot thug. 1.00

00:38:12.000 Avenatti reiterated threats made during the previous in-person meeting. 1.00

00:38:15.000 I guess he did this over the phone, along with his demand for a multimillion dollar retainer.

00:38:19.000 And he said he wanted to be paid at least $10 million and leave the bag of money in the parking lot.

00:38:24.000 In particular, Avenatti stated, quote, I'm not effing around with this, and I'm not continuing to play games.

00:38:28.000 You guys know enough now to know you've got a serious problem, and it's worth more in exposure to me to just blow the lid on this thing.

00:38:34.000 A few million dollars doesn't move the needle for me.

00:38:36.000 I'm just being really frank with you.

00:38:37.000 So if that's what's being contemplated, then let's just say it was good to meet you and we're done, and I'll proceed with my press conference tomorrow.

00:38:45.000 I'm not effing around with this thing anymore.

00:38:46.000 So if you guys think, you know, you're going to negotiate a million five, you're going to hire us to do an internal investigation, but it's going to be capped at three or five or seven million dollars.

00:38:53.000 Let's just be done.

00:38:55.000 I'll go and I'll take ten billion dollars off your client's market cap.

00:38:58.000 I'm not effing around.

00:39:00.000 And then he said that he had the and then he said another meeting where apparently he said the exact same thing.

00:39:05.000 And at one point he suggested. 1.00

00:39:08.000 That he would, quote unquote, cut off their balls. 1.00

00:39:12.000 This is a quote from Michael Avenatti. 1.00

00:39:13.000 He's so wonderful, Michael Avenatti.

00:39:15.000 So he said all of this in front of, while he's being recorded apparently by law enforcement.

00:39:19.000 So it's all going great for Michael Avenatti.

00:39:21.000 It was so bad that Stormy Daniels dumped on him.

00:39:24.000 I mean, not like that, guys.

00:39:25.000 Stormy Daniels put out a statement, quote, knowing what I know about Michael Avenatti, I'm saddened but not shocked by news reports he has made that he has been criminally charged today.

00:39:33.000 Wow.

00:39:33.000 When Stormy Daniels is now dumping on her own lawyer a person she called Michael Angelo of the legal Michael Angelo of the legal profession, you know, things have gone bad.

00:39:43.000 So great day for President Trump.

00:39:45.000 And Michael Avenatti remains a he's got a problem.

00:39:49.000 He's got a problem.

00:39:49.000 He's going to get to fulfill all his sexual fetishes soon enough in prison.

00:39:54.000 The reality show we didn't know we needed is Michael Avenatti taking Jacob Walden Law School in prison.

00:39:59.000 Okay, meanwhile, breaking news.

00:40:03.000 Prosecutors have dropped charges against Jussie Smollett.

00:40:06.000 The Empire actor is supposed to forfeit $10,000 bond payment and have the records in the case sealed.

00:40:12.000 Sealed!

00:40:12.000 Just over a month after he was charged.

00:40:14.000 Does that sound like privilege to you?

00:40:18.000 That sounds like privilege to me.

00:40:19.000 Now, I've been told that the only privilege that matters in America is white privilege.

00:40:23.000 But it turns out that if you fake a hate crime, you'll remember that Jussie Smollett faked a hate crime. 1.00

00:40:27.000 He pretended that he was garroted by a couple of Trump-supporting MAGA-hatted idiots in the middle of Chicago at 3 a.m. 0.99

00:40:34.000 who were shouting, this is MAGA country, in the middle of a polar vortex. 1.00

00:40:38.000 The good news was Jussie never lost his Subway sandwich.

00:40:40.000 He was holding on to that Subway sandwich forever.

00:40:42.000 It turns out the entire thing was a hoax.

00:40:43.000 It cost probably hundreds of thousands of dollars to Chicago PD to investigate this stuff.

00:40:47.000 Hundreds of man hours that could have been spent on, you know, actual crimes.

00:40:51.000 Is he gonna be charged with anything?

00:40:52.000 Nope.

00:40:52.000 They've dropped all the charges.

00:40:53.000 They say he already did community service.

00:40:56.000 According to the Smollett defense team, the community service was done prior for something not related to this case. 1.00

00:41:03.000 Just stupid garbage. 1.00

00:41:05.000 Stupid garbage from the prosecutors I mean, honestly, the federal prosecutors ought to go after him and nail him to the wall. 1.00

00:41:14.000 This is insane. 1.00

00:41:15.000 According to the Cook County Prosecutor's Office, who apparently there were reports that they were interfering even in the CPD investigation.

00:41:22.000 The Cook County prosecutors were deeply afraid this was going to go how it eventually went. 0.99

00:41:27.000 They put out a statement, quote, Absolute crap. 0.99

00:41:29.000 Absolute nonsense. 1.00

00:41:29.000 His record has been wiped clean. 1.00

00:41:30.000 Wiped clean. 1.00

00:41:30.000 Absolute crap. 1.00

00:41:42.000 Absolute nonsense. 1.00

00:41:43.000 His record has been wiped clean.

00:41:46.000 Wiped clean.

00:41:48.000 They're not even going to have a record of him pleading guilty to something like this.

00:41:52.000 Their statement.

00:41:53.000 Today, all criminal charges against Jussie Smollett were dropped.

00:41:56.000 His record has been wiped clean of the filing of this tragic complaint against them.

00:42:00.000 them.

00:42:00.000 This is the statement of his defense attorneys.

00:42:02.000 Jussie was attacked by two people he was unable to identify on January 29th.

00:42:06.000 He was a victim who was vilified and made to appear as a perpetrator as a result of false and inappropriate remarks made to the public, causing an inappropriate rush to judgment.

00:42:14.000 Jussie and many others were hurt by these unfair and unwarranted actions This entire situation is a reminder there should never be an attempt to prove a case in the court of public opinion.

00:42:23.000 That is wrong.

00:42:25.000 Jussie Smollett was not a victim.

00:42:26.000 He faked by every piece of evidence a hate crime.

00:42:29.000 This is absurdity at the highest, highest level. 0.93

00:42:33.000 Just amazing and just gross.

00:42:35.000 But don't worry, guys.

00:42:36.000 The Justice Department in Chicago is doing its best.

00:42:40.000 The criminal justice... I mean, if you are the CPD head, you have just got to be enraged, right?

00:42:46.000 If you are the head of the Chicago Police, the superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, who came out with all the evidence, you have got to be fighting mad today.

00:42:54.000 Smollett continues to insist that he was innocent.

00:42:58.000 That statement from his attorneys is, of course, a lie.

00:43:01.000 Smollett was originally indicted on 16 felony counts for falsely reporting a hate crime by a grand jury.

00:43:07.000 And the charges were summarily dropped because the guy is a celebrity and because he has connections inside the prosecutor's office is the best possible guess here.

00:43:15.000 Federal prosecutors should now move forward full scale with prosecuting him.

00:43:19.000 That should be the next move.

00:43:20.000 We'll bring you more information as it breaks.

00:43:22.000 Meanwhile, over at AIPAC, it's really interesting.

00:43:24.000 A gap is breaking out in the Democratic Party.

00:43:26.000 So Mike Pence, the Vice President of the United States, spoke at the American-Israel Public Affairs Conference.

00:43:32.000 This happens every year.

00:43:32.000 It's a huge event.

00:43:34.000 Tens of thousands of people show up, people from synagogues all around the country, because AIPAC is a pro-Israel lobbying organization.

00:43:43.000 They don't give money to candidates or anything.

00:43:46.000 But they do spend an awful lot of time talking to various members of Congress.

00:43:50.000 And Mike Pence went directly after Representative Ilhan Omar and the burgeoning anti-Semitism inside the Democratic Party.

00:43:55.000 Anti-Semitism has no place in the Congress of the United States of America.

00:44:02.000 And at a minimum, anyone who slanders those who support this historic alliance between the United States and Israel should never have a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States House of Representatives.

00:44:20.000 Okay, and of course all of that is true.

00:44:21.000 What now is hilarious is members of the media pretending like Ilhan Omar had never done any of this stuff and saying, oh, look at Pence, getting all, getting all partisan about this.

00:44:30.000 On the Foreign Affairs Committee is an open anti-Semite.

00:44:32.000 She's a Democrat.

00:44:33.000 The Democrats decided to cover for her.

00:44:35.000 It wasn't Mike Pence who made this partisan.

00:44:36.000 It wasn't Bibi Netanyahu who made this partisan.

00:44:38.000 It was Democrats who made this partisan.

00:44:40.000 Now, I do have to give props today to Steini Hoyer, the House Minority Whip.

00:44:45.000 When someone accuses American supporters of dual loyalty, I say, accuse me.

00:44:47.000 This takes some spine, spine that Nancy Pelosi doesn't have. 0.99

00:44:51.000 Here was Stiney Hoyer doing the right thing and coming after Elhan Omar.

00:44:55.000 Sadly, he should have done this when it was up for debate in the House.

00:44:58.000 He didn't then, but at least he's doing it now, better late than never. - When someone accuses American supporters of dual loyalty, I say, accuse me.

00:45:09.000 So let's have debates on policy instead of impugning the loyalty of Israel's supporters.

00:45:17.000 That is why I oppose those who push for boycotts, divestments and sanctions against Israel.

00:45:24.000 By the way, there are 62 freshman Democrats.

00:45:29.000 You hear me?

00:45:31.000 62, not three.

00:45:33.000 Good for him.

00:45:34.000 I mean, that's him calling out Ilhan Omar.

00:45:35.000 He's the House Majority Leader.

00:45:37.000 Sorry, not the whip.

00:45:38.000 Yeah, that was a far cry from Nancy Pelosi, who, speaking at AIPAC, said generally she's against anti-Semitism. 0.99

00:45:43.000 No specific words with regards to Ilhan Omar, because again, she is a coward. 0.96

00:45:48.000 Steny Hoyer apparently is not. 0.98

00:45:50.000 Her cowardice, however, rules the day in the Democratic Party. 0.97

00:45:55.000 This month, The full house came together condemning the anti-semitic myth of dual loyalty and all form of bigotry with a resolution that, quote, rejects the perpetuation of anti-semitic stereotypes in the United States and around the world, including the pernicious myth of dual loyalty and foreign allegiance, especially in the context of support for the United States-Israel alliance.

00:46:23.000 She didn't have any of the guts to actually come out against Ilhan Omar in any of this.

00:46:26.000 And now would be a very good time, it turns out, to be an Israel supporter, considering that Hamas is randomly firing rockets into the middle of civilian centers in Israel. 0.95

00:46:34.000 And Hamas is an evil, disgusting, vicious terrorist group that is interested in wiping every Jew out of the Middle East, if not across the face of the world. 0.89

00:46:43.000 And the Democrats couldn't condemn Ilhan Omar. 0.99

00:46:45.000 They could not do it.

00:46:46.000 That is not the... By the way, Bibi Netanyahu spoke at AIPAC as well, and he went after Ilhan Omar directly.

00:46:52.000 Here's what he had to say.

00:46:53.000 This Benjamin, it's not about the Benjamins.

00:46:58.000 The reason the people of America is not because they want our money, it's because they share our values.

00:47:07.000 They just don't get it.

00:47:09.000 It's because America and Israel share a love of freedom and democracy.

00:47:13.000 And of course that's true.

00:47:15.000 Ilhan Omar promptly tweeted back at Netanyahu, well you're under indictment for corruption, so obviously it is about the Benjamins.

00:47:20.000 The words of a woman who is truly contrite about her anti-Semitism.

00:47:24.000 Again, it wasn't the right that made Israel a partisan issue, it was the Democrats who decided to break with Israel.

00:47:29.000 At least Steny Hoyer and some Democrats are now saying the right things, even if they're too cowardly to do so in public when it actually counts.

00:47:35.000 Okay, time for some things I like, and then we'll do some things that I hate.

00:47:38.000 So, things that I like today.

00:47:40.000 There is a new movie that is out, Video On Demand, that is actually, it's a good movie, it's a really good movie.

00:47:47.000 It's called Dragged Across Concrete.

00:47:49.000 The guy who directed it, I'm trying to remember his name, I believe it's Zoller, and he has made some really kind of weird and interesting movies.

00:47:56.000 S. Craig Zoller.

00:47:57.000 He made Bone Tomahawk, which is a weird and interesting movie.

00:48:02.000 This movie is essentially about two cops who are booted from the force.

00:48:07.000 They are suspended from the police force for not really racism, but kind of excessive force.

00:48:13.000 And they are called racist in the process, even though they were not being racist at the time.

00:48:17.000 And then they decide that they are going to rob a criminal.

00:48:20.000 They're going to rob a criminal to make money so that they can support themselves. 0.94

00:48:24.000 The movie has been characterized as reactionary.

00:48:27.000 It probably is, in the same vein as Death Wish.

00:48:30.000 It's worth watching.

00:48:30.000 It doesn't move very fast, but it is very powerful.

00:48:34.000 It's good.

00:48:34.000 It's good stuff.

00:48:36.000 There's a reason I'm sitting behind this desk running things.

00:48:40.000 And you're out there with a partner that's 20 years younger than you.

00:48:43.000 Hey, Anthony's got a mouth with his own engine, but he's solid.

00:48:47.000 I'm thinking about the kind of future I can offer my girlfriend.

00:48:51.000 Pops is a yesterday who ain't worth words.

00:48:53.000 Good heavens and praise be to him.

00:48:56.000 Your absence was a weight upon us.

00:48:58.000 Thank you, Mr. Edmonton.

00:48:59.000 I don't like doing things with so many question marks everywhere.

00:49:04.000 Okay, so the movie is extraordinarily brutal, but it's got a couple of notes that are super conservative that are pretty astonishing.

00:49:13.000 So go check it out, Dragged Across Concrete.

00:49:15.000 It's available on Amazon Prime, Video On Demand.

00:49:18.000 It's really good.

00:49:18.000 Mel Gibson is terrific in it.

00:49:19.000 He really is.

00:49:20.000 I mean, it's a part that fits him.

00:49:21.000 Vince Vaughn is very good in it as well.

00:49:23.000 So go check out Dragged Across Concrete.

00:49:25.000 Well worth the watch.

00:49:26.000 Okay, other things that I like today.

00:49:28.000 So this is just hilarious.

00:49:31.000 Quote, a major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest-shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study finds.

00:49:37.000 This is according to NBC News.

00:49:39.000 The Jakobshavn Glacier around 2012 was retreating about 1.8 miles and thinning nearly 130 feet annually, but it started growing again at about the same rate in the past two years, according to a study in Monday's Nature Geoscience.

00:49:51.000 Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary.

00:49:54.000 That was kind of a surprise.

00:49:55.000 We kind of got used to a runaway system, said geological survey of Denmark and Greenland ice and climate scientist Jason Box.

00:50:01.000 The good news is it's a reminder that it's not necessarily going that fast.

00:50:04.000 But it is going.

00:50:06.000 So, they keep suggesting that it is continuing to go, but they were surprised by all of this.

00:50:10.000 Listen, maybe in the long term, their estimates continue to be correct, but it is weird how climate scientists keep getting surprised by the data every so often.

00:50:19.000 Now, I'm not saying this as somebody who denies that climate change is taking place.

00:50:22.000 I've said many times before that the IPCC estimates when it comes to climate change, I'm fine with accepting those.

00:50:27.000 I don't have a general problem with all of that.

00:50:30.000 However, When your computer modeling is wrong so often, you might need to think about your predictive capacity.

00:50:37.000 Because the IPCC report does have a range of possibilities that it offers, and the IPCC report has consistently overestimated the amount of global warming that they thought was going to take place, particularly at the upper end of that estimate.

00:50:48.000 Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.

00:50:54.000 So in the aftermath of proving that President Trump was a Russian tool, now the New York Times is on to proving that God doesn't exist.

00:50:59.000 That's exciting.

00:51:00.000 They have an opinion piece by a philosophy professor named Peter Aderton.

00:51:05.000 He is a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University, so his credentials are well in line.

00:51:10.000 He has a piece today called, A God Problem.

00:51:12.000 Perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful.

00:51:14.000 The idea of the deity most Westerners accept is actually not coherent.

00:51:18.000 And then he proceeds to lay out, in about 850 words, a sophomoric argument that ignores, you know, probably 3,000 years of Western philosophy.

00:51:26.000 The guy's a professor of philosophy, and he doesn't know the most basic Thomistic arguments about the existence of God, or Maimonidean arguments about the existence of God.

00:51:35.000 In other words, he's a dilettante when it comes to religious philosophy, which is true for a lot of people who think that they know what they're writing about when it comes to religious philosophy.

00:51:42.000 For those of us who spend a lot of our time studying religious philosophy, just as religious human beings, his complaints are nothing new.

00:51:47.000 It's funny when you hear people who have spent no time examining religious philosophy go, well, you know, if God knows everything that's going to happen, then how do you have free will?

00:51:56.000 And it's like, oh my God.

00:51:58.000 You're right.

00:51:58.000 You've hit upon it.

00:52:00.000 No one in the history of philosophy has thought of these questions.

00:52:02.000 Not going back to Augustine.

00:52:04.000 Not moving forward through Maimonides.

00:52:06.000 Nobody's ever thought about these problems.

00:52:08.000 You yourself have hit upon it.

00:52:10.000 Now you're right.

00:52:11.000 If we had just thought about these questions, when they say, how couldn't all good God allow bad things to happen?

00:52:16.000 You're right.

00:52:16.000 It's the first time anyone's ever asked this question.

00:52:18.000 Kudos to you.

00:52:20.000 God, so lazy.

00:52:21.000 Now, in my book, The Right Side of History, I do discuss these questions, and I give some very basic answers that virtually all Western philosophers, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, agree upon.

00:52:32.000 But this is basically, he legitimately raises the question, I'm not kidding you, he legitimately raises the, can God make a rock so large that he can't pick it up question, which is introduced in theology classes in like sophomore year of high school.

00:52:48.000 For the record, there are two particular perspectives on this.

00:52:50.000 Perspective number one is God can do anything, so he can even violate the laws of logic.

00:52:54.000 And then there's the general Judeo-Christian view, the Thomistic view, and the Maimonidean view, which is that God cannot violate the rules of logic because he created the rules of logic.

00:53:01.000 So God cannot be both something and not something.

00:53:04.000 God cannot be both a square and a circle.

00:53:07.000 Which is one of the reasons why Maimonides is constantly suggesting that you can't affirmatively describe God, you can only describe God in terms of what he can't be.

00:53:14.000 So God does not take physical form, according to Maimonides, because that would actually contradict the rules of his existence.

00:53:21.000 In any case, this article is just more proof that the New York Times, for them, this constitutes deep philosophy. 0.99

00:53:28.000 It's so dumb. 0.99

00:53:28.000 I mean, this article is really silly. 0.99

00:53:30.000 So he talks about the question of evil. 0.84

00:53:34.000 He says, if God is morally perfect, it is difficult to see why he wouldn't have created a morally perfect world.

00:53:39.000 So why didn't he?

00:53:40.000 He says, the standard defense is that evil is necessary for free will.

00:53:43.000 However, this does not explain so-called physical evil, like suffering, caused by non-human causes, like famines, earthquakes, etc.

00:53:50.000 Well, yeah, actually it does, because if it turned out that the universe actually just reacted in positive ways to you doing good things, there wouldn't be free will.

00:53:58.000 In other words, there has to be the patina of chaos in order for you to make freely willed decisions.

00:54:04.000 Again, very, very basic stuff.

00:54:06.000 Very basic stuff in Judeo-Christian philosophy.

00:54:08.000 They say, what about omniscience?

00:54:10.000 Philosophically, this presents us with no less of a conundrum, leaving aside the highly implausible idea that God knows all the facts in the universe.

00:54:16.000 They just say that it's implausible.

00:54:18.000 Why is it implausible?

00:54:19.000 Because this philosopher says so.

00:54:21.000 If God knows all there is to know, then he knows at least as much as we know.

00:54:24.000 But if he knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from his perfection.

00:54:28.000 Now, why would perfect knowledge detract from his perfection?

00:54:33.000 Because if they were known to God, that would make him a sinner.

00:54:37.000 He says, if God knows all that is knowable, God must know things that we do, like lust and envy.

00:54:41.000 But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. 1.00

00:54:45.000 Well, no, that's, that's idiotic. 0.96

00:54:48.000 You can know what lust and envy are without, quote-unquote, experiencing them, and the experience or lust of envy does not necessarily connote evil. 0.98

00:54:55.000 If you created the experiences themselves, then why exactly, I mean, that's, what?

00:55:00.000 That doesn't even, that doesn't even match up.

00:55:02.000 Also, there's the notion that virtue, and again, this is a Thomistic notion, that God created everything with an innate level of perfection, and then human beings with free will have detracted from that.

00:55:11.000 So, for example, lust started off as healthful sexual desire for members of the opposite sex, and when we are not perfect, when we exercise our will in bad ways, or our desires in bad ways, then that turns into lust.

00:55:24.000 You say, what about malice?

00:55:25.000 Could God know what malice is like and still retain his divine goodness?

00:55:30.000 All of this is so sophomoric, but unfortunately, sophomoric religious philosophy is stock in trade for the New York Times.

00:55:38.000 Speaking of sophomoric, San Antonio has now barred Chick-fil-A from their airport because Chick-fil-A is owned by people who are pro-traditional marriage, and that's very bad.

00:55:46.000 Chick-fil-A sells chicken sandwiches, if you didn't know.

00:55:48.000 That's what they do.

00:55:49.000 I wasn't aware that the chickens were gay or straight. 0.81

00:55:51.000 I wasn't aware that they barred gay people from buying their chicken sandwiches.

00:55:54.000 In fact, they didn't do any of that stuff.

00:55:55.000 You'll recall that Chick-fil-A opened on a Sunday, which they don't normally do, in the middle of the Orlando Pulse shooting to help take care of people who are doing rescue and cleanup and protesting and all of that sort of stuff.

00:56:06.000 But Chick-fil-A very, very bad, and so they must be shut down.

00:56:10.000 People who don't know basic religious philosophy make assumptions about religious people that are simply false.

00:56:14.000 That religious people are malicious. 1.00

00:56:15.000 That religious people think that if you sin, then this makes you an inherently bad human being in a way different from people who are religious.

00:56:22.000 That religious people believe that only religious people can be good, which is obviously false.

00:56:26.000 It's so funny.

00:56:26.000 My new book, The Right Side of History, I've been asked about it a few times on left-wing podcasts.

00:56:31.000 There was one from The Economist the other day where they asked me this, and the first question people always ask is, so what you're saying is that religious people are the only good people.

00:56:37.000 It's like, no, I'm not saying that.

00:56:40.000 Read the book.

00:56:41.000 Of course I'm not saying that.

00:56:42.000 There are lots of great atheists, and there are lots of bad religious people. 0.85

00:56:45.000 What I'm saying is you can't build a civilized foundation on the basis of pure scientific materialism.

00:56:50.000 That's the case that I'm making.

00:56:52.000 In any case, silliness about religion is undergirding part of the attack on the West, and that's a problem.

00:56:57.000 All right, well, we will be back here for two more hours later today.

00:56:59.000 We'll have updates.

00:57:00.000 We have great guests today.

00:57:01.000 Like, I'm very excited about our guests today showing up a little bit later today.

00:57:05.000 Thomas Sowell will be stopping by to discuss his book, Disparities and Discrimination.

00:57:09.000 We'll talk about racism and disparities in various areas of American life.

00:57:13.000 We'll also be talking with Majid Nawaz, who is a philosopher and Reform Muslim.

00:57:17.000 He will be stopping by to talk about the problem of radical Islam, among other issues.

00:57:22.000 Also, we should be having on Rafer Weigel from Chicago, from ABC7 in Chicago, to talk about The Jussie Smollett case.

00:57:31.000 Lots of good stuff happening this afternoon.

00:57:32.000 Please go and make sure that you subscribe.

00:57:36.000 99 bucks a year gets you a subscription.

00:57:37.000 And we'll see you a little bit later today or we'll see you here tomorrow.

00:57:40.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:57:40.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:57:46.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:57:48.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:57:50.000 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.

00:57:51.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.

00:57:53.000 And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:57:55.000 Edited by Adam Sajovic.

00:57:57.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.

00:57:58.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

00:58:00.000 Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.

00:58:01.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.

00:58:03.000 Copyright, Daily Wire 2019.

00:58:06.000 I'm Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles Show.

00:58:08.000 Democrats, already in the throes of their worst week since 1865, now suffer a further indignity.

00:58:14.000 A federal court has invalidated Obamacare in its entirety.

00:58:17.000 The DOJ agrees.

00:58:18.000 It just keeps getting better and better.

The Ben Shapiro Show - March 26, 2019

Donald Trump’s Dreams Come True | Ep. 745

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