Vladimir Putin and the Democratic Party have a complicated relationship with each other. Democrats complain about Russian interference in the 2016 election, but in the past, they have done exactly the opposite. In fact, they've done more than anything else in order to benefit Vladimir Putin and his cronies. Today on the show, Ben Shapiro takes a look at the history of Democratic hypocrisy when it comes to dealing with foreign countries and their leaders, including the Soviet Union, and how they've benefited from Vladimir Putin's interference in our election and other foreign affairs. Ben Shapiro is the host of the show "The Ben Shapiro Show" on the Fox News Channel and host of "The FiveThirtyEight" podcast. He is also a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard and The Daily Beast. Subscribe to his new book, "The Devil Next Door," out now. If you haven't already done so, you can do so by clicking here. Thanks for listening and share the show on your social media! if you like what you hear, share it with a friend, tell a friend about it! and spread the word about it on your friends and family! It helps us spread it around the world! Thank you for supporting the show! - Ben Shapiro and all the great work that's going on in the meantime, thank you so much for listening, and God bless! -- Your support is so much appreciated! Timestamps: 0:00:00 - The CIA didn't hack the DNC? 5:30 - What did the DNC hack? 6: 7:15 - What does Putin want out of the election? 8:40 - Did Hillary Clinton want to be President Trump to be president? 9:00 11: What did Putin do with Trump s chances of winning? 13:30 15:10 - What would Putin do? 16:40 17:10 18:00 Putin wanted to be a president of the United States of America? 19:00 Is this guy better than Hillary Clinton better than Trump? 21:00 What are we get out of it? 22:00 How did Putin s chance of being a better than that? 23:00 Does Putin s a better chance of winning in 2020? 25:30 Is this a deal? 26:00 Who s going to be the next President of the U.S. of the USA?
00:00:00.000Democrats are deeply bothered by the new CIA revelations that Vladimir Putin attempted to influence the presidential election in order to help Trump.
00:00:09.000The notion that one of the world's worst dictators hacked the Democratic National Committee in an attempt to boost a candidate's power should be kind of troubling.
00:00:16.000But they haven't typically been upset about such things in the past when they benefit Democrats.
00:00:22.000Go all the way back to March 2012, when Obama met with Putin's stooge and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
00:00:28.000Obama was caught on a live mic telling Medvedev, quote, on all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved, but it's important for him to give me space.
00:00:50.000In fact, they then proceeded to spend the rest of the election cycle mocking Mitt Romney for stating that Russia posed the greatest geopolitical threat to the United States.
00:00:58.000Obama himself mocked Romney by saying during a debate, quote, the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.
00:01:04.000He then handed control of Syria to Putin, and then he followed by doing nothing when Russia invaded Ukraine.
00:01:08.000Let's go back a little bit further to 1983.
00:01:10.000Senator Teddy Kennedy wanted to run for president, so he sent his friend John Tunney to Moscow.
00:01:15.000In Moscow, Tony told the head of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov, that he wanted a deal.
00:01:19.000According to Forbes, quote, Kennedy's message was simple.
00:01:22.000He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo.
00:01:24.000Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan.
00:01:27.000In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.
00:01:33.000The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace in Soviet-American relations, the memo stated.
00:01:39.000These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.
00:01:44.000Apparently Kennedy offered to help Andropov get TV interviews in the U.S., and he offered to visit Moscow.
00:01:48.000The deal didn't work out, but Democrats ignored the reports when they finally broke in 2009.
00:01:54.000Here's Craig Shirley and Andrew Shirley reporting, quote, In 1960, the Soviets held U-2 pilot Gary Powers after his plane crashed illegally in Russia, and specifically delayed his release until after the presidential elections.
00:02:04.000They used Powers as a bargaining chip, and according to Khrushchev himself, it worked.
00:02:08.000In his memoirs, the Soviet leader stated, We kept Nixon from being able to claim he could deal with the Russians.
00:02:13.000Our ploy made a difference of at least half a million votes, which gave Kennedy the edge he needed.
00:02:17.000Democrats complaining about Russian elections interference are breaking with historical president.
00:02:21.000It's also worth noting that so are Republicans, who suddenly don't seem to care about Russian involvement so long as it benefits their guy, but the hypocrisy of the Democrats is certainly on full display.
00:02:45.000So, if you're looking for healthier snacks around the office, really tasty, delicious snacks, all the people around the office, I think, are eating it right now.
00:03:39.000Over the weekend, the big breaking news, of course, was that the CIA basically suggested that Vladimir Putin, shirtless, riding a horse, had decided to hack the U.S.
00:03:50.000Not that he hacked the election results, but by hacking the DNC and helping out WikiLeaks by revealing information about Hillary Clinton, that this had made Hillary Clinton president.
00:03:59.000The CIA didn't say that they made Hillary president.
00:04:01.000They said that was Putin's intent, that what Putin wanted out of life was for Hillary Clinton not to be President of the United States.
00:04:07.000He wanted Donald Trump to be President of the United States.
00:04:09.000Here was the Washington Post's original report.
00:04:11.000They said, quote, Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the DNC and others, including Hillary's campaign chairman, according to U.S.
00:04:24.000Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intel community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton's chances.
00:04:55.000The Russians tried to hack the DNC in order to help Trump, and Trump would have won anyway.
00:05:10.000Okay, I think Trump would have won anyway, because the fact is that what actually stopped Trump, if you want to look at the news cycle, what actually hurt Trump was not the WikiLeaks particularly, what helped Trump was not the WikiLeaks particularly.
00:05:20.000It was the Comey investigation, which wasn't based on the WikiLeaks, remember.
00:05:23.000The Comey investigation was based on Hillary's email servers, and if she hadn't hidden the emails in the first place, it wouldn't have been an issue.
00:05:29.000And it was based on the fact that he found all sorts of Hillary emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop.
00:05:35.000Well, Anthony Weiner's laptop wasn't hacked by the Russians.
00:05:37.000So it really had, one didn't have anything to do with the other.
00:05:39.000Also, if you look at the polls, what you really see is that Hillary was wildly unpopular from the beginning of the election cycle, and she never was able to get out of that funk.
00:05:47.000She was never able to break out of that.
00:05:49.000It's not the Russians' fault that Hillary Clinton is the worst presidential candidate in the history of American politics.
00:05:54.000You can't blame that one on shirtless Vladimir Putin.
00:05:57.000That said, Trump's statement here is really dumb because instead of him just saying, look,
00:06:01.000This is something that ought to be investigated, but we won the election fair and square.
00:06:04.000There's no evidence that Americans voted for me because they were persuaded by Putin's leaks.
00:06:09.000Instead of saying that, instead he goes directly at the CIA and just denies the veracity of the report, which is a really simple-minded way of doing these things.
00:06:15.000It's really dumb, because now he's created a rift with the intelligence agencies, who supposedly he's going to be relying on to give him national security updates.
00:06:54.000Kellyanne Conway kind of knows that it's smart, and so she's on national TV trying to walk that back, saying that, no, no, no, you're missing the point.
00:07:00.000Trump actually likes the intelligence community.
00:07:02.000He respects the intelligence community.
00:07:25.000First of all, the CIA never said that Putin made Hillary Clinton lose.
00:07:29.000They said that that was Putin's intent, but they didn't say, here's our elections analysis demonstrating that this was what cost Hillary Clinton the election cycle.
00:07:39.000It is going to be a serious rift here.
00:07:40.000Here's what Trump actually had to say.
00:07:42.000Again, Trump has no evidence, as far as I'm aware, that what the CIA is saying is wrong, that this was not Putin's intent.
00:07:48.000He has no, again, I think that all that happened here is that Donald Trump doesn't like the result the CIA is coming up with, and so now he's gonna rip on the CIA.
00:07:55.000Whether you believe the CIA or not is irrelevant, actually.
00:07:58.000All that matters here is that Donald Trump has no evidence that the CIA is actually wrong.
00:08:01.000He's just saying this because he doesn't like the conclusion, which is that Vladimir Putin was trying to help him out.
00:08:07.000Which, by the way, was clearly true all the way through the election cycle, okay?
00:08:09.000The fact is, we'll get to this in a second, you can see sort of why Vladimir Putin was trying to help him out, but we'll talk about that in a minute.
00:08:14.000Here's what Trump said about this whole debacle.
00:10:38.000When a foreign country interferes in your election and the outcome is endowed in legitimacy of the government, I don't know how it worked constitutionally, I'm not a lawyer, constitutional lawyer, but I'm deeply disturbed by the fact that the Russians interfered, and I would like to see the evidence, because if the evidence is there, I don't see any other way than to vote again.
00:11:02.000Again, there's no evidence to suggest that Putin actually succeeded, and that's what cost Hillary Clinton the election.
00:11:07.000In fact, as Nate Silver points out, if Clinton lost the election because of an event, it was really not having to do with Russia, it was having to do with James Comey of the FBI revealing information about how the investigation was still ongoing or had been reinvigorated like a week and a half before the election.
00:11:47.000Here's a Time editor, Michael Duffy, and he's making a different argument.
00:11:50.000He's suggesting that what's really going on here is that the Russians could be blackmailing Trump, which again, no evidence of this.
00:11:55.000We know from the campaign, John, that Democratic e-mails were vacuumed up and leaked.
00:12:00.000We don't know exactly how much was vacuumed up from the Republican e-mails, but we now know from the intelligence, the reports about the intelligence community's assessment, that they also got Republican e-mails.
00:12:09.000Which means someone, if that's true, and of course the RNC has denied this, but if it's true, and it stands to reason that it may be true, then someone in Moscow or in Russia is holding on to all of those e-mails, too.
00:12:20.000Okay, so again, there's no evidence of this, but the Democrats have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing.
00:12:24.000Claire McCaskill, the senator from Missouri, she says that this Russian election interference is a form of warfare, using pretty extreme language here.
00:12:31.000How about this issue of Russian involvement?
00:13:02.000And by the way, this should be not only about protecting us going forward, but this is a form of warfare.
00:13:10.000For Vladimir Putin, who is a thug and a bully, and has the friends around the globe that we don't want to be friends with, for him to be trying to impact our elections, that, we have to, there has to be, he has to be held accountable.
00:13:26.000Well, some of that's classified, I believe, and I don't think it's something that we can discuss on TV, but I've had briefings just this last week that indicate that this is a very serious issue for the American people to understand, and for Donald Trump to dismiss out of hand the intelligence community's fact-gathering.
00:13:51.000Okay, so this is all, you know, it's funny to watch Democrats suddenly hot and bothered about Russia.
00:14:01.000As I said earlier, the Democrats didn't care about Russia when it was Barack Obama doing the catering.
00:14:07.000Here was the incident I mentioned earlier, Barack Obama, Dmitry Medvedev caught in a hot mic, Obama offering flexibility to Russia in return for their help in the 2012 election.
00:14:27.000Okay, so again, it is amazing for the Democrats how they are perfectly willing to have Russia intervene in our election so long as it's Democrats who are working with the Russians.
00:14:36.000If it were Trump working with the Russians, it's the end of the world.
00:14:38.000Now, Trump makes this point, by the way, and he makes it exactly right.
00:14:41.000He tweeted out earlier today, and this is 100% true about this.
00:14:49.000Can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and we tried to play the Russia CIA card, it would be called a conspiracy theory.
00:15:27.000Who are saying about Mitt Romney in 2012, look at that crazy Mitt Romney, that crazy Romney guy talking about Russia like it's all threatening and stuff.
00:15:40.000They're the ones who are screwing us, the Russians.
00:15:42.000And so we say, yeah, you're hypocrites.
00:15:44.000OK, the hypocrisy argument works both ways.
00:15:46.000If you were really bothered about the Russians in 2012, but now you're totally fine with Russia intervening in our elections.
00:15:53.000Let me recommend to you that you take a look at something called basic intellectual honesty.
00:15:57.000If your gauge, on the left or the right, if your gauge is good for Trump or bad for Trump is the only thing that matters.
00:16:02.000If you're on the left and your only gauge of whether something is positive is whether it is bad for Trump, let me suggest to you that you have no moral center.
00:16:10.000Because it turns out Trump takes a lot of variety positions on a lot of different issues and he switches those positions frequently.
00:16:16.000And so just because it's bad for Trump doesn't mean that it's good for the country if you're on the left.
00:16:20.000And if you think that, you need a different moral center.
00:16:22.000And if you're on the right, just because it's good for Trump doesn't mean it's good for the country.
00:16:25.000Just because the Russians helped out Trump this time doesn't mean the Russians are our friends, or that this is a good thing, or that this is something that we should be excited about as the Russians are trying to intervene in an American election.
00:17:05.000Is the place to go if you're interested in getting top-notch brands and also more importantly you actually get to work with a stylist so what you do is you you use their their service you go to trunkclub.com slash Ben and they hook you up with a stylist the stylist tells you what kind of clothes are good for you you say what kind of clothes you want and they take all your measurements and then they send you the clothes in a box and you can either pick them you can choose to keep them or you can send them back to them for no charge and
00:18:46.000And you're seeing Republicans react in a couple of different ways.
00:18:49.000You're seeing a lot of Republicans who are close to the Trump team basically saying, we're going to pretend that Vladimir Putin doesn't exist or that he's a nice guy and that he sucks you with his shirt off because he helped our boy.
00:18:59.000Jason Miller is a spokesperson for Trump, for the Trump campaign.
00:19:04.000He said, what this is, is an attempt to delegitimize President-elect Trump's win.
00:19:09.000So there's talk of a bipartisan probe of the Russian hacking, saying it's an attempt to delegitimize President-elect Trump's win.
00:19:15.000Or maybe it's just an attempt to look into the fact that we need to strengthen our institutions so that the Russians can't hack us and then reveal information.
00:19:21.000It's all fun and games, gang, until it turns out that Vladimir Putin decides that he's going to use the power of the hack against people that we like.
00:19:29.000Right, what happens when Donald Trump decides to cross Vladimir Putin over some issue?
00:19:33.000And next thing you know, Vladimir Putin has had his lackeys hack into Trump's email, and you're getting the French porn tape people were talking about this entire election cycle, right?
00:19:42.000Well, what happens when all that happens is nothing good.
00:19:45.000Chuck Todd was on with Reince Priebus, and Reince was doing his usual shilling routine, here's Reince, pretending that nothing is happening with Vladimir Putin, everything is great with Vladimir Putin.
00:19:54.000Do you believe, let's just clear this up, do you believe
00:19:58.000Does the President-elect believe that Russia was trying to muddy up and get involved in the election in 2016?
00:20:06.000Number one, you don't know it, I don't know it, and there's been no conclusive or specific report to say otherwise.
00:20:36.000Listen, I don't know what investigations he wants, but yes, we do want to know.
00:20:39.000But what I don't want to do, Chuck, is have a debate with you over an unnamed source that the article said was inconclusive over who hacked and why they hacked.
00:21:03.000Then why do you oppose an investigation?
00:21:05.000Why is Jason Miller out there saying that there shouldn't be any investigation?
00:21:07.000You just say you want to know, but then you don't want an investigation.
00:21:10.000Intellectually dishonest, and I'm going to call it out when it is intellectually dishonest.
00:21:13.000If the left is being intellectually dishonest because suddenly they care that Russia's getting involved in our elections, and they were fine with it in 2012, I'll call that out.
00:21:20.000And when the right, which opposed Vladimir Putin's dictatorial nonsense for literally my entire life, now comes out and says, well, you know, we don't really care whether they're hacking, or if they are hacking, maybe it's just a 400-pound guy.
00:21:31.000Sure, there were 17 different reports from intelligence agencies suggesting Russian involvement in the hacks, but, you know, no need for an investigation.
00:21:38.000It's just, it's utter foolishness, and that's a problem for me.
00:21:43.000We'll talk more about this, plus more breaking news on Trump's Secretary of State, and Trump did a big interview over the weekend, and we'll talk about some of the things that he said, and we'll get things I like and things I hate, so much more coming up over at DailyWire.com.
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