Trump accuses the Intelligence Community of leaking information about a confidential briefing. Is the intelligence community at war with Trump? And what does that mean for our trust in government and the people tasked with keeping us safe? Plus, a look at the Dadaist politics into which we have descended, and why we should all be rooting for a naked guy in a trash can to do the job we have become so used to seeing naked people in trash cans doing the job that we don t even realize it. Welcome to another episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, in which we talk about all of that and much more! Enjoy, and tweet me if you have any thoughts or suggestions on how to improve the show. Ben Shapiro is a writer, comedian, podcaster, and podcaster based in Washington, D.C. and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, and other media outlets. His latest book, "The Dark Side of Politics," is out now, and it's out in paperback! If you haven't already checked it out, you won't want to miss it! Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to our new podcast, The Dark Side Of Politics, wherever you get your favorite shows, and don't forget to leave us a five star rating and review! review on iTunes! It's free, honest, unadulterated, unfiltered, and unscripted, and uncensored. It's the best thing you can do for your tastes and opinions on all things politics, politics, real and real life. . Subscribe and share it all on both social media platforms, wherever else you get the most authentic and most authentic in the best of what's going on the internet. You can be a friend of the highest quality and the most honest, most authentic, and most of it's the most fun you can be? Thank you for listening and sharing it on social media, too! You'll get a whole lot more like that, right here, right there, no matter what you're listening to this, and more than that, thanks to Ben Shapiro, the real thing, right down to the rest of it, thank you, Ben Shapiro and more, thanks for listening to the real world, thanks Ben Shapiro and more. -- THE PODCASTING THAT SORRY FOR THAT, BEN CHECK OUT THE PEN AND GOT A FRIENDS AND MORE!
00:00:00.000Donald Trump has not been a fan of the intelligence community.
00:00:03.000For months, he denied, over and over and over and over and over again, the intelligence community's conclusions that the Russian government actors were behind the WikiLeaks targeting Hillary Clinton.
00:00:12.000Now, Trump accuses the intelligence community of leaking information about a confidential briefing.
00:00:17.000Trump went on a rampage on Twitter against the intelligence community over the leaks.
00:00:20.000He said, quote, intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to leak into the public.
00:00:29.000Trump says the briefing did not include information from the now infamous BuzzFeed report that accused Trump of being in bed or peeing on the bed with the Russians.
00:00:37.000Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggests that Trump was informed of such reports and says the intelligence community was not responsible for the leaks.
00:00:45.000Is the intelligence community at war with Trump?
00:00:49.000Commentators have said for months that anyone who attacks the intelligence community will find themselves on the wrong end of nasty leaks.
00:00:55.000Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened Trump, quote, Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you.
00:01:02.000So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he is being really dumb to do this.
00:01:07.000And the left has accused the intelligence community of tossing the election to Trump as a way of targeting Hillary Clinton thanks to FBI Director James Comey's announcement a week and a half before the election that Hillary's emails were still under investigation.
00:01:18.000This is actually kind of frightening stuff.
00:01:20.000The intelligence community is not its own government.
00:01:23.000Independent executive agencies that have access to classified information are inherently dangerous.
00:01:28.000They require a high level of trust to function well in a democracy.
00:01:31.000Pitting them against democratically elected political actors is a recipe for destroying both the credibility of the intelligence community and the credibility of those government actors.
00:01:40.000It creates the perception that a shadow government has the power to destroy politicians and that they're willing to do so.
00:01:46.000And it appears that such fear isn't totally ill-founded.
00:01:49.000According to The Guardian, quote, Is that legitimate?
00:02:42.000That's essentially what it's come down to.
00:02:43.000If you've never been to a piece of Dada theater, it's the most bizarre crap you'll ever see.
00:02:47.000It's always some random guy who for no reason in the middle of the show just gets nude and runs around, and then everybody cheers because they think that there's a deeper meaning underlying it.
00:02:55.000That's sort of what our politics has become, except we either root for or against the naked guy.
00:03:00.000That's pretty much what our politics would be.
00:03:01.000We'll get to all of that in just a second.
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00:04:49.000Okay, so the world is still falling apart over this whole BuzzFeed CNN Donald Trump hubbub.
00:05:25.000And so today's show is going to be an exercise in showing just how little people seem to care about the truth or intellectual honesty or decency and how it's all turned into just partisan bickering and bashing each other, which doesn't do the country any good and isn't likely to inculcate any sort of trust in Americans for either the government or the political process, which of course leads to the rise of demagogues.
00:05:49.000Basically, here's my theory about how 2016 went.
00:05:54.0002016, the Trump revolution, it really was all of the chickens coming home to roost.
00:05:58.000People didn't trust the media, Trump ripped the media, the chicken came home to roost.
00:06:02.000People didn't trust Obama, the chicken came home to roost in the form of Donald Trump.
00:06:06.000Lots of chickens coming home to roost.
00:06:07.000The problem is, the left spent so long
00:06:10.000Maintaining this facade that politics is decent, while ripping away at the heart of politics, ripping away at truth and decency, lying routinely, ripping their opponents, but then putting this false facade of decency and smoothness on top, that eventually people said, screw it, we don't need the facade anymore, this whole thing is a joke.
00:06:27.000All the chickens have come home to roost at once.
00:06:51.000I really like conflict in politics because I think it keeps everybody honest.
00:06:54.000But what seems to be happening is because everybody has fallen into such partisan traps and refused to acknowledge any sort of truth at all, and even the notion of objective truth has gone away, instead what you have is chaos not in service
00:07:07.000I'm trying to get at the truth, but chaos for its own sake.
00:07:12.000So we begin today with BuzzFeed falling apart.
00:07:15.000So BuzzFeed obviously made a mockery of itself by releasing this 35-page memo that includes all of these ridiculous allegations against President-elect Trump.
00:07:22.000Everybody was ripping them up and down.
00:07:25.000Nate Silver came out and defended them, which is odd because I don't remember Nate Silver defending other people who released unverified rumors years ago.
00:07:54.000So Chuck Todd over at NBC News, he had on Ben Smith of BuzzFeed, and he asked him some questions as to why exactly he had released what even Chuck Todd is calling fake news.
00:08:05.000When Chuck Todd is tearing apart BuzzFeed, and for good reason, you know that things are wild.
00:08:09.000When Chuck Todd is suddenly the guardian of truth and justice in the media, you know that things are going crazy.
00:08:14.000So there are really two questions for the media today, and they all come back to the same question.
00:08:20.000Does the media owe Donald Trump an apology?
00:08:22.000Does the media owe Donald Trump an apology?
00:08:26.000And the reason I ask that is because, as we'll see in a minute, there are a lot of people demanding that CNN apologize to Donald Trump.
00:08:31.000So, there are two things that happened yesterday that are controversial.
00:08:34.000One is the CNN reporter accosting Trump at the press conference and yelling at him and Trump shutting him down.
00:08:40.000And the other thing is the actual CNN report.
00:08:42.000They owe an apology for the CNN report.
00:08:44.000So, to give the background again, the CNN report claimed that intelligence community officials briefed Donald Trump
00:08:52.000They briefed Donald Trump on these rumors that were going around regarding his relationship with Russia.
00:08:59.000They briefed President Obama about that also.
00:09:01.000That basically, CNN reported that Trump received a summary of information contained in a series of memos that talked about his relationship with Russia.
00:09:11.000CNN says that Trump was informed of this.
00:09:19.000He said, We also discussed the private security company document, which was widely circulated in recent months among the media, members of Congress, and congressional staff even before the intelligence community became aware of it.
00:09:30.000I emphasize that this document is not a U.S.
00:09:33.000I do not believe the leaks came from within the intelligence community.
00:09:36.000This is his phone call with Trump today.
00:09:38.000The intelligence community has not made any judgment that the information in the document is reliable.
00:09:43.000We did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions.
00:09:45.000However, part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.
00:09:53.000So Clapper seems to be backing up the CNN report, right?
00:10:08.000Okay, so the CNN report, at the very least, is disputed.
00:10:11.000It is not an openly false report, as opposed to the stuff that BuzzFeed released, which is completely unverified and unverifiable, as even BuzzFeed acknowledges.
00:11:28.000Here's Randy Weber from the 14th district in Texas.
00:11:31.000He says, the CNN reporter who was disruptive to the press briefing and disrespectful to Trump should be fired and prohibited from any press briefings.
00:11:39.000And other people on the right have said this too.
00:11:42.000So Sean Spicer says also CNN should apologize for this reporter shouting at him here as the White House incoming press secretary.
00:11:50.000The office of President-elect of President of the United States deserves a level of respect.
00:11:54.000And having a reporter stand up and basically yell and scream and act as inappropriately and rude as he did is a disgrace.
00:12:05.000And he was an embarrassment to the press corps.
00:12:07.000Frankly, beyond the embarrassment that he caused to the President-elect, I think he's an embarrassment to the press corps.
00:12:12.000Because the rest of the press was behaving appropriately, raising their hand, asked to have questions asked.
00:12:18.000His network had already had a question answered.
00:12:20.000And I think he owes an apology not just to the president-elect, but to the entire press corps for his inappropriate behavior.
00:12:27.000Okay, and Sarah Palin put out a statement that was very similar, really, really going after this reporter from CNN and suggesting that these journalists ought to be slammed by Trump.
00:12:36.000It says, thank God, really, literally, thank God we're not facing a third Obama term.
00:12:39.000If you caught President-elect Trump's first presser today, you saw it.
00:12:42.000Thank you for creating the movement that shook things up to get America on the right road.
00:12:45.000And then she says, these journalists, bad characters that they are,
00:14:00.000I recommend people that have some moral compass.
00:14:02.000You know, I've been hearing more and more about a thing called fake news, and they're talking about people that go and say all sorts of things.
00:14:23.000But I will tell you, some of the media outlets that I deal with are fake news, more so than anybody.
00:14:28.000I could name them, but I won't bother, but you have a few sitting right in front of us.
00:14:32.000Okay, so the right responds to all of this stuff with CNN and BuzzFeed by basically becoming what the left was to Obama, right?
00:14:40.000You see Matt Boyle just kissing Trump's rear.
00:14:45.000And again, we'll talk in a second about the hypocrisy that exists on the right, then we'll get to the hypocrisy that exists on the left, which is truly astonishing, it really is.
00:14:52.000But first, we have to say thank you to another one of our advertisers, CISO.
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00:16:35.000You know, I would like to just remind the right, before they go completely nuts over this Jim Acosta routine where he said something to a reporter, and they say it's so great that Trump quashed it, flashback, this is Neil Monroe.
00:16:47.000Neil Monroe is a reporter for the Daily Caller, or was a reporter for the Daily Caller, and this is him at a press conference Barack Obama was holding back in 2013.
00:17:11.000So that was Neil Monroe jumping in while Obama was talking and asking him a question as to why he was treating illegal immigrants better than American citizens.
00:17:18.000Tucker Carlson, who was, you know, kind of egging Sean Spicer along, calling for an apology from Jim Acosta.
00:17:25.000I'm old enough to remember when Tucker Carlson defended his reporter, Neil Monroe.
00:17:28.000In fact, he went ahead and he said that Neil Monroe was doing a service at the time.
00:17:33.000He said, quote, this is what reporters are supposed to do.
00:17:36.000They're supposed to get their questions answered.
00:17:38.000It's hard to know what's wrong with asking the president a question.
00:17:41.000So now the shoe's on the other foot, and of course, nobody cares about the truth, so we all have to pretend that something great and glorious happened here, as opposed to the CNN reporter asked a question, Trump ignored him.
00:18:05.000So here's how the left responded to all this.
00:18:08.000So Trevor Noah, the least funny person in America, he and Amy Schumer have been, and Lena Dunham, have been a three-way running gun battle for that title, the least funny person in the United States.
00:18:17.000Trevor Noah from Comedy Central, he says that this was a frightening moment, that this moment at the press conference where Trump steamrolled Jim Acosta, that was a frightening moment.
00:19:39.000I mean, no one questions the right of any American, but particularly a journalist, asking the President of the United States a question.
00:19:47.000Where Neil Munro crossed the line by a mile is by questioning the President before he even finished speaking, one, and also yelling out a question where he knew questions wouldn't be entertained.
00:20:07.000Crystal, there are some true believers who are actually defending Mr. Monroe, as you know.
00:20:11.000And on Fox, they were suggesting a parallel with a moment from the Iran-Contra scandal where the press and Reagan had a similar kind of conflict.
00:20:20.000But as I understand it, he'd actually finished.
00:20:23.000Similar, except for one important thing, which is that he had actually finished his statement before the question was lobbed.
00:20:28.000But, you know, credit where credit is due.
00:20:30.000It's good to see some criticism from Fox News to Neil Monroe.
00:20:34.000Okay, so they're all happy that there was criticism of Neil Munro.
00:20:37.000Now, Jim Acosta's the great hero of the same people on the left.
00:20:40.000I love how Jonathan Capehart basically implies that Neil Munro's a racist for asking a question in the middle of Obama's statement, which is pretty incredible.
00:20:59.000We only answer questions from people who are subscribers, and we will answer live questions from subscribers a little bit later on the show, so you can check that out as well.
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