On Wednesday, hyped up on rumors of Russian connections with the Trump administration, CNN commentator Sally Cohn took to Twitter with her proposed solution to the turmoil shaking Washington, D.C. Impeachment, a constitutional crisis, a special election, a Hillary win, and a President Clinton win. It's good to dream, Sally. It s good to have an active imagination. And it is good to know that she's still dreaming of President Hillary, no doubt alongside President Hillary. Plus, we have a special surprise for our cultural correspondent, Andrew Klavan, who shows up here to annoy us in just a few moments. And we clean up a bit of unfinished business: a bet I made on the last election, and it's a big mistake I've been holding on to for a long time, and I'm going to pay it off in a big way. Thanks to our sponsor, Helix Sleep, for sponsoring this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show. You get 50% off your order when you use the promo code "Ben Shapiro" when you place your order through Ben Shapiro's website, plus a 50% discount when you enter the discount code "SallyCohn" at checkout. You can't ask for much better than that! Ben Shapiro is a writer, comedian, podcaster, and podcaster. He's also the host of the podcast "The Ben Shapiro" and is a regular contributor at The Weekly Standard. His latest book is out now: and is out in paperback! and available on Amazon Prime and Vimeo. If you like what you hear, you can buy a copy of his new book, "The Man Who's Good to Dream: It's Good To Dream." by clicking here. Subscribe to Ben Shapiro and Ben Shapiro on Podchaser, too! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Subscribe on iTunes, too, and leave us a review! if you're looking for a good night's rest rest easy and a good time in the next episode of Ben Shapiro, you'll get $50 off your first book recommendation. You'll get a chance to win $400, $100, $150, $200, $50, and $200 off your next week, and more! all of that plus a free shipping and free shipping, plus an additional $5 off a lifetime of VIP membership when you sign up for the Ben Shapiro book? all that and much more! Thanks Ben Shapiro.
00:00:00.000On Wednesday, hyped up on rumors of Russian connections with the Trump administration, CNN commentator Sally Cohn took to Twitter with her proposed solution to the turmoil shaking Washington, D.C.
00:00:53.000And then how about that special election?
00:00:54.000Well, I guess you'd need an act of Congress, because that's not in the Constitution.
00:00:58.000Well, Republicans control both houses of Congress, so there's that as well.
00:01:03.000And then, continuing on, Cohn suggests that the race would be Paul Ryan versus Hillary Clinton.
00:01:06.000Neither side of that equation is actually guaranteed.
00:01:09.000Finally, Cohn suggests Hillary would undoubtedly win the election, which is kind of silly, given she just lost to the most unpopular presidential candidate in modern American history.
00:01:16.000But it is good to know that Sally Cohn has an active imagination and that she's still dreaming of President Hillary, no doubt alongside President Hillary.
00:01:33.000So we will have a special surprise in just a moment here on The Ben Shapiro Show for our cultural correspondent, or Andrew Klavan's cultural correspondent, Michael Molls.
00:01:41.000He'll be showing up here to annoy us in just a few moments.
00:01:43.000But first, we have to say thank you to our advertisers over at Helix Sleep.
00:01:47.000If you are longing for a good night's sleep, if you have children that wake you up at all hours of the night, for example, not that it applies to you, but it applies to me, if you do, then you need a bed from Helix Sleep.
00:02:07.000And you can have a mattress that has two separate settings for you and your spouse, and then you order it, it comes in the mail, you take it out of the box, it inflates right in front of you because it's a foam mattress, and you use it for 100 nights.
00:02:21.000If you don't like it for 100 nights, then you can send it back to them for free.
00:02:26.000Shipping is 100% free, so you can try it.
00:02:28.000There is no risk whatsoever, because if you don't like it, you can always send it back.
00:03:09.000So I gave a bunch of odds, and I'd actually forgotten that I made a bet with Michael Mulls since I apparently decided to lose money to everyone in the office.
00:03:16.000I've already given small amounts of money to Jonathan Hay, I've given
00:03:21.000Larger amounts of money to Michael Medved and David Bowes.
00:03:24.000I gave amounts of money to Jeremy Boring, or at least I will, maybe.
00:03:29.000But Michael, I've been holding out on mainly because it's fun.
00:03:31.000So I'm actually signing him the check.
00:03:33.000Come on here, Michael, and congratulations.
00:04:20.000Now, in other news, everything continues to be crazy over in Washington, D.C., and it continues to be crazy because everyone has decided to go absolutely insane.
00:04:30.000Nobody is telling you the truth, okay?
00:04:31.000This is the running theme of the show today, is that no one is telling you the truth.
00:04:34.000Everybody tells you half the story, but not the other half of the story.
00:04:37.000So if you're on the right, then what you're generally hearing today is about intelligence leaks and how terrible they are.
00:04:42.000And intelligence leaks are bad, right?
00:04:44.000I mean, and we'll talk about that in just a second.
00:04:46.000And if you're on the left, all you're hearing about is how Michael Flynn is a secret agent of the Russians from Russia with love, right?
00:04:52.000That's all you're hearing is that Moscow is now in control of the government.
00:05:16.000And so, they've all gone crazy, and they're suggesting that Mike Flynn, the national security advisor being ousted, is the biggest story in the history of mankind, ever since Jesus apparently rose from the dead, or apparently since Moses received the tablets at Sinai, or since the creation of Earth.
00:05:33.000This is the biggest news that has ever happened, right, depending on your religion.
00:05:35.000This is the biggest news that has ever happened in the history of man.
00:05:38.000And so here's a little montage of people
00:05:41.000From the media losing their minds, this is Chuck Todd from NBC News and Thomas Friedman, who has the brainpower of a slightly overused hairdryer, and Dan Rather, talking about how this Mike Flynn thing is just the- it's not just big, it's the biggest.
00:06:00.000Welcome to MTP Daily and welcome to day one of what is arguably the biggest presidential scandal involving a foreign government since Iran-Contra.
00:06:11.000Hyperbole aside, folks, hunker down, because this is a Class 5 political hurricane that's hitting Washington.
00:06:17.000All this hour, we're going to dive into every angle of this breaking story as the White House scrambles to contain the fallout.
00:06:23.000Today, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that President Trump knew for weeks that his National Security Advisor Michael Flynn had misled the Vice President and, apparently, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, among other White House officials, about discussions he had with Russia.
00:06:38.000It's the biggest thing since Iran-Contra.
00:06:54.000I mean, literally, as far as we know, that is the entire thing.
00:06:56.000We don't know anything more than that.
00:06:57.000Those are all the verified facts thus far.
00:07:00.000And I don't even think that's fireable, as I discussed yesterday.
00:07:02.000And we'll talk about sort of the theories of why Flynn was even fired, because it seems really questionable to fire him based on sort of all the right-wing theories of what's going on here.
00:07:11.000So Chuck Todd says the biggest since Iran-Contra.
00:07:13.000That's sort of ignoring things like Benghazi.
00:07:15.000It's sort of ignoring things like Barack Obama lying to the American people and Congress and everyone about the Iran deal until it was already done and Ben Rhodes bragging about it in the press.
00:07:25.000It's sort of ignoring the weapons of mass destruction debacle under George W. Bush.
00:07:29.000It's sort of ignoring the Chinagate scandal under President Clinton.
00:07:33.000There have been a lot of real problems in foreign policy for a long time.
00:07:37.000If you just want to restrict it to scandals involving foreign governments, then it seems to me that in 2012, Barack Obama sang openly on a hot mic that he wanted flexibility from the Russian government for his re-election campaign.
00:08:26.000So Friedman says, can you imagine what the right would be doing if the situation were reversed?
00:08:30.000Well, can you imagine what the left would be doing if the situation were reversed?
00:08:33.000They'd be saying Hillary, of course, was going to win anyway because Trump was so unpopular.
00:08:36.000They'd be saying exactly the same thing that a lot of people on the right are saying today.
00:08:41.000Show us the evidence, no smoking gun, etc.
00:08:43.000But the idea that this is akin to 9-11 is akin to Pearl Harbor.
00:08:46.000It's an attack on our very institutions of government!
00:08:51.000Okay, again, you're gonna have to show me the people who died, okay?
00:08:53.000If you're gonna compare something to, you know, actual physical attacks in which thousands of Americans die, you're gonna have to show me the actual Americans who die, as opposed to just saying that leaked documents released by WikiLeaks, which is bad, okay?
00:09:05.000I was against WikiLeaks all the way through the election cycle.
00:11:20.000I don't remember you trying to force out Lois Lerner in the same way that you tried to force out Mike Flynn.
00:11:24.000And this brings up a real issue for the country.
00:11:27.000And here's the conservative take on this whole thing.
00:11:31.000This brings up a real issue for the country.
00:11:32.000But the issue for the country is less about Trump and Russia than it is about the fact that we now have collusion between the intelligence community and the media in order to undercut Trump.
00:11:42.000Regardless whether you like Trump or you don't like Trump, it is not a good thing when the intelligence community is acting as a shadow government, intervening in elections.
00:11:48.000You know, James Comey writing letters in the middle of elections, the left hated it.
00:11:51.000Now you've got the intelligence community leaking off the record like a sieve.
00:11:55.000I mean, it's not even a leak anymore, it's now a gushing flood of information coming out to the media, and it's all being delightfully overplayed by the media.
00:12:01.000I'll give you two examples just over the last 12 hours.
00:12:04.000So on Tuesday night, the New York Times ran with this headline, quote,
00:12:08.000Trump campaign aides had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence.
00:12:22.000They were in coordination all the way with Russian intelligence.
00:12:26.000And this was used as sort of the counter to the fact that Sean Spicer had said that nobody talked with Russia before the election because, again, the Trump administration is not competent at communications.
00:12:34.000Now, today, can you still say definitively that nobody on the Trump campaign, not even General Flynn, had any contact with the Russians before the election?
00:12:50.000My understanding is that what General Flynn has now expressed is that during the transition period, well we were very clear that during the transition period, he did speak with the ambassador.
00:12:59.000I'm talking about during the campaign.
00:13:01.000I don't have any, there's nothing that would conclude me that anything different has changed with respect to that time period.
00:13:06.000Okay, so there he says that we've had no contact during the campaign, and then the New York Times runs a piece saying there were contacts during the campaign, looks shady, looks like a cover-up.
00:13:13.000But, as James Barrett notes over at Daily Wire, by the third paragraph of their 1,300-word article, the Times admits that they said so far they'd seen no evidence of cooperation between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
00:13:23.000So, Spicer isn't telling the truth there, that Trump people weren't talking to the Russians, but there was no evidence of cooperation, and the New York Times acknowledges there's no evidence for any collusion with the Russians regarding the election, and then later in the article, the team of writers acknowledged that the contact that did allegedly take place between Trump's associates and Russian intelligence could have been done unwittingly.
00:13:43.000So it's possible that Spicer isn't actually lying, he just doesn't know the answer, meaning, we talked to people who are from Russia, were they working for the Russian government?
00:13:51.000And then CNN ran, here's a second story, CNN runs another story today, and their headline is, Trump aides were in constant touch with senior Russian officials during campaign.
00:14:00.000And so you get an idea, if you're reading that headline, the impression that you take away is there's coordination.
00:14:12.000But then CNN reports, quote, officials emphasize that communications between campaign staff and representatives of foreign government are not unusual.
00:14:20.000So if they're not unusual, what the hell are we talking about here?
00:14:23.000Presumably, what they're really asking Spicer is, were there any covert coordinations, were there any covert communications between Trump team and Russian team, but CNN can't say there was, and New York Times can't say there was, but the headlines seem to suggest there was.
00:14:38.000Why isn't the headline, no evidence of coordination, Ari Fleischer pointed this out, why is there no headline that says, no evidence of coordination between Russian government and Trump campaign?
00:14:48.000And why is the intelligence community leaking all this stuff anonymously?
00:14:51.000So Trump has been up in arms over this.
00:14:52.000He's been tweeting incessantly about the intelligence community leaking and saying it's really inappropriate.
00:14:57.000There is one problem with how Trump is doing this, and that is that Trump is saying these leaks are wildly inappropriate, and then he's also saying fake news.
00:15:04.000Okay, either the leaks are true or the leaks are false.
00:15:07.000You can't really say both the leaks are illegal, and they're really damaging, and they're really terrible, and also, they're false.
00:15:13.000If they're false, just say they're false, right?
00:15:14.000Just say it's a bunch of crap, and people in the media... I mean, Trump is familiar with tweeting in all capital letters fake news.
00:15:21.000But the real story here is not even about the media so much as it is about the intel community.
00:15:25.000So, this is what people have been referring to as the deep state, meaning the bureaucracy that is entrenched.
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