Ben Shapiro is back on The Ben Shapiro Show to discuss the latest fake scandal involving Devin Nunes and his meeting with the White House, as well as all the other nonsense that s been going on since then. Plus, President Trump reaches out to Democrats rather than reaching out to conservatives, and the administration seeks to block former Attorney General Sally Yates from testifying in a congressional hearing because of her "privilege." Plus, North Korea threatens to nuke us, and we talk about how to prepare for a nuclear North Korean attack on the United States. All that and much more on today's show! Ben Shapiro is the host of the Ben Shapiro show on the FiveThirtyEight Radio Network. See linktr.ee/BenShapiroShow for the full show notes and subscribe to the show on your favorite streaming platform so you don't miss out on any new episodes. Enjoy! Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's show on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five star rating and review the show wherever you get your favorite podcast listening to your favorite podcaster. You can also become a patron of the show by becoming a patron patron by becoming one of our platinum members! Thank you so much for supporting the show and supporting Ben Shapiro s efforts to make great podcasting! . Subscribe, rate, review, and review! and spread the word to your friends about what he's talking about on the airwaves and on social media! Thanks again and again for all the great stuff he does! - Ben Shapiro and his team at The Five ThirtyEighteen Podcasts Podcasts and much, much more! Enjoys this episode of The Ben's thoughts on the Ben's work and his deep knowledge about the culture and his love of all things political and culture and culture, and so much more. - - his thoughts on all things politics and culture! Timestamps: 5 stars is much, really really digs it! Also, check it out on this episode is a must-listens everywhere else on the internet too! ... Thanks for listening to Ben's show is much more than just that's not enough! ! Enjoymentmentals: Thankyou, Mr. Ben's review is much better than yours, too much else is more than enough, really gets it's enough than you could ask for it, right? thank you, really needs it? - the real thing?
00:00:18.000And there was an op-ed to back this idiotic contention up.
00:00:21.000In it, Harris argued that Gorsuch, a man so qualified that literally not one Democrat cast a vote against him for his federal appellate court position, was unqualified to be on the Supreme Court.
00:01:11.000But according to Harris, judges should fulfill the mandate of Thurgood Marshall, who said, quote, you do what you think is right and let the law catch up, which coincidentally is also something that every dictator ever has said.
00:01:34.000Okay, so we are going to get to all of the hubbub over Devin Nunes, the head of the House Intelligence Community, and the supposed scandal surrounding him visiting the White House.
00:01:41.000We are going to get to Donald Trump's decision to reach out to Democrats rather than reaching out to conservatives.
00:01:47.000We're going to get to some good Trump and some bad Trump.
00:01:48.000We'll do good Trump, bad Trump today, which is always exciting.
00:03:18.000Okay, so, the big scandal of the day is a fake controversy, and that is, Devin Nunes, who's the head of the House Intelligence Committee, he went over to the White House, apparently, and there he met with some intelligence official who told him all of the information that he broke last week.
00:03:33.000Now, if you recall, last week, Devin Nunes went out and did a press conference where he said that Donald Trump's team was surveilled.
00:03:38.000Now, he said that they weren't wiretapped.
00:03:40.000He said that what happened is that basically the intelligence officials were wiretapping all of these diplomats from foreign countries.
00:03:48.000And those people had members of the Trump transition team on the other line, as you would imagine they would.
00:03:52.000And then that information was disseminated in an irresponsible and or criminal way.
00:03:57.000So the dissemination of the information was really the question, not the gathering of the information.
00:04:02.000A lot of people on Team Trump have been saying that the intelligence community illegally gathered information.
00:04:07.000There's no evidence of that whatsoever.
00:04:09.000Did they illegally disseminate information?
00:04:11.000There, there's actually a fair bit of evidence that they illegally disseminated information about, for example, former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn.
00:04:18.000But Democrats, in the search for scandal, have been looking somewhere else.
00:04:21.000So what they say, the case that they are making now, is that basically Trump was engaged in some sort of nefarious activity with Russia.
00:04:28.000And now they're trying to cover it up.
00:04:30.000So today, the Washington Post says, quote, The Trump administration sought to block former acting Attorney General Sally Yates from testifying to Congress in the House investigation into links between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.
00:04:41.000According to a series of letters reviewed by the Washington Post, Yates was notified earlier this month by the Justice Department that the administration considers a great deal of her possible testimony to be barred from discussion in a congressional hearing because the topics are covered by the presidential communication privilege.
00:04:56.000Now, as you recall, Barack Obama also asserted the presidential communication privilege when he was attempting to defend his Attorney General, Eric Holder, from contempt of Congress under Republicans.
00:05:06.000Yates was supposed to testify before the House Intelligence Committee this week, defying the Trump administration, and then Devin Nunes mysteriously cancelled the hearing at which he would testify.
00:05:16.000He now says that she will testify next week.
00:05:18.000So the media immediately leapt to their some sort of horrible cover-up in progress, and they said that that cover-up is worse because last week, before Nunes announced all of this stuff about the intelligence community disseminating information wrongly,
00:05:53.000And that as chair of the House Intel Committee, he's able to see such material without reporting it back to his colleagues.
00:05:58.000He hasn't revealed what intelligence official actually communicated the information to him, and then he went back to the White House and told Trump about it.
00:06:05.000Now that's the part that's a little bit shady.
00:06:07.000The idea that he went and he talked to this intelligence official, and then he didn't tell any of his committee members, and then he went and told Trump.
00:06:13.000Well, if that were the case, then why didn't the intelligence official just go tell Trump?
00:06:17.000So people are latching on to this, and they're saying, well, this is obviously some sort of cover-up.
00:06:21.000Obviously, NĂșñez was fed something by the White House, and then he went and updated Trump on the feeding, and then he went out there and parroted the Trump line.
00:06:29.000But there's not a ton of evidence that that is true.
00:06:33.000There are basically two theories about what NĂșñez is doing here.
00:06:36.000Theory number one is the conspiratorial one, that NĂșñez knows that there is something nefarious that Trump was doing with Russia.
00:06:42.000And now he's out there attempting to misdirect at the behest of the White House, which is why he visited the White House both before and after he went out and announced all of this stuff.
00:06:51.000And this has led to a tremendous breakdown in the House Intelligence Committee.
00:06:54.000They've canceled all their hearings for this week because people can't get along.
00:07:00.000Let's imagine for a second that Obama intelligence community members are widely dispersing information illegally, which is probably true.
00:07:06.000And let's assume that Nunes found out about this from some sort of intelligence community whistleblower who didn't want to go directly to Trump because he'd
00:07:35.000He doesn't allow the Yates testimony, or at least the White House fights the Yates testimony, not because they think that Yates has something that they need to keep hidden, but because Yates is just going to go out there and be a political hack.
00:07:45.000Which, again, is not implausible because, after all, Yates is a political hack.
00:07:49.000She was fired, if you recall, by the Trump administration for refusing to defend Trump's travel ban in court when she was acting Attorney General.
00:07:56.000Both of those theories are plausible, but the media is only covering one of those theories, and the Democrats are only pushing one of those theories, and that is the Nunes-Trump cover-up theory.
00:08:04.000And, again, the big question in all of that is, where's the scandal?
00:08:07.000If there's going to be a cover-up, you assume something had to be done that was wrong.
00:08:11.000So far, the only thing I know that was done that was wrong in any of this
00:08:14.000Is that there were intelligence officials who worked for Obama who are leaking a bunch of information to the press and leaking a bunch of information to the rest of the intelligence community and unmasking people.
00:08:22.000That's the only thing I know was done wrong here.
00:08:25.000I don't know anything was done wrong between the Trump team and Russia.
00:08:27.000You know, you can suspect whatever you want, but there's no evidence.
00:08:31.000I don't know that anything was done in terms of coordination with WikiLeaks.
00:08:37.000Again, what's funny about this is that among all the leaks that have happened from the intelligence community to the press, the one thing that hasn't been leaked is actual definitive information that says that Trump was connected to Russia.
00:08:49.000There's all this smoke, but there's no fire.
00:08:51.000And so it's just as plausible as the cover-up theory that basically this is an incompetently handled, just normal order of business routine from Devin Nunes and President Trump.
00:09:03.000So here is Nunes explaining why he went to the White House grounds in the first place.
00:09:06.000The Congress has not been given this information, these documents.
00:10:45.000Yeah, well I'm sure that the Democrats do want me to quit because they know that I'm quite effective at getting to the bottom of things.
00:10:52.000Alright, well let's hope so, Congressman.
00:11:05.000Just to be perfectly honest with you, whenever you have a member of the party of the president who's investigating the president himself, it is very rare that you get an honest and credible investigation.
00:11:14.000Very difficult to get an honest, credible investigation of the president when the person who's leading the investigation was on the Trump transition team.
00:11:23.000So I think that it is perfectly fair to say the media is overblowing this case and this is a fake scandal and that we don't even know what's going on yet.
00:11:30.000And it is also perfectly fair to say that if you actually want a credible investigation that is going to be listened to by the vast majority of Americans, you can't have somebody who's on Trump's transition team leading the investigation into Trump.
00:12:07.000And in talking to friends on both sides of the aisle, we've got a lot of senators concerned about where we're headed.
00:12:13.000Okay, again, the only reason they're talking about using the nuclear option is because they are talking about filibustering a Supreme Court nominee, which has never been done before, as far as I'm aware.
00:12:22.000So, again, this is Democrats losing their minds because they don't know what to do with Gorsuch.
00:12:28.000They don't know what to do with Trump.
00:12:31.000I understand some of the frustration, but some of that is just endemic to not being in the party in power.
00:12:35.000Bernie Sanders is back, and he says that he hopes that the GOP does not change the rules when it comes to approving Supreme Court nominees.
00:12:44.000What concerns me is that right now we have a rule that says appropriately, I think, that for a Supreme Court justice, a lifetime term, one of the most important positions in the United States government, that it should require 60 votes because that would make it bipartisan.
00:13:25.000actually started ranting at somebody who voted for Donald Trump at a restaurant in New York last night.
00:13:29.000According to multiple witnesses, this is over at Daily Wire, as well as the victim of the ugly episode, the leading Democrat in the Senate, New York's own Chuck Schumer, lost it at a swanky Manhattan restaurant on Sunday after he learned that a well-connected woman had voted for Trump.
00:13:42.000After making a scene inside by declaring she voted for Trump, Schumer allegedly followed the woman and her well-known Democrat husband outside, repeatedly screaming, he's a liar.
00:13:50.000Apparently this happened in an Upper West Side restaurant, and apparently it was the Democrat Joseph Califano, a junior member of the Board of Directors at CBS, who served as the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under Jimmy Carter.
00:14:04.000So he was very upset that Califano's wife had voted for Trump, and so he actually started berating her in front of the crowd.
00:14:10.000That's how crazy Democrats are going, just to prove how nuts they are.
00:14:13.000Chris Matthews, you know what I'm saying?
00:14:15.000Guy comes out of a show, he comes on the air, he says, you want to vote for Trump?
00:14:49.000If you're just a regular White House staffer who maybe wants to offer advice that criticizes the president, this is a person who loyalty is the number one trait that Trump cares about.
00:15:01.000You remember that time that Chris Matthews over at MSNBC, you remember when Chris Matthews,
00:15:09.000You just know, you know, that if you look at Hillary Clinton cross-eyed, you look at Chelsea cross-eyed, Hillary will jump on you and tear your throat out like a dog right in the jugular.
00:15:18.000Because it's just like Saddam Hussein.
00:15:20.000It's just like, it's like Ciano with Mussolini.
00:15:28.000How much are they losing their minds when he's comparing Ivanka Trump, who is, by the way, Jewish, comparing her to Uday and Qusay Hussein, who were literally mass murderers who had rape rooms.
00:18:09.000His best-selling book, Reasons to Vote Democrat, a comprehensive guide, as I say, incredibly thorough.
00:18:15.000Sure, the book is blank, but still, it's a great book, and it's worth having in your library.
00:18:19.000More importantly, it's worth getting a free signed copy and sending it to all of your annoying Democrat family members, because it's hilarious.
00:18:24.000Dailywire.com, $8 a month, get two subscription, annual subscription, you get Knowles' book.
00:18:29.000Plus, I keep saying there will be a Shapiro store.