The Ben Shapiro Show - Ep. 277 - Real Controversies, and Fake Controversies

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?

00:00:00.000 When California lost Senator Barbara Boxer, it looked as though the title for stupidest woman in the U.S. 1.00

00:00:04.000 Senate had been lost too. 0.98

00:00:05.000 But thanks to the election of Kamala Harris to fill her role, California has retained its title holder.

00:00:10.000 On Friday, Harris tweeted, 0.99

00:00:18.000 And there was an op-ed to back this idiotic contention up. 0.97

00:00:21.000 In 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. 0.98

00:00:30.000 Why?

00:00:30.000 Because the court, quote, has the power to do enormous good, and Gorsuch wouldn't do such good.

00:00:35.000 What good would he forgo as a result of being, you know, like, a judge?

00:00:38.000 According to Harris, he would have voted to strike down laws forcing teachers to pay union dues.

00:00:43.000 Because that's a violation of their First Amendment rights, among other obvious legal issues. 0.97

00:00:47.000 But Harris says that because Gorsuch might take a look at that stupid old Constitution, he cannot be confirmed. 0.99

00:00:53.000 She writes, 0.99

00:01:05.000 Say, wouldn't it be awesome if we had some sort of like independently elected branch to make public policy?

00:01:10.000 Wouldn't that be awesome?

00:01:11.000 But 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.

00:01:21.000 But never mind.

00:01:22.000 Harris knows what is right for America.

00:01:24.000 Judges who openly ignore legalism in order to apply her standards of morality.

00:01:29.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:01:29.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:01:34.000 Okay, 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.

00:01:41.000 We are going to get to Donald Trump's decision to reach out to Democrats rather than reaching out to conservatives.

00:01:47.000 We're going to get to some good Trump and some bad Trump.

00:01:48.000 We'll do good Trump, bad Trump today, which is always exciting.

00:01:50.000 Plus, we'll deconstruct the culture.

00:01:52.000 But first, we should say thank you to our sponsors over at MyPatriotSupply.

00:01:57.000 So recently, North Korea's been making a lot of noises about how they want to nuke us.

00:02:00.000 Are they actually going to nuke us?

00:02:01.000 Unlikely.

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00:02:16.000 They said that there was a flaw in their packaging.

00:02:17.000 They immediately sent a note to the folks over at MyPatriotSupply, and they fixed the problem immediately.

00:02:21.000 They were really responsive.

00:02:22.000 They're terrific folks over there.

00:02:24.000 Preparewithben.com.

00:02:26.000 $99 plus free shipping provides you

00:02:28.000 We're good to go!

00:02:58.000 We're good.

00:03:18.000 Okay, 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.

00:03:33.000 Now, if you recall, last week, Devin Nunes went out and did a press conference where he said that Donald Trump's team was surveilled.

00:03:38.000 Now, he said that they weren't wiretapped.

00:03:40.000 He said that what happened is that basically the intelligence officials were wiretapping all of these diplomats from foreign countries.

00:03:48.000 And those people had members of the Trump transition team on the other line, as you would imagine they would.

00:03:52.000 And then that information was disseminated in an irresponsible and or criminal way.

00:03:57.000 So the dissemination of the information was really the question, not the gathering of the information.

00:04:01.000 And that's an important distinction.

00:04:02.000 A lot of people on Team Trump have been saying that the intelligence community illegally gathered information.

00:04:07.000 There's no evidence of that whatsoever.

00:04:09.000 Did they illegally disseminate information?

00:04:11.000 There, there's actually a fair bit of evidence that they illegally disseminated information about, for example, former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn.

00:04:18.000 But Democrats, in the search for scandal, have been looking somewhere else.

00:04:21.000 So what they say, the case that they are making now, is that basically Trump was engaged in some sort of nefarious activity with Russia.

00:04:28.000 And now they're trying to cover it up.

00:04:30.000 So 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.

00:04:41.000 According 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.

00:04:56.000 Now, 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.

00:05:06.000 Yates 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.

00:05:16.000 He now says that she will testify next week.

00:05:18.000 So 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,

00:05:30.000 Thank you.

00:05:47.000 Is that the information was not available at Congress.

00:05:49.000 It was only available to the executive branch.

00:05:51.000 That's where the information was.

00:05:53.000 And that as chair of the House Intel Committee, he's able to see such material without reporting it back to his colleagues.

00:05:58.000 He 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.

00:06:05.000 Now that's the part that's a little bit shady.

00:06:07.000 The 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.

00:06:13.000 Well, if that were the case, then why didn't the intelligence official just go tell Trump?

00:06:17.000 So people are latching on to this, and they're saying, well, this is obviously some sort of cover-up.

00:06:21.000 Obviously, Núñez 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.

00:06:29.000 But there's not a ton of evidence that that is true.

00:06:33.000 There are basically two theories about what Núñez is doing here.

00:06:36.000 Theory number one is the conspiratorial one, that Núñez knows that there is something nefarious that Trump was doing with Russia.

00:06:42.000 And 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.

00:06:51.000 And this has led to a tremendous breakdown in the House Intelligence Committee.

00:06:54.000 They've canceled all their hearings for this week because people can't get along.

00:06:57.000 But here's a counterfactual.

00:06:58.000 Here's another possibility.

00:07:00.000 Let's imagine for a second that Obama intelligence community members are widely dispersing information illegally, which is probably true.

00:07:06.000 And 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

00:07:12.000 I think so.

00:07:35.000 He 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.

00:07:45.000 Which, again, is not implausible because, after all, Yates is a political hack.

00:07:49.000 She 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.

00:07:56.000 Both 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.

00:08:04.000 And, again, the big question in all of that is, where's the scandal?

00:08:07.000 If there's going to be a cover-up, you assume something had to be done that was wrong.

00:08:11.000 So far, the only thing I know that was done that was wrong in any of this

00:08:14.000 Is 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.

00:08:22.000 That's the only thing I know was done wrong here.

00:08:25.000 I don't know anything was done wrong between the Trump team and Russia.

00:08:27.000 You know, you can suspect whatever you want, but there's no evidence.

00:08:31.000 I don't know that anything was done in terms of coordination with WikiLeaks.

00:08:34.000 I don't know that.

00:08:35.000 Neither do you.

00:08:35.000 Neither does anybody else.

00:08:37.000 Again, 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.

00:08:48.000 Still, none of that.

00:08:49.000 There's all this smoke, but there's no fire.

00:08:51.000 And 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.

00:09:03.000 So here is Nunes explaining why he went to the White House grounds in the first place.

00:09:06.000 The Congress has not been given this information, these documents.

00:09:11.000 And that's the problem.

00:09:13.000 So because this is executive branch, it was distributed widely through the executive branch.

00:09:19.000 This was from November, December, and January.

00:09:23.000 And these were reports, just let me reiterate, this had nothing to do with Russia, nothing to do with the Russia investigation.

00:09:28.000 There is no way

00:09:31.000 Okay, so he sort of says that I'm not going to be able to transmit that to the House Intelligence Committee.

00:09:44.000 The House Intel Democrats are saying, well, what the hell?

00:09:46.000 Why are you getting to see it and I don't get to see it?

00:09:48.000 Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, he says that Paul Ryan should immediately fire Nunes, basically.

00:09:55.000 If Speaker Ryan wants the House to have a credible investigation, he needs to replace Chairman Nunes.

00:10:05.000 And then, that is followed up on immediately by Mark Warner, who's a senator from Virginia, and he says that basically Nunes has to go.

00:10:13.000 I am totally mystified by what Mr. Nunes has said.

00:10:15.000 And I've talked to my chairman, Richard Burr.

00:10:17.000 He doesn't know.

00:10:18.000 I've talked to Democrats, Republicans on the committee.

00:10:21.000 I think it's fairly mystifying, if not outrageous, that he's

00:10:25.000 Okay, and finally, you have Nunes responding.

00:10:31.000 I guess I'm being told that it's not pronounced Nunes, even though everybody pronounced it that way.

00:10:35.000 It's actually pronounced Nunes.

00:10:36.000 I have no idea whether that's true.

00:10:37.000 In any case, Devin Nunes, he says that Democrats actually just want him out because he's effective.

00:10:43.000 Effective at what?

00:10:44.000 Nobody really understands.

00:10:45.000 Yeah, 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.

00:10:52.000 Alright, well let's hope so, Congressman.

00:11:05.000 Just 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.

00:11:14.000 Very difficult to get an honest, credible investigation of the president when the person who's leading the investigation was on the Trump transition team.

00:11:21.000 Which Devin Nunes or Nunez was.

00:11:23.000 So 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.

00:11:30.000 And 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.

00:11:41.000 It's just not going to work that way.

00:11:42.000 But all of this is leading the left to lose their minds and they're absolutely going crazy.

00:11:46.000 So Senator Chris Coons of Connecticut,

00:11:49.000 He says that the GOP, for example, on Judge Gorsuch, they should never, ever, ever use what they call the nuclear option.

00:11:55.000 They should let the filibuster stand and let Gorsuch go down to defeat him.

00:11:58.000 It's just insane.

00:11:59.000 It's insane.

00:11:59.000 All right, well, so then the Republicans are going to pass it using the so-called nuclear option.

00:12:04.000 Almost certainly.

00:12:05.000 And I think this is tragic.

00:12:07.000 And in talking to friends on both sides of the aisle, we've got a lot of senators concerned about where we're headed.

00:12:13.000 Okay, 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.

00:12:22.000 So, again, this is Democrats losing their minds because they don't know what to do with Gorsuch.

00:12:28.000 They don't know what to do with Trump.

00:12:29.000 They're very frustrated.

00:12:31.000 I understand some of the frustration, but some of that is just endemic to not being in the party in power.

00:12:35.000 Bernie 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.

00:12:44.000 What 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.

00:13:03.000 And I think that that's weird.

00:13:25.000 actually started ranting at somebody who voted for Donald Trump at a restaurant in New York last night.

00:13:29.000 According 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. 0.96

00:13:42.000 After 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.

00:13:50.000 Apparently 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.

00:14:04.000 So he was very upset that Califano's wife had voted for Trump, and so he actually started berating her in front of the crowd. 0.98

00:14:10.000 That's how crazy Democrats are going, just to prove how nuts they are. 0.99

00:14:13.000 Chris Matthews, you know what I'm saying? 0.94

00:14:15.000 Guy comes out of a show, he comes on the air, he says, you want to vote for Trump?

00:14:19.000 Jared?

00:14:20.000 These people?

00:14:20.000 They're just like Saddam Hussein's kids!

00:14:23.000 Ah!

00:14:41.000 This is what I worry about for other people in the White House.

00:14:44.000 Ivanka Trump has been described as her father's eyes and ears on the ground.

00:14:48.000 That's a little scary.

00:14:49.000 If 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.

00:15:01.000 You remember that time that Chris Matthews over at MSNBC, you remember when Chris Matthews,

00:15:06.000 Remember, he said, Chelsea Clinton.

00:15:08.000 And she works with Hillary Clinton. 0.94

00:15:09.000 You 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. 0.96

00:15:18.000 Because it's just like Saddam Hussein. 0.89

00:15:20.000 It's just like, it's like Ciano with Mussolini.

00:15:23.000 Ah! 0.98

00:15:23.000 He's gonna shoot his own son-in-law, but only later. 0.98

00:15:26.000 Until then, he's his ally. 0.99

00:15:27.000 I mean, like, 0.92

00:15:28.000 How 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. 0.97

00:15:43.000 This is how insane the left has gone. 0.96

00:15:45.000 They've lost all connection with reality.

00:15:47.000 So whatever problems we have here over on the right, the left is certainly not taking advantage of them because they are just awful.

00:15:54.000 They don't even know how to handle any of this.

00:15:55.000 Well, we're going to talk some good Trump, bad Trump after this, plus what's happening in the wake of Trumpcare going down.

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00:17:47.000 Okay, so, I think we're going to do a little bit of good Trump, bad Trump.

00:17:49.000 But first, you're going to have to go over to DailyWire.com and become a subscriber if you want to watch it live.

00:17:54.000 Plus, we're going to deconstruct some culture.

00:17:55.000 Talk Beauty and the Beast, actually.

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00:18:52.000 We are the largest conservative podcast in the nation.

The Ben Shapiro Show - March 29, 2017

Ep. 277 - Real Controversies, and Fake Controversies

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