First daughter Ivanka Trump secretly met with Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards in January, according to the Daily Beast. Is she part of the problem since she hasn t publicly opposed her father's opposition to funding Planned Parenthood? Plus, Devin Nunes recused himself from the Russia investigation, and Steve Bannon is out at the National Security Council. Plus, President Trump is making open overtures now to the left, which is not a good thing, which means she may have her father s ear even on issues upon which they disagree, and that is not good in the least. Today's show is brought to you by Lyft and Shazam, a ride-sharing company that makes sure you're safe and that you ride in a clean car and the driver isn't a creep. Lyft is all about making sure you re safe everywhere you go, no matter where you go or who you go to get there. You can get a $10 credit when you use the promo code SHOUTOUT, which gives you 3 free rides up to $30 when you sign up for a new vehicle inspection. Shazima is a great company that does background checks, background checks and background checks so you re not gonna get a 19-point vehicle inspection so you don t get pulled up in a clunker that looks like it looks like you ve got a 19 point vehicle inspection, so you ll be safe and you ll not get pulled over by a car with a driver who isn t a thief. It s safe, reliable, and it s not a creeper. I know because my wife uses Lyft. She s a lot of times, and she takes Lyft and she s a great driver, and I trust her home to make sure her home is a safe and a safe place to pick me up at night after a night out with her home. I know she s all about safety and she loves to take care of her kids at night, so she takes her kids in the morning and she doesn t get a good night out in the late-night ride home after a nap in the early morning in the car after a full day at the babysitter sips on the way home from the park. . Thanks, Lyft! Ben Shapiro - The Ben Shapiro, The Daily Beast is a writer, the wife of a doctor, the mom of a pediatrician, the daughter of a good friend of my wife, the girl who works at my place in Los Angeles.
00:00:00.000According to the Daily Beast today, first daughter Ivanka Trump secretly met with Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards in January.
00:00:06.000The story does not make clear whether the meeting took place before or after Trump's inauguration, but Ivanka is Trump's most trusted advisor along with her husband Jared Kushner, and she's a moving force behind much of the action in his administration.
00:00:17.000According to the Daily Beast, quote, the purpose of the meeting, from Cecile's point of view, was to make sure that Ivanka fully understood what Planned Parenthood does, how it is funded, and why it would be a terrible idea for Planned Parenthood to be removed from being able to see Medicaid patients, said Dawn Lugins, an executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
00:00:34.000The main thing that Cecile was doing was explaining that the money doesn't actually go to abortions, we get reimbursed the same way a hospital does.
00:00:40.000We're clearing up misinformation about how this works, unquote.
00:00:43.000Richards now says that Ivanka is part of the problem since she hasn't openly sounded off on her father's opposition to funding Planned Parenthood.
00:00:50.000According to Richards, quote, anyone who works in this White House is responsible for addressing why women are in the crosshairs of basically every single policy we've seen in this administration.
00:00:58.000It's worth noting that just yesterday, Ivanka told Gayle King on CBS This Morning that she sounds off against her father's policies all the time, behind closed doors.
00:01:06.000So, is Ivanka still stumping for Planned Parenthood behind closed doors?
00:01:14.000Trump has made clear he's willing to use Planned Parenthood as a cudgel to motivate Republicans, but he also spent months talking about all the non-abortion great work Planned Parenthood does, which accounts for a minute fraction of their revenue.
00:01:26.000Trump may have shifted his position for politics, but Ivanka probably hasn't.
00:01:29.000She's a career leftist on a variety of issues, from climate change to abortion to same-sex marriage.
00:01:33.000Her speech at the Republican National Convention was an ode to government-sponsored childcare.
00:01:37.000As Stephen Miller of Heat Street pointed out, Ivanka has donated thousands of dollars to prominent Democrat candidates, including Harry Reid, Andrew Cuomo, Eleanor Holmes Nolten, Kirsten Gillibrand, Gavin Newsom, Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, Eliot Spitzer, Hillary Clinton's Senate, and 2008 presidential campaign, and just recently to New Democrat star Senator Kamala Harris.
00:01:54.000In the interest of fairness, she did donate to McCain and Romney 2012,
00:01:57.000But according to sources, contributions to Republicans make up less than 10% of her overall donations.
00:02:02.000Ivanka was not even able to vote for her father in the GOP primary, as she did not switch her party affiliation by the deadline.
00:02:08.000Ivanka is the person closest to Trump's heart in this administration.
00:02:12.000An administration filled with people with little political background, but who compete to demonstrate their loyalty to the president.
00:02:18.000Ivanka will not be Trumped in this regard.
00:02:20.000That means she may have her father's ear, even on issues upon which they disagree.
00:02:42.000Steve Bannon is out at the National Security Council.
00:02:45.000So a lot of turmoil happening inside the Republican caucus.
00:02:48.000Plus, President Trump is making open overtures now to the left, which is not a good thing.
00:02:54.000But before we get there, we have to say, and we should say, obviously, thank you to our advertisers over at Lyft.
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00:04:25.000Devin Nunes, who is the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, he announced on Thursday he has recused himself from the committee's investigation into Russia's alleged meddling in the 2016 election.
00:04:35.000Now, this poses a problem for the Trump administration, because the Trump administration basically funneled all of the information about Susan Rice unmasking members of the Trump team and the Trump transition team.
00:04:46.000They funneled all that to Nunes by bringing him to the White House, and then he didn't update his House Intelligence Committee
00:04:53.000And then he went back to the White House to update Trump.
00:04:55.000So it looked like Nunes was working for Trump.
00:04:57.000That was really what this came down to.
00:04:59.000The reason that he is recusing himself is because the House Ethics Committee has now put him under investigation.
00:05:05.000Now, to be clear, they're not investigating him because they're saying he's a tool of the White House.
00:05:10.000They're investigating him because anytime somebody allegedly leaks classified information, they are investigated by law.
00:05:18.000Nunes has explained in a statement that he is not recusing himself because he did anything wrong.
00:05:24.000He says, several left-wing activist groups have filed accusations against me at the Office of Congressional Ethics.
00:05:29.000The charges are entirely false and politically motivated and are being leveled just as the American people are beginning to learn the truth about the improper unmasking of the identities of U.S.
00:05:38.000Despite the baselessness of the charges, I believe it is in the best interest of the House Intelligence Committee and the Congress
00:05:44.000For me to have Representative Mike Conway, with assistance from Representatives Trey Gowdy and Tom Rooney, temporarily take charge of committee's Russia investigation while the House Ethics Committee looks into the matter.
00:05:54.000I will continue to fulfill all my other responsibilities as committee chairman.
00:05:58.000And the ranking Republican and Democratic members of the Ethics Committee issued a statement.
00:06:02.000They said, the committee is aware of public allegations that Representative Devin Nunes may have made unauthorized disclosures of classified information in violation of House rules, law, regulations, and other standards of conduct.
00:06:13.000The committee, pursuant to Rule 18A, is investigating and gathering more information regarding these allegations.
00:06:20.000So, all of the leading Republicans from Trump to Ryan have expressed confidence in Nunes.
00:06:25.000What's amazing about all of this is that I actually think Nunes is doing the right thing here.
00:06:30.000I said a while ago I thought that Nunes should recuse himself after there were questions about whether he was working for Trump, mainly because it overshadows the actual scandal here, which is Susan Rice unmasking Trump officials and then disseminating that information widely to the Obama team.
00:06:44.000Does it mean that Devin Nunes did something terribly wrong?
00:06:47.000No, it doesn't mean that Devin Nunes did something terribly wrong.
00:06:49.000The headlines are just not going to be good.
00:06:51.000The question here was basically, would it be better for Nunes to stick it out through the House Ethics Committee and muddy the waters, or would it be better for him to step aside and hand it over to people like Gowdy and Conaway and allow them to pursue the leaks investigation about Susan Rice and Mike Flynn?
00:07:05.000Clearly I think for Trump it is better for Nunes to take the bullet on this one and step to the side.
00:07:10.000So I think that Devin Nunes did make the right call here.
00:07:13.000Don't pay attention to everybody who's saying this is obvious proof that he did something deeply wrong.
00:07:39.000Don't pay attention to everybody who's making a huge deal out of Nunes stepping away, not proof that he did anything wrong or that he was specifically working for Trump.
00:07:47.000I thought that he should... My feeling was that after he went to the White House and learned all this stuff, he should have updated the members of the House Intelligence Committee before running back to Trump's report.
00:07:55.000It was that second trip to the White House that looked particularly bad.
00:07:59.000And I wish he hadn't done that, but I don't know that he actually did anything wrong here, and I think it's premature to say that he did.
00:08:06.000Okay, in other news that surrounds Trump, Trump has done an interview with the New York Times, and in this interview with the New York Times, he is now saying that he wants to do a great infrastructure plan.
00:08:17.000And on that side, I will say, we're going to have, I believe, tremendous Democrat support.
00:08:23.000So basically he's looking for Democrat support for a trillion dollar infrastructure plan and there were questions about whether a lot of this money was going to come from public-private projects.
00:08:30.000So out here in Los Angeles, we have public-private projects at places like the Grove and the Americana.
00:08:35.000There's basically a lot of stadiums are public-private projects.
00:08:39.000Places where people invest their private dollars and those are matched by a certain amount of government money.
00:08:44.000Still not my favorite thing, but better than just pure public investment.
00:08:48.000Trump says he doesn't even want public-private projects anymore because he can borrow money more easily and he knows what to do with your money better than you know what to do with your money.
00:08:57.000He says we may take that trillion and we may also in addition use public-private but we're talking about an investment of a trillion dollars.
00:09:51.000The fact is that everybody talks about the interstate highway system as though it's going to cost a trillion dollars to fix up the interstate highway system.
00:09:57.000It doesn't cost a trillion dollars to fix up the interstate highway system.
00:10:00.000Plus, it is worthwhile noting that states and localities have an interest in maintaining the interstate highway system since it carries all sorts of goods and products and services through their towns.
00:10:10.000One of the great myths, by the way, of American politics is that the Eisenhower interstate highway system was some sort of magnificent creation that never would have happened if it hadn't been for the intervention of the federal government.
00:10:56.000All of these people who'd spent their life savings and all their time and money putting routes down around Route 66
00:11:03.000All of them were left behind and destroyed.
00:11:04.000So when you talk about forgotten people, there are a lot of people who are forgotten because of the interstate highway system, or whose houses were completely bulldozed by the interstate highway system.
00:11:12.000The case I'm making is not there shouldn't be an interstate highway system, it's that states have an interest in connecting their state highway systems, and most of it should have been absorbed at the local and state level.
00:11:21.000So when people say we need lots of infrastructure spending now because it was so great back in the 50s, it wasn't that great back in the 50s, it isn't that great now.
00:11:29.000And when Trump does this routine, what he really wants is to build big spectacular things.
00:11:33.000He doesn't actually want to fix up the roads and bridges that matter, per se.
00:11:37.000He just wants to build big stuff so that he can stamp the big T on it and then say that he built something, which is what a lot of these folks want to do.
00:11:49.000There's another poll, by the way, as long as I'm going to get all the bad Trump news out of the way at the beginning, there's another poll that's out today that says that 40% of Trump supporters would back a single-payer health care system, which just demonstrates what folks like me have been saying all along and the great damage that Trump could do, and he hasn't done it yet, but the great damage that it is possible for him to do is the soul-sucking of the Republican Party into a big government
00:12:11.000Nationalist party as opposed to a small government patriotic party, which is not quite the same thing.
00:12:16.000Well, all of that said, the big story of the day is we'll get to the Republican chaos in a second, but the big story of the day is what is going to happen in Syria.
00:12:24.000So if you've been watching the pictures that are coming out of Syria,
00:12:42.000If it had happened under Obama, I would have said the exact same thing.
00:12:45.000I have a very simple standard when it comes to what I expect from my politicians.
00:12:49.000And that is, you know, your word matters and what you say has credibility.
00:12:54.000And it turns out that in foreign policy particularly, it matters when you say things, so...
00:12:58.000The fact that Trump's people said Assad will stay in power and then three days later he's gassing children, I don't think that's any sort of major coincidence.
00:13:06.000A survivor of a 2013 Syria chemical attack, he was on CNN and he was talking about what he thinks Trump should do.
00:13:13.000If I may just say a few words directly to President Trump, if you'll just give me the chance.
00:14:17.000It's pretty clear that this is Obama's fault.
00:14:18.000It's pretty clear that this started under Obama, that it was Obama who was saying for years and years and years that we had disarmed the Assad regime.
00:14:24.000He proclaimed himself a massive political genius for having drawn a red line, then backed away from the red line after Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against his own people.
00:14:32.000And then he said that he had disarmed Assad and left Assad in power while Assad continued to gas folks.
00:14:38.000John McCain correctly says this is Obama's legacy.
00:14:42.000He is obviously, as we all are, appalled.
00:14:46.000One, this is the legacy of Barack Obama.
00:14:49.000The last time this happened, Barack Obama said they'd crossed a red line, called me and Lindsey Graham down to the White House and did nothing.
00:14:58.000One thing worse than doing nothing is saying you're going to do something as the most powerful leader on earth and doing nothing.
00:15:05.000So this is a legacy of Barack Obama, and it's been going on now for the intervening four years.
00:15:12.000So what we need to do, we need to stop Bashar Assad's planes from flying, and we can do that easily.
00:15:19.000You have been bringing this issue up to the forefront.
00:15:21.000I know it's been a great frustration for you.
00:15:24.000I gotta go, but just very quickly, are safe zones viable?
00:15:26.000Let me mention again, Barack Obama had an opportunity to stop this, and would have long ago, and he took a hike, and that's a terrible legacy.
00:15:43.000But, that doesn't answer what we should do now.
00:15:44.000I'm going to discuss that in just a second, but first, I want to say thank you to our advertisers over at CISO.
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00:16:47.000One of them that we tend to watch is, there's one called Harmon Quest that's pretty funny.
00:17:38.000So, the question is, what exactly should the United States do in Syria now that we've seen all of these terrible images coming out of Syria?
00:17:45.000But, for you to get the answer to that, you're gonna have to actually subscribe to the show.
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