On today's show, Ben Shapiro talks about the latest in the Mueller investigation, the latest on the Trump administration, and why the media is turning Ben Shapiro into a Trumpkin. Plus, he gives his thoughts on fake news and why he thinks the media are turning him into a "Trumpkin." Ben Shapiro is a conservative commentator and host of the conservative podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show" on the Fox News Channel. He's also the host of "The Weekly Standard" and hosts the conservative think tank "The Civility Project." He's a regular contributor on Fox News and CNN and is a frequent guest on CNN and other network news outlets. He is also a frequent contributor on the conservative radio show "The Opinionsated" and has his own show on conservative radio station SiriusXM Radio in the early morning hours of the morning, where he hosts a show called "America's Next Top Model" and gives his take on the latest news and takes questions from his audience in Dallas, TX and Phoenix, AZ. Enjoy the show and tweet me if you liked it! to let us know what you thought and what you would like to see Ben Shapiro do next! Tweet me ! with your thoughts on the news and opinion piece you think Ben Shapiro should do in the future! and we'll talk about it on the next episode of The Ben Shapiro's show! . Tweet us or send us your thoughts and your thoughts! on the topic you'd like him to Ben Shapiro! or your response to Ben on in a new episode of on this podcast! - Timestamps: - Ben Shapiro: - 5:00 - 6:00 - 7:00 | 7:30 | 8:15 | 9:10 | 11:40 | 12:30 - Is the media fake news? 13:00 / 14:00 // 15:10 16:15 17:40 / 16:30 / 17:00/16:15:40 18:30/17:30 - Is he a Trump a Trump fan? - 17:20 19:00 +16:30 +17:40:35 21:40 + 16:10 / 15:30 // 17:15 / 18:40/16 :30 27:30 & 17:50 25:30+
00:00:00.000President Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, says Robert Mueller is not going to indict President Trump, but Robert Mueller is still digging, Michael Cohen finds himself on the wrong end of leaks again, and the media lie about President Trump and immigration.
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00:01:22.000Before I get into the news, and there's a lot of news to get into today.
00:01:25.000First, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at LegalZoom.
00:01:28.000So, pretend you're in the government and you need legal help for just a second.
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00:02:59.000I have to tell you, it's an amazing thing.
00:03:00.000I'm getting notes from people, I'm getting texts from people, people who did not vote for Trump in the last election, who are now telling me, they're turning me into a Trumpkin.
00:03:06.000The media are turning me into a huge Donald Trump fan.
00:03:10.000Because the great arbiters of truth and decency, these wonderful arbiters of all that is good in the world, it turns out they are abjectly lying about issues ranging from Hamas to now MS-13.
00:03:21.000So the Democratic new playbook, I guess, for 2018 is defend Hamas, defend MS-13, and rip on the NRA.
00:03:27.000That's the new playbook from the Democrats, and the media are parroting that every step of the way.
00:03:31.000What am I so hot and bothered about today?
00:03:32.000Well, we'll get to the Hamas coverage in just a second, but here's what I'm really hot and bothered about today.
00:03:37.000President Trump yesterday was doing an event with a bunch of sheriffs from all over the country, and one of the sheriffs mentioned MS-13.
00:03:43.000And President Trump responded in this way.
00:05:58.000And these lies have been very typical of the media this entire week.
00:06:01.000This entire week we've heard from the media that innocents were killed on the border between Gaza and Israel.
00:06:07.000Except for the fact that Hamas admitted yesterday that 50 of the 62 people killed were Hamas members and another three were members of Islamic Jihad.
00:06:13.000So 53 out of the 62 people killed were active terrorists who worked for active terrorist groups designated as such by the State Department.
00:06:20.000And the media covered it as though this was all Trump's fault.
00:07:14.000And when they put people in front, when they put terrorists behind human shields in an attempt to get people killed for the cameras, that's bad.
00:07:21.000And he's right about both those things.
00:07:23.000And the media, because they hate Trump so much, decided to side with Hamas and side with MS-13.
00:07:27.000And then we're supposed to side with the media?
00:07:29.000We're supposed to believe the media's narrative about Trump?
00:07:31.000We're supposed to believe what the media have to say about truth and honor and how they're just firefighters running to the fire?
00:08:01.000This is what's going to put people into Trump's camp.
00:08:03.000Because this week, I gotta tell you, I was thinking about President Trump and what he did with regard to Jerusalem and what he's been saying about MS-13, and then I've been watching the media, and I gotta tell you, if the media want me to make a decision between Trump and Hamas, that's not much of a choice.
00:08:28.000You can't manipulate events on the ground.
00:08:30.000You can't ignore the truth about what's happening all over the world simply in order to slap at President Trump.
00:08:35.000If you do, it's just going to drive people into Trump's camp.
00:08:38.000I was talking to a top member of the Trump administration, this was a few months ago, and I was discussing, you know, how is Trump going to win the votes necessary in order to win re-election?
00:08:47.000Because George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 by 500,000 votes, and then he won by about 1.5 million votes against John Kerry, but he had to pick up about 10 to 11 million votes between 2000 and 2004 in order to win re-election, because the electorate expands every year.
00:09:00.000Well, President Trump lost the popular vote this year, or this election cycle, by about 2.5 million votes.
00:09:06.000That means that he's going to have to make up probably 12 million votes in order for him to win re-election.
00:09:10.000So I said to this member of the Trump administration, how do you plan on winning 12 million additional votes?
00:09:15.000How do you plan on bringing a bunch of people over?
00:09:20.000So part of it is going to be good policy, obviously, but part of it is going to be shifting definitions of Trump.
00:09:26.000Well, one of the ways that you can shift the definition of Trump is not by shifting who Trump is, but by the media making themselves so much worse than they already were that you feel like you're being forced to choose between the media and Democrats who are lying on a routine basis and defending the worst people on the planet and President Trump.
00:09:41.000There's a case that was made during the last election cycle that it was a binary choice between Hillary Clinton and President Trump.
00:09:46.000This was not a logical case that I agreed with.
00:09:48.000I thought there was a third choice, and it was to stay home.
00:09:50.000But the worse the Democrats get, the worse the media get, the more it looks like a binary choice.
00:09:56.000And the better Trump governs, the more it looks like a binary choice.
00:09:59.000You want to push people into Trump's camp, guys, you are doing an excellent job of it.
00:10:02.000Speaking of doing an excellent job of pushing people into Trump's camp, there's a person named Juanita Scarlett.
00:10:08.000Well, you know, Scarlett went to a party at Don Lemon's house, OK?
00:10:12.000And Don Lemon had at his house Errol Lewis, who's a commentator at CNN, and Margaret Hoover, who's another commentator at CNN.
00:11:13.000All they have to do is continue being who they are.
00:11:16.000I wrote a column earlier this week about comedy in culture and how the right-wing's response to comedy is not for us to generate our own comedians, it's to elect Trump.
00:11:25.000Because Trump's a giant middle finger to the entire comedic establishment.
00:11:27.000You make a bunch of jokes about Trump, you make a bunch of jokes about us, well screw you, we'll elect that guy!
00:11:33.000Well, the same thing is true of the media.
00:11:35.000Remember, in 2012, Newt Gingrich nearly won the Republican nomination based simply on ripping on an anchor at one of his debates.
00:11:43.000And we don't despise the media for no reason.
00:11:45.000We despise the media because since 2001, when Bias came out by Bernard Goldberg,
00:11:50.000There has been a 20-year campaign by the right against bias in the media, and the media's response has not been to try and moderate, to try and hire some people who are conservative, to try and hire some people who might balance things out.
00:12:01.000Their goal has not been to strip out their own opinions.
00:12:03.000It's been to exacerbate the involvement of their own opinions.
00:13:41.000Kinley Tirpaz is a founder and CEO of the Kibbutz Hadati Educational Network in Israel, and he has a report at Times of Israel on what actually happened on the border with Gaza.
00:13:56.000It was a tremendous supreme effort from our side to prevent in every possible way Palestinian deaths and injuries.
00:14:01.000Of course, the primary mission was to prevent hundreds of thousands of Gazans from infiltrating into our territory.
00:14:05.000That kind of invasion would be perilous, mortally dangerous to the nearby communities, would permit terrorists disguised as civilians to enter our kibbutz and mashab communities,
00:14:38.000When there is no alternative and live ammunition must be used to stop those who storm the fence, the soldiers make heroic and sometimes dangerous efforts not to kill and to only injure those on the other side, which is why you see so many leg wounds on the side of Hamas.
00:14:49.000The IDF stationed senior commanders at every confrontation point to ensure that every shot is approved and backed up by a responsible figure with proper authority.
00:14:57.000Every staging area has an especially large number of troops in order to make sure that soldiers are not put in life-threatening situations where they will have no choice but to fire indiscriminately.
00:15:05.000A situation where thousands of people rush you is frightening, even terrifying.
00:15:08.000It is extremely difficult to show restraint, and it requires calm, mature professionalism.
00:15:12.00062 dead is an enormous number, but I can testify from first-hand experience, every bullet, every hit is carefully reported, documented, and investigated in Excel spreadsheets.
00:15:23.000So, again, the media are reporting this as though it was an indiscriminate killfest over at the Gaza border, even while Hamas is admitting it was not an indiscriminate killfest over at the Gaza border.
00:15:33.000And the Israelis didn't have much of a choice here.
00:15:35.000Why do you want everybody to just run through the border?
00:15:37.000Then you have to mow down hundreds of people?
00:15:43.000The media know exactly what they are doing.
00:15:46.000There's no doubt that the media know exactly what they're saying.
00:15:49.000By the way, speaking of the media malfeasance, the AP has now deleted its tweet from Wednesday on Trump's Animals comments about immigrants because it wasn't made clear he was speaking after a comment about gang members.
00:15:59.000So now the media are going to have to walk back all of this in real time.
00:16:02.000They're going to have to walk back all of this in real time.
00:16:33.000But I'm more unhappy about untruth than I am happy about the effect of the untruth, even if they cut in my favor.
00:16:39.000OK, meanwhile, there's a lot of news today breaking in the Mueller case, a lot of a lot of discussion about what's going on with Robert Mueller.
00:16:48.000Rudy Giuliani, who is Trump's new lawyer, he was on Laura Ingraham's show last night, and he said that Robert Mueller has now announced that he will not, in fact, indict President Trump.
00:16:57.000Uh, if they subpoena us, challenge the subpoena.
00:17:00.000The same reason they can't indict him constitutionally.
00:17:15.000So legally speaking, it is true that the president could be indicted by Robert Mueller.
00:17:26.000Probably Robert Mueller said, look, I'd rather leave this to the political process as opposed to a criminal indictment, if in fact he has anything.
00:17:32.000This doesn't mean that President Trump is off the hook with regard to Robert Mueller.
00:17:36.000Rudy Giuliani says, listen, there's no collusion.
00:17:39.000But he does say, well, there's kind of evidence that there is intent to collude, but that is not the same thing as collusion, which is, of course, exactly what I said on yesterday's show.
00:17:46.000Their inability to reach a conclusion that is obvious and their unwillingness to recognize the damage this does to our country all over the world.
00:17:56.000There's no reason for this investigation.
00:17:58.000There never was a good reason for in the first place.
00:18:08.000So now I want to go through the full news about what Robert Mueller is doing, because there's a lot of news that broke yesterday on this.
00:18:18.000Well, the news begins with the Senate Intel report.
00:18:21.000So President Trump's son, Donald Jr., was responsible for setting up a meeting with a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower.
00:18:29.000Presidents of this meeting supposedly were Jared Kushner.
00:18:31.000I believe Paul Manafort was present at the meeting, if I'm not mistaken.
00:18:36.000And other members, top members of the Trump administration.
00:18:39.000Apparently Kushner got up and left after about five minutes.
00:18:41.000And there were other people who were there who also left, realizing the thing was a boondoggle.
00:18:45.000But the original pitch by the Russian lawyer and her advocate, who was a friend of the Trump family, was that she was going to give them information about Hillary Clinton.
00:18:54.000had written that they were very excited about that.
00:18:56.000And the email exchange with this guy, who had been pitching the Russian lawyer, suggested that the Russian government was supportive of President Trump in the election cycle, and Trump Jr.
00:19:12.000They say, questioned intently by a Senate committee, President Donald Trump's son struck a firmly unapologetic tone, deflected many queries, and said he didn't think there was anything wrong with meeting a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in hopes of election season dirt on Hillary Clinton, according to transcripts released on Wednesday.
00:19:26.000speaking in a closed door interview last year with the Senate Judiciary Committee said he did not give much thought to the idea that the June 9, 2016 meeting was part of a Russian government effort to help his father in the presidential race.
00:19:35.000He said, I don't know that it alarmed me, but like I said, I don't know, and I don't know that I was all that focused on it at the time.
00:19:41.000The committee released about 2,500 pages of interview transcripts and other documents tied to the New York meeting, which Trump Jr.
00:19:47.000The transcripts also show some new details, and they show how the meeting was arranged and efforts afterward to mitigate the political damage from the meeting itself.
00:19:56.000The transcripts also reflect an aggressive Russian outreach to Trump before and after the New York meeting, including an effort to arrange a follow-up get-together that November with a member of the transition team.
00:20:04.000The follow-up never happened, however.
00:20:06.000Rob Goldstone, who is the fixer-upper, he promised Trump Jr.
00:20:10.000very interesting information from a well-connected Russian lawyer, including documents that would incriminate Hillary Clinton.
00:20:32.000said he didn't recall who the person was and didn't know if his father used the blocked number.
00:20:36.000I have to imagine that Mueller is going to find out whether that is the case or not.
00:20:39.000In any case, there is no actual information that suggests that information passed hands between the Trump campaign and the Russian government or that there was open coordination or covert coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
00:20:53.000If he had this information, if this information was available to Robert Mueller or to James Comey or to anybody else, it would not be out of line to launch an investigation based on this information.
00:21:02.000And there's a lot of talk today about witch hunt, witch hunt, witch hunt.
00:21:05.000There's been no actual evidence presented to date of serious collusion between the Trump campaign and everybody else.
00:21:10.000But that's not the same thing as saying the investigation itself was initiated for bad reasons or that it's been conducted in the wrong way.
00:21:17.000I'll explain what I mean in just a second, because I think that we have to stick to the facts as much as we possibly can when it comes to this Mueller investigation.
00:21:24.000And I want to break it down for you in just a moment.
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00:22:28.000Okay, so, as I say, a bunch of stories released from the sort of Mueller investigation.
00:22:32.000One was the Senate Intel investigation of Donald Trump, or interview with Donald Trump.
00:22:36.000And this was supposedly, this demonstrated, obviously, that Donald Trump Jr.
00:22:42.000Was interacting with agents of Russia, maybe in an attempt to collude, but there's no actual evidence of collusion.
00:22:48.000Then there was this other big story, and this is the one where a lot of folks on the right, I think, are misreading the situation.
00:22:53.000Okay, this story is from the New York Times.
00:22:54.000It says, Now, remember, the going theory here is that the FBI, under President Obama,
00:23:03.000was interested in undermining the Trump campaign during the campaign by investigating and then presumably putting out information to undermine President Trump during the campaign.
00:23:13.000This is the going theory, is that this was all trumped up, it was all put together on kind of spit and glue, that they just decided they were gonna get Trump in the middle of the election cycle, that they worked to let Hillary Clinton off the hook, and then they worked to go after President Trump with nothing to verify it, they worked to target his campaign.
00:23:27.000He was wiretapped, in the words of President Trump, that he was targeted.
00:23:31.000Now, even if President Trump was quote-unquote wiretapped, he was not wiretapped at Trump Tower, but even if there was surveillance of particular members of the Trump campaign, like Carter Page, that does not necessarily demonstrate that surveillance was inappropriate or that anything wrong happened with the surveillance.
00:23:45.000Well, the story from the New York Times yesterday has a lot of people on the right saying that there is something deeply nefarious that was going on at the FBI during the campaign.
00:23:53.000The biggest question that I have about this is if you really believe that the FBI and the CIA and the DOJ were all working very hard to try and discredit the Trump campaign and to put out information that Trump was in thrall to Russia, then why didn't any of this information come out during the campaign?
00:24:13.000If they wanted to sink Trump during the campaign, wouldn't it have been useful for them to say that Paul Manafort was under investigation, like, from the very first day?
00:24:20.000Wouldn't it have been useful for them to say that we suspect that there is collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government?
00:24:27.000Wouldn't that be, like, a useful thing to have put out there on a routine basis?
00:24:30.000Because it's consumed the news cycle ever since.
00:24:32.000But most of this stuff broke after Trump was actually elected.
00:24:35.000So if you were inside the quote-unquote deep state and you wanted to take down Trump during the election cycle, why wouldn't you put it out early?
00:24:40.000Now, the theory is that they didn't put this out early because it was an insurance policy in case Trump became president and they thought Hillary was going to win anyway.
00:25:04.000Question number two is, can you point to any actual nefarious activity that you would have objected to if Hillary Clinton had been the target of it?
00:25:12.000So I have a very simple rule that I've been using for years.
00:25:15.000So I'm going to read this story, and for a second, I want you to assume that it's about Hillary Clinton and not Donald Trump, and then think, are you angry that this investigation was going on in the first place?
00:25:24.000Because I don't want to impugn people's motives or honor based on partisan concerns.
00:25:29.000So here it is from the New York Times.
00:25:31.000Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia in the summer of 2016, the FBI dispatched a pair of agents to London on a mission so secretive that all but a handful of officials were kept in the dark.
00:25:41.000Their assignment, which has not been previously reported, was to meet the Australian ambassador who had evidence that one of Donald Trump's advisors knew in advance about Russian election meddling.
00:25:49.000After tense deliberations between Washington and Canberra, top Australian officials broke with diplomatic protocol and allowed the ambassador, Alexander Downer, to sit for an FBI interview to describe his meeting with the campaign advisor, George Papadopoulos.
00:26:01.000The agent summarized their highly unusual interview and sent word to Washington on August 2nd, 2016, two days after the investigation was open.
00:26:08.000The report helped provide the foundation for a case that, a year ago Thursday, became the special counsel investigation.
00:26:13.000But at the time, a small group of FBI officials knew it by its codename, Crossfire Hurricane.
00:26:19.000The name was a reference to the Rolling Stones lyric, I was born a crossfire hurricane, because obviously now everybody was under investigation, so it was CROSSFIRE HURRICANE.
00:26:28.000Well, days after they closed their investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, agents began scrutinizing the campaign of her Republican rival.
00:26:36.000The two cases have become inextricably linked in one of the most consequential periods in the history of the FBI.
00:26:39.000All of those questions, I think, are perfectly legit.
00:26:41.000But here's what people are really worried about.
00:26:58.000Not only did agents in that case fall back to their typical policy of silence, but interviews with a dozen current and former government officials and a review of documents show that the FBI was even more circumspect in that case than has been previously known.
00:27:09.000Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.
00:27:15.000Agents considered, then rejected, interviewing key Trump associates, which might have sped up the investigation, but risked revealing the existence of the case.
00:27:22.000Top officials quickly became convinced that they would not solve the case before Election Day, which made them only more hesitant to act.
00:27:27.000When agents did take bold investigative steps, like interviewing the ambassador, they were shrouded in secrecy.
00:27:55.000The FBI faces a lot of criticism, but here is the actual story, buried deep in this New York Times piece.
00:28:03.000Crossfire Hurricane spawned a case that has brought charges against former Trump officials and more than a dozen Russians, but in the final months of 2016 agents faced great uncertainty about facts and how to respond.
00:28:12.000So Crossfire Hurricane began exactly 100 days before the presidential election.
00:28:16.000But if agents were eager to investigate Mr. Trump's campaign, as Trump has suggested, the messages do not reveal it.
00:28:21.000I cannot believe we are seriously looking at these allegations and the pervasive connections," Struck wrote.
00:28:25.000This is Peter Struck, who is one of the FBI agents who is anti-Trump, soon after returning from London.
00:28:31.000The mood in early meetings was anxious, former officials recalled.
00:28:34.000Agents had just closed the Clinton investigation they braced for months of Republican-led hearings over why she was not charged.
00:28:39.000Crossfire Hurricane was built around the same core of agents and analysts who investigated Mrs. Clinton.
00:28:44.000None was eager to re-enter presidential politics, former officials said, especially when the agents did not know what would come of the Australian information.
00:28:51.000So the FBI investigated four unidentified Trump campaign aides in the early months.
00:28:55.000They were Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos.
00:28:58.000Flynn had been paid $45,000 by the Russian government's media arm, the BRT, for a 2015 speech and dined with Vladimir Putin.
00:29:06.000Manafort, of course, has deep and abiding ties with the Russian government via Ukraine.
00:29:09.000Carter Page was well known to the FBI because he'd been previously recruited by Russian spies.
00:29:15.000The young, inexperienced campaign aide whose wine-fueled conversation with the Australian ambassador set off the investigation.
00:29:20.000Before hacked Democratic emails appeared online, he had seemed to know that Russia had political dirt on Mrs. Clinton.
00:29:25.000So, if you recall, Papadopoulos had apparently dined with a London professor who was an agent of Moscow, who said that he had access to all these emails, and then Papadopoulos was talking to the Australian ambassador, and he said, by the way, I know that the Russians have these emails.
00:29:37.000And so the Australian ambassador called up the FBI and they said, um, guys, Russia's interfering in your election.
00:29:42.000And then the FBI went over and interviewed this guy.
00:29:44.000So, does it sound like the FBI has done anything wrong in investigating these people?
00:29:48.000Are you looking at all the information?
00:29:49.000Looking at what they knew at the time?
00:29:51.000Let's say that it had been Hillary Clinton and a top campaign aide to Hillary Clinton.
00:29:55.000Let's say that Hillary Clinton's future national security adviser had been paid by Russia Today.
00:30:00.000Let's say that Hillary Clinton's campaign chair had been deep in bed with Vladimir Putin.
00:30:07.000Let's say that a low-level foreign policy staffer had been working with the Russians to bring across material about Donald Trump.
00:30:14.000Would you have said the FBI ought to investigate that?
00:30:16.000Of course you would have said the FBI ought to investigate that because
00:30:18.000The FBI ought to investigate that, right?
00:30:20.000I mean, they didn't do anything wrong in launching the investigation, as far as I can tell.
00:30:24.000Even if you believe that they used shoddy information to go after Carter Page, that is a slightly different contention than saying that the entire investigation never should have been launched and was a witch hunt from the very beginning.
00:30:36.000Apparently, they said that they had embedded an informant deep in this piece.
00:30:41.000It says, The FBI obtained phone records and other documents using national security letters, a secret type of subpoena, officials said.
00:30:47.000And at least one government informant met several times with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, current and former officials said.
00:30:52.000This has become a politically contentious point, with Mr. Trump's allies questioning whether the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign or trying to entrap campaign officials.
00:31:00.000But the real question again is, were they not aggressive enough?
00:31:39.000In self-serving desire to get a sympathetic story about its actions, DOJ, FBI leakers are willing to provide yet more details about that top-secret source, namely that the spying was aimed at Page and Papadopoulos.
00:31:48.000Making it all more certain that they will be outed, which is on them.
00:31:52.000DOJ and the FBI have shredded what little credibility they have in claiming they cannot comply with Devin Nunes' subpoena.
00:31:57.000So Devin Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, he subpoenaed the DOJ and the FBI for all the information about the Trump campaign investigation, basically, and they've not been turning any of this over, saying that it's dangerous for them to turn it over.
00:32:47.000And what really did inspire the CI investigation?
00:32:50.000Okay, so now the implication that she is drawing is that the real reason that the investigation was launched was not this meeting between the Australian ambassador and George Papadopoulos, that it was not Papadopoulos that launched the Russia collusion investigation, that what originally launched it was the politically motivated dossier that had been paid for by Fusion GPS at the behest of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
00:33:08.000That still does not answer the question as to whether everything in that dossier is false.
00:33:13.000For people who say the dossier is all lies, all untruths, there's a bunch of stuff in there that is probably untrue.
00:33:18.000There's some stuff in there that is probably not untrue.
00:33:21.000And it's a mistake to simply dismiss facts because it's more convenient for the narrative to do so.
00:33:26.000Finally, Kimberly Strassel says, So he says that she's basically suggesting that there are a bunch of people who are involved in this nefarious plan to take out Trump.
00:33:42.000I am not seeing the evidence that there are a lot of people involved in a nefarious plan to take out President Trump.
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00:35:13.000Alrighty, so, as I say, I am not fully convinced that this New York Times story about Hurricane Crossfire is this damning indictment of the FBI or the CIA, and that the FBI and CIA launched this investigation on zero grounds, and it was always a witch hunt designed to take down President Trump.
00:35:27.000In the same way I don't believe the Russia collusion story, I also don't believe the FBI collusion story, that the FBI was colluding to take down Trump.
00:35:54.000That's a different story than the FBI and CIA should they have launched an investigation again.
00:35:57.000If Hillary Clinton had been surrounded by a bunch of people who appeared to be trying to do business with the Russians, and then Chelsea Clinton had had a meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Donald Trump, we'd all be like, uh, yeah, I'm glad there's an investigation going on.
00:36:09.000So, I don't buy the investigation was launched under, for prurient, nonsensical reasons.
00:36:17.000I think after the election happened, that a bunch of deep staters, meaning Obama holdovers, inside the FBI and CIA decided, you know, it'd be awesome.
00:36:24.000It'd be great to undermine Trump's presidency by leaking out all of this information.
00:36:28.000Now, the excuse that they used for leaking is that Trump was going to come in.
00:36:31.000He was going to shut down the investigation and destroy the possibility of us uncovering all this collusion.
00:36:35.000Yeah, I think the reality is more like there are a bunch of people who are ticked that Hillary had lost.
00:36:41.000They could not believe that this dunder-headed Trump was president, and they were going to undermine him from day one by leaking a bunch of information that really was not criminal.
00:36:48.000It was not criminal for Michael Flynn to be talking to the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.
00:38:00.000So, apparently Cohen was trying to go after South Korean cash, and now there's a story from The Intercept, which is a very anti-Trump outlet, saying, in the blink of a Michael Avenetti tweet, Ahmed al-Rumaihi has suddenly found himself internet famous.
00:38:12.000It began on Sunday evening when the attorney for adult film star Stormy Daniels posted a screenshot of video footage from Trump's tower lobby recorded on December 12, 2016.
00:38:20.000Viral speculation followed, with online detectives identifying al-Rumaihi, the former head of a $100 billion wing of the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, in the image,
00:38:28.000And linking him to a Qatar-Russia deal to sell a portion of the oil company Rosneft, which had been referenced in the Steele dossier.
00:38:35.000From there, Slate took over, headlining a piece.
00:38:37.000Michael Cohen's meeting with Michael Flynn and a Qatari diplomat might be the key to unlocking the Steele dossier, the suggestion being that Qatar was trying to bribe Michael Cohen to broker basically a business deal for the sale of Rosneft.
00:38:49.000Apparently, al-Rumaihi said that Cohen asked him for an upfront fee of $1 million for his services in the midst of their conversation about a potential Qatari investment in U.S.
00:39:37.000There's not really a threat that Michael Cohen's financial records are disappearing.
00:39:40.000Benjamin Wittes, who's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and the editor of Lawfare Blog, he is not a Trump acolyte.
00:39:46.000He says, quote, I've been thinking about this New Yorker story on financial records missing from a government database.
00:39:52.000I don't want to rain on anybody's parade here, but color me at least a little bit skeptical.
00:39:55.000Assume for a moment that some records of Cohen's transactions are in fact missing.
00:39:59.000That doesn't mean the transactions themselves have disappeared.
00:40:01.000Only the Treasury Department's record of the back reports on the transactions are gone from the database.
00:40:06.000So when Bob Mueller, or the SDNY, the Southern District of New York, subpoenas the bank, as they surely have done already, for the records of all of Cohen's transactions, those transaction records will still be there and they'll be turned over.
00:40:16.000Moreover, the bank surely still has records of the transactions themselves.
00:40:20.000So I doubt very much there's a material loss to Mueller or the SDNY in any pending investigation, even if there has been, in fact, some data loss within the government.
00:40:29.000Moreover, were such a data loss to be discovered, and the destruction were intentional and malicious, that would be traceable, and that would be prosecutable, presumably.
00:40:35.000So, this excuse that is being used to go after Michael Cohen is obviously an excuse as well.
00:40:40.000So this is why I say, it's not that there's no corruption.
00:40:43.000It's that the corruption is not where you're looking for the corruption.
00:40:46.000The corruption is in distributing information to the press that should not be in the hands of the press.
00:40:51.000The corruption is in the post-election attempt to destroy Donald Trump by leaking a bunch of information that has not been confirmed, that has not been verified, and that has not been traced to any sort of real collusion.
00:41:02.000That's the real problem here, not the investigation itself.
00:41:05.000So the investigation itself, I think, was probably generated along correct lines.
00:41:10.000We'll see how it was how it was pursued.
00:41:30.000The Carter Page FISA warrant came about after the election, so maybe that's true.
00:41:45.000And I think we ought to be very specific about these arguments so that we can be as factual as possible.
00:41:48.000None of this, of course, means that actual collusion took place.
00:41:51.000There was intent to collude on the part of Donald Trump Jr., pretty clearly.
00:41:54.000But that is not the same thing as a crime, because collusion itself
00:41:57.000Meanwhile, the Democrats continue to struggle for air, so their generic ballot lead is now down to 4.7% in the latest RealClearPolitics poll average.
00:42:20.000This is because the Democrats have staked everything on the Russia investigation.
00:42:24.000What's amazing about the Democrats is how dumb they are.
00:42:26.000So after Trump was elected, if the Democrats had any brains at all, what they could have done is they could have come around and said, hey, you know, Mr. President, you seem like a pretty swell guy.
00:42:35.000You gave a lot of money to us in the past, and we feel like we can work with you.
00:42:52.000One of the reasons he has governed as a conservative is because the Democrats have decided that he is Satan and he must be destroyed from without.
00:42:59.000Well, they have nothing else to offer other than we hate Trump and Russia and Michael Avenetti and Stormy Daniels.
00:43:04.000Stormy Daniels, by the way, who is making a literal bare ass of herself.
00:43:08.000I mean, she is she's literally going to go to a
00:43:12.000There's apparently a statue of President Trump naked in Seattle or something, and she's going to go do a lap dance with the naked statue of Trump.
00:43:20.000I can't imagine why people aren't taking the Stormy Daniels stuff seriously.
00:43:22.000It seems to me that she's a very serious person deserving of nothing but intellectual respect.
00:43:27.000And also, yeah, she's gonna go spank a naked statue with a magazine.
00:43:30.000But other than that, I think totally, yes.
00:43:47.000Well, they don't really have much choice because their alternative is to say things like Keith Ellison.
00:43:51.000So Keith Ellison, who is almost the head of the DNC, Democratic representative from Minnesota, he actually made the case yesterday we ought to regulate employer pay.
00:43:57.000So we have a booming economy, incomes are rising, like in real terms they're rising, the economy is reaching historic heights, and Keith Ellison's solution is we should use the government to force employers to pay particular wages on the upper end and the lower end.
00:44:11.000Yeah, I can't imagine why people don't trust Democrats to run the government.
00:44:14.000I mean, this is not a big secret to shareholders.
00:44:16.000It's not a big secret to boards of directors.
00:44:18.000Don't you need direct government intervention?
00:44:20.000Are you favoring the government actually regulating the relationship between CEO pays and the average worker?
00:44:27.000I think it's a very good idea and I think we should start talking about it.
00:45:47.000Well, one of the things that is obvious about the Trump administration's decision to move the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem is that this should actually facilitate peace because it may take off the table an area of contention that should not be an area of contention.
00:46:36.000The left would prefer a false peace based on false promises than they would a real peace based on realities on the ground because then they don't get to paint their false moral picture of what's actually happening in the Middle East.
00:46:46.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:47:36.000No, you're not alienating the American public at all.
00:47:38.000You're not alienating the American public at all when you say that law-abiding gun owners are the real terrorists, but Hamas terrorists who use babies as human shields are not terrorists.
00:47:46.000By the way, there's that story about an eight-month-old baby that died in the crossfire in Gaza.
00:48:47.000Rahab was the whore that was in Jericho, and Joshua and the Jews invade the land, and when they get to Jericho, which is a walled city, Joshua and some of his other spies
00:49:00.000They go into Rahab's whorehouse, essentially, and people are looking for them, and she advises them on how they can get into the city, and she says, now that I've advised you on how to get in the city, and how I'm going to hide you, and she hides them, then I'm going to need your protection.
00:49:19.000The reason that I read this is because
00:49:44.000It's actually a really bad description of why you ought to believe in God.
00:49:48.000There's this, you know, the reason that she is saying that people are believing in God is because God is demonstrating his mastery through human beings.