The Mueller Report is out, and it's a doozy! Ben Shapiro breaks it all down in just one hour, and gives his thoughts on the key takeaways from the report and the press conference by Attorney General William Barr. He also explains why the President should not have been given the chance to read the report before it was released. And he argues that the President is not hiding anything from the public, but is simply using his own emotions as a means to determine whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians in order to obstruct justice in the investigation of the Trump administration and the Russia investigation, and why he should not be held responsible for anything that comes out of it. Ben also provides his analysis of the report, and explains why he thinks there's no evidence of collusion between the Trump Campaign and the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (F.B.I.) in the report. And, of course, he gives his own thoughts on why the report should be released and why it should be declassified before it is made public. You won't want to miss it! Watch the entire thing on The Ben Shapiro Show, wherever you get your news and information from around the world. Go check it out! Go listen to the full episode now! Subscribe to the show and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to our podcast wherever you re listening to podcasts. Subscribe and review the show! If you like what you're listening, share the show on your social media, share it with your friends, and tell a friend! and tell us what you think about what you thought of it's value and how much you think it means to you'll be impacted by the show. and what you'd like to do in the comments section! Thank you for listening and share it on your friends! Be sure to tell a fellow podcasting and we'll be listening to Ben Shapiro! on your Insta- if it helps us spread the word to your friends about Ben Shapiro's work and what he's listening out there about it's great! Thanks Ben Shapiro is awesome, Ben Shapiro, right? or tweet him on it's awesome, right he's amazing, right on the next episode! or on Insta: linktr. or Insta= & so on and so and so on & so forth! - Ben Shapiro -
00:00:43.000Stealing data from unsuspecting people on public Wi-Fi, it's one of the simplest and cheapest ways for hackers to make money.
00:00:48.000When you leave your internet connection unencrypted, you might as well be writing your passwords and credit card numbers on a giant billboard for the rest of the world to see.
00:02:01.000The reason that it's a weird thing to do is because we already have Attorney General Barr's letter, which is his summation of his findings regarding the bottom line of the Mueller report.
00:02:10.000I think the reason that he actually held the press conference was to push two particular points.
00:02:17.000One point was that he was being as transparent as humanly possible.
00:02:20.000And the second point was that he was using President Trump's emotional state as his basis for adjudicating whether or not the president was guilty of obstruction of justice.
00:02:32.000Those were, I think, the two key takeaways.
00:02:35.000So, obviously, he's already said that the Trump campaign did not collude.
00:02:39.000He's already said that this is, that he's redacting as little as humanly possible.
00:02:45.000He was also pointing out, I think, that the president had already seen the report, but that that was not illegal.
00:02:50.000That's clip five, him talking about the president's counsel being given the opportunity to read the report before release.
00:02:55.000In addition, earlier this week, the President's personal counsel requested and was given the opportunity to read a final version of the redacted report before it was publicly released.
00:03:08.000That request was consistent with the practice followed under the Ethics in Government Act, which permitted individuals named in a report prepared by an independent counsel the opportunity to read the report before publication.
00:03:23.000Okay, so that was Barr's take, and I think that's important, him saying that the President is not here to hide the information that's in the report.
00:03:33.000And it is obvious, by the way, that the President could have asserted executive privilege at any point in the middle of this report, as we'll see.
00:03:39.000There's plenty of information in the report that definitely falls under the rubric of executive privilege if the President of the United States wanted to assert it.
00:03:46.000So Barr is pointing out that the President was not really hiding a lot, which is true.
00:03:50.000Also, Barr points out that we have to bear in mind the context of Trump's actions, particularly with regard to obstruction of justice.
00:03:57.000Now, the report breaks down, the Mueller report breaks down into two sections.
00:04:00.000Section one is about Trump-Russia collusion.
00:04:02.000As I suggested before, I didn't think there was going to be a lot of enormous new information about Trump-Russia collusion, and there really isn't.
00:04:09.000It really is a rehash of stuff we already knew, the most important stuff being that June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was a lawyer who was acting as sort of a Russian front to supposedly pass information about Hillary Clinton to the Trump campaign.
00:04:25.000There are also a bunch of Roger Stone references, but not a lot of revelations in the first half of the report.
00:04:30.000The stuff that was revelatory, I think to everybody, was the stuff in the second half of the report, the obstruction of justice stuff.
00:04:36.000And there the question becomes, did the president obstruct justice when he repeatedly sounded off about wanting to get rid of Jeff Sessions, or when he repeatedly sounded off about wanting to fire Robert Mueller, or when he repeatedly reached out to members of his team and sort of patted them on the back when they did things that he wanted, and then offered them the stick when they did not.
00:04:54.000Now, the standard of obstruction of justice, as laid out in the actual Mueller report, is under 28 CFR 600.4A, federal crimes committed in the course of and with intent to interfere with the special counsel's investigation, such as perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and such as perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses.
00:05:14.000So they break down several basic elements of the crime in this Mueller report, and some of the elements of the crime include intent to commit obstruction of justice.
00:05:24.000So according to the Mueller report itself, obstruction of justice law reaches all corrupt conduct capable of producing an effect that prevents justice from being duly administered regardless of the means employed.
00:05:34.000An effort to influence a proceeding can qualify as an endeavor to obstruct justice, even if the effort was subtle or circuitous and however cleverly or with whatever cloaking of purpose it was made.
00:05:44.000An improper motive can render an actor's conduct criminal, even when the conduct would otherwise be lawful and within the actor's authorities.
00:05:51.000So if President Trump was trying to assert some sort of obstruction against, he was trying to get people in his team to corruptly impact the Mueller report, then this would serve as obstruction of justice according to this interpretation of the law.
00:06:13.000There has to be a nexus with the Mueller investigation.
00:06:15.000So, in other words, if Trump just decided, I'm firing Robert Mueller because I don't like the way his tie looks today, that's not obstruction of justice.
00:06:22.000If Trump fires Robert Mueller because he wants to obstruct the investigation, that's obstruction of justice.
00:06:27.000Maybe, although he still has the authority to fire Robert Mueller for any reasons, probably more impeachable than even obstruction of justice.
00:06:34.000According to the Mueller report, there must be a nexus within a current investigation.
00:06:39.000That nexus showing has both subjective and objective components.
00:06:42.000As an objective matter, a defendant must act in a manner that is likely to obstruct justice, such that the statute excludes defendants who have an evil purpose but use means that would only unnaturally and improbably be successful.
00:06:53.000In other words, you have to be effective in your attempts to obstruct justice, or at least the attempt must be Somehow within the boundaries of reason.
00:07:00.000As a subjective matter, the actor must have contemplated a particular foreseeable proceeding.
00:07:05.000In other words, again, Trump must have wanted to shut down the Mueller report because he thought that its result would be bad for him.
00:07:13.000It can't just be that he wants to shut down the Mueller report because he thinks that the Mueller report is just a waste of government money, for example.
00:07:21.000That's why there is the element of corruptly In the obstruction of justice law.
00:07:25.000The word corruptly provides the intent element for obstruction of justice.
00:07:28.000It means acting knowingly and dishonestly or with an improper motive.
00:07:32.000The requisite showing is made when a person acted with an intent to obtain an improper advantage for himself or someone else inconsistent with official duty and the rights of others.
00:07:40.000That last phrase is the one that matters.
00:07:42.000Inconsistent with official duty and the rights of others.
00:07:44.000As we will see, President Trump continually tried to interfere with players surrounding the Mueller investigation without in any underlying way Forcing people to lie.
00:07:54.000And he did so not because he wanted, in my opinion, and in the opinion of Attorney General Barr, not because he wanted to shut down or obstruct the Mueller investigation, but because he found the entire thing embarrassing and he was attempting to avoid press embarrassment for the most part.
00:08:08.000The most damaging section of the obstruction statute is witness tampering.
00:08:13.000A more specific provision in section 1512, according to the Mueller report, prohibits tampering with a witness.
00:08:18.000That would make it a crime to knowingly use intimidation or corruptly persuade another person or engage in misleading conduct toward another person with intents to influence, delay, or prevent the testimony of any person in an official proceeding to hinder, delay, or prevent the communication to a law enforcement officer.
00:08:32.000As we will see, there's behavior that verges on this but doesn't actually cross over Into that boundary.
00:08:37.000And finally, there's the question of the attempt.
00:08:39.000Is there attempted obstruction of justice?
00:08:42.000He says that the section includes attempt.
00:08:45.000So if you try to obstruct justice, but you fail, then that could theoretically be obstruction of justice.
00:08:50.000Now, the reason that he lays out this interpretation of the law is because Trump's activity here could legitimately be interpreted in a couple of different ways.
00:08:58.000On the one hand, it could be interpreted as President Trump trying to actively obstruct the Mueller investigation because he didn't want criminal activity to be uncovered by the Mueller investigation.
00:09:08.000Possibility number two is that Trump is a very frustrated guy.
00:09:11.000Who spends a lot of time doing immoral, bad things, and then does more immoral, bad, but non-criminal things in order to cover up the original things that he did.
00:09:19.000So it looks sort of like the Stormy Daniels scandal, in other words.
00:09:32.000So, you can interpret his activities in one of two ways.
00:09:34.000Attorney General Barr, I think properly, interprets Trump's activities in the second way that I named, and he especially does that in light of the fact that if he had attempted to prosecute Trump under obstruction of justice, he would have to prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt.
00:09:49.000Whether you're on the left or the right, you can think the president did something criminal.
00:09:53.000There is no prosecutor who would have taken up this case.
00:09:56.000Here's the difference between the Hillary Clinton case and the Donald Trump case.
00:09:59.000In the Hillary Clinton case, intent was not an element of the crime.
00:10:03.000If you expose classified information to public scrutiny by creating a server and putting classified documents on it, that is in and of itself a crime.
00:10:13.000That's why it was ridiculous when James Comey, the head of the FBI, said that Hillary had not committed a criminal act because she lacked the requisite intent.
00:10:23.000There is no requisite intent in that section of the law.
00:10:26.000There is requisite intent when it comes to obstruction of justice.
00:10:30.000So the reason I'm laying all this forth is because that's where Attorney General Barr is going.
00:10:34.000When he says that the president and the president's emotion matter, he says the reason he invoked that is because that stuff is in the report, because it is relevant to determining whether he had the requisite intent to commit obstruction of justice.
00:10:47.000Well, actually, the statements about his sincere beliefs are recognized in the report that there was substantial evidence for that.
00:10:52.000Okay, so people are treating Barr so people are treating Barr as though Barr is a deeply partisan figure here.
00:11:15.000Now, there's a case to be made that Barr is partisan insofar as he works for the President of the United States, but I don't see how an objective prosecutor could bring an obstruction of justice case Or a collusion case on the basis of the evidence that's actually in the Mueller report.
00:11:29.000So in a second, we're going to get to all of that.
00:11:31.000We'll also show you that the media were attempting to preemptively spin this report even before it was out.
00:11:36.000Again, I think it was a mistake to hold this press conference in the first place, but I think the reasons that I laid forth are the reasons that Barr did it.
00:11:42.000One, he wanted to show that he was transparent and Trump was transparent.
00:11:45.000And two, he wanted to point out that obstruction of justice is an intent crime.
00:11:49.000OK, we'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:11:51.000First, you've heard me talk about how Ring is reinventing home security with doorbells, cameras, even an alarm you can install yourself.
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00:12:45.000You gotta check out the Neighbors app yourself.
00:12:47.000The easiest way to get it going is ring.com forward slash Shapiro.
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00:12:55.000So as I say, Attorney General Barr does this presentation, and the media naturally have to set their side, which is that Barr is a political partisan hack.
00:13:03.000Again, even though the President of the United States did not assert executive privilege, even though the redactions Are minimal.
00:13:09.000They really only apply in the Roger Stone investigation, which is ongoing.
00:13:14.000The media still were claiming that this was some sort of cover-up by Attorney General Barr, which I fail to see how it's a cover-up when I can read the document and you can read the document and everybody can read the document.
00:13:24.000Still, you saw all the legal analysts saying ridiculous, silly things.
00:13:27.000Neal Katyal is a legal analyst over on CNN.
00:13:30.000He suggested, or MSNBC rather, he suggested that Barr sounded like a spokesperson rather than the Attorney General.
00:14:10.000When he says that Barr using the word collusion is some sort of manipulation, everyone in the media has been using the word collusion to describe this for two odd years.
00:14:19.000Let's not pretend that Barr invented the word collusion.
00:14:24.000Now, with all of that said, the case can be made that Barr was coming out to preemptively spin this thing in favor of his own take on the issue.
00:14:33.000As I say, maybe that's true, maybe that's not, but the Mueller report was revealed like an hour and a half later, and it says exactly what it says.
00:14:41.000So, let's get to the actual Mueller report.
00:14:46.000So, The Mueller report starts off with about 190 pages, 220 pages, something like that, on the Trump-Russia collusion stuff.
00:14:56.000And the effective findings are that Trump-Russia collusion did not occur, that members of the Trump campaign were giving shout-outs to WikiLeaks, that there were certain members of the Trump campaign who were unwittingly acting as kind of near-pawns of the Russians, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, for example, but that there was no high-level collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
00:15:16.000And there really isn't that much more that we didn't know in the Trump-Russia collusion part.
00:15:22.000The information that is clear, there are two conclusions that are pretty obvious and should be stated right at the outside here.
00:15:28.000One is that with the number of Trump-Russia contacts that were happening during the election, For all the talk about how this investigation, the Trump-Russia investigation, was begun under corrupt auspices, I don't see the evidence of that.
00:15:39.000I see evidence that the Trump-Russia investigation became more corrupt as time went on, particularly with them using the Steele dossier, which turns out to be a bunch of crap.
00:15:48.000The Steele dossier is only mentioned in this document a couple of times, and that is because The Mueller report found virtually nothing that corroborated any section of the Steele dossier.
00:15:57.000So the fact that the FBI was using the Steele dossier as the basis for large swaths of the investigation, including a FISA warrant against Carter Page, is just an absurdity on its face.
00:16:06.000That does not mean, as I've said all along, that the investigation was initiated under improper auspices.
00:16:12.000It means that it became improper over time, if anything.
00:16:15.000It also doesn't look like Mueller is a political partisan hack here.
00:16:18.000Who's simply attempting to do the nefarious work of a fusion GPS or something like that.
00:16:23.000So that is a conclusion that is worthwhile noting here.
00:16:27.000The second conclusion that is worthwhile noting is that, again, there is nothing in the actual report that suggests that President Trump had any deep abiding deal going with the Russian government.
00:16:39.000Basically, as with all things Trump, as I've said again and again, Trump does something embarrassing and then he doesn't want to be embarrassed so he does something else embarrassing.
00:16:46.000That is the nature of the Trump-Russia collusion stuff.
00:16:49.000So, the report begins by talking about the social media campaign in the GRU, which is the newfangled KGB of Russia, hacking operations.
00:16:57.000They say that those coincided with a series of contacts between Trump campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government.
00:17:03.000The office investigated whether those contacts reflected or resulted in the campaign conspiring or coordinating with Russia in its election interference activities.
00:17:11.000Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
00:17:30.000In other words, Trump was happy that WikiLeaks was doing what it was doing.
00:17:33.000Trump was perfectly happy that the Russian government seemed to hate Hillary Clinton.
00:17:40.000And again, I'm reading directly from the Mueller report.
00:17:45.000The Mueller report also says, while the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign, the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges.
00:17:56.000Now, that is not to say that no criminal behavior happened.
00:18:00.000Maybe criminal behavior happened, but there was not enough evidence to support criminal charges.
00:18:05.000Among other things, the evidence was not sufficient to charge any campaign officials as an unregistered agent of the Russian government or other Russian principal.
00:18:12.000Our evidence about the June 9, 2016 meeting and WikiLeaks releases of hacked materials was not sufficient to charge a criminal campaign finance violation.
00:18:20.000Further, the evidence was not sufficient to charge that any member of the Trump campaign conspired with representatives of the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election.
00:18:34.000That suggests that Mueller still suspects that something nefarious might have been going on, but there is no evidence to actually fulfill that expectation.
00:18:43.000And I think that when you read the report, there's fairly good, good feeling that the Trump campaign was happy about all this stuff.
00:18:49.000But again, there is no evidence to support the idea that they were actively involved with Russian collusion or conspiracy under any criminal statute.
00:18:58.000So, the Mueller report talks about a variety of matters that investigated.
00:19:03.000They say, for example, the investigation established the interactions between Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak and Trump campaign officials, both of the candidates' April 2016 foreign policy speech in Washington, D.C., and during the week of the RNC, were brief, public, and non-substantive.
00:19:16.000You remember, these were treated as bombshells.
00:19:18.000The fact that Sergey Kislyak met with people during RNC week, this was treated as a bombshell by the New York Times.
00:19:23.000The investigation did not establish that one campaign official's efforts to dilute a portion of the Republican Party platform on providing assistance to Ukraine were undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia.
00:19:33.000So in other words, there was one campaign official who wanted to have better relations with the Russians and the campaign platform was changed on Ukraine to reflect that, but that was not a reflection of Trump imposing that from above or Russia seeking it.
00:19:47.000The investigation also did not establish that a meeting between Sergey Kislyak and Jeff Sessions in September 2016 at Sessions' Senate office included any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign.
00:19:56.000Now, you'll recall that that meeting was the basis of Sessions recusing himself from the Mueller investigation, well, from the Trump-Russia investigation, because it was before Mueller, from the Trump-Russia investigation in the first place.
00:20:09.000According to the Mueller report, the office learned that some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated, including some associated with the Trump campaign, deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data or communications records.
00:20:26.000In such cases, the office was not able to fully corroborate witness statements through comparison to contemporaneous communications or fully question witnesses about statements that appeared inconsistent with other known facts.
00:20:41.000to be accurate and complete to the greatest extent possible.
00:20:44.000Given these identified gaps, the office cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light or cast in a new light the events described in the report.
00:20:52.000In other words, there are holes in the evidentiary record here.
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00:22:59.000As I say, the Mueller Report has two halves.
00:23:01.000Half number one, about Trump-Russia collusion.
00:23:03.000Not much there that we didn't already know.
00:23:05.000Just a lot of talk about George Papadopoulos and his weird relationship with a guy named Joseph Mifsud, who is maybe a Russian front, and Carter Page, who's a weirdo who kept traveling to Moscow, but...
00:23:15.000He would file his reports up the chain and nobody seemed to take advantage of those reports or care about his reports.
00:23:19.000So there's not a lot on the Trump-Russia collusion front that we didn't already know.
00:23:23.000But as I say, the investigation I don't think from this report was begun under evil auspices, although we will find that out when the Inspector General of the DOJ, Michael Horowitz, releases his own report on Trump-Russia.
00:23:33.000Now, we get to the heart of the report.
00:23:35.000The heart of the report is the stuff on obstruction of justice.
00:23:39.000So the stuff on obstruction of justice is the most dangerous for President Trump.
00:23:43.000Now, I will say, leading up to this, Attorney General Barr said, listen, if there's no underlying collusion, there's nothing to obstruct.
00:23:51.000It is also true that if you order people to lie to the government, that still constitutes obstruction of justice.
00:23:56.000So that is sort of where the controversy lies.
00:24:00.000Did Trump order anyone to lie or did he just sort of imply that he would like people to lie to the press?
00:24:04.000Was he telling people to lie to the government?
00:24:06.000Was he trying to shut down the Mueller investigation to avoid some sort of criminal charge?
00:24:11.000Or was he just saying stuff because he was angry?
00:24:15.000You know, my solution for all of this for President Trump is the dude says a lot of stuff because he's angry.
00:24:20.000And he's angry in large part because he feels like his election victory is being taken away from him by a media that was determined to suggest that he did not, in fact, win the election on his own merits, but only because of Russian interference.
00:24:33.000In any case, the Mueller report says, first, a traditional prosecution or declination decision entails a binary determination to initiate or decline a prosecution.
00:24:41.000But we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment.
00:24:44.000Remember, the Mueller report did not recommend that Trump be prosecuted or not prosecuted.
00:24:48.000Instead, they just presented the evidence to Barr and Barr, the attorney general said, I'm not going to prosecute.
00:24:52.000The Office of Legal Counsel has issued an opinion finding that the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting president would impermissibly undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.
00:25:05.000They say a federal criminal accusation against a sitting president would place burdens on the president's capacity to govern.
00:25:11.000But, in their later analysis, they say, well, we would still not allow that to prevent us from recommending a prosecution.
00:25:17.000They say, while the OLC opinion concludes a sitting president may not be prosecuted, it recognizes that a criminal investigation during the president's term is permissible.
00:25:25.000The OLC opinion also recognizes that the president does not have immunity after he leaves office, and if individuals other than the president committed an obstruction offense, they may be prosecuted at this time.
00:25:35.000And then they say, we considered whether to evaluate the conduct we investigated under the justice manual standards governing prosecution and declination decisions.
00:25:42.000We determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the president committed crimes.
00:25:47.000So in other words, maybe he committed crime, maybe he didn't, but we're not willing to go there.
00:25:54.000They said, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.
00:26:00.000Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.
00:26:04.000In other words, this is a judgment call.
00:26:06.000This is a question as to whether the president was safe at home or whether he was out at home.
00:26:12.000We are instead going to leave that up to the attorney general.
00:26:14.000And what Barr says is that there is not evidence sufficient to establish a prosecution for obstruction of justice, which after reading the report, I think is probably the fair way to come down on this.
00:26:25.000Okay, then we get into the actual meat of the matter.
00:26:29.000So the report suggests, during the 2016 presidential campaign, questions arose about the Russian government's apparent support for candidate Trump.
00:26:36.000After WikiLeaks released politically damaging Democratic Party emails that were reported to have been hacked by Russia, Trump publicly expressed criticism that Russia was responsible for the hacks.
00:26:44.000Trump also denied having any business in or connections to Russia, even though as late as 2016, the Trump Organization was in fact pursuing the Trump Tower in Moscow.
00:26:52.000After the election, the president expressed concerns to advisors that reports of Russia's election interference might lead the public to question the legitimacy of his election.
00:27:00.000Okay, none of that is obstruction of justice.
00:27:02.000That's all public-facing Trump being embarrassed.
00:27:06.000The report says that there was conduct involving FBI Director Comey and Michael Flynn.
00:27:11.000They talk about how in mid-January 2017, Michael Flynn, the national security advisor, falsely denied to the vice president, other administration officials, and FBI agents that he had talked to Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.
00:27:23.000And then the day after the president requested Flynn's resignation, the president told an outside advisor, now that we fired Flynn, the Russia thing is over.
00:27:53.000And then they talk in the report about the president's reaction to the continuing Russia investigation.
00:27:58.000In February 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions began to assess whether he had to recuse himself from campaign-related investigations because of his role in the Trump campaign.
00:28:06.000In early March, the president told White House counsel Don McGahn to stop Sessions from recusing.
00:28:11.000After Sessions announced his recusal on March 2nd, the president expressed anger at the decision and told advisers that he should have an attorney general who would protect him.
00:28:20.000The president also took sessions aside at an event and urged him to unrecuse.
00:28:24.000Later in March, James Comey disclosed at a congressional hearing that the FBI was investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, including any links or coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
00:28:37.000In the following days, the president reached out to the DNI Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, and the leaders of the CIA and the National Security Agency Again, does that constitute obstruction of justice?
00:28:46.000The president did not obstruct justice by asking people to tell the truth, which is that he was not involved in Trump-Russia collusion.
00:28:51.000Comey twice directly, notwithstanding guidance from his own White House counsel, Don McGahn, to avoid direct contact with the Department of Justice.
00:28:58.000Again, does that constitute obstruction of justice?
00:29:01.000The president did not obstruct justice by asking people to tell the truth, which is that he was not involved in Trump-Russia collusion.
00:29:08.000And then the Mello Report discusses the termination of Comey.
00:29:12.000And they say that within days of Comey testifying in a congressional hearing about whether the the president was personally under investigation, the president decided to terminate Comey The president fired Comey, and then he told Russian officials he had faced great pressure because of Russia, and that had been taken off by Comey's firing.
00:29:30.000But that is not the same thing as the president of the United States saying that he fired Comey so Comey would not find dirty material about Russia.
00:29:36.000He was just frustrated with Comey, which we already know because he said that on national TV.
00:29:41.000The really dicey material for Trump is all the stuff once we get to the appointment of Robert Mueller.
00:29:45.000It seems that once Robert Mueller was actually appointed, then the president's attitude became even more belligerent.
00:29:50.000And his activity included activity that looks more akin to obstruction of justice than his other activity.
00:29:56.000Now, does it shade over into a provable obstruction of justice?
00:29:59.000The answer is no, but Is it bad, immoral behavior?
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00:33:10.000At the point at which Comey was fired and the special counsel, Robert Mueller, was appointed, the president's attitude turned and it got even more angry.
00:33:17.000And that anger manifested itself in a bunch of directives to his immediate aides to do stuff that could theoretically be construed as obstruction of justice if they had actually carried it out and would probably be prevented from an obstruction of justice charge only because the president's Intent in saying all this stuff was to prevent public embarrassment, not criminal indictment.
00:33:38.000That's why you hear Barr keep coming back to the point.
00:33:39.000There was no collusion here for the president to protect himself against.
00:33:43.000This was all him being embarrassed by press reports.
00:33:45.000And so it was him telling people, hey, maybe you should just go out there and lie to the press.
00:33:49.000Which, by the way, is also not obstruction of justice.
00:33:51.000Lying to the press is not obstruction of justice.
00:33:53.000So here's what the Mueller report says.
00:33:55.000They say on May 17th, 2017, the acting attorney general for the Russia investigation appointed a special counsel to conduct the investigation and related matters.
00:34:03.000The president reacted to that news by telling advisers it was the quote-unquote end of his presidency and demanding that Jeff Sessions resign because he wanted to put in a new attorney general, presumably who would rein in Mueller.
00:34:15.000The president ultimately did not accept it.
00:34:17.000The president told aides that the special counsel had conflicts of interest and suggested that the special counsel therefore could not serve.
00:34:23.000The president's advisers told him the asserted conflicts were meritless and had already been considered by the DOJ.
00:34:29.000On June 17, 2017, the president called Don McGahn, his White House counsel, and directed him to call the acting Attorney General and say that the special counsel had conflicts of interest and must be removed.
00:34:38.000McGahn did not carry out the direction, however, deciding he would rather resign than trigger what he regarded as a potential Saturday Night Massacre.
00:34:46.000That's an invocation of the Nixon firing of Attorney General Archibald Cox, or the special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
00:34:52.000So, you know, all of this Is not necessarily obstruction of justice, but verges on it from the point of view that says that Trump was doing all of this stuff out of frustration that people were going to uncover his crimes.
00:35:05.000Again, intent is an element of the crime.
00:35:06.000I keep coming back to that because intent is an element of the crime.
00:35:09.000If this were a strict liability crime, Trump would be guilty.
00:35:24.000Two days after directing McGahn to have the special counsel removed, the president made another attempt to affect the course of the Russia investigation.
00:35:30.000On June 19th, 2017, the president met one-on-one in the Oval Office with former campaign manager and dope, Corey Lewandowski.
00:35:38.000And dictated a message for Lewandowski to deliver to Sessions.
00:35:41.000The message said that Sessions should publicly announce, notwithstanding his recusal from the Russia investigation, that the investigation was very unfair to the president, that the president had done nothing wrong, and that Sessions planned to meet with the special counsel and let him move forward with investigating election meddling for future elections.
00:35:56.000Lewandowski said he understood what the president wanted Sessions to do.
00:35:59.000This is the thing that comes closest to obstruction.
00:36:01.000It is the president trying to tell Jeff Sessions that he was going to change the nature of the special counsel's purview.
00:36:08.000Now, even that is not necessarily obstruction in the sense that the president does have authority over the special counsel.
00:36:14.000This is the case that Alan Dershowitz has made, is that the special counsel does work for the executive branch.
00:36:19.000Trump can fire him for whatever reason he wants.
00:36:22.000That may be the grounds for an impeachment.
00:36:24.000But that is not necessarily criminal obstruction.
00:36:27.000One month later, in another private meeting for Lewandowski, on July 19th, 2017, the president asked about the status of his message for Sessions to limit the special counsel investigation to future election interference.
00:36:37.000Lewandowski told the president the message would be delivered soon.
00:36:40.000After that meeting, the president publicly criticized Sessions in an interview with the New York Times and then issued a series of tweets making it clear that Sessions' job was in jeopardy.
00:36:48.000Lewandowski did not want to deliver the president's message personally, so he asked senior White House official Rick Dearborn to deliver it to Sessions.
00:36:54.000Dearborn was uncomfortable with the task and did not end up following through.
00:36:57.000So Sessions never received this message.
00:36:59.000His advisors prevented what could have been construed as obstruction of justice right there.
00:37:05.000And then there are a bunch of accusations that the president made efforts to prevent public disclosure of evidence, but public disclosure of evidence is not in fact a criminal offense.
00:37:15.000If I tell somebody to lie to the press, that is not criminal.
00:37:18.000It may be bad, but Trump lies to the press all the time.
00:37:44.000Finally, the Mueller investigation says, in early summer 2017, the president called Sessions at home and again asked him to reverse his recusal from the Russia investigation.
00:37:54.000On October 2017, the president met privately with Sessions in the Oval Office and asked him to take a look at investigating Clinton.
00:38:00.000In December 2017, shortly after Flynn pled guilty pursuant to a cooperation agreement, the president met with Sessions in the Oval Office and suggested, according to notes taken by a senior advisor, that if Sessions unrecused and took back supervision of the Russia investigation, he would be a hero.
00:38:16.000Sessions, of course, did not unrecuse.
00:38:18.000And the Mueller investigation went forward as stated.
00:38:22.000See, as we say, the question as to whether the president did stuff that was quote-unquote criminal here is not provable.
00:38:28.000It's not a provable question, which is probably the reason that Mueller left it up in the air.
00:38:31.000And I think Attorney General Barr looked at this and said, there's no way that I can prove this beyond a reasonable doubt.
00:38:36.000Him going to various advisors and fuming about Jeff Sessions and then not doing anything, especially when he has the full authority to just fire whomever he wants.
00:38:43.000If he wants to fire Jeff Sessions, he can fire Jeff Sessions.
00:38:45.000If he wants to fire Robert Mueller, he can fire Robert Mueller.
00:38:48.000If he wants to order an end to an investigation, the president can even do that, right?
00:38:54.000He can even order the end to an investigation without that necessarily being criminal obstruction of justice since he is, in fact, the president of the United States.
00:39:04.000In a second, we'll get to more on the Mueller report.
00:39:08.000So the Mueller report continues by talking about whether the president ordered people to lie.
00:39:13.000So apparently in early 2018, the press reported that President Trump had directed Don McGahn to have the special counsel removed in June 2017 and that McGahn had threatened to resign rather than carry out the order.
00:39:23.000The president reacted to the news stories by directing White House officials to tell McGahn to dispute the story and create a rector stating that he had not been ordered to have the special counsel removed.
00:39:33.000Megan told those officials that the media reports were accurate in stating that the president had directed Megan to have the special counsel removed.
00:39:42.000So again, this is The president telling his friends to tell McGahn to publicly dispute the story.
00:39:50.000That is not necessarily the president telling people to lie to legal investigators.
00:39:54.000Now, if you want to broadly read the statute, and a lot of this relies on sort of legalese, if you want to broadly read the statute to suggest that the president was corruptly intending to interfere with a pending investigation by publicly tweeting things, I don't think that that actually works.
00:40:07.000Legally speaking, if the president tweets something publicly, and he says, like, I hate Robert Mueller, and then the charge is you tried to corruptly impede the investigation, that doesn't work.
00:40:15.000And if he told Don McGahn, go out and lie to the press, that is also a terrible thing to do.
00:40:23.000The same thing holds true with regard to Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort.
00:40:28.000The suggestion that the president was publicly going around saying about Flynn and Manafort and Michael Cohen, where he was praising them and then he was criticizing them based on whether they were talking to the government.
00:40:37.000He was doing all of that in public, right?
00:40:43.000I mean, probably not, given that the president can sound off on his opinion as much as he wants.
00:40:48.000You could run into serious First Amendment issues, if you called it obstruction of justice, for the president to issue his opinion that Michael Cohen was a rat.
00:40:57.000So here's what the Mueller Report says.
00:40:58.000They say, Although the series of events we investigated involve discrete acts, the overall pattern of the President's conduct toward the investigations can shed light on the nature of the President's acts and the inferences that can be drawn about his intent.
00:41:09.000In particular, the actions we investigated can be divided into two phases, reflecting a possible shift in the President's motives.
00:41:15.000The first phase covered the period from the President's first interactions with Comey through the President's firing of Comey.
00:41:20.000During that time, The president had been repeatedly told he was not personally under investigation.
00:41:25.000Soon after the firing of Comey and the appointment of the special counsel, however, the president became aware that his own conduct was being investigated in an obstruction of justice inquiry.
00:41:35.000At that point, the president engaged in a second phase of conduct involving public attacks on the investigations, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation.
00:42:24.000Judgments about the nature of the president's motives during each phase would be informed by the totality of the evidence.
00:42:29.000Now, what that sentence is basically saying is that Mueller suspects that Trump actually wanted to shut down the investigation, but there is not enough evidence to prove that the president wanted to shut down the investigation for corrupt purposes.
00:42:40.000They said, because we ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw conclusions about the president's conduct.
00:42:47.000The evidence we obtained about the president's actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment.
00:42:56.000At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the fact that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.
00:43:03.000Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.
00:43:08.000Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.
00:43:14.000Bottom line is, this is all about intent.
00:43:16.000How do you read the President's intent?
00:43:17.000So people who don't like the President are going to read it as though the President's intent was to quash the investigation out of guilt?
00:43:25.000And people who are more fond of the president, and frankly people I think who are more objective, look at this and they say, there is no underlying crime.
00:43:31.000The president is a temperamental person at best.
00:43:34.000The president says a lot of dumb crap to his advisors.
00:43:37.000Those advisors shut him down on a regular basis and stopped him from doing things that would border on the criminal or veer into the criminal.
00:43:43.000And thus, while he has done bad immoral things here, while he has exerted pressure in certain areas, that does not amount to obstruction of justice with corrupt intent.
00:43:53.000And that seems to be the nature of a lot of this stuff.
00:43:57.000So, for example, when the president was upset about Mike Flynn's firing, he had lunch with Chris Christie.
00:44:04.000According to Christie, at one point during the lunch, Trump said, now that we've fired Flynn, the Russia thing is over.
00:44:09.000And Christie laughed and responded, no way.
00:44:11.000The president asked Christie what he meant, and Christie told the president not to talk about the investigation, even if he was frustrated at times.
00:44:19.000Toward the end of the lunch, the president brought up James Comey, who was then FBI director, asked if Christy was still friendly with him.
00:44:30.000At the end of the lunch, the president repeated his request that Christy reach out to Comey.
00:44:33.000Christy had no intention of complying with the president's request that he contact Comey.
00:44:37.000He thought the president's request was nonsensical.
00:44:39.000Christy did not want to put Comey in a position of having to receive such a phone call.
00:44:44.000So again, this is Trump lashing out, being mad at the investigation, saying, why don't you call up James Comey and say that we're best friends?
00:44:51.000And Chris Christie going, no, that's dumb.
00:44:54.000I don't think that amounts to obstruction.
00:44:56.000And most of the cases in here are just like that.
00:44:59.000Most of the cases in here are very much akin to something like that.
00:45:04.000Again, when it comes to Jeff Sessions.
00:45:06.000On March 3rd, the day after Sessions recused, Don McGahn was called into the Oval Office.
00:45:10.000Other advisors were there, including Reince Priebus, then the chief of staff, and Steve Bannon.
00:45:14.000The president opened the conversation by saying, I don't have a lawyer.
00:45:17.000He expressed anger at McGahn about the recusal.
00:45:19.000He brought up Roy Cohn, saying he wished Cohn was his attorney.
00:45:22.000He suggested that Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Eric Holder would not have allowed this sort of thing.
00:45:28.000And then he pushed back on policy suggesting that he should not make contact with Jeff Sessions or with anyone else in the DOJ.
00:45:37.000That weekend, Sessions and McGahn flew to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the President.
00:45:40.000Sessions recalled the President pulled him aside to speak to him alone, suggested that Sessions should unrecuse from the Russia investigation, which he did not do, and Trump did not fire him.
00:45:48.000So again, is that obstruction of justice or is that Trump just being a dummy?
00:45:51.000So much of this falls under Trump was frustrated and I think justifiably frustrated about the nature of the investigation, the intrusiveness of the investigation.
00:45:59.000Does this count as obstructive activity?
00:46:02.000It's sort of a matter of art rather than law.
00:46:15.000You know, I like to recall times in American politics that were a little bit higher-minded, when people had discussions about ideas.
00:46:21.000Well, if you're interested in that sort of stuff, go pick up a copy of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.
00:46:24.000The best version of this comes from the Lincoln Studies Center.
00:46:27.000It is edited by Rodney Davis and Douglas Wilson.
00:46:30.000It's a revision of the original text, because there are several original texts.
00:46:34.000They sort of compile what they think is the best version, and it really does raise issues, not only about the nature of the American Constitution and founding principles.
00:46:42.000Douglas basically claimed that slavery Was at least protected by the Constitution.
00:46:45.000Lincoln said that the Constitution and the Declaration installed immutable principles that cut against slavery itself.
00:46:52.000And thus, you could not create laws that would effectuate the addition of slavery to additional territories.
00:46:58.000It has stuff to say about the nature of the American founding, about the nature of America when we were getting rid of slavery, about the nature of questions like abortion, where people very often take the Stephen Douglas position.
00:47:08.000Ah, just leave it to each individual state.
00:47:10.000The Lincoln position would be protection of human life is a universal absolute.
00:47:15.000And there's just a lot there, and it's deep, and it's meaty, and it's great reading.
00:47:19.000Go check out the Lincoln-Douglas debate.
00:49:13.000That the biggest problem after creating Medicare for All, she says this in the video, Medicare for All and a federal jobs guarantee, the biggest problem is we couldn't find enough workers.
00:49:37.000...the federal jobs guarantee, a public option, including dignified living wages for work. Funnily enough, the biggest problem in those early years was a labor shortage. We were building a national smart grid, retrofitting every building in America, putting trains like this one all across the country. We needed more workers. That group of kids from my neighborhood were right in the middle of it all.
00:50:31.000Just random Native Americans show up to explain how to fix the bayous.
00:50:35.000And then, by the way, this girl goes on from working in the bayous to working at a solar plant, and then she decides she wants to be a preschool teacher making $150,000 a year.
00:50:43.000In AOC's magical—it must be nice to be in AOC's brain, really.
00:50:50.000Seems like things are—she has a really, like, optimistic vision of what the future is going to be if you just give her complete and utter control over the entire United States economy.
00:50:57.000Must be a wonderful place in there, so.
00:50:59.000Go check out that video because it is beyond parody.
00:51:20.000There's a piece in the Washington Post today.
00:51:22.000Remember, just two days ago, they printed a piece in which they suggested that I had evoked the specter of a war between Islam and the West by saying that Notre Dame Cathedral was an homage to Western civilization and Judeo-Christian heritage.
00:51:34.000Well, today they published another piece saying, quote, Ben Shapiro, an influential American right wing pundit with a huge following on social media, lamented a magnificent monument to Western civilization collapsing and then followed up with tweets that insisted upon the Judeo-Christian heritage embodied by Notre Dame and a duty of all to refamiliarize ourselves with the philosophy and religious lamented a magnificent monument to Western civilization collapsing and then followed up with tweets Critics quickly noted the brutal treatment meted out on French Jews for centuries while the cathedral stood.
00:52:26.000They say Richard Spencer, an American neo-fascist credited with coining the term alt-right for the online ecosystem of far-right voices in the West, spoke more plainly.
00:52:34.000You see, I am covert where Richard Spencer is overt.
00:52:42.000Astonishing language from the Washington Post.
00:52:44.000My book is entirely about the Judeo-Christian heritage and Greek teleology that undergird the West.
00:52:50.000I have suggested throughout my entire career that Western civilization is not unique to any particular race, and to construe it that way is to reduce Western civilization to mere tribalism, which is idiocy.
00:53:02.000In my book, I specifically mention Richard Spencer.
00:53:06.000I call him a racist cretin on page 22 of the introduction, an excreble on page 208, and yet apparently I'm just secret.