Speculation about the FBI's search on Mar-a-Lago continues, as Donald Trump asks how he can bring down the heat, Rudy Giuliani finds himself in the crosshairs in Georgia, and the Biden administration seeks a deal with Iran as Iran continues to murder its opponents abroad. Ben Shapiro's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN, which makes the switch from your current provider very easy, and won't take you more than 10 minutes. It won't even take you 10 minutes! It won t take you longer than that! It's well worth the savings! Right now, PeerTalk is offering their best discount ever to my listeners: One month for FREE! That's one month for $75 per month, which is a lot of money in a bad economy! They've never made an offer this big before, and it's never been offered this big! Thanks to PureTalk, I'm glad to be back here in the United States. Unfortunately, in my absence, it seems as though things have gotten a lot worse here, largely because of the weaponization of the FBI and DOJ. And it's hard for me at this point to read what is going on in this country, and see it as anything other than an out-of-this-world fishing expedition, you can't just go on a deep sea fishing expedition. I mean, you have to come up with something bigger than a minnow, right? or something that s going to be bigger than you can find out what you're looking for, you need to prove that you're going to find something like that. . You can't go on something bigger, can you can do it, right?? and you're not just by fishing for minnow right? You have to have something that's bigger than that, right ? at least it's going to have to prove you're fishing for something in some way, right you can be more than just minnow right here? ? or maybe a shark or something else something bigger that's not like a shark I don't know what you might be looking for an actual white whale just ? Well, I mean is what I'm going to do ... -- Ben Shapiro -- -- What do you think of this? -- Is this a fishing expedition?
00:00:14.000The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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00:00:26.000Well, I noticed in my absence that inflation is still really, really, really high.
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00:01:14.000Well, I'm glad to be back here in the United States.
00:01:16.000Unfortunately, in my absence, it seems as though things have gotten a lot worse here, largely because of the weaponization of the FBI and DOJ.
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00:01:27.000Well, I'm glad to be back here in the United States.
00:01:30.000Unfortunately, in my absence, it seems as though things have gotten a lot worse here, largely because of the weaponization of the FBI and DOJ.
00:01:37.000And it's hard for me at this point to read what is going on with the FBI and DOJ and see it as anything other than weaponization.
00:01:45.000The reason I say this is because they've now released the search warrant on Donald Trump's of residents at Mar-a-Lago.
00:01:51.000They've released some of the underlying legal materials.
00:01:55.000Merrick Garland has then emerged to explain in front of the cameras that he, in fact, ordered the code red.
00:01:59.000It was he who signed off on this FBI search on Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago property.
00:02:13.000If you are going to search the residence of the former president of the United States and the probable next nominee for the opposing political party, you'd best have an incredibly clear and convincing case as to why you are doing so.
00:02:25.000You can't just do so as a deep sea fishing expedition.
00:02:29.000Now, you might be able to find something with the fishing expedition.
00:02:32.000What you find better be absolutely outsized.
00:02:34.000You cannot go on a deep-sea fishing expedition here and come up with a minnow and then say, ah, it was all justified because we came up with this minnow right here.
00:02:58.000Every other minute, it seems, we are learning that they took something else from Mar-a-Lago, according to the UK Daily Mail.
00:03:04.000The Justice Department is hit back at Donald Trump's claim the FBI stole his passports during the raid on his Mar-a-Lago mansion.
00:03:10.000An insider told CBS the agency does not have the documents, but added whatever was seized that was not on the warrant will, in fact, be returned.
00:03:15.000It comes after the former president on Monday claimed his passports were taken, which would mean that he could not leave the country.
00:03:21.000And this led to all sorts of speculation.
00:03:22.000Of course, on the left, the way that this works is the minute you find out what sort of documents they seized, Then they go, oh, well, obviously he's guilty.
00:03:28.000If they took his passports, it means they don't want him to flee.
00:03:31.000Donald Trump is a flight risk from the United States.
00:03:35.000Or they seized secret classified documents.
00:03:38.000Probably it was the nuclear launch codes and he was about to hand them over to the Russians or to the Saudis because, you know, Jared Kushner has some sort of money deal with the Saudis.
00:03:46.000The speculation on the left is always and forever that whatever people are searching for on Donald Trump, they must have something.
00:03:55.000If you are a rational human being and you watch the FBI and DOJ go after Donald Trump while he was president for four years over Russiagate, You start to wonder if they really do have something, or is it just true that everyone is incompetent all the time?
00:04:08.000And so the combination of incompetence and gradual malevolence on the part of some people in the FBI and DOJ has some really dire consequences.
00:04:18.000As I said when this news first broke, in order for you to raid, and you know, you can say it's a raid, you can say it's a search, it doesn't really matter.
00:04:24.000In order to search the residence of the former President of the United States and current leader of the opposition to the President of the United States, in order to search his residence, You have to have high institutional trust in the so-called nonpartisan aspects of the American government.
00:04:38.000You have to trust that the FBI actually is not politicized.
00:04:40.000You have to trust the DOJ is not politicized.
00:04:43.000But it's hard to think of a time in modern American history when there's been less trust in these institutions.
00:04:49.000And so what you are doing is you are staking The possibility of faith in the institutions on a claim that appears to be slim as a reed.
00:04:57.000And I say this because I've now looked at the search warrant and it cites three separate parts of the United States legal code.
00:05:26.000Which is about the destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations and bankruptcy.
00:05:32.000So we were originally told that the search on Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago property was about classified documents he still had in his possession.
00:05:42.000Were these actually classified documents?
00:05:44.000Because the President has plenary power to declassify documents while he is still in office.
00:05:49.000So if the day before he took all of this stuff to his residence, he said just out loud, this stuff is now declassified.
00:05:56.000It is totally unclear, legally speaking, whether he has to go through any sort of procedure to declassify.
00:06:01.000Because again, the power to declassify lies in the President of the United States.
00:06:05.000And there's no actual procedure for declassification.
00:06:07.000It doesn't say by statute or under the Constitution that he has to Sign some sort of form saying this stuff is declassified.
00:06:13.000He can basically just do a Michael Scott, perhaps walk into the middle of the off, say, I hereby declare bankruptcy.
00:06:19.000I declare that this is declassified and now all of it is declassified.
00:06:23.000So he's now said, by the way, that this is what he did.
00:06:25.000And Donald Trump is sort of a defense mechanism here.
00:06:28.000He has said that this is precisely what he did.
00:06:30.000Apparently, a statement was put out to John Solomon, a reporter at Just the News, in which Donald Trump says this, quote, as we can all relate to everyone ends up having to bring home their work from time to time.
00:06:41.000American presidents are no different. President Trump, in order to prepare the work the next day, often took documents, including classified documents to the residence. He had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.
00:06:54.000The power to classify and declassify documents rests solely with the President of the United States.
00:06:57.000The idea that some paper-pushing bureaucrat with classification authority delegated by the President needs to approve the declassification is absurd.
00:07:05.000So the claim here is no one can tell the president that stuff is actually still classified if he declares it declassified.
00:07:13.000Maybe he didn't actually say at the time it's declassified.
00:07:16.000But it's going to be very hard to prove that in a court of law.
00:07:18.000And again, when it comes to classification and declassification, generally speaking, these are not statutes like the Espionage Act that have significant criminal penalties attached.
00:07:27.000They've largely been used with regard, well, the Espionage Act does.
00:07:30.000Rather, when you talk about, for example, the presidential archives, Anything having to do with the National Archives and the taking home of materials that belong in the National Archives, that's not stuff that really has criminal penalties attached.
00:07:43.000But the Espionage Act also suggests that you have to have some level of intent, generally speaking, or gross negligence in order to be charged under the Espionage Act, which is exactly why Hillary Clinton was not.
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00:09:23.000The original case was he has classified information at his residence.
00:09:26.000And as I say, this raises a number of questions.
00:09:28.000Number one, the president of the United States can declassify.
00:09:31.000Number two, If this classified information was so all-fired important, why are they going to get it by claiming that the National Archives is missing it using the non-criminal statute?
00:09:42.000And then they released the search warrant.
00:09:43.000It says, oh, no, no, it's not just the National Archives stuff.
00:09:47.000It's also these other aspects of American law.
00:09:49.000But what this really looks like in the end, as Andy McCarthy explains, is grab every paper you can find at Mar-a-Lago because maybe we'll come up with something.
00:09:58.000While the Espionage Act offense relates to defense secrets, the other two offenses are not limited to classified information.
00:10:03.000Section 2071 relates to the removal or concealment of any government record, not just classified information.
00:10:09.000Section 1519 applies to any item at all.
00:10:12.000It need not be a government record, for the point is to protect government investigations, not government property.
00:10:17.000And then it looks like the search warrant prioritizes classified information crimes, but less so than it first appears.
00:10:23.000One of the subsections of the attachment to the search warrant authorizes agents to seize documents marked classified, but the license is much, much broader.
00:10:31.000The warrant allows seizures of not only containers in which classified documents are found, along with their other contents, even if they're not classified, but also of other containers found proximate to the first containers.
00:10:40.000Again, regardless of whether the contents are classified.
00:10:44.000And inside that box, there was a low-level classified document, and that was stored next to 10 other containers of non-classified documents.
00:10:50.000The warrant would allow the FBI to simply grab all of those things.
00:10:54.000And the warrant also permits the seizure of communications in any form regarding classified information.
00:10:59.000So, in other words, if I write a note, and I make reference to classified information, but don't actually state the specified classified information, that could also have been grabbed by the FBI.
00:11:09.000And all of this precedes one of the subsections that Anne McCarthy correctly says is really elastic.
00:11:14.000This permits the seizure of any government and or presidential records created throughout the four years of Trump's presidency.
00:11:20.000This has nothing to do with classified information.
00:11:22.000It's mainly designed to use the criminal law, the search warrant, to enforce the Presidential Records Act, which again, as I say, is not a criminal statute.
00:11:29.000The National Archives, Presidential Records Act stuff, that is not criminal statute.
00:11:34.000So maybe they can get away with this sort of search warrant, but to pretend that this is a very specific, targeted, laser-like approach to finding specific documents that are a national security threat, that is not what this looks like in any way, shape, or form.
00:11:46.000It is far broader than that, and that raises serious political questions.
00:11:50.000But it seems like the strategy by the DOJ and the FBI here is basically throw everything against the wall, see what sticks, toss a bunch of lines in the deep sea, hope to come up with a really big fish.
00:12:02.000And so, when people say this looks like political targeting, it does.
00:12:04.000It looks like an action in search of a crime.
00:12:07.000It looks very much like the AG of New York State, Letitia James, targeting Trump.
00:12:13.000I mean, she said this when she went into New York's AG office.
00:12:15.000She said, Donald Trump is the target, now we just have to find the crime.
00:12:18.000When you have prosecutors, investigative agencies, the Attorney General of the United States, the DOJ, saying, we want this guy, and so we are now going to put in place procedures to get this guy, and then later we'll see if we came up with a crime, That's the sort of stuff that scares the living hell out of Americans and it should scare the living hell out of Americans.
00:12:35.000You're supposed to identify the crime first.
00:12:37.000The search warrant does not specify what the crime was.
00:12:39.000And when Merrick Garland goes out there and he says, how dare anyone attack the FBI?
00:12:44.000Listen, I'm not blaming the FBI agents.
00:12:45.000I don't think it's right to reveal, for example, the names of the FBI agents.
00:12:49.000They're the ones who are being given orders by the higher ups at the FBI to go do their jobs.
00:13:02.000I'm sorry, the media is just fawning benevolent Suck upage to Merrick Garland, who literally just went on TV last week and was like, and whining about, well, you know, everybody's very mean to the FBI.
00:13:23.000And particularly with regard to Donald Trump, because again, you guys went after Donald Trump for four long years.
00:13:28.000And as somebody who's open to the idea that you guys were good at your jobs and that eventually you would show evidence, and then you showed no evidence, you got to the end of it, you got to nothing, it was just a big nothing burger that took tens of millions of dollars, four years of time, endless media coverage, ripping away at Trump personally and the Trump administration, generally undermining his presidency, you have for four long years.
00:13:47.000And as somebody who at the beginning was open to the idea that maybe at the root of this, there would be something, when you keep doing it over and over, I'm far less sanguine about the possibility that you actually have something on Donald Trump.
00:13:58.000This feels much more like you're going to keep digging and keep digging and keep digging, and you're going to keep assuring us, like Adam shifted for four years, that you actually have the underlying evidence.
00:14:09.000Show me the evidence that he did something wrong, and that is why you are activating the search warrant.
00:14:13.000And when you say he did something wrong, don't give me that he took a classified document home to Mar-a-Lago and stored it in a box somewhere.
00:14:20.000And when people, by the way, compare that to Hillary Clinton and storing emails on her server, I'd like to point out two things.
00:14:26.000One, Hillary Clinton never had the power of declassification.
00:14:28.000Number two, if you're talking about the possibility of somebody grabbing a classified document and using it to their own advantage, which is more dangerous?
00:14:35.000Just on a pure level, taking home what appears to be printed sheets of paper in a box or having an email address that is not protected by the U.S.
00:14:43.000government and that is hackable by foreign operations.
00:14:46.000How do you hack Donald Trump's closet?
00:14:48.000Just going to point out right here, there is no way, unless you actually have an agent inside Mar-a-Lago, searching through the boxes, because they didn't seize any digital materials so far as we are aware, right?
00:14:58.000A box of papers sitting in Donald Trump's third bedroom somewhere, like 58 bedrooms in Mar-a-Lago.
00:15:04.000That box of papers is significantly less dangerous to national security than classified materials being trafficked online, which is what Hillary Clinton was doing.
00:15:12.000So if you're talking about, as the media are talking, well, it was espionage.
00:15:15.000Now you have to prove that Donald Trump was, what, going to take the nuclear codes and send them to Vladimir Putin?
00:15:19.000This is all part of the broader conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is actually a traitor to the country, rather than a guy who's incredibly sloppy and egocentric about the way that he does his job, or his post job, as the case may be.
00:15:30.000And without the actual evidence, I'm not sure exactly why we are supposed to believe the FBI and the DOJ.
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00:16:31.000And so the real rap on Donald Trump that the media are now coming up with is that he's not explaining himself.
00:16:36.000Well, he hasn't explained himself properly.
00:16:37.000commitments, no contracts, just head on over to stamps.com, click that microphone at the top of the page, enter a promo code Shapiro, and get started.
00:16:44.000And so the real rap on Donald Trump that the media are now coming up with is that he's not explaining himself.
00:16:49.000Well, he hasn't explained himself properly.
00:16:52.000So the New York Times has a piece today on the front page titled Trump's shifting explanations follow a familiar playbook.
00:16:58.000The former president and his allies have often given conflicting defenses of his retention of classified documents without addressing why he had kept them.
00:17:05.000Okay, well, it's your job to explain where the crime is that is so dire that it requires the FBI and DOJ to search his residence and perhaps then arrest him and prosecute him.
00:17:18.000It is not his job to explain why the documents are at his house.
00:17:21.000As it turns out, again, he has the plenary power as the President of the United States to take stuff home and also to declassify the stuff.
00:17:29.000So maybe you're going to bring that in court.
00:17:30.000Maybe you're going to say, well, he didn't really do that.
00:17:51.000But if the media just treat it as though Trump has to explain away everything, and Trump is particularly bad at explaining himself when it comes to this sort of stuff, because again, he engages in all sorts of sloppy and weird activity, to put it at the very mildest.
00:18:06.000In this country, when you are going to be searched by the police, they have to not get a rote warrant signed typically by some rubber stamping judge, particularly if you're a prominent figure with political implications.
00:18:37.000First, he said he was working and cooperating with government agents who he claimed had inappropriately entered his home.
00:18:42.000Then, when the government revealed the FBI during its search had recovered nearly a dozen sets of documents that were not classified, he suggested the agents had planted evidence.
00:18:48.000Finally, his aides claimed he had a standing order to declassify documents that left the Oval Office for his residence and that some of the material was protected by attorney-client and executive privilege.
00:18:56.000Those are the ever-shifting explanations that former President Donald Trump and his aides have given regarding what the FBI agents found last week in a search of his residence in Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
00:19:05.000Mr. Trump and his allies have cast the search as a partisan assault, while amplifying conflicting arguments about his handling of sensitive documents and failing to answer a question at the center of the federal investigation.
00:19:13.000Why was he keeping documents, some still marked classified, at an unsecured Florida resort when officials had sought for a year to retrieve them?
00:19:20.000Okay, well, here's the hilarious thing about that.
00:19:22.000Why was Hillary Clinton keeping lots of classified documents on her personal server and then hit it with bleach bit as soon as she was subpoenaed?
00:19:57.000They haven't hit him with a criminal charger yet.
00:19:59.000And if the idea is that you have to treat similarly situated people similarly, and Trump has available to him defenses that Hillary Clinton never did, the burden of proof is on you.
00:20:09.000The often contradictory and unsupported defenses perpetuated by Trump and his team since the FBI search follow a familiar pattern and playbook of the former president.
00:20:16.000He's used it over the decades, but most visibly when he was faced with the investigation into whether his campaign in 2016 conspired with Russians and during his first impeachment trial.
00:20:23.000In both instances, he claimed victimization and mixed some facts with a blizzard of misleading statements or falsehoods.
00:20:29.000The funny thing here is that the New York Times, this is such a perfect example.
00:20:31.000So the New York Times says, right, Donald Trump uses this pattern of obfuscation and confusion and sloppiness to cover up what he did with Russia.
00:20:39.000So shouldn't at this point you be asking yourself, so what did he do with Russia?
00:20:45.000And in the end, the answer was nothing.
00:20:48.000I've always said that you try to attribute to stupidity everything you can without attributing it to malice when it comes to politics.
00:20:57.000When it comes to Trump's defenses of himself, I think that is particularly true.
00:21:01.000It is very difficult not to read malice into what the FBI and DOJ are doing without knowing what exactly, again, maybe they'll come up with the white whale here, but it better be a damned white whale because otherwise all they have done is continue to undermine trust in an institution that already is lacking it in extraordinary and severe ways.
00:21:19.000And I'm not made sanguine by the fact that people like Peter Strzok are now appearing on mainstream television and mourning Joe to defend the FBI.
00:21:25.000Peter Strzok is, you'll remember, the FBI agent who was married and with his married lover was exchanging messages before the 2016 election talking about how they had insurance against Trump in the form of Russiagate materials.
00:21:38.000And eventually he had to leave the FBI in a state of disgrace, but now he's being brought back to talk about the veracity of the institution of the FBI.
00:21:46.000I'm not sure you could pick somebody who I have less faith to talk about the institutional trust in the FBI than Peter Strzok.
00:21:54.000Because for people on the left who watch MSNBC, Peter Strzok is a valuable figure.
00:21:58.000In other words, they trust the FBI when the FBI does the work of the left.
00:22:01.000So Peter Strzok is still somebody they have respect for.
00:22:03.000So here's disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok, who's at the top of Hurricane Crossfire, which was the investigation into Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and all the rest of it.
00:22:13.000Here he is on MSNBC talking about why we should trust the FBI.
00:22:18.000It's not that the FBI is targeting any one side or the other.
00:22:22.000What you see is the FBI going out on a day-in-day-out basis, objectively investigating allegations of law.
00:22:29.000It just so happens that the only thing that tends to come up in the right-wing ecosphere, whether in the media or on the Hill or from President Trump, are those things where they take a personal affront because it directly impacts them.
00:22:40.000There's absolute silence when the FBI is investigating former Secretary Clinton.
00:22:45.000There's absolute silence when the FBI is doing things that isn't targeting them.
00:22:50.000So I think this is a one-sided narrative that has been developed and amplified, particularly by President Trump, going back to 2015 and 2016.
00:23:31.000But here's Peter Strzok saying that Trump should be punished as Hillary Clinton apparently was not.
00:23:36.000Donald Trump, he has spent the entirety of his adult life living on the margins of the law, pushing up to the edge, seeing what he can get away with, and then taking a step or two beyond that.
00:23:47.000When we look at what he did over the course of his administration, but certainly right now, the things that were at Mar-a-Lago, whether withheld initially from the National Archives, whether later withheld from the FBI, there comes a point where no man is above the law.
00:24:01.000There comes a point that there are things that you do if you are holding these highly, highly classified documents.
00:24:08.000These things that if they fell into the hands of an unauthorized party, let alone a Russian intelligence officer, a Chinese intelligence officer, would cause massive damage to the national security.
00:24:19.000And if you hold on to that, after countless requests through the National Archives, through the FBI, you should be held accountable for that.
00:24:30.000I mean, just to point out here, when Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted, James Comey said, in the exact same statement, James Comey said that there was a high probability that somebody had gotten access to the classified information on her server.
00:24:42.000So, again, the double standard here is very telling.
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00:26:58.000If the Attorney General cannot bring himself because of lack of evidence or belief that the country is not ready to bring a president on charges of insurrection or obstruction of justice, how about violation of laws which keep this country safe, like the Espionage Act?
00:27:15.000If there's credible evidence, I think more of the American public would say, well, yeah, he shouldn't have done that.
00:27:21.000Let's see what the jury of his peers provides for.
00:27:26.000Jim Acosta just sitting there, nodding along to a man, the only man in America with thicker eyebrows than I have, Sam Donaldson.
00:27:34.000By the way, Sam Donaldson at one point was a quote-unquote objective news reporter for ABC News.
00:27:38.000He is now on the air calling for the President of the United States to be prosecuted on the basis of what we don't know.
00:27:58.000He did an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital on Monday morning.
00:28:03.000And he said he had his representatives reach out to the DOJ to offer to help amid outrage over the FBI's unprecedented raid on his private residence last week.
00:28:10.000He said the country is in a very dangerous position.
00:28:12.000There's tremendous anger, like I've never seen before, over all of the scams in this new one, years of scams and witch hunts, and now this.
00:28:18.000If there's anything we can do to help, I and my people would certainly be willing to do that.
00:28:21.000There's never been a time like this where law enforcement has been used to break into the house of a former president of the United States, and there's tremendous anger in the country at a level that has never been seen before other than during very perilous times.
00:28:31.000He said that his team has not yet heard from the Justice Department on whether they will accept his offer for help.
00:28:34.000He said, I think they would want the same thing.
00:28:49.000And then they break into a president's house, a sneak attack where it was totally, no one ever thought a thing like this would happen.
00:28:54.000And he told Fox News the FBI agents break in and take whatever they want to take.
00:28:58.000He said the FBI agents told his team at Mar-a-Lago to turn off the camera and said no one can go through the rooms.
00:29:03.000Trump said they could take anything they want and put anything they want in, right?
00:29:06.000So he's now claiming they planted evidence, which again, there's no evidence of that and it's typically a Trumpian flourish.
00:29:11.000He went on to suggest the FBI could have planted anything they wanted during the raid.
00:29:15.000And that's because, honestly, Trump reads memes online, and we're like, sure, why not that?
00:29:19.000So people are so angry at what is taking place, whatever we can do to help, because the temperature has to be brought down in the country.
00:29:24.000If it isn't, terrible things are going to happen.
00:29:26.000So again, I see the plausible read on the left, that what he's actually saying here is, if you don't stop this, terrible things are going to happen.
00:29:33.000But on the other side, maybe it's plausible that Donald Trump actually doesn't want the terrible things to happen, and he wants the FBI and DOJ to explain themselves and settle whatever it is they want to settle, so that he's not in any legal danger.
00:29:45.000Well, whatever the case may be, the tensions in the country have been ratcheted up.
00:29:49.000Merrick Garland had to know this was going to happen, right?
00:29:51.000And the FBI had to know that this was going to happen.
00:29:54.000That when you raid the house of the former president of the United States and the likeliest nominee for 2024, when that sort of thing happens, people are going to get rather upset, which is just another reason why you better have the damned goods.
00:30:06.000I'm not talking about if he committed a crime, don't prosecute him.
00:30:09.000Or if he did something truly egregious, don't investigate him.
00:30:11.000I'm talking about why can't you explain what in the world you are doing?
00:30:14.000I'm sorry, Merrick Garland getting on my TV and telling me to trust him is not going to work.
00:30:18.000This is a person who tried to weaponize the DOJ to go after parents in Virginia.
00:30:23.000This is a person who's weaponized the DOJ to go after police departments all over the country on the basis of no evidence suggesting they are systemically racist.
00:30:32.000I don't know why I'm supposed to trust the FBI, given the fact that, again, high-ranking public officials in the FBI were the people who were at the head of Russiagate in the first place.
00:30:43.000That doesn't mean they're to blame for people who then act insane and threaten FBI agents or threaten FBI offices.
00:30:49.000It does mean that, of course, the tensions are rising.
00:30:52.000Trump isn't wrong about that when he says that Americans are pissed.
00:30:55.000Well, yeah, I mean, I was in Israel when this broke.
00:30:58.000I can't tell you the number of calls I received from people in the United States who said that suddenly they were extraordinarily worried about the workings of law enforcement.
00:31:05.000I'm not talking about people on the right.
00:31:06.000I'm talking about people in the center.
00:31:07.000Some people on the left saying, I mean, this is unprecedented.
00:31:14.000The only time that I can remember a person in power using his authority to go after the political opposition in the middle of a campaign, which we're always in the middle of a campaign now, is Watergate, right?
00:31:26.000I mean, that's when Richard Nixon had the Watergate Hotel bug.
00:31:32.000He wasn't using the FBI and DOJ for that.
00:31:34.000The fact that the FBI and DOJ are Investigating the house of the former president of the United States.
00:31:41.000And then they say, trust us, trust you.
00:31:43.000What in the world are you talking about?
00:31:46.000And then they say that the threat level is like nothing that they've ever.
00:31:50.000And there is no justification for threats of violence or violence.
00:31:52.000It is not the FBI agent's fault that they are doing their job.
00:31:55.000It is the fault of Merrick Garland and the head of the FBI if they signed off on something that had very little predicate so far as we know.
00:32:02.000Their lack of transparency is utterly unhelpful.
00:32:04.000The fact that you don't get your dominoes in a row on this sort of thing is totally insane to me.
00:32:08.000If you're gonna make a major move like this, shouldn't you be out there explaining what exactly you are doing?
00:32:13.000Merrick Garland didn't bother to do that.
00:32:15.000So yes, I would imagine that tensions in the country are going up.
00:32:19.000Again, I don't blame politicians for people attacking other people unless they actually call for those attacks to happen.
00:32:25.000I don't blame Donald Trump when a violent Trump supporter attacks a Cincinnati FBI office.
00:32:29.000I don't blame Barack Obama when Dallas police officers get shot in the middle of Black Lives Matter in 2015-2016.
00:32:37.000I don't blame Bernie Sanders for a Bernie Sanders supporter attempting to shoot up Congress people.
00:32:41.000I don't even blame the Biden administration for somebody attempting to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh.
00:32:45.000I don't blame anybody for that sort of stuff.
00:32:46.000Unless you call for violence, you're not guilty of the violence yourself.
00:32:50.000However, if you raise the temperature, you're raising the temperature and pretending that Merrick Garland didn't know that when he raised the temperature.
00:32:56.000Are they really that ignorant at the FBI and DOJ?
00:32:58.000Did they really believe that they would be able to put out a search warrant on the former president and then suggest that no big deal, nothing is happening here, we're just doing a normal investigation?
00:33:10.000And well, this has resulted, of course, in the FBI doing this sort of passive-aggressive routine where they do something incredibly aggressive and then when people get angry about the aggressive thing, they complain about the threat levels.
00:33:21.000Again, totally fair to complain about the threat levels, but just recognize that that is part and parcel of raising the temperature in the United States.
00:33:28.000There's a difference between explanation and justification.
00:33:31.000There's no justification for people getting violent or threatening violence.
00:33:34.000But to pretend that there is no relationship between doing an unprecedented thing and getting an unprecedented response is silly.
00:33:39.000Here's Andrew McCabe, former FBI member, close to the head of the FBI actually, suggesting that the threat level is higher than he has ever seen it.
00:33:49.000How do you describe the threat level right now against the FBI?
00:33:54.000Never seen anything like this in my 21 years with the Bureau.
00:33:56.000You know, it's not completely crazy for individuals in the FBI to be subject of threats as a result of cases they're working, but this is a first time I've ever seen a broadside.
00:34:08.000All FBI personnel are considered a part of this reporting.
00:34:42.000We have seen nothing remotely like this reaction, for example, to investigations into, say, Rudy Giuliani.
00:34:49.000So right now, it is being reported by the New York Times that legal pressures on Donald Trump and his closest allies intensified further on Monday as prosecutors informed his former personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, that Giuliani was a target in a wide-ranging criminal investigation into election interference in Georgia.
00:35:02.000The notification came on the same day a federal judge rejected efforts by another key Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham, to avoid giving testimony before the special grand jury hearing evidence in the case in Atlanta.
00:35:12.000One of Giuliani's lawyers said in an interview he was notified on Monday his client was a target.
00:35:16.000That doesn't mean the person is going to be indicted.
00:35:18.000It usually means the prosecutors believe an indictment is possible based on the evidence they've seen up to that point.
00:35:23.000Giuliani, who is Trump's personal lawyer, spearheaded efforts to keep Trump in power, emerged in recent weeks as a central figure in the inquiry being conducted by Fannie Willis, the District Attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, which encompasses most of Atlanta.
00:35:34.000Earlier this summer, prosecutors questioned witnesses before the special grand jury about Giuliani's appearances before state legislative panels in December 2020, when he spent hours peddling false conspiracy theories about secret suitcases of Democratic ballots and corrupted voting machines.
00:35:48.000Giuliani is scheduled to appear before the special grand jury on Wednesday at a downtown Atlanta courthouse.
00:35:52.000His lawyer says that Giuliani will probably invoke attorney-client privilege if he is asked about dealings with Donald Trump.
00:35:59.000Meanwhile, the rejection of Senator Graham's effort to avoid testifying came in a written order from a federal district court judge in Atlanta.
00:36:06.000Graham is now scheduled to testify on August 23rd.
00:36:11.000So apparently prosecutors want Graham's testimony for a number of reasons.
00:36:14.000Among them are two phone calls Graham placed just after the 2020 election to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State, in which Graham inquired about ways to help Trump by invalidating certain mail-in votes.
00:36:35.000If people knew that the election was lost and they just started making stuff up, then you could in fact have an obstruction of justice case.
00:36:42.000You could have attempts to suborn perjury.
00:36:45.000You could have attempts to Prevent the counting of votes, attempts to suborn voter fraud, all the rest of it.
00:37:03.000What's happening right now is all these investigations seem to be sort of convening on Trump at the same time.
00:37:08.000But the last step there is if you're a prosecutor, forget all of your political priors here, right, left, doesn't matter.
00:37:13.000If you're a prosecutor, the way that you typically do this, and I've worked in a prosecutor's office, I've worked with prosecutors before, If you are a prosecutor, what you typically do is you get all the ducks in a row before you knock down that final door.
00:37:24.000Knocking down the final door first is a very weird thing to do.
00:37:28.000As you may have noticed, law enforcement is kind of a problem right now.
00:37:32.000Sometimes law enforcement, they're trying to do their job, sometimes they just do the wrong thing.
00:37:35.000What happens if, God forbid, you have to use a gun in self-defense?
00:37:46.000It's not enough to legally and safely own a firearm to protect your family.
00:37:49.000In order to fully protect yourself and your loved ones, you have to be prepared for the mental, physical, and legal ramifications of self-defense, which is why I'm a member of the US Concealed Carry Association.
00:37:58.000The USCCA is giving away a free concealed carry and family defense guide and a chance to win a thousand bucks to buy a firearm to protect yourself and your family.
00:38:07.000In this 58-page defense guide, you'll learn how to detect attackers before they see you, what the USCCA has learned about school shootings, equipment and training basics about the law and justice systems, how to responsibly own and store a gun, particularly if you have little kids the way I do, and a whole lot more.
00:38:20.000Text BEN to 87222 for instant access to this free guide And enter for a chance to win $1,000 to put toward a firearm to protect your family.
00:38:34.000Text Ben to 87222 right now to get started.
00:38:37.000Also, are you still giving your money to woke razor companies that hate your values and see masculinity as toxic and think you should teach your daughter to shave her beard?
00:39:15.000Meanwhile, speaking of other Trump members of the team who are in possible legal peril, according to the New York Times, a senior executive at Donald Trump's family business who is charged with participating in a years-long tax scheme is nearing a deal with Manhattan prosecutors but will not cooperate with the broader investigation into Mr. Trump, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
00:39:31.000If it becomes final, a plea deal for the executive, Allen Weisselberg, would bring prosecutors no closer to indicting the former president but would nonetheless brand one of his trusted lieutenants a felon.
00:39:40.000I love the way that the New York Times reports that.
00:39:43.000He's not going to give any evidence on Trump.
00:39:45.000But, well, you know, one of Donald Trump's employees and friends is now a felon.
00:39:49.000So I guess that reflects on Trump in some way.
00:39:52.000Once again, guys, Lucy and the football.
00:39:54.000On Monday, Weisselberg's lawyers and prosecutors met with the judge overseeing the case.
00:39:57.000According to a court database, the judge scheduled a hearing for Thursday, a possible indication that a deal has been reached and a plea could be entered by then.
00:40:04.000While Weisselberg, 75, is facing financial penalties as well as up to 15 years in prison.
00:40:08.000A plea deal would avoid a high-profile trial and spare him a lengthy sentence.
00:40:12.000And again, the terms of his deals are not clear, including whether he had made additional concessions to prosecutors in order to receive it.
00:40:18.000But there is no evidence that he is going to be testifying against Trump or that he's going to be turning on Trump in any way, shape, or form here.
00:40:25.000The notion that Trump is about to go down, which is what the left is continuously promoting here, whether it is via Rudy Giuliani's case in Georgia, or whether it is the Trump search, or whether it is Weisselberg.
00:40:36.000When you guys have the goods, let us know.
00:40:39.000But what you can't do is not have the goods and then tell us to trust you because, again, the trust does not exist.
00:40:44.000Speaking of the trust not existing, it is fun to watch as the media suddenly realize that the so-called Inflation Reduction Act passed by the Democrats does not, in fact, reduce inflation.
00:40:52.000This is just one aspect of the unbelievable stupidity of our media, who are in fact partisan hacks.
00:40:59.000The Democrats called a thing an Inflation Reduction Act.
00:41:03.000It is hundreds of billions of dollars spent on green boondoggle nonsense, raising your taxes, and hiring thousands of additional FBI, IRS agents in order to come after tons of people and audit them and make their life an actual misery.
00:41:16.000That is the goal of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
00:41:39.000Yeah, you covered it, like, well after it was important to cover it.
00:41:43.000That's called covering your ass, guys.
00:41:44.000Anyway, CBS News is now reporting, quote, The Inflation Reduction Act is aimed at tackling a host of problems, from climate change to catching tax cheats.
00:41:56.000That is the conclusion of the Penn-Wharton Budget Model, a group of economists and data scientists at University of Pennsylvania who analyze public policies to predict their economic and fiscal impact.
00:42:05.000Its analysis, published on Friday, comes as inflation remains near a 40-year high, crimping the budgets of consumers and businesses alike.
00:42:12.000The Inflation Reduction Act would invest nearly $400 billion in energy security and climate change proposals aimed at reducing carbon emissions by approximately 40% by 2030.
00:42:21.000But the impact on inflation is statistically indistinguishable from zero, the Penn-Wharton budget model said on Friday.
00:42:28.000Well, it would have been amazing if you guys had reported that like when there was an actual debate happening over the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
00:42:33.000John Carl over at ABC News, again, now he's allowed to say it, he asked a White House spokesperson over the weekend, isn't Inflation Reduction Act Orwellian since it doesn't actually reduce inflation?
00:42:42.000It's called the Inflation Reduction Act.
00:42:45.000But the Congressional Budget Office, which is nonpartisan, said that there would be a negligible impact on inflation this year and barely impact inflation at all next year.
00:43:40.000As soon as the act goes into effect, I hope that all of the provisions will begin to work.
00:43:47.000I know that those who've been blaming President Biden for the inflation going up are now giving President Biden all the credit for inflation going down.
00:43:55.000So we're moving things in the right direction already.
00:43:57.000And what parts of the bill do you think will quickly work on that specifically?
00:44:17.000This administration and the compliance of the media is what they rely upon in order to push forward all of their points.
00:44:22.000And then again, only later do you find out just how bad things are.
00:44:27.000Which is, for example, what you're about to see with regard to the Iran deal.
00:44:30.000So, over the course of the last few days, Iran has continued its campaign to literally murder all of its opponents.
00:44:36.000Now remember, the entire media has been absolutely apoplectic for several years at this point over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, who's a guy who wrote a couple of pieces for the Washington Post and also happened to be a Muslim Brotherhood-aligned thinker.
00:44:51.000He was killed by the Saudi government in Bonesaw.
00:44:54.000I mean, it's really egregious and gruesome.
00:44:55.000And this was supposed to be the predicate for all of American foreign policy with regard to Saudi Arabia.
00:44:59.000Meanwhile, Iran is literally attempting to murder high-level American officials, as well as some of their longstanding political opponents.
00:45:07.000And the Biden administration continues to negotiate with them about giving them billions of dollars and giving them a free pathway to a nuclear bomb.
00:45:14.000Apparently, over the course of the last few days, in case you missed it, Salman Rushdie, the famous author of the Satanic Verses, he was stabbed up to 10 times at an event in New York.
00:45:27.000The person who stabbed him, a 25-year-old, was apparently, according to the UK Independent, communicating with members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
00:45:40.000Salman Rushdie has had a fatwa on his head for decades based on his book, The Satanic Verses, which talks about verses supposedly excised from the Quran.
00:45:48.000And finally, they stabbed him to the point where he lost an eye.
00:45:52.000And he was communicating openly with the IRGC, which is an aspect of the Iranian government.
00:45:56.000One of the things Iran has been attempting to push in its nuclear negotiations with the United States is the delisting of the IRGC from international terrorism organization lists.
00:46:06.000So the Biden administration is listening on that.
00:46:07.000Meanwhile, the IRGC is literally telling people, if you could just go stab this elderly author in the face, that would be amazing and wonderful.
00:46:14.000Iran, for its part, blamed Salman Rushdie and its political opponents for Rushdie's stabbing.
00:46:20.000According to Reuters, Iran's foreign ministry said on Monday, no one had the right to level accusations against Tehran over Friday's attack on Salman Rushdie.
00:46:27.000Only he and his supporters were worthy of reproach and condemnation for denigrating the world's Muslims.
00:46:34.000So it's his fault that he got stabbed in the face because he pissed us off.
00:46:37.000And so we had to stab him in the face.
00:46:39.000Meanwhile, of course, the Biden administration continues to negotiate with the Iranians.
00:46:42.000We've been told incessantly by the media that an Iran deal is necessary.
00:46:46.000It's the only way to moderate this regime.
00:46:48.000By the way, the Iranian state media is openly now calling for the assassination of Donald Trump, as well as the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
00:46:54.000And that comes shortly after there was the arrest of a of a person associated with the Iranian government who's plotting to murder John Bolton, the former National Security Advisor to Trump.
00:47:07.000So, I guess we'll find out a year from now that the Iran deal is really bad, after the Biden administration signs it.
00:47:14.000The Biden administration does a thing, and then we find out well after the fact that the thing was bad.
00:47:18.000The Inflation Reduction Act, or what is happening right now with the Iran deal.
00:47:22.000And also, by the way, it has been one year since Afghanistan.
00:47:26.000Well, if you want to hear me talk about that, you're actually going to have to go listen to the rest of the show over at dailywireplus.com.
00:47:33.000We'll be getting into the one-year anniversary of Afghanistan, plus Kamala Harris making one of the dumbest statements I've ever heard in my entire life.