The FBI raids the offices of President Trump s lawyer, Trump considers war in Syria, and the left rushes to Teddy Kennedy s defense. It s a busy news day, and we ll have full analysis of all of it on this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show with Ben Shapiro ( ). Links From This Episode: Free Training From Drop Ship Lifestyle All Previous Podcast Episodes Leave Us a Review On Apple Podcasts And We'll Read It On The Next Episode Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel Learn more about your ad choices. What's your favorite kind of coffee? What s your favorite type of cappuccino? What kind of pasta dish do you like most? Favorite kind of scone? Which one is your favorite? And which one are you looking forward to eating most of the next week? Is it a witch hunt? Can you tell us who you think is a better lawyer than the one you mentioned in this episode? Have a question or suggestion for me? Tweet me and I'll get back to you in the next episode! Timestamps: 1:00 - Who do you think the best lawyer is? 2:20 - Is Michael Cohen a good lawyer? 3:30 - Is he a good guy? 4:00 5:10 - Does he look like a good person? 6:40 - Is she a bad guy or not a bad man? 7:00 | Is she good enough? 8:10 9:40 11:30 12:30 | What s a woman a good thing? 13:20 15:00 Is she better than a good idea? 16:40 | Is he not a good woman? 17:15 14:15 Is she not a problem? 15) 16) 17) 15 17 18) Is she really a bad thing? #1 13) #3 #5 + #6 & #6? #7 And so on? + And so much more? ) Thanks for listening? & Also tweet me out! # Tweet Me Out? Also ? Thank you! And tweet Me Out! & And This And This Also?
00:00:15.000Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of news.
00:00:17.000And we'll have full analysis of all of it.
00:00:19.000I will give you the full legal breakdown and everything going on with President Trump's personal lawyer, whose offices, hotel, home, were all raided by the FBI last night.
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00:01:43.000Again, the variety of classes, it's all terrific.
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00:02:41.000In fact, Michael Cohen has compared himself to Trump's Tom Hagen.
00:02:45.000Tom Hagen, of course, being the character from the Godfather movies, who is the personal lawyer for the Corleone family.
00:02:52.000Now, one of the problems here is that Michael Cohen is not supremely competent.
00:02:56.000And the other problem is that Michael Cohen has been cleaning up Trump's messes for so long that he may have gotten a little bit casual about it.
00:03:02.000The FBI apparently raided Michael Cohen's office yesterday, and the raid included documents that were that were regarding Cohen's self-stated $130,000 payment to Trump one night stand Stormy Daniels.
00:03:14.000So now we have a scandal, a real scandal brewing.
00:03:25.000I cannot imagine that that is not true.
00:03:27.000It is really unlikely that Trump did not shtoop Stormy Daniels, given all the surrounding available evidence and Trump's record with women and all the rest of it.
00:03:37.000If people had known about that, nobody would have cared because Trump has shtooped everything from here to Miami.
00:03:41.000I mean, that is really not a giant shock in any significant way.
00:03:46.000But, for some odd reason, about 10 days before the election, it looked like Stormy Daniels was going to talk to the press, and Trump's team, or at least Michael Cohen, was afraid that Trump would somehow be implicated and people would not like Trump if they found out that Trump was having an affair, which, by the way, is an insane thought.
00:04:02.000No one was going to shift their vote based on Trump having an affair with a porn star 10 years prior.
00:04:07.000Everyone had assumed, I think, that Trump had been doing that sort of thing all the time.
00:04:10.000Anyway, Cohen signed a $130,000 check to Stormy Daniels to shut her up, and they signed a settlement agreement.
00:04:16.000And the settlement agreement was run through an LLC, and that settlement agreement used a bunch of pseudonyms.
00:04:21.000So there's a pseudonym for Stormy Daniels, there's a pseudonym for President Trump, and this document was signed.
00:04:28.000Stormy Daniels, of course, is now complaining, and she's saying that the document wasn't actually formalized, and that it's not actually binding, but in any case,
00:04:35.000Michael Cohn is fighting that in court and suggesting that it is binding and that Stormy Daniels is supposed to shut up about all the details of her affair with Trump or he will sue her.
00:04:42.000In any case, what exactly went wrong here?
00:04:44.000Well, according to the Washington Post, Cohn is under federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud, and campaign finance violations, according to three people with knowledge of the case.
00:04:54.000So the story here is that that $130,000 that Cohn paid to Stormy Daniels, he has claimed that Trump had no knowledge of it.
00:05:01.000Which means that this could be a campaign finance problem.
00:05:12.000John Edwards was the vice presidential candidate with John Kerry, and then he was a frontrunner for a short period of time in the 2008 presidential election.
00:05:19.000Well, in the middle of that presidential election, it was about to come out that John Edwards had had an affair while he was married to his cancer-ridden wife, and he was having this affair with a woman named Rielle Hunter, and he impregnated her with a baby.
00:05:32.000And he had all of his donors get together and give Real Hunter about a million dollars to shut up for the duration of the election cycle.
00:05:40.000This constituted campaign finance violation and in-kind contribution by his people.
00:05:45.000And John Edwards actually went to trial.
00:05:46.000He was tried on six counts, including conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws.
00:05:50.000He was acquitted on one of those counts.
00:05:52.000The jury hung on the other five counts.
00:05:55.000And in the end, the DOJ dropped the case.
00:05:59.000This looks like what the DOJ is after here and what the lawyers are after, what the prosecutors are after, is the possibility that Michael Cohen was instructed by President Trump to pay Stormy Daniels and that this
00:06:09.000That's the entire crux of the matter here.
00:06:25.000This comes out late yesterday that Trump's attorney, his offices have now been raided by the FBI.
00:06:30.000And President Trump responds with the kind of language that we've become accustomed to hearing from President Trump.
00:06:44.000It's an attack on our country in a true sense.
00:06:48.000Okay, so he says it's an attack on our country.
00:06:50.000That sort of language I don't appreciate from the president given the fact that there are actually attacks on our country that take place on a pretty regular basis.
00:06:56.000It is not in fact an attack on the United States if the president of the United States does something wrong and then is then investigated for it.
00:07:02.000It is an attack, perhaps, on the presidency.
00:07:18.000There is such a thing as attorney-client privilege.
00:07:20.000If I'm somebody's attorney, I'm a lawyer, if I'm somebody's lawyer, and we are corresponding about a particular issue that does not involve me as a lawyer helping the client break the law, then all of that is privileged material.
00:07:32.000And it's very difficult to overcome that presumption of privilege for law enforcement.
00:07:36.000Law enforcement actually has to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to seize documents from a lawyer's office.
00:07:41.000They have to jump through a lot of hoops because we don't actually want the government jumping in and looking at everything a lawyer says to their client.
00:07:48.000If the government could do that, then they could presumably win every case, they could disbar lawyers on a regular basis, they could go after clients for saying things that aren't even legally challengeable in a certain sense because they're just running through case theory, for example.
00:08:02.000The reason attorney-client privilege exists is because there has to be a level of confidentiality between a lawyer and a client, just like there's a level of confidentiality between doctors and patients.
00:08:12.000So you have to overcome a serious presumption here.
00:08:15.000So Trump is saying this is an attack on him.
00:08:16.000It may very well be, but we're not going to know that until we find out what exactly the FBI was looking for.
00:08:21.000At this point, we still don't know exactly what the FBI was looking for.
00:08:24.000So when Trump says it's an attack on the country, I don't think Trump is the country, but it certainly is an attack on President Trump.
00:08:29.000And it may well be an unfair attack on President Trump, as I'll discuss in just a moment.
00:08:33.000Now, President Trump also is very angry at his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, because again,
00:08:38.000The way this worked is apparently the Mueller investigation referred out the information that led to the warrant to the U.S.
00:08:45.000District of Southern, the Southern District of New York.
00:08:48.000So this, this investigation that ended with the raid on Michael Cohen's offices actually had very little to do in the end with the Mueller investigation.
00:08:57.000District Attorney in the Southern District of New York.
00:09:00.000So this is a second investigation, right?
00:09:02.000This is a second investigation that we are talking about right now.
00:09:05.000And Trump is saying, well, if Jeff Sessions were really my wingman, he would have stopped all of this.
00:09:10.000If Jeff Sessions really cared what happened to me, he never would have accused himself in the first place.
00:09:14.000He would have done exactly what Eric Holder did, and he would have stopped any investigation into my administration.
00:09:19.000And Trump isn't exactly wrong about this.
00:09:21.000The fact is that Eric Holder did play that role for Barack Obama.
00:09:24.000Now, should Jeff Sessions play that role?
00:09:25.000Well, not in terms of being an honest attorney general.
00:09:28.000Eric Holder was a corrupt attorney general.
00:09:30.000I'm old enough to remember when we all said that.
00:09:32.000But I guess the idea on the right is that we're supposed to imitate the left, because if we don't imitate the left, then we're going to fall prey to the predations of people like Robert Mueller.
00:09:40.000I find this a problematic idea that because the left sins, we are therefore also allowed to sin or therefore our sins are good.
00:09:48.000So here's Trump going after Jeff Sessions, suggesting Sessions shouldn't have recused himself.
00:09:52.000Remember, Sessions recused himself in the Russia matter.
00:09:54.000He did not actually recuse himself in the Michael Cohen matter.
00:09:56.000So theoretically, he could reestablish his authority here and fire the U.S.
00:10:00.000District Attorney in the Southern District of New York, for example, or order a stop to that investigation.
00:10:07.000Sessions hasn't said anything so far, and Trump is mad that Sessions recused himself in the Russia investigation, which led to the appointment eventually of Robert Mueller, the special investigator, which led eventually to him referring out to the U.S.
00:10:19.000SDNY, the Southern District of New York, this Cone Raid.
00:10:22.000Here's Trump going after Jeff Sessions yesterday.
00:10:24.000They find no collusion, and then they go from there and they say, well, let's keep going.
00:10:30.000And they raid an office of a personal attorney early in the morning.
00:10:38.000But this is the most conflicted group of people I've ever seen.
00:10:41.000The Attorney General made a terrible mistake when he did this and when he recused himself, or he should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself.
00:10:52.000And we would have put a different Attorney General in.
00:10:56.000So he made what I consider to be a very terrible mistake for the country.
00:11:00.000So obviously Trump is very, very frustrated about all of this.
00:11:03.000So let's go through some of the facts here and some of the legalities.
00:11:05.000And then I want to get to what Trump is going to do next year because this could have some pretty significant ramifications in a couple of different ways.
00:11:11.000So first of all, attorney-client privilege does not actually apply if you are violating law with your attorney.
00:11:16.000As I say, attorney-client privilege is really, really strong.
00:11:19.000But if I'm Mathis's lawyer and Mathis comes to me and he says, you know what, let's do a drug deal together.
00:11:23.000Let's go out and buy some cocaine and then let's sell it on the street.
00:11:26.000This is not covered by attorney-client privilege because now I am complicit in a crime.
00:11:29.000This is what we call the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege.
00:11:33.000If I were to claim that our communications were privileged for the purpose of covering up a crime, that does not hold.
00:12:06.000I'll explain why it is that the raid was legal in just a second, at least presumably legal in just a second.
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00:13:24.000All right, so Trump suggests that the raid on Cohen's office by the FBI is in fact illegal.
00:13:30.000He called it a break-in, but the evidence is not there for that yet.
00:13:33.000So we'll find out what the basis was for the raid, but suffice it to say that the process for actually doing one of these raids on an attorney's office is pretty significant.
00:14:52.000The chances that the warrant is really weak, like supremely weak, I think are pretty low.
00:14:56.000The reason being, this is going to be the most scrutinized warrant in the history of American politics.
00:15:00.000Maybe right here, while we are looking at a warrant to go after the President's personal lawyer and uncover all the documents between that lawyer and the President of the United States, the burden is going to be really high.
00:15:10.000Unless the magistrate judge is a complete political hack, and my understanding is,
00:15:14.000The magistrate judge in this particular case might have been a Trump appointee.
00:15:19.000District Attorney's Office in Southern District of New York, the person who runs that office is a Trump appointee.
00:15:23.000We're finding out this morning that the U.S.
00:15:27.000Attorney's Office there is run by a guy who was actually a Trump donor, but he apparently recused himself from the case because he said that he was biased in the case because he was a Trump supporter.
00:15:37.000So Trump can't be happy with that recusal either.
00:15:40.000But in the end, all the information is going to come out.
00:15:42.000Neither this is going to look like, as President Trump says, another witch hunt.
00:15:45.000In which case, he'll be absolutely right to be angry.
00:15:47.000He will be absolutely justified in firing Sessions, in firing the U.S.
00:15:50.000District Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
00:15:53.000If this really is a weak warrant, and this is the FBI just fishing around for information on President Trump, there's going to be hell to pay.
00:16:00.000I mean, things will get really, really nasty, really, really quickly.
00:16:04.000So in just a second, I'm going to give you a little bit more information on what exactly is going on in this raid, what the FBI may be hoping to uncover, and how exactly the documents are going to be handled.
00:16:14.000Let's start with how the documents are going to be handled.
00:16:16.000So, here again is Ken White, who's a lawyer, and he does this sort of litigation on a routine basis.
00:16:22.000He says, quote, In other words, if you're running the investigation, you don't get to see the documents until lawyers have already reviewed it to ensure that attorney-client privilege is not violated.
00:16:40.000Another option is a special master, which is the name for a person who is appointed simply to distinguish documents you're allowed to use from documents you're not allowed to use.
00:16:48.000That'd be an experienced and qualified third party attorney to do the review.
00:16:52.000But if the FBI has all of the communications between Michael Cohen and Trump on hand, then there's probably gonna be a lot of interesting stuff there.
00:16:59.000Because if it turns out that Michael Cohen pays off Trump's paramours, which he obviously did with Stormy Daniels, he admits to that, then what else did Michael Cohen do for President Trump?
00:17:09.000Eric Erickson, who is a critic of President Trump's, but I would say mainstream Republican, Eric Erickson said that he pointed out there were a lot of rumors during the campaign that Trump had actually paid off women who had had abortions, for example.
00:17:22.000Would that come up in Michael Cohen's documents?
00:17:25.000And if so, would that actually be privileged or would not be privileged?
00:17:28.000Presumably, even if it came up, it would still be privileged, considering the fact that
00:17:33.000When considering the fact that nothing necessarily illegal went on.
00:17:36.000You're allowed to sign a settlement contract with a woman who had an abortion to keep her quiet.
00:17:40.000But if that were to break in the public sphere, then that obviously would undercut a lot of Trump's support base.
00:17:44.000Again, all of that is speculation, but suffice it to say that when you are
00:17:48.000Putting your dirty fingers into the offices of the personal fixer for the President of the United States, you may be able to find some stuff that is really, really gross.
00:18:23.000And even if you think this warrant is legit, which it may very well be, even if you think that a campaign finance law was broken here, which maybe it was,
00:18:31.000Is there any question that the treatment of Hillary Clinton was wildly, wildly kind and the treatment of Donald Trump has been wildly unkind at best?
00:18:41.000There's no question there's a wild disparity between Hillary Clinton's treatment and Donald Trump's treatment.
00:18:46.000Remember all the way back to the time when the FBI was investigating Hillary Clinton's missing emails.
00:18:51.000They were investigating her server because she had set up a private server in her house and she had classified emails flowing through that private server which exposed them to the possibility of foreign hack.
00:19:00.000And the FBI treated Hillary Clinton with kid gloves.
00:19:02.000They had basically cleared her by the time they interviewed her.
00:19:05.000They added an element to the crime in order to exonerate her.
00:19:10.000To pass off classified documents, it couldn't just be accidental, except the law doesn't require intent.
00:19:15.000That's what James Comey, the former FBI director, he actually changed the law in order to help exonerate Hillary Clinton.
00:19:21.000Loretta Lynch, of course, met with Hillary Clinton's husband on a plane on a tarmac in the middle of the investigation, and she still doesn't have any good answers about this.
00:19:29.000So Loretta Lynch was interviewed by Lester Holt, and Holt asked her about her meeting on the tarmac with Bill Clinton, and you can hear she's still obfuscating the issue.
00:19:36.000It was still 107 degrees outside, and I was told that he wanted to come on the plane and say hello.
00:19:41.000Did a part of you go, oh, no, no, no, no, no, turn him around?
00:19:45.000You know, at first my thought was, you know, I speak to people all the time, people in public life, people not in public life.
00:19:51.000Right, but his wife was under investigation by the Justice Department.
00:19:54.000Did you have any moment where you said, Mr. President, this is probably not appropriate or this is going to look bad?
00:20:02.000Well, I will say that in the course of the conversation, we spoke and it seemed like we were going to say, hello, hi, how are you, and move on.
00:20:16.000It was so suspicious that it is what led James Comey, he said in his own testimony, to basically take over the investigation from Loretta Lynch and then announce on his own what he thought the actual outcome of the investigation should be in order to shield Loretta Lynch from accusations of corruption.
00:20:30.000So there's no question that Hillary Clinton was treated with absolute kid gloves.
00:20:33.000And by the way, I have more evidence that she was treated with kid gloves, which I will present to you in just one second.
00:20:40.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Blue Apron.
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00:22:11.000Blue Apron is, indeed, a better way to cook.
00:22:13.000Okay, so back to the differential treatment between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump by the FBI.
00:22:19.000Hey, so Andrew McCarthy of National Review points this out.
00:22:22.000In the middle of the investigation, Hillary Clinton was interviewed by the FBI.
00:22:26.000And the Justice Department allowed Hillary Clinton to be accompanied at this interview by Cheryl Mills.
00:22:33.000Cheryl Mills was Hillary Clinton's not only close friend, but personal fixer.
00:22:38.000Cheryl Mills basically was to Hillary Clinton what Michael Cohen was to Donald Trump.
00:22:43.000And they allowed Cheryl Mills, who was a former employee at the State Department, to sit in with Hillary Clinton during her interviews, even though she was a subject of the investigation.
00:22:53.000This is what Andrew McCarthy over at National Review wrote at the time.
00:23:12.000Okay, so let me clarify that in case you missed it.
00:23:15.000Not only did they allow Cheryl Mills to sit in on an interview with Hillary Clinton, they allowed Cheryl Mills to claim attorney-client privilege in her communications with Hillary Clinton about the emails themselves, even though she was possibly complicit in the hiding of those emails and the setting up of the private server.
00:23:29.000So it's like, so here, they're saying no attorney-client privilege attaches to Michael Cohen, because the crime-fraud exception, but Cheryl Mills, who's literally under investigation at the same time, in the same way as Michael Cohen, or at least in a similar way, she was allowed to sit in on meetings with Hillary Clinton, and they were allowed to use, and they were allowed to claim attorney-client privilege.
00:23:49.000McCarthy writes, Mills was a participant in that procedure and it is the procedure in which we now know well over 30,000 emails were attempted to be destroyed, including several thousand that contained government related business.
00:24:01.000There is no way Mills should have been permitted to participate as a lawyer in the process of producing Clinton's emails to the State Department nearly two years after they both left.
00:24:09.000I thought it was astonishing that the Justice Department indulged her attorney-client privilege claim, which frustrated the FBI's ability to question her on a key aspect of the investigation, but it is simply unbelievable to find her turning up at Mrs. Clinton's interview, participating in the capacity of a lawyer under circumstances where Clinton was being investigated over matters in which Mills participated as a non-lawyer government official.
00:24:29.000So again, Trump is absolutely right to be angry at the fact that the FBI treated Hillary Clinton with kid gloves, that the DOJ treated Hillary Clinton with kid gloves.
00:24:53.000The left used the DOJ as a personal shield for Barack Obama.
00:24:56.000Eric Holder, when he was brought up on contempt charges, Barack Obama stepped in and declared executive privilege to prevent Holder from having to hand over documents.
00:25:03.000Eric Holder described himself as Barack Obama's wingman.
00:25:06.000Loretta Lynch played exactly the same role for Barack Obama and also for Hillary Clinton.
00:25:11.000James Comey obviously was biased in favor of Hillary Clinton in a wide variety of ways, although he ended up, close to the election, revealing something in order to proclaim his own honesty in front of Congress.
00:25:23.000He revealed that Hillary might still be under investigation, or at least her emails had come up on Anthony Weiner's computer.
00:25:28.000Despite all of that, his original attempt to exonerate Hillary Clinton was highly biased in the extreme, and he never should have done it.
00:25:35.000And so a lot of people who are on the right are saying, well, listen, why should Trump be pure as the driven snow when it comes to his law enforcement agencies?
00:25:42.000Why can't we just have Jeff Sessions step in and defend him?
00:25:47.000In fact, why doesn't he fire Robert Mueller?
00:25:48.000You know, if the situation is that the DOJ is supposed to protect the president, as the left claims about Obama, then why shouldn't Trump do the same thing?
00:25:55.000And Trump himself seems to be thinking a little bit along these lines.
00:25:58.000So Trump suggested that he may fire Mueller.
00:26:00.000He was asked about this and he says, well, we'll have to see what happens with regard to Robert Mueller.
00:26:58.000He can't fire Mueller, but he's so mad.
00:27:00.000You could see how they were reveling in the anger.
00:27:03.000They're very excited about how angry President Trump was because they're hoping that Trump fires Mueller and this precipitates an impeachment.
00:28:42.000Now we're on a campaign finance reform scandal that is absolutely separate from the Mueller investigation entirely.
00:28:48.000And so maybe you're saying, listen, Trump has to defend himself.
00:28:50.000He should fire whomever he has to fire because Obama would obviously do the exact same thing the media would defend for him.
00:28:55.000That's the argument on one part of the right.
00:28:56.000The argument on the other part of the right is that just because Barack Obama did something bad doesn't mean that we also get to do something bad.
00:29:02.000That just because Barack Obama turned the FBI and the DOJ into his personal playthings doesn't mean that Donald Trump should do the same.
00:29:08.000And in fact, we should stand up against any president who wants to turn the DOJ and the FBI into their personal plaything.
00:29:14.000I think conservatives are going to be forced to make a choice on which way this goes.
00:29:18.000That choice doesn't have to be made yet.
00:29:20.000And the reason the choice doesn't have to be made yet is because we don't know yet what the FBI is looking for.
00:29:36.000FBI raided David Yannick's hedge fund, which I'm convinced was an abuse.
00:29:40.000So before we jump to the conclusion that Trump is in serious, serious trouble, we're going to have to hear more about what happens next and what exactly they found.
00:29:48.000But if the pedal hits the metal, there are going to be a lot of people on the conservative side of the aisle, and I think not entirely unjustifiably, who will say, listen, Trump should fire who he has to fire.
00:29:58.000And we can't play by Marcus of Queensbury rules.
00:30:00.000And then I think there will be other people, and I probably count myself in this camp, who will say, listen,
00:30:05.000You don't get to pervert the system of justice just because the left perverts the system of justice.
00:30:09.000And by the way, it is not a great thing that the President of the United States, if this turns out to be the case, was having his lawyer pay $130,000 to a porn star to shut her up 10 days before the election and skirting campaign finance laws in order to do so.
00:30:22.000Now, I will also say that there's going to be a strong part of me that suggests that
00:30:27.000Campaign finance reform violations are stupid in and of themselves.
00:30:29.000I think campaign finance reform laws are dumb.
00:30:31.000If you think that the base is going to abandon Trump over this sort of thing, I think that's mistaken.
00:30:35.000I don't think Trump's base is going anywhere on this.
00:30:37.000I don't think that there are a lot of conservatives in the country who are going to say Trump definitely deserves to leave office over a campaign finance violation about him having an affair.
00:30:45.000I just don't think you're gonna get a lot of play on the right for that, even if, legally speaking, maybe you should.
00:30:50.000Okay, so, I do want to discuss the situation in Syria, because while we're all talking about Michael Cohen, war may be breaking out in Syria, we'll talk about that in just a second, but first, you're gonna have to subscribe.
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00:32:21.000All righty, so, meanwhile, while all this is going on, war may be imminent in Syria.
00:32:24.000Trump yesterday was, before he spoke about the Michael Cohen thing with the press, he was actually at a meeting with all of his military bigwigs, and he told the press, big decisions may be coming soon on Syria.
00:32:34.000I'd like to begin by condemning the heinous attack on innocent Syrians with banned chemical weapons.
00:33:50.000The monster who was responsible for these attacks has no conscience.
00:33:55.000Not even to be shocked by pictures of dead children.
00:33:59.000OK, General Mattis, of course, the head of the Department of Defense, our Defense Secretary, he says that he's not going to rule out anything, including possible U.S.
00:34:09.000The president has indeed canceled the trip to South America that was already planned, and he's going to stay in Washington, D.C., which suggests that there are going to be some bombs flying over Damascus in the near future.
00:34:46.000Okay, so this does raise one question.
00:34:48.000All the language coming out from the Trump administration has basically been about the morality of what's happening in Syria.
00:34:52.000We can all agree what's been happening in Syria is truly egregious, but there's one serious question.
00:34:57.000We talked about it a lot yesterday, particularly whether the United States actually has interests in Syria.
00:35:02.000Now, I made the case yesterday that we do have interest in Syria to the extent that we should be attempting to protect civilians from Assad's predations and we should be attempting to curb Iranian influence and Russian influence in Syria in order to protect against the Iranian caliphate that is going to threaten
00:35:16.000All the geniuses tell us that Assad killed those children.
00:36:19.000Okay, so Carlson is making a suggestion that's also been made by a lot of Russian sources, which is that Assad wasn't behind the chemical attacks at all.
00:36:26.000And it is worth noting that there were some allegations that there's no actual evidence that Assad was behind chemical attacks in April 2017 either, that maybe that was something that happened because of Syrian rebels.
00:36:37.000We're attempting to get a propaganda win or all the rest of it.
00:36:40.000Now, I'm skeptical that Assad was not behind this simply because this is a large scale chemical attack.
00:36:45.000Assad perpetrated large scale chemical attacks in Damascus in 2013 in front of the world press and didn't seem to care.
00:36:51.000And Obama, of course, didn't seem to care very much about it either.
00:36:54.000But the fact that that Carlson is calling this into question, what he's really saying here is what is our interest in Syria?
00:37:00.000And I think that's a question that ought to be debated at the congressional level.
00:37:03.000For all of my talk about how we ought to get involved at a certain level in Syria, and I've talked about minimizing American presence on the ground, using others to do it, using the Israeli Air Force as our proxy, using the American Air Force, this really does need to go through Congress.
00:37:17.000In the end, I think that Congress is the branch that declares war, and obviously this is indeed another undeclared war.
00:37:26.000And so for all the talk about about what Trump should or should not do, unless it provides an immediate threat to the United States, I am with Rand Paul and Justin Amash in the sense that I think the Congress ought to be voting on this stuff.
00:37:35.000OK, so meanwhile, the left is fighting mad, like very, very angry.
00:37:41.000Over the fact that there is a movie that is out about Teddy Kennedy.
00:37:49.000I was encouraging all of you to see it, not just because they're an advertiser on the program, but because the movie is actually quite good.
00:37:55.000The movie made $5.8 million at the box office over the weekend.
00:37:58.000The budget on Chappaquiddick was not high, if I get my numbers right.
00:38:03.000But the reality is... So, the box office, I guess, was $6.2 million.
00:38:11.000It looks like the budget, I guess, is not public at this point, but it was relatively low.
00:38:16.000So, let's see, the studio spent $16 million on P&A, that's promotion and advertisement, and the distribution rights were acquired for $4 million, so it needs to make back globally maybe $20, $25 million to break even.
00:38:44.000Teddy Kennedy drove off a bridge with a woman in the car.
00:38:46.000He then escaped the car, let her die either of suffocation or of drowning, and then swam to shore, went to sleep for 12 hours, and called the cops.
00:39:34.000So there are two pieces in the last couple of days talking about this.
00:39:38.000One from the New York Times, in which Teddy biographer Neil Gabler said that Chappaquiddick was too harsh on Senator Kennedy.
00:39:43.000And they say, this is the tweet from the New York Times opinion page, ready?
00:39:46.000Ted Kennedy was a real man living out a real life.
00:39:49.000His political opponents could and did distort that life for their advantage.
00:39:52.000But just how many liberties can an artist or entertainer take when deploying a biographical subject?
00:39:57.000And now the reality is the Chappaquiddick sticks to the facts pretty damn closely.
00:40:00.000Like, so closely that they don't even take the risk of making any of the allegations about him being drunk, which I think pretty clearly he was.
00:40:10.000One of the reasons maybe you swim away from a car and go to sleep is that all the alcohol in your blood goes out of your system because whether or not you intended for the woman to be left in the car, if a woman dies in a car that you are driving while you are drunk, that is DUI manslaughter and you go to jail for a long, long time.
00:40:23.000Teddy Kennedy did not report the thing until the next day when all of the alcohol presumably was out of his bloodstream.
00:40:30.000But according to Neil Gabler, the real victim of the Chappaquiddick movie is Ted Kennedy.
00:40:33.000Quote, So Teddy Kennedy isn't in the public domain?
00:40:48.000I have my favorite part of this article from the New York Times is where the author of the article declares that Teddy Kennedy immediately and forever after felt deep remorse and responsibility for the accident.
00:41:00.000He felt such remorse, such deep, deep remorse that
00:41:04.000In the mid-1980s, early 1990s, he actually sexually assaulted a waitress.
00:41:08.000I mean, that's how much remorse he felt about his treatment of women.
00:41:11.000And this is described by Michael Kelly in GQ.
00:41:13.000Gavilio is a 103-pound waitress, a woman who was at a club that Kennedy was frequenting with a senator named Chris Dodd, who was also a Democrat.
00:41:27.000Kennedy grabs the 5'3", 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table.
00:41:30.000She lands on her back, scattering crystal plates and cutlery and lit candles.
00:41:34.000Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken.
00:41:36.000Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who's sprawled in a chair.
00:41:40.000With Gaviglio on Dodd's lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair.
00:41:47.000As he is doing this, Lowe enters the room, Lowe is another waitress.
00:41:49.000She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers.
00:41:55.000Yes, clearly Ted Kennedy learned his lesson.
00:42:00.000Vox.com has another article today talking about Teddy Kennedy and how he really was a good guy and people ought to stop picking on him.
00:42:07.000The same people who defended Teddy Kennedy say that Donald Trump should be impeached because he had an affair with a porn star and then paid a bunch of money to her to shut up and they say campaign finance is really what ought to take him down.
00:42:18.000Spare me your moral indignation, folks on the left, unless you are really really into campaign finance reform.
00:42:24.000You're the folks who upheld Teddy Kennedy for years and years and years and years.
00:42:28.000OK, so in just a second, we'll get to some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:42:32.000And we'll do a Federalist paper since we didn't do one yesterday.
00:42:56.000Pursuing a guy it's sort of a Cinderella story that goes wrong But the music is really glorious, and it's really a it's it's not a fun ending, but it's a fun musical So check out once on this island.
00:43:07.000Here is what one of the the opening number sounds like
00:43:20.000We know the gods are happy when their green things grow.
00:43:25.000They're angry when their rebirth starts to overflow.
00:43:31.000And since we never know which way their wings will blow,
00:43:49.000Okay, so the guy who wrote the music to this is Stephen Flaherty.
00:43:58.000Stephen Flaherty also wrote the score to Ragtime, and it takes place in French Antilles in the Caribbean.
00:44:05.000I think there's a revival on Broadway right now, so if you're in New York, go see the revival because I've heard that it is pretty good.
00:44:10.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:44:15.000So Jack Dorsey is the head of Twitter and apparently he has now been getting personally involved, personally involved in banning people from Twitter.
00:44:22.000So we've been talking for a long time on this program about how social media is being used by the left in order to suck people in and then to censor what they see.
00:44:31.000Well, apparently, Jack Dorsey is doing exactly that.
00:44:36.000Apparently, he is now getting involved.
00:44:39.000He has started banning people on the basis of personal choice.
00:44:48.000Apparently, his direct approach is a welcome change to some people who are on the inside of the company.
00:44:53.000But now he is being like down to the individual, like saying which people should be banned and which people should not.
00:44:58.000Well, if that's the case, then perhaps we should blame Jack Dorsey that, for example, Louis Farrakhan is still verified on Twitter, but Richard Spencer is not.
00:45:06.000The leftist priorities of Jack Dorsey are very much in evidence.
00:45:08.000He actually tweeted out the other day in an article.
00:45:11.000That was pretty shocking about why the left should not tolerate the right.
00:45:16.000So the fact that all of these social media companies are run by folks on the left, they say that their companies are unbiased.
00:45:26.000They are not unbiased in the slightest, and people should be aware of that when they're using Twitter.
00:45:30.000Obviously, the bans are being extended over time to a variety of people, and that's true on YouTube.
00:45:35.000Which has been sued now by Prager University for demonetizing them.
00:45:39.000It's extended obviously to Facebook, which I've sounded off on in detail here on this program.
00:45:49.000We're about a quarter of the way through the Federalist papers.
00:45:52.000And Alexander Hamilton wrote this particular Federalist paper.
00:45:55.000And the goal of this Federalist paper is to explain what exactly the Constitution, the new Constitution, will do that the Articles of Confederation did not.
00:46:05.000And Federalist 23 talks specifically about the purposes of government.
00:46:26.000So for all the talk about how the federal government is supposed to regulate how much water you have in your toilet, and the federal government is supposed to be involved in criminal fact-finding, and the federal government is supposed to be involved in every area of your life, and we need thousands and thousands of pages of federal regulations released every year.
00:46:41.000The fact is that, as the founders thought, there are very few actual
00:47:12.000And those areas have to be pretty small, otherwise you're granting the federal government tremendous power over expanding areas of American life.
00:47:18.000That's what the Anti-Federalists said.
00:47:19.000And over time, they ended up being right as the federal government continued to grow and grow and grow, beyond the bounds that anyone, Federalist or Anti-Federalist, ever would have comprehended.
00:47:28.000Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest, because there's always breaking news.