Impeachment time! Today, the public hearings begin in the House of Representatives, and the question is whether or not there will be enough evidence to impeach President Trump. Or is there more to the story than what we have been told so far? Ben Shapiro breaks it all down, and explains why impeachment is unlikely to be as simple as it looks right now, and why it is a real possibility that the country will vote for him to be removed from office if he s found guilty of a crime that could be proven to have been committed by his own people. Ben also points out that impeachment is a bad public relations move by Democrats, and that if the evidence against Trump is overwhelming, the only thing that can be done is impeachment is impeachment, not acquittals, and impeachment is not going to happen unless something new is uncovered about the Trump administration s dealings with Ukraine and Russia that could prove that Trump colluded with the Ukrainian government to influence the investigation into the Trump Tower meeting with the DNC and other matters related to the Ukraine. Ben also notes that the Democratic response to the evidence has been slow and stalling tactics, and suggests that the only real defense is going to be from John Kennedy, not from the White House. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Stop putting your online data at risk! Get protected at Express VPN. Get protected against online privacy and cybersecurity by becoming a protected user at ExpressVPN at Parcast Connect with Ben Shapiro on the Parcast Secure Your Online Privacy Protections Program. Subscribe to the Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, The Ben's Notebook: The Best of the Week! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices and get 20% off your first month free on Audible, Poshmark's newest deal of the month, and much more! Subscribe to my new podcasting platform, The FiveThirtyEight's newest streaming service, The Best Podcasting Service, The Parcast's New York Times Besties! Become a Friend of the Ben's Backyard Podcasts Subscribe and Subscribe on Podulphia Subscribe on Spare Space Subscribe on Strava's New Year's Day and more! Learn more at Subscribe & Share Ben's Thoughts on the Real Life Podcasts and more? Subscribe at The Real Life Journalist Podcasts? Leave Us on Social Media & More? Subscribe to Ben's New Music: Podcasting on Podcasting?
00:00:16.000This show, The Ben Shapiro Show, is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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00:00:24.000OK, so the reason I'm not taking this supremely seriously is because everybody knows where this is going.
00:00:28.000The Democrats are going to vote to impeach President Trump in the House, and then the Republicans are going to vote to acquit in the Senate.
00:00:43.000The only other question here is whether Democrats are going to be capable of sinking President Trump's sort of public relations stance.
00:00:50.000Are you going to see the support for impeachment rise just because there is so much bad press surrounding impeachment and because President Trump continues to insist against pretty much all the evidence that The phone call with Ukraine was absolutely perfect.
00:01:04.000Absolutely 100% what Abraham Lincoln would have done.
00:01:07.000The reason that's not a smart strategy, honestly, in terms of public relations, in terms of impeachment, doesn't really matter what his strategy is.
00:01:13.000What's going to be is what's going to be.
00:01:15.000But in terms of public relations, the reason that's not a smart strategy is the same reason it is not a brilliant idea to go out at the beginning of your presidency and say, we are going to have 5% growth every year for the rest of my tenure.
00:01:25.000The reason it's not smart to say that is because if you come in at 4%, which is great, then everybody goes, oh, well, you said 5, and you completely missed the boat.
00:01:32.000Well, if you say that everything with Ukraine was absolutely 100% perfect, unbelievable.
00:01:37.000And then people like, well, doesn't look that perfect to me.
00:01:40.000It makes them more suspicious of your entire claim.
00:01:42.000That's why it is a bad public relations strategy.
00:01:44.000As I've been saying from the beginning, the president is not his own best lawyer.
00:01:47.000But of course, today is when the public impeachment hearings begin.
00:01:52.000And all of these hearings are basically going to repeat the testimony that we saw behind closed doors.
00:01:56.000There are no real surprise witnesses here.
00:01:58.000Democrats have not approved many of the witnesses the Republicans want.
00:02:01.000Yesterday, I talked a little bit about the witnesses that Republicans wanted.
00:02:04.000President Trump had put out a list compiled by Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who is currently sitting with the House Intelligence Committee.
00:02:12.000He's sort of a ringer brought in to do some of the questioning because he's good at this sort of thing.
00:02:16.000And Jordan had released a list of the witnesses that Republicans would like to see.
00:02:20.000On that list were people like Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, because Jordan wanted to ask, OK, well, was there something nefarious going on in Ukraine?
00:02:26.000And if there was something nefarious going on in Ukraine or suspicious with Hunter Biden, why is it illegitimate of Trump to ask the Ukrainian government to investigate all of that?
00:02:35.000Apparently, they also wanted to bring in the whistleblower.
00:02:36.000Democrats have been quite reticent to bring forward the whistleblower.
00:02:40.000Well, because they understand that there is pretty good information that the whistleblower is a Democratic operative, that the whistleblower is somebody who's a lifelong Democrat, who works from the Obama administration, who is good, or at least close, relatively speaking, with Vice President Joe Biden, who is close with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence.
00:02:59.000And because of that, the Democrats are concerned that if this person is brought forward in question, it's going to turn out this person was coordinating with the head of the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, and that this whole thing was put together behind closed doors.
00:03:10.000Now, that would not in and of itself debunk the claims made about Trump and Ukraine, but it would go to motive.
00:03:16.000And Democrats understand that would be a bad public relations move for them to allow that testimony, because the first thing that would happen is that Trump would say, which end?
00:03:24.000And most Americans would say, yeah, kind of.
00:03:26.000Because unless the crime is serious enough that we actually believe that it was not a partisan thing, it was actually just a, this is a danger to the country thing, that's going to be the Republican play.
00:03:40.000On the one side, the Republicans are going to claim, and this is really what it's going to come down to, Senator John Kennedy finally coming around to adopting the only real defense to Trump's activity, which is that it comes down to intent.
00:03:52.000And on the Democratic side, the American people are going to have to decide Democrats' intent.
00:03:58.000So John Kennedy made clear that when the question is, what was Trump intending to do in Ukraine?
00:04:04.000Was he attempting to quote unquote, get Joe Biden?
00:04:07.000Was the goal here to get Joe Biden in advance of the 2020 election in order to sink His perceived strongest opponents in the Democratic primaries or to or to knock him out in a general election.
00:04:16.000Or was this more what I have suggested, which is Donald Trump has a bunch of weird ideas floating around in his head about Ukraine.
00:04:22.000He knows that there is something going on in Ukraine with regard to the 2016 election.
00:04:25.000He realizes that the Ukrainian embassy was coordinating with Alexander Chalupa, who was an operative for the DNC, and they were coordinating with the Hillary Clinton campaign to dig up dirt about Paul Manafort and presumably about President Trump.
00:04:38.000He also recognizes Ukraine has a long history of corruption.
00:04:40.000And he's suspicious that some conspiracy theories are true, that Hillary Clinton's server is somewhere in Ukraine, buried in a forest or something.
00:04:48.000And that he is suspicious that Joe and Hunter Biden were coordinating in order to get Hunter Biden a nice salary from a very corrupt company allegedly called Burisma.
00:04:56.000And that all of this was wrapped up in his head.
00:04:57.000And so when people said to him, do you want to give the aid to Ukraine?
00:05:00.000He said, no, I want all those things investigated, all of them.
00:05:03.000And so it really wasn't about 2020 or getting Joe Biden specifically.
00:05:06.000It was about he had a bunch of weird ideas floating around in his head.
00:05:08.000So it's not a good thing that he mentioned Joe Biden in this context.
00:05:12.000It leads people to believe that he is that he is manipulating the international system and American taxpayer dollars for personal political gain.
00:05:20.000But that's not actually what's going on.
00:06:10.000OK, I'm glad to hear that John Kennedy, the senator from Louisiana, is finally coming around to the case I've been making with regard to this thing for literally months at this point.
00:06:18.000And I think this is the case that Republicans are going to end up coming around to.
00:06:22.000Now, there's a question of intent on the right side of the aisle.
00:06:25.000We're going to get to the question of intent on the left side of the aisle in just one second.
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00:07:40.000Okay, so as I say, there's a question of intent on the Trump side of the aisle, and then there is, in terms of public relations, the question of intent on the Democratic side of the aisle.
00:07:48.000And this is the case that Trump is going to make.
00:07:49.000Do you really believe that Democrats are All fired, upset about Ukraine, or is this just part of a long campaign of Democrats wanting to get rid of Trump?
00:07:59.000Is this really about a sincere effort to protect the presidency and the Constitution, or is this they hate me, they've wanted me out since literally the day I was elected, and before that, they wanted insurance policies against me according to texts from Lisa Page and Peter Strzok?
00:08:14.000And that's exactly why the Democrats are hiding this whistleblower, because I think that the whistleblower is probably going to make it pretty apparent that Democrats were, in fact, motivated by partisan animus.
00:08:23.000They were not motivated by some desire to protect the country.
00:08:27.000So that is how these impeachment hearings open.
00:08:30.000According to the Associated Press, the closed doors of the Trump impeachment investigation are swinging wide open.
00:08:38.000When the gavel strikes at the start of the House hearing Wednesday morning, America and the rest of the world will have a chance to see and hear for themselves for the first time about President Donald Trump's actions toward Ukraine and consider whether they are, in fact, impeachable offenses.
00:08:49.000It's a remarkable moment, even for a White House full of them, says the AP.
00:08:52.000All on TV, committee leaders will set the stage.
00:08:55.000Two seasoned diplomats, William Taylor, the graying former infantry officer now charged affair in Ukraine, and George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary in Washington, telling the striking, if sometimes complicated, story of a president using allegedly foreign policy for personal and political gain ahead of the 2020 election.
00:09:14.000Now, we have to examine exactly what these people are going to be testifying to.
00:09:19.000The Democrats are laying out their bar, okay?
00:09:22.000And their bar is no longer that Trump was simply trying to influence American elections, that this was overt bribery.
00:09:28.000That President Trump was trying to bribe the Ukrainians with American military aid in order to foster his 2020 ambitions.
00:09:33.000Now, they can't name the statute that Trump has violated here, because he hasn't violated any statute.
00:09:37.000It's the dirty little secret of all of this, and Democrats basically acknowledge this.
00:09:41.000But, at least colloquially, they're now accusing Trump of bribery.
00:09:43.000So Adam Schiff, the House Intel Chairman, who spent the last several years pitching a pup tent outside of the CNN green room in order so that he could be there at the drop of a hat, Adam Schiff says the impeachable offenses will include bribery.
00:09:56.000This will be the central, obviously, claim of the Democrats is that Trump was attempting to bribe the Ukrainians.
00:10:00.000And in return, the Ukrainians were attempting to bribe Trump.
00:10:04.000I don't think any decision has been made on the ultimate question about whether articles impeachment should be brought.
00:10:12.000But on the basis of what the witnesses have had to say so far, there are any number of potentially impeachable offenses, including bribery, including high crimes and misdemeanors.
00:10:22.000The basic allegations against the president are that he sought foreign interference in a U.S.
00:10:29.000election, that he conditioned official acts on the performance of these political favors.
00:10:37.000OK, so Schiff is going to be pushing bribery.
00:10:40.000Jackie Speier, another one of these Democrats, by the way, the best part of that clip is Schiff saying that he doesn't know whether impeachment charges are going to be brought.
00:10:49.000Okay, Jackie Speier is saying the same thing, so this is becoming a Democrat talking point.
00:10:52.000So if the Republican talking point is going to be motive, the Democratic talking point is going to be bribery, and the media are dutifully repeating this, right?
00:10:58.000They've decided they are no longer going to use the language quid pro quo, which is more accurate, right?
00:11:03.000Because the question is not whether a quid pro quo happened, right?
00:11:06.000That part is factually established, that there was some sort of quid pro quo that was attempted, right?
00:11:10.000Trump was exchanging military aid for something, right?
00:11:13.000He was holding back military aid in exchange for something.
00:11:30.000The question is whether it's a decent quid pro quo or an illegal quid pro quo.
00:11:34.000So Democrats are saying bribery and the media are dutifully repeating the idea that bribery has been established when in fact that is in fact the entire question.
00:11:41.000Here's Jackie Speier again repeating the word bribery.
00:12:00.000You have a president using his official office, using taxpayer money to demand from a foreign government that they are bribed to do an investigation to dig up dirt on the president's opponent in the upcoming election.
00:12:17.000The corrupt intent is there as well in many ways.
00:12:20.000Probably the most obvious is that they put the transcript or the summary of that phone call on July 25th into a special server.
00:12:31.000Okay, there are a few holes in what she is saying here.
00:12:33.000Hole number one is that Giuliani was already in Ukraine attempting to dig up dirt presumably on the Bidens.
00:12:38.000Number two, when she says that the evidence of guilt is that they hid the transcript on the private server or on the sort of protected electronic server, Yeah, except that the New York Times has reported that Trump has been doing that with documents since basically the beginning, since everybody in his administration worked for Obama and then wanted to leak all that information.
00:12:56.000OK, so in a second, we're going to discuss who exactly are the witnesses for today, because there are eight witnesses who are expected to testify within the next week in the House impeachment inquiry.
00:13:05.000We'll tell you who those are and who are the people you're going to hear from today.
00:13:10.000We'll get to all of that in just one second.
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00:14:25.000OK, so the witnesses who are expected to be called over the course of the next week include Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who was a member of the National Security Council.
00:14:35.000He is an advisor to the National Security Council, and he was on the Ukraine call, so he can testify as to what he heard.
00:14:40.000Gordon Sondland, who is the U.S. ambassador to the EU, who's an actual important witness because Gordon Sondland is the only person of whom I'm aware in this entire shebang, except for Rudy Giuliani, who is coordinating directly with President Trump.
00:14:51.000So he may have more of a window into what Trump was thinking than anybody else who's been involved in these conversations.
00:14:56.000Basically, Sondland was talking to Trump, but Bill Taylor wasn't talking to Trump Kurt Volker wasn't talking to Trump.
00:15:02.000Marie Yovanovitch wasn't talking to Trump.
00:15:04.000So if you are trying to pin intent on Trump, you have to talk to somebody who talked to Trump, right?
00:15:09.000You can't talk to somebody who talked to somebody who talked to somebody who talked to somebody who talked to Trump.
00:15:17.000Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine, who was involved in a lot of these negotiations, but again, was not having direct negotiations with Trump himself.
00:15:25.000It was all filed through Mick Mulvaney or through Gordon Sondland.
00:15:28.000There will be two State Department officials who are the first witnesses to testify publicly.
00:15:32.000These are the guys who are testifying today.
00:15:33.000Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent and Acting Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor.
00:15:39.000And each one of them, they have an account to tell, but their account is in fact somewhat secondhand.
00:15:57.000ambassador in Ukraine, Kent appears to have been privy to how Trump's point people were trying to get Ukraine to do his bidding and how those efforts were viewed by other administration officials.
00:16:05.000He was regularly talking to Taylor, and he heard about Trump's phone call with Ukraine's president from the person who set it up, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman.
00:16:43.000Okay, well, the only way you're gonna know that is by talking to the person who actually committed the crime.
00:16:47.000You can't talk to somebody who talked to somebody who talked to somebody who talked to somebody who may have talked to the person who committed the alleged crime.
00:16:53.000And so when you're talking about George Kent, Here's what he's testified so far, because all these people, remember, have already testified behind closed doors.
00:17:00.000He testified, according to the Washington Post, that Trump wanted Ukraine's newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to publicly and explicitly announce he'd be investigating matters involving Democrats and wanted him to use the words Biden and Clinton.
00:17:12.000Kent did not hear this directly from Trump, but rather from other officials who talked to people who talked to Trump.
00:17:17.000Not even other officials who talked to Trump.
00:17:19.000Other officials who talked to people who talked to Trump.
00:17:22.000So we are now hearing this fourth-hand, fourth-hand from George Kent.
00:17:27.000I love how the Washington Post couches this.
00:17:29.000In the absence of people who talked directly to Trump testifying reliably, Kent made the starkest claim yet that the White House's effort to get Ukraine to root out corruption was actually an attempt to make them dig up dirt on Trump's 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton and a potential 2020 opponent, former VP Joe Biden.
00:17:44.000But the key part of that sentence is, in the absence of people who talked directly to Trump, so what exactly is George Kent going to say that you and I don't already know?
00:17:53.000Ken testified about how corrupt Ukrainians recruited Trump's personal lawyer to attack U.S.
00:17:57.000officials with a campaign of lies about then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, which eventually made its way to the President.
00:18:03.000And I guess that that lends some color to the idea that Rudy Giuliani was feeding bad information to the President of the United States via some of his Ukrainian colleagues.
00:18:11.000But again, there's nothing illegal about Rudy Giuliani feeding bad information to the president of the United States unless he was acting as an actual foreign lobbyist, in which case that's a criminal problem for Giuliani.
00:18:19.000But being fed bad information and acting on that bad information by President Trump is not illegal or impeachable.
00:18:29.000From Ken's private testimony, Kent said POTUS wanted nothing less than President Zelensky to go to the microphone and say, investigation Biden and Clinton.
00:18:37.000That's what Kent said he heard in a text from Taylor.
00:18:40.000Okay, but again, Taylor was not talking to Trump, nor was he privy to the conversations between Trump and Zelensky.
00:18:47.000So what exactly does Kent have to do with anything?
00:18:50.000Basically, they're now bringing in MSNBC commentators, and it could be Fox News commentator, right?
00:18:55.000Cable News commentators to talk about what they think of Trump's actions.
00:19:02.000Now, the truth is that George Kent has said a couple of things that are actually kind of helpful to Republicans.
00:19:08.000He testified in his close testimony that if Hunter Biden was on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma, well, Joe Biden was VP, that that was a conflict of interest.
00:19:17.000He also testified that he raised those concerns with the Obama White House and was rebuffed and told, quote, there was no further bandwidth to deal with Hunter.
00:19:24.000So that's testimony from George Kent that could in fact actually be damaging to the Democratic push.
00:19:31.000So that is witness number one who's being brought forth today.
00:19:33.000Then there's witness number two who's being brought forth today, and that is Bill Taylor.
00:19:36.000Bill Taylor is the guy who is texting with Gordon Sondland, the EU ambassador, as well as Kurt Volker, the special envoy to Ukraine.
00:19:43.000And the three of them appear to be sort of trying to navigate the thickets of Trump's thoughts, trying to navigate the thickets of what exactly does Trump want in order to restore this aid.
00:19:53.000Now, again, the problem with the charged affair with Bill Taylor is that he's not the one who is actually talking to Trump.
00:19:59.000And the reality is, there's only one chain of command that matters in this whole story.
00:20:04.000And that chain of command is Trump's real inner circle.
00:20:07.000The people who actually were talking with Trump about this thing.
00:20:10.000See, I've been saying this about impeachable offenses for a while.
00:20:13.000And criminal conduct or political scandals for a while.
00:20:17.000The only political scandals that in the end tend to stick to politicians are the ones that are inherently personal.
00:20:22.000Which is why sex scandals tend to be very sticky, no pun intended, for politicians.
00:20:27.000The fact is that a lot of politicians, right, if you have a financial scandal, you can always blame it on somebody else.
00:20:32.000If you're Barack Obama and your IRS starts targeting conservatives randomly, then you can always say, well, listen, I didn't tell anybody to do that.
00:20:39.000They just kind of went and did that without my permission and then we policed it.
00:20:42.000It's very difficult to pin down a scandal on a politician that is not directly connected to the politician.
00:20:47.000Sex always is directly connected to the politician, literally, physically.
00:20:50.000So it's very easy to get a politician caught in a sex scandal because who are they going to blame it on?
00:21:42.000ambassador to Ukraine, also known as the Charged Affair.
00:21:44.000Taylor is also a career diplomat and military veteran who has served in Republican and Democratic administrations, including as ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009.
00:21:52.000He was asked by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to take over after Trump had Marie Yovanovitch removed from the ambassadorship.
00:21:58.000He said it was a tough decision to return to Kiev, but ultimately he accepted Pompeo's request.
00:22:03.000He was not in the room, as the Washington Post acknowledges, where the alleged quid pro quo orders were issued.
00:22:08.000But he was talking to many people who were in the key rooms, both in Washington and in Kiev.
00:22:11.000So again, we have second-hand or third-hand testimony.
00:22:14.000In his closed testimony, he was asked specifically if he'd ever spoken to President Trump.
00:23:09.000The Washington Post, though, is talking him up.
00:23:12.000They say he testified that he learned via conversations with White House aides and national security officials and Trump's point people in Ukraine.
00:23:17.000There was a concerted effort to force Ukraine into a quid pro quo.
00:23:20.000If it wanted military aid and an Oval Office meeting, Ukraine's president needed to publicly agree to investigate Democrats.
00:23:25.000What's critical about Taylor's testimony is that he didn't attribute this to one conversation with one person.
00:23:30.000He talked to high level officials at the National Security Council, officials in Ukraine's presidential office, and two of the three amigos designated by Trump to handle Ukraine policy outside the normal diplomatic channels.
00:23:40.000Taylor said he was in the regular channel.
00:23:41.000He said he was also in the irregular channel.
00:23:44.000Now, there are a bunch of people who have similar perceptions of all of this.
00:23:49.000Taylor's testimony was corroborated by a bunch of other people, including National Security Council official Tim Morrison.
00:23:55.000Gordon Sondland originally testified he didn't remember offering Ukraine a quid pro quo to unfreeze its military aid, but then Sondland went back and revised all of that.
00:24:04.000This is why the testimony that's really going to matter here is Sondland's testimony.
00:24:09.000Even in his own testimony, by the way, Taylor explicitly said that Trump didn't direct all of this, that he didn't know if Trump directed all of this.
00:24:19.000So Lee Zeldin asked him, where was this condition coming from if you're not sure if it was coming from the president?
00:24:24.000And Taylor said, I think it was coming from Mr. Giuliani.
00:24:26.000And Zeldin said, but not from the president?
00:24:33.000And what exactly does Giuliani have to say?
00:24:36.000Okay, in just one second, we're going to get to the outstanding questions here.
00:24:40.000Also, we're going to introduce you to some of the players who you're going to be hearing about in the very near future, because they are not actual members of Congress.
00:24:46.000They're just advising the Democrats and advising the Republicans.
00:24:48.000We'll give you their background, and it gives you a window into the strategy being pursued by both Democrats and Republicans.
00:24:53.000We'll get to all of that in just one second.
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00:25:56.000Again, that's PolicyGenius, the easy way to compare and buy home insurance.
00:26:03.000Okay, so there are a bunch of outstanding questions that we still need answered in this impeachment inquiry.
00:26:07.000Amber Phillips over at the Washington Post actually has a fairly good roundup of the questions that still need answering.
00:26:12.000And the fact is, Democrats are not going to get the answers from the witnesses that they are proposing to interview right now.
00:26:17.000Question number one, who is directing all of this?
00:26:19.000Did Trump himself order aid withheld to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political opponents?
00:26:23.000Or were some people in his administration acting of their own volition or their interpretation of what he wanted?
00:26:28.000And by the way, that last phrase is the key.
00:26:30.000Their interpretation of what he wanted.
00:26:31.000What we have seen with President Trump over and over and over again is that people who work for him are constantly trying to forecast what he wants.
00:26:39.000The most obvious example is there was talk back when Trump was visiting South Korea that people had ordered the cover-up of the USS John McCain, like the logo of the USS John McCain.
00:26:49.000And then it turned out Trump hadn't ordered any of that.
00:26:50.000It was just some intrepid, forward-thinking member of his administration trying to please him preemptively.
00:26:57.000Is it possible that people around him were saying things like, yeah, you know, I can see that Trump is really bothered by all of this, but the thing he's really bothered by is Joe Biden.
00:27:05.000And so we really need the Joe Biden statement.
00:27:07.000The statement will probably please Trump.
00:27:09.000Did Trump demand the statement or was that something concocted by other members of his team in order to sort of please Trump?
00:27:15.000And that makes a difference because, again, to go back to the Obama IRS example, let's say you wanted to impeach Barack Obama back in 2015.
00:27:21.000Over the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, they were targeting conservative 501c3s and preventing them from receiving their 501c3 status on the basis of ideology, a violation of IRS regulation and the First Amendment.
00:27:32.000And he said, OK, well, Obama clearly wanted that to happen.
00:27:34.000He was going out and publicly calling for it to happen, in fact.
00:27:37.000He and fellow Democrats were suggesting that the IRS do just that.
00:27:43.000Well, Obama would say, well, yeah, but I didn't order anybody to do that.
00:27:45.000I'm the president of the United States.
00:27:47.000If I want to order somebody to do that, theoretically, I could, but I didn't.
00:27:50.000That was just people taking the law into their own hands and trying to forecast what I wanted.
00:27:53.000Well, Trump could easily say the same thing here.
00:27:56.000In September, as all this was getting started, the Washington Post reported that Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold off on aid just before Trump called Ukraine's new president and asked for political investigations.
00:28:06.000But weeks of interviews with current and former officials have yet to connect the dots that Trump explicitly ordered the aid withheld to force Ukraine to do something for him.
00:28:17.000If you can't link it directly to Trump, if it was just people around Trump who were getting out over their skis because they were trying to please Trump preemptively, well, that's not going to get Trump.
00:28:26.000According to the Washington Post, what was Mick Mulvaney's role?
00:28:29.000They say if anyone knows why the aid was paused, it's likely Mulvaney.
00:28:32.000He publicly said Trump held up the money to try and force Ukraine to investigate a conspiracy theory about their involvement in the 2016 election.
00:28:39.000He said, did Trump also mention to me the past corruption related to the DNC server?
00:28:53.000But again, that's not illegitimate, right?
00:28:54.000If Trump said, I want to hold up the aid until you, Ukraine, investigate corruption surrounding 2016, I fail to understand how that is any different in any way from Senator Bob Menendez and two other Democratic senators in 2018.
00:29:07.000Sending a letter to Ukraine saying if you don't help with the Mueller investigation to get to the bottom of Russian interference in the 2016 election, then we're going to hold up the aid.
00:29:15.000There is, in fact, an ongoing investigation into Ukrainian and Russian interference in the American election.
00:29:22.000The results of the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation from the IG are supposed to come out very, very soon, like sometime this month.
00:29:30.000Then there is the question of Rudy Giuliani, and this is the big one to me.
00:29:33.000Because Rudy is the guy who Trump dispatched to Ukraine, and Rudy has the biggest mouth.
00:29:40.000So, was Rudy deployed to Ukraine to go dig up dirt explicitly on the Bidens, or was this about assuaging Trump's feelings about 2016?
00:29:47.000Was he investigating corruption in Ukraine that had to do with 2016, or was he looking forward to sinking Joe Biden in 2020 by digging up dirt on Joe Biden?
00:29:57.000And the only person who's going to be able to testify to that is Rudy Giuliani.
00:30:00.000And Giuliani, so far, has said publicly that his whole thing is that he wants to defend Trump against allegations.
00:30:05.000Well, defending Trump against allegations is, in fact, tied up in something that does have national security implications.
00:30:11.000Meaning, if the allegations are that Trump was involved in skewing the election of 2016, and so Giuliani is out there trying to dig up other information about people interfering in the 2016 election, there's nothing illegitimate about that.
00:30:22.000We just did a two-and-a-half-year investigation about foreign interference in American elections.
00:30:27.000If, however, it was about Giuliani digging up dirt on Biden in order to benefit Trump for 2020, and then Trump militarizing that with Ukrainian foreign aid, then you got a problem on your hands.
00:30:36.000Okay, we're gonna get to more of this, more of the analysis of Impeachmentgate.
00:30:47.000Well, you're really missing out if you're not.
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00:31:31.000Again, we don't know Giuliani's role, we don't know Mulvaney's role, we don't know whether Trump directly ordered any of this.
00:31:37.000The Washington Post suggests, if Giuliani was acting of his own volition, his motives are unclear.
00:31:41.000We know that two of his business associates who were recently indicted on campaign finance charges had ties to Ukraine, and State Department officials have testified they may have felt threatened by anti-corruption efforts U.S.
00:31:50.000diplomats were leading against some Ukrainian officials.
00:31:52.000Okay, well, let's say, in the most nefarious circumstance, let's say that there's an accusation made that these Ukrainian officials were trying to make time with the Trump administration by using Giuliani as a funnel for information.
00:32:04.000And they were funneling damaging information about Biden, about Ukraine, about corruption via Giuliani to Trump.
00:32:10.000Does that implicate Trump or go to Trump's motive?
00:32:31.000Let's say that Gordon Sondland was misinterpreting Trump, and then he went over to Ukraine and said, we want Biden.
00:32:37.000Well, without showing that Sondland was told by Trump to go get Biden, maybe that's Sondland who is acting on his own, not because he hates Biden, but because he is trying to forecast the feelings of the President of the United States.
00:32:48.000The Washington Post suggests Sunlin testified he told the Ukrainians they were likely to get their aid released when they announced an investigation into Democrats.
00:32:55.000But again, likely to get their aid released means that he is speculating.
00:32:59.000ambassador in Ukraine, Bill Taylor, was in close contact with the Ukrainians.
00:33:02.000He testified they knew what was being asked of them and they didn't want to do it.
00:33:05.000He said, I think it was becoming clear to the Ukrainians that to get this meeting they wanted, they'd have to commit to pursuing these investigations.
00:33:12.000Whether Ukraine knew it was being forced into something would go a long way to confirming a quid pro quo, but Democrats are actually backing off of this proposition because they don't like the idea they're going to have to actually prove the elements of bribery.
00:33:22.000Instead, they think that the president's attempt to simply hold back the taxpayer aid for unspecified reasons could theoretically be enough.
00:33:32.000Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, he said, extortion doesn't require a you give me this and I'll give you that kind of quid pro quo.
00:33:37.000It simply requires using your muscle to get something that you don't have a right to.
00:33:41.000Okay, but you haven't established what exactly he doesn't have a right to yet, or that he was applying muscle in order to get that thing.
00:33:49.000If I tell you that I'm not going to pay you until you give me that hamburger, that's called a free market transaction.
00:33:54.000If I tell you I'm not going to pay you until you off my wife, that is a very different sort of transaction.
00:33:59.000So we actually have to determine what kind of transaction this is.
00:34:04.000And the fifth question is really the big one, which is why did Trump withhold the aid in the first place?
00:34:46.000Also, he believes that something corrupt is going on with Burisma and Biden.
00:34:50.000And he believes that that impacted the 2016 election because obviously if the Ukrainians were working hand in glove with the Obama administration to get him and covering up for the Bidens, that's a big problem.
00:35:24.000Not unless what you're talking about is the president really attempting to leverage American foreign aid on behalf of his electoral results.
00:36:33.000Okay, so now we need to introduce you to a couple of the players who are going to become pretty important in this whole impeachment inquiry.
00:36:41.000The Democrats have an impeachment lawyer.
00:36:42.000The Republicans have an impeachment lawyer.
00:36:45.000The Democrats impeachment lawyer is a person named Daniel Goldman.
00:36:48.000He spent a decade as an assistant U.S.
00:36:51.000He left that job in 2016 to become a TV legal analyst, but now he is going to be questioning witnesses called to testify about Trump's efforts to persuade Ukraine to investigate a political rival.
00:37:03.000Again, alleged efforts to persuade Ukraine to investigate a political rival would be more honest, Washington Post.
00:37:09.000The Washington Post reports that Goldman is slotted to question each witness for 45 minutes, followed by five-minute question sessions for each lawmaker.
00:37:16.000Stephen Castor, the general counsel for the House Oversight Committee, will be the Republican's point man.
00:37:21.000Apparently, Goldman has been doing high-profile cases for quite a long time, and he has focused specifically on organized crime.
00:37:30.000attorney Brooke Cuccinella was preparing for the trial of Billy Walters, a professional gambler who made millions on insider stock trades, she knew it would make big headlines because the case involved Phil Mickelson.
00:37:40.000Cuccinella said she requested Goldman to be on the trial team because he has a bit of swagger as a trial lawyer and has a confidence that serves him well in a courtroom.
00:38:19.000To the extent the public will be watching him and looking for a credible questioner, I think they'll be very impressed with Dan Goldman.
00:38:27.000Papparara said that the impeachment hearing will be challenging, even for a skilled trial lawyer, because of the proceeding's unusual nature.
00:38:32.000He said impeachment is fully 100% a legal event, in that it's a constitutional enterprise right from the start.
00:38:37.000At the same time, the nature of the constitutional proceeding is a dynamic that includes two political branches, so it's political in that sense, but not political in the pejorative sense.
00:38:45.000That's how the founders wanted this to happen.
00:38:48.000He says that he thinks that Goldman will handle the spotlight well.
00:38:52.000Goldman, by the way, had prosecuted a number of the Genovese mobsters, including a hitman named Fyotis Fredi Gias.
00:38:59.000He also prosecuted a sprawling auto insurance fraud case involving Russian organized crime figures.
00:39:04.000So his job is going to be to connect the dots on behalf of the Democrats.
00:39:10.000Meanwhile, on the Republican side of the aisle, there's a man named Stephen Castor, who's the GOP staff attorney.
00:39:15.000The Washington Post reports that Castor will help lead the effort as General Counsel for the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
00:39:22.000Castor has spent his career avoiding media spotlight.
00:39:24.000He's risen through the ranks over nearly 15 years and seven consecutive chairmanships to become the Oversight Panel's top GOP lawyer.
00:39:32.000A half-dozen former colleagues and bosses praised him as a straight-shooting attorney whose deliberate low-key style will make him an asset to Republicans amid intense public scrutiny of the impeachment hearings.
00:39:40.000Daryl Issa said that Caster's job is to focus on making complex things simple.
00:39:43.000Daryl Issa said that Caster's job is to focus on making complex things simple.
00:39:58.000Issa said he wouldn't want to play poker because he doesn't give up what he's thinking particularly easily.
00:40:02.000Caster was originally hired by the Oversight Committee Chairman Tom Davis in 2016.
00:40:06.000He had spent four years as a commercial litigator at the Philadelphia and Washington offices of the law firm Blank Rome.
00:40:13.000One of his first investigations involved the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina.
00:40:18.000As part of that probe, the GOP-led committee held nine hearings, obtained more than half a million pages of documents, and released a 569-page final report critical of the Bush White House.
00:40:28.000Also, he helped handle the probes of Benghazi and the Fast and Furious scandal.
00:40:34.000So a lot of, even Democrats, suggest that this guy is an institutionalist who is a solid lawyer.
00:40:41.000So those will be two of the faces that you see cropping up throughout this entire process.
00:40:47.000Meanwhile, President Trump continues to fulminate.
00:40:49.000The best thing that Trump can do here is to sit still.
00:40:51.000I mean, again, this has always been true.
00:40:53.000It was true during the Mueller report.
00:41:14.000Apparently, however, inside the White House, there are constant conversations about firing people, which is obviously going to be a bad move.
00:41:21.000Apparently, Trump immediately wanted to fire Mick Mulvaney after Mulvaney went out there and said there was a quid pro quo.
00:41:27.000According to the Washington Post, senior advisors have cautioned Trump that removing Mulvaney at such a sensitive time could be perilous, both because Mulvaney played an integral role in the decision to freeze the aid and because of the disruption that would be caused by replacing one of Trump's most senior aides.
00:41:40.000One Trump advisor says, I don't think you'll see him going anywhere until after December.
00:41:43.000But the president was very unhappy with that press conference.
00:41:46.000That was a very bad day for the president.
00:41:47.000Well, the problem is you oust Mulvaney.
00:41:49.000And now what exactly is Mulvaney's interest in not going and testifying about what Trump ordered him to do, particularly if he's the one who ends up coming into the crosshairs here?
00:41:59.000Trump's advisors are saying, well, you ousted Bolton and now Bolton is flirting with testifying, so why would it be smart to get rid of Mulvaney?
00:42:06.000Plus, it would look to the public, the Democrats would make the case that the reason you fired Mulvaney is not because he was fibbing or because he was exaggerating, but because he was telling the truth.
00:42:13.000That he said something you didn't like, so you fired him.
00:42:16.000And by the way, they're going to use the exact same logic with regard to this other rumor, which is that Trump was apparently considering firing the intelligence community inspector general who reported the whistleblower complaint to Congress.
00:42:28.000According to the New York Times, Mr. Trump's private complaints about a man named Michael Atkinson, the Intel Community Inspector General, who deemed the complaint against him to be credible.
00:42:38.000According to the New York Times, Trump's private complaints about Mr. Atkinson have come as he has publicly questioned his integrity and accused him of working with the Democrats to sabotage his presidency.
00:42:47.000It's unclear about how far Trump's discussions about removing Atkinson have progressed.
00:42:51.000Two people familiar with what took place said they thought Trump was just venting and insisted Mr. Atkinson's dismissal was never under serious consideration.
00:43:27.000Those are all the ones that are going to matter at this time.
00:43:29.000Now, meanwhile, the Democrats are trying to beat Trump to the punch a little bit here because the Justice Department Inspector General is now inviting witnesses to review his draft of his Russia report.
00:43:38.000And Democrats are deeply afraid that the origins of the Trump Russia report are simply going to lend credibility to Trump's claims that they have been trying to target him via the intelligence community.
00:43:47.000Since before he was President of the United States, according to the Washington Post, the Justice Department's Inspector General has begun scheduling witnesses to review draft sections of his report on the FBI's investigation of President Trump's 2016 campaign.
00:43:58.000The clearest indication yet that the long-awaited document will soon be released publicly, people familiar with the matter said, and that will be a bombshell dropped right in the middle of the impeachment hearings.
00:44:07.000If it turns out that there was malfeasance by the Obama administration, in coordination perhaps with Ukrainian sources, as Politico reported, That is going to throw a bombshell into the middle of this because then it looks like Trump is really upset about something that actually happened.
00:44:20.000Ukrainian coordination with members of the Hillary campaign and the Obama administration.
00:44:25.000That Trump is really upset about the coordination of Democrats to suggest that he did things that he did not do.
00:44:33.000According to the Washington Post, several witnesses have been scheduled or in talks to review sections of the report dealing with their testimony in the next two weeks.
00:44:40.000That could mean public release is imminent, though the witnesses will be allowed to submit feedback, which could theoretically spark more investigative work and slow down the process.
00:44:49.000But again, if this thing is released in the near future, wow, it will definitely throw a wrench into the entire impeachment hearing.
00:44:58.000The Washington Post reported earlier this month the DOJ was trying to release the report quickly.
00:45:03.000One person involved said November 20th was being eyed as a target date.
00:45:07.000Lest you forget, today is November 13th, so one week from today, in the middle of the hearings, the DOJ report on Trump-Russia investigation origins could break, which would be just wild.
00:45:19.000Another person indicated the report was more likely to be released after Thanksgiving.
00:45:23.000But we are starting to get close, in other words.
00:45:28.000As the Washington Post suggests correctly, conservatives hope the report will give them ammunition to argue the FBI was corrupt in its pursuit of Trump and his alleged ties to Russia, and Republican lawmakers have been pressing the DOJ to make the report public next week.
00:45:39.000Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa tweeted, quote, I will be very disappointed and left to wonder what the game is.
00:45:43.000Is someone at the FBI or DOJ tying the IG's hands?
00:45:46.000So, again, this is the next two weeks are going to be a mess.
00:46:03.000They still have not decided whether, in fact, they want a revolution at the top of the Democratic ticket or whether they simply want a return to normalcy.
00:46:10.000Joe Biden would be the return to normalcy candidate, and then you have Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders campaigning for the revolutionary title.
00:46:17.000Certain candidates are basically done.
00:46:18.000So Kamala Harris is basically finished, right?
00:46:20.000She's down at 1% in the polls in New Hampshire.
00:46:36.000That's not a great reason to get rid of a candidate, but when the crazy laugh attaches to lack of credibility and ridiculous policy proposals, you're pretty much toast.
00:46:42.000Here's Kamala Harris laughing eerily over the last couple of days.
00:48:29.000I'm in the middle of a book by Yannick Wasserman, who's an economist.
00:48:32.000It's called The Marginal Revolutionaries, and it is an excellent book.
00:48:35.000It is all about the Austrian school of economics.
00:48:38.000I tend to think of myself as a devotee of the Austrian school of economics, but it talks about the different sort of views within the Austrian school, right?
00:48:45.000Hayek did not agree with von Mises, who did not agree with Schumpeter, These were all different thinkers and it's a fascinating sort of discussion of where the Austrian school came from, what its thought processes were, why in some cases Austrian economics has been exaggerated in terms of libertarianism.
00:49:05.000A lot of these economists were in favor of, for example, progressive income tax.
00:49:09.000It really does lend a lot of color to some of the basic thought that you would read if you just read The Road to Serfdom.
00:49:16.000The economists really did shape America in tremendous ways, because the battle between the Austrian School of Economics and then its sort of branching successor, the Chicago School of Economics, on the one side, and then the Keynesians on the others, it's really shaped how Americans think about economics.
00:49:30.000And now, of course, you have the actual Marxists who are coming back into play, which is absurd.
00:49:33.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:49:40.000So, if you think that Democratic cities are good evidence that Democrats should govern, I have some news for you.
00:49:46.000San Francisco's new DA says that public urination will not be prosecuted, so that's exciting stuff.
00:49:50.000Chase Abudin, the urine and feces-plagued city's incoming district attorney, according to the Daily Caller, pledged during the campaign not to prosecute public urination and other quality-of-life crimes if he was elected.
00:50:01.000He declared victory on Saturday night after results showed him winning a plurality of votes in the DA race.
00:50:06.000He said we will not prosecute cases involving quality of life crimes, crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc.
00:50:15.000should not and will not be prosecuted.
00:50:18.000He said many of these crimes are still being prosecuted.
00:50:19.000We have a long way to go to decriminalize poverty and homelessness.
00:50:25.000You are criminalizing people sleeping on the streets, spreading disease, living in their own filth, pooping on the sidewalks, pissing on the sidewalks, blocking children from going where they need to go, camping in public parks.
00:50:40.000Because the radicals of the Democratic Party, this is the America they want.
00:50:44.000And by the way, things are not going fantastically well in Democrat-governed cities where they have taken up this sort of policy.
00:50:52.000The New York Post reported that a homeless man dumped a bucket of hot diarrhea on an LA woman near the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
00:50:58.000Heidi Van Tassel said she was about to drive home from a Thai restaurant near the famed tourist area in April when her alleged assailant, Jerry Blessings, dragged her out of the vehicle.
00:51:06.000He pulled her over into the middle of the street where he dumped a bucket of feces over her head, she said.
00:51:12.000I was soaked and it was coming off my eyelashes and into my eyes.
00:51:16.000Presumably this all would have been okay if the guy hadn't just dumped it.
00:51:19.000If he just sort of like pushed the bucket at her and it had sort of spilled, then I guess that's not prosecutable in the city of Los Angeles.
00:51:25.000She was tested for infectious diseases and thank God she came up clean.
00:51:30.000But she said that apparently the paramedics said that it looked like the man had been saving all of this up for about a month.