The Ben Shapiro Show - Whistleblower Comes Up Empty | Ep. 869

00:00:00.000 The long-awaited whistleblower report is declassified and released, but does it help Democrats in their impeachment efforts?

00:00:06.000 Plus, Trump fires back.

00:00:07.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:08.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:09.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:19.000 The whistleblower report that was so scrutinized and examined and talked about in the past few days, finally it has been released to the public, a declassified version, which means very mild redactions, in the whistleblower report.

00:00:32.000 Now, remember, this whistleblower report was basically the inception of the entire Ukraine scandal.

00:00:36.000 So the whistleblower report was filed with the inspector general of the intelligence community by a member of the intelligence community back on September 9th.

00:00:44.000 The Congress was notified about it on September 9th.

00:00:46.000 On September 11th, President Trump restored aid to Ukraine.

00:00:49.000 And the whistleblower report was seen as sort of the be-all end-all in terms of the beginning of the examination of President Trump's activities with regard to Ukraine.

00:00:57.000 So as always, I want to recap in 30 seconds what exactly we are talking about, because this stuff gets very complex.

00:01:03.000 In 2016, Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States, was presiding over the withholding of $1 billion in loan guarantees to Ukraine.

00:01:10.000 He was doing so explicitly saying he wanted a certain prosecutor named Viktor Shokin fired in Ukraine because he was widely perceived to be corrupt.

00:01:17.000 Now at the same time, Shokin was allegedly investigating a company on which on whose board Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden was sitting.

00:01:25.000 There have been reports since that perhaps that investigation had already been basically put down and was no longer active.

00:01:31.000 Nonetheless, this raised a lot of hackles and suspicions, especially in Trump world and with President Trump specifically.

00:01:36.000 So President Trump then deployed Rudy Giuliani in the aftermath of the election to Ukraine to investigate what exactly went on with Hunter Biden and Joe Biden in Ukraine, among other issues, including his suspicion that the hack of the DNC may not have been Russian after all.

00:01:52.000 That CrowdStrike, the company that was hired to examine Hillary Clinton's servers, was in fact a Ukrainian proxy company and all this, a bit of a conspiracy theory.

00:01:59.000 Okay, so that was the lead up to July.

00:02:01.000 In July, President Trump withdrew aid from Ukraine.

00:02:05.000 He did not really explain why he was withdrawing aid from Ukraine.

00:02:07.000 Everybody was sort of puzzled.

00:02:08.000 A week later, he held a call with the president of Ukraine.

00:02:11.000 The transcript of that call was the subject of yesterday's show and the subject of tremendous speculation and hubbub.

00:02:16.000 Was President Trump pressuring Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden by withholding military aid from them in a time when they are effectively at war with Russian proxy groups in Ukraine?

00:02:26.000 Was he withholding the sort of aid necessary to protect the people of Ukraine in order to advance his own domestic political agenda?

00:02:31.000 That was the accusation.

00:02:32.000 The transcripts came out yesterday, and the transcript basically showed that while President Trump was having conversations with Ukraine about aid, he was also having conversations about ways that he thought that Ukraine could clean up its corrupt act, what kind of cases were being investigated.

00:02:47.000 There was no clear quid pro quo, but if you were inclined to believe that Trump was pushing a quid pro quo, then the transcript certainly does not disabuse you of that notion.

00:02:56.000 On the other hand, if you think that the transcript definitely proves that Trump was in fact pressuring Ukraine specifically to investigate Joe Biden using American taxpayer dollars as the lever, well, that is not exactly proved by the transcript either.

00:03:09.000 The member of the intelligence community got wind, second-hand, of this phone call, and then he reported it up the ladder to the Inspector General of the intelligence community, who proceeded to report the existence of this whistleblower report to Congress.

00:03:25.000 Well, this led the Congress to say, OK, hand over the whistleblower report.

00:03:27.000 So the Trump administration originally said, OK, well, here's the transcript.

00:03:30.000 We'll just give you the transcript.

00:03:31.000 But we won't give you the whistleblower report, which led people to think, OK, well, what's in the whistleblower report?

00:03:36.000 They don't want you to see.

00:03:36.000 Well, now the Trump administration has turned over the whistleblower report and has declassified the whistleblower report.

00:03:42.000 So now we know what's in there.

00:03:43.000 And as it turns out, the Democrats Who are sort of counting on as late as yesterday, we're counting on the whistleblower report going way above and beyond what the transcript said.

00:03:52.000 If they believe the transcript was not enough for impeachment, maybe the whistleblower report would point them in the right direction or would be the other shoe to drop.

00:03:59.000 Well, it turns out none of that is true.

00:04:01.000 It turns out that the whistleblower report is effectively a lot of hearsay.

00:04:05.000 The whistleblower report is secondhand reported by somebody in the intelligence community.

00:04:09.000 It mentions a few different issues, none of which are nearly as sort of suspicious as even the transcript of the original telephone call.

00:04:17.000 In fact, the whistleblower report seems to be milder in many ways and less harmful to the Trump administration, to President Trump personally, than the actual transcript of the phone call that the Trump administration released yesterday.

00:04:30.000 So now we have a copy of the whistleblower complaint, this much-ballyhooed whistleblower complaint.

00:04:35.000 And the Republicans had been urging its public release.

00:04:37.000 Democrats actually seem to be a little bit less interested in public release.

00:04:41.000 And now we see why.

00:04:42.000 Because the whistleblower report, it turns out, kind of a nothing burger.

00:04:46.000 Kind of.

00:04:47.000 Only because we already have the transcript.

00:04:48.000 We know what Trump said.

00:04:49.000 So this looks like a summary of a document that we already have.

00:04:52.000 Right, we now have more information at our disposal because the transcript has been made available than the whistleblowers did when he wrote the report.

00:04:59.000 So the whistleblower report reads very speculatively.

00:05:01.000 Whereas the transcript is the transcript, and we went through it word-for-word yesterday on the podcast and the radio show.

00:05:06.000 You can go back and listen to those if you want, like a word-for-word analysis of what exactly went down.

00:05:11.000 My read on that transcript of the phone call is that Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, clearly was attempting to broker some sort of deal to restore military aid, and President Trump was talking in a completely different direction.

00:05:22.000 Which, again, is not unique to conversations with President Trump.

00:05:25.000 He does this a lot.

00:05:26.000 You're talking to him about X, and he's talking to you about Y, and he does not listen, and so there's no actual meeting of the minds in the middle of the conversation, and that appears to be the case in that conversation, like many of the conversations in which Trump engages.

00:05:37.000 Well, now we have the whistleblower complaint, and we're gonna go through it for you, because information first here on the show, and then we'll get to opinion.

00:05:43.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.

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00:06:58.000 Okay, so now to the actual text of the whistleblower complaint, because we're gonna provide you all the information.

00:07:05.000 You're an adult.

00:07:06.000 You can make your own decisions on what you think the information means, but I'm gonna provide you the information.

00:07:10.000 I'll give you some analysis along the way.

00:07:11.000 So here is the whistleblower report.

00:07:13.000 Dear Chairman Burr and Chairman Schiff, I am reporting an urgent concern in accordance with the procedures outlined in 50 U.S.

00:07:20.000 Code 3033.

00:07:21.000 This letter is unclassified when separated from the attachment.

00:07:25.000 In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S.

00:07:28.000 government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S.

00:07:35.000 election.

00:07:36.000 This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President's main domestic political rivals.

00:07:43.000 The president's personal lawyer, Mr. Rudy Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort.

00:07:46.000 Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.

00:07:48.000 Now again, because this is based on secondhand information, it now appears that Attorney General Barr was not really involved in this particular investigation.

00:07:58.000 The reason, presumably, that the whistleblower is saying this is because he had a second-hand report that Trump mentioned Attorney General Barr and Rudy Giuliani in his conversation with Zelensky, but as we now know, Barr really had nothing to do with anything.

00:08:10.000 That's just Trump mouthing off, because the way Trump thinks, the way his brain works, is he goes, Giuliani's my lawyer.

00:08:15.000 You know who else is my lawyer?

00:08:16.000 William Barr.

00:08:16.000 You should talk to both of them.

00:08:17.000 Well, one of them's the Attorney General.

00:08:19.000 One of them is Trump's personal attorney.

00:08:21.000 Their missions do not match.

00:08:22.000 So remember, the whistleblower knows less.

00:08:24.000 This is very important.

00:08:25.000 The whistleblower knew less when writing this complaint than you and I now know about what happened in that conversation with Zelensky.

00:08:32.000 Because you and I have gone through the transcript of the conversation.

00:08:35.000 The whistleblower had no access to that transcript, and so was operating off second-hand sources.

00:08:40.000 So what's more important, the primary or the secondary sources?

00:08:44.000 Obviously the answer is the primary sources.

00:08:46.000 Okay, so there are a few wrinkles here that will add some fire to the Democratic investigation, a little bit, at least give them some areas where they can push in the investigation.

00:08:56.000 So the whistleblower complaint says, over the past four months, more than a half a dozen U.S.

00:08:59.000 officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort.

00:09:02.000 The information provided herein was relayed to me in the course of official interagency business.

00:09:07.000 It is routine for U.S. 0.92

00:09:08.000 officials with responsibility for a particular regional or functional portfolio to share such information with one another in order to inform policymaking and analysis.

00:09:16.000 In other words, this guy's saying, I'm not a political hack out there to get Trump.

00:09:18.000 People are just sort of coming to me with all the information.

00:09:21.000 That's important because Trump has suggested that this whistleblower is in fact a political hack who favors Joe Biden.

00:09:26.000 And the inspector general himself said that there may be political bias at work here.

00:09:31.000 And by the way, important to note here, the whistleblower himself wants to be able to testify in front of Congress, but his lawyers, according to the New York Times, are saying that he hopes to remain anonymous.

00:09:41.000 Good luck with that.

00:09:43.000 Good luck with that.

00:09:43.000 You've just put forth one of the most bombshell political documents in modern political history that could lead to the impeachment of the President of the United States for the third time in American history, and you want to remain anonymous?

00:09:56.000 Good luck.

00:09:57.000 Good luck, dude.

00:09:58.000 He says, I was not, I mean this is on page one, the whistleblower, I was not a direct witness to most of the events described.

00:10:05.000 However, I found my colleague's accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another.

00:10:12.000 In addition, a variety of information consistent with these private accounts has been reported publicly.

00:10:17.000 So again, he knows less than you do.

00:10:19.000 When he writes this report, he doesn't know as much about the transcript.

00:10:22.000 You know more.

00:10:23.000 You've heard it.

00:10:24.000 You've read it.

00:10:25.000 He says, I am deeply concerned that the actions described below constitute a serious or flagrant problem, abuse or violation of law or executive order that does not include differences of opinions concerning public policy matters consistent with the definition of an urgent concern under the law.

00:10:38.000 I am therefore fulfilling my duty to report this information through proper legal channels to the relevant authorities.

00:10:43.000 Now, this is the right thing to do.

00:10:45.000 I mean, it is.

00:10:47.000 If you're suspicious that something is going on, reporting it up the chain is the right thing to do.

00:10:51.000 Leaking it to the media would be the wrong thing to do.

00:10:53.000 There is something to the notion that there are members of the intelligence community who despise Trump and have been consistently leaking material that would supposedly damage him for the past three years, going all the way back to the campaign, but moving forward through the investigation of Trump-Russia ties.

00:11:08.000 And there is a belief that the intelligence community basically that maybe this whistleblower far from being super duper honest as we have been told by people including Joseph Maguire who is the president's own appointee as acting director of national intelligence maybe the whistleblower really doesn't like Trump and the whistleblower is seeking to as as they say who the president and do that because He has access to information.

00:11:31.000 However that works, he didn't do the wrong thing by leaking it to the press, right?

00:11:34.000 You gotta give him credit for that, right?

00:11:35.000 He did report it up the chain.

00:11:37.000 He used common sense protocols.

00:11:40.000 He did everything by the book.

00:11:41.000 And for all the people who are out there like, well, this is just like Edward Snowden said it would be.

00:11:45.000 If you reported up the chain, nothing happens.

00:11:47.000 Actually, if you reported up the chain, as opposed to, you know, running to Russia like Edward Snowden did, you know what happens?

00:11:52.000 This, like an impeachment inquiry.

00:11:54.000 Anyway, he says, I'm also concerned that these actions pose risks to U.S.

00:11:57.000 national security and undermine the U.S.

00:11:59.000 government's efforts to deter and counter foreign interference in U.S.

00:12:02.000 elections.

00:12:03.000 To the best of my knowledge, the entirety of the statement is unclassified.

00:12:07.000 Okay, now he gets to the meat of the matter.

00:12:09.000 So he says, the July 25th presidential phone call.

00:12:12.000 Now, here's the thing.

00:12:13.000 Again, we've read the transcript.

00:12:14.000 So we can analyze how true to form this whistleblower's complaints are against the content of the transcript itself.

00:12:20.000 He says, early in the morning of 25th of July, the president spoke by telephone with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

00:12:26.000 I do not know which side initiated the call.

00:12:28.000 This was the first publicly acknowledged call between the two leaders since a brief congratulatory call after Zelensky won the presidency on April 21st.

00:12:35.000 Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the president used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests.

00:12:44.000 Namely, he sought to pressure the Ukrainian leader to take actions to help the president's 2020 re-election bid.

00:12:50.000 Now that's interpretation.

00:12:51.000 It is.

00:12:52.000 The Biden part probably is designed to advance his personal interests, you could say.

00:12:59.000 It is also possible the president was just listing off stuff he thought was corrupt in Ukraine.

00:13:03.000 Which is also how the president's mind works.

00:13:05.000 You don't know.

00:13:06.000 You can be suspicious, but again, if you're going to impeach, you need more than just you're suspicious.

00:13:09.000 According to the White House officials who had direct knowledge of the call, the president pressured Mr. Zelensky to enter Aliyah, initiate or continue an investigation into the activities of former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son Hunter, assist in purportedly uncovering allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S.

00:13:25.000 presidential election actually originated in Ukraine, with a specific request that the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the DNC and examined by the U.S.

00:13:34.000 cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which initially reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC's networks in 2016, and meet or speak with two people the president named explicitly as his personal envoys on these matters, Giuliani and Barr, to whom the president referred multiple times in tandem.

00:13:50.000 Okay, so, couple of things.

00:13:52.000 One, it is important to distinguish between these various requests.

00:13:57.000 So, to start, the whistleblower's complaint, at least factually, I'm not saying his interpretation, but factually this is accurate, right?

00:14:03.000 We've read the transcript, this is a fair representation of the phone call, although it is adding a patina of opinion, which is that Trump pressured Zelensky, as opposed to Trump requested that Zelensky do X and didn't overtly connect it to military aid.

00:14:17.000 Also, The question is whether Trump is requesting this stuff because it helps Trump, or because it is in the interest of the United States to find out what exactly happened with things like CrowdStrike, at least in Trump's mind.

00:14:27.000 Okay.

00:14:28.000 The President also praised Ukraine's Prosecutor General, Mr. Yuri Lutsenko, and suggested that Zelensky might want to keep him in his position.

00:14:35.000 Note, starting in March 2019, Mr. Lutsenko made a series of public allegations, many of which he later walked back, about the Biden family's activities in Ukraine.

00:14:43.000 Ukrainian officials purported involvement in the 2016 U.S.

00:14:46.000 election and the activities of the U.S.

00:14:48.000 embassy in Kiev.

00:14:49.000 The White House officials who told me this information, says the whistleblower, were deeply disturbed by what had transpired in the phone call.

00:14:56.000 They told me there was already a discussion ongoing with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood, in the officials' retelling, that they had witnessed the president abuse his office for personal gain.

00:15:06.000 Now, this is weird, okay?

00:15:07.000 This is the part of the complaint that I frankly do not understand so much.

00:15:10.000 People are treating it as a bombshell that Trump, quote-unquote, hid the conversation.

00:15:14.000 The president has the power of classification and declassification.

00:15:18.000 Normally, transcripts of foreign leaders are not revealed to anyone because that does violate the president's unitary power of the executive plenary power over foreign policy.

00:15:28.000 Trump actually violated presidential principle in releasing the transcript.

00:15:31.000 He would have been fully within his rights, really, to say, I'm not releasing the transcript because, hey, I'm the president of the United States.

00:15:37.000 None of your beeswax.

00:15:39.000 So the complaint seems to be that the White House officials sort of hid it within particular executive channels where they wouldn't normally hide it, maybe out of fear that it would be leaked by unflattering members of the intelligence community.

00:15:53.000 Were such fears truly Unbased?

00:15:56.000 Considering that the intelligence community then took second-hand accounts of those conversations and spun it into a whistleblower report?

00:16:03.000 It doesn't seem to me like those suspicions are wildly off the mark.

00:16:06.000 Now, does that mean that Trump didn't engage in underlying activity that's bad?

00:16:10.000 No.

00:16:11.000 Does it mean that we still need more answers about the underlying activity and whether Trump was in fact utilizing taxpayer dollars to benefit himself?

00:16:18.000 Yeah, we do need more information about that, but the specific complaint, which is that Trump took this conversation and then sort of hid it in a safe somewhere, He's the president.

00:16:28.000 That's within his power.

00:16:29.000 I'm kind of confused as to why that would be, in and of itself, a violation.

00:16:35.000 He could have ordered the transcript of the conversation fully destroyed, and that would have been within his power.

00:16:41.000 They're classified.

00:16:42.000 He didn't have to declassify them.

00:16:44.000 He did.

00:16:44.000 He turned them over.

00:16:46.000 In just a second, we'll get to the rest of the whistleblower report and then we'll get to the big hearing that is happening today with Joseph Maguire, who's the acting head of the National Intelligence Services.

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00:18:10.000 Okay, so the whistleblower complaint continues.

00:18:13.000 They say the Ukrainian side was the first to publicly acknowledge the phone call.

00:18:16.000 On the evening of July 25th, a readout was posted on the website of the Ukrainian president that contained the following line.

00:18:21.000 It's translated.

00:18:23.000 Donald Trump expressed his conviction that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve Ukraine's image and complete the investigation of corruption cases that have held back cooperation between Ukraine and the United States.

00:18:33.000 Now, I'm not sure why that's super suspicious.

00:18:35.000 The Obama administration pressured Ukraine to investigate Paul Manafort.

00:18:39.000 That was legitimate.

00:18:40.000 Paul Manafort was a suspicious character.

00:18:43.000 So, that in and of itself should not raise the hackles of the whistleblower in the absence of this other information.

00:18:49.000 Now, what the whistleblower report does do is set the predicate for further investigation, meaning he's saying there are a bunch of people who know about this stuff and you should go ask them questions.

00:18:58.000 The whistleblower says, based on my understanding, there are approximately a dozen White House officials who listened to the call, a mixture of policy officials and duty officers in the White House Situation Room, as is customary.

00:19:09.000 The officials I spoke with told me that participation in the call had not been restricted in advance because everyone expected it would be a routine call with a foreign leader.

00:19:16.000 Which again goes to President Trump's tweet saying, it was a routine call with a foreign leader. 0.98

00:19:20.000 You think I'd be stupid enough to offer a quid pro quo in front of 20 witnesses? 0.99

00:19:25.000 And then he names some names. 0.99

00:19:25.000 He says that a State Department official, a guy named T. Ulrich Breckbuhl, listened in on the call. 0.99

00:19:31.000 He said, I was not the only non-White House official to receive a readout of the call.

00:19:34.000 Multiple State Department and Intel community officials were also briefed on the contents of the call.

00:19:39.000 Okay, that is section one of the whistleblower report.

00:19:41.000 Then, he says there were efforts to restrict access to records related to the call.

00:19:45.000 He said, I learned from multiple U.S.

00:19:46.000 officials that senior White House officials had intervened to, quote-unquote, lock down all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript.

00:19:53.000 Now, this is sort of a moot point because, again, the White House just spilled it out there.

00:19:57.000 Trump just said, OK, boom, enjoy.

00:19:59.000 So it's kind of like it's hard to call it a cover-up when it's now available to you and to me and to everybody.

00:20:06.000 And then there is Section 3 ongoing concerns.

00:20:09.000 So the idea here is that members of the Ukrainian government basically believed that they had to pursue investigations beneficial to Trump in order to get aid.

00:20:18.000 Now, their perception is not necessarily the reality that Trump pressured.

00:20:23.000 Meaning that we may have a he said he said situation here in which the Ukrainian government believed that Trump wanted a quid pro quo and Trump didn't actually want a quid pro quo.

00:20:32.000 That is quite plausible.

00:20:33.000 And when you read that Zelensky conversation, you kind of get that impression.

00:20:36.000 Zelensky is there going, what can I do for you, Mr. President?

00:20:39.000 What do I have to do to get military aid?

00:20:41.000 And Trump's like, you know, there's like a bunch of things that I think you should do just generally.

00:20:47.000 And then Zelensky is like, so I get military aid?

00:20:49.000 And Trump's like, you know who's awesome?

00:20:50.000 Giuliani.

00:20:51.000 Like that's how the transcript reads.

00:20:54.000 But this whistleblower says, I learned from multiple U.S.

00:20:56.000 officials that on or about August 2nd, Giuliani reportedly traveled to Madrid to meet with one of President Zelensky's advisors.

00:21:03.000 officials characterized this meeting, not reported publicly at the time, as a direct follow up to the president's call with Mr. Zelensky about the cases they had discussed.

00:21:03.000 U.S.

00:21:10.000 Again.

00:21:11.000 It is not a violation of law for Giuliani to meet with members of the Ukrainian government to gather information relevant, yes, to the 2020 campaign.

00:21:19.000 It is a violation of law if the president is withholding military aid based on the unwillingness of Ukraine to do so.

00:21:26.000 The whistleblower complaint says, on July 26th, the day after the call, the U.S.

00:21:30.000 Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker visited Kiev and met with Zelensky and a variety of Ukrainian political figures.

00:21:36.000 Ambassador Volker was accompanied in his meetings by U.S.

00:21:39.000 Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.

00:21:41.000 Based on multiple readouts of these meetings recounted to me by various U.S.

00:21:44.000 officials, Ambassadors Volker and Sondland reportedly provided advice to the Ukrainian leadership about how to navigate the demands the President had made of Zelensky.

00:21:53.000 Okay, again, this does not go to quid pro quo.

00:21:56.000 Maybe he made the demands, and the demands were broader than merely the things he brought up.

00:22:01.000 And the Obama administration made a bunch of anti-corruption demands.

00:22:04.000 Joe Biden made specific anti-corruption demands of the Ukraine.

00:22:07.000 Fire this prosecutor or you don't get aid.

00:22:09.000 The question is whether this was done to benefit Trump politically, and whether it was done to target his domestic political opponents.

00:22:16.000 And then the rest of the whistleblower complaint is basically just a bunch of reports on public recorded stuff.

00:22:21.000 I mean, it's a bunch of references to articles from Bloomberg and Fox News and The Hill, talking about how various characters did various things.

00:22:32.000 I mean, literally, he's just recounting stories from the New York Times.

00:22:35.000 And he's saying, these stories make me suspicious.

00:22:37.000 Okay, so, he floats this thing up the chain, and after floating this thing up, there's about one paragraph here, maybe two paragraphs that are redacted in the appendix.

00:22:49.000 And, you know, there's really not too much else here.

00:22:53.000 I'm kind of stunned that there's not much more than this.

00:22:55.000 And you can see the media playing it up, like, that the big story here is that Trump urged that the transcript be locked down, but the transcript's now available to everybody.

00:23:02.000 So again, this is sort of like when there were big stories about how Trump was going to fire Mueller, and then he never fired Mueller.

00:23:07.000 How Trump was engaged in a cover-up, and then there was not really a cover-up.

00:23:12.000 There are a few other details in the complaint, right?

00:23:14.000 right.

00:23:14.000 He says, I learned from U.S. officials that on or around May 14th, the president instructed Vice President Pence to cancel his planned trip to Ukraine to attend Zelensky's inauguration.

00:23:23.000 Rick Perry led the delegation instead.

00:23:25.000 According to officials, it was made clear to them the president did not want to meet with Zelensky until he saw how Zelensky chose to act in office.

00:23:31.000 Okay, again, this is all vague.

00:23:32.000 This is all incredibly, incredibly vague.

00:23:34.000 And then there is the Inspector General letter, which conveys this to Congress and says, I find this at least urgent, and you should take a look at it.

00:23:42.000 And that is where things stood.

00:23:43.000 And then the Office of the Director of National Intelligence They said, well, this doesn't really raise to the level of urgent since it has nothing to do with the intelligence community.

00:23:52.000 So we don't have to convey this over and that's what started off this whole firestorm.

00:23:57.000 Now in a second, I want to get to the Ukrainian perception versus the Trumpian perception and the big hearing that's happening today with Joseph Maguire, the acting director of National Intelligence.

00:24:06.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:24:08.000 First, I'm a parent.

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00:25:58.000 Okay, so.

00:25:59.000 There was a story that came out today talking about how an advisor to Ukraine suggested that Biden was key to all of this.

00:26:07.000 His name is Sergey Leshenko, and he told ABC News that after Zelensky's election, they wanted to speak with Trump.

00:26:13.000 But there's ABC News.

00:26:14.000 This issue was raised many times.

00:26:15.000 discussion with american officials ukrainian officials came to recognize a precondition to any executive correspondence the advisor said it was clear that president trump will only have communications if they will discuss the biden case said sergey lishenko an anti-corruption advocate and former member of ukraine's parliament who know who now acts as an advisor to zelensky this issue was raised many times i know that ukrainian officials understood lishenko also talked about rudy juliani's push for a biden investigation and said he believes

00:26:40.000 then prosecutor general luri litsenko invented the investigations that juliani pushed as part of an effort to keep Okay, so was Ukraine trying to make guarantees to Trump to get aid?

00:26:53.000 Or was Trump trying to push Ukraine?

00:26:56.000 Or is it possible that Ukraine was taking away from all the conversations that Trump wanted a quid pro quo but Trump never actually asked for a quid pro quo?

00:27:03.000 There's one dot that has to be connected here and nobody has connected it.

00:27:06.000 The whistleblower report doesn't do it.

00:27:07.000 There's a lot of speculation here.

00:27:09.000 So basically, where things currently stand is that unless the Democrats can uncover somebody who can say, just without a doubt, that President Trump informed me he is withholding aid to Ukraine unless the Ukrainians investigate his chief political rival Joe Biden.

00:27:24.000 Not just Trump is withholding aid from Ukraine until they fix up their corruption problems or investigate a myriad of topics.

00:27:32.000 Or even investigate the 2016 election, which is relevant to the United States broadly, not just with regard to Trump.

00:27:37.000 It has to be with regard to Biden.

00:27:39.000 So there's a very specific thing that has to be fulfilled in order for a quid pro quo to have happened and impeachment to really be justified.

00:27:46.000 Without that, there's just not enough.

00:27:49.000 There's just not enough.

00:27:50.000 Now, the Washington Post got a report wrong yesterday, apparently.

00:27:54.000 And this is one of the problems here, is there was all this smoke before any of this had been revealed.

00:27:57.000 Trump mentioning Biden eight times on a phone call according to the transcript.

00:28:00.000 He mentioned him three times.

00:28:02.000 Talk about Trump openly engaging in a promise with the Ukrainians. 0.96

00:28:06.000 No such promise is made.

00:28:08.000 Right?

00:28:08.000 All of that.

00:28:10.000 All that media overreach cuts in Trump's favor.

00:28:13.000 There was another one of these stories yesterday.

00:28:15.000 The Washington Post reported that the acting director of national intelligence threatened to resign over concerns that the White House might attempt to force him to stonewall Congress in his testimony.

00:28:24.000 The official said that Joseph Maguire warned the White House he was not willing to withhold information from Congress, where he is scheduled to testify in open and closed hearings on Thursday.

00:28:32.000 But Maguire denies this.

00:28:34.000 He issued a statement.

00:28:34.000 He said, At no time have I considered resigning my position since assuming this role on August 16, 2019.

00:28:40.000 I have never quit anything in my life.

00:28:42.000 I'm not going to start now.

00:28:43.000 I am committed to leading the intelligence community to address the diverse and complex threats facing our nation.

00:28:47.000 The White House also said, This is actually not true.

00:28:50.000 The Washington Post says they stand by their story.

00:28:52.000 Okay, so with that controversy brewing and with the credibility of the media always in a significant amount of question, Joseph McGuire appears before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday.

00:29:05.000 And McGuire, I think rightly, says that he did not deem the complaint as urgent under the definition of legal statute.

00:29:12.000 But when President Trump says this was just a partisan hack job, he says, no, you know, I have no evidence of that.

00:29:17.000 The Whistleblower Act did in good faith.

00:29:19.000 I want to stress that I believe that the whistleblower and the Inspector General have acted in good faith throughout.

00:29:26.000 out.

00:29:27.000 I have every reason to believe that they have done everything by the book and followed the law.

00:29:33.000 Respecting the privileged nature of the information and patiently waiting while the executive privilege issues were resolved.

00:29:40.000 Okay, so that is, I mean, he's basically saying we followed procedures, right?

00:29:45.000 And the procedures were followed, and that's fine.

00:29:48.000 Now we see the interpretations.

00:29:49.000 So, in a second, we'll get to the Democratic interpretation, and then we'll get to the Republican interpretation of all of these events, and where exactly we are, where exactly things stand, because President Trump Is really going to war.

00:30:04.000 We'll get to all of that in just one moment.

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00:30:19.000 Or you go to the gym and you're like, oh, it's the new year, I'm going to the gym, I'm gonna stay in shape this year.

00:30:24.000 And three weeks later, you're sitting on your couch eating potato chips while watching TV.

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00:31:29.000 OK, so.

00:31:31.000 President Trump is fighting back today.

00:31:34.000 So President Trump went on Twitter and in all capital letters, which means that he is very serious.

00:31:38.000 He tweeted out, the Democrats are trying to destroy the Republican Party and all that it stands for.

00:31:43.000 Stick together, play their game and fight hard, Republicans.

00:31:46.000 Our country is at stake.

00:31:48.000 OK, and then he the press secretary gave a statement today about the declassified whistleblower report saying nothing has changed with the release of this complaint, which is nothing more than a collection of third hand accounts of events and cobbled together press clippings, all of which show nothing improper.

00:32:02.000 The president took the extraordinary and transparent step of releasing the full unredacted declassified transcript of his call with President Zelensky, which forms the heart of the complaint, as well as the complaint itself.

00:32:12.000 That's because he has nothing to hide.

00:32:13.000 The White House will continue to push back on the hysteria.

00:32:17.000 And that is fair, right?

00:32:18.000 Remember, I've been saying for this entire week that basically there are three cases that could be put forth for impeachment and two of them are insufficient.

00:32:26.000 One is that the case could be that Trump is covering things up.

00:32:31.000 There's no evidence of a cover-up.

00:32:32.000 None.

00:32:33.000 He's now revealed everything.

00:32:34.000 So where's the cover-up?

00:32:36.000 Two, would be that the transcript itself, the mere attempt to garner information from the Ukrainians amounted to some sort of campaign finance violation.

00:32:45.000 That is very, very weak sauce.

00:32:47.000 Hillary Clinton worked with the Ukrainians back in 2016 to gather information on Trump.

00:32:51.000 The Obama administration pressured the Ukrainians to prosecute Paul Manafort, basically.

00:32:56.000 And then there's three, which is the quid pro quo, and that has yet to be proved.

00:32:58.000 In a second, we're going to get to how we are now watching the same set of facts in two completely different worlds of interpretation.

00:33:05.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:33:06.000 First, you have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.

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00:34:01.000 Okay, now to the two narratives that are coming out of the various camps.

00:34:12.000 So, you got the Democratic narrative, and this is the one being pushed by Adam Schiff, who, again, has very, very little credibility.

00:34:20.000 This is a person who was so far out over his skis, he was no longer connected with them during the Trump-Russia hearings.

00:34:25.000 And he was out there every day on CNN.

00:34:27.000 He had set up a pup tent outside the Green Room at CNN.

00:34:30.000 I mean, he was living on the streets of San Francisco.

00:34:33.000 I mean, like he really was like living on the street outside the CNN headquarters so that he could be there at a moment's notice.

00:34:38.000 He spent more time in the CNN green room than he did in Congress.

00:34:40.000 And pretty much everything he said turned out not to be true.

00:34:43.000 Well, now he is suggesting that everything he is now saying is true.

00:34:46.000 Right.

00:34:47.000 This is clear, convincing evidence.

00:34:49.000 So here is Adam Schiff getting out over his skis again, suggesting that we now have graphic evidence the president betrayed his oath of office.

00:34:57.000 Yesterday, we were presented with the most graphic evidence yet that the president of the United States has betrayed his oath of office.

00:35:05.000 Betrayed his oath to defend our national security and betrayed his oath to defend our constitution.

00:35:13.000 For yesterday, we were presented with a record of a call between the President of the United States and the President of Ukraine, in which the President, our President, sacrificed our national security and our Constitution Okay, so, again, that is the part that has not actually yet been proved.

00:35:37.000 Right, he says that he sacrificed our national security and our constitution for his personal political benefit is a conclusion driven from a read of the transcript alone.

00:35:46.000 They haven't connected that dot.

00:35:47.000 Okay, the transcript does not have an explicit quid pro quo.

00:35:50.000 Now, as I said yesterday, there is a plausible read of it in which it's Trump pressuring Ukraine.

00:35:55.000 There's also a plausible read of it in which it's Trump not pressuring Ukraine.

00:35:58.000 But at no point does Trump say anywhere in the document, by the way, if you do X, Y, and Z, military aid's back on the table.

00:36:04.000 Like, he doesn't say that anywhere in the conversation.

00:36:07.000 That's not a thing that happens.

00:36:08.000 And this has led to the Republican interpretation, which is Devin Nunes saying, Devin Nunes, the Republican from California and President Trump's favorite Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, he accused Democrats of trying to obtain every possible thing about Donald Trump.

00:36:24.000 And he put this into the context of Democrats digging deep on the Steele dossier and Trump-Russia.

00:36:29.000 He basically says, listen, you guys have had I'm trying to find a clean way to say this.

00:36:35.000 You guys have had a very strong desire to get President Trump impeached since the very beginning, and now this is just the latest iteration of a story we've already seen before.

00:36:45.000 Ukrainian official Sergei Lashchenko was a source for Nellie Orr, wife of Department of Justice official Bruce Orr, as she worked on the anti-Trump operation conducted by Fusion GPS and funded by the Democrats.

00:37:02.000 And of course, Democrats on this very committee negotiated with people who they thought were Ukrainians in order to obtain nude pictures of Trump.

00:37:11.000 Okay, I believe that that is a reference to a prank phone call that Adam Schiff was engaged in.

00:37:16.000 So, Nunes is basically saying, listen, you guys have been going after Trump since the beginning, and you got nothing, and you still got nothing.

00:37:23.000 So those are the two competing strains over all of this.

00:37:29.000 Now, the Democrats do have a bit of a pickle on their hands, and that is that a majority of the House does now support the impeachment inquiry.

00:37:35.000 That was going to be obvious as soon as Nancy Pelosi endorsed this thing.

00:37:38.000 As soon as Nancy Pelosi endorsed this thing, it was pretty obvious that impeachment was going to happen. 0.95

00:37:42.000 If you had to put your money down, you say that impeachment happens in the House and nothing happens in the Senate.

00:37:46.000 Well, Nancy Pelosi cannot afford to announce an impeachment inquiry and then say, oh, by the way, we're not impeaching him. 0.94

00:37:46.000 Why? 0.94

00:37:53.000 I mean, that is going to be a very rough Move for her. 0.89

00:37:57.000 If she puts impeachment on the table and then says, well, we couldn't come up with anything, so I guess he's okay.

00:38:03.000 Okay, that is not a thing that's going to happen.

00:38:05.000 Once she says the I word, it's now happening. 0.93

00:38:08.000 Democrats are going to vote to impeach Trump.

00:38:10.000 It's a foregone conclusion.

00:38:11.000 The question is whether that is justified and whether Republicans in the Senate will join or whether anything in the House will join except for Justin Amash, who now considers himself an independent.

00:38:21.000 The problem is that there's not a lot of suggestion that in the polling data that Americans actually want impeachment.

00:38:30.000 There's an article from the New York Times saying for many Democratic voters around the country, the prospect of an explosive impeachment battle in Washington left them nervous.

00:38:38.000 Republicans were mostly unmoved.

00:38:41.000 So there's not a lot of public approval for impeachment at this point.

00:38:46.000 There's not a lot of poll data on impeachment, but there's a story yesterday, it was a new poll, it said the majority of Americans were against the impeachment and removal of President Trump.

00:38:55.000 That was from Quinnipiac University.

00:38:57.000 4% of Republicans and 73% of Democrats support impeachment.

00:39:04.000 However, overall, the majority of Americans do not support impeachment.

00:39:09.000 The overall numbers, 57% no, 37% yes.

00:39:14.000 Now of course Democrats want Trump impeached because they're Democrats.

00:39:17.000 But overall, this is not a winning issue for Democrats, especially if they don't have a smoking gun.

00:39:24.000 So, Democrats are really running a bit of a risky game here.

00:39:29.000 Now, what they feel is like, okay, fine, so people don't support impeachment, so we impeach, what's the big deal?

00:39:33.000 He doesn't get removed from office, and then Elizabeth Warren runs on the basis of him being corrupt and wins.

00:39:37.000 So they're banking on Trump having an underlying popularity problem in a way that Bill Clinton did not.

00:39:42.000 Bill Clinton was a pretty popular president until the impeachment hearings began.

00:39:46.000 He was less popular afterward, but still pretty popular, and his popularity actually increased as the impeachment hearings went on, and as Democrats successfully, if falsely, argued that the whole thing was about sex.

00:39:57.000 But Trump, they feel, is not Clinton.

00:40:00.000 Trump does not have anything like the underlying approval ratings that Bill Clinton did.

00:40:03.000 And so what you're starting to see is the Democrats make excuses for why they're going to impeach Trump even without a quid pro quo.

00:40:10.000 They're shifting the standard pretty dramatically here.

00:40:13.000 So, top House Democrats, for example, put out a statement saying no quid pro quo is required to betray our country.

00:40:19.000 It's a statement from Schiff, Gerald Nadler, Elijah Cummings, and Elliot Engel.

00:40:23.000 They called the transcript an unambiguous, damning, shocking abuse of the office of the presidency for personal political gain.

00:40:30.000 Again, it's hard to say that Barack Obama in 2012 pledged the Russians flexibility in relation to the upcoming election.

00:40:38.000 That was bad.

00:40:39.000 Was it impeachable?

00:40:40.000 Probably not, because maybe Obama wanted flexibility for the Russians from a sort of defensive standpoint, because he thought it'd be good for the country.

00:40:50.000 Personal political benefit and the country's interests are not necessarily completely, completely separate is the problem.

00:40:57.000 The statement continued, let us be clear, no quid pro quo is required to betray our country.

00:41:02.000 Trump asked a foreign government to interfere in our elections.

00:41:04.000 That is betrayal enough.

00:41:06.000 Again, pretty solid info, according to John Solomon of The Hill, that the Obama administration was pressuring the Ukrainians to investigate Paul Manafort, who ended up being Trump's campaign manager.

00:41:14.000 Plus, Hillary Clinton was working with the Ukrainians to gather dirt on Trump and Manafort. 0.84

00:41:19.000 Nonetheless, you're seeing the Democrats shift their standard because they know that they now have to impeach, they've gone too far not to impeach, and they don't have the goods.

00:41:26.000 So instead, they're shifting the standard.

00:41:28.000 So you got Neal Katyal, the acting Solicitor General in the Obama administration, has a piece in the New York Times today called, Trump doesn't need to commit a crime to be kicked out of office.

00:41:38.000 So this went from Trump definitely committed a crime, to what he did is bad but not criminal, to It doesn't have to be criminal at all.

00:41:46.000 We can impeach him for any reason whatsoever.

00:41:48.000 Katyal says, the potential criminality of the president's conduct is not the full picture.

00:41:52.000 Our founders deliberately drafted the Constitution's impeachment clause to ensure the potential grounds for impeachment would cover more than criminal activity.

00:42:01.000 He says, this is brazen conduct.

00:42:02.000 It took place the day after Robert Mueller testified in Congress, perhaps when Trump felt liberated from the shadow of the Russia investigation.

00:42:10.000 He says to make matters worse, before the call record of that conversation was released on Wednesday, Trump pointed to it as exculpatory evidence, which makes you wonder what will be revealed about other calls or contacts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:42:20.000 But the bottom line is this, Democrats are now shifting the goalposts.

00:42:23.000 The goalposts have now moved.

00:42:25.000 AOC.

00:42:26.000 is making accusations that she can't back up, right?

00:42:28.000 AOC was on Chris Cuomo's show, not Fredo's show on CNN, and she says, without evidence, that Trump was actively withholding aid in order to achieve personal political benefit.

00:42:39.000 That is the dot that has not yet been connected.

00:42:42.000 What we are talking about here is the president essentially participating in what looks like a series of events that looks like extortion, withholding aid to an ally, and then quote-unquote asking for a favor to essentially benefit yourself politically, not in the interest of the United States of America, but in the interest of your own re-election.

00:43:08.000 Okay, so the Democrats are shifting the standard.

00:43:11.000 Now, President Trump is responding in a couple of ways.

00:43:14.000 First of all, he did a press conference with the Ukrainian President Zelensky.

00:43:17.000 Zelensky came out and said there was no pressure.

00:43:19.000 That's a pretty strong talking point for Trump, because if Zelensky says there was pressure, then Trump, at the very least, has a problem.

00:43:26.000 Zelensky says there was no pressure.

00:43:27.000 Now, to be fair, Zelensky's trying to get military aid from Trump still, so if you are a Democrat, you're saying, of course he says that!

00:43:34.000 He's in the room with Trump!

00:43:35.000 What else is he gonna say?

00:43:36.000 Here's Zelensky, though, saying there was no pressure.

00:43:38.000 President Zelensky, have you felt any pressure from President Trump to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden?

00:43:45.000 I think you read everything.

00:43:48.000 So I think you read text.

00:43:50.000 We had, I think, good phone call.

00:43:55.000 It was normal.

00:43:56.000 We spoke about many things.

00:44:00.000 So I think, and you read it, that nobody pushed me.

00:44:05.000 Yes.

00:44:06.000 In other words, no pressure.

00:44:07.000 Okay, and there's Trump filling in the gap.

00:44:09.000 You can see Trump is super irritated by all of this, obviously.

00:44:12.000 He doesn't think that he pressured the Ukrainians for this stuff, at the very least.

00:44:15.000 When Trump then came out yesterday, he said, I fully support transparency.

00:44:19.000 Which, by the way, again, he has now revealed two documents he did not have to reveal.

00:44:23.000 The whistleblower memo and the full transcript of the call.

00:44:27.000 We were going to do this anyway, but I've informed them, all of the House members, that I fully support transparency on the so-called Whistleblower information, even though it was supposedly secondhand information, which is sort of interesting.

00:44:47.000 And other things have come out about the whistleblower that are also maybe even more interesting.

00:44:53.000 But also insist on transparency from Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, on the millions of dollars that have been quickly and easily taken out of Ukraine and China.

00:45:03.000 By the way, Joe Biden is hardest hit in all of this.

00:45:05.000 Trump will likely survive this entire attempt.

00:45:08.000 His candidacy is basically over.

00:45:08.000 Joe Biden will not.

00:45:10.000 He was asked yesterday while leaving a car about Hunter Biden.

00:45:13.000 There are new allegations, by the way, that other members of Biden's family routinely try to take advantage.

00:45:17.000 of the fact that they are related to Biden to get special benefits.

00:45:20.000 There's a I think it's his brother who was trying to join a company having to with cancer research, who was promising members of the company that Biden's cancer moonshot would go to fund that research.

00:45:29.000 Anyway, here's Biden walking away from a car while not answering any questions about the Hunter Biden stuff.

00:45:34.000 Mr. Biden, Mr. Biden, can you can you respond to criticism that you and your son should not been working in Ukraine at the same time?

00:45:41.000 You just keep on walking.

00:45:44.000 Keep on walking.

00:45:45.000 Meanwhile, President Trump says, listen, there was no quid pro quo.

00:45:47.000 You know, whatever you guys say, there was no quid pro quo.

00:45:49.000 He said this yesterday from the UN.

00:45:51.000 I didn't do it.

00:45:52.000 You take a look at that call.

00:45:53.000 It was perfect.

00:45:55.000 There was no quid pro quo.

00:45:55.000 I didn't do it.

00:45:57.000 But there was with Biden and there was with these senators.

00:46:02.000 And they threatened.

00:46:03.000 They said, you do this, you do that.

00:46:05.000 We're not going to give you votes.

00:46:07.000 That's that's the real deal.

00:46:10.000 Okay, now what he's saying there is actually true.

00:46:12.000 So it is true that back in May, there were several Democratic senators, including Bob Menendez of New Jersey, and I believe Dick Durbin, who wrote a letter openly saying that if Ukraine didn't investigate the Manafort-Trump connection, and connections that Trump may have had with Ukraine and Russia, that if they didn't do that, that maybe they would withhold aid from Ukraine.

00:46:33.000 So Mark Thiessen reported on this yesterday in the Washington Post.

00:46:37.000 So what he's saying there is absolutely 100% true.

00:46:41.000 Now, one of the problems here is that a lot of the things that President Trump talks about being worried about with regard to corruption are stories that have not really been substantiated.

00:46:52.000 That is where Democrats are honing in on, right?

00:46:54.000 There's a vulnerability here, right?

00:46:55.000 So Trump is saying, if I am withholding aid from Ukraine, it's over corruption stuff, right?

00:47:00.000 He said this.

00:47:01.000 He said it was over corruption stuff.

00:47:02.000 But what Trump perceives as corruption stuff may, in fact, not really be corruption stuff.

00:47:06.000 It may be stuff that Trump has sort of heard about in the ether, and now he's channeling it into the general box of corruption.

00:47:13.000 So, for example, he mentions CrowdStrike in that call to Zelensky.

00:47:17.000 That is a reference to a company called CrowdStrike, which is an intelligence data firm.

00:47:22.000 And Hillary Clinton, the DNC, they turned over their servers to CrowdStrike as opposed to the FBI in the middle of an investigation so that those servers could be looked at and audited to see who exactly had been hacking into the servers. 1.00

00:47:38.000 And CrowdStrike came up with the idea that it was the Russians.

00:47:40.000 And Trump has always been suspicious of that idea.

00:47:42.000 So he mentions to the Ukrainians that maybe CrowdStrike is a Ukrainian-owned company, and that maybe the real DNC servers are still out there in Ukraine.

00:47:51.000 And maybe it wasn't the Russians after all who hacked the whole thing. 0.58

00:47:53.000 Now, Trump may see that as, why won't Ukraine investigate that?

00:47:57.000 It's corrupt.

00:47:58.000 In reality, there's not a lot of support for it.

00:48:00.000 This is why Trump yesterday makes the sort of bizarre statement that Hillary's deleted emails might still be in Ukraine.

00:48:05.000 I don't know where he's getting this from or why people think that information is particularly credible, but that doesn't go to Trump's personal political benefit alone.

00:48:13.000 If he actually believes that there was a Ukrainian proxy company that was actually hacking the DNC's emails, as opposed to the Russians, that does have some pretty significant national security ramifications for the United States, not just personal ramifications for Trump.

00:48:29.000 Do you believe that the emails from Hillary Clinton, do you believe that they are in Ukraine?

00:48:34.000 I think they could be.

00:48:35.000 You mean the 30,000 that she deleted?

00:48:37.000 Yes.

00:48:37.000 Yeah, I think they could very well.

00:48:38.000 Boy, that was a nice question.

00:48:40.000 I like that question.

00:48:41.000 Because frankly, I think that one of the great crimes committed is Hillary Clinton deleting 33,000 emails after Congress sends her a subpoena. 0.99

00:48:51.000 Think of that.

00:48:53.000 Okay, so again, I don't know what he's referring to here, but that in and of itself, the fact that President Trump believes a lot of things that he reads on InfoWars, that does not necessarily mean that he is acting out of concert with the interests of the United States.

00:49:05.000 It means that he perceives the interests of the United States differently, maybe based on factual incorrectness, but not necessarily for his political benefit.

00:49:13.000 So there is that.

00:49:15.000 And meanwhile, Mike Pence was making the case that President Trump has never threatened aid to Ukraine.

00:49:19.000 He also said President Trump has stood strong with Ukraine.

00:49:21.000 That is a point that is worth noting.

00:49:23.000 I mean, the Trump administration support for Ukraine has been significantly stronger than the Obama administration support was.

00:49:29.000 That still doesn't answer the two outstanding questions I have from yesterday.

00:49:33.000 And by the way, if Trump doesn't answer those questions, That doesn't mean he's impeachable, because the burden of proof is on the prosecution.

00:49:39.000 But, it would be good to have answers to why did Trump cut off the aid, and also, why was the State Department sending Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine?

00:49:45.000 Like, that's a weird thing.

00:49:46.000 Rudy being in Ukraine, I get.

00:49:48.000 Rudy being sent by the State Department, I don't get so much.

00:49:50.000 But in any case, here's Mike Pence saying that Trump stood strong with Ukraine.

00:49:53.000 That is effectively true.

00:49:55.000 The United States of America has stood strong with Ukraine ever since the Russian military overran Crimea and has been underwriting a savage war in the Donbas province of Ukraine.

00:50:09.000 Different from the last administration, we've actually been providing defensive weapons.

00:50:13.000 The Obama administration was sending them blankets and pillows.

00:50:16.000 But this president said, nope, we're going to stand for the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of Ukraine.

00:50:21.000 We've provided them with weapons, the ability to defend themselves.

00:50:25.000 Okay, that part is certainly true.

00:50:26.000 So, here is where things currently stand.

00:50:28.000 In synopsis.

00:50:29.000 We have the transcript.

00:50:31.000 The transcript is a Rorschach test.

00:50:32.000 If you think Trump was offering a quid pro quo, it looks like a quid pro quo.

00:50:35.000 If you think he wasn't, it doesn't.

00:50:37.000 It really is just a referendum on your own mind.

00:50:40.000 Less a referendum on the transcript of the phone call.

00:50:42.000 Two, we have no additional evidence from the whistleblower report that suggests that Trump was withholding aid in order to get Biden.

00:50:48.000 We don't.

00:50:49.000 There are a few witnesses that are suggested.

00:50:50.000 Those people will be questioned.

00:50:52.000 But right now, if you're the Democrats, you gotta feel like you went out a little bit far on this limb before all the information was in.

00:50:57.000 Opening the impeachment inquiry.

00:50:58.000 Trump will likely be impeached by the House, but if all they've got is what they've got right now, there will be no removal by the Senate or even a competitive attempt to remove Trump via the Senate.

00:51:08.000 Okay, time for a thing I like and then a thing that I hate.

00:51:11.000 So, things that I like.

00:51:12.000 Sometimes cute things happen on TV, and Ellen's show featured this child drummer, really, really cute kid, whose hero is Lenny Kravitz, and it led to this extremely adorable moment where this little talented kid is playing the drums, and suddenly his hero walks out on stage, which is a cool thing.

00:51:28.000 What's up?

00:51:40.000 What's up?

00:51:42.000 You are amazing.

00:51:43.000 Thanks.

00:51:44.000 You know, I'm a big fan.

00:51:46.000 Yeah.

00:51:47.000 I've been watching you.

00:51:48.000 Thanks.

00:51:49.000 He didn't know you.

00:51:49.000 You didn't even know that Lenny was here, did you?

00:51:51.000 No.

00:51:52.000 We kept it very quiet, so this is a big surprise.

00:51:54.000 Thanks, Lenny.

00:51:59.000 Okay, that is cute stuff right there.

00:52:01.000 Kids are awesome.

00:52:02.000 They really are.

00:52:02.000 They're just great.

00:52:04.000 And Ellen's good at what she does. 1.00

00:52:05.000 I mean, not my cup of tea politically, but she's good at what she does. 1.00

00:52:08.000 That is a fun moment.

00:52:09.000 Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.

00:52:14.000 So it is now incumbent, apparently, on every corporation to virtue signal its way through the world, so Mattel has decided that they are now going to launch gender-inclusive Barbies.

00:52:24.000 Because that's what the kids are demanding, of course.

00:52:26.000 I have three younger sisters.

00:52:27.000 I have a daughter. 0.99

00:52:28.000 This is dumb. 0.99

00:52:29.000 I'm waiting to see. 0.99

00:52:30.000 Where's the vast outcry and desire for gender-neutral toys?

00:52:37.000 In primates, in primates, female primates, like monkeys, female monkeys will play with dolls and male monkeys will turn them into weapons. 1.00

00:52:45.000 There are differences between male and female and this idiotic post-feminist attempt, it actually undercuts feminism, the post-feminist attempt to suggest that gender is completely malleable or that gender neutrality is a thing. 0.97

00:53:00.000 Or that gendered attributes are completely disconnected from biology is completely insane. 0.99

00:53:05.000 It's completely insane.

00:53:06.000 Now, is there an actual demand?

00:53:08.000 They're a company, they can do what they want.

00:53:09.000 Do I think these things are gonna sell off the shelves?

00:53:12.000 I think there are gonna be some woke parents who feel like better people for doing this sort of stuff, but it's actually been a problem.

00:53:16.000 They did it in Norway, and these sorts of toys aren't selling off the shelves, and by the way, aren't impacting the gender gap, which remains very wide in the Nordic countries, specifically because when it turns out that women live not in poverty, Then many of them will opt for careers that they would rather do as opposed to careers that pay better.

00:53:33.000 I mean, really, there's a bigger gender gap in places like there are more... I think the statistic is that there's a bigger gender gap in Norway than there is in Albania.

00:53:42.000 And that's because when you live in a country with poverty, women have to get the best job they can that pays the most. 1.00

00:53:47.000 When you live in a country that does not have poverty, then women get to pick and choose whatever kind of jobs they want that actually in some weird ways leads to a significant gender gap. 0.99

00:53:58.000 Look, Mattel can do what it wants to do.

00:53:59.000 It's a corporation.

00:54:00.000 Enjoy.

00:54:01.000 But, is this really about selling dolls or is this really about just free earned media from a media that is pushing the absolute lie that gender is completely disconnected from sex and that little girls everywhere are desperate to play with dolls that they can't tell if they're boys or girls? 0.85

00:54:15.000 Come on, this is just absolute silly towns.

00:54:18.000 Apparently, Mattel put out a statement.

00:54:22.000 They said, we see this line as an opportunity for us to open up a dialogue around what dolls are for and who dolls are for.

00:54:28.000 We kind of know they're mostly for girls.

00:54:31.000 I mean, I hate to break that to you statistically, dolls are mostly for girls.

00:54:34.000 And trucks are mostly for boys.

00:54:36.000 That doesn't mean that girls can't play with trucks and boys can't play with dolls.

00:54:39.000 My daughter, when she was like two, super into trucks.

00:54:41.000 You know what she's into right now? 1.00

00:54:42.000 Because she's five? 0.96

00:54:42.000 Dolls. 0.96

00:54:43.000 Because kids get more gendered as they get older.

00:54:46.000 Their gender attributes that are natural and good and distinct, they'll start to manifest more clearly as kids get older.

00:54:56.000 I love this.

00:54:58.000 Mattel says, Really?

00:55:07.000 If you really want to go for it, Mattel?

00:55:08.000 If you really want to pretend that boys and girls want to play with the same dolls and that girls are desperate for gender inclusivity, you should, as a way of fighting back against gender stereotypes, get rid of female dolls entirely. 0.94

00:55:20.000 They should all be gender- I mean, they don't have genitals. 0.99

00:55:22.000 They should all be Okay, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.

00:55:27.000 I'm sure there will be updates, so stick around for that.

00:55:29.000 I'm Ben Shapiro. 1.00

00:55:30.000 What grand and glorious world we are creating for our children and massive confusion and stupidity. 0.97

00:55:36.000 Okay, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.

00:55:38.000 I'm sure there will be updates, so stick around for that.

00:55:41.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:55:41.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:55:42.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Robert Sterling.

00:55:50.000 Directed by Mike Joyner.

00:55:52.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:55:54.000 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.

00:55:56.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.

00:55:58.000 And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:56:00.000 Assistant director, Pavel Wydowski.

00:56:03.000 Edited by Adam Siavitz.

00:56:04.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.

00:56:06.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

00:56:08.000 Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.

00:56:09.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.

00:56:11.000 Copyright Daily Wire 2019.

The Ben Shapiro Show - September 26, 2019

Whistleblower Comes Up Empty | Ep. 869

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