The Ben Shapiro Show - Who Gives A Schiff? | Ep. 872

00:00:00.000 New developments arise in the connection between the Trump whistleblower and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, the State Department Inspector General opens up another mess, and President Trump goes off in front of the head of Finland.

00:00:11.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:11.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:12.000 I mean, I do have to say, you have to feel a little bit bad for the foreign leaders who sit there while President Trump goes off because, man, when President Trump does these press conferences and goes off on the press and then goes off on the Democrats and you when President Trump does these press conferences and goes off on the press and then goes off on the Democrats and you are like the president of Finland or the prime minister of Finland and you are sitting there looking like you just It's pretty spectacular stuff.

00:00:40.000 Well, a lot breaking in the news.

00:00:42.000 First, I think that it's important to make a note that Andrew McCarthy makes today over at The Hill.

00:00:46.000 He, of course, is a legal correspondent for National Review, and he gives some important information about the background of this whole impeachment inquiry, and that is that so far, it is basically kabuki theater, meaning it's not an official impeachment inquiry.

00:00:59.000 For all the talk about it's an impeachment inquiry, and we're supposed to put all of our focus into impeachment, nothing has actually fundamentally changed.

00:01:05.000 Here's what Andy McCarthy writes today.

00:01:08.000 He says, There is no impeachment inquiry.

00:01:10.000 There are no subpoenas.

00:01:12.000 You are not to be faulted if you think a formal inquest is underway and that legal process has been issued.

00:01:16.000 The misimpression is completely understandable if you've been taking in media coverage, in particular, reporting on a haughty September 27th letter from House Democrats presuming to direct Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on pain of citation for obstruction to cooperate in their demands to depose State Department officials and review various records.

00:01:33.000 The letter is signed by not one, but three committee chairmen.

00:01:35.000 Remember your elementary math, though.

00:01:37.000 Zero is still zero, even when multiplied by three.

00:01:40.000 What is portrayed as an impeachment inquiry is actually just a made-for-cable TV political soap opera.

00:01:45.000 The House of Representatives is not conducting a formal impeachment inquiry.

00:01:48.000 To the contrary, says Andy McCarthy, Congressional Democrats are conducting the 2020 political campaign.

00:01:53.000 The House has not voted as a body to authorize an impeachment inquiry.

00:01:57.000 What we have here are partisan theatrics.

00:01:59.000 Preceding, under the ipsedixit of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it raises the profile but not the legitimacy of the same impeachment inquiry.

00:02:06.000 And there are no subpoenas.

00:02:08.000 As Secretary Pompeo observed in his fittingly tart response on Tuesday, what the committee chairman issued was merely a letter.

00:02:13.000 It's huffing and puffing notwithstanding, the letter is nothing more than an informal request for voluntary cooperation.

00:02:18.000 Legally, it has no compulsive power.

00:02:20.000 If anything, it is rife with legal deficiencies.

00:02:23.000 Andy McCarthy is pointing out here that all of the talk of impeachment inquiry, Democrats haven't actually utilized the power that they have in Congress in order to subpoena members of the executive branch.

00:02:33.000 Well, because then it would get litigated in the courts.

00:02:33.000 Why?

00:02:35.000 Because that's the way this stuff works.

00:02:36.000 You subpoena somebody in the White House, the White House says no, and then it ends up in court and the court hashes it out.

00:02:41.000 But that leads to delay.

00:02:42.000 Instead, what the Democrats are doing is they are issuing fake subpoenas, basically, requests for people to show up.

00:02:48.000 If the White House says, hold up a second, they then accuse the White House of obstruction.

00:02:51.000 So this appears to be manufactured.

00:02:53.000 I mentioned this yesterday.

00:02:55.000 The Democrats are now using a wide variety of theories in order to justify their push for impeachment.

00:03:00.000 As it turns out that the quid pro quo arrangement, supposedly evident from the Trump-Ukrainian President Zelensky's phone call, falls apart.

00:03:07.000 As it turns out, that allegation doesn't make any sense.

00:03:10.000 In the absence of any information that the Ukrainian leadership believed that the president was withholding military aid.

00:03:17.000 As that becomes clear, the Democrats are now shifting the narrative on impeachment.

00:03:20.000 Maybe the impeachment is not about quid pro quo after all.

00:03:23.000 Maybe it's about President Trump mouthing off.

00:03:25.000 Maybe it's about President Trump yelling at the whistleblower.

00:03:27.000 Maybe it's about obstruction of justice.

00:03:29.000 Well, what if the Democrats basically boxed themselves in here?

00:03:32.000 What if Nancy Pelosi went off half-cocked because she believed that it was important to get her base on board because she couldn't hold them back any longer?

00:03:39.000 Because Nancy Pelosi isn't actually in control of this process. 1.00

00:03:42.000 Remember, earlier this year, Nancy Pelosi tried to take out the squad. 0.99

00:03:46.000 Earlier this year, Nancy Pelosi tried to marginalize the radicals in her base. 1.00

00:03:51.000 And President Trump basically prohibited her from doing that by attacking the radicals in her base, forcing her to rally around them.

00:03:57.000 Well, that meant that Nancy Pelosi is now subject to their whims.

00:04:01.000 And that means, ironically, that President Trump unifying Nancy Pelosi with the radicals in her base led to this faux impeachment inquiry.

00:04:08.000 Well, Zandy McCarthy writes, Standing committees do have subpoena power, so why not use it?

00:04:12.000 Well, because subpoenas get litigated in court, when the people or agencies on the receiving end object.

00:04:17.000 Democrats want to have an impeachment show, um, inquiry on television.

00:04:20.000 They don't want to defend its bona fides in court.

00:04:23.000 And they certainly don't want to defend their letter threatening obstruction.

00:04:26.000 The Democrats' media scribes note the chairman's admonition that any failure by Pompeo to comply shall, quote, constitute evidence of obstruction of the House's impeachment inquiry.

00:04:34.000 What a crock.

00:04:35.000 As McCarthy points out, in criminal proceedings, prosecutors constantly demand information, and defense presumptively resists, and then it ends up in court.

00:04:45.000 He says Congressional Democrats know all of this.

00:04:47.000 Many of them are lawyers.

00:04:48.000 They're issuing partisan letters that pose legally offensive threats rather than subpoenas because this is a show, not an impeachment inquiry.

00:04:55.000 Subpoenas don't require chest beating about obstruction.

00:04:57.000 Everyone knows they're compulsory, but everyone also knows they may be held up in court.

00:05:01.000 So what this really looks like overall is the Democrats Basically trying to drum up something, something upon which they can get Trump in the public mind.

00:05:11.000 And that became eminently clear when it became clear that the whistleblower in this particular case was probably coordinated with Adam Schiff's office before the whistleblower complaint was even elevated to the level of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community.

00:05:22.000 We'll get to that bombshell story in just a moment.

00:05:25.000 First, Let's talk about the fact that if you are online, your data is likely exposed unless you're using a VPN.

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00:05:50.000 It really is ridiculous.

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00:06:45.000 Okay, so as I say, if this whole thing feels like it is being drummed up, that's because increasingly the evidence is that it was kind of drummed up.

00:06:52.000 That is the increasing evidence.

00:06:54.000 So, let me give you the breaking news.

00:06:56.000 The breaking news here...

00:06:58.000 Broke yesterday afternoon.

00:06:59.000 Adam Schiff, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, the chairman, Democrat, who was one of the leading voices in the Trump-Mueller saga.

00:07:07.000 He'd go out there on CNN every single day.

00:07:10.000 He had a pup tent outside the CNN green room.

00:07:11.000 And he'd go out there every single day and declare that just around the riverbend, like Pocahontas, just around the riverbend lay the great revelation that President Trump was in fact a Russian-speaking steward of Vladimir Putin.

00:07:24.000 Right, Schiff would go on national TV and he'd basically suggest that Donald Trump was Tom, was Kevin Costner from No Way Out.

00:07:32.000 That he was secretly a plant.

00:07:34.000 Okay, well it turns out all that was nonsense.

00:07:36.000 Well now Adam Schiff has moved on to his next allegation.

00:07:39.000 He's like just moving this thing gradually west.

00:07:41.000 He started off in Russia, now he's moved to Ukraine.

00:07:43.000 Eventually we'll get to France.

00:07:45.000 I mean, it really is absurd.

00:07:47.000 Now, this does not mean that the whistleblower complaint has no merit, we don't know yet.

00:07:51.000 But, the fact that the whistleblower was coordinating with Schiff's office to begin with does raise some suspicions, particularly because the whistleblower complaint was incredibly well written.

00:07:59.000 I mean, just as a piece of writing.

00:08:01.000 Mwah! 0.98

00:08:02.000 An A+.

00:08:04.000 A+, really good piece of legal writing.

00:08:06.000 This led people to suspect.

00:08:07.000 Wait a second.

00:08:08.000 CIA officers do not write like that.

00:08:10.000 That sounds like somebody has vetted this thing.

00:08:12.000 This sounds like a lawyer helped draft this thing.

00:08:14.000 Well, now, as it turns out, the Democratic head of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, learned about the outlines of a CIA officer's concerns that President Trump had abused his power before the officer filed a whistleblower complaint, according to a spokesman and current and former American officials, according to the New York Times.

00:08:30.000 The early account by the future whistleblower shows how determined he was to make known his allegations Well, I mean, it shows a little bit more than that.

00:08:36.000 I love how the New York Times is trying to suggest that the real story here is that the whistleblower was so determined to get out his story, he went to Adam Schiff.

00:08:42.000 administration initially blocked lawmakers from seeing it well i mean it shows a little more than that i love how the new york times is trying to trying to suggest that the real story here is that the whistleblower was so determined to get out his story he went to adam schiff and the real story is that the whistleblower was coordinating with schiff's office to get the information out there without going through the proper channels right the Because here is what happened.

00:09:04.000 According to Schiff's own aide, the CIA officer approached a House Intelligence Committee aide with his concerns.

00:09:10.000 And the House Intelligence Committee said what he was supposed to say.

00:09:13.000 He said, go get a lawyer, and elevated up the chain.

00:09:16.000 He then proceeded to report the entire story up to Adam Schiff.

00:09:20.000 And Adam Schiff, being a dunce, decided to tweet out the entire story on August 28th on Twitter.

00:09:26.000 I was suggesting last week that it was pretty obvious that Schiff had coordinated with the whistleblower because he was actually tweeting out the allegations of the whistleblower complaint a full two weeks before Congress was informed of the presence of the whistleblower complaint, which makes it look a lot more like a coordinated hit between Schiff's office and a partisan whistleblower than it does like a whistleblower with good information who is deeply concerned about his country and simply elevating it up the chain.

00:09:48.000 Now, two things can be true at once.

00:09:49.000 One, it can be a partisan hit.

00:09:50.000 Two, there can be truth to it, but we are still waiting on the truth to it.

00:09:54.000 I'm not seeing all of the evidence yet that there was a quid pro quo.

00:09:59.000 I'm not seeing evidence of criminal activity, and neither are the Democrats, which is why the Democrats are basically thrashing up against the box of impeachment, sort of like that weird alien creature in the Jake Gyllenhaal movie, Life.

00:10:12.000 What we are watching right now is the Democrats searching for another impeachment strategy, given the fact that the whistleblower complaints and the call do not match up with a quid pro quo story.

00:10:22.000 And this looks even worse when it appears again that the entire whistleblower complaint was coordinated with Schiff's office.

00:10:28.000 Now, President Trump has jumped into the middle of this.

00:10:31.000 Now, President Trump gave what can only be described as an epically chaotic press conference yesterday in front of the Prime Minister of Finland, who just looked like he wanted to dig a hole in the ground and lie in it because, again, you basically become window dressing to the Trump show.

00:10:48.000 You show up and suddenly you're playing the tree in a Christmas carol.

00:10:50.000 In any case, President Trump went after Adam Schiff.

00:10:53.000 He said, Schiff probably helped the whistleblower write the complaint.

00:10:56.000 Schiff may have learned some of what the whistleblower knew prior to the complaint.

00:11:00.000 Well, I think it's a scandal that he knew before.

00:11:03.000 I'd go a step further.

00:11:03.000 I think he probably helped write it.

00:11:06.000 Okay?

00:11:06.000 That's what the word is.

00:11:08.000 And I think it's — I give a lot of respect for the New York Times for putting it out.

00:11:12.000 Just happened as I'm walking up here, they handed it to me.

00:11:15.000 And I said to Mike, I said, whoa, that's something.

00:11:18.000 That's big stuff.

00:11:20.000 That's a big story.

00:11:21.000 He knew long before, and he helped write it, too.

00:11:24.000 It's a scam.

00:11:25.000 Okay, so did Schiff actually help write it or did he merely refer to a lawyer and then he was playing an inside-outside game?

00:11:31.000 Now, Trump doesn't actually have to make the allegation that Schiff wrote it in order to do damage to Schiff.

00:11:37.000 If it appears that Adam Schiff was effectively pushing the notion that the whistleblower complaint existed and he knew about it beforehand and the whistleblower was elevating it up the chain and then if there was any holdup, Schiff was going to push from the outside.

00:11:51.000 That's bad enough.

00:11:52.000 Schiff is now responding via the Daily Beast.

00:11:55.000 He had previously denied that his staff had any contact with the whistleblower.

00:11:58.000 He was on MSNBC just last week, explaining, he said, we had no contact with the whistleblower.

00:12:03.000 If by we he means he, that may be true.

00:12:06.000 If by we he means his staff, that's absolutely a lie.

00:12:09.000 Apparently, he told the Daily Beast that his staff had contact with the whistleblower.

00:12:14.000 He said he did not know definitively at the time if the complaint had been authored by the same whistleblower who had approached his staff, but he acknowledged he should have been more clear.

00:12:21.000 Now, that is him lying.

00:12:22.000 Oh, I'm sure it was just a second whistleblower.

00:12:24.000 Yeah, that's probably it.

00:12:25.000 That's the ticket.

00:12:26.000 Schiff told the outlet, we try not to confirm when people have come in.

00:12:29.000 I was really thinking along the lines of wanting him to come in and testify.

00:12:33.000 I regret that I wasn't much more clear.

00:12:36.000 Oh, that's it.

00:12:37.000 And then, of course, Schiff went after Trump.

00:12:38.000 He said, oh, well, his behavior at this press conference is alarming.

00:12:42.000 Americans have to be worried about the stability of our president, given the enormously erratic and dangerous swings we have seen him take in the last few days.

00:12:48.000 It is alarming.

00:12:49.000 Well, now this is just pure gaslighting. 0.95

00:12:51.000 Like, Trump is going to accuse Trump, basically, of being a traitor. 0.78

00:12:53.000 And then if Trump gets mad about it, then he's like, ah, you mad, bro? 0.95

00:12:56.000 You mad, bro? 0.95

00:12:57.000 We should impeach you for being mad. 0.89

00:12:58.000 It's like, we're going to impeach you over the Ukraine stuff. 1.00

00:13:00.000 And Trump says, well, that's a bunch of crap. 1.00

00:13:02.000 You're like, ah, how dare you get mad? 1.00

00:13:03.000 Obviously, you're unstable.

00:13:04.000 We should impeach you for that.

00:13:06.000 And then Trump's like, well, that doesn't make any sense.

00:13:08.000 Well, you're confused, Mr. President.

00:13:09.000 That's why you should be impeached.

00:13:12.000 Now, Trump went heavy after Schiff yesterday, and again, this will be a fruitful line of attack because Schiff is indeed pathologically dishonest about this stuff.

00:13:19.000 I mean, again, he spent two full years going on cable television promising vast revelations about Trump and Russia that never materialized.

00:13:28.000 And now it turns out that he was lying on national television when he said that his staff had no contact with the whistleblower.

00:13:34.000 I mean, this looks a lot more and more everyday like a produced hit.

00:13:37.000 Now again, for the 1,000th time, two things can be true at once.

00:13:40.000 One, it could be a coordinated partisan hit.

00:13:42.000 Two, there could be legitimacy to it.

00:13:43.000 We don't know yet.

00:13:44.000 The evidence is not there yet.

00:13:46.000 Here's President Trump going after Schiff over Schiff basically fabricating the contents of the Ukraine transcript.

00:13:53.000 Schiff did a hearing where he basically made up a story in his own head about Trump threatening the president of Ukraine.

00:14:00.000 And Trump went after him.

00:14:01.000 He said, like, Adam Schiff is calling me unstable.

00:14:03.000 This is a guy who basically had a mental breakdown in public.

00:14:06.000 Schiff went up and he got, as the chairman of the committee, got up and related a call that didn't take place.

00:14:12.000 He made up the language.

00:14:13.000 Hard to believe.

00:14:14.000 Nobody's ever seen this.

00:14:15.000 I think he had some kind of a mental breakdown.

00:14:17.000 But he went up to the microphone and he read a statement from the President of the United States, as if I were on the call, because what happened is when he looked at the sheet, which was an exact transcript of my call, done by very talented people that do this, exact, word for word, He said, wow, he didn't do anything wrong.

00:14:38.000 So he made it up.

00:14:39.000 OK, so Trump going after Schiff, and he went after Schiff even harder yesterday.

00:14:43.000 He suggested he has now pinned a nickname on Adam Schiff, not just Little Adam Schiff or Pencil Neck Adam Schiff.

00:14:49.000 He's got a new one.

00:14:50.000 For Adam Schiff.

00:14:51.000 We'll get to President Trump's new nickname for Adam Schiff in just one moment.

00:14:56.000 First, let's talk about your sleep quality.

00:14:58.000 So, are you sleeping well enough at night?

00:15:00.000 Sleep is pretty important.

00:15:01.000 You know, over the weekend, my kids were both sick, and that meant that I was sleeping with them in their beds.

00:15:04.000 But they don't have a Helix Sleep mattress, so I didn't do great.

00:15:07.000 Then last night, I climbed into bed in my Helix Sleep mattress, and let me just tell you, that thing is comfortable as all hell, and I feel refreshed and ready to battle the day.

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00:16:09.000 Okay, so President Trump now has a new nickname for Adam Schiff.

00:16:13.000 He's calling him Shifty Schiff, which you could sort of see coming.

00:16:16.000 But if the shoe fits, here's President Trump going after Adam Schiff.

00:16:20.000 And I will just recommend that if you can actually see this show, if you're a subscriber at Daily Wire and you're watching this show, keep an eye on the Prime Minister of Finland, who is just doing a consistent gym from the office.

00:16:31.000 Finland is the happiest country in the world.

00:16:33.000 Finland is a happy country.

00:16:35.000 What can you learn from Finland?

00:16:37.000 Well, if you get rid of Pelosi and you get rid of Shifty Schiff.

00:16:39.000 We have actually discussed about that.

00:16:41.000 Finland is a happy country.

00:16:43.000 He's a happy leader, too.

00:16:46.000 If you just get rid of Shifty Schiff, everybody will be happy. 0.95

00:16:50.000 The best part of that clip is where Trump leans over and sort of taps the Finnish president on the knee, and the Finnish president gives him the wave off, which is pretty spectacular.

00:17:01.000 Come on guys, this is high comedy.

00:17:03.000 Okay, and the reason it's high comedy is because in the end it's going to amount to nothing.

00:17:03.000 It is.

00:17:07.000 The Democrats may in fact impeach Trump over apparently nothing in the House.

00:17:11.000 I really have my doubts that Nancy Pelosi publicly, quote unquote, launches an impeachment inquiry, even if she didn't change anything legally, without carrying it all the way to fruition.

00:17:18.000 It's just not something that's going to happen, but...

00:17:21.000 Is that going to make a difference in the election?

00:17:24.000 Not if they've got nothing better than this.

00:17:26.000 They may have overplayed their hand pretty dramatically in the hopes that Trump would shoot himself in the foot.

00:17:31.000 By the way, Trump, you know, he was talking about the whistleblower.

00:17:34.000 The Democrats have trotted out another line about Trump and impeachment, that Trump is attacking the whistleblower.

00:17:39.000 Trump said, well, if the whistleblower is legitimate, of course he should be protected.

00:17:42.000 If he's coordinating outside the bounds of law, then he should not be protected.

00:17:45.000 I think a whistleblower should be protected, if the whistleblower's legitimate.

00:17:50.000 But when the whistleblower makes a big report on the conversation I had with a president of Ukraine, and it was a great conversation.

00:18:01.000 We talked mostly about congratulations on your win.

00:18:05.000 We talked about corruption, and we're really referring mostly to 2016, because what the Democrats did in 2016 was corrupt.

00:18:13.000 Okay, so again, I think that Trump's complaints about the whistleblower, given the coordination between the whistleblower and Schiff, while Trump's language is never He's never modulated correctly.

00:18:24.000 His basic point, which is that he's suspicious about the whistleblower and the relationship with the Democrats.

00:18:29.000 Given that New York Times report, hard to argue with them on that.

00:18:32.000 Meanwhile, a bizarre situation over on the Hill yesterday.

00:18:36.000 The State Department Inspector General, whose name is Linick, he decided to show up on the Hill and talk with Democrats And Republicans.

00:18:45.000 The State Department Inspector General was supposed to deliver a packet of documents and people on the Hill were suspecting he was going to stop by and show evidence that the Trump administration had been pressuring people inside the State Department to do his personal political bidding.

00:18:58.000 Instead, they walked out with a packet of old news reports about Joe Biden, which is weird.

00:19:03.000 According to James Barrett writing over at Daily Wire, a media-hyped urgent meeting between Democratic-led House committees and the State Department Inspector General on Wednesday turned out to be a big disappointment for those hoping it would offer incriminating documents related to the Democrats' impeachment effort.

00:19:17.000 Instead of evidence of retaliation against State Department officials cooperating with House Democrats, as Reuters and others reported ahead of the meeting, Inspector General Steve Linick ended up presenting the Democrats with months-old reports about Democrats' alleged collusion with Ukraine.

00:19:31.000 Which Democrats are decrying as hallucinatory and propagandistic.

00:19:35.000 The information presented at the meeting, Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin told reporters on Wednesday, feels like a completely irrelevant distraction from the work at hand.

00:19:44.000 So Democrats were expecting some sort of damning material on Trump.

00:19:47.000 And as it turns out, what ended up coming back was a bunch of old media reports about Democrats working with Ukraine to affect the 2016 election.

00:19:55.000 Very unfortunate for Democrats.

00:19:57.000 We'll get to more of that in just one second.

00:19:59.000 Okay, so yesterday, I gotta tell you.

00:20:01.000 Yesterday was not a great day for me physically.

00:20:03.000 Why was yesterday not a great day for me physically?

00:20:05.000 Well, because it was a fast day.

00:20:07.000 It was a Jewish fast day and that meant no drinking and no eating and three hours of radio and the podcast.

00:20:13.000 That is a lot.

00:20:14.000 I sure could have used a liquid IV infusion at that point.

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00:21:29.000 Okay, so...

00:21:31.000 What exactly happened in this meeting?

00:21:32.000 Well, according to CBS, in a briefing on Capitol Hill, the State Department Inspector General gave attendees a packet of hallucinatory propagandistic materials and articles about Ukraine, Biden, Giuliani, Trump hotels, and other matters that were sent to the Secretary of State several months ago, according to Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin and congressional aides.

00:21:50.000 The cover sheet of the documents, which was written in calligraphy, claims to have been sent from the White House, CBS reports, but nobody really knows who sent the materials.

00:21:57.000 It later turned out that Rudy Giuliani said, it was me.

00:22:00.000 So, Rudy, I mean, come on, like, this is worthy of informing Congress about that Rudy Giuliani sends weird Zodiac letter love notes to the State Department?

00:22:10.000 By the way, what that does tend to show is that the Trump administration was not going to the State Department and saying, top down, we want you to go investigate all this stuff.

00:22:17.000 You had Rudy Giuliani, from the outside, as part of the Trump campaign, sending a letter to the State Department and saying, you know what, you should investigate all this stuff.

00:22:25.000 Now, if the State Department initiated an investigation on that grounds, is that cause for great concern?

00:22:30.000 Here is Rudy Giuliani talking.

00:22:32.000 So, anyway, Rudy Giuliani, you know, when he talks about all this, he's always weird about it.

00:22:39.000 He acknowledged that he had sent this entire package to the State Department, and his idea was that he was going to inform them of stuff that they should check out.

00:22:47.000 CNN reported that it was indeed Giuliani who turned over the documents.

00:22:53.000 He told CNN Wednesday evening that some of the documents provided to Congress by the State Department's IG had originated with him.

00:22:59.000 He apparently gave the documents to the White House, which then passed them to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to a source familiar with the matter.

00:23:06.000 Pompeo then gave the documents to a subordinate, who provided them to the legal counsel at the State Department.

00:23:10.000 And the documents were ultimately given to the Inspector General.

00:23:13.000 Giuliani said that in late March, he had rooted what he called an outline of allegations against Biden, as well as Marie Yovanovitch, who is the ambassador to Ukraine from the United States, to Pompeo's office.

00:23:23.000 He said he had also sent details of his interviews from earlier in the year with the incumbent and former top prosecutors in Ukraine, who helped provide him with the information in his outline.

00:23:31.000 Giuliani said he received a phone call shortly thereafter from Pompeo, who told Giuliani he'd be referring the documents for investigation.

00:23:38.000 Giuliani told CNN, they told me they were going to investigate it.

00:23:41.000 Now again, that is not Corruption, per se.

00:23:45.000 I mean, it depends on whether in fact they were doing this for campaign purposes or whether they were actually investigating corruption in Ukraine.

00:23:51.000 And it looks very much like, frankly, the attempt by the Hillary Clinton campaign to root information from Fusion GPS to the Obama-era FBI.

00:24:02.000 In other words, funneling information into an administration which is then checked out does not amount to an actual violation of law.

00:24:09.000 It may be politically partisan, but that does not amount to an actual violation of law.

00:24:15.000 So, this is all a little bit strange.

00:24:18.000 Again, it's not a violation of law, it's just Rudy Giuliani being a weirdo and then his information being passed around.

00:24:26.000 The Democrats were very disappointed yesterday, in other words.

00:24:28.000 They were looking forward to some sort of testimony about how Trump was pressuring people internally to do his bidding, and that is not exactly what happened.

00:24:36.000 Nonetheless, the Democrats are trying to play this up, suggesting that there are troubling questions about apparent efforts inside and outside the Trump administration to target specific officials, including Joe Biden's son and Marie Yovanovitch.

00:24:47.000 There is this weird thing that is breaking out in the media today, specifically with regard to the control of the executive branch.

00:24:53.000 There's a whole article in the New York Times about how the executive branch and career officers in the State Department, they feel under threat by the Trump administration.

00:25:03.000 Well, last I checked, the Trump administration is in charge of its own State Department.

00:25:07.000 So, as long as that is the case, there's not really a legal problem there.

00:25:11.000 Now, again, you can say all of this is inappropriate.

00:25:14.000 You can say that the State Department should not become the go-between for Rudy Giuliani and the Trump administration.

00:25:20.000 You can say that this is misuse of public resources, but then you're going to get into the dicey question of how often public resources are misused for campaign-leveraged issues.

00:25:32.000 Again, Hillary Clinton's campaign was obviously leveraging information to Obama's FBI with regard to, for example, the Steele dossier. 0.93

00:25:40.000 So that is not whataboutism, that is what is the standard for impeachable offenses or crime.

00:25:44.000 And so far, not a lot of evidence of crime, a lot of evidence of ugly, swampy politics, but not a lot of evidence of crime.

00:25:53.000 Meanwhile, the media are trying to drag Mike Pence into this.

00:25:58.000 So there's a report from the Washington Post today that President Trump repeatedly involved Vice President Pence in efforts to exert pressure on the leader of Ukraine at a time when the President was using other channels to solicit information he hoped would be damaging to a Democratic rival, according to current and former U.S.

00:26:13.000 officials.

00:26:14.000 But Pence wasn't aware of any of this.

00:26:16.000 So the attempt to rope Pence into this scandal is not exactly going to meet with tons of success.

00:26:21.000 Trump instructed Pence not to attend the inauguration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in May, an event White House officials had pushed to put on the VP's calendar when Ukraine's new leader was seeking recognition and support from Washington.

00:26:33.000 Months later, the president used Pence to tell Zelensky that U.S.

00:26:36.000 aid was still being withheld while demanding more aggressive action on corruption, officials said.

00:26:40.000 Now again, we know that the Vice President of the United States in the last administration was pressuring the Ukrainians with $1 billion in American loan guarantees to get rid of corruption.

00:26:48.000 Withholding the VP's attendance at a particular event to push against corruption doesn't seem like anything supremely out of the box.

00:26:57.000 At the time, following Trump's July 25th phone call with Zelensky, the Ukrainians probably understood action on corruption to include the investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, according to the Washington Post.

00:27:08.000 But that is speculation, right?

00:27:09.000 So it is possible that if they had not investigated Joe and Hunter Biden, but they investigated other corruption, that Pence goes to the thing.

00:27:15.000 So now they're trying to downgrade the quid pro quo from $400 million in military aid to Vice President Pence didn't go to an event for Zelensky.

00:27:25.000 That's a lot weaker.

00:27:26.000 Officials close to Pence insist he was unaware of Trump's efforts to press Zelensky for damaging information about Biden and his son, who had served on the board of an obscure Ukrainian gas company when his father was overseeing U.S.

00:27:36.000 policy on Ukraine.

00:27:38.000 Pence's activities occurred amid several indications of the President's hidden agenda.

00:27:42.000 Among them were the abrupt removal of the U.S.

00:27:44.000 Ambassador to Kyiv, the visible efforts by the President's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to insert himself in the U.S.-Ukraine relationship, as well as alarms being raised inside the White House even before the emergence of an extraordinary whistleblower complaint about President Trump's conduct, according to the Washington Post.

00:28:00.000 Perhaps most significantly, one of Pence's top advisors was on the July 25th call, and the VP should have had access to the transcript within hours.

00:28:07.000 Right, but why exactly would Pence, like, spend lots of time perusing a transcript of the President of Ukraine?

00:28:13.000 I have my doubts that that is what Vice President Pence does with his day.

00:28:17.000 So now they're trying to rope Pence into this.

00:28:19.000 Because the suggestion is if they can impeach Trump, then they can also impeach Pence.

00:28:19.000 Why?

00:28:23.000 And if they can impeach Pence, then guess who becomes President of the United States?

00:28:27.000 Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

00:28:28.000 Yeah, good luck with that.

00:28:29.000 Good luck with that.

00:28:30.000 Now again, all of this also rests on a basic assumption, which is that it is illegitimate to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.

00:28:36.000 That nothing untoward happened with regard to Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.

00:28:42.000 I think we should just focus on he's the issue.

00:28:44.000 He says, no one has ever asserted I did anything wrong on Ukraine.

00:28:46.000 Well, no, actually, there are a fair number of people who have their suspicions that you did something wrong on Ukraine, including the other Democratic presidential candidates who continue to maintain that they will not answer questions about whether they would have allowed their VP's kids to do business in countries where the VP was presiding over foreign policy.

00:29:02.000 Here's Biden trying to shy away from all of this.

00:29:04.000 I think we should just focus on he's the issue.

00:29:07.000 Nobody has ever asserted that I did anything wrong except he and what's that fellow's name?

00:29:14.000 Rudy Hootie.

00:29:14.000 OK, so there is Biden trying to deny all of this.

00:29:19.000 President Trump, for his part, is going hard at Biden, basically saying, listen, there is nothing wrong with me asking about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden in the generalized context of corruption in Ukraine, particularly as has to do with the 2016 election.

00:29:32.000 Because Rudy Giuliani is making the claim that the 2016 election was actually impacted by Ukrainian, not Russian, influence.

00:29:41.000 I mean, there is a story out today specifically about a Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, the one who is now at the center of the Joe Biden allegations.

00:29:49.000 He's the one that Joe Biden wanted fired.

00:29:51.000 Shokin apparently has told a variety of people, including John Solomon of the Hill, that he was basically pressured to drop the Joe Biden case while he was prosecutor.

00:30:07.000 So if that's the case, then all of this is back on, right?

00:30:12.000 Fox News reported this yesterday.

00:30:13.000 According to Fox News, the fired prosecutor at the center of the Ukraine controversy said during a private interview with the president's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, earlier this year that he was told to back off an investigation involving Burisma.

00:30:26.000 That is the company that was linked to Joe Biden's son, according to details of that interview that were handed over to Congress by the State Department's inspector general on Wednesday.

00:30:34.000 So Giuliani was basically taking notes.

00:30:37.000 He sent them to the State Department.

00:30:38.000 Why don't you, if you're talking about corruption, you should probably investigate this whole Joe Biden-Victor Shokin thing.

00:30:44.000 That was some of the documents that were turned over by the State Department Inspector General in all of this.

00:30:48.000 We'll get to more of this in just one second.

00:30:51.000 Is the Biden issue still a live issue?

00:30:53.000 If so, that also casts a different light on Trump mentioning Biden in that call with Zelensky.

00:30:58.000 Again, there's no quid pro quo in that call, given that the Ukrainians didn't know military aid was even being withheld.

00:31:03.000 We'll get to more of that in just one second.

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00:32:20.000 Okay, we'll get to more of Joe Biden.

00:32:23.000 And is there a there there?

00:32:25.000 Maybe.

00:32:26.000 Maybe.

00:32:27.000 Certainly the Democrats do not want to talk about whether there is a there there.

00:32:29.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:32:31.000 First, good news for another Kingdom fans.

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00:34:26.000 So what is fascinating about the whole Ukraine Joe Biden thing is how hard the media are working to pretend that nothing untoward happened, not only with Joe Biden, but also with the 2016 campaign.

00:34:45.000 It was Politico that first reported in 2017 that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC had been openly coordinating with the Ukrainian embassy to dig up information on Paul Manafort that they could use against the Trump campaign and that the Obama administration was involved as well.

00:34:58.000 In that effort, right?

00:34:59.000 All of that has been reported over the past couple of years.

00:35:02.000 Now we're supposed to pretend that all of the Ukrainian influence in the election was basically on the up-and-up.

00:35:08.000 So we were supposed to, let's just be straight, we were supposed to focus on Russian interference in the election up through 2019 until the Mueller report ended.

00:35:17.000 And then as soon as the Mueller report ended, we are no longer supposed to focus on Ukrainian influence.

00:35:22.000 And now we're supposed to focus on Trump trying to influence Ukraine.

00:35:24.000 So we shift our focus to Ukraine, but again, The theory of the media and the Democrats seems to be that Trump is this god-like figure where he speaks things into existence.

00:35:34.000 So Trump says Russia, and suddenly the story is Russia for three years.

00:35:37.000 Then Trump says Ukraine, and the story is Trump and Ukraine.

00:35:39.000 But at no point are we allowed to look at Ukraine, not with regard to Trump using Ukraine, but with regard to Trump being targeted by forces within Ukraine.

00:35:48.000 And the opposite is true also.

00:35:49.000 We're not supposed to look at Russia when Barack Obama was president.

00:35:52.000 We're only supposed to do it when Donald Trump talks about Russia.

00:35:55.000 And so, all the world revolves around getting Donald Trump, right?

00:35:58.000 You may notice there's a pattern to all of this.

00:36:00.000 Like, listen to this report from the Washington Post.

00:36:04.000 Quote.

00:36:04.000 Rewrite the history of the 2016 election?

00:36:05.000 Well, I mean, again, Politico did report that the Hillary Clinton campaign was digging up dirt with the Ukrainian embassy on Trump's campaign manager.

00:36:12.000 Manifest.

00:36:12.000 And that was Politico.

00:36:35.000 The relationship with Giuliani, which Giuliani acknowledged in an interview this week with the Washington Post, stems from a shared interest in a narrative that undermines the rationale for the special counsel investigation.

00:36:44.000 That inquiry led to Manafort's imprisonment on tax and financial fraud allegations related to his work in Kiev for the political party of former President Viktor Yanukovych.

00:36:53.000 Apparently, a bunch of different Republicans have jumped into the fray.

00:36:56.000 This is not just a Giuliani thing anymore.

00:36:58.000 Senator Chuck Schumer, who's chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Senator Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, have announced their renewal of an inquiry into any coordination between Ukraine and Democratic Party officials.

00:37:08.000 Which, again, makes some sense.

00:37:10.000 Now, President Trump has been mocking Joe Biden on this.

00:37:12.000 There are basically two stories with regard to Ukraine, and we shouldn't conflate them.

00:37:16.000 One is Joe Biden attempting to influence the interior politics of Ukraine by withholding loans.

00:37:22.000 And at the same time, the prosecutor he was targeting, who he may or may not have been targeting for good reasons.

00:37:27.000 I mean, the EU, the IMF, the World Bank, they all didn't like this prosecutor.

00:37:31.000 But that prosecutor was apparently presiding over an investigation into Biden's son.

00:37:35.000 That's story number one.

00:37:36.000 And then story number two is Hillary Clinton and the DNC and the Obama administration.

00:37:41.000 Coordinating with the Ukrainian embassy to dig up dirt on Trump's team during the 2016 election, right?

00:37:46.000 Those are two separate stories.

00:37:47.000 And President Trump has been going hard after Biden.

00:37:50.000 Yesterday, he tweeted what is one of the funniest tweets of his presidency.

00:37:53.000 He tweeted out, look at the picture, and used a Nickelback video to do so.

00:37:58.000 Twitter has now pulled it down for copyright infringement, which is just ridiculous.

00:38:01.000 It's obviously satire.

00:38:03.000 It's a clip of Joe Biden explaining that he's never spoken to his own son about overseas business dealings, juxtaposed with a picture of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and a Ukrainian gas official all golfing together.

00:38:15.000 Have you ever spoken to your son about his overseas business dealings?

00:38:18.000 I've never spoken to my son about his overseas men's assailants.

00:38:21.000 Okay, that's pretty spectacular.

00:38:35.000 Taylor.

00:38:35.000 but That is some grade-A presidential tweet trolling.

00:38:41.000 Trump didn't bother with the Nickelback references yesterday in the presser. 0.81

00:38:44.000 He just said Biden and his son are stone-cold crooked.

00:38:46.000 Now, let's be real about this. 0.98

00:38:48.000 Hunter Biden probably is stone-cold crooked. 0.95

00:38:51.000 I don't know about Joe.

00:38:53.000 When you are a famous person, there are lots of hangers-on who probably try to use your name to get access in high places.

00:38:59.000 The fact is that Hunter Biden, who is basically a failure in everything he has ever tried, was getting paid $50,000 a month to be on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

00:39:08.000 You can't imagine it's because of his expertise in oil and natural gas.

00:39:11.000 It probably has a lot more to do with the fact his daddy was VP of the United States.

00:39:14.000 Is that on Joe Biden?

00:39:16.000 I mean, not really.

00:39:17.000 Lots of people are sympathetic toward their own kids.

00:39:20.000 President Trump is sympathetic toward his own kids.

00:39:21.000 With that said, does that exonerate Joe Biden?

00:39:24.000 Not really.

00:39:24.000 Here's Trump going after them.

00:39:26.000 What did you want about Biden?

00:39:26.000 What did you want him to look into on Biden?

00:39:28.000 Look, Biden and his son. 0.99

00:39:31.000 are stone cold, crooked. 0.99

00:39:34.000 And you know it. 0.94

00:39:35.000 His son walks out with millions of dollars.

00:39:37.000 The kid knows nothing.

00:39:39.000 You know it.

00:39:40.000 And so do we.

00:39:41.000 Go ahead.

00:39:41.000 Ask a question.

00:39:42.000 The question, sir, was what did you want President Zelensky to do about Vice President Biden and his son Hunter?

00:39:47.000 Are you talking to me?

00:39:50.000 You talking to me?

00:39:53.000 I'm walking here.

00:39:54.000 You talking?

00:39:55.000 In any case, the Democrats are trying to downplay all of this, obviously.

00:39:55.000 Okay.

00:39:58.000 So John Brennan, who is the head of the CIA while he was in the Obama administration, and who proceeded to spend two years, again, claiming that there would be undisclosed information linking President Trump to Vladimir Putin, demonstrating that he was, in fact, a traitor.

00:40:12.000 Now he's like, I don't want to look at the 2016 election anymore.

00:40:14.000 Why are we even looking at the 2016 election?

00:40:16.000 So just to get this straight, for two long years, All the Democrats wanted to talk about was corruption in the 2016 election.

00:40:21.000 Now, when Trump raises the question about whether there was Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election, again, based on published reports in places like Politico, John Brennan's like, ah, we probably shouldn't, should we look into that?

00:40:31.000 Nah, nothing to see here.

00:40:33.000 Nothing to see here.

00:40:35.000 Pay no attention to the John Brennan behind the curtain.

00:40:38.000 I remember William Barr, you know, when he was testifying in front of Congress, he said he didn't understand the predication of the counterintelligence investigation that was launched into Russia's interference in the 2016 election.

00:40:49.000 I don't understand the predication of this worldwide effort to try to uncover dirt, either real or imagined, that would discredit that investigation in 2016 into Russian interference.

00:41:01.000 You know, on one hand, the Obama administration is crucified for not doing enough.

00:41:06.000 And now they're looking for what we might have done in order to try to understand better and to prevent the Russian interference.

00:41:12.000 Well, no.

00:41:14.000 I mean, John Brennan contradicts himself seven ways from Sunday in this clip alone, right?

00:41:18.000 He says, you know, William Barr went out there and he said, why are we investigating Russia?

00:41:21.000 Well, why are we investigating Ukraine?

00:41:23.000 Well, you wanted Russia investigated. 0.66

00:41:25.000 So actually the hypocrisy here is you.

00:41:27.000 You wanted to interfere certain foreign investigation.

00:41:30.000 You wanted to investigate certain foreign interference into the election, but not other foreign interference in the election.

00:41:36.000 He says, well, we were criticized for not doing enough, and now they're saying that we did too much.

00:41:41.000 Well, no, they're wondering if you launched an investigation under false auspices, then that would make a difference.

00:41:49.000 If you're talking about the use of public dollars for electioneering, it seems to me that if it turns out that the Trump-Russia investigation was launched on false premises in order to get Trump, that makes a difference.

00:41:59.000 And if it turns out that the Obama administration or the Hillary campaign were coordinating with the Ukrainians, that seems like that would be impactful as well, especially if you want to prevent future interference in elections.

00:42:10.000 John Solomon, who's been reporting on this incessantly from the Hill.

00:42:13.000 Again, people keep saying that John Solomon's reporting on this has been debunked.

00:42:16.000 I've seen no evidence that his reporting on this has been debunked.

00:42:19.000 He says that a Ukrainian court has already found that leaked documents affected the 2016 election from Ukraine.

00:42:25.000 What about the evidence Ukraine meddled in our election?

00:42:28.000 They say, no, no, that didn't happen.

00:42:30.000 Yeah, it did.

00:42:30.000 Did that happen?

00:42:32.000 A Ukrainian court has ruled in December of last year that a senior law enforcement official and a parliamentary member intentionally leaked documents about Paul Manafort and Donald Trump in an effort to intervene in the U.S.

00:42:45.000 That is an official ruling of a Ukrainian court.

00:42:45.000 election.

00:42:48.000 OK, so that much is true.

00:42:50.000 So, again, all of this is a mess.

00:42:52.000 Basically, you've got the White House investigating Ukraine, and the State Department investigating Ukraine, and then you've got the Congress investigating the White House for investigating Ukraine.

00:43:02.000 Is any of it impeachable?

00:43:02.000 It's all a mess.

00:43:04.000 Does any of this have to do with impeachment?

00:43:05.000 It seems like we're pretty far afield, right?

00:43:07.000 That's funny.

00:43:07.000 I was talking to my mom, who kind of follows this stuff.

00:43:10.000 Yeah, I would say peripherally.

00:43:12.000 And she follows it closely enough that she sort of knows what's going on, but she's not in the weeds on this.

00:43:16.000 And maybe over the weekend, she was asking me, so what's the deal with this impeachment stuff?

00:43:20.000 And I started to try and explain it to her. 0.54

00:43:22.000 I got about a paragraph in and she said, sounds like bullcrap.

00:43:25.000 And I feel like that's how most Americans are going to respond.

00:43:27.000 Because this started off with a very clear allegation that Trump was engaged in a quid pro quo with the Ukrainian government.

00:43:33.000 That Trump was basically paying off the Ukrainian government to investigate his domestic political opponents.

00:43:38.000 And now, we've got, did Ukraine interfere in the 2016 election?

00:43:42.000 What was Rudy Giuliani doing in Ukraine?

00:43:44.000 Did the Democrats coordinate with the whistleblower?

00:43:46.000 Is there any criminal activity?

00:43:48.000 If there is no quid pro quo, maybe there's a secondary quid pro quo with Mike Pence, but Pence didn't know about it.

00:43:53.000 It's all very, very complicated.

00:43:54.000 The more complicated this gets, the harder I sell it is to the American public.

00:43:59.000 Now it's funny, I got a question.

00:44:01.000 You know, to let you behind the stages of what happens here at the Daily Wire.

00:44:05.000 I got a question from a member of the media the other day about the impeachment effort.

00:44:09.000 And it was from somebody on the left, obviously.

00:44:11.000 And this person said, well, you know, what I don't understand is Republicans who are sticking by Trump.

00:44:15.000 Why don't they just say, well, you know, so fine, we get President Pence.

00:44:18.000 Like, what would be the big deal?

00:44:19.000 A couple of things.

00:44:20.000 One, people should not be impeached over non-criminal behavior.

00:44:23.000 Seems like a pretty obvious one, like the truth actually matters.

00:44:26.000 And two, the fact is that Republicans rightly see this, I think, based on the current evidence, as a smear against Republicans generally.

00:44:36.000 And this reporter was asking me, you know, I get the theory that Republicans sort of see Trump as their avatar, and so an attack on Trump is an attack on them.

00:44:45.000 And I said, well, no, you're getting this wrong.

00:44:47.000 You've got the polarity reversed.

00:44:48.000 Republican voters feel like they've been attacked by the media.

00:44:51.000 We feel like we have been attacked by the powers that be.

00:44:54.000 We feel like the Democratic Party has been targeting us as bitter clingers who cling to our God and our guns.

00:45:00.000 We feel like we've been targeted for years.

00:45:02.000 And then Trump gets elected and you throw exactly the same accusations, but you put on top of it a bunch of politically motivated accusations that he's a traitor.

00:45:10.000 And so it's not that Trump is somehow like the tip of the spear.

00:45:14.000 It's that Trump is, in fact, the attacks on Trump are so similar to the attacks on conservatives generally.

00:45:20.000 The conservatives see attacks on Trump and they say, well, that is an attack on me because if Trump weren't here, they'd still be attacking me the same way.

00:45:26.000 And they're right about this.

00:45:27.000 The reason that Trump is popular in Republican circles is because the left is consistently attacking him and because Trump is aggressive.

00:45:34.000 Trump's aggressive instinct, his willingness to fight back, is indeed what endears him to the Republican base.

00:45:38.000 It's why he's the president right now.

00:45:40.000 So for all the talk that, you know, listen, I'll talk about how I think he's not focused enough in his pushback, how I think he's scattershot, how I think that he's wild on Twitter.

00:45:49.000 The fact is that his aggressive instinct is the reason that he is popular among Republicans.

00:45:53.000 Now look at Nancy Pelosi. 0.94

00:45:54.000 Nancy Pelosi hands out subpoenas like, you know, she has to approve it. 0.98

00:45:56.000 about Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats getting very aggressive.

00:45:58.000 And he says, listen, Paul Ryan never did this.

00:46:00.000 Now, look at Nancy Pelosi.

00:46:03.000 Nancy Pelosi hands out subpoenas like, you know, she has to approve it. 0.98

00:46:07.000 She hands out subpoenas like they're cookies.

00:46:10.000 You want a subpoena?

00:46:12.000 Here you go, take them, like they're cookies.

00:46:14.000 Paul Ryan would never give anybody a subpoena.

00:46:17.000 No, let's talk about it.

00:46:18.000 That's a big thing to give a subpoena.

00:46:20.000 Let's talk about it.

00:46:21.000 Two weeks later, they're still talking.

00:46:23.000 They wanted subpoenas to investigate the corrupt Democrats and the corrupt people on the other side.

00:46:29.000 Paul Ryan would not give subpoenas.

00:46:32.000 Okay, so his idea here is that Republicans have always played by the rules, and Democrats never play by the rules, so I'm not gonna play by the rules.

00:46:38.000 That does endear Trump, because the fact is that Democrats don't play by the rules.

00:46:42.000 And every story that comes out about Adam Schiff coordinating with whistleblowers makes this seem less like an honest attempt to get to the bottom of a violation of law, and much more like an attempt to get President Trump.

00:46:53.000 Meanwhile, the Democrats, it is amazing, just as proof of the sort of hypocrisy here, Hillary Clinton continues to maintain that she won the 2016 election.

00:47:03.000 She came out yesterday and said that President Trump is an illegitimate president.

00:47:06.000 That was her line. 0.99

00:47:07.000 She also suggested that she lost in 2016 because she was too serious, not because she was a garbage candidate. 0.99

00:47:11.000 Here she was on The View.

00:47:12.000 I'm a serious person but I'm also a fun person but I think I probably came across as too serious and too, you know, I really believed that my job, especially as a woman and the first woman to go as far as I did, that I had to Help people feel good about a woman in the Oval Office, a woman Commander-in-Chief.

00:47:36.000 And so I may have over-corrected a little bit because sometimes people say, oh why can't you be like that or why weren't you like that?

00:47:44.000 Okay, so again, Hillary Clinton trying to claim that she lost because she wasn't fun enough? 1.00

00:47:49.000 Yeah, lady, when you look up not fun, the opposite of fun, in the antonym dictionary, my goodness, Hillary Clinton definitely comes up on that list. 1.00

00:48:00.000 Pretty astonishing.

00:48:01.000 By the way, the Democrats continue to push forward this impeachment stuff largely because they are having trouble seeing how any of their candidates are a walk away to defeat Trump.

00:48:08.000 Kamala Harris, who again, has become Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, boiling rabbits for attention. 1.00

00:48:13.000 She says that we should bring Mike Pence before Congress now.

00:48:16.000 That's how far afield we've gone.

00:48:17.000 Over Chris Matthews, I'm gonna be safe.

00:48:19.000 Get up in the morning, come to the show, come in here, question Kamala Harris, she laughs all weird. 0.99

00:48:23.000 Then I kinda roll away on this chair.

00:48:25.000 Ah!

00:48:26.000 I drink a little, I come back in the next morning, go Kamala Harris, go!

00:48:29.000 You're raising a very important point, which is that the Vice President has a lot to answer to.

00:48:35.000 And he also should be brought before the United States Congress to speak about what exactly was his involvement and what, if any, solicitations were made by the President to have the Vice President engage in unethical conduct.

00:48:53.000 Yeah, and this is just, it's getting too far afield at this point.

00:48:56.000 And Trump is fighting back with everything, including the kitchen sink.

00:48:56.000 Too far afield.

00:48:59.000 In breaking news, according to the Associated Press, President Trump said in remarks to reporters outside the White House, quote, China should start an investigation into the Bidens.

00:49:07.000 So now it's not just Ukraine.

00:49:08.000 Here's the thing about Trump.

00:49:10.000 He's not hiding the ball.

00:49:11.000 Okay, for all the talk about Trump, you know, secretly behind the scenes, manipulating things, this is a dude who does not hide the ball.

00:49:18.000 Ever.

00:49:19.000 I mean, just everything is right out there.

00:49:21.000 He's not hiding anything.

00:49:22.000 This is a guy who, I mean, the way that he met Melania Trump is he was at an event where she was with another dude and he just walked up to her and gave her his phone number.

00:49:30.000 I mean, that is what Trump is in a nutshell.

00:49:33.000 Trump is not a manipulative player from behind the scenes.

00:49:36.000 He doesn't have a plan.

00:49:37.000 He just says it.

00:49:38.000 So he said it about China today.

00:49:40.000 So the Democrats will undoubtedly claim that this is now impeachable too, even though it's just Trump mouthing off.

00:49:45.000 He said China should start an investigation into the Bidens.

00:49:48.000 He said he had not directly asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to investigate Biden and his son Hunter.

00:49:53.000 He said it's certainly something we could start thinking about.

00:49:56.000 Trump and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have tried to raise suspicions about Hunter Biden's business dealings in China, leaning on the writings of conservative author Peter Schweitzer.

00:50:03.000 By the way, if there's one author who's made a huge difference in the course of American elections, it would be Schweitzer, who's very instrumental in Hillary and emailgate and all the rest of it, and the corruption inside the Hillary Clinton State Department and the Clinton Foundation.

00:50:19.000 Trump is not hiding the ball here.

00:50:20.000 So basically this is turned back into the miasma of fighting.

00:50:24.000 None of it sounds impeachable.

00:50:25.000 All of it is confusing and chaotic.

00:50:28.000 And that is why this effort in the end is going to go nowhere, I think.

00:50:31.000 Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then some things that I hate.

00:50:33.000 So, things that I like today.

00:50:35.000 So this was just an unbelievable thing.

00:50:38.000 Botham Jean is this accountant, black accountant, who was horrifically and tragically killed, murdered, by a police officer off-duty named Amber Geiger.

00:50:48.000 She walked into an apartment she thought was hers.

00:50:49.000 She saw Botham Jean in there and she shot him to death.

00:50:52.000 Well, yesterday she was sentenced to 10 years in prison, which seems like an appropriate sentence for What probably was manslaughter but was convicted as first-degree murder?

00:51:00.000 Brant Jean was Botham Jean's brother and I mean you want to talk about a person with absolute class?

00:51:07.000 You want to talk about a person with just integrity and decency?

00:51:11.000 This is an amazing amazing thing.

00:51:13.000 Here he is at the sentencing hearing asking if he can give the woman who killed his brother a hug.

00:51:18.000 I mean it's just it's an unbelievable thing.

00:51:20.000 I mean I I wish, you know, I hope that, God forbid, in a similar circumstance, I would have this kind of moral quality.

00:51:26.000 It's an incredible, incredible thing.

00:51:27.000 Here's Brant Jean.

00:51:29.000 I forgive you.

00:51:31.000 I know if you go to God and ask Him, He will forgive you.

00:51:36.000 I don't even want you to go to jail.

00:51:40.000 I want the best for you, because I know that's exactly what both of them would want you to do.

00:51:48.000 And the best would be, give your life to Christ.

00:51:51.000 I don't know if this is possible, but can I give her a hug, please?

00:51:55.000 I mean, that's just, man.

00:52:03.000 Well, what a human being of quality.

00:52:05.000 What a human being of quality.

00:52:06.000 Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.

00:52:11.000 Okay, so the federal government apparently has dramatically expanded its exposure to risky mortgages.

00:52:16.000 It's as though we don't learn anything ever in this country.

00:52:19.000 So according to the Washington Post, the federal government has dramatically expanded its exposure to risky mortgages as federal officials over the past four years took steps that cleared the way for companies to issue loans that many borrowers may not be able to repay.

00:52:30.000 Because it turns out that we have in this country a very conflicting set of principles.

00:52:35.000 Principle number one, you should pay back what you owe.

00:52:38.000 Principle number two, if you can't buy a house, that's our fault and we should pick up the risk.

00:52:42.000 Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Housing Administration are now guaranteeing almost $7 trillion in mortgage-related debt.

00:52:49.000 The federal government should have nothing to do with guaranteeing mortgages.

00:52:52.000 Nothing.

00:52:52.000 It should be completely on banks to guarantee mortgages.

00:52:55.000 Why I should be on the hook for you not paying your mortgage is ridiculous and vice versa.

00:52:58.000 If I can't pay my mortgage, that is a me problem. 0.89

00:53:00.000 And if you can't pay your mortgage, that is a you problem.

00:53:03.000 And the fact that people don't seem to understand this and they want the federal government to boost home ownership by guaranteeing loans is insane.

00:53:10.000 It's insane.

00:53:10.000 It's how we ended up in the subprime crisis in the first place in 2007-2008.

00:53:16.000 Apparently, that $7 trillion in mortgage-related debt is 33% more than before the housing crisis.

00:53:21.000 So, the housing crisis was in large part caused by a belief by the federal government that sponsoring Subprime mortgages that were going to default would turn out fine because real estate values would continue to rise, so lending companies, banks, they'd be able to foreclose on the property and still not lose money, which means that the federal government would never have to backstop this stuff.

00:53:40.000 Then the real estate market crashes, people are getting foreclosed upon, and guess who has to step in?

00:53:44.000 Their solution to that is, let's get more into the federal lending business.

00:53:48.000 These entities, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the FHA, are run or backstopped by the U.S.

00:53:52.000 government, so a large increase in loan defaults could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.

00:53:57.000 The risk is a direct result of pressure from the lending industry, consumer groups, and political appointees who clamored for the government to intervene when home ownership rates fell several years ago.

00:54:06.000 Starting in the Obama administration, numerous government officials obliged, mistakenly expecting that the private market ultimately would take over.

00:54:13.000 Why would it take over?

00:54:14.000 Why exactly would the private market take over for loans that they were never going to be able to support in the first place?

00:54:20.000 In 2019, according to data from the Urban Institute, there is now more government-backed housing debt than in any other point in American history.

00:54:28.000 Taxpayers are shouldering much of the risk.

00:54:30.000 A growing number of homeowners face debt payments that amount to nearly half of their monthly income, a threshold many experts consider too steep.

00:54:37.000 The basic rule used to be don't spend more than 20% on your mortgage of what you make in monthly income.

00:54:42.000 Now it's like 33%.

00:54:43.000 Spending 50% means you have a high likelihood of defaulting.

00:54:46.000 Roughly 30% of the loans Fannie Mae guaranteed last year exceeded that level.

00:54:50.000 Up from 14% in 2016.

00:54:51.000 Okay, that's insane.

00:54:54.000 And again, that is driven by the idea that government is the solution to all ills.

00:54:58.000 It is not.

00:54:59.000 It makes things worse.

00:55:00.000 It makes things worse.

00:55:01.000 And that's only going to become clear when the real estate market tanks.

00:55:04.000 Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.

00:55:07.000 Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.

00:55:08.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:55:09.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:55:14.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Robert Sterling.

00:55:17.000 Directed by Mike Joyner.

00:55:18.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:55:20.000 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.

00:55:22.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.

00:55:24.000 And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:55:27.000 Assistant director, Pavel Wydowski.

00:55:29.000 Edited by Adam Sajevitz.

00:55:31.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.

00:55:32.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

00:55:34.000 Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.

00:55:36.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.

00:55:38.000 Copyright Daily Wire 2019.

00:55:40.000 Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.

00:55:43.000 It seems President Trump is getting sick and tired of being lied about 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

00:55:48.000 The press can't understand it.

00:55:50.000 What's the big deal, they say?

00:55:51.000 Isn't that what we always do to Republican presidents?

00:55:54.000 Hilarity ensues on The Andrew Klavan Show.

The Ben Shapiro Show - October 03, 2019

Who Gives A Schiff? | Ep. 872

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