Ben Shapiro Breaksdown Comey Firing, Trump Impeachment - Joe Rogan

Hello freak bitches. He was willing to keep the mooch. I mean the mooch was only ousted because of John Kelly. And the mooch is it. What did the mooch say? What was his... It was about Steve Bannon sucking his own cock. Yeah that's exactly right. About him performing acts of... Why would he think that he could say that once he's in the office? First of all, why would he think that Steve Bannon could even possibly do that? I mean Bannon's not flexible. I know Steve. That's not something in Steve's repertoire. A giant unit. But it doesn't matter. Just the idea that he would think... I mean he must be emboldened by the fact that Trump has said so many outrageous things. Well, there were reports from the New York Post that he actually... that Trump liked it. That all that happened is that there was so much blowback that he had to replace Kelly. And he puts Kelly in there and Kelly's like, you can't do this. Right. And Trump's like, okay fine. But doesn't it seem more crazy to fire a guy after 10 days than it does to sit him down and say, hey man, don't say that again. You would think that's what... Right. Let's move forward. That's what they should have done the next day. But the problem is he'd been doing it for a week at that point. He was out there saying that Reince Priebus was leaking on the president and was an enemy of the president for a week. And he was saying that he was going to get him fired. Right. And at the same time, remember, this is the same week that Trump himself is tweeting out that Attorney General Sessions, who is his most loyal supporter for a year and a half, that that guy is like a traitor. Right. And that he wishes he would go away. Because he recused himself. Yeah. First of all, Trump can fire any of these people at any time. This is very passive aggressive. For a guy who made his living saying, you're fired on TV, it's amazing that all the people that Trump has fired have been fired actually through surrogates. Yeah. Mike Flynn resigned. James Comey was fired basically through Rod Rosenstein and Sessions. And then Rosenstein had to recuse himself, which is how you get the special counsel. And Comey found out on television. On TV. Right. Which is hilarious. He sent us like an emissary to go to L.A. and give him a letter. And like everyone he fires has to be fired in the most roundabout. I think that Trump actually... I think the dirty little secret is I'm not sure Trump actually likes firing people. I think he kind of like torturing people, but I'm not sure that he actually likes firing them. Well, he maybe doesn't like people being mad at him face to face. I think that's it. He wants them to love him in front of his face. So like when he's not there, you know, he can make a phone call, fire him. You're fired, Jetson, hang up the phone. And you don't have to actually see the guy. He wants that guy to like him. Yeah. I don't know. The Comey thing was really bizarre because it was like, oh, you can do that? Like this guy is looking into improprieties and you can just say, no, you can't do that anymore. You're fired. You can't look into the things I've done wrong. Yeah. It was... Well, the way he did it was the stupid part. So I was calling for Comey to be fired since last year. I thought the way he handled the whole Hillary thing from beginning to end was terrible. I thought that Trump should have replaced him before he became, you know, basically day one. Here's my new cabinet. Comey did a great job, you know, usher him out the door, bring in somebody new. He kept him around. And then the first thing he said to Comey, you remember, was when he met him. He said, you're more famous than I am. Well, when Trump says that to you, you know, that's the writing on the wall right there. First of all, it's not true. But second of all, I think maybe there was also a part of the problem was that Comey's a giant. Yes. You know, Comey's... What is he? 6'8"? 6'8"? 6'9"? Yeah, something like that. Giant dude towered over Trump. The whole thing is such a comedy. And Comey's saying he was trying to hide in the curtains to avoid Trump. So you just see Herman Munster over there hiding in the curtains. Yeah. Now, what did you think? I'm enjoying the show. I mean, it's wild. If I didn't think that nuclear war was a possibility, I'd probably enjoy it more. But if I see a fucking Korean missile headed our way, I'm going to be pissed. When Comey was handling the email thing, what specifically did you not like about it? What I thought was crazy was when he restarted or reopened the case because of Huma having used her computer... ...weeners. ...with Anthony Weiner's... ...the computer, yeah. ...all that stuff. I was like, that's not enough. Like, that seems crazy. The deleting the emails, to me, seemed like... I had Mike Baker on from the CIA, and he said essentially anyone else would be in jail for what she did. For sure. For sure. For sure, right? Well, Comey, so he screwed it up, and then he re-screwed it up. So when he originally said publicly, we're not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton, he was doing something he didn't have the authority to do. The FBI does not decide whether to prosecute people. They refer the information to the DOJ, and then the DOJ decides whether to prosecute people. It was Attorney General Loretta Lynch's decision whether to prosecute or not. The statute itself, I'm a lawyer, the statute itself did not say, do you have intent to commit espionage? Do you have intent to make classified secrets public or expose them to the possibility of being made public? Intent is not an element of the crime, right? If you do it, it's a crime. So my wife is a doctor, and that means that she is under HIPAA requirements. There's no element under HIPAA that says that if she reveals somebody's, you know, proprietary medical information by accident, well, there's no intent, so she's okay. That's not part of the statute. If she brings somebody's medical records out to her car, and somebody steals the medical records, you know, if she's working at the VA or something, that's a crime. It doesn't matter if she intended to do it and just left it in her purse. So Comey read the element of intent into the crime to get Hillary off, and then he said, okay, we're not going to prosecute this, we're going to leave it alone. He shouldn't have intervened in the first place. Remember, he made an entire case, basically, for why she should be prosecuted. And then at the end, he goes, but, you know, but no, we're not going to do that. He also said we're going to keep Congress updated on any future development. Well, you get to October, and there's a future development. They found this laptop with all sorts of information on it, with new emails from Hillary Clinton that they haven't seen before. And now he has an obligation to inform Congress because he told them that he would. And so he screws the pooch again, because he's afraid that if he doesn't reveal that information, Hillary goes on to win, and then it comes out there something criminal, then people are going to blame him for Hillary winning and putting a criminal in the White House. So instead, he says, oh, well, I'll be fully transparent. I have to honor my institution. I'm going to put this out there. Of course, then Hillary loses. And now he screwed it up twice. And then he gets into the White House. And now he's supposed to be investigating the Trump-Russia stuff at the same time. So now he's investigating basically both candidates in the 2016 election. He handled this the wrong way, every step of the way, because he was so focused on what will uphold the integrity of the FBI and the integrity of the investigations and the integrity of the DOJ. He was less worried about, OK, what do I actually have to do under the law? What's my obligation under the law? His obligation under the law is to shut his piehole, hand the information over to Lynch. If Lynch wanted to kill the investigation, let her do it. So in a sense, Trump was right in saying that he's a grandstander. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that part was right. But the problem, remember, was not the firing of Comey. It was that two days after he fired Comey, he went to Lester Holt on NBC. And he said, the reason I fired Comey was not all the excuses I gave about the Hillary stuff. It's because of the Russia stuff. I was angry about how he was handling Russia. I mean, that's really stupid. Yeah, that's intensely stupid. It's intensely stupid, but it's also strange that it didn't go anywhere. Right. Like that was it. That's against the law. Well, so, you know, obstruction. So obstruction, looking at the statutes, obstruction is a little bit more than that. So you have to actually obstruct an ongoing investigation into criminal activity. There's a counterintelligence investigation going on, but not necessarily a criminal one. So not to get too specific about it. But well, that is specific, but you should get specific about it. I mean, the obstruction laws, I mean, I've looked into kind of the statutes that they've used to suggest obstruction. And it's not clear that there's any statute that specifically governs something like this. Plus, it is true that Trump does have the power as the chief executive to fire as the commander in chief to fire the FBI director for any reason he chooses now. All that said, he can be impeached for any reason, criminal or noncriminal. Right. Impeachment is not a you don't actually have to have committed a crime to be impeached. Most people don't even understand what impeach means. They think that some are another impeach means you get kicked out of office. Right. That's not what it is. There's the House and they have to vote to impeach you. And then there's the Senate and they have to vote by a two thirds majority or 60. Yeah, I think it's two thirds majority to actually convict you of a set of crimes that they come up with. But these are all political definitions, right? When it says high crimes and misdemeanors, it doesn't mean they actually have to prosecute you like they would in a criminal court and you'd have to go to jail or any of that kind of stuff. Like they could impeach anybody at any time. Clinton didn't even have to commit perjury. If they didn't want if they wanted to impeach him, they could. They could impeach every president you can impeach. It's just a vote. It's just a vote. So all the talk about what's criminal and what's not criminal. The problem for Trump, there are two ways of reading Trump's behavior in the whole Russia thing. Right. Way one is he's got something to hide. That's the most obvious way. He's got something to hide. That's why he gets rid of Flynn. We don't know why he got rid of Flynn. He gets rid of Comey. We don't really know why he got rid of Comey and then brags to the Russians that it's a pressure off him on the Russia stuff. Yeah. So way one is he's hiding something and now he's firing everybody who gets in the way. And there's you know the chain of evidence doesn't not fit that. I mean, you know, the people he's angry at in order are Attorney General Sessions, the deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, the former head of the FBI, James Comey, the acting head of the FBI, McCabe, and the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller. So those are all people involved with Russia. Those are the only people he's really angry at. So there's something to be said for the idea that maybe he's trying to hide something. On the other hand, we haven't actually seen any hard evidence of collusion itself. So we saw an attempt to collude by Donald Trump Jr. But we haven't actually seen any evidence that the Russians were providing special information to the Trump administration, which was then being weaponized for use in the campaign. We haven't seen any of that stuff. So here's the other plausible theory. And this goes to Trump's personality. He's so petty and he wants to be loved so much that he is angry that people keep saying he won because of the Russians. And so now every time people say that, he just gets pissed and he fires people. So Comey, I mean, this is totally plausible, right? Comey comes to him and has said privately that you are not under investigation. And Trump says to him, well, why didn't you say that? And Comey says, well, I can't say that because if I say that, I'm going to have to update Congress if you do fall under investigation. And Trump doesn't like that. He wants the public to know he's free and clear. So he fires Comey. And then he goes up public and he says, I didn't like how he was handling the Russia thing. I'm innocent. Why won't these people leave me alone? Right. So there's two ways to read this. Either he's totally innocent but stupid or he's trying to hide something. Those are the only two plausible ways of reading the situation. The Donald Trump Jr. thing was really bizarre because he released all the emails. Like I just almost like, look, I've got nothing to hide. Like you aren't supposed to do any of these things you're saying in these emails. Yes, that was not a good moment for Trump Jr. Do you think he got, I mean, and then you hear that he was coached by his dad. Again, you know, none of this is good stuff. I think that Donald Trump Jr. releasing the email, first of all, it is imperative to note, eight minutes later, the New York Times released basically the email chain. Right. They knew. He was beating it out of the gate. And so he puts that out there. Which is a smart move. It would be smart if he had found a way to spin it. This is the thing in politics now. The way politics works now is your smartest move, if there's dirt about you, is to be the first person out the gate with it and you put a spin on it. Right. So like Barack Obama, imagine if Obama hadn't said anything in 2008 and then we found out a week before the election that he did Coke in high school. Now, a lot of people wouldn't care. A lot of people would. Right. In 2000, George W. Bush was hit with a DUI charge from like 1973. And it probably lost him a point in the polls. So what Obama did is he wrote an entire memoir and he just kind of dismissed it. Right. In the middle of the memoir, he goes, you know, when I was in high school, did a little blow. No problem. Did a little blow. Everybody went, oh, okay. Did a little blow. All right. You know, cool. So if you're going to release this kind of stuff, you have to put a spin on it. Trump Jr. didn't. He just put out the emails and the emails themselves contain the damning material. It says right in there. There's a Russian government lawyer. The Russian government sees this as part of its effort to aid Mr. Trump's campaign. And Donald Jr. is like, thumbs up, guys. He was like, I love it. He says I love it. Let's meet. And so that does not look good. It's not quite as much as people on the left want to say it is, meaning that there's no evidence yet that any information was actually exchanged with the Russians or that anything came of the meeting. Most of the people in the meeting who have said something that said nothing came of it. But we don't know whether Trump knew about the meeting. I find it kind of hard to believe he didn't, you know, considering every major campaign figure was there. But but, you know, then they then they just keep lying. And this is this is the part that's that's a problem. Are they lying because they just think they can get away with it and they're stupid or are they lying because they're actually being meticulous about their lies? Yeah, I tend to think the former because this isn't a professional administration. I think these I think Trump, you know, fibs a lot. He says things that I mean, like on stupid things. He says things like the leader of the Boy Scouts called me and told me that he loved my speech ever. And then leader of the Boy Scouts like, what? So it is. So is that a calculated lie to hide something or is it just that Trump lies by nature? And so he does it a lot. Well, I think he's just so used to putting that that spin on things that publicity spin. Right. And the thing that he said about this was that this is what politics is, what happens in politics. You get dirt about your enemy and people exchange information. It's just what happens. It's just you're seeing it now. So a lot of people like, yeah, well, that makes sense. Right. And this is something that again, I think that we're shaped by Hollywood a little bit. Politics is dirty, but some of this stuff is not usual. Right. It's actually not particularly usual to meet with a government that is really not friendly to the United States to receive information about your political opponents. But if you've watched House of Cards, you think, well, I mean, it's like two steps down from throwing somebody under a subway. So what's the deal? I don't because I work in politics and when I go home at night, the last thing I want to do is watch Andrew Heyman about politics. Now watch Game of Thrones. That's as political as it gets.