On Thursday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan weighs in on the coverage of the impeachment hearing. Video and partial transcript below:
Congratulations to the Democrats! There’s no avoiding my talking about this stupid thing. I mean, Democrats went on TV, smeared themselves with excrement, set themselves on fire, blew themselves up and then declared victory — it was embarrassing.
The Wall Street Journal is a funny paper because their opinion section leans toward the Right — they don’t like Donald Trump — but their news section is really trending Left and they hate Trump. They have this banner headline, “Public Hearing Surfaces New Claim,” I’m holding it up. You can see it goes right across the head — The Wall Street Journal rarely does that.
So now I was in journalism, I was a news writer on radio. I was a newspaper man for a brief period — you have a big banner headline like this, “Public Hearing Surfaces New Claim.” What do you think the lede is going to be? Because the lede is the first thing that you write. It’s always the big thing — the grabber — the lede should then be the new claim, right? It says:
President Trump and a summer phone call asked about politically advantageous investigations…
We’re going to take a look at that claim — what this thing is that they’ve got a banner headline over because it is hilarious. I mean, listen, this is a show where I don’t even have to write satire. It is that funny. So the whole thing, again, they had two witnesses, right? William Taylor, the acting ambassador to the Ukraine, and George Kent, who is a senior State Department official. These are their two star witnesses, remember, they wanted to lead off — it was going to be a blockbuster. It was going to be really powerful.
John Ratcliffe, one of the Republican congressmen and a good questioner, this is the way he summed up their testimony at the end of it, this is his question:
RATCLIFFE: In this impeachment hearing today, where we impeach presidents for treason or bribery or other high crimes, where is the impeachable offense in that call? Are either of you here today to assert there was an impeachable offense in that call? Shout it out. Anyone?
They haven’t got anything. They keep saying [paraphrasing] “Well, we’re not taking sides here,” [but] the information, despite what they tell you, is not new — most of the information was not new. They heard rumors, they heard ideas that Rudy Giuliani was running around behind the scenes trying to get investigations into the Democrats — reaching out to Ukraine for dirt on Clinton, and on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s corruption in taking this job with his corrupt gas company, this corrupt energy company, Burisma, while he had no expertise, was being paid massive amounts of money and his father was vice president. How did that happen?
They keep telling us, the newspapers, they keep saying there’s no indication of corruption here. The very fact of it is an indication of corruption — as they reported, as the mainstream media reported at the time. But the other subtext of this, and this is important before we get to the hilarity, it’s really important to point out that these are career diplomats with an investment in Ukraine being important to the United States and this anti-Russian policy that has been in place since Reagan, basically. This is this anti-Russian policy.
Now, Vladimir Putin is a gangster, and Russia is a gangster-ocracy. But the fact is, our main problem coming up is China. And eventually — I’m just telling you this, this is not predicting the future because this is just true — eventually, we are going to have to work with Russia against China, because China is a powerhouse, [and] Russia is a failed state. It is a gangster-ocracy, it has no money. Putin is very good at organizing big shows of force, and he’s very good at playing with other gangsters like the Iranians and all this. You know, gangsters love each other, they are not a major threat.
These guys in the bureaucracy don’t like the fact that Trump knows this, and he is not playing Ukraine. They keep saying everything leads back to Russia. Screw Russia! Really, Russia is a failed state. They don’t have — their economy is gone. The only place they’re getting money from is the Germans setting up oil [pipelines] with them.
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