On Wednesday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about the Democrats’ shifting attitude about the role of the whistleblower in the Ukraine story. Video and partial transcript below:
Controversy has broken out as Republicans are trying to out the whistleblower. Now, the Democrats are claiming that the whistleblower is irrelevant — that at this point we’ve moved beyond the whistleblower’s complaint. There’s truth to that. The fact is that we now know what the whistleblower had to say, we have the transcript of the call. The whistleblower complaint really didn’t add anything.
Now I’m being consistent on this. I said that the whistleblower complaint originally was less important than the transcript of the call, but that’s not what Democrats said. Democrats said, “We need the entire whistleblower complaint or its obstruction of justice and a cover-up. We need to interview the whistleblower, we need his thoughts!” Then, as soon as it became clear that the whistleblower was probably a partisan hack on behalf of Joe Biden, then it was, “Oh, we don’t need to hear from the whistleblower anymore.”
I’m of the opinion that the whistleblower is basically irrelevant once the claims of his complaint are made public. But is it fair for Republicans to point out Democratic hypocrisy right here? Yeah, that’s totally fair. As far as the idea that it is a violation of law to to release the name of the whistleblower — no, it isn’t. Whistleblower laws are designed to prevent the firing of a whistleblower. Keeping a whistleblower’s name confidential is usually designed to prevent their firing in the private sector, [or] as a private contractor with the United States government.
There are regulations in place that prevent the firing of whistleblower. The inspector general of a particular department is prevented from speaking the name aloud of the whistleblower, but there’s nothing that prevents Rand Paul from doing. This is the point that Rand Paul, who’s been pushing to out the whistleblower, made yesterday when he was in a tete-a-tete with the media.
REPORTER: You know it’s illegal to out a whistleblower?
PAUL: Actually, you see you’ve got that wrong too.
REPORTER: No, we don’t.
PAUL: You should work on the facts. The whistleblower statute protects the whistleblower from having his name revealed by the inspector general. Even The New York Times admits that no one else is under any legal obligation. The other point, and you need to be very careful if you really are interested in the news, is that the whistleblower actually is a material witness, completely separate from being the whistleblower because he worked for Joe Biden, at the same time [that] Hunter Biden was receiving $50,000 a month.
So Rand Paul is actually making a pretty solid case as to why we ought to know who the whistleblower is, which is why I covered it on the show. I mean, that is newsworthy stuff. The fact is that if the situation were reversed, and this were a Republican whistleblower in a Democratic administration, this would have been plastered all over the front pages of every newspaper immediately, if it turned out that the person was a partisan hack on behalf of the Republicans. The media are so invested in Trump being pushed out of office, they’re so invested in hatred of Trump, it’s pretty astonishing.
The best example today is that The Washington Post came out with a full, illustrated Mueller report. It’s embarrassing. I mean, it really is. Democracy dies in crappy cartoons. They drew all of these pictures, like Paul Manafort and James Comey, with thought bubbles. It’s absurd. They’re publishing a graphic nonfiction book centered on special counsel Robert Mueller’s obstruction of justice inquiry. I mean, I suppose they couldn’t do it with the Kenneth Starr report, then it just would’ve been pornography.
“The Mueller Report Illustrated is drawn directly from Volume II of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s report.” Of course, they’re not going to do it on Volume I because Volume I didn’t uncover anything. Volume I was about the Trump Russia collusion nonsense.
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