On this week’s “The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special,” host Ben Shapiro spoke with businesswoman, author, and former 2016 GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina about the implications of Robert Mueller’s final report on his investigation into President Trump’s campaign. Video and partial transcript below:
Ben Shapiro: So, my brief take on the Mueller report is that it has an enormous amount of both embarrassing and terrible behavior by the President of the United States. As a lawyer I didn’t see anything that rises to the level of criminal obstruction of justice. Obviously, William Barr felt the same. Robert Mueller had the capacity to rule on that; he didn’t. He sort of kicked it over. I didn’t see more evidence of collusion than was already there; I didn’t see criminal collusion. What was your overall assessment of the Mueller report and what ought to happen from here?
Carly Fiorina: Well, first let me say, one of the things I learned in my brief time in law school is that lawyers can disagree, and apparently a lot of lawyers disagree about this. I’m not a lawyer, but as a citizen reading this report I found the report — first of all, you’re right, and Mueller is very clear in this report that he sets a very high bar. It’s called criminal conduct, that’s a very high bar to have to clear. I would also say the report is carefully and precisely written. I would say that Trump is not exonerated. I would also say Trump did not fully cooperate, but more to the point – the Russian interference, that volume of the report is stunning and shocking, and the fact that we are not having a conversation in this country about how to prevent that from happening again is really dereliction of duty I think, honestly. And the fact that both Republicans and Democrats, in fairness, have taken that as a political issue, it’s not a political issue. The “sweeping, systemic,” I’m quoting as you know — the “sweeping, systemic” interference in our elections by the Russians is now a political football, and it should not be.
Do you remember when Republicans were so upset because President Obama whispered to President Medvedev and said, “I’ll have more flexibility after the election.” And Republicans went up in arms “oh my gosh!” Of course, the FBI had to investigate the hints that they were given; there was a lot there, and we should be shocked by what has been uncovered, and alarmed. I would also say that in volume two, I accept I’m not a lawyer, it wasn’t criminal conduct, but this is not the way a President of the United States and his staff should be behaving. My question is if it were a Democrat doing this, what would Republicans be saying?
See here’s the thing about principles, they’re sometimes inconvenient. And if a principle is right when it’s a Democrat in the White House, then that principle remains right when a Republican is in the White House. I think the Republican Party, the Democrat Party too, has to kind of get focused on “what are our principles?” And I think our principles, as a conservative, are power concentrated, is power abused, decision-making has to be dispersed, huge bureaucracies have to be reformed, people closest to the problem know best how to solve them, and that definitely doesn’t mean people in Washington, D.C. — it means people in cities and communities and families and businesses, and we are a long way from those principles.