On the latest episode of “Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special,” former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich discusses his take on the Robert Mueller report and blasts claims that Trump had “malicious” intent or attempted to undermine the Constitution. Video and partial transcript below.
Shapiro: Given the fact that collusion is sort of on the tip of everybody’s tongue, particularly in the media, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read or digest the Mueller report. What was your take on the Mueller report? The president obviously has declared that it was a witch-hunt from the very beginning, do you believe that it was a witch-hunt from the very beginning? Do you believe that it sort of went wrong in the middle or do you believe that the president was guilty in any way of anything approaching obstruction of justice, which seems like the more meaty part of the report?
Gingrich: Well I have a larger historic view of the Mueller report. I believe that there was a serious effort at a coup d’etat by the deep state that included certainly the Attorney General, the head of the FBI, a series of lies told to federal judges, an extraordinary effort to cripple or destroy the nominee of a major party and at the same time a remarkable effort which, people still haven’t dug into, to protect the Democratic nominee. People want to talk about obstruction of justice, and I say to them “great.” Let’s talk about 33,000 emails that are deleted, let’s talk about cell phones that are beaten up with a hammer, let’s talk about bleach bit for your computer hardware. If Trump had done that, would you think that was obstruction?
The one-sidedness of our standard here, that if Trump has a conversation in the Oval Office about a totally legitimate constitutional right — which anybody in the executive branch could be fired, that’s part of the president’s constitutional authority as the chief executive — suddenly we’re worried about whether or not he’s obstructing justice. If Hillary Clinton goes through everything I just said to you it’s a non-event, and that’s part of the corruption of the system. These guys thought that Hillary is going to win and they thought they could get away with anything if she’d won. I think it’s very sobering how corrupt the system would have gotten under her.
Shapiro: One of the things that was obviously very telling was the fact that James Comey effectively exonerating her wrote intent into a law that does not have a component of intent and then when they talk about obstruction of justice, suddenly they are reading intent out of the law, the law requires intent to obstruct justice. That’s one of the things that struck me about the Mueller report. On the other hand, you look at the president’s behavior and the president effectively allegedly telling Don McGhan to lie to the press, the president creating statements on behalf of Donald Trump Jr. This sort of stuff is not criminal but it is bad. I think that was not a great report for the president.
Gingrich: No, and look, a friend of mine sent me this internet story about a guy who had raccoons in his basement, and he said this really nice guy showed up in a really nice suit and he went down and when he left there was still raccoons, and this other guy showed up — he really had a degree from Harvard — and when he went down there was still raccoons. And then there’s a really rough-and-tumble guy who’s a little bit obnoxious showed up and there are no more raccoons, which one would you hire?
But on the left the hatred of Trump is so deep that people at the New York Times and Washington Post and CNN get up in the morning and they go, “I know Trump did something terrible, I wonder what it is.” And then they go looking for something terrible, which has to be something terrible because they have a daily terrible requirement, it’s like a feeding schedule. Donald Trump, nobody gives him any slack, but I’m gonna describe what slack will look like to historians. Donald Trump is a billionaire construction, real estate, finance guy who was clever enough to have a successful reality show for 14 years which for four years was the number one TV show, who then had the most successful tie in America, who runs I think 18 golf courses and a whole bunch of other buildings and hotels, who is at shameless self-propagandizing.
If you go on YouTube there is a series of pizza ads I think from the early ’90s, this kid shows up and knocks on the door for Domino’s and Trump answers and the kid says, “Oh Mr. Trump, here are your three pizzas for $15.” And Trump goes, “Wait a second kid, I gotta negotiate, tell you what — I’ll give you five dollars a piece,” okay? The kid looking totally mystified hands in the pizzas and they close in on Trump’s face and he goes “Donald, you still got it.” His willingness to make fun of himself while Domino’s paid for ads to make him more famous — take that personality, no government experience, no sophisticated sense of what you can and can’t do, and he claws his way to the presidency beating 15 other Republicans, the news media and Hillary Clinton, and he turns around and he’s pissed off and he acts like the CEO he is, which is not appropriate for the President of the United States.
So if you want to say that he had to go through a learning curve, I think that’s totally fair. You want to say “was it malicious?” or designed to in some way to undermine the Constitution, I think that’s an absurdity.