Democrats call Republicans bluff on impeachment procedures, an American military member blasts Trump over Ukraine, and an Obama official calls for rewriting the First Amendment.

I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

The Ben Shapiro show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Protect your online privacy today at ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.

Okay, so we begin today with impeachment K-19 because there are some new developments.

These developments are really two in nature.

One is the House Democrats changing their rules and procedures for the impeachment inquiry.

And this has got a lot of Republicans out there saying things like, well, if they're changing the rules, this shows that their rules were insufficient the first time. Like they could have just been transparent from the beginning. Obviously, they now acknowledge they did something wrong. That's true. That's true. There's only one problem, which is that nobody cares. The reason nobody cares is now that Democrats will simply claim, well, you know, at the very

beginning, it was important that we have behind closed doors meetings and that we restrict public

views so we could get the early information. But now we're going to get that out there in public.

Trying to hang your hat in defense of President Trump on all this impeachment stuff on the basis of

procedural inequities,

is just a fail. It's not going to work. And the reason it's not going to work particularly is because

what you are now seeing is Democrats saying that we're going to broaden the procedures. So we don't

actually know how the Democrats are going to broaden those procedures yet. We're going to find out

on Thursday. But for Republicans to sort of jump both feet in and suggest that this move by the Democrats somehow undermines the entire investigation, again, it's true that it shows the Democrats to know they were doing something wrong from the very beginning. But it is also true that that's not going to matter because now Democrats have opened the doors wide and said, okay, here we are, let's do this thing. That is

Democrats calling Republicans bluff and no amount of sort of puffed-off outrage over Democrats now

doing the right thing is going to detract from where we go from here in impeachment gate 2019.

So that is development number one. Development number two, as we're about to discuss,

is the testimony of a lieutenant colonel who's a member of the National Security Council who was probably the source for the whistleblower. We'll talk about that in just one second. First, let's talk about protecting yourself online. So I'm online like 24-7. I'm online all the time. You probably are too. I mean, if you're working in the business world, there's a good shot that you are online in enormous amounts of the time. And when you are online, there's a significant possibility that somebody is seeking your information, whether it is big data or whether it is hackers trying to actually break into your secure communications, steal data from you. If you ever had your credit card hacked, usually that happens because you're at some sort of public Wi-Fi and somebody on the public Wi-Fi is grabbing all of your data and then using it against you. This is why you ought to be using a VPN. And the VPN that I trust, the fastest VPN, the best VPN is ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN runs in the background of your computer or phone, and then you just use the internet the way you normally would. You you download the app, you click to connect, and voila, you're now protected. I won't go online without ExpressVPN, and you should not either. ExpressVPN is the fastest VPN I've tried. It costs less than seven bucks per month. It comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. ExpressVPN uses new cutting-edge technology called trusted server to make sure there are no logs of what you do online. It's time to stop hackers, big brother, internet companies from grabbing that data, take back your online privacy the same way I did with ExpressVPN. Right now, you can protect your online activity today. Find out how you can get three months for free at ExpressVPN.com slash Ben. That's EXPR, ESSvPN.com slash Ben for three months free with a one-year package again. That's visit expressvPNn.com slash ben. That's EXPR, E-S-V-P-N.com slash ben, for three months free with a one-year package. Again, that's visit expressvpn.com slash ben to learn more. There's a reason that we discuss them each and every day on the program. I really do trust the folks over at ExpressVPN. So as I say, House Democrats said on Monday, the House will vote Thursday to formalize procedures for the next phase of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Democrats say the move will ensure transparency and provide a clear path forward.

This has prompted the White House to point out that if the Democrats are so interested in transparency moving forward, why weren't they interested in transparency?

To begin with, that is a fine critique. It cuts no weight moving forward. It cuts no weight moving

forward. And meanwhile, Democrats are focused in, not on the procedural question. They're focused

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