John Bolton's book excerpt upends the Trump defense team Pam Bondi deconstruct Hunter Biden,

and it's DefCon 1 for Joe Biden against Bernie Sanders.

I'm Ben Shapiro.

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slash Ben. So let's begin with everything impeachment related because let's face it, right now,

impeachment and 2020 are all tied together in a ball. It is very obvious at this point that the

president is not going to be impeached. That does not mean that he cannot be damaged by the

impeachment hearings. And this is particularly true when you keep putting forward foolish defenses. So the fact of the matter is very simple here. The Trump defense team was putting forward a defense that Trump wanted them to put forward. He was not putting forward his own best defense. This is a point that Andy McCarthy has made at National Review. It's a point that I've been making for literally months at this point, which is that President Trump's best defense from the beginning, as soon as it became clear that there was, in fact, a quid pro quo was obvious. Yes, a quid pro quo happened. No, the quid pro quo is not impeachable. And even if you don't like the quid pro quo, even if you think the quid pro quo is bad, that does not make it impeachable. President Trump rightly suspected that Ukraine had

interfered in the 2016 election, not to the same extent as the Russians, and not in replacement

of the Russians, but he was right to suspect that the Ukrainians were interfering into the 2016

election because there were multiple credible media reports on that subject. And he was being

fed bad information by Rudy Giuliani about everything that was going on

in Ukraine, ranging from the crowd strike Hillary Clinton server being buried in the woods outside of

Kiev or some such nonsense to the Hunter Biden stuff, which indeed was suspicious. And because of that,

he wanted all of that investigated, and so he used military aides Ukraine as a way to leverage

investigations out of Ukraine. That's not impeachable. You may not like his judgment. You may think it's bad. You may think that it's rough and tumble. You may think that he shouldn't be using foreign policy in order to push for investigations that he could have done through the FBI or the DOJ. All of that is subject for elections. It is not subject for impeachment. That should have been his argument all along. But because President Trump is pathologically incapable of acknowledging that he has ever made a

mistake, and because President Trump rips anybody who ever criticizes him as the worst person in the

world, President Trump's defense team was then put in the position of making an argument that

is not factually based,

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