| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Reminders, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | |
| Coming up this morning on Washington Journal, along with your calls and comments on the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, we'll talk with Politico's Ankush Kardouri, who covers President Trump's use of the Justice Department towards his critics and political opponents. | ||
| Also, we'll discuss the state of free speech in America with author and free speech advocate Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. | ||
| Washington Journal is next. | ||
| Join the conversation. | ||
| A federal grand jury in Virginia yesterday indicted former FBI Director James Comey on charges of making false statements to Congress and obstruction. | ||
| The indictments follow President Trump demanding the prosecution and firing the Attorney General who had determined insufficient evidence in bringing the case. | ||
| This morning, we want to get your reaction to the indictment of former FBI director James Comey. | ||
| Democrats dial in at 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can also text if you don't want to call at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Just include your first name, city, and state. | ||
| Or you can post on facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and on X with the handle at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| From the newspapers this morning, the grand jury charging Mr. Comey with two criminal counts, making a false statement to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding. | ||
| This is from CBS and it broke yesterday. | ||
| Let's go to the hearing that they reference in these indictments. | ||
| It was back in September of 2020, and it was questioning with Republican Senator Ted Cruz to then former FBI Director James Comey. | ||
| Take a listen on May 3rd, 2017. | ||
| In this committee, Chairman Grassley asked you point blank, quote, Have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation? | ||
| You responded under oath, quote, never. | ||
| He then asked you, quote, Have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton administration? | ||
| You responded again under oath, no. | ||
| Now, as you know, Mr. McCabe, who works for you, has publicly and repeatedly stated that he leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and that you were directly aware of it and that you directly authorized it. | ||
| Now, what Mr. Kitten McCabe is saying and what you testified to this committee cannot both be true. | ||
| One or the other is false. | ||
| Who's telling the truth? | ||
| I can only speak to my testimony. | ||
| I stand by what the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017. | ||
| So your testimony is you've never authorized anyone to leak. | ||
| And Mr. McCabe, if he says contrary, is not telling the truth. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Again, I'm not going to characterize Andy's testimony, but mine is the same today. | ||
| All right, I'm going to make a final point because my time has expired. | ||
| This investigation of the president was corrupt. | ||
| The FBI and the Department of Justice were politicized and weaponized. | ||
| And in my opinion, there are only two possibilities that you were deliberately corrupt or woefully incompetent. | ||
| And I don't believe you were incompetent. | ||
| Senator Ted Cruz's line of questioning of them, former FBI director, in September of 2020. | ||
| And by the way, we've been showing you that hearing in its entirety since these indictments came down yesterday. | ||
| If you missed it, you can go to our website, cspan.org, to watch them there. | ||
| The indictments follow a social media post by President Trump on Saturday where he stated this. | ||
| Pam, that's to his Attorney General Pam Bondi, I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that essentially, same old story as last time, all talk, no action. | ||
| Nothing is being done. | ||
| What about Comey, Adam Shifty Schiff, Letitia? | ||
| They're all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done. | ||
| Then we almost put in a Democrat-supported U.S. attorney in Virginia with a really bad Republican past, a woke rhino who is never going to do his job. | ||
| That's why two of the worst Dem senators pushed him so hard. | ||
| He even lied to the media and said he quit and that he had no case. | ||
| I fired him, and there is a great case. | ||
| And many lawyers and legal pundits say so. | ||
| Lindsey Halligan is a really good lawyer and likes and likes you a lot, the president wrote. | ||
| We can't delay any longer. | ||
| It's killing our reputation and credibility. | ||
| They impeached me twice and indicted me five times over nothing. | ||
| Justice must be served now. | ||
| That is what President Trump wrote on Saturday to his Attorney General, Pam Bondi. | ||
| And as he noted there, he had fired the Virginia Attorney General and replaced the Attorney General. | ||
| That Attorney General went to the courts to bring these indictments to a grand jury, to bring these indictments against the former FBI director. | ||
| Now, here's what President Trump had to say at the White House yesterday before these indictments came down. | ||
| I can't tell you what's going to happen because I don't know. | ||
| You have very professional people headed up by the Attorney General, Todd, Todd Blanche, and Lindsey Halligan, who's very smart, good lawyer, very good lawyer. | ||
| They're going to make a determination. | ||
| I'm not making that determination. | ||
| I think I'd be allowed to get involved if I want, but I don't really choose to do so. | ||
| I can only say that Comey's a bad person. | ||
| He's a sick person. | ||
| I think he's a sick guy, actually. | ||
| He did terrible things at the FBI. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I have no idea what's going to happen. | ||
| The president in the Oval Office yesterday, Mr. Comey also posted a video yesterday claiming his innocence after these indictments came down. | ||
| Here's what he had to say. | ||
| My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn't imagine ourselves living any other way. | ||
| We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn't either. | ||
| Somebody that I love dearly recently said that fear is the tool of a tyrant, and she's right. | ||
| But I'm not afraid, and I hope you're not either. | ||
| I hope instead you are engaged, you are paying attention, and you will vote like your beloved country depends upon it, which it does. | ||
| My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system, and I'm innocent. | ||
| So let's have a trial and keep the faith. | ||
| Let's have a trial, Mr. Comey says. | ||
| Let's turn to all of you now. | ||
| Linda in Mississippi Democratic Caller. | ||
| Linda, what do you make of this news this morning? | ||
|
unidentified
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I think you say it. | |
| And I'm praying for this country because if Trump is skinny so thin, he should not stepped in the political arena. | ||
| If you're talking about lying to Congress, Pam Bundy lied to the country, to the Congress, Kash Patel, By Doc Kevin. | ||
| They all lied. | ||
| His whole cabinet lied to the Congress. | ||
| And when was that, Linda? | ||
| Where would you point to? | ||
| What hearing? | ||
| What testimony? | ||
|
unidentified
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Doing their confirmation, they lied because Peir Bundy, they're doing exactly what they accused someone else of doing, using the politicizing the federal government. | |
| The Justice Department using it for a political weapon. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's what they're doing, and they're doing it in the open and not even hide it. | |
| They're accusing someone else of doing it, but they're flat doing it. | ||
| And this country, if they can do it to, I don't, you know, if they can do it to him, they can do it to you. | ||
| Pick up your child, pick up anybody off the street. | ||
| They don't actually have no proof. | ||
| If Trump believed that he's been offended with his big band baby siphon, if he feels like he'd been offended, he could just tell them, go pick him up, charge him with anything. | ||
| No proof of nothing. | ||
| All right, Linda. | ||
| Doug in Ohio, independent. | ||
| Doug, what do you say? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, first, let me say the party of law and order, the Republicans say that they're party of law and order. | |
| Law and order in my sweet battle. | ||
| They ain't the party of law and order at all. | ||
| Second, Trump's the biggest baby I ever heard of in my life. | ||
| That's why I left the party because of him in Charlottesville. | ||
| And, you know, I think that this is just a witch hunt, a witch hunt, a witch hunt for James Comey because Donald Trump's just such a coward, and he's trying to cover up Epstein with any way he can, any way he can do it. | ||
| And it's disgusting because just open the Epstein files, let Comey go because he did his job and he supports the democracy, United States of America, and so do I. | ||
| And we got 250 years next year. | ||
| It'll be a beautiful country if we don't let Trump take over with his octorial powers that he wants so much. | ||
| He is not an authoritarian. | ||
| Doug, who is an independent, says he left the party because of President Trump. | ||
| Patrick, a Republican in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Patrick, what do you make of these indictments? | ||
|
unidentified
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I think that they're overdue. | |
| I think the weaponization of the government is front and center in the Democratic Party. | ||
| I think they have literally compromised our Constitution, the Bill of Rights. | ||
| And here's the proof. | ||
| So in 2016, I was traveling to Florida, and I picked up a newspaper in order to read something. | ||
| And a line jumped out at me, and it said the United States government will require all social media platforms to control and mitigate content. | ||
| I literally, it was like the oxygen was sucked out of the plane. | ||
| I couldn't believe what I was reading. | ||
| And this was all coordinated with the implementation of the Trump presidency. | ||
| And then what do we see? | ||
| We saw millions of people have their Facebook accounts eliminated. | ||
| Google eliminated millions of people's accounts, whether it's YouTube or whatever. | ||
| And so fast forward to where we are now, we're seeing a president. | ||
| And I was a Democrat for over 30 years. | ||
| So I switched in 2020. | ||
| And I'm advising everyone, vote Republican. | ||
| This is so insidious, what we're witnessing. | ||
| Free speech is not being destroyed by Republicans. | ||
| That's absurd. | ||
| It is the Democratic establishment along with big tech that is fundamentally destroyed and is now utilizing artificial intelligence. | ||
| So Patrick, tie this back to James Comey. | ||
|
unidentified
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James Comey is, they're so guilty, it's almost incomprehensible. | |
| They weaponized the federal judiciary. | ||
| They weaponized intelligence. | ||
| They weaponized every mechanism to attack people who had alternative political views. | ||
| You know, there's a reason why Google's admitting what they're doing now. | ||
| This isn't some conspiratorial nonsense. | ||
| What we're witnessing is the retaking of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. | ||
| All right, Patrick, a Republican in Pennsylvania. | ||
| The indictment against the former FBI director from the national newspapers this morning. | ||
| Here are some details. | ||
| Two indictments approved by Virginia grand jury. | ||
| The statute of limitations on this case was due to run out next week on Tuesday. | ||
| That is why the president moved quickly to fire the attorney general and put in place someone that would bring forth this case. | ||
| Comey is slated to surrender to authorities today. | ||
| The newspapers also report these details about the case that the arraignment was scheduled, is scheduled for October 9th before U.S. District Judge Michael Nakmanoff. | ||
| Now, he's an Biden appointee. | ||
| And if convicted, Comey faces up to five years in prison. | ||
| Let's go back to Alan in Brooklyn. | ||
| Democratic caller, Alan, your turn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you again. | ||
| The absurdity of this is impossible to describe. | ||
| Here's a president who, in his announcement of what the Justice Department is about to do, tries to make it sound as if it's an independent decision of professionals at the Justice Department. | ||
| Right after he was telling them, I hate these people. | ||
| You must find some ground to indict them, not even having facts to indicate there's a basis for indicting them. | ||
| So now to claim this very thin indictment against Comey is claiming something very similar, that something that he said his aide might have been advised to state on his behalf, even if it was true, he would be indicted for possibly recommending to the aide that he say these things that are true. | ||
| And Trump has been doing the very same thing in public, saying, oh, it's not me, it's the people I've hired who are making these decisions right after he's announced I want them to make these decisions. | ||
|
unidentified
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The absurdity is compounded by the fact of the immunity that the Supreme Court created in July of 24. | |
| Mr. Trump recently accepted $2 billion in gifts in exchange for liberalizing the controls on certain kinds of high-powered computer trips to Saudi Arabia and China. | ||
| That's a personal gift to his family. | ||
| That's not going to the federal treasury. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Alan, we're going to stick to what's happening here this morning, following up on the news that broke yesterday in a Virginia grand jury indicting the former FBI director on two charges. | ||
| Now, this is something the president has called for in his first administration as well. | ||
| The Associated Press notes this this morning. | ||
| Prosecutors in the first Trump Justice Department declined to prosecute Comey following an Inspector General review into his handling of memos documenting his conversations with Trump in the weeks before he was fired. | ||
| He also was not charged by a special counsel, John Durham, who scrutinized the FBI's handling of the Trump-Russia investigation. | ||
| Earlier this year, the department fired Comey's daughter, Maureen Comey, from her job as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. | ||
| She has since sued, saying the termination was carried out with any explanation and was done for political reasons. | ||
| Before these indictments officially came down yesterday, California Democrat Judiciary Committee member Eric Swalwell had this to say, speaking about how Democrats might respond to any indictments. | ||
| This was on CNN. | ||
| By the way, the president's saying he has no control here. | ||
| He has all of the control here. | ||
| He's the one who has been tweeting to the Attorney General that Comey needs to be indicted. | ||
| He's the one that fired the U.S. Attorney who would not indict Comey. | ||
| And so this is a very corrupt, corrosive act that the president is taking. | ||
| And what I would just say to any prosecutor at the Department of Justice is it's not going away. | ||
| As a member of the Judiciary Committee, I promise you, when Democrats are in the majority, we are going to look at all of this. | ||
| And there will be accountability. | ||
| And bar licenses will be at stake in your local jurisdiction if you are corruptly indicting people where you cannot prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. | ||
| Congressman Swalwell on CNN telling the reporter there that Democrats, when they're in charge, they'll look into this prosecution of the former FBI director. | ||
| We're getting your take on this debate this morning. | ||
| David in Maryland, Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, how are you? | |
| Thank you for having me on. | ||
| I think that, you know, Comey, you know, his record speaks for itself. | ||
| He was a very honorable man who served this country. | ||
| He did everything by the book. | ||
| I think he was the prime example of someone you want to direct the FBI. | ||
| Now, currently, we have Kash Patel, who I think is a complete idiot. | ||
| He's sick. | ||
| He's a sick man in that position and unqualified. | ||
| And for Trump to go after Comey at this point is very obvious, the trail that led up to this and his films about Comey. | ||
| And the only mistake Comey ever made was getting involved with Trump. | ||
| Well, David, how do you respond to this? | ||
| This is the Associated Press back in 2019. | ||
| According to Inspector General Watchdog, Comey violated FBI policies and handling of memos. | ||
| And this is what the Inspector General found: violated FBI policies in his handling of memos documenting private conversations with President Trump. | ||
| The watchdog office said Comey broke bureau rules by giving one memo containing unclassified information to a friend with instructions to share the content with a reporter. | ||
| Comey also failed to return his memos to the FBI after he was dismissed in May of 2017, retaining copies of some of them in a safe at home and shared them with his personal lawyers without permission from the FBI. | ||
| Goes on to say the report is the second in as many years to criticize Comey's actions as FBI director, following a separate Inspector General rebuke for decisions made during the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. | ||
| It is one of multiple Inspector General investigations undertaken in the last three years into the decisions and actions of Comey and other senior FBI leaders. | ||
| Now, David, you said Comey didn't make any mistakes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, okay. | |
| Well, what I could say is that, of course, it's doing business. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And when Trump had all those documents in his Florida Mar-a-Lago home, what about that? | ||
| Did that ever get followed up on? | ||
| What about all the things that he has done, making his own Bitcoin, about going after his political enemies? | ||
| What about his selling cars for Elon Musk on the White House lawn? | ||
| If any other president, especially Obama, if he did that, what would we be hearing from the Republicans? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Also, from that Associated Press reporting in 2019, the Inspector General report denied the president and his supporters who have repeatedly accused Comey of leaking classified information total vindication. | ||
| It found that none of the information shared by him or his attorneys with anyone in the media was classified. | ||
| The Justice Department declined to prosecute Comey back in 2019 during President Trump's first term. | ||
| We'll go to Rudy in Ohio, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Rudy. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning. | |
| Yeah, there is a God. | ||
| This is a great day for America. | ||
| James Comey should have been gone a long time ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Donald Trump could have gone after Hillary Clinton when he won the first time, and he tried to bury the hatches so the country could get better. | |
| And what'd they do? | ||
| Hillary goes out and gets the steel dossier, whatever. | ||
| And, you know, they went after Trump, lied, did everything, had every agency in the federal government go after him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
People tried to shoot him. | |
| Jane Comey's always been a crook. | ||
| And the people that ought to be looking out over their shoulder now, old Adam Schippt and these other people, Swalwell, the one you just had on a while ago, those people are crooks too. | ||
| You know, Swalwell was a Chinese spy, Schiff. | ||
| Everybody knew he lied every time he opened his mouth. | ||
| Still does. | ||
| You know, so going after Comey is just one person. | ||
| The whole bunch that went after Trump should be thrown in prison and rot. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Okay, that's Rudy there in Ohio Republican from the Washington Times reporting. | ||
| Mr. Trump last week forced out Eric Siebert, the acting U.S. Attorney. | ||
| Apologies, I had been saying Attorney General, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after he failed to seek an indictment of Mr. Comey. | ||
| He replaced Mr. Siebert with White House aide Lindsey Halligan, and she moved quickly to present a case to the grand jury to bear a five-year to beat a five-year deadline on pursuing a criminal indictment on false statement charges. | ||
| That's from the Washington Times reporting, and there is Lindsey Halligan on your screen. | ||
| The charges stem from Mr. Comey's September 30th, 2020 congressional testimony, in which he told lawmakers under oath that he had not leaked information about the Russia collusion probe to members of the media and knew nothing about leaks. | ||
| Now, his testimony contrasted that of his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, who told lawmakers that he informed Mr. Comey of a leak to reporters and that Mr. Comey approved, effectively authorizing it after the fact. | ||
| The grand jury that indicted Mr. Comey also heard testimony from one of his friends, Columbia University professor Daniel Richmond. | ||
| And you'll recall Mr. Comey gave Mr. Richmond classified information about the FBI's Russia collusion probe to pass along to the New York Times, which published stories pushing the narrative that Mr. Trump and the Russians worked together to help him win the 2016 election. | ||
| That is from the Washington Times reporting this morning. | ||
| Josephine in Livingston, New Jersey, and Independent, Josephine, we'll hear from you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| You know, when we appointed people to the position of the FBI to make it non-political, we gave them an appointment for 10 years. | ||
| Okay, forget about 10 years. | ||
| The idea that Comey, who was a civil servant for over 30 years, that doesn't matter. | ||
| Let's not keep pointing at the wrong area. | ||
| Bondi, remember, was in the state of Florida and told them not to prosecute the president regarding the material that he kept in his residence. | ||
| I mean, it all ties in. | ||
| Whatever he says, jump, they say, how high. | ||
| Never do I remember such corruption in my life. | ||
| Oh, yes, Nixon, he tried the same thing, but that's when the Republicans truly were Republicans. | ||
| They didn't look at Republican or Democrat. | ||
| When they saw something wrong, they honored the Constitution. | ||
| The Republicans today don't think of the Constitution. | ||
| They're all in the idea of power. | ||
| Sadly, you're taking your eye off Epstein on C-SPAN. | ||
| All they have to do is look at C-SPAN. | ||
| There is a tape there right now with Trump dancing with three teenage girls with Epstein at his birthday party, Maxwell, I'm the man. | ||
| And what was he doing right there on the tape? | ||
| Grab them, you know what. | ||
| All right, Josephine. | ||
| Josephine thinks this is all a distraction from the Epstein files. | ||
| The Attorney General posted on X yesterday this statement: No one is above the law. | ||
| Today's indictment reflects this Department of Justice's commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people. | ||
| We will follow the facts in this case. | ||
| And the president's FBI director, Kash Patel, put this out yesterday. | ||
| Today, your FBI took another step in its promise of full accountability. | ||
| For far too long, previous corrupt leadership and their enablers weaponized federal law enforcement, damaging once-proud institutions and severely eroding public trust. | ||
| Every day, we continue the fight to earn that trust back. | ||
| And under my leadership, this FBI will confront the problem head on. | ||
| Nowhere was this politicization of law enforcement more blatant than during the Russia Gate hoax, a disgraceful chapter in history we continue to investigate and expose. | ||
| And everyone, especially those in positions of power, will be held to account no matter their perch. | ||
| No one is above the law. | ||
| We'll go to Caroline and Atlanta Democratic caller. | ||
| Caroline, what is your take on this indictment news? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My take is: God bless America, first of all. | |
| My take is go to trial, put it on the air, let us see, because it's too much information for me to digest. | ||
| I can't talk intelligently about it. | ||
| So I'm just saying, go to trial and let's see what happens because I do believe that they can come to some kind of conclusion as to who is telling the truth. | ||
| And talking about above the law, we got somebody that's above the law. | ||
| And that's that during president you all have. | ||
| All right, Caroline. | ||
| From the Washington Post, to prove their case, prosecutors will have to convince a jury that Comey not only made false statements to Congress, but that he knowingly did so and that any untruths were material to the focus of the Senate proceedings. | ||
| Some evidence is likely to work in Comey's favor. | ||
| For instance, Cruz said at the 2020 hearing that the FBI's then Deputy Director Andrew McCabe testified that Comey authorized the disclosure of the Clinton email investigation to a news publication. | ||
| But the Justice Department's inspector general concluded in a 2018 report that it was McCabe who authorized the leak and who lacked candor when discussing the matter with Comey and investigators looking into the disclosure. | ||
| Comey's attorneys are also likely to point to the fact that before Thursday's indictment, the case had been rejected by Eric Siebert, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney who had been overseeing the investigation. | ||
| He concluded there was insufficient evidence to move forward with a prosecution. | ||
| That from the Washington Post reporting this morning. | ||
| Willie in Jackson, Mississippi, an independent. | ||
| Willie, welcome to the conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, this is a sad day in America. | |
| That's all I can say. | ||
| This president is unbelievable. | ||
| To be honest with you, it's all a divergent from the Epstein case. | ||
| They'll do anything to get a divergence from the Epstein case. | ||
| And all, you know, this time he in off this time in office, he has his self, he has got him some good cronies, some good cronies around him. | ||
| They ain't qualified for nothing, especially Kennedy, man. | ||
| All right, Dennis in Durrant, Oklahoma, Democratic caller. | ||
| Dennis, morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes, I'm actually glad to kind of see him bring the case. | ||
| That'll give us a rerun of everything that happened during the Russian probe. | ||
| All the people that worked for Trump in his campaign who were indicted, sent to prison, all the lies that Trump told during that whole debacle. | ||
| Yeah, we can replay it all right from the start. | ||
| Well, what about, though, the Mueller investigation not finding any ties between President Trump and Russia? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, they found plenty of ties. | |
| He just said that he couldn't be indicted. | ||
| He didn't think a sitting president could be indicted. | ||
| There was plenty of ties there. | ||
| If there wasn't any ties, why did Trump start lying from the get-go? | ||
| He started lying about no contacts with the Russians from the get-go. | ||
| And all the people in his campaign, the president of his campaign, the manager of his campaign, directly tied to Russia. | ||
| I mean, it's unbelievable. | ||
| And all the lies that the Republicans have been saying since that investigation, that nothing happened, that he was proven innocent. | ||
| No, he wasn't. | ||
| Well, Dennis, listen to this. | ||
| This is the Associated Press reporting on the indictments. | ||
| And in the story, it says lingering anger over the Russia investigation. | ||
| Trump has for years railed against both a finding by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia preferred him to Clinton, a Democrat in the 2016 election, as well as criminal investigation that tried to determine whether his campaign had conspired with Moscow to sway the outcome of that race. | ||
| Prosecutors led by special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish that Trump or his associates criminally colluded with Russia, but they did find that Trump's campaign had welcomed Moscow's assistance. | ||
| The indictment comes against the backdrop of a Trump administration effort to recast the Russia investigation as the outgrowth of an effort under Democratic President Barack Obama to overhype Moscow's interference in the election and to undermine the legitimacy of Trump's victory. | ||
| Dennis, respond to that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, how can you overhype? | |
| I mean, his campaign manager had direct contact with him. | ||
| He was sharing information with him. | ||
| I mean, the guy actually worked for Russia. | ||
| I mean, and all the ties that his sons, you know, were doing business, meeting with Russians and all the ties that Trump has had financially with him. | ||
| Dennis, there, Democrat in Oklahoma, we're going to hear from Jim, who is a Republican in Hudson, Florida. | ||
| Hi, Jim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you doing? | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| First of all, I'd like to say that I'm a Trump supporter. | ||
| Right or wrong, he's getting even. | ||
| Okay, that's I just want to make that statement. | ||
| But there was a statement made in 2016 by two people that worked for Comey. | ||
| One of them was drunk, and I don't remember the girl's name. | ||
| But they said Trump is not going to be president of the United States. | ||
| He's not going to be whatever method it takes for us to get whatever we need to do. | ||
| He's not going to be president of the United States. | ||
| That's all you need to say. | ||
| And that was people that worked for Comey. | ||
| Jim in Hudson, Florida. | ||
| We'll go to White, who's an independent in Sandy, Utah. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| You know, you got this justice thing going on. | ||
| You had two Supreme Court justices lie to Congress when they said they weren't going to vote down Roe v. Wade, and they did vote it down. | ||
| So they lied to Congress when they said they wouldn't vote for it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's your Justice Department. | |
| All right. | ||
| Kathleen in Chicago, Democratic caller. | ||
| Kathleen, let's turn to you. | ||
| What do you say? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| If lying to Congress would cause you to be indicted, Robert Kennedy Jr., the other day, he lied. | ||
| Patel lied. | ||
| Pam Bundy died. | ||
| I don't know if Trump has gone through the Congress, but he's a known liar 34,000 times. | ||
| You know, it's amazing that people think that Trump didn't have some kind of ties with Russia. | ||
| You can see it now. | ||
| Look what he did here a few weeks ago with Russia. | ||
| He gave the man the red carpet. | ||
| Trump got ties with Russia, but you know, you got to watch what you do. | ||
| I guess the Republicans think that they're going to be in for life. | ||
| If lying is a crime, Trump should be in jail right now because that's all they do is lie. | ||
| He's lying about the economy. | ||
| He's lying about, and let me see before you're cutting me off. | ||
| Didn't people in this office that indicted Comey, a couple of them said, no, we can't indict him because we have no proof he did anything. | ||
| So he kept fishing for somebody that he could find, and she has no knowledge of anything because nobody in his cabinet, including him, got knowledge of what they're doing. | ||
| He had to go back and find somebody to, I think he found her Monday, if I'm not mistaken, to indict this man. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's wrong. | |
| All right, Kathleen, thoughts there in Chicago. | ||
| What down in Mart, Texas? | ||
| Frank is watching there, an independent. | ||
| Morning, Frank. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, ma'am. | |
| Well, really, the Democrats are kind of late. | ||
| They've already had a trial on this. | ||
| It's called an election. | ||
| And he won it with 77 million votes. | ||
| And that shows you right there. | ||
| And he'd win by even more, according to the poll. | ||
| He'd win by even more now, probably 78, 79, 80 million votes. | ||
| So the trial has already been held. | ||
| Now, Comey might wiggle his way and lie his way out of this. | ||
| But yeah, Comey's guilty. | ||
| He's guilty of sin. | ||
| So, Frank, do you think the president should just let it go? | ||
| So the Justice Department just let it go, not pursue this then? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, they need to go after Comey. | |
| I mean, he's guilty. | ||
| He's always been guilty. | ||
| And these Democrats calling in, they just mad because they lost the election. | ||
| And all they want to talk about is race and hate. | ||
| That's all they want to talk about. | ||
| But yeah, Comey is guilty of sin, and so is Letitia James and that other sign, that Schwalwell or whoever he is. | ||
| They're all a bunch of liars. | ||
| Biden, he was a crook. | ||
| He wasn't nothing but a crook, him and Harris. | ||
| They both crooks. | ||
| And, you know, he just, you already had it in a trial. | ||
| And we are on an election. | ||
| He won it in the landslide. | ||
| The trial is over. | ||
| Now, Comey might have wiggled and lied his way out of this line, but the Mueller investigation showed that Trump was telling the truth all the time. | ||
| The Durnham investigation backed him up. | ||
| You know, and the man was, he was framed up by Hillary Clinton and the dossier sign. | ||
| He just framed up. | ||
| He's nothing but a bunch of lying crook. | ||
| All the Democrats want to do is let murder and killers come into this country. | ||
| All right, Frank, we'll leave it there at that point. | ||
| More of your calls coming up here on the news out of Virginia. | ||
| A grand jury in that state indicting the former FBI director James Comey. | ||
| We'll continue to get your thoughts here in the first hour of the Washington Journal. | ||
| In other news, from the Washington Post, the Pentagon's Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, orders a rare, urgent meeting of hundreds of generals and admirals. | ||
| The Pentagon also has summoned military officials from around the world for a gathering in Virginia. | ||
| Even top generals and their staffs don't know the reason for the meeting. | ||
| And then there is also this headline from the Associated Press. | ||
| The man who fired on the ICE facility this week hated U.S. government and sought to kill federal agents, according to officials who are investigating that case. | ||
| And also from the Washington Post, the president yesterday announcing new tariffs on trucks, furniture, and pharmaceuticals. | ||
| If you missed that announcement, you can find it on our website at c-span.org. | ||
| And then there's also this from CNBC. | ||
| The president yesterday and the Oval Office approving a TikTok deal through executive order. | ||
| The vice president says the business is valued at $14 billion. | ||
| Listen to the president in the Oval Office yesterday. | ||
| So this is interesting because I had a very good talk with President Xi. | ||
| I had a lot of respect for him. | ||
| Hopefully his letter respect for me too. | ||
| And we talked about TikTok and other things, but we talked about TikTok and he gave us the go-ahead. | ||
| You know, it's run by American investors and American companies. | ||
| Great ones, great investors. | ||
| The biggest, you don't get bigger, I don't imagine. | ||
| And maybe I'll have JD. | ||
| JD was very much involved and in charge of it. | ||
| And maybe I'll have you say a few words about the deal. | ||
| You would report back. | ||
| And the points of the deal, I think, are great for our country. | ||
| So JD, do you want to give it a little talk, please? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So thank you, sir, for your leadership and for your help. | ||
| We really couldn't have done this without the president actually ushering this deal over the finish line. | ||
| There was some resistance on the Chinese side, but the fundamental thing that we wanted to accomplish is that we wanted to keep TikTok operating, but we also wanted to make sure that we protected Americans' data privacy as required by law, both because it's the right thing to do, but also because it's a legal requirement of the law that was passed last year by Congress. | ||
| So we think that we were able to do that. | ||
| Of course, we're going to keep on working at it, but this deal really does mean that Americans can use TikTok, but actually use it with more confidence than they had in the past because their data is going to be secure and it's not going to be used as a propaganda weapon against our fellow citizens. | ||
| We're very excited about it. | ||
| We appreciate the cooperation of everybody involved and it's a big day. | ||
| From the Oval Office yesterday, the president announcing executive order on TikTok and 80% of the company owned by American leadership. | ||
| We're in this morning giving you other news before we continue with our conversation about the indictments against Mr. Comey, the Hill newspaper with this headline this morning, Israel's Netanyahu to address the UN as pressure mounts over the Gaza war. | ||
| Now the Prime Minister will go before other world leaders as part of the annual United Nations General Assembly. | ||
| And we expect his remarks around 9 a.m. Eastern Time. | ||
| You can tune in to our live coverage on C-SPAN 2, or you can download our free video mobile app, C-SPAN Now. | ||
| You can also find it online at c-span.org. | ||
| Mr. Netanyahu's remarks, according to CNN this morning, will be broadcasted in Gaza this morning. | ||
| CNN speculating that that is his audience when he addresses world leaders today. | ||
| That follows the president yesterday telling reporters that he would not allow the annexation of Palestine. | ||
| The Palestinian leader also addressed the United Nations this week, along with, of course, President Trump and other world leaders. | ||
| And we brought you coverage of the annual gathering. | ||
| Go to our website, c-span.org. | ||
| You can find our United Nations page there. | ||
| And it has videos of all the world leaders that addressed their colleagues in New York this week, as well as past United Nations General Assemblies. | ||
| Stacy in McLean, Virginia, an independent. | ||
| Stacy, we are talking about the indictment of Mr. Comey. | ||
| Your turn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, hey, good morning, America. | |
| Thanks for having me, Greta. | ||
| Two things. | ||
| As far as Comey's indictment is concerned, I consider that karma circling back, because if it wasn't for Comey, Trump wouldn't have never gotten to office because he sabotaged Hillary Clinton and violated policy, FBI policy, when he said there was an active investigation going on in Hillary Clinton's email. | ||
| And then they took that back, but it was enough damage done to put him in office. | ||
| And if Trump thinks that he betrayed him, if it wasn't for him, you wouldn't even be in office. | ||
| Let's get that straight. | ||
| As far as him indicting him, I say go for it. | ||
| Do it. | ||
| Do it. | ||
| Because Jesus said the wicked will do themselves in. | ||
| I remember Russians, I mean, Republicans taking secret trips to Russia. | ||
| And let's not forget Helsinki. | ||
| Never forget Helsinki. | ||
| If you don't think he had ties to Russia, go watch Helsinki. | ||
| He sided with Russia over our intelligence in front of the world. | ||
| He was a coward to him. | ||
| He cowered to Russia, to Putin. | ||
| Stacy in McLean, Virginia. | ||
| Oscar's a Republican in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. | ||
| Hi, Oscar. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Do you hear me? | ||
| Yes, we can. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Okay, I just wanted to start with some clichés. | ||
| It seems like the chickens have come home to roost and cows came home. | ||
| And I'm thinking that it is a very good thing it's happening because poor old President Trump, and I am a Trump fan 100%, has been nothing but tortured for the last, well, during his first term and during the auto pens term, he has been spent more time in the courthouse than he has out, and they've made his laugh and his family's laugh miserable. | ||
| And now, to quote one more cliché, it seems like what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and I'm glad to see it happening. | ||
| All right, Oscar. | ||
| Jan in Iowa Democratic caller. | ||
| Jan, what do you think about these indictments? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's crazy. | |
| Trump needs to take care of our country. | ||
| He doesn't need to be in courts and suing people all the time and all this and that. | ||
| He's just a loudmouthed little boy who keeps going until he gets his own way. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, Jen. | ||
| Listen to what the president had to say in the Oval Office yesterday. | ||
| Talked about other left-wing people his administration could investigate. | ||
| He made these comments yesterday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Antifa Soros. | |
| What names are we talking about? | ||
| Well, Soros is the name certainly that I keep hearing. | ||
| I don't know, but Soros is the name that I hear. | ||
| I hear a lot of different names. | ||
| I hear names of some pretty rich people that are radical left people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe I hear about a guy named Reed Hoffman. | |
| Somebody's a pretty rich guy, I guess. | ||
| And I hear about him. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe it could be him. | ||
| Could be a lot of people. | ||
| We hear the same names, but they're bad, and we're going to find out. | ||
| And if they are funding these things, they're going to have some problems because they're agitators and they're anarchists. | ||
| These are anarchists. | ||
| President Trump on the Oval yesterday, talking about other left-wing people his administration could investigate. | ||
| Listened to Democratic Senator and Judiciary Committee member Richard Blumenthal on MSNBC last night reacting to the indictment and accusing the president of singling out opponents. | ||
| Let's be clear about what's happening here. | ||
| The president is singling out someone he just doesn't like. | ||
| And that post that you just showed could create a defense, maybe even grounds for dismissal. | ||
| I spent most of my life in law enforcement. | ||
| I was the U.S. attorney in Connecticut for four and a half years. | ||
| We were very careful about what we said on charges because they could be used against us in a criminal trial. | ||
| And this case is replete with Donald Trump telling the Attorney General to act, to act fast, and creating possible defenses here. | ||
| But let's look at the broader picture. | ||
| I always felt as a prosecutor, the most consequential decisions I made were whether to charge someone. | ||
| People simply don't fully recover from criminal charges, even if they are acquitted, because half the world believes that they were acquitted on some kind of technicality. | ||
| Well, Donald Trump is populating the Department of Justice with lawyers who will do his bidding, pervert the rule of law, and single out people that they may not like, who may have offended them, or maybe adversaries politically, whether it's a small business person or a public official. | ||
| Today it's Comey. | ||
| Tomorrow it could be you. | ||
| Senator Blumenthal on MSNBC last night with his take on these two indictments by a grand jury in Virginia against the former FBI director. | ||
| Connie, we're getting your thoughts on the indictments this morning in Bakersfield, California, and Independent. | ||
| What do you say, Connie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I say that both parties are both corrupt. | |
| They all stand up for each other. | ||
| They have no individual ideals. | ||
| One person says, we're going to do this. | ||
| Everybody follows that person. | ||
| No one thought Donald Trump would get reelected. | ||
| So they didn't care. | ||
| They threw everything at him. | ||
| But he did. | ||
| And Donald Trump stood up and said, I hate my enemies. | ||
| And he meant it. | ||
| And I love your talk, by the way. | ||
| That is so pretty. | ||
| was very careful this morning to see. | ||
| And I just think that. | ||
| Well, Connie, what do you think should happen then with these indictments? | ||
| Should the. | ||
| Should the Justice Department have pursued this case? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And the reason I say so is the reason I think is because they didn't think he would be re-elected. | ||
| So I meant Biden's son got in trouble with China, then the files. | ||
| He had all kinds of files, but he wasn't drugged through the mud. | ||
| And anything that Donald Trump ever did wrong got drugged through the mud. | ||
| And I love the late night shows, by the way, because I enjoy hearing the remarks about Donald Trump. | ||
| But I can see where that would get under somebody's skin. | ||
| All right, Connie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| We'll go to John, who's next. | ||
| New York, Democratic College. | ||
| Hi, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you? | |
| Good morning. | ||
| First of all, let's go back to the history of where this all started. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And basically, you know, there is, you know, the Russia hoax and everything, but that's the farce. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| If you look back, you know, where it all started, even with his son, Eric Trump, he said, we get our money from Russia. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of, still a lot of issues out there about it. | ||
| And I think what this indictment has done is torn the country apart. | ||
| And you look at, you go back, there was a guy named Felix Seder who literally was part of that Russia. | ||
| And Trump is on videotape on a YouTube video, couldn't even identify this guy. | ||
| So right there, he lied. | ||
| He lies all the time. | ||
| And I think this is a horrific, horrific time for our country. | ||
| We need jobs. | ||
| We need a better economy. | ||
| The rich are getting rich, and the middle class is just getting really to the bottom pits. | ||
| And it's just not the way America should be right now. | ||
| John, in New York. | ||
| All right, John in New York with his thoughts. | ||
| The president, moments ago, posting on Truth Social, joining us in the conversation this morning, saying this, whether you like corrupt James Comey or not, and I can't imagine too many people liking him, he lied, it says. | ||
| It is not a complex lie. | ||
| It's a very simple but important one. | ||
| There is no way he can explain his way out of it. | ||
| He is a dirty cop and always has been, but he was just assigned a crooked Joe Biden appointed judge. | ||
| So he's off to a very good start. | ||
| Nevertheless, words are words, and he wasn't hedging or in dispute. | ||
| He was very positive. | ||
| There was no doubt in his mind about what he had said or meant by saying it. | ||
| He left himself zero margin of error on a big and important answer to a question. | ||
| He just got unexpectedly caught. | ||
| James dirty cop Comey was a destroyer of lives. | ||
| He knew exactly what he was saying and that it was a very serious and far-reaching lie for which a very big price must be paid. | ||
| Let's go back to that September 30th, 2020 hearing again. | ||
| This is Senator Ted Cruz and his questioning of former FBI Director James Comey. | ||
| On May 3rd, 2017, in this committee, Chairman Grassley asked you point blank, quote, have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation? | ||
| You responded under oath, quote, never. | ||
| He then asked you, quote, have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton administration? | ||
| You responded again under oath, no. | ||
| Now, as you know, Mr. McCabe, who works for you, has publicly and repeatedly stated that he leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and that you were directly aware of it and that you directly authorized it. | ||
| Now, what Mr. Kitten McCabe is saying and what you testified to this committee cannot both be true. | ||
| One or the other is false. | ||
| Who's telling the truth? | ||
| I can only speak to my testimony. | ||
| I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017. | ||
| So your testimony is you've never authorized anyone to leak. | ||
| And Mr. McCabe, if he says contrary, is not telling the truth. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Again, I'm not going to characterize Andy's testimony, but mine is the same today. | ||
| All right, I'm going to make a final point because my time has expired. | ||
| This investigation of the president was corrupt. | ||
| The FBI and the Department of Justice were politicized and weaponized. | ||
| And in my opinion, there are only two possibilities that you were deliberately corrupt or woefully incompetent. | ||
| And I don't believe you were incompetent. | ||
| September 2020 hearing, and of course, C-SPAN cameras were there. | ||
| If you missed it, go to our website at c-span.org and you can listen to the entire testimony. | ||
| The Washington Post editorial this morning, Trump gets his Comey indictment. | ||
| They write, during the president's first term, Attorney General William Barr appointed a special counsel, John Durham, to investigate the origins of the Russia probe. | ||
| Two people, Durham charged with making false statements to investigators, were acquitted at trial. | ||
| Barr and Durham were the A-team. | ||
| Those failed cases demonstrate the difficulty of proving lies in court, especially on politically charged subjects. | ||
| Given Trump's confessions of political motive and his firing of Siebert, the case might be hard to get to trial, much less yield a unanimous conviction. | ||
| From the national newspapers this morning, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Washington Times, here are some details about this indictment. | ||
| Two indictments were approved by this Virginia grand jury, lying to Congress and obstructing congressional proceedings. | ||
| The statue of limitations on this case were due to run out next week on Tuesday, and Comey is slated to surrender to authorities today, according to the newspapers. | ||
| They also report that on October 9th, there will be the arraignment of before U.S. District Judge Michael Nakmanoff. | ||
| Now, this is a Biden appointee judge. | ||
| And if convicted, Comey faces up to five years in prison. | ||
| We're going to go to Pete in Jupiter, Florida, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| How are you doing? | ||
| Morning. | ||
| Well, you know, is there like the Democrats used to say all the time, nobody is above the law. | ||
| Just their reaction this morning and last night is showing the hypocrisy. | ||
| They put Trump, they changed the statue of limitations in New York State to convict them or try to convict them of all these phony things with their real estate and the lady 20 years ago or whatever. | ||
| They changed the statue of limitations to bring that upon. | ||
| This here is just if there's nothing to worry about, let the trial play out. | ||
| And if he's not guilty, then it's over. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Pete's thoughts there in Florida. | ||
| Thomas in Humble Texas, an independent. | ||
| What do you say, Thomas? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man, this is amazing. | |
| I don't know what this has to do with the farmers that are losing their farms and ZD Vance buying them up. | ||
| But anyway, if you give anybody enough rope, they're going to hang themselves. | ||
| I can't wait till they find Giuliani to testify about the rest of the game. | ||
| Excuse me, I got to go. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You got to take care of me. | ||
| All right, Joel, Rochester, New York, Republican. | ||
| Your turn, Joel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you? | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| So I like how the Democrats make this guy look like he's an altar boy. | ||
| Let's not forget what James Colmy was. | ||
| He ruined Martha Stewart, if you remember, just because she says get lost. | ||
| You know, he indicted her. | ||
| And then how about Michael Flynn? | ||
| What he did to Michael Flynn? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He's not an ultra boy, this guy. | ||
| This guy is dirty. | ||
| He's a dirty cop. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I'm glad that he's getting indicted. | ||
| You know, he's got this phony look about him. | ||
| Oh, how about those 8687 that he happened to find on the sand? | ||
| He was walking. | ||
| You know, I mean, what are the chances of anybody finding seashells? | ||
| Okay, the whole thing was a joke. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I think I'm glad he's getting indicted. | ||
| And I hope, you know, he goes to prison because he ruined a lot of people's lives. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| John, Crystal Lake, Illinois, Democratic caller. | ||
| Good morning to you, John. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, I basically wanted to, because a lot of people on the right get really angry when we say, hey, this is a fascist administration. | ||
| And then they like to say, well, you don't know what fascism is. | ||
| So the definition of fascism, I just Googled it for everyone's edification, is an authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology that emphasizes a dictatorial leader, the suppression of opposition, and strict societal and economic control. | ||
| So if that sounds at all like what Trump is doing now, he's going after his political enemies. | ||
| He's basically saying all left-wing people are, you know, violent extremists. | ||
| But it's all projection. | ||
| You know, so fascism is here. | ||
| It's here to stay. | ||
| And hopefully he just doesn't send us all off to the gulags. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Doug, Newport News, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I just wish everybody would understand. | |
| If you break the law, it doesn't make any difference if you're a homeless person on the street or the head of the FBI or candidate for president. | ||
| You should be held responsible, especially if you're the head of the FBI. | ||
| I mean, if we can't trust them, who are we going to trust? | ||
| Doug, do you think this case is as much of a slam dunk as President Trump believes it is in his truth post this morning? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No case is a slam dunk until it goes in front of the American people who are going to sit on that jury and make a decision. | |
| And once that decision is made, everybody needs to accept it. | ||
| Granted, Hillary Clinton was a fool. | ||
| He had documents that were top sacred documents on an unsecure server. | ||
| But her excuse was, it's the most secure because I have security at my house. | ||
| I mean, this has got to stop somewhere, and we've got to get back to a normal country the way we were. | ||
| If you're guilty, you're found guilty. | ||
| If you are, you served your time. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Doug is a Republican. | ||
| We'll go to Ted, who's a Democrat in Hawaii. | ||
| Hi, Ted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Mimi. | |
| It's good to talk to you again. | ||
| This is quite a little mess we've gotten ourselves into, isn't it? | ||
| I think that people that think very logically and not emotionally can make good sense of this because if you've seen something like this happen before, it is what it is, but it'll go through trial. | ||
| And the thing is, the getting to trial will be a big enough smear on whoever it is, which happens to be Comey at this point. | ||
| The charge is worse than the actual outcome of the trial. | ||
| It's sort of like you're guilty just to be on trial. | ||
| And that's just not fair to call me. | ||
| And anyway, I wish him the best, and I hope our system continues to run as it should. | ||
| I've been in Hawaii for 48 years since the end of the Vietnam War, and I've been a farmer. | ||
| But I just, I can't help but think that you can see what's going on here when somebody cries liar, and a lot of times it's the guy calling liar that's the liar, not the guy he's pointing the finger. | ||
| Thank you, Mimi. | ||
| Ted's thoughts there in Hawaii Democratic Caller. | ||
| We're going to take a break later on the Washington Journal, a discussion of free speech in the United States with Greg Lukianoff, who's the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. | ||
| Next, after a break, political senior writer Ankush Kadori discusses President Trump's use of the Justice Department against his critics and political opponents. | ||
| And we'll continue the conversation from our first hour. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | |
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| At 7 p.m. Eastern, former independent West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin discusses his career, political polarization, and the importance of centrism. | ||
| Then at 8 p.m. Eastern, Independent Institute senior fellow Philip Magnus presents his critique of the New York Times magazine's 1619 project, which told the story of the United States with a focus on slavery and its legacy. | ||
| At 9 p.m. Eastern, a conversation about the influence of Karl Marx's work in America, a country Marx never visited with Illinois State University history professor Andrew Hartman. | ||
| And at 10.15 p.m. Eastern, Stephen Grant on his memoir of his year working as a mailman for the U.S. Postal Service during the pandemic. | ||
| Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| In 1945, the United Nations was founded in the aftermath of World War II. | ||
| This week, C-SPAN marks the 80th anniversary of the UN. | ||
| We'll dig into the C-SPAN archives for historic speeches from U.S. presidents and world leaders delivered at the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York tonight at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| We'll feature President Joe Biden addressing the annual UN General Assembly in 2024, saying the world was at an inflection point because of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. | ||
| Also, last year, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the United Nations General Assembly, criticizing Israel amid the war in Gaza. | ||
| We'll hear from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2024, who called the UN a swamp of anti-Semitic bile and an anti-Israel flat earth society. | ||
| He also criticized the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for considering arrest warrants against him amid their handling of the Israel-Hamas war. | ||
| Watch the 80th anniversary of the United Nations all this week at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| America marks 250 years, and C-SPAN is there to commemorate every moment, from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the voices shaping our nation's future. | ||
| We bring you unprecedented all-platform coverage, exploring the stories, sights, and spirit that make up America. | ||
| Join us for remarkable coast-to-coast coverage, celebrating our nation's journey like no other network can. | ||
| America 250. | ||
| Over a year of historic moments. | ||
| only on the C-SBAM networks. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Joining us this morning to continue our conversation about the two indictments against the former FBI director is Ankush Khidori, a senior writer with Politico magazine. | ||
| Mr. Khidori, let's start with these two indictments by this grand jury in Virginia. | ||
| How did we get to that point yesterday? | ||
| This was a really remarkable path that was followed to get to this indictment. | ||
| I mean, this case looks quite weak on its face. | ||
| So there was a lot of balking within the Eastern District of Virginia, which is the office that has brought these charges. | ||
| The U.S. attorney who was running that office was fired by Trump last week. | ||
| Trump said explicitly and publicly that the reason was because that prosecutor was not charging his political adversaries, including by name, Comey, Adam Schiff, and Letitia James. | ||
| In the last few days, Trump managed to install his formerly personal lawyer. | ||
| She now works in the administration, but she used to be his personal lawyer. | ||
| She was a criminal defense lawyer during the Biden years. | ||
| And she has no prosecutorial experience. | ||
| He installed her as the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. | ||
| Lindsey Halligan. | ||
| Lindsey Halligan, quick, sorry. | ||
| To secure this indictment, which she did. | ||
| It's an extraordinarily unusual process. | ||
| And, you know, it has all the hallmarks of sort of an abuse of power and an effort to sort of politically pursue his adversaries through the legal courts. | ||
| Well, let's talk about extraordinarily. | ||
| Why do you use that word? | ||
| I've never seen a situation where we have reports that not only did the U.S. attorney have questions about this case, the line prosecutors were worried they wouldn't be able to secure an indictment under the circumstances because of how weak that they thought the case was. | ||
| And then for there to be not just a decision to overrule the prosecutors, but to like remove and replace the U.S. attorney in order to make this happen. | ||
| I mean, this is not like a normal thing that occurs in the ordinary course. | ||
| I mean, it just has all the hallmarks of Trump really, really wanting to engineer this outcome and being so desperate, frankly, to engineer that outcome that he couldn't even get the U.S. attorney, who was a Trump supporter, to do this because he thought it was so weak. | ||
| So he had to install his personal attorney who has no prosecutorial experience. | ||
| And I honestly have real questions about what happened in that grand jury room yesterday because there are a lot of shenanigans you can get up to if you're a prosecutor and particularly someone who's perhaps unscrupulous and directed toward a particular outcome that can sort of muck with the process. | ||
| When it comes to trial, and we heard Mr. Comey post in an Instagram video, let's go to trial. | ||
| He said, I'm innocent. | ||
| Will his lawyers bring everything the president has said publicly as evidence that this is a politically motivated case? | ||
| Yeah, I would expect so. | ||
| I would expect so. | ||
| I mean, this is the, again, extremely rare case in which a defendant has that evidence available to him, and it's incontrovertible, right? | ||
| Trump posted and has been saying things publicly and posted over the weekend on social media about how he fired the U.S. attorney because he wouldn't charge these people. | ||
| So yeah, you can expect Comey to make every effort possible to get as much as that in front of the jury and the judge to the extent that they need it. | ||
| I mean, this is national news, right? | ||
| So if they don't know it already, they're going to learn it in the course of this proceeding. | ||
| The Attorney General posting on X last night, no one is above the law. | ||
| Today's indictment reflects this Department of Justice's commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people. | ||
| We will follow the facts in this case. | ||
| She says James Comey abused positions of power and that he must be held accountable for misleading the American people. | ||
| Yeah, well, look, this is a rather weak case on its face, right? | ||
| Concerns testimony that Comey made in 2020 that refers back to testimony he had provided years earlier involving events that had happened years earlier. | ||
| It's a rather peripheral question. | ||
| I mean, you played the clip a little while ago, the exchange that he had with Ted Cruz, that appears to be the basis for these charges. | ||
| It does not appear to be a particularly compelling case on its face. | ||
| It is a very tangential matter, and I have to say, like, reflects a lack of evidence and more compelling prosecutorial theories against Comey that this is what they were left with. | ||
| And I would just say, we can get into some more if you want, this is not really the first criminal prosecution that Trump has sort of managed to bring about. | ||
| We saw this during the John Durham special counsel John Durham and even special counsel David Weiss, who prosecuted Hunter Biden. | ||
| And Trump has a very mixed record when it comes to cases like this, particularly during the special counsel investigation run by John Durham. | ||
| They brought two different prosecutions, one of which was in the same district, the Eastern District of Virginia, against people on false statements charges. | ||
| Both of those defendants got acquitted. | ||
| So I think if I were, you know, Comey, I mean, you have to take this very seriously because you're the defendant, but I would be feeling pretty good about my chances at the end of the day. | ||
| Explain the grand jury process and who decides then to approve these indictments, the jury, and what role does the judge play? | ||
| So the judge doesn't really play any role at this point in the process. | ||
| So the way that this works, and now it's sort of an interesting mechanical question that most people don't have to know about in their lives. | ||
| So a prosecutor can impanel a grand jury. | ||
| They're usually impaneled for months at a time, hearing a whole bunch of different cases. | ||
| Grand jury has to have 23 people. | ||
| 16 have to be present for there to be a quorum for them to do business. | ||
| In order to secure an indictment, prosecutors have to go in, present some testimony from a witness. | ||
| You can just be a summary witness, an FBI agent perhaps, about the charges, give them some reason to believe that there's probable cause to bring the charges. | ||
| That is the standard that they're being asked to apply. | ||
| 12 of them have to vote in favor of the charges in order for the indictment to be returned. | ||
| So the, or usually this is a very straightforward process. | ||
| This one I have some questions about because I'll give you a very concrete example. | ||
| You do not have to present exculpatory evidence to the grand jury. | ||
| So if, for instance, there was some ambiguity about the exchange or even the department had gathered information or evidence that contradicted their prosecutorial theory, you don't necessarily have to present that to the grand juries as a legal matter. | ||
| Conscientious prosecutors will do that both because it's fair to the defendant and also because if it doesn't come up in the grand jury process, the exculpatory evidence is definitely going to come up in front of the judge and the jury. | ||
| So you're kind of doing yourself a disservice by not presenting it then. | ||
| The one situation in which it would make some sense to do it that way is in which you want the indictment and you don't care if you got the conviction at trial or you don't know, perhaps because you've never prosecuted a case in your life before, that these are the risks that you've run. | ||
| And so that is one instance, one sort of concrete example which you can kind of game the process if you're unscrupulous. | ||
| I've never seen anyone intentionally do this, nor did I when I was a prosecutor. | ||
| But this case has so many warts around it that, and the fact that Lindsey Halligan has no prosecutorial experience leads me to wonder what happened yesterday. | ||
| There was an attempt to have the grand jury indict him on three counts. | ||
| There were two rewarded and one rejected. | ||
| Tell us about what happened there. | ||
| So evidently they could not get a dozen grand jurors to sign off on that count. | ||
| This happens from time to time, but it's very unusual. | ||
| It's very unusual for grand jurors to refuse to charge even a single count, much less a whole indictment. | ||
| I actually kind of thought they might reject the whole thing just because of how public everything has been and how it's, you know, national and incontrovertible news that Trump wanted this outcome. | ||
| But they're past this hurdle at this point, so now we move on to the pretrial motion stage and then ultimately a trial if the case gets there. | ||
| And what happened in the grand jury will be of interest to people like me. | ||
| We may never find out, except in very limited circumstances. | ||
| And if we do, it'll be sometime down the road. | ||
| But it's very interesting to me, but peripheral for the moment. | ||
| Well, what is the timeline here? | ||
| Because the indictments come down yesterday. | ||
| There are cameras outside of James Comey's home this morning. | ||
| What are we expecting to happen today and in the days and weeks going forward? | ||
| Well, look, so Comey's turning himself in today, I imagine do some processing work. | ||
| He's going to have an arraignment, which I believe is scheduled for October 9th, which will be his first appearance. | ||
| And that will, first appearance in court. | ||
| And that will involve setting a schedule, presumably, for some pretrial motions, discovery, and then perhaps even a trial. | ||
| This is a pretty straightforward case in the grand scheme of things, right? | ||
| There are two counts. | ||
| The government will clarify this, but it appears to be the case that both counts concern a single exchange, right, in that congressional hearing. | ||
| All with Ted Cruz? | ||
| It appears to be the case. | ||
| Now, the government will confirm this eventually publicly. | ||
| If they don't do so now, then in the course of the proceedings, they'll have to do that. | ||
| But assuming that's the case, then we're really talking about whether that few minutes exchange between Comey and Ted Cruz was an intentional falsehood or not. | ||
| And so that's not a terribly complicated case. | ||
| It doesn't require an extraordinary amount of discovery. | ||
| And Comey may want this to go to trial quickly. | ||
| Usually it's the case that defendants, you know, they want to make sure the defense is in order. | ||
| They want to make sure their lawyers have enough time to bring a case. | ||
| But Comey is a very high-profile person. | ||
| And for people in that position, we often see this with public officials. | ||
| They sometimes want a faster trial. | ||
| They want to avoid any delays precisely because they think that they're on strong footing, as Comey appears to believe, and I think he has very good reason to believe that. | ||
| And because they don't want the case hanging over their head for years. | ||
| So in a case like this, it's hard to say how long the discovery process would take for sure and what the judge would want to do. | ||
| But you could see a trial in a case like this within like six months. | ||
| Ancos Kadori is our guest here this morning, senior writer with Politico magazine. | ||
| Let's get to calls. | ||
| Ed is first in Randolph, Massachusetts, Democratic Caller. | ||
| Hi, Ed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how you doing? | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for taking my call. | |
| Go ahead. | ||
| We'll take your question or comment, Ed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I've got a question for him. | |
| I was wondering if he thought that this, the way he's handling this debacle is that is the president, of course. | ||
| The office, I respect the office. | ||
| Not necessarily the person that's holding it. | ||
| But the fact of the matter is, does this not look like it's coming right out of a South American coup that they're taking over down there? | ||
| And they do this sort of to put their people in place so they can have some kind of political military coup. | ||
| And he's also called a lot of the military back off of their assignments around the world. | ||
| Yeah, Ed. | ||
| Well, let's stick with the Justice Department. | ||
| So what in the second Trump administration, what changes have you seen at the Justice Department and does it break precedent? | ||
| I mean, look, by far the most significant change is the Attorney General and the people that have been brought in below her. | ||
| The Attorneys General during the first Trump administration, Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, did a lot of highly controversial things, but understood sort of the very basic rules of the road, I would say, prosecutorily speaking, first and foremost, which is that you aren't just supposed to do whatever the president tells you to do. | ||
| Seems like a very basic proposition for the Attorney General, but at least those two men seemed to understand that one. | ||
| Pam Bondi has, I think, reshaped the role of the Attorney General. | ||
| I think she's more openly partisan and political than any Attorney General I've seen in my lifetime, and more of a loyalist to Trump, a personal loyalist to Trump, someone who wants to please him, to flatter him, and appears to know, perhaps appears to know that if she falls out of his good graces, she may be fired unceremoniously. | ||
| That is what happened to Jeff Sessions, in fact. | ||
| So as a result, we've seen a lot more direct influence that Trump has managed to exert over the Justice Department. | ||
| I mean, it's, you know, so far that he just publicly tweets out to Pamponte, we have to prosecute these people. | ||
| This is extraordinarily unusual. | ||
| If it was something that we found out that had occurred behind closed doors, it would be an incredible political scandal. | ||
| But Trump just does it out in the open. | ||
| So, and then, of course, beneath Pam Boni, there's Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is Trump's former criminal defense lawyer. | ||
| And until recently, Todd Blanch's deputy was Yamlo Bove, who was another criminal defense lawyer of Trump's. | ||
| So this is a whole group of people who are very personally, politically loyal to Trump. | ||
| And that is a real break from what we've seen in the past. | ||
| And so Trump has really been able to use the Justice Department as a much more direct instrument of his objectives than we've seen so far. | ||
| And Chris Khadori is Political Magazine's senior writer. | ||
| His column, Rule of Law, looks at national legal affairs and the political dimensions of the law at the moment when the two are inextricably linked. | ||
| He's joining us this morning for our conversation about the indictments against the former FBI director. | ||
| Mike, let's hear from you in Orland Park, Illinois. | ||
| Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, good morning, everybody. | |
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would just like to say all of this is kind of just power for the course. | |
| We've got a president who's become the president. | ||
| We went four years without an actual president with all of his underlings running everything rather than he himself. | ||
| But I don't see this as a political prosecution. | ||
| I see this as normal, back to normal, following the law. | ||
| The guy did lie to us. | ||
| He did hold information from us. | ||
| He should be prosecuted on us. | ||
| We trust all these politicians. | ||
| They charge Trump with a lot of things, and he's probably the most investigated man in history. | ||
| But they did it. | ||
| And I don't think that anybody should be complaining that they're doing this now. | ||
| It's politics. | ||
| Okay, Mr. Khadori. | ||
| You know, I don't really know what to say to that sort of thing because I understand the impulse. | ||
| There's a sense that we've been doing this for years now. | ||
| This is just the latest chapter in this drama. | ||
| With respect to whether or not Comey's guilty, that will have a process that resolves that. | ||
| And there will be much more aired out evidence. | ||
| We'll be talking about this for months, covering it all throughout very, very closely. | ||
| So people can render their own judgments about how serious the case is, and we'll see what happens. | ||
| I think the broader sort of tit-for-tat thing, you know, as many people have pointed out, it's not a healthy way to, I think, to look at the situation and say, okay, well, they did it to Trump, so Trump now gets to do it to them. | ||
| That said, I do have a slightly more relaxed approach to the question of like targeting specific people than I think other prosecutors do. | ||
| And here's, I want to say that in fairness to, I think, Trump supporters. | ||
| When the Manhattan DA's case against Trump was brought, the criminal case, I was very ambivalent about it. | ||
| I had a lot of questions about it. | ||
| I was not a supporter. | ||
| But many people on the left and Democrats were very fine with that case, even though it was rickety from the start. | ||
| And that case, too, also concerned the 2016 election. | ||
| Evidently, that campaign is never going to end because the 2016 election is also at issue in this indictment, too, very indirectly. | ||
| And so, you know, targeting people, like, it's not healthy, but at the end of the day, you have to look at the charges that have been brought, judge them on their own terms, and see if there's a conviction and see what you make of them as a political matter. | ||
| Do you think as an American this made sense? | ||
| It was an appropriate use of prosecutorial resources and tax dollars on Mad Dad. | ||
| This is not going to be cheap. | ||
| And I encourage people to kind of think about it that way, not to just say, well, they did it to this person I like, so that person gets to do it to him or her. | ||
| I would try to sort of segregate these things out if you can. | ||
| Our guest has mentioned this a couple of times. | ||
| Mr. Kadori is a former federal prosecutor at the Justice Department where he specialized in financial fraud and white-collar crime. | ||
| He worked at a law firm in New York City on commercial litigation and white-collar corporate defense. | ||
| And he clerked for a judge in the Southern District of New York. | ||
| Jack, Elkeridge, Maryland, Independent. | ||
| Jack, question or comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| You know, President Trump, when Biden was president, was complaining about how he was targeted. | ||
| And this guy is targeting people on steroids. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| I cannot imagine that this isn't going to get thrown out of court because he's already, and even one of the last people who commented, he's guilty already. | ||
| You know, Trump said he's guilty. | ||
| He's guilty. | ||
| He's guilty. | ||
| This is going to get thrown out of court. | ||
| That's my comment. | ||
| I don't know if the judge will throw it out, but I will say I would be fairly surprised. | ||
| I hate to render definitive predictions. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| But I would just say at this moment in time, given what we know now on where we are in the process, I would be surprised if Comey is convicted. | ||
| If he is convicted, I would be very surprised if he ever spends a single day in prison on a charge like this, given the circumstances, given his service, public service, and the fact he has no criminal record, on and on and on and on. | ||
| We may never get to that day where we have to think about that question or consider it because, as I said, I would not be surprised if he gets acquitted or the jury hangs. | ||
| The president already noted in today's, in his Truth Social post this morning, that the judge who will hear this case is a Biden appointee. | ||
| So what happens if they don't like the outcome and they point to this judge? | ||
| They're going to do that. | ||
| If the judge throws it out, they're going to do that. | ||
| They've been doing that all year. | ||
| Another, I think, rather unhealthy development in our country has been not just Trump, but his Attorney General and the most senior people at the Justice Department vilifying any judge that does something that goes against their objectives or that is at odds with their claims, even though often the judges are right that what the Justice Department has attempted to do was improper, baseless, legally questionable, whatever, whatever it are. | ||
| So yeah, there will absolutely be an attempt to vilify this judge if he or she can appeal then? | ||
| Appeal. | ||
| No, actually. | ||
| There are very limited avenues for appeals. | ||
| If the case gets tossed out by the judge at certain points of the case, if the case gets tossed out early in the case, potentially on a pretrial motion, that may be appealable. | ||
| But if, for instance, the judge hears all the evidence at trial and decides it shouldn't even go to the jury, that the evidence is insufficient for a conviction, a dismissal at that stage of the case is not appealable. | ||
| So things could get complicated. | ||
| Can I just say one thing on the sort of the Trump lawfare question? | ||
| Because it's come up a couple of times, like, oh, that during the Biden years, Trump was pursued by all these prosecutors. | ||
| I think that that's a very unhelpful, simplistic, and largely inaccurate way. | ||
| of thinking about what actually happened between the period of 2020 and 2024. | ||
| The way I see it, the Justice Department, the Biden Justice Department should have focused very, very early on on investigating and potentially prosecuting Trump over his involvement in overturning, attempting to overturn the 2020 election. | ||
| January 6th, the campaign and the months of misrepresentations to the public about him winning when he actually lost the election and on and on and on. | ||
| Had that happened, I don't think the Manhattan DA would have brought his case. | ||
| I doubt the Fulton County DA would have brought her case. | ||
| I'm not even sure there would have ever been a need for a classified documents case. | ||
| That didn't happen for reasons that, meaning the Justice Department sort of waited to sort of open its investigation at the level of Trump, and there was like a year and a half really in which they kind of sat on it, at least at the highest level. | ||
| And what happened was, you know, I think some sort of chaos resulted that local prosecutors felt like the Justice Department doesn't do anything. | ||
| We have these cases. | ||
| Why don't we fill the void? | ||
| And then the Justice Department, belatedly, after the January 6th committee sort of sort of publicly shamed them into doing something, then appoints Jack Smith toward the end of 2022, right after the 2022 midterm elections. | ||
| And then he deals with the documents case and he deals with the 2020 election case. | ||
| For Trump and a lot of Republican supporters, they look at these facts and they say, oh, this was a coordinated effort to sort of take Trump down through the law, whatever. | ||
| It's in fact a result of a lack of coordination among all of these people. | ||
| First and foremost, the Justice Department coordinator interacting with the local prosecutors. | ||
| So folks are right, I think, to be upset across the political spectrum about how that all unfolded. | ||
| But I think that kind of that's what really happened. | ||
| It was a coordinated campaign. | ||
| It was actually a bit of a mess. | ||
| Are they allowed to coordinate? | ||
| Well, they can coordinate in this, and this happens all the time, right? | ||
| When a federal prosecutor is investigating the same thing that local prosecutors are investigating, the Justice Department will often frequently tell the local prosecutors, you don't need to do this. | ||
| We're going to handle it. | ||
| You can stand down. | ||
| And local prosecutors do that regularly, all day, every day across the country for a variety of reasons, including that having two sets of prosecutors pursue a case in parallel can be very, very tricky. | ||
| And also state prosecutors are very, very resource constrained. | ||
| So they're not really looking to do a whole bunch of complex resource-intensive cases. | ||
| So yeah, that sort of coordination, the sort of coordination where you're saying, oh, I'm going to bring this charge in this jurisdiction, then a week later, you bring that charge in that jurisdiction, and then how about a month later she brings that, that would be very, very inappropriate. | ||
| What else or who else is the president eyeing for prosecution from the Biden administration years? | ||
| It is a long list. | ||
| So Schiff, California Senator Adam Schiff, this too, this sort of combative relationship also has its origins in the 2016 election, the Trump-Russia investigation, how Trump feels like Schiff mistreated him during that investigation. | ||
| I mean, these are very, very old, obscure events that I think most of us wish we could just put in the past definitively. | ||
| Then you have Letitia James, who is the New York Attorney General, who brought this civil fraud case against Trump. | ||
| He was found liable. | ||
| There was a very large verdict. | ||
| That verdict was recently tossed out at the appeals level. | ||
| You know, Trump has and the Attorney General insinuated that Jack Smith, who is the special counsel that handled the classified documents case in the 2020 election case at DOJ, that he might be prosecutable and his staff may be prosecutable. | ||
| John Bolton? | ||
| Oh, yeah, John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor, whose home was recently searched and office was recently searched in connection with investigation of whether he unlawfully retained and perhaps distributed classified information. | ||
| It's a long list of people. | ||
| Alvin Bragg, Trump has suggested maybe he should be charged. | ||
| Fanny Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney, Trump has suggested maybe she should be charged. | ||
| So it's a lot Pelosi, Obama. | ||
| I mean, you could go on and on and on. | ||
| We'll go to Al, who's in Washington, D.C. here, Democratic caller. | ||
| Al, your turn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| This reeks of the Nixon administration. | ||
| When the politics of the right became, I guess you will, a dirty business. | ||
| The Nixon administration just went over the top. | ||
| And then we passed a bunch of laws in Congress to say no. | ||
| And I think we need a political awakening in America, like after the Nixon years to say no to prosecutorial crap that's been going back and forth between the parties. | ||
| We just need to stand up. | ||
| To me, Americans need to stand up and say enough. | ||
| The politics of dirty business has just become such since Trump was prosecuted, since Comey went over and shook his hand and then Trump fired him. | ||
| Everything has been a political football. | ||
| That's just my take. | ||
| But that's from reading the Nixon thing with Archibald, you know, the prosecutor. | ||
| I've got a book four inches thick from back then. | ||
| And we just had such a terrible time then, and it seems like it's just become the rigueur now. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Okay, Mr. Kidori. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I do think it's a good point that there are echoes of this from the Nixon administration. | ||
| And this is actually true of a lot of what we've seen during these first, you know, eight, nine months of the Trump administration. | ||
| A lot of what we're seeing here, and this includes not just the use of the Justice Department in the way that your caller described, highly personal and directed by the president, on and on and on, but also even like the legal positions they've taken in court. | ||
| That, for instance, Trump can refuse to spend whatever money he wants. | ||
| That's a Nixon-era innovation, the position that the president has the power to constitutionally impound funds. | ||
| And, you know, there have been other elements of Trump's positions, legal positions, that also have their roots in sort of long-term conservative Republican ideology, including, for instance, that Trump can ignore certain laws because he's decided that there's an emergency or national security or foreign policy interest that you can trace back to the George W. Bush administration. | ||
| So in that way, like these are not necessarily entirely new innovations, but they are progressing and being expanded in troubling ways. | ||
| We'll go to Chelsea, Massachusetts. | ||
| Stephen is watching there, Republican caller. | ||
| Welcome to the conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you, sir? | |
| Morning, Stephen. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, Mr. Kedari. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| How are you doing, sir? | ||
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you? | |
| Very good, my friend. | ||
| I've been listening for the last half hour, 45 minutes to you and the callers, okay? | ||
| Well, everybody's missing the point here. | ||
| Now, you have to understand, I'm a news junkie. | ||
| I've been watching news for the last 25 years, every single station. | ||
| So what I would like everyone to do, and you too, sir, everybody's hyped up on what Donald Trump is doing right now. | ||
| I can tell you which person that called you, I can tell you which station that they watch all the time, because I can just tell. | ||
| If everybody looks, and I appreciate if you could do this, this started in the sick, January the 16th when 2016 when Donald Trump come down the elevator. | ||
| What's going on here is the only reason the Democrats did not want Trump in is because Donald Trump knew what everybody was doing. | ||
| That's why they wanted him out. | ||
| As far as Adam Schiff goes, he should be prosecuted for what he did. | ||
| I saw that live on TV. | ||
| He's had a piece of paper saying, I have the proof right here, he colluded with Russia. | ||
| Never produced it. | ||
| That's what the problem is. | ||
| You need to go back and talk about both things. | ||
| Not just what Donald Trump is doing, what everybody's saying he's doing, what the news media is telling. | ||
| All right, Stephen, let's take your point about Adam Schiff, his involvement in the Russia investigation, and Robert Mueller. | ||
| And what did Robert Mueller ultimately put forth to the American people? | ||
| What did he find? | ||
| Well, I mean, actually, I think Trump's summary is actually fair, pretty fair, right? | ||
| So he said no collusion. | ||
| You know, there was not sufficient evidence to bring charges suggesting that there was a conspiracy or collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government or Russian intelligence. | ||
| There was some evidence, just to be clear, that was summarized in Mueller's final report, but the prosecutors concluded it was insufficient to bring any sort of charge. | ||
| Then on obstruction, there was a separate obstruction element to the investigation. | ||
| And that the prosecutors did strongly suggest on Mueller's team that there was actual criminal obstruction. | ||
| Bill Barr, the Attorney General, when the Mueller investigation wrapped up, declined to bring those charges. | ||
| Merrick Garland, the Attorney General under Joe Biden, also declined to pick up and pursue those charges. | ||
| So that's the result of that. | ||
| I think, you know, the caller, you know, the caller articulates some frustrations, I think, from the public. | ||
| First of all, everybody who's watching this show and talking to you or me, they may be watching whatever on their old time, but they're clearly watching you and C-SPAN as well. | ||
| So I'm really reluctant to write off anyone who's calling into the show because everybody, I think, is actually quite news literate who calls in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Right. | ||
| So Senator Schiff, there hasn't even been a suggestion that I'm aware of that the government is investigating the exchange that the caller referred to, the statement the call referred to. | ||
| What Schiff actually appears to be under investigation for, and we know this again because Trump and his political appointees are just telling this in public, is mortgage fraud. | ||
| And that case too appears to be shaky. | ||
| Maybe they'll get over the finish line. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, look, you've got to judge the cases on their own terms. | ||
| And I would avoid, again, trying to do the tit for tat. | ||
| They did this to him, so he gets to do it to them sort of thing. | ||
| I think it's not a healthy way of thinking about this because at some point, I think as one of your other callers had to say, there does need to be an end to this, one would hope. | ||
| We'll go to Steve in Ormond Beach, Florida, Independent. | ||
| Morning, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| This is my opinion. | ||
| He is absolutely wrong about tit for tag because if it was reversed, I mean, justice, what is justice? | ||
| It's an idea that people are going to be treated equally. | ||
| You know, are they treated equally? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, both parties, you know, nobody's above the law. | ||
| Nobody's above the law. | ||
| We hear this all the time. | ||
| Well, you know, these people that are here to serve us and are the CEOs or the head of these departments, they did it to Trump. | ||
| How much did they do with the Trump? | ||
| How much money did they spend? | ||
| Yeah, the Democrats spent a lot of money going after Trump. | ||
| We don't care how much they spend now going after Democrats. | ||
| I mean, I'm an independent, and I don't care what they spend going after these Democrats. | ||
| It's funny that guy named Steven, because I wanted to bring up shift about his lives. | ||
| I'm glad they're going after him now for his mortgage fraud. | ||
| They should go after everything. | ||
| They went after Trump for things that he didn't even do. | ||
| The banks weren't even upset with him when he valued his house. | ||
| They'd say it was more, which was ridiculous. | ||
| Anyway, that's my thought. | ||
| Okay, Steve, we'll take your thoughts, Mr. Khidori. | ||
| So the cases against Trump, I think it's helpful to sort of level set here. | ||
| They sort of ran the gamut. | ||
| And I think it's, there's a lot of retconning, I think, or suggesting, oh, the cases against Trump were frivolous. | ||
| They were not, particularly the federal cases. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The federal government charged Trump with an effort to overturn the 2020 election. | ||
| It was a very serious case, very serious allegations, both legally and perhaps even more importantly, politically. | ||
| And then there was the prosecution over the classified documents. | ||
| The government seemed to have a pretty strong case since we all saw a video of that search happening. | ||
| And then they pull out this inventory of all sorts of classified documents. | ||
| And Trump, again, didn't ever really even deny that those, he embraced it and just claimed he had the authority to bring those documents, which was very, take those documents, which is very questionable. | ||
| Then you have this. | ||
| Stop for that, on those two cases, because what was the outcome of those prosecutions? | ||
| Well, they never went to trial. | ||
| The case concerning the classified documents case down in Florida, the judge, a Trump appointee, concluded that the independent, the special counsel, Jack Smith, had been unconstitutionally installed in his position. | ||
| And then the case in D.C. concerning the 2020 election, that went up to the Supreme Court on the question of whether Trump had immunity. | ||
| Supreme Court sort of took their time with it, in my estimation, and then issued a ruling in favor of Trump on that immunity question, finding that he had some immunity. | ||
| Now, that notion that there would be any sort of criminal immunity for the president was entirely new in American history, in constitutional history. | ||
| It has no basis in the text of the Constitution, the history surrounding the drafting of the Constitution, or the frame as expectations when they drafted the Constitution. | ||
| And the six justices, all Republican appointees who rendered that decision, all claim to be textualists and originalists. | ||
| So you cannot reconcile those two things. | ||
| But with respect to the state cases, right, then you have the Fulton County case. | ||
| That kind of fell apart because of Fonnie Willis' own sort of personal misjudgment. | ||
| But the notion that a state prosecutor where the Justice Department was absent might want to address a fact pattern that involved a president calling the Secretary of State, excuse me, yeah, the Secretary of State in Georgia, and we heard the call telling him, please find me these votes. | ||
| The idea that a prosecutor would entirely look the other way, even a local prosecute, the Justice Department isn't doing anything, I understood it. | ||
| Like the impetus behind at least conducting investigation, I wasn't so sure about the charging document, and it's now all academic now. | ||
| In Manhattan, this is probably the most controversial of the cases, and the case that people most often refer to, who went to trial. | ||
| That case was shaky from the start. | ||
| I wrote about this quite a bit. | ||
| I was not a fan of that case when it was brought. | ||
| I thought it shouldn't have been brought under if things had been proceeding correctly. | ||
| And I think in hindsight, particularly with the evidence that came in at trial the way that it did, I think it is fair to say that that case should not have been brought against Trump. | ||
| And remind us the details of that case. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| That case involved What we have referred to as Trump's hush money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in order to keep her from telling her story about having an affair with Trump during the 2016 election. | ||
| That was sort of the core fact pattern. | ||
| The charges were on falsifying documents, business documents relating to how that payment was recorded internally in Trump's, the Trump organization's own books and records. | ||
| This was an unprecedented prosecutorial theory. | ||
| Trump and his allies were right about this along multiple dimensions. | ||
| That sort of thing, you know, there are cases that you need to bring on novel prosecutorial theories from time to time, particularly the context of very important. | ||
| But this one, I think, it had all the appearance of sort of being jerry-rigged in ways that are not entirely dissimilar, if we're being honest, than this Comey case. | ||
| I wouldn't put them on a one-to-one comparison, one-to-one level. | ||
| But that case, I do think it was, in the end, it was not good for that prosecution to have been brought. | ||
| And I think the evidence was not there. | ||
| I would not have voted to convict Trump if I were sitting on that jury. | ||
| And what happened, though? | ||
| The jury did convict Trump. | ||
| A New York jury convicted Trump on all those counts. | ||
| I think it was 34 counts, but it was really just one sort of incident or one sort of core fact pattern that was at issue. | ||
| So all of that is just to say that there are gradations to these things. | ||
| And that's why I say it's kind of important you try to take them on their own terms. | ||
| We'll go to Virginia. | ||
| John, a Republican, welcome to the conversation, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, my comment is, so James Comey and of course, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and others, they came up with a, concocted this story about Russia collusion. | |
| And they had a special counsel and 19 lawyers investigating it. | ||
| They went on for years. | ||
| They spent tens of millions of dollars, taxpayer dollars. | ||
| And in the end, they had to say there was no collusion. | ||
| There was no obstruction. | ||
| They did not say there was no obstruction. | ||
| But please go on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He did. | |
| You full of bull. | ||
| Look. | ||
| Well, John, let's have our guests respond. | ||
| They literally did not say what he just said. | ||
| They said. | ||
| They did not say there was no obstruction. | ||
| That is what Trump said, which suggests to me that your caller is getting the information with Trump, which in that instance is false. | ||
| Explain a little bit more, though, what the outcome of the case is. | ||
| So when Mueller wrapped up his investigation, he issued a report. | ||
| There were two volumes to it. | ||
| One concerned the possibility of collusion or conspiracy, whatever, and the other concerned obstruction. | ||
| That whole volume contains reams of allegations that Trump attempted to obstruct the investigation, including by firing Comey. | ||
| And the recommendation from Mueller, he didn't make a recommendation to the Justice Department saying, oh, you should bring this case or not. | ||
| He left it in the hands of Bill Barr, effectively. | ||
| But the report does not conclude there was no obstruction. | ||
| In fact, it concludes there were many, many, I wouldn't say many, many, but multiple efforts by Trump to obstruct that investigation. | ||
| And ultimately, the decision to bring the charges was left to Barr, who decided he wasn't going to bring them. | ||
| The investigators, prosecutors on the case, absolutely did not conclude that there was no obstruction. | ||
| That is false. | ||
| It is something that Trump has said over and over and over again. | ||
| It's political propaganda. | ||
| And on the questions of collusion, one of our callers, a couple of callers earlier in our first hour this morning, referred to the president's campaign manager, Paul Manafort. | ||
| What happened with prosecution of some of the president's campaign aides? | ||
| Yeah, so some of them were prosecuted, including Manafort, convicted, including Manafort. | ||
| And like the idea that it was, I don't remember what the word was, I think contrived or that it was a concoction or a hoax or whatever. | ||
| Accepted the assistance from Russia? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, look, I just mean that the notion that the investigation itself was like bunk or like contrived or political from the start, I think is just really, really inaccurate. | ||
| And this really reflects an effort to rewrite history. | ||
| What happened during 2016, the 2016 cycle, is that the government came into possession of information from an Australian diplomat suggesting that there may have been improper coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. | ||
| On top of all that, lest we forget, Trump went on air asking the Russian government to release Hillary Clinton's emails. | ||
| So if you're the FBI and you're in receipt of this information and you've just seen Trump on television going at it and asking for help from the Russian government, you would be a fool not to look at something. | ||
| We'll go to Corey, who's in Richmond, California, Democratic Caller. | ||
| Hi, Corey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I would like to have your guest speak to, he touched on it earlier, the rocket docket in eastern Virginia. | ||
| I understood from a discussion yesterday that if Comey wanted to exercise a speedy trial, we could see something happening within 30 days. | ||
| Can you speak to the timing on that, Robert Dockett piece? | ||
| Thanks, Corey. | ||
| Yeah, I believe it's 60 days, but soon. | ||
| You have a right to a speedy trial and within a very short period of time. | ||
| And Comey can exercise that right. | ||
| Our guest this morning, Ankush Khadori, senior writer with Politico Magazine. | ||
| You can find his column, Rules of Law, if you go to politico.com/slash magazine. | ||
| Thank you for the conversation this morning. | ||
| We always appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| We're going to take a break. | ||
| When we come back, author and free speech advocate Greg Luki Anoff will be joining us. | ||
| He's the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. | ||
| We'll be discussing the state of free speech in America. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story. | |
| This weekend, as America celebrates its 250th anniversary in 2026, join American History TV for its new series, America 250, and discover the ideas and defining moments of our founding. | ||
| This week at 11 a.m. Eastern, we'll explore the creation of the Continental Army in 1775 with Duquesne University professor and former U.S. Army officer Holly Mayer. | ||
| And then historian and author Don Hagist examines the British Army before and during the Revolutionary War. | ||
| Then at 3 p.m. Eastern, legal and constitutional scholars highlight landmark debates and Supreme Court cases in the evolution of the U.S. Constitution. | ||
| Also at 2 p.m. Eastern on the Civil War, historians talk about Robert E. Lee as a complex figure whose legacy has evolved over time. | ||
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| University of Kentucky professor Melanie Gohn teaches a class on the state's decision and its unique relationship with the institution of slavery until the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. | ||
| Exploring the American Story. | ||
| Watch American History TV Saturdays on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history. | ||
| In our last podcast, Ed Luce of the Financial Times told us about his books big for his big new Brzezinski, who he calls America's great power profit. | ||
| In this episode, we're going to feature a book notes interview from April 2nd, 1989 with Dr. Brzezinski. | ||
| He was the first guest for the weekly Sunday evening program that ran till 2005, and that was for 16 years. | ||
| His book at the time was about his longtime prediction that there would be a failure of communism in the Soviet Union. | ||
| The name of Brzezinski's book was The Grand Failure. | ||
|
unidentified
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We revisit an interview with author Zavignu Brzezinski about his book, The Grand Failure, The Birth and Death of Communism in the 20th Century, on this episode of BookNotes Plus with our host Brian Lamb. | |
| BookNotes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| America marks 250 years, and C-SPAN is there to commemorate every moment, from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the voices shaping our nation's future. | ||
| We bring you unprecedented all-platform coverage, exploring the stories, sights, and spirit that make up America. | ||
| Join us for remarkable coast-to-coast coverage, celebrating our nation's journey like no other network can. | ||
| America 250. | ||
| Over a year of historic moments, only on the C-SPAN networks. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| At our table this morning is Greg Lukianoff, who is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. | ||
| He's also the co-author of The War on Words, here to talk about the state of free speech in America. | ||
| Let me begin with your New York Times op-ed. | ||
| Everyone's a free speech hypocrite, is what you wrote. | ||
| In the first paragraph, you say, if you're a free speech lawyer, you face a choice. | ||
| Either expect to be disappointed by people of all political stripes or go crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I choose low expectations. | |
| What did you mean? | ||
| Well, I've been defending free speech for a quarter century now. | ||
| That's what I went to law school specifically to do. | ||
| And if you actually let it really bother you that people who are so good on free speech when their own side gets in trouble, suddenly changing their tune when it's their other side's ox getting gored, you would go crazy. | ||
| So I've learned a certain amount of, I've come to some amount of peace with it. | ||
| I don't like it. | ||
| I'm still disappointed when I see it, but I'm not shocked when suddenly people who were one minute saying, I'm great on free speech, turn around and censor people themselves. | ||
| And you have low expectations. | ||
| I have low expectations. | ||
| I would love, I finished that article by saying I would love one day to be pleasantly surprised, and I am occasionally pleasantly surprised. | ||
| I would like to be pleasantly surprised more often. | ||
| Lately, what is happening with free speech in this country? | ||
| Well, first of all, the global picture is really bad. | ||
| And the local picture, you know, like America right now is the only country that has something that looks more like there's no such thing as free speech absolutism, but maybe what you might call in the First Amendment opinion absolutism. | ||
| And we have the strongest protections for free speech in the world, and I fear that we're blowing it here as well. | ||
| And I would say the last eight months of the Trump administration and oftentimes justified as a backlash to left-wing censorship on campuses, has engaged in some really remarkable abuses of power, including going after law firms, going after higher education. | ||
| And I'm a big critic of the way higher education runs, but the administration has tried to take on powers it simply doesn't have in that battle, which is deeply concerning. | ||
| And then, of course, all the things they're doing against the media, whether it's multi-billion dollar lawsuits, defamation lawsuits, you know, filed against the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, or whether it's the pressure from the FCC to sort of gleefully, you know, cheer the firing of Jimmy Kimmel. | ||
| But the Jimmy Kimble thing, honestly, is just a small part of a much more concerning, much larger pattern. | ||
| Last week on the Washington Journal, we began our first hour talking about free speech versus hate speech. | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| Well, there is no exception to hate speech under American law. | ||
| And we are right on that. | ||
| And the rest of the world is wrong on that. | ||
| And you're not supposed to say that because it's impolite, sort of like cultural imperialism. | ||
| But my mother's British, and I see what's actually happening in Britain right now with their hate speech laws. | ||
| And by some estimates, they're arresting 30 people a day at this point. | ||
| I think actually when the numbers finally come out, it's going to be even worse. | ||
| And the justification in Europe and all these other countries is that what they're saying is, what these people are saying is hateful. | ||
| Now, we have something that I've recommended every time I'm in Europe and talking to a place where I spent a lot of time in the UK as a kid. | ||
| And I argue for what we have under American First Amendment law, which is what we call the bedrock principle, is that you cannot ban something simply because it's offensive. | ||
| I think that is the right call for a multicultural diverse society because we all have very different ideas of what is and should be considered offensive. | ||
| When you say there is no exception for hate speech, is there no definition? | ||
| In the United States, no. | ||
| There are a lot of competing definitions. | ||
| There are people like Richard Delgado and Mary Matt Souda, who were kind of the grandparents of the speech codes movement on campus, who have ideas of what hate speech should look like. | ||
| I think the closest thing we have to it in law is racial or sexual harassment, which by the way, defined correctly, we have no issue with going after racial or sexual harassment, but it has to be defined in a way that it's not merely you said something offensive to me. | ||
| It has to be a pattern of discriminatory behavior directed at an individual that's severe, persistent, and pervasive. | ||
| It's basically something that sounds a lot more like what the word harassment is, that you're focusing on someone and trying to make their lives miserable because of their religion or color of their skin. | ||
| Relentlessly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What has the Supreme Court said? | ||
| The Supreme Court's been very clear that highly offensive speech is protected and it should be. | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| I think, and I do attribute this largely to our K-PhD education, is we've gotten people to think about whether or not they approve of the speech that people are saying or if they think the speech that people are saying is good in this very kind of primitive moralistic sense. | ||
| And I think that's a form of wrong thing, you know, itself. | ||
| Because what you should be thinking about is the informational value of knowing what people really think, which is essentially infinite. | ||
| You are flying blind if you think you can understand current American society if you don't know what people really think. | ||
| And it's one of the reasons why I love coming on this show because I get to hear what Americans really think. | ||
| Greg Lukianov is our guest this morning. | ||
| He's the president and CEO of Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. | ||
| FIRE. | ||
| How do you come about this role and this work that you do? | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| You know, it's a lifelong thing. | ||
| I'm a first-generation American. | ||
| I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of other first-generation Americans and immigrant kids. | ||
| And we never take America's free speech exceptionalism for granted because a lot of us were fleeing countries that were either authoritarian or full-on totalitarian. | ||
| And we know how bad it can be in countries that don't value freedom of speech. | ||
| So I started pretty pro-free speech as a kid. | ||
| And coming at this from the left, by the way, which was kind of like what it meant to be liberal when I was younger. | ||
| And then I was a journalist at American University in D.C. | ||
| That definitely radicalizes you further in the name of freedom of speech because you see how often people use whatever rationale they're allowed to shut down the press. | ||
| Then the Congress tried to ban indecency on the internet when I was in my senior year. | ||
| And I'm like, that's ridiculous. | ||
| That has no meaning. | ||
| That's way too broad. | ||
| So I decided to go to law school. | ||
| I hyper-specialized in it, took every class that Stanford offered on freedom of speech, did six credits on censorship during the Trudeau dynasty of my own design, worked at the ACLU of Northern California, and I've been lucky enough to be doing this now for almost 25 years at fire. | ||
| And your father, you mentioned this before we started talking with our viewers this morning. | ||
| What influence did your father's culture and history and his, where he came from, have on your role? | ||
| My father, Vasili, who turns 100 in April. | ||
| Happy birthday. | ||
| Yeah, and he survived a lot. | ||
| He had a rough childhood, partially because his dad was fleeing the Bolsheviks. | ||
| And he grew up in Yugoslavia, where he both knew that if the communists got him, they'd kill him. | ||
| But also, when the Nazis took over, you know, in the 1940s, he got kicked out of his high school for opposing the Nazis. | ||
| And he was told by the person who was kicking him out of school, I have the lives of 120 kids to think of, so you have to go. | ||
| So these were lessons that were really burned into me. | ||
| But then I also lived in Eastern Europe after the wall fell down. | ||
| And one thing that I just find so horrifying is like Gen X liberals like me, we didn't think that some of these old arguments for enlightened censorship, we thought they were done for. | ||
| We thought they'd been disproved. | ||
| And unfortunately, I'm hearing the same old tired arguments over and over again, first on the left, but increasingly also on the right. | ||
| Hearing people who are on the right now talking about how their admiration for some of the ideas of Lenin, because he was like a good organizer and this kind of stuff. | ||
| I'm like, no, I wanted to live in a world in which neither side took him very seriously. | ||
| So unfortunately, business is booming in free speech space and fire is busier than ever and sometimes kind of tired, but happy warriors. | ||
| Well, let's have our viewers join us in this conversation this morning. | ||
| We want to know from them the state of free speech in America. | ||
| Here's how you can join us. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| Remember, if you don't want to call, you can text at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Let's hear from Marty first, who's in Louisville, Kentucky. | ||
| Democratic caller. | ||
| Marty, good morning, and welcome to the conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Goretta. | |
| I'm using my nickname now. | ||
| I used to call in another Layla Martin. | ||
| I just wanted to mention that there's really two subjects we should be talking about as a result of the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco. | ||
| There's the subject of free speech, but there's also the subject of political humor, which sometimes political humor can go too far. | ||
| David Letterman, about 15 years ago, got in trouble telling a joke about Sarah Palin's daughter. | ||
| A lot of young people protested and called him a dirty old man. | ||
| I want to share with you all a joke that Johnny Carson told on his monologue about a month before he retired that I still can't believe he got away with telling. | ||
| So first of all, do either one of you think this joke is funny and should it be protected under free speech? | ||
| In 1992, David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan leader, was trying to run for president of the United States, but he couldn't find anyone that would let him on the ballot. | ||
| Finally, the South Carolina Republican Party decided to let him run in their primary, but he only got 6% of the vote. | ||
| And he was so depressed, he needed something to cheer himself up. | ||
| So he went to a video store and rented a copy of the Rodney King tape. | ||
| That's all I have. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Dark. | ||
| I don't know how funny it is, but, you know, dark humor is totally protected. | ||
| Now, it can't be offensive and protective. | ||
| And absolutely. | ||
| And when it comes to people criticizing, you know, Jimmy Kimmel's humor, I feel like we're forgetting that not everything has to be solved through power. | ||
| That essentially the way we handle these things is you're 100% within your free speech rights to be like, that joke was deeply unfunny. | ||
| You're a jerk or like whatever. | ||
| By all means, protest, make your voice heard. | ||
| But when you start using, so for example, if Jimmy Kimmel had told that joke or made that comment, sort of implying that the shooter was MAGA, essentially what I think, if he had just been suspended by ABC with no clear government pressure, this would not be a First Amendment issue. | ||
| Why it's a First Amendment issue is that we have an administration that's been constantly putting a thumb on the scale of media, including dangling their mergers ahead of them, but also Brendan Carr and the president himself being very clear that they're targeting Jimmy Kimmel. | ||
| So if there's not government pressure, you know, if you think someone was deeply unfunny and that they're a late-night host, that is something that can end someone's career. | ||
| What about the spread of misinformation on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and X? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And how do you address that? | |
| It's not an easy problem. | ||
| But here's one of the things. | ||
| One of the great discoveries in the history of humankind, possibly the most important discovery, is that we're not very good at understanding the world as it is. | ||
| We are designed for reproduction and survival, essentially. | ||
| And we have all these mechanisms in our brain that make us very good at that, but deluding ourselves in a variety of ways. | ||
| And we've come up with things like the scientific method, like peer review, like structured, what I call structured friction, in order to better understand the world. | ||
| So when people say, bring up the problem of misinformation, I think that they don't understand how difficult the problem they're talking about actually is. | ||
| And the single worst solution you can come up with is to have power, you know, people in government deciding what truth is. | ||
| You don't want them to be, you know, both have exclusive control of force and also decide what is and is not true. | ||
| So I think that there have been some interesting structures. | ||
| I think that the much maligned community note system at X is actually pretty clever. | ||
| I think Facebook took a lot of heat for when they tried to implement, when they've implemented something like that at Facebook, with people saying, basically, this is going to be chaos and anarchy. | ||
| And it's like, no, it's going to be people arguing with each other rather than a top-down decision coming out of Palo Alto on what's true. | ||
| Were you then critical of the Biden administration when we found out they put pressure on technical, on tech companies to not allow information about COVID-19 that they disagreed with? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| And I think how much that undermined public trust. | ||
| And particularly when people felt like the media wasn't really covering this. | ||
| But now there's been a lot of revelations about pressure on Facebook, pressure on Google to remove YouTube posts. | ||
| And this has all come out. | ||
| Some of this has come out just this week. | ||
| A lot of it, frankly, is if we knew before. | ||
| And what I wish it had happened is that either Google or Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook had joined in the Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit because that lawsuit, which was saying that the government must not be allowed to censor indirectly what it cannot censor directly, we lost in that case because the clients were found not to have standing. | ||
| But if Google had been part of that lawsuit or Facebook had been part of that lawsuit, I believe not only would they have won, I believe also that it would have actually resulted in a very good opinion that the government cannot pressure social media to censor speech that the government is forbidden from censoring itself. | ||
| All right, we'll go to Mike in Akron, Ohio, Independent. | ||
| You're next, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, thank you for a C-SPAN. | |
| As an independent, I don't hesitate to criticize members of both parties. | ||
| But what I will say about the freedom of speech, Donald Trump, first of all, is a reality TV extorted there. | ||
| Nobody else could compete with him. | ||
| And he was the only one I know who could get away with saying this comment and a eulogy. | ||
| This person was willing to forgive his enemies, but I could never forgive my enemies. | ||
| Now, imagine if Joe Biden, when he was at Jimmy Carter's funeral, he gave that eulogy about Jimmy Carter. | ||
| Imagine if he said Jimmy Carter was willing to forgive his opponents and his enemies, but I could never do that myself. | ||
| Imagine the uproar if he said that at Carter's funeral. | ||
| And one more thing at Carter's funeral. | ||
| I could read the body language of the people who were there, including Mike Pitts and his wife, Karen. | ||
| Mike Pitts shook Trump's hand. | ||
| Mike, what is your point about free speech here? | ||
| Yeah, do you have a question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, the question is, why is it that it's easy for Trump to get away? | |
| He laughed at people laughed at that. | ||
| Now, I'm no big fan of Joe Biden. | ||
| I had to hold my nose to vote for the guy. | ||
| As an independent, I hold my nose when I vote. | ||
| But I just find it odd that Donald Trump could get away with that. | ||
| And he even got some cheers for saying that. | ||
| Okay, so do you want to take that, Greg Likianov? | ||
| I think just that he can get away with it. | ||
| Take that part of it. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good point. | ||
| Trump says things almost every day that would have been a scandal or been a really big deal if any other previous president had said that. | ||
| And I don't know exactly where we're going to end up in the next election, for example. | ||
| But I do think that people are really reacting positively, unsurprisingly, to people who don't sound scripted. | ||
| And I think that that is actually one of the things that people got really tired about. | ||
| And they found it refreshing that this guy just seems to do like a comedy routine during his speeches. | ||
| So what the future of candor from our politicians is going to look like, I honestly don't know. | ||
| It depends on what their base will tolerate. | ||
| And I suspect the Democratic base is probably going to be less forgiving of sort of like this free willing style that Trump has. | ||
| But we'll see. | ||
| We'll go to Pittsburgh. | ||
| Jack, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Greg. | |
| Thanks for taking the call. | ||
| Really appreciate your viewpoint. | ||
| My point and eventual question is upon the Jimmy Kimmel situation. | ||
| And my deep concern is that he wasn't lying. | ||
| That someone as mainstream as Jimmy Kimmel was so engulfed in misinformation that five days after the biggest story in the world broke, he may have actually believed what he was saying about Kirk's assassin. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I guess my question would be, how do we combat misinformation in that large of a bubble into our mainstream? | |
| All right, Greg. | ||
| Do I answer that? | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| Answer. | ||
| So I, I mean, just to be completely frank, I was embarrassed on behalf of a lot of mainstream media outlets how quickly and passionately and even desperately they went to the argument that the guy who shot Charlie Kirk must actually be a right-winger. | ||
| And I thought that that was so, that was typical and sort of embarrassing and I think unworthy in a lot of cases. | ||
| So I do think that was the theme that Jimmy Kimmel was hitting. | ||
| And I do think that's one of the reasons why he angered conservatives so much because they're coming, are you kidding me? | ||
| So I get that part. | ||
| I think one of the ways you address that, frankly, is by having more viewpoint diversity in mainstream media. | ||
| That really helps. | ||
| I think that if there had been more people who disagreed with that premise, some of the stories that were coming out really doubling down on the idea that, oh, he's from a Republican family and, oh, he likes guns, so he must be implying that he must be a right-winger. | ||
| I think that wouldn't have flown if there had been more viewpoint diversity in the newsroom that day. | ||
| So I think that some of what we're addressing is that we're so walled off from each other. | ||
| And it produces situations where, and I ran into this a lot, I had dear friends call me and saying, oh, it actually turns out the guy who shot Charlie Kirk is a right-winger. | ||
| Now, first of all, that's not the most important issue of all. | ||
| The most important issue is that a young man was killed arguing with students on a campus. | ||
| But secondarily, to try to immediately turn this into a really unlikely story of it actually being his own side that killed him, that's something that's going to further increase cynicism about the media. | ||
| What you just said about the fairness of a network, is that grounds then for the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, to look at ABC? | ||
| Is there an argument there, a case to be made that there is not equal representation on that network and others that they may be looking into when it comes to licensing? | ||
| Yeah, that's the argument that the Trump administration is currently trying to make, and Trump made it very directly, is that I got overwhelmingly poor coverage from you guys, so maybe we should be looking at your licenses. | ||
| That is, to say that's a First Amendment no-no is an understatement. | ||
| Because the way we're supposed to handle these kind of things is being critical of these companies and that through a process of recognizing that their audiences are saying, okay, we're starting to get much more critical because you seem to be in kind of your own partisan bubble. | ||
| That's the way we deal with these things in a free society, is through legitimate pressure, through argumentation, all of these legitimate levers that people have in a democracy. | ||
| You don't use coercive power to achieve that. | ||
| What is the role of the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, in overseeing the networks? | ||
| And what do they not oversee as we're talking here on C-SPAN on a cable network? | ||
| I think the FCC, I don't know if anybody would really mourn if the FCC ceased to exist. | ||
| I think that it always had the power to abuse its power, and it has abused its power under every administration that I'm familiar with. | ||
| I think that you could figure out a much simpler way to divvy up the electromagnetic spectrum. | ||
| And I think it's trying to expand its power right now to have more power over media than any government entity should have. | ||
| It does not regulate cable and it does not regulate the internet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you think it should be that way? | |
| I think the FCC at minimum should do less, but they do. | ||
| Brendan Carr himself does seem to sort of mix arguments against things that are broadcast with arguments for things that are absolutely not broadcast. | ||
| So I think that less would be more in this case. | ||
| JD in Oklahoma City, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wanted to know what you thought about the seashells on the beach that were on like the internet. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And they go after the Call Me, I guess it was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the sheriff in Ohio that goes after the people that have red hats that says felon. | ||
| I didn't know about that last one. | ||
| Yeah, I'd love to know about the guy going after people with red hats that say felon. | ||
| That would be a great First Amendment case for fire. | ||
| I'd love to bring that one. | ||
| What, 8649? | ||
| Like the thing that Comey wrote in Shells, that's not a threat. | ||
| People are arguing that that's a death threat against the president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| What does it mean? | ||
| It means get rid of. | ||
| Like 86 someone is to get rid of. | ||
| People are saying sometimes it means kill that person. | ||
| You know, it's like, yeah, in mobster movie. | ||
| Sometimes that's what it means. | ||
| But a truth threat is something that a reasonable person would actually think, my life is in danger. | ||
| I don't believe for a second that shells that say 8649, like on the beach is something that actually placed Trump in fear of being killed. | ||
| Aubrey in College Park, Maryland, Democratic Color. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thank you. | |
| So I have a couple questions. | ||
| I'm hoping to learn a little bit more about what do you think the role of the FCC is in navigating this. | ||
| I'm sorry, I lost my point a little bit. | ||
| You said FCC navigating what, Aubrey? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sorry. | |
| So in the Biden administration, the FCC contacted social media companies and asked them to take down posts under the basis that they were both misinformation, but also being pushed by foreign actors. | ||
| And so in that instance, I think everybody's on the same page. | ||
| The government shouldn't be restricting what is allowed to be posted. | ||
| But what's the government's responsibility to say, hey, there's another country that wants us to kill ourselves with this bad men spin, and they're doing a great job at it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we have proposed legislation at FHIR that basically would say that, yeah, the government can reach out to social media companies, for example, or talk to the press. | ||
| It just should be documented that they've actually been doing that. | ||
| Because when you have power exercising power over social media or other media to get them to change their stories, the potential for abuse there is scary. | ||
| It basically allows a situation, which I said in a lot of different ways, that the government can police speech that it's actually forbidden from policing under the First Amendment, but do it indirectly. | ||
| So, you know, communications between the press and social media, I think, are going to happen. | ||
| And I think particularly if they're saying this is part of a, you know, a Russian or Chinese op, they have the right to say that. | ||
| But I do think that we should be aware of when the government actually exercises that kind of pressure. | ||
| We'll go to Steve next. | ||
| Levin and Junction. | ||
| Republican, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for taking my call. | |
| Listen, I think that obviously we have free speech in this country, but with great freedom comes great responsibility. | ||
| Uncle Ben. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And also, it comes with consequences. | |
| If I tell you a bunch of bad things about your character and to your face, you're probably going to punch me in the nose. | ||
| So there are consequences for our free speech. | ||
| There are censors on television for a reason because people shouldn't say anything in everything that comes to their mind. | ||
| There are sensibilities of the young people and things that we just don't even think about anymore. | ||
| And the left says things that just inflame and are mean-spirited versus a Charlie Kirk who came with a message of open dialogue and debate and respect. | ||
| He respected whoever disagreed with him. | ||
| The left does not have anyone that even comes close to a Charlie Kirk. | ||
| All right, Steve. | ||
| I mean, I confess, Steve, I found the argument so sort of confusing for this reason. | ||
| Your opening arguments were everything the left had been saying on campus for my entire career. | ||
| That essentially saying that it's not cancel culture, it's consequence culture, and that essentially this is incredibly mean-spirited and that it's nasty and that there are norms and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| It's weird watching the right adopt the rhetoric on the left that they have also criticized. | ||
| And when it comes to, you know, Charlie Kirk going on campus and being willing to address and talk to people, after being critical of Charlie on any number of things, including his professor watch list, this has caused me to go back and watch some of his videos and be impressed at how he was able to be respectful towards students in many, many cases. | ||
| But I want to remind you, Charlie Kirk himself rejected hate speech rationales for banning speech. | ||
| He rejected the use of coercive power of the government to police speech. | ||
| And so did Brendan Carr at one point, the FCC chair in his career, which he's unfortunately had quite a reversal on. | ||
| We'll go next to Lee in Kansas, Democratic caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Lee. | |
| Yeah, I got a hypothetical for your guest. | ||
| I have a child that died from information he received on social media. | ||
| So I have a dead child, but yet we protected that guy's freedom of speech. | ||
| So good job, America. | ||
| So when it comes to public safety, like wearing a mask, stuff like that, that the government has an obligation to its citizens to protect them, whether it be smallpox, COVID, anything like that. | ||
| They have an obligation. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I wanted to ask, what do you mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lear. | |
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| He hung up. | ||
| If he's still there, because I need to understand more than that in terms of what he means that speech led to his dead child. | ||
| Yeah, he hung up. | ||
| When he talks about protecting, though, speech in general, what's your reaction? | ||
| Yeah, in that situation. | ||
| It's one of those things where giving government the power to decide that is something to pressure companies in order to ban things that the government might think is harmful led to a real disaster of trust during COVID. | ||
| That a lot of the things that were being banned at the time or being treated as if they were blasphemous were things that later came out as being like, okay, actually the critics had a point here. | ||
| The efficacy of masking unless you do it perfectly. | ||
| That's something that's pretty well established at this point. | ||
| That when it comes to like this six feet apart thing, that was apparently just kind of made up. | ||
| When it comes to the Wuhan lab thing, that I had friends who acted like in March of 2020 as if we'd done some kind of massive study of what actually happened in Wuhan that somehow the Chinese government allowed us to do, and we knew for sure it definitely wasn't coming out of Wuhan, which of course, people aren't stupid. | ||
| They knew that was nonsense. | ||
| So I understand the emotionality of like attributing this to it was only misinformation that led to someone's child being killed. | ||
| You have my greatest sympathy for that, but usually it's not as simple as that. | ||
| We'll go to St. Paul, Minnesota. | ||
| Mark, welcome. | ||
| You're a Republican. | ||
| Tell us your thoughts. | ||
| Question or comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| It sounds like the guest is clutching his pearls and falling back on his fainting house because the anti, what he perceives to be the anti-free speech activities of the Trump administration. | ||
| I am wondering what his thoughts are about the Biden administration leaning on the social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story and also deplatforming individuals who are making critical comments about the COVID vaccine. | ||
| And finally, what his thoughts are about the Mary Puffins singing misinformation sorry that the Biden administration proposed. | ||
| Okay, Mark, Mark, and St. Paul, hang on the line. | ||
| We're going to get a response. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| I would have thought you were a bot if that had been written because I've been dealing with this argument from people who will not read what fire writes. | ||
| We have criticized everything you're talking about. | ||
| But because we also are critical of Donald Trump, you turn on this whataboutism machine that clearly were nowhere on the file. | ||
| Where were you on censorship on campuses the last 25 years? | ||
| We were leading the fight against it. | ||
| So please stop with the whataboutism. | ||
| We oppose government jawboning. | ||
| We were part of the Murthy v. Missouri litigation. | ||
| We submitted amicus briefs. | ||
| We let people understand how serious it was. | ||
| So please, when I'm critical of censorship coming from the Trump administration, don't throw at me cases that we're already involved with. | ||
| I have a term for this, by the way, me and Ricky Schlott do. | ||
| It's called hypocrisy projection. | ||
| That essentially, because you disagree with someone, you assume they must be the hypocrite. | ||
| You do no research into whether or not they've actually taken on the other side, and we have. | ||
| And we're one of the few groups that always does. | ||
| So please, people who either think like bots or actually are bots, this argument is not good. | ||
| Where can people find more information? | ||
| Thefire.org. | ||
| Thefire.org. | ||
| How long have you been around? | ||
| 26 years. | ||
| And I've been there for 25 of them, almost. | ||
| And you join cases, you said? | ||
| Yes, we do. | ||
| We litigate, but also one of our main weapons is actually public awareness. | ||
| We have a great research department. | ||
| We do a campus free speech ranking every year that just came out that I really want people to check out before they send their kids to various schools. | ||
| How are you funded? | ||
| We are funded overwhelmingly by individual donor donations. | ||
| We're about 30% foundations and about 70% individual donors. | ||
| I think we have about 20,000 donors overall. | ||
| But in order to, and I believe we are the nation's premier free speech organization, but we need, the demand for our work is just so great at this point. | ||
| We need to be much bigger. | ||
| Thefire.org for people who want to do their research. | ||
| Glenn in Roanoke, Virginia, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| The free speech issue, it essentially down, not from. | ||
| You're breaking up. | ||
| Yeah, Glenn, can you, Glenn, can you start over? | ||
| You're breaking up there. | ||
| The free speech issue? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, if we take it from the top down, I mean, if you live in a autocracy, a dictatorship, essentially like we do now, when you can start to silence the comedians, the people on the lighter side of criticism, working it down to the, well, the universities putting pressure on some of the television ownership companies, | |
| restricting their ability to maybe expand. | ||
| Jimmy Kimmel, for example, is not on the different cities that he normally would be in. | ||
| And I take the restriction there. | ||
| You know, we're seeing free speech, maybe not on an individual level so much I can go out and say whatever I want. | ||
| I'm really a nobody to be innovative. | ||
| But when you take a look at the larger picture, I think it's being restricted more and more. | ||
| And eventually, this top-down approach will help the dictatorship, autocracy, you know, create the truths that they want to. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Glenn, I'll jump in. | ||
| Greg Lukiyanov. | ||
| Yeah, I'm very worried about the state of free speech at the moment. | ||
| And I definitely, the willingness of this administration to use whatever lever of power they have against their political enemies is very concerning. | ||
| But I've also been very concerned about what's been going on on campuses for 25 years. | ||
| And I felt like I was screaming to high heaven trying to make three points, going back to my article with Jonathan Haidt, that's about 10 years old this month, saying that essentially that the new attitudes we're seeing hitting campus, both administratively and with students, was going to be a disaster for mental health on campus. | ||
| It was going to be a disaster for academic freedom and free speech on campus. | ||
| And it was going to lead to a conservative backlash. | ||
| All three of those things have happened. | ||
| And I think that in higher ed, they need to take a hard look at themselves. | ||
| But also, well, at the same time, I hope they'll join us in fighting attempts to expand executive and governmental power to harm freedom of speech as well. | ||
| You said you have a ranking, and you hope parents look at it before they send their kids off to school. | ||
| Which colleges, universities are in your top 10 or top five? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, University of Virginia does very well. | ||
| University of Chicago, you know, is back at the top, which is great. | ||
| Michigan Technological University has consistently done extremely well. | ||
| Harvard was dead last two years in a row, and it really earned that. | ||
| It's now decidedly, you know, it's outside of the bottom 10. | ||
| It's still not doing great. | ||
| Some of the real Cinderella stories, though, the ones that have really turned things around and have gone from quite poor rankings to excellent rankings. | ||
| Well, the one that went from quite poor to excellent is Dartmouth. | ||
| I'm very impressed with what Cyan Bailock is doing there. | ||
| And then Daniel Diermeyer at Vanderbilt. | ||
| Vanderbilt's in the top again as well. | ||
| And they were doing pretty well to begin with, but they've done even better. | ||
| So I think that there are people out there who are thinking deeply about how to fix the problem on campus. | ||
| And that gives me some hope. | ||
| We'll go to Ashley in Washington, D.C. here at Democratic Color. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how y'all doing this morning? | |
| Morning, everyone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just wanted to say, I'm a fan. | |
| I've been in D.C. all my life, so I've seen some of the writing samples on the writing stuff you've done back in America. | ||
| I just want to ask really quickly, we're talking about free speech, right? | ||
| It's saying so many people lose their job and be ostracized because they've gone on their personal social media pages and posted things about Tracy Kirk or Republicans or whatever, and they essentially have been ostracized or punished for that. | ||
| But when we're looking at the Minnesota senators, we're looking at even Obama, going back as far as that, like I personally, you know, remember so many nasty things being said about these people and the things that we read online. | ||
| And they punished, you know, they weren't punished in the way that we're being punished for even speaking our opinion about this situation, especially someone like me, right, who's of color. | ||
| Not that I am happy that he passed, but also like he was not someone that I idolized at all. | ||
| And he's somebody, someone to me that, you know, did kind of arouse people to be more in a hateful space than loving space. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Ashley, let's take your point here this morning. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, what's interesting about human psychology, and I do tend to be a First Amendment person who falls back a lot on psychology, is that people can, when people, when insults are directed to you individually, particularly if it's something that you consider sort of sacred, the tendency to get really offended by it, to have this very, you know, very powerful disgust response, essentially, is just part of human nature. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why you have to remove the idea that offensive speech should be banned. | ||
| And I don't think you were suggesting that, by the way, to be clear. | ||
| But I think what you were getting at was kind of the double standard and the hypocrisy that when the Republicans, for example, were saying things that you found extremely offensive about Obama, they argued free speech. | ||
| But when people are saying offensive things, you know, about a murdered young man, that the left is arguing free speech and the Republicans are saying, let's punish them. | ||
| This is why, like we said at the top, I am used to people being free speech hypocrites. | ||
| I kind of expect it in my job. | ||
| But it is one of these situations that when the temperature is so hot, when people are so at each other's throats, the rules of the road don't become less important, they become more important. | ||
| And one of the primary rules of the road for this country is that freedom of speech belongs to everyone and you don't, and there is no right not to be offended. | ||
| Can you get fired for it? | ||
| You absolutely can get fired for it. | ||
| I do, however, since I wrote a book called Canceling of the American Mind, and I am concerned about cancel culture, is that yes, you have the First Amendment right that I would even defend to say you, Greta, need to get fired for your free speech. | ||
| But I warn people all the time that essentially, just ask yourself this question. | ||
| Do you want to live in a country in which you can have a strong opinion or a job, but not both? | ||
| So be careful how you use this weapon. | ||
| Saying that you disagree with someone, that is great. | ||
| The campaigns to really go after people's jobs, though, that really accelerated after 2014, when frankly it was possible for the first time to create the appearance of angry mobs thanks to social media, was something that I didn't see as a welcome change in the United States. | ||
| And it's more prone to backlash after backlash after backlash. | ||
| Rob in California, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Rob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Greta. | |
| I have a serious concern. | ||
| The issue is, is SB 771 has just been dropped on Gavin Newsom's desk. | ||
| To sign anything offensive in California will give them the right to have lawsuits. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you heard of that bill? | ||
| I have heard of that bill, and I think it's laughably unconstitutional and a bad idea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| What does it say? | ||
| It essentially creates sort of a products liability idea for speech that essentially sort of harmful speech. | ||
| It's part of a package that's currently on Gavin Newsom's desk that I think would create something that, one, would be laughed out of court, but also threaten speech on the internet and speech relating to AI as well at a level that we should not tolerate. | ||
| Mark is in San Antonio, Florida, independent? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, this is Mark. | |
| My question is, you can't yell fire in a theater. | ||
| And that's what we're talking about, freedom of speech. | ||
| There should be some kind of bar that, especially for Republicans and Democrats that tend to lie and spread misinformation. | ||
| And another thing is TikTok in the hands of big business in the United States or government is very scary. | ||
| And we need to put some kind of control so people don't use it as a tool to manipulate the people. | ||
| That's really all I had to say. | ||
| All right, Mark, two issues there. | ||
| Yeah, two issues. | ||
| So I just came out with a book called The War on Words with Nadine Strawson, who's the former president of the ACLU and one of my heroes, to be clear. | ||
| And we address the fire in a crowded theater cliché. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Explain the history of that. | ||
| So Oliver Wendell Holmes went back before he was good on free speech, likened a communist slash anarchist having free speech rights during the end of World War I to that would be like shouting fire in a crowded theater such that it causes a panic. | ||
| And this line has lived on in infamy, in my opinion, as basically the definition of an exception to freedom of speech. | ||
| Now, first of all, people shorthand it into just, well, shouting fire in a crowd, sorry, saying fire in a theater, which I think you said it, is absolutely protected. | ||
| Rosencrantz and Gilmster improved this every night they performed that play because they actually literally do shout fire into the theater and say, well, basically there goes that theory. | ||
| And if you actually have the scenario in which someone is intending to shout fire in a crowded theater such that it causes a panic and it actually does, could there potentially be liability there? | ||
| Maybe, but I'm not familiar actually with that case. | ||
| But the problem with that cliché is that people trot it out anytime they want more speech banned by the government. | ||
| So First Amendment people kind of roll their eyes at it. | ||
| No offense to you. | ||
| It's a very common one. | ||
| Now, when it comes to the issue with TikTok, that one is a confusing morass because we had a combination of a law that we opposed at FHIR that was too broad. | ||
| It was basically trying to ban propaganda sites in addition to pointing out the real privacy concerns that people had about TikTok. | ||
| But saying that you can ban propaganda is just too vague, too broad of a power to give to government, and we oppose that. | ||
| You're talking about the original ban on TikTok. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| It is, you know, I even find some of this confusing. | ||
| And so it went up to the Supreme Court. | ||
| The Supreme Court kind of ignored the whole propaganda thing and said that if TikTok is being used essentially as Chinese spyware, then it can be banned. | ||
| So they kind of ignored the whole propaganda issue and went to their strongest argument. | ||
| Then Trump decided not to enforce that and is in negotiations with the Chinese in a way that I don't entirely even understand where ended up. | ||
| I think that right now they're saying that China will continue to control the algorithm, but an American company will protect the data. | ||
| But it's very strange. | ||
| It's very conflicted as a civil libertarian who thought that there was real problems with this ban in the first place. | ||
| But then when the Supreme Court actually comes up with an arguably constitutional way to uphold it, that then the president decides that I'm not actually going to enforce the law, which is kind of the definition of his job. | ||
| Barbara in Georgia, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I have two issues. | ||
| Number one is the First Amendment itself gives us the right to say just about anything with a few restrictions in the amendment, but we won't be arrested. | ||
| It does not say, and it shouldn't say, that there can be consequences for what you say. | ||
| For instance, my daughter, the company she works for, she can't post anything or make anything public that is the least bit offensive or political, or she will be fired. | ||
| That's the company policy, and that's the way it is. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Let's hear your response. | ||
| Companies can do that. | ||
| And the argument that I made previously was essentially, but imagine all companies did that. | ||
| Imagine every single company in the country actually decided, you know what, if you want a job here, no political opinions offered publicly. | ||
| That's where I get concerned. | ||
| And that's where I really want to caution people. | ||
| Because in 2020, and it is weird because you're a Republican from Georgia. | ||
| It's not cancel culture, it's consequence culture, is basically the arguments that people who like to pretend cancel culture doesn't even exist and then sort of toggle into, but if it does exist, it's a good thing, like podcaster Michael Hobbes, who somehow makes both of these arguments. | ||
| That essentially, like that argument has been adopted wholesale by the right at the moment. | ||
| So yes, can people be fired from their jobs in a private employer for saying things that the company doesn't like? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Should we be cheering that in every circumstance? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Greg Lukianov is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression or FIRE. | ||
| You can learn more if you go to thefire.org. | ||
| Thank you for the conversation. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| We're going to go to open forum here in just a few minutes. | ||
| So any public policy or political issue that's on your mind, start dialing in. | ||
| There are the phone lines right there. | ||
| While we wait for your calls, let's go over to our live coverage on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| We're covering the United Nations General Assembly, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still speaking to world leaders. | ||
| Let's listen in. | ||
| It just keeps coming back with its libelous lies, refurbished, regurgitated over and over again. | ||
| And I want to tell you something else. | ||
| These anti-Semitic lies, they have consequences. | ||
| In recent months, Jews have been assaulted in Canada, Austria, or rather Australia, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. | ||
| Here in America, an elderly Holocaust survivor was burned to death in Colorado. | ||
| And a beautiful young couple from the Israeli embassy in Washington was brutally gunned down right in front of the Holocaust Museum there. | ||
| Thankfully, President Trump's administration is forcefully fighting the scourge of anti-Semitism, and every government here should follow its lead. | ||
| But instead, many do the opposite. | ||
| They actually reward, reward the worst anti-Semites on earth. | ||
| This week, the leaders of France, Britain, Australia, Canada, and other countries unconditionally recognized a Palestinian state. | ||
| They did so after the horrors committed by Hamas on October 7th. | ||
| Horrors praised on that day by nearly 90% of the Palestinian population. | ||
| Let me say that again. | ||
| Nearly 90% of Palestinians supported the attack on October 7th. | ||
| It's not supported only. | ||
| They celebrated it. | ||
| They danced on the rooftops. | ||
| They threw candies. | ||
| That's woes both in Gaza and in Judea, Samaria, the West Bank, as you call it. | ||
| And it's just the way they celebrated another horror, 9-11. | ||
| They danced on the rooftops. | ||
| They cheered. | ||
| They threw candy. | ||
| You know what message the leaders who recognized the Palestinian state this week sent to the Palestinians? | ||
| It's a very clear message. | ||
| Murdering Jews pays off. | ||
| Well, I have a message for these leaders. | ||
| When the most savage terrorists on earth are effusively praising your decision, you didn't do something right. | ||
| You did something wrong, horribly wrong. | ||
| Your disgraceful decision will encourage terrorism against Jews and against innocent people everywhere. | ||
| It will be a mark of shame on all of you. | ||
| Wait a minute, Mr. Prime Minister, they tell me. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| We believe in a two-state solution where the Jewish state of Israel will live side by side in peace with the Palestinian state. | ||
| There's only one problem with that. | ||
| The Palestinians, they don't believe in this solution. | ||
| They never have. | ||
| They don't want a state next to Israel. | ||
| They want a Palestinian state instead of Israel. | ||
| And that's why every time they were offered a Palestinian state, but were required to end the conflict with Israel and recognize the Jewish state every time. | ||
| Over the decades, they turned it down. | ||
| And that is why every time they were given territory, they used it to attack us. | ||
| In fact. | ||
| Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Yetanyah, who talking live right now at the United Nations General Assembly before world leaders, where our live coverage on C-SPAN 2 this morning, he started around 9 a.m. Eastern Time. | ||
| All this week, we've been covering the world leaders talking to each other in New York City for this annual gathering. | ||
| Prime Minister's remarks right now follow remarks by the Palestinian leader yesterday and President Trump saying he would not allow an annexation of Palestine. | ||
| You heard the Prime Minister there saying that the countries of France, Australia, Canada, Britain, that in recognizing Palestine as a state, he believes they have encouraged more killings of Jews, as he just said there moments ago. | ||
| Those countries did recognize Palestine as a state. | ||
| And his remarks also follow a UN panel concluding that Israel has been committing genocide. | ||
| At the beginning of his remarks, and you can see right there on his screen, several people walked out as the prime minister began his remarks. | ||
| The New York Times says representatives from dozens of countries walked out of the hall just before Mr. Netanyahu began his address, the latest public protest of Israel from an audience of world leaders who are demanding an end to the war in Gaza and pressing for recognition of a Palestinian state. | ||
| Israel had expected today's walkout. | ||
| And there it is on your screen. | ||
| We're in open forum here for the remainder of today's Washington Journal. | ||
| You can talk about what you just heard from the prime minister and this debate over a two-state solution, recognizing Palestine as a state and the situation in Gaza, as well as any other public policy or political issue. | ||
| Ron is in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, a Democratic caller. | ||
| Ron, good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just want to bring up a couple things. | ||
| The Palestinian state, you know, in my, what I'm worried about right now has nothing to do with it. | ||
| I'm worried about the price of eggs, insurance, gas, things like that, the everyday things. | ||
| So the more we talk about the other things, it's just, you know, it drags on me, but it ain't a problem to me. | ||
| These are problems. | ||
| People in the United States worry about those things. | ||
| All right, Ron there with his thoughts. | ||
| We'll go to Austin, Texas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Carla, Democratic caller. | |
| Yes, good morning. | ||
| I really wanted to speak to the gentleman that was there before, and I was going to speak on free speech. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One thing is, people cannot verify things. | |
| They can't verify things all over the world. | ||
| So at the minimum, when they show a movie, they say there's going to be blood, violence, nudity. | ||
| The least they could say is, this is entertainment. | ||
| This is our opinion. | ||
| Or they say this is verifiable news. | ||
| And I know they know when they say what they say, whether or not it's verifiable enough. | ||
| This gentleman was talking about fire, shouting fire in a theater. | ||
| The president's shouting fire, and our country is the theater. | ||
| He can walk out and feel free because nobody knows if he's a Democrat or Republican as a white man. | ||
| There's a certain freedom. | ||
| I'm not speaking against that. | ||
| But when you're a black or brown person, there's no way to hide your identity, even if you don't want to. | ||
| But you hear all these facts and things, all these things said over the TV or the media. | ||
| expressing things about you and you're denigrated before anyone knows anything that you think or feel. | ||
| So he walks with a freedom. | ||
| He walks with a freedom that black people have never known. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, Carla's there, her argument there in Texas. | ||
| We're going to go to Tim, who's in Haverville, Massachusetts, independent. | ||
| Tim, we're an open forum. | ||
| What's on your mind? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Well, I'm calling about a subject that I try to call in every month, not quite as regularly. | ||
| And the person who took my phone call asked me to mention, to thank you guys, that you're there because I've been calling in for about 30 years or more. | ||
| And so I appreciate that. | ||
| And no better example of free speech. | ||
| So I'm calling and going to relate a subject that I call about to the gentleman that was in earlier. | ||
| And I believe the greatest assault on our ability of free speech was our inability to elect the proper number of representatives in the United States Congress. | ||
| Back in 1911, they fixed it at 435. | ||
| It no longer increases with the size of the population. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that was directly against the wishes of the proponents of the Constitution. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Tim in Massachusetts with his monthly comment. | ||
| We're in open forum here this morning. | ||
| We began today's Washington Journal with the news that broke overnight, a Virginia grand jury yesterday indicting the former FBI director James Comey on two counts, lying to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding. | ||
| Those indictments came down yesterday. | ||
| According to news reports, the former FBI director will turn himself in today to authorities. | ||
| There have been cameras outside of his home. | ||
| There it is on your screen, hoping to track the former FBI director today. | ||
| The case against him points back to testimony he gave in September of 2020 and this exchange between Senator Ted Cruz and Mr. Comey. | ||
| Take a listen. | ||
| On May 3rd, 2017, in this committee, Chairman Grassley asked you point blank, quote, have you ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation? | ||
| You responded under oath, quote, never. | ||
| He then asked you, quote, have you ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton administration? | ||
| You responded again under oath, no. | ||
| Now, as you know, Mr. McCabe, who works for you, has publicly and repeatedly stated that he leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and that you were directly aware of it and that you directly authorized it. | ||
| Now, what Mr. McCabe is saying and what you testified to this committee cannot both be true. | ||
| One or the other is false. | ||
| Who's telling the truth? | ||
| I can only speak to my testimony. | ||
| I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017. | ||
| So your testimony is you've never authorized anyone to leak. | ||
| And Mr. McCabe, if he says contrary, is not telling the truth. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Again, I'm not going to characterize Andy's testimony, but mine is the same today. | ||
| All right, I'm going to make a final point because my time has expired. | ||
| This investigation of the president was corrupt. | ||
| The FBI and the Department of Justice were politicized and weaponized. | ||
| And in my opinion, there are only two possibilities that you were deliberately corrupt or woefully incompetent. | ||
| And I don't believe you were incompetent. | ||
| Senator Ted Cruz and former FBI Director James Comey back in 2020 in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. | ||
| It is that exchange that prosecutors point to in these indictments and these indictments against the former FBI director. | ||
| If you missed that hearing and we want to find it, go to our website, online on demand at c-span.org, and you can watch that hearing in its entirety. | ||
| Al in Michigan, Democratic Caller, we're in open forum. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I would just like to speak to the gentleman you had on before about their free speech. | ||
| I think that the only way we really have free speech is if it's protected by a free press, especially when you enter the political realm. | ||
| America, you know, the land of the free, we should have always have access to the truth. | ||
| And if a person, you know, truth varies depending on people's experiences. | ||
| But the truth can't hide. | ||
| We know who you are when the truth comes out. | ||
| So if you have money and influence and you're able to alter that and have alternative truth and you're able to do all that without any consequences, I think we lose all the way around if we really are America the way we used to be. | ||
| And if we want to find our way back to being, you know, all for one when a handshake really meant something. | ||
| And you can depend on the truth. | ||
| That's just my comment. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, Al. | ||
| Joe in Red Bank, New Jersey, Republican. | ||
| What's your comment, Joe? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, this may seem trivial compared to all that's going on right now, but I saw the design for the new ballroom that's supposed to be built next to the White House. | |
| It looks like a cross between the Lincoln Memorial and a mausoleum designed by some ancient king to glorify his immortality. | ||
| It's supposed to be funded by contributions. | ||
| They already have some from R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Google, Lockheed Martin. | ||
| There's supposed to be contributions. | ||
| Some people might call them bribes. | ||
| What I don't understand is how Trump can do this. | ||
| He doesn't own that property. | ||
| It's the property of the people of the United States. | ||
| And, you know, I don't understand why someone isn't looking into this. | ||
| What about Congress holding hearings on this? | ||
| And what about all these NGOs and organizations down there in Washington, environmental organizations? | ||
| Why don't they get a lawyer and put an injunction against constructionists into these issues about whether or not it's even legal for a private citizen to build on a government property? | ||
| All right, Joe. | ||
| We'll go to Godus in Spotswood, New Jersey, Independent. | ||
| Your turn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, hello? | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Go ahead, caller. | ||
| What's on your mind? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's just all that's going on with Israel right now. | |
| It's just, we send so much tax dollars over there, and it's just, there's so much carnage in the world. | ||
| I mean, look at Ukraine. | ||
| Look at Israel. | ||
| Look at Gaza, the West Bank. | ||
| I mean, everywhere you turn, CNN, C-SPAN, News 12, everywhere you look, it's just there's war and carnage. | ||
| And I can't help but say to myself that this needs to stop. | ||
| I mean, our tax dollars are going across these seas and just funding wars. | ||
| I mean, we are the world's police, and we need to stop injustice and stop tyranny and just horrible things that are going on in this world, but we need to just like the United States before World War II and World War I. | ||
| We need to just work on ourselves. | ||
| I mean, look at Baltimore. | ||
| I mean, we're sending billions of dollars to Ukraine, but yet look at Baltimore. | ||
| There's potholes that are about five feet big, and no one cares. | ||
| No one cares. | ||
| There's just corruption across the United States and every other city in this country, but yet no one cares. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right, Colon in Spotswood, New Jersey. | ||
| Another news to share with you this morning. | ||
| Here's a headline in the New York Times. | ||
| Amid impasse on shutdown, the president threatens mass firings. | ||
| Congress and the White House face a September 30th deadline to fund the government or there could be a government shutdown. | ||
| Listen to the Democratic leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, yesterday on the government deadline. | ||
| Do you view the OMB memo as a threat, an effort to get you guys to back down or a bluff? | ||
| We will not be intimidated by Rust Vote, who's completely and totally out of control. | ||
| The OMB has been illegally shutting down parts of the government throughout the entire year. | ||
| And the notion that Democrats are going to be intimidated by this guy, when all he's done is sent a message to voters in Virginia and across the country that Republicans are determined to hurt the American people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. | |
| The government shuts down. | ||
| It's because they want the government to shut down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And now, the Trump administration has made their intentions clear. | |
| They want to continue to fire civil servants who are hardworking American taxpayers. | ||
| Because throughout the year, they've been firing civil servants who are hardworking American taxpayers. | ||
| We will not be intimidated by these threats coming from the most extreme parts of the Trump administration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Leader, I understand that you are not going to be intimidated by the Trump administration, but there are federal workers who don't want to get caught up in a political fight here. | |
| What would you say to federal workers that are just worried about losing their jobs? | ||
| Donald Trump and the administration have been engaging in mass firings that we deem illegal throughout the year. | ||
| We will continue to push back against any effort to undermine federal civil service protections that exist in the United States of America. | ||
| As a negotiating tactic, our response to Russ's vote is simple. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Get lost. | |
| The Democratic Leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, on negotiations between Democrats, Republicans, and the White House, the White House over this government funding deadline. | ||
| Here's what the president had to say at the White House responding to a question about plans to lay off federal workers amid a possible government shutdown. | ||
| Here's what he told reporters in the Oval Office yesterday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The furloughs are very typical when the government shuts down. | |
| Why is the administration directing federal layoffs of federal workers this time around? | ||
| Well, this is all caused by the Democrats. | ||
| They asked us to do something that's totally unreasonable. | ||
| They never change. | ||
| They want to give money away to illegals, illegally, people that entered our country illegally. | ||
| They want to give them massive federal money. | ||
| And we don't want to do that because it means everyone's going to just keep pouring. | ||
| But right now, we have absolutely perfect borders like you haven't seen in many years. | ||
| Even better than the, I had great borders during my four years, but these borders are stone-cold closed. | ||
| You can only come into our country legally now. | ||
| But the Democrats want to give it all away. | ||
| They want to also, they want to open up the borders. | ||
| Take a look at that. | ||
| It's a big thing. | ||
| They want to open borders again. | ||
| After what we're going through now, getting rid of prisoners, getting rid of all of these people dropped out from mental institutions, drug dealers, drug addicts, everything. | ||
| They're putting everybody into our country. | ||
| It's all ended now. | ||
| But this is what Schumer wants. | ||
| This is what the Democrats want. | ||
| President Trump in the Oval Office yesterday when he was asked about negotiations between Democrats, Republicans, and the White House to avoid a government shutdown. | ||
| In other news to share with you as well, the Washington Times and other newspapers with the story about the president striking a deal to rescue TikTok. | ||
| And they note that the vice president estimates the worth of TikTok at $14 billion. | ||
| The Washington Times says the app's American operations will be run by a joint venture among American investors, owners, and boards of directors such as tech giant Oracle and investment firm Silver Lake Partners. | ||
| The White House said Oracle is expected to oversee the app security, including the algorithm. | ||
| The American Consortium will have a majority stake of about 80%, with ByteDance, that's the Chinese company, holding no more than a 20% stake. | ||
| Bob and Doylestown, Pennsylvania Democratic Caller, we're an open forum. | ||
| What's on your mind? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm back to the issue of free speech. | ||
| A very brief comment. | ||
| I would like to, if I could, distinguish two sides of a coin. | ||
| Free speech being on one side, wisdom about free speech being on the other. | ||
| Just because we have the right to free speech does not mean, nor should it, I hope, that we have the right to use invective, to use insult, to be rude, to be inappropriate, to lack propriety, to be disrespectful. | ||
| We lose the benefit of free speech when we talk to each other in those name-calling, insulting ways. | ||
| That's kind of my main point. | ||
| That's what I wanted to say. | ||
| All right, Bob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| We'll go to Dublin, Ohio. | ||
| Drew is watching there, Republican. | ||
| Morning to you, Drew. | ||
| Drew in Dublin, Ohio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi. | |
| So the main thing on my mind is what's happening in the U.N. General Assembly. | ||
| I'm a Republican from Ohio, and I'm just so irritated with what I'm seeing from Republicans and how they're treating Israel. | ||
| I mean, they have no spine to stand up to Netanyahu and what he's doing in Gaza. | ||
| I mean, they're just giving him weapons after weapons after weapons, no conditions on aid. | ||
| And what are we seeing from Gaza? | ||
| No progress in the war, just saying Hamas needs to be eliminated, big promises, and nothing to show for it. | ||
| So I'm just frustrated with what I'm seeing from Republicans. | ||
| On that, they have no moral compass and they can't stand up for anything. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Drew, they're a Republican. | ||
| Sharon's an independent in California. | ||
| Hi, Sharon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| How are you this morning? | ||
| Morning doing well. | ||
| What's your comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, my comment is, why don't they all just stop this fighting? | |
| All they do is fight back and forth. | ||
| What we need to do is go to the polls and clean house ourselves. | ||
| They can't clean their own house. | ||
| We need to clean house. | ||
| Start all over because they never accomplish anything. | ||
| All they do is they give money. | ||
| I've never seen so much money leave our country when we need it ourselves. | ||
| Sharon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We have all these illegals. | |
| It's terrible. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Sharon's thoughts there in California. | ||
| John, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning. | |
| So what I wanted to say is that the Supreme Court has given the executive branch permission to become a dictator. | ||
| In what way? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the president can start saying, if anybody continues to speak against me, I'm just going to have them arrested, put in jail. | |
| Nobody can do anything. | ||
| What are you going to do about it? | ||
| He has permission. | ||
| He can do whatever he wants. | ||
| And it's the Supreme Court's, you know, it's because of what they did, giving them permission. | ||
| So what's going to happen? | ||
| If he starts saying, if you, as a journalist, say anything negative against him, he's going to arrest you. | ||
| And he has the right and he'll make a reason for it. | ||
| What are you going to do about it? | ||
| John in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. | ||
| Speaking of the Supreme Court, below the fold of the Wall Street Journal this morning, justice has tackled Feds' independence. | ||
| Nick Timaros, who covers the Wall Street this morning, reporting the Supreme Court is poised to decide whether President Trump can remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve's board in a case that economists and former Fed officials say threatens to severely erode decades of central bank independence. | ||
| Trump's broad challenge over interest rate policy, which began with criticism but has moved to action to remove governors, represents an existential crisis for the Fed, said Ethan Harris, former head of global economic research at Bank of America. | ||
| Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn lower court rulings that said Cook could stay on the job while she challenges the White House's attempt to fire her. | ||
| A ruling in favor of the White House wouldn't necessarily be the final word on the matter, but analysts said it would be a crucial development that opens the door for Trump to replace other Fed governors, flattening 90 years of legal precedent that insulated central bank officials from political control. | ||
| Clifton in Indiana, Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi, Clifton. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I just wanted to ask a question. | ||
| Has our president been convicted of a felony? | ||
| And how does a convicted felon be able to run this country and fire good people? | ||
| Ivan in Noakesville, Virginia, Republican. | ||
| Ivan, we'll go to you next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's a quick question. | |
| Do you know if Social Security gets paid, if the government shuts down? | ||
| A lot of people in Virginia would like to know. | ||
| Does Social Security get paid? | ||
| Yeah, we can try to find a story real quick. | ||
| The House is going to gavel in here any minute for just a pro forma session. | ||
| The Washington Journal will come to an end at the top of the hour like we normally do, but we can try to find that for you. | ||
| Evan, if we can't, if we run out of time, that's something that you can find. | ||
| What agencies close down during a government shutdown? | ||
| I don't want to give you any wrong information. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Social Security said the last time that they don't shut down. | |
| Yeah, I believe that's the case. | ||
| I believe that is the case. | ||
| Harold in Ohio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Go ahead, Harold. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I didn't know, Virginia. | |
| Harold, you got to listen through your phone. | ||
| Go ahead and talk. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I know. | |
| All right. | ||
| Let me turn this off. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Go ahead. |