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April 15, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:01:16
ABOVE THE LAW Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep69
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A double standard of justice, one for the January 6th protesters, a totally different one for the left-wing rioters.
I thought Democrats weren't going to pack the court, but now it seems they want to.
And former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich joins me to talk about the Democratic Party and prison and the deep state and a lot more.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
It's become increasingly apparent that there is a horrible double standard of justice in this country.
When my own case went up before the court, I thought that this was a double standard that applied perhaps to high visibility political pundits, later to high visibility political figures like President Trump.
But now it's very clear that this built-in inequity, if you will, this is the real inequity in American justice, is permeating out into society more generally, and we see it right before our eyes if we only will have eyes to see.
We're seeing riots as we speak.
Riots going on in Minnesota and many other cities.
And you see people fighting with cops, hitting cops, jumping on police cars.
And what happens to those people?
Well, what happens to them, by and large, is they get caught.
They get arrested. They are released immediately, very often without bail.
And then promptly they have their charges either significantly modified or dropped completely.
So this is a sort of catch and release, no big deal.
And why? Well, you know, they're fighting against social injustice.
They're fighting because they believe that our justice system is wrong.
Now... Let's compare this to the January 6th protesters.
Every day I see on social media, the FBI puts up photos.
They're trying to catch this old man.
They're trying to catch this little girl who has a cap over her eyes.
Can you find her? Will you report her?
So these are people who are being treated completely differently.
Completely differently. No catch and release.
In fact, when they are caught, the federal prosecutors go to judges and say, let's just leave him locked up.
And in some cases, locked up in solitary confinement.
And they're facing the most serious charges that carry years and years and years in prison.
Now, of course, the left's pretext for this double standard is, well, Dinesh, there's an obvious difference.
In one case, you have people who are fighting for social justice.
And in the other case, you have people who believed a lie.
Wait a minute.
Political protest is not contingent upon whether or not you agree with what the protest is about.
Just as the people on one side firmly believe that our system is corrupt, and you can say that they believe a lie.
Who says that the police are actually treating blacks and whites inequitably?
In fact, if you look at the Derek Chauvin case, the prosecution hasn't even really brought up the race issue.
In no way have they even sought to prove that Derek Chauvin is a racist.
So the public propaganda surrounding this, It's completely different from the actual prosecution, which is simply a policeman is a bad apple.
He got out of hand. He did things that he should not be doing in the line of duty.
We never trained him to do this.
Race is really not a central issue.
And yet, in the public perception, it is.
Let's say the January 6th protesters believe a lie.
So what? Their political protest isn't invalidated.
their constitutional rights aren't chucked out because they happen to believe something that you think is false.
So let's look at a simple case. Here is a mother of four, I believe her name is Victoria White. She traveled from Rochester, Minnesota to D.C.
You can see her on the video, actually she goes into the Capitol, but you can see her on the FBI's own video and in the FBI's own charging documents they admit that she is arguing with other protesters telling them, don't break the windows.
And she's telling them this would be wrong.
This would be unpatriotic.
She's actually saying that on the video.
And she's trying to pull people away from doing any kind of physical damage to the property there.
Now, the sole hub of the case against her, the reason that she's facing really, I would say, the rest of her life in prison is what?
That the government claims that she tried to, quote, grab an officer's shield.
Now, according to Victoria White, she wasn't doing that.
The shield was about to strike her.
So she grabbed the shield as a form of self-protection.
In other words, to keep it away from her.
She wasn't trying to wrench it away from the officer or use it herself.
None of that. It was one of those reflections of self-defense to prevent herself from getting whopped with the shield.
And then promptly, shortly afterward, she was struck in the head with a metal baton and she went down.
So, My question is, what is a just penalty for someone who does that?
By the way, Victoria White is facing a series of charges, which if she was convicted on all of them, she would get 55 years in prison.
55 years in prison. Now, let's compare this with what is going on elsewhere.
We have cases now in Oregon.
And by the way, some of these go back to the Oregon riots of last year.
And federal prosecutors, one by one, are assigning what are called these Deferred Resolution Agreements, DRAs, so-called.
What is a Deferred Resolution Agreement?
Essentially, it is, we're agreeing to drop the charges as long as you don't do something like this again.
No felony. No misdemeanor.
Nothing on your record at all.
And this is happening time and time again.
And according to a recent article in Politico, it's because of the Biden administration.
The Biden administration is pressuring these prosecutors to basically cut deals with these people and let them go.
Now, what are these people guilty of?
Let's go through some of the things that they're doing.
Striking police officers, jumping on police cars or police officers, using lasers and other forms of police interference.
In other words, there is a close similarity between the charges in Oregon.
In fact, the Oregon guys are doing worse things.
We're talking about the brutalization, obstruction, assaulting police officers.
And so here's Politico.
Some of the assaults described in the Portland cases bear similarities to capital violence, and they give an example.
One of the civil disorder defendants, Alexandra Uten, E-U-T-I-N, used a wooden shield and hoses to strike a Portland police officer in the head while he was trying to make an arrest.
Several Capitol riot suspects are accused of using riot shields to shove police or obstruct their efforts to secure the building from the mob.
So we have two parallel cases.
And yet they're not being treated the same.
Here's something very interesting.
It came out just yesterday. The Department of Justice, they've closed the investigation into Ashley Babbitt.
And I want to read their reason why.
In order to establish a violation, they say, I'm now reading directly, prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer, this is the black police officer who shot Babbitt in the neck, this officer acted willfully to deprive Ms.
Babbitt of a right protected by the Constitution or other law, here the Fourth Amendment right not to be subjected to an unreasonable seizure.
Prosecutors would have to prove not only that the officer used force that was constitutionally unreasonable, but that the officer did so willfully.
Which the Supreme Court has interpreted to mean the officer acted with a bad purpose to disregard the law.
As this requirement has been interpreted by the court's evidence that an officer acted out of fear, mistake, panic, misperception, negligence, or even poor judgment cannot establish the high level of intent required.
Now, let's just switch for a moment to the Dante argument.
Right killing. Isn't it a fact that if you apply this exact same standard, which is to say, we don't care if the officer acted out of fear, which it seems that she did, mistake, that applies, panic, that applies, misperception, that applies, negligence, that applies, or even poor judgment, that applies.
But according to the federal prosecutors, we can't get the guy who shot Ashley Babbitt, even if all those things were present.
And yet, this woman, Kim Potter I believe her name is, is charged with second-degree manslaughter for doing exactly that.
Why isn't the guy, the Capitol Police officer, charged with second-degree manslaughter on exactly the same grounds?
So what we have here is a breakdown of the system of equity.
And justice is equity.
In other words, it's not enough to say, here's a law, and if you break it, you'll get X, if everybody else gets Y. It's one thing to say, if you're speeding 90 miles an hour, you're going to get a $1,000 ticket.
But then if everybody else gets off or other people get five years in prison, then there's no equity under the law.
Because the same or similar offense done for similar reasons doesn't carry the same penalty.
Bottom line, we're seeing a troubling breakdown of the basic conception of justice in this country.
And now it doesn't just affect the high and mighty, the political officials and even political pundits.
It affects people like you.
The Democrats are now moving to pack the court.
We told you that they wanted to pack the court.
They told you that they didn't.
And having told you that they didn't, they're now proceeding to do what we told you they were going to do.
And with Biden, his approach appears to be a little bit more genteel, a little bit more procedural.
I'm going to set up a commission and it's going to study the matter.
I'll stack the commission with left-wing academics.
They'll come up with recommendations and then we will sort of try to endorse those recommendations as if we're merely doing what the commission said, even though it's our commission and we told it what to say in advance.
So, this is the Biden approach.
It's at least cloaked with disguise.
And it would take time for it to unfold.
There would be arguments over what the commission came up with and so on.
So, you know, you have these left-wingers in the Congress.
And these are people like Ed Markey of Massachusetts.
The rotund, virtually immovable Jerry Nadler.
Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia.
Representative Jones of New York.
So these guys have come together and they go, listen, what's the point of a commission?
If we have a commission, they're going to take eight months and they're going to do a lot of intellectual tubing and they're going to come up with kind of where we want to start out with right now.
Why go through all that?
Why don't we remove the disguise, take off the veil, and just stack the court?
We have the power, we think, to do it.
At least we have a chance to do it.
So why don't we just go for it?
And the transparency, the sheer brazen, this is not even cloaked in any way.
It's not about, well, maybe we should add, you know, 11 new justices and perhaps there'll be some for me.
None of that. The basic idea is this.
Let's add four new justices.
Why four? Well...
I don't know if you're a math major.
I'm not, but I'm actually good at math.
And here's the simple thing. The chord is a 6-3 majority.
So now start adding 4 to the 3 side.
Three, four, five, six, seven!
Seven, six!
Suddenly the Democrats have a majority, so they're adding just enough justices, at least in this Nadler scheme, to take away the constitutional Republican majority on the court and make it a Democratic majority.
That way the Democrats now control all the branches of government and the court essentially becomes a kind of license or rubber stamp for what The Democrats are doing.
We become, in effect, a one-party state.
Now, in theory, we'd have one more obstacle that would be protecting our rights, the Constitution itself.
But let's remember, the Democrats know, and they have a lot of wink-wink of this among each other, that what's a Constitution among friends?
In other words, the Constitution has to be interpreted.
Who's going to interpret it?
The court! The court can kind of make the Constitution say whatever they want it to say.
So under the disguise of interpretation, you can actually disregard the Constitution.
You can even take flat statements of the Constitution and say that they don't mean what they mean.
Biden himself said something to that effect recently.
He says, look, read the Second Amendment.
Congress shall make no law.
Restricting the right to, infringing the right to bear arms?
And he goes, that's not absolute.
Which basically means we get to carve out whatever exceptions to that that we feel like.
And so the Constitution then becomes disposable.
So I'll have a lot more to say about this in the days and weeks ahead.
I want to dive deep into the architecture of the American founding and why the court was set up the way it did.
But the simple bottom line of it is we have the Democrats now dropping all pretenses of respecting checks and balances, respecting the idea of an independent judiciary, respecting the idea of the court as a check on the Democratic majority.
Let's remember that much of the Constitution is a check on the majority.
I believe it was Justice Story who said the Constitution exists and the court exists to stop the people themselves.
In other words, to stop the majority, to stop the people's will as channeled through the majority.
The court is an intentional break on that.
Why? Because majorities of people can act just like aristocracies or like monarchies and run roughshod over the rule of law.
The court has to protect people.
You may say the minority from the majority.
And these functions of the court are at least in jeopardy to the degree that one major party now no longer really believes in them.
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There are a bunch of ways to look at Biden's border policy and the horrors that it is producing on the border.
But one way to do that is just to zoom into an individual case and just look to see the human tragedy behind all this.
And the way in which the Biden administration is, you may almost say, working in tandem with a whole corrupt cartel and smuggling and kidnapping regime on the other side of the border.
There's no innocence on either side.
The kidnappers know that Biden is opening the door.
The Biden people know that the kidnappers are the ones who are bringing the kids to the border.
And sort of both sides are in on it to the degree that they recognize the utility of what the other side is doing.
Now, recently I played a touching video, which is all over social media, of this little kid in La Gruya, Texas, talking to the border officer and basically saying, I'm lost, can you please help me?
And I want to pull back and talk about the backstory of this kid, which again I'm getting from the Daily Mail in London.
There's no real news in this country anymore.
You have to go abroad to find out what's happening here.
And so I frequently consult the British press just because they report things that are suppressed in the U.S. media.
So this kid, his name was Wilton Obregon.
And his mother, Malin Obregon, was leaving their family in Nicaragua and trying to make their way through Mexico toward the U.S. border.
Now, along the way, both the mother, Malin Obregon, and the son, Wilton Obregon, were kidnapped.
They were kidnapped by traffickers and ransom artists.
And these people, who are very smart, they contacted an uncle who lives in America and basically said, you've got to pay $5,000 a piece for us to release either Malin, who was the cousin, or the nephew, which is young Wilton.
So the poor guy in America was frantic, the uncle.
He didn't have the money, so he struggles around.
His name is Miss Rael Obregon.
He was struggling to get the money together.
He was able to get the $5,000 together to pay to get the kid released, but not the mom.
She's still being held by the kidnappers right now.
And now suddenly the Nicaraguan government is involved because they know this has become a bit of an international incident.
People know about the family.
They're trying to get the mother released.
And the kidnappers decide, well, let's dump the kid.
So they dump the kid into a caravan, and the caravan kind of shows up at the border.
The kid, of course, knows, but the backstory is unknown.
The Border Patrol officials, the caravan basically decides that the kid falls asleep, and they decide, let's abandon the kid.
Who cares? So the caravan marches on.
The kid is all by himself on the American side of the border.
That's how he walks up in La Gruya.
That was all the backstory.
That was what was going on.
And that is what is going on multiplied a hundredfold, if not a thousandfold.
Human tragedies, one on top of another.
And my point is, these are not tragedies that are sort of just happening.
In fact, who is that? Ridiculous woman, corpulent reporter from CNN. She's like, Mr.
Biden, this is all happening because you're unbelievably moral.
You're unbelievably just and parents are trusting you with their kids.
No, they're not. They're not trusting Biden with their kids.
They know Biden couldn't care less about their kids.
Biden hasn't even shown up at the border.
And neither is Kamala Harris.
She's the designee.
And basically, she's getting her nails done.
She's going to the movies. She's eating ice cream.
She's anywhere except at the border.
So for Democrats, this is all a cynical political move.
But the sad thing here is lots of people are being deprived.
Not just the American citizens whose jobs are ultimately taken away.
Not just immigrants trying to get in long lines in other parts of the world who are being cheated.
But also the migrants themselves who have become cruel pawns in a vicious game of political and financial exploitation by drug gangs and by the Biden administration.
And when you stack the two side by side, I'm really not sure which gang is worse.
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The Republican Party is obviously in a state of profound transition.
It's becoming in some ways a different party than it was.
Not necessarily different in its core values, but different in the way that it interprets those core values and in the way it appeals to different constituencies.
Now, interestingly enough, here is Asa Hutchinson, the governor of Arkansas, talking about the need to broaden the party By changing the Republican or conservative position on transgenderism.
Listen. Are we going to be a narrow party that expresses ourselves in intolerant ways?
Or are we going to be a broad-based party that shows conservative principles but also compassion in dealing with some of the most difficult issues that parents face?
Now, Governor Hutchinson is saying this after vetoing a bill that passed the Arkansas legislature that would have severely restricted this attempt to engage in the chemical castration, the chemical and hormonal transformation of little kids Based upon this idea that this is a boy who really thinks he should be a girl.
This is a girl who really thinks she should be a boy.
Okay, let's make an attempt to create a, you may almost say, a physical or a biological transition.
Now, this is a deeply sick transition.
That is being pushed by the far left.
And they're doing it because they want to break down gender categories.
They actually want to destroy not only the family, but just the distinction between the sexes.
And they're willing to take heavy casualties in doing this.
Destroy the privacy of a women's restroom.
Destroy women's sports.
They don't care about any of this.
Now, my question is, why would this fool Hutchinson want to get on board?
And listen to his... Stated reason which really defies logic.
It's that the Republican Party shouldn't be intolerant.
Intolerant of whom? Is the Republican Party being intolerant by saying let boys be boys and let girls be girls?
The Republican Party is not even saying that we can't have transgenders, but it's this idea of systematizing a process.
Of taking kids who might be baffled or confused or discovering their identity and subjecting them to all these chemical treatments that may be difficult to reverse later at a time when they're too innocent to know the difference?
This is supposed to be compassionate?
I mean, it seems to me that the governor here is behaving in a massively freakish way.
And his reason...
He wants to broaden the ranks of the Republican Party in this way?
This is something that strikes at the moral core of what the Republican Party is unified against this nonsense.
And yet this guy thinks, well, you know, we need to stand with principles but be compassionate at the same time.
First of all, the hidden implication here, and this goes back to the Bush years, that if you're conservative, the implication is you're not compassionate.
So the adjective compassionate needs to now be appended to conservatism to modify conservatism.
But no, those of us who are conservatives have long believed that our policies are just.
They do promote freedom.
They are compassionate.
There doesn't need to be a compassion added on to make them better.
They're compassionate in the way that they apply logic and principle and justice so that we can achieve our full potential.
Bottom line of it, I think this is a man, if we listen to his advice, would truly destroy the Republican Party.
He's not the future of the party.
He's part of this wing and it seems to be made up of Liz Cheney and, I'm sad to say, Kristi Noem.
Now, in Kristi Noem's case, her motive was different.
It appears to be, let's appease the Chamber of Commerce.
But I think these are people who, at the best, are not only politically, but morally short-sighted, myopic.
We don't mind them being in the Republican Party, but the idea that they should be leading us in anything is downright ludicrous.
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I did. My daughter came upstairs, one of my daughters, she says, what are you doing?
I said, I said, I'm going to invent this pillow.
It's going to change the world. It's going to be called MyPillow.
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Dad went back downstairs. This guy is absolutely hilarious, a very normal guy.
But he's a guy who holds firm, who knows how to fight back.
The left has tried to cancel him, most recently Costco.
So he's building his own platform, his own digital platform called Frank, which goes up later this month.
More on that as we get closer.
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Should the Republican Party be, this is a question we've been discussing, a working class party?
There's a very interesting memo by Jim Banks, Congressman Jim Banks, who heads the Republican Study Committee.
He presented this memo to Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader.
And basically, Banks says that both parties are undergoing major transformations.
The Democratic Party is becoming the party of professional elites, even of corporate America.
To some degree of the billionaires, of the billionaire class, as witnessed the Silicon Valley moguls.
And the interesting thing about Banks is that he goes, this is not something that Republicans need to worry about, because the Republican instinct is to panic.
Wait a minute, we've always been supported by the Chamber of Commerce!
And Banks' view is, no, don't go there.
Let him go. Let him go.
Why? Because the Republican Party has been caught...
Between its corporate supporters and Chamber of Commerce types, and on the other side, working class people who are increasingly coming into the party, not just the white working class, but the black working class, the Latino working class.
And if Republicans try to sort of do this kind of balancing act between the corporate types and the working class, it creates a sort of ideological confusion.
And so Banks' point is, let it go.
The Republican Party, he says, should, quote, So, in a weird way, what he's suggesting...
And I agree, is take advantage of what's happening in the culture.
Look at all these woke CEOs.
Now, banks doesn't talk about this, but I'm going to.
You have all these lines and lines of corporations all lining up here.
We're going to do what we can to block the law in Georgia.
We're going to block similar laws everywhere.
We're not going to invest our resources in those states.
And so, it seems to me, what might at first glance seem dismaying, wow, all these people, all these resources are taking their stance against us.
My point is, there's a silver lining, and the silver lining is, we can say sayonara to those guys.
You know what? In the past, they would come running to us, oh, the Democrats want to increase the top rate to 90%.
They want to destroy our wealth.
They want to take away our yachts.
My point is, take away their yachts.
We don't care. We're not on your side anymore.
So protect yourself from those kinds of proposals because you certainly aren't going to be able to count on us to protect you.
Why? Because we're going in search of new friends.
And these new friends are ordinary middle class and working class people.
And the key point here, and this is I think what Banks is getting at, embrace not only middle and working class economic interests, But embrace middle class and working class values.
This is a little bit why in my previous segment I was a little bit ferocious against Asa Hutchinson.
My point is, this guy is so off the reservation, he's moving in the wrong direction.
Embracing middle and working class values means not signing on for all the kooky cultural innovations of the left.
But rather resisting them in the name of the values of the people whose votes you actually want to get.
The final point made by banks is the GOP should now start campaigning against billionaire intervention in politics, campaigning against corporate fundraising.
Hey, my opponent got money from this corporation and that corporation.
You know why? Because all these corporations are counting on him or her to give them tax breaks and other types of benefits and under-the-table advantages.
And so, Support us because we are the party that stands against these crooks and against these thugs.
I'm talking here a little bit of what can be called Teddy Roosevelt conservatism, a conservatism mobilized against the big corporate interests.
Why? Because Teddy Roosevelt realized that those were monopolies, those were cartels, those were really bad guys who far from being on the side of genuine competition, genuine trade, genuine capitalism are actually some of its deadly enemies.
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Rod Blagojevich was twice elected governor of Illinois.
He was a golden boy in the Democratic Party, mentioned actually for the presidency.
And then he was ensnared in a kind of political hit, launched sort of by the Obama establishment in Illinois.
He served time in prison, and his sentence was commuted by President Trump.
I've been looking forward to having Rod Blagojevich on this podcast. I'm delighted he's able to join us.
Rod, it's really great to have you. Thank you for coming on the show.
We talked shortly after President Trump commuted your sentence.
And I remember you were just really excited because you were just playing with your dog.
And you made the comment that just the simple domestic act of having fun with a pet was something that was giving you the greatest...
It was very touching for me to hear, but I identified with it because in prison you are sort of cut off from society.
And I hope that the last year, the country has been in sort of a shutdown, but I hope that you've been enjoying domestic life and enjoying the things that matter most.
I really have, Dinesh, and thank you very much for that.
Introduction. Yes, it's been a blessing.
I've been home now for a little over a year and wouldn't have happened had it not been for President Trump.
What he did reaching into arrest to rescue a Democratic governor was something he didn't have to do, didn't benefit him at all politically, but he saw something that was wrong and he stopped it.
And the blessing, of course, for me is to finally, after eight long years of sheltering in place in prison, by the way, for things that aren't crimes, for routine political conversations, to I've enjoyed this past year, as you can imagine, and you hit it exactly right.
It's the smallest things that you never really noticed before, that once you've been through something like that, you've returned home, you really not only notice them, but you really appreciate them.
Even the simplest things, like you say, snuggling with one of our little dogs here in the house has been a real blessing, and I do it a lot.
And I think it's partly because I've been starved for affection all those years.
Now, when the political kind of hit went down on you, this was presented as you were, you know, caught in a ring of elaborate corruption.
Of course, the center of the accusation was that you were somehow trying to, quote, sell the Senate seat.
We're talking now about Obama's Senate seat that he vacated when he ran for president.
But in fact, something else was going on, right?
Why don't you say in your own words what this fight was really all about?
Well, there's several aspects to it.
Let me just start out by quoting Winston Churchill.
He said, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.
To this day, Dinesh, I'm still trying to put my pants on.
The sale of the Senate seat was a big lie, just like Russian collusion was a big lie that they tried to put on President Trump.
That's done by design.
These people, these corrupt prosecutors, We're good to go.
It was the result of conversations that were initiated by then President-elect Obama.
He sent an emissary to me to talk about political deals.
Nothing untoward about that.
It's routine in politics. President Obama didn't do anything wrong when he did that.
I didn't. But they came after me for whatever their motivation was.
I wouldn't give in. I fought back and they were able to convict me at a second trial by using an unlawful standard.
They couldn't convict me at a first trial on their fake corruption charges, so they moved the line.
And applied a standard to me that if it were applied to every other governor, every senator, every congressman, every president, they too would have gone to prison because it was refund raising with no quid pro quo.
And on the Senate, sale of the Senate, the appellate court eventually reversed that.
They understood that that was what they called routine political log rolling.
They also understood that if they upheld that standard, government would shut down everywhere because that's how government works.
It's the give and take of politics and government horse trading.
Let's look at these so-called smoking gun statements that you allegedly made.
At one point, you were saying, they got you on tape saying, I've got this thing.
You described the seat as, quote, golden.
And you said, I'm just not giving it up for nothing.
Now, I suppose that can be interpreted in two completely different ways.
One way would be to say that this is somehow a property that you own, that you're putting up for sale, you're not giving it up in that sense.
But it's very easy to see the other interpretation, which is, hey guys, listen, I'm the governor.
I'm actually the guy who has some say in this, so the idea that I'm just going to let you decide, in other words, let Obama decide who's going to be his, quote, successor, you wanted to have an active role in that, and that, as you say, is part of the political...
I mean, I suppose it's naked political jostling, but it happens every day in America.
Well, not only that, I think it would have been irresponsible of me to not follow up with the overture by President-elect Obama.
You have to understand, Dinesh, That conversation that you're referring to was a Wednesday, the very day after President Obama was elected president.
We were all there here in Chicago.
I was there. President Obama and Michelle Obama, the children, 500,000 people.
It was a historic event. I was approached that night by a labor leader telling me that Barack, he said, called him the night before, wants to talk to you about discussing the Senate seat and making a political deal.
And so the next day was a Wednesday.
I remember vividly saying that.
I just got done running about eight miles.
I was sweaty, laying on the floor, talking to one of my advisors.
And I said, you know, they want to make a deal on the Senate seat.
He wants Valerie Jarrett.
I have to tell you, this is, and I'll quote myself, but I'll modify, effing golden.
I didn't say golden. This is effing golden.
I'm not giving it up for nothing.
Now, here's what these corrupt people did to me.
They don't play the rest of the tape.
Because the rest of the tape, if it were to say, I want $10 million in a Swiss bank account, you got me.
That's a crime. I ought to go to prison for 14 years.
But that was never the case.
I joked about my nephew turning 30, and I could give him a Senate seat for a birthday gift, which I, of course, never intended to do.
But what they did was they took snippets of conversations.
They took the ugliest portions of them, took them out of context, and they did what they did.
And they were able to then get convictions after two trials because they could never Allow me to get away free because what they did was they hijacked a governor twice elected by the people.
They're the criminals. They broke the law and that's why the whole deal was whitewashed and that's why I've been so blessed because President Trump, who'd have thought?
My last line of defense, a Republican president.
It would be the one to undo or at least put an end to that grievous injustice.
I broke no laws.
I crossed no lines. I wouldn't give in to what those bullies, those extortion artists wanted me to do and say.
I wouldn't take the light sentence.
They were dangling if I said some of those things.
And I fought them. And because I exercised my rights as an American citizen to fight for my innocence and seek a jury trial and go to two jury trials, This is what they did.
And this is what they tried to do to President Trump, some of the same people using the same playbook.
Is it not a fact that the tapes that you're referring to, the tapes that in context you say provide not only context but a kind of exoneration because it's very clear that you weren't selling anything, there was no price tag, no money was going to end up in your pocket.
Is it not a fact that those tapes to this day have not been publicly released and why is that?
Because it's corrupt, because they're whitewashing the corrupt acts that they did when they stole the governor from the people of Illinois.
It's too explosive, I think, if they were to show what was actually done here.
And so therefore, they've sacrificed me on the altar of these prosecutors who, you know, as I said, not only were extortion artists when it came to me, but they were basically pointing guns at the other political leaders because they're afraid of these people.
Now, you're right.
They played 2% of the tapes at the trial.
They wouldn't allow us to play the tapes we sought to play at the trial.
I was promised that if I agreed to testify, I could play the tapes and back up my testimony.
But after I got on the stand to do that, they wouldn't allow the tapes to be played.
I was allowed something like three or five tapes.
There were hundreds of hours, maybe 600 hours of tape recordings.
They taped me for six months.
I wanted every tape played.
Publicly and in court.
So the public can hear the full truth of what was being said.
At least give me the tapes to fill out the context of the ones they were using against me.
To this day, they don't allow it.
They've got a sealed order on it by the courts.
And it's a massive cover up because the tapes will show that I've been telling the truth all along and these prosecutors Took snippets of conversations out of context.
And even them by themselves, by the way.
This is Zef and Golden. I'm not giving it up for nothing.
By itself, there's no crime there.
That's just dumb talk.
The fact is, it was a political hit job, as you say, and they covered it up by covering up those tapes, which I still can't play today.
When we come back, I want to dive into life in prison, but I also want to talk about Trump and I want to talk about the Democratic Party, past and present.
We'll be right back. Do you think our nation's economy is going to be protected, insulated from Biden's big, planned, massive tax increases?
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Back with former Governor Rod Blagojevich.
Rod, we were talking a little bit about the political jostling of a Senate seat.
It actually throws me in mind of Kamala Harris because here's someone who kind of rose through the political establishment in California, but it's almost like she was ordained as the sort of person to have the seat.
She ran almost unopposed.
Of course, once you get the Democratic nomination in California, it's a virtual done deal.
So isn't in a wake the meteoric rise of Kamala Harris in California kind of a confirmation of what you were saying about how you have the political establishment kind of making a decision?
She's our golden girl.
We're going to push her forward.
And that happens all the time in American politics.
Yes, I think that's absolutely the case with her.
And again, in my experience, looking back after all these difficult years away, I was naive to think that this is a country where the federal prosecutors were the good guys.
I still think the overwhelming majority of the men and women in federal law enforcement, particularly the prosecutors, have to be good.
I refuse to believe that they're not, but in every organization there's going to be some bad people.
And the people that did this to me were the same ones.
Fitzgerald and Comey, Mueller, who then took what they did at the AAA level to a Democratic governor and tried to apply it at the major league level to a Republican president.
And Dinesh, this is very serious.
I've already gone through what I've gone through, and I feel, as the scriptures teach us, what they meant for evil, God meant for good.
I'm back. And I feel like I could be a real voice on many issues, criminal justice reform, but also this issue about freedom.
And you as an immigrant understand the beauty of coming to a country like America that's free, creates opportunity, gives you an opportunity to be the big success that you've become.
I'm the son of an immigrant.
I know how valuable that is, but I would say, as someone who was born here, I never really heeded properly the lessons my father would teach me, because he fought against the Nazis and he spent four years in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, about how fragile freedom and liberty is.
Not until it happened to me do I really appreciate and realize that, and I feel like perhaps I might have a role to be able to play in that.
And in the larger sense, in terms of what they did to me and what they tried to do to President Trump, This is the threat against our right as a free people to self-government to choose our own leaders through free, fair, and honest elections.
It's a very serious thing.
It's not a Democrat issue or Republican issue or Libertarian or Socialist issue.
This is an American issue.
Well, I think you and I have both experienced a sort of force of these police agencies of government.
And we were both, it seems, raised in this civics book idea of America.
So we're a little shocked when the very people who starred in The Untouchables, the people who went after the mafia, the bad guys, suddenly turn out to be instruments of a political hit.
I remember when a Let me ask you this.
Do you think that our police agencies of government have been somewhat corrupted at the top?
It seems obvious that my case, your case, and President Trump's own case would illustrate that something very bad has happened to these supposedly neutral agencies of government.
Very bad, very dangerous.
And unless we, the people, again, irrespective of your political affiliation, your party affiliation, or your political philosophy, whether you're a socialist, a libertarian, left-wing, right-wing, whatever you might be, Stealing from the people their right to choose their leaders will obviously destroy what America's supposed to be.
We fought a civil war over this issue.
600,000 men died in the battlefields all across America during the Civil War.
Right of self-government and then eventually freeing the slaves.
And so when you have these prosecutors and...
It's like any other business.
It's a copycat league.
You win the Super Bowl one year, then the other football teams try to borrow from what the winning team did.
They adapt their game plan.
That's how these prosecutors operate.
And so there's a group of them.
And I identified some of them, Fitzgerald, Comey, Mueller, and some of the others.
This guy Weinstein, the guy that was a part of the Mueller lead lawyer, who it was a travesty what he did in the Arthur Anderson case.
It was reversed nine to nothing by the Supreme Court.
There was no crime there.
And the misconduct that they operate with.
In my case, those guys, the older guys, came to my house, Dinesh.
They didn't go to yours. They had sunglasses on, and they brought a SWAT team with them to arrest a sitting governor at 6 o'clock in the morning.
I was Roger Stone before Roger Stone was Roger Stone.
And they did that because it was intimidation, and it's that psychological warfare that they bring to try to break your will to resist and make you say the things they want you to say, even though they're not crimes.
And it was a political hit job.
And it isn't just me that they've done it to.
As I said, they try to do it to President Trump.
And I think they're trying to do it to other people.
And this is a very dangerous thing.
They're unaccountable bureaucrats with fancy law degrees.
And they are outside of the system of government that was established by our founding fathers, where they're not really part of the system of checks and balance.
It's a cancer that's grown out of the executive branch of government.
I mean, would we say that today we're actually even seeing it in the larger society?
That at one time, it was maybe confined to high visibility political figures.
But even when I look around, I mean, I don't see an even standard of justice being applied.
I mean, I think that the people, for example, who stormed the Capitol January 6th, they broke the law.
They should be held accountable.
But every day I see FBI photos of some guy with a partially hidden face under a cap.
Can you identify this guy?
Meanwhile, I see rioters setting fire to buildings, jumping on police cars, attacking cops and so on.
And I don't see their pictures being put out by the FBI. So just on the face of it, it appears that we now have two systems of justice, not just for the powerful and the ordinary guy, but even among ordinary guys, there's political discrimination afoot.
Would you agree with that assessment?
Wholeheartedly, I would agree with that.
And again, what they do, some of these federal prosecutors, they work hand-in-hand with the news media.
And they pick their favorites in the news media, who they know will go out and spread their narrative, their false narrative.
There is no equal protection under the law in America.
And there is a tremendous double standard.
And you described it.
None of us agree with what happened on the 6th of January with those crazy idiots who stormed the Capitol.
None of us, including President Trump.
We don't agree with that. We also are offended by, and understandably so, by the rioters on the left, Antifa and the others, who loot and burn and riot and destroy property and actually take lives, like in the case of the police officer in Dallas, Texas, I think it was. But somehow that is not being treated the same way by the media or by some of these federal prosecutors.
So, no, this is a systemic problem.
And I don't know that I have the answers to it.
I can identify it.
I recognize it because I've lived it.
But I'll tell you this, if we love America and we cherish our freedoms, we better do something about this because this is going to destroy our country.
When we come back, I want to talk more to Rod Blagojevich about life in prison, but also about the way in which the Democratic Party ain't what it used to be.
We'll be right back. My podcast is sponsored by Dr.
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Yes, well, I learned a lot, and I had more than enough time to learn a lot.
Eight years is a long time.
It's something like 3,000 days in prison.
The first 32 months, Dinesh, this was part of their effort to break my will to resist.
And your listeners should know, I never took a penny.
No one even alleged that I took a penny.
It was political conversations, but they put me behind what the inmates call the razor wire, the barbed wire fence, where they put murderers and Cartel leaders, gang bangers and drug dealers and bank robbers, a whole bunch of sex offenders.
Only 2% of the population there, and there were about 900 guys there, a little over 900.
Whereas the so-called white collar category, which would be me.
Of course, I was the only governor there.
Tough guys, all tatted up, muscled up, and all the rest.
One of the benefits to prison, though, Dinesh, is that my home was a six foot by eight foot prison cell.
And if you watch movies in prison, it was that.
And, you know, I found myself there with all kinds of experiences.
The hottest summer in Denver history was the first summer I was there, no air conditioning.
I remember in the middle of the night one night thinking, how the F did I end up here?
I'd just been the governor of Illinois not long before.
But it's an opportunity to be tested.
I do believe when adversity comes into our lives, this is God's way of testing us.
And the challenge is, if you can reach down inside of yourself and get the inspiration you need, in my case, the love I have for my daughters and my wife, To be strong for them, to be strong for me, and to use that time, Dinesh, as best I could on constructive things, to work my way back home, and then to turn something bad into something good.
So prison's a good place to exercise, work out, and it's a good place to catch up on reading.
And I did a lot of reading, and one of the best books I read there was a book written by an author named Dinesh D'Souza.
It's called The Biography on Ronald Reagan.
And I have to commend you, Dinesh.
I don't know if you can see the book. You know what?
I'm kind of chuckling about it.
And of course, I'm chuckling for two reasons.
One is, of course, I'm thrilled that, well, I mean, I guess my book, was it part of the prison library or did you take it with you?
No, I saw it in the prison library, and I read the softcover book, and I liked it so much, I asked my wife to mail me this hardcover book so that I could cherish it and put it in my library, which is here, once I finally got home.
And so your book is fantastic.
I read it twice. I've even underlined it in places.
And congratulations on a work well done.
That's hard to do, isn't it, to write a biography of somebody's life?
Well, thank you. I want to ask you a question, though, because this raises for me the issue of the type of Democrat that you were and are.
In some ways, would you say that you were a Reagan Democrat?
And by that, I mean a Democrat seemingly of a kind that has become more rare, at least in the party leadership today.
A Democrat who represents working class values.
A Democrat who's anchored in a kind of social conservatism, by which I mean nothing more than patriotism and attachment to civic values.
What happened to that Democratic Party?
And where would you be today if you were right out in the political fray?
How would you describe yourself now?
Well, to answer your question about being a Reagan Democrat, I've got real bona fides on it.
I voted for Reagan twice.
I voted for him in 1980 as a Democrat.
I voted for him enthusiastically again in 1984 as a Democrat.
Yes, I think that's a good description.
Today I'm a Trumpocrat, very much supportive of President Trump.
Even before he sent me home, Dinesh, I was watching it all from prison.
And President Trump is realigning politics.
This is one of these transformational periods in our history where there's an opportunity for political realignment in America.
Franklin Roosevelt did it during the Great Depression.
Lincoln with his new party in the 1850s and then 1860 did it.
President Reagan did it in many ways in the 1980s, and President Trump has begun this process now.
And no, the Democratic Party, as Reagan, a former Democrat once said, left him, and it's left many people like me.
It's no longer a party that we recognize.
President Kennedy, to borrow from my prosecutors, would roll over in his grave if he saw this Democratic Party.
President Kennedy believed in coal miners having jobs in West Virginia.
President Kennedy believed that we should honor and respect our flag.
President Kennedy believed that we should cut taxes to generate enterprise and business and create more jobs and grow the economy.
President Kennedy and Democrats like him and Democrats, frankly, like me, well, we love our country.
And I don't care what they did to me.
That wasn't my country that did that to me.
That was some bad people with uncontrolled power who did it to me.
This country is terrific and great.
We've got problems in our history, but unlike other countries, we fixed those problems.
We've been too late when it comes to Black lives and African-American issues.
I'm the first to say that.
I believe Black people have been screwed in America, still are.
But here's the place and an opportunity for Black America to...
Take a look at the Democratic Party today.
It's a party that has taken the black community not only for granted, but they're cynically using them.
They're the ones who put together the tough-on-crime laws that have led to what I believe is a racist criminal justice system at the federal level, where black men, first-time nonviolent drug offenders are sent to prison for 25 years.
Joe Biden wrote that bill.
Bill Clinton signed that bill.
Dick Durbin, our senator, supported that bill when he was a congressman.
The Democrats did that.
They're not the ones who are truly interested in solving the problems in the low-income neighborhoods in the inner cities of our country.
They just want to do just enough To keep black people in the places they're at and then start flinging racism accusations against others who dare to try to do something real, who offer solutions like school choice and some other opportunities to lift all Americans out of the difficulties that they're facing.
That's the America Kennedy believed in, the one I'm talking about, lifting people up, Roosevelt believed in.
Roosevelt saved capitalism by using the government in certain ways.
Not everything he did was right, but I think a lot of it was.
And Democrats like me, in the final analysis, we love America, we respect our flag, and most of us believe in God.
I mean, could it be that those ideals that you just described could be reflected in a kind of reconstituted Republican Party?
And what I mean by that is that I see all these woke corporations, you know, and they're all jumping on board.
And by the way, these are guys calling in from the Augusta golf course and they're calling in from their mansions.
And, you know, Mrs.
Rothschild is calling in from a horse riding lesson and so on.
They're like, you know... We stand against Georgia and so on.
And I'm thinking to myself, there's a silver lining here, which is that if the Republican Party, which has been tied to all these characters, says, listen, you know what, guys?
Goodbye. It's been nice.
But we're no longer the party of your interests anymore.
If Biden wants to raise your taxes to 90 percent...
We're going to stand on the sidelines and cheer because the truth of it is we want to represent middle class interests and working class interests and middle class and working class values.
Would you enthusiastically sign on to a Republican Party that did that?
Absolutely. And that's the big challenge now.
You know, six out of ten Americans are people who go to work, working people.
That was the base of the Democratic Party.
This Democratic Party, and it's been happening for the last two decades gradually, But this Democratic Party has walked away from those Democrats.
They, like they do with the black community, take those working people for granted.
Labor bosses don't really reflect or represent the working guy who's digging the ditches or doing the welding on the pipes.
They become political centers themselves.
And you talk about corporate America.
Look, it's always been the case with corporate America.
Their interests are their shareholders and their big bonuses.
They're not interested in what's good for America.
You have to marshal that as an elected official to make it work for the people.
And so, yes, this is an opportunity for the Republican Party.
It's a defining moment, really.
Are they going to go back to that country club Republican Party of Mitt Romney and Congressman Kinzinger, who we have here in Illinois, frankly, John McCain, frankly, President Bush, that country club Republican corporate party that never even pretended to be on the side of working people or black people,
or will they seize this moment and grow what President Trump started by reforming Repositioning politics and the Republican Party reaching out to those groups that were traditionally Democrat because the Democrat Party has abandoned them or taken them for granted.
It's a tremendous opportunity for the Republicans.
And I'll tell you something else, Dinesh.
They can't compete if they don't.
The demographics in America are such That for the Republican Party to be able to compete, they have to remake themselves along the lines of what President Trump has done.
You see, with increased voter support among the Latino community, among African Americans, the Asian community, they need to grow that.
And they have to have candidates who can say, You know what, Rod?
I'm just thinking of this. Because you said earlier, I'm kind of looking for the right opportunity to step back out there.
And I think there should be, hopefully, some smart people in the RNC, Rona McDaniel, some of these people who recognize that there needs to be some new strategic insight and wisdom.
And I really hope that one of them gives you a call.
Hey, thanks for joining the podcast.
I really appreciate it.
It's been a very, very stimulating conversation.
Thank you, Dinesh. Thanks for all the great books you write and for your advocacy, your terrific addition to the American story.
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