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July 23, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:27
OBAMA’S CRIMES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1131
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Coming up, I'll discuss whether Obama has immunity for the crimes he may have committed.
Or on McIntyre of the Blaze joins me.
We're going to talk about how Democrats have laid the groundwork for holding Obama and his ring of co-conspirators accountable.
And I'll also explore how Trump is bringing Harvard and other universities to heal.
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Evidently, the Attorney General Pam Bondi is going to meet with Gillen Maxwell.
And she says, I anticipate meeting with Ms. Maxwell in the coming days.
She also says, quite interestingly, until now, no administration on behalf of the department had inquired about her willingness to meet.
So evidently, there was no interest in the Biden years about developing any kind of Epstein list or Epstein client revelations.
And this is important because right now you see these Democrats sort of very pompously, we demand to know the full truth about Epstein.
Now, these are the same people who were completely quiet before.
And as Pam Bondi reveals, Mara Garland made no effort to get this information or put it out.
So the newfound enthusiasm of the Democrats needs to be attributed to pure hypocrisy, which is what it is.
Now, what does Bondi say she's after?
She says she wants to find further evidence of Epstein's child trafficking operation, including, quote, uncharged third parties.
So this, I think, is getting to what people are really agitated about.
They're agitated about the whole issue of who killed Epstein and the unlikelihood that it was Epstein himself.
But I think they're more incensed about this idea of special privilege for the rich and powerful.
So let's see what happens here with this meeting with Gill and Maxwell.
I'm assuming that Maxwell will want something in return.
And of course, Democrats are like, get ready.
She's going to be pardoned by Trump.
I don't think this is actually going to happen.
But this is something to more information to come.
Now, Trump, on a separate note, we've just completed a massive deal with Japan.
Japan will invest, at my direction, $550 billion.
That's a big number.
Half a trillion dollars into the U.S., which will receive 90% of the profits, hundreds of thousands of jobs.
There's never been anything like it.
Perhaps most importantly, Japan will open the country to trade, including cars and trucks, rice, and other agricultural products.
So Japan is still going to pay a modest tariff, but it's 15%.
Now, for a long time, people had observed, and for a long time, I mean for 30 years, people had observed, hey, listen, there are Japanese cars all over the United States, but when you go to Japan, you never see American cars.
They are a rarity.
So Japan was protecting its own market while demanding full access to the American market.
So that evidently is coming to an end.
And coming to an end in a good way.
It's not that we're blocking their cars and they're blocking our cars.
It's the opposite.
They're now opening their market to our cars.
And agricultural products.
If one thinks about the issue of tariffs, countries are relentless in protecting their farmers.
One reason is farmers are a powerful political lobby.
And so the French protect their farmers and the British and the Japanese and the Indians in India protect their farmers.
So many countries will block farm products from coming in from other countries because they want to give their farmers essentially exclusive access to their market.
But evidently the Japanese, again, are relenting on this.
So this is the kind of concrete progress that Trump promised.
He's made a bunch of other deals, but by and large, smaller deals with typically Smaller countries.
So I think this one is a significant breakthrough.
Here's a piece of big news: the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee has, by the way, without fanfare, right?
There's no press release.
They just changed the eligibility rules that say the trans athletes cannot compete on essentially opposite sex teams.
You can compete, but you've got to compete against your actual biological sex.
And the reason for this appears to be, by the way, not a big change of heart on the part of the Olympic committee who had wished that they had looked at scientific studies, seen the light, recognized how fundamentally unfair and shameful their behavior has been to date.
But I think their reason is pretty simple.
And that is they want to forestall, they want to prevent the rage of Trump.
And they realize that if they don't conform to this executive order, Trump might take all kinds of extreme action, including, by the way, moving the Olympics, which he has threatened to do.
So I think they've realized, listen, we better conform, we better go along.
So it's the same reason that a lot of universities are falling into line.
I'll talk about this in the next segment.
They're falling into line due to being strong-armed.
Now, I'm all in favor of the strong-arming, by the way.
And I do think that the implications of this are pretty far-reaching.
Why?
Because the Olympics covers a lot of sports.
Not every sport.
There aren't sports.
There are sports not covered in the Olympics, but many sports are covered.
And what that means is that in all those sports, think about it.
If you have swimming and the swim people decide, well, why don't we have some trans females, you know, which is biological males, participate in the female section?
Well, if the trans female is a winner, you can't say to that person, you're going to the Olympics.
You have to say to that person, well, you're a winner.
You can have the local prize here at the University of Pennsylvania or wherever, but you can't go to the Olympics because we've got to take the woman who came in second.
You're not a biological female.
So my guess is that this will convince a lot of the athletic organizations in many of the sports that feed into the Olympics to say, all right, we've got to follow the lead set by the U.S. Olympic Committee.
If they don't permit it, we can't permit it in all the local regional competitions that we conduct with a view to selecting people who then go on to the Olympics.
So this affects skiing.
It affects, well, it even affects chess.
It affects soccer.
And it affects all kinds of races, both in the water and on the track.
Now, Colbert is, his contract is not being renewed, and Trump has a new post.
The word is, and it's a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is next to go in the untalented late night sweepstakes.
And he says shortly thereafter, Fallon will be gone.
Now, what's going on here, I think, is, and the reason Trump is on such strong ground here, is market forces are producing this.
All of these late night shows are losing money.
Why?
The demographics are getting older.
The advertising revenue is shrinking.
And basically, fewer people are watching.
People just don't have watching late night TV on their daily routine.
I mean, I remember Debbie and I have talked about this when we were about, well, when we were really teenagers and in our early 20s.
And I remember when I first came to America at the age of 17, the host families I stayed with, it was a late night ritual.
Maybe not in all four families, maybe three out of four.
You know, it's, we've had dinner.
Let's watch Johnny Carson.
And so we'd watch Johnny Carson, at least the monologue and sometimes the whole show, before kind of signing out for the evening.
So late night was part of the, you can say, intellectual diet or entertainment diet of the normal American family.
Well, it's a matter of debate whether such families even exist in that form, but quite clearly, this is not on the normal menu anymore.
There might be niche audiences.
I think one of these niche audiences, by the way, is journalists.
One reason they seem so upset and they're rallying to Colbert is that these weirdos still do watch Colbert.
And they watch Colbert, by the way, not because of his sense of humor.
He has no sense of humor.
He's actually kind of a dummy.
But what he is, is he's an ideological, he's an ideological, kind of heavy-handed guy, right?
Sort of like, you know, Trump's a rapist.
And I can see all these journalists.
They're like, oh man, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
He called Trump a rapist.
Hey, come over here, Edgar.
Just see what happened.
Colbert called Trump a racist or a rapist.
This is humor for journalists, you could call it.
But nobody else finds it funny.
And I think Trump is right.
Even though Trump ends his post by basically saying he, I hope I played a major part in it.
And he will have played a part.
But I think ultimately the biggest part is played here by the market.
Now, let me turn to talking here about Barack Obama.
And I think that people are underestimating the significance of Trump now saying on multiple occasions, in other words, he seems to say this now more than once a day, that what happened in the White House was treason.
And the person who did it is Obama.
So it's not Hillary, although she played her part with the steel dossier.
It's not even Clapper and Comey and Brennan, because think about it.
I'm sure they hated Trump, but why did they do it?
Who told them it would be okay?
Who is the driver of the scheme?
Barack Obama.
Debb and I watch a lot of these crime shows, and in some of them, you'll have a man who walks in and blasts a whole family with a shotgun.
And yet, that guy gets 20 years.
And the woman, who's let's say perhaps the wife of the guy who got blasted, gets life in prison.
Why?
Because she has the motive.
It was her idea.
She hired the hitman.
The hitman merely carried out what the true conspirator put into effect.
None of this would have happened if there wasn't a motive.
None of this would have happened, for example, if in this case, let's just say the wife didn't decide, I've got an insurance policy I want to collect on my husband, and so I'm going to stage it like it was a robbery.
You see where I'm going with this.
Obama is the one who cooked this up, and therefore, this is the guy that needs to be on the front seat.
Sure, you've got a lot of other malefactors.
And by the way, their crimes go beyond even what they did to Trump.
You remember the scene where Comey was actually on a TV show, and he was boasting about how he and the FBI entrapped General Flynn.
Basically, Comey was saying, listen, those guys are so dumb that they didn't monitor the movements of the FBI in the White House.
Normally, if the FBI wants to go talk to the National Security Advisor, you've got to go through all kinds of layers of scrutiny, and they're going to have to want to have lawyers present.
But in this case, it was kind of like, hey, we want to talk to you.
Sure, come on over.
I'll talk to you.
And Comey is like, basically, we were able to set our trap for this guy.
And by trap, what we mean here is that the intelligence agencies saw Michael Flynn as a threat to their autonomy, to them being able to have their run of the place.
And so they were like, we got to get rid of this guy.
Once again, it was probably Obama who either knew about it or gave the order, but it was Comey who carried it out.
When we come back, I'm going to go a little further into all this and explore the question of what needs to happen now.
Is Obama covered by immunity?
And how should the necessary arrests be made?
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Here's a very interesting quotation from Cicero that applies, I think, very much to Barack Obama.
A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious, but it cannot survive treason from within.
An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly.
But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
Of course, in this case, Obama is inside those very halls of government.
For the traitor appears not a traitor.
He speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments.
He appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.
He rots the soul of a nation.
He works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city.
He infects the body politic so it can no longer resist a murderer is less to fear.
I mean, this is, isn't this a description of Obama and the way that this guy operates?
Far more dangerous, I think, to our liberties and to our country than Putin or G or the Iranian mullahs or any foreign adversary.
And for the exact reason that Cicero gives here.
Now, there are some who say, and already I'm seeing this on the left, that Obama can't be prosecuted because he has immunity.
And the Supreme Court Has in fact decided that presidents have immunity for their official acts.
And so I think it is quite reasonable that if it came to that, and by the way, all of this comes later, right?
This is the arrest comes first, the charging documents come first, the grand jury comes first, and then Obama's defense, which by the way, would take months, he'd have to file an objection, it would have to make its way to the Supreme Court.
So we're talking about a lengthy process that, by the way, would cost Obama millions of dollars, all of which is, by the way, excellent reason to do it, even if he got immunity in the end.
Because all the immunity would show is not that he didn't do anything unlawful or even criminal.
It would just show that he can't be punished for it.
But is it really true that he can't be punished for it?
Well, it depends what the it is.
And by that, I mean he maybe cannot be punished for that meeting in the White House.
But what about the cover-up that ensues after he is president?
See, this is, I think, where the legal opening comes for the DOJ to say, all right, we are not prosecuting him for the orders that he gave at that meeting, because that would be presumably covered by presidential immunity.
But we are going to prosecute him for an attempt to cover up a massive scheme to frame the leader of the opposition party and ruin his presidency and subvert democracy and violate his civil rights.
And this is a crime not just against Trump, but against the American people themselves.
So I am actually looking forward to the day, and I don't know if it'll ever come to see not just Obama, but Brennan, Clapper, Comey.
We need to have helicopters.
We need a 5 a.m.
FBI raid.
We need long guns.
We need to have these people dragged out into their front yards.
We need handcuffs.
We need all of that.
So none of the decorum of please show up to get your mugshot taken.
I'd like to see the FBI go all out on this.
Now, let me turn to and speak briefly about the Trump administration's ongoing campaign against the universities, focusing really, they've decided to make Harvard the target.
And Harvard has found a left-wing Obama judge in Massachusetts to put on hold the Trump administration's strictures and sanctions on Harvard.
And Trump himself posts to say the Harvard case was just tried in Massachusetts before an Obama-appointed judge.
She is a total disaster, which I say even before the hearing, before her ruling.
And she has systematically taken over the various Harvard cases.
So Trump is basically saying, listen, we are going to lose at the district court level.
But he says when she rules, he doesn't say if, he goes, when she rules against us, we will immediately appeal and win.
And he goes on to say the government is going to stop giving these billions of dollars to Harvard.
Much of it was just given, oh, Harvard's the greatest.
Harvard's number one.
So Harvard had apparently a carte blanche in being able to loot the treasury.
In other words, take away your tax money and mine, all in the name of research.
Most of the research, by the way, bogus.
Probably some of it legitimate.
But when you put a lot of bad apples in with the good ones, the best solution is to throw them all out.
And so this is a long fight.
It's not going to be settled in a week or even a month.
But I think ultimately this is going to redound very badly for Harvard.
I know that there are Harvard negotiators like behind the scenes trying to find some workable like modus vivendi, which means a kind of a way of getting along with the Trump administration and meeting the Trump administration's, at least some of their main objections.
I don't know if those sorts of negotiations are likely to work, but I think Trump needs to show complete ruthless relentlessness in going after Harvard and other universities as well.
These universities all engage in systematic discrimination.
It's built into the structure of the way they operate.
DEI has become, in a sense, an inextricable part of these universities.
In fact, they do DEI more than they even do education.
So ultimately, I think our system, at least for a lot of these colleges, is largely irredeemable.
I'm not really sure this stuff can be fixed.
In some ways, I think you have to pulverize these universities into submission, bring them to their knees, so to speak.
They have to rebuild from the ground up, probably with new leaders, new personnel, ideally over time, new faculty, and a completely new outlook which gets away from all the poisonous influences that have taken over our campus.
Not in a short time.
All of this has happened over a long period of time, and I think it's going to take some time to undo.
Guys, it's always a pleasure to welcome back to the podcast, Orin McIntyre.
He is host of the Orin McIntyre Show and a columnist for Blaze News.
He's also the author of The Total State, How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, which is available now.
Follow him on X at Orin McIntyre.
Orin, thanks for joining me.
Appreciate it very much.
I want to begin with something that I saw Larry Elder tweet this morning.
He said, Obama is sitting pretty.
He has nothing to worry about.
He's not going to be charged with anything.
He's not even going to get a parking ticket.
The implication of this, I think, from Larry is that maybe Obama has this powerful network that's protecting him, but the other implication is that the Republicans are just way too cowardly to attempt anything so bold.
Do you agree with that assessment?
What's Going to happen to Barack Obama?
Unfortunately, I think he's exactly right.
And this is just a stunning thing from the GOP: how spineless they have been over and over again on this issue.
The call is always: well, if you set this precedent, something terrible will happen.
If you go out and politicize the justice system or go after a former president or hold anyone accountable for what they've done in office, this creates this slippery slope that will all slide down until we're just arresting everyone whenever someone gets put into office.
But that's ridiculous at this point.
We've seen the left break this taboo.
You know, personally, that the left is more than willing to go after people legally and destroy their lives.
And we've seen this with everyone, including the president of the United States.
The Rubicon is already crossed, and yet we're wringing our hands and saying, oh, what if, what if?
We're already there.
And the fact that the GOP does not understand this, even at this late stage, is truly insane.
I mean, isn't it the case, Oran, that there is a different kind of slippery slope that never goes mentioned?
And here's what I'm getting at.
Obama started his political campaign against the right way back with the IRS targeting of the Tea Party, of conservative groups.
He unleashed Lois Lerner.
And nevertheless, nothing happened to him.
The IRS would torment these organizations, demand that they give him a list of every donor.
I remember they were asking groups to give a list of every speech you've given, every email you've sent.
I mean, this was outright blatant harassment.
And yet nobody paid a price, not even Lois Lerner, and certainly not Obama.
And so the slippery slope is that Obama goes, hey, guess what?
I'm above the law.
I can do whatever I want.
And this is probably part of what gave him the chutzpah to have that meeting where he basically said, I know the intelligence is cutting one way, but why don't we start steering it another way?
How come the GOP doesn't pay attention to this slippery slope?
Because ultimately, they are terrified of taking any kind of action.
They truly believe, and they're right to some extent, that the press will simply crucify them the minute that they reciprocate with the Democrats.
But look, in game theory, you have the basic strategy tit for tat, and it's the only thing that creates any kind of seasis in the system.
You cooperate, but the minute one person defects, you have to defect back, because if you don't, they learn that they can just keep defecting without any kind of consequence.
We all know this in the simplest language of the schoolyard bully.
Yeah, they shove you once, maybe you forgive them, but eventually, if they continue to get away with bullying anyone in the schoolyard, they are just going to be a complete menace because there is no consequence for their action.
The Democrats can't keep doing this.
They can't keep getting away with this if we want to have anything approaching an actual republic.
You cannot have one party that gets to throw its opponents in jail, prosecute its enemies, go ahead and put the thumb on the scale of justice anytime someone they don't like is up for trial or any kind of charges, and then turn around and do nothing in response.
As you say, if we don't stop the slippery slope, if you continue to allow the left to do this as they have over and over and over again, whether you look at the J6 protesters, you look at the pro-life protesters, you look at Donald Trump, you look at Steve Bannon, all of these different cases that the left has brought and all of these people they have politically prosecuted, if you continue to allow this, then the system is a joke and everyone knows it.
I saw an article this morning.
It's written by Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post.
And it's called Tulsi Gabbard's Seditious Conspiracy Claim is Based on Thin Gruel.
Now, the thrust of the article is that what Tulsi Gabbard is revealing here can't possibly be either new or significant or true in the way that it's being advanced because, he says, numerous people have already looked at this.
He says there was the Mueller report, there was the Justice Department's Inspector General report, a bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and then the Durham report.
And he goes, since none of them concluded that Barack Obama is the head of the snake or that there was a manufactured plot to get Trump, he says there couldn't have been.
What's your response?
I mean, obviously that's ridiculous.
And it's amazing that this is really the only coverage that this scandal is receiving in the first place.
But ultimately, I don't expect the media in general to put this out there or to make it.
I think that, you know, most of the major papers, if they're covering this at all, are burying it 15 pages deep at this point.
It's very clear that they do not want this narrative out there.
But honestly, I'm less concerned about how the liberals are controlling the spin on this because that's what they're going to do anyway.
I'm more concerned about whether or not we're going to get prosecutions.
It's not enough to just do revelations.
We've already seen this with Jake Tapper and the Biden senility.
We've already seen this with the COVID lockdowns and everything from Anthony Fauci.
Eventually, the New York Times says, oh, no, it is.
I guess it is okay to believe that there was a lab leak.
These things are post hoc disclosures that ultimately just become pressure release valves.
They don't do anything.
Yes, we now know that all of this was a lie from the Biden White House.
Yes, we do know that COVID was ultimately manufactured in a lab in China, but does it matter?
Does anything happen?
Does anyone pay a price?
If the answer is no, then this is just a learned helplessness.
The people find out over and over again that their government is lying to them, that they're being manipulated, that things are not in the up and up.
And ultimately, they just learn that, yeah, okay, whoa, look, there's a revelation.
We know this now, but nothing happens.
There's no consequence.
And so they learn that nothing can ever change.
The ruling class is untouchable.
And this is why I think so many people really went over the wall when it came to the Jeffrey Epstein files.
It's not about the Epstein scandal itself, though, that matters.
It's about the idea that our elites never pay a price for what they do.
And this is just going to be another example if the Trump administration is not willing to bring some of these actors to justice.
I mean, you seem to have this weird dynamic, Oren, where on a regular basis, Trump will talk, for example, about we need to investigate the 2020 election, which was rigged and stolen, and yet nothing happens.
There's no nothing seems to occur in the aftermath of that.
And similarly, Trump seems to suggest, oh yeah, Obama's the ringleader.
I think Trump even used the word treason.
And so you have a clear signal to Pam Bondi, who I'm taking it is a little bit of a Trump sycophant.
In other words, she's basically subservient to Trump, is, as far as I can tell, will do what Trump says, and yet no action, at least to now, on her part.
How do you interpret this kind of weird dynamic in which Trump is telegraphing these public statements, and yet there's a kind of awkward silence from the DOJ?
Again, it's very confusing because, as you say, I believe Bondi was placed in that position specifically because she would do what Trump asked her to do.
That's how Trump staffed his administration for the most part this time, which I think is a vast improvement because you get more compliance from the people who are actually supposed to work for the president.
So why, especially Donald Trump has literally been shot in the head over this.
How does he not understand at this point where we're at?
The hour is late and we need to know what time it is.
Donald Trump was prosecuted on all kinds of phony charges in the desperate attempt to keep him from becoming president.
And when that didn't work, they tried to shoot the man.
We are well past the point at which you can just say, well, we're the bigger guy and we don't prosecute our enemies and it's okay.
We're going to show everybody the way this is done.
That is not working.
The Democrats are already talking about how the minute they get into power, they are going to start prosecuting everyone.
They are going to start putting all kinds of political enemies in jail and we should take them very seriously because that's the exact same thing they did last time.
There's no reason for Donald Trump to be putting his foot off the gas at this point.
These people have threatened his life.
They have tried to put him in jail.
They have already put his other administration officials through the ringer.
And he should expect exactly the same thing should they ever come to power again.
If you don't make them pay a price, they will do it all again.
Do you think it is the case, Oran, that we have a strange hierarchy in the Justice Department where you've got cash and you've got Dan Bongino and left to their own devices, those guys would unleash on the left.
But it turns out they report to Pam Bondi.
And with Pam Bondi, my reading of her temperament is that she likes sort of safe prosecution.
She likes, okay, we're going to go after the sanctuary cities and we're going to sue them in court.
That's the kind of move that I think she feels like she's, that's within her comfort zone.
But bringing the handcuffs out on Obama, that's something that she won't do unless there is a direct order coming from Trump.
And I think the question you and I are asking aloud is, why hasn't that direct order been given?
Right.
And that really is the question.
A lot of people want to point to Pam Bondi.
And I'll be honest, I don't have the level of criminology necessary to decipher the Trump White House at this moment and figure out exactly where that dynamic is.
I do think that ultimately what you're pointing to probably is something that is real.
We know that Pam Bondi was not the first choice for this position.
Of course, Matt Gates was, and you can understand why he was pushed out.
I think he might have been more willing to take these kind of chances and put these kind of things forward.
But at the end of the day, while Bondi might be someone who is a little more reserved, you got to feel like she's ultimately answering to Trump.
And if Donald Trump wants this prosecution to happen, she's probably going to do it.
Unless we really think that she is someone who is completely ignoring the executive's authority in this area, which I just don't see any evidence of that being the case, then you think this needs to be an action that would be taken if Trump is putting that forward.
And it's very clear that Donald Trump was very concerned about this prosecution.
When the Epstein stuff was really flaring up, he repeatedly said, oh, well, this is just a hoax like the Russia Gate stuff.
Now, a lot of people said that that was because they thought ultimately Trump was in the files or he was nefariously attached to this.
I never thought that was the case.
What I think it was is Donald Trump was knew this revelation was coming down the pipeline, believed it to be huge and was really wanting people to focus on that and was very frustrated.
That was top of his mind when he was being asked about Epstein.
Why are you guys worried about this?
Because right now I'm about to drop the biggest bombshell in the world on you and you don't know it quite yet.
And I think that was really what he was thinking when he was making those references.
But now that the information is out, again, the revelation itself is not sufficient.
If action is not taken, then nothing matters.
And Donald Trump has to be the one that initiates this at the end of the day.
Yeah, I mean, Trump, as you know, posted a meme a couple of days ago in which it was kind of a funny meme.
He's sitting with Obama and then the agents come in and arrest Obama and they toss him into prison.
But I think what you and I are saying is that the time for memes is past.
We need to go to the next step.
And in some ways, the Democrats have made it so easy, haven't they?
I mean, think about it.
They can't say you can't take a mugshot of a president because they took one of Trump, right?
They can't say, you can't charge Obama with seditious conspiracy.
They charged people with seditious conspiracy who weren't even in Washington, D.C. on January 6th.
And they said, nevertheless, you exchanged text messages and hatched a plot that was subversive of democracy and the republic.
So we're going to try to put you away for many years based on that.
So the Democrats have, they have already, in a sense, opened up this package, opened up this Pandora's box.
In a way, they've created a precedent.
Republicans just have to say, well, all we're doing is using these charges that you used in very much the same way in a much more grievous situation.
Yeah, you know, there's a famous joke that goes around where conservatives are always saying, well, imagine if the other side did this, right?
Imagine If the other side had done this, well, guys, it's time to be the other side.
It's time to do the thing.
As you said, the precedent is already set.
Sitting around clutching your pearls about, oh, where could this take this?
What dark place could we go to?
We've already been there.
I mean, they tried to use the 14th Amendment to keep Donald Trump from running for president.
Come on, guys.
Who are we kidding at this point?
It's time to take action.
And again, we can't look at this as some minor offense.
Okay, we already know that not only did this basically create a coup situation where Barack Obama used phony intelligence to disrupt an incoming president specifically because he was from the other party and he wanted to use his power to punish his political enemies, but we know that because of the Russiagate interference, it was likely a significant factor in not only hindering the Trump administration, but messing with the 2020 election.
And ultimately, the 2020 election creates a scenario where Joe Biden, who is a puppet of a cabal of people who are actually operating the White House under his name, are using an auto pin.
So it's a second coup.
And then on top of that, they use Joe Biden and his senility to manufacture their own Democratic presidential candidate because Joe Biden proved to be such a embarrassment during a debate that they put Kamala Harris, who no one ever voted for in a primary, into the position of running for the president of the United States.
Had she won, she'd have won without winning a single primary.
How many elections can the Democrats rig in a row before they pay some kind of price?
You cannot live in a country, pretend that you have any kind of popular sovereignty when election after election is being rigged by the president and the intelligence apparatus from, you know, almost for a decade at this point.
Yeah, I think the lesson, Oren, is that, you know, Republicans need to start putting aside their, you know, their Edmund Burke and their Jon Stuart Mill because this is not a time to be cogitating about principles.
You're saying that basically we're in a political combat zone.
And if you're going to read anybody, read Klauswitz, read Sun Tzu, read Machiavelli, you're in a fight for your life.
And the other side is playing by a whole different set of rules.
I've been talking to Orin McIntyre, the host of the Orrin McIntyre Show, a columnist for Blaze News.
Follow him on X at Oron McIntyre.
Oron, great stuff as always.
And thank you for joining me.
Thanks again.
I'm discussing my book, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
And I'm now going to talk about the Iran-Contra scandal, which was the one scandal that seemed to raise the prospect of ruining Reagan's second term.
Reagan had had a very successful first term, but right about 1986, 87, things started looking the other way.
And it all arose out of the fact that Congress had shut off funding for the Contras.
This was called the Boland Amendment, as I mentioned.
And so the Reagan administration should have realized that at this point, short of raising funds for the Contras through private organizations, which could have been done, and had Reagan assisted with that, it probably would have worked.
But the Reagan administration did something very different.
And this is something that Reagan himself does not seem to have directed, although it remains an open question whether he knew about it.
It was organized by his national security advisor, a bald-headed guy named John Poindexter.
And John Poindexter realized that two things were going on simultaneously.
One was the Contras need money, and Congress is refusing to give them any.
And by money here, I mean money also to buy material and money to buy weapons.
On the other side, John Poindexter realized that there were some American hostages being held in Iran, and Reagan, somewhat against his inclinations, had made a pragmatic deal, a compromise, where he basically said, listen, we will supply Iran with certain types of basic weapons in exchange for getting those hostages back.
So basically, Reagan succumbed to a hostage trade, a trade in which the hostages were returned, but Reagan, in return, sold.
He didn't give money to Iran, but he sold arms to Iran.
Now, notice that when you sell arms to Iran under the table, you get money in return.
So Reagan had this sort of stash of money that had come in from the sale of arms to Iran.
And John Poindexter kind of put two and two together.
He goes, here are the Contras on this side of the world, and they don't, they need money.
And here is this money, and it is kind of unaccounted for.
We don't have to explain it.
It's money that's come from Iran from these arms sales.
How about if I direct my chief staffer, a guy named Ali North, Oliver North, to meet with the Contras.
And basically what North does is he takes the money from the Iran arms trade and he diverts it to the Contras.
This is the essence of the Iran-Contra scandal.
Now, the left was apoplectic for a number of reasons.
One, it circumvented the Boland Amendment.
Number two, they were trying to get Reagan on the arms deal with Iran on its own strength.
Like, why would Reagan make such a deal?
And didn't Reagan have the position that we don't negotiate with hostages?
But the last straw was combining the two and taking the money from the one and essentially passing it under the table to the other.
And so the left tried very hard to show that Oliver North was some kind of a mercenary.
He was corrupt.
He was keeping money himself.
But Ollie North gave a very rousing and stirring defense of himself and his role.
And he basically said, I did what I was told.
I was Instructed to organize this by my boss, John Poindexter, and I did it, and I didn't keep one penny for myself.
And that was true.
And so, Ollie North ultimately, even though the left tried very hard to get him, they couldn't because he was a soldier who did what he was told.
John Poindexter basically said, I'm responsible.
I made this decision.
I take the fault and I will resign.
There was, as I say, a strenuous effort to go after Reagan, but there was no link.
There was no shred of proof.
And to this day, I couldn't tell you for sure whether or not Reagan knew about it.
Now, knowing the way things do work in these situations, two possibilities emerge.
One is that John Poindexter said to Reagan, let me tell you what I'm doing, but I want you to know this is being done on my authority.
So Reagan did know, but there was no paper trail.
The second possibility is that John Poindexter decided this is something that Reagan would have wanted, the result, I mean.
And so let me, John Poindexter, do it, but let me do it giving Reagan plausible deniability.
I won't tell Reagan about it.
And that way, if it ever comes out, I can truthfully say I decided Reagan didn't know, even though my motive for doing it is to accomplish a goal that Reagan certainly would have sympathized with.
Ultimately, it was the absence of any direct link to Reagan that made it impossible for the left to really get him.
They talked about impeachment, but they couldn't do it because they didn't have that connection.
And so although this wounded the Reagan second term, it didn't destroy it.
But there were times, I'll tell you, as somebody working in domestic policy in the White House, I was kind of frustrated because I'd go to my boss and say, like, nothing is happening in our department.
And he would go, that's because everybody's focused on Iran-Contra.
The White House is preoccupied with it.
And so everything is stalled.
It was about nine to 12 months of my tenure in which I was so idle and actually frustrated over being idle that I began to write articles on literature for scholarly magazines about topics like Robert Frost and the road not taken.
And I would submit these articles to the legal counsel at the White House.
And one time, Chris Cox, who was the legal counsel later, he became a congressman and also head of the SEC.
He called me and he goes, Tinesh.
He goes, what's this?
You're basically turning into a professor of literature.
And I go, Chris, I'm actually looking for work to do, but there is none.
And so you don't expect me to sit at my desk and twiddle my thumbs or juggle, even though I'm pretty good at juggling.
I'm trying to make myself useful.
And he goes, well, this stuff you're writing on Robert Frost is really interesting.
He goes, yeah, I have no problem with it.
Go ahead and publish it.
Because I had to get anything that I wrote cleared before it could be published.
I'm just mentioning this to give you an idea that sometimes when things hit a wall, a standstill, nothing gets accomplished.
By the way, fast forwarding to the present, this is a little bit of what I was worried about and I'm still worried about with the Jeffrey Epstein stuff.
If you allow something to become so front and center, it consumes you, you're dealing with it day in and day out, the rest of your agenda gets kind of sidelined.
It falls by the wayside.
But despite all this, the good news is that the money that was diverted to the Contras actually kept the Contra movement going.
And this is a point that's often missed, that even though the whole thing was a mess, it had the effect of keeping the Contras alive.
And then what happened was the Sandinistas were under pressure.
Even the Democrats would say to the Sandinistas, well, listen, you know, one way you can discredit these Contras is if you hold free elections.
And the Democrats were very confident that the Sandinistas would win.
Why?
Because the Sandinistas controlled the media, they controlled television, they had censored the press, they were using the resources of the state to support the Sandinista party.
So for all these reasons, the left and the Democrats thought, basically, our side is going to win.
Interestingly enough, the Republicans and conservatives in America agreed.
They too thought that the Sandinistas were going to win.
Now, the candidate for elections on the conservative side against the Sandinistas was actually a terrific person.
She was the wife of the guy, Pedro Chamorro, who was the editor of La Prensa, the magazine that had been, the newspaper that had been censored.
And she turned out to be a very feisty campaigner and a very effective communicator.
And so even though to the last moment, a victory was predicted for the Sandinistas when the results came in, the Sandinistas lost.
And they lost by a big margin, 55 to 40.
They were thrown out of office.
And Violeta Chamorro became the new president or the new prime minister of Nicaragua.
And I cannot tell you how amused I was to see all these scenes on television.
This was in the Managua hotels where all these Western leftists had gone down for the election.
They were all hoping to celebrate with the Sandinistas.
But when the Sandinistas lost, they were all crushed.
And so you could see them like sitting on the floor.
Some of them were like weeping.
I remember the Reverend William Coffin.
This is a big leftist, kind of a bogus preacher from the Riverside Church in New York.
He's like, yeah, the Sandinistas, the Nicaraguan people were deceived.
And so Witness for Peace blamed, once again, U.S. imperialism for somehow producing the result.
But the good news was that the left, which I mentioned, was on a quest to find a peasant paradise abroad.
And it started with the Soviets in the 30s and 40s, and then it moved to Mao in the 50s and China.
And then it moved to Cuba in the late 50s and early 60s.
And then it moved to Nicaragua in the 1980s.
But finally, with the defeat of the Sandinistas and their ouster from power, it was very clear that this peasant paradise was not to be.
And the left, in a sense, was inconsolable because its illusions had ground against the wall, with now it seemed no place to go.
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