Hunter Biden’s Sweetheart Plea Deal Falls Apart, Dems & DHS Secretary Call for Domestic War on Terror, & Mitch McConnell Embodies Gerontocracy | SYSTEM UPDATE #118
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, a truly rare event took place in a federal courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware.
The judge presiding over Hunter Biden's criminal case involving allegations of tax fraud and gun charges, Mariela Noriega, expressed significant doubt about whether the plea deal given to the president's son was fair and reasonable.
Specifically, she questioned whether the plea bargain offered to Hunter Biden by the GOJ was excessively generous to Hunter Biden, the defendant.
As a result, she gave the prosecutors and Hunter's lawyers two weeks to attempt to rewrite the plea deal in a way that was both clear and fair enough that she could confidently ratify it.
It is really difficult to overstate how rare of an event this is.
Usually in a criminal case, especially involving what ended up being misdemeanor charges here, it is nothing more than a formality for a judge to accept the plea bargain agreed to by both sides, by the prosecutors and the lawyers for the defendant.
The judge does theoretically have the power to reject the deal if they suspect that it is unclear or unfair or in some way corrupt.
But in practice, it is extremely rare for a judge to do anything other than rubber stamp the agreement.
But Judge Noriega seemed shocked by the extremely broad scope of the immunity that the plea deal would have bestowed on Hunter, specifically barring future prosecutions and other cases, such as one investigating whether Hunter failed to register as a foreign agent for paid work he performed on behalf of foreign governments.
When the two sides could not even agree on what the deal meant in terms of the scope of this immunity, with the prosecutors suddenly declaring that the immunity they gave to Hunter was very limited, while Hunter's lawyers made clear that they had been led to believe it was very broad, and Hunter's lawyers asserting that he would not plead guilty without this broad immunity for future prosecutions, the judge threatened to reject the deal entirely, which would mean there would be no plea bargain agreement and the criminal case would continue, presumably to trial.
So at least for now, the plea deal is on hold.
Now, it still seems likely to me that this plea deal will eventually be rewritten to the satisfaction of the judge because, again, it is extraordinarily rare for a judge to reject a plea bargain deal between the two sides.
And so I do think that Hunter eventually will get away with misdemeanors for crimes that are often charged as felonies.
But regardless of the ultimate outcome, today's fiasco yet again reveals what is now becoming increasingly undeniable, even for Joe Biden's allies in the media.
As the two IRS whistleblowers who worked for years on Hunter's case have been risking their careers to emphatically warn the public, the President's son seems to have been the beneficiary of very unusual interference on the part of sectors of the DOJ that were designed to protect him from more serious prosecutions, meaning to protect not only Hunter from the prospect of greater punishments for the crimes he committed,
But also protect his father from the risk of more revelations from additional criminal proceedings.
Now, as it turns out, we devoted last night's program, the bulk of it, to demonstrating a fundamental lie disseminated by Biden's allies in the media about all of these cases.
Namely, that these sleazy deals are only about Hunter and have nothing to do with his father.
And therefore, the minute the name Hunter Biden is invoked, everybody can and should ignore it because it has nothing to do with the president.
It is almost impossible to imagine more compelling proof to emerge the very next day after last night's episode than a debacle of this kind at this judicial hearing that demonstrates just how much effort has really been devoted to protecting Hunter Biden in order to shield his father from scrutiny and questioning over the extensive role the president played in these business deals.
We'll delve into what happened at this hearing and what it means.
Then, thanks to the use by House Republicans of the subpoena power that comes from being in the majority, the U.S.
security state is receiving more congressional oversight than at any time since the Church Committee's revelations in the mid-1970s of fundamental corruption and abuse of power embedded in the highest levels of the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other agencies.
Earlier today, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified to the House Judiciary Committee about a wide range of topics, including the systemic censorship programs that DHS has implemented in order to stifle dissent from the Internet.
Not dissent by foreign actors or terrorist groups, but from American citizens.
As happens almost customarily now in Washington, Democrats in the House leapt to the defense of their allies in the U.S.
security state, insisting that homeland security is censoring for our own good and that any efforts to criticize these agencies are dangerous attempts to erode faith in government.
While the Smarter House Republicans on the committee continue to focus on the extraordinary fact that a federal court just three weeks ago found that there is a systematic censorship program in the United States that is a grave assault on the free speech rights of Americans implemented by the CIA, the FBI, by health policy agencies, and others with the specific goal of stifling debate and dissent from American government orthodoxy.
We'll show you the key excerpts from today's hearing to let you see the ongoing political dynamic that is allowing our most basic freedom, the right of free speech, to be assaulted in ways that are genuinely unprecedented, all in the name of combating, quote, disinformation.
And there is an entire political party in the United States, the Democratic Party, that with unanimity stands in support of the censorship regime.
I wish that weren't true.
I wish I didn't have to describe the political reality in such starkly partisan ways, but there is no way to describe the situation truthfully without acknowledging the fact that Democrats are unanimously in support of the censorship regime and are defending it with greater degrees of candor but there is no way to describe the situation truthfully without acknowledging the of the censorship regime and are defending it with greater degrees of candor and explicit justifications.
And then after that, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell today began a press conference in the Capitol with visible physical weakness.
And within a matter of just seconds, he inexplicably froze physically.
He was clearly disoriented.
He had no idea where he was.
He was incapable of speaking or understanding what was being said to him.
Now it should go without saying that we wish nothing but the best for the Senator's health, but scenes like this are becoming increasingly common because the top wing of the political leadership of the United States is just extremely old.
It's composed of people who simply refuse to loosen their grip on power long after they show signs of becoming physically and cognitively incapacitated, beginning of course with the President of the United States himself.
There's a name for this, gerontocracy, meaning a society ruled by the elderly, and it has long been regarded as very dangerous for the health of a nation and for good reason.
We'll examine this long overlooked development that has been emerging with great speed in the United States.
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You can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and all major podcasting platforms.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
For those of you who watched last night's program, you know that we devoted virtually the entire episode to dissecting all of the various cases involving the president's son, Hunter Biden.
And we did so with one principal objective.
To debunk the lie that is constantly disseminated by the Democratic Party, by Joe Biden's supporters in the media, by the liberal establishment in general, that has continuously insisted something that is just plainly untrue.
Namely, that even if Hunter Biden is corrupt, even if he committed crimes, even if there is validity to all of these scandals, ultimately it really makes no difference because none of it involves the president himself.
This is the narrative that has been constructed.
And so last night's show was designed to walk you through each of those scandals and demonstrate the increasingly convincing levels of evidence that the president had direct knowledge of, if not direct participation in, many of the sketchiest and sleaziest deals pursued by his son in order to enrich himself and his family.
It really is remarkable when you look at the body of evidence that has developed over the last several years and set it aside, the consensus media narrative, to see yet again how much disinformation emanates from the corporate media outlets that insist that they are devoted to combating disinformation.
As it turns out, there was at a plea hearing today involving the charges that were brought against Hunter Biden relating to tax fraud and tax evasion, as well as a gun charge, a scene that played out in a federal court that we obviously did not predict last night.
Nobody did, nobody could have, because it's so rare, and yet it really reveals Some of the core points that we were making last night about the extent to which Joe Biden's government and Joe Biden himself are directly implicated by many of these scandals, which is the reason they're worth paying attention to.
At least speaking for myself, if it were the case that Joe Biden had little to no involvement in these deals, I would not really be interested in Hunter Biden.
He is the president's son but that's all he is ultimately.
He's not someone who is exercising political power.
He doesn't occupy political office.
He's not running for any political position and therefore I wouldn't be particularly interested in Corruption schemes of Hunter Biden and even less interested in aspects of his drug and sex life.
The reason I am interested is precisely because it involves both Joe Biden himself as well as Joe Biden's government when it comes to the question of whether Hunter Biden is being unfairly and politically protected due to the fact that he is the president's son.
Now one of the things that has long bothered me the most is that every time this issue is raised or people ask the president about Hunter Biden, he manipulates and exploits the emotions surrounding things like addiction to try and say that this is just an unfair attempt to vilify a father for loving his son.
Even though, as we've shown you many times in the videos, Joe Biden has devoted his entire political career to arguing that not just drug dealers, but drug users and drug addicts deserve to go to prison for many years.
And he has boasted of the role that he played, and he did play an important role, in ushering in a legislative scheme that to this very day causes huge numbers of Americans to spend years in prison For nothing more than possessing drugs, often in order to satiate their addiction.
And those are laws that I have long opposed.
I don't think they're morally just.
I think that they are highly counterproductive.
They are likely to take people who aren't really criminals, who are suffering from addiction, and put them into prison, and they come out worse than they went in.
There are other countries that have decided to decriminalize drugs and have been able to use those resources for far more constructive aims like offering drug counseling and drug treatment that I think makes society better.
But that isn't the law in the United States.
And a big reason that's not the law is because of Joe Biden.
And so we've watched Hunter Biden commit exactly the crimes that Joe Biden has argued for years deserves to be harshly and severely punished.
Only for Joe Biden to turn around and pretend like he's some kind of compassionate, empathetic defender of addicts generally, when in reality, he only defends his son.
And that's what led to a lot of suspicion that the criminal case that was conducted by a special counsel, a prosecutor of the kind that Robert Mueller was, and others designed to reduce the political influence of the Justice Department in the White House.
He ended up announcing a plea deal with Hunter Biden where he would not spend a day in jail or have to even plead guilty to felony counts, but instead only to misdemeanor counts.
Here you see Politico reporting that plea deal in June of this year, so just a couple of months ago, and you see there the headline, Hunter Biden reaches plea deal with feds to resolve tax issues and gun charge.
He didn't pay his taxes for many years.
He failed to report income.
He issued fraudulent or filed fraudulent claims that things that were not business expenses were actually deductible business expenses, things that people go to jail for all the time.
And yet Hunter Biden reached this seemingly very favorable deal where he was facing the prospect of a lot of prison time for felonies, including lying about The fact that he was not a drug user in order to get a license to carry a firearm, which is a serious felony for when people want to treat it as such.
But he got this deal that would have ensured that he didn't go to prison for a single day and didn't even have to plead guilty to a felony.
And when the concerns were raised, even before the IRS whistleblowers came forward, that this deal looked unduly favorable to Hunter Biden in terms of how other people similarly situated are treated.
The assurance that we were given was, oh don't worry, this is only a plea deal that applies just to this criminal investigation.
It doesn't protect him from other pending criminal investigations that he continues to face.
That was the justification that was given.
To assuage public concerns.
Here you see the political article, quote, Hunter Biden has reached a deal with federal prosecutors to resolve a five-year federal investigation into his failure to pay about $1 million in federal taxes and his purchase of a handgun in 2018.
Under an agreement detailed Tuesday in a filing in a federal court in Delaware, President Joe Biden's son will plead guilty to a pair of misdemeanor tax charges.
Prosecutors have also charged him with possessing a firearm while being a user of illegal drugs, a felony.
but have agreed to dismiss that charge if he completes a two-year period of probation.
Quote, this is the end of it, the person involved said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Weiss's office, that's the special counsel, confirmed some details of the agreement in a press release that added, without elaborating, quote, the investigation is ongoing.
In other words, he's telling the public this is not the end of it.
We have other investigations.
Those are ongoing.
This does not cover those other possible criminal prosecutions.
Politico observed, quote, it was not immediately clear what parts of the inquiry are continuing, but prosecutors could look at potential crimes or civil liability on the part of others who have come under scrutiny in the probe.
One particular possibility for future prosecutions is that under Biden has done paid work on behalf of foreign governments.
When you act as an agent, a paid agent of a foreign government, trying to influence American policy on behalf of that foreign government, you're required to file what's called a FARA form, where you disclose the fact that you are operating as a paid agent of a foreign government so that you can't do that clandestinely.
The failure to file FARA forms is an extremely common crime that are committed by all kinds of lobbyists and highly influential people in K Street on Washington, and it's rarely prosecuted.
But that was one of the charges that the Mueller investigation used to ensnare a lot of the people that they wanted to prosecute who were in Trump's closed circle.
But who they were unable to prosecute on the real crimes that we were supposed to believe was what caused the Russiagate investigation in the first place, namely criminally colluding with the Russians to interfere in the 2016 election, a crime for which no American was charged because Robert Mueller concluded that there was no evidence to establish that core conspiracy that dominated our politics for three or four years.
So there's the possibility of that kind of prosecution and other prosecutions as well for other crimes that Hunter Biden may have committed in the course of pursuing all these deals.
But what we were told was, oh, don't worry.
This plea deal is very limited just to these charges.
And so today, the hearing was scheduled because when there's a plea deal reached between prosecutors and the defendant, theoretically the judge has to sign off on it.
It's presented to the judge, doesn't become valid until the judge accepts it.
As I noted at the top of the show, almost always that is kind of just a ceremony.
It's something that is almost automatic.
The judge does have the right to reject it in certain circumstances.
There are cases where judges have.
But generally, it's assumed that that is just a kind of procedural inevitability.
And so nobody expected that there would be an issue with that today.
But there was an issue, a huge issue.
In fact, the deal ended up not being ratified by the judge as a result of concerns she expressed about exactly what the scope was of that immunity, namely, whether it really is true As the prosecutors assured the public that the immunity being given to Hunter Biden would not extend to other cases.
Here is the New York Times account of what took place today, which seems to be a fairly accurate description.
Quote, the president's son, there you see the headline, judge delays Hunter Biden plea deal.
And the sub headline is the president's son had an agreement with prosecutors to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and avoid prosecution on a gun charge.
The judge overseeing the case demanded more information from both sides.
Here's the article.
Judge Mary Ellen Noriega has delayed a decision.
On whether to accept the plea agreement between federal prosecutors and Hunter Biden, demanding that the two sides make changes in the deal, clarifying her role, and insert language that limits the broad immunity from prosecution offered to Biden on his business dealings.
From the start, the judge seemed highly skeptical of the unusual deal, which offered Hunter Biden broad immunity from prosecution in perpetuity.
Questioning why it had been filed under a provision that gave her no legal authority to reject it.
When she asked Leo Wise, a prosecutor, if there was any precedent for the kind of deal being proposed, he replied, quote, no, your honor.
In other words, there's no precedent for what they were trying to do here.
Now, the context for this hearing is critical.
Critical for understanding what took place.
Remember that two career civil servants in the IRS who worked on Hunter Biden's case for many years, who nobody is accused of being politically motivated or partisan in any way, who have no record of any sort of misconduct of that type in their past, knowingly and willingly risk their career
And their reputation in order to step forward and to blow the whistle on what they claimed was political influence pervading this investigation from the start, all of which was designed to protect Hunter Biden and to prevent more serious charges from being pursued.
And they talked about all the extremely rare and unusual events that guided and formed the case and the investigation from the start.
Ways in which they were prohibited from investigating certain kinds of information that ordinarily for any other person being investigated for tax crimes would be virtually automatic.
And their view that, exactly as the judge today concluded, much of what was done in Hunter Biden's case was very atypical for how these kinds of cases are treated.
So the fact that the federal judge walking to this court today And from the beginning, aggressively interrogated the two parties, gives a lot of credibility to the statements of these IRS whistleblowers that there was inappropriate, even corrupt political influence brought to bear on how this plea bargain was reached.
Now I want to explain the details in just a second of exactly what the judge's concerns were.
But before I do, let me show you this video from CNN, because obviously if CNN is treating this as a serious matter, you know it's only because they can't do anything but that.
So they had a reporter inside the courtroom.
There was no cameras in the courtroom.
That's typical.
So there were no cameras to record the proceedings.
So soon as all of this happened, she ran out and was put on the air live.
It's not the clearest exposition of What took place that you'll hear, but these people are typically accustomed to reading from a script.
She had no script.
It had just happened.
She did her best to try and explain what she had witnessed.
It was clear enough that you could understand what happened, more or less, and then I'll fill you in on the parts that ended up not being clear.
So here's how CNN, somewhat breathlessly and with a kind of tone of gravity, treated what the judge had done.
Breaking news out of Wilmington, Delaware from the Hunter Biden plea deal hearing.
Our Cara Skinnell just ran out from inside the courtroom.
Cara, bring us up to speed.
Yeah, so as I went back into the courtroom, the hearing had just begun again.
The judge was back on the bench and she was pressing the prosecution on this investigation and the four corners of this plea agreement.
One of the prosecutors said that the investigation was very much ongoing and that she asked him, well, what is not covered in this plea agreement if you are leaving the possibility for there being other future charges?
So then the judge said, would this include a possible FARA charge that's not registering as a foreign agent?
The prosecutor said, no, the deal would not include that.
It was at that point that she had said to the prosecution, you know, if you were not good, if you can charge that, then what does this mean?
And the prosecutors, she asked Hunter Biden's attorneys about that.
And he said, well, then there's no deal.
And the prosecutor said, Then there is no deal.
So Biden's team said that the plea agreement, as far as they understood it, was now null and void.
They were moving ahead to talk about what the next steps would be in this case.
So as of right now, the deal appears to be dead and off the table.
And it remains to be seen how they're going to move forward.
But he has been charged with those two misdemeanor tax evasion charges.
But one thing we learned is that this investigation is very much still ongoing.
So, the more I listened to the reports from various people in the courthouse, the more I spoke to people who have knowledge of this case and who are present, the clearer this became to me.
This is what happened.
The special counsel, as I showed you, made these statements to the public about the very limited nature of the immunity deal, promising the public, oh don't worry, it doesn't apply to any other Prosecutions, it's still very possible that Hunter Biden will end up facing additional charges, might have to plead guilty to felony deals.
This only applies in a very limited way to just this case.
And I always thought it was odd that Hunter Biden would plead guilty when the immunity was described as that limited.
And I always was a little bit suspicious of whether that was really true, but I hadn't seen the documents, the plea agreement.
And so the judge today looked at the plea agreement and she read it and based on the words of the plea agreement, it bore very little resemblance to what the special prosecutors had told the public about the immunity.
It wasn't limited at all as she read it.
It looked to be a full scale immunity that was bestowed on Hunter Biden, not just for this case, but for other charges as well.
And she began interrogating the DOJ prosecutor saying, well, you keep telling me this plea deal is limited, but I'm reading it and it doesn't look limited to me.
It looks unlimited.
And that was when, with that kind of pressure being brought to bear by the judge with reporters in the room, after weeks of being accused by these IRS whistleblowers of being unusually and even kind of suspiciously generous to Hunter Biden, then they began insisting, no, your honor, this deal is very limited.
The immunity is very limited.
It doesn't apply to these kind of future cases.
And she said, well, the deal I'm reading doesn't actually say that.
It doesn't say what you're telling me.
So at first it just became an issue of you need to rewrite this deal to make a lot clearer that the immunity you're giving to Hunter Biden really is as limited as you're purporting it to be.
But then the other issue that she had was the way in which this plea deal was constructed Was done in a very strange way, basically to make it so that there was no need for judicial approval.
And that struck her as very odd, because that is something that is almost never done, to create a plea deal that way.
And that's when she asked him, in your years as a prosecutor, is there any precedent for your constructing a plea deal that wouldn't require judicial approval?
And that's when he said no.
So that piqued her suspicions even more.
And so once Hunter Biden's lawyers heard from the prosecutor, their insistence that the immunity is very limited and does not apply to future cases, that it doesn't get them off the hook for other prosecutions, which of course is what you want when you're pleading guilty.
You plead guilty because you want everything to be over with.
You want everything to be done with.
You wouldn't plead guilty knowing that there was a good possibility that you might just be back in court in a couple of months on something completely different charge or somewhat related but different enough that they could still prosecute you for it.
So when they heard Hunter Biden's lawyers heard the DOJ prosecutors insisting that this is a very limited immunity, they said, well, if that's the case, we don't have a deal.
We're not pleading guilty in exchange for this very limited immunity.
So it seems very clear to me is that the DOJ prosecutors did in fact negotiate a sweeping, almost comprehensive immunity deal with Hunter Biden and then tried to do it in a way that would not require judicial approval precisely to avoid what happened today, namely a judge sounding the alarm about how unusual this all was.
And it was only once, because of these IRS whistleblowers coming forward and accusing these prosecutors of being unduly generous to Hunter Biden, with so much public attention lavished on their conduct, combined with now the judge doing that in front of a courtroom full of reporters, did the prosecutors then feel compelled to say, no, the immunity is not nearly as broad as they suggest.
And that was when the deal unraveled.
And it seems clear that they did actually offer this kind of extraordinarily broad immunity for Hunter Biden.
That was their intention, to do it without having the judge scrutinize it and then have nobody pay attention to it and have it just rubber stamped.
That was clearly their expectation.
And they got caught.
Now, again, I do still think That they're gonna go, these are all smart lawyers, they're shrewd, and they're gonna rewrite the plea deal in a way that satisfies the public and the judge.
It's gonna kind of box her in and force her to accept this deal.
It'll probably look as though the immunity is more limited than the current deal was structured to provide, but it'll in effect be a kind of informal guarantee to Hunter Biden and his lawyers that their chances of facing future prosecutions is very small.
And eventually, I think this plea deal will be signed.
But the fact that this all happened today Is shining a lot more light on just how extreme the behavior has been on the part of the entire liberal establishment.
And yes, that includes a special counsel appointed by President Trump.
This idea that everybody ever appointed by President Trump answers directly to President Trump.
Is preposterous.
We know from all kinds of reporting that the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI constantly operated to sabotage and undermine and subvert the president's desires.
It's not as though everyone he appointed was some loyalist to President Trump.
The entire liberal establishment has been working so hard from the start to protect Hunter Biden.
Including by manufacturing a lie that the evidence the New York Post used to report on his conduct was, quote, Russian disinformation.
That's how desperate they were.
They censored that reporting.
They attacked journalists who investigated this.
Everything we went through last night.
And it now is culminating in this fact that this plea deal was done in a way that was remarkable from the judge's perspective.
She intervened and refused to sign it, even though they were trying to do the deal in a way that didn't require her signature.
So we'll see what happens over the next two weeks.
My expectation, as I said, is that it will end up being signed and that Hunter Biden will be off the hook.
Because there's a lot of eagerness to make sure that happens.
Not to protect Hunter Biden, but to protect Joe Biden from future revelations.
Now, here is the statement issued by James Comer, the House Republican who is chairing the House Oversight Panel that has been shepherding a lot of these proceedings, including the IRS whistleblowers.
And part of what happened was, I'm sure you heard about this, maybe you haven't, but for those of you who have, the House Republican Committee filed a brief two days ago with the information about the IRS whistleblowers, alerting the public to the fact that these prosecutors have seemingly bent over backwards to pretend to be Biden.
And somebody from the law firm that is defending Hunter Biden called The clerk of the court, and according to the clerk of the court, purported to be working with the committee, the House Republican Committee, even though in fact she works for the law firm representing Hunter Biden.
And according to the clerk, misrepresented who she was and said she wanted this document withdrawn and taken off the docket so the judge didn't see it.
Now, the judge found out about this, demanded an explanation.
It didn't come up at today's hearing.
Presumably it will in the future.
I don't know exactly what to make of that.
I'm a little bit skeptical that someone who works for a large law firm would engage in that kind of a fraud so easily detectable.
My guess is it probably was a miscommunication that she did nothing to stop because she knew it would be favorable to her if the clerk thought she was calling on behalf of the committee, asking the committee's own brief to be withdrawn.
But the committee did file a brief to make sure the judge knows about the allegations of these IRS whistleblowers that the prosecution has been corrupted by political attempts to protect Hunter Biden, hoping she would take that into consideration when deciding whether or not to accept this plea deal.
So the chairman of that committee, James Comer, who has done a, I think, good job overall of using the subpoena power and the oversight responsibilities of the House to provide oversight to these security state agencies issued this statement today about the events in the courtroom.
He first tweeted, quote, today District Judge Noriega did the right thing by refusing to rubber stamp Hunter Biden's sweetheart plea deal.
But let's be clear, Hunter's sweetheart plea deal belongs in the trash.
The DOJ must be The DOJ must be held accountable for its Biden family cover-up.
My full statement.
And then if you look at the full statement, he said this about today's events.
Quote, today District Judge Noriega did the right thing by refusing to rubber stamp Hunter Biden's sweetheart plea deal.
But let's be clear, Hunter's sweetheart plea deal belongs in the trash.
Last week, we heard from two credible IRS whistleblowers about the DOJ's politicization and misconduct in the Biden criminal investigation.
Today, the DOJ revealed Hunter Biden is under investigation for being a foreign agent.
The evidence uncovered by the Oversight Committee's investigation into the Biden's influence-peddling schemes mirrors the evidence put forth by the IRS whistleblowers.
We will continue to follow the Biden money trail to determine whether foreign actors targeted the Bidens, whether President Biden is compromised, and our national security is threatened.
We will also continue to work with the Ways and Means Committee and Judiciary Committee to investigate the Department of Justice's cover-up and hold bad actors accountable.
I'm not really moved by these national security claims that someone has something over President Biden that was constantly asserted about President Trump as well.
It's just sort of this innuendo that people in Washington like to raise.
But I do think there's real question about the extent to which the Justice Department treated this case inappropriately and even correctly in order to protect the President's son, which really was about protecting Joe Biden from these revelations that are now piling up in a way that Not only proves President Biden was involved in a lot of these schemes, but that the White House and Biden himself have been emphatically lying about them for years.
Claiming that Joe Biden never talked to Hunter Biden, that is now a claim that is unsustainable.
We showed you last night that they've retreated from what they're denying, now simply claiming Joe and Hunter Biden were never in business together.
A much different and more limited denial because the evidence that emerged from these investigations Prove that the original denial was a lie that the White House repeated over and over and over again.
And what I can tell you for sure, what I can tell you for sure is that proceedings like this, where a judge so aggressively expresses doubts about the integrity of the process, Is extremely unusual.
And that's because from the beginning, this case has been treated in a very unusual way because there is an obvious eagerness on the part of the entire liberal establishment, the political wing and the media wing, and certainly the intelligence community to protect Hunter Biden as a means of protecting Joe Biden. and certainly the intelligence community to protect Hunter Biden as Hey, everyone.
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One of the most overlooked political realities is that it has been a top priority for the Biden administration, one that they announced even before President Biden was one that they announced even before President Biden was inaugurated, to usher in a new war on terror, specifically one that is primarily aimed not at foreign terrorist groups or at foreign state actors, but at domestic dissidents. specifically
THE FAMILY IS THE FAMILY.
And so much of what we reported on this show, so much of the reporting I did prior to starting this show when I was at Substack and then at Intercept before that, was about the growing powers of the security state agencies that are now devoted to monitoring not the activities of foreign actors, but of American citizens, and not the commission of crimes by American citizens, but by the expression of dissent, which increasingly is becoming characterized as criminal behavior.
In order to circumvent the barriers of the First Amendment, it is easily documented that this is the priority of the Biden administration to create a new war on terror.
There's legislation pending from Adam Schiff That would do nothing other than take the authorities that emerged in the wake of 9-11 that became the first war on terror and just amend it to include the word domestic and almost every provision to allow the US government to do everything it used to do in the name of fighting ISIS or Al Qaeda.
And so many of the House hearings that we've been reporting on over the last year or so, the last nine months, eight months, since the Republicans regained the majority in the House and fulfilled their promise more or less, at least in this limited respect, to hold hearings to try and bring transparency to what these agencies are doing, has been motivated by this objective.
Now, we try and cover every hearing that happens along these lines because it's so central to the focus, one of the focal points of our show.
It's hard to cover them all, but we try and do our best.
And there was a hearing earlier today that didn't get a lot of attention.
In the House Judiciary Committee, where the Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified, we covered the hearing from a couple of weeks ago, from I think three weeks ago, when FBI Director Christopher Wray did the same.
And these hearings are starting to take on a very similar dynamic, where the better, smarter, and more serious members of the House Republican Caucus Focus on the censorship regime that has been systematically implemented by these agencies.
That's what the Twitter files revealed.
It's what a lot of other reporting revealed.
It was why the liberal establishment became so contemptuous toward Matt Taibbi and toward that reporting, because they wanted that scheme to stay secret.
So that those of us who would denounce U.S.
censorship could be told, oh, you're crazy, you're a conspiracy theorist, you're imagining things that aren't happening.
The reporting forever prevented that tactic from taking place because it made manifestly clear that it is taking place.
It produced the documents where you could see in real time The FBI, the NSA, the CIA Homeland Security communicating directly with Big Tech to try and remove material and viewpoints that they regard as threatening because they constitute dissent.
And the same, of course, happened during the COVID pandemic with health policy agencies.
It is every time now there is a crisis or some significant policy.
It's happened with the war in Ukraine.
It happened with Russia.
It happened with January 6th.
It's all used as a pretext to escalate This domestic war on terror, this treatment of dissidents in the United States as criminals, this attempt to control the flow of the internet.
And so at today's hearing, you have, again, a couple of really important exchanges that we want to show you with some of the better members of the committee who focused on this and produced really important and illuminating responses.
And then every time at these hearings now, because Democrats can no longer deny the existence of the censorship scheme by the U.S.
security state, they're now instead forced to admit that it's happening and to defend it.
And they're starting to defend it with an increasing level of candor about what they really think.
In particular, they're starting to argue that it is unpatriotic and even a form of treason or domestic extremism.
To erode trust and faith in these agencies.
In other words, that criticizing the CIA or Homeland Security or the Justice Department or FBI is intrinsically wrong and dangerous and that it shouldn't be done.
Because to do so fosters domestic extremism, meaning it makes people aware of what their government is actually doing and therefore causes them to be angry about it.
And the Democrats' view is that should never be done, that no patriot would ever dare criticize the government because to do so spreads the seeds of doubt about what our government is doing, erodes faith and trust in the government.
And therefore is rightfully considered dangerous to our national security and we want Homeland Security and the FBI and the CIA to be monitoring and hunting for dissent of that kind.
So I know sometimes when I describe it that way it sounds like I'm exaggerating or unbelievable, which is why we think it's so important for you to see the key excerpt at these hearings so you can watch the dialogue that ensues whenever Biden's top cabinet secretaries who oversee this censorship regime are questioned about it.
Now the first clip I want to start with is from Mike Johnson who is a Republican from Louisiana.
I had him on my show a month or so ago after I think the hearing where he so adeptly questioned the FBI director and I think because he has kind of a Banal name and he doesn't draw a lot of attention to himself with rhetorical fireworks or with positions that are just catered to get attention for himself on cable news.
He kind of fades a little bit into the woodwork, but I've become increasingly impressed with him the more I pay attention to what he's doing.
He's a constitutional lawyer and focused on that before he entered the Congress.
He really knows what he's talking about.
I think he's extremely genuine about the principles he's defending about the right to dissent and the importance of free inquiry and the dangers of having our government involve itself and arrogating to itself the power to decree truth and falsity and to try and ban free expression on the grounds that it's false.
And so I want to show you the bulk of his exchange today with the Homeland Security Secretary because it really eliminates, I think in a very clear way, What the U.S.
security state is doing and how they're defending it and what the actual critique is that I think every member of Congress should be vocally raising and objecting to.
So let's start with that clip of Congressman Johnson questioning DHS Secretary Mayorkas earlier today.
Secretary Mayorkas, we have the frustrating responsibility on this committee of providing oversight of your agency.
But I have to be honest and tell you, I'm not sure exactly what you do.
At the Department of Homeland Security, other than great harm.
On your watch, the data is pretty clear.
We've had record levels of illegal immigration, a rapid decline in deportations, skyrocketing fentanyl deaths across our country, and the Secret Service, which is a DHS component, can't determine who left cocaine at the White House.
In the middle of all this, you created the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, CISA, which is a division of DHS.
And it's one of the Biden administration agencies that colluded with and coerced the social media companies to censor Americans' protected free speech online.
That's specifically detailed in a 155-page court opinion that came out of the federal court in Louisiana in the landmark litigation of Missouri v. Biden.
Have you read that court opinion?
Congressman, I have not.
Let me just stop there for a second because when he questioned FBI Director Christopher Wray, he devoted five minutes of his time to asking about this court opinion and I had him on that night and mentioned the fact that I'm actually amazed And how little attention that court opinion is receiving.
Just to remind you, it was a federal judge who for months reviewed the record.
In a case brought by the Attorneys General of Louisiana and Missouri that alleged that the federal government, not in an individual or isolated way, but in a systemic way, is functioning to censor the internet, to suppress dissent, exactly what the First Amendment is designed to prohibit.
And the judge issued a 155-page ruling detailing all of the evidence that proves that that, in fact, is happening.
Rule that it is one of the gravest assaults on First Amendment press freedom or free speech rights in years, if not decades.
and enjoined the Biden administration and these agencies, including the White House Press Secretary, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the CDC, from continuing to pressure big tech companies to censor information online.
This should be the biggest story in our politics.
And yet, not only isn't it, there's only a handful of members of Congress even seemingly interested in this, talking about it.
And one of them is Congressman Johnson.
And he told me in that interview that he thinks that not only he, but everyone on this committee should be focused on this court ruling extensively.
But it's so suppressed and so ignored that this happened.
That Secretary Mayorkas says that he didn't even read the ruling, and I believe him, because he's almost never asked about it in all the news shows that he appears on.
So let's watch the rest of this.
Well, the court found otherwise, and it's really curious to me, actually it's quite alarming that you haven't read the opinion, because your agency is listed in this opinion.
The federal court looked at volumes of evidence over months of litigation, and they determined, among other things, Uh, if the allegations made by the plaintiffs, the states in this case are true, and hold on, the preliminary injunction was granted against your agency, sir, and other Biden administration agencies, including the DOJ and FBI.
The court said it involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.
And you're telling me this opinion issue, July 4th, has not reached your desk?
No one's briefed you on it?
Oh, I have been briefed on the Missouri litigation.
Okay, but you haven't taken the time to read it yet.
Congressman, um... No, hold on.
Have you read it or not?
I have read parts of it, Congressman.
Oh, parts of it.
Did you read the parts where it said that this is Orwellian and dystopian, and that your agency is involved in a massive cover-up of specifically conservatives' free speech online?
Congressman, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is not involved in such conduct.
Okay.
Well, the court found otherwise, and you stand here under oath, and you give us these answers that we know are not true, because this is demonstrably untrue.
I'm suggesting to you that you're saying things to us under oath that are proven by the record to be untrue.
Let me ask you about this specifically.
CISA was created to... We call it the Misinformation and Disinformation Subcommittee of CISA.
Are you familiar with that?
The MDM Subcommittee?
Are you familiar with that?
Congressman, I am very well aware of the threat of disinformation emanating from adverse nations.
Are you familiar with the subcommittee?
Just answer the question.
I am.
Okay.
Does it still exist?
Congressman, are you speaking of the... Does the MDM Subcommittee still exist?
I would have to get back to you on that.
Okay.
Alright.
Kind of a big deal in your agency.
I'm kind of shocked that you don't know the answer to that.
Can you define what misinformation is?
Congressman, misinformation is false information that is disseminated to... Excellent.
Who determines what is false?
Congressman, our focus... No, who determines what is false in your agency?
If you're going to pull something off the internet and collude with a social media platform to make sure Americans don't see it, Who determines what's false?
Congressman, we don't do that.
That's not true.
That is not true.
That is not what the court has found.
I know that any of you who watch this show or who have been paying attention to the news cycle at all know that what he's saying is a lie.
We read in the Twitter files endless streams of emails emanating from Homeland Security officials to Twitter detailing all of the content they wanted removed on the ground that it constituted disinformation in their eyes.
Not from Al-Qaeda or ISIS or Russia or Iran, but from American citizens who were talking about COVID or the war in Ukraine or any number of other Controversies.
And that's why Congressman Johnson is uncharacteristically angry here because he knows that what he's being told by the Secretary under oath is a lie.
Even before the Twitter files began, my former colleagues at The Intercept, Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fong, who we're going to have on the show tomorrow, Lee Fong that is, published an article that I hope you'll go read.
We've been over it many times before, I'm going to ask Lee about it tomorrow in light of this testimony, that published a previously classified plan by Homeland Security on more ways to infiltrate these companies to make sure that their desires for censorship were fulfilled.
The scandal that emerged and erupted when they tried to appoint that joke of a person, Nini Yankovich, as the disinformations are, came from Homeland Security.
They have dozens of programs designed to identify what they consider to be disinformation and censor it off the internet.
And all he's trying to do, Congressman Johnson, is his job of getting the basic facts to try and understand how do you determine what is true and false to call it disinformation.
And you just see him getting the runaround, not with evasive answers, but with lies.
And it is frustrating because he's seen all the same information that you have.
This is not a Republican talking point.
This is what the documents show.
We've had people testify under oath that say, and you just defined the term, you're telling me that you don't know who determines what is false?
Congressman, what we do at CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is identify the tactics that adverse nation states use to weaponize disinformation Okay, what is disinformation?
What is disinformation?
Misinformation is inaccurate information.
Who determines what's inaccurate?
Who determines what's false?
Do you understand the problem here?
The reason the framers of our Constitution did not create an exception for quote-unquote false information from the First Amendment is because they didn't trust the government to determine what it is.
And you have whole committees of people in your agency trying to determine what they determined, they define as false or misinformation.
That is not true.
Then what is true?
Please enlighten us.
No, sir.
No, sir.
The court found specifically, it's a finding of fact that is not disputed by the government defendants, the Biden administration, your agency, the FBI, or DHS.
Not in the litigation.
They determined you made, you and all of your cohorts, made no distinction between domestic speech and foreign speech.
So don't stand there and tell me under oath that you only focused on adverse, you know, adversaries around the world.
Foreign actors.
That's not true.
Congressman, the Missouri case, the litigation to which you refer, is the subject of continuing litigation.
But the facts were not disputed, and I so, so regret that I'm out of time.
I hope I get some more yielded.
I yield back.
Again, this is a mild-mannered person and he was driven to this level of anger for reasons that are totally understandable.
In fact, what's not understandable is that every person on this committee and every person in Congress doesn't share his anger.
How is it that anybody could see this evidence proving that we have Homeland Security and the CIA and the FBI and the NSA irrigating into itself the power to decree what is disinformation and then believing it has the authority To have it removed from the internet.
And they're spending enormous amounts of money on these programs to combat what they regard as disinformation.
Again, not from foreign state actors, as he tried to imply repeatedly, but from American citizens.
In fact, that is the focal point of these programs.
And it is genuinely repellent to me that you cannot get a single member of the Democratic Party, not a single one, Willing to join with them and object to this.
Even though a lot of what these agencies regard as threatening or criminal disinformation comes sometimes from the left.
They don't care at all.
The entire Democratic Party caucus in the Senate and the House are captive to and locked up by the establishment in Washington.
And everybody, virtually, including the holdouts who are willing to defend AOC and the squad, until very recently as some sort of subversive or anti-establishment radicals, have finally given up that argument.
No one, barely, is willing to stand up in public and defend them any longer as anything other than establishment frauds.
They're all completely satisfied with the fact that These agencies, the criticism of which have long been a staple for decades of left liberal politics, are now seeking to control the limits of political discourse in the United States, even though those agencies are the most aggressive liars in the entire government.
We showed you just a couple days ago that tweet from the New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, where she was unveiling this theory that misinformation lies outside the First Amendment.
This is what they're trying to do as a way to justify There's censorship powers and claim that it's reconcilable with the First Amendment by claiming that they're not targeting dissent, they're targeting lies.
But lying about politics is protected political speech, precisely as the Congressman said, because nobody ever trusted the US government to be the arbiters of truth or falsity.
If you give the power to the state, To decree truth and falsity and ban ideas that they determine to be false, that is despotism by its definition.
If we don't have the right as Americans to debate and express and defend views the government regards as false, given how often the government has been caught lying about the most central matters, they're the last people you would want to trust to do that.
Democracy really is only an illusion and that's why I say so much more energy and attention is merited by this federal court decision and more broadly by these censorship programs that Democrats, after years of denying they exist, are now finally forced to explicitly defend.
So when people start talking about the lesser of two evils and which party is so clearly the lesser of two evil when it comes to considering third parties and the like, the fact that the Democratic Party is fully aligned with the agencies inside the government that have done the most amount of damage for decades, who are the most chronic liars.
They don't lie about small matters.
They lie to lie the countries into wars.
That they are allied with those agencies, aligned with them, and far worse, satisfied, supportive of the fact that they are the ones who determine the outer limits of our political discourse, means that that party will never be the lesser of two evils.
Unless you're somebody who just doesn't care about the bulk of political issues other than a tiny handful of culture war contests.
And if that's your only agenda, then yes, Democrats are the lesser of two evils, and congratulations that they're more pro-trans than the Republicans.
But if your worldview is even slightly broader than that, as Cornel West was saying when I asked him about this lesser of two evils argument, unless you're completely captive to the establishment way of understanding the world, this concept of lesser of two evils barely makes sense, given that Most of the time the parties, the bulk of them are in agreement on most issues like they are with the war in Ukraine.
But there are a wide range of issues in which the Democrats are the leading advocates of some of the most toxic and destructive policies and the worst people and the worst parts of the US government.
Let me show you one other exchange, which is one with the Secretary and Congressman Thomas Massey, who is a Republican from Kentucky and a quite principled defender of civil liberties as well as other limitations on government power.
Here's his exchange.
National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin this year in February.
It said the United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories and other forms of mis, dis, and mal-information.
Can you define mal-information for us?
Let's set the setting, the context for this.
He's reading from documents of Homeland Security that purport to define their function and mission.
And one of the functions of the Homeland Security Department, as they perceive it, is to combat disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation.
That's their own description of what they're there to do.
Did you know that?
That we have a part of the federal government That is, exist for some reason to combat what they consider to be falsehoods being disseminated by American citizens over the internet as part of our political debates.
When the Homeland Security Department was created in 2002 in the wake of 9-11, did anybody anticipate that that would be a self-described role?
Two decades later, that is what the DHS, what their own description of their function is.
So Congressman Mastey is reading from their own description of what they do and trying to understand what these words mean in their eyes, including this new term, malinformation.
Why did they need a new term?
Why wasn't disinformation and misinformation, already repetitive terms, sufficient?
Here's why.
Congressman, we're dealing with false information that is used for a particular purpose.
Isn't malinformation actually true information that may be inconvenient to the establishment orthodoxy?
I'm sorry.
Isn't malinformation a made-up word that refers to information that's actually true but just inconvenient to the government narrative?
That is not true.
Let me ask you this.
You said that the proliferation of false or misleading narratives sow discord and undermine public trust in U.S.
government institutions.
Is it illegal to undermine public trust in U.S.
government institutions?
Congressman, we become involved because we believe in the First Amendment right and we have safeguards to protect it.
We actually have a statutorily created Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
We become involved not with respect to a particular ideology.
We are ideology neutral, but it's connectivity to violence.
Isn't larger government an ideology?
The bigger government?
Let me ask you my original question.
Is it illegal to undermine public trust in U.S.
government institutions?
Congressman?
We understand First Amendment principles.
We embrace and protect them.
Individuals can espouse whatever ideology they believe in.
Let me ask you the question if you just answer it directly.
Is it illegal to undermine public trust in U.S.
government institutions?
Isn't that in fact what we're doing here today?
When we point out that you've released a million or two million people into this country without trying to deport them?
I mean, are we in fact undermining trust in your institution?
Aren't we doing that?
And isn't that actually healthy when we point that out?
So, I'm going to stop that exchange there, but the point that is raised by this is crucial.
If you listen to Democrats, if you listen to the Biden administration, if you listen to these security state agencies, what they do is justify everything they're doing on the grounds that dissent is actually a national security threat.
Because by criticizing the CIA or Homeland Security, of course in ways they believe are unjust or unfair, what you're actually doing is eroding faith and trust in the government.
And that in turn may make it possible that somebody would want to carry out violence against CIA agents or FBI agents or homeless.
That's their theory for why the censorship is justified and why these programs to monitor what they consider to be domestic extremism are so necessary.
Because we can't have public faith and trust in the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security eroded.
That is their prime argument for why dissent is a national security threat and obviously why dissidents, people who express dissent, are national security threats that the U.S.
security state ought to be monitoring and working to silence and weaken, just like they used to do about Al Qaeda or before that Soviet communism.
That is their principal enemy.
Their explicit view is that the number one national security threat to the United States are domestic extremists.
And that's why they want these agencies with even greater power to act against them.
So let me show you a couple Democrats who are on the committee who have been, who today acted to defend the secretary.
Here, first of all, is, I want to show the Hank Johnson clip first.
So here is Hank Johnson, the Democrat from Georgia, who, by the way, ran for office as a civil libertarian.
I remember early on in my journalism career, I used to hear from his office all the time and from him.
I think I interviewed him a couple times even, because he was very supportive of the work I was doing against domestic spying, in behalf of privacy rights, against the FBI, because that's what he presented himself to be.
And now he's one of the leaders in not only defending the U.S.
security state like most Democrats do, but in arguing that criticisms of them are unpatriotic and dangerous.
Listen to what he said today during this hearing.
The greatest threat facing our homeland is white nationalist ideology that lies beneath such rhetoric.
Experts agree that dangerous speech from elected officials creates a climate that ferments violence and threatens public safety.
So that is their official position, that the greatest threat to our national security is not from terrorist groups, which this infrastructure and the war on terror was designed to combat.
Nor from foreign state actors.
It's from domestic extremists, as they defined it.
Here is Congressman Adam Schiff, the person I would describe as the most authoritarian member of Congress and most definitely the worst pathological liar.
He's now running for the Senate in California.
The Democratic establishment is openly supporting him, even though he's running against the African-American Congresswoman Barbara Lee.
Ordinarily that would be considered the wrong thing to do if identity politics was applied consistently, but as we know, that's just easily waived whenever it suits them.
In fact, the reason Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are urging Dianne Feinstein not to resign is because they know if she does, Gavin Newsom will appoint Barbara Lee to that position, and it will make it much more difficult for Adam Schiff to win that seat if he has to run against Barbara Lee while she's a Senate incumbent.
They're doing everything possible to ensure Adam Schiff and not Barbara Lee ends up in that Senate seat precisely because he's such an authoritarian and a pathological liar.
So here he is explaining his view on why we all owe our gratitude to the U.S. security state and why it's so urgent and imperative that they be allowed to censor the Internet.
I'm particularly concerned about YouTube's recent decision about...
I think, you know, the Republican badgering has had an effect, and this is part of the effect.
YouTube recently decided to, quote, stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past U.S. presidential elections.
So YouTube has now decided it's not going to remove content it knows to be false.
Other social media platforms like Twitter have decided to fire those that would be in the business of security or looking for misinformation, disinformation campaigns from whatever sources?
So he decided to use his time at this hearing, ostensibly to exercise oversight over the U.S.
security state, to complain that Google is allowing too much free speech.
That Google is allowing too many statements, item shift regards as false.
To continue to be heard when expressed by American citizens on its YouTube platform.
These are, they're explicit in their advocacy for censorship.
It is their prime tool, their prime goal.
Yesterday on the, one of the most popular MSNBC programs, the one hosted amazingly by the former spokeswoman for the Bush-Cheney White House and the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Nicole Wallace, when I started writing about politics in 2005, It was commonplace gospel among Democratic Party pundits, especially liberals, to call George Bush and Dick Cheney literal Hitlers and Nazis.
And yet now their primary operatives, their spokespeople, are the most beloved pundits in American liberalism, the host of MSNBC's most popular shows, the writers at their beloved magazines like The Atlantic, where Jeffrey Goldberg runs, where David Frum is a writer, who is Bush's war on terror speechwriter, etc., etc.
So here is a guest on Nicole Wallace's show, Paul Rickenhoff, who is a veteran who served in Iraq, and he uses that constantly to usher in an authoritarian agenda.
And I want you to listen to what he specifically advocated that needs to be done by the Democratic Party in order to combat what he regards as domestic extremism, specifically people like Michael Flynn, And other members of the Donald Trump movement, listen to what his prescription is as Nicole Wallace, George Bush and Dick Cheney's former spokeswoman, sits there and mutters yes to as he advocates it.
I wouldn't dismiss it as just something that only people on the right or watching Fox News can latch on to.
I mean, we're in a battle for hearts and minds.
And there are people who are on the fence.
You've got to have leaders and messages and messengers and programs that get to those people, that bring them over into community organizing and into nonprofit organizations and away from the Patriot Front and the Oath Keepers.
And I think the parallels with 9-11 are important.
We've talked about this before.
After 9-11, the laws didn't work.
Like, they made massive changes to respond to a new threat.
And I think we have to face the fact that many of our structures, laws, and policies may not work.
After 9-11, we created the Department of Homeland Security.
There was the Patriot Act.
There was massive change in our entire society to face the number one threat, or at least what was communicated as the number one threat.
I think we need the same kind of tectonic shift.
It's got to be much more than see something, say something.
But maybe our laws need to change to respond to the fact that someone like Mike Flynn, the former national security director, is openly calling for violence consistently.
So what he's saying there is that the edifice, the infrastructure built after 9-11 to combat the foreign threat of terrorism, things like the Homeland Security Department, the Patriot Act, all of those other powers that were assigned to the Bush administration all of those other powers that were assigned to the Bush administration that liberals routinely called fascists
They don't go far enough in dealing with the current threat of domestic terrorism that the United States faces and therefore we don't just need a Patriot Act or a Department of Homeland Security to combat the Trump movement and people he regards as extremists like Michael Flynn.
We need to go beyond that.
That is the position of the Democratic Party.
We need a due domestic war on terrorism.
That's what he's saying.
Although he thinks it needs to be even stronger than the one implemented to combat foreign terrorism after 9-11.
While Nicole Wallace, the Bush-Cheney spokesperson, and one of the most popular liberal pundits in the United States, sits there and interjects yes, continuously, like she's at some sort of evangelical church where she can barely contain her excitement.
This is the context for this hearing and for all the other hearings, that this is the posture of the U.S.
security state.
They have defined the greatest threat to American security, American national security, as domestic dissent, domestic extremism.
Now, as I said, this is something I've been reporting on, kind of trying to sound the alarm about for a couple of years now.
Here is just one of many articles I wrote when I was at Substack in June of 2021.
There you see the headline of it is, The Domestic War on Terror Has Already Begun, Even Without the New Laws Biden Wants.
And one of the things, I'm just going to show you this excerpt here, is that there was an article in the Wall Street Journal, I don't know if I have this excerpt as part of this article, but shortly before Biden's inauguration, after he was declared the winner of the 2020 election,
The Wall Street Journal had an article that was interviewing top Biden officials who said that their priority was a new domestic war on terror.
This was before January 6th.
Obviously, January 6th became the pretext for what actually has been a domestic war on terror, a strengthening of the domestic conduct of the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security away from foreign threats onto American soil.
But they were urging this well before January 6, right after Biden got elected, they said this was one of their priorities.
And so what that guy is saying on Nicole Wallace's show, actually, I do have it here.
It's from this article.
It says, quote, in January, the Wall Street Journal reported that, quote, Biden has said He plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism.
And he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.
Nancy Pelosi wanted, demanded, and then got $2 billion more for the Capitol Police.
They've been funding these security state agencies.
Now, again, the idea is this is not a fight against international terrorism.
It is a fight against domestic extremism.
And one of the things Congressman Massey was trying to do was to understand what Homeland Security defines that to be.
And yet they've produced documents before that we've reported on that make clear just how broad this concept is for them.
So here's a chart that I think we can put on the screen that maybe we can... I don't think I can enlarge it, but I think that we're able to kind of highlight some of These some of the key passages.
So here you see the first racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist people who have racist ideas.
Here is.
Environmental, animal rights and environmentalists, people who seek an end to mitigate perceived cruelty, harm or exploitation of animals or perceived exploitation or destruction of natural resources in the environment.
These are people the Homeland Security Department considers to be domestic violent extremists, people who need a new war on terror.
Here you see abortion-related violent extremists, people with an ideological agenda in support of pro-life or pro-choice beliefs.
Here's the most important one, anti-government, anti-authority violent extremists.
Domestic violent extremists are people with ideological agendas derived from anti-government or anti-authoritarian sentiment, including opposition to perceived economic, social, or racial hierarchies, or perceived government overreach, negligence, or illegitimacy.
So if you're somebody who questions the federal government's authority or power, you fall into what they regard as domestic extremist.
The people against whom they want to launch and have launched a new domestic war on terror.
Here you see anarchists, violent extremists, sovereign citizen violent extremists, and then they have a catch-all, all other domestic terrorist threats.
Domestic violent extremists are people with ideological agendas that are not otherwise defined under one of the other domestic terrorist threat categories, including a combination of personal grievances and beliefs with potential bias related to religion, gender, or sexual orientation.
The prism for understanding this is really not right versus left, even though it ends up being applied a lot more to conservatives because the reality is the American right is much more willing at this point to challenge establishment authority than the American left is.
Which to the extent it means people like Bernie Sanders and AOC are not anti-establishment at all.
They are completely embedded into establishment centers of power and establishment orthodoxy and therefore are not considered threats.
There are, though, tiny pockets of left-wing radicalism that are anti-establishment, and those parts are still considered threats.
People who are animal rights activists, who protest inside factory farms, who do symbolic rescues of animals that do no property damage even but are treated as terrorists.
We've reported on the case of the black, radical black leftists who are prosecuted, being prosecuted by the Biden Justice Department now because they're accused of being agents of the Russian government.
They don't really care about right versus left as much as they care about people who either submit to establishment authority and establishment power or people who are dissidents to it.
It just so happens to be that the American right and the parts of it that are more anti-establishment are far greater in number and in strength, and so that's where most of the focus becomes.
But the framework itself is basically about crushing and destroying all forms of anti-establishment dissent.
And that's why the Democratic Party is so supportive of it unanimously, because the Democratic Party is the party of establishment power and authority in the United States.
And so the reason why we think it's so important to constantly show you these hearings is so that you can see in the words of the members of Congress and these political parties as this breaks down what their real animating mentality is.
And the mentality of the Democratic Party and of the Biden administration and of the U.S.
security state with which they are now aligned.
And there are plenty of members of the Republican Party who are pro-establishment, who are aligned right along with them.
Is that any real dissent cannot be tolerated.
It has to be categorized as dangerous, as extremist, as threatening, as criminal, that it erodes the faith and trust in the U.S.
government and therefore is considered a national security threat.
That is what they regard as the number one national security problem and that is why the focus of the U.S.
security state, which when it was created was never Supposed to be about directing its powers inwards to the American citizenry has instead become primarily an agency of domestic control.
And all of these hearings are unearthing the truth about what these agencies are doing and the justifying rationale for them.
They're very valuable in that way.
They're not doing much about it, in part because they don't have majorities that are willing to do much about it.
Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, that whole crowd, Nikki Haley, people like that Chris Christie, Mike Pompeo, are all completely fine with all of this.
And they're part of the Republican Party.
And they're more than enough when combined with the entire Democratic Party to create a majority in its defense.
But the transparency and the information that is emerging from these hearings that give you the real framework for what the U.S.
government is doing and they're justifying rationale for it is very valuable because at least it gives us the truth about what is being done.
And I guess ultimately it's left to the citizenry itself to decide whether they're willing to take the necessary action to combat that.
That's what Benjamin Franklin said.
Famously, perhaps apocryphally, when asked outside the Constitutional Convention what it is that they did inside, he said, we created a republic.
If you can maintain it, that's what he meant.
That you can guarantee rights on a parchment, or in theory, but ultimately it will be up to the citizenry to defend those rights, just as the new citizens of the United States had done against the British Crown.
But I can't stress enough how all of these systems connect.
And the censorship of the internet is the linchpin of it.
Because it's designed to create a closed propaganda system and to prevent any real dissent from being heard and from emerging.
And it's the reason I spend so much time on it.
Because it is the principal weapon that one has to combat what's really being done.
And what's really being done is a war on domestic dissent.
And these documents barely hide that with euphemisms.
They essentially say it explicitly.
And that's why it's so important to listen, not only to the Republicans, like Congressman Massey and Johnson, who are trying their best to extract this information into the open light so people can see it, but also listen to the Democrats, who, with great candor, are explaining their vision for what they want the government to do.
And what they increasingly want the government to do is to render illegal Criminal.
Any real, meaningful dissent.
Trivial dissent, marginalized dissent, impotent dissent, they're fine with that.
It creates the illusion of freedom.
But once dissent starts to become serious, Once it starts convincing and reaching enough people, that is when they regard it as dangerous.
And that is what this war on domestic terror is about.
It's what the war on independent media is for.
And it's what the systemic censorship programs emanating from the U.S.
security state are designed to accomplish.
And it's the reason the Democratic Party, the parts of the corporate media that are aligned with them, are so energetic and emphatic in defense of these programs because they understand how vital they are to ensuring their hegemonic control.
So earlier today, just to conclude the show with a somewhat quick but I think important point about the nature of the American ruling class, Mitch McConnell gave a press conference in the Rotunda of the Mitch McConnell gave a press conference in the Rotunda of the Capitol where as soon as he began he was quite visibly shaken and incapable of maintaining any kind of focus
And very quickly after that, he became utterly incapacitated, basically incapable of speaking, inexplicably froze.
and was very disoriented as his colleagues realized what was happening and tried to get him off the podium and get him to some help.
Let me show you first what happened.
It is a somewhat disturbing scene.
There is no enjoyment that anyone should derive from watching somebody suffer in this way.
And a string of...
Are you good?
Yeah.
Do you want to say anything else to the press?
Do you want to say anything else to the press?
Let's go back to the...
Go ahead, John.
So that was disturbing.
That was alarming.
I don't want to speculate at all about what might have happened there.
There's, from what I've seen right before we went on air, no reports about his medical condition.
We obviously hope he's fine.
But look, Mitch McConnell, if it seems like he's been around forever, it's because he has been.
He was first elected to the Senate in 1985.
He was actually elected as part of the election that Re-elected President Reagan.
So basically, he ran for the Senate for the first time in the first term of Ronald Reagan's administration.
He has been re-elected seven times since.
He is now in his seventh term in the Senate.
And he has been the leader of the Republican caucus in the Senate, both as majority and minority leader, for many, many years now.
And these scenes are becoming increasingly common because the American ruling class is getting older and older and older and they simply refuse to retire.
I've told the story many years ago as part of the Snowden reporting.
When I was first contacted by Edward Snowden, he obviously didn't want to use his real name.
He was concerned for good reason, obviously, about the surveillance state in which he knew we were living, but not very many other people did.
And the pseudonym that he used to contact me was Cincinnatus, who is a renowned leader of the Roman Empire from the 4th century BC.
And he was essentially renowned because he had been in power, decided he wanted to retire from public life.
He was getting older.
He didn't want to keep working.
He believed a healthy society has a constant refreshing of people who are in power.
And so he went to his farm, intended to live out the rest of his life in his farm.
And Rome ended up in a war, and the Roman elite and Roman citizenry called on him to return, needing his leadership, and he did.
He went back to leadership because they called on him, they urged him to do so.
He won the war, he became incredibly popular, couldn't have stayed in power forever.
And instead he immediately announced, as he promised to do, that when the war was over he was going back to his farm.
He gave up his position and never again returned to power.
And Snowden chose that pseudonym because he so admired this idea that people actually go into public service sometimes With the intention of actually helping other people, helping the society be well governed.
And not for selfish reasons of clinging to authority and prestige and title and power.
And there are still some people who do that in public life.
They retire.
But it seems increasingly like people are just desperate in the Capitol, in particular, to just keep their aging hands on whatever levels of power they're able to cling to, well past the time that they're physically able to sustain that.
And Mitch McConnell is 80 years old.
He has been there since the first term of the Reagan administration.
That's 45 years in the Senate.
Seems like enough.
And the whole concept of what the American Republic would be originally was the idea of a citizen legislature.
We weren't supposed to have a professional political class.
It was supposed to be people who worked in business or in particular trades, who got elected, they would go serve for a couple of terms and then return back to normal life so that we didn't have a political class that was isolated and insular.
When's the last time Mitch McConnell just had an ordinary life that most Americans have?
He's been a senator for 45 years.
Joe Biden got elected to the Senate when he was 29 years old.
He's now 80.
And he's running for re-election at the age of 82, which he'll be if he gets re-elected, and 86 when he concludes his term.
These people just don't ever go away.
And so because of the Power of incumbency, the fact that people just develop these massive networks of power and donors, they're impossible to remove from power.
Mitch McConnell will be re-elected in Kentucky for as long as he's alive and keeps running.
And we're seeing these scenes over and over.
Dianne Feinstein, it's now well known, at the age of 90, often doesn't even know where she is.
It's sad.
No one should mock this.
We probably all have had family members that we've seen go through the incapacitation of aging.
I certainly have.
It's something that most of us are likely to encounter in one way or another if we live long enough.
It's just part of the human process.
And it's the reason we ought to encourage people not to cling to power well beyond the time that they're capable of performing those functions, even with just a minimal amount of dignity.
So Dianne Feinstein refuses to resign.
As I explained just a few minutes ago, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton are urging her not to for very selfish and manipulative reasons.
But Dianne Feinstein has been off for months, oftentimes not even allowed.
The Democrats can't even get judicial nominees confirmed because without her vote there, they don't have a majority on the Judiciary Committee.
And so when she finally went back, What has the response from your colleagues been like?
The well wishes?
What have you heard?
What have I heard about what?
About your return!
How have they felt about your return?
No, I haven't been gone.
of 2023.
She basically denied that she had been away at all as if she didn't even realize that she had been away for months.
What is the response from your colleagues been like?
What have the well wishes?
What have you heard?
What have I heard about what?
About your return.
How have they felt about your return?
No, I haven't been gone.
Okay.
You should follow the That's sad.
I haven't been going.
I've been working.
You've been working from home is what you're saying?
No, I've been here.
I've been voting.
Please, either no or don't no.
What do you say to Californians, like Roe Conner would say you should resign?
I mean, honestly, that is pathetic.
That's sad.
I can't stand Dianne Feinstein.
And I feel nothing but pity watching that.
She should not be in the Senate.
And it's amazing that her colleagues who see this every day won't say it because this is a gerotocracy.
It is a rule.
It is ruled by the elderly.
That's the system that people get older and older and their power increases and they never go away.
There's no term limits.
And the power of incumbency is so great that the re-election rates are higher than they were for the Soviet Union at certain points under their geratocracy.
Now, we've all seen here, for example, is a really pathetic scene where Congressman Jerry Nadler, who has battled obesity and is an obviously unhealthy person, he's now 76.
I think he's like in his 18th term or something in Congress.
was part of this press conference with Nancy Pelosi, where he clearly defecated on himself and had to walk very delicately away in order not to create a scene.
As I bring on Congresswoman Maloney, I want to join the distinguished chairman in acknowledging legislation of other members I want to join the distinguished chairman in acknowledging legislation of other members of Congress that are contained in the chairman's legislation that they are putting
And I also want to acknowledge Maxine Waters is doing some very important work on this subject, not part of this package, but part of preserving our I mean, this is decrepit.
It's depressing.
And it is, I mean, truly just horrible to watch.
of the government.
I mean, this is decrepit.
It's depressing.
And it is, I mean, truly just horrible to watch.
But it is what the top ring of the American leadership has really become.
The videos of Joe Biden and the obvious cognitive breakdown that he has in public over several years, I could show you a half an hour, an hour straight of extremely disturbing ones.
Here's just a montage of just a few of them.
them.
Let's take a look at the 80 year old Joe Biden.
You know, our natural wonders are, you know, inspired and the reflection inspires our right to take action.
You know, America is a nation that can be defined in a single word.
I was in the foothills of the Himalayas with Xi Jinping.
Traveling with him unless we travel 17,000 miles when I was vice president.
I don't know that for a fact.
A solid meeting with um with uh the uh they make a very good point.
Here's the deal.
Here's what drives the driver in the states that are affected.
We owe these truths to be self-evident.
All men and women created by God, you know the thing.
You know the thing.
Joe Biden has been cognitively sound for years.
I mean, only a perfectly sane man in All right, so you get the point.
The people who first began raising concerns about Joe Biden's cognitive decline were Democratic Party insiders in 2018 who were very concerned that it was looking like he was going to run for president and they know how Democratic Party voters function.
And they knew there was a very good chance he was going to win simply by virtue of the fact that Democrats know him, that he was at President Obama's side for eight years, and it was his turn.
And they were the ones sounding the alarm of saying, he's not the same Joe Biden that he used to be.
And then once he got the nomination, they were in bed with him.
And then they started turning around and saying, only immoral people They blamed Bernie Sanders supporters and Donald Trump supporters, would talk about Joe Biden in this way, they started claiming that he has a stutter, that no one had ever previously noticed, and that was what explained these nonsensical statements.
But you're talking about people in their late 70s, into their 80s, now even their early 90s, and the ethos is very much that these people are, because of seniority, entitled to cling to power forever.
There's no sense at all about the impact on the people Who elected Dianne Feinstein about the fact that she's barely able to orient herself in terms of where she is.
It's such a narcissistic elite class that they believe the only thing that really matters is their own entitlement and their own prerogative.
And nobody wants to create this framework that says, look, at some point it's time to call it a day.
Because they probably don't want to be pressured to retire either.
This is their identity.
This is the thing that gives them purpose.
That people call them senator or congressman, they have their own drivers, their cars, they go on television, they have their staff, people treat them a certain way.
They don't want to give that up.
And they don't have to.
And this is the symbolism of America's leadership class.
Now, as I said, this is a real term, gerontocracy.
That's not something I invented.
It's something that the United States, in fact, used to openly criticize the Soviet Union for being suffocated under because they had the same system where people just rose through Soviet bureaucracy.
And if you looked at the leaders of the Kremlin in the late 60s and through the 70s, led by Leonid Brezhnev, this very gray, obese, older person, The criticism of the Soviet Union from the United States was very often that it was a gerontocracy.
And they define that as rule by men over the age of 70, which is now basically a kid in the highest levels of American power.
I think Chuck Schumer is 73 or 74, and he's youthful when compared to those around him.
So here's this article that I recalled seeing from a while ago.
I looked for it today.
It's from the New York Times in 1976 during the Brezhnev era and it was entitled Soviet Gerontocracy and it was mocking and criticizing the fact that the Soviet Union and the Kremlin are ruled by old people and all the reasons why that's so unhealthy.
Here's what the article said.
Gerontocracy is alive and well in the Kremlin.
That is the indisputable lesson taught by the impact of the 25th Soviet Communist Party Congress on the Moscow leadership.
The clique of elderly gentlemen that has ruled the Soviet Union so tar the 1970s remains in control.
The marginal changes announced last week involved the removal of the quote young Dmitry S. Polonovsky, who is still on the right side of 60, and now the election of Dmitry Ustinov, now 67, and Grigory Romanov, a mere stripling of 53.
But the real kernel of power remains in the hands of Messrs.
Brezhnev, Kozygin, Suslov, and Pogorny, a quartet whose average age exceeds 70.
Throughout the Congress, now concluded, it was evident that the effort was to convince both the Soviet public and the outside world that continuity and stability are key features of Soviet rule.
And then we don't have this paragraph.
The article concludes by essentially saying that the reason this is so bad is because old people start facing mortality.
They start seeing the world differently than everybody else over whom they're ruling.
It distorts their perception and their ability to govern.
That was a critique we were freely making of the Soviet Union for many, many years.
But now that we're ruled not by people in their 70s, but people in their 80s, Nancy Pelosi finally gave up her House speakership at the age of 83, but not her seat in Congress.
It is a critique that now if you raise it people will accuse you of being indelicate because again the idea is supposed to be that we owe our allegiance to the sensitivities of America's ruling class and not to the people whose leadership they impact.
So I hope Mitch McConnell is doing well.
I hope it was just kind of a Temporary episode of incapacity, which may have happened, but the fact is that he, like most of the people who wield real power in Washington, are older than they have ever been, older than a ruling class should be.
And something, whether it's term limits or just some kind of social pressure or ethos, that pressures people in power to give up that power once they get too old to responsibly exercise it, is clearly needed.
Because the nature of our ruling class is very much the kind of gerontocracy that we used to mock the Soviet Union for living under.
That concludes our show for this evening.
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