The New Trump Indictment Over 2020 Election. Plus: FBI Gets Caught Again Manufacturing Its Own Crimes | SYSTEM UPDATE #122
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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, in a storyline you are probably quite used to already and will hear several more times between now and the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump has once again been indicted.
The criminal charges, released shortly before we were about to go live on our program, is his second federal indictment and his third indictment overall.
He's really piling them up now like collectibles.
The first indictment was back in April, and it was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, alleging that Trump improperly misaccounted for payments made to Stormy Daniels and internal Trump Organization accounting records, and that his doing so somehow constituted 34 counts of felony charges.
The second, brought by Independent Special Counsel Jack Smith, accuses Trump of violating the Espionage Act and other laws by taking and refusing to return classified documents which everyone acknowledges Trump would have had the power to declassify unilaterally.
Because everyone in Washington reveres the sanctity of classified information and would never leak them without permission.
Tonight's indictment is based on Trump's conduct during the 2020 election and specifically relating to the January 6th certification of that election.
It charges Trump with three separate felony counts, essentially alleging that Trump attempted to obstruct the January 6th proceeding and the 2020 election.
By claiming falsely that the election was shaped by voter fraud and by attempting to overturn the legitimate outcome of the 2020 election by making claims about voter fraud that Trump and his allies, according to the indictment, knew to be false.
Now the expectations and the hopes among the liberal commentariat and among the Democratic Party was that the indictment would be much more sweeping.
That Trump would be essentially indicted for inciting what they call the insurrection.
This indictment is far short of that and seems to have, at least on first read, some pretty serious flaws and some pretty serious dangers.
The indictment concedes, because it must, that Trump has the absolute right to claim that the results of the 2020 election were the byproduct of fraud, even if those claims of fraud were untrue.
It also acknowledges, again because it must, that Trump has the absolute right to use every legal process available to him to try to overturn the results of the election by seeking judicial action, even if the claims on which those attempts are based are also ultimately proven false.
It is hard then to see what exactly Trump did beyond that.
That the indictment acknowledges he has the right to do that would constitute felonies given those concessions.
Now, like everyone, we had only a small amount of time to examine this indictment.
It was released less than an hour before our show started tonight, and so I want to be careful about the scope of the claims I'm making about this tonight.
We'll certainly cover this more in depth throughout this week, but what is unquestionably true is that the indictment appears to try to criminalize Trump's speech by alleging that it was disinformation.
The first real attempt, as Professor Jonathan Turley put it, To criminalize disinformation.
It's essentially based on the claim that Trump alleged that the election was based on fraud, and according to the indictment, that claim was false.
Now what seems to be also clearly true is that Trump's prior two indictments have had very little effect on denting his political support.
Indeed, a New York Times-Seattle poll released today showed him with a massive 37-point lead over his nearest competitor in the Republican primary, Ron DeSantis.
Despite these two indictments, he is also tied with the incumbent president 43-43.
If anything, these indictments seem to be helping Trump politically.
Indeed, prior to their starting poll showed the GOP primary far closer than that.
This shows that there is pervasive and intense distrust in our judicial system, in our justice system, in the institutions of authority, and in the Justice Department specifically.
The fact that a political candidate now benefits, or at least Trump does, the more he's indicted.
Because people perceive that the law is being cynically invoked as a political weapon against the leading opposition politician.
That perception is not healthy for anyone, but it's hard to argue that that perception is wrong.
Then, a federal judge this week ordered the release of three American citizens who were in prison since 2011 as part of the so-called Newburgh Four, a case that attracted substantial media coverage when the FBI back then announced it had arrested four Muslim American men joining a plot to shoot down planes from a National Guard base in upstate New York.
The judge's reasoning?
The FBI manipulated the defendants to join the plot by using an unscrupulous informant where the FBI essentially created its own plot that the defendants on their own would never have joined without FBI encouragement.
This is part of a long series of cases in which the FBI has essentially gotten caught manufacturing their own crimes and they've continued that into this second war on terror, the one aimed at what they call domestic extremists.
We'll take a look at this case, time permitting, as well as a recent Joe Rogan segment where he tried to explain to a comedian he had on his show that In fact, the FBI, there's evidence for, was heavily involved in the January 6th plot, and this comedian, this liberal comedian, was shocked at the idea that the FBI would be capable of such things, and it really reveals, and it connects to tonight's indictment, the extent to which the liberal establishment, the Democratic Party, liberals in the United States, have come to see the U.S.
security state, including the FBI and the Justice Department, as beyond reproach, even though their history suggests they should be regarded as anything but that.
Usually on Tuesday and Thursday we have our live after show on Locals.
Tonight, because of the extensive effort and very kind of intense effort we had to put into processing and researching this indictment in order to be able to report on it for you, we won't have our show but we will be back next Tuesday at its regularly scheduled time right after our Rumble program.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms where you can follow the program.
They post 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble, and you can rate and review the podcast, which helps spread the visibility of the show.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
That the federal government and most of the liberal establishment is absolutely determined to do everything possible to sabotage Donald Trump's re-election campaign is really not beyond dispute any longer, and that amazingly includes...
Breaking a long-standing taboo against the current government prosecuting the leading opposition candidate as well as a prior president.
Now, I'm never one who believed in the validity of this taboo.
I've always thought that high-ranking political officials, even if they're the President of the United States, ought to be treated the same as ordinary citizens under the law.
That is, when they break the law, they ought to be treated the same.
But this clearly is not what's happening in this case.
This is an establishment that is petrified at the prospect that Donald Trump will be re-elected.
They regarded 2016 as the most cataclysmic moment in American political history, and they were openly determined in 2020 to do whatever they had to do to make sure that Trump wasn't re-elected to the point that, as we've gone over many times,
When reporting surfaced that was highly incriminating of Joe Biden and his integrity, the CIA joined with the corporate media simply to lie and invent a lie that it was Russian disinformation that this evidence was, even though it was genuine, authentic, and Big Tech colluded to censor this reporting from reaching the hands of the American people.
That's how desperate they were.
They also, of course, manufactured the Russiagate scandal that dominated and drowned our politics in the Trump presidency for almost three years, only for Robert Mueller, the exact prosecutor they wanted, who was armed with the supposed dream team of American prosecutors and unlimited funds to conduct an 18-month investigation, only to end up indicting exactly zero Americans on the court charge that gave rise to that investigation that was at the heart of the conspiracy theory.
That the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government in order to interfere illegally in the 2016 campaign and Mueller himself in his investigative report admitted they could find no evidence to establish evidence of that core crime.
The crime that the media had drowned American politics in for years as a result of their desperation to destroy the Trump presidency.
And they are equally petrified, as they should be, Let's talk about the very real prospect Donald Trump can be reelected in 2024.
Joe Biden's going to be 82.
He's visibly in cognitive decline.
And Donald Trump this time doesn't have to run as an incumbent.
He has to run again as a challenger to the status quo, which is what he was able to do in 2016 to great success.
And a poll released just today shows that even though they've now charged Trump with two separate indictments, As well as got him found guilty on a civil charge involving claims of sexual assault.
He has a bigger lead than ever in this poll when it comes to every other candidate in the Republican field and is tied with Joe Biden 43-43 even though needless to say the entire media is lying against him and tonight he has his third indictment.
So what the political effects are of this indictment seems pretty clear.
It seems unlikely to have much of a political effect except that it helps Donald Trump because his supporters and many members of the Republican Party who are prepared to consider other candidates perceive that our institutions are fundamentally corrupted.
It's not a fringe view, it's a widespread view.
It's available and visible in many, many polls.
And the perception obviously is that attempts to prosecute Donald Trump for political crimes is the byproduct of an abuse of the justice system and not evidence that Donald Trump committed crimes.
We saw the same thing in the Clinton years when Bill Clinton ended up being enmeshed in all sorts of legal proceedings around his lies about Paula Jones and sexual harassment and the like and it really never ended up hurting him politically because there was a perception That it was kind of a witch hunt, that that was about his personal life.
Whether you agree with that or not, Americans care about their material well-being, and these crimes are not the kind of crimes that they typically get angry about in terms of involving violence or embezzlement or bribery.
These are all very classical political crimes that involve, at best, dubious interpretations of law, and people seem to be perceiving that.
Now let's look at the indictment itself.
As I said, it was released only within the last hour before we came onto our show.
So I'm not going to report to do an in-depth dive into this indictment because that would be a disservice for me to do so without taking the necessary time.
But I was able to discern a pretty good amount.
I obviously read the indictment through twice.
I was able to Based on my prior knowledge of what this indictment was likely to be, able to draw some conclusions that I think are based in some pretty confident and reliable facts.
So let's look at what we do know.
Here you see it.
It is from the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, and it is filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, which means if it goes to trial, It will be tried with a jury of residents of the District of Columbia, unlike the document case, the one alleging that Donald Trump harbored top secret documents at Mar-a-Lago, which would be tried before a Florida jury.
They already had that other case in New York that will be tried before a Manhattan jury.
So there's a very good chance Donald Trump will be convicted on one of these or more of these charges.
And there's no guarantee this is the last one coming.
As I said, liberals were really hoping for this sweeping indictment that accused Trump of being guilty of treason, basically, of being part of an insurrection, of inciting an insurrection.
And it doesn't do that.
It doesn't allege that he incited violence at the Capitol.
It doesn't charge him with crimes pertaining to violence at the Capitol.
Instead, it essentially says that the claims he made repeatedly, both in public and in the courts, that the election results were the byproduct of fraud in the election were false.
That he knew them to be false, and that by conspiring with his lawyers like Rudy Giuliani and others, it named six, or it refers to six co-conspirators without naming them, although it seems clear we know who some of them are based on who meets the description, that it was a conspiracy to unlawfully obstruct the January 6th proceeding as well as the 2020 vote.
Now, how that is a crime, Is a very difficult question to answer.
So let me go show you the key paragraphs of what I think are the key paragraphs of the indictment based on my preliminary read of it.
So he's charged with four different counts.
So you see it on the screen.
Let's put the caption back on the screen.
Count one is conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Count two is conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.
Count three is obstruction of and attempts to obstruct an official proceeding, and count four is a conspiracy against voting rights, meaning an attempt to deny the voting rights of other people by falsely claiming the election was fraudulent.
Now, we covered on this show before, and it is very relevant to note that there have been a thousand people, a thousand people, criminally charged in connection with the January 6th riot.
The vast majority of them Are nonviolent.
By which I do not mean that I believe they didn't engage in violence.
What I mean by that is they're not alleged to have engaged in violence.
They're alleged to have entered the Capitol, to have believed that the election was the byproduct of fraud.
And yet, many of them have been charged with felonies, felonies, for nonviolent political protest.
And there has always been a question, how is it that people who, American citizens who are involved in nonviolent political protest, We've watched violent protests break out all throughout 2020.
And members of the Democratic Party often raise money for their bail.
And very few of them were actually charged with felonies or even misdemeanors unless they really harmed somebody through violence.
So the question is, how do you turn people who did not engage in violence or protesting an election into criminals?
And one of the ways they did that in the District of Columbia was by using a law that was enacted after the Enron Scandal involving this company that was apparently a huge success.
Paul Krugman was on his board making $50,000 a month or so.
And it turned out the whole thing was a Ponzi scheme.
And they enacted a law called Sarbanes-Oxley, after the Maryland Democratic Senator Paul Sarbanes, that made it a crime to obstruct official proceedings because they were attempting to make it a felony for people to block legal investigations into financial fraud the way they did with Enron.
And prosecutors in the January 6th case, the DOJ, took this proceeding and tried to say that they could use it to turn into felons people who were protesting at January 6th because they too have obstructed official proceedings.
The problem with that was it was an extremely dubious interpretation because there's nothing about the January 6th proceeding that's actually a substantive proceeding.
It's a purely ministerial act.
And ironically, the prosecution, in order to argue that that was a felony, had to essentially say that January 6th proceeding at the Capitol was a real decision-making ceremony, that it was not just ceremonial or ministerial to just that it was not just ceremonial or ministerial to just rubber stamp the certified voting results of the states, that the Senate really did have the right to reject the electorates if they had wanted, which ironically is the view of Trump and his lawyers that they were trying to get Mike Pence to
which ironically is the view of Trump and his lawyers that they were trying to get Mike Pence to adopt.
But nobody cared about the rights of the January 6th defendants. - Yes.
The Q shaman was sentenced to over four years in prison, even though he wasn't accused at all of committing crimes.
We saw what he did on January 6th.
It wasn't anything remotely violent or threatening, because the liberal establishment decided that this was one of the worst acts in American history.
It was an insurrection.
They were going to punish these people no matter what, regardless of legal niceties.
And that's very similar to what this indictment seems to me to be.
They're just so enraged that Trump claimed the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud that they're determined come hell or high water to indict him and criminalize him for it, even though it's far from obvious.
Even if you believe he did everything the indictment alleges to know what crime was committed by doing so.
So let's look at paragraph three of the indictment.
And it is a paragraph that is intended to say we acknowledge Trump had the right to do certain things and we want to make clear we are not prosecuting Trump for doing the things we acknowledge he had a right to do.
Quote, the defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim falsely That there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.
So, they're saying he was allowed to say, I'm the real winner of the 2020 election, there was fraud in this election that changed the results, even if what he was saying was false.
He has that right.
They acknowledge that.
A free speech right.
Quote, he was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states, or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures.
And of course, that's what Trump did as well.
And they're acknowledging he had the right to do that, even if the claims on which those challenges and lawsuits are based were false.
They go on, quote, Indeed, in many cases, the defendant did pursue these methods of contesting the election results.
His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.
So the question becomes, if you acknowledge that Trump had the right to do all of those things, how is it that you're able to file four federal felony counts against him?
In connection with his allegations that the election was the byproduct of fraud.
Here's what they say in paragraph four.
Quote,
1.
Number two, a conspiracy to corrupt, to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6th congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified in violation of 18 U.S.C.
1512.
And three, a conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one's vote counted in violation of 18 U.S.C. 241.
Now, if you spend your time reading this indictment as we did before the show, and again, I don't want to suggest I conducted an in-depth scholarly study of it because we didn't have the time to do that, but if you read it just on the first and second reading, you will see that there's very little substance to what they're claiming Trump did beyond the things they claim and acknowledge and concede he has the right to do.
Which has challenged the election, the results of the election, by claiming it was the byproduct of fraud.
They use a lot of accusatory words.
A conspiracy to use unlawful means.
They talk about the attempt to overturn the results in Arizona and Wisconsin.
They talk about the pressure put on Mike Pence to reject the electorates presented at the January 6th hearing.
It's unclear, within the scope of what they've conceded he has the right to do, any of that encompass that went beyond what they acknowledge he had the legal right to do.
He tried to overturn the Wisconsin and Arizona results through the lawful means of suing in court and trying to speak with people in those states to gather evidence that fraud was committed.
And with regard to the attempt to convince Mike Pence to reject the electorates, he had lawyers telling him that those theories were valid, that Pence had that power.
They cite things that were Trump-admitted.
This seems kind of crazy, but that's hardly a proof that you know you're engaging in fraud.
That seems kind of crazy, but it seems like the lawyers are right.
So I don't want to sit here and Vigorously defend Trump from this indictment.
But what I'm telling you is that if you're going to indict the former president of the United States, the person who is currently the leading oppositional figure to the incumbent president, you need to have very solid ground for doing so.
That was our claim about the ridiculous, preposterous, laughable Alvin Bragg indictment in Manhattan.
What I acknowledge is the stronger but still frivolous claim that he committed felonies by holding classified documents that he had every right to declassify had he wanted to, given how often in Washington, every single day, you can pick up the Washington Post or the New York Times and see that people are leaking classified information without authorization because it serves their interest to do so.
People in Washington are never convicted or charged with crimes for doing this sort of thing Trump did in that case or the one in Manhattan, nor is this even close to a strong indictment.
And I think they're playing with huge fire by piling up these criminal indictments in a way that polls already show at least half of the voting electorate perceives to be abusive and politicized to the point that it's strengthening Trump when they do so because they don't really have very compelling evidence that he committed serious crimes of the type that justify bringing these charges against him in the context of how politicians are usually treated.
And I think we should think about what our media would be saying, what our establishment would be saying, if in some other country that was a country we're taught to dislike, in Russia, Iran, or Venezuela, or whomever, where they do actually have elections, if
The government in place looked at polling data that showed there was an oppositional politician gaining popularity.
This is what it said about Putin and Alvani, for example.
And the government is, instead of engaging them in debate or trying to defeat them in elections, instead putting them in prison on dubious charges.
I watched that happen here in Brazil twice.
In 2017, former president Lula da Silva was leading all polls by significant margins at a time when the Brazilian establishment wanted to get rid of Lula and his party because they were hoping to get a center-right party in place that they've loved forever and couldn't get.
And so they impeached the president from Lula's party.
They then put Lula in prison.
And instead of getting the center-right establishment candidate they thought they were getting, they instead got Bolsonaro.
And then when Bolsonaro was president, they knew that there was only one person who could defeat Bolsonaro, and they were desperate to get Bolsonaro out of office, so they let Lula out of prison.
Our reporting was credited for that, and they did use our reporting as a pretext for it, but they would never let him out of prison had they not needed him to defeat Bolsonaro.
They would have kept him in prison despite that evidence.
They let him out of prison.
He beat Bolsonaro by less than two points, despite all of the same things aligned against Bolsonaro.
The entire media, COVID, allegations of criminality.
And in less than a year of Lula winning that election, in less than six months, in fact, courts have already declared Bolsonaro ineligible to run again for the next eight years until he's 78 or something. 76.
So they already got rid of Bolsonaro using legal means just like they got rid of Lula.
This is becoming the standard tool of the establishment in Western democracies throughout the world.
And that is clearly what's happening here.
Now, one of the things I want to remind you of, because so much of this has been forgotten, Is that we're so often told that Trump's allegations about the 2020 election being invalid and the byproduct of fraud is some sort of grave and horrific attack on American democracy, as was his attempt to arrange for an alternative slate of electorates based on his view that the state election results that had been certified were the byproduct of fraud or were inaccurate.
Let's remember that after Trump won the 2016 election and was certified as the winner, The Democrats came up with a theory called the Faithless Electorate, or Elector, where they went on a campaign to try and convince the electors elected by each state, including especially the ones who Trump had won, the states where he had won, to abandon Trump and vote for Hillary Clinton or some other
candidate instead in order to ensure that Hillary Clinton won the election despite having lost the electoral vote.
They tried to subvert the legitimate outcome of that election.
Here's a PBS report that details what the Democrats were trying to do with persuading electorates to vote faithlessly, meaning against the voting outcome of their states where they had been elected as electorates.
Back in this country, President-elect Donald Trump is now one step closer to officially sealing his victory.
But the debate over the value of the Electoral College has intensified this year, in part because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote By almost 3 million votes.
William Brangham has our report.
At the Maryland Statehouse in Annapolis today, a rare sight for our cameras.
Members of the Electoral College gathering to cast their official votes for president and vice president.
I vote today for Hillary Rodham Clinton.
After a simple roll call vote, Maryland's 10 electors have spoken and certified the official results for the state.
Hillary Clinton swept Maryland on Election Day, and, as expected, she received all 10 electoral votes.
In just 40 minutes, more than a year of presidential campaigning comes to an end.
But it's not just here in Maryland.
Across the country today, electors from all 50 states and the District of Columbia gathered to do the same, from Pennsylvania and Virginia, To Colorado and Michigan.
Even Bill Clinton is an elector in New York.
Now, in most years, no one pays much attention to this process.
The Electoral College vote is something of an afterthought.
But this time, electors have been under a lot of pressure.
Some even received hate mail and death threats because some voters wanted them to change their votes and deny Donald Trump the presidency.
All right, did you hear that?
There were leading Democratic pundits and leading Democratic politicians leading a campaign to coerce and pressure the duly elected electors of each state to abandon the outcome of that state and to switch their vote to deny Donald Trump his legally earned victory in 2016.
Nobody was charged with crimes for doing that.
Nobody was charged with trying to obstruct The legal proceedings of the electorate vote, of the elector vote, of the electorate college, electoral college, even though some of them were getting death threats and all sorts of demands as a result of that campaign, not led by Twitter trolls, but led by prominent Democratic pundits, to try and get them to abandon the certified vote total and vote against Trump and for Hillary or some other candidate besides Trump so that Hillary would end up winning the electoral college.
We all know the White House hinges on that magical 270 number.
That's the simple majority of 538 electoral votes.
It's a number Mr. Trump clearly reached on election night.
The Associated Press is calling Wisconsin, so that puts him over the top.
Donald Trump is the next president of the United States.
That's the theory, at least, because most states have laws that bind electors to cast their vote according to the popular vote in their state.
If they don't, they can be replaced or punished with a fine.
But some states do allow for what's called faithless electors, and they can vote for whomever they want, regardless of how their state voted on election day.
Now, these faithless electors are pretty rare.
There have only been about 160 in history, and they have never flipped the outcome of an election.
To have upended Trump's victory this year, it would have taken 37 electors to change their votes, and that didn't happen.
There were a handful of would-be defectors this year, including ones in Georgia and Texas.
They chose to resign as electors rather than vote for Mr. Trump.
They were replaced by Trump supporters.
But only one Republican had come out publicly as a faithless elector, Chris Supran from Texas.
I'm not voting for Donald Trump because I don't think he is the right man for the job.
And Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, who briefly ran for president as a Democrat this year, argues electors have a moral obligation to vote their conscience.
Our goal is to let the electors exercise their judgment.
The Electoral College was made for this election precisely.
But Trump's incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, says these efforts are just sour grapes.
It's about Democrats that can't accept the outcome of the election.
It's about... Alright, so you see there the tone is much, much different.
They're not indignant.
They're not warning that the pillars of democracy are coming crashing down upon us, even though That was a very serious effort to the point that newly elected electors in these states were being...
Targeted with death threats and all sorts of pressure campaigns to abandon their outcome because they wanted to duly change the results, change the results, the duly elected results of the 2016 election to elect Hillary Clinton, even though she lost that election.
They began calling Donald Trump the illegitimate president, saying that he didn't legitimately win the election.
There were Democrats standing up and trying to object to the certification like they did in 2004, like they did in 2000.
And all of that was considered totally normal until 2020 when suddenly or 26 2020 when suddenly attempts to object to how the election was carried out was now considered criminal.
I can show you a video of leading Democrats in 2016 and 20 in 2004 and in 2000 alleging fraud in the election and refusing to certify the outcome of the election on the equivalent of January 6th.
And nobody thought they were criminals.
Nobody suggested that they had done anything wrong.
Now, here is a Politico article about that campaign that you see from Politico, Democratic presidential electors revolt against Trump.
Some of them actually responded to this campaign.
At least, quote, at least a half dozen Democratic electors have signed on to an attempt to block Donald Trump from winning an electoral college majority, an effort designed not only to deny Trump the presidency, but also to undermine the legitimacy of the institution.
The presidential electors, mostly former Bernie Sanders supporters who hail from Washington State and Colorado, are now lobbying their Republican counterparts in other states to reject their oaths, and in some cases state law.
to vote against Trump when the Electoral College meets on December 19.
Here from Reuters was a report on the ultimate outcome.
Trump wins Electoral College.
A few electors break ranks.
Republican Donald Trump prevailed in the U.S. Electoral College voting on Monday to officially win election as the next president, easily dashing a long shot pushed by a small movement of detractors to try to block him from gaining the White House.
Trump, who was set to take office on January 20th, garnered more than 270 electoral votes required to win, even as at least a half a dozen U.S. electors broke with tradition to vote against their own state's directives.
The largest number of faithless electors seen in more than a century.
The Electoral College vote is normally a formality, but took on extra prominence this year after a group of Democratic activists sought to persuade Republicans to cross lines and vote for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
She won the nationwide popular vote, even though she failed to win enough state-by-state votes in the acrimonious November 8 election.
So, I will tell you that when you're at the indictment stage, it is very easy for a prosecutor to obtain an indictment.
And it very well may be the case that by bringing this case in Washington, D.C.
that's 90% Democrat, and by bringing that first one in Manhattan that is 75 or 80 or 85% Democrat, maybe even more, they definitely have a good chance to convict Donald Trump.
But they are playing with fire here.
If you think that half the country that already perceives almost every leading institution of authority to be fundamentally and institutionally corrupted He's just going to sit by while what they perceive to be happening, which is that the law is being radically abused by the incumbent president to criminalize and put in prison his leading oppositional candidate, someone that polls show has a very good chance of being elected by the American people in 2024.
And they're just going to sit back and take that in the context of this perception that already exists.
That our institutions are against them, that the elite authorities in the United States are radically corrupted to try and subvert their interests and to make Democrats win no matter what, to try and censor them, to take away their political rights?
When you start trifling with the foundations of democracy like this, when you start taking away the things that people believe or the things that give them the only outlet to have an effect on their society and change what they're dissatisfied with, You're essentially telling them that they have no more democratic means to use as an expression for their anger.
And that's when you start inciting all sorts of violent action, which is what you saw on January 6th.
And what we're starting to see in all sorts of ways as the country gets more and more polarized.
And if you don't have a legal system in place, a Justice Department that people can at least trust, is somewhat fairly administering the law and people now really believe that there is a concerted effort to give up on trying to defeat Donald Trump and simply indict him and imprison him using the Biden Justice Department to the point where he's going to be in prison and unable to run.
I think the effects are going to be a lot worse than whatever their worst nightmare is about a Trump victory.
We're heading down a very dangerous path.
When almost every institution of authority is held in extremely low regard, from the media, to the Justice Department, to the US intelligence community, to large corporations, all of whom are perceived as being willing to cheat against the interests of the American people who don't agree with their views, that people are being censored systemically, and being silenced in all sorts of ways, and they're right about that, they're right to think those things, those institutions are radically corrupted.
I don't think we know what the outcome is going to be.
I just know that it's going to be one of instability and rage and increasingly anti-democratic efforts to try and fight back.
So we will continue to report on this indictment.
We're going to try and take some more time over the next day or two to delve even further into the substance of it, to speak to some people who are experts in these specific laws to keep informing you.
But I do want to talk about a related issue, which is the extent to which the FBI has become even more brazenly willing to abuse its political power for all sorts of politicized ends.
I want to begin with, there was a case this week I mentioned at the top called the Newberg Four that I had been reporting on since back in 2010 when I was at Salon Magazine and I was covering the abuses of the War on Terror.
Remember, the abuses, the civil liberties abuses carried out under the War on Terror were the reason I started writing about politics in the first place under the Bush and Cheney administration, then continued by the Obama administration.
And this was a case in which I focused most because the FBI was doing this constantly during that first War on Terror.
And I have to say, not a lot of Republicans cared.
It was aimed principally at Muslim Americans.
I think a lot of people on the right have come to realize that allowing the U.S.
security state, under the War on Terror, to claim excessive powers and not question what they were saying, as long as it was being done with the excuse that they were fighting Muslim extremism, was a mistake.
Because a lot of the theories they are now using, a lot of the structures that are now in place, are in place because people allowed it to be in the name of fearing terrorism and extremism after 9/11.
And these same theories and tactics are now being used domestically as part of the second war on terror, in particular the FBI fabricating and manufacturing their own crimes to justify this exaggerated claim of the threat of domestic extremism in the United States.
So Joe Rogan had on the comedian Jim Gaffigan on Friday night, on his Friday night program, We were going to talk about this last night and ran out of time, so we do want to show it to you now.
In which Rogan tries to say he believes, with pretty good reason, that the FBI had some role to play in the events of January 6th.
And there's no doubt that they had some role to play.
And we're going to show you the reports from places, even like the New York Times, that admit that they did.
But I want you to see the reaction of Jim Gaffigan, who believes he's this very informed and good-natured American liberal, who clearly has been feeding on CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times.
You can tell by everything he says.
And he's aghast at the suggestion that the U.S.
security state would ever do anything like try and take a peaceful protest at the January 6th Capitol and make it a little bit more violent in order to blame Trump for it, in order to render Trump A criminal in order to claim there's an insurrectionary movement in the United States that requires extreme powers in the hands of the FBI to combat.
So I found this discussion extremely informative, particularly because of the reaction of Gaffigan.
So let's watch some of this.
I think the January 6th thing is pretty bad.
Well, the January 6th thing is bad, but also the intelligence agencies were involved in provoking people to go into the Capitol building.
That's a fact.
So wait a minute, you're saying that that guy, what's his name?
Ray Epps?
Yeah, you really think that he was- I don't know.
I don't know, but I do know that every other- I think that's pretty apparent.
I think he's gonna sue Fox.
I think every other person who was involved in January 6th, who was involved in coordinating a break-in into the Capitol and in instigating people break-in, they were all arrested.
This guy wasn't.
Not only that, they were defending him in the New York Times, the Washington Post, all those different things, saying that Fox News has unjustly accused him of instigating.
Well, he clearly instigated.
He did it on camera.
I don't know if he was a Fed.
I know a lot of people think he was a Fed.
The people that were there were calling him a Fed.
What I do know is when they asked the FBI, the FBI said, we can't tell you whether or not there were people that were there that were doing that.
Now there's been reports that there's hundreds of agents that were there that were doing that.
I don't know if that's true either.
But I do know that they do use agent provocateurs to disrupt peaceful protests.
It's a common tactic.
What they do is say if there's a, like the World Trade Organization is a great example.
That was in, I think, the 90s in Seattle.
And so what they did was, they were protesting the World Trade Organization.
They were doing it peacefully.
It was a big problem.
So what they did is, they sent in, allegedly, agent provocateurs.
They started smashing buildings and lighting things on fire.
Now it's not a peaceful protest.
Now they can bring in the police.
Now they can start arresting people and then they created a no protest zone where literally if you had a pin on your jacket that was the WTO with a red line through it, they would not let you cross.
You could not cross with a pin that was against the WTO and go to work.
There was a no protest zone.
So they silenced protest, which is a part of our freedom of speech.
So this is a tactic that some government agencies use to stop peaceful protest.
So what you're saying is on January 6th.
So Joe Rogan just sat there and spent three minutes correctly, and I mean only partially, explaining what the FBI has been doing in this country for decades.
They infiltrate groups they regard as anti-establishment or in some other way threatening, and they use agent provocateurs.
They purposely try and persuade people who are otherwise peaceful to commit violence in order to malign and demean those groups, to turn them into violent groups that they can then arrest, even though their original interest in them is their political views.
Or to claim that there's a much greater threat of violent extremism in the United States so that people turn to the FBI and give the FBI more powers in the name of being protected.
Wanting to be protected is a natural human instinct.
If you can scare the population into believing that there's all these different groups out there committing violence in the name of their political agenda, people will say, please FBI, do whatever you have to, save us.
And one way they accomplish that is by infiltrating these groups, which we know they have done.
There has been ample reporting on it.
I've done a lot of the reporting.
And they implant people in these groups who they control, often people who they catch in other crimes and who are desperate to avoid prison and are willing to serve the FBI however they can in order to stay out of prison.
And these are unscrupulous people.
These are career criminals.
Who know that they have to prove their value and use to the FBI by going into these groups and getting these people in these groups to agree to commit crimes or otherwise commit violence or commit the violence themselves as part of these groups.
And take what might have been a slightly violent group and turn them more violent or take a peaceful group and turn them violent.
And what Rogan is saying is that there's a lot of evidence that the FBI was infiltrated these groups.
We know for a fact that they have.
And that it is a common technique that they use.
And in response to hearing all of that, this Jim Gaffigan cannot process anything that he just heard.
He just knows the FBI is good.
He can't believe this could have happened.
And so he just resorts to what CNN has put into his head about how the real bad guys in January 6th are clearly Donald Trump.
That uh this event that obviously Trump organized forget about the Giuliani stuff and the uh you know whether they thought that it was he definitely encouraged people to protest yes but all right so you're saying that like the the FBI and Nancy Pelosi and I'm not saying Nancy Pelosi no but like you're saying that like they're like you know
We'll make this, instead of an awkward protest, we'll encourage it so that it'll backfire on Trump, rather than being this rising of people that believe that there was election corruption.
I think it's certainly possible.
I think that would be hard.
You think it's possible?
I think it's possible!
Wait a minute, you think it's hard to do?
I think that, you know, that the FBI or the CIA saying, you know, Trump lost this election, because here's what you're kind of implying.
Trump lost the election.
He is such an amazing communicator, and he's convinced this loyal base that there was election interference.
We don't want them to protest.
How we can end this Yeah.
is if we encourage people to go beyond protesting to essentially go into the Capitol and take a shit in the hallway.
I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit.
But like, I don't see why that would be of use.
I mean, do you see?
He just has to believe that it's Trump that's the problem.
That's all his brain can process.
you know, for the Capitol Police.
You know what I mean?
It's like...
I mean, do you see he just has to believe that it's Trump that's the problem.
That's all his brain can process, not the FBI.
Now, in addition to the reason Joe Rogan gave, which is that you would want to take these groups and turn them into violent groups so that you can crush them and arrest them, which is something you can't do if you only hate them because of their political views, something the FBI has done continuously, the bigger reason that's not part of this discussion something the FBI has done continuously, the bigger reason that's not part of this discussion about why the FBI would have a
It's because even before January 6th, the Biden administration's priority, and this has been reported in the Wall Street Journal, they have talked about this openly, was to have as their priority a domestic war on terror, targeting domestic extremists.
Remember, the position of the U.S.
security state under the Biden administration, and even before, was that the number one threat to American national security is not ISIS or Al Qaeda or Russia or Iran or North Korea.
Or China or any other foreign threat.
It is American extremists.
And if you can convince people of that, if you can convince, the key to the U.S.
security state is and always has been, you need to scare people into believing that there's such a grave threat that is after them, that you have to allow them powers to spy, to operate in secrecy, to censor.
And so how better to do that?
How better to put the country in a legal footing where there's an insurrection that they face and have to crush?
That inflaming what happened on January 6, knowing that people were going to descend on the Capitol and having informants on the ground that were there to incite people to do it.
This person can't believe that this could happen.
The FBI is a noble institution.
They would never do such a thing.
He can't comprehend it.
And this is what they've conditioned most American liberals to think.
This is how they think now.
You can see it in the polling data.
I've shown it to you before.
Overwhelmingly, Democrats hold the CIA, FBI, and Homeland Security in very high regard.
They trust those institutions because those institutions have said, we are on your side in fighting domestic extremists.
And this is a perfect liberal cartoon, a caricature.
Maybe he used to be an interesting commentator.
I don't know.
Some people seem to like him.
But this is what the Trump era did to people.
It convinced them that we were under the threat of the new Hitler.
And you can see his brain only can go back to, but what about Trump?
But what about Trump?
But what about Trump?
As of the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, and NSA have never been a meaningful threat in the United States before.
No, let me just show you, even if you look at the four quarters of the New York Times and you know nothing else about January 6th other than what the New York Times has been willing to admit, let me show you what they have admitted about January 6th and the FBI.
Here is an article.
Let's pull that up from November of 2022.
The headline is, listen to this headline, FBI had informants in the Proud Boys, court papers suggest.
In filings in the seditious conspiracy case against members of the far-right group, defense lawyers claim that information favorable to their clients was improperly withheld by the government until recently.
According to the FBI, according to the US government, there were three groups primarily responsible for organizing the January 6th protest, and they ended up being accused of and convicted of sedition against the United States.
The Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters.
For years, the FBI has been warning that those three groups are extreme dangers to the United States.
It is inconceivable That the FBI didn't have multiple informants and all other kinds of way of monitoring these groups well before January 6th, which leads to the question, if these three groups were the primary groups organizing January 6th and intended to commit an insurrection, how is it possible that the FBI that had multiple tentacles inside these groups did not know beforehand?
That is impossible.
Here's what the New York Times says in its report.
Quote, the FBI had as many as eight informants inside the far right Proud Boys in the months surrounding the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
Recent court papers indicate raising questions about how much federal investigators were able to learn from them about the violent mob attack, both before and after it took place.
Here's an article from five months earlier in the New York Times, September of 2021, entitled, Among those who marched into the Capitol on January 6th, an FBI informant.
A member of the far-right Proud Boys texted his FBI handler during the assault but maintained the group had no plan in advance to enter the Capitol and disrupt the election certification.
Quote, as scores of Proud Boys made their way chanting and shouting toward the Capitol on January 6th, one member of the far-right group was busy texting a real-time account of the march.
The recipient was his FBI handler.
In the middle of an unfolding melee that shook the pillar of American democracy and the peaceful transfer of power, the Bureau had an informant in the crowd providing an inside glimpse of the action, according to confidential records obtained by the New York Times.
In the informant's version of events, the Proud Boys, famous for their street fights, were largely following a pro-Trump mob consumed by a herd mentality rather than carrying out any type of pre-planned attack.
Now, one of two things has to be true.
Either the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters set out to plan a well-thought-through, premeditated insurrection and sedition campaign, which is what they've been accused and convicted of doing, in which case, how is it possible that the FBI, with all of its tentacles in these groups, spying on these groups, with informants in them, could not have known in advance about those plans?
This FBI informant is telling the truth, and it was just a spontaneous kind of joining of mob mentality, and there was no pre-planned use of violence, in which case, how is this an insurrection or sedition?
They're completely contradictory, but if you look just at the New York Times, let alone independent media or more honest media, you will see the evidence that the FBI had its hooks in all of these groups.
And the fact that we know for certain That the FBI regularly and routinely uses these tactics has been demonstrated for many years.
So I mentioned this Newberg Four case that I had reported on at the time.
I've been disgusted and outraged by this case for years.
They targeted four young, poor, emotionally unstable, very uneducated Muslim Americans.
They used this unscrupulous, scummy FBI informant who'd been caught up in other crimes to lure them into crimes that the federal judge herself said they would never have committed.
They would never have joined this plot.
They would never have thought of this plot or any other plot absent being prodded and encouraged By the FBI.
She criticized the FBI from the beginning for inventing their own plot.
But was unfortunately constrained because the law of entrapment has been so narrow that even if you prove that the FBI was the proximate cause of the plot, the creator of the plot, the driver of the plot, the entity that caused you to join the plot, you still can't raise the entrapment defense.
And so she had no choice but to convict them, even though she was expressing her disgust for the FBI along the way she did it.
And she finally released them just on humanitarian grounds because she knows how much they don't deserve to be in prison.
Here's what the New York Times reported.
There you see the headline, Judge orders release of three of the Newburgh four criticizing the FBI.
Judge Colleen McMahon of the FBUS District Court suggested that the federal agency had invented A conspiracy.
Quote, the federal judge on Thursday ordered the, quote, compassionate release of three Hudson Valley men who were part of a group known as the Newburgh Four after finding that FBI agents had used an unscrupulous operative to persuade them to join a plot to blow up synagogues and bring down military planes more than a decade ago.
During the trial, a fourth defendant, James Cromide, was presented as being a key player in the plot.
Though Judge McMahon seemed most aggrieved by Shahid Hussain, a longtime FBI informant, the decision by Judge Colin McMahon of the United States District Court in Manhattan was scathing in its description of the methods used by the FBI in its pursuit of the three.
Owntop Williams, Laguerre Payen, and David Williams, calling the plot in which they were convicted of participating in 2010, quote, an FBI-orchestrated conspiracy.
Quote, a person reading the crime as a conviction in this case would be left with the impression that the offending defendants were sophisticated international terrorists committed to jihad against the United States, Judge McMahon wrote.
Quote, however, they were in actual reality hapless, easily manipulated, and nerdiest petty criminals.
In the Newburgh case, Judge McMahon wrote that Mr. Hussein, whom she described as most unsavory, had lured Mr. Chromighty in 2007, quote, with promises of both heavenly and earthly rewards, including as much as $250,000 if he would plan and participate in and find others to participate in a jihadist mission.
So they picked impoverished people, Intellectually unsophisticated and mentally unwell, offered them $250,000, used FBI experts, psychologist experts on how to manipulate people, got them to join a plot they never would have thought of on their own, broke up the plot, congratulated themselves for doing so, told Americans there was a huge terrorist threat, and then sent these people to prison for 25 years.
Quote, after waffling for months, Mr. Cremati recruited the other three defendants.
Though none had any history as terrorists, and instead were, quote, impoverished small-time grifters and drug users, street-level dealers who could use some money, the judge wrote.
The three men were recruited so that Cromartie could conspire with someone.
The real conspirator, the real conspirator, the real lead conspirator, said the judge, was the United States.
Their plan, encouraged and orchestrated by Mr. Hussein, was to bomb Jewish sites in the Bronx and fire Stinger missiles at military planes at Stewart Airport near Newburgh, New York.
Bombs were, in fact, left outside the synagogues in the Riverside section of the Bronx, but they were fakes built by the FBI.
The FBI invented the conspiracy, identified the targets, manufactured the ordinance, Judge McCann wrote, adding that officials had, quote, federalized the charges, ensuring long prison sentences by driving several of the men across state lines into Connecticut to view the bombs.
bombs.
While Judge McMahon conceded the government had a legitimate interest in identifying and capturing terrorists, she was unsparing in her criticisms, saying that the defendants, quote, never could have dreamed up such serious criminal acts on their own.
She also suggested that the government had undermined, quote, respect for the law by sending a villain like Hussein to troll among the poorest and weakest of men.
With quote, an offer of much needed cash in exchange for committing a faux crime.
Had the government not contrived its elaborate sting operation, it is highly likely that the defendants would have simply lived out their lives in Newburgh.
Quite possibly doing life on the installment plan as they cycled in and out of jail for a string of petty offenses, she wrote, but never committing a crime remotely like what they became involved in.
Do you hear that that's what the FBI does?
They commit their own crimes?
And I used to ask all the time during the war on terror when I was covering it, why if there's such a grave threat of domestic terrorists in the United States, does the FBI constantly need to invent its own plots?
And they're doing exactly the same thing now, only this time it's not aimed at Muslim Americans, it's aimed at your neighbors.
People who are perceived to have ideologies that are threatening to the establishment and make them domestic extremists, whether on the left or the right.
In July of 2021, I wrote exactly that article, there you see the title, quote, FBI using the same fear tactic from the first war on terror, Orchestrating its own terrorism plots.
And it was about the plot involving Gretchen Whitmer and questioning the FBI's role in 1-6.
As I wrote, questioning the FBI's role in January 6 was maligned by corporate media as deranged.
But only ignorance about the FBI or a desire to deceive could produce such a reaction.
And I wrote then about that case.
I talked about several cases where the FBI got caught in egregious conduct.
Creating their own crimes and luring people into it.
And when these people get sent to prison, they get sent to prison as terrorists, which means they don't go to any prison.
They go to prison, special prisons, created after 9-11, to be extremely repressive.
Just like the January 6th defendants were treated like insurrectionists, including the ones who didn't use violence, and were put in solitary confinement, pending trial.
A four and a half year sentence for the Q shaman who didn't get near violence because liberals were demanding the head on the pike of people involved in January 6th and because they're eager to criminalize the Trump movement by turning it into an insurrectionary movement.
They're inventing criminality in the Trump cases and in these cases.
So let me just review for you what I wrote about the Newburgh 4 case back in 2021 before the judge this year just now finally ordered the release of these defendants.
Quote, one of the most egregious cases I covered was the 2011 arrest of James Cromighty, an African-American convert to Islam who the FBI attempted to convince over the course of eight months to join a terror plot only for him to adamantly refuse over and over Only once they dangled a payment of $250,000 in front of his nose, right after the impoverished American had lost his job, did he agree to join.
And then the FBI swooped in, arrested him, and touted their heroic efforts in stopping a terrorist plot, one they had created.
The U.S.
federal judge who sentenced Chromighty to decades in prison, Colleen McMahon, said she did so only because the law of entrapment is so narrow that it is virtually impossible for a defendant to win.
But in doing so, she repeatedly condemned the FBI in the harshest terms for single-handedly converting Chromighty from a hapless but resentful and anti-government fanatic into a criminal.
In other words, they targeted Chromighty because he was poor and jobless, but also because he had expressed anti-government views before.
She said the defendant, quote, was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own.
She said, adding, quote, only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromighty, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.
She added, quote, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that James Cromighty could never have dreamed up the scenario in which he actually became involved.
Now, there are so many cases like this, if you look at This study from Mother Jones in September of 2011 entitled The Informants.
It collects a lot of data about how often the FBI did this.
It's called The Informants.
And you see the sub-headline, the FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another domestic terrorist attack.
But are they busting terrorist plots or leading them?
And the answer was, they're leading them.
Quote, ever since 9-11, counter-terrorism has been the FBI's number one priority, consuming the lion's share of its budget, $3.3 billion, compared to $2.6 billion for organized crime, and much of the attention of field agents and a massive nationwide network of informants.
They have an army of informants that they can target people with at any time, based on their political views.
After years of emphasizing informant recruiting as a key task for its agents, the Bureau now maintains a roster of 15,000 spies.
Many of them tasked, as Hussein was, with infiltrating Muslim communities in the United States, now its right-wing extremist groups.
In addition, for every informant officially listed in the Bureau's records, there are as many as three unofficial ones, according to one former high-level FDI official known in Bureau parlance as hip pockets, meaning they have them in their pocket to use at any time against anyone they want to criminalize.
Throughout the FBI's history, informant numbers have been closely guarded secrets.
Periodically, however, the Bureau has released them.
A Senate Oversight Committee in 1975 found the FBI had 1,500 informants.
In 1980, officials disclosed there were 2,800.
Six years later, following the FBI's push into drugs and organized crimes, the number of Bureau informants ballooned to 6,000.
And according to the FBI, the number grew significantly after 9-11.
In its fiscal year 2008 budget, the FBI disclosed it had been working under a new November 2004 presidential directive demanding an increase in, quote, human source development and management.
And that it needed $12.7 million for a program to keep tabs on its spy network and create software to track and manage them.
The bureau's strategy has changed significantly from the days when officials feared another coordinated, internationally financed attack from an al-Qaeda sleeper stealth.
Today, counterterrorism experts believe groups like al-Qaeda, battered by the war in Afghanistan and the efforts of the global intelligence community, have shifted to a franchise model, using the internet to encourage sympathizers to carry out attacks in their name.
The main domestic threat, as the FBI sees it, is a lone wolf.
The Bureau's answer has been a strategy known variously as preemption, prevention, and disruption, identifying and neutralizing potential loan walls before they move to action.
To that end, FBI agents and informants target not just active jihadists, but tens of thousands of law-abiding people seeking to identify those disgruntled few who might participate in the plot, given the means and the opportunity.
And then, in case after case, the government provides the plot, the means, and the opportunity.
So there's all kinds of data and all kinds of history of the FBI doing exactly that which Joe Rogan tried to explain to that guest the FBI almost certainly did in the wake of January 6th, and the only question is the extent to which they've been doing it.
Now, as I said back in my salon days, here you see an article from 2011 entitled, The FBI Again Thwarts Its Own Terror Plot.
And I ask the question, are there so few actual terrorists that the FBI has to recruit them into manufactured attacks?
And there was actually an FBI whistleblower from the Committee of the Judiciary and the Senate Subcommittee on Weaponization that's been ongoing and that's been invaluable in uncovering all this information from March 18, 2023.
And this whistleblower talked about how FBI agents are given quotas and bonuses Based on how many terapods they can manufacture using exactly these kinds of informants.
Now all of this creates a clear and conclusive image of a U.S.
security state that is completely out of control.
Their attitude is that domestic extremism is the number one problem in the United States, that that justifies turning their resources inward, the U.S.
security state, and the number one problem they see is Trump and the Trump movement.
And just like they're willing to lie and invent plots to induce people and lure American citizens into plots that they would never have joined and send them to prison for decades to justify greater and greater power, You can argue about which of these three indictments has a little bit of validity, which one has less.
But no honest person denies, no honest person denies, that the liberal establishment in the United States is absolutely determined to turn Donald Trump into a criminal purely for political ends.
To send him to prison to damage his chances to win re-election in 2024.
I don't even think it's working.
I don't think it's going to work.
Because these kind of crimes are exactly the kind of crimes that people perceive as being political.
And if Donald Trump can successfully turn himself into a victim of persecution by an out-of-control, politicized Justice Department in a U.S.
security state that wants to cheat yet again in the election, and by yet again I mean the way they did in 2016 when they thought Bernie Sanders was going to win and they cheated for Hillary Clinton.
And in 2020, when the entire establishment, according to Time Magazine, had a covert clandestine plan to unite to defeat Donald Trump, there's a good chance all of this will backfire.
But regardless of the political implications, everyone should be deeply concerned by the politicization of the Justice Department and the legal system in general.
None of these indictments are serious indictments.
Most people will say, including Trump supporters, they think the strongest case by far is the one in Florida that alleges that he committed espionage by stealing and refusing to turn classified documents.
And maybe that's because they have greater sanctity, greater reverence for the sanctity of classified documents than I have.
I know that in Washington, classified documents are treated as a joke.
And the idea that Trump, who was the president, and had the power to access everything and declassify everything, somehow committed something on the level of a felony by taking documents to Mar-a-Lago, while the same media outlets that feign indignation trade classified information every day for purely political ends, is ludicrous to me.
But this first case in Manhattan is just an insult to everyone's intelligence, and based on my preliminary reading, This one seems on some level worse because it's not just frivolous, it's designed to essentially criminalize Trump for spreading what they regard as disinformation.
And disinformation is becoming their central weapon for controlling political discourse, for controlling the flow of information, and this seems to me to be the first attempt to criminalize it.
To admit on the one hand that Trump had the right to make false claims about the 2020 election if he wanted, but then on the other hand turn that into four felony counts Under some of the most serious criminal statutes that we have in the U.S.
Code.
So we will see how this plays out.
We will report on it more as this case evolves and as we're able to delve in a little bit further to the legal issues surrounding this indictment with more time.
But this whole picture is one that is very disturbing and I think is starting to create some serious backlash against the stability of American political life.
That concludes our show for this evening.
As I indicated, though, it's Tuesday night.
We will not be doing our Locals program just because of the necessity of how intense this preparation was to get this show ready with little time once the indictment came out.
But we will be back with our Locals after show on Thursday for those who want to Have access to that.
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