Politicized DOJ: Anti-Trump Law Professor Warns of Indictment Dangers. Plus: Is Biden's Ukraine Policy Compromised by Personal Interests? And Is Left v. Right Still Relevant? | SYSTEM UPDATE #126
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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, the fact that many of us are immersed in the daily news cycle can mean, on the one hand, that we're more informed, but on the other, this intense immersion sometimes results in extraordinary situations becoming rapidly normalized.
In the digital era, a news cycle of three weeks can feel like it's a full year, which means that our ability to take a step back and contemplatively evaluate events with in-depth analysis can be easily compromised.
To invoke a horrid cliche, one that applies here though, the speed of the flow of information and the intensity of the 24-7 news cycle can easily cause us to focus on individual trees at the expense of seeing the entire forest.
Such is the case with the fact that there are now three separate criminal indictments, and likely more to come, brought against former president and current frontrunner for the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump.
Two of those are federal indictments, which means they have been filed by an agency, the U.S.
Department of Justice, that works under the authority and power of the sitting American president, Joe Biden, who only narrowly defeated Trump in the certified electoral college results of 2020, despite a wide array of obstacles that could not have been any more unfavorable to an incumbent president, starting with the COVID pandemic and all the resulting economic harm that it fostered.
Trump is, no matter how you cut it, a direct political threat to the ability of Joe Biden to remain in political power.
The fact that Trump is now being prosecuted by the administration of Joe Biden, and not for classic or easily recognized crimes such as murder, bribery, extortion, or other forms of political corruption, but instead on charges that depend upon novel and dubious interpretations of law, That is an extraordinary set of events that has become quickly normalized as the result of a dissent-free media that treats these accusations as unquestionably valid and treats Trump as an already proven criminal.
An op-ed published today, remarkably by the New York Times, does one of the best jobs yet in illuminating how destabilizing and dangerous these indictments are likely to be.
Its author is a vocal Trump critic, Jack Oldsmith, who is a high-ranking official in the Bush Justice Department and is a long-time professor at Harvard Law.
He writes, quote, there's no getting around the fact that the indictment comes from the Biden administration.
When Mr. Trump holds a formidable lead in the polls to secure the Republican Party nomination and is running neck and neck with Mr. Biden, the Democratic Party's probable nominee.
We'll examine Professor Goldsmith's entire argument and the broader historical and political context whereby the D.C.
ruling class has eagerly and recklessly abandoned their longstanding view that only, quote, banana republics prosecute former presidents and opposition leaders for crimes of a political nature.
Then, the most unhinged, deranged, and evidence-free conspiracy theory in the last 20 years, the worst since Jeffrey Goldberg used the pages of the New Yorker in 2002 to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein had a secret alliance with Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, came not from boomer pages on Facebook, nor from the bowels of 4chan.
It came instead from the largest and most powerful media corporations.
For years, they recited as gospel A deranged script that was cooked up by the CIA that maintained that Russia had seized controls of the levers of American power through various forms of sexual, personal, and financial blackmail held over the head of Donald Trump, which Moscow then used to force Trump to do Putin's bidding at the expense of the interests of the United States.
They continue to insist on this conspiracy, even in the face of Trump's attacking the most vital Russian interests, such as when he reversed President Obama's decision and sent lethal arms to Ukraine in 2017, or then spent years badgering Germany to abandon Nord Stream 2.
Those are the most vital components of future Russian plans for economic growth, and Trump did everything in his power to sabotage them.
And the defenders of this conspiracy theory barely blinked, let alone apologize and issue retractions, when their Jack Smith of 2018, former Bush Cheney FBI Director Robert Mueller, closed his 18-month investigation without even mentioning, let alone vindicating, this laughable and paranoid McCarthyite tale.
In Newsweek today, political science professor Max Abrams asked a provocative question only half-tongue-in-cheek.
His article appears under this headline, quote, Does Ukraine have compromat on Joe Biden?
I always find it so amusing whenever our media class takes what are very common practices and uses the Russian term for them as though the Russians invented them, like calling blackmail kompromat, but that's the media discourse.
In this article, Professor Abrams argues with obviously compelling evidence that the case for suspecting Ukraine's leverage over Biden is far more credible than the fever swamp dream that Trump was controlled with sexual and financial blackmail by Putin.
Professor Abrams examines the multiple evidentiary basis for concluding that Joe Biden is vulnerable to all sorts of leverage that the Ukrainian government could wield over him, in large part due to the various ways that his son Hunter Biden profited enormously by selling at least a perception, if not the reality, of his father's influence in that country.
Abrams reviews the evidence now lost under a pile of intense partisan media denials that Biden's interference in Kiev, whereby he boasted of having a prosecutor filed, fired, directly benefited the gas company Burisma that was paying Biden's son roughly $80,000 a month.
We'll speak to Professor Abrams tonight about his argument and how, as is so often the case, the Biden administration is the living, breathing embodiment Of what Democrats breathlessly accused Trump and his administration of being.
So much of this points to a vital but often overlooked fact.
One of the central questions in American political life, if not the central question, is not whether someone is now on the right or the left in the sense of how those terms have been traditionally understood.
What is often more determinative is whether one sees this widespread, intense, and deep distrust of America's leading institutions of authority and believes that that distrust is valid and deserved.
In other words, the defining metric for placing someone on the political spectrum is not so much liberal versus conservative or Democrat versus Republican, but instead is whether one is pro-establishment or anti-establishment when it comes to the most powerful political and financial actors in this country.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
We have an extraordinary situation politically in the United States that has gone very underappreciated by the fact that the media has insisted on treating this as so normal and so natural and so justified that an appreciation for just how remarkable it is has started to very quickly arise.
A road.
Namely, the former president of the United States, the person who ran and governed the executive branch in the United States from 2017 until 2020, Donald Trump, who happens also to be the frontrunner in all polls to become the Republican nominee for president, and obviously in a polarized society like ours that is basically 50-50, gives him a very good chance to unseat the current incumbent president, Joe Biden, and win the presidency again.
He is being prosecuted in three different courts.
Two of which are federal prosecutions, which means that they are being brought and overseen by an agency, the Department of Justice, that answers directly to his political opponent, Joe Biden.
And a third prosecution, which has been brought in Manhattan by a district attorney who is openly a left liberal prosecutor.
His campaign was benefited greatly by a massive donation from George Soros to a PAC that ended up supporting Alvin Bragg's campaign for a Manhattan District Attorney and all three cases have something in common which is that they are not the kind of classic typical crimes one typically thinks merit prosecution.
Murder and rape and kidnapping and extortion or even political crimes of a kind that we are all conditioned to expect and want such as prosecutions for bribery other forms of political corruption.
Each of these cases ...requires a rather dubious interpretation of law.
In the case of the first prosecution in Manhattan and now this last prosecution in Washington based on the events around January 6th in the 2020 election, in order for the prosecution to even have a chance to bring Trump to trial, they will have to prevail by convincing a court to adopt an interpretation of law it had never previously adopted.
In other words, they are looking to pioneer the law to create brand new precedent as a way of prosecuting Trump.
The second indictment, which is the one in Mar-a-Lago, based on Trump's allegedly reckless handling of classified information, is the sort of thing for which people have been previously prosecuted, but it's also far more often behavior that does not prompt prosecutions, especially when engaged in by high-level, powerful political actors, every single day, literally.
Members of the media and members of the Biden administration engage in transactions that provoke and cause and celebrate the unauthorized disclosure of classified information and virtually never is there even investigations to find out who did it, let alone prosecutions for it, even though that involves the public disclosure of top secret information, because that is the stuff of which Washington is made.
It's the stuff that drives Washington every day, and yet Trump, who's not even accused Of having disclosed the information only recklessly maintained it, even though everybody agrees he had the unilateral and unreviewable power to declassify it, is being charged under the Espionage Act of 1917.
Regardless of your view of the merit or lack thereof in all three of these cases, we are undoubtedly, as we so often have been in the Trump era, faced with a genuinely unprecedented political situation, a historically unprecedented political situation, not due to the actions of Donald Trump,
but due to the actions of those unified against him in the name of sabotaging his presidency, his campaign, and his entire movement, essentially looking to criminalize not just Donald Trump, but Trump politics in general.
And earlier today, there was an op-ed in, of all places, the New York Times.
The New York Times will air a certain kind of dissent, provided that the person who wants to write the article has impeccable establishment credentials, and such is the case for the author of this op-ed.
His name is Jack Goldsmith.
He was a high level Member of the Bush Justice Department.
And even though he was part of a Republican administration, he ended up being very popular among the media because he was often very reluctant to endorse a lot of the more extreme theories of executive power that people like John Yoo and various lawyers of Dick Cheney were promoting.
He was kind of the person standing in the Justice Department saying, this goes too far.
In particular, when it came time for the Bush and Cheney administration to adopt and affirm a kind of warrantless eavesdropping, spying on American citizens that had clearly been criminalized and outlawed by the Congress.
Only for various extremist Bush Cheney lawyers to adopt a theory of presidential power that said basically the president can violate the law as long as doing so is justified in the name of terrorism.
It was Jack Goldsmith in the Bush Justice Department, along with a couple of others who were resistant to being able to do that.
So we gained a lot of trust, a lot of popularity among the corporate media at the time.
And he's also a very well-regarded professor of law at Harvard Law School.
So there's no questioning his credentials or his pedigree.
And so he's one of the very few people that is willing to use his credentials to insert dissent into our political discourse.
I've been somebody who has admired Professor Goldsmith for a long time.
We often have similar views, but certainly not always.
When I was writing about the Bush administration early on, I was often very critical of him.
And yet he's extremely smart, and I find him to be a person of very high integrity.
And he's clearly a...
Trump critic.
In fact, he's somebody who believes it's very reasonable, if not likely, that Trump committed crimes, at least in one of these cases, if not all three.
Nonetheless, he has an article in the New York Times today, an op-ed, warning, as the headline there suggests, quote, the prosecution of Trump may have terrible consequences.
And it tries to lure the New York Times reader into his argument by constantly affirming what he knows they believe, which is Trump is a bad person.
He acted horribly when it came to January 6th, and that even there may be components of his behavior that are not just morally offensive, but over the legal line.
He's willing to concede all that in order to nonetheless make this argument that I think is very well crafted.
And to be honest, I think it's something that even those of us who have been making this argument can sometimes lose sight of.
As I was saying at the beginning, in this kind of day-to-day frenzy of thinking about the news and every day there's a new development or a new event around Donald Trump or those united against him, it's easy sometimes to forget how Spectacular how remarkable it is that the current government is prosecuting their leading political opponent in two separate cases at least so far.
In order to put him into prison as we head into the election that will determine who will be president for the next four years.
That is a shocking situation for American politics, no matter views on Donald Trump or on the specific legal issues raised.
And here's the argument that he makes, quote, it may be satisfying now to see the special counsel, Jack Smith, indict Donald Trump for his reprehensible and possibly criminal actions in connection with the 2020 presidential election.
But the prosecution, which might be justified, reflects a tragic choice that will compound the harms to the nation from Mr. Trump's many transgressions.
Mr. Smith's indictment outlines a factually compelling but far from legally airtight case against Mr. Trump.
The case involves novel applications of three criminal laws and raises tricky issues of Mr. Trump's intent, his freedom of speech, and the contours of presidential power.
Now let me just stop here and say that when Jack Smith filed this indictment, he was very aware of all of those issues Professor Goldsmith just identified.
Remember that what liberals really wanted was a prosecution trying to convict President Trump on charges that he was the one who quote inspired or engineered what they still consider to be the insurrection of January 6th, namely the three hour riot.
And what they were hoping for was a theory that said, a prosecution theory that said, with the speech that Trump gave to that crowd that had assembled, he essentially directed them to go to the Capitol and engage in violence, and by doing so, he became responsible.
And it was very clear that that was not just a dubious, but a dangerous theory.
We devoted an entire show to explaining the contours of the First Amendment as defined by the landmark cases of the 20th century, particularly in the two cases of Brandenburg and Claiborne, that says essentially any form of political expression, even political expression that advocates the necessity for violence as a response to political injustice,
is protected by the Free Speech Clause as long as it does not lead to the imminent incitement of a gathered crowd.
Meaning, somebody says to a crowd gathered on a corner, go burn down that house, and they then go and burn down that house.
And of course, liberals hear that and they think Trump falls into that exception, but Trump told the crowd, let's march to the Capitol and do so peacefully.
You can just look at the transcript of Trump's speech, search for the word peacefully, and you will see that.
So it was almost impossible to bring a case based on that dream that liberals had that Trump would actually be accused of inciting what they call an insurrection.
Instead, he brought a case that does actually raise issues of free speech because the indictment is predicated on the view That Trump's claims that there was fraud, outcome-determinative fraud, in the 2020 election was both false and something Trump knew to be false.
So it's essentially a way to criminalize disinformation.
It's saying Trump spread disinformation, he then petitioned the government based on his false claim, and that is somehow a crime.
And what Jack Smith did, knowing that this was going to be an issue and one that the media was going to be forced to discuss, was he inserted a paragraph very early on in the indictment that said, obviously, even a president has the constitutional right to express views that are false.
And so every time somebody says this indictment is predicated on trying to criminalize President Trump's political speech, Idiots in the media and liberal activists will point to Jack Smith's paragraph and say, oh look, the prosecutor himself says it's not based on that.
Therefore, why do you keep saying it is when the indictment itself says it isn't?
Imagine the naivete and the ignorance required to believe that because a prosecutor Says something about his own theories of criminality and prosecution that they're binding on all of us to just mindlessly accept.
So because Jack Smith says this is not a case that infringes on free speech rights, automatically we're supposed to reject any claims that it is.
Here's Professor Goldsmith, as you can see, a very stalwart critic of President Trump and especially his behavior in connection with the 2020 election.
Pointing out that this indictment absolutely does raise pressing questions involving freedom of speech and his intent and the contours of presidential power, even though the prosecutor said in his indictment that's not the case.
Goldsmith goes on, quote, if the prosecution fails, especially if the trial concludes after a general election that Mr. Trump loses, it will be a historic disaster.
Imagine that.
Prosecution here, the Justice Department, the Biden Justice Department, through a special counsel, brings an indictment against President Trump.
Let's assume, as is very possible, that the trial doesn't happen before the election is held.
The election is held, Trump loses, and then at some point after that, The trial is held and Trump is acquitted.
Imagine what a historic and irretrievable disgrace that will be to the Justice Department.
Imagine how many millions of Americans will become even more convinced that the Justice Department is irredeemably corrupted and cannot be trusted.
Because they will have gotten what they wanted, which is Trump's defeat, by indicting him, only for then the trial to acquit him.
That is the gigantic risk that is being taken through this prosecution.
He continues, quote, but even if the prosecution succeeds in convincing Mr. Trump before or after the election, the cost to the legal and political systems will be large.
There is no getting around the fact that the indictment comes from the Biden administration when Mr. Trump holds a formidable lead in the polls to secure the Republican Party nomination and is running neck and neck with Mr. Biden, the Democratic Party's probable nominee.
This deeply unfortunate timing looks political and has potent political implications even if it is not driven by partisan motivations.
And it is the Biden administration's responsibility as its Justice Department reportedly delayed the investigation of Mr. Trump for a year and then rushed to indict him well into the GOP primary season.
The unseemliness of the prosecution will most likely grow if the Biden campaign or its proxies use it as a weapon against Mr. Trump if he is nominated.
Imagine And it's almost inevitable that it will happen.
That if, as all polls show, is highly likely Donald Trump is the Republican nominee and we head into the general election, a major theme of the Biden campaign of Democrats is going to be that Donald Trump is criminally charged by this heroic prosecutor.
So they will have brought charges using their power over the justice system to indict people, the Biden administration will, and then they will immediately exploit that, extract all the political value they have to gain from that by weaponizing those indictments in their political quest to defeat Donald Trump.
Just imagine the perception that that will create justifiably.
Goldsmith goes on, quote, this is all happening against the backdrop of perceived unfairness in the DOJ's earlier investigation originating in the Obama administration of Mr. Trump's connections to Russia in the 2016 general election.
Anti-Trump texts by the lead FBI investigator, a former FBI director who put Mr. Trump in a bad light through improper disclosure of FBI documents and information, transgressions by FBI and Justice Department officials in securing permission to surveil a Trump associate, and more, were condemned by the Justice transgressions by FBI and Justice Department officials in securing permission to surveil a Trump associate, and more, were condemned by the Justice Department's inspector general even "But it's not a good thing.
The discredited Steele dossier, which played a consequential role in the Russia investigation and especially its public narrative, grew out of opposition research by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Now, this is a perfect example of something that I think we, again, easily forget in the incessant tsunami of new political news, little bits that we're supposed to digest and keep us entertained.
The debacle that was Russiagate is, in my view, the greatest political scandal in the last two decades at least.
I was listening to a YouTube show that is hosted by a couple of left liberals, and because I don't remember the exact words that they said, I don't want to attribute it to them by name, but essentially the point that they were making was, look, Russiagate is over.
It's in the past.
It's time to forget about Russiagate.
And the fact that they acknowledge Russiagate was a fraud perpetrated by the FBI and the CIA doesn't mean that the current investigation or indictment of President Trump is equally invalid.
And the reason why that's preposterous is because the very same people and the very same agencies and the very same lawyers Operating with the exact same motives who foisted that gigantic fraud on the country.
It's like saying, OK, yes, the advocates of Biden's war policy in Ukraine, the people who are telling us what we should think about Russia and Ukraine, are the exact same people who have lied about and defended every war since Iraq, from Iraq to Syria to Libya and Afghanistan and beyond.
But that's all in the past.
We shouldn't think about that when deciding whether it's time to think whether they're reliable and genuine now.
Of course you use the political context.
To assess current events.
That's what history is for.
That's what this context is for.
I thought the other day about an article or multiple articles that reported on how when Robert Mueller closed his investigation without indicting one American, not one,
On the core conspiracy theory that gave rise to the Mueller investigation and the 18 months of intense media coverage and indictments and subpoenas and testimony and digging into records, not a single person indicted on the core conspiracy that the Trump campaign criminally conspired with the Russian government to hack into the DNC's emails or John Podesta's emails.
And when he further filed his report, Explicitly stating that after searching for 18 months with unlimited resources, with the dream team of prosecutors, with full subpoena power, that in the words of Robert Mueller, they could find no evidence to establish that that actually happened.
After that happened, that should have shook every single major institution of authority in this country, especially corporate media outlets, at their foundation.
And there was reporting that the then editor-in-chief, the executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Basquet, when that happened, when Mueller closed his investigation, didn't indict anybody on that charge, and then filed his report, he addressed the newsroom and he said, look, we have to admit everything we said was going to happen and we told our readers to expect and that we expected ended up not happening.
The entire storyline from the start was a gigantic scam.
And it was cooked up in the bowels of the CIA and the FBI and fed to the Washington Post and the New York Times, principally, which ended up giving themselves Pulitzers for that reporting, and especially the role of Russian interference in the 2016 election, which only mattered because of suspicions that Trump played a part in that.
It was a scam that exposed as illegitimate almost every institution of American authority, but especially the justice system.
Exactly as Professor Goldsmith points out in this op-ed, we know for sure that the people inside the FBI, like Peter Strzok, Here we're playing key parts in this investigation.
While they were doing that, we're talking about not only their contempt for Donald Trump, but the need to do everything in their power to sabotage his election, his campaign.
The political motive was explicit.
It was in documents that we all read that came from the exact places in the FBI responsible for that investigation.
And then we know that James Comey and Andrew McCabe constantly leaked, illegally, findings of that investigation to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Andrew McCabe was fired as a result of lying to the FBI in their internal investigation about whether he leaked.
And he then, after being disgraced for lying, got hired by CNN to help report the news.
None of these institutions had any accountability at all because they knew they got caught but they didn't care because they believed their cause was so just that they were entitled to do anything, including lie, in the name of stopping Trump.
That's how righteous they believed their cause was.
And they looked at people who got caught lying.
Like Andrew McCabe or this Miles Taylor who broke that op-ed under an anonymous byline saying I'm inside the Trump administration and it's bad as you think and he was repeatedly asked whether he was the author and he lied and said he wasn't.
Including to CNN, of course, he got hired by CNN also and he told his own colleagues falsely when asked that he wasn't the author of that.
He lied straight to their face.
These people all got caught and revealed as liars and as corrupt political actors, abusing the law for political ends.
Inside the FBI, inside the CIA, inside the Justice Department, these are the same exact people now prosecuting Donald Trump and now justifying these indictments.
And so of course there's extremely compelling reasons to distrust The motives behind this indictment and the indictment itself, because the Justice Department has proven itself under first President Obama, where Russiagate began, and then under President Biden, to be completely corrupted for political ends.
And the irony of that is that that's what they spent four years accusing Donald Trump of doing.
Remember, he treated the Justice Department like his own personal law firm.
He treated the Attorney General like his own personal lawyer.
And meanwhile, the whole time he had their Bill Barr, Who, as we all now know, was very willing to say no to Donald Trump and to conclude that a lot of things Donald Trump was saying and doing were baseless.
He was a zillion times more independent than Bill Barr was.
Then the people that in the FBI and Justice Department under Obama now Biden are so blatantly and flagrantly abusing the powers of our law enforcement system for political reasons.
So that's part of the context in which this indictment or these indictments have emerged that there's already this very pervasive and justified distrust.
On the part of American institutions of power generally and the Justice Department and the FBI in particular.
Because of this extraordinary debacle that I know everybody wants to move on from.
Because people are embarrassed by it.
They have nothing to say about it, to justify it.
It all collapsed with the Mueller investigation.
Except, I remember very well the price that the few of us paid inside the media who were willing to stand up and say, this is all bullshit.
This is concocted, this is free of evidence.
There is no reason to trust these evidence-free, anonymous leaks emanating from the FBI and CIA to the New York Times and the Washington Post, given that we know that all of those institutions inside government and media are aligned against President Trump in such a self-righteous manner.
But then there's more to it.
There's more to this context.
As Professor Goldsmith points out, quote, and then there is the perceived unfairness and the department's treatment of Mr. Biden's son, Hunter, in which the department has once again violated the cardinal principle of avoiding any appearance of untoward behavior in a politically sensitive investigation.
Credible whistleblowers have alleged wrongdoing and bias in the investigation.
Though the Trump-appointed prosecutor denies it.
And the department's plea arrangement with Hunter Biden came apart in ways that fanned suspicion of a sweetheart deal in response to a few simple questions by a federal judge.
That, too, is something that happened just recently that, because we just blew past, or the media blew past it in embarrassment, is something that was not fully appreciated in terms of how revealing it was.
Hunter Biden did all sorts of things that people routinely go to prison for for a long time and are either convicted of felonies for or forced to plead guilty to felonies for doing.
And yet the deal that he got from the Justice Department whereby he got to plead guilty to two misdemeanors and not spend a second in prison.
The plea bargain fell apart the minute it was aired in the light of day.
And a judge asked very basic and simple questions about it.
She was shocked by what she had seen.
Because plea bargains like that are not given with this kind of immunity clause that is so wide and ample heading into the future.
Why would you bestow on somebody such full-scale immunity Just to induce them to plead guilty to two misdemeanors when they clearly are susceptible to being convicted of felonies.
They're doing you a favor.
Or you have to confer benefits on them to lure them into pleading guilty.
Of course Hunter Biden is willing to plead guilty.
If he gets to plead guilty to misdemeanor counts that involve no jail time.
You don't have to give him full-scale immunity for every other conceivable crime plus ones into the future unless you want to protect Hunter Biden.
And that's exactly what happened.
The judge immediately recognized that when she began asking the prosecutors from the Justice Department about the scope of the immunity clause, because they were in public for the first time, they were embarrassed.
And they denied that the immunity was as broad as the document itself made clear that it was.
And so soon as Hunter Biden's lawyers heard the Justice Department denying what they had obviously been promised, They immediately said, OK, then we have no deal.
There's no meeting of the minds.
The prosecutors understand or claim to understand the deal they gave Hunter Biden totally differently than Hunter Biden's lawyers understand it to be.
You can't have an agreement when the two parties have completely different conceptions of what the contract or the plea bargain in this case provides for.
And so just with a few minutes of very light judicial scrutiny, this deal fell apart.
It probably will be revitalized because in general, prosecutors and defendants have a lot of leeway to forge a agreement that both of them think is fair.
It's very rare for judges to reject that.
But aside from how incredibly wide this immunity provision was, it also was crafted in a way To make it so that judicial approval is not even required.
They tried to circumvent the judge and when asked by the judge whether this was something they had ever done previously, they said no.
They admitted it was a first time unprecedented provision.
And as Professor Goldsmith also points out, it's not just that you have the Justice Department being extremely aggressive.
In pursuing claims against Donald Trump that are not only dubious in nature, but that have proven to be fraudulent going all the way back to the 2016 election.
It's not just that you have an overzealous Justice Department prosecuting Trump under a Democratic President.
Simultaneously, you have a Justice Department that is being extremely accommodating to the President's son in a way that judges and a lot of lawyers are shocked by.
Why would anybody trust a justice system that has done all of this at a moment when it comes to trying to prosecute a person who is the chief political threat to the current government?
Now, as I'm going to show you in just a second, I am not somebody who believes that former presidents should be immunized from crimes.
In fact, I wrote an entire book In 2006, arguing that George Bush and Dick Cheney were guilty of crimes in the war on terror not to be prosecuted, and I wrote a second book in 2011 that was a response to President Obama's decision to immunize everybody who committed those crimes.
And I railed against the consensus in Washington that political opposition of former presidents should not be prosecuted because it bestows on former presidents or powerful political leaders a kind of exemption from the law.
That creates a two-tiered system of justice that we're not supposed to have in the United States.
But if the prosecutions are clearly politically motivated, and on very shaky ground, then the people who were supporting this consensus for a long time, and the concerns they expressed, namely that it looks like something that happens in a, quote, banana republic, as they put it, Namely that it has a facade of democracy but it's all really just about power.
That all seems to become true.
Goldstein goes on, quote, these are not what aboutism points.
They are the context in which a very large part of the country will fairly judge the legitimacy of the DOJ's election fraud prosecution of Mr. Trump.
They are the circumstances that, for very many, will inform whether his prosecution is seen as politically biased.
This is all before the Trump forces exaggerate and inflame the context and circumstances and thus amplify their impact.
These are some of the reasons the Justice Department, however pure its motivations, will probably emerge from this prosecution viewed as an irretrievably politicized institution by a large chunk of the country.
The Department has been on a downward spiral because of its serial mistakes and high-profile contacts, accompanied by sharp political attacks from Mr. Trump and others on the right.
It's predicament will now very likely grow much worse because the consequences of its election fraud prosecution are so large, the taint of its past actions is so great, and the potential outcome for Mr. Biden is too favorable.
The prosecution may well have terrible consequences beyond the Department for our politics and the rule of law.
It will probably inspire even more aggressive tit-for-tat investigations of presidential actions in office by future Congresses and by administrations of the opposing party to the detriment of sound government.
It may also exacerbate the criminalization of politics.
The indictment alleges that Mr. Trump lied and manipulated people and institutions in trying to shape law and politics in his favor.
Exaggeration and truth-shading in the facilitation of self-stirring legal arguments or attacks on political opponents have always been commonplace in Washington.
These practices will probably be disputed in the language of and amid demands for special counsels, indictments, and grand juries.
That's what should happen.
What should happen is that if this is going to be the framework that the Biden Justice Department imposes, that the Obama Justice Department imposed before that, it should at least be evenly applied.
But there's no question that this kind of prosecution is only going to exacerbate the very disturbing fact that a huge chunk of the country does not trust The legitimacy of the actions of Americans leading institutions of authority, and in my view, they have extremely good reason to distrust that.
Now, we have showed you before this poll, or polling data like it, about just how pervasive is this distrust in these American institutions, and how partisan This distrust is.
So there are many polls like this.
Here is one from October of 2022 from Gallup that publishes its findings on how trusted or distrusted particular institutions of government are.
And it breaks it down by political parties.
The question is, how would you rate the job being done by each agency?
Would you say it is doing an excellent, good, or only fair or poor job?
And the percentages indicated here are the percentages of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who say that the agencies are doing either an excellent or a good job.
And you can see here the immense distrust that these institutions have among the big sector of the population and how it is all dependent upon which political party someone belongs to, which is the worst possible outcome.
So here you see the FBI.
I want you to just consider this.
79% of Democrats think the FBI is doing an excellent or good job.
For decades, distrust of the FBI and a view that it is a fundamentally corrupted organization pervaded and shaped left-wing politics.
That is gone.
Democrats worship the FBI.
We report on those hearings all the time in the House, where Democratic members of the House, of Congress, stand up and applaud the U.S.
security state for censoring the Internet on the grounds that these agencies are benevolent, have nothing but the most patriotic and noble intentions, and want to protect us from disinformation.
So here you see the FBI with 79%, trust among Democrats, among Independents about half, it's 47%, and among Republicans, 29%.
So essentially, the FBI is seen through a purely partisan end or political framework, ideological framework.
They have immense powers.
They operate in secrecy.
They spy on Americans.
They investigate crimes.
And the only people who really trust them are Democrats.
Independents are split.
Republicans overwhelmingly view them as corrupted.
Very similar for the Department of Justice.
Although it's even worse for the Department of Justice.
Only 58% of Democrats trust the Department of Justice.
28% of Republicans, or rather Independents, think the DOJ is doing a good job.
Only 24% of Republicans.
How much this is going to exacerbate that distrust.
These remarkable and extraordinary prosecutions brought during an election against the leading political opponent of the current government.
And then you have the CIA.
Now when I tell you that Opposition to the CIA has long been a central plank of left liberal politics.
I cannot overstate that case.
To be on the left meant that you viewed the CIA as a malevolent institution forever, for decades, until 2016.
You see the reversal happen immediately.
And the reason for it is so disturbing.
It's because the CIA, the FBI, is where Russiagate came from.
And liberals started recognizing, validly, that the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security and the NSA and the Justice Department were on their side.
They were political allies of Democrats.
And so now you have this remarkable reality that 69% of Democrats, 69%, think the CIA is doing a good or excellent job.
69% of Democrats.
To be a Democrat is basically to mean that you place a lot of faith and trust in the CIA.
And even among this 30% that won't say it, you barely can find opposition to the CIA in mainstream left liberal discourse.
Turn on podcasts or YouTube programs of self-proclaimed leftists.
I don't mean real leftists like the kind we have on our show from like the Black Revolutionary Network, but I mean like the ones loyal to the Democratic Party, the ones who follow Bernie Sanders and AOC.
You will not hear a peep of meaningful denunciation of the CIA.
If they mention them at all, it's very much in passing, with no passion, with no concern, because they don't consider the CIA menacing because they know the CIA is their political ally.
The CIA is not supposed to be anyone's political ally.
They're not supposed to have anything to do with American politics.
And yet everyone knows they do, and that's what explains these percentages.
Here you see 50% of independents.
So again, independents are split like they are with the FBI.
38% of Republicans have positive views of the CIA, largely from probably decades of Republican politics.
The establishment wing, the hawkish wing of the Republican Party that has long viewed the CIA as an important ally, but that has cratered.
And here you see the massive partisan split in how these agencies are viewed and the fact that a huge chunk of the country believes that these institutions are politically corrupted and fundamentally and irretrievably broken.
It's a massive crisis of institutional authority in the United States and it's Aimed at the agencies that are now the ones responsible for trying to prove that the indictment of President Trump is legitimate and valid.
Obviously, they're not on this list, but it goes without saying the corporate media is the most despised of any of these institutions.
The only people who poll worse than corporate media are pedophiles and Vladimir Putin.
And they're the ones who are supposed to now convince the American public that these indictments and prosecutions of President Trump, while he's leading the polls, are justifiable, but they have no credibility either, for very good reasons.
And so that's the key context.
Now, as I said, I've long been a critic of this idea that former presidents shouldn't be prosecuted.
Here's the 2006 book that I wrote called How Would a Patriot Act.
The subtitle was Defending American Values from a President Run Amok.
The president in 2006 was George Bush.
And it was about my view that they had committed serious crimes, eavesdropping on American citizens with no warrants is required by law, torture, rendition, kidnapping people off the streets of Europe and sending them to Syria and Egypt to be tortured.
And then in 2011, after Obama announced full-scale immunity, not only for all members of the U.S.
security state, but also the private actors in the nation's largest telecoms that collaborated with the government to turn over huge amounts of data with no warrants in violation of the Constitution and the law.
And they, too, were given retroactive immunity by the Congress when Obama was in the Senate and he voted for it.
My book in 2011 was, with liberty and justice for some, how the law is used to destroy equality and protect the powerful.
And it was condemning this idea that former presidents should be immunized for prosecution because the political instability and the political costs are too high.
That was the consensus in DC for decades.
But like so much of what happened in the Trump years, they completely abandoned their long-held beliefs in the name of Donald Trump.
They abandoned their beliefs about how journalism works, about how law works, about how the U.S.
security state works.
It all radically transformed in the name of one person.
My argument was always that you should be able to prosecute presidents as long as you have a very solid ground for doing so and clear-cut violations of very clear laws, and you have everything but that in the case of these indictments by Trump.
And I think the fact that Professor Goldsmith is such an institutionalist, somebody who worked inside the Justice Department, and is somebody who obviously has a lot of Contempt for a lot of the ways President Biden or President Trump conducted himself.
The fact that he's the one sounding this warning in the pages of the New York Times makes it extra compelling.
And I think a lot of times what we need to do is kind of just take a step back and appreciate things like Russiagate being this gigantic fraud perpetrated on the American public by the leading institution of authority.
And that these very same people responsible for it in politics and media are now the people behind the multiple indictments of the leading political opponent of the current president.
When you look at all that, I think what you conclude is that.
So as I was saying, we just had a little glitch there with the server.
But earlier today in Newsweek, the political science professor Max Abrams published an article about President Biden's multi-pronged personal, financial and family involvement in Ukraine under the headline, quote, Does Ukraine Have Compromat?
On Joe Biden, as probably most of you know, kompromat is the very sophisticated word that people really in the know use when talking about blackmail.
And they use the Russian term for it because they're Russia experts.
It was Russia that invented the concept of blackmail apparently, just like they invented the concept of whataboutism.
And so that's how you know that somebody is really sophisticated and insightful when they use the word compromise.
And of course, they spent four years alleging that Russia had seized control of the levers of American power by wielding compromise, namely blackmail information, over President Trump.
And the essence of the article, and we're about to have Professor Abrams on so he can describe it himself, and I want to ask him a few questions about this argument, is that there's much more ample basis for believing that Ukraine has a lot of incriminating information about President is that there's much more ample basis for believing that Ukraine has a lot of incriminating information about President Biden that if released could seriously damage President Biden's political prospects and reputation than there ever was for believing
President Trump.
So let's bring Professor Abrams on and we can talk about the article.
Good evening.
Are you able to hear me?
Well, I hope you can and I want to welcome you to System Update.
It's great to talk to you.
Thanks for having me.
Sure, so let's just go ahead and dive right into this article first.
I do have some issues I want to ask you around it, but the argument you essentially make is that there is good reason to believe, even if a little bit of is tongue-in-cheek using the word compromise, that the Ukrainian government very well might have dirt on President Biden.
That could be very incriminating.
Of course, the first impeachment of President Trump was based on Trump's suspicion that they had a lot of this dirt, and he was trying to convince them to release it on the grounds that the public had the right to know, given that Biden was going to run for president, and the Congress decided that that was impeachable for him to do, given his use and the Congress decided that that was impeachable for him to do, given his use of leverage So what is your argument, or what is the evidence you point to that suggests that the Ukrainians might have this kind of dirt on Biden?
Amen.
Well, you're right.
I am sort of mocking legacy media.
I would never have, you know, thought of the idea of using the word kompromat if not for the fact that we were just inundated with this word during the Trump presidency.
We were told that there were all sorts of You know, manifestations of the Kompromat, or examples of it, or types of it.
But the biggest one we were told about was the so-called P-Tape that Moscow had on Trump, which of course Hillary Clinton, you know, her project in the Steele dossier as part of the Russia collusion hoax, they just contrived that all together.
And mainstream media just relentlessly said, you know, that That Russia has compromised on Trump.
They have video of this pee tape of prostitutes peeing on Trump.
But it was actually quite serious because they then used that in order to say that Trump was an agent or asset of Russia.
That he didn't have freedom of movement because they had this compromising material.
And of course it was all made up.
Essentially, what I'm doing in the article is asking, you know, is it possible that actually Ukrainian officials have compromise on Joe Biden?
And I think that the evidentiary basis is stronger, certainly, than during the Trump administration.
When we talk about Joe Biden's corruption, conceptually, I think about it in two components.
The first is his shady relationship With Charisma, which enabled him as well as his son to get over $10 million in payments.
So there's that aspect of it.
And then the other related aspect is his intervention when he was vice president to fire the prosecutor who was on the cusp of divulging Biden's charisma shadiness to the public.
So let me just interject there because that part is something I find so remarkable that there's always this kind of intense projection going on with the way in which Democrats talk about President Trump, accusing him of doing all sorts of things that whether he does it or not is certainly something the Democrats do and the parallels between what Biden did in Ukraine and that first impeachment where Trump was accused of interfering in Ukraine, demanding changes in their
Internal Affairs, namely the release of information about their investigation into Burisma and Biden in order to continue USA to Ukraine, was exactly what Vice President Biden did when he threatened the Ukrainians to withhold aid if they didn't fire the prosecutor involved in the Burisma case.
Let's just show the video.
You probably have seen this before.
This is President Biden speaking in 2018 at the Council of Foreign Relations where he boasts about the fact that he got this prosecutor fired.
That was the level in which the United States was micromanaging Ukraine.
So you have the vice president of the United States, obviously very fixated on who the prosecutor, the corruption prosecutor, is supposed to be in Ukraine.
And we're supposed to believe that it had nothing to do with the fact that the company paying his son $80,000 a month was in the crosshairs of the Ukrainian authorities, but instead was just this kind of good government concern that everyone in the EU shared.
Let's listen to President Biden, or then, he was then candidate Biden, talking about his work as Vice President in Ukraine.
I'll give you one concrete example.
I was, not I, I, but it just happened to be that was the assignment I got.
I got all the good ones.
Do you see he says, I, back then, I, well it wasn't me, it was just a coincidence that it was me, because that was the assignment they gave him.
He was very defensive about his own choice of words when he said, I, called the Ukrainians, and then listen to the rest of what he said.
Ukraine, and I remember going over convincing our team, our others too, convincing that we should be providing for loan guarantees, and I went over I guess the 12th, 13th time to Kiev, and I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee.
And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor, and they didn't.
So they said they were walking out to the press conference, and I said, we're not going to give you the billion dollars.
They said, you have no authority.
You're not the president.
The president said it.
I said, call him.
I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting a billion dollars.
I said, you're not getting a billion.
I'm going to be leaving here.
I think it was, what, six hours.
I look, I said, I'm leaving in six hours.
If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money.
Oh, son of a bitch.
Got fired.
And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
All right, so that's his story.
What do you make of that?
It's unbelievable.
I mean, the evidence is right in front of us all.
Remember, there was a big dispute about, you know, the nature of Trump's conversation with Zelensky, but there's no dispute about what's going on here.
What he says, just so everybody is clear, Is that he personally spearheaded the firing of this prosecutor, that it came mainly due to his initiative, that he convinced the president he knew that Obama would rubber stamp his decision.
And furthermore, that he then would replace or did replace Shoken, the prosecutor at that time who was investigating Burisma, he would replace him with someone solid.
And that's kind of interesting because we know that, A, Shoken was investigating Burisma, B, Shoken believes actually that the Biden family is very corrupt and that the information that would have emerged in the course of the investigation would be extremely damning to the Bidens.
And see, upon Shoken's removal, that replacement Put the kibosh on the Burisma investigation.
That's what Joe Biden meant when he said he was going to put in somebody solid.
It was all for Biden's personal benefit.
It had nothing to do with rooting out a corrupt prosecutor, which was the excuse that Biden gave.
It That narrative doesn't make any sense because the replacement was not interested in investigating Burisma, which was well known to be an extraordinarily corrupt Ukrainian energy company.
So just to underscore that point.
Here is an article from the Kiev Post, which is now one of those English-speaking Ukrainian newspapers that has been presented as a highly credible source when it comes to the war in Ukraine.
I believe they had some change of ownership and they're now operating under a slightly different name.
But this was, at the time, a newspaper widely considered by Western sources to be very reliable.
And they have this article in January of 2017, so after President Trump was elected, right before he was inaugurated.
And the headline of it was just to remember in real time what was being said before it became necessary to protect President Biden.
Here's the headline.
All cases closed against Burisma Group and its president in Ukraine.
The company cooperated with law enforcement agencies and paid in full all outstanding fees.
And then the subheadline is International Energy Group Burisma with assets in Ukraine announces that all legal proceedings and And pending criminal allegations against his president and operating companies of Burr International Energy Group have ceased.
This is from the prosecutor that took Shunkin's place after Biden got him fired.
And the article reads, quote, the decision to fully close all pending legal proceedings and criminal allegations was the result of many months of full cooperation between the office of the general prosecutor and the legal team representing the Burisma the decision to fully close all pending legal proceedings and criminal Further, the Burisma Group agreed that there should be that should an investigation determine that the Burisma Group own outstanding taxes and fees.
It would pay all of them.
So.
They tried to spin it, the prosecutor did and Burisma did, as though it was some kind of confession of guilt and some kind of amazing recovery of assets for the Ukrainian people, but the investigation just disappeared.
There were no prosecutions, no jail time, no anything.
Is there any doubt at all that Biden's intervention in getting this prosecutor fired, which he boasted about being the person who did it, directly benefited the company paying his son?
There's another video, which I know you've seen because we've both tweeted it, and that's video testimony by the prosecutor, Victor Shokin, who is the guy we're talking about, who was fired.
So since you mentioned that, let me just show that and then you can continue.
I just want everybody to be able to watch it.
For me, the combination of those two videos, it makes it really compelling.
It seems very dispositive, doesn't it?
I mean, when I listen to Victor Shokin speaking, If we're talking about the fact that these things were supposedly sleeping, then we can give very vivid examples.
and conducts himself professionally.
And let's just listen to that video that you referenced so that people can hear it for themselves, and then go ahead and I want to hear the rest of your analysis on this.
- - - - - - - I appointed a police investigation.
I called a criminal case that dealt with how and why this money was withdrawn in the UK.
which was about how these money were made in the United States.
For 10-12 days before my statement about the U-Hobby, 2 February 2016, were arrested by the active of the were arrested by the active of the "Chap's" his own personal belongings, the property, the machines and so on.
In the process of the investigation, which we had before, there were also been an arrest on the waste, on the material waste of Zлачевского.
To what they were trying to convey as a spastic, I understand perfectly well that the United States has one of the strongest intelligence agencies in the world.
are probably one of the most powerful investigations in the world.
And of course, during the investigation of the murism, they were very внимательно looked at not only legally, but also not legally.
It's not in English.
We have the English subtitles on the screen for those listening in podcast version and those interested in hearing the rest.
He's essentially saying, look, we were actively investigating Burisma.
We definitely believe that they were corrupt.
Yeah.
There was a very aggressive investigation in which we seized the assets of the Burisma president.
And we were also intending to start investigating Hunter Biden and other people who were helping Burisma facilitate all of this corruption and to stay protected.
The United States government do exactly what we're doing.
They were spying on us illegally, as they usually do.
And it was Joe Biden's intervention, which he says was absolutely motivated by an attempt to protect his son and to protect Burisma, that ended up letting Burisma off the hook.
Now, the defenders of Joe Biden say that all Joe Biden was doing was carrying out the official position of the EU, that this prosecutor wasn't aggressive enough.
But what do you make of this very detailed version of events that is clearly backed up by real-time media accounts?
In a way, that second video is even more important because Democrats haven't disputed the first video, the Joe Biden video, because it's so well known.
There's no dispute that Biden fired a prosecutor.
What they argued is that he was fired because he was a corrupt guy.
We were engaged in anti-corruption at the time in Ukraine and it had nothing to do with the bribery scheme with Burisma.
Over and over again, the media said that the investigation into Burisma was, quote-unquote, dormant.
If your listeners do a search on dormant and Burisma, they will get loads of hits because that was a talking point that was shared to the T across mainstream media.
I don't know exactly the timestamp on the Shoken video, but it seems to me that he is directly rebutting that talking point, because at least based on the translation, he uses that exact word.
And what he says explicitly is that the investigation was far from dormant.
That the founder of Burisma had recently, very recently, within the past 10 days, had his assets seized, and that Shogun and his team were rapidly moving forward and closing in on the Bidens, and that the Bidens knew that, and that that was the basis for him being fired.
He further goes on to say that contrary to the smear against him, that he wasn't regarded as a corrupt leader, as a corrupt prosecutor, and that actually he had frequently received accolades for the perseverance and diligence of his anti-corruption and that actually he had frequently received accolades for the perseverance and diligence of his anti-corruption efforts by very important people, including the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, including all
And so together we have, you know, Biden bragging that he fired Shogun and Shogun making it what I think a very compelling case that the firing was done in order to protect the Biden racket.
You know, one of the things that is so interesting to me, obviously this has a lot of importance just as a kind of standalone political scandal for Joe Biden.
This was something I tried to write about when I was at the Intercept in the weeks leading up to the election and I ended up quitting because they tried to block me from doing so.
So clearly it has a lot of political importance in terms of Joe Biden's reputation for integrity or the lack thereof.
It also, in my view, has even more importance because of the fact that the United States has evolved in a very dangerous and always escalating war in that country.
And this has been something that I, to be honest, sometimes struggle to understand, which is, if you go back to the early days of the Obama administration, and then in the second term when you have the coup or the change of government in which the United States was heavily involved,
involved, you had John McCain and Chris Murphy and Democrats, senators from both parties going to Kiev and openly pledging support for the anti-government protesters that removed the democratically elected government before the term ended, replaced them with the more pro-Washington or pro-European or pro-West government.
You have Victoria Nuland, very obsessed with Ukraine from the time that she was in the Clinton State Department and then the Kerry State Department.
And clearly you have Biden, you know, it's so funny.
We're always talking about Russian interference in our sacred politics and the way other countries You have Joe Biden elected to be the Vice President of the United States, instead spending all this time at this micro level of managing who their prosecutors were in Ukraine.
Clearly, the United States, well before the Russian invasion in 2022, was heavily involved in Ukraine, cared so much about it, was arming them, even while President Obama, kind of standing alone, was saying, I don't actually think Ukraine has a very vital interest in the United States, which had been the longstanding line.
Why is it that well before the invasion in 2022 by Russia, Washington is so fixated on what's happening in this country that doesn't have obvious vital interest to the United States.
I mean, I think that 2016 was such a watershed event.
You're quite right.
Obama was explicit that Ukraine was not considered by his administration, at least their official position, was that Ukraine was not a vital interest.
And so when Russia invaded to a much smaller extent in 2014, Obama was very reluctant to supply weapons to Ukraine.
And it should be said that at that time, according to surveys, That was a politically wise decision because Democrats by 6-1 opposed supplying weapons to Ukraine.
And then after 2016, when Hillary Clinton's loss was attributed to the Russian intervention in that election, ever since then I think that Democrats have been baying for blood.
And I don't think that Putin fully understood this when he invaded again in February 2022, because the American domestic polity had changed so much.
And so even though Joe was the vice president when Washington didn't regard Ukraine as a vital interest, that had changed after 2016.
And so Biden has been so forceful In leading this massive, you know, NATO coalition at tremendous expense to Americans and Europeans, and essentially a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
So, domestic politics is an enormous part of understanding why the Biden administration is so enthusiastic now when the Obama administration wasn't and Joe Biden was the vice president.
Yeah, I'm sure you've seen the recent polling data and it's been evolving in this direction for quite some time, but it's now reached a tipping point.
It seems that 55% of Americans, so a pretty clear majority, oppose any further U.S.
financial assistance to the war in Ukraine.
They don't want to keep sending tens of billions of dollars every couple months to keep this war fueled.
They think we've done enough.
But the only reason that it's even that close is because 75% of self-identified liberal Democrats support ongoing U.S. assistance to the war in Ukraine.
In other words, liberals who have been saying for decades that the problem with the United States is we spend way too much on the military and on wars, we should be spending it instead on social programs for improving the lives of American citizens at home, are the group that far and away most supports this U.S. war and this are the group that far and away most supports this U.S. war and this Why do you think that is?
It really is remarkable.
If you go back to the Democratic debates, it was very common for the candidates to say that they oppose these never-ending wars.
They oppose these forever wars.
And the first major thing that Biden did was he executed the botched withdrawal, but withdrawal nonetheless, from Afghanistan.
And so, in a way, it might have appeared Oh, look, he's part of this zeitgeist of greater American restraint.
And immediately after then, we became the leading, you know, external participants in the Ukraine war.
And so it is surprising.
I think that a lot of Americans still continue to think of the Democratic Party as, for example, The Republicans more hawkish on some issues.
That is true.
Like that is true towards Iran.
That is probably true towards China.
But it's not true towards Ukraine.
And so there is an interesting partisan component to the U.S.
war.
And I do think that the Biden administration is in a pickle, if you will.
Because American patience isn't forever.
And so they really were hoping that this so-called Ukrainian counteroffensive, which was supposed to start several months ago, would be a major military breakthrough.
Which would produce optimism among Americans that this wouldn't be another never-ending war.
But that, in fact, Ukraine could win it all by coercing Russia to fully withdraw from Ukraine.
But the truth is that the war, and I know that you've had Mearsheimer on before, who's been quite prescient in this, but the war, as he said it would be, looks quite a bit like a stalemate.
This counteroffensive hasn't shown very much movement at all over the past few months.
And to the extent that that holds true, I can predict that American public support will continue to decrease.
Yeah, you know, my hypothesis about Liberal Democrats, because unfortunately I've spent a lot of time thinking about them and focused on them and hearing from them, is that a major reason, and it's kind of remarkable, actually, that they are motivated by such trivial, pedestrian, partisan concerns when supporting an extremely dangerous war that they have been feeding
On this extreme anti-Russian sentiment for so long that in the discourse they have had stimulated their most primal urges of hatred and tribal resentment toward Russia.
They still believe the kind of Rachel Maddow narrative that the reason Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 which is their greatest apocalyptic event was because of Putin.
And that hatred is leading them to just want to destroy Russia, to go to war with Russia, to bomb Russia, to do anything possible to undermine Russia.
And I believe that's one reason why there's so much support among that sector for the war.
But let me just ask you to kind of conclude our discussion here.
You mentioned this counter offensive and we were it was sold as something that was going to produce dramatic reversals of fortune that the Ukrainians were going to break through these heavily entrenched defensive positions that the Russians have constructed over the past six months or so all throughout eastern Ukraine and into southern Ukraine.
And now you see the media preparing everybody for the fact that that's not happening and now trying to say this will be a war of attrition.
They're going to gain, you know, yards and The only prospect is this long, endless, grinding war.
At this point, it's inconceivable that Moscow would give up much position in eastern Ukraine, let alone in Crimea, in order to end the war.
But it's also inconceivable that the West could accept a position that permits Russia to simply keep that territory and allow the war to end while they would essentially rightly declare victory.
How do you see this war ultimately ending, or do you see an end to it in sight?
Yeah, and I think Biden has a big problem, and one of the reasons why is because he really sort of ballooned the stakes of this war, right?
He, you know, they attacked Ron DeSantis for saying this was a territorial conflict.
For Biden and his loyalists, you know, this was about preserving the rules-based order.
This was about blunting Cohen from acting like Adolf Hitler and steamrolling through the rest of Europe, including through NATO countries.
Yeah, on to Paris.
So, yeah, I mean, so if the stakes are that big, then how do you compromise?
Do you get, like, 50% of a rules-based order?
You know, so it was so blown up, and that's not conducive to the pragmatics about what has to happen for there to reach some sort of a compromise between Russia and Ukraine.
But I'll just add this.
One of the reasons why this is a proxy war is because American officials don't have the exact same goals as the Ukrainians on the ground.
So for the Ukrainians, this war has been terrible for them.
It has led to untold death and suffering with no end in sight.
But for many American officials, especially after the 2016 election, they view success as harming Russia.
And this war has harmed Russia.
Frankly, it has harmed both Russia and Ukraine.
And so from America's perspective, if you're cynical, Perhaps that's not such a bad outcome if your foremost priority is to stick it to the Russians.
So I predict that increasingly there's going to be friction between American and Ukrainian officials.
We have very different interests in this conflict.
And I cannot answer your question.
I do not see any realistic ending on the horizon.
Yeah, unfortunately I don't either, and of course the ultimate irony is this war was sold based on the claim that it was necessary to protect Ukraine and protect Ukrainians, and yet the people paying by far the biggest price are Ukrainians who are being killed in very large numbers, they're being trapped in their country, prevented from leaving, they don't want to fight, and Ukraine is being completely destroyed while the vultures from Black Rock and other venture funds circle around them, looking to profit the minute that
They're giving a chance for a reconstruction.
So it's clearly something that the United States and the West is going to be invested in for the long haul.
And it's hard to see how this war ends as well.
And then lurking behind this all, you definitely do have this very serious scandal that does involve Joe Biden.
And I do think it's a question how much the Ukrainians actually do have the power to release incriminating information about him if they're so inclined.
Thank you for raising that in that article, and I'm really excited to speak with you in your debut on our program, and I hope to have you on again soon.
Thanks for everything.
All right.
Talk to you soon.
Bye-bye.
So earlier today I was on Russell Brand's program, the program that he hosts here on Rumble Live every day at noon, and it's a program that in some way overlaps with the focal points of our program, but he, being Russell Brand, covers things in a obviously different way than we cover them, and sometimes covers different issues as well, and
I just want to mention one of the issues that we discussed today, because we're going to do a show in the near future, probably within the next few days, that is focused entirely on this question.
And we were discussing the fact that both he and I are sort of in the same boat, along with people like Matt Taibbi and others, where the perception was that for a long time we have been associated with the political left.
And we are all now accused of having radically changed our political views, that we are now more associated with the right, that the reason for this is because of some kind of financial motive, none of which makes any sense.
The easiest way to get rich in media and politics is by jumping up and down and accusing Trump of being Orange Hitler and of saying that he is performing a fellatio on Vladimir Putin.
If you look at who has gotten very rich in politics, It's the people who kept calling Trump a fascist and a white supremacist and warning that he was the greatest threat to democracy, being a little critical of the Democratic Party, but at the end of the day always urging everybody to go and support him.
People motivated by money would do that!
Not stand up in the middle of the 2016 election and question the evidentiary validity of Russiagate.
But the irony, the bigger irony, is that for Matt Taibbi, for Russell Brand, for myself, for a lot of other people in this kind of group, we actually haven't changed any of our views at all.
The focal point of my politics and my journalism for a long time has been the abuse of the U.S.
security state, the virtues of free speech, and it still is.
It's just that, as we've shown you in these polls, the faction that used to oppose that that now support those things is The faction that calls themselves Liberal Democrats.
And those of us who have refused to change our views to stay in good standing with them haven't changed the place where we are, just other people moved around us.
But I think the point that is actually illustrated by that is that for a long time, the prevailing political framework that determined who you were politically and where you fall on the political spectrum was based on these debates, these endless debates about are you on the right or are you on the left?
Or are you a Republican, or are you a Democrat, or a liberal, or a conservative, and all those political cliches.
And in so many ways, the reason I think that a lot of people who find themselves looking at a lot of key political controversies similarly, who not all that long ago might have seen them differently.
And Max Abrams, for example, is somebody who, during the war on terror, I perceived as a hardcore warrior on terror.
He was a big supporter of a lot of the Bush cheney.
policies including the invasion of Iraq, and he's a steadfast supporter of Israel and the U.S. support for it.
But at the same time, you see when it comes to issues like Ukraine and the corruption of institutions that we find ourselves having a lot of similar views on these questions.
And the reason for that is, I think, that the most important metric for determining your political perspective and your political allegiance and where you fall on the political spectrum is no longer these kind of old categories of right versus left or Republican versus Democrat Those are still relevant on culture war issues, maybe on some kind of economic policy discussions, although there's a lot of anti-corporatism on the right.
And there's a lot of neoliberalism on the left, people who revere international financial institutions, Wall Street, big tech are all behind the Democratic Party.
So it's very hard to make the case that that's some kind of anti-corporatist party.
I think the much more significant question is the one that ties together the two stories we did tonight that are seemingly disparate.
The first about the politicization of the Justice Department and the ways in which they are motivated by corrupt political ends and indicting President Trump.
And then the second is the oozing deceit surrounding both Biden's personal investment in Ukraine, but also the narrative that justifies the war in Ukraine itself.
It's a CIA and a NATO war, and that is essentially If you survey the intense distrust and contempt for America's leading institutions of authority, corporate media, big corporations, big tech, the U.S.
security state, whether you view that distrust and that contempt as justified, as I do, Or whether you viewed it as unjustified, meaning do you think American institutions of authority, the FBI, the CIA, big corporations, big tech, are fundamentally good or do you think they're fundamentally rotted?
That is likely a far more important metric for determining how you see the world politically and with whom you're likely to be aligned than a lot of these old traditional political labels that increasingly no longer have value or no longer have as much relevance as they did.
Because so much of our political power, ironically in the age of the internet, which was supposed to decentralize power, has instead centralized it in the hands of a tiny number of entities.
And they are increasing their stranglehold on propaganda at exactly the time that the Internet was supposed to liberate us from centralized propaganda through a combination of corporate control of the Internet and then censorship and the crushing of dissent that is enabled by concentrating the power over the flow of information in the hands of a tiny number of large actors that are susceptible to political control.
So this is something we're going to explore a lot more of on this show.
I think that when you look at the fact that in 2016 a lot of people were saying my two favorite candidates are Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, something that makes no sense to paid professional pundits in Washington or political operatives in Washington who think Bernie Sanders is over here on the left and Donald Trump is way over here on the right.
When in reality what they had in common is an anti-establishment rhetoric and in a lot of cases policies.
But also the fact that there are millions of people.
He twice voted for President Obama and then voted for President Trump, which again makes no sense from a left-right perspective, but makes a lot of sense from a pro- and anti-establishment perspective, because both President Obama and President Trump ran as outsiders, vowing to tear down this political establishment of which they claimed never to be a part, to which they were going to be extremely hostile and adversarial, and that was their political appeal.
So, a lot of people who are paid to write about politics, work in journalism, work in government for a living, can't conceive of anything other than these old, archaic political labels that have divided people for years and that are purposely used to keep people divided at the benefit of an establishment that is far more bipartisan in nature than anybody wants to admit in Washington.
They can't see that, but they look at citizens who do see it as being misinformed or misguided, when in reality, people who see the world that way, namely through the prism of, I don't really care about which party someone belongs to or whether they identify as left or right.
I care about whether they're part of this rotted establishment or they're opposed to it.
Those are the people, in my view, seeing things a lot more clearly.
And I think that is, in a lot of ways, the common ground that has united so many people who previously were on different sides of the political debates that were the most important.
I think it's what is the ethos that is defining independent media.
A lot of people who are the ones with the biggest audiences inside independent media are people who have previously succeeded.
And more established media who no longer want to be a part of it, who no longer accept the constraints it imposes.
And the ethos of independent media and the people who are now turning to it is way more defined by hostility toward establishment institutions of authority, to believing that this polling data that holds these institutions in contempt, especially corporate media, But also institutions of the corporate world and the US security state viewing that sentiment as valid and legitimate and as necessary.
In fact, if anything, I think we need more distrust for these institutions still.
More opposition to them, more realization that they are fundamentally corrupted.
And the more I think about that, I talked to Russell earlier today about that, we both kind of explored that, the more I think it's important to spend some time on this show and in other contexts elaborating on it and exploring it and digging a little bit deeper into it because I do think it is the most important part of how our politics is shaped and defined.
So with that, that will conclude our show for this evening.
As I noted at the top of the show, every Tuesday and Thursday night, which includes tonight, it's Tuesday, we move to Locals, which is a platform that is part of Rumble, where we have our live interactive after show to take your questions and respond to your feedback.
As I mentioned, it was a subscriber who mentioned the film that we covered last night, Theaters of War, and we interviewed the director because we didn't know about that film.
That happens often where someone suggests that we cover a particular topic or talk to a particular person and we then end up doing that.
I've always viewed audience interactions as extremely valuable.
It's an important way for journalists to stay accountable as well, not just to speak in monologue form, but in dialogue form.
That's what we do on this After Show.
If you want to have access to that, you can join our Locals community by clicking the Join button.
As I mentioned, we're going to be integrating a lot more interactivity as well into this show that we have every night on Rumble.
That should be coming within the next couple of weeks, so you're free to join that Locals community as well.
As another reminder, we are encouraging everybody to download the Rumble app, which I think you will find Works extremely well.
It's very clean.
It's very efficient.
That will enable you to follow our show, follow other Rumble shows, and be notified as soon as we go live on air so you don't have to wait around for a few minutes late or you don't have to try and remember at what time we are.
It'll also enable you to encourage others to download that app.
I think Rumble is an extremely important player in our political landscape for the reason I just said, but also because it's truly devoted to protecting free speech in a way that very few other platforms are, so I hope you'll join in the effort to kind of evangelize about Rumble and spread it and build the audience for it even further, which you can do by downloading that app.
And then as a final reminder, we're available in podcast form as well.
You can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and all of the major podcasting platforms.
You can listen to the show 12 hours after they first are broadcast live here on Rumble, and if you rate and review the show, it helps spread the visibility of the program.
Thank you so much for continuing to watch.
We hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
