New Trump Indictment Presents Now-Familiar Dangers. Plus: Zelensky Battles Draft Dodgers & a Failed Counteroffensive | SYSTEM UPDATE #131
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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, it's getting very hard to count how many times Donald Trump has been indicted.
We are now up to four.
Two federal cases and two state cases.
Yesterday a District Attorney in Georgia, Fannie Willis, who represents the deeply blue Fulton County, home to Atlanta, convinced a grand jury to return an indictment of 13 felony counts against Trump, with many more against 18 of his closest political allies, including his attorney Rudy Giuliani.
The latest charges are based on very similar grounds as the prior indictment brought, this one by Special Counsel Jack Smith, namely charges that the former president committed multiple crimes for, in essence, claiming the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud and then seeking to invalidate the outcome of that election through what the last indictment and this one alleges are unlawful means for doing so.
The primary difference between yesterday's Georgia indictment and the federal one brought last week by Special Counsel Jack Smith is that the law in Georgia is, as a result of having been shaped by a so-called tough on crime mentality for many years, decades in fact, Milan, Georgia is far more sweeping, rigid, and threatening than federal law is.
Indeed, Georgia has a very permissive anti-racketeering statute, meaning the equivalent of RICO, the statute used by federal prosecutors to charge mafia bosses with being part of a broad criminal conspiracy since they often are not susceptible to being convicted of any standalone crime.
So they created this racketeering theory to drag mafia bosses or other high-level mafiosas into broad crimes committed by low-level people that they would charge with crimes and then hope to convince or coerce into becoming state witnesses against these higher-ranking people.
The district attorney, Willis, succeeded in characterizing the efforts of Trump and his allies as a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election and then treated it as eligible to be criminalized under the racketeering laws of Georgia, which makes everyone who did anything as part of the conspiracy which makes everyone who did anything as part of the conspiracy to further the conspiracy a full and equal member of the criminal ring, equally responsible for every crime, even if committed by others, as long as they were committed in furtherance of the criminal
see.
The real motive for charging so many people the way she did is to pressure the lower-level conspirators into turning state's evidence and then accusing the higher-ups of criminality as a way of saving themselves, then trying to use that coerced testimony to convict the bigger fish.
Needless to say, to a liberal prosecutor representing a county full of Democrats, there is no bigger fish than convicting Donald Trump.
Already the media worship of this District Attorney has predictably begun.
She's not quite at the level of toughness and attraction as Jack Smith is, but she's rapidly making her way there.
And while this indictment suffers from many of the same flaws and dangers as the prior one brought by Smith, The rigidity and heaviness of Georgia criminal law poses real challenges to Trump's legal team, including the possibility of far harsher pre-trial measures, almost certain to include his first mugshot, the possibility of pre-trial restrictions or even jail, pending trial.
The immunity of this state prosecution to any presidential pardon because it's a state crime, and the very pro-prosecutor provisions written into the law that will govern the pretrial proceedings and the trial itself.
Now, as we have noted before, criminally accusing populist and popular political leaders and then rendering them ineligible to run is an increasingly common weapon in the democratic world.
And that is clearly at least part of what is motivating this spate of prosecutions.
We'll examine this latest indictment and its various implications and put it in the overall context of liberals and other establishment defenders around the country desperately seeking to find a way to turn Joe Biden's primary election competition into a felon.
Then, at the start of the latest stage in the war in Ukraine in February of 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged supporters of his cause and the cause of Ukrainians all throughout the West to stop cheering for the war and making themselves feel strong and powerful and Churchillian by doing so on social media.
And instead go to Ukraine and pick up arms to help them fight against the Russian army based on the argument, among many, that Ukraine has far fewer people to fight against the much more populous country of Russia.
Unsurprisingly, very few of our pack of Western war cheerleaders in the media or political and punditry class heeded Zelensky's pleas.
Very few of them actually went to Ukraine to help them fight against and expel the Russians.
And as a result, Ukraine, which already faces a massive disadvantage in population sizes compared to Russia, Has really been struggling from the start and especially now that the most trained and most aggressive fighters, a lot of them have been removed from the battlefield, killed or wounded.
They're really struggling with an inability to match the sheer number of Russian men who are either willing or required to fight in this war.
Lately as a result, however, President Zelensky has become increasingly more repressive, both in terms of banning all dissent from being expressed, he has imposed martial law making it clear that there will be no elections until this war is over, which means he will remain in power for the foreseeable future into the indefinite future, and he has really had to crack down
on the attempt by Ukrainian men increasingly either to bribe their way out of the country or to just risk their lives fleeing the country because they don't want to be used as cannon fodder in what they obviously regard as an increasingly futile war.
We will look at the latest events in Ukraine, including on the part of President Zelensky that are increasingly anti-democratic in nature that signify the futility of this war effort, as well as the U.S. role, and remind you of some of the worst offenses of media propaganda that have been designed to sell this war to and remind you of some of the worst offenses of media propaganda that have been designed to sell this war to the West, something that finally is eroding as a majority of Americans have
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Donald Trump is 77 years old.
He has spent almost his entire life before running for president in 2016 involved in very complex business transactions in some quite difficult fields including
Gambling and real estate and he has long been known as being very aggressive if not somewhat sketchy in his business practices He has frequently been sued in civil court by all kinds of parties who have sought To dig into his deep pockets alleging fraud and all sorts of other breach of contract and other kinds of civil transgressions But the one thing that has never happened to him Until the last six months was he was never charged with any crime.
He was never indicted Now I suppose you can believe, if you really want to, that the fact that Donald Trump has never been indicted until now is simply a byproduct of the fact that very wealthy people, famous people, people with a lot of financial power are typically immunized from prosecution In our political culture and in our judicial system, and I certainly agree with that as a general sentiment.
In fact, I wrote a book in 2011, the title of which was, With Liberty and Justice for Some, that makes exactly that argument.
It was following President Obama's announcement that no one in the CIA, nobody in the Bush administration will be prosecuted for any crimes committed during the war on terror, even though he ran for president and won for president in 2008, vowing to allow his attorney general to prosecute people
If there was any indication of any crimes, torture, rendition, kidnapping, spying on people with no warrants, including American citizens and the like, things that have traditionally and classically been characterized as crimes, Obama simply bestowed a full-scale immunity not only on CIA officials and Bush officials, but also on the major telecoms
in the United States that participated in illegal spying by turning over huge amounts of their user data to the NSA, to the FBI, without even being presented with a subpoena.
So it is true that we have always had this kind of ethos that, except in very rare cases, usually when elites take action that prejudices or harms other elites, people like Bernie Maydow, who actually stole from a lot of rich people, there is a tendency not to bring criminal charges against them, except there is a tendency not to bring criminal charges against them, except that this has now been completely abandoned, but not as a general proposition, but only with regard to
He spent 77 years involved in all sorts of transactions that left a lot of people angry, was sued a lot, but was never charged with a crime.
And I guess you're now supposed to believe that at the age of 76, he is turned into a chronic criminal.
It's a gigantic coincidence that he amassed a huge amount of political power and exercised it in a way that angered Every sector of institutional authority in the United States, every sector of American power.
The U.S.
security state turned against him from the start.
The corporate media was united against him.
Almost every politician in establishment Republican politics either publicly or secretly despised him.
I guess you're supposed to believe, if you want to view these prosecutions as valid, that all that is a gigantic coincidence.
That Donald Trump simply broke the law repeatedly, violated the law, the criminal law, committed major crimes in a way that requires, in each of these cases, the law to be pioneered for new sorts of legal theories to be embraced about what is a crime and what isn't.
And that none of it has anything to do with political motivation, with residual anger over the way Trump exercised political power, and especially with fear, over fear that Donald Trump is leading most public opinion polls, not just within the Republican primary, but also in a head-to-head matchup with Joe Biden, to regain the presidency in 2024, something that leaves most establishment senators of power in the United States aghast.
Now we have, each time President Trump was previously indicted, spent the show dissecting the indictment, dissecting and analyzing the legal issues raised by them.
It's not entirely necessary to do so with this latest indictment yesterday from the grand jury in Georgia at the hands of this Fulton County District Attorney because it's extremely similar.
In its factual framework to the indictment on a federal level that was brought by Jack Smith just a week ago.
Jack Smith's indictment, the second one, the first one was about Donald Trump's alleged carelessness with classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, which as of course you know if anyone is careless with classified documents in our media and political elite they're instantly charged with crimes.
Of course, that's exactly untrue.
They leak classified information every single day.
No one cares.
Everyone knows that's part of the game.
Trump's not even accused of having done that.
And yet he's facing major felony counts, which for me, that combined with the absolute joke of a prosecution brought by the very liberal Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg in Manhattan, which was the first one, reveals the sham that's going on here.
How transparently the law is being politicized and abused.
The third indictment, the first federal one, which was the second federal one, which was brought by Jack Smith, alleged that Trump's efforts to contest and then invalidate the certified results of the 2020 election that certified Joe Biden as the winner and Donald Trump as the loser was criminal in nature.
And that's exactly what this new indictment in Georgia alleges.
It's based on almost the same facts.
The district attorney interviewed almost exactly the same witnesses as Jack Smith interviewed.
It's based on essentially the same set of events as that federal indictment.
In fact, supposed to be prohibitions on things like double jeopardy and being accused of crimes twice for the same set of events.
And yet, here we have this district attorney in Georgia who has now succeeded in convincing a grand jury, which of course is very easy to do, to return indictments against Trump and 18 of his political allies and And the reason this indictment is more serious in terms of the dangers posed to Trump Is because Georgia law has been shaped for many decades by a political so-called tough on crime mentality.
And it's one of the reasons why I think people on the right and conservatives who typically cheer for that kind of a ethos need to think twice about whether handing prosecutors this very broad and permissive and sweeping ability to find crimes that take away rights from the defendants, the people accused of committing their crimes, in the name of being tough on crime,
Whether that has the potential to criminalize all sorts of behaviors and provide huge amounts of discretion in the hands of whoever becomes prosecutors to turn almost anybody into a criminal or a felon for actions that really should not be criminalized.
We are going to spend a little bit of time just going over the key details of this indictment on the way to putting it into its key context.
So first of all, here from the Associated Press, yesterday is Trump and his 18 allies charged in Georgia election meddling as the former president faces his fourth criminal case.
Quote, Donald Trump and 18 allies were indicted in Georgia on Monday over their efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.
With prosecutors using a statute normally associated with mobsters to accuse the former president, lawyers and other aides of a quote criminal enterprise to keep him in power.
The nearly 100 page indictment details dozens of acts by Trump or his allies to undo his defeat.
Including beseeching Georgia's Republican Secretary of State to find enough votes for him to win the battleground state, harassing an election worker who faced false claims of fraud, and attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new slate of electoral college electors favorable to Trump.
That kind of blurs the line between the prosecutor's description of events and the media's accounting for them.
Although, of course, when it comes to corporate media, there won't really be any line.
They're 100% on the side of these prosecutors.
In almost every one of these indictments, they barely disguise or attempt to disguise their glee over these indictments being brought.
But the whole criminal case, like the one brought by Doc Smith, is contingent upon the belief That when Trump claimed the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud, he A, was lying.
There was no outcome determinative fraud.
B, he knew he was lying.
In other words, he wasn't pursuing claims that he thought were valid or had any good faith to them.
And that C, the methods he used were unlawful to overturn the election.
So for example, in that call to the Georgia official, You can look at these words of, I just want to find 12,000 votes or 11,800 votes.
And if you believe that Trump's claims of election fraud were totally false and that he knew they were false, then you can look at that conversation with one interpretation, which is Trump was trying to coerce or encourage politically favorable officials in the state to fabricate or find Fake votes in order to give him an election that he knew he had in fact lost.
If, however, Donald Trump genuinely believed that there was massive voter fraud and that he had legal opportunities or legal outlets, valid legal outlets, to contest them, meaning he thought there were a hundred thousand Fraudulent votes cast or votes for him that weren't counted.
And he calls a Georgia official and says, I just need 12,000.
It has a much different read.
It means that he's essentially calling this Georgia official and saying, I need your help in proving what happened, namely that there was massive fraud and that I was the real winner of Georgia and not Joe Biden.
And so I hear so often now, Liberal left commentators, and it's increasingly this faction, liberal left, is increasingly becoming merged.
I know a lot of people who are in the mainstream Bernie AOC left who pledge their loyalty to the Democratic Party, get so offended when you say liberal left, because I'm not like resistance liberals, we're radicals, we hate the Democratic Party, but increasingly they view every event Every political controversy, exactly the same.
Their views, their opinions, the content they produce, if they're a podcast host or YouTube host or whatever, is completely distinguishable from the narrative of MSNBC and CNN and the Democratic Party narrative.
And I hear some of these people so often saying that these indictments can't possibly be based on Trump's free speech rights because Jack Smith in the second paragraph of the indictment and this prosecutor too specifically said it wasn't about that.
The level of blind reverence and faith in prosecutors From left liberals is alarming to see to say that it's out of character and that they're making massive exceptions to what they claim is their worldview.
Remember, these are the people marching in 2020 based on the view that all cops are bastards, that the jail should be defunded, defund prisons and the like.
That prosecutors are corrupt arms of the evil prison state?
They now are willing to say, well, if the prosecutors say this case isn't about free speech, that's proof that it isn't.
And anyone who says it must not have read the indictments, because if a prosecutor says something, then of course that means it's true.
You accept it as gospel.
Just like they have the same mentality now for corporate media, for the US security state, They really have come to be a political movement that reveres institutions of power because they regard them validly as being their political allies.
But if you're willing to look past prosecutorial claims about their own indictment and their own charges, of course prosecutors are going to say, these charges don't infringe free speech rights.
Do you think there was ever a prosecutor anywhere?
Who said, yes, this indictment is about protected free speech?
Of course they all say that it's not.
You have to actually look past that claim and see whether it's valid.
And if you look at these events in this indictment, just like in Jack Smith's indictment, the question of whether Trump really believed that there was election fraud and whether he really believed because his lawyers told him that these were valid means of contesting election are critical.
Because it changes the interpretation of everything.
If Trump genuinely believed there was voting fraud, and I know for sure a lot of his followers do, and I believe Trump did as well, despite having been told by some people that there was not enough voting fraud, including Bill Barr, he was told by a lot of other people that he trusted more that there was.
And yes, state of mind is crucial for a crime.
It is in every single case.
If you take a car and run somebody over because you hate that person and want to kill them, that is a completely different act under the criminal law than if you take that car and are drinking and run into somebody by accident whom you don't know and have no intention to kill, even though it looks exactly like the same act, when the only difference is what's going on in your mind.
And then if you can prove that you took that car and ran that person over because you actually heard voices in your head as a result of a mental illness, that someone in your head told you to run that person over or you hallucinated that they were coming to kill you and you could prove that, you won't be guilty of any crime at all because you lack the requisite criminal intent.
Intent is everything in the criminal law.
And it so much reminds me of everything that Russiagate was based on.
Where Trump stood up in a press conference and said, Russia, if you're listening, maybe you can get Hillary Clinton's emails.
He was mocking the media so blatantly and flagrantly using that kind of satirical tone that he always uses because they were asking him about whether he had worked with the Russians to hack into the DNC's emails.
He thought it was preposterous.
And so we said, Russia, if you're listening, maybe you can hack into, find those missing Hillary Clinton emails.
And they decided to interpret that earnestly as some sort of direct request to the Russians to actually hack Hillary Clinton's emails, as though he would make a request to Russia in front of a hundred cameras to undertake an illegal act.
They're constantly taking Trump's statements and giving them the worst possible interpretation, often absurdly, obscenely dumb.
In order to give it the most nefarious possible reading and so an example like that where Trump picks up the phone and either coerces a Georgia official to fabricate 12,000 fraudulent votes or he picks up the phone and encourages the Georgia official to find what he believes is there which is voting fraud makes all the difference in the world for how you interpret this.
One of the things I'm increasingly seeing Is that when Trump was first indicted, almost every Republican was extremely careful not to defend the prosecutor, including Governor DeSantis, Trump's main opposition.
Usually in an election, if your opponent, your main opponent is indicted, of course you jump on that.
You're excited by that.
But DeSantis has been very careful, as has almost every other Republican candidate, except the ones who have no chance, who are just there to bash Trump and get on TV for it, like Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson.
But the ones who actually believe they're real candidates and have a chance have been very careful to defend Trump and criticize these prosecutors.
Obviously, that was easy to do in the Alvin Bragg prosecution, because it's so blatantly frivolous, that case.
As you might recall, it just alleges that there was like a bookkeeping inaccuracy designed to mischaracterize the nature of the payments to Stormy Daniels as instead a legal fee.
And they took a completely unprecedented legal theory to try and turn that into a felony felony.
Something like that would always be a misdemeanor because Alvin Bragg wanted attention and wanted political approval and wanted to be able to, for ideological reasons, turn Donald Trump into a criminal by dragging him before a Manhattan jury knowing they will be politically motivated against him.
What I'm now seeing though is not so much Ron DeSantis or other candidates
Coming out and defending these prosecutors, because they know Republican voters don't want to hear that, but there are a lot of people, surrogates and the like, people online with a lot of influence, who support DeSantis, who are increasingly getting very vocal about starting to defend these prosecutors, including this one, this district attorney in Fulton County, despite her self-identified status as a Liberal Democrat.
I think it's out of desperation, because the more Trump gets indicted, the more his lead grows, and that is absolutely the dynamic that's happening.
Still time left, still six months to go before the first votes in Iowa are counted, but obviously if you're DeSantis, you're Nikki Haley, you're Tim Scott, You're any other candidate.
You're looking at this with increasing desperation.
And so taking the side of the Democrats and liberals and the media in these prosecutions is for a lot of them, I think they think it's their only choice.
And one of the things they're doing is even now going to defend Stacey Abrams and Other Democrats who have also contested elections and tried to overturn elections by saying the difference here is that Stacey Abrams, even though she refused to concede, even though she claims to this very day she really won, was the rightful winner of that 2018 governor's race in Georgia against Brian Kemp where she was declared the loser.
Even though she contested the results and even sought to overturn it through legal theories, they will say she never used anything, any means illegal to try and overturn the election.
But that leaves me asking, what is it that Donald Trump did exactly that was illegal?
He definitely sued in court multiple times and lost, which is absolutely his right to do.
He told Mike Pence what he heard from his lawyers Was Mike Pence's ability to do even if it wasn't, which is act as that vice presidential role and reject as certified results, ones that he regarded had evidence of fraud and send them back to the states.
He arranged for an alternative state of electors to be ready to be anointed in the event he could prove that there was fraud.
But what about this is criminal?
Which of these steps are illegal?
You really have to stretch the law to make it into a crime.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but this is what I've been saying from the beginning.
If we're going to abandon Decades worth of consensus among Washington elites in the political and media class.
Consensus that I have not shared, that I have rejected, but I only wanted to ban it if it's going to be applied equally to everybody.
I don't want it to be a one-time only exemption for Trump.
I had been arguing since the beginning of writing about politics that the media's fraudulent neutrality or posture of Not having opinions or not being subjective was devastating to journalism because everybody knows it's a fraud.
And then of course sometimes as a journalist you have to take sides if one side is saying something untrue and the other side is saying something true.
The example I always use was the use of torture methods by George Bush and Dick Cheney that had been regarded as torture in every single jurisdiction, including American jurisdictions, for decades.
And I don't just mean waterboarding.
The torture that was used by the United States as part of the War on Terror went way beyond that.
All kinds of stress positions, keeping people in cold, depriving them of sleep for days at a time to disorient them.
Classic techniques of torture that had been regarded as torture and prosecuted as torture by the American authorities for decades.
And then simply because George Bush found a couple of lawyers, neocon lawyers, in the Justice Department to say it wasn't torture, the media refused to call it torture.
On the grounds that they shouldn't take sides.
And they would start to call it harsh interrogation techniques because that was the terminology the Bush Justice Department had adopted.
And I always was against that.
Of course the media needs to have an allegiance to the truth and sometimes that does mean you say that one side is wrong and the other side is right.
They obviously have abandoned this feigned neutrality.
They don't pretend at all to be neutral.
It's just their loyalty is not to the truth.
It's just to defeating Donald Trump.
It's not that they've abandoned this practice of feigning neutrality or being objective to a flaw.
It's a one-time only exemption for Donald Trump.
Everything has been transformed as a result of Donald Trump.
Every profession, every institution that has anything to do with politics has abdicated their role in order to do that.
And that's the same here.
This does not mean, none of these indictments mean that we're now going to start to have a very wide and permissive interpretation of law to start indicting top-level politicians.
If it were, I would look at it differently.
I would still only favor prosecution where someone has actually committed clear crimes.
You cannot go around charging popular politicians with crimes absent clear criminality, because if you do that, You're going to destroy the credibility of the justice system and of the legal authorities who administer it, which is exactly what's happening now.
But I am not in favor of the idea that top-level political officials should be immunized or exempt from the law simply because they're popular.
It's just I see and I know that this is a one-time only exemption for Donald Trump.
And all of these cases require a very dubious and strained interpretation of the criminal law.
And it's relying on the fact that the judges in the judiciary will abdicate their role, just like journalists have, just like the US security state has, just like Big Tech did.
Because they will adopt the Sam Harris view, as expressed in that viral video, for which I will be eternally grateful to Sam Harris for expressing, because it was so illuminating, that the evils of Donald Trump are so great that any other transgression, especially if undertaken in the name of stopping Donald Trump, is automatically justified.
And they think there are judges, and I think there are too, who are willing to stretch the law to turn Trump into a criminal based on their view.
Either that Trump is so nefarious that you have to kind of stretch the law and make exceptions to stop him.
Or these are people who live in liberal elite circles.
They live in nice Washington neighborhoods or wherever they are from, and they don't want to be known in their circles as the judge who defended Donald Trump or who ruled in favor of Donald Trump.
That is a very significant motivating factor for liberal elites.
I've seen it in media.
I've seen it everywhere.
And so the combination of bringing these lawsuits in places like Atlanta or Manhattan or Washington, where they know they're going to have a lot of Democratic voters on the jury automatically, or bringing them in the hope that judges will be afraid of being the judge who ruled in favor of Trump, is what they're banking on to take these dubious cases and turn them into winners.
And maybe they will win.
But The entire context of all of this, as I just laid out, makes it so dangerous.
Now, the AP article goes on.
It says, quote, the indictment alleges, go to the next paragraph.
The indictment alleges that rather than abide by Georgia's legal process for election challenges, the defendants engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia's presidential election result, Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis, whose office brought the case, said at a late night news conference.
Now, to me, racketeering or undertaking criminal acts to overturn the election would be things like threatening election workers, we're going to have you killed unless you overturn these results to announce that you found fraud.
Or bribery, paying people to do that.
Or blackmail, threatening people that if they don't, they'll have things revealed about them.
Calling them up in a good faith effort, if it were a good faith effort, to find evidence of fraud if you think it's there.
Invoking methods that you're told by your lawyers and you have a good faith reason to believe is true are legal.
Nobody would believe that you could threaten people with violence, even if your lawyers told you could, nobody would threaten, believe that it was legitimate to use blackmail.
But to invoke a legal process or to Arrange for alternative electors or to encourage Mike Pence to do what you think is his constitutional exercise, constitutional right, even if you're wrong, is not the stuff of which crimes are made.
That is not criminal intent.
Here's the indictment itself.
And here you can see on the screen to put that indictment on the screen.
Here is the state of Georgia versus Donald J. Trump.
And here you see the counts that apply to him, the charges on which he's been indicted.
There's 13 of them.
And then there you see the other defendants that include here Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, who was Trump's lawyer, Mark Meadows, who was his chief of staff.
So then they go down the list, way down the list.
To people who just can't afford to hire lawyers to fend off a prosecution with no limits on their resources.
And the hope, of course, is that those people will become sufficiently desperate and be willing to say whatever the prosecutors want them to say in order to be immunized.
And then they take that accusation or those accusations and use them at the trial against Trump and the people they really want to prosecute.
That's the intent here.
That's the strategy.
Now, the media is, as I said, barely hiding their glee over this indictment, just as they've done for every other indictment.
But there was one comment in particular that I wanted to highlight because it's from Van Jones, who, as the independent journalist Max Blumenthal pointed out, used to be in a Marxist-Leninist group whose official position was that The prison state should be abolished.
That prison should be defunded.
They hated prosecutors.
They thought prosecutors were an inherently evil arm of the unjust prison state.
And suddenly here's Van Jones singing a much different tune because now it's Donald Trump who has been accused.
And I thought what Van Jones said was very notable about this prosecution.
Let's listen to this video.
on a bigger slice of America than even just these little cowardly candidates to start talking about the beauty of our institutions.
This is a beautiful system that we have.
People around the world don't have this.
It's so inspiring.
It's a beautiful system we have where liberals and Democrats, you get elected prosecutors, bring charges based on dubious theories of criminality.
Against the leading conservative politician where Joe Biden's Justice Department charges his leading, the leading oppositional politician with all sorts of felonies as a way of trying to weaken him. - Or put him in prison prior to the election?
So inspiring.
And this idea that this only happens in the United States, basically it's a theory of American exceptionalism, that only we in the United States are lucky enough to have a system that permits this, is the exact opposite of reality.
In fact, it is becoming an increasingly common weapon in democracies around the world to imprison popular leaders or former presidents, or both, In order to prevent them from running again or to undermine their chances of winning.
Here are just many examples in 2018 when former President Lula da Silva was leading all public opinion polls after serving two terms in office that ended in 2010.
He was seeking reelection.
He was leading every public opinion poll.
He was quickly charged with corruption, convicted on dubious charges, sent to 11 years in prison.
It was only once we did the reporting that showed that his prosecutor and the judge who presided over the case were politically motivated and active corruptly.
Was that prosecution invalidated and reversed and he was permitted to run and then he ran in 2022 and won by a very small margin over Jair Bolsonaro.
Now Jair Bolsonaro, who's Lula's primary challenger himself, Has been declared ineligible to run.
There you see from AP, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro is barred from running for office until 2030.
He hasn't even been accused of a crime yet, let alone convicted of one.
He likely will be accused at least.
But they've already banned him as well.
So the last two presidents of Brazil were banned from running.
The one before that was impeached.
Here from NPR, there you see former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy found guilty of corruption.
It happened in France as well.
In a much more recent example, and a much more dubious example, in Pakistan, the highly popular Prime Minister Imran Khan was imprisoned and sentenced to three years in jail, where he now is in prison.
After in 2022, in February of 2022, he enraged the United States.
By flying to Russia on a long-scheduled visit.
It happened to be on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine.
And then he declared Pakistan's neutrality.
And we just saw the mail emerge published by my former colleagues Ryan Grim and Martaza Hussain that is from the State Department and describes that the State Department flew to Pakistan and met with Pakistani military leaders and said you either remove Imran Khan from office or You will get a lot of punishments in the way of all sorts of aid caught and other reprisals.
They removed him the next month, and now he's convicted, imprisoned, and barred from running as well.
It happened in South Korea, where a former president of South Korea was sentenced to 20 years in prison on various corruption charges.
It happened in Ecuador as well where former President Rafael Correa, who governed Pakistan at the time that Ecuador offered asylum to Julian Assange, enraging the rest, the West.
He was also charged and convicted of various corruption charges.
He now is living outside the country in exile in an asylum, I believe in Belgium, somewhere in Europe.
But he's extremely popular.
In fact, the candidate he's currently supporting in the election is leading public opinion polls, although that might have changed as a result of one candidate just having been assassinated.
Correa is so popular still in Ecuador, even though he's criminally charged and convicted in absentia and now in exile, that the candidate who he's supporting, who she has pledged to put him into power in the government, is leading public opinion polls.
Of course, it happened in Israel as well, where Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Prime Minister, is facing very serious corruption charges.
Now, there has been a term for this forever, which is called lawfare, where The establishment corrupts the democratic process by fabricating criminal charges against popular leaders because they don't trust democracy, they don't trust the people of the country to choose the president.
They're worried that the people of the country will make the wrong choice, that democracy in their hands is unsafe, they cannot be trusted, just like they don't trust the internet any longer to be free.
And so they use what is called lawfare, a form of waging war against the democratic system by charging and convicting popular presidents.
I'm not suggesting that all of these presidents and all of these people are being unjustly charged.
I think some of them for sure are.
But what I found so repellent is Van Jones's effort To instruct us and sermonize us that we're all supposed to be so grateful because owning the United States is such a thing possible, when in fact it's happening in multiple countries around the world.
It's becoming the preferred weapon of establishment centers of power to render populist leaders and popular leaders, especially anti-establishment leaders, ineligible to run or otherwise destroyed because they're convicted of multiple crimes.
That is happening in many, many countries of the United States.
Now, as I said, the media is already doing to Fannie Willis, the district attorney in Georgia who brought this indictment, what they did to Jack Smith.
Here's a remarkable article that just turns her into kind of a folk hero in the most naked and repellent ways, and in doing so says some things along the way that I think are highly revealing.
So there you see her.
There's her obviously posed picture.
She's standing in front of a wall of books looking into the distance, not to the camera.
I don't know what that's intended to convey, but obviously she posed for her glamour shots.
The Guardians.
Headline on this article is the fight for democracy.
That's what Fannie Willis is doing.
She's fighting for democracy by trying to imprison the most popular politician in the United States, or at least the most popular presidential candidate at the moment.
And they have a threat from her.
Quote, he's going to be very surprised Georgia D.A.
Fannie Willis prepares to face off with Trump.
Legal Watchers say the Fulton County District Attorney's entire career has prepared her for the prosecution of Donald Trump.
I bet it has.
The article says, quote, the synopsis for a Fannie Willis biopic, they're already imagining what the film is going to look like, celebrating this great woman's life.
The synopsis for a Fannie Williams' Willis biopic would probably go something like this.
In Fulton County, the first black woman to serve as district attorney takes on an unlikely case.
Willis grew up attending court with her father, a defense attorney in Black Panther.
Now, she sits on the opposite side of the courtroom, hoping to indict a former president who sought to overturn election results and often espoused white supremacist rhetoric while doing so.
This is a news article.
The film's montage would pull from real life, depicting a determined, unflappable Willis.
Remember the headlines about Jack Smith's steely-eyed gaze?
Willis has a determined, unflappable demeanor as she relentlessly pours over documents, leading her team through the long work hours and security risks that come with bringing an indictment against an often inflammatory former president, even as national attention on the case reached a groundswell.
We'd watch her face racist threats and unsubstantiated rumors of misconduct, but she'd refuse to back down from the task at hand.
How are they not so embarrassed to write this?
To write this copy?
She'd advocate for what she believed to be... This is a film they're imagining.
This is starting the entire article.
This is a film this reporter has fantasized in his head.
Where this prosecutor trying to put Donald Trump in jail, who's a liberal and a democrat and a admitted one, is the star of this film and she's being depicted as this very brave and intrepid figure standing down racist violence.
Quote, she'd advocate for what she believed to be right, even when it wasn't popular.
How is that not popular?
Every institution of liberal authority in the United States is celebrating her, including the Guardian.
She'd appear in press conferences and in media interviews delivering stern soundbites such as, quote, Lady Justice is actually blind.
This is the reality.
If you come into my community and you commit a crime, you deserve to be held responsible.
Her investigation is focused on Trump's efforts to subvert the will of Georgia's voters, including his campaign's plot to assemble a state of faith electorates and Trump's phone call to Georgia Republican Secretary of State, Blatt Raffensperger, asking him to quote, find 11,780 votes, which would make him the winner over Joe Biden in the state.
In her first term as DA and amid ongoing conversations about criminal justice reform in Georgia and beyond, Willis has not only prepared to face off with the former president and his legal team, she's also been tough on crime in a number of other ways too.
These people in liberal media Two years ago, we're saying to be tough on crime was to be a white supremacist.
They marched in the streets demanding the dismantling of the police state and the emptying of prisons.
And now they worship prosecutors like pop stars.
They repudiate every professed value that they have.
The minute it comes to finding a way to undermine Donald Trump or preventing Democrats from having to actually defeat him in an election and being able to turn him into a criminal, they're talking about tough-on-crime politics like they're Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, even though they want empty prisons and defund the police.
Quote, since running for office, the Democratic official has made no apologies for being a liberal.
With conservative leading views on criminal justice or the fact that she was endorsed and received funding from a police union during her campaign.
As the, from the police unions you mean the white supremacist fascist police force that supports her?
As DA, she's indicted the Grammy award-winning rapper Young Thug and his music collective under Georgia's racketeering statute, fought appeals from teachers she previously prosecuted during a high-profile standardized test cheating scandal, and sought the death penalty for a man who murdered four women during a shooting spree that targeted Asian spas in Metro Atlanta.
If this person were a Republican and if she were a white prosecutor, She would be called a Nazi by every media outlet, talking about tough on crime, prosecuting teachers, saying how people need prison terms, harsh prison terms, being supported by the white supremacist police, and being proud of that.
But here she's a folk hero.
Do you see how every single view they have is jettisoned immediately and without the slightest hesitation?
When it comes to Donald Trump, this is a microcosm of what's taking place in every major American institution.
Quote, RICO is so broad in Georgia that it really is a free-for-all, Franklin said, and allows for the substance of the case to become secondary, and it allows for a prosecutor to just tell a narrative of whatever they want to tell, because the pattern of racketeering only has to be two occurrences that don't necessarily have to be related to one another.
It just felt abusive and leans into this concept of prosecutors as bullies who just want to get what they want as opposed to using the tools of their disposal to achieve community safety and justice.
Georgia's RICO Act was enacted in 1980, a decade after the federal version, which is a notably narrower scope.
The federal statute, for instance, requires that prosecutors show proof that there is a threat of ongoing racketeering activity in Georgia.
Only two related acts are needed to prove a pattern.
It was enacted in 1980 at the time of the same election that enacted Ronald Reagan when Republicans were absolutely running on a tough-on-crime platform, and they enacted a lot of laws that made it way easier for prosecutors to easily obtain convictions against people with barely any proof.
And now they're, in some way, reaping what they've sowed.
And that's what makes this prosecution probably more dangerous than any of the others, though not more valid.
Here from Business Insider from today, also on why this lawsuit is more threatening to Trump than the others, Trump would have to serve five years in prison before he can be pardoned in the Georgia criminal case.
Expert says Trump can't pardon himself out of this one.
Quote, if the former president is convicted in Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis' new criminal case against him, he'll have to serve five years before he can be pardoned.
Willis' case, brought in Georgia, accuses Trump and 18 of his associates of forming an illegal enterprise to keep him in power, breaking numerous laws along the way.
Trump was personally charged on 13 different counts.
The top charge for racketeering, or RICO, carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.
Unlike in his two federal criminal cases, Trump can't expect a Republican president to pardon him before or after he goes to trial, nor can he rely on a Republican governor in Georgia to pardon him and get rid of the criminal charges.
Georgia is one of five states that doesn't grant pardon power to the governor.
Instead, the state's constitution gives pardon power to the state's five-member board of paroles and pardons.
Quote, if there were to be a sympathetic Republican elected president, Trump, on a federal conviction charge or the federal charges, could be given a pardon immediately.
Ronald Carlson, a professor at the University of Georgia Law School, told Insider, quote, that is not possible in Georgia.
So you see why they're particularly excited about bringing this case in Georgia, where the law is incredibly favorable to prosecutors.
Now, I have seen a lot of misconceptions, including by some people defending Trump or criticizing this prosecution.
The indictment, for example, mentions a lot of acts that seem on their face to be benign or at least clearly legal.
Trump tweeting certain things about the election or saying things to certain people.
The problem is, is that when you're bringing a RICO case under Georgia law, this incredibly permissive RICO statute, it isn't just criminal acts that can become part of the conspiracy.
It's anything that's done to further a criminal conspiracy gets included in the lawsuit.
Including legal acts.
So if a legal act is undertaken to further a criminal conspiracy, the indictment's going to talk about that.
I saw someone today offer an example that I thought was a pretty good one that illustrates the point, which is if you're charged in a conspiracy to kidnap The fact that you went and bought duct tape at a grocery store would probably or a pharmacy would be included in the indictment even though obviously buying duct tape is not criminal.
If it's done in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy, however, it becomes part of the criminal conspiracy and therefore is mentioned in the indictment.
The problem is that what is the criminal conspiracy here?
Here from The Free Bacon, this was in April of last year, just to give you a sense for how often this is done, namely contesting elections in the United States.
We talked before about how Democrats in every election they've lost since 2000, 2000, 2004, 2016, have claimed that the election outcome was illegitimate, that it was achieved only through corruption or fraud.
They obviously sued repeatedly in 2000 to make Al Gore the winner.
They, in 2004, brought objections in the Congress, as they did in 2000, contesting the certified results.
They did the same thing in 2016.
And then Stacey Abrams, the failed gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, who to this day has not conceded.
is probably the one who most aggressively has contested the election outcome, and this case is risking criminalizing the contesting of election outcomes on the grounds that there was fraud, which is practically a national pastime.
A lot of historians, if you ask them, will say that JFK's victory in 1960 was due to election fraud committed by then Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to hand Illinois, the key determinative state in that election, to John Kennedy, whereas Richard Nixon really won it.
Many elections have been marred by charges of fraud and efforts to impede the certification.
Joe Biden's FEC nominee sued Georgia over Stacey Abrams' election loss and blamed, quote, unreliable voting machines.
Quote, Dara Lindenbaum represented Abrams' nonprofit, Raphael Warnock's church, in a suit that questioned the, quote, unconstitutional 2018 election.
It reports, quote, President Joe Biden's pick to serve on the FEC is representing Stacey Abrams' nonprofit and Raphael Warnock's church in a lawsuit that challenged the validity of Georgia's 2018 election due in part to the state's use of, quote, unreliable electronic voting machines.
In November 2018, election lawyer Dara Lindenbaum signed on to a federal legal complaint on behalf of Abrams' Fair Fight Act.
The complaint challenged the constitutionality of Georgia's 2018 election, which saw Abrams lose to Republican Governor Brian Kemp in a race she never conceded.
Warnock's Ebenezer Baptist Church joined the suit in early 2019, just months before the Democrat entered Georgia's 2020 Senate race.
According to the complaint, the state of Georgia, quote, grossly mismanaged the election by depriving Georgia citizens, and particularly citizens of color, of their fundamental right to vote.
As a result, the complaint said, Georgia's election, quote, violated the first 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S.
Constitution.
The complaint also lamented the use of, quote, insecure and unreliable electronic voting machines that, quote, lack a paper trail and thus cannot be audited.
And those machines even switch votes from Abram to Kemp, according to the complaint.
Now, Stacey Abrams' attempt to insist that the election in 2018 that she lost was the byproduct of fraud was not confined to legal challenges, all of which she lost.
She engaged in a public campaign to persuade the public that she only lost because of fraud.
This is a five minute or so video of her repeatedly doing that.
We'll just show you a minute or so just to give you a sense for how sustained and committed Her effort was to deny the legitimacy of the 2018 election that continues until this very day.
I do have one very affirmative statement to make.
We won!
But I didn't lose.
I got the votes.
But we won't know exactly how many because of how they cheated.
I did win my election.
I just didn't get to have the job.
We were robbed of an election.
She's using the word rigged, using the word steal.
Do you think it's dangerous going into 2020?
I don't because we can actually back it up.
And so in response to what I believe, This is not a speech of concession.
Because concession needs to acknowledge an action is right, true, or proper.
And I will not concede because the erosion of our democracy is not right.
People are going to make you mad.
They will defend your future.
They're going to steal your election.
It was not a free and fair election.
I think the election was stolen from the people of Georgia.
I believe it was stolen from the voters.
Thousands of Georgians had their voices stolen because they were not able to cast ballots and they cannot be guaranteed that their votes will be counted in 2020 if we don't do this right.
Now there you see, that's a minute long of what we showed you.
There's five minutes at least of that.
She's going on every MSNBC program and just explicitly stating that the election was stolen from her, that the results are illegitimate, that there was fraud in the campaign that was outcome determinative.
On the very same MSNBC shows that just two years later would look in the camera and tell you that anyone who does that is destroying American democracy, even though Democrats have been doing that forever, every time they lose an election.
I saw some DeSantis supporters today saying that Stacey Abrams is different.
She didn't go as far as Trump.
But again, what did Trump do that is criminal that Stacey Abrams didn't?
Trump believed that all the legal processes and all the attempts to persuade officials to look again were perfectly legal.
He was told by lawyers that they were.
And again, he didn't do anything classically criminal.
You can think of crimes that could easily be committed in the furtherance of a criminal scheme to overturn an election.
Threatening people with violence, using violence, blackmail, extortion, bribery, etc.
Trump did none of that.
You really have to stretch to turn these into crimes.
Now, you probably recall that
There was actually an effort after the 2016 election to take the certified outcome of the states where Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump and turn them into Clinton states in the Electoral College by convincing Electoral College members that they had the right to ignore the certified results of their state and vote for Hillary Clinton or not for Donald Trump even though their states This is a scheme implemented by Democratic operatives.
They campaigned.
electoral votes for Trump.
Here in the Atlantic, very approvingly reporting on the, quote, Hamilton electors, hoping for an electoral college revolt.
This is a scheme implemented by Democratic operatives.
They campaigned.
They called these electorates.
They waged a campaign publicly and privately to induce them to change their votes, to become faithless and to ignore the outcomes of their state.
Why is that not criminal to do?
Why is that a legitimate, lawful means of overturning an election, whereas what Donald Trump did is unlawful?
That is not an easy question to ask, to answer rather.
From the Washington Times, in February of 2021, Democrats copy Trump playbook, alleged voting machine flaws in a tight New York House race.
Quote, taking a page out of the Donald Trump playbook, prominent Democratic Party lawyer Mark Elias is alleging voter machine discrepancies in a close New York congressional race.
And the machines being criticized are Dominion voting systems.
The same ballot scanners vilified by Trump supporters in battleground states and defended by winning Democrats.
Mr. Elias of the D.C.
firm Perkins Coie led a team of President Biden's attorneys successfully fighting Trump challenges in over 50 courts.
And yet he then went on and In a court hearing contested the reliability of Dominion voting system by alleging that there was fraud that led to the victory by the Republican congressional candidate over the Democratic one.
That is one of the dangers from these two lawsuits, the one by Brock, by Jack Smith, the one in Georgia, the specific risk of criminalizing attempts to contest the outcome of elections, which has been done for decades by both parties.
But the much broader risk and danger
is to abuse the political system as a means of turning political opponents who most threaten your chance to stay in power into felons by taking democratic party prosecutors or prosecutors who have allegiance to the establishment who are willing to abuse the law and that is a problem is that mostly the republican party though some democrats really have worked for a long time to arm prosecutors with increasingly unchallengeable authority to win criminal cases
To take away rights of the defendant and give more power to prosecutors.
That is true.
That is part of what is happening here is that prosecutors have very wide discretion and can win criminal cases very easily.
But it becomes a major problem if a certain framework is being applied to Donald Trump for political reasons that doesn't get applied to anybody else.
And if you look at the context of these four Criminal indictments, it is extremely difficult to conclude that at least the vast bulk of the motive, if not all of it, is something other than political.
And it is very difficult, no matter how negative your views are of Donald Trump, to contest the fact that what is being done to Trump is infinitely more dangerous than anything that Donald Trump might, in the wildest worst fever dreams of his opponents, do to American democracy.
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The war in Ukraine is still going on and the United States is increasing its involvement in it.
The Biden administration just last week sought another $25 billion in various forms of value and spending to support the Ukrainian military and Ukraine itself in this seemingly endless war that we were promised would be radically transformed by the vaunted counteroffensive that has turned out, at least for now,
to be extremely unimpressive in almost every sense the Ukrainians gain inches or to be extremely unimpressive in almost every sense the Ukrainians gain inches or very little territory weeks at a time, nowhere near breaking through the defensive lines AND I THINK IT'S A LOT OF PEOPLE.
And it's hard to see what will change that dynamic, at least for many months to come, if not years to come, given the realities of that war.
And yet, it is important to still talk about it.
It's like what has happened was, for the first two or three months, it's all anyone wanted to talk about.
They weren't enough Americans on board with their narrative to ensure enough support To get both parties, the establishment wings of both parties, fully on board with spending endlessly to fuel the war.
And even though, as always happens, public opinion now has turned against the war, the majority of Americans no longer want to keep funding this war, believe we've done enough.
Public opinion no longer really matters.
The U.S.
security state has what they need, has what they want.
Both political parties remain committed to funding this war indefinitely.
Public opinion won't matter unless it turns much more against the war or manifests in the form of protest, and even then, probably would make a difference.
So this is a war that the United States is now in, even though people really don't talk about it anymore, and it's important that we keep reporting on it and keep talking about it.
I want to show you somebody who came out today in vocal favor of this war.
His name is John Bolton.
He probably is the most extremist pro-war advocate that the United States has.
Worse than Liz Cheney, worse than Victoria Nuland, worse than Lindsey Graham.
Because he not only supports every war and cheerleads for every war from a safe distance that the United States either is fighting in or might fight in, but often has the power to make that happen.
And here today he came out and demanded that the United States do even more than it's doing to fund the war in Ukraine.
He said, quote, Ukrainians inability to achieve major advances.
Can we put this on the screen?
Ukrainians inability to achieve major advances.
So he's admitting there that the Ukrainians are stalled.
Is the natural result of a U.S.
strategy aimed only at staving off Russian conquest.
Biden needs to start vigorously working toward victory.
It's time to get moving.
I think it's incredibly notable that this is the position shared by only one demographic group in the United States and that is self-identified liberal Democrats.
That too has a similar foreign policy vision to John Bolton's.
That is how much American liberalism has changed.
They love David Frum, they love Bill Kristol, they love John Bolton, and if you look at the replies to this tweet, this pronouncement, it's filled with nothing but resistance liberals and people on the left saying, Mr. Bolton, I don't often agree with you, but in this case, I agree with you completely.
You're 100% right.
American liberals are the most steadfast in doing everything possible to destroy Russia, largely because their media outlets told them that Russia was responsible for Hillary Clinton's defeat to Donald Trump in 2016.
They're willing to risk nuclear war for it.
They're willing to send billions and billions of dollars over to that war in order to satisfy their bloodlust.
And of course, John Bolton is, in essence, their avatar, their spokesman, because he sees the world the same way they've been trained to see the world.
It's an incredibly revealing alliance.
Now, it's not just the majority of Americans who have turned against the war.
Increasingly, Ukrainian men are doing everything possible to avoid being sent to the front lines because they know they will be used as cannon fodder in what they obviously view as a futile effort.
The way they're trying to break through Russian entrenched offensive positions is these sort of probes where they send Ukrainian soldiers and see where they get killed.
And they know those aren't weak spots.
And then the ones where they don't get instantly killed, those are the parts that they think are sort of softer targets.
So they're just sacrificing men by the thousands.
In what looks like, at least for now, a futile effort to break through the entrenched Russian lines.
And Ukrainians see this war better than the West does, that's for sure.
It is true, all dissent in Ukraine is abolished.
Anyone in the media who raises opposition or objections to the war will be prosecuted, will be arrested.
We're about to show you a Ukrainian pacifist who's currently being charged with treason.
For his view that the war is wrong on pacifistic grounds.
There's no democracy of any kind in Ukraine.
Zelensky is the leader under martial law indefinitely.
Even before the war, Zelensky was closing media outlets, TV stations that he viewed as oppositional, shutting political parties.
And since the war began, there's just no political dissent of any kind in Ukraine.
And part of that repression is increasingly cracking down on Ukrainian men who are trying either to flee Ukraine, leave Ukraine by bribing people to do so or by just risking their lives to get out by fleeing in very dangerous ways, including exposing themselves to very cold weather.
Or just the elements in order to get to Romania or get to Russia even.
Because the borders are closed, they don't let anybody out.
Zelensky's not fighting with the volunteer army, he's fighting with the conscript army.
And even though they're being bombarded with propaganda where dissent is not allowed, they see that this war is something they don't want to fight it.
Hear from The Guardian today.
The Guardian, of course, is, like most British outlets, very, very vocally in favor of the Ukraine and the war.
So you know that it must be very extreme if they're willing to report this.
Quote, bribes and hiding at home, the Ukrainian men trying to avoid conscription.
Some are spending life savings to stay out of the war, but such actions are seen as treasonous by those already fighting.
Quote, it is believed that tens of thousands of Ukrainian men have left the country illegally Since the full-scale war with Russia started last February, many by paying bribes.
On Friday, the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky fired every regional military recruitment head in the country, citing endemic corruption in the apparatus.
Odessa, now I just want to stop here and just note, as a kind of side observation, that as soon as this war began, The Western media stopped saying things about Ukraine that had been saying for a full decade, such as it's dominated by neo-Nazi battalions, such as the Azov battalion.
They just overnight changed their narrative about Ukraine.
But one of the other things that they did was they started using completely different spelling for the cities of Ukraine, for names in Ukraine, because they didn't want to be accused of using the Russian version or the Putin version, even though that had always been how they spelled these names forever.
They always used to write Odessa with two S's.
They used to spell Kiev, K-I-E-V.
Now it's K-Y-I-V, Odessa's with one S, because if they don't do that, they get accused of using the Kremlin or the Putin version, and so they just are so easily coerce these media outlets into printing what they're told to print.
It seems like a small example, but it exemplifies the mentality under which they're working.
Odessa has emerged as a particular hotspot for draft evasion schemes, with a recruitment official arrested after he was found to have $5 million in savings on a lavish property in Spain.
But across Ukraine, there are reports of corrupt officials willing to take bribes from people eager to buy their way out of the draft.
There are more than 100 other criminal proceedings against enlistment officials.
In the first weeks after the invasion, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Ukrainians volunteered to serve at the front in an explosion of patriotism that helped keep the country independent and fight off the initial attack.
That's the problem, is those kind of fighters, the ones eager to fight, the ones capable of fighting, many of them have been killed and they're left with people who aren't trained to fight, who aren't capable of fighting, and who don't want to fight.
And they're forced against their will to do so with the threat of long-time prison or a treason prosecution under martial law.
More than a year later, however, many of those initial recruits are now dead, wounded, or simply exhausted.
And the Army needs new recruits to fill the ranks.
By now, most of those who want to fight have already signed up.
Leaving the military to recruit among a much more reluctant pool of men.
Fathers of more than three children, people with disabilities, and those working in strategically important jobs are exempt from the draft, but everyone else is expected to join up if called.
Crews of mobilization officers roam the streets and sometimes go door-to-door to hand out notices.
Viral videos show officers bundling men into vans to deposit them at enlistment offices.
The stakes have left many people reluctant to comply with mobilization calls, and those who receive the initial set of papers often lock themselves away to avoid being dragged to the recruitment office.
Now, the United States has used conscript armies before and prosecuted draft doddlers as well, including during Vietnam, lots of armies do.
Russia is also fighting with conscript armies.
But it's important looking outside as somebody who's being told that you have to support this war, that a lot of men in Ukraine don't even want to do this fighting.
And President Zelensky, as I said at the start of the show, at the start of the war, urged Westerners to go and help Ukraine fight the Russian army because he knew That Russia has a much smaller, or the Ukraine has a much smaller population than Russia and therefore much less access to fighting men, which is a major disadvantage of war, and yet so few Westerners who beat their chest about the nobility and the urgency of defeating Russia were willing to go and fight.
And so Ukraine has increasingly had a crackdown on their own population that people were told are being defended in this war, but who in fact are dying against their will.
Politico in February, so this has been going on for months, reported that Ukraine army discipline has a crackdown and it sparks fears and fury on the front.
Quote, critics say new legislation that punishes deserters and rule breakers more harshly contravenes human rights and demotivates military personnel.
So they've been increasingly extreme about imposing more and more punishments, severe punishment.
You can go to years in prison.
And Ukrainian men are willing to, to not fight in this war, which is a violation of human rights conventions, because forcing people to fight and die in a war against their will is a very extreme action, even if sometimes it's justified.
But it shows you, for those of you who think it's justified, but it shows you the mindset of Ukraine, much different than the media narrative we've been fed, the one that's inspiring and uplifting about the feisty Ukrainians.
Here from the Kiev Post in January of this year, Zelensky signs controversial law toughening punishment for desertion in army.
Soldiers could face up to 12 years in prison for desertion and up to 10 years for disobedience.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday signed a controversial law toughening punishments for disobedience or desertion from the armed forces amid Russia's invasion.
Stronger sanctions will also apply to offenses such as threatening commanders, fleeing the battlefield, or consuming alcohol, according to the law published on the Ukrainian parliament's website.
The new law also prohibits courts from giving reduced or suspended sentences to soldiers found guilty.
You can really tell the kind of breakdown of morale in Ukraine, and I don't blame anyone in Ukraine for that.
This is a brutal war that Ukraine does not appear capable of winning in terms of expelling Russia from all their territory.
And if you look at that, And you're seeing how many people are being maimed and killed in a futile cause.
It's normal human instinct to want to avoid that.
And if Ukrainians aren't willing to fight in this war, then why is the West, why is the United States being told that while we have all sorts of social pathologies, we have to spend huge amounts of our own resources On this war, a war that Westerners would not go and fight when asked.
Here's the Guardian article I referenced about Zelensky at the start of the war.
Quote, Ukraine appeals for foreign volunteers to fight against Russia.
Quote, President Zelensky issues call to arms to foreign nationals in battle against Russian war criminals.
You know, if there's anything that sickens me, it is pundits and politicians who never got near a war Who evaded wars, but who cheerlead wars from a safe distance to give themselves purpose and a feeling of strength.
As long as it's other people having to go fight and die in those wars and other people's kids having to fight as well in them.
And that's basically the entire Western punditry class, the entire Western media class, and a good amount of Western politics is characterized by exactly that.
At least in the wars of the 17th and 18th century, European royalty used to go to the front lines and fight because there was a sense that If the monarch wasn't willing to go fight, or their families weren't willing to go fight, then the war itself was not justified enough to ask people to go fight in those wars as well.
We've lost every conceivable sense of that.
I mean, in Vietnam, the elite just basically did not go to war, even though there was a draft.
That's why so many of these boomer politicians, who talked so tough during the war on terror like Dick Cheney, didn't get near war.
They found all sorts of ways to get out of it.
Democracy Now!, which is a program that used to do a lot of good things that no longer does, it's pretty much indistinguishable from MSNBC, to their credit had a Ukrainian pacifist whom they interviewed and he's currently being charged with treason.
For doing nothing other than on pacifistic grounds opposing his country's war with Russia.
I warn you that his English is very, very halting in a way that I found disturbing to listen to or just difficult to listen to, but I'm going to show it to you anyway because it's important to hear what he's saying because we're being told we're fighting for Ukrainian democracy and yet At least since the U.S.
was involved in picking Ukraine's government by removing its leader before his office was up.
And certainly now, whatever you want to call what's going on in Ukraine and call President Zelensky, it has nothing to do with democracy.
Let's listen to this Ukrainian peace activist.
This total nonsense that a pacifist is accused in justification of war for anti-war statement.
This peace agenda for Ukraine and the world, it denounces Russian aggression.
quotes United Nations General Assembly Resolution, which denounces Russian aggression.
We must understand that any violations of international law are not appropriate in contemporary international order.
OK, I just want to stop it there.
I don't want to be critical of him.
I know from experience that it's not easy to speak in a second or third language in an interview in the media if you're not accustomed to it.
But the message is more important than the delivery of it, which is a good thing because the delivery is quite awful.
But the message, this is a Ukrainian citizen.
He's a pacifist.
He doesn't believe in war.
It's his ideology.
It's his conviction.
He didn't just become that to avoid the war.
He's been this for a long time.
You see the paraphernalia all around him.
And he's being prosecuted and convicted as a traitor to his country simply for advocating pacifism and anti-war messaging.
That's the Ukrainian democracy that we're fighting for.
Now, I thought of this today and I want to just bring it up because It's really something that, it was really when I saw this, when I went through this experience, that I realized just the amazing extent to which the West has been propagandized about this war, and the way in which the Western media is completely complicit in that.
If there's any time when you need media scrutiny and skepticism of official pronouncements, it's in wartime.
That was the main lesson of the war in Iraq.
That was what the media failed to do.
Who scrutinized government claims sufficiently and therefore participated in the selling of this war on false pretenses that killed so many people and destabilized the region, led to ISIS, etc.
And yet here we are 20 years later, none of those lessons has been learned.
There's more dissent in the Iraq War than there is in the war in Ukraine.
From the beginning, repression of dissent.
Was governing the Western reaction, they made it illegal for platforms, the EU did, to even carry Russian state media if people wanted to listen to them, and they made it a crime to even carry those platforms.
Social media, big tech, at the urging of the US security state and Western intelligence agencies banned all kinds of dissent across the board from people contesting the Western narrative about the war in Ukraine.
But, and obviously people who were standing up early on, Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard, Rand Paul, myself, people internationally were put on official lists as being Russian propagandists by the Ukrainian intelligence services and others, simply for asking whether there was more the West could have done or should have done to avert this war diplomatically, whether this war will actually end up protecting Ukrainians as opposed to destroying them.
But one of the defining moments for me was on March 8th, just a couple of weeks into the war, Victoria Nuland, who we just devoted our entire show to last night, she's now the number two person of the State Department, a very vocal advocate of the war in Ukraine and has been for a long time, testified before the Senate regarding Ukraine and Marco Rubio, she was vetted by members of both parties, and Marco Rubio I only have a minute left.
her to deny claims that Ukraine had any kind of biological or chemical weapons and he thought she was just going to say no.
But instead, when he asked her, she provided information that no one had previously heard.
Let's remind ourselves of what she said.
I only have a minute left.
Let me ask you, does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?
Ukraine has biological research facilities, which in fact we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of.
So we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can I'm sure you're aware that the Russian propaganda groups are already putting out there all kinds of information about how they've uncovered a plot by the Ukrainians to release biological weapons in the country and with NATO's coordination
If there's a biological or chemical weapon incident or attack inside of Ukraine, is there any doubt in your mind that 100% it would be the Russians that would be behind it?
There is no doubt in my mind, Senator, and it is classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they're planning to do themselves.
All right, so we showed that last night as part of the episode about who Victoria Nuland is.
And I think it's hilarious, as I mentioned, that every time they take very common human behavior, they attribute it to something uniquely Russian.
Like, oh, this is classic Russian statecraft.
They blame on the other person what they themselves are doing, as though the United States doesn't do that in every other country.
And the world doesn't do that as well.
But the notable part, when I heard that, I remember thinking, wait, what is that?
The Ukrainians have biological research facilities that, according to Victoria Nuland, are so dangerous they're worried that they will fall into Russian hands?
What is in these biological research facilities?
What are they doing in those research facilities?
I was surprised to learn that.
And so, being a journalist, being a sentient human being, I remember saying, wait a minute, what are those?
Why does Ukraine have Sophisticated and dangerous biological research facilities that are so sophisticated and advanced and dangerous, she's worried they're going to fall into Russian hands.
And immediately the media rushed to her defense and said, no, no, no, she didn't mean anything by that.
All she said was there are these biological research facilities.
She just meant that there are these remnants of Soviet-era programs that the United States is trying to secure.
That's all she meant.
But that's not what she said.
And it doesn't make any sense, that excuse.
If all these are are just remnants of old Soviet-era programs, why would you be afraid of them falling into the hands of the Russians?
Moscow was the capital of the Soviet Union.
It controlled the Soviet Union.
These are just Soviet-era programs.
Obviously, Moscow already has whatever's going on there, by definition.
You wouldn't be afraid they would fall into Russian hands.
You would only be afraid of that if it was something very dangerous, something advanced and sophisticated in these biological research facilities.
And so I didn't believe the government's claim.
It didn't make sense that I wanted to know more about what these facilities were and why she was so afraid of asking that.
And as a reward for that, for asking that obvious question, here you see my Wikipedia page.
We previously, recently did a show on how Wikipedia has become a blatant weapon of establishment propaganda.
Here's my page, which as I said before, there's been a war over for a long time.
And part of the page now includes this, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
That's a section of my Wikipedia page, and it reads, quote, In an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Greenwald expressed support for the Ukraine Biolabs conspiracy theory.
In 2022, the Security Service of Ukraine placed Greenwald on a list of public figures who it alleges promote Russian propaganda.
Can I ask this?
What is the Ukraine Biolabs conspiracy theory?
It was Victoria Nuland who brought this up, not me, or Tucker Carlson, or Tulsi Gabbard, or whomever.
And obviously, when Victoria Nuland says something like that, I'm going to be interested in what she means.
But asking those questions is foreboding.
It gets you labeled a conspiracy theorist for the Kremlin.
And there's a little link here to the Ukrainian Biolabs Conspiracy Theory.
If you click on it, it takes you to a page that could be written by the CIA that says that it's a total lie that Ukraine has biological weapons.
And it's the Kremlin who said that.
I never said Ukraine has biological weapons.
I didn't hint at that.
I just said, I think it's very notable that apparently, according to Victoria Nuland, Ukraine has such sophisticated and dangerous biological research facilities, they're worried it would fall into the hands of the Russians if they get them.
It was a summary of what she said, and now if you ask any kind of just person who pays enough attention to politics by reading corporate outlets, they will say, oh, Kremlin propagandist or the right invented this theory that was a conspiracy theory that Ukraine has biological weapons to justify the Russian invasion, when in fact, I never mentioned that or thought about that in my life until Victoria Nuland mentioned it.
That is the climate in which we have been submersed ever since this invasion began.
Now, as I said, and I noticed this the other day, there's all kinds of examples of extreme propaganda.
Go back from 2014 until 2021 and you will see almost every Western corporate media outlet, and even activist groups like the Anti-Defamation League,
Warning that the dominant battalions and military military units in Ukraine are neo-nazis particularly the Azov battalion Which is neo-nazi they said over and over and over and over The minute the war happened that language disappeared first they started calling the Azov battalion Nationalistic or right-wing neo-nazi disappeared and then within months they were
Overtly venerating the Azov Battalion, running stories about the heroes of the Azov Battalion, who they spent a decade calling Nazis before that.
And now if you point out that there are dominant military units in Ukraine with neo-Nazi ideology, you of course get accused of being a Kremlin agent, even though that was the gospel in Western media until they were told to switch on and die as soon as the Russian invasion happened, and they did.
And this might seem like a small example, but to me it really illustrates that if you're willing to follow orders on this kind of granular level about your own language and how you have to change the spelling that you've used forever, because somehow that spelling has become pro-Kremlin overnight, and you do it, you just immediately take orders as a media outlet and change the way that you even refer to things, that is a sign of just how compliant they are.
Here is a Guardian article from 2015, and the whole article itself you wouldn't be allowed to say now.
It was basically an article about the neo-Nazis in Western Ukraine who were imposing all kinds of indiscriminate violence and human rights abuses on the people of the Donbass.
Obviously you couldn't say that now.
But here you see it focused, part of it did, on the city in southern Ukraine called Odessa.
And there you see the spelling that the Guardian used for Odessa, which is basically the spelling that all Western media outlets had always used right until the evasion.
O-D-E-S-S-A.
For some reason, and somehow, the minute the war started, it became a sign of criminal loyalty to spell Odessa this way.
Odessa is supposed to be spelled only with one S if you're pro-Ukrainian, and so The Guardian, like most media outlets, just turned around on a dime and started spelling it the way they were told to.
Same with Kiev.
Here is The Guardian from, I believe it's... I've, like, hyperactively enlarged these graphics so I can't say anything now.
It's from 2016.
Just one example of countless ones.
You see Kiev, K-I-E-V, is from a very pro-anti-Russian Guardian reporter, Sean Walker, and that's how he wrote his copy, K-I-E-V.
Suddenly, if you write Kiev that way, that is a sure sign you are a Russian propagandist, and therefore the Guardian turned around and immediately did what they were told, and now they spell it K-Y-I-V.
In every single article.
Every media outlet has done this.
Again, it might be a small sign, but it's very illustrative of the predominant, very compliant mentality that the Western media has when it comes to the narratives in Ukraine.
I realize people have gotten tired of this war.
I realize we've just accepted that we're going to keep spending money on it.
We're going to keep fueling this war.
It doesn't matter how many Ukrainians are killed.
It doesn't matter how despotic Zelensky becomes.
It doesn't matter how even the people of that country want out of this war.
Because it's not defending or protecting Ukrainians and Ukrainians destroying Ukraine at the altar of the American geostrategic goal of weakening Russia.
A goal that I don't understand why the United States has.
I think Donald Trump and Barack Obama were both correct that Russia doesn't need to be viewed as our enemy.
They're an adversary in some instances, but in others, a country with whom we can cooperate.
But I just think it's urgent to continue to focus on this war because it is still being waged in a way that is directly harming the American people.
Just as a reminder of what Wikipedia is, here is a Reuters article from 2007, so 15 years ago, when I had on Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, who warned that Wikipedia is no longer trustworthy and hasn't been for quite some time.
He alluded to this, that the CIA and the FBI computers have been caught editing Wikipedia.
And if you read any Wikipedia page about a person or an event that has to do with foreign policy, you will be completely unsurprised to learn this.
But they're so incompetent, they just got caught using their own computers.
And then, just on the issue of Wikipedia, earlier today, and we're going to cover this at some future point, my former colleague and my current friend, Lee Fong, on his Substack, which really has some of the best investigative journalism you will find, reported that He got ahold of an email showing that a firm hired by Hunter Biden, who are specialists in altering and manipulating Wikipedia, quietly airbrushed his Wikipedia page.
Hunter Biden, like so many powerful individuals and corporations, hired special consultants to edit Wikipedia without any fingerprints.
That's from today.
I think you know what Wikipedia is by now, but I think it's important to mention it.
But it's the word Ukraine that is drowning in this sort of propaganda and has been from the start.
I think people are finally starting to see it now.
It is a genuinely tragic war that has no purpose other than to benefit a tiny sliver of Western elites.
And it really doesn't seem like it is an end in sight.
It is an incredibly cruel war.
It's a very expensive war in every sense of the word.
And the only reason why it was allowed to go on for this long and will continue to go on is because the media acquiescence and malfeasance and refusing to even question any of the narratives from the government about this war was so extreme that the image that got created that seems to be indelible It was allowed to go on for this long and will continue to go on is because the media acquiescence and malfeasance in refusing to even question any of the narratives from the government about this war.
It was so extreme that the image that got created that seems to be indelible was virtually absolute.
They just refused to question anything that they heard and instead aggressively spread it and demonize those who did their jobs of questioning it.
And we're going to continue to report on the war in Ukraine because it is an incredibly tragic and devastating war, not just to the countries fighting it, but to those who are fueling it as well.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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