The Jan 6 Rematch: Glenn Greenwald & Destiny Debate
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We're going to be debating about whether January 6th was an insurrection and Trump's role in it.
So let's get started and lay some ground for the rest of the debate.
Was what happened on January 6th an insurrection?
And within your answer, can you define what an insurrection is?
Glenn, can you start and then we'll go to Destiny.
Yeah, I'm really glad that we started there because I do feel like we spent, in that last debate, a lot of time on the question of whether this was a coup or whether this was an insurrection, and I feel like these are more political terms of art than terms of science that have a concrete definition, which is one of the reasons why I think it's
Not only justifiable, but actually necessary to look at how these terms have been applied historically in another context, not as a way of distracting from January 6th, but precisely to see whether or not the attempt to apply those terms to January 6th is consistent with how these terms are generally used, or whether it's just kind of a partisan attempt to create a narrative that serves the Democratic Party.
So for me, I guess you kind of have to look at coup and insurrection a little bit differently.
A coup is when some faction in society, either the faction that is already in power or the faction that is not in power but wants to be in power, mounts some very credible and serious attempt, almost always using force or the threat of force, people who are a militia or the actual almost always using force or the threat of force, people who are a militia or the actual military, in order to seize power illegitimately outside of the legal structure, using violence or the threat
An insurrection just simply, I think, implies that there's a faction domestically that has launched a serious rebellion, a serious attempt to seize power in that country, again, using extrajudicial, extralegal means that, in almost all cases, involves either the use extralegal means that, in almost all cases, involves either the use of force or the threat of You may be able to imagine a situation where the use of force or the threat of force, uh,
Uh, is not necessary for an insurrection, but I think it's extremely difficult to imagine such a case.
But in general, that's how the terms are used.
And then you have these kind of subsidiary terms that are very new, that are kind of retreats from those terms, like legislative coup, or soft coup, that, as I said, is a way to kind of put it into the general category of coup and insurrection without actually calling it one.
And that typically involves the illegitimate use of a legal process or some other means that's still extrajudicial, contrary to the law, without actually using force or the threat of force to achieve those ends.
Well, what about faking votes?
What about what?
What about faking votes?
Would that be counted?
I'm sorry?
If you tried to fake votes, would that be counted as an insurrection or just force, really?
To fake votes?
Yeah.
I mean, if you were to try and steal an election using fraud, I don't really think that's the sort of thing that we have in the past described as either an insurrection or a coup.
That's just more stealing an election.
And that's why I think it's so important To distinguish between when force is actually involved or invoked or the threat of violence is invoked, precisely because there are so many other ways to seize power illegitimately that fall short of being a coup or an insurrection.
That's actually a good example of one, which would be fabricating votes or throwing away valid votes or fabricating invalid votes as a means of winning an election illegitimately.
Destiny, what's your thoughts?
Yeah, I think I'm happy to almost run with Glenn's definition here, because I think January 6th pretty squarely and easily falls within that, but I guess the two definitions I would offer up are the Colorado Supreme Court, they concluded that an insurrection, as used in Section 3, is 1. a public use of force or threat of force, 2. by a group of people, and 3. in order to hinder or prevent the execution of the Constitution of the United States.
In Paulson and Bodd's paper, they go over broader definitions, but they more or less say the same thing in more words.
I mean, we can read from them, and they would say that insurrection is best understood as concerted, forcible resistance to the authority of government to execute the laws in at least some significant respect.
So I would say that, like, an insurrection is probably more than being upset at a police officer and saying, like, no, I'm not gonna, you know, get a ticket and running away.
Probably has to involve a group of people who are making a concerted effort to, like, resist the good faith execution of law from the federal government in this case.
And I think January 6th with Uh, Trump's plan to circumvent the electoral process with false electors, um, the actual day of events where Trump gives a huge speech.
He sends a whole bunch of people down to the Capitol, uh, ostensibly to protest the certification of the vote, where the people at the Capitol engage in violence, uh, in order to prevent Congress from certifying the vote.
And then when the people at the Capitol engaged in violence succeeded in preventing the certification of the vote for some number of hours, and then were finally cleared away, I would say that But whatever we call an insurrection or whatever definition we use, all of the events here are bullseye, like an insurrection.
So, can I ask a question of you?
I don't want to usurp your role.
I don't know how you want to conduct it, but if you don't mind, I'd like to just ask kind of a follow-up question to that.
The question I have for you then, Destiny, is, is there any requirement that it actually poses a credible or a serious threat to succeed in its aim?
So, for example, let's imagine that Donald Trump wins the election in November.
Most polls predict that he will, at least as of now.
And let's say that you have one or two people inside the U.S.
government who are kind of career civil servants who view Trump as such a great threat to all things decent in the United States and they go to the Capitol and they're armed with knives and they stand outside and they say, We have knives and we demand that Donald Trump be removed from the White House and the Congress vote to impeach him immediately and reinstall Joe Biden because we think he's the legitimate president.
Would that, in the history books, is something that you would then call a coup or an attempted coup or an insurrection?
Um, I mean, you might call it one, but I think it would be so minor, um, and it would be so silly that I don't know if we would necessarily refer to it as such.
Uh, for instance, like, we could- we could concoct a conspiracy to murder thing where I make a plan that's so ridiculous with another person that we're gonna go and buy, you know, I guess, snow, and we're gonna pour it down somebody's roof until it all melts and the person drowns and dies.
I'm like, maybe it- and we actually go and buy the stuff and we go to the house and take steps towards the crime, but it's such a silly crime.
I don't know if you'd call it that.
Um...
I'm sure we could find cases like really far away on the peripheral on the edge but with January 6th I think we're again I think we're in a bullseye definition of whatever we would call insurrection or attempted coup or rebellion.
So I think the reason I ask that is I think actually the extent of the threat, like the credibility or the gravity of the threat, is absolutely critical to whether or not in any other instance we would be calling something like this a coup or an attempted coup because if you look at January 6th, although you did have more than two people doing the sort of thing that I just described, and I asked a ridiculous example to try and understand whether you would at least concede that it requires some kind of
Significant or quantitatively impressive attempt to actually seize control from the legal means of power.
What you had on January 6th is a hodgepodge of people which according to the federal government itself had only a minority, a small minority of people who actually use violence of any kind.
There's only something like 10% or 8% depending on how you counted the number of people charged who are even accused of having used violence at all and it's a pretty broad definition for using violence like anyone who got near any attempt to hit a police officer or to push a police officer aside got put in that violent category so I'm at a very small small number of people and then on top of that
Not a single person during this entire three-hour riot actually pulled out an arm, let alone discharged an arm.
The only arm that was discharged was one that was used against the people who were protesting.
And then it basically got subdued In three hours, not with any kind of real force, pretty easily.
I mean, it was pretty easily subdued in a very short period of time.
And I don't think anybody would argue, and I'm interested in whether you would, that this ever got near a serious threat to remove or topple the most powerful and militarized government ever to exist on the planet.
I mean, do you think it even got close to a serious threat to do that?
Um, so just, just as a quick thing, going through all of these points, uh, there's a whole bunch of things that's used to talk about January 6th that I feel like doesn't want to engage with the facts of what happened, and most of these points are just not relevant.
So HodgePodge of People, um, it was a collection of Donald Trump supporters that had been called there weeks or months in advance by Donald Trump All of these people showed up to his ellipse speech.
A lot of them did.
All of them marched to the Capitol, all chanting the same things with the clear goal of protesting the certification of the vote.
That's why they were saying things like 1776, which we all recognize was a rebellion against Great Britain.
Like, it wasn't a hodgepodge of people, it was a collection of people that were all there for an incredibly specific purpose.
I think it would be unbelievable for me to ever accept the idea that it just randomly happened that those people happened to be gathered, that were all supporting the same candidate, that was saying that Congress shouldn't certify the vote, that was trying to get Pence not to certify the vote, that these people happened to go down to the Capitol, they happened to engage in violence, they happened to succeed in delaying the certification of the vote, All of this happened randomly from a hodgepodge of people that were subdued in three hours, whether they were subdued, whether they discharged an arm.
And to say that they weren't a serious threat is also crazy, given that there were times where these people were literally rooms away from other lawmakers.
I think it's more incredible to say that it never was a serious threat.
You yourself say that only a small percentage engaged in violence, What if that percentage instead of 10% was 15%?
What if instead of 15 it was 20 or 25%?
Who's to say what could have possibly happened afterwards other than the fact that thankfully retrospectively we can look and see that it didn't get to that.
But I mean this was some tens of thousands of people that were many engaged in violent protests that were breaking into the Capitol and managed to delay the certification.
How many people are you saying were at the Capitol on January 6th?
I don't know.
I've seen everything from 100,000 plus to, some people say it was 50,000 to 70,000.
I don't know what the exact number is.
Who entered the Capitol?
No, no, not who entered.
Who were there protesting outside?
Oh, how many entered?
How many entered?
Was it, the numbers I saw were anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000?
Right, okay.
Yeah, so imagine if 5,000 would have entered or 10,000, right?
Who's to say that there couldn't have been?
Yes, so just on Destiny's point, Glenn, at what point would you call that an insurrection?
At what point would you say you said six, seven percent were violent?
Is there a certain percentage that needs to be hit?
Well, I mean, Destiny himself acknowledged in the very first question I asked him that there's a quantitative component to this for sure, which is why nobody would seriously call two people with knives gathering outside the Capitol, even though they're proclaiming an insurrectionary intention or objective, nobody would say in history that that would be referred to as the United States having survived a coup or a coup attempt or an insurrection because it was just far too insignificant.
And I don't think that there is a, like, as I said, I don't think it's a term of science, these terms like insurrection and coup.
I think they're like a lot of the terms that we use in our political vernacular, like terrorism and hate speech or disinformation.
There really has no fixed meaning.
It all kind of depends on who gets to apply the term and for what purpose.
Is a group using violence?
a revolutionary group fighting against corruption?
Are they trying to topple the government and therefore are terrorists?
All these terms are very kind of shifting because they're points of propaganda.
But what I think is that in order to make a serious case that this is a historic event, I mean, I think one of the Krasenstein brothers began by comparing it to Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and the Civil War kind of invoking those kinds of events.
Democrats have done that as well.
I don't hold destiny to that, but clearly there's a belief, I think, that this is like a major event in United States history.
And for me, the reason it wasn't is because it never did get anywhere near The number that would be required to pose a significant threat to the power of the United States government.
I don't think you can set a quantitative number.
I think the kind of people who were there is so important.
Destiny dismissed the idea that it was a hodgepodge trying to say they were all homogenized.
Even the U.S.
government admits they were wildly disparate people, both in terms of why they were there and what they intended.
That's why a few of them got charged with sedition And then others got charged with misdemeanors, and then some people got charged with felonies even though they weren't accused of violence because they had extraordinarily different intentions.
This was not, for example, like, I think you can look at an event that kind of comes closer to what would be required to call it a coup, which was the rebellion by the Wagner Group in Russia, where you're talking about an extremely well-trained militia, a well-armed militia of 25,000 soldiers, That had the capability to shoot Russian military aircraft from the sky, and they did.
They took down six helicopters and a military jet.
But even there, the Russian state, nowhere near as powerful as the US state distracted by the war in Afghanistan, crushed it in 12 hours.
Like in the context of Russian history, That is not even like a footnote in terms of like a real threat to the power of the Russian state.
And yet, that at least had real numbers.
25,000 who were real soldiers.
Most of the people who were at this Trump rally, remember the four who died on January 6, two of them died of a heart attack.
One died of a speed overdose.
These are people who are not even fit, let alone well-trained soldiers, at least the majority of them.
And so when you're talking about people who really did anything like that, you're talking about a very small number.
Yeah, so there's, again, I find this, I feel like it's going to be a theme here.
The obfuscation and then the misdirection and everything, I just don't think any of this is relevant.
Nobody thought that the Whiskey Rebellion or the Whiskey Insurrection was going to destroy the entire U.S.
government, right?
It's a few hundred farmers that were upset over, you know, taxes and alcohol.
But like, why do we think that the insurrection or rebellion needs a significant chance to succeed in order to be called an insurrection or rebellion?
That's just historically, you keep saying historically, historically, that's never been the case.
It's never been the case that we've had to establish that it would have never been the case, for instance, if only one state seceded and they had no realistic chance of winning in the Civil War, that we would say, oh, well, they weren't insurrections or rebellions because they were never going to win.
So on that ground of like they have to have a realistic shot at winning, that's I just don't think that that's just not grounds ever for an insurrection or to declare an insurrection or rebellion.
It's just a way to minimize the events that actually happened because they happened to not be successful.
Um, when we talk about how- If it's a joke, then, if it's a joke, it should be treated as such.
But if it was a joke, it was a historic event.
It did threaten the U.S.
government.
It was a historic event.
What other time in U.S.
history has the certification of the vote been delayed?
The certification, we've had so many official proceedings of Congress, including things like confirming Supreme Court justices, delayed because people went to Capitol Hill, entered Capitol Hill, occupied Capitol Hill, and protested the proceedings, and ended up delaying the proceedings.
There have been proceedings to vote on wars.
Yeah.
our anti-war protestors have disrupted.
So all the time we've had people entering the Capitol, protesting congressional proceedings, and never are the ones who don't use violence accused of felonies, let alone anything resembling the kinds of charges that the January 6th defendants face because the ideology, the ideological let alone anything resembling the kinds of charges that the January 6th defendants face because the ideology, the ideological component here is what made this to be something so much bigger than in fact what it
When in the history of the United States has the certification of the electoral vote, the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next, been delayed by protesters or violent protesters?
I'm happy to concede that this is the first time that people went on January 6th.
Then it's historical.
Then it's historical.
Yeah, then it's historical, right?
By definition, it's a moment in history that is unique.
It wasn't a serious disruption.
They delayed the vote, didn't they?
By three hours, or by four hours.
For the first time in U.S.
history, yes.
That's significant.
That's serious.
Why is it more significant to delay this proceeding than other congressional proceedings?
Things like voting on wars or confirming Supreme Court justices are pretty serious, too, in terms of the things Congress is supposed to do under Article 1.
But the reason we don't consider those protests, even though they might have delayed the proceedings some, to be historic or serious or an insurrection, is because they never posed a threat to the stability of the United States government.
In order to have an actual insurrection, What?
of the kind that you want to claim this is, you would need enormous numbers of very well-trained people who are heavily armed with serious plans to go into the Capitol and overthrow the power of the United States government.
This is the kind of drama queen behavior that has dominated the Trump series where every kind of event is catastrophized to its highest extent.
So you would say that any past, so like the Whiskey Rebellion in the United States, that's stupid.
They shouldn't have called it that.
They should have called it like the farmer protest or something different or Because what you're saying right now stands in contrast to how every other person viewed insurrectionism or insurrectionists at the time when, say, the 14th Amendment was drafted and ratified.
People viewed people sometimes as being insurrectionary or giving aid or comfort to enemies of the United States just for letting their children go off to war to serve the Confederacy.
It's nice if you, Glenn Greenwald, personally have some view of what you personally think an insurrectionist or rebellion might look like or what it should be.
But to be quite frank, your opinion doesn't really matter.
The opinion would be the historical relevance of the saying in the United States.
It would be the historic analysis that exists for historical rebellions or insurrections in the United States, which oftentimes had very little to no chance of succeeding.
Even the insurrectionists themselves thought that they were going to succeed.
Um, and we would use that analysis that exists at the time when, say, the 14th Amendment was ratified, and then we would use that going forward to figure out what do we think an insurrection and a rebellion is.
And again, you can try to minimize and you can try to call it ideological and whatever you want, none of those congressional protests that you mentioned in the past rose to a level where tens of thousands of protesters were violently breaking into Congress and delaying the certification of the presidential vote.
You just got done saying that the maximum number of people who entered the Capitol was 2,000.
And now you're calling it tens of thousands of people because you know so well.
In fact, you conceded in the very first question I asked you that of course there has to be a quantitative component in terms of the gravity of the threat in order to seriously call it an insurrection or a coup, which is why I began by asking you whether or not if two people armed with knives went to the Congress and demanded that Donald Trump be removed after he was declared the winner and threatened to use violence with their knives, whether that would, in the history books or by our major newspapers, be referred to as the United States fighting off a coup or an insurrection.
And you said, yeah, I mean, I guess if it's just two people, then it would probably be pretty ridiculous to call it that.
So I see this, what happened on January 6th, a three-hour riot that even the FBI's informants on the ground told the FBI in real time was never intended to be, any kind of premeditated violent act on the part of most people, but instead was something that happened spontaneously, as so often happens, any kind of premeditated violent act on the part of most people, but instead was something that happened spontaneously,
I see it much more akin to the kind of ridiculous example that I began by asking you, were you conceded that wouldn't be called an insurrection than I do some kind of civil war type situation or even a meaningful armed rebellion of the kind that happened in Russia last year where even that was crushed in 12 hours.
Are you familiar with Loki's wager?
Explain it to me.
So, I think Loki makes a wager with two dwarves or whatever, and eventually they say that they can cut his head off.
It comes to the point to where he loses the wager, they go to collect their bet, and when they're trying to figure out how to cut his head off, they're arguing over what part of the neck is when the head starts, and then the rest of the neck begins, basically.
And the argument he eventually makes is, well, you can't take even a centimeter, an inch of my neck, therefore you're not allowed to cut my head off.
You're trying to argue right now that because I might not consider two people an insurrection, that I can't possibly consider 2,000 people an insurrection?
That's the same as you saying since I can't tell precisely where your head ends and your neck begins, I might say that your toe is part of your head.
This argument is nonsense, and the only way that you can make the argument is to continue to try to make comparisons to other more extreme coups or more intense insurrectionist attempts, which I agree!
There can be more extreme insurrectionist attempts, there can be more extreme coups, but the reality is- Even if you want to wind it all the way back down, even if you want it all the way back down and say, okay, we'll ignore the tens of thousands of protesters outside.
We can just go with 2,000 people.
Glenn, how are you seriously going to argue that 2,000 people, a lot of them broke into the Capitol building with the goal of delaying the certification of the vote because they didn't like the outcome of the election and they wanted to change it.
They needed to fight like hell to take their country back because Mike Pence wasn't gonna do the right thing by helping Trump do his constitutional coup.
And so they turned it into an insurrection.
It's plainly what happened.
Now, if only 20 people went in, would I consider it an insurrection?
I don't know.
Maybe, maybe not.
If only, you know, 100 people went in, maybe.
Maybe if 200 people went in and they got further, maybe.
I'm not sure where exactly I would, you know, slice the pie to call it, you know, whatever we call it.
But wherever we're at, we're way, way, way, way, way over that.
And I just don't think the comparisons to other more extreme coups or more extreme rebellions or anything in Russia, it just doesn't make any sense.
It's only done to equivocate on what's actually happened or to do a whataboutism to something that I would probably plainly agree with.
Like, wouldn't you agree this is a more serious coup or more serious insurrection?
Yeah, sure, there can be more serious coups and more serious insurrections.
Tell them and argue for them that some injustice has been committed and that they ought to protest in response to it.
There was one time, and only one time, when Donald Trump addressed the question of whether or not violence should be used when those people went to the Capitol.
And what he said was this, quote, I know that everybody here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully And patriotically make your voices heard.
And the fact that people, because he said peacefully, then have to resort to things like, oh, well, he invoked political cliches like, fight like hell.
Politicians use fight like hell in almost every speech.
Joe Biden You can read this in the New York Times on December 2nd said, quote, I want to make sure we're going to be fighting like hell.
You can find pretty much every politician saying that.
So that's one thing is that to the extent you want to say that Donald Trump was somehow involved in this quote unquote insurrection.
The only thing he did was give a constitutionally protected speech.
And that is the reason why Jack Smith has not charged him with inciting or participating in an insurrection.
It's not my opinion.
Obviously, Jack Smith shares the opinion that he could never obtain a conviction.
The second thing is on the numbers, 2,000 people, let's use the maximum number, went into the Capitol.
A small percentage, a tiny percentage of people who went into the Capitol actually used violence.
So most of those people, the vast majority, according to the U.S. government themselves, were doing nothing other than peacefully protesting.
Again, protesters entering the Capitol without authorization, occupying offices of members of Congress in order to pressure them to take some step or not take some step is something that happens all the time.
We've seen many more than 2,000 protesters.
So don't try and imply that on January 6, 2,000 armed people or well-trained people intending to commit violence went into the Capitol.
The most of that number that you could possibly squeeze out of it is something like 100 or 150.
And now we're back way closer To the most ridiculous example that I began by asking you about, where even you said, oh that probably shouldn't be called an insurrection, then we are to an actual threat to American power or to our system of government, which is necessary to claim in order to turn this into what you want to turn it into.
Okay, just before I respond to this, so then do you think then that the Whiskey Rebellion or the Whiskey Insurrection, was that not a rebellion or insurrection then in your eyes?
I think it's a rebellion.
I think it's a rebellion.
I don't think I would call it an insurrection.
I think it's perfectly fine to call it a rebellion.
I would have to look a lot more into the facts of exactly what happened with the Whiskey Rebellion.
I haven't thought about that question before, but I think the word rebellion is vague enough that any kind of protest could be called a rebellion.
I mean, people who are protesting and interrupting political events and going to the White House and begging on the fence against the war in Israel and the U.S.
support for it are rebelling against U.S.
policy.
I don't have a problem with that term.
But I have to look a lot more closely at the Whiskey Rebellion to be able to say definitively.
That's fine.
Okay.
If you want to make these arguments that any protest can be called a coup or rebellion, you're free to make that argument.
But you have to understand that you are using it in an ahistorical way, that no legal scholar, that nobody who's passed laws in Congress that refers to an insurrection or rebellion, literally nobody in the legislative or historical context in the United States has used rebellion or insurrection to mean protest.
That has just never been the case.
That's not my argument at all.
What?
That's not my argument at all.
My argument is that what happened on January 6th was a protest.
That's fine, but I'm saying that what you just said, what you just said, any two people knocking on a fence might be considered a rebellion or insurrection.
That can be your assessment, or that the Whiskey Rebellion was a rebellion but not an insurrection.
That might be your assessment, but at the time, it was known as the Whiskey Insurrection, which was around the time when people were drafting the 14th Amendment.
So I would think that their understanding of what an insurrection was at the time is probably a more important analysis than what your personal subjective and convenient interpretation of what an insurrection might be right now.
Now you're just ranting.
I mean this claim that like everyone who was ever involved in the lawmaking process or the legislative process sees the term as you do.
We can agree just like to set this fact straight that Jack Smith who charged Donald Trump with many crimes including crimes that were considered quite aggressive from a prosecutorial perspective like he was not a overly cautious prosecutor but a quite aggressive one who stretched a lot of theories to accuse him of certain felonies.
He chose not to I agree that Jack Smith hadn't charged him with that, but whether or not somebody did something isn't relevant to a particular criminal charge.
Well, I mean, there's two reasons.
of what Jack Smith charged Donald Trump with. - I agree that Jack Smith hadn't charged him with that, but whether or not somebody did something isn't relevant to a particular criminal charge.
- Why not? - Well, I mean, there's two reasons.
Well, one is because-- - All legal scholars and all members of the lawmakers are on your side.
Why didn't he?
- Well, because one, if we're talking about, for instance, the 14th Amendment, a criminal conviction isn't relevant here.
We don't need a criminal conviction for... No, I'm asking you why Jack Smith... I'm not talking about the banning from the ballot.
That'll be a U.S.
Supreme Court decision, and the courts have thus far split on that question.
Democratic judges in Colorado and then Secretaries of State in California and Rhode Island both have taken the opposite position.
I'm not asking you about whether he should be stricken from the ballot or you need a criminal conviction.
I'm asking you, why did not... why did Jack Smith, An extremely aggressive prosecutor in these cases not charged Donald Trump with inciting or participating in an insurrection.
It could be for a variety of reasons.
It could be that that's a question.
Do you have an idea?
Well, I was about to, but then you cut me off.
Yeah, it could be that he feels like he doesn't have enough strength to secure a conviction for insurrection.
It could be that if you actually read the statute for insurrection, even the criminal statute itself is like kind of vague because it uses insurrection like in the statute of insurrection doesn't really give much guidance as to what it is.
Nobody in the history of the United States has ever been charged with that particular crime.
And yeah, it could just be that he felt like there was an easier prosecutorial path to go.
You're not seriously making... You're not of the contention right now that if somebody isn't charged with a particular crime, nobody thought they did it, right?
You don't think that prosecutors just think that we're gonna charge you with everything we think you did, right?
You understand that when people are charging crimes, they're charging what they think they can get a conviction on, yeah?
Yes, having worked in the legal profession as a lawyer for more than a decade, I do actually understand that sometimes prosecutors opt not to charge people with crimes, even though they may think they're guilty.
What I'm saying is a specific case of a prosecutor who has demonstrated an eagerness to be extremely aggressive in the charging documents, including bringing crimes that many legal experts, including ones who aren't pro-Trump, believe is quite a stretch and will be very difficult to prove in court, opted not to charge Donald Trump With participating in or inciting an insurrection.
I think your answer is actually correct.
That he believes it would be very difficult to prove that what took place on January 6th was an insurrection and or that Trump participated in or incited it.
And I think it's an extremely important point.
It's not just positive.
Maybe Jack Smith had suddenly some kind of like secret motive that made him not do that.
But everything we know about Jack Smith and what he was doing in these cases I think it leads us to at least acknowledge that that's pretty relevant.
That not only Jack Smith, in fact no prosecutor, despite being very aggressive and wanting to convict Donald Trump of crimes, chose to accuse him of that crime.
And I do think it's worth asking, why not?
If Donald Trump actually incited an insurrection, as you believe, I would hope that the prosecutor would charge him with that crime, but I agree with Jack Smith's decision not to because I think it would be very close to impossible to prove that that was an insurrection that he participated in or incited.
So if all these legal theorists and legal scholars that you're so acquainted with unanimously agree with your view, why wouldn't Jack Smith do that?
Are you angry Jack Smith didn't charge him with that?
I would want Jack Smith to pursue, it's a federal court, so I'd want him to pursue whatever charges he thinks he can get Trump the most on, not just any particular thing that he thinks he might have done.
There might be a number of political reasons why he decided not to go the insurrection charge route, least of all the fact that it would be the first time a criminal charge like this has ever been attempted to be used in the entire history of the United States.
And also because it might actually call into question too much, you know, what is First Amendment speech versus not?
And trying to convict a former president or something like that might be a really hairy political question that the federal courts, for whatever reason, feel like they just don't want to get involved in.
So they went on what they thought were more solid legal grounds that wouldn't put them, you know, in the eyes of the American public right during an election that would cause force them to have to answer essentially an incredibly difficult political question regarding protected speech.
Which is why I like the route that Jack Smith went where he's going after, I think, much cleaner legal questions relating to obvious matters of obstruction that are cleaner and simpler than trying to define, you know, what is insurrection when the statute itself doesn't even necessarily call it out.
But again, to recenter, this idea that because he didn't charge for a particular crime, we can't say that J6 wasn't an insurrection, just, again, doesn't make sense when no one has ever been charged with insurrection in the United States.
I think we all agree that the Civil War was at the very least an insurrection, if not a full-on rebellion.
Nobody was charged after the Civil War with insurrection as a crime.
It doesn't mean we don't think that they weren't insurrectionists, right?
Right, for political reasons.
But in the case of Jack Smith, and I want to let this go because my argument is not that it's dispositive, my argument is that it's rather relevant.
Now, let me ask you this, because this is something I was really trying to pursue in the last debate.
I don't think we ever got to have a dialogue on it, so I just want to return to it, which is the following.
If Donald Trump, let's assume that you are right, that Donald Trump had an intention to incite a coup or an insurrection in the United States, that he was hell-bent on breaking the law in order to cling to political power.
There were all sorts of things that he not only could have done, but that typically people trying to perpetrate coups, in almost every case, do do.
Namely, right up until the time that he peacefully walked out of the White House on January 20th before noon, which is the time when the peaceful transition of power occurs, Trump was the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, he was the head of the executive branch, which means under his command he had the entire US military All sorts of agencies that are very well armed and very trained and all of whom are duty bound to obey his orders.
Maybe some of them would have refused, but probably a lot of them would have obeyed.
A lot of them are probably on his side.
We heard for years how there were all these fascists and white supremacist factions within these military units.
Why do you think that if Donald Trump wanted to perpetrate a coup, he didn't do what almost every other person capable of this, who perpetrated the coup, has done, which is order the military or these other armed agencies to surround the White House, keep anybody who tried to come and get him out, and ensure that he remains in power using violence or other illegitimate and illegal means.
Like, why didn't he even try that?
You're asking me why Donald Trump didn't order the military when he already thought Milley was literally a treasonous actor for not giving him all the information that he thought he was entitled to for military events.
You're asking me why he didn't ask the military to help him when he already disagreed with so many members of the military.
You're asking why he didn't ask the intelligence services to help him that he had said since the start of his presidency were engaged in Russia collusion hoax and with Peter Strzok and his text messages and with the Hunter Biden laughter that were all set against him.
You're asking me the question of why didn't Donald Trump order the very parts of his government that he thought were backstabbing the most to help him ensure his coup?
Is that what you- just to be clear, that's the question you're asking me?
Yeah, and I'll tell you why- Okay, the answer- the answer why is because he didn't have any of these people on his side and he knew it.
That's why he fired people like Comey.
That's why he tried to intimidate and bully every other part of his administration that wouldn't follow him, whether it was Jeff Sessions when he served as temporary attorney general, whether it was trying to undermine his own attorney general bar when he turned against him, whether it was trying to undermine literally every other part of his government that turned against him.
Like Donald Trump didn't have any friends anywhere.
The idea that he wouldn't turn to, you know, other members of the government to help him, like the military or the secret service agencies, or not the secret, the intelligence agencies, is not only is it like, well, why didn't he do it?
Well, it's obvious why he wouldn't do it because he didn't think these people had his back.
I think the more difficult question for you is that if he really didn't think that there was going to be like violence at the Capitol, If he really didn't want any of that to happen, why didn't Donald Trump pick up the phone and call anybody to get the National Guard there to protect the Capitol building?
When Pence, when Ivanka, when Meadows went in over and over again, when other congressmen were calling him, why is it that when the violence was at its peak, why was it just him, Eastman, and Giuliani making phone calls to other congressmen to, surprise, surprise, delay the certification of the vote?
OK, I promise I'm going to answer that, but I want to go back to the question that I posed to you first and the answer that you gave to me.
Oftentimes, first of all, if it's true that the leaders of the armed forces and the intelligence community and every one of these armed executive agency branches, even including ATM and the DEA and all these other ones, all were in the posture that they did not regard themselves as duty bound to follow Donald Trump's orders, If you're somebody, and I don't mean you're saying this had already been the case.
Hold on, can I just say real quick as a friend, you say this, you just as real quick, you keep saying this, duty bound to follow Trump's orders, the oath that you take is to the Constitution of the United States, not to the President of the United States.
Just to be very clear, go ahead.
You have the right, no, the President is the head of the executive branch.
He's the commander in chief of the armed forces.
And he is below the Constitution.
He is below the Constitution.
If you are in the military, You are duty-bound to obey orders.
Now, you can object if you think the order is illegal.
You do actually have that right.
And as I said in my question, I'm sure a lot of them would have done that.
But there's no question that there are members of the military and members in these agencies that absolutely were loyal to Trump.
And oftentimes what has happened in coups and those sorts of other things is that Members of the various military branches or the armed wings of the government break up into factions and often start fighting one another.
That's how you get a civil war.
So even if Milley or the leader of the CIA, who at that point was Gina Haspel, who he had actually appointed, would have done what you claim, which is a pretty significant threat to democracy, they regarded themselves as antithetical or adversarial to the president, not subordinate to him.
There's definitely a good chance that a lot of those people who have guns and run the power structure of the United States would have answered his call and been on his side.
The fact that he didn't even try is so reflective of the fact that this was not an insurrectionary intent.
That he walked out of the office peacefully on January 20th at noon the way every other president previous to him had done as part of the peaceful transition of power.
There were so many things that he could have done.
Now, just remind me what the question is that you asked that I promised you I was going to answer.
Before we do this, can I actually take a step back?
Because I just want to actually take a step back.
So Glenn, you said it wasn't an insurrection because on January 6th there was no threat to actually overthrowing democracy or actually doing anything major.
Destiny, as far as I understood from your previous response, and I want to get this clear before we move on, you're saying it's not just January 6th, there's also all the events leading up to it.
I think that's a lot of it, but we don't even have to... Is it worth going into it, just so we exactly know why you think it's an insurrection and what specific events led up to it?
We can go into that to assign more culpability to Trump, but we don't need that.
Just on the events of J6 itself, it is very plainly and clearly obvious, unless you have heavy political motivations to believe otherwise, that what happened was an insurrection.
Just every single element is there.
And we can try to pivot with this like, well, usually people do this.
I agree that usually people do some things.
But just because usually people do something doesn't mean that that's always the case.
As you've said yourself, there are constitutional coups.
Some people might consider the Enabling Act that Hitler did in order to become a dictator in Germany was a kind of constitutional coup.
Some people claim that Ivo Morales in Bolivia was enacting, trying to enact some sort of coup.
Some people say that in Ukraine when Yanukovych left and that parliament decided to elect a new president.
Some people call that a coup.
There are lots of coups that can happen that, or rebellions, or not rebellions, there are lots of coups that can happen that are, for a variety of reasons, not involving the military.
We can look at the president and say, well, why didn't he try?
We can think of a number of reasons why he didn't try.
Because he didn't have the support of the military.
Because he thought it would be incredibly risky.
Because he thought it would devolve into chaos.
He wouldn't have a clean transition of power.
Nobody here is claiming that Trump is brave.
Nobody here is claiming that Trump wants to lead an armed insurrection to the White House.
He wasn't his own...
Handlers told him that he wasn't even allowed to go to the White House, even when he begged that he wanted the Secret Service to drive him there.
So, we can think of a number of reasons why Trump, you know, didn't actually order the military to go and show up and start killing people.
What I'm curious, though, is, to my question, you asked me what my question was, why did Trump sit and watch the violence carry on at the Capitol building and not try to intervene, despite the fact that he had the authority, and many would argue the responsibility, to do so?
Why would he sit and watch it?
Well first of all, when Trump, and people may have thought he waited too long, it took him too long to realize the significance of the events, although I don't see the events as nearly as significant as you.
We've had tons of protests before at the Capitol.
He knew those people were angry and had gone there to protest, but he actually did.
First he went on Twitter and he told everybody there, leave now, don't use violence, violence is not the kind of thing that we Glenn, just as a quick fact check, he did not say that in his, he did not say that on Twitter.
He said that in tweets on January 6th.
He absolutely did.
Repeating the message that he gave to the crowd before they went to the Capitol, which is, I know that you're going to go there and peacefully protest.
That was the message that he consistently delivered to them, both before January 6th at the protest and after.
Secondly, this, again, this was a protest that turned into a riot that was quelled in a matter of Hours.
It started in the afternoon and it was over in the afternoon.
And in order to quell it, they didn't even need to open fire.
As we know now, we should have known this two years ago, but the January 6th Commission purposely concealed the videos that negated the kind of narrative they wanted to feed.
A lot of the people who ended up in the Capitol ended up in the Capitol because the Capitol Police opened the door This is just not true.
Can we focus on one false fact at a time before we dive into like every conspiracy theory that- I don't know why people- It's not a conspiracy theory!
It is a conspiracy theory!
We've seen all the videos!
I watched it on video.
Which video?
What video did you watch?
The videos that were actually released finally to the public, not handpicked by Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney, once Kevin McCarthy and then Mike Johnson fulfilled their promise to make sure the public could see all of the video, not the video that they handpicked.
You're right, I'm sorry.
You're talking about the footage that McCarthy handpicked to give to Tucker Carlson that he made a 30-minute documentary out of?
No, I'm talking about the decision by Mike Johnson, a promise he made as a condition to be the last speaker, to make all of the January 6th surveillance footage available to the public, not just the handpicked parts that Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff decided to show us.
It was all an effort from the very beginning Okay, okay, okay, hold on.
to exaggerate and make this event seem much worse than it was, including this insane claim that was an absolute lie that Brian Sicknick was murdered by a savage mob of Trump supporters when he had his skull bashed in with a fire extinguisher until he died.
Okay, okay, okay, hold on.
One fake claim at a time.
So, firstly, Donald Trump's initial tweets were not to leave, and— And when you ask, when you claim over and over again that, you know, they managed to calm it down in three hours, that was because finally, like two or three hours after everything, on Trump's, I think it was his third tweet, after being begged over and over again, after already having the note delivered and sitting on his desk that Ashley Babbitt had been shot and killed, he finally tweeted, okay, you guys can go home, we love you, you're very special, you know, congratulations.
And don't use violence.
The initial two tweets that Donald Trump tweeted were not telling people to go home.
He already knew there was an ongoing riot, and he tweeted to encourage his supporters to continue protesting.
Donald Trump was the President of the United States who was the highest on the pecking order for delivering the National Guard to protect the Capitol building, and he failed to do that.
He failed to To do that duty that he had that was exclusively under the purview of the President because D.C.
is federal ground, and he didn't do it to stop his protesters that were there to try to delay the certification of the vote of an election that he lost.
And during that three-hour time period, all he was doing was making phone calls or telling Giuliani, his stooge, to make phone calls to other congressmen to delay the certification of the vote, which is exactly what he was trying to do, which is exactly what an insurrection is.
It's having a large group of people engaged in violence trying to stop the lawful execution of government action.
Which is exactly what every historical person has believed.
The fact that you have to resort to this kind of nitpicky behavior, like, oh, he didn't tweet soon enough, it took three whole hours to get these people very easily to march peacefully out of the Capitol, is more than anything that I could do to show what an absurd farce this entire thing is.
Like, you mentioned other historical examples, and by the way, like, Let's go back to the tweet.
time to like constantly proclaim like everybody agrees with me it's so clearly and provably true that what i'm saying is correct these are not arguments let's just like eliminate that fluff and try and focus on like the substance you can go and do all your post video like post debate videos about why you won to your audience but for now let's just focus on the facts okay focus on the facts how do the first people get into the capital building are they let in or do they break in let's go back to the tweet i just want to focus on the tweet because destiny you said that
He actually posted tweets encouraging them to actually continue What tweets were those?
Because Glenn said, of course, that he actually told them to stop.
So when the riots were going on at the Capitol, Mark Meadows, because other people went to him and other people, continued to go in.
Initially it was to talk to Trump, and then I think just to Meadows, because Trump had locked himself in his room, just watching what was going on, begging him to please tweet out something and stop.
Tell your supporters to go home.
And for the first two tweets that Trump sent out, he refused to tell people to go home because he enjoyed the protest, because he liked the violence, because he thought it would probably increase his chances of furthering delaying the certification of the vote.
But those first two tweets that he sent, yes, after three hours when he realized that it wasn't going to help, On the third tweet, if you look at any of the examples, even like you mentioned Bolivia, where the coup was not, according to most observers of Bolivia, that Evo Morales tried to stay in office.
Evo Morales was given the go-ahead to run for a term by the electoral court appointed by the Constitution to make those judgments and allowed him to run for a fourth term.
Evo Morales ran.
He won.
People in the West claimed, because they didn't want him to win, that And it's so ironic, the fraud claim ended up being because he was only 8 or 9 points ahead and you have to be 10 points in order to avoid the runoff and win on the first round, that a bunch of Morales votes came in late at night to put him over that 10%.
Very similar to Trump's claim about why there was fraud.
It's absolutely not similar.
The claim was that those servers that were being ran were completely and totally unmonitored, not part of any election monitoring procedure, and that nobody could verify any of the votes that were going in and out of that server.
I absolutely know what I was talking about, and the fact that you say that even Morales was allowed to run for another term, the reason why people accuse him of being a coup is because, or why they thought it was, was because he was in charge of electing or appointing a lot of the court members that would eventually go on to overturn the part of the Constitution that allowed him to run for a third and fourth term.
Right, because he had been president for 12 years!
Let me make my point about Bolivia.
He was president for 12 years.
What happened was when he was declared the winner and even think tanks that had suspected fraud ultimately reviewed all of what happened.
And the reason there were so many pro-Morales votes at the end is because the outer regions with indigenous and rural voters, which had always been his base, are always the votes that come in late and which is what put him over the top.
Not only did I report on this, I was the first journalist to interview Eva Morales in English after that series of events.
In order to interview him, I couldn't go to Bolivia.
You know why I couldn't go to Bolivia?
Because he had been driven out of Bolivia by the military and the police that threatened to murder him and his whole family if he didn't leave Bolivia.
He then had to go to Mexico, where he sought asylum, and that's where I interviewed him.
And then in that next week, the interim coup government, the leaders of whom are now in prison, ended up murdering All of the, not all, but many of the peaceful protesters who were contesting the fact that the military and the police drove Ivo Morales out of the country.
That's what happens in a coup.
When the people with the guns come and say, we're now taking over.
We're going to decide who's in power.
We don't care that you were certified the winner of the election.
We demand that you either leave Bolivia or we're going to murder you.
Every event that is seriously viewed as a coup, whether the coups in South America throughout the Cold War, the coup in Iran that has happened, you go through all over the world and you look at coups.
Almost always they involve not 100 people or 120 people for two hours protesting and rioting in the Capitol, none of whom pulled out a gun and discharged a weapon at any point.
It involves real sustained violence by the serious factions in that country that dominate with violence.
And nothing like that happened here on January 6th.
The reality was, there was violence on J6.
You literally, we've all watched the videos.
There were a small number of Trump supporters, as I said, 10% of the people charged who were engaged in fighting with the police.
How did they get into the Capitol?
Glenn, how did they get into the Capitol?
They used force in order to break in.
Okay, so they used force to break into the Capitol, okay?
How did they get through the rest when cops were pointing guns at them saying, don't come in here?
What were they doing?
They were breaking windows.
How did Ashley Babbitt get shot?
They were trying to go to places where lawmakers were, where they were saying, don't come.
And what did they end up doing?
They delayed the certification of the vote or the execution of the law of Congress, of the Constitution.
How many people, how many people on January 6th Glenn, all of these questions are bullshit!
How many people is not a real- that's not a real contention!
It doesn't matter!
You can not think much of my questions, but I'd still appreciate if you answered them.
How many people on January 6th were killed by these quote-unquote insurrectionists?
How many people did they kill on January 6th?
It doesn't matter!
How many people died in Fort Sumter?
How many people died for the start of the Civil War in the United States?
How many people died in Fort Sumter?
Just answer to humor me.
How many people were killed by the insurrectionists on January 6th?
I guess it depends on if you count them taking drugs.
Is that killing themselves?
Right, well, the only people who died, right, you can say some of them actually died, and one of them was shot by the Capitol Hill police, but the people who are being called insurrectionists, or the attempted coup against the most powerful militarized nation in the world, did not kill a single person on January 6th.
That was why the anti-Trump media had to invent a lie.
That has no in- No, no, stop with the weird partisan.
It shows what a joke this entire riot was.
It's such a partisan hack.
Just engage with the facts.
Both of us agree that you don't need people to die for it to be an insurrection, right?
So why do you keep bringing that up?
You're the one who goes around devoting yourself and urging people to vote for one of the two political parties.
I have never done that in my entire life.
I've spent the last four months attacking one of the core policies of the Republican Party, which is US support for Israel.
I don't go around encouraging people to vote for the Republican Party.
Glenn!
I wanna talk something about this.
So there was a phone call, Trump made a phone call to a governor, I'm sure you've heard it went really well, not really well, but it went quite big.
Of him asking to find 11,000 votes, would you not call that at all?
Or doing a queue or trying to bring votes to win?
No, if you assume that Trump believed that there was serious voter fraud in Georgia, as he did believe and as he was being told by many of his advisors, including lawyers who had been celebrated as some of this country's most prestigious lawyers for years, who were telling him there was ample voter fraud in Georgia, he was trying to say, I don't even need you to prove that every last ballot that was fraudulent be discovered, I just need you to find 11,000.
I know the interpretation that people want to give to that.
They always want to try and pretend that Trump meant something sinister, like, oh, invent 12,000 cases of voter fraud so that I can win Georgia.
That isn't all what the context was.
The context was, I believe there was ample fraud in Georgia.
People are telling me in an informed way there's ample fraud in Georgia.
I personally don't believe that claim.
But that was the context of what that call was about.
And so, I mean, if that is a coup, you call someone up and you say, I think that, first of all, this is not the first time that people have believed that elections were committed by fraud.
In fact, Democrats believe that the last three elections that they lost were illegitimate.
In 1960, here's...
It's every talking point.
that that election was stolen by a combination of voter fraud in Chicago that made John Kennedy the winner over Richard Nixon.
There was that incident where Hawaii had two different sets of electors.
1876, there was a huge pervasive allegations of voter fraud.
You can sit there and mutter all you want, Destiny.
I'm not going to play on your little field.
If you don't want to look at history, you don't want to put this in context.
The reason is, is because you have blinders on.
You only know the CNN version of the world.
You're one of those people who only began paying a president to politics in 2015.
Okay, so then let's just be very clear then.
Would you say that the battle of Fort Sumter, would you consider that the Fort Sumter event?
Would that have been an insurrection to you?
Even though only one person died?
Without anything else that followed?
Without the entire civil war?
Without anything else that followed, yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know if I would consider that an insurrection or not.
Okay, so for the whiskey insurrection, where no— The reason we remember Fort Sumter is because of the part that it played in the Civil War.
It's the Civil War that made that so historic.
Well, that's fine, but again, your analysis there is ahistorical, because people considered that others that were giving aid to Confederate states as they succeeded, before any actual violence happened, were insurrectionists.
So, if you think that Fort Sumter was not an insurrection of the Civil War, that's fine.
That's an insane take.
Especially given that Lincoln literally invoked the Insurrection Act right after Fort Sumter, but that's fine if you think that wasn't an insurrection.
Okay, so for the Whiskey Rebellion then, do you think for the Whiskey Insurrection that also wasn't an insurrection because people didn't die?
Fort Sumter did not just appear out of nowhere.
It was not a spontaneous protest that turned into a riot.
It was part of what became an obvious attempt on the part of the South to launch a rebellion against the North and to secede from the Union.
Lincoln knew what was going to follow.
And I think this is an important point.
If what happened after January 6th involved acts of Donald Trump trying to extend what happened on January 6th by repeating violent protest or trying to threaten the stability of the United States government in all the different ways that he could have done but chose not to, Had he not walked out peacefully of the White House on January 20th, we'd be looking at all of these sets of events differently.
That's an imaginary history that would make it more like the Civil War.
None of that happened, however.
All we have is a three-hour riot and Donald Trump walking out of the White House peacefully.
So the Civil War, or for Fort Sumter, for the Civil War that followed, if that hadn't had followed, Even though Lincoln invoked the Insurrection Act to deal with Fort Sumter, you would say that that wasn't an attempted insurrection.
That wasn't an insurrection.
I mean, it's such a counterfactual and such a hypothetical that it's impossible to imagine taking Fort Sumter, tearing it out of its context of a nation that had been heading for civil war for a long time, where they were doing everything possible to avert it.
Lincoln understood that Fort Sumter was not some isolated event of a two-hour riot that was easily subdued, but knew that the entire South was armed to fight against the North.
Take Fort Sumter and completely change every single fact and tear it out of its historical context, and then trying to debate whether or not it's an insurrection is a child's game.
There's so many- Let's say that after Fort Sumter, let's say they were crushed so hard and so fast that there was a sweeping change of mind among the states.
And they were like, you know what?
Oof, this Lincoln guy seems serious.
Let's not go to war and have hundreds of thousands of us die.
And they decide to not do that instead.
In your eyes, Fort Sumter would have then not been an insurrection.
Yeah, I think there's a good analogy to that, which is the one I mentioned earlier, which is what happened in Russia, where Purgosian... No, no, let's just talk about the United States.
No, no, no, you can't ask me... No, we're going to pivot to Russia, a totally different system with a totally different set of laws, with a totally different... You're saying no, no, stick to this... This is such an easy yes.
It was obviously an insurrection.
It was so obviously an insurrection.
The idea that you're trying to argue that Boyce Humphrey was only an insurrection because of acts that came after is unbelievable to me.
What came after was a rebellion!
And the acts that came before, the idea that Fort Sumter was analogous in any way to January 6th, even taking Fort Sumter and imagining nothing else happened after, that is what is, hey, historical.
What a real coup looks like is what Purgosian tried to do in Russia.
But in the context of Russian history, even in a few years now, that will be a tiny little footnote because it never posed a serious or meaningful threat to the system of power that governs Russia.
It was crushed in 12 hours, and now Prigozhin is dead.
So if you have the magnitude of these events is what matters so much.
The very first thing you said in that first debate was you tried to create this dichotomous framework, this very reductive binary framework that either you believe, and this is almost quoting you verbatim, you said, either you believe that the insurrection was justified and that nothing wrong happened on January 6th, or you have to admit that there was a coup.
And the very first thing I did when I spoke was linked onto that and said, that is an absurd framework.
Of course, there's a gigantic difference between acknowledging that people behaved poorly on January 6th, behaved in ways we wished would not happen, seeing citizens be shot despite being unarmed while they're protesting.
How many people died for the Procosis stuff?
How many people died when he did his attempted coup?
What, they shot down a few helicopters?
It was like five or ten people.
How many people even died for that?
There were more than two dozen Russian troops that were killed.
Imagine if the group of people at the Capitol had shot down actual U.S.
military planes and military jets and murdered American soldiers.
So for one person, so how many people needed to die then on J6 for you to think that that was a coup?
What is the number then there?
The criterion for me is not how many people died.
The criterion for me is how serious of a threat did it pose, or does it pose, to the actual system of power in the United States.
And the fact that this two-hour, three-hour riot, filled with people who were too obese to get off the couch without dropping dead of heart attacks, That's fine.
maybe had a couple of dozen or a few dozen well-armed and well-trained people there, that it ever posed a meaningful threat to the system of power of the United States is a complete and utter joke.
It reminds me so much of the people who tried to say that Russia buying a few Facebook ads or a few Twitter bots was the kind of interference and a democracy that was so unprecedented.
That's fine.
I don't know why you're pivoting to no one is talking about Hillary or the laptops.
You know what an analogy is?
An analogy is when you say that one thing is wrong.
It's a whataboutism and a pivot because you don't want to actually argue the facts of this.
That's what it is.
They're not analogies.
They're not used to strengthen the argument.
They're used to obfuscate it.
Let's go back to January 6th.
So Glenn said that on January 6th there was no actual, no point in time was there an actual threat to the democracy.
Destiny, what specific point would you say?
Or a specific example, could you say, no, this was a threat?
It's a fantastic delusion.
If you were to take Glenn or anybody else that has their, whatever their partisan takes on this, if you were to take them, put them in a room with artists and animators, and then have them describe what J6 was, then the animators would draw, I don't know, I guess like 500 Greenpeace activists Picketing outside the Capitol building with signs saying, we don't like that you guys are trying to steal the election.
That's what it sounds like.
And then maybe a few of them got led in by the Capitol police to walk around.
Thankfully, however, thank God, we're in an era where we all have videos.
We all have the internet.
We can see the tens of thousands of people outside screaming.
We can watch the brawling Screaming!
Metropolitan police.
That's not all they did, Glenn.
We can watch them brawling with the Metropolitan police.
We can watch them breaking into the Capitol from like 500 different angles.
We can watch Ashley Babbitt getting shot as she's trying to crawl through a window where lawmakers are in direct opposition to federal police shooting her.
We can watch every single one of these events unfold in real time, and it doesn't look like anything that's being described by Glenn.
Instead, the only response is Glenn says we saw the real videos because Tucker Carlson published 0.3% of the footage that McCarthy granted him that doesn't change any of the underlying facts of what we've seen.
Yeah, were there some people that were walking through the Capitol building because the police were trying to guide them to another area where they could more heavily, more easily secure it?
Yeah, of course.
Were some people guided through and then led into a chamber because police had an easier control of that area than something else?
Yeah, sure.
But again, we've all seen the videos.
You admitted yourself that the first entrance into the Capitol broke in.
The first people to breach the barricades Broke them down.
Nobody was let into a new initial area because the Capitol Police let them in.
They were only sometimes ushered through the building because there were more defensible positions, which is obvious if you've watched any of the video footage available of that day, besides the selected clips that people like Tucker Carlson or Glenn Greenwald want you to watch on Twitter.
Again, if this was so easy and so simple and there was nobody there but a bunch of fat people, how did the certification of our vote get delayed by three hours?
And why were we waiting for the national- For the first time in all of history.
Three hours!
Three hours!
Oh, as opposed to what, Glenn?
I mean, how did the Republic survive?
First of all, let me just clarify.
Glenn, how long was the story about Hunter's laptop delayed?
How many days was that delayed?
One day.
You guys say that that was a more serious thing, right?
Because a story is delayed by one day.
Come on.
Facebook suppressed that story all the way up until the time of the election, algorithmically.
But let me just, I want to go back to the history of what we saw with the videos, because you obviously are not familiar with this history.
At the beginning, for two years, all of the information that we got about January 6th was controlled by a partisan commission filled with, effectively, Democrats.
The people Nancy Pelosi let onto the commission.
Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger hated Trump almost more than any Democrat did.
Those were the two Republicans.
Just as a quick thing, you can't lie.
That's not true.
Uh, Pelosi would have allowed others.
Pelosi was gonna allow people on there, but unfortunately, McCarthy, when he nominated 5-2 of those people, uh, Jim Jordan and... something, Johnson, I think, maybe?
Um... Well, you're just lying, though.
You can't just, like, lie.
You can't just say that things are lies.
Pelosi accepted people from McCarthy.
McCarthy didn't want to nominate more people.
That's his fault.
Sorry, go ahead.
Nancy Pelosi was the first ever Speaker of the House in 225 years to reject the nominees by the opposing party to serve on an investigative commission.
It had never happened in the history of the United States.
She was the first one to do it.
Let's directly ask Destiny that question.
Why did Nancy Pelosi reject those two Republicans?
Why did she reject them?
So when Nancy Pelosi was forming this committee, she said that McCarthy could nominate five people.
Of those five people, I think it was Jim Jordan and somebody Banks, two of these people, a lot of the J6 investigations were probably going to be analyzing their behavior specifically, and Pelosi felt like the presence of those two people on the committee would have poisoned the committee.
So she told McCarthy, I accept your other three nominees.
Just give me two others, and they can be part of the committee as well.
But McCarthy, because he knew January 6th was an insurrection, and because he knew that the behavior that day was indefensible, decided to pull all the Republican nominees and say, you know what?
Screw you.
I'm not gonna give you anybody.
You can just have Kissinger and Cheney or whatever, the two people that I know hate Trump.
So that afterwards, conveniently, people like Glenn can make this exame bullshit argument where they say, oh, well, actually, it was a completely partisan committee, so I'm going to ignore the fact that 95% of the people that were actually testifying were Republicans, and ignore the fact that all of this is under oath, and ignore the fact that all the evidence is easily available, and I'm just going to hand-wave all of it by calling it partisan.
Meanwhile, I'm going to believe everything that, I guess, Russia Today tweets about it, or everything that Tucker Carlson puts on his show about it, or everything that McCarthy himself says about it.
- Yeah, go ahead. - Eli, I just wanna go back to the history of the, first of all, I'll say one more time. - Of the videos. - Never before in the history of the Republic did Nancy Pelosi, did any Speaker of the House or Majority Leader do what Nancy Pelosi did?
The prerogative of the minority party to pick their own members to serve on that commission was never subject to the approval of the opposing party until Nancy Pelosi, while the Democratic Party always claims it's upholding norms and health and tradition, decided to block the choices
And so it's true, the Republicans decided, we're not going to participate in a farce where for the first time in 225 years of our history, Nancy Pelosi gets to choose who cannot be on the panel, even though that's who we want and think will be most effective on there.
And as a result, Nancy Pelosi ended up choosing those two Republicans.
They were the ones willing to serve when the rest of the Republicans weren't, and it became a partisan farce.
Had she allowed Kevin McCarthy's members the way every other speaker for 225 years had done, you would have had an actual bipartisan commission.
As a result, the only videos that we saw were videos that were hand-picked By these very partisan anti-Trump members who then were allowed to create a narrative filled with lies beginning with Brian Sicknick getting his head bashed in and then hiding the videos that undermine their narrative and only allowing us to see the videos that made it look as violent as possible.
Kevin McCarthy gave the rest of the video to Tucker Carlson so that he could report on them, but that's not even what I'm talking about.
What I'm talking about is that it was Mike Johnson, the newly elected Speaker, who released all of the video.
And only then did we see the video for the very first time after two and a half years of these people who were walking into the Capitol being led in by the Capitol Police after they opened the doors and led them in peacefully.
Hold on, wait, you don't need to do facts, that's fine, but I don't need to, I don't need to present a noun as my tactic.
is to create this binary where either someone has to say-- - Hold on, wait, you're gonna do facts.
That's fine, but I don't even know what my tactic. - I said from the beginning, I said from the beginning that it was a riot.
There were people who were there on behalf of Donald Trump who used violence.
There were police officers who ended up injured as a result, just like happened in the Black Lives Matter protest, although actually police officers, at least one of them for sure, and probably a few others, were killed and the amount of injuries were far greater.
I also don't consider the Black Lives Matter movement, even though it was A lot of people there had insurrectionary intent.
Anarchist groups and Antifa and others.
I don't consider that an insurrection either, though I think you can make a much stronger case that the damage and violence that it posed to our prevailing law and order system was far greater than what happened on January 6th.
So yes, you are right that some people used violence to get into the Capitol.
Some people broke windows.
They were screaming.
They were protesting.
Things that have all happened before.
I don't say that everybody on January 6th behaved properly.
I think a lot of them ended up properly being imprisoned there were some who use violent but that is it was a riot and not any real threat to the stability of the United States it's something that's being exaggerated because the thing that Democrats want to do more than anything is to say that Donald Trump is not just somebody with bad policy or bad ideology he's an unprecedented threat to American democracy and his movement ought to be criminalized and this what were they there to
what were they there to protest what were they what can You're an absolute liar, Destiny, or you have no idea what you're talking about.
Mike Johnson is the one who released all the videos.
- Literally, I don't know, that's like a guy telling you that yesterday I saw UFOs making crop circles. - You're an absolute liar, Destiny, or you have no idea what you're talking about.
Mike Johnson is the one who released all the videos.
How do you not know that?
Go Google it right now!
Go Google it right now!
Do you not know that?
Go Google it right now!
Go Google Other than those two reasons, there is absolutely no reason to reference this video footage.
Everybody knows that there were times, even before Mike Johnson and even before Tucker Carlson, we all knew that there was footage of cops leading people in some places around the inside of the Capitol building.
People do this with riots all the time.
We know that they were understaffed.
We know they didn't have enough people to deal with all of the protesters or rioters that were in the building, and we know that lawmakers were being shuffled through the back trying to make sure that they weren't secured areas that protesters weren't.
So the idea that it's somehow strange or inconceivable that police officers were leading people into more defensible areas of the building just doesn't make any sense.
Like, I could ask very simply, what is the point of saying that there are videos of police officers ushering people or shepherding people into different areas?
What's the point of bringing that up?
What are you contesting there?
I'll explain it, and this is, like, you are the most binary thinker I've ever heard.
You begin every sentence by proclaiming it is either 1 or 2, and there's no 3rd or 4th or 5th.
Neither of those two choices is my argument.
The reason why it matters is twofold.
Number one is it demonstrates that from the start of all of this, The media and Democrats knew that what had happened was nowhere near sufficiently serious in order to present it as some sort of an insurrectionary threat to the United States.
That was why the Brian Sicknick lie was important.
That was why it was so important to conceal these videos.
That's why it took Mike Johnson and the Republicans taking over the House and being willing to release all the videos, not just the part that was handpicked for us by Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney, to get the real story.
The second part is that the reason it's relevant is not because it proves that none of the protesters used violence.
I will say, probably for the eighth time, that there were a small number, a minority of people, who were at the Capitol and who entered the Capitol who used violence.
They used violence against police officers.
They attacked police officers with physical force.
Some police officers were injured, pretty much like happens at every protest that is turned into a riot.
But what it demonstrates is that even though you have to try and reach for this maximum number, 2,000 people who entered the Capitol, the vast majority of them were not part of any premeditated plan to overthrow the U.S. government, as even the FBI's own informants acknowledged to the vast majority of them were not part of any premeditated plan to overthrow And I can read you the New York Times article about that that makes very clear that the FBI's informants on the ground were telling them none of this was planned, this all happened spontaneously,
and that even though it is true that a small number of people who were present ended up using violence and fighting with police officers or by engaging in property and that even though it is true that a small number of people who were present ended up using violence and fighting And that is the reason why only a small percentage of them have been accused of violence.
And the reason that matters is it goes to the question of the magnitude or the extent of the actual threat that January 6 posed to the American Republic and to our system of government, which was extremely trivial and minor, both in the context of our own history and how other coups happened in other countries as well.
OK, so none of this was a response to anything.
So, and none of these points even make sense.
So the first thing you say is that it demonstrates from the start that the media and Democrats knew what happened.
You said in the beginning, I know that you're scared.
I know you're scared of talking about the facts.
Glenn, I know you're scared of the facts, but that's okay.
Let's follow them.
Let's be brave.
Let's be brave.
Let's be brave, okay?
So you said that it demonstrates that the meeting the Democrats knew what happened wasn't sufficiently serious.
That was the first one you brought up.
How does the release of the videos make the event less serious?
Was there not a delaying of the certification of the vote?
Were there not thousands of people inside the Capitol?
Did they not break in to get there?
There weren't thousands of people inside the Capitol.
You yourself put the maximum number at 2,000.
What does 1,000s mean, Glenn?
Hold on.
English might be your second language.
I'm trying to figure out.
What does 1,000s mean?
Thousands.
2,000 is thousands.
be your second language.
I'm trying to figure out what does thousand S mean?
Thousands, two thousand is thousands.
There were thousands.
I'll say two thousand makes it better.
So we know that there were.
That's the maximum.
What the videos show is that at least a significant number of those people did not use violence in order to enter the Capitol.
They walked in peacefully and were led into the Capitol.
If somebody breaks into the building, the people that come in afterwards, of course, are coming in peacefully.
In any riot situation like that... Led in by the police!
Led in by the police!
The police are not... But the initial entry into the Capitol was a break-in.
Yes, a small percentage of the people on January 6th... Glenn, what Dustin is trying to say is that the first people who will come in will do the violence and the rest of the people will just follow them in and won't do all the violence.
So the first person will... It's like saying a thousand people go in through a broken door and saying only one guy broke down the door.
A thousand people were trespassing through a broken door!
Like, do you think the cops- for the cops, they were leading them around the Capitol building.
Oh my god, the pivot, the whataboutism.
None of them to try to- none of them to try to prevent the execution of the election.
That's why this is a historic event.
You admit it as much.
Nobody's delayed the certification of a vote like this before, and nobody- It was delayed by three hours.
It happened on the same day as it was scheduled to happen.
When I say Glenn, can you go back to the original point which Destiny made, which is that if you've got those 2,000 people in the capital and you said only a couple of hundred people, maybe only a hundred people will actually be violent.
Destiny said it's only the first hundred people that will go through, they will do the violence and everyone else will be trespassing.
Does that make sense or what's your thoughts on that?
No, because if that crowd were actually there to overthrow the government of the United States, or to prevent a peaceful transition of power, they would not have marched in peacefully to the White House when the police let them in, and then marched peacefully out of the Capitol when it was time for them to go, which is exactly what happened.
There was no violence even needed to subdue this riot or to put an end to it.
What it shows is that the vast majority of people there were peaceful protesters.
They were absolutely people who believed that the election was the byproduct of fraud.
They wanted their voices to be heard in Congress.
They wanted the Congress to exercise what their constitutional right was, in the view of many people, which was to hear claims of fraud, which is what happened in 2016, and in 2004, and in 2000.
The Congress, including members of Congress, objected to the certification of votes.
They most definitely were exercising their constitutional rights to protest the 2020 election.
They're exploiting constitutional rights.
Yes.
No, I agree with everything he just said.
They thought the election was fraud, and so they showed up to try to protest the results of the election.
And they did it with violence.
Yes, that's called an insurrection.
When you don't like how an election goes, and you show up to have a riot to try to make it so it doesn't happen, that's an insurrection.
Yes.
There were a tiny number of people.
It doesn't matter the number.
When you pivot to irrelevant facts like this, there were a tiny number of people.
That doesn't matter.
It might have been 100.
It might have been 2,000.
It doesn't matter what the tiny number means.
It does matter.
It does matter in terms of the gravity of this threat.
And we began the discussion by your conceding that if it were a tiny number of people, like two or three, then it would be very difficult to call it an insurrection.
So for me, there's a huge difference between... And yet 500 people was enough to call it the Whiskey Rebellion.
Even though those 500 men had no chance of taking over the federal government.
That's called a whole rebellion, which is more serious than an insurrection.
History, legal experts, and the Constitution does not agree with you, Glenn.
You are on an island.
This idea that you constantly proclaim that everybody agrees with you and nobody agrees with me, in what fucking world are you living in?
You're so... Even in the U.S.
Congress, the majority of people in the Senate voted that it was an insurrection.
The majority of them, not a super majority.
So even in the Congress, they agreed with me.
Yes!
I don't know if you're aware of this, but the person that you claim led this insurrection and that everybody agrees was an insurrection is currently leading in all presidential polls to be the next president because Americans actually don't see it the way you see it.
OK.
Another person who doesn't see it the way you see it is Jack Smith, who had the opportunity to charge Donald Trump with insurrection and chose not to.
That's a good argument.
If he's really popular, it can't be an insurrection, I guess.
- Insurrection, I guess. - To put at the beginning of a YouTube video where you're gonna be like, everybody agrees with me, you're on an island.
As though I'm the only one who makes these arguments.
There are millions of people who think what you're saying is bullshit, Destiny.
And the fact that you don't know that shows how insulated you are. - Glenn, can we go back straight to the right, without the insults, but can we go straight back to the beginning of the debate?
Which is, we started off with trying to define what insurrection meant.
I think we lost that way.
So, Glenn, you described insurrection as something that has the potential to overthrow.
A serious threat to the system of law and order and to the stability of power in that country.
That's what I think an insurrection or a coup is.
Destiny, would you agree with that?
Basically, yeah.
Basically, yeah.
Public use of force by a group of people in order to hinder or prevent the execution of the Constitution of the United States.
Absolutely, yeah.
Okay, so we keep going back to this, but what happened on January 6th?
It delayed it for a couple of hours.
Was that Was that trying to overthrow democracy?
How does that qualify to be an insurrection?
The reason why it qualifies is because, as Glenn accurately pointed out, the reason why the people were there was because they thought the election had been stolen from them.
When they were marching down, they were chanting 1776 and they were going down with the idea that Vice President Pence would unilaterally overturn the election that they thought was done fraudulently in order to soft coup Donald Trump back into power as the rightful leader In contravention of what the Congress was supposed to do, which was the certification of the electoral votes.
That was Congress's job.
They were there on January 6th, specifically that day, because Donald Trump asked them to be there.
They went to the Capitol grounds immediately after his speech because Donald Trump told them to go there.
They broke into the Capitol building because they thought that they could delay the certification of the vote.
And then when they were there, they only left when Donald Trump told them to.
And a lot of them had said in much and all of their convictions that they were waiting for his orders to go home, of which his first two tweets weren't.
They were encouragement to continue rioting, and they continued to do so even an hour after Donald Trump, the one who's authorized to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol grounds, sat and watched them do it even an hour after finding out that Ashley Babbitt had died.
Again, if you want to say that two people is an insurrection, not sure, that's fine, but 2,000 is way over wherever either of us would reasonably draw the line.
I think we've gone over sufficiently the amount of people who were actually there engaging in violence of any kind with any kind of an insurrectionary intent, which is the, I'll be generous and say that a hundred or a hundred and twenty of them were being.
But can I just establish a point of agreement because I've never heard you actually acknowledge that this was true.
That in this speech you're trying to depict these people as kind of like mindless zombies who just follow the orders of Donald Trump and do whatever he instructs them to do.
Do you agree that and can you acknowledge that in his speech there was one time and one time only where he addressed the question of whether or not violence should be used at that protest they were going to at the Capitol and when addressing that on one occasion he told them to go there and protest peacefully?
Is that something you acknowledge is what he told them?
So, I would acknowledge that.
However, on my YouTube channel, we try to engage in serious political analysis.
Oh, I know.
You're well known for that.
I know, yeah.
As are you, I guess.
While we're engaged in serious political analysis, when we're looking at what is actually going on or what's in the minds of people, I would never in my entire life imagine cutting one sentence out of an hour-long speech to try to determine what the actual motivation of that speech was.
What I would do is I would look at the totality of the speech, It's possible you've never watched it before because you only read Twitter headlines.
Maybe.
And I would also look at the actions that happened after of both the protesters and the guy who incited the speech to see, you know, what were the actual intentions of what was going on.
In that speech, Donald Trump multiple times made allusions to the fact that our democracy was under threat, that our election had been stolen, that Congress was failing the people to act in how they should, and that Vice President Pence was the last hope of saving our republic.
And that if you don't fight like hell, they're gonna steal your country from you.
So, I also know that Donald Trump was informed by the Secret Service that there were people trying to get into the protest, or trying to get into his lip speech, that were literally armed and had guns.
The Secret Service said, we can't let them in.
Donald Trump said, let them in, they're my friends, I love these people, that's fine.
And I also know that after the speech, when Donald Trump told everybody to march to the Capitol, when they were marching, they were marching, chanting rebellious, rebellious slogans.
Uh, you know, they were saying 1776!
You know, they were looking to have a rebellion, because as you said, they thought the election was stolen.
When they got there, and Vice President Pence didn't unilaterally toss the election, what did they do?
They said, hang Pence!
Hang Pence!
Hang Pence!
Pence himself called Trump to complain about this!
Trump didn't check in on him a single time that entire day, because he was so upset that Pence wouldn't unilaterally toss the election.
So when I look at the totality of the events, am I here to say that because he said march to the protest peacefully, that means that it was peaceful?
If that was the case, then as soon as Donald Trump saw violence, you know what he would have done?
Donald Trump would have made a phone call and he would have said, uh, Miller, why is the, why is the National Guard not there right now?
What's going on?
My daughter-in-law is talking Everybody's talking to me.
My daughter's talking to me.
My chief of staff's talking to me.
My lawyers are talking to me.
People from Congress are calling me.
Everybody's calling me saying violence is happening.
Why aren't you guys stopping it?
He didn't do that.
Instead, what he did was he had a two-minute conversation with Giuliani, and then Giuliani started ringing up all these congressmen saying, hey, don't you think you guys should delay the vote?
Give us 10 days, right?
What is that?
Capitalizing on violence to circumvent the constitutional transfer of power from one president to the next, also known as an insurrection.
It's so clean, and it's so easy, and none of the facts that I just gave, by the way, Glenn will not contest a single one of them, even though all of those facts are in the politically partisan J6 committee.
How crazy is that?
Tell me when you're done talking and I will immediately contest the kind of what you said.
Glenn, can you respond to this particularly the two points?
I'm very surprised that your incredibly substantive discussion on a YouTube channel led to a conclusion that was the most negative possible about a Republican candidate.
That would be completely unpredictable.
But I'm going to tell you why in everything that you just said, we can get back to the question and be able to answer the question of why it is that Jack Smith did not actually charge Donald Trump with doing what you claim he did.
Which, had he done, would have been a very serious crime and I think he should have been charged for.
The reason is, is because in what Donald Trump actually said, as opposed to all the secret meaning that you and your Democratic Party community believe he intended to convey through very banal political slogans like, go fight like hell, is the only thing he actually told them was that they should go and march there and be peaceful when they went and protested. is the only thing he actually told them was that And you know what?
The vast majority of people who marched to the Capitol did exactly what Donald Trump told them to do, which was to be peaceful.
There were a 10, let's say 10,000 or 15,000 people outside the Capitol.
And you said before they were yelling, which actually is constitutionally permissible and protected.
You're actually allowed to yell at politicians when you're angry about what you perceive to be a political injustice.
Of those, a small percentage actually entered the Capitol.
And of those, a very small number of people used non-fatal violence against police officers.
Something that we had watched occur for months.
through the summer and into the fall of 2020, over and over and over and over again, when thousands of Americans were injured as part of a nationwide protest movement that repeatedly ended up with the protesters engaging in violence against the police.
This, as I said before, I don't regard the Black Lives Matter movement as an insurrectionary movement.
I would never call it a coup.
But by every metric, it would be so much easier to make that case about the Black Lives Matter movement than it would be about January 6th in part, in large part, because the number of people actually involved in trying to use violence was very small.
Even the people who use violence were not engaged in even the kind of violence that you often expect, which is again, pulling out guns, shooting people.
There was none of that.
That's why nobody died on January 6th except for four pro-Trump protesters.
So yes, there was violence on January 6th.
Yes, they were there because they believed that the election was stolen.
Yes, they ended up delaying this ceremonial ministerial process by a grand total of two hours or two and a half hours.
But while it was a riot,
Perpetrated by a small number of people, it never got even close to threatening the levers of power of the United States, the most militarized country on the planet, and that is why it is an absolute joke to try and put it up there with the major historical events of the United States, let alone the kinds of coups or attempted coups that take place all around the world that always involve universes greater levels of violence and threats to the status quo than January 6th did.
Wait, so Destiny, just before you continue, I want to go back to what you said, because I think it's really important.
Wait, can I ask one quick question, and then you can ask me anything?
If they would have managed to kill, like, one lawmaker, would you call it an insurrection then?
They'd, like, kill, like, Nancy Pelosi?
Because the government could still continue, like, everything could still go on, it's fine.
I mean, I would need some context, like, was it one rogue guy, like, who found Nancy Pelosi and shot her?
Was it, like, a huge group of thousands of people dragging her out and hanging her in the public square while the crowd cheered?
That guy, I would need the context.
Oh my god.
Okay, sorry, what was your question?
Let's go back.
There have been politicians killed before, assassinated in the United States before, and we didn't call those insurrections.
Because they probably weren't a group of people trying to prevent the lawful execution of power in the United States.
Exactly, which is why I said it would need the context.
Oh, like a group of people like Trump's audience trying to circumvent the legal execution of the Constitution?
That's like that context?
Yeah.
Wait, so let's go back to Destiny.
You made two points before, and I want to stick on those, because actually, good points we need to go over.
Number one is Trump's full speech, the context of the speech, and why he actually said, and number two is the National Guard.
So let's go back to Trump's full speech, which he started on, Glenn, but let's actually continue on that point.
So, Destiny mentioned that if you look in the context, he was actually inciting people to go there, not just peacefully.
Would you agree that makes sense, or what's particularly your thoughts?
Do you think he was just telling people to go peacefully and that was it?
Why didn't he tell them to go home when they were unpeaceful?
Are you asking me?
Yeah, why didn't he tell them to go home when they were rioting?
I'm trying to answer, but since you're talking, I can't.
The way I interpret a speech is I look at the words that are spoken by the person delivering the speech, and when someone stands up in front of a crowd and says, I want you to be peaceful when you go on this protest that you're about to go on that the Constitution permits you to go on, I take that seriously as an instruction given to his followers not to go there and use violence.
And the attempt to suggest that, as I said before, phrases that politicians use in almost every political speech, like, let's fight like hell and let's get our country back, things that Joe Biden said over and over in the 2020 campaign and many times before, that somehow that was like a secret code
To go tell those people that what I really want you to do, even though I just told you to be peaceful, is in fact, go and use violence, is something that you have to be delusional in order to find.
And apparently, that is not what the crowd heard, since the vast, vast majority of the people who went to the Capitol, in fact, did not use violence.
Only a very small number did.
So then the easy question, wait, on the back of that, just an easy question then.
First of all, also, no one is saying he's speaking in secret code.
Everybody understood, apparently, loud and clear, to go to the White House to protest.
That's why thousands of people, or I'm sorry, the Capitol building protests, that's why thousands of people went in.
But the question would be, let's say that I grant all of that.
Let's say every single thing you just said is true, and Trump really did just want them to peacefully protest.
Why is it that when the rioting had started, and people went to him begging him, please, Trump, please tweet and tell these people to go home, why would he not do it?
Well, he did do it.
Your argument is that- After hours!
No, no, don't lie!
Glenn, why are you lying?
Why are you lying right now?
Can you just shut up and let me answer your question?
You're in.
Okay, go ahead.
You can lie.
Go ahead.
Just let him respond and then respond afterwards.
I think you've lied probably a hundred times, but instead of calling you a liar, what I try and do is go instead and demonstrate what the actual arguments are because I don't feel a need to constantly declare myself You haven't contested a single fact I've given because I've been correct on everything.
The reason that I believe that Donald Trump delayed telling those people to go home is because for a long time he saw it as a legitimate protest, including people going into the Capitol.
So if this entire case now rests on the fact that Donald Trump should have posted a tweet an hour earlier than he should have, And that that way the riot would have dispersed after two hours rather than three hours, I think that illustrates the triviality on which we're actually having this discussion.
These kind of reaches to try and say that the reason this was an insurrection and Trump tried to overthrow the government or seize power illegally is because he tweeted an hour after you think that he should have tweeted?
That is, I mean, we're talking about the smallest details because That's all you have.
You're mistaken.
You're mistaken.
When you say that it illustrates the triviality, that's not true.
What it illustrates is how childlike Trump is, that our only expectation would be to pray for him to tweet to send his followers home.
Which he did.
What his actual constitution, hours after the rioting had carried on.
Donald Trump is the head of the National Guard that ought to have been deployed to D.C.
And he failed to uphold in his duty to do that.
Instead, he sat and he watched and he prioritized his own political career by telling Giuliani to make phone calls to congressmen.
That's fine.
executing his duty as the commander in chief to deploy the National Guard to DC for hours.
So you are right in one sense that begging for a tweet is a bit trivial, but what it really trivializes is Donald Trump's competency and the expectations of him even as a president.
Because you're right, a tweet would have been trivial and it wouldn't have been enough.
He should have taken charge as a president and 20 or 30 minutes after violence happened, he should have called in the National Guard to stop it.
He sat there for an hour after Ashley Babbitt died and watched it rage on before he finally made the tweet telling people to go home.
How is that at all compatible with the President wanting to be peaceful?
I have a question for you.
So I don't mind arguments that Donald Trump should have been faster in deploying the National Guard or dispersing the riots and the riot would have only been 90 minutes or instead of three hours.
But let me ask you this question.
If, in fact, Donald Trump were trying to lead a coup and an insurrection in the United States, why did he go at all onto Twitter and tell those people to leave peacefully?
Why didn't he go and say, you know what, we're currently seizing control of a corrupt government and therefore I want even more of you to come to Washington and go join these patriots in engaging in violence?
Why did he call it off?
Why did he tell them for the third time or the second time that day Don't use violence, be peaceful, and go home.
That does not sound to me like the kind of statement that somebody intent on a coup would actually be issuing.
I've never heard of a perpetrator of a coup before telling the crowd beforehand to be peaceful and then telling them two and a half hours later again to go home and be peaceful.
It's because he didn't have the support for it.
It's so obvious.
Because Donald Trump doesn't want to actually be caught in the middle of military conflict.
He was looking for an easy win, and he didn't get it, and he saw that his supporters were failing.
Eventually, you know, he kind of encouraged them.
When people were begging, you know, please, you know, tell him to go home, and then he starts tweeting out how Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done instead of telling him to go home.
When it looked obvious that his little attempt had failed, he's not going to go out there with an AK-47 and start fighting with his supporters.
And he doesn't want to leave obvious, clear evidence on Twitter.
Guys, go coup the government!
So of course he speaks, you know, a little bit out of both sides of his mouth and he eventually tells people to go home because he failed.
That's so, it's so obvious, such an obvious reading of events.
But he ended up doing exactly the thing that you said a real leader would have done.
Your argument is that he did it like an hour late.
Why do you keep saying one hour late?
It was like three hours after the protest, the rioting had started.
And that's a long time when he's getting.
And it's also not just that he waited that time period.
It's that when congressional leadership and congressional people were calling him and his family, he was making fun of them.
What was it?
I think it was even McCarthy that made the phone call where he was like, hey, what's going on with your followers out here?
And Trump was like, looks like they're a little bit more mad about the rigged election than you are.
Like, holy shit.
Like, these are insane statements to be making when instead Donald Trump should be saying, hold on.
Let me get the National Guard over there as the guy that's literally in charge of it.
It's pretty crazy what's happening right now.
I have been passed as part of my oath to the Constitution.
It's just so far removed from like what any country would ever describe as a coup, what any historian would describe as a coup.
Well, hold on.
Wait, wait, wait.
You're wrong.
Hold on.
To be clear, I don't care about any other country.
I care about the United States.
This is my country.
And insofar as what a historian would call a coup or a rebellion, again, you are on an island there.
You don't think the Whiskey Rebellion was a rebellion.
Not enough people died.
You don't think that Fort Sumter would have been an insurrection without the Civil War after it.
It's only retrospectively determined.
And also, you think that Donald Trump wasn't an insurrection because he wasn't charged with insurrection, even though nobody from the Civil War was charged with insurrection.
Glenn, you are completely You're on your own legally here with nobody in your corner!
Again, this is what you do.
You're like, you're alone!
Nobody agrees with you!
Talk about the number of people who are violent again, Glenn.
Go ahead.
I'm gonna let my statements speak for themselves about what I said about Fort Sumter and your imaginary Fort Sumter that you wanted me to analyze and all the other things I said.
What you just said, I believe, is a complete distortion of what I actually said, but I'm not interested in bickering about that since there's a videotape that everybody can watch and see what I actually said.
Yes, the reason why we look at other countries, I don't know if you know this or not, but the State Department calls what happens in other countries all the time coups and insurrections.
They condemn coups and insurrections under the law.
We punish and impose sanctions when every government enters in a way that we call a coup or an insurrection.
So we have created a long history of how this term is actually used.
And this is what I was saying at the start of our discussion, which is that if all you want to do is have history begin with 2016 and Donald Trump and only look at the United States and partisan politics, then you will end up American.
There's a long record of how we use these terms.
And there is no case in which we would resort to trivialities like the leader waited an hour too long to tell people to go home Or there was a protest that turned into a riot that delayed the certification of an election by three whole hours.
And now we're going to impose sanctions on countries because we believe that there was some kind of an insurrectionary attempt that was serious in nature.
Yes, if you just look at everything in isolation and say, as long as I can prove that some people on January 6th did something bad, which is that framework at the beginning, you try to create this binary framework, then it means that I win, then yeah, that is, I agree.
You can definitely prove that there were people who did bad things on January 6th.
But when you look at it in the context, this context that you insist should be ignored, of historically how we've used these terms, both in our own history and in the history of other countries, It is a joke to try and apply those terms to this three hour ride.
So Glenn, let me ask you a question about that.
So about the three hours, about waiting three hours to do the votes, they did it three hours later.
So instead of a full insurrection, is that at least, could you say that's an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power?
No, I think it would be a preposterous statement to draw from that conclusion.
I think if Trump didn't walk out of the White House peacefully, as he did on January 20th, and had in the interim tried to incite or encourage more violence on the part of the people in the government and in the military who were loyal to him to engage in violence in a way that he really actually tried to stay in power, then I would be more open, more amenable to the idea that this was actually an attempted coup or an insurrection.
The fact that political protests delay important proceedings all the time, that's in fact one of the purposes of political protests, is to be disruptive.
To make the people in the government understand that there are people in the citizenry who are angry about a perceived injustice.
That is often the goal of political protests.
And if the goal of this protest was to delay by a couple of hours, a certification that is ministerial in nature and that happened on the exact day the Constitution requires it to happen, if that's all we're arguing about, then to me it settles the whole case.
What was the goal of the protesters?
A complete joke.
What were they there to protest?
To make themselves heard.
I believe they were there to make themselves heard.
To make themselves heard about what?
What were they there to make themselves heard about?
About the fact that they believe that Donald Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and that Joe Biden and the Democrats had engaged in fraud in the election in order to win that election.
So they didn't believe in the outcome of the election, they showed up to protest the outcome of the election, violence was used, and they delayed the certification of the vote.
Do you disagree with any of those facts?
No, I do not.
No, no.
I don't disagree with any of those facts.
Okay, we'll go over them again.
Okay, you agree that they were protesting the results of the election.
I just said I don't disagree with any of those facts.
He said he agreed with all four of those facts.
Then what part of this is not an insurrection?
I agree.
We agree that this was a riot.
The fact that the number of people who engage in violence and the way they engage in violence was very similar to how protests often turn into a riot.
It is universes away from any kind of actual serious threat.
I agree.
To the power of the United States.
We agree that this was a riot.
No one is denying this was a riot.
Right?
It was a riot.
Whenever riots bring in violence into the political system, and one of the protesters, an unarmed protester, ends up dead, and police officers end up injured, it's a lamentable act.
It's something we don't want to encourage.
It's a bad thing.
But this is so much to me like the inability to say that a foreign government or a foreign leader is doing bad things without them immediately calling them Adolf Hitler.
And not understanding that there's a difference between a bad event, or a bad person, or a bad act, and what the Nazis did.
Like, everything has to go to the furthest extreme.
No one is taking anything to a further extreme.
It was a bad, violent riot.
It was a riot.
But it was nowhere near undermining or subverting the system of law and order in the United States.
It did undermine it.
Nor was it intended to do so.
It did undermine it.
You said it!
You said they went there to protest the election results, it turned into a riot, and they delayed the certification of the vote.
By a couple of hours!
It doesn't matter!
They still did it!
That was the goal!
That's what they did!
They weren't that successful!
That's not an argument that it wasn't an insurrection!
If you think that that was the goal, then I think your argument is even weaker than I thought so the first time.
If you believe their goal was to delay this ministerial act by Congress to make it happen at 4.30 p.m.
instead of 1.30 p.m.
or whenever it was scheduled, Well no, the goal was to delay it completely.
to do, and that is what they succeeded in doing, then the idea that that was an insurrectionary intent to delay a ministerial act, a ceremonious act, by a couple of hours so that they could have their grievances heard, then I think it's even a weaker case than I thought so having listened to you for then I think it's even a weaker case than I thought so having listened to Okay, and that's fine.
But historically, whether we're talking the Whiskey Rebellion, which used to be called the Whiskey Insurrection, whether we're talking about Shea's Rebellion, whether we're talking about Nat Turner's Rebellion, whether we're talking about any of the insurrections that were protesting and insurrecting against the Fugitive Slave Act, whether you're talking about literally any of these things that were historically all whether you're talking about literally any of these things that were historically all understood to be insurrections that Congress was talking about in the 50s and 60s where they passed These were all understood to be insurrections.
Were those coups?
We're not talking about a coup right now, we're talking about an insurrection, aren't we?
Who's talking about a coup?
No, coup is a word that we've been using from the very first second that we started talking.
I'm sorry, I believe that in the beginning of this, Eli, I'm sorry, pull the tape.
Were we talking about defining an insurrection or a coup?
I asked you for both.
We haven't even gotten to coup yet.
We can get to coup.
If you want to get to coup, the electoral slate, that's a way easier argument for me, okay?
But if you're having trouble with this argument, like... That's certainly something I've been talking about quite a bit, and I've used the word coup many times, but... Of course, because you're trying to obfuscate.
It's totally fine, so let me ask you, do you think what happened on January 6th rose to the level of an attempted coup?
Firstly, I would say that, just to reiterate in the past, your understanding of insurrection is unique and ahistorical.
Stop saying that because it's so untrue and it's so irrelevant.
Even if I were the only one who thinks it, it's not proof that I'm wrong.
The idea that I'm the only one who thinks that everyone in the world agrees with you is ridiculous.
I'm not saying it's proof that you're wrong.
Not everyone is on your side, Destiny, even though I know you sit on a YouTube channel with Democrats and people who tell you that you are.
There's a much bigger world to your YouTube channel.
I'm going to go back to the actual point.
So the coup part, if I were to look at coup or call it a self coup, I guess, since Trump was still in power, the coup part is going to be Donald Trump on two or three different One is going to be trying to bully at least seven different state legislatures or electoral bodies to change the results of their electoral votes.
knowingly that he was working with false evidence because every single person he entrusted to gather data about voter fraud had told him prior to the statements he made about these things that the voter fraud wasn't real.
That would be the first part.
The second part-- Can you just answer first?
Is what happened on January 6th an attempted coup?
I realize there's other things that you can go-- This is the-- yeah, I'm getting it.
The second part is the electoral slates scheme, where Donald Trump and his people basically contacted seven different states and got all these people involved in making and testifying to falsely being electors of these states to be sent to Congress, and then the
I guess the climax of that would have been, in Congress, Donald Trump asking Pence, when he gets these fake slates of electors, to ignore the real electors, say that these particular electors, it's too hard to figure out what's going on, and then throw it to the House, to have the House, essentially, because the Republicans were controlling the parts of the House they needed, basically, in order to elect Donald Trump as the president, for them to make a determination on the election.
That part was an attempted self-coup, yes.
So you do think, your argument is also that it's an attempted coup, not just an insurrection.
I don't know why you got so... Because the self-coup part, I'm explaining, because the coup part is fundamentally separate from the insurrection part.
There were two different things going on that day.
I think it's a good point to kind of like summarize.
We've been going almost two hours, which is like what we said was our kind of target goal, but so let me just tell you about all of that, my view of what all those events are, which is that As has happened before in elections, in American elections, when people perceived or believed that there was fraud in the election and the illegitimate winner was certified and the legitimate winner was declared the loser, as has happened previously, Trump exercised all of his legal recourses.
He was the leader of the executive branch and he went to the two other branches of government first to the courts and then when that failed to the Congress using a theory that some lawyers had told him and I don't mean like personal injury lawyers that he picked for that reason I know I mean, lawyers who had previously been regarded as some of the most prominent and prestigious lawyers, like Rudy Giuliani, not by me, but by many people, celebrated for many years.
And John Eastman, people like that, had told him that this was a role the Vice President had had.
There was an incident in 1960, albeit different, that could have suggested that that was part of the Vice President's duty.
He went to Congress in order to appeal to the legislative power, and when that failed, When he exercised all of his legal options in the judiciary and failed, and then exercised his recourse in the Congress and failed, he walked out of the White House on January 20th before noon, peacefully, and turned over, peacefully, the levers of power to the certified winner of the 2020 election, which was Joe Biden.
Real quick, just on that explanation, what happened in 1960 that was comparable to this event?
There was a dispute about which candidate had won Hawaii, whether it was Richard Nixon or John Kennedy.
First, Richard Nixon was declared the winner, then John Kennedy on a recount was declared the winner as the certified vote.
They sent both fleets of electors to the Congress, and Richard Nixon presiding over the Senate, like Mike Pence, serving that function.
Exactly.
Yeah, that's great.
So I mean, I'm actually, I mean, I was hoping that you didn't know that.
The fact that you know that is even more disingenuous then.
in that case the state had certified exactly last resort but yeah that's great so i mean i'm actually i mean i was hoping that you didn't know that the fact that you know that is even more disingenuous then because the issue with donald trump's slaves of electors i'm gonna if you i'm gonna explain to you why i cited that as the only example i want to be clear i don't agree with the legal theory that like but you just cited it and you didn't explain it any further until i asked you because because you interrupted had you not interrupted no you were done you moved way past it
i let you move past it no no no The relevance is that the reason why there were well qualified actual members of the bar who had long been advising Donald Trump on a whole bunch of legal matters had come up with this theory was because that was the one time in history after 1876 when the Electoral Act and the procedures were implemented when there was an actual dispute about which slate of electors should be chosen.
And Richard Nixon, serving as the presiding officer of the Senate, Was widely complimented because he actually acknowledged that the winner of Hawaii was not himself, but was John Kennedy, implying that he had some discretion about which to choose.
The reason I immediately said that it wasn't comparable and it's the reason I never thought Mike Pence had the authority to do what Donald Trump believed he had the authority to do was precisely because Richard Nixon was duty-bound to choose the actual certified winner of Hawaii, which is what he did.
Nonetheless, he was complimented because he did have the ability To choose otherwise.
If Mike Pence had done what Donald Trump had requested that he would do and that some lawyers told him Mike Pence had the duty to do, I have no doubt about what would have happened, which is that that would have then gone to the Supreme Court and asked the Supreme Court whether or not Mike Pence, in fact, had the authority to do what he did.
The Supreme Court would have ruled.
There was no inclination that the Supreme Court had to interfere and to make Donald Trump the president.
See, they had, for the president, they had several opportunities to go and refrain.
He would have lost in the Supreme Court and he would have left office just as he did once he exhausted all of his appeals in the other two bodies, branches of government, and left peacefully on January 20th.
The fact that Trump left peacefully on January 20th is, to me, the most dispositive fact.
And it was a fact that will never change, it will always be true in history, and I think will make the attempts to depict what happened as part of the 2020 election as some sort of serious insurrection or serious attempted coup nothing short of laughable.
That's fine.
That's fine.
I'm sorry, a failed coup is still a coup.
Whether you leave afterwards because it failed is... that's... it doesn't change the fact that the coup attempt was... That's great, but you're literally willing to retroactively analyze...
Retroactively analyze whether Fort Sumter was an insurrection based on the events that came after.
You would change that.
Let's not go over the old ground that we've already gone over.
The facts are hard.
But hold on, just in response to what he said.
So in response to what he said, I know you're upset.
I know facts are hard.
I know.
I'm sorry.
So the reason why I'm upset that you brought up 1960 and why I'm even more upset now that you know the details of it is because the issue was never that multiple slates of electors were sent because state legislatures almost certainly have the ability to do that.
The issue was that Hawaii sent two sets of electors because it was legitimately an incredibly close, I think it was off by like 140 votes.
I just got done explaining I understand that you did, but the issue with what Trump did was they had electors in these seven states falsely attest that they were authorized and duly elected by the state assemblies in order to send their electoral votes to Congress.
That was a lie.
It was perjury.
They were encouraged to do it by people under Trump, and they did it on a bullshit legal theory from Eastman that everybody knew was bullshit, and they literally, they actually, yeah, that's, you can always find one crazy- And not Rudy Giuliani and not Sidney Powell!
That's great, and I'm sure I can find a doctor that'll tell me that acupuncture will cure my diabetes, okay?
Just because you have one person... I don't agree with those lawyers.
The point is Trump had lawyers telling him it was invalid, and he lost, and he accepted the loss.
The issue is that these electors transmitted their votes to Congress falsely.
They lied, and they were encouraged by Trump's campaign to lie.
They were not authorized by the state assemblies like they were in Hawaii in 1960 to do so, which is why the comparison is insane.
And by the time those electoral votes got to Congress, the plan from Trump, the plan from Eastman at that point, wasn't to say that Pence could declare a winner after the legitimate negotiations had happened in Congress over whether or not these electoral slates were real.
The goal was to say, Pence was going to just say, hey, actually, I don't know where these came from.
We're just going to go ahead and throw it to the assemblies in the House and let them decide, which Republicans had 26 and Democrats had 24 state assemblies, which would have meant that Donald Trump arguably could have won the election.
This is undoubtedly a self-coup.
Nobody thought this legal theory was valid.
Even Eastman called it highly into question multiple times during some of the memos that he sent himself.
And the only three lawyers that Trump took advice from, in opposition to his actual qualified lawyers, were Eastman, Giuliani, and Powell, who are so much clowns.
Even people like Tucker Carlson were texting back and forth with Fox News execs saying how annoying it was that Sidney Powell was making claims that they had to carry on the network.
Rudy Giuliani spent most of his adult life as one of the most revered lawyers and political figures in the United States to the point where people thought when he ran for president in 2008 that he was deemed the frontrunner.
I never thought so.
I always have despised Giuliani.
But the way the criminal law works is very often if a defendant is charged with some sort of criminal intent and they can prove that they had actual lawyers who were advising them that what they were doing was legal, that goes directly to their intent of whether or not they understood.
No, you're dead wrong.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
You're dead wrong!
We have practiced law for so many years!
If you can prove that you have lawyer letters telling you that what you've done is actually legal and is highly relevant in a court of law as to whether or not you had criminal intent because people are expected to rely on the advice of their counsel to understand what the law is.
I think Trump's theory, for the reason that I explained well before you took 10 minutes to do so, was faceless.
But he thought it was valid because he had lawyers who were telling him that it was.
You're right.
Okay.
That's okay.
Maybe you're right there.
You're the lawyer and I'm not.
Can you tell me what is it called if I do a thing with a lawyer where we both make a plan to break the law?
What is that called, Glenn?
Oh, if you have lawyers who are giving not only deliberately false advice, but false advice that the client knows is false, just to create a fraudulent scheme that you had legal counsel, that then will of course be relevant to the question of whether or not that person had Correct.
But they're also indicted in some cases as co-conspirators.
lawyers were not, again, these were not personal injury lawyers that he just pulled off the street and paid a bunch of money to to write a letter that he told them to write.
These were lawyers who had operated at the highest levels of the United States government, who had been regarded as highly prestigious lawyers who graduated some of the best law schools in the country.
But they're also indicted in some cases as co-conspirators.
So if they're indicted as co-conspirators, you can't use the fact that they're giving you legal advice because you seek them out for that particularly legal advice, trying to break the law.
You can't use the excuse that their lawyer is giving you advice.
It is literally one of the key exceptions to attorney-client privilege, Glenn.
They hadn't been accused of it when they were breaking the law.
That's normally how breaking the law works.
Yes, correct.
Usually when you're in the process of breaking the law, you're not being accused currently of doing it.
At the time, if you look at it from Trump's perspective, which is what the law is required to do, to determine not whether he was wrong in the theory that he embraced, but whether or not he knew that it was illegal and pursued it anyway.
The fact that he had not only various members of the bar, but three lawyers who had long been regarded as highly prestigious, who graduated some of the best law schools in the country, who, in the case of Rudy Giuliani, was one of the most revered public figures for decades in the United States.
I believe he was time man of the year once.
He was as celebrated as you will ever find after 9-11.
He had actual lawyers who were giving him this advice, writing legal memos about why Mike Pence had that theory.
When Mike Pence concluded otherwise, Trump accepted his defeat and left the White House peacefully.
He had resorted to all the legal recourses that he believed he had, that lawyers told him that he had, and when those were exhausted and he lost, he didn't order the military to keep him in power, he walked out of the White House.
Peacefully.
What am I?
What did you say?
So you're a fan of using one sentence to incriminate somebody or exonerate them.
When Pence and Trump were talking— What am I?
What am I?
When Trump said— What did you say?
I'm a fan of what?
You're a fan of using one sentence to either exonerate or convict somebody, I guess, because when Trump said, "March peacefully," you're a fan of what?
You think that's okay?
So the peaceful thing completely exonerates Trump from the hour minute rile up that he did before the insurrection.
That's fine.
When Trump was talking to Pence and Trump said, you're too honest, Mike, after asking for like the 50th time to decide the election on his own, what did Trump mean when he said that?
I have no idea if that's being conveyed accurately.
I have no idea what Trump's intention was.
But we have all kinds of evidence that Trump vehemently believed that the advice he was given by lawyers was advice that he found persuasive.
It wasn't just whispered to him.
It was conveyed to him in the form of legal memos of the kind that lawyers write all the time to lay out the arguments.
And there were not just three lawyers in the United States.
Eastman literally thought that their little scheme... Eastman literally thought their scheme would get overturned in the Supreme Court.
He knew it was bogus legal theory.
He literally had said this and they were just trying to buy time for their coup.
That's the whole point.
Yes, exactly.
Because Trump believed that there was actual fraud in the election.
He wanted more time to be able to find the proof of that fraud.
Yes, I agree.
You're justifying the insurrection.
He wanted to coup the government because he thought they stole it from him.
No, that's proof that it's not an insurrection.
He knew it was going to end up in the Supreme Court.
Had Mike Pence... You keep trying to invent false histories.
I don't blame you.
You're giving like a mens rea for insurrection.
He thought the election was stolen, therefore he could try to flip the election?
is vital in every single criminal prosecution.
If you don't have mens rea, you don't have a crime.
That's literally not true because strict liability crimes can be convicted with no mens rea.
Unless you have, which are the tiny minority of prosecutions.
Sure, that's fine.
But mens rea is not, just because you didn't know you're doing an insurrection doesn't save you from the fact of the matter of it being an insurrection and you being held to account for every single thing related to it.
These are empty arguments.
This is just you saying it was an insurrection.
Well, we'll see when it goes to court, I guess.
Trump didn't know that it was an insurrection.
Wait, so I think, Glenn, I think we've gone around quite a bit.
probably gone everything.
What time do you want to finish?
Because it's been around too long.
I mean, honestly, unless there's, like, we haven't discussed the issue of, like, what the FBI role is, although we did talk about the fact that the FBI had informants on the ground.
I don't really need to go into Ray Epps, a thing I've never really been a fan of.
I do think there's a question about why the FBI didn't know more, or if they did know more, but I feel like we debated that a lot in the first debate, which was three plus hours.
I feel like we're kind of at the end of the discussion.
It's been just a little over two hours, so I'm fine in ending it here, unless Destiny feels like No, I think this is... What do you think about the whole elector scheme?
No, I think this is what do you what do you think about the whole elector scheme?
I think Trump believed that there was an actual good faith reason to believe that there was fraud committed in the election And he was told that if you submit various electors that would buy them the time to find the proof that they hadn't yet found So you think that as long as Trump thought there was fraud He was authorized to do basically whatever he wanted as long as he could find a lawyer that agreed with him.
No, actually I believe that that entitled him to exhaust every legal recourse in the other two branches of government, which is what he actually did.
And once those recourses were exhausted and he lost them all, as he did, his obligation was to do what he did, which was to walk peacefully out of the White House on January 20th as part of the peaceful transition of power to Joe Biden.
Do you think the fake electors were legal?
Having people testify to being electors when they're not, you think that's okay?
Because he thought that maybe there was election fraud?
You could have those people lie about being the duly elected electors or appointed electors?
I contest that characterization, but I also think that it would have been part of what would have been contested as part of the judiciary.
All of this would have ended up in the courts.
You want to create this false history about how if Mike Pence had done something that he didn't actually do what Trump would have done.
My belief is that Trump would have left the White House on January 20th no matter how many other proceedings he ended up resorting to.
There was the Supreme Court there even though people were claiming that Amy Coney Barrett had only gotten this position because of a promise that she made to vote for Donald Trump in the election.
None of that ever happened.
In the real history, in the actual history, once Trump lost everything that he tried, in the legal process, he left office peacefully.
And that is the core fact.
If he would have delayed- If he defeats everything you say, it will never change.
Gotcha.
So if he would have managed to delay the certification of the vote by, let's say a month, because a Supreme Court case, they wanted to wait for whatever reason.
And then they do the electoral investigation, they find out there's no fraud, and then he leaves peacefully after staying in office longer than he should have for a few weeks.
Would that have been okay?
I mean, again, you're trying to create false histories.
That's literally what he was trying to do!
If Trump convinced the Congress that there was sufficient evidence of fraud, that a month was required to investigate the evidence of fraud that Congress believed had there, they wanted to delay it by a month, and then Congress went back and certified the actual results of the election and then Trump left peacefully on January 20th, my view would be the same.
As long as Trump confined himself to appealing to the other two branches of government and did not try and use his command of the military or his command of the other armed parts of the government to keep himself in power, words like coup and insurrection are things that only MSNBC fans get excited about and believe.
And I think it's the reason why Trump is leading in all the polls because people obviously don't think that what Trump did rose to a level of criminality even to keep him out of the White House, much less to put himself in jail.
And then when Trump told his Justice Department, when he told Clark to go and talk to, I think it was the acting AG Rosen and the acting deputy AG Donahue, that you guys need to write a letter to the state saying we have all this evidence of election fraud, and that if they refused, Clark told Rosen that he'd basically be fired and he'd be made acting Attorney General.
And when that same scheme was brought up in the Oval Office, and I think half of the White House staff threatened to quit if Trump went through with it, do you think that any of that was improper?
Asking his Department of Justice to lie to the states about election fraud?
If you believe, as I do, that Trump's contention that the 2020 election was pervaded with all sorts of fraud and that he was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, asking his Justice Department to find that evidence and telling them he would fire them if they refused looks a lot different in its intent than if you begin with the assumption that you are beginning in that Trump knew that he lost and that everything he was trying to do was an attempt illegally to stay in power.
And as I've told you many times, that narrative that Trump was willing to do anything, even outside the law, as long as he could stay in power, is completely contradicted by not only the things that he did do, but by more importantly, the things that he didn't do.
And that you can try and create every alternative history that you want.
It's very difficult to analyze hypotheticals like that, where we don't have any context or any details for what happened.
I can look at the events that happened in real life.
And those culminated with Donald Trump not Not calling in the military, not trying to rile up the armed factions of the government as he could have done.
Certainly a lot of them would have been loyal to him.
He could have caused a lot of violence, a lot of internal conflict, maybe even a civil war in order to stay in power.
He did none of that and he transferred power peacefully to Joe Biden in the way that has been done since the beginning of the republic.
Do you think Donald Trump, does he bear any responsibility at all for what happened on January 6th?
I'm not asking about Maddow or Bernie Sanders.
I know we like to pivot.
I mean, he clearly riled up that crowd.
He got people riled up.
I mean, Rachel Maddow and Bernie Sanders once riled up one of their fans so much— I'm not asking about Maddow or Bernie Sanders.
I know we like to pivot.
I'm just saying, do you think Trump at all— —does he have any culpability?
No, no, I'm— The reason I'm going to bring up analogies, even though you interrupt me and tell me that I shouldn't, is because— Which is because you don't want to actually say something bad about Trump.
Because you need to be partisan.
It tests whether or not you actually have any consistency.
I have all the consistency in the world.
Glenn, you mentioned that.
If he wants to prolong this by asking me questions, I'm going to insist on the right to answer the questions in the way that I actually want.
And if that means bringing up analogies or metaphors... I can help with the analogies.
If anybody else did the same thing that Trump did on J6, I'd say it's an insurrection.
We're kind of like at the point where it's an interrogation.
I'm kind of flattered that Destiny seems not to want to end, so he's just kind of now asking me a bunch of questions, which I'm happy to engage in for a little bit longer, provided that I'm able to answer the questions without constantly being interrupted.
A lot of people have inspired other people to commit crimes.
Rachel Maddow and Bernie Sanders, as I said, once got a Democrat, a liberal fan of theirs, so riled up in the belief that the Republicans were fascist and in bed with the Kremlin that one of them actually went, and their names, and shot up Republican congressman to try and kill as many of them as he could, and almost killed Steve Scalise.
So if you were to ask me, did Rachel Maddow and Bernie Sanders do anything to cause that person to go and do that, I would say yes, but not in a way that they bore any blame.
They got people riled up, and sometimes if you get people riled up, some of them are going to go and commit crimes.
The Supreme Court has said you can never be held liable for what other people do as a result of being inspired by your speech.
So yeah, if you go around and constantly claim that the election results were the byproduct of fraud, I think it's predictable that some people might engage in violence.
It's the kind of thing that you might even think, if it really happened, violence might even be justified.
But I don't think that Donald Trump did anything illegal or anything that could be prosecuted, which is why, again, Jack Smith did not charge him with inciting an insurrection, because there's nothing in what Trump said that was anything other than constitutionally protected.
I think what Glenn said is really what lies at your whole basis of the argument, was that Trump did not tell them exactly to go into the Capitol.
Like what Glenn said, is he heated up the crowds.
He did heat up the crowd and he did talk about false election, which did incite them, although he didn't actually tell them to do that.
He told them to go peacefully.
That's what he told them.
He also said to fight like how they're stealing your country.
Glenn, did he not just say he heated up the crowd?
Yeah, heat up the crowd, because a lot of crowds get, you're allowed to heat up crowds.
I've heated up crowds before by saying, oh look, the NSA is spying on you in a way that's unconstitutional.
Now maybe some of those people might have been motivated to go to the NSA and try and plant the bomb, because I heated them up.
But it wouldn't mean that I was responsible.
The only thing that Trump said about violence and whether it should be used on January 6th was, don't do it.
Go to the Capitol and be peaceful.
Obviously they were agitated and riled up as a result of a political speech.
That's what you want to do in a political speech.
You want to agitate people and get them riled up about an injustice that you're there to speak about.
That's what every good political speech does.
Do you—one final question.
I'm so curious on this.
For Trump legitimately thinking that there was voter fraud, legitimately thinking that the election was stolen, so despite the fact that all of his campaign people—I think Bill Stepien is field director—despite the fact that Chris Miller from Intelligence Agency, despite the fact that William Barr, his Attorney General, despite the fact that all of these people that he trusted in his government, I think Pence and his team looked into it, everybody that he trusted to look into election fraud, they all said that it wasn't there, and he still said it was there.
What would it take for you to be convinced that Donald Trump was knowingly repeating false claims about the election, and he was only repeating them so that he could stay in power.
What would you need to actually prove a state of mind there?
First of all, you were the one who said earlier that the reason why Trump didn't order the military, the intelligence community to act to protect him is because they were essentially trying to subvert him.
You even said that he was basically alone, that no one was on his side in the government, that even the people surrounding him in the military intelligence community didn't actually trust him.
So I'm not surprised that he didn't find those arguments or their conclusions persuasive because he understood that a lot of people in government were there to subvert him.
But as Darren Beatty said to you, who worked in the Trump White House and knows a lot of people who knows Trump well and who himself knows Trump well, I don't think there's a single person who knows Trump well who doubts that Trump actually believed that there was fraud in the election.
Now maybe that's because he's so psychologically invested in his ego that he actually can't believe that he would have actually lost an election.
Maybe it's because he had really become convinced that the entire American establishment was so corruptly aligned against him and willing to do anything and everything to remove him from power.
Maybe it's because Democrats have cheated before in elections, like I said, in 1960.
There's probably other times as well.
Because they cheated in 1960?
The Hawaii thing?
There's, I mean, I wasn't around then, but there's a lot of historians who believe that the Daily Machine in Chicago got John Kennedy the election in Illinois.
I mean, I'm not saying I believe that, but that is something that a lot of people... Let's say that what you're saying is true, that he didn't trust any of these people.
Wasn't the reason why he didn't trust them because he asked them to find election fraud and they said no?
Doesn't that show that... Then why did he trust them to investigate election fraud?
Then why did he trust them to investigate election fraud?
A lot of people who were telling him that they had proof that there was fraud in the election.
There were a lot of people who were making that argument both publicly and privately to him.
But without any evidence.
And anything about Donald Trump, his inability to believe that he actually lost, that the American people had actually rejected him, and that the Democrats and the U.S.
security state and the deep state, something he had spent years complaining about, and that you yourself even said were in fact aligned against him, the fact that Donald Trump would actually, under those circumstances, come to conclude that he didn't really lose, but in fact was the victim of fraud, is something that is very easy for me to believe was true.
And I think what Darren Batey said is right on that almost every person who knows Trump that I've ever talked to, even ones who believe that the election fraud claims are bullshit, were convinced that he was up then to get his belief that that election was stolen.
So what evidence would it take to show you otherwise?
To convince you otherwise?
I mean, ultimately, there's no proof one way or the other about what's going on in somebody's brain.
All we can use is circumstantial evidence.
Correct.
So I'm asking what circumstantial evidence?
Yes.
Yeah, I think that the fact that there were people telling him in his ear that he did not actually lose the election, the way in which he psychologically constituted, the way that he has talked so many times about both the Democratic Party and the U.S.
establishment, the fact that he maintains to this very day that the election was stolen, even though that a majority of Americans don't actually agree with him on this, the lengths to which he went, the way in which he argues it, the fact that a lot of people
believe in the Republican Party, in fact I think a majority, that there was actually election fraud, all to me point to the fact that when you put that together with Trump's psychological incentives to believe that he didn't really lose, it's far more likely than not that he truly was convinced that there was sufficient fraud in the election that made him the legitimate winner.
So there's no piece of evidence, because everything you're saying is also consistent with him just wanting to stay in power.
There's no such thing as dispositive proof when it comes to understanding what's in somebody's brain.
Okay, I don't know why you keep saying that.
How do we get convictions where mens rea is an essential part of the crime?
Like, for first-degree murder, we have to know that you intended to murder somebody.
It was just manslaughter, right?
Glenn, we read people's states of mind all the time for criminal court.
I'm realizing now that you don't understand the difference between evidence and proof.
Proof is something that is dispositive.
So, if someone steals something and they're caught on a videotape stealing it, then you have dispositive proof that they've done so.
Usually in criminal cases, there's not proof, there's evidence.
And the evidence is often conflicting, and a jury has to decide how to resolve that conflicting evidence.
And that's why in a civil trial, they're told they have to believe just 51% or more In order to reach a verdict, whereas in a criminal trial, they have to believe beyond all reasonable doubt.
But the way that works is you present evidence of intent.
There's very rarely proof of intent, which is the thing that you're looking for.
Sure, I'm sorry.
You don't have it either.
You're right, you cannot prove 100%.
That's true.
Exactly.
What I'm asking is, what is the types of evidence that would move you over into thinking, oh, he was probably just trying to hold on to power?
Oh, and actually, I think I did say evidence, by the way.
But what is the evidence that would convince you that, oh, you know, there's not one piece of dispositive thing, not a written confession or a travel to the past.
If Trump had said to people who convincingly relate it, oh, you know what, I actually think I really lost this election.
So you need a confession.
No, you're asking me for examples of things that I would find convincing, and I'm giving those to you.
Besides a confession, obviously.
Well, that's one good way.
Another good way is if he had nobody around him who was believing or arguing that there was evidence of fraud, that he was just kind of, as you were trying to claim I was, on an island all by myself.
If he had actually nobody that he was around him or that he trusted, telling him that there was proof of fraud or strong evidence of fraud, even though you had Rudy Giuliani and other people telling him that they strongly believed there was, I think that would add to the belief, to the credible case, that Trump was saying there was fraud, even though he really didn't believe it.
None of those things actually happen, though.
None of those things is true.
And so you're asking me to say what my belief is, based on the body of evidence that I have, all of which I've described for you and laid out in great detail over the last five minutes, that leads me to believe very strongly while recognizing there's no proof that So to be clear... Yeah, that's fine, I'm good.
I'll just respond to that final point.
I don't have any more questions.
To be clear, you haven't laid out any strong evidence showing that Donald Trump sincerely believes other than this idea...
Other than this idea that Trump has this psychotic attention.
I don't know.
The American vote is going to decide.
The Supreme Court is going to decide.
All sorts of people are going to be deciding.
A whole bunch of things.
But this idea- No, we should participate in a debate, but this need that you have to constantly say, "I'm on an island.
Nobody agrees with me.
You're right.
I have no evidence." Just let people watch the debate- They can do it, but I think it's important to call out- People will understand that.
You have not laid out any factually compelling arguments.
Nothing that you say is factual.
I have.
I can point to exact things.
For instance, that Rappensperger call that you brought up earlier.
Oh, we're still looking for 11,000 votes.
I know you don't want to debate on the facts.
You want to talk about the fact that they're partisan and the courts were Democrats.
And Pelosi was the first one to put together a partisan body.
I'm done.
This is not interesting or helpful.
I'm above this.
Go ahead.
Have fun.
I think that's the best time to finish off.
Thanks, Booth, for responding.
Actually, it was around half an hour ago.
I think it was actually around 34 minutes ago.
I wrote down the time because you actually both agreed with each other, so I was very proud of that moment 34 minutes ago.
But aside from that, I think overall it was a good debate.
There were some heated moments, and thank you, Booth, for joining.
