Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the state of Texas has undertaken various measures to stop the flow of migrants illegally entering that state.
One such measure was the 2021 construction of miles of barbed wire that was intended to, and by all accounts succeeded in, significantly reducing the number of immigrants able to enter the state illegally.
But the Biden Department of Homeland Security ordered Texas to cease this construction and to remove that fence.
And when Texas refused, DHS agents and Border Patrol officials began cutting down Texas's fence.
The state sued DHS and various Biden agencies in federal court.
And although a district court judge, the lowest level of the federal court system, found in favor of Texas on every single factual question, including the fact that without the fence, huge numbers of immigrants were entering Texas illegally and in an unsustainable way, and that the barbed wire was very effective in reducing the number who were entering.
The court nonetheless dismissed Texas's lawsuit on the technical finding that the U.S.
government enjoys sovereign immunity and cannot be sued.
Texas, however, won the case on appeal, won the full Fifth Circuit of Appeals, ruled that the U.S.
government could be sued in this case.
And then after finding that in favor of Texas on that technical ruling, it affirmed the lower court's factual findings in favor of Texas.
Again, including its finding that the federal government had been negligent in protecting Texas from waves of migrants it could not afford to accommodate.
In that the barbed wire fence that Texas constructed and that the U.S.
government was trying to destroy was in fact highly effective toward that aim.
Last week, however, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that effectively overturned that favorable decision for Texas in the appellate court and instead decided in favor of the Biden administration.
The Supreme Court vacated the lower court's injunction that prevented Homeland Security from tearing down Texas's wired fence.
In other words, it gave the go-ahead to the U.S.
government to take down that fence and destroy it.
Two conservative judges on the court, John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett, joined the three liberal justices to form a 5-4 majority that ruled that Texas has no right to construct that impediment.
That order was not accompanied by any significant rationale.
It's possible they may issue an actual explanation or a decision in the future, but that left many people confused about what happened here and why.
So we will walk you through this legal controversy and explain both the political and the legal implications that arise from it.
Then in April of last year, a 50-year-old black left-wing political party called the African People's Socialist Party was criminally indicted by the Biden Justice Department, along with three of its members, including its 81-year-old American citizen and head of the party, Amali Yeshitala.
Both the party and its members have been opponents of U.S.
foreign policy and U.S.
wars for decades.
And consistent with that ideology have been outspoken opponents of the U.S.
war, the U.S.
involvement in the war in Ukraine.
Yet the Biden Justice Department pointed to their anti-war opposition regarding Ukraine and Russia when criminally indicting the party on the grounds that they are, quote, Russian agents.
And after making that allegation about this party that they're Russian agents by virtue of their trips to Russia and their opposition to helping Ukraine, they then accused the party of failing to fire the forms required when one is acting on behalf of or at the behest of a foreign government.
Now the party vehemently denies that it has ever taken any kind of instruction from anybody.
It insists that it acts fully in its own autonomy, that it is following its ideology, that it has been advocating consistently since the early 1970s.
And yet, despite the grave free speech implications of this prosecution, and this is one of the worst and most blatant abuses I have ever seen, that tries to use the criminal justice system to criminalize political dissent.
Virtually no corporate media outlets have covered, let alone denounced, this prosecution.
One of the few people who did was Tucker Carlson, while still at Fox News, who, despite obvious ideological differences with this black socialist party, angrily condemned the prosecution as a direct attack on Americans' rights of free speech.
Just two days ago, a magistrate judge rejected the party's motion to dismiss the indictment on First Amendment grounds.
And that means, amazingly, That these charges are actually now likely going to trial, where O'Malley and his fellow defendants face up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
Now, that wouldn't likely be the actual prison term that they would get, but if they go to trial and contest the charges and are found guilty, and most defendants who do so end up being found guilty in the federal system, it is likely that they would actually spend real time in a federal penitentiary.
We'll speak tonight to the chairman of the party, as well as to his very noble lawyer, Leonard Goodman.
And I say noble because Goodman is representing this group and these individual members pro bono in order to defend all of our free speech rights.
And we'll hear the latest on the case and try and understand why it is so dangerous.
Now, this is all part and parcel of the Democratic Party's broader, deranged insistence on casting all opponents of its foreign policy as Kremlin agents.
Just this week, Nancy Pelosi accused pro-Palestinian protesters outside her house as being linked to the Kremlin and called on the FBI to investigate those protesters.
But in this case, Democrats did not limit this fixation solely to reputational destruction as they usually do, but are now trying to imprison people for expressing views that are fully consistent with their lifetime of political activism and ideological expression.
And yet angers the government because they oppose US foreign policy.
This case really needs to be seen to be believed and so we're going to show it to you.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
The issue of illegal immigration and problems at the American border has been an issue that has been widely discussed and debated in the United States for quite some time now.
During the Trump administration, it was typically cast as an issue of great moral urgency.
Illustrated by things like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dressing up in a white outfit, a white costume and driving down or flying down to the border and staring at a building through a fence while she was photographed in various forms and postures showing great distress and pain and internal suffering as she surveyed the plight and suffering of immigrants at the hands of the cruel fascist Trump administration.
Now, very little has actually changed at the border since Joe Biden was inaugurated, except people like Alexander Ocasio-Cortez no longer make those kind of melodramatic trips to the border.
You never hear any longer about comparisons between how people are treated at the border and what the Nazis did to Jews throughout Europe.
Those things are all gone.
You barely hear any more about The treatment or mistreatment of migrants at the border now that Joe Biden is president.
But what you do hear a lot of increasingly from Democratic Party mayors and governors who just a few years ago were denouncing anybody concerned with immigration or calling for greater restrictions as a white nationalist or a racist.
And they would say things like the Statute of Liberty is crying, hearing people say that America should restrict the number of immigrants that we can have.
Now they've completely changed their tune.
And the reason, of course, is that large numbers of immigrants who are here illegally in the country are now being sent to and arriving in very large numbers, no longer just in border towns in Texas and Arizona or California, but instead in northern cities run by Democratic mayors and governors.
And what they've been saying is almost verbatim what mayors and governors in border states and communities have been saying for many years now and being called racist for saying it, which is that the number of people entering the United States illegally,
no matter how noble you think immigration is as a concept or no matter how noble you think immigration is as a concept or how much you love diversity and believe it's a strain, the sheer number is simply unmanageable for the country from almost every perspective, economically, logistically, culturally in terms of trying to assimilate logistically, culturally
And now what democratic mayors, mayors of democratic cities, of blue cities, and being a mayor is really the kind of political office that requires you to be the most pragmatic.
When people have problems in their everyday life, they blame the mayor.
The mayor can't really afford to reside on a level of pure abstraction.
You have mayors of New York and Washington and Chicago essentially demanding the Biden administration do more to prevent people from entering the border in the numbers that they are currently entering.
It has become almost a political consensus.
That the federal government has failed in one of its core duties, which is to protect the American border.
And that's true of people who have always believed in the nobility of immigration, the fact that America is a nation of immigrants, all those bromides that are easy to say, but in the face of this year numbers, there are a lot of people, including in political office from both parties, now insisting that this has become unmanageable.
Texas is, of course, one of the states that has been kind of at the forefront of all of this because they obviously are a border state and measures that Texas has taken has caused a controversy between it and the federal government that just reached the Supreme Court.
Now before we get into that, here is the voice of America from January of 2024, January 23rd, so last week, that Says the following, quote, nine U.S.
governors call for action on immigration reform.
The article says, quote, as the U.S.
Congress struggles to agree on a package of immigration reform measures, the Democratic governors of nine states have added their voices to the call for action.
The letter demands the leaders make, quote, a serious commitment.
to improving a national immigration system that is, quote, outdated and unprepared to respond to a recent surge in migrants across the southern border.
The list of governors calling for assistance includes the leaders of Arizona, California, and New Mexico, three states directly on the southern border.
Their letter echoes the complaints of leaders in Republican-led Texas, which has a longer border with Mexico than the rest of the border states combined, and has been demanding increased federal assistance for years.
However, several of the governors who signed the letter are from states far from the southern border, including Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York.
Doesn't get more blue than that.
Signaling that the stress of increased levels of immigration is being felt nationwide.
Now, we actually covered the hypocrisy angle of this before that sickens me to my core.
Because it's so emblematic of American liberalism, which is what they love to do, is to go around imposing policies and constraints and restrictions and moral dictates on other people, knowing that they're allowed to insulate themselves from the effects of those policies.
And therefore can call names and malign the people who actually have to confront the consequences of the policies that they, with great moral sanctimony, love to defend.
And yet the minute those same liberals actually have to start confronting and living under the effects of those policies that they demand to be imposed on others, They will turn on a dime and start screaming bloody murder because liberals only like to support these kinds of policies and demand sacrifice from others as long as they and their families aren't part of the group that needs to, in any way, pay a price.
And that's why you see this shift.
But beyond the hypocrisy, it just simply demonstrates that no matter how kind-hearted somebody is, no matter how pro-immigrant somebody is, I mean, remember, a lot of these blue state governors and
Mayors and obviously the Biden administration itself have run for office and won by insisting that they will defend not just legal immigrants but illegal immigrants as well, making themselves sanctuary cities and they rely on a lot of immigration activists and groups of voters who are highly supportive of Immigrants and very opposed to the idea of trying to close the border in any way.
And yet it has become so unsustainable that those people are willing to betray their own constituencies and their own campaign promises to not just tolerate but demand federal government action to close the border in a way that, as the article says, echoes the statements
Of longtime restriction advocates like Republican governors of Texas, who they have spent the last decade or so calling racist and white supremacist, for expressing views that they themselves now advocate.
Now, this issue between Texas and the U.S.
government, namely the state of Texas concluded that the U.S.
government was failing in its duties to protect Texas from the cost and impact of huge swarms of illegal immigrants, caused Texas to start to take matters into their own hands, including building things like barbed wire in areas such as near the Rio Grande to prevent crossings and entry into the state of Texas that everybody acknowledges has been effective, and yet the U.S. government under Biden took the position that Texas has no right to do that,
that the only body authorized constitutionally to deal with the issue of immigration that the only body authorized constitutionally to deal with the issue of immigration is the federal government, that states are powerless to do anything other than sit back and accept the failure of the federal government, even if it's harming their own budgets and And this case has made its way all the way to the Supreme Court, where last week, as the Guardian indicates on January 22nd, U.S. Supreme Court allows Border Patrol to cut the razor wire installed by Texas.
Quote, the justices grant an emergency appeal from the Biden administration in a 5-4 vote, while lawsuit over the wire on U.S.-Mexico border continues.
Quote, the Concretina wire, another word for barbed wire, type of barbed wire, deployed at the direction of the Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, runs roughly 30 miles along the Rio Grande River, near the border city of Eagle Pass.
It is part of Abbott's broader fight with the Biden administration over immigration enforcement and what he calls Biden's reckless open borders policy.
Border security and immigration officials fell under the purview of the federal government as decided in the 2012 Supreme Court case Arizona versus United States.
The court held that federal immigration law preempted Arizona's immigration laws.
Now, that is true.
But Texas has argued that their measures that they have taken are about a lot more than just keeping immigrants out of their state, including enhancing the safety of their state, the health of their state, protecting the budget of their state.
And in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the level of the judiciary right immediately beneath the Supreme Court, The full Fifth Circuit reviewed all of the evidence that had been collected by the lower court that held the hearing.
All of this was done through emergency measures because what was happening is the Biden administration dispatched Border Patrol agents and Homeland Security operatives to the state of Texas where they began cutting down the barbed wire fence that Texas had constructed.
And so Texas ran into a court seeking an emergency order Blocking or enjoining the federal government from destroying its fence.
And the Fifth Circuit issued that injunction.
And then the federal government ran to the Supreme Court and asked for an emergency order vacating that injunction, or giving them a green light, a go ahead, to destroy that fence.
And so what the Supreme Court did is, usually when we have a Supreme Court ruling, especially on a controversial case like this, We have a long, detailed decision of both sides, often multiple judges from each side, laying out their rationale for why they cast their vote as they did.
Because this was an emergency order, an emergency case, there was no real rationale given.
There probably will be at some point in the future.
Either when this issue goes back to the Supreme Court or the Supreme Court just on its own explains this vote.
But for now, all we have is a summary ruling that doesn't tell us anything other than who voted on which side.
Here's the full content of the order where the Supreme Court decided against Texas.
There you see Supreme Court, and it's titled Order an Appending Case, Department of Homeland Security, Secretary, At all, meaning other agencies versus the state of Texas.
And it says this, the application to vacate injunction presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the court is granted.
So this is the court's only substantive ruling.
There was an injunction issued by the Fifth Circuit ordering the federal government to stop taking down Texas's fence.
There was an application made by the US government to vacate that injunction.
Purely as technicality, in the first instance it gets sent to a specific justice of the Supreme Court in an emergency action, and then that judge has the discretion to either decide on his own, or if it's a case of greater importance, to refer it to the full court.
It got assigned to Justice Alito, he referred it to the full court.
And here the court is granting the government's application to vacate the injunction.
The December 19, 2023 order of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is vacated.
So that's the ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas' favor and it's hereby vacated.
So they overturned that ruling and they vacated the injunction giving the green light to the federal government to go destroy Texas' defense.
The judges who would have voted to deny the application, who would have ruled in favor of Texas, were Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh.
Right now, the conservatives on the court have a 6-3 majority, so it's not enough to have just one conservative judge rule with the liberal justices.
You have to have two.
And in this case, the liberal justices, the three liberal justices, were joined by both John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett.
And that's how you got the 5-4 ruling.
No, by the way, just I don't know how many of you saw the debate that I did last night on January 6th with the YouTuber Destiny.
I'm not necessarily even recommending that you necessarily go and watch it.
It was a very contentious debate.
I personally think it clarified the issues.
A lot of people found the debate unworthy of their time and mine, but I'll leave that to you.
But one of the things that I remember I was talking about the Supreme Court and the fact that the Supreme Court at no point during the attempt by Donald Trump to reverse the official results of the 2020 election indicated the slightest inclination to intervene in any way on the side of Donald Trump and to help reverse the results.
They could have on several occasions and they declined And you can go back and when Amy Coney Barrett was appointed to the court, the most vile things were said about her.
And one of the specific lines of attack that was very common to hear from Democratic Party officials and their allies in the media Was they had alleged over and over that there was basically a quid pro quo that Amy Coney Barrett had agreed in order to get on the Supreme Court that she would rule in Trump's favor in the event that he lost the election.
And she was presented as this radically and fundamentally corrupt figure who was put on the court because she had agreed To rule in Trump's favor and make sure that even if he lost the election, he would be maintained in power.
This was not a conspiracy theory pushed by obscure, random, anonymous people online.
This was something that was a very common theme that was being asserted, obviously with no evidence.
And ever since then, Amy Coney Barrett has ruled more often than not with the conservative majority, as you would expect.
But many times, as in this case, she didn't, and there was certainly no inkling That she or any member of the court had an intention to interfere in the election on Donald Trump's side.
Do you think that any of the people who insinuated that or stated that have ever gone back and recanted or apologized for that innuendo?
Of course, that's a rhetorical question.
To ask the question is to answer it.
This is kind of a side note to remember at when these kinds of accusations emerge, the people making them know they will never be held accountable No matter whether they're true or false.
They don't care in the slightest if they're true and false.
And many of these people, the ones who do this, are the ones who call themselves journalists and say how vehemently opposed they are to Disinformation, to the point that they want to censor the internet to protect ourselves from it.
Now, in this case, if you're wondering why would Amy Coney Barrett, maybe you're not wondering about John Roberts, he does more often than any of the other conservative judges, join the liberal judges.
But if you're wondering why Amy Coney Barrett would do so, it's because it doesn't really have anything to do with the question of immigration.
The ruling is really about the constitutional role assigned to the federal government versus the states on the question of immigration policy.
And it is the case, as the Guardian alluded to and as we're about to show you, that the Supreme Court has previously ruled on several occasions, most explicitly in 2012, That immigration policy can radically affect the relationship that the United States has with other countries because these migrants are coming from other countries.
The measures that we take to keep migrants out or letting them in have an effect on our relationship with other countries, countries that border the United States but ones that are in its proximity.
And as a result of the clear intention of the Constitution to place issues of foreign policy largely, though not entirely, in the hands of the executive branch, but entirely in the hands of the federal government, the idea has always been that states cannot override the federal government on issues of immigration because it's really a question of foreign policy.
And then there's a subsidiary issue of something called the Supremacy Clause that basically means that in any area where the federal government has decided to legislate, and obviously immigration is an area where they decided to legislate, anytime there's a conflict between the state and the anytime there's a conflict between the state and the federal government, in any such instance, the federal government is supreme.
The federal government can override the state, in part because you don't want to have, especially when it comes to foreign policy, different states doing different things, so there's no clarity in foreign policy.
Now, we don't have a rationale from the Supreme Court so I can't tell you that that's why Amy Coney Barrett decided in favor of the U.S.
government and against Texas.
My belief, my strong belief, however, is that that is her argument and it's one that A is stripped of any kind of ideological or political view, given again that that would not be a question of how one views immigration.
But also B, I have to say that even if I disagree with Amy Coney Barrett, and for reasons I'm about to tell you, I do in this case.
You do actually want to encourage Supreme Court justices to be willing to vote on the principles of constitutional law and the issues of statutory authority regardless of their political agenda.
In fact, one of the worst things that has happened is that most Supreme Court rulings are now predictable and break down along the lines of Democrat or Republican or conservative versus liberal.
And while you expect that in certain instances, everybody knows that conservative judges interpret the Constitution differently than liberal judges on questions like gun control or abortion.
There are a lot of issues where you hope that there is no ideological component to it where judges are able to separate their political agenda, there's no question Amy Coney Barrett is a political conservative, to separate their political agenda from their jurisprudential rulings.
Even if their willingness to do that in a certain case ends up angering you or undermining your political agenda, that's something we should applaud judges when they do so.
And it really happens.
And so if that's what Amy Coney Barrett did here, then even though she might have caused a political outcome that a lot of conservatives dislike, the act itself If in fact that's what she did, and it's hard to know for sure, though I speculate, is something that I think ought to be considered noble.
Let's look at the Fifth Circuit ruling, because the Fifth Circuit ruling, which ruled in favor of Texas, actually issued the kind of judicial decision that enables us to see what the issues are in this case, what the factual findings are of the lower court judge, and how much in favor of Texas both the lower court judge and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found, and why on the constitutional issues, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is known as a more conservative court,
So, let's start off with...we selected the passages we think are most important to enable us to understand the issues here.
even though in general, immigration as a foreign policy matter is left to the federal government.
So let's start off with, we selected the passages we think are most important to enable us to understand the issues here.
So here's how the ruling begins, or toward the beginning of the ruling.
Quote, "Although the 1,200 miles of the Rio Grande forming the border between Texas and Mexico, there are 29 official points of entry into the United States.
To guard the, quote, vast stretches of land between these points, Congress created the Border Patrol, whose objective is to, quote, deter illegal entry in the United States.
In recent years, illegal crossings have increased dramatically.
Quote, the number of border patrol encounters with migrants illegally entering the country has swelled from a comparatively paltry 458,000 in 2020 to 1.7 million in 2021 and 2.4 million in 2022.
58,000 in 2020 to 1.7 million in 2021 and 2.4 million in 2022.
So that's a five-fold increase just from 2020 to 2022.
Here's that five-fold increase.
That's an extraordinary amount in essentially three years.
A comparatively paltry 458,000 cases where Border Patrol agents encountered migrants illegally entering to 2.4 million in 2022.
Obviously they are coming in much, much greater numbers than they did back in 2020 when Donald Trump was president.
There's just no question about that.
And it didn't just increase by a small amount, it increased exponentially.
The court goes on, quote, unsurprisingly, the situation has been exploited by drug cartels who have made, quote, an incredibly lucrative expertise out of trafficking human beings and illegal drugs like fentanyl, which, quote, is frequently encountered in vast quantities at the border.
In 2021, Texas launched Operation Lone Star to aid the Border Patrol through allocation of state resources.
The activity in question here is Texas's, quote, laying of Concretina wire along several sections of the riverfront.
The wire serves as, quote, deterrent, an effective one at that, causing illegal crossings to drop precipitously.
Quote, by all accounts, Border Patrol is grateful for the assistance of Texas law enforcement, and the evidence shows the parties work cooperatively across the state, including in El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley.
Now, Let me stop here and say that I know that immigration is an issue that provokes a lot of deeply polarizing feelings and I'm sure there are people in this audience who like a lot of issues we cover.
Russia and Ukraine, the war in Israel, the U.S.
role in that war, the Middle East.
And definitely this ruling probably think very differently about this issue.
And so what I want to emphasize is that what the court just did, what I just read from, were the factual findings by the lower court that held an evidentiary hearing.
And remember that lower court sort of did what I just speculated Amy Coney Barrett did.
The lower court sided with Texas on almost every question.
And all of the things I just read to you about the efficacy of the border fence, about the massive increased exponential problem of illegal immigration Texas was facing, were all factual findings by the court, and yet the court nonetheless dismissed Texas' lawsuit on the grounds that the United States enjoys sovereign immunity.
So there was a court clearly favoring and deciding in favor of Texas on the substantive question and yet still able to issue a legal ruling that prevented Texas from prevailing.
So I just want to have everyone do our best to try and be able to understand the factual issues, the factual evidence, and the legal issues without letting all of that be clouded by the political controversy that undergirds all of it.
Because it's fundamental to understanding what the courts are trying to do here.
So the court goes on, quote, "Although the court would ultimately deny a preliminary injunction on sovereign immunity grounds," that's the lower court they're talking about, "the court made numerous fact findings supporting Texas's trespass to chattel claims." As a general matter, the court rejected the defendant's claim, that's the government's, that the Border Patrol was justified in cutting the barbed wire.
This is the government's argument as to why they were justified in cutting Texas's barbed wire, and the court rejected all these arguments, but this was the government's argument.
One, to inspect, apprehend, and detain illegal aliens.
And two, to prevent or address medical emergencies.
To the contrary, the court found that the Border Patrol cut the wire, quote, for no apparent purpose other than to allow migrants easier entrance further inland.
So here's a case where the government was trying to say, look, we're not trying to sabotage Texas's efforts to keep out migrants.
Oh no, to the contrary.
We want to cut down the fence because that's what enables us to be able to get into the Rio Grande and keep them out.
And the court said that that was a lie based on all the evidence, based on all the testimony about what the Border Patrol is actually doing when they cut down the fence.
They're not actually cutting down the fence and then using their access to that land to keep the migrants out.
They're cutting down the fence in order to facilitate the entrance of these migrants into Texas and into the United States.
As for this claim that, oh, we can't have a fence because it prevents us from getting into that area that the fence keeps out and saving people who are suffering from medical emergencies, Texas has always said that they agree the United States government, the Border Patrol, have the absolute right to access that area in the event of medical emergencies.
And nobody ever claimed that Texas tried to impede the Border Patrol in any way from doing so.
So the government had two reasons, two justifications for why it wants to cut down Texas's border patrol, get Texas's fence, and basically it was a preposterous farce.
Namely that, oh, we're trying to do it because it'll help us keep migrants out.
And the court said, everything in the record demonstrates the federal government is lying there.
They're not trying to keep out these migrants, they're trying to let them in.
So the court went through the kind of technical arguments, which I'm going to spare you from having to hear because they're very dry and very precedent based.
But basically, I'll just explain briefly to you the issue of sovereign immunity, which is that in general, the United States government, as the sovereign, Enjoys immunity.
It's a concept that comes from British royalty where no one can sue the crown and it's something that the United States government as the sovereign needs because otherwise citizens and people can constantly sue it for every single decision that it makes.
It would render governance impossible.
There's an exception to that, however, where the government agrees to be sued.
And there's two statutes in particular that Texas cited that it says constitutes consent by the federal government to be sued in specifically these kinds of cases.
The district court judge, when rejecting the case, despite finding in favor of Texas on every factual question, ruled that that statute did not constitute consent by the U.S.
government to be sued in these kind of cases.
That was the place where the appellate court said the lower court was wrong.
So that these statutes clearly were the Congress and the federal government saying in these kinds of cases we agree we can be sued and so they said sovereign immunity does not apply to Texas's lawsuit against the government.
And it's a very dry legal question but that is essentially what happened.
And so once the Fifth Circuit ruled that the United States government could in fact be sued here, they were required then to determine what was served by the public interest.
And this is what they said, quote, finally we turn to the public interest prong.
And they cite a precedent saying that that's the prong that has to be analyzed, that is outcome determinative whenever the United States is the party being sued.
And this is what they said.
Quote, the district court, incorporating its TRO opinion by reference, focused its public interest analysis on two distinct bases.
One, preventing unlawful agency action, and two, deterring illegal immigration.
Agreeing that the first ground plainly serves the public interest in ways in Texas' favor, we need not consider the second.
So what the court is saying is that there were two different areas of public interest identified by the lower court, and one was Texas has wanted to prevent unlawful Action by the Department of Homeland Security and the Border Patrol.
Namely, cutting down their fence was illegal and that is a legitimate public interest that justifies Texas' action to seek an injunction.
Let's stop the government from taking this illegal act of destroying our fence.
And so the court said, once we find that public interest is served, we don't even need to get to the second question of whether or not deterring illegal immigration is also in the public interest.
And the court then went on and said, quote, there is generally no public interest in the perpetuation of unlawful agency action.
And there is, quote, substantial public interest in having government agencies abide by the federal laws that govern their existence and operations, citing a Fifth Circuit case that previously had ruled on a similar question.
The district court found that the Border Patrol exceeded its authority By cutting Texas's barbed wire fence for purposes other than a medical emergency inspection or detention.
In other words, every federal agency has powers that are limited by the congressional statutes that create those agencies and that govern those agencies.
Homeland Security can't just go around doing whatever it wants.
It has limits on what it actually can do.
And what the court found is that Homeland Security and the Border Patrol do not have the authority to go around cutting down fences constructed by states that construct them for a reason that's in the public interest.
And therefore, they exceeded their legal authority, and the injunction is necessary to stop the agency from acting illegally.
The court then went on, quote, Moreover, the public interest supports clear protection of property rights from government intrusion and control.
Accordingly, we find that there was no abuse of discretion in the district court's weighing in the public interest conclusion prong.
In other words, the court found that the public interest would be served for two reasons, by stopping the federal government from doing what it's been doing, and the appellate court said, as long as there's no abuse of discretion in what they ruled, we have to uphold that decision, and that's what we're doing.
So here was the conclusion of the appellate court, quote, Because Texas had carried its burden under the Nikin factors, that's the precedent that governs, we grant its request for an injunction pending appeal.
Accordingly, defendants are enjoined during the pendency of this appeal from damaging, destroying, or otherwise interfering with Texas's C-wire fence in the vicinity of Eagle Pass, Texas, as indicated in Texas's complaint.
As the parties have agreed, defendants are permitted to cut or move the C wire if necessary to address any medical emergency as specified in the restraining order.
So again, it's a little bit difficult to know exactly why the Supreme Court decided in favor of the U.S.
government, but what we know for sure is that there are four justices on the Supreme Court who are very prepared to rule that Texas has every right to construct its own fences and that the federal government is acting illegally by entering Texas against the will of the Texas government that was democratically elected and removing those fences.
Why these five judges on the Supreme Court overturned the Fifth Circuit's ruling is very unclear because they haven't yet issued an order.
My guess is That the three liberal judges are going to just reject entirely the entire factual findings of the lower court, say that Texas has no public interest in constructing these fences, say that the federal government has every right to cut down these fences, that it's well within the power of Homeland Security.
But the question is, why did these two conservative judges, Amy Coney Barrett in particular, Decide in favor of the federal government against Texas.
And it could be something as simple and as technical as agreeing with Texas on every single issue except on the question of whether or not the United States waived its sovereign immunity in a case like this.
So it could be a very unexciting and unglamorous ruling from Amy Coney Barrett that is very constitutional in nature.
And is designed to limit the ways in which the U.S. government can be sued.
It's an important doctrine.
Nobody opposes sovereign immunity.
It sounds like an outrage.
Like, why should the government, the sovereign, be immune from lawsuits?
But it's actually very necessary for the governance, for any sovereign to govern a country, or otherwise they're going to be sued on every single decision they possibly ever take.
And yet there are times when the federal government through the Congress says, well, there are certain times we should be sued.
We should be allowed to be sued.
If, for example, a detainee in our custody is injured through malice or through negligence, of course we can be sued by the family members.
Lots of cases like that.
And so it's very possible that although this is an incredibly inflammatory controversy, immigration, and the attempts by states to compensate for the federal government's failures, it's very possible that it comes down to a very dry and legal question.
And although it probably is frustrating for conservatives who worked hard to put somebody like Amy Coney Barrett on the court, only to watch her rule against them on one of their most important political priorities, Depending on what her ruling is, and I'd be very interested to read it when she actually issues it, it could be one of those cases where a judge acts against their own political agenda, their own ideological belief system.
Which again, despite being very frustrating, is something that we want courts to be doing, judges to be doing that I think they do far too rarely.
All that said, There is no question that Democrats understand very well that the issue of illegal immigration has become not only a huge political liability for them, but also an actual policy liability.
And as somebody who has been more or less ambivalent on immigration, certainly believe that the United States has benefited over the decades from the waves of illegal immigrants that have come into the United States,
The ways in which these communities have assimilated, usually, I grew up in South Florida where there's a large Cuban community that never really regarded itself as American, always thought it was going to go back to Cuba once Fidel Castro fell.
And yet, as a result, a lot of people who lived in that Cuban community in Miami, their entire lives never assimilated, never learned English.
But in general, immigrants do come to the United States and assimilate.
As long as the numbers are manageable, and I do think that has been a positive for the United States.
There's almost no denying that.
You look at achievements in every field that have strengthened the United States, and so many come from people who are owning the United States by virtue of legal immigration.
It's so foundational to what the United States government is.
But there's no doubt that opening the border and having no controls over the border is something that is completely unsustainable.
And just to close on this issue, I think one of the really interesting dynamics politically is that for a long time, when I first started writing about politics in 2005, the way immigration debates broke down in the United States was very, very different than the way it breaks down ideologically now.
The people who were always calling for quote-unquote immigration reform, which would allow a lot more people to enter the country, that would allow amnesty for people who were here illegally, that was a project of George Bush and Dick Cheney and the Chamber of Commerce and the corporatists who ran the Republican Party at the time.
Ronald Reagan did one of the most sweeping immigration reform acts in decades, and in part that was because he too was a corporatist.
And corporations have always loved having huge amounts of excess labor in the United States because obviously, like any supply and demand, when you have a lot of labor, it drives down the cost of labor.
When you have more people competing for jobs, you can pay them less.
And on the other side, the people who are very skeptical of immigration, who wanted immigration reform, or immigration restrictions, were left-wing politicians.
At the time, Bernie Sanders was very anti-immigrant.
And labor leaders were very anti-immigrant.
And this is something that people like Bernie Sanders never really got rid of.
In 2016, he sat down for an interview that we showed you before, where he was asked by Ezra Klein About the issue of immigration and by this point immigration had gone from an economic issue where the left was often opposed to it because it would drive down wages and had gotten put through the grinder of identity politics.
Where you had to prove that you loved all races by being in favor of open borders.
And if you wanted to be called a racist or a white nationalist, the easiest way to do so would be by arguing that we need to be restrictive of our borders.
And so a lot of leftists and a lot of Democrats suddenly switched sides and became very pro-immigrant.
And so in 2016, when Bernie Sanders was running for president, he was asked by Ezra Klein Do you favor something like open borders?
And Bernie Sanders looked at him and interrupted and said, open borders?
Are you crazy?
That's a Koch Brothers proposal.
Of course I'm not in favor of that.
And then went on to explain why having a large influx of immigrants into the United States illegally in an uncontrolled way is terrible for the American worker that was always a left-wing position.
In 2013, Jamal Bowie, who is now a New York Times op-ed writer, who is just very partisan but hues to a kind of left liberal ideology in almost every word that he writes.
He wrote an article at the time he was at the left liberal journal, The American Prospect, and he was warning Democrats.
That the people who are most skeptical of permissive immigration are African Americans because they know that they're the first ones who are going to pay the price for large-scale immigration.
It's their jobs that will be lost to immigrants.
It's their wages that will be depressed.
And he told Democrats, to Mel Bowie, he would never say it now, but at the time he was saying, you need to be very careful in how much you service and appease these Latino supporters of yours, these pro-immigrant activists of yours, because if you become too pro-immigrant, you will alienate African Americans.
And there is still a lot of those residual dynamics in how voters feel about immigration.
You go and you ask people who are concerned about illegal immigration, and it will often not be the kinds of people that you expect, either racially or politically or anything else as usual.
The media radically distorts how that debate breaks down.
But this Supreme Court case is obviously a big win for the Biden administration because it consolidates all power for now in the hands of the U.S. government and takes away the power of red state governors to be able to take steps that they feel are necessary that the federal government is not undertaking.
We got a lot of requests to go through the Supreme Court case.
I think one of the things we can do on this show, both because of my legal background and because it takes time to really convey.
And explain the true nature of the legal issues at stake is we have the time and the expertise to be able to go through and through that.
So when people ask, cover this Supreme Court ruling, I know what they mean is cover it in a way that we can actually understand the true issues, the true dynamics driving it.
And so that's what I promised we would do and we took the time and hopefully that was a helpful explanation.
Speaking of the Democratic Party, they have spent seven years with their primary political tactic being that they accuse whoever is an adversary of theirs or a critic of theirs of being a Russian agent, a Kremlin asset, an apologist for Vladimir Putin.
You open your mouth and criticize the Democratic Party and one thing you know for certain is you are going to be accused of being a Russian agent.
It's happened to me so many times by so many different figures in the Democratic Party.
I once wrote an article critical of Howard Dean.
He went to Twitter and said, I think the Intercept needs to be investigated to see how much Russian and Iranian money they're receiving.
I once wrote an article critical of Joe Scarborough for a segment he did on Morning Joe about foreign policy and he posted a tweet saying, oh, I'm sure your article sounded better in the original Russian.
Just the most banal, cliched accusations, but they cast it reflexively and automatically.
And usually it's done against Republicans or people on the right or people who have no loyalty to the Democratic establishment due to anti-establishment ideologies.
But in this case, this week, Nancy Pelosi decided to use this tactic against people who are on her side, who are leftists, who generally are supportive of the Democratic Party but have become vehemently opposed to Joe Biden's support for the war in Israel.
We showed you the video.
Here's the Guardian explaining what happened.
There you see it.
Nancy Pelosi is condemned for suggesting that pro-Palestinian activists have ties to Russia.
The former House Speaker called on the FBI to investigate protesters pressuring the Biden administration to support a ceasefire in Gaza.
And here is one of the people that The Guardian cited to support Nancy Pelosi's innuendo with no evidence whatsoever.
It's a person named Brianna Wu.
I'm not certain what their pronouns are.
I think it's a trans woman, so I'll use she and her.
And Breonna Woo is the head of this supposedly progressive political action campaign, this PAC, that was founded by Jane Uygur, supposedly to push a left-wing political agenda designed to pressure the Democratic Party to be called left-wing.
It's called Rebellion, the Rebellion PAC.
But Breonna Woo has become a supporter of the Israeli war and of the U.S.
policy of financing and arming Israel and its war in Gaza.
And as a result, she's been attacked by a lot of people on the left who she thought were on her side.
And she has taken to accusing people on the left of being Russian agents because that's what all Democrats do.
When they're attacked by somebody, when they feel criticized by somebody, they say, that is a Russian agent.
Quote, Breonna Woo, who created a pact to support progressive candidates called Rebellion.
She's a rebel to the establishment.
She wrote on social media that Nancy Pelosi's comments were inartful, but Tracked with recent efforts by Russia to interfere in a US election, quote, information warfare doesn't invent new divisions.
It finds existing divisions and exacerbates them, Wu wrote.
Since Putin wants Trump to win, he will obviously be finding efforts to split the Democratic Party.
Israel-Palestine is proving to be very effective at this.
Now, you may be a supporter of Israel.
And the U.S.
decision to finance and arm the war, or you may be an opponent of it.
But I presume that anybody rational understands that the people who are critics of Israel and opposed to the war in Gaza, even if you think they're misguided, are doing that out of conviction.
I've certainly been a critic of the war in Israel and U.S.
financing of Israel.
I don't think that should be surprising.
It's very consistent with my views that I've expressed for 20 years about war and U.S.
interference in that region.
And yet, these people really believe that if they're being criticized on Twitter or other social media platforms by people they think should be applauding them, No matter how obviously sincere the convictions are, it must be because the Kremlin is behind it.
It is a mental illness.
It is a mass delusion.
It is basically a conspiracy theory that is embedded in the Democratic brain.
And that's why Nancy Pelosi sees protesters outside of her house.
She's angry about it.
They interrupted her event three days earlier.
And so she just goes on CNN and says, these people are probably Kremlin agents.
Let's have the FBI investigate who's financing them.
Now usually that tactic results in people being unjustly defamed.
Tulsi Gabbard you might recall sued Hillary Clinton for implying or stating that Tulsi Gabbard was going to run for president as a Russian asset.
Even though unlike Hillary Clinton, Tulsi Gabbard actually went and risked her life to fight for the United States.
But in this case that we're about to tell you about, that we've talked about before, it didn't just result in reputational destruction, this democratic fixation on Russia is now resulting in a criminal process, a very serious one, charging American citizens who are lifelong political activists
Leftist anti-war activists of the kind of old left that opposes US imperialism, that of course is going to be opposed to a NATO war in Europe in order to weaken Russia.
And because these citizens, all of whom belong to this black left-wing socialist party, are outspoken opponents of Joe Biden's policy and the war in Ukraine, the Biden Justice Department decided to charge them With the felony of being agents of the Kremlin and failing to file the required forms on the flimsiest basis imaginable.
Here's the AP reporting on the indictment when it was first unveiled in April.
The U.S.
charges four Americans and three Russians in election discord case.
Quote, the four Americans are all part of the African People's Socialist Party and a Huru movement, which has locations in St.
Petersburg, Florida and St.
Louis.
Among those charged is Amalia Shalita, chairman of the US-based organization which was raided by the FBI last summer when the Russian also accused Yanov was originally charged.
Much of the alleged cooperation involves support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Now, feel free to disagree with that view.
2022, Yashatella held a news conference in which he said, quote, the African People's Socialist Party calls for unity with Russia and its defensive war in Ukraine against the world's colonial powers.
He also called for the independence of the Russian-occupied Donics region in eastern Ukraine.
Now, feel free to disagree with that view.
I've never argued the Russians are justified, but when I had Norman Finkelstein on my show, he actually yelled at me for only limiting myself to opposing U.S.
support for Ukraine, telling me that if I really believed all the arguments I was making, which he does, namely that NATO is purposely expanding as much up to the Russian border eastward as possible in a way to deliberately threaten and provoke the Russians, that you should have to believe that the Russians were justified in that invasion.
That's a position that he believes.
That it was NATO and the U.S.
who provoked the war?
You can disagree with that, but the fact that Norman Finkelstein believes that is completely unsurprising to me, given how consistent it is with everything he's argued his whole life.
If someone were to try and tell me that he was only advocating that because he was a Russian agent, I would laugh in their face.
It's so obvious that that's a view he reached through his own intellectual autonomy.
It's the natural byproduct of his ideology.
And the same is true for this left-wing party.
It would be shocking if they did anything other than side with Russia against NATO, given their five-decade history of opposing U.S.
foreign policy from the left.
And yet, here's the Department of Justice, the Office of Public Affairs, announcing their indictment.
Quote, U.S.
citizens and Russian intelligence officers charged with conspiring to use United States citizens as illegal agents of the Russian government.
Defendants sought to sow discord, spread pro-Russia propaganda, and interfere in elections within the United States.
Now, we have seen for seven years how dangerous these concepts are.
Of every time you say something that aligns with Russian interests, even if that's not your motive, You get accused of being a pro-Russian propagandist.
In fact, we've deconstructed studies before that accused acts of allowing pro-Russian propaganda when all they meant by that is anybody who says anything that promotes the interests of the Russian government.
So if you don't want the United States government to fund the war in Ukraine, which is every bit your right as an American citizen to advocate, it of course is a view that aligns with the interests of the Russian government.
That doesn't mean that you're acting on behalf of the Russian government or at its behest or at its direction.
Anything that you argue might happen to align with the interests of Russia.
People who opposed coups and cold wars during the Cold War in the name of fighting the Soviet Union were advocating views that might have aligned with Russian interests.
It didn't mean they were agents of the Kremlin.
Here's the DOJ's press release.
A federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida returned a superseding indictment charging four U.S. citizens and three Russian nationals with working on behalf of the Russian government and in conjunction with the FSB to conduct a multi-year foreign malign influence campaign in the United States.
Among other conduct, the indictment alleges that the Russian defendants recruited, funded, and directed U.S. presidents political groups to act as unregistered illegal agents of the Russian government and sow discord and spread pro-Russian propaganda.
The indicted intelligence officers, in particular, participated in covertly funding and directing candidates for local office within the United States.
Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights, freedom Russia denies to its own citizens, to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States, said the Assistant Attorney General responsible for this indictment.
This department will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who so discord and corrupt U.S.
elections in service of foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits are U.S.
citizens or foreign individuals abroad.
If you look at the indictment, other than the receipt over six years of a trivial sum of money by this party, $7,000 over six years, that the U.S.
government alleges came not from Russians, but Russians affiliated with the Russian government, the entire indictment is based entirely and exclusively on the political activism and the political advocacy of this party and its members.
And it's trying to criminalize their political opinion, to criminalize their dissent against the U.S.
government.
And what's amazing is there was so little coverage of this case, in part because right-wing media were reluctant to rise in defense of a black left-wing socialist party, and then there were a lot of liberals who were reluctant to rise and criticize the Biden Justice Department.
One of the people who actually covered the case at the time and denounced it vehemently was Glenn Beck.
But the only person with a corporate media job, a corporate media platform, who covered this case and denounced it was the white nationalist Tucker Carlson.
I say white nationalist in quotes because it is gospel.
In liberal discourse, that he is a racist and a white nationalist, and yet he is the only one out of all of them willing to rise in defense of the constitutional rights of these black American leftists.
I went on his show to talk about the case, but he also did his monologues on it and called on his show the leader of this party and had a very amiable conversation with him.
Here's part of what he said.
But not anymore.
According to the indictment, the criminals in question, quote, wrote articles that contained Russian propaganda and disinformation.
Huh?
They also gave speeches and posted videos that annoyed the State Department.
Here's one of them.
There's a discussion about Russian military buildup on this border with Ukraine and how this represents a terrible threat to Ukraine by Russians.
But there is no acknowledgement of the history that took us to this place, how the U.S. participated in facilitating the overthrow of a government in Ukraine that was friendly to the Soviet Union, nor does it talk about the history of this relationship between nor does it talk about the history of this relationship between Ukraine and This is an ongoing aggression.
It did not just start.
It's been going on for a while, but the U.S. government relies on the ignorance of the people in this country and much of the world that's facilitated by people like Zuckerberg.
So, for whatever it's worth, we're not really sure who that guy is.
We know he's American.
Pretty sure that on a lot of issues we likely would not agree with him.
A lot of what he just said in that video seems to be true.
But even if it weren't true, even if he was wrong, it would still be constitutionally protected speech.
In a free country, which we had until recently, you are allowed by definition to have dumb opinions.
Most of us do.
But not anymore.
So that man you just saw is facing 10 years behind bars for expressing views about Ukraine that the Biden administration doesn't want to hear.
That's terrifying.
Does no one else think that's terrifying?
It is terrifying.
And to that man's credit, whoever he is, he saw it coming.
Here he is at a rally last month.
They have declared that black people are so stupid that it takes Russians to tell us that we are oppressed.
I have never known a moment of black freedom for my entire life.
I've never read of a moment since the beginning of a colonial mode of production where black people have been free.
And yet they are saying that we are agents of some foreign power because we say black people must be free.
Okay, again, we're not defending that guy because we agree with all of his views.
We probably don't.
That is totally irrelevant.
Whether you agree with what someone is saying has nothing to do with his right to say it.
Americans are allowed to say what they think is true.
Period.
It is really remarkable that we got to the point where the only person in corporate media on television or in major newspapers willing to stand in defense of the free speech rights of a black left-wing anti-war socialist group is Tucker Carlson.
But that is the society in which we live.
Neoliberals and Democrats have zero belief in free speech.
Zero.
If you look at the indictment, here it is the indictment, the superseding indictment.
It's from January of, January 2nd, 2024.
You see the, I actually think this is the court ruling if I'm not mistaken, where the defendants actually We filed a motion asking for dismissal of this case on the grounds that everything they're accused of doing is protected by the First Amendment.
When you file a motion to dismiss before it goes to trial or anything else, you basically say, we're going to assume for the sake of argument that everything the government alleges that we did is something that we in fact did.
And the argument was, even if we did everything the government says we did, it still cannot be a crime because everything we did is protected by the First Amendment.
And yet the magistrate judge decided that they would not dismiss this case, meaning it's likely to go to trial, and essentially had an argument about free speech that was worked beyond belief in terms of what the free speech clause actually permits.
Here is part of what the court said, "By the motion, defendants argue the superseding indictment should be dismissed on First Amendment free speech grounds because the superseding indictment directly targets political speech and the law with which they're charged is unconstitutional as applied." Now, the law that they're charged with doesn't say it's illegal to be a foreign agent of the Russian government or any other government.
It says that if you're acting on behalf of a foreign government, you have to file a disclosure form, the FARA disclosure form that identifies yourself as being that, and that they failed to do so.
Now, this is the kind of law that they almost never invoke against anybody, but they suddenly decided to do so when they wanted to prosecute people like Paul Manafort.
This is the kind of law that they dragged out.
And the court goes on, quote, The United States contends that Section 951 targets Democrats' conduct rather than speech and is constitutional as applied under an intermediate scrutiny standard.
On September 28, 2023, this court held a hearing on the matter.
Based upon the party's briefs and the overall record, the undersigned finds that defendants' arguments must fail at this time and therefore recommends that defendants' motion be denied.
What the court essentially said And just to hear it doesn't even pass the laugh test is that there was nothing ideological or political about this prosecution.
In other words, if this had been, say, a standard pro-Biden liberal group that loved Ukraine and flew the Ukraine flag and was highly supportive of the U.S.
role in Ukraine and cheered Biden for doing it, But met with Ukrainians and over the course of six years received some trivial sum of money, the Biden Justice Department would have prosecuted them too.
And that it's therefore a viewpoint neutral prosecution having nothing to do with the First Amendment.
Anyone who believes that or who purports to believe that is either incredibly naive or a blatant liar.
Of course the reason this prosecution was brought was because these people are dissidents.
They're anti-establishment dissidents.
And they're critics of the Biden administration's foreign policy and its role in Ukraine.
And they're getting called Russian agents not because they're incapable of thinking for themselves or forming anti-war ideas without being told by Russian officials what to say and think, which is the rather condescending and insulting premise of this indictment, but instead because the United States government, especially under the Biden administration, sees anybody
Who opposes their policies and their wars, especially the ones pertaining to Ukraine, as being a Russian agent.
And because the leader of this party had traveled to Russia, something that's very legal to do, I've done it twice, and received $7,000 over the course of six years in donations from people they say were linked to the Russian government.
And then made statements, political statements of exactly the type you would expect a person like this, given his long history of activism, to say this is an 81-year-old man who was raided by the FBI with guns pointed at him and his wife in the early morning, even though he obviously poses a threat to nobody.
The type of prosecution this is is very recognizable.
It's one to criminalize dissent and to scare everybody in the United States from understanding that if they, too, oppose the U.S.
government's efforts with regard to Russia, they can be criminally prosecuted as being a Russian agent.
This is not a new tactic.
It was done throughout the entire Cold War.
It culminated and found its most disgraceful expression in the McCarthy era, but it has been completely rejuvenated.
For different ends, and primarily by Democrats and neoliberals.
So, we sat down right before the show live, just to accommodate them and their time, and we spoke with the chairman of this party, Amali Eshiel Talha, and his lawyer, Leonard Goodman, who, as I said, is a criminal defense lawyer.
He's also an adjunct professor of law at DePaul, who has taken on the case pro bono, because he understands, as Tucker Carlson does, The free speech rights that are being attacked for everybody.
Imagine if the government can win this case and if they can prove that you said things that they believe is pro-Russian propaganda, which means basically everything that criticizes the Democratic Party, or that you intended to do so with the intent to influence the election, which is every bit the right of an American citizen to do.
That they now have a legal foundation to accuse you of being an agent of a foreign power?
It is hard to overstate the threat that this poses to the free speech rights and First Amendment rights.
And even if they ultimately win, they're going to have huge costs.
Even though their lawyer is acting pro bono to his great credit, there's all kinds of costs with having to get expert witnesses.
The government intends to bring expert witnesses to testify about how disinformation works.
You can imagine what kind of people those are going to be.
So during the interview, and we're going to post at the end of the show as well, how you can contribute to their legal defense fund, which I hope you will.
It'll also be in the description in the video.
And they both give that information.
But this is a serious case, even though you might think this is a small party.
It's a fringe party.
But the case itself is very serious.
And one of the strategies governments use is they purposely bring the case against people who You might feel a little bit uncomfortable by aligning with or defending.
I actually found him to be incredibly well-spoken.
You get a very clear sense of exactly what he is, of the political movement out of which he emerged in the 1960s.
He's very rational.
He's very thoughtful.
The idea that he's a puppet being told To oppose the war in Ukraine simply because Russian officials are telling him to is something that I think you'll instinctively realize is not even plausible.
And Mr. Goodman, his lawyer, makes a very strong case as well about why this case is incredibly frivolous.
Frivolous though it is, it is very dangerous.
And so we intend to keep reporting on it.
And here's the interview that we conducted just a few moments before we started our live show, both with the chairman of the African People's Socialist Party, who faces 15 years in prison, and his lawyer, Leonard Goodman.
Gentlemen, good evening.
Thank you so much for taking the time to join us tonight.
I think your case is so important and I'm really happy for the opportunity to talk with you about it.
And if you don't mind, let me begin with Chairman Nyeshtala because I want to understand a little bit, or I want the audience to understand a little bit more about the African People's Socialist Party, which is at the heart of this prosecution.
It's an organization of which you're the chairman.
You've been at it for a long time.
So just tell us a little bit about the The history of the party, when was it formed and in what ideology or for what reasons was the party created?
Well, the party was formed formally in 1972, but I was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, that made a significant move within the civil rights movement within 1966 to call for black power.
And this was a major change in development of the civil rights movement itself, where one trend of our movement, which is historical, has been there all along, moved toward actual accomplishing self-determination moved toward actual accomplishing self-determination as opposed to simply trying to integrate into American society.
And based on the struggle to be able to have self-reliance, feed, clothe, house ourselves, just be a self-reliant people.
And so in 1972, after many years of involvement, first with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, I spent time in prison in St.
Petersburg, Florida, for having removed a horrible offensive mural that was on the City Hall wall.
An eight by ten foot mural there that depicted African people in grotesque caricature.
And after pleading with the mayor for a while, I led a demonstration in City Hall that resulted ultimately in our taking the mural down from the wall and was sentenced to five years in prison for that act after having been charged with 11 different offenses and spent time in prison as a consequence of that, in and out of prison for a while.
got out of prison on bond, or actually the four days before the assassination of Martin Luther King.
I participated in a demonstration in Gainesville, Florida.
And on my way to Florida on the Greyhound bus, I arrived and learned that King had been killed The demonstration I was going there to attend was to help defend some young African men, black men, who had been imprisoned there.
And when I got there, learned King had been killed, and the character of the demonstration changed, revolving around his assassination.
I was arrested there, one of the first two persons who was arrested on a law that had just been created, called inciting to riot, that did not require a riot to occur.
It was a thought crime and that it required me to have wanted a riot to occur after having made a speech.
So I spent some time in jail through that and in the process of all of this, We concluded after a period that it was not good enough just to be involved in protests, that we had to be able to build a movement that was about achieving power of our lives, and determined that the best vehicle for doing that was a political party.
That was the basis for the founding of the African People's Socialist Party.
And at some juncture during this work, We also concluded that the struggle of black people in this country was part of a much broader struggle of black people around the world that it began when we were first introduced into this country, that is to say black people at gunpoint.
And so we began a movement to connect the struggle of Africans here with Africans everywhere and with the struggle of colonized peoples around the world.
And so that's kind of, sort of, you know, the history and motivation of the African People's Socialist Party and of me.
Yes, so I mean that last point that you made is a crucial part of really why I ask what I think connects so much to this case.
Typically on Martin Luther King Day, what has become this federal holiday, I often feature what for me was I think one of his most interesting speeches given in Harlem exactly a year to the date before he was killed in 1967 where he explained Yes.
he had come to the conclusion that domestic activism on racism and racial equality was insufficient.
Why?
Similar to what you just said, it was inextricably linked to questions of U.S. foreign policy, U.S. behavior in the world, and in particular in that moment for him, that meant opposition to the war in Vietnam.
It was something where he kind of expanded his focus to the consternation of a lot of liberals at the time, where he began focusing on anti-war activism.
And of course, in the 60s and the 70s, anti-war activism was often linked with the American left, although there were parts of the American right that were more isolationist, but largely it was viewed as a left-wing cause.
Interestingly, at least when it comes to certain wars like the NATO-U.S. war in Ukraine against Russia, opposition to that war has now gotten cast as almost a right-wing cause, which is very bizarre to me.
I presume it's pretty bizarre to you too, having been at this for even longer.
And In cases like the one that you're currently involved in where the question is, is somebody acting as an agent of a foreign government?
Typically, when I think of someone who's acting as an agent of a foreign government, that to me is somebody who's like a lobbyist, somebody who's saying things that they don't believe because they're being paid to say them or to work on behalf of a foreign government.
In this case, in the case of your advocacy against US involvement in Ukraine or even your advocacy where you end up citing On the side of Russia in certain controversies, do you see that as consistent with the activism and ideology that you've been pursuing and defending for decades?
It's very much consistent with it.
The fact is that it's very disingenuous for the United States government to charge us of not having agency, that we are working on behalf of a foreign government.
The fact is that I was in Belfast, Ireland in 1983 and working in solidarity with the Irish people in opposition to British colonialism.
I was in Nicaragua at the time of the Reagan inauguration in opposition to U.S.
solidarity with the people of Nicaragua who had just won their freedom despite the policies of the United States government.
In fact, it was a time of extreme turmoil that even changed some policies in the United States government in terms of how it would characterize people like me who were talking about freedom and had determined that people who were engaged in struggles like it was a time of extreme turmoil that even changed some policies in the United States government in terms of how it would characterize people like me who were talking about freedom They would be characterized as terrorists.
And so I was in Spain, invited to speak in Spain by an NGO that was supported by the Spanish I was there in 2007.
And when I spoke there, I spoke also in opposition to U.S.
policies that were impacting on peoples around the world.
I was invited to speak at Oxford Union.
And I spoke there in 2019, and I opened my presentation in 2019 expressing solidarity with the government of Venezuela that at the time was being challenged by United States policy as well.
So this is historically what we've been about.
And so this whole notion that somehow we become an employee of Russia, because I visited Moscow and got marching orders from Moscow at that point, that's been responsible for the fact that we ran and participated in elections, not gun battles, but elections.
Participate in elections in St.
Petersburg, Florida, for mayor, for city council.
2017, 2019, we ran candidates on reparations and things like that, that suddenly we are learning is a consequence of a relationship to Russia and not due to the agency of black people.
And even the whole nonsense about Russia.
hiring us to talk about genocide.
I mean, we held a convention, a tribunal on reparations for black people in the United States in 1982 in New York City and used international law as a basis for that.
And one of those laws was the UN Convention on the punishment and on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide.
So it's disingenuous.
There's nothing that we're doing now that we haven't been doing for the last 50 years. - Yeah, I mean, it's so bizarre.
You know, you can go back decades, of course, to the Cold War, and it found its most disgraceful expression in the McCarthy era, where the U.S.
government, the U.S.
security state, would routinely accuse American citizens who dissented from the policies, the war policies of the U.S.
government, of being somehow in cahoots with the Kremlin, or disloyal, or an agent of the Kremlin.
And it's really bizarre to watch that be rejuvenated even after the ideology of Russia has changed so radically, albeit often by the Democratic Party, the kind of neoliberal order.
Just this week we saw a suggestion from Nancy Pelosi that anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protesters might be somehow connected to the Kremlin and they ought to be investigated.
This kind of paranoia that we hadn't seen for decades.
Before I get to your counsel, Mr. Goodman, talk about a couple of the Technical aspects of your case and where it is.
I just want to ask you one last question which is, or for now I mean, which is I've seen videos of you speaking before your arrest, before this indictment where you seemed to be almost anticipating That there would be accusations of this kind launched at you or that there would be some kind of case brought against you.
Is that a correct perception?
And did this indictment come as a big surprise to you to hear that you were actually being criminally accused by the Biden Justice Department of being agents of the Russian government?
It was surprising in terms of when it happened and how it happened, because it was a very violent attack on my home, threatening my life, threatening the life of my wife.
A tremendous amount of resources were stolen, properties damaged, and things like that.
And it was a pre-dawn raid, and so we were surprised by that.
But the history of our struggle, I mean, they raided my home at 5 o'clock a.m.
But when I came at their command out of my house and with my hands up as they commanded and faced armored vehicles and assault Weapons carrying camouflage donned men who were pointing these weapons and with the laser targeting devices bouncing off my chest.
What came to my mind was 1969 when, in December, when the FBI raided the home of, or they assisted the attack on the home of Fred Hampton in Chicago.
Uh, where he was assassinated.
And so I thought I was going to die when I walked out of that house.
So, uh, my point being is that the treatment of people like me, who, uh, Moved from a particular policy that has prevailed for a long time in this country, especially since people like King and Malcolm X and Fred Hampton and others have been assassinated.
There is that history and there is that tradition.
So I'm not surprised that U.S.
government attacked me.
We have an incredible program where we've done incredible projects, particularly in the city of St.
Louis, where, I mean, actual redeveloped much of the north side of St.
Louis, which is a predominantly African community that's been left to deteriorate and not just deteriorate, but a policy that they characterize as benign neglect has been imposed on this community.
And so this is The work that we've been doing and we knew that it wasn't something that the government was happy with, but that the population, the community was happy with.
So I'm not I'm not surprised.
And we expect, I guess, to be attacked by the government, but not because we violated a crime.
And this is the thing that makes this extraordinarily interesting to us.
Is that we find ourselves in a position of having to fight in defense of the U.S.
Constitution and the right to free speech against the very government that says it's about free speech and that's upholding the Constitution and against the institutions like FBI and the presidency of this country that's supposed to be upholding the Constitution.
I think they even have to take vows to that effect.
And so here we are, as an organization that has come to the conclusion some time ago that we have to be free from the colonial domination of the United States government, in a position fighting fiercely and have fought fiercely for the rights of free speech as according to the Constitution, freedom of assembly according to the Constitution, and that kind of thing.
So no, yes, I'm not shocked.
By the attack.
As I said, the way the attack occurred on this occasion was shocking, unexpected, and pre-dawn, my wife and I sitting up at the table, she and her being prepared to come to our headquarters here in St.
Louis to preside over a program that we are training black women as doulas to be able to help women and children have safe births in a city that has a situation where enough black babies die every year to fill 15 kindergarten classes.
And this is what we were preparing.
We were talking about this when this noise came out of the dark telling us to come up with our hands up and flashbang grenades exploding all around, ultimately coming into the house and things like that.
And then to be confronted with this armed force out there, that was a surprise.
I don't blame you.
I think that a lot of people don't understand the amount of force that the federal government brings without the slightest consideration of whether or not there's any actual threat posed.
This is not a case, even if you want to believe all the allegations, involving any accusation of violence or any kind of use of force.
It's clearly a political case at its core.
At best, a kind of argument that you violated technical parts of the law by failing to register as a foreign agent.
To treat American citizens that way is, I think, something that people don't quite realize how often it happens until they actually go through it, which is a great segue for me to ask.
You, Mr. Goodman, about this case.
There's so many parts of this criminal prosecution that are shocking to me, including the almost non-existent amount of media coverage that has been devoted to it.
We certainly covered it at the time when the indictment was issued.
I was happy to see Tucker Carlson do so as well, but very little else.
So before we get into the kind of substance of the case in the First Amendment, let me just ask you, there was an indictment.
You filed a motion to dismiss.
There's been some recent developments in the case.
Just talk to us about where this case is and where we can expect it to go over the next few months.
Well, they're being prosecuted under a rarely used statute, 18 U.S.C. 951.
951, which makes it a federal crime to act as a foreign, unregistered foreign agent in the United States.
And it's an unusual case in that the overt acts all involve political speech, giving speeches, publishing articles.
And the indictment alleges that after O'Malley took a trip to Russia in 2015, he became a Russian agent.
Now, 10 minutes of research as to his positions over the years will show that that's not true.
Their positions have not changed after the trip to Russia.
Even with respect to Russia, prior to 2015, you can look at their own newspaper called The Burning Spear.
They have speeches online.
Before 2015, his party opposed NATO expansion eastward after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
They opposed U.S.
interference in Ukraine and U.S.
involvement in the coup in 2014 that overthrew the democratically elected president and installed what the party called a U.S.-EU puppet regime.
And then after Russia invaded Ukraine, Omali and the party were quite vocal in opposing U.S.
funding that war and arming Ukraine.
And in fact, a few days after the invasion, and this is charged in the indictment as an overt act, O'Malley gave a speech where he described Ukraine as a country armed by the white colonizers, a place that Russia could not retreat anymore, and as a dagger pointed at the heart of Russia.
Five months later, the offices of the African People's Socialist Party are raided, his home is raided, the two co-defendants' homes are raided, Penny Hess and Jesse Neville.
And then in April of 2023, they're all indicted under this statute.
So yes, we filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that political expression is a core value protected by the First Amendment.
And these defendants are not Russian agents.
But of course, to get An indictment dismissed, you have to argue that even if the allegations are true, even if they were acting or speaking at the direction of Russia, this is still protected speech.
And on Friday, the magistrate issued a recommendation to deny the motion.
And basically what the magistrate found was that political speech done at, quote, the alleged direction of a foreign government is not protected speech.
In the motion, we relied on a 1937 case, Dijon versus Oregon, where the Supreme Court struck down the conviction of a man who was speaking on behalf of the Communist Party.
And the Supreme Court made it very clear in that case, they said, that the only question to ask is whether this speech, quote, transcends the bounds of freedom of speech, which the Constitution protects.
Is it criminal?
Is it inciting violence?
Is it obscene?
And if the content of the speech is protected, then the relationship of the speaker to the Communist Party is immaterial.
To get around Dijon, what the magistrate judge has found in Tampa is that this case, this prosecution is a content neutral prosecution.
In fact, they compared it to what's called time, place, and manner restrictions, where such as a town ordinance that says no loud noise after 10 o'clock.
According to the judge, the fact that O'Malley and the African People's Socialist Party are harsh critics of U.S. foreign policy has nothing to do with this case, and this is just an ordinary prosecution.
We have a hard time accepting that, and we will be filing an objection with the district court judge to the magistrate's recommendations.
So we're still fighting this motion and we don't have a trial date yet.
If it's denied, we will be going to trial in front of a jury.
Yeah, just for the audience, the judge in the ruling is called a magistrate.
They're not actually a full-fledged judge.
They're not appointed under Article 3 of the Constitution and confirmed by the Senate.
They basically are there to make A lot of discovery rulings and then recommendations to a district court judge to kind of narrow the issues.
I think in a case like this, the district court judge will rely on the ruling, but hopefully will also revisit it.
But it's not really a formal ruling until the district court adopts it.
And it sounds like since you're making these objections, that will be the next step.
This idea that this is content neutral, that they would do this to anybody, even if they were cheering and supporting Ukraine, is so laughable on its face.
You know, as someone who covers a lot of issues and not just covers them as a neutral reporter, but opines on them as well, I can tell you that every single time there's an issue, a contentious issue or a war involving a foreign country, if the country perceives that what you're arguing is in their interest, they will reach out to you.
They will encourage you to come visit them.
They will arrange trips for you to come there.
They will want to work with you because On your own, you're speaking in defense of that.
And of course, everybody knows that countries like Israel do that all the time.
They invite pro-Israel advocates to come and visit their country.
They fund all kinds of organizations in the United States, let alone everything that goes on a K Street where people are acting as lawyers or lobbyists or consultants on behalf of foreign governments and never registering.
It is an extremely rare thing to prosecute.
We saw this under the Trump era to rejuvenate this statute.
Let me, though, ask you about the central claim of the government, which is that in this case, it's not just that.
The organization had a relationship with Russia, but that the party actually received funding that according to the government can be traced to or linked to sources inside the Russian government.
Is that true?
And what are the alleged amounts that we're talking about?
Yes, well, the allegation and the indictment is that they received about $7,000 during their relationship with this Russian national over about a six-year period.
So I think you described it in one of your reports earlier as trivial.
I would agree with that.
And the money was specifically directed to support activist work, a four-city speaking tour.
So, yes, it's a trivial amount of money that's alleged.
And as you correctly state, Glenn, I mean, you look at what goes—I mean, you talk about the K Street lobbyists, but also the think tanks that receive tens of millions of dollars from Gulf states in order to advocate, publish articles, publish op-eds.
To advance the policy goals of the donors.
So why would they pick these folks in this case?
You know, such an incredibly weak case that these people are Russian agents.
So it's laughable to suggest that this has nothing to do with the message or the fact that they're criticizing the government or a war that the US had just begun to support.
Um, so...
Yeah, let me ask you as the last question.
The vast majority of criminal cases, both in the federal system and the state system, conclude not with a jury trial, but with a plea agreement between the government and the defendants.
Have there been plea discussions that you're able to talk about?
Is the view of the party that they will under no circumstances agree to plead guilty and will want to have their day in court?
What can you tell us about the nature of those kinds of discussions, if anything?
Yeah, none of the three defendants that have been charged have indicated any willingness to plead guilty in this case.
And, you know, if I could just mention one other thing about the indictment, that, you know, it also charges that they're spreading Russian propaganda and disinformation.
So that seems to completely contradict the finding that this is content neutral, this has nothing to do with speech.
And the one interesting thing is in the motion to dismiss, we cited, we looked at their speeches and cited articles by Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs that say the exact same thing in different ways, but basically the exact same thing about the United States involvement in Ukraine, which is
something that's named in the indictment, that our advocacy or our complaint that the United States was involved in provoking this war.
So we cited those articles, and the government's response was to say that, well, when we say disinformation, that doesn't mean it's not true.
It could still be true, but it's basically Russian tradecraft.
And they intend to call experts, basically Russia experts, to say that even though it's truthful information, it still benefits Russia, and we're still doing Russia's bidding.
So it's quite bizarre.
It's almost Alice in Wonderland to basically say disinformation.
If you look it up, it means false information, but not according to the government in this case.
Well, that's why I think this case is worth so much attention because that is becoming one of the most pervasive tactics.
Of course, this word disinformation is being used to censor the Internet.
And what it's really being used to do, above all else, is criminalize dissent.
Exactly as you said, the minute you oppose US involvement in the war in Ukraine, which obviously advances the interests of the Russian government, regardless of whether or not that's your intent, they regard you automatically as a Russian propagandist.
And if there's anyone who believes that this prosecution would have been brought if this party had instead of opposing US support for Ukraine, opposed US support for Ukraine, been cheering for US support for Ukraine.
I can't imagine the level of naivete and or dishonesty necessary to believe that.
Amali, just to conclude, you know, like I said, I mean, we covered your case.
I know a couple of other smaller independent media outlets covered your case.
I had talked to Tucker Carlson about your case and I was very glad to see, I believe he had you on the show, and he was pretty clear that he was horrified by this prosecution, very much saw it as an attack on the First Amendment.
He said so subsequently as well.
But beyond that, has there been Much media coverage.
It's interesting, I think, you know, you're kind of in this weird place because you largely have been identified as a left-wing party.
There may be people on the right kind of unwilling to defend you, even though it's the Biden Justice Department, and even though they could easily be targeted by similar theories.
And then you have a lot of people on the left who are weary to criticize it, because to do so is to criticize the Biden Justice Department.
So where has the media coverage been in terms of this prosecution against you?
It has not been.
It has not been that much.
That's one of the reasons we're glad to be here with you.
We were glad to see Tucker Carson mention it.
We have seen some coverage from some other kinds of independent platforms that's not typically recognized as mainstream, etc.
But the media, it seems to me, Uh, either intentionally or otherwise collaborating with this entire process.
And it's really interesting to see much of what is often characterized as leftist or left-wing media.
Not all of it, but when I say characterized as leftist or left-wing media, I think Much by itself.
They're not forces that I would necessarily characterize as left-wing, but that they seem to collaborate, and others have been made fearful themselves because of what is happening to us.
And that's one of the issues that we have, that it's a very slippery slope, that this has a chilling effect on free speech.
There are even some things that we don't talk about anymore, because if they can concoct this tale that they have already, and threaten me with a life sentence, which a 15-year prison sentence is all about.
If they can do what they've done, take my passport, make it necessary for me to report on a weekly basis to something like a parole officer who can come to my home anytime they want to, this is a chilling effect on a lot of forces, that media.
But there has been media support from some independent sources that's been good, but nothing that reaches the magnitude of the traditional establishment media.
Yeah, our friends at the Revolutionary Blackout Network have covered it, and we've had them on our show a lot, and they cover it a lot on their network.
It's unfortunate that there hasn't been More attention either from the left or the right because one of the things I try and do is convince both sides that when you see a precedent, even if it's being used against somebody that you're not inclined to defend politically, you ought to think about how that precedent probably can and will be used against you and your allies.
So just along those lines, my last question, I don't know what your relationship is with your counsel.
I know that federal court litigation, criminal litigation is very expensive, especially to bring it to a trial or anything like that.
Is there a defense fund that you have or how else can other people help and contribute to your party as you navigate this criminal proceeding?
Thank you so much for raising that.
People should go to handsoffuhuru.org, handsoffuhuru.org.
The issue of lawyers and what we're going to have to spend, witnesses and things like that is very expensive.
I'm very happy to say That attorney Goodman here is working on this case pro bono.
He's been able to do it pro bono.
He's a firm advocate of the free speech and that's the basis for his jumping into this with us as well.
So that's hands off uhuru.org.
Well, we will definitely put that on the screen when we air this.
We will encourage people to support it because, first of all, Mr. Goodman, just let me congratulate you.
I think when a lawyer works on a case pro bono because of the vital rights that are at stake, they are really doing something heroic and noble, and I think everybody owes their gratitude to you.
society does for the work that you're doing.
But I know there are a lot of expenses and other sorts of costs that are associated with being criminally prosecuted, including cost and the like.
So we certainly hope that anyone who believes in these core free speech rights and understand how they're being attacked will support it.
And we definitely intend to continue to cover this case as it proceeds, hopefully to dismissal very shortly.
Thank you so much, both of you, for taking the time to talk to us tonight.
And we will, I'm sure, be speaking again.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
Have a great evening.
Have a great evening.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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