TIMESTAMPS: Intro (13:42) Media Distorts SCOTUS Ruling (20:22) Smoke-Filled Rooms (1:19:12) Outro (1:46:49) - - - Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community - - - Follow Glenn: Twitter Instagram Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Good evening, it's Wednesday, July 3rd. | |
| 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 top story dominating our politics, for obviously understandable reasons, is the massive multipronged pressure being applied by multiple power centers to force the sitting president, Joe Biden, out of the election And possibly even out of the White House despite his obvious and genuine desire to remain. | |
| We'll examine the various democratic implications of all of that in a few minutes, but before we get to that, the Supreme Court last week issued a ruling regarding the scope of presidential immunity relating to criminal prosecution in the context of the attempt by Jack Smith and the Justice Department to prosecute Donald Trump for his behavior after the 2020 election. | |
| Now, this is the first time in history that the Supreme Court, or any court, had to address this specific question. | |
| And the reason for that is an obvious fact, namely never before in our nation's history has any president been criminally prosecuted either during their presidency or after. | |
| We'll leave it to you to ask whether that's because no American president prior to Trump has ever violated the law while in office. | |
| Or if this is yet another instance of long-standing and unquestioning American traditions and norms being disregarded in the singular name of Donald Trump. | |
| Whatever is true about that, it is vital to engage in a sober, careful, and accurate analysis of what this ruling actually said. | |
| Both because it is an important decision in its own right, but also because I have rarely, if ever, seen a Supreme Court decision be so deliberately distorted, misrepresented, exaggerated, and hysterically maligned as the one issued by the court last week in Trump versus the United States. | |
| Now, I say that not because I am a fan of or supporter of presidential immunity. | |
| The exact opposite is true. | |
| One could say without exaggeration that opposition to presidential immunity under the criminal law was one of the two or three issues on which I focused most during the first decade of my journalism. | |
| In fact, it was one of the reasons I started writing about politics in the first place. | |
| In fact, I wrote two books. | |
| My first one in 2006, and especially the one in 2011, Which were devoted to denouncing the evils and dangers of immunizing the president and other high officials from the mandates of the law to which all other citizens are subjected. | |
| But that's exactly my point. | |
| To hear the liberal punditocracy and the corporate media tell it, one would believe that presidents, before last week, were held fully accountable under the law in the exact same way that every other citizen is. | |
| And that presidents always have been held accountable for their crimes. | |
| All this noble fairy tale about the American justice came to an abrupt and tragic end when a fanatically conservative Supreme Court turned centuries of tradition and precedent and uplifting American tradition on its head solely in order to protect Donald Trump both from his past crimes as well as to enable future crimes he wants to commit if he returns to the White House. | |
| That really is the dominant narrative. | |
| To call that narrative grossly misleading and an insult to our intelligence is to understate its transgressions. | |
| There has, for decades, been a virtually universal consensus among Washington elites in both parties and in the media that a president should never, must never, be prosecuted for any crimes they commit while in office. | |
| In fact, anytime anyone proposed over the last several decades that presidents be prosecuted for the crimes they committed, both media and political elites have acted with horror, insisting that it is only in third world banana republics, as they call them, that presidents are prosecuted by successor governments. | |
| Indeed, what the Supreme Court ruled last week bears almost no resemblance to what has become accepted dogma about what the court did. | |
| At worst, one can say that the Supreme Court last week merely formalized a form of presidential immunity that, in practice, has, for better or worse, and I think it's for the worse, dominated and governed Washington for decades, if not longer. | |
| But the reality is that the court's ruling was actually far more partial, nuanced, and ambiguous than almost all media accounts and hysterical denouncements have suggested. | |
| In fact, it's more nuanced than the way Washington has treated presidential immunity for the last several decades. | |
| And we'll demonstrate why that is in the case with a careful analysis of what the court did. | |
| And did not say. | |
| Now before we get to all of that, including the issue with Joe Biden being forced out of the race, a few programming notes. | |
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| For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. | |
| System Update. | |
| System Update. | |
| The distortions of the corporate media are often so extreme, so glaring, so obvious, that one gets the feeling, if you see it, that you're almost living in this parallel universe, if you see it, that you're almost living in this parallel universe, this world that is completely different than | |
| They're describing one obvious example is the way in which so many Americans have watched Joe Biden over the last several years and concluded that he's not just too old to be the president, but that he obviously suffering from cognitive decline. | |
| And then the media, on the other hand, with very few exceptions, We're insisting that this was a lie. | |
| This was a right-wing smear. | |
| Anyone who was saying this doesn't understand the reality of Joe Biden, that he's as alert and engaged and in command of his critical faculties as he ever has been. | |
| Even Joe Scarborough, according to Joe Scarborough, he's now more engaged than he ever has been before. | |
| And so, so often you listen to the claims that they're making And compare it to what you're seeing and what you know to be true. | |
| And it's hard to express just how wide the gap is between the claims that they're making and the reality as you see it. | |
| And I can't really recall many cases where that has been more true for me than listening to the fallout from the Supreme Court's decision last week that for the first time had to decide the scope of presidential immunity under the criminal law given the fact that Donald Trump is the first ever president in American history to be criminally prosecuted for acts that he undertook while serving as president and so | |
| Obviously, there was never a decision like this before because no president had ever been prosecuted, and thus the court was never faced with the question. | |
| But there were many other similar questions that the court was faced with regarding the scope of presidential immunity. | |
| And over and over and over, over centuries and decades, the court has repeatedly held that because of the nature of the presidency, given in the scope of the constitutional system that we have, Presidents are in fact immune in many ways from the law in ways that ordinary citizens are not. | |
| Now, it's not just the fact that you can agree or disagree with the court's ruling, and we'll get to that in just a second, but the narrative that we were fed is an absolute fairy tale about American history and American political life. | |
| To listen to Democrats and their media allies tell it You would think that presidents have a long history in the United States of being criminally accountable for the illegal acts they undertook in office, that it has always been the case that presidents enjoy no immunity that any other citizen of the United States doesn't enjoy, and that all of a sudden, out of the blue, a conservative fanatical court driven by ideological and political considerations to protect | |
| Donald Trump invented out of whole cloth some kind of new immunity that never previously existed. | |
| It's the exact opposite of American history, of the longstanding traditions and ethos that have governed Washington. | |
| And beyond that, it goes without saying that this court ruling of presidential immunity does not only apply to Donald Trump, who, by the way, is not currently the president. | |
| It would protect in exactly the same way all future presidents. | |
| And one of the claims that liberals have been making is that one of the things President Trump intends to do that no one but a dictator would ever do is weaponize the Justice Department in order to go after his political enemies, including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and people who worked in the executive branch. | |
| And as a result, this decision that was issued would not only protect Donald Trump and the current indictments against him, but as the court pointed out, it would also protect, for example, Joe Biden in the event that Donald Trump tried to prosecute him for acts undertaken while Biden was president. | |
| For example, you can make an easy argument that under the law, the president is duty bound to enforce the law, to execute the laws of Congress. | |
| And yet Biden has failed to do that by refusing to enforce, say, laws governing admission to the United States by allowing a virtually open border. | |
| And you can imagine President Trump deciding, or someone in the Justice Department of President Trump deciding, that they believe Joe Biden is criminally responsible and liable for that sort of an act, and as a result would want to prosecute him for that. | |
| And the presidential immunity that this court not invented, but basically just formalized, it's always existed in Washington, would not only benefit Donald Trump, but all other future presidents who may be held criminally accountable in that way for acts they undertook in office, including by Donald Trump, which liberals say is something Trump very much wants to do. | |
| Now, just to give you an example of the sorts of things that have been said about this court ruling, the absolutely unhinged and hysterical claims that really bear no resemblance either to the realities of American history or to the court ruling itself, | |
| Let's begin first with the president himself, Joe Biden, out to prove that he is an extremely cogent and alert president, as evidenced by his ability to stand tall and read from a teleprompter. | |
| Here's the statement that he issued about the court ruling on July 1st. | |
| This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America. | |
| Each of us is equal before the law. | |
| No one is above the law, not even the President of the United States. | |
| With today's Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity, that fundamentally changed. | |
| For all practical purposes, today's decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what a president can do. | |
| This is a fundamentally new principle, and it's a dangerous precedent. | |
| Because the power of the office will no longer be constrained by the law, even including the Supreme Court of the United States. | |
| The only limits will be self-imposed by the president alone. | |
| Virtually everything in that statement, it will come as no surprise, is completely and provably false. | |
| The idea that this was invented out of whole cloth When it has been the prevailing ethos in Washington for as long as I can remember that presidents should never be criminally prosecuted, that only third world and republic countries do that, is something that everybody in Washington has affirmed forever and beyond that, He just completely falsely describes the scope of the Supreme Court order. | |
| It does not say, in fact, it goes out of its way to emphasize that it does not believe that there are no circumstances in which a president can be held criminally responsible for acts undertaken while in office. | |
| And that's the reason the Supreme Court did not dismiss the indictments or prosecutions against Donald Trump. | |
| It instead sent the indictments back to the lower courts in order to apply the principles that the court announced for when presidents can be criminally prosecuted. | |
| And there are many categories for when that could happen, as the court laid out, and when they cannot be. | |
| Now, again, I'm not defending this Supreme Court ruling. | |
| Quite the contrary. | |
| As I said, I've devoted a good part of my career to denouncing the dangers of immunizing presidents from the criminal law. | |
| In fact, That was one of my major concerns with the War on Terror and things like major radical theories of executive power before that that helped immunize Richard Nixon. | |
| And after that, the Reagan and Bush officials who engage in crimes under the Iran-Contra Affair, and then the War on Terror crimes of George Bush and Barack Obama. | |
| And you can go back and read, as we're going to show you, media accounts at the time saying how important it is never to allow successor administrations to prosecute prior presidents for the acts they undertook in their office of president, because to do so would ensure a destructive cycle of prosecutions, where every time one president leaves office, the next time there's a president of another party, they will then prosecute him. | |
| This has been the idea in Washington forever. | |
| And in fact, this ethos that has governed Washington has been far more absolute in terms of the need to immunize presidents than the Supreme Court actually ruled in its decision. | |
| Here, unsurprisingly, is an equally, if not more, hysterical description of the court by the usually sober and very restrained Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said the following, quote, The Supreme Court has become consumed by a corruption crisis beyond its control. | |
| Today's ruling represents an assault on American democracy. | |
| It is up to Congress to defend our nation from this authoritarian capture I intend on filing articles of impeachment under our return. | |
| Now, just by the way, this idea that there are six conservative justices on the Supreme Court who are united ideologically without any regard to legal precedent to destroy our country by ruling in favor of Donald Trump and this idea that there are six conservative justices on the Supreme Court who are united ideologically without any Absolutely. | |
| As we have proven to you and demonstrated many times, at least three of the judges on the court who are regarded as part of the conservative faction, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, frequently side with the three liberals on the court on crucial cases. | |
| Remember, it was John Roberts who saved the constitutionality of President Biden's Obamacare, something that had been a major objective of conservative judicial activists for a long time. | |
| And just last week, Amy Coney Barrett joined the liberals in order to defend the theories that were used to criminally prosecute nonviolent January 6th defendants, while Justice Kataji Brown-Jackson joined the conservatives in order to Defend the January 6th defendants. | |
| And even in this case alone, Amy Coney Barrett wrote a separate concurrence disagreeing strongly with a lot of what the majority ruled, even though she ultimately agreed with the outcome. | |
| There's this constant attempt to suggest that this is just a monolithic court only pursuing political ends, when in fact you can see in so many instances, including this case, When that's so plainly not the case. | |
| Here just one more very unsurprising example of an absolute hysteric who screeches in the most partisan way possible. | |
| The Justice Correspondent for the nation, Elie Mystal, a favorite of Joy Reid and other MSNBC hosts. | |
| He said on July 1st, 2024, the president can now officially assassinate you. | |
| The president can now assassinate you officially. | |
| Under this new standard, a president can go on a four to eight year crime spree and then retire from public life, never to be held accountable. | |
| Now, number one, that is an absolute lie about what the court ruled. | |
| But number two, this was long true well before this court decision. | |
| One of the major controversies of the Obama administration, as most people have forgotten, is that the Obama administration actually claimed the power, the authority, the right To target American citizens with assassination, using drones as long as they were on foreign soil where they say that justice could not reach them. | |
| And they didn't just claim that right in theory, but they actually put it into practice when they assassinated the American-born citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen. | |
| The ACLU went to court before the Obama administration did that. | |
| Demanding that the Obama administration should have to explain why they thought he should be murdered and offer evidence for his guilt. | |
| And the Obama administration got the courts to dismiss it on the grounds of national security. | |
| And then the Obama administration went and murdered Anwar Awlaki. | |
| And a lot of people believed, and I was certainly one of them, that Obama could be criminally prosecuted for that act. | |
| But the Consensus in Washington was killing Anwar al-Awlaki on the suspicion that he was a terrorist, on the accusation that he was a terrorist, with no due process, even though he was an American citizen. | |
| Was part of Obama's duties and responsibilities and powers as president, and therefore he was immunized from the criminal law for having done so. | |
| This has long been the principle that has governed how presidents have been treated. | |
| Again, if you go back to the first five to ten years of my career as a journalist, I began writing in 2005. | |
| Largely in response to the assault on civil liberties and due process rights during the war on terror carried out first by George Bush and Dick Cheney and then not only extended but often strengthened by the Obama administration in ways that I just explained. | |
| You will see that a common theme, probably the most central theme of everything I was writing then, was that we now have a system where presidents are not subject to the law but reside above it in a way that makes them kings and monarchs. | |
| And because I was writing this about the Bush and Cheney administration, almost every Democrat and leftist that I know who read my work were highly supportive of it, cheerlead it, were responsible for the growth of my platform, because that was the common view. | |
| Going back to the 70s with Nixon and the 80s with Reagan, and then into the war on terror that one of the problems with American political life is that presidents are outside of the rule of law. | |
| Something everyone decided to pretend was just invented and only started last week when the Supreme Court issued this ruling. | |
| Just to give you a few examples, here's an article I wrote in December of 2005, barely two months after I began writing about politics. | |
| The title was, Do Bush Defenders Place Any Limits on His Quote, Wartime Power? | |
| And here's part of what I wrote. | |
| Quote, virtually no serious Bush defenders claim any longer that the administration's warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens was authorized by the FISA law. | |
| To the contrary, FISA expressly prohibited such surveillance. | |
| Thus, to defend George Bush, they must literally claim that the president has the right during, quote, wartime to violate congressional statutes which relate to national security. | |
| On its face, this theory that Bush is a wartime president has the right to break the law, Squirrelly contradicts their insistence that they are not advocating for monarchical rule. | |
| Once you advocate a theory that authorizes a president, even during times of an undeclared and endless war, to violate any congressional laws he wants, as long as he says, with no judicial review possible, that doing so is for the sake of our security, what possible checks or limitations on presidential power are left? | |
| That was the view of the American left, of the liberals, of the Democratic Party, and a large part of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, which was that because of the war on terror, we have created a system where presidents now have embraced a theory of Article 2 presidential power so radical and so extreme that they are immunized from the law, that they're no longer bound or checked by the law, that they basically have the powers of a monarch. | |
| That wasn't something that they only started saying last week as they're now pretending. | |
| Here's another article written two weeks later, which was when I was just writing on a blog, a free blog, called Unclaimed Territory. | |
| This is in December of 2005, and the headline was, Bush's Unchecked Executive Power vs. the Founding Principles of the United States. | |
| And here's what I wrote, quote, underlying all of the excesses and abuses of executive power claimed by the Bush administration is a theory of absolute unchecked power vested in the presidency, which literally could not be any more at odds with the central founding principles of this country. | |
| January 6, 2006, I wrote an article, the headline of which was an ideology of lawlessness. | |
| And I wrote the following quote, what we have in our federal government are not individual acts of law breaking or isolated scandals of illegality, but instead a culture and an ideology of lawlessness. | |
| It cannot be emphasized enough that since September 11th, the Bush administration has claimed the power to act without any constraints of law or checks from the Congress or the courts. | |
| It is a definitively authoritarian and lawless ideology that has truly expressly become the governing philosophy of George Bush and his administration. | |
| And it is not something the administration has merely embraced in theory. | |
| It has been aggressively exercising these limitless powers. | |
| Now, while I was at the Guardian, during the Obama administration in 2012, the Obama Justice Department announced Even though Obama ran on a platform in 2008 of promising to criminally investigate whether crimes were committed by the Bush and Cheney administration and the CIA during the war on terror, things like torturing innocent people, detaining and kidnapping people from the streets of Europe and sending them with no due process to Syria and to Egypt to be tortured and interrogated. | |
| Spying on American citizens without the warrants required by law? | |
| Despite promising all that, the Obama Justice Department, in fact, did everything possible to shield the Bush administration from any form of accountability. | |
| And the final straw, the final nail in the coffin, happened in August of 2012. | |
| And there you see the article I wrote for The Guardian. | |
| Obama's Justice Department grants final immunity to Bush's CIA tortures. | |
| And this is what I wrote. | |
| Quote, the Obama administration's aggressive, full-scale whitewashing of the war on terror crimes committed by Bush officials is now complete. | |
| Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the closing without charges of the only two cases under investigation relating to the U.S. | |
| torture program, one that resulted in the 2002 death of an Afghan detainee at a secret CIA prison near Kabul, and the other, the 2003 death of an Iraqi citizen while in CIA custody at Abu Ghraib. | |
| This decision, says the New York Times Friday, quote, eliminates the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the CIA. | |
| In sum, the Obama administration has been desperate to ensure that there will be no accountability or even meaningful investigations ever take place. | |
| And then I said, quote, that is almost certainly due to the fact that numerous high-level members of Obama's own party were so complicit in these crimes. | |
| But at least equally important is this remarkable, and it turns out prescient, observation from a New York Times article by Charlie Savage in December 2008 on the prospect of torture investigations aimed at Bush officials. | |
| Listen to what the New York Times said in 2008 about why it was highly unlikely that there would ever be Prosecutions of Bush officials or members of the Bush administration by the Obama administration. | |
| This is what the New York Times said. | |
| And this is actually what has governed Washington for decades, long before the Supreme Court ruling last week. | |
| Quote, because every president eventually leaves office, incoming chief executives have an incentive to quash their investigations into their predecessors tenure. | |
| In other words, Obama is motivated to shield Bush officials from accountability for their crimes in the hope that once Obama leaves office, he too will be gifted identical immunity from the rule of law. | |
| This is how Washington has worked for decades. | |
| And in fact, the Supreme Court, when justifying its immunity ruling, said the reason they were doing it, aside from their view that the Constitution requires it, was not to protect Donald Trump, But instead they said exactly what the New York Times said 15 years ago, which was that it's the only way to avoid a series of criminal prosecutions of every president by the successor administration. | |
| And that has been why presidents have always refused to hold previous presidents accountable, even when they committed crimes, because it's an unspoken and implicit agreement among Washington elites that as long as one party never prosecutes the other, the other party won't prosecute them either. | |
| It has taken American political elites and placed them above the law, and that has been true for decades. | |
| That's why no president was ever criminally prosecuted until Donald Trump. | |
| Not because our American presidents have been so noble and respectful of the law that they would never take an inch outside the law until big bad Donald Trump broke laws? | |
| That's not the reason. | |
| This is the first time it's happened. | |
| The reason it's only happening now is because like so many things in the name of stopping Trump, every one of our norms and our traditions and all sorts of views and traditions and ethos that govern Washington, including ones that I disagree with and dislike, have not been tossed out. | |
| but have been suspended in a one-time only exemption in order to get Donald Trump. | |
| That's true of media practices that have changed only for Trump. | |
| It's true for legal theories that have been applied only to Trump, including the things for which he was indicted. | |
| Now, to just give you, and this is why I said I feel like I'm living in a paralleled world. | |
| In 2009, I had a debate with Chuck Todd, who at the time was with NBC News. | |
| He still is. | |
| Because Chuck Todd had gone on there and said, look, this is the beginning of the Obama administration. | |
| He said, it may be very well the case... | |
| That people inside the Bush administration committed crimes and the things they did as part of the war on terror, because a lot of them remember at the CIA didn't only follow the Justice Department guidelines for what they could do, but many exceeded it by a large amount and the Bush administration knew about it and approved of it. | |
| Things that even the Bush Justice Department thought were crimes. | |
| And yet at the beginning of the Obama administration, Obama announced, contrary to his constant vows during the campaign, that he would immunize all Bush administration officials and the CIA and not allow any prosecutions of them. | |
| And I'm telling you that at the time, virtually every journalist who worked in mainstream media and corporate media, Celebrated that, and they said, of course we can't have prosecutions of Bush and Cheney and the CIA, because we're the United States. | |
| Only banana republics have these sorts of things. | |
| Our presidents are not prosecuted for the things they do in office, even if it's ultimately determined that it was illegal. | |
| That has been the consensus view in Washington for decades. | |
| The Supreme Court decision last week only formalized it. | |
| And again, did so in a less absolute way than people have long been arguing. | |
| So I want to just give you this glimpse after I wrote a column heavily criticizing Chuck Todd. | |
| To his credit, he agreed to a debate about that, even though at the time I was barely in media. | |
| And here's a little clip of the back and forth we had about whether or not presidents should be immunized from criminal law. | |
| While in office. | |
| Actually, I think we played this clip recently, so I'm just going to read you the transcript. | |
| The Huffington Post, there you can see published part of the transcript. | |
| The Huffington Post title was, Chuck Todd and Glenn Greenwald Debate Torture in the Media. | |
| And here was the back and forth debate we had. | |
| This is what I asked him. | |
| I said, okay, let me ask you a question about that then. | |
| If a president can find, as a president always will be able to find, some low-level functionary in the Justice Department, like a John Yoo, to write a memo authorizing that whatever it is the president wants to do, and you say it's legal, then you think the president ought to be immune from prosecution whenever he breaks the law, as long as he has a permission slip from the Justice Department. | |
| I mean, that's the argument that's being made. | |
| Don't you think that's extremely dangerous? | |
| And Chuck Todd responded and he said, that could be dangerous. | |
| Well, let me tell you this. | |
| Is it healthy for our reputation around the world? | |
| And this, I think, is that what we have to do, what other countries do more often than not, so-called democracies that struggle with their democracy, and sit there and always put the previous administration on trial. | |
| You don't think that we start having retributions on this going forward? | |
| So he's saying, we're the United States, we don't prosecute our prior presidents. | |
| That's only done in those crappy countries that barely can hold on to a democracy because they're constantly engaged in retributive justice, where one president leaves office and then is immediately imprisoned and prosecuted. | |
| And then he goes on and says, look, I am no way excusing torture. | |
| I'm not excusing torture, and I bristle at the attack when it comes on this specific issue. | |
| I think the political reality is, and I understand where you're coming from, you're just saying that just because something's politically tough doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. | |
| That's, I don't disagree with you, from 30,000 feet, and that is an idealistic view of this thing. | |
| Do you see how patronizing he's being? | |
| He's saying, like, OK, it's a nice idea. | |
| It's very ideal that we should hold presidents accountable to the criminal law. | |
| And then he went on to explain to me, then you have the realistic view of how this town actually works, saying, I know how Washington really works. | |
| And what would happen, and is it good for our reputation around the world, if we're essentially putting on trial the previous administration? | |
| We would look at another country doing that and say, geez, boy, this is... And then he goes on to say... So just put this in context, is we had all last week people saying, I'll bet you even Chuck Todd said it, that The Supreme Court decision is an incredibly dangerous attack on democracy because it means for the first time that presidents are immunized from the rule of law. | |
| When in reality, and Chuck Todd was saying what every single journalist in Washington was saying when Obama immunized Bush officials, he was saying that Is it good for our reputation around the world if we're essentially putting on trial the previous administration? | |
| That this is not something that we do in the United States. | |
| And he is exactly right in saying that, that that has been and long was Now all of this is what caused me to write my book in 2011, the title of which was With Liberty and Justice for Some. | |
| out of self-interest that the New York Times said that they have an implicit agreement that presidents will never be prosecuted once they leave office because that will protect the leadership of the political class of both political parties. | |
| Now, all of this is what caused me to write my book in 2011, the title of which was With Liberty and Justice for Some. | |
| And the whole point of this book was to contest the idea that it is good for our country that presidents should be held immune from the criminal law. | |
| I've been arguing against this for a long time precisely because it wasn't just something that was created by the Supreme Court last Friday. | |
| It's something that has long been the truth and the way that the United States operates. | |
| And I can show you many, many passages from this book where I talk about how we've made presidents into kings, going back all the way to the pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford, which almost every journalist in Washington stood and applauded and cheered on the grounds that it wouldn't be good for our country to prosecute a prior president. | |
| Same thing when George Bush 41 pardoned every official in the Reagan and Bush administration who had participated in the crimes of the Iran-Contra scandal. | |
| Just to remind you, the Congress had enacted a law prohibiting the executive branch from sending any money to the Contras in Nicaragua to help overthrow that government. | |
| And the White House officials decided to ignore and violate that Congressional law. | |
| And in order to get the money that Congress wouldn't give them, they sold secretly highly sophisticated weapons to Iran, armed Iran with extremely sophisticated missiles and weapons. | |
| This was the post-revolution Iranian regime, the one that's still in place. | |
| And they then took that money and sent it to the consuls in Nicaragua to arm them in violation of the law that Congress had passed. | |
| It was clearly a prosecutable offense. | |
| They had a special counsel that was prosecuting it. | |
| And George Bush 41, upon being elected, pardoned every single close associate that he was working with in the Reagan administration. | |
| He was the vice president, the Reagan administration heavily involved in these affairs, and that ended the criminal investigation, including protecting George Bush 41 himself. | |
| And almost every columnist and every journalist in the Washington Post and the New York Times, remember this is obviously before the internet but also before cable, you had just ABC, NBC, CBS, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, that was about it. | |
| Virtually unanimous that this is a good thing for American public life because we don't want to see prior presidents being held criminally accountable. | |
| So to pretend now suddenly that the history of the United States was exactly the opposite And that we've always held presidents to the same standard of the law as every other citizen is nauseating to watch people pretending, including the very people who for decades have been arguing exactly the opposite. | |
| Now, just to give you an extent of how far this has gone, here was the very pro-Democrat, pro-liberal talking points memo in 2012 mocking | |
| The theory that the Obama Justice Department used to explain why President Obama had the right to target American citizens for death by drone, for assassination, without any due process, without any presentation of any evidence of their guilt to a court, even though the ACLU argued before this happened that the president should be required to do so. | |
| And the headline was Eric Holder says executive branch reviews of targeted killings count as due process. | |
| In other words, as long as the White House meets in secret and decides an American citizen should die, that's all the due process that you need. | |
| You could have easily argued But that was a criminal offense and yet nobody thought Obama should be prosecuted for that because people said that was within the scope of his acts official acts as president in carrying out the war on terror and even if it was a crime he could not be prosecuted for it. | |
| Here in the equally pro-democratic outlet Slate Here you see the headline in March 2012, Not So Innocent Abroad. | |
| Eric Holder says the United States can kill American citizens overseas and he doesn't think he should even have to explain why. | |
| All right, now let's get to the court's ruling itself. | |
| So now that you see this history here. | |
| Obviously there was an attempt to claim that the Supreme Court majority, these conservative fanatics who are politically motivated in the court, invented out of nowhere this new, this brand new notion that presidents are not subject to the law like everybody else, but somehow occupy a special place that give them a certain form of immunity. | |
| No court had ever ruled this before. | |
| This was completely invented. | |
| It's a total attack on American democracy, a complete subversion of everything we've, et cetera, et cetera. | |
| Here's a U.S. | |
| Supreme Court case from 1982, and this is one of the cases on which last week's ruling relied, called Nixon v. Fitzgerald. | |
| About whether the president at the time, Richard Nixon, could be sued after he left for acts he undertook in office. | |
| Specifically, a plaintiff in a lawsuit claimed that he was a whistleblower and had been fired illegally by the former president, and the court had to decide whether a president can be held liable for civil damages just like any other American citizen could be for the acts he undertook in office. | |
| And the majority that issued the ruling and said the president was immune was not full of conservatives protecting Richard Nixon. | |
| It had some of the most liberal judges in the majority, including people like John Paul Stevens, arguably the most left-wing judge on the Supreme Court in the last 40 years. | |
| And I just want to give you a sense of what this court in 1982 says so you can compare it to what you've been hearing over the last five days about how unprecedented last week's ruling was. | |
| Quote, the plaintiff in this lawsuit seeks relief in civil damages from a former president of the United States. | |
| The claim rests on actions allegedly taken in the former president's official capacity during his tenure in office. | |
| The issue before us is the scope of the immunity Possessed by the President of the United States. | |
| So, they're acknowledging the presumption, the premise of this court is that the President of the United States possesses immunity as a result of being Presidents that no other citizen has and what they have to decide is what the scope of that immunity is. | |
| This was more than 40 years ago, before anyone ever thought of Donald Trump being near the White House. | |
| And the court went on, quote, the court, this court consistently has recognized that government officials are entitled to some form of immunity from suits for civil damages. | |
| Considerations of, quote, public policy and convenience therefore compelled a judicial recognition of immunity from suits arising from official acts. | |
| Quote, in exercising the functions of his office, the head of an executive department, keeping within the limits of his authority, should not be under any apprehension that the motives that control his official conduct may at any time become the subject of inquiry in a civil suit for damages. | |
| It would seriously cripple the proper and effective administration of public affairs as entrusted to the executive branch of the government if he were subjected to any such restraint. | |
| And that's quoting a prior precedent. | |
| And then the court in 1982 went on to say, quote, applying the principles of our cases to claims of this kind, we hold that petitioner as a former president of the United States, Is entitled to absolute immunity from damages, liability predicated on his official acts. | |
| Absolute immunity, said the court. | |
| And it then went on to say that we consider this immunity a functionality mandated incident of the president's unique office rooted in the constitutional tradition of the separation of powers and supported by our history. | |
| And then they quote, a very storied and honored and old Justice, Justice Story. | |
| And they say, Justice Stories analysis remains persuasive. | |
| Quote, there are incidental powers belonging to the executive department, which are necessarily implied from the nature of the functions which are confided to it. | |
| Among these must necessarily be included the power to perform them. | |
| The president cannot therefore be liable to arrest, imprisonment, or detention while he is in discharge of the duties of his office. | |
| So let's just say again that although this case is a case about whether the president can be liable for civil damages, not for criminality as the court last week had to rule, the longstanding precedent that this court is citing from two centuries ago | |
| says that because of the need to have a president act robustly and without fear and the exercise of his responsibilities and the official duties that he has, it is necessary that the president cannot be liable to arrest, imprisonment, or detention while he is in the discharge of the duties of his office. | |
| So very contrary to the notion that this court just invented some shockingly authoritarian and un-American principle of the law out of nowhere simply to protect Donald Trump, to enable him to commit crimes, to be free of crimes he committed in the past, and to enable him to commit crimes in the future with no fear of prosecution, this has been a debate the scope of presidential immunity that has been going on inside the highest levels of our court system ever since the Constitution was enacted. | |
| And go and look at any of the narrative that has been presented by the media, including supposed experts, many of whom these experts have completely politicized their expertise over the last eight years to get on cable by becoming experts who feed the cable narrative, the cable audience, whatever they want to hear about Trump. | |
| Just look at this. | |
| This is a Supreme Court case from 1982, quoting a Justice of the Court from two centuries earlier saying exactly what liberals have spent the last six days insisting was completely foreign and unknown to our tradition. | |
| The Court went on, quote, the existence of alternative remedies and deterrence establishes that absolute immunity will not place the President, quote, above the law. | |
| For the president, as for judges and prosecutors, absolute immunity merely precludes a particular private remedy for alleged misconduct in order to advance compelling public ends. | |
| All right, so that's the context, both the actual practical precedent and tradition of the United States when it comes to presidential immunity, as well as the legal precedent on which this court relied. | |
| Now, it is true, again, that this is the first time a Supreme Court has ruled. | |
| That a president has immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts undertaken in office, but the only reason that this is the first time they've ruled this is because it's the first time they've been able to rule on this question since no previous president has ever faced prosecution. | |
| And that's because, it's not because no president has previously broken the law, but because of the gentleman's agreement that presidents should never be prosecuted once they leave office. | |
| So let me just give you a few key passages from the majority's ruling, just so you understand. | |
| You can just decide for yourself. | |
| Just listen to what they actually ruled, and you will see how radically different it is from what has been claimed. | |
| There you see the official title of the court. | |
| It's Trump versus the United States. | |
| And the ruling begins, quote, this case is the first criminal prosecution in our nation's history of a former president for actions taken during his presidency. | |
| We are called upon to consider whether and under what circumstances such a prosecution may proceed. | |
| Doing so requires careful assessment of the scope of presidential power under the Constitution. | |
| We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of presidential power requires that a former president have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. | |
| Some immunity. | |
| I've seen Joe Biden, I've seen members of Congress, I've seen supposed experts go on television and say that what the court ruled is that there is nothing a president can do in office, including order the military to go kill and murder political opponents because the court gave quote, absolute immunity for anything a president does while in office. | |
| That is an absolute lie. | |
| They said there are principles that give them some immunity. | |
| Based on what those acts were, how rooted they are in the Constitution. | |
| And in this case, as I said, they did not dismiss the indictments against Trump because they didn't hold that Trump can't be prosecuted. | |
| They ruled that before Trump can be prosecuted, courts have to determine whether what Trump is alleged to have done was within the scope of his official duties as defined narrowly by this court ruling. | |
| Again, you don't have to agree with the court. | |
| I don't agree with the court. | |
| I just will not allow people to make insanely inaccurate, obviously inaccurate claims about what the court did, especially because these same people have long advocated the immunity that they now pretend is so dangerous. | |
| The court went on, quote, as for his remaining official actions, he is also entitled to immunity. | |
| At the current stage of proceedings in this case, however, we need not and do not decide Whether that immunity be absolute or instead whether a presumption immunity is sufficient. | |
| So they're explicitly saying we are not deciding because we need not decide whether the immunity that presidents have is absolute or whether it's simply a presumption of immunity that the government can overcome. | |
| Has that been reflected in anything you've heard about this ruling? | |
| Quote, no matter the context, the President's authority to act necessarily, quote, stems either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself. | |
| In the latter case, namely when what the President is doing is exercising power from the Constitution, the President's authority is sometimes, quote, conclusive and preclusive. | |
| When the president exercises such authority, namely authority from the Constitution, he may act even when the measures he takes are, quote, incompatible with the expressed or implied will of the Congress. | |
| And that's what I was showing you that I devoted my first seven years as a journalist to writing about, that the theory of the Bush administration and then Obama was that even if we break the law, as Congress has written it, We have every right to do so because the Constitution gives us and the Congress the power to decide how this can be done. | |
| So the Congress can't limit us in any way. | |
| The court went on, quote, the exclusive constitutional authority of the president, quote, disables the Congress from acting upon the subject. | |
| Congress cannot act on and courts cannot examine the president's actions on subjects within his, quote, conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. | |
| It follows that an act of Congress, either a specific one targeted at the president or a generally applicable one, may not criminalize the president's actions within his exclusive constitutional power. | |
| Neither may the courts adjudicate a criminal prosecution that examines such presidential actions. | |
| We thus conclude that the president is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution only for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority. | |
| We must however, quote, recognize the countervailing interest at stake. | |
| Federal criminal laws seek to address a quote, wrong to the public as a whole, not just a wrong to the individual. | |
| There is therefore a compelling quote, public interest in fair and effective law enforcement. | |
| The president charged with enforcing criminal laws is not above the law. | |
| Let me say that again. | |
| The president charged with enforcing federal criminal laws is not above the law precisely because they're not giving absolute immunity for acts undertaken by the president while in office. | |
| The only time, says the court, that they have absolute immunity is when they're acting with powers that exclusively are provided to the president under the Constitution. | |
| Which was the theory of Reagan and Bush for why they had every right to violate congressional law on banning the flow of money to the Contras. | |
| It was a theory of the Bush and Cheney administration defended by Obama about why they're allowed to violate the law when it comes to national security and terrorism questions. | |
| It's not something new, it's something very old. | |
| And then the court goes on to say, we offer guidance on those issues below, certain allegations Such as those involving the Trump's discussions with the acting attorney general are readily categories in light of the nature of the president's official relationship to the office held by that individual. | |
| But other allegations, such as those involving Trump's interaction with the vice president, state officials, and certain private parties, and his comments to the general public, present more difficult questions. | |
| Although we identify several considerations pertinent to classifying those allegations and determining whether they are subject to immunity, that analysis is best left to the lower courts to perform in the first instance. | |
| That's why they're saying we refuse to dismiss the case against Trump. | |
| What we need is to send it back to the lower court for the court to analyze whether the acts in question are the kind that give a president immunity or whether they fall outside the scope. | |
| Of presidential immunity and they even say that many of the acts in the indictment are difficult cases. | |
| Meaning they're very open to the idea that this indictment and many of the acts on which it's based are the sorts of things that do not give a president immunity. | |
| Just the exact opposite of everything we've heard about this ruling. | |
| The court goes on, quote, Unlike Trump's alleged interactions with the Justice Department, this alleged conduct cannot be neatly characterized as falling within a particular presidential function. | |
| The necessary analysis is instead fact-specific, requiring assessments of numerous alleged interactions with a wide variety of state officials and private persons. | |
| And the party's brief comments and oral argument indicate that they starkly disagree on the characterization of those allegations. | |
| The concerns we noted at the outset, namely the expedition of this case, the lack of factual analysis by the lower courts, and the absence of permanent briefing by the parties, thus became more prominent. | |
| We accordingly remand to the district court to determine in the first instance, with the benefit of briefing we lack, Whether Trump's conduct in this area qualifies as official or unofficial, they're very open. | |
| What they're really saying here is, look, this is an extremely complex question involving decades and centuries of constitutional analysis of how the Constitution was constructed, what is and is not an official act of a president for which he has immunity or doesn't. | |
| But because this case has been so rushed, because the real objective of this case, this prosecution, has not been to administer fair justice. | |
| Instead, it was to convict the president before the election to help Democrats win, as Democrats themselves have been openly admitting. | |
| In fact, they're enraged that the court took so long. | |
| And the court is saying, contrary to the claim that we took so long, this case has been incredibly rushed. | |
| To the point that the lower courts barely examined any of these questions or issued any analysis. | |
| And as a result, we can't throw this case out. | |
| We're just going to set guidelines for what courts now and in the future have to do to determine whether the acts in the indictment are in fact the kind that give immunity. | |
| And we are very open to the possibility that a lot of what Trump did, as alleged in the indictment, falls outside of the scope of what gives him immunity. | |
| Would you have known any of this if you hadn't read this ruling, you hadn't looked at it, and you just listened to media accounts? | |
| I would strongly suggest that all of those accounts have deliberately distorted, in a very fundamental way, what was actually decided here. | |
| And then finally, the court says, quote, coming up short on reasoning, the dissents repeatedly level variations of the accusation that this court has rendered the president, quote, above the law. | |
| As before, that, quote, rhetorically chilling contention is wholly unjustified. | |
| Like everyone else, the president is subject to prosecution in his unofficial capacity. | |
| But unlike anyone else, the President is a branch of government, and the Constitution vests in him sweeping powers and duties. | |
| Accounting for that reality, and ensuring that the President may exercise those powers forcefully as the framers anticipated he would, does not place him above the law. | |
| It preserves the basic structure of the Constitution from which that law derives. | |
| The dissent's position in this end boiled down to ignoring the Constitution's separation of powers and the court's precedent and instead fear-mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the president, quote, feels empowered to violate federal criminal law. | |
| And this is the key part. | |
| The dissents overlook the more likely prospect of an executive branch that cannibalizes itself With each successive president free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next. | |
| For instance, Section 371, which has been charged in this case, is a broadly worded criminal statute that can cover, quote, any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing, or defeating the lawful function of any department of government. | |
| Almost every president is criticized for insufficiently enforcing some aspect of the federal law, such as drugs, guns, immigration, or environmental laws. | |
| An enterprising prosecutor in a new administration may assert that a previous president violated that broad statute. | |
| Without immunity, such types of prosecutions of ex-presidents could quickly become routine. | |
| Which is exactly what Chuck Todd told me back in 2009 about why no Bush administration or CIA officials should be charged with crimes even if they actually broke the law. | |
| This has been the consensus of Washington for as long as I've been paying attention to politics. | |
| And again, for better or for worse, It has very strong grounding in all sorts of prior legal precedents from not just decades ago, but centuries ago, where people have been arguing about the nature of the office of the presidency and the fear that if presidents face prosecution when they leave, they will be deterred from acting robustly in their duties. | |
| This is not a new idea that this court invented. | |
| It's a very old idea. | |
| It's one that has absolutely protected every prior president before Donald Trump. | |
| Now, usually I will read the dissent as well or go over them. | |
| In this case, because of how widely circulated Sonia Sotomayor's utterly deranged, fear-mongering dissent was that completely contravened the language of the case. | |
| And I'm sure you've heard all of that. | |
| And I went over some of those hypotheticals she raised. | |
| Oh, this means that a president can go on a murder spree and be immunized. | |
| I just want to instead show you Justice Barrett's concurring opinion. | |
| Because she agrees with some of the majority, but also a lot of the dissent. | |
| And this is what she says, quote, I would thus assess the validity of criminal charges predicated on most official acts, i.e. | |
| those falling outside of the president's core executive power, in two steps. | |
| The first question is whether the relevant criminal statute reaches the president's official conduct. | |
| Not every broadly worded statute does. | |
| For example, Section 956 covers conspiracy to murder in a foreign country and does not expressly exclude the President's decision to say order a hostage rescue mission abroad. | |
| The underlying murder statute, however, covers only, quote, unlawful killings. | |
| And then she cites the Obama administration's position about why Obama had the right to kill Anwar al-Awlaki. | |
| Quote, the Office of Legal Counsel has interpreted that phrase to reflect a public authority exception for official acts involving the military and law enforcement. | |
| I express no views about the merits of that interpretation, but it shows that the threshold question of statutory interpretation is a non-trivial step. | |
| In other words, She's saying that she agrees with the court's principles, but that in many cases there's a different analysis, and she specifically cites the precedent where the Obama administration, the noble, pro-democracy, law-abiding Obama administration, created a theory about why Obama is immunized from the federal murder laws when he was killing American citizens on purpose with no trial. | |
| Not on the battlefield, not in uniform, just murdering them, primarily because his view was that they were giving speeches and sermons inspiring radicalism, which could easily be characterized as murder. | |
| And the Obama administration said, this is a statute that might cover this behavior, but because a president is exempt when it comes time to his official acts, In fighting terrorism, Obama could never be held responsible under that statute. | |
| He is immune. | |
| Exactly what the majority is applying to Donald Trump. | |
| And it's just so ironic to listen to so many people claiming that the Supreme Court invented some brand new theory that, in fact, I've been writing about for 20 years as one of the things most corrupting Washington. | |
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| There are all sorts of very fascinating dynamics that have emerged with the, I would say, close to unprecedented attempt to force Joe Biden, the close to unprecedented attempt to force Joe Biden, the current sitting elected president, out of an election that he obviously wants to run in, that he was named the Democratic nominee | |
| that he was named the Democratic nominee for and one that he has no intention of leaving, and yet there is a concerted effort on the part of the media that had long protected Joe Biden, but that is so desperate to do anything to ensure Donald Trump but that is so desperate to do anything to ensure Donald Trump doesn't win, but also the kind of 500 or 1,000 people that really run the Democratic Party, the very large funders, the oligarchs that fund the Democratic Party, and both of them are in a concerted effort to force Joe | |
| the oligarchs that fund the Democratic Party, and both of them are in a concerted effort to force Joe Biden out of a race, that whatever you think of Joe Biden, he is the president and wants to remain And that obviously raises all kinds of interesting questions about what type of democracy the United States is. | |
| We're constantly hearing from the Democratic Party that they and they alone can protect and preserve American democracy. | |
| And this raises a lot of questions. | |
| Now, one of the questions before we get to that is that we have long heard over the last several weeks from Biden defenders | |
| That the reason it's so inappropriate to force Joe Biden out of office is because the Democratic Party voters, their sacred voters who have the power in our system of government to make decisions, were given a wide choice and they decided that they wanted Joe Biden to be their presidential nominee in 2024 and it's therefore inappropriate to try and deny them that wish. | |
| Now, the reality is that as the Democratic Party claims that it is the only believer in or protector of American democratic values, the Democratic Party for years now has been acting in an extremely repressive, anti-democratic way, especially when it comes to choosing who the nominee for the presidency that party will have. | |
| That's been the case in 2016 and in 2020, but also in 2024. | |
| The idea that Democratic voters were given a free choice and decided they were going to vote for Joe Biden as the nominee that they wanted is an absolute joke. | |
| The Democratic Party, more than a year ago, was clear and explicit That they were not going to allow any primary challenges to Joe Biden. | |
| That even if there were primary challengers, and there were, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | |
| and Marianne Williamson and others, they would not allow any debates, they would not give those candidates any chance to even get on ballots, and that they had declared before any vote was cast that no matter what, the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party Would be Joe Biden. | |
| Now that stands in stark contrast to what the Republican Party did. | |
| You'll probably recall that a lot of different well-known and established and popular and very well-funded politicians like former, like current Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley and Tim Scott and former Vice President Mike Pence ran for the Republican nomination. | |
| They were given the opportunity to appear on screen and in debates and people voted for Donald Trump. | |
| He was the actual choice for the Republican Party to be the nominee. | |
| The Democratic Party did the opposite. | |
| They foreclosed any possibility of having a Democratic vote. | |
| Here was Simone Sanders, who worked both for the Biden White House and then also for Kamala Harris. | |
| And then like so many of them, like Jen Psaki, she left to do the same thing at MSNBC. | |
| She's an official Democratic Party spokeswoman. | |
| But for MSNBC, she went on Morning Joe in May of 2023. | |
| And this is what she announced about the upcoming Democratic primary to determine who will be the nominee for 2024. | |
| Bobby Kennedy Jr., doing well. | |
| He's at 19%. | |
| Hasn't really gotten that much out there. | |
| I mean, it's, and I'm starting to hear more and more talk about him. | |
| Are we going to actually have a challenge here? | |
| I'm trying not to laugh, Joe. | |
| There's not going to be— Wait, can I just—can I stop you for a second? | |
| Yes! | |
| Do you know how many people said the same thing about Donald Trump in 2015 on this show? | |
| Yes, except I will note— Said the same exact thing. | |
| Yes, because there was going to be a Republican primary. | |
| But I really think that the mealy-mouthed Democrats, as I like to call them, and some of my progressive friends— OK, so first of all, she's saying that Joe Scarborough tried to say, you're laughing at the idea that anybody might be able to win over Joe Biden. | |
| And then Joe Scarborough said, well, people were saying the same thing in 2016 about Donald Trump. | |
| They were scoffing at the idea that he might win. | |
| And she said, yeah, but the difference is the Republican Party actually allowed a primary in 2016. | |
| So anybody might win, whoever the voters choose. | |
| In contrast, We're the Democratic Party and we are not going to have a primary. | |
| We're not going to allow anyone to challenge Joe Biden. | |
| And that's why I'm saying I know for certain Biden will win because there's not going to be any kind of free and fair election. | |
| There's not going to be an election at all. | |
| Listen to what she says. | |
| ...who would like to live in a fantasy land, they need to come back to reality. | |
| And the reality is this. | |
| The sitting president of the United States of America is a Democrat. | |
| A Democrat that would like to run for re-election, so much so that he has declared a re-election campaign. | |
| In that case, the Democratic National Committee will not facilitate a primary process. | |
| There will be no debate stage for Bobby Kennedy, Marianne Williamson, or anyone else to stand on. | |
| So we're going to have another Bobby Kennedy in an empty chair in the debate, right? | |
| There will be no debate. | |
| The Democratic National Committee administers the debates and they're not going to set up a primary process for debates for someone to challenge the head of the Democratic Party. | |
| Do you hear what she said? | |
| She said the Democratic Party, the DNC, will not facilitate a primary election. | |
| There will be nobody permitted to challenge Joe Biden. | |
| We will not have any presidential debates. | |
| The Democratic Party won't allow them. | |
| And we are telling you right now before a single vote is cast that the nominee of our party will be Joe Biden. | |
| Not because I'm predicting that, based on what the voters might do, but that we're not going to give the voters any opportunity to actually choose. | |
| There's no choice, she said. | |
| And that's exactly what the Democratic Party proceeded to do. | |
| In fact, there was in some states, not even a Democratic Party ballot. | |
| So this idea that, oh, it would be contrary to democracy to force Joe Biden out of the race because he was the nominee chosen by the base of the voters of the Democratic Party is a complete joke. | |
| I heard Jen Psaki saying that. | |
| I heard Joe Scarborough saying that. | |
| So many of them have said that. | |
| David Axelrod said it. | |
| It's the exact opposite of reality. | |
| Now obviously this is not the first time that the Democratic Party, the saviors of American democracy, have acted anti-democratically as we know in 2016. | |
| The DNC cheated in every conceivable way possible to ensure that Bernie Sanders could not possibly win the nomination over Hillary Clinton, even if he got the most votes. | |
| And you don't need to listen to me to believe that happened. | |
| Here is a stalwart Democratic Party loyalist named Senator Elizabeth Warren, who went on PBS in November of 2017 and said this. | |
| We're learning today that a new book that is coming out by Donna Brazile, the former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee, that the campaign of Secretary Hillary Clinton was far more influential at the Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee, than we previously knew. | |
| Do you think, though, that what we're learning from Donna Brazile's book suggests that the campaign, that what the Democratic National Committee did, meant this election was rigged? | |
| I think it was. | |
| It's a pretty powerful charge. | |
| What we have to focus on now as Democrats is we recognize the process was rigged. | |
| And now it is up to Democrats to build a new process, a process that really works and works for everyone. | |
| Now, isn't it amazing, by the way, how if Republicans say that they think the 2020 election was rigged, That's considered almost illegal. | |
| It's called election denialism, whatever. | |
| But Elizabeth Warren came right out and said, and so did Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore's campaign, was the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, that the Democratic Party rigged the election in 2016 to ensure that Hillary Clinton won and that voters had no choice. | |
| Here is another thing the Democrats did from Politico in October of 2016. | |
| Donna Brazile is under siege after giving Clinton debate questions. | |
| As you might know, Donna Brazile was a CNN commentator at the time. | |
| CNN was hosting a debate between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. | |
| And she got exposed for having passed debate questions that CNN prepared and intended to ask only to Hillary Clinton but not to Bernie Sanders. | |
| And here's how it got exposed. | |
| Quote, "After hacked emails published Monday by WikiLeaks appear to reveal that Donna Brazile during her time as a CNN commentator gave advance notice to Clinton's camp about a debate question, Brazile has lost a CNN contract, which had been suspended since Brazile took over the DNC in July, and found herself used as fodder for one of Donald Trump's favorite talking points. | |
| That in this, quote, rigged election, the DNC has been in the bag for Clinton since the beginning. | |
| It's amazing they're like, oh, this is a Donald Trump talking point when we just heard Elizabeth Warren say exactly the same thing. | |
| And by the way, is it any wonder why the Democrats wanted so badly Julian Assange to rot in prison, given how much corruption he exposed on the part of the Democratic Party in the Hillary Clinton campaign, including what Donna Brazile did? | |
| And just to remind you, here from The Guardian in July of 2016, quote, Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign as DNC chair as email scandal rocks the Democrats. | |
| Quote, Schultz said she would step down after the convention. | |
| She has been forced to step aside after a leak of DNC email showed officials actively favoring Hillary Clinton during the presidential primary and plotting against Clinton's rival, Bernie Sanders. | |
| They rigged the election in 2016. | |
| They cheated constantly. | |
| They denied voters the opportunity for a free and fair election, just like they did in 2024, as we just heard from Simone Sanders. | |
| And they would have gotten away with it. | |
| People would have suspected it, but couldn't prove it unless and until WikiLeaks published the truth about what the Democratic Party did in the emails that they published, which is, of course, why Democrats to this very day despise Julian Assange and want him in prison. | |
| Not because they think he endangered national security. | |
| But because they think that he helped elect Donald Trump in 2016 by exposing true, authentic, and genuine corruption on the part of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. | |
| This is the party constantly claiming they're the only ones who believe in the values of democracy. | |
| They cheated in 2016, their top officials had to resign, they got caught passing questions of the Clinton campaign and rigging the entire thing. | |
| 2024, they just said, we're not having an election at all. | |
| And then in 2020, as you might remember, Bernie Sanders won the first three primaries, including in Nevada, where he had a gigantic victory. | |
| He looked well on the way to winning the nomination until Barack Obama intervened and basically made deals with and threatened and cajoled every candidate who might divide the vote with Joe Biden to drop out of the race. | |
| The only one they allowed to stay in was Elizabeth Warren because they knew she would take votes away from Bernie Sanders, which would help Biden. | |
| And rather than a free affair election, it was one that was completely shaped and controlled by the intervention in secret of Barack Obama. | |
| Here from the New York Times in April of 2020. | |
| Quote, accelerate the endgame, Obama's role in wrapping up the primary. | |
| Quote, with calibrated stealth, Mr. Obama has been considerably more engaged in the campaign's denouement than has been previously revealed, even before he endorsed Mr. Biden on Tuesday for months. | |
| Mr. Obama had kept in close contact with senior party officials in hopes of preventing a repeat of the protracted and nasty 2016 presidential race. | |
| Then in the weeks after it became clear that Mr. Biden was the party's near-certain nominee, Mr. Obama, telling a friend he, quote, needed to accelerate the endgame, had at least four conversations, long conversations, With his former vice president's remaining rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, Mr. Obama's efforts to ease the senator out of the race played a significant role in Mr. Sanders' decision to end his bid and endorse Mr. Biden. | |
| According to people close to the Vermont Independent, Mr. Obama did not directly encourage Mr. Sanders' rivals to endorse Biden ahead of the decisive Super Tuesday primaries, but he did tell Pete Buttigieg, a moderate, that he would never have more leverage than on the day that he was quitting the race. | |
| And the former South Bend mayor soon joined the avalanche of former candidates backing Mr. Biden. | |
| Meaning, look, if you drop out now, Pete, and help Joe Biden, you have a lot of leverage right now. | |
| Biden got the nomination because Buttigieg dropped out at Obama's urging. | |
| The minute Biden wins, he names Pete Buttigieg, whose only experience was Becoming mayor of South Bend, Indiana with 8,000 votes. | |
| He puts him in charge of the Department of Transportation. | |
| An area in which, obviously, Pete Buttigieg has no experience and was completely unqualified to run because of that quid pro quo. | |
| Here from Fox 35 in Orlando in March of this year, quote, why Florida Democrats will not even vote in the presidential preference primary. | |
| Quote, if you are registered with the Democratic Party, you will not receive a ballot in this PPP. | |
| Since the Florida Democratic Party nominated Joe Biden as their sole candidate, there is no ballot for registered voters, voters registered with the Democratic Party. | |
| So there's your party that saves American democracy, that is safeguarding the values of democracy. | |
| It is the very opposite of what democracy is. | |
| And while I want to be the last person to ever defend Joe Biden in any way, I do think it's worth noting, just to close this up, that there is something a little bit odd from a perspective of what democracy is. | |
| So we have an elected president who, according to the Democratic Party, won the nomination. | |
| He is the Democratic Party nominee for president. | |
| And now, because a lot of people, very powerful and influential people, are frightened that Biden is going to lose to Donald Trump, they are now organizing in secret, using their power to force the elected president out of the White House and out of the race. | |
| Kind of smells like a little bit of a coup in some sense. | |
| And it doesn't matter what Democratic Party voters want in polls. | |
| It doesn't even really matter what the media is saying because what they're saying is what they're told to say. | |
| The reality of American democracy is that there are about 500 to 1,000 people who actually control both parties. | |
| The billionaires and the mega donors who facilitate the campaign. | |
| And those are the people who are really making the decisions about who will be the nominee for president. | |
| Here's the New York Times on July 1st. | |
| Quote, The Road to a Crisis, How Democrats Let Biden Guide to Renomination. | |
| Quote, An 81-Year-Old Candidate and No Plan B. Quote, How Did We Get Here? | |
| One Leading Democrat Asks. | |
| The answer is complicated. | |
| Many party leaders, donors, activists, and ordinary voters stunned by the president's faltering debate appearance now fear he will lose to former President Trump and drag Democrats to devastating defeats in congressional and state elections. | |
| Mr. Biden is surrounded by a tight circle of longtime aides and family members who have encouraged his desire to seek a second term. | |
| At key moments, those who tried to sound the alarm about Mr. Biden's potential weaknesses, among them David Axelrod, Mr. Obama's chief strategist, and James Carville, who helped elect Bill Clinton in 1992, were slapped down by Democrats, often in the brutal discord of social media sites like X. | |
| and chastised by top Biden aides for being disloyal. | |
| Quote, I stated that, I said then, privately and publicly, if Biden ran, he would be the nominee, Mr. Axelrod said. | |
| I felt a primary challenge would fail and only help Trump. | |
| I'm sure there were potential Democratic challengers who made the same calculation and didn't want to jeopardize their future by running and taking that risk. | |
| But now here's what's really going on. | |
| From the New York Times two days later, July 3rd. | |
| Quote, big donors turn on Biden quietly. | |
| Some of the president's past supporters want a new candidate, but they are leery of going public. | |
| Quote, as of late Tuesday, the party's moneyed class was carefully monitoring post-debate poll results and the positioning of elected Democrats for signs that support for Mr. Biden was cracking. | |
| At a breakfast on Friday morning at the Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado, where nearly 50 Democratic donors had gathered for a pre-planned meeting convened by the Super PAC America Bridge, one person asked the crowd for a show of hands of how many thought Mr. Biden should step aside. | |
| Nearly everyone in the room raised their hands, according to two people present. | |
| On a private email list, including members of another liberal donor collective called Way2Win, participants expressed frustration with the Democratic Party's circling of the wagons around Mr. Biden and urged that Vice President Kamala Harris be considered for the top spot on the ticket. | |
| On Tuesday, both American Bridge and the Democratic Alliance hosted calls for donors. | |
| Anxious about the situation of the more than a dozen donors who spoke on the Bridge call, only one argued that the party should stick with Mr. Biden. | |
| Others expressed a desire to move on. | |
| The debate has particularly riven Democratic Party donor groups that are typically fairly harmonious. | |
| At Way2Win, a donor collaborative founded during the peak of Trump-era resistance, organization leaders have touted Ms. | |
| Harris as a potential replacement for Mr. Biden. | |
| Jen Fernandez-Ancona, a founder of the group, stressed Mrs. Harris' electoral viability to allies in an internal email chain reviewed by the Times. | |
| I absolutely believe we can do it with Harris at the top of a ticket and a good VP choice. | |
| Here's Ari Emanuel, the extremely wealthy Hollywood agent and brother of former Chicago mayor and Obama chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who is opining here at the Aspen Ideas Festival. | |
| These are where these people congregate. | |
| These are the people who actually make the decisions. | |
| Well, we call what we have a democracy. | |
| Listen to what Ari Emanuel said. | |
| Alright, Democrats are jumping out of the window. | |
| What are you thinking? | |
| Well, I'm pissed off at the Founding Fathers. | |
| They had the start date of 35. | |
| They just didn't give us the end date. | |
| And, well, everybody died, so they didn't have to give the end date. | |
| I don't want to deal with Donald Trump and what he said was true. | |
| It's a given, certain things. | |
| I'm not going to talk about CNN. | |
| Here's what Biden did. | |
| He said he was going to run for one term, and he's doing it to restore democracy. | |
| He now runs for a second term. | |
| First bit of malarkey, as he would say. | |
| Then, He says that this is for the quintessential thought about saving democracy and it's so important etc. | |
| His cohorts have told us that he's healthy for over a year and I think it was two weeks ago there was an article in the Wall Street Journal and I had a father Who died at 92, but at 81, I took away his car. | |
| And it's a very simple test for me. | |
| If you were driving from, from downtown Beverly Hills to Malibu, Would you want Biden to do it at night? | |
| Would you want Trump to do it at night? | |
| Neither. | |
| Okay, so you just see his frame of reference there. | |
| If you're driving from Beverly Hills to Malibu, he's at the Aspen Ideas Festival. | |
| These are where decisions actually get made about American democracy. | |
| Just to underscore the point as the final Article here from the New York Times, this was June 29th, that really kicked off the entire cycle of people like Ari Emanuel, very powerful, very rich, big donors to the Democratic Party, who for the first time decided that they were going to criticize Joe Biden. | |
| They need to throw him out because they're worried he will lose to Trump. | |
| They don't care what The primary process resulted in they don't care what Democratic Party registered voters decided, whether they wanted Biden or they don't care about any of that. | |
| These are the people who run the party. | |
| These are people who fund the party. | |
| And therefore, it's like 500 of them run both parties. | |
| And the New York Times here tells the story, quote, Major Democratic donors ask themselves what to do about Biden. | |
| Quote, some floated interventions and worried about how to reach and wondered about how to reach Jill Biden. | |
| Others hoped the president would bow out of the race on his own. | |
| Many came to terms with the low chances that he will do so. | |
| The Democratic Party's perennially nervous donor class descended into deep unease on Friday as some of the wealthiest people in America commiserated over President Biden's weak debate performance and puzzled over what, if anything, they could do to change the course of the race. | |
| There were discussions with political advisors about arcane rules under which Mr. Biden might be removed from the ticket against his will and replaced at or before the Democratic National Convention, according to a person familiar with the effort. | |
| In Silicon Valley, A group of mega donors, including Ron Conway and Laurene Powell Jobs, were calling, texting, and emailing one another about a situation they described as a possible catastrophe. | |
| Now, Ron Conway is one of those billionaire hedge fund managers. | |
| Laurene Powell Jobs is not only the widow of Steve Jobs, which is where she got all of her billions of dollars from that she uses to fund the Democratic Party, but she's also the owner of the Atlantic. | |
| A magazine monomaniacally devoted to stopping Donald Trump. | |
| These are the people who, for all we want to call our society democracy and our voting political system of democracy, are the ones who actually run things. | |
| And you see them all like rats, like in secret, plotting about what they're going to do. | |
| Are they going to remove Joe Biden against his will? | |
| Are they going to try and get to Jill Biden and persuade her? | |
| Are they going to try and prop up Biden? | |
| Quote, the donors wondered about whom they could, in the Biden fold, they could contact to reach Jill Biden, the first lady who in turn could persuade her husband not to run. | |
| A Silicon Valley donor who had planned to host an intimate fundraiser featuring Mr. Biden this summer decided not to go through with the gathering because of the debate, according to a person told directly by the prospective host. | |
| Another major California donor left a debate watch party early and emailed a friend with the subject line, quote, utter disaster. | |
| In group chats and hushed discussions, some wealthy Democrats floated interventions. | |
| And others hope Mr. Biden would have an epiphany and decide to exit on his own, and is still more strategized about steering dollars to down-ballot candidates. | |
| The most optimistic donors wanted to wait for the pull-up polling to see the scope of the fallout. | |
| The crisis in the donor class outlined in interviews of almost two dozen donors and fundraisers, many of whom insisted on anonymity to discuss their private conversations, could not come at a worse moment for Mr. Biden. | |
| Former President Donald J. Trump has outraised him in each of the last two months, erasing the president's once gaping financial advantage and opening one of his own. | |
| So on both sides, you see the total fraud of this democracy narrative. | |
| You see the Democratic Party running their party, With nothing resembling a democracy where voters have almost no say on purpose and the outcome of the election or who their nominee will be. | |
| And on the other side, you see who actually runs the party. | |
| People like Steve Jobs' widow and hedge fund managers who fund the Democratic Party with hundreds of millions of dollars. | |
| Which is why it was such a joke to hear in 2016 about how a few Facebook Fake pages from Russia and a few Twitter bots somehow shifted the election when these elections are flooded with billions of dollars from the richest people in the United States who have immense power over each of the political parties and their agendas. | |
| And the idea that Democrats really do believe or that the media allies really do believe that somehow the Democratic Party Is the sole guardian of, protector of, and believer in democratic values when the party is essentially the living, breathing antithesis of what democracy is supposed to be about? | |
| is exactly the opposite of reality, just as the narrative about what the Supreme Court ruling did and what its actual context is in history was all about. | |
| All right, so that concludes our show for this evening. | |
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| Because of the holiday tomorrow the 4th of July and then on Friday as well we will be off just to Observe the holiday. | |
| It's usually a day where there's very little attention paid to politics, so hope that you will take advantage of that as we intend to. | |
| We will be back on Monday at our regularly scheduled time and tend to do our regular schedule all of next week, including our after shows on Tuesday and Thursday. | |
| So for those of you watching the show, we are, of course, very appreciative and we hope to see you back on Monday night and every night at 7 o'clock p.m. | |
| Eastern Live exclusive here on Rumble. | |
| Have a great evening and a great holiday weekend. |