Trump is Inaugurated & Immediately Issues Executive Orders; Biden Pardons His Family, Liz Cheney, Fauci; Michael Tracey DC Interviews
Trump promises to bring in a "golden age" in his inaugural speech and unveils the first executive orders of the second Trump administration. Meanwhile, Biden pardons his family, Liz Cheney, and Anthony Fauci. PLUS: Michael Tracey interviews members of Congress in DC at Inaugural Balls.
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It's Monday, January 20th, our very first show in the second era of the Trump presidency.
It's actually our first show ever in the era of the Trump presidency, so we weren't on the air for his first term.
So that makes it all the more exciting, and we certainly have a jam-packed episode to talk about.
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...
Donald Trump was inaugurated today at the U.S. Capitol, changed to an indoor venue at the last minute for avoiding the extreme cold, and most of official Washington, along with his horde of new big tech billionaire supporters, attended and were featured central stage and played a critical role. attended and were featured central stage and played a critical Trump's speech gave a very clear glimpse of what he at least intends to do.
It remains to be seen whether he will be able to carry out all or even much of what he envisions.
The story of his first term, other than the endless stream of false scandals from the CIA and the media and all kinds of threats to put him and his family in prison, was that many of the people he appointed to keep positions in that first term were there to subvert his agenda, not to carry it out.
And many of them did exactly that, often with the applause of the U.S. media.
Trump and his closest allies have insisted for months that their paramount goal is to prevent a repeat of that biggest failing in the first term.
Only time will tell whether they're successful, but I know for certain they understand the importance of, Now, Trump's speech today was actually quite heavy on specifics, unlike most inaugural addresses, at least when it came to principles and goals and even several policies.
He had a passage about the need to avoid wars and his determination to do so.
He vowed to restore free speech in the United States, both generally and online.
He again promised to overhaul the old bipartisan orthodoxies in D.C. that have prevailed for decades of militarism, free trade, and the deindustrialization of the heartland.
And accompanying those were all kinds of vows that he would...
Issue all kinds of threats, such as the threat to take back the Panama Canal from Panama, vows that the U.S. would now be forcibly collecting revenues from foreign countries in what he called the external revenue exchange, and the deployment of U.S. military troops to the southern border, which presents a lot of constitutional and legal issues.
Now, dozens of pre-planned executive orders were signed by Trump almost immediately upon arriving in the White House, most of which intended to implement those policies.
That he laid out today, but also throughout the campaign, even if some of those orders were of questionable legal validity and almost certainly will make it through the courts.
Now, the entire climate that emerged today in official Washington was perhaps the most telling of all.
The very people who have spent years insisting that Trump was a Hitler-like figure determined to install a white supremacist dictatorship and amend American democracy.
The greatest threat we've ever seen in the American presidency certainly did not act that way at all.
starting from President Biden's very warm welcome home announcement when Trump and his wife Melania arrived at the White House to move in for the second time, to Democratic congressional leaders lining up in an orderly, even very respectful way to affably congratulate Trump on his reascension to the presidency, as even very respectful way to affably congratulate Trump on his reascension to the presidency, as if it were a perfectly normal and ordinary transition of power and a completely normal election, which, despite the endless hysteria and drama queen behavior and baseless warnings over the last eight despite the endless
Then, speaking of the attempt to depict Donald Trump, but not George W. Bush or Dick Cheney or Obama, as a singular threat to American democracy and embodiment of all things corrupted and authoritarian, there really was no warning issued more shrilly or continuously in the last year of Trump's there really was no warning issued more shrilly or continuously in the last year of Trump's turn in 2020 than the endless claim that he would destroy the rule of law by issuing preemptive blanket pardons to all of his
And this, we were told by leading Democrats, including Joe Biden, Now, as it turned out, Trump never actually issued pardons to anyone in his family, nor did he issue preemptive pardons of any kind to his key political allies, even though he had all sorts of good reasons for doing so.
Beginning with the fact that top intelligence officials in Washington and media figures were constantly threatening to arrest Trump's entire family and all of his closest allies.
But there is a president now who has done exactly that with his pardon power.
His name is not Donald Trump, but Joe Biden, who weeks ago pardoned his convicted son Hunter after spending all of the campaign vowing that he would never do so.
And then today he went much, much further.
By first issuing sweeping preemptive pardons to people like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Dr. Anthony Fauci and General Mark Milley and more, all people who serve his political agenda.
And amazingly, or really not amazingly at all, the same exact Democrats and same corporate media personalities who cast such acts, if they had been done by Trump, even though they weren't, as the epitome of corruption and the end of the American rule of law.
Are today not just defending Biden for doing exactly that, but actively applauding him?
There's a lot going on here, a lot to draw from in all of this, and we will do exactly that.
And then finally, we sent our intrepid, roving reporter, independent reporter, Michael Tracy, to Washington this weekend for the inaugural festivities, where he has conducted some remarkable and...
Actually quite amusing interviews with various DC luminaries in the way that only Michael Tracy can.
We'll show you some of those and put the rest of them on our Locals platform exclusively for our members.
Before we get to all of that, we have a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Donald Trump is now officially the 47th president of the United States, as well as the 45th.
J.D. Vance was sworn in today as the Vice President of the United States, and that means Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are officially out of government.
The entire ceremony in Washington is, on the one hand, a bit over the top.
It's a bit melodramatic, but also it has a sort of important tradition in the United States to signify the passing of this very important power that has been accomplished through the decisions and autonomy of the American electorate.
So I don't want to be too cynical about it.
But there was a lot going on at this inauguration, beginning with the speech Donald Trump gave, which typically is designed to set the tone of the election.
of what his next administration is going to be, what he wants the American people to understand about it and to expect.
And on the one hand, Trump really evoked the standards themes that he campaigned on throughout the second term of his campaign, his campaign to become the re-elected president.
There weren't a great deal of surprises, but I think one of the things that surprised a lot of people, maybe even so me, Was that he really avoided the sort of bromides and cliches of inaugural addresses about unity and all of that.
And he unflinchingly identified the people that he believes were the cause of America's woes, even though most of them were sitting right behind him, inches away, in the frame of the camera as he spoke.
I think this is one of the things, I'm not entirely sure about this, I tried to find this out.
But originally, as I said, the inaugural address was going to be held at the mall, which is where the inauguration usually is.
So it's outdoors.
It's much more spread out.
There's a lot of former presidents typically in attendance, but you don't really see them.
They're kind of on the stage, but a little bit further away from the president.
But because it was moved to the Capitol due to the cold weather, they were in this very tight, almost claustrophobic setting up on the stage.
Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and also the current sitting vice president, Kamala Harris, were extremely close to where Trump was speaking.
They were sitting just inches away from him, off to his left, and you could see them the entire time.
What was so amazing about it was that most of Trump's speech was devoted to, unflinchingly, And without any real politeness to soften it, condemning the entire bipartisan political class over the past 20 years that has essentially,
in his view, come close to destroying America due to not just ineptitude, but even more so to corruption, to moral and ethical failings where they elevated the interest of their donors and themselves at the expense of everybody else in the society.
And they all just sit there.
While he issued vicious condemnations, not only of their own policies and actions, but really of their own character.
And that produced a lot of amusing moments, the most amusing of which I think came right at the beginning, where Trump followed tradition by reading the names of all of the presidents who were in attendance, as well as the vice president.
The only one was Kamala Harris who was there.
But then right after he read all their names to make clear that they were present, This is what he said immediately after reading their names.
Thank you very much, everybody.
Thank you very, very much.
Vice President Vance, Speaker Johnson, Senator Thune, Chief Justice Roberts, justices of the United States Supreme Court.
President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, President Biden, Vice President Harris, and my fellow citizens.
The golden age of America begins right now.
So we're in a new age.
That age is the golden age.
And obviously the people who he just listed, who are sitting on that stage, who are...
Governing America ostensibly for the past 20 years or 25 years had done something other than the Golden Age in the United States.
The Golden Age is not something that's been evolving.
It's only beginning right now.
All of those other people that he just named were people who could not deliver a Golden Age to the United States, but instead, according to him, delivered nothing but destruction and the collapse of the American way of life.
The American industrial base, American power, all because they had zero concern about or interest in the vast majority of American citizens.
They were concerned, said this critique, with the public opinion of them in European capitals and in global media.
And you can certainly make a good case that that's true.
It's just amazing how blunt and direct and just very harsh that...
Very first opening was to say, here's all these people.
They're from the past, but the golden era, that doesn't include them, obviously, starts right now.
Now, one of the things that Trump has, I think, in his best vision when he lays out is stuck to the ideology that not only enabled him to win against Hillary Clinton in 2016, but also destroyed the Republican field.
In the primary in 2015 and 2016 as well, which was an America-first ideology that wasn't just rhetoric but had a very specific ethos to it, a very specific ideological core about how this priority was supposed to manifest in all forms of policy.
And it seems to me like, and I think if you talk to anybody in the Trump world, they will tell you too that Trump is a lot more disciplined.
The people around him are more serious.
They came in with a very clear plan for how they're going to get a lot of this done, overcoming all the people in the administrative state and the deep state and permanent Washington who thwarted them the first time.
Again, that is absolutely Trump's main objective, not just during the transition, but well before that they were planning on how to take this behemoth of the permanent power faction of Washington and defang it.
Because at the end of the day, they are unelected.
They're a permanent, unelected administrative state and U.S. security state that has for way too long prevented our elections from really having any significance or meaning because you can vote for the Republican or the Democrat, and those people are going to end up ruling and doing what they want,
even if it means, as happened in Trump's first presidency, overtly ignoring and overriding and even subverting the policy preferences and even orders of the person elected to Here's Donald Trump in just one of those passages in which he seems very focused on rejuvenating that 2016 spirit.
Here's what he said.
From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world.
We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.
During every single day of the Trump administration, I will very simply put America first.
It seems so odd to me that that is a political phrase at all, let alone a controversial one.
It should be so foundational to American democracy that when American political leaders get elected Their paramount goal, arguably their only goal, but certainly their paramount goal is to put the country that just elected them, the country they're duty-bound to serve,
the people in that country who are citizens of the country that elected them, put those people first and not prioritize the interest of global institutions or certainly foreign wars subsiding everybody's army.
And there's a lot of policies, including The billions and billions and billions of dollars the United States spends to protect Western Europe and NATO, even though Western Europe has every ability financially to take care of itself.
It's an alliance that was formed to combat a threat that no longer exists, which was Soviet communism.
And it's clear that Trump believes that American interests are best formed through doing deals in other places, including in the Middle East and in Asia, and that Europe has basically become...
An albatross around the neck of the United States that benefits Europe and its elites and its citizens at the expense of the United States.
And there's so many other examples like that.
And if that actually finds expression in foreign policy, then all of these words that we're constantly fighting that have no palpable or even identifiable benefit to the United States should in fact fall by the wayside.
Now, Trump wasn't contented to say, Our government's falling apart among all these leaders that I just named who are here in both parties.
He lambasted so much of what the Biden-Harris administration did right in front of them.
While they could do nothing but just stand there and grimace and have blank looks on their face.
It was the kind of thing that signals that he's going to do away with.
The kind of protocol and niceties in Washington that I do think have been intensified far too much.
Where political leaders are all part of the same class, even if they're Democrats or Republicans, right or left, they never really condemn one another except in presidential campaigns where it's sort of allowed and then you saw Obama at the Jimmy Carter funeral giggling with President Trump, obviously based on their understanding that, oh, what you say in a campaign, I called you a Nazi or a fascist.
You called me, all sorts of things, but let's just all fun and games for us to create the theater that the two parties are different.
We know that we're really in the same club.
A lot of people around Trump are absolutely uninterested in maintaining that bipartisan club, which has led to so many different pieties and orthodoxies that are destructive being so unquestioned.
And one of the ways that whoever worked on Trump's speech decided to do that was to just Say exactly what they think about the failures of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, even though they were sitting closest to Trump in the most prominent seat, not during the campaign, but while Trump, just after Trump vanquished them at the polls, and now is taking over.
Here's just part of what he said along those lines.
Fails to protect our magnificent law-abiding American citizens, but provide sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions.
We have a government that has given unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders, but refuses to defend American borders or, more importantly, its own people.
Our country can no longer deliver basic services in times of emergency, as recently shown by the wonderful people of North Carolina who have been treated so badly.
And other states who are still suffering from a hurricane that took place many months ago.
And he goes on to say the federal government just had no capability to fight those fires, to give basic aid to the people whose lives have been upended by hurricanes.
And it really is true.
The United States is the most powerful and the richest country on the planet.
And we've continuously seen what looks to be more like a struggling...
At best, second-order power.
We have oil spills in our water or poisonous water supplies or natural disasters where people get no help at all from the federal government.
And I think the key comment Trump made there, and it remains to be seen whether any of this is followed through with, for the reason I said at the top, but the vision that he's laying out there is that what we're spending on so much...
Is other people's countries?
Is other people's borders?
Is other people's wars?
We're sending billions and billions and billions and building up our military to benefit these other people.
We don't have basic infrastructure in the United States.
That's a Ron Paul view that he laid out in 2008 and 2012, that the United States need not involve itself in all these wars that aren't about our direct interest.
And that is the economic populism of saying, instead of...
Sending all our money to globalized institutions and to NATO wars and foreign military bases all over the world.
We should take that money and rebuild American communities.
If you look at...
I mean, this is just really a basic observation, but it's so striking and really true.
If you look at the recent skyline and the development of architecture and buildings and exciting new construction in the Gulf states, We're a country that spends more money
than any country by far.
The question is, on what do we spend this money and for whose benefit are we spending it?
And Trump seems to be saying his main goal is to Now again, I'm just telling you what Trump's vision here is.
I have skepticism and doubt about the extent to which it will be carried out because I saw similar things in 2016, but I also have some hope.
That this time they understand what went wrong in 2016 and have taken real steps to correct a lot of that.
I'm going to be skeptical.
I'm not going to celebrate until I see actions when there's a deviation from this vision.
I'm going to be the first here denouncing it.
But I think it's important just to kind of analyze and break down what the most important parts of what he said was to give you a feel for what he's trying to get the American people to see and expect.
One of those passages, a pretty significant one, was about what has become a major cause on the right but not on the left.
And that is the banner of free speech, which has primarily been waived in response to the effort to seize control of political discourse on the internet.
Censorship that has largely, not entirely, but largely targeted not just conservative speech, but right-wing popular speech, pro-Trump speech, and leaders like Trump throughout the Democratic world, the liberal elite in these ruling class institutions and democratic world capitals are frightened and petrified of a free internet.
And the trend in the West more than anything other has been to impose a systemized, industrialized framework for re-controlling and re-seizing the internet and preventing it from becoming a meaningful threat to their orthodoxies and their interests.
This is something Mark Zuckerberg declared war on when, for whatever motives, trying to please Trump and appease him, partially anger over being forced to censor during COVID in a way he came to view as unethical and tyrannical.
Whatever the motives, it doesn't really matter what Mark Zuckerberg's motives are or even Donald Trump's.
What matters is what they do.
They are clearly saying to the rest of the world that we are going to unite and use our force.
To prevent the value of a free internet, one of the most important human vations in decades, from being degraded and converted into a tool of propaganda.
Here's part of what Trump said about this.
After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.
This is probably the issue on which I'm most skeptical, but also obviously harboring the greatest hope for.
So much of the campaign, so much of things that Trump's key appointees have said, so much of the Republican Party, even their allies in the Democratic Party, and so much of what Trump himself said has been about these vows to combat the evils of anti-Semitism, not anti-black racism, not anti-Latino racism, not homophobia or transphobia or misogyny or Islamophobia or any other kind of bigotry.
Only this one bigotry.
And we've seen incredibly disturbing assaults on free speech going back all the way to October 7th and way, way before that, too.
In the name of shielding Israel from criticism, the TikTok ban, in my view, I'm not going to say it was only about that.
For sure, the origins, the impetus of it in 2020 was this constant attempt now to create a view of China as our existential enemy against whom we need to have a Cold War the way we did the Soviet Union.
But they could never get enough votes for that until October 7th when they just openly admitted the reason they decided to ban TikTok was because there was too much pro-Palestinian speech on there because it was used by the young Americans who had empathized with the Palestinians and turned against Israel.
And they banned it to prevent that from continuing.
At the same time, it's Donald Trump almost single-handedly in Washington, even against many of his own members in the Republican Party, who's doing his best to prevent a ban on TikTok.
It was dark for about 24 hours over the weekend because it was scheduled to take effect January 19th.
And due to things that Trump did, it's now back on.
We'll see where that goes.
I have a lot of concerns about what the Trump administration and their conservative allies and especially the pro-Israel sector have planned for free speech when it comes to criticizing Israel.
We've seen a lot of very aggressive assaults.
Dozens of people fired at media and academia and politics over it.
The principle is right.
And I think the fact that the right has been waving this banner for so long and making so many arguments in its favor at least gives the space when they inevitably start trying to curb pro-Palestinian speech in the name of Invoking the same left-able arguments.
This isn't really political speech.
This is incitement to violence.
This is designed to be hateful.
This is bigoted against a minority group.
We can't allow it, etc., etc.
They banned Trump from Twitter and Facebook and banned so many of his followers by saying that's not political speech, that's incitement to violence, as we saw on January 6th.
It's advocacy for an insurrection.
It's bigoted against trans people and can result in violence and even genocide.
You know all the arguments.
And I've been seeing a lot of invocation of those exact left liberal arguments for censorship, rejected when it comes to speech that a lot of conservatives most like, and then suddenly embraced for speech they most hate, and that includes pro-Palestinian speech, and that is going to be something that anyone who has really believed in what they've been saying about free speech and censorship, including Donald Trump, It's going to really have to be monitored and have their feet held to the fire.
If in the likely event that they start to pursue that, then that's going to merit a lot of pressure and condemnation because free speech does not mean you haven't restored free speech if you're only revitalizing the right of your political allies to speak but not your political enemies.
Alright, here is the The one time that the prevailing dynamic in the Congress today shifted on virtually everything Trump said, virtually everything, Republicans stood and cheered, Democrats sat on their hands looking grim and angry for pretty much every single observation he made, every vow he issued, every condemnation he defended.
It was that sort of standard.
State of the Union address where the Republicans stand up and the Democrats sit very purposely on their hands.
There was only one exception in everything Trump said that both parties not only stood up but jumped up and began with a sustained applause and you'll never guess which foreign country this is about.
I'm pleased to say that as of yesterday, one day before I assumed office, The hostages in the Middle East are coming back home to their families.
Thank you.
Off their asses, nothing unites the bipartisan class in Washington.
Like any mention of Israel in passing, they're petrified not to applaud the most.
It's like those famous attempts to say that everybody was petrified to be the first to stop clapping in a Stalin speech.
When Netanyahu comes and speaks before the Congress, not only is the reverence at its all-time high, but they're afraid not to give him a standing ovation on every pronouncement he makes.
And it's sustained and long and spirited because this is one of the main religions of Washington is to support Israel.
And it was disturbing and notable that Trump celebrated the ceasefire deal as an effort and a way to get the Israeli hostages home.
Which any decent person is happy to see them coming home.
But zero mention of the thousands of Palestinian hostages in Israeli dungeons who are there with no trial, no charges, no trial.
And that's all.
There's ample evidence many have been sexually abused and raped and psychologically tortured.
They come out looking barely alive and coherent.
Whereas these hostages, and these are not the first ones, have come back to Israel looking very happy, very well cared for, and they've said that too.
But that's just politics.
I'm willing to give Trump some license here for a while because whatever else is true, we've gone over this a couple of times before now.
There was no chance of any meaningful sustained ceasefire for 15 months while Joe Biden was president.
The Israelis made very clear they didn't take seriously anything that he said.
Trump wins.
He sends his very close.
Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, with very clear instructions to be extremely aggressive with the Israelis and demand that this war end before his inauguration.
And he gets that done, and you don't have to decide.
If you want to celebrate, it's the Palestinian people in Gaza who are jubilant, knowing that it may not last forever, but still feeling like they've got a reprieve and an end to this conflict for the moment they can return to the rubble of their homes.
And it was Donald Trump who absolutely did that.
So if he needs to sell it in Washington as a way to get the Israeli Jewish hostage home or the American hostage home and not acknowledge the humanity of all the people in Gaza who have been suffering as well, what matters to me more is the policy success.
And that has been extremely significant and extremely notable.
Given that Democratic Party operatives and spokespeople in the media mocked.
Everybody throughout 2024, Muslims and Arabs and younger voters and leftist voters who said, I cannot in good conscience vote for the people who have been arming and funding the destruction of Gaza and the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people, including children.
And they were told, you're idiots, you're morons, you're morally self-indulgent.
Everybody knows that Trump is going to get in and make that.
Destruction of Gaza is so much worse as though it could be.
And instead, before he's even in office, but clearly due to him, as every report from every region admits, he gets at least the most sustained cessation of hostilities yet.
Leaving all those people who mocked the idea that maybe Trump, through his unpredictability, could actually get things done looking like the complete partisan morons that they are.
Trump himself said that avoiding wars is his number one priority.
As we often pointed out, Trump was the only president during his first four years in office who did not get the U.S. involved in a new war, either directly or as a proxy.
He prides himself on that.
And yes, he threatened it.
He came close to it.
But he believes that's how you avoid wars.
And here is him saying today, My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.
That's what I want to be, a peacemaker and a unifier.
I mean, I haven't heard...
I know there's a chance that the hostilities in Gaza can restart.
Netanyahu sold this Another part of the protocol,
the ceremony, the theater of a new president being inaugurated is that the president who's outgoing Trump welcomes him along with his spouse to the White House by standing there with the president and their spouse.
And we reported before how Biden previously invited Trump to the White House and they sat there and had a very amiable conversation.
Biden told him, if there's anything I can do for you in the transition to help smooth the transition into your presidency, I'm here to do it.
And today, Joe Biden stood on the steps with Joe Biden, and when Trump arrived to move into the White House, Joe Biden said, welcome back.
Welcome home, actually, was what he said.
Remember, these are people, the Democratic Party, the leaders of the Democratic Party, who have spent years saying Trump is a fascist.
If he wins, he's going to end American democracy as we know it.
He's going to put people in camps.
That he's basically a Hitler figure.
Kamala Harris called him a fascist in the last week of the campaign.
The media's primary theme was that he admired Hitler.
And if anyone believed this, none of this behavior would make any sense.
None of it would be justifiable.
But of course, none of them believed it in the first place.
Here's Biden, courtesy of ABC News, welcoming Donald and Melania Trump back to the White House.
Welcome home, Mr. Hitler.
Come right in.
I know you're here to put minorities in camps and to end American democracy as we know it and install a white supremacist dictatorship that will end everything about America that has been built up in history to this very day, but welcome.
We're so happy to have you.
When Donald Trump went to the Rotunda today, the Capitol, where he gave his speech, Congressional Republican, Democrats, Senate Democrats, House Democrats, we're also just standing there very respectfully and amiably welcoming Trump, shaking his hand, smiling.
Nothing that they would be doing, or at least ought to be doing, if any of the rhetoric they had been spouting for eight years, but especially the last couple of years, were things they actually believed.
Here is Trump with Amy Klobuchar.
He greets Hakeem Jeffries and a bunch of other Democratic leaders in Congress.
The President: Good morning, sir.
How are you this morning?
Mr. Good morning.
Thank you.
President Trump, how do you feel?
President Biden?
Well, it's just a lovely party where everybody's so happy.
A couple of people choose not to go.
AOC didn't go.
No one missed her.
But for the most part, this was a much, much different climate than the one in 2017, where the Democrats really did believe that Trump's victory was not just an aberration, but illegitimate.
They thought that it was just a moral crime that he could possibly occupy the White House.
Their duty was to do everything to prevent him from carrying out the agenda he had promised Americans he would carry out.
Everything was resistance and resistance and impeachment and investigations and Robert Mueller coming to arrest him.
All of that has been silenced by the American people through their democratic will.
The very democratic will that Democrats have claimed only they safeguard and represent, but that Donald Trump is a singular threat to.
And from Trump's speech to the way in which Trump is being treated to Trump's policy visions as he's laid them out.
And I'm not saying there aren't some debatable and even disturbing ones.
You have to be very careful with how you deploy the U.S. military on U.S. soil.
There's a Posse Comitatus Act that's designed to prevent the use of the military for carrying out law enforcement on U.S. soil.
There are all kinds of questions about the validity of these executive orders.
Congress passed a law banning TikTok whether Donald Trump has the right to...
Issue an executive order to delay it 90 days or to try and subvert it is something that Republican senators are objecting to.
But these are the normal back and forth between the executive branches that the founders decided.
And if and when these come to a head, they will go to a court, including the Supreme Court, that has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to draw lines for President Trump.
We were told that all these Supreme Court members, including Amy Coney Barrett, were appointed to just do whatever Trump wanted, including overturn the results of the 2020 election.
None of that has happened.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly intervened against Trump and to put limits on what he can do.
It's business as normal inside Washington, except for the elites who've been feeding out the trove for so long.
Those are the ways that normal business has to end and should end.
That's what Trump's promising to end.
And then I think the big question hovering over his presidency is whether this time he's actually prepared to do it.
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Ever since Donald Trump descended down that escalator in 2015 to announce his presidency, but especially once it became evident that his candidacy was a serious threat, but especially once it became evident that his candidacy was a serious threat, first to the Republican Party establishment and then the Democratic Party establishment
We have heard a never-ending series increasingly shrill and baseless and paranoid and conspiratorial that has nothing to do with the ideology Trump believes in or the policies he was elected to implement, but everything to do with these CIA-concocted Scandals, all of which, most of which, have turned out to be completely baseless.
And every year brought a new media theme as to why what Donald Trump was doing was unprecedented.
He was destroying our democracy.
Obviously, voters didn't believe this.
They didn't care about it.
And in 2020, and even before that, 2018, 2019, when the Mueller investigation was ongoing, and there was a lot of I don't know if it was prediction or desire on the part of the Democratic Party and most of their media allies that not only Trump,
but his sons and his daughter and his closest associates were going to be, quote, frog marched out of the White House by Robert Mueller and put into prison for life for having conspired with the Russians to intervene in our 2016 election.
None of which ever happened because Robert Mueller closed an investigation by saying he could find no evidence that any of that took place.
But all the way through 2020, the end of 2020, we were told that Donald Trump was likely to give blanket pardons.
Not just pardons for people who've been convicted or who are charged with a crime, but blanket pardons.
Meaning, you're off the hook for every crime you've committed, no matter what those might be.
Ones we know about that you're being investigated for, and even ones we don't for this big time period.
And because we were told he was going to issue blanket preemptive pardons, not pardons for people already convicted or charged, and because we were told that he was going to give pardons to his family members and closest political allies, therefore placing them all above the law in a way that had never previously been done, we were told that Donald Trump was going to destroy American democracy and the rule of law on the way out of office with these pardons.
Like, so much of what the Democratic Party and their media allies promised, including the Trump family being arrested, none of that came to pass.
Trump didn't issue any pardons to his family members on the way out, let alone preemptive blanket ones.
He pardoned a couple of his close political associates who've been caught up in the Robert Mueller investigation, and he pardoned them for specific crimes, not blanket preemptive pardons.
So none of the pardons that we were told were so destructive and corrosive and toxic to American political values ever actually emanated from Donald Trump, and yet it was just a given that he was a threat to the rule of law because he was somehow, they knew, planning on doing it.
He never did.
I think they were about four years too early in hitting the panic button because we do now have a president who has done all of that that I just described.
And his name is not Donald Trump.
His name is Joe Biden.
Starting two months ago, Joe Biden, who had spent years promising that he would never pardon his son, Hunter Biden, that he would trust the court and the rule of law to adjudicate his guilt, saying, unlike Trump, he believes in the justice system and the rule of law and nobody is above the law.
Soon as that election was over, he turned around and pardoned Hunter Biden, exactly what he swore and promised he would never do.
And then in the last day of his presidency, early this morning, he issued preemptive blanket pardons to some of his most important political allies, including Liz Cheney.
And the rest of the January 6th committee, including Adam Kinzinger and Jamie Raskin, that whole crowd.
Just want you to think about that for a second.
Joe Biden, on his last day in office, Did not really pardon huge numbers of people who have been overcharged, in part because of the laws he helped pass for nonviolent drug offenses.
He did pardon a lot of those before, but not on the last day.
He instead chose to immunize from criminal liability Dick Cheney's daughter.
Obviously a gift for having supported Kamala Harris, along with Dr. Fauci, whose behavior during the COVID Pandemic was highly, highly questionable, to put that generously in so many ways.
And this general, General Mark Milley, who had worked for Trump and actively sought to subvert Trump's foreign policy in a way that he boasted about it and the media celebrated, he now too has a part in, and therefore immune from whatever possible crimes he may have committed by deliberately sabotaging.
The foreign policy of the elected president as an unelected general and basically inverting the way we're supposed to live, which is with civilian rule over the military, not military rule over our civilian politics.
Here from NBC News, they were anticipating that Biden would do this a few days ago.
Quote, Biden is expected to leave office to issue more pardons before leaving office on Monday.
the timing of the clemency action, should Biden decide to grant them, is likely to be during his final hours in office and could include preemptive pardon, sources told NBC News.
And that's exactly what Joe Biden did today.
Here's the first one, the set of...
Pardons that he issued early in the morning, not to his family members that came after, but to his political allies.
Our nation, said Biden, relies on dedicated, selfless public servants every day.
They are the lifeblood of our democracy, yet alarmingly, public servants have been subjected to an ongoing threats and intimidation for faithfully discharging their duties.
I believe in the rule of law, said Biden, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics, but...
These are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing.
That is why I am exercising my authority under the Constitution to pardon General Mark A. Milley, Dr. Anthony S. Falchi, the members of Congress and staff who served on the Select Committee of January 6, and the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan Police Officers who testified before the Select Committee.
The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgement that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing.
Nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offenses.
Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country.
We were constantly told that the most important principle that Trump was eroding was that nobody is above the law.
The rule of law makes all of us, no matter our station or position or power station, subject to the same rules as everybody else.
And here you have a lot of public officials about whom there's evidence certainly to investigate, let alone be highly suspicious of, in terms of whether they committed crimes, but because they're all political allies of Joe Biden's, he decided to issue not just pardons for specific crimes, but blanket preemptive pardons, things they have not been charged with, and not specific crimes, but all crimes.
For these very long periods of time going over years.
Now, again, that was what we were told throughout 2020 was the greatest threat that Trump could possibly impose on the United States.
Here is the Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, who I really believe is, and I know I could say this about a lot of people, but he is the most flagrant, blatant Democratic Party policy in any mainstream He never deviates from defending the Democratic Party and just spewing standard anti-Trump resistance track from the pussy protest of 2017. Here's what he said in December 20th in his Washington Post column.
Quote, Trump could grant his kids a blanket pardon for federal crimes from their birth to the moment of the pardon and it would probably hold up if challenged.
The primary obstacle to doing this?
Norms.
So nothing.
In other words, Trump doesn't care about norms, unlike us, unlike the Democrats.
So because the only thing that would stop him from giving blanket preemptive pardons to all of his kids is norms and he doesn't care about norms, there's nothing out there to stop him.
That's what Philip Bum said.
And then Donald Trump left office without issuing a single pardon to a single family member.
And obviously he never went back and accounted for that.
Now here's the very same Philip Bump in the Washington Post.
Not in 2020 when Trump was president, but in 2025 today while Biden still was.
Talking about the exact types of pardons that in 2020 he said were so evil and corrosive.
The Washington Post gathered all their very esteemed and diverse columnists today to react to the He had announced pardons for General Mark Milley,
Dr. Anthony Fauci and the members of Congress and staffers who served on the January 6th committee.
These were all preemptive pardons.
None of these people had been convicted of a crime.
This goes to the seriousness of today.
The person being inaugurated as president has often suggested he will use the legal system to punish people simply for not agreeing with him ideologically or on policy issues or for conducting legitimate investigations of his conduct.
I can understand why Biden.
Felt the need to issue these kinds of pardons in a way that Bill Clinton did not before George W. Bush took office or George H.W. Bush did not do before Clinton assumed the presidency.
I mean, can you believe that?
Just the flagrancy of it?
Oh yes, if Trump had issued pardons like this, that would have been the end of the republic.
But when Biden does it, it's totally different.
Totally different.
And the one thing I continue not to be able to believe, even given the level of audacity we usually see from these people, is that they have gone around for a year warning that it was Donald Trump who had weaponized the justice system in order to prosecute his political enemies, even though he did none of that in his first four years of office from 2017 to 2021. You know who did do that?
You know who did weaponize the justice system to try and continuously put into prison their political Enemies, that would be the Democratic Party under the Biden administration.
I showed you how they were drooling at the mouth to watch Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and all those close Trump associates and then Trump himself being, quote, frog-marched out of the White House by Robert Mueller and imprisoned for life.
They're the people.
Who has spent years trying to imprison their political enemies.
They brought four different felony charges against Donald Trump in four different jurisdictions.
One more frivolous than the next.
And they were open about the fact that they believed their best strategy for winning the 2024 election was to make sure Americans saw Donald Trump behind bars.
Prosecuting and imprisoning their political enemies was close to a number one goal.
Of Democrats and the corporate media throughout all the Trump presidency and even especially as he looked like he was going to be a big threat to win the 2024 election again.
And then these very same people turn around, have the audacity to turn around.
I don't understand the shamelessness here.
And say that even though four years ago we were worrying about the evils of preemptive pardons to your family and close allies, this is totally different because Trump is the one who wants to weaponize the justice system.
To imprison his political enemies, so it's totally different when Biden did it.
Here is Philip Bump responding to Perry Bacon.
He said, Perry, all that's true, but it's worth noting that James Biden was part of Hunter Biden's business efforts and a particular target of Republicans.
Others in his family have been looped in as well into the, quote, largely contrived investigation as well.
So it's not just the media as an abstraction.
That treated a possible Trump preemptive pardon or blanket pardon of his family members and close allies as the end of the American rule of law.
It's the very same people who said that.
And I can show you example after example who today on a dime switched everything they were saying and said that it was justified for Joe Biden to do so.
It was completely different.
Here from Politico, this is how they describe these.
Last minute flurry of preemptive pardons to Joe Biden's entire family.
The headline, Playbook PM American Carnage Part 2, quote, with just 20 minutes left in office, Biden announced a final batch of pardons for his family members, including his siblings, James Biden, Valerie Biden, Owens, Francis Biden, and their spouses.
Biden's 11th hour decision on the matter serves as a final check of Trump's power.
Blocking him from exacting legal revenge against those on his rumored enemies list.
In a statement announcing the pardons, Biden noted the move could, quote, should not be mistaken as an acknowledgement that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt or any offense.
Those public servants have served our nation with honor and distinction and do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.
Can you just believe they went from, in four short years, preemptive hardons to family members is the greatest assault on the rule of law and it makes us all look corrupt and like a decadent democracy in front of the entire world to four years later saying Biden did this to safeguard against Trump's corruption and threats to imprison his political opponents?
Here's the clemency given to Dr. Anthony Fauci.
And what's notable about this is that Not only is there no specific crime for which Fauci is being shielded, he's being shielded for all crimes.
It's not just during the COVID pandemic that he was pardoned, but going all the way back to 2014, which is the same period of time that the pardon of Hunter Biden applied.
And I think there's a couple of reasons for that.
One is that most crimes that took place before 2014 would be beyond the statute of limitations and couldn't be prosecuted anyway.
But who knows what Fauci was doing going back to 2014. That's when a lot of reports suggest gain of research function actually began when they were purposely manipulating viruses that could infect humans to become even more contagious and deadlier in the name of studying them, something that Fauci always denied.
So Fauci could have committed an enormous number of crimes between 2014 and today.
And same with Biden's family.
And this is a pardon that shields all of that, including crimes we don't even know about, possible crimes.
Here is real clear investigations today that at least makes this observation, quote, despite Biden's pardon, Fauci still faces legal perils.
Here they are.
Quote, these pardons will not stop DOJ investigations, said one advisor to the Trump transition team who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
We expected this and look at it as the predicate to get truth from people who can no longer use the Fifth Amendment.
Now we can bring everyone of them in front of a grand jury.
That's a really important point.
If the federal government tries to prosecute somebody and they have a real risk of being convicted under the Constitution, they have a Fifth Amendment right, Not to incriminate themselves so they can refuse to answer and the courts will accept it by saying, oh, if I answer it, it may help the government incriminate me and help the government prosecute me and I'm not required to do that.
But now that Fauci is pardoned and these other people are pardoned, they don't have that excuse.
They can be questioned and investigated because there's still a lot to get to the bottom of.
Here is the official document for Biden's Now, Joe Biden,
on January 10th, 2025, Was questioned about the whole idea of whether he would give himself a pardon.
And here's why he said he didn't need one. - Sir, on pardons, have you ruled out a pardon for yourself or any other additional members of the family?
Yes, sir.
What would I pardon myself for?
That's what I'm asking.
No, I have no contemplation of pardoning myself.
I didn't do anything wrong.
Mr. President, would you comment on Metta's decision to...
So look at that rationale.
He's saying, no, I personally, Joe Biden, I don't need a pardon.
I didn't do anything wrong.
Only people who did things wrong need a pardon.
But that would mean that...
Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney and General Mike Milley and all the Bidens, according to Biden's rationale, may have done so.
Now, just to make a technical point here that can be really important about how pardons work, the president can pardon somebody, but then that person has to accept or reject the pardon.
And if they reject the pardon, it means it has no effect in court.
The president can't impose a pardon on somebody.
Somebody has to see the pardon offered to them, and then they either accept it or reject it.
And despite Biden's claim and the media's claim that the acceptance of these pardons, and this means that all the people who are pardoned today, Liz Cheney, Fauci, the Biden family, Jamie Raskin, Adam Kinzinger, chose to accept these pardons.
And back in 1915, the Supreme Court, in the case of Burdick v.
United States, which for the first time was trying to rule whether a citizen can reject a pardon because there was a newspaper editor who the courts were trying to force to give up his source and he refused.
And Woodrow Wilson thought it was wrong, so Woodrow Wilson pardoned him, but this editor said, I don't want that pardon.
I want to fight this on principle.
And the Supreme Court had to ask, is this refusal of a pardon, does that mean that he's not pardoned?
And they ultimately concluded that he does have the right, and here's part of what they said.
And then later on in the decision, this is what they said.
Listen to this.
This has been part of the jurisprudence of pardons for more than a century now.
The court explained there are substantial differences between legislative immunity and a presidential pardon.
The latter, meaning the presidential pardon, carries an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it.
People who accept pardons under the law are accepting an imputation of guilt and the acceptance of a confession to the crime.
So Joe Biden, the media, everybody else can say these pardons don't mean they're guilty.
But according to longstanding jurisprudence in the United States, which cannot just be waved away with decrees by Joe Biden, no matter how much the media supports it, it means that technically these people have acknowledged some sort of confession of some sort of wrongdoing.
Okay.
Interestingly, as you know, Donald Trump has been making very clear that he intends to pardon the January 6th defendants, including ones who engage in violence against police officers on the ground that, and we've covered this before, the Justice Department went way overboard in terms of inventing new theories to turn them into felons, including people there who are for nonviolent protests.
They've been given extremely harsh political sentences.
Unlike any sort of protesters, including ones who engage in far more disruptive pardons, typically debt.
And I think right after we went on the show, I'm hearing that Trump actually did issue pardons of all 1,500 January 6th defendants who have been found guilty who are in prison, so all of them are going to be getting out of prison, I assume.
He made good on that promise.
Here is Politico.
When they were talking about the prospect that Donald Trump might follow through and pardon the January 6th defendants, the Justice Department.
January 6th defendants who accept pardons will make a, quote, confession of guilt.
Some defendants claim that Trump can issue, quote, pardons of innocence.
But federal prosecutors told a judge that pardons would not wipe away their guilt.
Quote, the Justice Department sent a message Wednesday to January 6th defendants, accepting a pardon from Donald Trump is a, quote, confession of guilt for your crimes.
Quote, a pardon at some unspecified date in the future would not unring the bell of a conviction, federal prosecutors argued, in a January 6th case before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols.
Quote, in fact, quite the opposite.
The defendant would first have to accept the pardon, which necessitates a confession of guilt.
Do you see how they're willing to say completely opposite things when they're talking about what Joe Biden might do versus what Donald Trump might do?
Politico just said in that article that I read you that all these people who accepted pardons today from Joe Biden, Liz Cheney and the rest...
Aren't confessing to guilt, and yet when it came to the pardoning of the January 6th defendants, the same politicos said, no, by definition, federal prosecutors say you have to accept the pardon, and once you do that, it's a confession of guilt, which is what the Supreme Court said in 2015. It just doesn't apply only to people getting pardons from Trump, but also Joe Biden, which now includes his entire family, and the January 6th Commission, and Dr. Mark Milley, and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
I think this might be my favorite one.
Back in 2020, after Biden was named president-elect, he sat down for a joint interview with Jake Tapper on CNN, along with Kamala Harris.
And this was when there was all that talk about Trump issuing preemptive blanket pardons to his family.
And Jake Tapper said, what about the possibility that Donald Trump might do something so horrible, so destructive, so abusive to the rule of law as issue blanket preemptive pardons to his family?
And here's what Joe Biden indignantly responded.
President Trump is reportedly considering a wave of preemptive pardons.
Does this concern you?
All these preemptive pardons?
Well, it concerns me in terms of what kind of precedent it sets and how the rest of the world looks at us as a nation of Can you believe that?
Seriously, can you believe that?
Joe Biden went on air in 2020 and said, if Trump were to issue preemptive pardons to his family, that would degrade how America, how the world sees the United States and whether we live under the rule of law.
And then Biden said, you're not going to see any kind of pardons like that in my administration.
In our administration, the approach to making policy by tweets, you know, it's just going to be a totally different way in which we approach the justice system.
Totally, totally different way we're going to treat the justice system.
That last statement that Biden made.
It was actually honest and true inadvertently.
Biden did treat the justice system very, very differently than Trump did in two key ways.
One is that, unlike Trump, Biden actually did weaponize the justice system to prosecute his political opponents, including the person who was almost certain to be his primary adversary in the election.
He tried in every way he could to imprison them, unlike what Trump did.
And then the second way is that unlike Trump, who never issued pardons to his family or preemptive blanket pardons to his political allies, Joe Biden did exactly that.
It's really amazing to watch that.
Here is Chuck Schumer on this question in December of 2020 when they thought Trump was going to issue preemptive pardons for up to 20 allies.
Even as, quote, Republicans bucked.
Even Senate Republicans were concerned about this.
Quote, Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, like other Democrats, has described the possibility of these preemptive pardons from Trump as a, quote, gross abuse of the presidential pardon authority.
Do you think that Chuck Schumer issued a similar statement today at the pardons that Biden issued that Trump never did?
Here's then Congressman Adam Schiff.
Who at the time was a congressman of California, arguably the single most pathological liar in all of Congress.
He said that he saw smoking gun evidence proving that Trump and the Russians colluded in the 2016 election, something that Robert Mueller said after looking for 18 months did not exist.
And he never showed it, of course, here.
He was with the very esteemed, sober, across the spectrum respected.
Journalist Joy Reid, who asked him about preemptive pardons for Trump's family members and associates on the way out.
Have you ever heard of somebody getting a preemptive pardon who was innocent of all crime?
Who's just an innocent person?
Have you ever heard of that, just somebody getting a blanket pardon and they're an innocent person?
No, I think that it's an effort not only to...
Prospectively pardon people for things they have not yet been charged with and may never be charged with.
But also, it's the president's own family.
It's people that have been covering up for the president in addition to his own family.
This is the nature of those the president has surrounded himself with, including his family.
And that is, it's been essentially a den of thieves and thieves environment.
And so I think the president used this as his way of trying to protect those that have protected him.
You know, there's really no point, especially after as long as I've been doing this, and just constantly pointing out the hypocrisy of politicians or political parties.
Yes, they say things that benefit their interest at one moment, and then if it turns around two months later, a year later, or three years later, they're going to say the exact opposite.
They're going to be totally shameless about it.
If I spent all my time pointing out this hypocrisy and these switches, I would do nothing else.
But sometimes it's so disgustingly flagrant, it's so glaring, that it actually pains your eyes to gaze upon it.
And this is one of those times, because it wasn't just some cursory statement in passing, it was the primary theme of 2020. Congressman Ted Lieu of California, December 3rd, 2020, here's what he posted on X. What 20 crimes did the allies of Donald Trump commit that would necessitate the preemptive pardons?
There is no doubt the Trump administration is the most corrupt in history, and that's saying a lot when you include Richard Nixon.
So again, there's that presumption that people who get preemptive pardons must be guilty of something.
Now, I think what's so notable here is that Biden pardoned all these people, even though the chances, in my view, that Trump was actually going to try and prosecute Liz Cheney and Dr. Fauci and General Milley were very low.
If there were real evidence of crimes, and in some of these cases I think there might have been, the Justice Department should, but even in his inaugural address today, Trump said the days of weaponizing the justice system against our political opponents is over.
I don't think he has any intention of doing that.
And I think these pardons that Biden issued were utterly unnecessary.
Trump, however, had very good reasons to pardon all of his family and his associates, even though he didn't.
Because not just random Democrats, The most influential people inside the government, like former CIA director John Brennan, who is a former CIA director, but no CIA director really is former, had been saying for years that they expected Robert Mueller to arrest Trump's entire family and then after that for Trump to be imprisoned in these four different cases.
Here was John Brennan.
He went on MSNBC in May of 2019, right as there were reports that Robert Mueller was going to close his investigation, but he hadn't yet charged anybody with the core conspiracy theory, the allegation that gave rise to all of Russiagate in the first place, was that American citizens, including Trump or people in his campaign or family, had actively conspired with the Russians to hack into the DNC and Podesta emails and interfere in the 2016 election.
They caught people like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone and Carter Page in process crimes, meaning they claimed they weren't telling the truth during the investigation itself, but nothing was done about any alleged crimes that gave rise to the conspiracy theory in the first place.
And so here was John Brennan on MSNBC with Lawrence O'Donnell saying he believed that although Robert Mueller was likely to close his investigation, he would not do so.
Until he criminally charged with felonies, not just close associates of Trump, but his key family members.
Listen to what he said.
This is John Brennan on MSNBC getting the liberal audience to believe because they're threatening that Trump is going to prison and so are his sons.
Investigation.
Are you one who's willing to, at this stage of the game, venture a guess about where Robert Mueller is in his process and how close he is to filing a report?
And beyond that, what you would expect from such a report?
Well, I think Robert Mueller wants to be able to conclude his work and turn over the investigative threads to the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of Virginia, and other jurisdictions as appropriate, as we're coming up to two years.
So I think he does want to conclude that.
I wouldn't be surprised if, for example, this week on Friday, not knowing anything about it, but Friday is the day that the grand jury indictments come down.
And also this Friday is better than next Friday because next Friday is the 15th of March, which is the Ides of March.
And I don't think Robert Mueller will want to have that dramatic flair of the Ides of March when he is going to be delivering what I think are going to be his indictments, the final indictments, as well as the report that he gives to the Attorney General.
What makes you believe that he has more indictments?
Because he hasn't addressed the issues related to criminal conspiracy as well as any individuals.
Criminal conspiracy involving the Russians?
The Russians, yes.
I think it was very...
In terms of an American person, a U.S. person.
That's an area you know something about.
That investigation was developing while you were still on the job.
Well, it was, in terms of looking at what was going on with the Russians and whether or not U.S. persons were actively collaborating, colluding, cooperating, involved in a conspiracy with them or not.
But also, if there's going to be any member of the Trump family...
Did you see enough at that stage to believe that there would now...
That that would result in indictments once investigated?
I thought at the time that there was going to be individuals who were going to have issues with the Department of Justice.
Yes, and I think we've already seen a number of individuals who have been indicted, either have pled guilty or have been convicted now.
So, again, I don't have any inside knowledge.
I'm not talking with anybody in special counsel.
Yes, you do.
You have the inside knowledge of what began at all.
But not about the status of the investigation right now.
But I do think also if anybody from the Trump family, an extended family, is going to be indicted, it would be in the final act.
of Mueller's investigation because Bob Mueller and I think his team knows that if he were to do something, indicting a Trump family member, or if he were to go forward with indictment on criminal conspiracy involving U.S. persons, that would basically be the death knell of the special counsel's office because I don't believe that Donald Trump would allow Bob Mueller to continue in the aftermath of those types of actions.
John Brennan, thank you very much.
You have to listen to every word in the John Brennan answer.
Thank you very much for joining us.
I really appreciate it.
So just as an aside, is it any wonder that most liberals have just completely abandoned all of this media?
Look at how often they were lied to.
These liberal true believers constantly promised things.
You know, Lawrence O'Donnell says, oh, John Brennan, you really know what's going on.
You have to listen to every word because you speak with great code and sophistication.
And John Brennan was saying there's no way Robert Mueller will close the investigation unless he first charges all the people who actually conspired with Russia, something he hasn't done yet, including Trump's kids and his family.
And then Mueller closed the investigation without ever charging anyone, let alone Trump's family.
With conspiring with Russia because the whole conspiracy theory was fake.
There was no evidence for it, as Mueller said in his report.
But they were constantly threatening Trump's family and his closest circle.
And even despite those actual threats, which Joe Biden has not had, Trump still didn't issue these kinds of pardons.
They were swearing he would, unlike Joe Biden, who just did.
This is why I think the media is lost.
This is why I think the Democratic Party is lost.
This is why I think they were just there kind of stumbling around today, giving up all this resistance posture.
Everything they tried, everything they believed, everything they told their followers to believe, either none of it came true or most Americans didn't care about it.
And now they have no concept of how else to oppose Donald Trump.
Because everything they've been doing for the last seven years is fraudulent.
And it's without principle.
And so to watch Joe Biden and the Democrats turn around and do everything they said Trump was going to do, yet he never did, that was so corrosive and destructive through the law, now watch them turn around and not even acknowledge their prior statements and in fact affirmatively defend what Biden did, says everything you need to know about the...
These scummy people in media and the fact that Joe Biden's last act on his way out the door is to pardon Dick Cheney's daughter Liz Cheney says everything you need to know about why there's a political alignment in the United States and why the soul of the Democratic Party is both rotted and dying and deservedly so Kamala can't pain with.
Liz Cheney and Biden's last act, the thing he thought was most important, was to immunize Liz Cheney of all people from criminal investigation along with his entire family.
As we try and do with every major political event, the debates, the conventions, we try and make sure we have journalists on the ground.
I've been to some of these.
We often send Michael Tracy, who does a great job with his roving interviews.
We sent him to Washington this weekend with our staffer, who is outstanding at sort of producing these.
They've made a great team for so long, Megan O'Rourke.
Locals, where you'll have exclusive access to it because we don't have time to show all of the interviews here, even though so many of them are great.
There's over around 15 minutes of them.
But I want to show you, actually just of this one interview, but I do want to show you this one interview that I find so remarkable.
I think it says so much about Washington, where Michael was able to interview former Congresswoman, outgoing Congressman Cori Bush, who lost her.
Primary seat to Wesley Bell, who's basically owned Lock, Stock and Barrel by AIPAC since he got $15 million from them and that's why he won.
There was just a vote where the Congress wanted to sanction the ICC for the crime of issuing an arrest warrant against Netanyahu and very few Democrats, just a few dozen, voted to sanction the ICC. Most Republicans did except for Thomas Massey, of course.
And Wesley Bell was one of them, as if the very poor, predominantly black people in his St. Louis district actually sent him to Congress to do that.
It was AIPAC who bought him and owns him, along with George Latimer, the person they funded to take out, Jamal Bowman in New York, who also voted for him.
So AIPAC, congratulations.
You've purchased two new members of Congress.
I think you'll have about 350 of them on your shelf at least.
But here's Cori Bush, who Michael talked to specifically about Why it is that she voted, along with every other Democrat, to send billions and billions, tens of billions of dollars to fund the NATO war in Ukraine.
And it was a particularly ironic thing to do, given that she was at a conference that was called the Peace Conference.
Here's that interview with Michael and Congresswoman Bush.
You mentioned in your speech earlier at this event that we're at the Peace Ball.
We want to, basically advocating for a general movement of peace.
I'm wondering how you relate that to the issue of Ukraine, because it seems like the Democrats in Congress were almost virtually united, actually 100% united in funding Ukraine, which, whether you like it or not, that does involve sending a giant amount of munitions and weapons and armaments into a hugely destructive war where you have hundreds of thousands of casualties, Russians and Ukrainians piling up in the battlefield.
And the only criticism was coming from a section of Republicans.
Is there any contradiction, do you think, in terms of you calling for peace or Democrats calling for peace and not being willing to at all re-evaluate the policy on Ukraine, which has really been extremely catastrophic.
It's some of the most brutal warfare since World War I, like 100 years ago.
And Democrats, from my perspective, just to be honest with you, have been very missing in action in kind of critically evaluating that policy and just going along with it, whatever the Biden-Harris administration wanted in terms of weapons.
Really, what about diplomacy?
What about some other option rather than just dumping endless weapons into Ukraine?
Is that fair, do you think?
I think the other part of that, though, is the threat of...
U.S. troops by the masses moving to the ground was a very real thing.
At least that's how it was presented.
It had been presented to us in Congress.
And for me...
Presented by who?
Presented by the administration.
That, you know, that that would be a very real thing, you know.
So did we want to keep U.S. troops from having to go?
So the White House presented, just to clarify, the Biden White House presented the issue to you as if you don't supply the weapons that they say are required, that could involve, that might mean that U.S. troops would have to go into the combat?
Not saying that if we don't supply the weapons, it was if you all don't support.
If you all don't support these bills, then that could be the outcome.
And so for many, and I can't speak for everyone, but the question, when I look at my own district, when I look at my own district and I think about those who often are the ones who end up with the least amount of help, the least amount of services, often don't have...
What they need when they return back.
I wanted to support my community in that.
So that's what that was about, making sure that we weren't sending the same black and brown bodies to go and do this bidding and then using the money and the resources to go and do that.
I can't speak for everyone, but I know that that was what some people were thinking.
Like I said, I can't speak for everyone.
I didn't have those conversations, but that was just a very...
Sorry, I forgot to put my microphone in my face.
Your thinking at the time, when these appropriations bills came forward in terms of arms for Ukraine, was that by approving arms for Ukraine, you were lessening the likelihood?
As you put it, black and brown soldiers or people that had joined the military would end up getting deployed to Ukraine.
So that's how the administration framed it.
So I assume, through no fall of your own, you're not somebody who spent a whole lot of time probably focused on the issue of Ukraine.
Over the course of your career, you have other interests, mostly, right?
And so they presented it to you, or your interpretation was that by providing those munitions, you were basically saving or...
No.
No, no, no, no.
It wasn't providing munitions.
It was supporting these bills, supporting these bills to hold off Russia, supporting these bills.
Was there funding for munitions?
For what the funding was for, this was a way to stop us from sending U.S. troops who, for me...
What I was already dealing with in my district were mostly black and brown and marginalized folks that we were trying to help.
It was to stop that from being the next occurrence.
That's what that was for.
But those bills provided munitions.
I've given you a lot of time, a lot of time, and so, you know, and for you to turn this into a Ukraine thing was not, you know, so I, you know, I'm trying to answer your question.
I'm trying to be respectful, honestly.
I just thought that Ukraine was relevant, given that we're at the Peace Ball, that's another conflict going on.
You don't think so?
No, no, no, no, absolutely.
I just, what I'm saying is, is that I, you keep...
Like, going, asking question after question after question.
I only answered two questions with everybody else.
I gave you, like, what, six?
No, that's fine, yeah.
So, you know.
All right.
Well, I appreciate it either way.
I didn't mean to be rude at all.
You weren't being rude.
You took the opportunity to just...
I did.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anyone would do.
I get it.
I'm just saying.
I don't want to speak for other people about it because I haven't had those conversations.
So, yeah.
All right.
Well, former Congressman Cori Bush of Missouri, thank you very much.
Absolutely.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right.
So there you have it.
Michael was on his best behavior.
He was...
You know, appropriately assertive.
After all, she is a member of Congress, or was, who voted for an extremely dangerous war, sending hundreds of billions, tens of billions of dollars at a time, but hundreds since, to a NATO war in Ukraine while she's at a peace conference.
And there wasn't a single Democrat ever in dissent, not just then, but now, even though much of the world realizes that this has been a mistake.
And when he tried to ask her, Why she sent that, given her insistence that she stands for peace, she said something kind of remarkable.
She was basically saying she sent that money because she thought it was the only way to avoid having black and brown American soldiers be sent to Ukraine to fight directly.
And she, for a minute, insinuated that that's how it was pitched to her by the Obama administration, by the Biden administration, either you.
Send all this money there or we're going to end up fighting there, which doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
But I think the other notable part was that every time Michael kept saying, you voted to send munitions, right?
And she would deny.
She would say, no, no, no, that's not what I did.
And she would go to explain the bill.
I don't think she knew that the bill and the money that she allocated was intended to buy huge amounts of weaponry from Raytheon and General Dynamics and Boeing in order to send to...
Ukraine, I don't know if she thought it was like nice humanitarian aid to build like nice schools or whatever.
And he did say, look, Ukraine's obviously not an issue that you've given a lot of thought to.
And if you listen to the members of Congress, so many of them who vote on these things, speak about these issues, it's shocking how little they know.
Now, not all of them can be experts in every area.
That's to be understood.
They're going to know more about some things than others.
But if the United States is involved in a major war with the country with the largest nuclear stockpile, and you're voting to send tens of billions of dollars over there because your party tells you to, I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that you have a basic understanding of what you're sending.
And she seems to be at least a little bit, I don't know, I don't want to say rebuke, but maybe a little uncomfortable.
She doesn't really...
I think that's her greatest moment.
But this is the kind of accountability that you almost never hear.
That's why we send Michael there.
You'll hear people who voted yes to send these things asked about, isn't it crucial that we stop the Russians?
How much territory is Trump going to give?
And isn't that going to embolden Putin?
But what about the people who voted yes and created an absolute bloodbath that achieved all the goals that the Russians set out to achieve?
With a diplomatic solution that could have been had very early on that instead was deliberately derailed by the United States and NATO and now has resulted in the destruction of Ukraine, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, hundreds of thousands of lives of young Ukrainian and young Russian men extinguished, including huge numbers who were forced against their will to go and fight.
It just gives you a sense of how war is so common in Washington that they really don't think much about it at all before they vote yes on it.
There was a lot going on in that dynamic that I think you could think about as well.
There's another Michael interview.
This one was with Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts that we were going to show you.
It's not like it's so earth-shattering.
It's just Congressman McGovern's behavior there was quite notable without...
Asserting it definitively, you may have seen that in the confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, they were asking him a lot about his alcohol use and showing up for work inebriated.
And Senator Mark Wayne Miller, the Republican of Oklahoma, said, this is incredible hypocrisy.
So many of you, either yourselves or people you know, show up here all the time drunk and you never say anything.
Why don't you ask them to resign?
And he made a lot of accusations like that.
And you should take a look at that interview that Michael did with the congressman from Massachusetts.
We also have a roundtable that Michael did with the great free speech lawyer Janine Yunus along with Aaron Mate on the ceasefire and everything going on in Israel.
So there's a lot of exclusive content that we have.
Other interviews as well.
We're going to put them on Locals throughout the week.
So if you're not a member of Locals...
And you would like to join, as I said, there's always a lot of original, exclusive content that we don't have time to put here that's still a very high quality.
We also have after shows twice a week, every Tuesday and Thursday, where we take your questions and respond to your feedback and critiques and hear your suggestions for future shows.
We have a lot of features there, including written transcripts of every program we broadcast here, we publish there the next day.
And most of all, it really is the community that enables this show to happen.
It's the community on which we rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
All you have to do is click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
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