Should Obama Admin Officials Be Prosecuted for Russiagate Lies? Major Escalations in Trump/Brazil Conflict
As it becomes apparent that Obama administration officials spread Russiagate lies, will these government officials now face any consequences for the hoax? Plus: tensions between Brazil and the U.S. escalate as Brazil's censorship judge continues to crack down on speech and persecute his political opponents. -------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday, every single Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the RussiGate fraud is receiving all sorts of new attention and scrutiny thanks to documents first declassified and then released by Trump Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.
As we reported at length last week, these documents are quite incriminating for various Obama officials, such as former CIA Director James Clapper, FBI Director, former CI Director Jim Brennan, I should say.
John Brennan, I don't know why my brain did that, FBI Director Jim Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, as they reveal what was clearly a deliberate attempt to weaponize intelligence findings for purely partisan and political ends in 2016, namely to manipulate the American electorate into voting for their former Obama administration colleague Hillary Clinton as president and more importantly defeating Donald Trump.
And then they repeatedly lied about it to Congress and the American people.
As a result of these findings, Gabbard made several criminal referrals to the Justice Department.
And yesterday it was reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi is not only investigating, which is kind of meaningless, but what's not meaningless is that she's also apparently impaneling a grand jury to investigate whether there was prosecutable criminality at the highest levels of the Obama administration.
This in turn has predictably provoked shrill objections from the same media outlets which worked in partnership with the CIA and the FBI to disseminate this hoax as they all come forward to insist that this is nothing more than a case of political retribution more appropriate to what they call a banana republic rather than an advanced democracy.
Does that claim have any validity at all?
Or is this just an attempt to shield their political allies at CIA and FBI and in the Obama White House from accountability?
We'll examine that obviously important question.
Then ever since President Trump announced 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods as retribution for what Trump sees as Brazil's authoritarian judge censoring political opponents, including inside the U.S., and also persecuting, in his words, former President Jair Bolsonaro, that conflict between the Trump administration and Brazil has only escalated.
Following the vows by Judge Alexander de Maraj, the censorship and authoritarian judge who basically runs Brazil, as well as the country's president, Lula de Silva, they vowed that they were going to ignore Trump's objections, the Trump administration proceeded to not just impose tariffs, but also personal sanctions on Judge Marais as a human rights violator under the Magnitsky Act.
To then show that he is still defiant toward the U.S. and unbowed by these personal sanctions, the judge then ordered Bolsonaro to be arrested and confined to pre-trial imprisonment at home.
All because over the weekend, Bolsonaro, who was prohibited by Mauraesh already from leaving his home on the weekend, appeared by phone at a political rally that was held against Mauraish.
Exactly what tyrants always do when someone criticizes them.
They order them in prison.
And that's what Mauraij did with Bolsonaro.
All of this essentially ensures still further punishments and sanctions from the U.S. government on Maj, perhaps his wife and family members, and other key Brazilian officials.
And this conflict is only likely to spiral and escalate further.
We'll examine what's driving all of this, what's at stake, and the potential consequences for all sides.
Before we get to all of that, a quick couple quick programming notes.
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I believe it's been obvious pretty much from the very beginning of the Russiagate hoax, the Russiagate fraud, which I'll remind you again was driven by the core conspiracy claim that the Trump campaign campaign officials collaborated and colluded and conspired with the Kremlin to hack into the DNC email server as well as John Podesta's email and disseminate those emails to WikiLeaks and by the broader conspiracy theory that Trump was being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin with sexual
material compromising financial information, personal blackmail as well, and that therefore the Kremlin was basically one Trump got elected running the country.
It was a completely unhinged and deranged conspiracy theory from the start for which there was no evidence.
I'm not just saying that retroactively.
Like some people, not very many, but some, I was saying it quite vocally at the time.
And it was clear not just that this was a scam or a fraud, but that it was one deliberately cooked up from the bowels of the intelligence community and law enforcement agencies where so many of these lies get disseminated, mainly from the CIA, then led by John Brennan, who we now know is a vehement, devoted hater of Donald Trump, as well as Jim Comey at the FBI, same thing, as well as James Clapper, who was the director of national intelligence under Obama.
This is all done under the Obama administration.
And they were trying to help what had been their colleague inside the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, who served as Secretary of State, and obviously was at the center of Democratic Party politics.
The idea was to do what they could using their power of the CIA and the FBI to anoint her as president and more importantly their eyes to prevent Donald Trump from ascending to the presidency.
And when Robert Mueller closed his investigation, didn't arrest anybody for that core conspiracy, produced his report saying despite looking for 18 months with unlimited resources, the dream team of prosecutors, unlimited subpoena power, he could not find the evidence to establish that conspiracy theory between Trump and the Russians.
And of course nobody got prosecuted for it as well.
Any rational person at that moment would have said, wow, this whole thing was a hoax.
And a lot of people did say that.
The problem is that as usual, none of the people responsible for this hoax that was not just, again, disseminated for because they erred or because they were victim of groupthink.
It was deliberately manipulated intelligence, deliberate lies spread to their favorite media servants in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and NBC News, who they knew would go forth and mindlessly spread it, despite it all being anonymous and without evidence.
And none of these people, despite being exposed as the perpetrators of a pretty serious fraudulent attempt to manipulate the electorate, have ever faced accountability.
And it's possible this might be changing largely as a result of what Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabber did a couple of weeks ago when she announced she was declassifying and releasing to the public a huge batch of previously unseen documents detailing what exactly was done inside the CIA, inside the FBI, inside the Obama White House to manufacture this intelligence and fabricate the scam.
And while there are people who would say that they knew that that was likely true, and I'm certainly one of them, having more evidence, more proof of exactly how they did it, of exactly what they did, showing not only that they knew it was false at the time they were saying it, but that they lied to Congress and therefore the American people about it, which is itself a crime.
The question is, why don't they deserve legal accountability, criminal accountability, for having done that?
And it's not just that Tulsi Gabbard released these documents.
She also, on the basis of those documents, made a criminal referral about several high-ranking Obama officials, including John Brennan and James Clapper, to the Justice Department, which is not that meaningful.
Anyone can make a criminal referral to the Justice Department.
Obviously, if a cabinet secretary does it, it's going to get higher attention and priority, but it doesn't mean anything.
It's just asking the Justice Department to take a look and determine whether there was criminality, whether there were crimes committed in this matter.
And oftentimes what the Trump Justice Department has been doing is they make these very melodramatic announcements, often to distract their supporters from something they're unhappy with or to give them red meat, where they say, oh, the DOJ is opening investigation into this person or into this matter.
And you look at it and it's like, who cares if you open investigation?
So many investigations that are quote unquote open never go anywhere.
You can open investigation, not do anything with it.
It's a completely meaningless announcement, which is why it's typically not announced by the Justice Department.
But a lot of these are very politicized investigations that are being opened.
So it's a way of telling Trump supporters, I know you're disappointed in a lot of things, like with Epstein and the war in Iran and the war in Israel and the war in Ukraine and all these other promises that we made that we haven't kept.
So here's some red meat.
But in this case, it goes far beyond that.
Here's Fox News reporting yesterday, exclusive, the Justice Department is launching a grand jury investigation into Russia Gate conspiracy allegations, sources say, quote, Attorney General Pam Bondi directed her staff Monday to act on the criminal referral from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard related to the alleged conspiracy of the President Donald Trump to Russia.
And the Department of Justice is now opening a grand jury investigation into the matter Fox News Digital has learned.
Bondi personally ordered an unnamed federal prosecutor to initiate legal proceedings and the prosecutor is expected to present department evidence to a grand jury which would allow the department to secure a potential indictment according to a letter from Bondi reviewed by Fox News Digital and a source familiar with the investigation.
The DOJ spokesperson declined to comment on the report of an investigation but said Bondi is taking the referral from Gabbard quote very seriously.
The spokesman said Bondi believed there is, quote, clear cause for deep concern and need for next steps.
Now, the reason I say it's a serious matter to initiate a grand jury investigation, even if it doesn't lead to indictments, it's a real step.
It's not like announcing an investigation that's meaningless.
You don't initiate a grand jury investigation unless you're serious.
It requires you have to go to court, you have to convince the court that there's sufficient grounds for impaneling a grand jury.
Oftentimes it takes huge amounts of time of the citizens who serve on the grand jury.
It could take months of their time.
It takes a lot of resources from the Justice Department to conduct an investigation using a grand jury.
But that is what you would do if you're serious about indictments.
We don't know exactly who the targets of this grand jury investigation is or which prosecutors are overseeing the investigation.
But we do know, at least based on this Fox News report, and obviously Fox News have a lot of contacts inside the Justice Department and the Trump administration more broadly, a grand jury panel has been assembled to oversee the investigation into these potential crimes that were committed in 2016.
We had Aaron Maté host our show, I think it was about two weeks ago, July 23rd, actually.
And he had on John Solomon, who's a longtime journalist and columnist who works for The Hill.
And they discussed the possibility of a grand jury investigation.
And here's what they said.
This was two weeks ago.
What do you expect to happen in the coming months?
More document releases?
Do you think that – I mean, and who do you think they're looking at when it comes to building a criminal case?
Well, listen, you've got to have the apparatus to do it.
It's one thing for the FBI to open the case and gather the evidence that's currently available.
But for the evidence that hasn't been produced and needs to be forcibly produced, you need grand jury power.
You need grand jury subpoenas.
And I think that's a good point.
So we have to look.
The ball is in Pam Bondi's court.
is is she gonna shoot the three-point shot or not i don't know the so sorry for the sound quality that we're gonna fix that in just a second but i think you it was good enough for you to hear the primary point which is two weeks ago aaron mate who's one of the people who was highly skeptical of the russia gate claims the rush gate conspiracy theory very very early on in 2016 he had john soloman on to talk about this criminal referral and they were both saying,
look, you'll know this is serious if they convene a grand jury, if they impanel a grand jury.
Because that is when the Justice Department has massive investigative power, very invasive investigative power.
You can force people to go testify before the grand jury.
It's not optional.
You can get all their documents, their phone records, an enormous amount, an enormous scope of evidence.
So they were anticipating this grand jury investigation, or at least saying, well, no, Pam Bondi is serious if that's what she does, and now she's done it.
It doesn't mean they're going to try and indict Obama officials, but that is actually the first step.
And it's a very real, concrete step, not a illusory step like sometimes just Department of Trump does.
Here, Stephen Miller talked to the Trump White House.
We're going to get back to that in just a second.
But here's a article by Miranda Devine, who is another journalist who was very skeptical of the RussiaGate story from the very start.
And she wrote on August 3rd in the New York Post an article with this headline, RussiaGate lies are being exposed and everybody is watching, even the Democrats.
Quote, despite the best efforts of RussiaGate complicit media to dismiss as, quote, Russian disinformation, the latest revelations and escalating scandal implicating President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the treasonous, quote, years-long coup against President Trump, the public is paying attention and wants heads to roll.
According to a Rasmussen poll released Monday, nearly two-thirds of voters, 65%, are following declassified releases over the past month by DNI Tulsa Gabbard and Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, quote, very closely, 32% or somewhat closely, 33%, repudiating the calculated media silence about the Obama administration's fake narratives and manipulation of intelligence to frame Trump as a Kremlin stooge to cover up Clinton's wrongdoing.
The poll shows 54% believe Obama administration officials committed serious crimes in, quote, manipulating intelligence, with 37% saying it's, quote, very likely and 70% saying somewhat likely.
A staggering 69% agree it is critical that the perpetrators be held accountable, quote, for the survival of our country.
This is not about looking in the rearview mirror or pursuing petty vendettas, as Trump critics say.
It is about holding the coup plotters accountable as a deterrent, restoring the integrity of our intelligence and law enforcement institutions, and righting a historic wrong committed against the American people.
Now, that frames this debate extremely well.
Because so often in American politics, this ethos emerges among mainstream media outlets, among mainstream journalists, among the Washington political class in both parties, that when it comes to political elites, we have to let bygones be guygons.
When it comes to financial elites, we have to let bygones be bygones.
It's too disruptive.
It's too inappropriate.
It's too distracting to go and prosecute Wall Street barons just because they caused a global economic meltdown that destroyed the economic security of millions and millions of Americans for generations to come.
They're too important for our economy.
We can't be suing Wall Street tycoons and investment banks.
These are not the people who belong in a criminal court.
And the same thing happens every time there are political elites who seem to have engaged in potential criminality and all of Washington unites to say, we're not a country that prosecutes our political elites and former government officials.
That's only what banana republics do.
And I think it's a very real question.
Is a country more of a banana republic if they announce or basically effectively decide that high-level political elites and high-level financial elites are going to be immunized from crimes on the grounds that looking backward is too disruptive.
We only have to look forward.
I mean, looking backward is what's required for prosecution of every crime.
Or is it more of a banana republic to hold people accountable in high levels of government when they commit crimes?
I would argue the latter.
Obviously, you don't want a endless array of lawfare and abuse of the legal process to imprison people.
And it's so, of course, ironic.
Probably should go without saying.
But the very people now who are expressing such indignation, like how dare the Trump administration even talk about prosecuting former government officials and the other party, this is the stuff of Banana Republics.
All of these same people were so devoted to prosecuting Donald Trump once he left the White House and trying to imprison him so he couldn't run again in 2024.
They first tried to get him off the, kicked off the ballot, when that didn't work.
They brought felony prosecutions in four different jurisdictions, two in state courts, one in Atlanta, one in Manhattan, and then two federal prosecutions, one in Miami, one in Washington.
So to watch these people say, oh, it's a threat to our democracy to prosecute high-level political officials.
It's the kind of thing banana republics do.
It's enough to make you want to vomit, like you choke on their insincerity and hypocrisy.
But I was never opposed to prosecuting Trump because I believe that former presidents should be immune.
I was opposed to prosecuting President Trump because I didn't think that any of those four cases had any legal validity of any kind.
Lots of people who believe that will say, oh, I think the classified documents case in South Florida, the one that alleged that he took classified documents without authorization to his Mar-a-Lago home and then refused to turn them over, that that was the strongest case.
I just am so unsympathetic to this idea that of all people, a president who is the sole and exclusive arbiter of what is and isn't classified, he can just literally wave his hand and say, this is hereby declassified.
Or he can wave his hand and say, this is classified.
The idea that a person with that power over classification designations can somehow commit a crime by taking with him documents that he obviously thinks are safe for him to take when he has the absolute power to declassify them is preposterous.
On top of which, every day, literally, there are official leaks, official disclosures of classified information.
All of RussiaGate was that, whispering classified information to the Washington Post and the New York Times.
That's how the Iraq war was sold.
Oh, we have top secret intelligence that shows Iraq is getting weapons of mass destruction.
This is the stuff that drives Washington every day.
No one ever gets prosecuted for it unless you're like a low-level leaker that's not trying to advance official narratives the way most leaks are done in Washington with their media servant, but like Edward Snowden or Daniel Ellsberg or Chelsea Manning or Thomas Drake or William Benny who leak not to serve the government's agenda but to expose their wrongdoing.
Those are the only people who ever get prosecuted for mishandling or taking with them unauthorized, in another unauthorized way classified documents.
The idea that a president would be guilty of that is preposterous.
The case in Manhattan we've gone over many times, it's like an accounting error that they turn into a felony to cover up payments to a porn star that Trump had an affair with.
It's like, who cares?
And then the claim that he somehow incited an attempted coup on January 6th because of a speech that he gave, which was not only filled with at least one major sentence was telling them to go to the Capitol and march peacefully.
But even if he had said, I think it's justified to be very aggressive at the Capitol, that would still be protective speech.
You can't be held responsible for the acts of people who hear your speech under the First Amendment.
So none of those cases have any merit.
But if they had merit, I would have absolutely been in favor of prosecuting Trump.
I don't think Thai government officials like John Brennan or James Clapper or Hillary Clinton or John Brennan deserve immunity.
Why would they deserve immunity?
I didn't believe after the 2008 financial crisis that Wall Street barons deserved immunity.
I didn't believe after the Trump administration, after the Bush-Cheney administration, that people who spied on American citizens without the warrants required by law because Bush and Cheney ordered them to do so at the NSA, or people who engage in torture, setting up torture black sites all over the world, and it wasn't just waterboarding, it was all sorts of other sleep deprivation and stress positions and manipulation of diet to break people that people get prosecuted for all the time.
I didn't think that deserved immunity either.
And yet, that's when I first began encounting this argument was back in 2008.
Barack Obama was repeatedly asked during the campaign, which he won against John McCain: if you get into office, would you consider having your Justice Department and your Attorney General investigate whether or not people at the CIA, whether or not George Bush and Dick Cheney, whether or not people at the NSA committed crimes by spying on Americans without the ones required by law, by implementing torture regimes, which are crimes under American law that people are prosecuted for?
And Obama always said, yes, absolutely, when he was running, he's like, I would absolutely let my justice department instruct my justice department to investigate whether there were crimes and whether folks should be held accountable.
He said, nobody's above the law.
Why would they get immunity?
And Obama wins.
He gets into office.
And within two weeks, Ron Emmanuel is going on Sunday shows saying, don't even ask me about prosecutions.
Those aren't happening.
We're not intending to prosecute anybody for past crimes.
I mean, we're intending to prosecute huge numbers of ordinary American citizens.
Obviously, we're going to look back and put them in prison, but not anyone in the Bush administration.
But Parrisha thought.
And then in March of 2009, just two months after he was inaugurated, President Obama announced, I'm immunizing basically everybody at the CIA, at the Bush administration, no prosecutions of any kind, and none were ever permitted, despite him promising to do so.
And the debate at the time, basically, everyone in the media, everyone in the corporate media, which at the time in 2008 was the only game in town.
There wasn't really thriving independent media.
There were blogs, but nothing like what we have today.
They actually mattered back then.
And it was essentially a universal consensus before Obama announced it.
They were urging him, don't do prosecutions.
We're not a banana republic.
We don't prosecute past crime by high-level officials.
And that was the ethos in Washington, that there's full-scale immunity.
And it drove me mad.
I couldn't even understand the argument.
Like, why would we have a more that just because someone is a high-level, powerful government official, they should be immune from prosecution.
Every American is subject to prosecution.
We imprison more people on a raw basis, raw numbers, and as a proportion of our population than any country on the planet.
It's not like we have a very lenient criminal justice policy.
We imprison millions and millions of Americans for nonviolent drug offenses, for all sorts of things.
And then at the same time, while we're imprisoning ordinary Americans in mass, we're going to immunize high-level government officials.
And remember, it was also Obama who basically said, we're not prosecuting any Wall Street firms or any Wall Street tycoons that caused the meltdown and the economic, the financial crisis by engaging in massive fraud with derivatives and other instruments that Warren Buffett had been warning about for years, that Ron Paul had been saying were all just scams and invisible imaginary money that it was all going to come crashing down.
Everyone knew that it was.
And they just pulled as much money out of this fake system as they could, got extremely rich in the caused of financial collapse.
And Obama had people like Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury, who was extremely loyal to Wall Street.
That's why he was chosen.
He had been the New York, the chair of the New York Fed Bank.
He was incredibly loyal to and integrated in Wall Street.
Same with Larry Summers and all the people that, first as Treasury Secretary under the Bush administration, who architected the bailout of Wall Street, which was Hank Paulson, who came from Goldman Sachs, and then all the Obama financial advisors did as well.
And so not only did Obama say, we're not going to prosecute anyone in Wall Street, we rely on them.
They're too important to get our economy rolling.
We can't be prosecuting them.
He also bailed them out.
Both parties got together and bailed out the criminals that caused the financial collapse.
They gave them billions and billions in taxpayer money.
Remember, the argument was they're too big to fail.
They're just too powerful.
We can't let them fail.
They can't have any consequences for their improprieties.
They're too important.
They're too big.
And then Obama had this gigantic fund that Congress gave him to save the middle class families who couldn't keep up with their mortgages because of all the meltdown in the economic system.
And he let millions of Americans, ordinary Americans, just be, have their homes foreclosed.
And so you see that you constantly see this two-tiered justice system.
I actually wrote a book in 2011 after I had seen this for so long.
There you see the title on the screen.
I'm just showing this to show how long I've been writing about this, which is called With Liberty and Justice for Some, How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.
And it was basically about we've had this ethos for so long in Washington.
It actually goes back to Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon.
If you go and watch the speech Gerald Ford gave to justify his partner Richard Nixon, which at the time, owning Americans, was extremely controversial.
Like, why should the president of the United States be pardoned when many of his underlings went to prison and Americans go to prison all the time?
Why is the president getting this free pass?
But among Washington media, it was basically unanimous that we shouldn't prosecute Nixon.
And the speech that Gerald Ford gave, he basically said, look, it's more important to look forward and to deal with the problems that we face than it is to look backwards.
Prosecuting high-level political officials is too disruptive.
It's too distracting, too distracting.
We have to make sure we're looking to the future, not the past.
And that became the prevailing ethos in Washington with regard to every form of criminality among top-level financial and government elites.
There are exceptions.
If someone, member of Congress, takes massive bribes in a very sloppy way and they get caught, they'll be prosecuted.
If someone in Wall Street just commits blatant massive fraud, they might get prosecuted.
It's very rare.
It has to be like an aberration.
Usually they have to victimize powerful people or very wealthy people.
And like the reason Bernie Madoff was so hated was because he stole from essentially quite wealthy people.
But if you're just a government official and you don't really have important and powerful and wealthy victims or the people are just, the victims are just the United States, you get immunized.
And it's just been this effective ethos.
And that was why when the Supreme Court decision came out granting immunity, full-scale immunity to Trump for all acts he undertook in his office.
Everyone was so shocked.
Like, this is an attack on our democracy.
How can we, immunity is so antithetical to the United States.
I don't necessarily disagree that immunity is antithetical to how the United States is supposed to function, but it wasn't some new radical invention that the conservative Supreme Court created as a gift to Trump.
Aside from the fact that as it pointed out at the time, the immunity goes to all other presidents as well, before Trump, past presidents, like Joe Biden and Barack Obama, as well as future presidents as well.
It's not some gift to Trump, but also it wasn't some radical break or departure from how America works.
It was basically just a codification of this immunity that we all decided effectively American political elites and financial elites should enjoy, but only them.
And so during this controversy over whether there should be criminal investigations into the NSA and the Bush-Cheney administration and the CIA, this is when I first really encountered this argument that the media was advancing that basically said that there should just be immunity in terms of how our system should work.
And one of the people that I heard making this argument most preposterously and most loudly is, I'm sorry to say, but it's really true, just the longtime MSNBC and NBC News idiot Chuck Todd, who at the time was the political director, I think, at a show on MSNBC, ultimately became the host of Meet the Press once Tim Russer died.
And he went on Morning Joe and he was talking to the equally brilliant Mika Brzezinski.
And they were talking about the possibility that the Obama administration might prosecute officials in the prior administration.
And Chuck Todd vehemently argued that this cannot happen, like most everyone in the DC media did.
And this is what he said, quote, look, let's take all of these stories in one big thing.
Really, the only important thing, the most important thing, the president has to focus on getting the public's trust on the economy and pushing health care.
Cheney, the CIA, and in some respects, Soda Mayor are cable catnip.
And Mika Brzezinski says, yep.
And then Chuck Todd says, it's news catnip.
But they're sort of clouding the two most important issues the president's got to get his arms around this week, winning back trust of the middle class on the economy and pushing health care through.
Winning back trust of the middle.
That's what they, they're always, the left, the right are horrible, but the middle, that's what matters.
Obama has to win back their trust.
That's what they always say.
And that's what a lot of the media are saying, no.
It's like, look, we have way too many problems.
We're going to waste time focusing on the Obama officials.
Even though, again, looking backwards is intrinsic to any kind of criminal prosecution.
By definition, you have to look backwards to acts that took place in the past in order to prosecute them.
Now, as a result of that article by Chuck Todd, it was really at the start where the internet was really penetrating into these mainstream media outlets.
I had a lot of readers who would go kind of harass people and follow them around the internet if there was a critique that they wanted an answer to.
And Chuck Todd actually felt compelled to respond.
And this is, I think, the very first time I ever debated any prominent person in the mainstream media.
He kind of felt compelled to debate me.
And I debated him on exactly this question.
And I was able to ask, I think we have the Huffington Post article here that summarizes that debate.
Okay, actually, we do not have it.
So let me just show you this article that I wrote about it, because this is what really precipitated Chuck Todd's decision to debate me.
This is the article I wrote critiquing him.
This was July 15th, 2009.
The headline was, Chuck Todd's Arguments Against Investigations.
Blocking investigations of those in political power is one of the unifying beliefs of establishment journalism, which is exactly what it was.
I couldn't believe that these arguments were being made.
Oh yeah, maybe the law was broken.
Maybe the government spied illegally on American citizens without warrants.
Maybe they did implement underground black site torture regimes that are illegal, but they shouldn't be prosecuted.
We don't prosecute governments.
And it was the unifying belief of establishment journalism.
And as a result, I was able to debate him, which I'm going to show you a little bit of in just a second because it's so illustrative of what's taking place now with the media's arguments being exactly the same 15 years later.
Oh, they made an exception for Donald Trump.
They all wanted Donald Trump prosecuted and imprisoned.
They were happy to look backward then.
That was the one exception they ever made.
So all the people who wanted Donald Trump in prison are again stepping forward and saying, we don't prosecute members of the opposing party.
We don't prosecute past political leaders.
That's the stuff of a banana republic.
Here is the article that I wrote when I released the book about this mentality prevailing in Washington, the headline of which was the two-tier justice system in illustration.
And it said the lack of prosecutions after the financial clap reveals the full-scale immunity vested in elites.
And I talked about how the founders had the exact opposite idea, that you have to have punishment for lawbreaking.
Otherwise, laws don't make any are irrelevant.
Quote, in a 1795 letter, George Washington vowed that, quote, the executive branch of this government never has, nor will never, nor will suffer, while I preside, any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity.
Washington was saying, it's one of my main obligations to make sure anyone in government, no matter who they are, if they act improperly, they don't get to escape impunity.
Thomas Jefferson, in an April 16th, 1784 letter to George Washington, argued that the foundation on which American justice must rest is, quote, the denial of every preeminence, meaning that just because you're a high-level government official,
just because you are a high-level Wall Street tycoon who might be important to economic stability, you're not entitled to prerogatives or exemptions from prosecution, which is exactly the mindset that we created, except when it comes to Donald Trump.
He wasn't even prosecuted for real crimes.
He was prosecuted because the establishment faction of Washington of both political parties and the media were determined to imprison him to prevent him from becoming president again.
That was the real Banana Republic behavior is inventing and fabricating crimes to imprison Donald Trump.
Now, the argument as to why there's real criminality here in the case of Brennan and Clapper and Jim Comey.
And a lot of people are saying Obama, he clearly wasn't involved in this.
He clearly knew about it.
He clearly directed it.
But I do think quite strongly that the immunity decision handed down by the Supreme Court that saved Trump from all those prosecutions is extremely broad and would apply to Obama even if he committed crimes.
The whole point of the Supreme Court decision is let's assume my president committed crimes while in office.
What the Supreme Court said was as long as those crimes were committed in exercise of his Article II powers as president, the Constitution of Science Executive, he cannot be prosecuted.
It's a violation of separation of powers for a court to put him in prison because of how he chooses to use his executive powers.
And that was why they were saying that everything Trump did in connection with January 6th was an exercise of his presidential powers.
You couldn't really prosecute him for it.
Same with these classified documents, even the Fermi Daniels case.
And so if Obama, in the course of overseeing or ordering intelligence investigations and intelligence findings, even if he acted corruptly and committed a crime, that Supreme Court decision that gave very broad immunity to Donald Trump and prevented him from being prosecuted on those cases would also almost certainly apply to Obama.
But nobody else besides Obama in that administration enjoys that immunity.
It's solely for the president.
Here's Stephen Miller.
He went on Fox News with Maria Bartiroma on August 4th, and he explained the White House's view about why, in their view, this criminality is very serious.
Here's what he said.
That was the time and the hour and the moment for accountability so that we can reclaim this democracy, Maria.
Well, do you believe we will actually get accountability?
We've been demanding accountability now for a decade.
Our audience is well aware that this is the biggest political scandal we have ever seen and an effort to undermine and take down a duly elected president.
But now we want to see the tricksters face the consequences.
Will they?
I have complete confidence in the Department of Justice to follow these facts, to follow this new further avalanche of evidence and to take all the necessary legal steps to ensure that the wrongdoers, the coup plotters, the schemers, and the insurrectionists are held fully accountable under the laws and constitution of these United States.
Yes, Maria, I believe that.
All right, now, obviously, some of this, obviously, is about understandable vengeance for what they did to Donald Trump.
The whole Trump movement was deemed insurrectionist.
They banned Trump from speaking and expressing himself on major social media sites while being the sitting president, like Twitter and Facebook and others.
And if Trump hadn't won in 2024, had defeated Comwell Harris, I think there's an extremely good chance that he would have spent the rest of his life in prison.
And they accused him of plotting a coup, all the things that Stephen Miller just accused the Obama administration of doing.
And that is one of the dangers of trying to put people in prison as a way of preventing them from returning to power, especially if the charges are frivolous, which is if they get into office, you don't forget that.
You don't forget when people try to put you in prison for life and actually come pretty close.
Remember, Trump was convicted in one of those cases.
So part of it is that, but part of it is also that it is a genuine threat to democracy, which none of the people who claim to be the guardians of our democracy cared about.
In fact, many of them were on board with it, were the perpetrators of this.
To have the CIA and the FBI with their massive powers abused and politicized and weaponized in order to manipulate American voters into voting the way they want by trying to convince them that Donald Trump was involved in a conspiracy with the Kremlin or that they had blackmail power over him and that effectively the Kremlin would be running our government.
Russia would be running our country if Trump won.
This is very sinister, very malicious, very dangerous to allow.
And that is what people like John Brennan and James Clapper and James Comey and others did.
And I don't understand the argument that says they shouldn't be held accountable because it's too much of a banana republic practice to try and put prior administrations in prison.
Even if I were inclined to believe that, and again, I wrote a whole book against this.
I've written about against this many times in other contexts.
It certainly is not something that we should be hearing from the people who tried very hard to put Donald Trump in prison, who made it their priority to put Donald Trump in prison.
These people have no credibility to say, oh, it's only a Banana Republic that tries to imprison prior administrations of the other party, given that that's what they were hell-bent on doing to Donald Trump.
After I did the debate with Chuck Todd, and for that era, it really viralized in a lot of ways because it wasn't very often that people who were in independent media, I mean, I was writing for Salon, but I had started as a blogger and moved my blog to Salon.
I certainly wasn't in corporate media at all at the time, 2009.
It was very uncommon at the time for corporate media figures to feel accountable to critique coming from basically bloggers.
And I felt very strongly about this issue.
I had written about this issue, and for whatever reason, he said yes.
Actually, he wrote to me, I remember now, and started complaining about the article I wrote about him and all the readers who were harassing him in every venue.
And I said, well, look, why don't we, instead of bickering on email, why don't we have a debate about it that the public can hear?
We'll just debate, you know, very civil, I told them, very, very civil, very constructive.
We'll debate whether you're right that it's too disruptive and too gauche for a government to prosecute criminal acts by high-level political and intelligence officials or whether it's a matter of the rule of law that our country was based on, that they should be.
And he, for whatever reason, said yes.
And I felt the debate went well in the sense That I was able to get my points across very well and hold somebody accountable.
I mean, of course, it's happened a lot since then.
But at the time, it was hard to make people like that do that.
They felt invulnerable.
But this was just when they started to feel like the gates were being breached.
And here is an article from the Huffington Post that says Chuck Todd and Glenn Greenwald debate torture in the media.
Chuck Todd and Glenn Greenwald debate torture in the media.
All right.
And then this is some of what it said: quote: They quoted a part of the transcript.
And I said, This was me saying to Chuck Todd, Let me ask you about that then.
If a president can find, as a president, will always be able to find some low-level functionary in the Justice Department, a John Yu, to write a memo authorizing whatever it is the president wants to do and to say that 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.
Because that was the argument: well, everything that the Bush administration did with torture, with illegally spying on Americans with no warrants, they got John Yu to write a memo saying he didn't have to abide by congressional law.
And I said, that's the argument that's being made.
Don't you think that's extremely dangerous?
That was the argument Chuck Todd was making.
And Chuck Todd said, quote, that could be dangerous, but let me tell you this.
Is it healthy for our reputation around the world?
And this, I think, is that 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?
And he said, look, I am no way excusing torture.
I'm not excusing torture.
And I bristle out the attack when it comes to this specific issue.
But I think the political reality in this, and I understand where you're coming from, you're saying 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.
Then you have the realistic view of how this town 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 could look at another country doing that and say, geez, boy, this is, and so I interrupted and I said, so what do you think happens?
I think what has destroyed our reputation is announcing to the world that we tolerate torture and telling the world that we don't.
And he said, Chuck Todd, we have elections and we also had an election where this was an issue.
A new president who came in there and has said, we're not going to torture.
We're not going to do this and we're not going to.
I'm not sure if that's the end.
Yeah.
So, but essentially the argument that I was making was what you're saying essentially is that you cannot have accountability for anyone who rises to the highest levels of government, no matter how blatantly criminal what they do is.
Because that might be like a view from someone who doesn't understand how Washington works, like you, but I'm Chuck Todd.
I understand how this town works.
And the reality is that this is just too damaging.
This is what banana republics do.
Now, one of the ironies of this is that the United States always goes around the world telling other countries that it can't give immunity to people they think are criminals.
Here from the New York Times, August 5th, 2009, just two months after Obama announced full immunity for everyone in the Bush administration, the CIA for all the crimes, including illegal spying.
Kenya's volatile politics shadow Hillary Clinton.
This is about Hillary Clinton going to Kenya and lecturing them that they have to put in prison people in the opposing party who she says committed crimes.
Quote, some of the headlines greeting Mrs. Clinton on her first morning in Kenya focus on American pressure to set up a special tribunal to try the perpetrators of election-driven bloodshed earlier that year that left more than a thousand people dead.
Despite strong pressure from its own citizens and Western donors, the Kenyan government has refused to begin work toward a separate tribunal, saying that it would try perpetrators through existing institutions instead.
Kenya's judicial system, however, has done little to pursue suspects in the post-election violence and is often accused of perpetuating the nation's culture of impunity.
Many people feel that the Kenyan government will take no action.
Quote, we are waiting.
We are disappointed, Mrs. Clinton told a news conference.
And then she said, it is far profitable that prosecutors, judges, and law enforcement officers step up to their responsibility.
So at the same time, they were all saying, including Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration, we're not going to hold anybody accountable in the prior administration.
They were going around the world to countries like Kenya and they were saying, look, we expect you.
In fact, we demand that you hold tribunals and hold people accountable who previously engage in illegalities.
We're not going to accept that you're going to have this immunity.
They did the same thing in Afghanistan here from the French Agency Press, July 10th, 2009.
Quote, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Richard Holbrook, the special UN envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, have cold, told Afghan President Karzai that they objected to the recent reinstatement of Doston as military chief of staff.
Quote, we believe that anybody suspected of war crime should be investigated thoroughly, the officials said, hinting the Obama administration is open to an inquiry.
So they go around the world to Afghanistan.
Kenya says impunity is unacceptable if you want to be someone that the United States respects.
We demand that you punish and prosecute and put into prison people who in the past have committed war crimes.
But impunity is for the United States.
And to say that this was a consensus in the Washington media, I can't express enough how much this was true, that we just don't hold people accountable.
Political elites and financial elites are just too important.
In June of 2007, so this was during the Bush administration, the second term, the liberal columnist Richard Cohen, who worked at the Washington Post, wrote columns there, like being a columnist for these newspapers is basically like a life-tenured position.
I don't think he ever uttered a single interesting or novel thought.
He was just like the most bland purveyor of DC conventional wisdom.
But for that reason, it was actually sometimes valuable to read his columns because he basically is the prevailing Washington consensus.
And he wrote an article on the prosecution of Dick Cheney's top age, Scooter Libby, and basically was saying Scooter Libby should not be prosecuted because he's too important.
And it's too bad if we, it's not good if we prosecute high-level government officials.
This is what he wrote, quote, and this is the liberal columnist of the Washington Post defending Dick Cheney's top aid from any form of criminal accountability.
Quote, with the sentencing of Louis Scooter Libby, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has apparently finished his work, which was not to put too fine a point on it, to make a mountain out of a molehill.
This is not an entirely trivial matter since government officials should not lie to grand juries, but neither they should be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics.
And I always found this sentence so amazing and so revealing.
Remember, this comes from a journalist.
He said, so he's saying, look, of course, you shouldn't lie to a grand jury, but You should also not to be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics.
And then he said that with this, as with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off.
He's basically saying, look, this is a journalist in the Washington Post saying, sometimes you just have to let political elites, political officials, government officials practice the dark arts of politics and just accept they're going to do bad things.
And this for me is the motto of mainstream corporate journalism, quote, it is often best to keep the lights off.
The whole point of journalism is to turn the lights on, to shine light on what powerful people are doing in the dark and demand accountability for them.
If you don't believe in that, you cannot be a journalist.
That's the function.
That's the job.
And he says, as with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off.
I mean, we don't want to know what government officials are doing.
Just leave them alone.
In January of 2009, just seven days after Obama was inaugurated and there was all this talk of whether Bush officials, CIA officials would be prosecuted.
He wrote another article titled Moving Past Torture.
We need to move past this.
And he said this, quote, the past is a foreign country.
They do things differently there.
So goes an aphrodism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorize and use torture should be prosecuted.
In a very different country called September 11th, the answer would be a resounding no.
Here's David Ignatius, who was basically the CIA spokesman for life at the Washington Post, writing January 15th, 2009, just a few days before Obama was inaugurated.
Bush's incautious optimism, quote, to underscore the message, Obama indicated that he would oppose retrospective investigations of wrongdoing by the CIA and other agencies.
What does that mean?
Opposed retrospective investigations?
What other kind of investigations are there besides retrospective?
All investigations, by definition, are retrospective.
You can't investigate the future.
You can only investigate what people did in the past retrospectively.
But he's trying to say these investigations are bad because they require us to look backward.
No one ever makes this argument in the DC media to defend the prosecution of ordinary citizens.
Oh, they committed bank fraud two years ago or they got caught with cocaine six months ago.
Why are we looking backward?
Shouldn't we be looking forward to these persons' future, to our country's future?
Why do we need to constantly be looking backward?
They never make that argument for ordinary Americans, only for political elites.
So he quotes Obama saying, quote, when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on in getting this thing right is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.
That was Obama's argument.
Look, we, yeah, we got something wrong.
Like, we criminally spied on Americans without warrants.
We tortured people systematically around the world.
We kidnapped them off the streets of Europe and sent them to Bashar al-Assad and Mubarak in Egypt to be tortured.
But Obama said, yeah, we got something wrong, but what we need to do is focus on getting things right in the future, not looking at what we got wrong in the past.
And then Ignatius says, this is the kind of realism that will disappoint liberal score settlers.
But it makes clear that Obama has a grim appreciation of the dangers America still faces from al-Qaeda and its allies.
So this has been the prevailing wisdom of the Washington Press Corps, of official Washington for decades.
You do not prosecute government officials no matter how venal, no matter how corrupt, no matter how criminal their behavior was.
We're just a village.
We're like, this is Washington.
We're all in this together.
We don't prosecute each other.
We don't hold each other accountable.
These are the really important people.
You have to understand.
They're going to do the dark arts.
They're going to do bad things in secret, and you just have to keep the lights off.
That's often best.
And if it were still just a continuation of that mindset, now being applied to the question of whether Obama officials who fabricated intelligence and drowned the country in a deliberately fake conspiracy theory for almost three years as a way of manipulating the election and then destroying the elected president, his administration, I would say, well, they're being consistent at least, but this is what they think.
But here's why I disagree.
The fact that all these people suspended that belief in order to try and put Donald Trump in prison, and they were trying to put his family in prison, his son in prison.
They wanted Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in prison.
Really, I don't mind if you put Jared Kushner in prison, just not for this.
But they wanted the whole political circle of Donald Trump, not just Donald Trump himself, they had fantasies of Robert Buller frog marching Trump out of the White House.
And when that didn't work, they created four new prosecutions.
These people were bloodthirsty for Trump's imprisonment and prosecution on completely trumped up charges, excuse the pun.
And that's what makes it extra sickening to watch these same people now leap to the defense of Obama's director of the CIA and FBI director and director of national intelligence and not really justify what they did, not even defend the hoax itself, but just return to this incredibly tendentious, self-serving argument that if you're important enough in Washington or on Wall Street or in the country, criminal prosecutions are not for you.
That's for the peasants.
But we're not a country that looks backwards.
And I know the argument is only banana republics engage in cycles of retribution and criminal prosecution, one government after the next.
To me, you're much more likely to be in a banana republic, so-called, if political and financial elites have full-scale immunity from prosecution for the crimes that they commit because they're just too important to allow to be put in a courtroom and then be put in prison.
And that's exactly what, with Trump's, the exception of Trump, what our political class on a bipartisan basis, what the media class as well, has been peddling for many decades now.
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at cbdistillery.com code rumble cbdistillery.com not available in idaho iowa and south dakota Donald Trump has picked a fight with a lot of different countries, though typically with the idea that it's about arriving at a deal, a deal that's better for the United States.
He threatens other countries, he badgers them.
And it's not really for the purpose of creating long-term protracted conflicts that escalate.
It's really in order to try and generate a deal, for the most part.
What is happening between the United States and Brazil, the escalating conflict between the two countries, that's unlike any other conflict the United States currently has with any other country is really fascinating, raises a lot of important issues about both countries and the relationship between them and the role of the U.S. in the world.
But also really has the potential to spiral out of control.
It's seemingly close to doing that on a daily basis.
So the story begins with the fact that Brazil is basically ruled by a tyrannical and authoritarian judge named Alexander Morais.
We talked about him many times on the show.
He became very notorious.
He blocked Elon Musk's ex from all of Brazil when Elon Musk refused to obey his censorship orders because they were issued in secret with no due process, with no explanation, with no notice to the people they were censoring.
He just would send secret notices to social media outlets and say you're hereby required to ban these people immediately.
Oftentimes they were members of Congress, elected officials in Brazil.
And X said, we're not going to abide by this.
And when they said that, not only did Alexander Marais ban them for over a month from existing in Brazil, he also invented a law when he issued this ruling that said anyone who uses a VPN to circumvent this buck, meaning a VPN that will make it seem to the computer like you're not in Brazil and therefore you can see X, will be guilty of a criminal penalty.
No, Congress didn't create this crime.
He just decreed it.
That's what rulers do.
And it was only once Elon and X agreed to abide by these censorship orders was X restored in Brazil, but not before he imposed massive fines on X. And because X didn't have a bank account in Brazil, it didn't have operations in Brazil, he just took it out of the account of Starlink,
a completely different company, obviously one associated with Musk, but a completely separately constituted company, and just decided to stake their money to pay for X's fines, which even for Brazil that reveres Marais and is behind him, that was a bridge too far because they knew that a company internationally can't do business in Brazil if they're just bound to have their bank accounts raided by some mad tyrannical judge.
So this has been going on for a while.
Rumble is still banned in Brazil because unlike X, Rumble never agreed to submit to these censorship orders.
And as a result of this and the fact that Brazil is very close to imprisoning Jair Bolsonaro on what I regard as very dubious charges, that he plotted a coup to overthrow the government after he lost the 2022 election, a very close race to Lula Da Silva.
And they're on the verge of imprisoning him.
They've had the trial.
The verdict is expected in the next couple months.
And the verdict is no matter what going to be questioned and bereft of credibility from the start because instead of putting it before the entire Supreme Court, if you want to imprison a former president, it has to go to the Supreme Court.
Instead of putting it before all 11 justices of the Supreme Court, they decided to only give it to one part of the court.
I think there are 10 justices on the Supreme Court, not 11.
They only decided to give it to half of the Supreme Court, and that half, who will decide if Bolsonaro is guilty and if he goes to prison, is composed of one judge who is Lula's longtime personal lawyer, who he put on the Supreme Court.
So that's one of the judges of the five that will decide that Bolsonaro, Lula's principal opponent for reelection in 2026, will go to prison.
The Supreme Court has already declared Bolsonaro banned from the ballot in 2026, but that could be reversed if he gets acquitted.
So it's really about whether he'll be able to run him, whether he'll go to prison for life.
So you have Lula's personal attorney.
Then you have Lua's longtime friend and political ally who was his justice minister, who Lua also put on the Supreme Court.
That's two of the five judges who will judge if Bolsonaro is guilty.
And then third is Marais, who is monomaniacally devoted to destroying the entire Bolsonaro movement and putting all of its adherents and defenders and spokespeople in prison and banning them from the internet.
And so it's automatic that Bolsonaro will get convicted because just by basis of these three judges alone, who would never vote to acquit him because of their loyalty is to Lula.
And seeing all this, seeing Marais attacking and censoring not just Brazilian companies or Brazilian people, or not even American companies as it pertains to Brazil, but a couple months ago, Maj actually issued a secret order to Rumble ordering Rumble to ban an American citizen living in the United States.
He's also a Brazilian national, but he's an American citizen who lives in the U.S. Marais, in a secret order, ordered Rumble to ban him from their platform and to turn over all user data about this American citizen living in the U.S. to Mauraish and threaten Rumble with massive fines if they don't comply.
And of course, they didn't comply.
They have a lawsuit against Mauraije and they ran into court, asking the court to declare that legally baseless in the United States.
Rumble doesn't have to comply.
So there's been these constant provocations, these constant deprivations of free speech, of due process, all for political reasons, basically trying to end Brazilian democracy, make it impossible for anyone from the Bolsonaro movement to ever have the right to run again, to ever be able to be able to vote for them.
Obviously, you don't have to like the Bolsonaro movement or Jair Bolsonaro.
He threatened me with prison in 2020 for reporting that I was doing at the time.
And under his government, the federal prosecutor's office actually did indict me for 26 felony felonies, something like that, alleging that I conspired with my sources who had hacked into the emails of the highest level judges and prosecutors.
We were able to do reporting.
They tried to create a conspiracy that I had worked with that source or became part of the conspiracy.
And it was only because the Supreme Court had issued an order previously barring any retaliation against me for that reporting that the judge have to throw those criminal charges out.
But the judge made clear that if it weren't for that ruling, he does think I had committed crimes and would have accepted the indictment.
So no one needs to tell me about reasons that you should dislike Jair Bolsonaro or the Bolsonaro movement.
I was at war with them for two years.
He himself personally threatened me with prison.
They attacked our family in all kinds of ways, and they ultimately criminally indicted me.
So this has nothing to do with whether you like Bolsonaro or not, or like Ula or not.
That has nothing to do with the issue.
It's about whether it's just like with Trump.
The way they tried to ban Trump from the ballot and put him in prison to prevent him from running, I was completely against that, even though my criticism of Trump are numerous and well known.
I still was against it.
It had nothing to do with whether I like Trump or not.
It was whether this kind of law affair should be permitted.
And the censorship regime in Brazil, the attacks on American social media platforms and American free speech rights, this political persecution in all sorts of ways is very real, regardless of what you think of Bolsonaro.
And so seeing what's being done to Bolsonaro, who Trump likes a lot, seeing the attacks on American social media companies like Rumble, and Rumble has, remember, Dan Bongino is one of the key stakeholders in Rumble.
He had his huge show that was on Rumble, and he's now the deputy director of the FBI.
The general counsel of Rumble went to the Trump administration and became the deputy director of the CIA.
So Rumble has a lot of contacts in the Trump administration.
And when they go and say, hey, this Brazilian judge is trying to force us to censor American citizens on American soil and threatening us with fines.
That's something the U.S. government is going to take an interest in.
And as a result of all that, on July 30th, here at the BBC report, Trump hits Brazil with a 50% tariff.
Now, it says, and sanctions the judge in the Bolsonaro case.
That actually came after Brazil, Trump imposed a 50% tariff on Brazil.
This judge and Lua's government said, we don't care about what you've done.
We're not going to bend to your will.
We're going to ignore you.
We're going to do what we want.
And then afterwards, in response to that, the Trump administration sanctioned this judge, Judge Marais, under the Magnitsky Act, concluding that he's a human rights violator.
And at first, Marais and the Brazilian government tried to mock these sanctions, saying, oh, who cares?
Marais doesn't even have any assets or any bank accounts in the United States, as if that's the only thing sanctions by the United States government does.
Sanctions by the United States are no joke.
Because of the dollar being the reserve currency, basically the entire financial system depends on access to an American system of currency and finance run by the United States government.
So for example, Brazilian banks need to participate in the SWIFT system in various financial systems that require transactions with the dollar.
They issue credit cards from Visa and MasterCard, which are American companies.
And most Brazilian banks have business in the United States.
They have presence in the United States.
And so now Brazilian banks understand that if they continue to let Marais have accounts there or do any business with Marais or let him have credit cards, they can be destroyed by sanctions as well.
And so nobody's laughing anymore because now they realize that this can really put, he can't, he had his visa revoked.
If he is perceived by the United States government to be helped by anyone in Brazil, they could view that as a violation of those sanctions and apply sanctions to those people.
And it's created a real crisis because 50% tariffs on Brazil are extremely harmful to Brazil economically.
And while Lula tried to exploit it politically by raising the banner of sovereignty and no one tells us what to do, we're Brazilians.
We decide for ourselves.
It's a smart political move.
I don't blame him for doing that.
The reality is now sitting in that their economy is in jeopardy.
The election is 14, 15 months from now.
And if people are suffering economically, they're not going to remember that 16 months ago Bolsonaro's son tried to get the U.S. to take retaliatory steps against Brazil.
They're going to blame the sitting president, as people always do.
And that will jeopardize Lulu's re-election if there's financial suffering, but also they're threatening to impose a lot more sanctions on a lot more people.
And American sanctions are no joke, despite the fact that they tried to pretend that they didn't care.
And when this was all announced, this is what the White House said as on July 30, is addressing threats to the United States by the government of Brazil.
This is Trump's statement.
Quote, as president of the United States, my highest duty is protecting the national security, foreign policy, and economy of this country.
Recent policies, practices, and actions of the government of Brazil threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.
For example, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexander de Marais has abused his judicial authority to target political opponents, shield corrupt allies, and suppress dissent, often in coordination with other Brazilian officials.
He has also authorized the confiscation of passports, jailed individuals without trial for social media posts, opened unprecedented criminal investigations, including into United States citizens for their constitutionally protected speech in the United States, and issued secret orders to United States social media companies to censor thousands of posts and deplatform dozens of political critics, including United States persons, for lawful speech on United States soil.
When United States and United States headquarter companies have refused to comply with his unlawful censorship demands, Justice Dimaraj has imposed substantial fines on United States and United States headquarters companies.
In fact, Justice Dimaraj is currently overseeing the government of Brazil's criminal prosecution of a United States resident for a speech he made on United States soil.
Brazilian officials are also persecuting former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro.
The government of Brazil has unjustly charged Bolsonaro with multiple crimes related to Bolsonaro's 2022 election runoff.
And the Supreme Court of Brazil has misguidedly ruled that Bolsonaro must stand trial for these unjustified criminal charges.
Political persecution through drummed-up prosecutions threatens the orderly development of Brazil's political, administrative, and economic institutions, including undermining the ability of Brazil to hold a free and fair election in the presidency in 2026.
And it goes on to say these are repugnant practices.
They violate the moral and political values of democratic and free societies.
And as a result, says I Donald Trump, find that the scope and gravity of these policies by Brazil constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to deal with this national emergency.
I determine it's necessary to impose an additional duty rate of 40% on certain products of Brazil as detailed below.
And then at the same time, U.S. Department of the Treasury, July 30th, Treasury sanctions Alexander Di Marais.
Today, the United States Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control is sanctioning Brazilian Supreme Court federal judge Alexander de Maraj, who has used his position to authorize arbitrary pretile detentions and suppressed freedom of expression.
Scott Benson said the Treasury Secretary Baraish has taken it upon himself to be judge and jury in an unlawful witch hunt against U.S. and Brazilian citizens and companies.
He's responsible for an oppressive campaign of censorship, arbitrary detention that violates human rights and politicized prosecutions, including against former President Bolsonaro.
And then it goes on to explain what the sanctions are under the Magnitsky Act and how he's deemed to be a human rights violator.
Now, you can question, is this something the United States should really be doing?
Punishing people for human rights abuses in other countries.
Is that really our place?
But it's what the United States does and has been doing forever.
And in this case, though I'm generally very against that, Maraj has been attacking American citizens, has been attacking American social media companies, has been trying to censor inside the United States.
and punish American companies for refusing to censor American citizens inside the United States.
It is a direct attack on the American national interest.
And the United States has the right, in fact, the duty, I would say, to respond.
Now, again, the whole mindset of Judge Maraj is, look, I'm the ruler of this country, which he has really become.
He rules everything.
Lula is completely powerless.
He does nothing.
He can't do anything.
If he does anything that the Supreme Court doesn't like, they'll just overturn it.
Maraj will just block it.
Or the Congress as well.
They'll pass laws.
And if the Supreme Court doesn't like it, they'll just throw them out.
It's complete judicial rule under Mauraish's control.
And he is a, there's something very deranged with him.
Like he's absolutely drunk on his own tyrannical power.
This is how authoritarians get when they just are so not only convinced of their own righteousness, but just on this power trip where they are determined to show that nobody can place limits on whatever they want to do.
Their will is absolute.
And he's very much suffering from this mental malady.
And so even though what he's doing jeopardizes the economic welfare of 250 million Brazilians, the whole country, and has already resulted in his being sanctioned, his wife is likely next, as well as other members of the Supreme Court who are supporting him and others as well.
Talking about the most powerful country in the world, the United States, they can screw you up in a lot of ways.
He's trying to basically say, I don't care.
I'm not letting Brazil negotiate with the United States.
I don't want Brazil appealing to the United States.
And in fact, what he's doing is going way further than he otherwise would have gone in order to purposely provoke and worsen this fight between the United States and Brazil.
So just a few days after he was sanctioned, he had already issued an order.
Even though Bolsonaro has not been convicted of anything, the verdict is not issued.
He's not convicted of anything.
Maraj issued an order that banned Bolsonaro from being interviewed by any media.
He was required to wear an ankle bracelet and stay at home on the weekends because Maraj doesn't want him going and participating in protests.
And he's also barred from speaking with his own son.
Bolsonaro's son is a member of the Brazilian Congress.
He's currently in the U.S. trying to lobby the U.S. government to stop this persecution.
And so Marais said, you're not allowed to speak with your own son.
I mean, incredibly draconian limitations on somebody who used to be the president and who hasn't been guilty of anything.
And over the weekend, there were protests nationwide in every city, including one in Rio de Janeiro.
And it was protests by Bolsonaro's supporters demanding the impeachment of this judge.
And Bolsonaro wasn't allowed to leave his house because it was the weekend.
He has an ankle bracelet.
He's barred by Mauraj from leaving his house.
So he spoke by telephone.
Another one of his sons is a senator, put him on a speaker, and he addressed the crowd for like 10 minutes, 15 minutes from his home, criticizing Mauraij, the Supreme Court, the persecution, censorship.
And after that, Maraj issued an order just three days after he got sanctioned by the United States for this stuff.
Here from the New York Times, this is August 4th.
Brazil's Supreme Court places Jair Bolsonaro under house arrest.
Quote, the new measures threaten to escalate the biggest diplomatic crisis in decades between the United States and Brazil, set out by President Trump's decision to defend Mr. Bolsonaro and slap 50% tariffs on some goods from Brazil, Latin America's largest economy, unless it dropped the case against the former president.
Obviously, the New York Times describes the rationale for these tariffs and these sanctions in the least generous way possible to the point of being deceitful.
It's not just about Bolsonaro's prosecution.
It's about all the other things I've just described that I read to you.
But it's the New York Times and they're going to be the New York Times.
They go on, quote, Mr. Bolsonaro, who was ordered last month to wear an ankle monitor while he awaited trial, had already been told to remain at home most hours, stay away from foreign embassies, and keep off social media platforms.
In the new ruling on Monday, Alexander D. Marais, the Supreme Court justice, is overseeing the case, said that Mr. Bolsonaro had violated some of those terms, including indirectly using social media through the accounts of his allies and sons.
A day earlier, one of those sons, a Brazilian senator, shared a video in which the former president virtually addresses his supporters in Rio de Janeiro.
In his decision, Justin Morais said that this violation and others were, quote, deliberate and made it necessary to impose more serious restrictions on Mr. Bolsonaro, quote, disobedience of the precautionary measures demonstrates contempt for judicial decisions and compromises the effectiveness of the investigation and the credibility of the judiciary itself, he wrote.
The judge also ordered Brazilian police to seize Mr. Bolsonaro's cell phone and limited visits to his home except by his close family and lawyers.
Now, obviously, Trump administration is going to respond further.
In fact, the Under Secretary of State, number two at the Secretary of State, Behan Marco Rubio and the Bureau of the State Department for Latin America issued very aggressive statements condemning Raish and basically promising further punishments and sanctions not just against Maraesh but against others who are helping him.
Trying to make clear, like if you're a bank and you let him do business, if you facilitate financial transactions with him, if you're supporting his persecution, you will be subject to very severe sanctions as well.
And there's a lot more the United States can do to him than it has done yet.
And so all of this is starting to really create a serious crisis in Brazil.
It's barely talked about the United States.
The United States really doesn't care.
Brazil can't really do much to the United States.
There were a few of those tariffs that might have harmed the American consumer because there's certain goods that are obtainable from Brazil that aren't really obtainable elsewhere easily.
But the Treasury Department just issued exceptions saying for the products that we actually need from you, we'll exempt those products from our tariffs so that you suffer but we don't.
There's a lot that the United States can do to Brazil.
Whether you think the United States should or not is a separate question.
The reality is the United States has that power.
They clearly have that intention.
And it's like, what is Brazil willing to accept all this punishment and suffering and damage to their economy and their officials' lives?
For what?
To protect this one maniacal judge?
And so there are a lot of media outlets that are starting to really say, wait i feel like this judge has gone too far like this is way too much he's completely out there on his own and like what did bolsonaro do to man to merit pre-trial imprisonment he attended a rally by phone and spoke for 15 minutes to his supporters this is not something that's not allowed in brazil now you're not allowed to participate in political rallies or or protests you're not allowed to criticize that judge if you do you you go to prison you have your phone seized this
is like the stuff of of the worst tyrannies.
And Brazil has a perception of itself that it has a constitution that guarantees free expression.
It's scarred by the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for 21 years after the CIA helped overthrow its democratic elected government in 1964.
The military dictatorship obviously put people in prison for criticizing it, for marching, for protesting.
And this all seems redolent of that.
Although this time it's not coming from the right, it's being deployed against the right.
And so here's the nation's largest newspaper, Folio of Sao Paulo.
It's basically like the New York Times of Brazil.
It's a very establishment paper.
I actually, when I have journalism that I do in Brazil or Colombes I want to write, I typically work with Folio because despite them being an establishment paper, I have always found their journalistic integrity to be impeccable.
They've let me publish investigations that are dangerous, including a major one against Maraj last year when we got a big leak from the inside of his chambers of huge numbers of documents showing serious improprieties.
And Folia published my reporting and I worked with the Folio reporter, Fabio Sripiyo, and we published one article out the next on the front page, even though Maj was threatening to criminalize it.
So I've always not only disagree with Folio and their politics, that's for sure, but I've always found them journalistically to be very courageous, very brave.
They've in the past been the ones that have most vocally criticized the censorship regime from Mauraish.
And they published a lead editorial in their newspaper today about all this that I just described.
And it wasn't just a lead editorial.
They blew it up on the front page of their website.
I'm sure it'll be on the front page of their print edition tomorrow.
And they very notably published a version of it in English, which they rarely do because they know that it has implications to the United States.
They want the United States to see what they're saying.
And this is a paper that absolutely is very much opposed to Bolsonaro.
They've done reporting against Bolsonaro.
They've editorialized against Bolsonaro.
They're a censorous paper.
They hate right-wing populism, just like the New York Times hates Trump.
It's the same dynamic.
But they also understand how abusive and dangerous Maish has become.
And here's the lead editorial.
And again, this was done right after the United States sanctioned Maj and then Maj ordered Bolsonaro to prison.
The headline of this editorial was, Bolsonaro has the right to free expression.
And then the subheadline, Mauraij is wrong to order the former president's house arrest and the court should reinstate his rights.
Bolsonaro would have become a dictator were it not for the institutions.
But Democrats do not fight tyranny by becoming tyrants.
And here's part of what this establishment paper, the largest in Brazil, based in Sao Paulo, the largest city in the hemisphere, what they said, quote, under the guise of fighting authoritarian threats, Justice Alejandro de Maraj, backed by most of his peers, has developed legal theories and practices that are foreign to the Brazilian constitution.
Censorship orders, often issued in secret rulings that allow no defense, have become commonplace.
A majority of Mauraij's fellow justices must reestablish this fundamental principle of democratic order.
Institutional solidarity or pressure from abroad are no justification for undermining constitutional guarantees.
That's pretty strong language.
And right before we went on air, Folia published reporting by its star reporter, whose name is Monica Bergamo, who's extremely, she's very much perceived to be a stark opponent of Bolsonaro's, very sympathetic to the government, to the court.
She's very well sourced.
She's an amazing journalist, despite her politics.
She just does really good reporting independent of it.
And she published a report, again, very well sourced, saying that many members of the Supreme Court are extremely now bothered and uncomfortable about what Maj is doing, perceive him as being out of control, view his imprisonment of Bolsonaro as being completely provocative, unnecessarily so, way over the line.
And there's a good chance, she said, that a majority of the court will reconsider this order and reverse it, which would be a huge blow to Maurais.
Nobody ever has pushed back on him, especially not the government or the court.
As I said, last year we got this huge archive from Maish's cabinet from very brave whistleblowers to say, look at all these documents that he's been ordering, these chats he's been involved with.
And it showed just an extreme abuse of power for completely political ends.
He'll just wake up one day and be like, and he'll tell like investigators, I want this magazine shut.
And some of the chats where these investigators came back and said, we couldn't find anything this magazine did that would justify them being shut.
And then his chief of staff would come and say, he wants you to be creative.
Basically, like fabricate crimes.
No crimes were brought to him.
It's not like the police came to the court, the prosecutors came to the court and said, we think there's crimes being committed.
He just decides, he opens a case.
Oftentimes, he's even the alleged victim.
Like a lot of times, someone will post social media criticizing Mauraij, so he's the alleged victim.
He says it's false or it destroys the legitimacy of Brazilian democracy, which means him.
So he's the alleged victim.
He then opens a criminal investigation into the people criticizing him.
So now he's acting as the police as well.
He then leads the criminal investigation, so he's like the prosecutor, and then he rules them guilty and doles out the punishment, so he's also the judge.
Victim, police, investigator, prosecutor, and judge all at once.
It's just like he has complete power.
And that's what a lot of those documents that we got and were able to show.
And then Michael Schellenberger, on his blog, he speaks Portuguese.
He's done a lot of reporting on Brazil.
On his substack, Public, its name is, three Brazilian journalists used various documents.
I can't say where they came from or exactly what they are, but they published this investigation yesterday, exclusive.
New files show Brazil's Supreme Court illegally used social media posts to frame pro-Bolsonaro protesters as insurrectionists.
And it basically showed how they were using people's social media posts and the opinions that they expressed to decide who should be targeted for prosecution in connection with this so-called plot or coup.
It was very similar to January 6th.
It was like a two-hour protest.
They invaded buildings.
In that case, nobody died.
There was no real violence, but they did property damage.
And that has become the justification for everything.
So it is just interesting to be so up close and watch true tyranny unfold, like the kind that you read about in books.
And you're always like, how did people in the country let it happen?
And the reason they let it happen is because as long as Brazil's, as long as the country's institutions and a major political faction are happy with the tyranny and the entire Brazilian left worships this judge, he didn't come from the left.
He's more like a center-right figure and in fact when he was appointed to the court the entire brazilian left united they called him a white supremacist a fascist they said he was part of a coup government that he was corrupt one major leftist politician even accused him of having committed genocide against poor black people and he was the head of security for Sao Paulo.
This was only five years ago, six years ago.
He never apologized for it.
He never acknowledged he did any of that.
He doesn't think he did, but the leftists decided, yeah, forget it.
So what if he committed genocide against black people?
We don't really care.
We don't really mean it when we call people white supremacists or fascists.
He's turned into their national hero.
So they worship him because even though he's acting tyrannically, he's acting tyrannically against their political opponents.
He's putting them in prison.
He's censoring them.
He's driving them into exile.
And then the entire Brazilian establishment has been very happy because he's been attacking Bolsonaro, who they view as a threat, just like the American establishment views Trump and his movement as a threat.
And that's how you get a majority of people who are fine with tyranny.
And that's why it was so important for Folio to say all of this is being done in the name of stopping Bolsonaro's authoritarianism, but you can't stop tyranny by becoming tyrannical.
You can't save democracy by dismantling democracy.
And it's exactly what it's being done.
So people can debate whether the United States government has a place here or should be issuing sanctions.
But whatever else is true, I can assure you that in all the different countries where I've done reporting in the democratic world, I have never seen somebody quite as extreme and severe and unhinged and deranged in his just tyrannical inebriation as this judge who basically rules Brazil.
And whatever ends up happening to him from the United States or from anyone else, independent of whether it's a proper role of the United States, is something that he very richly deserves.
He gave a speech the other day whining that Bolsonaro, their supporters in the U.S. are trying to get his wife sanctioned and his family members sanctioned.
He's saying, that's just cowardly to attack my family.
I can't tell you how many times he's closed the bank accounts of family members who aren't even being investigated just to get out the husband or the father of the family.
He's prohibited teenage girls from using social media for fear that their father, who he wants to silence and is out of the country, could use their accounts.
So he just says to these teenage girls, you're barred from the internet.
No Instagram account, no Twitter account, nothing.
Just two weeks ago, he froze the bank account and assets of the wife of Eduardo Bolsonaro, who's the congressman, the son of Shair Bolsonaro, who's in the United States, lobbying for these measures.
Even though she's not even under investigation, he just randomly decided, yeah, I'm not going to just close your bank accounts.
I'm going to close hers too.
And then to watch him whine like a week later, like, they're going to do it to my wife and these sanctions against my children too.
This is what he does.
He's reaping what he's sowing, what he has sown.
And again, I'm not a big supporter of the United States ruling the world through sanctions and their dominance of the dollar, but they've done it all the time.
Nobody seems to mind when they do it to Russia or Iran or Cuba or Venezuela, who they've been choking for decades, not getting the government changed, which is supposedly the goal, but just immiserating the population.
But nobody minds when they do that.
So I'm not really that susceptible or open to hearing these complaints of the United States shouldn't be doing that.
People are very happy when they do it elsewhere.
And I think if anyone deserves it, Alejandro J. Baraeshan, he's determined to provoke and escalate these tensions just out of ego.
And either Brazil is going to let him do that, which is going to provoke a ton more of punishments.
I can guarantee you from the Trump administration they're coming now.
Or they're going to finally put a stop to him.
And even though it's going to be seen as a big victory to the Bolsonaro movement, who sees him as public enemy number one, which is why they never wanted to limit him, even when they thought he went over the line, they're in a very bad position now as a result of the United States attention that's being paid to Brazil.
I knew it was only a matter of time for Trump to start paying attention to Brazil.
Elon Masvaskier vowed that he would see Maraesh behind bars when he banned action and took that money out of Starlink.
So this conflict was a long time coming.
It's finally here.
And because there's a madman at the center of it, there's a real question about where this is going to end and how many people are going to get hurt.
Because this conflict is very real now between these two countries, which is a small country, but obviously the United States is a much more powerful one.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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