Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dissect the "Deep State," arguing that government surveillance, prison overcrowding, and Democratic hypocrisy regarding Iraq and Clinton impeachment reveal a flawed democratic system. They analyze Bill Barr's claims that the FBI's Trump investigation was a coup based on the fabricated Steele dossier rather than evidence of collusion. Ultimately, the episode suggests that elite manipulation overrides public will, from Brexit to unfulfilled campaign promises, framing these events as a coordinated effort to unseat Donald Trump and undermine American sovereignty. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Taking Over The Libertarian Party00:03:31
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up?
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Of course, you know, I'm Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein, the king of the caws.
That's right.
What's going on, bro?
People are trying to challenge my title.
I'm reading stuff on Twitter.
Who's challenging that?
The new LP chairman guy is going for that thing.
He's getting a little too ambitious.
He's like, being the chairman of this whole thing is not enough.
I want to declare myself the king, but he messed up.
He called himself the king of the Meekawks.
And I'm like, well, then you're not even really challenging me for my title.
King of the Meekawks.
That's not even a thing.
That's not even a thing.
Yeah.
Joshua Smith.
Yeah, I'm the king of the cocks.
Had the nerve to come at the king of the cocks.
He's trying.
He's campaigning.
Listen, first he takes the cost.
This is a mutiny, is what it is.
It is.
You know what?
First, take over the LP, take over the chairman thing.
You know, you got to work your way up.
We don't just jump straight to the stage.
No, I don't even think you can work your way up.
I think you have to be born into the monster.
It's a true kingship.
This isn't like there's no vote.
There's no campaigning for it.
It's just you got to be born with it.
If you want to give me your wife or daughters, we can arrange for the bloodline.
It can get down to your skin.
That's a good point.
That's a good thing.
It can happen for you.
You got to play the long game.
This is 60 years away.
Some say the blood of the king is the blood of the gods.
I don't know.
That's the legend.
But anyway, that's outrageous to me.
I'm going to make some phone calls, put an end to this at once.
But we do still support Joshua Smith for chair of the LP.
He can fuck up a lot, and I'll still support him for chair of the LP.
That's how bad the current chair of the LP is.
Josh has a lot of wiggle room, but he should not be speaking ill of his canon.
You become a big-time player.
You have the guy who's running for president on the thing.
Then you got the whole, we're really taking over.
Yeah, that's right.
We're taking over the Libertarian Party.
We're making the Libertarian Party libertarian again.
Because why not?
Because why not?
What the fuck else are we doing?
It's like, this is, I think the timing is right for there to be another resurgence in the liberty movement.
You're right there?
You're losing the mic?
It's just like, and with Jacob Hornberger and the guys in the Mises caucus, I think it's a great opportunity to make a big splash in the political scene, especially just with watching everything go down where it's like the dynamic is like, okay, so the Democrats just deserve,
the Democrats deserve not only to lose for what they've done over the last two years, it's not just that they deserve to lose.
They deserve to be disbanded as a party.
They deserve to be kicked out of polite society and nobody ever is willing to have them in their restaurant again.
I mean, they deserve, like, I don't even know how to express how much they for like in all seriousness, man.
Democrats Deserve To Be Disbanded00:07:33
And this is like the, you know, it's so funny because I'm an anarchist, but there still are these like the most nationalist or like constitutionalist or any of those like, you know, attributes, like the most I'll ever feel is like this is America.
Because I still do have, even as an anarchist, it's like, one of the things that libertarians get, I think, is that there is a difference between the state and the nation.
And one of the big things, this is why Murray Rothbard's great work, which you brought up on the last show, the Anatomy of the State.
One of the reasons why it's so brilliant is because it gets at this distinction.
So the first portion of Anatomy of the State is what the state is not.
And he just goes through what the state is not.
And it's like the state isn't the people.
It's not the land.
It's not that, you know, like you get, like, there's so we have this kind of mindset.
And I think it's just something natural about the way human beings work.
Like we see things in patterns and we're somewhat collectivist in the way our brains like.
So if the Iranian government, you know, did something, we tend to go, Iran did this.
And in your mind, you group together this kind of like, this country, everything there.
It's like the land, the people, the buildings, the government, them.
Iran, they did this.
And then China did this.
But if you're being like more precise about it, it's not really that you're saying that the people of Iran did this.
You're like, oh, their government did this fucking thing.
Like the Ayatollah is not the same as some fucking eight-year-old kid.
You know what I mean?
Like it's not the same thing.
But that's just how we kind of shorthand think of things and talk about things.
That's the language we use and all of that.
And in the same sense that you'd be like, if you were like, Americans, you know, throw people in jail for marijuana possession.
You don't mean like me and you do that.
It's like, well, I don't know.
Some fucking criminals in Washington, D.C. decided to do that.
It has nothing to do with you.
So like, you're not like the Mormons in Utah did it.
It's like they had nothing to fucking do with it.
These people did it.
It's a different group of people.
Anyway, the point I'm getting at is that America, like I've never, and it's part of the reason why I never got on board with the left, is that even though I hate the government, I love America.
Like I love the country.
I like people in this country.
I love New York City and I love, you know, I don't know.
I love the country.
I've been just about everywhere in this country, just being a comedian who's gone on the road a decent amount over the last decade.
I love the country.
I think it's really great people.
I mean, you know, they got their problems, but so do all people in general.
But there's something about what the Democrats did to Donald Trump that strikes right at my like, like, you're anti-American.
You shouldn't be allowed to be in this country anymore.
It's also the Jewiest of Jews, which makes it almost embarrassing.
Who?
Like both Schiff and Nadler, their entire behavior and the cause, like it's irritating.
Oh, yeah, I've seen a lot of it.
I saw something, I forget what it was on Twitter the other day.
Fuck, I can't even remember exactly what he said, but it was something about lecturing about like the evils of American racism.
And I was like, and I clicked on his bio and I was like, just please don't say Jew and bio.
Don't say Jew and bio.
Don't say Jew and bio and right there, proud Jew.
And you're like, motherfucker, can you can Jesus, Jews, if you're going to subvert the society, can you take like take a back seat and like not advertise that you're the one doing it?
Please, just for the sake of me and my family.
Anyway, but you know, but this is the most, so so even as an anarchist, I still have maybe like this tinge of like patriotism and love of country.
And what the Democrats did, I mean, you straight up, you openly accused the president of the United States of working, of being involved in a conspiracy with a hostile foreign power off nothing.
And you lied through your fucking teeth and you knew it was bullshit.
You fucking knew.
And you worked with these fucking CIA criminals to try to frame the president.
Like you, and it's also somebody who doesn't believe in democracy.
But you're still like, but you were willing to fucking work with the CIA to overthrow the fucking duly elected president of the United States.
I'm sorry.
That's just, it's a crime against the country.
And those people deserve to never fucking win again.
They deserve to never hold any office again after that.
And that being said, Donald Trump rode this populist wave and in many ways helped shape the populist wave.
And, you know, there was some good, I guess.
Like, I do think that in terms of actually being a president, actually presidenting, you could argue that the most important thing, and I'm saying this is like once you're in there, not just on the campaign trail, that you could argue that the most important thing you could do is just discredit the media as much as possible.
That might be the best service you could provide.
And Donald Trump certainly did a good job of that.
And he inserted some issues into the conversation, into the national conversation that were like, you know, important.
But the guy who's being undermined by this deep state is fucking going to reauthorize the Patriot Act, reauthorize the NSA spying.
Every single one of these wars is continuing.
And the problem that I feel like to some degree has fallen out of favor.
Like, I think it was very in in 2010 when Obama was in and the Tea Party rose up and stuff like that.
And now it's kind of like, I guess just nerds like me and you really care about it.
But this government spending thing isn't a fucking joke.
And Donald Trump is just, he's worse than Obama.
I don't know how else to say it.
He's worse than Obama when it comes to expanding the size and scope of government and government spending.
I mean, he's what we're going to spend in this next year is going to break all previous records.
No, they worked it out.
They just passed the new $1.1 trillion.
So they must have figured it all out.
Yes, yes, that's right.
I'm sorry.
I stand corrected.
I'm getting a text message in right now.
That's very, very smart people.
So it's just like, it's like Donald Trump is, there's too many bad qualities to overlook.
I'm not going to support somebody who's fucking helping to conduct a genocide in Yemen and spending more money than any president ever and, you know, continuing all the worst.
If ever there was going to be a president who would be like, hey, we need to really like scale back these intelligence agencies, wouldn't it be the guy who they just did this to?
And still, no, nothing.
That's not going to happen at all.
And so it's just like, you need like, like, the problem with populism is that it's got like it's great at being against the current order.
It's great at being anti-elite, but it doesn't actually have a guiding, like, principled philosophy to understand what to actually do in this situation.
And that's where libertarians come in because we are right about everything.
So it's just like, it's time for Jacob Hornberger to have his moment.
I just think it's the best thing for the country right now.
Truth Is On Our Side00:15:11
And it'd be a lot of fun.
Truth is on our side.
Yeah.
Truth is on our side.
Unfortunately, propaganda is not.
No.
Okay.
So I wanted to start today's show.
And I should give credit to the person who tweeted it at me because I saw this and I was just like, oh, holy shit.
Well, I got to fucking, we got to play this on the show.
And this, I, I would have missed this.
I didn't watch it on TV.
I guess it was on CNN.
But it was.
At Robbie the Fire.
What a great account.
At Robbie the Fire.
No, sorry.
No, it was Rodrigo is the first name of this person who tweeted at me.
Which is short for Rodriguez Go.
He's trying to kick him out of the country.
Yeah.
Very, very racist guy, although he looks pretty Spanish.
Racist guy.
But he said you should pull this up on the show.
And he sent me a tweet.
It was from Liberty for the Masses.
We're the ones who tweeted this out.
But I guess it was a CNN town hall of some sort.
It's got a million views on the video, which is just incredible to me that so many people have seen this.
And this gets, to me, right down to everything.
Like this couldn't sum up how I feel about the impeachment more precisely.
And the moment, I must say, it reminded me of that Chuck Schumer video that I love to play on the show where Chuck Schumer has a moment of honesty.
He's giving his talking points, and then Rachel Maddow goes, hey, listen, I hate to spring this on you, but Trump just tweeted this about the intelligence community.
You know, what do you think about that?
And he has this moment of honesty where he goes, sure, I wouldn't criticize the intelligence community because they'll fuck you over.
You know, my words, not his, but more or less, that's what he said.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
This was another moment of honesty from Nancy Pelosi, who's not known for moments of honesty.
But this happens in a little bit of a different way.
See, she thinks this is almost what you have to count on for these liars to ever give you an honest moment, is that she thinks she's proving her point.
And they ask her about impeachment and why you didn't want to impeach George W. Bush, but you do want to impeach Donald Trump.
And she's proving, she's like, listen, this is how much I don't like impeachment, is I wouldn't impeach George W. Bush for this.
So you know this impeachment must be serious.
But I found it somewhat revealing.
So let's play the clip.
Let's hear from the Speaker of the House.
Speaker Pelosi, you resisted calls for the impeachment of President Bush in 2006 and President Trump following the Moore report earlier this year.
This time is different.
Why did you oppose impeachment in the past?
And what is your obligation to protect our democracy from the actions of our president now?
Thank you.
Thank you for bringing up the question about, because when I became Speaker the first time, there was overwhelming call for me to impeach President Bush on the strength of the war in Iraq, which I vehemently opposed.
And again, I say again, I said it other places.
That was my wheelhouse.
I was intelligence.
I was a ranking member on the intelligence committee even before I became part of the leadership of Gang of Four.
So I knew there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq.
It just wasn't there.
They had to show us, they had to show the gang of four all the intelligence they had.
The intelligence did not show that that was the case.
So I knew it was a misrepresentation to the public.
But having said that, it was, in my view, not a ground for impeachment.
Let's pause it right there.
Has she lost her fucking mind?
It looks like she's gotten new work done and she's like, I mean, she's really aged since the last time we saw her.
Yeah, she's also, listen, I'm not the smoothest person myself.
And I know I stutter and like say, I mispronounce words and I don't say, but you know, the title of my job is not speaker.
You would think she could be a little bit more eloquent.
But here's what happens.
This is an amazing moment.
So Nancy Pelosi starts by like...
It looks like a dog you just beaten.
Well, look, she starts off by being like, yes, this is proving my point.
And what she's trying to say is more or less like this.
It's like, this proves how obvious, obviously right I am because I didn't even want to impeach Bush.
So you know I'm not just impeach happy.
I had the opportunity and she starts kind of making like, look, there was a case to impeach Bush, but I didn't impeach him then.
But now, so you know, I must be really serious when I impeach Donald Trump.
But as she starts to make the case for impeaching George W. Bush, you can actually see in her mind that she starts to realize, oh, damn, I'm actually saying out loud that lying us into a war isn't impeachable.
That I know for, because she, in no uncertain terms, she's not saying like, oh, he made a big mistake.
She's saying, I saw the intelligence.
I know what the intelligence was.
And he misled people to think it was something else and use it as grounds for a war.
But I didn't want to impeach him for that.
Because that's not the type of thing you impeach.
Bring it back a little bit and play this again and actually pay attention to when she starts to realize that she's like, oh shit, this is not actually sounding so good as it comes out of my mouth.
Because when I became speaker the first time, there was overwhelming call for me to impeach President Bush on the strength of the war in Iraq, which I vehemently opposed.
And again, again, I say again, I said it other places.
That was my wheelhouse.
I was intelligence.
I was a ranking member on the intelligence committee even before I became part of the leadership of Gang of Four.
So I knew there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq.
It just wasn't there.
They had to show us, they had to show the gang of four all the intelligence they had.
The intelligence did not show that that was the case.
So I knew it was a misrepresentation to the public.
But having said that, it was a, in my view, not a ground for impeachment.
That was, they won the election.
They made a representation.
And to this day, people think, people think that it was the right thing to do.
And people think that Iraq had something to pull in 9-11.
I mean, what you've been saying is, hey, there's so many other impeachable offenses that to look at this one under a microscope is ridiculous.
And now she's admitting to it because that is a much worse offense.
Look at what the result of the Iraq war was.
I mean, in other words, and you should fucking be taken out of office too.
So you know that a false war was started based off of evidence that didn't exist and you did nothing about it.
And you didn't step up to it, and you didn't think that was impeachable.
And by the way, what you're impeaching Donald Trump for is abuse of power.
But it's not an abuse of power to lie the American people into a war.
If what she's saying is true, not only should, which it is, it is undeniably true, not only should George W. Bush be impeached, he should be tried for war crimes.
She should too, because she was silent on the fact that they lied about evidence that brought us to the middle.
Well, maybe not the war crimes, but certainly she should be kicked out of office.
But I mean, the idea that you're like, this is not a fucking joke.
This is a war that we're still bogged down in today.
That like, I mean, she, you're talking about a war where hundreds of thousands, some estimates put it, over a million people have died.
It destroyed not only the nation, the region.
I mean, 15, maybe 16 million people were displaced.
I've seen different numbers on this.
And the war has had catastrophic effects, not to mention trillions of dollars.
Yeah, how's that spending really going to play out?
In the long term, how's that spending really going to play out for us?
I mean, it's like, it's outrageous that she would go and she breaks it down piece by piece.
Like, she's not even saying, you know, but she's not even saying like, oh, you know, they believed in this war.
I thought the war was wrong for the time, but I didn't think it was impeachable.
She's saying, I saw the intelligence.
There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
And yet they lied.
They misrepresented this to the American people.
So obviously, she's not saying I saw intelligence that George W. Bush didn't see.
She's saying he knew too.
She's saying that everybody who was pushing this war knew about it.
But that's not impeachable.
That's not impeachable.
And then what is her reasoning for that?
She says, well, they had won an election, and there are people who still think it was the right thing today.
So that makes it not an abuse of power?
That makes it not an impeachable offense?
Like, okay.
Well, the problem with that, which might be kind of self-evident, is that Donald Trump also won an election.
And there's also people who think what he did is okay.
I mean, if you want to like, if you want to poll the popularity of the war in Iraq versus the popularity of Donald Trump investigating the Bidens, I don't think it would be drastically in the favor of like, no, everyone agrees.
There's no people who think this was okay.
This is so her whole argument, I mean, you'd, you'd absolutely, you'd have to be a batshit and crazy, a batshit crazy person to think that this argument holds up.
That lying us into a war, that was bad, but it wasn't like impeachable.
Now, let's let Nancy Pelosi finish.
I mean, it's appalling what they did.
But I did, and I said, if somebody wants to make this case, you bring it forward.
But they had impeached Bill Clinton for personal indiscretion and misrepresenting about it.
Impeached him.
Some of these same people are saying, oh, this doesn't rise to impeachment.
We're right there impeaching Bill Clinton for being stupid in terms of something like that.
I mean, I love him.
I think it was a great president.
But being stupid in terms of that and what would somebody do not to embarrass her?
Fuck that.
Pause it already for a second, too.
By the way, here's something that I find really funny is that I understand that this has been the Democrats' narrative on Bill Clinton.
And I certainly, I agree.
You know, look, I agree with like what Ron Paul was saying when we were playing that clip a few episodes back.
There were a lot of reasons to impeach Bill Clinton.
The Monica Lewinsky thing was a pretty stupid one to go over.
It's just what's kind of interesting to me in watching this now, and this is aside from the whole point of playing this video, but they show Nancy Pelosi giving what was, I remember this, what was the standard Democratic talking point in the 1990s.
But then they cut to the audience to like two young girls and they show them smiling when she says Bill Clinton was stupid.
And that's what he did.
Well, first of all, a couple quick things.
They didn't impeach him for having an affair and misrepresenting him.
They impeached him for committing perjury.
Now, feel however you feel about that.
Perjury is a crime.
And you could at least see what the argument is that like, yeah, look, perjury, you guys, by your own twisted logic, right?
I mean, Mueller's put several people in cages for years over lying to Congress or lying to the FBI.
So if you people think this is such a serious crime and you guys, Congress, the one who writes the laws, have written perjury as a law that you can go to jail for, then maybe there's saying that you should lose the job of being president over it isn't that crazy of a step.
Again, I don't particularly care about Bill Clinton committing perjury.
I don't, you know, I'm not like saying he should have been impeached.
I think the Monica Lewinsky thing, it pales in importance to so many other issues, but.
You know, the thing that's really weird to me is that in the, you know, 2019, pretty close to 2020, we're in the month of December already.
And we've gone through this whole Me Too moment and the changing of the rules around, you know, sexual harassment or sexual misconduct in the workplace.
And you still see these kind of young girls kind of smiling when they talk about Bill Clinton being stupid.
I mean, just saying, what Bill Clinton did, right, was he was president of the United States of America and he fucked a 21-year-old unpaid intern.
In the mouth.
Yeah.
Thank you, Rob.
That's correct.
From the transcripts, I believe you are on point with that.
But isn't it like, first of all, I also got to say, like, you know, it's my own.
You know, I've become a traditionalist conservative Christian.
So to me, I do think like cheating on your wife is pretty shitty.
I don't think it's anything that should just be like laughed off.
It's like, poof, stupid.
But it's not really an issue for the public.
But if you're like, if you're going to talk about like power dynamics and propositioning women in the workplace and how wrong that is, well, where is there a greater power dynamic between the president of the United States and an unpaid intern?
And the other thing is that it's like, I don't know, having some guy who's like, what was he, like 50 at the time or something like that, you know, like who's the president of the United States?
Like, I don't buy into this Me Too moment logic that there's power dynamics in work.
I think if like, if somebody wants to ask somebody out at work, they have a right to do that.
And I don't care who's promoted higher than the other one.
And if an intern wants a cigar tube in her vagina, who am I to judge?
Well, I don't think there should be a law.
But I will say, that is, it is pretty goddamn sleazy in that example.
Like, it's almost like if you were to go, you know, when they go like, well, Louis C.K. was hitting on other comedians and he was a more famous comedian than them.
And you're kind of like, yeah, but that's stupid because it's like, I don't know.
So he's a more successful comedian.
Mueller Report Doubts And Logic00:10:13
What?
More successful men can't sleep with less successful women, then the species won't survive.
You know what I mean?
Like that's kind of how it works.
But they were like, well, let me paint you a picture.
Okay, let's say one guy is the president of the United States and the other one was like just 20 and, you know, he's like in his 50s and she's in her early 20s and he's the president and she's an unpaid intern.
And I'd be like, all right, you got me.
That's pretty fucking sleazy.
Like that's that's the most extreme me too example where I would go, yeah, that is really fucking sleazy.
So it's just weird to me that the Democrats, like female Democrats, can still, after this whole Me Too moment, still dismiss that as who's stupid.
I still want to know what she was wearing.
It was a red dress, blue dress?
Was it blue dress?
It was a dress.
Was it tie up?
Was she wearing stockings?
Maybe it was Bill Clinton.
She was wearing the blue dress.
That was an Epstein painting, right?
I don't remember what happened.
But you know what I'm saying?
Like, it's weird to me that she can still just like dismiss this as stupid.
Anyway, that aside.
Is a feminist icon, such as herself.
That's right, yes.
Okay, so anyway, back to the main point.
Bush, not impeachable.
All he did was get hundreds of thousands of people killed, drain the country of trillions of dollars.
And, you know, the fact that there's still, like, I mean, just, by the way, what a fucking insult.
What an insult to all the, like, I mean, all the troops.
All the troops who served over there in Iraq, how about the ones who are gone, the ones who died over there or killed themselves coming back?
How about the ones who are like out on the streets right now, the ones who are fucking heroin addicts?
You know, it's like fucking Jacob Hornberger when he was on the show, Jacob Hornberger, libertarian for president, Hornberger for president, Jacob for Liberty.
He said something that I thought was a really good point when we were talking about like how fucked up these troops are when they come back.
And he was saying like, well, picture someone who's like a serial killer.
And I'm saying this in my words, not his, but this was the point he was making.
He goes, think about someone who's like a serial killer.
And they're like so messed up.
Probably have this like terrible childhood, crazy life.
They're all messed up in the head and they kill people.
And whatever, if they have a conscience at all, it's probably so buried down.
And like there's all this craziness that they go out and do it.
But that's not what troops are.
A lot of these guys are just like regular guys who like go to church, have a family, do all this.
And then you take them and you throw them in this situation, give them a gun and people are shooting at them and they start killing people.
And then they got to come back and process the fact that they killed a whole bunch of fucking people.
And it's like, that's a whole different thing than somebody who had this like, you know what I mean?
Like this.
It's like, yeah, no wonder these guys are coming back and becoming drug addicts and committing suicide and all of this shit.
But what an insult to all those guys to be like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like that sucks.
That sucks that that happened to you, but it's not like impeachable.
It's not, you know what I mean?
Like it doesn't rise to this level.
What an outrageous thing to say.
It's a really good episode of this show called You're the Worst, where one of the characters has PTSD and then another soldier says to him, best line I've ever heard about the topic.
He just goes, they turned us into murderers and they don't know how to turn us back.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that is it.
That is the process they think.
And then just send you back into society and go, okay.
Like they know how to convert a person from a normal human being into a murderer.
It's boot camp.
It's the brotherhood of you and the other people in arms and us versus them and getting out into the battlefield and they know how to do that.
But then when it's over, they don't know how to like after ripping you of that morality or whatever that thing is that doesn't have, you know, they don't know how to restore it.
Yeah.
No, they sure don't.
All right, let's play the rest of this.
And that said they did.
Bill Clinton, now they want me to do George.
I just didn't want it to be a way of life in our country.
As far as Mueller report, there was a good deal of the academics said a thousand legal experts wrote a statement that said the Mueller report is an impeach.
What's in there is an impeachable offense.
It wasn't so much of what's in the Mueller report will be more clear once some of the court cases are resolved.
But it wasn't so clear to the public.
The Ukraine, this removed all doubt.
It was self-evident that the president.
Can you just pause for one second?
This is a tool that they're using that drives me nuts, which is they're like conflating two different, like the way legal evidence works, if you present something and it gets struck and down, that's now struck and down.
So like, for instance, let's say I brought you into court for financial fraud, and then they go, you're not guilty of financial fraud.
And then two weeks later, we bring you in for, I don't know, let's say hitting on your secretary.
And then I go, oh, this is the guy who we didn't, we had to bring him in for financial fraud.
And now we got to bring him in for I'm sorry.
Like, I beat that rap.
And then imagine you bring somebody in for a crime, you know, whatever it is, financial fraud or something like that, and they get found not guilty, which understand in this analogy would be way further than the Mueller report went with Donald Trump.
Donald Trump didn't get indicted and then tried and found not guilty.
They were like, there's nothing to indict for here.
Which they're still trying to pretend.
But then they go, but imagine, even if it went to court, right?
Let's say it fucking went to court.
Let's say it got further than the Mueller hearing did and I got indicted and I got charged and I get I go to trial and I get found not guilty.
And they go, well, he was found not guilty, but a thousand academics wrote that they think he is guilty.
It's like, oh, okay.
Well, that's not the legal process.
So who the fuck cares?
Oh my, are you telling me you found some academics who don't like Donald Trump?
Shocker.
I'm so, I'm so, are these the same academics who think there's 72 genders?
I don't really give a fuck what these academics think.
And like, what is this?
Wow, I wonder if all thousand think he should be impeached for this thing too.
Yeah, I bet they do.
No kidding.
But like, who the fuck cares?
What a weird thing to just put out there.
And of course, it's like, well, we had the Mueller report.
And even the way she says it, which is such bullshit, she goes, well, that wasn't clear.
But now with this Ukraine thing, there's no doubt.
I mean, no doubt amongst who?
I mean, you're not citing any polls because that wouldn't exactly show that there's no doubt.
That would show that there's like 50% of people doubt it.
In fact, 50% of people like are against this impeachment.
So no, I don't think there's any like that.
But it reminds me of the thing that Joe Biden said, which is so funny.
Like a lot of these, these, you know, career politicians, they use this tactic where, remember the video we played yesterday when the guy says like, oh, where there was something shady with you and your son?
And he goes, that's not true.
No one's ever said that.
No one's ever said that.
No one's ever said there was anything corrupt about it.
Really?
No one?
You're telling me no one said that.
But you just, I don't know.
These words sound good.
So let's just say them.
No one.
No one thinks there was anything corrupt about Hunter Biden getting this fucking 600K a year job when he didn't speak the language or have any experience in the energy sector.
No one.
And you're like, well, okay, I think it's corrupt.
I just said it.
Now, can you still say it?
No one goes, no one said that.
Well, this guy just said it to you.
So it's not no one.
You were literally just presented with someone who said this to you, but they just say it like that.
So there's no doubt.
No one has any doubt now about the Ukraine thing.
That's it.
But okay, let's just play the end.
Undermined our national security, jeopardize the integrity of our elections as he violated his oath of office.
There's just that's something that cannot be ignored.
So there you go.
So the Ukraine thing, just to get it clear, because Nancy Pelosi, I'm not like really adding a lot to this.
This is what you, you got to watch this and make up your own mind.
But it's not like...
See, part of the reason why I love this video is because a lot of times with the stuff that goes on in politics, we have to kind of be like, well, they're saying this, but this is obviously what's really going on.
But in this case, I don't even have to make the next line.
This is what's going on.
Take it from her mouth.
She is saying that George W. Bush, the George W. Bush administration, knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, yet they misled the American people into believing that the intelligence said there were and used that to launch a war that cost trillions of dollars, killed hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed a nation, destabilized a region.
And so many of our troops, all that praise the troops, these guys who love the troops so much, so many of them died over this.
But that's not impeachable.
But Donald Trump thinking about withholding military aid and a meeting to try to get Ukraine to look into the Biden's corruption, that is.
That's what she thinks.
And she doesn't even, like, like, how does she not hear herself speaking and go, oh, that seems like a fucked up standard?
That seems pretty weird that that's what it is.
And it's not even like there's some specific statute that they're impeaching him over.
And she's going like, oh, there was nothing impeachable about that, but this isn't impeachable.
She's just impeaching him under the vague abuse of power.
Abuse of power.
So I guess it's not an abuse of power to lie a country into war.
But it is an abuse of power to ask another country to investigate the Bidens.
That's where the abuse of power lies.
It's almost like it's not an abuse of power if you're working with the deep state to manipulate America, but it is an abuse of power if you're working against the deep state.
That seems like the real abuse of power there.
A fucking weird thing.
I don't know.
Anyway, I saw that and I was like, well, we got to play this on the podcast.
Defining Abuse Of Power00:02:46
It's just too perfect.
It's her summing up.
It's Nancy Pelosi unintentionally summing up why every decent person shouldn't just blindly support this impeachment.
Like why every decent person, at the very least, even if you're going to support it, you should support it with like an air of like, what a bullshit thing to impeach someone over compared to all of these other crimes that are committed.
And as you pointed out, Rob, earlier, and you said this, you know, the point you made was like spot on, is that this isn't just an indictment of Bush.
It's really an indictment of Pelosi right from her own lips.
That she's going to say, I know this guy lied us into war, but I didn't impeach him.
Why?
Because people had voted for him.
Well, the last guy got impeached, and I didn't want it to be a way of life.
Because government has its secrets, and in order for us to operate, we need to have our secrets and be able to do things that are the bidding of some of the financial elite that's against the will of the people.
That's the way government functions.
So of course I was going to keep those secrets.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
It's really, that was really something.
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The Anti-Democratic Voting Lesson00:08:52
All right, let's get back into the show.
So, okay, so I guess another piece of big news that happened just the other day Was the UK elections?
The UK general 2000, general elections of 2019 saw huge wins for Roger Rabbits.
They put him right back in power.
Right.
Boris Johnson won a big victory.
Labor, the Labour Party was destroyed.
And it seems like a lot of it was over this Brexit stuff, which is all pretty...
You know, I don't follow this super closely and we haven't talked about it a ton on the show, but I was a big supporter of Brexit when it happened.
Of course, if you are a libertarian, I think you have no choice other than to celebrate Brexit.
I mean, if we're talking about being for decentralization and secession and things like that, well, there's, I don't know that there's another example that rivals this one.
Of course, it also kind of shows you that, like, you know, like I'm, I'm old enough that I still remember the EU being created.
So you need to secede just to get back to where we were, you know.
But basically, the Brits voted to leave the EU and nothing's happened on that front since then.
And the Labor Party has been doing their best to put off the deal over and over again and basically just keep them in the EU, even though they voted to get out of it.
And the most amazing part of Brexit, and I don't know everything about it, but it seems like there's been a phenomenal amount of propaganda against it.
The first wave of propaganda was all the, hey, if this happens, like England's going to be done.
They can't even operate as a country.
There's going to be all these financial penalties and all these arrangements have been made and they'll be screwed.
And then the other thing is they were trying to shape it like people didn't really even want it.
And like, that was what was so interesting was that you seem to actually have put up a public vote.
Does the public want this?
And they said yes.
And then all of a sudden they're like, it was like they got caught.
They're like, fuck, they do want like, shit, we can't really do that.
We were just hoping that they'd say no and we could be like, the people didn't really want it.
And so they've been trying to do everything to build this story that it's been going to be a mess and that it's not what people really wanted.
And so it's interesting that after all the delays and the unable to get it done, I guess they did this revote to see how many people really want it.
And like, they want it.
Well, there is something really interesting about that.
And they also, you know, it seems like the margins have gone up, that Brexit passed by a slim margin and this was more of a like resounding victory.
And I think that there's got to be something.
Maybe the lesson that could be taken from it is that people buy into this whole voting thing.
And when you're just nakedly trying to overturn the will of the vote, people are like, well, no, fuck you.
You don't get to do that.
And maybe there's a lesson that Democrats could take from that as they are actively trying to overturn the results of the last election.
It's interesting because there's, you know, so many of the issues that we talk about with democracy and why I am, let's just say, not a fan, not a fan of democracy.
I mean, we'll kind of dissect the philosophy of it and like the kind of like take it apart on paper almost.
And you'd go like, well, like what, and it's look, it's fun to do and it's an intelligent, it's an interesting intellectual exercise or whatever.
But if you go, what did Gene Epstein said?
Democracy is the right of the majority to piss in the soup of the minority, which was well put.
And of course, right, like it's why should if there's three people in a room and two of them vote to take the other one's shit, like, why is that legitimate?
Two of the three people voted and two-thirds would be considered a landslide in America.
So the whole process is kind of fucked up.
And there's nothing noble about it.
It's actually really absurd when you think about the way democracy is discussed in such religious fervor.
It's like this just noble good unto itself.
And this is why Hans Hoppe called it the God that failed because democracy really is worshipped in this country.
And of course, that's because the state is a religion and democracy is supposedly in this weird, you know, anti-logic kind of creation.
Democracy is what gives the state its legitimacy.
Like basically, everybody acknowledges that what I'm saying, what you're saying, would be true if we didn't have a democratic process.
So democracy has to be this really precious thing.
And that's why we're wrong about what we say, you see, because this is the government of the people.
So we had a say in it.
So, you know, like, too bad you didn't want to vote.
But that's like, this isn't, you know, just an authoritarian body.
It's the vote was there.
But pretty much everybody in contemporary America would agree with us if there was no vote.
Like if you just said tomorrow there's no vote, the government just decides what they're going to do.
They're not representing the people.
Like there's no, you get no say in it.
This is it.
Whatever your tax rate is, your tax rate, whatever the policy is, the policy.
They'd go, oh yeah, well, that's tyrannical.
I mean, but if you vote for it and then the exact same thing happens, then it's not tyrannical somehow.
So all of this is kind of absurd, but this is how they justify every inch of the state.
So this process needs to, you're not supposed to ever critically think about it.
That's why if you're anti-democracy, it's just you're anti-democratic.
That's that's terrible.
And you could be a socialist and just say, no, no, no, I'm a democratic socialist.
And then they go, oh, well, that's totally different.
You're into democracy.
So that's fine.
But if you actually think about it with any like, I mean, any one ounce of scrutiny, the whole thing falls apart.
Like if you were to say, okay, so we had, let's say, there's like some referendum for whatever.
I don't know.
A new tax or something like that.
And 53% of the people vote for the new tax.
I'll just say 53% of the people vote for the new tax and whatever, 47% against.
And then after the 53% of people voted, they just went, nope, we're not going to do that.
We're not doing that.
Well, most people would be like, well, this is anti-democratic.
I mean, the majority voted for this and you're not enacting it.
Like this, the people are supposed to have control of their government, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff, right?
But if 53% of the people voted for it.
So if you were to, let's say, not enact the policy that 53% of the people voted for.
So 53% of the people are not getting what they voted for.
But 47% are.
It's only 6% worse in terms of like not representing the people.
You know what I'm saying?
And then if like whatever you're saying is happening to those 53%, but these people voted for it and they formed a majority and they're not getting what they wanted.
Well, democracy is just that happening to the 47%.
Still a huge chunk of people who aren't getting what they wanted out of their government.
Like it's still in the spirit of being anti-democratic.
It's still anti-democratic in a sense.
You know what I mean?
You're still not giving the people what they want.
But anyway, we take on these issues of like the philosophy of democracy and how flawed it is.
But there's a whole other reason to be anti-democratic.
And this is what the Brexit thing kind of gets to.
And that's that it's not real.
It's a fucking illusion.
It's all an illusion.
You don't actually get what you fucking vote for.
The same way that, like, look, Obama won what's considered like a landslide victory against John McCain on we're going to close Guantanamo Bay.
He was saying we're going to have all of our troops home by the end of the year or 16 months or whatever it was he said.
None of that happened.
So you don't actually get.
So a lot of times you vote for something and they're just like, no.
Look at Trump.
Look at the, where's that wall?
Where's all the things he ran on?
It's just no.
You're not getting it.
I don't care.
The CIA will step in or some judge will step in or someone else.
Like, no, you don't, you don't get that.
But Brexit, to me, is like the most blatant example of it that I can think of in modern history.
Where they were just like, okay, referendum.
Infinite CBD Sponsor Segment00:02:38
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But by the way, if you vote leave, you're an idiot racist.
And the obvious answer is vote to stay.
And they go, we want to leave.
And they're like, hmm, really?
No.
And that's more or less what happened.
Oh, oh, you went the way we're not supposed to.
No, we're not going to do that.
And they still haven't.
But this was a huge win for the conservatives over there.
And maybe this takes them a step closer to leave.
I'm still not convinced they're actually going to go.
But it does seem to make it harder and harder for them to convince you that like, no, no, no, this is a real thing.
Democracy is a thing.
I swear to God.
So anyway, we'll see what happens with that.
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Investigating Political Techniques00:14:56
All right, let's get back into the show.
But anyway, anytime anyone who's called labor gets their ass handed to them, it's somewhat of a good thing.
So there you go.
Congratulations.
England.
All right.
Okay.
So moving on.
The other thing we wanted to play a little bit of, and it's a long interview, but I figured we'd jump into it and dissect it a little bit.
And it was you sent it to me, but it was the interview with Bob Barr.
He's being interviewed on NBC News.
Is his name Bob?
I thought he was Bill.
I'm sorry.
Billy Barr.
Bill Barr.
Bob Barr ran on the libertarian ticket back in 2004.
Not very libertarian.
But yes, I like him, but I'm not ready to take him on as a Bob.
Doesn't have Bob-type characteristics.
No, listen, when you're right, you're right.
And I'm not going to sit here and try to fight you.
It is, in fact, Bill Barr, Attorney General Bill Barr.
And yeah, okay, so here's his interview, which was pretty interesting.
So let's jump into that.
Why do you say that the FBI opened the investigation of the Trump campaign on the thinnest of suspicions?
Well, I'm glad to get into the issue of predication, but let me just start out by saying that I think you have to put this in context.
I think the heart of the IG's report really focused on how the investigation was conducted once it got going.
And that is especially the very serious abuses of FISA that occurred, much of which has been, in my view, not accurately reported by the press over the last day.
But in one area, I do disagree with the IG, and that was whether there was sufficient predication to open a full-blown counterintelligence investigation, specifically using the techniques that they did to collect intelligence about the Trump campaign.
Well, as a policy matter, why not open an investigation on a thin pretext?
I guess on the one hand, you could say it's a presidential campaign.
It's very sensitive.
You need better evidence.
On the other hand, you could say it's a presidential campaign.
We have to be very careful.
There could be a threat to our political process.
I'm going to pause for a second.
So already, this is Pete Williams, who's like one of the senior NBC investigative journalists.
And isn't it amazing right away?
Now, first off, one of the things that's crazy is just that NBC News and MSNBC, their cable news outlet, they'll just be trashing Barr all day long and how he's a stooge of Trump and all this.
But they won't bring this shit to him when they're interviewing him because there's nothing he says here that's not completely reasonable.
But what a crazy question that was.
What a crazy question.
Like, this is such an Orwellian thing to say.
So he goes, well, you're saying there was a very thin pretense to open the investigation, but why not open it on a thin pretense?
I mean, it's really important, right?
I mean, how else do we know unless we investigate?
It's like, what?
Like, because that's the difference between a tyrannical police state and a free society, is that you can't just be investigated without there being like a reasonable pretense to open an investigation.
That you can't just have...
I mean, it's crazy that you already know what the rules are, right?
That like if the FBI talks to you and you misremember a date, you're going to jail for many years.
So maybe there has to be a reason before the FBI comes knocking on your door?
I thought right off the bat, I thought that question was just batshit crazy.
All right, let's keep playing.
I think probably from a civil liberty standpoint, the greatest danger to our free system is that the incumbent government use the apparatus of the state, principally the law enforcement agencies and the intelligence agencies, both to spy on political opponents, but also to use them in a way that could affect the outcome of the election.
As far as I'm aware, this is the first time in history that this has been done to a presidential campaign, the use of these counterintelligence techniques against a presidential campaign.
And we have to remember that in today's world, presidential campaigns are frequently in contact with foreign persons.
And indeed, in most campaigns, there are signs of illegal foreign money coming in.
And we don't automatically assume that the campaigns are nefarious and traitors and acting in league with foreign powers.
There has to be some basis before we use these very potent powers in our core First Amendment activity.
And here, I felt this was very flimsy.
Basically, I think the department has a rule of reason, which is at the end of the day, is what you're relying on sufficiently powerful to justify the techniques you're using.
And the question there is, how strong is the evidence?
How sensitive is the activity you're looking at?
And what are the alternatives?
And I think when you step back here and say, what was this all based on?
It's not sufficient.
Remember, there was and never has been any evidence of collusion.
And yet this campaign and the president's administration has been dominated by this investigation into what turns out to be completely baseless.
Well, of course, it doesn't turn out that way at the beginning at the start.
So let's look at the Pete Williams' take on things.
It's like, oh, well, this turned out to be completely baseless.
He goes, well, it doesn't turn out that way at the start.
It's like, well, you've got to investigate you before you know you're innocent.
This is like the guilty till proven innocent mentality, which of course they would only apply to Trump.
He's not applying that to Pete Williams, right?
He's not applying that to the NBC News.
Well, how about I think you guys are working with a foreign power?
Okay.
So, you know, we won't know until we find out.
And then when we find out, I just made it all up and there's nothing to it.
Well, there was no way to know unless we investigated you.
But don't what Bill Barr just laid out, which absolutely is the story, there's no denying this anymore.
And if you are denying it, you're just, I don't know what to say.
You suffer from Trump derangement syndrome or you haven't been paying attention.
You haven't done your homework on this.
But what Bill Barr just laid out is what happened.
An opposition party candidate was running against the incumbent's party, Barack Obama, and the power, the spying apparatus and investigative criminal shadow government arm of the state was turned against that candidate and then did not stop.
It's investigate him for a year and then the first two years of his presidency, three years total.
That's what happened.
That's a big story.
You would think journalists would be all over this.
But instead they go, well, we wouldn't have known there was anything unless these fine men and women had investigated him for three years.
That's just, it's a crazy, a really crazy and quite terrifying perspective that mainstream quote-unquote journalists have, quote unquote.
All right, let's keep playing.
Look at what the basis of it was.
So in May 2016, apparently a 28-year-old campaign volunteer says in a social setting.
This is George Papadopoulos.
This is George Papadopoulos.
And this was described by the foreign official who heard him as who couldn't remember exactly what was said, but it was characterized as a suggestion of a suggestion.
He suggested that there had been a suggestion from the Russians that they had some adverse information to Hillary, which they might dump in the campaign.
Well, what was going on in May?
You may recall that we were in the thick of the investigation of Hillary Clinton's secret server.
And the media was full of stories, and the blogosphere was full of stories, and political circles in Washington were full of stories and speculation that the Russians had, in 2014, two years before, hacked into her secret server and were therefore in a position to drop this stuff during the election.
In fact, the day before this comment was made in a bar, Fox News was reporting that their sources told them there was a debate going on in the Russian government as to whether or not to drop this, Hillary Clinton's emails, between the intelligence agency and the foreign ministry.
But that related to Hillary's server.
So the FBI, what the FBI did is later, after the DC, the DNC hack and the dumping through Wikipedia in July.
WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks, yeah.
Wikileaks.
In July, they get this information that this somewhat vague statement was made in a...
Nothing like just an old man talking about it.
They jumped right into the inventory.
And they tried to dump it through the WikiWebs.
And then they wikeed their way right over there.
They wickawkaded.
WikiLeaks.
How do you not know that term by now, Barr?
All right, sorry, keep it.
Investigation.
Before they even went and talked to the foreign officials about exactly what was said, they opened an investigation of the campaign and they used very intrusive techniques.
They didn't do, I think, what would normally be done under those circumstances, which is to go to the campaign.
And there certainly were people in campaign that could be trusted, including a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the governor of New Jersey, former U.S. attorney.
There were people to talk to.
And what I find particularly inexplicable is that they talked to the Russians, but not to the presidential campaign.
On August 4th, Brennan braced the head of Russian intelligence.
He calls the head of Russian intelligence and says, we know what you're up to.
You better stop it.
He did it again later in August.
And then President Obama talked to President Putin in September and said, we know what you're up to.
You better cut it out.
So they go and confront the Russians, who clearly are the bad guys, and they won't go and talk to the campaigns and say, you know, what is this about?
So the Inspector General says he found no evidence to indicate that the FBI's decision to start this investigation was based on political bias.
Do you agree?
Well, what do you actually, I think you have to understand what the IG's methodology is, and I think it's the appropriate methodology for an inspector general.
He starts with limited information.
He can only talk to people who are essentially there as employees, and he's limited to the information generally in the FBI.
But his approach is to say, if I get an explanation from the people I'm investigating that is not unreasonable on its face, then I will accept it as long as there's not contradictory testimonial or documentary evidence.
In other words, it's a very deferential standard.
And all he said is people gave me an explanation and I didn't find anything to contradict it, so I don't have a basis for saying that there was improper motive.
But he hasn't decided the issue of improper motive.
Have you?
No.
I think we have to wait until the investigation, the full investigation is done.
And that's the fundamental distinction between what Durham is doing and what the IG is doing.
Durham is not limited to the FBI.
He can talk to other agencies.
He can compel people to testify.
One of the problems in the IG's investigation, I think he would agree, is that Comey refused to sign back up for his security clearance and therefore couldn't be questioned about classified matters.
So someone like Durham can compel testimony.
He can talk to a whole range of people, private parties, foreign governments, and so forth.
And I think that is the point at which a decision has to be made.
Yeah, I mean, just the fact that what I was hearing in the news is it sounds like they did their one investigation, and the conclusion of this one investigation was that there was gross negligence, but nobody did anything.
No one did anything illegal, or it wasn't improper.
And isn't this amazing to hear him break it down?
And go, no, no, no.
That is one half of the investigation.
That is the guy who goes in and talks to the people at the FBI who give their report about what happens.
And now we got this other guy who does the more thorough version of it and can actually compel testimony.
Now, how does a media that is supposed to be telling me, hey, what's going on, doesn't let me know, oh, this is half the investigation.
How is that nothing that I found out about?
And yet the headlines were FBI is cleared.
The FBI is cleared.
And then even the way he breaks it down where he goes, well, they found there was no political motive.
And he's like, yeah, but you have to understand how the IG operates.
He's just going to FBI agents and going, were you politically motivated?
And they're like, no.
And he's like, all right.
They weren't motivated.
They say they weren't motivated.
Like, okay.
I also love how Barr, who, by the way, I don't buy that Barr is a good guy.
He's a bad guy too.
But even when he keeps saying, like, it's inexplicable that they would do it this way, it's like, well, it's not inexplicable.
There's one explanation that covers this whole fucking thing.
And that's that these guys were politically motivated and that they were trying to bring Donald Trump down.
And when he says, why would Brennan go to the Russians?
Why would he go to the bad guys when he could have talked to Donald Trump?
It's like, oh, well, it's actually quite simple.
It's because the Russians aren't the bad guys.
So this is what deep state bar will never like see things this way.
But actually, Brennan is the bad guy.
That's what's going on here.
The Russians aren't the bad guys.
I mean, they're a state.
They're as bad as anybody else's.
But the Russians didn't fucking do anything to us.
The bad guys in this story are obviously Brennan and Comey and McCabe and Rosenstein and all these guys who tried to fucking have a coup in America in 2018, 2017.
These are the bad guys in this story.
The Real Coup In America00:11:54
Like, I don't know.
I'm not saying like there's no other bad guys in the world, but in the context of this story, those are the bad guys.
And yeah, if you were so concerned about the Russians, why would you be going to the Russians but not going to the Trump administration?
Doesn't really make any sense.
The only way that this, you know, that this situation becomes not inexplicable is if you realize that the goal was never to fucking thwart Russian collusion.
The goal was to unseat Donald Trump.
And then all of a sudden, everything fits right into place.
All right, let's keep playing.
About motivations.
And I think right now it would be premature to make any judgment one way or the other.
I just wonder, though, about the what the FBI would say, I think, here is, okay, so they opened an investigation.
Nobody was ever charged.
They were concerned about possible Russian meddling in the election.
Just pause it already.
I just love it.
Just understand that this is Pete Williams, straight journalist from NBC News, right?
And Pete Williams, the guy's been around forever.
Like he's one of their senior journalists.
And if you ever hear a journalist saying these words, it may not be a journalist.
They might be a propagandist.
Where they go, well, I think what the FBI would say here is, like, why are you speaking for the FBI?
If nothing else, the FBI has been caught in doing a terrible job.
And then you go, well, I think what the FBI would say is, you know, we were just out there trying to do a real good job.
What are you talking about?
Something reasonable.
Well, I think the FBI would say, well, we're concerned about this.
And so why not open an investigation and figure it all out?
I mean, we're the Federal Bureau of them.
Yeah, because let's investigate, baby.
They got a hot hand.
Let's fucking investigate some presidential candidates.
Anyway, keep playing.
Investigation.
What's the harm?
You've said intrusive means.
So what is your concern about the fact that they did this?
Well, I think the big picture is this.
From day one, remember, they say, okay, we're not going to go to talk to the campaign.
We're going to put people in there, wire them up, and have these conversations with people involved in the campaign.
Because that way we'll get the truth.
From the very first day of this investigation, which was July 31st, 2016, all the way to its end in September 2017, there was not one incriminatory bit of evidence to come in.
It was all exculpatory.
The people that they were taping denied any involvement with Russia, denied the very specific facts that the FBI was relying on.
Hold on, hold on for a second.
Because I just got an address that Pete Williams actually asks the question, well, what harm came of this?
I mean, sure, they started this investigation.
Okay, they found out there was nothing there, but like, what harm came of this?
And it's like, how could you even ask that question?
Do you know what harm came of this investigation?
Well, I mean, there's a whole bunch of people who are fucking in jail for bullshit crimes that they wouldn't have been in jail for.
I mean, Roger Stone is quite possibly going to die in jail for what?
For, you know, quote, lying to the FBI when the whole investigation shouldn't have happened to begin with.
So that's kind of like, you know, there's that.
But how about the people who didn't get charged with anything?
Carter Page was tarnished as a Russian agent in the media.
I mean, like, supposedly serious people were saying that this guy is an agent of a hostile foreign power.
The guy's life was ruined.
I mean, like, real damage to real people has been done from this investigation.
And then even bigger than that, you're like, look at the effect this had on the country.
I mean, this is like this investigation like tore up the country for two straight years.
It totally put a cloud over the first two years of Donald Trump's presidency.
And what's even more important, I guess, to me is that Donald Trump, this is the crazy thing.
And the biggest impact that the Russia investigation had on the country is that Donald Trump being elected president, you would think would have been a moment in American history when there would be no possible way that everybody involved wouldn't reassess what's going on in this country.
That everybody involved, the Republicans, the Democrats, the media, the Hollywood, the academia, and just the people in general, that every one of us wouldn't go, wow.
So we live in this country.
I mean, we kind of thought it was here, and now we're realizing it's here.
That the media wouldn't go, whoa, we have not been speaking to this whole portion of the country.
They're this furious at us.
Like they hate us this much that they'd want to send this big middle finger our way.
And the guy who we told you had no chance of winning, we were wrong.
The guy who said he's wrong on all of these issues, well, the people thought he was right on all of those issues.
All these things that we said were disqualifying, they went, those aren't disqualified.
Like there should have been this big reset in America.
And instead, what did the media focus on for the first two years?
Russia, Trump, Russia, collusion.
That was the whole thing.
So the damage is so obvious.
How could you not see this?
It's insane to me that a journalist could just ask this question: well, what harm was done?
All right, let's keep playing.
The FBI ignores it, presses ahead, withholds that information from the court, withholds critical exculpatory information from the court while it gets an electronic surveillance warrant.
It also withholds from the court clear-cut evidence that the dossier that they ultimately relied on to get the FISA warrant was a complete sham.
They hid information about the lack of reliability even when they went the first time for the warrant.
But in January, after the election, the entire case collapsed when the principal source says, I never told Steele this stuff.
And this was all speculation.
And I have zero information to support this stuff.
At that point, when their entire case collapsed, what did they do?
They kept on investigating the president well into his administration after the case collapsed.
But here to me is the damning thing.
They not only didn't tell the court that what they had been relying on was completely rubbish, they actually started putting in things to bolster the Steele report by saying, well, we talked to the sources and they appeared to be truthful.
But they don't inform the court that what they're truthful about is that the dossier is false.
So that's hard to explain.
And the core of them in Mark.
And I think this is where we'll cut the interview off because we've got to wrap up in a second.
But this is what's crazy to me about that.
It's that Barr keeps coming back to this thing and goes, that's hard to explain.
But really, it's not.
It's not hard to explain.
It's just you don't want to look at what the obvious explanation is.
But this is, get this straight.
And this is really like, this was the most damning part of the IG report.
It's not just that they relied on this bullshit dossier to get the FISA warrant and all that stuff.
Which, you know, do you remember back on this?
I think it was like shortly after you came on the show when we did it, because we were still at Ralph's place, I believe, when we did this, but when the Nunes memo came out and it was like the first memo about how they got Carter Page and how they relied on this dossier.
And then the Democrats came out, if you remember, and said, this is all bullshit.
They weren't relying on the dossier.
There was lots of other evidence about Carter Page.
All those Democrats are still there.
None of them are apologizing.
None of them are saying they're wrong.
It's just like the shif guy.
He was one of them.
You know, they just move on to like, oh, well, now we're on Ukraine.
We're not talking about that anymore.
But remember, no, now it's all out on the table.
They did rely on the Steele dossier and they knew it was bullshit.
But then after this FISA warrant expires and Donald Trump wins the presidency, they re-up it two more times.
And by this point, they know it's bullshit.
They know it's bullshit because people involved in the report have come to them and been like, I never told Christopher Steele this.
This is not true.
And lots of other facts because they're investigating at this point.
Like this just didn't happen.
You know, like said, that said these things like, you know, the thing about Michael Cohn going to Prague to receive payoff from the Russians.
It's like, well, this didn't happen.
He didn't go to Prague.
He's never been to Prague.
There's records.
There's passports.
There's travel logs.
Once you start investigating, you can find out whether there's anything to this, right?
Like, right away, right?
If somebody was, let's say there was a dossier that said that Rob Bernstein went to Paris to do this illegal deal, and then you start investigating Rob Bernstein.
Well, one of the first things you might investigate is, was Rob in Paris at this time?
And if you find out he wasn't, you can pretty much dismiss the fucking dossier.
You're like, oh, not only, like, if we found out you were there, it still doesn't prove there was some illegal dealing there.
Not even like but gets.
But yeah, once you find out that those aren't even Rob's type of sandwiches, Rob be in Italy, if anything.
Hell yeah.
In meatballs.
Yeah.
You know, that.
Maybe I'll pick up a French bag and go down to Italy and put the meatballs, make myself a sub.
You put that in a dossier, I'm giving you a FISA warrant, okay?
But the craziest thing about it is what Barr just alluded to, and this was in the IG report, is that they continuously misled the courts.
Even when they knew the dossier was full of shit, they acted like they had bolstered the dossier, like they had cooperated with it.
And they'd say things like he said, they'd go, well, so more or less, you'd interview somebody who was one of the informants in the dossier.
And the dossier would say, well, this guy told me X, Y, and Z about Donald Trump's nefarious activities.
And then you'd interview the guy, and he'd be like, I never told Christopher Steele anything like that.
And then the FBI would go back to the FISA court and say, we interviewed the people in the dossier, and we've determined them all to be telling the truth.
Ah, what a great trick.
And they'd go, oh, well, then in that case, but they wouldn't acknowledge that they were telling the truth about the dossier being bullshit.
That's how dirty and underhanded this is.
And then Barr, which actually kind of pisses me off, even though his case he's making is very reasonable here.
But then Barr will go, now this is very hard to explain.
It's like, no, it's not hard to explain.
It's fucking easy to explain.
There's only one explanation.
This was an attempted deep state coup against the president.
I know I've been saying this for years this time, but this is like, I mean, this is a fucking, it's such a compelling argument.
There's no other explanation.
This is it.
And if you don't have this explanation, then it is going to seem, in fact, inexplicable, as Attorney General Bill Barr keeps saying it is.
All right.
We got to wrap up there.
Run your mouth podcast with Rob Bernstein at Robbie the Fire.