James Smith and Robbie the Fire dissect the unprecedented FBI raid on Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago, challenging his claims of prosecutorial misconduct while noting the dubious nature of classified document allegations. They explore theories linking the investigation to January 6th probes or mid-term political strategies, critique Trump's "draining the swamp" narrative by citing Ray McGovern's continued influence, and debate abolishing politicized agencies like the FBI and NSA. Ultimately, the discussion suggests this legal maneuver may weaponize federal institutions to stifle opposition, potentially energizing Trump's base or forcing a radical shift in how deep state power is addressed before 2024. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Okay, so huge thing happened yesterday in the evening.
Yesterday afternoon, I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about on the show today.
And then by the evening, you were like, well, I think it's pretty much been figured out for us to that extent right to your door.
Yes, they do.
The Trump Documents Raid00:13:50
They sure do sometimes.
Okay, so as everyone knows by now, Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home was rated by the FBI.
So this is, there's a lot of different angles to talk about this, a lot of really important, different things to cover.
So we'll try to get into all of it and cover all of it as best we can and just talk about how to think about these things and what the different dynamics at play are.
But I guess we could just start here.
This is huge.
This is a really historic event.
Truly, nothing like this has ever happened before.
The term unprecedented is overused, but it really does apply to this.
And not just that, the obvious, this is, we've never seen a former president be rated by the FBI.
This is in itself a new thing.
Donald Trump is also in somewhat of, at least in our lifetimes, I'd have to go back and think about this a little bit more.
I mean, you'd have to go back at least, I think, over 100 years if there ever was a situation like this.
I think maybe with Theodore Roosevelt, I don't know if there was thought that he would come back and run again.
But the point is that Donald Trump occupies this space, which has never, like no one's had this in our lifetimes, where he is the former president, but is also the frontrunner to be the nominee in the next presidential cycle.
So that he's not just the former president, but he's also the most likely competition for the current sitting president.
So there's kind of like a double whammy of what this means to be, you know, sending in the, you know, the feds to go get him.
Now, of course, Donald Trump can't tweet about this, but he did put out a statement.
So so far, this has been confirmed, right?
The FBI showed up.
They had a search warrant.
They searched his like living quarters and his office.
And Donald Trump says cracked open his safe and all of this stuff.
The what this is over is not exactly clear.
Although there's been a lot of speculation that this had to do that Donald Trump's been in a dispute over national archives.
Is it things he took that they're saying he wasn't supposed to take?
That's known.
Like silverware?
Yeah, who the hell knows?
It's shit that Donald Trump took from the White House.
This is actually fairly common.
This happens with President.
Didn't the Clinton take everything?
They took the carpets.
They took the couches.
They go to the place.
Yes, they really did do that.
Obama took the keyboard keys and the air conditioning units.
It's a weird thing, but this does happen very regularly.
And they've been the Justice Department and Trump's lawyers have been negotiating over this stuff.
That's usually how this would be handled.
I like it.
Yeah.
Now, there have been reports that, look, to be honest, must be taken with a grain of salt because it's like, you know, New York Times saying someone close to the matter says, and we've seen so many times that this turns out to be complete bullshit.
But there are reports that he, you know, was accused of having classified material that he took with him.
This, to me, seems highly dubious, this claim.
Now, I'm not saying it's impossible and perhaps it is true, but the thing is this, right?
Donald Trump, until he leaves the White House and Joe Biden is sworn in as the president, Donald Trump, there's no crime associated with him having any classified information.
And he can also declassify anything he wants to.
So as soon as he's not the president, if he has classified information, that would technically be a crime, mishandling classified information.
My point is he could have just declassified it and then taken whatever he wants with him.
It would be so, even for Trump, who is a little bit of a buffoon at times, it would be so profoundly stupid for him to just take these highly classified materials, knowing that there's like, you know, going to be so much pressure for him to be investigated and all of this stuff.
So that just seems unlikely to me.
Now, none of this, by the way, is confirmed at all.
The Department of Justice has not made a statement yet, at least as of now.
We have not seen a copy of the warrant.
We don't know that this also could be connected to the January 6th investigation.
And so that's basically where we are right now.
We don't have exactly like a solid answer on what were the pretexts for this warrant that ended in this raid.
If you go with a classified documents crime, let's just even say that he committed that crime.
That's too specific.
That's one of those crimes that's on the books.
So that if you want to prosecute someone, like you're telling me if we went into John Brennan's house tomorrow, there isn't some classified document there that he's not supposed to have.
Think about how much paperwork the government makes.
It's like, did a person keep a document that they weren't supposed to have?
Did you give them notice that they're not supposed to have it?
And then there was there some sort of a malicious intent of them having it or some sort of a criminal criminal negligence.
Like, yeah, I guess if he left with the nuclear passcodes and they told him, hey, you can't leave the nuclear passcodes on your desk.
And then they kept calling him up and saying, hey, are you going to get rid of the nuclear passcodes?
It makes sense to kick in his door or information on that level that if someone were to steal it from Mar-a-Largo, we would have like an internet, you know what I mean, a major security issue.
If there's some document that's supposed to be classified and it's an email between him and the prince of whatever, and it doesn't fucking matter about anything, then this is just the deep state finding some technical rule on the book to get him in trouble or at least make a show of force.
Right.
That does seem to be the case.
And of course, this is something that, again, would not be unique to Donald Trump on just on the face of it.
If that's what this was, oh, he had some classified information there, right?
This has happened many times before.
Of course, General David Petraeus famously got in trouble for this.
Of course, Hillary Clinton had, you know, classified government documents on her private server, which you're not supposed to have.
This happens a lot of times.
Maybe it's the Pizzagate and Sandy Hook actress files.
Maybe this is the good stuff.
Well, I'll tell you, this is what is a tremendous fodder for conspiracies is that like you go, okay, so what would make it different this time?
Because there's lots of times where people mishandle classified.
Yes, well, people mishandle classified information, but they don't, it doesn't lead to an FBI unannounced raid.
There's also, of course, something here that's, you know, it breaks with this huge precedent of the fact that we don't prosecute previous presidents in this country.
Now, to be clear, that is not a position that we support.
We don't support the idea that former presidents are above the law.
I think, you know, like we've been the first ones to always say that, yeah, former, like Bush should be prosecuted for his crimes and Cheney should be prosecuted for his crimes.
Obama should be prosecuted for his crimes and Trump should be prosecuted for his crimes.
The thing about this dynamic, which is interesting, is that it's not, again, like this was always true with the Donald Trump stuff.
A lot of people would say, well, Dave, why are you like, you know, why do you care if the president's being impeached?
Aren't you the one who's saying all of them should be impeached and tried and convicted and all of this?
And it's like, well, yeah, I mean, if Donald Trump was being impeached for, say, committing war crimes in Yemen or illegally bombing Syria or like something like this, sure, then that would, right?
But he's not.
Instead, he's being impeached for holding up an arms deal to Ukraine, which he eventually caved on and gave them the weapons.
And look where we are now.
So it's like, if you have a whole group of people who hate Donald Trump because he, you know, questioned the military industrial complex or something like that, then no, we're not just going to get on board with the impeachment when it's complete bullshit.
So much like that, no one is talking about actually holding former presidents accountable for their crimes against humanity.
What we're talking about here is an FBI who's been at war with Donald Trump since he was a presidential candidate all through his presidency, now coming in and making what seems to be the first move in what I think it will likely be Donald Trump being charged with a crime.
That's where I think we are right now.
This seems to be the most likely course that if they're saying, like, we, you know, we went and got a warrant because we believe there was something in this, in his house or office that would be evidence of a crime and they put on this big of a show, my guess is that they think they can get that there is some prosecutor somewhere who says, I think we have enough to go forward and I think I can get a conviction on this.
That would be my guess.
Any thoughts?
Wait, so you think that, what do you think that can you actually think they're going to bring a case against him for classified documents?
I feel like this has to be January 6th or something bigger.
Think this is just overclassified documents.
Well, it's just too technical of a thing to take him down for.
I don't think the public would like support it.
Well, look, I mean, here's the thing, right?
If they don't have something big here, then this is an unbelievable blunder on their part, because this is going to make, first off, this is there, and there seems to be no thought about this, but this is going to whatever you know, divide there is in the country now, this is going to seriously intensify it.
This is going to seriously motivate Donald Trump's base.
I mean, I think he was just, if they don't get him with something here, I think he was just handed the 24 nomination.
I think there's no question he's the guy.
And if there was any debate between him or DeSantis before, although I'll get into a little bit more about that on DeSantis in a second.
But so I think that it's like for them to make this move seems to me to indicate they're going for it.
Now, I don't know.
I could be wrong about that, but it seems to indicate they're going for it.
Now, it also is possible and should be, you know, mentioned.
It's not beyond the realm of possibility that they actually found something.
I'll say, and this is something I suppose I was wrong about, at least so far.
But if you listen back to old episodes of Part of the Problem, like back in 2017, when Mueller was first assigned to special prosecutor, what I said back then was that my prediction on the whole thing was that they would find a crime on Donald Trump.
Now, I said from the very beginning, I said it will have nothing to do with Russia because that was easy.
It was already easy for me to see through all that bullshit.
I go, there's no conspiracy with Russia here.
This is all bullshit.
But they're going to sick a special prosecutor on you.
And I thought it would kind of go like the Clinton thing did.
Like when Clinton had, what's his name?
Fucking blanking on the prosecutor's name.
Ken Starr.
So when Ken Starr was prosecuting Clinton, it was over the Whitewater thing.
And they were going after him for these like financial crimes.
They never found enough to prove a case on that.
But in the process of the investigation, they found out that, oh, he was banging this Monica Lewinsky chick and, oh, he lied about it under oath.
And so now we got you on perjury.
So I thought it would be something like that.
I went, well, he's obviously not involved in a conspiracy in Russia, but they're going to, you know, pour over every inch of his life with a fine-toothed comb.
The guy was a real estate developer in New York City.
I'm sure there's some crime that he committed at some point along the way.
That's kind of how I saw the thing going.
I was pretty surprised that they were never able to get anything on him.
You're like, wow, I guess Trump might have had a much cleaner path than I thought.
You know, like they never found a single thing.
That being said, taking it to now, I'm just saying it's not beyond the realm of possibility that they found something, that they actually found something.
There could have been a smoking gun with the January 6th thing.
I mean, I don't know.
It's all seems so the whole Donald Trump contesting the election.
Well, don't get me wrong, there was something beautiful from the anarcho-capitalist perspective of like just questioning the entire legitimacy of the government and democracy and all of this.
Donald Trump, in terms of like a plan of how to wield power, it was buffoonish.
I mean, he was just like, here's my plan.
I'm going to bitch and bitch and bitch, and then I'm going to leave when it's all over.
Like, what, you know, and then even the January 6th thing itself, like to any degree that someone there really thought, what did they think?
They were going to hold up the election being certified?
Pence wasn't going to be a bitch.
That's what they thought.
They thought if they just stepped up and pressured Pence, he wouldn't bitch out.
He'd support Trump.
He then would return to the state.
Why Professional Counseling Matters00:02:39
And then I don't know where it goes from there.
And even it getting that far is so absurd.
And then the idea that the states, even if it was returned to the states, that they wouldn't have just sent it back in the exact same way.
They wouldn't have just been like, no, listen, this is like that the state of the world.
That's only two steps.
So they only went to the state step.
That was as far as they planned.
And then it's unclear.
You know, right.
And so, um, so anyway, so, so, is it beyond possibility that they found, let's say, a correspondence between Donald Trump and Roger Stone or something like that, where he actually was dumb enough to say, you know, like, okay, this is the plan.
We're going to intimidate them into not doing this or something like that.
Now, I don't think that's the most likely scenario, but I wouldn't rule it out.
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BetterHelp Discount Code Reveal00:11:26
To speak to the blunder first, because I'm fascinated by that, I do think that the mentality right now is know Donald Trump at all costs.
And so, the question is: are they able to actually do that?
Or do they actually turn on the American public?
I mean, do the American public kind of turn on them and go, We don't like this no-cost thing.
This isn't the way democracy is supposed to operate.
And so, you end up seeing like even amongst non-Trump supporters just going, All right, this is too much.
This is not the country we want to live in.
In terms of what you were saying, if there's a smoking gun here, I do really wonder if maybe this is because of the Alex Jones thing.
I don't know if you covered, but with the phone.
And I also, I'm going to go straight conspiracy here.
And this is a courtesy of BK Chris on this one, but I think the NSA has everything at all times, and they're not always allowed to tell us.
They're not allowed to open up the file unless they have a reason to go and here's how we got this information.
It could be that that slip up, which maybe even wasn't a slip up.
We don't know what happened there, but it could be that the deep state found its opening for opening up certain files, and now they have everything and they have a reason to say, This is how we got it, even if it's not how they got it.
They got, you know, or they're able to search that database and go oh, here's what you got to pull from that phone and you can say it was in that, that type of thing.
Uh, so you, there could be that that Alex Jones thing just opened up a really big door.
Well, it's really yeah yeah look, I thought about this as well, because it's really it's it's.
You're one degree away from the heart of it right, like if you have Alex Jones phone, I mean, what it hits it's him to Roger Stone, to whatever whoever else is involved there, like right there, you know with, with all of the people on the ground.
So that look, that is possible.
Now, all all of these things.
The NSA angle is interesting too.
I hadn't thought about that, but that certainly is true and I my assumption would be that people at the NSA are pulling these records and looking at them and then kind of working backward, re-engineering exactly.
So that's, that's all.
Possibly there, like all of these things could be true.
It can also obviously be true.
They could have found the smoking gun and still, what's motivating them here obviously is not, you know like oh, my god, we can't let former presidents be above the law.
What's motivating them is, as you said, stopping Donald Trump.
Look, they're very concerned right now.
I mean, they have been this whole time.
They're very concerned because the Trump Endorsed Uh candidates have been winning around the country.
The Democrats are looking in to be in a terrible position going into the the midterm.
So this is now a perfect storm of.
Not only are the Republicans going to take back Uh control of of the, the Congress, but it's going to disproportionately be Trump Picked Republicans taking back control of the House and the Senate.
And then what do they have here?
I mean, they're in a situation where this senile old man is claiming he's running again.
You know, and they the everything you know.
He's just done a terrible job.
It's transparent.
He's an embarrassment.
He has no chance of winning.
They've only got Kamala Harris sitting behind him.
They're really in trouble, and so they're.
And if Trump is the presumed, you know Uh frontrunner for 2024, what are they looking at now?
They're looking at, you know, potentially Donald Trump, who was already, you know, a deal breaker to them, potentially more pissed off, more angry, more aware of what the deep state did to him, coming back with not only with a Republican UH Congress, but with a more Trumpian Republican Congress.
So it's not a it's not a complete coincidence that now is when this happens.
I there's two more variables that I wonder about.
One is if they create enough of a charade where they essentially go.
Well, Donald Trump can't run while he's being investigated, like these crimes are too great and there's too much concern, so we're not going to allow him to run.
And if they get away with that.
And then the other, which I don't think they would.
But then the other variable is, do people don't like the nonsense?
I think a lot of people get sick of Trump and it's not that they're sick of Trump, they're sick of the temper tantrum over Trump and so they just go.
I just don't want that.
And so now you got the gamble of, do they?
Do they overplay the temper tantrum to the point that people actually see through it and go, okay, you turned this not fair and we don't like that.
You can just get rid of someone.
Like they actually go, wow, this is a temper tantrum.
Like they actually start to see through it and like when you got a little kid having a temper tantrum, at some point you got to ignore them so that they stop doing it.
Or if people just kind of revert back to, hey, I don't like this.
Can we just move on from Trump?
Yeah no, that is a very interesting question.
That that's a very interesting question.
And what uh the?
The spectacle of Donald Trump running in 2024?
What would that be?
And how would the country you know to the question you asked which, which way would they fall on?
That is an interesting uh question.
Um so, you know, on on top of all of that, it is also, you know, pretty important to keep in mind that look these, See, I just want to find the right way to put this.
When I say that if they go for this and have nothing, this is such a huge fuck up on their part.
It's a lot of people will say, well, yeah, but they went for the whole Russia collusion hoax and came up with nothing.
So, and there's truth to that.
But the thing is, they did get something big out of that, which is that they boxed in the president of the United States for years.
But at the same time, there was also a long-term cost associated with that, which is that, you know, for half the country, their faith in kind of like the federal law enforcement was completely shattered.
Their faith in the corporate press, their faith in these institutions, all completely shattered.
Now, which, you know, I think is the best thing that has come out of all of that.
Faith, again, as Rothbard writes in Anatomy of the State, he doesn't use that word, but faith in government is really a huge part of this, you know, this whole operation.
So, but this is a little bit different.
I mean, if they, if they don't achieve, he's not the sitting president, they're not boxing him in with these accusations.
If they don't achieve something out of this here, then this was just a complete blunder.
So that's just what's very interesting about this dynamic.
What exactly, you know, like you said, Rob, that might be it.
It might be a way to bog him down in an investigation.
It's possible.
It's also possible that they didn't find a smoking gun related to January 6th, and it is a really petty charge, like something with mishandling classified information.
And they just think, you know what?
This is a federal crime.
We can get him tried in Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., something like 95% of the people voted against Donald Trump.
You know, they go, we'll take our chance there with what?
Maybe we get an Obama judge and an Obama-appointed judge, and we get a, let's take a random jury of Washington, D.C. residents.
Or you raid his office.
Maybe you get lucky.
Maybe they were in there for something and they just got lucky and pulled something out or knew that something else interesting was in there.
And this was a good excuse to go in.
Yeah, perhaps it could be all of that.
It could be all of that.
It also, and look, let's not forget we're talking about cops here, federal cops, but maybe they plan something.
Who knows?
This is, you know, all of these things are possibilities.
It's going to be interesting to try to figure this out as we see what comes of all of this.
I do think to go back to your original point, if they don't have something big and something convincing, I do think your average American, not your ultra left, I think your average person is going to be like, all right, they're going too far.
This is too much.
What's going on with the FBI?
Yeah.
No, that's right.
It is, it's a line being crossed.
And it's not a good line because it's symbolic.
If they'll do that to the last president, what can they do to me?
I mean, I felt that way with Twitter.
You're going to censor that guy.
I would have thought that guy at least has enough political capital to not be censored off of social media.
He doesn't.
Wait, the FBI is even going to raid that guy's house.
And then you start hearing about them, you know, hiring 88,000 IRS agents.
And you're like, oh man, the machine's really starting to just come for its, you know, come for us.
It's, it certainly does feel like it's a crossing of a line to go.
This has always been an unwritten rule that you don't prosecute previous presidents, previous administrations.
Now, that is, by the way, not my position.
Just to be clear on this, my position isn't that you don't prosecute previous presidents.
I would like to see all presidents prosecuted for their crimes.
But this is, if it makes sense, this is the worst of all worlds.
This is prosecuting a previous president, not for actual crimes against humanity or something like that or violations of liberty.
This is prosecuting them for political reasons.
And so, you know, I'm assuming.
And so this changes things.
You know, Ludwig von Mises, the great libertarian economist, classical liberal economist, he was for democracy.
And of course, this is, you know, before, you know, kind of the rise of the, you know, modern superpower superstates where, you know, democracy has changed a bit from then.
But basically, he was, he, he supported democracy on the justification that it allowed the peaceful transfer of power.
So not like none of these goofy, like kind of modern progressive defenses of democracy.
He wasn't saying like, oh, therefore you have the consent of the governed or therefore this, you know, it's the government of the people or something like that.
But he was just like, look, if you have democratic elections, at least that allows one, you know, group of people to take over power peacefully from the previous group of people.
There's other libertarians like famously Hans Hermann Hoppe who just reject this outright and are like, no, democracy is just horrible and it just leads to nothing good except an expansion of the state.
Hoppe famously argued against democracy and just basically said that, look, this is it's nothing but mob rule and it always leads to an increase in the size and scope of government.
Wherever you might fall on that debate, this really does a lot to weaken whatever the benefits of democracy were for the argument Mises was making, because it does seem like, okay, well, you're crossing a line here now where I guess this is just the way people are going to have to do things.
I mean, if this is the precedent that's been set, then, okay, it's like there really is no more peaceful transfer of power because the next guy coming in is just going to have all of the incentives to now investigate, you know, the previous regime or the next regime or whoever, you know, whoever the opposition candidate who's running against them is.
Political Targeting at Highest Level00:03:20
But that's really what's going on here.
Look, this for sure, and of course we'll find out more details about exactly what's going on here, but there's no question that at minimum, this made its way to the to the absolute top of the Justice Department.
There's no way this was not done.
This decision was not made by low-level people.
This at minimum, I'd have to assume this went all the way up to the White House, but for sure, Ray and Garland gave the green light on this.
They're not just raiding a former president's home without going up to the top and checking that this was okay.
They're kind of eating themselves.
It was a boring, it was very boring, but the Republicans finally got ahead of the hold of the head of the FBI.
Sadly, some of the big ones were at a different committee talking about gain of function research.
So there weren't that many bombshell questions asked, but they brought in the head.
Best moment was, I always forget the old guy's name, but he was asking about one specific FBI guy who was posting stuff on social media and then seemed to be in charge of the like Hunter Biden investigation.
Weren't too many bombshells.
But I guess there's a bit of a race against the clock right now that if the Republicans actually take over and start looking into some of this other shenanigans, it's maybe like the Democrats are going on the offensive a little bit and being like, yeah, but we still got the Justice Department and the FBI.
So like, if you like, like they're almost an offensive strike of like, hey, guys, this is what's going to be coming.
And we'll have a full two years to come up with something solid and get a lot of you in trouble.
So you better lay off.
Yeah, maybe, maybe that's it.
All right.
I want to read Donald Trump put out a statement.
So I wanted to read that and we could go through this a little bit and respond.
So it reads statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States of America.
These are dark times for our nation.
As my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
So beautiful.
You can even book a reservation.
You can see why the FBI likes it here.
It really is.
I'll just show Trump right away.
Is currently under siege, raided and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.
Nothing like this has ever happened to a president of the United States before.
After working and cooperating with the relevant government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate.
It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the justice system, and an attack by radical left Democrats who desperately don't want me to run for president in 2024, especially based on recent polls and who will likely do anything to stop Republicans and conservatives in the upcoming midterm elections.
Such an assault could only take place in broken third world countries.
Sadly, America has now become one of those countries, corrupt at every level, corruption at, oh, sorry, I was wrong, corrupt at every level, not seen before.
They even broke into my safe exclamation point.
What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democratic National Committee?
Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th president of the United States.
Quitting Cigarettes with Fume00:03:31
He makes some fair points in that.
The political persecution of Donald J. Trump has been going on for years with the now fully debunked Russia-Russia-Russia scam, impeachment hoax one, impeachment hoax two, and so much more.
It just never ends.
It's a political targeting at the highest level.
I got to say, I completely agree with him on that.
That is true.
I mean, look, the Russiagate shit, the Ukraine gate shit was absolutely nothing more than, as we mentioned on this show many, many times, it was an attempted coup attempt by the deep state.
And this was basically, I mean, I thought, you know, I remember we were kind of making this case for years.
If you remember back on the show, we were making the case that this is what it is, an attempted coup attempt, an attempted coup.
And I thought when Andrew McCabe went on 60 Minutes, it was like, okay, well, that's it.
Case closed, right?
I mean, the guy literally just like the number two at the Justice Department just admitted it, that when they fired Comey, they debated invoking the 25th Amendment and ultimately settled on the special prosecutor.
They were like, okay, we're trying to remove this guy.
How do we remove him?
Okay, this is how we remove him.
Like, oh, well, okay, that's what a coup is.
Like, how else do you say this?
So anyway, this has been, and since then, you know, mountains more evidence has come out proving this.
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Draining the Swamp Again00:14:48
Okay, Hillary Clinton was allowed to delete an acid watch 33,000 emails after they were subpoenaed by Congress.
Absolutely nothing has happened to hold her accountable.
She even took antique furniture and other items from the White House.
This is all true.
This is really none of that is even debatable.
I stood up to America's bureaucratic corruption.
I restored power to the people and truly delivered for our country like we have never seen before.
That is bullshit.
That is complete bullshit.
And we'll get into that a little bit more.
The establishment hated it.
Now, as they watch my endorsed candidates win big victories and see my dominance in all polls, they are trying to stop me and the Republican Party wants more.
The lawlessness, political persecution, and witch hunt must be exposed and stopped.
I will continue to fight for the great American people.
Okay, so I think he came back to some truth there in the end, but there was something really important there that Donald Trump said that absolutely was not true.
I want to read this line one more time.
I stood up to America's bureaucratic corruption.
I restored power to the people and truly delivered for our country like we have never seen before.
Yeah, that is just bullshit.
And in fact, this is more evidence that that is complete bullshit.
In fact, the head of the FBI, Ray, was appointed by Donald Trump.
And this could maybe plausibly be seen, be believable if, like, let's say Joe Biden had come in and fired all of the great FBI people who Donald Trump put in and put back in his corrupt people.
And then they did this to him.
But no, it's actually the people Trump appointed doing this.
So this is the thing about Donald Trump that is so important for Trump supporters to understand that this, forget all the other like specific campaign promises that Donald Trump didn't deliver on.
This was the most profound failure of Donald Trump.
Now, perhaps it wasn't a failure.
Perhaps he had no intention of doing it.
But the idea that he drained the swamp, the guy kept Fauci on his COVID task force for the entire year of 2020.
We can't, we couldn't even count on him for that.
All of these people he could have fired, he could have gotten rid of.
All of them.
He's, you know, for the foreign policy stuff, my God, what a nightmare.
My God, all of the people that he put at the to head the State Department and the Defense Department and his National Security Advisor being John Bolton.
I mean, all of them, McMasters and, you know, Pompeo, just all these just horrible people.
Domestically, it was nothing but what, you know, it was Goldman Sachs people at the Treasury Department.
It's, it's, you know, the Fauci, the biggest crony, epidemiologist, liar, sociopath ever to run the pandemic response.
It was, and, and here, look at the FBI.
This is who he left in there.
So it's complete bullshit, this idea that he drained the swamp.
And by the way, you know, there's something else there that's kind of an interesting lesson as well.
Like I said, like he could maybe make that claim if he had gotten rid of all of these Obama, you know, or, you know, previous FBI people and put in better people.
And then when Joe Biden got in, he got rid of all those people and put back in or put new, you know, corrupt people.
And then they did this to him, right?
Then maybe he'd have an argument.
But even then, you'd go, oh, well, then I guess draining the swamp was pretty ineffective, right?
So really the lesson to take from this is that there's only one way to actually drain the swamp.
And that's to abolish it.
Like the answer would, the answer here would never be, let me get good people in the FBI, because okay, how long does that even hold for?
Till a president you don't like comes in, till one corrupt president comes in, till, till, or even till corrupt people are able to like manipulate a president, and then they take back over control of the thing.
If the power source exists, that's it's it's going to be corrupted.
It's a matter of time.
This is why, you know, in the Lord of the Rings, they're not trying to find the right person to wear the ring.
They're trying to find the right person to destroy the ring.
That's the idea.
You have to destroy this power.
So the, you know, Donald Trump, there's something about this that I got to say that there's a lot of different angles to this.
There's the angle that it's like, has Donald Trump been, you know, to some degree the victim of political persecution, as he puts it?
Yes.
I mean, yes, he was framed by his own deep state for, you know, being a traitor and a Russian spy or whatever.
And that was all complete bullshit.
And yes, there's no question that the entire corporate press and the entire political class and the CIA and the FBI and all of them were weaponized against him.
All of that is true.
But that can be true.
And it can also be true that Donald Trump absolutely failed to deliver for the American people, absolutely failed on the idea that he was in any position to take on these entrenched interests and do anything about it.
Now, they don't hate him because he delivered power back to the people.
They hate him for some other really interesting reasons.
Personally, I think it's kind of because of what he represents and what he would say.
They really don't like that.
They don't like the fact that he could say anything at any given time.
Like he was seen as a real threat to them.
But it's not because he drained the swamp and gave power back to the people.
I also think that I just think that Donald Trump doesn't deserve your loyalty, Trump supporter.
I think he did nothing for you.
He is now outraged that this has happened to him, which is something about that that really bothers me.
I mean, it's like, you know, we have tens of thousands of SWAT raids every year, but that's just like to the peons, to people.
Who cares about that?
The real problem here is this.
I mean, like, they murdered Duncan Lemp.
You know what I mean?
In his sleep.
But this, you know what I'm saying?
Like, I understand why it's a bigger thing historically when this happens to a former president, but it's like Donald Trump, I think his people, Donald Trump supporters, should show him exactly as much loyalty as he showed to his people on January 6th.
So those people who just entered the building and are doing fucking years in jail, have been held in solitary confinement, and he disavowed them the next day.
That's what you should, that's the amount of loyalty you should have to him.
I think Trump's done a great job of being a symbol to these people.
It's like a sports team.
So they take it personally.
Like, if something happened to Trump, that's like it's happening to me because Trump was the one guy who stood up and said, hey, I'm here for the middle class.
I'm here for these people.
Everyone else hates you.
And so like, if they like Trump, they see that their lives were better when he was in office.
And then they see attacks on him as being, you know, the deep state not allowing them to have representation.
And so they take it personally, but you're right.
It's stupid.
Well, yeah, I mean, and I get that.
I guess my message to them is like, yeah, no, all of your anger at the deep state and the establishment is completely justified.
You're completely right about that.
It's just that Trump and his the entire kind of Republican, even the new populist Republican establishment.
I just have absolutely no sympathy for him.
These people ran around in 2020 and fucking, you know, encouraged all of the insanity, encouraged all of the lockdowns until way after the fact.
You know what I mean?
When it was like, and they were like, oh, yeah, we were against it the whole time.
Until it seemed like it could hurt Trump's reelection campaign.
Then he bragged about the production of the vaccine.
It's all he's been doing since then.
It's like they don't do anything for real people.
They don't care about like any of their supporters.
And I certainly think that, you know, he's, I see no evidence of him ever really going to bat for the people who stood up for him and suffered because of it.
I just don't, I don't see what it is that, you know, like all of a sudden now you're supposed to go to war for this guy.
I'm sorry.
He's he's the guy who appointed Ray to be the head of the FBI.
That's that's on him.
Now, if you want to see, you know, if Donald Trump, let's say that Donald Trump survives this and it's not the big, you know, they didn't find the big smoking gun on him, which is quite possible.
And Donald Trump survives this and it's just now he's got all this juice and he's coming back to 2024.
I'd at least like to like, let me hear him say something that actually indicates that he gets it.
You know, I saw Newt Gingrich on, fuck, what, I can't remember what show it was on, maybe a Fox News show or something like this, but he was talking earlier today and he said, you know, this is because Donald Trump, they know Donald Trump's going to win, blah, blah, blah.
And he goes, Donald Trump will win.
And now he understands the deep state.
He's coming in understanding them.
And now he's really going to destroy them.
He's going to destroy the deep state once he gets back in there.
And you're like, okay.
So in order for me to believe this, in order for me to believe that this is possible, let me hear something that indicates that he actually gets it.
Like, okay, look, if Donald Trump said, you know, like, I've learned my lesson, you know, say it in his Trump way, you know, I've learned my lesson.
I thought we could work with these people.
I thought it would be terrific.
But now the only thing left is to abolish the FBA, the FBI, abolish the CIA.
These organizations are completely corrupt.
They must be abolished or something like that.
Okay.
I'd start listening.
You'd go, hmm, all right, that's interesting.
Maybe he did learn something from this.
Maybe have him, can he acknowledge one thing that he got wrong?
I know Trump doesn't really do that, but you know, could he go whatever?
You know, they pushed this vaccine on me.
They, they led me to believe it was going to be this or that.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, nothing.
There's none of that.
It's just like when I win, everything's awesome.
And when I lose, everything's terrible.
Look how terrible it is that my beautiful house.
Like, but it's like, look, that's really who this guy is.
It's unfortunate in a way.
It's, it's really tragic that the one guy who was able to rise up and represent all those things that you're talking about, Rob, to represent all of these people, you know what I mean?
Like that he was this guy, just this piece of shit who's just has no idea about anything.
And honestly, I don't think really cares.
I think really only cares about self-aggrandizement.
Like he really only cares about like being like, I'm the biggest winner and I have the biggest house and I have the biggest, you know, whatever.
Like all of this.
Donald Trump's the guy who fucking bragged about passing the biggest spending bill in the history of the world in 2020.
That's what he bragged about.
How are you feeling about that right now?
You know, sit here all day long saying, oh, the inflation is all Joe Biden's fault.
Okay.
All right.
You know, this was Donald Trump, by the way, complained way before the COVID shit, if you remember, he complained for the first three years of his administration that the Fed fund rate wasn't at zero.
He goes, why are they bringing it back up to 0.75 basis points?
Crank that baby down to zero.
Let's rise.
You know, that was his big complaint.
All right.
I just, I don't see, you know, the tragic thing here is that if they didn't, if they didn't get him with something big here, then they really have put a whole lot of wind in his sales.
And I think Newt Gingrich is wrong.
This guy is not going to come in and solve all of these problems, even if he does get back into the White House.
Well, whoever's writing the script, I just want to give him credit for going full batch of crazy.
You send Nancy Pelosi over to Taiwan, disturb some shit.
You get this blunder going on in Ukraine, you know, possible World War III, Russia, China.
Now they're going after Trump.
You know, we're going full chaos here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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So I saw Jack Posebiak.
I forget how you say his last name or whatever.
He's a big Trump guy, but even he's saying, it's like, this is why like the whole Republican movement just fails and fails and fails.
So I literally just pulled up Twitter right now as we're doing this to see what some of these people are saying.
Here's what he says, okay?
This is his line.
Do not donate one cent to the RNC until they commit to FBI reform.
Doesn't that just say the whole thing right there?
Right.
They commit to reform.
What does that even mean?
Abolish the FBI.
And by the way, even if they say we're going to abolish the FBI, that doesn't mean they're actually going to do it, but they at least better be saying it.
Go ahead.
So does the FBI, because like even you and I in this current environment, we go defund the police.
That's fucking nuts.
Like, we like the spirit of it in a way, but we're going to need someone to police the rape and murder.
Does the FBI do anything of value?
Like, I, because I, all I see from the FBI is all of this horseshit.
I'm sure they claim trafficking and drugs or, I mean, I don't really care about drugs.
Well, well, the difference about right.
Yeah, there's, I mean, like, the difference with the FBI versus local police communities, which by the way, I don't, I'm not against defunding the police.
Ron DeSantis and State Power00:09:22
In fact, I think that more and more that I've seen out of it is like, yeah, as long as you were like, and with that also went no like prosecution and enforcement of self-defense and property defense, I think that'd be great.
I think, you know, you see like just these videos of like store clerks like starting to really fucking defend themselves against people.
It's like a lot of this crime would be cleaned up real quick if people were just allowed to defend themselves.
But the major difference here is that we definitely don't need federal cops.
You know, I mean, like, yeah, are there some legit crimes that the FBI investigates?
Sure.
But all of those could be handled by the state, you know, justice departments, by the state attorney generals and district attorneys and stuff like that.
There's no need for this to any of this to be prosecuted on a federal level.
As it is, the states are the ones who prosecute murder and rape and all of that type of shit anyway.
So, and then you wouldn't have this poisonous, you know, political operation, which another major mistake that all these Republican talking heads say is they act like the Justice Department was politicized under Donald Trump, which is like complete bullshit.
It's just that for the first time, a real like kind of, at least from their perception, from their perspective, outsider came in.
And so it was used.
But it's like this, it's like, let's just go back to the good old days before the FBI was politicized under J. Edgar Hoover or something like that.
What?
I don't know.
Read up on it a little bit.
It's always been politicized from day one.
Woodrow Wilson used them to spy on anti-war activists who didn't want us to be involved in the European conflict in World War I. Woodrow Wilson actually went on to arrest many of those anti-war activists.
So this is nothing new.
This is what the organization does.
It's the purpose of the organization.
And if you can't, after all of this, if you can't just take the position that we should abolish the FBI, abolish the CIA and the NSA, then I'm sorry.
I don't, I don't think Republicans will ever get there.
And that's, I would need to hear something.
Give me something to indicate that there's any reason to believe Newt Gingrich.
Because last time Donald Trump got in, it's not as if we didn't all know.
I mean, I fucking knew.
So I'm sure that like these people knew that the deep state had been completely weaponized against Donald Trump.
So he had years where he was in with that.
And they all came out with bigger budgets than they went in with.
So what are we talking about?
No?
I mean, I just don't see it happening.
So anyway, I guess that's more or less where we are with this.
Now, the other thing, that's one other point that I did think was very interesting from all of this, which is worth mentioning, is that, you know, another angle to this, which has a lot of potential to it, is that, okay, there's one other guy who's become a Republican star who theoretically has floated out there as the 2024 nominee.
Of course, is Ron DeSantis.
And Ron DeSantis is the governor of Florida.
And Mar-a-Lago is in Florida.
This happened in his state.
And Ron DeSantis has shown over the last few years a willingness to stand up to the feds, at least to some degree.
This is a very interesting opportunity for him.
You know, this happened in his state.
Now, particularly if this turns out to be bullshit or if this turns out to be petty.
You know, let's say there is even accusation that Donald Trump, anything short of a smoking gun.
You know, this is, they, they did find that he had some classified information or whatever, but they would never do this with anyone else.
They literally, it's, it still could be, it still was clearly like weaponizing, you know, the Justice Department against a political enemy.
If that's the case, this will be a real opportunity for DeSantis to stand up and like really claim that he's going to use the power of the state to protect people from the power of the feds.
This we're not going to let the feds come in here and harass our citizens.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Like, so that that could be a really amazing opportunity for some kind of like state governments trying to exert their power to hold off the feds.
There's a lot of potential there.
There's also, it's, it's, you know, Ron DeSantis is in a little bit of a tricky spot here because he's, he already came out and said something, but it was very soft.
It was very like, I want to get to the bottom of this and know why this happened.
You know, it's like he's, he's going to have to, I think, come out forcefully against this in order to maintain any chance of really being like one of the future stars in the Republican Party.
I mean, he's one of the present stars, but in order to keep this thing going, he's a young guy, I think, with a lot of ambition.
So that'll be very interesting to see how he plays, he plays this whole thing.
I think there's no question this was a game changer.
I don't know to what, exactly in what direction or exactly to what extent.
A lot of that's really going to depend on what they got out of this.
But if it's not something big, they really just gave Trump a lot more juice.
That's kind of where I fall on this.
Any other thoughts, Rob?
We're at the cusp of this one.
Curious to see how it develops.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, me too.
It'll be interesting.
Oh, one more thing, I guess, that could be mentioned, just to throw out there, just for a little fodder for conspiracy theorists out there.
I guess it turns out that the judge who signed off on the warrant has ties to Epstein.
He was the lawyer for Epstein or something.
He was in the New York Post.
Yeah.
Maybe that's what Trump walked away with and he wasn't dumb enough to back it up.
He got his leverage.
Pizza Gate, Epstein.
He had all those files in his safe and he said, come fuck with me.
And then the FBI is like, all right, well, we'll come take that.
We know exactly which judge to go.
If I was Trump, I'd hide into my hair.
That's what I would do.
I would keep a little safe right under the comb over.
I'll gladly step outside, search everything.
No problem.
Yeah, maybe, maybe.
I mean, who the hell knows?
But it would, you know, it does make you wonder if maybe there isn't something more going on with all of this.
And particularly if they were going to do something like this and not, you know, like no major charges come of this.
And you're like, well, what would the strategic benefit of this be?
Maybe that's it.
Maybe they just really needed to get their hands on whatever the hell he had.
There's there was some, there was some reporting.
I can't remember if this came from the New York Times, but I know Rachel Maddow was reporting that they said there were, there were, you know, again, let's take it with a grain of salt shit, but there's, you know, people familiar, you know, anonymous.
They're the same ones that told her that Trump was a spy.
So, you know, yeah, right, exactly.
So who knows?
But that said that he had information that was at the absolute highest level of classified material.
Isn't Rachel an entertainer, though?
Yes, she is.
That is legally, she is.
But they said that they couldn't even list it on the search warrant because it was so classified.
You know, again, take it with a grain of salt, but there could be something like a lot more than meets the eye here.
Again, transformer.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
Again, though, it's, you know, these type of these institutions and these federal law enforcement agencies have been weaponized against the American people for a very long time.
You know, you know, people go, oh, the FBI just became corrupted after Obama when Trump got in there.
And it's like, well, let's talk to the survivors at Waco and see how they feel about how great the FBI was previously.
You know, there's like that, it's, it's, I, I'm not playing this game where like we now all of a sudden that it happened to this fucking billionaire who sat there and presided over the federal government and did nothing for the American people.
Now all of a sudden it's some type of tragedy.
That being said, it is definitely a step in like the weaponization of the federal government against kind of a movement that they deem to be the bad people in America.
Maybe they'll, maybe they'll reawaken fun Trump where he goes, all right, you know, I tried playing a little bit of ball and he just goes scorched earth and he like runs with, I don't know, Alex Jones as vice president.
He frees Assange, gets that guy who did WikiLeaks and makes him the head of the NSA, like really just goes full batch of crazy.
Oh, he's Snowden, you mean?
Yeah, WikiLeaks.
Snowden?
Yeah.
Assange for press secretary.
Who are all the other deep state enemies?
I don't think Assange is going to be press secretary anytime soon.
But yeah, listen, if that is the case, then I'm here for it.