Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dissect Trump's Florida arraignment, arguing that prosecuting him for retaining documents while ignoring similar actions by Biden or Clinton reveals a "deep state" double standard. They contend the case sets a dangerous precedent for removing political opponents via legal mechanisms, potentially creating a "Banana Republic." The hosts suggest unsealed notes regarding Iran strategy and Kevin McCarthy's defense of CNN hiring leakers prove the Justice Department is weaponized against Trump, framing his trial not as a crime but as a referendum on systemic corruption that could end democracy if he releases sensitive files. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Layers of the Transcript00:15:05
Fill her up.
You're 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.
Steer's your host.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith, and he is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
We got a classic in the making for you guys today.
Just a classic episode.
Very excited to get into all of this.
And I think it's going to be a classic episode because, of course, the big news, Trump being indicted.
And I feel that no one is breaking this down exactly correctly.
And that calls for the libertarian Tupac.
Libertarian Pupac.
The Libertarian Tupac and the King of the Caulks.
It's not bad.
That might be the new one to break it down like only we do.
Maybe someone else has done it, but I haven't seen it.
And we'll get this right.
So first, just a couple issues of business here.
Thank you so much to everybody who came out to the Comedy Mothership over this last weekend.
Just an incredible weekend of shows.
Absolutely.
Just a really special thing that they've got going there with the Comedy Mothership.
Absolutely had a great time.
A lot of great people came out.
So thank you for that.
Me and Rob are going to be all over the road.
Go, if you want to find out where we're at next, go to comicdave Smith.com.
I know we're coming to Kansas City and Cleveland coming up soon.
I think those are both going to be real fun gigs and then all over the place.
All right.
RobbyTheFire.com for Rob Solo stuff.
Anything else you want to mention before we get into this, Rob?
Jacksonville this Saturday is the official porch tour kickoff.
Come hang out.
It's going to be a blast.
And then I've got a bunch of weekends up, including Milwaukee, Denver, Sandpoint, Idaho, Nashville, a whole bunch.
Go to the website, RobbieThefire.com.
More dates come soon.
All right.
Sounds good.
All right.
So let's just jump right into it.
The big, big, big news.
And this is really hard to overstate how big it is.
We kind of, our last episode was the day that the letter had been sent out to Donald Trump, that he was the target in this investigation.
Since then, he has been indicted.
He has been indicted and charged with many, many counts of mishandling.
We don't like you.
Many counts.
We don't like you.
Well, let's get into this because there's actually several layers here that almost need to be broken down.
And what I see being broken down, not only across the corporate press, but even amongst some of the more independent journalists types, some of the internet news is almost like the first level of it, like the most shallow level.
And so there is, there's a sense in which they're right, but there's just a lot deeper, a lot deeper that you can go than this.
So Donald Trump is being charged with, you know, mishandling of classified documents.
And he's being charged.
I forget the exact exact name of the charge.
That's not exactly it, but it's close enough.
That's basically what he's gotten in trouble for.
And what the consensus seems to be that this is very bad for Donald Trump.
And I don't necessarily think that's wrong.
So not only was his, not only was his indictment unsealed, but it also included the transcript.
Yes, willful retention of classified documents.
That's the charge that he's being charged with, multiple counts of.
Now, not only was this released, there was also a transcript of a recording with Donald Trump on it, and people are making a lot of hay out of that.
That's where actually this whole thing gets much more interesting.
But let's start with the surface level analysis, where I am essentially going to agree with the mainstream opinion on this, that I think this doesn't look great for Donald Trump.
It doesn't look good.
Now, one thing I should correct before we even get into that, he is being charged in Florida, not in Washington, D.C.
And the judge assigned to the case is a Trump appointed judge.
He's going to be, if he goes to trial, he'll be tried in southern Florida, where it's certainly a much better environment for him than Washington, D.C. As we've talked about many times on the show, that detail really matters in this case where he would be being tried.
So that is an interesting thing to just keep in mind.
But there is no question, this looks pretty bad on a surface level.
It seems that Donald Trump did have very sensitive documents.
It seems that he was kind of aware.
And there's at least some instances where he seems to acknowledge that.
And he seems to acknowledge that he can't, he could have declassified these at one point and then can't later.
That's what a lot of people are jumping on.
We'll get back to that in a second.
But on the surface, like by the letter of the law, I think Donald Trump might be in trouble here.
I don't know if you have any feeling or disagreement with me on that.
I think every level of this situation is full-fledged malarkey, my friend.
Okay.
And I think even the charge itself is while there might be 31 counts of them sitting down with the thesaurus and coming up with different ways of spinning the exact same thing.
There's two variables here.
One, everyone's had documents.
Joe Biden just had documents in his garage.
Mike Pence had to return documents.
Hillary Clinton had a full email server that they said.
The thing that they're really upset with here is that it was not returned to them on their schedule.
Yes.
And you're going to tell me that of all the crimes of every president that's committed, the thing that someone's going to go down for is not returning documents on a proper timeline.
That's really what the charge is.
The charge is not that he had the documents.
Now you're getting into a layer deeper, a layer deeper of this, which is then even.
So it's, well, it's even easy for people to look at it on the surface level and just be like, hey, look, it does seem that by the letter of the law, he broke the law here.
They're deciding to charge him.
And what defense does he really have?
That, you know, it's not actually a legal defense to say there's all these other people who have done it and you're just coming after me.
And I have to say, even the letter of the law part kind of it comes down to actually to me, was he president when he took the documents with him?
Was it when he was out of office or while he was still in office?
Because to me, I'm actually agreeing with Trump here.
If he's got the single authority to declare that something's declassified and he's allowed to keep it, then he took it.
And that was him declassifying it.
And now you might go, well, that's not the way the process works.
Yeah, but he's the boss.
So what, you're going to get him now once again on some technical paperwork that he didn't go see some subordinate and file it in the proper way?
He made a determination as it was his authority that he was going to keep it and he kept it.
Well, this is where there are.
And one more point.
Also, the, oh, well, there was a tape.
Now, that might convince a jury, but Donald Trump says stupid shit all the time.
The fact that he was sitting there with biographers and going, oh, look, I got this document here and it's still secret, so I can't show it to you.
He's a little kid showing off his toys.
He's an idiot.
All right.
And not only is an idiot, the document might not even exist.
Well, there's another thing to a whole element of that, but let's hold it.
Let's get into the tape in a second.
No, no, because the tape actually is so much more interesting than even just this.
But we'll get into the tape in a second.
But I feel like this is what we sometimes refer to as a blue pill versus red-pilled distinction of how you look at things.
And there's this very blue-pilled take that people have where they'll say like, well, look, I don't think, I don't think the president should be above the law.
And I don't think anyone, any president should be above the law.
And at least in this case, one former president is being held, you know, to this standard that he's not above the law.
And if he broke the law and if he had sensitive classified documents, if he didn't classify them, then he wasn't allowed to keep having them.
And he didn't classify them when he was president.
So as soon as he's not president anymore, he now doesn't have the authority to have them.
That's kind of the argument.
And I'm just going to say, maybe me and you differ a little bit here, but I think in the strict legal sense, there is an argument to that.
Can I?
However.
Can I counter that though?
Well, sure.
Just counter that.
Go ahead.
Okay.
Even if we want to live in a landscape where we go, hey, some politician might go down for breaking the law.
And it's good if they go down for breaking the law.
It's good if they go down for breaking the law if it's something like corruption.
If we're reinforcing bureaucratic bullshit, I don't want more bureaucratic bullshit in my life.
Like, I don't want to be told, hey, you're at the DMV.
You're supposed to stand on this line for this amount of time and hand the paper to that guy to then go to this guy.
I don't want that in my life.
So I don't care if you enforce that on Donald Trump.
Nobody should be pro-morber.
Like there was no harm, no foul here.
If he had access to documents, well, he had access to those documents while he was president.
No one's claiming that anyone was harmed by him having the documents.
Their best claim is that there was, he didn't follow the proper process and we're the government.
We asked him to return it.
He didn't do it on our timetable.
Well, that's not something you want anyone against.
No, no, no, listen, I agree with you.
I'm just saying this is almost like, okay, so now we're going, that's the surface level.
And then when you scratch a little bit deeper, you go, okay, well, wait a minute.
What is actually the crime here?
The crime is that the government is allowed to keep secrets from its own people and you're not allowed to have these secret documents, even though you were just in a position where you could have made them all not secret documents.
And then that gets pretty goofy.
Now, the other thing here is that this is compared often.
Now, one of the things that people, anyway, let me get that.
This is kind of the red pill distinction is that you go, no, wait a minute.
There's so many ridiculous laws on the books that the truth is they could prosecute any president at any time, not to mention if they wanted to go after presidents for their real crimes.
If they wanted to go after them for their real crimes, they are all like dead to rights doing life in a maximum security prison.
If you're talking about, you know, blatant violations of the Constitution, you know, blatant crimes against humanity, war crimes, things like this.
But regardless of all of that, so then when you realize that, and then you also realize that, like, as you kind of pointed out, that Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and Mike Pence and probably Barack Obama and probably everyone, if we had to guess, could be guilty of this exact same crime.
Yet they're choosing to prosecute Donald Trump and not any of these other people.
And then you realize that Donald Trump was also the only president in our lifetime who was targeted in the way he was by the deep state.
You realize that if you're somebody who believes the president shouldn't be above the law, as I think both of us are, but you realize this is nothing to celebrate.
But that's not actually what's happening here.
What's happening here is not that, you know, oh, finally, presidents are being held to the standard that they're not above the law.
What's happening here is that the agencies that are actually far more above the law than even the president have targeted this one guy when they could have targeted any of these other people.
Now, adding one more layer to that, there is no equivocation between what Joe Biden did and what Hillary Clinton did to what Donald Trump did.
It's not the same thing or what Mike Pence did for one major reason.
Trump was the president.
None of them were.
The president himself can declassify anything at his own whims.
That is not true for vice presidents.
That is not true for secretaries of state.
So for them to take this classified information and store it in the wrong way or keep it personally or have it in their home is a much different thing.
There's just this, whether it's the letter of the law or just the spirit of the law, it's a totally different thing for someone who could have declassified all of this to take it.
It's very different than for, say, Hillary Clinton, who also, when she got a subpoena, wiped 30,000 emails.
Now, she, as I guess in one of these transcripts, supposedly Trump was praising her lawyer for how he got her out of that.
He was kind of seemed to be like giving his own lawyers a wink and a nod, like maybe you take a page out of these guys' book and you freaking handle it the way Hillary did.
But I don't think that's happening for Trump.
In fact, two members of his legal team have already left since this came out.
So it seems like he's going to be in a little bit of a different situation.
Now let's go one layer deeper, because to me, this is really where it gets interesting.
And so this is about the transcript that came out.
So what the corporate press is jumping on here, which like, again, there's not nothing to this.
I'm going to be clear about this.
There's not nothing to their narrative.
It's just that they're right at the surface and not looking any deeper.
This really reminds me.
I don't know, Rob, have you ever heard the Victoria Newland, what's known as the fuck the EU phone call?
I don't think so.
So Victoria Newland, she was the, I forget what her position was, deputy assistant secretary of state or something like that in 2014.
And she was like the State Department's point man for Ukraine.
And so there was a videotape released of her.
It was released, I believe, in the first week of February in 2014.
It's believed to be from sometime right before that, but it was discussing the Madan revolution that was going on at the time.
And so there's this tape.
It's also believed that it was intercepted by the Russians and they released it, although we don't really know who released it, but we know it's the tape.
And it's with Victoria Newland and Pyatt is the guy's name who was our ambassador to Russia at the time.
So the two of them are talking and the tape opens up and Pyatt's like, this is when the violent like coup is going on.
It's like, it was like two weeks before it ended.
So like in the middle of the craziest violence of the Madan revolution.
And so the tape opens up and Pyatt goes, he goes, Ms. Newland, we're in play.
And she's like, yes, this is very good.
Speculation on an Attack00:14:56
It's going according to plan, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, here's who I think should go into government.
Here's who should stay out of government.
She's talking about all the opposition leaders.
She's like, this is who we want as the prime minister.
This is who we want to be on the phone with him, but not have an official role in government.
This guy, Klitschko, doesn't have the experience.
So I don't think he's ready to go into government.
This is blah, blah, blah.
We'll put the plan into action.
We're going to go.
She goes, I'll call Joe Biden in the morning.
He's already said he's committed to this.
He'll call up and give him an ada boy, blah, blah, blah.
And they have this whole conversation about how this transfer of power is going to go, who's going to be in the government, who's going to be out of the government.
And at one point, She makes the claim that she, uh, she's like, and if the E, if the EU can't get it together, you know, we'll just fucking come in there and we'll have to get someone else to glue this thing because this is, they're just taking their time.
And you know what?
Fuck the EU.
Like, we're just going to go with this.
And what everyone jumped on in the corporate press was they go, whoa, here's a diplomat saying, F the EU.
That's so not diplomatic.
And that's, wow, behind the scenes, she's cursing and being disrespectful to the European Union and all that.
And it's like, that was the whole conversation.
And you're like sitting there and you're like, wait, what?
There seems to be a lot more going on in this phone call than just the fact that she dropped an F bomb about the EU.
It seems kind of like when Jeffrey Pyatt says we're in play, and then she's talking about who's to go into the government and who's not.
This kind of seems like it's a U.S.-backed coup, not just an organic revolution.
But it was almost like they would just play the excerpt from the tape with the F the EU.
And then that was the only thing they talked about.
So anyway, this just reminds me of that so much.
So let me just read this from for a little bit.
So here's what they're really jumping on.
There was the line that President Trump allegedly said, and the quote is, as president, I could have declassified, but now I can't.
So it's seemingly that there's an admission that he had his shot to do it, but now he can't.
And now it's still classified and he still has this material.
And he seems to be showing it to other people.
Oh, see, now that's what they're jumping on as, aha, this is a nightmare.
This is a dagger for his case in court.
He's there clearly admitting that he could have declassified it, but didn't.
And now he can't.
Therefore, it's classified material that he has.
He's showing it to other people and he hasn't returned it when it's been requested of him to return it.
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So this is, again, Trump showing this information to other people.
And he says, secret.
This is secret information.
Look, look at this, Trump says at one point, according to the transcript.
This was done by the military and given to me.
Well, the Miley, let me see that.
I'll show you an example.
He said that I wanted to attack Iran.
Isn't that amazing?
I have a big pile of papers.
This thing just came up.
Look, this was him.
They presented me with this.
This is off the record, but they presented me with this.
This was him.
This was the defense department and him.
We looked at some.
This was him.
This wasn't done by me.
This was him.
Now, what they're jumping on here.
Okay, hold on.
More quotes from him.
All sorts of stuff, pages long.
Look, wait a minute.
Let's see here.
I just found, isn't that amazing?
This totally wins my case, you know?
Except it is like highly confidential secret.
This is secret information.
Look, look at this.
What they're jumping on here is like, okay, okay, and I'm not even fine.
If you're just making the argument on surface level A, right on the ground, this is bad for his legal case.
All right, fine.
But what is the conversation that's happening here?
No one seems to be like even examining this at all.
Basically, Millie has said that Donald Trump wanted to attack Iran and that they convinced him not to.
They convinced him not to go to war with Iran.
And what Trump is showing off to all of these people is no, no, no.
They, the Department of Defense, they wanted to attack Iran.
That's what's going on here.
And he's like, look, look at this secret documents.
This proves my case.
He's not referring to the case.
This is before he's been charged.
He's not referring to his legal case.
He's saying this proves my point that I didn't want to attack Iran.
They wanted me to go to war with Iran and I didn't.
And look, I have the documents right here to demonstrate this.
It's insane to me that almost no one who's covering this seems to be interested in what's happening on this tape that you're using as your smoking gun evidence.
What's happening here is that it's like, why did Donald Trump want to keep these documents?
What does anyone think here?
No one's claiming that he was going to sell these to some foreign government for money.
I don't think that's the accusation.
No one's claiming, like you said earlier, that anyone's actually harmed here.
Why did he keep these documents?
And why is he showing them to people?
He's showing them to people very clearly in this instance because he's saying this proves that I wasn't about to start a war with Iran.
They were, though.
Our defense department wanted me to start a war with Iran and these were their plans for it.
And I said no.
And now they're claiming that I wanted to start this war and they said no, but that's just not true.
And he's like, look, look at these top secret confidential documents.
They prove my point.
Now, all of this is somewhat speculation.
We don't actually know exactly what happened here.
But by the transcript that they're presenting, there seems to be a much, much bigger story than whether Donald Trump did what everybody else does, but didn't return the documents when they were requested of him.
Something much bigger is going on here.
And it's amazing.
It's just like the Victoria Newland phone call, where they could report on the phone call and somehow ignore the entire content, like the entire content of it and go, oh, what's actually going on here?
What are we talking about?
We're talking about Donald Trump being in a battle with what was his own defense department, who evidently were trying to push him into yet another regime change war of choice.
It seems like the evidence here is that he was resistant to their plans to go to war.
Then that's, and just to watch this thing get covered everywhere, not just in the corporate press, but everywhere in the alternative press.
And this topic doesn't seem to come up.
Like, how are you talking about this?
How are you talking about what?
Like, how do you read that transcript that I just read and not go, hey, that's a pretty interesting topic of conversation as well?
Maybe one that's even much bigger than whether our secret government secrets that our people aren't allowed to hear were kept by the guy who used to be in charge of whether we could hear these secrets or not.
But as soon as he wasn't the guy, he has to give back the secrets.
Maybe that's not actually as interesting of a conversation as fucking this, what they're talking about here.
Why is he showing this to people?
What point was he trying to prove?
Anyway, it's shocking to me that that's not more interesting to more people.
Yeah.
And there's a flavor of there's evidence here that we cheated you, but you illegally took that evidence, which goes back to the origins of this when they were saying nuclear documents and threat to our nation and they're just sitting there.
And there was talks at the time that he might have had evidence of like the Clintons and all the other deep state usage against him.
But aside from like even with the, hey, these might be nuclear or, you know, dangerous materials, the guy was the old head of the company.
We have resources.
The idea that you can't work with him to secure the documents or that you knew that there were important documents that weren't being properly stored, then you're also making an admission of your own negligence.
If the government's got a responsibility to secure information that can harm all of us and they know that it's sitting out unsecured for two full years, then they're at fault for that also.
And the idea that you can't work with the guy to protect the files that he had wanted to keep, I just don't buy any of it.
Yeah.
Well, you, it may, to me, this does make you wonder.
And it makes me wonder.
I'm not saying I know this for sure, but it does.
Look, Donald Trump clearly had a lot of documents.
I mean, we've seen like pictures of him and stuff now.
Like he had, he had a lot of documents there.
We don't know how much of it was trash.
There was literally newspaper articles and went open boxes.
That's right.
So we don't know what was what, but it does seem like Donald Trump was keeping a lot of these documents and they were requesting them back.
And he was, let's say, at best stalling and not giving them back to him.
Now, however you feel about whether that violates the letter of the law, that's back to surface level one.
I'm trying to get a little bit deeper on this.
The question that I'm wondering is why?
Why was Donald Trump like, why did he want to keep these documents?
And that does make you wonder what was on some of the other documents.
Like what this one, the evidence seems to be pointing at was the Department of Defense presenting him with war plans that he ultimately did not enact.
And then they're out there claiming that he was the one who really wanted to go to war.
And he's sitting here keeping this proof.
Like, no, look, I have proof.
I have proof that it wasn't me who wanted to go to war.
It was that.
These guys were planning this.
What are the other documents?
Like, maybe there's a bunch of stuff there that's like, oh, look, I'm just proving how much I was sabotaged by the deep state.
I mean, the guy clearly was very sabotaged by his own government.
Maybe that's what it is.
Now, I don't know, but it certainly is an interesting question.
And this one, the one piece of evidence that we've gotten seems to explain why he wanted to keep this, why he was showing this to other people.
Like the legality of it aside, because that's not actually what people like us care about.
I don't care about stupid government rules.
What I care about is like, what's the real story here?
What's going on?
And so it just like when they say all these things about how like, oh, he had these top secret things about how we would respond to an attack or how we could launch an attack or that.
It's like, well, that's vague.
What exactly do you mean?
What exactly are these documents?
And so that's, that's the thing that to me that's like really fascinating about all of this.
It's like, this isn't just any ex-president.
This isn't just like Barack Obama having some documents.
This is the guy who was targeted, who was framed for treason by his own FBI.
This is that guy keeping documents about classified information.
Like, oh, I wonder.
I wonder what some of the other stuff is.
And it does seem like for whatever reason, there is an unusual, then that's an understatement.
There is perhaps an unprecedented extreme desire by the federal government to get these documents back.
And like, why is it?
And as you kind of alluded to before, when you say like, well, who is harmed by this?
What's the concern?
This is kind of like what I'm getting at.
Like, why do they need to get these documents back so badly?
Why is it that they're so concerned about this guy having these documents when they've never shown that type of concern about any of these other people who do the exact same thing, even when they weren't president?
They don't seem to have that concern.
Why are they so desperate to get these documents back?
No one's giving you that.
In none of these reports are they going, we think he had plans to sell these to the Saudis.
We think he was passing these off to the Chinese.
We think he was going to do this.
People would have been harmed by that.
There's none of that there.
So where is this like intense desire to recover all of these documents coming from?
Kind of makes you wonder.
What were these documents?
So the average American's response here, I don't think should be like, oh my God, he broke the law and no president's above the law.
The average American's response here should be like, what are you keeping from me, my government?
What are these secrets?
What are these secrets that he was so desperate to keep so he could show to other people because he thought they would vindicate him?
And you're so desperate to get so that other people can never see these.
That's the interesting question here.
And there's going to be a stupidity to this case.
So they're going to do a court case about super secret documents.
The jury doesn't get to know the documents.
So the conversation is, well, they just weren't returned when we needed.
Like we said that these were important documents that could be dangerous.
And we said that we needed them back and he didn't give them back, which is all fine, except you don't get to bitch out the last president.
I get that most people, you get to bitch out and go, hey, we're the government.
Right.
Right.
But in this case, your entire complaint for not letting a person that half the country might want to vote for might even win the election.
The reason why this guy is going to be imprisoned is over the fact that you said we wanted documents on a particular schedule and needed it.
That's the entire claim.
The Stupidity of Secrecy00:03:07
They can dress it up however they want.
The claim here is we told him we wanted them back on this date and he didn't give them back to us on that date.
That's it.
And then also, how come there's not a single conversation about the actual process of declassifying information?
I'm just saying if this whole thing is he saying I did declassify it and they're saying it wasn't declassified, wouldn't that be the most important element here?
Is what is, I don't know typically what the process, how is it that there's no reporting on what is the typical process for declassifying information?
When Bill Clinton left with the stuff in his sock drawer and they made the Presidential Record Act that you get to keep some materials, did he go through some formal process?
Was it declared?
Because it sounds to me like he left with it.
They tried to collect it and then it was said, oh, he was allowed to keep it.
So it sounds like taking items is the act of declassifying it.
Yeah.
Well, there's some debate about that, but as you said, you understand there's a stupidity to that.
There's a debate around that.
There should be a formal process by which you declassify items.
And I actually side on the side that if you're the boss and you get and just your intent to declassify something makes it declassified, it shouldn't take anything more than you taking the documents.
Imagine if I could own territory just by stepping on it.
The territory is conquered.
Then if I stepped on it, it's conquered.
That's the rule.
You just made the rule.
And I get that this is a little circular because now we're speaking to rules and going, well, isn't there the importance of the rule?
But there's not the importance of the breaking of the rule.
But that's what makes this whole thing a fucking, you know, it's a nut job.
Well, yeah.
Yeah, it is.
The whole thing is pretty nutty.
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Going Back in Time00:14:56
All right, let's get back into the show.
Moving on to like what's not so nutty, it's like just in the order of importance, when you really start to look at this and understand what's going on here, I'm just like, as I was saying, like the first surface level thing that the press is obsessed with is like the least interesting part of all of this.
And what's actually much more interesting is when you get into like, wait, what was this conversation really about?
What are these documents?
Why is there this struggle between the executive branch and the former president over these documents and how sensitive they are?
Why are they sensitive?
Who are they sensitive to?
And then the bigger question, that's like the most interesting thing.
And then the second most interesting thing is that you're like, look, Donald Trump is winning in the polls right now.
He wins the Republican primary and he wins the presidential election as of right now.
And you're telling me that for the first time in American history, we're going to see a sitting president arrest the guy who is most likely running against him and who happens to be winning in the polls right now.
That's what we're about to watch.
And that is of much more importance to the state of our country than whether he was really allowed to bring these documents out.
If he, he could have done it if he declassified him before.
No one's really denying that, but he didn't.
And then therefore, you know, like even if they're disagreeing with your take one step on the territory argument and they go, no, no, no, he had to like do it in some formal way before.
He couldn't just take it.
No one's denying that.
Had he done it in a formal way before, he could take it.
That is just so unimportant compared to the question of like, what does this do to the state of our society to have the optics or not just the optics, but the actuality of a sitting president having his opponent arrested in the middle of campaign season.
Banana Republic shit.
Yeah.
But just to clarify a point, even if that's not accurate, that he can just leave with it and that that should be a declaration of it being declassified.
So like, let's say he left with classified information.
Let's go with that.
Donald Trump left with classified information and it's stuff that could be dangerous.
That's not something a president should be going to jail for, unless it happens to be that he was actually trying to engage in treasonous behavior.
And it would be on the government to help secure them and work with him.
This is not the, and just one more thing.
If he happened to have left with evidence of the fact that we have a corrupt deep state and he's going to go to jail for that, where the government has the ability to classify all documents that keeps a record of how nefarious its activities are, well, then what's the protocol for possibly releasing that without breaking the law?
How do you possibly correct government?
How do you possibly punish them for the crimes?
So if there's a possibility here that the government just classifies all information, Donald Trump decided to leave with some blackmail leverage of the fact that he had been cheated the first time and thought that holding on to these documents might actually give him, offer some level of protection and they took it back.
Well, I don't know.
How are you supposed to keep any record of the government's crimes or expose them?
Well, and look, we know from, I mean, countless examples in the past, but there have been, there's been many times that things have been classified and they've only been classified because they show nefarious deep state actions.
Like they, they weren't like, there weren't like names and sources or locations or anything in there.
They weren't classified.
You know, there's lots of examples of this.
The one I always think of is the that memo that was all about Carter Page's the FISA court warrant against him.
And basically the memo had been, they finally got it declassified.
This is when the Republicans were in control of the House under Trump.
And they got it declassified.
And basically all the memo said was that like the FBI was full of shit.
And they had that completely, that the FBI had gone after that had targeted Carter Page, even though they kind of knew that all they had was this steel dossier and that it was completely unverified and unreliable and they still went after him.
And they had that classified because it made the FBI look bad and not just made him look bad, but kind of was, you know, indicated that they were doing some like suspicious shit, targeting a president with very flimsy evidence.
Really no evidence.
And they'll classify that.
And we only know that because it got declassified.
How many more things are classified where the deep state's just doing shady illegal stuff?
Tons, I'm sure.
And so that's right, right.
Like that's kind of the system here, that the shadow government can do illegal things and classify it.
And then if you try to take that information to expose them, you're committing a crime.
So their illegal activity is legal, but exposing their illegal activity is illegal.
That's kind of the game here.
And so yes, that does raise this question that you're asking.
Like, so what the hell are you supposed to do when you have proof of like theoretically, if you have proof of like crimes being committed by the CIA or the Pentagon or the Defense Department or the FBI or something like that, but it's classified?
What are you supposed to do about that?
And the answer is you're supposed to go to jail and protect their secrets.
Just to float a scary thought by you.
It seems to me like the Democrats have played a card here that they can't walk back.
And that if Donald, like it seems like Donald Trump can't possibly be allowed to win at this point, because I don't see how it seems like we've gone full scale Banana Republic here.
They've overplayed their hand where we're now essentially looking for political prisoners.
It's go after your opponent to try and remove their ability to run for office, get them into jail.
We're playing a new game here.
And now that they've changed the rules of the game, I don't see how Donald Trump gets into office and doesn't go after all of them and how they allow him to possibly get back in.
And with all that said, to me, I don't even know how they fuck up so badly where they make you root for Donald Trump.
Donald Trump's like one of the luckiest, most privileged people that's ever existed.
He's just this asshole of a human being of a character who just seems to fail his way to the top, lives an incredible life.
And somehow the deep state gets him on such a nitpicky nonsense thing that you get me rooting for Donald Trump.
And I can't be the only way that the only one that feels that way.
I bet there's a lot of people looking at this and going, oh, wow, you know, when Donald Trump was screaming that the system wasn't fair to him, I thought that that was nonsense.
The January 6th thing was nonsense.
But this, we're seeing, we're all seeing it.
We're all seeing it.
This is Banana Republic shit right here.
I mean, if they did this, they might have cheated on him in an election.
I mean, who's to say?
What do you call this?
If this isn't cheating, if, you know what I mean?
So it just seems like they're changing the rules to a game and that I don't see how we walk back from this.
This seems like we're going to be in a new corruption landscape.
Well, just to add to your, to your point here, it also seems to me that it's quite possible that we've got, it's almost like this, this very bizarre Pandora's box has been opened where they're going to do everything they can to crack down on Donald Trump, which then has the result of sending his poll numbers higher because it's obvious to everyone that they're doing everything they can to crack down on Donald Trump.
So they do more to crack down on Donald Trump, which sends his poll numbers higher because it's more obvious.
So they do more.
So it goes higher.
Like it's like this weird feedback loop where it's actually ingratiating him to his base more and more the more you crack down on him.
And we're almost going to hit a point where you're like, yeah, it's becoming more and more of a situation where it's not an option for them to let him back in.
Like you kind of can't swing at the wasp and miss this many times because how many times can you do it before he is certainly going to sting you?
And so now they cannot let him back in.
But now the level of what they'll have to do to not let him back in gets raised higher and higher and higher.
And where does that all end?
And then the other thing is that they seem to be, there's, there's a lot of different groups of people in America, not just the political class or the media class or anything.
I just mean like amongst Americans who I think have not yet swallowed a very bitter pill for what is a very bitter pill for many of them, which is that we're not going back.
We're not going back to the 1990s.
We're not going back to like some previous.
Huh?
Rock will never be cool again.
There'll never be another error of growing.
Not in the way it was.
Like we're never going back to just like a pre-woke time.
We're never, no, that doesn't mean that the wokes can't lose.
I'm just saying it's not going to be the time when that had never happened.
It's going to be something else.
And like it's, it's kind of hard to make, particularly for conservatives, because this is what conservatives like, this is basically the definition of their whole ideology is always just wanting to go back a little bit, going back to right before this, right before that, maybe go back to right before this.
Then if you see in the history of conservatism in America, like over the last hundred years, it was always wanting to go right back to at the beginning, like the best of the old right.
We're like, we just want to go back to before the new deal, you know?
Like, just take us back to before the new deal and we'll be fine with that.
And then after a while, they kind of accepted the new deal and they were like, all right, well, could we just go back to a time before, you know, civil rights?
Like, can we go back to the time before the civil rights legislation?
And then they all accepted, okay, civil rights, new deal.
That's all here.
No one's ever fighting that.
But it was like, oh, could we go back to a time before like whatever the latest thing was?
You know, could we just go back to before Obamacare?
You know, like that was like this.
And then when they get in power again, it's like, wow, we got to accept Obamacare is here to stay.
But like, maybe we could go back to, it's always trying to go back to a time.
But after all of this craziness, we're not going back.
And I think that even there's a lot of people at the top who kind of have this view of like, if we could just get Donald Trump, we could go back.
We could go back to a time when it was Mitt Romney would come up there and give a respectable showing and lose with grace and then hand it off to Obama so he can do whatever the hell he wants to, right?
Wasn't that a pretty good time back then?
But the truth is like, we're not going back to that.
We're just not.
And I don't think a lot of people, even people in really powerful positions, recognize the like magnitude of this.
That if you're really going to, if the way you stop Donald Trump from reclaiming the White House is by throwing him in jail, then man, all bets are off.
All bets are off.
But the one bet, no, the one bet that's definitely off is that we're going back.
We're not going back.
We're going to be looking at something new and probably much crazier than what we even already say.
Maybe he's got copies of these files.
He goes to jail and he releases it.
And then democracy is really over, or at least their version of it.
Well, look, it does, there's a lot of questions here, but it does make you wonder.
It does make you wonder, what was the most sensitive thing that Donald Trump insisted on having?
What did it prove?
What did it?
How much of those boxes did even pack or knew what was in it?
Well, a lot of them.
I'm sure that's true with a lot of them.
But are there some things that he did know?
And if so, did he just keep them sitting there in those boxes?
Or did he make copies of them?
Are they out there somewhere?
Can they be released?
You know, like, who knows?
It's just, you know, it's not, I don't think of Donald Trump as like a great strategist.
Like he's got, he had some like full proof plan here.
But I wouldn't put it past him to have maybe thought a little bit, a couple steps ahead on this one.
Although I could also see him not.
I could also see him just thinking like, yeah, my lawyers will figure it out.
I'm fine.
We'll see.
You know, it seems, and I haven't seen anyone say this yet, but one of the interesting aspects of this case is that the judge basically unsealed or got rid of the lawyer privilege.
What do they call that?
Yes, the lawyer, a client, confidentiality.
Confidentiality.
So there was notes that were taken by the lawyer after, I guess, the first meeting when the lawyer went through documents to try and send, I guess, classified materials back to the United States government and also claims that there were rooms that things were stored in that he was not directed to.
Once again, perfect Donald Trump situation.
He was directed by SNAF and not by Donald Trump.
So it could have just been an error in terms of the rooms that he was going to.
I'm actually getting a feeling that what's nice about having a lawyer is you get to check with them and you get to brainstorm and figure out, yeah, there's laws on the books, but how do we work around it?
Hey, the EPA says you can't release this.
Cool.
Well, what can I do?
Is there something that's not considered releasing it?
Is there a different way to store it?
That's kind of the way you operate in business.
It seems like Donald Trump is so slimy and pushy of his lawyers for, let's just call it creative solutions that even they are uncomfortable and document it because they realize, oh, this might go sour.
And so the fact that you're a lawyer in white, or maybe you think like, you know, wow, this is my moment to be famous.
I'm going to document all this.
I'm going to write a book down the line about my tales of working with the president and creative legal solutions.
But there just seems to be something very odd where it's like either this lawyer was actually working for the government that he gets in his car to document the entire process or Donald Trump's actually so slippery that the lawyers feel uncomfortable with it because they don't talk about this lawyer having records of everything.
But for some reason, he's got a tape of the exact time he left Donald Trump over this instance and the judge forced him to turn it over, which also the, I forgot the exact language that I saw, but the entire basis for, I guess, undoing the usual confidentiality that's supposed to exist, I don't understand.
Yeah, I'm not super clear on that either, but yeah, they definitely did overrule that.
Donald Trump, by the way, I believe is supposed to give a press conference tonight.
I'm not sure if that's still happening, but as of yesterday, that's what they were saying.
They were all crying.
Even the judge said, this is just too horrible.
Everyone was upset.
Justice and Double Standards00:10:45
I told them it'll be okay.
It'll always say a thing.
And then like just like lots of people know it or something like that.
You know, it'll always be like the greatest crimes against any president that's ever been committed.
Lots of people are saying it.
They say it's the greatest crime.
That's why there were no cameras.
Even the prosecutors apologize.
Well, we all kind of, I mean, I think what you should expect from this is that Donald Trump's going to give a political speech.
He's going to talk about how this is all a political issue, how they're weaponizing the Justice Department against a former president, the frontrunner to be president, how this has never happened before in American history, how this is Biden.
You know, they know they can't win an election against him, blah, blah, blah.
And so this is what they have to do.
That's what I'd expect.
I don't expect much more than that about like details of the case or details about the document or even about this transcript.
It would be great if we got a little bit of that, but I'm not expecting that.
I am expecting this to be what Donald Trump has to turn this into is not the trial, not the charges that he's being charged with, but rather a referendum on the fairness of the entire system.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
There was an interesting moment the other day.
Again, as you said, in terms of them, how much I hate that they're making me root for people who I despise.
Another example of this was CNN correspondent grilling the Speaker of the House, McCarthy.
Let's take a look at this.
It was pretty entertaining.
The idea of equal justice is not playing out here.
And so that's a real concern to all Americans.
So as a policymaker elected officials, we want to make sure it's equal justice for all.
We want to look that if weaponization.
Now, are you with CNN, right?
Yeah.
Okay, so let's talk about this even further because when somebody weaponizes government and they actually get removed from government, let's say Andrew McCabe, okay?
Former deputy.
No, that's different.
No, no, let me answer this question.
That's a different set of circumstances, right?
I mean, the former president is accused of misleading law enforcement, of a conspiracy of obstructing justice.
That's a different set of facts.
Are you prepared to defend him as the former president?
And what other actions will the House take in the House Judiciary Committee in terms of funding?
Are you prepared to defend your network, CNN?
I'm answering your question.
You can ask me any question you want, but I'm entitled to answer the question, okay?
You can't put words in my mouth, even though your network can hire Andrew McCabe, who was fired from the FBI for leaking classified documents.
Did you remove him from your network?
No, you continue to put them on to give judgment against President Trump.
You also hire Clapper.
Clapper has come out publicly.
What steps is the House going to take in terms of is there any effort to defund the FBI, any effort to defund the Department of Justice after what you've seen over the last several days?
So your network hires Clapper, who literally lied to the American public, one of 51 other individuals that had briefings and used it politically to tell the American public that a laptop was Russia collusion, even though it had all this information about the Biden administration.
Are you prepared to get rid of those people from your network?
Because my concern as a policymaker is that when you weaponize government and now you're weaponizing networks, that is wrong.
So we will take all of our power to make sure that the legal system in America gets the blinders back on and people are treated fairly.
I have a real problem that your network actually pays people who did classified information and then lied to the American public to try to influence a presidential election.
And then you put them on your network to give an opinion about a president.
And I'm answering your very clearly because what your network has done has weaponized at the same time.
I think equal justice is important.
All right.
So that was McCarthy responding to CNN there.
And it was great.
I got to say, that was a great response.
And he did a very good job of refusing to allow them to control the narrative.
And this is how they succeed in these things.
And you can see where she's very well trained in her propaganda craft of being like, no, no, no, I'm not going to let you talk about that.
We're only going to talk within these parameters, you know?
And like what people will accuse you of when you do this is, you know, what they usually say is what about ism, but she didn't use the term, but she basically said the same thing.
But that's different.
That doesn't apply.
But he did a good job because when he frames it as our concern here is like an equal application of justice.
Like our concern here is the weaponization of the government versus one person and like a double standard in the law.
Because then if you're making that point, then no, we have to talk about all of this.
And what I see a lot of this is it's almost like if you could imagine if there was somebody who was like a serial killer who had killed like 25 people and they're, you know, grilling you and they're like, well, you've been accused of murder.
And like, we're appalled by this.
Isn't this wrong?
And you're like, yeah, but you've killed 25 people.
And they're like, no, no, we're not talking about that right now.
We're just talking about the murder you've been accused of.
And you're like, yeah, but you killed 25 people and all day all you do is report on how I've been accused of murder.
This seems unfair.
And people can claim that's whataboutism, but it's like, no, this is, we're getting to something more important here.
Like, what's your angle?
Because it's clear you don't just care about murder or you would be reporting on how you've committed all these murders.
CNN doesn't care about like mishandling classified information.
You've hired all of these people who have leaked classified information for political reasons.
No one's accusing Donald Trump of doing that.
No one's accusing Donald Trump of like revealing this classified information to some end that suited him, just having it.
And so anyway, I think he does a very good job there of kind of exposing like what's really going on in this game.
Like what's really happening here?
And yeah, I thought I thought he did a pretty good job.
There was one point in there where she just asked him a question and he just completely ignored it and went right back to the statement he was making.
And I was like, that's kind of how you have to handle these people.
It was great just watching her slowly fold and then she starts talking and realizes she doesn't even know where she's going, which I do a lot.
You know, I can't really fault someone for that, but I pull it through.
She just she was like someone was in her earpiece and like just cut them off and say something.
And she just started talking and was like, do you guys have anything for me?
I'm coming up dry.
That part she goes, are you going to defund the FBI?
He's like, let's just switch topics entirely.
Which, by the way, he's not.
He should, but he's not because he's also a bad person.
You're just making me root for him.
But it is, this is like, so the truth is like, while I, and this is kind of my takeaway from all of this, is that while I think Donald Trump's in real legal trouble here, however, politically, this is a huge winner for him because politically, he can make this point that McCarthy is making here.
And it's such a compelling point that it's so obvious that he has not gotten a fair shake in the sense of him being treated the way any other ex-president would be.
It's so clear here that this is one more example of the system that's been weaponized against him since before he was elected and has been weaponized against him throughout his presidential, throughout his presidency and throughout his post-presidency.
And that this is just one more example of that.
This is like fairly obvious.
And now he has an opportunity to just really hit that home.
So you've taken, you've given the guy who is already by the polls the favorite, the polls, which notoriously always underrate his performance.
He's winning the polls as of now.
And now you've given him another huge political winner.
How this all shakes out is going to be fascinating to watch.
But the key to it, the first key to it, it is to like understand what's actually happening here, which I just think a lot of people are missing.
I think a lot of people are missing that um, all right.
Anything else you want to add, rob I just it's unbelievable to me that this is the best they can get him for is not returning documents on time, and any claim of well, it's dangerous, for his job was to have these documents.
So for four years it wasn't dangerous for him to have these documents.
And if it was dangerous for him to have it after he left, and now if the danger was oh, he was going to expose our own crimes, well then, That's not dangerous for us.
That's dangerous for you.
And that's actually helpful.
And if it was dangerous in the sense that he has nuclear codes, then you guys are also complicit for having a system here where it's unclear what, like, I don't know, tomorrow if the president wants to just walk away with literally the diagrams for our nuclear submarines, is he allowed to publish them on the internet?
I would think that's stupid.
So change that law.
You know what I mean?
Like, if you guys are sitting around with negligent laws that make no sense, then that's your fault.
Yeah, it certainly doesn't reflect well on you.
All right.
Well, we'll be keeping up on this.
But that's our at least preliminary breakdown of all this stuff.
Sugarloaf Comedy Festival00:00:53
All right.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
Catch you next time.
Yes, sir.
We got to plug.
We got that festival coming up next.
I think it's next weekend.
Sugarloaf Comedy Festival.
Yes, the Sugarloaf Comedy Festival.
That's right.
Jim Norden, Jim Florentine, Brian Bodux, Boudine, something.
I don't know the guy's name.
Well, all of them and us as well at the Sugarloaf Comedy Festival.
It's an all-day event, I believe it's in Chester, New York.
There's a ticket link up on my website, comicdave Smith.com.
And then, of course, Kansas City and then Hilarities in Cleveland.
Really looking forward to both of those.
And then Dania, Florida, Dayton Beach, Florida.
Then I go on the Legion of Skanks Theater tour.
A lot of fun stuff coming up with taping a half hour special in the middle of all of that.