Welcome to American Countdown this Tuesday, May 19th, 2020. 2020.
Day 40, 50, 60 or 70, depending on where you are in the country, of the continued lockdown that various politicians have imposed to some degree or some scale.
Worse in some places than others, but still continuous in large parts of the West.
Tonight we'll be discussing Obamagate and exposing the details of Obamagate with author Lee Smith.
Who wrote the book, The Plot Against the President, who is a longtime investigative journalist who went into great detail about this for multiple years.
And it continues to develop as we'll go into the new developments related to the Flynn case that developed today, both in terms of court filings and new declassifications.
But first, the daily COVID-19 update.
The while there was a lot of controversy over the president taking the position that he is in fact using hydroxychloroquine with the other methods including zinc and other aspects which by the way goes to our sponsor InfoWarsStore.com The Infowarsstore.com sells products that include zinc.
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But the reason why zinc is included is probably for the same reason.
It's likely included in a wide range of other products, including why the president was talking about why he incorporated a wide range of things to benefit him.
And the media got into such an uproar that you had various media members like Joe Scarborough, like Neil Cavuto, suggesting that somehow if you take this combination of hydroxychloroquine and other products to deal with the potential risk of covid, that somehow you were going to die tomorrow from it.
That is not what the medical data shows or suggests.
If we were in a court of law, that would not be the likely outcome from that aspect.
Indeed, if the media really thought that, you would think they would be encouraging the president they hate to be taking it, rather than being so enraged that he is.
That's the environment we're in.
And in that context, a survey shows from this news article, overwhelming majority of doctors would prescribe hydroxychloroquine to a family member with the coronavirus.
And they go into a new survey from Jackson and Coker shows an overwhelming majority of doctors would prescribe the same thing the president himself is now taking or another anti-malaria drug if they had a personal family member suffering from COVID-19.
65% of physicians across the United States said they would prescribe the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine to treat or prevent COVID-19 in a family member.
The survey, which questioned 1,271 doctors in 50 states, found, indeed, only 11% said they would not use the drug at all.
In addition, a significant number of doctors said they would prescribe the drugs to those exposed to the virus as a preventative measure and would take it themselves if they felt they were at risk.
So there's nothing that is a guarantee.
There's nothing that is a cure.
Indeed, there's no vaccine either that is a guarantee or a cure for this right now.
But what doctors are saying, what the reports have suggested, is what the President is doing is consistent with what they have said they would recommend in various published articles, in various published surveys.
So the idea that it's somehow extraordinarily dangerous to do something, to take a drug that has been around for 70 to 80 years, that the side effects are publicly known, When there's an informed consent between patient and provider, why should that be so controversial in the press?
Is it because the press only wants one objective, only wants one narrative?
An objective that says it's a vaccine or nothing before we unlock America, before we reopen the country?
In the same context, there are more judges that are stepping up to the plate.
Now, there's many judges that haven't, but there's some that are.
And in a judge in a state court in Oregon ruled, judges rule against the Oregon governor's executive order banning religious gatherings.
The suit was brought by 10 churches across the state.
This Oregon governor, even though there has been no sort of disastrous, catastrophic outcome in Oregon from COVID-19, the governor continues to extend and expand the shutdown and lockdown there to the degree that my firm is looking at bringing potential suits on behalf of potential clients against the governor.
And it's good to see these other suits moving forward in that regard.
And, in fact, the first state court to rule on an organ has determined that, indeed, the organ governor's order violates the Oregon Constitution and the provisions related thereto.
The case is now likely to go up to the Oregon Supreme Court.
The, in fact, now what's interesting here was the defense urged by the Oregon governor.
She said, quote, the science behind these executive orders hasn't changed one bit.
Ongoing physical distancing, staying home as much as possible, and wearing face coverings will save lives across Oregon.
So what she's saying, though she separates out the sentence, is that physical distancing will save lives according to the science.
That staying home as much as possible will save lives according to the science.
That wearing face coverings will save lives according to the science.
But she didn't produce any of that scientific evidence in court that I've seen.
Indeed, why?
Because there is no scientific evidence to back that up.
The experiment with physical distancing is just that.
It's an experiment of social distancing.
It is not based or founded in any peer-reviewed, medically established, well-accepted, well-regarded scientific literature concerning pandemics.
You won't find it before this time period.
Indeed, previously the only suggestion was limiting mass gatherings in close confined quarters, not everyday social physical distancing inside your home or outside on the street.
In the same manner, staying home as much as possible.
Increasingly, the evidence shows that the people who do so are at more risk at getting the disease because this is an indoor transmission disease.
So the science doesn't support that claim of the governor either.
In the same capacity, she says wearing face coverings will save lives.
Indeed, the science says actually quite the contrary.
It suggests, as even Fauci himself admitted within the last six weeks prior to this sudden reversal of position that was not predicated on science, but was predicated on a social experiment of public humiliation to see how many people will comply with medical sharia law in some cases and in some places without the law even imposing it or requiring it under this constitutionally dubious component that they can govern what you can say and wear now in public settings.
That too is not based on the science.
They've even looked at COVID-19 and seen whether or not N95 surgical masks, and remember a lot of the masks that are out there, bandanas, other things, these are not N95 surgical masks.
But even those that were, they did not find consistent evidence that in fact it would stop the transmission of the disease.
That it would, in the name of the governor, quote-unquote, save lives.
So she claims she's supporting the science, but the science does not support her.
Indeed, a meaningful hearing with real evidence and real testimony would likely prove as much, but we'll see whether courts will ever allow that to occur.
Meanwhile, we're seeing more of the deadly consequences of releasing inmates under the COVID-19 directions.
As was a headline in the ABC News, man arrested three times in one day under California's coronavirus-based pre-bail policy.
Basically, where you're let out just because of the risk of COVID-19.
Indeed, in the same capacity, we have more data from Professor Ianidis, who has done an estimate on the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 that can be inferred from the seroprevalence data.
And what he is increasingly seeing, witnessed with all of these studies, serology studies all across the world, increasingly supports what he originally suggested way back in early March, which is that the evidence did not substantiate the lockdowns, number one.
And number two, The fatality rate was being greatly exaggerated.
And that is, in fact, what the serology studies are increasingly proving.
In fact, he estimates that the fatality rate is something less between less than a severe flu to something that's more like the Asian or Hong Kong flu of 1958 or 1968.
It is not at all the Black Plague.
It is not at all the Spanish flu.
It is not at all what they said it was.
That is, in fact, what the science increasingly is saying.
Meanwhile, the BBC in the UK is telling people, quote, UK may have to live with the virus for months if not years.
Suggesting that in fact the virus will be around for a while, which is true, but it's never been that deadly from the get-go, which means this lockdown policy was never wise or sound or sage or scientifically predicated or premised in the first instance.
In addition, a friend of the show, Richard Barris, you can follow at peoplespunditdaily.com, and you can follow online, has additional inside the numbers report on how there's been perverting the science and the data, not only in the polling context, but in the pandemic context, and how that data has been misapplied.
Indeed, in that same context, Sean Trendy, a friend of mine from Yale Days, has issued a report from Real Clear Politics.
called the costly failure to update the sky is failing predictions of these doom and gloom models.
He goes into how one doctor did a 35 tweet thread that predicted and forecast endless exponential growth and complete hospital collapse across the U.S., a wide-ranging death rate, and how the U.S.
was at imminent risk of harm even if it did take shutdown procedures.
As trendy details, the information was wrong from the inception.
And then many of these news stories, press stories and public models and PR propaganda campaign of a fear driven agenda to push a different political objective that has never been democratically approved was predicated on data that was, quote, wrong about the rate of spread, quote, very wrong quote, wrong about the rate of spread, quote, very wrong about the rate of hospitalization and, quote, led to empty hospital beds and unused emergency capacity.
He talks about the all the predictions of doom and gloom for Georgia, all the predictions of doom and gloom for Florida.
Florida closed late and opened early.
Georgia closed late and open early.
Texas closed late and opened early.
Tennessee closed late and at least partially opened early.
The eight states, the Dakotas, Arkansas, Iowa, elsewhere that never shut down have experienced better outcomes than the states that have shut down early and refused to open until late.
And he details that that's what the data in fact shows.
As he goes into, and he shows some of the charts that prove this, for state by state, by region by region.
And as he points out in the end, the probable net effect of all of this will be the failure to acknowledge errors, foment cynicism, and further distrust of experts.
As it should.
We need to have less deference to the white lab coat crowd, rather than more.
In the same context, the New York Times reported on a report from the Fed that, quote, cites red flags for further financial strain.
One of the significant worries that remain is that it turns out, of course, a lot of corporations are leveraged with heavy debt.
According to this report, economic activity is contracting sharply, and the associated reduction in earnings and increase in credit needed to bridge the downturn will expand the debt burden and default risk of a highly leveraged business sector.
Widespread downgrades of bonds to speculative grade ratings, there's a word for that in the bond market, it's called lowering it to junk bond status, will lead investors to accelerate the sale of these bonds, possibly generating massive market dislocation and downward price pressures in a segment of the corporate bond market Generally known to exhibit relatively low liquidity.
In other words, you could have a complete corporate bond default debacle.
Defaults on leveraged loans have already gone up and are likely to increase and asset prices may continue to fall.
This is some of the unique leveraged level risk that we have in the economic system due to the shutdown of the various politicians and political actors.
The same way the Wall Street Journal has its various charts that it puts in its Sunday edition.
If you look at these charts, you see a lot of numbers moving in the wrong direction.
Whether it's the forex currency race, whether it's the treasury yield curve, whether it's certain key stocks and stock indexes around the Western world, or whether you're talking about currencies.
Including the year-to-date decline in currencies like the Brazilian currency that has gone down almost half compared to the U.S.
dollar, Mexico peso almost down 25%, the Russian ruble down 20%, the Iceland down 20%, a wide range of countries, South Africa down 35%.
What this means is you have a lot of emerging market economies that may be completely collapsing.
And when that happens, you've got a whole different debacle on your hand economically.
Because ultimately, that economic infection will reach back to us, and will lead to massive deaths, potentially of starvation, and lack of health needs being met around the world.
So the next time you hear someone say, we have to do the shutdown to save lives, know the shutdown is killing lives.
That's what the science shows.
That's what the economic data shows.
In the same context, we see an increasing number of people in talking about the Ahmed Arbery case out of Georgia, the shooting case there, who are getting basic facts and basic information wrong.
One of the more popular ones is Philip DeFranco, who has a popular YouTube show that gets millions and millions of views, and he got basic facts about the law wrong, as well as basic facts likely wrong.
Let's take a look at video clip number nine.
Even though Arbery was in this home, that's not necessarily a crime.
And even if it was considered one, it would be a misdemeanor unless he was found to have taken anything.
And the reason I mention that is actually very important because according to Georgia law, a citizen can only arrest a person if that person is committing a felony.
And on top of that, even if it was a felony, which we are not saying that it is, They reportedly would only be able to use reasonable force to detain a person unless they're preventing a forceful felony or using self-defense.
But of course, the McMichaels allegedly initiated this attack with their guns, which is why we saw that Atlanta-based lawyers say, if you initiate an assault, you don't get to then claim self-defense if the other person reacts to them being assaulted.
It takes a lot of skill to get that many law and facts wrong in a minute, even though Phil DeFranco does it well with the speed in which he talks.
So let's go with what the actual law says.
See, in his version of the law, you can only do a citizen's arrest if there's a felony, and you can only do forcible, some form of physical force in that context.
But in fact that's not really what the law says at all.
There are other people who believe that the law requires that you can never do a citizen's arrest unless you have imminent knowledge within your immediate knowledge of what took place.
That too is not what the law is.
The law has one standard for when a citizen can do an arrest in a misdemeanor case, a different standard for what a person can do in the felony case.
So the law is based on the Georgia statutes, the Georgia Code, and Title 17 under the criminal procedure.
And Article 4, and it's known as the citation, would be OCGA 17-4-60.
You can look this up online yourself.
Places like Justia and Fine Law have it available to you for these precise public purposes, for informative purposes, for educational purposes.
And the law has two sentences, and those two sentences are separate and distinct.
And people are trying to combine them in ways they don't apply.
So what the law says is that a private person may arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge.
End of that sentence.
The next sentence says, if the offense is a felony, And the offender is escaping or attempting to escape, a private person may arrest him upon reasonable and probable grounds of suspicion.
So what people are doing is they're taking all the words in this statute, and they're finding the most restrictive provisions, and they're adding them together in ways that make no sense.
So people are saying, okay, it talks about the offense being a felony, so that means you can only arrest in the case of a felony.
That makes the first sentence of the statute make no sense.
The law has to be read together to be coherent and to make common sense.
The second part is they think that the reasonable and probable suspicion is on top of within immediate knowledge.
Well that doesn't make any sense from a legal interpretation perspective.
If something is within your immediate knowledge as you've seen the crime committed, why do you need to say also you need to have reasonable suspicion?
That doesn't make sense.
If on the other hand you have to also, some people are saying well you have to have at least immediate knowledge as well.
There was someone on YouTube, Uncivil Law, that had this interpretation of the statute.
That's just a mistaken view, and here's why.
Why would you say it would make this language redundant?
Why would you say, okay, you have immediate knowledge of the crime, but you also have to have reasonable suspicion of the crime?
If you have immediate knowledge, you don't also need reasonable suspicion, because immediate knowledge is reasonable suspicion.
So what these provisions are, are two separate provisions.
So when someone sees a crime happen, when it happens either within their knowledge, or committed in their presence, and it's important to note those are separate.
So there's also people out there that say, you have to witness it personally.
No, that's not the law.
If you research Georgia law, you'll find security guards do arrests all the time, and the courts have improved it, going back over 40 years.
Where they didn't witness it at all.
Most security guards who will do an arrest, somebody else tells them the information, hey I saw that person grab something or take something or see something.
That's what leads them to be able to legally arrest them.
Otherwise they can be charged with false imprisonment.
That can be both a crime and a civil tort claim against themselves and their employer.
So what allows them immunity, and this is the most common application of the citizen arrest statute in Georgia, is going to be The security card context.
It's not going to be the McMichael context.
And that's where you'll find the most adjudication and litigation developed.
And what you find there is, that's why it provides for a broad interpretation and application of the statute.
It's saying, if you see the crime, or someone tells you, hey, by the way, I saw the crime, then you can make an arrest no matter what.
Whether it's a misdemeanor, whether it's a felony, doesn't matter.
All you need to do is have immediate knowledge from someone else that you rely upon or trust, or information source that you trust, or have witnessed it yourself.
Either one, and you can arrest, period.
Now, the second statutory provision is an alternative basis of arrest.
So, if you didn't see it, and you do not have immediate knowledge of it, Then, you can still do a citizen's arrest if three facts are true.
One, you have reasonable suspicion, reasonable and probable suspicion, as the law defines it, of a felony.
Second, that what it was is a felony, what you have reasonable suspicion of.
And third, they're escaping.
So that they're saying, look, you have to have immediate knowledge if you're going to arrest generally, but if it's an escaping felon, Then you only need reasonable suspicion.
You don't need immediate knowledge.
You don't need to be in the immediate presence of it.
You don't need to have witnessed it or been told by someone who witnessed it or have a source that witnessed it.
So that's the basis.
And by the way, that conforms to a long list of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in the country as well.
A lot of this statutory language is mirroring that.
And the reason why it's significant in the Arbery case is if they did not have a reasonable suspicion, The theory of the government and the prosecution in the case is, in order to get around the fact that they may have not deliberately shot Arbery at all, the McMichaels, but in fact Arbery by pulling at the gun caused it to go off, they need a different theory.
Their theory is a crime called felony murder.
That's why you're hearing the prosecutors down there talk about felony murder.
And they've now brought in a liberal Atlanta prosecutor to prosecute these guys, so the chances of it being a fair prosecution are next to nil.
But so the goal is to say, you know what, they were committing a felony by basically entrapping this individual, by falsely imprisoning him, by depriving him of his liberty, by creating an undue emergency, by instigating the conflict.
And that way they don't have to prove they pointed the gun, they don't have to prove anything else.
But that entire case depends upon proving that they did not have reasonable suspicion of him committing, of him being an escaping felon.
And for that, there's a lot of people, just like Fidel DeFranco, who are talking about facts that are not relevant.
It is not relevant whether or not he stole something, Arbery stole something.
It is not relevant whether Arbery had the intent to steal.
All that matters is the state of mind of the McMichaels.
Did the McMichaels believe, have a reason to suspect, that Arbery had committed a felony?
That's it.
That's about their state of mind, not about Arbery's state of mind.
And for that, what they suspected Arbery of is significant and pertinent as to Arbery's state of mind, but Arbery's actual state of mind is not relevant to that.
It's what facts did they, the McMichaels, know or believe they knew that governed whether or not their suspicion was reasonable or not.
And in this context, There's other information that was buried in the Sunday New York Times.
Remember you heard reports, like DeFranco reported, where he said, oh, there's only been no or maybe one police report of any crime in this neighborhood.
Well, that turned out to be inaccurate as well.
In fact, they went back and looked at the 911 calls from that neighborhood.
And there had been more than 80, I think it's 86, Emergency 911 calls in just the three months leading up to this incident about suspicious individuals committing crime in the neighborhood.
Indeed, there had been multiple reports of multiple break-ins on multiple pieces of property on multiple cars around the same place where Arbery was found.
That's fact number one.
Fact number two that's pertinent to their suspicion is they had seen the videotape, apparently, that showed someone that looks an awful lot like Arbery Going in at night to that property on three different occasions previously in just the weeks before.
Indeed, that goes to fact number three.
The son, who's the person whose gun went off, had actually seen someone that looked like Arbery right outside the house at night in a few weeks prior to this incident and had tried to call 911 and get them to catch him and he had taken off.
The incident number four is that they had had crime happen right in their home when a gun had been stolen from the truck outside of the McMichael's home just weeks before.
Fifth, their understanding was that many of the neighbors were worried about crime taking place and worried about crime being committed on a routine basis.
Fact number six is that on the day in question they see Arbery running out of the house, the same house they had seen him at before as far as they understood it, the same house they had seen him in person and seen him on videotape that they understood to have been previously robbed when there had been a wave of robbery complaints in the neighborhood
They see that person that they have prior reason to that the Father McMichael knows has a prior criminal record for theft, a prior criminal record for having a gun on him, and in places he's not supposed to, and they see him running down the street while they see someone else have being on the phone calling 911.
And so they get in their cars, go after him, and what they keep asking him is, just stop, we want to have the police there.
There's no evidence they point the gun at him, there's no evidence they actually physically trap him, there's no evidence they assert any physical force against him, there's no evidence they instigate anything.
And so in that context, were there actions, did they have reasonable suspicion that Arbery was an escaping felon?
Flight by itself, under suspicious circumstances, can, by itself, constitute reasonable suspicion under U.S.
Supreme Court law, going back to the Ward Law decision.
So, and this is something that Father McMichael, as a 20-year law enforcement officer, would know.
So under the actually pertinent facts, you have them seeing someone flee a crime scene, as they understand it, They see a 9-1-1 person, someone calling 9-1-1 across the street.
They know about all the 9-1-1 calls that have been made.
They've been requested to look out for the neighborhood.
They've previously seen him outside the same house.
They've previously seen him on video inside the same house.
They believe he is the culprit that has committed multiple felons in the neighborhood.
They've tried to restrain him before and he successfully escaped.
And so they decide at that point they're going to try to make sure that they can prevent him from escaping.
At which point he makes a 90 degree turn and physically attacks him and grabs the shotgun.
That may be the cause of his death, his act of grabbing that shotgun.
In that context, there's frankly no evidence to support the jogging thesis, yet.
There's no videotape from anywhere.
There's no other witnesses that say, oh yeah, I saw him jogging in this neighborhood.
Why hasn't his employer spoken out?
If in fact that this is the case that he's an entirely innocent individual that just loves to randomly look at people's homes under construction repeatedly, particularly late at night.
And then when he sees someone calling 911, takes off and starts hauling rear in the ways that Mr. McMichael put it.
When you look at all of those pertinent facts, you see a very different legal storyline than the one that's being pushed by large members of the press, by large members of the social media celebrity world, and people like DeFranco who are giving people completely wrong, completely bad legal advice.
Whatever you think about the facts, at least try to know the law before you tell it to your millions of followers.
He didn't.
He failed.
Now, as we go into the next half hour, we're going to be talking with Lee Smith about the General Flynn case, another case where a lot of people are talking about the law who don't know it, or making up facts that aren't really true, where they're trying to railroad an innocent man.
Come back with us and talk to us then as we get into the railroading of General Flynn and how Obamagate sits at the center of all of it.
Welcome back to American Countdown.
Pleased to have with us Lee Smith, the author of The Plot Against the President, who's been breaking down this scandal for multiple years.
Lee has a long record of writing in journalism for going back decades, written for all kinds of people, from the Washington Post to the New York Times.
Written for Wired, written for a range of the Weekly Standard, to the Village Voice, a wide range of publications ideologically, politically, but they all share certain storylines in common, which is discovering the facts and the truth wherever it may lead, regardless of its consequence.
You can get his book, The Plot Against the President, which has excellent detail in it.
Lee had superb insight and relationships with people like Congressman Nunes, who was on top of this long before anyone else was, and it took a lot of heat for it.
And Lee writing for publications like Tablet, Uh, took a lot of heat for it at the time as well.
Anybody trying to expose it or detail it did.
And of course, the person that sit at the top of the setup chain was General Flynn himself, who is now having to fight for his freedom, despite a government admitting he'd been wrongfully prosecuted.
Uh, Lee, glad you could be with us.
Thank you for inviting me.
It's a real pleasure.
Absolutely.
You detail it in your book.
You also have a good new article out about how much of what's happened to General Flynn exposes a wide range of other problems that you've been talking about in broad scale.
Could you talk about what some of those are?
Well, I mean, I think we see the different documents that have been declassified the last couple of weeks now.
What we see is an enormous surveillance operation that was run by the Obama administration.
We saw the declassification of the document last week, the list of people who unmasked General Flynn.
And there are 53 different, 53 unmaskings by 39 Obama officials.
And this is in a period of less than two months.
We have people, we have the Obama's ambassador to Italy, who is unmasking General Flynn.
Now, it's important for people to understand, and I'm sure your audience, you know, I'm sure your audience is with it, but I just, just in case, just like to make clear, I mean, unmasking is not in itself illegal.
It's not even necessarily improper.
However, there has to be a real national security reason for doing so.
What we see in this list is there is no reason for the ambassador to Italy to be unmasking the name of the incoming national security advisor.
If we look at how many times the former UN ambassador, Samantha Power, Obama's second UN ambassador after Susan Rice, I mean, she unmasked U.S.
persons more than 300 times, making her, as former Congressman Trey Gowdy told her, the largest unmasker of U.S.
persons in our history.
So I think that's the bigger picture we're getting for, you know, one of the things that That we've seen certainly the last couple years, the focus has been rightly on the FBI and DOJ.
And this was a lot of what happened before the election.
And then we have the Mueller Special Counsel Office.
That's after the election.
What we didn't have a tremendous amount of insight into previously that we have much more now on Is that a lot of this is coming out of the White House.
It's coming out of the White House.
It's coming out of very close Obama allies.
We see that Vice President Biden was involved in one of the unmasking.
So we're actually we're getting a larger map of what happened starting in 2016.
Certainly through the Mueller investigation.
And it's a very ugly picture, the idea that the Obama administration and any presidential administration would nurture and promote what is nothing but a culture of espionage.
So I think that's the big takeaway from the last couple weeks.
And again, it's very, it's a very dark picture we have.
I mean, the country is 50-50 Democrats and Republicans, right?
But we're supposed to agree on certain important things.
For instance, you're not supposed to use the resources of the federal government to spy on your political opponents.
Oh, exactly.
And I think the scope and scale of this is extraordinary.
I think the other useful context that you put this in is you look at Brennan getting caught spying, lying about it.
Clapper getting caught spying, lying about it.
We don't have an Ed Snowden in all likelihood if Clapper doesn't lie to the world about what happened.
So what everyone's view on Snowden is, Snowden is the product of this massive turning-on-a-spy campaign against the whole country.
Can you talk about that context of how this was just sort of due course under the Obama administration?
Well, I mean, you know, we have to look at this in a larger trajectory.
I mean, the Bush administration was involved in, you know, You know, warrantless wiretapping.
And the problem is, is that a lot of people, I consider myself a national security hawk.
I think these programs are important.
We've all been told they're important to stop terrorists and to stop other bad people from doing stuff to Americans.
However, I think a lot of people, including people on Capitol Hill, including lawmakers, I mean, Rand Paul most prominently, certainly, but they're saying, look, this is a big problem here.
Should Should we be using these programs?
These programs seem to be abused nearly as often, as far as we know, maybe more often than they're used for good purposes.
So that in itself is a very serious issue.
We have to look at the Obama administration, people.
Who were actually endangering American national security.
You know, John Brennan gets on TV, James Comey gets on TV, and they portray themselves as patriots who are keeping America safe.
As it turns out, by abusing these programs, they made America less safe.
They not only spied on Americans, they made America less safe by using these national security programs for their own political gain.
That's how I see it, and I think in some ways a lot of Americans who had been supportive of these programs still believe that there are terrorists who want to do us harm and there are foreign governments who want to do us harm.
Nonetheless, we look and see these different programs, our own government, has used against American citizens.
It's time for at least an argument over this.
No doubt.
Can you explain to people how the General Flynn case fits into all of this?
Well, this is another thing I think we're getting more color on.
I mean, General Flynn is sort of the central figure, actually, right?
We've been talking about, rightly, the other people who were targeted by the FBI and the Department of Justice.
We've been talking about Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.
And it's all right to talk about that because these people, their privacy was invaded.
They were put in the middle of this insane operation.
Carter Page, there were death threats leveled against them.
It's terrible what these guys did.
We haven't really understood the centrality right now of the Flynn affair.
I think that one of the things is, one of the important things is, is that General Flynn came to the Trump administration with experience, vast experience as an intelligence officer.
He's a person who would have known how to find the documents and what the documents describing the surveillance of the Trump campaign and the transition team would have meant.
He would have understood that very clearly.
That's why the FBI had problems with him.
Other actors in the intelligence community, James Clapper certainly, John Brennan perhaps, had problems with General Flynn.
The President, former President himself, had problems with General Flynn because General Flynn went in talking about how, like the President, President Trump, how they had problems with the Iran deal, how this was an enormous catastrophe.
And this was the centerpiece of Obama's foreign policy legacy, right?
Former Obama deputy Ben Rhodes said that this was, to the second term, what the Affordable Care Act was to the first term.
So the idea that General Flynn was going to go in there And was going to tear up the deal that caused great concern for Obama and Obama aid to help market the Iran deal to tie American interests to those of a terrorist state.
Again, it's a it's another very sorry chapter in American history.
Why that seemed to make sense to the former president is remains a mystery.
Because one of your other areas of expertise is Mideastern policy.
You lived there for a good number of years.
Could you explain to people why the Iran deal had the kind of problems it had that someone like Flynn could expose quicker and easier, maybe, than others?
Yeah.
I mean, General Flynn, of course, he was in Iraq.
He was in Afghanistan.
He saw up close what the Iranians were doing, how they were targeting American forces.
And he saw the violence, the instability that the Iranians caused in the region.
So he saw this firsthand.
President Trump, of course, didn't have that experience necessarily.
He didn't have that experience.
He wasn't on the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan.
But what he did recognize was that this was a What the Iran deal is, it's not an arms agreement, right?
All you need to do to understand what the Iran deal is, to look at the sunset clauses.
These are the parts of the agreement that Obama struck with Tehran that are due to expire over time.
What the Iran deal was, it was an agreement, a cover that allowed Obama To bribe the Iranians not to build a nuclear bomb on his watch.
That's what the Iran deal was, right?
This happens all the time in foreign policy.
A lot of foreign policy is kicking the can down the road.
However, why Obama wanted to free many hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions penalties against Iran and why he sent cash, as President Trump talks all the time, $1.7 billion in cash and wooden pallets.
Why Obama felt that was necessary is again, it's a very, it cuts to the heart of what that previous administration was about, as does this same fact that it cultivated, it cultivated espionage against its opponent.
Yes, because the other context you put this in is what happened with Obama and the Israelis and his attempts to interfere in the Israeli election.
Could you explain that as well?
Well, I mean, you know, remember these were Obama's Justice Department was wondering if there had been a and the FBI as well had General Flynn had violated the obscure Logan Act by interfering in U.S.
government In US government policy, and of course, what we see is that the Obama administration, I'll get to the Israel thing in a second, but what the Obama administration did was they interfered in the functioning of the Trump administration, right?
This is what Russiagate is really about.
It's about how Obama officials created a screen, a false flag operation, even if you want to describe it as that, to conceal their massive spying operation against the Trump team.
This had been tried out before.
They'd done it before.
They had U.S.
lawmakers and pro-Israel activists Under surveillance in the lead up to the Iran deal to find out what their plans were trying to break the Iran deal.
And it's very similar, actually.
Actually, it's identical.
They said that they were targeting Israeli officials to find out what they were doing when in fact they really wanted to know what Americans were doing.
It was only American lawmakers who had the ability To stop the Iran deal, right?
Not Benjamin Netanyahu, not the Israeli ambassador to Washington D.C.
This is only about Americans.
So they had honed their techniques, taking the Iran deal to market.
So after the Iran deal, remember the Iran deal is struck in July 2015.
It's less than a year and a half Later, when they start rolling out, again, the same campaign in terms of unmasking, they're finding out what the Trump team is doing by listening to their conversations with foreign officials.
So it looks like, look, of course we want to know what foreign officials, especially adversarial or the foreign officials from often adversarial states like Russia.
That's fine.
That's what our intelligence services are supposed to be doing.
But they're not supposed to be listening to the conversations of U.S.
officials who are engaged in the normal run of politics and policy.
And that's what the Obama administration was doing during the Iran deal.
And that's what they did during what they call Russiagate.
Again, Russiagate is what they use to obscure the cloud and the static.
The chaff that they used to obscure what was really going on, which was their wide scale surveillance operation against the Trump transition team and then the Trump White House.
I was intrigued watching this develop because I had my own reasons for dealing with politicized cases as to why I was suspicious out of the gate.
Sure, right.
Why were you suspicious?
You were one of the first people to sniff out their serious problems here.
The official narrative was not the likely right narrative.
What led you down that path?
Yeah, well because I had, as you mentioned before, thanks for mentioning it, I'd written a lot about the Middle East and I'm a Middle East analyst so I've been doing a lot less of that the last couple years.
But because I followed the Iran deal so closely, I recognize how the Obama administration messaged Message their media campaign, their echo chamber, how they sold the Iran deal.
And so when I saw these different things about Russia and Trump and Russia, which made no sense, right?
I mean, I'm from New York City.
I have heard Donald Trump's voice in my head since I was, you know, since I was a kid.
The idea that one of the most, one of the biggest celebrities in the world was somehow secretly a Russian spy was absolute nonsense.
So you could dismiss that immediately.
To figure out what was going on, though, that that was something different.
But again, that struck me very quickly.
You have the same people, the same journalists, who are writing the same sorts of things.
They're part of the Obama administration's messaging operation.
So that's how That's how it was easier for me to pick up how important the media was, how important the public campaign of this was.
I had, of course, like most people, I had no idea that the Obama administration had Trump campaign officials under surveillance.
When this came out, this was Of course, astonishing and repugnant.
But again, it could be tied back to what they were doing with the Iran deal as well.
Again, spying on Americans.
Yeah, the temptation is simply too inherent.
It's what people like Snowden and others were talking about, the threat of, if you didn't have someone with some degree of screen on their own activity, the power to, well, I could just look at what anybody's saying anywhere is naturally tempting.
Now, you've also highlighted the critical role that Congressman Nunes played in all this.
Could you describe that for the audience?
Yeah, well, I mean, Congressman Nunes was the first one to identify this and to call it out.
And, of course, by calling it out, by calling out, he wound up walking a very dangerous path where, you know, as I describe in my book, I mean, everyone was lined up against him.
You had the press.
You had the bureaucracies.
You had, of course, Democrats, as we well know by now, including his counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, the nonsense he's been speaking for three years, pushing collusion.
You know, they really targeted Congressman Nunes.
And I described in my book, it got very ugly.
There were death threats.
You know, and they really tried to damage him.
Eventually, in time, other Republican colleagues.
It's important to understand that it wasn't that Republican colleagues did not trust the Congressman.
They did.
They know he's an upstanding and serious representative.
And he's a terrific, terrific person.
They were worried because they saw how the press targeted anyone who was tempted to speak about this.
They were terrified of it.
Congressman Nunes was the person who came out, spoke about it clearly, and that's what their investigation was about.
Their investigation was about getting this information to the American public.
Now some of it, some of it has Taken longer to get to the public because it was blocked in different places.
Congressman Nunes, for instance, has been talking about the transcripts of the interviews they conducted in the House Intelligence Committee.
And obviously everyone knows that there was never any evidence of collusion.
And no one, Susan Rice didn't see it.
James Clapper didn't see it.
John Brennan didn't see it.
Had they seen evidence of collusion, Adam Schiff would have taken it immediately.
And would have said, we're ringing up everyone.
We're putting everyone in orange jumpsuits.
So of course, this is all nonsense.
But now, thanks to the fact that not just Attorney General Barr, but that acting DNI, Richard Grinnell, and his deputy over there, Cash Patel, and Mr. Patel was the lead investigator on Congressman Nunes' committee.
So Mr. Patel has seen the broad sweep of this of this operation for several years now.
And he knows what to look for.
He knows who he's looking for.
So again, Ambassador Grinnell and Mr. Patel have made a fantastic team.
But it's important to see where this starts.
It starts with Congressman Nunes.
He's the one who's desperate to get this information to the American public.
And now, as we have more and more of this information, he can understand even more clearly why he was so keen To have it in front of all of us.
And so we would understand what happened, what Obama officials and Clinton operatives were up to from late 2015, early 2016.
Again, at least up through the Mueller report.
Well, through the Mueller report.
But then, of course, that's rolled into impeachment with many of the same people and with many of the same methods.
So that's potentially the broad sweep.
Of what we've been looking at.
The anti-Trump operation is a permanent coup.
Exactly.
And in that context, though, what else do you think needs to be declassified that we can expect to be declassified that can be helpful in this context?
No, I mean, my understanding is we've seen we've I mean, Mr. Ambassador Grinnell and Mr. Patel are going to be leaving DNI soon, and you may have seen that Representative John Ratcliffe went out of committee today.
Where he's going to be the next Director of National Intelligence, and it appears he will have no problem getting confirmed.
And he'll take over, and again, Ambassador Grinnell and Mr. Patel will leave.
I think that a lot of the... I think they've done a lot of heavy lifting, and they've done it very quickly.
I'm sure there's more work for Mr. Ratcliffe to do, but I think they've done quite a lot.
I think right now, we have so much information to see what happens.
To understand exactly what happened.
I think what we're waiting on now is John Durham's investigation.
You know, Attorney General Barr talks about it every once in a while.
Well, you heard what Attorney General Barr said yesterday.
You know, extremely critical about what happened to President Trump.
And so this is the...
This is what they're looking at.
And I, the more and more documents that come out, knowing how much evidence there is, I'm more optimistic that that justice will be served, especially on behalf of people who have been, you know, like General Flynn, like Carter Page, like President Trump, like Devin Nunes, that justice will be served.
And the people who did the right thing, they will be They have been thanked in large part by the American public, but even more people will understand the extent to which they worked on behalf of the American public and the people who did the bad things.
The Obama administration officials, the bad actors at FBI and DOJ.
Again, that they will be held accountable and if they broke the law that they will pay the price for breaking the law.
And you've developed some of the record, and one of your recent articles went through some of the open questions raised by the most recent discoveries and disclosures.
Can you go through what some of those potential charges may be coming down the pipe?
Well, I think that's a little hard to say.
My most recent article was in, I think you're referring to the one in Just the News, and that describes, we have a pretty good idea of what the FBI and DOJ have done.
Now we're starting to get a little bit bigger picture of what the Mueller special counsel prosecutors were up to.
And if you look at their record, I listed 10 different things they did that are questionable.
Those practices are ethically challenged, shall we say.
Some of them may be criminal, right?
In the Flynn case, one of the things we know that the lead prosecutor, the lead special counsel prosecutor, Brandon Van Grack, withheld Withheld exculpatory information, what lawyers call Brady information, and ignored a federal court order to produce this information.
So they, you know better than I, they could be in trouble for that.
Exactly.
We'll be right back with Lee Smith and go through some of the things that may be coming down the pipeline in terms of the bad actors in Obamagate.
The British are coming.
The British are coming.
You are about to be on the great debate.
And one small threat for air.
America first.
There he is.
What's your husband?
Oh, no, no.
All right, we're back with Lee Smith for one last question.
You can get his book, The Plot Against the President, which is an excellent book that both previews and reviews what has happened.
Lee, do you have confidence that John Durham is going to take meaningful action so that we don't have this sort of continuous two-tiered system of justice some people fear?
Yeah, again, I think the documents that we've seen that have been put before the American public, it seems to me that they They provide a lot of evidence of wrongdoing.
And I'm sure that the, I'm sure that the Durham investigators that they have much more evidence.
And we know from Mr. Durham's reputation, he's a serious guy.
So I am confident.
But as you say, as you say, we cannot live as we can't live together.
With a two-tier justice system.
There has to be the same law for all.
And that's the point.
I mean, Mr. Barr has made this point regularly.
Mr. Nunes, Congressman Nunes has made it.
And I think that's essential.
Exactly.
Thanks for being with us, Lee.
Thanks so much for inviting me.
I really appreciate it, Robert.
Absolutely.
Lee is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
You can follow his work on Twitter, you can follow his work at various publications where he publishes, and you can get his book, The Plot Against the President, available on Amazon and other locations, which is an excellent book with excellent investigative journalism.
Indeed, I'll go through what his recent article does about going through the 10 different actions that are already ripe for scrutiny by John Durham.
And that includes the fact that it's now admitted and conceded effectively that various agents within the FBI and within the Department of Justice set a perjury trap for Flynn.
That's issue number one.
Issue number two, that there was misrepresentations to courts and the public about Papadopoulos' cooperation.
In fact, he was cooperating when they claimed he wasn't cooperating.
people connected to Mueller's team and they set them up with an interview under a false pretense, much as they did with Carter page, much as they did with general Flint.
Third, that in fact they knew about exculpatory evidence concerning Donald Trump Jr.
The Donald Trump Jr. at a Trump Tower meeting with a lawyer from Russia, that was actually a fusion GPS employee that was running a different scam on their behalf.
That in fact Donald Trump Jr.
never asked for dirt on Hillary Clinton in that conversation.
Never asked for anything of that nature.
And it was falsely put out that he did.
While the Mueller team knew that in fact that was not true.
They knew that was false from day one.
So why did they hide this exculpatory evidence from the public?
Fourth, they deceptively edited emails that they released.
So, for example, there was an email from Sam Clovis, who basically advised Papadopoulos and others that they had no interest in pursuing discussions with Russia during the campaign.
And yet it was leaked as if that was the opposite of what the email said.
So we have editing of emails, deceptive editing of emails.
We could all really call that sort of forging a document by omission.
Fifth, the memo written by Rod Rosenstein.
I know Rod Rosenstein from his days at the Tax Division.
He greenlit or was complicit in a range of bad cases that, to the degree that they were bad, led to government dismissals, admissions of misconduct in those proceedings, one involving Sally Yates as well, ultimately a lot of acquittals, appellate reversals, record-setting wins for my firm against those cases because Rod Rosenstein kept greenlighting bad cases.
So I had personal and professional experience that he was not a trustworthy individual.
Well, here he actually used apparently much of the Steele dossier as the predicate for the Mueller scope of investigation, even when he knew that there was reason to believe that was entirely bogus.
That it was as good as what's described in the Taylor of Panama or Our Man in Havana in terms of its reliability.
And yet it was pushed through anyway.
Uh, why was that the case?
Did it conform to ethical standards?
Did it conform to special counsel statutory obligations?
Was information withheld?
Indeed, as Ali Smith articulates, the entire Steele dossier was based on word of mouth and hearsay, had been rejected By its supposed source.
The source of the information said none of that, by the way, is really true.
They were remarks, quote, made in jest or conversation with friends over beers.
And yet somehow that became the basis of a massive special counsel investigation?
The sixth issue relates to the deceptive editing of voicemails.
President's counsel, John Dowd, had left a voicemail that was deceptively edited and deceptively leaked by omission, much as the emails were previously as well that we discussed, leading to further questions as to who was doctoring documents, who was doctoring emails, who was doctoring voicemails to create a false and misleading impression while omitting critical context, while excluding information that in fact was exculpatory.
So they were creating fake inculpatory evidence while leaving out critical exculpatory evidence.
Similarly, the secret side deal that Prosecutor Van Grack did in the General Flynn case that he tried to keep from the court and keep from public disclosure.
Then we have the improper acquisition of information.
Both the improper FISA warrants that the FBI has now admitted were never properly authorized.
Seizing and obtaining information and intel they weren't entitled to get.
There's a doctrine called fruit of the poisonous tree and it's the we don't give rewards because you're able to get information and intel illicitly or illegally.
You must be punished and penalized for so doing.
That's so they say if the tree was poisonous, and the fruit of information you got came from that poisonous tree, it must be killed and suppressed.
There must be consequences to those who violate the Fourth Amendment rights of others, and that can apply in a criminal context or a civil rights context.
So, the other way they did so was improper acquisition of transition emails.
I wrote about it and spoke about it at the time.
There is additional evidence of that now, based on what has been recently released.
In addition, apparently Mueller's team deliberately lied to President Trump and his team about whether President Trump was under any form of investigation.
Internally, they had told courts that President Trump was, in fact, the subject of an obstruction investigation.
That was secret.
Well, what they told President Trump and his counsel and his team is they wanted him to turn over all this information because he was not the target of any investigation or the subject of any investigation.
They wanted to avoid the warning requirements that necessitate any interview to be done with the President.
So they deliberately withheld information.
Deceive the public, deceive the courts, deceive Congress, deceive counsel.
That was their campaign of deceit by Mueller's team, by James Comey's team, by Sally Yates' team.
There needs to be consequence.
And in the Flynn context today, We have a writ of mandamus.
I'm going to explain what some of that is.
Sidney Powell, who wrote it on behalf of General Flynn, tagged me and sent it to me to make sure I got it.
A writ of mandamus was filed today with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Now, a writ of mandamus is pursuant to a statute called the All Writs Act.
That's because federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction, whereas state courts are courts of general jurisdiction.
So when you're a court of limited jurisdiction, you only have the power the statute or the Constitution gives you, whereas state courts can have certain inherent jurisdiction that goes past that.
Well, the All Writs Act allows for certain kinds of emergency relief to be sought, because normally you're not allowed to appeal in a federal district court case until the end of the case, until the sentencing happens, until the verdict happens in a civil case or criminal case.
But in a writ of mandamus allows you to circumvent that process and say we have an emergency.
We have something that can only be remedied by the Court of Appeals now.
An irreparable injury will occur if that doesn't happen.
So I have the copy of the writ of mandamus that Sidney Powell sent me.
And you start off, it looks like your typical formatting, you know, you have the, on a petition for writ of mandamus, you list the district court, you list the case number, you call an emergency petition because that's what it is, that's why you're seeking this unique, because writ of mandamus is, I, Court of Appeals, mandate you, lower court, to do a particular thing.
So, you're explaining that, you put who you are as your counsel, the local counsel plus her, you do your table of contents, and you lay out your arguments, and the better your arguments are, here and here, the better they are.
Because, believe it or not, there's a lot of courts that you either win or lose them with what they read in your table of contents.
Doesn't sound like that should be the case, but it's reality.
And what she identifies is the district court legally erred because it lacked authority to appoint an amicus counsel in the first place.
Remember what happened is government files motion to dismiss.
What should have happened is you just rubber-stamped the dismissal end of story for the judge.
Instead, a bunch of outside agitators start writing to the judge and write op-ed pieces in the Washington Post saying, no judge, don't let this dismissal go through, even though all the law says that's what he has to do.
So all of a sudden the judge says, oh I've obviously heard what these people on the outside are saying.
Remember they say judges never listen to the court of public opinion.
It's a flat-out fabrication.
Just a big lie.
Judges are human beings like everyone else.
They're political actors like everyone else.
They always pay attention to what's happening in the court of public opinion.
Clearly he'd heard it.
Clearly he was part of that echo chamber to some degree.
And he had shown that before when he had that lunatic allegation of treason against President against General Flynn, which was never on the table, couldn't be legally.
Treason is limited to basically times of war or declaration of the other side being an enemy.
It's a common political phrase that doesn't really apply in a legal context outside of very rare circumstances.
And yet here you had a longstanding federal judge who did not know that and was also accusing someone of something he couldn't have done and was never accused of doing.
That showed the degree to which he was off his rocker.
And that happened at the prior sentencing hearing.
And then the evidence that he was closely following the court of public opinion was that over the lunch break he came back and said, you know, oh I didn't mean to say that.
The only way he could know that was an issue is if he was paying attention to the public reaction to his own hearing.
And so here you have someone, and what happened is after this motion dismiss came in, the government laid out why General Flynn committed no crime, why in fact it was all part of an entrapment effort by rogue agents within the FBI, while material information had been withheld from General Flynn so that he could make a meaningful decision.
There had been a secret side deal that wasn't supposed to be part of the plea discussion ethically or professionally, and information had been withheld both from the defense and the court about what took place.
And the government said the only thing that justice requires is full dismissal of all charges against General Flynn.
Instead of granting that, instead the judge listening to this says I'm going to allow people to file quote-unquote amicus briefs.
These are called friend of the court briefs.
And I'm going to allow all these people to write in and I'm going to tell you who can and can't write in.
And in that context, the next day all of a sudden he says, I want this particular ex-judge to be the amicus.
And this ex-judge, just coincidentally, happened to have written an op-ed in the Washington Post telling Judge Sullivan what he wanted him to do.
And here Judge Sullivan is saying, I want you ex-judge to come in here and give me a road map as to how I can continue to screw General Flynn.
Uh, even though that is not something that has any historical precedent that I'm aware of, of a district court doing.
Amicus briefs are supposed to be for the Court of Appeals, or for legally distinct issues at the district court level in other, and usually civil cases.
Uh, they, I have never seen them used at a district court level in a criminal case, and I've never seen them used in this manner.
The, basically a judge saying, I don't know how to do my job, can you ex-judge tell me how to do my job so I can screw this guy?
And that's really what that was.
Judge Sullivan is not known for having the reputation as being the brightest bulb on the block.
And so he issues that order, and because of that it's clear, and then of course this new amicus brief judge, ex-judge, comes in, works for one of these big white shoe law firms, and asks yourself if this is the kind of way he acts as a general matter.
If you're a criminal defendant, or someone facing criminal prosecution, do you want this pro-prosecution, let's punish everybody as much as possible person defending you?
Probably not the best idea in the world.
But so he comes in and he says, you know what?
I needed more investigative power, Judge.
I need to be able to issue compulsory discovery.
So now he's going to create his own personal Mueller committee as a amicus council only writing about the law governing the Flynn case.
He's going to use it as a pretext to create what you see in Europe.
In Europe, the judges often have prosecutorial authority.
He's trying to recreate that here in the United States where we've explicitly constitutionally prohibited it.
He's going to use it to just go on a massive ransacking search of anything related to Attorney General Barr, anything related to President Trump, anything related to General Flynn, in order to cover up this prior misconduct that Obama's administration led, and in order to facilitate further punishment and wrongful prosecution of General Flynn.
So because of that, Sidney Powell filed her emergency petition saying, we've got to stop this nonsense now.
You Court of Appeals have to step in.
And the first part is that the District Court lacked authority to even appoint an amicus.
In addition, she makes an extraordinary request.
She also requests that the case be reassigned.
Now often in state court, you have a right to replace your local judge.
In federal court, you basically never do.
You have to beg either that judge to recuse himself, never going to happen with a judge who should.
A judge who should recuse himself, never will.
A judge who should not recuse himself, often will.
That's just the nature of it.
Because the logic is the judge who is too biased to recognize their bias is someone who will not recuse themselves when that's exactly the judge you want out.
A judge who's so hyper aware that they could be perceived as being biased that they will in fact recuse themselves is exactly the judge you don't need to recuse themselves because they are cognizant of potential bias such that they can adjust for it in their adjudication process.
Here, he's also requested that the Court of Appeals reassign any future proceedings away from Judge Sullivan, that he's too unreliable, untrustworthy, and personally biased.
What you get through next when you're reading these forms of either briefs, or motions, or in this case a writ, a request for a writ of mandamus, is you get the table of authorities.
And that's all the different cases that are going to be cited throughout the motion, and the page number that they're cited at.
You get the court cases, then you get the statutes, then you get other authorities.
This is an underutilized aspect of the practice of law.
I think it's a wise practice to identify within the court of public opinion, within the court of scholastic opinion, other people that are explaining to the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court why this case is significant, why this case is important, why they have to get involved, what the policy consequences are broad scale.
It's an underutilized aspect and Sidney Powell does a great job of Corporating that here.
Going through the fact that Professor Dershowitz has talked about how problematic this behavior is.
Talking about revealing the degree to which Gleeson has been openly and gleefully biased in this process and never should have been appointed as an independent amicus friend of the court pursuing independent truth or justice.
And goes through other people who have detailed how much the judge has made inflammatory, factless comments.
Comments that are not based on any degree of factual, empirical foundation.
And he's had a history of doing it now for years in the Flynn-related cases.
Next he goes through the rules.
There's a certain federal rule of appellate procedure that governs this appeal.
There's a federal rule of criminal procedure that governs whether the judge can do this.
And there's local rules in the court system that can be applicable or relevant.
Then you do a certification, which just explains what the status of proceedings are in the case.
Then you start with jurisdiction, which just explains to the Court of Appeals why should they be able to look at this case.
The All Writs Act gives the court jurisdiction.
She notes that the seminal case in this field was the Fokker decision, which is something out of a movie, basically.
But it talks about that's the reason why the court has the right to issue a writ and why it should, because in fact, in that case, the court also issued a writ.
And talks about the recent United States Supreme Court opinion that deals with the appointment of a meek eye and its abuse by the courts.
She goes into the relief sought, which is very clean, very clear, very neat.
This is an underutilized aspect of law, too.
Sometimes you can't even figure out what someone's relief that they're requesting is.
She says, look, the court of appeals should just order him to grant the motion to dismiss, vacate his order of appointing an amici, reassign the case to a district court judge that's not biased as to any future proceedings that could potentially happen.
Goes and explains the factual protocol.
And here, this is the first opportunity that Flynn has had to explain the factual record.
Because what's happening, as other commentators have pointed out, is that Judge Sullivan is trying to co-opt the history of this case.
In the same way Judge Jackson was trying to write the history of the Roger Stone case so that she would have the determinative history of it in case he was pardoned especially.
That's what Judge Sullivan is trying to do too.
He is trying to do the same thing according to independent third-party observers and commentators familiar with the criminal justice system and Judge Sullivan.
He wants to be the final arbiter of truth in the General Flynn case.
He doesn't want the government's motion to dismiss to be the final arbiter of truth.
This is General Flynn's first opportunity to say, here's what the true factual record is.
This is where, in fact, you go back and look at old legal pleadings and briefings going back over hundreds of years, you'll often find extraordinary facts.
And that's the real historical record.
The real original source is often in those legal documents, in those transcripts, in those findings in the court records.
And so she goes through and notes how the whole process worked.
And this is sort of Obamagate 101.
The how James Comey admitted he just sent the FBI FBI agents in there to do the interview in direct known violation of known procedures and protocols and how he would not have gotten away with it in normal context.
How long suppressed Brady material had just been recently turned over.
How the FBI had plotted to interview General Flynn without doing the standard required warnings in order to quote get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired.
How the entire interview was protectual because they had found no derogatory information that could justify or warrant any real predicated investigation.
They admit that they doctored the 302, quote-unquote struggled to maintain the other agent's voice, pretending the other agent was writing the 302 when they were, and they were changing it materially throughout the process.
They note, of course, we have Peter Strozek is integral to this.
It also turns out, by the way, he was integral to clearing Hillary Clinton.
He was one of the agents who did the Hillary Clinton interview, allowed her to be interviewed not under oath, and allowed her to make the determination that she could take a walk.
So covering up the Clintons, facilitating Obama spying, and entrapping General Flynn, almost all the same participants keep showing up again and again and again.
In fact, and she gets to note in detail how Mueller, quote, promised threatened to indict Flynn's son and, quote, give him and his son the Manafort treatment.
That's what happens when we allow abusive prosecutions to take place against somebody who may have made some serious mistakes but never should have been treated like he was El Chapo, which is basically what happened with Paul Manafort.
In fact, you could argue El Chapo got some better treatment in some respects than Manafort did.
But that, by doing that, by showing that raw abuse of power, just like sort of what happened at Waco.
These, hey, you know, look at what we can do to you.
Look at what we were willing to do to some, you know, a bunch of little two and three year olds.
If we can do that, imagine what we can do to you.
That's what the Manafort treatment threat was all about.
Goes into all of that factual detail, goes into the fact that the AUSA who came in and said this case should be dismissed, based on Attorney General Barr's appointment of him, had been both an FBI agent for more than a decade, before he was an Assistant United States Attorney for another decade.
This is a career professional.
This isn't some, you know, flighty, dreamer, politically appointed hack.
This is someone that is a career believer in the prosecutorial federal system, saying that this was one of the most egregious abuses of it that has ever occurred.
Indeed, as was concluded, quote, the FBI interview was a setup and the 302 was doctored.
Just as General Flynn's counsel had been saying all the way through, the judge had tried to deny that discovery, to try to hide that inculpatory information, tried to cover up for the rogue prosecutor, cover up for the rogue prosecutor and federal agents involved in the case, and maybe cover up for President Obama.
Because it was after Obama made certain comments worried about the Flynn case that that sent the signal to people to make a big public row about it, which led in turn the judge to take action.
It was Obama starting to squeal.
But as they say in Tennessee, say in Arkansas, only a stuck pig squeals.
Well, in the same context, the information goes into further detail, talking about how the charge was fabricated and framed of General Flynn.
The government acknowledged the statements to the FBI were not material to a legitimate investigation and thus legally could not be a crime at all.
The writ goes on to explain why the writ should be granted.
First is, you're not supposed to be appointing amicus brief, amicae, period, in a federal criminal case.
That the principle of party autonomy is particularly salient in criminal cases where the power to prosecute is assigned by the Constitution to the executive branch.
And it quotes extensively from various court proceedings that have previously taken place.
The role of the judge in this context is ministerial.
It's simply, hey, I have a motion, I have to dismiss.
The only excuse, the only reason not to dismiss is if the defendant objects or some other extraordinary fact is present.
Indeed, as the writ motion explains, courts lack authority to second-guess a prosecutor's constitutionally-rooted exercise of discretion in the prosecutorial charging decision.
Mandamus serves as a check on any usurpation of judicial power by the judicial branch against the executive branch.
Notably, the writ goes on to note that neither the federal rules of criminal procedure nor the district court's local rules authorize any amicus participation period in criminal cases.
Indeed, as it wisely notes and comments, this judge himself had repeatedly pointed that out himself.
He said, when other people were trying to appear on General Flynn's behalf, Judge Sullivan was like, you have no business.
You can't do that under the rules.
And then all of a sudden, Obama says, hey, hey, I don't like how this case is going.
A couple of his friends.
Write aggressive letters to the editor and letters to the judge, and voila!
The judge has a sudden change in reversal, of course.
Indeed, in fact, this judge had denied more than two dozen attempts by third parties to intervene or file amicus briefs in the case on behalf of General Flynn.
When it became against General Flynn, all of a sudden, oh, this is totally reasonable.
As noted, the federal rules of criminal procedure do not provide for intervention by third parties in criminal cases.
You know who said that and acknowledged that?
Judge Sullivan did just several weeks ago.
Before now, he himself is doing it.
This is what rogue justice looks like.
This is what two-tiered justice looks like.
In the same context that the entire Flynn case reflects.
Indeed, as the D.C.
Court of Appeals noted a few years ago in that same Fokker decision that issued a writ of mandamus because the district court was not obeying these rules, the judiciary lacks authority to second-guess the executive branch, much less to impose its own charging preferences.
Indeed, the court is simply not competent to undertake that sort of inquiry, and it entails, as they note, systemic costs.
The public policy implications of this dangerous, precarious precedent being set by this judge goes beyond the General Flynn case, goes beyond Obamagate.
It puts at risk the entire criminal plea process.
It puts at risk people willing to challenge and contest misconduct and malfeasance by the government or the agents in other cases, because they're being told, if you do so, The decision of the prosecutor can't be relied upon.
The judge may actually separately investigate you and prosecute you for some other crime in the process, if you merely contest government misconduct.
Judge Sullivan, who's had this bogus reputation as being concerned with discovery abuses, is exposing how much that was entirely bogus and ill-deserved.
Indeed, as the Supreme Court noted, it could chill law enforcement, cause delay, and impair the performance of core executive constitutional functions.
Indeed, in explaining the whole roots of the rule that allows for leave of court, noted that it was to protect a defendant against prosecutorial harassment when the government moves to dismiss an indictment over the defendant's objection.
It noted that a court cannot deny leave of court because it believes the defendant should stand trial or face a different outcome than the executive branch has chosen.
That would undermine the executive branch.
Indeed, as she goes into further detail, the basis of dismissal is without doubt here.
Because the government admits that the materiality element of a section 1001 prosecution is a critical protection of personal liberty because as the courts themselves have repeatedly stated it prevents law enforcement from fishing for falsehoods merely to manufacture jurisdiction over any statement true or false uttered by a private citizen or public official.
Unless you want to criminalize, under federal law, every statement anybody's ever made, anytime, anywhere, anyplace, there must be a sharp limitation on what kind of statements can be prosecuted.
It's only those statements that you intend to impact and obstruct a government from being able to perform its job.
Any other statement is not significant.
That could never be the case in the Flynn case, because Flynn was simply talking about a conversation they already knew all the details of and had the transcript from.
So there never could be, and never would be, any attempt to obstruct a government investigation in that instance.
And that was the conclusion of the independent prosecutor who reviewed the evidence.
That was the conclusion of any other objective observer reviewing the evidence.
And the last part of the writ that goes into detail about why the writ is appropriate, why the judge's replacement is necessary, wisely cites from Kafka.
And notes that effectively today, General Flynn has been put into, quote, a Kafkaesque nightmare that is a cross between Kafka's book, The Trial, and Kafka's book, In the Penal Colony.
Flynn has been subjected to deception, abuse, penury, obloquy, and humiliation.
He's risked his life for service to the country that has instead made him a target of a political vendetta designed to strip him of his honor, designed to strip him of his savings, and designed to deprive the president of his advice.
He confessed only to a crime that he did not commit because the crime did not even exist.
When we come back, we'll go into a little bit more detail of the General Flynn case and we'll take more of your calls as you, the jury, get to speak.
So bring back.
Welcome back to American Countdown.
Some of the same experts who helped set up General Flynn, some of the same experts who pushed the Iranian deal, some of the same connected experts are now in fact pushing a sort of vaccine-only solution to the pandemic, or a other related, relying on companies like Gilead, and that's why there's been this media outrage in responding to the president talking about chloroquine and other potential remedies.
So it's useful to remember that Gilead has been in the news for other reasons in recent memory.
Let's take a look at video clip number seven.
Hi, I'm Lisa Miller from the law firm of Miller & Zois.
Our firm handles product liability and dangerous drug lawsuits across the country.
In this video, we're going to talk about the growing number of lawsuits against Gilead Sciences regarding their popular HIV drug, Vired.
TDF is an anti-retroviral drug originally developed by Gilead Sciences and sold under the brand name ViRed.
Gilead is now facing a growing number of lawsuits alleging that the company failed to adequately warn about very serious adverse health effects caused by the drug and intentionally kept a safer alternative drug off the market.
Vired was a groundbreaking drug when it first released in 2001.
Vired was the first viable treatment for the HIV virus.
Soon after the drug's release, hundreds of thousands of people living with HIV were using it to manage their condition.
Unfortunately, the amazing benefits of Vired came with significant side effects.
It eventually became apparent, however, that these adverse health effects were much more serious than Gilead had originally disclosed.
A number of studies have now confirmed that continued use of Vired can cause acute kidney failure, cancer, and osteoporosis, and the incidence rate of these side effects is alarmingly high.
Gilead is not being sued simply because Vired can cause kidney failure and bone damage.
Gilead is now being sued because there was a safer alternative drug.
By the time Vired was released in 2001, researchers at Gilead were well aware of the drug's flaws and the company had already developed a newer safer drug called TAF.
TAF had the same effect as TDF drugs like Vired, but without all the dangerous side effects.
The development of TAF presented a business dilemma for Gilead.
The company was already making billions on Vired, and Vired was under patent protection for another 10 years.
If Gilead had released its newer, safer TAF drug in 2002, this would have immediately killed the market for Vired.
Gilead would have lost a decade of patent protected sales of Vyred worth billions in revenues.
Rather than cut off the Vyred profits prematurely, Gilead made a very deliberate business decision to delay the release of the safer TAF drug until the patent protection on Vyred was almost over.
Gilead ended up waiting over 10 years before releasing TAF.
When this was uncovered, it immediately led to a wave of product liability lawsuits against Gilead.
The lawsuits alleged that Gilead had a legal duty to immediately release the TAF drugs once it became aware that there were safer alternatives to the existing TDF drugs.
Gilead had a choice between maximizing profits or maximizing patient health and safety.
They clearly chose to prioritize profits.
By intentionally delaying release of the safer alternative TAF drugs, Gilead exposed patients to 10 additional years of toxins known to damage the bones and kidneys.
Our firm is currently accepting new cases against Gilead Sciences.
If you were one of the thousands of people who took Vired, or another TDF drug for the treatment of HIV, you may have a claim against Gilead.
Contact our firm, Miller & Zoys, today at 800-553-8082 or visit us online.
Well, that lawsuit is just one of the many.
There's other lawsuits against Big Pharma across the country.
Maybe that's why they immunized vaccines.
Maybe that's why Bill Gates is demanding immunity for anybody involved in any vaccine related to the pandemic or anything related to it, period.
Maybe that's why politicians are immunizing nursing homes and immunizing themselves for their course of conduct during all of this.
Because they know they could not face up to the truth of a jury trial.
In that same context, that's not all that Bill Gates is up to.
Let's take a look at a part of a documentary series from the Corbett Report.
Let's take a look at video clip number 11.
Although vaccines and identity may seem unrelated, Bill Gates has spent the last few years funding research that can bring the two ideas together.
Late last year, Gates once again turned to Robert Langer and his MIT colleagues to investigate new ways to permanently store and record the vaccination information of each individual.
The result of their research was a new vaccine delivery method.
They found that by using dissolvable microneedles that deliver patterns of near-infrared light-emitting microparticles to the skin, they could create particle patterns in the skin of vaccine recipients which are invisible to the eye but can be imaged using modified smartphones.
Rice University describes the quantum dot tags left behind by the microneedles as something like a barcode tattoo.
So who was behind this development?
As lead researcher Kevin McHugh explains, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation came to us and said, hey, we have a real problem, knowing who's vaccinated.
So our idea was to put the record on the person.
This way, later on, people can scan over the area to see what vaccines have been administered and give only the ones still needed.
The microparticles that form the fluorescent quantum dot tags are delivered along with the vaccine, but they cannot be delivered by a traditional syringe.
Instead, they must be delivered by a patch of microneedles made from a mixture of dissolvable sugar and a polymer called PVA, as well as the quantum dot dye in the vaccine.
It should be no surprise, then, that big pharma vaccine manufacturers, in their scramble to produce the coronavirus vaccine that, Gates assures us, is necessary to go back to normal, have turned to a novel vaccine delivery method.
A dissolvable microneedle array patch.
The University of Pittsburgh is where the polio vaccine was first discovered.
At the medical center, researchers are now developing a vaccine that is delivered using a dissolvable patch called a microneedle array.
Think about them as almost like a band-aid.
And so the microneedle array is simply applied to the skin topically, pressed into place very shortly, and then taken off and thrown away.
And then the antigen is already delivered.
As is becoming evident, this new vaccine-delivered barcode-like tattoo is about much more than simply ensuring that children get all their Gavi-recommended immunizations.
On a recent Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit, when asked, what changes are we going to have to make to how businesses operate to maintain our economy while providing social distancing, Bill Gates answered, Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently, or when we have a vaccine, who has received it.
In his answer, Gates fails to mention that he has himself been instrumental in kick-starting and funding the research into the very type of digital certificates for vaccination that he is speaking about, or that these digital certificates, likely, at first, to be a digital marker linked to a biometric ID, at first, to be a digital marker linked to a biometric ID, could very well one day take the form of vaccine-implanted quantum dot
But, as in so many other aspects of the unfolding crisis, Gates' unscientific pronouncement that we will need digital certificates to prove our immunity in the new normal of the post-coronavirus world... Eventually, what we'll have to have is certificates of who's a recovered person, who's a vaccinated person.
...is now being implemented by a number of governments.
It is now being reported that OnFido, a tech startup specializing in AI-based biometric ID verification, is in talks with the British government to provide the type of digital certification Gates mentioned, dubbed an immunity passport.
The proposed system would require would-be workers to use the OnFido provided app to scan their face or other biometric data, link that information to a SARS-CoV-2 antibody test, or, eventually, proof of coronavirus vaccination, and then have their picture taken and immunity verified every time they wish to access a restricted space or work environment.
Last month, OnFido announced that it had raised $50 million in a round of investments led by Bill Gates' old company, Microsoft.
But this is not Gates's first experience with the field of biometric identity.
A decade ago, the government of India began what has been called the largest social experiment on earth, enrolling over 1 billion people in the largest biometric identification database ever constructed.
The project, involving iris scanning and fingerprinting the entirety of the Indian population, recording their biometric details in a centralized database, and issuing them a 12-digit identity number that could be used to prove residence and access government services, all within the span of a few years, presented an incredible societal, legal, and technological challenge.
It's no surprise, then, that the person who was brought in as the chief architect of the Adhar project when it was launched, Nandan Nilukani, co-founder of Indian multinational Infosys, is also a longtime friend of Bill Gates and a partner with Bill & Melinda Gates on a philanthropic venture called Co-Impact, which supports initiatives to address major social challenges at scale.
Nilukani's involvement in Adhar has even made him one of Gates's heroes, featured in slick video promotions produced by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
My friend Nandan Neelakani is one of India's best-known entrepreneurs.
He led the creation of the world's largest biometric ID system.
Now he's working to promote his platform to improve the lives of the world's poorest people.
There are more than a billion people around the world who don't have any kind of ID.
You can't do anything in life without an ID, because people are mobile, they're migrant, and wherever they go, whether they want a job, or they want to board a train, or whether they want to get a bank account, or get a mobile connection, if the person has no way of proving who they are, then they just won't get access to those services.
So the challenge we had was, how do we give a billion people, many of whom don't have birth certificates, how do we give them an ID?
Well, Adhar is a huge asset for India.
the Adhar scheme as a huge asset for India.
Well, Adhar is a huge asset for India.
It was designed very well.
The fact that you can make digital payments so easily, you can open a bank account.
India is a leader in that.
Our foundation worked with the Reserve Bank.
Nanda Neal and Connie and a group of people that he pulled together did a great job.
Thank you.
But Gates is not merely an arm's-length admirer of the Adhar experiment.
He is not only personally connected to its chief architect, he is also connected to one of the key companies that spearheaded the technology that underlies the project's biometric database.
The company that provides the iris recognition technology at the core of the Adhar system, Idemia, also provides facial recognition systems for the Chinese government, and is currently developing digital driver's licenses for use in the United States.
Idemia even created the cushy baby identification necklaces with embedded microchips that Gavi CEO Seth Berkley touted in his Nature article.
Unsurprisingly, the company received support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through its involvement in the GSMA Inclusive Tech Lab.
And now, Gates is funding a scheme to retool Adhar for a global rollout.
In 2014, the World Bank created a multi-sector working group to launch the Identification for Development Initiative, or ID4D, which aims to support progress toward identification systems using 21st century solutions.
The World Bank cites Goal 16.9 of the UN Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, vowing to provide legal identity for all, including birth registration, in the next 10 years, as the basis for its initiative.
But ID4D was little more than a pipe dream until 2016, when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided catalytic contributions to launch the ID4D Multidonor Trust Fund, which enticed the UK, French and Australian governments, along with the Omidyar Network, into a partnership aiming to shape global approaches and a shared vision on identification.
Unsurprisingly, this World Bank ID4D initiative includes Nandar Nilukani, Gates's partner and the chief architect of Aadhaar, on its advisory council, and Gates has said that he is funding the World Bank to take this Aadhaar approach to other countries.
This headlong rush to capture the biometric details and assign digital identification to every person on Earth is sold to the public under the guise of financial inclusion.
The poorest people on the planet have trouble accessing financial services and receiving government aid because they don't have official government identification papers.
In this formulation, being issued a government ID, having one's biometric details registered, tracked, and databased by the government, is a human right that must be secured.
It should be no surprise by this point that this human right also has direct benefits for big business and for the entities that are looking to exert greater control over the human population.
Gates provided insight into the real purpose of this identification control grid in a speech at the Financial Inclusion Forum hosted by the U.S.
Treasury in 2015.
Every country really needs to look through these KYC Know Your Customer rules to make sure that Customers are able to prove who they are, but of course in many countries you don't have any type of ID system.
And the lack of an ID system is a problem, not just for the payment system, but also for voting and health and education and taxation.
And so it's a wonderful thing to go in and create a broad identification system.
Again, India is a very interesting example of this, where the Aadhaar system, which is a 12-digit identifier that's correlated to biometric measures, is becoming pervasive throughout the country and will be the foundation for how we bring this low-cost switch to every mobile phone user in India.
The same type of thing is happening now in Pakistan, and there's early beginnings of creating these ID programs in Africa as well.
We expect to be able to use the ID so that when you show up for any government service, say you walk into a primary health clinic, we'll be able to take that Bio-ID very quickly and bring up your electronic health record.
Even if you've moved from one part of the country to the other, you will be well tracked and well served without nearly as much paperwork or waiting.
And so the ID system is foundational.
The ID control grid is an essential part of the digitization of the economy.
And although this is being sold as an opportunity for financial inclusion of the world's poorest in the banking system provided by the likes of Gates and his banking and business associates, it is in fact a system for financial exclusion.
Exclusion of any person or transaction that does not have the approval of the government or the payment providers.
Once financial flows go underground, where you have lots of legitimate transactions mixed in with the ones you want to track, once they're going over a digital system that the U.S.
has no connection to, it's far more difficult to find the transactions that you want to be aware of or that you want to block.
And once again, this is no mere theoretical talk from Gates.
He has been intimately involved in this process of switching the world over to a digital payment grid tied to biometric identity.
In 2012, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation helped found the Better Than Cash Alliance, which brings together governments, international organizations, and the private sector to accelerate the transition from cash to digital payments globally.
And, when the Indian government made a bold move to demonetize large amounts of its circulating currency in order to draw off the book's funds back under the purview of the Indian tax office, there was Gates to praise the move as an important step toward the creation of a brave new digital economy, tied, of course, to the Adhar ID grid.
The bold move to demonetize high-value denominations and replace them with new notes with higher security features is an important step to move away from a shadow economy to an even more transparent economy.
And digital transactions really, I think, will rise dramatically here.
In fact, I think in the next several years, India will become the most digitized economy.
Not just by size, but by percentage as well.
All of the pieces are now coming together.
One piece of this that we enjoyed consulting with the government on, making sure it comes together in the right way, is the pending rollout of payment banks. - is the pending rollout of payment banks. - Yes.
This, for the first time, really will mean that you have full currency capability on those digital phones.
Once you have that digital infrastructure, the whole way you think about government benefits can be done differently.
Over time, all of these transactions will create a footprint.
And so when you go in for credit, the ability to access your history, that you've paid your utility bills on time, that you've saved up money for your children's education, all of those things in your digital trail, The different parts of this population control grid fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
the risk and therefore loosen up more money for investments not only in the agriculture sector, but for all the entrepreneurs in the country.
The different parts of this population control grid fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
The vaccination drive ties into the biometric identity drive, which ties into the cashless society drive.
In Gates's vision, everyone will receive the government-mandated vaccinations and everyone will have their biometric details recorded in nationally administered, globally integrated digital IDs.
These digital identities will be tied to all of our actions and transactions, and, if and when they are deemed illegal, they will simply be shut off by the government, or even the payment providers themselves.
The Indian experiment in pioneering this biometric digital economy, an experiment with which Gates has been so intimately involved, also provides a perfect example of just how such a system will be abused.
In January 2018, a report in the Tribune revealed that all of the details, including the name, address, postal code, photo, phone number, and email, of all billion-plus Aadhaar-registered Indians, was available for purchase on WhatsApp for 500 rupees, or about 7 US dollars.
The Unique Identification Authority of India that administers the Aadhaar scheme was then forced to admit that approximately 210 websites, including websites of the central government and state government departments, were displaying the list of government beneficiaries along with their name, address, other details, and Aadhaar numbers.
Even more worryingly, newly obtained documents show that the Indian government is integrating adhar collected data to create a 360-degree database that will automatically track when a citizen moves between cities or buys new property, and integrate that data into a real-time geospatial database built by the country's space agency, ISRO.
Only the most willfully obtuse could claim to be unable to see the nightmarish implications for this type of all-seeing, all-pervasive society where every transaction and every movement of every citizen is monitored, analyzed, and databased in real time by the government.
And Bill Gates is one of those willfully obtuse people.
The current debate that's on in India and globally as well around data.
Now you've been an advocate of Aadhaar, you've supported it, you've defended it and I think that the questions arise not on whether it's a good idea or not but whether it should be made mandatory for every citizen for every service possible because it was envisaged as people accessing government subsidy using the Aadhaar card to avoid duplication and leakages.
The question then is that India today is still grappling with putting in place a privacy framework, a privacy regulation, a data protection regulation.
In that context then, does it make sense, even though the matter is in court today, to link Aadhaar to every possible service?
Well, Aadhaar is just something that avoids you pretending to be somebody else.
That, you know, you can have I don't know.
You know, prevents you being on that payroll as a ghost worker.
It prevents you from collecting things that you shouldn't collect or accessing a health record you shouldn't have access to.
So the basic Aadhaar mechanism is an identity mechanism.
And so it's too bad if somebody thinks that because Aadhaar is there, that in and of itself creates a privacy problem.
It's just too bad if somebody has a privacy problem with Bill Gates' agenda.
Ask ourselves, do we know what a digital ID, digital chip, digital vaccine world might look like?
Well, look at what the promises were about digital surveillance in the United States under the NSA, under the Patriot Act.
Just ask General Flynn how that turned out.
Just ask President Trump how that turned out.
Imagine that on a massive corporate global scale with Bill Gates in charge.
It's time we make America, America again.
We need to restore our fundamental constitutional liberties and the original ancient liberties of our Republic.