Ezra Levant critiques Canada’s free speech hypocrisy, exposing how judges and charities—like the Western Canada Wilderness Society and Sierra Club BC—surrender political neutrality for privileges or funding, violating CRA rules since 2003. With Kinder Morgan’s May 31 deadline looming, he warns Trudeau’s government may force taxpayer-funded pipelines despite market risks, citing lobbyists like Gerald Butts and Zoe Karan. Meanwhile, the Mueller probe’s one-year anniversary sparks debate: Andrew McCarthy dissects Clapper’s misleading claims about FBI surveillance of Trump’s campaign, calling it institutional overreach, while questioning Antifa’s unchecked violence against conservatives. Levant ties these issues to systemic corruption, where power curtails dissent and distorts priorities—undermining both democracy and accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, foreign-funded environmental charities are at it again, breaking the Income Tax Act by engaging in political campaigns.
It's May 23rd, and you're watching The Ezra LeVance Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
We've got free speech here in Canada.
You can say whatever you want about the oil sands, about pipelines, but there are some people who aren't allowed to because they voluntarily give up some freedom of expression in exchange for receiving special privileges in society.
A judge is an obvious example.
Judges have to be politically neutral and nonpartisan, and they have to appear that way too.
Otherwise, how could anyone expect a fair trial?
Here's an excerpt from the code of conduct that the Canadian Judicial Council uses.
They're the disciplinary body for Canada's judges.
Just an example of their rules that apply to politics.
There are many other restrictions on judges, too.
And if you don't like them, then don't ask to be a judge.
Here, let me quote.
Judges should refrain from A. Membership in political parties and political fundraising.
B, attendance at political gatherings and political fundraising events.
C, contributing to political parties or campaigns.
D, taking part publicly in controversial political discussions, except in respect of matters directly affecting the operation of the courts, the independence of the judiciary, or fundamental aspects of the administration of justice.
E. Signing petitions to influence a political decision.
I'm not going to read anymore.
It's a whole booklet, let me put it that way.
The Judicial Council actually says that even if a judge's family members engage in politics, that judge might have to remove themselves from a case.
You've got to be completely nonpartisan.
Hey, doesn't a judge have the right to free speech just like the rest of us do?
Well, as a citizen, he does, but a judge is given such broad power over society, a power that must be used neutrally and must be seen to be neutral, that a judge must voluntarily agree to give up politics.
If he wants to be political, that's fine, but he can't have it both ways.
Of course, they're way tougher on conservative judges than on liberal judges.
Here's a Hamilton judge who wore a Trump hat.
He was suspended for 30 days.
I've never seen a left-wing judge sanctioned this way, but the principle is there, okay?
I just wanted to put that obvious example out there because there is another group of Canadians besides judges who have the constitutional right to be politically active, but they have voluntarily given up that right in return for special benefits from the government that the rest of us don't have.
I'm talking about registered charities that are tax-exempt under the Income Tax Act and who have the power to issue tax receipts to their donors.
That's a pretty incredible privilege when you think about it.
I mean, if you were tax-free in your business, imagine if you could say to your customers, guess what?
You can now claim any money you pay to us.
You can claim that against your taxes.
You're a tax receipt.
It's actually a huge subsidy to your business and to your customers.
It's a subsidy from the rest of society to you.
And we all agree to that.
If you're doing something that is in the Latin legal phrase, pro bono publico, which means for the public good.
Something for which there is no opposite point of view, for example.
So a soup kitchen, a homeless shelter, training seeing eye dogs, you know, helping out volunteering at a hospital.
We all agree that those are for the public good.
There's no other side to that argument.
Being anti-soup kitchen or anti-food bank isn't a thing.
These are not controversies.
We all agree they're for the public good.
There is a special page on the Canada Revenue Agency website explaining how and why politics are banned from charities.
You can see in the top left corner, I don't know if you can see that, this was first published in 2003 when Jean-Cretchen was the Liberal Prime Minister.
And it's been tweaked a bit over the years, but it's pretty much the same.
No politics.
And I mentioned 2003, and I mentioned Jacques Réten, to point out that this is not a partisan thing.
It's just the legal definition of a charity.
And both Liberal and Conservative governments have implemented those rules through a non-partisan civil service at the Canada Revenue Agency.
So let me read to you a couple of sentences from this website.
This is not from the Income Tax Act itself.
This is a Revenue Canada explainer.
It's official.
It's on the website to help people understand the Income Tax Act as it applies to charities.
So it's written in pretty plain English for normal humans to understand.
Let me read this part.
It's the difference between political purposes and charitable purposes.
Okay, ready?
All registered charities are required by law to have exclusively charitable purposes.
Okay, well, what does that mean?
Under the Act and common law, an organization established for a political purpose cannot be a charity.
The courts have determined political purposes to be those that seek to further the interests of a particular political party or support a political party or candidate for public office.
And the second point there, very important, retain, oppose, or change the law, policy, or decision of any level of government in Canada or a foreign country.
So for example, you can't support Justin Trudeau or oppose Stephen Harper.
I mean, you can fill your boots, but then you can't be a charity and get free money from the government.
You can't oppose the Kinder Morgan pipeline and its approval process.
Remember, that's a policy.
That's a decision of a government.
I mean, again, you can oppose them, but then you can't call yourself a charity and get free money.
Let me read just two more sentences that really turned on the light bulb for me.
This is plain English from the government, which is very rare.
Let me read it.
It says, a political purpose, such as seeking a ban on deer hunting, requires a charity to enter into a debate about whether such a ban is good, rather than providing or working towards an accepted public benefit.
It also means that in order to assess the public benefit of a political purpose, a court would have to take sides in a political debate.
That's so clear, isn't it?
So some people could think that banning deer hunting is a really good idea, really noble.
You could think it's really for the public good and charitable.
But there is another side of the debate, too.
There's another point of view that is legitimate.
It could be wrong, but it's legitimate, and therefore what you think is a public good, someone else doesn't.
That's politics.
It's not charity.
Food banks, there's no other side to the story on food banks.
There's no legitimate anti-food bank point of view, anti-hospital point of view, right?
Justin Trudeau, Stephen Harper, Kinder Morgan Pipeline Expansion, those are all legitimate subjects for controversy and debate.
So you don't get to be a tax-free charity if you hate a pipeline or hate a politician, because that's just lobbying or political chatter.
You're not housing the homeless that we all agree on.
Which brings me to Canada's environmental charities.
Given what I've just shown you from the Canada Revenue Agency's long-standing rules against politics, what do you make of this?
It's a tweet.
Have you heard our new radio ads calling on the federal government to cancel its plans to bail out Kinder Morgan's pipeline and oil tanker project?
Give him a listen and visit our website to call your MP and stop this bailout today.
Stop Kinder Morgan.
So that was a tweet from the Western Canada Wilderness Society.
Here, listen to the 30-second ad that they're running.
Have you heard Justin Trudeau wants to waste billions of our tax dollars to bail out Kinder Morgan's pipeline in oil tankers?
Public funds should pay for schools and hospitals, not bailing out a project that puts the BC coast at risk of an oil spill disaster.
Because it will be you and me, not these Texas billionaires, who will be on the hook for the cleanup.
We don't have much time to stop this.
So call your MP today and tell them to stop the Kinder Morgan bailout.
A message from LeadNow, Sierra Club BC, Wilderness Committee, and some of us.
So that was also from the Sierra Club of BC, eh?
Well, here's the CRA charities page for the Sierra Club of BC Foundation.
It is a registered charity.
And if you click on their official website link on the CRA, this is what you are taken to.
Stop Kinder Morgan Pipeline.
It's a big protest.
The first words you see on the website, by definition, a debate, a dispute, a political controversy with two different sides.
The main thing on their website of a charity?
And that tweet itself, that was from the Western Canada Wilderness Committee.
Sorry, I said society a moment ago.
Well, the Wilderness Committee is another registered CRA charity.
This is taken from Revenue Canada's own page.
And look at this one.
Make sure you join us in Montreal on May 27th to stop Kinder Morgan.
That's from something called Climate Reality.
Do you see that up there?
Well, that's a registered charity too, linked to Al Gore, the climate huckster who made almost $100 million in a business deal with the OPEC dictatorship of Qatar.
And here's their charity registration with the Canada Revenue Agency.
So what have we here?
Well, the left might say, we see free speech.
Well, sure you do.
But it's illegal if you want free money from the rest of us.
You've got to make a choice.
You can't scam free money from the rest of taxpayers through the CRA by calling yourself a charity, but then also engage in political campaigns.
That's just against the law.
Now, I can understand why they all think they can get away with it.
Here's David Suzuki of the David Suzuki Foundation, literally starring in an old campaign ad for the Liberal Party with the disgraced former Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty.
And Gerald Butts was actually working for McGuinty.
He's now the principal secretary to Justin Trudeau.
He led another extremely political, quote, charity called the World Wildlife Fund Canada before he ran Trudeau's campaign.
In fact, weirdly, the World Wildlife Fund Canada continued to pay Butts a six-figure salary long after he went to work for Trudeau.
How's that even legal?
So he was still being paid by the World Wildlife Fund when he worked for Trudeau.
Maybe that's why these charities think they can get away with it now.
The Fox is in charge of the hen house.
The guy who worked for Dalton McGuinty, the guy who worked for Trudeau, he's fine with this.
That's exactly why they think they can get away with it.
You might recall that a few years ago when I ran something called the Ethical Oil Institute, we brought this law breaking to the attention of the public and to the CRA itself.
And dozens of illegal charity scams were investigated.
And these very groups were audited and they failed their audits.
I mean, of course, I read you the law.
Here's a CBC news story, totally torqued, of course.
I mean, look, the CBC is where David Suzuki has worked for years.
And the Suzuki Foundation was one of the groups being investigated.
So, of course, the CBC was giving you pure environmentalist propaganda here.
But let me quote from the facts buried within the CBC spin.
Take a look.
Political activity audits of charities suspended by liberals.
And then look at the smaller text there.
Panel report says charities should be free to engage in politics.
Minister Suspend's infamous audit program.
I love that.
The audits were infamous.
I'm sure every single tax cheat in history has said their audit was infamous, whether Cretchen was running the government or Mulrooney or Harper or Trudeau.
In fact, Greenpeace was audited both under Cretchen and under Mulroney, although both audits were done by the neutral civil service auditor.
It wasn't political either time.
It was Greenpeace that was political, and it actually had its charity status revoked twice.
But look at this, look at this, from the same story.
National Revenue Minister Diane LeBoutillier, quote, has asked the CRA to suspend all action in relation to the remaining audits and objections that were part of the Political Activities Audit Program initiated in 2012, a release Thursday said.
And let me read one more.
A spokesman for the minister, Chloe Luciani Grouard, said Thursday's suspension affects 12 audits, of which seven have resulted in an intention to revoke charitable status.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Having your liberal political friends interfere at the tax department and suspend your audits.
You failed your audits.
You broke the law, a law that's been on the books for many years.
You're about to have your charity status revoked and lose your ability to give out receipts.
But you've got Gerald Butts in high places and he'll get right in there, Librano style.
I wonder what other friends of the Liberals have infamous audits of their businesses canceled by the Prime Minister's office.
And he's not even hiding.
He's boasting that he's interfering with the audits.
So seven of these charities had broken the law so badly that they were in the process of having their charity status revoked for illegal conduct.
But then Trudeau's minister, more accurately, Gerald Butts' minister, came in and told the auditors to leave, go away, shoot.
I'm sorry, that's a form of corruption, by the way.
And so they're back at it.
Registered CRA charities campaigning politically against pipelines.
Just like Gerald Butts himself did when he ran one of the, quote, charities that lobbied against pipelines, the World Wildlife Fund.
Oh, and by the way, each of the charities I've referred to above takes funding from foreign anti-oil lobby groups.
So yeah, you got the worst of both worlds.
You got the corruption of the Libranos interfering in tax audits.
And you've got the environmental extremism of U.S. leftists.
That's Justin Trudeau's Canada.
Or more accurately, that's Gerald Butts' Canada.
The Easy Way Out00:15:14
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, as you know, it's May 23rd.
And on May 31st, Kinder Morgan, the giant pipeline company that owns the Trans Mountain Pipeline that's been shipping oil from Alberta to British Columbia happily and peacefully for the better part of a century, it's going to make its final decision on whether or not to expand that pipeline.
The construction side of that project alone is worth $7.4 billion.
The company's already sunk $1 billion into it, but they say this political mess, it's too high risk for our investors.
We'd rather go elsewhere.
We'd rather write off the billion dollars that we've already blown than risk another dime.
They say they have to make the decision in eight days' time because they're getting into a season where they would start to spend as much as a billion dollars a month in construction.
So they're not going to throw another billion after the first billion unless they have a clear path.
That path is anything but clear and joining us now to talk about it.
And his column on the subject is our friend Lauren Gunter, who's a senior writer for the Edmonton Sun.
Lauren, great to see you again.
Good to see you.
I have in front of me your column in the Edmonton Sun.
Let me read the headline.
Trudeau takes the easy way out on Trans Mountain.
I suppose the easy way out is, you know, another way of saying it's just really not doing anything.
The easy way out, but it means you take the view that the pipeline will fail.
Is that your prediction that eight days from now, Kinder Morgan will, in fact, leave?
No.
No.
No, my prediction is that eight days from now, the federal government will impose on every taxpayer in the country some penalty in order to give the money to Kinder Morgan to appear to keep the pipeline alive.
The point of the column is that there's a simple way to deal with this and there's an easy way to do it.
Unfortunately, the simple way is not easy.
The simple way is for the government to assert its constitutional authority over the interprovincial trade of goods, which would include pipelines, would include diluted bitumen.
And the federal government could just say, okay, we're passing a law that says we have authority here and we are going to push this pipeline through.
BC would undoubtedly challenge that in court.
It might take a while for that to go through the court.
But at least then the company would have something it does not have now, which is concrete evidence that Ottawa actually really wants this pipeline.
We keep having the prime minister saying, oh, the pipeline will be built.
The pipeline will be built.
So what?
That's lip service.
That's the simple way.
But the simple way comes up against electoral political calculations.
There are three liberal MPs in Alberta where that move would be popular.
It's unlikely, even if they made that move, that those three would be re-elected.
Certainly not all three of them.
They have 18 MPs in BC where that move might be considered unpopular by a lot of people.
And they're worried they would lose a lot of those.
So the electoral politics in this is simple.
It means that the simple answer will not be undertaken by the federal government.
They will not assert their authority in any meaningful way to have this pipeline built, which leaves the easy way.
And you remember last week that Bill Mourneau, the finance minister, gave an update on the pipeline, and he said he was sure that there would be all sorts of people jumping up in line to take over from Kinder Morgan if they withdrew.
Well, you know, Enbridge has backed out of a pipeline in Canada now.
TransCanada has backed out of a pipeline now.
Nobody is interested with the new liberal regime on environmental assessments.
Nobody is interested in building a major energy project.
So I have no idea, and neither do any real analysts, what company would step forward.
But the easy way would be there for the federal liberals to say, well, all 27.1 million of you who pay taxes in Canada will pay a little more, or we'll go a little more into debt.
They have no qualms about either one, raising taxes or going further into debt, so that we can give Kinder Morgan a billion, $2 billion, whatever it is for them to say the project is still alive.
And that then is the saw-off, right?
The people who want a pipeline can't say, well, they've killed the pipeline.
And the people who don't want the pipeline can't say, oh, well, they're shoving the pipeline through.
The feds will just be paying Kinder Morgan for its name.
So basically, your prediction is that Trudeau will try and use cash just to paper over the problem, give enough cash to Kinder Morgan to change their shareholder calculus and say, well, you know, this is a really bad idea.
We don't see any path forward, but they're giving us so much money that we'd be dumb not to take it.
Am I summarizing right?
That's precisely it.
I mean, you have very good examples of how governments do this.
In the green energy plan in Ontario, governments threw scads of money and allowed utilities to raise the price of electricity when they wanted wind and solar power.
There was no market for that, but the government of Ontario threw enough money at it that it's now over $300 billion in debt.
It threw enough money at that problem that companies finally said, well, I mean, they're giving the money away for free.
We'd be stupid not to take it.
In fact, we have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders to maximize our profits.
And if the government's giving away hundreds of millions, billions for free, we better take it.
And we've also seen that in Alberta with the climate leadership plan, where there is no market for the social license, the green energy that the Alberta NDP are pumping.
But there is a lot of money there.
And so you saw when Notley introduced her climate leadership plan back in November 2015, all sorts of oil sands companies, for instance, standing up with her to say, yes, we think this is a great idea, because she'd already agreed to give them hundreds of millions of dollars above and beyond what they were making already.
And it would have been insane for them not to say yes.
Well, I have to say, I find your prediction depressing.
I mean, I think it's plausible, but it's depressing.
I am a little bit skeptical, Lorne, and let me say why.
Kenneth Morgan, their main office is based in Texas.
They have a Canadian branch which runs the Transmount, which is an outstanding pipeline.
Never a navigational incident in the 50 years.
It actually supplies a little tanker terminal in 50 years.
There's never once been a navigational incident.
So they've been plugging away.
I think they're so grossed out by the super politics here that they probably don't want to get entangled or embroiled.
And they would rather do business in America, frankly, in another regime, even an illiberal regime.
I mean, as I've noted so many times, we've talked about this before.
Total SA, the great French company, pulled out of Alberta, invested in Iran.
They think that's safer.
But I think I'm skeptical that Trudeau would actually take $1 or $2 billion and give it to an oil company, because that would almost look as bad to his BC environmentalist base as the constitutional reference.
And remember who's around him, Lauren?
Gerald Butz, his principal secretary, formerly the boss of the World Wildlife Fund.
Who's the chief of staff to the energy minister, Jim Carr?
Her name is Zoe Karan, former president of the Sierra Club.
Who's Trudeau's senior advisor on energy and the environment?
Her name is Sarah Goodman, former vice president of the Tides Foundation.
Who's the chief of staff for Catherine McKenna, the Environment Minister?
Marlow Reynolds, former president of the Pemba Institute.
These names might not mean anything to most Canadians, but for those who follow this politics, these are anti-oil lobbyists, professional anti-oil lobbyists.
I don't think they want this to go through, Lauren.
They don't want it to go through.
The only reason I think that it probably will, there'll be some sort of deal made, is that they realize for political reasons that they have to have it at least appear to continue, not go through, but at least appear to stay alive.
And the political calculation is ahead of everything in all of this.
Now, I can certainly see what you're talking about.
And you and I have discussed before the fact that a lot of those people you just named were involved in a scheme called demarketing back six or eight years ago, where they thought, well, you know what?
We can let Alberta have its development of the oil sands.
What we're going to do is we're going to take away its markets.
So you can pump out all that stuff you want to, but we're not going to make it easy or even possible for you to sell it.
And so that is where we're going.
The unfortunate thing is that the federal liberals now realize that they do have some kind of voter discontent over huge deficits.
And they do have some voter, they still do have centerist voters who want to vote for them, but who also like economic development.
And they might be thinking, you know, if we're going to win that 905 region around Toronto, if we're going to win some of the areas in the eastern townships in Quebec, we're going to hold on to some of the outer parts of the lower mainland.
We really do have to show some economic activity.
And besides, we want a whole bunch of money from the revenues on this.
And so we're going to have to at least make it appear that this is a go until after the next election.
And once they're safely back in office, I think then those people with those I hate oil ideas will clearly take over.
But I do think that we're going to see some kind of cynical deal in the next week or two.
It might not be the next week.
They might say, oh, well, we're still talking about it.
Kinder Morgan has decided to put off a final decision for another month or so while we continue to talk.
At some point, though, I think we're going to have some sort of cobbled together deal that isn't going to appeal to anybody in particular.
Well, I mean, I don't know.
I have absolutely no direct connection to the liberal side of the negotiation or the Kinder Morgan side.
But here's what I can observe.
About a month ago, when Kinder Morgan put things on notice that they were leaving, Jim Carr, the energy minister who has the former Sierra Club boss as his chief of staff.
That's a hell of a thing for an energy minister.
He said all options are on the table to get tough.
He's done none of those options.
Trudeau himself referred to possible legislation.
It's been a month.
He's not introduced any.
We saw Bill Mourneau saying there are other parties who might be interested.
We know that's just not true.
So I think you see no real work is being done, just shallow talking points by people who can't back it up.
I think they're just sort of sleepwalking this thing to its doom.
Justin Trudeau is on his, what, his 56th vacation now.
I think he's in Rome with his wife right now.
Maybe he's back.
I don't know.
I don't think anyone cares.
There's no grown-up.
The only closest thing to a grown-up in this administration is Gerald Butz.
And he's the guy who famously said, we don't believe in better routes for pipelines.
We believe in no routes for pipelines.
We believe in an alternative economy.
I just don't think...
Five years ago, an environmentalist said to me, it's not pipelines.
Stop talking about pipelines.
It's not pipelines that we're worried about.
It's what's in the pipeline that we don't like.
And so that's exactly what you're saying there.
And they don't build pipelines until every part of the country was covered in pipe.
They don't care so long as there's nothing in them.
Yeah.
Well, there's two pipes in every person's home in this country.
One is a toxic pipe called your sewer pipe.
The other is a dangerous explosive pipe.
That's your gas pipe.
So I don't know how they managed to demonize pipes that go back to Roman times, aqueducts and whatnot.
And in a country where we just finished six months of winter, how do you demonize the most efficient, least expensive sources of energy that have ever been devised in human history?
We have become a goofy country at the political level, at the policy level.
No other country is doing this.
No other country is freezing itself out, beggaring itself, throwing itself on the altar of the environment and ruining its economy just so that it can say that it's the Boy Scout.
Yeah.
Well, Lauren, I've kept you a fair bit of time, and I appreciate your time.
I will let you get back to your business in Edmonton, a city then in about two or three weeks will proudly give David Suzuki, another registered anti-oil lobbyist, an honorary award.
And I think that suggests the problem here is much larger than just the Liberal Party or politics.
I think it's our broader culture.
It's like we're living in Atlas Shrugged where all the elites have suddenly lost their brains.
Yeah.
Well, they've gone to the United States.
And whatever you think of Donald Trump, they're drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
They're drilling offshore.
They're exporting oil and gas.
Whatever you think of Donald Trump, he has said to the world, come and do business here.
And that's also part of the reason why we've got a pipeline backlog is the Americans now are quite keen to keep us out of the international markets because they've got their own fracking oil that they want to sell.
That's another issue.
But you're absolutely right.
At least they have an administration at the federal level that is pro-business.
Yeah.
Well, the only man who's going to get a pipeline built in this term in Canada is named Donald Trump.
He's the one who revived the Keystone Excel pipeline.
Keystone Excel.
Obama and Hillary Clinton killed without a peep of protest from Trudeau or Rachel Nawley.
So, you know, I sent out an email earlier today about Donald Trump, and a number of our viewers said, oh, we don't like Trump.
We don't like Trump.
You don't have to like the man's personality to understand that he's the best thing that happened to American oil and gas workers in a generation.
And you don't have to dislike Justin Trudeau's personality to realize he's the opposite.
Lauren, it's great to see you.
I find this topic so distressing.
Last word to you.
Oh, you know what?
I don't think I'd want to do a round of golf with Donald Trump.
But boy, if I had him over Trudeau to plan business strategy, industrial strategy, I'd take him a heartbeat.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, there it is.
No solace, no relief in sight for the oil and gas workers and pipeline workers of this country, I'm afraid.
But Lauren, it's good to talk with you as always.
Good to talk to you.
All right.
There we have it, folks.
The deadline is May 31st.
I'm more pessimistic than my friend Lauren.
I don't think Kinder Morgan's going to stick around.
I don't think Trudeau really cares.
And I don't think Kinder Morgan's Texas bosses have a lot more patience for these Canadian shenanigans.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Russia Collusion Anniversary00:04:50
Welcome back.
Well, we just passed the one-year anniversary, Mozeltov, of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, looking into Russia collusion on the Trump campaign.
I wonder if this is a permanent mission for Mueller and his lawyers.
Unlimited budget, a scope of investigation that is not being made fully public, and has yielded remarkably few instances of collusion.
It reminds me of the old Soviet phrase, show me the man and I'll give you the crime.
They've shaken out a few unrelated crimes that they've managed to get some of the people they've targeted to plead guilty to.
But the central raison d'être, taking out Trump has so far not yielded fruit.
Trump himself seems to have lost patience and taken his complaining to a whole new level.
Let me read to you some of his tweets.
He's been on a tweet storm.
Here's one.
If the person placed very early into my campaign wasn't a spy, but there by the previous administration for political purposes, how come such a seemingly massive amount of money was paid for services rendered many times higher than normal?
And he went on, follow the money.
The spy was there early in the campaign and yet never reported collusion with Russia because there was no collusion.
He was only there to spy for political reasons and to help crooked Hillary win, just like they did to Bernie Sanders, who got duped.
There's so many more tweets by Trump.
Some of them seem obscure if you haven't been following this.
Let me read one more here.
Look at how things have turned around on the criminal deep state.
They go after phony collusion with Russia, a made-up scam, and end up getting caught in a major spy scandal, the likes of which this country may never have seen before.
What goes around comes around.
That is tough talk.
I think, do we have any more tweets?
There's one where he specifically named the spygate could be one of the biggest political scandals in history.
And there's another one where he specifically named former, here we go, James Clapper.
He says, Trump should be happy that the FBI was spying on his campaign.
No, James Clapper, I am not happy.
Spying on a campaign would be illegal and a scandal to boot.
James Clapper was the former director of national intelligence under Obama.
He and other senior intelligence officials in the Obama administration have been very vocal accusing Trump of betraying the country by colluding with Russia.
I want to show you a quick video, and then we're going to go to our expert on this file.
This is a video of the same James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence under Barack Obama, answering a question on, of all places, the women's daytime show called The View, about whether he can even be trusted about spying and lying, because he's done a bit of both.
Take a look at this.
What that stems from is an exchange I had with Senator Wyden five years ago in March of 2013 about a surveillance program, and he was asking me about one, and I was thinking about another.
So I made a mistake, but I didn't lie.
That's Clapper saying, no, no, no.
When I told Congress that we didn't spy on Americans, I wasn't lying.
I just misunderstood the question.
I thought he was talking about another spy program, but his excusology went on for quite some time.
What does all this mean?
What does it mean for the legality of the seemingly endless investigation of Trump?
Does the investigation itself come from false pretenses?
Is it politically motivated?
Joining us now is, I think, the only man in America who can explain it clearly.
His name is Andrew McCarthy.
He's a contributing editor at National Review, and he's a former Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney who was involved, for example, in the prosecution of the first attack on the World Trade Center.
Andrew, it's such an honor to have you back, and I don't say that lightly.
You are so in demand on this issue.
You followed every twist and turn.
Can you try and sum up all these strange parts?
Trump's tweet storm.
James Clapper saying, well, I sort of spied and I didn't mean to lie about it.
Suggestions that a spy was placed in the Trump campaign.
Help us make sense of it.
What's the latest?
Well, the interesting thing, Ezra, and thank you so much for the kind words.
The interesting thing about what General Clapper also had to say in that interview was that they weren't really spying on the Trump campaign.
They were basically watching him for his own good because of those bad Russians out there.
So I was delighted to have this opportunity to speak to you today, not only because I always enjoy speaking to you, but all day long I've been working on, I had a bunch of mafia guys and drug cartel guys and terrorists who I prosecuted when I was for 20 years a prosecutor for the federal government.
A Different Way00:04:33
I've been busily writing them letters today to try to explain to them that it was just for their own good that we used informants on them.
I wouldn't want them to think that we were spying or anything.
You were just looking out for them.
You were just looking out for you.
Because you care.
You care.
Because I'm that kind of guy.
You know, I want to say I'm a Canadian, but I have a deep affection for America.
And growing up, I would read stories about World War II, and I saw Canada, U.S., U.K. were allies.
So we're different parts of the Anglosphere.
My sense of patriotism was for Canada, but I also felt sort of a surrogate patriotism for America.
I thought America's the good guys.
The CIA sometimes gets its hands dirty, but it's generally in the service of freedom and democracy and American interests, which are related to Canadian interests.
The FBI, I sort of regarded them a little bit like I regard our own mounties.
You know, those are the good guys.
And although the FBI and the CIA and other parts of the security complex would sometimes get into trouble, I'd say, you know what?
On the whole, they're on our side.
They're good guys and they're protecting our freedoms.
But watching guys like Clapper and Brennan get hyper-partisan and seeing the proof that maybe they actually spied on a campaign, like an official version of Watergate, not a burglary version, I want to tell you, this really makes me feel like I was naive and a little bit foolish, and that even these institutions that I loved from afar, they weren't as trustworthy as I thought they were.
And I hate that disillusionment, Andrew.
Well, let me give you a different way to look at it.
And you may be right, but maybe a different way.
And that is that what you admired about them is the idea that they wouldn't do the things that we're seeing.
And that when they're admirable and when they're doing the things they're supposed to do, this is the kind of thing we don't get.
But what happened here, it increasingly appears, is that these guys forgot that their job was to serve the country and they got confused about whether serving themselves was somehow conflated with serving the country.
And I think that they came to regard, rather than them being the custodians of the security of the United States, they regarded an election, which is something they're supposed to protect, as instead a threat to the established order of the country, the established order of the country being them.
So I think really what seems to have happened here is we had an incumbent government that chose sides.
And I don't think we should be altogether shocked by it because the eight-year legacy of the Obama administration was that it was the most politicized law enforcement arm of government and the most politicized intelligence community that we've ever had in the history of the United States.
So if you take that legacy seriously, how surprised should we be that they were very political about the election and they put their thumb on the scale in favor of the Democratic candidate?
And, you know, frankly, when I look at this as a law enforcement person, I see two things.
Number one, when you handled things the way they did as a counterintelligence investigation, which means it's basically a classified matter, what you often find is that agents take kind of wild chances and do heavy-handed things that they wouldn't do in a criminal investigation because in a criminal investigation, everybody knows that your work is going to be checked at the end.
Everything's going to be disclosed in connection with the prosecution, and we'll get to see exactly how they conducted the investigation.
That doesn't happen in counterintelligence, and I think it gives them a kind of incentive to do heavy-handed things, and that's what we're seeing.
Secondly, the overlay here, in addition to that, was everybody operated on the nearly 1,000% ripe-dead certain conviction that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election, and that this would never, ever come to light.
So I think with both of those incentives as the wind at their back, what we're seeing is as we look at, as we finally got to see what they actually did, that it looks like it's abuse of power.
Internal Oversight Moves Slowly00:02:40
Yeah.
You know, it's a really good point.
Obama politicized so many different branches of government.
I think of lowest learner at the IRS that basically anyone who was right of center was audited if they had an NGO of some sort.
I look at the Department of Justice.
Even one of his first moves in buying out Chrysler and dealing with the bondholders, there were so many high-handed moments.
Of course it would be in law enforcement too.
Let me say, though, the fact that these truths are emerging slowly but surely, maybe that's proof that the American system is robust.
If the Inspector General, which is sort of like an internal senior auditor of the FBI and of these other agencies, maybe it moves slowly, but it moves.
Maybe these facts are coming out.
And maybe in another system like our own Canadian system, we would never even know this was going on.
Can you speak to the internal checks and balances?
Have I got it right to say an Inspector General is basically someone in each department or agency that is sort of like the in-house opposition checking things financially and for corruption, like almost like an internal affairs in a cop shop.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's correct.
And in the Justice Department in particular, the Attorney General reports to both the, I'm sorry, the Inspector General reports to both the Attorney General and to the Congress, which is supposed to be, it may be, as some, including myself, think, a constitutionally dubious arrangement because it really stretches the separation in powers principle.
But what it does do is enhance the ability of the legislature to conduct oversight because the Congress, even when it wants to do an aggressive job of managing or overseeing what's going on in these executive agencies, particularly the ones Congress itself has created, like the Justice Department, it lacks the tools that an ordinary prosecutor has.
Plus, it's a political body, not a legal one.
So there's a lot of obstruction and a lot of toing and froing that make it difficult to do an investigation.
Having an in-house prosecutor inside the Justice Department to ferret out corruption, waste, fraud, abuse, and that sort of thing really is helpful in terms of their being able to conduct oversight and to get us political accountability, which is usually the most important thing in these situations where it looks like power has been abused.
Need Someone to Investigate00:09:46
Yeah.
One of the interesting things, we were talking to Joel Pollock of Breitbart.com.
He's obviously not an experienced prosecutor like you, so he's not worked on the inside, but he is trained as a lawyer.
And I think he's got a pretty sober-minded approach to things.
I think it was he who was telling me that it was interesting that on the one hand, the Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein was in charge of managing Mueller and basically giving effect to the president's will on these matters, but also the one resisting the disclosure of some of these facts to the Congress.
He was in a pickle and he knew Mueller and he had, it was a whole bunch of shenanigans.
And I see increasing calls just to release everything, just to declassify things, and there'll be some noses out of joint and some warts shown.
But there's so many layers and layers of conflict and who's behind what that just let it all out.
Is that an extreme idea?
I think conspiracies fester where facts are suppressed.
That's one thing.
And I think we've seen that these aren't just conspiracy theories.
There really was some conspiring here.
What do you make of just throwing open the doors and letting the sunshine in?
I'm sympathetic to it, and I'm all about transparency.
I think we must have as much as we possibly can to get to the bottom of what happened here.
What gives me pause is just knowing how this system works, which is we get people who cooperate with our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and they often cooperate in more than one matter.
Sometimes they're still out there working cases for us.
Sometimes, even if they're not out there working cases for us, they've introduced other people into bad networks that can, and these people become our sources of vital intelligence.
If you reveal sources of intelligence without going through the mental gymnastics of who gets hurt if we do this, we could put a lot of people who are actually just trying to help the United States protect itself at risk.
And if you do that and you appear to be cavalier about it, the other problem you have, of course, is that who would ever want to cooperate with us again?
Who could we ever again give a guarantee to that if you share intelligence with us that helps us protect the country, we will keep that confidential and keep you safe?
So I think we need to have as much transparency as we can, but it's our responsibility to go through that calculation to make sure that we're not exposing people who have only patriotically tried to help us.
You know, that's a very important point.
I recall Wikileaks in its first iteration when it was leaking things in the Iraq war would reveal the identities and in some cases even locations of Arab Muslims who had at extreme peril tipped off America and they were killed.
And we've seen other leaks, for example, leaks of American assets in China.
So it's very, I'm very glad you brought the counterpoint there.
I know you're so busy, you're so in demand because you have the unique situation of having done this, having been a prosecutor for decades before you became a pundit, instead of wannabe experts who started as pundits.
So you're very rare in this.
I want to throw a goofy thing at you.
You probably know the character I'm referring to.
He's a real handful.
He's a real professional troublemaker.
He's been a troublemaker for decades, going back to the Nixon years.
In fact, he's got a big Nixon tattoo on his back.
His name is Roger Stone, and in fact, Mueller is investigating him in a number of ways.
The other day, he said something, and he's a shock jock in his own way, but it rung true with me.
He said, Donald Trump should pick up the phone, call Andrew McCarthy, and appoint him to dig around and root around in this.
And I thought, you know, Roger Stone is over the top, but I actually think he's spot on in this one.
I'm not asking you to reveal any confidences, but do you think that we need someone, if not you, someone with your knowledge of how the system works to go in and sort of be, I mean, I don't want to use the word counterintelligence, but a counterinvestigator to this increasingly suspect Mueller investigation?
Do we need someone to investigate the investigator?
I'm not going to ask you if you would do it because you wouldn't answer me for sure.
But do you think we need someone with your talents to do that?
Well, it's very nice of you to say.
And I don't mind answering the question because I actually feel pretty strongly about this.
I don't think you are.
To me, the most important thing or one of the most important things about an investigation is not only that it be done right and done with integrity, but that it appear to be fair and impartial.
And even though I personally think that I would be very good at this, I also think I'm a person with a point of view who's not been shy about sharing the point of view about what's gone on here for two years.
And I think if you're going to have an investigation that's going to have credibility with the public, it's got to be somebody who's perceived as objective.
So it really wouldn't matter that I thought I could do it objectively.
It would matter what people would think of it because our the credibility that we give to the system really depends on whether things appear to be on the up and up as well as actually being on the up and up.
So I do think, yes, this needs to be investigated.
I don't like the institution of the special counsel because it's pernicious in many ways and it really is heavily tilted toward finding even trivial offenses, as you laid out before.
And it often gets deviated way away from the rationale that started the investigation in the first place.
I do think it needs to be a Justice Department prosecutor, but someone who's remote from Washington and who has the kind of integrity and scruples that the public will accept it as an objective, thorough investigation.
And that's why I applauded Attorney General Sessions, who's been much maligned in this, for appointing John Uber, who is the U.S. Attorney of Utah, to actually be, in addition to the Inspector General, the prosecutor who scrubs all this and tries to get to the bottom of it.
And I have confidence he will.
Yeah.
You know, that's a very good point.
Utah is not just geographically far from Washington.
I think it's psychologically probably the most opposite to Washington of the 50 states.
I have to say, and I know I'm just showering you with compliments, but I mean it.
The fact that you would demur shows, in fact, why you are fit for the job.
But I hope we get to the bottom of it because I want to watch, you know, I was thinking today, 007, license to kill.
I mean, it's a funny thing.
We all grew up loving it.
But if you give someone the license to kill, you've got to trust them that they will not just kill for their own passions.
And I'm not saying these men had license to kill, but they had license to do dramatic things because we trusted them to defend America and indirectly defend other allies like us in Canada.
So we loved that.
And that's why we loved the spy movies, because we thought these are the good guys who have awesome powers, but they are morally strong.
I want to get back to the place where I can love the FBI and the CAA because I don't feel like I'm loving skullduggery.
I feel like I'm loving at the end of it patriots.
And I have to say, that's what's depressing about this for me, is these institutions that I had such an affection for as a boy.
Anyway, I'm getting a little emotional now, but I hope that we see the end of this, and I hope it's positive.
And I hope there's a house cleaning.
And I know that your journalism has already been a part of that, even if you yourself won't become an investigator.
Let me give you the last word.
And I'm sorry I'm gushing here, but I just find your piece very powerful.
Let me just tell our folks if they want to read the latest, I've got it in my hand.
It's called The Real Origination Story of the Trump-Russia Investigation.
It's a lengthy piece on nationalreview.com.
And I am absolutely certain that the president is reading your work, by the way, his tweets suggested.
Last word to you, Andrew.
Well, I appreciate all of that, Ezra.
And I'm glad you said it because you've really hit on what animates me about this.
I didn't start out.
I was not a Trump person during the campaign.
He wasn't my guy.
I've been pleasantly surprised by how good a president I think he's been to this point.
And I think he's getting better in the job as time goes by.
But I got in the last half of my career as a prosecutor, I got to work on national security matters.
And when you do that with a little bit of depth in the law enforcement side so that you can see how different it really is, what really hits home to you is that so much that goes on in order to protect our country.
And America's got a special role in the world as far as that's concerned, not just protecting our country.
The more you realize that you have to be able to preserve secrets, and a lot of what you do in the national security realm has to be classified.
Punching Nazis and Trusting Police00:04:58
It has to be confidential, which means those guys have to be able to look you in the eye and say, trust us, because there's no other way that you can protect the country.
And we have to trust them with these powers.
And if it turns out that we can't trust them with these powers, what that means is not just that we condemn them in a way.
It means we condemn ourselves in a way because we won't be willing to do the things that need to be done to protect the country and in our role to protect the world.
So to me, the big thing about this isn't the 2016 election.
It's whether we can have confidence that the people we trust to wield these awesome powers are trustworthy.
Yeah.
Well, that's very well said, and that is exactly right.
We need to be able to trust people.
We need a high trust society, especially in these parts.
Andrew McCarthy, contributing editor of National Review, we're so grateful for your time.
Keep it up.
We'll be reading you on nationalreview.com and following you as this story unfolds.
Thank you, Ezra.
All right.
All the best.
There you have it.
There's a lot to follow here, and we're certainly not even at the apex of this story, are we?
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
On my monologue yesterday about Antifa thugs assaulting conservative journalist Liza writes.
It was disturbing watching Faith and her companion being swarmed by that pack of fascists called Antifa.
That is not peaceful protesting.
The police should have stepped in sooner.
I saw one eventually did.
Yeah, what's the point of police not doing anything?
I understand sometimes on an operational basis, in the fray, in the thick of things, police making a decision to extract a law-abiding person for fear of having a riot with hundreds of law breakers.
I don't like that, but you have to give police the discretion on the scene to say, yikes, there's 100 bad people, one good person.
I would like to take on the 100 riders, but the safest thing I can do is scoop up the good guy and sneak him out.
That's not what happened here.
The police were not overwhelmed.
They were not unprepared.
They were not surprised.
In fact, as you saw, the police were sort of overprepared.
They had the full bomb squad, armor, personal armor, SWAT team there.
The Antifa were a bunch of ragtag losers with handkerchiefs over their faces or whatever.
The police had no reason, other than politics, not to intervene.
And I'm not even saying arrest people.
They should have.
Just to stop them from punching a girl.
Harold writes, can the police be sued?
They stood by observing yet remained willfully blind, or at least exhibited a depraved indifference.
I don't know.
Just wondering if there is a legal responsibility for police to at least use best efforts to protect and keep the peace.
Well, you're sure right.
And I tell you, put the shoe on the other foot.
Imagine, I'm just going to switch things up here to make it super politically correct.
Imagine if it was cops and instead of a right-wing journalist, Faith Goldie, being attacked by a mob of leftist, alt-left, antifa.
Imagine if it was, I don't know, a minority of some sort of black Muslim, whatever, being beat up by a white mob, an alt-right mob.
So switch it around.
Oh my God, you would have seen arrests.
You would have seen prosecutions.
You would have seen the prime minister, the premier, the mayor, the whole of the United Nations weighing in on it.
Yeah, but you know, it's okay to punch a conservative.
That's seriously the standard out there now.
Deborah writes, I hope that Faith and her companion are all right.
It's sick of me watching those, quote, feminists attacking her for wanting to report the truth.
Well, they shouldn't attack her for any reason whatsoever, even if she, no matter what she was doing.
As I mentioned the other day, this punch a Nazi meme that's been going on the left for about a year and a half.
Punch a Nazi.
Well, wouldn't you punch a Nazi?
Don't we all hate Nazis?
There's not a lot of Nazis around there.
But it's actually illegal to punch someone in Canada because you disagree with them, even if they are a Nazi or a racist or another ist.
We don't allow vigilante justice.
We just don't, even if they are a Nazi.
And by the way, it's not against the law to be a Nazi.
I don't recommend it.
I'm opposed to it.
But punch a Nazi itself is illegal.
And then there's the obvious problem, well, you start calling anyone you don't like a Nazi.
Basically, you call someone a Nazi so you can punch them.
You want to punch someone, you call them a Nazi, you give yourself a license to do it.
And then pretty soon you've got a bunch of masked thugs who are a little bit Nazi-like punching a girl.
Punching Nazis Illegal?00:00:44
It's happened too much in Canada.
Well, that's our show today.
What do you make of the fact that Gerald Butz personally intervened, or if he didn't personally do it, he instructed the minister to stop seven audits that had been completed and cheating charities were about to have their licenses revoked.
And he said, no, no, no, those are my friends.
Let them go.
How is that not corruption?
And how does it not immediately beg the question, who else has he just let go because they're a friend of Trudeau?
I'm curious.
I don't know.
I don't think we'll ever find out, do we?
I think we have an extremely incurious Ottawa press corps.
And I think the civil service just love the precious one too much to ever blow the whistle on him.