New Trump Executive Order: Good Move Or Global Asset Forfeiture?
President Trump has signed a new Executive Order allowing the US government to freeze the US assets of individuals or corporations worldwide who are determined by the US Administration to have violated "human rights" or engaging in corruption. What about due process? What about jurisdiction?
President Trump has signed a new Executive Order allowing the US government to freeze the US assets of individuals or corporations worldwide who are determined by the US Administration to have violated "human rights" or engaging in corruption. What about due process? What about jurisdiction?
President Trump has signed a new Executive Order allowing the US government to freeze the US assets of individuals or corporations worldwide who are determined by the US Administration to have violated "human rights" or engaging in corruption. What about due process? What about jurisdiction?
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
Doing very well and we're going to talk a little bit today about executive orders and Donald Trump.
I think he said that he wasn't going to write a lot of executive orders.
I think he was going to erase a lot of executive orders.
But we came across this, thanks to Zero Hedge pointing this out, you know, last week, right before Christmas, he issues a significant executive order, which it doesn't take too much understanding to realize that it has a lot to do with asset forfeiture on an international scale.
Motivations behind it, you know, I'm still uncertain exactly what they are, but some people paint it, well, maybe this executive order is what he needs to go after Hillary and find out what kind of shenanigans were going on.
But if you look at it, it's really broad, broad brush, and people who are violating international human rights violations, and they're going to be charged, and we have to crack down on those people.
But it's very broad.
It reminds you of the NSA report about how broad they can do.
And everybody's a participant, and there's a little bit of that in there.
Any individuals tied to a corporation that they suspect, they can have their assets frozen and taken.
It's an exaggeration.
It almost reminds me of taking the asset forfeiture that we complain about on the drug war and making it international.
Yeah, that's true.
Essentially, what, I mean, talk about, you know, going big.
This, I think, is going big, unless I'm misreading it.
He's basically saying we have jurisdiction over the whole world.
We will freeze your assets.
We will grab your assets under a number of circumstances.
One, the U.S.-based assets of foreign individuals who are deemed human rights abusers and government officials found to have engaged in corruption.
These are foreigners.
Also, anyone in the U.S. who aids those overseas in either of those two things, corruption or human rights abuse.
They have their assets taken.
Also, any corporation that employs a foreigner who commits an act of corruption to benefit his company, that company, that corporation's assets are frozen.
And the fourth, and this is, as you were pointing out, this reminds you of the NDAA, where anyone who materially assists, sponsors, or provides financial, material, or technological support or goods and services for any foreigner targeted by this executive order can also have his or her assets frozen.
This is a global asset forfeiture, very political, very open, I think, to politicization.
Now, they're saying the lobbyists become vulnerable, the big corporations might, but I can't imagine Trump doing this deliberately that they might be able to punish Boeing or some of these other companies.
So I don't fully understand exactly the motivation.
There are some people who are implying that, oh, this is a way of getting to Hillary.
But the law, I think, probably was broken with the Hillary campaign and the foundation.
And there was a mixture, you know, with the funds being used, you know, with her being the Secretary of State.
But there's laws on the books.
If it was just shenanigans going on in our political system, it seems like the Justice Department could have handled that.
It doesn't seem like this is the vehicle to use that there is a conspiracy of expanding international power.
A little bit complicated, but that's the way they like to make it because not the average person on the street will know about this.
This is why I like the idea of suggesting that if you want to think about this, you ought to think about a globalist approach to asset forfeiture and the broad brush where people can be found guilty without due process of law and just being loosely associated with an organization.
And that is, of course, the total rejection of the rule of law and makes everybody vulnerable eventually, you know, under these circumstances.
I mean, some of the things that Bush said about if you're associated with any group, then you're not with us and you're guilty and this sort of thing.
And that's such an important distinction to make because the executive order, as I read it and as it's been interpreted, does not say anyone found in a court of law to have violated the law on human rights abuses or corruption.
It's just anyone to have found to have been involved in these.
Found by who.
It opens the door to politicization.
And the way it was framed, I think, in the Zero Hedge article, and a lot of people in the comments praised it.
Okay, we're going to go after Hillary.
This is great.
We're going to get all this corruption, like you said.
But even if you despise Hillary with a passion, do you really want one person, the executive, without a court, without anyone else, to have the power to seize any American's assets that he deems to have materially assisted, been involved in any way?
Do you really want to give up that power just because you can't stand Hillary?
I think that is really a devil's bargain.
No, I'm sure that's right.
But I'm afraid we've been moving in that direction for a long time.
You know, that being found guilty of something isn't necessary anymore.
And then when you think of international law too, I mean, when sanctions are put on and bombs are dropped and they say, well, there's aggression and all that, and they never look at it and say, you know, what really is going on?
Is any of this true?
And then when you get back to the fake news.
But I'm not totally shocked that this is happening.
I didn't think that our protections would be greatly magnified with this administration.
And yet here it is, an executive order being used to expand the type of government that we're so opposed to.
So this is something that is going to be with us for a while, unfortunately, as it is a trend.
And because it does get a little complex, I think it's much easier for the people to wake up about asset forfeiture and how terrible it is when they think of their automobile being stopped and something maybe in the trunk of the car or some passenger having something.
All of a sudden their car is taken and you're guilty and you lose your property and maybe never get it back again.
Yeah, even if you're proven innocent, you don't get it back in most cases.
But you hit it on the head earlier because if you are corrupt, if you're an American and your company is corrupt and you're involved in corruption or you're involved in human rights abuse, you already have a court of law that convicts you.
If you're a foreigner in a foreign corporation doing things overseas that are not very nice, well you're not subject to U.S. law.
You know, we have no jurisdiction over it.
But this is the idea that somehow we are the global cops.
We're going to go tell everyone.
And I think really if anyone thinks this is going to be enforced evenly across the board, even if you had the markers down, the exact markers for how it's enforced, if anyone thinks this is going to be evenly enforced, if anyone thinks they're going to say, okay, Saudi Arabia, you've got a lot of abuses on here.
We're going to seize your assets, I think you've been smoking something.
You know, the law that he was citing was the Global Human Rights Accountability Act.
And it was passed a couple years ago, I think it was 2016.
At that time, Manitzki was involved in that, but really, behind the scenes, what were they achieving there?
Just setting the stage for this kind of thing?
What motivated them to do this at that particular time?
I think it's all about politics too.
You know, the Magnitsky thing, without getting into a lot of the details, it involved people that were passionately opposed to Putin and Putin's party in Russia.
And so they're obviously in favor with the neocons in the U.S.
The neocons and the human rights interventionists are really hand in glove in a lot of this global interventionism.
So a lot of it has a political leaning in places like Russia and China and elsewhere because they want to get at people who are not favored by the U.S. You know, all this extension of asset forfeiture and all that's going on.
But if it does get to the news, it'll be, they'll talk about Hillary.
You know, there's corruption there, and this opens up the door and they can do something about it.
But I don't think this administration really has been very serious about as serious as they pretended to be in the campaign.
I don't think they're serious at all.
Because matter of fact, I think Trump's even backed off on his locker-up type of thing.
It isn't there.
So he could have had Sessions check into things.
No, Sessions isn't going to look into maybe some domestic corruption that is pretty bad, this connection with Hillary.
He is much too busy out there making sure nobody smokes a marijuana cigarette.
He really is a tough guy.
So that's a mission for him.
And somebody asked me the other day about, well, do you think he should get rid of Sessions?
Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
But who's going to be the replacement?
We have, in the international affairs, if you get rid of one guy, too often we get another neocon.
That's what happens when you just think you can solve the problem by getting rid of one person.
Well, yeah, that's what worries me about.
Someone like Nikki Haley, we'd love to see her gone, but here comes John Brown.
We still would have her go if we could.
That's true.
But here's a good example that Zero Hedge makes about this.
If you were really to apply this to the letter, imagine the scenarios, which I don't think is that unrealistic.
So the Apple, huge corporation, mega corporation, one of its employees, Chinese foreign national employee, gives a bribe to the Chinese government for some ruling that favors Apple.
Free Speech vs. Government Power00:02:53
Well, the U.S. could use this theoretically to seize all of Apple's assets and freeze them.
You know, that's a lot of power for the government to have, and it's also pretty unrealistic that it's going to be enforced.
Yeah, that is a shame.
And then there's the mixed bag, too, that, yes, some of the big corporations are threatened, but most of the big corporations are involved in the deep state.
You know, even if they're on internet type of corporations, they're working for the government.
So it'll be political.
You mentioned early on that this is probably going to be a political thing, you know, used for political reasons rather than justice.
This isn't seeking justice.
This is using justice in a perverse manner.
It's injustice and using this threat and this tool of asset forfeiture to try to promote an agenda.
And it's easy to hate D.C. lobbyists.
Everyone likes to say how horrible and evil they are.
But the fact of the matter is there is a free speech issue involved.
And really the people we should be furious with are the policymakers and the politicians who accept favors from the lobbyists.
But what the lobbyists are doing, they often do have to represent governments that are out of favor in Washington.
That doesn't mean it's objectively true what Washington says about them, the level of the abuses going on in their country and other things of that nature.
So these people do have a right to have their voices known.
We do have a right to hear them, but this will have a chilling effect on DCPR people, lobbyist people who represent governments that are out of favor with the current U.S. government.
So if I could just have a final word, I just want to remind our viewers once again that this is probably going to be one of our last, if not our last, shows of the year.
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Very good.
And I want to thank our audience for being with us today.
And one thing is, this is a complicated issue, but it's very important.
But it's the kind of thing that we wouldn't have to worry about if we had a different form of government and a different foreign policy.
We wouldn't be so engaged that we can have these laws that become very international and we take over, take over the militarism of the world and we impose ourselves and then we come up with these legal matters where we can have asset forfeiture dealing with foreign corporations.
It's way too messy.
It would be so much better for the cause of justice if we just understood and got our government to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy.
That should be our goal and hopefully we contribute to promoting that goal.
I do want to thank everybody for being with us today.