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May 6, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:22
'Evidence Tampering' Threatens Trump Political Show Trial

Shocking news over the weekend that the "Justice" department had "altered or manipulated" key evidence in former President Trump's classified documents trial casts a shadow on the case against him. Was it incompetence...or something more? Also: As Israel prepares to invade Rafah, will Biden finally stand up for civilians in Gaza? A report in the Israeli media reveals that the US supplies 50 percent of all Israel's ammunition.

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Evidence Tinkering 00:14:49
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
How are you today?
I'm doing well and ready and raring to go.
And there's lots of activity.
There was something, I don't know exactly what it was, but markets were excited today.
Gold went up a bit.
And I keep thinking, is there a bigger war or are they spending more money or both?
And I think both happens all the time.
So you can't always figure out what the immediate movements are all about.
But there's somebody worried about the dollar ultimately.
And I think they are very justified in that.
But we'll talk about spending, some of this needless spending, especially today, the spending in the warmongering that's going on in the Middle East and all the preparation.
Like Daniel likes to point out so often, he said, yeah, we talk about foreign expenditures, but it just, it goes through the people who get their cut.
And that's the military industrial complex right here in the United States.
So we will be talking a bit about that.
But before we do this, you know, the big news has been this whole thing about Trump.
He stays in the news.
If he's known as the expert on that, he's been doing a good job.
But most of the time, it's pretty amazing.
It's amazing to all us on the staff is how does he put up with it all?
You know, it is pretty amazing.
So, but he's in the news.
They're punishing him.
But yesterday, the news came out and said that there's evidence and the Department of Justice admitted they tampered with the evidence.
Can you believe that?
What I have trouble believing is they allowed the information to get out and nobody else was arrested.
So, but anyway, it was a significant enough event, Daniel, for Trump and others to call for.
This is a mistrial.
Well, it was a mistrial before it started, you know, the whole thing about the documents and whatever.
But the documents that were taken are now, there don't even seem to be arguing that there has been tampering with these documents.
And you would think that would be enough, you know, to tamper a little bit this enthusiasm for trying to put Trump in jail.
But they're not going to put him in jail.
There'd probably be a civil war before that's going to happen.
So I don't think that's going to happen.
And mentioning before the show to Daniel, I said, you know, it's pretty amazing.
They come up with all these things and this tinkering with the evidence.
That's a big deal.
It's terrible.
I said, but, you know, I was looking at what Hillary had done, you know, a couple years ago.
And boy, I'll tell you, she was really pretty ambitious.
And she had a lot of protection someplace because all her records are gone and nobody says anything.
So, Daniel, what do you think is going to happen here?
Will the prosecution get into trouble?
and will some judge come along here and bring sanity to this trial.
Yeah, it's really fascinating because, you know, Trump faces 40 charges, 40 charges just from this mishandling of classified documents issue.
You know, they've stacking charge upon charge upon charge on him.
But, you know, what we saw over the weekend is either really gross incompetence on the part of the prosecution or something even worse and more untoward, which is a politically motivated attempt to manipulate the trial.
Now, this isn't like someone went in and scratched out and wrote in something different in the documents, but it's, you know, we don't want to go too far into the weeds here, but essentially what it was, as I understand it, is that there was specific order of the boxes as they were seized from his house in Florida.
And it was expected to be a main part of his defense that his staff simply went in when he was leaving the White House and boxed up everything without looking inside to see if there were classified documents, boxed it all up and sent it in the order that they boxed it.
Well, now that that order has been changed, it alters his ability to make that claim.
So the big thing that happened over the weekend is special counsel Jack Smith, his team admitted that key evidence in the Trump classified documents case was altered or manipulated, i.e. changing the order of the documents and the boxes full of documents.
It's a pretty big deal, I think.
You know, there's, of course, a lot of question about whether or not there was a major infraction of the law with Trump.
But I think the way this started should have been a full warning to everybody about how they got the records.
It wasn't ordinary.
It wasn't routine.
It wasn't with any bit of courtesy how they went in into Mar-Lago and taken those materials from Trump.
So this has been, you know, just bad politics, not bad politics, but bad legal activity.
And yet, you know, the Republicans have stood up to it.
Trump certainly has because he never hesitated about what's happening now with this.
He says, lock him up, lock Smith up.
He deserves it.
But at least I would think that if there was a true justice system, this case probably would have been dismissed.
And if you had a half decent Department of Justice, it probably would have never come up.
And that's where our problem is because at this rate, so far, the people in charge of the Department of Justice, they do exactly what they want to do.
And unfortunately, they get away with it.
And that is a big problem for the American people.
The other issue that came up last week, I think it was, is really what is the standing of Jack Smith?
He's a special prosecutor, but he hasn't been confirmed by Congress to be so.
They say the claim is that he's not an officer of the court.
He's just some guy that Biden picked up and said, okay, you'll be the special prosecutor.
You've got to go get Trump.
You know, there's a process for doing these things.
So there's that argument as well.
But we looked at the story on Zero Hedge, and they quoted a defense attorney, Tim Partolore, who had worked for Trump's team earlier.
And he said, the admission, because Jack Smith and his team admitted, yeah, we changed the order of these documents.
And that was after they swore that the documents were exactly the same.
He said, yeah, they were altered a little bit.
And so the attorney Charles' former attorney said the admission is stunning on multiple counts because it reinforces the incompetence of the prosecutors.
But he said at a deeper level, the loss of a specific document locations is destructive of exculpatory evidence.
He said, I went through all the boxes at the National Archives, and the document order was important because it was clear to us that the boxes have been untouched since leaving the White House.
So that chain of evidence, of custodiation of evidence has now been changed, has altered.
You know, this mess that we're looking at and witnessing and they're trying to sort it out is typical of a government and a system that is runaway.
It's so big, so huge, it's so complex.
And then they come along and a group of people get hold of the Department of Justice and they get away with this.
But it's a system that cannot last.
You know, the Republic, as far as I'm concerned, has been lost a while ago.
And that doesn't mean we should give up on restoring some principles of liberty in our Constitution.
But I tell you what, a long time ago, this idea that we would expect, oh, let's just rest a bit.
Let's get a new person in here and there.
And things will correct, reversing the trend that's been going on for a good many years, whether it's economics or the foreign policy or whatever.
It usually ends up into a calamity that it forces the people to respond and change the position of the government because we cannot continue to do what we're doing.
Eventually, the marketplace and just the political system will see to that.
And as you suggested early on, Dr. Paul, the political marketplace is also speaking because it seems like every time they dump another 10 or 20 charges on Trump, he gets more and more popular.
You know, he raises money off of them and he makes fun of the prosecutors and he seems to get ahead.
You'd think that they would learn by now that this isn't really the best approach, but they seem to be doing the same thing and hoping for different results.
Yeah, and this is something people anticipate.
We hope some good comes of it.
But others will say, well, you know, who knows?
Since we don't have total control of the future, who knows what this election is going to come to?
I could, you know, think about it and think, oh, it's going to really be bad.
It could be worse and there's a lot more violence.
Or there might be somebody coming down to earth and acting halfway decently and recognizing that we are bankrupt.
We're morally bankrupt and financially bankrupt.
And we have to change our ways.
But right now, we don't see any real signs of that other than the hints.
I have to give credit to some of the Republicans.
But right now, I don't think the control of the House of Representatives has really done their job in trying to sort some of these problems out.
Yeah, well, I guess if we'll keep an eye on this trial, we'll see what happens.
But let's move along if it's okay, Dr. Paul, to the next thing we're looking at this Monday morning, which is what appears to be an imminent Israeli invasion of the Rafah area in Gaza.
Now, Rafa is where the Palestinians were initially evacuated to keep them from harm, quote unquote, as Israel invaded the rest of Gaza.
They were saying, go down to Rafah, you'll be safe there.
Well, now the Israelis have dropped, I think, 10,000 or so flyers down on the people of the refugees who are there saying, okay, well, we're going to bomb this place too.
So you got to find somewhere else.
So it's a very serious situation.
This happens right in the middle of the Israel-Hamas negotiations, ceasefire negotiations.
And so these negotiations have broken down.
The ceasefire doesn't look like it's going to happen.
And one of the reasons the ceasefire discussions broke down is that Netanyahu, who's feeling a lot of pressure himself in his government and the population being against him, he said, I don't care whether we get a deal with Hamas or not.
We're going to go into Rafah either way.
So, of course, that removes the incentive for Hamas to even negotiate a ceasefire.
You're not going to get anything out of it.
So, it's a tense situation, Dr. Paul.
And obviously, the people who always suffer the worst in war are civilians.
And this is going to be the case in Rafah as well.
You know, it's amazing how times change things because here we've heard the accusations and the charges, you know, by the opposition.
We're going to invade.
We're going to do this.
You wait and you wait and you wait.
And it's sort of a game they play.
I got to think it, you know, I don't think the Japanese did that over Pearl Harbor.
You know, okay, next week we're going to bomb Truro.
Next week we're going to do this.
And it's just probably what it does to me makes me realize that the system is so mixed up and there's limits that what people can do.
There's too much internationalism and all this combining efforts and these multi-national committees putting together and run their foreign policy.
And they can't really happen.
So right now it's certain we're going to do it.
We're going to do it.
Go hide where we told you to go hiding.
And sometimes I thought, well, you know, when they were telling the people up north to go south, I said, you know what?
They're going to do that.
Yeah, they did.
And lo and behold, it looks like they were in a position where they made themselves more vulnerable.
It is a real mess.
And, you know, it's this group of nations taking care of things and making plans that I see as a fundamental problem.
And I certainly put the blame back.
Of course, with Ukraine, we've talked a lot about NATO and how they've interfered and caused trouble.
But what about the United Nations and the Middle East?
They're the ones who cut up the Middle East.
And that doesn't mean there weren't problems and they couldn't be solved.
But all I have observed has been that the more we rely on these multinational organizations, more money is spent, more people who die, and the worse the problems get.
So that is why, of course, I'm on the side of national security and independence and get along with people by voluntarism, trade with people, and not get involved in these entangling alliances.
So this is an entangled alliance.
And right now, because of the situation we're in, I do not see how this is going to end gracefully.
No soft landing as I see it.
Yeah, and it puts the Biden administration in a real blind because we've been talking about this for months now.
It's clear that a sizable portion of the electorate that is planning to vote for Biden is extremely unhappy with the slaughter in Gaza.
All Americans should be unhappy, but certainly his political base, according to all poll numbers, is very unhappy.
And the administration just seems completely impotent, completely incapable of using the influence that they have to try to protect civilians in Gaza.
So it shows the administration to be weak.
And in fact, Biden had a call with Netanyahu over the weekend where he said, please don't go into Rafah and this is going to be a disaster.
Don't do it.
Netanyahu says, I don't do what I want to do.
I don't care.
So it just shows that the U.S., for all the strength it likes to portray, when it comes to Israel, the Biden administration doesn't seem to have any pool whatsoever.
Well, one thing is that the system encourages it not to work because if the president say he had a bit of sincerity and he wants to, you know, calm things down, but the most pressure is going to come from Americans, you know, American companies, international companies.
Weapons And Moral Liability 00:11:31
And there's everybody's involved now.
So many countries are involved in building weapons.
So they're the ones that really put the pressure on the president, even if he was sincere and trying to calm things down.
And that's why Yahoo can tell him to go fly a kite.
Yeah.
But the interesting thing, and here's the other part of this second section, is an article we noticed this morning from WyNet, which is an Israeli news outlet.
And they're talking about a new defense ministry report, Israeli Defense Ministry report that shows that half of all IDF ammunition in the war comes from the U.S.
So the U.S. military aid to Israel comprises half of the weapons, half of the bullets, half of the bombs that are being dropped on Gaza.
So what that says is that the U.S. government is extraordinarily involved and extraordinarily important to the Israeli war machine.
So you think that because of that, there would be some more leverage from the United States in terms of how these weapons are going to be used.
We know that they've been used by and large against civilian population.
We know that they have not been very successful in getting rid of Hamas.
Obviously, it's a tough fight.
It's an urban warfare situation.
But with the fact that the U.S. provides half the weapons, you would think that a threat to cut off armed shipments might bring Israel to the negotiating table more earnestly, or at least to delay the invasion of Rafah, which had, I think, a civilian population before the war of about 100,000.
And now there's a million people stuck in, crammed into this little space like fish in a barrel.
You know, the official policy is no boots on the ground.
And in a way, they do that to a slight degree.
But in reality, we have boots on the ground.
We have special forces there.
And it's very much involved.
But even if that wasn't the case, if you provide the money and the weapons, we do have a moral responsibility and liability for this.
And they keep thinking, and the American people can be lulled and think, you know, they don't see body bags coming back.
It was quite a bit different in the 60s when everybody was aware of how many American soldiers are dying every week.
But the damage done to the world of peace and the spending, the spending continues.
The people still have to pay for it.
The inflation is still there.
Our liberties are undermined.
It continues that way.
Yet they keep saying, well, we don't have any boots on the ground, but it is not a good foreign policy.
You can't doctor up this policy we have and try to make rules and regulations and then try to talk the enemy into doing something.
And probably, you know, everybody's complaining about how it has divided both Republicans and Democrats.
Each side now has sides to, especially, you know, we notice this on the college campuses, picking sides.
But that might be good, you know, in a way that at least there's a debate out there.
At least they know there's something going on if it was if it was domineered by one side and that's all you heard.
So in some ways, this is a reflection that things are doing poorly and the American people are waking up.
And for many reasons, you know, I think just the fact that this is a dead end street with this foreign policy, I think it's also orchestrated.
I think people do take advantages of conditions like this.
And if they can contribute to chaos and undermining our system, I believe this gives the people who want chaos do a pretty good job to jumping in and then stirring the pot.
Yeah, you're right, Dr. Paul.
It does divide people.
I mean, for myself, I don't understand why it shouldn't be a bipartisan issue.
I can't imagine why pro-life conservatives aren't concerned about the slaughter of innocent civilians.
You can hate Hamas all you want, but you don't see a lot of pro-life people talking about the murder of a lot of children in Gaza, and that's a real shame.
It's unfortunate.
But I guess we move on to our third, and this is kind of a follow-up to something we did last week, which is that the Biden administration is trying to make a deal with Ukraine to tie the next president's hands and force money to go to Ukraine into the indefinite future.
Well, the U.S. is doing the same thing with the G7.
They're trying to strongarm the G7 to put in a long-term aid package for Kiev as well.
So they're looking everywhere desperate for money to lock in the spending.
Dr. Paul, you were talking about the economic implications of this kind of future spending.
What do you think about it?
Yeah, this is an invention to make people think it doesn't really cost that much to do it.
But $50 billion, they say, oh, you know, we're going to get the others to pay for it.
You know, the Europeans, they're more, you know, they're closer to the problems than we are.
So they think that's going to get by with it.
But we end up paying no matter what we do.
Then they come up with these crazy schemes and Republicans and Democrats say, well, we shouldn't just give them that money.
We're going to loan it to them.
We made fun of that already.
But it's sort of crazy.
You know, by September, they're supposed to, you know, they can be excused.
The debt can be written off.
And yet they do this seriously.
But I think one other thing that's pointed out is they think that this is a sign that the war is not going well.
It's going to last a long time, especially in Ukraine.
And who knows what will happen in the Middle East, that the sooner they can get support from more people.
And this one, you know, the long-term 50 for Ukraine, $50 billion for 10 years.
Well, this problem is not going to last for 10 years.
It's going to get a lot worse before it starts to get better.
But right now, it's not going to work how they're planning to do it.
But they want people locked in.
And it's just not going to happen.
So it doesn't look good.
And I think the one thing, too, is when they get in groups like this, especially Americans, they'll say, well, you know, we're helping.
We're peacekeeping.
We have this responsibility.
But it'll eventually be very much recognized that there is a moral liability for us to get involved because we are guilty of participating and creating a war and spending that is so out of whack that people have to pay for this and somebody should have the liability of this.
And, you know, there was an article we read just recently, Daniel, about Afghanistan.
Some friend of ours added this up and it was $2.2 trillion for the war in Afghanistan.
I said, that's a lot.
I figured it was pretty darn high like that.
But this author went ahead and he said, yes, but under Bush, the war on terrorism cost eight more truly, oh, a total of eight onto it.
So it's very, very expensive.
So they prolong this.
What I'm arguing is all this nonsense on the economics will end.
That's the way all empires end.
They overextend themselves in spending.
They have welfareism out of control.
And then they have their foreign policy out of control.
And believe me, things are out of control.
And all you have to do is look at the Department of Justice.
You can't have a sound economy.
You can't have a safe haven in a country that has no Department of Justice or a Department of Justice, which doesn't provide any justice.
That is what's happening.
So it is a major problem.
And I think financially this is bipartisan.
They get together.
I was very much outraged.
And Daniel and I talked about it at the time when a Thai vote in the Senate or in the House, the Speaker came in and rescued the Democrats.
And this is just beyond belief.
Oh, well, we don't want to disrupt the process.
I don't know what their argument is for that.
So the other thing about how this planning, the 10-year plan and the financing, and telling the Russians, we're going to take your money that we stole from you and we're going to give it to the will give it to the Ukrainian.
Well, Russia will not, I think they've been, you know, in a way, this is dangerous to say, but they've been probably halfway patient compared to some others.
But I don't think their patience will last.
They're going to get pretty upset on one of these days.
And if the push comes to shove, I think you're going to see the results of a bankruptcy, a moral bankruptcy, and a financial bankruptcy as we're witnessing right now.
Yeah, it's a crazy, it's a crazy scheme, at least to me.
I don't know what you think, Dr. Paul, but you know, the Europeans mostly are holding on to some $300 billion in frozen Russian assets.
They're sitting there, they're held.
Well, what the plan is to take the interest on those assets and hand it over to Ukraine to keep the war going.
And Russia said, hang on a minute, that's our money.
If you steal our money, well, we're going to steal your money.
I mean, as you could expect, but what might this do to the global economic system if countries start stealing the money of people of other countries they view to be their enemies?
And, you know, overall, this policy will weaken the currency, the reserve currency, the dollar, and it's already, you know, in trouble and having problems.
So this will eventually continue to undermine the dollar.
And right now, people recognize this, but the connection isn't there.
That bothers me is that the average person are sick and tired of prices going up.
It's hard to get enough money.
Wages go up a little bit, but prices go up more.
And they don't understand it.
So they go to the government.
We need more help.
So they raise the benefits.
Social Security and welfare benefits go up.
And they think that's going to take care of it.
And that's the source of the problem.
It's the devaluation of the currency.
And it happens with wars.
Wars, you can't be opposed to the war because that's our defense, national security.
You can't give up on that.
Don't ever cut that.
And so often that happens, even under today's circumstances, it doesn't take long for them to have an international emergency.
And the American people will roll over and say very little about just adding more trillions of dollars worth of debt.
But long term, the market is more powerful than the planners in government.
The planners always have this good intention and they can win votes on the short run.
But eventually, all this planning is going to backfire.
And that's what we're facing right now.
Planners vs. Market 00:01:57
All right, Dr. Paul, then we're going to close out.
I think we did the best we can with our few topics today.
I just want to thank the viewers for tuning in this Monday morning.
We appreciate it.
I hope this week, hopefully earlier this week, we'll be able to announce the dates of our annual summer DC conference.
It's going to be in the late August, early September era, but we still have to sign with the hotel before we announce the date.
So just kind of keep that in mind.
It's a great way for us to get together and hopefully we'll make that announcement soon.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
You know, over the years, as I talked about non-intervention and staying closer to home militarily, but to extend ourselves in a voluntary way, that that was a better way to go.
And this is something that we should do and can do, and something that should be welcome.
But right now, of course, they're too interested in the fanfare of the war and the special interests, the military-industrial complex.
So that comes through as being very special interest.
So I think that one thing I remember, I would be pressed during campaigns and they'd say, yeah, you want non-intervention, but it's already in the intervention.
We're already intervening all over the place.
How can you come home?
And, you know, I didn't like complicated, I didn't like unnecessary complicated problems.
And I didn't think that, and it was difficult to come up with, you know, how do you wean yourself off and come home?
And I just thought the best thing is to think about is, you know, we just marched in there.
Why can't we just march home?
And that's what I'd like to see happen.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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