All Episodes
Previous Next
July 1, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
24:18
Big Win For Trump At The Supremes

Former President Donald Trump caught a major break from the Supreme Court today in a ruling that the president has broad immunity from prosecution for acts committed while exercising the office of the president. Also today: January 6th protesters also get a big break, as the "insurrection" is downsized.

|

Time Text
Democracy's Mob Action 00:14:36
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 this morning.
How are you, Dr. Paul?
Doing well.
Good, all right.
Doing well.
All right.
So always better than the country itself is doing.
That's true.
What we'd like to see is improvement in our country and emphasize the right things.
Now, there was a major ruling this past week that a lot of people were pens and needles and it sort of divided some of the libertarian-leaning people and digesting all this because there was politics involved a little bit how this would be stated.
And it had to do with the immunity thing about Trump and hundreds of people who were arrested and mishandled by the Justice Department.
So this ruling was very, very important in that sense.
And it came down, and I'll just read a headline, how Trump responded to it.
And it was easy to figure this out.
Trump says the immunity ruling a big win for democracy in Donald Trump.
Yeah.
That's the way it's interpreted.
And it really is, because most people believe now that there will be, there's not going to be any more attempt to try to put Trump in jail before the election.
This thing is going to be played out.
The Supreme Court essentially sent it back to the other courts and ruled that he can't currently be charged for some of the really, really bad stuff, you know, the criminal things.
And some describe this as just describing that these people that went in there, because it was obvious they went in, some, we don't know how many, and they did a little bit of trespassing and some damage.
And then the question always came up, who encouraged them, who put them in there, where was the conspiracy?
So it was a lot of mucking around there.
But the real crime of this whole thing, and I don't know how they're going to be, how that, it has yet to be justified.
The people who were arrested, not because of trespassing, they were visitors to the Capitol and they didn't participate.
And yet, people are in prison.
And they have not had it.
That is the real crime of this whole thing.
And they said, you know, it's clarified some things.
And those people that are in prison are probably breathing better today.
And that is good.
But they have to still go through a court ruling.
And I don't think that should be a big deal.
But just the whole process, who's going to give them their year back?
Well, four years, three years.
Yeah, that's true.
There were a lot of them.
So it's been an ordeal.
And the one thing I want to mention, a little bit esoteric, but to me it's very important and to others.
The headline in Zero Hedge was Trump says immunity ruling a big win for democracy.
Well, you know, I get annoyed by democracy because I think that's mob action.
As long as you get 51%, we had 51% at the beginning of our country that said we should perpetuate and continue with slavery.
So that was democracy, but not too many people talk about that.
The democracy is sort of a mob action.
It can't be the majority and they join in.
And yet electing leaders, some countries are doing this now.
But even our country tried to, our constitutionalists tried to prevent that by having electoral college.
And even that has, it's not pure democracy because, you know, a little state has representation, especially, you know, in the Senate.
That is where they're really challenging the pure democracy.
But democracy is the word you use.
Yet it doesn't even exist in the Constitution.
But if you're for democracy, everybody is going to be happy.
And that to me is different than participating and influence a public opinion, you know, a prevailing attitude.
How two and two is four, not two and two is six.
You know, this attitude is important, but you don't call that mob rule.
So I think when they talk about democracy, they're not emphasizing the things that should be emphasized, and that is justice and truth.
And even with this ruling, there's a shift in that direction.
But we still have a long way to go because when you think of a need to have justice and truth, maybe in the Department of Justice, what do you think?
That would be helpful to have.
But anyway, it's an important ruling, and people are going to breathe easily.
If Trump wins in the fall, it will even become less significant.
So for that reason, anybody charged on six, he can pardon them.
Who knows what will happen?
The election becomes a big deal.
It does for sure.
Well, put on that first.
The two were transposed again, so put on the second clip.
Yeah, go ahead, Juan.
The second is the first.
If you can go ahead.
Yeah, the second one.
There we go.
Yeah, so this is from heads.
Two big Supreme Court rulings over the weekend and today.
Two big rulings.
The first one, as you mentioned, Dr. Paul, has to do with the immunity from criminal prosecution for acts that he did while in office.
And this is a big ruling, a six to three vote from the Supreme Court that former presidents, including Trump, enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct involving official acts.
So the question is whether it's an official act or not an official act.
And as you say, Dr. Paul, that'll go to the lower courts.
But to upheld the idea of the immunity, and as you say, it makes it very unlikely that Trump will even be facing a trial before the election.
The Supremes ruled that there is immunity unless the president is impeached and removed from office, which, as we know, didn't happen to President Trump.
And the second one we'll talk about in a second, as you alluded to, has to do with the January 6th cases.
So I think essentially if you were going to put a label on it, it would be the narrative is falling apart.
The Democrats put up a narrative, and they've done it since 2016.
Their narrative was that Trump was an agent of Russia.
That fell apart.
Now, the narrative was that Trump incited an insurrection.
That now has fallen apart.
That Trump has committed all these crimes in office.
That's falling apart.
So the entire narrative against Trump is now falling apart.
And I think it's a very good week for him, I think.
Well, I'll tell you what, he's breathing easier as many others that have had injustice thrown at them.
So we will hear more.
There was one, when I looked at the names, how they voted, the two I remember, and I assume the report was correct, but the article I read said that Amy Barrett, which remember about a couple weeks ago, she says, I'm my own person.
Yeah, yeah.
She voted against this.
All the other more conservative justices.
So she may have, sometimes she might have one point that you'd have a hard time arguing with.
I don't know if that's true.
But it was a surprise to me, especially when Katina Brown Jackson had a vote here a month or so ago that we were surprised.
Yeah, yeah.
And from our viewpoint, she deserves credit for that because she voted yes on this.
Yeah, yeah, very interesting.
Well, Sean Davis, I think from the federal list, if I'm not mistaken, he had a couple of interesting insights, and they appear in the Zero Hedge article.
If you could just fast forward to the one that says key paragraph, I think it's two or three in, and put that one up.
So key paragraph in the Supreme Court ruling, Dr. Paul, and this is a quote from the decision.
Taking into account these competing considerations, the court concludes that the separation of powers principles explicated in the court's precedent necessitate at least a presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for a president's acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility.
Such an immunity is required to safeguard the independence and effective functioning of the executive branch and to enable the president to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution.
At a minimum, the president must be immune from prosecution for an official act unless the government can show that applying criminal prohibition to the act would pose no dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the executive branch.
And, you know, you spend a lot of time, Dr. Paul, being critical of the executive branch overreach, but at the same time, they try to clip the wings of the, you know, of the legitimate powers of the executive branch.
And I think they got this right.
I'm not a constitutional scholar, but I think this makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, and Jonathan's article, and we're going to be talking about that, is interesting because he's an academician, and he mentions where he was not exactly right during the discussion of this.
And then he brought up some alternatives of that.
But I think his heart is with the direction of the court.
Yeah, yeah, that's going.
Well, let's go ahead and put that one up then, because this is Charley writing today.
I think it was.
And again, this is the narrative falling apart from day one.
I remember it was about two days after the January 6th, and you wrote a column saying this was not an insurrection.
And people flipped out when you said that.
But every day, every ruling that comes down tends to bolster your initial view on that.
If you can put that up, insurrection light.
The Supreme Court downsizes the insurrection to largely trespassing.
And he says, he's talking about, he says on Friday, Fisher versus the U.S. reject hundreds of charges in January 6th cases for obstruction of legal proceedings.
For many cases, that will leave relatively minor offenses like trespass or unlawful entry.
It's only the latest blow to efforts to portray the riot as a massive conspiracy to overthrow the government.
While portrayed by pundits and press in strictly ideological terms, it actually produced an interesting lineup with, as you point out, Dr. Paul, Justice Brown Jackson voting with the majority and Justice Amy Comey Barrett voting in dissent.
Nevertheless, it was a solid ruling that they were not guilty of obstruction of legal proceedings, but just trespassing.
And even that would be a question, I think, because it's supposed to be the people's house, right?
It's a major, major defeat for this narrative.
Yeah, the trial is so annoying.
It was a kangaroo court for all that.
It should have been thrown out for that.
Yeah.
Nothing else.
But the charges were originally obstruction of official proceedings.
And that's pretty vague.
But the other one is conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.
And I thought, well, has the DOG ever conspired to defraud the liberties of the people?
I mean, it's so crazy.
But it's also, they had been charging Trump and others against the conspiracy against rights.
We don't want them to conspire against our rights.
But in doing so, they threw the whole Constitution out the window.
And just words, words, words.
And they got away with it for so long.
But it was mostly the perpetuation of this had to deal with the complicity of the media.
The media was a ringleader there.
But it's interesting, though.
It's not quite total movement, significant movement in the right direction.
Might have saved an election.
And I think that this is pretty good, but we'll have to wait and see.
And I think that when this all started on this conspiracy and why the takeover of the Capitol was occurring, all I could think of is, you know, somebody was able to portray this as, you know, how often have they said Trump called up and said, get those votes, no matter how you can do it, cheat, lie, cheating, and steal.
And what they should have said is, do you think it should be okay for us to have a challenge to make sure they counted all the votes correctly?
Yeah, yeah.
They never talked about it.
It's wording.
You're right.
It's wording.
If he just had some different wording, he'd get in less trouble.
He needs to call you up.
Why didn't the Republicans do this?
Sometimes I wonder where they are on this.
Because maybe they have their controllers versus their controllers.
Well, you hit the nail on the head, though.
What are you going to say to these people that have been riding away in this horrible D.C. jail for years and years with all of these serious charges?
You know how they packed the charges onto them.
It turns out they didn't do anything except enter a building.
I mean, you're so right.
How are they going to get this time back?
Time with their families, grandchildren.
Ridiculous Wording Debate 00:08:54
Here's a couple of things from Jonathan's article.
Just skip one and go to the one that says, I've always believed, because this kind of gets to the meat of what Turley's writing here.
I've always believed the criminal charges were warranted for the riot of January 6, 2021, he writes.
And I underline this part.
But this week's decision shows how the Justice Department has wrongly prosecuted hundreds of people for the obstruction crime.
It was all part of what Justice Department official Michael Sherwin proudly declared in a television interview that, quote, our office wanted to ensure that there was shock and awe.
It worked because we saw through the media posts that people were afraid to come back to D.C. because they're like, if we go there, we're going to get charged.
We wanted to take out those individuals that essentially were thumbing their noses at the public for what they did.
I would recommend, Dr. Paul, that those hundreds of people be released and that Michael Sherwin take their place in a jail cell.
Because talking about Americans like this shows to me at least that he deserves to be in a jail cell.
Yeah, you know, as the case went along, and Jonathan, I think, sat in a courtroom.
Yeah, I think so, yeah.
But the more information he got, the more willing he was to shift his concrete opinion.
So that's not like these other people when they have a scenario and an agenda and they know exactly what it is.
Get Trump, get Trump.
And that even started before anything happened.
It started just because they hated his guts before he was president even.
And during the 60s, and that's why you already mentioned the one episode on the Russia Gate business.
That's pretty evil, too.
Years ago.
Because that was illegal.
Maybe, you know, I keep thinking it's so frustrating to get the truth out quickly.
But I always say it would be nice if the truth can be placed in a place where somebody with integrity will see it someday.
And I think sometimes it pops up a little sooner than I expected.
And that's what's popping up right now.
So we'll see.
But the nature of the political system and the nature of some, especially the people in there, these kind of problems, they're going to, I think if you become fascinated with them, when I have something to talk with, we're not going to run out of things.
I wish the conversation was a little bit better.
How faster can we move to a Republican form of government and to deal with individual liberty and get rid of the Department of Justice as being the arm of a lot of problems for us?
Absolutely.
Well, you mentioned President Trump.
Put on that next clip.
Here's an actual interesting part of this.
This is where they intersect.
For most cases, the decision may require re-sentencing, hopefully.
Others with pending charges will go to trial without an obstruction claim.
One of those is former President Donald Trump.
Special Counsel Jack Smith brought four charges in Washington, D.C. Obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and conspiracy against rights.
The Fisher ruling means that half of the indictment would be dropped.
Smith could be compelled to seek a superseding indictment.
So the case against Trump is also falling apart partly because of this.
It looks like between now and November, things will calm down from day-to-day new information because nobody has to deal with it.
They have to deal with the election.
And we might have another debate to help us sort out the pros and cons of that.
I don't know.
I wouldn't put money on that.
You know, if we could talk about politics for a second.
You know, the one thing with all this thing on the debates and all, you know who I decided lost it?
It was Jill.
Oh, yeah.
She was weird.
And angry.
She was screaming, and that picture of her screaming.
Somebody said it was, she just lost her power, her podium.
And I always thought she was off at college teaching kids.
But I think she's behind it.
So then you can get into morality here.
What is her moral obligation?
And I think it's, well, anyway, that's an opinion.
Yeah, no, I got the same feeling.
She's pushing him along.
Apparently the family thinks they thought back in 2020 that he shouldn't run.
You know, even Trump did a good one in the press.
It was sort of when they were trying to get him to say something really nasty.
He says, you know, it was like, what should I, what could I say?
He kept having that look on his face, too, as Joe was blabbering on.
No, Trump did all right.
If you're talking about techniques in the debate.
Yeah, he was a little restrained even.
So interesting.
Well, we'll keep our eyes out.
I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul, by reminding everyone that it is Monday.
Put on that next clip.
Monday means get your tickets to the Ron Paul Institute Conference on October 31st.
Here's the great Joel Salatin with my favorite slogan, everything I want to do is illegal.
Come see legendary libertarian farmer and environmentalist Joel Salatin speaking at the 24 RPI conference.
I will put a link in the description.
Get those tickets.
They're selling pretty well, Dr. Paul.
I think we're going to have to show up.
Well, you know, maybe I imagine you've checked him out.
I imagine he'd agree with us on the Department of Justice.
Yeah, I think he would too.
So, well, I'm looking forward to that.
And, you know, the atmosphere, political atmosphere and what's going on, like I hinted to, I think it's changed dramatically with this court ruling.
That doesn't mean it's going to go away.
You know, the one thing is that the Democrats get credit for, they don't give up easily.
They'll come along.
And they are really pointed about losing power.
You know, that's what they're after.
Power, it's not justice.
And when you look at what's been going on in this country, it's easy to see.
So I think that what we're witnessing now is a shift in attitude.
People will concentrate on the election.
And then the questions are going to come up.
Is Biden going to be on the ballot this year?
And they're in a box, no matter what their motives are.
And they, you know, like the judges before they ever ran for office, it isn't that they got in office and made some mistakes.
Before they went, I'm running to get Trump.
And that should have canceled the whole thing, you know, for the court cases.
But I think that things will be very active here trying to out-guess what the Democrats are going to do because they don't have any easy thing.
And somebody was asking me the other day, well, maybe just Biden, Pete Trow and throw him out.
And then you can, yeah, then you have Kamala Harris.
Her numbers are lower than the rest of them.
So it's no easy out.
I said, at least the Republicans were smart enough.
They decided to get rid of Agnew before they knew they were getting rid of Nixon.
And of course, others have said, and I sort of agree with this because I remember those days.
That was when I first got involved in politics during the resignation of Nixon.
So he resigned.
But when you go back and look at it, the insurrection part, the charges against Trump were tenfold greater than anything Nixon did.
And matter of fact, there was another story out recently that there were some conspiratorial things against Nixon.
Guess who was involved?
The CIA, you know, the CIA involved.
And they did get rid of him.
But compared to the two, Nixon had enemies and they did this.
And Trump has enemies.
So, you know, the other day, I don't know if I mentioned on the program, they said, what would you do?
How would you handle preparation for one of these debates?
I said, well, it's complicated.
Principles Over Names 00:00:31
There are so many things that you have to remember and everything.
And I tell myself, well, I'll tell the truth and I'll be polite.
And that was my rule.
And that was easy to remember if I didn't have a long list of names and countries and what's happening, but principles, knowing about principles.
So that didn't happen.
And I would like to, once again, thank all of you for joining in today, but also looking forward to seeing you at the conference.
Export Selection