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July 24, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
41:12
Episode 155 Scott Adams: President Trump Using His Success to Divert Attention From His Smart Moves
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Hey there Freudian slap.
I like your username.
Alright everybody, get in here.
It's been far too long since we spoke.
Nearly a day.
And it's time.
You know what it's time for.
Oh yeah, you do.
Yeah, you do. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams.
And it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Are you ready? Join me if you will.
Lift your glass, your beverage, your vessel full of liquids of your choice, preferably coffee.
Mmm. Good stuff.
Well, if you're watching the news, you're seeing something, well, really fascinating going on lately.
And it goes like this.
There's a story in the anti-Trump side of the press, which is most of the press, that goes like this.
It says that President Trump got Russia to agree with Israel to keep Iran 100 kilometers from Israel's border.
Which is a huge win for our close ally Israel.
It's a huge benefit to keeping peace in that part of the world.
And it's exactly what the President and the United States would want Russia to do.
Something very productive that actually moves against their old ally, Iran.
Think about it. Russia and Iran were kind of part of the bad boys club, but now Russia's doing something that we like and Israel likes, and Iran probably doesn't like it so much.
How is this being reported?
Well, in the pro-Trump press, it's being reported as, hey, that's exactly what he was trying to do.
He was being friendly with Putin, which is, you know, not the easiest thing to do, because Putin's got some rough edges, if you know what I mean.
But he did it because we have higher priorities.
The Middle East, North Korea, there may be other ways that Russia can be helpful.
And sure enough, right after President Trump was nice to Putin, Something happens right away, which is that Russia does exactly what we wanted them to do, which is be more our friend in the Middle East than Iran's friend.
How did the anti-Trump press cover that clear victory that is clearly based on his strategy, which is completely transparent?
I'm going to be good to Russia because they can help us on these things that are high priorities for us.
And those things that we don't like about Russia probably are lower priorities anyway, at least for the United States, which is the president's whole deal, America first.
And the anti-Trump press has decided to cover it this way, that the President is using his success with Russia in terms of the Iranian buffer zone to divert from his good strategy at the summit of being friendly to Putin.
It feels like I'm making that up.
But that's exactly what I watched all day.
People saying, hey, I think he's using his success to divert our attention from his good decision.
It was a good decision to play well with Putin, if, in fact, Russia continues to be flexible and back us on some of the key things.
So they literally are covering the news.
As his success is a diversion from his good decision.
You know, it feels like I'm in some kind of weirdo world.
Well, at the same time, North Korea, according to one of the satellite tracking entities that apparently has a lot of credibility, even CNN retweeted them, so I believe they're a credible source.
They say from the satellite images they can see that North Korea has started dismantling one of its, I think it was its rocket launching test sites.
Now, that one site may not be terribly important, you know, compared to all the things that North Korea would need to dismantle.
And, yeah, 38 North is the site.
And in the article, they speculate, and I think speculate is probably the right word.
I'm not sure how much anybody knows about what's happening in the closed meetings.
But they speculate that in order for North Korea to do more, They're going to need a big gesture from the United States and allies.
And I thought to myself, oh, there's the problem.
It's going to have to be a big gesture.
What are we going to do that we're willing to do That's good for North Korea so that they'll go to the next level.
And I'm like, oh, this next gesture is going to be something we don't want to do.
What is it? And I said that the big gesture might be that we would declare an end to the war.
That we would just sign a peace agreement to end the decades-old war.
And I thought to myself, That's like the easiest thing we could possibly do.
So our big gesture would be just doing something that we wanted to do anyway.
Now, that big gesture requires something.
In order for us to sign a peace deal, and part of that obviously would be guaranteeing the security of North Korea, what would it take To credibly guarantee North Korea was safe from any of the big powers trying to take over.
Well, it would require China being on board.
Seems doable.
It would require the United States to agree.
And if North Korea is playing along and getting rid of their nukes and missiles, we would certainly be on board with that.
And it requires Russia Now, I know Russia has only a tiny border, but they are one of the big powers, a nuclear power.
And what would be more credible to North Korea?
Take these possibilities.
What is the most credible security deal?
One in which only the United States says, yeah, we won't attack you.
One in which the United States and China only say, yeah, we'll take care of you.
That's a little better. Because you've got two major powers, and they're sort of adversaries, at least in trade.
So if you have both of them, that's pretty good.
But not quite there.
But what if you had the United States, South Korea, China, and Russia, all saying that if any one of those entities goes into North Korea, the remaining entities are going to be against them.
Well, now you're pretty credible.
So it might be, and this isn't a prediction, but a possibility, that Trump, that tricky, devious, con artist bastard, he might try to use his success in North Korea to divert from his other good decisions.
I worry about that.
Don't you worry that he'll use his success to make us focus away from his good decisions?
We can't have that.
What kind of a world do we live in?
The other interesting story And I waited a few days to weigh in on an opinion because there are some stories that are complicated and you need to see how they play out a little bit with the experts to figure out what's going on.
And that was the case with the Carter Page, the FISA stuff that just came out.
Now, I can't catch you up on that whole story, so you need to sort of join me midway in the story and I hope most of you have been following along.
So the big question was, was the FISA warrant to wiretap, or I guess it was to wiretap, card your page, was that based on the so-called dossier, which was not verified?
Or was the dossier just part of a larger application, but not a necessary component?
Now what happened when this big confusing legal document with lots of redactions came out?
Did everybody in the entire world say, oh, here it is.
This document clears up everything.
Now that we've seen the document, all of our questions are answered.
Did that happen?
Well, it should have happened, right?
Because the document very clearly It says what elements were in the request for watching Carter Page.
But nothing like that happened.
Now, just because it's clearly written down in a document doesn't mean everybody's going to read it and say, well, that's pretty clear.
Instead, our two movies on one screen, as I like to say, Kicked into high gear.
And that was two terrible analogies, just back to back.
I apologize for all of that.
But what happened was, if you turn to CNN and MSNBC, they'll tell you, yep, we're looking at that document.
And it very clearly says that the dossier was not that important.
And there were other reasons for the FISA warrant.
And then you switch over to Fox News and their experts are saying, it's very clear that it depended on the dossier, the fake dossier.
It's very clear.
Which one of those is accurate?
Well, probably...
Well, let me give you the big picture here.
You and I are probably not lawyers.
Some of you probably are lawyers, but not many.
But the public, I'll put myself in the class of just the public.
We, the public, are looking at the experts talking about that document.
Some of us maybe looked at it as it was reported.
And what can we citizens declare is true or not true based on that document?
Well, I'll speak for myself.
I can't tell.
I cannot tell independently.
In other words, I can't look at the document and say, oh yeah, CNN's reporting is right.
That dossier wasn't terribly important.
And I can't tell if Fox is right.
Oh yeah, that was critical.
And without it, they never would have done any of this stuff.
I can't tell what's right.
Now, if you think you can...
You might be wrong, because I'm pretty sure that if you put 10 lawyers in a room who were just completely independent lawyers, if such a thing existed, I don't think they would have the same opinion.
I think that there's enough ambiguity in this thing, maybe intentionally, it may have been originally developed, to be a little ambiguous because the ambiguity works for the maker of the document because then you could say well we didn't rely on the dossier but we certainly persuaded the judge didn't we?
So see how you could have it both ways?
You would not want to put together this warrant in a way that says if you don't like this dossier part we don't need this warrant because it really depends on the dossier.
Then the judge would say yes or no on the dossier.
But the way they wrote it, I believe, Was that, well, we're not saying that dossier is the whole thing, and it's not 100% dependable, and maybe there was a political opponent involved in funding this.
We don't need to name names, because opponents are opponents.
Doesn't matter who the opponent is.
If it's an opponent, if you know it's from an opponent, funded by an opponent, you can discount that.
So, here's the question.
Was the dossier used for persuasion of the judge, but not used as an actual factual sort of evidence that you would have to present to meet the requirements of the warrant?
So in other words, did they know they didn't have enough on the facts, but they thought they could push it over the line with a little persuasion?
That's what it looks like to me.
It looks like the maker of the warrant knew they didn't have enough facts without the FISA warrant, but I'll bet they also knew the FISA warrant was not reliable.
So they had something that the reliable information got them 75% of the way, which would not be enough to get a warrant.
Because if you haven't met the standard, you haven't met the standard.
So they were 75% of the way, maybe, and they just needed a little persuasion to take it the rest of the way, and maybe that was enough and maybe that worked.
Now, if that's the case, and who knows if I'm presenting this accurately or not, that's really my whole point is that none of us can really make heads or tails out of this, even if we were lawyers.
I think this would be confusing.
But it could be that both sides are kinda right.
Meaning that when Fox News says, hey, this couldn't have happened without that dossier, that may be true because the dossier was persuasive Even though it didn't meet, it didn't check any of the boxes for actually being good enough as evidence.
But it might also be true that the other side says, hey, the dossier was not presented as a check the box element.
It was just more information and we thought the judge should have everything we know.
So we gave it to him. It was just on top of our other evidence.
But since we don't know what was in the judge's mind and what influenced him, you can't really separate what were the parts the judge said, oh yeah, this checks the box, this hits all the criteria, and what was the part that they were just sort of influenced by that dossier thing that just seemed bigger and more important than the evidence they actually had.
So we've created a situation where everybody can see whatever they want.
Both sides can be right with completely different opinions, at least in a way that they can support their opinion.
So, would that be enough to say that the FBI lied to the court?
Probably not. My take on it, and again, I'm not a lawyer, so I think my credibility on this has to be really low, but I would say the same of just about everybody else you hear about it.
The FBI probably didn't lie.
Here's what they did.
They persuaded.
Is persuasion a lie?
Suppose they said we have five bits of evidence which are not sufficiently convincing for a warrant, and here they are.
And then we have a dossier which we will tell you comes from the opponents and therefore you should discount its value and we haven't verified it.
But the dossier in its importance, if it were true, is really big.
It's really big. We just don't know if it's true.
But we do have these other things that are smallish that we're pretty sure are true.
Carter Page went to Russia, for example.
So, could you say the FBI lied if they presented the dossier as unverified and they said that it came from an opponent?
Not really.
That's not technically a lie.
But is it a weasel move of the highest level?
Oh yeah.
It's a weasel move of the highest level.
What would have made it not a weasel move?
Well, not a weasel move would have been that they verified what they could in the dossier and then said, here are the parts we verified, that's all we know.
We don't know anything about the rest of the dossier.
Would that have been legal and appropriate?
I would think yes. Again, I'm not a lawyer, so my credibility on this is low.
But it seems to me the FBI had two ways to go.
One probably wouldn't get their warrant, but it would be completely honest and it would be the best work they could do.
The other way they do get their warrant, but they're using persuasion on the judges a little bit more than they're checking the boxes.
Is that illegal?
Not if you tell the truth.
As far as I know, as far as I know, everything in the dossier was true, right?
Is there anything in the dossier that was untrue?
There are things that people think should have been included, things that people think should not have been included, but I don't believe there was anything untrue.
I did read Andrew McCarthy's take on that.
I read the difference between the verified and the unverified, and the point of it was, Andrew McCarthy, I hate to summarize his opinion because he's the smart version of this, and if I summarize it, I may lose something that was necessary, but I think There's a distinction between verified information, meaning the FBI checked on it before they put it in the document, and unverified.
I believe this was presented as unverified, which normally wouldn't be in the application, but that doesn't make it a lie.
If you present it as unverified, in whatever words you use to do that, I don't know, that feels like it's honest, but a weasel move.
So, the FBI probably doesn't have any legal liability here, but they certainly have some explaining.
Nothing in the dossier is true.
Well, that doesn't matter in terms of the application, so long as it wasn't presented as true.
They said the source was one they have used before.
That's different than verified.
They said the source had been accurate before.
Now that's just true.
Alright, so I know you hate to think that the FBI didn't lie, but I think it would be more accurate to say they were persuasive Because they knew they didn't have the goods, so they used some persuasion on top of the facts, and the facts were not convincing.
Now, let's talk about Carter Page.
Now, Carter Page is an interesting character, because apparently he was involved in working with the FBI to try to do a sting on some Russians that were trying to recruit Americans, and it wasn't that long ago.
But my question is, Don't you think that Russia tries to flip everybody who's at the level of Carter Page?
So Carter Page is a person who has, you know, some ties with the government of the United States and business with Russia.
And, you know, he's visited and he's given speeches and stuff.
Now don't you think Russia would be trying to flip everybody who fit that profile?
I don't think Carter Page was special.
I would think that the moment that Russia knew that somebody connected with the government was doing business in Russia, I've got a feeling suddenly that person would have a new friend.
Just, you know, just poking the doors, saying, yeah, let's check out this guy.
No, obviously they can't check out every American who visits Russia, but I'll bet they do check out anybody who's got some ties to the government.
The point is, yeah, I'm not arguing what the point is, I'm just giving some context.
So those of you who are saying, let me be clear here.
I'm not defending the FBI just because, as far as I know, there are no lies in their applications.
That's not a defense of the FBI. Because if they put persuasion in there to substitute for the persuasiveness of the verified facts, that's not good.
I'm not saying that's good.
I'm just saying it might not be a lie.
Somebody's saying, they lied, you moron.
Can somebody give me an example of a lie that was in the FISA warrant?
Keep in mind that I'm not tied to my opinions on this.
So we all agree that the dossier was not verified and that as far as we know, there are parts of it at least that are unverified.
So that part we all agree on.
I think we're having a situation Somebody's going, they effing lied.
I think we're having a situation where you actually, that some of you, and this is sort of interesting, some of you literally can't hear what I'm saying.
I don't mean literally in terms of sound, but I'm saying something very simple that is being translated into your brain to some other thing so you can disagree with me, because I don't think you like what I'm saying.
But I'm open to a counter, so watch what happens.
I'm going to ask somebody. So there are a number of people who are saying they lied.
Give me the specific thing they lied on, and you can change my mind.
So whoever is yelling in all caps, they lied, they lied.
Can you give me the example of the thing they lied about?
The dossier was filled with lies.
That's not an answer to my question because it was presented as unverified.
Lying by omission is not a lie in terms of...
What was the omission?
Lying by omission.
Didn't mention it was funded by a political party.
It did mention it was funded by a political opponent.
If you're a judge, and you hear that something is funded by a political opponent, do you need to know who it was?
Would that make any difference?
Now, it looks like, and again, this is the part I don't know, since the warrant was written with names left down, apparently, as in Person 1, Person 2, Political Party 1, Political Party 2, Don't they do that to take the bias away from the judge so that the judge could look at it as a generic situation without knowing the names of the people?
I thought that was the whole reason.
So isn't the omission a feature and not a bug?
If you say this was funded by the political opponent, haven't you said everything you need to say about its possible credibility?
What else would you have to say?
If you said it was Hillary Clinton's campaign, does that make it worse?
Political opponent. An opponent's an opponent.
It's not going to be any worse depending on the name of the opponent.
It should be completely uncredible because of that.
You say, no, the judges see the names.
Somebody says, yes, yes, yes, that makes a difference.
So if something is not credible, And you want it to be not credible because, let me say this, if you tell me this information comes from a political opponent, and it's unverified, I say to myself, okay, I got it, that's not credible, but you're just making a complete picture so I can see the whole landscape.
If you said the political opponent's name is Hillary Clinton, what part of my opinion changed?
None. None.
Doesn't matter if it was Hillary Clinton or anybody else.
It was completely unverified and not credible information by its nature because it was funded by an opponent.
Now, there are other facts that the judge took into account, but that lie of omission Is it not an active lie?
Meaning it couldn't have possibly made any difference to the judge, right?
If the judge was a good judge, why did they care the name of the opponent?
As soon as you hear funded by an opponent, there's no credibility.
FISA requires both sides to be present.
I don't know what that means. Unverified facts were the basis for tapping.
Depends what you mean by the basis.
If you mean it was included in the application, why are we not just blaming the judge?
Why are you blaming the FBI? So whoever it is here who said the FBI lied, you haven't presented an example of a lie.
A lie of omission, if you've omitted something that has no active importance, that's not much of a lie.
They said it was verified.
False. They did not say it was verified.
Warrant requires verifiable info.
True, but did they lie about it?
They did not.
I'm pretty sure you can throw stuff in that's just context.
Omissions are lies.
No, omissions are not lies unless they're material.
I'm telling you that there would be no material difference between saying Hillary Clinton did it or Podesta did it.
There's no difference.
If it's an opponent, it's an opponent.
That should be completely damning, no matter what name you put to it.
The judge assumes everything's true, unless it's presented accurately, as it was.
It was accurately presented as something they hadn't verified.
And it came from somebody that they thought was a good source.
Now, the judge, the judges, Might have some answering to do.
I don't know if there's any process for doing that, but probably not.
You said you are not a lawyer.
But it's a simple question.
What part was lie? What else is there besides the phony dossier?
What else was there was that Carter Page visited people and I don't know, some other stuff.
FISA court was not expecting the weasel answer.
Yeah, but the trouble is if the...
The FBI lied when they said they had complete confidence in the dossier.
they never said that.
Yeah, if you're saying that the If you're telling me that the FISA application was not done in the normal way and not the way it should have been, that's all true, but that's different than a lie.
FBI claimed the Isikoff article was independently sourced.
I don't think they claimed that.
I think they just included it.
Now, if they knew it was not independently sourced, then that would be a lie.
So I don't know the answer to this question, but if the Isikoff article was included as an independent source, And the FBI knew it wasn't an independent source.
That would be either a direct lie or a lie of omission, and that would be material.
But I don't know if that's the case.
Sets a dangerous precedent.
Yeah. So it could be...
The situation can be all kinds of bad and it could be, you know, signs of treason and revolution within the government.
It can be all those bad things.
And still, the FBI may not have technically lied.
Those two things can be both true.
And at the moment...
It looks like they didn't lie, but they did something so incredibly weasel-like that its effect was as a lie.
It's just they might not be technically lying.
They gave credibility to it.
Yeah, so I'm agreeing that they used it for persuasion.
That part is not in question.
The name does matter when it lies her team to spy on the other team.
Well, if it allows...
Oh, it matters because the opponent would be also connected to Obama, but that would be true of...
Yeah, you'd have to connect those dots to me.
All right, so I guess this demonstrates my first point, is that if you and I have a conversation about this dossier, we can't get anywhere, because we very is that if you and I have a conversation about this dossier, we can't get anywhere, because we
Now, those of you who said, hey, go read Andrew McCarthy's article I did, and it was Very well written.
He's a great writer, by the way, Andrew McCarthy.
His actual writing style is spectacular.
And he very clearly laid out what his objections were.
But here's the problem. If you read a clear argument from one side in this debate, you go away saying, oh, I guess I get it.
Now I understand it all.
But you don't know what you don't know.
In other words, if you were a lawyer at the same level as Andrew McCarthy, and you looked at the same data, would you have the same conclusions?
I don't know, but I doubt it.
And so therefore, Andrew McCarthy can be Completely accurate.
Every fact he mentions could be spot on.
The context that he gives it might have all accurate facts.
And still, it's not credible.
Even if everything about Andrew McCarthy is good and right, let's say he's honest, he's a clear writer, he knows the law.
If all of those things are true, it's still not credible.
Because you have to hear the other side.
And if you don't put them in the same room where they're talking about, you know, hey, you said this, no, what I meant was this, if you haven't heard that conversation, you don't really know what's going on.
You know, there's a reason that court cases are not one side presenting their case.
You know, you get it, right?
The reason that the entire justice system depends on you hearing both sides within the same, you know, and also hearing the counter to each side and, you know, questioning the evidence of each side.
There's a reason they do it like that.
Because if only one side came in and talked, you really wouldn't know anything.
Because, you know, a lawyer can make anything sound convincing.
That's what they do for a living.
So if you read Andrew McCarthy's article, which looked completely credible to me, and you said, well, there, I understand the situation, and now I can form an opinion, that is a huge mistake.
You could be right, and he could be right, but you wouldn't know it.
You wouldn't have any way of knowing you were on the right side.
You could just be there by accident or by luck.
So I'd like to hear two people who actually understand this entire situation but have opposing views sitting in a room and talking to each other with maybe some kind of a judge in between.
Then and only then you might get to something that looks like understanding.
But even then maybe it would be too lawyerly for us to understand.
Yeah, who would you get on the On the other side, so Dershowitz and McCarthy probably would be on the same side of this opinion.
Who would be the best source on the other side?
Who's the lawyer on the other side who would say that Avenatti Anyway, so we need to see the lawyers in the same room, otherwise you don't know anything.
So that's my position. My position on the dossier is I don't understand it, and I don't know enough to have an opinion.
And I think that was demonstrated here, that we're all in a similar boat.
Did you hear Avenatti announce that Stormy Daniels was getting a divorce from her husband?
And I'm thinking to myself, How is this the final straw?
You know, I'm just imagining the husband of a porn star.
And, you know, they fall in love, and she's like, okay, honey, yeah, I want to marry you, but you have to understand some things.
I've got this job that I'm going to keep doing, and while you're home doing the ironing, I'm going to be out...
You know what I mean? With other men.
And he says, oh, well, that's okay.
I guess I can put up with that while I'm doing the ironing.
But just, you know, not too many men, right?
Oh, it's a lot of men.
It's a lot of men.
And he'll be like, all right, but, you know, it's PG-13 stuff, right?
Well, not really PG-13 stuff.
He's like, soft R? Well, soft R if I don't want to have good earnings that night.
I'm talking about a...
Soft X. Maybe a hard X, depending on the money.
And so her husband says, all right, all right, I'll put up with this.
So he's home doing the ironing, and I don't know if they have a kid.
And she's off doing her porn star stuff.
And he's okay with that.
What in the world was the final straw that made him say, you know...
I think you've gone too far now.
What was it?
Given that situation, what part of it did the husband say, all right, now you've crossed the line.
You've gone too far this time.
I think it might have been hanging out with Avenatti.
I've got a feeling that he thought to himself, I don't mind that she gets busy with dozens of strangers every evening at her job, but she was sitting right next to that Avenatti guy.
I don't think I can touch her again.
I don't know. What was it?
Was it that?
So, that's a fascinating story that's none of our business, but I can't help but talk about it.
All right.
I think I've said all I need to say about this.
Oh, and remember my prediction from last week?
That I said that a week from now, that whole summit thing is going to be just evaporated in an avalanche of new news?
Well, you got it.
So let's watch the media continue to argue that the president is using his successes with North Korea and his successes in the Middle East that no other president could succeed at as a diversion from his good decisions that got him to those successes.
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