Aug. 22, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:32
4174 The Michael Cohen Scandal
The mainstream media is openly celebrating the legal downfall of President Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his former lawyer Michael Cohen - in hopes that this will 'finally' take down the President of the United States. Stefan Molyneux breaks down the Michael Cohen allegations, the impact this could have on President Donald Trump, and what this means for the rule of law moving forward.Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
So, my friends, it looks like the midterms are upon us, and we are looking to the Democrats for interesting platforms, engagement with voters, economic ideas, political ideas, ways to move...
No, none of that. Campaign violations is how to take down the presidency and take an axe handle to the centerpiece of the republic.
So what has happened? Well, I'm going to step you through it.
Just a reminder, I'm not a lawyer.
These are just my opinions, but I will put all sources below to what I'm saying.
So, Donald Trump, U.S. President, had a lawyer named Michael Cohen, who he's not a big fan of anymore.
It was his former personal lawyer and his fixer who claimed once he would take a bullet for the president.
And, well, he doesn't seem to be doing that so much anymore.
He testified on Tuesday that Trump told him to commit a crime.
Whew! Quite a strong thing for a lawyer to say.
So what happened was, ahead of the 2016 presidential election, like 10 or 11 days beforehand, there was money shelled out to two women who said that they had affairs with Donald Trump, some of them of course many many years prior.
And Trump has denied these affairs, but the money was paid out.
So what happened was there was a crazy raid on Cohen's offices.
Turns out he recorded some interactions with his client, one of which, of course, is Donald Trump.
And he pled guilty to eight criminal charges in federal court.
So there was tax evasion, quite significant tax evasion, bank fraud, and campaign finance violations.
You know, they really, really care about these things now.
So, let's just say he faced up to five years in prison and seemed to change his loyalties, which I guess when you're staring at a big hole called prison for half a decade, maybe that can cause you to change your loyalties just a little bit, and he has, I'd say turned on, but has changed his tune.
Now, If I were to write a story about this, just my hypothesis, if I were to write a story about this, what I would say is, if I were the prosecutor, and not a nice person, of course, I would say to Cohen, okay, man, we got you dead to rights on tax evasion.
The problem is, you see, the tax evasion doesn't have anything to do with Donald Trump.
We got you on some kind of bank fraud and filling out improper information on a loan, but we can't really tie that to Trump.
But let me tell you, If you can get us to the campaign finance stuff, which does theoretically tie stuff to Trump, well, let's just say there might be a little bit of time reduction in the sentencing that way.
There might be a deal if you can get us to Trump.
And, of course, I have no proof any of that happened, but it's a possibility in my hyperactive imagination that this might be what have happened.
So the question, of course, can a sitting president be indicted for a crime?
Well, there's lots of disagreement about this.
The Constitution, of course, does allow Congress to impeach a president, to remove a president from office for, as you probably know the phrase, high crimes and misdemeanors.
Seriously, serious stuff.
Now, this is the accusation.
So Cohen told the judge that, quote, In coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office, end quote, he arranged payments to two women for their silence, quote, for the principal purpose of influencing the election.
Now, that is quite a statement, and I can't imagine that he said this spontaneously without any input from the prosecutors.
And the phrase, for the principal purpose of influencing the election, is really to get you afoul of these regulations and laws.
So, if he's saying that Trump directed him to do it, I mean, again, just amateur outside hour here, you have to have this scenario where Trump and Cohen are sitting in an office and Trump says, I really want you to do something illegal.
And Cohen's like, sounds great, let's do it.
And they both acknowledge it.
Maybe it's in writing somewhere, which of course it isn't, I'm sure.
But, you know, this would be the scenario.
And, you know, lawyers aren't supposed to be doing illegal stuff.
Or it could be that Cohen said to Trump, I can take care of this for you.
And Trump's like, great, you are the fixer.
Apparently, you take a bullet for me.
So please go ahead and take care of this for me.
And then Cohen went ahead and paid these women off.
And there's contradictory information about whether he was reimbursed or not.
I'm sure that will come out in time.
And Trump didn't know what was happening and did not know the legality of it.
And from what I've read, intent is pretty important, if not downright crucial in this kind of electioneering stuff.
And of course, for the left to say, well, intent doesn't matter anymore, when it was the sole reason that Hillary Clinton got off from the Comey investigation.
Well, she didn't intend, you see, to send or receive any classified information.
So, of course, we have adult film star Stormy Daniels and a former playboy model, Karen McDougal.
So, Stormy Daniels was given $130,000 and Karen McDougal was paid $150,000.
Now, this has been going on for a while, the Stormy Daniels one in particular.
I think the affair was like in the mid-2000s, but since 2011, Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen have Have been waging war over these allegations that there was an affair and, you know, this negotiations have been going on forever.
So, did it happen just because of the election when the negotiations and back and forth have been going on for seven years?
Seems a little tough to make that case, but...
The other thing, too, is that the media just goes nuts over this kind of stuff.
If you're a Republican, if you're a Democrat, then the very left-leaning media will work as hard as they can to cover up just about everything.
The fact that the media would have made serious meat out of all of this stuff may have been some kind of incentive.
Towards paying this stuff off.
And, you know, we'll see, again, how this plays out.
Now, in court, Cohen didn't actually name Trump.
But his lawyer, whose name is Lanny Davis, we'll get to that in a moment, said that, oh yes, my client was in fact referring to the president.
He said that afterwards.
Now, Lanny Davis. Interesting.
So you'd sit there and think, okay, well, there's some Washington lawyer and he's representing...
Michael Cohen. So, you know, we've got lawyers hiring lawyers to fight against allegations about legalese made by other lawyers.
It's like this Gordian knot of infinite entanglement in Washington these days.
But Lanny Davis is very interesting.
Washington lawyer, public relations consultant.
And he actually served in the Clinton White House.
He served when Bill Clinton was president.
He served as special counsel in the 1990s, all the way through Clinton's impeachment.
And this guy supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
So that's quite a flip when you think about it.
I'm not sure exactly what it means.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
It's quite a flip. That this guy who's, you know, cheek by jowl with Trump for many years as his fixer and would take a bullet for him and suddenly when he needs to be defended he switches to a total Clinton supporter and somebody entwined with the Clintons.
That seems like quite a switch.
So under U.S. election laws, let's look at what keys might fit into what locks here.
So under U.S. election law, campaign contributions.
It's... A little vague, but not too vague.
So campaign contributions are things of value given to a campaign to influence an election.
And they have to be disclosed.
So there are caps, right?
$2,700 for an individual, $2,600 for an individual.
There are caps on what you can spend.
And there are, of course, the whole super PAC thing where you can spend as much as you want as long as you're not coordinating with the campaign.
And if you are...
Spending your own money, then you can spend as much as you want, but if it's directly to influence an election, it has to be disclosed and so on.
So here's the question.
A payment that is supposed to silence these allegations of an affair before an election, is that a campaign contribution?
Well... There seems to be quite a wide spectrum of...
Expert opinion about all of this stuff.
And if Cohen was reimbursed by Trump, could it have qualified as a campaign expense if it was paid by Trump himself?
In other words, if it was not paid out of Trump's campaign war chest.
Because you can spend without limit on your own campaign, but if it is with the direct purpose of influence and the outcome of the election, Then you have to disclose it, and Trump spent about $66 million on his own campaign.
Now, of course, the point of all of this is to try and keep people from directly paying a million dollars to a candidate in return for political favoritism after the fact.
So it forces people to hold fundraising dinners rather than give money directly to a candidate.
But of course, if you're paying your own funding, is the point to keep you from lobbying yourself down the road?
road are you going to take yourself for lunch and try and get yourself to change your mind and provide political favors to yourself and punish yourself as a potential enemy.
I mean, the whole point is to keep outside people from influencing you in an election if you're paying your own money out of your own personal finances.
It doesn't seem to me to run afoul of that kind of stuff.
And it's not anything that could potentially affect a campaign, right?
I mean, let's say that you like wearing suits made on Savile Row, right?
I mean, or Italian suits or something like that.
You like wearing those suits and then you decide to run for office, of course, in America.
Well, you probably want to ditch the European and British suits and you want to start wearing American-made suits, right?
So you go out and you buy...
An American-made suit.
Is that a campaign contribution?
While you're spending money, I guess there's some goal of affecting the outcome of the election, but that would not qualify as a campaign contribution.
You know, Bill Clinton's famous $200 haircut, you know, I mean, if you get a really great haircut, could that affect a campaign?
Well, sure. I mean, you want to be presentable when you're out on the road, but is that a campaign contribution?
I mean, you understand, right? So, a lot of things can help A campaign that aren't classified directly as campaign contributions.
So one example that was given is let's say that Trump decided to announce even ahead of the election he was going to give massive Christmas bonuses to his employees.
Well that might help his reputation, that might help people want to vote for him and so on.
Is that a campaign contribution?
Well it might affect the outcome of the election.
So not everything that might affect the outcome of an election is a campaign contribution.
So let's look at Professor Bradley Smith.
So he's a former FEC, that's Federal Election Commission Chairman, right, responsible for this kind of stuff.
So he was on the Mark Levin Show, and he was saying that Stormy Daniels' hush money, the money paid to Stormy Daniels by Michael Cohen, $130k, it cannot be an in-kind campaign contribution, right?
So It's not anything related to a campaign, but things which only exist because of the campaign and solely for the purpose of the campaign.
So there are many other reasons, of course, why Trump would have wanted to keep this alleged affair quiet.
He doesn't believe it's true.
He doesn't want the hassle and it's cheaper to just do it that way.
Has he done it in the past?
Seems that there have been some examples.
I think that the National Enquirer brought up a story and so on in the past.
There's lots of other reasons why he'd want to keep this quiet.
It is not solely for the purpose of the campaign and something that only arises because there is a campaign that is going on.
So, according to some experts, it is not a campaign contribution for a candidate to instruct his attorney To give money to what has been described as a nuisance claim to avoid embarrassment, bad publicity and so on.
It is not a campaign donation for Donald Trump to pay back his attorney who paid off that nuisance suit.
So, is it an in-kind campaign contribution?
It seems tough to make that case, right?
There's no explicit rule that says, well, you can't pay off an accuser.
You can't pay off a nuisance claim.
And if you pay off an accuser to avoid, I don't know, embarrassment, controversy, negative publicity, and so on, doesn't matter.
It's no different than if you buy an American-made tie with your own personal funds to look better on your campaign speech.
It doesn't really have that kind of effect.
So, is it an in-kind campaign contribution?
Well, when the former chair of the FEC says no, that seems quite important, although you're probably not going to see that on CNN or, you know, the people who are just like, he's doomed!
We finally got him! We've cornered him!
His mask is off!
He's revealed! Right?
I mean, this is not particularly true.
And yeah, it was his own personal income, and his attorney...
It was on a monthly retainer and so on.
And the claim of campaign finance violations did not come out of the FEC. It came only from the prosecution.
And so... That is not valid.
Now, when it comes to, and it's interesting because I think we've all noticed this particular process over the past couple of years, that you have like massive laser-like Hubble telescope scrutiny of everyone associated with Donald Trump, and of course Donald Trump himself, who's come out remarkably clean out of this kind of massive examination into anything he has ever done.
But it's not hard to miss how these standards are simply not applied to the Democrats at all.
So here's an example.
And again, the links to this were below.
So this is Mark Penn. He's a former pollster for both Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton.
So he wrote an op-ed in The Hill just today.
He says... That Michael Cohen's guilty plea shows these ridiculous double standards that prosecutors apply to Donald Trump.
This is sort of like what was done to Dinesh D'Souza for campaign finance violations versus what was not done to Rosie O'Donnell, who was sending in campaign contributions using five different fake addresses and all that kind of stuff.
Nothing happened to her, right? So this guy...
Mark Penn, the former pollster for Bill and Hillary Clinton, he says that Stormy Daniel's being paid for a non-disclosure agreement, and she had sought this for a number of years prior to the elections.
That was legal. It's legal to enter into a non-disclosure agreement with people, and it's legal.
It happens all the time in business, happens all the time in other spheres where you pay people to not talk about you.
So, perfectly legal. He argues that Hillary Clinton did not report the campaign expenditures that generated the Steele dossier.
And his argument is that if anyone broke campaign finance laws, it was Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump.
But of course, the prosecutors want Trump out of office, and therefore this case is made.
So this is his statement, or what he wrote, or part of it.
Quote,"...the usual procedures here." Would be for the FEC to investigate complaints and sort through these murky laws to determine if these kinds of payments are personal in nature or more properly classified as campaign expenditures.
And on the Daniels payment that was made and reimbursed by Trump, it is again a question of whether that was made for personal reasons, especially since they have been trying since 2011 to obtain agreement, Just because it would be helpful to the campaign does not convert it to a campaign expenditure.
Think of a candidate with bad teeth who had dental work done to look better for the campaign.
His campaign still could not pay for it because it's a personal expenditure.
And he goes on to write, There is no question that hiring spies to do opposition research in Russia is a campaign expenditure.
And yet, no prosecutorial raids have been sprung on the law firm Fusion GPS or Steel.
Reason? It does not get Trump.
And this is the kind of lawfare issue.
That occurs between the Republicans and the Democrats or the double standards that are applied.
It is horrendous. It is shredding the remnants of people's respect for the rule of law.
But of course, they don't care. They're so consumed with bottomless hatred for Trump that they don't care how much credibility they shred with regards to the court system, with regards to objectivity, with regards to the legal system, with regards to the Justice Department.
They don't care. They just want to get him by any means necessary.
If that means destroying people's faith in the republic, well, I think that's barely even a speed bump on their writing down on Trump.
Now, the FEC, the Federal Election Commission, is just a civil law enforcement agency, so it can only levy fines against people who are found to have violated this kind of stuff.
Now, that doesn't mean that there can't be criminal stuff further on, but the FEC, which would, I think, be the first place to determine Whether or not this happened, they can only levy.
Fine. Now, in-kind contributions.
I mean, it's pretty wild when you think about it.
I think a pretty strong case could be made that since the media is so overwhelmingly Democrat in America, that the entire media is an in-kind contribution to the Democrats, because they're constantly praising the Democrats, covering up for the Democrats, downplaying Democrats' dirty deeds, while magnifying and exacerbating any potential misdeed on the part of Republicans.
And if you have any doubt as to the left-leaning nature...
Of the American media, I give you this tasty little nugget, and I quote, More than $396,000 combined to the presidential campaigns of Clinton and Trump, according to the report.
The vast majority of those funds, about $382,000, or 96%, went to the Democratic nominee.
Only about $14,000 went to the Republican.
That is an astounding lack of diversity, I must say.
I mean, that's mad. And they think that this doesn't produce any bias.
So this is all contributions in kind, with the direct goal of trying to influence the outcome of an election.
What's that worth? How can anyone win against that?
Well, I guess Trump did, which is really quite remarkable and speaks to the power of social media, which we'll get to in a moment.
So yeah, what is the value of relentless anti-Trump propaganda from the mainstream media?
What is the value of spending 18 months pumping this mad Russian collusion theory for which there's no proof?
No proof! After untold amounts of money spent, after untold amounts of man-hours poured into trying to find anything negative about anybody and looking for this magic pixie elf of Russian collusion, nothing has been found.
Now, switch gears for a sec.
So, Cohen, I was a little surprised about this.
Maybe this is more common than I think, but I'll just share my surprise.
Let me know what you think. So Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer, blah blah blah, scheduled for sentencing on December the 12th.
Now, it's currently mid-August.
December the 12th, 2018.
Now that... That seems like quite a long time for a guy who's copped a plea bargain.
Because normally, I would assume you only cop a plea bargain if you have some guarantee of what your sentence is going to be.
You don't cop a plea bargain unless you're given some consideration in the sentencing.
You know, the old thing, well, it's, we're going to go for 10 years if we go to trial.
But if you cop a plea, it's only going to be two years or something like that, right?
So given that he copped a plea, and I assume that there's some consideration in his sentencing, why is it taking so long?
To get his sentencing.
Interesting. Now, this, of course, is after the November midterms.
Interesting. So one thing, of course, is that it will help keep the story alive.
The other thing that it does is it keeps leverage on one Michael Cohen.
Because until we find out whether the Democrats or the Republicans are going to win in November, when we find out the outcome of the midterms, well...
It's sort of like when the Manafort trial was going on, and some of the media was desperately trying to unseal the records of where the jurors lived.
Trying to dox the jurors in a trial.
Ah, horrible. And now that the trial has ended, they don't care anymore.
I guess they've got to keep the leverage.
They've got to keep... The squeeze on people, and I just think that's interesting.
Whether it's true or not, I don't know.
Just interesting.
It also struck me.
You know what else could be considered vaguely in the territory of an in-kind contribution to a political candidate or political party is, I don't know...
Massive deplatforming of alternative media, because, you know, a lot of the alternative media are somewhat friendly to Donald Trump, and so, yeah, Yank and those guys are off the air, or off the internet, or off the social media platforms as a whole.
Don't tell me that's being done accidentally.
Social media giants with leftist biases manipulating data and promoting certain stories and...
Deprecating other stories.
Hmm, I wonder if that could be considered any kind of in-kind contribution.
And you see the media very, very concerned with any sexual impropriety and any cover-ups and any payouts, you see.
Phony campaign contributions.
Ooh, terrible, horrifying because it involves silencing people about sexual misconduct.
Just to remind you, just to remind you, there's a taxpayer-funded slush fund for sexual misconduct cases against congressional members.
In other words, you as an American taxpayer, I'm speaking to the Americans here, you as an American taxpayer are being forced to pay for hush money being paid out to people who've accused members of Congress of sexual misconduct.
Nobody's investigating that.
Nobody seems to be trying to get that unsealed.
Now, of course, this is all going to be screams for impeachment, and it's going to be, well, you've got to vote Democrat so we can impeach this guy who made improper campaign contributions.
We way back machine here, just going back a decade.
We're not going as far back as Stormy Daniels' supposed affair with Donald Trump.
But back in the day, President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign was fined a jaw-dropping $375,000 by the Federal Election Commission.
Well, why? Because they received a set of donations during the final days of the campaign, and they were subject to reporting violations.
And, yeah, it was one of the biggest fines ever levied on a political issue.
Oh, a presidential campaign.
And so what happened was nearly 1,300 contributions were made, which was almost $1.8 million.
And you're supposed to file reports during the final weeks of your campaign about all of this sort of stuff.
And yeah, there was a series of missing 48-hour notices for the nearly 1,300 contributions.
And yeah, that's pretty serious stuff.
You know, money piling into a candidate right before the election, of course that's designed to influence the outcome of the election because it's happening right before.
So, contributions of $1,000 or more that are received within the 20-day window of an election day must be reported.
And I guess that didn't really happen so much now, did it?
And so there they got fined a massive amount of money for, you know, clear and admitted and accepted campaign contribution reporting violations.
Now, does that mean that everybody could immediately call for the impeachment of Barack Obama?
Well, no. See, as I may have mentioned, he's a Democrat.
Now, A bigger picture story, of course, is this whole Trump-Russia collusion was an excuse to just start investigating and punish anybody who was associated with Trump.
I mean, it's not exactly a witch hunt if you can find and make witches.
No, Russia collusion has been proven, right?
I mean, if you count the FBI and since May 27 by Mueller, more than two years into this Trump-Russia investigation, Not only is there no proof, but there isn't even any clear allegation of any collusion between Trump and Russia for the 2016 election.
I mean, Mueller did catch some fairly big fish, right?
You got your Gates, your Manafort, your Flynn, but none of them were accused of being part of or having anything to do with some imaginary Trump-Russia election conspiracy.
So it continues.
It is a blank check to investigate and pursue and persecute virtually at will.
And sleepwalking Jeff Sessions, it would be great if some Rip Van Winkle hand snap could get him out of his dogmatic slumber or his absence slumber or whatever the hell is going on and get him to actually start taking charge of this out-of-control assault and attack.
Because, I don't know, it's funny.
You could make some even vague case that it's an in-kind contribution to the Democrats to make sure that anybody with half an ounce of common sense stays as far away from the Trump campaign as humanly possible because you're going to get this winch hunt targeting you.
And even if you found innocent, it can completely destroy your finances, your peace of mind, your family.
Who knows, right? Now, Alan Dershowitz...
I like him. He's a pretty hard lefty, but he's good on freedom of speech.
And, you know, he has taken the step of even sacrificing nonsense personal relationships in his defense of principle, which is great.
Also nice to see the ACLU finally coming out.
Good job, guys! It only took you a while coming out and saying that the deplatforming of Alex Jones was not exactly double-plus good.
So yeah, Doshiewicz has recently said, yeah, Democrats are gonna yell and scream for impeachment, but impeachment is for like major crimes, not tiny little things like possible fuzzy campaign finance violations.
Because most campaigns run afoul of these Byzantine laws.
And he said, Dershowitz said, and I quote, Because Either the Stormy Daniels thing was technically a violation of campaign finance rules or it wasn't.
Now, if it was, the remedy, as was the case with Barack Obama, is a fine.
I mean, Barack Obama wasn't prosecuted.
Nobody in his campaign was prosecuted.
And it was paid for. The fine was paid by the DNC and by the campaign.
So it didn't even impact his personal finances.
So it is a heck of a long way to any kind of crime.
And of course, since it was a private meeting and you have a guy, Michael Cohen, who seems to have changed his story quite a number of times over the last little while, It's going to be a he said, she said, but only one person is an admitted liar.
So it's going to be a little tough to make this case, I guess, unless he recorded something.
But if he'd recorded that, that would have been out by now.
I'm sure they've scoured every recording, if there are more, for just about anything to do with Trump.
So yeah, is it going to be easy for them to try and impeach Trump?
Well, no.
I mean, he's an unindicted co-conspirator.
Some guy under pressure of jail time has turned and has said, oh yeah, this guy conspired with me about something.
Innocent until proven guilty, people.
Innocent until proven guilty.
And let's let the FEC talk about it first or investigate it first.
So, yeah, Dershowitz went on to say, if Mr.
Trump, the candidate, contributed several hundred thousand dollars to his own campaign to pay hush money to women who were either truthfully or falsely alleging against him, that's not a crime!
Said Dershowitz, a candidate can contribute as much as he wants.
He also said, I wonder how credible, I'm paraphrasing, I wonder how credible Cohen himself is.
And I quote, the only evidence that the president did anything that might be unlawful, even arguably, comes from a man who's admitted to be a liar, who has a lawyer-client privilege with the president, unless there are exceptions to it.
So can he just up and report on private conversations that are covered by lawyer-client privilege?
Alan Dershowitz also said, do you know how many technical violations has the Obama campaign committed and every other campaign committed?
Failure to report a contribution by the candidate itself is essentially jaywalking.
Now, you look at this prosecutorial zeal and compare that to Hillary Clinton and what happened in the lead up and really since the 2016 election.
I mean, she ran classified State Department business on her own private server.
She deleted tens of thousands of emails, and some of which have been recovered and have been examined and have been found to have contained classified information.
And thanks to Tom Fitton and Judicial Watch for that.
Nothing! Nothing!
Jeff, your conscience is paging!
Get up and do something!
But we all know. Look, the Democrats are currently, like, there's JFK Democrats that are still hanging around by their cryptkeeper fingernails, and then there are the new hard-left semi-commie Democrats, and they're currently at war, which means the Democrats don't really have a platform.
What are they for? What are they for?
Who knows, right? And so they don't have a platform, and so what they are is in attack mode, which is basically what hard leftists do as a whole.
The witch hunt is designed to keep good people from working with Trump, and I think we can all see pretty clearly what's happened.
Justice. The rule of law has become weaponized, and this is all third world stuff, and it is so far away.
From the originating views, or the original views of the founding fathers, that I think you measured the distance in parsecs.
So justice, the rule of law has become weaponized.
There are way too many laws, way too many regulations, and there's so much money in play, right?
They don't hate Trump. They hate the fact that the free market might somehow interfere with the trillions of dollars being siphoned out of the middle class and sent to the rich, politically connected, and the poor on welfare.
They're concerned or afraid or deadly terrified, in fact, of the trillions of dollars being moved around by the government, of slowing down or changing direction.
And this is what happens when you have a government this big, when it has the power To create money out of thin air, when it has the power to transfer trillions of dollars, when it has the power to borrow and bribe its way into power.
Power corrupts, and the more power you have in the government, the more corruption over time you're going to get.
I view Trump as a wild exception to this particular rule, but you can see this general trend occurring.
And it's funny because everyone says, oh, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely, Lord Acton's statement.
Everyone believes that power corrupts.
But let's have the government run health care.
You know, like, it's just wild.
And when you have these trillions of dollars sloshing around, it's too tempting.
It's too tempting.
It's like that scene in Lethal Weapon, I think it is, where the Danny Glover character is looking at a big pallet full of money.
I mean, not as big as the pallet that was sent to Iran by Obama, but a big pallet of money.
And... He says, ah, just, you know, take one.
It'll pay for your daughter's education.
There's all this money sloshing around.
Nobody's going to miss it. It's very, very tempting.
And I have looked at some of the websites, some of the Twitter feeds and so on of the leftists, right, of the Democrats and so on.
And there's a lot of cheering going on.
There's, you know, Mueller is the steely-eyed guy who's going to rip out the heart of this corruption and expose it wriggling to the light of justice and truth.
And it's a bad idea to do that, I'm telling you.
You know, it is the weaponization of the justice system.
It is the use of the justice system to pursue political enemies and frankly to overturn the results of an election.
Not in that soft Theresa May gooey porridge betrayal way, but in a direct voting to impeach and remove a president.
Lawfully elected.
And it is terrible.
This is third world stuff.
So yeah, I guess if you're cheering all this highly totalitarian and dangerous nonsense, I guess you can enjoy your triumph for now, at least until it all turns on you or someone you love.
Actually, no, that's not true.
If you're cheering on totalitarianism, You're pretty much incapable of love.
