Uncensored - Piers Morgan - 20241209_syria-latest-trump-pardons-bombshell-jay-z-allegat

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Dec. 9, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan

01:24:38

20241209_syria-latest-trump-pardons-bombshell-jay-z-allegat

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Assad Fleeing to Russia 00:15:15
	We have three big stories in a blockbuster edition of Uncensored.
	Revolution in Syria, pardons or prosecutions for Fauci and Liz Cheney, and a bombshell lawsuit for Jay-Z.
	First, after five decades of dictatorship under one family's rule, Syria's Basha al-Assad is gone.
	The man known as the Butcher of Damascus has fled to Russia.
	The men and women he oppressed were pictured walking the halls of a ransacked presidential palace.
	But why now?
	And will Syria be safer under the rule of a group founded in part by al-Qaeda?
	President Biden ordered U.S. airstrikes on ISIS targets in Syria yesterday and blamed Dassan's downfall on the weakness of America's enemies.
	For all this is, for the first time ever, neither Russia nor Iran nor Hezbollah could defend this abhorrent regime in Syria.
	This is a direct result of the blows that Ukraine, Israel have delivered upon their own self-defense with unflagging support of the United States.
	President Trump, meanwhile, is in Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame.
	World leaders flocked to the new sheriff, French President Emmanuel Macre, almost lost his arm in their latest arm wrestling battle, and Trump left them in no doubt about his policy on the chaos in Syria.
	The United States should have nothing to do with it, he said.
	This is not our fight.
	Let it play out.
	Do not get involved.
	Is he right?
	We'll debate that.
	Back at home, President Biden's considering more sweeping and preemptive pardons.
	Dr. Anthony Fauci for allegedly lying to Congress about gain of function research on COVID.
	Senator elect Adam Schiff for leading the Russia Gate impeachment.
	Liz Cheney for leading the January 6th committee.
	Trump told NBC News that he'll look at pardons for capital rioters on day one.
	Those who investigated his role in January 6th should expect no such mercy.
	This was a committee.
	A big deal.
	They lied.
	And what did they do?
	They deleted and destroyed a whole year and a half worth of testimony.
	Do you know that I can't get...
	I think those people committed a major crime.
	And Cheney was behind it.
	And so was Benny Thompson and everybody on that committee.
	For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail.
	Is this justice or vengeance?
	Did the Democrats open Pandora's box by targeting Donald Trump through the courts?
	And finally, Jay-Z is named in a civil lawsuit which claims he sexually assaulted a 13-year-old at a Diddy party.
	Jay-Z says the claims are idiotic and false.
	I'll give my response later.
	But first, let's meet our panel.
	Joining me now, the Democratic strategist Julie Ryzinski, host of No Lie, Brian Tyler Cohen, host of The Crucible, Andrew Wilson, and Vinny Oshama, who will be joining us very shortly.
	All right, let's start with you, Brian, if I can.
	Donald Trump's interview that he did, first of all, made it clear about a number of things, and we'll come to the others in a moment, pardons and so on.
	But on Syria, he's been giving some pretty strong statements in the last 48 hours that America should have nothing to do with this.
	And those statements are going down quite well.
	What do you think of that?
	I would tend to agree that the U.S. probably should learn from its lessons of the past, that we shouldn't have anything to do with this.
	At the same time, I do think that there is some inherent conflict in him naming someone like Tulsi Gabbard, who has been aligned with, you know, has met with, aligned with Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
	And so to have somebody like that nominated as director of national intelligence obviously creates some inherent conflict here that I think makes it look to some degree like there's a little bit of egg on his face.
	But overall, generally, yeah, I do believe that we should probably err more on the side of staying out of these affairs than involving ourselves in them.
	I mean, the other side of that coin, Brian, is that the leader of the rebels used to be running al-Qaeda in Syria.
	And people are pointing out, well, this is ridiculous.
	How can we be supporting America, be supporting a guy that was part of al-Qaeda who committed 9-11?
	I guess the obvious answer to that is, could it be worse than what was in place at that very moment?
	Right.
	But we don't know, do we?
	We don't know.
	But I guess, you know, at this point, we're going to find out.
	Andrew Wilson, I mean, it's very complicated.
	You know, my brother was a British Army colonel.
	I talked to him at length yesterday about this.
	And it's a complex situation.
	There are so many different groups and factions in Syria.
	So many people have been killed.
	12 million or more have been displaced, have moved across the continent, ended up in many, many European countries.
	The whole thing has been a disaster now, really, for much of this century.
	Do you have confidence that the overthrowing of al-Assad will actually improve the lives of Syrians?
	And will it improve security in the region?
	No, of course not.
	Trump's made it very clear that he will be working hand in hand with Israel on whatever interest Israel has.
	They see this as a weakening of Iran, who is a staunch ally or was a staunch ally of the Saud regime.
	So at this point, you know, we have al-Qaeda coming in.
	You made the point, Piers.
	Well, wait a second.
	Isn't it ridiculous that we're backing up al-Qaeda?
	I mean, Al-Qaeda was essentially formed by our CIA.
	So it doesn't really shock me that we're backing them up or that Biden is backing them up.
	So yeah, it is a mess.
	It's extremely complicated.
	There's a multitude of factions.
	This is a 50-year ongoing process in the region.
	No, it's not going to help security for anybody.
	We should really stop sticking our nose in places which are not our business.
	But unfortunately, we are stuck in this.
	At this point, we have the one ally in the area, Israel.
	It's one of our staunchest allies.
	And we really don't have much choice at this point but to play geopolitics with them.
	We're too far in bed.
	Julie Ruzinski, I mean, Trump's whole tone on the foreign stage is very much one of America first and let's just not get involved in what he sees as very expensive wars waged far away from America's borders.
	I suspect this is going to prove increasingly popular because let's be honest, America's track record of intervening in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and so on has been pretty disastrous.
	It will probably be popular if he can get away with it.
	But look, we are the indispensable nation, whether we like it or not.
	And nobody's suggesting that we put boots in the ground in Syria.
	I don't think that's something that anybody on either side of the aisle would advocate.
	But look, we have allies like the Israelis who have crossed the Golan into Syria proper, crossed to militarized zone.
	We are bombing ISIS strongholds in parts of Syria right now.
	Our ally Turkey, is bombing our troop positions as we speak and, of course, Vladimir Putin, with whom I know both Tulsi Gabbard and Donald Trump seem to be very close has just lost a major client state, but he has bases at Tarsus in Syria that he wants to keep and so, by the way, if I were Assad, I wouldn't get too comfortable in Moscow, because I'm sure Putin would trade him away in 30 seconds if he could keep those bases in Tarsus.
	So when you have such a geopolitical maelstrom going on with our allies, with our adversaries on all sides of this issue, I don't know how much Donald Trump will be able to stay out of this diplomatically or potentially even militarily, if something like ISIS is allowed to foster in Syria or some offshoot of Al-Qaeda, and that becomes a threat not just to the Israelis and our other allies in the Middle East, but also to us.
	Let me bring in Vinny Ashana, who's joined us now, I believe.
	Vinny, welcome back to Uncensored.
	It was great to have you.
	If I said to you, look, there's a Middle Eastern country where the the new leader is somebody who was helping to run Al-Qaeda.
	You would probably want to go and deal with it, particularly if there were also people from ISIS that were circling around as well crediting, you know, filling the vacuum of of Assad being thrown out.
	And yet we know that President Biden is offering support to this guy, leader of the rebels.
	Donald Trump meanwhile, says we shouldn't really be getting involved at all.
	America, what do you sit with this?
	You know me peers, as a United States AIR Force veteran who has brothers and sisters that are actually veterans, who have friends that are still serving in the Marines and the ARMY all around the around the world.
	I'm anti-helping like let.
	This is their mess peers, and I understand we kind of started it.
	You know Obama, with Brennan, with the Operation Tinder Timber Sycamore, which brings the CIA in there.
	You know I mean, arm the rebels.
	Those rebels are trying to take out Assad.
	They fail, the weapons are left over and ISIS is created.
	Peers, I am 1000.
	Leave everybody all the mess.
	Leave them up to their own peers.
	We have enough problems in our country right now.
	Biden just gave another billion dollars to Africa.
	He gave another billion dollars to Ukraine.
	God knows how much more money he's going to give right now to Syria, because that's what they want to do.
	Peers, I am anti any soldiers.
	I know we have almost a thousand there right now.
	Peers, I don't want any involvement with the United States.
	I don't want any of our soldiers to die.
	And all these people, all these people that are pro-war peers, I will.
	How about this?
	They can't sign any bill, they can't sign any declaration of war unless your children are going there okay, unless your kid is over there fighting.
	Enough with sending Americans, kids there, to die for for, for money and for geopolitical purposes.
	I mean Brian, I know a lot of Americans feel that way and that's one of the reasons Trump got re-elected.
	People do think is sort of no war, America first, don't get involved in this stuff.
	It never works, just makes things worse.
	At the same time, you know, we don't know what kind of leadership we're looking at in Syria now.
	We don't know if they are genuinely changed leopards or whether the spots remain exactly the same and if they remain the same, we're dealing with Islamic fundamentalists and we know where that can lead.
	We saw what happened with ISIS.
	We saw what happened with Al-Qaeda.
	It seems to me quite a precarious bet that America is making if it decides to, as Trump wants to just keep out of this completely that if you allow Al-Qaeda and ISIS and people that align themselves to that very extreme Islamic fundamentalism to grow up again in somewhere like Syria that is going to represent at some stage, there's going to be retribution against America, who they hate Well,
	I think to some degree also it could be, you can make the counter argument that if America intervenes, that that will foster the same resentment toward the United States.
	And so to some degree, look, I think to some degree I do agree with Vinny, probably the only thing that we're going to agree with on this panel, but I think I would tend to be more isolationist as it relates to issues in the Middle East than not.
	Yeah.
	I mean, Andrew, like I say, I think Vinny's views, if you go back 10 years ago, they might have been a lot more controversial.
	This seems to me now to be the growing sentiment amongst, I would say the majority of Americans.
	Well, that's because the millennials and, you know, the next, the following generations have been living their whole lives under perpetual warfare.
	So, you know, since 9-11, most of my adult life I have spent with the United States in perpetual wars in the Middle East that nobody understands.
	They don't really know why we're there.
	Soldiers who come back can't really illuminate it any better for you.
	People in command can't really illuminate it any better for you.
	And the American people are sick of it.
	Trump, the great populist that he is, recognizes this, and he happed into that as part of his reelection and his initial election.
	And I think it's a really good idea for us to draw back from the Middle Eastern affairs as much as possible.
	It's not good for the Christian population of the United States.
	We have compatibility issues with both Muslim ethics and with Jewish ethics.
	So ultimately, for us, we need to focus on our domestic policies, and that's what we put Trump in there to do, not to get us involved in foreign affairs.
	Yeah, but Judy Roginski, it's a massive departure from where America has been for the last 60, 70 years, and really since the end of World War II, to take such an isolationist view.
	But like I say, I do think it's where the majority of Americans sit now.
	Well, it depends on where it ends, right?
	The PAX Americana has served the world pretty well, as you point out, since 1945.
	The reality is, as I said earlier, we are the indispensable nation.
	And sometimes we don't invite these crises, but these crises come to our shores anyway.
	And so I think we need to be very realistic about the fact that the world is very unsettled.
	We've got things going on in the states of Taiwan right now.
	We've got things going on in Europe right now with respect to Russia and Ukraine.
	We have a huge refugee crisis, as you pointed out, from Syria and other places in the Levant that are coming to Europe to our European allies, including the fact that Donald Trump may or may not want to keep NATO as the force that it's been low all these many decades.
	And so, look, I tend to agree that we don't need to get involved in another Middle Eastern fight.
	We certainly don't need boots on the ground in the Middle East.
	But I also want people to be realistic and understand that we cannot build a moat politically or militarily around the United States and not expect anybody to have what goes on abroad start to affect us because I'm old enough to remember 9-11.
	Of course, it did come to our shores that day.
	And of course, we did have to go to Afghanistan as a result of that.
	We stayed way too long.
	We didn't accomplish the mission.
	We didn't accomplish anything we set out to do.
	I completely get the frustration.
	I was anti-Iraq war from the very beginning.
	A lot of my friends on the Republican side, as I recall from my days at Fox News, were the biggest cheerleaders for this invasion possible.
	Now, of course, everybody's kind of changed their mind.
	But I do want to be realistic, as I keep saying, that we don't know what's going to happen, especially in a place like Syria, which was so reminiscent to me of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, where you didn't really know which side was worse.
	You didn't know who to root more for.
	You kind of had to root against both of them.
	And this is kind of similar to that, right?
	We've got a butcher in Bashar al-Assad.
	Nobody's shedding a tear over him being gone.
	And now we've got this question mark about whether this leopard, as you point out, has changed his stripes, whether he's still allied with al-Qaeda in some capacity, and whether they're going to try to build a pluralistic society in Syria, protect their minorities, protect the Alawites, protect, of which Bashar al-Assad is one, protect the Christian community, and see what really happens between the Sunni and the Shia sects there, which also obviously plays out.
Avoiding World War III 00:03:31
	But this is not a bad day for the United States because it weakened Iran tremendously.
	It weakened Putin tremendously.
	And it helped the Israelis get control of their northern border to some extent by preventing Iran from using Syria as a conduit into Lebanon to help Hezbollah.
	So I'm not shedding a tear for what happened to Bashar al-Assad this weekend.
	This is silly, though.
	This is totally silly.
	We can build it.
	Hang on, Vinny.
	Let me spoil.
	I'll come to you Vinny.
	The Andrews Bonford.
	We can build a moat around the United States.
	Absolutely.
	And we should be building a moat around the United States.
	The truth is, when you say, well, you know, that won't prevent attacks on the United States like what happened in 9-11.
	No, that happened because we didn't build a moat around the United States, because we were busy doing nation building all over the world, especially during the Cold War.
	We helped fund most of these groups, one of which is about to take over, which includes al-Qaeda, which were CIA assets.
	It's ridiculous for you to say, oh, no, we don't.
	We funded the Mujahideen.
	Let's not say we funded it.
	We funded all of these groups.
	The CIA right now has boots on the ground in this nation.
	And for you, and here's the thing.
	We can pretend that they're not there.
	We can pretend that we don't have the CIA all over the Middle East.
	We do.
	I guarantee you they're involved in this conflict right this second.
	And that'll probably come out in the documents 10 years down the road.
	The truth is, is that it is our foreign interventionalism which causes most of the blowback, which then we get attacked for.
	It's mostly us doing foreign intervention, regime change, things like this, which have caused most of these.
	Can I ask you a question?
	A legitimate question.
	If we take a step back, who do you think will fill that void?
	China?
	Russia?
	Who's going to fill that void?
	Because somebody's going to fill it.
	And it's not people who wish this nation well.
	And as I said earlier, the PAX Americana has largely kept peace.
	Yes, we've been at war, but the PAX Americana has largely kept peace across the world.
	We have avoided World War III.
	We have nothing since 1945.
	War is everywhere.
	What are you talking about?
	Of course there are war really do you want to say what a war was like if the United States, if the United States had not involved itself in the Cold War like you advised, what do you think would have happened to the rest of Europe?
	Yeah, the Cold War is a very important thing.
	What do you think that people in Western Europe are living under right now?
	The Cold War was an entirely different phenomenon.
	And a lot of that was due to the blowback of us backing up the Russian international.
	But I would say, I would say, okay, so a lot of this, again, was foreign intervention, which caused this to begin with.
	I would say this, that it's, you could, somebody, a Lebanese friend of mine, messaged me last night and he said, if you look at what happened in Iran with the Shah being overthrown, you look at Saddam Hussein being taken out, you look at Gaddafi being taken out in Libya, and you look at what's happened in Syria now, where he predicts a bloodbath, you know, it's very hard to say that any of these countries were improved by the removal of the, quote, dictators.
	And that's part of the problem here, where it all sounds great in the moment, and I'm absolutely thrilled that Assad is gone.
	But who follows is a massively concerning thing for all of us.
	And I'm not sure America, given that it's still the number one superpower in the world, can actually afford, for its own national interest, never mind anything else, to just completely retreat from these things.
	I think they've over-engaged, but there's also, I think there has to be a compromise.
	For example, if I had been running the United States, I would have said, rather than withdraw overnight in that catastrophic way from Afghanistan, keep a couple of thousand troops in Kabul.
Biden Pardons His Son 00:14:56
	And it might have kept the Taliban in some form of box, which they just burst out of with that ridiculous series of events.
	And we've all seen what's happened.
	Taliban are taking complete control again, and women have been sent back to the Dark Ages.
	So sometimes just American boots on the ground, even if they're not huge amounts of boots, can have a deterrent effect, I would argue.
	Vinny, I want to switch gears.
	I want to talk about pardons and this extraordinary situation where Joe Biden, having spent the year telling us that the rule of law means that no one can be above the law, then dramatically pardons his criminal son so he doesn't go to jail and is now apparently considering widespread pardons for people who've not even been accused of any crimes.
	Well, they haven't been charged with any crimes.
	They've been accused of potentially committing them.
	And Trump has obviously seized on all this and was asked on Meet the Press about the January 6th protesters who've been jailed.
	And he said this.
	I want to look at everything.
	We're going to look at industry.
	Different places, yeah.
	Okay.
	But I'm going to be acting very quickly.
	Within your first 100 days, first day?
	First day.
	First day.
	Yeah, I'm looking for.
	These people have been in.
	How long is it?
	Three or four years?
	You know, by the way, they've been in there for years.
	And they're in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn't even be allowed to be open.
	Now, Vinny, I mean, this is entirely predictable that Trump would say this and want to pardon a lot of the generalists.
	He didn't say all of them.
	I mean, clearly, he was trying to make some distinction between the categories, really, of people involved.
	But what is your view of this pardon process generally?
	I mean, every president pardons people, but it does seem extraordinary that Biden, having banged on about the rule of law all year and weaponized the justice system, in my estimation, against Trump all year, is now effectively weaponizing it preemptively, where he is almost second-guessing that people like Anthony Fauci or Liz Cheney or others may or may not have committed crimes.
	And so he gives them these blanket immunities, apparently, like he's given Hunter.
	That's the plan, which seems to me to be an utter repudiation of the rule of law, isn't it?
	Piers, I agree 100%.
	And obviously the left is going to play the whole song and dance of, oh, it's his son.
	It's the love for his son.
	They went back to 2014, Piers.
	And if you're going to preempt it, which I don't think has ever happened, preemptive pardon, you know what that means?
	They're guilty, Piers.
	They all had a hand in it.
	And Dr. Fauci, okay, if you guys, if any of you have read RFK's book, The Real Anthony Fauci, please read it because everything that he said in there, if any of it was false, Piers, Joe Rogan's mentioned this, he would have been sued years ago.
	It shows exactly who that individual is.
	That person exactly.
	We, as Trump supporters, Piers, and you know what?
	Everybody expects him to come in and be this guy and retro.
	No, we, he isn't half as bad as what we want him to be.
	Like Hillary Clinton, he said he was nice.
	He didn't want to put her in jail.
	He had enough to put her in jail for a very, very long time for all of her crimes.
	And it's ridiculous.
	And you know what I did, Piers?
	I took a list.
	Guess how many?
	A list of all the pardons by all the presidents.
	Franklin D. Roosevelt did 3,687 pardons.
	Barack Obama did 1,927.
	Linda B. Johnson, 1887.
	Donald Trump, 237 pardons, Piers.
	And you know what I mean?
	It's absolutely ridiculous.
	We all know the deal.
	Nobody really talks about it on the left.
	We know exactly what it is.
	And you know what?
	If I was Donald Trump, why doesn't he have Don Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka just start doing crack cocaine, start doing drugs, videotaping themselves having sex, leave the freaking laptops at a repair store with all the damning evidence, the big guy, all the business dealings, all the money that they've made.
	And then in four more years, they're all walk-free.
	It's absolute hypocrisy, Piers, and it's ridiculous.
	We know the deal and they're all protected.
	Well, I do know.
	That guy had secret service protection for the rest of his life.
	Our taxpayer dollars are protecting that little rat and all the lives that he's ruined.
	I have friends that are vaccine injured, not that long COVID BS, Piers.
	If he freaking pardons that little rat, it's going to be one of the worst travesties in the history of this freaking country.
	That guy belongs in prison for the rest of his life.
	Just to pick you up on your long COVID BS comment, I had long COVID for about eight months and it was extremely unpleasant.
	Lost my taste, my smell.
	The vaccine, Pierce.
	I'd say about 80% of my energy.
	No, after getting COVID.
	Are you vaccinated, Piers?
	I had the first two, yeah.
	I haven't had anything since.
	That's where that comes from, Piers.
	That's what I'm saying.
	I don't agree with that.
	But listen, I don't want to get into the whole COVID vaccine debate.
	But I'm going to say, Brian, it does seem extraordinary to me.
	I mean, my issue with Joe Biden pardoning his son is not that as a father, I don't understand why he wants to stop his son going to prison.
	It was the blatant lying by him and Corine Jean-Pierre from the White House podium, which I thought was so damaging to his legacy and to the reputation of his administration to do that from the podium in such a brazen and ongoing manner for months on end and then to just do it anyway.
	But this development now, where they're almost second-guessing that, as the Republicans were saying, I think a lot of sympathy for this, that they're saying, look, clearly the justice system was weaponized against Trump.
	They tried everything to put him in jail and a lot of the people that worked for him.
	So now Trump is suggesting that maybe we return the favor, as of course he was going to.
	Now, he did say, I don't want retribution.
	I think the best revenge is success, which is an old Frank Sinatra line, which I use in a column.
	I suspect that's where he got it.
	But I think that that would be a very good strategy.
	Don't look back, look forward.
	However, however, the fact that Biden may be moving to give people blanket immunity against any possible crimes they committed for many years, I think is outrageous, don't you?
	Piers, I think that if you're not looking at it in the context of why it's being done, then you're just ignoring reality here.
	The reason that Biden has to consider preemptive pardons for people like Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney is because Donald Trump is storming into office by assembling a Justice Department and folks around him in the legal community who have promised to enact Donald Trump's retribution.
	What if they've committed crimes?
	What if they've committed crime?
	Brian, what if they've committed crimes, genuinely, like Hunter?
	What if they have committed crimes?
	If Adam Schiff has committed crimes, I mean, he hasn't.
	There's no suggestion that he has.
	How do you know?
	Because how do you know that he has?
	It's ridiculous.
	Why pardon him is because Donald Trump's FBI director is coming into office with an enemies list.
	Why wouldn't you?
	You're saying they're going to manufacture crimes against shit.
	Is that what you're saying?
	You're saying that they're going to manufacture crimes against you?
	Does that even make sense?
	Does that even make sense to you?
	If there were any crimes against Adam Schiff, then they would have brought them up at any point unto this point.
	But they haven't.
	And so why pardon him?
	Then why pardon him?
	Then why pardon him?
	Makes no sense.
	Your logic is totally flawed here.
	It makes no sense.
	It's not flawed.
	There's no reason to pardon him.
	Okay, Julie, let me bring in Julie.
	If you can answer it, answer it.
	I can answer that question because Donald Trump went and meet the press yesterday and said point blank that he thinks that the January 6th committee committed crimes.
	What crimes?
	I don't know.
	Maybe doing their due, maybe doing their due diligence.
	Stop.
	Maybe doing their due diligence over the course of the time.
	We have gotten that clip.
	Let's play that clip.
	Let's play that.
	Julie, hang on.
	They have immunity.
	Hang on, Julie.
	I want to play the clip.
	Let me play the clip again so we know exactly what you're talking about.
	We played it earlier, but we'll play it again.
	This was a committee.
	A big deal.
	They lied.
	And what did they do?
	They deleted and destroyed a whole year and a half worth of testimony.
	Do you know that I can't get, I think those people committed a major crime.
	And Cheney was behind it.
	And so was Benny Thompson and everybody on that committee.
	We're going to...
	For what they did.
	Honestly, they should go to jail.
	Yeah.
	So what is he talking about?
	So let's just start.
	Let's preface this.
	None of that is true.
	None of that is true.
	How do you know?
	Because he says it doesn't make it true.
	How do you know?
	How do I know?
	Because I would assume that if his mother's...
	Assumptions are a very dangerous thing when it comes to fact gathering.
	I'm asking you.
	Are you saying that Donald Trump's lawyers would have to do that?
	Is going to manufacture evidence of crimes or aren't you?
	Because it could not be the question of these people.
	Well, you're not really answering the question.
	You're going on a diatribe.
	Well, you're not letting me answer.
	You're not letting me answer.
	Do I believe that you wonder?
	Okay.
	Well, actually, thank you so much for telling me how to speak.
	I think that Donald Trump just sent a very big message to Pam Bondi as to what he expects.
	And he expects her to start investing to Kash Patel to start investigating these people.
	Whether they get indicted or not, it doesn't matter.
	It is expensive.
	It is consuming.
	And it becomes a huge pain in the you-know-what to be investigated by the federal authorities.
	And that is the message that he is sending.
	He knows full well that there is nothing that's been destroyed because had it been destroyed, his lawyers would have filed a motion.
	But Julie, I would say to you, hang on, hang on.
	They were not in a position to do that.
	I would say to Julie, look, when you weaponize the justice system of the United States of America against a president of the United States, first ever criminal court case we've ever seen involving a president.
	And it's about shuffling some paperwork over an alleged one-night stand he denies with a porn star 18 years ago.
	When you render the justice system to be such a politically motivated farce, and most Americans actually thought that, when you do that as an administration, when you allow that to happen, you open up a whole can of worms.
	You've done it first.
	You've gone after this guy.
	You've tried everything you could, however petty, trivial, ridiculous.
	Now you're going to be able to do it.
	You're trying to put him in jail.
	And when he doesn't work and it actually backfires and it fuels him and he ends up winning big.
	So you're talking about a state.
	So you're talking about a statement.
	You're talking about a state charge that has nothing to do with Joe Biden.
	If you're talking about the federal investigation.
	I'm talking about Democrat-motivated prosecutors who were doing their master's lead, right?
	I don't know who you're talking about.
	If you're talking about the Justice Department over which Donald Trump will have authority by appointing an attorney general, I am telling you that what the Justice Department under Joe Biden was investigating is the fact that Donald Trump refused to return classified information that he stored in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.
	It is the fact that he incited a violent riot that effectively harmed and hurt our transfer of power for the first time in our nation's history.
	Well, you're now convicting him of all these crimes, which he's not being convicted of.
	I'm not convinced.
	I'm not convinced.
	The only thing he's been convicted of is shuffling paperwork with a porn star.
	Let me rephrase that.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Let me rephrase what I'm saying.
	I'm talking about weaponizing the justice system.
	Let's make it a more all-encompassing thing.
	Where you have Democrat slanted prosecutors who just want to jail Trump, even if it's down for shuffling paperwork over a porn star.
	To me, it was utterly ridiculous, that case.
	And the idea that you then criminally charged.
	I don't disagree with that.
	Right.
	So my point is, I don't think anyone disagrees with it, really.
	So here's my point: is that as a Democrat, you know, when you look at this, what's happening now, why wouldn't Trump do this?
	I mean, he's perfectly entitled to return the favor, isn't he?
	All's fair in love and politics.
	To do what?
	To do what?
	Because we're not going to be able to do that.
	To be equally as aggressive as aggressive political targets.
	He has specific crimes with which he was charged.
	What are the specific crimes with which you want to charge Liz Cheney, that she stood up to Donald Trump?
	Well, that's not the point.
	That's not the point.
	Hang on, that's not the point.
	As a congressperson?
	No, but Julie, the point is we don't know because what is being mooted is that there are going to be blanket immunities against any crime that may have been committed, which does, I'm afraid, prompt the question, what are they hiding?
	Why are you so scared?
	If there's literally nothing there, if none of them did anything wrong.
	Do you like it?
	Why do you need blanket immunity?
	Because you have a justice department that was just told in very clear terms by Donald Trump to the people that he's putting in there whom he considers to be his loyalists that he believes that these people committed crimes by investigating him.
	That is what they're looking into.
	Not that they might have smoked pot back in 1974 in college.
	Why would you need a pardon?
	Not that they might have driven drunk in 1983.
	For what?
	Yeah, but why would you need a pardon?
	It makes no sense.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Let me ask the question.
	Let me ask the question.
	Even if it were the case that Trump wanted to open an investigation as to whether or not there was foul play during the previous administration's investigations of him, why in the world would this require a pardon to these people?
	That makes no sense to me at all.
	Because why do these people, because why do these people need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees on dealing with BS, which is part of their oversight duties to have doubts of crime investigators?
	They have immunity.
	What are you talking about?
	So we just can't investigate anybody because they're criminalizing.
	Because it's part of their work.
	Have you ever worked on the Hill?
	Because I can tell you they have immunity as senators and congresspeople to do their oversight responsibilities.
	There is literally a long time ago that there's going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.
	Now you're back in the middle of the morning.
	Because, of course, you'll have to go.
	Because you're going to have to go hire lawyers to be able to prove that this was part of their own.
	But you just said they had immunity.
	Do you think these people want to have both ways here?
	Jesus.
	Do you understand how this works?
	You have to get a lawyer to tell a judge all of this.
	You obviously don't understand how it works.
	You obviously don't.
	I'm sorry.
	Do you not understand what I'm getting here?
	No, I don't understand why these people need to have a pardon because they might be investigated for potential crimes they may have committed.
	Can I tell you?
	I have nothing to worry about.
	Can I tell you?
	What are the truths?
	Why do you need the pardon?
	It makes no sense.
	Brian, Brian, hang on, hang on.
	Don't talk at once, please.
	Brian, you say, what are the crimes?
Insurrection Pardon Debate 00:05:06
	That's the point.
	We don't know.
	And we may not be able to do that.
	You're looking for crimes because Donald Trump is looking for crimes because he doesn't like Liz Cheney and the fact that she did not.
	He genuinely believes she's broken.
	He genuinely believes she's committed crimes.
	Here's the point.
	To Julie's exact point.
	First of all, what crimes?
	Second of all, it costs money to get lawyers, to get legal representation to go prove all of this stuff.
	And third of all, it's moot because all of these people have immunity anyway.
	You are allowed to act in your oversight capacity in Congress and the Senate to pass legislation to discuss.
	You didn't care what Trump had to spend on lawyers.
	You didn't care about it.
	The law was broken.
	Yeah, you're right.
	They can't break the law, but there was no law that was broken, but it doesn't change the facts.
	So why do you need an all-encompassing immunity if you've never broken what?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	All right, let me bring in Vinny.
	I don't know if you guys are playing dumb or not, but the fact is it costs money to move forward with this obviously.
	I'm glad she's playing devil's advocate.
	Hang on, I'm going to bring Vinny in, but I am playing devil's advocate here because I do think there's a shocking hypocrisy by the Democrats, led by Joe Biden.
	The whole year they banged on about the rule of law.
	No one's above the rule of law.
	And here is President Biden in his last few weeks basically riding roughshot over the rule of law to bail out.
	You're not pretending that it's happening in a vacuum.
	Piers, you're pretending that it's happening in a vacuum.
	No, no, not because Donald Trump is not a family.
	I'm saying you reap what you sow, though.
	You reap what you sow.
	But Donald Trump has promised to use his Justice Department as a vehicle to enact his personal retribution toward.
	That is why it's happening.
	I'm not pretending that they're good.
	But Brian, Brian, you're saying good for Brian.
	Good.
	Good.
	Because we want Brian.
	Good for him.
	If they did illegal shit, then go to jail.
	You guys are talking all that crap.
	And you're warning what Trump is going to do to what Biden and his DOJ has done this entire four years.
	Are you not seeing it?
	And you think you just feel curious because they're going to have to spend money.
	What do they do?
	Do you think Donald Trump is going to be aware of that?
	Do you think Donald Trump should have stolen?
	Do you think Donald Trump should have stored these documents in Mars?
	For them, Julie, spending money, spending money on lawyers.
	How much money have they gutted out of Donald Trump?
	How many people have suffered for that fake-ass cost?
	Zero!
	Because he had his campaign paper for everything.
	Obama's people sent money to him.
	Hillary got fined.
	DNC got fined.
	You're not going to talk over me.
	Let me finish.
	Thank you.
	And your whole, he incited an insurrection.
	It's all bullshit.
	There was no insurrection.
	He said, go quiet, go peaceful, don't hurt anybody.
	It got out of hand.
	But well, the FBI can't even answer how many FBI agents were on the ground.
	Ted Cruz asked or in Congress.
	How many of them incited violence?
	Yeah, oh, yeah.
	It's all fake.
	Nobody got arrested for the future.
	If we're going to go down the conspiracy rabbit hole, there's no point even talking about this because it's like when you're talking about somebody else's family, you're a vlogmas.
	It doesn't fit your narrative.
	I would say, Julie, hang on, hang on.
	I would say, Julie, if we're going to go down conspiracy routes, I do remember a two-year conspiracy being peddled by almost everyone in the American media that Trump had had the election fixed by his collusion with Vladimir Putin, which turned out to be horseshoe.
	That's right.
	So, you know, it does depend which conspiracy theory you want to have.
	In general, in relation to Robert Mueller's investigation, I don't recall ever saying that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump colluded to steal the election.
	So let's not say that everyone else is going to be able to do it.
	A lot of people did.
	And the media did fuel that bullshit for me.
	Okay, but you're asking me to debate.
	But Pierce, you're asking right now for me to debate somebody who thinks that January 6th was a peaceful protest that got out of hand because the FBI set up these poor MAGA people to go beat up.
	It was.
	I mean, if we're going to have that kind of conversation.
	They did.
	If we're going to have that kind of conversation.
	Stop screaming in my air, please.
	If we're going to have that kind of conversation, finding out what the National Guard there's for record.
	Why did Stephen Son, the chief of Tampa?
	The National Guard.
	They were requesting help and she denied it.
	She's on camera.
	You're delusional.
	Okay.
	You're actually one day.
	I'm not interested in that.
	I actually thought the most interesting point that Trump made in relation to all that was the different double standard.
	I listen, I thought what happened on January 6th was appalling.
	And I think that a lot of people behaved extremely badly.
	And a lot of them should have gone to prison, which they did.
	I think maybe it was overdone or some of them got ridiculously long sentences.
	But I thought the point that Trump made about the hypocrisy and double standard of how, for example, the BLM rioters were treated with the devastating damage that they caused, I thought it was a very good point.
	And I think, again, it comes back to the hypocrisy, right?
	Democrats cheered on the BLM rioters.
	That was all in the cause of tackling racism.
	But here you have people who believe they were standing up for democracy.
	I don't agree that they were right.
	They shouldn't have been doing it.
	But there was a double.
America's Swagger Returns 00:07:37
	But Julie, Julie, hang on, Julie.
	There was a double standard.
	There was a double standard in how the different types of protesters got treated.
	There was.
	Piers, Piers, if you're suggesting that Democrats cheered on BLM rioters.
	No.
	They gave them entire cities.
	What?
	They gave them whole cities.
	What crazies on the left?
	Yes.
	Really?
	You're saying that?
	Oh, yeah.
	You're saying that.
	And you're saying that Nancy Pelosi cheered on people who were rioting and meeting David.
	Yes.
	They were saying it was a piece of people.
	That's what I'm saying.
	Show me where Nancy Pelosi at the time was saying that.
	Show me where Joe Biden was.
	You know what we need now?
	You know what we need now?
	We need a group handshake, which takes me neatly to the Donald Trump Macron Love-In at the Notre Dame reopening.
	By the way, let's just take a moment to salute the French, who have got a lot of issues right now.
	But the way they rebuilt Notre Dame, I was there a few months after the fire.
	I thought it would take 20 years.
	The fact they've got it back even better than before in five years is an amazing feat.
	I can only compare it that in London, one of our great bridges, Hammersmith Bridge, stopped having cars over it in the same year, 2019, because of cracks in the bridge.
	And today, it's now at least another five years before that bridge will be fixed, which means a minimum of 10 years.
	They've rebuilt Notre Dame in five in France, and we couldn't get a bridge with cracks in it fixed in 10 years.
	I think it's embarrassing for my country.
	Anyway, that's nothing to do with what I want to talk to you guys about.
	I want to show a mashup of Trump and Macron.
	Now, Brian, it is, I mean, it's very funny on one level, the way they arm wrestle for hours on end when they see each other.
	However, my point watching it, when I watched Trump go into Notre Dame, every eye was on him.
	He has superstar power.
	I saw it myself when he first got elected in Davos, when all the world leaders were down there.
	The moment Trump came in, it was pandemonium.
	He is the biggest star on the world stage by a country mile.
	And there's something about America right now getting its swagger back, which I can tell you in a country like mine, where it feels like the opposite is happening, a lot of people are like, you know what?
	Whatever you think of Trump, whatever comes out of his mouth, all the usual stuff, I quite like the confidence that America now seems to be exuding.
	And I wish we had a bit of it here.
	Well, Pierce, I think if you look at what the rest of the world actually thinks about Donald Trump, the vast majority of them don't view him as some gauzy figure with a lot of swagger.
	I mean, he has negative approval.
	He has negative approval.
	It's very different to 2016.
	I can tell you it has definitely changed.
	I don't agree with that reading of it.
	I've spoken to a few senior politicians in various countries, and they've learned to deal with Trump and accept what he is, good, bad, and ugly.
	And there is a respect for the leadership that he shows.
	I mean, if you try and think about Carmela Harris and the kind of leadership she exuded, there's just no comparison.
	You look at Biden.
	He can't.
	Biden can't even say that.
	This is bizarre analysis.
	But this, Piers, this is bizarre analysis.
	This is what you think about Kamala Harris and conversations that you've had with like two or three people.
	This doesn't reflect the vast majority of the world.
	And all of the actual data that we have from the rest of the world in terms of their views on Donald Trump shows the exact opposite.
	Okay, let me bring in Andrew on that.
	I think America has its swagger back.
	Now, Trump has to deliver, and he knows that.
	I spoke to him last week, and he knows the challenge ahead of him.
	But he also knows he's got a chance to really reset his legacy and become a transformative and potentially great president.
	I think he's got a great chance to do that.
	It'll be down to him and his team.
	But I do think that when I watched him in Notre Dame, I was like, you know, he's back and he's swaggering and America looks like it's got someone in charge who actually does want to make America great again and people are feeling it.
	Yeah, well, I mean, to just listen to the analysis from the Lib on the panel, he says, he says immediately, well, how could he come up with such an analysis based on only talking to two or three people when the whole world hates this guy?
	Like he's talked to the whole world, right?
	Suddenly, Piers Morgan's anecdotal evidence isn't good, but his is.
	He's talked to nobody.
	It's not my, it's not my anecdotal.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Hang on.
	It's not your turn.
	It's not your turn, Lib.
	Calm down, Lib.
	So anyway, listen, it's very, very clear to me.
	You are very stopped.
	It's not all you think.
	Let me get it out.
	Can I get it out?
	Can I get it out before you start?
	Hear yourself talk.
	Ahead.
	So anyway, I'm trying to.
	Trying to.
	You're still talking.
	So anyway, the point is, is like, no, of course there's a lot of swagger to Donald Trump.
	The American people know that.
	It's why they overwhelmingly voted for the guy.
	That's why he got the popular vote.
	That's why he's winning across the board.
	People overwhelmingly across the globe do actually love this guy.
	They like watching him.
	They like listening to him talk.
	They like hearing his speeches.
	They enjoy this guy.
	When you say America's got a swagger back, that's exactly right.
	Donald Trump represents the don't F with us, America-first policy that America has been known in the past for and that we all wanted back.
	Julie, I mean, look, I know you've been quite critical of the way the Democrats have conducted their politics this year, but the Democrats desperately need somebody that can have the same effect, galvanizing, energizing effect and unifying effect on the party that Trump had with the Republicans, given the scale of his win.
	I mean, it's an utter repudiation of so many things that Democrats thought they had the lead in.
	And you can't deny it.
	I mean, the scale of the win is what it is.
	Well, let's not go crazy.
	The scale of his win was actually smaller than Joe Biden.
	Well, hang on.
	He won the popular vote.
	If I said he'd win the popular vote, if I said six months ago.
	Congratulations.
	Congratulations.
	If I said to you six months ago, Trump will win the popular vote, you'd have laughed in my face.
	He won the popular vote, the Electoral College, the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives.
	He won all five.
	I mean, if you can't call that a massive win, what is it?
	No, no, no.
	I'm asking you to say that.
	Democrats did not royally.
	Well, can I speak or do you want to keep interrupting Flat Earther?
	Listen, here's the way I look at it: Democrats screwed up.
	Democrats don't know how to communicate.
	I've been banging the drum on this since 2015, if not earlier, since Trump came down the escalator.
	He's a master communicator to his base, and Democrats don't know how to speak to normal people.
	We always speak and we lecture like we're from the podium at Harvard Law School.
	So you won't get an argument from me.
Democrats Fail Communication 00:05:27
	I will tell you that whether it's Macron or anybody in your government, Pierce, or Vladimir Putin or anybody else, they have psychological profiles on Donald Trump, like we do on all other world leaders as well.
	And they understand exactly how to get what they want out of Donald Trump, and they know that flattery will get you everywhere with Donald Trump.
	All will be forgiven if you flatter him.
	Macron knows that well.
	That's why he engages the way he engages with him.
	That's why Putin engages the way he engages with him.
	That's why half of the people, like his own vice president, who thought he was basically the second coming of Adolf Hitler, and I'm not paraphrasing here, now know that if they bend the knee and if they flatter him, that all will be forgiven and he will listen to them and he will take them into his confidence.
	And if you're Macron and you're in a country that is very dependent on Americans' NATO umbrella, if you're in a country that is trying to hold the EU together, if you're trying to hold a Western alliance together against an encroaching, newly aggressive Vladimir Putin, or maybe not so newly aggressive, you understand that the way to Trump's heart is to invite him to Notre Dame, to give him a seat pretty much next to Prince William or wherever he was sitting,
	and to make him the star of the show because that is what Trump wants to do and wants to be.
	So this is not a surprise to me.
	It's a smart move by Macron to do that.
	It's a smart move by Xi to do that in China.
	Look, he all of a sudden went from threatening to nuke North Korea to becoming best friends with the North Koreans because the leader of North Korea decided to flatter him.
	And what did North Korea do?
	What did North Korea?
	Okay, but what did North Korea, China, or Russia do on Trump's watch in his first four years?
	What did North Korea do?
	What did they do on Trump's watch?
	What do they do?
	Are you suggesting?
	They didn't need to do anything because I'm saying his technique of actually having civil relations with these people is wrong.
	North Korea is damaging.
	North Korea developed North Korea.
	Where's the evidence he didn't want?
	North Korea continued to develop missiles.
	China continued to develop its military for a potential attack on Taiwan.
	All under Biden.
	That's the point, isn't it?
	They've all carried on the exactly the same under Biden, who has the complete opposite way and says they're all enemies.
	Let me bring it, Vinny.
	But you're suggesting.
	Go on, Julie.
	Piers, you're suggesting.
	Hang on, Vinny.
	Let Julie finish her point.
	You're suggesting that if he doesn't pull out of NATO, as he's said, he doesn't.
	He's never going to put out of NATO.
	He was never going to put out a bratload of bullshit.
	Trump was never going to pull out of NATO.
	What he said was if NATO comes out of my mind.
	I've interviewed him and talked to him privately about it.
	All he's ever said about NATO is he thinks the country should pay their dues.
	And if they don't, why should America keep bailing them out?
	Given America pays the lion's share of the cost.
	And guess what?
	They're all paying their dues now.
	What's going to happen?
	They're all paying their dues.
	What's going to happen?
	What is going to happen when he stops giving aid to Ukraine?
	What do you think Russia will do under Donald Trump?
	I would not make any assumptions about what Trump is going to do to try and resolve the UK and Russia war.
	I talked to him last week about this, and I would not make any assumptions at all.
	People who think he's just going to give Putin everything he wants living in cloud cuckoo land, I can tell you.
	Well, let's wait and see.
	I will say with Trump, much better to judge him on his actions than what he says.
	Vinny, what do you think he's going to do?
	I think it's completely different.
	I think it's very, very difficult, honestly, Andrew.
	I think it's an incredibly difficult thing to resolve, but I do not think he's going to make one of the first things he does as president again to give Vladimir Putin a massive win.
	I just don't think it's going to happen.
	So, how he navigates a settlement where that doesn't look like it's the story is going to be complicated, but I'm sure Trump is not going to want a Russian dictator to be throwing his hands up going, victory.
	I just don't see it.
	Vinny, let me end with you here.
	Well, Piers, here's my thing.
	The delusion, the delusion of these leftists that Donald Trump, I'm going back to the beginning of your question, isn't popular.
	Have you every freaking Trump dance is all over the world?
	Athletes all over, soccer players, football players.
	The guy is the most popular guy on the planet, hands down, period.
	And I'm telling you Julie, I respect you, but you guys, I'm telling you right now, you guys have to start changing your tune.
	This fear porn of Donald Trump, you're losing.
	CNN is losing.
	MSNBC, Joyless Reid, they're done.
	If you guys don't start changing your freaking tune, you're going to be out of work.
	America has spoken.
	They want a freaking leader that goes to France and almost rips off Macron's arm.
	That's who we are.
	We're tough.
	Joe Biden would have been taking a nap.
	We need freaking somebody that has the ball to go talk shit.
	Nobody's believing your fear porn.
	Vinny, the only sadness for me is Vinny, the only sadness for me is that so far you have not been appointed the White House press secretary because watching you at the podium every day would be one of the greatest things I would ever watch.
	It's like a Facebook comment.
Jay-Z Allegations Explained 00:06:57
	And I would do it and I would mention your name.
	I would mention your name every single time.
	I was there, Pierre.
	Thank you, Vinny.
	Another reason that you should get the job.
	Thank you to my panel.
	I appreciate it.
	These debates will run and run.
	Thank you very much for joining me.
	Thank you very much.
	Well, joining me now for a quick update on a big development concerning Diddy and Jay-Z is the legal analyst, Lexi Rigdon.
	Well, Lexi, thank you very much, Dave, for joining me on Uncensored.
	Thank you so much for having me.
	Yeah, it was good to have you to come put a legal brain to this because massive bombshell overnight that Jay-Z has been named in a new lawsuit from a woman who claims that when she was 13, she was sexually assaulted by both him and by P. Diddy and that there was another famous person, a woman, we believe, there at the same time.
	Jay-Z's come out with an extraordinarily long and passionate and defiant statement on his Instagram saying that this is all complete nonsense and he's furious and he has to tell his kids now and explain all this and so on.
	But the lawyer representing the woman who I've interviewed actually represents a number of Diddy alleged victims has come out himself last night and said equally robust pushback against Jay-Z.
	Now, for context, we had a guest on here recently who made allegations about Jay-Z in relation to Diddy.
	And Jay-Z and Beyoncé sent me a pretty strongly worded legal letter demanding we take that down because we had no evidence for the allegations, which we did because we didn't have independent evidence.
	But there's a lot going on here around Jay-Z and it's culminated now with this lawsuit.
	What do you make of it?
	Well, you know, when I read it, I don't think it has indicia of reliability yet.
	Of course, things could change.
	More things are going to come out.
	I am sure that Celebrity B will soon be revealed also.
	But when I read it, and I'm a criminal defense attorney, so I try to approach things from that standpoint.
	And I also feel as though maybe my husband would disagree, but I feel as though I'm a pretty objective person.
	And so I tried to look at this and think, okay, it's a 24-year-old allegation.
	The girl was allegedly 13 at the time.
	She said she had been drugged.
	Her words in the complaint, or actually Busby's words in the complaint, were that she was quote unquote woozy.
	And, you know, so I just think that in light of all of that, it doesn't strike me as I'm not looking at it and thinking, wow, this is really damning.
	I'm looking at it and thinking, is this actually a shakedown?
	Or am I going to find out later when more facts come to light that this was a really significant allegation?
	But one of the things that I found noteworthy about his denial was just how strong it was because we're so used to hearing people say things like, oh, this is a private family matter.
	We're working on it with our attorneys.
	This was a full throttle denial and also an indictment of the attorney bringing the case.
	And from a guy, Jay-Z, you know, I've met him a few times.
	He doesn't ever come out and talk like this about his own life ever.
	So for him to do this is pretty unprecedented.
	There is a development while I've been talking to you.
	He's filed to dismiss the civil rape lawsuit that was amended to include his name.
	In his filing on Monday, his attorneys cite the earlier rulings and argue that Busby, the lawyer I alluded to earlier, and his accuser have not met any of the key requirements to litigate her case under a Doe pseudonym.
	In technical terms, he wants the judge to force her to reveal her name or dismiss the case entirely.
	What do you make of that?
	Well, I mean, it's only fair, right?
	I mean, if you're going to drag someone through the mud and make this type of heinous allegation, I understand that if she is a true victim of sexual assault, that is horrible.
	And in a perfect world, she wouldn't have to reveal herself.
	But we're not in a perfect world.
	We're in a courtroom.
	We're in a lawsuit.
	So I think fairness dictates that she should have to reveal herself.
	And I've seen commentary from people saying, why didn't he just get rid of this?
	Well, this isn't a Pete Hegset situation where the accuser is essentially saying you raped me.
	He's saying that she didn't.
	And it's not necessarily criminal conduct in and of itself.
	He can't silence somebody who said that he raped her when she was 13.
	And I can't believe that anybody would actually say something so preposterous.
	If you're accused of that, you can't pay them, as he said, one red penny, or this not only will continue to happen, but when it comes out in years that you actually paid someone off for their silence, even if you did it to protect the family and Blue Ivy, who he alluded to in his statement, you just can't do that with an allegation like that.
	I mean, what's damaging for Jay-Z is that despite his extraordinary statement, this has gone around the world.
	It's been leading bulletins.
	But, you know, it's gone around the world, hasn't it?
	And Mudd sticks.
	I mean, there's no question.
	I mean, he's been emphatic in his denials, both when he denied what was said about him on this show and also now, obviously, what's come out in this lawsuit.
	But there's a lot of negative stuff around Jay-Z right now, which is clearly damaging to him.
	Yeah, and I think there's like a famous quote from someone who was acquitted and he said, all right, where do I go to get my reputation back?
	Right.
	So obviously, we're not talking about acquittal in the criminal sense here.
	I don't know if it will ever get to that.
	But, you know, this has got to have probably ruined Thanksgiving for his family and a significant period of time where he's sitting and waiting for this to come out.
	He had also sued the lawyer for gone after him for extortion for all of this.
	So this must have been a hellacious few months having to deal with this.
	But we saw this.
	I mean, social media was a light.
	There was a lot of chatter basically saying Beyonce is next, Jay-Z is next.
	All the people in the inner circle is next.
	And as I tell my son, you got to be careful who you hang out with because this is the type of thing that happens.
	Because even if he is nose-clean innocent and all he was is friends with Diddy, now he's embroiled in this scandal just because of his association with him.
	Yeah, and the problem is there are just so many pictures of the two of them partying together, and he clearly was at a load of Diddy parties.
	It doesn't mean he's guilty of any crimes or any wrongdoing whatsoever.
	I've got no independent evidence to suggest that at all.
	But when people start filing lawsuits against you, directly accusing you of committing crimes at parties like this, however emphatic your denial, we can see the impact this has on world media, right?
	And therefore on the public.
	Yeah, but I would bet you, unlike the partisans in the media who hear certain things about people they don't like, of a certain political persuasion, and they condemn them immediately, my prediction is that there are going to be a lot of people in the media who say, all right, let's wait to see how this plays out.
	Let's take a measured approach because they like Jay-Z.
	They like his music.
	They like his wife.
	I like his music.
	I like his wife's music.
	So, like, I get it, but there's a lot of inherent unfairness with how people are treated about these allegations.
	The allegations against Jay-Z, for example, are undoubtedly worse than the allegations against Pete Hegseth, because it's a child.
	Yeah.
	But that's being treated very, very, very differently.
	Yeah, it is.
	Lexia, thank you very much, indeed, Johnny.
	I appreciate it.
Middle East Tensions Rise 00:15:25
	Thank you, Pierce.
	Well, returning now to the revolution in Syria.
	I'm joined by the former British lawmaker and host of the mother of all talk shows, George Galloway, who's previously spent time with President Bashar al-Assad.
	George, thanks for joining me again on Uncensored.
	You appear to have gone into some form of grief about the downfall of this ruthless, vile dictator.
	Why?
	Well, when you say I spent time with Bashar al-Assad, you might have added that I spent time with him in Buckingham Palace when he was a guest of Her Majesty the Queen, literally living in the spare room at Buckingham Palace the night before going down the mall in an open top coach with Her Majesty on a royal trot around central London.
	You might have mentioned that Tony Blair suggested a knighthood for Bashar al-Assad.
	I've met him once, twice in my life, and the second time, not on my own.
	So grief, no, my grief is for Syria.
	My grief is for the Syrian people, who are now ruled by ISIS and al-Qaeda.
	And if you were being honest with yourself, knowing what you do about ISIS and al-Qaeda, you'd be grieving with me.
	Well, I certainly think there are a lot of concerns, legitimate concerns, about the leader of the rebels, who clearly was running part of al-Qaeda in Syria.
	That's unquestionable.
	He says he's a changed person.
	He's distanced himself from, as he puts it, the extremists.
	I think we have to wait and see how this plays out and see if he is true to his word.
	Certainly the Americans seem to be buying into that at the moment and are supporting him, as are many other countries.
	In this country, for example, in the UK, I've seen that the government is saying we may have to un-prescribe the group that he represents as a terror group in light of what's happened.
	So there's a lot going on here.
	And clearly, there are a lot of groups in Syria.
	And there's a lot of people who are claiming they have gone from extreme fundamentalism to more moderate positions.
	Let's wait and see.
	It has been known to happen.
	I would say to you, though, I'm not talking really about what happened with Assad when he first came to power, because he was all the things that you rightly articulated.
	I just find it odd that you would view his dismissal now as a bad thing for Syrians.
	And we made a quick checklist here.
	You know, this is a guy, I remember I was at CNN at the time with the 2011 Arab Spring.
	He crushed the peaceful resistance.
	It led to a devastating civil war, at least 300,000, maybe 500,000 deaths.
	More than 14 million Syrians had to flee their homes.
	He fired rockets filled with sarin gas on Ghouta, killing nearly 1,500, mostly women and children.
	Continued to use chlorine and sarin on his own people between 2014 and 2018.
	Russian and Syrian government airstrikes killed more than 100,000 Syrians since 2011.
	Thousands tortured and left to rotten prisons.
	The prisons are currently being emptied out.
	People have been kept there in underground, horrific conditions for sometimes decades under this guy.
	And so, whatever the argument, which is a legitimate one, as I say, about what may come next, we've seen with Libya and with Iraq and even with Iran, sometimes be careful what you wish for.
	And I'm absolutely cognizant of that.
	And I'm not getting too excited until I see how this plays out in terms of the leadership.
	But you cannot defend Assad's record of how he has treated his own people, given the scale of death, destruction, wrongful imprisonment, torture, and so on.
	Can you?
	Well, that's the kind of propaganda porn that you've just adumbrated, that we were treated to about Saddam Hussein to justify invading and occupying Iraq.
	Both you and me, to our eternal credit, saw through that because we refuse to abstract, even if one-fifth of what you just said there is the case, that is not a justification for making every matter worse.
	Now, it's true that Paul had a dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus, but we know al-Gholani.
	He wasn't just the number two to Zarqawi in Iraq.
	He was the al-Qaeda number two in Iraq, killing British soldiers, by the way, killing American soldiers, by the way.
	And then he went to Syria and became the number two to al-Baghdadi, the founder of ISIS in Syria.
	So that would knock Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus into a cocked hat.
	Now, like you, I'm waiting for developments.
	Like you, I'm ready to treat this on its merits.
	If the Christian priests are not massacred, if the nuns are not kidnapped, if the religious minorities and Kurdish minorities and Druze minorities are not hunted down like Gholani did just seven years ago, well, nobody will be happier than me.
	But you used the words, be careful what you wish for.
	In the Umayyad mosque in Damascus yesterday, his supporters were chanting that they're on their way to Jerusalem next.
	And after Jerusalem, they're on their way to Mecca next.
	Now, I could live with that, Piers.
	I'm not sure that you could.
	Listen, I'm not trying to make a defense of any of it at the moment.
	I think it's a very turbulent situation.
	As you know, I've got relatives, including my brother, who've been in the military.
	And you can make a very good argument that when you depose dictators, it often leads to a worse situation.
	I mean, I think that's inarguable.
	And I'm not saying for a moment that I have absolute confidence that won't happen here, but I certainly wouldn't let that stray into a defense of Assad, who I think has indisputably proven himself to be an evil dictator.
	But you're building a strong man there based on something I said in 2005.
	To be fair to you, be fair.
	So what is your view of him?
	He's been a guest of Her Majesty.
	Right, so what, okay, so let me ask you again.
	To be fair to you, listen, I get that point.
	To be fair to you, what is your current view of Bashar al-Assad?
	He's a dictator like all the Arab rulers are dictators.
	Sir Kir Starmer, the British prime minister, is right now, right now, in Saudi Arabia, freedom-loving Saudi Arabia, trying to get some money out of them for the powerless British economy.
	The idea that Assad is a worse dictator than the other Arab dictators is for the birds.
	The real crime of al-Assad was that he allowed the Palestinian resistance to stay to base, to train, and to live in Syria and to direct the operations of the Palestinian resistance.
	That's why they really hate Assad, not for the reasons of dictatorship.
	All our friends in the Middle East are dictatorships.
	I mean, you tweeted in May 2023, I would have been proud to have stood by Syria even as she'd fallen.
	Watching President Assad towering in the Arab League in Jeddah has made me happy today, forward to Arab unity and independence.
	I mean, do you regret saying that?
	Absolutely.
	No, I believe in Arab unity and independence.
	And the Arab League did bring Assad back into their ranks.
	And he did tower over them.
	Because in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is the king.
	And al-Assad had one eye.
	All the rest of them are blind.
	So how would I regret it?
	I believe in the unity of the Arab people from the Atlantic all the way to the Gulf.
	I believe in that.
	Now, there's nothing left of that.
	Islamism is the way forward that the Arabs appear to have chosen.
	Be careful what you wish for in supporting that.
	I mean, the nature of dictatorship, we've seen so many now being toppled in the Middle East.
	That surely ultimately has to be a good thing, doesn't it?
	I mean, historically, when you look at this period in history, you would hope that countries could move forward from being run by dictators, whether it's Saddam Hussein or al-Assad or Gaddafi.
	I mean, it has to be better for the world that over time these countries move away from that kind of leadership.
	Yeah, sure, but the ones that disappear are the ones that don't do Western bidding, that stand up to Israel.
	The others are left.
	And, you know, Kir Starmer's not in Saudi Arabia this week to give them a lecture on their dungeons, their political prisoners, the way that they treat their minorities.
	He's there as the best of friends of Saudi Arabia.
	So you have to take a consistent approach to this.
	I'm against all dictators, always everywhere.
	But our government is not.
	And as you talked about the undoubted horrors of al-Assad's prisons, I got to remembering that Guantanamo Bay is still open.
	Yeah, I know.
	I know.
	And Barack Obama had...
	Barack Obama ran in 2008 on one of his manifesto pledges was that he would close it.
	Yeah.
	And he's a lawyer.
	And by the way, and by the way, al-Assad's jails were used as black prisons by us during the war on terror.
	We were illegally, extraordinarily renditioning prisoners into Assad's dungeons to be tortured so that we didn't have to do that dirty work ourselves.
	So the double standard is what I can't accept.
	I'm all for the downfall of all dictators.
	I think you and I can agree on that.
	We can.
	And listen, I do think it's all very complex, this.
	And when people have simplistic overviews about it, I think they're always universally wrong.
	Let me ask you, there's a lot going on in the world right now, not least in the Middle East.
	You've seen Israel clearly have military success now, both against Hamas and Hezbollah, which seems to have given them a resurgent popularity.
	Netanyahu was very unpopular, is now much more popular because his people support what he's been doing with what they perceive to be terrorism.
	Iran, I would argue, is indisputably being weakened, not just by that, by also what's happened with al-Assad.
	You could argue that Russia has also been weakened because they basically pulled out of Syria completely.
	They've got a lot of troops there, but they've tried to get out of there completely.
	What do you make of the whole situation in totality?
	Donald Trump's coming in.
	He's made it clear he wants to end the war in Ukraine.
	He wants to try and end the wars in the Middle East.
	But where are we going to be left out of all this in a few months, do you think?
	Well, unfortunately, for the purposes of show business, I agreed with all of that that you just said.
	The truth is that the big winners in this are Erdogan, the new Ottoman emperor, whose flag is flying on the citadel in Aleppo for the first time since Lawrence of Arabia and the Syrian Arab National Movement drove the Ottomans out in the First World War.
	And Netanyahu, who looked dead and buried only 15 months ago.
	He looked like he was headed for the Poki.
	And now he's the cock of the walk.
	And frankly, the Arabs are lying prone on the floor.
	And only his tender mercies are anything or everything that stands in the way of him doing to them as he pleases.
	And he's now invading Syria.
	He's expanding the Israeli so-called buffer zone, occupation zone on Syrian territory.
	He's cleaned half of the Gaza Strip entirely of its Palestinian population, the north of Gaza.
	He could right now, tonight, open the gates of Rafah and drive the remaining Palestinians into the desert in Egypt.
	And nobody, literally nobody, is going to stop him.
	And he's got a president coming in who is completely on his side.
	Well, we'll see about that.
	Depends which Donald Trump you meet.
	If it's the Donald Trump that was campaigning in Michigan on the eve of Poe, before his greatest comeback since George Foreman's Rumble in the Jungle, that Donald Trump wants to end the wars.
	that Donald Trump might be the one, counterintuitively, I'll grant you, who forces Netanyahu to have some mercy and to try and bring about an end to this supurating conflict that has poisoned world affairs for all, basically all.
	I think Trump, you know, I actually agree with you.
	I think Trump, I spoke to him last week and it came up about Middle East and Ukraine and Russia.
	He is instinctively, he's anti-war.
	Always has been.
	Apart from anything else, as a business guy, he just thinks war is bad for business.
	It costs an awful lot of money.
	It puts enormous strain on the economy.
	And what do you gain?
	I mean, his argument, I think, would be, actually, if you look at America's wars and interventions over the last 50 years, where could you see a clear victory which justified all the money and all the bloodshed and everything else?
	And I would agree with him.
	So I do think he can be surprising.
	I also think there's a will to get peace now in certainly with the Israel-Hamas war and I think also with Ukraine-Russia.
	You can see the rhetoric from Zelensky that he is clearly now ready to do some kind of deal because they're both losing too many people.
Trump Instincts on Peace 00:03:01
	I mean, Russia's losing 2,000 soldiers a day.
	That's why they've got the North Koreans coming in.
	Well, I've not yet seen a North Korean.
	I've seen lots of newspaper allusion to a North Korean, but no one's yet produced a North Korean.
	Either a picture, unlike the fake Daily Telegraph photographs the other day of North Korean women soldiers from years ago in North Korea.
	I've not yet seen a North Korean, but I think that you are right, that Trump's instincts are anti-war.
	Like you and me, he opposed the Iraq war.
	He wanted to pull out of Afghanistan and the Democrats and the military-industrial complex frustrated that, only to then do it in the most humiliating, cataclysmic way, stealing out like a thief in the night, leaving hundreds of billions of dollars of materiel behind them and losing quite a number of American and Afghan lives in the process.
	I do think that Trump's instincts are right.
	But I worry about the people he's surrounded himself with, Pierce.
	I wish he'd taken you into the White House because, frankly, little Marco Rubio doesn't fill anyone with any sense of confidence.
	So the coming struggle for Donald Trump will be decisive in world affairs.
	And however the war in Ukraine ends, it's going to end in less advantageous terms than it would have done if Boris Johnson hadn't gone all the way to Kiev to scupper the Istanbul peace agreement.
	Ukraine has lost hundreds of thousands more men and hundreds of thousands more square miles of territory.
	So the end game will begin in January.
	One of the reasons why all this chaos is happening is so the Democrats and the military industrial intelligence complex that stand four square against Donald Trump can cause Trump as many problems as possible before he gets in the door on the 20th of January.
	I could argue this is a kind of coup by the Democrats in the United States.
	They are willfully denying the settled will, the express will of the people of the United States who voted for an entirely different approach to world affairs, including wars, but who are having fait accompli hammered into place at great cost.
	I mean, now Joe Biden's about to give aid to the al-Qaeda ISIS rebrand in Syria.
Democratic Coup Accused 00:05:20
	I mean, that is extraordinarily perverse.
	It's been wasted elsewhere.
	Yeah, I totally agree with you.
	What's also interesting to me, and it must be to you, has been the extraordinary evolution of a lot of American Republicans, conservatives, who 30 years ago would have been implacabed to any suggestion you would appease a Russian dictator.
	They totally supported intervening where they believed freedom and democracy had to be defended.
	Now it's a very different atmosphere with many, many Republicans in America believing that Trump's mantra of America first, don't intervene, let countries get on with it unless it directly impacts on American national security.
	It's been a real sea change, hasn't there?
	Politically, never mind anything else.
	Well, cross-dressing is the new zeitgeist, isn't it?
	And political cross-dressing is what we have experienced so completely on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years.
	Now it's the left that is in favor of censorship, the left which is in love with the three-letter agencies, the left which is increasingly authoritarian.
	In the name of liberalism, they're prepared to stamp on anybody, prepared to choke off anybody.
	Whilst people, as you say, that we would once have said were on the right, are taking a far better line, a far better view on these things.
	So I don't know where all this cross-dressing is going to be.
	Well, maybe you're going to have to identify, George.
	Well, George, you're going to have to identify as a Republican, aren't you?
	Well, I was very happy that Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris.
	You know, arrest me now.
	I was very happy.
	I was very happy.
	And I endlessly evangelized for it on the mother of all talk shows and elsewhere because Kamala Harris and the Joe Biden administration have been an unmitigated, unqualified disaster for the American people and for the world.
	And I reckon that on the principle that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, let's take a chance on Big Donald.
	At least he's a Scotsman at heart.
	Yeah, you know what?
	I've spoken to him five or six times in the last three months, once after he got shot and a few times around the election, including the morning after he won and so on.
	He's definitely a slightly changed man.
	He's not going to change the combative side or the trash talking or any of that kind of thing.
	But he's definitely aware that he's been given a second chance at life after not one, but two assassination attempts.
	People underestimate the second one on the golf course where he was four minutes away from being shot dead.
	And he's also got another chance politically to create a legacy for himself, which he must have in his heart thought, I've blown it.
	My legacy is going to be January the 6th and all the rest of it.
	And he's now got a chance with a big mandate to come back and do another four years where he hasn't got to scrap away in a campaign again.
	He can just basically work on delivering on his promises and having a legacy that could be one for the ages.
	I wouldn't put it past him.
	I think he's in a very, far more content place than he was when he won the first time.
	And then it became a war of attrition with the Democrats, with the media, with everyone.
	And Trump's just a very pugilistic kind of guy.
	If you punch him, he punches you 10 times.
	And it was constant war of attrition.
	This feels very different.
	No protest marches, no real aggravation.
	Most of his opponents have just shut up because what can they say?
	And the scale of the win by winning everything, including the popular vote, and by winning like, you know, the Latino vote.
	Who would have thought that five, six years ago?
	So I do think he feels the hand of history a bit on his shoulder.
	And ultimately, he's got a big ego and he'll want to go down as a great president.
	And I wouldn't put it past him.
	No, I wouldn't either.
	And I hope that that all happens.
	He doesn't have to please any vested interests.
	If he follows through with the appointments of Kennedy, for example, in the health sphere, he could change medicine, pharma, the American healthcare system so profoundly that he would always be remembered for it.
	If he follows through with Tulsi Gabbard and the new FBI director, if he forces the rhinos to endorse these people and to get them around that cabinet table, all kinds of things could be opened up.
	And we could know, for example, I'm very interested in doing so, who really killed Jack Kennedy, a personal hero of mine.
	You know what?
	Trump may open the files on our wall.
	Yeah, Trump may well open those files.
	Why not open the files?
	Well, I very much hope so.
	So he doesn't have to please anyone.
Opening Ukraine Files 00:01:57
	He doesn't have to be re-elected.
	He's playing for the history books now.
	And I hope that he rises to the challenge.
	And I hope he opens the books in Ukraine.
	I'm absolutely convinced that the scandals that lie within American involvement in the Obama and Biden eras, I think Hunter Biden is just the tip of the iceberg.
	You know what?
	I've always thought that.
	I've always thought that.
	And that's why I think all of these people.
	Yeah, that's why.
	That's why they've been so involved in this.
	Well, that's why they've given him dead people.
	Yeah, that's why they've given Hunter Biden this blanket immunity going back to the year he started working in Ukraine when his father was the vice president and was given... before he started.
	Exactly.
	So it all stinks to us.
	January 2014.
	Yeah.
	Any or all crimes he may have committed from January 2014.
	He began work in Ukraine in February of 2014.
	There are some real bodies buried there.
	And Trump could do us all a service and bury the Democratic Party once and for all by exposing the extent of the corruption, which led to a lot of dead people and hundreds and hundreds of billions of burned dollars.
	Yeah.
	Listen, I think you may be onto something there.
	The nature of that blanket immunity to Hunter raised a lot of alarm bells, the timing of it going back to just when he started working out there and earning a million dollars a year as an executive for an energy company with which he had zero experience.
	They were only buying the access to the vice president.
	And what access did they get?
	What did they get back for employing him for all that time?
	George Galloway, I've got to leave it there.
	We had a reasonably, well, I mean, almost found ourselves on the same page.
	Terrifying development.
	It was more civil.
	Terrifying development.
	But always good to talk to you.
	Thank you very much.

Chapters

00:00:00 Assad Fleeing to Russia
00:15:16 Avoiding World War III
00:18:47 Biden Pardons His Son
00:33:44 Insurrection Pardon Debate
00:38:50 America's Swagger Returns
00:46:27 Democrats Fail Communication
00:51:54 Jay-Z Allegations Explained
00:58:52 Middle East Tensions Rise
01:14:17 Trump Instincts on Peace
01:17:19 Democratic Coup Accused
01:22:40 Opening Ukraine Files