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July 16, 2023 - Viva & Barnes
02:25:55
Ep. 169: Ray Epps Sues Fox; Ripple Wins; Steve Bannon; Elon Musk; Kari Lake AND MORE! Viva & Barnes!
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This thing was going to go.
My gut instinct is that I will be the nominee and in a position to win this in a landslide versus Biden.
And they will not let Biden run against me.
So I believe that if I am the nominee, they will not let Biden run.
It is why they're holding in the back pocket the documents case against Biden.
It is why they're holding in the back pocket everything else that you're wondering why they're not charging or bringing now.
It's not a Democrat or Republican thing.
It's a managerial class, deep state bureaucratic class versus elected official puppets that this thing was going to go.
My gut instinct is that I will be the nominee and in a position to win this in a landslide versus Biden.
You can't criticize his optimism.
I would not be quite...
My mic is not plugged in.
Son of a gun, no matter how much I do here.
Where is the mic cable?
It's right there.
Come on.
Okay, hold on.
It's not yet.
Come on.
Now you can listen to Viva.
What's it called?
ASMR.
All right, let's start that again.
You can't blame Vivek, or you can't criticize him for not being optimistic.
But I would not place a bet on Vivek as being the nominee.
Unless I were trying to win the 1,000-to-1 long shot.
But even then, I think I would...
No.
Although I like him.
And that's not to say I don't like him.
But let's play this out because I think Vivek is right, but for the wrong reasons.
And they will not let Biden run against me.
I need to hear this.
Would they let Biden run against DeSantis?
Would they let Biden run against Trump?
Would they let Biden run against...
I can't think of the other people in the...
Oh, Mike Pence!
Whose political career and business career should be done, given that recent outrageous statement that he made to Tucker Carlson.
Something about Vivek, that they wouldn't let Joe Biden run against him in particular, but the rest of the GOP field?
I don't think so.
I just happen to think they're not going to let Joe Biden run, period.
So I believe that if I am the nominee, they will not let Biden run.
It is why they're holding in the back pocket the documents case against Biden.
I think he has a good point here.
I think we've talked about this a little while ago.
Maybe Vivek is watching the channel, the Sunday night streams.
They go after Trump for the wrongful handling of classified documents so they can then turn around and use it against Joe Biden when he's no longer quite the useful idiot that he's been for the last couple of years.
It's not far-fetched.
Who would be a more useful idiot to replace him?
Gavin Newsom.
He's slightly more liked than Kamala Harris, but at this point, I think they would take anybody who's going to be a plausible, useful idiot that the deep state, the administrative state, can use for their bidding.
But I don't think Vivek is wrong here.
It is why they're holding in the back pocket everything else that you're wondering why they're not charging or bringing now.
It's not a Democrat or Republican thing.
It's a managerial class, deep state, bureaucratic class versus elected official puppets thing.
This thing was going to go.
Tend to agree with him.
Tend to agree with him.
Good evening, everybody.
Let me make sure that everything is good before we go on.
I had to move studios yet again.
What I'm going to do is make sure that we're live on Rumble.
It looks like we are, in fact, live on Rumble.
Very good.
We're live on Rumble.
Are we live on vivabarneslaw.locals.com?
We look like we're live on vivabarneslaw.com.
VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com Okay, look, I've got the sponsors coming up, but let me just make sure that I actually check the box for this stream contains a paid sponsorship.
I did.
Good.
I've set everything up.
Before I get into the sponsors, though, I actually want to talk about some dirty, dirty stuff.
You all know that I cannot help myself.
I follow Mehdi Hassan on Twitter.
Mehdi Hassan.
To quote a Jerry Seinfeld episode, he's a very, very bad man.
Jerry, he's a very, very bad man.
In the political, I don't know personally, maybe he's, you know, I'm sure he's a great father, great dog owner if he has a dog.
Politically speaking, he is what we call a dangerous player.
Dishonest, like it's nobody's business.
Tactical, like it's nobody's business.
Intelligent.
Like it's nobody's business.
People don't like it.
Mediasan is not dumb.
He's smart.
But intelligence without a moral compass is like a donkey with a tomahawk.
No, they couldn't use a tomahawk.
Intelligence without a moral compass is a liability.
It's not an asset.
And intelligence with a twisted moral compass or a partisan political compass, that's just outright dangerous.
So pull this up, by the way, because it's an amazing thing.
I just had Glenn Lowry on last week, and one of my observations, and this was not an observation on affirmative action.
This was sort of a community observation.
The Jewish community loves statistical over-representation when we get to say, look how many artists, scientists, Nobel Peace Prize winners.
There are out there, surely it shows something wonderful about the history and the culture of Jews, the love of the book, yada, yada, yada.
Every group loves statistical over-representation when it's a good thing.
And then all of a sudden, when it's not a good thing, then we say, well, you can't determine anything from that statistical over-representation.
And if you come to any conclusions that are based on...
Statistical over-representation in fields that you don't necessarily want to have statistical over-representation in, well, then you're called the isms, the ites, the ists, and whatever.
So all that to say, you know, within the community, we know, you grow up, your parents tell you who all the famous actors are.
They're Jewish.
Oh, you never knew.
Harrison Ford's half-Jewish.
Go listen to Adam Sandler's Hanukkah song.
You'll find out a lot of actors who are Jewish.
O.J. Simpson, not a Jew.
But guess who is?
Hall of Famer Rod Carew.
I don't even know who Rod Carew is.
I just know the lyrics to that song.
So check this out.
I'm just fishing through my Twitter feed before the show, and I read a tweet from Mehdi Hassan that says, so weird that the Jewish public health expert and world-renowned vaccine doctor Peter Hotez didn't want to debate with the, quote, are Jews immune from COVID, dude?
Intelligence in that this is a cunning misrepresentation or repetition of what is overt MSN slanderous hit piece disinformation.
RFK Jr. did not say that the COVID virus was intended to target certain races and not other races.
What he did observe, and from what I understand, there is some scientific...
Legitimacy to it is that much with certain diseases that can affect certain genetics more than others, Tay-Sachs sickle cell anemia happened to hit certain demographics more than others.
His observation was not that COVID was a bioweapon designed to target certain races and leave others alone, but that it might have happened that some races are more susceptible And others less susceptible for whatever the reason.
But the media headline, because they got to find a way, they got to go like a next angle to defame and demean and degrade and slander RFK Jr.
RFK Jr. says it was a genetically designed bioweapon that was going after certain races, but not other races.
Somebody said hogwash horse crap.
Mehdi Hassan knows it, but he knows that his audience is not going to necessarily delve into what...
RFK Jr. actually said.
Even though RFK Jr. spent more time than he should have addressing these accusations on Twitter this weekend.
Okay, set that aside.
So weird that the Jewish doctor...
It's nice.
You know, like I always say, you know who never...
I said it with Glenn Lowry, tongue-in-cheek.
You know who never lets you forget that you're Jewish?
Members of the Jewish community and anti-Semites.
And the reason is...
Oddly the same.
It's because that aspect of the identity is the determinant, highly relevant, defining element of a human.
When you're in the Jewish community, for good and for bad, you're like, oh, he's Jewish.
Okay, well, you know, whatever.
Oh, good to know.
Oh, are you Jewish?
Oh, we have a kinship.
We have something to talk about.
Other groups, oh, you're Jewish.
Well, I'm reducing you to that aspect of your identity.
It's a little, you know, it takes a little more dancing to get to sometimes because, you know, black where people can't see it on your face.
Sometimes they can't, sometimes they can't.
So it's a bit more of a dance.
But the people who continually bring it up and who never let you forget it.
Oh, you're eating a ham sandwich on Yom Kippur.
You shouldn't be doing that.
Shame on you.
Members of the community and people who only see you as a member of the community.
So weird.
That Jewish doctrine.
Hey, you know what's so weird, by the way?
For someone who pays attention to this stuff, I didn't know that Peter Hotez was Jewish.
I have to look it up now because now I'm thinking maybe he's not even Jewish.
But maybe he looks at Peter Hotez.
I didn't know it.
I didn't know Peter Hotez was Jewish.
I know that this will certainly now foment some conspiracy theories.
This will certainly now play into some bad stereotypes, some statistical over-representation, and some theories that some people have.
And now Mehdi Hassan knows damn well it's going to play right into it.
Oh, there's going to be people who didn't know that Peter Hotez was Jewish.
Jewish public health expert and world...
There's going to be some people out there, and I suspect a lot of them, who never knew this.
There's going to be some...
Genuine bad faith actors who are gonna say Peter Hotez.
You know, this plays into a lot of historical stereotypes.
He did this, he's pushing this jab, yada, yada, yada.
There's gonna be other people, just the outright trolls on the internet, who are going to now take this piece of information and use it to troll Peter Hotez.
And there's going to be, there will be the...
Malicious political partisan tools out there, the foot soldiers, who are deliberately going to send anti-Semitic, vitriolic messages to Peter Hotez, even though they are on probably the same ideological alignment as Mehdi Hassan.
They're going to do it so that Peter Hotez says, look at all these nasty anti-Jewish comments I'm getting in my DMs right now.
The right is anti-Semitic.
The anti-vaxxers are anti-Semitic.
And Mehdi Hassan knows damn well that he just sparked that.
He just sparked that by doing what he did with this tweet.
He knows it.
He knows that he did it.
I've got to see this.
I did not know that Peter Hotez, Jewish, had no idea.
Peter Hotez, well, let's just go here.
I guess it's going to be Jew.
Hotez was born in Hartford, Connecticut to a Jewish family.
I read his Wikipedia page and I didn't know that.
That's interesting.
Mehdi Hassan knows exactly what he just did here.
And he did it on purpose.
He did it maliciously.
That is a dog whistle.
That is to get everybody out there, every troll on the internet to send Peter Hotez dirty, mean, nasty DMs so that Mehdi Hassan's next tweet is going to be, look at all those anti-Semitic, anti-vaxxer, far-right, alt-right, whatevers.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, now Barnes is in the back, but I haven't done the sponsors yet.
You may have noticed, everybody, it said this video contains a paid sponsorship because it does.
We're going to do two tonight.
I found this to be much more effective and I like it.
It flows better.
We're going to start with the looking good and then we're going to go into the feeling good.
Although looking good and feeling good as Geraldo, what was his name?
Fernando's Hideaway.
He's better to look good than to feel good, darling.
Well, if you can look good and feel good, that's the best.
Hold on a second.
Let me just see here.
How do I look?
How do I look?
I don't know.
Maybe I look tired and cranky.
I am not one who really cares about what one looks like physically, except I did brush my hair and oil it up so it's nice and smooth and hydrated.
Some people care about what their skin looks like.
Some people want to look younger.
They want to have tighter, firmer skin.
They want to get rid of the grimmest wrinkles.
Genyacel.com.
I spent time on the phone with this company, one of the members of the company.
To talk about this and make sure I understood the product properly.
They've got a number of skin products which are scientifically based as far as I understand.
Dr. Drew has talked about it.
Retinol firms up the skin.
This is the story.
It's an American success story.
An Egyptian pharmacist comes to America, starts up his pharmacy, has his own proprietary blends of skin creams, puts them together, sells them or gives them to his customers, and they come back after the weekend and say, we need this stuff.
It's so damn good.
Make more of it.
And thus, a business was born.
Made in America, out of New Jersey, I believe.
They employ something like 50 people.
The product is amazing.
The people love it.
What was I going to say?
Sponsor the New Jersey Devils.
And if I look younger, if I look younger, people, I guess it will actually work for your observation as well.
Genusel.com, promo code VIVA will get you 70% off the most popular package.
It's good stuff.
Shame to admit, I've been using it, but only as a scientific experiment.
So if you see differences, that is why.
Second sponsor of the evening, people going from looking good to feeling good.
Brickhouse Nutrition, fieldofgreens.com.
This is another one because I, first of all, I use this stuff and I don't, you know, I rarely will say, you know, promote something that I don't actually use myself, only so that I could feel good and feel secure about it.
But in addition to using stuff myself, I also like to make sure that it's something legit and something that's actually good and that there's actually some science behind.
So I spent a good half an hour on the phone with the doctor from Field of Greens asking about this product.
How does it work?
How do they make it?
Where are their ingredients from?
Made in America, USDA organic because it's a food.
It's not a supplement and it's not an extract.
It's powdered greens.
Most people don't know you're supposed to have five to seven servings of fruits and vegetables a day.
Most people do not have that.
One spoonful of this.
It tastes good.
It looks like swamp water because swamp water is the nutrient of life.
One spoonful twice a day is two servings of fruits and vegetables.
You get your antioxidants.
You get all your good stuff in it.
It's a healthy habit to get away from the power drinks, to get away from those disgusting chemical sodas.
And for those who can't get their fruits and vegetables, it's the alternative.
The healthy alternative made in America as well.
USDA organic because it's a food.
It's not an extract.
It's not a supplement.
It's delicious.
It's a healthy habit.
And if you can't get your fruits and veggies, this is an alternative.
If you're on vacation and all that you get is fast food crap, even there when you get your vegetables, it's like iceberg lettuce, which has no nutritional value, plus the salad dressing, which is crap.
This is the healthy alternative.
Packs easy, packs light, mixes up great.
It's delicious.
Geniusel.com, promo code VIVA for 70% off their most popular package.
Fieldofgreens.com brings you to Brickhouse Nutrition, 15% off your first order with the promo code VIVA.
Now!
Links are in the description as well.
Thank the sponsors and thank Robert Barnes for being so patient behind there.
You forage.
Don't forage.
I knew someone who wrote the book on mushrooms, like wild mushroom eating.
It was my mother-in-law's good friend.
And the person actually passed away from making a mistake that you can only make once, I guess.
All right, Robert, I'm bringing you in here.
Five, four, three, two, one.
Sir, how goes the battle?
Good, good.
Alright, now, everyone let us know if the audio is good.
Robert, am I getting too conspiratorial, or does Mehdi Hassan know damn well exactly what he was doing by pointing the big finger at, now everyone knows, Jewish doctor Peter Hotez.
Whatever ill anyone thought of Peter Hotez because of what he did and said, will they now have an identity aspect of politics to hang their hat on?
Does he know what he's doing, or is he just a useful idiot?
Well, I guess if he attacks you, that must mean he's an anti-Semite.
We'll see.
We'll see if that happens.
He's been ignoring me.
He's been ignoring me.
It's the best tactic that I think he can employ.
Robert, what do you have over your shoulder?
That is Lincoln at Gettysburg.
It is the book of the month that we are reviewing over at vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
And a great book about how the America was reinterpreted, re-understood, and partially recreated through the filter and frame of Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence by Lincoln's Speech at Gettysburg.
Oh, I forgot one other thing, by the way.
No medical advice, no legal advice, no election fortification advice.
These things right here, by the way, Super Chats.
YouTube takes 30% of all of them.
So if you don't want to support YouTube, but you want to support us, you can go over to Rumble.
The link is up there in the pinned comment.
Rumble takes 20% of those, but they're not doing it for the rest of the year.
And best place, Robert, where's the best place to follow us?
Yeah, well, there's a live chat ongoing at vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
In the part of the show that is the Locals exclusive part of the show, we'll be covering four bonus topics, plus answering any question that has any $5 tip or more in the live chat, we will get to.
All right.
And now, Robert, we didn't have the Ray Epps lawsuit on our menu, but do we add that maybe for the after party at Locals, or do we have it up there?
Oh, we do.
So here's our top 12 topics tonight.
The Fifth Circuit stay on the censorship, government censorship case, whether Vivek is a natural-born citizen for the purposes of qualifying for the presidency or the vice presidency, and how it also may relate to both his and Trump's proposals to take away birth citizenship.
What sometimes is called the anchor baby debate.
Ripple has a big win against the SEC.
The impact may ripple out throughout the crypto industry.
A major crypto arguable fraudster was indicted, the Celsius former CEO.
We have the big Trump trial where Trump's team is moving for a continuance of the case until after Election Day.
Our sixth topic, which was the favorite topic on the board.
In the board poll was for the rare January 6th acquittal out of the District of Columbia.
In some other January 6th cases, people had asked about the Supreme Court petition by Pattis on the obstruction issue we've previously discussed, the Owen Schroyer plea deal, and another bad bail judgment by a January 6th judge.
Then we have the Epps defamation case and whether he will now be prosecuted like he claims in his complaint as part of the January 6th cases.
New York's redistricting, what does that mean?
The New York's real Supreme Court is its court of appeals.
Its Supreme Court is its trial court.
And it has ordered the commission back to redistrict.
What does that mean potentially for Republicans and Democrats in Congress?
Carrie Lake takes her case up to the Arizona Supreme Court or asks that they take it.
And Abe Hamada finally gets an order on the last possible day from a trial court judge.
Did he dodge justice once again?
I'm sure everyone would be shocked, shocked by the answer.
Ohio 1 is a proposal a lot of people have been asked to discuss because it's up for a vote in August.
We'll discuss that.
The 11th case we'll be discussing is the justice system in Mississippi is, I think, justifiably under legal attack by the NAACP.
Both Steve Bannon and Elon Musk have major fee disputes that are ongoing in multiple courts.
And our four bonus topics that will likely be reserved for the locals' only exclusive portion of the show will concern the Microsoft Monopoly case concerning Call of Duty, Walmart and Bank of America both getting caught overcharging and overbilling, the Texas TikTok ban faces a First Amendment challenge,
In a little analysis on the legal take on the scenes from the movie that we watched this week at VivaBarnesLaw.Locals.com, Dirty Harry, was that a correct constitutional analysis in the middle of the movie?
Fantastic.
Now, Robert, I need you to refresh my memory.
The first one of the day is the Fifth Circuit's stay of censorship.
I'm absolutely blanking out as to what that subject is.
Oh, so that's the Missouri v.
Biden, the Louisiana case, where the judge issued an injunction to prevent the Biden administration's ongoing censorship efforts.
The government appealed on an emergency basis to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals expedited the process for briefing an oral argument and issued what they call an administrative stay, that's a stay that doesn't resolve anything on the merits, pending its oral argument.
Okay, so there's a stay of the stay.
There's a stay of the injunction.
Right.
So the Biden administration can go back to censoring for the time being.
And they can go back to discussing with the intent of trying to get them to take down posts on social media.
Administrative stay, is there a...
I have no idea how that works.
Is there a time frame?
Or is that administrative stay until the hearing on the appeal of the injunction to preclude, to prevent the...
Interference.
It's an administrative stay pending their resolution of the case.
But they have ordered an expedited resolution of the case.
Yeah, the expedited.
We'll talk about expedited resolutions of cases when we get to Trump.
Vivek.
Right before we get to Vivek, people would ask, Tim Pool was asking, how could this happen?
Whenever the deep state, which has deep ties to this case, ask any federal court for emergency relief, they almost always grant it.
When the deep state asks, the courts come bowing.
That's the short answer on why they granted the administrative stay.
Again, they didn't address the merits, but when it's the FBI, when it's the Department of Justice, when it's the Central Intelligence Agency, when it's the CISA, when it's these kind of agencies, federal courts...
Just do whatever they ask, nine times out of ten.
Now I say the judge is going to be pissed because his order is obviously being overridden, not on the merits though.
Does the precedent or does the factual, not timeline rather, but does the factual elements of the judge's order still have the same value that it had prior to the stay of the injunction?
Kind of.
And I mean, everything's kind of pending the appeal, but the only thing they stayed was the injunctive relief.
They didn't overturn anything on the merits or anything else at this stage.
Okay.
All right.
Interesting.
And we'll do the Vivek before we head over to Rumble exclusively.
So the discussion with Vivek, he's a natural-born American.
He constitutionally has no...
Potential impediment to becoming president, much like Kamala Harris did not either, despite the fact that she's first generation born to immigrant parents, brought up in Canada, actually just up the street from where I used to live, went to Westbound High School.
Vivek has the same type of issue, same type of questions going on for him right now.
Yes, so there's people out there that still believe that the phrase natural-born citizen in Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5 of the United States Constitution is the precondition to be elected president, along with the fact that you have to be a 14-year resident in the United States and you have to be at least 35 years of age, which at the time of the Constitution, that was relatively old.
These days, it'd be the equivalent of 45 today, maybe even 50, you could say.
But there are people who believe natural-born citizen requires your parents also be natural-born citizens.
And so the debate is, what does natural-born citizens mean?
It has correlation to the 14th Amendment provision.
About if you're born in the United States, you're a citizen of the United States.
Both Vivek and Trump have both proposed banning citizenship for those born in the United States unless their parents were also citizens of the United States.
And so the question is, are their proposals constitutional?
Under Vivek's proposal, in essence, he himself wouldn't have been qualified to run for the president if his changes became law and in the future.
It's mostly anchored in the so-called anchor baby debate, but it's come up in the case of McCain.
It came up prominently in the case of Obama.
There's been efforts to change it legislatively over the years.
One time to try to make Schwarzenegger qualified, another time to make Orrin Hatch try to push that through.
So the question is, what does natural-born citizen mean in the Constitution?
But is there not a logical sort of a, what's the word, the philosopher Zanonian paradox here?
If it couldn't be, if you're not natural-born because you were born here but your parents weren't, Would that not still be the same problem for the next generation if that rule were to apply?
If the father or the parent who was born in America but their parents weren't is not eligible for the cause to be president, would their kids then be eligible?
I mean, the full ramifications of it are unclear.
The issue really becomes...
I mean, my view is a lot of this argument has erupted in the context of immigration primarily.
Secondarily, in the context of Obama, and even McCain was challenged in 08 on these grounds.
Others have been challenged over the years.
There are people who have brought suit challenging whether that provision is itself overridden by the 14th Amendment.
And in my view, the 14th Amendment and this clause are the same.
I don't think they're really different.
Even though the words natural born don't exist in the 14th Amendment, I think that's what born and subject to the U.S. jurisdiction means, is the same as natural born.
And it's a place where I disagree with it.
I don't think Trump's proposal is constitutional at all.
I don't think Vivek's proposal is constitutional at all.
A natural-born citizen.
And it's a misunderstanding of the history of the term.
It's a desire to restrict what people consider illegal immigration.
There's an incentive to illegally immigrate here.
If you can have your child here, because then you can use that as, quote, an anchor to bring in family members and make them citizens as well, or get immigration, protected immigration status as well.
So I get the political concern, but it misses why this constitutional provision exists.
It also misses the common sense interpretation of the word.
It also misses the history of where this originates, policy and principle-wise.
Not to get too deep into it, but explain that.
Someone in Rumble on the chat said, native-born is not natural-born.
And now, I don't know if that's a distinction without a difference.
Yeah, I think that person's wrong.
So there have been legal scholars, and this goes all the way back to Samuel Johnson in the UK.
The term itself was commonly used in the United Kingdom going back to the early 1600s.
And what it really represents is the idea of citizenship derived from the power of the king.
If you were someone that was subject to the power of the king, then you were therefore a citizen of the realm.
Now, often that came with duties and obligations as much as it came with rights and privileges and immunities.
In our case, it comes with a lot more rights, privileges, and immunities than duties and obligations than it did in the United Kingdom at the time, in the 16th and 1700s.
But the principle is, as Samuel Johnson noted, as future legal scholars noted, as people at the time of the founding noted, natural-born really meant native-born, that you were native to the land, that you were native to the community, that you were native to being under the jurisdiction of the king.
And this provision exists primarily and principally to preclude royal aristocrats from stealing the presidency.
That's why it exists.
The 14th Amendment exists to make sure to overturn Dred Scott and make clear that everybody born, white or black, slave or not slave, was a citizen of the United States, regardless of their ancestry, and that Lincoln at Gettysburg is partially about.
All men are created equal is the meaning of the American experiment.
And that the people being defined therein is anybody born.
And the king, like the U.S. government, like sovereigns today, had power, two kinds of power.
One was based on who you were as an individual, you know, in personam.
Personal jurisdiction, jurisdiction over the body, over the corpus, over the individual.
Habeas corpus is thus my body is illegally restrained or detained or imprisoned.
But also territorial jurisdiction, that I have power because of the land where something happened or occurred.
And the theory has always been that if you control the land, anybody born on that land is subject to your jurisdiction, subject to your control.
So native-born, natural-born, to me are identical to the 14th Amendment provision of being born and subject to U.S. jurisdiction.
Who they wanted to carve out, aside from royal aristocrats coming in and stealing it, were people that were diplomats that were here because they were not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, but they were here as diplomats, or maybe an occupying foreign army, that those people would not be considered part of the polity, part of the community.
It was not intended to exclude anybody born of immigrants.
There's simply no constitutional history for that interpretation, despite anti-immigration voices pretending they are.
The Supreme Court has addressed this indirectly, never directly, a half dozen times, and in every single instance, going all the way back to 1844, they agreed that a natural-born person is someone who's physically born within the territory of the United States, period, regardless of who their parents are.
That that is illegally inconsequential to the analysis.
So that's why Kamala Harris qualifies to be vice president constitutionally.
That's why Vivek qualified.
People don't always remember this applies to the vice president through the 12th Amendment, which added this clause's provisions to the vice president through that amendment.
But that, I mean, for example, I saw there's like post-millennial, some of these other publications were posting stories that said both of your, everybody knows that both of your parents have to be citizens.
That's directly refuted.
And by the way, if both of your parents had to be natural born parents, Donald Trump wouldn't qualify for the presidency.
So, you know, the people that are advancing these ideas that somehow we should limit citizenship to ancestry, what they're mostly confusing is that they've always wanted to extend citizenship.
To people who are born of American parents, even if they're born outside of the United States.
And that was to protect their citizenship inheritance rights through their American parents.
And they didn't want them to lose their citizenship just because of the coincidence in those cases of them being born in a foreign territory.
But so the and thus it extended to John McCain, who was born in Panama.
Thus, even if in my view, even if Barack Obama had been born in Africa, that was part of the dispute.
To me, it was a statutorily coincidence that at the time the Congress didn't recognize that as natural born citizenship.
But I don't think Congress has the right to interpret it however it wants.
I think that that because his mother was an American, he was an American.
But they take that and they try to make that the limit of citizenship, and that's a different strain.
You can either be subject to the king because of who you are as a person, or you can be subject to the king because of where you are as a person.
And who you're born to or where you're born to are two alternative paths, not only one path.
To citizenship.
And that's what it means.
That's what it was intended to mean.
That's what almost every scholar, senator, congressman, representative, founder, Supreme Court decision, jurist, legal decision has said about it.
And so this attempt to eviscerate this because it might be politically convenient is a bad idea.
You know, as I always say, you got to accept the entire, if you don't like the Constitution, amend it.
And that's your solution.
It's not to amend it by legislative fiat, by executive fiat, or by judicial fiat, or by political convenience.
That's very interesting.
I had only looked at it from the perceived loyalty aspect, like someone whose parents are immigrants and who was born here as an anchor baby might have conflicted loyalties and people would be concerned in terms of representation.
The historical aspect that you just explained adds another dimension to it.
And I was just making sure when it came to Vivek, parents were immigrants born and raised in Ohio, I think.
And as far as, I had no idea he's 37. I didn't realize he's that young.
Loyalty to nation, I don't think people would have the same concern with Vivek that they have with Kamala, who, first-generation born immigrant parents, but raised in Canada.
And even there, that's like, you know, we allow dual citizenships.
That really wasn't their concern.
Their concern wasn't the possibility of being subject to another foreign government.
Their concern was royal aristocrats stealing the presidency.
So it was not that somebody might have another obligation.
And I've never supported that.
Because there's people who want to interpret natural-born citizenship to be exclusive.
To mean that you can only be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States under the 14th Amendment?
Well, that's not what it says.
They could have chosen that.
They chose not to.
And this debate was had at the time in Congress, by the way, about what did it mean to be subject to a foreign government.
And they chose to just make it subject to, not only subject to, because otherwise, for example, what would happen if a foreign government, this happens in Israel in some cases, other cases, make someone a citizen, or declare someone a citizen.
For some reason.
I would say that they can't serve in government.
Robert, I'm going to need you to convince me why I...
To me, that doesn't matter at all.
That should never matter constitutionally.
Because otherwise you subject a person's citizenship rights to the whim of a foreign government.
Because the foreign government can declare it without your willingness.
Oh, you could renounce it then.
Sometimes you can renounce it.
Sometimes you can't.
I mean, take, for example, most people who have U.S. citizenship didn't realize they had U.S. citizenship because they were born overseas, grew up overseas, etc.
But their parent was a U.S. parent.
And then the U.S. decided to impose FATCA on their foreign bank accounts.
They're subject to it.
You know, they can't retroactively.
Repatriate or renounce.
The U.S. often objects to the ability to even do so, to expatriate or renounce.
So whether you have a right to renounce is still an ongoing issue because they still say it's a matter of legislative grace whether you have a right to renounce your citizenship.
They can condition it upon forfeiture of your property.
So I'm not in favor of giving any state that kind of power.
Plus, it's just not what the founders meant at the time.
There's absolutely no evidence that they intended...
And it makes sense if you understood the history and the origin of the term.
The origin of the term was, if you're subject to our power, then you have the privileges of our power.
So is someone born in the United States subject to the jurisdiction of the United States?
Yes.
The only people who wouldn't be...
Would be a foreign occupying army, the son of a diplomat here on immunity.
You know, those are the rare exceptions.
But nobody else would apply.
And again, this was intended.
It's like the emoluments clause being misapplied these days.
This was intended at a very particular concern.
Foreign aristocrats, dukes, kings usurping the American presidency.
If it doesn't address that...
It doesn't really reach anything else.
And then the limited issue of Americans born overseas who might be on military or diplomatic duty or for other reasons, and ambassadors' kids born here.
Those are the only people they met really subject to the exclusion and nobody else.
And once you start giving presidents and politicians and jurists the means to start excluding people from citizenship, you end up with decisions like Dret Scott.
That's an interesting perspective about it.
I'm still concerned by the dual loyalties of those who are sitting in government, and I needle some of our Canadian politicians who are not Ukrainian and have the Ukrainian flag in their bios along with the Canadian flag, and I do question whose interests they represent.
It's an interesting perspective that you can't renounce it for tax reasons.
That seems to be indicative of another problem, not necessarily the one that I think is the problem in terms of representing your citizens.
All right.
Fascinating.
And hold on.
There was one more thing about Vivek.
I forget, Robert, is your opinion on his odds changing in accordance with the market?
No, no.
Okay.
All right.
Now, before we go over to Rumble exclusively, let me just bring up a few of these super chats.
Robert's opinion on citizenship runs contrary to the understanding of every other nation in the world.
Wrong.
Wrong and wrong.
Read the history.
Read the legal history.
Read the Supreme Court's history.
Read the scholar's history.
Don't read your selective history.
I get a whole bunch of anti-immigrant.
And once again, they're unleashing something dumb and dangerous because they're short-term minded.
If you believe that you don't want anchor baby problems and that that's such a disaster, amend the Constitution.
That's your remedy.
Not by judicial fiat, not by legislative fiat, not by executive fiat.
And ask yourself whether you really want to start giving the state that power.
When the state gets to decide, we can strip you of your citizenship just by redefining what something means at a whim.
You like that idea?
You really think that's a good idea?
People have not thought this through.
They get short-term minded, they get short-term focused, and they make dumb decisions when they do that.
Notes, and I don't know this to be true, Robert.
You'll know better than me.
SCOTUS rule is that children born to lawful U.S. residents...
Completely wrong.
The Supreme Court explicitly rejected exactly what he said.
Learn to read Supreme Court decisions before you make dumb questions.
Thank you for the super chat.
However, now, the Chief Sway says, here's my conspiracy theory.
Department of Justice fakes charges on Epps to give Epps a reason for a lawsuit for a fake trial to clear her name and save their arse.
Not bad.
And then we got the mark of my little beast is not a birthmark.
Well, I've got both dogs down here now.
One sleeping on my backpack and the other one already took a dump.
I cleaned it up before the stream.
That's why I was a little late.
Okay, how do I get this out of here like this?
Everybody, head on over to Rumble now.
We're going to continue the party exclusively on Rumble because they are the platform that supports free speech and I'm exclusive of them.
So, Viva Barnes, Viva Fry on Rumble.
The link is there.
2466 people should be migrating.
To the Great Rumble.
And then we're going to go to Locals afterwards.
So I'm ending on YouTube right now.
Go to Rumble.
All right, Robert, what was next on our menu here?
Ripple.
Ripple.
Oh, this is...
So this is...
I know you're happy about this.
Happy.
Whether or not you made predictions that you could...
Had it gone one way or the other, you could have said I was right.
But you were right, Robert.
Now, the argument at the time...
Was that these are not securities in the standard sense of the word, as per the Howey test, which I'm going to ask you to explain for us.
But the bottom line, the SEC went after Ripple, claiming that their tokens, that their crypto, was a security.
You'll have to flesh out the difference between a currency and a security.
But a security subject to the Security and Exchange Commission regulation.
The judge came down.
I suspect this decision is going to go right to appeal.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
But bottom line, they said, Ripple can issue securities as securities, but that their crypto or their tokens, whatever we want to call them, do not pass the second aspect of the Howey test and are not securities and shall not be deemed to be securities.
Ripple obviously, once upon a time I had Ripple, I sold it when it was delisted because I never made a penny off crypto.
Ripple obviously had a great day on Friday.
The decision sounds sound, Robert, but I'll lead you to flesh out for everybody who might not know exactly what the Howey test is.
What is the Howey test?
Is this decision the sound, correct decision?
I know that you think it is.
Does it get appealed?
And what is the long-term prospect for Ripple specifically?
And does this have actual Ripple effects for all other cryptocurrencies out there?
Oh, without question, because the federal judge said that a digital token is not in and of itself a security.
And that's precisely what the Securities and Exchange Commission was using the Ripple case to try to establish.
And that's what, there's criminal cases pending we'll get to that actually rely upon the assumption that a digital token is a security.
There's a bunch, all those lawsuits involving crypto that are trying to go after Tom Brady and Shaquille O 'Neal and Matt Damon and all the rest and Kim Kardashian and Mayweather and you name it.
All rely upon the assumption that a digital token is a security and holding them liable for promoting security without it being registered and without meeting other standards and tests.
I have never believed...
One, I think the SEC is always overreached.
I think the Howey test is too broad.
I mean, the SEC was meant to really govern...
Stocks traded on Wall Street are traded on those kind of exchanges.
It was never really intended to reach everyday, ordinary business activity.
Investing in commodities and currencies and other things of that nature outside of the stock market itself or something equal there too.
But the Supreme Court extended it, expanded it dramatically during the peak of the New Deal so they could regulate whatever the heck they wanted.
And basically now they can regulate anything as long as it's an investment contract.
But even under that broad definition of security, a digital token never fit that definition.
Nobody is buying the token.
One, few people are buying it as part of a contract.
Two, here there were some institutional people that did, and thus that was subject to the security laws in the Ripple case, but everything else they rejected.
But yeah, I mean, the investment of money, common enterprise, expectation of profit derived from the effort of others.
That's too broad.
Well, to play devil's advocate, I could see the investment of money.
People buy crypto with the expectation- What does that even mean, investment of money?
Does that mean expenditure of money?
Does that mean transfer of money?
Does that mean transfer of other things?
Oh, no.
Without commenting on whether or not this should be the test, just as far as the test goes, on investment money, I spend $100 on Ripple.
I'm not doing it because I think it's going to be worthless.
I do it because it's going to be worth something, like I buy a gold coin.
In a common enterprise, and that's where I guess the main distinction is, when you buy shares in the company, you want to have a say in the activities of the company.
When you buy crypto...
It's roulette.
In a way, it's sort of like gambling at a casino.
Nobody would consider that, I don't think, a security.
You're not buying shares.
And then the other component is the promoter component.
What should have been defined as a security is something that was more akin to a stock.
And they should have defined it that way.
And instead, the court just expanded it to reach things that were akin to.
And it ended up being anything that was an investment contract.
And then what the definition of investment really ended up depending upon, because they were so vague about what common enterprise means, so vague about what it means to invest, it all came down to, are you paying for somebody to promote it?
And it's like, okay, now you've got every promotion plan out there, and that's way too big or broad of a definition.
But even under that, and Ripple to their credit here, Try to restrict the definition of Howery.
Use it to say, here's what the law was really intended to get to.
Here's what's still consistent with Howery but will restrict this from getting wayward.
The court rejected Ripple's defense, but Ripple's defense will take that up through the appellate food chain and say, this is what the law should be because this is getting way too lax, way too liberal, way too much regulatory power.
But even under that, the court said, digital token doesn't even meet that standard.
And so, I mean, what Ripple does, it's a cryptographic blockchain ledger.
And then they created XRPs, a digital token.
And some of those digital tokens they gave to employees and gave to key executives.
Some they gave...
They were allowed to be sold on an exchange where nobody knew who the seller or buyer even was.
There was anonymity in that process.
And then some they sold institutionally pursuant to contracts.
Only the last one did she say could that constitute a security.
The rest she said don't.
She said because there's no two main reasons why.
And here the anonymity function of Ripple was critical.
The anonymity functions, he's like, how can you call something an investment contract with an intention and expectation of promotion of the contract when the seller doesn't know who the buyer is and the buyer doesn't even know who the seller is?
That's kind of nuts in the context of an exchange.
What she said is all the cryptos on exchanges are not securities.
This guts.
All the civil lawsuits out there against all the so-called promoters.
This guts the suits against Shaq.
Guts the suits against Tom Brady.
It guts all of them.
And so, I mean, that was a massive, massive win against the SEC by Ripple, but for the entire crypto industry.
Robert, I'm just thinking out loud now.
These markets where you have the futures on presidential candidates, those are not considered to be securities?
Well, I mean, there are aspects that the CFD, I think it was the Community, I think it was the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission, they were trying to regulate, predict it on some grounds that they had regulatory control, but the Fifth Circuit stayed it.
People wondered why predict it's still up and active.
That's why.
The court was skeptical of the, and it hasn't been reached final adjudication, but they aren't allowing the government to enforce that.
And nor should they.
And I've had a problem with a lot of, The gambling law is applying to a lot of what goes on in political betting or sports betting in general.
Because in reality, it's not random chance.
It just doesn't meet the definition of gambling.
Gambling is something you have no control over the outcome of.
And that sports betting, you absolutely have some control over the information that's either more likely or less likely to occur.
Same with political campaigns and the rest.
So I think they've misapplied those laws in those contexts.
But they've tried to apply securities.
And California is also one of the worst.
I mean, you know, future purchases in vehicles.
Way back, it's an older case.
They try to call that a security.
I mean, they try to call kinds of things a security that just aren't.
It was meant to, I'm going to give you money for stock in an enterprise, right?
I mean, that's what it was meant for.
And if you want to apply it outside the stock market, okay.
I'm not a big fan of that, but fine.
You know, the penny stocks and the unlisted stocks and all those, okay.
But that's what it was for.
It was not for every other contract concerning a commodity or concerning a currency.
And it should never have been applied there.
Now, this case doesn't reach those aspects because it doesn't have to, because it says all you've got to look at is the anonymity by itself, and you realize that it's just the very nature of a digital exchange.
And then she said, as to all the money given to executives and employees, that's an in-kind benefit.
They didn't even make the investment.
So there's not even an investment here.
So the government was trying to pretend that your labor time was equal to being an investment.
That gives you an idea how badly they were, broadly, they were trying to define investment.
That now it meant anything.
Anything in exchange for possible future compensation was now an investment.
This was the problem with those two loose, two liberalized terms the Supreme Court used.
And they emphasized it doesn't matter if your motive is speculative, because going to your point, that was part of what the government was arguing.
If your motive is to purchase this because you think it will go up in value, it's automatically a security.
It's like, dear Lord, that covers a ridiculous number of things.
Baseball cards.
Yeah, absolutely.
Can you imagine everybody getting arrested for selling baseball cards because they're unregistered securities?
I mean, that's how nuts the government was doing.
But it was essential to their war on crypto because, I mean, Ripple had been very effective at selling its XRP token on digital exchanges, but it also is open source, which I like.
So people can use it for why it's more transparent than the problematic cryptos.
It still has certain issues because people closer to it make the most money and that can create an effect that's undesirable.
But putting that aside, the open source saw a component of it.
It ended up saving it in many respects because it created the anonymity for the digital exchange to operate, but also allowed people to use the app for all kinds of payment processing purposes and become almost a de facto medium of exchange that facilitated the exchange around the world.
And basically, it's removing power from central banks and government.
That's what crypto really does.
It limits surveillance power.
It limits control power.
It limits the government's ability, central banks' ability, and really a cartel of private banks, if you talk about the euro dollar, who's really running the financial system more than the central banks or governments even are.
And it precludes them from having the power they want.
And that's why there was this SEC war on them.
And this was a massive, massive, this was their big test case.
Massive, massive defeat.
But also it has all kinds of repercussions and ramifications for all those plaintiff's lawyers thinking they were going to get rich.
So in the shacks of the world, because they advertised or marketed a digital token.
Well, I mean, they could still go after the shacks for, I don't know, fraudulent misrepresentation, which, you know, I'm thinking of Dennis.
Almost all their theories are promotion theories because they really don't have him knowingly, knowing that the underlying, they don't even, I think, allege that he knew that what he was promoting wasn't good.
They were saying, you're a promoter, you're an unregistered promoter, hence you're liable under the securities law.
That's interesting.
If it's not security, bye-bye lawsuit.
When it comes to Kevin O 'Leary, I sort of took for granted.
He was in on the pump and dump.
He's a different story.
Okay, so that's fascinating.
They're not undoing the Howey test.
I mean, we brought it up and we could see how- No, this judge did not.
This judge did not accept.
But Ripple is preserving that.
So that's the government risk for fighting this up to the appellate food chain, is that the court goes even further than an appeals court or the Supreme Court goes even further than the district court does and says, we're going to clarify what this means going forward.
And uses what Ripple called the essential ingredients test, which is saying, let's get this back to being stocks.
It's got to be, you have a contract for the purpose of increasing the value of what you're purchasing, depending upon the promoter's explicit and express commitment to promote it.
If you include those components in it, you make it a stock.
Which is what Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to be about, not about anything traded that they want to regulate.
All right.
Well, I guess now I see the interplay between this and the Celsius indictment, but I suspect the guy from Mashinsky from Celsius is in big trouble anyhow.
So Celsius, Robert, I have just brain farts when it comes to crypto.
I understand sort of what it is.
They say decentralized digital ledgers and it can't be falsified and yadda.
I know what crypto is, in a sense, and I don't understand it.
Celsius is yet another one of these cryptocurrencies that issue a token.
Apparently, they were offering easy-access loans based on their tokens, which they were hoping would increase in value.
I don't know what Mashinsky did to pump up the value of the tokens, but it went the way of the Dodo Bird, of the Sam Bankman Freed's, of the FTX's, and I guess their token tanks.
The very asset that makes the value of the company disappears into nothing because as far as I still understand, cryptocurrency is money made out of nothing.
Now he's been indicted, fraud, but the SEC is going after him as well for violating securities and SEC law.
If you're able to explain what Celsius did better than I can, and is the fraud merely a pump and dump fraud scheme or is this somehow unique to crypto?
And now what's going to happen to the SEC aspect of it, given the rippling effect?
This is one of the many bad faith actors, according to the allegations of the indictment, in the crypto space that used some of the benefits of crypto against its potential audience.
And basically, they're saying because crypto has all of these values, you can now use it to...
Do high leverage loans.
You can store it now as an asset for us that will get you a higher rate of return because of how we're able to invest.
That you'll get all the benefits of the big banks without the burdens of the big banks, without the access restrictions of the big banks.
And so they parlayed how this is an alternative to the big banks to a susceptible audience that didn't understand the distinctions and some of whom were just greedy.
Some of the audience, if it's too good to be true, it's not true.
I mean, some of the leverage promises and profitability promises they were making were deeply problematic.
It sounded just as preposterous as FTX, like it's just going to keep going up.
What I don't understand in all of this is they use the tokens to procure easy access loans.
That loan has to be turned into fiat currency somewhere down the line.
I don't understand how that interplay works.
I don't understand how that works.
Can you flesh it out for a dunce?
It gets complicated.
The short answer is, it's, hey, give us your crypto.
And if you give us your crypto, we'll convert it into investments.
We'll convert it into lending power to you, potentially in US currency.
And we'll...
Invest it on your behalf and you'll be investing it.
You can buy our token as a way in which to securitize it and collateralize it.
And what they really did is they were taking the money, using it for speculative investments that weren't getting the rate of returns that they were lying about.
They were secretly buying up at different key times part of their own token in order to inflate its value and create a run in the market.
And then they were not securing the customer's deposits like they said they were, much like FTX.
So it's very analogous to FTX in many respects.
It was like a mini FTX.
Now, the CEO apparently made $40 million in profits off of this.
At one point, they had $25 billion under management.
They ended up with less than $5 billion, had to go into bankruptcy.
A lot of big names were tied to Celsius.
Now, the CEO had been around for a brief period of time.
His COO was, I think, a UK corporate lawyer that came in on the scam, saw the opportunity, ran with it, according to the allegations of the indictment.
Where I have, the Fed say that the earnings program that they were running, the rewards program, which was a disguised investment scheme, was a security.
They may be right about that, but they also claim the token was a security.
I don't think they went on that anymore.
So I think that securities fraud part of the case goes away.
But they also have just old school conspiracy to defraud, commodities fraud, wire fraud, etc.
So I think they have plenty of ground.
Wire fraud is so broad.
If you use anything that goes through the mail, and these days, internet automatically is across state lines, and you do anything to defraud someone of their money or property.
Basically, you're nailed.
So it's basically a fraud case these days.
And it sounds like from the indictment, they have a long litany of false statements and misrepresentations made by him, known to be made by him, that weren't just speculative investment hopes or promises.
So I think that he looks to be in serious trouble.
And now I'm just pulling up his Wikipedia.
Early life.
Mashinsky was born in 1965 in the Soviet Union to a Jewish family.
His family obtained permission to leave the country.
In the 70s, later moved to Israel.
From an early age, he was a tinkerer, like his father, yada, yada, yada.
I was looking for any political connection, Robert, like the FTX.
What's his name?
Sam Bankman Freed.
Do we know if there's any political Ukrainian, Russian, I don't know, aspect to this?
Not that I know of, no.
And now, do we know if he's actually, is he like the Lord of War guy who pretended to be Jewish to get out of the Soviet Union to go to Israel, or is he...
Okay, fine.
I'm trying to get my oldest to watch Lord of War because I think it's a great movie to watch, but I made the mistake of starting Wolf of Wall Street.
I've never seen it before, Robert.
The first two scenes of that movie are wildly inappropriate.
That's not a kid's show, no.
I was like, oh, it's a lot.
It's about the law stuff.
It's a trip through depravity.
Anyhow...
That whole movie is, by the way.
That whole movie is really a trip through degeneracy and depravity.
Well, I learned a valuable lesson.
It's not really hardly at all about his Wall Street activities.
Damn, I thought it was going to be an educational thing.
Oh, boy, oh boy.
Anyways, I'll watch it with my wife, maybe, when the kids aren't around.
Okay, Robert, the big...
I guess it's the big news of the week.
I've been watching...
So, first of all, I watched Robert Gubay's breakdown.
Explanation of the whole Trump request for a continuance.
I'm trying to get, you know, the differing points on this.
We've talked about how the federal indictment was going to proceed, how a criminal federal trial proceeds, how long it takes, how it's, you know, they set the tentative or the initial trial date knowing that it's never going to be respected.
It takes, what, two years, Robert, to get to a typical federal?
A criminal trial?
A complex white-collar case, usually 18 months.
18 months.
And I'm reading the filings.
I'm listening to analyses.
I even went to CNN.
And they had a decent guy on who said, look, typically it's 18 to 24 months.
Trump is not abusing of any process here.
It would actually be outlandish to think you'd get a December trial date.
But then you have the Anderson Coopers and the others pontificating.
Trump's lawyers, and you'll flesh this out a little more for us, they need to apply for clearance so they can see the alleged classified documents that are at the source of the indictment.
And Anderson Cooper's like, well, shouldn't they just do that?
And the guy who's answering was like, those documents take like a week to fill out.
They ask for everything in your history.
And so now you have the government that's prosecuting Trump.
Determining whether or not his attorneys get clearance to look at the documents.
So the whole thing is outlandish.
Trump asked the big news of the week and people are like, he's gaming for delays.
He asked for an indefinite postponement of the trial because the initial August date obviously was never going to get respected.
As far as I understand, Robert, they need to set this date.
For the protection of the defendant, for no other reason, so that the defendant benefits from the right to a speedy trial and the defendant can agree or not to postponements, which are basically systematic because a lot of stuff needs to get done before you get to trial.
In this case, they had an initial August date.
They requested continuance.
Jack, whatever his name is, asks for it until December.
Trump says, look, indefinite.
We've got a number of preliminary motions to dismiss, constitutional challenges, discovery, etc., etc.
Let's not even schedule a pro forma date.
Do it indefinitely.
And now everybody in the media is saying he's gaming the system for a delay until after the election because he's a crook and a thief and a liar and yada, yada, yada.
I mean, you'll let us know what you think.
This is standard.
It's unreasonable to think that you would have a trial.
A, by December, but even before the election.
It might even be constitutionally insulting to suggest that you should have a criminal trial when this would be the issue for the election in and of itself.
Robert, I've been rambling for long enough.
What do you think about all this?
Yeah, so there's two different provisions at issue.
One is the Speedy Trial Clause of the U.S. Constitution, and the other is the Speedy Trial Act passed by Congress.
The Speedy Trial Clause is just the accused.
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy a right to a speedy and public trial.
The Speedy Trial Act goes further.
It says the government and the public...
The Supreme Court determined in 2006, SIRDOC I think is the case, which said that the defendant's interest is not alone sufficient under the Speedy Trial Act that you can take into consideration the public and prosecutorial interest in a speedy trial as well.
But the government requested it without really strong, compelling grounds for why the trial date in December is practical.
The defense objection is solid but not spectacular.
So in a case, what they did is they filed the kind of motion to continue or motion to, effectively it's a motion to continue, the currently calendar trial date.
It's just an opposition to the motion to continue.
The government filed for December.
They want a motion to continue.
It's currently trial scheduled for August.
It's due to be indefinite after the election with just status conferences scheduled.
I think they've been better off putting a specific date on there, but putting that aside, because there's some language in the Speedy Trial Act that can be interpreted to mean you have to set a specific date.
There's judges who recognize that the courts generally don't require that if you give the good cause exceptions.
But this judge has typically been more of a rocket-tocket, quick judge, Judge Cannon.
So even though she's a Trump appointee, it was expressed skepticism about...
Aspects of this case during the search warrant stage of it and recognize the uniqueness and the extraordinary nature of it, she is someone that is inclined to set specific dates and go quicker rather than slower.
Under the Speedy Trial Act, there are many grounds to continue to extend the date.
So basically, the Speedy Trial Act says you've got to hold trial within 70 days of arraignment.
But it says...
What should not be counted within those 70 days is any time needed for an interlocutory appeal, any time needed for dealing with any pretrial motion, any time needed for the defense under ends of justice.
And the ends of justice, they have to make specific findings verbally or in writing on the following factors.
The case is unusual.
The case is complex.
The case has novel facts.
The case has novel law.
The case has pretrial proceedings that will require unusual preparation.
Or, these are all or, reasonable time necessary for effective preparation of the defense counsel, given due diligence the defense counsel must engage.
These would have applied to Trump had they been ands, conjunctive ands.
Exactly.
Now, I'll lay out what their motion laid out and lay out where I think they could have been a lot better.
But what they laid out are the, here are the unique novel, complex facts.
This is a case that they are trying to schedule in the middle of a presidential election.
It is an incumbent indicting his opponent.
It is the first ever indictment of a former president.
It is the first ever indictment of the leading opponent of the incumbent administration.
That the review for classification principles has all kinds of problems.
Problem one is them even getting a chance to review it due to the delays in the authorization process.
The second problem is only they can review it.
They can't subcontract it out to anybody.
For those that don't know, in a criminal case, white-collar cases, lawyers often subcontract that out to parents.
One, sometimes it's with it in-house.
Other paralegals, other associates, forensic investigators.
But there's third-party firms that specialize in just helping you index, organize, do the discovery, review, put it in a searchable database.
They can't allow that in this case because they have to physically, personally review every single one.
Can't give anybody access to it at all to even organize it or index it, which makes it unusually extraordinarily difficult.
And then there's, under the classification review procedure, what's also unique about the case is they have to submit in advance to the court what documents they wanted to publicly publish.
It's a whole specialized protocol, and they're opposing, they're saying a lot of this is not really classified, but that's going to be subject to a separate pretrial proceeding.
Whether or not certain things we've even been given under the grounds that they're too classified for us is going to be subject to a separate pretrial proceeding.
The government wants to introduce some of this as secret evidence.
We oppose that entirely, but basically the classification review procedure are unique, unusual, complex questions of both fact and law that are novel to the case.
Then they say, look, there's going to be natural delays here because of the limited personnel.
Then they say, there's also something that's very unique and novel and complex about the case, is how the heck are we going to pick a jury in the middle of a presidential election?
And then they talk about the unique legal issues.
The unique legal issues include the Presidential Records Act, include the classification questions that are coming at issue, whether the special counsel even had authorization to bring this.
And then they mention all the preparation.
That there's already more than 800,000 pages of discovery, more than 100,000 emails, 57 terabytes of CCTV footage.
And if there's more to come and more to fight over.
And I'll just play in the devil's advocate because I've been listening to too much CNN.
Oh, there's 80,000 documents, but only, what did they say, 4,600 were relevant.
Oh yeah, we've got months of CCTV footage, but the government's telling you only this is relevant.
Oh yeah, they need special access to the classified documents, but they can have a team look at the documents that are not classified.
The problem with any claim like that, and governments often do, Is they wouldn't have produced it if it wasn't material.
I'm going to let the person prosecuting me tell me what they've selected from an exorbitant amount of documents as being the relevant part.
Don't worry about the rest of it.
There could be exculpatory stuff in there that was not brought to my attention.
And the federal government doesn't have an open file policy.
So anything they produce is an implicit admission that it is material to the case.
I'm sorry.
They may not plan.
What does that mean?
An open file policy?
So in open files, you turn over everything you have in your case.
Federal government does not utilize that standard.
They only give you what they feel they are obligated to give you.
They don't give you everything they have.
So that means when they give it to you, they're saying, by the way, this is material to your case.
They may only want to use a small subset in their prosecution.
But that's not the definition of materiality, because they wouldn't have given it to you if it was material.
It's the stuff they're not planning on using that you really have to look at, because they're giving it to you because they're saying it's material, but it's not incriminatory.
So that means it's probably exculpatory.
So that is all exceptional grounds.
And what I said at the very beginning...
It was highly unlikely that this case would take place before Election Day, and that it was much more likely that Election Day would be the de facto verdict day of America on this case.
And I still stick to that, and I don't think the judge will grant the government a trial date in December.
Even if the judge did, they...
Defense can come back and continue to submit motions to continue as the record gets more thorough and developed.
So I've had cases where the judge will set it, saying, well, if you're really right, just come back in two months when you really have more record detail for me to find.
I do think she's more inclined to give a set date, but I think if she gave a reasonable date, that date's going to be early 2025.
Just realistically.
And then schedule some pretrial hearing dates, etc.
By the December date, this government was trying to set, they were saying the defense had to bring every single motion on the merits, every motion to dismiss by the end of July.
But why?
I mean, it's not even a plausible prospect to entertain.
Even to hear an appeal on an interlocutory decision in an ordinary one-issue case will take, you know, six to 12 months.
What is the irrational...
Quixotean pursuit of the prosecution to get a trial before the election, where even everything they've done seems to be increasing Trump's numbers.
Even if they get a conviction before the election, I think that would help Trump more.
What is their irrational obsession with having a trial before?
Oh, because they know if Trump wins, the case is DOA.
And so they're their only chance at securing a conviction that can even temporarily matter, or to justify what they did.
Is if it happens before Election Day.
So they try to bring it quickly enough so that they could, in their minds, get it before Election Day.
But it would be insane for a judge to give it to them before Election Day.
And I don't think this judge is, even though she's a rocket docket judge, I don't think that's going to happen.
Even if she were to temporarily set it that way, it would just be a temporary setting, trial date setting.
And I said this from the get-go.
People were, oh, you know, Steve Dace was saying, Trump will be in jail before Election Day.
None of that was ever likely to happen.
Well, people freaking out about the August trial date.
I mean, it's...
Yeah, and I kept trying to tell you, they have to schedule that because of the Speedy Trial Act until the court makes separate independent findings.
That's all that meant.
Procedurally, if you knew the history of white-collar cases...
I mean, I obviously do a lot of federal criminal defense work and have for about a quarter century, but, you know, you could just research this a little bit and see, you know, I mean, even the reality winner, you know, those kind of cases that were much simpler and clear, those cases typically took almost a year and a half to get to trial.
So it's inconceivable in a case with intensive documents.
Period.
You get to trial quickly.
And of course, he listed, you know, there's already trial calendar conflicts for Trump.
There's trial calendar conflicts for the lawyer.
That's also a pertinent material issue.
What I would say is, I thought they could have done a much more thorough and robust presentation.
Don't treat this like your typical case where you can just throw in your five-page template of saying, look, here's all the complexities, judge, just kick it down the can, like you could a normal case.
I mean, what they filed is something you wouldn't file in a normal case.
Pretty basic, pretty simple, pretty straightforward, not too many legal issues, not too much previewing of your anticipated defenses.
Here, I would have gone further.
I also would have used it as an excuse.
To present to the court some of the underlying issues.
And it concerns me a little bit that they may not even be thinking about these issues.
I get my impeachment clause argument.
I'm one of the only few people making that argument.
I think they should make it.
There's no downside to making it.
But I recognize that that's not being universally suggested.
But what is very commonly being suggested by lawyers who have studied this case is the Article 2 problems with the case.
And they don't even mention Article 2. They seem locked into just the...
Now, the good news is they at least have woken up to the special counsel issues, that there are issues about how he procured the indictment.
But there's also no recognition of the potential grand jury issues, the potential venue issues.
They already know about some government misconduct issues, and they just chose not to mention them.
I would have.
So, you know, I would have used...
And I would have, you know, for example, they could have gone through category by category.
And said, let's just look at the chance of interlocutory appeal here, Judge.
Here's just some of the legal six different big constitutional issues or statutory interpretation issues we're going to deal with.
It's reasonable for the court to anticipate that the 11th Circuit of the Supreme Court might want to make a ruling on this.
Interlocutory appeal by itself is going to delay a trial date.
So why are we going to stick a trial date that we all know we're not going to stick with, that we all know we can't do, that the Court of Appeals or Supreme Court may intervene in?
Why not put it off to a date that affords them opportunity and time to get involved, as we know that they're probably going to do anyway, and make clear, give a little preview to the court and to the public, court of public opinion that's reading these cases, what are all the big constitutional flaws?
They have some decent language in there about how extraordinary and unusual the case is, etc.
But they could have...
Developed further the selective prosecution issues.
They don't.
They could have developed further the Fourth Amendment implications on the search warrant.
They don't.
They could have implemented further the Fifth Amendment grand jury clause issues.
They don't.
They could have gone further on the Sixth Amendment violations of attorney-client privilege.
They don't even discuss it.
So, you know, all of the failure to even talk about the Constitution is not a great indicator that this is going to be a top-notch defense team.
Well, and when I'm looking over all this stuff and I'm hearing your voice in the back of my head saying, you know, this is the time to speak to the public, if not only to the court.
Because the media is going to try to spin it.
And force those constitution issues up there.
And force them to even talk about or discuss it or circulate.
And get it out there thinking within the Republican audience, the conservative political audience, about how unconstitutional this prosecution is.
And give a little sneak preview also to the court and the court's clerks.
Here's where we're going.
And, you know, I fear that they didn't preview it because they're not cognizant of it.
Well, and knowing the way the prosecution and the media is going to spin, if it's not totally fleshed out and extremely well justified, they're going to say that, you know, he's gaming the system for delays because he doesn't want a trial before.
And they haven't explained it well enough why they need it.
To me, it was so outlandish that you'd have this trial, knowing the preliminary motions on the constitutionality of certain laws, the procurement of documents, etc.
It's unfeasible.
It shouldn't even be an expectation in the public mind, but the media is what it is, and Anderson Cooper is who he is.
And, you know, these lawyers should have just filled out the documents, and then, you know, a week long to get clearance, and what they ask for...
Former CIA guy.
He thinks, man, I get classified intel all the time with ease.
Okay, so then, and how long until the judge rules on this?
I mean, it's not going to wait too long.
The government has a chance to file a reply.
I don't know if they have yet.
And then the court will definitely issue an order before the currently calendared trial date.
And I assume also before the currently calendared motion date.
So that would probably mean within the next 10 days, you'll see a decision from the court.
I have no doubt she'll move the trial.
The question is how far she moves it and whether she sets a date certain or not.
And the risk is they can't even concede.
They say, okay, move it to July 20...
What month are we going to be?
July 24. You can know why they moved it to December.
You know, they would have liked to have scheduled it for 2024, but they knew that...
The primaries.
Right in the middle of it, and it would look bad.
So that's why they have a problem.
So, I mean, realistically, you know, scheduling it for...
I would have...
Recommended.
Here's the normal time.
They included the Noriega case, which was nice.
I think it took almost two years to reach trial.
I would have said, look, let's schedule this for the summer of 2025.
That's a reasonable time frame.
That's a two-year time frame.
That's still incredibly fast, given the unique issues here.
But let the court put a date on it.
And make it clear rather than indefinite.
Maybe they're asking for indefinite because they're giving the court the option of splitting the baby and setting a definite date, but still in 2025.
I anticipate this trial won't happen until after the election.
Even if the court schedules an earlier date in the next two weeks, that date itself will get moved.
There'll be an appeal on an interim judgment that will take it past the 2024 election.
And the pretrial motions are unusually complex in debts.
And they're going to have huge fights over all kinds of things.
All right, now, if you see me, like, reaching under the table, it's because Pudge is down here.
She's banging her head on my leg because she wants food, which I don't have because we ran out of food.
Robert, I've realized now I haven't done any of the rumble rants.
Let's take a few minutes just to go through these.
And we're going to go bottom to top because that's the order.
Okay, let me read these real fast.
M. Sidloy.
Great stream on Friday, David.
Just one thing, Libs of TikTok's name is Shaya, and that's Chaya in Hebrew, okay?
Reading right to left.
Please tell me you guys will cover Tucker ruining political careers on Blaze.
Robert, you saw Mike Pence?
Oh, yeah.
No surprise.
None of those people can hold up to any serious scrutiny.
Oh, God.
Pence walked into it twice.
Okay.
We've got Randy Edwards said, you know who else will never let you forget you are Jewish?
Your Jewish mother.
Okay.
Arkansas crime attorney.
Setting in Memphis, preparing for trial next weekend, needed a break.
What a great way to break.
Catching Viva Live.
I bought Jen, yourself and my wife, and we love it.
I'm going to snip and clip that, and that's going to be part of the ad going forward, because people do rave about it.
It's weird.
Oblividan.
Mr. Barnes, do you think we will ever find out how many Feds and Fed assets were involved in instigating chaos on January 6th?
We're not going to get a number.
We know it's a lot.
We'll see if Tucker gets to re-interview the guy that he interviewed while he was at Fox that they fired him before they aired it and didn't air it.
M. Menorath, Barnes, you should read the Senate discussions on the 14th.
They covered this topic viva.
My rant last week was on veterans' disability, not Virginia.
I had family court illegally apportioned.
Yeah, and I have read it.
And what they really meant by subject to a foreign power was along the lines of aristocracy, diplomats, etc.
Not that both of your parents had to be U.S. citizens.
And then Rock Bottom 56 says, even immigrants who came here under false pretenses, General Malaise.
Oh, General Malaise is English.
Under Trump's logic, wouldn't naturalized citizen parents result in a natural-born citizen child?
In this way, children of non-citizens would still have a path to make their children citizens.
We're not going to harp over this.
Grotesque spearball.
Wow.
Cup of sooth.
Barnes is wrong.
The Office of the 14th said so.
It did not even apply to Native Americans and no SCOTUS opinion supports.
Native Americans were always exempt.
There are whole different provisions under the U.S. Constitution.
There's a bunch of provisions that are specifically applied to members of Indian tribes.
Kupasuth, if the 14th Amendment did not apply to Native Americans, please explain how it applied to illegal immigrants.
I'll wait.
Yeah, Indian tribes are specifically put into separate provisions within the, untaxed Indians, etc.
That's a whole different discussion about the nature of that.
Arkansas crime attorney, rumble has dropped a little.
This is by way of stock price.
Viva, start pushing a little more.
No, I do not.
I'm not getting sued for pushing securities.
I just purchased more when it dropped because I expected to go up.
Not financial or legal advice.
Get Tucker to join.
I could retire.
TX47, do we really believe the government has not done enough of a deep dive on Donald Trump's legal counsel to know whether they are worthy of security clearance?
It's idiotic.
Il Sarto, sorry I'm a little behind.
Maybe you and your people should call out these...
I'm not even going to have that soundbite circulating the internet.
It is my responsibility.
Okay, it both amazes and saddens me how much I wish to join CSIS in high school to know how I obviously despise the intel agencies and they've broken their oaths and those they sort of protect.
I'm not your buddy guy, Britt Cormier.
How do you pick a jury to review classified docs?
Interesting question.
Do they get redacted copies of the docs or do they all have to pass a background clearance check?
Robert, how's that going to work logistically?
That's where the defense has to make presentations to the court, and the court has to make pretrial rulings on what information will be published and what wouldn't.
But the jury has to see it in order to be able to adequately make a trial on it.
So the jury has to see all of it, and the jury, they cannot require classification requirements of.
That would be a violation of the jury trial impartiality provisions.
I Care 22. Love your show.
Learn, enjoy, and entertain.
Just join Rubble, Cheryl Gage, and we're at the Stingray.
Could they be prosecuting Trump to hamstring his next presidency like they did with the Russia hoax?
Robert, I'm going to ask this question.
He walks right in and he pardons himself, so that ends that.
Yeah, but it'll cast the same shadow that the Russia hoax did.
He won't care at that stage.
And verdict day will have been election day, so he'll have all the authority he wants to do it.
Well, I got a question that Brandon Strzok...
Brought up in a tweet yesterday.
We're going to get to that before we go into the next topic.
Last one.
Praying hard for Trump, the judge, the Trump team, and this constant evil.
Thanks, Barnes, for a little white pill.
Robert, hold on.
Let me break this out.
Take this out.
Bring this in.
Robert, I've got a question for this, and Brendan Strzok raises an interesting point.
Not this one.
Here.
I won't play the whole video.
I'll send everybody the link so you can go watch it.
Earlier today, Donald Trump put out a post on Truth Social asking the question why he was being charged under the Insurrection Act and not Joe Biden.
He then deleted the post on Truth Social and replaced it with the same post, replacing the words Insurrection Act with Espionage Act.
Okay, we'll pause it there.
I'm going to give everybody the link.
You can go watch that full video.
theorizes or hypothesizes, if I can get this out of here, that maybe Trump knows that they're gonna go after him under the Insurrection Act, so that they can then get him off the ballot,'cause that would exqualify, That won't work either.
To quell everybody's concerns, logically, legally, conceivably, what could they do to keep Trump off the ballot of the presidential election?
Nothing.
Even liberals have admitted this.
Liberals have said there's no change.
James Comey admitted it.
There's nothing to keep him off the ballot.
They also admitted that they can't do the loan forgiveness.
They're not going to get states and courts to go along with him being kept off the ballot.
It's not going to happen.
And if there's anomalies?
What if a state says, oh, I thought I was doing the right thing legally?
It doesn't matter.
The courts will take it off.
It's not something that will happen.
It's never been something that was an achievable objective.
They couldn't keep Eugene V. Debs off the ballot while he was in prison.
So it's not something that's practical.
It's already a misapplication of the attempts to use the 14th Amendment in that manner.
But even if they were to somehow indict him under the Insurrection Act, somehow get a trial done before Election Day, somehow get him a conviction, somehow get the entire thing affirmed, almost all of which is extremely difficult to see happening.
The courts are still not going to strike him off the ballot.
And so even if states try to, and which states are going to, there's not enough states to do so.
Again, he just needs to win the majority of electoral votes.
It doesn't matter if Democrats keep him off the ballot.
Democratic states, so what?
If he's not on the ballot in California, so what?
If he's not on the ballot in New York, so what?
It has no impact.
But the courts aren't going to go along with it because it's too much of an embarrassment.
The Constitution is clear on the limited qualifications necessary for the ballot.
They've enforced that in every case that's ever been adjudicated.
They've said we're not allowing a person to be taken off the ballot for anything that doesn't meet the qualifications, period.
And they've said this over and over, whether it's McCain cases, Obama cases, left cases, right cases.
The only context in which any court has said the state can keep someone off the ballot is if they admit...
In their qualifying papers, they're not qualified.
I actually had that case because I was trying to argue that that's a decision for Congress, not the courts, which, by the way, most scholars agree with.
It was Kaczynski that screwed around in that case, in my view.
I've got to bring that up with him next time I talk with him.
Now he's no longer in the Ninth Circuit.
Kaczynski made the point, he goes, well, Mr. Barnes, are you saying they can put Bugs Bunny on the ticket, on the ballot?
And my response was, Your Honor, I think a lot of voters would have thought Bugs Bunny was a better candidate.
This was after the 2012 election.
Just so everybody knows, you're talking about Judge Kaczynski.
I forget his first name.
Not Ted Kaczynski.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Alex Kaczynski.
He was on the panel with you at Freedom Fest a year ago.
But this ship has sailed.
And even liberals aren't even saying they can get this.
There's a few lefties out there that are desperate for it.
But even liberal lawyers that hate Trump.
They're not even going to try to push that route because they want to selectively use the 14th Amendment argument for selective controversial people where they can try to set a precedent for future use.
They know as soon as they go at someone like Trump with it, then it will look purely political, the indictment, and courts will look horrible.
Courts don't want to keep all of a sudden leading presidential candidates off the ballot.
Courts are, you know, courts can often be lazy.
They can often be corrupt.
They're not incorrigibly stupid.
They understand the court of public opinion, and they're not going to take that, pass that path.
They're not willing to go past that Rubicon.
As I've tried to explain to people, like, courts are, you often can't get the relief or remedy you want from them, but anybody expecting them to just completely abandon everything and just say, screw it.
In the name of defeating Trump, let's just abandon all our credibility and have half the country in an uproar.
That they're not willing to do.
Before we get on to the Ray Epps defamation lawsuit...
I just want to bring up two more here because...
Oh, we got the January 6th cases before that.
Oh, yeah.
My bad.
Arkansas crime attorney, who is Little Rock on YouTube, who is a practicing attorney, says, I agree with Robert on the 14th.
And then Amandine said, here's some bucks to buy food for your doggy.
Seriously, though, love your podcast.
Barnes is great, too.
Thank you very much.
No, it's not.
We didn't run out of money or food.
I just left the dog food in my mother-in-law's freezer.
And I asked my wife to get just like raw beef.
So we'll just give her raw beef tonight.
Okay.
So hold on.
January 6th comes before...
Oh yeah, I highlighted Epstep.
Okay, Robert.
Hey, Louis, another white pill.
The one lucky bastard gets off.
Okay, so he was acquitted by the judge.
This is one of the defendants of January 6th.
Basically, it's, I forget the other guy's name, but same type of defense.
Like, I wasn't there to do anything.
There was no pre-planning.
I didn't do anything violent there.
I thought I was allowed to be on, and I left when I wasn't.
This one schnook.
In addition to the other one, gets acquitted.
The other people, not so lucky.
One of his co-defendants was found guilty because he was friends with either the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers.
I get those mixed up all the time.
Oath Keepers.
Oath Keepers.
How is it an acquittal?
Did this guy opt for a bench trial, or did they make a motion to get it dismissed before it went to a jury trial?
A smart lawyer who read the judge.
This is a very hostile judge to most January 6th.
Yes, that's the other thing that's surprising.
Judge Mada.
But my interpretation is it's a defense lawyer that read the judge right.
And so he convinced the government to dismiss all the charges except the obstruction counts.
So he didn't face misdemeanor, trespass, or any of those counts.
So it was just, was he there to obstruct the certification of the Electoral College?
Which was also smart because that preserved any appellate issues on whether that could even apply to these circumstances.
We'll get to that.
That's the Norm Pattis Supreme Court case that may go up.
So he read it, and he had a guy that was in musicals and an actor, and he said, yeah, he joined Oath Keepers, but he just thought they were a peace group.
There was no evidence of any pretrial communication that he engaged in.
There was no violence that he engaged in.
He just entered the Capitol.
That's all they had.
He entered the Capitol, member of the Oath Keepers.
That was it.
The government thought with this judge that was enough to convict him of the higher felony charge of obstruction.
They misread the judge because the judge wasn't willing to go that far.
And the defense lawyer, you know, successfully made, you know, him, he had his client throw the Oath Keepers under the bus.
Say, oh, I thought they were just a peacekeeping group.
I thought that's what that meant.
I had no idea.
I'm an actor.
I'm traveling around.
I go down there.
You know, I just walk into Capitol.
I didn't plan to obstruct anything.
And they didn't have any evidence to that.
And so the judge drew a distinction and thus gave him an acquittal.
But it was a smart move of the defense team for him to, one, get the other charges dismissed, and two, make it a bench trial because truth isn't D.C., jury still would have convicted him.
Given how bad the D.C. juries are.
There's only been two acquittals so far, both by judges in the January 6th cases.
Robert, I was reading the courthouse news article.
I don't like this either because he still said I love Big Brother at the end of this.
Prosecutors claimed Beeks was a member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group.
Beeks said he'd been duped into believing that the Oath Keepers were a peacekeeping group, a contention that Meta, that's the judge, seems to have found at least partially convincing.
Smart move by the defense lawyer, right?
You know the judge hates Oath Keepers, so you throw them under the bus.
Man, I'm just a nice, naive dupe.
Look at how bad this organization is, Judge.
They fooled a sweetheart like me.
Well, he was in a play.
Jesus Christ Superstar is the play that he was doing the tour on when he was arrested.
That had a lot to do with, you know, like, okay, this guy's liking music.
He's not sending random threats.
He's not doing, you know, he didn't fit the kind of person the judge wanted to punish.
And that was a good read by the defense lawyer that they recognized that.
Bad read by the government that they went along with that.
He played Judas.
In Jesus Christ Superstar.
I don't know what role Judas played in that play.
I think I know what role he played in life.
But, Robert, he gets acquitted because the best they had is that he didn't mean anything.
There was no violence, no threats, no nothing.
But then I look at Adam Johnson, the lectern guy, and I don't see much more with him except his theft of the lectern, which he never had any intention of stealing to begin with.
So, I mean, some people, I think, did as little as this guy and got convicted.
I think he fled, didn't he?
He pulled it?
Yes, he did.
He never faced trial.
It's because of how hostile the D.C. jury pools are.
But in the same week, that is a January 6th case, we had a ridiculous denial of bail.
A guy who was accused of two misdemeanors had been saying a bunch of stupid stuff online, but he isn't being charged with any of this stupid stuff online.
And so he's only being charged with misdemeanors.
The judge denied him bail.
For misdemeanors, frankly unheard of in the federal criminal justice system, on the grounds that she was worried he might be a threat to the community.
What she really means is, you know, politics.
But the, I mean, obviously it said dumb stuff, but that should not matter for bail.
The Eighth Amendment requires that it, she admitted he was no flight risk.
So this is the other case.
Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqi said he was ordered, his name is not Tarantino, it's Taranto, to await his trial behind bars because of a string of threatening statements and actions he had made in the days leading up to his June 30 arrest, including a since-deleted live stream he posted while driving to the National Institute for Standards and Technology, in which he allegedly threatened to blow up his car.
How do you do that?
Well, again, if he's prosecuted with that, different story.
Obviously, there's something that they're not telling us, including the judge, because he hasn't been indicted for any of those things.
Only indicted on two misdemeanors.
So being a big talker has no bearing on bail.
The Supreme Court Salerno case, 5-4, made-up case because defense lawyers are no longer even actively pursuing the case at the time, said that you could extend bail.
To not just whether someone was a flight risk, but whether there was clear and convincing evidence under the Bail Reform Act of 1984 as to whether or not, I think Salerno was decided in 1986, as to whether, Rehnquist, a lot of so-called conservatives, don't care about that part of the Constitution.
And as long as there are clear convincing evidence they were a risk to the community in certain ways, the safety.
But that has to be specific findings.
It's supposed to be limited to when you're charged with specific dangerous crimes.
It's not supposed to be a random minority report mechanism to lock people up pending trial.
It's what they did in Canada for the truckers.
Mischief, inciting mischief.
Oh, we know that this person is going to go back on social media or they can't be controlled.
They said they'll go and speak and defy the court orders.
So pre-trial detention.
I hope the defense lawyer pursues it to the District Court, District Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court because the bail abuses have been ridiculous in these D.C. cases and they're just getting worse.
And then meanwhile, we go and lecture, or we attempt to lecture other autocrats, tyrants, other people for abusing the judicial system.
Although, who knows, Robert, maybe if he appeals it, he's going to get sanctioned like Carrie Lake's lawyers, which we're going to get to in a bit.
Okay, so Jan 6, one good news, and it's not enough of a good news because they still destroyed this person on the process.
And then the more bad news, they're political prisoners, period.
And two other briefly mentioned January 6th cases before we get to Epps.
Owen Troyer did a plea deal.
I assume the plea deal is that he's not going to do any time, but I don't know.
He was charged misdemeanor trespasses, I recall.
Norm Pattis is his lawyer.
And then Norm Pattis is bringing a petition before the Supreme Court on one of the January 6th cases on the obstruction issues that we've discussed.
So, you know, we'll...
We'll debrief that further when it gets closer to the Supreme Court deciding whether or not to take the case.
But the issue is the misapplication of the obstruction statute.
Because in my view, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, overruling the district court that dismissed on obstruction grounds, basically defined a protest as obstruction.
They didn't easily carve out when it could or couldn't be.
And that shows how preposterous the obstruction statutes are.
All right.
Yeah.
Vivek mentioned, you know, a blanket pardon for the nonviolent Jan Sixers.
Has he mentioned that recently or that hasn't sort of...
I think he reaffirmed that both in the...
He said January 6th that he thought was a product of censorship in the Tucker interview.
And I think, believe, he discussed it at the Turning Point presentation where, other than Trump, he had the most, the strongest reaction to.
I mean, it was so bad that DeSantis and Scott and Haley all refused to go to the Turning Point event.
So it gives you an idea that they know that the base doesn't like them at all.
Robert, another thing that you predicted way back in the day that I hope does not come to fruition, but I can definitely see how it does, is that DeSantis will have killed his state political career.
I think he's killing everything.
Slowly, surely, and steadily.
It's a kamikaze campaign to end his political future.
They used his ambition against him successfully.
Yeah, I think he's got two months to get out to try to preserve his legacy.
I don't think he's smart enough to do it.
And if he gets out and endorses Trump and gets on the bandwagon, that could preserve some goodwill.
Oy, all right.
You got to come to Trump Jesus for contritioning.
Well, that's going to be used against you later by someone, Robert.
We're going to skip and clip that right there.
Okay, let's get to Ray Epps, Robert.
Mind-blowing.
So I read through the lawsuit sometime last week.
Ray Epps actually had the balls to sue Fox News in Delaware.
Now, Cernovich actually replied to a tweet of mine where I was saying, oh, he only seems to have sued Fox in Delaware, didn't sue Darren Beattie, didn't sue Revolver, didn't sue Tucker Carlson, so none of these other people are now parties to the suit who could avail themselves to their procedural litigious rights in the suit.
He only sued Fox News and only sued it in Delaware.
Cernovich, tell me if he's right, said that Delaware does not have strong anti-slap suits or anti-slap legislation and also that Fox News is the only one that might bend over pay-ray apps to make it go away and thus, I don't know, engage in political money laundering.
The lawsuit, nobody needs to read it, but I'll snip and clip that, but basically says...
Fox News, through Tucker Carlson, through, I think, Laura Ingram, defamed Ray Epps by saying or suggesting that he was a federal agent there as a paid agent provocateur, as an agent to stir up shit.
Whether or not that's a statement of opinion based on the facts of he's there on camera saying we need to go into the Capitol, that'll be a legal argument.
When they call him an agent provocateur or a Fed, is that a...
Statement of opinion based on the facts which are undeniable, or is that a statement of facts susceptible to defamation?
Sued on defamation and false light.
I guess Delaware has a false light provision of law.
False light is similar to defamation in that it causes personal harm, but defamation is based on more reputational damage.
False light is not the same thing as public disclosure of a private fact, which would mean the fact is true, but it does damage by being disclosed.
What did I miss?
What's your take?
Is this a strategic, settle this lawsuit, launder some money, line the coffers of Ray Epps so that he can run off into the moonlight with a piggy bank to live off of?
Is Fox News a deep state asset?
Are they going to fight this properly, or are they going to just bend over and be the tool to the administrative state anti-Trumpers that they seem to be proving themselves to be?
What's your take?
So, I mean, substantively, I don't think there's a strong case.
Perhaps.
I mean, especially if the Delaware courts apply any consistency, which is still an open question, because these are the same Delaware courts that said Candace Owens couldn't sue because everything was protected opinion.
So are they going to apply the same standards when it applies to these clearly opinion statements?
They're opinion statements based on disclosed facts.
So if you make an opinion statement based on undisclosed facts, then you can claim the undisclosed facts are a lie.
But if you disclose the facts and then give your opinion, that's classic constitutionally protected opinion about someone who may consider himself an involuntary public figure, but a public figure nevertheless under the circumstances.
So I don't think the private figure standards would likely or probably apply, especially because he himself has availed himself of media and press coverage before some of these statements that he's complaining over were made.
I think procedurally it's correct that he's suing in Delaware to avoid the anti-slap laws that might apply if he were to sue Darren Beatty or the Revolver or to sue Tucker Carlson.
It is also probably the case that he's suing, your analysis I think is correct, that he's avoiding those individuals who may have an independent interest in litigating the case, may not be insured by the same set of entities, may reject that insurance for the purposes of litigating the case.
May want to proceed into discovery and information he would not want to divulge or disclose as a process of the case.
And so then the only question is why?
And given it appears to be a weak case, why is he pursuing it?
And the two possibilities that I see are either everybody sees Fox is weak at the moment or Fox is insurer.
It is weak at the moment.
They're writing huge, ridiculous checks to some preposterous claims.
Not only the ludicrous amount paid to Dominion, over $700 million, but then they turn around and pay somebody who's suing over Tucker on a ridiculous claim.
And they pay that out, like $12 million or some preposterous amount.
So right now, they appear to be screaming, we're a blank check, please sue us.
That could be part of it.
Or as you know, it could all just be one big money laundering effort.
To get him money without it looking like Fox is part of a scheme to cover up what took place in January 6th by paying him directly as some sort of consultant.
Instead, they pay him because they had to because they were sued.
It's a very creative mechanism of money laundering, but it's not one you can rule out in these circumstances.
The question I had, Robert.
Insofar, they're not named defendants, but they're very much interested parties.
Could Darren Beattie and Tucker Carlson not, I don't know if the term is in plead in the United States, can they not ask to join this lawsuit?
No, they can't.
There's no way that they can get involved.
I mean, it's like, is it not defamatory to them to have a guy sue, alleging that he defamed, that they defamed him?
All court pleadings are immune from suit.
So you can't sue based on anything that happened or said in court?
So he can't intervene.
He can't request to be an amicus, like, you know, submit filings.
Now, is Fox News potentially that dirty that they are so anti-Trumper that they would participate?
In quelling what was obviously...
It's not a conspiracy.
Ray Epps is on video saying, I don't even want to say what we have to do because I'll get arrested for it.
And then they say...
And then he says, we need to go into the Capitol.
They call him a Fed there.
He's there the day of saying, this is where we're going.
This is where our problems lie.
He's there breaching offense violently.
Whether or not he's pushing it and doing violence, he's there partaking in the violence and breaching, going into a restricted area.
That's all on video.
Is Fox potentially that much of a never-Trumper that they would partake in some scheme to try to rehabilitate Ray Epps?
If they settle at all, then yes.
Okay.
That's the reasonable inference.
I mean, their behavior has made no sense.
I mean, this is the same Fox that gave away their key moneymaker in Tucker Carlson.
And if they had any doubts about its impact, they have lost more than half of their young primetime audience.
And not just...
During Tucker's time slot, during every prime time slot.
So, I mean, you multiply that money-wise, it should impact more than half of their advertising revenue.
I mean, it was an insane action, and they know that, and yet have taken no action to remedy it.
So, you know, the people running Fox are incompetent, incapable.
The second generation, Murdoch always relied upon Roger Ailes.
To keep the political antenna afoot.
And even Ailes was often behind the times on a range of topics and subjects.
But not nearly as far behind as Rupert Murdoch is.
And nowhere near where his idiot kids are.
Alright.
Good.
I feel better in my assessment.
It does not make any sense.
And if this settles, and if it settles quickly for some undisclosed, holy crap apples, Fox will be beyond.
Irrelevant to me.
One more from Arkansas crime attorney.
Looks politically motivated, Robert.
I agree with you in almost all cases, but not here.
Now, I don't remember what that was for exactly.
All right, Robert, you send me gerrymandering cases.
I immediately tune out.
I read about a page and a half in.
I don't understand.
I mean, they all seem to be one and the same.
We're arguing over how we subdivide the electoral district for the upcoming elections.
Did we ever, did you ever explain what gerrymandering means or how, not know what it means, but how it came to be the term?
Like, why is it called gerrymandering?
Oh, that I used to know, but that I don't remember.
All right.
And now I get, I immediately shut off, Robert.
This is another case of unfair contested redistricting coming out of New York.
I stopped reading after two pages.
Tell people why they should care.
So what happened in, so in 2014, New York voters voted to change their constitution.
So that the legislature no longer did the redistricting each 10 years.
So the way it works, once the census does a census every 10 years, usually each state legislature, but these days increasingly independent commissions, redistrict their seats.
State House seats, state Senate seats, city council, county commission, and congressional seats.
From a federal perspective, the big one is the congressional seats, the House seats.
And what happened is the New York was irritated at all the redistricting fights coming out of the New York state legislature.
So the people said, screw it, we're just going to have an independent commission do it.
And the way it worked is an independent commission was bipartisan.
It would propose a map.
If they couldn't agree on the map, or they sent it to the legislature for an approval process, and it has to be yes or no, and if that doesn't work, then you do a second map, and if that doesn't work, then the legislature in certain instances could try to maybe take control.
But the first time this was going to be tested was after 2020.
They came up with a first map that the legislature rejected.
They wouldn't come up with a second map, and so the legislature said, screw it, we're going to do our own map.
And they changed the laws again, presuming they could just override their own state constitution.
The court stepped in and said, no, you can't override the constitution.
So I guess in the interim, since we're on the eve of the 22 elections, the court will draw the map.
That map produced a Republican landslide in 2022.
And so Democrats have been desperate to get that map set aside ever since.
So they relitigated the issue, and they went up to the equivalent of New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals, because the Supreme Court of New York is called the trial court there.
In fact, it's at every level the system's called Supreme Court.
It'll be Supreme Court or Supreme Court, comma, Court of Appeals.
The Court of Appeals, 4-3 split decision, most of the issues being who had standing to sue and the rest, but the majority said, yeah, they have a right to sue.
And said, look, the way this is supposed to work is a mandamus action, which is when a government agent has a non-discretionary mandatory duty to do something and isn't doing it, you can go to the court that says, issue a writ of mandamus, that they do so immediately.
And the argument was the independent commission was obligated under the New York State Constitution to submit a second map that it never had.
And by the four to three decision, the court agreed and issued the writ of mandamus saying you got to issue a second map.
And so that's all that happened.
The concern is that the new map, even though it's supposed to be a bipartisan commission, will be less favorable to Republicans than it was before, but we'll have to see how all that shakes out.
I think as a decision, I don't really disagree with the decision.
I do think the independent commission failed to do its duty.
And now I was going to pull up the meh duty.
But instead, I got an email in real time, Robert.
I don't know if I can quote the source.
Someone who sends me some stuff says, Dear Viva, gerrymandering is a team for redistricting done in Massachusetts when Elbridge Gerry was governor.
Elbridge.
Elbridge Gerry.
So, okay.
So, because he did it or they screwed him?
Hold on.
I'm going to go to the Wikipedia link.
It says, in representative democracies, gerrymandering originally is the political manipulation of electoral districts, yada, yada, yada.
Etymology.
Originally gerrymandered.
The name was Jerry and the...
Animal salamander was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette.
This was created in reaction to the redrawing of Massachusetts Senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry, later Vice President of the United States.
Gerry, who personally disapproved of the practice, signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts for the benefit of the Democratic-Republican Party.
When mapped...
One of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble a mythological salamander.
Appearing with the term and helping spread and sustain its popularity was a political cartoon depicting...
Okay.
He did it.
Further proof, everybody at FeverBarnesLaw.com is above average.
Yeah, this is one of my trustee sends me very interesting stuff to read.
Not everybody has my email address.
Okay, so now...
Okay, it's cool.
It's another one of those stories.
The gerrymandering, it's funny.
I don't know how you ever redistrict without it screwing somebody.
Is there not a way just to not redistrict?
Just agree on what's a fair way to do it randomly and not based on...
Well, that's what these commissions kind of are.
But what you could do is you could have statewide elections and things like that.
And that might...
And just, you know, whoever gets so many votes then gets seated.
You know, top nine vote-getters get seats, for example.
If you have nine seats, you could do it.
But it's up to each state how they do it.
And they don't like that because they love their gerrymandering power.
Oh, yep, that is.
But speaking of elections...
Some big news out of Arizona.
So, hold on.
Maybe I have different news.
I think I might have read something different.
Was it about the lawyers being sanctioned for $122,000 in legal fees?
Oh, not.
Because I think that's the federal court case that's ongoing where they're trying to go after Dershowitz and all that.
Yeah, Dershowitz has to pay.
He's on the hook solidarily for like $12,400 or something.
It's a mistake for them to whack Dershowitz.
I think that's going to go up on appeal.
I think it's going to get overturned.
They would have kept Dershowitz out.
They probably could have got away with it.
But that court is so egotistical, it can't help itself.
I've had the...
Distinct displeasure being in many federal courts in Arizona and not being very fond of any of those federal courts, frankly, that I've experienced.
I've got them overturned repeatedly, though, to my great privilege and pleasure, including in some real big cases.
No, Carrie Lake has petitioned to transfer her case directly to the Arizona Supreme Court, and the judge finally issued a decision in the Attorney General race and Abe Hamada race as well.
Okay, so...
Let's start with the Cary Lake petitioning.
What is the purpose of that?
To skip a certain litigation process, expedite it to the highest court of the land?
Of the Arizona land?
Yep.
And the Court of Appeals was doing weird stuff.
They were transferring it from one Court of Appeals to another Court of Appeals.
So Cary Lake's team was like, this is getting squirrely.
So they went right to the Arizona Supreme Court and said, look, we got big issues that have never been addressed by the Arizona Supreme Court.
This is still concerning the election.
Let's get this cleaned up and wrapped up quicker rather than later.
Go ahead and take it.
You might as well, and then decide one way or the other, however you're going to decide.
And they focused on all the issues that the trial court had not addressed, including the new evidence, what the new evidence meant and didn't mean.
And in particular, I thought what was really smart about her petition was highlighting the signature process.
And I think correctly interpreting what the trial court did, rather than get caught in the weeds of a factually dense issue that Supreme Appellate Courts hate to deal with, said, look, what the district trial court really did was say that whether or not the statute's requirement that the election officials compare signatures, is that subject to judicial review or not?
Because the court said, no, it's not even subject to judicial review.
I think that's a correct interpretation of what the court did.
That thereby presents a neat and narrow legal issue for the Arizona Supreme Court to decide.
Does a court have authority to interpret and enforce the meaning of the word compare in signatures?
Or is it so vague and so obscure that it means nothing and there's no judicial review even capable of the executive branch's obligations in that respect?
I think that's their best legal issue.
Narrow, neat legal issue.
And clearly, quite frankly, the judge is wrong because they compare signatures all the time in a range of other contexts.
So the idea of this is beyond judicial review, beyond judicial understanding of what the statute means, contradicts a long line and litany of cases, including those in Arizona courts.
So the compare, everybody knows what compare means.
It means more than two seconds.
That's what it means.
It means do what they did in California for that district.
What was his name?
It was a French name.
Gascon.
Do it for what they did for...
What's the other one there?
Newsom.
They disqualified more than 0.02% of the ballots for whatever the reason.
And even if you only went by the signature verification with Gascon, it was 9,000 of...
It was like a couple of percent, which would have been more than enough in Carrie Lake's case.
The woodpelter is what the lawyer called it.
100% approval.
Abe Hamada, the judge who had to issue an order on Friday, finally did, though without much explanation as to what his order was.
Well, it's coming motherly.
It's coming Monday.
Apparently there was a fire, Robert.
There's literally a fire that prevented the judge from issuing the motivated ruling.
Get the details tomorrow.
Abe Hamadet, he was asking for a retrial on his unsuccessful first trial to, I don't know if it was overturned, but rather properly count.
He had a marginal differential between victory and loss.
He lost.
The judge said, you haven't proven your case.
I sort of forget the details of Abe's original contest.
The issue is the bunch of provisional ballots that weren't properly counted, that should have been, I think it was over 8,000, that if he just had, I think, 257 or more of those provisional ballots being counted in his favor, he wins.
And he won the election.
And the judge waited until the last possible minute to issue a ruling.
Basically, the judge's sitting there saying, how do I screw Hamada?
How do I screw him?
I wait!
That apparently was the main excuse.
It said, man, it's a close call, but I've got to screw the outsider.
Sorry.
Those are typical judges, sadly, in America.
I guess we'll have a written ruling at some point.
Hamada, of course, is going to appeal it.
It's clear Hamada, in my view, won, and they stole it from him.
And so it's like all these ridiculous claims where they're pursuing Trump on having electors and going through the constitutional process that he was entitled to, to legally contest who won the election.
All the media hit pieces all say he was trying to falsely claim that he was elected.
You disagree with whether he, the media, you disagree with whether he won, but he wasn't falsely claiming anything.
He believed he won, and the objective facts would support it.
No, as Tucker Carlson pointed out to Nikki Haley's embarrassment, Tucker kept hammering.
He goes, 81 million.
81 million.
Do you think Joe Biden got 81 million votes when Barack Obama couldn't get that many votes?
81 million?
Do you really think it?
Population growth.
The population has grown since Obama.
There was growth, though, right?
In mystical, mythical, miraculous ballots that came in on election night or afterwards.
So Hamada's going to challenge that all the way through the process.
The Arizona Democratic illegally elected attorney general is busy trying to figure out ways to prosecute Trump, too.
That's what's going on in crazy, kooky Arizona.
Katie Hobbs has been a complete failure as governor.
Carrie Lake is still one of the most popular candidates to potentially be a vice presidential candidate.
Now up there with Byron Donalds and Vivek.
As the most popular candidates amongst Trump's base to potentially be vice president.
DeSantis is busy sinking.
I made a joke comparison.
I won't make it again because I need to probably make more time.
Tragedy plus time equals comedy is what Woody Allen instructed, so I'll stick with it.
It was a funny meme, though, but I have a dark sense of humor.
Carrie Lake's doing a good job pursuing this case.
Make the Arizona Supreme Court, make a decision.
At least the Arizona Supreme Court should say it's judicially reviewable.
Even if they don't reinstate her, which is what should be the case, create a retrial or an election, a runoff, or a new election, if you will, then if at a minimum established that courts do in fact have the power to enforce the law governing signature review processes, I hope they at least do that.
She's done more work for election integrity than...
Anybody in the last several decades.
So credit to Carrie Lake for continuing to pursue the gate all the way through.
Yeah, Hamadeh was Attorney General that he was running for.
He should be.
The Arizona voters voted for him.
And he was wrongfully denied the office.
Now, before I forget, actually, I consistently forget.
Everybody, hit the little plus button on Rumble on the bottom, the thumbs up.
And if you haven't already joined or subscribed, subscribe on Rumble.
And also, I just put the link in there to come visit us on Locals after we're done here, because we're going to be done here soon.
Ohio won.
Speaking of election reforms.
You're going to have to do this one beginning to end, Robert, and I'll ask you questions as you go.
Yeah, we've had people continually ask about this, and some people emailed some stuff.
I have a simple answer on this.
Vote no.
Now, I understand why there's a yes campaign.
The pro-life community is worried.
That if an abortion amendment is put on the Ohio Constitution, that a majority of voters will vote for something that is less restrictive than its current Ohio law.
That is not an excuse to try to change the rules to impose a supermajority requirement and make initiatives harder to obtain.
Giving more power to the legislature is not the answer.
I'm a big fan of initiatives and direct voting.
So I think the 50% rule...
Plus one rule, majority vote rule, actually, not 50%.
The majority vote rule should stay in place, is my take.
I mean, if you vote yes for Ohio 1, you're going to require future amendments to get 60% or more support.
And more significantly, you're going to require at least 5% signatures to get past an initiative, which will make initiatives very hard to get through.
And all you're really doing, you're saying, we the people want less power?
We want to give more power to the legislature and the governor.
Ask yourself if that's a good decision.
You might have to back it up and you might have the curse of knowledge here.
Ohio is proposing an amendment to its constitution called Ohio 1 up for a vote, I believe, first week of August.
And it's an amendment to the constitution that would require future amendments.
I always love these.
This amendment can pass by majority.
But it says all future amendments have to pass by 60% or more, or they fail to amend, and they can only get even on the ballot for people to even get a chance to vote on them if we increase the number of signatures they have to get to 5% of the gubernatorial electoral vote, which is going to make it very difficult to get in or very expensive.
The only initiatives that will get through are big corporate, big money-backed initiatives.
And by the way, that won't prevent the abortion one from being presented on the ballot.
So the pro-life community is mistaken on that.
But they think it's easier for them to get 41% of the vote than 51% of the vote.
Honestly, that should tell the pro-life community in Ohio that you need to do a better job persuading people, not let's rig the rules so as long as we control the legislature or the governor's branch, we can keep our policies in place even if we know 59% of our fellow citizens don't agree with us.
All right.
And there's going to be another quick one before we get to the good ones, which is Steve Bannon and Elon Musk.
Oh, my goodness.
You're going to tell me.
I don't know how you think about the Twitter lawyer retainer agreement change at the eve of the closing, but I think I know where you're going to go with it.
Mississippi, Robert.
I'm not sure I fully understand this one.
I think I understand the dynamics, but not necessarily.
There's a predominantly 70% black district in Mississippi.
Where they've elected black judges, black law enforcement.
And the allegation is that the funds or the financing of these aspects of justice and law enforcement are determined by a part of government that is not in the district that elected these black judges, black officers, and that because of racism, they're systematically deciding to underfund this particular district for law enforcement, for judicial resources.
Is that sort of the gist of this Mississippi case?
Yeah.
So the additional component is that it's Hines County, Jackson, Mississippi.
I always forget whether Johnny Cash in his song, Going to Jackson, I think he's talking about Jackson, Tennessee, not Jackson, Mississippi.
But it's always possible he's talking about Jackson, Mississippi.
Great song with him and his wife that they sing together, June Carter Cash, from the great Carter family of East Tennessee and elsewhere.
Great folk singing tradition that blended into country music.
And so what's been happening is Hines County is 70% Black in terms of voting population.
They've been voting in Black judges, Black prosecutors, Black police.
Now, what else is Jackson, Mississippi?
It's the state capitol.
So the politicians in the state capitol are unhappy about being governed by a Black Democratic majority.
So they've been doing two things.
They've been squeezing the funds available to the entire criminal justice process, not giving them new judges, not giving them other means of remedy and relief, having their criminal dockets being backlogged, etc.
But their second new scheme was to create a capital improvement district.
That was going to say, well, really, this is all part of the Capitol and we're going to include all the suburbs over here and we're going to create a 70% white district.
And now this is who's going to govern the area around the Capitol.
It's now going to be overextended into basically all the white areas of Hines County and outside Hines County and especially the Capitol.
And now we're going to give all that power to new judges.
We're going to give that power to new cops.
I'm not in favor of these kind of ideas in general.
I mean, it's like...
Nancy Pelosi's little Capitol Police, let's extend it to everywhere we could claim jurisdiction.
And that's going to be the whole country, ultimately, because we have to protect members of Congress who represent the entire country, right?
Similar kind of scheme.
And the NAACP has sued.
The Biden administration has intervened on behalf of the NAACP on the grounds that it violates the 14th Amendment because it's intended to harm the Black community in Hines County.
And preclude them from exercising the political power to which they are lawfully entitled to under Mississippi law.
And so I think they're right.
I'm not in favor of what Mississippi is trying to do.
Now, this does reflect a broader concern, which is so many state capitals are in jurisdictions where the state is conservative and the capital is liberal.
I think that is an issue for lawsuits, for venue, and things like that.
And I think we should re-examine that.
It's a problem with the District of Columbia on a national level.
It's a problem in all of these states, including Florida with Tallahassee, Georgia with Fulton County with Atlanta, here in Mississippi with Jackson.
So they should just move the state capitol, in my view, in many of these cases, or at least change the venue provisions so that you don't have all liberal juries deciding issues of state law against the conservatives.
But I think it appears to try to interfere with local policing, local judges, that I have a problem with.
And the racial history of Mississippi needs no repetition.
My brother and I once saw Mississippi Burning.
We went to a movie theater.
It was a cheap movie theater.
And we didn't calculate the audience.
So we showed up and we were the only white guys in the entire audience.
And I remember just, you know, in case, you know, people got, you know, this was very dramatic.
What's in there?
And I was like, I'm a good white guy.
Good, good, good, good honky.
Just so you didn't show up in a Dukes of Hazzard car.
Don't let me.
That's a no bueno.
Everybody was cool as things turned out.
But the, I'll never forget that.
Yeah, I also once walked into school days.
The D-A-Z-E, one of the early, and I walked into it by accident.
I was trying to go into another movie theater.
And I go in, I sit down, I sit down like in the middle, like those middle seats, we get the whole view.
And then I realized, oh, I'm in the wrong movie.
And then I realized it's a whole black audience.
I'm like, I'm going to look like an idiot if I get up and walk out.
They're going to think, oh, look at that guy.
I was like, I'm just going to have to sit here and watch it.
That's what I did.
It reminds me of that scene in Road Trip where they go to the fraternity and they're sitting there.
It's like, you realize this is an all-black fraternity.
And the other guy's like, I don't see things like that.
A movie that has aged particularly well.
Okay, fascinating now, Robert.
Now we're going to get to...
Lawyers are bad people.
I don't know enough about the Steve Bannon underlying part of the case.
Steve Bannon racked up allegedly $850,000 in legal fees.
I suspect this was in the context of the contempt of Congress case.
Ran up a bill of $850,000, or that is to say, his lawyers charged him $850,000.
Apparently, according to the judge's ruling, he didn't contest it or object to it in time.
Paid $300,000 and some odd thousand, $380,000, and they sued.
Judge says, no, you got to pay it.
He didn't object to the billing at the time, and it was reasonable legal services.
So now he's got to pay close to $500,000.
He's got a new law firm.
I presume he's paying them who say they're going to appeal the decision because it's clearly wrong.
I mean, you have the same mechanisms in the States that you have in Quebec, where if you get an invoice, you have a certain period of time within which you can contest it, and there's a process set up.
But if you don't, and you sit there and you let them accumulate, and then, oh, you realize they're up to $800,000 and you don't want to pay it, too late, so sad.
I don't know any details above and beyond that.
Does Steve Bannon have any legitimate excuse here?
Is there outrageous after-billing, or is this just Bannon not paying attention to the legal fees as they're coming in?
The two major problems with the court's decision, where the judge issued partial summary judgment in New York State court proceeding without any discovery being allowed, is it's a complete...
Misapplication of the account stated doctrine in America.
So the account stated claim is that when you have an account, the other party accepts that they have that account and that the amount stated has been accepted or agreed to as being due and owing by either express language or by implication.
The implication provisions have been limited.
It's supposed to be a recurring credit or debtor relationship.
So this is supposed to be your bank statement.
This is supposed to be a relationship between you send me something, I review it, check, come back.
It is not supposed to apply to every other contract in America.
It should not be used for doctors.
It should not be used for lawyers.
It should not be used for accountants.
But they misuse it and abuse it.
And, of course, judges love to help lawyers rack up fees if they're on the political right side of the equation or if the defendant's on the wrong political side of the equation.
And the green light things are not supposed to.
So in an account-stated case, you're supposed to prove, as a plaintiff, undisputed liability.
It's basically account-stated supposed to be equal to a settlement agreement.
And the only time that you getting an invoice and not objecting to it constitutes a settlement agreement is when there is a undisputed pattern, custom and practice of a debtor-creditor relationship like a bank statement.
So you get a bank statement and something in there is taken out that shouldn't have been and you don't call the bank on it.
There you're stuck because you're part of it's a recurrent debt or credit relationship.
That is not the case with a lawyer and client.
It's not the case with a doctor and patient.
Not the case with an accountant and client.
And these misuse and abuse of account stated doctrines.
Now New York is horrible.
New York comes up with every excuse in the world to help lawyers.
They still have retention file doctrines where you can continue to hold a file.
Including of the client's own information from a new lawyer or from the client, unless they pay the lawyer's financial demand.
It's hijacking, extortion.
It's stolen property is what it really is.
Almost every other court in America has rejected it.
But New York courts are so incorrigibly corrupt.
And so in the pockets of lawyers that they make ridiculous rulings in favor of lawyers, particularly if they're politically protected.
So, Bannon has robust appellate rights, appeal issues present.
I don't know how well his trial counsel raised these issues.
The trial court would make it sound like it was poorly presented.
You never know whether that's true or not.
But he has, one, he should have been allowed to challenge the underlying liability.
Second, and what's the underlying liability?
In this context, ethically, as we'll get into the Musk case, You as a lawyer have to prove that your fees are ethically charged, consistent to your fiduciary obligation, and reasonably incurred, and in the quantum merit context, conferred real value upon your client.
The last reason is why I've never been sued for an illegal fee dispute ever.
Because I always tell them, occasionally I'll get a client that will want to weasel out of something.
You don't always get the best clients in the world.
I've had above average clients.
A couple of, you know, skiing through the process that are always trying to figure out a way to save an extra buck.
And I remind them, okay, I was like, look, we'll just waive the contract provision and we'll go and do quantum merit.
Let me explain to you all the value I conferred on you and how the court will see it.
I'm like, well, but you're going to owe me money.
I'm not going to owe you a refund.
You're going to owe me money by the time that analysis is done because that's pretty universal.
But that's what they're supposed to prove.
They didn't prove any of those things.
They didn't prove their fees were reasonable.
They didn't prove that they completely honored their ethical and fiduciary obligations.
They didn't prove that there was any...
Of what value they provided to ban, and it's not obvious they provided any value, quite frankly, given the outcome of a lot of these cases, but for being salvaged and saved by a pardon in the rest of the cases, they failed to achieve any benefit on that I could witness.
There were conflict of interest issues because there were going to be witnesses in some of the proceedings.
There were legal malpractice issues because it appears they gave them bad advice.
So he can also challenge them like any settlement agreement you can challenge on, mutual mistake, on fraud.
On all of those other grounds.
So the court just assumed that liability couldn't be contested because this was an account-stated case when it's not an account-stated case.
They didn't have a recurrent credit or debtor relationship.
That's not the nature here.
And my favorite part of the decision was the judge said, quote, he doesn't dispute that he received the documents.
And then quotes him saying, I never personally received the documents.
And the judge is like, well, never personally received doesn't mean never received.
In what world is that?
What a ludicrous ruling!
For summary judgments, had Bannon, or was he able to rely on any documents in defense, or was it just basically a summary judgment where he presented no discovery was allowed, and his basic affidavit was ignored.
The affidavit saying, look, I didn't receive this.
I didn't approve this.
I never had time to object because I never personally received it.
$800,000.
You didn't receive it.
You said, didn't personally.
What is that?
That's preposterous.
So it is a preposterous ruling.
I just don't know how good his lawyers are.
I don't think these lawyers that overbilled him were any good.
But to be honest, this is part of a bane and recurrent issue of bad personnel decisions.
So the, I mean, Milo is a guy he shouldn't have promoted.
He was early, even before the election, promoting some people connected to Dominion that were nuts.
He's right now promoting, he's been promoting for years now, Naomi Wolf.
Naomi Wolf is out there pretending that she's Brooke Jackson and that she's going to bring one of the first False Claims Act claims concerning Fiverr.
How she makes this stuff up is beyond me.
I saw her do it in other contexts.
She was the first one to bring FOIA challenges after those FOIA suits had been brought.
She was the first one to challenge the authority of the FDA to do this, while our lawsuit for Robert Kennedy and CHD was already pending, or with Robert Kennedy was already pending.
But he does this all the time.
About two-thirds, well, I'll say 50-50, half the time you meet really interesting people that Bannon promotes, and half the time they're idiots.
And now you see why he was not a good advisor about personnel.
Yeah, Trump Sessions will be a great attorney general.
Worst possible place to put Sessions.
God bless his soul.
But hopefully all of these problems will wake him up, that he needs to get a little bit better, just like his former boss, with who he hires for staff.
Well, now I'm thinking which...
I think I know which 50-50 I go on because Bannon hasn't promoted me, but I've been on the show back in the Trucker Convoy a lot, and I know he likes me, but...
And I like Steve.
I think he's a brilliant architect, brilliant idea, but he makes...
Often he promotes some deep...
People he shouldn't promote, number one.
Number two, quit hiring bad lawyers and you won't get stuck with big fees.
$800,000 for a conviction and...
Yeah.
Not to be judgmental, it's very easy.
And I know they weren't doing good work on the federal case because I consulted with other co-defendants in that case, was never their lawyer, but there was basic stuff his lawyers weren't doing that should have been done.
And we talked about it at the time.
There was no reason to believe these lawyers were, he just kept hiring these conventional guys.
It's like, why do you keep hiring?
But this is a guy who got taken in by Mueller.
Again, Bannon, brilliant guy, brilliant architect, brilliant ideas, great advocate.
This is an area of weakness that he happens to share with his former boss named President Trump that really could benefit from upgrading.
And I'm going to say this.
It's always easy for other people to criticize the work of others or especially the contractors that came before them.
Sticker shock when I saw the amount.
When they say that he had to pay $500,000 above and beyond the $380,000.
What's the value?
I mean, I would be embarrassed to ever sue a client if I didn't achieve anything of value for that client.
Now, to be frank, that's never happened to me.
But, you know, I mean, even in cases where we don't get the outcome we want, I achieve something.
I get something better than the average schmuck.
But to sue somebody for half a mil after delivering absolutely nothing of benefit?
You've got to be kidding me.
I'm clipping that, Robert.
Wonderful.
All right, now, speaking of asking for something for nothing, Robert, I don't know the names of the law firm.
You'll mention the names.
In the context of the closing transaction, Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, you have law firms that organize the transaction, the merger, the closing documents, the due diligence, yada, yada, yada.
This law firm, our community pointed out, or someone pointed out that this law firm is known for making, what do they call them?
Not bonus payments, but performance bonuses.
Like, you know, we do a big deal, you get a percentage of the deal.
Bottom line, this law firm was working and billing in the orders of the millions.
They had billed Twitter $18 million for this due diligence merger acquisition with Elon Musk.
On the eve, and I might be getting some of the timeline mixed up, but I don't think I am because I think the timeline goes down to hours.
They, through Vijay Gad, who I'm not naming to be mean, just she's named in the lawsuit, they...
Modify their retainer agreement, their legal contract agreement between Twitter and this law firm to say, we're going to pay you $90 million.
It includes the $18 million that you've already billed for this transaction.
And we're going to do this on the eve of the closing.
And we're going to rush the wire out.
Like, within hours before the closing or hours before Vigey God was ultimately fired from Twitter, $90 million.
Now, it's ex-corporation Elon's company that's suing.
Now, I'm blanking out.
He's suing the law firm or is he suing the law firm?
Is he suing Twitter?
No, hold on.
He's suing the...
Geez, Louise.
He's suing the law firm, correct?
Yeah.
Total brain fart for a second.
The term he was using...
I forget.
It was a lame duck fiduciary.
But basically accusing the law firm of bilking the company that he's going to acquire of a massively unwarranted legal fee.
And it doesn't harm anybody except for Elon Musk.
And you have these...
There's saboteurs or executives who are supposed to have a fiduciary obligation to the company agreeing to modify the retainer agreement to just pay out $90 million, knowing it comes out of Twitter, which is going to be bought by Elon as of midnight, and he's going to be $90 million poor, and this law firm's going to be $90 million richer.
Robert, is this a legitimate practice?
It's Wachtel, one of the most prominent law firms in America.
It tells you how big corporate firms really operate.
I mean, they're issuing invoices with like blank billing, with what's called block billing, where it's like 10 hours, did work.
That's all it said.
You know, they had an hourly billing agreement.
How you run up $18 million in hourly billing in a month or two is by itself preposterous.
This wasn't that complicated or complex of a case.
$18 million in a month or two?
What a crock.
You know, it's what they're used to.
And what it is, and Twitter had an agreement with Musk.
That a bunch of last-minute expenses would not be approved without his approval.
And they just decided...
What it was is the corporate staff there, the general counsel, the lady you mentioned is the one that was on, Joe Rogan, that tried with Tim Pool, with Jack Dorsey, that tried to lie and cover up all the Twitter censorship, opposed, hated having to sell this to Musk.
And they just decided...
When you sell an asset...
To another person.
You don't get to raid the asset right before you leave.
Oh, but it wasn't for her benefit.
It wasn't for her benefit, Robert.
It was just for legal services.
It was a contract.
It was for her pals.
This is how this system works.
How can you raid the corporate treasury for your corporate legal law firm pals that will then reward you probably down the road?
I mean, this was $90 million for nothing of benefit that I could see that was not part of the original agreement even.
Oh, no, no.
I think what they had a benefit is 90 million bucks to hide from Elon, the liability that he's purchasing in Twitter, hide the, hide the FBI, you know, the, the intermingling, hide all of the, the backdoor entrance stuff.
Yeah, no, no, it's crazy.
I, I mean, the Wire posted literally like an hour before he was able to fire these people.
I mean, so that's how imposter it was.
But credit to him for suing.
Suing on unjust enrichment, breach of fiduciary duty, aiding and abetting the board members and other executives, breach of their fiduciary duty.
What's interesting, because he's saying it's an unreasonable fee, it's a contingency fee that wasn't properly agreed to under the California ethical rules applicable under the Twitter contract.
And now what's interesting is he's interpreting the generic unfair competition, consumer fraud statute.
And the fiduciary duty provisions to incorporate the California ethical rules.
That will be the most interesting part of the case to watch.
If you breach an ethical duty, have you breached a fiduciary duty?
If you've breached an ethical duty, have you been unjustly enriched?
If you've breached an ethical duty, have you also committed some form of consumer fraud or unfair competition?
So all of that will be interesting to see, because those are kind of novel theories that are trying to establish new law.
So we'll see how that develops.
But I think on the face of it, Wachtel is your classic corrupt corporate firm that tried to rob from Elon Musk on the eve of Elon Musk coming into power.
And Elon Musk is having none of it and going back at him for it.
I mean, do they have the money?
They'll have the money.
It's not like they won't have it.
What was it?
Almost a billion a year?
Something like that?
It's a ridiculous amount.
Not bad.
Now, before we go over to...
We're going over to locals now.
So everybody, you got the link in there.
And there is only one way to end this episode on Rumble because of the gratuitous use of the word duty coming out of Robert.
We're going to end it with this, people.
Duty.
It will never get old.
Diarrhea.
What?
Diarrhea.
Okay, it's classic.
It's classic.
Family Guy, Once Upon a Time, was the funniest show ever.
I don't know if it's still funny.
All right, Robert, so we're taking this party over to Locals.
We're going to get to the $5 and more Locals tips.
We got a couple of bonus episodes.
Yeah, the Microsoft antitrust case concerning Call of Duty, Bank of America and Walmart get caught cheating their customers, and the TikTok Texas case and whether it violates the First Amendment.
I'm not playing the duty again, but everyone come on over to Locals.
And the party shall continue there.
I'm going to go and end this.
I'm going to continue talking as I go into the live streams.
And it says, end on Rumble.
See you all on Locals in 5, 4. Enjoy the week, people.
Robert, what's your schedule for this week?
Do you have anything coming up?
No.
Okay.
I will be on the road, but I'll be doing lives nonetheless.
And a couple of good guests coming up this week, so stay tuned.
Ending on Rumble now.
Okay.
Let me refresh here and make sure that we are only...
On Locals.
Hold on.
Come on now.
Come on now.
What's going on here?
End livestream.
Okay, are you sure you want to end it?
Yes.
Okay, so now it looks like it's ended on Rumble, and we're good on Locals.
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