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Jan. 12, 2024 - Viva & Barnes
42:23
Live with WIll Chamberlain! Team DeSantis vs. Team Trump Part Deux! Viva Frei
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Time Text
I started three seconds early.
Just so you can look at her face.
Just look at it.
Look at it.
Oh!
I'm not making fun of her demonic spirit.
Just look at it for three more seconds before you hear the verbal diarrhea come out of that mouth.
Oh, and by the way, wait for her smile to drop like the beat of a club song.
Oh!
What do you make of your security detail arresting David Menzies?
Oh, I already want to vomit.
I want to start with what was important about Monday.
U.S. Americans are having trouble fighting.
And what was important about Monday, January 8th, was the fourth anniversary of a date that I think forever needs to be marked and circled in black.
On the calendar of all Canadians.
It was a tragedy for Canada.
Canadians were criminally murdered.
And I want...
If this were a deposition and I were the lawyer, I would stop the witness right now and I said...
And I've done this all the time.
It's actually kind of a decent tactic.
I'd say, stop.
What was the question I just asked you?
Nine out of ten times, they, at this point, into their idiotic rambling, will not even remember the question that was asked.
What was the question that you were just asked, Madame Fräulein Freelander?
What was it?
Freeland, not Freelander.
What do you say about your security detail falsely arresting and assaulting David Menzies?
So, let me just go on for a minute about exploiting and milking the victims of...
Call it a terrorist attack, or at the very least, the deliberate downing of a commercial airliner.
Let me just go ahead and milk those victims to distract from the question, and then I'll get to your question soon.
I want to say to the families and loved ones of the people who were murdered that Canada remembers Canada will not forget.
Canada remembers and Canada will not forget, and it took Justin Trudeau about a week.
To finally refer to it as a plane that was taken down and not a plane that crashed.
At first he was saying, it's a plane crash.
Sorry, planes getting shot out of the sky is not a crash.
It's a terrorist attack, more likely.
Now she can admit it, because now she gets the virtue points for invoking the victims of that downing of the, was it the Ukrainian flight or the Iranian flight?
I forget.
Now they can talk about it.
Instead of answering the very straightforward question that she was asked to begin with.
And that's why I was in Richmond Hill.
Marcy was there too.
To show that this is a Canadian tragedy.
That Canada remembers.
And Canada will not forget.
Canada remembers and Canada will not forget.
You are about as smart as Kamala Harris.
Chrystia Freeland.
On...
By the way, we're now a minute into the question?
The incident.
As you guys know very well, Canada is a rule of law country.
No, it's not.
It's a tyranny.
Rule of law?
Extrajudicial freezing of bank accounts with no due process and no judicial oversight?
Not a rule of law anymore.
Canada is a democracy.
Operational decisions about law enforcement are taken by the police of jurisdiction quite appropriately.
Political elected officials have no role in the taking of those decisions.
Bullshit.
And that's why I don't have any further comment.
That took me a minute to, like, look at her face.
Just look at this, by the way.
Look at it with the volume down.
What did you just say?
She's demonic.
I've used that word twice today, and for good reason.
Everybody, good morning.
Good morning.
I had a Twitter space yesterday, a very entertaining Twitter space, which I'm going to put together a short vlog later today, a car vlog.
I'm going to go sit in the car, listen to the birds chirp, and highlight the fact that I did a two-hour, or participated for two hours in a Twitter space with scientists, doctors, and PhDs who expose themselves for what they are, as relates to jab-pushing.
As I've said, demons.
I asked three of them at the end, "How many jabs have you had?" One confirmed zero.
The other one refused to answer.
And then after the stream, one of the doctors went to Twitter to confirm that he got myocarditis from his first jab.
These are the people pushing this on other people and calling people like me who subjected myself to two shots anti-vaxxers.
They can't go to hell fast enough.
Okay.
Will Chamberlain is in the backdrop listening to me rant like a lunatic.
Everybody share the link because it's super short notice.
Or at least I set this up with super short notice.
Will Chamberlain has a very similar name to Wilt Chamberlain.
So when I was online doing my research, I'm like, holy crap, he played basketball.
And then I realized, nope, I autocorrect went to Wilt Chamberlain, not Will Chamberlain.
And then the internet, at least Google searches.
Not much on Will Chamberlain.
I was watching some podcasts, and it seems that for whatever the reason, lately, Will's been doing the rounds debating Dave Smith, or at least having discussions on the Israeli-Palestine conflict.
I pulled up a podcast with him and Michael Malice from 2019.
I know some of you watching are already predisposed to not like him or make fun of him.
He's a very smart guy.
I happen to think he might be a little out in left field with some other stuff.
We're going to talk about it.
We've had a Twitter beef, and I said, look...
Instead of misunderstanding back and forth on Twitter, let's just have a discussion in real life.
And he's in the backdrop.
Wilt Chamberlain, are you ready?
I'm here, brother.
How's it going?
Very good on yourself.
Okay, so I'm going to zoom in like this.
Now, what I'm going to do, if you could give us the elevator pitch.
Hold on, because I'm going to make sure my audio is good.
Let me hear your audio for a second.
Sure.
You hear me?
I think it's perfect.
Chat, let me know if I'm too soft or too loud.
Because for whatever reason, it sounds good to me, but there's always a few people in the chat who say I'm too loud or too soft.
Will.
You're not Will Chamberlain, and who is the Chamberlain Peace in Our Time guy?
What was his first name?
Neville.
And you're not Neville, that was Chamberlain.
No, no relation, thank God.
For those of us who don't know who you are, tell us who you are.
So I'm the former publisher of Human Events.
I'm a lawyer by training.
I'm a former publisher of Human Events, you know, Jack Posopic.
They're all still there, good friends.
But most recently, I was working for the DeSantis campaign in June and July.
And then I worked after the layoffs that happened there, I worked at the executive office of the governor.
So in his actual official office of the Capitol.
And currently, I am senior counsel at the Article 3 project and the Internet Accountability Project.
Focus a lot on the Internet Accountability Project.
Big tech has been a longer-term focus of mine in terms of fighting against censorship on social media platforms.
Can I ask the indiscreet question how old you are?
Because you look very young.
I'm 38. 38?
Okay, you're a baby.
I'm not talking about it.
I've got a wife and a kid, man.
Only one kid?
Only one, yeah.
I say the exponential difference is going from two to three.
One to two, no big difference.
Two to three.
Parents are outnumbered and holy crab apples.
Born and raised in Florida?
No.
Born and raised in California.
Okay.
And have moved around a lot as a result of it.
I went to law school in D.C., came back to California to work, went back to D.C. to work, moved down to Florida most recently.
So I've been all over the place.
How many siblings do you have?
I won't get too far into the family.
Just a younger sister.
And what do your parents do?
Or what did they do?
They're both retired.
My mom was also a lawyer, although she left to be a stay-at-home mom after when she met my dad.
My dad did a variety of things.
We lived in Silicon Valley.
He was kind of a mid-level manager at Tandem Computers, which was bought out by Compaq, which was bought out by HP.
And then most recently, he retired from a second career doing complex tax work.
So now I think people in the crowd might be suspecting you're either a closet Democrat or a CIA asset.
You go from California to D.C. to study law.
Yeah, I got into Georgetown.
Georgetown, okay.
And did you practice law after your degree?
Yep, I practiced complex commercial litigation at Quinn Emanuel in Los Angeles.
And then I did non-profit class action work at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Where we fought against, we objected to unfair class action settlements.
I can go to detail on that if you want to know how much time we have.
Well, I say, typically, I mean, if you got an hour and a half, we got an hour and a half.
But this is kind of interesting.
So go in.
You got to make people like you before they decide they hate you for the DeSantis stuff.
Oh, right, right.
Okay.
So anyway, well, Quint Emanuel is like a big litigation firm that had a lot of interesting...
Cases, like, oddly enough, I turned down the opportunity to represent, for example, Bill Cosby, who we were representing in a defamation case.
I had a client briefly that was on Dirty Money, Netflix's Dirty Money.
I saw that later.
So we had interesting, you know, both plaintiff and defense side type work and some white-collar criminal defense, which is like the Dirty Money type stuff, and also just normal kind of civil business litigation.
And then when I was at Competitive Enterprise Institute, what we were doing was we were objecting to unfair class action settlements.
So if you ever get one of those cards in the mail that gives you like a $5 or less coupon that you say you get out of a settlement, well, that's the product of a class action lawsuit.
And unlike you, who's getting just a coupon, the lawyers are often getting millions of real dollars, not just a coupon that you can use to buy something from the company that wronged you.
So we would go in and object to those settlements and try and make it a little bit fairer.
And ensure that, I mean, the problem in those settlements is that there's this, you know, kind of conflict of interest that the plaintiff's lawyers has.
They have an incentive to maximize the amount of returns they get in terms of their fees that they're given to them by the court, while not really caring that much about how much you, the class members, get, because who cares, it's coupons, or who cares, it's a small amount of money.
And you're also not their client, right?
Like, they might have one single client who's the lead plaintiff, but you, just the random class member who's not a part of a lawsuit officially.
You're not their client.
So there's a lot of tension there in terms of how that lawyer negotiates with the defendants.
And so we were doing work to ensure that things were fair.
And I'm pretty proud of that work.
And it still goes on.
You say not for profit.
Who do you go in?
Who is your...
You have to have standing.
You have to have somebody who's your client.
Who goes in and says, I object to this?
It's one of the people who gets a $5 coupon and says, what the hell is this?
It's an unnamed class member.
And so, I mean, these class action lawsuits can all have millions of people in the class, right?
Like, if you purchased, a good example would be there was a false advertising claim about a particular olive oil that it was, it said it was made in Italy, but in reality, it used Greek grapes or Greek olives, sorry.
Well, if you bought that olive oil, you're a class member in the relevant time period.
So if we see a class action settlement that looks off, we would solicit for anybody who is actually a member of a class and doesn't mind being an unnamed class member and the named objector to the settlement.
Barnes and I, we just covered one relatively recently.
I forget the details.
I think it was a credit card class action and they were offering coupons.
And the question was whether or not...
I forget the details of it.
But anyways, we've talked about this.
It's interesting because some of these things, you get a notice in the mail, you're not aware of it.
The lawyers are settling for millions for legal fees and then, you know, dividing up coupons or actually no compensation for the members of the class.
Now, someone said, I don't know if someone knows something that I don't know.
Jesuit's going to Jesuit.
You're not a religious person, are you?
I'm not Catholic.
Okay.
Sometimes the chat knows.
I'm not Catholic.
I'm not even religious, man.
Like, I don't know where people...
I get this sometimes.
People assume, like, I randomly...
This is a random story.
You know, Bethany Mandel or the Mandel family?
Like, they invited us over for Shabbat dinner.
And they, like, assumed I was Catholic for some reason.
I'm like, my mom's Jewish.
My dad's Christian.
I'm non-religious.
Dude, I totally assumed you were the furthest thing from Jewish that I could imagine.
Most people don't see it coming.
That's true.
I don't really look Jewish.
How tall are you?
6 '2"?
Yeah, you see, I knew you were, you could tell by a good deep voice that you're a tall person.
6 '2", Chamberlain, I wouldn't have seen that coming.
Okay, so how long did you practice for?
I didn't practice for all that long, honestly.
I practiced for like a little less than two years before I decided to kind of move into politics.
All right, and then how does that transition work?
What year was this?
This was like 2017.
So 2017, I moved to D.C. in March to take the job at the nonprofit.
But then I was also getting, you know, I was excited at Donald Trump winning in 2016 and wanted to come to D.C. And, you know, because like I was one of the only people in my social circle I knew that voted for Trump.
I, you know, I was doing big law.
This is not a Trump friendly environment.
In elite legal circles.
Certainly not in 2016.
So I was like, well, that means this is a good opportunity for me to come be a part of the movement.
And so I came to D.C. I knew Mike Cernovich, who I'm still friends with.
And he was a very major Trump advocate at the time.
And sort of got hooked into the people he knew in D.C. that were involved in pro-Trump activism.
And so I met a whole bunch of people and a whole bunch of friends.
When I just started, I was doing like cocktail hour type things, you know, after work to try and meet people in the area and organize Trump supporters at the Trump Hotel in D.C. back when it was still the Trump.
And then, you know, once I got to that, I eventually decided to leave my job and try and do more politics stuff full time.
And in 2019, I ended up buying Human Events, the rights to the intellectual property of Human Events with Raheem Kassam.
Or I'm sorry, I bought it.
Let me put that clear.
I bought it.
Rahim was my partner at the time to try and run and create a new magazine.
And since then, it's been kind of like, you know, what I was looking for is I didn't think we had a national review like on the popular side of the right.
And I wanted to create Human Events to be that.
That was my vision at the time.
Human Events, I know.
I mean, I know Posobic is there.
Human Events bought out, I want to say, a Canadian outlet.
I forget what it was like.
No, Postmillennial.
Well, no, you're right.
Human Events bought out Postmillennial, right?
Basically, at some point, I brought in a business partner, and we had some editorial disagreements.
And he was a much wealthier guy than I am, so it made sense for me to sell to him rather than the other way around.
And so I sold my interest.
Since then, he bought out Postmillennial, and so now you have Human Events and Postmillennial under the same enterprise.
Okay, so you bought Human Events.
How long were you involved with it for before you were bought out or sold out?
I want to say a full two and a half years.
No, it was finalized in 2022.
Early 2022 is when the...
The sale was finalized.
Human events, I don't know what it was like back then because I don't think I was politically conscious at that time to the degree that I am now, but today it's amazing.
Postmillennial does great work.
Was it hard work getting that up and establishing a name and a brand for it?
It was challenging.
I'd never done news before.
I came from the law and debate, so I'm an opinion editor type guy.
That's primarily where I focused.
When Rahim and I separated pretty quickly, After getting started, I kind of steered it towards focusing on opinion.
You can read a lot of my old opinion pieces that I wrote there.
They're still up.
I was just trying to do intellectually serious but nationalist advocacy.
I'm still very involved with, for example, the National Conservatism Organization and go to their conferences and speak.
I do their podcasts every week.
I was looking to try and like, and a lot of it was because I felt like National Review did a terrible job.
They just decided to go full on anti-Trump.
And even after he was president, they were just obnoxious about it.
And I thought there was a very intellectually serious case to be made for the Trump presidency and for the program that he was trying to implement through 2016 to 2020.
And so I, you know, and I was really happy to see that the way he had kind of shifted the Republican Party, too, that was a big thing.
You know, the Republican Party pre-Trump was terrible.
It was just neocon hawks and it was just not nearly as good as it is now.
And Trump gets a lot of credit for that.
I see Trump as the catalyst to shifting the way the Republican Party...
He made the Republican Party a lot better.
That's what I think.
Hold on.
We're going to shift into the actual meat of this now.
So what I'm going to do for those on YouTube...
We're going to end this on YouTube and come on over to Rumble because now it's going to be getting into what you did for Trump or what you did...
Supporting Trump and the transition to a very proactive protestantist.
We're going to get there.
Okay, we're ending on YouTube, everybody.
The link to Rumble is there.
Or, actually, I should say this.
Hold on.
You can all come over to vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
We end on YouTube in 3, 2, 1, now.
All right, well, so you get into politics.
You're on, I don't want to say on the Trump train because I don't view things that way, but you're supporting wholeheartedly Trump at the time, 2017 to 2020.
Flesh that out.
What are you doing?
Is it, I say, paid in a non-cynical way?
Is it just politically, you're ideologically aligned?
I mean, you know, we're, you know, I'm running Human Events at the time.
We're taking subscriptions and getting support.
So in sort of an abstract sense, I have people who are probably, you know, handing over money to Human Events because we're a pro-Trump outlet, I guess.
But I don't want to, I'm not paid directly by any Trump affiliate.
Or, you know, any part of the Trump campaign or, you know, anything related to him.
So you're supporting him and you see the way the media from day one of the presidency is, I won't even say, what's the word, not handcuffing his pregnancy, but overtly sabotaging it.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
No, I don't give any time to the media in terms of, like, they were horribly unfair to him.
You know, a lot of people were horribly unfair.
You know, but the thing about being there and being in D.C., and I knew plenty of people who worked in the administration, got a lot of, you know, inside baseball in terms of what they were dealing with, or huge, huge, huge staffing problems in terms of, and the ability of people who were in the American First Movement to actually get in the administration.
Part of, I mean, one of the things that, the way I look at Trump, and it's, you know, he's a, one, he's strangely flawed, right?
He's unique talents and then unique flaws.
And then the second big thing is that, You know, he's an excellent foreign policy president and a kind of mediocre domestic policy president.
Like, that's what I look at Trump.
And the reason he was mediocre on domestic policy is because on foreign policy, he has much more personal direct responsibility, right?
He can just make good decisions.
And if he just makes good decisions on foreign policy, generally, things are going to be okay, right?
He's the guy who controls, who's ultimately in charge of our diplomacy, in charge of our war making, whatever.
I thought he did a good job on that.
But man, he just really...
He struggled to control the bureaucracy to do anything with Congress.
And in particular, some of that's always going to be hard because you don't have full control of Congress, for example, obviously.
But he did terrible personnel and did terrible running his cabinet.
And for me, you notice that basically every cabinet secretary, or 90% of them, he decided they were losers after they said bad things about him.
And it's like, well...
You're the guy who hired them.
You hired all these people.
I think, ultimately, one of the things is he's not...
I don't know if you read Jocko Willink's book on extreme ownership.
The idea is that, as a superior, you are responsible for what happens underneath you.
It's your fault.
You don't get to blame your subordinates for things.
It's on you.
You are in charge.
Obviously, there are some things you're not in charge of that you don't get the blame for, but you control who your cabinet secretaries are.
You could fire them at any time.
That's on you.
And if your administration, your White House doesn't function, that's your fault as the president.
And so I got really tired of that.
I still supported him.
And obviously, I can't stand the Democrats.
They're far, far worse.
But, you know, once and especially once 2020 happened and he's out of office, I'm like, new blood.
We need to go in a different direction.
If we can keep somebody who's aligned with the policy, we should be going in a different direction here.
You name your cabinet right from the get-go.
Once your first day is in office, it was...
He gets sworn in on January.
It's January 2021, right?
The transfer of power?
Just hypothetically, people often blame him for this.
He hired the wrong people.
He didn't fire the right people.
He's coming into politics as an outsider.
Maybe my not defense of Trump, because I'm pro-Trump, I'm not pro-anything, despite what people think.
I just say he's an outsider coming in, thinking he's going to bridge divides.
He's going to be able to convince, negotiate with the enemy, as typical politicians had done, but had no idea the degree to which they were going to play dirty.
What's he supposed to do?
Like, just fire everybody who's part of the administration and hire his own people?
How would it have worked in the ideal sense had he done everything right?
I mean, in the ideal sense, first off, I mean, he easily could have prevented the Russia special counsel investigation from even happening, right?
This is a very small, like, little-known fact, and people don't really discuss it.
And that's not to say that it wasn't unfair.
Holy cow, was it a massive abuse of power and everybody responsible in the FBI needs to have the book thrown at them.
Don't get me wrong.
If you remember, he fired James Comey and that firing was the catalyst for the special counsel being appointed by Rod Rosenstein.
It was the firing of James Comey.
And why was that?
Well, they fired James Comey and Rod Rosenstein writes a memo about why the administration's firing James Comey.
Donald Trump adopts, right, that Donald Trump signs off on.
And that memo says James Comey meddled politically in the 2016 election by bringing up random news about Hillary Clinton and not handling the Hillary Clinton affair in an objective way.
And Trump's like, fine, that's the reason to fire him.
Okay.
And then Trump, for no reason at all, gives an interview to Lester Holt, where he contradicts his own deputy attorney general on the reasons for James Comey's firing.
Putting him in a terrible position in his own department.
And it was a complete own goal.
There was no reason to even do that interview.
There was no reason to say something that was contrary to what your own administration had put out.
And as a result, that was the catalyst that kicked off the special counsel investigation.
So there's a value to having the ability to put out disciplined communications as an administration.
And Trump is an incredibly undisciplined communicator.
Sometimes it's freewheeling and fun, but other times it really screws you.
And this is a case where it really screwed him.
Well, if I play not even devil's advocate, but, you know, having lived through this and seen it, some are going to say, okay, there's literally nothing he could have said or not said that would have avoided it as of that position, as of that time.
I don't agree with that, because Rob Rosenstein was his subordinate, right?
Like, if he had talked with Rob Rosenstein and not publicly contradicted him...
Right?
On an issue as central, as important as the firing of James Comey, this would have been avoided.
Right?
It was his administration that appointed the special counsel.
And his, I mean, all he needed to do was listen to his lawyers.
And this is actually a consistent theme through, like, where you're talking about the problems in the Trump administration.
Like, the failure to take the good advice from his lawyers and, like, on things that did not have any substantive impact.
Right?
Just literally on, like, his rhetoric.
And as a result, like, the administration was, like, hobbled from day one.
And I think part of the reason, you know, there's a lot of reasons I prefer to Sanis, but one of them is, like, I've seen how his administration works firsthand.
I literally worked in the Capitol.
And when they need to be, when they're doing something important that a lot they know will get legal scrutiny, the communications are incredibly disciplined.
Everybody is on the exact same page.
We're all saying, everybody's saying the exact same thing about the reasons why the administration is doing something, right?
And nobody goes off script.
And that's valuable because it means that you actually achieve your goals.
It means you win.
It means courts don't start saying, oh, this was pretextual.
Oh, you know, you have other people saying things, going crosswise.
Like, DeSantis is incredible, and his team is incredible at ensuring discipline and communication.
I'm trying to fact check one thing in real time.
Rosenstein created the Mueller investigation.
In virtue of what authority did he do that?
Are you saying?
He had authority because Sessions had recused himself from covering Russia.
And so basically under special counsel, under the regulations and the...
Basically, the special counsel, whoever holds the post of attorney general has the authority to appoint a special counsel.
Okay, I'm going to have to check something afterwards.
But okay, so...
Well, let's start with...
So item number one, he didn't fire the right people.
He didn't hire the right people.
I don't think there's anything he could have done to avoid the Mueller investigation silence or vocalness because it was going to happen regardless because it had been hyped up for the last six months.
I mean, I just, I don't agree with that.
Also, I don't agree with, I mean, there's also the fact that if he wanted to, he could have fired those people right off the bat, too.
He's still the president.
Remember, this is, he is the president of the United States.
He has all the executive authority.
And that includes, like, he can essentially say, oh, you know, the DOJ has internal regulations about how a special counsel is appointed.
Well, he's the president.
He can just ignore them and impose his will on the Department of Justice.
He didn't need to let that happen.
Okay, and then...
It's not Monday morning quarterback.
It's just ignoring that there would have been nothing that he could have done.
Fire them, dismiss it, then there would have been a third impeachment.
It just would have started with another one that he's interfering with an ongoing investigation into Russia collusion, impeachable offense.
Okay, fine.
So, when do you...
What is their specific catalyst under the Trump administration where you say this is it, no longer supporting him?
There wasn't one under the administration itself.
I supported the Trump administration.
I was in Philadelphia in 2020.
I don't know if you recall the video of the poll watcher getting kicked out of a polling place that went viral on Election Day.
It was in Philadelphia.
Everybody reposted it.
I actually think I'm personally responsible for kicking off Stop This Deal as a hashtag.
Because that tweet had stopped the steal.
And there's actually been articles written about it, how it went viral after that tweet.
So I was volunteering to help the Trump campaign in 2020 and wanted him to win re-election.
I guess if you're talking about where I was not happy, I was certainly, after about late November, I was of the belief that there was absolutely no possibility of any of this, like, essentially all the attempts to try and fight the election results were doomed to fail post.
It was starting on, like, at least December 1st.
And so I was not happy with, like, the whole attempt to start January 6th, then, like, to bring people to the Capitol.
I thought it was all dumb.
And it's like, I couldn't articulate fully why.
Like, I didn't predict what would happen, for example.
But I just, I saw it as a case that's like, this can't possibly accomplish the ends that it's being designed to accomplish.
I think at the time, I even placed bets, you know, unpredicted at the time.
You could place bets on whether Joe Biden would take office.
And this is after the election, December 1st, when, you know.
Most of the results had been confirmed, like certified at least.
And people were still saying there was like a 15% chance that Trump would be president.
I just made a bunch of money betting against them because there was like a 0.01% chance in reality.
And so I didn't approve of that.
Certainly after January 6th, I was, you know, I already, after he lost the election, I'd already kind of made a decision that like, well, clearly we should move on here.
I didn't even think that Trump would consider running again.
Let me stop you there.
You say as early as December 2016, you don't feel the legal challenges are going to succeed.
Yeah.
Why?
Oh, because two reasons.
One is that they were clearly not ready for this in the sense that they were very late, they were very slow getting those challenges filed.
And then the second reason is you have people like Lin Wood.
And Sidney Powell filing things that were absolutely insane.
Like, legal documents that were incoherent.
Completely, like, hadn't seen a proofreader.
Like, you know, typos on everything, everywhere.
And just terrible, terrible arguments that...
If I may stop you there, though.
Yeah, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Linwood and Sidney Powell are not filing them for and on behalf of any official Trump campaign or Trump request.
Sure, but Sidney Powell's like, you know...
Trump put Sidney Powell up there next to Rudy Giuliani at one of those famous press conferences and had her go off.
Basically, the entire thing got covered with a stench of incompetence.
Is there any part of you that thinks that this might have actually been overt sabotage?
There's as many Republicans who want Trump out as there are Democrats?
I don't think it was overt sabotage.
Part of the problem is there's too much.
I'm not a big conspiracy believer if the conspiracy requires a lot of people to be involved.
Too many people would leak it.
So I don't think it was overt sabotage.
I think it's as simple as they were incredibly behind the eight ball.
It wasn't just one state.
They had four states that they had to challenge.
They didn't have a great legal team that they had.
They really just did not have the legal firepower they needed to challenge us if they ever were going to.
And then basically they passively kind of let...
Other people, like Sidney Powell, would take the lead filing lawsuits that were insane.
So I just thought it was pretty clearly doomed.
And I thought, like, okay.
And part of me is just also, I think, from my perspective, like, I was there in Philadelphia, and I kind of got a view of fraud that was interesting, right?
So I saw, you know, they kicked the poll watcher out of the polling place with my own eyes.
I filmed it.
I watched it.
I did another Periscope where...
There was an incident at a polling place where a Democrat poll worker had cast an illegal vote because they had voted absentee already.
And instead of voting provisionally on...
Sorry, not that they had voted absentee, but they had received an absentee ballot.
And in Pennsylvania, if you receive an absentee ballot, if you want to vote on Election Day, you need to present it in person to get a real ballot.
Otherwise, you have to vote provisionally.
This poll worker refused to do that and just went ahead and voted straight away.
The entire apparatus of...
The RNC Politicos descended on this public school in Philadelphia to deal with this one vote that might have been illegal or was illegal.
And it made me realize, it's like, okay, if this is able to bring everyone that I was seeing at Trump headquarters, if this is able to bring 20 people to deal with this one vote, there's some shenanigans, but there isn't mass fraud, right?
There isn't the level of fraud that would essentially overturn tens and tens of thousands of votes.
Because you use the word fraud, and then the question is going to be, if it's the result of recently changed regulations, then it's not fraud with the capital F, but what it is is constitutionally invalid ballots or votes that could be challenged.
I agree that there's that issue in Pennsylvania, but there's three or four other states, too.
And trust me, I'm not a fan of...
Mail-in voting.
I think that it opens up the possibility of mass fraud.
Well, I mean, everybody knows that.
Anybody who denies it is just not even listening to what they were saying 10 years ago.
But the question was this, though.
So you say they're doomed to fail in December in your view, but from what you're describing, it sounds more on a procedural, strategic level and not on a substantive level.
The question that I have for all DeSantis supporters is, to me, and I didn't mean to, like, reduce you to a DeSantis supporter.
My question to you is...
It sounds like you're acknowledging that there were shenanigans afoot for the election, and that their mistake was not on the substance, but rather on the strategy through which to challenge it legally.
I think there's, it's not, I think for me, it's substantively unclear whether or not there was sufficient fraud.
I view it as very unlikely, right?
That's how I'll put it, right?
I think it's very unlikely there was sufficient fraud to overturn the election.
Not impossible, and not provably false, but unlikely.
I think substantively they were always going to have, the challenges also were probably going to fail, even if they got past these procedural hurdles.
I mean, it's four states.
They had to win in all four.
They weren't just trying, you know, this wasn't a one-state issue.
It's a four-state issue.
I mean, I would disagree with you there and say if they've proven fraud, fraud or constitutionally invalid ballots in one state, that is the catalyst of the victory.
Well, then there might be enough of a push to say, Because if it's proven in one state, well, it wouldn't have impacted the other states.
Well, we don't know that.
Well, I mean, but that's distinct to Pennsylvania.
Like, the Pennsylvania issue is the fact the votes were constitutionally informed in Pennsylvania because of a particular provision in the Pennsylvania Constitution, right?
And I'm thinking Wisconsin also.
Wisconsin was the indefinite confinement, right, where they had 220,000 ballots from COVID indefinitely confined, which some people might argue legally are, in fact, constitutionally invalid.
Right.
I mean, I guess, like, that's the best, you know, the best you can hope for is, like, some sort of redo out of that.
But I don't know.
I thought, you know, it was just very clear, like, you know, maybe those would have worked if they had had more time or better lawyers or work quicker.
Or judges.
But they weren't ready.
And here's another point, which is sort of connected to the extreme ownership thing I was talking about.
Like, the way I view it is, like, That's on Trump and his team.
And they didn't have that ready.
Like, they weren't ready for it.
It's like, okay, like, I'm not angry at you.
But then I'm also not patient with the, like, one of the big tensions and things that I found very frustrating about, like, Trump 2024 is, it's like, you know, I say, oh, well, you're not president.
You didn't, you lost.
No, no, no, no, no, we won.
It's like, okay, you won.
All right.
You sure?
I mean, you can't prove that, obviously.
Like, you can't prove that you had the votes.
You say things were unfair, but...
You didn't, whatever, you at the time had more power to stop shenanigans than you ever would have.
You were the president of the United States vested with the full power of the federal government.
Now you're a private citizen.
And the idea that you're going to be more able to deal with fraud and more able to fight these shenanigans as someone who is, as a private citizen than you were as president, just, it doesn't make sense to me.
Like, I think that you...
And to defend, not to defend you, but to legitimize some of this critique, Robert Barnes and I, we were, I remember now in retrospect, starting in 2020, when there were private litigations and settlements, I think it was in Georgia, the DNC or Democrat activist organizations, you know, they were entering into settlements as to changing the rules for mail-in ballots.
And Barnes and I, you know, at the time it was more him.
He's saying like, they're a little bit behind the ball in the pre-election litigation.
They haven't hired the best team for the election litigation.
All that being said, all right, but if there was a fortification of foots, which I mean, I'll get into whether or not...
You have no idea how corrupt it is to fight back, whether or not DeSantis and his idealism can do it.
He who has never done has never made the mistake yet.
But if you acknowledge that the system is so fundamentally corrupt that it would change the rules, it would arguably constitutionally invalidate certain ballots, and then the corruption of the system is that which would not hear the cases on the merits, so you're going to drop support for the person who is the victim of that.
That's where I have...
The biggest objection or the biggest problem to all of this is, even if it's right, what you're basically saying is, yeah, he didn't do a good enough job fighting the corruption of the system and was a victim to it, so we're going to abandon him.
Yeah, well, my view is not abandon him.
It's that you don't get a mulligan.
Especially when we have a guy like DeSantis, who's a Harvard-trained lawyer and who's much more legally sophisticated.
Well, Will, I'll stop you there.
Some people might think the Harvard-trained lawyers, four of whom on the Colorado bench just voted to get, you know, agreed to get Trump off the ballot, Harvard-trained might not make them smarter and street smarter.
It might actually make them more ruthless.
Right?
Like, this is, and the thing is, I mean, I'm, you know, this is one of my theses, and the campaign's never going to adopt this.
This is my thesis.
Right?
Republicans haven't really tried the, you know, haven't gone the lawyer route in a while.
For president.
And, you know, there's this, you know, the broad thesis of Trump is like, oh, he's a dealmaker.
We need somebody who makes deals.
And I look at the modern Democratic Party and I'm like, we don't want to make deals with these people.
We want to use power and wield it and impose it on them.
And to do that, you need somebody who walks into the White House and understands in detail what are his powers, right?
And to me, Trump doesn't do that.
Trump was like a novice pilot in a 747 when it came to his powers under the Constitution.
He didn't know what buttons he could press.
I think DeSantis actually laid this out pretty elegantly, I think maybe yesterday, where he described this distinct difference between how Trump is perceived and the media narrative around Trump and the actual Trump.
The media narrative is Trump was this tyrant.
He used all his power abusively.
And if he came into power again, he'd be a dictator.
And I laugh at this because my view of Trump is the opposite.
He's a pussycat in office.
He didn't wield the powers available to them.
I mean, there's other examples I can bring up.
The wall.
The National Emergency Declaration?
Dear Lord.
But basically, Trump is not that legally sophisticated.
He didn't have a good understanding of his powers.
He tried some things very early on with things like the travel ban, got a huge blowback.
And then after that, he basically was like, whatever, left the machine on autopilot.
And I want somebody who's a much more legally sophisticated guy because I want, for the populist movement, I want our Obama.
Not in the sense of, like, what he did substantively, right?
Obama doesn't agree with us.
But I want somebody who is as effective at advancing our objectives as Obama was effective at advancing Democrat objectives.
And I think the guy who's going to put up W's on the board for us is DeSantis.
This is what I think is unfair about what you're saying right now, is that your perspective of what Trump should have done, the powers that he could have wielded, other than being untested, they have the benefit of the last, what is it now?
Eight years of seeing the degree to which a corrupt regime will sabotage, will attack, will try to jail somebody.
And you say like, okay, well, you now know this and are holding this standard to Trump in 2016.
I don't think anybody could have foreseen the degree and the depths of depravity to which the left would sink to sabotage, to lie, to spy, to persecute.
And so you have this hindsight now that you're holding against Trump at the time when he's got the same hindsight now.
And arguably is the only one who's had direct experience of this type of corruption.
And yet somehow you think DeSantis, who has never experienced it...
He's experienced a lot of nonsense coming at him from the Florida Democrats.
There's nonsense.
With a very hostile...
Press and hostile for Democrats.
And he's just beaten them nonstop.
Well, there's hostile and then there's trying to lock him up hostile.
And he's got two young kids and maybe he's not that much of a threat to them yet where they even see this as the necessary means.
But for anybody who, and I keep saying this, for anybody who thinks that they will not indict DeSantis for human trafficking, fraudulent inducements, for anybody who doesn't think they'll do that if he's seen as a threat.
And if they don't do it, it's because they don't see him as a threat, which could be a problem in itself.
This is the difference.
If DeSantis is president, he won't be indicted for any of that stuff by the federal government.
You know why?
Because his attorney general will be a loyalist to DeSantis personally.
He won't be just some random guy.
He'll be a loyalist.
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