34 posts from Monday, August 7, 2023

Welcome back, America. In addition to denying President Trump attorney-client privilege in one case and executive privilege in the other case and his communications with his vice president, you see anything else weird going on here, Jim Trusty? Yeah. I mean, look, I think there's a real parallel between two investigations that speak volumes about this attorney general and his integrity. The IRS whistleblowers on the Hunter Biden case said that they went to the assistant U.S. attorney ready to do a search warrant to find documents belonging to Hunter Biden. It could be a real treasure trove, of course. The AUSA didn't just say, "No, we're not doing the search warrant." She picked up the phone and called Hunter's lawyers and said, "The IRS is trying to search location X." Okay? In my book, that's basically obstruction of justice. The parallel on the Mar-a-Lago case is that you have the high-level DOJ official, according to a statement submitted as an officer to the court to a federal judge, told Stanley Woodward, a defense attorney representing Walt Nada, that it would be a shame, essentially, if he endangered his pending judgeship by not flipping Nada against President Trump. Again, it's extortion. And so the people that we are entrusting in our criminal justice system to fairly and partially and transparently pursue justice are actually obstructionists, because they're so hell-bent on going after one target against President Trump. And I hope your viewers recognize there's a lot of details, a lot of legal and factual arguments. I hope and try to be an evidence-driven guy, but there's evidence from both of those cases that suggest this Department of Justice, if those accusations are right, has no compunction about breaking the rules, about destroying the rule of law because of their political interest in being the ones that got President Trump. Do we know where that extortion case is now, what the judge has found? I mean, it would seem to me it's relevant to the judge in Florida that the judge in D.C. come to a conclusion. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, look, you had a presiding judge in D.C. that had a case that suddenly became indicted in Florida, and I'm not saying that it was bad for the president, that the case moved to Florida, but there's a lot of shenanigans in terms of grand jury usage. You know, you don't do a grand jury investigation for a year only to move it to another district unless there's more to the story. I'm concerned that some of those abusive behaviors we talked about played out in front of the grand jury in D.C., and so what Florida got was a much sanitized version of what was presented over the course of a year in D.C. So again, I'm not on the case. There'll be litigation, I assume, that relates to these issues of how the grand jury was used or abused, but it's certainly, again, new territory when DOJ shifts an investigation at the last minute to an entirely different venue. And they would start an investigation in a grand jury in one place and move it to another, which violates the rules of the Department of Justice. But there's a lot of reasons you can do that if you're really a sleazy prosecutor, including you feel you can get a better grand jury from your perspective in Washington, D.C. than in Florida. You're making a point, I'm reading between the lines here, that a lot of stuff took place in that grand jury in Washington, D.C., that the grand jury and the judge in Florida can't possibly know about. You talked about sanitizing that process. I assume some of that, I'm guessing, has to do with attorney-client privilege information and so forth. The reason I'm saying that is past people I have talked to that have faced this man, Smith, say that's exactly what he does. He pierces attorney-client privilege by hook or by crook, gets it in front of the grand jury. It's used in front of the grand jury. And now in this case, he's moved it to another grand jury. And so the grand jury in Florida and the judge in Florida don't know anything about it unless Trump's lawyers are good enough to raise it with them. Is that your point? Yeah, I think that's right. Again, I think there's a lot to be looked into. Of course, the grand jury proceedings in general are one-sided, right? The old saying about the grand jury on the Ida Ham sandwich if a prosecutor asked them to. We understand that. We're not pretending that the grand jury should be like a full-blown trial. It's not. But when judges make historic decisions based on ex parte submissions, in other words, one-sided submissions that defense attorneys don't get to even challenge, to make history. And then, by the way, to avoid all appeals by rushing the witnesses in the grand jury right after they get the friendly ruling, I mean, all of that smells rotten to me. And I think it's the type of stuff that will hopefully be brought to the attention of Judge Cannon or Judge Chutkin, depending on what the specific issue is in Florida or in D.C. And as you started out, the idea that this is being done to a former president who's running for president again, the stretching of laws, the application of laws that have nothing to do, in many cases, with what's taking place, a general warrant rather than a very clean, laser-focused warrant, sending SWAT teams in, where his Biden son, his lawyers get a heads up from the government and so forth. This damn thing is so completely out of control. Jim, trust you, I want to thank you very, very much. God bless you, my friend. All right. Thanks, Mark. Good talking to you. We'll be right back.

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That was a very contentious election, and we all know it. January 6th, this past cycle for the president said to be an insurrection. And President Trump was said to be guilty of seditious conspiracy. We had a whole January 6th commission set up by Nancy Pelosi. She picked the Democrats and the Republicans. She rejected the Republicans that Leader McCarthy had chosen. It's never been done before in American history. And they do all this one-sided public stuff, and they turn it over to a prosecutor. The funny thing about the prosecution is, here it is. There is a criminal act, rebellion or insurrection, passed during the Civil War period. It appears nowhere in the charges against Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not guilty of rebellion or insurrection, he's not even charged with it. Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the US or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or in prison not more than 10 years or both, and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States. That's not in here. Well, what about seditious conspiracy? I remember legal analysts all over cable TV, some here, CNN for sure, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington, but seditious conspiracy, they have Trump dead to rights. But it's not in the charges. If two or more persons in any state or territory in any place subject to the jurisdiction in the United States, conspired to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to cease, take or possess any property of the United States, contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or in prison not more than 20 years or both. So why? Why didn't this out of control rogue, Eric Holder, Obama, Biden, prosecutor, Garland's man, Smith, bring these charges because he had no evidence. Rebellion or insurrection, all the testimony, the January 6th committee, all the testimony, all the witnesses, all the documents, not a centilla of evidence that Donald Trump led any kind of rebellion or insurrection. What about seditious conspiracy? There was no seditious conspiracy. Donald Trump is the man who said if they want 10,000 armed army soldiers to protect them on January 6th, please let me know while nobody's leading an insurrection if they're offering armed federal troops to protect the Capitol building. And we heard what Donald Trump said about peacefully lobbying Congress. So it doesn't work. So what happened? So Jack and the boys go back and they say, you know what, we can't let this go anyway. So they go back to the Civil War, post Civil War period, a law that was passed in 1871. It was called the Ku Klux Klan Act at the time to try and defeat the Klan. That's one of the counts here, 18 U.S.C. 241 conspiracy against rights. It is a disgusting and preposterous overreach. Then we have two counts under 18 U.S.C. 1512. Now these laws were passed in 2002 to address gaps that they felt existed in the Enron scandal investigation. If you consider the Enron statutes, they have nothing to do with January 6th protests, even though this has been used, so-called obstruction, this has been used against one protester after another by the same prosecutors from January 6th. This has not yet gone to the Supreme Court. It will be tested by the Supreme Court. And I believe the Supreme Court will say no, this was never intended to be used that way. Then we have count one, 18 U.S.C. 371. Now that count is a garden variety statute that the federal government uses against federal contractors, people who cheat the government out of money and so forth. And that has been expanded to include, you know, challenging the legitimate activity of the government. Again, stretched completely out of control. Those are the four charges. This is a disgusting attack on our electoral system. And as I've said before, the electoral system in America is now dead unless all of this is reversed. We cannot have, after all these years, more than two centuries, a Department of Justice and U.S. attorneys with 20/20 hindsight delving into what a president or a candidate thinks. Now that 1876 election, I told you that that state sent in two groups of electors. You're free to do that. Congress decides all this stuff. They're not criminal activities. So but now what are the rules for running, challenging and disputing elections today? We don't know. Who decides? Apparently prosecutors. What can a candidate or when can a candidate rely on legal advice since President Trump's lawyers are being indicted for giving legal advice? Is a president not free to discuss decisions about elections with his vice president and strongly urge him to take one position or another? Of course he's free to do that. Is a president free to publicly dispute election results? They all do when they lose, including people like Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. The electoral process is now not purely political and constitutional as it was intended. But now it is the control of prosecutors, Department of Justice, and in the hands of these people, the Biden administration, it is a disaster. The judge who's going to hear this case is the most radical partisan activist Obama appointee in the entire federal judiciary. Gee, I wonder how she got chosen. We'll be right back.

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History is lost on prosecutors, it's lost on all these debate shows, it's lost among lawyers who talk about January 6th, "Oh, it was an insurrection." No, it wasn't. We've had contentious presidential elections in the past, I mean really contentious. Some have almost led to civil wars, one did. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson and his chosen vice presidential pick, Aaron Burr, tied for first place. Because back then, the ballots were separate for president and vice president, even though they might run in the same party. And it was 73 to 73 electors, due to a communication error among Democratic Republican electors, or a Burr led conspiracy depending on whom you believe. In other words, Burr was disloyal to Jefferson. Jefferson was really running against Adams at the time, but he only got 65 electoral college votes. So the first of only two times in American history, the election went to the House of Representatives. They had over 30 votes back and forth, and back and forth, the House was to choose the next president, Alexander Hamilton had enormous power. He disliked Jefferson immensely, but he hated Aaron Burr. So finally what happens is Alexander Hamilton, of course he was the first Treasury Secretary, he turned the tide by lobbing his fellow Federalists to throw their support to Jefferson. A couple years later, the famous duel that took place between Burr and Hamilton, where Burr killed Hamilton and then Burr fled the country. It seems a little more contentious than what took place on January 6th in the last election, but there's more here. Let's take a look. 1824, this was a doozy. There were four candidates, they were all the Federalist party, had dissolved, they were all Democrat Republicans. Then there was Andrew Jackson, you might recall, the hero of the war of 1812. He won the popular vote by fewer than 39,000 votes. Captured 99 electoral votes. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, he took 84 electoral votes, came in second, 41 votes, went for William Crawford, he was the Treasury Secretary, and 37 for the House Speaker, Henry Clay. So no candidate earned a majority of the electoral votes. The election again went to the House of Representatives. Clay was eliminated, he was the lowest vote-getter. Only three candidates can be considered, but the House still controlled. After a month of back and forth negotiations, it went on and on. Henry Clay's supporters threw their weight behind John Quincy Adams, even though he had gotten less votes than Jackson, less electoral college votes than Jackson. So Adams would become president and he would choose Henry Clay as his Secretary of State. Soon after his inauguration, this enraged Andrew Jackson. He resigns from the Senate, he called it a corrupt bargain, he said the whole election was a fraud, and then he would go back and run again the next time around and he would defeat Adams. But this almost led, almost led to a civil war. Then 1860, presidential election wasn't just contentious, as is pointed out, it tore the nation apart. Abraham Lincoln got about 39% of the popular vote. He was running against Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democrat from Illinois, they were both from Illinois actually. Also, running for president was John Breckenridge, as well as John Bell of Tennessee. Lincoln won, as I said, about 39% of the vote, but took most of the electoral college votes in the North and California and Oregon. Breckenridge won the electoral votes in most of the South, along with Maryland, Delaware. Bell won Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia, Douglas captured only Missouri, despite finishing second in the popular vote. You had a real mess. Just weeks after Lincoln's victory, South Carolina voted to secede. Six more southern states followed, forming the Confederate States of America in February 1861, and they elected Democrat Jefferson Davis as their president. I would say that was pretty contentious, America, but it also gave us Abraham Lincoln. Here's the biggest, 1876. Democrat Governor Samuel Tilden of New York won 250,000 more votes in the popular vote than Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican. He also got 19 more electoral college votes, but Tilden was still one electoral vote, one, short of the required 185 majority, and 20 votes remained uncounted. In Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, why? Because their votes were too close to call. Each party accused the other of fraud. And yet in Oregon, one elector was declared illegal and replaced with controversial results. So you had a crisis here, the greatest electoral crisis in American history. And threats of another Civil War was 1876. So what happened here? Congress established a 15-member commission of senators, congressmen, and Supreme Court justices. So they said, you know, we can't free this out. Let's have a commission. So this is about as far as from the popular vote in the electorate as you can get. But keep something in mind. Congress is making all these decisions. Not a Department of Justice, not a prosecutor. In every one of these cases where fraud is alleged, where there's lobbying, where there's pressure on state legislatures, and so forth and so on, it's the give and take of politics. And Congress has the final say under the Constitution. Congress and nobody else. So they set up this 15-member commission of senators, congressmen, Supreme Court justices, seven Republicans, seven Democrats, one independent, ultimately to decide the election. After that swing vote turned to Hayes, that one controversial elector goes to Hayes. Hayes, even though he is 20 Electoral College votes behind, even though he got 250,000 less votes than did Tilden, it goes to Hayes. And so what does the commission say? Well, the swing guy went for Hayes. We'll give the other 19 Electoral College votes to Hayes. So the commission picks the president, Rutherford B. Hayes, who had the less popular vote, the less Electoral College vote, and they threw the 20 Electoral College votes remaining to Hayes. And after the Democrats, they said, you know what, we don't have to put up with this. We're going to filibuster this and block the official vote count that's going to take place. So what did they do after that? Well, they met at a hotel in Washington in February 1877, and they worked out a compromise. The Democrats would accept Hayes' victory, provided that Hayes removed all federal troops from the South. The compromise consolidated Democrat control of the region, the South, effectively ended Reconstruction, reversing the gains that African-Americans had made during the post-Civil War era. So the Democrats not only did that, they undermined the efforts that had been undertaken by a Republican president earlier, Ulysses S. Grant, to send the U.S. Army into the South to destroy the Klan. All that changed as a result of the 1876 election. Now, later, they'd pass the statute to try and work all these things out. But it's amazing. Nobody was indicted, Mr. Producer. Nobody was charged with anything. It's just incredible that we have the election of 2000. Al Gore, George W. Bush, all came down to Florida, a couple of hundred votes. Al Gore brings the first lawsuit, and it becomes litigation hell. Different districts throughout the state, forum shopping by both sides, trying to find judges that would uphold this part of the law, that part of the law. Meanwhile, the radical left-wing Democrat controlled Florida Supreme Court steps in and keeps changing the law, changing the law, changing the law to try and get Gore over the finish line. In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court steps in and says that's enough. That's enough. The voting has to stop at some point. The Supreme Court of Florida can't keep changing the rules. They are destroying one person, one vote, the entire concept. And so George Bush winds up being the winner. And he wins the Electoral College by five votes. He also lost the popular vote by over half a million votes. That was a very contentious election, and we all know it.

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(crowd cheers)

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