24 posts from Monday, January 15, 2024

Hello America, I'm Mark Levine and this is Life, Liberty and Levine Sunday. You may have heard again, the Iowa caucuses start tomorrow. So that's the official kickoff of the Republican primaries leading to the general election. There's a lot of coverage of it and I'm glad there is. But one of the things that relates to our election, whether it's Iowa or the rest of our states and the general election, is the monumentally outrageous interference in this election by Joe Biden personally and by his surrogates at the Department of Justice and his party members and the judgeships and the unelected prosecutors and the would-be unelected jurors should there be trials in these Democrat cities. It is a disgrace, the likes of which we've never experienced in America. When he talks about democracy, of course he has destroyed what is a constitutional republic, which is one of the reasons this man must be defeated. All this talk about he hasn't interfered, he's interfered up and down, if you heard what I had to say on last night's program. But I want to follow that up with what's going on in the circuit court in Washington. Mark, what does that have to do with the election, everything? Right now they have commingled law enforcement and the Constitution and criminal statutes with the electoral process. You can no longer discuss one and not address the other because they're undermining our voting system, they're undermining our constitutional system. It wasn't supposed to be this way. This issue that's before the circuit court that was argued last week, which is amazing because the circuit court panel, three judges, two of the three decided that they wanted to have an emergency expedited hearing of the issue of presidential immunity or more specifically whether a former president has immunity from indictment for activities that took place while he was president. Very important issue, I'm going to walk us through it in plain English. But I also want to expose what's going on here. The two of the three judges on this panel are radical left wing Democrats and the worst of the bunch was appointed by Biden. The worst of the bunch was appointed by Biden. Let me tell you about her. Her name is Judge Florence Pan. With the help of a real journalist, Julie Kelly, she writes some of the information on Judge Florence Pan, one of the judges on the three judge panel hearing oral arguments on Trump's appeal of Judge Chunkins, and she's an Obama appointee, ordered denying presidential immunity in the January six case. And I will explain this immunity issue so you understand it momentarily, but let's first look at the figures who were involved in this. Pan is married to Max Steyer, a Democrat party activist and one of Brett Kavanaugh's chief antagonists. Steyer claimed that's this judge's husband. He observed Kavanaugh engaged in lewd behavior at Yale. He reported it to the FBI and Senate during Kavanaugh's hearing. And by the way, they just lied about Kavanaugh has recently featured this guy Steyer in a film about Kavanaugh that criticized the FBI's investigation to various claims, including his. A longtime Washington DC fixture, Judge Pan has friends in high places. Take this from the Washington Post in 2021 quote, in one of her first hearings, Pan took over the politically sensitive lawsuit brought by 2016 Trump campaign adviser Carter Page against the FBI. Justice Department and several former officials alleging they unlawfully surveilled and investigated him during the FBI's Russia probe, a DC veteran. Judge Pan offered to recuse herself from the case, saying she's been friends with a lawyer for defendant Lisa Page, a former FBI attorney. Judge Pan said she's known Page's attorney, former Justice Department lawyer Amy Jeffries for 27 years. See the incestuous nature of all this attended her wedding and met Page at a party. Jeffries is married to a DC circuit court judge, Chris Cooper, appointed by Obama. Merrick Garland officiated the wedding. Isn't DC cute, says Julie, although three judge panels are supposed to be randomly selected. Judge Pan oddly is seated on unusually high percentage of consequential political cases involving Trump, among others. She was on both and I repeat both panels to hear arguments on an appeal related to 1512 section of the code, obstruction of official proceeding. This is very controversial. That is the end run obstruction of those two charges brought against Trump. And they had rewritten that statute, which of course is why Jack Smith was appointed in the first place. He does that all the time. He rewrites statutes. Sometimes the judges slap him down. Sometimes they don't. Judge Pan was the decisive two to one judge in both decisions upholding the department's use of the post Enron statute. Her lead opinion, and I use that term projectively, says Julie in Fisher versus USA is now under review by the Supreme Court of the United States. And she has more to say about her. Pan has been assigned to several panels for appeals filed by January six defendants. Just last week, Pan denied the appeal of Russell Alfred, who is that he was convicted by a Washington D.C. jury of four misdemeanors and sentenced by Judge Chunkin to 12 months in prison. Wow, he must have done something horribly bad in a concurring opinion. The panel, including Pahn, agreed to the following. The trial evidence indicated that during Alfred's brief time within the Capitol, he was never violent nor destructive. Nevertheless, we affirm his convictions because a jury could rationally find that his unauthorized presence in the Capitol is part of an unruly mob, contributed to disruption of Congress's electoral certification and jeopardize public safety. He was inside there 11 minutes roaming around at absolutely nothing. That's her. Let's get to the substance. She's on the panel. There were two opinions written about the issue, whether a sitting president can be indicted. Both concluded absolutely not. One was written by the Office of Legal Counsel, the Brain Trust, the Department of Justice, under the Nixon administration. The other was written under the Clinton administration. And this first opinion, over half a century old, has been adhered to by every subsequent administration. That is, you must not and cannot indict a sitting president. Well, what did they say? Well, the 2000 opinion confirming the 1973 opinion says in part this, "The House and Senate are appropriate institutional actors to consider the competing interests favoring and opposing a decision, to subject the president and the nation to a Senate trial and perhaps removal. Congress is structurally designed to consider and reflect the interests of the entire nation. And individual members of Congress must ultimately account for their decisions to their constituents. By contrast, the most important decisions in the process of criminal prosecution would lie in the hands of unaccountable grand and petty jurors, deliberating in secret, perhaps influenced by regional or other concerns, you know, like in Democrat cities. Not shared by the general polity, guided by a prosecutor is only indirectly accountable to the public, not elected, that's for sure. The framers considered who should possess the extraordinary power of deciding whether to initiate a proceeding that could remove the president. Even of only two constitutional officers elected by the people in Seoul, the president and the vice president, and place that responsibility in elected officials of Congress. In other words, you cannot have an unelected prosecutor, an unelected attorney general, an unelected judge, and potentially unelected trial jurors decapitating the executive branch, which was put there by the majority of the American people. It would be inconsistent, they write, with that carefully considered judgment to admit an unelected grand jury and prosecutor effectively to remove a president by bringing criminal charges against him while he remains in office. Well, Mark, that's all well and good. But Donald Trump is not in office. He's a former president. Stick with me. Thus, they write, the constitutional concern is not merely than any particular indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president would unduly impinge upon his ability to perform his public duties, a more general concern is that permitting such criminal process against a sitting president would affect the underlying dynamics of our governmental system of profound and necessarily unpredictable ways by shifting an awesome power to unelected persons lacking an explicit constitutional role vis-a-vis the president. So given the potentially momentous political consequences to the nation at stake, there's a fundamental structural incompatibility between the ordinary application of the criminal process in the office of the president. Say, well, again, Mark, Trump's not president. Stick with me. They also write in part, "We have separately reconsidered whether if the constitutional immunity extended only to criminal prosecution and confinement, but not to indictment itself." What they're saying is, "But still, can you indict a sitting president and then hold the criminal trial process and so forth after he leaves office?" They said, "No, we believe the better view is the one advanced by the department in 1973. A sitting president is immune from indictment as well from further criminal process where the president is concerned. Only the House of Representatives has the authority to bring charges of criminal misconduct through constitutionally sanctioned process of impeachment." All right, plain English. The point is that an indicted president, indicted by unelected individuals within the criminal justice process, has an indictment hanging over his head. That indictment, of course, is problematic when he's dealing with members of Congress, when he's dealing with law enforcement, when he's dealing with foreign nations. And it can have monumental consequences, including unintended consequences. So they say, "No, he cannot have that cloud hanging over his head, okay." Now the Trump case. What about indicting a president after he leaves office for actions you claim he took while president? Well, first of all, what actions are they claiming he took as president? Not insurrection. Despite what the media say, despite what Biden says, in fact, Trump was found not guilty. He was adjudicated under the impeachment process, our constitutional process, and found not guilty. And he's not even charged with insurrection by the rogue prosecutor, Jack Smith. In fact, nobody's been charged with insurrection of anybody who's gone into the Capitol building peacefully and unpeacefully. Nobody, despite all the propaganda you hear from Biden and the others. The Biden administration has created this issue. Why? They have brought four phony charges against Donald Trump, having nothing to do with violence, nothing to do with insurrection or sedition. The Klan Act, two Enron obstruction charges, and a federal contractor's fraud charge. Preposterous, and yet they raise this to a constitutional level that can forever change the presidency. You're president of the United States, and you have to make decisions. Some of them are very difficult. Some of them are decisions of first impression. Some of them are very complex. You have to make these decisions, and many of them are unique. And at that moment, you're going to have to look over your shoulder and wonder if a future administration, particularly administration or the party opposite, is going to indict you after the fact. Presidential immunity is fine while you're president. But if you're president, you have to worry about being indicted when you leave office for your official acts. And in this case, Trump was indicted and found innocent, and in this case, Trump is charged with four charges that have nothing really to do with January 6th, that is, concocted and rewritten statutes that have been applied to January 6th to try and get Trump. Think about the precedent that that sets. No you can't indict a sitting president, they argue. No you can't indict a sitting president and then say, well, we'll carry out the prosecution later because that cloud is still over his head. But this is even worse because it's completely unpredictable. You're a sitting president, you take actions, you believe they're legal. And after the fact, you have an attorney general appointed by the opposite party. You have a prosecutor, a rogue prosecutor like the case of Jack Smith. But you have a president like Biden who keeps urging them to charge Trump that he's committed an insurrection. If you sent that message over and over again publicly, if not otherwise, you will forever destroy the office of the presidency and make decision making almost impossible. And to underscore the point quickly, this Judge Pan, why did I mention her? Because last week she was the most aggressive in questioning Trump's lawyers, the most radical and preposterous. She posits a hypothetical. What if the president of the United States orders the Silkem 6 to assassinate his political opponent? Judges only make such clowness comments with such extreme examples if they are radical and if when it comes to the law and the Constitution, they really don't have a substantive position. That's not the case in front of this court. The case in front of this court is a former president who made decisions that he believed were legal, a former president who was impeached but found innocent, a former president who's been subjected and targeted by the existing administration at the urging of Joe Biden. Whereafter Joe Biden made those demands, both in the New York Times and otherwise, they dust off a Klan statute, an Enron statute and a federal contractor statute to charge him. That's what's before this court. Not a sitting president ordering the execution of a candidate opposite. Her hypothetical underscores the outrageousness of what's going on. And yes, this is crucially important because the January 6th charges should be put to an end.

Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.