Speaker 1: Well, sorry, James, I'll go ahead. I just asked if
you want.
Speaker 2: But.
Speaker 3: I will, and you can take it wherever you wish.
That's what we do here. Imagine your roblong and I'm
asking a question that he's just going to go where
he wants to go.
Speaker 1: Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask
what you can do for your country.
Speaker 3: Mister Gorbut you'll tear down this wall. It's the Ricordshe
Podcast with Stephen Hayward and Charles C. W.
Speaker 1: Cook.
Speaker 3: I'm James Lellax. Today we're going to be talking to
Anne McCarthy about Trump's leap of woes and more so,
let severs was a podcast.
Speaker 4: How should voters look at some of the changes that
you've made that you've explained some of here in your policy.
Is it because you have more experience now and you've
learned more about the information? Is it because you were
running for president and a Democratic primary? And should they
feel comfortable and confident that what you're saying now is
going to be your policy?
Speaker 3: Moving from Welcome everybody, this is the Ricochet Podcast, number
seven hundred and six. I'm James Lilax drinking a cup
of tepid office coffee in a skyscraper in downtown Minneapolis,
which did not burn to the ground parts. Yes, but
the fires did not lap on the shores of our
corporate office here and I'm joined by Stephen Hayward and
Charles C. W. Cook. Gentlemen, Hello, between Florida and California.
Once again we span the nation.
Speaker 1: Actually, James, I am coming to today from Raykovic, Iceland.
We're combining a business and pleasure trip. But I have
found something for your Lilax Museum of Curious Cultural Collections,
whatever you call it. Did you know, Yeah, because r
right next to my hotel turns out to be the
most visited museum in Iceland. It's called the Icelandic Fall.
A lot of hamilgrit and Theseum.
Speaker 3: No, it's not okay, No, I know what you're thinking.
Speaker 1: You're thinking of the hot dog place that's the other
side of my hotel.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 3: I believe it was a hamburger that was putt It
was a hamburger, that hamberger that was put under glass
in Iceland about twenty years ago McDonald's Hamburger and is
not decomposed in the least bit anyway. So phallologically, yeah,
what's the only it's the only penis museum in the
world that is exactly what you think it is.
Speaker 1: Ah, Okay, the brochure says it's family friendly. I'm skeptical
of this, but there you go. I'll send you the brochure.
Speaker 3: Well, since my side is the Gallery of Regrettable Food,
I am not sure whether or not that would constitute
a goustatory experience, but of course it depends on one's
orientation of preference.
Speaker 1: They have a phallic cafe b stro James, so maybe
it will make your gast Okay.
Speaker 3: I you know, I I missed that when I was there,
and I advise that everybody in their lifetime should go
to Iceland, because it really is an incredible, spectacular, amazing place,
this little island of civil It's little, this this this
civilization that they built on this rock, which has in
the you know, a certain part of the day, a
certain part of the year, it's just always bright and
then a certain part of the year is always dark.
So everyone has two jobs in an alcoholic habit and
and they're in a band. I just I love the place, Charles.
How are you? How's Florida Muggy?
Speaker 5: I assume no, it's really nice. It's really nice. I've
bed to Iceland. I went in two thousand and seven.
I agree, everyone's drunk, but that's why they have no money,
because it's so expensive to drink in ice. And that's
in Scandinavia. And I annoyed my sister on that trip
by eating a puffin in a restaurant.
Speaker 3: Braids braised, puffin. Why not?
Speaker 6: It was on the menu.
Speaker 3: Do they bring the beak?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 5: But it was on the menu, and I thought, well,
I'll try that because I like trying random and unusual things.
And then she said, well, you can't eat a puffin.
They're so cute, and I thought, well, now I have
to eat a puffin.
Speaker 1: Well they don't they taste like spotted owls?
Speaker 3: I think, I exactly with a little snail darter relish
if you will. One of the things that I love
about Iceland, Reykovic, and also what it sort of says
about Europe and Northern Europe, is that they have this
incredible modern cathedral, this church. But you don't really get
the sense that anybody believes in any of that stuff.
I mean, if you were to believe it, if you
were to build a church for a culture that was
nominally habitually, ritualistically Christian, but really didn't believe it it
would be that church. That was just the feeling that
I got. It's so spare, it is absolutely so white
and so pure, but so somehow lacking that wonderful effervescent
divinity that you get in baroque churches, for example. But
enough of our travelog gear. We're here to discuss the
ways and means by which the country is going to
come to rack and or ruin or success or as usual,
middle and muddel in betwixt the two points. So we
had an interview with Kamala Harris this week on CNN
in which she laid everything out. I get the impression
that the problem that we have been suffering in this
country is an insufficient amount of government. Is that basically
what you get. We're about four percent away. For if
we had four percent or maybe seven percent more government,
we would solve housing, we would solve the middle class problems.
We would solve climate change, which we have to do
on a schedule that is of time and to hours
and the weeks that she said, so, what did you
take away from this? Did you do you think this
is a fresh breath emanating from the Biden administration. A
clean break revitalized attempt to drag Joe Biden's great policies
over the goal line. Well don't everybody talk at once.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 5: I don't know what I made of it, because she
didn't say anything. She did an interview, she well, she
answered questions, but she didn't really advance anything. And there
was a tweet that went out off It's by DNM
where they said, we got closer to understanding. They always
talk about her, so she's an ancient Mayan civilization. We
got closer to understanding what Kamala Harris wants to do.
And I thought, well, actually that's not true at all.
She didn't account for her shifts in policy. She said,
my values haven't changed. And what she should have done
if she was going to make that argument is say,
here are two or three examples of where the policy
has changed, but the values that informed them were different
for this or that reason. In fact, Dana Bash tried
to set her up to do that by giving her
the answer before she gave it, but she didn't. She
then said that, oh, I know that in twenty nineteen
I said I would ban fracking, but in twenty twenty,
I said I wouldn't, which isn't even true. In twenty
twenty she said Joe Biden wouldn't ban fracking. She didn't
explain why she shifted view, or even if she has so.
Throughout Yes, I got the vague, effveescent sense that she
wants more government and that she thinks that we have
been beholden to some ancient ideology for too long. But
she never actually really outline what she wanted to do,
so I don't think it was particularly useful as a voter.
Speaker 3: Stephen. There have been attempts recently, devious attempts, I think
rhetorical slights of hands that have attempted to tether That's
the word Kamila Harris with a Biden adminstration. Was there
was there tethering going on? Was there breaking going on?
Was there was there? Was there anything going on that
made you sit up and say that's new?
Speaker 1: I don't think so. One of the blessings of being
on overseas travel as you got to miss it, and
I've only caught up with a few things I've seen online.
I think Charlie puts his finger on something. The most
important part of it is her saying over and over
again her one message was my values haven't changed, which
ought to be the four most terrifying words in the
English language today, you know, after one's the old Ronald
Ringing line, I'm from the government. I'm here to help,
because what are those values. They're all pretty deeply radical,
as any check of the record will show. And if
you had an alert Trump campaign, and it's still not
clear whether we have one or not, they would be
running ads and they just have a clip of her
saying my values haven't changed, and then just throwing up
on the screen some of her previous statements on what
her values are. I think that it was a wink
and a nod to progressives and the media. Who are
you know, carrying water for saying, you know, don't worry,
I'm still the progressive if you want, and you know,
backing down on fracking and sting relatively quiet about climate change.
For the most part, it's going to be you know,
Biden times ten when I get past the electorates in November.
I think that this is not new, by the way,
this has been a democratic playbook for quite a while,
and people like Obama going all the way back to
Doucaucus can try and get away with it, and have
in some instances, like Bill Clinton, But in her case,
she's got such a long record of very radical views
that it still astounds me to think that she can
away with it. On the other hand, as has been
pointed out, the election is not sixty five days off
or whatever it is. Early voting starts in three weeks,
and so the votes will start getting locked into the
can very very soon.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 3: The CNN story about the interview says, Harris laid out
an economic plan earlier this month, did you know, focused
on bringing down costs on food, housing, and childcare, in
part by going harder after corporations. There's stunning new development.
She's going harder after those corporations. Her proposals include efforts
to combat price gouging. My my mind, Okay, so we
are going to do that again, where we're going to
go and investigate and of course it doesn't matter whether
or not anybody actually is price gouging. What matters is
that they're going to be dragged through a process that
we'll just add to their costs and you know, cripple
them and keep them from doing things and hesitate to
do this and they'll have rippling effects about the entire economy.
But oh, well, you know she's doing something. She's least
she's doing something. Recently, here we had an institution which
raised its prices by eight percent. Eight percent, just announce
eight percent. And the strain thing about it is here
is that you don't have the option not to pay.
You have to because there are property taxes. Our property
taxes going up eight percent, and what's more, because of
the new evaluations. It's a tax on unrealized gains. It's
just perfect. Do we have any saying this, No, no, no,
we just absolutely have to pay. That's not gouging at all, though. No,
that's an absolutely reasonable response to the needs of the
particulars of the people. But she also said that she
was going to ramp up construction of affordable housing. Now,
low information people may not look at that and nod
and say, well, that's good. Folks need housing. That's something,
But this is not the job of the federal government.
The reason that you don't have affordable housing and so
many of the cities that need it. Leaving aside whether
or not the homeless crisis is a result of the
lack of affordable housing usually isn't is because you have
any number of heavy boat anchors that are draped around
the neck of the people who are trying to build
these things, from the code requirements to the cost of material,
from this to that that. I mean, San Francisco does
not have an a lack of affordable housing because there
are people just for some reason who can't build there.
I mean, it's it's the process, it's the rules, it's
the nimbi's, it's the rest of it, things over which
Kamala Harris has absolutely no control whatsoever, unless we want
the federal government to march into our communities and say, well,
you know what, you don't have enough affordable housing in
this neighborhood. Therefore we're gonna build them, which they've been
trying to do for years and years and years and
years and years. And if that's what she's talking about,
redoubling that effort to just sort of sweep aside what
people in particular communities want and say, we're doing it
from Washington. We're telling you what in Idaho you got
to have in your neighborhood. That's again, dare I say
I get the idea that she's in favor of expansion
of the state that maybe just me.
Speaker 1: Maybe, just could you have gotten that idea, James, Look,
the land thing, I mean, the talk of bringing back
price controls. Let's be clear, that's what she's really talking about.
That's a bad idea we thought we'd gotten rid of
for the last time in the seventies. You may remember, James,
I know you follow these things. I know the history
of it. There was a push back in the mid
seventies at the time of price controls to have the
federal government get directly involved with local zoning. In other words,
weren't just going to leave it to states and cities.
And you know, there were bills in Congress that was
back on the palmy days of the Clean Air Act
and the Clean Water Act and all the other national
legislation we passed after the First Earth Day, and you
know it got shot down in Congress because of massive
resistance by the states and local governments and the home
building industry and others.
Speaker 3: But I wouldn't be.
Speaker 1: All surprised if we're there have been sort of backed
or ways to try and coerce states and cities for
a while now. But I wouldn't be surprised if we
did not see from the Harris administration a brand new
initiative to get the federal government directly involved in local
zoning decisions.
Speaker 5: I just think it's worth saying that this line that
I've started to see that Kamala Harris is some sort
of yimbi yes in my backyard is ridiculous because the
primary reason that the demo crowds are struggling on this
issue is that there are a whole host of interest
groups on whom they rely that stand in the way
of the production of new homes and development more generally,
and those are environmental groups, unions of various sorts, and
other left wing interest groups that don't like development for
various reasons.
Speaker 3: And this is a.
Speaker 5: Problem that will only be solved when a Democrat stands
up and says to those people, no, it is more
important for us to fix this on the supply side
than it is for you to get what you want.
And I just don't see any evidence that this is happening.
If you read left leaning self professed wonks in the
United States, you will see that they are aware, especially
in California, New York, that they have an issue here,
but they don't really know how to fix it, because
the internal politics within the party makes fixing it really tough.
And I just see nothing in the history of Kamala
Harris's life of public role that suggests that she has
an interest in doing that whatsoever, Which is why, in
addition to saying all of these things that some reformers
have said are encouraging, she said, I'm going to give
twenty five thousand dollars to anyone who's by, because that's
actually something that won't be upsetting to the people she
needs to win the election and keep on side.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: Yes, well, I think that's all very unfair, Charlie. We
know that she curls up at night with a glass
of wine in a copy of Shane Jacob's Life in
Different of the Cities. Just deeply interesting, a great book
and developed the progress it is, indeed, But that's another podcast.
In this podcast, we bring you Andy McCarthy. Andy McCarthy,
We're proud to do so again, senior fellow the National
Review Institute and a contributing editor there as well as
at Fox News. Andy, welcome back. Breaking news, right, Hi.
Speaker 2: Jans, how are you good? Yes, breaking news. Trump is
trying to get his sentencing in the Manhattan case postponed
by moving again in federal court to have the state
proceeding removed there, that is, to have the federal court
take jurisdiction over it.
Speaker 6: And the point of.
Speaker 2: This is there's now a profound immunity question in connection
with Braggs prosecution, and immunity is supposed to be litigated
whether Trump wins it or not as a different matter,
but immunity is supposed to be litigated through appeal before
other proceedings in the case happen. And that's obvious enough
that even Alvin Bragg, the District Attorney of Manhattan who
brought the case, has conceded that there should be a postponement.
At this point, sentencing is supposed to happen on September eighteenth.
For whatever reason, Judge Merchon, who has been I think
credibly accused of being biased against the defense in this case,
has not acted on the motion to postpone the sentencing,
even though the prosecutor agrees that it should be postponed.
And the way this is teed up at the moment,
merch On has said that he'll rule on Trump's immunity
claim on September sixteenth, and then proceed to sentence him
on September eighteenth, which certainly suggests that he's trying to
frustrate Trump's appellate rights by not giving him enough time
to get to another court to stop the sentencing from
going forward until the immunities decided. So they're going to
federal court at this point now to try to make
them act.
Speaker 3: Before I hand it over to Stephen and Charles. I
just want to bring everybody up to speed, because memories
are short. Remind everybody what Trump fell for in this case.
I use fell in the old dragnet sense of having
been found guilty.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this is a very strange case. You know.
Speaker 2: I think there's some really strong allegations against Trump that
come out of the law fair stuff.
Speaker 6: This case is just a joke.
Speaker 2: He was accused in thirty four counts of falsifying his
business records in order to conceal a second crime. Ordinarily,
in New York, nobody gets prosecuted for these kinds of offenses,
particularly under Bragg, who is like a textbook progressive prosecutor. Ordinarily,
business records offenses are misdemeanors. These misdemeanors happened, I think
now twenty seventeen, so seven years ago. The statute of
limitations on misdemeanors is two years. By alleging that Trump
was trying to conceal a second defense, he got it
inflated from a misdemeanor to a felony and thereby did
an end around the misdemeanor statute of limitations. And then
he carved this one transaction into thirty four by basically
taking each piece of paper that was involved in the
payments that occurred here and charging it as a separate felony,
which totals up to I think one hundred and thirty
four or one hundred and thirty six years of criminal exposure.
It's capped at twenty in New York, but that's still
a lot of a lot of penalty. So that's the crime,
and I think the outrage, well, there's a lot of
outrage about the case, but the worst part of it
is that the judge did not require the jury to
find beyond a reasonable doubt what the second crime was
because the judge misinterpreted the law of conspiracy. What Bragg
relied on as the so called second crime was a
New York election law conspiracy to influence an election.
Speaker 6: By unlawful conduct.
Speaker 2: And therefore Bragg said, as long as the jury finds
beyond a reasonable doubt that he conspired to influence the election,
then that's sufficient.
Speaker 6: So we don't have to figure out what.
Speaker 2: Unlawful conduct he agreed to participate in.
Speaker 6: And the problem with that.
Speaker 2: Is in conspiracy law, first of all, it's not a
crime to influence an election.
Speaker 6: That's what campaigns try to do.
Speaker 2: What makes it a crime, What makes it a conspiracy
is the agreement, the meeting of the minds by two
or more people on the criminal objective. So you can't
have a conspiracy in the criminal law unless the jury
agrees beyond a reasonable doubt on what the statute, the
criminal statute the crime that makes it a conspiracy. Otherwise,
if it's just an agreement to influence the election, that's
not criminal.
Speaker 6: So there's a lot of problems with the case.
Speaker 1: Well, any it's Steve Hayward who said a couple of
days ago, why don't we have Andy here since so
much legal news is breaking this week, and it turns
out to be timely. Look my summary for lay persons,
which I think as a lawyer you may find a
little too cute, which was they try to elevate a
misdemeanor jaywalking into a felony by first counting every step
taken across the road as a separate felony, and two
saying once the person reached the other side the road,
he was either gonna mug somebody or rob a liquor store.
And you can decide which crime you think the person
was going to. I mean, that's silly to me, But
then the other I don't want to I still have
a question about the appellate process. But the other big
story that first brought you our attention again was Jack
Smith introducing a new set of indictments against Trump for
election interference. And I'm it just took my breath away.
I mean, I thought even this Justice Department would at
this point say it's too late based on their rules.
I know there's some ambiguity about whether it's a sixty
day deadline or a ninety day deadline ahead of the election,
that you do not bring a case against somebody who's
up in an election or a political figure. But they've
gone ahead and done this here, and I'm simply it
takes my breath away that they would do this. It
seems politically reckless, but then also the legal grounds. I
haven't quite figured out the legal grounds yet, So why
don't you comment or say your own thoughts on what's
going on there and whether I'm right that it's politically
reckless or legally dubious.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Steve, I'm a pretty strong critic of Smith, but
in this particular, I think he's getting a bad rap.
Speaker 6: So let me explain why.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, so we all know the Supreme Court didn't
throw out the election interference case in the immunity decision, right.
What they said is that Judge Chuckkin, who was the
presiding judge Obama appointee in Washington, was supposed to get
input from the parties and do an exacting examination of
the indictment in order to determine which acts are official
presidential acts that would be amenable of an immunity claim
and which conduct that's alleged in the indictment is private
and could be grisk for a criminal prosecution. So she
wanted to have Smith weigh in on that issue and
originally directed him to do so on August ninth, he
asked for a three week delay, and the interesting reason
why he asks for a three week delay is this
is a dilemma for the Justice Department. Ordinarily, the Justice
Department's job is to defend the executive branch. So the
immunity ruling by the Supreme Court is a godsend to
doj because in the future they will be able to
use it to very expansively argue that presidents have immunity.
Smith's case cuts against that. So anything that Smith does
to try to argue that the presumption of immunity can
be overcome in his case creates potentially a precedent that's
going to hurt the Justice Department in the future. And
therefore it's not just a matter of the Trump prosecution.
Everybody in the Justice Department needs to get on board
about what they think this decision means, which is why
he has for the delay. Obviously, August thirtieth is today.
This would have been the day that Smith had to file.
So if Smith had simply done what Chuckkins said, he
would have been providing this week his vision of what
the case is going to look like. That is what
things can still be prosecuted and what things Trump has
immunity for. Instead, what he did was what I would
have done, which is I don't want to consult with
the court and the defense about what the case looks like.
And the one advantage I have as a prosecutor is
I can rewrite the indictment.
Speaker 6: And that's what he did.
Speaker 2: But all he did in rewriting the indictment is strip
out the allegations that the Supreme Court said he can't
run with, which is mainly Trump's control over the Justice Department,
and to the extent that that piece of the indictment
further the schemes that are alleged. So the four crimes
that are in the new indictment are exactly the same
as the original indictment.
Speaker 6: And the only thing he's done.
Speaker 2: Is strip out the stuff the Supreme Court told him
I had to be stripped out. But whether he had
done this by making a submission on Friday or done
it by filing a superseding indictment on Tuesday, it's the
same thing one way or the other.
Speaker 5: So Andy in the bragcase, it was assumed before the
Supreme Court weighed in on the immunity question, once Trump
had been found guilty, that there would be a sentencing,
and it was possible that Trump could go to jail
while he was running for president, and the question got
a bit scrambled, partly because of the immunity case and
then a few other legal developments. So my question is,
given the changes that you described in your first answer,
what is most likely to happen next in the brag case?
And if there's no way of telling what's most likely,
what are the options in the next, say, six months
to a year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, Charlie, I think Bragg wanted to press ahead
with the sentencing because he knows that Trump is not
actually going to prison, and I think kind of almost perversely,
that incentivizes him to give Trump an even more stiff
sentence than he would otherwise have given him, because what's
going to happen here. This is a non violent crime.
Trump is not going It's not like he's going to
get carted off to rikers the second that march On
imposted sentence. But what they've always wanted out of this
case was for the Democrats to be able to say
he's a convicted felon facing a stiff prison sentence in
the run up to the election, and they would have
that the problem legally that they now have, and this
is a I think reckless and certainly gratuitous presentation of
the case by Bragg. They didn't need the Trump presidential
acts as evidence in the trial. They could easily have
proved up what was charged to the indictment by just
sticking with employees of the Trump organization and the testimony
of Colin and called it a day. Instead, what they
did was they called two of Trump's White House staffers
to testify about his customary with the way he ran
the White House, you know, the way he conducted himself
as president, etc. Bragg is now in the position of
trying to argue that that was just harmless error, but
when his prosecutors summed up to the jury, they described
it as devastating proof of kilt. So he's got a
tough time saying it was harmless error at this point.
The other thing he did that I think was pretty
outrageous was he had Cohen testify that Trump had told
him that Jeff Sessions would make the Federal Election Commission
investigation of the non disclosure agreements go away. There's no
corrobore evidence that that happened, but it's important evidence, even
though it was fleeting, because Bragg didn't make it prove
anything that would indicate to anyone that Trump was even
thinking about federal election law, much less that he was
willful beyond a reasonable doubt in conspiring to violate it.
Speaker 6: Right, So this was all stuff that Bragg threw.
Speaker 2: Into the case that he didn't need and didn't have
any business in the case. And at the same time,
they proved that they knew that the Supreme Court was
considering immunity and that the oral argument had happened, and
during the oral argument a number of the justices had
seemed to be sympathetic to Trump's position. Yet they kept
insisting to Brag that there was no presidential immunity and
certainly no derivative evidentiary privilege not to have proof of
presidential acts come into a criminal trial. So Bragg understands
now that he's stuck with having made this decision. There
was proof of presidential acts that came into the trial,
which if they had just waited until the Supreme Court
ruled as Trump's lawyers asked them to, the judge would
have known, you can't let that evidence into the case.
But he let it into the case. So that gives
Trump a strong immunity claim. Now Trump is not going
to win his ultimate claim, Trump is saying that the
indictment should get dismissed. I think ultimately what the courts
will probably decide here is that the guilty verdicts need
to be vacated, and if Bragg wants to try him
again at some point, he can try him again.
Speaker 6: I don't think they're going to throw out the.
Speaker 2: Case on a ruling that couldn't be that would end
the case completely.
Speaker 6: It'll be up to brag whether he wants to bring
it again. That's what I think will happen.
Speaker 2: But this is going to take a long time to
play out because it seems to me that merch On
being merch On, and we've seen the way he's performed
the whole time he's had this case. He's going to
rule against Trump on the immunity, and then I think
Trump is entitled if that, If that's the state of play,
Trump is entitled to go to the appellate division first,
and before brad can before merchand consentence him. He should
be able to go to the appellate division and litigate
the immunity because immunity is supposed to be decided first.
What Trump is trying to do now is circumvent the
process of going through the New York appellate courts and
just get the case brought back to federal court again,
and have at the very least have a federal judge
tell merch On he can't impose sentence until immunity is litigated.
Speaker 6: To the ground.
Speaker 2: I think Trump would rather if he could litigate the
immunity in federal court rather than in the New York courts.
But at a minimum, and his immediate objective here is
to get the sentencing postpone.
Speaker 1: Well, well, now, Andy, it quick jurisdictional question here, sort
of law one on one. It's usually not simple to
jump from state to federal court. The federal courts don't
like to admit you until you've exhausted all the state
courts and so forth. So But on the other hand,
I can I mean on political grounds. I can see
some federal judge saying, hey, wait a minute, this is
out of hand. Maybe one way of asking is this
is judge merch On's I think pretty obvious bias is
that sufficient grounds legal grounds for a federal judge to
leap frog of state courts and search jurisdiction.
Speaker 2: Not in and of itself, but and there's always a
butt when you have me on, right, and there's a
butt to the butt. So if it was just if
the only claim here was biased by merch on, that
would be one of the bundle of things that happens
in a criminal case that all goes up on appeal together.
Speaker 6: Right, There are a handful.
Speaker 2: Of issues in criminal law that have to be decided
before anything else happens in the case because they go
to the legitimacy of the preceding itself. In other words,
if you have immunity, the constitutional offense is not convicting you,
it's trying you in the first place.
Speaker 6: You have a right not to be tried. Right, So
there's a handful of these issues.
Speaker 2: Immunity and double jeopardy are the ones that come immediately
to mind. Where those actually are issues that you are
allowed to have what's called an interlocatory appeal on. That is,
you don't have to wait till the end of the
proceedings in the trial court.
Speaker 6: You get to appeal those immediately.
Speaker 2: So because for two reasons, Steve, One because this is
an immunity issue, and two because it's a question of
a state prosecuting a federal official. Arguably in connection with
activities in furtherance of his federal responsibilities.
Speaker 6: I think got it.
Speaker 2: Brad should have been able to obviate the second one
by saying, look, I'm not proving any of his federal activities.
Speaker 6: This is strictly private. But he went there. He shouldn't
have gone there.
Speaker 2: And on that Congress has had, i think since sometime
in the nineteenth century, a removal statute on the books
that is pretty forgiving that allows federal if a federal
official is charged with a state crime and the federal
official can argue that he's being prosecuted for the furtherance
of his federal duties or and this is usually end
actually that he has a federal defense to the charge,
that case is supposed to be removed out of state
court and brought into federal court.
Speaker 1: You know, this reminds me. I was gonna I'm going
to ask you a political question a minute, but this
is starting to remind me a little bit of an
obscure nineteenth century case called Kirby versus New York. Do
you want any chance to know that Andy case? It
was where some local Kentucky officials, local Kentucky sheriff arrested
a person from a male carrying barge for murder, right,
and as I'm look, I don't remember the exact details,
but the claim was made that this was the state
interfering with the delivery of the lawyer. The person's lawyer argued,
there's a state interfering with the delivery of the mails.
That's illegal and the constitution you have to dismiss the
murder claim and put the sheriff on trialph Anyway, an
absurd case, and the Supreme Court saw right through it
right away. It's a fun one to bring up with students,
But I want to ask you a political question.
Speaker 6: Can I just can I just say?
Speaker 2: Can I just say, Steve, there's analogous modern cases where
you know, you have a lot of these states think
that they're safe havens from the immigration laws. Right, So
the thear always is that if the if the federal
officials go in and try to arrest somebody or do
a search and further into the immigration laws, that the
state will arrest the federal officials. That kind of stuff
is a concern all the time.
Speaker 3: Hi, this is and colder. You can hear me every
Monday on Ricochet with the five things you need to
know this week, and on Fridays, I'll give you the
big stories of the week that you may have missed.
Look for it every Monday and Friday on Ricochet or
wherever you get your podcast.
Speaker 6: Ricochet Join the conversation.
Speaker 3: If I may just jump in here for a second.
I was attempting to find out exactly what case this was,
and so I typed Kirby Versus into my search bar
and it auto populated completed with Kirby versus Goku, Kirby
versus Jigglypuff versus Dice, Kirby versus Sonic, Kirby versus Mennonite,
Kirby versus Mario, and Kirby versus Superman. So I take
it that there is a game character named Kirby out there, Sitch, Yeah, right,
that's what I'm getting very nation.
Speaker 1: It might be Usb Kirby. I might have had it backwards,
and so I screwed everything up.
Speaker 6: It's a lot of it. There's a lot of United
States cases.
Speaker 3: So you know, good luck, right.
Speaker 1: Political question, I mean, you know, what was being thought
for the last year and seemed to be borne out
by events, was every one of these indictments of Trump
strengthened him, at least with Republican voters in the Republican base.
And everyone's been saying for months, well, gosh, if Merchon
puts him in an orange jumpsuit and marches him off
to Rikers, Trump's gonna win in a landslide. And I
still kind of think that. On the other hand, everything
has suddenly changed here. In the last sixty days, you had,
you know, Biden was replaced by Harris. Harris is running
on joy. The latest poll show her pulling ahead by
you know, credible polsters. And suddenly I'm questioning everything I
thought I knew about American politics. Not everything, but I'm
questioning whether it's still true that the legal harassment of
Trump helps him or not. I can actually see that
maybe this is good. In other words, voters are going
to say, well, Harris's untested, we know what she thinks,
but yeah, Trump is this convicted felon, And I'm worried.
Now that's just it just might work. What do you think?
Speaker 2: Well, I think I've all along thought that this was
a conspiracy, a brilliant one by Democrats. Are pal Jonah
Goldberg has argued that I've been a little bit too
conspiracy minded about this, but I don't think it's a
complicated conspiracy. And I think it's when they ran in
twenty twenty and twenty twenty two as well, and that
is that the indictments at the beginning, when the target
audience was the Republican base, rallied the base to Trump,
and it made it impossible for what I thought would
have been a more electable candidate like a DeSantis like
Haley to get traction with Republican voters. The Democrats wanted
to run against Trump, but they always thought Steve that
phase two of Law Fair was going to be in
the run up to the election. They were finally going
to get their trials, and they thought they were going
to get two or three of them and dump out
all the bad evidence in the form of riveting testimony
that the press was going to cover in every gory detail.
And then at that point, the target audience is the
voter the electorate at large rather than the Republican base.
In the electorate at large, Trump is much less popular,
I think, you know, I think it's fair to argue
that he's unpopular with about fifty five percent of the country.
So I think that was the target audience. It was
probably a good strategy, and to me, I don't. I
think Charlie probably agrees with me on this, but I'll
let him obviously speak for himself. I think that what's
left on the table now are kind of low information
voters if you haven't made up your mind about what
you think about this, and while we look at this
stuff very closely, I think all those voters are going
to hear is that Trump got convicted of felonies. They're
not going to look into it the same way that
we have. And I just don't think this can help
Trump at this point with those voters. I think there's
a way that you can, like people who were informed,
could look at Bragg's case and go just like a
lot of you know, progressive commentators did. And I don't
think Democrats are happy that the Bragg case went first,
because I think the brag case tainted law there as
an enterprise, whereas if they had gone, say with the
Florida case, where there was a pretty strong obstruction element
to it against Trump, they would have had a much
better time with this than Bragg's case. Which is even
people on the on the left, at least the credible
ones diminute a small pool small pool, but they think
it's you know, they think it's a joke.
Speaker 5: I think that low information point goes both ways, although
I do think it probably hurts him more than helps.
But if you're told it's a low information voter by
Trump or sarrogates that the system has gone after him
and you don't know any of the details, then you
perhaps believe that. And then if you're told on the
other side, why he's a convicted fell and you don't
know any of the details, then you believe that. So
the question is who gets to them first?
Speaker 6: I guess, well, that's a proble.
Speaker 1: I always say that low information voters is one of
those you know, threewere euphemism for morons? How much I mean,
I always hate these debates A little rant here. I
always hate these debates with undecided voters are in town
hall format with three weeks to go before an election.
Who can be undecided with three weeks to go in
the presidential race? Well morons, that's and that's why those
debates so often are moronic, and why it always this
favors Republicans. It seems to me, yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well you don't want morons.
Speaker 2: And I thought about this a lot when we I
tried the blind shake back in the nineties, and one
of the things that the defense wanted was, like, anybody
who had heard about the World Trade Center bombing or
some other notorious things that we had shouldn't be on
the case because they've already formed. And I said, like,
anybody who hasn't heard about this has been living under
a rock. That's not somebody that you want as ature
in a case.
Speaker 6: You know, right right.
Speaker 3: Before we go, and we've plenty of time here. I'm
not trying to hasten you off the broom or a hook,
but to change the subject. Mark Zuckerberg re had a
letter where he said, you know what, yeah, yeah, they
did ask us to take some stuff down. And it's
interesting that some of the things that the Biden Harris,
I'm sorry, there I go tethering again. Administration I wanted
to get rid of was a satire and humor when
it came to things like COVID and the virus in
the vaccine and the rest of it. What are we
to make of this? And isn't a little late for
this information to be coming out? Or have we all
just decided, as we did, that the laptop was faked,
that the Twitter files and the Facebook files that they
were coming out with, that's all settled and factored in
and baked in. Isn't it something that somebody would want
that a canny campaign would want to make a point of.
I mean, when you talk about authoritarianism, which we're supposed
to be very worried about because it's going to destroy
our democracy, this seems kind of authority. This seems kind
of fashy to me, to use their terms.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd say two things about it. First, it would
have been nice to have Zuckerberg's testimony in the case
that the Supreme Court decided at the end of the term.
You know, remember they threw out that they threw out
this challenge because they said that the States and the
social media users whose communications or postings had been suppressed,
that they didn't have standing. And the big problem with
the case was there was a tenuous connection. This is
always a problem when you're you're going after the third
party actors. Right, their communications were suppressed directly by the
social media platforms. But what they were saying was that
the government officials were the ones who were responsible when
you have a case like that, you have to show
a tight connection between the actions of the third party,
and you know, hear the suppression And what Justice Barrett
said in her majority opinion was that the case was
poorly pled by the plainers, that the lower courts had
just gotten some stuff flatly wrong in their analysis of
the record, and that the claims were too attenuated. Now,
you know, Justice Alito had a pretty good pushback on that,
but a lot of what Barrett said about the standing
was very persuasive.
Speaker 6: It would have been nice to have Zuckerberg's testimony.
Speaker 2: Zuckerberg's testimony could have helped them on the causation part
of this. So, you know, I think to the extent
people think that the Supreme Court has now said you
can't bring a case like that, that's not what they
said that. What they said was that this one was
poorly played and that you have to show a better
chain of evidence. The more important thing, I think, and
this really goes to the Hunter Biden story, and this
should be a major major scandal. The Hunter Biden laptop
stuff that got suppressed happened in October of twenty twenty,
in the run up to the election. The FBI got
Hunter's laptop in December of twenty nineteen. They had it
for nearly eleven months when they were going to the
social media companies and telling them watch out for that,
you know, Russian disinformation.
Speaker 6: There could be Russian disinformation.
Speaker 2: About the Biden family and about Hunter. And I think
if you I tried to do this in a piece
at NR this week, if you trace the chrinology of
what happened. The the FBI had Hunter's laptop, knew it was,
they had subjected it to forensic testing, They knew that
it was authentic. There was no reason to think it
wasn't authentic. But what happened was in twenty twenty, the
two Republican senators, Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson are investigating
the Biden influence pedling scheme and they're getting all kinds
of evidence about it, mainly financial records. That was really
what the House built its investigation on the scut work
that Johnson and Grassley had done. And they're collecting all
these bank records and suspicious transaction reports from the banks
and all this other stuff that show that there's a
lot of smoke here at the very least, and the
Democrats in Congress were very concerned about that. So top
Democrats in the House and then also in the Senate,
acting together, ask their pals at the FBI, in particular
a guy named Tim Thiebo, who was running the Washington
Field office and was later forced into early retirement over
his anti Republican, anti conservative social media postings. They call
up THEBO, the Democrats do, and they say, we would
like a briefing from you on Russian disinformation and interference
in our elections. And THEBO assigns to it a guy
named Auton, who we know as the handler for the
guy who provided the information for the Steele dossier.
Speaker 6: So that's where he's coming from.
Speaker 2: He's under investigation by the Bureau for his participation in
the misrepresentations that were made to the Pisa Court in
connection with the Russia Gate stuff, and yet he gets
brought in to do an analysis of Russian disinformation as
it affects as it may affect the election. So what
Grassley says in a letter is we never asked for
a briefing, and this stuff wasn't Russian disinformation.
Speaker 6: These were bank records.
Speaker 2: There was no reason to think any of this stuff
was coming from the Kremlin. And as I've pointed out
a number of times, the fact that something even if
it is disinformation or information that's provided by the Russians,
that doesn't make it inaccurate.
Speaker 6: Sometimes the Russians.
Speaker 2: Actually leaked through information if they think it could put
somebody in a bad light. So the whole thing was
complete bs. But the Democrats use the fact that the
FBI collaborated with them in doing a writing an analysis
up that talked about Russian interference in the election and
did it particularly in the context of Biden and Ukraine.
And then what the Democrats did was they began to
that to the Washington Post and all the usual suspects,
and wella, we have a you know, a gaslight situation
where they've created this story that this is all Russian disinformation.
And at roughly the same time when all this is
going on, we now know that Anthony Blincoln, who was
then a Biden campaign official, is working with Mike Morell
and these other Clapper and Brennan and these former Obama
intelligence officials, you know, national security officials, and they crank
out the letter that's fifty one of them sign off
on saying that we're not saying that we have any
of the inside facts here, but this sure looks like
Russian disinformation, which Biden then a couple of days later
when they have the debate with Trump, like I think
it was the last of the debates between Trump and Biden,
when Trump raised the Biden evidence, Biden used the letter
from the fifty one officials saying that it was Russian disinformation,
like conclusively saying four former CIA directors have said this
is Russian disinformation. So to me, the big issue here
is not just what Zuckerberg said, which is remarkable on
its face, but if you trace what happened here, this
is an elaborate fraud conspiracy, and if it had been pulled,
if Republicans had even tried to pull it off, it
would be the scandal of the century.
Speaker 6: Now, I think.
Speaker 2: It's basically being dismissed as the old news. Maybe it's
because the Trump campaign's not competent enough to make a
big to do with this. Maybe it's because the media
just won't let it be a story. But I think
that's one of the most scandless things I've ever seen.
Speaker 3: I agree, if you have a laptop that has videos
of an own drug addict chopping up some cocaon a mirror.
Ockham's razor says, that's Hunter's a razor. Andy. It's kind
a pleasure. You're talking to you as usual. We learn
so much, and we'll talk to you again down the
road again when something legal that we don't like or
is annoying or frightening happens. So I have a good liberty, will.
Speaker 6: Have a great, weaken great weekend.
Speaker 3: Before we go. And we got a couple of other things.
And yes, that's the second time I've said before we go.
It's almost like I got to be somewhere. I don't
you know. I got a lunch, I got the gym.
We got a nice weekend ahead of me, three days
in which the wife will put me to doing various
things around the house. She's decided that there should be
more stones in the front yard. We got three big
stones last week, and then she cogitated a while and
sort of study them the way an artist does when
he steps back from his canvas to see how it's working.
She's decided that we need more geological formations in there,
which is my lot in life to haul stones. If
I was the sort of person who enjoyed gaming on
the Internet, and I do. And if I was the
sort of person who also did things like fantasy football,
and I don't, i'd be right up there with Ricochet's
new fantasy football league. Luckily, Charlie Cook is a great
fan of football and as a guy, can tell us
what it's all about and encourage people to sign up
and play. Right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think the exact details of this and how
it's going to be executed still need working out, and
we'll be very soon. But what is more important is
who wants to do it. If you want to do
it and you're a member at Ricochet, and there do
seem to be a whole bunch of people, I just
don't want anyonet to be left out. This is why
we've mentioned it a couple of times and we pinned
it on Ricochet and we will soon be sending out
messages subliminally to all Ricochet members just to say football, football, football, football,
If you want in say so. There's a little logo
icon graphic on the right hand side of the site
at the moment, which has a football picture and says
Ricochet Fantasy Football and if you are interested, click it
and register your interest. And the details will be forthcoming
this week.
Speaker 3: And if you're thinking, what exactly is a center right
political side doing talking about football and fantasy football, it's
because Ricochet is so much more than just chattering upon politics.
If you go to the member feed, which does cost
a little bit, yeah, not a lot, but it's worth it,
you will find mean the sites that are free, they're
worth every penny Ricochet. We're talking old time radio, new
time music, meme dumbs, literature, fiction also, got means just
there's so much going on in the member feed, you
ought to check it out. One of the things we've
been talking about though, in the member is this question
that's vexing me. And I'll end with this. That's the
third time I mentioned we're ending. It's anagging question. I
know it probably is ridiculous to bring it up, but
I'm gonna ask you guys and give you both a
shot at this. Who's running the country right now?
Speaker 1: You can tell by our silence we have no idea
who's running the country right serious question. I worry that
it's some intern, or somewhat more seriously, that it's the
chief of staff whose name I don't even remember right now,
or that Susan Rice has been the shadow president from
perhaps the very beginning. I have no idea, but I
should hope we find out someday. It would be nice to.
Speaker 3: Know, you know.
Speaker 5: I was asked this a lot before Joe Biden disappeared
from public view, when he seemed seen island.
Speaker 6: Indolent.
Speaker 5: I was asked who was running the country, And usually
the question came in connection with a theory that the
person asking me had you had a particular figure in mind.
Is it Barack Obama? Is it Susan Rice? And my
answer then is the same as it is now, which is,
if you understand how the left works, the answer to
the question is the progressive blob. The progressive blob is
running the country. They are not reliant upon a president
in the way that the Constitution envisions a president, which
is a person who has control over the executive branch,
not over legislation, not over the Supreme Court, but over
the executive branch. This is another reason, incidentally, why they're
so horrified by the idea of the executive being able
to control all aspects of the executive branch, including these
supposedly free floating institutions. The Department of Justice, and the FBI,
the fourth branch of government that we are supposed to have.
We don't have that, but in their estimation, it works
much better if we have that set up. Because the
Progressive Blob is this sort of permanent, lumbering, self executing
thing that knows that its basic task in the world
is to advance progressive policy in the prospects of progressive politicians.
And they don't need Joe Biden to be active for
that to work. They don't need Kamala Harris to be
able to speak English or have any ideas for that
to work. On the Republican side, because this exists, you
actually do need someone and I'm afraid Trump is not
this person, as the last administration showed. You actually do
need somebody like a desantist in Florida who is full
of vigor and ideas and resolve, who is going to
through his own sheer force of character, make the executive
branch to do what the elected head of that executive
branch wants. So the answer is the Progressive Blob is
how democratic administrations work, and they're not suffering from the
lack of Joe Biden right now because everything's running on autopilot.
Speaker 1: Can offer you one last observation from a traveler, Believe
it or not. Here in Kubik there is the Monument
to the Unknown Bureaucrat. I am not making that up
and our listeners won't be able to see this, but
I'm going to show it to you guys here if
I can. Yeah, there it is, and if listen, just
look it up. It's the solid stone block that goes
down about the waste of a bureaucrat, and I think
it couldn't be any more perfect than it is. I
encourage listeners to google the Monument to the Unknown Bureaucrat.
It's a perfect, if unintended I think, an ironic a
description of what Charlie describes, which is the blob that
actually runs the country, that is impervious to outside pressure
or erosion or lightening strikes, whatever metaphor you want.
Speaker 3: That art is a work of staggering genius. I heartily
endorse it, and I think that it should be put
up outside of every state capital in this great country
of ours. Stephen, as long as you're in Reika vicdumuitzevor
go down to the bar when you do and have
a Reika r e Yka it is the best Icelandic vodica.
I think they filter it through lava rock or something
like that. You can really taste the lava, but it's
really good. Charles, I can offer you no advice for
Florida cocktails except to say that I hope you have
one on this great week. And of course, as an American,
you're going to be grilling. I'm going to be grilling.
I don't know what you're going to be doing, Steven
out there when it comes to laborty, but I hope
somebody can supply with hot dogs, ribs, beef, hamburgers and
the rest of the staples. Happy long weekend and puffing
and puffing that's right, that's right. If you have some
puffin thyroid on a toothpick or something like that, I'm
sure that that's gormand enough. Be lieve you with whatever
song our producer says, And we thank you for listening
to us. We enjoin you to give us good reviews
at Apple iTunes, and we will see everybody in the
comments where why of course Ricochet dot com Next week, guys,
have a good weekend.
Speaker 5: All right, Thanks James.
Speaker 1: Next week