Taken from JRE #2025 w/Dave Smith:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6fppkhPnw5PCspRVGhZhOG?si=9c11527580a844b5

Well look, even with this Trump thing, man, it's like, it's, like I was saying, how so many people still believe the Russia collusion story, which was all made up, man, and you can go, like, you can go follow this whole thing.

There's that clip, by the way, before any of this, this is before Donald Trump ever took office.

Did you ever see the Chuck Schumer 6 Ways to Sunday?

You were telling me about it last night and you were saying we should watch

Let me just preface it briefly to kind of set up What's so amazing about it?

Where even like I said the thing what Chris Murphy just happens to blurt out like oh, yeah We are policies overthrew Yanukovych, right?

Like there are these moments where kind of like these rare moments of honesty from the kind of leaders of the regime.

And this 1 comes because Rachel Maddow asks him like an impromptu thing.

So but this is, and just so you know, this is Donald Trump has been elected but he hasn't been, he's a president-elect here.

So it's after the election but he's not president yet.

So this was about him tweeting something here.

But he's taking these shots, this antagonism, this taunting to the intelligence community.

They have 6 ways from Sunday at getting back at you.

So even for a practical supposedly hard-nosed businessman He's being really dumb to do this.

What do you think the intelligence community would do if they were I don't know But I from what I am told they are very upset with how he has treated them and talked about them.

And what happened right before that is that Rachel Maddow goes, she goes, all right, I'm sorry to put you on the spot here, But Donald Trump just tweeted this thing about the intelligence community any thoughts on that so it's not like he was prepared for this Right his the most powerful senator in America his Initial gut reaction was like well, dude you're taking on the intelligence I mean you're gonna go up against the CIA You think you're gonna win that fight?

Yeah, like they're gonna get you and this was already after they had already been They were spying on his campaign.

They had already kind of begun Framing him for this whole this whole Russia thing, which was always nonsense and that started with them You know the Steele dossier and all that stuff and then they were spying on Carter page who was like a pretty low-level advisor in Donald Trump's campaign and the Allegation was that the Russians had offered him a huge stake in like 1 of their biggest energy companies if he could get Donald Trump to remove all of the sanctions that we had at the time on Russia, which on the face of it made no sense because he's like a low-level advisor on the campaign.

No, this was based off the Steele dossier, which was a Opposition research that Hillary Clinton had funded where she hired this British spy to go like dig up dirt on Donald Trump and they put together this whole dossier alleging that he was you know he had been in bed with Russia for years he was compromised it was the that the prostitutes were peeing on him And all this like crazy shit and they all knew it was unverified They all knew it was like the and and all of it Almost all of it was ended up being disproven But so when they went to Carter pit But just to understand like the idea of trying to bribe a low-level advisor on a campaign to then somehow take over the administration once he got, it'd be like on the level of if someone was like, we're gonna bribe the door guy at the mothership to make sure that the Joe Rogan experience only talks about these subjects.

And you're like, I mean, even though there's a loose connection between you and the guy who works at the mother's, the idea that he would ever then be able to come in and take over the show and control, it just made no sense.

But we now know that the CIA told the FBI that Carter Page was a good guy, that he was a CIA informant.

They were like, no, no, no, he's not a spy.

And then the FBI lied about that on the FISA application.

And this was the only guy who went down for the frame job was this 1 FBI lawyer for misrepresenting what the CIA said.

But Basically, they said that he was approached by Russians and that he was approached by a group of Russians to see if he would turn and work for them.

And he came right back to us and told us about it And then when they were putting in the application for the FISA warrant the FBI said he was approached by these Russians and the CIA confirmed it So they took they said that the CIA confirmed that he was approached by these guys but they left out the part that the CIA said and he came right back to us and told Us about it so that 1 guy was the only guy who got charged

no no the FBI agent who that by a lawyer who lied on the application Carter page They had 3 FISA court warrants on him.

Never been charged with anything because he wasn't a spy.

And there's look that Donald Trump even now with all these charges, right?

He's never been charged with inciting an insurrection Because they know they can't get him on those charges.

So what they're getting them on is all these like novel legal theories Well, it's not very clear that he violated the statute But if we interpret it this way we could make the argument for the first time ever that this was actually a violation of law.

It's all like they're grasping at straws.

And it's very clearly like they've weaponized the legal system against this guy.

It's not a coincidence That all of these indictments are coming down right now like why why was the January 6th thing?

Why would any of this be coming down right now right all those other people in January 6?

They got charged and arrested immediately It was determined by the powers that be you know with the corporate media the deep state all of the establishment that he was unacceptable And that's not new to Donald Trump.

There were a lot of candidates who have been determined to be unacceptable.

And you saw, like, the machine be weaponized against all of them to keep them out, but Trump beat the machine Trump the difference is Trump won I mean there's other differences, but but the guy who they determined was not acceptable ended up winning and part of what was so powerful about that is that it kind of destroyed the the illusion of inevitability that I think progressives rely on that you know like progressives will very confidently tell you that you're on the wrong side of history you know Which is like a really interesting thing to say if you think about it.

Like you're on the wrong side of history.

Meaning like it's a guarantee that history is moving in my direction and I'm telling you how you will be judged in the future based off how you feel right now.

And they kind of have good reason to feel that way because they have been kind of moving in the direction that they want to move in.

But it was just like, we just had the first black president and now we will have the first female president and of course, you know, this throwback bigot, male chauvinist Donald Trump could never possibly win.

This is what's going to happen in history now, is Hillary Clinton is the next president.

they going to stop him from winning again?

Oh yeah, that's what all these indictments are right now.

The problem is it has the opposite effect on his base It doesn't make people reluctant.

It makes people more convinced that there's a conspiracy against him It makes people more convinced that there's corruption that's fighting against him.

Personally that Trump was at his most vulnerable within the Republican primary at the very beginning I thought he for the first time to me.

He seemed like he was very out of step with his own base He's sitting there still bragging about operation warp speed and how he saved hundreds of millions of lives by developing the vaccine He was getting booed a few times at his own speeches He just seemed kind of out of touch.

And it seemed like, you know, it seemed like the energy of his campaign wasn't 2016, which was make America great again.

We're gonna, I'm gonna come back and win again.

And it seemed to me like that wasn't really connecting.

And then, you know, this before DeSantis got in the race, but it was heavily speculated that he would be getting in the race.

And, you know, he was like this guy who has a very good record on Covid, at least compared to all the other governors, just about all the other governors.

And there just seemed to me like there was an opening there.

And then they raided his house in Mar-a-Lago.

And I felt like that guaranteed Trump frontrunner.

Because as soon as they did that, it was like, oh, now it's shifted right back to this like look what they're doing to your guy They want to not give you the chance to vote for this guy They're gonna weaponize the justice system against this guy because you like him They're not just and they're doing it to him because they want to do it to you It kind of gave him like all this energy back And so there's a real dynamic to that where his numbers go up every time a new indictment comes out Yeah, people aren't buying into it because it's not like you know look.

It's just so obvious that it's politicized You know the interesting thing There's an interesting thing about the law.

Like people have this conception of what the law is, and then there's the reality of it.

Like people have this conception of like there's a rule written down on a piece of paper, and that's the rule.

And if you break that rule, you broke the law.

And if you don't break that rule, you didn't break the law.

It's like in the same way like down to the lowest level, if you get pulled over by a cop, you know there's times where like he could give you a ticket or he could let you off with a warning, you know?

And like sometimes it's just how that guy feels.

Maybe he stops you and goes, oh shit, Joe Rogan.

There could be so many different factors.

Well, just for example, James Clapper, he was the director of national intelligence.

He was basically the head of the shadow government.

That's the highest position in the deep state.

You oversee the CIA and the NSA and the FBI and all this stuff.

He was asked point blank, Is the NSA involved in any bulk data collection on American citizens said no We're not doing that then Ed Snowden came out and exposed that he clearly was and he was the the DNI like he knew this Okay, he lied to Congress Why isn't he arrested for it?

It's like because there's no political will to arrest that guy.

He's of the deep state He's 1 of the top guys that he's not getting arrested now Michael Cohen lied to Congress He got a month wrong when he was talking about a deal that that he was working on for Trump He said it happened didn't you know June, but it was really in January or something like that.

He got charged with that and because they wanted to put pressure on him to get him to flip on Donald Trump which he did.

So that's it's not like there are crimes that are committed all the time.

And I think the thing that's wild about this with Trump is that if you think of all the crimes that presidents have committed, the idea that this is what 1 of them is actually going to go down for is insane.

Obama murdered American citizens without charges.

They by the way, every war is illegal He was that the Supreme Law of the land is the Constitution and it says only Congress can declare war The last declared war was World War II.

Every war since then has been an illegal war.

Anyone could be arrested for this at any time.

The legal defense is that they're military actions, not wars.

It probably smelled like a war to you But no not a war Korea wasn't a war Iraq wasn't a war Afghanistan Libya Syria Somalia Yemen None of those rewards, you know it's anyone if there was any political will any 1 of these presidents could be arrested for for any number of crimes and yet they're not but yet Trump didn't give back the classified information quickly enough even after they asked him up he's got a he's got to be indicted for that even though other presidents have done pretty much the same thing now he's got to be indicted for that.

What is the Georgia thing is interesting because he was going to have a press conference where he's going to reveal all the information that proves that he was telling the truth about the Georgia election being rigged.

Yeah, He didn't have the press conference.

Well, this is a thing that I gotta say is a kind of knock on Trump here That you know, this is a thing his lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani who just turned himself in into custody today But they They would always say this after 2020.

We have proof that millions of votes were stolen from Donald Trump and we'll be releasing this soon and then it just never kind of comes.

So I don't know what he thinks he's going to tell us about that.

The issue with the thing in Georgia where I will grant There's like a little bit of a gray area there.

And I think that, look, there is a gray area there.

It's kind of like when they impeached Trump over Ukraine.

There was like a little bit of a gray area of like what exactly he did.

It's just that when you look at things of all the crimes that presidents commit, The idea that you go after a president for this, it's so petty compared to these greater crimes.

But he called the Secretary of State in Georgia and was kind of like, I need you to find me these votes.

But he was saying, he was like, look, There's been fraud.

You got to go look for it The guy's like, I don't see any evidence that there's fraud here and he's like find it.

I know there's fraud, you know He was putting pressure on the guy to go look but it's not as if he was telling the guy I need you to commit fraud, right?

I want you to flip votes or I want you to manipulate something.

He's like I want you to go find where the fraud is.

So you'd almost have to prove that he didn't really believe that in order to prove, you know, because if there was really fraud he has every right to tell the guy to go find it.

So now they're arguing that he didn't and in the indictment they argue that he knew it and he was a Like he knew that there was no fraud, but was still trying to get the guy to go find it and The case that they're using to argue that is that he had advisors around him who told him that the election was legit.

The problem with that is that that doesn't prove at all that Trump believed those guys just because they told him that.

If there's 1 thing I'm fairly confident in, I believe Donald Trump believes he won the election in


Speaker 0: The Joe Rogan Experience.

Speaker 1: Well look, even with this Trump thing, man, it's like, it's, like I was saying, how so many people still believe the Russia collusion story, which was all made up, man, and you can go, like, you can go follow this whole thing. It was all made up and they knew it. They knew what they were doing. There's that clip, by the way, before any of this, this is before Donald Trump ever took office. Did you ever see the Chuck Schumer 6 Ways to Sunday?

Speaker 2: You were telling me about it last night and you were saying we should watch

Speaker 1: it today. We should play this. Okay. Let me just preface it briefly to kind of set up What's so amazing about it? There are these occasional moments?

Where even like I said the thing what Chris Murphy just happens to blurt out like oh, yeah We are policies overthrew Yanukovych, right? Like there are these moments where kind of like these rare moments of honesty from the kind of leaders of the regime. And this 1 comes because Rachel Maddow asks him like an impromptu thing. And she says that, she leads that. So but this is, and just so you know, this is Donald Trump has been elected but he hasn't been, he's a president-elect here.

So it's after the election but he's not president yet. So this was about him tweeting something here.

Speaker 0: But he's taking these shots, this antagonism, this taunting to the intelligence community.

Speaker 1: Let me

Speaker 0: tell you,

Speaker 3: you take on the intelligence community,

Speaker 0: They have 6 ways from Sunday at getting back at you. So even for a practical supposedly hard-nosed businessman He's being really dumb to do this. What do you think the intelligence community would do if they were I don't know But I from what I am told they are very upset with how he has treated them and talked about them.

Speaker 1: And what happened right before that is that Rachel Maddow goes, she goes, all right, I'm sorry to put you on the spot here, But Donald Trump just tweeted this thing about the intelligence community any thoughts on that so it's not like he was prepared for this Right his the most powerful senator in America his Initial gut reaction was like well, dude you're taking on the intelligence I mean you're gonna go up against the CIA You think you're gonna win that fight? Yeah, like they're gonna get you and this was already after they had already been They were spying on his campaign. They had already kind of begun Framing him for this whole this whole Russia thing, which was always nonsense and that started with them You know the Steele dossier and all that stuff and then they were spying on Carter page who was like a pretty low-level advisor in Donald Trump's campaign and the Allegation was that the Russians had offered him a huge stake in like 1 of their biggest energy companies if he could get Donald Trump to remove all of the sanctions that we had at the time on Russia, which on the face of it made no sense because he's like a low-level advisor on the campaign.

He's not even in the administration.

Speaker 2: Was this based on intercepted emails?

Speaker 1: No, this was based off the Steele dossier, which was a Opposition research that Hillary Clinton had funded where she hired this British spy to go like dig up dirt on Donald Trump and they put together this whole dossier alleging that he was you know he had been in bed with Russia for years he was compromised it was the that the prostitutes were peeing on him And all this like crazy shit and they all knew it was unverified They all knew it was like the and and all of it Almost all of it was ended up being disproven But so when they went to Carter pit But just to understand like the idea of trying to bribe a low-level advisor on a campaign to then somehow take over the administration once he got, it'd be like on the level of if someone was like, we're gonna bribe the door guy at the mothership to make sure that the Joe Rogan experience only talks about these subjects. And you're like, I mean, even though there's a loose connection between you and the guy who works at the mother's, the idea that he would ever then be able to come in and take over the show and control, it just made no sense.

But we now know that the CIA told the FBI that Carter Page was a good guy, that he was a CIA informant. So they told the FBI. They were like, no, no, no, he's not a spy. He's 1 of ours. So just lay off.

And then the FBI lied about that on the FISA application. And this was the only guy who went down for the frame job was this 1 FBI lawyer for misrepresenting what the CIA said. But Basically, they said that he was approached by Russians and that he was approached by a group of Russians to see if he would turn and work for them. And the CIA were like, yes, he was. And he came right back to us and told us about it And then when they were putting in the application for the FISA warrant the FBI said he was approached by these Russians and the CIA confirmed it So they took they said that the CIA confirmed that he was approached by these guys but they left out the part that the CIA said and he came right back to us and told Us about it so that 1 guy was the only guy who got charged

Speaker 2: did he get

Speaker 1: so no jail time But he did get charged

Speaker 2: Carter page got

Speaker 1: no no the FBI agent who that by a lawyer who lied on the application Carter page They had 3 FISA court warrants on him. They spied on him all up and down. Never been charged with anything because he wasn't a spy. And there's look that Donald Trump even now with all these charges, right? He's never been charged with treason.

He's never been charged with inciting an insurrection Because they know they can't get him on those charges. So what they're getting them on is all these like novel legal theories Well, it's not very clear that he violated the statute But if we interpret it this way we could make the argument for the first time ever that this was actually a violation of law. It's all like they're grasping at straws. And it's very clearly like they've weaponized the legal system against this guy. It's not a coincidence That all of these indictments are coming down right now like why why was the January 6th thing?

Why would any of this be coming down right now right all those other people in January 6? They got charged and arrested immediately It was determined by the powers that be you know with the corporate media the deep state all of the establishment that he was unacceptable And that's not new to Donald Trump. There were a lot of candidates who have been determined to be unacceptable. Ron Paul was unacceptable. Bernie Sanders was unacceptable.

Tulsi Gabbard was unacceptable. And you saw, like, the machine be weaponized against all of them to keep them out, but Trump beat the machine Trump the difference is Trump won I mean there's other differences, but but the guy who they determined was not acceptable ended up winning and part of what was so powerful about that is that it kind of destroyed the the illusion of inevitability that I think progressives rely on that you know like progressives will very confidently tell you that you're on the wrong side of history you know Which is like a really interesting thing to say if you think about it. Like you're on the wrong side of history. Meaning like it's a guarantee that history is moving in my direction and I'm telling you how you will be judged in the future based off how you feel right now. And they kind of have good reason to feel that way because they have been kind of moving in the direction that they want to move in.

But it was just like, we just had the first black president and now we will have the first female president and of course, you know, this throwback bigot, male chauvinist Donald Trump could never possibly win. This is what's going to happen in history now, is Hillary Clinton is the next president. How are

Speaker 2: they going to stop him from winning again? They're trying.

Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's what all these indictments are right now.

Speaker 2: The problem is it has the opposite effect on his base It doesn't make people reluctant. It makes people more convinced that there's a conspiracy against him It makes people more convinced that there's corruption that's fighting against him. I I think

Speaker 1: Personally that Trump was at his most vulnerable within the Republican primary at the very beginning I thought he for the first time to me. He seemed like he was very out of step with his own base He's sitting there still bragging about operation warp speed and how he saved hundreds of millions of lives by developing the vaccine He was getting booed a few times at his own speeches He just seemed kind of out of touch. And it seemed like, you know, it seemed like the energy of his campaign wasn't 2016, which was make America great again. This was like my vengeance tour. They screwed me.

I lost, but I really won. We're gonna, I'm gonna come back and win again. And it seemed to me like that wasn't really connecting. And then, you know, this before DeSantis got in the race, but it was heavily speculated that he would be getting in the race. And, you know, he was like this guy who has a very good record on Covid, at least compared to all the other governors, just about all the other governors.

And there just seemed to me like there was an opening there. There was like a vulnerability. And then they raided his house in Mar-a-Lago. And I felt like that guaranteed Trump frontrunner. Like that guaranteed it for him.

Because as soon as they did that, it was like, oh, now it's shifted right back to this like look what they're doing to your guy They want to not give you the chance to vote for this guy They're gonna weaponize the justice system against this guy because you like him They're not just and they're doing it to him because they want to do it to you It kind of gave him like all this energy back And so there's a real dynamic to that where his numbers go up every time a new indictment comes out Yeah, people aren't buying into it because it's not like you know look. It's just so obvious that it's politicized You know the interesting thing There's an interesting thing about the law. Like people have this conception of what the law is, and then there's the reality of it. Like people have this conception of like there's a rule written down on a piece of paper, and that's the rule. And if you break that rule, you broke the law.

And if you don't break that rule, you didn't break the law. But that's not really how it works. It's like in the same way like down to the lowest level, if you get pulled over by a cop, you know there's times where like he could give you a ticket or he could let you off with a warning, you know? And like sometimes it's just how that guy feels. Maybe he knew you.

Maybe he stops you and goes, oh shit, Joe Rogan. I'll let you off with a warrant. You know what I mean? There could be so many different factors. Well, just for example, James Clapper, he was the director of national intelligence.

He was basically the head of the shadow government. That's the highest position in the deep state. The CIA answers to you. You oversee the CIA and the NSA and the FBI and all this stuff. And he lied to Congress very blatantly.

No question about it. He was asked point blank, Is the NSA involved in any bulk data collection on American citizens said no We're not doing that then Ed Snowden came out and exposed that he clearly was and he was the the DNI like he knew this Okay, he lied to Congress Why isn't he arrested for it? It's like because there's no political will to arrest that guy. He's of the deep state He's 1 of the top guys that he's not getting arrested now Michael Cohen lied to Congress He got a month wrong when he was talking about a deal that that he was working on for Trump He said it happened didn't you know June, but it was really in January or something like that. He got charged with that and because they wanted to put pressure on him to get him to flip on Donald Trump which he did.

So that's it's not like there are crimes that are committed all the time. There's just no political will. There's no desire to arrest that person. And I think the thing that's wild about this with Trump is that if you think of all the crimes that presidents have committed, the idea that this is what 1 of them is actually going to go down for is insane. Like Bush instituted torture.

You know what I mean? Obama murdered American citizens without charges. These guys lied us into wars. They by the way, every war is illegal He was that the Supreme Law of the land is the Constitution and it says only Congress can declare war The last declared war was World War II. Every war since then has been an illegal war.

Anyone could be arrested for this at any time. The legal defense is that they're military actions, not wars. So you know that thing in Vietnam? It probably smelled like a war to you But no not a war Korea wasn't a war Iraq wasn't a war Afghanistan Libya Syria Somalia Yemen None of those rewards, you know it's anyone if there was any political will any 1 of these presidents could be arrested for for any number of crimes and yet they're not but yet Trump didn't give back the classified information quickly enough even after they asked him up he's got a he's got to be indicted for that even though other presidents have done pretty much the same thing now he's got to be indicted for that.

Speaker 2: What is the Georgia thing is interesting because he was going to have a press conference where he's going to reveal all the information that proves that he was telling the truth about the Georgia election being rigged. Yeah, He didn't have the press conference.

Speaker 1: Yes. Well, this is a thing that I gotta say is a kind of knock on Trump here That you know, this is a thing his lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani who just turned himself in into custody today But they They would always say this after 2020. We have proof that millions of votes were stolen from Donald Trump and we'll be releasing this soon and then it just never kind of comes. So I don't know what he thinks he's going to tell us about that. The issue with the thing in Georgia where I will grant There's like a little bit of a gray area there.

And I think that, look, there is a gray area there. It's kind of like when they impeached Trump over Ukraine. There was like a little bit of a gray area of like what exactly he did. It's just that when you look at things of all the crimes that presidents commit, The idea that you go after a president for this, it's so petty compared to these greater crimes. But he called the Secretary of State in Georgia and was kind of like, I need you to find me these votes.

But he was saying, he was like, look, There's been fraud. I know there's been fraud. You got to go look for it The guy's like, I don't see any evidence that there's fraud here and he's like find it. I know there's fraud, you know He was putting pressure on the guy to go look but it's not as if he was telling the guy I need you to commit fraud, right? He wasn't telling him.

I want you to flip votes or I want you to manipulate something. He's like I want you to go find where the fraud is. So you'd almost have to prove that he didn't really believe that in order to prove, you know, because if there was really fraud he has every right to tell the guy to go find it. So now they're arguing that he didn't and in the indictment they argue that he knew it and he was a Like he knew that there was no fraud, but was still trying to get the guy to go find it and The case that they're using to argue that is that he had advisors around him who told him that the election was legit. The problem with that is that that doesn't prove at all that Trump believed those guys just because they told him that.

If there's 1 thing I'm fairly confident in, I believe Donald Trump believes he won the election in

Speaker 0: 2020.

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Dave Smith on the Trump Indictments