Trump Org & Allen Weisselberg Tax Charges, Pelosi’s New Jan 6 Committee, SCOTUS Voting Rights

Prosecutors submit indictment against the Trump Organization and its CFO Allen Weisselberg, who appeared in court today. Nancy Pelosi and House democrats vote to approve and form a select committee to investigate the Capitol Hill protests. The Supreme Court of the United States upholds a major voting integrity law in Arizona, signaling a likelihood to so elsewhere around the country. And more! Join criminal defense lawyer Robert F. Gruler in a discussion on the latest legal, criminal and political news, including:​

🔵 Trump organization and CFO Allen Weisselberg were charged with 15 criminal counts in fraud scheme today.​
🔵 New York Attorney General Letitia James, who campaigned on prosecuting Trump, says this is an important marker.​
🔵 Review of the indictment in New York State Court and the various allegations against the Trump organization.​
🔵 Trump Organization issues a formal response, calling the prosecution political and being born out of a desire to hurt former President Donald Trump.​
🔵 Jonathan Turley weighs in on the Trump prosecution and provides helpful context.​
🔵 Nancy Pelosi and democrats pass legislation to create a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. ​
🔵 Two republicans, Re. Liz Cheney and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger join with the democrats to establish the committee.​
🔵 Review of the House resolution submitted by Nancy Pelosi “Establishing the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.​
🔵 In major win for voter integrity, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds Arizona voting restrictions.​
🔵 In a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court found Arizona is allowed to maintain restrictions securing the integrity of the vote.​
🔵 Review of the opinion in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decided in the U.S. Supreme Court on July 1, 2021.​
🔵 Your questions after each segment at watchingthewatchers.locals.com!​

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello, my friends. And welcome back to yet. Another episode of watching the Watchers live. My name is Robert Mueller. I am a criminal defense attorney here at the RNR law group in the always beautiful and sunny Scottsdale Arizona, where my team and I over the course of many years have represented thousands of good people facing criminal charges. And throughout our time in practice, we have seen a lot of problems with our justice system. I'm talking about misconduct involving the police. We have prosecutors behaving poorly. We have judges not particularly interested in a little thing called justice, and it all starts with the politicians, the people at the top, the ones who write the rules and pass the laws that they expect you and me to follow, but sometimes have a little bit of difficulty doing so themselves. That's why we started this show called watching the Watchers so that together with your help, we can shine that big, beautiful spotlight of accountability and transparency down upon our system with a hope of finding justice. And we're grateful that you are here and with us today because we've got a lot to get into. We're going to be talking about the Trump organization and the CFO Allen Weisselberg. Who's charged with 15 counts of fraud today out of New York. And we've been sort of monitoring this. This has been a slow boil, a lot of people on the left wing on the ideology, the leftist ideology here in this country, very excited about this today, and we're going to talk about it. So we're going to hear from Latisha James, the New York attorney general, remember her, she kind of ran for office on the back of prosecuting Donald Trump. So we're going to revisit some of those statements and then Donald Trump and the Trump organization, not Donald Trump himself, but the organization issued a statement in response, a formal response. So we're going to see what they have to say about it. And then of course, Jonathan Turley is a esteemable lawyer. Somebody who has been around a little bit longer than I have been. So I want to make sure that we check in with him as well and see what his thoughts are on this. So we've got a lot to get to Trump organization, little bit of a activity going on there. So we're going to get into that end more. We've also got, uh, some, some stuff to talk about related to, uh, Nancy Pelosi. Of course, January 6th, the Capitol hill riots. We've been covering this for some time. A lot of people want a deep dive investigation. The Democrats really want it so that they can sort of, you know, continue to beat this thing into the, into death already. But the Republicans have been sort of oppositional to this well now today, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, they pass legislation that will ultimately create a select committee to investigate the Capitol hill riot. So we're going to talk about that representative Liz, Liz Cheney, who's a Republican, but a never Trumper. They mega never Trumper is going to be on that committee, which of course is very convenient. Her interests are sort of aligned with Nancy Pelosi and maybe even Mitch McConnell. I don't know. And then, you know, as long as Donald Trump doesn't ever run again, I think that they're all sort of happy about that. We'll see whether or not that comes to fruition. So we've got to talk about that and we'll probably continue to talk about that because the Democrats and nobody will ever let that go. Then we're going to wrap up with some heavy lifting from the Supreme court. I know to leave that as, as at the, at the end of the show, but it's worth it. Cause this is a good one. This is a six to three vote. This is a partisan vote. The conservatives went one way. The liberals went the other way and it all involves voting rights, voting integrity, voter suppression. If you're on, on one political side of the aisle, but the Supreme court came out major, win for voter integrity throughout the country. And there's some pretty interesting things that we can dive into about that. So we've got a lot to get to, we're going to jump right into it, wanting to invite you to be a part of the show. You can head on over to watching the watchers.locals.com, which is our sort of independent platform forum away from some of the big tech companies like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and the others where we do other things. We just had a monthly meetup where we all got to connect with each other over zoom and kind of learn a little bit about where people come from and what issues people are interested in. And so we're trying to, you know, do something a little bit more than, than maybe just do live streams here, trying to build a little bit of a community. And if you want to participate in that, it's available over@watchingthewatchersdotlocals.com and you can also join in on the live chat that's happening right now. So if you want to ask a question, Ms. Faith is back there, she'll be clipping some of those questions and adding them into the slides. And we'll be sure to get to those today. Also want to invite you to check out some of the other links down in the description below specifically, of course our law firm here at the RNR law group, we love helping good people facing criminal charges to find safety, clarity, and hope. We would love a referral from you. I also have some informational offerings down at gumroad.com/robert ruler, along with some other YouTube channels. And of course, while I'm asking, would love us subscribe and a thumbs up and a comment if you are here watching this currently. Okay. So enough of all of that, let's get into the big news of the day, the Trump organization, and the CFO, both charged with 15 counts of alleged fraud. That sounds pretty bad. But when you start to sort of decipher this, what is this really all about? It's kind of all about taxes and about like improper reporting of taxes, something that basically everybody in America does. And so we've been asking ourselves here, you know, is this a legitimate prosecution or is this a political prosecution? And based on sort of the other patterns that we've seen out of this administration, it certainly feels to me like this is absolutely a political prosecution. And so we're going to go through this and see what we can extract out of this. We're going to get some background over here from CBS news. They gave us an update today this afternoon. They say that lawyers for the Trump organization and its top executives, they pled not guilty to a slew of charges in lower Manhattan courtroom on Thursday. So that was today. Prosecutors alleged that there was a 16 year scheme of fraud and tax evasion by Donald Trump and his, his, his company, not the president, but the former president, his company. So a grand jury came back 15 count indictment. They've got Allen, Weisselberg the chief CFO, the, uh, late Wednesday evening prosecutors from the Manhattan attorney's office. They detailed the crimes in a 25 page indictment. We're going to take a look at some of that. The indictment alleged that the company and Weisselberg orchestrated us scheme to funnel more than 1.7 million in indirect employee compensation to the executive from 2005 to 2001. So 16 years of, of data, they went back just to go and fight and try to extract this charge. Okay. Prosecutor said the Trump organization failed to properly report the payment to tax authorities, right? So it's, it's, it's, it's a reporting violation. So you can, if, if you've ever sat down at a lunch or something like that and said, uh, oh, Hey, you know, oh, oh, do we talk business? Yeah, we did. Oh, that's a business expense. Since we're just going to write that off. Right. How many, how many business owners in America I've ever done that? Uh, every single one of them. Right. We all joke about it. You know, all those, maybe this is just lawyers to do this, but oh yeah. We talked business. That's a write off[inaudible] and then write down, you know, on your, on the back of your receipt had lunch with this person, right? This is a, I've never done that. Of course. So IRS take it easy on us. But my point here is that, you know, there there's, the tax code is a mess. And so what we're talking about is basically a reporting violation. So we'll see where this goes. Now, New York attorney general Latisha, James we've talked a lot about Leticia James here said that the indictment is an important marker in the ongoing criminal investigation. She also says the investigation will continue. We're going to follow the facts and the law wherever they may lead. So let's take a look at, remember, remember, Latisha, James, remember this gal, she actually ran for office promising to target the president and his family. So you see this Kyron down there at the bottom here she is getting sworn in. And this is from CNN back. Whenever she got sworn in, you know, this was a while ago, but it says new New York attorney general vows to target the president and his family. So she actually got elected on this, on, on the basis of this she's here,[inaudible] from the New York times or CBS news, whatever we discovered, you know, out there, sort of doing a, a victory celebration. She ran for office promising this. She vows she's being sworn in to target the president and his family. And it's not just the Kyron. Listen to this woman here she is sworn in

Speaker 2: 7:50

On Tuesday has made clear that among her biggest targets will be sworn in on Tuesday has made clear that among her biggest targets will be president Trump and his business practices that will never be afraid to challenge this illegitimate president

Speaker 1: 8:09

After off. So I remember that that was the, the, the, the facial Twitch Latisha, legitimate president. She's very upset about this so much that it actually contorts her face like the dark side kind of a thing. So she also recalled this and until they got to this moment today, they're very excited about it today. You know, they've been, I've been sort of been, you know, getting a little bit vulgar on the show, kind of, you know, using some, you know, self-gratification language because that's what it has felt like for a long time. You've had Michael Cohen, you've had Stelter, you've had all of these people sort of in mainstream left side of the aisle, going out there everyday, Trump's going to get indicted. It's common any day. Now the clock is ticking, you know, and just very excited about it, sort of, you know, very exciting themselves over this stuff. And here today, we sort of are at this is it, it's a, it's a reporting charge and you didn't even get Donald Trump himself. You just got the CFO and the org. Okay. For, for non-reporting stuff. Let's see what's in here and recall, this has been going on for some time. So they've been scraping scrounging around in the gutter to try to find whatever they can for the Trump administration. They even went so far back in may to actually subpoena the guys, grandkids schools. So New York prosecutors, they subpoenaed an elite private school that was attended by Allen Weisselberg grandkids. Okay. That's how kind of insane these prosecutors are. They have such a derangement syndrome. They have such a, sort of a frothing at the mouth that they can't help themselves, but just go after their political enemies, she ran for office on that basis. CNN acknowledges it in their Kyron. We've got documented stories that are going after his grandkids at their private schools, just to check the records. You know, it's not political or anything like that. We just want to do our due diligence. We would certainly do this to anybody over at CNN or anybody over at Amazon or Facebook. Uh, certainly we would do a deep dive investigation if it were not our political enemies by, they just happens to be, it's a weird coincidence. Other than that, you know, let

Speaker 3: 9:56

Let's, let's just, uh, let us

Speaker 1: 9:58

Do our jobs. Okay. We're good. Wholesome prosecutors here. Now of course we know Donald Trump responded to this previously, May 19th after they started to basically scour through the guys, grandkids schools. He said that this is there's nothing here, more corrupt than in an investigation that is in desperate search of a crime, which is exactly what this is. It's a corrupt investigation that is in desperate search of a crime. So Trump nails it on that. Here's some pictures from the proceeding today. This is inside the court building. So, you know, some, some are masks, some are not masked. This is Allen Weisselberg. And so you'll notice as we go through this, there's a lot of,

Speaker 3: 10:31

Of sort of th th this, this building is it's, it's funny

Speaker 1: 10:35

Spend time in courtrooms. They all sort of look the same to you. We have a courtroom here in Phoenix, uh, the central court building that looks exactly like this. It's funny. They all sort of look the same. Here's them coming out of the courtroom. So Weisselberg is, is here. We've got a whole entourage, right? Number of different guards. It's a big political prosecution. They just like to really milk this thing.

Speaker 3: 10:54

And, uh, that's where we're at.

Speaker 1: 10:57

Let's take a look at the indictment here. This is coming out, the people of the state of New York versus let's take a look against the Trump organization, the doing business, I'm sorry, the Trump corporation doing business as the Trump organization, the Trump payroll Corp, the Trump organization, and Allen Weisselberg. So, you know, who's not on that list, Donald Trump, right? The, the former president of the United States. So kind of anticlimactic, you know, you expect after, after all that effort, all that work, just having a lot of real, real, sort of

Speaker 3: 11:24

Bigger and energy in, uh, celebrating this, this

Speaker 1: 11:28

Investigation here we get it's they don't even have Donald Trump. All right, well, that's kind of a letdown, isn't it? The grand jury of New York by this indictment, accuses Trump and Alan Weisenberger of the crime of the scheme to defraud in the first degree. Oh my gosh. That's just horrendous. So the defendants, now they engaged in a scheme of a scheme, constituting, a systematic ongoing course of conduct with the, to defraud more than one person. And blah-blah-blah right, the us IRS, New York department of resonant revenue, finance, blah, blah, blah. The defendant is the Trump organization. It's a trade name. It is, there's a revocable trust. They're located on fifth avenue, New York, they call it Trump tower. Trump cert Trump corporation serves as the employer of senior managers, including Allen Weisselberg. We've got corporation, Weisselberg works for them. These senior managers oversee many of the operating entities doing business as the Trump organization. They're all based in Trump tower. And if you've been following Trump for any length of time, you know, that, that, that people in these positions, they have sort of, you know, hundreds of corporations. And so they there's a lot to manage there. It sounds like Trump had that same sort of setup in order to, you know, defray liability and for some tax benefits. And the point of this is saying that there is a lot of moving parts here. Okay. I run a small business in Scottsdale, Arizona. We have about 23, 4 employees, I think now. And it's a, it's a, it's a big job. Okay. It's a big job to, you know, we have a CFO, we have a bookkeeper. Uh, my business partner handles a lot of that. We have, uh, business coaches and a lot of eyeballs. We have a, a financial firm to sort of help with all of this stuff so that we don't run a foul of the rules. And we just have one company, right? Not, not hundreds of them, not billions of dollars in revenue. We're, we're a small operation here, but there's a lot of compliance costs, right? This thing can, can easily get complicated. I'm not saying that to make an excuse for, for Trump or his organization at all. I'm just sort of trying to provide some context. All of these corporations are being housed and held under one umbrella corporation, taking place in the Trump tower. So as the employer of Weisselberg and other managers, Trump corporation was obligated to report taxes. Of course, it was also required to withhold and pay taxes at all relevant times. The Trump corporation delegated its obligation to other people, the Trump payroll corporation. So, you know, when you're w you know, I'm not a corporate lawyer, but when you start layering on different layers, what you're trying to do is sort of create,

Speaker 3: 13:49

Uh, some, some, some rooms

Speaker 1: 13:51

So that if somebody tries to Sue you, they Sue one organization. And then,

Speaker 3: 13:55

Uh, you know, that organization would absorb the liability, right?

Speaker 1: 13:59

And it wouldn't spread out into other potential corporations where maybe they would be able to access those bank accounts or recover under a lawsuit in that regard. So, so Trump organization said, we're not going to handle the payroll stuff. That's going go over to the payroll company. Trump payroll Corp then is now a, an organization also in the Trump tower, also run by the staff. Trump also uses W2 forms. They file income tax, all that stuff. Weisselberg. Now we get to paragraph

Speaker 3: 14:23

Three is now, and

Speaker 1: 14:25

At all relevant times, the CFO of the Trump corporation Weisselberg has worked for Trump since 1973, Bennett CFO comptroller. Before that it all times he had the authority over accounting functions, including its payroll. So he supervised the comptroller of the Trump organization, managed day-to-day fares in accounting, including payroll and other things at all times, Weisselberg was authorized to act on behalf of Trump Corp and Trump payroll Corp to formulate policy and to supervise subordinate employees, blah, blah, blah, as such, he served a high managerial agent of the Trump organization. So that's what they need to do is they're sort of saying, well, who's responsible for all of this. They're short. They're trying to connect it back up to Weisselberg they say, look, he, he, you know, the comptroller reported to him, he had to deal with, you know, payroll. He was sort of responsible for all of the employees in a managerial capacity, or at least it was delegated down to the controller who would w would subsume most of those responsibilities. So now that they've sort of identified who they believe to be the culprit. The next question is what was the scheme? What was the conduct that they think was inappropriate? So it says here now, beginning from at least 2005, two on or about June 30th, 2021, 16 years, defendant and others operated a scheme for defrauding. The purpose was to compensate Weisselberg and other Trump executives in a manner that was quote off of the books, beneficiaries of the scheme received substantial portions of their income through indirect or disguised means and compensation that was unreported to the Trump corporate or payroll. The scheme was intended to allow certain employees to understate their compensation and so that they could pay and did pay less taxes. Right? So the idea here is, uh, you make a hundred thousand dollars a year, right? And so you, you, you have to pay taxes on the income that you receive from the organization. So let's say Weisselberg receives a hundred thousand dollars a year. Great. So he's, he's being compensated appropriately. Maybe, you know, they, they, they justify that some way, don't think about the numbers, but if it's just a hundred thousand dollars, he gets a hundred thousand dollars. He's got to pay taxes on that. Fine. We all understand that. What if Donald Trump's organization said, well, we're just going to pay you$100,000 on paper, but you also get to, you know, live in this house and you also get to drive this car and you also get to go on these vacations and your grandkids get to go to this school and all of that stuff. Well, what then do you count those benefits as income? And if the answer is, is yes, they are income, then that has to be reportable. You got to pay taxes on those benefits you receive. So if the kid's tuition was 20 grand, and that residents would have rented at, you know, a hundred grand a year, and whatever you add all those up, well, you gotta pay taxes on those benefits here. What they're saying is that the, the CFO, essentially wasn't doing that was allowing the scheme to go on where people would go and they'd go on a vacation, but it was kind of that benefit was more analogous to income than it is to some sort of a fringe benefit that people just get on the fringes. Right? It's not something that the IRS considers to be actual income. It's just like, oh, you did a great job. Here are a couple of tickets to the movies. You go to the movies, you don't report that as income, it's kind of a fringe benefit. Right. And I don't know what the rule is on the movie. So don't quote me on that. But that's what they're saying is happening here. Okay. I'm not a tax lawyer. I took tax in law school. And it was a very, very interesting class, largely because it is so convoluted. How, how messed up the tax code is. I mean, really in my perspective, the tax code is, is even, I don't know if it's worse than the criminal code, but it's just as bad. I make this point here regularly that you can be convicted of, of, uh, you, you can be charged with a crime for virtually anything, right? Make this point all the time you drive to the office, you've committed like three crimes. You don't even know it. And I, and I mean that seriously, people don't recognize how much activity is criminalized in this country. They just have no idea, same thing with the tax code. It is so con it's actually, I would say more complicated in many ways than the criminal code, because the criminal code is kind of straightforward, right? What is assault? Well, it's, you know, made contact with somebody. It put them in an apprehension of imminent physical injury, and there was a physical contact and there was harm. And we can kind of decipher that with tax code. You're talking about all these deductions and above the line and below the line, and all sorts of, you know, very, very, uh, sort of, uh, abstract financial concepts that most Americans have no idea what the hell you're even talking about. So, you know, the criminal code is complicated. And so now we're going to create another code. That's sort of layered on top of that. That's even more complicated that, that people are even less adept at understanding and decipher. And just, uh, just due to the nature of the subject matter. We thought we're talking about a major, major ability for the government to go through it and find that you violated it for essentially whatever reason they want. They know, uh, we, we w w when I was, when I was in law school, I bought the digital version of our tax book. And then I printed them out. For some reason. I don't know why I did this, but I did this. And it was two binders about this big, all right. So the, the papers of course were thicker because I printed them. If they would have been a textbook, it probably would have been smaller, but that was just the textbook. Okay. That was not the criminal, or I'm sorry, the, the tax code. And it was also not the tax regulations, which is a whole separate thing. So it is so beyond convoluted, I can't even, I can't even explain it as somebody who's studied it in law as somebody who has to pay a lot of them for all of our employees in our, in our organization. And I know what a huge burden it is on, on us and others. So let's see what else is going on here. Let's see, it says further, the scheme involved the failure of the Trump organization to withhold income taxes. The scheme also allowed Trump and the organization to evade payment of payroll taxes that it was required to pay. Right? So if these benefits are being handed out, if they're saying, go live in this house, go drive this car. Well, Trump organization, as the purveyor of that benefit as the, as the organization that is handing, doling that out, they've got to be the ones who say, well, that, that is sort of income. And so we're going to categorize it as income and then tax it appropriately, or at least withhold the taxes so that we can pay them to the government. The government wants their money. Five says one of the largest beneficiaries of the defendant's scheme was Weisselberg. So during the operation defendants, so Trump arraign Trump organization arrange for Weisselberg to receive indirect employee compensation in 1.7, 6 million. How did he do it, enabled him to receive compensation in ways that enabled the corporate defendants. So the Trump org to report it, to avoid reporting it to the tax authorities, and that did not result in the withholding of income tax by the Trump organization, Weisselberg then concealed the compensation from his tax preparer and intentionally emitted it from his tax returns. Okay. So that is a troubling sentence right there. And I'm curious to see what evidence they've got. Okay. What does that intentionally mean? Right. Do they have an email from Weisselberg saying no, don't count that as compensation, you know, something like that, you know, uh, uh, Mr. Weisselberg, this is your CPA. This is your tax attorney. I need to know what you want me to do with this income. I think that this is a tax

Speaker 3: 21:13

[inaudible] a taxable benefit

Speaker 1: 21:18

Going to be able to file this as a fringe benefit. And I need to know what you want me to do about this. And if Weisselberg responds back and says, oh, no, file that as a fringe benefit, I don't want to pay income taxes on that. That's that's, you know, that's intentional, obviously, right? You don't even have to argue about that,

Speaker 3: 21:32

But do they have that honestly?

Speaker 1: 21:35

No, no, they they're saying they do. They're saying they've got some evidence that his tax prepare that, that Weisselberg concealed it from the tax prepare and also intentionally admitted it from his tax returns. Okay. So, uh, we're gonna, we're going to check in a little, a little about preview of what's coming up, but we're going to be checking in with Donald Rumsfeld. He just passed away 88 years old, and he has an issue with taxes as well. So we're going to see what that looks like, but, you know, w we've we've got a lot of moving parts. I already explained that we've got a bookkeeper, a CPA, we've got all sorts of different, uh, financial advisors and all sorts of different people. And the thing that's interesting about this is, as people have a lot of differing opinions on this, you know, you might talk to one CPA says, oh, that's, that's questionable. You know, if you did it this way, then I would say that that was this cap classification of attacks. And if you did it this way, well, I would say, it's this classification. And you can take that same issue and go to another tax lawyer. And they would give you that same analysis because the law literally is so convoluted. It's not even funny, same thing with any lawyer, right? You can go to a criminal lawyer, happens all the time at our firm. People call us and they say, Hey, you know, I spoke to this other law firm and they said that I'm totally screwed. There's nothing that we can do. They've seen many of these cases, they know the prosecutor and the judge, and we're just out of luck. And we say, well, that's insane because that's not accurate at all. We help people through these cases all the time and they hire us and we get them a great outcome. And it's because there are differing opinions about different legal situations, right? In, in law school, we kind of joke about this. What is the, the only answer to any legal solution that ever has existed ever if you're in law school, you know what it

Speaker 3: 23:02

Is, the answer is,

Speaker 1: 23:04

It depends. It always depends. You can always make arguments both ways. And so, you know, the government, this is why we have these big high standards is this burden of proof that says the government has to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. They've got to make that showing, right? It's like 80%. If you want to use that figure more likely than not is not good enough. It's got to be beyond a reasonable doubt. So they've got to prove that it was intentionally omitted from his tax returns. They've got to show that maybe there's no real justification for that. And I think the defense there is probably going to be pretty, pretty easy. We'll see. I'm not sure Weisselberg concealed for years. The fact that he was a resident of New York was required to pay New York city income

Speaker 3: 23:39

Taxes. Okay. So like you

Speaker 1: 23:42

Can debate that, right? What is a resident of New York? How much time did he spend there? Did they really go through, are they going to be able to make that case? Maybe he had a resident someplace else or residents in a different state with lower taxes. Right? A lot of people do that. They have a place in Florida, they travel back and forth between New York and Florida go down there for the summer, back up to New York. So they're saying, well, you're a resident. And his attorneys were saying, no, I wasn't. So I'm not concealing anything because I wasn't actually a resident during that period of time, this says he evaded 556,000, a federal taxes, 1, 1 0 6 in state taxes, you know, adding up the numbers, saying he was not entitled to not keep those to keep that money. Now, here is the Trump organization. So they're responding back. They're saying, uh, he's a loving and devoted husband, father and grandfather. Yeah. He sent his kids to a nice school, worked at the Trump organization for 48 years. He's now being used by the Manhattan district attorney as a pawn in a scorched earth campaign, an attempt to harm the former president. The district attorney is bringing a criminal prosecution employment involving employee benefits that neither the IRS, nor other district attorney would ever think of bringing this is not justice. This is politics. And I actually couldn't agree more. It, it feels to me like this has, is, has been a long, long exercise in just a political prosecution. And finally, they're getting to this very, very unknown, satisfactory climax. Uh, but, um, I hope they certainly enjoyed themselves. Now, as I mentioned earlier, Donald Rumsfeld, why are we talking about Donald Rumsfeld here? Well, he just passed away. Doesn't really have much to do with Trump's taxes or the Trump organization or Allen Weisselberg. But I want to pause on here because he wrote a very, very interesting letter to the IRS in 2016, that I think it's worth mentioning here. So Donald Rumsfeld, as we know, he passed away. He was a former secretary of defense died 88 years old. So they call him here over at CNN, at CNN, the, uh, service architect of the Iraq war, a master Washington power player was the secretary of defense for two presidents, died, pugnacious, businessman, bureaucrat, lawmaker. He helped drag victims out of the burning Pentagon on September 11th, the Al Qaeda attacks heralded the war on terror and he directed and ultimately ended his political career. When they went sour, Rumsfeld died, surrounded by his family. No cause of death was provided a longtime associate of Dick Cheney and George Bush, et cetera, served also for president Gerald Ford. Right? So that's who

Speaker 4: 26:00

He is now. So I came

Speaker 1: 26:02

Across this very recently and I just sort of laughed out loud. Okay. That that's who that person was. Right.

Speaker 4: 26:08

Uh, secretary of defense, two presidents, somebody

Speaker 1: 26:12

Who was a businessman bureaucrat, former lawmaker drag people out of the Pentagon. Okay. A political career served under president Bush served under Gerald Ford, former associate vice president. Dick Cheney was the, was in the re in the cabinet during that administration. Somebody who's been around for a long time. Okay. Extremely accomplished column, smarter, whatever. He doesn't really know what to do about taxes either. It's convoluted. He sends this letter back on April 15th, 2016. So he drafted this from Donald Rumsfeld. He sends this directly over the IRS. Okay. 10th street over in Washington, DC. He says, look, uh, dear sir, or Madam, once again, I have mailed in our federal income tax and gift tax filings for 2015. And I've requested an extension due to the delays in materials required to complete our tax return. He says, well, despite having performed this civic duty for over half a century, at the conclusion of filing this year's taxes, I remain mystified as to whether or not our tax returns and tax payment estimates are accurate. Doesn't even know the possession of a college degree retention of an experienced tax accounting firm. And the earnest application have failed to provide confidence that my returns and my payments are properly completed. It says evidentially, evidently I'm not alone. In my concern, millions of Americans find the U S tax code in the forums to be so complex that they will individually pay between several hundred to several thousand dollars a year to hire a professional, to help them file their taxes. A fundamental and annual civic duty should not be so laborious and costly for the average American. He says, I hope at some point in my lifetime that I'm now in my eighties, the U S government will radically simplify the tax code, possibly even Institute a flat tax. So all those willing to pay what is required are able to do so with confidence that they have done so correctly, you have questions. Our tax account can be in touch with you to provide any additional information. You may require it sincerely Donald Rumsfeld. I have no idea what the hell the IRS does. He says, I have no idea what, what I don't w what you want me to do here. I filled it out. I've been doing it for 80 years. I would love to die. Knowing that this reprehensible code has been dealt with, fortunately, that did not happen. Rumsfeld passed away. We still have the current tax code. Now let's take a look at what Jonathan Turley has to say. Jonathan Turley, of course, very esteemable lawyer been around a little bit longer than I have, has a little bit more familiarity with some of the tax code. Right? I know how criminal law works pretty well. I'd say. And, uh, not so much with the tax stuff, but other attorneys certainly have been around a while. I can always shoot from the hip. I took tax law. I don't like paying taxes. I know enough about it to deal with it, but let's see what Jonathan Turley has to say. So on Twitter, Jonathan Turley says, well, for a trophy prosecution nailing a 73 year old man for not reporting car and apartment benefits is not enough to Mount let alone brag about, right? So that's, he's talking about Weisselberg. He says, these cases tend to be easy to prove for failing to report income, but he says they are overwhelmingly addressed as civil matters, right? IRS comes through, they say, Hey, you've got this delinquency. You have this offer and compromise, you know, wreck rectification. I'd actually did some tax law for about nine months, uh, when I was an intern my second year in law school. So I know a little bit about it, but you have this offer and compromise. IRS is say, Hey, you owe us 500 grand. You say, well, I don't have it. And they say, well, what do you have? Let me look at your assets. Let's schedule this payment plan and sort of you, you pay back your taxes and you may even be able to compromise, uh, a much lower reduced payment, right? So rather than the 500,000, you reduce it down to, you know, 250, you pay it over five years. IRS says, all right, that's good enough. Don't do it again. And you know, and you sort of work things out that way, uh, that didn't happen here, obviously, right? Criminal charges. They're not pursuing this as a civil matter allegations. Like the payment of tuition are the strongest claims of taxable benefits, but it's not clear if his team has anything more meaty to charge, right? Anything else? Other than that, the charges against the Trump organization are exceptionally rare. He says, as the sole basis for a criminal case, certainly seems more of a retaliation for failing to give incriminating material as well as pressure to flip on Trump. Huh? Very good observation. However, not only is this a threat of a year in jail, it is extremely unlikely to result in jail time for first offender. Even if this bloated prosecution effort can secure this conviction in the first place, which I have some doubt about the case, seems more like a thrill kill prosecution in terms of its real size and significance. These cases tend to be easy to prove. We already read that the issue for me comes down to these lines, right? Weisselberg then concealed the compensation for his tax preparer. The same line I mentioned previously, we already read that. It says this could be spinning the failure to disclose as concealments right or something more intentional, which we don't know that type of conduct obviously makes the violations more serious of proven in a criminal prosecution. So is it just a misclassification or is it intentionally hiding

Speaker 4: 30:52

The, the, the income

Speaker 1: 30:55

Don't know. We'll see how that works. Let's take a look@somequestionsoverfromwatchingthewatchersdotlocals.com. First one in the house comes over from thunder seven. Hey, thunder says, Hey, Rob, love your show. And learning about the basic legal details. Nobody is surprised at the Allen charge. The dams have been searching for a crime for four years. There is nothing there, or they would have found it by now. Don't you think? Yeah, I do. I mean, they would've found it a long time ago. If there was something there, remember they were, they were grinding down Trump and the entire family all throughout 2019. And we know that even the Obama administration and all of the Michael Flynn and the Carter page and, uh, the, the two FBI lovers and all of that was going

Speaker 4: 31:34

On, they have access

Speaker 1: 31:36

To all of the, the inside information. Right. Tucker Carlson is saying that they're creeping on him. Are they w did they do the same thing to the Trump administration? There's a lot of evidence that says, yeah, they absolutely did. And so you would imagine that they would have been able to find something in there. Right. So it's sort of like having access to somebody's closet, right. Or their locker going in and, oh, well, let's see what you got in here. Let's see what creams you got and all this, uh, these kinds of, oh, you have to use that. That's kind of weird. So, you know, one of those things, the FBI gets

Speaker 4: 32:04

To see it all and they've been,

Speaker 1: 32:07

And they've got Biden in there now, and apparently they're looking at Tucker and they've,

Speaker 4: 32:10

So I, I don't think there's anything there,

Speaker 1: 32:12

But it's just political. Of course, Saudi says this may be similar to what thunder seven suggested. Do you think going after Alan is a result of not being able to find something on Trump himself? Yeah. So, so, yes. Right. So, you know, I sort of explained this on yesterday's show, but there'll be situations where prosecutors will use one. And I didn't, I didn't explain that in the Trump context, but there'll be situations where prosecutors will see the big prize, right? The big fish that they want to go latch onto. And so they got to work their way up there. Right. And they got to go start at the bottom, find the receptionist. Okay. Receptionist, implicates, the assistant, the assistant implicates, the manager, the manager assist the assist, you know, uh, implicates, the executive assistant who implicates the CFO who implicates Trump. Right. They're working their way up there. And every time they, they work their way up, they want to exert some leverage on that next tier. And so now they get to Allen Weisselberg, he's a CFO, right? He's certainly going to be the guy that's going to turn on Trump. They were supposed to get it from, uh, Michael Cohen. Trump's lawyer didn't have anything there either. Right? Apparently that guy's like, you know, singing like a bird. And so

Speaker 3: 33:16

Now they've got all his archives

Speaker 1: 33:21

Think that he had on Trump and they still don't have anything. So now they're trying to get it from Weisselberg because Cohen failed. They couldn't get anything from Weisselberg. So they go, all right, jerk. You're not going to give us anything on the big guy. That's fine. We're going to prosecute you 15 counts of whatever this is. And we're going to implicate the organization because it's a political prosecution. They are mad at him and they're going to make him pay the consequences for it. It's

Speaker 3: 33:42

Disgusting

Speaker 1: 33:43

That this happens in our justice system. That is not justice. That is political

Speaker 3: 33:47

[inaudible] attacks. It is

Speaker 1: 33:50

Lyrical persecution. Okay. This happens in insane other countries around the world. And it's now happening here because a lot of other things are happening here as well. We've got wants to know, says, what do you think about Cabella's bad work environment? No one likes her, her kind, kind of like the witch and the wizard of Oz, not even the monkeys of the guards liked her

Speaker 3: 34:07

Treated like prisoners. Uh,

Speaker 1: 34:11

No, I can't do a, I can't do wizard of Oz analogies with Kamala Harris. Cause that would probably make me a racist and a bigot and a woman hater or something. I don't know all of the things, but it's a funny comment. Wants to know. I think that it is absolutely expected. I got a little bit of glee reading that because we all know it's true. Right. She's kind of a miserable person. Just in general. She makes fun of prisoners. There was a, an interview where she was like, you know, mocking them saying, oh, you know, like they're begging for food and water. And she put her hands out like this, like they're begging for water. Oh please, sir. These are people incarcerated. She was a, the attorney general and a prosecutor over in California. So I don't think that she has much empathy and human compassion. And so it certainly shows in her office over in the Vice-President's wing of the white house, Sharon Quinn, and he says, no doubt about it. This is a political persecution, a witch hunt. These people will never give up until they manage to concoct something, anything to get Trump and his organization supporters, thus giving meaning to new trumped up charges. Yeah. I like that. That's a that's uh, why didn't I think of that trumped up charges. It's pretty good. I like that. Good to see you. Sharon wants to know, says, are a prosecutor supposed to review cases, not prosecuted frivolous cases dismissed on prosecutable cases, is this against prosecutable law or ethics? Could Trump run a campaign and promise of having the FBI and the IRS investigate her great questions. Want to know? Uh, yeah. Prosecutors are supposed to, um, swear an oath and then follow that oath, right? To only do justice to only prosecute where cases have probable cause to not make things about politics or about personal vendettas. And this certainly doesn't resemble that to me. Right. Jonathan Turley came out and he said, Nope, that's kind of out of the ordinary. I, you know, I don't see people calling us all the time for,

Speaker 3: 35:54

Or, you know, tax reporting problems as, as a criminal

Speaker 1: 35:57

Violation because most of this stuff is handled civil similarly. And so, you know, what can Trump do about

Speaker 3: 36:02

If the problem here is that, you know, it's, it's sort of a double-edged, it's not that it's not the right way to say it. There is a, there's a Pandora

Speaker 1: 36:11

Box. That's going to be opened up a little bit here, which is very, very concerning to me. You start to have these political prosecutions take place. That's what's going to happen next, right? The Republicans, when they're in charge and something like this happens, they're going to do the same thing. And I'm going to oppose that as well. It's not appropriate. Political prosecutions in criminal law is not appropriate. You're supposed to

Speaker 3: 36:28

Prosecute those, those cases in the court of public works

Speaker 1: 36:31

Opinion. That's what elections are for. So it's not about

Speaker 3: 36:34

Sort of, you know, I'm not

Speaker 1: 36:36

Opposed to rooting out corruption or investigating where it needs to be investigated, but this is not the crime of the century. This has nothing to do at all. With anything that Trump did in, in an office, this is a private business. They were doing the same thing that every other company does. They're not going after Amazon or Facebook or Twitter or any of the people that are friendly organizations, they're going after a political rival and it's reprehensible. And if the Republicans do it, I'm going to condemn that as well. The criminal courts are not supposed to be used for that.

Speaker 3: 37:03

It's a very sacred process. Okay.

Speaker 1: 37:05

We were talking about taking people's lives and Liberty away from them.

Speaker 3: 37:08

It's a big deal. And so to just make this about making sure

Speaker 1: 37:12

Your political enemy doesn't run again, because you don't like his policy positions on whatever immigration or something like that is insane. This guy's life is going to be up and up,

Speaker 3: 37:20

Uh, you know, up in flames for the, for the foreseeable future he's facing,

Speaker 1: 37:24

You know, some serious consequences for something that is relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. Now I'm not gas as I follow exclusively follow John McAfee for tax advice. I'm not suicidal FYI. That's good. I'm not either. I'm not gas. I've definitely not. And apparently John McAfee wasn't either, maybe who

Speaker 3: 37:43

Knows. All right. So

Speaker 1: 37:45

That's a great comment. So obviously don't follow John McAfee

Speaker 3: 37:48

Tax advice. Um, well maybe yeah,

Speaker 1: 37:51

You can, you know, if you want to live that lifestyle, he lived a pretty interesting life. There are consequences though, for following John McAfee's tax advice, John McAfee, man, what a, what a story that was, oh, we didn't really spend much time on that, but rest in peace there, John McAfee big John

Speaker 3: 38:06

McAfee was, was a pretty

Speaker 1: 38:11

Memorable figure for me. I remember growing up, talking about McAfee, antivirus software. I was an Anthem. Maybe I did talk about this on the show. I was an ant. I was sort of like an antivirus sort of, you know, we call them, uh, progress right back in the AOL days where you would sort of program these, these programs and visual basic. And you'd go into these chat rooms and you'd sort of create these chat bombs. And you could go, you could create these instant message bombs on AOL, instant messenger. Remember aim any of you, nineties kids, and you would go on there and you could create these, these, uh, these progs, these programs that would send these instant message bombs across the internet. And it would actually log you off of AOL. Like if you got this, it would be like a, uh, uh, a strangely warm ad, uh, formatted

Speaker 4: 38:48

Text that would

Speaker 1: 38:50

Crash the AOL server or that the software that was being run on your computer. And so people would send you text messages and it would log you off and back in the nineties, that was a big deal. You had to like, oh, like dial back in, you know, you dial in on the phone and it would connect you. It take like five minutes and then somebody would instant instant message bomb you and all that stuff. And anyway, so John McAfee at that time, the McAfee antivirus software, and they were sort of scanning for all of these, uh, these, these progs and all these different things. And so I was very interested in that space, sort of a cat and mouse game was going on online. And I was probably way too young to be in that space. But, uh, you know, here we are, we made it. So John McAfee rest in peace. What a great comment. All right, speech unleashed us here says, did you know that the IRS can not even be held liable for any errors in their tax instructions, which caused a person to pay the wrong amount in taxes. There've been several court cases where that has happened and the court has ruled in favor of the IRS. So it doesn't surprise me at all. You know, it sort of resembles a qualified immunity type of thing, right? The police, well, it's not their fault. They're the police they're allowed to do those things, IRS. Well, you kind of screwed up the errors in your tax instructions, not our fault, right? We're we're the government. You can't Sue us. What are you nuts? All right. So Viking says, although Latisha, uh, uh, alright, there we go. Alright. Although Leticia with her endless budget and aspirations will go hard. Like you mentioned with the layers, once again, this will not touch Donald Trump. I totally agree. I don't think it's going to go anywhere against Donald Trump. They're all very excited about it. But as I said, very anticlimactic, we've got, Jeremy says, if they find anything worth noting, he should thank them for finding discrepancies. They were able to take care of, it's not like heaping hot coals on their head. Right, right. It's like, okay, we misclassified this. How much do we owe$700,000? I think they said$500,000 here. Okay, here you go. Go away. Right. That's how most of these things are dealt with, not this one though. White, because it's Trump and it's the Trump organization we've got share quit. And he says, the dams are going right by the playbook of labyrinth barrier, which is Stalin's secret police henchmen. I've never heard of that name. That's a, that's interesting. Who famously said, show me the man and I'll show you the crime. Wow. That is that's amazing. I have not heard that. I've not even heard that name. I'm going to read about that later. Thank you, Sharon. Gosh, I love this show. It's amazing. We have Kenny one B says a jury will find him guilty just because he worked for the Trump organization. Yup. Unfortunately beyond the reasonable doubt standard, no longer applies. If you're a white male or a Trump employee. It's true. Right. It's true. And this is, this is what I've been saying about the weaponization of the justice system. You know, the juror number 56, Brandon, uh, what was his name? Brandon Mitchell. Was that his name? I think it might've been that, but

Speaker 4: 41:30

He he's, he's sort of elbowed

Speaker 1: 41:33

His way to get on that jury to effectuate a specific outcome. I think that is without any question, right? There are several images

Speaker 4: 41:40

Because of him with the George Floyd,

Speaker 1: 41:43

Get your knee off of our neck shirt on and he's at protests on podcasts doing those things. And he makes comments after the Shovan verdict came out about, about, you know, African-Americans, you need to get onto juries. We need to get on there to effectuate social change. And you say, that's, that's not justice at all. You can get a bunch of new Yorkers who become jurors and they want to incriminate Weisselberg. But guess what happens when we let this standard slide? When we, when we'd say this line in the sand can be crossed. If we say that the Democrats can do this, they can go and make sure that they know they can weaponize political criminal trials. And so the Republicans are going to do that too. You know, folks, it may be a natural consequence. There may be nothing we can do to prevent that from happening. If one side exercises that weapon, the other side is going to respond in kind, do you know who gets hurt everyday Americans, everyday people like you and me, those of us who just want to live our lives. Okay? These politicians are prosecuting the hell out of each other, having this political, you know, high school drama with each other because they're, they're incompetent power hungry egomaniacs. And what ends up happening is we start to see this overcriminalization that then trickles down to everybody else. And it hits people. If you start seeing weaponized jurors, listen, if you say that we have weaponized jurors and half the country are racist white males, how do you think a jury is going to respond? If they feel that one particular ideology is punishing white people like, like Derek Shovan for example, hypothetically. And we, we sort of reverse that, right? What if all these white racists, we keep hearing so much about get on juries and they start effectuating the other way. They just start incriminating African-Americans or Hispanics, right? If this is really the premise that they're operating under, it's not okay. People on both sides, innocent people who should not be caught in the blast zone of this political prosecution, both directions, it's going to hurt real people. And

Speaker 4: 43:28

You know, people, people like,

Speaker 1: 43:31

Well, like our company, we, our office, our team, we have to help deal with the, the catastrophe of this constant overcriminalization people's lives are being ruined. And there there's one half of this country. That's like, yeah, good candidate. Trump's the worst, man. Get them out of there. You know,

Speaker 4: 43:46

You go what? My friend,

Speaker 1: 43:48

You know, this, this, the next time this happens, this could be to you. This could be to somebody that you care about. It's a political prosecution based on policy, not based on an actual criminality, everything, and somebody is going to respond and say, well, it was criminal. Look at the code. Look at the statute. Yes. I know because everything is criminal, literally everything as Sharon, Courtney just said, love victory

Speaker 4: 44:08

Barrier. Show me the man.

Speaker 1: 44:10

And I'll show you the crime. There it is. Right. It's it's exactly right. It's a profound, it's a profound statement. Furby slayers in the house as Turley nails. It, this was a dam. It would be a fine and a slap on the wrist. Several high profile members of Congress had many recent tax issues. They did not do too much about the court should remove the AIG from any involvement. No. Yeah, they should. I mean, they should absolutely. Based on that statement, she's, she's running for office to go prosecute somebody, right? And that's, in my opinion, prosecutorial misconduct. It is a conflict of interest. Clearly she's got, she's got a hard conflict there and she's been involved in this and spearheading it. And you know, there, this is what they're going. After a$500,000 delinquent tax bill, they got Andrew Cuomo with like 10 legitimate complaints from women saying that he's sexually assaulted them. And they're, and, and these attorney, this attorney general and this, uh, whatever city prosecutor, they're both like, well, I don't really know why, what are we going to do about that? But Donald Trump over there, right.

Speaker 4: 45:02

And he's right, they are picking and choosing based on their political

Speaker 1: 45:08

Ideology and political leanings and it's reprehensible. I think they should all be paid. They should all pay the consequences of the ballot box. And this goes for Republicans to Republicans who get in office and start trying to prosecute their political enemies are as reprehensible as the Democrats. And I will take that to the bank across the board. All right. D K pore says, Hey, Rob, do you think this will somehow backfire at the Dems now that this is getting obvious to the American people on both sides, that the Dems are using their power against their opponents? I do think so. I think that the, we talk a lot about the pendulum swing in both directions, right. And there, there is going to be, I think, a response to this. I think the Democrats largely overplayed their hands, you know, talking, continuing to talk about January 6th. Like they, like, they almost seized. America is now looking ridiculous. Right. It, it looked ridiculous

Speaker 4: 45:52

The entire

Speaker 1: 45:53

Time, but it's looking ridiculous and we're starting to see sort of a crack in the facade. I think it just in general, sort of a, a general distrust in the government. I saw something. Uh, oh, w w did we talk about this? Uh, I'm sort of mixing worlds. I might've posted this on Twitter. I can't recall. But there was a pullout from the traveler Gar group, a good polling organization that came out and said recently that they were having conversations

Speaker 4: 46:16

About whether Americans now

Speaker 1: 46:19

Think that they today have more freedom or less freedom than pre COVID. And something like 50, I posted this on Twitter, something like 57% of people say that they have

Speaker 4: 46:28

Less freedom. And I, and I was

Speaker 1: 46:30

Like shocked, like only 57%. That's crazy. Right. We have, we absolutely have a lot less freedom. Uh, monetarily, you've got, you know, we went through a whole period where you actually couldn't leave your house. Right. People couldn't go to churches. People can't say what they used to say anymore on the internet and things like that. So freedoms have certainly been diminished.

Speaker 4: 46:46

And I think that when, when we juxtapose that with the other thing,

Speaker 1: 46:52

We see like a lot of questions about Wu Han and about Biden's capacity, right. They told us that Beau, he's great. And he's looking at where he's riding a bike and he's got a lot of vigor over there. Okay. And we all are just sort of seeing it going. This is, that's not right. Uh, even Joe Rogan's out there that we all know he's out of his mind. Okay. When you sort of lose people that are that mainstream, you're going to start to see some shifts in the general populace as well. You and I, all of us here on this channel, we've been seeing it for a long time, but now it's sort of trickling down into the masses. And I think that there will be that there will be a little bit of a shift the other direction. Right. What we're seeing here is, um, is pretty plain and obvious. And I think that when more people wake up, w w w we'll see the consequences of that, we've gotten a dark, says didn't the Mo G get punished for doing exactly what this N Y a G is doing to Trump and the couple that had held guns outside of the house. Yeah. So that was the McCloskey is Missouri ag. What did the Missouri do? I mean, there are, so I, I don't recall. I don't. So the other prosecutor that was Kim garner, Kim gardener, right out of, um, is that Louisiana, the McCloskey is where were they out of? Yeah, it was down there in the south. I can't recall where it was, but you know, some of the, the, the remediations are prosecutorial misconduct or malicious prosecution, uh, sort of the same thing, but there's also, there's also some, you know, some, some just general ethical violations that you could file against really any attorney, if you wanted to go that route. So I'm not sure if they're going to be any consequences for any of them, but, uh, the Trump organization, now we know of course, facing criminal charges, if you or somebody, you know, where love is also facing criminal charges, our law firm would love the opportunity to help. There's a lot that we can do. We help people with felonies, DUIs, drug charges, even traffic violations. We have a lot of criminal traffic laws here in Arizona. We have criminal speeding here. You can just be speeding. Boom, it's a crime class, three misdemeanor, 30 days jail. Uh, it's, it's kind of insane, but we have a lot of that here. So my point is, if you know anybody that needs some help, we've got a whole amazing team of people in Scottsdale. We would love the opportunity to help 4 8 0 7 8 7 0 3 9 4 4. That now, if you don't need any actual legal representation, there may be some information that might be useful to you and invite you to go check out my gumroad.com/ Robert Mueller page. And specifically take a look at this law enforcement interaction training. It's a two and a half hour workshop. Just go take a look at it. There's a lot of information. Once you click this, it'll open it up and tell you all what's in there. If you want to check that out, we had our griller method, legal mastermind today. Talk to several other attorneys, including another YouTuber you probably know about. Uh, and we'll see if we can maybe connect and, and, uh, do some work together, but that was a lot of fun. So I want to invite you to go check that out. gumroad.com/robert ruler, and as always, thank you for all your support over@watchingthewatchersdotlocals.com. It really means the world to us that you are helping us to build a separate community, one brick at a time. All right. So we're going to change gears. We've got another segment we got to get to. Of course, we're talking about Nancy Pelosi, really excited about a January six committee, and she's got, she's going to do it, man. She did it today. In fact, we've got a committee that was just formed by Nancy Pelosi. And so this has been an ongoing issue. There's a lot that we can break down here. Let's get some background from Fox news. Marissa Schultz wrote this. She says, oh, the house. So the house of representatives, the U S passed legislation, which we're going to read to commit a select committee focused only on one thing that is, of course, the January six riots. This move was panned by the Republicans. Republicans don't really want to go through this, but the passed in the house two 20 to one 90 with two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger joining the Democrats to establish the committee. Okay. So it's a bipartisan committee now because Cheney and Kinsey girt joined on it. Democrats had wanted to form an independent panel, moderate modeled after the nine 11 commission, but that got thrown out without any way forward in the Senate to, to form this nine 11 style commission. She just did it on her own in, in the house of representatives. So she established a select committee. We've talked about what a select committee is, really can't do much of anything. Uh, essentially it's sort of like a sub committee that asks questions. So we we've, we've checked in on a number of different subcommittees here on this show from both the house of representatives and from the Senate, you know, they call people in and they say, Hey, mark Zuckerberg, is it true that you're censoring people? And he says, no, Senator no. And they go, oh, great, thanks for showing up here. Appreciate you being here today. Uh, go back to your business and then they go on CNN. No, no nothing's happening. So they're going to form another select committee. Not normally these are subcommittees like, uh, pro appropriations or Homeland security or judiciary or whatever. So they have a separate select committee. Now only for the purpose of this investigation. It's not going to be permanent. It's going to spring up, they're going to investigate it and then it's going to go away. All right. So they're charged with investigating the circumstances surrounding they, the, and you're gonna see this in the, in the actual document itself surrounding the domestic terrorist attack. Huh? So it goes from like domestic violent extremism to like a riot from a protest to something else. Now it's a domestic terrorist attack according to Nancy Pelosi. So, uh, they're going to issue a final report with recommendations for corrective measures, whatever those may be. Of course, probably that Donald Trump be thrown out of the country. There's no timetable for the work to be completed, meaning that they could keep going well into the 20, 20 midterm election year. Isn't that convenience. Isn't that nice? So that means that in the new cycle from now, probably all the way up and through 2022, we're at least the elections after the elections, depending on how those goes, probably don't really need to talk about them again, unless, and until 2024, when Trump runs again, then we're going to have to talk about it again. So maybe they'll just extend the committee all the way until 2024, who knows, but they're a, they're going to beat this thing. Oh my gosh, just beating it to death already says it's going to, it will find the truth with which clearly Republicans fear said Nancy Pelosi. So house GOP leader recommended a no vote, but passed. Anyways, the select committee is going to have a 13 member. Body Pelosi is going to appoint eight members, including a democratic chairperson, an aid to Pelosi says she is seriously considering including a GOP member on her list of in point of appointments. Huh? Yeah, we'll see who maybe makes it on there. We have Chaney and Kinzinger would be under consideration as they have been vocal critics of president Trump. And they backed his impeachment for incitement of insurrection. Right? Remember that? So, uh, they're joining the Dems now. Great Cheney said she, that she voted in favor of forming the committee because it's the only option remaining to thoroughly investigate the unprecedented assault on Congress already ousted from her GOP leadership position. She said that the threat to our Republic has not been lost yet. So here is what she posted on Twitter. So as I've said before, this is Liz Janney. I've said before that a bipartisan independent commission would have been the best way to investigate the attack. The effort was unfortunately, blocked. Select committee is now the only remaining option. I will vote to support it. See my full statement. She says the attack on January six was an unprecedented assault on Congress. Okay. And the functioning of our doc, a democratic process that day, that day, almost all of us recognize what happened to the party. Okay. The courage of my party's leaders has faded. She says the threat to our Republic has not on a daily basis. Donald Trump repeats the same statements that provokes the violence that he provoked before his attacks on our constitution are accelerating. Our responsibility is to confront these, uh, threats. Okay? So earlier this month, along with 34 other Republicans, I supported the creation of a bipartisan agreement. I've said before, this is the best way to address the assault. It is right to be wary of ache, overtly partisan inquiry. But Congress is obligated to conduct a full investigation of the most serious attack on our capital. Since 1814, we deserve Bray law enforcement officers. I will vote to support it. Let's see. She says she wants it to be sober professional. And non-partisan says the threat to our democracy is far too grave for grand standing or political maneuvering. Oh my God, these people, they can't even recognize their own hypocrisy, writing their own statements. She says the threat to our democracy is far too grave for what grand standing and political maneuvering, and then supports the creation of a grand standing and politically maneuverable entity. Okay. So that's great committees should issue and enforce subpoenas promptly, hired counsel and do its job thoroughly and expeditiously. The American people needed deserve a full accounting. They must ensure this never happens again. Well, maybe they want to start with, uh, asking, you know, the FBI and some of the intelligence officials, why they allowed all of this to happen in the first place. If we've got 18 intelligence communities and they're all supposed to be very intelligent, well, they sort of dropped the ball on this one. Didn't they? So let's finish the article over from Fox news. Before we get some updates on who is going to be joining the committee. So house minority leader, we all know Kevin McCarthy says that he's going to be half. He's going to have to be consulted. They're saying 140 police officers were injured. Two officers died by suicide in the days that follow. And a third Brian sickening collapsed and later died after engaging with the protestors by natural causes. They don't add that in their medical exam. Oh, there it is. Natural causes. So Pelosi invited members of DC and us Capitol police to attend Wednesday's votes rep Mo Brooks was there. I think leader McCarthy should have their own select committee that does an investigation says Mo Brooks, if you're going to form a committee, we're going to form our own sticking committee and we're going to investigate your committee. What do you think about that? There, Nancy, the January six committee will have subpoena power and it's basically going to do a bunch more of nothing. Okay. We have already gone through this. My friends, we already went through the impeachment.

Speaker 4: 56:35

We just did this and they failed miserably. It was a joke.

Speaker 1: 56:39

It was an embarrassment. So that didn't happen. So they're going to keep, you know, okay, well, we can't actually impeach the former, the, the Trump. So we're just going to, I don't know, complain about him for the next two years. Live updates. So Pelosi,

Speaker 4: 56:51

He then named Chaney. So it's

Speaker 1: 56:54

Cheney was now being kicked around and boom, there she is named on the committee, of course, which is where she wants to be because Kevin McCarthy said you're not in leadership anymore. So she says, okay, that's fine. I'm going to go and just be over here on this committee. And I'm just going to continue to be a thorn in your side for the foreseeable future. So good for her for playing her cards. Speaker Pelosi chose Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican. Who's a prominent critic of the president, former president Trump for one of her eight spots on the committee. Republicans have not announced their pigs. So that's going to be fun to see what Cheney has to say. So the house passed a hundred, the, some other, some other stuff that's not relevant to that speaker. Nancy Pelosi named Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, and a harsh critic of former president Trump to a newly created council. Chaney was ousted from Republican leadership for speaking out about Trump. Her appointment to the committee appeared to be an attempt by Democrats to bring a degree of bipartisanship.

Speaker 4: 57:47

Cheney said in a statement she was honored to serve and wants to

Speaker 1: 57:50

Above partisan politics. McCarthy said that, uh, Chinese decision to accept the post

Speaker 4: 57:56

Was shocking suggesting that

Speaker 1: 57:58

He was stripper of all other committee assignments as punishment. I don't know, in history where someone would get their committee assignments from the speaker and then expect to get them from the conference as well. He said it would be the second time in as many months as McCarthy penalized Cheney, but she doesn't change. He's going to go over to the Democrats at some point, if I had to say so, or she's just going to sort of embrace this mantle is like the new John McCain. Okay. But, uh, that's Kiersten cinema. So I'm not sure who she's going to be. I don't know. We'll have to, we'll have to see on Thursday, Pelosi also announced representative Bennie Thompson, a Democrat is going to be on it, going to have to get to the bottom of finding out these things that went on. He said, so we'll see, right? We'll see. Let, let's take a look at what the resolution actually says here. Very dramatic as is usually the case with these things. She says, this is HR, whatever it ends up being. This is establishing a select committee to investigate the January six attack on the U S Capitol. So they are going to give us some background, right? When we see these resolutions, they're typically they lay out some framework for us. They say, okay, well this happened. And then this happened and this, this happened. And then this happened. And therefore this happened, which means we have to respond and do this. So they lay out sort of a causal link, the chain link of all the different things that are going on. And here she says on January six, one of the darkest days in our democracy, during which insurrectionists attempted to impede, Congress's constitutional mandate to validate the election blah-blah-blah physical harm, 140 members of law enforcement, et cetera. Then on January 27th, department of Homeland security issued a terrorism advisory bulletin due to a heightened threat environment. Okay. January 27th, of course Biden's an office at that point in time says, uh, some ideology ideologically motivated, violent extremists with objections to the government's exercise of government authority could incite and commit violence. So department of Homeland security then comes out as soon as Biden takes office and starts throwing their weight around says that this concern DHS is concerned at the same people who attack the Capitol might target other government officials. Again, threats of violence against critical infrastructure are very, very scary for us, including violent extremists and conspiracy theories. And they're angry about COVID-19. These people are, are scaring us. So on September 24th, then 2020 FBI director said that the underlying drivers for domestic violent extremism are things like, you know, perceptions of government or law enforcement overreach. Okay? So like, uh, like people like me, right? Who say that they don't like it when the government oversteps their bounds. When, when my perception of the government is that it is useless and garbage in most situations. Uh, apparently I'm, uh, I'm dry. Am I, am I driving this stuff? Are you, are you serious? Am I driving that sociopolitical conditions? Uh, apparently, uh, racism, anti-Semitism Islamophobia, misogyny reactions to legislative actions all remain constant. So basically anytime that you want to participate in American ideals, if you want to have a conversation about, you know, any socio-political

Speaker 3: 1:00:51

[inaudible] or if you have a reaction to legislative actions, well, now you are somebody who is a contributor

Speaker 1: 1:00:59

Literally to the underlying drivers for domestic violent extremism. That's in this paragraph, right? Underlying drivers reactions to legislative actions. Okay? He says that they all remain constant within that bucket, a category, we have the racially motivated violent extremist. He says, I think this is the biggest bucket in the larger group. So now they go after the white supremacist and so on, right mate, racially motivated, violent extremists bucket. Big bucket goes on. This says on April 15th, Michael Bolton came out 2021. He said some stuff, us Capitol police did not have any policies or procedures in place. Then the us Capitol police failed to disseminate information from the outside sources.

Speaker 3: 1:01:38

So therefore then

Speaker 1: 1:01:40

We testify that this whole thing needs to be established and resolved. Therefore it is section one, we established the committee, section two, we appoint some members. We designate a chair, we fill any vacancies. What's the purpose of this? Why are we creating this in the first place? Number one, to investigate and report upon the facts, circumstances, and causes relating to the domestic terrorist attack upon the U S Capitol here and after referred to as the domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol, this is now being called a domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol.

Speaker 3: 1:02:16

So do whatever

Speaker 1: 1:02:17

You want with that. I mean, we know what the last time they started to go after terrorists out there, Americans lost civil liberties, hand over fist, just sort of evaporated right in front of our eyes. Actually, we didn't even know about it. They didn't tell us about it until Edward Snowden revealed it in front of our very eyes. So now what they're doing is they're just sort of taking this, this thing that, that would easily fit in a criminal buckets. Okay. You could easily say every single one of those people were trespassing. They were interfering with lawful government operations. They were, uh, you know, making unlawful threats and, and, and doing things that were intimidating people, which are all crimes. And, uh, now we're, we're not going to put them in that bucket. We're going to put them in the terrorist bucket. Why is that? Why do you think that is? It might be because they want to use the same tools that they use for the foreign terrorists here with here for domestic terrorists. I think that may be where this is going. Maybe I don't know, and relating to the interference with the peaceful transfer of power, including facts and causes. They want to find what are the facts in clot causes? What are all the instrumentalities here? They also, the purpose of this is to examine and evaluate evidence that was developed surrounding the domestic terrorist attack to build upon the investigations of others, to make sure that we're not duplicating efforts or any of these other things. Cause we, we, we really want to make sure that this is a nonpartisan commission. As we investigate the domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol. There it is. Again, what other functions do we have? Well, uh, we want to investigate the facts of course, investigations. Good. We want to investigate all the causes relating to the domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol. Also activities of intelligence agencies, armed services, influencing factors. What else, what else contributed contributed to this terrorist attack? Other entities of the public. They want to identify review and evaluate the causes, the command and control of the Capitol police, the national guard, Metro police, federal state, blah, blah, blah. The structure policies protocols of all of the, uh, all of the things. What are they going to report? What are they going to create a report? They're going to have interim reports. So every so often we should be expecting them to give us the results of its investigations. We'll see if we ever get those treatment of classified or law enforcement sensitive matter. How, what are they going to do with this stuff? Well, it may be issued in unclassified forms, but not if it's classified corrective measures. So they want to prevent future acts of violence. Of course, they want to prevent domestic terrorism. Again, got to make sure they do that. They want to improve the security posture of the us Capitol complex, the procedure. This is how you get access to classified information. We've got these different rules. So all this is pretty boring select committee. It's going to go and, you know, rule rule 11 select committee, rule 11 over here, parts three and four. Don't need to get into that record sharing of records and funding and all of that other stuff. So at the end, the termination, the select committee shall terminate 30 days after filing the final report under section four, which of course is over here. The final report is going to be, you know, some are summarizing all of those different functions there. So records

Speaker 4: 1:05:17

Are going to be the records of the committee and copies are going to be provided to everybody else. So we'll see.

Speaker 1: 1:05:25

Well, look, I honestly would like to know what, what the truth is here. I, if I had to suspect, I would guess that there were probably a ton of a ton of intelligence officials that sort of had a pretty strong hint that something like this might be going on. Right. We had the FBI that was embedded

Speaker 4: 1:05:41

With the, the governor Whitmer kidnappers for a while,

Speaker 1: 1:05:47

Long period of time. And apparently they were some sort of loosely organized militia. The FBI had several informants there. You're telling me that they didn't have any of that going on in any of those organizations that were taking place in front of the Capitol that day,

Speaker 4: 1:06:02

They didn't know there were, there were

Speaker 1: 1:06:04

Several different sort of what felt like stand down orders. We've read them here. We read mayor immoral, Bowzer over there from Washington DC who sent a letter the day before January 6th saying we don't need the national guard.

Speaker 4: 1:06:17

We don't want them here. Don't bring them here. I would like to know

Speaker 1: 1:06:21

What prompted all of that. And if there were

Speaker 4: 1:06:24

And on orders, where'd they come from because

Speaker 1: 1:06:28

A lot of people had a lot to gain by allowing

Speaker 4: 1:06:31

This to happen. And I'm curious

Speaker 1: 1:06:33

As to, I'd like to know more about that. We have some questions coming in hot from over@watchingthewatchersdotlocals.com. First up is ZZ the boxing cats, as who knows. Maybe we will find out who murdered Ashley Babbitt. Good question. Yeah. I wonder who did right? No, we don't really know what happened there. And nobody ever really talks about that. Right? There's a lot of people who are, who are, you know, dead two officers by suicide sickness, by natural causes, but actually Babbitt kind of just gets forgotten about,

Speaker 4: 1:07:00

I think they're going to investigate that problem.

Speaker 1: 1:07:03

Probably not. All right. We've got John Dillard, 52 says, why don't they create a committee about the three months of writing done by the Democrats? They actually cause billions of dollars in damage and attack people because it's the wrong political party. That's the only reason, right? The only reason is because the Democrats are in control of Congress right now they can do these things. So they are going to do it. It has nothing to do with law and order or justice or threats against American democracy. Give me a freaking break. It wasn't even close to that. Right. It was done. And over, in like three hours, they finished counting the votes that same night.

Speaker 4: 1:07:35

Right? So it wasn't, you

Speaker 1: 1:07:39

Know, the darkest day in America, I can think of many other darker

Speaker 4: 1:07:41

Days in this one. Okay. We've got

Speaker 1: 1:07:43

So biking says, I am sure they will be ignoring inconvenient facts or circumstances like accounting for the large number of the unindicted. Co-conspirators how convenient.

Speaker 4: 1:07:52

Yeah. They just want to be able

Speaker 1: 1:07:54

To bring this up every time and they don't want people to forget about it. Feisty lady says, if Republicans take back the house, can they disband this select committee? That's a good question. You know, I don't know that. I think that's probably something that you would have to refer to the house rules on. Probably not right. Because I don't think you want that to happen. I would guess that they can't disband that

Speaker 4: 1:08:15

Because

Speaker 1: 1:08:15

Th th there are probably rules that, that prevents sort of the ping pong going back and forth, right? Every time there's a transition of power, you just dissolve the other side's committees. Every time you get control, you just kick everybody else off the boat. You're out, you're out of here. Right. Sorry. And so you, you don't want,

Speaker 4: 1:08:32

Uh, any, you want some consistency. So I would guess that they just wouldn't their rules

Speaker 1: 1:08:39

And allow for that to happen. But I don't know. Right. We have one. It's a great question. Wants to know, says, isn't this just a scam to try to blame Trump again. Yes. Wait, Pelosi. Wasn't charged. So replace her only thing Dems can agree on is to go after Trump. Those two aren't Republicans, they're getting primaried by Trump. That was his political promise to them. That's what his whole energy is being used for. Want to know, it's a lot of good statements

Speaker 4: 1:09:01

Is there. And I think,

Speaker 1: 1:09:05

I think you're probably right. I think that both of those candidates will,

Speaker 4: 1:09:07

I see some pretty heavy primaries.

Speaker 1: 1:09:11

The next election we've got thunder nine is in the house, says, Rob, the GOP will be allowed to view the video footage. And can they take testimony from the mega crowd who witnessed the FBI and Antifa damaging property and inciting violence? It could all backfire on Pelosi. It could, but remember the GOP is basically useless, right? They haven't done anything, right. Th th the, the efforts to defend any of this stuff have been totally absent. Okay. They're showing at the impeachment trial was pretty, pretty weak. I would say, I think they did a fine job, right? They didn't really need to do much because it was kind of a foregone conclusion. We all knew this was a political spectacle that had zero possibility of passing because they just didn't have the votes. So all they wanted to do was waste a bunch of time and sort of, you know, bloviate for themselves to puff up their political profiles, knowing that it was never going to go anywhere. So

Speaker 4: 1:10:00

The,

Speaker 1: 1:10:03

The Republicans in order to make something good of this, right, to turn a bad day,

Speaker 4: 1:10:07

A bad development into a positive, to seize on an opportunity

Speaker 1: 1:10:12

Would actually have to get their act together. And I don't think that they have any interest in doing that. Okay. Mitch McConnell, McCarthy, any of these mainstream Republicans, they don't want to go defend Trump or the maggot people. They have no care that they have no interest in that at all. And so you sort of see, we saw this after the election, Donald Trump was sort of scrounging around attorneys, the GOP wasn't fighting for him in almost any of the post-election lawsuits. And everybody just sort of ran the other way, because they were satisfied with their results. Nobody liked Trump because Donald Trump was not playing according to the old GOP playbook. And so they were kind of, okay, that he's gone right there. They're not particularly upset that they're not in power anymore. They know they've got sleepy, Joe and ineffective[inaudible] up there that are, that are sorely just bumbling through this administration. And they pass anything meaningful yet. No, uh, infrastructure sort of working its way through. They've passed an ungodly amount of spending. But you know, if the, if the balance of power changes next year, and it's not looking like they're having really any good momentum on the border and Joe Biden came up and screwed that one up. And so, you know, if a president doesn't have a big win and sort of the first two years, the balance of power changes, it might be the end of the presidency, which is why Democrats are freaking out right now. This is why they're, you know, they're, uh, coming out there and sort of blaming Republicans for the defund, the police stuff. And you're seeing the narratives shift. You're seeing the stories come out. Kamala Harris is now having some interoffice problems because nobody likes to work with her because nobody likes her

Speaker 3: 1:11:37

General. So, you know, I don't, I don't expect the Republicans to, to do much,

Speaker 1: 1:11:43

Which have to do much of anything because they kind of know that Biden's is probably going to be a lame duck here soon enough. And they don't want Trump to win. So if they rubbed Trump's noses in the Capitol hill riots,

Speaker 3: 1:11:54

It's a win for them. For everybody,

Speaker 1: 1:11:56

For them, we've gotten a DOB, says if they don't end up finding any new information on the supposed pipe bombs, then we'll know it was a complete setup. Also, isn't it a conflict of interest that the wicked witch of the west AKA Nancy Pelosi said she was one of the people responsible for the lack of a national guard presence. Yeah. Yes. Right. Are they going to ever reveal to us any of their own incompetence here? Right? She is the speaker of the house or at that time I, uh, at that time, was she the speaker? I think she was right. I think she was the speaker of the house

Speaker 3: 1:12:25

That time. So they have the house Sergeant at arms and they've got all,

Speaker 1: 1:12:31

You know, she's, she's been in charge of a lot of this stuff for 175 years. So presumably she knows,

Speaker 3: 1:12:37

You know how

Speaker 1: 1:12:39

To handle some of this and she's out there affirmatively denying additional resources from the national guard, if that's true. All right. We have, Sharon says, one thing we can absolutely count on 100% from this select committee is quote, no evidence whatsoever of any involvement of the FBI, CIA, DHS, NSA, NSA, DEA, all of them, ATF, all of them. Any state local government law enforcement agency. Yeah, no, they had nothing to do with it. This was all white supremacists. Oathkeepers proud boys. The proud boy, the racist proud boys with the non-white leader named Enrique. Tario the whole, thing's like a joke. It's like a Ms. Lucky says capital defense obtain government video by discovery or subpoena identify government operatives who were not charged, establish their actions, physical and verbal possible entrapment, defense change of venue from DC. So a lot of good questions there. So it's a good, it's a good question. Right? So the, the select committee certainly has subpoena power and I'm not sure really how that, you know, how that's going to work and whether they're going to disclose much or any of this to us. So I'm not sure that we're going to going to actually get any of that material.

Speaker 3: 1:13:47

So the select committee

Speaker 1: 1:13:49

Might get it, but are they going to disclose it to the public? And also this committee doesn't look like it is

Speaker 3: 1:13:56

Actually charging anybody with a crime

Speaker 1: 1:14:02

Capital defense. Yeah. So we're talking about the, yeah. So the, so this committee is not actually charging anybody with crimes. Now they might make recommendations about, you know, future

Speaker 3: 1:14:09

Criminal policies

Speaker 1: 1:14:12

Or how to deal with these in the future. But from my understanding right now, this is just sort of an inquiry. They're just gathering information. They're going to, you know, investigate and subpoena and interrogate and call in for hearings. And just generally make this a pain for the Trump side of the country, but not actual criminal charges. So that means that, you know, a defense wouldn't wouldn't be available like entrapment you'd have to charge somebody with a crime. And they say, no. As a, as an affirmative defense, I was entrapped. And therefore,

Speaker 3: 1:14:40

I think

Speaker 1: 1:14:41

We're talking about two different things. So this is a congressional hearing. So there really would be no need to change venue from DC. So a change of venue would be appropriate if you were trying to sort of rectify a jurisdictional issue. So for example, in the Derek Shovan case, Derek, Shovan a change of venue. Might've been useful for him because he could've gotten a different jury. He could've gotten a different trial environment, something that is more beneficial to him, but in this case, this is just Congress, right? They're just going to be doing all of this in the congressional buildings. They don't need to go anywhere else. They're going to be communicating with other DC officials. So I don't think they need to go anywhere. Good question. We've got, Chris Wiseman says to paraphrase from Rumsfeld, the IRS tax code is the ultimate known unknown. It

Speaker 3: 1:15:21

Really is a mess. Good

Speaker 1: 1:15:24

To see you chairman. And that's Chris Wiseman. Chris Wiseman is in the house. We got boxy punk chick says, I believe it is a way for Pelosi to hide her name from being at fault for not allowing the police. Yeah. It's sort of like, it's like when you overcompensate for something,

Speaker 3: 1:15:37

You know, it's like, if you, uh,

Speaker 1: 1:15:39

If you injure somebody and you're like rush over there and help them and all this stuff, and you sort of kind of oversell it a little bit, they go, did you, did you cause that in the first place, did you leave that banana banana peel on the ground there? So it's,

Speaker 3: 1:15:50

It's sort of feels like she's turning this

Speaker 1: 1:15:54

And do a bigger thing than it is maybe for some of those reasons DK pour says, have you ever wondered why the Republicans Pelosi is having on the committee will want to commit political suicide to their career in the RNC, in the long run? Uh, I, I do wonder that. Yeah. I mean, I wonder if it's because they see the political tide shifting. If they see the writing on the walls, if they're going to be abandoning ship and going over with the Democrats, I don't know a lot of good questions. I'd be curious what your thoughts are on that DK. Pour we'll catch those later. I'm sure. All right. Some great questions came over from watching the watchers.locals.com. And quick reminder, before we move on that, I am a lawyer at the RNR law group in Scottsdale, Arizona. We love helping good people facing criminal charges to find safety, clarity, and hope in their cases and in their lives. We can help with all types of cases, things like drug charges, felony charges, DUI charges, traffic violations. We can help clear old mugshots off the internet. We can restore your civil rights so you can vote again to possess a firearm. Again, we can file motions to set aside anywhere in the state of Arizona. And if you happen to know anybody, we would be very humbled at the opportunity to help. So the phone number there is(480) 787-0394. And if you don't need any actual legal services, I'd encourage you to go check out my informational offerings down here at gumroad.com/robert ruler. Or you can take a picture of that QR code. And the one I would recommend for most people is down here. The law enforcement interaction training. It is a two hour course, two and a half hour course about an hour and a half of content. And about an hour of minutes of, of, uh, questions and answers go, we go through the 1, 2, 3 rule for dealing with the police. It's the one rule, the only rule you need, there are two questions that law enforcement officials can ask you that you have to answer. And if they ask you something that is not one of those two questions, rule number three is you got three responses you can use to get yourself out of most situations and protect your rights is really what this is all about. So it is the 1, 2, 3 rule available over@gumroad.com under law enforcement interaction training. And of course, thank you so much for your support over there. We really do appreciate it. All right, last segment of the day, we're going to be talking about voting rights. The Supreme court of the United States just came out with a major ruling on voting rights, voting restrictions, some people calling it, uh, maybe this is an encouraging voter suppression. I like to think of this as really doubling down on voter integrity. Now, of course, that probably makes me somebody who is, uh, well, we'll leave that alone. Let's go into the article here. This came out of an Arizona case more. If you can believe that mark[inaudible] is our attorney general here. And I've been very critical about the Supreme court for a long time, specifically relating to their opinions and their activities. As it relates to, uh, election cases, voting cases, we saw this, we had many cases file a petition for writ of certiorari in front of the Supreme court. I think it was 16 different attorney generals that had issues with the 2020 election and the Supreme court. Oh, we don't want to deal with that. And they also said, Pennsylvania, your state legislature, whatever you want to do, do whatever you want. We don't care. You can run your elections. However you want to. If you want to make a mail-in ballots, that's fine. If you want to extend the deadline for voting, that's fine. If you want to go harvest ballots, whatever you want to do, as long as you, uh, you know, get Trump out of there, go hog wild, go, go nuts. And w w I was not happy about that, right? I've said for a long time that the constitution is pretty clear. The elections are run under the purview of the legislature, the state legislature, and they are the ones who get to set the rules. What we saw in 2020, in my opinion, legally was a lot of manipulations around those rules. And it wasn't anything that was, you know, this isn't rigged. I'm not trying to say that that happened, but the rules absolutely did change. We saw that there was a deadline on one day, and then suddenly it changed three days later, or nine days later. And it wasn't the state legislatures that have been delegated the responsibility under our constitution to do that. It was courts, or it was, uh, officials from the executive branch, like we saw down in Georgia and elsewhere in other parts of the country. So the rules were changing all over the place. So, you know, president Biden is the president. He's in the white house. He's sitting there right now. So I'm not gonna be making any claims here that anything went wrong with the 2020 election. YouTube will literally just throw you off there for that. So we're not going to go down that road, but in response to 2020, a lot of states have now passed a bunch of new rules. So we're not looking backwards. We're looking forward in the next election. What can we do about this? A lot of people said, well, whatever happened in 2020, whatever you want to leave that at

Speaker 3: 1:20:24

Was not. Okay. And w w

Speaker 1: 1:20:26

So sort of seeing that there are a lot of other problems sort of percolating around America relating to voting in Brooklyn or in New York city, the race for mayor there. I think they just threw out or had to, they're having to re tabulate the votes because 130,000 extra votes just sort of

Speaker 3: 1:20:41

Popped up out of nowhere, the most secure election

Speaker 1: 1:20:45

History, right? And so states are tired of that. They want to pass some rules. Arizona did that, and the Democrats were not happy about this. So they sued. We have a lot of very powerful organizations on that left side of the aisle with people like mark Elias and others, democracy, docket, who are waging wars in the courts to, to, to seize an advantage as it relates to voting. So in Arizona, we passed a new law

Speaker 3: 1:21:10

And we, we, we of course had

Speaker 1: 1:21:16

Somebody file a lawsuit against us. They did not like the law. They say, it's discriminatory. They say that this is violating voting rights. And so there's a lawsuit that happened. It went up to the ninth circuit. The ninth circuit said, Nope, those laws are okay. You can actually keep those. Then there was a rehearing in the ninth circuit and the full court came back and said, no, that's not okay. You can't have those rules. They're too restrictive. They're too discriminatory. They're too much sort of suppressing the vote. And they're desparately impacting certain demographics, right? Certain people of color, persons of color. And this is discriminatory.

Speaker 3: 1:21:50

So we're sort of in a precarious

Speaker 1: 1:21:53

Position until today, the Supreme court came out

Speaker 3: 1:21:55

And said, no, no, Arizona, you're, you're free

Speaker 1: 1:21:58

To impose those restrictions. Let's get some background here. Before we take a look at the syllabus, from the opinion, here are the Supreme court upholds the restrictions over from the New York post posted the today Supreme court upheld in a vote of six to three, three liberal members are joining in descent. So we have, of course, as we know, the Supreme court has nine members. Currently we have, you know, six, five and a half conservative judges, and we have three liberal judges. And so today, very ideological split some of the prior Supreme court cases we've covered here have been almost like unanimous. We've talked four or five different unanimous cases, and we're going, wow, this is crazy. You know, all of the, the rest of the country is extremely divided politically, but the Supreme court kind of feels like it's, they're working in unison. Not today. Today was a split. The righties on the right, the left is on the left. Let's take a look at this decision. It was the court's first consideration of the voting rights act. The part of it that talks about voting rights. So Republican controlled state legislatures, like here in Arizona, they, they, what they say is they call it, they seek to impose restrictive new voting rules. Okay. So you see how the New York times frames that, right? It's a restriction. So we've talked about the spectrum before, where on the one side you have sort of the pejorative term of the concept. If you're talking about, let's say more verification for voting. If you're talking about, you know, making sure people go to their polling place rather than anywhere else, if you don't let people collect ballots and things like that, the left will typically call that voter suppression, right? It's it's racism, it's voter suppression, blah, blah, blah. The same concept with a positive spin on that is called voter integrity. Right? That's what the Republicans call it. So it's the same concept it's we're gonna, we're gonna sort of put more protections around the voting process. Liberals, call it voter suppression, Republican say, oh no, that's that's negative. We call it voter integrity. Okay. And, uh, what the New York times is doing of course is framing it in the pejorative sense. They're saying, oh, it's, it's restrictive new voting rules. Whereas people like me might say, well, what's showing your ideas restrictive. Like we can't verify who you are. Oh, you have to go to your polling place. Oh, we don't want people harvesting ballots just sort of get, you know, gathering them up and doing whatever with them because that breaks the chain of custody to some degree. Uh, so all of those things, to me feel like voter integrity. We want to know who is voting when they're voting, where they're voting and, and make sure that it's a legitimate vote so that we don't run into these issues again. So the opposite side of that is that, no, this is it's too disenfranchising. This is something that is precluding people who should be voting from voting. And of course in America, we all talk about democracy and how important the vote is and how, you know, how, how essential it is to exercising your American freedoms. And now it's supposed to be something that, uh, you know, we want everybody to do because it matters and tell it kind of doesn't anymore. Right? And so we don't want people to, to not feel like they're participating. And so we want massive voter enfranchisement. So we're always playing this balancing act between what kind of restrictions can we impose that ensure that we have some integrity in our elections versus how do we make sure that the people who should be voting and, and want to vote can vote without a bunch of speed bumps in the way that make it more difficult for them to do so. So we're having this conversation back and forth last election. It was very much about voter and franchisement COVID, COVID COVID grandma can't leave her house. So we're just going to give them whatever you need vote whenever you want. However, you want vote online, vote five times. If you want to, nobody cares go wild. Right? And we saw this. We, we covered a lot of this case. A lot of these cases, I think this is largely why we're demonetized currently, but it is a big issue. And now what's happening is the Supreme court came out and said, we're going the other direction on this. If the states want to respond to a lot of the insanity that we saw in 2020, they're free to do that. We said that Pennsylvania can, you can move your rules around. However you want to Arizona, same goes for you. If you guys want to actually make this more about voter integrity, you're welcome to do that. Let's go back to the article and see what else is happening here. The Arizona decision suggested that the Supreme court would not be inclined to overturn many of the other state measures. Okay. They're saying that there let's see here, Samuel Alito, he wrote for the majority good judge, a very conservative judge said that courts should strike down voting restrictions only when they impose substantial burdens on minority voters that effectively block their ability to vote. Okay.

Speaker 4: 1:26:15

Very high standard, substantial burden. That, that, that is essentially blocking the vote. Okay. That's a very high standard.

Speaker 1: 1:26:24

It means that if somebody is like, well, you know, it's a little inconvenient for me to vote at that time, based on whatever that restriction is that you're

Speaker 4: 1:26:31

Imposing. That's not

Speaker 1: 1:26:34

A valid concern anymore. If somebody wants to come through and say, well, I don't have ID. The state says I gotta have ID. I don't have ID because I am. I'm a, you know, a disenfranchised person of color or whatever. And I'm going to file a lawsuit. And Supreme court is saying, don't bother, don't bother, uh, go get an

Speaker 4: 1:26:49

ID and go vote, right? It's not blocking

Speaker 1: 1:26:51

Your vote. Your ability to vote in that is not a substantial burden, right? I don't, I don't know if that they're going to rule that way on the ID thing, but that's what we're saying. Right? That's the standard it's got to be. If we're going to overturn and strike down a state's voting restrictions, it better be a big one. Like it better be a substantial burden. And it better basically

Speaker 4: 1:27:11

Blocking that community from voting. Anything else, pretty much fair game.

Speaker 1: 1:27:16

He says where a state provides multiple ways to vote. Any burden imposed on voters who choose. One of the options can not be evaluated with also taking into account. The other available means. So you just put in one escape valve, you know, sort of an alternative, and that gives people multiple ways to get there. He says, fraud can affect the outcome of a close election and remember folks, justice Alito, if I'm pretty sure, I think, I think he would have actually heard the case from the attorney. General's back in the 2020 election. I think he wrote a dissent that says he would have said

Speaker 4: 1:27:47

That they had standing could be mistaken

Speaker 1: 1:27:49

On that though. Uh, fraud can affect the outcome of a close election. He said, fraud can also undermine the public confidence in the fairness of the elections and the perceived legitimacy of the announced outcome. Yeah. Right. Because I think there are still huge swaths of the American public that has questions about this. Now this is how the judges ruled. This is the breakdown over from the SCOTUS blog. And as we recall, right, this is the split on this side, on the right side, we have the so-called conservative judges. Roberts is questionable, right? I think you could you make the align to the, make the argument that the line is kinda kinda here. Maybe, maybe like a little bit squirrely over here like that, but what you see here, Republicans conservative judges over here, the leftovers

Speaker 4: 1:28:31

Not winning. So the

Speaker 1: 1:28:33

Was written by here by justice Kagan. And then the majority was written over here by justice Alito. So pretty, pretty obvious split there in the descent. Now, justice

Speaker 4: 1:28:44

Kagan. She says that

Speaker 1: 1:28:47

Everett can the majority, which means the court here, they give a cramped reading

Speaker 4: 1:28:52

To broad language. She says then

Speaker 1: 1:28:55

Uses that reading to uphold to election laws in Arizona that discriminate against minority voters. Hmm. So the New York times says that the ruling will draw fresh attention to, uh, address voting restrictions. The Democrats called for the, for the people act, but it's stalled unless Democrats like Joe mansion or Kiersten cinema want to jump in on this, it's dead because they need 60 votes. Some congressional Democrats are holding out for more legislation. John Lewis justice department is sort of getting involved in George's new voting law. We didn't talk about that, but that's a big deal. The court today, she says, uh, it says a university of California professor the court today also makes it harder to prove intentional racial discrimination in passing a voting rule, making it much harder for the DOJ to win in its lawsuit against the new Georgia voting law. So the DOJ just got a little bit of a backhand there as well. Thanks for playing. You're not going to be doing that in Georgia. They're allowed to pass these laws. Uh, the larger message of the ruling was that the voting rights act of 1965, that was hobbled in 2013, retains only limited power to combat voting restrictions said to disproportionately affect minority voters access to the polls. Let's see president Biden said in a statement that the court has now done severe damage to two important provisions of the voting rights act says that after all we have been through to deliver the promise of the nation to all Americans, we should be fully enforcing, voting rights laws, not weakening them. He said, this decision comes just over a week after the Republicans blocked even a debate, even consideration of the, for the people act that would have protected the right to vote from action by Republican legislatures in states across the country, they are so mad about this, about that. They are so mad about that. HR one, not passing. The four of the people act, oh my goodness, because that would have cemented their power for basically the rest of our lives, right? They would have been able to federalize elections and they the same rules that they sort of maneuvered in order to win the last one, they would be able to permanently effectuate. This is a big, big, this is a big ruling while this broad assault against new voting rights says Biden is sadly not unprecedented. It's taking on new forms. It is no longer just about a fight over who gets to vote. So obviously in this nicely prepared statement, you know, he didn't think or say any of that, obviously, cause that's actually, well-written uh, the new case burn of versus national committee concern, two kinds of voting restrictions in Arizona. One required officials to discard ballots that were cast at the wrong precinct. So in Arizona, of course we have different precincts. There was a, there was an effort here to, to create what are called these tabulation centers, which are sort of these big mega conglomerates where all the ballots can come into. And part of the problem with this we've talked about this previously is when you want to do an audit on any one particular precinct, if you lump them up into a big bucket, you can't determine what precinct the problem was in. Okay. So let's say we've got, you know, a hundred different counties in Arizona and we want to go audit all the 100 counties. We go to each county, we say, show me your bucket of votes. And we audit the vote. Okay. Signature, you know, this is a real person. This is not fake. Okay, great. We're going to audit, you know, 2% of the total ballots in that county. We're able to see that. Okay. So this, you know, a Pima county is good. We got coachees. They're good. We got Coconino. They're good. We got Maricopa. They're good. Now the problem here is that in some of these counties and some of these precincts, and of course the counties have all the different precincts in them. And so you wanna be able to audit those different precincts and sort of, you know, create these chain of custody is that you can monitor the flow of the ballots. Well, what Arizona was doing this last election is we created these tabulation centers were where you would take, let's say, you know, 50 different precincts and you'll just sort of dump them all into one big bucket. So now when you want to go do an audit, you get this, you pull out from the big bucket, you can't distinguish between all the different counties. And so Arizona said, uh, we're not happy with how that, how that went, because we have some questions about some of the votes here. And we don't like, we don't like that process. So we pass this new, this new rule that says, if you're going to do that, if you're not going to cast it in the right, in your right precinct, your, your boat doesn't count. Uh, there are, there are ways to go cast the legitimate vote. That is not one of them by just going and dumping it wherever you want, where we have precincts for a reason it's organized a certain way to protect the integrity of the vote. There are many reasons for that. This is not a situation where you just get to, you know, write it on a sticky note and, and fold it into a paper airplane and throw it at your senior citizen, working your polling place case, not how this works. And so when Arizona then wanted to pass a new laws, Supreme court came out today and said that that was fine. The other things that it made it a crime for campaign workers, community activists, and most other people to collect ballots for delivery to polling places also called ballot harvesting, right? The law made exceptions though, for family members, caregivers, and election officials. So the problem with that of course, is you would just send these ballot harvesters to go around to different communities. And you might pick out a community that happened to be very red, right? You go to this zip code, a bunch of Republicans, well, we're here to collect your ballots and we're from the Republican party or whatever, and go, sure. Yeah, that sounds great. Save me a trip to the poll. You give them that all of those just make a right into the garbage, right? Because we have people like, you know, acorn or whomever that are out there trying to gain the system. So Arizona said not going to happen, not, not interested in that. And the court also agreed. So the larger battle in the case was not whether the particular challenged restrictions should survive. The Biden administration said for instance, that they told the justices in an unusual letter that the Arizona measures did not violate section two, but the letter disavowed Trump's interpretation, which would have limited the availability of the test to lawfulness of all sorts of voting restrictions. So section two bars voting procedures that result in a denial of an abridgment of the rights in the Arizona case, the democratic national committee filed a suit in 2016 last year, the U S court of appeals for the ninth circuit ruled that the Arizona restrictions disproportionately disadvantaged minority voters. Okay. So by, by passing those two things by saying no ballot harvesting, and my saying, you got to vote in your actual precinct, the democratic national committee Suze says, Nope, that's discriminatory. It's going to disadvantage minority voters. We think that's wrong. Then they ask the court to throw that out 2016, we have black, Latino, native American voters. We're about twice as likely to cast ballots in the wrong precinct. As other voters, according to the judge on, in the ninth circuit, he wrote for the majority, right? It was a seven to four decision. So he goes through and he says, listen. Yeah. I mean, uh, we, we we've analyzed the data that people who are voting in the wrong precincts, they're blacks, Latinos, and native Americans.

Speaker 3: 1:35:31

So yeah, it is discriminatory

Speaker 1: 1:35:34

That judge also comes through. He says that there is no evidence

Speaker 3: 1:35:37

Of any fraud in

Speaker 1: 1:35:39

The long history of the third party ballot collection in Arizona, right? So this is not the election officials. This is the ballot harvesting. So why can't minorities vote in the right precinct? He says there were frequent changes in polling locations. So maybe there's some malfeasance from the, you know, the evil, racist, Republican election operators. They say, well, we're just going to, oh, that's a black zip code. We're just gonna move the polling place here. And then the next day moving over here. And then the next day we went over there and then over here. And so nobody knows where to go. So they just drive down and I go that's that, that says vote here. They just go in there and throw their ballot.

Speaker 3: 1:36:10

Right? Other could be confused

Speaker 1: 1:36:12

Using the placement of polling locations and high rates of residential mobility. So this would be that people just move a lot and they don't actually update their address, which would with the DMV or the MVD, which would then give them a new polling location. They don't do that.

Speaker 3: 1:36:25

So they should be allowed

Speaker 1: 1:36:29

According to this judge to just kind of drop off their ballot. Wherever four judges in the dissent said that the state's restrictions were commonplace, supported by common sense, and applied neutrally to all voters. The lawmakers were entitled to try to prevent potential fraud said, judge,

Speaker 3: 1:36:43

Uh, Dr. Mewed oh, scandal LAN, what a name

Speaker 1: 1:36:46

Given its interest in addressing its valid concerns of voter fraud. Arizona was free to enact the prophylactic measures even though no evidence of actual voter fraud was before the legislature. Right? So saying that the government has the ability to go out and effectuate these measures. So we have now this, this back and forth, the ninth circuit says those, those restrictions are great. No problem at all. You're welcome to do that. Then the full ninth circuit says, oh no, no, no, there there's no history that ballot harvesting is problematic. There's also a pretty good evidence that, that the ninth circuit finds that actually minority voters are voting and wrong. Polling precincts more than, than white people are. And so it's a disparate impact on them. It's disproportionately harming them. So

Speaker 3: 1:37:27

It goes from Arizona. Yep. It's good to Arizona. Nope.

Speaker 1: 1:37:30

It's not good. And then we go up to the Supreme court and now Supreme court says, yup, totally okay. To do that. So this is from the Supreme court of the U S it says here, Barnovich the attorney general of Arizona versus the DNC, the democratic national committee. So Barnovich which of course is a Republican and being sued by the DNC. They submitted a sorority to the United States. Supreme court appealing from the ninth circuit argued March 2nd of this year decided July 1st, 2020. Now this is a syllabus, which means we're not going to read the full opinion. Very, very long opinion. I think even the descent was like 40 pages. I think that was a Cavanaugh. I can't recall. Let's see if it's in here, but anyways, we're going to go through this. This is the syllabus. It's not the full opinion. We're going to kind of read through it quickly because there's a lot here and I don't want to bore you by just reading everything. But it says Arizona law generally makes it very easy to vote. Okay? Generally, it's easy to vote. Photos can vote on election day in person. They can, uh, they have a voting center in their country, county of residence. We've got, let's see, early ballot that you can vote by mail in 27 days. They also may vote in person at early voting locations in each county. So right there, you've got four different options for this. These cases say that under the voting rights act that Arizona law was essentially violating the voting rights act. It says Arizona's who vote in person on, on election day in a county that uses the precinct system much must vote in the precinct to where they're assigned, right? That's the rule. Uh, if a voter votes in the wrong precinct, that vote is not counted. Second for Arizona to vote early by mail. It makes the new bill house bill 2023 makes it a crime for anybody to harvest the ballot cake except, you know, voters, caregiver, family, or any of those things. So the democratic national committee, they filed suit. They said that the state's refusal to count those ballots in the wrong precinct, those were eight restriction. It had an adverse and disparate impact on the state's American, Indian, Hispanic, and African-American violate communities in violation of the voting rights act. So the voting rights act, of course, is federal legislation. It sort of raises up the standard, the baseline, right? It says, well, you know, states, yeah, you're kind of free to do what you want, but we're going to make sure that you're at least doing this stuff. Can't discriminate against minority voters. You can't disenfranchise them. And so what, what they're saying is happening here is that these new laws are lowering the line. They're saying that violates the VRA, the voting rights act. So it goes through the district court rejected all of the plaintiff's claims, which means that the lower level district court, the DNC loss, the Democrats Democrats lost. But then it went up to the ninth circuit. The on the, on on-body court, which is the full court found that the court, the lower-level district court committed clear error, and they overturned that. Then it goes up to the Supreme court. So what does the Supreme court say? The holding today is Arizona's out of precinct policy and HB 20, 23, do not violate the voting rights act. HB 20, 23 was not enacted with a racially, racially discriminatory purpose. Okay? So essentially what this means, the implications are of this Arizona. You're, you're free to pass these, these rules out of precinct. Prohibitions allowed. If you are a ballot harvester in Arizona, you're out of luck, you're out of a job. Go find something else to do. That's more useful. There are rules and restrictions that states can put in place that are now going to be acknowledged and upheld by the U S Supreme court. It's a big deal to threshold matters. Grab the court's attention. First. They say they reject that the has no article three standing, okay. We're gonna skip over that. The court statutory interpretation starts with a careful consideration of the texts. So standing, we would do we talk a lot about standing, right? So somebody said they don't have standing courts said, Nope, we're going to hear the case. So we can skip over that. The courts, statutory interpretation, they say they want to carefully consider the tests, the text. So they look at section two of the voting rights act, 1982 Congress amended the language. And they said that it required the burden of proof of discriminatory, discriminatory intent. Ah, okay. So yeah, so th th this is quite bland, but there is some interesting things sort of happening here. So there was section two that said that there there's a standard number. We talked about standards earlier in the show about when, what sort of the baseline, there's a low level of conduct that the government has to prove, or a plaintiff has to prove, or anybody bringing a lawsuit has to prove here, or the DNC was bringing a lawsuit. And what there's claiming here is that there's a disparate impact. Meaning there's a differential between what the white people get and what the non white people get. And so if we're going to be judging a law here would be HB 20, 23 and saying that this thing is discriminatory. How do we come to that conclusion? How do we analyze that? Go to the law section two says, well, previously there was sort of this, this language that said that proof of discriminatory intent required a certain type of language. But now that language says that is it discriminatory intent is in a manner that results in the denial or the abridgment of that. Right. Okay. So it's a higher standard, right? In a manner, in a manner that results in a denial or an abridgment of that, right? So Congress amended this in place of that language. Congress changed it. The phrase went from something different to now discriminatory intent means something that was done in a manner that results in the abridgment of the right, right. The, the denial or the abridgment to vote on account of base of race or color. So it's just like what we read in the article, what the judge here was saying, is it, if you're going to consider this to be a restriction, it actually has to be a restriction. Okay. It cannot be one of these things like ballot harvesting, or like going to the right polling place, right. It actually has to sort of prevent somebody from voting makes the standard much higher. That means a lot more conduct is going to be able to be prohibited in the voting process, right? Things like IDs and other signature verification and all of those things. If the states want to respond, the court is going to back them up here. All right. It goes on. It says another important feature is the totality of the circumstances requirements. So they're going to be looking at all the different factors. The court goes through different, important circumstances, but does not attempt to compile an exhaustive list. The size of the burden imposed by a challenge is highly relevant. Voting necessarily requires some effort and compliance with some rules, thus, the concept of a voting system that is quote equally open, and that furnishes equal opportunity to cast the ballot must tolerate quote, the usual burdens of voting, right? Mere inconvenience is insufficient. We're sorry that it's inconvenient for you to show your ID, but we got to make sure you are who you are. Otherwise we might have illegitimate elections. Okay. That's kind of what that is saying. It's a mere inconvenience to go get those things. Now, the response to that is always, no, it's not right. These, you know, there, there are certain people in certain environments and certain situations where they don't actually have an ID,

Speaker 3: 1:44:21

Which is, I think borderline

Speaker 1: 1:44:24

Racist in many, in many concepts. You know, there was that man on the street video, I think on YouTube where there there's, there's some YouTuber who's going around. He's going up to black people in cities saying, uh, you know, this person said that you don't have an ID and you don't know how to

Speaker 3: 1:44:37

Do you have an ID? And they say

Speaker 1: 1:44:39

Kind of insane question is that, yes, I'm an adult person in society. Yes. I have an ID. Right. And he's being ridiculous about it. Cause it's a ridiculous thing. But Joe Biden says that, you know, certain, uh, certain minorities don't have access to the internet. And what else did he say? Oh, they're afraid they're going to get deported if they don't get the vaccine. So we got racist Joe up there now. All right. So, you know, these things are mere inconveniences. We have to make sure that we protect the integrity of our voting systems, the degree to which, all right. Let's, let's go on to the next slide. It says here, they're also considering some other factors like the strength of the state's interests. So does the strip, does the state, does the state of Arizona have a strong, legitimate state interest in preventing election fraud? Of course they do. Right? So they've got a strong interest in making sure that they're governing the integrity of their elections. Some factors identified in a different case, we've got a more totality of the circumstances stuff. So let's just carry on here. We've got the racial disparity portion of this. So let's see what they say here. Next, the racial disparity in burdens that, that are allegedly caused by the out of precinct policy is small in absolute terms. All right, let's see the analysis here. He says of the Arizona counties that reported out of precinct ballots in 2016, a little over 1% of Hispanic voters, 1% of African-American voters and 1% of native American voters who voted on election day cast and out of precinct ballot for non-meat minority voters, white people, the rate was around 0.5%. So half a percent difference, a procedure that appears to work for 98% or more of the voters to whom it applies minority. And non-minority alike is unlikely to render a system unequally open. Okay. So because about 2% of the people can't figure out how to vote. Does that mean that we can't

Speaker 3: 1:46:23

Pass any voting restrictions? No.

Speaker 1: 1:46:26

The court says, no, you're welcome to do that. Okay. It works for 98% of the people, those other 2%, sorry, figure it out. Next time. Appropriate weight must be given to the important state interest furthered by precinct based voting. It helps to distribute voters more evenly among polling places. It can put polling places closer to voter residence. It can help each voter receives a ballot that lists only the candidate and the public questions in their precinct. Right? It's been a long pedigree in the U S the policy is, is widespread. We do this everywhere. So stop complaining about it. Court of appeals, you know, they, they did what they did. Let's wrap this up. It says reversed and remanded. We have a Lido who wrote the opinion joined off on by chief justice, Roberts, Thomas Gorsuch, I'm sorry, Thomas and Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. So those are the six, three judges Gorsuch, uh, filed a concurring opinion in which Thomas joined, which means that there's a separate opinion here. That that also has some things that we can take out of it. And then Kagan, Briar, and Sotomayor. They all filed dissenting opinions as we talked about previously. So there was another, uh, there was another point that I, I needed to make, I wanted to make about the concurring opinion. Oh, I think it was this. I think it was that Gorsuch wrote the concurring opinion. And Thomas joined that opinion. Now what Gorsuch was saying, I think was that there was a question about standing here. Okay. Whether the DNC we've already talked a lot about standing, whether the DNC had standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place.

Speaker 3: 1:47:56

Right? So if Gorsuch and the Supreme court say that some of these entities don't have a claim

Speaker 1: 1:48:03

To bring a lawsuit because they don't have standing. Remember, we ha we talked all about standing. We're not going to beat that up again here. But in other words, the concept is that you don't have the ability to bring a claim into court in the first place, because the harm doesn't impact you. So the DNC here, you know, they may be saying that, well, we know we're going to file these lawsuits on behalf of all of these voters and the court might say, yeah, but just like when, uh, when all these people wanted to file lawsuits on behalf of Trump, we said that there was no standing there because they weren't

Speaker 3: 1:48:29

Harmed. So if the DNC is not

Speaker 1: 1:48:33

Currently being harmed by this, cause they're not the voters, right? They're an organization. Gorsuch is saying, well, maybe they don't have standing either, which might wipe out

Speaker 3: 1:48:40

All of these sort of, you know, overly active litigious wings of the parties, both parties,

Speaker 1: 1:48:48

The big one, of course, being mark Elias and democracy docket, right? They, they, they filed lawsuits all over the country. We've covered most of them. And you know, they were, they were moving things around

Speaker 3: 1:48:59

Legally. So if the

Speaker 1: 1:49:00

Court now is sort of hinting that maybe they don't have standing, maybe they lose a lot of their power. They can file all the lawsuits in the want. They want the court just dismisses them and says, no,

Speaker 3: 1:49:08

I'm sorry. So this might actually have some

Speaker 1: 1:49:14

Consequences down the line. And mark Berta vetch, the person who actually brought the suit, he posted on Twitter, very happy about this. He says that SCOTUS rules in favor of Arizona's election integrity protections in Burnsville versus DC, I'm thankful the justices upheld the state's ability to pass and maintain common sense election laws at a time when our country needs it most. So he sent the whole, he linked over to the opinion, mark Barnovich over on Twitter. You know, I listened to mark Barnovich at a, a campaign speech one time. And he said something that was pretty funny. He says, I'm so fiscally conservative that I don't even buy the vowel right there between the R and the end. Barnovich right. He's missing a Val or I'm sorry, B maybe between, between the B and the R maybe that's what he's referencing like a, B U R, or a, B E R or whatever. Bercovitch so fiscally conservative. I don't even buy the vowel. That's a good line. I don't know if he is fiscally conservative or not, but big win on that one. Big win on that one. That's for Arizona. That's for the country voter integrity. It's back in Vogue in the Supreme court. That's good stuff. We've got questions coming in hot from watching the watchers.locals.com queued up and ready to go look at this. We got ZZ. The boxing cat is here. It says it's absolutely insane that not all people want secure and transparent elections. Well, yeah, it is insane, but they want something more than that. Something that benefits them better, it's called power. And they want that badly. We've got Jeremy Machida says if the state legislature has the sole authority to decide how elections are conducted, who then would have standing to be able to bring suit. So I think that's sort of up in the air. I was sort of commenting on that by Gorsuch's concurring opinion. So it sounds like right now, currently the rule is that the DNC was allowed to bring the lawsuit, right? They brought it Supreme court accepted it, heard it, everything. So currently the DNC can Sue, or you could have, you know, any other entity sort of Sue to stop these things. The Supreme court at this moment is not said that they don't have standing, but Gorsuch is sort of hinting towards that direction. So that may be further down the line. We get a different situation, a different case where they sort of are revisiting the same standing issues that we had a lot of grief about during the Trump election litigation. Maybe they sort of flip that and they stop the, the, the they're nipping it further down the line. Okay. So let's, so let's back this up. So the Supreme court, during Trump's election litigation, they said you don't have any standing because he was sort of filing claims after the fact, right. He was, the election had already happened. He was filing, looking backwards. What's happening here is they were filing to stop the new law from going into effect in the first place. So it's a different issue. And so the standing for them filing that new lawsuit thus far has, has been held, right? It, it, it was found that they did have it. That's why the case made its way up to the Supreme court. Whereas Trump's didn't they said he did not have standing, but Gorsuch is hinting that maybe, maybe this is an issue that is worth revisiting. And so now the concept might be that the court has already found that standing doesn't exist in post look back type of cases. Trump lost look back. Nope, no standing to challenge certain things or certain people filing lawsuits on his behalf, don't have standing. And so now maybe they're, they're starting further down the line. They're saying even the people who are sort of filing these claims in the first place, like the Marc Elias is the democracy dockets that are suing all the different, uh, election directors. People like Kathy Boockvar from Pennsylvania. Maybe they don't even have standing in the first place to bring the lawsuits

Speaker 3: 1:52:49

To begin with, which would change a lot because they manipulated the rules to serve there.

Speaker 1: 1:52:57

It could be a big deal. Sharon Courtney says, I wonder what would happen in states without voter integrity laws like blue states, if conservative voters were to engage in what you might call massive anti-vaxxer suppression activities, AKA erection, frogs. Yeah. I don't know. Wonder if they could manage to change anything. It could be interesting to see how many votes the population is exceeded. So sheruts, so we're not endorsing any voter fraud here or a election or erection frogs either. No erection, frogs, but it's a good question. Right? And, and we, we sort of were joking about this, that if, if both sides are allowed to cheat, if the courts just say, do whatever you want, then both sides are just going to out cheat each other. Right? The Republicans are, I would, I would,

Speaker 3: 1:53:36

I would venture

Speaker 1: 1:53:39

To guess if they were marginally competent, they would say those Democrats, they did a pretty good job with whatever that looked like. We're going to take a play from their playbook and we're going to try to effectuate it this next, this next election. And so you just have, you know, one-upping each other. And then you have like the state of Arizona with 8 million people that has 12 million votes go. That's strange. But this just happened

Speaker 3: 1:53:58

Bend in New York city. So it's not

Speaker 1: 1:54:02

Too far out of the ordinary. Is it? We got, wants to know, says a dozen constitution. Citizens shall vote. Don't most citizens have ID. Yes. They do like go to work. Yes. They do rules legally required like social security numbers. Yep. Uh, how does anyone have a job without an ID? Uh, uh, maybe they're paid in cash. I don't know. Uh, or a bank account. Yeah. I think banks want them. IRS wants you to have an ID. Police want you to have an ID? How do you live without an ID? I don't know. How do you get out of jail without an ID? It seems the government wants you to have ID everywhere, but not to elect the most powerful person in the world. You don't.

Speaker 3: 1:54:35

Huh? So good.

Speaker 1: 1:54:40

That was such a good comment. Thank you for that. Once a numb, but not to elect the most powerful person in the world. You don't. Huh? Yeah. You're exactly. Yeah. It's curious. It's weird. I don't know why you need it for all that other stuff, but not for that. I don't know. Maybe our elections, they can just sort of send sentence

Speaker 3: 1:54:54

That they can just sense who you are. All right.

Speaker 1: 1:54:57

Jeremy madrina says, logically speaking of the right to vote is specifically granted to a real person who meets certain criteria. Therefore it is reasonable to expect one, to be validated that they indeed meet the criteria. Right? Rights are meaningless if they can't be validated. Yeah. So yes. It's

Speaker 3: 1:55:13

You want a functional voting system.

Speaker 1: 1:55:17

We saw what happens when it, when it doesn't work. All that well, makes perfectly reasonable sense to me that we know who is participating in the election. I don't know. What's so complicated about that, but ZZ the POCs and Kat says, I don't know why it always comes down to race with the Democrats. There's poor people, old people, handicap people of all races and creeds that have hardships. Yeah, it's true. It is true. Right. What about people who were born with, uh, you know, physical disabilities or something like that or mental incapacities, you know, there's a whole different category of people, but they don't ever talk about that. They kind of just talk,

Speaker 3: 1:55:47

Talk about race. Wonder why.

Speaker 1: 1:55:50

So Viking says I have not yet read the text, but hopefully there is explicit abundantly clear definitions, for example of care, caregiver nursing home operators typically had been called caregivers in the past in other capacities, but this can not stand think Pennsylvania. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I haven't read it either. I'd be curious to see how specific that is and whether you know that person, well, look, I mean, candidly, right? I think that, I think that this still sort of solves the problem because I think the caregiver relationship is you're right. It's not a one-to-one relationship because nursing home operators might be a general caregiver for like, let's say a group of people. Right. And so one caregiver maybe just becomes a caregiver for the entire floor of senior citizens. And something happens to their ballots.

Speaker 3: 1:56:33

Right. Unless the caregiver is a one-to-one relationship. Okay.

Speaker 1: 1:56:38

I'm a disabled senior person and I have a caregiver. So that caregiver is entitled to take my ballot. Cause I can't I'm incapacitated. Right. Something like that would make sense, but not a caregiver that serves the entire floor that just says, oh, okay, well I'm in a nursing home. We've got 400 people here. I'm just gonna go collect all the ballots. And I happen to know everybody's political ideology. So this'll be fun. Right. I, I agree with you. I think it's worth, worth looking at the text, but we'll see, wants to know, says wasn't, mail-in voting for bedridden people. Originally military rules are completely different dins. Always trying to confuse the two. Yeah. So there were a lot of different rationales for mail-in voting and why people we've covered a lot of this when we talked voting. I think we were talking about a case

Speaker 3: 1:57:20

Michigan that

Speaker 1: 1:57:24

I, no, I think it was Wisconsin. I think it was a Wisconsin case, but basically the courts, uh, the, the, the legislature said we don't want, mail-in voting. Like we don't want it at all. We think it's, it's problematic and it can be problematic, right? Because

Speaker 3: 1:57:36

In a, in a polling place, you have it

Speaker 1: 1:57:39

Physical presence. You can physically see who it is. There's it's we call this in law chain of custody. Think about evidence that is being seized from, let's say somebody suspects that you've got drugs in your car. Well, you got to make sure that whoever takes those drugs documents, it seals, it, impounds it properly into evidence. And all of those things, because if one officer just throws it in his trunk and then he, you know, takes it out a couple of weeks later and throws it in the evidence locker, and you don't really know who had it, where it came from, whether somebody manipulated it, whether somebody went in there and modified the drugs or, uh, spiked them, or, you know, did something to that. So we always are checking the chain of custody. Where did the evidence come from? Who gave it to AA? Rob gave it to Ryan. Ryan gave it to Paul. Paul gave it to mark. Mark gave it to John. And we all just sort of work our way and connect the dots from one person to another.

Speaker 3: 1:58:24

And mail-in voting just, doesn't really foster that. So states have said specifically, we don't want it at all. But when COVID came around, the corner

Speaker 1: 1:58:34

Said, well, you have to have it now. You gotta, you gotta allow them to do. Then you gotta move these dates around and you gotta make it. So people can just go online and request the, and all these rules that then, you know, Zuckerberg and other people spent$400 million in specific districts to then start, uh, you know, create a tide that was going one direction. And we all saw what happened there. Sharon Quinney says, unfortunately, this ruling welcome as it might be as a case of trying to close the barn doors after the horse de camp was several bags of Trump votes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So it's like, I agree with you, Sharon. Hey, thanks. That's great. That's nice ruling. Their Supreme court would have been good if you did that a couple of years ago, but they didn't do that. We've got last one up from the feisty lady here says I read the whole Alito opinion and mixed in all that text seems to be a statement made more than once towards keeping the federal government out of the state, right. To run elections as they see fit. Yeah. And so I, I think you're right. I think Alito is, is more of that mindset. You know, I've read many of his opinions and he is somebody who I think is more in alignment with the, the federalism concept. Okay. So like Alito and Gorsuch, you know, there, uh, let me, let me say Alito and Thomas, certainly they're sort of more on that, on that end of the spectrum. Whereas I think that Roberts Barrett and Kavanaugh, you know, they're sort of more of that. Like the Federalist society is sort of the neo-con wing of judicial philosophy. So, uh, I think Alito certainly is more, more in alignment with federalism feds. Do what the feds do. States do, what th the states do. And we don't like the cross, the co-mingling of those different rights and responsibilities. And, um, I mean, that's, that's a media opinion to read their feisty lady. I mean, it, couldn't my goodness. That's a, that's a big one. Good for you. Uh, all right. Well, those were great questions. Those all came in from watching the watchers.locals.com. I appreciate all of your support there and all those were great questions. I've got some actual homework to do. Thank you, Sharon Queenie for that. So we, uh, before we get out of here, quick reminder, I'm a lawyer here at the RNR law group. We've got an amazing team of people here. We can help with felonies, drug charges, traffic violations, DUIs, and anything, and everything in between. So if you happen to know anybody in the state of Arizona that needs some help with a criminal violation, we would love the opportunity to help we offer free case evaluations. We've got all sorts of financial options that we can work with, and we love what we do. We would be really humbled if we just had the opportunity to help. So our phone number is(480) 787-0394. And the QR code there. If you want to take a picture, we'll take you right on over to our website where you can schedule online. All right. And if you don't need legal services, that's all right. You can get some education. If you're kind of looking for something to do, want to invite you to try out my law enforcement interaction training program, two and a half hours where you learn the 1, 2, 3 rule for dealing with law enforcement. And you can check that out at gumroad.com/robert ruler. It's a nice app because you can sort of listen to this stuff on an app on your phone, take it with you to the gym, take it with you in the car, wherever you want to go. You can just kind of listen in on some of this good stuff exist in systems is over here. And if you're a lawyer or a legal professional, definitely check out the mastermind group that we have. We meet twice monthly, a lot of good stuff. Also thank you to our new supporters. Who's just signed up over at locals, and I want to welcome all of you. Thank you for joining us and helping us to build a separate independent platform. One brick at a time, every one of these one brick at a time we've got CLC. 2, 9, 2 is here. Welcome to CLC. We got that one, Florida, man. Oh my goodness. This is, this is outstanding.

Speaker 3: 2:01:53

That one, Florida, man, he's officially here. I've

Speaker 1: 2:01:55

Been making fun of him for like nine months. And here he is good to see you. That one, Florida man. Welcome. We are, we are forever grateful for your presence. We have at Murphy 24. Welcome Murphy. We have rye. Fusion is now in the house. Welcome to you. I use you and we got crazy neutrino also joined us. Welcome to you. Crazy neutrino. And we have at dove 65, we got some new people in the house and a big welcome. Thank you all seriously. So much for your support. It really does mean the world. As you know, YouTube is not really happy with us. And so the fact that we're able to kind of do some, some other interesting things like having these monthly meetups and doing law enforcement interaction training, and just sharing links and communicating, it really is

Speaker 3: 2:02:33

A lot of fun. I'm sincerely enjoying getting to know you and learning from you. I've got, you know, I've got some stuff I gotta, I gotta, I gotta do today. We've got

Speaker 1: 2:02:43

Great questions. As we all already talked about from everybody here on the screen, you know who you are. If you have not gone over to locals yet, you can get all this good stuff. When you go over their free copy of my book, it's called beginning to winning. You can download a PDF. If you're a member at locals, otherwise you can buy it on Amazon. There is a PDF of all the slides we went through today that you can download. You can download my impeachment party document. You can also download my existence system, personal productivity template. We share links throughout the day. There's a lot of great people over there. And our next zoom meetup is on Saturday, July 24th, 2021 7:00 PM. Eastern time. If you're a member@watchingthewatchersdotlocals.com,

Speaker 3: 2:03:19

Then you will get the registration

Speaker 1: 2:03:22

Link as soon as it is posted. And it's a lot of fun. We've done two of these now we had at the last one, we had some amazing people on there. We had, uh, somebody from the Czech Republic that was asking us about our opinions on, uh, on policing here. And so you sort of,

Speaker 3: 2:03:35

It's an international community. My friends, it's amazing. This is global. So worldwide movement want you to be

Speaker 1: 2:03:41

Part of it and watching the watchers.locals.com. All right, my friends and that is it for me for the day. I want to thank you so much for being here. We're going to be back at your same place. Same time. It's Friday, tomorrow. Hey, look at that. So that's going to be fun and I want to make sure that you're here

Speaker 3: 2:03:55

Part of the show at that time. So that's it for me. We're going to wrap up and leave it here. I will see you all

Speaker 1: 2:04:01

Here tomorrow. Same place, same time, same location, 4:00 PM, Arizona time, 5:00 PM, mountain 6:00 PM. Central 7:00 PM. For that one, Florida man, who is now

Speaker 3: 2:04:09

In our community. Everybody else also has

Speaker 1: 2:04:12

Tremendous evening sleep well eat well, I'll see you right back here tomorrow. Bye-bye.