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Open To Debate: Kori Schake vs. Brian Klaas, Is America Still A Model For The World?
Via Open To Debate -- When Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol and halted the Electoral College certification, European leaders decried the violence as horrible and disgraceful, and called on the president to allow the peaceful transfer of power. Meanwhile, China, Russia, Venezuela, and Iran issued swift condemnations with not-so-subtle jabs at the legitimacy of Western democratic values. In the wake of this, can America remain the world's model for democracy? Have months of strife around the election results and ensuing political violence destroyed America's credibility and ensured it will no longer inspire the oppressed or legitimately condemn authoritarians? Or have the nation's institutions held under pressure and demonstrated democracy's strength and resilience in politically polarized times?
This episode of "Agree to Disagree" features Kori Schake, director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Brian Klaas, American political scientist and columnist at The Washington Post.
Yes
Kori Schake, Senior Fellow and Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies for the American Enterprise Institute
Debater Bio: Kori Schake is a senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Dr. Schake is the former deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. She has worked at the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the National Security Council at the White House. Author of five books, most recently "America vs. the West: Can the Liberal World Order Be Preserved?" Dr. Schake is widely published in policy journals and the popular press. She has a doctorate in government and politics from the University of Maryland.
No
Brian Klaas, American political scientist and columnist at The Washington Post
Brian Klaas is an Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is the author of four books, most recently Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us, and is host of the Power Corrupts podcast. Dr. Klaas has advised governments, US political campaigns, NATO, the European Union, multi-billion dollar investors, international NGOs, and international politicians. He received his DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford, an MPhil in Comparative Government from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor of Arts from Carleton College.
Categories: News Domestic and International
Trump: "Our Country Is Going Marxist," "Our Country Has To Protest," "Peacefully"
Former President Trump delivered this message to protesters who plan to demonstrate outside the federal courthouse during his arraignment tomorrow in Miami.
"They have to protest peacefully," Trump told Roger Stone in an interview that aired Sunday on WABC Radio in New York. "They have to go."
"Look, our country has to protest. We have plenty to protest. We've lost everything," he said.
ROGER STONE: Mr. President, many of your supporters intend to go to the Miami courthouse on Tuesday to demonstrate their support for you add to protest what they see as unfair and politically motivated charges. I've urged all of your supporters on social media and on my daily show StoneZone.Live, that you can see 5 o'clock on the internet, that if they decide to go, it is essential that they keep it peaceful, civil, and legal... Do you have a message for those who may be planning to go just to demonstrate their support for you?
DONALD TRUMP: I do, we need to strength in our country now, our country is being taken away from us. Our country is going communist, it's going Marxist, it's going really bad, and the people of our country aren't that way. But the people running it are. And we need strength at this point and everyone's afraid to do anything. They're afraid to talk, and they have to go out and they have to protest peacefully. They have to go.
You know, in New York, where the fake DA, this DA who is totally against doing anything against me because you said he didn't commit a crime, then he gets talked into it by one of Hillary Clinton's lawyers, if you can believe it. A guy named Mark Pomerance, who left his law firm representing Hillary and the Democrat Party to become a prosecutor in a district attorney's office to get me, then he was so radical, that the district attorney said, only this guy's crazy we've got a fire him, they get him out, and then he writes a book during the course of the investigation, which is it, which is totally illegal what he did. So I guess he's going to be suffering certain consequences, based on what he did. Think of it, the prosecutor writes a book and puts out, and publishes a book before they do anything, the DA then changed his mind and they said let's, on something that's not even a crime. It's not a crime, did nothing wrong. And so that was, so they had protesters. The problem is they put up so far away that nobody knew about them.
They had a tremendously large -- Marjorie Taylor Greene was there, you probably saw that, but there's a lot, but they put in a try and put them so far away.
Look, our country has to protest. We have plenty to protest. We've lost everything. We've lost our borders, we've lost our election integrity, we've lost respect all over the world, they want to double and triple your taxes. Look at what they want to do to your taxes, these crazy people want to make your taxes so high you won't be able to live.
You know, we were energy-independent, Roger, three years ago, totally energy-independent. We were soon going to be energy dominant, we have more oil than Saudi Arabia or Russia. We were going to be doubled up insize. We were going to have more than both of them put together in production. And we're going to lower taxes still further. I gave the largest tax cuts in the history of our country. Bigger than the Reagan tax cuts. We were going to lower taxes further and pay off debt simultaneously, because of the energy industry. The liquid gold under a feet, we have more than anybody else. And then we had a rigged election, and that ended. Now energy is going through the roof. You have to see what they're paying in New England for electricity. Nobody in the world is paying the kind of numbers they're paying. And it's very sad to watch what's happening to our country.
You can listen to the entire interview, Sunday on WABC Radio here:
Categories: News Domestic and International
Mark Levin: Out Of Control DOJ Has "Destroyed The Next Election," They Want Trump To "Die In Prison"
FNC's "Life, Liberty & Levin" host Mark Levin warns that Democrats want former President Trump to "die in prison."
LEVIN: By now, you've heard a lot about this. This is the indictment, the various charges against President Trump. It is 49 pages long. There are 38 charges, 37 involving President Trump, the one against Walt Nauta, who's a Navy vet, and an aide to President Trump is in here in order to try and pressure him to turn on Donald Trump. That's why they put it in here.
Now, some people are very impressed by this. I'm very troubled by this. Thirty-seven counts against the former president and the leading Republican nominee right now for the Republican nomination for president, 31 having to deal with document retention. Why would you pile on 31 counts when it could be one count, or three counts or five counts?
The answer is, they want to put Donald Trump in prison. And as I said last week when I was on Hannity, Donald Trump is 76 years old, some of these counts are 20 years, 10 years on them. If they convict him of one count and he is sentenced and he is sentenced to the full amount, he will die in prison. That's how out of control Biden and Garland and this hack prosecutor are.
Now there are some things missing from all this, despite all 49 pages and all these witnesses and all these documents, what's missing? Obstruction and false statements, and this, that and the other, which are borne out of the fact that they criminalized this investigation, as I explained earlier. Had they not criminalized this investigation, none of this would be an issue.
So they lay the foundation for conspiracy to obstruct, obstruct and all of this sort of thing. But what's missing? Retention of documents. There is not a single syllable in this 49-page, 38-count indictment, 37 against Trump, about a single document being destroyed, not one. You would think if they had evidence of that, it would be right there in the first charge.
Number two, there's not a single syllable in this document alleging that any document was altered. Not one. If there was and they had evidence to that effect, you think that would be in the front.
Instead, they are attacking the former president for retaining documents, classified documents talking about declassified documents. There's not one syllable of evidence in here, that any information under the Espionage Act was passed to any spies, to any enemies, to any foreign countries - not one.
The Espionage Act was passed in 1917 under the tutelage of Woodrow Wilson, who was a racist segregationist and he locked up 2,000, people, the vast majority of whom were innocent, because they disagreed with his position. There's something wrong with such a statute.
And so this is written for a Democrat jury, and even though the jury will be in Miami, assuming it gets to that point, and it shouldn't, it's going to be filled with Democrats, because the most southern part of Florida is filled with Democrats.
No, it's not New York, it's not Washington. But it's not Idaho and Utah either. So I want you to keep that in mind. They figured, if we can get him on one.
The other thing is, they have all the resources in the world because they are the government. They are the government.
So Donald Trump's lawyers are going to have to take all of this and try and unravel it. That's also one of the reasons they pile on. It's also one of the reasons they had hundreds and hundreds of witnesses from the janitor to the vice president of the United States, and that's also why they had tens of thousands of documents, because now, a private law firm, a relatively small firm, is going to have to try and figure out how to unravel what the prosecutor did.
Now, I want to remind you of a few things about a grand jury. All it takes is a majority of the people in the grand jury, typically up to 23 or so to vote to indict. So if it's 23 members, or if it's 21, whatever it is, it just takes 12 in Washington, DC, or in Miami, it takes 12. That's number one.
Number two, no witness, no target is permitted to have counsel in front of this grand jury. You're there by yourself in front of prosecutors asking questions, and many of them driving an agenda. That's number two.
Number three, you're not permitted to provide the grand jury with any exculpatory information or contrary information to what the government is feeding them.
Grand juries were intended to protect potential defendants against an overwrought and over-zealous government. But now they've been used, it has been twisted. They are used against individual citizens and so forth as they have been used against Donald Trump.
And so aggressive and out of control is this prosecutor that he went to a Democrat Obama-appointed judge who he know would give him what he wanted, because her record has been to reject every single motion filed by Donald Trump's lawyers, because she is the motion judge. She's the chief judge in Washington, DC when it comes to these grand juries. She gave them again what he wanted.
He wanted this prosecutor to get testimony from President Trump's lawyers, including his lead lawyer, about conversations President Trump had with that lawyer and the notes from the lawyer. I suspect some of that is in this document.
And so what he's done is he's taken pieces and puzzled together, cherry picked testimony from this witness or that witness, nothing, exculpatory in here, no exculpatory testimony or document and he has chiseled it, and pieced it all together, so you are left with a document that says Donald Trump was a grave threat to the country, the way he handled it. The way he handled classified information, the way he handled documents and so forth. The way he retained them, the way he tried to cover up, he moved to boxes.
He told people to move boxes. He motioned somebody about getting rid of something, which is why I started out this segment by asking how many documents were destroyed? There is not an allegation in here that any documents were destroyed, not even one.
How many documents were altered or molested? There is not an allegation in here that any were altered or molested. Period. False statements, conspiracy to obstruct, retention of documents, obstruction.
All of this comes out of the criminalization of this case and this is what prosecutors do and what this prosecutor, this Justice Department, this attorney general and yes, this President Biden have done is they have destroyed the country, and I don't know if we can ever get it back.
They've destroyed something that matters to each and every one of us. They talked about suppressing the vote. They've destroyed the next election. They've interfered with the next election.
This isn't natural or normal for America. This was taken out of the Joseph Stalin playbook.
Categories: News Domestic and International
Steve Bannon To Bill Barr, Chris Wray: "Shove It Up Your Ass," "You're Guilty Of Treason"
"War Room" podcast host Steve Bannon and former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani discuss former Attorney General Bill Barr's comments about the Trump indictment, calling Barr's comments "misdirection" from "treason" committed by Barr in "covering up" the Hunter Biden laptop in January 2020:
Bannon doesn't hold back on Bill Barr.pic.twitter.com/yjweyLddDF
- Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) June 12, 2023 STEVE BANNON: Wray and Bill Barr should be brought before national TV and we should go back to the Watergate saying, "From December 2019 to January 2020, what did you know and when did you know it?" RUDY GIULIANI: Absolutely. BANNON: And then follow the money. We just go back to Watergate, the Democrats all love Watergate, and they're running around, you see Nixon's lawyer up there all day long on MSNBC. Let's give them a little Watergate. What did you know and when did you know it? From December 2019 to January 2020, for 60 days, Chris Wray and Bill Barr had all the information about the Biden Crime Family... from the Laptop From Hell, what Rusy gave them. They had the information and follow-up questions, they had it all and they buried it because the Praetorian Guard selected, remember, Joe Biden finished 4th in Iowa and 5th in New Hampshire, he was a dead man walking. The Praetorian Guard in February 2020 selected Joe Biden. They hid information that's treasonous, not just disqualifying for running but treasonous. They hid information and they selected him. This is end of Republic, beginning of Empire stuff. This is the Praetorian Guard, and Chris Wray and Bill Barr are as guilty of crimes as the Biden family because Chris Wray and Bill Barr had the information, and we can prove they had the information from the Laptop From Hell and from Rudy Giuliani's 100-page report, they had all the information... Forget this Trump stuff, that's all nonsense, we're going to get to the heart of the matter. And Bill Barr, you can sit up there and say it's a great case, we're going to shove this up your ass. RUDY GIULIANI: Ha ha ha ha. STEVE BANNON: You are fricking guilty of treason. And Wray is guilty of treason. You had this information and we can prove you had it. ... STEVE BANNON: This takes place in January 2020, the meetings with the U.S. Attorney in Pittsburgh... The Laptop From Hell was sitting at the FBI in November, December of 2019. Before this. So hang on, when Bill Barr is out there dumping on Donald Trump, that's a misdirection play. Bill Barris a traitor. let me cut to the chase, Bill Barr is a traitor and so is Chris Wray. RUDY GIULIANI: 100%. STEVE BANNON: They had all the information... from the [Hunter Biden] laptop at the FBI and Main Justice no later than December of 2019. 60 days before this meeting takes place... And then when they realize what they've got, the Praetorian Guard Hermetically seals this. RUDY GIULIANI: It goes into a dry hole called Delaware. And what was surprising to us was it must have happened when it got to Barr, because the U.S. Attorney there seemed 100%.... he was like a regular U.S. Attorney... and he realized the quality of our evidence. Before we even get to the hard drive, we had a provable RICO case... I'm well known for being the architect of RICO... STEVE BANNON: Is there any doubt in your mind you could have gone before a grand jury and brought a slew of indictments against the Biden family? RUDY GIULIANI: No, no, no doubt about it at all. I was in a short period of time when they were doing nothing, I did a podcast outlining the RICO case, how to prosecute it. No, I could have done that case a month later after putting it into the grand jury. I've done a lot of RICO cases... this would have been one of the easier ones to do... before we got the hard drive. Here's what I'm really angry about. They made fools out of us, all of us sitting there. Barr is sitting back, letting us go through this exercise, they already have the evidence. I'm like a big jackass sitting there, telling them about something they already know.
Categories: News Domestic and International
Scarborough on Trump Indictment: If Republican Party Wants To "Harbor A Fugitive," You're Giving Up On 2024
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Scarborough reacts to the indictment of former President Trump for violations of the Espionage Act.
JOE SCARBOROUGH, MSNBC: First of all, it appears, it appears by his own words, by his own deeds, by his own actions, that he stole nuclear secrets, right? Let's break this down because there's people talking, "What about Hillary? What about biden? What about this?"
He stole nuclear secrets, allegedly, in his own words, and he knew what he was doing. He's on tape.
They got him dead-to-rights. He hid it. He lied to the FBI, and so everybody is going, "Oh my god, the Republicans," I'm not looking at the Republicans. I mean, do they really -- if they want to harbor a fugitive politically, who stole nuclear secrets, good luck. You're going to lose even more in 2024. Lose even more in 2024, and these people say "we are going to commit acts of violence."
Guess what? Guess what.
That's been tried before. They're in jail or going to jail. So if you think you're intimidating anybody, like the FBI is just going to say "okay, okay, they said that. How many more? Do we have enough jail cells? Yeah, we have enough jail cells. Yeah, we have enough jail cells. Go ahead."
We have seen it all before, Jonathan, and it went very badly on January 6th. If they hate America so much that they want to overthrow the government, it doesn't work. You end up in jail, and the people who tried with the conspiracy, in jail for 20 years. And Republicans want to go down the path even more? Harboring a guy politically who stole nuclear secrets? And figured out what documents to steal that showed America's greatest weaknesses. Why did he do that, do you think? Are they talking about that like on the 19th hole while having drinks? We don't know why, but it doesn't matter. He stole the worst stuff.
They can do this, listen, listen, listen. You break my heart, [New York Post], and you break my heart official newspaper of Morning Joe. You break my heart. You don't have to play to the dumbest readers you have. You really don't.
We will see a lot of the noise, but as one admiral said to me, you have the ground noise and the signal. Ignore the ground noise, Joe, and focus on the signal. The signal is we have a guy, as president, committing the worst crimes in the white house and outside of the White House of any chief executive in the history of this republic, and my feeling, if the Republicans want to defend him, if they want to completely destroy their party, have at it. We have seen this before as far as what happens when they defend him. This the worst yet, and a lot of them are still too stupid to realize that they are giving up 2024 by doing it.
Categories: News Domestic and International
Watch Live: WH Press Briefing With Karine Jean-Pierre
WH press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters around 2:15 p.m. on Monday.
Categories: News Domestic and International