Let Me Put You on Hold

There’s a moment in The Avengers, when we first meet the Black Widow. She is tied to a chair, leaning out over a pit, being tortured by bad guys, when a phonecall comes in—on the bad guy’s phone—and she's annoyed by the interruption—because she had them right where she wanted them and “this moron is giving me everything.” But she is told of the important mission, so she says, “Let me put you on hold.”

Then of course she miraculously breaks free, because she has such amazing skills. And then casually picks up her shoes and the phone and walks away.

We, the good citizens of the United States, seem to be tied to a chair, leaning out over a pit, being tortured, figuratively speaking. Under the circumstances it might take a shift in perspective to believe we have the bad guys right where we want them—information coming out, takedown about to happen.

The bad guys only think they’re in control.

I am not one who believes that some version of a SHIELD team has a long, elaborate plan that they are allowing to play out. I am, however, one who believes that, particularly for our day, we have our God in Heaven who has a plan to take down the bad guys. And His skills are way better than the fictional Black Widow’s. I don’t know which moment it will be when He answers our prayers by saying, “Let me put you on hold,” and then destroys the wicked. But He has told His prophets through the centuries that such a moment is coming.

So I have hope. Even when the loss of our freedoms is more apparent with every news cycle.

In the meantime, I am trying to understand the enemy, and what the enemy is doing.

This past week someone on that side, not one I had thought of as an enemy, said the quiet part out loud. This was Sam Harris, noted mainly for being an atheist, but an atheist with morals. He was on the TRIGGERnometry podcast. We learned from him that he doesn’t care about morals. As he put it, “Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared.” Whatever is on that laptop—including Joe Biden’s corruption, “and understand they’re getting kickbacks from Biden’s deals in Ukraine and wherever else, right? Or China.” Doesn’t matter. “It is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It’s like, it’s like a firefly to the sun.”

Sam Harris, on TRIGGERnometry podcast
screenshot from here

What does he enumerate of Trump’s sun hot sins? Trump University, for one. Worse than everything on that laptop? Trump University was a class action case, brought in 2013, settled for $25 million, fully compensating all claimants plus $1 million in punitive damages. It likely would have gone to trial and been fought and appealed on the merits of the law, but for the timing, which put it right after the 2016 presidential election, during the busy inaugural season. So they settled for convenience. That is apparently gazillions of times worse than Biden kickbacks in exchange for access to the VP, for multiple millions of dollars, putting our nation at risk. Not to mention the drugs and sex and possible sex trafficking on the Biden laptop, which was withheld from the public for a year by the FBI, and then quashed in media just prior to the 2020 election.

Does Harris mention anything else? Yes, Trump said mean things on Twitter. He actually claimed Trump doxed people “again and again and again.” I’m unaware of any accusations of Trump ever doxing anyone. Trump followers, however, have been doxed, and persecuted, and targeted by the IRS, taken down from not only Twitter but Facebook, YouTube, and wherever else.

But self-proclaimed moralist Sam Harris thinks an outright conspiracy to prevent Trump from regaining the White House was absolutely justified. Who cares about democracy when an asteroid that is hurtling toward earth in the form of a seventy-something businessman could be stopped by any means necessary?

We have to wonder, why really does Sam Harris fear another Trump presidency? A long-past settled lawsuit and nonexistent doxing claims can’t be it. Is it because Trump moved us to the verge of a Hitlerian nightmare in his first term? No. In fact, he deregulated, freed us up, moved the economy out of the Obama malaise and into full recovery, particularly lowering unemployment for blacks. He stopped the majority of the border crisis with a “remain in Mexico” policy. He practically achieved lasting peace in the Middle East. He was, refreshingly, not authoritarian.

What are we supposed to be scared of? White supremacy—a miniscule issue without any connection to Trump. Racism—a dwindling issue without any connection to Trump. COVID—not caused by Trump and would have been nearly immediately solved with low-cost medicines given as early treatment, which Trump touted—if that normal action hadn’t been halted by Deep State actors here and across the world.

So what is there to fear?

Maybe loss of power to the ruling class. Trump, despite the money, despite the education at an Ivy League institution, is not considered elite. He is too much like the working class people the elites need to rule over.

And, let’s be clear, Sam Harris the intellectual is an elite. Apparently nothing emotionally upturns him more than someone in power who is not an elite—democracy be damned; that must be stopped!

People who believe they have the right to rule over others will always be the enemy of the people.

Will Cain discussed the Sam Harris clip with Gad Saad, a one-time friend of Sam Harris, who called him out for this immoral and unreasonable assertion. Cain summed up Harris’s viewpoint, I think accurately, as, “He said it’s perfectly fine to lie, steal, and cheat in order to accomplish ‘victory.’” In other words, Sam Harris has no principle, beyond winning, that he’s willing to stand on.

Will Cain (left) and Gad Saad discuss Sam Harris's moral relativism
screenshot from here

As Cain and Saad continued the conversation, Cain commented that, while “Sam’s not a Nobody, Sam’s not that big a deal; the problem is, Sam said out loud what many others believe.” He then reminds us that former CIA Director Michael Hayden said something similar recently, painting with an even broader brush, that there is nothing in his life more threatening that the modern-day Republican Party. Cain continues, “Worse than Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda and Isis. If that is their belief, they will break any rule. They will break any principle. Because the existence of humanity is at stake.” That’s what they seem to have convinced themselves to believe—because the supremacy of elitism doesn’t sell well among the masses.

Wednesday, Viva & Barnes did a Sidebar discussion with Michael Millerman, political philosopher and Aleksandr Dugin expert (he translated some of Dugin’s writings). Dugin is an anti-West and anti-modernity philosopher who has Putin’s ear; his daughter was assassinated this week, and there is speculation that the car bomb was meant for him. That’s all a discussion for some other day. But Dugin has been called a Neo-Nazi. And Viva Frei, who is ethnically Jewish, got called a Nazi this week as well. So they asked Millerman about the use of this term. Millerman answers:

I think everybody knows who’s watching this, on one level, everybody gets called a fascist today. Everybody gets called a Nazi today, if you veer a millimeter to the right, probably, of the ideological consensus.

He mentions an article in IM1776.com, by the online magazine's editor Daniel Miller about the history of that anti-fascist accusation of the left. Within that article the author makes this connection that might be relevant to our discussion today:

For the same reason the 2016 election victory of President Trump and populist dissident movements in Europe are repeatedly connected to Putin. The objective is to refuse democratic legitimacy to what would otherwise register as democratic movements, operating in nominally democratic societies, to suppress them as issues of national security.

Millerman continues about the Nazi epithet:

This is just automatically to discredit your enemies. And by the way, if you can legitimate calling all of your enemies fascists, and you can legitimate, you know, fascists are so much the scum of the earth that they should be cancelled—or killed—well, you’re not very far from legitimating the killing of your political enemies.

We’ve seen that you can cancel your political enemies. That happens all the time now. But, you know, we’re not too many steps away from car bombing your political enemies, in the West, I think, if you follow out the logic of delegitimating with this title.

Robert Barnes (top left) and Viva Frei (below) talk with Michael Millerman
screenshot from here

All this sounds like things are getting more dire. I don’t dispute that.

But there’s also something else going on. Truth is more powerful than raw assertion of power. The enemies of freedom are revealing everything they’re doing, and people are starting to see what was hidden:

§      There is no way they had the right to raid former President Trump’s residence with a general warrant—illegal for criminal investigations. They have tried to frame him, and have tried to cover up their crimes. The truth is going to be seen.

§      When the DOJ let it slip that they were targeting parents who spoke up at school board meetings, and investigating them as domestic terrorists, the truth got out, and perfectly normal and peaceful parents woke up. They now see the enemy.

§      Fauci has announced he is stepping down by the end of the year—which ought to have happened a decade or more ago for the octogenarian who has called himself “the science.” No matter how many times lately he’s tried to push for mask wearing and vaccination for children, people aren’t heeding him anymore. And there are threats of investigation into his corruption related to COVID origins, vaccine kickbacks, medicine kickbacks, and a whole lot of other crimes he’s committed. Personally, I think he should be prosecuted for every COVID-19 death that resulted from prevention of early treatment and by vaccine or Remdesivir adverse reactions.

§      More truth continues to come out about election fraud.

§      This week Biden announced he is forgiving student loan debt for vast swaths of that demographic—to be paid for by people saved, scrimped, paid off their debts, or had to forego the education for lack of money. And his answer to whether that’s fair is to mumble something unintelligible. It appears to be a brazen attempt to buy votes. And even Nancy Pelosi has pointed out that he doesn’t have the power to do it.

If history and recent primaries are an indicator, this November election could mean a switch of power in the legislature. And that could lead to some good things, like clearing out some of the swamp, even without Trump in office.

I can’t say whether November 8^th is going to be the “Let me put you on hold” moment, when the enemy suddenly and decisively gets taken down. I’d like that moment to be soon—for everyone’s sake. But if not then, the tension is mounting, and it will be coming.

And we know the outcome. Truth wins.

Unprecedented

The unprecedented raid on the former president of the United States is such a big news story, it’s totally eclipsing the promise of an additional army of 87,000 IRS agents—far more than necessary to audit every household making over $400,000. That’s a big and horrendous story. But this attack on President Trump is even more shocking. We talked about it here last week. But of course there’s more to learn about it every day.

the vague and general warrant, from here

 

Another Possible Motive

Attorney Robert Barnes has been giving his take on the Mar-a-Lago raid since that Monday afternoon, a week ago now. And as news comes out, he finds his take is still accurate. As he explains it, there are two basic narratives—on the Trump side; the FBI/DOJ side is something else altogether. These two narratives are trying to figure out what the FBI and DOJ are really up to. Barnes lays out the basic narrative first, and then his take:

The dominant narrative, this is an attempt by the Biden Justice Department to take Trump off of the 2024 election calendar by convicting him of a crime that removes—that has, as a consequence, the inability to hold federal office, and that it was based on Trump having documents he was not entitled to have, either because the archivist was entitled to them under the Presidential Records Act or that they were defense related documents and thus could not be in his private custody.

That’s basically the narrative we looked at here last Thursday. I should add that an additional scenario he doesn’t detail, and I don’t buy into either, is that they were fishing for incriminating evidence related to January 6^th. The reason they weren’t fishing for that is that they already know there isn’t any; Trump did not cause what happened at the capitol that day, nor was what happened an insurrection. But, as I said Thursday, their show inquiry is failing, so they’re moving on to the next attack.

Viva Frei (left) and Robert Barnes on their law vlog Sunday night livestream
screenshot from here

Here's Barnes’s take on their motive:

My theory was different. My theory was that this was a Deep State raid, that this was a raid not intended for the purposes of any kind of criminal prosecution or punishment, for the primary reason that the any criminal charge would require disclosure of what documents they were really, truly seeking…. Before Trump left, he asked all the agencies which documents they really wanted to keep classified. And there was speculation at the time that they basically gave him their Deep State, deep secret wish list to remain secret. And he declassified them but didn't publish them; he just took them with him. And that it would be potential insurance against indictment, insurance against assassination, insurance against other political threats that he knew he was going to be facing after leaving the presidency, particularly if he sought election again in 2024, and that they were paranoid about what was in those documents.

And so they were willing to risk the massive political blowback from an unprecedented raid of a former president and future presidential candidate’s personal residence for the purposes of getting those documents.

If I was right, what I predicted at the time was that when—this is before the warrant was released—that when the warrant is released, you'll find it to be very vague and very uncertain as to what exactly it’s seeking. It will be very elastic in what criminal statutes it claims there's probable cause of. That it will be notoriously overbroad in what it is seeking, and that they will be very bland and generic in their inventory. They won't list in detail what exactly they took, because they don't want anyone to know what exactly they were looking for. And that we would find out they would have kept the lawyers from overseeing it and anyone else in Trump world. They would ask cameras to be turned off, so nobody could know what it was they were actually seeking; that the goal wasn't to actually get these documents and restore them to their lawful owner, but to destroy them permanently and fully in the hopes that they were the only copies that existed.

It's not clear they have found such documents. They searched for a long time, you know, over 12 hours, then seized everything that was kind of there anyway. Apparently Trump had told them he kept the super secret documents in the safe. They had a safecracker there. They opened the safe, and the safe was empty, you know, Geraldo Rivera/Al Capone style.

Trump seemed unfazed and unbothered by what took place. That was outrageous and offensive, what took place. And he brought that to the court of public opinion. But he personally, by everybody who has talked to him since then, is not rattled and saw this coming at some level, understood the Deep State war that he's in the middle of—and has been ever since his candidacy rose to prominence in 2016.

In short, they are after evidence of Deep State wrongdoing—which is likely to begin to come out after the November midterm election, as soon as there is a shift in power in the House and hopefully the Senate. Such exposures will be easier and more complete with a return of Trump or a non-Deep-State Republican to the White House, but the threat to their power is much more immediate than keeping Trump from running in 2024.

What Barnes predicted turned out to be true: their warrant was vague and broad—which is not a legal warrant for a criminal investigation. Barnes lays out what we should have seen in a legal investigation, compared to what we saw:

The constitutional requirement is three-fold. There has to be probable cause of a crime for which there is specific evidence in the place that you're asking to be searched, and you can only request that which is evidence in support thereof. That's probable cause.

The second aspect is presentment, which means that when you get to the place you're going to search, you give the warrant to the person who you're—who has custody over the property, so that they can make sure you actually comply with what the warrant states and don't execute what's called a general warrant, which we'll get to in a minute.

Then the third aspect is particularity. This is the requirement that you specify individually which documents you're seeking and how probable cause exists both for the crime and for that document being evidence of the crime. Unlike civil discovery, which is under a general rule that if it could lead to discovery in America, you can request and get the information. That's not the case in a criminal search warrant context. You have to have particularity. You have to meet probable cause that both the crime exists and probable cause that the document you're asking to search and seize is evidence of that crime. What you cannot do is say, “I want to search your whole house and see if maybe there's some evidence of some kind of crime there.” That's what's not allowed.

That was the general warrants that the British were given prior to the American Revolution, which allowed the army basically to come in, and the colonial authorities, to come in and ransack your home—raid and ransack your home in search if maybe they’d find something. They could search anything, and they could seize anything, in the hopes that maybe it would be evidence of some sort of crime. That’s why we imposed the particularity, presentment, and probable cause preconditions for the execution of the search warrant.

Everything about this “criminal search warrant,” then, is bogus. Its vague and general, and the crimes they have hinted at are not possible crimes for the former president to have committed.

Other weird things about the warrant: they needed a separate, additional warrant to break into the safe, which they just happened to have a safecracker on hand to break into (it was empty). And the unprecedented gall of doing this at a former president’s residence is increased when you know that—it was supposedly urgent, but they waited three days before getting a judge to sign it—a judge who recused himself from a Trump case just six weeks ago, admitting he could not be unbiased. Hmm.

We learned today that they are fighting the request to publish what was in the affidavit requesting the search warrant—the statement of suspected crime and the reason the particular items to be searched would be evidence of such crime. However, such information might not be made public until there is an indictment. And in this case, since there is not likely to be an indictment, we may not get to see it for some time.

The reason there is not likely to be an indictment is that they do not want it known what they were searching for—which has nothing to do with any criminal lawbreaking of President Trump, because they know he didn’t do any.

One surprising thing Barnes said Sunday night was that he thought they didn’t think word would get out about the raid:

I don't think they thought this would ever become public knowledge. They went in with plainclothes. It did not leak at all until Trump himself told everybody about it. That means the Deep State didn't leak it in advance, like they do cases where they want the world to know about it.

They probably thought Trump would be too embarrassed by the fact of the raid to publicly disclose it, not understanding that Trump understands this game very well—or  well enough at this point. And so he was—Trump is the one saying, “These nuts are raiding my house; they're ransacking Melania's closet.”

Plainclothes or not, 30 FBI agents showing up anywhere is likely to raise attention. They’re doing something that egregious, and they think Trump will be embarrassed to let the world know? And yet, these are desperate times for the ones on the verge of losing their power.

  

They Can’t Be Trusted

On the Will Cain podcast today, about 20 minutes in, he talks why we should not believe the government in this case.  He says,

Will Cain on his August 15 podcast
screenshot from here

For 6 years Donald Trump has been the subject of an attack by many American people and many institutions, from the media to the national security state apparatus, who believe that he is illegitimate. That has been consistent. And that brings us to our final category: the credibility of these institutions. We’ve talked about this in the past. If there are many people that believe that Donald Trump is illegitimate, there are perhaps more who believe that the institutions of the United States are now illegitimate. And why would they believe that? Why would they have such little faith? Why would the believe the FBI, the DOJ, the media have no credibility? It might be because of this, over the past six years.

1.      The Russia collusion hoax.

2.      The Steele dossier hooker story.

3.      Russia paying bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan.

4.      Trump calling neo-Nazis, supposedly, “very fine people.”

5.      Trump suggesting drinking, injesting, injecting bleach to fight COVID.

6.      Trump overfed koi fish in Japan.

7.      Trump cleared protesters with teargas for a Bible photo op.

8.      Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

9.      Elections were fair, because no court found major fraud.

10.   January 6 was an insurrection to overthrow the government

11.   Trump tried to grab the steering wheel of the Beast—he leaned over the Secret Service and grabbed the steering wheel of the Beast.

All of these stories are false. Cain points out that each one was debunked. (I had to look up the one about the koi fish; I hadn’t heard that one.) A lot of people still don’t know those are all lies. But a lot of us do. Cain adds, for those of us who recognize all these past lies, “We’re just going to jump on the bandwagon and believe that Donald Trump stole the nuclear codes?” I don’t think so.

By the way, nuclear codes are changed daily. Former President Trump doesn’t have them. I don’t know who’s making that up—the Washington Post story claimed it was about documents related to nuclear weapons—but there’s a scary pattern of these enemies of freedom doing whatever they’re accusing the other side of doing.

 

Attorney/Client Privilege

Over the weekend it came out that, among the documents seized by the FBI in last Monday’s raid were attorney/client privilege documents. That is, correspondence between Trump and his counsel, which the FBI had no business taking. They cannot use them against him, and they should not be able to view them; they are private. It’s a constitutional right.

What should happen isn’t what is happening. What should happen is that, as soon as it was noticed that the FBI had “accidentally” seized documents were attorney/client privilege documents, they should have arranged for them to be returned. That could have been done simply and directly by returning them. Or, to ensure security of the documents, they could have had a court-appointed person, called a special master.

But they did not do that. Instead they appointed a “filter team” of FBI agents going over the documents to decide which they should be reviewing and which they shouldn’t. Then they still wouldn’t return them; they’d send them on to a “tank team” of FBI agents, another level up, for review. It’s a fox guarding the henhouse scenario. As Jay Sekulow asks in his ACLJ broadcast, “Does anybody believe these are not being reviewed by the FBI?”

That’s multiple sets of eyes. They saw the documents when they were deciding what to box up and take from Mar-a-Lago. With anything but a general warrant, they would have recognized these as “do not take.” They had many hours at Mar-a-Lago to see them and make that decision; they took them. Then they went through them somewhere, enough to recognize they were attorney-client privilege documents, because they identified the boxes that contain them: A-13, A-14, A-26, A-33, A-43, and one labeled “set of documents.” Then there’s the “filter team,” followed by the “tank team”—all of these various FBI officials.

And remember, last Thursday DOJ Merrick Garland said it was wrong to question the FBI—which was something of a veiled threat toward anyone with common sense enough to question what this FBI is doing.

Law vlogger Robert Gouveia goes over the DOJ objection to 
warrant affidavit release, screenshot from here

We’ve never seen anything like this in America before—because the institutions that are clearly corrupt have never been this openly brazen before.

Again, I say they are desperate to maintain their power, at any cost, even at the cost of unveiling how corrupt they truly are. If they don’t succeed in maintaining their power in November, then it’s game over. So watch for more desperation in the next few months. It isn't going to be pretty. But it sure is unprecedented.