Hello, my friends. And welcome back to yet another episode of Watching the Watchers live. My name is Robert Gruler. I am a criminal defense attorney here at the R&R Law Group, and he 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 I to follow, but sometimes have a little bit of difficulty doing so themselves. And so 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 back down upon our very system, with the hope of encouraging some meaningful change.

We’re very grateful that you are here and with us today, we’ve got a lot of impeachment nonsense to talk about. It was one of the most boring days in terms of political news that I could imagine in recent memory, it was a lot of, sort of the same things we’ve been talking about. This is supposed to be one of the biggest, most important trials of our political lives because of what happened on January six. And it was not that it was quite bland or going to go through it. We have the house rules and the Senate rules on what the trial is going to look like today was all about jurisdiction. So we’re gonna spend a little bit of time talking about that. And some of those arguments, if you’ve been following us thus far, you’ve known, we’ve been talking about some of this stuff, uh, for the last two weeks or so.

So we want to break that down. We also want to get into some clips from rep Joe and Nick goosey over from Colorado. We’ve got Jonathan Turley and other constitutional lawyer who responded, and then we’re going to be diving into, uh, after we get done with some of this impeachment stuff, it was a little bit boring. So we’re not gonna spend the whole show on it. I also want to get into this new little scandal that’s brewing here in Phoenix. There’s this thing going around, uh, this sort of there, there was this thing going around called the challenge coin. People are calling it different things, but it’s this challenge coin the Phoenix police department was spreading around and it’s turning into this a little bit of a scandal. There’s a reporter here from ABC 15, who goes by the name of Dave, Dave Bisco, being who has done an outstanding job investigating what this is, but it all stems from the protest that took place a couple of years ago in 2017.

So we want to bring you up to speed on this story because I think it’s going to be pertinent for the foreseeable future. And then at the end of the show, we’re going to dive in a little bit onto Golin Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s number two, because there was a new order that came out yesterday, two orders. In fact, that show that well, some of her success in trying to keep her 2016 depositions under seal, those are flying out the window for some period of time. The courts had said originally that they were going to keep that stuff secret because she’s talking about some sex stuff or who knows. We really don’t know what she’s talking about, but there was a big attempt for her attorneys to keep that secret. And now that is going to be coming out. So we’ve got a lot to get into today.

Don’t want to waste a lot of time. Want to remind you that if you want to be a part of the chat that we’re going to have at the end of the program, please head over to locals.com to do that. Watching the watchers.locals.com is where we’re going to chat at the end of the broadcast. And it’s also where you can get a copy of the slides that I’m about to go through. So we’re going to go through a lot of material here, look at some primary source documents, and then you can get those at the end of the show. locals.com uh, is a, is a nice website. There’s a lot of other creators over there. So go check that out. All right. So let’s get into it. As I mentioned, I wanted to start with sort of a little bit of an overview on what this is looking like.

And I put together a little bit of a diagram here just to give us a high level overview, a little bit of an understanding on where we’re at, as it relates to the impeachment proceedings. Okay. So right now we are in a trial. The trial is taking place in the Senate. Donald Trump has already been impeached as a result of what took place in the house of representatives back in January, right after the Capitol Hill riots took place. And so today we were only having conversations in the Senate about jurisdiction. Okay, that’s it, that’s all that the rule set. And I want to show you what the rule sets specifically. This is the resolution, and this is saying that it’s Mr. Schumer and Mr. McConnell, they submitted their resolution. And this was to provide for related procedures concerning the article of impeachment for Donald Trump. And we’re not going to go through this whole document, but I just wanted to show you what was scheduled for today.

So today, Tuesday, February 9th, there shall be four hours of argument by the parties equally divided on the question of whether Donald Trump is subject to the jurisdiction of a court of impeachment for acts committed while president not withstanding the expiration of his term of office. So can he still be impeached? Can he still be tried even though he’s not an office anymore? That’s what we were trying to discuss today. Each site may determine the number of persons to present argument for the foregoing questions, without any intervening action, except for deliberation. They’re going to go and move forward. They’re going to have, they’re gonna be able to vote. Basically. It’s going to just be a quorum. If, if it’s, if it’s a majority vote and they can move forward. And it’s going to say that they’re going to decide by, you know, yeas or yeas and nays.

If they voted in the negative, meaning if they voted, there’s nothing constitutional about this, they’re going to dismiss the case. And if it is approved, then it is going to move forward. And we already know if you have been following the news, it’s been approved. It’s I think it was 56 to 40 something. I’m going to show you that slide here in a minute, but those are the rules we’re just talking about jurisdiction. So what I did is I put together a little bit of a flow chart on, for example, how I would be handling this case. If I were a prosecutor, if this were a real court of law, if we could talk about, you know, some civil law elements and criminal law elements and political elements, if we could cram all of that into one proceeding, which is kind of what this is and the impeachment proceeding that took place today, this is how I would do it.

Now, if you’ve been a regular of the channel, you know, that largely been pretty sympathetic to Donald Trump’s defense here, because I just don’t think that his conduct on January six or even preceding that, that it amounted to insurrection that it wasn’t incitement of insurrection. I’ve said that it’s reckless. I said that I don’t necessarily agree with a lot of what he has set out there or how he framed it or phrased it. But is it criminal? Is it a high crime or misdemeanor? Is it something that warrants impeachment? I just haven’t seen legally how that works, how you can get there. And I’m a criminal defense attorney. So I like to take hard cases. I like to defend people. That’s just my instinct. I don’t like the government prosecuting anybody, whether it’s a, you know, a single mom who is being charged with a license plate violation or whether it is somebody who is the PR the former president of the United States.

I want the government to pro to prove their cases. They don’t just get to say something bad happened and we’re angry about it. So we got to charge somebody with a crime. They got to prove it, and they got to go through the motions in order to do that. And I just have not seen that here for the impeachment proceedings. And I know a lot of people disagree with me, but if I were a prosecutor, this is what I would do. And let me show you this flow chart. It’s not something that is the only way to do it. It’s not something that is the right way or the wrong way. It’s just one way to do it. And I just, I’m using this for illustration for illustrative purposes. Only feel free to disagree with it. Here is what the flow chart looks like. And so what I want to do is run you through this.

This is generally how, you know, loosely, how a criminal case would work or how an impeachment proceeding in my opinion should work. That’s not what we saw at all today. So let’s run through this. We’re going to start up top here. What you need of course is a bad event, right over here. This first box, this is going to be a bad event. And it’s going to be, of course, the Capitol Hill protest. Or you could really define this. However you want put whatever you want in there, the riots you could call it Trump’s speech, whatever it is, then you’re going to need to establish jurisdiction. So the court has to be able to hear the case, right? If you get charged with a DUI in the state of Texas, Texas has to hear the case. You can’t go to California because California doesn’t have jurisdiction over the underlying charge.

Courts have different jurisdictions, right? You don’t, you don’t file a DUI case in the United States Supreme court. They don’t have any jurisdiction over it, right? Unless there’s an appealable issue. And they grant a writ, a search, your worry and all that stuff. But largely that happens at a lower level state court. So we were just talking about jurisdiction today and specifically about whether the constitution permits this to move forward. Whether the article of impeachment was several, whether there were any procedural problems that the Republicans could use to throw some of this stuff out and so on. And this is where we were supposed to just hang out. We were supposed to spend a lot of time only talking about jurisdiction, because this is a threshold issue. You can’t move forward. You can’t talk about incitement or insurrection or interference or anything unless the court has jurisdiction.

And we know that they do have jurisdiction or that they just voted that way. So we know that we’re moving forward tomorrow into this other stuff, but today was only supposed to be about the jurisdiction. Now, what you’ll notice is we didn’t really spend much time talking about that. At least from some of the commentary that we heard from some of the Democrats today, uh, I heard, uh, uh, Raskin, the us house representative, the impeachment manager. Talk a lot about how much harm there was. We, I think we had a 17 minute video or something of all the damage that was occurring around the Capitol building. All the harm Raskin gave this very emotional plea where he was specifically saying, I, we just buried my son. You know, my daughter was there at the Capitol and we were scared to death. I heard pounding on the doors, very emotional statement. And I have a lot of empathy for the man. He sounds very, very fearful. His daughter was very fearful and it’s not something that I would want anybody in this country to express,

But that’s, that’s just the,

Yeah. Right. What does that have to do with anything else here? What does that have to do with incitement, causation, insurrection or any of these other things? Basically what he was talking about was not jurisdiction. He was talking about the interference. He was saying there was a lot of interference. There was a lot of problems going on that, that he recounted with his daughter and all of that stuff, but he kind of skipped over these other boxes, which again, I’m going to run through here briefly. So we spent a lot of time talking about sort of the verdict that Donald Trump should be guilty because of there was interference and we kind of skipped over things like causation, whether there was actually insurrection taking place or whether there was incitement. And so I understand what’s happening here. Okay. I understand that this is a political spectacle that both sides are trying to just make frothy emotional appeals.

Largely the Democrats did that today. They will want to rile you up. They want to bring out, uh, sort of the, the worst emotional experiences that they had so that you feel it so that you also will associate those bad feelings with Donald Trump. And this happens a lot in criminal law, and it’s not particularly ethical. In my opinion, what happens all the time is if the prosecution in a criminal trial has a bad, bad case, let’s say they’ve got a murder, a defendant, somebody is on trial for murder the prosecution. They can’t really prove that he did it, but they have a lot of victims, right? They have a dead guy. They have his wife, daughter, spouse, husband, brother, sisters, employers, everybody. And they just parade them into court. And it’s sympathy statement after sympathy statement, your honor, don’t do this, don’t do this right. It’s in the course of trial. And they’re just parading all of these people in front of the court and you as a defendant, you’re going, Oh, well, that’s great. You know, we’re sorry for your loss or sorry that he’s not around anymore. I’m,

I’m very, you know, regretful that he’s

Not here. And it sounds like mom, you’re hurting dad, YouTube brother, U2, sister, witness, all these other people who know that this person is dead and their lives are over because of it. We, we got it right. Awful situation. But what does that have to do with anything connecting my client to that death. They still got to prove that he was there, that he caused it, that he didn’t cause it out of self-defense that there was no other supervening cause or intervening cause, or there’s a, there’s a lot of other things that they have to prove. You can’t just bring in a bunch of people that have been harmed by something and just sort of loosely tie that to the original charge. I know it might feel like that’s okay. You might be able to say, well, this is really traumatic. I mean, this is the Capitol building. Oh my goodness,

This is

A threat to America because of what we saw happen there. Yeah. It was egregious. It was gross. But did Donald Trump cause that did it, his speech inside

It, that’s what they got

Approved. And they skipped most of that today. They just kind of jumped right into it. We have, we do have a clip from John Joe over from Colorado, a representative who, uh, who talked a little bit about it and mentioned Jonathan Turley, and we’re going to get into all of it. But we just want to be very clear about where we’re at in this process, because you have to go through a, you know, formal due process. Typically this isn’t, this isn’t a regular criminal trial, but it should resemble a criminal trial. It should resemble some sort of due process that you would see in a regular court of law because Donald Trump is on trial for committing high crimes and misdemeanors. One of which happens to be the incitement of insurrection. All right. So let me run you through how I would break this down if I were a prosecutor. Okay. Now, if I’m the prosecutor, of course, we’re going to get past the jurisdictional

Hurdle. We have to show

That it’s constitutional, that there is no severability issues and that the procedurally it’s, it’s all, it’s all. Okay. Right. And they basically did that today. So we don’t have to spend a lot of time on that. But once you get there, then you also have to prove incitement. Okay. And incitement means something. It’s not just that you said some bad words, it’s about you knowingly said something that was intended to do something and then something happened. Right. And there’s some standards that we’ve talked about. So if you’re a prosecutor, you got to identify it. What’s the language. What did he say? And what was the resulting cause what happened? Like what was the harm that came as a result of that? And so that’s incitement. Now. They tried to do that in their article of impeachment in a four page document. That was largely a joke.

We’ve made a joke about it. We talked about the impeachment party. I wrote templates to show you how easy it is to just fill in that, that basically blank form and impeach anybody you want for incitement. It’s a very low standard that they set because they referenced two statements in that article from Trump’s speech, that’s it just two quotes. And they were both very benign if you read them in context, which we did on the show. So very, very benign stuff. They went forward on it anyways. Then when they realized that the, the underlying article was so sort of facially deficient, they beefed it up with an 80 plus page memorandum that, uh, sort of brought in a lot of other stuff they brought in, they expanded the scope of the inquiry. Now they’re talking about, well, just not those two statements in Donald Trump’s speech, but they’re also talking about what Rudy said and what Don Jr said. And what’s any Powell said and what Lynwood said, and you go, wait a minute. I thought Donald Trump incited this. Now you’re saying that everybody else is responsible for it. All right. So they’re modifying their argument a little bit, but you also have to consider what some of the defenses are. So let’s break this down again. You have to have incitements of something. Okay. Incitement by

Itself is, is something

That leads to some other action. Yesterday, we talked about the Brandenburg test and on this, this a flow chart in red, these are the defenses. So if you’re Donald Trump’s defense teams, uh, you’d bring this up in response to this. So if the prosecutor is saying, okay, we have enough here to prove incitement

Donald Trump and his team

Could just simply respond. And they could say, well, that actually doesn’t fall within incitement because the U S Supreme court has said that you can follow the Brandenburg test, which says you have to be likely to incite something that, and it did incite. And you’re using the reasonable person standard. If that all is okay, if that all happens, then this, this Brandenburg defense will fail. But if it’s not, if it doesn’t meet all of those elements, then this is an absolute defense to the incitement charge, right? There, there is no incitement, therefore there’s no insurrection. And the whole thing goes away. Right? And so Donald Trump would use the Brandenburg defense. And I didn’t hear any of that today, which we shouldn’t because we’re still talking about jurisdiction, but are we going to hear that tomorrow and third?

I don’t know. So once again,

Incitement, what are you inciting? We went through some of the Brandenburg stuff yesterday, the U S Supreme court. When we were talking about the KKK member who was out there saying, we’re going to take to the streets and he made some veiled threats.

They said, that’s not enough. Okay. That’s not incitement. You want people in this country to be able to get out there and speak vocally.

The Supreme court has even said things like if you go on Cornell’s website and look up the Brandenburg test, yeah.

Then you’ll see what it says. And it will, it will tell you

Very clearly that the Supreme court favors the side of

Free speech, especially political speech. If you’re out there being vocal, that’s political speech, that’s protected, especially if it’s in the context of an election, which is exactly, excuse me, what Donald Trump was doing. So

The Brandenburg test is

A defense. Now inside.

It can be other things right? In this claim, they’re talking about the incitement of an insurrection, but you can also incite other things. You could incite a riot, right? You could incite a murderer. You could incite a, you know, manslaughter. You could incite, uh, you know, uh, public disorder by screaming, fire in a crowded theater. You can incite a lot of things, but you got to incite something else. So the first thing that they would have to do is say, well, Donald Trump, he was responsible for the incitement, but what did he insight? And that’s where as a prosecutor, you’d come back and you’d say, well, it was pretty clear, right? It was an insurrection. And we defined insurrection on this show. And I actually was, was, uh, you know, I kind of adopted the looser definition

Of that, where I think, arguably you could make the claim that what

Happened was an insurrection. Very brief. It was like three hours maybe. But yeah, they were interfering with the government operation. They were interfering with the counting of the electoral votes. And that was a big problem. Right?

That’s insurrection. So Donald Trump incited the insurrection, just like you could incite a riot. This was insurrection because it involved the U S government. If he was inciting a riot at a Walmart, well, then this element doesn’t get mad. Right? Cause there’s no insurrection there. It has to be interfering with the government. And so as a prosecutor, what would you do? You’d say, well, Donald Trump had the mens REA he had the mental state, he had a guilty mental state. He wanted this to happen. He was intending for the electoral vote, count to be disturbed. And I think you could make an argument for that, which they’re probably going to do tomorrow. You could go back all of his prior statements and say, yeah, kind of a, kind of a pattern here right now that is not in the article of impeachment. So it’s sort of after the fact they expanded the scope of this thing, but you could make that claim.

I don’t think that he intended there at all. Personally, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think that you can glean from his speech, that he was intending that the Capitol building be stormed, but I can see the argument. And then you have to have, what’s called an actus Reyes, which is a physical act, right? This is an act in furtherance of the offense. So you got a guilty mind and you’ve got a guilty act. So you’ve, you’re not only are you thinking about a crime, but you’re also moving the ball forward to commit the crime. And so if they can prove that and they would say, well, his speech that directly came from incitement is enough, right? And that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s how they would define that term. And so they would say, okay, we have jurisdiction. We also have incitement because it fails a Brandenburg test and they interfered with the government.

So now that’s going to be an insurrection right now, Donald Trump has his automatic defense is going to be that’s political speech. I’m allowed to say it. Okay. I’m allowed to get out there and talk about this stuff. And I think he’s right. If the Supreme court, if you read some of their case law on first amendment, especially political speech, it is the most, it’s highly protected, highly, highly protected. It’s basically the, one of the main reasons we have free speech so that you can be vocal and even volatile about politics. Now you may disagree with it politically, but if you have a problem with an election, if you think that an election was fraudulently conducted, don’t you want to be able to speak out about that. Don’t you have to be able to speak out about it. And how do you do that in a way that isn’t volatile?

Okay. Trump is a show person. There’s no question about it. I think you could, you know, he could have easily, uh, tampered down his language. He could have said, well, you know, I think that this was, um, an election that was not legitimate because of the irregularities that I saw, but he doesn’t talk like that. He says this thing was stolen. They ripped it out from under us. That’s political speech. It’s it’s not well-advised in hindsight in 2020, but is it not protected? I think that it is. And I think the Supreme court would agree with that. So here you’ve got Donald Trump raising a defense of political speech, insurrection political speech. That’s his defense. Now, if the Democrats can overcome that, which they have tried to do, they’ve said that, well, it’s not, it’s not protected under the first amendment. We can still move forward with an impeachment, which they’re going to continue to do.

Then they can just say, well, this defense doesn’t count either. Okay? So now they have to move on. They got to show causation. So not only does the court have jurisdiction, not only did Donald Trump say something that led to something else called insurrection, but the, but all of that was the cause of the interference. Okay? Because if you have incitement, but somebody else caused the ultimate interference. Well then that’s, that’s a not guilty for Donald Trump. So causation means that they can tie this incitement directly to the interference. So there’s, there’s a, there’s a, a breach of conduct here that was directly caused by Donald Trump that resulted in the governmental interference. Donald Trump’s defense would be, I didn’t, I didn’t cause that. And I wrote down here, intervening or superseding causes, Donald Trump can say, no, I was giving a speech, something else, set them off. Something else released them.

I was speaking. They were walking towards the Capitol before I was even done with my speech. Something was intervening, some external cause or, or an entirely different cause. Right. It could have been Q it could have been, he, you know, it could have been any other politician. It could have been third parties that are organizing militias around the country that were just upset that Joe Biden one just in general, right? I mean, there’s a million different people or a different organizations that I’m not a million, but you get my point. There’s a lot of other organizations that are highly involved in, in this. Okay. We’ve had the oath keepers. You have the proud boys. We’ve had BLM people who were there and on and on and on. So was anybody else the underlying cause? Did somebody else step in? What else triggered it? That would be Donald Trump’s defense. I didn’t cause it, it happened. Yeah, it was really bad. It happened, but I didn’t do it. People were upset. CNN, MSNBC, Fox news, anybody else, right? That would be their defense. Then you’ll also run into interference. Now they got to show that what was the interference here? Pretty clear, pretty obvious. This is easy to prove. This one is not even, you can’t even argue with this. There was 100% interference. Congress could not count the votes. They got interrupted for three or four hours. They were back. They finished it, but there was interference.

Now I wrote also negligence.

Negligence is sort of a causation, uh, argument here, but I also wanted to sort of bring this up negligence. So if Donald Trump says, if they say no, there was, there was absolute interference here. Capitol building was stormed, huge mess, not so good. Trump can come back and say, well, you contributed to that government. You were the one responsible for it. Mayor Bowzer refused my, uh, my help. We were going to send in. I, I saw a headline today, 10,000 additional national guard that was declined. The Sergeant of arms in the house and the Senate. They were on notice according to the former chief of police for the Capitol Hill police, that this was going to be a problem. They declined because of optics the government. That’s responsible for making sure that the Capitol building is safe and secure. They were negligent. That goes back to causation, Donald Trump didn’t cause it, if they prove that he did cause it or they, they make the argument that he is, and that led to the interference.

He responds back. He says, Nope. If the government had been prepared, if they were not negligent, then the interference would not have happened. Okay. This is sort of like a, uh, a superseding. Cause this is the bigger, cause not Trump negligence was responsible for what’s. What we saw happen on January six, not the speech, the government was just not prepared. So it’s another defense. Now, again, we didn’t talk about any of that stuff. Now, if the Democrats can prove all this, if they can follow all the way through the chain and they can convince some senators, some Republican senators that this is really accurate and it is agregious. Then the Republican senators should vote to convict him. But they won’t because they’re not going to go through this motion today. We talked a lot about, about this. We talked a lot about interference and we actually really didn’t even talk about interference.

Honestly, they were more talking about something down here that we would just call harm. Okay. Which was, which was hard. There was a lot, there was a whole different box, a whole harm box. And they were really going from this bad event that happened a different box over here. So bad was up here. They kind of, you know, a total right. Tiptoed around jurisdiction, but they were just going directly around here. They were just saying, Oh, something bad happened. There’s a lot of harm. That’s taking place. Uh, that took place. And Donald Trump’s responsible for it. So we’re going to impeach the guy now tomorrow, we’ll see if they are able to connect any of these other dots. I would have preferred that we spent some more time today talking and flushing out some of these issues, but it was a disappointing day from both both sides.

Honestly, you know, uh, Raskin was talking about a lot of emotional stuff. A lot of frothy appeals to emotion, a lot of, you know, video montages of stuff, getting blown up and then, you know, buildings getting demolished and all of that stuff. Got it. We got it there harm. That’s not what we’re talking about today. We’re talking about jurisdiction and then tomorrow we’re expecting them to connect the dots and it doesn’t have to be this way, many other ways that you can go about this, but you want to see some due process. You want to see that chain connected. Now our first clip, we only have two. I’ve got one from, uh, the Democrats and we’ve got one from the Republicans. Largely. This was an, uh, an uninteresting day, in my opinion. Uh, um, I’m an, I’m a real lawyer actually. And this was like brutal to watch for me.

I was, I was flipping through it when Trump’s first attorney came on cast or I was like pulling my hair out. I have no idea what he was talking about for 45 minutes. I had to turn it off. Uh, what is he talking about? Uh, and I think that it was probably a strategic thing to just waste time at that point. I really can’t explain it any way else, but, uh, but that was kind of the tone for the entirety of the day. Just kind of like what, what are these people doing? Not even interesting, not even good arguments, just a disappointment across the board. Uh, we do have some semblance of a substantive argument from this guy’s name is Joe. Nick USI, I think is how you say it over from Colorado. Let’s listen in on what he had to say on the Senate floor today.

I know some of you know, and some of you have actually spoken with recently up until just a few weeks ago, he was a recognized champion champion of the view that the constitution authorizes the impeachment of former officials. And that is professor Jonathan Turley. Let me show you what I mean, these are his words. First in a very detailed study, thorough study. He explained that quote, the resignation from office does not prevent trial on articles of impeachment. That’s professor Turley’s words, same piece. He celebrated the Belknap trial. He described it as a corrective measure that helped the system regain legitimacy. He wrote another article he’s written several on this topic. This one is actually 146 page study, very detailed. And in that study, he said, quote, that the decision in Belknap was correct in its view that impeachment historically had extended to former officials, such as Warren Hastings. So you heard lead manager Raskin. Describe in fact, as you can see, presser Turley argued that the house could have impeached and the Senate could have tried Richard Nixon after he resigned his quote on this very telling quote, future presidents could not assume that mere resignation would avoid a trial of their conduct in the United States Senate.

Finally, last quote from professor Turley that no man in no circumstance can escape the account, which she owes to the laws of his country. Not my words, not lead manager. Raskin’s words, professor Jonathan Turley’s words. I agree with him because he’s exactly right.

All right. Well, he doesn’t really agree with you. So Jonathan Turley is somebody that we, he kind of does agree with him, but it’s a little bit more complicated than those little, uh, uh, quotes that he pulled out of context there. And Jonathan Turley responded on Twitter. Jonathan Turley is somebody that we follow. I’ve talked about him and some of his scholarship on the impeachment articles, brilliant guy writes a ton, a ton, very familiar with the history of the country, especially as it comes to political issues. And so he posted right on Twitter soon as a rep, John of Joe. Lucy said that on the floor, he said, well, retina goosey decided my Duke piece and said that I was an advocate until just a couple of weeks ago for retroactive trials. I appreciate the citations, but it is not true. That article was 21 years ago.

He says the issue on such close questions remains your default on such questions. I have certainly become more textual in the last three decades, which I’ve written about over the years. However, this was not a recent change as suggested by Joe, uh, Nick UC just used a quote that, uh, that from Blount that is highly contested. First, as I have discussed, there was the question of whether a legislative official could be tried for impeachment. However, negoti is citing blouse line that he would never argue that a person can avoid accountability by resigning Joseph story. And others did not believe that a former official could be held accountable in an impeachment trial. They did not rule out other accountability. So, uh, basically what he’s saying here is yes, he said that he did say that 21 years ago, and it’s still relevant. He actually still agrees with it, but he’s adding some more meat around the bones back then.

He was sort of talking about this in the context of, well, impeachment can be useful in those other situations where there are no other remedies that are available when you don’t have a justice department who can go and criminally charged a president or former Senator or whomever is being impeached. And so amazingly Jonathan Turley already, Rick wrote a response based on what he heard today on the Senate floor. And here’s what he says. My recent position of 21 years ago, house Democrats site in 1992, Duke article and supportive impeachment. You said recently, I wrote about how Lawrence tribe bizarrely claimed that not long ago, I argued in favor of retroactive trials. Now house managers have claims that I supported those up to a few weeks ago. Rep Joe nuke, NuSI cited my Duke piece at length to support the basis for retroactive trials. After saying that I supported such trials and tell a few weeks, I felt he did an excellent job in his argument, but that statement is simply not true.

His reliance, however, on the Duke article is not misplaced. I did it and continue to recognize the value of such trials and certainly the historical use of such trials. It is only his characterization of my position. That was misleading. Indeed. If my views of 21 years ago were going to be cited as recent, please use my photo from the nineties. I was thinner then to give you an idea of how recent this was, here’s a picture of when I wrote it, right? So that’s him. So he’s kind of having fun with this. He’s being very, uh, deferential. He’s being very, uh, you know, he’s, he’s being a gentleman about it. Indeed. As scholars, we are ideally, always evolving our knowledge and our views. However, I still believe the retroactive active trials question that they have dialogic value. And this remains a close question. My default today is more textualist on the question.

And so he’s not answering, he’s not really getting to this, but if you click that link, it will take you to this article. And he says the case against retroactive impeachment trials, a response to the open letter of the scholars. A lot of other people endorsed the constitutional basis for trying president Trump, but the letter contains many individuals. I know and respect. However, people of good faith can disagree. And I would like to respond and offer a countervailing view. So I’m not going to go through this entire article. He wrote it on January 29th. You can go check that out. It’s a good one. And I actually agree with it. Will we go back to the original article? Uh, so this one where he was responding to, to what happened today, he said, well, only briefly addressed in my past writings. My view of this threshold issue has continued to evolve over the last 30 years. I found over these decades, that departures from language of the constitution have produced greater dangers and costs. I become more textualist in that sense, but I’m neither an originalist nor a strict textualist. I have discussed the trend in my writings over the last three years. If I were to write this piece today, I would still maintain that it shows how impeachment trials serve this dialogic role, but that of the three outlying cases. I agree with the decision

In Blount and roughly half the Senate in Belk nap,

Such trials are extra constitutional. So he’s saying, you know, back then these were these, these had value. It was good to talk about these things, but they were not constitutional back then. It was historically allowed, but I believe that it is not constitutionally sound that view against retrofit retroactive impeachments is strengthened by what we have witnessed in the two Trump impeachment. Thus, I don’t fault. I don’t fault reliance of the Duke piece by house managers to support how they value retroactive trials and the historical defense of such trials. I still believe that however, my textual views did not recently changed. They have changed almost almost three decades.

I’ve been criticized

For my greater reliance on the text in such interpretation. So you understand what Joe [inaudible] was trying to do, right? He was trying to pick sort of this right wing, constitutional

Lawyer cite one of

His articles and then make the claim, Hey, look, even your own

Guy agrees that

This thing’s constitutional. So why

Don’t you? And it’s,

You know, it’s a good argument. I it’s, it’s, uh, a little bit disingenuous, but he may not have known the nuances of this. Right. He made, he was probably him and his researchers or just looking for, they were, they were looking for what they wanted and they found it and they used it. Now, Jonathan Turley just got on Twitter and said, no, that’s not exactly right. You know, I still don’t think retroactive trials are constitutional. I did say 21 years ago that there was some value to them for having conversations about it back during that other era, but not so much anymore. Right. So that was his point counterpoint. Then we’re going to get over to Donald Trump’s attorney. So as I mentioned, uh, his first attorney, I don’t know what the heck he was doing. He was out there. He was like talking for 45 minutes and I could not even follow him.

Uh, to me it sounded like he was stalling. I think his defense team, as we read in the rules, they both got two hours to have a conversation. And I think they just split it right down the middle. David scone is the second attorney who came out and he actually also had some legal arguments, which are good. That’s what we wanted to focus on. Uh, but the first attorney castor, I don’t know, like I said, I don’t know what he was talking about, about senators being good people on and on and on. So we’re just going to skip right over that. Here is David scone. So this is Trump’s second attorney. This guy, uh, people I think were, were making fun of him on Twitter because when he was drinking a sip of water, he was covering his head when he was drinking, it’s going back like that. People are like, well, what, what does he have a hole in his head? Is the water going to come out back? What’s going on?

He’s got a yamaka, right? I think that’s the, that’s the thing. He’s got a yamaka on his head or he’s used to having a yamaka on his head. And so he just typically we’ll, you know, we’ll do that when he drinks, just because it’s there, you know, when you’re gonna kind of fall off. Uh, so you know, everybody on both sides today is just waiting for anything that they can grasp on and it’s kind of embarrassing, but all right. So that’s that here is David scone, uh, today, and he’s talking about something called a stipulation, which I’m going to explain.

They want to put you through a 16 hour presentation over two days, focusing on this as if it was some sort of blood sport and to what end for healing for unity, for accountability, not for any of those four, they surely there are much better ways to achieve each. It is again for pure raw misguided partisanship that makes them believe playing to our worst instincts. Somehow is good. They don’t need to show you movies to show you that the riot happened here. We will stipulate that it happened and you know all about it. This is a process fueled irresponsibly by base hatred, by these house managers and those who gave them their charge. And they are willing to sacrifice our national character to advance their hatred and their fear. That one day they might not be the party in power. They have a very different view of democracy and freedom from justice Jackson.

All right. So what he’s talking about there is what’s called a stipulation and this is something that happens a lot in criminal law. Stipulation basically means that both sides are agreeing to something. And example that I was thinking of is in a DUI case. And this is something that sneaky prosecutors can do, especially if you are a new, uh, criminal defense attorney, be cognizant of this. If you’re a defense attorney, be cognizant of this, if you’re a prosecutor, don’t do this. It’s not cool. You’re going to anyways though, this, this, this happens, let’s say you’re in a DUI trial. You’re representing a client and your client is a, let’s say a college student, female who gets emotional. Okay. When she gets stopped by the police. All right. So she’s pulled over for allegedly drinking and driving. Now you are, you’ve gone through the case. You’ve been working on it for months and you’re on the day of trial.

You go to trial and you’re having your arguments in front of the judge. You do your opening arguments and the prosecution is presenting their case. And one of the elements that they have to prove, of course, they got to show that your client was driving a car, right? And whether actual physical control or whether the car is in motion, you got to be driving. You gotta, if you’re gonna get a DUI, you gotta be driving the car. You also gotta be under the influence of something. You gotta be impaired to the slightest degree. Your blood alcohol content has to be over the legal limit. There are certain elements, depending on your state that they got to meet, but they also got to prove to the court that the person who was driving the car was in fact, your client, right identification. They got to make that connection.

And it may seem so obvious to you. You may just go, well, I mean, yeah. I mean, if she’s sitting in court and you know, w you know, she knows she got the ticket and we’re all there. Okay, fine. But it can get a little bit more complicated than that. You know, they have to prove that it is your client. And so what often happens is the parties will stipulate to identification. Okay. So the government will say, well, and, and officer, isn’t it true that the person you stopped incited is sitting right there in court and they’ll go, and the officer will look at them and go, yep. That’s her. That’s who I stopped six months ago. Okay. That’s one way that they can prove identification. Sometimes that happens. That’s not sneaky. What some prosecutors will do is they’ll say, ah, okay, thank you. Thank you, officer.

And I also want to show you this picture and I want you, I know you’ve identified them, but I want to show you this picture that we took, or that you took right there on the side of the road. Okay. Just to make sure that it’s the same person. And what they’ll do is they’ll show that photograph to the officer. They’ll show it to the defense. If you don’t catch this, you know, you could object to that photograph. And I’m going to tell you why in a minute, you could object to that and you can say, Nope, we don’t need that. Your honor, we’re going to stipulate to ID. We’re going to just agree that we don’t need the jury to see that photo. We don’t need that admitted as an exhibit. We agree that what the officer just said about our client is accurate.

The reason why they want to get that photograph in is because you’re very emotional, 22 year old college student guy, or girl, whatever. It doesn’t matter, right? If they’re very emotional, they’re going to be crying on the side. They’re going to have mascara falling down their face. Their eyes are going to be swollen and puffy and bloodshot, uh, whether they’re drunk or not, right? If you’re, if you’re driving and you’re pulled over and you’re hysterical on the side of the road, you’re going to look drunk in a photograph. You’re going to look terrible. And the prosecutor wants to get that in, in order to make your client look bad, it’s evidence, right? It’s going to, well, we’re going to Mark this as an exhibit, uh, just to show officer, right? That’s her. And so they’re going to try to get it in, on an identification basis. And unless you object to that, that document might come in and sit in front of the jury. And it’s only for identity. But if you are a criminal defense attorney, you object to that, you say, judge, look, we’re going to stipulate to that. We’re going to agree. We don’t even,

I need to fight over it. We acknowledge that identity is proven. Hey, both sides agree. You don’t have to fight over that stuff.

What would be good? Now, if a prosecutor gets that in now, a jury that was originally looking at your client’s sitting there w you know, with nice makeup, nice clothes, ready for a trial, looking at

Presentable. They look at her and they go, eh, yeah,

Strong. She looks bad. She looks like a hysterical mess. We’re going to punish her. And a defense argument would be note, your honor, that provides no value to the determination about the person’s identity. We already agree. It’s her, the jury, seeing that photograph would just be way more prejudicial against our client than it would be probative. It’s not going to add any value. It’s just going to do more.

Right. And so the judge typically, depending on the judge will say, yeah,

Stripe prosecutor, good job. But we’re just going to let, uh, we’re, we’re, we’re going to just accept that stipulation. And everything’s going to move forward without that photograph being admitted. So it’s a stipulation, it’s the same thing that David scone was just talking about. And to go back to our flow chart, he is saying, yes, listen, we’re going to stipulate to all of this. We’re going to stipulate that there was massive amounts of interference. We get, it we’ll even stipulate that they storm the Capitol. All of this was harmful. Okay. We will agree with you. 100%. They were breaking things. They were trying to

The podium, they had their feet on Nancy’s Pelosi’s desk. We got it. Okay.

We’ll agree to all this. We don’t need videos. We don’t need photographs. We don’t need long, uh, you know, sort of winded statements about how traumatic this was for.

We all got it.

I don’t need that submitted as evidence. What we do need is to show all of these

Other chain links were connected and we haven’t

Gotten there yet. We have a couple more days. We’ll see if we do. And so, uh, he’s

Enough enough already, right? They were only talking about jurisdiction or supposed to be,

And it really didn’t turn into that. So, as we know, this is what the final vote count looked like as to the question of whether former president Donald Trump is subject to the jurisdiction of a court of impeachment for acts committed. While president the, everybody voted 56 voted yes. 44 voted. Nate who voted yes of the Republicans. Well got six of them. And it’s, as I have been calling them lovingly these squishy Republicans, the ones who were always sort of in the middle, we’ve got, uh, Susan Collins for Maine, Lisa Murkowski, from Alaska Mitt Romney from Utah. We got Cassidy over from Louisiana, to me, from Pennsylvania and SAS, from Nebraska, who I think will probably be running for president in 2020.

And then what are the rules say about tomorrow before we change gears? The former

President in the house of representatives shall have until 9:00 AM on Wednesday to file any motions permitted under the rules of impeachment, with the exception of motions, to subpoena witnesses. So no witnesses are coming in tomorrow or documents or any other evidentiary motions. So I’m not sure what they’re going to be filing, but they’re filing stuff. As long as it’s not subpoena witnesses or documents or any other evidentiary motions responses to any shuts motions shall be filed no later than 11:00 AM tomorrow on Wednesday. And then all materials filed pursuant to this section are going to be filed with the secretary printed and made available to all parties. Arguments on the motions will begin at 12 noon tomorrow. And each side may determine the number of persons to make its presentation, following which the Senate shall deliberate. If so ordered under the rules of impeachment and vote on any such motion. So tomorrow morning, we’re going to see a lot of activity. They’re going to be drafting motions. Presumably everything needs to be submitted early tomorrow. Our response is then due by 11 and then everything in terms of arguments, we’ll start at 12:00 PM

For another day

Of the impeachment spectacle.

All right.

So let’s change gears. Let’s leave some of the impeachment stuff behind, cause there’s some other interesting stuff, even more interesting stuff going on. I want to tell you about this Phoenix police department story. There is kind of a scandal brewing here in Arizona. This article was put together by a guy here. Who’s an ABC 15 staff reporter. He, his name is Dave Bisco being huge fan of this guy. Huge fan. I would tell you to go follow him at Dave Bisco being 15 on Twitter, because he is just a grinder on the police here in Arizona. He just goes after them very hard. And we have a lot of respect for him for doing that kind of the whole weight of ABC 15 and all of their reporting. And, and with him leading the charge, they have put together some outstanding reports that we have covered here.

I think I played a large part of it, one of them a couple months ago. So he has this new article. It says Phoenix city manager, the PD chief call for an investigation after his report, the ABC 15 report on a protest shooting trophy. What the police have protest shooting trophies. Are you kidding me? No, I’m not kidding you. In fact, Phoenix city’s manager, Phoenix’s city manager and chief of police are calling for an outside investigation after an ABC 15 report exposed a commemorative coin shared and sold between a team of officers to celebrate shooting a or in the groin in 2017.

Okay.

Literally they’re they’re they’re trading coins. The challenge coins clearly depict the man being shot on the front and have the date of the protest on the back. The coins also have the following two phrases, good night left nut, make America great. Again, one nut at a time

Police in Phoenix folks right here is Dave Bisco being a police shoot. Then celebrate our latest ABC 15 investigation shows Phoenix police officers kept trophy to commemorate shooting a man in the groin during a protest. And here is the coin good night left nut. And they have this guy getting hit in the nuts. Okay. We saw this in the news, making America great. Again, one nut at a time, Phoenix AC August 22, 2017. I laugh, but this is disgusting behavior, right? I mean, this is the police celebrating, shooting a guy in the groin and like having coins made and then transferring the coins from one person to another.

Oh my goodness. All right. The Phoenix police department trophy celebrates shooting a man in the groin. We have the video protest occurred August 22nd, 2017. Following president Trump’s visit to the Phoenix convention center. Things got tense, Phoenix police shot pepper balls at the feet of a crowd. While some people threw objects and gas candidates servers back at the officers, it sounds like if they’re throwing things that sounds like that might be insurrection or like an incitement of insurrection. I’m not sure in all of the chaos, the shooting of Joshua Cobin became the iconic and lasting memory of the night video captured by the Phoenix station. KTV K shows, Cobin kicking a gas canister away from the police seconds. Later, he shot in the groin with what’s called a pepper ball. Here. It is

That line of officers in defiance. Vigneron you just saw one of the protestors go up there and actually pick a candidate, kicking a pepper spray back, and a guy just got shot with a rubber bullet

Video. All right. So that’s that right? He’s okay. Hopefully, hopefully his, you know, his, uh, manhood is still intact. I’m sure that it is. I’m sure he’s okay. Hopefully I don’t know. I haven’t read the F the rest of the article just yet Ms. Faith clipped most of this today, but that’s not the point, right? The point here is that the Phoenix police are sort of getting off on this. They’re literally transferring coins from one person to another. Let’s take a look at where this article goes. It says no discipline. The coins were largely kept and shared by the tactical response unit as part of an ongoing class action lawsuit against the department for their protest response, chief, Jerry Williams, and several members of the special unit were deposed right now. There’s a lot, there’s ongoing lawsuits because of the protests there. People have been arrested and they’re charged with crimes for just protesting, which of course is protected political speech. In my opinion, Williams’ deposition took place August, 2019, the chief was asked several questions about the coin, whether it would be appropriate for officers to create or have an image like that. And she said, no, but apparently no officers were investigated or disciplined related to the coin. According to an email sent to attorneys seeking records in 2020, of course not, why would they invest

Them folks? They’re the police. They don’t

Do anything wrong in response to a request from any documents and actions related to the coin. They responded by saying, there are none, there are none, no documents or actions. There are no records because the coin was not department sponsored or

Funded coin. It’s, it’s their personal coins folks that they,

Or celebrating that their performance of their duties. You know, it’s just like,

It’s, they should be congratulated for that. Right? Dave

Says any check on this statement from the Phoenix police quote, any such point, it exists, the PD knows it exists. The chief was shown it during a deposition. Officers testified that they owned, shared and sold them. And the department and its lawyers have these records. And the statements that the ABC 15, the Phoenix police department spokesperson said they did not participate in encourage fund or sanction. The creation of any such challenge coin. There was also no indication, such a coin was used for any public or official purpose on the department’s behalf. A review at the time by a commander with the department was unable to substantiate any claims of misconduct related to a challenge coin, right? So, uh, this statement came out first and then de Bisco bang. The St. Yeah. They know it. They knew it. They know it exists. She was shown it during a deposition. So they’re just flat out lying about this. Some followers have pointed out something very troubling about the message on the front of the coin kept by the Phoenix

Police officers, Google goodnight,

Left side. It’s based off of a neo-Nazis Neo Nazi imagery and slogan. I did not know. City of Phoenix can not ignore this. Okay. So now it’s,

It’s ballooning. It’s becoming

Even potentially a Neo Nazi slogan. Let’s be very clear. Some of the officers who handled the BLM protest response and arrest of BLM supporters kept shared or sold this coin and the Phoenix city police department didn’t care. Read my story for, for their statements. One such iteration of good night left side. Okay. So it’s a different phrase, which

I had never heard of disturbing

Neo-Nazis stickers have started appearing in central London. Okay. Never heard of that. The sticker is representative of the potentially more violent form of neo-Nazis activism. It’s use of a Dodge charger vehicle is a disturbing and deliberate choice following the terroristic murder of Heather

Payer higher in Charlottesville. Isn’t it,

The threatened communities and individuals, they perceive to be on the left there,

Right? So you have this good night left side, a Neo Nazi symbol, another one, good night left nut. Is it similar? Yeah. Is it the same? I don’t know. We’ve got three versions of this coin being passed around. They knew

Phoenix police didn’t do anything about it. Here’s some statements from them joint statement from the police chief, Jerry Williams and city manager, Zucker. There are disturbing claims that members of the Phoenix police department circulated an inappropriate challenge coin related into 2017 incident. This is unacceptable and not in line with the behavior expected of my officers said chief Jerry Williams. I not only expect more, but demand more from my officers that are now new allegations, that the language on the hate coin on the coin may be connected to hate speech. Oh, hate speech. Hate speech in any form is unacceptable. Even more so from officers who we rightfully hold to the higher standards of excellence will not be tolerated. We’ll take disciplinary action against the officers involved in any illegal or unethical behavior. So we’ll see, we’ll see working together with chief Williams. I have instructed the city attorney’s office to begin the process of an outside investigation. We do not accept hate speech at the city of Phoenix. It’s unacceptable. We must have an independent look at these disturbing allegations and de Bisco being is responding, saying, remember, police chief Williams knew governor Doug Ducey just appointed her to the state police board. I cannot emphasize this enough. This statement makes it sound like chief Williams didn’t know. She knew. And she knew 1.5 years ago, she was shown pictures in a deposition. Watch my story. I put the depo transcript in there. Okay. So that was their statement.

No, no. We had no idea. No. I mean, are you serious Nazi imagery on coins. Wow.

Oh, all right. So we’ve got a new reaction on the coin kept by Phoenix police officers. This one comes from plea, the Phoenix law enforcement association, our police union, uh, here, which is, uh, the subject of continual criticism by yours truly, uh, because of what they do the main union for rank and file police officers released this statement. President Michael Britt London said the role of the Phoenix law enforcement association is to promote the positive role of the police profession at tasks that we do not take lightly. We do not condone hate in any form. That is not what we stand for as police officers. The recent reports about the creation of controversial challenge coin are concerning. And we trust a thorough investigation. We’ll provide additional information at which time appropriate action can be taken. So, uh, what we’re asking for now, or what many people are are asking for is who knew what and when, and why was this covered up for so long?

Why is this only now sort of, uh, coming to everybody’s attention? Well, it’s because they’ve Bisco being that’s number one, but what, why were our elected people? Why were, was our chief of police? Why was plea? Who presumably all knew about it because they had depositions years ago. Why is Allister Adele, the County attorney? What are they doing about any of this? Well, here is Dave Bisco being just, he keeps digging in. He says the cases go on. She promised to do what’s constitutionally required to anyway, we asked the below questions, we got the following answer. So Dave sent her these questions. What is the Maricopa County attorney’s office position on the challenge coin and its ties to hate speech. You’re going to answer that what actions will the County attorney’s office now take to ensure these cases are fair and just, and not tainted by officers who possess trophies tied to speech.

Okay. Those officers have been prosecuting. A lot of people they’ve been arresting. A lot of people charging them with crimes. They’re carrying around hate speech, Neo Nazi, propaganda. All right. Is that going to impact your criminal case? Good question. We’ll MCAL collect and gather records related to the coin to ensure it’s properly disclosed to defendants. So if you’re charged with a crime and one of these officers was in possession of one of those coins, would you ever even know about it when you want to know about it? Right. If you’re a defendant and you’ve got this cop carrying around what allegedly could be, might be Nazi propaganda, or at least a highly inappropriate promotion of, of violence, I would say, right? Getting glee off of firing rubber bullets of protestors and hitting them in the groin as though it’s some sort of a joke specifically will the office review and reevaluate the protest cases, including the gang case.

And so this is where things get a little bit squirrely. Now, the police are, are claiming that a lot of these protestors are in fact part of a gang, right? They’re, they’re sort of trying to increase penalties for them in Arizona. We’ve got, we’ve got some gang modifiers, essentially. If you’re a part of a gang you’re charged with an underlying crime and it’s you get gang terms, or you add on these additional penalties because you’re a part of a gang. Well, what our County attorney here has been doing as been saying, well, these sort of qualify as gang behavior, and we’re going to show you what they mean. So Dave Bisco being sent those over to the County attorney County attorney responded. She’s had recent reports of a challenge coin with alleged ties to hate speech created by members of law enforcement are very troubling. We do not have the results of an investigation. I want to make clear any information provided to my office will be carefully reviewed to ensure proper disclosure takes place. So they’re saying we’re going to get copies of it. If we see it, if our officers had it,

If you’re a criminal defense

Attorney in Arizona, it might be a good time to make sure you’re asking that

Question.

Phoenix manager tells ABC 15, they hired an outside law firm to handle the investigation. There was a review in 2017, but no records and officers under the investigation are being reassigned to non-enforcement positions. Cause, cause they know right. They know if they were in possession of that, they got to tell defense attorneys, defense attorneys are going to have a field day with that. Rightfully so totally inappropriate, totally inappropriate. Now what is the Maricopa County attorney’s office going to do with these protest cases? Right? You see this all around the country, not just Arizona, but a lot of people are protesting and they’re being prosecuted for protesting. We’ve seen it all throughout the summer stuff. Uh, even people who were there at Capitol Hill, they’re getting arrested even though they weren’t in the Capitol building. Okay. We’ve covered several stories where people or outside of the Capitol building or they arrived the next day we talked about two people like that. One person was arrested the following day for, uh, for basically getting into a street fight with somebody the next morning or the next evening. I don’t know wasn’t there. But the media was saying this guy was, uh, was a, he was threatening to kill Pelosi. He was part of the Capitol Hill riots, what a disaster. Right. And he wasn’t even there when he was all going on. He was there then

Next day. So you’re starting to see on both sides right. And left. Okay.

These protests were all about BLM and Antifa. And the summer unrest, I think is that, is that what that

Was? I can’t even keep track

Anymore. There’s so many protests going on in this country, but that was, that was that right? And

Trump’s people are getting arrested. Democrats,

People are getting arrested. Now the question is what are they going to do

With those charges? Are they going to consider them to be gang members? Well,

What’s MCA all going to do defense attorneys and community leaders are calling for controversial gang charges against protesters to be dropped after learning that the Phoenix police response unit possessed commemorative coins with neo-Nazi inspired hate speech, Maricopa County attorney Alister, Adele Dodge

On Monday, but she did call the report very troubling. Another law firm

Getting involved as is the mayor city also told ABC 15 that chief Jerry Williams will place officers under investigation and in non-enforcement assignments, they don’t want him to continue to go write tickets and arrest people. If they’re, if those charges are going to be thrown out because they’re Neo Nazi racist, it’s not clear if any officers have been identified by the department and reassigned yet ABC has confirmed five officers have admit admitted to possessing the coin in court testimony. Uh, officer George, George, her Jeffrey howl. We’ve got Glenn Naville. We’ve got Jay Scott and John Sticka. So five Phoenix police officers who have been confirmed to be in possession of it. ABC 15 viewer also provided images from a 2018 eBay eBay sale showing the coin for sale by Barry Bryce. Another Phoenix police officer Phoenix’s response to the coin has evolved in recent days, beginning first in a dismissive statement that distanced the city from any such coin. So they’re backtracking

Hard on

Friday. Phoenix police told ABC 15 that a commander did review at the time, but didn’t find any

The misconduct. No, they didn’t find any misconduct because they didn’t

Instigated themselves. They did a very thorough job. They looked hard, really hard. They had some hard conversations

Talking to all sorts of people digging, are you sure? But at the end of it, no misconduct, nothing even to worry about nothing even report about not even any discipline status,

Couple more years in response to the follow-up questions. The city confirmed the commander who did the review was Brad Burton. Spokesman said there are no records related to this supervisor review. Cause it probably didn’t happen folks. That’s why there’s no records. Phoenix tactical response unit and his Sergeant, Doug McBride had been heavily involved in several controversial protest arrests and prosecutions. And one case made bride testified before a grand jury to charge a group of protesters as a criminal street gang. His testimony is full of exaggerations and false statements. No surprise there. According to multiple defense attorneys, he repeatedly compared the groups to notorious street gangs like the Crips, the bloods and the hell’s angels. Sergeant McBride is the same so-called gang expert who either ignored or missed the fact that members of his own unit created and shared the challenge coin modern modeled after the neo-Nazi paraphernalia.

What this demonstrates is that he has no credibility should not be allowed to shape the prosecution of these protestors. So this is the guy Doug McBride, right? He says he oversees the unit with many members who kept the coin is the same on, he testified before the grand jury, the green at the gang street, gang charges against protesters. And here’s how he justified it. How did they create this fictitional gang woman by the name of Amy caper? So she’s not a gang member. She’s a graduate student. She doesn’t run drugs, traffic, guns work in any organized crime ring, but she did protest police violence last year. And what happened? Well, the Maricopa County attorney’s office, the prosecutor’s here and the Phoenix police they’re prosecuting her and a group of 17 other defendants, including three minors for being part of a criminal street gang. Following an October 17th protest in downtown Phoenix.

In fact officers and prosecutors alleged the group is dangerous and in some ways more dangerous than notorious gangs like the Crips, the bloods and the hell’s angels caper and other defendants could face eight and 32 years in prison between eight and 32 years. The gang charges based on broad and easily abused statutes are a clear quote, political prosecution. You’re not you’re kidding me. You’re kidding me. Intended to silence the scent and scare protestors from organizing. According to community activists and groups like the ACLU, Arizona statutes say that the criminal street gang classification are so broad. They only require two of the following criteria to be met. Self proclamation, witness testimony, or statements written or electronic correspondence, paraphernalia, or other photographs, tattoos, clothing, or colors, and any other indicators, Phoenix police, Sergeant McBride, a granite deer who manages the tactical response unit and former gang detective testified that all members of the group meet the criteria for three reasons. The first is chanting. All cops are bastards, which he claimed is self proclamation. The second was the most of the group was dressed in black, which meets the colors requirement. And the third was that many of them carried umbrellas, which he claimed was part of their uniform.

There you go, folks.

So if you are a, I don’t know, dressed in a Superbowl sports Jersey and you’re walking down the street, shouting something about Tom Brady being amazing. And you have an umbrella in your hand. Yes.

You are a part of a criminal gang. According to this Sergeant, Sergeant Doug McBride here from Arizona. K D

Do the police meet those standards? Let’s see. Did the police meet those standards? Self proclamation. Okay. They all, they all say the same things. Largely witness statement, testimony or statements written or electronic correspondence. Yeah. They communicate with each other. Do they have, uh, paraphernalia or photographs? I would say so. Right. They all take group photos together. They all take headshots. They all have photographs. They all go on the walls. So yeah. They’ve got a groups of photographs. They have tattoos. Yeah. Many of them do have tattoos. I don’t know if there’s any rhyme or reason to them, but it doesn’t say anything about that. Clothing or colors. Yeah. I mean they all wear uniforms. They all wear badges.

They need three.

Okay. Photographs. We got correspondents. We’ve got color.

There you go. The police are a gang. You’re welcome. Sergeant Doug McBride.

So that’s, what’s going on in Phoenix. That’s going to be a lot of fun. This is going to be a scandal that just keeps the tentacles will just keep spiraling out. So if you are somebody who’s interested in that, uh, buckle up, it should be fun. So we’re going to continue to cover that. We hope you join us. Good reason to subscribe and be a part of our channel. All right. Let’s change gears yet. Again, I wanted to wrap up today with a little bit of a segment

On Golin Maxwell. Glenn Maxwell

Is somebody who we’ve been sort of dabbling on. We’ve covered this case here and there. And the reason why I’m so interested in this case is because she has some just behemoth attorneys working for her. I don’t even want to know what their costs, but I am what I am very curious as to what they’re doing and how they’re going to be defending this woman. So I’ve been following it for some time just to figure out sort of how they structure things. You know, I’m always trying to learn from other attorneys and see ma’am, that’s a good idea. Maybe we can take that and use that for something that we do now. I I’ve never represented anybody as high profile as Glen Maxwell for charges. Like she faces on a federal level, right? There’s a very high profile case. She’s got a ton of money.

And so she’s got just, you know, behemoth attorneys who are out there working on her case. And so I’ve been very curious just to follow along and it’s been a hard case to follow. This is not one of those that we can just sort of read the court documents. And I go, Oh, I see what’s going on here. Uh, that, that, that, that argument. So it’s sort of like, you know, building a house, okay, we’re going to paint that this way and put that finish over here and buy a couch over there. And you can do that with criminal law. You can say, okay, it’s this defense in this case and this argument and due process here and whatever. And so we kind of have been, have been following along Glenn’s case, but

Most of her case is under seal. It’s confidential. It’s not disclosable.

This is what I’m talking about. This is a motion that she recently filed and we don’t know what anything that’s in this paragraph. What are they talking about here? And this has kind of been the same thing that’s been going on for a long period of time. And now it looks like the judge may be taking some of this away. We may be able to see what is going on behind the scenes. I’m going to show you what we’re talking about, but this comes from one of her. Uh, so w what we’ve been, what they’ve been battling about, there were 2016 in 2016, there were depositions where Glenn Maxwell was being interviewed in a civil claim by, by Virginia. Ghafari who you may have seen if you’ve watched any of this stuff on Netflix, you know, not, not a real good series, in my opinion, it was very emotional and not particularly, uh, legally interesting, but it was some good backstory there. If you want to go check out that series on Netflix, I digress. The point here is that they were arguing, releasing, and unsealing some depositions that took place in 2016 at deposition is sort of, it’s a formal court proceeding. You’re on camera. Everything is being recorded, transcribed, you’re under oath. And so you

Gotta be honest about this stuff. Well, there were these

Depositions that took place, and there were some hard questions, apparently for Golin Maxwell who was Jeffrey Epstein’s number two helps allegedly helped him, uh,

You know, sort of, you know, what’s the word, nurture, curate.

Can’t think of the word it’s on the tip of my tongue right now. But, but, but,

Uh, whatever

It is, you know, she she’s grooming there. It is grooming, grooming, grooming, underage individuals

To, you know, basically

Sex slaves for Jeffrey Epstein, pretty gruesome stuff. Now what she’s talking about here, we don’t know, because during the deposition in 2016 there, these questions came up. They had some arguments about them. The Supreme, the, the different higher level courts turned around and said, yeah, you got to answer those questions. So she came back down, they did answer the questions. And now the courts are trying to open up those records. The allegation here from Ms. Uh, Glenn Maxwell and her defense team is that she made these statements under the belief that they were going to be sealed and confidential and protected forever. Now that you’re opening them up, that is a violation of her rights, right? She made them with these guarantees of protection. But now that you’re trying to open them up, you’re violating that she wouldn’t have made those statements. If you knew that they were going to be opened up. And so what they’re talking about here in this document that I’m about to read you is their requests that the judge continues to keep it sealed. They’ve been fighting over this stuff for a long time, and they’re saying, you got to keep it sealed. Here’s

Why, if you open it up, there

Are other people, not just Maxwell who are going to be harmed by this information, getting out. So, presumably they’re talking about some sort of, they’re talking about it as it’s consensual sexual activity that she is engaged in.

And presumably

We can’t tell what they’re talking about because it’s all blacked out like this. We can’t see it. But the concept here is that there are other people who are involved in whatever that consensual activity was, who might be harmed. And therefore, if they were to release this stuff open, if they were unsealed,

Those people would, would be legitimately harmed by.

So let’s read this. This is where they’re making their argument, that all of this stuff should stay under seal. Relying on the confidentiality protections of the protective order. Maxwell declined to invoke her privilege against compulsory self-incrimination and agreed to testify at the April, 2016 deposition. So she’s saying we entered into an agreement, a protective order. We didn’t invoke our PR her privilege against self-incrimination. We didn’t plead the fifth. We agreed to testify because of the confidentiality protections. And then in that deposition, all of this stuff happened. Nobody knows

What that says. Hey, this is kind

Of the curious part. Following the deposition, Guthrie moved to compel Maxwell to answer additional intimate and personal questions that she had previously to answer in support of the motion. Schiller assured the district court that quotes such questions are entirely appropriate in the discovery phase of the case, particularly where any answers will be maintained as confidential under the protective order in this case. So at the time contemporaneously with her conversation, they were saying, yup, all of this is going to be protected. It’s not going to come out. Now, look again, this is the next slide. Look at all this stuff that’s blacked out. We can’t see it. It’s all redacted. The district court, granted the motion and requiring Maxwell to answer highly intrusive questions, quote, relating to her own sexual activity and her knowledge of the sexual activity of others. The court held that Maxwell’s privacy concerns are alleviated by the protective order, in the case.

In other words, the court is making sure that the information that you are detailing during the deposition, we’re going to make sure it’s protected. It’s not going to get out. So don’t worry about that. Talk about what, you know, talk about what you’re willing to talk about, because it’s going to be confidential now, not so much. And they’re saying you you’re violating a prior agreement secure in the belief that the protective order would be honored. Maxwell appeared at a second deposition and answered hundreds of work pages, worth of questions. About, about, what about, what about what is this and someone else? What is that from the very first question Maxwell discussed, uh, redacted, redacted, redacted, redacted. She was asked redacted, redacted, redacted. Next, next sentence. She was also asked redacted, redacted, redacted. We can’t see any of it. What are they talking about? What’s so important about this.

It’s killing me. It’s killing me. What are they talking about? All right, here is the order that came down from district court. This was filed yesterday, February 8th, page one to three, not a long order. It says in response to Maxwell’s counsel’s letter, uh, in ordering the continued sealing of its order on January 19th. So there was a prior order. So this judge has slowly been, uh, sort of opening the box a little bit, letting some of this stuff out, and then they’re going back through this and you can look this up in the court record. It’s it’s, it’s pretty, it’s pretty interesting actually. Um, I think hundreds of pages, I’m not sure how many pages, but they have basically this table in a word document and they’re going through and they’re saying, okay, this paragraph, this sentence, uh, we want it sealed and they give a reason.

Next one, we want this sealed. Here’s a reason. Next one, this one is not important. Don’t need it sealed. Next one, this one is already made public. It’s irrelevant for like a hundred pages. I mean, just a ton. They’re analyzing every single sentence. Every single syllable, every single comma is being argued over in this criminal case, which is not, not particularly common, right? This is, this is a little bit out of the ordinary. And now the judge has said that this is a, some of this can be made public. Some of this can be released, but they’re going to be weighing a couple of different factors. They’re going to be deciding whether or not the public has a presumption and a right to know versus protecting her privacy. So you’ve got these two competing interests going against one another, whether the public has a right to know, versus whether Glenn Maxwell has a right to privacy, pretty

Compelling interests

At each other’s throat. So let’s go back to this order. It says Maxwell’s testimony was pertaining to private sexual activity with consenting adults and the testimony and identifying information of a non-party dose. So that’s other people who are not there who have not been considered for unsealing the court considered as it did during the last round of unsealing the Alliance of these parties on the cases protective orders. So this is kind of a botched paragraph. I didn’t like how that was written, but it says here as Maxwell points out, the court of appeals recognized that the third party reliance on the protective order warranted the continued sealing of some materials in this case. So Maxwell in her motion said, yes, court of appeals notified notice that there are third people here. You know, if you, if you unseal this stuff, it just doesn’t hurt Maxwell.

It hurts other people who are part of the depositions. And so, yeah, you may want to keep some of that stuff secret in considering for unsealing the materials that issue. And it’s January order. The court also considered this reliance when it undertook its particularized review. And so that’s where they’re going through that table, uh, hundreds of pages and just, you know, detailing what was done in the deposition concluded that some portions of this case as materials should remain under seal. So some of that stuff was under sealed. Now we get to some, some, uh, law reliance on the protective order itself. So they’re talking about, as I sort of frame this out, Glenn only made these statements because she thought she was being protected, that it was going to be confidential and what this court is saying. Yeah. But that doesn’t just on its face per se, that doesn’t just automatically outweigh the public’s right to access the deposition.

Okay. In unsealing

The summary judgment, the court of appeals redacted deposition responses concerning intimate matters or the questions were likely only permitted. And the response has only compelled because of a strong expectation of continued confidentiality. In recognizing this reliance interest, the court of appeals did redact some of her testimony related to her consensual sexual activity with adults, but it unsealed testimony report relating to purportedly nonsexual massages, finding that the presumption of public access was not outweighed by the private interest in sealing this portion of her testimony. So what they’re doing is they’re just breaking this down sort of paragraph by paragraph line by line. And they’re saying this is protected because it’s closer to consensual sexual activity with adults. This is less protected because it’s a non-sexual massage.

It just going through the deposition

Item by item. Here’s the final page of this order. We have one more consistent with the court of appeals directive. The court considered the reliance of mixed Maxwell and others in the order and directed materials, unsealed where this reliance interest or other private interests did not outweigh their presumption of public access attached to these materials. So this,

In this order, the judge is just saying, look, weigh those out, okay. Balance those out. And then we’ll decide what should be released

And what should not. There was a second order that also came out. So when that, when, when, when, when this was coming down, Glenn and her attorneys, they filed a motion to reconsider, which is basically asking the court, Hey, we know you ruled

This way, but

We really want you to reconsider that. Okay. Here’s why you miss this. You miss that, you miss this. And so that’s what this next order is. We’re going to go through quickly. It says before the court is Ms. Maxwell’s motion seeking limited reconsideration of the courtship court’s order, which is look how much we’re not in sealing a lot. They’re fighting over a lot of, uh, very little information. This court order is unsealing 20 lines of mix, Ms. Maxwell’s July, 2016, deposition transcript from page one 12 line 17 through and including page one 13, line 12, very specific Ms. Guthrie and non parties. Julie Brown in Miami Herald media co oppose the motion. So they want this interaction

To come out. Maxwell is saying, we want it protected GFI.

They’re saying we want it out for the reasons described below Ms. Maxwell’s motion is denied. Court goes on, she submits the court should reconsider its order. Unsealing on the basis that this portion of the testimony falls within the category of adult consensual activity

Warrants ceiling. To the extent that

Testimony was not sexual in nature was outside the scope of permissible

Position questions. Number two,

To Ms. Maxwell’s reliance on the confidentiality assurances of the protective order outweighs the public interest and the her testimony the court already said, nah, we don’t think so because public release of this section of testimony will make it more difficult for Ms. Maxwell to suppress this testimony as evidence against her at a criminal

Trial. Right? And that’s

Probably the biggest one.

There might be something, something in there

They really don’t want out the court declines, Ms. Maxwell’s invitation to consider its order unsealing portions of her testimony. First, Ms. Maxwell’s motion does not meet the reconsideration standard. She points to no change in the law, no new evidence, nor any clear error on the court’s part. So you need those things in order to be successful on the motion. The court already weighed the evidence just because you don’t like their opinion. Doesn’t mean you get to go in and ask him to change it again. You got to find something else change in the law, clear error on the court’s part, new evidence. Any of those things, Maxwell doesn’t have them. She made in her original objections to the unsealing of the three points she raises for the second time in your motion, the court considered each argument already, already heard it accordingly. The presumption of public access to somewhat less weight than for a dispositive motion. Nevertheless, it’s important that the public interest in monitoring federal courts, exercise of their article two powers that the public reviews, the documents public access to certain parts of this transcript is outweighed by Ms. Maxwell’s countervailing interest in resisting disclosure of DS

Details goes on.

See what else we have. All right, we’ve got second. And more importantly, there was no reason to unseal this portion of it.

Testimony

Does not relate to private sexual activity of consenting adults. I’m sorry. There was no reason not to unseal this portion of the testimony. It’s a pretty important word there. It does not relate to the private sexual activity of consenting adults, but only two massages makes Maxwell. It makes miss Maxwell’s privacy interest in such testimony is minimal. And as the court determined when it unsealed his portion of the testimony, any private interest she has in sealing, this portion of the testimony does not outweigh the presumption of public access that attaches to it. And the third, and lastly, while the criminal court acknowledges or interest in a fair criminal trial, Ms. Maxwell can argue all her points to the presiding judge and her criminal trial. As she already has seen her memorandum, she’ll still have all the rules of evidence and her disclose disposal and procedure, just like any other criminal defendant.

To the extent that Ms. Maxwell can show at her criminal trial, that the government improperly obtained this section of her testimony ahead of time, she can argue about whether the sanction of suppression is warranted for these reasons, or a motion for reconsideration is denied, signed again by the same judge, Loretta preska senior United States district judge, New York, New York, February 8th, 2021. So, you know, this is, this is one of those that it’s kind of hard to have an opinion about because you don’t know what they’re arguing over. You know, you don’t really know what, what is that? It’s hard for me to come in here on here as a defense attorney and say, well, this is a, this is a good fight worth having, because I don’t know what they’re talking about, but there are putting a lot of effort into this. They do not want this to come out.

If you go back and look at the court docket, they’ve been fighting over this for a long time. So it’s just a couple, couple of paragraphs in there, but what does it look like? And let’s take a look at the entire memorandum that her team submitted. This is from Gullah Maxwell. This is what it looks like. If they’re all the pages are spread out and look how much of this is just redacted. Even like from the table of contents, redacted, introduction, redacted, major redactions across the board, whole block paragraphs of stuff that is just excluded. Look at this over here. Two paragraphs over here, variety of sentences all the way throughout. So this case has just been interesting because we just don’t really know what they’re doing because everything is under seal. Her attorneys are being extremely aggressive. None of the public access records are available. They’re all redacted and the courts are upholding a lot of it until now. So we’ll start to see if any of this continues to come out.

All right? And then our last little, you know, there’s a, it’s not often you get a feel good legal story that happens in court, but we had one today and I want to share this with you. Before we jump into our chat portion of the program, there was a court proceeding that took place on zoom. And one of which is happening a lot nowadays, a lot of, a lot of these proceedings are happening on zoom. It’s kind of funny that people just kind of are still having some zoom issues, but it’s going to happen. We all have them zoom performance issues. Oh, don’t you hate that? Very embarrassing. But what we have here is kind of a fun one. This, this attorney calls into a formal court proceeding and he has a filter on his webcam. So sort of like you have on your phones, uh, when you can, you know, do a, do a, I don’t have an iPhone because I’m an adult. But if you, if you have one, I think you have your aunt emojis where you can like, kind of, you know, put your face in there and move things around. And it looks like you’re an animal or a creature or something like that. Well, that happened in court today. Let’s take a look at what happened on the zoom proceeding in court

DuPont. And I believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings. You might want to, uh, can you hear me, judge? I can hear you. I think it’s a filter and I don’t know how to remove it. I’ve got my assistant here. She’s trying to, but I’m prepared to go forward with it. I’m here. Lie about Scott. That I’m not a cat. I can, I can see that

Just outstanding. I’m here. I’m not a cat. And what I really like about that is he was just ready and prepared to move forward. So he’s Hey judge. You look, I’m not a cat. I got my arguments. I’m ready to rock and roll buddy. Boy, let’s get this show on the road. I can appreciate that. So a little bit of a fun thing to wrap up the day. All right. So let’s jump into some of the questions. As a reminder. This is all taking place over on locals.com. However, if miss faith or Mr. Ma, if we see anybody in, you know, in YouTube, feel free to clip some of that stuff. Just, we don’t, we don’t want to forget about our, our YouTube brothers and sisters over there. Okay. We, you know, let’s we gotta, we gotta be, uh, that’d be very inclusive here. YouTube is, you know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna work our things out.

I think with YouTube, we’re gonna, we’re gonna make, we’re gonna make it work, but, uh, this is a good time to chat. So watching the watchers.locals.com go on over there, there’s a live chat. Uh, as long as you are a supporter over there, then you can ask a question. You don’t have to pay separately for each question. If you’re just a regular monthly supporter, unlimited questions, it’s kind of an upgrade. So head on over there. And our first question today comes over from hack consulting says, is there a way to Sue possible class action, those who defamed Trump’s supporters these last four years calling us Nazis in order to direct rage against us and such good question hack, uh, you know, I don’t think so. I think, you know, the closest analogy that I can think of would be what happened with the Covington kids.

Remember when, uh, I forget his name, it’s escaping me right now. I follow him on Twitter. Um, you know, one of the, one of the kids who I think Lynwood was actually representing him, sued a bunch of them and it was successful for him, right. He sued them, filed defamation claims and he w we won or at least settled. I think a lot of them were non-disclosed, but he settled those claims. And I think that that worked for him because it was him specifically, right. It was one individual. They were calling him out. It was singling a group of individuals. It was a small group. So in terms of, you know, what you could do with, with several hundred people, I think, yeah, maybe a class action would be something worth organizing, but it’s not my area of law. So I don’t want to sort of, you know, spin off on that too much.

I just think that, you know, the point here is the bigger the audience, the more spread out the claims would be. So in a defamation case, and you’ve got to go prove that they intended to do certain things. And it did actually cause you harm. If you’re a small group, like the Covington, Covington kids were, then each one of them can show specific harm. They can show how they were directly impacted by this, the main guy who was on there. Uh, you know, the, the main kid, Kyle cashews, I think is his name. Now he, he was, you know, he was all over the news. It was his face. People were saying he was beating the drum. He was, you know, in front of the, the other fellow who was there and it was him. He got harmed by that. So he could show where the harm came from and make a claim that I think is strong. If you want to make a claim, you know, about,

You know, 70 million Trump people, I don’t know how you would quantify the harm for them

Sort of like a generalized claim. And I just don’t know that that would go anywhere. Good question though, Liberty or death says, I see that Senator Kane’s idea of censoring, president Trump of the 14th amendment to prevent him from running again is picking up steam. I don’t see how that would be anything less than a bill of attainder either, which is what a conviction in the Senate would be. Yeah, that’s a good point. Liberty or death. And I think this is going to be very interesting to see where, where this argument goes. So what he’s talking about specifically is after this impeachment fails, we all know that it will, he’s not going to get convicted. Democrats are already looking for other things that they can do. They’re grasping, they’re there. They’re trying, they, they really don’t want Trump to run again. And one of the things that they’re trying to do is say, all right, well, we can essentially censor him, sent censure him under the 14th amendment.

And what they can do is then sort of invoke that incitement of insurrection under the 14th amendment. They can pass that by just by a simple majority 51 votes versus the 67 that they would need to convict him in the Senate. They can just pass it with a, a much smaller margin and still preclude him from running again. So some of the issues that pop up are exactly what Liberty or death is talking about specifically, is it a bill of attainder right? And the response, at least as it relates. So a bill of attainder is getting so ahead of myself here, bill of attainder is basically the legislature acting as a judicial body and punishing somebody for their conduct without the official sort of due process that you would see in a court of law. You don’t want the legislative branch acting like a court. You want the courts acting like courts. That’s why

We have a judiciary. And so if the legislature is trying to, you know, sort of

Process private citizens through a pseudo,

So Judy

She’ll process in the legislature, we’re not allowed to do that because our constitution says so because of the founders, didn’t like when England was doing

That to them. And I think even some of

The earlier colonies were also doing it. So they just said, Nope, no more of that. If it’s a judicial process, go to the courts, don’t do it in the legislature. So their response

That

Liberty or death is bringing up is well, okay, Trump’s a private citizen

Now. So if they want to

Prosecute him, according to the 14th amendment, that is a bill of attainder, that’s not allowed, it’s prohibited under the constitution. So the response that same issue is actually a parent right now, right? Donald Trump’s a private citizen at this moment in time, the democratic response has been well. They impeached him while he was still the president, the trial didn’t start, but we impeached him while he was president, which they did. And so they’re just carrying this out further. So the prosecution started when he was not a private citizen, therefore it invalidates the bill of attainder stuff. Well, in this situation, if they’re going to try to renew this under the 14th amendment, after they lose the impeachment proceedings, then this would be a new cause of action. Arguably, in my opinion, it’s a, it’s an entirely new cause of action. It’s essentially, and it’s not an impeachment it’s different.

And so in my opinion, it would be a bill of attainder, but I think their response is going to be the same argument. They’re going to try to connect that back to conduct when he was the president, they’re going to make the same sort of asinine arguments that they’re making today. Good question there, Liberty or death. All right. Ryan says that first defense lawyer for Trump was unbelievably horrible at his job. Lots of rambling, losing his train of thought, awkward pauses for getting things. I know I li I had to turn it off. I’m like, what am I watching here?

It was embarrassing. And I was reading some, uh, some, some, somewhere else that that was an intentional strategy, basically, that he was responding to the emotional pleas of the Democrats. You know, they came out there with a very emotional statement, uh, you know, seven, 12 minutes, 17 minute video of all the mayhem Raskin comes out there. So we just buried my son, my six year old daughter’s here. It was a nightmare horrific. Right? And so the Republicans are Trump’s defense attorneys were going, yeah, that’s pretty bad. Uh, we gotta change our strategy. Uh, you know, they may have been sort of going into it with nuts and bolts, constitutional arguments, jurisdiction, severability, whatever due process, all of the arguments that we covered in their memo. And then they saw that. And so he just went out there and he’s like, all right, I’m just going to riff on how great the Senate is and how great America is.

And he just kind of slapped his argument together. And if that’s what happened, he did a terrible job at it. Right. Terrible. Uh, the fact that you can’t go out there and pontificate about how great America is for 45 minutes, just ad-libbing stuff is, uh, not good. We’re going to see what happens with that lawyer. We have Jeremy [inaudible] says I watched the proceedings today was painful to watch the Democrats played a propaganda video. And the defense made a very compelling case that this is not constitutional. I think that’s probably a pretty fair analysis I would give. I would give the defense a little less credit. I think, I think half of them made a compelling case the other half, not so much. Uh, Ryan also says the fact that it fails the incitement test vis-a-vis Brandenburg should have meant that this impeachment should have gotten anywhere near this far should not have gotten anywhere this far, I think is what he’s saying. Yeah. And so, as you went through my flow chart, right, Brandenburg was right there. If they can’t prove it’s incitement,

Then it’s all done. It’s over. It’s the end of the quarter

We have Chris Wiseman says my recommended defense strategy will be to spend two hours reading transcripts of Dem tweets, post clips, calling for incitement calls to action Gorsuch. Hearing capital’s being stormed 2016 election was hijacked slash Moe, Russia, and the time article. Yeah, pretty good. A pretty good list there, Chris, there’s a lot of stuff that you can talk about. And you know, I got this comment on Twitter from some guy who probably didn’t really watch the show yesterday, but he said the same. You need to say it kind of had the same argument. He was, he was responding to me on Twitter. And he said, uh, just got a good laugh from Robert ruler, reading through the truck’s Schumer, impeachment proceeding yesterday. And he said, wow, I wonder what reality he’s living in because in one version, Donald Trump gave a speech and they stormed the capital in another version, Chuck Schumer gave a speech and there was no storming of the capital. You know, there was no,

No, there was no harm there,

John. Yeah. See, you know, how, how far off are you? And it’s because this is a very common mistake and I wanted to spend some time dissecting it at the start of the show. Okay. It’s not about the harm. It’s not about the, the damage to the Capitol building. It’s not about the dead people, as awful as that is. And I are more than for them. I’m very regretful that any of this stuff happened. I think it was a bad day for America. And I’ve been very consistent about that. I’m not excusing that, but the question here is how you connect that back. If you can then great, then do it, then prove it, connect it back to Donald Trump, inciting the insurrection through his speech or through his prior actions. Just because something bad happened doesn’t mean you can go and find whatever defendant’s you want and just pin it on somebody. You got to prove your case. And they just haven’t been doing a good job of that. They’re all deferring back to this harm while the Capitol building it’s sacred. Great. That’s great. But that’s not the harm that we’re talking about. The harm that comes from an insurrection is an interference with the operation of government. It’s not damaged to a building. Okay? If Donald Trump gave a speech outside of a Walmart and they stormed

The Walmart, that’s not insurrection.

It could be incitement of shoplifting, incitement of a riot. If somebody got killed in their incitement of murder, but not in service,

But the building could be totally damaged. That’s not it. So it’s not the dam,

Just not the deaths. They could have charged them for incitement of, for anything. They could charge him with incitement of murder for the police officers. If they think they could prove their case, they can’t because legally and criminally, it’s just not there.

The evidence isn’t there because he didn’t do it. If you,

You now brought, let’s say you go back to the Walmart hypothetical and you brought in

Congress

To count electoral votes in Walmart and you stormed Walmart. Yeah. That would be closer to insurrection, right? Because now you’re interfering with government proceedings. It’s the interference. That is the harm, not the damage to the Capitol, as bad as it

Was. And so when you’re going to be making the claim that let’s say in the Chuck Schumer case, Chuck Schumer,

I made a statement. It was responded to by the Supreme court.

They said, this is dangerous. We’re going to continue on. That was

Interfering with the operation of a separate branch of governor.

The Democrats are trying to sort of finagle that what they’re really upset

About as the interference. That’s the criminality that’s being alleged here. Now they’re not proving that. They’re just saying what happened at the Capitol was awful,

But

It has to be an incitement of an insurrection

Interference. That’s why

You can impeach Chuck Schumer. That’s why you can impeach Kamala

Harris because the harm that

They cause was the interference of the government in what you know, they don’t have to storm the Capitol building in order for it to be insurrection. You can have insurrection. There were a number of other things. Anytime you’re interfering with the normal functioning of a government Schumer was doing it with the Supreme court. Kamala was doing it with the bail bonds and the torching of the third precinct in Minneapolis, helping people get back out and onto the streets, interfering with government. I didn’t set this standard folks. I’m not making this up. This is their standard. This is what the Democrats put in their article of impeachment. I didn’t come up with it. I think it’s a stupid, ridiculous standard. That’s why we’re being so satirical with it. It’s so low and it can encompass anything.

You can impeach anybody for anything doesn’t even matter. Cause it’s a political show trial. It’s not even connected to legal elements.

It’s anymore purely political. And you have a good list. There. You have a good defense Liberty or death has on the 14th amendment. President Trump would have to be convicted of insurrection for them to be able to use it to censor and prevent him from running again. Kane wants to do this in lieu of conviction in the Senate. So you would have to be criminally charged and convicted meeting the standards in Brandenburg versus Ohio. So censoring the president, absent a conviction for insurrection would be a bill of attainder. All right. So I haven’t really looked into what Kane is saying about that. If that’s the strategy he wants to use, that’s, that’s a non-starter. I don’t think that he would be convicted in a court of law, criminal law, a real court of law, uh, at all, for what he said and there’s precedent for that. Okay. We’ve caught, we’ve covered some of it here. Hack consulting says the S the impeachments of other nations tended to be political actions. Only the founding fathers broke from tradition because those historical impeachments went against due process and other concepts they wish to have in their new government. Yeah. It’s not. Look, I understand what they’re saying about no free speech about, you know, this being a political mechanism where you can punish people politically for it.

Look, I get it. If

That’s what they want the standard to be. I think it’s a sad, sad thing in America. And I know I poke fun a lot about the government, but I want a functioning government. I think that we would have a much more functional government if it was about a 10th of size, but we’re all working on that. But when they’re talking about,

You know,

Impeachment as a political tool, the pendulum is going to swing the other way, guys. And it’s, it’s just ridiculous. You know, this, this is a waste of time. It’s going to be a waste of time. Again, sometime in the future, the Republicans are going to try to impeach some Democrat at some point for something stupid. And we’ll be making the same arguments here, but you know, this is it. This is what it comes down to. We’re having these political spectacles, uh, for, from all of our elected officials, people who we pay, they’re wasting a ton of the country’s time and money on all of this. There are many other things that we could be focused on, but we’re not going to because they want to go forward with something that they know is not even going to be successful. All right, we got crock one, one alpha says all the title, 18 chapter one 15 sections in question refer to the government is the sitting president as executive branch also not considered the government, unless he incited complete dismantling of authority of Congress and executive takeover of authority itself. How is that in any way? Insurrection or sedition? Yeah. So crock one. It just depends on how you define that. Right? And we don’t know what it is. So the only definition that we could take and use as an operative tool was exactly what they put in their article of impeachment. They said that this was wrong. This was bad. This is what they said, constitutes or warrants, impeachment, impeachable

Proceedings. Their standard was basically non-existent

Excitement of insurrection. And so when you boil it down, when you take all the, well, all the fluff away, when you take all of the, the, the casualties, all of the damage, all of the videos and horrific stories from all of the major news companies, if all of that goes away, what you’re talking about, somebody said something and it interfered with the government. That’s, that’s kind

Of it, right? And

That’s a very low standard that I think anybody in this country can meet. Now. It was, it was an actually sedition. Was it really a coup? Was it really insurrection? Not no. Right? No, they were back there. They were back in charge, arguably within an hour, they were back to business, arguably within three hours, four hours, they got back to counting that same

Dang, pretty weak. Who, if, if, uh, you asked me,

Chris Wiseman says, great analysis worth listening to TLDR the house, botched it with the snap impeachment. What they should have done was to impeach for dereliction of duty, which would have been much better standing butter, better standing, although still dicey because they failed to hold substantive, hearings and investigations. Yeah. So that’s a due process argument there from Chris, uh, basically saying, you know, if the president is going to be charged with high crimes and misdemeanors, the impeachment process should at least

Symbol, a criminal court of law and payment for high crimes and misdemeanors. Well, we have criminal

Court of law. We know what that process looks like. We know that in a criminal court of law, uh, if we walk into a court and the judge who was going to be ruling on the case was also the police officer who arrested our clients. And they’re also going to be voting on the jury on whether or not to our clients. That would

Be a joke, right. A joke.

And that’s exactly what’s happening. Uh, today we have another one from Chris Wiseman says TLDR part to either treat it as a political cause of action

And political

Treatment or a criminal cause of action and give it basic criminal standards of evidence and due process. The worst thing is to use a criminal cause of action and apply and apply political standards of due process. Yeah. Good points there, Chris, and

You know, I,

This, this, this is what we think it is. It’s a political spectacle, right? That’s it, they know it is. They all know it is. They’re out there getting their 15 minutes of grandstanding so that they can run ads back in their districts. That’s all it is. We have another one from Sarah, some others. Rob, were you surprised by today’s voting? If Trump had a more spirited crew speaking on his half, do you think things would still would be still moving forward? Good question, Sarah. You know, I am actually not surprised by this. I think this mirrors a little bit of the vote that we saw. So remember, I think a week ago, or two weeks ago ran Paul was on the floor of the Senate and he issued a point of order. He was basically asking the Senate to vote on whether or not they thought this was constitutional. And so I think only one vote changed. And I can’t remember who that was, but it was, I think, 56 to 44 in the Senate today. And I think when Ray ran, Paul had his point of order in front of, uh, the, the Senate. It was 55 to 45. So I think the presentation today,

One vote, but that’s it. So yeah,

Not, not much of a surprise. I’m actually surprised at that one person.

I didn’t hear anything today that would have made it unconstitutional

A week ago and then constitutional

Today. But yeah,

Apparently one Senator thought so, so I was thinking it was probably going to be in, in, in the same alignment as Rand Paul’s votes because you already had 45 cent or whatever. The number was 45 senators who said no it’s unconstitutional. So for them to flip that I think would be a tall ask. We have Liberty or death says, I thought scone did pretty well until his slam poetry session. What was that about? So Liberty, I’m not sure that I caught that. You know, I kind of was, um, after I checked out from caster, I would just was like, all right, that’s it? Uh, the rest of the stuff, I was just watching clips. I really don’t know what they

Were doing. I mean, they don’t have to do anything

Quite frankly. It’s embarrassing that they weren’t better prepared. And th they didn’t have a fiery delivery. I mean, I was sitting there going, can I, can I hand you want me to go? Do you want me to go handle this?

I’ll make a PowerPoint. I’ll do it. Just put me on the live stream. I’ll do it. I’m ready. Put me in coach. Cause it was just that embarrassing. But you know, I don’t know

To do anything truthfully. They don’t need to do anything. I think the Trump could just sit there and not show up. And he still is not getting convicted because there’s just not enough. Not enough there. Chris Wiseman says oldie, but a goodie disavow, bad Popo is pepper balls, best unintentional headline, ever. Pepper balls tear gas after Trump rally. Yeah. I mean, that looks painful right there. That is painful pepper balls. That is just a double entendre. That’s like a triple entendre, right? You’ve got the actual pepper spray ball as, as a projectile. Then when it hits you in your male genitalia, it explodes and you have a different version.

Oh.

Condoning police violence. All right, this is ridiculous. These challenge coins should be investigated. And I hope that the people who were responsible for it get properly investigated and reprimanded, but pepper balls is pretty funny. We have hack consulting says, wait, what, why are the coins alongside of that Neo Nazi symbol? Are they really inferring? It? It’s a dam image in a circle. It’s like walking into a daycare and seeing a red triangular prism and freaking out thinking your child is now a Nazi because the Nazis once used a red triangle. Yeah. So, you know, look, I don’t know about that. I don’t know about, about where that came from. I think it’s worth an investigation though. You know, I’m not one who instantly says, okay, well, you know, there’s, there’s that symbol. Therefore, that person believes all of this stuff, right? Symbols are a very diverse people.

Use a lot of different symbols for a lot of different things. Just because you have a triangle, like in your example, doesn’t mean your whatever, right? So you gotta be careful with some of that. But if you do have look there’s there, there, there is a lot of smoke here where there’s fire. We’ve talked about this. I talked about this. I don’t know, a year ago on our channel, I made a bunch of videos about some of these LA gangs. We’ve got some LA I forget the names of them, but there’s a whole series of them in Los Angeles. There are these like little literal gangs within police departments, sheriff departments, uh, in a lot of these big cities, New York and LA and elsewhere. And they’re like actual gangs. I mean, they have, uh, initiation protocols, they’ve got tattoos, they’ve got all this stuff. And so to, for me to jump into this, you know, the, the next logical step and say, well, yeah, maybe this is something similar to that.

It’s it doesn’t take a big leap for me. But I, I also understand your point, right. I just, just because it says goodnight left nut in my mind, that doesn’t mean that it’s Nazi imagery, but it’s worth an investigation completely. All right. We got another one from Jack Elia says since all national socialism is, and is only leftist ideology, no symbol concerning its ideology can occur on anything that is conservative. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Jack Aliah. Yeah. You know, look, I’m not, I’m not particularly worried about the Nazi imagery as much as I am, because I don’t know yet. Right. I mean, that’s still sort of speculative at this point, if it is true. If the guy who created the coin said, yeah, I’m a, I’m a Nazi. And I got my idea from this other coin. All right. Well, that’s, you know, that’s pretty bad, but it could have been a situation where the police were just, Oh, that’s hilarious. Right. That’s pretty funny. I was there. I remember that. Oh, you know what, a joke, it’s sort of gallows humor that you probably have in your profession. You have it everywhere. Doctors have it, lawyers have it. Everybody’s got that, right. It could be that

Totally inappropriate, totally unjustified. It doesn’t necessary.

Really have to be Nazi propaganda just to be totally unjustified. The fact that they have these trophies for injuring, other people who are, who are rightfully protesting, uh, you know, out there expressing their first amendment. Right? I don’t know the specifics of that specific protest, but you know, protest is allowed in this country. I disagree that it’s effective. That’s a whole separate story. You’re allowed to do it. And if that guy was, you know, otherwise operating within the confines of the laws, which is arguable, since he’s kicking pepper, spray cans back at them, but then the question goes, well, they started it. And so you go round and around and around and around the point is the police should not be exchanging trophies for their interactions, doing their jobs with other regular, everyday civilians, not appropriate, regardless of where it comes from, what the imagery is. And the bigger issue here is not only, you know, of course they were doing it that’s bad, but the police who were, you know, this was brought to their attention, the chief of police, it sounds like a Sergeant McBride and others. They were all apprised of this. Not one of them thought, Hmm, this is a problem worth investigating. Maybe we should document what we did here. It all just swept right? Under the rug as is usual. Some indication that there was an investigation that was initiated, but nobody wrote anything down about it. Nobody responded.

They investigated themselves and they found that it was all fine. Not a surprise. Hack consulting says, hate speech.

It’s supposed to be protected under free speech. I don’t agree with the ideology, but not all forms of speech are that, uh, of that ideology. Like how are we going to have documentaries? If we have no clue what they said and how they spoke of their ideology, if American history shows anything, it shows that we were all people and intolerance eventually resolves itself. Yeah. Good point there hack. I think that that’s also a good point, right? Free speech

Includes all types of gross speech. You don’t have to agree with them, but

If you want to engage in real conversations, if you want to live in a world where it’s just fake conversations, where everybody’s too scared to actually say what they mean,

I believe we’re going that way. So maybe you’ll get what you,

Sharon Courtney says. There seems to be an overreaching theme in today’s stories, the total absence of civility. There’s no sense of empathy or compassion to be seen. It’s like our whole society has descended into barbarity. And that’s an interesting observation there, Sharon. I had not noticed that, but I think you’re right, right.

Sort of the impeachment stuff was, I mean, it was mostly civil, I guess. Ridiculous and waste of time. Yeah. Yeah. It’s

Interesting times there, Sharon, but keep, keep your head up. We’re going to be all right. We’re going to get through it. We got Chris Wiseman says at faith, joy, not buying the story. No, no entries on know your meme or urban dictionary for quote, good night left side. The closest reference I could find is from the ADL under an entry for anti Antifa images. ADL is hardly neutral when it comes to anything right. Leaning, much less alt-right so here we go. We’ve got, so Chris is doing some digging right now. Uh, other aunt auntie Antifa, symbology, perverts, common Antifa slogans and logos, such as changing goodnight, white pride too. Goodnight left side.

Often anti

Antifa symbology, implicitly, or explicitly promotes violence against left-wing activists. So additional images. So looks like the Antifa flag with a cross out goodnight left side. So somebody looks like it’s hitting somebody with a chair,

Anti Antifa

Supremacist. It looks like anti Antifa, anti Antifa, worldwide destroy the red scum, anti anti for USA. Yeah. Like, well, first of all, Chris, thank you for that. That’s outstanding research on the fly, educating us in real time. Awesome. So I don’t

No, you know, I don’t know where that stuff is.

It comes from again, I don’t really particularly care. What’s what it says. If they’re still, you know, they could have just had a picture of the guy getting hit in his genitals and that’s that’s enough for me. Right. They shouldn’t be celebrating that like trading cards and that’s, that’s just a bad culture if it’s Nazi. Yeah. That’s even worse, but it’s not, it’s not, it’s not the highlight of the story to me. We have no doubt says, I would like to hear Robert’s thoughts on punishment, modifiers, whether it’s gangs or hate crimes, the threshold seems low. It punishes for potentially unrelated activities or thoughts. Um, so yeah, I mean, I’m a criminal defense attorney. I think you can probably guess my position on sentence enhancement modifiers. I, I don’t like them. Right. I think that they are, um, overly punitive. You know, I think that this is stuff that politicians think sounds good.

And it does sound good if you’re in a red district or you’re in a high crime district, you know, uh, we, we heard a lot about this in the 1994 crime bill and the proceeding bills where they talk about the three strikes rules, you know, boom, boom, boom, mandatory sentencing in Arizona. We have mandatory sentencing, right? So you have these three categories of offenses category one, two, and three. If you’ve got a prior felony, you move up, you move up in categories until you get to the third category. And once you’re in that category, then you can sort of look at this chart and you’ve got a range of penalties. You’ve got a presumptive term, you’ve got a minimum term, which is what the defense wants. You’ve got a maximum term, which is what the prosecutor wants. And then on either side of those, you’ve got aggravating. So it goes presumptive maximum aggravating. Then you’ve got presumptive minimum mitigating, and there are some statutory rules in there on how you can move your, your result one direction or the other.

And I’ve seen some pretty, what I would call totally unjustified sentences

Are statutorily required, mandatory for people just because of a couple of a couple of fact patterns hit a couple criteria, boom, boom, boom. It hits that aggravated criteria, but it’s not an aggravated case, right? This is somebody who is a good person. Somebody who doesn’t deserve that at all, but because it falls within that category, statutorily speaking, the judge has no discretion to move outside of that box. It’s really disturbing. And it happens all over this country because of that. We have Nabar lush. Lesher says yo, a bit off topic, but I don’t know if you have heard of this case Marsh versus Alabama 1946, but if not, you should check it out. Let us know if you think it could work against big tech on the next episode. I think it’s a pretty good argument. Thanks. A 1946 case against big tech. My curiosity is peaked.

So I will, um, I’ll take a look at that. Miss faith. Can you write that one down for me? Thank you. All right. We’ve got Jack Elia says if they prevent Trump from running again, he will become more powerful as both a martyr and a martyr with a bank account and allies to go after the seats. Yeah. So I’ve sort of made that same point. You know, if Donald Trump is, um, is, is not allowed to run again, I think he’s going to be even more, you know, more vocal. Well, I don’t know what he’s going to do, to be honest. I think a lot of people feel like he’s that way already. All right. Smother says pure, purely speculation. What if Trump is impeached your thoughts on what that would mean? So I would be very curious to see if Donald Trump would take this up any, uh, any further litigation, right?

Basically appeal this to the Supreme court is what I would, what is what I would expect him to do if he is ultimately convicted. I don’t know what the precedent is for that. Right. What would, where would he take this over to the Supreme court? He would say it was an unconstitutional proceeding. I’m going to be appealing. It, this is the court. They get to rule on how this happened. Right? The chief justice wasn’t even presiding over this thing. So would they invalidate the conviction? Would they overturn it? Would they abstain from it? Would they uphold it? I don’t know if he’s convicted. I think that’s what would happen. And truthfully, if I had to extend that further, um, I would probably say that’s the impeachment would not stand. I think that the Supreme court would come back and say, no, it was unconstitutional shouldn’t have happened. And they would overturn it. Imagine that that’s also the more interesting story rather than them refusing to grant, search your worry or to not hear it be way more interesting. What if Donald Trump is convicted appeals to the Supreme court? They overturned the conviction. He runs again in 2024. Could you imagine? All right, we got a Rob. So are you going to hire legal paraprofessionals when they get licensed here in Arizona? How do you feel about the new gig

Work? Oh,

Oh, SOC this is, uh, this is, uh, kind of in the weeds question. I appreciate it. But a lot of people probably don’t know what you’re talking about. Arizona recently passed a new rule that says you can have these things called legal paraprofessionals and they can actually sort of do some things that a lawyer can do. It’s part of this movement now to have more people have access to legal services, right. Instead of hiring an attorney and whatever it costs, you can go hire a legal paraprofessional for a much lower rate and a legal paraprofessional. I think they just have to get certified. You know, it’s a small course, whatever that looks like. Uh, in other words, they don’t have to go to three years of law school. They don’t have to take the bar exam and get certified and all that

Stuff. They just have

A much lower threshold. So I’m not, I’m not opposed to it at all. You know, I’m, I’m sort of,

Uh, I’m sort of

Opposite of a lot of other attorneys. I think a lot of attorneys in this country think that they are the gatekeeper of knowledge, right? They’ve got all this information in their head. I’m so smart. I’ve been practicing for 20 years. Look at me, I know everything. And if you want access to that information, you got to pay for it. You got to pay good money for that. And I think that worked, you know, in the eighties, nineties, uh, before the internet. And I think there are still a lot in two thousands, even, even the 2000 tens, you know, there are a lot of attorneys out there who still act as a gatekeeper. They don’t want to give you information unless you pay him for it. And I think that’s just kind of an old model. I don’t think that works. I mean, it still works. Obviously a lot of attorneys are making a lot of money that way, but I’m just sort of on the opposite side of that, I think that the best way that we can help improve our criminal system, our entire society as it relates to law

Is to just give the value

First. Or I’ve got probably 450 videos on this channel before we started this show where I’m just talking about the law, right? The very nuts and bolts of the law. Very bland, not interesting. If you go check out our new Arizona law channel, uh, you’re going to see that, right. It’s not political commentary. It’s not a show. It’s not current events. It’s just information about how the law works and it’s out there for free. I’m not trying to make you pay for me to answer your question. In fact, many of those videos I get emails about from people saying, Hey, thanks so much. I’m sorry. I didn’t have to hire you, but thanks for helping me with my case anyways. And my response is always happy to help. Glad you didn’t need us, uh, at some point in the future, if you do, we’ll be here, right? And so you build that connection. You build that relationship. So it’s kind of like providing value first, but a lot of attorneys don’t like that concept, you know, they’re really sort of up in arms about this illegal paraprofessionals. They’re going to come undercut us on price and they’re going to come do this and they’re gonna, they’re gonna, you know, shake the Apple cart and it’s not going to be good. And I’m thinking, eh,

Well, I’ve already been

Giving away free information. Um, I’m putting together a course right now based on my book beginning to winning, right? So I’ve got a whole nine step framework that I basically it’s it’s for free. If you want it, you can get it on our local channel. I’m trying to give information out so people can, can know how to process some of this stuff themselves, rather than having to hire an attorney to do it. Now, there are many situations where you absolutely have to have an attorney. I, I, in fact, I would recommend it in almost every case, but I just know that most people can’t do that. They just can’t afford it. And so I’m not going to, um, I’m not going to leave them out to dry. If I can help it, they can a copy of my book. It’s free PDF over on locals.

Uh, I’m going to put together a course based on the book right now that I’m working on. And so that’s going to be coming out hopefully this quarter. And we’re probably going to give that away for free too. Right? Want to help as many people as we can. So we’re already operating in that space, the legal paraprofessionals. I don’t have any problems with that at all. I mean, if they do a good job, as long as clients aren’t getting underserved, if more people are getting better results, if more people have access to good representation, I don’t care. Who does it? Uh, so a good question though. Oh, SOC we have no doubt says, please share your thoughts on punishment, modifiers for how gang membership and hate crimes. I think I answered that question. No.

Yeah. I think I answered that one. We have Jack Elia says I maintain that only incitement insurrection is the malice and anti-American agenda of the left. Yeah. Good point there Jack Elia, we have Jeremy and Katrina says, how can the president be charged with inciting an insurrection? If the claimed insurrection failed? Shouldn’t the claim be inciting an intended insurrection. I think you could. Uh, yeah, I think you could make that argument, right? I mean, the, the insurrection was not successful at all. Like they were basically out of the building and they were back to work within four hours or so. So yeah, it wasn’t attempted insurrection still would be a misdemeanor. So I still think they can move it forward. So kind of splitting hairs on that, but I understand your point. It was not a successful insurrection. The follow-up question would be okay, well, if it was a successful insurrection, then they wouldn’t be prosecuted, right?

Cause they would be in control of the government and presumably the department of justice. So they wouldn’t be prosecuting themselves for seizing control of the government. We have, see the veil says, can impeachment be used against Biden on the following, opening the border with no due inspection upon immigrants per Biden’s orders to knowing the cartel’s plan to invade the USA with drugs, sex slaves, who were miners and rape trees, being the evidence I’ve not heard of a rape tree, knowing they run guns of various makes into the USA. Does this not qualify as disruption of government and threatening the lives of Americans as national security? Maybe I’m off the Mark. I mean, look you could, my opinion is the answer is no, right. I mean, I don’t think Trump should be impeached under this standard. I don’t think that that Biden shouldn’t be impeached. I’ve drafted articles for Kamala and Chuck.

Cause it’s a joke. It’s ridiculous. The standard is so low that it’s basically encompasses virtually anything by their own words. I’m not making it up. Okay. I’m not trying to be ridiculous just for the sake of being ridiculous. They wrote it and we’re just taking their standards and applying it. So could you make the argument against Biden? Yeah, you could. I don’t even think you have to go that far just to find a situation where Biden said something and somebody did something bad as a result of it or the government was interfered with as a result of it and yeah,

Same standard. Don’t even have to prove anything. Well, we’ll see.

See what they unveiled tomorrow. But yeah. You know, in this case, generally, the answer is no right. It’s not impeachable. And these are just policy decisions. You shouldn’t be impeaching people for policy decisions. You shouldn’t be impeaching people for making political statements for arguing over legitimate political issues. If you’re upset about an election that you think was stolen from you, are you not supposed to?

So talk about it. You just want him to go,

Well, the selection was stolen, but I can’t talk about it because that might incite insurrection. So therefore I’m just going to sit on my hands along with 70 other million Americans who also have some questions about the regularity of the election. And we’re not going to talk about it because we can’t, Hey, you have to talk about those things. Now you can disagree with how he talked about them, but you got to talk about them. And if every single political statement that you make, that’s challenging, anything is now incitement of something that’s a bizarre country to live in. It’s certainly not something that is conducive to, uh, progress and democracy. We have Jack Elia says, have, has there been any scientific studies to demonstrate that more or less justice is achieved through mandatory sentencing? Good question, Jack a lie. You know, I don’t know the answer to that. I would think that just sort of off the top of my head, that the answer is probably no, it probably does vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. So I’m not sure how, how well a study would be responsive to that. But you know, some, some like in Arizona, for example, you know, if you would get a DUI and you’re convicted

The jail, it’s in the law, California.

No. Right. Your first offense, you don’t have to go to jail. You go to probation, takes an alcohol classes and you’re good to go. So, you know, Arizona has mandatory version of DUI sentence in California. Doesn’t so much. And so, you know, you’ve got two huge, hugely different populations with different penalties. And so to have a study that identifies one way or the other, I don’t know. I would tell you this though, you know, people still commit DUIs. People still are using drugs, right? You can punish the hell out of people. Uh, people are still gonna break the law. So I’m not sure that increasing punishment is always the answer. And that has been the trend in our criminal justice laws and rules

For a long time, 30 years, really?

I mean, we’re just now just started last year as a result of George floored, Brianna Taylor, people are now starting to go, Hey, maybe we should rethink some of this stuff. But up until that time, it’s just been the same thing. Harsher laws, more severity because the politicians don’t know what to talk about. They don’t know how to talk about anything else. They just defer to what they’re pre-programmed to say, Oh, tough on crime. I’m tough on crime. The police unions love me. The police loved me. The firefighters love it.

Hey, look at this. So

Penalties get harsher and there is no justice hack consulting says, I argue that we need peace in order for justice to become abundant. But then again, how can we have peace if we have no principles to co-exist on, it’s a deep question there hack. So I think, you know, I think this is a point that guys like Ben Shapiro make all the time politics is downstream

Of culture, right?

You got to have culture before you’re going to have a functioning political system. Now I don’t necessarily agree with that. You know, culture I think is very important. And I do think, I sort of believe in the Edmund Burke concept of a social fabric and we all have to have certain ideals and we all got to think a certain way. I mean, not think a certain way, but I would say be invested in certain fundamental principles, right? If you are a democratic Republic and you, and you have half the country that doesn’t believe in that stuff, well, you’re not going to be functioning very well as a democratic Republic. It’s not going to work out for you too well. So you got to have some alignment in certain areas. And if it does maybe feel like

That’s diverging apart a little bit

More now than it has. Uh, previous years in my life, Chris Wiseman says, how do you feel about three strikes or mandatory sentencing for small class of violent felonies rape murder kidnapping? Or is it just too slippery of a slope also re Marsh versus Alabama check your tips box sent an analysis a while ago.

All right. So Chris is on it. Chris, what a guy. Thank you.

Before that, Chris, I will take a look at that face. Don’t write that down. All right. Cause Chris already sent it. All right. So how do I feel about three strikes or mandatory sentencing for small class of violent felonies? So yeah, most of those, you don’t need any, you don’t need three strikes for those, right? If you’re convicted of rape, I mean, it’s just automatically a very high threshold, which I think is justified, right? I mean it, if they can prove their case and the rape, the rape cases are not as cut and dry as many people think, you know, there’s, there’s a lot that goes into those cases. But that being said, you know, th the crimes against children, um, you know, murder, kidnapping, those types of things. Yeah. The, the penalty, you don’t need three strikes for

Those, you get one strike, one strike

You’re out. The penalties are so severe child pornography, you know, it’s like 10 years of photo. And in many places you got five photos, 50 years, that’s it? Right? That’s it. So it’s, you know, I think those are more justified. The problems, my, my bigger issues with the three strikes rules are, you know, alcohol crimes and drug crimes. Those people are addicted. They’re not bad people. They’ve got an addiction problem, throwing them in prison for two and a half years is not going to solve that. It’s going to make it worse. There are plenty of drugs in prison when they get out, they’re going to be a bigger detriment to society. They’re going to be harmful to themselves. It’s not good. So for, you know, that’s kind of where I would, I would,

Uh, divest or diverge, certainly

Classes of crimes, I think should absolutely not be three strikes. We should have other

Punishment, quote, you know, measures

That are focused more on rehabilitation and restoration rather than pain and punishment. We have cattle. Caregiver says if the scenario about Trump being impeached and then appealing to the Supreme court happened in the Supreme court, overturned, the impeachment would mean a lot of things have changed since the Texas

Mainly Roberts.

So I think you’re talking about the Texas lawsuit. Yeah. You know, I think that the reason the Supreme court did not want to get involved in the underlying election litigation is because it was really kind a political question as far as they can. They can tell when courts are asked to weigh in, on political issues, they really like to punt those cases, they say, well, it’s a political question. Go deal with that in Congress, go deal with that at the ballot box, that’s not our role. And judge Roberts is somebody who wants to be very,

Very cautious and cognizant

Of the courts reputation. He does not want to get out there and jeopardize the court’s credibility because if the courts credibility is jeopardized, they lose their legitimacy. And the court’s legitimacy is the only real source of their power. So it sort of protects that at all costs to his credit. And I got a lot of disagreements with John Roberts, but I think that he is a brilliant man and he has the sanctity of the court first and foremost, even if I disagree with that. So I appreciate his duty to that. Um, but, but it would be different. The Texas

Election lawsuit is one that was highly political. This one,

One would also be highly political if Trump was trying to overturn his impeachment conviction, but it’s addressing a constitutional issue of law that I think is a matter of first impression that the court has not

Already ruled on. So they might

Be more inclined to hear it. I don’t think it’s a likely scenario. I think Trump just doesn’t get convicted. Period. We have another one from Jen. McClellan says, uh, what’s up Robert faith, joy, Mav Fox, and all the rest of you. I work from home and rarely speak to coworkers. I choose your outlet to learn about the law and have some water cooler time. Thanks. Chosen coworkers. Brilliant peeps. Thanks Jen. McClellan. That’s a very nice comment. We’re glad that you’re here and we’re glad that you’re hanging out with us because I think this is a good spot to have good conversation. I learned a lot. I mean, you know, literally these questions get me thinking, uh, you know, obviously people like Chris are just throwing out knowledge in front of, in front of all of us. So it’s kind of a cool thing that has developed, and I’m very grateful for all of you for making it a reality. And our last one other day is from hack. Consulting says people who are quote tough on crime should not be solving the crime issue, give us better policies and enforcement methods. Instead of planning to throw the book at every druggie that gets arrested, just because they quote

Broke the law here, here,

Hack consulting. I think we have a lot of politicians who don’t know anything about criminal justice and they’re all just pontificating. They’re all doing what sounds good. And you know, a lot of people in this,

The country, unfortunately, you know, they, they sort of

Like to make themselves feel good by watching how bad other people are. And everything’s a lot of people live in judgment. A lot of people are just kind of walking around the world, going, Oh God, look at her hair. Look at her shorts. Look at that car. How, what an idiot? Why is he doing that? Right? All the time, their minds are just sort of spiraling that way. And so when they see articles about somebody got arrested or like, they like to go on the mugshots website and go, Oh God, look at these dregs of society. What a bunch of disgusting people then that’s just something that makes them feel better about themselves. And so you have politicians who are always out there criminalizing, uh, you know, talking about how, how awful certain people are and other people go, yeah, you know, my life is pretty miserable, but at least I’m not that guy.

At least I’m not that person. And so they just get on board and I, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to. So I’ve never broken a law. And I go, yeah, you have, you just broke the law right here. I want you to do that. And that’s a crime and that’s a crime and we drove in your car. That’s a crime. Right. And you know, people just like to have these sort of, uh, differences as it relates to justice. And my only position on this is look a lot of good. There are a lot of good people who are in that situation, just because you have not been in that situation, doesn’t mean that you will never be in that situation. And if you are, I do hope that you have good representation and you get through it. Okay. Because many people do not.

And I want, I want people to be treated well treated with justice and ideally come out the other side, better off. We have, it looks like we’ve got a couple more that came in late. We have a Jack Elias says, Robert, do courts still offer dice sulfur M to alcoholics? Or do they assign it for the year necessary for the person to begin real adjustment had a family friend commit suicide over alcoholism. Sorry to hear that at the end of a three month period on di sulfur him because he didn’t manage to get free of it. So I don’t know what I solve for him is if you’re thinking about, um, what they’re, there’s a, what’s it called Al uh, Al abuse and abuse and abuse is what I’m thinking of. Is that the, is that the generic name for that? And to abuse alcohol abuse and abuse, one of those drugs?

Uh, you know, no, I haven’t seen that in, in Arizona. You know, if it’s the same drug that I think he’s talking about, there is a drug that you take that makes you violently ill. If you consume alcohol, basically, uh, even if you have like hand sanitizer on, you know, if you ingest alcohol through your body, through pores, if you drink it, you can become violently ill. Um, I’ve never taken it or tried it, but I’ve heard of other people who have, and, uh, it’s not a good experience. And so the idea is you take that so that if you do drink, you sort of disconnect. You disassociate yourself from the good feeling of alcohol. You sort of like Pavlov’s dogs, right? Every time the bell rings, you start salivating for the food. Well, if you take this particular drug, you get that same craving for alcohol, but you ingest it.

Now you get physically violently ill. So the bells ringing, but you’re not salivating. You’re thinking of vomiting. And so the alcohol suddenly doesn’t feel as attractive to you. And so, you know, I’m not sure specifically what, you’re, what you’re referencing there. Jack. I’ve not seen that in my practice, but it doesn’t mean that those, those types of deals aren’t being negotiated. Another one from Osaka. Rob does the three strike rule have to be the exact same crime to apply in Arizona. No. So it can be a number of different felonies. So let’s say for example, uh, you have a aggravated DUI, right? It’s your third DUI. You’ve got an alcohol problem. Boom. You get a felony conviction for alcohol strike one. Now you come back, you’ve got a drug problem. Well, it’s a felony drug problem. Strike two. You get another felony drug problem that strike three.

Now you’re going to prison for, I don’t know, a decade probably depending on what your charges are. So it doesn’t have to be the same. You could have multiple different charges as long as there are different dates of offense and they’re all felonies. It’s just going to move you forward. In that sentencing chart. Jason Segal says couldn’t a legitimate charge of negligence. Be brought against the individuals who failed to order a substantial number of police to protect the capital on January 6th. The potential for trouble was known in advance. And what about the charges against the police themselves for letting the quote mob into the building? Yeah. Jason, and that’s sort of why I put negligence in there on the flow chart. Right? I think that that’s a pretty pertinent question to be asking right now. Now I don’t know what the answer is because I don’t think we’ve seen any investigations from the people who are responsible for the security that day. My understanding is the Capitol Hill police are still investigating. I think the FBI is still

Investigating. I would like to hear from

The Sergeant of arms for both, both the house and the Senate, uh, I would like to hear from the former chief of police for the capital Hill police who resigned Steven’s son, he’s out there. And there’s a lot of information here, right. But we’re asking the government to investigate themselves and I’m not particularly optimistic that they are going to give us what we’re asking for. So we’ll see where that goes. And that was the last question of the day. So want to remind you that we have sort of transitioned our home base over to locals.com and it’s a great platform because we have a lot of, and a lot of good stuff that I’m gonna tell you about over there, but we’re sort of, we’re sort of, you know, doing the soft disconnect from some of the mainstream platforms that have less freedom for us to come out here and speak our mind.

As we know, uh, you know, we’re, we’re seeing sort of the narrowing of commentary from around the internet, not just on this channel, but other channels as well. And so locals is kind of one of those experiments where we’re trying to get some people to, you know, to, to join a new platform. One that has a strong dedication to free speech. And it’s also giving us a little bit of freedom. You know, if we don’t have to worry about monetization and demonetization or worry about certain chat platforms canceling us or, you know, or terminating us temporarily banning us of these different platforms, if we can operate in a safe zone, then that’s pretty cool. We can actually even have more free conversations and, and maybe talk about some things that might be too provocative on some of the more mainstream channels. And that’s what we’re doing over at locals.

So I want to invite you to go on over there. It’s watching the watchers.locals.com. We are going to be posting the slides over there. And I want to thank the people who are supporting us there because without you, it would not be possible, right? W w we are sort of asking you to help us build this different pillar. And, uh, these people are, are, are helping. Uh, so let’s take a look. We’ve got Jason Seagal saw him today. Sarah Smothers was also, uh, chime in. We have a Hain two Oh two Cody bear one. We got sliding edge. My Fox is always, always, always in faith. Joy. Thank you for your help. Uh, we had some, a lot of new people sign up. So we had CA uh, yesterday, uh, Katz 59 was already subscribed. Danny girl, we have Angley. We got one drop. And then we had some newbies join in.

We got, uh, we saw X Andrew today. What’s up? XN drew. We, uh, okay. So who, who joined a lot of people? S dog three, two, two, the underscore Marriner. We got Cavour. We got Barbie and we’ve got Dragos. Dragos. We have hot dog, fixer Lana, 12 B. Can’t be in the house. Mapmaker maker. Jenny joined up. We got [inaudible] good to see you snuck gums. We got Jay proper. We have echo house. We have dark hour, 1992. Abby, Lou Jack. We have, I’m a lemon. I’m a lemon. We got mother Joe who joined up. I think I might know who that is. We have Yulia Belarus. We got Larry 1944. We got D nice Lou Walker. See the veil joined up, saw him around here today. We got get some skates. We got Katie’s. We got Bernadette. See, we have ward working medic in the house.

We got Kenny [inaudible]. We have our, our law group in the house. Oh my goodness. Our, our law group. I don’t think that’s actually the RNR law group, but somebody snagged a good username. We have S S S F Bob must be from San Francisco. We got no doubt in the house. I love them growing up. We have Joe’s Joe’s now Blake Brown. We got dangerous freedom. We got one 11 Patriot in the house. And then we got mad max. Oh seven. And lastly, but not leastly. Fish are friends and I don’t have a good fish tank right now, but I used to have a beautiful fish tank, but it’s a lot of maintenance. Now it’s over at the Eric’s house, which is a, it’s a good little nonprofit organization. So I want to thank everybody for your support over on locals. What’s going on over there.

Well, if you want to head over there to watching the watchers.locals.com, you can get a copy of all this stuff. Of course, my free book is over there. Beginning to winning. I talked a little bit about that today. You can download a PDF if you’d like, you can also get a copy of the slides which are available for download, get a copy of the impeachment documents. We’re not going to keep talking about the impeachment, of course, after the impeachment. So we’re going to get rid of that. As soon as the impeachment party is over and replace it with something else, I’m sure, but get a copy while it’s hot. You can also get a copy of the existence systems, which is a little personal productivity tool that I use. I made a video on January 4th. You can take a look at that, share links in conversation over there.

But the main reason of course is great people. A lot of awesome people over there, and we want you to be there. So go check it out. Watching the watchers.locals.com. One other reminder to subscribe. If you’re not already subscribed, here we go live at this time. Every day of the week, every weekday, we want you to be a part of that, lastly, but not leastly. I am a criminal defense attorney here at the RNR law group. We’re in Scottsdale. We help good people charged with crimes, find safety, clarity, and hope in their cases and in their futures. We love to help good people. We help, uh, with current open, active criminal cases, anywhere in the state of Arizona, we also help with old closed cases. We can clear a record up so you can restore your right to vote, restore your right to possess a firearm, become a full citizen.

Again, we help with mugshot removals. We can clear up old warrants. We do a lot of stuff. We’re pretty good at it. We’re pretty passionate about it. So if you happen to know anybody who needed help in any one of those areas, give our office a call. We offer free case evaluations. We would love to speak with you or the people that, you know, make sure you leave in a better position than when you contacted us. So, uh, that’s it for me, my friends. I want to thank everybody once again for being here, joining us as this impeachment party goes on. Everybody have a wonderful night sleep very well. I will see you tomorrow. Same time, same place back here. 5:00 PM Arizona time, which is 5:00 PM. Mountain 4:00 PM in California on the West coast, 6:00 PM, central Texas time, 7:00 PM. For those of you on the East coast and for that Florida man, everybody sleep well. Have a wonderful evening. See you right back here.

Bye-bye.