"None of the Above" with Amy and Jim 1/31/20, Impeachment & More
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Yeah, we're streaming live on YouTube right now. Yeah, I got a notice. Yeah. Okay. So we are on. And then the question is, are we on where people expect us to be on? And that is the thing that I need to fix right now. Right. So that people can find us.

Yeah, so there I've went ahead and muted the YouTube delay and we are on. Okay, this is made a lot easier now. So let me go back to the URL that people expect and tell them where we are. And okay, let's see. They're live at and let them know. Sorry to those of you who have been hanging on live.

And I'll have to delete all of those. I have a feeling actually, I think that there have been a few mistakes there. So we are live on YouTube now and we will wait for people to join us over here. Yes, we're live on YouTube. We have Gail over there in the chat room confirming that. So hi Gail. Marius, okay, sorry to those of you who have tried to join us. I, you know, why do I do this, Jim? Okay, let me tell you what happened. So yesterday,

I put together our little test using the old creator classic platform, whatever, which I know exactly how to use and it's great. So then after we were done, I put together our new show and it seemed to work fine using their new beta updated, supposedly new and improved better,

Forget it. It's not. So anyway, it didn't work. And so now here we are. We are starting late. We're starting almost 15 minutes late.

James, can you forgive me? Better late than never. Of course. Nothing to forgive. Technical glitch. Yeah. So this is none of the above. And I guess I'm going to keep using Creator Classic to set it up next time so we won't have any more glitches. I'm sorry about that. Please forgive me. It's been about four months since we have been on. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Four months. Four months.

I hope you're feeling better. Yeah, I am feeling better. And if you go over to the program notes at don'tletitgo.com. Gosh, I'm not going to try to give a huge long...

I'll give a synopsis, it'll be brief of what's been going on with me. It turns out that I had some combination of like a very not sexy digestive condition combined with mold in an apartment where I was living with. And I wound up sick and doctors weren't really figuring out what was going on and they kept prescribing me antibiotics which made the digestive component of it even worse.

And so I have been sick off and on for a very long time and then trying to figure it out. Finally, bless his soul, a doctor at UCI, UC Irvine in Orange County, you know, told me, by the way, this could have to do with more of your digestion, not your respiratory tract, which is...

you know, an interesting thing to learn that it took, I don't know how many doctors to even get to that. And then finally from there, it's been trying to figure out how to make myself better overall. But I have been

antibiotic free. I have been, I was on actually asthma inhaler a bit and I haven't used that for months. So I am doing so much better, but that's been part of the reason why I haven't been on. I wanted to do a show with your own a couple of times and then scheduling wise, it didn't work out because I had some stuff going on with my other project that we'll talk about in a minute. But the thing

I want to tell you guys and people who are interested in getting in a deep dive of this, maybe we'll do it in the future. I might even try to interview the author of the book that I've linked to in the program notes at don't let it go.com. But, you know, there's so many people, especially in my sort of philosophical bubble that,

who are into either the paleo kind of diet, or now it's carnivore, people are going really hardcore and just eating all carnivore and stuff. There is another facet to this whole thing, which actually turns out, I think, to be most, probably most important overall, I'm going to argue, but at least most important for my health condition, this I know,

And it is discussed in this book called Fast Track Diet. A guy named Norm Robillard is a PhD researcher. He did research in this area. And the focus that he has, which is consistent, I believe, with

Dr. Amy Athey: Paleo idea and then also it's consistent with the carnivore diet for sure is he looks at something called fermentation potential of food. In other words, ease of digestibility of food. Dr. Amy Athey: And so when people for various reasons, either have low stomach acid or other things that are interfering with their ability to digest food properly. You have all kinds of bizarre horrible symptoms.

And he, you know, breaks it down in terms of the different types of carbohydrates and why people have different troubles with them and what kind of tests you can do to find out. First of all, if you have kind of bacteria in the wrong place in your digestive tract, which can be caused by antibiotics and other things. If you have trouble breaking down certain types of carbohydrates, how to test for those things with the breath test. I mean, it's crazy stuff.

And I didn't even know this facet, this component and learning about it has helped me tremendously. I'm still kind of stumbling because I haven't given up in the sense of, I'm not going to eat some variety of foods, at least with vegetables, at least maybe some fruits as well. I haven't gone full carnivore, but apparently if you go full carnivore,

That is something that gets rid of all the fermentable carbs. Right. The sugar is gone, right? Yes. And so that's the reason I think that a lot of people get results in terms of health conditions and digestion and stuff improving on the carnivore diet because you're starving either the bad bacteria or the bacteria that are overgrown in the wrong place or whatever. You are starving those suckers, right? Right. And so you're going to have an improvement in symptoms with that.

sort of protocol, but at the same time, is it required? And then the other thing is if your goal is to repopulate the good bacteria and sort of help the bacteria who the good ones kind of get their market share back or something, if that's what we want to call it, right? Then you need to eat certain kinds of carbs

the prebiotic carbs and things like that in order to do that. And so do you want to give up on that entirely and go full carnivore? So, so far I haven't, but even this week I had a little glitch because I was still thinking that I could eat certain kinds of dairy and

and be okay. And it turns out I have to be really strict and maybe only have the very highest fat dairy or only cream. Well, well, and not even that certain kinds of cheese. Right. So I need to gain some weight back. Right. Because of all this horribleness. And I thought, okay, I'm going to go to in and out.

And I'm going to have like a protein style double double every day until I gain this weight back. Right. Right. And then it turns out the damn American cheese on the double double is not my friend. And if you look on a, yeah, if you look on a chart for what they call lactose percentage or lactose content of various types of dairy products, American cheese can be up to 14% lactose if it's pasteurized, which is,

which, you know, I don't know, but whatever. I had a setback this week just because of that. So-

It's ridiculous. And so anyway, like I said, I'm on the right track now. And then the question will be, you know, how much can I put these in? Could you need digestive enzymes to help you out at a certain point? This is a whole world that I didn't know about before. So fast track diet, I've got the link at don't let it go.com. And the program notes for people who are interested in this.

There's a number of digestive disorders that can be improved by taking this into account. He's got an app and everything as well. So check that out. Fascinating. Yeah. So how about you health wise? Are you you're doing good? Yeah, I am right now. I'm doing well. Or, you know, I just in terms of what you were saying, I had a bout with diverticulitis over the summer. And I have to admit, I

uh, that I did not, I dropped the protocol that they, you know, let me out on normally with diverticulitis, they'll get you back onto the first, give you a bunch of antibiotics, three different antibiotics, really powerful ones. Yeah. And then they'll tell you to reintroduce fiber into your diet slowly. Uh, and I,

I have a friend who's an MD, some other friends on Facebook, they recommended sort of the keto response to diverticulitis this time. And so I stopped taking the antibiotics pretty quickly after leaving the hospital against medical advice. And I did not go for a slow introduction of fiber this time. I stuck.

with fatty protein rich foods, sort of a soft diet. And it worked magnificently. It worked much better than years ago when I had diverticulitis and I went by the medical protocol, which kept my intestines just in distress and just not happy.

This time went through it much more smoothly because those antibiotics always do give me a hard time because they kill all the good bacteria. Yeah, they kill the good stuff. Yeah, exactly. And then you have to, like you say, to reintroduce those good bacteria sometimes involves some carbohydrates. Yeah.

Yeah. So take, taking product probiotics, and then also eating some of the right kinds of carbohydrates, but not too many, because if you have too many, it's going to distress your system because you're not geared up. So I, you know, I always think of in, uh, you know, Rand's philosophy that you and I both have done some study. I see your big image of your book in the background there, Jim, the passion of Ayn Rand's critics. Uh, but she has this useful concept

called the spiral theory of knowledge, where she talks about the fact that, you know, you will kind of come back to something and revisit a topic again and learn a little bit more about it and then go on and on. And I apply the spiral in so many areas.

And so I'm thinking that it's a, it's true also about diet when you're trying to kind of reintroduce and get your body back up to speed. Maybe you have to be kind to it at first and go nearly strict carnivore, but if you're just going to stay there, then you're not going to kind of repopulate and be able to again, digest a wide variety of foods. But then when you're going to reintroduce,

do things kind of slowly. And there are better ways of doing it. I mean, for example, there's, you know, make sure it's like sugar-free yogurt. When you do use yogurt, now there will be lactose and it will be really good. Actually, this is the thing about yogurt, right? So if you have the right kind of yogurt, there is so much lactase in the fermentation process that it eats up the lactose. Right, right. And if it doesn't have sugar added into it,

If it's sugar-free yogurt, it's mostly a good thing. Just eat plain. Plain Greek yogurt is the very best. As your sugar content goes down in your diet, sugar-free high-fat foods taste better and better. I've noticed that the sugar-free yogurt, for example, tastes a whole lot better when you don't eat a lot of sugar in your diet. No, and things just end up tasting too sweet for you after a while. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, that's...

Okay. But I am feeling better. Well, good. Okay. So I actually think probably you would also be helped by this. So check out his book because I, you know, just for instance, so, you know, just to give you one snippet of something that I learned yesterday, reading the book and I didn't even know before his argument is that this fermentation process in your gut causes all sorts of horrible symptoms, heartburn among them. Right. And, and,

you know, he was saying, well, if you doubt that there could be enough pressure created by a fermentation process in your gut to like push things up to create heartburn, right? He says that he, and he gives a link, you know, telling you, so this is all citation based, evidence-based and everything that there have been documented cases of explosions during intestinal surgery because of the amount of gas that's there.

Whoa, whoa, that's a disturbing and disquieting sort of image. So if that isn't enough to intrigue you to check out this book, that maybe this guy is onto something, then yeah, check it out. But you know, I'm a person who has been pretty much blessed most of my life, being able to eat this variety of whatever I wanted. And I drank tons of milk as a kid.

But it's just the case that as we get older, things can change for various reasons. And one of the reasons, as you said, is taking too many antibiotics. Right. Yeah. So that's it. Enough on that. So my health, your health. We're good on our health. And why don't we then go on to the stuff that will distract us from any of that in a very good way. And it's the projects that we've been up to. So I've got next in the program notes that don't let it go dot com a link to

to Center for the Legalization of Privacy. And those of you who either haven't been following me that closely or not that long don't really know about this, but this has been kind of on the back burner for me for a long time. And then it came to the forefront this last year in 2019. I decided I'm going to go ahead and make this an actual legal entity, an official legal entity, the Center for the Legalization of Privacy. I've been, you know, I had legalizedprivacy.org for a long time, but

finally made it an official entity and in part so that we could file an amicus brief

in United States versus Facebook. And United States versus Facebook is the FTC going after Facebook for supposed violations of user privacy. That's what it's about. And what I have to offer that is unique in this sort of case is a theory that I think is helpful

in addition to a trend that's already been happening in the law. And there's a trend that already was kind of started with the Snowden revelations in 2013, but then in terms of Supreme Court precedent was showing some sort of effect in 2018. And it's this, in the law ever since the 1970s,

This is what has been the case. They have said that if you share information with what is called a third party, so if you share information with Facebook, if you share information with YouTube that we're on now, if you share information with Twitter, if you share information with your bank, if you share information with your cell phone provider, if you share information with anybody,

then the law has been saying that the government can obtain that information from Facebook, the bank, whoever, without a warrant. That means there's no probable cause, no particularized suspicion about you being guilty of any crime. Nonetheless, the government can grab it.

The only thing that can protect your information in that context, because there's no Fourth Amendment protection, according to this precedent that's been there for decades, the only thing that can protect you is a statute. So, for instance, in email, they've had something called the Stored Communications Act.

And, you know, email and then Facebook is arguing that it also applies to communications on Facebook as well. But the Stored Communications Act will say that if there are communications that have been stored

for less than a certain period of time, less than 180 days, then yes, they still would have to maybe get a warrant. But if it's been stored for more than 180 days, then they could get it with just a subpoena. Right. And so you don't have to have probable cause or particular suspicion. Now, what is this, though? This is a statute and it applies only to the content of communications.

So even that protection that you get with respect to your communications applies only to the content of the communications itself. It doesn't apply to what you've heard in the news called metadata. And that could be just the length. Who I spoke to, when, how many times I spoke to them. Yeah, how many times, for how long you spoke to them or how many characters were in the text message or whatever it was, right? Right. So there's a lot of personal information that,

Some statute like that doesn't cover. And then you're left to the mercy of whatever judge is sitting in the court that day. Right. Right. OK, so this has been the case for decades. Now that you say, OK, so, Amy, what is it that you have to say about this? It happens to be the case that back in 2012, I thought of the solution to this problem. I thought, you know, I identified where I believe the Supreme Court went wrong in the 1970s.

putting us in this direction. Because in the 1970s, with respect to a phone company and your bank, Yeah, this broad third party doctrine. Yeah, the third party doctrine is what it's called. And that's when the Supreme Court said, if you share information with the phone company or with the bank,

the government can obtain it without a warrant. And that's when we started down this path. So that's what I uniquely have to offer is a theory about this. It's a theory that's rooted in the common law. I'm not going to go into it in detail now if people are interested, but my point is, is that I have a common law based solution to this problem.

In 2018, the Supreme Court itself showed that there are at least limits to the application of this third party doctrine. In 2018, there's a case called United States versus Carpenter, actually Carpenter versus United States. It gets switched, which party is the lead party in the case title. But in any event, they said in that case that

the communication, excuse me, the location data with your cell phone provider, right? Cell phone providers is always getting some communication data about you, but your cell phone provider also collects location data. So right now- - My phone knows where I am at every time. - Exactly. - Do you wanna let people know that you're here? It'll tell me 'cause we know you're here.

Right. We know you're here. And do you want to let people know? And so at least the Supreme Court said that with respect to 127 days worth of this location data, that the government would have to obtain a warrant in order to get it. So they said, OK, there's some limits. And what my concern is with the United States versus Facebook case is.

is that under the guise of protecting us, that's what the FTC thinks that they're doing. They're protecting us from big, bad Facebook and all their privacy practices. I don't take a position on that. And CLP does not take a position on that in the amicus brief at all. All we say is that whatever you say about Facebook, we should not, as part of the enforcement, give government warrantless access to Facebook user data.

And the settlement order that is before the court appears to do that. And so what I did in the brief that I wrote in October is I

show the parts of the settlement order that appear to give this warrantless access. I argue that based on both the precedent in Carpenter and of course where I think it should go, this trend towards limiting the doctrine should go, which is to scale it back to pre-1970s scope,

Both of those show that the government is not entitled to rely on the third party doctrine in order to give itself warrantless access to Facebook user data. Right. Pretending that they're protecting our privacy. Right.

That's what I argued in October in the brief. And so, you know, I had to start up the organization and do this and hire local council so that I could file it in the DC circuit. And that's what I did, even though I was sick and everything, I didn't feel good enough to be on air, but I could sit there and type a brief, you know, in front of a computer. So I did that. And you were able to appear and give testimony on it. No, not there. Not there, but you were still able to talk about it. Well,

Right, right. But where I then appeared was very recently. So very recently, I've been feeling quite a bit better. Yeah. And I took the step that I was a little nervous about, but it worked out fine, was traveling, which I hadn't traveled all this time since I've been sick either, traveled to New Hampshire, even longer flights and everything. So I went to- Because New Hampshire is considering legislation on this? Yeah. So New Hampshire is considering amending their constitution to

in accordance with what I think is, again, the right solution to this third-party doctrine problem. And the solution, again, has to do with scaling back the doctrine to its pre-1970 scope. And in essence, what it does is it says, if we are not criminals, if we are just ordinary people sharing information with criminals,

phone company, bank, anybody else, Facebook now, you know, all the modern ways that we do it. You know, one example I love to use is the grocery store. They have their little discount membership club and you're sharing information about your habits with them, et cetera. All this information that we share all the time without even thinking about it

We're just law abiding citizens. And the contracts that we make with these service providers are perfectly legal contracts. And I'm saying those should be enforced because shouldn't contract govern this matter. I mean, if I want special privacy, I can negotiate for it. If I don't, if I want it, if I want to allow the person that I'm giving the information to, to use it and share it, we'll say with advertisement and marketing people.

That should be a subject for the provider and the person to negotiate privately, contractually. Such as when I go to a doctor, I expect privacy from the doctor or a lawyer. Or with my wife, I have a certain amount of, can't I contract for a specially private relationship? Yes. Yes. And that's what we should be able to do. So when I talk about Center for the Legalization of Privacy,

I actually say we need to legalize privacy and that today privacy is essentially illegal because according to this precedent set in place in the 1970s, we have not been able to make a legal contract with service providers that includes provisions that protect our privacy vis-a-vis government. Suddenly, they're entitled to warrantless access to everything just because we are out there

getting services, goods and services that enhance our lives, that seems very wrong. And as I said, there is a solution in the common law for this. And I've detailed it a number of times. Go to legalized privacy dot org. Also, the most recent way that I did detail it, Jim was talking about that. I had the privilege of speaking before the New Hampshire House Judiciary Committee

and in favor of this proposed constitutional amendment explaining exactly how it is that the common law supports allowing people to make legally enforceable contracts that include provisions to protect their private information and that these contracts should be treated as anything else, person, houses, papers, and effects in the Fourth Amendment.

Right. If it all turns on, and I've never been very comfortable with this as a standard, but if it all turns on a person's reasonable expectations of privacy, as the Supreme Court has said repeatedly, it seems to me that those expectations should govern. That is to say, if I put something into my home or into a safe, or if I say to my lawyer, keep this quiet, the privacy is what I control and what I expect.

Right? Right. And is there any way for the person, the individual to have to demand increased privacy for something? There really ought to be, right? Well, and this is the problem with the whole reasonable expectation of privacy standard, because reasonable means that society is prepared to recognize it as reasonable. And one of the circular arguments. So, and, and

You know, in the 1970s, when Smith versus Miller or Smith and Miller, there are two different cases. So there's Smith versus Maryland and Miller versus United States, the phone and the banking cases respectively. Right. Those cases just involved.

phone numbers that you dial, some metadata with respect to this. And with respect to Miller, certain transactions that were governed by regulations, the government sweeping up all this information about our financial transactions with their regulatory schemes.

And, you know, that's about the most personal data maybe that we had in the 70s and, you know, the cases involve these horrible criminals and so nobody really cared. And it's only now that we realize that.

How ubiquitous, how just commonplace in our lives, sharing information is. There's so many services, goods and services that are available to us that enhance our lives that depend on us sharing information. We'll take YouTube, for example, we're here right here on YouTube. YouTube, by the way, give us better placement for this, you know, for this video because of what I'm about to say in favor of YouTube, right?

So seriously, come on, YouTube, help us out here. Help us out here. Give us better placement for this video. YouTube will, when you go there, suggest the most awesome music videos based on your past watching history. And this is something that can enhance your life. Spotify, Amazon, they all do it, right? Yeah. And so they enhance your life.

But that depends on sharing information with them. It's just one tiny example. But yeah, if you think about it, go through your daily life, all the ways that you share information and they make your life better accordingly. Then why is it that somehow availing yourself of these advances, these improvements in our lives,

is getting you treated like a criminal by the government where they get warrantless access. And when I say treated like a criminal, again, my common law solution to this problem has something to do with that. Basically, they are treating this all like criminals. If you want more details, go to legalizedprivacy.org. Watch the YouTube video that I've got linked to in the program notes at don'tletitgo.com. It is my testimony to the New Hampshire House Judiciary Committee where I explain

the wording of the proposed constitutional amendment, its roots in the common law, and how it's going to prevent us all from being treated as criminals were pre-1970. That's where the Supreme Court went wrong. It's just crazy. I have a conversation with someone, a private conversation with someone in my home or in my car or at a table at Starbucks. That's treated

One way, if I have a conversation over my telephone or with Facebook Messenger, that's treated another way. That doesn't make any sense, whatever, to me. Actually, it's all treated the same way as long as you're your cell phone on you. You know, I'm serious. You know, you will be having a conversation. Seriously. I had this happen, I believe, just yesterday. You'll have a conversation, but your phone is near you.

And, you know, I do iPhone. And I don't know if this is stored anywhere, but I do know this and it's a little unsettling that if you then go into the Safari browser on your iPhone, and you start to Google something related to your conversation.

The exact thing that you are looking for based on your conversation will show up after you type maybe a few characters only and not enough distinguishing characters to have given you that result apart from Siri listening to your conversation. And it showed up yesterday as a Siri suggested result. Wow.

Wow. Oh, wow. Wow. It helped me tremendously, but I was sharing these with our party. Right. No, Holly and I have noticed some creepy things that way. We'll be looking for something and then suddenly we'll get a whole slew of advertisements for related things.

oh yes someone's paying attention to everything we do on our phone that's for sure yes now i believe that yeah i believe that apple is still holding firm on the fact that our phone is encrypted and so if that is kept in my phone and it's just something that is a cool feature of my phone subject to apple encryption i'm

perfectly happy with that. But that's one of the things that I would like to do with the Center for Legalization of Privacy in the appropriate way. I haven't figured out what the appropriate way is yet, but there's a lot of buzz. There's a lot of buzz about politicians wanting to ban encryption to mandate a backdoor to our phones. This is just one of the projects that I would like to do. But as I said, I've got two projects right now that have

heated up in the last few months I've been busy with. One is the United States versus Facebook. And the cool thing in that case is, think about this, and this is pretty rare. I

I file an amicus brief, a friend of the court brief. I'm not a party to this case and I'm one of three amicus briefs that have been filed there, right? And the judge took the unusual step of ordering both the parties, that's the government and Facebook, to respond to all the arguments in all the amicus briefs, which meant they had to confront and respond to mine, which was unique.

The CLP brief was the only brief to raise Fourth Amendment concerns from the FTC Facebook settlement order. So I am really proud of the fact that because I raised the concern, I said it's a concern even in light of the existing precedent from Carpenter, even Carpenter calls into question whether Facebook

Facebook data is similar enough to 127 days worth of cell phone location data in carpet. You know how the legal arguments go, right, Jim? You have to make an analogy. But yeah, I made the analogy that said even under the existing precedent, but if you read the writing on the wall and you see

the way that this is going. For instance, Utah has eliminated the third party doctrine entirely by statute. I think it's a mistake. It goes too far. And in my New Hampshire testimony, I explain why you shouldn't eliminate it across the board. What you should do is you should revert it to the old scope.

Right. Very principled, bright line fashion made possible by the common law. It's there. The answer is there. And be governed by contract. Right. But this is the direction it's going. People are saying this third party doctrine, there's something wrong. We shouldn't all be treated like criminals. Right. And-

Now, of course, if they have probable cause that a crime has been committed, evidence of a crime is there, then they can get a warrant. Right, right. And, you know, and moreover, if they're doing, if they put secret agents into criminal conspiracy crimes,

they'll still be able to do that. And that's what Utah is not going to be allowing under their law. They made a mistake, I think, right? So my solution preserves government's ability to use secret agents in infiltrating criminal schemes, while at the same time, making sure that all of us who aren't the Tony Sopranos of

the world are not treated like criminals. And that's what I think I uniquely have to offer. That's what I deployed in Facebook. And that's what, you know, has now made both Facebook and United States confront

Fourth Amendment arguments. And you can see what their responses are. Again, if you go to legalizedprivacy.org, you can see what Facebook's attorneys and what the government attorneys wrote in response to the Fourth Amendment challenges that I raised.

with respect to this settlement order. Of course, they say I'm crazy, but you see what they say in terms of, especially what the government says in terms of their entitlement to our data. And it might disturb you. So go to legalizedprivacy.org. If you are interested in supporting my work, please do. 99% of what I have done so far in the past several months is funded only out of my non-deep pockets.

And I did it because in the face, I mean, had to do it. I actually think that government obtaining our Facebook data and the guise of protecting us is the next step towards 1984. We don't want the social credit system in here, you know, the China social credit system. So, you know, I had to send this out there. I didn't know what it was going to do. The fact that the judge even ordered them to respond. Well done.

was amazing. No, yeah. So you expose this, right? So if anybody's listening, if anybody cares, go to legalizedprivacy.org and please consider sponsoring. In the program notes, I put three ways that you can support my work. Not everybody who would be interested in making a larger donation would want to go through those channels. And if you want to talk to me about what, which I, you know, what work that I do might be 501c3 tax deductible, and you want to make a larger donation, I'm,

thinking of doing a hybrid like a 501 C four where some of it is tax deductible and some of it isn't because if you are, for instance, arguing in favor of specific legislation, like I was in New Hampshire, which I think is something that I want to and should try to do, that wouldn't be tax deductible. But for instance, if you do things in litigation,

like Institute for Justice and other wonderful organizations do, then it is 501c3. It's allowed to be taxed. Interesting the way the tax code is. And so, you know, I think that there is good work that I can do in deploying this solution in both realms. I think both are important. Yeah.

You know, again, I'm working within the law. I'm not some anarchist, as you'll see if you go look at all of my things. I'm interested in still preserving proper role for law enforcement. But I want to get government not treating us like criminals. I want to avoid Orwell's 1984 from becoming reality. And I think I can do it in these two realms if you'd like to help me. Legalize privacy.org.

So that is what I have been up to. So I haven't, you know, I haven't been on air. I haven't felt good enough to be on air and I'm still looking at myself and going, oh my God, my face is thin because I need to gain like 10 pounds, but whatever, I'm feeling better. I'm feeling stronger. So I'm back here.

someone in the chat room over at YouTube is saying you could start a GoFundMe. I might think about that at a certain point, but again, go to legalizedprivacy.org. If this work means anything to you, whatever contribution that you give to me is going to help

you know, objectively, financially on the one hand, and it's going to help me spirit wise too, because, you know, if I'm going to continue to do this and think that there's a future for this organization, I'm going to need to see some of that support. So check it out. Yeah. People help anything you can do, please, whatever you can do, any of those ways that you want to do it. Those of you who have hung in there through Patreon, a subscribe star or giving me monthly donations through this stretch,

I thank you very much because yeah, it's like, where's Amy? What is she doing? Is she going to come back? She's right. Believe me. I felt like, like just horrible.

number of, you know, God, I had a whole weekend where I was like, am I going to go to the ER? I'm not going to go to the ER just because of side effects from one of the medications that the misdiagnosing doctors prescribed to me, right? Just hell off and on for months. And so I promise I got on back on air as soon as I possibly could. So

Here I am. And now I want to hear about yours. You've had your ups and downs in health, but you have been mostly positively busy with your Creating Christ project. Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's a documentary underway. I think we were discussing it before. But boy, we've done the interviews for it. My co-author and I, they've interviewed some other scholars for it, including some eminent names like Dr. Robert Price.

like the world's leading mythicist says, you know, there's no Jesus altogether. We've got Professor Eisenman, who was a historicist who believes there was a historical Jesus. But he's, you know, probably the number one expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, in my view. And both of them were interviewed saying wonderful things about the book. The documentary, I think, should take a little while longer, but should be out later on this year.

This year. Okay, so this year we're going to see it in 2020. I hope so. Yeah. We're there hoping to get it on PBS. They've done that before with their work. So yeah, they've worked on Emmy award winning projects. They're really cool people actually making the documentary.

So we're very excited. That would be amazing. And so you've done interviews for that and you're seeing the development of that. Are they also involving you beyond the interviews kind of in some of the production of it or no? A little bit, a little bit. My co-author is going up today to LA to do some work with that, see how they're doing and maybe...

maybe do some pickups and I may have to do the same thing soon. They'd gone to Europe. They took a lot of excellent B roll footage, especially in Italy. Yeah. The thing is, Oh, it looks beautiful too. Quality of it. You know, we went to Balboa park in San Diego and because of the fish image, we looked at the giant koi pond they had. And they're actually going to do some graphics where they pull out from the live fish into a graphic image of a fish. Yeah. Really technically excellent. Yeah.

So we're excited. And what else have you been busy with? Oh, lots of things. Writing, writing, writing, writing. We're considering, well, I probably maybe shouldn't talk about this, but a lot of writing projects have been going on. So I've been writing my fingers raw.

Okay, so you don't want to divulge what the writing project is yet? One of these writing projects I should probably wait to make a public announcement on. Okay. Yeah, but I am writing other stuff, yeah. I'm going to want to talk to you about just writing schedule and discussions.

discipline and all those things, because now you have, you know, look at your books under your belt, you've got behind you sitting right there. So I've still got my legalizing privacy book, which is becoming an urgent thing for me to get out of the way. I mean, you know, if after all this, if all this fails, and I don't get CLP off the ground, and I have to go work at Starbucks or whatever, I'm gonna just go, no, seriously, guys, I'll just

you know, drop all this. Cause it, it's kind of stressful for me to go out there and argue with people online and these things. And that was something, you know, cause again, digestion issues are also affected by stress. Right. So, um, you know, it's worthwhile. I've got this theory that's like my baby and I think it can solve problems and do some real good out there. And so that's why, you know, I've got to try to at least get

Facebook and the government to confront the fourth. This is important. And this is important to put into the idea stream. Yeah, you're thinking on this. Absolutely. But I mean, it's like people say, oh, well, nobody cares about privacy anymore, right? And is it that they don't care or is it that they've given up because they think nothing can be done about it? And I think what I've shown in the last few months is that there appears to be a concrete thing that

that we can do about it. And I've started doing a little bit of something about it. It may not, you know, CACR 15, by the way, in New Hampshire, they're going to vote on it in terms of whether it gets out of the committee. They're going to vote on it on February 5th. So anybody who's watching this in New Hampshire, and if you have a member in the house,

contact them and say, you really want to see CACR 15 come out of committee. I told the committee, now again, you know, this is a piece of legislation that is sponsored by a Republican and it's a Democrat led committee. And so they're kind of, you know, there there's partisanship and there's always skeptical. I come in there, I say, look,

I should tell them, I'm an oblectivist. That won't mean anything to them, right? But the point is that it's a nonpartisan issue. It really is. It should be. I'm showing them that we have roots in our common law tradition that allow us to scale back this insidious, I think it's insidious doctrine, in a way

principled way in a bright line way see that's and that's exactly what's missing is a principled approach and partisan

Partisan politicians don't much care about principle one way or another. I mean, you could look at it, for example, take the FISA court thing going on right now with Trump. I mean, the Democrats hated FISA. When it was first out, they thought it was a violation of the Constitution of Privacy. When they expanded it after 9-11, the Democrats again screamed bloody murder. But now that it

Trump is complaining about the FISA process. It's the Republicans who say, hey, there was FISA abuse. You know, it's a one-sided secret proceeding. And everyone's position on FISA will switch depending upon their political, the politics of the day. They don't have any principles. They're a bunch of hypocrites. And their position on these things like privacy will switch depending upon the political news of the day. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's true in a lot of cases, but my hope is, and so don't extinguish my hope yet. We just got back on. Bye.

hope is that by going there and giving the thorough argument that I did to that committee and just showing them that all I'm really trying to do is solve this problem and yeah you know it's sponsored by a republican and yes you know my background studying some of objectivism

you know, helped me to look at all of the common law that I was taught in law school and see a solution to this problem in a certain way where other people might not have had exactly the focus that I had kind of steered by a bit of philosophical background. But, you know, this is somebody that I, I mean, this is a solution that I think both left and right can embrace. Yeah.

It doesn't require, it doesn't even require Jim, it doesn't require overthrowing completely the so-called reasonable expectation of privacy doctrine. Although that should be. Well, okay. So you and I can talk about that, right? But yeah.

There's two things, you know, Scalia had started this trend in the law that was continued through the carpenter in 2008 where they're saying, well, we both, we have the reasonable expectation of privacy, but that was supposed to be more privacy. It was supposed to be giving you more

than what the common law would give you. Let's at least give people what the common law offers them. And what they were talking about was the common law of property. What I'm saying is, look, common law of contract has some things to say about privacy too. And this is becoming increasingly evident, more important as...

civilization progresses because as civilization has progressed, we are sharing more information in the context of contracts. Right. Right. So, so, you know, I'm saying you can have those two alongside each other, just like the Supreme Court has been doing thanks to Scalia in recent years.

And then the other way you could kind of gloss this is what is a reasonable expectation of privacy? Maybe the court needs to reconsider whether somebody reasonably expects privacy in the context of perfectly legal contracts that they make. Can that phrase reasonable expectation of privacy and what a judge interprets it to mean be

Can that be informed by the common law? Why not? Why not? So those are the little things that, you know, you can actually do something. And so that's, yeah, well, I'm trying to do it. So help me out, people. Help me out. Show me that you want me to do this. If privacy is to have a future, this is it.

I think so. I'm convinced, yeah. I mean, this is the first step towards a future of privacy is at least getting the government out. Because once we're in the situation where we have the social credit system, and I saw an article the other day, and I haven't looked at it yet, about that Democrats have now killed something that would have killed. There were so many negatives in this thing you can't even follow with political procedure. But it was, you know, Democrats have done something to help

the Chinese social credit system become a reality here some small step towards that in terms of legislative process and I have to go entangle it because I said it's piled with negatives and so they didn't do this thing that wouldn't have done that what the hell what is this let me I can't follow this you know I play chess but what you know it's two-dimensional chess only is all I'm doing um

And I don't play two-dimensional chess that well either, but I play. So yeah, we can do something. And the first step, I believe, is scaling this back.

And then government is not going to get its hands on our data, which it has no right to. Right. Whereas this litigation could actually send things in a very negative direction and start creating precedence for ever increasing government access to our information and intrusions on our privacy. That's what I really fear. And I think you and I have talked about that before that

what the FTC probably hopes to do is to use the settlement order as a template. You know, how can...

- How can they control? - Impose this across the board. - Yeah, how can they control these companies? - And that gets the government in there, you know, giving permission, right? And once you've got someone in there from the government giving them permission, at least in one narrow area, why not just expand it and expand it and expand it and the government will have access and control eventually of everything. - Yes, yes. So,

That's what you and I have been up to for all of these months. And now people are updated on it. Oh, so yeah, what I was going to say is I'm going to dive in and finish my book before I go work at Starbucks, at least. And how I'm going to finish it. Am I going to finish it in a way that's more sharing it with supporters and stuff? Or am I going to just kind of go off in a hole and do it? That all depends on you guys. You know, you guys want to keep me motivated to be out here in the fight.

as Haley Mary would call it in one of her recent songs, you know, back in the fight where I belong, right? That's where I feel where I am right now. Um, that I can be good at this. It does cause me some stress, but in many cases, I think it's worth it. And if I can make a living out of doing this somehow, I would really love to. And so that's where people support, uh,

you know, really matters. And if you go to legalizedprivacy.org, you can find out and also, you know, feel free to contact me. I've got an email, an official email address for CLP, which is legalizedprivacy at iCloud.com.

legalized privacy at iCloud.com. And if you write me there, then we could talk about people who would want to sponsor in a bigger way and how we can make it tax deductible and stuff. Cause that's the part that I'm just exploring. My first and only priority was,

say something about that FTC Facebook case, because I do see that as a huge step towards a Chinese style social credit system being started here. Government gets access to that data. And you'll see my argument as to why I think they're trying to grab it at legalized privacy.org. We just had to shut that down. Next step is, is there more work to do? And there appears to be a lot more work to do.

Okay, so that's my pitch, long pitch. And let's go on to a couple topics of the day if you were game and we didn't talk about this yesterday we talked a little bit about impeachment we're gonna talk about that in a minute. But first I want to talk a bit about coronavirus.

Coronavirus, do you have any down by your area? You're down in the San Diego area. There have been cases reported in Orange County and LA, I believe. Yes, Orange County and LA. So it's here in Southern California, and we've had the first person-to-person transmission in Chicago reported this morning, right? I think it was last night they reported the first person-to-person transmission.

The question is, of course, how serious it's going to be. It seems to be moving faster than SARS did.

You know, what I've seen on and I've actually put for people who are interested in a deeper dive, I put a link to New York Times article that they've got this morning. They've got live updates and they oh, you know what? I didn't put a link to this second. They have two different articles. So one of them is just kind of the live updates as to what either private companies like airlines or governments are doing about coronavirus to try to contain it.

But then there was a more scientific article talking about things like what you're saying, rate of transmission. Then you want to talk about, you know, what are the death rates like? As far as I understand, the rate of transmission is probably about like SARS, maybe a bit less, but they're guessing still. Yeah, I think, you know, that's something I need to pin down for sure. Right. Yeah, it's early. And then, you know, in terms of the

death rates from it. They're thinking it's going to be a bit less than SARS as well, less maybe than the flu even, but

To keep things in context, lots of people die from the flu every year, just regular old-fashioned flu. A lot more people were dying of flu than SARS even, although these new diseases are scary and you have to put it. At one point, we talk about immigration and the validity of immigration restrictions. Where should the government be able to restrict immigration? Here is a subject on which I really think the government does have an

an active role. There may be objectivists who disagree with me, but it seems to me that when there's a deadly infectious disease coming from overseas, the government has

in fact, a responsibility, it would seem to me, to physically protect the American people. And it is perfectly appropriate and reasonable under those circumstances to do some screening, in my view, for people coming in, whether they're tourists or immigrants. Yes, yes, definitely. I agree with that. And then the question is, to what extent is it appropriate in this situation? And I think the biggest problem with trying to figure out how

how sort of strict the conditions of travel should be is that we don't really know the truth.

about this virus, because it appears that the Chinese authorities had kept so much under wraps for so long. And so we're having to look at things like human to human transmission outside of China, which we have seen, like you said, in the Chicago case. As I understand, the Chicago case involves the partner, the domestic partner, wife, maybe, of

the i think it was the husband who was still his his wife had been diagnosed with it and he was still having very intimate contact with her even after she was symptomatic okay um

That tells us something right there. We don't quite yet know if there's asymptomatic person-to-person transmission or how easy, let's put it that way, asymptomatic transmission is. Because if you're not having any symptoms yet, there's even still a problem if you are, but if you're not having any symptoms and you can transmit the disease, that maybe calls for a higher level of

protection quarantine screening. But think about it. SARS and coronavirus, they're like the common cold, right? So you could have a tummy ache or a runny nose. And how do you know you don't have a cold or a flu? In fact, what it is is coronavirus. There's another issue, but...

You know, and on this kind of an issue, it is the experts that I'm going to be deferring to. It's doctors, pathologists, epidemiologists, things like that, that I'm afraid I'm going to defer to at this moment. Yeah. Yes. No, we do have to defer to them. And then if you want to follow a really good one who has been...

keeping abreast of all of this. And of course, he's been asked to comment on Fox and different networks. He's quoted in a bunch of articles, et cetera. It's Amish Adalja and he has a website called Tracking Zebra, which I linked to again in the program notes at DontLetItGo.com. So if you go to DontLetItGo.com, you will find a link to him.

And you can follow him, you know, Twitter and Facebook and stuff like that too, and keep up with the latest that he's seen about it because I find him to be a really good voice of reason on all things infectious disease.

And I'll say, you know, I don't know if he's ever going to watch this. He's way too busy because he's, you know, busy with all of his commenting and keeping abreast of all this right now. But he has been in the times that I've talked with him very, you know, giving me caution and warnings about antibiotic use. So he'd right now say, I told you so, Amy, you know.

take too many of those and it messes you up and it really does. But no, he's really excellent on these issues. And so check him out. And now without further ado, the topic of the hour.

impeachment. I want to know what's the latest. So, you know, I have not looked at New York times in at least an hour and a half or two. I don't know what's going on. We're going to go over there. Part of me, part of you, we did the big drum roll for impeachment, but part of me says, well,

The media has been giving it 24-7, wall-to-wall coverage, and there have been things like the coronavirus out there that maybe are even more interesting, more relevant. We all know that they're never going to get the two-thirds to remove the president.

from office. So it was just a giant attempt at, you know, affecting the body politic, at doing politicking. You know, the Democrats during the impeachment are accusing the president of trying to interfere with the 2020 presidential election by asking for the Biden investigation. But of course, what the Democrats are doing with impeachment itself

is a giant attempt to influence and interfere with the election by getting negative publicity out right now. It's a giant political exercise. And of course, the deadly damage that it can do

to the process of creating precedent is what they are fecklessly, heedlessly risking here, because it seems to me to use the ultimate sanction that Congress has, impeachment and removal, to so little effect is to only cheapen and diminish the effect of that.

Last year, Nancy Pelosi herself made a big deal about how it had to be overwhelming and bipartisan. And she couldn't get a single Republican vote. In fact, she lost a few Democrat votes in the House. OK, no, in the House, though, didn't she have at least not a single Republican vote, either for the inquiry or for the impeachment? In fact, she lost three Democrats. And in fact, one Democrat at the end, just Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii, just voted present.

which really must have irritated her leadership, the Democratic leadership, because it wasn't even a no like the three Democrats. No, they didn't get a single Democrat vote coming out of the House, either for the inquiry itself or for the impeachment. - You mean Republican, a single Republican? - A single Republican, excuse me, yeah. The Democrats didn't get a single Republican vote. And while they may get a vote or two for evidence, more evidence in the Senate today, I don't see them even getting a vote or two for impeachment.

I don't see Mitt Romney or Susan Collins voting for impeachment. No, they're going to get a majority against impeachment. But they are going to vote for bringing witnesses. And I don't even know if they're going to get that. Things are looking pretty grim for that. And that's what the New York Times is saying now. When I went over to New York Times, the latest headline is,

that GOP likely to prevail in blocking witnesses. But let me ask you this question. So Justin Amash, is he retired now?

He's a, an independent now, he left the Republican Party. Okay, so you're saying his vote doesn't count as a Republican vote. He wasn't a Republican. Okay, so he was an eye for it so he did vote for it. He is I guess an ex Republican, but notice what also happened, a Democrat switch to Republican, he switched parties all together because of it, they lost the Democrats.

So while Justin Amash way before this went over to becoming an independent and no longer a Republican, he didn't go so far as to become a Democrat. There was a Democrat who actually switched parties to Republican because of all the impeachment hearings. So if anything, the bipartisan effect is on the other side. Do you think he was wrong to then vote for impeachment, Amash? I would not have voted for impeachment. I do not like President Trump.

I am opposed to President Trump. I wouldn't cry if President Trump somehow was removed. Don't worry, we won't take away your left of his car, James. Thank you. Thank you. But on the other hand, what's being done to the process of impeachment itself, I think, is distressingly bad. You know, the arguments that are being made by the president.

Most effectively, I think Professor Dershowitz, Alan Dershowitz from Harvard University, is arguing that there has to be a crime.

And while I don't think that there should necessarily have to be a crime. Yeah, I don't agree either. Yeah, the phrase in the Constitution actually says something other than crime, too. It says treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. So there's something other than crime that's a misdemeanor. And how is misdemeanor defined back in the late 18th century? They went through all that. It does seem no matter how vaguely.

we interpret misdemeanor, it does seem to me that a violation of law of some kind, what do crimes and misdemeanors have in common? A violation of law of some kind. Whereas a crime, I think, is a little too restrictive. What if a president, say, flouted some well-established constitutional principle?

Right. He refused to leave office on noon of January 20th. Right. Or that may not be practically a good example. But let's say the president was ignoring some constitutional provision. It would seem to me that would be an impeachable offense, too. But absent some legal standard, what is there to prosecute? What is there to defend against?

In this case, to use the facts here on the table, they say that requesting of a foreign government information on a political opponent is corrupt in itself. And since you're doing it for political motives and interfering with foreign affairs with your own personal political motives, that was pure self-serving on the part of Trump and he should be impeached for it.

The response from the Republicans is, wait, no, there's at least a reasonable suspicion to validly investigate Trump. All Trump was doing was asking for information. Could you do us a favor? Could you please check out this? Investigate it. And if you think that it wasn't worthy at all of investigating Trump,

then I question your judgment because Biden was vice president, had just been named by the president to be the point man on Ukrainian policy. His son shortly thereafter is given a million dollar a year job on the board of what we now know to be a pretty corrupt energy company in the Ukraine. He says what?

If my name wasn't Biden, I probably wouldn't have been given the job. What did I do? I attended a couple of board meetings and he's getting a million dollars a year. It's clearly his name, Biden, and the fact that his father was vice president. Now, people looking at that can say, and I think this is correct, it's nepotism at best and really nefarious at worst. And

But it's has that standard procedure. Does that go on all the time? Sure But is there a reasonable suspicion to look into the Bidens? Sure there is So the request itself to investigate the Bidens which was privately done, you know, the the phone call was classified No one would ever have heard about this if the Democrats and if the media hadn't made a big deal of it so the the request was made the

The thing that the Democrats are trying to argue, which is also instrumental to their case, is that the president somehow conditioned the aid that they were getting, the military aid that we were giving, at least a portion of the military aid we were giving to the Ukraine, on getting this investigation done.

They have no evidence to that. They really have zero evidence that there was any linkage. The president didn't say it on any of his conversations with the president of the Ukraine, didn't connect the two. He asked for the favor.

but he didn't bring up the aid in that context at all. Nowhere was there a linkage. So, and for the Democrats to call it a shakedown seems bizarre to me because if you don't communicate the linkage. - Sure, how can it be a shakedown? - So here's the question. So you have made, I think, a compelling case that

there's really not a good cause to remove this man from office as much as you and I do not like him. And as much as maybe we don't like even the way that he was going about this, because we don't know had it not exploded in the media, how it would have continued to play out. Right. Right. We don't know that, but nonetheless, as far as we know now, it wasn't communicated, even though maybe it would have been going in that direction.

My question is learned about it in the end of August last year through the media, a political right. Right. Right. They freaked out. There was a flurry of activity. And a few days later, the aid was released. Yeah. So within two weeks. Yeah. But it could have gone this way. Yes. If it hadn't been exposed. Right. So, you know, kind of slimy. At least it is. I don't like it. I don't like it. It's his swamp answering their swamp because it's I mean, there's a swamp there.

It's so funny because, of course, the Obama administration launched an investigation of Trump based upon information from a foreign government. Exactly. So the same. And just as that's coming to a head to make this the issue is obviously, in effect, the Democrat counter to all that. They could see that Durham was investigating the FISA abuse and the spying on Trump. And I think they're trying to...

headed headed off at the pass by making a similar accusation against trump you know that's the way they do it in the very midst whether it's trump or the democrats in the very moment they make the accusation they're doing the very thing they're accusing the other guy of doing well and that's the only kind of argument they have because they have no principles they have no principles and it just seems to me the other guy does it or the other isn't a very good argument uh

The question is finding a principle, a principle and applying it consistently across the board. And it seems to me that the only way you can determine that a political motive is a corrupt motive is by saying that there's a violation of law. How would I know that a political motive is a corrupt motive? Every politician who's seeking his own political advantage

thinks he's doing it for the advantage of, it not only helps my political career, it also helps the country, the world that I'm elected. Dershowitz made a really good point that way. If something's got mixed motives, in other words, if the president does have a valid public interest in investigating the Bidens, the fact that there's also a political motive

that there's these mixed motives can't be impeachable. Everything a politician does has got those kind of mixed motives. - Yeah, and that was a good point, even though he was saying it in answer to a question. And so at first he didn't word it correctly, I guess. And so it caused this whole storm in the media. But he made a valid point. He made a valid point. - He did.

Okay, so here's the question for you. Now that I believe, and you've given a great summary here, James, so thanks very much. Now that the issues have been narrowed in this way and just pointed out, and it seems like if they did have some witnesses testify, they would get to the root of it or they could get to the root of it and be done with this very quick. Do you think it'd be better to have witnesses to establish

definitively exactly what you've already said? Or do you think they've already seen enough to know that exactly what you say is the case and they should just vote and get it done with and just get this off their plates and

We all hope that they'll do something constructive, but they won't do anything constructive, but at least not do this. Well, of course, if we're talking the politics of it and the political perception of it, that's one thing. If we're talking about the actual merits of the case and whether it merits additional witnesses, that's another. The abuse of power, Article 1 impeachment from the House is insufficient on its face, it seems to me, absent violating the law in some way.

the criminal law, some kind of legal standard that he's violated, whether it's a constitutional provision or something else, I would have to say, if I was Senator Jim Valiant, I'd say no more investigating because there's nothing to investigate on Article 1. It's insufficient in itself. Obstruction of Congress, Article 2 is insufficient too. They didn't fight it in court. They haven't even

tried to subpoena Bolton. All those subpoenas that happened before the impeachment inquiry was voted are dubious too. If they want to take their time and do it right,

Okay, but you can't claim obstruction of Congress without an underlying crime violation or something, at least trying to get some legal process at getting the evidence they claim is being held back by the president because the president does have an affirmative responsibility to protect the office institutionally. Without going to court at all to try and get this, I don't see an obstruction of Congress charge either. Now, I would say no, because even if Bolton were to say, "Yeah, I had a conversation

in August of last year, where the president said, I want those two things linked. That linkage was never communicated to the Ukrainians. Absent the communication to the Ukrainians, I don't even see what the relevance is. Okay, so let me throw a legal analogy at you because, of course, as someone who went to law school, it occurred to me. Conspiracy. Okay. Is...

sort of communicating to Bolton and starting the process of ordering him to do it, even if he hasn't fully done it yet. Is that an overt act in the furtherance of a criminal conspiracy, even if not itself? Sounds like discussions. Still sounds like discussions for a conspiracy, right? The conspiracy has the communications, but then it has to be separate. How about the withholding of the aid policy?

The aid had already been withheld and it was released the minute that it was released only when it was exposed. So, so, so what I'm going to argue with you, Jim is the withholding of the aid while also having these discussions, which seemed to mean that probably he was intending to communicate this. If it hadn't been blown up by the media, maybe can't, can an omission be an overt act of,

in a criminal conspiracy, and I think it could be. I mean, that would be my position. Well, you would still have to understand that the suspension of the aid was specifically done for that reason. Okay, but I think there's decent evidence that it might have been. Might have been. What is our standard beyond a reasonable doubt? Well, so then get those guys up to testify. Yeah, I mean...

Let me put it this way. If you could have evidence, and this is what I don't know that they have, and I think you'd have to have an idea that that's what the evidence would show. Because otherwise, it's just a fishing expedition. See, the no vote for our evidence is a bigger, broader issue. You get the position, though. You get the position, though, right? I do. I do. The position is an omission can be the overt act and furtherance of a conspiracy. And the omission is the withholding of the evidence. A conspiracy to commit what crime?

a conspiracy to do what you know sort of the quid pro quo whatever it's going to be okay a quid pro quo by itself let's say i ask ukraine to do something in exchange for something else okay okay but jim jim jim you're walking it back you're walking it back right because before you said no before you said that if it had been communicated that that would be compelling to you well

That would be one element. It seems that the communication is one necessary part that if you don't have it, everything else collapses. Okay, but you were acting as if it would make a difference. And what I'm saying is- Well, at least we'd start getting it off the ground. What I'm saying is we can, just like the law does, go back to a standard of a conspiracy in which all that is required to prove a criminal conspiracy is an overt act in furtherance of the criminal end.

So if- And what's the criminal end? So you're saying that there wouldn't be a criminal end anyway. Well, we need for conspiracy, we need a crime. We need an underlying crime for conspiracy, don't we? Okay, but what I'm talking about is, so why even- It's a conspiracy. Okay, but why even mention the fact that-

that it hadn't been communicated before Politico blew it up. Because it seems to me that destroys the whole claim that there was any kind of shakedown or pressure. Sure. I mean, you couldn't have been pressuring. All those things that come out of Schiff and Nadler's mouth are just... Okay, okay. So maybe the crime is something like... Because again, our law is so convoluted these days that there can be crimes that you and I wouldn't necessarily say should be crimes. But I've heard in some of the articles that I've seen, just headlines and stuff that...

Trump did have a duty to release the aid unless there was X, Y, Z reason not to that kind of thing. And so he was if it was shown, if it was shown that he did release aid is held up all the time. Aid there, as the testimony is indicated, is.

Obama did it, the Bushes did it, Reagan did it, Trump has done it several times with other aid. The president's constitutional power to conduct foreign policy gives him plenary in a way power to- You would say that even if my argument holds true, that there is no crime. The GAO, for example, could say- You and I were also talking about what you and I were also talking about.

not necessarily agreeing with what Dershowitz says about the standard, that there has to be a crime that he's guilty of. But conspiracy requires an underlying crime or the wrongdoing. So at least we should define what the violation is that we're conspiring to do. I'm saying

I'm making analogies. I'm making analogies. You know that I am. And so if it's a conspiracy to do something that would be impeachable and all you need is the overt act. Right. There we go. But this testimony could show enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, a linkage between the withholding of the aid and this intention to, you know, if Politico hadn't blown it up first, do the shakedown.

They're there. OK, if we have evidence that the president intended to hold it up and to say that we're going to make this a condition of this aspect of the aid. OK, then we would have at least a conspiracy, if not to commit a criminal act. Then what we might think is an impeachable act. Right. Right. Right. Even if that's the best that's the best we can do. Right.

If the aid is released, you see, they did make a big splash about it in early September. And the Democrats say, oh, well, you got caught. That's why you released the aid. Sure. There are other reasons, that is to say, beyond the reasonable doubt standard, if the president says, well, look, the corruption court didn't even get up to started until September 5th. All I can say is Trump wants you as the judge, not me. Well, but I'm just saying if there is a reasonable explanation other than this,

then we have to say not guilty, right? That's not beyond a reasonable doubt. And the president has, I think, provided enough of other reasons. In other words, the new president had just been elected in July or June and took office in July. The new legislature had just been coming in on August and the new corruption court didn't even get started until September 5th. And it was on September 11th that the president released the aid.

And given that context, it seems to me a small delay even before the fiscal year. See, the GAO thing doesn't impress me at all. All presidents have violated GAO in that regard. And the aid was released before the fiscal year. So it didn't cause any delay in getting the aid. Again, I would want to maybe see some of the testimony.

I have a bigger issue, though. I have a bigger matter issue on all that. The House cannot turn the Senate into an original investigative body on impeachment. And that is what they are demanding. And there is a deeper constitutional problem here with the entire impeachment. They rushed an impeachment through the House.

the thing that the senate tries is the house's impeachment the senate doesn't need to call any new evidence now they have in previous impeachments but they only did so and i recall the clinton impeachment very very well there was the argument that the senate should only call witnesses where there's been a change in circumstances or something they didn't know during the months and months and months of investigation reveal

The Bolton book reveal is something new, okay? But it isn't something new as such. In other words, they knew all about Bolton and that Bolton might have evidence. So should we subpoena Bolton? But they didn't have a guide to, I mean, now they have substance about what the evidence might be. This is true. But it seems to me that initially what we have to do is we have to say, was there a reason? In other words, you have new evidence on Bolton.

But did you know that Bolton could provide information and you do fail to subpoena him? If that is the case, the Senate should not be in the position of cleaning up. But they didn't know it was so relevant. They didn't know it was so relevant. But relevant to what? That is, let me put it this way. Relevant to showing the linkage between the omission, which I argue is the overt act, and the.

They knew that Bolton had called this a crack deal. They knew that Bolton didn't like this. They knew that Bolton had a thought on this. He was the national security advisor to the president. Why do you think they didn't call him? Time, purely, purely. They wanted to get this done by Christmas. They didn't even subpoena Bolton, who would call this a crack deal. They didn't try to get Bolton, and they already knew that Bolton was opposed to this.

Okay, so that was a bad judgment on their part because they should have gotten him. Indeed, I'll go so far as to say this.

They cannot, if in other words, they say they have beyond a reasonable doubt evidence, they are not in a position to demand that the Senate call more evidence. That is to say, either your case has been proved or it has not been proved. And if you need new evidence- Well, I think the fact that this came out since so that we actually have an idea concretely of what he has to say is just as good as- He called it a crack deal.

The New York Times, the new report wasn't really much, was it? President says what? The president told me they were connected. OK, well, I was obviously already the case in your head because you called it a crack deal. And we knew that long before last week.

Anyway, I don't know. I think that they've got enough. They've got enough to call him. And if they could have the votes, you know, okay. I wouldn't want them to drag it on forever. Politically, as I say, there's a distinction between the law that I think as a senator, I would protect the institution of the Senate.

I would say that the procedure was so unfair in the House. The president was not given counsel to hear the witnesses. A lot of it was done in secret. The president was not allowed to call witnesses. The Republicans, while they were present in those skiffs in the basement, they were obligated not to say things about it. Do you believe in the exclusionary rule, Jim? Do you believe in the exclusionary rule?

I do. And that is controversial among objectivists. So you actually do. Okay.

in a really bad way, that evidence should be excluded. See, I don't. I go with the Achille Amar approach, which is that you allow valid evidence in, if the manner of obtaining it is somehow that the government planted the evidence, obviously this is ridiculous. But if it's valid evidence, you allow it in and then you prosecute

or, you know, get redress for trespass or breach of contract or whatever it is that the government did wrong. Well, I think there's, there's a separate, having practiced law. Okay. So let me, let me, let me finish the analogy in my head because you know where I'm going, but the audience doesn't know where I'm going. Right. So, so the reason I asked this question, of course, was because an analogy occurred to me because I'm a lawyer. I think like a lawyer all the time. So if you don't believe in the exclusionary rule, um,

like I don't, then by the same token, you could say, yeah, the house proceedings were crap.

I suppose I think they're crap, right? For the reasons that you state. And nonetheless, I think the Senate should pursue a case insofar as it's valid. And then people in the House, there should be some sort of an ethics violation remedy against them or whatever it is that we could do for them doing the bad job that they do in the House. See, I don't think that's sufficient. I think

See, if there is a, I sometimes think that there is a relationship between the credibility of the evidence and how the government obtains it. If there's any nexus. Sometimes there is, sure. And if there's any such nexus, right? Obviously it's out altogether, right? Now that's not quite the exclusionary rule, is it? Because you're saying that the wrongdoing has some evidentiary nexus. Exactly. And all I would require is the most modest evidentiary nexus because it's

I've been there in court enough in hundreds and hundreds of cases to know how it goes down. You can still, let me put it this way. When we allow, when we say it goes to the weight, we can say, okay, the accused says the defendant, the cop broke into his house without a warrant, ran in, beat him up, stole the evidence, came out. The cop says, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not the way it happened at all. See, it's a factual dispute.

So if the judge says, as a matter of law, no, no, no, no. He went in and the evidence gets excluded. That seems to me to go to the heart of the reliability of the evidence. We have a lying cop in addition to everything. So now.

Furthermore, the institutional integrity of the Senate is such that I would say, you know, the the lack of warrant and the fact that he had the evidence that could have gotten been gotten only by going in without. Or let's say he has some other explanation. There's a trespass case against the cop. Maybe we want to look at the nature of the evidence to see whether it's reliable. The trespass case will require proof beyond a reasonable doubt, just as the case that the cop is bringing requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

in reality that's never gonna happen would not though a civil trespass case would not oh what are you gonna get a dime declaratory relief and 20 cents if the risk is that your reputation's been sullied because you're but the evidence came in and i was found guilty well then even more so right if i'm found guilty i can't sue right sue for a trespass then i found guilty the the thing is i uh

So you think only a criminal... Well, but the point is, where do we place the burden, right? We place the burden for the validity of the evidence, lest we place the burden for the guilt on the state. Okay, okay. Then I'm going to try a different tack with you then. So we could... This is an interesting challenge in favor of some form of exclusionary rule, okay, that you're putting forth here. But what you're talking about now is...

doing that for the sake of protecting innocent civilians or not innocent, but just civilians, right? Civilians in general. So this is not every case is a murder case. If it's a petty theft case, what are we going to say? Are we going to let the government? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm going to finish my distinction. So my distinction is

that you're talking about individual citizens and whether they're guilty of crimes. And here we're talking about the president who works for all of us. And so I think that we should not have an exclusionary rule for an impeachment trial because the person who's being affected is not, you know,

you know, some individual civilian who's going to jail, but instead it's a president who is supposed to be serving all of us and is, is arguably. And I, you know, again, I, I, I think this conspiracy argument that I just gave you kind of holds actually. And I think he, I'll go back through a couple of those things. He's guilty of, I think he's guilty of a conspiracy to do something bad that may or may not amount to be a crime, but nonetheless doesn't seem to be.

wholesome and good for a president to be doing. Let's just say that. - Well, let's hold off on that, but let's finish this thought about the exclusionary rule and impeachment. There is really no evidentiary rules in an impeachment trial. There's been all kinds of hearsay, opinion, stuff discussed outside of the record, stuff without foundations, stuff, oh, all kinds of prejudicial stuff. My God, the way both sides talk about each other at the defendant. No, no, there's no courtroom, civil or criminal in this land who would have permitted

anything like what has gone on in the Senate and then the House before that. There's no evidentiary rules. It's like evidence out the window. And you think that's a bad thing, obviously, right? I'm not sure. I mean, there's also no libel laws on the floor of the House or Senate, right? Whatever they say, they have immunity, right? All those senators and congresspeople are immune. There might be good reasons for the lack of

certain of these rules that apply when you're dealing with civilians. Yeah, I'm not sure that the federal rules of evidence or something or the Fourth Amendment rule, law should apply in impeachment. I agree with you. I'm not sure that we, in other words, the House and the Senate make their own rules in this regard. And I think maybe we should just leave it there. However, backing up now to whether the president should be impeached. Yeah.

He had... Well, I'm just saying that we should call witnesses. That's all. Call witnesses. Okay. Or even just the calling of witnesses. There, there's a Senate integrity issue. If the proceedings in the House were so insufficient, there's no way that the Senate should be used to clean up what was a messed up record on purpose in the House. In other words, what the House did was so bad... I'm just saying, you know, okay, just as people are saying...

let the president, you know, suffer in the election for it and blah, blah, blah, don't have impeachment or you could say just as easily let the people in the house who

who were in charge of this bad impeachment proceeding, whatever they did in the House, right? All the junk that they did, let them be accountable for it politically. Let them be accountable for ethics violations, whatever it is. But nonetheless, if the Senate sees- They're not going to.

I mean, there's a bunch of safe to see. If the Senate sees the kind of thing that I'm arguing for might be there, which is a conspiracy to do a bad thing that might be worthy of impeachment, then why shouldn't the Senate clean it up? Why shouldn't the Senate clean it up? Because the Senate's role is to try the impeachment that the House gives them. If the House doesn't have sufficient- And they've given them a nugget of something. A nugget of what?

A nugget of what I just argued. Abuse of power. They have not articulated an impeachable offense. You don't think so? No. I think maybe they have. Oh, no. So we'll just have to agree to disagree. What's the impeachable offense? The impeachable offense. See, the charge needs to be articulated, right? So let's first have a valid charge. Okay, but first you said this. This is the thing, Jim, right? So you said the shakedown hadn't been communicated as if it was very important that if it had. And what I'm arguing is that it- And that the Biden investigation would be valid.

In other words, requesting an investigation of... But what I'm arguing is there was a conspiracy... To do? To do exactly what you say would have maybe been a bad thing. You articulate that. I'm going to put you on the spot. Articulate that thing that was bad, the impeachable thing. The thing that is bad is...

withholding aid that he was otherwise under a duty to release. There was no other national interest, arguable national interest within his discretion for which he could have withheld the aid. There was a conspiracy to withhold that aid so that he could get the investigation that he wanted against a political opponent. And the reason that it was never communicated is only because it blew up

in Politico. And what is the overt act? The overt act was that he was withholding the aid and that we know that during the time, some of the time that he was withholding the aid, there was this

formation of intent to communicate it, even though it hadn't been communicated yet. That's it. Okay. So what if I were to say the Biden investigation was a perfectly valid thing to put a quid pro quo on? In other words, for just legal public interest reasons, the president could say, I'm not going to deliver the aid until you do the investigation of the Bidens, that there was a good motive for that, or at least an innocent motive for that. I don't think in the case of your political opponents that that should be something- Does a political opponent get immunity?

In other words, let's say Biden hadn't been running for president. Imagine your president, imagine your president, and you can just use the purse strings that you have with regard to foreign aid to get all of these different foreign governments to investigate all your political opponents one way or the other. Because probably, probably anybody who is going to be your political opponent is

is going to have some connection with... I agree that an investigation that was purely political, of just a political opponent, would be morally wrong, if not criminally wrong, and impeachable. But do we know that from these facts, because of the Biden situation being stinking to high heaven right at the outset...

there's a valid reason to investigate the Bidens, a non-political reason to investigate the Bidens, an innocent reason for Trump to request it, and an innocent reason for him to even make it a quid pro quo. Okay. So then what I'm saying is, let's call the witnesses.

And that would have to include stuff about the Bidens, the underlying case then too. That's right. Let's do it. Let's do it. So then we... No, no. And then what you show is whether there is indeed, as was argued by Dershowitz, right? There might be a national interest involved, even though there was a significant political component involved.

And so we have to get at, you know, what is it that the Bidens were guilty of? And is it something that is, you know, so much different than any of the prior corruption, etc.? And let me put it this way. The Senate should not be the place where we do this kind of original de novo investigation. Right.

The Senate should not be the place where we start a whole. I'm going to disagree, though, too. I'm going to disagree, though, too, because we have it is very political, the underlying issue. Right. That's true. And it's an issue of whether he's doing this against a political opponent. It happens to be that the House was run by Democrats. Right.

So that they would not be eager to follow the whole trail all the way to the end to the corruption of the Bidens because as I mean you and I've been disagreeing this whole, which I think is a healthy thing right because here we are we're two objectivist lawyers. Sitting here coming up with arguments to disagree yesterday I was deferring and today here I am sorry so.

And I promise I only came up with it as we were sitting here talking. I did not plan to play gotcha here, but I thought, what about this conspiracy analogy? This is how my brain works. So, but no, this is good, healthy that we have disagreement here.

But the, you know, the Democrats would not be eager to follow it all the way to the end, which is where we've gotten now in our discussion, which is what is the underlying thing that the Bidens were involved in. But is this something that

the president should be using this quid pro quo withholding of aid in order to expose, right? That's the question. Now, I know you're following me quickly, but I just wanted to get the rest of that statement out so that people could follow what I'm saying. So what I'm saying is that

Because the House is run by Democrats, you can't necessarily expect them to follow this all the way to the end because the end question would be, how bad are the Bidens really? Right. I'm not sure that's the question. Well, no, no. Well, because that's what you're saying. OK, no, no, no, no. OK, wait, wait, wait. Is there a valid reason to ask for the investigation? Yes. That's all we need.

I don't care. I don't care anything about anything else. What was the evidence Trump had? Right, right. And that's all that matters, right? Okay, but what I'm saying- So in other words, I actually have a Democrat argument for not calling the Bidens. It is irrelevant what else we learn about the Bidens for this case.

Lindsey Graham, Senator Graham makes a really good point. The Bidens should be investigated, but the impeachment trial is not the correct forum for doing that. The only thing relevant in the impeachment trial about the Bidens is what the president knew at the time.

Anything else that we learn in addition is really irrelevant to the reasonableness or the legality of the president's request. But this is also true of Bolton, isn't it? Kerry Sautner: Okay. You're going to say no, my argument about they shouldn't have called them in the House or whatever, they wouldn't have called them in the House so they should call them in the Senate. It doesn't matter, it's irrelevant. Then this. Here we go.

No, but I mean, we're both working this out. We can. To be honest, listen, listen, I'll tell you my frame of mind here. I have avoided this whole impeachment thing. I haven't talked about it. No, no, no. I just, no. Well, you've had it on in the background forever. So I'm just, I'm thinking and digesting. So I'm sorry. So, you know, my overall approach to this, you know, should the Senate clean up the House? Should the Senate clean up what the House did, the mess that they made?

My approach is that we have a system of checks and balances, that there is a role for the Senate to play in a checks and balances sort of a way. And, you know, for instance, the Senate has refined and framed the issues and kind of, you know, asked better questions, say, than maybe some people in the House were.

And so there might be a reason to call new witnesses in the House, given that the questions have been framed.

And so why not, you know, again, I don't see a reason against calling witnesses as long as they don't do what some people in the YouTube chat were talking about a little while ago. They said, why don't we have 500 witnesses and then wrap up the trial on November 1st? No, no, politically, politically. Yeah. I mean, if you were to ask me, what do I want?

Politically, I'd love there to be a trial and drag out all this evidence and let the whole world know everything there is to know and expose all of it. If what we get is an exposure of all this evidence and finding out more and more information, I want the information.

The question is, is it appropriate in an impeachment proceeding to do the investigation of the Bidens? There is information that the House could have and should have collected on the Bidens that is relevant. They don't regard it as relevant. They think it's a conspiracy theory. It's been debunked, even though no one's ever investigated it. I don't know who debunked it, but...

But in their minds, the Biden thing's been debunked and they dismissed it out of hand. It's inherently corrupt to ask anything of the Bidens. That's a very partisan, one-sided position. They could have asked about what was known, you know, the facts on the table at the time. Right. That's relevant. Right. And the same with Bolton. Until we have a clear charge of

One, what is he conspiring to do? Two, was that... I told you what I think he's conspiring to do. I think I formulated that pretty decently anyway. Well, you did formulate the... If it was a purely political thing, in other words, if he was just asking for any political opponent of foreign governments, that would be invalid. But if there's this evidence that we have on the Biden's,

I don't care what the political situation is. The situation of evidence with respect to Joe Biden and his son is such that regardless of whether he was- I don't know if-

There was enough yet to know. And that's the thing. That's what we want to know. We want to know what was the state of evidence of what they were guilty. Is there a reason, a good reason, a good faith reason to ask for a little investigation? Normally, when we do criminal investigations, we keep quiet, right? We don't let anyone know unless there's an outcome. And most of the time people get investigated for crimes. They never learn about it.

What Trump does, he's the chief law enforcement officer. For example, talk to Attorney General Barr. Barr, could you do an investigation of this? Let's not tell anyone, but let's see where it goes. So long as he has a good faith, reasonable basis to do that, he's the chief law enforcement officer. If he's also the chief diplomat. Did he do that here?

Were people investigating the Bidens here? No. Interesting. Interesting. And again, and again, and you know why, right? You know why? Because I mean, again, we have to look, no, but we'd have to look into the different details and right. But there is less accountability for our government in all kinds of contexts when they are asking people

foreign governments to do the dirty work for them well you see i'm going to do it again one we have specific evidence with the bidens if you were just to ask about a political opponent that would be wrong without reason here there was reason secondly secondly but secondly but secondly if he's so confident that it was not good and it's his duty to investigate why not get our powers to do it

No, the reason why he asked the Ukrainian president is because it was a Ukrainian company. We can't. We're not in a position to investigate Burisma. But you can investigate Biden's. Well, our investigative powers would be somewhat limited if Burisma needs to be investigated. So it's reasonable to ask. And when he did talk to the president of the Ukraine, he said, get in touch with Barr. It's not as though Trump was saying avoid Barr.

But since the corruption happened in the Ukraine, doesn't it make sense for the Ukrainian government to investigate it? Maybe they can investigate it in a way we simply cannot. Yeah. So both the unique, the unique situation, there's two facts here that are important. One, we have specific evidence about the Bidens, which doesn't make this just investigate

For example, we didn't have any investigation of Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or any of the others because there wasn't any reason. Well, I think at the time Biden was the leading candidate, but go on. That may be, but we also have evidence that Giuliani was asking about it long before Biden announced his presidency. Well, Giuliani is probably, you know, looking at all the... But if we have memos written by Giuliani well before about this,

well before Biden announced his candidacy, which we seem to have, then it doesn't really even seem to be related. What do you mean we seem to have? Well, all I'm going on is what the senators and the House managers and lawyers tell me. So you're saying maybe they need to call some witnesses? No, no. There's been no... The House, the president's lawyers have said that memos exist where Giuliani was saying, investigate the Bidens. We need to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens well before Biden announced his candidacy.

Okay. If that is true, and I presume it's true because it hasn't been contested by the House managers, then we have evidence that it had nothing to do with the election. Okay. Now we could say that announcing the candidacy

Announcing the candidacy is maybe not the litmus test. It's have you heard he's going to be a candidate blah blah blah Here's here's a question that's coming in from one of the people on youtube He says is is not the factor of a foreign government being solicited an essential distinction And that's what i've been arguing. Oh gosh, wait, that was no, it's perfectly legal to ask for information I thought of that at the same time. This is coming in information information Is not a campaign contribution

The law is very clear. If I ask if I solicit for information on my political opponent and get it, that's not a campaign contribution because you see campaigns have to know what I'm doing. No, no, no. But the courts have held that information is not what Trump what Trump may be guilty of, again, is a conspiracy to do this thing.

quid pro quo using budget money at his disposal to get foreign governments who have a lower standard of, you know, warrant protection and all those different things to do an investigation that he wouldn't do through his own people. And so to me, that stinks.

I don't see that. No, maybe, maybe. But it's not. It's not just maybe. There's quite a bit of evidence. Do you believe there's a valid reason to investigate the Bidens? Maybe. OK, if there's a good faith, reasonable, if there's a reasonable basis to ask for an investigation of Bidens.

Full stop. I said maybe. And so with that, well, if I say maybe I'm asking for so long as there's a reasonable basis, maybe then that's it. No, no, because we don't know whether there's a reasonable basis. This is the thing. No, no. Just the facts. I know there's reasonable basis. OK, but what I'm saying is maybe they need witnesses to establish that.

very now well-framed question in the Senate, because again, the Senate has done additional framing of the issues. And so I don't think that it is bad for the Senate to call witnesses in order to clarify

clean up whatever horrible job the house did. If there's nothing you can expect. I mean, you know, again, the Senate is building on what the house started as well. Right. So even if they weren't, you know, horrible and motivation and rushing it through before December, it's not the motive that bugs me.

me. It's the process, which is on its face institution. Whatever, whatever, whatever, James, whatever, James, this is subject to a motion to dismiss. Whatever, James, whatever. All I'm saying is that the Senate is building on whatever crappy stuff the House did. You can say it's as bad as you want.

But then you've got a refinement of the issues and things in the Senate. And I do not think, especially in light of the fact that, you know, the thing about Bolton came out and the fact that the Senate is doing additional framing of the issue, that it would be bad for the Senate to call witnesses and look at whether the president could have been said to be acting, you know, I would say primarily in favor

public interest. - Ooh, primarily? No, I have to say that once we get into the mind of the president-- - Like 50 whatever percent. - No, that would be a terrible thing to do. We cannot start, once there is a valid public purpose, over mixed motives, mixed political and valid public policy motives,

what president wins period so long as there is a valid motive unless it is so inherently corrupt a motive and that i don't see here in other words so long as there's a valid motive the fact that would also help him politically is not is not relevant so let's go further so the evidence the evidence that would be presented in the senate would be looking at whether at the time he knew enough to have a valid motive

Is that the question? But I know enough to know that he had a valid motive. In other words, there was enough evidence to make a request for an investigation valid. But my point is, based on what you've heard about the evidence, but isn't it okay for the Senate to have that evidence presented to them?

Well, let's say that Bolton, this is the real test. Bolton is called, Bolton comes in, Bolton says, yeah, oh no, the president told me we should communicate this. Not only is there a linkage, but you asked me to communicate this to the Ukrainians. So what? I'd still vote not to impeach him.

Because there was a valid reason to investigate the Bidens. Okay, okay, but what I'm saying is... You make the quid pro quo. Okay, okay, but they could also ask Bolton, what did he know about the Bidens? And was it a valid investigation anyway? Ask him that question. I suppose you could ask him just that question, but we already basically know the answer. Okay, no, but I'm saying maybe there is evidence relevant to the answer to that question that should be heard before the Senate. Why not?

No matter what Bolton says, I'm voting no. This is what I'm saying is that nothing Bolton says would change my opinion. I'm not. I'm not. I would want to know. Let me put it this way. If the president could validly request the corruption of the Bidens to be investigated in the country where it happened, which I think is true, and if it is valid for the president to even condition that,

We don't know how long he would have conditioned it, if that would have been a violation of law to do that. But can the president ask for, in other words, we have a corrupt country, Ukraine. It's steeped in corruption. We want some good faith beginning to know that corruption is over in the Ukraine, or you're not going to keep getting our help.

Right. So the president says one of the things I want. So obviously there's corruption here too, right? Oh, completely. Completely. And then the question is, is, you know, is it just my corruption versus your corruption? No, well, wait a minute. If there's a reason to investigate the Bidens and the president says you guys are corrupt and the way to convince me that you're no longer corrupt is to investigate the Bidens. Okay. Okay. Okay. Give me, because...

Now it comes down to whether or not he had a valid reason in the national interest to investigate the Bidens. That's the issue, right? Which already we know he plainly does. Stop, stop. That's the issue, right? We agree that's the issue? Right. So then tell me what it is that you know where you think it's already, the answer is yes, and the Senate doesn't need to investigate. What are the things that you know?

And how do you know them? There was a reasonable basis to investigate the Bidens for corruption. Because?

because someone with absolutely no experience in international finance, the energy business, someone who didn't know the Ukrainian language, Russian or Ukrainian languages, this guy had on the face of it, the vice president's son getting a million dollars a year from the government that his father has just been put in charge of the policy for is suspicious and violates and could be a violation. In other words, I don't need to prove the violation.

All I need to do is prove that there was a reasonable basis to ask for a further investigation. That's the way the government works. That's the way the cops work. That's the way DAs and prosecutors and U.S. attorneys work. They get a whiff of something, a suspicion, and then they investigate, see if they can develop probable cause or further proof beyond a reasonable doubt. As a magistrate, as a criminal investigator, which is what the president is, would it be valid for him to ask the Ukrainian government to investigate corruption that happened in that country

That involved Biden and his son. The facts that we have on the ground that Biden's son, shortly after the vice president was put in charge of United States policy for the Ukraine, was given a million dollar a year job by a corrupt Ukrainian energy company, a job that he basically did nothing for except attend a couple of board meetings. Yeah, on the face of it, that creates a valid basis for the president to one, request the investigation.

Right. Privately, which is all he did is to privately ask. He wasn't smearing the Bibles. He was asking for information. He was asking for. Well, he wasn't privately asking if he was. It was a classified conversation. OK, OK. But what I'm saying is he's asking with the weight of money that he has discretion over releasing or not behind him.

So it's not really private. It's not private. But any request he made would be that. So is anything that he requests, therefore, a shakedown? Or in other words, if he said, oh, and by the way, I want. Give the aid and then request. Well, but he never said I was conditioning the aid. Give the aid and then request. Well, but he was reviewing the aid. Give the aid and then request. But he was reviewing the aid in his mind. Let's say he even conditioned the aid on the investigation. What's wrong with that?

That's the thing that gets a little weird, right? Jeffrey Rosen: Well, no. As long as it's a valid investigation. See, we can put quid pro quos on that aid, can't we? We do it all the time. The United States government says if you don't clean up your corruption act, you don't get the aid. That's perfectly reasonable. One test of that clean up the corruption stuff is will you investigate the Bidens? Let's say the president never did condition it on the investigation. Kerry Sautner: Well, he would have. I think he would have. Jeffrey Rosen: He would have.

If Politico hadn't blown it up, he would have. Well, first of all, if he had, and it's still, let's say he had. Okay, you don't believe he would have? Well, I don't know. Okay, well, I believe based on the things that I've heard that he would have. And I think that Bolton testified. Well, okay, okay. I still wouldn't be in a impeachment vote. Okay, okay, okay. But let's let the Senate vote.

vote about it let's respect of course the senate will vote on it but senator jim but let's let the evidence too yeah but on the substance of the matter senator jim isn't going to vote for witnesses so they can engage in a fishing expedition the senate is not it's not fishing though i don't think i think that there's plenty that they could get from bolton as i say let's assume let's assume that bolt gives them everything they want

Let's assume that it's as bad as it could possibly be for the president on Bolton. That Bolton says, yes, I still wouldn't be a... In other words, it's irrelevant. That's you. That's you. That's you. Well, and I think it's a matter of law. I think they should make a more informed vote. Well, in other words... It's not a matter of law because again, you and I have agreed, you and I have agreed that abuse of power is something beyond just...

Something criminal. Abuse of power is a bad charge. The whole thing should be rejected just for the way it's charged by the House. I don't, as Senator Jim, if I was a United States Senator, I would not need evidence because on the face of it, this should be rejected to protect American history. I mean-

The precedent created here, the precedent would be deadly damaging to presidents will get more impeached and it would have destroyed the entire impeachment process and created, turned it into a routine partisan exercise. If this gets- You don't think there could be bright lines created? I think we've destroyed a bright line already in what the House has done. If the Senate doesn't reject what the House has done outright, then what we've done is we've opened the gates. The House has opened the gate already.

They've already created a bad precedent that we're going to have to live with.

for the Senate to validate that in any way is only going to make matters worse. I think you and I are going to have to agree to disagree. And here we are. We've been on, we've been on for almost two hours, right? Total. We've been on for almost two hours, even since the time that we had the glitches. But I think hopefully this is instructive for people to say, does this have anything to do with impeachment? We have just had two

two lawyers, two objectivists arguing about this impeachment issue. And we're at a bit of loggerheads, but it's good. At least we've narrowed the issue down. Yeah. And hopefully somewhere in here. I really wish that the House had done a better job. Sure. And I wish the House had done a better job as well. But I'm saying that it is natural to expect

the Senate to be able to do a better job looking at what the House did. Everybody needs an editor, for example. Let me put it this way. There should be something that they would find that would make a difference. So long as what they would find wouldn't make a difference to me, I'm not voting for it. Well, just to you, but I'm saying that what they could find would make a difference to senators. And I think legitimately could make a difference to senators. I don't think it would be legitimate.

I don't think that if you have that evidence. I know you don't think it would. We know this. But I'm saying, here I am. And I think it would be legitimate. And it could make a difference. And I think this discussion would be helpful to people who are here. Yeah. Why not? Why not? Okay. So anyway, I think we should wrap up though. And I want to wrap. Let's, I don't know. Are we going to agree about this? We're going to disagree about this. Hayley Mary came out with a really cool album. That was

That was actually, it's just an EP. It's five songs. And I put one of the songs in the program notes at don'tletitgo.com. You and I were, I guess we're still both a leftist, even though you're arguing against impeachment. And I'm arguing, not necessarily in favor of removal of office. But again, I'll be clear about my position. My position is it's not invalid for the Senate to necessarily call witnesses against

and, you know, continue to try to refine this issue and get to the bottom of this, I think, well-framed question on your part, which is whether it is, it would have been valid for him to use quid pro quo to call for the investigation, given what he knew then, given that he's using foreign aid at his disposal as this lever to do it, et cetera. That's the question. And I think,

them calling witnesses in the Senate to refine and then, you know, depending on what they learn taking their vote in a more informed way. I don't think that's bad. That's all I'm saying here right now. Right, right. Okay. But yeah, so we're still the both of left of us and the other thing that you and I think agree on is that

You know, the Haley Mary, for instance, I think I've talked about this in the past. People have followed me. Haley Mary styles herself somewhat of a feminist.

But she is certainly not a man-hating feminist. She's in a great relationship with a partner and, you know, awesome. She does not hate men. And moreover, I just, I really love her lyrics discussing her brand of feminism. The song that I put in the program notes happens to be my favorite on the EP. It's not about feminism, but she has another one called Like a Woman Should.

And what she's imagining is that she is a woman from the past. And what that woman would say about how she just wishes she could live in the future and just walk on the street like a woman should being herself and not worrying and that anyway, so that's

Like a word should, it's a great song. But this song, Brat, I really love. And go check out the lyrics because in the lyrics, she's talking about, oh, well, everybody says that nothing is more, that nothing will, having nothing will change your life. You know, so it's kind of a jab against the extreme draconian or kind of deprivatory, you

idea of minimalism, right? Nothing is more. It's going to change your life. And she says, well, but what if I'm a brat and I want more? I love it. It's catchy and it's fun. It sounds like it's from the eighties. So I'm sorry, you know, I'm older or whatever. Eighties were awesome. I thought. And so that,

the music will sound a bit nostalgic to you but no it's released just now from hayley mary and the lyrics are just brilliant and so go check them out you know she has the lyrics right next to it in youtube you can look at that and enjoy hopefully um i don't know have you listened to any of it i listened to some of it yeah no i like what i hear yeah you posted a couple of things and i checked it out check the ones that you posted okay so you do you do like it okay so we'll normally we'll end

on that you know when you post music I normally try and check it out but I may not get to it right away but I normally check out the music no it's there is no duty to check out all the music that I post because I just do it as the the spirit moves me as something strikes me but um I think this is worth it this is awesome she has not yet announced any U.S. dates but she's already ventured she's from Australia by the way so she's been doing a bunch of dates down there she's going now to U.K.

hopefully she'll come here as well come back she all she has to do is pass over north america and make a quick little stop or two or three darn i would hate that right yeah so i'm hoping to get to interview her again etc so check it out um jim thank you so are we going to make this a thing are you still going to talk to me now that i've sit here and debate this is a

with you on impeachment and oh gosh i don't know baby um i have to excommunicate you with extreme prejudice no we're gonna make it regular of course i don't mind club right yeah of course not of course we're still friends yeah let's make it fridays midday friday why not so friday's 2 p.m we'll do it again next week yeah please

Thank you. I love it. And yeah, I promise. I promise. I was not trying to ambush you with these things on impeachment today after yesterday I was going, okay, yeah, yeah. He's making all these good points. It's just, you know, how a lawyer's mind works. We come up with our analogies at the darndest times.

But yeah. Anyway, so thank you. Thank you. And we'll talk next week. And everybody, thanks for tuning in. Go to my blog, don'tletitgo.com. Go to creatingchrist.com for Jim. And also go, most importantly for me anyway, personally, legalizedprivacy.org and check out what I'm up to there. Thank you.