IHIP News - Trump Calls For GOP to Takeover Voting as DOJ Ramps Up 'Weaponization' For Him

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

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All right, Donald Trump went on Dan Bongino's podcast. You may remember the podcaster he hired to be second in command at the FBI who didn't like his job because it was too many hours, we quit. So Donald Trump calls into Dan Bonino today because the Democrats are winning in all of these special election races, even in Trump, strong counties in Texas. So Trump calls in to Dan Bongino and says this. Play the clip. And they vote illegally.

and the, you know, amazing that the Republicans aren't tougher on it. The Republicans should say, we want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so. All right. So he's clearly obsessed with this because he knows what's coming. And our voting is localized.

Josh Welch is filling in for pumps today. She has the day off. Josh, what's your take on this? I don't think this is a surprise at all, actually. We saw the search warrant that was issued in Fulton County. We know in 2020 that he actually called the state officials in Georgia asking for more votes. So the fact that he's in office sees that he's unpopular. The public sentiment is clearly against him.

He lost this recent election in Texas or the Republicans did that he had carried by 17 points. So that's what authoritarian do when there are areas of, control that they can't areas of power they can't control. What do they do? They try to seize control, whether lawful or unlawful. All right. And speaking of trying to seize control, we have Pam Bondi, the Attorney General at DOJ, and she is going to ramp up weaponization. She's calling for weekly meetings. Put up the headline. CNN is reporting Justice Department expected to ramp up efforts. to deliver on Trump's weaponization priorities. And here's an excerpt from the article.

Almost immediately after Pam Bondi stepped into her role as Attorney General last year, she established a weaponization working group to review law enforcement actions taken under the Biden administration for any examples of what she described as, quote, politicized justice. She said the group would focus on investigations

into Trump conducted by former special counsel, Jack Smith, and his staff, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James, at any improper investigations into the January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol. It goes on to say, in recent weeks, Trump has been pressuring Justice Department officials for results in these and other investigations recently admonishing a group of U.S. attorneys for failing to deliver on cases he once brought. You may remember he tried James Comey, Letitia James. He wants whatever the Republicans have always accused the Democrats of, it's just a confession.

It's what they want to do. Josh, you work with a lot of U.S. attorneys. You work with DOJ. What is your take on this? I think from a legal perspective, this is the most interesting because you see Trump utilizing his Department of Justice. You remember there used to be a little bit of independence with the Department of Justice. and the executive branch, the president. Here,

President Trump and A.G. Bondi make no secret of the fact that the A.G.'s office is serving to weaponize that office, as you pointed out in your intro, against his enemies. I mean, they're very blunt about it. And that's the biggest difference in what you're seeing across the country in Minnesota. You see it in almost every district or U.S. attorneys taking the stance. And some of them saying, I didn't sign up for this. The rule of law means something to me.

I'm not going to prosecute or fail to prosecute any certain case just because the president wants me to or doesn't want me to. I think you saw that mass exodus in Minnesota when they refused to investigate the homicides of Alex Pready and Renee Good. And you're seeing it a lot. I think the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office had 50 career prosecutors at one point. they were down to 17. If you look at some of the recent indictments, like on Don Lemon's indictment, you see that none of the local U.S. attorneys signed off on it, which means only the Department of Justice lynchmen are doing it because no one else will have anything to do with it.

So it's a systematic problem across the country, and judges, district court judges, are having to confront the incompetence of what is now the Department of Justice. You remember when Merrick Garland was Attorney General, and they'd worked out a plea deal with Hunter Biden, and the Republicans pitched a fit. And so then they said, okay, we're going to charge Hunter Biden because we don't want to have the appearance of not being, you know, of curring favor with the president. Do you remember that? And then they ended up charging Hunter Biden. And this is also the same DOJ under Merrick Garland that had the EPSC files for four years. The same DOJ that failed to charge the elites that funded January 6th. They only charge the poor, lower income people that were paid to go and their travel was paid to go to do the insurrection.

They didn't charge the high up people that funded it. Talk about the difference between the way these two people. parties operate the way the Republicans are operating and way the Biden DOJ operated. So when Merrick Garland was appointed Attorney General, it's like he went out of his way to say that this is an independent organization. We do not work at the behest of President Biden. We're not going to investigate or charge political enemies just for the sake of doing so. So there's that mindset. There's that thought. And then you have someone like, Pam Bondi in President Trump's mindset, which is very overtly, very in your face,

we're coming after people that investigated President Trump. And it's like they're playing this game, we're playing this game. And I think all of us at the time with A.G. Garland, we're all kind of shaking our head saying, what are you doing? I mean, this insurrection happened on national TV. We all watched it. as you point out, they didn't investigate any of the top-tier financiers of 1-6. They went after these low-level

individuals that breached the capital. They're just playing by a different set of rules. And President Biden and the Department of Justice, they had all of this information about Epstein. They set on it for four years. Every time I find myself getting more and more upset about President Trump, I find myself getting angrier and angrier at former President Biden and Merrick Garland, because I blame both of those individuals for putting us in this situation to begin with. I don't think there's any question about it.

It makes you wonder like they had valid reasons, the protection of democracy, reconciling the guardrails that collapsed in order for Donald Trump to do the stuff that he did. did in Trump 1.0. He was impeached. And you could, and it was all justifiable. I don't think anybody could make the argument that this would have been some sort of a witch hunt or a political prosecution. It was all on national TV. President Trump. But let me say this. This is what pisses me off about the Democrats. They are so scared of the narrative that right wing says, Trump, it's a witch hunt, it's a witch hunt. Russia, Russia, Russia is a hoax. That they allow themselves and their moral compass to be defined by right-wing bullshit.

And that's what Biden and Biden DOJ did, don't you think? 100%. And I think we're all waiting. We wondered why it took a year, year and a half for Merrick Garland to initiate any sort of meaningful investigation in the President Trump. It was something none of us could explain. And then I remember we discussed. President Biden at one point said that he wouldn't pardon his son.

And it's when I heard that, that I thought to myself, are you kidding me? What do you think President Trump would say to that? It's just that you have two mindsets. You have someone who's evil that will do anything. And then you have this other approach that we're going to play integrity politics. And that's exactly precisely why we're in the situation that we're in, 100%. All right. And then as all authoritarian regimes do, they start off by.

attacking comedians because they're thin skinned and we saw what happened with Jimmy Kimmel. After the Grammys last night, the comedians were making jokes about President Trump, which welcome to being in the big boy chair. All presidents get ridiculed and made fun of course, now he's threatening to sue Trevor Noah because he's such a titty baby. He can't handle it. And then they go after the press. Trump's propaganda towards the press started a long, long time ago, even before he descended down the escalator, you know, the Vanity Fair article that talked about him having little hands, and he sued all sorts of people in the press. Barbara Walters in the 80s spoke to him about him reading from Hitler, and he's been mad at the press forever. So why somebody that's so thin-skinned and doesn't have enough confidence to handle the press,

would choose to be in public office is a case for the psychiatrist. But now he finally has his DOJ going after our friend, friend of the show, and my and Josh's personal friend, Don Lemon. And here is what he said on Air Force One regarding his DOJ, weaponizing and targeting Don Lemon after three judges said there was nothing to bring charges for. play the clip.

I don't know anything about the Don Lemon thing, but he's a sneeze back. Everyone's still good. It's a question. Probably, from his standpoint, the best thing they're going to happen to him, he's getting you know, he had no viewers. He had, he was a bad news, he was a failed jobs. And now he's in the news. I didn't know anything about it.

Okay, two questions, Josh. Number one, when the people in Pam Bondi's DOD, after two rounds of judges said, no, there's nothing to see here, no charges. And then somebody that works in DOJ, an assistant U.S. attorney says, we will stop at nothing to arrest Don Lemon. Number one, can that be a defense of Don to be selective prosecution? Number two, if you were Don Lemon's criminal defense lawyer and you have the president of the United States, who has no independence from the DOJ standing there calling him a scus bag and all of, scum bag and all of this stuff, is, are they just so,

incompetent, do they sabotage their cases before they even get them in front of a grand jury? I think to answer your second question first, as to incompetence, absolutely. There's what's called selective and or vindictive prosecution. And I think that President Trump's words in the clip you just played calling him a sleaze bag. And I think I'm sure there's a plethora of other public statements that Donald Trump has made about Don Lemon. All of those will go very neatly into a motion to dismiss this matter for various reasons, one of which will be, he's vindictive, selective. But then there's a whole other plethora of motions that I'm sure his lawyers are going to attack this case with. If you'll notice the narrative by the Department of Justice in the indictment and in any sort of public comments they've made about this,

is that they try to paint Don as a participant in the protest, not a journalist covering, because they really, that there is a First Amendment right for journalists. So they try to switch or change the narrative to the fact that he's a protester. Well, obviously there's all sorts of problems with that because Don himself says multiple, multiple times during the live stream. I'm covering this as a journalist. So I don't think that when Pam Bondi brings these charges, I don't think they think about having enough evidence to get a conviction.

And when I say that, it almost makes my head sort of explode because all prosecutors, according to DOJ manuals, have to look at the evidence as far as whether or not they're able to obtain a conviction. But I don't think that's even in their thought process. I think what they're thinking is they're going to get some immediate gratification for their boss by being able to say that we've charged this person. We're asked to charge this person. We're told that we had to charge this person, in this case being Don Lemon. We did it, so we get to take a victory lap. And then I think that as you see in James Comey and Letitia James and other cases, they crumble. They fall apart.

I anticipate in Don's case with the caliber of lawyers that he has assisting him, that will play out the very same way. Unfortunately for him, he does have to go through this process. But it's clear to me that this case is a clear winner for the defendant, but it still doesn't sit right the fact. that you have a president that can weaponize this DOJ to pretty much do anything that they want at any time. Well, they're going to start meeting weekly to make sure they continue the weaponization of the DOJ. But in the indictment, it says one of their points is that Don Lemon peppered the pastor with questions. As a criminal defense attorney, Josh, if you're Don Lemon's attorney, who is a journalist, Journalists are known for, quote, peppering their interviewee with questions.

How idiotic is this? And also in the indictment, it says that Don reports that the kids look scared. He's doing, they actively in the indictment describe the job description of what journalists do. And I'm just puzzled as to how they think this helps their case, those points. Well, the elements of both of these offenses require that there be some sort of intimidation or some sort of aggressive act. And so you see in the indictment they've alleged these overt acts in a conspiracy, none of which give rise to meeting the definition of intimidate or scare tactics or use of force or anything like that. I think they say that when Don's interviewing the pastor, that the pastor gets too close to him and Don pats his hand away or something like that as if that's some form of aggressive act. I mean, the indictment's complete with all sorts of exaggerations.

And here's the thing. In the court of public opinion, Pam Bondi can say these things. She can put these things on Twitter. She can grandstand. She can do whatever she wants to. When you get into a courtroom, you have specific elements that the government has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. They can't meet those elements in either count. He's charged in two separate counts.

And their case is going to fall apart. Don didn't go in. He didn't intimidate. He didn't threaten. He didn't harass any of the members of that church, at least what's on the video. So again, a courtroom is different than the court of public opinion. In a courtroom, you have to put up or shut up, and you have to put up and you. You've seen the Department of Justice results in all of the acquittals from the various defendants

that have gone to trial that they're not able to prove these cases. And I'm not sure that they even care about that, which is a really sad thing for this Department of Justice. Yeah, I read, sorry if you guys hear snorting viewer and listener in the background, it's my two little French bulldogs having afternoon playtime. But I read somewhere that authoritarian, what he's trying to do by arresting Don Lemon, ascend a jolt of fear to people like me and Pumps and Midas Touch and other people in independent media. Donald Trump has been able to pay off, to shake down corporate media. He's been able to get

hardcore right-wingers like Larry Ellison and Barry Wise to completely turn CBS upside down. He's got Jeff Bezos in his pocket. Jeff Bezos spiked the story endorsing Kamala Harris in the Washington Post. But independent media is the fastest growing media and everybody's abandoned the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC. So you have this whole media ecosystem that's growing very quickly. And also in the black community, it's very much felt personally because they notice immediately that the four journalists that were arrested, it's not just on, all four black journalists. and this white supremacist fascist cult, hang on, you guys stop it. This white supremacist, sorry, listener, this white supremacist fascist cult is going to go to the people

that they've been actively dehumanizing year after year, decade after decade, century after century, black people to remind the base, look, these black people shouldn't be journalists. We're going to show them. We're going to tell them they can't go into and report. on news that's happening. That's right. And if you look at authoritarian regimes, they try to dismantle various aspects of society. And so just look at what he's done in Minnesota.

He's arrested a member of the press. We have freedom of the press in the First Amendment. He's arrested protesters. We have freedom of assembly in the First Amendment of the Constitution. He's now gone after the ballot boxes. In Georgia, we have the right to vote, which is a fundamental part of our democracy. We have the right to do process. We see all of these non-citizens being detained without any form of probable cause.

We have academic freedom in this country. We see all the universities under attack. We have the right to privacy against unreasonable search and seizure. We see that these encounters with these non-citizens with different individuals are not based on any kind of probable cause. So you see this systematic effort intentional on the part of the government to slowly dismantle or chip away at each of those different rights that form our democracy, that form our country. And it's a systematic intentional effort, albeit led by incompetence at certain times, very mean, vindictive individuals that are held in on carrying out this agenda for this president. I there's no question and then we don't you know we didn't even talk about all of the warehouses that are being purchased in all of these red states to create a network of concentration

camps with our taxpayer dollars because this regime's desire for recreational cruelty is nothing short of sadism and racism and the worst people in the world are trying to silence the best people in this country and so josh i want to thank you for filling in for pumps and for your legal expertise listener i'm sorry about my little piglets snorting in the background this is independent media it puts a little real life spin on it thank you for joining us make sure you like subscribe comment and we will be back tomorrow with more news