Judging Freedom - Today_s Hot Topics (1)

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, March 6, 2023. It's about five minutes after 11 o'clock in the morning here on the East Coast of the United States. Here are your hot topics for this morning. From former President Donald Trump to ex-felons in Minnesota now being allowed to vote. We'll start with the former president. The investigation of President Trump's behavior on January 6, 2021 is nearing the end of its investigation, meaning the investigators in the Department of Justice will soon decide if they have enough evidence to ask a grand jury to indict the former president and if they have enough evidence to convict him, and they'll make that recommendation to the Attorney General, and the Attorney General will say, I agree with you. Go

ahead and get the indictment, or I disagree with you, let's just end this. But one of the last witnesses that they've subpoenaed is former Vice President Mike Pence. Pence announced that he would hire lawyers to quash, the real word is squash, the subpoena so that he doesn't have to testify. Before the former vice president could do that, the feds made a motion to enforce the subpoena. Now, that's very unusual for that to happen because the subpoena is presumptively valid and the recipient of it has a presumptive obligation to comply with it. When Pence made the announcement he was going to move to quash the subpoena, the feds moved to enforce it. Pence has not yet filed a motion to quash it, and he's soon running out of time. But Donald Trump did file a motion to quash the subpoena,

even though it's not on Donald Trump, it's on Mike Pence. So Pence has a theory as to why the subpoena shouldn't apply to him. He says it shouldn't apply because of the speech and debate clause in the Constitution, which protects members of Congress from being called to account or being sued or being prosecuted for what they say in the course of their regular business as members of Congress on the floor of the House or the Senate in House or Senate committee meetings on their way to the House or the Senate or to those committee meetings. Well, Mike Pence is not in the Congress. How can that clause in the Constitution protect him? Ah, he argues, and he hasn't argued this formally yet. He hasn't filed this, but he's just said it in the press. He will argue, his lawyers will argue, that when he was presiding over a joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes, which was his goal and his duty on January 6, 2021, when the rioters or demonstrators, whatever you want to call them, rushed into the Capitol and prevented him from completing his duty.

When he was doing that, he was acting as the president of the Senate and as a de facto, that is by operation of his personal behavior, not by operation of law, was a member of Congress and therefore was entitled to congressional protection. That is a very, very weak argument. Very weak argument. Vice President Cheney once made the same argument and the courts rejected it a generation ago. Vice President Pence has yet to make that argument,

but President Trump's argument was you cannot enforce the subpoena because it will compel the former vice president to violate executive privilege by telling people what he told me and what I told him. which judges have made up, but which is well respected since the Nixon years, allows the president to speak freely with his advisors on matters of national security, military secrets, national security secrets, diplomatic secrets, and military secrets. Anything outside of that is not protected by executive privilege. President Trump says, whatever Mike Pence said to me on January 6th and whatever I said to him is protected by executive privilege. I think that is a weak argument for two reasons. It would be hard to argue that whatever Donald Trump wanted Mike Pence to do on January 6th, and whatever they talked about fell in the category

of military secrets, diplomatic secrets, or national security secrets. It was politics. There's no way around it. Trump wanted Pence to reject the electoral votes from Georgia and Arizona and Wisconsin so that the state legislatures in those states could send different electors, Trump electors, not Biden electors, to Congress. Whether that's lawful or constitutional, the courts will decide, but there's no question, but that's what Trump and Pence talked about. How do we know about it? Because Mike Pence has already told us about it in his book. So if the executive privilege has been, if it even existed, was violated by one of the participants in the conversation here, the vice president, in this book that he wrote entitled So Help Me God,

that's the name of the book, then there is no longer any executive privilege. We'll see where it goes. This could be a delaying tactic or it could be a serious constitutional issue. If Mike Pence is going to move to quash the subpoena, he better hurry up and do so before the court rules on him and he doesn't have a chance to file his application in the time period permitted under the rules. ICE and the Secret Service have been conducting illegal surveillance of cell phones. All right, we all know what this is. Almost all

of us have them and we carry them. If you have it in your briefcase, if you have it in your pocket, if you have it in your pocketbook, if you have it on the front seat of your car as you're moving and you pass by something you probably haven't even seen or noticed called a stingray. It's about half the size of a telephone pole and it usually sits a little bit back from the roadway so it might be hidden by trees or buildings. The stingray can trick your cell phone into thinking it is a cell tower, and the cell phone will latch onto the stingray. And whoever owns or operates the stingray then not only will know you're there, not only will know where you're moving from point A to point B in the range of the stingray, it can also capture any communications you're engaged in while you're moving. Well, if it's in your briefcase or your pocketbook or your pocket, you're probably

not using it. You may be using it with earbuds to have a conversation. If it's on the front seat of your car, you may be using it with Bluetooth to have a conversation. What would the Secret Service be doing with this? What would ICE be doing with this? Nobody knows. Can they do it without a search warrant? Absolutely not. But they got caught doing it. The Freedom of Information Act requests that were made by certain websites revealed that ICE and the Secret Service, whose job it is to protect the president and the vice president and nothing else, were surveilling people, following the movement of their cell phones and listening to their communications. Another Freedom of Information Act request revealed that the Biden administration is using third-party vendors to suppress speech by giving them grants of money to tell the Biden administration how to suppress speech online.

What? Yes. The Biden administration gave $1.1 million to the University of Texas, a public university owned by the state of Texas, to tell the administration how to suppress speech because of its content. So you have the federal government, which is not allowed to suppress speech because of its content. The First Amendment prohibits that. Paying a university owned by a state government, which is not allowed to suppress speech because the First Amendment prevents it from doing that. What did the Biden administration want to suppress? It wanted to suppress people like you and me and the physicians who were arguing a year and two years ago that the vaccines are not really vaccines and that they can harm you, and you better think twice

before you take them. That's the speech that the Biden administration wanted to suppress. That's the speech that it hired the University of Texas to show it and tell it how to suppress it, and then it went out and hired other third-party vendors to actually engage in the suppression. And all of this was revealed when Freedom of Information Act requests were made to the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security, obviously part of the federal government, is regulated and controlled by the First Amendment. The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government out of the business of speech. The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to allow you and me and everybody else on the planet to think as they wish and say

what they think and publish what they say without fear of any surveillance by the government, without fear of any repression by the government, without fear of any surveillance by the government, without fear of any repression by the government, without fear of any suppression by the government, without fear of any interference whatsoever by the government. But the government and its rapacious appetite to suppress the speech that it hates and fears, which is usually speech that challenges it, has found ways to get third party vendors to do indirectly for the government what the government absolutely cannot do directly on its own. None of this is new, but we keep learning more and more about it, following you or me wherever we go, and monitoring everything we say or do on our mobile devices, and engaging in massive programs to suppress digitally

the free exercise of speech under the guise that the speech is unhealthy, under the guise that the speech is misinformation, is absolutely a violation of the First Amendment. The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to allow you to decide what you want to hear and what you don't want to hear, and it's to keep the government totally and completely out of the business of being engaged in speech. The governor of Minnesota last week signed a bill to allow all convicted felons who served their terms in jail and paid their fines to the state of Minnesota to be able to vote. I support this 100%. I know this is something that liberals like. For some reason, I think that people that have been in jail are going to come out of jail and vote for Democrats. I don't know how they're going to vote, and I don't care how they're going to vote. But the concept of lifelong punishment is antithetical to the concept of justice. You

broke the law, you pleaded guilty, or you were convicted by a jury, you were sentenced to time in jail or work release, or you paid a fine, it's over with. You have a right to get back into society. The concept that you are forever barred from participating in the most basic aspects of democracy is antithetical to the concept of justice. If you deserve life punishment, you should be in jail for life. If you don't deserve life punishment, when your punishment is over, you should be able to come back into society and reenter society as a normal human being without any disability on you whatsoever. That, I think, is the libertarian position on whether or not you should be able to vote. And I disagree with my conservative

and libertarian friends who think that convicts should never be able to vote. Once you've served your time, you're back with the rest of us. Two Ukrainian pilots are in the United States of America undergoing training to fly F-16 fighter jets. Oh boy. Have we given, has the United States of America given F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine? Well, no, they don't have an air force that can fly these jets. This is what President Zelensky has been begging for. This, of course, will get us even deeper into World War III. The normal training period for an F-16 is 18 months. The federal government has found a way to shorten it to six to nine months. So two Ukrainian pilots are in the United States.

They won't say where, learning how to fly these jets. I guess the government believes, I think falsely, that the war in Ukraine, you know, that proxy war between the United States and Russia will be going on, will be going on for another six to nine months. Why else would they be training Ukrainian pilots to fly these F-16s? And else would they be training Ukrainian pilots to fly

these F-16s? And what are they going to do with the F-16s? The F-16s will allow them to target Russia, will allow them to target Russian troops in Crimea. Crimea has been a part of Russia since Catherine the Great, who reigned in Russia before George Washington was the President of the United States. Crimea has been part of Russia for over 300 years. Crimea was a part of Russia for the entire time during the Soviet Union. Crimea was a part of Russia when the Tsars ruled Russia. Crimea became a part of the Ukraine after the coup that the CIA fomented in 2014 that overthrew a popularly elected government and installed a puppet government favorable to the West, and then Putin had to take Crimea back by stealth and by some force. If the United States State Department thinks that the U.S. is going

to get into a war involving F-16s over what country Crimea belongs to to Crimea as Russian speaking and Russian culturally and is part of the Russian Federation. And as I said, was under the Tsars and under the Soviets as well. How much deeper into World War III is the Biden State Department going to bring us Victoria Nuland, she of the Ukraine Trump imbroglio. She is number two in the State Department today. She said, we will fight to liberate Crimea. That's going about as far as any official in the American government has gone. She said this over the weekend. I guess she really does

want World War III. This lady makes Lindsey Graham sound like Bernie Sanders by comparison if she thinks that American fighter pilots are going to be attacking Crimea. Attack Russia, and guess what Putin can legally do in response? Attack American assets in Europe or elsewhere. Do these crazy people in the Biden administration really want World War III? It seems they do. Does the American public want World War III over Ukraine? Absolutely not. Has the Congress declared war against Russia? Absolutely not. Can the Congress declare war against Russia? Absolutely not. Congress can only declare war against a country that poses a serious military threat to the United States. Does Russia pose a threat to the United States? Absolutely not. Does the United States pose a

threat to Russia? Yes, it does. We are training Ukrainian pilots to fly American jets, which will attack Russia. That is posing a threat on Russia, President Biden. Is that what you were elected to do? When Congress gave you a $113 billion blank check to send military equipment to Ukraine, it did not authorize you to send troops, but troops you've sent. Troops out of uniform on the ground in Ukraine, troops in uniform on the ground in Poland, all of them shooting at Russian troops in Ukraine. Itching for that fight so that old Joe can run for re-election as a wartime president and American boys can come home in body bags. Not on your watch, Mr. President. Not while there's freedom of speech. Not while the Americans

really know what you and the administration are up to. What a way to start the week. Judge Napolitano, more as we get it. Judge Napolitano, later on I'm going to tell you why Alex Murdoch, in my opinion, was not legally convicted of murder. Later on today. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.