The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Democracies in trouble - a controversial political pardon

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus. Democracies are in trouble from South Korea to France to the U.S., where voters have lost trust in political elites, especially in France where the blowback to Macron's brand of politics has made room for the ascendency of the far-right under Marine Le Pen. Rudyard and Janice then turn their focus to the U.S. where President Biden has conferred an unconditional pardon on his son Hunter Biden, with speculation that he might pardon any politician or civil servant who could face prosecution from a vengeful Trump administration. This controversial move would be unwise, Rudyard argues, setting a dangerous precedent and confirming voters' suspicions that elites are not subject to the same consequences as everyone else. In the final moments of the show Ruydyard and Janice turn to Syria, where rebels have renewed their offensive against the Assad regime and taken over key battleground areas. Could this successful push have anything to do with Iran's weakening in the region, as a result of Israel's military successes against its proxies?  To access full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by The Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk Debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website. in just a few simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar,

the top right of the website. Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Welcome to Friday Focus. Rudyard Griffiths here, the executive director of the Monk Debates. This is our show for the 6th of December,

joined by Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs. Janice, an interesting and somewhat alarming constellation of stories this week, all I think interwoven around the theme of democracies in trouble. We had a bizarre 12-hour declaration of martial law in South Korea. We've seen the Macron government in France face big parliamentary defeats with the resignation of the current prime minister. And we're seeing other kind of eruptions of democracy in distress through the United States, Eastern Europe. The list goes on and on. Before we get into the specifics, Janice, what is going on here?

Why are democracies seemingly under so much pressure? now to be showing the strains. What's driving at all and should we be worried? Yeah, I think we should be worried, because the examples you just said, and I know we'll get into them, but they're a story of institutional failure. This is not just politics as usual. There's a story of institutional failures in South Korea. This hasn't happened for 40 years. It's a friend. It hasn't happened for 60 years. So something's up here. That is not politics as usual. The question is why voters distressed political elites. They don't, they've lost their trust.

I think that's the biggest single takeaway. It's a COVID legacy, but it's been exacerbated. How do you have a democracy? If you don't believe a word that a political leader says, and not only don't you believe the political leader, you don't even believe the opposition, Roger, because they're just a group of elite who lie all the time to the public. That's the story that you hear over and over in the populist rate.

And it only gets a little better when they say, yeah, maybe it's not everybody, but it's the deep state. We have to go after the deep state, these entrenched bureaucrats who don't get us and don't understand us. I hear that all the time. And I guess, Janice, you know, trying to think this through. There's something that's happened, obviously, in the background. We've had some tough years of the pandemic, inflation, a breakout of bigger wars and conflicts that seem to be worrying the public. But I agree with you about this kind of crisis of elites. And let's turn to France first because it's, in some ways, is the most interesting example of the kind of crisis of democracy.

let's call it that for now, that we're seeing. So just a reminder that Macron came to power around the time of Justin Trudeau, almost a decade ago, and he effectively created a new political party. The existing mainline French parties were decimated in that election. Their memberships taken down, you know, in a country of whatever it is, 60, 70-odd million, their memberships were taken down into the low hundreds of thousands. Macron creates this new party, assumes power with a reform, form agenda. And there was a lot of optimism, Janice, about what Macron could deliver and this new

kind of political energy that he had created to form this new party and displace the old divisions of right and left in France. But here we find ourselves, less than a decade later, with Macron utterly embattled in the Choles de Liszt in his palace. His prime minister has been defeated. It's not clear who can come forward as a new prime minister to pass a budget, a very significant budget as France faces real problems around funding, its government operations, and a soaring debt and deficit. Why did France evidence this turmoil this week? And does it go back, Janice, to, as you say, a certain kind of technocratic view of society, of politics, of democracy that really is embodied and was emboldened in Macron as French president.

You know, I think Macron is actually a wonderful place to start, Roger, to tell the story of these last 10 years. I can remember when he was elected, a very distinguished Canadian political commentator, not you, although you're all of that, Richard. But not you said, oh, look at that. Macron is going to rest. store the liberal international order. We're all good.

And I looked at him and I thought, oh, wow. Now, call the patrician Frenchman. You know, he talks, never talks with, frankly, talks down to voters, repeatedly, repeatedly ignored public opinion in France. There have been eruptions in France over and over. under his leadership, the jeanjean, the yellow jackets that took to the streets over pension reform. Now, any economist is going to tell you that the French pension system needed to be reformed. People were retiring way too young and the population was aging.

But he did it in a way where he knew what was right for everybody. And the opposition be damned. That's been the tone of McCann. And under that tone, Marine Le Pen, the far-right populist leader, has flourished, frankly. And so it is a story of not even so much technocratic elite. So there's a piece of that. It's more of leaders who have, who condescend to voters, whom they characterize ignorant voters who don't understand these big issues.

So just listen to me. I'll tell you what to do. And listen, I know. So I don't need to pay attention to your frankly ignorant comments because I'm right. That has been his tone. He's not the only one from the beginning. That's why he finds himself where he is now. You mentioned that he wiped out the traditional political parties.

Well, that's great. That's a regeneration. renewal, except he wiped out the traditional political parties. And in doing that made much greater space for Marine Le Pen. And of course, his party's gone. Of course it is. We've seen this movie before. Let's shift to the United States because we saw another blip.

There's a lot of blips in America. But we saw these pardons by President Biden of his son, Hunter Bride, Biden. And there could be all kinds of valid reasons why. a father would pardon his son who was facing basically the threat of federal jail time, mainly related to some serious drug addiction issues. There's lots of other scandals swirling around Hunter Biden related to inappropriate lobbying of foreign governments and companies, but that's all kind of TBD. Yet Biden said he was never going to do this.

He promised voters over and over again that he would never pardon his son. There are now rumors that the Biden administration is considered. mass pardons, that they will preemptively pardon senior figures in the intelligence community, Liz Cheney, the former senator who campaigned against Donald Trump, the daughter of Dick Cheney. Again, Janice, I just wonder the kind of corrosive effects on, you know, on our democracy, not saying they're right, but you're effectively embolding the conspiracy theory. You're playing into these narratives that, oh, well, the pardon isn't really about his son's drug addiction. It's about covering up, you know, the Biden family's illegal foreign lobbying.

Or this is now about protecting the deep state from, you know, the scrutiny of the Trump administration and his new very, very out there FBI nominee Cash Patel. again, Janice, I just wonder why elites are behaving this way. They look like they're scared. They look like they're defensive. And that's not good for our democracy. And before I turn it back to you, that's my final point. Like, we need elites. There's, yes, Macron may be condescending.

But Marie Le Pen is saying a lot of really dumb, stupid, frankly, at times, racist things. And she shouldn't be the president of France. So what do we do? Like the elites are arrogant. I get it. We don't like them at times. But look at the alternative. Look at the alternative. And then here goes Biden.

I think one of the better elites, because he did seem to have a sympathy for working class voters. He had his own narrative from Scranton, you know, his working class roots. And then here he is, if he does do this next step of like pardoning the deep state, wow, this just confirms everyone's worst suspicions. I take a few extra minutes. Here's all I want to separate the Hunter Biden pardon from the other pardons you're talking about. It's really interesting because there's no justification for a president to do what Joe Biden did with respect to his son.

But I just asked five fathers, I knew, all of whom had sense. And I won't put you on the spot here, Roger, but I said to them all, if your son were facing jail time and you could pardon him, would you do it? Yes. Uniformly. Now, one father said no.

I think Joe Biden, this is not an excuse. It is not right. It is not right. But I think he is just trapped. He's a father first, frankly. He's in the waning days with his presidency, and he did it. Now, the preemptive pardoned, so really, so let me tell you a personal story, which I rarely do.

But I was at a long meeting. with one of the people who signed the letter of the, it's called the 51 letter now. Our listeners are not going to know about that. That was a letter signed by 51 current and former intelligence operatives in which they challenged that while they challenged the Trump allegation about fake data with respect. interesting enough, again, to Ukrainian intelligence. And Hunter Biden was peripherally part of that story. Now, what I was in mean with one of those 51, okay? Well, he spent his life in the service of his country.

He led some of the most dangerous operations overseas. And he was told by his lawyer, leave the United States because I don't want you in the United States on January the 20th because there may be executive orders calling for your arrest and your and charges against you. He is frightened, okay? He's frightened. Now, that would cover somebody like Mark Millie,

who was the chairman of the Joint Chief. of staff who objected after the fact to walking out into Lafayette Park and being, as he sees it, used by former President Trump. It would cover Liz Cheney. In other words, those preemptive pardons are all people that Trump has collectively said, I'm going to lock them up. This man that I was with, he's not wealthy. He's been in the service of state.

He's a civil. You know, he's an independent. an intelligence agency. He's worried that the Internal Revenue Agency will harass him that there will be hundreds of thousands of legal fees, of dollars, legal fees.

How does he defend himself? A GoFundMe campaign, it's not going to work for him, Roger, given what he's done in the past. So you put your finger on it. There is palpable fear in the United States by people who, after the January 6th, riots. And that's what they were. After those riots stood up and defended democracy and came out

openly against Trump, there are lists of those people that the Trump campaign has. And these people know it. That's a much harder argument. If Biden parties, those people, that's not to me in any way an inappropriate thing to do. We have a weaponized justice system. Well, but unfortunately, the Hunter Biden laptop was real, despite the clapper and all these officials coming out and saying that this was a Russian plant, it was disinformation. The laptop was real. Most of the Russia investigation against Trump was baseless.

There was no there there. There was this steel dossier that in fact had been paid for by an operative associated with Hillary Clinton campaign. You know, with the likes of Millie and John Kelly and others, they made a decision. They made a decision. Well, Cheney's a bit different because she's a politician, but especially Millie. He was an officer in the U.S. military. He made a decision in retirement to put one big foot into politics at the hottest moment of an election, the final closing weeks of the campaign. People have to live by their decisions. If you go out and you, you know, you hype up a laptop story that's not true, probably for political purposes because you're being pressured by different operatives or peers or

others, if you step off the curb from, you know, the world of the military and the non-political expectations that are the code of military officers, including in retirement and you smack dab yourself right in the middle of that election and you attack Trump in the way that he did as a dictator and an autocrat and he used the strongest language he called him a fascist. I don't like any of this Janice, but life has consequences. And I think there are a lot of Americans who are going to see mass pardons as something exactly what they are. And inside the Beltway, elite, protecting itself, covering itself up in the dying days of the Biden administration to withhold themselves probably from some

scrutiny that they do need. I don't think they need cash Patel. I don't think they need to be bankrupted with investigations. But, you know, politics is rough. And there's consequences when people do things and they have actions. And this is a really bad precedent to set. This means, in effect, that Trump gets to do this at the end of his term. He gets to do mass pardons for everybody. Suddenly you have no accountability in the American political system because nobody will be subject

to the threat of litigation, of criminal punishment and other things, which should be a threat to inform their behavior when they are in power. We are shattering norms here for the sake of, frankly, a selfish, interested kind of cabal, political cabal around Biden and his administration because it's in their interest. And I get it. It is in their interest. But they did things. And those things that

they did have consequences. So I'm sorry, I'm not going to just give them a blank check and a blank pardon and say that this is all okay. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast to get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program. Simply go to our website, triple-w, the monk debates.com. Click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site. Make a donation as little as $25 a year of 50 cents an episode. It will send you not only the full-length editions of each and every Friday Focus podcast, but all kinds of special offers, perks, access to events, and additional content. Again, you can do that right now by becoming a donor to the monk debates at triple w monk debates m unk debates m unk

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