The Ricochet Podcast - Lessons in Discretion with Professor Yoo

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

John Yoo returns to the Ricochet Podcast, joining James and Rob for a discussion on prosecutorial overreach. The gang cover the unprecedented lawfare being waged against a former president, and consider the executive statesmanship that's kept the lawyers in check over our history. Plus there's some discussion of Biden's move to withhold congressionally approved arms to an ally at war; and, naturally, John has a few things to say about porkchops, bacon and Texan barbeque.- This week’s sound: Donald Trump comments from outside the NYC courtroom and Joe Biden reads the stage directions from the teleprompter.

He never mentioned I was going to be on the podcast with him, with you guys. It's good you keep him in the dark. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and John Yoo, sitting in for Peter Robinson. I'm James Lilacs, and today we talk about the Trump trial and more. So let's have ourselves a podcast.

This case is highly unconstitutional. It's presided over by a very conflicted judge. Conflicted like I've never seen before. He refuses to take himself off the case, and it should be a misdraft. Imagine what we can do next. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years.

Four more years. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast number 691. And if you add all those numbers up, you get the sum of 16, I believe, which means nothing. So we're off to a great start. I'm James Lilex here in Minneapolis. Beautiful, gorgeous, blue spring day. And I'm joined by Rob Long. Rob Long, that's right. That's me. In grim and grimy Gotham. No, that's wrong. New York is beautiful in the spring. And John Yu, who is beautiful all year round. Welcome, John.

Thank you. I am, indeed. And I'm coming to you not from California. I've escaped the insane asylum for a week, and I'm in Austin, Texas this week. Peter Robinson and I spent the week together here. But Austin, of course, is a little bit of California inas itself isn't it uh or is are there certain texan elements that still predominate in a blue city oh come on it's such a sad wannabe for a place like berkeley or venice beach yeah it's too clean and orderly here it's just it's like uh

it's a disneyland version of berkeley there you go there you go yeah which is actually better actually the disneyland version of a lot of things is better you go yeah which is actually better actually the disneyland version of a lot of things is better exactly and i'm coming to you actually from the carl rove memorial studio he lives he lives out there i got a whiteboard out here and everything good really uh well good for carl good for you good for all of us let's go straight to the news um oh where to begin is it just me or i feel like i feel like j6 was two weeks ago and also that biden has been president forever it's really weird it's very strange um and here we are now in the trump trial going on i was going up the stairs to get a cup of coffee here at the world headquarters, and it was interesting.

The Fox feed on the television was all about the denial of arms to Israel. The CNN feed was all about Stormy Daniel texts are being read in open court. And I'm profoundly indifferent to this particular trial, but since we've got an actual lawyer guy with us here, walk us through how you think this is going so far. John. John would be the actual lawyer guy. Yes. Oh, I thought it was going to be Rob, but I complained. You know, I moonlight as a lawyer. It's actually really easy, I've found.

In a few years, Rob is going to be a pastor, a lawyer, a neurosurgeon, and probably an astronaut. Exactly the same thing. I find that lawyers say things, if you say the right phrases, like, well, that inures to you, that inures to them. It doesn't obtain, it inures. You find just different verbs for the same stuff. These are my dinnertime conversations with my wife, who is a lawyer. I'll look up from my pork chop and say, well, they don't have standing. And we're actually talking about the neighbor who put down some sod and encroaches on our part of the lawn.

But anyway. Well, I can't look up from a pork chop in California because those are illegal unless they have free range. And if I ever do look up from the pork shop and i look out gaze out on my class and i see a young youthful rob long's face in there i promise i will retire that very day i will take emeritus status take my california pension and get the hell out you know you would be wise to do that before we get to the interesting things to talk about, but go ahead. Yes, okay. Let me talk about the trial. So far, we have not seen any facts presented in the Stormy Daniels case which have any material relevance to what he's charged with. And that's what you always do when you're weak on the law. They say, if you're weak on the law, pound the facts.

And that's what the DA is doing. Of course, they also say, if you're weak on the facts, pound the law. And if you're weak on both, pound the table. And that's what the da is doing of course they also say if you're weak on the facts pound the law and if you're weak on both pound the table and that's coming next because so far you may not even remember that trump's being charged with essentially a deliberate effort to defraud the people of new york by hiding his payments to stormy daniels in his bookkeeping right which was an effort according to da to corrupt the 2016 election that's what they said in their opening statement whether donald trump actually had sex with stormy daniels and what kind of hair what kind of shampoo he uses and aftershave he uses and what that whole night back in 2006-7 was about isn't really relevant thank god

yeah those are the last images i wanted rattling around my head by the way my mistake glanced at the newspaper oh my god i don't want to know this um so my here's my question john is this um. Is this a specifically egregious, unique use of the legal system to harass somebody? Or are we just, as sometimes happens with this stuff, are we just looking at something happening to a high-profile person that actually happens a lot and we should be more concerned about it does feel like prosecute prosecutorial whatever overstep it does feel like sort of a character attack it does i mean paying somebody hush money is not illegal but but my so my question sometimes we hear that these stories we think oh well they're just going after trump right which is true right but is could could this be happening in courtrooms across america and we just don't know it to

ordinary people who are just now in the crosshairs of a prosecutor that is a great question and that is the real uh threat of that could come out of all this to our you know system of institutions and laws so uh trump i think one reason why this hasn't hurt Trump in the polls is because maybe he's expressing a lot of the frustration people have with the justice system, the sense that prosecutors are out there picking people to go after because they just don't like them. If prosecutors are doing that, that is a violation of the duty of prosecutor. The greatest prosecutor, at least the person who put this best in words, was Robert Jackson, who was FDR's lawyer, who became Attorney General and then became a great justice. He's a wonderful writer.

He's the one who came up with the phrase, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, for example. And so he said, as prosecutors, we do not prosecute people for being bad people. We don't prosecute the man. We prosecute the crime. We prosecute the conduct. And what you're seeing in the trial now is a violation of that fundamental principle of being a prosecutor. What Bragg is doing is dragging all this in, dragging him through the mud of stormy daniels because he wants to persuade the jury that donald trump is a bad man he should be punished for something even if it may not be the crimes that he's being charged with now this is something prosecutors are not supposed to do but you know you hear stories about this off and on like al capone right being prosecuted for tax evasion uh you know right right, that was the idea.

Get the mafia, even if they spit in the street, prosecute them for that because we just have to go after them. That's actually an abuse of what prosecutors are supposed to be doing. And the reason why is because, and this is another thing Trump is, you know, informing the American people about something that lawyers know is that, as you pointed out, Rob, prosecutors have enormous discretion yeah and picking the cases they go after and they're supposed to do it in the public interest but what should be afraid of is that becomes like what happens in the soviet union you know remember

a berea stalin's uh you know secret service chief said show me the man and i'll show you the crime and we're you know starting to sound something like. But that's the threat of all this, too, that if Trump in attacking these prosecutions also undermines public faith in the justice system, then our law enforcement system can't work. Because believe it or not, it depends on voluntary cooperation from the public. The public are the witnesses. The public are the ones who identify the crimes. They are the ones who report it to the police and the prosecutors. If the public doesn't support what prosecutors and police are doing, then our system can't work in the end. Well, I can't see Donald Trump tearing down an institution or something just to benefit

himself. But I would add that if there is a lack of faith these days, it might come from the actions or the inactions of the prosecutors themselves. In every major city, we've got prosecutors who seem to say, well, okay, all right, seven felonies, we, you know, okay, well, you can plead it all down, we'll give you an ankle bracelet, and out you go. I don't think it's Donald Trump that's going to reduce the credibility of the institutions. I think it's the actions of the institutions themselves. And Trump is just, you know, revelatory in that respect um but john rob do you think that the end result of this is going to be to to cause indifference in the public to subsequent legal matters i mean this is the one they sort of open up and start with kind of this

is the one that's dominating the field and people are looking at this and you know you mean in regards as regards trump yeah that is you know they see one after the other and think they're just piling up on the guy yeah well what's going on actually is trump has the virtue of his enemies going crazy to get him because this might be the only trial that gets to a verdict before the election and this is by far the weakest shabbiest one i mean the crimes are i mean this should be overturned on appeal, but it would take time for it to get up on appeal. But look what's going on in the other ones.

You've got, right, the one involving classified documents, which was just announced will probably go past the election. And that was sort of beclouded because then it turned out lots of people were taking their classified documents home, including Joe Biden. And then you had the one in Georgia, right, which I call, I think I called it with you guys before, I call it the real prosecutors of Atlanta, where it's just imploded. That was also an outrageous charge. The presidential reelection campaign is actually an organized crime operation. That's what Fannie Willis claimed. And look, the news there is the

Georgia Appeals Court just said they are going to review whether Fannie Willis should be involved and has to recuse herself. If they find she has to recuse herself, that's going to send it to a new prosecutor who could very well drop it. And I've always thought, and we've discussed this before, the only real case that's important is prosecuting donald trump for insurrection on january 6. that's the one that really matters uh they've screwed that one up too that's what i'm sitting at the supreme court right now on whether there's immunity for a president i expect trump to lose that one but then he'll go back and he has the right to attack these charges like newsflash jack smith didn't charge Trump with insurrection.

He charged him with obstructing justice by destroying documents. He charged him with trying to defraud the United States. He charged him with taking away all our voting rights by eliminating our vote for president. I don't know if you felt your voting rights go up in smoke on 2020. I didn't. But none of those charges i think actually is going to fly so if that's the case then you're right james this will be the only trial that reaches a verdict that will stick in the public's mind and is so shabbily done and so weak on the law that right it might it might benefit trump actually that this is the case but i guess my so but my so i two questions one i sort of go back to just the uh ordinary citizen famous person. Ordinary citizen, I mean, I remember during the Clinton scandal and his impeachment for perjury, one of the arguments people made in defense of Clinton were saying, hey, okay, yeah, perjury in a civil case that involves a sexual romantic matter is not that bad, and we don't prosecute people for it.

At most, they get fined, and then people said, no, no, here are the list of five people or ten people that under the Clinton Department of Justice have been prosecuted. Some of them have done time, right? And so it's sort of interesting. Okay, well, citizens and the president should have the same laws, right? So one of my fears is that we're just discovering this kind of abuse, and there are ordinary people we've never heard of who have been suffering under it for a while. The second thing is, to what extent are these things going to be valuable?

It seems to me the immunity case by the Supreme Court is a valuable case to bring. It's an interesting case to be decided. It is not Trump-specific. It actually has wider, rippling implications for a president. And the second thing would be the insurrection case, which you say has not been brought. To what extent can a president who loses re-election complain and demand redress in some way, right? I mean, even if you are Jack Smith and you have this urge to win, it seems like that would be a really interesting case

to have heard and tried and then taken to the Supreme Court, right? Or are we going to cheat on that? You're trying to push me out of my job because you just asked a poor student here a tripartite question. Yes, exactly. I'm like writing down furiously subsection 3E question. That's my job. Jesus, I'm pity. Are the questions too hard for you john so look the the fundamental point i agree with uh the only case that's

important legally is a january 6 case and you identified two reasons why it's the most important issue one is uh it's not just about donald trump it creates incentives for all future presidents right anything the supreme court says now about, it's going to change the way future presidents act. And you could hear them talking about an oral argument. They said, well, if we give them immunity, won't presidents go off the reservation without any kind of consideration for the laws? On the other hand, if you don't give them enough immunity,

will presidents be risk-averse? Will they be worrying about being sued every time they have to make a tough decision like whether to fire off a drone right well they worry about being prosecuted for killing innocent civilians who are nearby the military target that is out of all this that's the most important the other issue that's extremely important which you also put your finger on is even if there's immunity or not everyone everyone, even Trump's lawyer, conceded. And I'm sure Trump wasn't listening, so he didn't know his lawyer conceded this.

Actually, Trump's lawyer didn't say presidents have absolute immunity. He said presidents only have immunity for their official actions. And so what's an unofficial action when you're president? Almost by definition, it's got to be things you do to run for re-election, right? Because you're not supposed to use the power of your office to guarantee your incumbency. So that's a really important question is, as you said, Rob, what things did Donald Trump do between the election and January 6th that were not public, were not governmental actions, were for him as a private citizen that led to some kind of insurrection or sedition and then shouldn't he be in the same position as you know

the guy with the viking hat hat who i assume is a minnesota resident and got lost on his way to the football stadium excuse me what a bone that giant horn irritating giant yeah yeah and then all those 500 people who are prosecuted shouldn't trump be treated the same as that because he's got no special immunity if this was where were you on that day by the way i'm gonna go look at those crowd what did you see any picture of guy in philadelphia eagles gear no you did not philadelphia eagles you're pushing the vikings fan in front of the cameras here's another here's another point that is um does not hold up to

intellectual scrutiny at all as a matter of fact and disconnects two disparate things that really ought not to be linked but yet we live in a society where images count where we see things in broad terms ergo we saw uh the people as you mentioned j66, the QAnon shun and walking through howling. We saw the people breaking windows, taking things and the rest of it parading. We saw parading and we have seen a stern response to it and people going to jail. Lots of people going to jail. I have no problem really with people who were who broke into the Capitol and did bad things going to jail. I hate that stuff. I hate it. But at the same time, we have seen across the country massive civil disobedience

and fights with police and clashes and destruction of government buildings and all sorts of defacing over, well, does the issue even matter? What we know is that we've seen it. And we're pretty much sure that none of the people involved in that even the people that are arrested are going to go down into a the gray bar hotel and just about everybody if they're honest knows that if all of those campuses have been taken over by clean-cut young men with tiki torches and khaki pants and mega hats yeah that this would be a completely different situation that there would not be the romanticism attached to youthful rebellion but there would those kids with the tiki torches were saying essentially the same thing right it was just kind of like different wardrobes but for the but for the wrong reason i mean that's the great thing it's the wonderful thing about these protests is that if you let them go long

enough eventually they slip up and they start saying jew instead of zionist and you're seeing it all over the place. Now, there's a guy on Twitter who's circulating a list of Zionist writers so everybody can know who's on the list and tick them off accordingly. And, you know, yeah, they there in the kind of sort of right side of history and probably will see this summer when we have the conventions. Hasn't what we've seen this last, I guess, month now on our campuses neutralized the idea that Trump is the agent of chaos now. I mean, it's just people are forgetting about the chaos of January 6th and the video when you have these campuses now erupting. And of course, before that, you had the border crisis. I think it's hard now for the Democrats to attack Trump for introducing chaos. And he can blame them for BLM, and he can blame them for the border.

And now, I think one other just side note about these trials is that I think it's, again, unintentionally good for Trump in that because of the gag order and because he's sitting in the courtroom all day, he can't say anything stupid. He's like, all he's doing is coming out at the end of the trial,

attacking Biden for cutting off aid to Israel and high inflation. He only has about 30 seconds, and then he disappears. This is like, maybe this is why it's been good for him. But, right, all he has to do is say, Biden is the one under whom the world has become chaotic. It's just like 1968 again, or it's like 1980 again. The gag order is his version of campaigning from the basement right um and it's been successful for him so far right but is it possible i mean i'm giving you another theory here that the even people who don't like trump so there's a bunch

of there's a bunch of potential trump voters out there he needs more people to vote for him they voted from last time right and so the people who voted for him last time who like him they're going to vote for him and the people who don't like him but are very pro-israel are very angry at joe biden right now so maybe they're going to turn to trump and say well you know trump is a better friend to israel than joe biden's that's possible too but isn't there a third section of people who are sort of american civil libertarian types who think we need to show the assorted, mostly progressive, mostly Democrat, mostly partisan prosecutors and DOJ employees that they can't pick our president for us. That to me, I am not, as you know, a Trump fan or a Trump supporter in any way. But that is, to me, an important, crucial signal to send that we, you know, these people sort of govern and administrate the justice system with our consent. But, you know, I don't know. I mean,

as you know, I'm a brilliant legal mind of my own, but I can't possibly fathom these arguments and make these decisions. I have to trust them to do the best job they can in the best judgment they can following the law. And it does seem to me that in a lot of places, they're not doing that. And i'm an american citizen that makes me mad i might even just cut off my nose despite my face and say you don't like the guy fine i'm voting for him and i'm voting for him even though i know he's mentally and emotionally unfit even though i know he's unstable even though i know he's not going to do any of the things he says he's going to do because he didn't do them four years ago um but i want to prove a point to you, which is that you can't tell me

who I get to vote for. Isn't that... John, while you break down and metabolize the complex carbohydrates of Rob's question there, I'd like to remind everybody else that complex carbohydrates and metabolism are things that affect your health. And I'm here to tell you about Lumen.

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And I'm a big advocate for, you know, cutting out the carbs, working out a little bit more and losing that paunch, which I managed to do. And I had to do it all by looking at the side of the package of absolutely everything and counting my carbs and watching the camera. How nice it would have been at the time to have Lumen, a metabolic coach that fits in the palm of my hand. Well, I'm keen to get one anyway because I'm still on this diet and I intend to stay there because I feel great. So if you want to take the next step in improving your health, go to lumen.me. That's lumen.me. And use Ricochet to get $100 off your lumen. That's l-u-m-e-n

dot m-e. Use the coupon code Ricochet to check out for $100 off. And we thank Lumen for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Fantastic. Thank you, James. Did my best. Answer the question, John. John, answer the... Stop, uh... I can't take the fifth against podcast fantastic thank you james did my best all right john question john john answers stop i can't take the fifth against you stop waffling yeah

so i would put it a little differently i don't know how many people would vote on principle i agree with you on the principle rob that what you're seeing here is a replacement of the political process with the law. The law is now taking over who gets to be on the ballot or not, which used to be the job of primaries and the general election. But I read it a little differently. If I were Trump, anyway, if I were Republicans, this is how I would phrase the argument, is that the reason why the Supreme Court's involved, the reason why all these courts are involved, the reason why the legal system is taking over is because of Joe Biden's failure of statesmanship. It's Joe Biden who's decided to unleash the Justice Department on Trump.

Now, it's the White House that's been coordinating with these DAs, apparently we're starting to learn, to bring criminal charges. In the past, presidents would say okay you know we could prosecute former presidents i'm sure trump's not the only president who could be prosecuted i mean you got to read lyndon john the biography of lyndon johnson that's going on with robert carrow and it's like it's like as a prosecutor like there's one there's another one there's one we could have got right but president said let's put even richard nixon put lbj behind him and jerry ford put nixon behind him and said we're not going to spend the presidency really relitigating the past we got to move forward make decisions now on behalf of the american people on

our issues that are facing us now and biden doesn't have the leadership to do that. That vacuum of leadership is what lets the legal system fill in. If the politicians don't show statesmanship, then what happens is the legal system will fill the gap and the legal system is worse because we go to extremes. It's either Trump has immunity, Trump has no immunity. There's no compromise in the legal system the way the political system can generate a compromise. And look, even Trump, for all his faults, he showed this kind of statesmanship. Remember, he didn't prosecute Hillary Clinton, right?

Even though his main campaign song was Lock Her Up. And so I think every president obeyed this idea. And it was just statesmanship. There's nothing constitutionally that stopped them from prosecuting their predecessors. And Biden was the one who showed failure. And now it's going to unleash possibly this tit for tat retaliation now that we're going to have to live with every presidency going forward. Have we ever had that before? I mean, it does seem like American politics for at least 70 years there in the 19th century,

late 18th, 19th century, was incredibly bitter and personal and involved all sorts of things. But did it ever really, I guess we didn't have this kind of society, this sort of litigious society, thanks to all the lawyers we have now. But we had personal stuff, nasty stuff. Oh, yeah. And sort of illegal vote tampering and all sorts of stuff like that. But I don't think we ever had this horizon, unbroken horizon in the future of, you know,

the president's lawyers and the vice president's lawyers and the challenger's lawyers deciding who's going to be the president which is what it seems like to me yeah I agree Rob that hasn't happened before in our history the only thing that was close was 1976. I mean 1974 to 76 under Ford right right Ford could have allowed the prosecution of Nixon to go forward historians say nowd may well have been re-elected if he had done that right right instead he pardoned nixon on these grounds get it behind us close the chapter on that and let's the nation let's go forward you barely lost the 76 election and it looks like it was because of nixon's the pardon of nixon but that's the i think the time we came

closest before but you're right rob in the 19th century we had vicious politics just were more partisan more polemical than now but they never resorted to this idea of i'm going after my predecessor we did not even like lincoln did not even prosecute jefferson davis right right all right maybe it's just the last gasp of this generation and that when we clear the decks um and in and in a new generation arises they will be so disgusted with this uh this the the tendencies that have come to define the previous political generation that they will endeavor to do something new i mean really if you look this has got to be the last gas because people are looking at the situation and saying, well,

we got Biden. He's been around forever. We got Trump, who's been around culturally forever, and people are casting their eyes about for something new, and what do they give us? A Kennedy. Just to complete the fact that we utterly run out of people.

The worm in his head. It is you guys and your baby boom generation that have ruined the country yet again, and you're still hanging on with your fingernails. What are you talking about? Finger tips. You're about to fall off. I am X. I am not a boomer.

I'm a boomer, and I have absolutely nothing in common with the boomers that came before me. I am a late boomer, and so I regard their culture as anathema. I don't regard it as mine at all, and I don't like to be lumped together with those people. But that said, Rob has to go. Yeah, I'm sorry to say. Right. So if you'd like to, Rob, ask another 47-minute question. 47-part question?

Can I drop off right as John's trying, tempting to answer it? I would say this. He's going to do it. All you can do is make lawyers that's your job yes i get paid handsomely to make to reproduce to make lawyers do we need all those lawyers i mean are you i asked this i will are you doing a good thing?

Rob, I got a great story for you. And now, since you're leaving, you can't interrupt me. This is for the first time ever. This is awesome. It's horrible. No, so actually, when I got into Yale Law School as a senior in college, I went to the great sociologist, Daniel Bell. I don't know. People don't remember who this guy is.

He might have been the great, last of the great big idea sociologists. He's the one in the 1960s who coined the term post-industrial society. Because in 1960, he wrote a book saying information is going to be the product, the good for the economy, not manufacturing. And this guy wrote this in 1960. He foresaw the future. It was amazing. So I went to him just like Rob and I said, Professor Bell, I just got into law school. Should I go? Remember, this is the time when Japan's eating our lunch. Japan has almost no lawyers. They're kicking our body economically. Shouldn't our society shift more lawyers to more productive capacities? And this is what Bell said. I've remembered it ever since. And damn if he isn't right. He said, no, we need more lawyers. Actually, America will prevail because of the

lawyers. And I said, that's crazy, Professor Bell. Nobody thinks that. He says, because if information and content are the future products and they're so easy to steal, right? You can copy any book, just copy it and steal it. He said, the only societies that will actually zoom ahead in an information economy are the ones that respect property rights over ideas. And he said, the people who do that are lawyers. Because otherwise, nothing prevents some guy in China from stealing all of Rob's screenplays or his TV shows. But if you have a legal system that rewards investment and work in ideas intellectual property then we will prevail and he was he said this to

me in 1989 so that's him if he wasn't that's how you look at yourself in the mirror every morning interesting that's right i would say that the reason we need lawyers is because the other guy has a lawyer and that is not a reason to have a lawyer. Bye. See you later, Rob. Good luck. Go forth and do great things. I mean, yeah, John, I see your point there. We need the good people. But first of all, A, it's done diddly all when it comes to China, which has managed to steal vast amounts of IP.

And secondly, I have no idea, but I would suspect that the number of people who are indeed imbued with a spirit of justice for maintenance of intellectual property rights are probably outnumbered about 10 to 1 by the people who are going to sue a website because there's a mistake in the alt text code that violates the ada in other words a parasitical class i get it you know exists within this virtuous and i'm like i say i'm married to a lawyer i know what she does she does great work and she does and she works on behalf of good things but an overabundance leads to a lot of people casting about for something to do and something to do turns out to be something to sue so i yeah i'm kind of you know on the fence about that yeah no we know all those stories about plaintiff's lawyers who are going into like mcdonald's and suing about the coffee being too hot right or the

i'm sorry but the coffee was a real case the coffee was too not for me from what i understand that actually was a proper case and i don't like like, you know... Ah, come on. Hey, you're just drinking some McDonald's coffee right now. Come on, it's supposed to be too hot. Oh, this is fine coffee from a bun-o-matic, as a matter of fact, that has been so perfectly engineered in its construction that the entire vat becomes tepid within about seven minutes or so. So you have to drink it at a tongue-scalding temperature. Otherwise, it's going to be the quality of something you get in a Lutheran basement on

Sunday afternoon after everyone's gone home. Well, we should probably depart here, but before we do, I want to ask you one question. Something floating out there right now says, wasn't Donald Trump impeached for not giving weapons to an ally that were legally agreed upon and is not Joe Biden doing the same. When you see something like that, your mind immediately goes, probably. And it doesn't matter because the rules are probably different, which is a pain and sad, but maybe not because this seems too convenient. And it's if you can distill the problem down to a Twitter length, maybe there's something more here um let's pretend that i just asked you that question like rob did and there's 17 questions

nested inside of it there are a lot of important points built into that james but the important point is that it shows how you how flimsy the first impeachment of Donald Trump was. Because, in fact, if you were going to say this is something that is impeachable, withholding congressionally approved arms given to an ally, then the Israel one, I think, is a much more worthy case for impeachment. Because Ukraine wasn't at war then. Right now, we have an ally who's actually in the fight and closing in on the last redoubt of the enemy and we're going to cut the arms off now right that

seems to me a greater dereliction of duty right if you're going to say as the democrats said in congress when they impeached trump that the charge is abuse of power dereliction of duty, harming the public interest, which is the greater offense to the public. Monkeying around with Ukraine in order to get re-elected, which is why Biden seems to be pulling back on arms to Israel now. But monkeying around with Ukraine, Ukraine is not in a shooting war at that time. They're just, you know, scrimmaging, as it were, with the Russians along the border. Skirmishing, I mean,

but they're not actually suffering an invasion. Eventually, right, Trump does release lethal weapons to the Ukrainians. Actually, Obama didn't want to send them lethal weapons. Versus, right, our allies in the Middle East, the only democracy there that's actually in a

shooting war after they were attacked on October 7th, which is the greater insult to the public interest. Right. And with two points about that, one, the whole thing about not giving them the weapons after Congress had passed and the rest of it, you know, if you have defense contracts and arrangement with a country, you're going to sell them some really high-tech stuff, some really good stuff. And over the course of a week, there's a revolution in a country, you're going to sell them some really high-tech stuff, some really good stuff. And over the course of a week, there's a revolution in the country, and the previously friendly government is replaced by somebody inimicable to us who hates us and is, you know, an Islamist government that wants to take apart our tools

and sell them to Iraq. Yeah, no, you know, maybe we don't have to fulfill that contract, you know, next. But the second point is that Biden's move doesn't seem to have placated anybody and seems to have aggravated everybody. I mean, the people who want Gaza war to stop now are peeved that he's still even considering helping them in some other respects. And the people who, you know, who see him doing what he did to placate voters who are not going to be placatable. It's great. That's enough of it, right?

It's the fecklessness of the entire foreign policy this administration summed up in one move of tying your shoelaces together and then trying to run. It's all been this way from afghanistan to ukraine the rest of it's it's it's been incoherent you know what changed which

is different but it's like the accusations they made against trump is uh you could have said up to now it was incompetence they had a different vision we disagreed with maybe they believe in american decline so they're trying to pull back. But this is blatantly for electoral purposes. The reason why is because the claim is we're cutting off the arms because of humanitarian worries, worries about killing civilians. Well, then why are you cutting off the arms that are for precision? Right. You're cutting off the precision weapons and saying, oh, no, but it's OK if you use the more indiscriminate, violent, destructive weapons. To me, that just signals this is about, you know, winning Arab American votes in Michigan.

But even they ought to see through it. If Biden said in order to placate the Michigan voters, I'm going to make an announcement that we are banning export of an extremely accurate sniper rifle, but we are selling them barrel bombs. I mean, I don't know how the people That's essentially the equivalent of it. Yeah. Yeah. Can do that. You know, everybody dunks in the Trump administration for the foreign policy, but there were two things. One, yeah, NATO ought to pay more. Yes. Meet your obligations. Come on, shovel it out. We're dying here. Give us some more. Yes, meet your obligations. Come on, shovel it out. We're dying here.

Give us some more. And the Abraham Accords, which were a remarkable way of changing the paradigm in the Middle East that had existed for decades. And I don't see anything in the Biden administration's work that equals that. So, I mean, again, do I attribute those to the diplomatic skill and intellectual precision and behind-the-scenes arm-twisting and magnificent politics of Donald Trump? No, I don't. But there were people in the administration that got things done, and the people behind the Biden administration seem to be about 27 years old and spending a lot of their time on Twitter liking Dylan Mulhaney videos. You know what? We're going to be done. I'm going to let you get a head start on the line at McDonald's

so you can get your McRib if they're available now. They're probably going to be $37 the next time they're out. You mentioned before when we were talking at the top about pork, right? How did that come up? We were talking about what? Pork chop. You said you looked up from your pork chop, and I'm like, I don't gain pork chops in California becauseia because of the strange crazy pork law we have right which of course

pushes broke as they do with chickens and it pushes the price up everywhere so everybody if they want to sell in this big market has to adjust their pen size to accommodate the the california law at the grocery store the other day there was's a, you know, this pork roll that's flavored, marinated, and seasoned, and the rest of it. And I always, since I do the shopping, I'm keenly aware of what the price fluctuations are. And they dropped the price of these things, special deal, from about $9 to $4. And the price of bacon was also just in an absolute floor at $2.60 for a package of bacon, which is remarkable. And since the big pork and bacon producers in the country are being taken over by the Chinese, Smithfield being the one that really irritates me, it makes me wonder exactly what's going on there. We have some sort of overproduction. Is there a surge in the pork industry that we don't know anything about? Because it used to be, oh, that's a great price. I'm glad to pay for it. Now it's like, um are there is there a surge in the in the pork industry that we don't know anything about because it used to be oh that's a great price and i'm glad to pay for it now it's like how is this

impacting the chinese domestic pork market and i wish i didn't have to think about these things but there you go go have your i know i i'm in i'm in texas every i've gone to barbecue place every night here in aust. They're awesome. We have nothing like that in California. And I noticed actually the same thing you did, James. The price differential between beef brisket and pork ribs is quite wide now. Usually they're not so different. Doesn't matter.

I'm going to get both. It's not a choice. Get both. Still, get them both and get different kind of sauces. I know that they'll probably frown on you if you want the mustard-based, but it's still good. I envy your gustatory culinary experiences to come,

and by gosh. Anyway, thanks, everybody, for listening. Thanks to Lumen for sponsoring the podcast. Thanks for Ricochet.com for just being there, right? And if you don't know what that is, I don't know how after 691 episodes of the podcast, but you'd best go there and find out because that is the civil, sane, center-right

place you've been looking for all of your life on the internet. Peter will be back with us next week. John, of course, you're always happy to be here with us, and we'll see everyone in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Ricochet! Join the conversation.