1.
Lavelle: Hello and welcome to CrossTalk, where
all Things are considered. I’m Peter Lavelle. Hillary Clinton and her never
ending scandals, the FBI’s Decision to continue it’s Investigation into her use
of e-mails presents a troubling prospect of a protracted political Crisis. Is
winning the Election now the least of her Problems?
To CrossTalk,
Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. I’m joined by my guest Mark Crispin Miller in New
York. He is a professor of Media Culture and Communication at New York
University as well as author of Fooled Again: The Real Case
for Electoral Reform. Also in New York, we have Don DeBar, he’s an
anti-War activist and host of a daily Radio programme. In Washington, we cross
to Bruce Fein, he is a Constitutional lawyer and a former Associate Deputy Attorney
General under President Ronald Reagan.
All right
gentlemen, CrossTalk rule is in effect, that means you can jump in anytime you
want and I very much appreciate it. I must say gentlemen, there’s so much to
discuss here, there’s so many different odds and ends coming into play and a
lot of different Decisions have been made and we know about the commentary,
what the head of the FBI, James Comey when his Decision to continue with this Investigation.
I’d like to start very broadly with Bruce, given your Knowledge of Constitutional
Law, what really bothers me the most at this point is that we could have an
elected President under federal Investigation, criminal Investigation, going
into The White House. That’s not going to sit very well with a lot of People,
particularly the Person, if she wins, that didn’t vote for her. Go ahead,
Bruce.
2.
Fein: Well that’s exactly right. I was there and
I worked in the Watergate Investigation of then President Richard Nixon and the
conclusion at that Time reached by the acting Attorney General Robert Morgan and others
was that a sitting President cannot be indicted criminally and prosecuted, that
Impeachment is the only route. After Impeachment if it succeeds, then you can
criminally prosecute. We would be in this situation if a criminal Investigation
culminated and some kind of Charge against a then President Clinton, we’d be
forced into an Impeachment situation because there isn’t any ability to
prosecute a sitting President under the Constitution. In
my View, the whole Thing was Wrong-headed from the outset of the Investigation
of the e-mails because we have an Investigation run by the continuing director
of the FBI, James Comey, and then the Attorney General Loretta Lynch, both who
could be promoted and they’re politically ambitious People, by the target of
the Investigation Hillary Clinton. You have a glaring conflict of interest at
the outset. Hillary Clinton could make James Comey Attorney General if she’s
elected, she could make Loretta Lynch a Supreme Court justice or maybe
Secretary of State, whatever else she wanted. There should have been a
special prosecutor as with the case in Watergate from the outset. If that were
true, we wouldn’t be in this kind of dilemma because I can guarantee you that
when there was a special prosecutor, that we use the FBI during Watergate, the
FBI didn’t make the Decisions to investigate or not & go forward. That was
made by the accountable special prosecutor.
3.
Lavelle: Mark, weigh in there. What Bruce just
said there, he didn’t use the word, but pay-to-play. We could have these other
characters involved in the story and they could be promoted. That sounds
exactly what the Clinton Foundation does. One of the Things I find very
interesting is that the 650,000 e-mails, that sounds like the entire Time
Hillary Clinton was at the State Department. I think that’s one of the reasons
why we have them saved on an unsecure Computer. Go ahead.
4.
Miller: I don’t think there’s any Question but
that this should’ve been investigated, and I agree with Bruce that it should’ve
been investigated properly. I can very easily imagine a special prosecutor
being subject to the same kind of abuse that Comey has attracted for his Decision
to look into the e-mails on Anthony Weiner’s Laptop and to announce his Intention
to do so a week before the Election. I’ve been staggered throughout this whole
latest Crisis by how the Democrats are partying like it’s 1953. You have James
Carville actually invoking the Spectre of the KGB, you have Paul Krugman and
Robert Reich, self-professed staunch liberals, really sounding like the most
troglodyte anti-Soviet hysterics of decades ago clearly as a kind of Stratagem
to deflect attention from the substance of the Charges. I have to say,
I’ve never seen anything like it, really.
5.
Lavelle: Don, if I can go to you, I don’t think
any of this and I don’t like it and I don’t want it to happen again but it
seems to get worse and worse here. That’s a really Good point that Mark brings
up is, what is the Content of these e-mails? That’s what we all want to know.
Hillary Clinton says have them exposed and let everyone ready them, we know
that’s not going to happen because they’re under Investigation right now. I
have to wonder, where’s the key here? Is it Weiner, is he the one that really
has the key to all of this? Is he talking to prosecutors, cutting a deal for
himself and his estranged wife?
6.
DeBar: Or is he
texting a fourteen-year-old girl and asking her to look at a picture of his
boxers? You know, all of this is breaking in a political condition where
there’s a huge division among the Electorate, among the Population of the
United States with a great deal of acrimony, maybe unprecedented since the
Civil War. In addition to that, sitting on top of a looming financial Crisis,
an economic Crisis, and an
international geopolitical environment where the Spectre of World War Three is
being seriously considered as a Possibility. We talk about going
into a Constitutional Crisis perhaps over an indictment of Clinton if she wins
after the Election but it seems with the polling as reliable as it may or may
not be, it’s quite possible we might end up in the House of Representatives because
somebody didn’t get enough electoral votes and/or in front of the Supreme Court
with Charges of Fraud of all types. A Supreme Court that right now is evenly
divided, it only has eight members. Also though, this Crisis, basically a Crisis
of confidence in the Institutions, a Crisis of legitimacy of the entire Apparatus,
the Government, the Media, across the board among the entire Population. You
have an explosive condition with all kinds of superstructural Problems like the
global Economy and the political division in the United States where the
outcome of this Election may be uncertain, decided by the Elite in the eyes of
one or the other half of the Population, and maybe the Possibility of actual Civil
Unrest as a Consequence of it.
7.
Lavelle: Bruce, again, going back to Constitution-
8.
Miller: Can I-
9.
Fein: I’ve been here and make this observation
that it is true in the past when presidents have been under attack, and I
remember when Bill Clinton had the Impeachment proceedings against him, he was
launching Rockets into Iraq and Afghanistan to deflect attention and even into
Sudan, it was a veterinary pharmaceutical Factory. We cannot underestimate that
potential out there which is very quite troublesome. Okay, we’ll deflect the
attention from domestic Things by doing crazy Things abroad, whether it’s going
into Eastern or Central Europe, Poland, the Baltic States, China, the South
China Sea, anything to deflect attention. The other Thing
that I’d like to make an observation about that’s really been unrecognised is
how do these Government documents end up in private hands?
10.
Lavelle: Exactly.
11.
Fein: Ed Snowden, I have to confess, I
actually represented his father. Ed
Snowden takes those, he’s charged with what? Theft of Government Documents among other Things. How do all these e-mails that are State
Department Property end up on Anthony Weiner’s Computer? Somebody stole the
documents, irrespective of whether there’s any classified Information or
otherwise.
12.
Lavelle: Hang on, Mark wanted to jump in. Go
ahead Mark, go ahead.
13.
Miller: Right, thanks. I wanted to follow up on
Don’s point and add to the catalogue of Crises that he correctly laid out for
us. He said that the outcome of the Election may be uncertain. Well, I can
assure you that the outcome of the Election will be uncertain because the
outcomes of all our Elections are necessarily uncertain. Not the least
important Crisis that we’re actually facing here, and it’s one that the entire Media
in the US has been hysterically denying is that we have the worst Voting System
in the developed World. That’s not just my opinion, that was the Finding of the Electoral Integrity Project
at Harvard University and the University of Sydney in the spring. It’s something that
Jimmy Carter confessed on NPR in 2006. We have a Voting System that is
largely computerised and privatised, it is no more honest and trustworthy than
the last Person who’s had his hands on either the op-scans to count the votes
or the Machines. Let me add that this is something that Donald Trump, as usual,
has discussed but in a kind of crude and exaggerated way that makes sensible Discussion
very difficult. He invokes the Spectre of People voting fifteen times. Well,
that almost never happens, that kind of old fashioned voter Fraud is pretty
much impossible under the system we have today but he’s Right to say that the Election
can, in some sense, be rigged. It is extremely vulnerable. I want to note that
neither of the two Parties has done anything to fix this situation and since we
profess to be the World’s greatest Democracy. It is really a scandal of the
highest order-
14.
Lavelle: It is a scandal. A bigger Scandal is.
Hang on. I’d want to go to you right now, Don. The Election is rigged in a
different way, the Media has rigged it, absolutely rigged it in favour of
Hillary Clinton if you look at the mainstream. Go ahead, Don, before we got to
the break. Go ahead.
15.
DeBar: There are a variety of ways in which Elections
are stolen in the United States and some are used, some of the Techniques are
used more often by Republicans, for example voter suppression, voter caging and
such, and some by the Democrats. In this particular Election, you have an
alignment of the Elites of both Parties behind Hillary Clinton. That’s at the State-level
also where you have Secretary of State and the Commissioners of Elections and
all of that. If you look at the primary Election - and
it’s ironic, Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State - State Department has
a Standard for a vector between the exit polls and the actual declared official
Result where beyond this Standard, beyond this vector, they will not recognise
the Election as being legitimate. Like half of the primary Elections that
Clinton won this year exceeded that, some of them by two or three times.
16.
Lavelle: Gentlemen, I’m going to jump in here,
we’re going to go to a short break. After that short break, we’ll continue our Discussion
on Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, stay with RT.
Welcome back to
CrossTalk where all Things are considered, I’m Peter Lavelle. To remind you,
we’re discussing the final stretch of the US presidential Election.
Okay, Bruce, I’m
going to ask you first and then I’ll ask the rest of the panel. James Comey, is
he a hero or a villain? He has found himself in a very, very Bad spot. I think
it’s because he made a mistake earlier and there wasn’t a Grand Jury and now
he’s paying for it. Go ahead.
17.
Fein: I’d [quote] Alexander Pope, “to err is
human, to forgive is divine.” I don’t think
he’s either a hero or a villain, I think he’s human and he made a blunder here.
He made a blunder first of all by trying to go beyond
initially and explaining his Decision to at least, initially, decide not to
move forward with the Prosecution. I think he made a blunder at that stage in
saying, “That’s really not my Decision, we need to give it to a special
prosecutor because I have a conflict of interest. If Hillary Clinton, the
target of the Investigation, is elected she could promote me or benefit me. I
clearly made a blunder in my Judgement.” Then he went ahead and, “Now we’re
reopening the Investigation,” knowing that 650,000 e-mails
can’t be reviewed by the Time of Election which is going to create a cloud over
everything. It’s a huge, huge mess. I don’t think this is a matter of, I
say, individuals as opposed to this system itself falling down. I want to just add
the comment about the Media bias, we just had the stories today that one of
Clinton’s closest assistants, both during Bill’s Administration and afterwords,
Donna Brazile at CNN was handing off in advance the questions that she had
uncovered that CNN was going to ask Hillary Clinton at these presidential Debates. If that was
done on the Republican side, you can imagine if it was Fox News, every single
headline is, “This is just an organ of the Republican Party, there’s no
separation.” That again, it undercuts the ability of an informed Electorate to
make Decisions because they’re not getting the straight story from the Media.
It’s clearly, clearly biased with regard to the Establishment.
18.
Lavelle: Mark, same Question about James Comey.
I think he did the Right Thing, he just did it really late in the game here,
that’s all. Go ahead, Mark.
19.
Miller: I agree with that. I think he did the Right
Thing and I think he did it too late. I think he made a number of errors as
Bruce said. I don’t want us to get lost in the weeds of this Discussion about
Comey per se. I think it’s
extremely important that we note that we wouldn’t be going through this gut
wrenching unprecedently eye-popping Experience, this circus of a presidential Campaign
if the nomination hadn’t been systematically stolen from the most popular
candidate in this race on both sides, and that’s Bernie Sanders. This has
everything to do with every aspect of Election Theft we’ve discussed here.
Clearly, the Press, it’s now functioning as an overt cheering section for
Hillary Clinton was also unanimous in its scorn and its derision and it’s put-downs
of Bernie Sanders. But more significant than that, more significant than what
the Media had to say is how the peoples vote in primary and caucus after
primary and caucus was subverted. People need to read the study Democracy Lost from
Election Justice USA, it’s readily available online, 180 pages, chapter and
verse of the use of both vote suppression and Election Fraud to rob Bernie
Sanders of the candidacy but more importantly to rob the American People of a
really viable choice that they overwhelmingly chose and that includes even People
on the right. Don is Right to say that a certain kind of Election Theft
has been the specialty of the Republicans for a long Time. What we’re seeing
now is in a sense the World turned upside down, that it is the Democrats who
have used these devices basically to destroy the candidate on their own left.
The Republicans now are continuing to engage in vote suppression and some small
amount of Election Fraud. The Democrats are engaging in
some small amount of vote suppression and what looks like a considerable amount
of Election Fraud, computerised Election Fraud. I want to say this
again, this is a scandal that we the People have to face eventually, the Problem
of a corrupt Voting System.
20.
Lavelle: Let me add to the corruption and the World
turned upside down and go to Don right now, we haven’t discussed the all
important presidential Power of the Pardon here. Unlikely,
but we could see Barack Obama pardon Hillary Clinton either way what happens on
the Election Day or we could have the prospect of Hillary Clinton, like her
husband, being impeached and then she would pardon herself. That would be very
much in line with Hillary Clinton because Hillary Clinton only thinks about
Hillary Clinton. Go ahead, Don.
21.
DeBar: Well, at first, I just want to take what
Bruce said before a step further which is of course, regardless of which one of
them or any of them as a matter of fact theoretically is elected, their Job is
at the mercy of the next President of the United States. Whichever way Conflict
would break, Comey should not be treating it this way. They should have a
special prosecutor no matter what because it directly impacts on basically the Job
of the People conducting, the AG, the FBI, all of the People involved in the Food
Chain of conducting an Investigation. There’s that first. The Selling of the Theft
of the Election over the primary Period, what we’re talking about People have
heard here on RT and in a few other Media Places and on the Internet but it’s
really not been the topic of Discussion on the New York Times or CNN or any of those places where the mass
American Audiences are. It’s being stolen but in plain sight but most People
aren’t aware of it or don’t factor it into their narrative. Finally at the end
of the day, there are these massive Problems that are facing the People in the
United States and that fact has been manifest in the vote that lifted Sanders,
the vote lifting Trump, the People in the streets in the United States, Black
Lives Matter and everything else. That’s not going to go away no matter who’s
elected in November and the Election is going to be viewed through the prism of
(a) our situation is intolerable and (b) our Institutions are not a solution to
it. That is going to be the soil in which whatever plays out November 9th will
play out.
22.
Lavelle: You know Bruce, it’s very interesting,
there’s a-
23.
Fein: If I could add on your specific Question-
24.
Lavelle: Go ahead.
25.
Fein: That’s a President
can’t pardon somebody who doesn’t agree to accept it and acknowledge a
violation of the Law. If Hillary Clinton accepted the Pardon, she would be
admitting that she had violated the Criminal Law. That would not shield her
from an Impeachment proceeding because at that point, the House of
Representatives could say, “She’s already acknowledged she committed a Crime, a
Crime that related to the integrity of her processes as Secretary of State.”
She’s not trustworthy-
26.
Lavelle: Exactly, but Bruce, James Comey told us
that she had broken the Law repeatedly but he decided not to indict. This is a
circus, it’s amazing here. Let me go to Mark here because we’re rapidly running
out of Time. One of the Things that’s really tragic for the Country and for the
World, as Don pointed out, is that whoever is inaugurated in January, the Country
is going to be very deeply divided. It’s going to be a very, very tough Time
moving forward and as Don has pointed out, there’s so many critical issues that
need to be addressed. We need to get out of this cesspool that these Elites
have brought us into. Go ahead, Mark.
27.
Miller: Absolutely and I want to follow up on this
point about how the Press has not informed the American People about the facts
of Election Theft. As someone who has written two books on the subject, I can
tell you from personal Experience that this is a forbidden topic in the eyes of
the US Media Establishment, which I guess is to say the US Government. I see no
daylight between our Free Press and the State, none whatsoever. That subject of
Election Theft, its importance cannot be overstated. It’s only one of a broad
range of vital Subjects, urgent Subjects that our Press either ignores
completely or radically grossly misrepresents. As far as the Election’s concerned, all we keep hearing is that
Russia may hack the Election. This is a claim with no basis whatsoever in fact
and it’s also part of what appears to be a fevered attempt to lay the
groundwork for some kind of perfectly distracting military Adventure against
Russia which has a Nuclear Arsenal and which is being represented repeatedly,
consistently, and completely misleadingly as an aggressor on the World stage. This may
sound like an exaggeration but reading the New
York Times about Putin’s intentions on the World stage reminds me, very,
very directly of passages in William Shirer’s Berlin Diary. When he was stationed over there in the [1930s] for
CBS, he marveled at the Nazi Papers describing Poland as a Threat to Germany
after a year before having described Czechoslovakia as a Threat to Germany.
This was the antithesis of Reality and this is what we read consistently in the
New York Times, the Washington Post, we hear it on CNN, it is really, genuinely frightening and
represents, to put it charitably, a new low in the quality of American Journalism.
28.
Lavelle: It’s only going to get lower, I’m
afraid. That’s why I do what I do. Don, if I can go to you. Let me get this
right here, if Russia wanted to influence the Election, then why didn’t
Vladimir Putin participate in a pay-to-play with the Clinton Foundation?
Everybody else did, foreign Governments did. That would’ve been the way through
and they would’ve taken the Money, oh yes, they would’ve taken the Money, to a Charity.
Go ahead Don, you’ve got the last word here, forty seconds, go ahead.
29.
DeBar: Well first of all, Russia is a player on
the World stage like every other nation that is on the World stage and a major
player both because of the size of its Economy and Population and landmass and
also because it’s a major military power in the World. You have to look at
Russia in that context when you start walking around, doing what you did with
Iraq for example and painting it as an existential Threat to the United States
or these other countries that they’ve treated from Time to Time as an
existential Threat to the United States right before they obliterated them. If they try that with Russia and it appears
that they’re walking that way, there’s an entirely different Outcome that
encompasses a lot more Human Beings and Real Estate than any of the previous
ones in the aggregate. That scares the hell out of me.
30.
Lavelle: All right, I’m going to jump in here
gentlemen. My last comment here is
they should install showers in every voting booth because a lot of People are
going to want to take a shower after this Election here. [Because of Bill
Maher, Matthew Yglesias. Paul Krugman, Joyce Carol Oates.] Many thanks
to my guests in New York and in Washington, and thanks to our viewers for
watching us here at RT. See you next Time, and remember, CrossTalk rules.
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