00:02:25.000As you know, I've put up, or Grace has put up and most put up over the last couple of weeks,
00:02:29.000the full interview I did with PBS to put it out.
00:02:33.000But now you're going to see it in actually the form of the documentary itself.
00:02:37.000The title of it is Trump's Power in the Rule of Law.
00:02:41.000And this gets back to these, you know, 175 to 200 lawsuits that the left has to try to slow President Trump down,
00:02:49.000to try to slow his implementing of his plan down.
00:02:54.000As we say, you know, power delayed is power denied.
00:02:58.000And so that's what they're trying to do.
00:03:00.000This explains, I think, very well from the very start of the administration and flashing back to the first term and flashing back to the interim period.
00:03:09.000And you're going to see a lot of familiar faces from the war room on this, but done by a bunch of progressives.
00:03:15.000But I think you'll find you will learn a lot, even those of you that have been watching the show every day.
00:03:20.000And particularly, we always like to show different perspectives and perspectives on the progressive left.
00:03:25.000So now a encore presentation of Trump's power in the rule of law from Public Bar Kissing.
00:03:32.000Let's let it rip and I'll be back in a little while.
00:03:35.000The United States Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to continue with their cuts to the Department of Education.
00:03:41.000The showdown over the power of the president.
00:03:44.000The Constitution vests all of the executive power of the federal government in a single person, the president.
00:03:50.000Do we have the rule of law or do we have royal decrees? That's what's at stake here.
00:03:54.000You're not going to scare us and we're not going to stop.
00:03:57.000Our constitutional structure is definitely stressed.
00:04:00.000Now on Frontline, Trump's power and the rule of law.
00:04:11.000President Trump is at the Capital One Arena for his inauguration parade.
00:04:22.000He is expected to fire up that packed crowd there.
00:04:25.000President Trump will sign in the arena from cheering crowds a number of executive orders.
00:04:30.000Norms and institutions are a thing of the past.
00:04:47.000Sure. The first item that President Trump is signing is the rescission of 78 Biden-era executive actions, executive orders, presidential memoranda and others.
00:05:02.000For a lot of Americans, it just looks like change.
00:05:05.000Donald Trump is someone who campaigned on saying he would test American institutions.
00:05:10.000And it looks like Donald Trump is delivering on these promises to upend Washington, to drain the swamp, to do it completely differently.
00:05:21.000It was as if he was sending thunderbolts out to the country.
00:05:24.000And here is the withdrawal from the Paris climate treaty.
00:05:28.000All I have to do is put my sharpie on the page and I can make law a reality.
00:05:40.000And he did one after the next, after the next.
00:05:43.000The next item, sir, is a freeze on all federal hiring.
00:05:46.000There were so many things happening at once that it was very hard to focus on any single one thing.
00:05:51.000We will address the cost of living crisis that has cost Americans so dearly.
00:05:56.000Requirement that federal workers return to full-time in-person work.
00:06:01.000Immediate restoration of freedom of speech and preventing government censorship of free speech going forward.
00:06:07.000Ending the weaponization of government against the political adversaries of the previous administration as we've seen.
00:06:14.000That was what Steve Bannon used to call the flood the zone approach to politics.
00:07:42.000What he's saying in that day is, I'm going to be a man of action.
00:07:46.000That's a phrase he likes, a man of action.
00:07:48.000And he's going to do it with the stroke of a pen.
00:07:53.000We saw a president using his power from the very first moment in very expansive ways to put his fingerprints on all sorts of areas of the government and society.
00:08:06.000He signed more executive orders on day one than any of his predecessors ever did in their early days.
00:08:16.000And they stretched the power and the authority of the presidency beyond what any previous president had done.
00:08:36.000President Trump leaving the White House for the last time as president.
00:08:46.000Just how quickly and how fast things fell apart from this president.
00:08:50.000He is leaving the White House with much fewer people standing by his side in the wake of the January 6th riot.
00:08:57.000After January 6th and what happened on the Capitol that day, it was universally terrible.
00:09:03.000There wasn't even the most ardent Trump fan defending it.
00:09:25.000After President Trump left in January 2021, your audience should understand that President Trump and the core team around him, we were deplatformed by big tech.
00:09:45.000Steve Bannon was Trump's 2016 campaign CEO, his White House chief strategist.
00:09:50.000He was charged with fraud and went to prison rather than testify about Trump's role in the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
00:09:59.000In those years of 21 and 22, when the entire world was against President Trump and his team, it looked like the odds were so incredibly long.
00:10:08.000It was a very lonely time around Mar-a-Lago.
00:10:15.000President Trump was essentially a dead political body left on the side of the road.
00:10:22.000In isolation, that is Florida's state.
00:10:25.000More trouble for the former president.
00:10:27.000The FBI raided the former president's Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, unannounced, breaking into the home.
00:10:34.000Former U.S. President Donald Trump once again found himself the target of an investigation.
00:10:39.000A cascade of other legal problems, multiple civil trials.
00:10:43.000Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.
00:11:09.000That he'd worked to overturn the 2020 election, culminating with a mob of his supporters attacking the Capitol on January 6th, while Congress was trying to certify the results.
00:11:22.000An indictment was unsealed, charging Donald J. Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States,
00:11:33.000and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding.
00:11:36.000Since the attack on our Capitol, the Department of Justice has remained committed to ensuring accountability for those criminally responsible for what happened that day.
00:11:48.000Special counsel Jack Smith had prosecuted Democrats and Republicans.
00:11:53.000But Trump's supporters saw this case as politically motivated.
00:11:57.000What they were doing was so wrong and so destructive to the presidency.
00:12:00.000That you can have a president throw his predecessor in prison for non-crimes.
00:12:10.000And that's how we destroy our country.
00:12:12.000That's how we become a third world Marxist hellhole.
00:12:16.000Mike Davis is one of Trump's trusted advisors, known in Trump's circle as the Viceroy.
00:12:21.000A Washington insider, a former chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
00:12:28.000I was the only person, it seems, who would go on Fox News every day and defend President Trump.
00:12:36.000We've seen that they have weaponized, they have politicized law enforcement repeatedly to get Trump.
00:12:41.000I've done over 4,500 media hits supporting and defending President Trump.
00:12:48.000They have completely politicized the Justice Department.
00:12:50.000This Justice Department is rotten to the core.
00:12:53.000A lot of what they're trying to do is recast the narrative of what happened to him during his impeachments.
00:12:58.000To recast the narrative of what happened on January 6th.
00:13:02.000To suggest it was a day of peaceful protest and not a violent attack on democracy.
00:13:06.000I think the public record in the investigations would show otherwise.
00:13:11.000This is lawless, this is Democrat lawfare, this is election interference.
00:13:16.000He has presidential immunity for his acts as the President of the United States.
00:13:21.000Trump has come right up to the edge of saying, you don't get to tell me what the law says, I get to say what the law says.
00:13:28.000He believes, as he once said, that Article 2 of the Constitution means that he could do whatever he wants.
00:13:35.000He believes that if the President does it, it can't be illegal.
00:13:40.000It was a familiar argument that a President was above the law.
00:13:45.000It went back more than 50 years to another President dogged by legal problems.
00:13:50.000So what, in a sense, you're saying is that there are certain situations where the President can decide that it's in the best interest of the nation or something, and do something illegal.
00:14:06.000Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.
00:19:55.000In Trump versus the United States, the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Roberts writing,
00:19:59.000says the president is the chief of the executive branch.
00:20:03.000And the president is also in charge of executing the laws.
00:20:07.000And for this reason, must have immunity from presidents later on prosecuting him or her for those decisions.
00:20:14.000The president may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers.
00:20:21.000One of the reasons the chief justice gives is so that the president can fully run the executive branch
00:20:29.000without having to worry about his criminal liability or civil liability after.
00:20:33.000The immunity decision was arguably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, legal victory that Donald Trump has had in his entire time in public life.
00:20:46.000It essentially spelled the meaningful end of the federal prosecutions of Donald Trump.
00:20:53.000That immunity decision, you could say that was like the precursor event to Trump 2.0 in almost every respect.
00:21:34.000Psychologically, it was a big stamp of approval for the sense that the president is kind of above the law.
00:21:41.000I mean, literally above the law. That's what the immunity decision found.
00:21:44.000You can't find, he's immune from a normal legal challenge.
00:21:48.000You got a pretty powerful feeling that you're kind of unconstrained.
00:21:51.000I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear that I will...
00:21:55.000Now, that sense of power would fuel his presidency.
00:21:59.000It signals a very different kind of president, and a president who doesn't want to be bound by either the Constitution or statutory law.
00:22:10.000He believes he has literally unrestricted power.
00:22:14.000So help me God. So help me God. Congratulations, Mr. President.
00:22:17.000The strategy is to flood the zone, to overwhelm the opposition, and stun people who are used to the legal constitutional order and the rule of law.
00:22:31.000Donald Trump immediately getting to work with a remarkable show of the use of executive power.
00:22:37.000We're going to see a president pardoning people who participated in this erection that he supported.
00:22:43.000So this is January 6th. These are the hostages. Approximately 1,500 for a pardon.
00:23:49.000With the stroke of a pen, the legal consequences virtually undone.
00:23:54.000The largest criminal prosecution in U.S. history is abruptly over.
00:23:59.000The prosecutions, persecutions of these January 6th defendants were so politicized, made it illegitimate.
00:24:07.000They went through years of suffering, they had their lives destroyed, bankrupted, lost family members, some people killed themselves.
00:24:17.000So I have no problem with President Trump pardoning almost all of those January 6th defendants because they've suffered enough.
00:24:26.000People who attacked Congress, people who used violence to spread their political message,
00:24:32.000people who had no regard for our institutions and our democracy.
00:24:39.000That's who he was issuing pardons for.
00:24:42.000This was a day of violence. This was a day in which 140 police officers were injured, and we cannot rewrite the history of that day.
00:24:50.000Property was destroyed. People were injured. Police officers trying to defend the democratic process. Die.
00:24:56.000We stood up against a stolen election. We will be vindicated in the pages of history as patriots and freedom fighters.
00:25:05.000He's put my family back together again. Without him, I wouldn't be out right now.
00:25:16.000We don't condone violence, but we're also not the insurrectionists here.
00:25:26.000I feel, I feel, I feel, yes, I feel vindicated and validated. Yes, absolutely.
00:25:39.000It really sends the signal that people can engage in violence on his behalf, and he's got that pardon power there for them.
00:25:46.000He wants people who are on his side to think, you know what, if I go a little bit too far, you know, they got a president there who's kind of watching out for you.
00:25:57.000It really puts us on a road that goes pretty far from the neutral rule of law and pretty, and pretty far, unfortunately, towards a kind of personalized use of government to go after your enemies and to forgive those on your side who break the law.
00:26:14.000Trump and his advisors were pushing to go further, exact retribution for what they called lawfare.
00:26:23.000I think retribution is a very important component of justice.
00:26:27.000It serves as a powerful deterrent to people who may commit crimes in the future that there are going to be consequences.
00:26:33.000The president and his Justice Department team should hold accountable those who wage this unprecedented Republican lawfare against President Trump.
00:26:44.000The first target, the Department of Justice itself.
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00:27:27.000While this transition won't not happen overnight, but trust me, it's going to start in Rio.
00:27:33.000The Rio reset in July marks a pivotal moment when BRICS objectives move decisively from a theoretical possibility towards inevitable reality.
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00:31:11.940What I'm really happy about in seeing this, obviously, a slanted, because it's done by PBS documentary, but the Frontline series, I think, has overall been pretty good over the years.
00:31:32.560It's done things that I'm familiar with, and what I'm really proud about is how engaged this audience has been in this from the beginning.
00:31:42.180I mean, when you look at this and see the detail, they go back to the beginning and think about all the shows and then all the phone calls you made and all the various situations, like on confirmations early on, and you're fighting nonstop for these to support President Trump.
00:31:57.860You see how historic it has been, and that's why I wanted to play over the two nights is actually to play the documentary itself because I think it gives you a chance to see how we're viewed by the other side and how we're viewed historically.
00:32:11.500And this is a historic fight, we said from the beginning, and remember, for those of you who have been with us for a number of years, you go back to 21.
00:32:19.120When I say those dark months of the first part of 2021, it's been pretty extraordinary about how the issues we talked about at the time, and we'd had the Russ votes on, and it's the beginning of Project 2025 and beginning of CRA and America First Policy Institute and Stephen Miller's America First Law.
00:32:38.480But these issues, and a lot of it revolved around as the Mike Davises of the world started coming on the show and getting to know him, this whole concept that we had not executed on in the first Trump term, and that is this unified executive, right?
00:32:53.580The unified executive where he is the chief executive officer of the U.S. government, that he is the commander-in-chief of the United States military, and that he is the chief magistrate and chief law enforcement officer.
00:33:05.900Go back and see that, and it just warmed the cockles of my heart to see about President Trump going to the Justice Department, which remember, back at the shows, we were advocating that every day, and then President Trump went over there, and what did we say?
00:33:20.900Oh my gosh, he's gone, he soiled the temple, because that was the railhead, post-Watergate, that was actually the railhead of how they ran the deal.
00:33:28.060They ran it through both the CIA, but really the Justice Department, so to see President Trump go over there.
00:33:32.440And then the voices, the voices that PBS had, I think it was Judge Lustig and others that are sitting there going, oh, he soiled the temple.
00:33:43.920Exactly what we told you they were going to say.
00:33:46.420So really want to, I think they've done an extraordinary job, and I believe, and if you look at the chats, that you guys, understanding it is from a left-wing perspective,
00:33:54.900and this is what's essentially been defunded, PBS and NPR have had a billion dollars cut of their funding, the Democrats did not put it back in, which I think is pretty extraordinary, so just incredible.
00:34:07.980I want to thank Birch Gold, our sponsor, for supporting us in all of this.
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00:34:44.520but over the last 25 years, it's been the best-performing assets, which is pretty extraordinary.
00:36:20.060They fired more than two dozen career prosecutors, people who had worked either on the investigations and cases against Donald Trump himself or against the people who had stormed the Capitol on January 6th.
00:36:36.780The message that I took out of it was if you persecute Americans as a Justice Department prosecutor or agent, you're going to lose your job, and you should.
00:36:47.080When you try to throw President Trump in prison for the rest of his life, when you try to bankrupt him, when you throw his supporters in prison after January 6th, when you do these things, there are consequences.
00:37:08.160They also forced out about half a dozen or so of the senior career leaders at the FBI.
00:37:15.060They were fired as a group because they were not deemed to be sufficiently politically reliable.
00:37:25.440The message that sends is your job may depend on you being perceived as supporting the president's personal and political interests.
00:37:35.120And that sets the stage for turning law enforcement into another instrumentality of politics, where if you're the subject or a target of an investigation, how you're treated may depend on what your politics are.
00:37:55.000And that's the opposite of what the system should be doing.
00:38:01.160It was time for Trump to deploy his own team to the Justice Department, one he could depend on.
00:38:08.660At this stage of his presidency and what he wants to accomplish, he really only values loyalty and virtually nothing else.
00:38:16.880Criminal defense attorney Ty Cobb was part of Trump's legal team during the first term.
00:38:25.420He's not looking for them to tell him what to do. He's looking for them to do what he tells them to do.
00:38:32.560He learned a lot the first time around, I think, in terms of how far he could go.
00:38:37.700Trump's first attorney general was Jeff Sessions.
00:38:40.620Sessions was a constant object of desire, in part because of the recusal, without consultation with the White House.
00:38:51.240I have now decided to recuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matter relating in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States.
00:39:03.760Trump saw Sessions' decision as disloyal, not protecting him from a DOJ investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
00:39:13.520The Justice Department naming the former FBI director, Robert Mueller, special counsel to take over the investigation.
00:39:20.480That rubbed the president the wrong way, and he never got over it.
00:39:23.840Time and again, during Trump's first term, it was the lawyers who got in his way.
00:39:28.860There were people in the first Trump administration, the so-called grown-ups in the room, more traditional conservatives,
00:39:39.080federalist society lawyers who were very conservative ideologically, but were also very serious lawyers as well,
00:39:46.500who were occasionally willing to say no to ideas that they thought were outside the bounds of legitimate legal interpretation or just simply bad ideas,
00:39:55.120to raise objections, to slow things down.
00:40:02.720One of the lessons learned for the people who stuck with Trump after the events of January 6th was that one of their mistakes was having too many people like that around the president.
00:40:12.200And there was a very deliberate effort to vet people to ensure that they would be more in the MAGA mold,
00:40:20.800more permissive lawyers, people who were not going to be obstacles, slowing down ideas coming out of the White House, but accelerators.
00:40:29.680His new attorney general this time would be Pam Bondi.
00:40:35.400I think she's going to be as impartial as you can possibly be.
00:40:38.500I know I'm supposed to say she's going to be totally impartial with respect to Democrats,
00:40:43.360and I think she will be as impartial as a person can be.
00:40:46.900I'm not sure if there's a possibility of totally, but she's going to be as total as you can get.
00:40:51.440They were friends. They've known each other a long time.
00:40:56.040Part of this with Trump, yes, it is loyalty, and part of it is personal.
00:40:59.780She has served as his personal lawyer.