Title: FBI's Mar-a-Lago Search Affidavit Is Unsealed: CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou
Show: Kevin Gosztola (The Dissenter)
Date: 2022-08-27
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFmZiLO0vI8
Duration: 0:57:00

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[00:02] hello everyone i'm kevin gustola i'm the managing editor for shadowproof and also the curator for the dissenter and welcome and i'll just put this up here for those of you who are joining this is the website that you can go to to get my updates and coverage of the julian assange case and then other coverage of whistleblower stories of course we're here today to discuss president donald trump and the justice department's investigation uh the fbi's search warrant affidavit was unsealed

[00:33] you've probably seen it's like a holiday for cnn and msnbc and they've got everyone uh is is deployed and ready to go but i don't need you're gonna see i don't need eight people to join me in a broadcast to break down this affidavit i just have john kiriakou who is a former cia officer as well as a whistleblower he himself was prosecuted under the espionage act then pled guilty to the intelligence identities protection act did some time in prison he knows all

[01:04] about these issues and he's here to talk with me so welcome back john thanks kev happy to do it and uh so so let's begin because first um the the thing i want to play for you is this uh msnbc clip um and i'll probably stop and start it just a little bit along the way but i want people to get a flavor for the difference between what they do and what we do uh because i thought this was really silly i just thought uh like it's i mean it's usually the

[01:35] case that we don't want to rely on them for uh their coverage these days but also i mean i'm i'm i'm constantly impressed by what they're able to so look look at all these people look at all these p how many people do you need and this looks like the worst team building exercise ever and anyways they got all of these people together i'm going to go to the beginning here and start first um let's see and let me know if you can't hear it

[02:06] nine pages um of an affidavit in support of an application under rule 41a for the warrant to search and seize so uh i think you're all going to be starting to get this as i am now getting it let me just show you also the list of redactions which is listed by paragraph so this is the list of paragraphs that have been blacked out and redacted why do they do this john why do they do this kind of media where they don't know what they're reading and they just try

[02:37] to do live news uh before they know what they're reading i was actually in the middle of my show when this thing was released and my colleague and i michelle witty decided not to comment on it substantively because everything was redacted and we we didn't have any idea what it said now if you read it and then reread it you can make a couple of you can draw a couple of conclusions but you know to have eight people eight

[03:09] talking heads sitting there on msnbc all pretending to know what they're talking about it's just silly here so i'm just gonna play a little bit more involved and then like again there's like what you just said the example uh ryan reilly have you been able to read some of this put him on the spot right no he hasn't i am can you hear me yes i can yes tell us what you know sure so i think one highlight i wanted to uh bring up here is that the in this in this affidavit uh the narrati

[03:41] the narrow referral is referenced here and the nara's white house liaison division director after a preliminary review of these 15 boxes that were originally received to the national archives from trump went through those boxes and found they contained newspaper magazines printed news articles photos miscellaneous pronouns notes presidential correspondence personal and post-presidential records and quote open quote a lot of classified records close quote so that was what sort of kicked

[04:11] this all off all of these classified records that were found uh by uh the national archives when they eventually received this initial uh load of boxes that came in uh from the trump camp after he left office i'm looking even on page two here it says that that's right that documents based on qualifications all of these people like they don't know what they're going to say what they're going to do it contained in the 15 boxes that were stored in the premises in an

[04:41] unauthorized location and that is again the initial 15 boxes further there is prob then and that's all i'm really going to play there's nothing else to really say there but like they're all on screen and in that clip that they posted none of those people talk except for ryan reilly the whole entire time when they do that segment and it's just i mean first off the waste of money all those people got paid to show up yeah they're all getting paid that's right they're

[05:11] all on they're all on contract they're all getting paid yes and they're all like looking blank dear yeah hope she doesn't call on me one guy's coming through the pages over here what does this mean i don't even know what this means yet nobody knows what it means nobody knows what it means nobody knows because so much of it is redacted you can't draw any real conclusions so let's i got some slides here we'll go through and there there are there you know like there are

[05:42] some things we can talk about otherwise i wouldn't waste your time i wouldn't have asked you to come do this if there wasn't truly some things to talk about i mean i have my own knowledge of this to draw from but uh i you know i i think we knew that there were going to be heavy redactions yeah we knew that the judge was going to protect a lot of this information uh but before i get going i'm uh there are people who are making donations to the

[06:12] work that we do and i want to say thank you for that um and thank you for all of those people out there who support the work that i do as well as what john does you know i believe we are the voices that you should be listening to and i think the broadcast we did a couple weeks ago after there was the search um that uh that that proved that you know what we were doing and the search warrant was unsealed uh that proved that you know we really do have a lot more credibility than they do

[06:44] and then just again let me interrupt you on that i i was very proud of what we did uh in that um in that talk and i ended up writing it up and sending it to uh joe lauria at consortium news it was published this morning and i posted it on twitter this morning without even really thinking about it i don't spend a whole lot of time on twitter but i went back today and i've i've never blocked anybody on twitter just because it's not that terribly important to me i had to block six people

[07:16] uh i was called a nazi a reactionary a fascist a fake lefty um all all different kind of russian stooge only because i said that donald trump shouldn't be charged with espionage not because he's donald trump and not because he didn't illegally take out uh uh documents but because the espionage act is a flawed law that is used to silence

[07:47] whistleblowers and people just jumped on me like i mean i i felt like beaten up about the about the face and head by the end of the day it was really shocking to me so i'm just gonna put this on screen for just a second uh just uh thank you thank you for gregory's exactly right and uh and then uh yeah okay so this is what uh one more nuisance and then we'll get into the substance of our conversation so julian barnes over at the new york times put up

[08:19] this explainer on the espionage act yeah i've been watching very closely to what the media puts out about this law just because i think we are in a danger zone here when it comes to donald trump when it comes to legitimizing something that was used against you and others who never deserved to be uh prosecuted under this law and what we see here is we got to keep our eyes on the media because here we get this weasley language that says and i'll read

[08:50] it to you and i'll get your reaction john now hopefully hope hopefully you're as irritated as i am by the way this is written in recent years some on the left have criticized the law saying it was used to prosecute people who leaked government secrets now republicans are denouncing the act after the justice department referred to it in its search warrant to retrieve documents from mr trump's home in palm beach florida including some that were marked classified some on the left why why are we fringe why are we making it a fringe that is so offensive um and it's

[09:22] incorrect i mean you can you can look at figures on the right like alan dershowitz or bruce fine or any number of conservative groups that that are concerned about constitutionality and civil liberties uh american conservative magazine the hudson institute so it's just factually incorrect to say that some on the left have complained about the espionage act no people who love civil liberties people

[09:53] who love civil rights and human rights and the rule of law have complained about the espionage act there's nothing strange about this at all there's nothing wrong with the left being the representative here but the civ civil society organizations are not the left the aclu reporters committee for freedom of the press committee to protect journalists go on down the list of people and these groups human rights organizations this is not the left no this is this is not the left i mean i'm proud to associate with the left i'm

[10:25] i'm a proud uh uh what are we calling ourselves now progressive but uh but you know to to equate it with some sort of a fringe view on civil liberties come on new york times what what a typical mainstream phony neoliberal thing to say it is all right so going back to okay so you know like you said these there's these like heavy redactions throughout it um and and so this is basically what it looks like and

[10:56] i guess they can't tell us more share more about the trucks that are moving the information um and then again the provision of the 15 box to the national archives which we already know about i guess that this is something that they have to protect i'm not really sure what they're protecting here then this one's the most hilarious where it says there is probable cause to believe that documents containing classified national defense information and presidential records remain at the premises and you get none of it so the

[11:28] public can't read the probable cause at all for any of it um and i guess you know on one hand i recognize that they are trying to ensure that donald trump can't harass and intimidate any of the sources the justice department is working with on the other hand i feel like the justice department could have maybe shared a little bit of detail on what the probable cause is in that section absolutely and may i comment on

[11:59] something that one of your viewers hey roger roger makes a very important point here he says theft is theft f potus will have tough time claiming this stuff is low value since he's always claimed that his name alone adds a thousand percent you're absolutely right and this is a point that i think is very important and should be part of of the overall conversation about what to do legally um to to uh move this case forward i mentioned um in this article that i wrote in consortium news that when i was

[12:30] still at the cia i sat next to a woman who was having an affair with a former senior cia officer who had retired and gone over to cnn and in the course of pillow talk she revealed some classified information to him and he ran straight to cnn and blabbed it on the air well the cia filed a crimes report and the fbi did investigation and they immediately tied the information back to her okay today she would be charged with espionage and

[13:00] she would be facing a 10-year federal prison sentence but what they did to her and this was not too terribly long ago this was 1996 they put a letter of reprimand in her personnel file they suspended her without pay for four weeks and they made her ineligible for promotion for two years that was an appropriate punishment now what she was found guilty of was theft of government property even though she took the the property out in her

[13:32] head you know she she walked out with the information and passed the information to somebody else technically theft same kind of thing they they tried to charge tom drake with it didn't rise to the level of espionage it was only at the tail end of the george w bush administration that they decided to weaponize the espionage act and then barack obama went forward with it you know with guns blazing and so did donald trump but uh but there are other ways to punish people who

[14:04] take out classified information it doesn't have to be under the espionage act yeah yeah there are that so uh one thing to say before we get back to the affidavit itself is you know the opening i do think does a good job for clarifying to the public why the justice department is conducting the search and if you didn't believe the news media it's really good to see the details just laid out right there i mean it opens like this the government is conducting a

[14:36] criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of government records and i think what's really important to do is distinguish donald trump from you or from thomas drake or from edward snowden because i don't know if people who are talking about this are doing a good enough job of articulating to people how different the facts of

[15:07] this case are from the cases in which we've defended people who were prosecuted again we don't know that donald trump's going to be prosecuted i think both of you we both agree that it's highly unlikely the justice department charges him under the espionage act yes but that being said what he's done is so far and away different from the people who we think are truth tellers he takes this information i mean in order for it to be similar to anyone before who we've defended it would have

[15:38] to be like edward snowden took the information took it back to his bungalow or his pad wherever he's living and he stored it there and he'd check it every once in a while and you take good care of it and he thought it made him cool and he told his friends he had the information from the nsa but he never did anything with it and we never heard about it and we didn't know what he had in the material that's essentially what donald trump was doing yes yeah kevin i have to say too i i laughed out loud

[16:08] when i read what trump had done with uh this correspondence with kim jong-un did you see this yeah my god this was so funny normally when the president uh writes a letter to another foreign leader there's a very formal process by which that letter is delivered um it's sent by diplomatic pouch to the american embassy in that country or to the american interest section in the country that's representing uh american

[16:38] interests and uh and then it's hand delivered by an ambassador donald trump fedex kim jong-un specifically because he wanted a tracking number so he could follow its progress on his phone i've never in my life seen anything like this yeah i've never seen anything like it just incredible yeah and it says um yeah i mean this this is incredible i mean i should just read some of this so people have this this

[17:10] antidote i guess more than a year had passed since the officials had begun talking with him and you've got that a senior archives official instructs a former lawyer um who had been appointed to send the letters um okay so the national archives actually asks them to fedex it it's crazy but um i mean just to think that like classified material is moving through the private yeah system um and not through the usps system i

[17:42] guess like that's i guess fedex is more secure than usps that says a lot i suppose well there's actually a rule um if you are fedexing or mailing classified information you have to put it in an envelope and you have to seal it seal it like cover the entire thing in clear tape it has to be stamped before you tape it um property of the us government classified documents return to you know this this address if found and then you have to put it in a second envelope and then

[18:15] wrap that one and that way if the outside envelope breaks open the inside envelope is still sealed and it says classified and you're supposed to return it to the uh to the federal government it's it's not secure and listen if if the united states has units that can surreptitiously open mail and we have since you know the the 20s uh so do the chinese and the russians and the iranians and the french and the british and the cubans and everybody else who might be interested in

[18:46] presidential correspondence with a foreign leader well yeah um okay so um let's get back to i'm gonna remove this let's get back to our our blacked out documents so so this was it's gonna be hard for people to read this but this was something that was i'm gonna i'm gonna take us down just to make this a little larger this is a footnote that um that you probably can't really see very well but it was what i found

[19:17] this to be an important footnote and i know that getting in the weeds is sometimes when we lose people but i do think it's worth making the point here that is made in this affidavit where they actually are saying that the threshold for going after donald trump is so low that you don't really that there's not a whole lot that we need to do and they cite the case law and they're saying that look national defense information isn't classified information it's much broad much more broad the generic concept is

[19:49] one that then they're they're listing these cases and they're basically saying that some cases even aside from the fact that you have to show it's closely held information some cases actually have held that the disclosure of documents must be potentially damaging but some have held that you don't even have to show that they're damaging at all some some have shown that like so i i pointed this out to people who follow my work just to show that to me if we learn anything from what we're

[20:19] going through right now it's that this national defense information is a construct of our three branches of government that serves and this is my view the national security state because it helps them more closely guard their secrets and maybe in this instance it's justified for them to invoke it but there are many other times in which they are broadly weaponizing national defense information as this concept so that we don't know

[20:50] the information that we need to learn yeah good point and you know i would i would uh remind everybody of again the tom drake case where uh tom drake truly did not disclose classified information or national defense information to a person not entitled to receive it in a conversation that he had with a reporter for the baltimore sun the information was clearly marked unclassified and

[21:21] he was charged with seven counts of espionage anyway because the government argued that the information should have been classified and because tom drake was a national security professional he should have recognized that the information should have been classified so this is just a [ __ ] kind of law that the justice to mark department can twist uh to use as a weapon against anybody it wants yeah yeah and look i'll

[21:51] i'll i won't hide that in in my coverage i'll have an agenda i'm gonna constantly if the justice department really does want to charge donald trump i'm going to constantly be steering them back to the obstruction of justice charge or this records and reports char in the criminal code there's a records and reports section and he's accused of uh mutilation or you know whatever he did to those records that he shouldn't have done to deface them that's apparently something

[22:22] that you can charge fine either of those i don't feel like that threatens our democracy if you if you get charged with violating either of those provisions right you know and we should note too that there's a difference between section 793 of the espionage act and section 794. 794 is used to prosecute people who are spying for foreign powers who mean to do harm to the u.s national security um but 793 is a political

[22:54] weapon uh there was a there was a proposed bill earlier this year and i think it was ilhan omar that had uh sponsored it is that rasheeda saleh that's right yeah that's right and unfortunately it didn't get out of committee but i know you read it i read it a couple of other people that i know read it and it was a it was a terrific attempt to begin reforming the the espionage act i'm wondering now if congressional republicans are going to

[23:25] be so furious that merrick garland has the audacity to investigate their hero and demigod donald trump under 793 that maybe republicans will finally come around and say you know what this is something important that we can work with democrats on it's a bad law a bad law that's been on the books for more than a hundred years it's time to scrap it and maybe redo it yeah i i'm reluctant uh given the

[23:56] political makeup of elites and how subservient they are to national security agencies to see them uh remove it and then replace it with something because i don't know what they would replace it with and it could be worse but what i will give those who have followed this closely like i recently interviewed bill arkin who's been doing really fabulous reporting at newsweek on the raid and the search of uh and the investigation itself and talking to

[24:27] sources you know he made this really essential point which was that we don't have a law that deals with the security classification system that's right and it's it's it's way way way beyond time that they come up with something the problem for our congress is that i don't think they can write a law without creating an official secrets act that violates the first amendment and i believe that's why we don't have a lawyer yeah you know a lot of them would want an official fact which would be even worse than the espionage act

[24:59] so gregory has a question for you and then i'll get to the other few that i have here which he wants you to confirm that the lunch menu at cia is classified um actually it used to be yes uh when i first started at the cia there were two separate cafeterias there was a large one that was called the classified cafeteria and then there was a small one where you could take visitors who weren't cleared like if somebody came over for the day from the state department or the office of personnel management or whatever um and it was

[25:29] lunch time you could take them there it was very small and it was an unclassified menu but yeah the stupid as it sounds the menu in the cafeteria was classified and so they ended up scrapping all of that like around the year 2000 i guess they made the little cafeteria into an event space and then the big cafeteria instead of having an actual cia cafeteria they put in a starbucks a subway a dunkin donuts

[26:00] and uh you know all name brand silly stuff uh there was a panda express so yeah so it's not classified anymore but it was for many many years yes all right so uh i'm gonna go through some of my notes here so one thing that stood out to me in the affidavit was that uh you know they are saying very clearly that the agent was saying that they're going to determine whether the mar-a-lago storage locations for classified information were

[26:32] authorized that's a fascinating thing to me like i know we kind of got that from the search itself but what's fascinating about the affidavit and then this whole thing is well was the justice department going to try to make the space secure and just leave the information there no no there's also a process for that so what they're talking about there is something called a vaulted space uh you've got to have you know a steel door with a big

[27:04] bank vault kind of you know spin lock on it and motion detectors and there's a there's a way to do this and then it has to have a safe not like the safe you buy at costco but like one of these heavy-duty pound solid steel kind of safes and then you have to treat the windows so that nobody can you know shoot a laser beam at it and detect the vibrations on the window to try to decipher what it is you're saying it's a process and it's kind of expensive uh they built one of

[27:36] these vaults over at the eastern district of virginia when jeffrey sterling was on trial so he could have classified conversations with his attorneys and it cost about 125 000 there are a handful of these things in defense contractors offices around washington so every former president when he leaves office gets a secret security clearance not top secret so he doesn't have that security clearance on a daily basis like he's not receiving

[28:08] classified briefings anymore on a daily basis if the pres if the former president is interested in something he can call a liaison officer at langley and say hey i'm really interested in what's going on in sri lanka right now can you send an analyst down to brief me and a couple of analysts will fly to wherever the president happens to be they'll give him a briefing at the secret level but it contains no information from nsa and information from human sources only

[28:39] if it has been pre-cleared by the cia's directorate of operations so you know just to have classified documents sitting around even if it is in your costco safe it doesn't meet the requirements yeah okay and so we also see that they're gonna go and identify people who may have removed or retained the classified information without authorization which i suppose i i think it's worth posing this question to you we've seen a lot of

[29:09] investigations into trump you know we have the january 6th you've got the russia investigation and all the time donald trump escapes but some of his minions get charged and i guess effectively they sort of were like the fall guys for whatever donald trump was up to i mean i know that there's varying understandings and there's really no consensus on what trump did and whether it even was criminal when it comes to the russia investigation truly but uh i suppose that could happen here

[29:40] right like there could be people in the trump organization who get charged and trump's okay yeah if if the fbi develops information indicating that some assistant or some secretary was seen going through the boxes or filing the documents that were in the boxes or moving the boxes from one room to another yeah that person can be charged with a crime one of the things that that is going to be to me very interesting is eventually we're going to be able to

[30:10] figure out who the rat was and you know there were a couple of there were a couple of articles saying oh it was jared kushner he wants his old life back and he doesn't want to he doesn't want trump to run for president i heard the other day it's matt getz where gates which doesn't make any sense at all i think based on what we learned today from the parts of the document that weren't redacted i think it was the secret service they're there 24 7 they have access to the office they know

[30:42] what's classified and what's not classified and if it is classified how it should be treated i think the secret service ratted them out hmm i like that theory um oh and there is one housekeeping item that is worth doing uh two weeks ago when we talked or we uh we talked about the saudi theory with the nukes and and then the washington post it says something about nuclear weapons i think it's pretty clear at this point that that was overblown and what they were referring to were these

[31:13] letters between trump and kim jong-un uh the negotiations you know the potential peace negotiations over uh denuclearization that's my opinion yes i think you're exactly right on that you know it was interesting speculation at the time and and admittedly that's all it was was speculation because everybody knows that the saudis have been seeking nuclear technology since the 1980s uh we know that trump has a very close relationship with the saudi

[31:44] royal family so people were throwing the idea out there i agree with you that it's likely not the case yeah all right so uh then one thing we do get from the ba uh the you know there's a section where they lay out the like definitions of the different terms they're going to use and then when they deal with those terms that's all redacted but what we know and can figure out is that you're going to be dealing with that in your affidavit and so we we've gotten that they put human

[32:16] human intelligence control system they define what that is and they say it's intelligence information derived from clandestine human sources yes they talk about sci they talk about something called special intelligence too and they talk about no foreign which is information that you can't expose to foreigners and then another category that i hadn't even heard of before but maybe you knew of originator controlled or or con or you're not allowed to like share it with anybody who wasn't approved so on your

[32:47] very first day at the cia literally your very first day you learn these terms these are all important terms so we'll start with human intelligence human intelligence or human is intelligence that is collected from a live human being as your source your recruited source okay just by default all human is classified under an authority called hum4-82 and it is automatically classified at

[33:19] the secret no foreign no contract or con level that means it's secret there are three classifications there's confidential secret and top secret and then there are other they're not classifications but controls beyond those um so it's classified at the secret level no foreign means it's not releasable to foreigners and when i say foreigners i mean foreign intelligence services no contract means it's not releasable to contractors

[33:49] even if they're cleared they can't have the information because you know the cia only like 50 of the people that work at the cia are actual cia employees everybody else is working for raytheon and saic and khaki and all these a million different contractors so that information is not releasable to them and then or con means originator controlled so for example if i'm writing if i'm writing a paper that's going to go to the secretary of state and the deputy secretary of state and the national

[34:19] security advisor and i use secret no foreign no contract or con humans when i finish my paper i have to send the paper and attach the original source document and send it to the office of um clearance control and say i wanna i'm writing this paper i'm using this information and i want it to be released for eyes only for the secretary of state the deputy secretary of state and the national security advisor and then they'll document that those three people

[34:50] saw it and nobody else can see it so that's what that document is the bottom line is it's sensitive intelligence derived from a human source mm-hmm is special compartmented information that's a euphemism for an electronic intercept so everything that comes out of nsa is called si special intelligence sci special compartmented information it's also normally classified at

[35:21] something called the sitk gamma level so it's special intelligence code words talent keyhole gamma and so each one of those compartments makes the circle of people who can see it smaller and smaller and smaller we were always told from my very first week again at the agency we were told that there were three holy of holies these are the things that you never ever talk about

[35:51] one was liaison relationships one was sources and methods and the other was anything coming out of nsa so like you i'm led to believe because these these terms were in the the redacted uh affidavit um that donald trump took special compartmented information with him and that's going to be a serious problem now one other thing too in in the use of the espionage act in a

[36:22] national security prosecution like that they will tell the court the prosecution will tell the court what level of damage revelation of the information has caused or could cause to the national security yeah sei is what they call the gravest that's the word they use the gravest damage to the national security the gravest i mean ed snowden didn't release that stuff chelsea manning didn't release that stuff

[36:52] this is beyond it's classified above what uh what those guys ever did yeah okay so you were uh you pled guilty to the intelligence identities protection act violation it sounds like this material probably puts trump in violation of the iipa it it could if there is a single name of any cia officer who has served overseas in the last five years whether

[37:24] they're active or retired is irrelevant he's violated the iipa is it only cia or are there other agents covered now there are other agents covered when it was first written in uh 1981 it it was meant to counter what philip agee had been doing he had written several books that revealed the identities of some cia officers but now that's been extended to whatever they're calling defense human services now uh they include nsas

[37:54] undercover officers uh there are even contractors now who are undercover uh the navy seals are included so you know there there are a lot of people that are protected by this thing okay so if trump was proud about a raid that he had launched that involved people who were undercover then they would be in the documents and he would have compromised their identity yeah that yeah that's absolutely right and i think that's one of those things we're going to learn more about in the coming months yeah okay

[38:24] so uh we got a good question and then i've got another uh thing from the affidavit to ask you about but i think while we do have people tuned in it's good to stay engaged with them and i'm gonna put up this on the screen so what would be the punishment if trump did uh what was convicted of the laws that you are talking about and uh i'll just i'll frame it to you john is like this is kind of a complex thing in my opinion because there's one

[38:55] conversation about whether the justice department would prosecute and then there's another conversation about what he did that's violated the law when you watch cnn and msnbc they won't parse that out because they have people from the justice department who believe in the rule of law and that they are never actually sparing elites while punishing the most lower ranking officers or lower ranking employees yes correct now in the event that that trump is charged under 793

[39:26] uh it was my understanding that we're talking about 793 e yeah so to the best of my recollection 793e is a maximum punishment of 10 years in uh in prison per count now i think so what they could do and we we don't know we don't even know if he's going to be charged but what they could do is make every single one of those documents a separate count or they can make each box one count and there were 15 boxes or they could just

[39:57] have the whole case as one count but in any event 793e is 10 years the intelligence identities protection act is 10 years and obstruction of justice is five years making a false statement is five years uh now another thing that's gonna that's gonna weigh very um uh importantly on this is are these in the event that he's charged are these going to be charged as one

[40:28] single criminal act all different charges but one criminal act in that case were he to be convicted all those sentences would run concurrently yes so you're probably looking at a maximum sentence of 10 years if they were charged separately as separate criminal acts well you know it could be 250 years in prison right but if we look at president yes my guess if trump wasn't trump right

[41:00] then it would be probably like what two to four years maybe like the average yeah uh reality winner got an unusually harsh year he got five years and three months i think is what it was but yeah we're probably looking at uh two or three four years uh-huh okay so excuse me let me add one thing because this is a national security case he would be ineligible to go to a minimum security work camp he would have to go to a real

[41:30] honest-to-god prison right because they put you in this like special security designation exactly and uh track your every move i was told right to my face in prison that i was too dangerous to allow the uh public to be exposed to me well that's funny because donald trump's such a talker that if he was in prison he would actually be a national security threat because he'd be talking about what he did with everybody who was like a fellow inmate definitely

[42:02] definitely okay so there's this figure who's popped up in this and i just wonder if you have any opinion on him cash patel who worked for the house intelligence committee who um i think has done some work helping devin nunes when it come to like the counter investigation into what everyone was doing to go after trump with russia but he's apparently been giving quote unquote um advice or like exist like operate something like counselor role or

[42:33] something i don't know anyways uh he's made this claim that trump had declassified all the documents that went to the archives not actually not the boxes that were in the estate that the fbi seized but before that he had made this claim that the ones that the archives had were just declassified um but you know this is something that they're talking about msnbc and cnn we don't have to spend a lot of time on it but i did want to just hit this point very briefly of there was no process ever undertaken by donald

[43:04] trump to declassify no and the declassification law says that if a president does declassify documents which in most cases he has the authority to do those documents then have to be posted on the website of the national archives the national security archives or the appropriate presidential library so that scholars have access to them and that was never done with a single page of these documents yeah well you have one friend who um who served on the uh the senate intelligence

[43:34] committee and um he told me that that cash patel is a is a problem not a problem for the case against trump he's a problem because he's a nut yeah there's there's also there's another person that um i think we're going to be hearing a little bit about in the near future and it's this guy who founded judicial watch yeah i'm glad you're gonna bring him up yeah this guy apparently was able to get into trump's ear several months ago and convinced him that that a case that judicial watch had launched that was heard by the supreme court um

[44:07] meant that anything that trump took with him was automatically um declassified because they're trump's personal possession and several of the attorneys around trump said as soon as this guy appeared on the scene everything just went downhill because trump kept coming back to this that he's innocent they're his documents they belong to him they don't belong to the country or to the national archives he just can't fathom the notion that he was involved in public service and in public service

[44:39] you're working for the people and the government and these documents are not your personal possessions yeah this is tom fitton and again what we've got going on here is this idea that somehow the clintons got preferential treatment to me and just to clarify what happened was judicial watch said that we want access to these records with a historian whose name was taylor branch there were apparently interviews that were conducted with

[45:09] president clinton when he was president with this historian and the national archives say that these were not presidential records and they do not have the authority to designate them as such and so he lost his case in trying to get these recordings through foia and because tom fitton lost he's presuming that that means that uh that donald trump gets to keep the records the logic is very flimsy the logic is very flimsy and it was

[45:40] funny to me that the people around trump those people who are the most concerned about his precarious legal position right now are the most worried that he's taking the advice of tom fitton yeah all right i got one more thing for you which is just to take note of the fact that uh we get a we get an idea of where some of these documents would have been in mar-a-lago

[46:10] uh where the agent writes that it's in the storage room um it's in the residential suite so we know in the residential suite this is what bill arkin has said that there's a leather bound book that was taken that had records and then pine hall which i had not heard about before but i looked this up and it's apparently an anti-chamber or a vestibule so it looks like it would be some connecting area in mar-a-lago i wonder if it has foot traffic i don't know but it's kind of like odd to think that that might be a

[46:42] place that had classified records man it's uh and then 45's office uh was obviously a place that they were going to look so this was where they were authorized to look for all the documents um and that's you know that's and look i'm not gonna go through the defense for why things were redacted i do by and large feel like they probably had some good justification i think there's too much that was but i

[47:13] err on the side of transparency all the time so you're always going to hear me say that there's too many there's too many redactions i mean i just you know like i don't know they always have this you know they subscribe to this thing called the mosaic theory right they have this fear that no matter whether they just are using a scalpel to just only protect names and uh locations and dates and very specific information that even if they take those out you'll be able to like read it

[47:44] i guess kind of like you read a mad lib and like you could fill it in with your own information and you would be able to figure out what they were talking about yeah that's exactly what it is it's it's the mosaic theory that that you can take all this redacted information like you can take reams of of unclassified documents and put together a classified program kind of like a jigsaw puzzle that's what they're afraid of all right

[48:14] well um i'm just gonna put this up on the screen here um again just i just want to remind people that like uh we do it better than all eight of these people whatever they were doing and um they're not doing much um and we also oh i have another good example we do it we do it better than this guy um who was brought on to literally i mean i'm not even kidding explain the meaning

[48:46] of top secret documents to the public like you really need to break down what it means for a document to be top secret i mean like i mean how dumb do they think we are like like i think the public wants to understand the issues like we've discussed they want to know the legal jeopardy they want to know what's real they want to know the politics and maybe for your final thoughts here on the way out you know

[49:17] has the fbi stepped in it is there a disaster here have they gone too far is there something that they need to be concerned about because or or are the republicans gonna have a really hard time trying to turn this around and make it an issue of abusive power because they're really trying i mean they're trying they're trying with the hunter biden's laptop and the fbi and it looks like they might have something and it's not just smoke but there is something about

[49:47] what was going on and chuck grassley and some of the other senators have been focusing on it there was mark zuckerberg in the last day he said that the fbi came to him and told facebook that they needed to change the algorithm so people couldn't see the story as much in their news feed so something was going on but i don't know that i don't i don't i don't know if this becomes like another prime example of the fbi abusing its power i think it remains to be seen i i

[50:19] agree with you i think it does remain to be seen and i think what what it boils down to is this good this is going to be a political decision whether or not to charge donald trump um do you really want to charge a former president with a with a crime this isn't 1974 anymore um the country has changed it's different and i i think in many ways this whole operation against trump has been a gift to him because it keeps him in the news it

[50:49] keeps him relevant it riles up his base people are rallying around him on the other hand um it allows challengers or would-be challengers like ron desantis for example to uh to try to poke holes in in the persona of donald trump and make a name for himself it also sets a very bad precedent you know what's to stop the republicans now from

[51:20] looking to charge joe biden or hunter biden or whatever the daughter's name is abby biden or whatever her name is uh it's it's just it just seems to be a bad precedent yeah it doesn't seem to be kind of one of those things where i mean you think of it like uh political offenses as we talk about them under the extradition treaty it's like you're never going to be able to agree although i mean look in this case he did actually do something that seems to be prohibited

[51:50] by our law but like you're it's it's far and away different from saying like oh that president's a war criminal and he needs to be held accountable that person authorized torture that person was involved and is implicated in a genocide against an entire population like that to me screams like you need to do something but i mean oh donald trump took some boxes kept them in his estate didn't do anything they haven't suggested that he did anything with the documents yet just

[52:22] had them there they weren't safe because of the traffic but okay we were talking with him about getting them back for almost uh eight or nine months maybe a little longer and uh and now we got them now we have them back so it just seems like the problem has been resolved and i mean and you have to ask was there damage to the national security and there's no evidence that there was any damage i mean all we will hear is on msnbc they'll talk about all the people who traffic through

[52:53] mar-a-lago and that is true and the no foreign you know the reason like that caught my attention is because it would seem that maybe part of this affidavit mentions who comes in and out of mar-a-lago and that maybe they're concerned about that person uh you know there's been a lot of speculation about oh there are certain characters who were showing up to mar-a-lago and the fbi got con uh got worried i also see there was a story that somebody actually infiltrated mar-a-lago and was moving around i don't

[53:24] know if you saw this um it wasn't that chinese woman was it no was just like remember that it was like inga or um well one second let me see mar-a-lago uh traded um oh yeah numerous times by a ukrainian woman oh geez who was using a fake name i'll just i'll just we'll wrap with this this is a good way to end because this is actually something that

[53:54] i think would make the fbi crazy and it was uh that uh this woman came in claiming to be an heiress from a famous european banking dynasty visited the seaside golf resort on numerous occasions mingling with guests including mr trump this is a report in the independent from the uk the woman however was not a wealthy heiress instead a ukrainian-born daughter of a truck driver in illinois and with an alleged shady background connecting her to charity scams and organized crime

[54:26] okay so okay so the credit goes to pittsburgh post gazette and the organized crime corruption reporting project that found that anna de ross child the woman who claimed to be a member of the ross child banking family charmed her way onto trump's property and into the power center of the republican party um he's actually her name is inna yashishan a ukrainian woman who immigrated to the u.s and is now subject to an fbi investigation um and yeah just scammed her way in and is in in there in her in the mar-a-lago

[54:58] residence um she claimed uh yeah yeah so anyways there's nothing there's no reason to say anything more but like that would that would be a problem the fact that you know it's so easy to infiltrate mar-a-lago oh yes that's a big problem yes indeed all right well i won't let you go you've been gracious with your time my pleasure this was this was uh the article you wrote that everyone should get over to consortium news

[55:30] and read don't charge trump with espionage nobody should face the espionage act charge unless they are working for a foreign power and mean harm in the united states so um we can head over there and uh yeah so remain vigilant um my last thing to everyone will be as you're watching the media and you're and they get lazy about how they describe the espionage act or any of these things yeah just just be mindful of what they're doing because

[56:00] what i'm most fearful of in this moment is that they make the espionage act seem like something that the justice department doesn't abuse when they use it against individuals and also let me remind you if you want to repeal or abolish the espionage act you're not a traitor you're not treasonous that's what they were saying about rand paul i found this to be one of the most awful bafflings to sort of but one of the most disgusting things that was making its way around the internet um in the last several days

[56:32] so just some it's really worth saying all right we're gonna sign off here i'll put our faces back on screen i'll put my site down here and i'll just say goodbye to everyone and thank you for engaging and being such a wonderful audience and uh we'll be back soon with uh updates on this investigation until then have a good weekend bye everybody
