Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATIONS ELECTION SURVIVAL GUIDE: "How Trump Will Dispute the Result" with Journalist Matt Bevan

Transcript

UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATIONS ELECTION SURVIVAL GUIDE: "How Trump Will Dispute the Result" with Journalist Matt Bevan · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans welcome at SafeSpace for dangerous ideas and there are a few ideas more dangerous
• 0:08
  than some of the more extreme ones that have been concocted by certain individuals over
• 0:14
  the past four years who wanted to ensure that Donald Trump would not once again lose
• 0:21
  a US election.
• 0:24
  I want to give you a kind of survival guide today for how you should watch the election
• 0:29
  unfold next week, what you should make of what will inevitably be a confusing tsunami
• 0:35
  of different allegations on election night and probably in the days after.
• 0:40
  And what you should know now about the plans that exist and that will unfold in some capacity
• 0:48
  depending on what happens on election day.
• 0:52
  That beven is an ABC journalist who is one of the wonkiest most delightful nerds about
• 0:58
  the minutiae of American politics you have ever heard.
• 1:02
  He is currently as I speak on a plane to the United States where he'll be completing
• 1:07
  the final season of his smash hit ABC audio show and podcast, which is called if you're
• 1:14
  listening.
• 1:15
  It began as a show called Russia if you're listening and it was an investigation into the allegations
• 1:19
  of a Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.
• 1:22
  And he's done a number of seasons on different aspects of American politics.
• 1:26
  And the latest is called America's last election and the first few episodes have already
• 1:32
  dropped.
• 1:33
  It is absolutely riveting, absolutely captivating about the cast of characters stretching
• 1:38
  back for decades who have all come together and coalesced around some of these frankly
• 1:44
  hair-brained constitutional schemes to make it very, very difficult for there to be a cultural
• 1:51
  consensus and a legal consensus around a Democrat winning the White House.
• 1:58
  It's critical that you understand how these things have been set up before the election
• 2:03
  comes around.
• 2:04
  I want you to arm yourself with these facts and want you to stay sane on election night.
• 2:10
  This episode is your toolkit, really, against those schemes, those schemes to sow confusion
• 2:17
  and ferment chaos and challenge the vote.
• 2:20
  There are very weird ways in which the schemes that we know about today relate back to January
• 2:26
  6th and the riots at the Capitol and the election denialism that came out of that.
• 2:33
  So we spend more than half of this episode understanding the sort of seeds that were
• 2:38
  sowed in that period.
• 2:40
  But I find it totally fascinating and it's wonderful to talk to someone who comes at this
• 2:44
  with such levity and sort of joyful curiosity instead of earnestness and downiness.
• 2:51
  So for everything you need to know, to understand election night and the days and weeks beyond,
• 2:56
  enjoy it to one, the only, that never.
• 2:59
  Well, thank you for doing this on the eve of literally getting on a plane.
• 3:05
  Assume that anything you say henceforth is going to be available to the general public.
• 3:10
  You are now on the record, you're on a, you don't have to tell me secrets about how and why
• 3:16
  you were defacing your clothing with alcoholic beverages.
• 3:20
  May or may not have just happened.
• 3:22
  Actually, it's the best reason not to be wearing pants.
• 3:25
  That's true.
• 3:26
  Any other reason would be a sort of a Jeffrey Toobham kind of sliding weird, you know,
• 3:30
  you're getting caught.
• 3:31
  I'm happy to admit that I'm not wearing pants and...
• 3:33
  You're wearing pants and it's fine and I need them to...
• 3:36
  Also, I mean, let's give you the benefit of the doubt here, Matt.
• 3:39
  The real reason is because you're such an intrepid journalist, you're heading off to the
• 3:43
  United States and you're such a kind, a colleague of mine and friend that you would, you would
• 3:48
  devote the eve of your long haul trip just to allow my audience to understand what may
• 3:56
  be coming down the pike for them.
• 3:58
  So with that, with that, with that set up, should we just start by maybe...
• 4:03
  Maybe talking about what happened last time and what it can tell us about what might
• 4:07
  happen this time, because my sense is that there's a certain cohort, well, if ever there
• 4:13
  was a subject on which there are a lot of people who don't share facts, you know, I would
• 4:18
  put climate chaos into that and I would put the stealing of the 2020 election into that.
• 4:25
  What are the facts about...
• 4:27
  And I'm talking now, I suppose, to people who might sort of have the attitude towards
• 4:33
  2020 election, which is, yeah, of course Donald Trump, you know, was an asshole about, you
• 4:40
  know, not trying not to give up power in January 6th was a terrible thing, but lots of people
• 4:45
  are, you know, mop after they lose elections and Hillary Clinton barely wanted to concede
• 4:52
  and, you know, like all of these lawsuits seem a bit overblown against Donald Trump and
• 4:56
  like, isn't the deep state kind of trying to just reject this insurgent candidate one
• 5:02
  more time, you know, he gave him four years, he wasn't the end of the world, why would
• 5:07
  he be the end of the world now, etc, etc.
• 5:10
  Let's one of the amazing things that you do in your podcast is just break down with good
• 5:15
  humor, but also finesse precisely how complicated and nuanced and audacious the plot to derail
• 5:25
  the election in 2020 by the Trump camp was, what happened?
• 5:31
  So what happened was that Donald Trump was pretty confident that he was going to win
• 5:37
  the election.
• 5:38
  He didn't think that he was on the verge of losing and so he was pretty confident going
• 5:44
  in and didn't have a lot of plans for exactly how he would react if he lost.
• 5:50
  That being said, people around him had sort of been talking a bit about, you know, what
• 5:55
  is the best strategy going into this election night in an election that should, it must
• 6:02
  be said, was a very strange election, it was a COVID, obviously it was 2020, obviously
• 6:08
  there was lockdowns, there was varying degrees of, you know, of public freedom in various
• 6:16
  states and you had a situation where the government, the Trump administration, was setting
• 6:23
  up a lot of facilities for people to vote by mail and to assist the states in helping
• 6:28
  people to vote by mail.
• 6:31
  Democrats were encouraging people to use those facilities to vote by mail as much as possible.
• 6:38
  States were extending the early voting periods and that kind of thing, opening up ballot
• 6:44
  access to a lot of people via unconventional means.
• 6:49
  But at the same time, Donald Trump was encouraging people not to use that.
• 6:52
  Donald Trump was saying that mail invotes no good and they're suspicious, despite the fact
• 6:58
  that he himself voted by mail that year, it's a resident of Florida at the time, he voted
• 7:05
  by mail.
• 7:06
  And so the thing is, it is, yeah, so going into the election, there was an understanding
• 7:15
  amongst Trump's team that it was likely that things were not going to look very good
• 7:20
  for him immediately as the results started to roll in.
• 7:25
  The things would look very good, there would be what they call a red mirage, a lot of the
• 7:30
  ballots that would be coming from small towns, the in-person votes would be counted first
• 7:36
  and then the mail in ballots would be counted.
• 7:38
  And so it would appear that things are going very well for Donald Trump and then things
• 7:43
  would start to shift.
• 7:45
  And that's just because of the way that the votes get counted, that the votes that are
• 7:50
  counted, that are done in person account at first.
• 7:54
  Yes.
• 7:55
  And in particular, the votes will be counted in person at a precinct level, so in the
• 8:02
  local area.
• 8:03
  So let's take, for example, Detroit.
• 8:05
  So let's take Detroit, for example, Detroit is a city where more than half of people vote
• 8:10
  by absentee ballot or mail-in ballots, right?
• 8:13
  But they also have 1100 precincts around the city where people can vote in person.
• 8:20
  And what happens is about 500 people will go to each one of those, the polls will close,
• 8:25
  the people in each of those precincts will count those ballots.
• 8:28
  It won't take them too long, it was only 500 ballots to count.
• 8:31
  They'll send their result into headquarters, headquarters, sends it to the networks.
• 8:35
  Meanwhile, all of the absentee and mail-in ballots are being counted at one giant counting
• 8:42
  center.
• 8:43
  It was the TCF center in Detroit in 2020, a big convention center.
• 8:49
  They are counting all of those votes in one place that takes longer, it's slower.
• 8:52
  You don't get a result as soon.
• 8:55
  And just to clarify, Matt, they haven't started counting all of the votes that were cast
• 8:59
  three weeks ago until the day of.
• 9:02
  No, no, no, they don't count the votes beforehand.
• 9:05
  They count how many votes they have, they count.
• 9:08
  And right now we can find out how many Americans have already voted in this election, but not
• 9:12
  who they voted for, they don't precount the ballots.
• 9:16
  And so, yeah, all of the smaller local areas and the in-person votes get reported first,
• 9:24
  you see those on CNN first.
• 9:27
  Then the absentee and mail-in ballots start coming in, and that's where a huge number
• 9:31
  of Democrats were voting in mail-in.
• 9:36
  And so the situation was, things looked very good for Donald Trump and gradually shifted
• 9:40
  to Joe Biden.
• 9:42
  And part of this is, just to quick, if I'm wrong, part of this is demographic and part
• 9:45
  of this is that Democrats are likely to stay home during COVID.
• 9:49
  Yes.
• 9:50
  And that Democrats were really being encouraged by the Biden campaign to vote in the mail,
• 9:59
  to mail-in ballots.
• 10:00
  Right, I see.
• 10:01
  Yeah.
• 10:02
  Whereas the Trump campaign was encouraging people to vote in person.
• 10:05
  I see.
• 10:06
  Yeah.
• 10:07
  Got it.
• 10:08
  You have a situation.
• 10:09
  So everyone knew at the back end of the Trump campaign that what was going to happen over,
• 10:14
  and this is not your conjecture.
• 10:16
  No, no, no.
• 10:17
  In your podcast, you play clips of prominent people, Steve Bannon and so on, saying,
• 10:24
  which is for the election.
• 10:26
  Yeah, and days before the election that what's going to happen is that there's going to be
• 10:29
  an early, you know, the early results in the early portion of the evening will skew towards Trump.
• 10:36
  And then there'll be a shift back, and that's just the natural course of the counting process.
• 10:42
  And the strategy should be to find the moment at which the presumably Trump is at his peak
• 10:50
  in terms of the counting of the votes.
• 10:52
  And just to clear that to be the point at which the election is sort of over.
• 10:56
  And we don't want to keep, you know, counting all of these ballots that start mysteriously flooding
• 11:00
  in that happen to be for Joe Biden.
• 11:03
  Yes.
• 11:04
  And they were like various people were amazingly open about that as a strategy.
• 11:09
  And on the night, Donald Trump gets up and says, you know, we were winning this election.
• 11:13
  In fact, I think we did win this election at whatever was voting to stop.
• 11:18
  He said in this speech that he gave at the White House two o'clock in the morning,
• 11:24
  as the results began to shift towards Joe Biden in all these key places.
• 11:29
  And so not only, yeah, so it was something they expected to happen.
• 11:33
  And then it was something that they capitalized on as the night went on.
• 11:37
  And then what we saw is larger cities.
• 11:41
  So we're talking about cities like Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee.
• 11:47
  These are large cities in the swing state start reporting large numbers of votes for Joe Biden
• 11:53
  because Democrats tend to congregate in large cities.
• 11:57
  And because they tended to vote by mail.
• 11:59
  And so you had a situation where large dump, what appeared to be big dumps of Biden votes
• 12:05
  would come in all at once.
• 12:07
  The tally would be, you know, Trump, a million votes, Biden 900,000 votes.
• 12:13
  And then suddenly 200,000 votes would be added to Joe Biden's column.
• 12:18
  I see.
• 12:19
  And this and Trump supporters and Trump and people who believe in that the deep state
• 12:23
  was trying to keep him out are like, well, isn't that convenient?
• 12:26
  That 200,000 Biden votes just miraculously materialize.
• 12:30
  Yes.
• 12:31
  But miraculously materialize and, you know, are received at the appropriate counting depot.
• 12:37
  Yes.
• 12:38
  Having been collected from electoral polling booths.
• 12:41
  Yes.
• 12:42
  Are also, you know, both both good options, both good explanations.
• 12:46
  Indeed.
• 12:47
  And it is in fact an explanation that they knew was going to happen.
• 12:52
  Like that it wasn't as though this was a surprise to people like Steve Bannon
• 12:57
  and people inside the Trump campaign that all these votes arrived early in the morning
• 13:02
  and then in the subsequent days after the election.
• 13:05
  And so I think that is one of the clear things is they knew that this was going to happen.
• 13:11
  And then they started to really look for things they could blame for this happening,
• 13:17
  saying these votes are illegitimate because.
• 13:20
  And they didn't have a lot of strong strategy for what they would blame this on beforehand.
• 13:26
  And they reached for some pretty extraordinary and unprovable or in fact easily disproven explanations
• 13:37
  for what these votes were and why they were going in this way.
• 13:41
  Well, I mean, do you want to get into the hammer and scorecard?
• 13:44
  Yeah.
• 13:45
  I mean, the incredible thing is that I consider myself to be reasonably well informed about this topic.
• 13:50
  And I had not actually heard about this particular right wing meme until I listened to your excellent podcast.
• 13:56
  So yes, what is the hammer and scorecard?
• 14:00
  So there's this gentleman by the name of Dennis Montgomery who is has a very fascinating history of claiming things,
• 14:13
  claiming to be able to do things with computers that he seems to not have been able to really do.
• 14:20
  He claimed to have basically in the early 2000s, he claimed very generous because I believe he's gone to jail for such claims.
• 14:28
  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
• 14:58
  no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
• 15:28
  to analyze video footage for them and the biggest thing that he that they got him to do was basically they were very convinced that there was something fishy about the signal from the Katari broadcast to Al Jazeera. This was, of course, after 9-11, so the CIA was very convinced that somehow Al Jazeera was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow that Al Jazeera's broadcasts were being used
• 15:58
  as a way of disseminating instructions to Al Qaeda sleeper cells. And so they handed over, you know, hours and hours and hours of Al Jazeera footage to Dennis Montgomery, asked him to feed it through his image recognition software. He came back with a string of numbers and letters. Oh, yes, these numbers and letters are sort of subliminal messages hidden inside the images that are being sent out over Al Jazeera. And the CIA interpreted these random numbers and letters.
• 16:29
  To be flight numbers of incoming flights to the United States. They ordered the grounding of a number of flights that were due to depart from Europe and flight to the United States on Christmas day, 2003.
• 16:45
  And so it was, based purely on these numbers and letters that Dennis Montgomery claimed to have coming out of the Al Jazeera broadcasts.
• 16:56
  Right. And this was not a small thing. This was like, it was it was it was it was.
• 17:01
  Christmas, 2003, you know, many of our listeners will remember, will vaguely remember this. Oh, yeah, there was, you know, I mean, this was around the time with the shoe bomber and, you know, right, all when all there was just a
• 17:13
  slide paranoia and there was a on Christmas day, a lot of people were stranded, couldn't see their families on these flights because of this individual who had come up with a computer program that could find noise that could find signal in the noise of Al Jazeera broadcasts.
• 17:30
  This is the same individual so that we don't have to linger too long, but this is the place. He was he was he was grounding a lot of air France flights.
• 17:41
  And the French government went find ground the flights, but you need to explain what on earth is going on here. The French were handed his information and they went, this absolute nonsense and total garbage.
• 17:55
  This man is conning you. This man is swindling you CIA. The CIA seems to have cotton onto this and then
• 18:04
  quietly stopped working with Dennis Montgomery, but didn't tell anyone about it so that the CIA would not be embarrassed by being drawn in by this, this, this man, Dennis Montgomery.
• 18:17
  And so he continued working with the US government for years afterwards, different departments, none of whom were talking to each other and reporting to each other, maybe don't work with Dennis Montgomery.
• 18:29
  And so yes, for years afterwards, he continued to work with the CIA and get involved in some fascinating things and when you say work, every step of the way he's basically concocting what what one might interpret to be a rather hairbrained claim about some computing ability that he either has access to or has invented or has discovered.
• 18:51
  And this is going back as we say more than two decades now, and it's on the record in the sense that those flights really were canceled on Christmas day 2003.
• 19:02
  So it's been widely reported since in in books and eventually came out all the news about Dennis Montgomery sort of spilled out in the early 2010s.
• 19:11
  Right. And it was reported in, you know, long reads in Rolling Stone magazine. There's a book about it. It's, it's, it's a very well reported story.
• 19:19
  The listener can take this to the bank. And if they're scratching their head wondering what the hell are Josh and Matt talking about this guy from 20 years ago and his crazy computer machines.
• 19:30
  This brings us to the explanation of widespread explanation for what actually happened in the theft of the 2020 election that is going to be salient when we get to 2024.
• 19:41
  So how does Dennis figure this now?
• 19:45
  So a couple of days before the election, there started to be discussions on Steve Bannon's podcast and other right wing outlets about Dennis Montgomery being a NSA CIA.
• 19:59
  The whistleblower who wanted to tell the truth that, you know, the truth about a surveillance super computer that he had developed for the CIA, which had been taken away from the NSA and CIA by Barack Obama, sent to an undisclosed location somewhere in Virginia, and then, and then used using a software that Dennis Montgomery also designed.
• 20:30
  To change vote totals in voting machines. And so it's kind of unclear exactly why this didn't work in 2016 and why Donald Trump was elected despite the existence of this apparently Obama controlled super computer that has the ability to change votes.
• 20:48
  But Dennis Montgomery said that he was convinced that this computer program would change votes during the 2020 election. And then in the days after the 2020 election, you had people like Sydney, oh, damn it, I forgot her name.
• 21:07
  Powell, Sydney Powell, you had people like Sydney Powell, who was a Trump affiliated attorney, going on the news and going on Fox business and talking about the hammer and the scorecard developed by Dennis Montgomery to change votes.
• 21:22
  And that might be the hammer and the scorecard.
• 21:25
  The hammer is the super computer and the scorecard is the software that the super computer runs to change votes. And is this part of the diebold voting machine accusations and scandal indeed.
• 21:41
  So in the weeks after the election, the explanation changed pretty rapidly, but it began with this discussion about the hammer and the scorecard being able to change votes inside dominion voting machines, which was a big voting machine company that was involved in the 2020 election.
• 22:02
  Right, dominion and it was dominion the one. Am I getting confused between diebold and dominion, which one was the one that ended up getting it sued?
• 22:11
  I mean, sorry, suing Fox News. Dominion. Yes. Right. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Yes. So so basically the reason why Dennis is relevant, you know, and his multi decade long, well established track record of making incredible claims about top secret computing capacities that turn out to go nowhere.
• 22:32
  Is that he becomes really prominent in the right wing blogger sphere and podcast to stand and Steve Bannon's show and all these kinds of commentary after the after Trump loses saying, yeah, the reason why Trump loses is because here we have this whistleblower who has literally worked for the CIA and the NSA. He's from the deep state and he's blowing.
• 22:52
  He's blowing the whistle on this on this way in which the voting machine companies are in cooots with the Obama administration will the Biden administration at this point.
• 23:01
  No, the Obama administration, the Obama administration, which have been out of office for four years, yes, right. And so it's so but basically the conceit would be that the deep state is still in control of this thing and President Trump didn't know about it.
• 23:17
  Yeah. And that it would be used and was being used in the 2020 election. Yeah. Okay.
• 23:24
  Subsequently, as you as you mentioned, this voting machine company dominion launched a swath of lawsuits against people who'd claimed things about their company and
• 23:35
  Mike Lindell, who is a pillow magnate, paid Dennis Montgomery a large sum of money to buy the evidence, the proof of the hammer and scorecard system Dennis Montgomery handed over the proof and then disappear into the wind and I haven't seen been able to figure out what he's been up to for about the last two years. He sort of disappeared out of the news, but Mike Lindell,
• 24:03
  and then Michael and Del then held a symposium where he invited any computer experts that wanted to come and see the evidence of the hammer and scorecard system changing votes. They could come and he would pay $5 million to anyone who disproved Dennis Montgomery's data and a Trump supporter who was very interested to see the evidence came along. He had decades of experience in software engineering.
• 24:30
  He had one look at the quote unquote evidence and went, this is an Excel spreadsheet that's full of random numbers.
• 24:39
  There's an absolutely no evidence here at all. Can I have $5 million and Michael and Del has been locked in a years long
• 24:48
  court battle with this gentleman who is demanding the $5 million because he easily and simply proved that Dennis Montgomery's hammer and scorecard evidence quote unquote was nothing. It was absolute nonsense. There was no evidence to this existing in the first place, but this is the kernel center of this and the thing about it is that so many people who had serious titles and reputations, you know, people who were
• 25:18
  expert lawyers, former officials in the US intelligence agencies who were all clear, you know, clearly very keen Trump supporters were willing to grab onto this because it helped Donald Trump despite the fact that it was paper thin evidence and that's really the story of what so much of what happened after the 2020 election is a lot of people who really wanted it to be true that there was some sort of fraud.
• 25:46
  But never being capable of producing any actual evidence of fraud and one of the incredible things is you have story after story of Donald Trump speaking to people inside of the government.
• 25:59
  So the attorney general, you know, experts in the in the security agencies and that kind of thing going find me the evidence of the fraud that I keep talking about them going off to find it.
• 26:10
  Coming back and telling Donald Trump, well, I have nothing. There is no evidence of any widespread fraud and then Donald Trump just finding someone else and finding someone else and finding someone else and eventually latching on to anyone who had a plausible sounding resume who was willing to go along with some sort of a scheme in order to try and keep Donald Trump in power, which is why all the people who ended up being involved in this did not work for the government. They were private individuals.
• 26:38
  Who were working for Donald Trump in a private capacity.
• 26:43
  Many of them, Rudy Giuliani, for example, was doing on a no win no fee basis, which is an interesting really. Yes.
• 26:52
  I mean, I we could do a whole other hour mat about Rudy Giuliani because I actually feel really sorry for the guy. I honestly do like here's a person who has been screwed.
• 27:06
  Every way from Sunday by Donald Trump and obviously has some personal failing that has not enabled him to stand up on his own two feet and the idea that he's like whatever demons he's battling and, you know, many claims about, you know, alcohol sub and substance abuse and like just standing out there in the baking hot sun in front of four seasons gardening enterprises with like, you know, like hair dyed trick like this face like.
• 27:34
  And now he's melting out of his ears, not having any money apparently doesn't have any money anymore because Trump doesn't pay anybody and I didn't realize that he was on a no fee.
• 27:47
  I mean, the quest for relevance is so sad. It's so tragic. Where's Rudy's movie, you know, at least Donald Trump even got a movie about how terrible his upbringing was. Where's, where's anyway.
• 28:01
  I mean, you know what, one of the fascinating things about this is that, you know, it's, it's, it's kind of a concentric circles of people swindling the the circle inside of them, you know, Donald Trump is desperate to hold on to power despite the fact that there's no evidence.
• 28:19
  And there's a circle of people around him like Rudy Giuliani who are willing to capitalize on this by, you know, beefing up their reputation or telling Donald Trump what he wants to hear.
• 28:30
  And those people then find an outer layer of people like Dennis Montgomery who will tell them what they want to hear and give them phony bogus evidence of what they're claiming so that they can then appease Donald Trump. It's, it's, it's an and that is what how you end up with people like
• 28:49
  Dennis Montgomery involved in making money somehow out of this entire process.
• 28:53
  But what's weird Matt is that in the, in this model of concentric circles, it seems like the people at the outside of the circle, well, the people are the very, very outside of the circle like the QAnon shaman on January 6th get fucked.
• 29:07
  But there's a layer inside, which is the Dennis Montgomery layer, which actually does really well.
• 29:13
  And then there's a layer inside that which is the Rudy Giuliani layer, which gets fucked if you're too close to Trump.
• 29:19
  And then there's Trump who always does well. So it's like there's no rhyme or reason it's not like a, you know, a shock wave from dropping a pebble into a pond where there's no consistent explicability about it. It's like
• 29:31
  it everything you never know whether you're going to be in the situation of a Midas or everything's going to turn to shit.
• 29:39
  It's really hard to know.
• 29:41
  Well, from what I can tell, there's a strong difference between the people who knew where a line is.
• 29:48
  For example, signing a fraudulent document or making a fraudulent claim about a multi million dollar company on the television.
• 29:58
  There were people who knew where the line was and they did not cross it.
• 30:02
  Dennis Montgomery made these claims, but he didn't sign a paperwork.
• 30:07
  He didn't, he didn't, you know, sign an affidavit to a court.
• 30:11
  He didn't go on Fox News and claim that, you know, Dominion voting systems is a criminal enterprise.
• 30:20
  Just like he didn't go to the CIA and say, you need to ground these flights.
• 30:25
  He went, oh, yes, here is some numbers and letters.
• 30:27
  You can do with that what you want.
• 30:29
  Just some information about a supercomputer.
• 30:30
  You can grab what to do with that, you know, and, and there are.
• 30:35
  I mean, if anyone is a, is a master at walking that line, it's President Trump himself.
• 30:40
  Indeed.
• 30:41
  Yes, although he is brilliant at that.
• 30:44
  He's not perfect enough to be able to withstand necessarily every conceivable legal challenge,
• 30:49
  given the magnitude of the very, and the scope of all of the things that he did.
• 30:53
  But, you know, unless a man wouldn't, would have been slightly clumsier.
• 30:59
  Even the call to the Georgia attorney, the Secretary of State, you know, about it,
• 31:04
  it would be good if you could find me.
• 31:05
  If you could just find 11,000 votes is when you actually pass it.
• 31:12
  So, shrewdly phrased that one word out of place and the man would be behind bars,
• 31:19
  but, you know, he just knows how to play the game.
• 31:22
  But anyway, let's, yes, sorry, do you have any joint to that as well?
• 31:25
  No, no, no, no, no, I want to talk about the scheme,
• 31:28
  because we've got, we've set up the, we set up the narrative of 2020.
• 31:33
  I promised to the listener and the viewer, we'll get to 2024,
• 31:36
  but like this is all important stuff, because we need to understand that there was,
• 31:41
  there's not just a haphazard or accidental or chaotic misunderstanding of what took place in 2020.
• 31:49
  That there is a, there was a comprehensive and quite shrewd plot,
• 31:54
  even if it somewhat took Donald Trump himself by surprise.
• 31:58
  And now it is not taking him and his most senior advisors by surprise at all.
• 32:03
  And so how could it differ this time from then?
• 32:06
  So, you've got the narrative about these, you know,
• 32:09
  machines that are in cahoots with some kind of deep state operation to flip votes.
• 32:14
  You've got social media presumably, which is,
• 32:18
  you're throwing up for the first time in terms of just in terms of the scope of people
• 32:22
  all having smartphones and all being keenly concerned about election fraud.
• 32:28
  Images of why are there these, you know,
• 32:31
  poll counters who are blocking out the windows of this poll counting booth,
• 32:35
  and here's an anomaly, and here's a garbage bin full of votes.
• 32:40
  And here are all these, you know, what we would call an Australia scrutiny is,
• 32:43
  poll watchers being kicked out of this vote place.
• 32:47
  You know, they're being screened from the inside.
• 32:51
  But the thing is, if you peel back the layer of any of these things,
• 32:55
  you often find a very justifiable explanation.
• 32:58
  For example, in, you know, in certain counting centres,
• 33:01
  these people were kicked out, but it was because there was legislation that said
• 33:07
  you can only have up to 400 poll watches in this location,
• 33:12
  and there was 420, and they went, well, you can pick, pick 20 of you to go.
• 33:18
  And there were still 400 inside, 400 Trump people inside watching the count,
• 33:24
  but there were 20 that got kicked out.
• 33:26
  And then the, the, the narratives is that we've been kicked out of the voting center,
• 33:30
  they're doing something scammy inside.
• 33:31
  Even though there's 400 of them still in there watching the entire situation.
• 33:35
  Just one, allow me one more aside, Matt, before we get to the scheme of the fake electors,
• 33:41
  and the, you know, the conundrum that Vice President Pence found himself in,
• 33:45
  the, I think I need to make a nod to the type of person who is listening to this and saying,
• 33:53
  okay, it's great that in a court of law and in your journalistic newsroom circles,
• 33:58
  you are so confident that the absence of kind of binding evidence is a slam dunk.
• 34:06
  But there is a, an obvious meta kind of story going on here, which is that there are vested
• 34:15
  interests in powerful places that don't like the doctrinal Trump and don't believe that he should
• 34:20
  disrupt the world order. And of course, I mean, you know, at the risk of saying the absence of
• 34:27
  evidence is, there's evidence that the, that the conspiracy is working. You know, it is conceivable
• 34:34
  that there might be something a little bit smelly about the way that the whole thing
• 34:41
  went down without it being quite as obvious as the hammer and sword and the dominion and
• 34:48
  everything like that. It might just be that, you know, lots and lots of democratic, you know,
• 34:54
  poll, you know, I don't know, democratic states and, uh, and secretaries of state were able to
• 35:01
  in small ways put their fingers on the scale in ways that are not exactly provable, but in an
• 35:06
  election that close, you know, who knows if it could have gone another way. What do you make of that
• 35:13
  mindset? I think one of the interesting things about the Trump era is Trump's
• 35:23
  level of determination to cast aside anyone who disagrees with him for even a second. You had a
• 35:28
  situation in 2020 where you had, uh, Donald Trump had an extremely loyal attorney general,
• 35:35
  Bill Barr, who did a lot of things to really assist Donald Trump in a lot of different ways.
• 35:42
  And really did want Donald Trump to win that election. He really did. He fought hard for it.
• 35:49
  He had the entire, the entire mechanism of the, of the US government, including all the people
• 35:55
  that Donald Trump had, had installed inside the US government at his disposal, which he then
• 36:02
  used to search for evidence of fraud for weeks after the 2020 election. And he came back to Donald
• 36:09
  Trump and said, I did not find anything. You'll recall in 2017, Donald Trump set up an electoral
• 36:16
  fraud, fraud investigation commission. He put Mike Pence, the head of the, of the head of the
• 36:22
  commission. He hired Kansas Secretary of State Chris Cobak, who was very convinced there was,
• 36:28
  you know, millions of illegal immigrants voting or dead people voting and that kind of thing. He gave
• 36:33
  them, you know, just go off and find it. Find the evidence. And they went off and they found
• 36:38
  nothing. And they had nothing for him. And so what Donald Trump does in those circumstances is say,
• 36:46
  well, actually, Bill Barr is the worst person I've ever met and he's an idiot and doesn't know
• 36:50
  anything and, and what a terrible monster. And, you know, Mike Pence, I never agreed with anything
• 36:56
  that Mike Pence did. You know, all these people who, the moment that they act in a way that, you
• 37:02
  know, they may feel, you know, they're conscience demands. If it does not align with exactly what
• 37:10
  Donald Trump wants, they are immediately traitors. And that is so much the situation through this.
• 37:16
  You had so many people who really, really, really want to Donald Trump to win the election,
• 37:21
  unable to find things, unable to cross those lines and, and commit fraud of perjury for him.
• 37:31
  And they are cast aside as traitors instantly by Donald Trump, people who had been loyal to him
• 37:36
  for years. And that's the story all the way through this. And that's how you end up with people
• 37:39
  like Rudy Giuliani being his final protector for Sydney Powell and, you know, Mike Lindell,
• 37:48
  the pillow magnate, these people being the final people who are saying the things that Donald Trump
• 37:53
  once said, they are the, the, the, the last remaining messages of the inner circle because all
• 37:59
  the other people refused to do it. And yeah, okay, with those people always in on the deep state,
• 38:06
  was Bill Barr are always a member of the deep state. Just, you know, he, he,
• 38:10
  he worked acted in Donald Trump's interests where he saw it as a, as he macked in a way that was legal.
• 38:17
  But then the moment that he went, well, I can't purge myself, I'm not going to lie, you know,
• 38:21
  to Congress for you, Donald Trump. He's suddenly a traitor. And that's, that's, that's the thing.
• 38:28
  He's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would also add a meta point to, to anyone who is sort of
• 38:36
  on the fence about whether or not we're being a little bit too pedantic in holding the bar
• 38:42
  to a kind of evidentiary standard that's too high, which is simply to say, if you would
• 38:47
  go through life with that kind of epistemological attitude that you are going to sort of fundamentally
• 38:57
  question some of the deepest principles that we all agree on, such as democracy is important.
• 39:02
  And honoring the outcome of elections is important. And being a gracious loser in the political
• 39:08
  sphere is important. And that co-hearing as a demos of people in a modern Western liberal democracy
• 39:16
  is important. And if you were going to throw all of those values under the bars or jeopardize them
• 39:21
  on the basis of a suspicion that maybe something smells fishy even though you can't quite tell what,
• 39:27
  what or why, that's hazardous. That's extremely hazardous, right? I mean, you're basically,
• 39:37
  I would invite people who still have some suspicions about 2020 to step back and go, surely there's
• 39:43
  a more common set of meta principles that we can agree it's in the long term interests of all
• 39:49
  of us to uphold. Even if it is the case that when you get hundreds of millions of people to vote,
• 39:57
  things are messy, there are irregularities, there's weird stuff that's go, it's almost a bit like,
• 40:02
  it reminds me a bit about 9-11. Like, you know, I don't want to talk about the melting point of
• 40:07
  steel and building seven. Like, I want to talk about the general principle of counterterrorism
• 40:13
  and national security, you know, like the moment you start getting down in the weeds, it just becomes
• 40:19
  I think. And the things with the thing with all of these is it requires such a large conspiracy.
• 40:25
  It would require so many people. The thing about American elections is they are so big and
• 40:30
  they're so messy, it's a million different elections all being held on the same day.
• 40:35
  There are, and this is one of the things that I've, you know, that has shocked me out of this,
• 40:43
  you know, out of this research for this series, there are 170,000 precinct election boards
• 40:51
  in the United States. There are 170,000 precincts, you know, voting precincts, each of which has
• 40:59
  an election board who has 170,000 polling places. You mean 170,000 like organizations?
• 41:08
  Well, no, it'll be the organizations that organize the polling places. So they will be
• 41:13
  right. Yeah. And so they will have scrutiny is, you know, in the, but will each one have multiple
• 41:19
  polling places or is that 170,000 polling places? That will probably 170,000 polling places,
• 41:23
  some of which will have two or some of which will have, you know, but, you know, Detroit has 1100
• 41:30
  precincts, you know, all of which has people watching, people Republicans and Democrats, all
• 41:37
  there who have to certify the results of that precinct before it gets sent off to the county level.
• 41:42
  Right. And then the United States has 3,000 counties, all of which have an election board of
• 41:47
  scrutiny is made up of Republicans and Democrats, all of whom have to sign off on that election
• 41:53
  and then it gets sent to the state level, where there's obviously 50 state election boards and
• 41:58
  then it gets sent to the electors and then it gets sent to the vice president. You are talking
• 42:03
  about literally hundreds of thousands of people. Right. And you would have to swindle so many of them
• 42:10
  or somehow, you know, organize a conspiracy of such an enormous amount of number of people
• 42:16
  in order to scam an election. That's why it becomes really fishy that people who are
• 42:23
  in the know who are close to Trump can actually believe any of this bullshit because
• 42:29
  it's very easy to believe conspiracies when you're not close to the lockers of power. And you can
• 42:33
  talk in vague terms about the nefarious hand of cabals and things. But once you, I certainly felt
• 42:40
  this when I moved to New York and started hanging out and, you know, sort of got scooped up into
• 42:43
  certain elite circles in Washington, DC, I was like, oh, this is all actually just a bunch of
• 42:47
  idiots running around like with, you know, not quite, you know, this is, it's part of the,
• 42:52
  actually the process of growing into an adult is just to realize like when you're a kid, you think
• 42:56
  that the grownups are in charge and then you become a grownup and you go, oh, no one's in charge.
• 43:00
  In charge. We have no idea what we're doing. The whole world is held together with duct tape and
• 43:05
  twine. Like, no, there is no. I don't know whether that's more or less terrifying than the idea
• 43:10
  that there's a nefarious cabal like coordinating everything. But really, you know, when you actually
• 43:15
  put it that way about the, you know, the hundreds of thousands of different polling places like,
• 43:19
  you know, by, if you're actually working in politics at the highest levels, you would understand
• 43:27
  by what mechanism is the election stall and where is the insertion point into which you can
• 43:33
  place the lever. And, and one of the extraordinary things about Donald Trump's attachment to conspiracy
• 43:39
  theories and his attachment to the idea that somehow there is a cabal of people working against him
• 43:45
  is Donald Trump himself is unable to have basically any conversations with anyone without
• 43:51
  that conversation ending up in somebody's book. Donald Trump, we know virtually everything that
• 44:00
  Donald Trump has said or done because everybody writes a book about it. Right. And because the amount
• 44:07
  of loyalty that he inspires is zero because the amount of loyalty that he gives is zero.
• 44:12
  Yes, he will cast you aside the second that you do anything wrong. And, and, and, you know,
• 44:19
  everybody leaks like a sieve inside the Trump administration. It was, it was extraordinary.
• 44:25
  The amount of information that was just flowing out of the White House through the Washington
• 44:30
  Post and New York Times every single day. We knew everything that was happening in that place.
• 44:35
  The idea that that in that environment Donald Trump could be like, oh yeah, but somewhere out there
• 44:40
  there's another group of people who apparently managed to never spill anything who managed to hold
• 44:46
  together a massive conspiracy to steal an election without anything, any cracks ever opening up
• 44:53
  in anything. Yeah. Yeah. You basically have to not understand really how the bureaucracy and
• 44:58
  public service works because you would, you basically have to think that there is a parallel
• 45:03
  government consisting of who I don't know, but, you know, I don't know the head of the NSA or
• 45:10
  something is probably in on it, you know, whatever. But like it's very, yeah. So let's leave that.
• 45:16
  Let's leave that. That was all the side. Now that we get back to, should we just glide very quickly
• 45:22
  because I'm mindful of your time over the alternative slates of electors, I think people are sort of
• 45:27
  vaguely familiar with this. So, you know, once it's, once, once there are enough agitated
• 45:33
  Trump supporters in some of the swing states, they concoct a plan. A conspiracy is in the charge,
• 45:42
  in the criminal charge, to, to do what exactly. And this probably requires a brief explanation of
• 45:50
  how American elections work. Like why don't they just fucking nationalize the election and just
• 45:54
  have a national election commission like Australia does that runs the whole thing instead of having
• 45:59
  the states send it in. But hey, what do I do? Do you want to answer that question or do you
• 46:06
  actually have a really good answer for that? Well, they don't have, but really good answer is that
• 46:11
  they, the problem is that they run all the elections on the same day. They run every election from
• 46:17
  school board up to president on the same ballot paper. Can you imagine the complexity
• 46:25
  of a, you know, a national bureaucracy in Washington printing off ballot papers for 300 million people,
• 46:35
  all of which has correct every single, you know, race and, you know, ballot measure. You know,
• 46:42
  we have the situation in Michigan County where it was, you know, there was, should, should we allow
• 46:48
  a license, should we give a license to a local marijuana dispensary? Do we want a marijuana
• 46:54
  dispensary to get a license to run here? Do we want the, you know, these people for town council,
• 46:59
  these people for county clerk, these people for blah, blah, blah, blah, senator, you know,
• 47:04
  on top of that is governor and secretary of state for the state, your local representative in the
• 47:11
  state senate, your local congressional delegation and your national senator and president, all
• 47:19
  in the same ballot paper and they made a mistake. They made a single mistake because there was an
• 47:24
  added, you know, and one person wanted to run for town council and they were a late addition,
• 47:30
  they added it, they messed up something with the voting machines, all the boxes were in the wrong
• 47:34
  places. They fed the ballots into the voting machines and there was a, there was a terrible mistake
• 47:38
  and, you know, it got national coverage because, but I don't know how you would do that.
• 47:44
  You would just have different pieces of paper. Oh yeah, yeah, but, but, but you would have to have
• 47:49
  someone administering all of that. They can barely do it when the person who's administering it.
• 47:53
  Yeah, that's because Americans don't fund their public service to be able to run things properly
• 47:58
  and, you know, we break the elections up in Australia and we have different council elections
• 48:07
  run by the council and the state elections run by the state and the national elections run by the
• 48:11
  AEC. And yeah, I see what you're saying. It's usually okay. But imagine all of those things and
• 48:18
  all the things they vote for judges, uh, controllers, all those things. Yeah, they, they, they, they,
• 48:23
  they've heard a bunch of other things. Yeah, like what the fuck is a comptroller? I don't, and also
• 48:28
  why are you voting for your judges? That's yeah. But the, the idea that they'd be able to organize all
• 48:33
  that on the same day. I don't know how they will be able to do it. But the point is that at the end of
• 48:37
  all that process, do it on an open day, but do it on a Saturday. Yes. Yeah, Carol. At the end of
• 48:42
  that entire process, um, the, you know, the, the top of the ballot is the president and the way that
• 48:48
  that gets converted into who is and is not the president is via the electoral college and the
• 48:54
  electoral college is apportioned. Uh, you know, each state gets a group of electors based roughly
• 49:00
  on their population, but the, and then, um, but then actual people, electors come together,
• 49:07
  they sign certificates saying, I am an official elector for the state of Michigan. And I am casting
• 49:14
  my ballot for Joseph R. Biden and, um, then the governor certifies that and it gets sent off to
• 49:22
  be counted by the vice president on the 6th of January after the election. That is the, the way
• 49:27
  that they elect their president and there are electors, real humans in every single state.
• 49:32
  And after the, and who gets to be an elector, man? Generally, it's appointed by the party. So
• 49:38
  the party will say these are our electors. Are they like prominent business people and like,
• 49:45
  nearly of the community or like, who, why, why them? Well, it's, it's basically the, the, the,
• 49:52
  the presidential campaign needs to find 11 people to be the electors in, uh, Arizona.
• 49:59
  They don't really care who they are. It's mostly they need to be prominent people. So they're
• 50:03
  members of the campaign. Well, all members of the party, you know, the local Republican chair,
• 50:08
  the local, I see, I see. Okay. Secretary of the, of the, uh, Phoenix Republican party. Uh,
• 50:14
  you know, a couple of friends of this, but it doesn't matter who they are, but the point is that
• 50:18
  the party has its own batch. Yes. They get their own slate. And if the, if Joe Biden wins the state
• 50:28
  of Arizona, then the Biden electors get to sign these certificates. They're certified by the
• 50:34
  governor and sent off. And how do they get those certificates? The governor sends it to him?
• 50:39
  Well, they all meet. They meet with the governor generally. Um, right. Okay. You know, there's
• 50:43
  an official ceremony, uh, often held in the state capital building, uh, where the governor will be there.
• 50:50
  And the winning party, uh, the delegates of the winning party come in. They sign the papers off
• 50:56
  and go, okay, got it. Yeah. It's a little ceremony. You know, it's a cute little thing. It happens
• 51:00
  on the 14th of December after the election. And, uh, the thing was that in all of the states that
• 51:06
  Joe Biden won, the democratic electors came and they signed their certificates. They got put in,
• 51:10
  you know, stamped by the, uh, you know, certified by the governor. Yep. You take yourself
• 51:16
  here at the state capital. Uh, this is the moment of my, yeah, highlight of my life. Yep.
• 51:20
  Shake hands with the governor. Yep. Yeah. Off we go. Yep. Off you go. Go to Christmas. Go to
• 51:25
  Christmas. I'll see you in four years time. Hopefully if we win again, you know. Um, and so that
• 51:31
  happened with all the Democrats. But what happened was in seven states, um, only six of which were
• 51:37
  swing states. New Mexico did it as well for reasons that nobody really understands.
• 51:41
  Wasn't even close in New Mexico. But the Republican electors who mo the ones who were, you know,
• 51:48
  on the, on the list of these will be the electors if Donald Trump wins, met signed certificates
• 51:55
  of their own claiming to be the official electors for their state and then sent those to Washington
• 52:01
  as well. Uh, they were, sorry, all of these states were, one by Biden. Yes.
• 52:07
  Biden states were were swing states that Biden won. Yes. In which the Republican delegates who were
• 52:15
  not invited to sign the actual documents, nonetheless signed what counterfeit documents to send,
• 52:23
  like what were they actually signing? Well, allegedly fraudulent certificates, fraudulent official
• 52:28
  documents, uh, that is in, in the cases against them, uh, that have now been. That's the allegation
• 52:35
  from the Department of Justice. Yes. Indeed. And in many cases that the people have pled guilty to
• 52:41
  this, uh, saying that they signed fraudulent certificates. Now some, and that was a crime, that
• 52:48
  was a parent, I mean, that would have been a crime at the time to, um, annoy yourself a legitimate
• 52:54
  delegate when the state has the conspiracy to defraud the United States of America. Okay. Um,
• 53:00
  by impeding in an official election proceeding. Got it. And some of them, uh, in some of the states
• 53:08
  were smart enough to write on their certificate, uh, only to be used in the case that a legal
• 53:15
  challenge proves that Donald Trump was the rightful winner of my state. And those people who wrote
• 53:22
  that on their certificate have avoided being charged. Uh, but the people who didn't write that on
• 53:28
  their certificate and said, I am the official elector for the state of Arizona. Those people have
• 53:32
  been charged with criminal offenses. Okay. And the, so that was all then sent off to Mike Pence
• 53:40
  to be counted on January 6th. This is what January 6th was that and just again to pause for a moment.
• 53:47
  This is, this is not happening haphazardly. This is not, it's not like seven times someone just
• 53:53
  came up with a bright idea in, in an unrelated, in seven unrelated, you know, states to do this.
• 54:00
  Where is this? By a private attorney, uh, that was hired by Donald Trump. His name is Ken
• 54:06
  Cheesebro, uh, which is a funny name. I mean, I don't know what to do about it. I don't know what
• 54:12
  to say. It's pretty funny name. So Ken Cheesebro wrote down this plan. I just love the way you say it
• 54:20
  because it's a name that is familiar to anyone who was in the States, uh, in 2020. But I guess the
• 54:25
  American style. I don't know. That sounds just like a bit less cheese. Yeah. Cheesebro cheesebro cheesebro
• 54:32
  cheesebro. But, uh, yeah, I like the fact that you're really leaning on the, I like to think
• 54:38
  that's a, I like to think that that's kind of a higher sense bouquet sort of a situation, you know.
• 54:44
  So, okay, so Mr, the hamburger lawyer, he's, he comes up with this, yeah, this cock-a-man scheme,
• 54:52
  which is, yeah, and this, this scheme is about as credible as the, the bloke who thought he'd
• 54:58
  hacked Al Jazeera's, uh, Air France codes. Yes. Right. Yeah, there was nothing to it. The legal
• 55:04
  basis of this. Yes. And they weren't even really sure exactly what they were going to do with
• 55:09
  these certificates at the time. They kind of just wrote it. They were, they were good to have these
• 55:14
  just in case, uh, sent them through. And then it was on Christmas Eve of 2020 that another lawyer,
• 55:24
  John Eastman, uh, he wrote up a plan for Mike Pence to follow, which would allow
• 55:33
  um, those certificates to be used, not necessarily as the legitimate certificates. The plan was,
• 55:40
  according to the documents that were written by John Eastman, was basically that Mike Pence on
• 55:45
  January 6th would say, oh, well, I've got a set of certificates from the Democrats for Arizona
• 55:52
  and a set of certificates from the Republicans for Arizona. How confusing. We must invalidate
• 56:00
  Arizona's votes altogether, uh, or maybe send back to the Arizona State Senate to figure it out,
• 56:07
  or maybe you have the House of Representatives figure this out. That kind of thing, uh,
• 56:12
  was the plan basically to say, oh, my pants have to use that voice.
• 56:17
  Yes, that was part of the plan in, in, in the most intimate confused tone. Very good. You can
• 56:24
  must have. He would have to. Yeah. Confusing pieces of paper. Okay. Good. Yeah.
• 56:32
  Somewhere between Steve Carell and 1980s Chevy Chase, you would have to be there banging a
• 56:36
  gavel and slipping off off his perch. That's right. And John Eastman will be a name that is somewhat
• 56:42
  familiar to people in the sense that he was and is a legitimate authority. I mean, this, this,
• 56:50
  this idea is highly, highly unusual, but he's basing it on some constitutional theory.
• 56:58
  So, right. So what he based it on, I didn't, I didn't go into this level of detail on the
• 57:02
  episode, but what he based it on basically was he was convinced that the Electoral Count Act,
• 57:09
  which is, uh, the law that was signed in the 1800s, uh, to deal with how you count the votes
• 57:15
  after the US election, he thinks that that is an unconstitutional law and shouldn't be followed.
• 57:21
  And so Mike Pence should ignore that law, make up his own laws, uh, and then it'll go into the
• 57:28
  court system. It'll rise to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court will agree with my interpretation
• 57:34
  that this law should never have been a law in the first place. Now, just to clarify also, the,
• 57:39
  the Electoral, I mean, the electors did not use to be beholden to the voters back in the day,
• 57:45
  right? I mean, it's not like this. Well, they're still, yeah, it still varies from place to place,
• 57:49
  yeah. So like, it is not the, what I'm saying is that at the founding fathers would not have found
• 57:54
  it weird, I mean, the founding fathers will find with, you know, uh, slavery and women not voting
• 57:59
  and so on, but they would, they would have not found it weird for any state legislature or
• 58:04
  governor potentially to just send whatever electors they want to, even if it, yes, possibly
• 58:11
  contravened what the voters had said. It's, it's a norm that America now has that it's a democracy.
• 58:17
  Yes, true. I mean, this was designed, but it was a system designed by Alexander Hamilton,
• 58:22
  didn't make it into the musical. Uh, but yeah, the, the, the, the theory was that the electors would
• 58:30
  provide a last line of defense against a tyrant being elected, although exactly how that would
• 58:37
  come to pass is not exactly clear, but there is nowhere in the constitution that it says that states
• 58:44
  can, that just random, you know, just people can sign their own electoral college certificates
• 58:49
  and send them to Washington and they have them counted. They still do need to be, you know,
• 58:54
  certified by the governor or by, you know, right. I see. Or overseen by the state government in
• 59:00
  some way. As far as though they can just, you can just send a letter to Mike Pence and have Mike
• 59:05
  Pence go, oh, maybe these are the certificates. Okay. So this is, this is a good place to get to 2024,
• 59:12
  I think, because we can rule out the Mike Pence scenario because this time around Kamala Harris is
• 59:18
  the vice president. So there's no way that Kamala Harris is going to invalidate her own election
• 59:24
  just because she receives a bunch of confusing or fraudulent documents from various states.
• 59:30
  But the question of whether or not the state legislatures in those states or the governors of
• 59:36
  those states, if their Trump supporters could do something that throws sand into the gears is
• 59:44
  another question. What are the, the sort of legal, what are the tools that exist that are currently
• 59:50
  being looked at by people who want to do absolutely everything they can to make Trump win
• 59:56
  that they can do in the days and weeks after the election? So it's probably not going to be
• 1:00:02
  something to do with the electoral college because the, you know, high up people in the state
• 1:00:10
  governments, the governors are on the side, and we were talking earlier, these are the governors
• 1:00:17
  of these states are people that understand that there are laws and that if they break those laws,
• 1:00:23
  they're a potentially serious legal consequences. So they are unlikely to cross that barrier and
• 1:00:28
  start to run into problems against their own state laws that have been passed to bind electors
• 1:00:33
  to the electoral election results. Or they, when you say those laws have been passed to bind them,
• 1:00:38
  have they been passed since 2020 because I know US Congress also passed the law that the president
• 1:00:43
  Biden signed right to tighten them. Some states have, yes, tighten this up. But also some state,
• 1:00:49
  in some states, those laws predated 2020, states can pass their own laws, you know, about the way
• 1:00:56
  that the electors are, are operated. And most many states basically said, you know, the winner of
• 1:01:05
  the electoral count gets to the, the governor can't swing in and go actually my party won, not them.
• 1:01:10
  There's laws at the state level to prevent that. And they could the state legislature
• 1:01:16
  try something fishy. I mean, potentially the signature. Whether it would stand up in the court
• 1:01:22
  system is the question. What is more likely and what appears to be a plan that is in motion
• 1:01:32
  is not about that. It's about the step before that. It's about the certification of the votes
• 1:01:38
  at the precinct, county and state level. So in order for the results in, for your ballot to be
• 1:01:50
  you know, validly counted, it needs to be signed off at the precinct level. And if you sign off
• 1:01:55
  by the county board and by the state election board before it can be then handed over to a point
• 1:02:02
  electors and that kind of thing. And if you can, and most of those boards are bipartisan boards with
• 1:02:09
  an equal number of Republicans in Democrats. So there might be, you know, four member boards,
• 1:02:14
  two Republicans, two Democrats, it needs to be a majority vote to be to certify those results.
• 1:02:20
  If you have two people on your county election board who refuse to certify the vote,
• 1:02:30
  that's going to cause some really serious problems. And the interesting thing is that the United
• 1:02:35
  States is such a big and complicated place that theoretically people at this county board level
• 1:02:41
  shouldn't have that kind of power. But the thing is because democratic voters are so concentrated
• 1:02:48
  in big cities, there are in fact six or seven county boards that if those six or seven county
• 1:02:58
  boards were to refuse to certify the votes, then Donald Trump would win all seven of those states.
• 1:03:03
  Because, you know, Wayne County, Michigan, Fulton County, Georgia, Philadelphia County,
• 1:03:11
  I can keep going through them, but these these counties are where so I can attest to the listener
• 1:03:16
  that it matters not reading off a card, a piece of paper or something scribbled on his palm.
• 1:03:23
  He is, he is, but he knows this stuff.
• 1:03:25
  Milwaukee County.
• 1:03:28
  Well, I got all night. I mean, we could keep you up until you fight, Matt.
• 1:03:33
  We could wait for my pants to dry. So I just,
• 1:03:40
  these so the county board and the boards are comprised of who, why would a board that
• 1:03:46
  is overseeing a democratic district or county have enough Trump supporters on it to be able
• 1:03:55
  to do anything bad? Because they, the boards are given two seats for Republicans and two seats
• 1:04:01
  for Democrats, even in a county that is 90 percent Democrat voters. There are two seats for
• 1:04:08
  Republicans and two seats for Democrats. We saw in the 2020 election in Wayne County, Michigan,
• 1:04:19
  which is the county that takes up the biggest county in Michigan, it's in Detroit.
• 1:04:26
  The Republican members of the county board of canvases had a real go at not certifying the vote
• 1:04:35
  in that, in that county and not, and potentially not counting the votes that pushed Joe Biden
• 1:04:43
  over the line into winning the state of Michigan. It was an incredibly, incredibly tense meeting.
• 1:04:50
  Donald Trump himself got on the phone with the county board canvases at one point,
• 1:04:57
  encouraging them not to sign off on the election result, encouraging them to just go home,
• 1:05:01
  don't sign it, and I'll send lawyers to assist you. This is according to recordings heard by the
• 1:05:07
  Detroit News. They did crack, they did sign off on it after three hours of public comment,
• 1:05:17
  let's say it was a pretty forceful public comment. These people were subjected to basically three
• 1:05:26
  hours of Democrat screaming at them and they did crack and they did agree to sign off on the results.
• 1:05:33
  But those were people that weren't expecting to be in the situation they were in. Now we have a
• 1:05:39
  situation where people have been selected for these boards in many key places around the country
• 1:05:46
  who have specifically said before being elected, I will refuse to certify if I think there is
• 1:05:53
  fraud in my county and I believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent and was stolen from Donald
• 1:06:01
  Trump and now these people are in place in key positions. Now whether right refusing to certify
• 1:06:09
  results would stand up in court is a question that will be explored no doubt if they decide to do
• 1:06:16
  that. But that has the potential to cause unbelievable chaos in the days and weeks, following the
• 1:06:24
  the election in. So let me just see if I understand this correctly. It helps me to think it through
• 1:06:31
  when I hear myself try to articulate it. The Trump accolades have systematically installed
• 1:06:39
  2020 Truthers election deniers who think Trump won and was robbed of the election somehow for no
• 1:06:48
  without being able to provide any evidence of that. And those people are now at a pivot point or
• 1:06:59
  they're a link in the chain basically between us and a fair election and they may be the weakest
• 1:07:04
  link in that chain in the sense that they have the ability to at that pinch point of saying,
• 1:07:10
  you know, we're not going to allow these votes to be certified that there's no there's no it is
• 1:07:18
  it akin to the kinds of congressional grilling that Supreme Court justices get where they try not
• 1:07:26
  to say directly that they're going to overturn Roe versus Wade, but they sort of wink and nod at it.
• 1:07:33
  Is that the kind of thing that we're looking at? No, what is it? These are people who have
• 1:07:38
  you know, a long history of tweets saying Donald Trump won the 2020 election. You know, they were
• 1:07:50
  really vocal in their skepticism that the 2020 election was free and fair. They are now in these
• 1:07:57
  key positions on election boards across the country. There's no doubt about where they stand.
• 1:08:03
  Wow. And there's no vetting. I mean, I suppose it's a democracy, right? The party can put
• 1:08:10
  in place whoever they want to. What are even people who are ready to do it? They were elected by
• 1:08:15
  the, you know, rank and file members of the Republican Party. And since the 2020 election,
• 1:08:22
  we've seen a situation where spurred on by encouraged by people like Steve Bannon, large numbers
• 1:08:29
  of really hardcore Trump supporters because you've got a strange situation where Trump supporters
• 1:08:36
  potentially weren't really a big part of the Republican Party. Beforehand, they may have only
• 1:08:43
  started getting really involved in Republican Party politics during the 2016 election inspired by
• 1:08:48
  Donald Trump. But the rank and file level of the Republican Party tended to be sort of, you know,
• 1:08:54
  George Bush, Dick Cheney Republicans. Right. But they have now been swamped by people who are hardcore
• 1:09:04
  Trump supporters getting into those low level positions inside of the Republican Party at the
• 1:09:09
  precinct and state level who were and then being able to elect themselves, get those people onto
• 1:09:16
  these key level, onto these election boards in these key parts of the country.
• 1:09:20
  And so what happens if they just go, no, these these votes from this particular county are not
• 1:09:26
  valid. There's too many irregularities. Well, at that point, you're going to end up going to
• 1:09:31
  state supreme courts. You're going to end up having, you know, democratic potentially secretaries
• 1:09:36
  of state, you know, trying to overrule them, trying to, and how many of these states are democratic,
• 1:09:43
  have democratic governors and legislatures. Well, that's a trick question of, you know,
• 1:09:48
  a difficult question to ask you off the top of your head. Well, I mean, Michigan and Pennsylvania
• 1:09:52
  to start with, you know, and really, you really don't need Pennsylvania, really. Yeah.
• 1:09:59
  You know, we're we're heading towards a situation where potentially Pennsylvania is the
• 1:10:04
  the pivot one state. Yeah. And you have Josh Shapiro is the democratic party governor of the state
• 1:10:12
  and potentially you have this situation. But you also you have the same situation is particularly
• 1:10:19
  concerning in Georgia where you have a number of, you know, strong Trump supporters on the
• 1:10:24
  Georgia state board of elections. We saw Donald Trump recently at a rally call out by name
• 1:10:32
  the Republican members of this Georgia state board of, uh, board of elections saying that they
• 1:10:38
  were pit bulls for fighting for victory. Um, and, and, you know, this is not something that Donald
• 1:10:45
  Trump, I mean, Donald Trump shouldn't know the names of the members of the state board of elections
• 1:10:52
  in Georgia. Uh, but he is calling out. I mean, it's what just was there. This is this is an
• 1:10:59
  incredible, an incredible moment that the like think about what democracy is supposed to be,
• 1:11:07
  right? It's supposed to be there are two or more people who are standing up and going, here's
• 1:11:14
  the direction I want to take the country in on a policy basis. Let's have arguments about policy,
• 1:11:19
  let's have arguments about values, let's have arguments about what we want to do when we're in
• 1:11:24
  power. Separate and apart from that, there are elections that get run by the state,
• 1:11:32
  qua state, not by political partisans. And those elections are supposed to enable the demos to
• 1:11:40
  express its preference for those candidates and those candidates policies. And the candidates
• 1:11:46
  are supposed to concern themselves with the policies. And of course, that's going to be cynical
• 1:11:51
  and they're going to tailor some of those policies to, you know, towards particular demographics
• 1:11:55
  and they're going to be swayed by financial donors and everything's messy and that, you know,
• 1:11:58
  there are smoke filled rooms and whatever. And at the end of the day, they're in the game of
• 1:12:02
  figuring out how to govern. And here you have one of the candidates in a rally, specifically
• 1:12:10
  reaching outside of the sphere of governance and into the sphere of how the state conducts
• 1:12:17
  its expression of voter will. And openly talking about that as being part of his domain,
• 1:12:26
  that's not part of his domain. That's not part of the candidate's domain. How people, the mechanics
• 1:12:32
  of how people choose the direction of their country is not the business of the person who is
• 1:12:39
  vying, who is trying to make an argument for why their vision of the future is the correct one
• 1:12:46
  and why their means of getting there is the best one. I mean, that's, I think that's just worth
• 1:12:50
  pointing out at how irregular and improper that is. Imagine a situation where in, you know,
• 1:13:01
  say in a federal election in Australia, you had a situation where Anthony Albanese is the
• 1:13:09
  prime minister. The Australian prime minister is following the election, calling up members,
• 1:13:16
  you know, the person who is running, you know, the vote count for the, you know, first some key
• 1:13:25
  seats for the Australian electoral commission and asking them to do things. You know, don't sign off
• 1:13:33
  on this. Do this. Go home. I'll send lawyers to protect you specifically if you decide not to
• 1:13:39
  sign off on this. That is unthinkable in Australia. Absolutely inconceivable. I mean, absolutely
• 1:13:45
  inconceivable. It would be like you, you would be like what we've been taken over by the mob.
• 1:13:51
  Yes. Like this is, this is, this is, I'm thinkable that Anthony Albanese would even know
• 1:13:56
  anybody after the electoral commission. None of us know anybody at the electoral commission.
• 1:14:04
  Yeah. Who is the electoral commissioner in Australia? That's right. I don't know.
• 1:14:07
  Don't know. Also, I don't want to know. Also, there's just something. I'm sure they're doing
• 1:14:12
  a great job. I don't know anything about them. You know, this, we can wrap up, we can get
• 1:14:18
  towards wrapping up on this map. But I think it's important to sort of expand the conversation into
• 1:14:24
  the question of cultural norms and so on because it's not just that the Prime Minister of Australia
• 1:14:29
  would not know probably off the top of his head who the electoral commissioner is. You might
• 1:14:34
  know the top dog, but he's not going to know that people in specific states. The point is that
• 1:14:40
  there is a culture of democracy and separation of powers such that should the Prime Minister ask
• 1:14:47
  an aid for such information during an election. eyebrows would be raised in the equivalent
• 1:14:54
  of the Oval Office, in the Prime Minister's office. Word would get around Parliament House.
• 1:14:59
  People would be like, what is it? What? The PM is asking for names of people who are in charge
• 1:15:05
  of counting. It'd get leaked to the press. There'd be an uproar. It would be considered a massive
• 1:15:13
  norm violation and something that's happened in the past eight years in the States is that those
• 1:15:18
  norm violations, well, look, it may be partly because in the United States so many people turn over
• 1:15:25
  during an election. So there aren't as many people who are part of this sort of ongoing public
• 1:15:30
  service bureaucracy and civil service to raise their eyebrows. But it's like the expectation of
• 1:15:38
  the kind of standards of distance and dignity that a candidate is supposed to present themselves
• 1:15:44
  with or that a leader is supposed to maintain. Doesn't no longer seem to exist in the States.
• 1:15:52
  And when it is Donald Trump involved, he, you know, to be clear, he wasn't calling
• 1:15:58
  electoral election officials in, you know, to voices concerned about fraud in gubernatorial
• 1:16:08
  racists or in Senate racists or in congressional racists. He was only calling people to express
• 1:16:16
  concerns about fraud at the presidential level. He's only concerned about fraud when it comes to
• 1:16:22
  elections of him. He has made no allegations that there is fraud at any other level. He doesn't
• 1:16:29
  question that, you know, the governor of Georgia was was legitimately elected. He was a Republican.
• 1:16:35
  He won, he won an election. Donald Trump pays no attention to this. Donald Trump only pays
• 1:16:40
  attention to fraud in the circumstance where it affects him very specifically and gets involved
• 1:16:48
  in the electoral process only where it affects him specifically.
• 1:16:52
  So, and can we just to finish the before I ask you the big kind of the big 30,000-foot question,
• 1:16:58
  just to finish the mechanics of what might happen? So the, you say that the that governors and state
• 1:17:04
  legislatures would probably be sufficiently risk averse to avoid putting themselves in the firing
• 1:17:10
  line of criminal sanction by sending into slates of electors or, you know, a fraudulent slate of
• 1:17:16
  electors. But there was an interesting piece in Politico last week entitled the very real scenario
• 1:17:23
  where Trump loses and takes power anyway. Some titled if Trump overturns the 2024 election,
• 1:17:28
  here's how it could happen by four, it's a big piece by four journalists. And their claim,
• 1:17:35
  their proposition is that if Trump can sort of, you know, so if you can do what you said and you
• 1:17:45
  can basically sort of make crazy hyperbolic claims about widespread voter fraud without any evidence.
• 1:17:53
  And if you can pressure people to resist certifying election results, which may not take much
• 1:18:02
  pressure if those people have already been handpicked not to, then those controversies around whether
• 1:18:10
  or not counties, is it counties? What's the lowest level of the one that you were talking about?
• 1:18:14
  Precincts. Precincts. Then counties states then.
• 1:18:17
  If the precincts in the counties say, oh, look, there's something terribly fishy has been going on.
• 1:18:23
  What is it? Oh, well, I don't know, but we're not going to certify it. Then couldn't that potentially
• 1:18:29
  put enough pressure and provide enough of an out for a Republican legislature, a Republican
• 1:18:36
  state house, a Republican governor, to go, we're not pulling this out of our arses. We have
• 1:18:42
  an actual constitutional crisis here. So we do not have a slate of electors to send you or we have
• 1:18:48
  to send you two sets. Potentially, yes. And I guess the Supreme Court goes, I mean, that was a fair
• 1:18:59
  enough call in the heat of a confusing battle to make. Yes, they are. But I guess the thing is that
• 1:19:07
  there is also a circumstance where Kamala Harris ends up being the president of a country that
• 1:19:15
  half of the population is adamant that she is not the properly elected president.
• 1:19:21
  And in a circumstance where Donald Trump is likely to face very serious criminal prosecution
• 1:19:29
  over the next few years, if he is not elected president, and potentially a really hazardous and
• 1:19:35
  frightening political situation going forward for her. It's potentially there may be so many
• 1:19:42
  allegations of fraud that it really potentially kneecaps her ability to govern, particularly if she
• 1:19:48
  has to work with a Republican Congress or a Republican Senate, because even the polls that
• 1:19:52
  indicate that she is potentially going to win the presidency do not indicate that it's likely
• 1:19:57
  that the Democrats are going to hold much power in the Congress. So even just just just
• 1:20:03
  just technically just chaos. Even just creating that level of chaos will potentially before you
• 1:20:08
  before you were before I allow you to free me completely from the shackles of technocratic
• 1:20:14
  nerddom. I just need to know, is there any way that the Trump campaign manages to essentially
• 1:20:22
  just sees things up such that Kamala Harris has denied 270 votes in the electoral college.
• 1:20:30
  The election goes to like the House of Representatives and Republicans in the House of Representatives
• 1:20:36
  select Trump because hey, the whole thing is just too confusing and there was too much fraud.
• 1:20:40
  I mean, it's certainly possible, but I don't know that it's necessarily likely. I mean,
• 1:20:47
  you saw the level of pressure that the electoral system was put under after the 2020 election.
• 1:20:54
  But that wasn't that nothing in comparison to the pressure that it could be under now if there's
• 1:20:58
  a very narrow Harris victory given that they've stored all of these stuages and had four years to
• 1:21:04
  think about it, which they hadn't had last time. Yes, potentially. I guess, I guess there
• 1:21:11
  is certainly it would it would depend on the way that the victory is constructed for Harris.
• 1:21:18
  If then the states that she's relying on in order to make it make 270 electoral college votes.
• 1:21:25
  Because, you know, Michigan's not going to be a problem. There's a democratic governor.
• 1:21:30
  Pennsylvania's not going to be a problem. Democratic governor.
• 1:21:35
  Several of the states, it's not going to be a big issue for her. If she cleans up the rust belt states
• 1:21:41
  and wins, you know, the bearest of margin by the bearest of margins gets to gender and 70 votes,
• 1:21:48
  then those those democratically led states will potentially be able to carry her over the line.
• 1:21:55
  But if she's requiring Georgia or Arizona or something like that in order to get her there,
• 1:22:01
  then that could make things more complicated. But I think I think the other key part of this is
• 1:22:06
  the threat of violence and the threat of violence in in places that have less resisted less
• 1:22:17
  ability to resist violence than the national capital. Yeah, it's not going to happen in Washington
• 1:22:24
  DC again. No, but what if it happens at the TCF Center in Detroit, you know, where the absentee voting
• 1:22:32
  the absentee ballots are being counted or at the Michigan state capital in Lansing,
• 1:22:38
  which has which has been stormed before just in 2020 it was stormed by
• 1:22:44
  by Trump supporters bearing assault rifles. They were in the state capital them.
• 1:22:50
  Uh, there are lots of lower level potential pressure points that could be affected by by violence
• 1:22:58
  after this after this election. And that's something that is a real concern. I, you know,
• 1:23:03
  I'm traveling to the United States tomorrow. And I got a, you know, a notification sent to me
• 1:23:10
  automatically via email warning me of potential election related violence in certain parts of the
• 1:23:15
  country. Uh, Neymar from whom? Uh, well, it was, let me, let me tell you. Is it from the Australian
• 1:23:21
  Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which tends to send, which runs an outfit called smart
• 1:23:26
  traveler and they send out warnings there about places that you shouldn't go to because yeah,
• 1:23:32
  I got, I mean, obviously they're hyper cautious so they can cover their arses and say,
• 1:23:37
  yes, yes, you know, let me just see what's interesting. Anyway, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
• 1:23:41
  Yeah. Sorry. I don't have to find the email. That's all right. Um, so okay. Lastly, things that people
• 1:23:48
  should look out for and be aware of as the election approaches, they should understand
• 1:23:53
  the waxing and waning nature of, uh, accounting on election night. Obviously, they should be aware
• 1:24:00
  of the tactic that Trump will deploy of announcing victory at whatever point it looks like he's
• 1:24:06
  ahead on the night in the knowledge that it's going to swing back, uh, after the fact and they
• 1:24:12
  should be mindful of the fact that when they hear news reports about, uh, election irregularities
• 1:24:19
  being raised by county and precinct, uh, electoral officials, those officials themselves may be
• 1:24:25
  stooges who've been installed, uh, as part of a plan to disrupt the election and this brings us
• 1:24:32
  to the final point which you just alluded to, which is suppose none of this works technocratically
• 1:24:37
  and technically and the system holds. Is there any part of you, Matt, that thinks, you know what,
• 1:24:48
  in some ways for the future of American democracy and maybe thus the world, it could be better if he
• 1:24:54
  just wins this one and we just endure him for four years and America retains a faith in its
• 1:25:01
  democratic institutions and in its electoral process. Then if Kamala Harris narrowly wins and as
• 1:25:10
  you just said, half the population probably for a generation and maybe forever believes that
• 1:25:18
  America's not a real democracy. I think, uh, someone, you know, uh, asked me,
• 1:25:27
  well, you know, was I frightened of a, of a Trump presidency and no. Um, and, and if, if, if the
• 1:25:35
  United States legitimately, and this very well could happen, legitimately elect Donald Trump,
• 1:25:41
  if he's the winner of the election, just as he was in 2016, which I have absolutely no doubt of,
• 1:25:46
  if he's the winner of the election, then that is a situation where they have, they have selected him.
• 1:25:50
  They know there is no illusion about who Donald Trump is. Everyone knows who Donald Trump is
• 1:25:56
  and they've chosen him to be their president and that is, that is the decision that they get to make
• 1:26:00
  as Americans and good for them. Uh, and, and that is the country that they have decided that they
• 1:26:06
  want to be and they've elected Donald Trump. Uh, and that's, that's, that's the way it is and that's
• 1:26:11
  the way it should be. Um, but if there's a situation, if Donald Trump is elected, I think the interesting
• 1:26:18
  thing is that I don't know that that's going to be the end of this story in terms of, you know,
• 1:26:26
  Donald Trump has made some unbelievably strong claims about the 2020 election, about this election,
• 1:26:34
  um, that if he is the president and if he has a significant amount of legislative control,
• 1:26:41
  which he likely would for at least two years, if he was elected president, he's likely to, to carry
• 1:26:47
  the, the, the, the Senate and the House with him, then it would entirely make sense of for him
• 1:26:54
  to pass legislation to change things, to put people in positions that would potentially, uh,
• 1:27:01
  make the 2028 election, um, much more difficult for Democrats to, to win. And potentially,
• 1:27:09
  much less free and fair. Do you think that he actually cares if he's not going to be on the ballot?
• 1:27:14
  I mean, how much does he really care? Once he knows that he's not going to be on the ballot,
• 1:27:17
  and just as an aside here to any one who thinks that there's a chance that he won't leave after
• 1:27:22
  another term, I don't think, I mean, you know, you know, you're currently from wrong mat,
• 1:27:26
  you don't have to worry about that. That's in the constitution.
• 1:27:28
  If he tries not to leave the Secret Service, we'll drag him out of the Oval Office kicking
• 1:27:33
  and screaming and they will tasey him if they have to. I have complete faith. He would need to,
• 1:27:37
  he would need to genuinely, he would genuinely need to enact a military coup in order to
• 1:27:41
  yes, exactly. They would have to be a full scale. Yeah. And why would the military be on his
• 1:27:46
  side and he would have to change the constitution? These are totally, totally implausible scenarios.
• 1:27:54
  So he's got one more turn in term if he wins. It's interesting that you say that maybe he would
• 1:28:00
  have invested interest in just in trenching, undemocratic. And I suppose his allies would
• 1:28:05
  even if he didn't, but I just sort of feel like once he knew that he couldn't win anymore.
• 1:28:08
  He would still be in legal legal jeopardy, though. He would still be, he's still in legal jeopardy.
• 1:28:13
  However, he is not the president. He's in legal jeopardy. He would be, he has all these court cases
• 1:28:21
  that would presumably be put on hold while he was the president. I see. But if a, if a
• 1:28:26
  democratic gets back in power, then they get reactivated. And if it wasn't that's in power,
• 1:28:30
  they probably pardon him. If why wouldn't, well, yeah, why wouldn't they be reactivated
• 1:28:35
  once he leaves office in 2020? I see. You know, he will have control of the justice department
• 1:28:42
  while he's the president. And he cannot remain the president afterwards. So, but if JD Vance says,
• 1:28:48
  you know, of course, I would pardon you if I was made the president, or, or, you know,
• 1:28:53
  some other person that is connected to him, then Donald Trump has invested interest in trying
• 1:28:57
  to make sure that that happens. And something that would be extremely keen to do because Donald Trump
• 1:29:04
  is extremely concerned, clearly extremely concerned about these criminal cases that have been brought
• 1:29:09
  against him. It's not as though he, you know, really thinks that he's, he's, you know, he's not
• 1:29:17
  worried about them. He's concerned about them. You know, he, he talks about little, you know, early
• 1:29:22
  on this year, he talked about little else apart from which, which hunt and that kind of thing.
• 1:29:27
  It's only later in the year as things have been pushed beyond the election that he's really
• 1:29:31
  got into talking about policy and talking about other things. He was really, really, really,
• 1:29:34
  really, really worried about it earlier in the year. And he would presumably be extremely worried
• 1:29:39
  about them for his future. So he has invested interest in trying to make sure that someone
• 1:29:44
  friendly becomes the president after him. And he's a person who's made incredible allegations about
• 1:29:50
  the, about fraud in the American democratic system. And would potentially be, be interested in
• 1:29:57
  in changing things in order to make that system more friendly to him and people like him.
• 1:30:04
  So I guess, I guess that's, that's the, the, the rebuttal to that point about whether if Donald
• 1:30:08
  Trump is elected, then all, all these problems of election fraud and, and American democracy would,
• 1:30:14
  would return to normal after Donald Trump left office in 2028. I don't know that you could, you could
• 1:30:21
  say that confidently, that this problem would be solved. This problem of half of America,
• 1:30:27
  not trusting the way that their elections are run, would be solved by Donald Trump winning the
• 1:30:32
  election and then retiring in bliss blissful happiness to Mar-a-Lago in 2028 on, well, on 20th January,
• 1:30:42
  29th. So if, if Donald Trump loses, then American democracy loses because there will be
• 1:30:50
  potentially violence at, at worst and at best, a, an enormous distrust in the American electoral
• 1:30:57
  system. And if Donald Trump wins, then American democracy loses because he will put in place
• 1:31:03
  whatever reforms he can to undermine it. So it's a, you're leaving us with an optimistic
• 1:31:09
  vision of the future. American democracy has been unbelievably damaged by the events of January 6th.
• 1:31:18
  The vision of these people storming into the Capitol building, beating up police officers,
• 1:31:25
  hunting after police officers to beat them up, dragging police officers into the mob to beat
• 1:31:31
  them and taser them. And then going into the Capitol building and attempting to interrupt the
• 1:31:40
  transfer of power is a real, like that is a real damage, you know, that is an incredibly
• 1:31:48
  damaging thing that happened to American democracy. And it's not something that takes four years to
• 1:31:53
  recover from. And I don't know how they recover from that kind of violence in their Capitol.
• 1:32:01
  In their system. But I don't know that, yeah, as you say, I don't know that the result either way
• 1:32:08
  is going to, you know, lead to a, a solving of this problem. Well, enjoy your time in the United
• 1:32:18
  States. I'm so excited to be enjoying it. I'm sure you are. And, you know, find a hairdryer
• 1:32:26
  in the hotel and just make sure those pants are dry before you get on the long flight
• 1:32:31
  to the United States. Go to bed. Take a man. It's great to talk to you.