July 1st, 2024

July 1st, 2024

On Monday’s Mark Levin Show, the Constitution won today. The Supreme Court majority has just made it harder to prosecute Biden for his offenses in office, starting with immigration and the special counsel’s report. The Democrats should actually thank the Court.  It has been the official position of the DOJ for more than half a century that they cannot indict a sitting president for, among other reasons, it would essentially decapitate the executive branch; moreover, those involved in such a process (grand jury, prosecutor, judge, etc. ought not to hold such power over a president who is elected by the entire nation. The immunity issue flows from that — that is, if a president knows he can be indicted for his official acts by a subsequent administration after he leaves office, it would cripple his ability to exercise his duties.  He would have to wonder whether a quick decision or a difficult decision or a decision that seemed right at the time would be subjected to criminal scrutiny after the fact, and after he had left office.  The presidency would be gravely damaged. This would have fundamentally altered the separation of powers, greatly weakening the office of the presidency, and effectively amend the Constitution by criminal prosecution.  No longer would there be the balance and division among the branches that the Framers worked so hard to enshrine. The January 6 case was built on 3-statutes having nothing to do with the events of January 6 and nothing to do with insurrection or sedition.  The statutes have never been applied in the way that Jack Smith applied them. AG Merrick Garland and Jack Smith are disfiguring the Constitution, and the Supreme Court, as well as Judge Cannon, are doing their best to set things straight and place things back in the Constitutional box.  It is Smith, a historically rogue and vile prosecutor, who deserves our contempt, along with his boss, Garland.  The January 6 case is a farce. The documents case was utterly unnecessary. He and the Democrats may be in a rush to destroy a Constitution they have never admired, and whose authors they hate, in pursuit of their American-Marxist police-state, but the rest of us are not.  Also, President Biden gave a primetime address and sent Smith, Judge Chutkan, and Garland their marching orders: keep pushing this farcical January 6 case and try and drag it across the finish line before the election. Keep up the lawfare like never before. Biden had 4 executive orders stopped by the Supreme Court. If Biden believed a president shouldn’t be a dictator why did he defy the court? His rhetoric and actions don’t match.

NY Times
Trump Moves to Overturn Manhattan Conviction, Citing Immunity Decision

Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu

The podcast for this show can be streamed or downloaded from the Audio Rewind page.

Rough transcription of Hour 1

Segment 1
Hello America. Mark Levin here. Our number 877-381-3811.  877-381-3811. By the way, it is Covid. But I’m feeling better. The medicine they came out with is pretty good. So I’m feeling about 70%, but I’m at 70%. That’s 150% for most people, don’t you think? And this is why I want to thank our affiliates. I want to thank Sirius Satellite. I want to thank all the platforms who carry this program. Because the insight that you and I discuss and provide. On these cases, on the republic, on the country, the Constitution, we’re able to weave them in to what’s taking place in America so uniquely, not because of me per se, but because this is what we do. This is who we are. We’re not paint by the numbers. I don’t come to this as a. Person. Who spent 50 years in 15 different radio markets. I come to this as a person who started in the biggest market in America, in New York. And because of the power of our message. The listenership and so forth spread throughout the country. So let’s get started. Some of what I’m about to say. You’ve already heard because I spoke on Fox, but you haven’t heard it the way I do it here on radio. This immunity issue came up. Early on. President Trump’s lawyers said we have a right to immunity. Period as a president period. Why? Because a president cannot function otherwise. The position of the government, that is the Biden administration, officially the Department of Justice and their unconstitutional prosecutor, Jack Smith, was We can prosecute a sitting president or. A retired president. Even for things they did while president. Now, to be honest with yourselves, if you’re honest with yourselves, we’re not going to go back and get the video and audio. Almost every legal analyst. Said that the Trump position is nonsensical. Nonsensical. Slowly but surely, they began to make the case that. Well Smith was too extreme to. But they said that the court will more handily and quickly reject Trump’s arguments. And then came the oral argument. While many of the justices weren’t so quick to do that. Not that they were embracing all of the Trump lawyers arguments, but they were embracing the idea that you would damage the president’s. The institution of the presidency, the Constitution and separation of powers. Many of these legal analysts, some of whom are professors and former professors. On other networks. We’re still at it. But I do, Mr. Producer and I. And others in my crew and staff and at Fox and at plays. We kind of laugh. Because the positions I take are positions based not on ideology. They’re based on the Constitution. And how can the Constitution function? In a republic. And so on. Fox as one of the few, maybe the only I don’t know, I don’t watch it. 24 seven But I said this is not a frivolous. A frivolous challenge by the Trump people. I condemned what Chungking had done. The district judge. I condemned the three judge panel who took about seven days to dismiss this and gave the Trump lawyers a truncated period of time to even file an appeal. I warned you about Chunky, and I warned you about Circuit Judge Pompei. And she’s a Biden appointee. Drunken Obama. And I told you. But these are dangerous people. As is the attorney general of the United States, as is the special counsel, that they’re going to destroy the Constitution. If they get their way. I’ve also made the point. That this pursuit of Trump by the Department of Justice and through this specific prosecutor. Is an attack on at least half a dozen parts of the United States constitutional. The most important part is separation of powers. But it is an attack. On the appointments clause of the Constitution, which has now been seriously challenged. And if you read. Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion with a majority, which nobody’s discussed on any network, including Fox. I mentioned it briefly. He embraces the fact that there’s been a challenge to the actual appointment. Of the prosecutor. Mentioning me, mentioning the landmark brief and so forth. Seems to me whether that is formally brought up or not, it is a very important point. So we have the appointment clause. Separation of powers. When you look at this case in the Florida case, the First Amendment put this gag order nonsense due process. Under the Fifth Amendment and the right to company counsel under the six with the attack on attorney client privilege that took place. In the district court in Washington, D.C.. Questions raised about the sufficiency of the search warrant that led to the FBI SWAT team. Of course, questions to come about. Presidential declassification. But even questions about the use of classified information in an open courtroom. I can tell you from my own experience as chief of staff to an attorney general, Edwin Meese in the Reagan administration, that the reason a lot of these big spy cases. With these American spies who spied mostly for the Soviet Union. Deserved the death penalty but didn’t get it. Was because our Constitution requires, to the fullest extent possible public trials. For reasons you can understand. And so the issue of what classified information can be used at their public trial was so daunting and so complex. But we tended to negotiate for life sentences. Because we didn’t want to reveal the classified information, which kind of defeated the point. Right. That’s not so. In this case with Donald Trump. What Jack Smith is saying. Just, you know, as a side point in Florida is he wants as little classified information as possible, even shared with the defense, because they can’t be trusted. So how are you supposed to have a trial of any kind? And Trump’s not going to plead the crap. But all these. All these efforts. In the January six case, the documents case. Attacking all of these these aspects of the constitutions, raising these questions, most of them for the first time ever. And then demanding that the courts move quickly. Sky. Smith went to the Supreme Court on immunity, said We need to act quickly. They said, No, we don’t. They ruled against him unanimously. This guy goes to Judge Cannon’s courtroom. He sits there, tries to stare down. His subordinates treat her with disrespect. The media treats her with disrespect. She’s doing exactly what you’re supposed to do. She’s got serious motions that are fired. And unlike Judge Duncan, she’s reading them. She’s saying these are serious constitutional questions. Some of them questions of first impression. I’ve got to deal with them. Trump can didn’t do that. The Obama judge, she just rubber stamping and she was utterly. Incompetent in the way she even responded to these, including the obstruction charges. Let’s get to immunity now. What does the Supreme Court. Excuse me? What does the Constitution of the United States say about presidential immunity? Nothing directly. And yet they did debate the issue. Have. How do you deal with a president? Who violates not just criminal laws, they didn’t have a criminal code at the time, but it violates even more broadly and more importantly. Societal norms. Undermines the civil society. In other words, does grave damage to the country itself. And so they created the impeachment clause. Indicting a sitting president. There was some. Generalized discussion. But they came up with impeachment. They didn’t invent it on their own. They looked at what the British were doing with impeachment, and then they stylized it for an American. Small our Republican constitutional system understanding they wanted separation of powers, power, as they say over and over again. Power competing against power. That’s what they wanted. They’re worried about tyranny in many forms, tyranny of a centralized government. They don’t want to create a president who was a monarch. On the other hand, they didn’t want a mob ocracy tyranny of the legislature. The American Revolution overlapped the French Revolution. They wanted nothing to do with mob ocracy and pure democracy. They wanted nothing to do a monarchy with monarchy. And today we called dictatorship centralized power. And so they took mud to excuse words from the spirit of the laws. Power. Checking power. Mixed government. Aristotle talked about a mixed government. He certainly wasn’t the only one. John Locke talked about potential of three branches competing against each other, but he didn’t detail it. Marta skewed did a legislative, a judicial and executive. Just a couple of pages in a. Well over a thousand page book turned out to be a book. And as I’ve told you before, he was the most important. Philosopher during the constitutional period. The most important philosopher during the revolutionary period was John Locke. But it was Montesquieu for these purposes. And he cited a few times in the Federalist Papers, and he cited specifically for this separation of powers. Something very perverse that nobody talks about. But it’s true. And I’ll get to the nub of this case in a minute. The Department of Justice. Obviously didn’t exist. When the Constitution was ratified. There weren’t U.S. attorneys. There weren’t federal prosecutors. Let alone special prosecutor. On the one hand, the executive branch is considered a unitary branch. What does that mean? It’s the presidential branch. He’s the executive. He’s the commander in chief. He is the executive branch. And yet. You can have the executive branch that is people with inferior powers investigating the head of the executive branch. See what I’m saying, Mr.. Is. So you literally have subordinates investigating the constitutional. Unitary head. Of the executive branch. And so we as a society by government more particular struggle with this. They’ve come up with an independent counsel act that these special prosecutors and so forth and so on. It would be bizarre in the extreme if an inferior officer of the executive branch had the power. To indict. The head of the executive branch. Per official powers that he’s exercising as president of the United States. Do you see what I’m saying? Maybe I’m getting too philosophical. All right. I’m going to get to the nub of this in a minute. We’ll be right back.

Segment 2
All right. Immunity. What’s immunity? More than 50 years ago. More than half a century ago. I got one minute. Okay. I’ll explain this after the one minute and I’ll explain it in a way that I’ve discussed some time ago but is not being discussed now. But it’s very, very important. But the Democrats are arguing for today is the crippling of the executive branch. After Biden leaves office. In other words, do anything you have to do to get Trump. Anyway. You have to do it. Just do it. The candidate we have is, in fact, a halfwit. He’s got dementia. We worry that he can’t win. They’re up to their antics today. I’ll get to that in a minute. Biden’s going to give a speech at 745 to try and change the subject. And I’ll be right back.

Segment 3
All right, here we go. It’s been the official position of the Department of Justice for more than half a century. That it cannot indict a sitting president for, among other reasons, it would essentially decapitate the executive branch. Moreover. That those involved in such a process, the indictment and so forth. Grand jury. Prosecutor, Judge. Or not hold such power over a president who is elected by the entire nation. Now, I have argued in part that the immunity issue flows from this. That is, if a president knows he can be indicted for his official acts by a subsequent administration, that is after he leaves office. It would cripple his ability to exercise his constitutional duties. Because in the end, the issue. Is it resolved? On whether the act is criminal or not, per se. Until the indictment occurs and there’s a trial. So he would have to wonder whether a quick decision or a difficult decision or a decision that seemed right at the time when he was president. Will be subjected to criminal scrutiny after the fact. And after he left office, the presidency would be gravely damaged. Yet that was the position of the Department of Justice. That is the Biden administration and Jack Smith. Now, this would have fundamentally altered separation of powers by greatly weakening the office of the presidency. It would have effectively amended the Constitution through criminal prosecution. No longer would there be the balance and the division among the branches that the framers worked so hard to enshrine in our Constitution? The weakest branch by far would be the executive branch. The January six case. Is the first of its kind. Ever. It was built on three statutes. Having nothing to do with the events of January six. All the talk of insurrection. But there was no charge involved in the insurrection statute. All the talk of sort of sedition or conspiracy. But those charges were brought either. Because the object, the target of the prosecutor, didn’t commit those crimes. So we had a look around. Rather than shut the case right there and say, okay. There’s no insurrection. There’s no sedition. There’s nothing to prosecute here. That’s not what Jack Smith did. That’s not what the Department of Justice did. That’s not what the Biden administration did. They went through and they looked at all the statutes they could. They went through the criminal code and they found three, they thought. Which they believe they could creatively massage fashion. And take facts that they creatively massaged and fashion. In apply one to the other. Which is why the indictment itself has what they call a talking indictment. In other words, it goes on and on and on. Rather than just lay out a concise case. There is no concise case. So you have section 1512 of the Criminal Code. The. Saxby Oakley act or what I call the Enron Act. To keep it simple. What Enron did when it knew it had huge problems is it began massively destroying documents with the expectation. That there’d be congressional oversight in investigations. That’s why when you read the statute, the plain language of the statute. Which language of the statute? Is focused exclusively on documents, the destruction of evidence, that sort of thing, as obstruction. And then at the end it talks about or otherwise the word but or otherwise applies to the facts. That we’re involved in Enron and the law. The Enron law. It had nothing to do. With January six. It had nothing to do. With the protests or even the violence that took place on January six? Nothing. But they didn’t have any other obstruction statute. So they used it. Jack Smith picked it up from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington that had been applying it to one protester after another and used it against President Trump as two of his four charges. But what did President Trump do to obstruct a proceeding? Even his public statements. About peaceful and so forth. That was administration. He has every right to talk to the vice president about what he should do, as the court noted today and what he felt he should do and so forth. But that’s irrelevant. It’s not obstruction. So. The Court By 6 to 3. Said no to obstruction. And then we have clever legal analysts who say, well, Jack Smith, you know, we could say that this document was written and find some kind of documentary evidence that he did. You see what I mean? You’re talking about. A past president. The leading candidate for president. In one of the major parties in America. And they’re looking like scoundrels for something, anything. That’s not the way this is supposed to work. But that’s only one way Jack Smith knows how to practice law. So we have those two. Okay, well, there’s two other statutes left. Two of the charges. What are they? One of them is a statute that is used to prosecute federal contractors who on their own or conspired to rip off the government. Fraud. Jack Smith took that and said, well, what Donald Trump was saying publicly and urging, whether it’s in Arizona or Michigan or elsewhere. What’s front? What? That has nothing to do with that statute either. Fact that statute can be used against virtually any politician who challenges any election. It’s crazy. What’s the other statute? The other statute is the 1871, some say 1872, but it began in 1871, what they called the Ku Klux Klan Act. It was a civil rights law. That was passed. To stop the Klan from preventing newly freed black slaves from voting. And it’s been amended since. To protect the right of people to vote. January six had nothing to do with the right of people to vote. And yet that’s one of the charges. So you look at these these obstruction, two counts. Federal contractors statute, as I call it, the Klan statute, as I call it. This is what they brought. And so you’re supposed to take this case so irresponsible, so outrageous. They cobble this together. And destroy presidential immunity. To try and reach Donald Trump on U.S. president. And so Donald Trump’s lawyers went to the Supreme Press. Wait a minute. These were acts he took while he was president. The district court dismissed out of hand what Trump lawyers argued. The three judge panel on the circuit court in DC faster within a week said, Nope, you lose. And by the way, you got one week to appeal. Then he would take any time with it. Why? Because. They know the deal. This has to get done before the election. We have an imbecile running for president and the Democrat side. You’ve heard what he said. That Donald Trump has Hitler effectively. Okay. A Supreme Court. Gets it in. What happens? Jack Smith says, okay, this is crucial Supreme Court, we need to resolve this quickly. We ask you to take this up as an emergency case and put everything else aside and resolve in the court in a unanimous responses. No, we’re not going to do that. Why? And I know what they’re thinking. Just because you have the election calendar on your list has a federal prosecutor, which you’re not supposed to. It’s a serious matter. And we’re going to take it seriously. We’re going to have oral argument. We’re going to go through the motions here. That’s what you do. When a case of first and possession that involves a major constitutional issue that could destroy. The construct. But the federal government. They took up the case. They had their own argument, the position of the government. Was utterly and completely unsound, almost irrational. I just want to remember the legal analysts said the same thing about the Trump lawyer argument, which was we have complete immunity. And why did they argue that? Because in the past, no former president has ever been indicted, number one. Number two, for anything associated. Two when they were president. Official or not? Well, the court said that goes a little too far for us in its decision today. They said, look, Solomon couldn’t cut the baby in half and he wouldn’t have they wouldn’t been very wise. And we’re not either. Here’s what we’re going to do. A president cannot be indicted. While he’s president, he has full immunity for his official duties. That’s number one. Okay. Just so you know, that’s the first time the court has ever said that. Because it’s never had to say anything before. Jack Smith. Merrick Garland. Joe Biden. Judge Chunking the three blind dummies on the circuit Court. They brought the court to the point where it had to make some decision. They said, that’s number one. Number two is that you heard during our argument this issue of whether what is official conduct versus official conduct. We can’t assume, based on the record presented to us here on the Supreme Court, that that’s been resolved. Just because a prosecutor puts in his papers a bunch of facts that says it’s the case. And just because a district judge says, okay, I agree, just because the three judge panel. In Washington, D.C. The circuit court panel said not only do we agree, we agree with an exclamation mark. Now hurry up and get this done. We’re not going to take that. As serious, professional, legitimate adjudication. So what did they say? They said, Look. There are obviously occasions when a president can take actions. That have nothing to do with his job as president. And you heard the list of preposterous hypothetical idiocy coming out of Sotomayor and the others. SEAL Team six This will become infamous. Should be on our epitaph. When the day comes. Because it’s so damn stupid. But I’ll get to that in a minute. So the court said, Look. You’re a trial judge. We’re up here. High up here. We got these cases, these constitutional matters, legal matters. We’ve got matters involving jurisdictional questions. Which state has authority questions? And he tries all kinds of questions. Damn it. You do your job down there. And you conduct a hearing at evidentiary hearing you many trial, whatever you want to do, and you tell us what you conclude and back it up, because they didn’t say this, but we know it’ll be back up here. So do your damn job and you, circuit court. You’re a joke. They didn’t say it, but they almost did. And so the new test is a presidential action. That is an action by a man or a woman whose president will be presumed as presumptively official unless proven otherwise. So that’s the standard. It’s a brilliant standard. Brilliant. Nobody criticizes his court more than I do or many of the justices. This is a brilliant decision. And so now they have to do that. People are trying to read the tea leaves from Barrett, who goes off in the others. Well, what about the elector? She said that she’s one justice. And what about that? It’s not. What about. The system is intact. Separation of powers and the Constitution are intact. There’s a process now in place. The Constitution one today. When we come back, the responses. I’ll be right back.

Segment 4
Turns out, America. That Joe Biden is going to give a speech at what time? 7:45 Eastern Time. He wants to make sure it’s primetime on the Supreme Court’s immunity decision. So this is very obvious. What they’re trying to do, folks, is change the subject. The guy at least is fairly competent, not completely in reading the teleprompter. He will talk about the rule of law, the threat to democracy. The right wingers on the court. How if you elect Trump and you don’t elect him, there’ll be more right wingers on the court. This is exactly what he’s going to do. Trying to change the subject. The media will run with this. The media, who demanded his head 24 hours ago, will now soothe him, massage him and give him a wet kiss. You watch. I’ll be right back.