Talkin’ Liberty is the segment of Liberty Nation Radio where Tim and Scott focus on a few of the week’s stories affecting our liberty that deserve a little more focus or may have been overlooked in part or whole. Here is the latest episode where we discuss the update in Mueller’s team Hillary, as well the Net Neutrality vote by the FCC. You may listen here.
Tim: This Mueller probe, the special counsel who was hired to find a crime rather than to investigate an alleged one-
Scott: On no, Tim. Let me stop you right there. The crime was Hillary Clinton is not the President of the United States.
Tim: Oh, yes. I keep forgetting that one. That’s the crime. To investigate-
Scott: That’s the crime that must be–at all costs–seen to.
Tim: … the crime of Trump getting elected. Okay.
Scott: Yes. That’s where we are.
Tim: You know what? We look to you for clarity, and you just provided that.
Scott: We all have to pay for that crime, Tim.
Tim: That’s too good. All right. So, the tentacles of that investigation have reached far and wide, and we all knew they would when a special counsel is given basically unlimited portfolio to investigate anybody, anything that has any kind of tangential relation to the Trump campaign, to the Russian government, to the so called cyber propaganda that was advanced by the Russians, etc. But because this is such a far reaching investigation, it now may be possible–and it should be likely–that he will look into crimes, so to speak, from the other side, from the Obama and Clinton people, and the fact now that Peter Strzok, who was one of the agents assigned to the special counsel’s team to investigate all this, has clearly been revealed, unmasked as an extreme Hillary Clinton partisan. And now, a conservative group is suing the FBI for records on that agent, Strzok, who was dismissed from the Mueller probe.
Scott: Tim, Tom Fitton’s Judicial Watch again doing the Lord’s work here to coin a phrase.
Tim: What would we do without them? What would we do without them?
Scott: I don’t know. I’m tempted to send them another donation-
Tim: I agree.
Scott: … which is a confession that I have in fact donated to them in the past.
Tim: I agree. Okay.
Scott: The truth is that the FBI has never done, and we cannot expect it to investigate itself or actors that are high up in it. All organizations are loathe for honest self assessment, especially when that honest self assessment might come at a steep, steep price, which I think would be the case here. So, then we have to have independent channels to do so. One of those independent channels is the judiciary enforcing FOIA acts to at least expose what’s gone on, and that’s what the great service that Tom Fenton and Judicial Watch are doing here. We may actually get some revelation as to what. You seem to have a handle on the pronunciation of Mr. Strzok’s name?
Strzok
Tim: You know what Rush Limbaugh does? He says Struck Stoke, Struck Stroke, because he doesn’t know because everybody says it differently.
Scott: Well, that person and his girlfriend, I guess, or whoever the woman that he-
Tim: The person in the FBI with whom he was having an illicit affair.
Scott: Right, and apparently planning an insurance policy against the Trump presidency-
Tim: The insurance policy-
Scott: … at the highest level.
Tim: And the tweets.
Scott: By the way-
Tim: I mean, the tweets are just so transparent.
Scott: Let’s get back to your question. To the extent that I can shed any light on, which I don’t know that I can, there seems to be, based on a plain reading of what has been exposed, in the even mainstream press, that there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that multiple federal crimes were committed by Mrs. Clinton, by Huma Abedin, by the whole setup of the home brew server and the attempt to avoid disclosure. And absent a competently place authority willing to investigate those crimes, certainly they’ll never see the light.
Will Mueller look at them? It seems like the whole thing, Tim, to the extent that it’s been revealed, has been a rigged process against Donald Trump and in favor of turning a deliberate blind eye–what the law calls willful blindness–to the actions of Mrs. Clinton. So, I’m in favor, certainly, of her misdeeds being brought to light and also an exposure of the FBI, which if we remember correctly, for the duration of its existence … It’s not new that the FBI has been politicized, and one of the things that in fact the left has in generations gone past railed against FBI and conservatives. We kind of bolstered it, but now we’re seeing a little bit of the flip of the coin here.
Tim: Well, the FBI has, let’s face it, they’ve been all but totally disgraced because of all the evidence that’s being uncovered day after day. They were working in conjunction with Obama’s Department of Justice and the administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign to assure that Trump would not be elected.
Scott: When we read about the unmasking and when we read about the perjury traps–this is as an attorney–a perjury trap is just a process crime.
Tim: Process crime.
Scott: Okay. So, there’s no underlying crime, and the street level example of this is also outrageous and something that we have bucked against on this very program, which is to say there are times when people are arrested for resisting arrest with no underlying charge. That happens when police are often rude and-
Tim: And that’s a different form of process crime.
Scott: That’s exactly right. It’s a street level process crime, and it’s easy to see how that’s outrageous, right? Well, the same exact thing is true with these perjury traps, and they shouldn’t be undertaken. And they shouldn’t certainly be undertaken for political purposes, which seems to be what happened here.
Tim: The whole idea of an investigation to uncover “collusion” leads most Americans to believe that there’s some law against collusion, but it’s a political crime. It is not a crime under the law.
Scott: There’s no crime there. Just in case anybody’s confused by that, there is no actual crime called collusion that Donald Trump could have engaged in.
Tim: But there is a political crime that the democrats will pounce on and certainly introduce articles of impeachment and almost certainly approve them if they take control of the House next year. I think it’s very clear.
Scott: I’m afraid, Tim, of the consequences of that. There was an interesting piece I read the other day by Patrick J. Buchanan who talked about how Trump is not Nixon, and because there’s no actual crime involved, this is not going to be a quiet affair. I’m reminded, Tim, of the movie “The Man With One Red Shoe”. If you’re not familiar with that-
Tim: Don’t remember it.
Scott: … it’s an oldie but a goodie, and it is a farcical comedy that describes a power play move between FBI and CIA in this country. It seems like if that’s not happening, there are certainly … The idea that there’s a deep state war going on started off, I think, as sort of a lunatic fringe idea, and the more and more we see, it seems like that’s what the obvious answer to what’s happening is.
Tim: You know, going back to the FBI for just a second before we leave this subject, I was thinking about this earlier this week and what you said, that the FBI has always been under a shadow-
Scott: Yes. Hoover and –
Tim: … from Hoover forward, I think the thing that elevated the FBI to a point of public support and approval was the old TV show “The FBI” with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. That sort of cleansed them and made them look like they’re-
Scott: All of their movie and TV – they did great work in establishing through those cultural outreaches that they were the sine qua non of law enforcement professionalism, which is all bunk, and it was all show and all Hollywood. They never were.
Tim: Sine qua non. I’m just overwhelmingly impressed by that.
Scott: Thank you, Tim.
No Net Neutrality
Tim: We could spend the whole time on this, but let’s go on to net neutrality because you’ve written a really good piece on LibertyNation.com. Net neutrality, for years, the first 20 years or so of the Internet, there was really no regulation, and then all of a sudden in 2015 the Obama administration, or the FCC under Barack Obama, passed what they called net neutrality laws, and now by the same three to two margin with Trump in, the FCC has reversed that. Tell us about it.
Scott: I’ll talk about this in its most practical rubber meets the road, domestic, residential Internet connective standard, okay? And that is that you go home, you wanna turn on your TV, and you wanna watch House of Cards on Netflix, and you’re disappointed because it’s too slow, it doesn’t load right or whatever, and Netflix says we’re having issues with Comcast or Verizon or your ISP because they’re not cooperating with us in terms of getting you the fast speeds. And Verizon says “Yeah, that’s right, we don’t care about Netflix particularly”, or Comcast says “We’ve got this Hulu product that we’re interested in selling you, so please look at that instead.” And people freak out, and they say, “I want my Internet preferences to not be metered or even validated or not by my ISP.”
Net neutrality provided a measure against that, which was that Internet service providers, or ISP’s, could not discriminate against different kinds of data. This also included the popular BitTorrent program, which is responsible for some massive percentage of the amount of ones and zeros that come through the pipe. Those regulations said if you’re an ISP and one person has a BitTorrent machine running and another person’s watching cat videos on YouTube and another person is doing navigation on their device, doesn’t matter. All those have to be treated equally.
It was the first instance, though Tim, of a government agency or government putting itself between the people and the ISP’s. Previously, they were just governed by ordinary contract law. An ISP couldn’t lie or steal from you just like any company couldn’t, but there were no special laws because of the fact that this was the Internet. So, that net neutrality thing changed the nature of the relationship of how it was governed by making essentially it a utility service. It said this is like a utility, and we now have the right to-
Tim: Like gas or electric.
Scott: Sewer, gas and electric. Exactly. The reason why that’s not an appropriate analogy, for people like myself who think it’s wrong, is I cannot change my electric company tomorrow. I don’t even know if I have more than one option for electric. I know that I have a dozen options for an ISP though, so if I don’t like the terms of how my ISP is dealing with me, I can switch it.
That’s what happened on Thursday when, in a three to two vote … And the vote, by the way, to enact those net neutrality rules was a three to two partisan vote. We saw a three to two partisan vote on Thursday to strike them down. The rules governing your relationship with your ISP are now the same as they were in January of 2015 and forever before that. That’s all we’ve done.
There were a lot of hysterical notions about what would happen, and guess what? Your ISP might do horrible things, and you’re going to have to go ahead and get a new one. That’s part of the big, bad world we live in. But in any case, the government won’t be involved, and in all things, Tim, I think that I would rather have, for good or ill, privately engaged people working it out, in the marketplace rather than the government, which as we all know does not often behave in ways that benefit consumers.
Tim: When the government gets involved, it begins a slippery slope.
Scott: The most scary sentence in the world. I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.
