Talkin' Liberty is the segment of Liberty Nation Radio where Tim and I 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 go over the latest travel ban bans, Russiagate on Uranium, and how the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office will try to steal your house. You can listen here.
Travel Ban 3.0 Killed In Stereo
Tim: Two more courts struck down the Trump travel ban. Now, these are by federal judges in two of the most leftist states in the country, Hawaii and Maryland, so my question to you is do these two strike downs really matter considering we've known for some time now that this issue will have to ultimately be settled by the Supreme Court?
Scott: What we've seen is the ban as enacted was stricken down. It was stricken down again and then revised and then revised again, and it was on the schedule to be heard by the Supreme Court in their current term they just started, what's called the October term, and they were going to hear the case, but because of the administration's modifications that came through at the end of the summer, basically they thought the case was moot and that his new executive order cured defects that were perhaps present in the previous version, and therefore that case was removed from the docket and now we have these new ...
Tim: Well, this is what the third ...
Scott: Yes, I think that's right.
Tim: ... or fourth travel ban.
Scott: People are calling it the third, yeah, the third ban. So, well it's three and four I guess if you want to count the Hawaii and Maryland courts differently and as you say they are both liberal jurisdictions. These are Obama appointees. That's not to say that the judges are necessarily just substituting their personal opinions for the law. They are ... Honestly, Tim, the one part of the opinion I think is most noteworthy is how Judge Chuang, district judge in Maryland, ruled that Trump's statements, basically campaign trail sort of level statements are relevant in determining the legality of the executive orders, and I think this is a new standard for presidential proclamations and policy making and I think this is going to be quite troubling for Democrat presidents in the future, all presidents in the future if they're going to be held to this standard.
Tim: I mean, Trump has been filling a lot of the lower federal court vacancies, almost an assembly line coming from the Heritage Foundation and a federal ...
Scott: It's quietly the best thing ever about this administration, a thousand Scalia’s out there.
Tim: So they now will be empowered to say that the statement of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren is relevant in considering whether their actions once they become president ...
Scott: And can you imagine what the community organizers of our presidential, the ghosts of presidential future will have said?
A Russia Story With Legs?
Tim: Meanwhile, it turns out that the Obama department of justice blocked an FBI informant from talking about the uranium one deal and you wanted me to explain this a little bit. This ...
Scott: Yeah, this is breaking news this week. I think that finally we've got a Russia story that is worth talking about.
Tim: But not with the subject that the left pretty much expected. I mean, this was a deal where there was a Canadian cutout, a company went to Russia doing business with Russia on an ongoing basis consistently, and they gave millions, tens of millions of dollars ...
Scott: A uranium mining company. Let's be clear here.
Tim: A uranium mining company, and they gave tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation ...
Scott: Over a hundred million. It's close to 200 million dollars by the way, is the total that I understand.
Tim: And what they got in return was Hillary Clinton's assent to the idea of selling 20 percent of US ...
Scott: Oh, I don't think Hillary Clinton's assent had anything to do with the close to 200 million dollars in donations.
Tim: Well, and the bottom line was that 20 percent of the US uranium supply was sold to a company with interests in Russia and is now ... Now they say it wasn't going to be used for any purpose except domestically, and now it turns out that that may not be true because some of it has been distributed to sources unknown, but ...
Scott: Oh, I'm sure they're all really good sources.
Tim: Now we knew about this from the Peter Schweitzer book Clinton Cash about the whole uranium one deal, but the new part here is that the FBI informant who's now coming forward to talk about bribery kickbacks, extortion, money laundering ...
Scott: Has implicated, yeah.
Tim: Has been, was squelched.
Scott: So Victoria Tensing ...
Tim: And threatened, right, by the Obama administration.
Scott: Yes. This story comes to us via Victoria Tensing who is the attorney for that person who is yet unnamed, and they tried to sue under a whistleblower act, alleging bribery, kickbacks, extortion, money laundering with this Russia deal, getting 20 percent of our uranium deposits and they were threatened by the Holder / Obama Department of Justice, that they would be criminally prosecuted for doing so, and the reason was that when they first encountered this, all these many crimes, like a proper concerned citizen would you would think, they went to the FBI and reported them, and the FBI made them sign basically sort of like a confidentiality clause almost and they said that this would be breaking it in order to expose the corruption, and well, Tim, it just furthers the idea that the FBI is simply the political tool of especially during that administration, whatever would further Obama and Holder's political interests and of course, we know that Obama picked Holder for a reason. Holder was the bagman for the Clintons at justice. He ate the bullet on the Mark Rich pardons and basically papered that over.
He was willing to do the dirt, and that's why he was there for Obama and as senior justice administration official in the Clinton justice department, but he is a guy who does the dirt, and it's no surprise that we have another story now of dirt coming out of that department.
Tim: So, it's remarkable that the Russia, Russia interference in the election which has apparently been so serious that it warranted a special counsel to determine whether there are any ties ...
Scott: Impeachment.
Tim: ... to the Trump administration has now boomeranged on the left and now they're on the defense about this shady deal that was cut by the Obama administration.
Scott: Have you seen Maxine Waters now calling for Holder's arrest and prosecution?
Tim: I actually missed that.
Scott: Yeah, well, yeah, because that's not going to happen.
Tim: Could you send me that sound bite when you get it?
Civil A$$et Forfeiture Laid Bare
Tim: The leak, manual, forfeiture manual issued to agents of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, instructs the agents to seize houses if they contain a phone implicated in a crime and here we go again with out of control civil asset forfeiture.
Scott: Tim, we talk a lot about this on this segment and this sort of confirms all of our worst suspicions about civil asset forfeiture again. It's like every single story you read about it just ... How is this a good thing for anybody except for the law enforcement officers lining their professional pockets? I'm not suggesting they're taking that money home, but they're buying all sorts of new toys at work with it, and they're doing it on the backs of these people that often have little or tangential relationship to any illegality, so if your kid is a drug dealer and you don't know about it, and he's at home and he uses the landline to conduct a drug trade well, obviously it's not appropriate for the government to come in and try to seize your home as some sort of instrument to the crime. It's just outrageous. It's so anti-liberty it's hard to describe, and the problem is that it often happens to people who don't have the resources to challenge that sort of activity, and so we need to end it and bringing it to light is the best we can do for you and I, I think.
Tim: Thank you, Scott.
Scott: Thanks, Tim.
