And a moment ago, Hunter was begging the court, please dismiss my tax charges, insisting that his sweetheart plea deal is still on, despite the fact that it’s quite clearly not a judge ruling yesterday that, no, that, that plea deal, not in effect. Sorry, Hunter, you’ve got to be charged with these tax crimes. For more on this, and, of course, the efforts to go after Donald Trump, I want to bring in Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch and the author of a Republic under assault.

Tom, great to have you back with us, sir. It’s good to be with you. Thank you for having me. So the Biden family’s kind of brazen behavior, to some extent, is catching up with them. Hunter Biden still has to fight out these tax charges in court. We’ll see what kind of consequences he has to face in the end. But it’s amazing that he thought that he could still get away with using this sweetheart plea deal as a way to get rid, to not be held accountable for anything.

I know. It’s like going at the court, say, your honor, we had it rigged. This isn’t fair anymore. Yes, and that’s the scandal here, is that, you know, this is only proceeding because whistleblowers came out, blew the whistle as to what was going on. A federal judge highlighted that the plea deal was highly irregular and it blew up. And so, you know, there’s nothing right about this case.

Hunter has a point. They’re doing things only for political reasons. He doesn’t have a legal point in the sense he should be therefore immune. But the big questions for Hunter’s case is why wasn’t he fully prosecuted for other years that he didn’t pay taxes, years that would have been even more problematic for Joe? And where are the leads to Joe Biden here? There’s all this money that was laundered into Hunter’s accounts.

And we’ve learned separately that any attempts to follow those threads to Joe were obstructed by this administration’s justice department. But of course, you know, Hunter isn’t going to say that. He’s just going to say, I shouldn’t be, I should be protected from the rule of law here because Donald Trump doesn’t like me. I mean, so you’re right. The Justice Department, according to the whistleblowers, has done everything to protect Joe Biden from any scrutiny in this whatsoever.

They’re about as brazen as they can be in protecting him politically. Why wouldn’t Joe Biden just come along and do a pardon for his son and say, okay, stop hassling him entirely. Do you think that’ll happen? It might. It depends on how the selection goes or actually may not depend on how the election goes. But certainly it’s unlikely to happen before the election because that would strike me to be poorly received by a large number of Americans.

Let me move to Donald Trump’s legal issues right now with the Biden administration and all these associated Democrats across the country trying to both imprison and impoverish him. Former President Trump on Monday submitted a $175 million bond as a part of his appeal against this civil fraud judgment in New York. That was according to a filing by his attorneys with the Supreme Court of New York. Appellate division.

Judge Engarron down there wanted closer to a half billion dollars. Trump was able to appeal and get a court to agree to lowering the amount to a smaller but still huge $175 million here. This prevents, as I understand it, Tom Fitton, Leticia James, or any other agencies in New York, at least for the moment, from seizing Donald Trump’s properties and stealing them from him. Yeah, people should understand this is just done so he could appeal the half billion dollar ruling against him, effectively.

That would decimate his finances and destroy his business that he built up for decades, all because someone doesn’t want, there’s a dispute about the valuation of properties that harmed no one, that the court or had evidence of that there was any evidence that was brought before the court there any harm to anyone. And, you know, let’s be blunt here. The judges in New York are as political as Leticia James, as political as Joe Biden.

They’re elected Democrats or appointed Democrats, especially at the judicial level. It’s even worse than your normal politician because it’s purely the result of machine politics in New York. To get a judgeship, you’re basically put in there by political operatives and party leadership, and the elections are almost an afterthought. So these judges, you know, Trump is absolutely right in highlighting the political nature of what they’re up to. And frankly, the law, you know, the laws that they’ve been making up to try to impair his campaign, you know, it’s just further evidence of it.

I mean, the idea that these cases were allowed to proceed at all, to me, is an indication of bad faith by the judiciary. You talk about these New York judges, I want to move to another one who’s telling Donald Trump that he’s not allowed to defend himself in public. He’s issued a gag order. He says that Trump attacking, literally just saying, making verbal criticisms of Democrat political operatives amounts to, quote, a direct attack on the rule of law itself.

The judge in question here is acting New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchant, who is overseeing this so called hush money case that Alvin Bragg is going after Donald Trump in, in Manhattan. And he says that Trump has to have an expanded gag order. Now. He’s precluded from making public statements about the case. The theory is that he attacked Merchant’s daughter. That would be Trump attacked Merchant’s daughter.

In a post on truth social, Merchant wrote in his four page ruling that the conventional David versus Goliath roles are no longer in play, as demonstrated by the singular power defendant’s words have on countless others. The average observer must now, after hearing defendants recent attacks, draw the conclusion that if they become involved in these proceedings even tangentially, they should worry not only for themselves, but for their loved ones as well.

He said. So, Judge Merchant, now he’s talking about his own daughter here. Trump criticized her because she is a Democrat political operative. She’s an adult. She is not a child. The media keeps saying daughter and then not giving you any more information about the subject. What do you make of the judge saying Trump can’t use his First Amendment right to defend himself? Oh, it’s an indication that New York is a banana republic.

I mean, that’s what you do to your political opponents. I don’t like your criticizing me. I don’t like you criticizing my family. And even true statements, or even potentially untrue statements, you can’t say. And it’s a far cry from making a threat, which Trump has never done and hasn’t done, versus criticizing someone based on their political stances and calling attention to the politics behind these charges against him and the way Judge Merkin has handled this case and another case that involved the Trump business.

So to me, it’s like Justice Thomas putting a gag order out on the Washington Post from criticizing my friend Jenny. No one would think that’s appropriate. You know, these are people that are, like it or not, in the public sphere. And the criticisms you would hope, would be honest and well founded, which I think a lot of what Trump’s concerns are, given what’s happened to him, this unprecedented effort to try to jail him in the middle of a campaign.

Yeah, the judge said that Trump’s criticisms are, quote, a direct attack on the rule of law itself. Well, this is like, this is a perfect inversion of the truth. I mean, this is the, this is kind of the old, you know, the left says words are violence, and in other words, Trump is not allowed to defend himself. I mean, how could that even be constitutionally sound? You know, that’s the challenge in New York.

He has, prior gag orders have been upheld. This one probably goes a little bit too far, but even to overcome it, he’s going to have to take some, you know, spend much more money. Yeah. Right now his speech is being constrained, and right now, the election is being interfered with as a result of this gag order. So he can’t educate Americans and the voters from which he’s seeking their votes about what he thinks is really going on in New York.

It’s naked political interference. And it should be no surprise that’s what’s happening in New York. And it’s frustrating the way our legal establishment, and frankly, too many Republicans here in town, you know, our AWOL on this attack on our Republican form of government up in New York and Fulton county and here in DC with Jack Smith. Yes, they’re rolling over and just letting it happen, unfortunately. And there’s any number of people around Donald Trump have also been attacked by this justice system under Joe Biden as well.

One of the latest examples of this is Peter Navarro has been filing appeals. Remember, Peter Navarro is just President Trump’s trade advisor advised him on trade issues in the White House, and he has begun serving a four month prison sentence because he was convicted on so called contempt of Congress charges in September. Of course, you know, any number of lefties have been referred to the Department of Justice for contempt of Congress.

Never charged. Eric Holder, Lois Lerner. The list is long. Peter Navarro is now serving a four month sentence because he said that the conversations that he had with Trump were subject to executive privilege and he didn’t have anything to share with the committee. That, by the way, wasn’t even a legitimate committee. It was just a Nancy Pelosi hatchet job. This, this appetite to go after the people around Trump, how far are they going to take it? Well, you see, in Fulton county, which is a, which is a stalking horse for the Democrats here, up here in Washington, how far they’re willing to take it.

They’re going after his former chief of staff. They’re going after Trump himself in other states. They’re going after state leaders, volunteers who were participating in these disputes over the electors, alternative electors, who were just trying to do what they understood they could do under the law at the time. And so it’s about Trump, but it’s a broader attack on the republican party and trying to scare people off from participating in 2024.

Because if you want to dispute an election, the new rule is they’ll put you in jail for doing it and ruin you in the process. Well, yeah. I mean, look at what’s happening to John Eastman now. I mean, there’s. So you have attorneys. That’s right. Perfect example. You have attorneys who represented Trump, who gave him legal advice and were advising, okay, this is how you should handle this.

And now you have people like John Eastman being disbarred by the american left for simply giving his legal advice. Now, not every lawyer is going to give the same advice. That’s actually why there’s a difference in which attorney you might hire, actually. And, and Eastman comes along, gives advice, and now he’s being disbarred for that advice. John Eastman committed no crime. He gave advice on what he thought the law said, and now he’s being disbarred for that.

Does that make any sense? Tyranny. And it’s a way of restricting any Republicans or any dissenters ability to get legal counsel on issues of controversy. If the regime thinks that your position is on the outer edge, they’ll come after you, try to jail you and disbar you, and it undermines our general rights to get lawyers or right to counsel. And they’re even, you know, it’s like me, I got called in before the grand jury was harassed on all of these issues.

Yes. For hours. Now. I was just a witness. I mean, you can just imagine how much money it cost to deal with those issues that judicial watches subpoenaed. I was subpoenaed. Outrageous harassment. Why? Because we were standing strong in election integrity and we were calling out the Justice Department over their hypocritical and lawless attacks on Trump. We’re doing our job as a government watchdog, and we were hauled in before a grand jury and harassed for hours.

And I’ll tell you, that’s what goes on in Russia. That’s what goes on in China. And the left may not want to hear this, but it is no better than an authoritarian, totalitarian regime in terms of their crazed effort to keep Trump off the ballot and jail him before the election and to scare anybody else away from even wanting to support him in the first place, to help him get across the finish line.

And the other, the other piece, of course, is, as you just alluded to, is the financial impact. They really want to take it out of Trump, but they definitely want to take it out of everybody around him. Just ask General Mike Flynn or anybody who’s been subjected to this system. The goal is to impoverish you and leave you with nothing. I mean, sure, if you’re a defendant in that Fulton county craziness.

Down with Willis. Yeah. And you want to fight, you’re facing million dollar plus in legal fees. I’m sure that would be the case. Well, that’s. No, that’s. And what’s frustrating to me, Vince, is that, you know, we had Republicans in the House running the house. They had opportunities to kind of take a stance against this by defunding certain aspects of what Fannie Willis was doing both directly and indirectly.

The same with Jack Smith, the same with Alvin Bragg and Leticia James. And they couldn’t give a rat’s tale about doing any of that, it seemed, and they didn’t. So I’m completely, you know, we can complain about Jack Smith’s abuse just so everyone listening, fully funded by the republican controlled House and many Republicans in the Senate. Yeah, it’s a tragedy, a real tragedy. Thank you for calling it out.

I know you’ve been subjected to it. Thank you very much, as always. Tom Fitton from Judicial Watch. Really appreciate your time today, sir. .

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