 Joe, you should speak, it's moving. I'm reaching miles behind in the face. Welcome back to CN Live's continuing coverage of the U.S. Presidential Election 2020. Hello, Elizabeth. Hi, Joe. It's Elizabeth Loss. It's Joe Lauria, the chief of consortium news. It seems like we've never left the air that we've been continuously going since Tuesday. We apologize for our viewers for our late start today. I thought with that late start that we would have a declared winner. But it looks like the networks are being extremely cautious in declaring Biden winner. He's for all intents and purposes at 270. He took over the lead in Pennsylvania. Several hours ago now. There is 96% counted there. His lead has stretched, by the way, he was way behind. This is all because of the mail-in ballots. He now leads by 14,000 votes, which sounds slim. But he was trailing on Wednesday morning. That's the day after election day by 600,000. The mail-in ballots are being counted. I think there's still several thousand in Philadelphia to go. So they were going to probably wait. So those votes are counted. Once he wins Pennsylvania, he's the president-elect with 270 electoral votes. If he wins Nevada and Arizona together, he will also reach 270. He's leading by 50 to 48.6% in Arizona with 93%. Counted and there, there's about a 45 or 44,000 vote lead for Biden and in Nevada. He leads by 23,000 or 22,000, let's say. And there, there's 92%. So Elizabeth Biden is going to win this. But Donald Trump and his people still have a lot to say about that. Have you been following his Twitter feed, for example? Yes, I have. And it's been interesting. It looks like a few of his tweets have been uncensored, but mostly it seems very... And he actually seems, from what I saw, to calm down slightly just in terms of the fact that I don't feel he rolled back at this point. But yeah, he's still very, very much not giving up. He's calling this fraud. He's referencing missing ballots, missing military ballots. As of one hour ago, he tweeted, what are the missing military ballots in Georgia? What happened to them, et cetera, et cetera. So he's far from giving up. Missing military ballots. So he's talking about fake ballots on one hand and missing ballots on the other. Look, this started way back when he tried to defund the post office. He knew his advisors knew all the Republican strategists knew. And Donald Trump once admitted in an interview, if too many people vote Democrats win. He came right out and said that that's the whole idea of suppressing the vote. Making, putting one machine in an African-American neighborhood or at a university area, trying to get people discouraged from voting. All the things Greg Pallas talked to us about. Republicans are always trying to limit the vote in a national or general election. Because the more people vote generally, Democrats do better. But those suppression tactics, while I'm sure they employed them on the ground, didn't work if mail-in ballots are going to be the way of voting this time. And because of the pandemic, that's what happened. So Trump was leading when only the in-person votes were counted. He wanted to stop it then, ridiculously. The mail-in votes came and he's losing. So they could not suppress the vote when it came to the mail-in. They tried, I guess, by defunding. That's the reason they wanted to defund the post office. They knew. They knew that if Democrats voted in large numbers by mail, he would probably lose. And it would happen a couple of days after election day. And here we are, four days after election day. So this is exactly what the Republicans and Trump feared has come to pass. And unfortunately for him, there's really nothing you can do about it. Now they're going to challenge recounts. They're going to try to sue here or there. But I think that there's a very little chance that it would be overturned. Because Biden's winning in too many states for one thing. It's not like it came down to one state where there was like Florida, for example, one state. And it was a 500-vote margin. That's the kind of thing you might overturn in a recount. But this cannot happen this time. And the question remains whether he will eventually understand that, step down on January 20th, and maybe run for reelection again on 2024. I agree. I wonder just to answer questions that people who potentially support Trump might be asking in order to kind of clarify things. Is it easier to submit fraudulent mail-in ballots? If there are some fraudulent mail-in ballots, will those be sorted through and found in the process of a potential recount in these swing states that Trump is very likely to contest? Look, I've never voted by mail. Have you? No, I haven't. I don't know anybody who's ever voted by mail. This was something that didn't happen very often. But I do know that you get from your polling place, from your registration, your place that you vote, they send out a county ballot, I believe, for you to fill out and send back. In this case, what a pre-postage paid envelope. That ballot they send you is got to, I've never seen one, but I'm presuming that it's, it's got some kind of protections on there against counterfeit. So that they, there's something there that will tell the county when it arrives that this is a legitimate ballot. Can you fake it? Can you, can somebody be in the basement cranking these out and then check off Donald Trump? Of course, who's the name attached to it? Once they receive one ballot, that person can vote again, obviously. They could try, if they're not on the registration rolls in another locale, they cannot vote. You can only be registered in one place, obviously. And you can only vote in one place. So once you send it back to them and they certify this as a legitimate ballot that they sent out to you, I don't see any possibility of, you know, voting again or sending in counterfeit ballots. I don't, I think there was a mistake, apparently in Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, that's where Pittsburgh is. And they had sent out a wrong ballot. This is reporting that I saw, I don't know any more details. The reporter wasn't forthcoming with many more details other than a wrong ballot was sent out and then a correct one was sent out. So they had to put aside all the wrong ones and then as they received the correct ones. Now, the possibility of them getting mixed up, you know, so they're taking a lot more time to make sure that the vote that they're counting from that voter is not the one that was the false ballot for whatever was wrong about that first ballot. So they were, so there was their screw ups. They're going to be screw ups, but the idea of massive fraud on that scale just doesn't exist. The record show there are very few people who actually ever get arrested or tried for fraud, for voter fraud. The voter suppression is the issue in the millions of people who are suppressed. And that is the real issue there. So I mean, I don't know what these guys, they just, they're trying to delay this, but how much has got to get to Giuliani first and then Trump and tell them, you know, unfortunately the mail, we couldn't suppress it this time, Donald, because we had to allow voting by mail because of the pandemic, which we should have taken a lot of greater care and more seriousness to begin with. But that's, that's it. Those are the marbles. That's the, what's the Marla Maples. So we got Scott Ritter coming in. Who's going to join us? Yeah. That's great. No, I think it's important to answer those types of questions that people have, you know, a lot of people don't know how this works, especially with mail and ballots changing, changing the picture entirely in this case so quickly. I think that a lot of people looked at the way in which figures change so rapidly and thought, well, that must be fake. And Trump definitely created that sense. So I think it's good to answer these types of questions. Yeah. And maybe Scott knows something more about that. If he's been in the military, so he very well. Scott, are you with us? We just need you to unlock your, here you go. Welcome back to CN Live. I really appreciate this. Day four of our election. Scott, of course, former US Marine counterintelligence official and better known to the world as a lead UN weapons inspector in Iraq and a critic of the war for which he was ostracized and he is back with us. He's a great analyst and we really appreciate you having. Let me ask you a first question. Scott, you were in the military. You were overseas several times in your life. You've been posted overseas. Did you ever vote by mail? Absolutely. I was a Florida state resident. I was born in Florida. My father was a career military officer. So I retained that Florida residency when I turned 18. I went to college in Pennsylvania, but I was a Florida state resident. So I voted by absentee ballot while I was in college. And then when I was in the military, I voted by absentee ballot. How did that work? How did that work? I would receive a notification from the Sarasota. I was registered in the Sarasota County court house. I'd receive a notification that if I wanted to vote, I needed to put in an application. I would submit my application. They would send me back the ballot. I had very strict rules on filling it out and on timelines. The most important thing was the timeline to get it in because this vote had to be in before election day. And I would submit my vote and generally speaking, what would happen with all military votes is they'd come in and they'd throw them in the corner of the courthouse because for the most part, they weren't relevant to the election because the election would usually be won by margins greater than the number of ballots available. But I voted because it was my civic duty and responsibility. So it was a very close election. They would go to the military. That's my understanding. Again, I wasn't an election official. All I know is that every time I voted, the margin was greater than what I thought I could contribute to. Now this ballot that you received, was there some markings on there that would make it a certified so that when they received it, they knew that that was the one that they'd sent out to you. Was there some kind of ways of them knowing this? This is in the 1980s. So they're, you know, this is, this predates us, you know, all of the computerized document verification, fancy printing, fancy anything. They were official documents. And your signature was your bond. I mean, it made it clear that once you signed this document, you were legally bound. If you committed fraud, they could come after you. But no, there was no, you know, secret handshake or anything with the document. Now speaking of secret, once you signed it, was that a secret vote then? If you put your name on it. Well, there are secret votes. Yeah. I mean, they, I guess somebody would have to open up the ballot and then run it through a scanner. So in theory, whoever did that could see, see how I voted, but, you know, it didn't say on the outside of the envelope. Scott Ritter voted for Ronald Reagan, hunt him down and kill him if the Democrats win. On the back of the envelope, not on the front. No. Okay. So it was, it was still a secret ballot. So obviously I'm asking, you know why I'm asking these questions, because this is the story of this election. This was known to the Republicans early on, that the Democrats were saying because of the pandemic, they were encouraging people to mail in their votes. And it appears now that there were a very bad strategy of the Republicans was to try in, in amidst all their other suppression tactics to somehow get people not to vote by mail and even talk about defunding the post office. So it'll be harder for them to do that. And it turns out that the Democrats have told their voters to vote by mail did so. Trump said not to. So a few Republicans did. So that, yes, he was winning. When all the in person votes were counted, he decided, okay, I'm winning. Let's call it off. And then now they've counted the mail in ballots. Byness come from behind in Georgia and now most importantly in Pennsylvania. So. Right. Distinction here. Okay. There is a distinction between an absentee ballot, which is what I. All right. What I filled out. I've been reading through the legal arguments that were put forward by the, by the Republican party in Pennsylvania. There's a difference between an absentee ballot. I don't think anybody is challenging. The legitimacy of the absentee ballot process. But the key thing about an absentee ballot is I have to request it. Right. I have to request it. It is a by exception procedure. It is a by exception procedure. Meaning that the default mode in an election is the citizen goes to the polling place and cast their vote in person. If you are unable to attend for a reason that is deemed to be legitimate. Then you get to apply for an absentee ballot. There, this is different than what has occurred in this, in this election, what has occurred is the Democrats. The Democrats. Claiming a public health risk due to COVID-19. But recognizing that if you can send a ballot to somebody's house. And all they have to do is fill it out and mail it back in. You're going to radically, radically increase the number of people who are participating. Because Republicans tend to show up at polls in certain areas of the country, greater and greater public health. And so, this is why the Democrats have always fought against voter identification. And other things that they deemed to be disqualifying for a certain brand. Second, eliminate the phone. But again, I'm not criticizing. I mean, the Democrats every right have every right to say, we want every vote to count. I mean, I'm not criticizing. I mean, I'm not criticizing. I mean, I'm not criticizing. I mean, I'm not criticizing. I mean, I'm not criticizing. I'm just saying, They have every right to say we want every vote to count and they have every right to say we want to get maximum participation. And I know why they do that because they want to win elections and there's nothing illegitimate about wanting to legitimately win elections. You get on awful voter, That's the lawful vote. My daughter, she's being quite persistent, but I'll get her later. The fact of the matter is, ballots were mailed out that nobody asked for, and they were based upon voter rolls that are notoriously inaccurate, they're not updated, et cetera. So you have ballots mailed out to dead people, you have ballots mailed out to people who are qualified to vote, you have just ballots mailed out. And apparently, you could get a number of these ballots. This is the problem. This is why, for instance, in 2012, the New York Times came out and said, this mail-in voting stuff is rife with problems that can lead to corruption and worse, fraud and worse. You can lose the legitimacy of the election. This is New York Times writing an article about this. And this is the same argument that many European Union countries. I find it ironic that the OSCE sent observers over and they're challenging Trump about criticizing mail-in vote. Trans prohibits this kind of stuff because they say it just leaves you open to fraud. Many European countries prohibit mail-in voting. They allow absentee voting, but they prohibit the kind of just mass mailing of ballots because it's susceptible to fraud. This is what Donald Trump is based his argument. I mean, look, he's not the most articulate man in the world, but if you take a look at the argument he's made from day one, there is an inherent consistency to his arguments that's backed by a very substantial record of legal analysis and informed opinion. So it's not as though he just invented the concept of voter fraud. This problem is he's talking about the perception or theory of fraud. I don't think anybody's been able to document substantial fraud on a scale that would tip the election in the favor of Joe Biden, meaning that if you invalidated these votes, Donald Trump is the winner. And I think that's the bar he's going to face and going to the Supreme Court, except for the fact. And again, read the opinions of Sam Alito and of Brett Kavanaugh and the lead up to this election are very telling. Alito refused to hear a case from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court about the legality of the ruling of the Supreme Court to allow mail-in ballots. Unsolicited mail-in ballots is what you're saying. Unsolicited. Unsolicited. Unsolicited mail-in ballots. He said it's too close to the election. We can't get involved in this because it would be disruptive. But he said, this case remains before the court. And if it's brought forward, we will hear it in short order, meaning bring it back and we will hear it. And then you match that with Brett Kavanaugh's hearing about Wisconsin versus the DNC, where Brett Kavanaugh said, hey, it's OK for the federal government to intervene in cases where rules have been broken. Americans must have rules, he said. And it's OK. And the case that the Republicans are making is that the Pennsylvania legislature did not make this rule. This is an intervention by people outside of the legislature. So the rule allowing these unsolicited mail is illegal. Now, if Trump can get this before the Supreme Court, take a look at the people who signed on to Alito's thing. Alito, Thomas Gorsuch. Take a look at, then we throw in Kavanaugh. That's four. And if Amy Coney Barrett does what everybody claims she was hired to do in Votes for Trump, that's five. That's a 5-4 lock. So this ain't over yet. I don't know if the Trump administration will be able to meet the legal bar to get a case before the Supreme Court. That's a difficult thing to do. But if they do it, and it's a cognizable case, the Supreme Court is positioned with sympathetic judges who have already played their hand. They've already let it be known where they stand on this issue, who've let it be known that they are willing not just to stop a vote count, which is what Bush v. Gore was, but to reverse a vote count. That's what Alito said. So we can mock Trump all we want, and I do all the time. I think he was very impolitic on some of the things he said, the way he said it. But the concept of challenging the legitimacy of unsolicited mail-in voting, no, that is actually a very legitimate thing to do. Many people have done it before him. And to say this needs to go to the Supreme Court, that's the logical venue for litigation. So nothing he has said is wild and unrealistic and irresponsible. How he said it perhaps is where it raises tension. Before Elizabeth comes in, you're saying now the legislature didn't make the law about mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. That a court, was it a court that a court made this decision based on that? It was an election commission that made a rule that was challenged and the court intervened. The Democrats are saying that the legislature created the election commission, and therefore there's an interesting legal argument here. It's not as though the Democrats are totally off base. They may have the prevailing legal view. It's the question is how you view the legislature. And again, I'm not a lawyer. I have been interested in constitutional law for personal reasons. And I will say that an originalist interpretation of legislative intent comes from the words of the legislature, not the words of a body appointed by the legislature. And what were they ruling on on the admissibility of unsolicited ballots, mailing ballots? Basically, modified Pennsylvania election rules to allow for unsolicited ballots. And I think another one of the case dealt with when the ballots are returnable, meaning that they should have been returned on election day, but then they allowed for an extension. And this is where the Republicans, so it's purely a procedural legalistic argument that may proceed without evidence of fraud. So we'll see. Again, I'm not the Supreme Court justice. I don't want that to make decision. But this is a very, it's still very much an open book. How is this susceptible to fraud? For example, you say Republicans like to go to the polls. He has mostly the Republicans have the rural areas where the pandemic is less of an issue. But in a tightly populated area like Philadelphia or Pittsburgh or other urban areas, the idea of receiving a ballot in a pandemic and mailing it in is very convenient. But where is the possible fraud there? Now, it's sent to you by the county, right? Now, if the county were Republican, they would have not sent out these ballots, you think? Is that what you're saying? Was only Democratic? No, no, no, that I don't think the process is the is, I don't think the fraud is in the act of sending out unsolicited ballots or filling them out or mailing them in. I mean, one of the sad realities of this is that a very large percentage of these ballots have been invalidated because they were improperly filled out. They, you know, so they pretty much committed electoral suicide by submitting these ballots by mail instead of going to the poll. Their votes don't count. The problem is perception. And this, again, is that the heart of the legal writing of Brett Kavanaugh, who cited Richard Fieldies, I believe, as a New York University law professor, expert on constitutional law. We said, if the election isn't decided on day one, and if you allow the vote to extend out for a number of days, you create the perception that votes are being magically appearing that will undo the will of the people, which is exactly what the perception is on the part of the Republican Party right now. And so then you have a notoriously corrupt political machine, Democratic political machine in places like Philadelphia, where corruption is their by name. And again, you create the perception that votes are being manufactured in numbers sufficient to overdo it. Again, perception versus reality, nobody's been able to prove that. Right. And that's one of the problems that confronts the Trump administration is every time they've tried to go forward, they've been thrown out of court because you're presenting so-called hearsay evidence. And so unless they can document it with proof sufficient to overturn the election, they may have a case, for instance, that they can document that 21,000 dead people voted. And I've read somewhere that they can document that. But if Biden's margin of victory is 100,000, the court's not going to act because that doesn't change anything. That's why I think this is more about perception than actual demonstrated reality at this point in time. The Trump administration has not been able to demonstrate that actual fraud has taken place. So a dead voter would be, let's say, someone, they mail it out to a house. Someone in that household had died. But he's still on the voter rolls. That family would decide to fill out their own. No, I think- How have the dead relatives? I think what the machine, the political machine would be doing, is holding on to a whole bunch of these ballots and showing them out for the dead people. They keeping them aside and going, hey, how many votes do you need? We need 922. We just happened to have 923 right here. Yeah. Well, and the other thing about that is, too, that they're, again, going to perception. You had these votes being counted, the injection of blue votes counted at four and five in the morning repeatedly. And night, so that gives a perfect perception to Republicans that these are just being delivered in the dead of night from wherever there have been stockpiles. I mean, one would think that in the process of a recount and verification that if there are fake ballots or ballots from dead people, that those will be found in the process that will go forward, no doubt. But the perception remains. And the other part of that is, too, that should, like in the scenario where the court may overturn some aspects of this, and especially if the Supreme Court could basically rule that Trump would be president, and although that's unlikely, if that were to happen, you would equally have the perception on the left that it was a stolen election, that the court had overturned the will of the people. So no matter which way it goes, half of the country is going to think its will has been corruptly taken away from it. Not just the court, Trump's court. I mean, that's the issue here. And again, this isn't a matter of people manufacturing that out of thin air. Trump was at a rally in North Carolina the day after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, where he told his adoring fans that I have stacked the federal court for this very purpose. The reason why I'm looking for a 6-3 lock on the Supreme Court is so they can deliver the election to us, because he was already saying it's going to be a rigged election. I mean, so it's not that the Democrats or the left are manufacturing out of thin air the notion of a corrupted court. Trump said, I have corrupted the court for this person. This election, regardless of who ends up being president, has destroyed the concept of America as a viable democracy, because we're not. We're a corrupt little banana, big banana republic, that the hypocrisy of the United States going around the world and wagging a finger in the face of people who don't practice democracy perfect. We no longer qualify. This is a joke. I mean, what we call a democratic election in America is a joke. And the proof is that no matter who wins in this one, it's not democracy that's spoken. It's flawed processes. I mean, my God, Afghanistan and Iraq under American occupation, we demanded that people line up at polling stations, get assassinated, had car bombs blow them up so they could dip their finger in purple ink and say, I voted for a same day result. And they did it. Here we have COVID-19, it's a disease. People are dying. It's real. But hey, this is the presidential election. Go to the poll, not just spacing. Wear your mask. You're outdoors most of the time. You're not indoors for the two hours that the doctors say you have to be exposed to the disease. Cast your vote so we get the result. You know, it's just hypocrisy, a double standard. And then the Rube Goldberg, I think I read somewhere they called it a Rube Goldberg contraption, the way we run elections in this country. It's just a joke. It should be pretty simple. You should have to require an identification. You should go in there, check your ID, have a ballot linked to your ID, cast your vote, have it scanned and have the result known that night. Why can't we do that? We can send a man to the moon. We're thinking about sending a man to Mars, but we can't run a darn election. It's embarrassing. Yeah. It does raise questions as to why the vote counting is taking so long. Again, that plays into the appearance of democratic or democratic controlled states having to scramble to conjure up fake ballots. That's a perception, especially the Republican side, will use and see regardless of what the reality is. But in your opinion, what's actually going on that these mail-in ballots are taking so much time to count? Well, the main problem is that, again, the election commissions have committed suicide in terms of public confidence. If you want to ask my personal opinion, I don't think there's large-scale fraud going on. I really don't. I think this has been an amazing election period where Americans participated in unprecedented numbers. Think about it for a second. Joe Biden has 73 million-plus votes, more than anybody else. And guess who's number two in the history of American electoral politics? Donald Trump with close to 70 million Americans voting for him. This is the kind of participation that democracies generally thrive on. But what we've done here is Pennsylvania wouldn't allow the ballots to even be touched, open, processed until after election day, which means this was going to be a cluster, you know what, from day one. Had Pennsylvania done what other states did, which is allow the votes to be opened up, processed, scanned in advance, like all other advanced voting, we wouldn't have this issue. There wouldn't be four o'clock in the morning radical transformations of the vote count. The vote count would have been known the same day. That's what's going on. This is here an adulterated incompetence on the part of election commissions who decided they wanted to have this grand new way of voting, but didn't organize properly. Didn't foresee the myriad of political and practical problems that would come with this. That's what's going on right now. I mean, I could be proven wrong. Maybe Donald Trump's gonna find grand proof of massive fraud. I don't think so. And I think at the end of the day, unless the Supreme Court is willing to intervene procedurally, which I just don't see that happening. You know, this is Joe Biden's election, but it's gonna tear the country apart in the meantime because there's going to be a fight. And if we got 70 million Americans are gonna think that the election was stolen from them. And if Donald Trump manages to flip it, we got 73 million Americans are gonna think the same thing. And regardless, both sides are gonna be accusing the other of being un-American, unpatriotic, unconstitutional. And it just doesn't bode well for whoever is gonna govern this country for the next four years. There will be a giant stain on their election. And it's incredible to think that two candidates who in the minds of half the country are such failures, whether you're talking about Trump and his personality or Biden and his cognitive difficulties to think that these two candidates have now hauled the record for the amount of votes cost for them. It's insane. It's incredible. It's American democracy. And it's about as ugly as it gets. Absolutely. And I think also, go ahead, Joe. No, I'm just gonna interject about it. It would happen because there was so many mail-in votes. That's what I think drove the number of that. There's no doubt about that. The increase in numbers, I think it's a combination of how divided this country is that the passions were inflamed. But it's also a fact that people were able to vote by mail-in ballot, that we made voting easy. And there's something to be said about that. But again, I think this whole controversy could be solved rather than just doing unsoliciting mail, let everybody know that, hey, all you have to do is say you want it. I'll mail you a postcard with an already posted page. You don't have to do anything other than check the box. It says, I want a ballot to be mailed to me. Mail it back and then you get a ballot. Now it's no longer unsolicited. Now it's the voter taking proactive measures to participate in the election process. But these ballots, the county would send these ballots out to all voters, not just Democratic voters, right? Right, they use voter rolls, right? Republicans could have voted by mail just as much as Democrats did. And why did that happen? 70% of votes are Democratic by mail-in. Yeah, I think what happened here is that first of all, Donald Trump went out of his way to suppress this. It became a political issue, an act of political defiance, just like wearing a mask sort of became an act of political defiance. If you want to commit suicide, don't wear a mask. If you want to commit electoral suicide, don't submit a ballot, show up in person. I don't know, look, we've allowed this wonderful constitutional gift that we've been given of voter participation for the most powerful position in the land to be destroyed by partisan politics. I just, you know, Donald Trump is his own, this was a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is a man who sat there and said, I mean, he literally said before this happened, I don't want to wait until four o'clock in the morning for the vote to change. He said this back in September. And so what happened? Four o'clock in the morning, the vote changed. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. He did everything in his power to make this happen. And now that it happened, he's whining and crying about it. You know, that's not the way this process is supposed to work. American people should be in control of what happens on election day. We go out, we cast our vote and that decision becomes final. The fact that this even has the chance of going to a court for resolution means that something very wrong is taking place. Well, I mean, you said that this one really puts the nail in the Democratic coffin in the U.S. A little, not a big deal, not a big deal. That happened, yeah, a little bit. Didn't that happen in Florida in 2000? Didn't that happen in 1888 in Hildon and Hayes? Didn't that happen when Tammany Hall and others would get people drunk on election day to get their vote or people buying, selling and buying votes or kidnapping people in order to get them to, I mean, the long list. The beautiful thing of a little de-democracy is that it's a living entity, meaning that it is capable of repairing and regenerating. So, you know, and we've proven that over time. Look, the United States was formed as an imperfect union. Women couldn't vote. We had slavery. There were a lot of problems. And over time, you know, we fear ourselves. There's a curative process, whether we have to have a civil war to do it or we have to go through lengthy civil rights battles or, you know, to get the right for women to vote, there's a word, I'm missing it. It's a, it's a, pardon? Suffrage or franchise? Suffrage, that's it, suffrage. You know, you know, this didn't happen overnight. These were long drawn out battles for it to happen. And the fight is still taking place today. So, as a nation, we continue to cure ourselves to try and become this more perfect union that we aspire to. And part of that, I think, is, you know, the little de-democracy. Yeah, we've got problems. But the thing is, you know, when we learned about Tammany Hall getting people drunk, we sort of put that, we put an end to that. One would have hoped that after Bush v. Gore, you know, in addition to curing the issue of hanging chads, we would have tried to de-emphasize a judicial involvement. And I think the United States collectively is gonna have to take a retrospective look at this election and say, we can't let this happen again. What do we need to do to fix this, to cure the problem? And then we can revive the democratic body and breathe new life into it and hopefully get it to do something, perform better. You know, this isn't the end of America. This is just, it's just a bad day for America. It's, you know, I do believe that we can and we are capable of fixing problems at home. We've proven that in the past. It's not a pretty process, but I am utmost confidence in the American people and it may sound a little bit corny, but that constitution that I took an oath to uphold and defend my life, I believe in that constitution. I believe in what it stands for. And I believe that as long as we try to remain true to that document and the intent of that document, we'll get out of this mess. It's when we turn our back on the constitution, when we seek shortcuts, whether they be legal shortcuts, because not everything that happens legally is constitutional, or we do shortcuts via government. We know that the government is fully capable of behaving in unconstitutional manners. You know, we, if we can get back on track collectively, we can fix this thing. You know, and I think there's an important constitutional issue that needs to be resolved about the legality of unsolicited in mail-in ballots. I do think that there's a legitimate constitutional question there because it's the citizen's vote. It's not the, you know, it needs to originate from the citizen, the request, the desire. It shouldn't be something that's imposed on the citizen by, you know, by an unelected body, or at least a body that wasn't specifically tasked to do that by the legislature. That's the way the constitution's written, and we need to respect that. You wouldn't agree with countries that make it illegal not to vote there. Argentina, Australia, there are others. Well, you must vote. Well, it's not that I don't agree with them. If their constitution requires them to vote, and that constitution was, you know, voted on and made the law of the land, no, I 100% support that. I would love if the United States made it a requirement to vote. I think it's a citizen's duty to vote, but that's not the way our constitution's written, you know, because I want it to be. Then it doesn't come from the citizen. It's not their request to vote. It's imposed on them. They must vote. Right, but I mean, that's a constitution that would be a constitutional thing. And if the majority of citizens, you know, because there's a process to amend the constitution, if that happened, that would be it. And again, I think it's pretty cool to vote. And I'd like people to believe it was cool and it was a civic duty, but today, the way the constitution written, I have every right to be an old curmudgeon, sit at home and say, stick in your ear, I'm not voting. And that's my constitutional right, you know, and nobody can say anything about that because I have the right to do that. It's so cool, you should have done it twice. But anyway, you mentioned the CW word, civil war, that it took a civil war wants to get rid of slavery, for example. People talking about civil war now, not in the sense of two armies, although that could come to that too. Maybe there's plenty of police who support Trump and the military might be against him if a Biden wins. But what is your view and your concern about real violence resulting from this election? Well, you know, we've always lived in divided nation. I mean, especially, I mean, we have this two-party system that inherently creates close to a 50-50 split each election. And Americans aren't mature enough apparently to go out and form a third party that's viable. We end up voting the way our parents voted. I vote all Democrat because my father was a Democrat. I vote all Republican because my father was a Republican. That kind of nonsense. You know, but even if you take a look at Bush v. Gore, we were a pretty divided nation there. There was a significant number of people that viewed George W. Bush as, you know, if you go back to, I mean, we're all old enough to remember that, you know, this was, you know, the moron son, the idiot son who was, you know, was anointed. He didn't earn this that he was given this and he's dumber than dirt and he's dangerous. And, you know, everybody was against, you know, George W. Bush and yet he won and people demonstrated but it wasn't violent. And that's the one thing I'll say back then that we didn't have that element of violence. COVID-19, the long, hot COVID-ridden summer that we had this year that where, you know, you combine, you know, economic depression in many cases, a recession in some cases, some people would say depression. I mean, the percentage of GDP that was lost was greater than the Great Depression. You combine that with racial tension with, you know, with the gentleman being killed in Minneapolis and then we actually had violent outrage in the streets. And then you have the right wing coming out, the right wing malicious, threatening to kidnap a governor, carrying guns in the open, et cetera. You know, this isn't just about demonstrations and more than that, you know, these are demonstrations that don't just want to confront the cops, they want to kill the cops. And now we have a police force today that's more militarized than ever before. And so they don't just want to enforce the law, they want to beat the crap out of people. They're looking for an excuse to play heavy muscle man or woman or whatever you want to, you know, begin or end in specific, but they want to beat up somebody. That's what they do. So we got violence already staged, pre-staged here. And, you know, a lot of people said, well, you know, why hasn't there been a massive outbreak of violence? Because we don't know who won. So it's hard to draw up sides decisively until, you know, once Biden declares victory, and I think he's going to do that very soon, you know, now you're going to have mobs going down the street, A, to protest him, and B, to defend him against the protesters. And now we have the potential of violence. And the danger comes if, I mean, let's just give a hypothetical, I hate hypotheticals, but we'll do it. Look at Michigan where the sheriffs have lined up with terrorists who are plotting to kidnap and murder a sitting governor. So what happens if law enforcement chooses sides? And then you bring in the National Guard. And the National Guard is now broken because they decide to choose sides too. Some of them, they don't want to fire on the cops, so they go over and join the cops. Or, and now you have to bring in the regular military who's now going to fight the National Guard in the cops. And now we're talking big time gunfights. I hope that doesn't happen, but the fact that I can even articulate a scenario where you're shaking your head going, yeah, God, yeah. That means we're broken as a country. This isn't just a bunch of demonstrators going out there, giving people the middle finger and screaming their heads off. We're used to that. That's okay. I actually liked that because it shows people are engaged in the care. But these are people that burn buildings down. These are people that actively want to hurt people, kill people. These are people who are armed. And we have a nation so divided, especially on the issue of law and order that cops may be called upon to pick a side. And we saw that in Kenosha where the cops turned their back on armed militia members, literally led the guy shoot two people to death and then walk through the police and they got molested. And yet they went out and beat up the BLM and what they called the Antifa crowd. There's something wrong here. There's great potential I think, especially if Trump takes it to the court and the court overturns. I mean, you could see, I'm not saying I want this, I would, but you could see a scenario where a mob took over the Supreme Court and burned it to the ground. I mean, I could, I could easily see a mob taking over the Supreme Court and just burning it to the ground because they have lost faith in the institution. And there's good reason. I mean, when you have a president saying, I'm stacking the court so I can win an election. And then if he uses the court to win an election, that court's no longer serving the greater good or the constitution. They've become a politicized arm of a partisan political leader. Probably, I hope that doesn't happen. I hope none of this happens. I want a peaceful outcome. I would like Donald Trump to wake up today and recognize the inevitability of his electoral defeat and give the most gracious concession speech ever and say he's ready to work with the Biden administration for a smooth transition to power because that's what Americans do. That's not going to happen. That's definitely not going to happen. Definitely not going to happen. But I have a question that I wanted to ask you and also chat that I've heard a couple of times. And that is that while we can talk about the constitutionality of mail-in ballots, unsolicited mail-in ballots, we've seen repeatedly that there have been issues with the voting machines and the tabulation of those votes that they're easily hackable. Do you, although there doesn't seem in this election to be the same perception of there being issues with that, do you think that that could have been an issue as well? How does election integrity overall play into this? Do you think that there's a chance there could have been any type of mass interference in any way? Well, I mean, you know, after 2016, one would fully have expected this. I mean, and we were told in 2016 that the Russians, you know, while they may not have changed any votes, they definitely, you know, brainwashed American people to do things in that there, you know, that there was the possibility. If you can hack into the DNC, you could hack into voter data. I mean, here's another one with unsolicited ballots, because one thing that hackers were allegedly able to do in 2016 was to hack into voter registration databases. And if you're using these voter registration databases to send out ballots and then check ballots, I mean, why can't a hacker go in there and throw in a bunch of names? Now you got ballots, I'm just showing out hypotheticals. There's no evidence that that occurred. I firmly believe there's no evidence that there was any manipulation in 2016 by the Russians or anybody. But definitely today, you don't see the FBI or the NSA or Homeland Security raising the flag that says, oh, somebody hacked into the Pennsylvania database and that's what's taking place. But again, we come back to perception. You know, if you recall, I forget which election it was where they were talking about these, you know, voting machines that were paperless and that, you know, you'd go in there and you'd cast your vote, but then people were saying, hey, we can hack into this. We can change your vote. We can demonstrate how this can be done. This is not secure voting. And this is, again, I come back to the notion of, you know, I think there's universal recognition that paper ballots are perhaps the most secure way to do a vote. And yet there isn't widespread endorsement of that. And you have to ask yourself the question, why? Why aren't these election commissions willing to do the most secure and practical means? And I think the, you know, an answer that comes out, I'm not saying it's the answer. One answer comes out is, because then you can't manipulate the vote. And I'm disturbed by the notion, for instance, down in Atlanta, they found a, they were transporting ballots using the data sticks. And they take the data and it was marked provisional ballots. And I think the big scandal was when somebody looked at it, they weren't provisional ballots, they were real ballots. But my point is, why the heck is it on a data stick? I mean, that alone creates, you know, you lose the data stick, you lose the votes. Is there a second data stick around? You pop it, then when you stick it into the computer, this is insane. There's got to be a better way to do this. I have to say right up front, I'm not an expert on these voting machines. And there may be an expert out there who can sit there and laugh at me and say, now, Scott, you got it all wrong. You don't understand what's really going on. X, Y, and Z is really taking place. And I hope that's the case. But as your average citizen, I can't explain to you. And I'll tell you what, because this is about little de-democracy, if you don't have a system of voter security that can be comprehended by the average citizen, the day they go in there, so they have confidence, that's not much of an election. Because one of the reasons why a lot of people don't vote is they just don't believe that their vote matters, that their vote counts, that, you know, the system is taken over, that it somehow can be manipulated. If you engender voter confidence, I believe you will engender voter participation. The sad thing is you were mentioning before just how divided we are at the moment in the United States. And I think that it's very sad that there could be the potential of violence depending on the outcome between two candidates that are so, as we mentioned before, so appallingly inadequate. The idea, and I am particularly disturbed by the sentiment on the centrist left, that once Biden might take office, that there'll be a return to civility, a return to a better way of being in American politics. And the idea that Joe Biden's 94 crime bill or any of his other policies are in any way civil, I think is really disgusting. I just wanted you to comment on the fact that, you know, whether we have a Trump or a Biden presidency, obviously it looks like it's going to be Biden. The Trump has been business as usual in a much uglier way, but it will still be business as usual under Biden. You know, one of the interesting things of this election was, you know, the exit polling that took place. And some of the details that came out about that, you know, we were, you know, we were told, you know, a consumer of mainstream media was enundated over and over and over again during the lead-up to this election that, you know, the Trump was murdering the American people. We had 200,000 plus dead. And this is all Donald Trump's fault and the American people hate him because of this. He's a bad leader because of this, et cetera. Then we were also told that Trump destroyed the economy because he didn't respond properly to COVID-19. Therefore, he allowed the economy to collapse and then he, you know, he turned his back on the people with the stimulus and that he's to blame for your economic suffering. We were told that he's a racist. He's a fascist, et cetera. And yet the exit polling came out and COVID was not the number one issue. In fact, COVID was well down the list of people's concern. The economy was the number one issue. And moreover, Trump's handling of the economy, there had to be something right here because on every demographic except white men, on every demographic except white men, he outperformed any modern Republican candidate who outperformed them with white women. If you remember in the lead up to the thing, we were told that white suburban women, especially college educated women were fleeing Trump. No more voted for him this time around than last time. More black women voted for him. More black men voted for him. More Latinos voted for him. More anybody who wasn't a white male. The only place that he lost votes was in the white male sector which tells you that Trump had to be doing something right. That with all of his crassness, with all of his vulgarity, he was doing something right as a leader because all these people who were being primed by the mainstream media to hate and despise this man went out and voted for him. I mean that, so when you say business as usual, I will say that I don't think that Biden is gonna come back to business. I think Trump was a unique leader. You either loved him or you hated him, but he governed in a unique style that Joe Biden will never master because Joe Biden is the living personification of the establishment. And so yeah, we're gonna go back to business as usual circa Barack Obama, circa George W. Bush, circa Bill Clinton. But we're not gonna go back to business as usual under Donald Trump because that was a completely different animal. And it's not gonna be replicated. The interesting thing is gonna be see how Joe Biden transitioned from a nation that has been shaped with four years of Trump and trying to transition that back to the establishment because I think there's gonna be a large number, a large segment of society is gonna say, no, we don't want to transition back to that. That didn't work. That's why we supported this guy. That's why things were starting to work from our perception. I don't think that Biden, that the country's just gonna immediately breathe a heavy sigh of relief and rally around Joe Biden and say, thank God we've returned to normalcy. I don't see that happening. Yeah, normalcy was a problem, but Trump was- Trump may not have been the solution, but he was different. Yes, I mean, he broke the mold, you would think, but now the mold is being put back again. It's being glued back, right? But now the clay doesn't necessarily want to go back in the mold. Right, and neither guy is the answer, clearly. But it's surprising how many people voted. Even though there seems to be, I don't think she was aided Biden the way Hillary was. I think in the 2016 election, people voted against Hillary rather than for Trump. And in this election, a lot of people voted against Trump rather than for Biden. Right, I think Trump's supporters voted for Trump. Yeah. They made a decision that they could overlook a lot of his issues. Joe Biden, the word, I mean, there's a lot of things about it. I think Elizabeth hit it on the head. I mean, there's just, you guys know my history with Joe Biden, I think. And you know that I- No. I have a, well, I mean, it dates back to my September 1998 Senate hearing where he mocked me, called me Scotty Boy. That's why they get the big limousines and you don't. And he basically disregarded my testimony about Iraq and weapons and mass destruction. He was compelled to apologize for it. He wrote a letter to the Washington Post that they published and then he invited me back a month later and I had a 45 minute meeting with him one-on-one in his office where he explained why he did what he did. And afterwards he promised that he would stay in touch. He wrote me a very nice letter. You know, Scott, our conversation was wonderful. We will be in touch. This is an important issue. In 2002, I reached out to him, or no, in 2000 I reached out, I had written an article, this is on the eve of the election. And I said, you know, the Senate needs to tone down. It's Iraq rhetoric. And I had written an article in arms control today and I had sent it out. Biden refused to meet with me. He instead he sent his chief of staff who called me a traitor. And being a former Marine, that conversation didn't go very well and it almost ended in violence. But he backed down. But then he said, I agree with everything you say and here you've got the facts. But politically we can't do this right now. We have to stay with Al Gore. So we're gonna disregard you. We disregard the facts. In 2002, in the summer of 2002, Luger, Senator Luger, the Republican and Joe Biden were saying that it's not a time for a hearing about Iraq. We're not gonna hold hearings. And I and others were pressing them for hearings. We need to have expert hearings about weapons and mass destruction. And again, I reached out and I said, I'm willing to testify about the state of affairs for weapons and mass destruction. Well, so much pressure was put on them to have a hearing that they ended up agreeing at the end of the month to have a hearing, but they kept me out of it. They wouldn't let me in the hearing. Instead they brought in Peter Hamza, Richard Butler, a bunch of other frauds who lied about Iraq about weapons and then used that testimony to justify the vote for war. I hate Joe Biden. I despise Joe Biden. I blame him for facilitating the war in Iraq. So people like me who know Joe Biden, I think, and I would say any black male that got caught up in Joe Biden's anti-crime bill hates Joe Biden. The vast majority of Americans know of this bag of hot air that every once while appears on C-SPAN and gives long-winded speeches about nothing. So they view him as yet another harmless politician. And so I don't think there was too many Trump people out there that voted against Biden. They voted for Trump. Whereas Trump had been vilified for four years by the Democratic establishment. And I do think there was a huge number of anti-Trump voters, which again, Biden needs to, if he won't, but Biden is in his people need to understand that the 73 million people that voted for you didn't vote for you. They voted against Trump. And once you become president, they're not gonna rally around you like Trump supporters rallied around Trump. They're gonna hold you to account. And this is gonna be a completely kind of small D democracy going forward. And I don't think the Biden administration recognize, if he tries to stack his administration with a bunch of Obama or Clinton era reruns, that's not gonna go over well. And yet that appears to be what he's probably gonna do. And I think the American people, because they didn't vote for him and there's so many people against him that he's in for a world of hurt, which again comes down to small D democracy reforming ourselves. I don't think we can truly reform ourselves as a democratic nation until we figure out how with 320 million people, we end up with Joe Biden and Donald Trump on the ballot for the most powerful position in the land. Surely we've got somebody else in this nation that's better qualified than those two. Surely we do. But they're gonna be backing a very big money in there. Well, Citizens United is the, that's one of those small D things that's gonna have to be fixed. I think- I never heard your story about Biden, Scott. That's really shocking. That if you could tell us more unless it's completely private, but you're a 45 minute conversation, did he admit why he took the position he did that it was purely political? Was he personally against this invasion? Is that the impression you got? Well, remember our conversation was in 1998. So at that time we were talking about the Clinton policy. And one of the problems is I was invited, it was actually a big honor. I was invited to something that hadn't occurred ever before, which is a joint session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Armed Services Committee. I was supposed to give testimony with Madeleine Albright and Secretary of Defense, I believe Cohen was at the time. And that's a big honor to be seen as the equal of a Secretary of State and a Secretary of Defense. But they bowed out. They did not wanna get up there because they knew that I knew the truth and they couldn't tell a lie because I would just sit there and say, no, that's exactly not what happened. In fact, as we called you on this day, Madam Secretary, this phone number, this is the conversation. I was there. I know what happened. So they knew, I knew the truth. They didn't wanna have anything to do with me. And the Democrats were told to shut down the hearing and they tried. They tried every parliamentary trick. But at that time Trent Lott was the Senate majority leader. And I thought it was odd because before the hearing I was invited to Trent Lott's office. And I had a nice little one-on-one. I got my picture taken with Trent Lott and as a Reagan Republican, this was like a big deal. I'm getting my picture taken with a Senate Republican leader. And then he walks me into the Senate chamber. And I'm like, this is weird. Does everybody get walked into the Senate chamber? No, they don't. What had happened is the Democrats had tried to stop and they did some sort of, back then you needed 60 votes to get the rule change. What Trent Lott did is rather than let them shut down the hearing, he suspended the Senate. Again, the first time in the history of the Senate he suspended the Senate and then reconvened the Senate just for this hearing and then walked me in. And so the mere fact that he walked me in immediately alienated every Democratic Senator in this hearing to me. And I didn't realize that was going on. So a lot of what was going on with Joe Biden is he was PO'd about what was transpiring and he viewed me as nothing more than the compliant tool of the Republican Party. When the fact was I was there to testify about the truth about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and American policy regarding disarmament. And Biden sort of explained that to me when I met with him. He also accused me at the time of wanting to start a war. He said, you believe you're the one who has, you believe you get to pull the trigger. You believe you're the one because you're the inspector. Scotty Boy wants to get in. And if they don't let Scotty Boy in then there's going to be a war. But they get paid more money to make decisions than you do, da, da, da, da. I said, no, I'm not making that decision. And I said, what I'm doing is holding up a mirror to you. And I'm telling you that you voted in favor of resolution 687, a chapter seven resolution of the United Nations Security Council, which says that Iraq must obey and let inspectors in. And if they don't, then they will be held to account. You sent me to Iraq. I'm doing the inspections. I was stopped. All I'm doing is telling you that I can't complete the job you told me to do. Somebody said, well, what's inspections do you want to do? And I said, what's inspections do you want me not to do? The one where we're going to find chemical weapons? The one where we're going to find by-law? You tell me which one you don't want me to do because every inspection I went on went on with the goal of pursuing our mandated tasks of disarming Iraq. So you don't stop the inspection process because it's all about the inspection process. And when the Iraqi stopped the inspection process you have to do something and yet you don't want to. You pull the rug out from under us. And Biden was like, okay, I see that you don't want to start the war but you put us in a very difficult position. I said, that's not my problem. It's not my problem that you're in a difficult position. It's your problem that you're in a difficult position. You know, it's your problem that you said you need 100% confirmation of all weapons of mass destruction. You wouldn't accept 96%. You wouldn't accept 97%. You wouldn't accept 98%. You wanted 100% and you said, the job isn't done until you find 100%. So I was going into Iraq looking for the last 2% to 5% which means I'm digging deep. And had you let me do my job I would have been able to tell you either there are or they're not and then you can make a decision. But the fact of the matter was and Biden admitted this it was never about WMD. It was always about creating the perception of Iraqi non-compliance. And because I was getting so close to be able to say definitively that there's no WMD in Iraq they had to shut down the inspections. And this is here again, Scott. 1998. September, I wrote about it before an airstrike when they pulled the. It was before December airstrike, right? The operation Desert Fox in December of 1998. But anyways, that's why I have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to Joe Biden. I will never trust him as a man. I will never trust him as a politician. And I definitely won't trust him as the president of the United States. That's just me. He then became a leading and very important proponent of the 2003 invasion. He paid this speech in which he was, and frankly, I've never met him. You have Mike Ravel served with him. So, and he told me his intellect isn't all much to speak about. But I think Biden thinks to himself was some great intellectual. He starts throwing around the Treaty of Westphalia and all that. He's trying to say that this preemptive war was not a preemptive war. No, he's. Which is a violation of the UN Charter. He was trying to justify this war legally in this very important speech. And he was the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time. He supported a Republican president's war. And that is never mentioned once during this camp, not by the mainstream media anyway. They didn't mention it. No, and it's not just that. He initiated a process that led to everything that has transpired since then. I mean, our invasion of Iraq in 2002, you know, helped create the condition for the Arab Spring and helped create condition for the chaos that's transpiring today. You know, it all dates back to that decision. Had we not invaded Iraq? I mean, we wouldn't be in half the mess we are today. Millions of people would be alive today. Millions of American dollars would not have been squandered. Thousands of American servicemen would be home with their families. Tens of thousands of American servicemen would have their legs, their arms, their brains, their faculties. Oh, this is on him. All of this is on Joe Biden. But as you said, the mainstream media is today, he's just Uncle Joe, man. He's a nice guy. He's a family man. He's got his little grandchildren. He trots out. He loves his kids. He's a good man. He's a good decent human being. He's not. He's a warmongering SOB. He was, you know, good friends with John McCain. He was a fellow warmongering SOB. You know, Biden gave us Libya. He helped give us Libya. A lot of people forget that. Now Biden helped keep, turn a war that should have been over in Afghanistan in a year and a half into a 20 year nightmare where we're still not gonna get out because Joe Biden damn sure isn't gonna get American troops out of Afghanistan. He criticized Trump all he wants about Iraq and Syria. You think Joe Biden's gonna withdraw from Syria? You think he's gonna withdraw from Iraq? No. I mean, this is the reality of Joe Biden. This was an America voted for, but they didn't realize that. They thought they were voting for Uncle Joe. And he was the viceroy of the United States in Ukraine after the coup d'etat. We know that Victoria Nuland said he would play a key role before the Yanukovych was overthrown. Talk to me a little bit about what Biden did in Ukraine. Now, in this whole thing with the laptop, et cetera, or even during the impeachment process, it was never reported the U.S. role in the overthrow of this government. That is the backdrop. That was the first act in this drama. Fox didn't do it, MSNBC didn't do it. No one would ever touch that. But without that first act in the drama, you can't understand the play. You don't have anything else. Look, the Maidan Revolution was not a revolution. It was an American back coup d'etat where the CIA was heavily involved in recruiting. If you remember, the intercepted phone call of Victoria Nuland, and she talked about Yats, Yats and our boys. Well, how can you speak of our boys? And it turns out that our boys were hand-picked, taken by the CIA out of Ukraine, trained up, and then sent back, and these were going to be the people who were going to run the government. We were hand-picking the government to do our bidding, and it was all done as a revenge against Putin. I mean, again, what predates our Ukraine intervention was Michael McFaul's fantasy that he sold to Barack Obama that when Putin stepped aside as president, became prime minister and allowed Medvedev, Demetri Medvedev and his president, that we could empower Medvedev to stay in, keep Putin out. We could change him. We could go back to puppet-like Yeltsin that we can control, because Michael McFaul was all about the Yeltsin puppeteering and all that. But what happened is that Putin came back, despite our intervention. Remember, Hillary Clinton speaking out, trying to get the opposition to rise up against Putin. Direct interference in the democratic processes of a sovereign country. The kind of thing we would scream bloody murder about if it happened here. But we did that, our CIA, all these talking heads you see on TV. This is why they've all unfollowed me on Twitter and everything, because I call them out. They're all like, no, the dude, you're the chief of station in Moscow. You know, damn well what happened. I've said that to McFaul, you're the ambassador. You know what the chief of station was doing. You know how much money was being funneled into the Russian opposition. You want me to give you bank accounts, because I will hunt that down and give it to you. You know that was happening. Oh no, we never, and then we can't talk about that. But it happened. Just because you can't talk about it doesn't mean it didn't happen. Putin knows it happened. Putin rolled up all these. There's a very important time leading up to Ukraine, who were the Russian security services, who rolled over all our CIA assets in Moscow. They know exactly what we were doing. They know exactly what we're up to. They know everything. And then so we got upset. So how do we punish Putin? Well, we go to Ukraine and we put forward a coup d'etat in Ukraine. You know, this was purely a CIA driven operation. Joe Biden knows this. You know, he's protected because the transcripts of the meetings he has will be classified for 75 years. He'll be long dead, will be all dead before this stuff sees light. But hopefully this record is made right here and I'm gonna tell you right now. In 75 years, when they declassify those transcripts, you will see the same thing we see today when we talked about CIA involvement with Mossaday. When we talked about CIA involvement with Bay of Pigs, it was real. They meant to do it. They were going after regime change. That's what they wanted. That's what they want. That's what they still want. And remember, Joe Biden, this is the scary part. He keeps talking about, I'm gonna, Putin knows me. Well, Putin knows him. Putin kicked his butt. But Putin also knows what Joe Biden was trying to do. And Joe Biden keeps saying, I'm gonna hold them to account. How? How are you gonna hold Russia to account? For what? You're gonna be a tough guy with Russia. And the scary part is when Biden was saying that back then, we had the INF Treaty. We had a viable strategic arms treaty. We had relations, arms control relations with the Russians. We don't have those anymore. And right now we're back to the situation where the wrong move in Europe, the wrong move by NATO could precipitate a conflict that leads to immediate nuclear exchange. The kind of 1950s, 1960s stuff where the world has gone overnight. And that's another reason why I'm anti-Joe Biden because everybody mocked Donald Trump. We can't give him the suitcase. He's irresponsible. Well, you know what? No nuclear weapons flew during his four years and he actually was trying his best to create the de-emphasis of nuclear weapons with North Korea. As imperfect as that outreach was. His desire to transform the INF Treaty, which I think is misguided, but to include China so that we can control Chinese nuclear weapons. Probably not viable, but not a bad way to think. Joe Biden, on the other hand, is gonna come in and he's going to just build up our nuclear weapons and he's going to confront the Russians. It's just a dangerous situation. This is a man who believes he can, he can posture, words matter. And again, we go back to Ukraine. The United States has long had active measures in Ukraine and in Russia that are designed to achieve regime change. And that's just the fact. Putin's beating us across the board. He's beating us in Ukraine right now whether we recognize it or not. The Russians have learned to live with sanctions. They've got the Crimea and they've put Europe in a huge quandary. One of the reasons why there's so much tension between NATO and the United States today is because of the unresolved issue of the Ukraine. Europe needs Ukraine to be solved so they can get back to economic normalcy because they need Russia as a viable trading partner. The United States isn't gonna let that happen because we're not gonna normalize relations till they leave Crimea. They're never gonna leave Crimea. I mean, Donald Trump was our one hope of moving this issue down the road to where we could get past Crimea. We believe had he been re-elected for four years, that would have been one of his policy goals. It's not gonna happen under Joe Biden. Take us through Biden's role in Ukraine. So if Victoria Nuland says on that tape, Joe Biden is gonna pay this key role to help glue this together. The midwifing of a new leader. That's the key word in that whole thing with midwifing because that- The way the system normally works is policy, interagency policy is managed by the National Security Council. And so you have the National Security Advisor. He's a principal. And then you have a Deputy National Security Advisor. And then you have regional heads, people who control certain areas of the world. And normally policy bubbles up, meaning that you'll give direction, it'll go down. There'll be a working group about Ukraine where the experts from the CIA, the DIA, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from the Defense Department, from Treasury all get together and they say, this is the policy we want. And then they bubble it up, it comes to a deputies meeting. And this is where the deputies get to come in, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Deputy CIA Director come in and they work at through fur. They send things down to the working group for revision and it comes up to them. Then they take it to the principals. And that's the National Security Advisor with the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, usually the principals plus one, plus two, some experts come in with them. And they finalize policy, which is then presented to the president of the United States. That's the way it's supposed to work. What happened here is that Joe Biden was made policies are, which means that everything is done by Joe Biden. All that other process is out the window. Joe Biden is in charge because this was a very sensitive thing. So Joe Biden is the guy who is directing the State Department to do things. Joe Biden is the guy that's directing the CIA to do things. So it's a top to bottom reversal of how policy is supposed to be made, how policy is supposed to be implemented. Joe Biden was the heart and soul. Nothing happened in Ukraine that Joe Biden wasn't aware of. Normally, what happens, and one reason why you like bottom to top president is that down at the bottom all the crazy, I used to function at the deputies level, all the crazy ideas come out there. Man, what if we do this? What if we overthrow the president of Ukraine? What if we have a Maidan revolution? And then normally, Sainter heads come in and go, dude, let's do the ramifications of that. We now get Russian intervention to take over the Crimean Peninsula and we're in a permanent state of conflict. And then it goes up to deputies level and they all go, bad idea, send it back, refine that one. So there's some sort of control, sanity control process when we're working up from the bottom, the crazy ideas get filtered out. So generally, what's presented before the principle for the president is a well fleshed out policy decision that everybody's in agreement on how it's gonna unfold. Biden reversed that and he's directing things. And so what happened is, he is directing Victoria Nuland to form this new government. His fingers are everywhere, which means that he's also getting involved in things that the vice president should never be involved in. For instance, like having a prosecutor fired. I don't care what the background story of that is, they have Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States in a position where he has to threaten to withhold a billion dollars of aid so that a special prosecutor is fired. No, that's demeaning, that's bad, but it happened because he was bizarre. Everything came through him. Nothing happened without him, which now, I don't wanna deviate the hunter, but it puts hunters appointment to barisma in a greater perspective because it's not just the son of the vice president, it's the son of the Ukraine czar where every decision about the Ukraine is made by the vice president. And now his son is on the board of the most corrupt energy company in Ukrainian history. And again, that wasn't as explored as much as it perhaps needed to be, but no, Joe Biden, again, he's protecting now. It's a lot like if you're, Elizabeth, you may not, you might know of it, but I'm sure Joe, Henry Kissinger's, what was it, the 638 committee or 648 committee, he had a special committee under Nixon where he basically he plotted world domination and they said that stuff will never see the light of day, it'll be classified forever because it was so unconstitutional what they were doing. Well, fortunately, because of the Pentagon papers and stuff, that story got out and people were able to explore it. Maybe someday somebody will be able to get access to Biden's Ukraine deliberations, but he feels protected because it feels like he's protected by this wall of classification. So the US overthrows the elected government, Biden becomes essentially the overlord of Ukraine. US State Department official becomes a Ukrainian citizen on one day and then the finance minister the next. Jeffrey Archer, a friend of the John Kerry family, Kerry being prime minister, together with this vice president's son, get on this board to make a lot of money. Now, I don't think anybody's ever proven a link with how Hunter Biden got that job to begin with, but it's after the overthrow and it's after all these people are being installed by the United States. And as you're saying, Biden was in charge of that operation. Nothing happened in Ukraine without Biden. Including his son getting that job. Yeah, to pretend that Hunter Biden slipped into Ukraine under the cover of darkness without his father knowing and magically accepting this board position without his father's concurrence or knowledge is absurd. His father made that happen. But the problem is there's a bipartisan cover up here of the U.S. role in the overthrow of that government. And that explains why he could get that job and Biden's role as the czar. Fox is not gonna tell you that. MSNBC is not gonna tell you that. CNN is not gonna tell you. And the New York Times, they're all debunked when anybody tried to suggest that there was a U.S. involvement in the overthrow of that government. It's gone because they have to cover that up. U.S. doesn't do that. Well, that's just to remember that, and you're 100% right. Well, Biden may have been the czar. He still had to deal with the committee of eight and the committee of four when you deal with covert action. And so Biden has this intimate relationship with John McCain with other senior Republican senators with Democratic senators. So this wasn't just an Obama-Biden intervention in Ukraine. He had the support of the Republican establishment because this was about going after Vladimir Putin. And you have to keep it in perspective. It was just about Ukraine in isolation. It would never have gotten this high level of tension. The reason why Biden was put in charge is that this is about sticking it to Vladimir Putin. This is about getting revenge on the embarrassing collapse of the reset. I mean, Barack Obama committed to this absurd notion of a reset with Dmitry Medvedev. And when Putin came back into power in 2012, when he won the election, despite Hillary Clinton speaking out, this was a thumb in the eye of the Obama administration and of every Republican who bought into the reset. And now the Republicans are saying, you were embarrassed, the Republicans bought into this regime change nonsense in Ukraine. And that's why there's the coverup because Republican fingers are just as dirty as the Democratic fingers when it comes to what transpired in Maidan. Right, exactly. And we'll never hear that story about the American involvement there, which you can't understand Biden's role and everything that happened after that. And if you read Victor Shokin, the prosecutor that he wanted to fight, his testimony in a court case in Vienna, he says, clearly I was fired because we were looking into the Sun's company. And then Trump in his inimitable way screwed it up by calling the president of Ukraine and instead of the Department of Justice doing this, he got involved to ask Zelensky to look into all of this. That was a big mistake. They impeached him on that, which was just extraordinary to me, Scott. And what we saw again was this recitation of Russia. And I wanna ask you, Biden is one. He's up by 1600 votes in Georgia, 13,000 in Pennsylvania, 20,000 in Nevada, 40,000 Arizona. He's one. I haven't heard the word Russia interfering in this election. Last few days, a couple of weeks ago, Russia and Iran were interfering. Russia and Iran and China were. No, he's one. And what happened to Russia's involvement in this election? No, this is the cleanest election in the history of a foreign interference. There's just no foreign, there's nothing that happened to taint this. The American people weren't brainwashed. You're not gonna hear about, what was that, Concord Analytica? Cambridge Analytica that allegedly brainwashed us all. I mean, the moment you opened your eyes on Facebook, somehow flashing lights told you to support Putin and vote Trump. The absurdity that was going on, you're not gonna hear word one of that because that would taint the legitimacy of the Biden outcome. The 73 million people that voted for Joe Biden currently don't read Facebook, don't have access to Twitter, don't have any social media, they're pure as the driven snow and they voted based upon pure intent. It's just absurd, you're right. We're not even hearing, oh, Biden overcame Trump's ground game and the Russian interference. And the Russian interference, yeah. We're not even saying that. They want to get that story, they have to, straight, they have to say that. If you think it was real, if you think it was real on the scale and scope that they were talking about, they'd be bragging how they beat the Russians. Exactly. I mean, that would be one of my number one talking points. You know, I didn't just beat Donald Trump's ground game. It's called Vladimir Putin's propaganda machine and I overcame it and it was wonderful victory for America and American democracy. God bless you and God bless our troops. Or whatever nonsense he puts. If you could even get that out as a coherent sentence, if he could even express that coherently, yeah, that's what he would probably say. It's what he wants to say. Look, I'll be careful because I know people that are struggling with late-stage dimensions. I have it in my family. I just don't, I'm just saddened by this. I mean, I, you know, it shouldn't be happening. I mean, that's all I'll say on that. Well, on that point, I think it's interesting. It was something that came up last night with Pepevescuvar and I think it's interesting to also state that a number of viewers pointed out why is this not considered elder abuse? Why is his family putting him out there? And I think when you look at the Hunter Biden scandal and you look at Bursman, all of these things, it's very clear that he's their friend ticket. So this is something that his family are doing to him in order to, it seems, benefit themselves. It's really, that is really sad when you think about it that way. If it comes down to that, yeah. I mean, you know, but then again, where is the impetus gonna be on investigating this? I don't see, you know, a Sally Yates Justice Department pursuing this matter closely. You know, and the question is, how long is he going to be, you know, president? You know, it's a rapid decline. One only has to take a look at the decline of Robert Mueller, you know, and how quickly he transformed from a man who could give a coherent talk to a man who sat there in the most painful fashion before the Senate answering questions that he couldn't answer. You know, and, you know, today we don't see Mueller. Mueller will not be trotted out in front of anybody because he can't be. And when's that gonna happen to Joe? You know, at what point in time where will he no longer be capable of functioning? And then we get, you know, president, Kamala Harris. I might have said her name wrong and if I did, I apologize, it wasn't deliberate. Well, you said it right. Okay, good. Let's talk a little about the cabinet that Biden might put together, Scott. A lot of names and floated out there, but I saw a piece the other day on Axios that McConnell is gonna be tough on Biden. So to try to, in the confirmation hearings, it looks like the Republicans are gonna keep the Senate. That he won't even give them Les Susan Rice, for example. So there might be even more right-wing candidates in there. What are your guesses for Secretary of State, for Secretary of Defense, for National Security Advisor, for example? Well, for Secretary of Defense, there's a, and I mean, I wasn't prepared to go down this route, so I didn't refresh my memory. There's a female, a former female Assistant Secretary of Defense. Yeah. Michelle Floner, yeah. That's exactly right, Michelle. And I believe that I think she's gonna, she's a leading candidate for Secretary of Defense. She would, and not my favorite person, I don't support, but, you know, what we're looking for is competence. You know, we're looking for somebody who knows the system and can move into the system and, you know, keep the system functioning. So I think she would be a very good choice for Secretary of Defense from that standpoint. We're not gonna get, I mean, I don't think you and I are gonna get the people we would want to be Secretary of Defense. You know, we're going to get establishment types that promote the military industrial complex, that will promote the continued growth of the American military, and will continue to promote the militarization of American diplomatic interaction abroad. And that is, that is Michelle in a heartbeat. You know, Secretary of State is a more difficult one. If he's denied the Susan Rices, he would probably be denied the Samantha Powers. He may have to dip into him. We've seen him, there's been talk of him interviewing a number of Republicans. And so I think you're gonna see a Biden administration actually put up a number of establishment Republicans from the never Trump crowd, you know, who've passed the purity test and try and shoehorn them. And I, you know, I can't come up with a name off the top of my head. I know he's been talking to Kasich, former governor of Ohio, could be a logical candidate for Secretary of State, things of that nature. National security advisor, first of all, it's probably gonna be Tony Blinken or somebody like that. He's got these people around him. The Senate has no say on that. So I think you're gonna see the national security advisor being a hardcore Obama era person who, you know, and you're gonna see somebody who, you know, is going to seek to have that kind of, you know, Obama toughness, you know, and Obama openness, even though it's not. I mean, you know, the advice that's been given about, you know, everybody's saying, oh, at least Biden will go back to the JCPOA. We'll get the Iran nuclear agreement back. No, he won't because a precondition from Biden is a renegotiation of the JCPOA. He says, we will immediately go back to the JCPOA if the Iranians agree to begin negotiating a new deal. I mean, it's not gonna negotiate a new deal. So, you know, the Biden, no Biden, the Biden form policy is going to be castrated from day one. And maybe that's not a politically correct term. Hamstrung from day one, but it, you know, they think the world is gonna respond to his grand leadership, but the world knows the truth. The American people may not know about Biden, the Ukrainians are, the world knows about it. The world knows about the reality of the Obama era of foreign policy and the buckle that that brought on the world. And I just think that whatever team Biden assembles is gonna be a team that is gonna have a very hard time getting traction. First and foremost, because he still has to deal with COVID-19. And he's gonna find out that it ain't that easy of a problem to deal with. And there's such great expectations for Joe to come in and fix his thing, snap his fingers and make it all go away. It's not. And then he's gonna have to deal with the economic reality of COVID-19. Now he's gonna have to get his domestic affairs in order before he can even begin to talk about, you know, fixing foreign policy. And so I think you're gonna find that a lot of the foreign policy that transpires, there'll be some superficial things. But, you know, how do you repair relationship with NATO? I mean, Trump has gone so far down that route. And what do you want to do? Send more troops to Poland? How do you fix the relationship with NATO? Send a division to Germany while we reinforce Poland. You know, send more nuclear weapons to Europe. But I don't know, you know, how much Biden is gonna be able to do in terms of changing the world that Trump has created. He's gotta fix a lot of things at home first. And a lot of these are gonna be insurmountable. He's not gonna be able to do, you know, the tax reform that he claims he wants to do and have our economy respond positively. It's gonna be a great challenge. And he's gonna need a lot of Republican help there. So I think you're gonna see a Biden cabinet that's going to have a heavy Republican representation. One, because he's gonna claim that he wants to reach out to the other side and create this, you know, this American government. But two, if Mitch McConnell's in the way, you're gonna have to nominate people who are gonna be able to pass confirmation. I think pandemic is gonna be what he's first absolutely tested on. It's the reason why I think a lot of people voted against Trump. They may have voted for him last time. So this is the really huge challenge. Everyone's gonna be looking to him now. And he's gonna be faced with the same problem. All leaders around the world are. How do you balance maintaining an economy where keeping people safe and providing a situation where the virus will die out by restricting social meetings, by keeping people separate, by locking certain parts of the economy down. Even Boris Johnson now has had a month of lockdown almost the whole country again because of the resurgence there. Now, because it's the first year of his term, he might be able to afford an economic downturn in terms of resulting from a lockdown where Trump was, his bad luck had happened in the election year that this pandemic came and destroyed the economy that he was running on, 100%. That's what he was running on. Even though he had a 31% GDP growth on November 1st, that wasn't enough to win over the American people. It came too late. How many people died because of that, Scott? I mean, how many people? He opposed lockdowns. He opposed masks. Well, he said he was from masks. But he clearly was encouraging, reopening of the economy. We had 121,000 cases yesterday in one day in the United States. So people are acting like it doesn't exist anymore. They're in denial about this virus. So, I mean, Biden could afford, I'm saying, to take an economic hit at the beginning of his term, maybe. And I would hope that he takes the scientists' advice and do what they tell him to do and not try to play it. Well, then he's going to have to get Congress to pass a hell of a stimulus. Yes. They're going to have to create something like what they have in Australia, a job keeper program. And in Britain, they had paying workers, their wages because you're telling them to stay home. You got to keep printing money to do that. I understand. That's the only way you'd be able to pay for that. But yes, this is a stimulus that the money doesn't go up to the top, doesn't go to the cruise industry and the airlines, but goes to workers to stay home. If you don't have to work so we can. My family's personally impacted. I thank goodness. I'm able to continue doing what I do because I work from home and I write. You know, hey, I'm not really impact. My wife has been if she works in the financial sector. So she's an essential employee in her industry kept going. But, you know, people close to me have lost their job. And, you know, they had to foreclose on homes. They can't send their kids to college. You know, I mean, their lives are turned upside down. And it's a cascading effect. So, you know, there's got to be some sort of stimulus because remember, there's, there's 70 million people out there that believed in opening up the economy. You know, keeping, keeping it going. And if you shut them down and don't, and then there's a, that's another way you get, you know, angry people in the streets. And Biden's got, you know, right now the default in the American public appears to be putting angry people in the street. And, you know, the more unemployed, angry people you have, they have no hope. You know, the more chance for, for political violence exists. So yeah, it's a big challenge. I mean, I'm interested to see what Joe's going to do. You know, he has a plan. He said so. So I got him a chance to implement it. Maybe Elizabeth wants to get in on this about Kamala. What kind of a president, what kind of a vice president will she make? What do you think about her, Scott? She seems to be a very ambitious and opportunistic woman. And it's very likely that she will be president before the term is out. Right. You know, I first found out about her, I forget, was it Barack Obama that, that made a comment about how pretty she was. I mean, it was just this, this unbelievably sexist comment about how good looking the attorney general of, of California was. I don't live in California. And I said, oh, okay, she is, but I mean, that's sort of like, we don't want to go down in that route. Do we? You know, we should judge her on her. Here. So Trump would say not Obama, but anyway, no, but I'm pretty sure this happened. I'll Google it and I'll apologize right now to Barack Obama. If I've somehow smeared you, but my memory hasn't totally faded yet. I'm fairly certain he said something about how, how good looking she was or attractive she was. But, you know, I didn't realize, I didn't follow her closely until she ran for president. I was a big Tulsi Gabbard supporter. I still am. I'm a big fan of Tulsi. And when Tulsi took her down, you know, I, you know, I started doing the research behind, you know, Tulsi's accusations and then they realized that, you know, there's some issues with this person. She's not, she's not what she claims to be. She's running on a, on a platform of lies or misrepresentations. Mis, you know, characterizations. And then I, I wasn't impressed with watching her there. I think someone just said he called her the best looking attorney general in the country. That's right. I do get. Apologize to her. You're sitting on that. Yeah. But I mean, but still that's, that's the first time I heard of her when he said he's the, she's the best looking attorney general in the country. But, you know, look, he doesn't respond well under pressure. You know, I spent a lot of time in a, in a line of work where you assess people's faces when you, you know, confront them with things to see, read their facial language to see how they respond. It's not a perfect science, but it gives you a gut feeling. Her face doesn't respond well to, to being confronted. She doesn't respond well to being confronted. She becomes a totally different person than the character that she, he portrays becomes a mean person, a mean spirited person. And I think that's what we're getting. We're getting a very petty, mean spirited person. Is he smart? Yeah. I'll give her credit for being smart. Is he motivated? Does he have, you know, a fire in her belly? Yes. Is she going to be lazy? No. I think she's going to be a very activist, engaged vice president. But here's the danger of her. Biden knows one model of being a vice president and that's the model that Barack Obama gave him. Where he's a very hands-on vice president who plays a heavy role in policymaking. Barack Obama leaned on Joe Biden quite a bit for, for policy decisions. He, he wasn't quite a coat. He wasn't the co-president that Dick Cheney was, but you know, Brock, but, you know, he also wasn't the kind of vice president. It just sits in the corner and takes random overseas trips to, you know, to, to open up crayon factories. He was a very active president. And I think that's the model that, that Joe Biden is looking for, especially given his perhaps reduced cognitive abilities. So she, she's untested. Remember, she has done nothing but be an attorney general of California and a senator of California, where she's never been truly tested by, by any major crisis. And she's never been tested by, by any major crisis. She doesn't know how to govern America. She doesn't know how to interact with the world. And now she's in a position where she's not only just one heartbeat away from the presidency, she's going to be the de facto president in many ways. She's going to be taking those principles meetings because Joe isn't going to be taking those principles. She's going to be interfacing. And so I think we're getting a very intelligent, a very, you know, I, I, you know, how much more ambition can you have? She's on the verge of becoming the first female president in the United States. And on the surface, let me just take a step back. And say, wow. First female president. You know, my, my mom, she's 80. Gosh. Coming up on 80, 87. Still alive. Fighting cancer. She's not going to be around much longer. And her one regret when Hillary died or not died when Hillary failed to get elected. I said, I'll never get to see a female president. And while I'm not a big fan of Joe Biden, you know, I hope my mom gets to see a female president. It may not be the female president I wanted, but you know, the fact that America is capable of putting a female in the highest office, however imperfect her route to power is. That's not a bad thing. Because it breaks one is whether she's the right female. We'll see. Maybe she may be the right female. She has ambition. I believe she. She's intelligent. And I believe if she surrounds herself with good advisors and she can take good advice. That she'll make competent decisions. So I don't see the end of the world. I don't see the end of the world. No matter how much I might personally dislike. You know, Senator Harris. I don't think that her becoming the president of the United States or her becoming the vice president. Is the death knell of America. Not far from it. I actually see it as a growth for America. It's like Barack Obama being elected president type of black man elected president of the United States. It was an amazing thing whether you agreed with him or not. And if Kamala Harris can become the president of the United States. I think that's an amazing day in American history, even though I personally. Don't support her. I have a lot of problems with her record as the attorney general. I think that she will function confidently. She's not an incompetent person. We have no idea about her foreign policy. None whatsoever. We know that she attended a pack. She attended a lot of a pack. She attended a lot of, like, like every want to be politician. And she has knelt at the altar of, of, you know, Israel. And I remember I say that not as somebody, not an anti-Semitic bone in my body. I worked very closely with Israel in the 1990s, trying to disarm Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. I've been to Israel many times. I believe in the right of Israel to exist as a sovereign state. I don't support anything what Israel is doing right now. And I despise a pack for intervening and interfering in American politics. And yet, you know, she doesn't have the courage. And she wouldn't be where she is today if she did have the courage. I mean, imagine the politician with the APAC and said, stick it in your ear, you know, stay out of American politics. That would be the end of them. You know, she played the game. She said what she needed to say. They all did. Elizabeth Warren did. They all went to APAC and Nelton and got anointed. So we know that she'll be pro-Israel. I mean, a true test will be, you know, We'll see, take the embassy out of Jerusalem. Yeah. They were asking, um, Who were we asking the other day Elizabeth about that? Was it not Pablo last night? I mean, sorry. For that. These days, into each other. Oh, Georgia, they're Middle East. He was saying he did not think that that would happen. They would not, It's not gonna happen. Send the embassy back to totally. No, the chest thumping and hair pulling and screaming about Trump doing this, it's it's going to be, you know, Biden policy, Kamala Harris policy. Yeah, well, I wonder about what her views towards Russia now that Russia is not being blamed for this election that's been forgotten. What is the policy of a Biden administration going to be towards Russia given a again the Biden's role in Ukraine? Will they also start arming the Ukrainian government and stir up that civil war? Yeah, this is this is a really dangerous point and I'll say this about Biden. He's smarter than Trump when it comes to foreign policy, meaning that he I think he can understand cause effect relations better than Trump did. Trump acted on the gut and he just did things and we were fortunate enough to dodge some some big bullets. I mean, you know, he was within a few minutes of bombing Iran that could have led to a major confrontation. He was positioning nuclear forces for a preemptive strike nuclear decapitation strike against North Korea. Unfortunately, things evolve differently. I don't think I don't think Biden wants to get us now, but he's like Obama. He's capable of the long fail, not the short fail. And what I mean by that is he has such a hard line stance against Russia and against Vladimir Putin that he won't take advantage of opportunities as they arise to normalize relations with Russia. He's in a permanent containment mode. And the end result of that is that we end up getting ourselves boxed into a policy corner. A prime example of that is Iran. If you remember under Barack Obama, it was not one single spending centrifuge will be permitted in Iran. Zero, no enrichment program, none whatsoever. Sanctions, sanctions, sanctions until they woke up one morning and went, wow, the only policy option we have left is war. And the only way out of this is either bomb them or we have to allow an enrichment program. And then they engage with Iran said we'll allow enrichment. Next thing you know, we have the JCPOA. You know, my concern with Biden is that he will get us in a situation where, for instance, we start sending lethal arms in significant quantities to the Ukrainians. And then the Ukrainians start killing Russian soldiers in significant numbers, which will prompt Russia to send soldiers and tanks and aircraft in significant numbers. And we have a general war in Ukraine where if the United States is not drawn directly into that and cascade into a conflict where in order to offset the pressure on Ukraine, NATO opens up a second front, proxy front, however we want to call a hybrid war in Belarus. And now we have Russia moving into Belarus. And the Milwaukee gap becomes a thing where Russia seeks to divide the Baltics from the pull. These are the kind of cascading effects that occur, not because you want them to occur, but because you box yourself in policy-wise and you make them occur. And that's what I think is the real danger of a Biden administration is that he has created the perception that he's going to be tough on Putin. I can guarantee you on day one, Putin was going to call President Biden, he'll call transition President-elect Biden and say, we're ready to do business with you. We're ready to engage in a constructive manner. We don't want bad relations. Russia doesn't. And I can guarantee you Putin is going to reach out. He's already hinted that. I don't think Biden politically can take that offer. I think Biden has to continue to be the tough guy because he has boxed himself in with his rhetoric. And he's going to be expected to maintain this tough guy policy. It would be nice if he didn't. It'd be nice if he took Putin up on his offer. It'd be nice if he had a summit meeting with Putin early on to set the stage of repairing relations. But I don't think Biden's capable of doing that. More than nice would be essential. Yeah, survival to do that. The one caveat I'll put out there is that, thanks to the large part to Trump, we have created a situation where the Russians are ready to immediately extend the New Start Treaty without pre-conditioning. They've agreed to freezing with non-verification. But the bottom line is there won't need to be a long drawn out negotiation. If Biden wants to, on January 21st, extend New Start for five years, the Russians are ready to do that right now, no pre-conditions. So we may be able to save the New Start Treaty. That's the one good news. And maybe building on that, maybe Biden then can find other ways to engage with the Russians in a constructive manner. That's more of a hope than an assessment. But I do believe that New Start Treaty will be saved under a Biden administration. I don't believe they're going to let that go to the wayside. I wanted to ask you to return a little bit to the voting results that we're seeing now. We've noticed that Trump essentially doubled his percentages among minority voters, not just his numbers, which obviously the numbers are huge for both candidates this year. You've said that you felt that Trump voted for Trump when they voted for him, not against Biden in the same way that they voted against Hillary in 2016. So in terms of these percentages doubling amongst minority voters, do you think that's because Trump voters are they're actually voting for Trump and his policies? Or do you think that's a result of more people across the spectrum waking up to the corruption and the policies of the Democratic Party not being in their interest? Do you think it's a result of kind of a dem exit movement that's growing? Or do you think that they found Trump appealing? I can't. The problem is I am a white man. So if you ask me, what's going through the mind of a suburban mom? I have no idea. I mean, I can talk about what my wife shares with me in terms of her thing, but I don't know. Do I know what's going through the mind of a black man? I don't. I wasn't raised as a black man. I don't know the oppression and the economic reality they have. What I do know is what I read and what I hear. What I read, what black men write and what I hear, what black men are saying. And, you know, Trump was mocked, reviled even when he said, what do you have to lose? Support me. You've been voting for Democrats your entire life and they take your vote and then they sell you down the river. They do nothing. But what do you have to lose? Vote for me and things will change. Now, not too many voted for him in 2016, but Trump followed through. I mean, he followed through with criminal justice reform. That's a big deal for the black community. When you have Van Jones, a left wing, you know, Trump-hating guy, break down in tears in the White House thanking Donald Trump for finally standing up and caring for incarcerated black men. You know, that's a big deal. Black men are just like white men, they're aware of this. They see this. They understand this. And then they also take a look at, you know, the struggle they had under Obama economically. You know, the continued degradation of the inner city, etc. Trump actually was trying to put money in their pockets. There was increased economic opportunity. Now, we can debate how he did that, whether or not that was sustainable. But from the perspective of the black man, I would imagine that they look in the mirror and say, yeah, this guy, he's another dingbat white dude who says stupid things. But his heart appears to be in the right place and he's right. But if I support him, the last four years have been the best four years of my adult life. And I mean, again, not if you were, you know, a black man who got shot by a cop. Not if you were, you know, somebody who got arrested and trumped up drug deals. I'm not saying that things were perfect. What I'm saying is that more opportunity availed itself to a broader spectrum of the American population than Trump has been given credit for. He's been accused of solely looking out for rich white men. But the reality is, if you're a soccer mom whose husband's back on the job, and he's bringing in money, and you can buy your kids Christmas gifts that you couldn't buy him before that you can put a little money aside so your husband and you can go down to, you know, whatever that town is in Missouri, where they play country music. And you're able to do that for the first time instead of dreaming about it. Your life is better. And I think a lot of people woke up and looked in the mirror and said, you know, Trump is just crude, rude and lewd. But my life is better. And maybe I'll just put that stuff to the side. And I'll vote for him because I do believe that my life has been better. And that if I give him a chance, he can make my life even better. And I think that's what the appeal was. He didn't appeal to blacks because he's some sort of Renaissance man who, no, this is a guy that wanted to put the five guys from Central Park, you know, in jail for life. And the black community doesn't forget that either. This is a guy who's said very crude thing about women. I mean, that whole tape that they showed, you know, the access Hollywood tape or whatever. But I think what happened is that people, they know that about Trump. There's no hiding it. It's there. And they recognize that. But I think a lot of people are becoming more mature, meaning that if you're really a mature human being and you look in the mirror and you say, you know, none of us are perfect. We've all done stupid things and said stupid things. And Donald Trump has done and said some stupid things. But when it comes to the job, he's actually trying to do a good job for me. He's trying to. And I'm seeing the results. That's what I think was going on. No, no, there's no other way in my mind that I can explain this phenomenon because it's not not as though, you know, Latino women woke up and said, boy, that man can salsa. And I'm going to vote for him because he can do that tango or something. Yeah, it's a fascinating question because it's a very fascinating question to me because I also think that there's the potential that voters are becoming more informed. They're becoming more educated. And I think that despite the media not mentioning the 94 crime bill, I think more and more people in minority communities are becoming aware of that history and his actual record as well as the record of Kamala Harris as Attorney General in California. So I think that you also have in the wake of George Floyd's death and the protests that resulted from that, that you have the Democratic Party throwing a huge insult to minority communities by nominating Biden and Kamala Harris. I think there's not, I mean, it's like, it's a, they've a, they're a personified middle finger to that movement. So I, and all, but you won't hear the media talk about that. So in my opinion, there's a mix of things going on there and the Democratic Party really did not do a good job in addressing that issue. No, look, I learned a lot of things in the last couple of years. The reason why I'm on Twitter, I think, Joe, you communicated to me via direct message on Twitter. Two years ago, you wouldn't have been able to do that because I wasn't on Twitter. If you had tried to reach out to me in Facebook, you wouldn't have because I wasn't on Facebook. I had my old Dinosaur AOL account and that's, that was my extent of, you know, internet interconnectivity. My daughter said, that's not, you know, that's just not how the world works today, dad. You got to get, you got to get plugged in. You got to talk, you know, and I'm still a guy that sits down and turns on the TV and thumbs my way through, you know, the mainstream media, so to speak. My daughter doesn't watch TV at all. She watches podcasts. She watches, I mean, she's wired in. She is wired into a whole different information spectrum than I am. And a lot of it is good, meaning quality. And, you know, there used to be a time when you said, well, the mainstream media has a built-in filter and it filters out nonsense and you only get the good. The mainstream media today is more biased and it puts out more false information than this stuff. The internet is sort of a self-correcting institution because if you say something, you immediately have a whole host of people jump on you and say, that's not true. They all Google when they get the exact quote like you did. And, you know, you can be immediately held to account. It's a very democratic institution, the internet, that if you're, if you speak nonsense, they call you out and you become known as a nonsense speaker. But you're somebody who speaks the truth and you, and you're factually accurate, you become an influencer. That's a word that I've learned, an influencer. And there's a lot of influencers out there who are knowledgeable, who are informed and are influencing this new generation of American voters getting their news from social media. I'm going to jump on you and challenge you right now about whether the black community is going to better off on the Trump. First of all, I don't know the, I don't have the numbers, but I don't know if black unemployment was significantly reduced under Trump. Do you know that? Trump claims, I can't, I can't give you that number right off the bat, but Trump has claimed, and even the Democrats had to acknowledge that black unemployment was lower than it's ever been and black employment was higher. But I, I'm just repeating what someone's told me. I haven't done the research myself. Okay. He claims Trump that he helped to fund black colleges and universities. Ten-year funding, yeah. Okay, great. That's in one column. But nobody can deny his absolutely playing to racist, if not being one himself. All of these, his cozying up or his refusal to really disassociate and condemn white supremacy. He's not done that. He's given many opportunities to do that. He started in his speech where he launches campaign attacking Mexicans as rapists, et cetera. I mean, the guy has been, his rhetoric is racist. There's no question about it. I don't dispute, but I'll come back with this. You and I, I think get more outraged about Donald Trump's racist rhetoric than the average black person else. And I'll explain why I think that's the case. Because they're confronted with it every single day by virtually every single white person they meet. They don't expect white people to do anything different than what Donald Trump is simply behaving the way they expect a white person to behave, that they've grown accustomed for a white person. The systemic racism that exists in the United States is real. It's from top to bottom. So if you're a black guy who's raised to, for that reality, you don't expect white people to be enlightened and informed in this. And yet when one of these white people who does exactly what you expect them to do, racist rhetoric, you know, speaking down to you, et cetera, suddenly says though, I'm going to, I'm going to try and do good things for you. And he does, and he gets the economy turned up. That might be appealing, not because they suddenly think that he's a wonderful non-racist entity. He isn't. He's racist as the next white guy. But he's, I just think that the, again, the fact that the economy was the number one factor in this election, according to the exit polls, I think we can't ignore that fact that a lot of people believe that Donald Trump was, was producing a strong economy. And you marry that with this uptick and support across the board from minorities. And I think there's a connection there. I could be wrong, as I said from the start. I'm not a black guy. I'm not a Latino. I'm not, I'm none of that. I don't know truly until somebody goes out and canvases them and gets, it gets their answer, we're going to be guessing, at least I'll be guessing. I think I'm just trying to put the dots together. That's all. Biden still got 90% of the black vote in this election. I don't know. Did he favor that? I think it was something like 86 or 88. Trump's not percentages doubled from 6% to 12%. What, the black vote or minority vote? It was the African American vote. Look, I mean, I don't, they're solely behind Biden and Biden made racist remarks too during this campaign. If you don't vote for me, you're not black, man. I mean, he made some bizarre statements. The thing you said about Obama was the most insulting. You know, we finally got an articulate clean one. Right. Forgot that one. I forgot that one. That was horrible. And he did the crime bill, which just, of course, targeted black men. So, he's not so great either. And he's a white guy. So, but it's still, he got 90%. I don't understand why. Good Democrats. That's the, that's the function of this two-party system that they stick with the Democrats, although they've been, and Trump's right, they're taking advantage of it. But wouldn't it have been an amazing thing if Trump had gotten four more years? Again, I'm really hypothetical now. And in 2024, we saw that the black community doubled from 12% to 25% in support of a Republican candidate because they suddenly realized that being married to a single party doesn't necessarily advance their interest that they, you know, they're not going to be taken for granted. Who knows? I'm not saying it would have happened, but that would have been an amazing thing to actually get a Republican party that minorities find attractive. Well, look, look at his attacks on Black Lives Matter and the uprisings. He and Barr became vicious. And he's tarring everyone as being a socialist, you know, he said Biden was a socialist. Let me give me a break. So this kind of, his race-baiting was clearly evident by Trump. And I want, talking about these, the police and his unbelievable support for the police, no matter what they did during the summer here in the U.S., let me ask you, as a military, foreign military man, a lot of former soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan have become police officers. Is that a bad thing? It seems like it is to me. They bring that mentality that everyone is the enemy around them, right? But it's the worst thing in the world. First of all, we have a police force that is probably the most poorly trained police force in all of the world. And yet we put more responsibilities on their shoulders than probably any other police force in the world. I think it requires 18 weeks on average to become a cop. You go to these little academies that the cookie stamp you out and become a cop. The education requirement is not uniform. Some places like Tulsa, Oklahoma require a four-year degree. Some places require a two-year degree. Some places just require a high school education. But you do get veterans' preferences, regardless. For instance, they will replace the college education requirement if you have honorable military service in a field that's deemed to be transferable. And what kind of field is that? Infantry, combat. Not just military police, but combat arms, leadership. And so you bring them into an environment where you already are overly militarized. I mean, we're not talking about Andy Griffith anymore. We're talking about cops that dress up to play soldier. And there's a guy on Twitter. I don't know, you should look him up, Patrick Skinner. He came to the forefront. He's a former CIA officer, counterterrorism officer who became a cop in South Carolina. I think Charleston, South Carolina or Savannah, maybe Savannah. And he's in his 40s. So he became a cop early on. But he wrote an article. He didn't write an article. It was written about him in the New Yorker where he became very prominent. But he talked about this guy and his approach. And I read it. And I have to tell you, when I first read it, when I first opened it up, man, I was against Patrick Skinner. I mean, the concept of a CIA case officer being a cop, worst thing in the world. I could never imagine that working out. His approach to policing is just so phenomenal. First of all, he doesn't view, he calls everybody my neighbor. My neighbor. He doesn't say criminals. He says, my neighbor's having a hard day today. My neighbor's having trouble today. He tells a story. It was just a wonderful story. He was out with a female officer, a newly trained female officer. And he was going into question people. And he had previously handed out his card. He prepares these little packets and he goes around. And if he sees a neighbor in trouble, he stops and gives them a care package that has soap. It has toothbrush, toothpaste, some food items, et cetera. And he gives them their card. If you need anything, give me a call. I'll be there for you. And he has gone out at two in the morning to help a neighbor need, which means helping a citizen in need. But he was dealing with this person that had been accused of having a gun and violent. And he was talking to the guy and the approach is supposed to be two cops coming in, hands on guns. And if the guy moves, draw the weapon, put him down. His hand never went near his gun. He just talked to the guy. And at the end of the conversation, the guy turned around and hugged him, hugged him and broke down and cried. The girl afterwards saying, we're trying not to do that. We're trying not to do that. You lose tactical advantage. And he said, yeah, for a moment there, I lost tactical advantage, but I gained strategic advantage. And that's the, that's his approach. That it's not about being the tough guy on the spot. It's about winning over the population, being a cop who's one of the people. We don't do that anymore. There's some good cops out there who are trying to do this. But for the most part, I'll give you an example in Minneapolis and in Tulsa, two places where I've written about the police department. They have unions that have gone against the will of the city councils. The city councils have said, reduce choke holds, seek to engage, deescalate, etc. The unions have gone out and they do this training that's very combat oriented training. So they actually train the officer to do the exact opposite of what the city council wants so that the officers view everybody as a potential enemy in a life and death situation. And then if you bring in these war veterans, these combat veterans who are already screwed up. I mean, I'm going to say something that's very politically incorrect at this point in time. I spent a lot of time in the military and I went to war and I know a lot of guys who went to war. We didn't commit suicide in high numbers. The guys coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq today are knocking themselves off at a very high rate. 22 right now is the number they're saying, 22 a day. And you have to ask yourself, why? Why is this the case? Yes, I understand they're putting under a lot of stress, but a lot of the guys that are killing themselves aren't combat veterans, meaning that they weren't on the front line. They're guys who served in the military. We're recruiting a different age group. We're recruiting a different kind of American who's not equipped to deal with stress, who's not equipped to deal with, you know, they don't view themselves as part of society. The military was the first time they were belonged to something. And then they leave the military, they try to reintegrate back into society and they're lost. They end up getting drunk, getting addicted to drugs, and killing themselves. Or they join the police department where they suddenly can now revalidate themselves by beating the crap out of people. And that's what they do. I would find it, if I were in charge of a police department, I would say that if you serve, it's like, you know, the state, if you served in the Peace Corps, you can't go in the CIA, you know, because you don't want to corrupt. If you served in the military, I don't believe you should be allowed to become a police officer unless you pass a psychological review board first. I think we have to have more cops like Patrick Skinner who take the approach that every citizen is a neighbor, that it isn't in us versus them. We're not at war with our neighbors. That's what he keeps saying. I'm not at war with my neighbors. Stop treating it like a war. Stop calling this a war on crime. If it's a war on crime, who's my enemy? A citizen? No. But yet all these cops view it as a war on crime. And most of them are guys who come back from the military where they've been prepared to view everything as a life and death situation. And then result is what we see on the streets. Police officers were committing horrific crime. I'll tell you another thing to discuss, man. I don't mean to drone on, but this is a topic near and dear to my heart. When Donald Trump spoke before a police association a couple years ago, and he said, hey, and when you take him into the car, take their head and just bang him on there a little bit. Let him know, you know, who's trying to rough him up a little bit. And the cops applauded. The cops applauded. If I were a city counselor and I saw on videotape one of my officers applauding, I would have fired them on the spot. The fact that a police officer is willing to applaud when the president of the United States encourages them to commit a civil rights violation is astounding. The fact that the police don't police themselves is astounding. People ask me, do you believe they're good cops? And my answer is no. You may go in as a good cop, but the moment you see another police officer violating the civil liberties or civil rights of a citizen, if you don't step up and stop it or say something, you become a bad cop. And every cop out there because of the strength of the union is a bad cop because they've been silent and they should have spoken up. And that's a shame. Cops should be the most honorable members of our society, the ones we trust the most, the ones that we've trained to do the most difficult job. In Europe, they'll train you weeks to shoot a weapon with lethal impact. And then they'll train you months longer than our total time training as a cop on how not to shoot. And that's why European cops don't kill European citizens at the rate that we do. They're better shots than we are because they've received better training. But they've also been conditioned to de-escalate, to avoid going to the gun, where our first impulse as a cop is to go to the gun and shoot the kill. And that's why so many minorities die. That's why so many white people die at the hands of cops. I mean, cops kill people uniformly. It's not just blacks that are dying. It's whites that are dying. It's citizens that should be alive today, but the cop killed them because the cop is trained to shoot first and ask questions later. Long answer. I've got a quick question from the audience and that is what your opinion is on rank choice voting? You know, I'm just finding out about rank choice voting. I mean, I didn't know it was an option in the United States. I know that it's something that I think has been going on in Europe for a while. But here's my problem with rank choice voting because the way it was described to me on TV, let's say you have two candidates for Senator, or you have two major party candidates, but then you have a third party candidate. And neither one of the two major guys get the 50% necessary. But because your options are limited and you don't really know the people at the bottom, you just put a name down there because you ranked them. And now neither one gets 50% and it goes down and suddenly you have a person serving in this high office who maybe hasn't passed the same litmus test that everybody else has. I've been subjected to the same review, et cetera, and they sort of get it by default. That's my problem with the country. I could be totally uneducated. I think I've been honest by saying that I've just recently found out about this. But the way it was explained to me, if that way is correct, then I'm against it. I'm against rank choice voting because it allows somebody to win office who hasn't been subjected to the same litmus test, the same review, the same pressure that the primary candidates have been. You can sneak in. And I'm against it. I do understand why it's a good thing because you avoid expensive runoff elections and things of that nature. But again, to me, it's more important to put the right person in the position than to save money by avoiding a runoff election. Another question from the audience is why there's such a discrepancy in voter intention between urban and rural areas? And I think that's a huge topic we could spend a lot of time talking about. There are clear cultural differences between the two. But if you want to take a stab at that, go right ahead. Well, I mean, it sort of answers itself. I mean, there's an urban reality. The level of government involvement in an urban setting is radically different than the type of government involvement that exists in a rural setting. And so the approach towards how governments should behave, how governments should operate, is a completely different approach. When you enact policies that impact a million people living in close proximity in an urban environment, that population reacts one way. When you enact a policy where people are separated by five miles between each other, they react differently. It's a completely different social, economic reality. Night and day. And I think that's why you see the difference. And it also impacts on what people's expectations from life are. I think people who live in this city have a certain expectation from life. It might be more primarily economic in nature, greater opportunity, things of nature, where people in the rural areas might be looking for more of a quality of life type thing. This is gross oversimplification. I'm not pretending that I have insight. I've just given the obvious disparity, the discrepancy between rural life and that. And we see that in the map. I mean, when you take a look at the political map of the counties that voted Republican versus the counties or urban areas that voted blue, there's a lot less blue, especially in the middle of the country. It's all red because that's primarily rural environments where people have a different approach to life, different life priorities, and then the urban concentrations that exist on the east and west coast. In general, we spoke last night with Pepe about the general shift in farm policy we're likely to see under Biden. In 2016, I personally was very worried that Hillary Clinton might start World War III if she was elected because of the way that she was discussing a no-fly zone over Syria, et cetera, et cetera. Do you think there is a similar danger with Joe Biden or do you think he's less of a war monger than Hillary would have been? Oh, no, Joe Biden is a war monger. The question is opportunity. Hillary Clinton, if she had been elected in 2016, would have inherited an economy on the upswing. If she would have had less domestic roadblocks to an aggressive foreign policy, she would have had greater liberation to engage in a very aggressive, proactive foreign policy. There were some opportunities. The Russian involvement in Syria was still young enough, not developed enough, where the concept of rollback, not just pushback, but rollback, was deemed deviable. She could talk about putting in a no-fly zone where there's the possibility of actual contact combat between US and Russian pilots. That doesn't exist today. Joe Biden is a realist. Anybody who thinks that the United States is going to go in and force the Russians out of Syria today, I'd like to know what they're smoking. Apparently, it's legal in a lot of places in America today. Maybe I could enjoy what they're smoking, but you'd have to be high on dope to think that you can get the Russians out of Syria by flying more American aircraft. The same thing around the world. Russia is more solidly entrenched after four years of Trump. They're very solidly entrenched. They redefine the geopolitical map. The one place that Joe Biden might perceive a vulnerability is Ukraine. As we talked about, he has a deep vested interest in Ukraine. He knows the players, and he may believe that he can pick up the policy that he was implementing when he was Vice President and start running it again by putting pressure on Putin, by militarizing this. I know he has spoken of building up the US-Ukrainian defense relationships. Right now, we have a situation. I don't think a lot of Americans realize it, but we have American combat troops in Ukraine. They're primarily in Western Ukraine. We keep them away from the east, but we've actually flown in American jet fighters based them out of Ukrainian bases, and they fly exercises. That's a horrifically dangerous situation, because what if, while American troops are in Ukraine for ostensible training purposes, and then the Ukrainian government decides to launch an offensive operation that wasn't coordinated with the United States, that prompts a Russian military response? Now you have Russian planes, maybe bombing sites near Kiev, while American planes are in the air. This is the kind of stupidity that Trump avoided, besides step that we didn't get a direct Russia versus America confrontation. I don't know if Biden can avoid that. I think Biden will seek to push the Russians as much as he can, and in a place like Ukraine, we could very well end up in a situation where, inadvertently, we have Russians and Americans engaged in life and death combat. Then once that happens, all bets are off, because we're not going to let them shoot down five airplanes and not respond, and they're not going to let us bomb an airfield and not respond. You're going to get this tit-for-tat exchange that suddenly blows up. That's the danger with Joe Biden, because he honestly believes it's America's right to do this, America's duty to do this. Donald Trump, for all the criticism you can levy at him, and there's much, he wanted better relations with Russia. He was never given the opportunity to do so, and I don't think that he was strong enough politically to disregard Congress, because had he done so, he would have found it even more difficult to get re-elected. Even though he didn't get re-elected. Well, an interesting thing is to see what happens between now and the time he leaves. What kind of insanity he might do just to shake things up. I'm not talking about go to war, I'm talking about recognized Crimea. I don't think he's going to do that, but pardon Snowden, pardon Assange. Who knows what this guy might do just to mix things up before he leaves office. One thing I can say is that Joe Biden is going to come in with a very, just look at the people that he surrounds. I don't want to deviate too much from this, but I've done a lot of studying on the, criminology used to be a thing. Back in the days of Ronald Reagan, we had a whole bunch of criminologists, because as a student, you could go over and do a six month exchange, but for the most part, if you're an American government official, you either worked in the embassy, where you're surrounded by KGB all the time, didn't have freedom of motion, or you're looking at the Soviet Union from the outside looking in, and you're, you're studying it, you know, based upon, you know, the revolution and the civil war and World War Two. And because all, all of that was relevant to the people that were alive in the 70s and the 80s. And so criminology was a big thing. Richard Pipes was a, a big deal, like, you know, Reagan era scholar. I, I read a lot of his stuff, but then they started to die out, and then the Soviet Union died out, and now Russia came in, and we have a whole new generation of people who examine Russia, who have been raised not to study Russia in terms of accepting the reality of Russia, but studying Russia from the fact that Vladimir Putin is the personification of evil because he doesn't do what the United States wants him to do. And that's what populates the Russian expert pool today. And that's where Joe Biden will be drawing upon to be his, you know, national security, national intelligence officer for, you know, your region and Russian affairs to be his national security advisor for Russian affairs to work the State Department, to be the embassy. These are all people who aren't geared to evaluate Russia as a, as a whole, but to rather view Russia as an extension of its leader who's not going away anytime soon. I mean, you know, you know, Vladimir Putin has outlasted, you know, a lot of presidents, he's outlasted Bill Clinton, he's outlasted George W. Bush, he's outlasted Barack Obama, he's outlasted Donald Trump, and I guarantee you he's going to outlast Joe Biden. That's just the reality. So, you know, Joe Biden is coming in thinking he's going to have some sort of, you know, fundamental clash with Putin to roll Russia back, and he's going to be advised by people to think that's a good thing. You know, we lost one of the great Russia minds recently. I think his last name was Cohen, Steve Cohen. He died, but, you know, he was one of the few old school Russian experts who looked at Russia as a whole and put Putin in perspective, as opposed to focus solely on Putin, and therefore lose perspective of Russia. And I think that pretty much encapsulates the Biden presidency. They're going to focus solely on Putin and they're not going to have any perspective on Russia. That makes a lot of sense. I also have a question from the audience, and it's still, it remains on the topic of war, which you've been speaking about. An audience member wants to know about your thoughts on how to finally end the long-enjoyed impunity for war criminals, which also the subject links over to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, who reveal much evidence of war crimes on the part of the West. Yeah, to do that, you're going to need more than just a politician with an open mind. You're going to need a country with an open mind. I will tell you this. When I was in the Marine Corps, I was trained from day one that we don't obey unlawful orders. We were schooled on this over and over and over again. And, you know, that's just, that's the way it was. But we were also told that we would be held accountable to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and American Law, that we would be judged by American standards and American standards only. So the concept of Americans being held to, you know, account as war criminals in a jurisdiction other than the United States, it's just simply speaking a non-starter at this point in time. First of all, the American people won't support that. And if you do that, you're going to have a hard time getting people to sign up for the American military is different to just about any military in the rest of the world because we are an interventionist military. We exist overseas. We are engaged overseas. So when you join the military, it's not to stay at home and defend your country against aggression. You're joining the military knowing that you're going to deploy overseas and you're going to be, you're going to be part of an inter, of course, of intervention. And you can do this and still, you know, be trained to respect the law of war, but safe in the knowledge that when called upon your country to do something, you will not be called a war criminal by a non-American entity. Maybe you should be called a war criminal by a non-American, but you're not going to. And that's just not going to happen. You cannot speak of the American military today functioning if they could be held to account by a jurisdiction other than the United States of America. Is America capable of punishing its war criminals? Yes, to a certain degree. America will never punish the ultimate war criminal. You'll never see Dick Cheney called before the court. You'll never see George W. Bush called before the court. You'll never see somebody with four stars, three stars, two stars, or even one star called before a court. But you'll see the privates, the corpals, the sergeants, the lieutenants, the captains, maybe a major or two. They'll be held to account when they commit gross violations and some have been committed. But for the most part, you know, I would say that virtually every engagement the United States has done in Afghanistan has incorporated an element of a war crime. Not winningly, just through the nature of the way we operate in Afghanistan. Ticking in doors in the middle of the night, having a free fire zone. Whereas if somebody perceives a threat, they can immediately put rounds in there. And so you kill the family of 17. You won't be charged because all you have to do is say, sir, I thought they were armed insurgents. And now you are literally given a clean bill of help. You know, that's wrong. And but that's just the way it is going to be. As long as the United States has this interventionist policy where we take American men and women, you know, train them to kill, give them weapons, and we send them overseas and give them opportunities to carry out their training. The best way to prevent a war crime is to get American boys and girls home and recondition the American public that military service is about staying at home and training for the opportunity to defend your country if somebody attacks you. Not joining the military overseas and involved in conflicts have nothing to do with the national security of the United States of America. Scott, as you know, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is investigating possible U.S. offenses in Afghanistan. The response from the Trump administration, I think Bolton was still national security advisor, was to threaten the ICC, any of their officials that could not come to the U.S., threaten them with sanctions. You think the Biden administration would reverse that? No. I don't think the Biden administration would be as crass and crude. I mean, John Bolton, you know, is a special category of crass and crude. I'm not a big John Bolton fan. But John Bolton is simply implementing the policy that every presidential administration would implement. There's not a single man or woman who could be President of the United States who would allow an American military person or American diplomat to be prosecuted under foreign jurisdiction. It just isn't going to happen. Biden would probably come up with a more clever way of saying this. Maybe he wouldn't sanction the court, wouldn't be as punitive. But the impact would be just the same. He would not allow, and he will not allow Americans to be prosecuted by any international court, especially American military members. You're muted, I think. I was indeed. You mentioned Syria before. Trump twice said he wanted to pull the troops out and never happened. What about a Biden administration in Syria? Will they revive an attempt to overthrow Assad that was begun by the Obama Biden administration? Or is it irreversible now, the victory by, except for Idlib province, the victory by Syria, Russia, Iran, Hezbollah? Well, now we're in a very curious question because it's not just Syria that we're talking about, but you know, Syria would have been the last of the three places Trump would withdraw. When we eventually leave Iraq, we will have no choice but to leave Syria. So that'll be done virtually simultaneously. Trump was on the path of pulling troops out of Afghanistan and pulling troops out of Iraq. And the end result would have been troops being pulled out of Syria because you can't stay in Syria without an American military presence in Iraq. That's just a reality. But people go, oh, well, that means he was going to get out of the Middle East. No. We still have tens of thousands, I mean, like 50,000, 60,000 military personnel deployed in the Middle East outside of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. They're in places like Kuwait. They're in places like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in Saudi Arabia. And we've now, in Bahrain, we've now under Trump, we've built this new line of defense. See, when Trump speaks of leaving Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, he's not speaking of leaving the Middle East. He's simply talking about withdrawing from regions where we're involved in wars that we can't win. They're endless wars. They're just grinding us down. And they actually end up strengthening our number one foe in the region, Iran and Hezbollah. What he's seeking to do is withdraw back to a new line of anti-Iranian resistance. And this is one of the trademarks of his current policy of, you know, Arab nations normalizing relations with Israel, because now you're getting a Gulf Arab State-Israeli coalition lined up against Israel. And this isn't theory. This is happening. It has happened. So one of the questions is, what is Biden going to do about this? Because we've already started this policy. This new relationship has already advanced. What we've gotten Israel to normalize relations, is Biden going to reverse this? Because I can tell you that if Biden re-engages in Iraq, re-engages in Syria, re-engages in Afghanistan, this new coalition's going to fall apart. This new coalition requires a lot of hands-on treatment that they were getting from the Trump administration. And if they don't get that from the Biden administration, you know, it's going to collapse. And if it collapses before we've re-solidified our, you know, our first line of defense against Iran, Iran will just emerge stronger. So this is one of the, you know, the great challenges for Biden administrations. What are they going to do? The smart thing for them to do is accept the inevitability of Assad's victory. Because today, this isn't 2012-2013. You're not going to be, there is no Arab spring that you can exploit. The opposition has been destroyed. There's a tiny group of al-Qaeda hardliners that are dug in in Idlib, and their day is numbered. Look, these repositioning forces. And the reality is, they're not going to last too much longer. There might be some sort of last second Turkish gambit seeking to annex a strip of territory where they can populate, you know, these people. But the concept of turning that around into the kind of viable anti-Assad coalition that can threaten to remove Assad from power is, those days are done. Iraq, you're not going to be able to recover America's position in Iraq. The Iraq that Biden's inheriting is not the Iraq that Obama left. You know, we have a parliament that's voted American troops out. We have a ceasefire that's contingent upon American troops leaving. And Biden will be confronted with that to you. If Biden doesn't withdraw, he's going to immediately find that these pro-Iranian militias are going to be attacking the American troop concentration. What is he going to do about that? And then Afghanistan, you know, Trump has said, I'm getting the troops out. He signed a peace deal and he's turned a blind eye to just about every violation that one can imagine because he wants to get the troops out. When Biden comes in, the first time the Taliban violate this by attacking, you know, Afghan government installation or something, what is Biden going to do? Be a tough guy and bomb back, destroy the peace treaty, reinforce American troops? There's not any domestic support for this. Or is Biden going to continue the Trump policy of retrograde, getting out? That would require Biden to take on the military in a way that, you know, a lot of people don't realize this, you know, and he was mocked for it. You know, Matt has spoke about this, so did Bob Woodward, you know, that Trump went to the Pentagon and at a table full of generals called them losers, called them losers and idiots. You guys can't win a war. It was the most refreshing, honest thing an American politician has ever said to a collection of American military leaders, especially after 19 years of not winning a war in Afghanistan, after promising they could, if we just gave them a few tens of thousands, more troops, then a trillion more dollars. Every president that's been involved in Afghanistan has given the military everything they wanted and the military continues to lose that war and Trump finally had it up to here and he called them out on it and it was a wonderful moment in American presidential history. Americans will never truly appreciate a president calling the collection of senior leaders losers because they don't know how to win a war. Honest, refreshing. Biden will never do that. Biden will go in there and he will call them the greatest men the world's ever seen, the sonification of honor and what do you need to win? My son, Beau is a soldier. He deserves a medal and his Hunter Biden help him score the cocaine heat up in a sailor. And I mean, whatever, Joe Biden just discussed me the way he, you know, uses his sons to disguise the fact that he never served in the military. But he's going to continue to be this faux patriot, great supporter of the military, and he's going to give him whatever they want. And I don't think the military has learned the lesson yet. I think they honestly believe that they can prevail. I know the CIA thinks they can prevail. The CIA's running the show in Afghanistan. We want to continue to stay there. They need the military to be the heavy hand behind the CIA's secret army. You have a secret army in Afghanistan. Most Americans aren't aware of it. If you run around, they commit war crimes on a daily basis. CIA knows that this secret army can't continue to function without American military muscle. Trump recognizes that. That's why Gina Haspel's mad at him because Trump is getting ready to pull out that last American military muscle, which means the CIA has is going to be compelled to disengage. They don't want to. Biden is going to inherit this. And I don't think Biden knows how to say no to the military. You think Biden will keep Haspel? He'll probably keep Haspel, won't he? No, Biden's going to pick his own person. Haspel has too much baggage. She's the queen of torture. She's done some other things that the American people don't know about. I'll say this in defense of her. You cannot have been involved in the director of operations during the Bush administration and during the Obama administration. Have clean hands. And she has some filthy, dirty hands. And I think Biden is going to dump her, and he's going to bring in his own people and try and remake the CIA in his own image. I have a question from a viewer that's related to what we've been talking about. This viewer would want to ask you to evaluate Turkey's goal on Azerbaijan and the current conflict with Armenia and also how the Bush administration, I get it right, the Biden administration will react to that. What will be Biden's policy on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and his relations with Turkey and also Turkey's de facto occupation of Idlib? So we're going back to Syria, but let's ask first about Azerbaijan, Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Biden's relations. Let's start with Turkey because that's the key player here. Turkey had no problems with our neighbor's policy when Erdogan came in. That policy was thrown out the window during the Obama administration. We had a program called Timber's Sycamore, I think, where the CIA program providing weapons. The weapons were shipped from Libya through Turkey into Syria. So Joe Biden and Barack Obama were part of the Turkish engagement in Syria. It's not as though this happened overnight and blindly. Turkey also lost, began to divorce itself from Europe and the United States during the Obama administration. If you remember the 2016 coup that took place, I think that there's the Turkish have a point that there was some American involvement in that coup that we were viewing Erdogan as a Islamist that we couldn't trust. And while we may not have actively supported the coup people, we might have known about it and not informed him about it. And so there's going to be some bad blood between, some complicated blood between Biden and Turkey. But what's happening in Azerbaijan today is just an extension of Turkey's transformation of geopolitical reality in the region. For decades, Turkey was supposed to be the secularist nation, Kamalist nation that wanted to be a member of the European Union and link itself to the West. Those days are gone. Turkey has never been a secularist country. I've lived in Turkey. I've been in Turkey. It's a Muslim country. It's populated by a heavily Islamic population that the government may have been secular. The military may have been secular. People were never secular. If you go back and look at Turkish history from 1930s on up, Ataturk was always opposed by staunch Islamists. In fact, in the 1960s, they actually elected one of these Islamists and then they killed them. They hung them by the neck until death. The military rose up. In the 1970s, there was, you know, I think Erdogan was the guy, the Turkish military put him down in the 80s. Another guy rose up. They put him down. Erdogan is a direct, his mentor was the last great Islamist leader to be put down by the Turkish military. Erdogan isn't Islamist. He's governing Islamists. The coup gave him a chance to cleanse Kamalism out of mainstream Turkish governance. The Turkish military today, the Turkish government today, is a completely different beast than it was when Biden became vice president in 2008. It's a reality that Biden's going to have to deal with. Turkey's flexing its muscles in the area. Azerbaijan's an interesting problem because, you know, the primary combatants are Armenian and Azerbaijan. Armenia, as people should know, is more closely aligned with Russia. But there's a heavy Armenian diaspora in the United States that has a great amount of political influence, especially in the state of California. They're in opposition and you can't ignore the Armenian diaspora if you're an American politician. So there's a great deal of, you know, contrary, do you support Armenia? And if you support Armenia, therefore you're supporting Russia. Is that really the policy the Biden administration wants? Or will they support Erdogan and Azerbaijan, which is opposed to Russia, but now you're helping Erdogan flexes regional muscles. And then the other question you have is international law says that Nagorno-Karabakh belongs to Azerbaijan. And we support that. So here we have Azerbaijan with Turkey's help trying to return the lands that everybody said legally belonged to them, return them to their sovereignty. Are we against that? Biden's going to be in a very difficult situation when it comes to Azerbaijan. And if he's smart, he'll do what Trump has done, which is absolutely nothing. And let this play out because, you know, Azerbaijan left to its own devices is going to recapture Nagorno-Karabakh. And they're going to reoccupy the lands that were captured by Armenia. That is going to happen. And once that happens, you've eliminated one of the great, you know, problem areas. And I say this, and I know people are going to say, well, you can't condone this now. Look, I didn't create this problem. I'm just talking about geopolitical reality. It's like looking at what happened with the Croats and the Serbs and cleaning up the Yugoslavian Civil War. You know, in the end, we had to basically let the Croatian army run rampant across of Bukovina and ethnically cleanse 300,000 Serbs in order to realign the map so that you could have a chance for peace in that region. Nobody would say that that's a good policy. Nobody would say that that's a humane policy. It's not. But it did create the opportunity for peace, whether or not we've successfully acted on that is another question. You're not going to have peace in the South, caucuses, so long as Armenia maintained its presence, not only in Nagorno-Karabakh, but in 20% of Azerbaijani land that they occupied in the 1993-1994 war. Right now, that reality is being changed. If Azerbaijan and Turkey continue their offense, if they continue to be successful, there's not much Biden can do to change that. Without direct intervention, it would be sloppy. So the best thing Biden could do is to sit back and do absolutely nothing. I don't know if Joe Biden's capable of doing nothing. I don't know if he's capable of doing something about anything right now, but I don't know about the analogy with Croatia, because in that case, the U.S. didn't do nothing. Madeleine Albright actively encouraged that. We armed them. Yeah, no. Yeah, we armed them. We gave them the green light. We made it happen. That's different than doing nothing. That was... Right. I was just talking about the situation of the end result. I mean, the fact that we tolerated a policy where hundreds of thousands of people were ethnically cleansed from their homeland, where they've been for centuries, that's a tough policy to embrace under any circumstances. Yeah, I don't know if Trump ever heard of Nagorno-Karabakh. No, and I think he's heard of Erdogan, and he likes Erdogan because Erdogan's a tough guy. So I think that's the extent of his analysis of that situation. And again, from my perspective, that's fine, because the last place America needs to be sticking its nose in right now is that area of the world. That's a Russian problem, Armenian problem, Turkish problem, Azeri problem, Iranian problem. Let them sort it out. We don't need to be there. Right. There's no wonderful national security implication on that one at all. There would be if we got involved, because now Americans would be dying and more trillions of more dollars would be wasted. But I'm just as happy to let the rest of the world solve its own problems, as bad as those problems are. There is, of course, a secular intellectual population in Turkey, mostly in Istanbul. So there were people who supported Kamal. There are Kamalist parties, the Republican party it's called, which has never been able to do much under Erdogan. And Erdogan's main target was the Berlinists, of course. In that coup, he blames without real evidence and he attacked and destroyed this group and called them terrorists. And I can tell you they're not terrorists. I know a lot of them. No, no, I'm not accusing them of, but I think that was an excuse. One of the things that happened in cleaning out the military is almost every general that had a NATO affiliation and NATO alignment, a history of training with NATO, educating the United States, were purged. And the military leadership today is a far different composition than the military leadership pre-2016. So Scott, we have a new guest coming in, Alexander McChura. So you're welcome to stay, but we're going to be talking to him most. So we've had you here about two hours. So no, I appreciate it. I have to actually go take care of some domestic issues. Yes, we're going to be talking about foreign issues now, Alexander. So take your time, Scott, as always. Thank you so much. Thank you. Well, thank you. See what's going to happen. We'll probably have you back on and talk about as the Biden administration goes forward. All the best. Okay. Super. Thanks, Joe. Hello, Alex. Can you hear us? And can you? Yes. I am very well. Hello, everybody. Great to be with you. I ask you to come on to give us a perspective from Britain and Europe of this, this fiasco, really, this American election, which the whole world is glued to, because it affects the whole world, particularly Britain. What are your personal views, first of all? Well, I'm going to make a very brief comment. I mean, obviously fiasco is the right word in term, but I'm not surprised by it. And by the way, I'm not surprised that Trump did much better than many people expected. I'm going to say very simply and very straightforwardly that the Democratic Party for me is a party which is unfit for purpose. What the Democratic Party needs to do, maybe it cannot do it. What it needs to do is to reform itself and to reconnect with its progressive past. In other words, it has to be a left-wing party again. What we had was an attempt to try and defeat Donald Trump and the Republicans by getting a very establishment, very centrist, very conservative political leader in Joe Biden, with a very, very compromised past, put him up against Trump. And in the best possible circumstances, with a pandemic, an economic crisis, when everything apparently going wrong, they still are only just able to e-counter victory. So I think this is bad. This is a bad result. And it was a bad result in terms of the congressional elections. It's a bad result apparently in connection with the elections in the various states. I think this whole idea that if you go for a centrist, a conservative Democrat to take on a right-wing Republican, it seems to me a completely misconceived thing. They should have gone in for someone much more well-established and more left-wing and more connected to the kind of tradition that might have won over more of those sort of working-class voters who, for various reasons, which I'm sure you've been talking about, are still voting for Donald Trump. That's my view about the election in a nutshell. Well, Alexander, had Biden lost, it would have been, again, an indictment against this center-right centrist establishment Democratic Party that has twice successfully defended against a strong insurgency led by Bernie Sanders and through not the most open-handed means as well. But had they lost, the pressure probably would have continued to grow on them to move more to the left and take this progressive wing of the party more seriously as much as it threatens their own class interests. But now that he's won, is that your view, does that push that even further into the past where the left-wing of the party has even less standing now? I'm afraid that's exactly what's going to happen. It's going to be already, in fact, you have the centrists, if I'm going to call them centrists, I mean, I think you can use stronger language within the Democratic Party, the DNC, all those sorts of people, and they are blaming the left of the party for the fact that the party didn't do as well as it should have done in the congressional elections, that they lost ground in the House of Representatives. So they're saying, you know, we're fine, we got Joe Biden elected, so it's obviously we're doing that right. It's you people who talk about socialism and left-wing policies. You are the people who are losing us support and who are losing us votes. That, unfortunately, is the view that he's now going to become further entrenched in the United States, in the Democratic Party, in American politics, and it is entirely wrong, in my opinion. What it is going to do is it's going to store up the prospects of a further right-wing reaction in 2022 and 2024 with, you know, even more problems accumulating down the line. I mean, I think this is, in fact, if you really look at this election properly and examine it as one should do, it's the obvious lesson to learn. I'm going to make another point, by the way, which is that it's very interesting and ought to be very disturbing for the Democratic Party that, rather like the conservatives in Britain, so much of their vote seems to be coming from retired people and working America is increasingly not supporting them. A party that represents, if you like, the Democratic tradition in the United States, that positions itself as the left should be connected with the productive part of the U.S. population. And that is something that I think the Democrats don't seem to understand at all, at least the DNC part of the Democrats don't seem to understand at all. So how does the British government, what would the religion be like with the Biden administration? Well, I think there's some people who think that the British government, Boris Johnson and all of those, will not be happy to see Biden. I think they would probably have preferred Trump. I think they will adapt themselves to Biden. I think they'll get on with him perfectly well. This is my own personal view. I think if we ever get a Labour government, which is possible, one day they will be even happier to work with Joe Biden than the Conservatives are. I think the British establishment, the British ruling elite are not bothered by this. But if you are talking about liberal opinion in Britain, they are in profound shock. They had been expecting a Democrat landslide in Britain. Donald Trump, to say that he's unpopular, would be an understatement. I think the British were expecting a massive repudiation of Donald Trump, of the Republicans, and of everything he stood for. They simply cannot understand why it hasn't happened. They haven't been prepared for it. They haven't really, I think, grasped the granular realities of American politics, which I suspected beyond them. What the British feel about this is, I think, replicated right across Europe. I don't think it's just the British who are dismayed. I've been talking to friends in Germany, friends in France, and they're all astonished that Donald Trump has done as strongly in this election as he has, and that the Republicans are not just still standing, but have actually apparently grown in strength in Congress and in the various states and local elections across the United States. It's dismayed people. It's astonished them, and it's even appalled them. What do you think the Biden administration's relations with Britain would be like? Well, we've been discussing that Biden is more likely to be more aggressive in foreign policy than Trump was. Traditionally, when the U.S. wants to be aggressive, they always drag Britain along with them, don't they? Oh, absolutely. The British will not be sorry. I mean, there are some people in Britain who have opposed Britain becoming involved in these aggressive policies. But the fact is, this year, those voices have all been marginalised. Jeremy Corby no longer leads the Labour Party. The people who were opposed to more interventionist foreign policies within the Conservative Party have been marginalised also or driven out also. The political class in London, the leaders of both the Conservative and Labour parties, would be fully signed up to more aggressive foreign policies by the Biden administration. They would support them, and some of them would support them with enthusiasm. Now, looking across the continent, what are the reactions we're hearing from France, from Germany, from Europe? Greece, for example, you might be plugged into that. Is there anything coming out yet or they're still waiting? Well, I mean, they're looking, I mean, the election, to my latest knowledge. I mean, it's almost decided. It's not quite yet decided. I think the Europeans are looking forward to a Biden administration. They think they will get on with it an awful lot better. But at the same time, I think that they sense that the United States is drifting away from them in the sense that it's become clear that its politics are very different from those that Europeans feel comfortable with. I'm talking, I mean, this is true of Germany, it's true of France, it's true of places like Greece. I talk, of course, always about the sort of liberal mainstream of European politics. If you're talking about people like Aubame in Hungary, Kaczynski in Poland, they have seen how strongly the Republicans did, how strongly Trump was done in this very difficult election, or ought to be in a very difficult election for them. And I think they've drawn encouragement from it. One of the things you were hearing before was, you know, this was going to be the turn of what is called the populist tide. Well, I think the populists in Europe are undismayed. Alexander, I forgot the question, but it'll come to me in a moment. Yes, I thought one of the unintended consequences of Trump's alienation of NATO and all of his bluster and that was to spark inside European leaders the idea of becoming more independent from the US, going their own way, not being the lackey of the United States, and to take an independent foreign policy between Russia and Europe, and the United States, for example, in Germany, getting rid of those sanctions against Russia to help their own businesses. Would that be reversed? That tendency that we started to see, Macron, was one who articulated that. Will Biden now put Europe back firmly into the US corner? I think this is what Biden himself thinks. I mean, one of his people apparently spoke to some Syrian officials, some Syrian opposition officials, and talked for the United States and for Europe, which I think has gone down, you know, not terribly well here. I think the Europeans looking at the election itself and the outcome of the election are going to say to themselves, clearly, Trump is not an aberration. We don't know how stable this Biden administration is going to be. We may be looking at more gridlock in the United States, and there's every possibility that, you know, what the Trumpism may come back, you know, with renewed force in 2022 or 2024. And I think they'll be very cautious. And I think they will say that, you know, we will continue to look for independent paths. I think that's certainly the mood in Germany. I'm not so sure about what the French think, but I don't think Macron is the kind of person who will feel comfortable to reverse an independent line, which he's already taking. Are you just trying to play the ball? I mean... Well, he also has a difficult election coming in a few years. I mean, he's got his gears trying to play to go. But at the same time, I mean, Macron is somebody who I think has high ambitions for himself. And I think he doesn't want to be the kind of political leader that Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy were seen to be, which was just basically the handmaidens of the United States. I think he feels that many people in France, who also have aspirations for France to be a major player in world affairs, were always uncomfortable with that. And I think that he doesn't want it. And I think he senses that most French people don't want it. I don't think he has the intellectual coherence behind all of this, or the political stature and force of personality to carry it off in the way that De Gaulle did. I don't think there's anything like that going to happen this time. But I think he will try to distance, continue to play an independent role from the U.S. And also, and this is perhaps a more important, even more important priority for him, distance himself from the U.S. and distance France from the U.S. and distance Europe from the U.S. in order to position France as more important in Europe and that way to crystallize Europe around France, breaking up the German-American-British axis, which has run European affairs basically since De Gaulle's time. Thank you, Alex. How long can you stay with us? As long as you want. Okay, we have another guest that we need to go to, because she only has about 20 minutes. If you don't mind staying by, and you can perhaps participate, it's Whitney Webb. Whitney, thank you for coming on and just unmute your microphone, of course, so we can hear you. Okay, hello. How are you? Great to be here. Thank you. Oh, I'm doing well. I finally got my kid to nap, so I get to pop in for a little bit, which I'm very happy to do. Thanks again for the introduction. I'm glad to have you. Of course, we want to talk to you about the article you wrote, but before that, you're not surprised by this. What are you surprised about in this U.S. election? Anything? Well, I haven't been following super closely today, but I honestly thought people would be a little more tense than they are now, at least from what I've seen. I'm glad that's the case. I was certainly worried that based on how the Transition Integrity Project and other groups had sort of planned for this to transpire, I was a little worried that it would get dicier faster, but I think a lot of Americans are as maybe tired from just how crazy 2020 has been and a little unwilling to buy into this sort of effort to manufacture and gin up tensions even farther than they've been over the course of this year. But as far as surprise, I mean, I don't know, nothing really surprises me anymore. I'm really cynical, so sorry if that's not a great answer. Tell us about this Integrity Project, and it was set up in case Trump would win, but what happens now that Biden is one, and Trump decides he doesn't want to leave all? Well, they were actually set up for a different reason. Basically, it's a marriage of Obama national security officials and Bush era neocons and also project for a new American century neocons like Bill Crystal and the like. And they publicly justified their existence by saying that they were concerned that if Trump lost, he would not leave office. And so they had to plan for that particular scenario. But actually, they planned for several scenarios, including Trump winning. And in the Trump winning scenario, they basically forced simulated how to create a constitutional crisis and prevent him from taking office. And every single scenario they simulated, they simulated four different ones. In every single instance, Biden was either became the president or there was a constitutional crisis resulting in no president-elect being decided on January 20th. So it definitely seemed to me at least that this group was planning for the very chaos they claimed to be preventing because if they're publicly justifying their reason for existence is saying that Trump isn't going to leave office, why would they simulate a scenario where he clearly won by a landslide? And then they did all these extreme things to prevent Trump from actually taking office. It seems like there was an ulterior motive there. And the transition integrity project is, I would argue a manifestation of what a lot of related nationals, former and current national security officials and intelligence officials were saying in the US last year, basically saying that it was inevitable that the 2020 election would be chaotic before any of that chaos or this contested election scenario that we're now seeing was really even palpable, at least to most people publicly. So because that first sort of became obvious a couple months ago, I would say to the general public, but intelligence officials were saying last year around this time. And there were also simulations with intelligence linked firms for chaos in the 2020 election as well. So just a lot of sort of suggestions from the national security community that they somehow knew that there was going to be a lot of chaos around the day of the election before the general public was aware that that would be the case. And then you have these, the never Trump Republicans and the Obama-era national security officials coming together to simulate and game this stuff out. And what's interesting is that the transition integrity project also has ties to a group at Georgetown that also is full of basically their executive directors, the former national counterterrorism advisor to Obama's National Security Council, but they're called the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. And basically what they do, what they have done is since the transition integrity project did their simulations in June, right after that took place, this particular group at Georgetown went to city various cities and states, battleground states and major cities, including Philadelphia, and advised the creation in Philadelphia specifically of their election task force with the district attorney, Larry Krasner, that includes a whole bunch of different officials and has really now at the center of a lot of this controversy in Philadelphia in particular. But the person that was doing this on behalf of this group ICAP at Georgetown was Mary McCord, who was one of the Department of Justice officials intimately involved in the illegal FISA spying on the Trump campaign Crossfire Hurricane. So it's interesting to see these officials that clearly had showed extreme bias and had deep ties to the Obama administration taking these actions in the months before the election. And also, you know, I just I think a lot of this, you know, this chaos was preplanned. And I think the fact that the intelligence community in the US was basically stating that was the case over a year ago, and that there were simulations to that effect over a year ago, even before the transition integrity project came into existence, I think that is pretty telling about how we got here and who plans to benefit from, you know, the scenario that we're seeing play out in the US right now. Before I turn it over to the two quick questions, one had Trump won a landslide. What were they planning to do to prevent it from coming to office? And the second question is now that he has lost, and he may not leave, what are they planning to do to get him to leave? All right, well, I'll have to remember back to the article because I actually wrote it on September 3. But as far as I can recall, in the scenario where Trump was to win, they were going to basically first have what they call dueling electors, where a governor would send a different set of electors to the electoral college than those that were decided in the votes or because of some controversy in this particular in a particular state, they named three states in that scenario, Michigan, North Carolina, Carolina, I think, Washington, I can't remember exactly, which the ones they were in the exercise, but they were going to send a different set of dueling electors that would vote for Biden, they would be pro Biden electors as opposed to the ones that had been elected per votes, which would have had them be pro Trump electors, so the whole dueling electors narrative. And of course, since that was simulated, this has been seated in mainstream media, including in the Atlantic, whose editor in chief David Frum is a member of this whole transition integrity project group. And then after that, they were going to the Biden campaign in the simulation. By the way, in the simulation, the person playing Joe Biden was John Podesta, which is worth pointing out a little interesting. After that, they were going to basically pressure three states to to secede from the United States, the Cascadia region, Washington state, Oregon and California. And in order to prevent the secession, we're going to try and get the basically pressure Republicans to agree to a series of what they called structural reforms, which included abolishing the electoral college, but also things that were very extreme and unprecedented, like dividing California into five states in order to give it greater representation in the Senate, making Puerto Rico a state and making Washington DC its own state, which of course would basically assure Democrats a longstanding majority in the Senate, which they have not been able to obtain in recent years. So for a group that claims that they want to prevent chaos for them to have a simulation where their favorite candidate, because they're all pro-Biden people, have a simulation where their favorite candidate doesn't win and then go through those unprecedented actions that would create extreme political chaos, I think is very significant. And your second question, what they plan to do if Trump, I'd have to go look at the other scenarios, but some of them were things like he's just going to be escorted by the Secret Service. I'd have to go back and look at all of it because it's pretty extensive, the document. And like I said, I wrote this article back in September, so my memory is failing me a little bit on that one. So I'd have to go back and review that because I basically focused on how the group was hypocritical for having their public claim about all being about keeping maintaining integrity in the transition process and preventing Trump from refusing to leave or something like that. So I think that aspect of it is probably playing out the way we're seeing now. People saying that he needs to be escorted out on January 20th and things like that. But I think what they also simulated too was a lot of extensive litigation and things like that. But I'd have to go back, like I said, and look at the specific scenarios because I didn't cover those in my article. In a general sense, now that we're seeing the election play out in the way that it has where it's very close, it does look like Biden will win in the end, but it is a very close race. Do you have a general sense of the way this will play out according to the transition integrity projects plans or in a general sense, how do you think it will play out? Well, I think there's a lot of different plans going on right now. I think the transition integrity project represents one particular power faction and how they expected things to play out and how they wanted to ensure a desired result for them, regardless of what the vote counts ended up being. Personally, I think, and I've been talking about this for a while, I think there is an intent to engineer chaos around the selection. And really, under the guise of, I'm sorry, it's been a long day. So lost my train of thought there. So sorry about that. I have another question while you recover the train of thought eventually. And that is that basically, I don't believe that you're exactly a fan of Trump. I'm not either. But what is your assessment of his claims of mass election interference and fake ballots and all of this type of thing that we've seen play out on his Twitter feed? I'm not referring to any single specific tweet by him, but the claims he's making around election interference by the Democrats. Well, I personally do think that some of the numbers are not necessarily accurate. But I mean, basically the situation we have as it's set up and how it was set up before the election is that the people that were pro-Trump and pro-Biden either way are willing to turn a blind eye to the type of stuff if it favors their particular candidate. I think so even if there is a presentation of legitimate evidence of election fraud or something like that having taken place, you're going to have people that voted for Biden denying that to be the case because they want a particular outcome and then obviously the people in the pro-Trump camp claiming the opposite because it's not their desired outcome. So I think it's just going to be contested regardless of whether they end up presenting that results to the courts or not, whether that's going to be the case. I mean, I think is ultimately what decides if that fraud took place. But if you look at what a lot of these intelligence officials were saying last year, it was all about talking about how Americans were not going to have faith in the electoral system after the 2020 election and basically would no longer trust in the integrity of elections. I would argue that part of the interest in that is this push within DHS in particular for the imposition of a more federally controlled voting system sort of moving away from the localized nature of elections to a federal system that runs a particular software that was produced by Microsoft in a DARPA contractor called Election Guard. And the current guy who's in charge of DHS is a CISA agency, which is there in charge of protecting critical infrastructure, including election infrastructure, was the former vice president for Microsoft's relationship with the U.S. government and has been a longtime lobbyist for Election Guard. It continues to lobby for it. So it's interesting that they've talked about, you know, perhaps there'll be some sort of cyber vulnerability in the election system going forward. Of course, that would be beneficial for the solution that's waiting in the wings, Election Guard. So, you know, if there's enough questioning in the system across the board of people not believing, you know, the results that they're being told, whether it's on, you know, the left or the right or whatever, you know, there are people that are looking to benefit from that. And if it is engineered, it makes a lot of sense that there seems to be this, you know, inescapable catch-22 situation where if Biden wins and then Trump eventually takes the case to the Supreme Court, it's overturned. You have the Biden supporting half of the country thinking the election was stolen, that it's invalid. Then on the other side of that, you have Trump supporters feeling that the election was stolen if Biden comes out triumphant. Do you feel, if you're right, that this was engineered chaos, do you think that was also an engineered catch-22 situation? Yeah, I mean, I think they game this out pretty extensively. Like I said, there was not only the transition integrity project, but you had a company called Cyber Reason, which has very extensive ties to both US and Israeli intelligence that were simulating this with, simulating complete electoral chaos. Beginning in 2018, and they've been doing it, you know, the last one they did was in February of this year, I believe. So they've been doing it pretty extensively and often in cooperation with federal officials, the US Secret Service, DHS and the FBI. So, you know, I mean, there definitely has been a lot of interest in the national security community in sort of gaming out how such chaos could take place and things like that. Another group that I didn't bring up is the one that was funded into existence by Michael Bloomberg, which is called Hawkfish. And they're the origin of this whole narrative called the Red Mirage, where they said, I think in early September that it was going to look like Trump won an election day and then the mail-in votes were going to throw it for Biden over the course of several days. But of course, they were funded entirely by Michael Bloomberg and have had a contract with the DNC this entire time that they've been promoting this particular narrative. So, you know, I want to cut our view, that's a conflict of interest. But, you know, it's just interesting to see all these high-powered players in the political sphere and also in the intelligence community, essentially, you know, indicating that this was going to happen months in advance and years in advance even. That's fascinating. And it is interesting that's pretty much exactly what we did see is we saw a very red swing states turn blue overnight. In addition to all of this, in your article on the Transition Integrity Project, you also talked about artificial intelligence. Can you explain to our viewers how artificial intelligence plays into all of this? In the Transition Integrity Project article? Yes. Sorry, I don't remember discussing artificial intelligence in that particular... You talked about the faction in the U.S. that wants to work with China on AI? Oh, right. So, that would be the one backed by Eric Schmidt and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. Right. So, that's basically a marriage of the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and Silicon Valley. It's headed by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, who of course has very close ties to the DNC and the Quentin family. And also some of these groups that I talked about earlier, like the Georgetown Group ICAP, their executive director, was hired by Eric Schmidt's philanthropic arm in September when they were setting all these task forces up for the election across the country and things like that. But that particular group, the National Security Commission on AI, says that we have to basically beat China in the AI arms race at all costs. And that basically means that we have to implement AI and automate the economy, basically supercharge the U.S.'s implementation of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution in order to have developed better AI algorithms than China. And that this group in particular, but they have a lot of sympathy in the National Security State, they feel that the only way to maintain U.S. military and economic hegemony is to basically do that, to basically remake how the American economy works, automate to a very significant degree in order to basically feed as much data as possible into these AI algorithms, because the way you make a better AI algorithm is to feed as much data into it and train it on as much data as possible. So the more data you have, the better your AI is. And they keep bringing up the point that we are lagging far behind China because they have a larger population, they have mega cities, they have more smart cities, smart city functionalities than a lot of U.S. cities do. So, you know, this group argues that it needs to go further. And there are ties to the TIP to that. For example, one of their co-founders is part of the Bergruen Institute, which is basically looking to create a transnational group that want to promote the sort of transhumanist fourth industrial revolution economy and things like that. So, and Eric Schmidt is a member of the Bergruen Institute, so is Jack Dorsey of Twitter and a lot of other prominent Silicon Valley executives. So, hopefully that answers what you were looking for me to say there. Sorry. Absolutely. It does. Thank you so much. Sorry, I've got a cat in here also, and it broke in me. Whitney, what is your view of Biden administration in terms of, this is apart from your article now, just in terms of what kind of changes you might see in foreign policy from Biden in any regard, particularly towards Russia? Well, you know, honestly, I don't really expect it. I expected to be just as hawkish as an Obama administration was and will probably increase a lot of things that were bad that happened under Trump too. For example, the drone war, you know, the amount of drone bombings from Obama to Trump did increase. It will probably increase under a Biden administration. I don't expect them to withdraw from anywhere. I've heard people saying that they think Biden will end the war in Yemen. I highly doubt that. His foreign policy team is very hawkish with respect to Israel and Palestine, for example, which, you know, will obviously have a lot to do with Middle East foreign policy. His main advisor is part of this Tel Aviv national security state think tank that regularly collaborates with the IDF in Israel's government. So it's very likely that a lot of Trump era policies in Israel that were viewed as kind of extreme will continue. And I actually don't really expect him to get back into the Iran deal, because a lot of the posturing they were making over the summer made it sound like they were a lot more hawkish on Iran than they had planned to. And there was also this talk that Iran would be unwilling to enter back into the deal unless some of these sanctions were, you know, that have been placed on during the that have been placed on Iran during the Trump administration, those would have to be removed for them to enter back into that agreement. And apparently the Biden camp has been unwilling to really budge on the reduction of those of those sanctions for whatever reason. So, you know, I think that would be I don't really expect to see a lot of change. Honestly, I'm rather pessimistic, mainly because I expect Biden to do this whole shtick about how he's going to unite the country now and by bringing a bunch of, you know, the neocon side of, you know, the Republican Party of the Never Trump Party into his cabinet as a way to sort of be a bipartisan leader going forward. So, you know. Alexander, can I bring you in here about some of these foreign policy issues you need to unmute? Yes. What about Biden's relationship with Russia to begin with? And the other things that Whitney touched on? I think that basically on the generality, I agree with Whitney. I don't think there's going to be any fundamental change in US foreign policy. I think it'll become more consistent and more aggressive. But the overall contours will remain. I think we will still see, you know, the Iran, I don't think they're going to go back into the deal. I don't think they're going to soften on China, for example. With Russians, it's more complicated because, of course, the Russian-US relationship is conducted at two levels. There is the sort of arms-controlled side. And there is here, perhaps, a possible opening with the United States agreeing with the Russians to continue with the New Star Treaty, which Obama and Putin and Medvedev negotiated. So we might actually see at that level of overall military competition a certain reduction, a certain slackening of tension. I think, though, that's going to be accompanied by an escalation, if you like, of the political tensions. In other words, we're going to see a more aggressive attempt by the United States to involve itself in Russian domestic policies, which hasn't happened very much recently. And we're also going to see the United States nibbling away at the countries around Russia's periphery, Ukraine, of course, where Biden has personal interests of all kinds, but also races in the Caucasus, in Georgia, in Moldova, where they're having a difficult election of the moment in all those sort of places. And, of course, I don't expect any slackening in US sanctions policy whatsoever. But I think that won't change much from the Trump years. So a perhaps more stable military competition, if you like, accompanied by a more active and hostile political relationship on the ground. I think the Russians are prepared for this. I think they've been working out their moves, if you like. And I think this is perhaps something which perhaps Biden doesn't understand. I think they feel that they're in a stronger position to resist that sort of pressure than they were six years ago when Obama and Biden imposed the first set of big sexual sanctions on Russia. The Russian economy has been recalibrated, the financial reserves have been increased, there's much less input dependence than there was, and the military has been considerably strengthened. So I think the Russians expect that they can see out the storm. But I think they do think that at that level a storm is coming. Whitney, do you ascribe to that? And what do you think Biden's policy against Ukraine might be? And I want Alexander's view on that. Well, unfortunately, I think I'm probably going to have to go tend to my daughter. Sorry about that. No problem. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, sorry. Sorry, I'm not more awake. So a crazy week. We totally understand. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Take care. Bye. So Alexander, you're in a well position to answer that question. I think that we're going to see continuation of what has been already happening under Trump, which of course didn't happen under Obama, U.S. arms sales to Ukraine, more political support for Ukraine, and perhaps even a renewed push to bring Ukraine into NATO. Though I think that will run into strong opposition from Germany and France, just as it did before when George W. Bush first suggested it. So I think more of the same in Ukraine. The problem with Ukraine is again, and this may not be something that perhaps Biden understands, Ukraine itself is not quite the same place that it was back in 2015, 2016. There's been local elections in Ukraine recently, pretty much all the big parties did badly in them. There is a sense that the economy isn't going very anywhere, very far. Living standards are falling. I think there is a sense of general exhaustion in Ukraine. And I think the Americans coming in, Biden coming in, saying we must renew the push, perhaps against the Russians in the East, might not be as welcome in Ukraine as perhaps Biden expects it to be. It's not the same Ukraine as when he was running Ukraine. It's not the same Ukraine as it was when he was running Ukraine. I think that's an important. How will Zelensky respond to pressure from Biden to enforce, to start that war up again in a more significant way? I think he will be most unhappy. I mean, he was already losing support. He of course came to power as the person who was going to end corruption in Ukraine, an almost impossible task, and finding political and peaceful solutions to the conflict. So I think if he finds himself instead being dragged into a war, which is what some of the people you get this sense in the Biden administration would almost like, I don't think he would welcome that. I don't think most of the Ukrainian political elite would welcome it either actually. There are obviously some very hardline people in Ukraine. There's some very, very, you know, ultra nationalist people, people with fascistic views who are, you know, anxious to sort of pursue the war. But I think a lot of the momentum behind this, a lot of the energy, if you like, that was there back in 2013, 14, 15, even, even, even, you know, 16 has dissipated. And I think it's going to be difficult, more difficult to restart it than Biden perhaps understands. So we'll see. Is he likely to embrace the Minsk plan and actually try to get Ukraine and implement it? No, again, I can't really, I mean, it's possible. I mean, I only see that happening if he decides or when we say he, I mean, you know, his administration decides that there has to be some kind of overall reconciliation with the Russians. And I think that would perhaps be, I mean, it's not inconceivable. I mean, we've talked about him being a more aggressive leader and perhaps pushing a more forceful policy towards Russia. But, you know, it may be that, you know, as reality starts to emerge, and it may be that policy shifts, and it might be easier to shift under a Biden administration, which doesn't have, you know, the specter of Russia gate hovering over it than it was under the Trump administration. But it may be that at some point, you know, they might decide that they need to start sorting out their problems with Russians, as opposed to creating more of them. And in that event, maybe they would look at the Minsk accords and try to put life into them again. But for the moment, I don't think that's what they will do. Given all the domestic problems that, political problems that Ukraine gave, Biden, is he likely to stay away from it for a while or? You just thought so. I would have thought that would be the obvious thing to do. I wouldn't have thought that he would want people to, you know, remember Ukraine, especially as, by the way, I suspect that some of these stories about, you know, what his son was up to in Ukraine and what perhaps he himself was up to, I think they probably did gain some traction with parts of the US public and may have had some effect in the election. So I'd have thought, you know, logically, he would want to stay away. But of course, there's lots of people around him. And some of the people who are there, you know, we've heard from Whitney about, you know, how, you know, they're pretty hawkish. And I think that those sorts of people will be speaking very loudly and very forcefully for more active engagement in Ukraine. I have to say, my own guess is, Ukraine is a priority, but Syria for these people is perhaps an even greater priority. To an extent that I find difficult to understand sometimes, you know, hardliners both in Washington and London seem to have a particular issue, obsession if you like, with the situation in Syria. And maybe, maybe the pressure in, for, you know, if you're looking for a confrontation with the Russians, the pressure in Syria will be even greater. I mean, there was a most interesting article in, I think it was antiwar.com about, you know, this Biden, future Biden administration official talking to, you know, the Syrian opposition and outlining what looked like a very hawkish policy on Syria. And what hasn't heard that actually so much with Ukraine. So maybe, maybe Syria will be, if you like, the major flashpoint. Alexander, what do you think the Biden administration would try to revive an attempt to overthrow Assad? Or have they accepted that that war is over and he won? I think that there might, there will be certainly some people, I suspect, who do want to see that. And I think also, there's also going to be this even further attempt to economically strangle Syria in order to engineer the overthrow of Assad. But I think what they're going to try and do actually, and this is where it comes, they're going to revert to the Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry policy of trying to get the Russians to agree to remove Assad from them, for them. It didn't really succeed. But I think more than, you know, clash with the Russians head on in Syria, which I think the US military probably wouldn't want. I think that's probably what we're going to see. Oddly enough, that might result in a strange kind of way, in more diplomatic engagement with the Russians. But in terms of that policy succeeding, I think there's no chance. Now, you mentioned Russia gave before, a couple of weeks before this election. We heard again from anonymous intelligence officials in the US that Russia was interfering in this election. Now, funny enough, Biden is one, we're not hearing that tonight. No, it's an extraordinary fact. You know, that whole narrative, which was so all embracing and so dominating, and which dominated, you know, the four years of Trump's administration, has suddenly been switched off. And having said that, I think it's done immense damage. It's done immense damage in relations between the US and Russia. It soured the Russians about the US and about prospects of a future partnership with the US to an extraordinary degree. And of course, it's also provided much of the backdrop to the things that Whitney was talking about, you know, this sense of conspiracy and intrigue that surrounds this election with all these strange groups emerging with all these very, you know, rather troubling and concerning plans about managing the transition and all the rest. And if we have a disputed election, and we have a disputed election with many, many people across the United States, willing to believe stories about election fraud, which may have some substance, by the way, but if they're willing to believe it, and they're not prepared to trust the media because of it, well, it's partly because they've been fed for four years with the Russia Gate story, which was, which is essentially disintegrated. And which, as I said, the media isn't even talking about anymore. So it's done damage this, this narrative, this, this fictitious narrative has done damage at every, every level between US and Russia, within the US itself, in immeasurable ways. Elizabeth, did you have any follow-up on that on Russia Gate? Sorry, I didn't, I didn't catch that. Can you repeat that? Elizabeth, yes. Yeah. So I was just wanting to ask, we know that obviously a part of Russia Gate was focusing on WikiLeaks. You've been really helpful in helping us cover the exhibition here in Julian Assange, the co-founder and former editor and chief of WikiLeaks. I've asked almost every guess we've had on this question, but I'll ask it of you as well, especially because you helped us cover Assange's situation. What do you think, if any, will there, will the difference be under a Biden administration when it comes to Assange, or is there really no difference whatsoever? And is that one of the ways in which, you know, although Biden and Trump look very different, they speak in different ways and they sort of have different personas in many substantive ways, they are very much the same in their policies. Indeed. Can I just, before we discuss that, because it's an important question, can I just preface it by saying that apparently there's been information. I haven't researched it fully, but apparently Mueller was trying through, you know, prosecuting Roger Stone to connect WikiLeaks to the Russians in some fashion and found that he couldn't, and that's why he didn't, you know, charges on that issue have not been brought against Assange. It has not been reported here in Britain at all. It is quite depressing. Or by means of the US. Or exactly, but that major issue, which has actually done Assange's public image here, damage. It's not been corrected at all. Now, what difference will the Biden administration make to these proceedings? I think absolutely none at all. I say that with, you know, regret, because I would love a new administration to come along. Look at this mess that has been made. Well, actually, let's not call it a mess. Look at this persecution of this man. And say to themselves, well, let's go back to what Barack Obama and his Justice Department were thinking. And they were saying, well, we can't possibly press on with this, because if we do, it will go against any and every journalist in the United States and could, you know, compromise First Amendment rights and freedoms of the media and all of that. I wish I believed that. But unfortunately, I don't. I think the momentum behind this has now become so great and so strong that I think it will continue. And the kind of national security, various hawkish people we see around Biden, I'm afraid they're the kind of people who will not want to see, you know, Assange go. Having said that, there is one thing Biden could do, which would separate him from Trump is he could drop this prosecution. That would make a big impact. I mean, that is something people would notice. But, you know, I'm afraid realistically, I don't expect it. Yeah, unfortunately, I completely agree with you. I think it's one of those issues that really does show how much this is a really a bad choice of two evils. It is very hard to say that one's really a lesser evil than the other. We've got some questions from the audience. One of them is whether you think Hillary Clinton might become Secretary of State again. I know that Joe's talked during our broadcast since the election that it might be someone like Susan Rice. What's your take on that? And do you see Hillary Clinton taking a role in a Biden administration at all? Right. Well, I think firstly, I think it's more likely that it's going to be Susan Rice. I think that Biden, if he's got any political sense, will want to keep a certain distance from Hillary Clinton, not just because she's a non-popular figure with many people. But I think if he starts teaming up with Hillary Clinton, it will seem as if he's brought in to his administration a very powerful alternative center to himself. So I think he won't want to do that. And I don't think he needs to do it. Obama needed in a way to do it in 2008 because bringing in Hillary Clinton into the administration united the Democratic Party. I don't think that need exists anymore. So I think it's much more likely to be Susan Rice. That's a guess. I mean, I don't know. But I think it's much more likely to be Susan Rice than Hillary Clinton. I think Hillary Clinton is, however, always going to be there. She's going to be a voice. She will be. She's obviously very influential still in the Democratic Party. She played a prominent role in the Democratic Party's convention where Biden was formerly nominated. So, you know, she's still going to be an influential voice, both behind the scenes and in public. So, you know, when we mustn't count her out, and I've heard another rumor that perhaps when the next vacancy comes up for the Supreme Court of the United States, well, she might be proposed for that. And perhaps in a way, that's a more, I'm not sure it would be a popular move, but I think that's probably something I could perhaps more easily. Exactly what Joe predicted as well. Exactly. Where did you hear that rumor from? Because I said it yesterday. Well, you know, I read it somewhere, but you know, Joe, it's quite possible. It's somebody, somebody you said and somebody picked it up. But I mean, I can certainly see it. I mean, I think that's very plausible. I doubt on the only one. I hadn't heard it before, but I'm sure somebody else has thought that. She'd love it. She'd love it. Oh, she'd absolutely. And you know, as you know, Alexander, they've been talking about expanding the size of the court. So to reverse this five, there's now six, three conservative majority by adding four more seats, they can have a seven, six majority. Well, with that, they will, as I understand it, need the Senate to do that. And I mean, I, I, it doesn't look as if they've got it. And I can't imagine Mitch McConnell, the kind of person who will help them do it to be quite frank. So I would have thought that particular plan is, is not going to, is not going to happen. But certainly, there will be vacancies that will come up. And I can certainly see Hillary Clinton sitting in the Supreme Court. And by the way, can I just say, I mean, she is by all accounts an extremely, you know, able lawyer. I don't know how much of a jurist she is. But you know, she probably has the legal qualifications to do it. Who knows, we'll see. I just hope she's not sitting on the court if a Saundra's case, a challenge to the First Amendment, to the Espionage Act and conflict with First Amendment goes. Well, well, I entirely agree with that. And I, I think that would be a disaster. And I think frankly, if she was, I mean, it would be so bad that given some of the things she said about Assange, I think even talking about sending drones to kill him or things like that. I mean, there would be, yeah, I mean, there'd be, I mean, there would be, there'd be such an obvious conflict of interest that she would, she should recuse herself. But anyway, I don't think it's going to happen soon enough, to be honest. Well, but we know, we'll see, we'll keep our fingers crossing. Another question that we come back to you repeatedly, but it's important. So I'd like to ask you about it is the fact that we know that Biden will not remain in office or in a cognitive capacity that will allow him to really serve as president for all that long, if he does get into office. So what is your opinion on Kamala Harris? What do you think? How do you think she would run the country in a different way potentially? And as Joe and others have pointed out that she's on foreign policy, at least she's an unknown, but in a lot of other ways, she's also an unknown really. So if you could give your opinion, I mean, this is the great problem because she is unknown. I find it difficult to form a clear view of her. I'm going to say this, she doesn't come across to me as a very authoritative figure. And the fact that if she were to step in, because Biden had been forced to step down for one reason or another, I wonder what legitimacy, well, not legitimacy, what authority as president she would have in that case. I mean, she'd have obviously certain things working for her, but I wonder whether she would be the kind of person who, you know, the Democratic Party, the bureaucracy, the officials are in the bureaucracy, would take especially seriously, given also that as I understand it, she's not very popular in the United States. I mean, she may become more popular, but if she remains less popular, I mean, she didn't do very well in the primaries. She was bested by Tulsi Gabbard in a most extraordinary way. But if she continues to carry all that baggage, they may say to themselves, well, this is a person who hasn't been elected president, has inherited the presidency in rather strange circumstances and isn't realistically likely to win the presidency by herself. So how much notice will we pay to her? Problem with that is I sense anyway that the Biden administration is going to be, you know, sort of collective leadership of people, partly because I don't think Biden himself will be a particularly strong president. You know, he may surprise me, but I doesn't look like that. So if he goes, that quality of a collective leadership, if you like, will become even stronger. And that doesn't seem to me to be something that the US Constitution is really very geared towards. So we'll see. I haven't answered the question very well, because I just don't know enough about this person. Well, and that's exactly the issue that none of us really, she doesn't have enough of a history and politics for us to have a good assessment of what she might do. And that's really scary, considering the fact that she might very well, relatively quickly become our president. So another thing that we've talked about a lot is just the general chaos that might develop in the next few weeks. From an outside of the US perspective, what do you make of that? How do you think Europe will respond if there is a lot of chaos, especially once Biden does declare victory? Well, I think this is an issue which is very widely felt, not just in Britain, but across Europe and in other places, which is people look at the United States and they see this country, which is still the world's most powerful country, still the world's richest country, still a country that promotes itself as being enormously technologically advanced. And it doesn't seem to know how to do a proper vote count. It doesn't even seem to understand how to do an election. And I think they look at the system in the United States, and they see a system that is both profoundly dysfunctional and unfit for purpose. But also, it seems unreformable, because there doesn't seem to be any way of sorting this thing out. I mean, you have this bizarre situation where the United States, in one sense, is a country. It clearly is a single country. But it conducts an election, as if it was 50 different countries with different rules in different parts of the Union. No central electoral commission that can impose sort of a more uniform system across the entire nation that can look into what goes on in Michigan or Arizona or Texas and see if there's problems there, what to do about them. No single set of electoral laws. And they worry, I mean, they say to themselves, if the Americans can't even run that and can't even organize sensible transitions of power, then what can we realistically expect of them on other matters? And this does create nervousness. I mean, it's something, by the way, that is relatively new. Because until perhaps the Bush-Gore election, nobody thought that elections in the United States were at all problematic. But they started to look to Europeans, and not just Europeans, but to many people, increasingly so, in a way that, as I said, does undermine confidence in the United States. Perhaps more than Americans themselves understand. So the next question I wanted to ask you was about the media. We talked earlier about Russiagate. We talked about the way in which the media has used Russiagate dishonestly. But there's also the fact that the media has profited extensively from coverage of Donald Trump and whipping up hysteria around it. What do you think, if anything, the media will latch on to to keep its viewership and ratings and clickbait type income flowing once he leaves office? If he does, I assume that he will at the current time with what the results of the election are looking like. What are they going to do when he leaves? I'm sure there's lots of people in newsrooms and boardrooms all over the media who are asking themselves exactly that question. I mean, they've done marvellously out of Donald Trump. I mean, they've loved to hate him. And now, you know, this figure who's made them so happy and is now probably going to disappear from the scene. And if we really are going to go back to politics as usual, well, it's going to be hugely boring and very dull without Donald Trump there. So I think they're asking themselves the same question. And I don't think they know. Maybe perhaps some of them on the fringes may be saying to themselves, well, you know, we need another scandal. We've got all sorts of scandals lurking in Joe Biden's closet. We didn't want to talk about them during the election. But perhaps now is our opportunity. I'm not sure they will want to go there, because I don't think they want to undermine his legitimacy, if you like, the legitimacy of his election. So soon after they were backing him to get elected. But I think they're going to have problems and we'll see what they come up with. I mean, I'm sure they'll come up with something. But of course, the danger is that one thing they might say to themselves is, well, you know, one of the ways we can get attention is by having another, what was it, you know, Theodore Roosevelt said a nice little walk somewhere. I mean, that's exactly the speculation I've seen. That's exactly the speculation I've seen is that they'll start beating the war drum again. I hope that's not correct, but that seems relatively likely. Joe. Yes, we're still waiting for somebody to announce that this guy's won this damned election. It's been stuck at 253. He's doubled his lead in Nevada. He's up by 14,000 in Pennsylvania, the melon ballots that came in are 70 to 80 percent in his way. There's no way he's losing this now. I suspect that in 22 minutes from now, the three networks, the over-the-air networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, the traditional three networks in the U.S., have their nightly news. It was yesterday that Trump timed his remarks in the White House press briefing room at 6.30 for those over-the-air broadcasts, and they all cut them off, by the way, because they were afraid he was riling up his people on the ground to start doing something violent. So they cut them off, which was controversial, where CNN continued to broadcast on cable, which is not accessed by as many people as the three networks are. So maybe we're going to get this in 20 minutes. So you don't mind hanging around 20 minutes for you if you want to be on here when this starts. Possibly. I mean, I think, I think, I think Kassman will probably want me at some time, but your dog is sleeping. He certainly is. He certainly is. I mean, one of your dogs. Anyway, one of your dogs. Let me ask you this last question, then, Alex. We talked about Maiden in Russia, but what about Maiden's relation to China, given all the background of the allegations of his corruption, where he used his office to help his son get deals there, and then he is the big man. He may have gotten into it. Of course, he didn't sign these deals until a couple of months after leaving office to make it legal, since he couldn't do that while he was vice president, but he may have used his office to set it up. It seems like. So what going forward is Biden's relationship with China like will he lift these tariffs? Will he be more aggressive than Trump even militarily outside of sea, for example? I think he's vulnerable on this issue. I mean, this is an issue which the remember the Republicans have and they might want to run on. And if they want to do a sort of reverse Russia gate on him, which is not impossible. I mean, there's some people in the Republican Party who I think would be quite happy to do that. They control the Senate or it seems likely they will control the Senate so they can do all the kind of things that the Democrats did to Trump. They can hold all kinds of hearings and get all sorts of witnesses and start pressing for special prosecutors. And if the electoral cycle starts to turn in their turn their way in 2022, you know, who knows, you know, they can perhaps use that even more. So if they do that, that might make Biden anxious not to be not to appear too close to China, just as Russia gate made Trump very nervous of getting too close to Russia. I think over and above and beyond all of that, my own senses that China and the US are each going their separate ways. This began before Trump came in. Trump turbocharged it to an extreme degree and infuriated the Chinese in the way that he went about it. But I think the drift to separate had already to some extent be gone under Obama. So I don't see a whole bunch of results as well. So think about what you just said. Let's break that down. Virtually simultaneously. Yes, your dog is called you Alex, but I'm loving your please finish it. I will let you go. Yes. So I think that this period, you know, which which we had, you know, especially under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the United States and China being very close, Chimerica, as we used to say in Europe at that time. I think that's gone forever. So I think we will still see the Chinese moving away towards export dependency on the United States. And I think we will see the US increasingly seeing China as an adversary and a challenger, both economically and politically and technologically with the kind of things Whitney was saying. So I think that kind of competition is going to continue. And it's going to perhaps even intensify, but it will perhaps be conducted in a rather more civil and polite way. Well, we'll let your dog have the last part. And we'll end the interview there. Thank you so much, Alexander. It's very interesting, the prospect of China gate replaying itself by having trying to undermine and weaken a Biden presidency. They'll get back what they gave to Trump. Thanks so much, Alexander, Bill. Thank you. My regards. And a pat on your dog's head for me. Bye-bye. So, Elizabeth, we are once again here awaiting this declaration. I'm going to make a proposal that we wait until the bottom of the hour, which is 12 minutes from now. And if they don't announce it then, if Biden doesn't come out to the parking lot that he was in Delaware with the cars and say, I'm, I'm the president. Now, where do I go now? Oh, no, I'm in the Senate again. He's not sure whether he's one seat in the Senate or whether he became president. We'll see if he gets that right. Or if he remembers that he's against Trump and not George Bush, we'll see. Oh, yeah, right. So I propose a short musical break. We'll be back, let's say in five to 10 minutes. And then we will take it to the bottom of the hour, which is when the broadcast news takes place. And if he doesn't call then, we're going to call, we'll call us our broadcast off. But today we'll reassess about whether we'll come back tomorrow to talk again. But we've been talking throughout the day today as if he'd won already. So I'm not sure there'd be much more to say after this, but let's come back in about 10 minutes and see what happens. That sounds good. Okay, we're back here at CN Live with our coverage of the 2020 U.S. election. We were waiting until 6.30 when the over-the-air broadcast began in the U.S. And they have started. There's no announcement from Biden. We don't know when this is ever going to happen. CNN is going over and over the same material for the last 12 hours. It hasn't been news since early this morning in the U.S. when Biden overtook Trump in Pennsylvania. That was major news. He's up to 14,000. Vote lead in Pennsylvania with 96% counted. He wins Pennsylvania. He wins the presidency. If he wins Arizona and Nevada, he wins. If he's in ahead in those two states. So he's won this thing. But they're not announcing it for some reason yet. Biden hasn't come out to his car park and made his announcement. That he's won. But we're saying he's won. And everybody else is, except Biden, it seems like, and the networks saying that he won. So we're going to leave it at that tonight. We had three excellent guests. Scott Ritter, Whitney Webb, and Alexander McCouris, Alexander from London, who was giving us a European and British point of view on this. And I think we did a tremendous job, Elizabeth. I have a friend. I'm going to say this to everybody. I was just going to tell you privately, but I have a friend, Oris Lipishek, who's the most famous TV reporter in Slovenia and unknown anywhere outside of Slovenia. But believe me, he's well known. First time I traveled there, I was a friend of his from the UN because he was based in New York. And I was on a train in Slovenia and I started speaking to a woman there. And I asked her if she knew Oris Lipishek. And of course, he was the Dan rather of of Slovenia. Anyway, he wrote an email the other day, he's been watching our broadcasts. And he thought you and I said you and Elizabeth are a great team. And we're doing a great job. So a guy who's been in the TV, he even became the director of that TV station. And some of his people telling him to run for parliament, they wanted him to even be prime minister someday, but he'd stayed in TV. Anyway, it was just I just I felt great hearing that from him, a TV professional from way back. We're doing a great job. So I'll let him say that instead of us. But I've enjoyed these four days with you going over this. And we're going to pick this up again. We don't know when but stay tuned to our Twitter feed and to consortium news for if we do another installment on this. But we've spoken today as though Biden had won and what the consequences are of that in terms of his foreign domestic policy. So Elizabeth, Kathy, our producer, our guests, we've done several shows going back to Jill Stein, Chris Hedges, Rick Wolf and Mike Ravel. Before that we had Greg Palast as well and our four shows here. So I think we've given a very different and I think more informative and in-depth look at this election that you're going to find on any over the air or cable TV station, certainly in the United States. So I'm proud of what we did. And I thank you, Elizabeth, again. Thank you. It's been great. So to our audience, and we've had some good numbers and we appreciate all of you for coming in. We apologize for our late starts, especially today, but we picked up audience anyway. So that means there's been interest in this. And I thank you all. So for CN Live for consortium news, this is Joe Lauria. Goodbye.