 Trump had some thoughts from Bedminster yesterday on the indictments. So let's get the Trump version of events now and react to that. This is called election interference and yet another attempt to rig and steal a presidential election. More importantly, it's a political persecution like something straight out of a fascist or communist nation. Don't forget this persecution is being done by the same weaponized agencies that for seven years have been running illegal psychological warfare campaigns against the American people. From the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, to the no-collusion Mueller witch hunt, to impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two, the fake dossier paid for by the Democrats. How about the fake dossier, remember that one? The FBI, Twitter files and so much more. That's an example of, it's just the frustration of kind of pulling apart a Trump speech where there are certain components there that are valid, like aspects of the Russian investigation as we've covered on the screen before were pretty bogus and a lot of wasted. We're completely bogus. Yes, the fact that the FBI and the Justice Department as we've already talked about have been sloppy at times, seemingly politicized or unfair, seems to have opened up the opportunity for this kind of obfuscation from somebody like Trump. And I don't know if you have any thoughts as to how we move forward from this spot because it's one thing to say, we got to stop handing out the free passes, but then how do you do that in a way where you're not just acknowledging the political reality and seeing that you're going to inflame a large segment of the country over this perceived unfairness? Yeah, look, it's a tall order. I mean, the Department of Justice is an utterly rotten and compromised agency. I know I've been throwing a lot of stink at it, but look, I mean, this is the agency that gave Jeffrey Epstein a slap on the wrist. They caught the most prolific child molester in the history of this country and gave him a slap on the wrist. And the plea agreement that they reached with him, the non-prosecution agreement is one of the most corrupt documents that I have ever seen in my life. And they handed that out, you know, why? Because, well, he just knows a bunch of famous people and some of them are on his plane to his private island. So can you redeem an agency like that? I'm not sure. I think it's worth adding, watching Trump go through his list of grievances, his Festivus list there for a minute. He's absolutely right about all of that. And of course it's larded in with a bunch of bullshit and things like that. I'm looking at that and the one thing I want to say, Zach and Clark is, you know what? At least we can say libertarians are not to blame for this. Libertarians routinely get blamed for moral breakdown because, you know, people smoke weed now instead of drinking themselves to cirrhosis, you know, or we don't care about kids, we don't do this or we're irrelevant, blah, blah, blah. But it's like, the one thing that is good to say is that a libertarian perspective on the size scope and spending of government, the role of it and whatnot, you would not lead to this kind of outcome where you have two equal and opposite forces, you know, that command fewer and fewer adherents from the American population and Republicans and Democrats. These are two parties that have been around since the before the Civil War. And they are locked, you know, like Professor Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes in a death embrace constantly falling over Reichenbach's fault. And neither of them can get to that place that I think Clark is talking about where you say, you know what, in the interest of the country, in the interest of something other than the most base and banal and vulgar self-interest that I need to win the next news cycle or the next election, I am actually gonna do the right thing and start to reform a government, you know, that has single digit ratings. I think Trump is guilty. I think he's wrong the way he acted is wrong and that should be changed. But what we need to take away from this as a way to actually create a different system and a different framework that does not just say, you know what, you know, it puts the American electorate in the role of, you know, of little kids watching their parents beat each other. There are no cops that are coming like this. We need to be removed from this kind of spectacle and put into a different situation altogether or create that situation. It seems like we're caught in a vicious cycle to some degree and you see this in... It's a dialectic with no possibility of synthesis. Yeah, exactly. And you see this in countries that have high levels of corruption where all... If all the top officials are constantly either breaking the law or at least kind of pushing the boundaries of legal behavior, then their political opponents come in and they kind of, with some justification, take them down legally. And then it flips back the other way. And we're, you know, we've seen it, the pendulum kind of always swinging back and forth from Clinton to Trump. And now in the Republic... In just yesterday, the Republicans in the Senate have announced that they're, you know, they have these documents that may or may not prove that Biden was involved with Ukraine and some sort of bribery scheme. And so you can see this back and forth pendulum swing in motion and what, you know, I'd like to see libertarians somehow disrupt that, but I'm not sure, you know, what the next steps are in order to stop that pendulum swing. Can we run the Vivek Ramaswamy clip? He has an idea. This is my commitment on January 20th, 2025. If I'm elected the next U.S. president to pardon Donald J. Trump for these offenses in this federal case, and I have challenged, I have demanded that every other candidate in this race either sign this commitment to pardon on January 20th, 2025 or else to explain why they are not. Pardons have obviously played a role in presidential crimes in the past. What role do you think they will play, if any, in this situation? Well, this is now we're really in the out beyond what anybody can predict here in the Twilight Zone. So there are two possibilities besides, I would say that Vivek, pardoning a president is outside the realm of possibility since he won't be president, but I would not rule out the possibility that Biden pardons Trump. I don't think it's likely. Maybe it's something on the order of one in 10 or one in 20. But you could imagine Biden essentially treating this as an active statesmanship the way Nixon, Ford did with Nixon. And then there will be the subtext, right? Because everybody knows that the preferred candidate for the Democrats in the next election is Trump. They want Trump to run. And if they thought that this would enable him to stay in the race and get the nomination, you could see that sort of checking a couple of boxes for them. Again, I don't think it's likely, but I think I wouldn't rule it out. The other even more sort of a science fiction question is could Trump pardon himself if he were to somehow be elected? If he's not yet been convicted by the time he gets to be elected president and inaugurated if that were to happen, he could just order the Department of Justice to terminate the investigation. But if he had been convicted but somehow still manages to win the presidency then the question is, can he pardon himself? And guess what? We don't know the answer to that question. Thank goodness it's never come up in real life, but having kind of poured over the relevant language just the other day, I think it's within the realm of possibility and not a completely preposterous reading of the relevant constitutional language. And I don't even know what's gonna happen if we get to that point. I just think we're gonna, well, we'll be tapping the strategic cynicism reserves of the entire country at that point. So hopefully it won't come to that. Hey, thanks for watching that excerpt from our conversation with Kato's Clark Neely about the Trump indictment. For the full conversation, click right here. For another clip from that conversation, click right here. And come back every Thursday at 1 p.m. for more conversations just like this.