Sex, Lies and Notebook Computers

You're stunking mad, as they say, not what your country can do for you, as what you can do for your country. Mister gerlbucha, tear down this wall, read my lips. It's the Ricoche Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lilas and today the subjects are well, Romania, laptop, subway crime. That means it's Andy McCarthy. So let's have Oursellsther podcast. You held onto those documents when you knew the federal government was

seeking them, and then it had given you a subpoena to return. You're ready? Are you ready? Can I talk? Yeah? Can I do you mind? I would like for you to answer. It's very simple, toys as it's very simple to you're a nasty person, I'll tell you. Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number six hundred and forty one. I think if you're in your cell making a little Roman numeral marks on the wall. If I'm wrong, drop me a line at Ricochet. And

what is ricochet dot com. Well, it's just the place you've been looking for all these years on the internets. It's the same civil center right conversation where actually is Rob coined long ago. People have skin in the game, not actual literal skin, but metaphor as possible. You know, you know that is rob Along by the way, Peter Robinson will be coming along shortly,

we hope. Perhaps Right now in California, Peter is looking at the border and wondering exactly when the throngs will reach his stately little corner of the world. I'm looking at this and thinking this is unusual. Apparently a law elapsed, and now we have to let everybody in kind of what it's like. We're powerless to do anything about it. If there's nothing you can do. As a matter of fact, the only humane thing you can do is

to make sure there's enough busses to take them elsewhere. If this was an actual foreign I mean, if this was a foreign invasion by people inimicable to the United States, hostile to us, shall we say, you'd like to think that there might be something we could do the people out, and by the people, I mean the people who are coming here as economic migrants, as you are coming here for various reasons. But I'm sorry, we have

a process, don't we Now we don't. There's nothing we can do, right, rob Nothing we can do well, which is interesting thing of the idea, like, well, there's a law, got to obey, the law is law, and the laws bired, we got to obey it. I can't do much about the law, the idea that we're somehow hamstrung by a law that that allows other people to break the law. I mean, he just sneek at a country anytime they want, is um. I mean it's a very strange. I don't. I always trying to figure out what

the strategy is left and right, and this one I don't. I just don't understand. Like a bold move to secure the southern border by a president sitting president the current one running for reelection, seems to me to be a wise move, A different brainer. Yeah, Like I was looking, I'm not quite sure I get the the larger sort of conspiratorial issues to replacement stuff.

And maybe I have never known a president, or studied a president in my entire life, in the history of this republic who would not toss out long term planning, long term thinking for a short term political gain. In my life, yeah, I would. I dare you to find me a president, any president, even the great ones, who would ever do that. This president is a just recently approval is facing a pretty uphill climb in twenty twenty four. It is just sheer political incompetence that he wouldn't just say,

let's let's get that border secure. Incompetence is is it? I mean you may think, okay, no, this is Clauwert Piven. Oh no, this is this is Marxism, this is all these things. Yeah. No, more likely it is just simply incompetence and an inability to do anything and no reason to think why they should. I mean, perhaps their instincts say, well, these people, you know, they should come here. They land of opportunity. You know what it says in the Statue of Liberty

and the rest of it. Okay, let's let's quadruple the numbers. Let's say that forty thousand people a day are streaming over and there's nothing we can do, and they are we are obligated to put them up in southern in the border states, and to give them phones, and to give them a little piece of paper that says we'll drop by in twenty twenty seven and we'll take a look at your claim, which means they evaporated the country would ever

see again. But when you add this to everything else, this general sense that the government, which supposedly is here to protect us is doing absolutely nothing willfully. So then you wonder exactly what's the state of the social contract. They're supposed to keep us safe, they're supposed to have law and order reasonably so. But we watch every day a video of somebody walking into Walgreens and filling up a trash bag and then running out to go sell it somewhere.

We watch every day some subway nonsense going on, and of course, and the neely thing that's going on in New York right now is a prime example of that. We see here as we have in Minneapolis roving gangs in Kia car running around terrorizing people. And what does Baltimore do. We're going to

sue the key of people for making their cars so easy to steal. All of these examples in which we as a people have ceded to the government the right to use force against other miscreants in order to keep things working, and in every instance we look around, they're not doing it. I walked past the television here at the office, the CNN was playing, and apparently they've

got a special coming out. What happened to San Francisco. Which is good that they're going to take a look at it, but it's a real head scrap. Happened? Happened? What happened? Peter iPhone hasn't rung. They don't need to do a documentary. I can give them a list of San Francisco be cleaned up and crime free before anybody on the left understands what happened in San Francisco. That's more likely to happen. Well, what happened? What did happen? Can I just get back to the border. Yes.

The Speaker of the House should already this morning have gone to the cameras and made a statement saying that although debt limit is a serious matter and the risk of default is of course grave, that doesn't come for another month. What's happening right now, as of today, is a threat to the integrity of the nation itself. It is a crisis that must be dealt with, and therefore, at noon I will be introducing legislation. The House of Representatives will

be voting on it at one o'clock. We will send it to the Senate by two. This is a crisis and the nation itself is at risk That's what should be had. Greg Abbott should have been given a speech by now where's Ronda santis By? It's just taking actions as of this morning, as of this already today. Previously there was legislation in Florida that banned the hiring of illegals. Am I correct? I'm sorry? Undocumented? Am I not correct? Now? You're being high minded. You're talking about policy, I'm

talking about politics. Who's in front of the cameras this morning? To reassure the public and to take advantage, frankly, of the gigantic political opening. Everybody is looking at images right now and saying, well, I guess we're stuck with Trump. He's the only one who's going to talk about this. That cannot be the case. Sorry, boys, we were talking about political

malpractice, and I just had to jump in on that. Well, I mean there is that question, right, I mean, like I to keep asking myself, I don't I'm trying not to come up with a singularity argument. But has everyone lost their minds at some point like Baltimore? And then and then look, I mean, look, you say what you like about Joe Biden. I mean, you know he's a fool in many ways, but he's not a foolish at least in the past, it's not been a

foolish politician. It's one of the reasons why he's been in a government for so long. He's been able to stay there. The idea that there's not an easy lob here for even a liberal to take on the eve of a presidential election just ridiculous. You can probably find footage of Joe Biden a twenty years ago saying, if it were up to me, I would go down to the border and whip the immigrants with rains, you know, I mean,

he's all over the road and all over them. Now. Of course, that's what the press corps in DC brings up, is the fact that, well, you know, we can't do anything because we had that whipping incident, which to discredit aw Erica said, no, that sound sense, I got to correct you, right, But that underscores a lot of this is that it is cruel, it is it is trump like to oppose this.

It doesn't matter in the merits whether or not we should opposed the uncontrolled blow of immigration, because it is identified with the with the the the tip of the sphere of fascism in American political parties today, it must be opposed. Nobody wants they what's yeah, I mean that the derangement is the drangement is so amazing. I mean, I know, we don't really want to get into the CNN interview with the town hall wherever you want to call it.

What Trump does to death right, Well that's what everybody lost their minds at CNN. The idea. I mean, I said this, this is not my insight. This is Ben Shapiro who wrote this, and I think he's absolutely right, because I was watching this thing thinking why is this so weird? What's wrong? What is what is not working about this interview for me? And it's not just that I don't like Trump, but just like,

but this sounds so strange about it. And I think that this was the premise of the town hall was a number the depending on how you look at it, the most popular Republican running for president in twenty twenty four. The front runner is having a town hall meeting with Republican primary voters, and the questions asked of this front runner in a Republican party were questions that are

utterly uninteresting to the Republicans in the audience. So none of those questions had anything to do with the Republican primary, and that was what the business was so bizarre. It's like, you know, one of those people were laughing and hooting, and they're like, this is not what we came here for. We came here to ask why he blew it? If you're against him

in a Republican why he blew it? And Brian Camp and Ron Desantists didn't when it came to COVID, why he blew it building the border wall, which he didn't build any of it, and he promised he was going to build it, So all those are good questions to ask. Instead it was all this weird you know, so everybody lost their minds. That's my that's my working theory for the next six months is all the questions he got, as far as I can tell, all the questions he did receive, reduced

to one. Mister President, mister Trump, We we CNN, the media, the FBI, the CIA, the Democratic Party. We have spent six years trying to humiliate you. Why aren't you humiliated? That's really what I came down to, Why aren't you embarrassed? He doesn't have no shame? The answer is no, of course not. We knew. I knew that. Well, the prospect of a presidential election coming up that is Joe Biden

versus Donald Trump. It is mortifying on so many levels. And and and not just because we almost felt that, you know, in the last presidential election, this is the last gasp of the gerontocracy. I mean, Trump was vital, but you know you're not that old. But still this this is the last hurrah of that generation. And and for four years later to be presented with the same choice is is just there's there's no last gasp. When everybody's on a ventilator. It's just to keep these guys wheezing away.

So very good point. It's a great line. And also the argument is like just political, pure politics. It's like you knew, almost always beats old. Change, almost always beats more of the same. There have been very rare instances where that hasn't been because the mantra in the first bill in Bill Clinton won, I remember that was this thing that everybody say, well, we need change, change, change, we need change because there have

been X number of years of Reaganism and they're we need to change. And also we were as clintonshood at the time experiencing the worst economy since the Great Depression, which everybody kind of sort of didn't really believe but kind of felt in their bones because we had a downturn. And I still remember when I was covering the Democratic Convention in New York, there was a button for sale that had this frazzled looking woman in the words worried about everything. Vote Democratic,

and that was pretty much what they had. And then pretty much kind of what people did, and it was changed. We need change, we need change, change, change, change, And of course that went with all the people who were walking around Manhattan, or rather slumped up against a building with a cup rattling and saying the very same word, Oh, I remember that convention. Well, it was in New York, and New York in the summer is a hot, hot, hot, steamy, uncomfortable,

smellty place. But it's still New York, at least back then it was. I don't know what it's going to be like now, Rob can tell us. Maybe it's a little bit emptied out. Maybe the smell of weed wafts over everything in a way that it didn't in ninety two. But here's the thing here many where it's getting warm, it is just it's great. It's great, and pretty soon I'm gonna turn my AC on. And you're thinking, well, if you're going to do that, you better change your

sheets. Well, first of all, change my sheets all the time. But secondly, just because it's getting warmer and I'm turning on the air conditioning doesn't mean that I change my sheets because I use That's right, you said it yourself, if you thought it yourself. Bold and Branch Bowling Branch is the betting expert. They make the highest quality sheets with incredible craftsmanship. Each sheet set is slow made for unmatched softness with one percent organic cut, and

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and now we welcome back to the podcast or old friend. Andy McCarthy, senior Fellow of the National Review Institute and a contributing editor to there, as well as with Fox News, served as an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York. And we got big investigations, big lawsuits going on, so we thought we'd have them back. Welcome Andy, guys. Great to be with you as always. Oh hey, here's the deal, laptop. The story is it was Russian dis info, was signed by fifty

one people who agreed, so, and then it was real. But it doesn't matter because none of that is so. And then CNN, well, there may be eleven shell companies but calling money to grandkids, but none of it went to Joe Biden. So nothing burger, nothing burger, Move along, move along. Tell us what matters the most Out of the things we've heard re Hunter and the Bidens over the last I don't know, three or four weeks. I think obviously the most important thing is to prosecute Santos.

I mean, under the questions as you blamed them out. I mean, I can't see any other alternative. You don't look. I thought the House over Sight press conference that they had the other day was pretty good in the way that they pretty efficiently over fifty minutes, laid out a lot of this financial evidence, which has you know, goog gobs of money going into Biden family coffers over a number of years. This is not a new story. I mean a lot of us were writing about this a couple of years ago.

On the other hand, the House Republicans now have subpoena power, so they're obviously using it to advance the investigation beyond what was known. But I think the big takeaways are, you know, in any big transaction where you have, you know, whether it's a million bucks or a billion bucks or whatever go in one way, you expect to see you commodities, assets,

things of value coming the other way. And the only thing that resembles something of value in this equation is access to Joe Biden and his political influence, which I think leads to the second part of this that for a prosecutor is very interesting, which is that when people are doing legitimate business, even if they're big dollar transactions, they're generally very simple, straightforward transactions. I mean, there may be you know, mortgages and all that stuff, but I

mean money goes one way, the commodity comes to the other way. You know, Steve Collins for that, right, right, So he buys the Mets, right and I'm sure he feels like he uh, defrauded at this point, but you know, he pays what was it like two billion dollars or whatever it was, and he gets the ball club. You know,

you can see it when people are doing illegitimate business. What you tend to find is what we're seeing here, which is like there's seventeen different LLC's, these limited liability companies that have been created for the for the purpose basically their paper creations for moving money. And there are five or six different banking channels that are also used to sluice money through these entities. And usually when you're doing that kind of business, I mean, this is this is essentially what

money laundering becomes. If you can show that. The big thing with money laundering is you have to show that the money that you start with is the proceeds of criminal activity. If it's your own money and it's legitimate money, you can change the form of it however many times you want. But people don't tend to do that with legitimate money. What happens with illegitimate money is you know, you have to move it through a bunch of different accounts to

kind of disguise the source of it. And often what you find is that transactions that are you know, large sized transactions get broken into five or ten or fifteen smaller transactions in order to keep the dollar figure down. And in this instance, what we see is the money is going to like a variety of different bidens rather than one. Right, and all this they're all really good, like it's they're a really really great uh Internationally they're excellent, excellent,

including the grand children. Right, Hey, Andy, isn't that a crime just in itself? I mean, I of course, as you know, I'm not. I did not pass the New York State Bar just to be fully just fully transparent or any bar. Well, I've never passed the bar without least trying to walk in like knocking on the door. Untum. Is this structured they call structured, and that it just structuring a system so that you could Isn't that also a crime? I mean yeah, so so,

Rob, There's two things here that are very important. One is structuring and the other is another term that we heard the the day repeatedly, which is SAR or suspicious activity reports, which I think the House guys mentioned like one hundred and seventy stars that they reviewed the other day. So let's start

with structuring, because that's the crime. I think it was in the eighties that we started to put on the books these money laundering laws, and the idea was that because it was so common for drug dealers to engage in cash transactions, the laws were put in place to make it if you do a ten thousand dollars domestic cash transaction with a bank, the bank has to file what's known as a currency transaction report, and for international transactions to the trigger

is five thousand dollars. So there's nothing there's nothing wrong, Like, for example, if you were in a cash business, you have no problem with doing a currency transaction report with the bank because you can show that there's a legitimate source of the money. But people who are engaged in criminal behavior, narcotics traffickers and organized crime in particular, they get a lot of cash and

they don't want a paper record of it. So what they did was put these laws in so that people had to identify who was the owner of the

money and where the money came from. And that's so structuring that you refer to is like I get twelve thousand dollars on a drug deal, say so, I don't want to go to the file a CTR, a currency transaction report, so I'll break it into four different deposits of three thousand dollars to make sure I don't hit the ten grand mark, which triggers the currency transaction

report, which brings us to stars. The banks detect this kind of activity, you know, they see my full or three thousand dollar deposits and they said, hmmm, that seems fishy, but it doesn't trigger the law violation because I haven't hit the ten thousand. So they file what's known as a suspicious activity report, which they also provide to the government that says there's something fishy going on here and we maybe want to keep an eye on it.

And that can be done because of the way that transactions seemed to be structured to defeat the reporting requirements, or and sometimes it's both the source of the money is suspicious. So for example, Hunter Biden, as I understand it triggered at least one suspicious activity report because when he got money from his father to pay his outstanding prostitution bill that ended up going to just part of his

monthly allowance. Yeah, but it went to an email account that had a dot RU for Russia at the end of it, which got the bank. You know, not that not that there'd be any allusion with Russia. Russian collusion now, we don't believe in Russian clues. I was on the wrong side of this years ago, just a little personal JUSTI which I know the the what's the right side of this? I was writing a column for the Abu Dhabi English language Abu Dhabi newspaper called The National. I read it for

about twelve years and suspicious activities exactly. And they didn't pay me for like eight weeks, nine weeks, ten weeks, twelve weeks. They were trying to sort it out, and so should we're gonna wire it? You wired to wire you? Um. They finally sorted it out. I said, whatever you do, please do not wire me all of that money all at once and uh and I and they said, well we have to. And I said, can you just spread it out a little bit? And I called my account and I said, what do I have to say to them

just to get them to not do this. And he said, you don't say that at all, because there's no reason for you to say that, because you are intending to pay income tax on this money. Yes, And I said, yeah, I mean, yeah, so yeah, it really I mean. And my idea, my level of hyphinance doesn't even come close, or level of expenditure or interesting expenditure even come close to Hunter Biden.

Why is this guy not in jail yet? Well, here's that's a very interesting question because a lot of what we know they have investigated him for is the kind of stuff that would take a competent investigator five days to pull together, not five years. So for example, and this is probably the best example of this, Hunter obtains a gun in a handgun in I think it was twenty eighteen. It gets this guy is just the gift that keeps garing. So he has to fill out the required federal He uses the money left

over from paying the prostitute. Well, no, we're coming to the next prostitute. Slow down, get your prostitute order, Peter. So unbelievable. He buys, he buys a gun. He fills out the federals like Form forty four seventy three. It's it like an ATF form. Everybody's got to fill it out when they when they purchase a firearm. And he lies in

the form about his narcotics use. He's at that time he's a historic cocaine abuser, but at that time he's going through a jag in that in that particular time frame, and he says in the form that he does not use uh, illegal narcotics. A few days later, we now know from the infamous Laptop from Hell um, he is depicted in a video with a prostitute waving the gun around. Um, so as one does, yeah, as

one does. Um. And a couple of days after that, um, his I guess he was then involved with with bow Biden's wife, so his his former sister in law. Now, uh, you know paramore um, but that was just at that time. The widow of his brother correct it, okay, So she seeing the uh the drug abuse and the other stuff

he's up to, gets nervous and basically takes the gun away. They lose the gun and they ended up they end up trying to I think she disposed of it in a in the garbage of a like a grocery store that was across the street. From a school um and eventually, you know, the gun is recovered and there's some reporting that says the Secret Service, um, you know, insinuated itself to try to get the documents back from the gun transaction to make the whole thing go away. They haven't proved that yet,

but it sounds very fishy what went on here. But in any event, that case, for a good prosecutor in a decent investigator, we're not talking, you know, I mean, this is an Elliott Nest stuff. This is like very straightforward. Should have taken five days to pull that case together.

It's still sitting there five years later. They haven't charged it. The other thing we know that the prosecutor in Delaware is looking at this is the US Attorney David Weiss in Delaware, who is appointed by I think he's appointed by Trump, who's assigned the investigation by Bill Barr. But people should understand if if you're the US attorney in Delaware, you can't be the US attorney unless the two senators in the state have basically blessed that. So you know

he's got Democratic connections as well as being Trump appointed. But in any event, the other cases we know he's looking at our crimes. We know he's looking at our tax evasion violations that go back years, and that resulted in leans putting on being put on Hunter's property in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen. So this stuff is has been out there for years, and a lot of it isn't that complicated, and yet they're sitting on it.

These cases have not gone forward. And now we're getting reports that whistleblowers have complained to the two guys in the Senate who've been looking at this the most, Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, and also to now the House committees complaints from an investigator from the IRS and an investigator from some agency in the Justice Department, who are complaining that there's been political interference and that they haven't been

able to do the normal things that you would do in a criminal investigation. Hey, Andy, one to double back, just very very briefly, when you look at what we what you started by describing, when you look at the way that they've set up they've structured that move the money around to various bidens, do you look at that and say, hmmm, pretty sophisticated. These guys may have been up to no good, but they knew what they were doing. Or do you look at and say, what amateur hour here?

Yeah, Peter, you know there's a combination of both. Is I mean, it's really not that difficult to set up these kinds of LLCs and a lot of the behavior I think that the Bidens engaged in here is pretty gross. You know, some of it is obviously made the money difficult to trace, and there's so many people involved in it. They were clearly trying

to keep the amounts down so that that really trigger people's suspicions. But my sense of this is that, you know, I mean, with with one of these Chinese efforts to CEFC, which is really just a Chinese intelligence operation that that the Biden stumbled into, I mean they gave they gave Hunter a diamond as a bribe to start off the relationship, you know, um and uh, it just seems like, you know, pretty sort of low level stuff, and it makes you think that at some level these guys just think

they're invulnerable. You know, this did this? A lot of this behavior goes back when you get that idea. Yeah, but I mean, look it goes back to like twenty ten, even even a little thing. It shouldn't be a little thing. But you know Joe Biden being caught with classified information that he took when he was in the Senate. You know, senators are not not supposed to have classified information. There's a place on Capitol Hill

or places skiffs that they have to go to um to review it. It's not like, you know, there's some ex Ecutive branch positions, which are national security jobs, where they come and put a skiff in your house because your whole job is national security and you're on duty you all the time.

That doesn't happen with members of Congress. If senators and members of the House have to go to skifts to review classified documents, So what the hell is Biden doing with classified documents in his house that date back to his time in the Senate. And I think you see enough of that kind of behavior again and again, and you just think these guys have a sense of entitlement and they think that they can get away with stuff and no one's ever going to

call them on it. There's a new wrinkle this week. I mean, going back to what you said before, I mean the fact that the hundred stuff has been sitting there forever is fascinating because it's like somebody came to them and said, you know, I hear this guy. It's got a gun that he shouldn't have light on his application formed he've been waving around. He's doing a lot of drugs and he's hiring hookers, and Siddy says, yeah, well's gonna be hard to prove. Oh well, actually here's the video

of it. Yeah. Well, okay, okay, you mean the Russian James, you mean the Russian disinformation, right, the Russian did They're so good at that. Anyway, moving forward, we had a new wrinkle this week though, in which Romania has entered the chat. Previously it was just China in Ukraine, and now there seems to be a little Romanian connection here.

Have you been following that and exactly what was spent, what was given to which grandchildren, and what the president eventually and what Biden then later said about Romania back in the Yeah, so this goes to what I was saying about some of the behavior being gross. You know, this is whalt Biden is vice president. He's over there giving speeches in Romania about anti corruption, and the guy who ends up being the source of the bribe turns out to

have been prosecuted in Romania for corruption and he avenged. Essentially, he gives the Biden's a million dollars, and at least some of it is in the form of like one hundred thousand dollars that went to one of the grandchildren. You know, just the kind of stuff that it's. Romania played a big role in the press conference they had the other day. I think I had a dim memory of having heard of Romania before. But there's more countries involved

than just China and Ukraine we've had. You know, there's a Russian source of about three and a half million dollars. There's a Mexican guy that Hunter did business with and had a bunch of meetings that some of which involved Joe Biden, and we don't know how lucrative that was. I have to ask that, I have to ask the question. This is a question that Rob

has a serious question. This is flippant but seriously at the same time, and I stipulate this is exactly the kind of question that drives Rob nuts. I cannot forbear to ask it all the same if his we're Hunter Trump, how would it all have been different by now? Well, first of all, it wouldn't have gone on for decades, which this now looks. I mean, this looks to me like it's gone on for close to twenty years. And it would be the only story around. I mean, it would

be the only story we were talking about. It'd be almost like, let me imagine something that might be close to it, Like let's say the border collapsed, like there was no border enforcement and tens of thousands of people pouring over the border. You know, if something like that happened, it would be the only story in America that anyone was talking about that and that could never happen, of course, something like this. Yeah, well I got

it. So and so here's my questions. Since you brought the border a legal question, so U and I think I had this right? Correct me when inviably I say something stupid. Federal judge in Florida blocks the Biden administration carrying out parts of the immigration plan last night, a suit brought by clear by Governor Ronda Santis. Is that going to be effective? In effective?

I mean, I think it's affected politically for Republicans. And if you're running in a Republican primary, it looks like you're you know, you're sitting in Tallahassee, but you've got the problems of the country on your mind. Is this a little blip, is it pure theater or is there something effective here? Hard to say at this point how the administration will react to the ruling. I mean, the bottom line is the framers thought that the judiciary was

the least dangerous branch because they lacked the purse and the sword. And sometimes, you know, we think that everybody in government genuflex when there's a court decision, but in point of fact, you know, courts don't have a means of enforcing their rulings. And if the government decides, if the if the reigning administration decides not to follow a judicial decision, it's a question of

how much politically they think they can get away with. As you just said, you know, these things can be politically effective, right, because it's a most people think it's a pretty outrageous thing. If a judge makes it appears to be a lawful ruling in the even an unlawful ruling, they feel like, oh, to be followed until it gets reversed. Right. So, and I think that you have to juxtapose that in terms of the politics of it, which may be probably is much more important than the law.

You have to juxtapose that with these images, at least those of us who watch some like you know, Fox News and other places. I guess, I guess everybody is not seeing this, but you know, these images of of people coming across the Rio Grand and these lines in Brownsville, Texas, and I mean, they're just shocking. Even for those of us who've watched this for a long time, it's just shocking to watch. Yeah, Drudge this morning is the headline is five hundred thousand lined up to come in?

So Andy, may I ask wait a minute, Drudge? Yeah, Drudge, who's no friend of last person in America who goes to Drudge. After this is done, we're going to go and talk about removing bookmarks from your browser. Andy, can you explain, Just give me a brief explainer. Rob asked the probing questions. Here, I'll do the water bug thing skittering across the surface. Here's the way I've been traveling the last few days. And here's what I hear as I listen to podcasts and punched the car radio

one. There's something called title forty two. The Trump people enacted two As of midnight last night, Title forty two expired. Three. Because Title forty two expired, there's nothing we can do. We just have to let them all in. What was Title forty two? And why must it be beyond the ken of man and woman? Why can't the Speaker of the House go in front of the cameras and say this piece of legislation will be enacted this

day in the House of Representatives and set to the Senate by noon. Well, in other words, what is the legal How does anybody get away with saying we don't have the legal standing to protect reporters anymore because something called Title forty two expired. Well, let me start out with what the law says now and why it shouldn't even be necessary for the Speaker of the House to

do what you just said. The law of the United States, by statute says that if you are here illegally or try to get in illegally, you shall be detained. That's the words of the statute until your application claiming lawful admission into the United States is resolved. So, under the law, even when we think people have a colorable legal basis to be here, they are supposed to be detained, not released into the country until going back three years

later. Right now, we have about thirty six thousand detention spaces for people that are dedicated to people who try to come into the country unlawfully. Now, I think to me, and I may not be a paragon of common sense, but like to the common sense person, what that says is, you can't detain more than thirty six thousand people. So once you reach maximum detention, you don't let anyone else into the country until you have room to

detain people. What the government's position has been for decades is, well, if more the people want to come in, then we have space for Obviously, we have to let them in and adjudicate their claims. So that's the backward assumption that we're dealing with that even though Congress has said these people don't have any right or authority to be at liberty inside our country. This has

been going on for decades because it's been so out of control. Title forty two was kind of a pretext in place to kind of paper over a lack of serious enforcement policy. Title forty two was a policy that was related to the pandemic that gave the government an excuse to not let anyone in during COVID

because of infectious disease fears. And what a number of us argued all along, and I think the Supreme Court, especially Justice Coursage, said this when it came up to the Supreme Court, is the government is saying COVID's not an emergency anymore. So what you're trying to do here is take something that you did over COVID as a pretext and make it your policy because you don't have the nerve to like legislature and put in actual enforcement policies. And yeah,

I think Peter that he's right about that. He's totally right about it. But the problem is, I think in our political culture, we like to look at all these controversies with the assumption that everybody has at some level common ground about like the betterment of the country, but they have very different

ideas about how to get there, and this is not that issue. You have some people who philosophically do not believe the United States should have a border, and they want to see radical change in the country, which they think changing the racial and ethnic composition of the country would achieve at least more rapidly than otherwise. So I don't know how you make a compromise with people who

don't think we should have a border in the first place. But that's where that's the reason nothing ever gets done to you reach out to the people who are in the communities where they're being bust Two. We saw this in Chicago. There was a town hall where they said, by the way, two hundred and fifty immigrants, migrant's going to be coming to stay here, and the neighborhood, which was not your shall we say what you might think of

a leafy, waspy suburb of Chicago, reacted poorly. They hadn't been consulted, they didn't like it, didn't and they didn't The interesting thing is the two hundred and fifty is not particularly that much. But you get the sense that people did not want the composition of their neighborhood to be altered instantly, in a large degree, all at once. So when you ask people about this thing, you actually find common ground. And so their solution, of

course, is just simply not to ask. All right. It takes a I mean, I don't know what, I don't know what. I think. I've read like the Bolsheviks that had about seven percent support in Russia in

you know, when the revolution started in nineteen seventeen. So I think it takes no but it may be. But what all My point is that I just think it takes a only a small determined faction, uh to make you know, real progress for itself, if it's willing to do things that defy what what people think are like and and likewise, at the same time, I'm sorry, but this would be my last event. But you know my last vent. Donald Trump does this town hall on CNN, and it's he's

on form. He's Trump again, except that we've lived with him and we know this is just not going to end well. So I'm saying to myself, wait a minute, Well you know what I know, I am now in favor of vivic rama Swami because that guy is talking back. Why has it ron to Santa Is stepped in front of the cameras already this morning?

You say it, of course correctly. If you have a dedicated faction, and they seem to be the people in charge of this walking zombie who's the President of the United States, the people adjusting him and moving him and propping him up, seem to be this dedicated faction that wants to eliminate the border. Likewise, what we need on our side is leadership, leadership, not this. Donald Trump has his points. He's an amazing and engrossing person,

but he's not a leader at this point. Let's hear from you. De Santis, Glen Young can stop screwing around if you're going to run for president, because this is a crisis. Say so, these people should be in

front of the cameras before Monday. I'm done venting, or Andy. Is it possible that the right can ever adrest this issue because it's been tainted with the allegations of xenophobia, racism, etc. It can only come from somebody in the Democratic Party, somebody to make the populous point from the Democrat Party why this can't stand and why it's to use their favorite word sustainable. Yeah, well, I don't know. I mean, I'm not a Trump fan, um, but I do think he moved what they I guess they called

the Overton window on us, right. Yeah, so I think it is possible to make these arguments, and I'm you know, I'm looking. I'm with Peter on this. I think THEOT to be getting busy. I know, the Santis is on his own schedule in terms of when he wants to announce his candidacy. But you know, here, here's the crisis. Where's the man. There are times when you don't get to choose. Yep,

yeah, yep yeah. Just just to piggyback on that, I mean, one person who is and who is moving the over to window a little bit. On the other side is Eric Adams, who's discovered that a city as big as New York City, which actually probably just statistically could take many more uh migrants from the border right just in terms of space and people and budget, more many more than Brownsville, Texas, as long as you put them any place but the village. Yeah, truth, the consequences New Mexico.

He's decided that this is a crisis for New York City, which, of course, if you're the mayor of any of those little towns, small bunch of towns around the border, you must be rolling your eyes like, are you serious, dude? I would they exist on one tenth of one percent of his budget. But since we're talking about since I brought up New York City, I gotta bring up another before we let you know, because you're you're you know you already put Hunter Biden in jail, thank you on I

guess today or tomorrow. Daniel Penny, who was riding the subway with Jordan Neely right, Jordan Neely was the man who was either threatening or making trouble or doing the kinds of things that threatened people on the subway car put him in a chokehold. He died. The district attorney, Manhattan District Attorney has said that he is going to charge Penny for second degree manslaughter. I think he's going to be he's going to surrender today, or maybe he's already surrendered.

He said it to trainer Friday morning, stipulated, this seems morally ridiculous, like like an absolute put up job by a Manhattan District attorney who is among the worst, maybe the worst da we've ever had in the city, focusing entirely on the wrong things instead of the right things. What do you think's going to happen here? Is this marine gonna go to jail? No, I think he'll get he'll get acquitted if they're daft enough to follow through

with this. But you know, I think we talk all the time about the many, many things that are wrong with the federal government. One thing that's right with the federal government is that prosecutors are appointed, they're not elected, you know, they and they get vetted. They get vetted by the Senate. And even though this may be you know, the tribute that vice pays to virtue, they at least pay lip service to the idea that they

are going to enforce the law in a nonpartisan fashion. That is part of the expectation of being qualified to be a prosecutor, at least in the federal system. So I think when you look at Bragg, the state system is

not that way. I think it's much more accurate to look at Bragg as an elected progressive Democrat than as a law enforcement efficient Yeah, right, if you inject I think, if you would inject electoral politics into this instead of the things that drive law enforcement decisions, what he has to do is use his power in a way that pleases to people who put him there in the first place. And I looked at this this morning because I wrote about this

financial review for this coming weekend. There are one point seven million people on the island of Manhattan. Eighty five thousand people voted for Alan Bragg in the Democratic primary, which essentially made him the district attorney. So that's about five percent of the residence. So we're back again to the determined faction. I guess that's why I have it in the front of the brain today. But he's there to deliver progressive results. He's not going to be judged by whether

there are acquittals in the case because it's not a law enforcement decision. It's a political decision. It's the same reason he charged Trump in a case that he didn't even lay out what the crime is in the indictment. Because what he's there to do is what he campaigned on, which is to use use the powers of the District Attorney's office to further the walk progressive ageddam That's what he's doing, and he can really quickly. This is on my mind because

of Trump and the trial the other day. You just said totally confidently, and you said it immediately as though it's just something that is part of the ground of your being that this guy would be acquitted if you if it want to trial, right, are you can we Here's the question is Manhattan, Manhattan juries. Can you get twelve people to do the right thing, to stand above identity politics and Manhattan. It just Peter here. I guess i'd

be I'd be reassured. Please reassure me that. Yeah. Here's the difference between the Penny case and the Trump case. The Trump case is a political case. The Penny case is about security on the subway. Manheal Knights ride the subway. They are craving. They know what a hellscape it's become.

They are craving police presence on it. And they want somebody, a man who won't just look at his shoes when some insane person gets on a train car and starts to harass the old ladies and harass everybody else on the train, card intimidate them. They may it may have become the fashion in New York that men are now supposed to just like sort of stare at their shoes

and look at their phones while that kind of stuff goes on. But this guy Penny, who actually in a valorous way put himself on the line against somebody who is a career criminal who just get out of Riker's Island after I think sixteen months there for punching an old lady in the face where he broke her nose and broke her occipital bone arrested forty two times and threatening to people. And what New Yorkers, even in Manhattan one, when they're on the

subway, is somebody like Daniel Penny who's willing to step up. So I don't see how you get twelve people to agree to convict him, thank you. The quantity of his arrest just simply means it's forty two times that the system failed him, is what we're led to believe. We're supposed to be told by some of these people that the fact that he was raving and screaming on the subway is a reflective of a society that refused to do anything for

him. At some point, people wash their hands of that and say, no, it is the obligation of the society to make sure that people are safe in the subway. And you have this new idea amongst the left that not only should we stare at our shoes, but this is part of the rich and diverse, vibrant element of living in a city. Well, you know, as it's just why you gotta put up with. This is what you this is what we do here. If you don't like it, go back to the go to the suburbs and drive a car, to which most

people would say, yes, yes, I will. I don't know what burb you are in, Andy or what you're driving, but we're glad you pop by today. And for those of you who are looking on the live stream, he's wearing a Chicago hat. I was just in Chicago, and I was I actually had people were telling me, you know, you're going to Chicago, as if they expected that I'd be gunned down in front of the Art Museum. No, it was a Saturday, It was beautiful,

and there were so many tourists around. There were so many people that had felt absolutely safe, which is what cities need and what they're not getting. But that's another day. Know the story and know the podcast. No the raps. Thanks for joining us. Andy, We'll talk to you later. Hey Man. Great to be with you guys. Thanks Andy, Thank you

Andy. Rob. I was going to ask you, and this is not a segway, are the streets of New York because I just mentioned Chicago, which was great because there was all kinds of people there and it made it safe. Now, granted they were all just staring at the mirrored bean or walking around him. If you're going to Avenue gawking at the buildings, but

cities need eyes subways. I mean, the reason that they don't feel safe to a lot of people was because if somebody mentioned there's not the guy who's who you think is going to step up, that nobody's stepping up, that there's just a rot in a drain that is plaguing our cities. That is irreversible. Is how is New York doing? Which is probably not a question, so I guess it is an issue. I mean, I don't think it's irreversible at all. I mean, I mean I couldn't imagine anything worse

than New York City in nineteen eighty nine or nineteen ninety. I mean, because people who murder rate was much higher. It's reversible. You just have to just decide you're going to reverse it. Um. But also, I mean in New York and eighty nine ninety did not have the sort of depopular but you still had downtown office corps that were fairly well developed. In families, you didn't have to try back, you didn't have a behalf of the Brooklyn was still kind of a kill zone. Now, young people move to

New York City and they moved to Crown Heights. I know people when I first came back after being thirty years in LA and I'd meet people and say where do you where you live? They'd say Crown Heights and I'd say, no, you can't live in Crown Heights, right, but of course you can't live in grown is crazy, but people live. Good things have happened.

I just and I think the best thing that has happened. If everyone's are the focuses and people and we isolate and point and shout at the people who have lost their minds, which includes people on the subway and also people who are in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, we can easily get it back, and we could easily get we could almost get like I have an optimist so I don't think anything is inevitable and or inevitable or irreversible. Decline is

a I mean, this is a cliche, but it's true. It's a choice and we can choose not to. And it isn't that, especially now, because the opposition to that is so bizarre, it's so weird. It wasn't not weird in the sixties or even the seventies. To want big government programs made total sense. If you were, especially if you've grown up under the New Deal. These are all making liberalism, big government, liberal policies make a certain amount of sense. I mean, I don't think they're right,

but I get it. They're not irrational. Nobody looked at somebody who was liberal and said you're weird. It only became like in the nineties and then oughts where the weirdness started to creep in, and that the strange like regulations and the strange bias in favor of like crazy people walking on the subway, that that is something that is easily winnable from an opposition, you know,

political opposition that want to make it. I mean, I remember that's the one thing that that King Rich said, king Rich, whatever you think of him, now, political genius in nineteen ninety four ninety five, and he kept saying, let's just remind America how weird the left is. Not that that you know, big government this or that, just how weird it is and how weird some of their policies are. UM. And that was very successful. And I think we're we had that opportunity now and we're kind

of not taking it, seems people on the right. UM. But I still have hope. Okay, by the way, I'm with both of you. I'm with James that New York is important. The one year I lived in New York, I'll be very brief about this, but I have experience of it. The one year in my life I lived in New York was nineteen ninety nineteen ninety one. Now, this is after we'd won the Cold War. The country had been turned around. But everybody with whom I spoke

in New York said get out of here. My wife and I had just gotten married, we'd had our first child, and I was asking people an what I do by an apartment or just no, here's what you do.

You're still young, leave get out now. I can remember driving out to visit people and friends for the weekend in Bucks County in Pennsylvania and pausing before going to the Lincoln Tunnel, and it was totally standard to have the squeege men, the guys who had put some soap on your window and then you either paid them something, roll down your window and paid them something, or they broke off the windshield wiper. Okay, and then Rudy Giuliani comes along.

We now forget this because we had a dozen years of Mike Bloomberg. He tends to get the credit for saving the city. He did do a lot, I have to grant that. And Rudy himself has now become such a crazy person and so tied up with all of this election denial. Nevertheless, when he was elected, he transformed the city. It was an act of political will. And by then I had left the property values of all the apartments I might have bought. At that time. We're starting to climb.

But my friends in New York were saying, oh, oh, this we can do it. It's a choice. It's a choice. You can save the city. It's really important, really important for the whole country that the results of that experiment should be preserved, that New York should continue to function, that the subways get cleaned up again, and on and on. Yeah. But I mean my point is New York is a place to start

in a way it was for so many a couple of decades. Now the example of what could be done, not just New York, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, every city in America. A last, one of the choices that people make is to stay home in the pajamas and work, which is completely understandable. It's rational to say I would rather be home and be comfortable and walk the dog when I waste them get in my car, or get on the subway subway and go someplace and sitting in an

office in a teal devil pen and tap away for eight hours. People don't want to do that anymore, which is a rational decision that people make, and the aggregate consequences of that are ruinous. When I was in Chicago last week, as a matter of fact, it's about actually to the moment. About seven days ago, I was walking down a rather unremarkable street in Chicago and encountered a couple three buildings which stood out to me because they were ordinary

and normal. One of them was the Banker's Building, which was what it was named nineteen twenty four. When it went up, was presumed to be twenty five stories when it was announced they couldn't stop. I guess when they got going, because it went up to forty one stories nineteen twenty four. The ornamentation is rather wrote for nineteen twenty four. The building itself looks a little bit shabby because they replaced some bricks with other bricks, but it's huge

it's absolutely immense. It's forty one stories of offices where people worked in. Right next to it is the Field Building, which has now been renamed, which went up in the teeth of the depression when it finished in nineteen thirty four, forty seven stories. I think. I say, it's enormous, and the style is different, stripped down its machine orient it's modernistic. It's

the America that's coming and at the absolute native of capitalism. The Field Company just said, screw it, we're going to build it, and they built it. And it's tall. And that across the street from that is a nineteen sixties technocratic international style means Vandero post Office building, which itself is almost piece of abstract sculpture, and it has a certain black presence to it, and it's also got an interesting sculpture. So take three of these buildings together,

and each one of them has their different function in American society. The post office building, well, we don't send letters anymore, and nobody looks for the mail. The banker's building, while we all bank online, nobody goes into a hall anymore and exchanges coins through a little getting cage. And the Field Building, while it was named after a retailed empire, which is

dissolving because everybody wants to shop from home on Amazon. All of these three paradigms are shifted, but these buildings remain, and they are absolutely unremarkable for Chicago. In any other city, they would be monuments. Here, they're unremarkable because Chicago has so much of this, sobody tall towers, so someone

being broad shoulders from block to block to block. And it's great and there's an energy to it when you just look at it, and when you study the themes and the styles and the history of the American twentieth century that's written on all of these facades, you cannot help but love the city and want more of it. But you also feel, looking around at everybody in their pajamas at home, that the time when America built tall towers is done.

And that's a choice that somehow we all decided to make. And it's a bad one, and I don't like it, and I don't do not know what to do about it, and I do not want to become marinated in my own pessimism about that, because it bleeds into everything else we built up, you know, the Empire State building, when everything else was crashed. We keep going up, and you know, Elon Musk and the rest of

the guys going up. That's great in the rocket sense. I like that there are all You can't apply a twentieth century paradigm to everything else and expect the grid to overly perfectly. But I worry about the death of the cities because at the height of the American Renaissance was the renaissance in these cities as well, where they were pleasant, interesting, fascinating, artistic, good places

to go. And America is both the rural, the small town, the medium sized burg, of which we've got so many, but it's also the dethrobbing heart of the metropolis. And what each one of these places says about America, and I hate to lose that characteristic and it's difficult. I've made a rant at the end of the show where everybody's tuned up. Don't really matter, but I would like to know. I would just say this,

James, to make you feel better and worse. At the same time, they built a huge tower here in New York City, tall tower in Brooklyn for people, now I mean in Manhattan Midtown, for people, for billionaires to live in. And it turns out the elevators don't work, and so people who have been spending thirty million, forty million dollars these apartments, the things shaking like crazy and the elevators aren't working. And it's absolute, tiny

little seedlet of populism. But somehow I didn't think existed in the and the harsh soil of my soul has sprouted. And we walked by that building, and everybody place goes. All those rich guys, they got to take the stairs sometimes. Uh huh are you talking about Symphony Place? We're talking about billionaires Row right here, which is a series of super tall buildings. Normally, the engineering expertise that keeps these things from waving more than five feet in

the wind, it's pretty good. But when they built one of these supertalls, they did not factor into well. My favorite story about one of them is that the it's got a trash shoot naturally, and when people throw down eight stories of something rocketing down because right because what they eat, and the pipe snap because it sways a little bit too much. Each one has their own little dampening mechanisms. So I know, I just I am. I

hate the supertalls. They're they're architecturally meretricious. So I'm I am glad that that and then a Brooklyn tall. You just want too tall, You're just no satisfy. I am just the Goldilocks and these. No. I want tall, and I want too tall, but I want it to be for a mixed use thing, and I wanted to be sturdy, not some little slender read in the restiume on. Speaking of which, I would love to say that there's a New York meet up coming soon. But Robbie can catch

us up on where the meetups are going to be. Well listen, well, maybe we should have a New York meet up. If you're interested, let's set up. Um okay, uh, there's a bunch of meetup stuff. If you are not a member Ricochet, why are you not a member Ricochet? Join and come to the IRL events. They're the most fun. That's the perk of being a member. Here perk of joining the club, and we want you to join. PJS open invitation to Yankees game this week.

So um, I hope somebody took her up on. Western Chauvinist has acquired about members in the UK. The Western Chauvinis is gonna be in the UK later this month. So let it know you know, Um, Tory war Writer is back and hoping to meet members in or around Columbus, Ohio in late June. Uh. Columbus is a beautiful city. It really is a beautiful city. Um. People aways forget about Columbus. This isix Cincinnati,

Cleveland, Columbus is beautiful. Um. And Randy's got another meetup uh set for Winston Salem mid July. UM, so lots of stuff is happening in the summer. Matt Balters also ask you for rsp peas for the annual German Fest meetup in Milwaukee. That's also the last weekend in July. UM lots stuff. So uh if none of these for some reason work for you, because you are somewhere else or you're not around that time, here is the simple solution. You simply join Ricochet, put up a post in the

member feed, say hey, how about a meetup here or there. At this point it is a guarantee that Ricochet members will come. That's what we do. We show up and have a lovely conversation, set of conversations, and hoisted drink or two and make some jokes. And it's an incredibly lovely group, and we want you to join bub and we're gonna and so James, you and I want to talk about a New York time. We'll have

to set. We'll have to because I don't want to deprive you of an opportunity to come to New York so you can walk around and get depressed. No, I won't be depressed. I will be elevated by the beating of the architecture, as I inevitably am depressed when I leave, but happy to do so because after about three or four days, I always look in New York and say you win, and sort of slink out of town with the din still echoing in my ears to quiet Mini Rob. I'm still thinking,

can I get a job as a Domino's pizza delivery guy? Because I'm thinking that if you have to walk up sixty flights of stairs to deliver a pizza to a billionaire, you get a pretty good tip. When was the last time, Peter, that you met a billionaire who was a good kipper or who ordered from Domino's. Peter, the point you make, I think after the sixtieth floor, they land on the helicopter pad at the top of the roof and the guy just repels down the window, you know, Batman style,

and drops it in. That's it. We're done. It's been fun, great time. Good to talk to you guys again. And I might not be here next week because I may be off again. I'll last. I'm sure you'll carry on. Thanks everybody for listening. Boll And Branch with a sponsor, support them for supporting us. Join Ricochet today is Rob said, why aren't you no excuse? And it would it be a podcast if I didn't end by asking you begging you to give us a five star review

on Apple Podcast, it would not. I just did that, So that means we're done. We'll see everybody in the comments they had Ricochet four point next new extweet falls. Ricochet joined the conversation