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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech Podcast brought to you by Fox News. You can check out all of our podcasts at foxnewspodcast.com. And I hope that you will rate, review, and subscribe to this one. Share it with a friend if you find it of interest. There are obviously so many different legal challenges facing the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, that it's difficult to keep track of them all.
He had to come to Washington, D.C. for just the latest indictment this past week. And I wanted to talk to somebody who could walk us through all of the different
issues, threats, potential timelines for what we can expect to happen over the coming year, and the strength of these various cases. And of course, that means there is nobody better at doing that kind of thing than Andy McCarthy. Andy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, contributing editor to NR. He's also the author of Ball of Collusion,
of collusion and he is someone who we've had on the program before to walk us through different legal issues related to impeachment and otherwise.
Andy has his own perspectives on what's going on here based on his own experience working as a prosecutor in the past. And he's someone who gives a very fair analysis of the situation. We talk about that and then a little bit about the case being made against the Supreme Court in the public affairs world being driven by a number of different Democrats and well-funded organizations and nonprofits. Andy McCarthy coming up next.
This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.
Reporting live from under my blanket, I'm Susan Curtis with Duncan at Home. Breaking news, pumpkin spice iced and hot coffees are back. I'll pass it to Mr. Curtis with his blanket for the full story. That is so right, Susan. You know, it's never too early to get in a spicy mood. I'm talking cinnamony goodness that's so tasty, people don't want to leave their blankets either. Back to you. No, back to you. All you.
The home with Dunkin' Pumpkin Spice is where you want to be. Andy McCarthy, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Ben, my pleasure. So it's been about a year since we had an emergency conversation about everything that was coming to the fore with the Trump situation, everything that was turning this into a moment of real lawfare against a former president.
How shocked were you that this indictment in particular took the shape that it did, that it looks like what it looks like based on what we knew before it being handed down? I guess I'm very surprised only in that I very closely followed the reporting about what Jack Smith, the special counsel, was planning and.
As things would come up, Ben, like this idea of a conspiracy to defraud the obstruction counts, which have a pretty profound legal issue regarding what the definition of corrupt is.
And then the latest or the last thing, which I really thought was an afterthought after some of what I thought was Supreme Court cases that would cause problems for him this spring, this idea of civil rights came out. And as I looked into each one, I thought there were a lot of problems with it. And particularly in comparison, say, to the Mar-a-Lago indictment, which I thought was very strong on the law.
So I always try to remember that when I was doing my cases as a prosecutor, I always knew things that weren't being publicly reported. So I simply assumed that he had more than they were reporting and that I'd be surprised. And I guess what I was surprised by was that I wasn't surprised in the sense that everything that's in there is exactly what we've been talking about for the last –
Many months.
It's like, gosh, guess we already knew all this. And so that puts us in kind of an odd position because I think the general American populace – and this is the thing that I hear from readers. I'm sure you hear it too. I hear it when I give speeches and things like that. It's basically –
you know, they're indicting him for having an opinion, an opinion that I, meaning many of the people who are talking to me, you know, happen to share. Uh, and that, and that, you know, I feel these certain things about the 2020 election, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you know, and, uh, and this really makes me scared that this is something where you're weaponizing speech and opinion. So what's, what's the strongest argument in favor of that? And what's the strongest argument against that point of view? Yeah.
The strongest argument in favor of the point of view that we should be frightened by this? The point of view that this is effectively weaponizing speech or going after speech. So I've thought about almost nothing but that in the last couple of days. And, you know, it occurs to me that in like nearly a quarter of a millennium,
Congress has never... The problem that Smith has had all along is he's got a lot of evidence of deceptive behavior, but he doesn't have a statute that he could really comfortably hang his hat on for what happened here. And you have to ask yourself, since we've had a Congress for well over 200 years, why is that? And I think the answer to that is that it's a feature, not a bug. It's not something that was forgotten. And it has to do with the...
the structure of our government, which is in our constitutional system, it was really intended that Congress would be the ones to police executive misconduct and that we don't want to have a bunch of laws that police elections because the last thing you would want structurally is to invite the incumbent government, which is in control of the federal police apparatus to
and in here specifically the Justice Department and the FBI, you don't want them having a normal role in elections. The electoral process is something they should steer clear of, and to the extent that we've now had this experiment in having them involved in it, which now goes back to 2016, it's been a frigging catastrophe. It's disastrous. So I think the reason that he's having trouble isn't because this is a particularly –
complex case, it's because what he's trying to do is out of the norm and should be out of the norm. So I think the best case for the idea that this is really dangerous is because we've always been, in the previous centuries, we've been smart enough not to do it, and it really is foreign to the way our system is structured, where we rely on both
and the political process, including the voters, more or less to police the president. And I think he's parting from that. I mean, a question that I would have is logically following from that. If the president had been convicted in that second impeachment, do you think that this would be happening? No. Yeah. No, I think...
Well, I guess because I'm jaded, I think this is very political in every way. So I don't think the complications here are just because it's a difficult legal problem. And I just point out on that point just quickly, the prosecutor gave, what, about a three-minute statement after he filed the indictment the other day?
Two and a half minutes of the three minutes were about the Capitol riot. Yep. The Capitol riot's not a charge in the case. Nope. So...
I mean, I don't know what other conclusion you draw from that other than that this is a political exercise. And my view of it, for what it's worth, is that it's been a political exercise from the start. You have the Biden administration, which will not – the Biden Justice Department will not appoint a special counsel for the Biden corruption investigation where there's a neon blinking conflict of interest. Yet in this situation where there's no conflict of interest between –
the Biden Justice Department and Trump, they brought a special counsel in and they did it for a very political reason. They knew that Trump was going to say that Biden was using the criminal justice system against him. So they brought in a guy who was going to bring exactly the case they knew was always going to be brought, but who they could say, he's an independent actor, he's doing it and we don't have anything to do with it. I mean, he's brought in for a political reason. Mm-hmm. Um,
obviously as a Virginian and someone who likes Bob McDonnell a lot, am familiar a little bit with Jack Smith from that case and experience. Obviously that was a case that ultimately was thrown out by the Supreme Court unanimously. Is there anything to learn from Jack Smith's previous work that kind of flows into this current experience? I
I think it's not – every case is different, obviously, and so you can't always kind of put apples to apples in that kind of situation. But are there things to take away from the approach that he used perhaps in a case like that involving a very prominent Republican, someone who was talked about prior to that case being brought as being potentially presidential timber, and this one? Yeah, I think –
We have a concrete example of what I'm going to describe, but I think the thing to watch is there is a philosophical divide regarding what the proper role of the federal government and particular federal prosecutors are, not only in policing elections, but in –
describing crimes. And I use the word describing because the divide is, can prosecutors basically criminalize things that Congress has not codified, or are they stuck with the statutes as they exist? And I think this divide is shown particularly in this case with this main charge, which is conspiracy to defraud the government. So on one side of the divide, Ben, you have the
Justice Department practice manual, which is written by people like Jack Smith with an eye toward this idea of a very expansive role of the federal government in terms of being able to criminalize activity by pushing the boundaries of statutes. And then on the other side, and this happens all the time in fraud cases, you have the Supreme Court pushing back, as they did in the McDonald case, and
saying the prosecutor's job is to apply the laws that Congress has written in accordance with the original understanding of those laws at the time that they were enacted. So the divide here is specifically about fraud, and it really shows the two mindsets. As far as the government is concerned, the conspiracy to defraud the United States statute –
allows them to criminalize any deceptive scheme that could frustrate or undermine an essential function of government. And they're relying for that on a couple of Supreme Court cases from 1910 and 1924. The modern Supreme Court, since it became a textualist Supreme Court when Justice Scalia's –
has been telling the government since 1987 in the McNally case, no, no, no, fraud in federal law means a scheme to bilk somebody out of money or tangible property.
And it is not a license – the word fraud is not a license for federal prosecutors to stretch deceptive schemes that are not about money and tangible property in order to impose somebody's idea of what good government is and what good government practices look like. So I think Jack Smith –
is very much because I dealt with this mindset 20 years as a prosecutor. He's very much of the mind of people, mainly progressives in the Justice Department, who are always trying to expand the authority of prosecutors to criminalize things that feel icky but don't necessarily fit a particular crime. And then you have others, the Supreme Court in particular, who are pushing back saying, ain't your job to
You have to live within the statutes. And if Congress wants to make something a fraud law, they can redefine fraud as long as they do it clearly and not vaguely. But it's not the prosecutor's job. I think Jack Smith thinks it's the prosecutor's job. And he's not the only one. I'm not I don't mean to single him out. I think that's an ethos of a of a certain broad swath of the Justice Department. How is this trial going to play out? How do you anticipate it playing out going forward?
What are kind of the key points that are going to be reached here or that people should expect? And just calendar wise, is this something that is going to be resolved before people start voting? Yeah. So I think the big thing here, Smith got a very good draw from the D.C. Circuit. Judge Tanya Chutkin, who's an Obama appointee from 2014, said,
She's notoriously the harshest sentencer in the January 6 cases, which all the D.C. circuit – the D.C. district court judges have a ton of those cases. There's about 1,100 of them to be divided up. So that's a very good draw for him, and I –
The important thing here, I think, Ben, is if you were to look at the Mar-a-Lago case, I could see a million reasons why there could be appeals in that case that would go up to the Court of Appeals and maybe even the Supreme Court before trial. Because that case is covered by the Classified Information Procedures Act, which has a specific provision in it that allows you to appeal.
generally speaking, the preference in the law is that the whole case gets tried and litigated in front of the district court. And then if there's a conviction, after sentencing, the case goes up to the Court of Appeals as one big bundle. And you don't get to do what we call in the biz interlocutory appeal. That is, you don't get to go up before the trial starts. I think in this case, especially given that he landed with Judge Chutkin,
President Trump is going to want to get up to the Court of Appeals because I think that I think Chutkin will be a lot more sympathetic to Smith's view of the law than I am. And I think if if Trump wants to get rulings that some of these counts are infirm.
He's probably not. He's probably going to have a hostile audience in the district court. But I don't as I sit here and we talk about it, I don't see an obvious vehicle for him to do that. Now, maybe he can figure out a way to say this is a unique situation because I'm running for president and we have a constitutional problem because the incumbent president.
is affecting and strangling my constitutional right not only to prepare for trial by throwing all these indictments at me but also just to run for president, which I'm allowed to do. And maybe he can figure out a way to get up to the Court of Appeals on that basis. But if he has to litigate the whole case in the district court first, I think what you'll find is this case will get to trial and it'll probably get to trial sooner
If not when people are starting to vote, pretty close to that. You know, I don't know what seems worse in my mind. The idea that this entire election is going to hang on this point, that the president, the former president could get reelected and pardon himself, or the idea that we go through all this and presumably Joe Biden is reelected.
And then you have a former president convicted and going to jail. Both of these things are are are terrible things for the country. Like, I mean, you know, it's not I mean, I understand that, you know, there's this partisan warfare that plays out every day on our airwaves. And it's part of the business of of media. But aren't both these things really bad?
Yeah, they're really terrible for the country. The thought of an American president being sentenced to prison. I actually think that if Biden were to get reelected, there'll be a lot of incentive when he doesn't. If he's reelected and he never in his what remains of his life has to worry about the progressive base again going crazy on him. He may see the upside in pardoning Trump.
If Trump wins the election, actually, pardon doesn't have to be part of an issue. I know Vivek Ramaswamy keeps talking about this. Once you're running the Justice Department, you don't have to pardon anybody. You just drop the case. But but I do think the specter of an American president in federal prison should be unacceptable to everybody except like the worst whack jobs in our country.
No matter what he did. I mean, it's enough to condemn him for what he did historically. I just think, you know, it's I would not wish that on my worst political enemy. And I think that the precedent that that sets going forward is one that I think is really heinous. Back to the issue at hand, you know, there are all these different cases and I think people will have difficulty tracking them.
It does look, you know, sort of like there's an Axios calendar that sort of lays out when things are going to happen and sort of looking at it, it looks like most of this is going to be post Super Tuesday in terms of the expectation for the primaries. Just in terms of the earliest case to resolve, what do you think that will be?
Well, I would not go to sleep on – we're all looking at the criminal cases, and I'm an old prosecutor, so I get that, and they're obviously what he's got the most to lose. But politically speaking, I wouldn't go to sleep on the civil trial that starts in October.
Because that's the case – remember when the New York DA was Cy Vance, that's the case that he went up to the Supreme Court twice to get Trump's financial records because I think they thought that was going to be the motherlode for a criminal indictment. And then it wasn't as good obviously as they hoped it was going to be for them. But Letitia James, the hyper-political –
attorney general in New York who ran for office saying she would use her powers against Trump, much like Alvin Bragg, the D.A., did. She picked that ball up and ran with it and basically charged this as a civil complaint, not a criminal indictment. But it's the same evidence. And
It's more of a problem for Trump because in a civil case, he would be expected to testify. And if he doesn't testify, the court will tell the jury that they can hold that against him, that they can presume that if he had an innocent story to tell, he would have gotten up on the stand and told it. So I think that's a very problematic case for him because it goes through his history of crime.
And he's got more of an affirmative obligation to produce evidence than he does in the criminal cases. Mm-hmm.
I think it sounds to me like Alvin Bragg is hoping to stand down and kind of hide behind the Justice Department. He indicated this week that he'd be willing to reschedule his trial so that the Justice Department could go first if the Justice Department asked, which if you had Alvin Bragg's case, I think you'd probably take the same position. I think what he wanted, because he also ran on using his power against Trump, was
He wanted to charge Trump, which is what his base wants. I'm not sure he cares that much. I mean, obviously you want to win, but I think it's more important to him to have the case than necessarily the conviction. But if that case goes, if it stays on schedule, you'll have pretrial hearings in December and the case starts in, I think, March 24th, 25th, something like that. And then we don't know what's going to happen with this Georgia case, but I assume in the next –
Two weeks, you're going to get an indictment out of Georgia. The reason I dwell on the state cases is the Justice Department, unless they get voluntary cooperation from the states, they're not really in a position to tell them what to do. So it's going to be up to the state authorities and the state judges when those cases get tried. And then the other problem, I think, Ben, that he has that that that Smith has in Georgia.
He obviously wants to get this January 6th case to trial fast. That's the reason for bringing it, and it's also the reason for putting the Capitol riot stuff in the indictment even though he hasn't charged Trump with it because they want that imagery in front of the voters. That's the reason I think it's in there. But strategically, the problem for him is he indicted the Mar-a-Lago case first.
So Trump is going to argue today, how can he rush me to trial when he's indicted me in another jurisdiction, frustrating my ability to prepare my defense, which the Constitution allows me to do? And even with an anti-Trump or a very pro-government judge, I think that's a pretty powerful due process argument. And it may be a real scheduling complication. The co-conspirators – let's talk about that for a second. Yeah.
Obviously, they didn't actually take the step of indicting them yet. Do you expect that they will be indicted? That's one question. And then the second is, given the fact that so many of these quote-unquote co-conspirators are attorneys, this really seems to me to be something that is designed to put fear into...
legal representatives about taking up cases defending Republican politicians and the like. Am I wrong to think that? Because it certainly seems like even if a lawyer is giving you some bad advice, as I think that John Eastman in particular was doing in this scenario, it has a chilling effect, I would think. I think you'd end up with
much worse legal representation perhaps than you would otherwise if the lesson they take away is that it's risky to do these kinds of... take on these kinds of clients. Yeah, well, I would say...
That's a good assumption. Even if this were a one-off, it would be reasonable to deduce that. But the problem is it's not a one-off. What we have seen for the last three or four years is that what you described as a possibility is actually happening and happening to, I would say, not just pro-Trump lawyers, I think conservative lawyers across the board. I mean, you see that Paul Clement, who was one of the great lawyers in the United States—
ended up leaving his firm because he was doing brilliant Second Amendment work that they were uncomfortable with him. Or at least that's – I don't know if that's the exact reason, but that's sure what it looks like from the outside looking in. So I think what you're describing is something that we're dealing with as a phenomenon that's already happening. And a big part of – you remember they were trying to invoke Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, right?
all along, which has this disqualification provision in it. I think the left has been going into legal jurisdictions and trying to get the lawyers disbarred and going into political jurisdictions and trying to get people found disqualified from running for Congress. So this is really, we're in a scorched earth time. I wish it was just a specter or a possibility, but I think it's very real right now.
You know, I did a different topic than what we've talked about to this point, but I've just written... The first time I really got into the...
network of left organizations and funders targeting the Supreme Court, you know, the ProPublica investigations, everything else related to that. And, you know, I have to say, Andy, I've never actually sat down and written about that to an extensive degree. I had done some research into it. I had, you know, I'd read other people about it, obviously, and certainly the reporting in The Wall Street Journal, etc.,
But just digging into it, I mean, I wrote a 4,000-word piece, and I could have written a 12,000-word piece on this. It is so blatant what they are trying to do. And I went to this event in Washington that Sheldon Whitehouse was speaking at where he was speaking to a friendly audience. And I think Senator Whitehouse is not particularly all that bright because several of the things that he said –
were just so blatant in terms of talking about working hand in glove with these organizations that are trying to essentially make the court something that you would never want to take on that job, even with the lifetime guarantee. What can be done to push back against this?
What can be done to prevent these people from basically saying, if you are going to be brave enough to stand up and go on the court and make rulings based on the Constitution, that we are going to make your life a living hell and target you and target your family and not arrest people who go and protest outside your house or threaten you. You are going to be someone who is just anathema. How can we turn that around?
I don't see how you turn it around unless we change the culture, which is now very receptive to thug politics. I mean, obviously, if you wanted to discourage people from...
demonstrating on the lawns of the Supreme Court justices homes you would prosecute them there being a law on the books and yet the Biden administration no matter how many times they got called out on it would not do that and it was perfectly obvious that you know I kept getting asked why don't you think they'll enforce the law is it that they're so intimidated by the left that
And I was like, well, that may be part of it, but they're not enforcing the law because they're hoping it works. The whole idea was to intimidate them into changing the decision in Dobbs that we all thought was coming, right? So sometimes, like, the obvious answer is the answer. I mean, that's why they were doing it. And I think there's a – I've had this experience too, Ben, because when I was – one of the last things I did as a prosecutor all those years ago was –
I had to defend the sentence of Susan Rosenberg, who was one of the weather underground people. And after about a year and a half of litigation, I got the court to rule that she would stay in prison. And then about five minutes later, Bill Clinton pardoned her. And she ended up in a very key position in the wellsprings of all these deep, deep funding issues.
that the Democrats have that you've no doubt just looked into with all the work that you've done. And I find it, you know, everybody always talks about the Soros prosecutors. It's not just Soros. I mean, these rivers run very deep. It's the thing. It's way more than that.
Oh, yeah. It's phenomenally more than that. And the other thing – so you got two things. You have number one, these people who were terrorists in the 70s and 80s, they're now like respectable academics, et cetera, who have key positions in all this. And the other thing is there's a long tradition on the left of –
What they what they euphemistically call direct action, but what most of us would call in the prosecutor business, we call it extortion. But, you know, one way or the other, this is like politics by other means. And that's the way they look at it. And I think if you don't discredit that.
And I'm, you know, if I've been holding my breath, I'd been holding my breath for over 60 years for them to discredit. I haven't seen it happen yet, but I think it's on a, it's unfortunately it's on an upswing. Yeah. I just think something about the fact that when they were doing the little dropped pins, you know, on the map to show where the Supreme court justices lived and they screwed it up, they screwed up where Alito lived and they actually dropped it, uh,
15 blocks from my house near like a farmer's market. Right. Um, cause they like, they, they, cause they did it like by zip code or something, not by the address. And, um,
And so there were a bunch of people who showed up to protest outside of a bike shop or something like that. It was kind of a funny image. But just thinking – like seeing that in the news and having to tell my wife, don't take the kid in the stroller to the farmer's market because there's going to be a bunch of crazy people out there looking around for Sam Alito. And I can't believe that I had to have that conversation. And it's something that is just –
absolutely, you know, it's one thing to see a occasional prominent politician getting yelled at in a restaurant. You know, that's rude and it's awful and they can kick the person out. But this is absolutely, I mean, I'm glad that Alito is talking out, talking as much as he is right now in terms of the interviews that he's giving and the pushback that he's giving because, you know, I think he understands that
You know, this is personal and it's not going away. And the only way to combat it is to be more outspoken about what's going on because it's absolutely – it's abhorrent and it's unacceptable. And we can't continue to have an institution like the court if this is going to be the way that people behave. And, you know, I just –
I hope the people who are invested in this, and I know many of them personally, as I'm sure you do as well, I hope they understand what they're up against because I think the left has crossed into territory that they haven't been in since Rosenberg was...
doing her direct action. Yes. Well, the most important point about that is the first one that you made, which is I'm also glad Alito is speaking out. But, you know, it's a two-edged sword. Him speaking out means that more people understand how much of a problem this is. But it also means a lot of people will say, geez, I wouldn't put my family through that. And this is what they want. I mean, the whole thing about Kavanaugh,
the interorum effect, right? I mean, they'd love to have knocked out Kavanaugh, but what they really wanted was to convey the message out there is that don't you even think about taking a job like this because this is what we're going to do to your life. And that's a powerful message, I think. It's a message that says if you haven't been keeping diaries about your
everyday activity from when you were a teenager. Andy McCarthy, thank you so much for taking the time to talk me through all of these things. I'm sure we'll have a reason to talk again through the course of these indictments, and I really appreciate your insight. Well, thanks so much, Ben. Thanks for having me. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this.
So I wanted to point out something of interest that I think may have missed the kind of attention that it deserved. In the past week, there was this piece at Tablet magazine. Tablet is a publication that's been around for a while. It has kind of a Jewish focus in terms of a lot of its different religious writing, but it talks generally about American politics.
This was a conversation between two different people who have been paying attention to Barack Obama over the years. Biographer David J. Garrow, who is a noted biographer of both Martin Luther King and wrote a biography of Barack Obama that received a little less notice than it deserved.
and David Samuels, who is someone who has written on his own about Barack Obama in very intelligent and insightful ways. They discussed a number of different issues over the course of
A lengthy piece. I mean, you know, if you can get through all of it, I encourage you to do it because it is well worth your time. But you should check it out at Tablet Magazine's website, which is tabletmag.com. The title of it is The Obama Factor, a Q&A with historian David Garrow.
And it received a number of different sort of viral elements. Certainly on Twitter, there were a lot of people who were quote tweeting it or were sharing different portions of the interview because of just how hot button it was. They talked about Barack Obama's girlfriend. They talked about things that he apparently made up that were in his initial memoir. You know, a lot of different other things that are mysterious about his past.
All elements that have been discussed to some degree before, but they do so with new detail, including some very hot-button stuff that was redacted in letters to his old girlfriend until fairly recently and ended up in the second edition of Garrow's book. But one portion in particular really stuck out to me, and it's something that I have generally heard, but I've not seen reported and related in the way that it was in this article.
Sam Mills writes in part, or I guess he's saying this in the course of interviewing Garrow, the rest of the year Obama lives in a large brick mansion in Calorama, meaning the time that he's not spending at the mansion that the Obamas have in Martha's Vineyard. Doesn't it strike you as weird that he's an ex-president, he's comparatively young, he's living in the center of Washington, D.C.,
The original excuse was that Sasha had to finish school. And then you could say, well, the opposition to Trump needs a figure to rally around. But now Sasha has graduated from USC. Trump is gone. Joe Biden was elected president, but he's still there. Doesn't that strike you as odd? I mean, I have heard from more than one source. This is again, Samuel saying this, that there are regular meetings at Obama's house in
with Secret Service and cars outside. I don't write about it because it's not in my lane. There are over 1,000 reporters in Washington. There are zero stakeouts of Obama's mansion, if only to tell us who is coming and going. But he clearly has his orion. Garrow responds, I don't follow the Iranian stuff super, super carefully, but I have been puzzled at the Biden administration's continuing attachment to the Iran deal.
And Samuels responds, the easy explanation, of course, is that Joe Biden is not running that part of his administration. Obama is. He doesn't even have to pick up the phone because all of his people are already inside the White House. They hold the Iran file. Tony Blinken doesn't. Now, obviously, this is something that is an incredible violation of what we expect of ex-presidents. We expect them to take a step back.
I mean, notoriously in the modern era, the approach of ex-presidents was to not even comment on the work of those that followed them, certainly not even weigh in on decisions of policy. And that's something that has largely been abided by, with the exception of occasionally going out there and giving speeches related to endorsing a candidate or appearing at conventions on
daily basis they certainly were not interacting with the policy leadership trying to force or prevent certain policies from being put into place. It was just kind of taken as like, "I had my time. The nation's elected you now and I'm not going to go about either undermining or trying to turn you into a puppet for my own wishes."
To me, this is actually very illustrative because it explains a lot about who's actually in charge in the White House. And it also explains why someone like Joe Biden, who did not have a reputation for being a real culture warrior of the left, certainly of the woke progressive side of the left, has leaned so much into those divisive issues as president.
you know, the Joe Biden that we knew on the national stage back in, you know, 2015, 2016, as he was about to depart, what we assumed would be kind of his last stint in the white house in any capacity, you know, that he was basically going to be, you know, sort of an elder statesman quote unquote type for the Democrats, uh, in the same way that someone like, you know, John Kerry has, has done before and the like, uh,
We did not, I think, see him as or perceive him as being this aggressively woke, progressive person.
culture warrior in any real sense. And yet he's the president who puts the new LGBT flag, you know, in place of the American flag on the front of the White House. You know, it has this crazy group of people over, including, you know, people who go topless in the White House lawn. And it's something that is just, you know, it does not seem like what you would expect from a Biden administration. It is, however, I think what you could expect from
from a third Obama term where he doesn't have the kind of restrictions on him of even having to run and defend such policies, especially when it comes to
The other decisions that have been made about both trying to restart the Iran deal to undermine our relationship with nations like Israel. And certainly I would say it includes the general attitude toward Afghanistan that proved so terrible when Joe Biden actually put it into practice, something that Barack Obama was not willing to do when he was obviously commander in chief. So I think that at the end of the day,
Regardless of whether this is true or not, it certainly offers an alternate explanation for who's actually in charge of our country, who's actually making the policy determinations, and
And it makes me wonder why, you know, coming out of an era in which every coming and going of every figure was tracked by the media as signs of who was in and out, up and down in terms of their relationship with Donald Trump, that there would be such a lack of interest about the idea that Barack Obama is projecting power from the Calorama two miles away from the office that he used to sit in.
I'm Ben Dominic. You've been listening to another edition of the Ben Dominic podcast brought to you by Fox News. We will be back soon to dive back into the fray. Listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music
I'm Guy Benson. Join me weekdays at 3 p.m. Eastern as we break down the biggest stories of the day with some of the biggest newsmakers and guests. Listen live on the Fox News app or get the free podcast at Guy Benson show dot com.