Name: Dave Smith on the Trump Indictments
Uploaded: 2023-08-24T17:28:49.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dave Smith on the Trump Indictments' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-08-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dave Smith on the Trump Indictments' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-08-24. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- Well look, even like with this Trump thing, man,
it's like, it's like I was saying how so many people
still believe the Russia collusion story,
which was all made up, man, and you can go,
like you can go follow this whole thing.
It was all made up, and they knew it.
They knew what they were doing.
There's that clip, by the way, before any of this stuff,
this is before Donald Trump ever took office.
Did you ever see the Chuck Schumer Six Ways to Sunday?
- You were telling me about it last night,
and you were saying we should watch it today.
- We should play this.
'Cause, and let me just preface it briefly
to kinda set up what's so amazing about it.
There are these occasional moments where,
even like I said, the thing where Chris Murphy
just happens to blurt out like,
oh yeah, our policy's overthrew Yanukovych, right?
Like, there are these moments where kind of like,
these rare moments of honesty
from the kind of leaders of the regime,
and this one comes because Rachel Maddow
asks him like an impromptu thing.
And she says that, she leads that.
And just so you know, this is, Donald Trump has been elected,
but he hasn't been, he's a president-elect here.
So it's after the election, but he's not president yet.
So this was about him tweeting something here.
- But he's taking these shots, this antagonism,
this taunting to the intelligence community.
- You take on the intelligence community,
they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.
So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman,
he's being really dumb to do this.
- What do you think the intelligence community would do
if they were moving to? - I don't know, but I, from what I am told,
they are very upset with how he has treated them and talked about them.
- So, and what happened right before that is that Rachel Maddow goes,
she goes, "All right, I'm sorry to put you on the spot here,
but Donald Trump just tweeted this thing about the intelligence community.
Any thoughts on that?"
- So it's not like he was prepared for this.
- Right.
- The most powerful senator in America,
his initial gut reaction was like,
"Well, dude, you're taking on the intelligence."
I mean, you want to go up against the CIA?
You think you're going to win that fight?
- Yeah. - Like, they're going to get you.
And this was already after they had already been,
they were spying on his campaign.
They had already kind of begun framing him for this whole,
this whole Russia thing, which was always nonsense.
Now, it started with, you know, the Steele dossier and all that stuff.
And then they were spying on Carter Page,
who was like a pretty low-level advisor in Donald Trump's campaign.
And the allegation was that the Russians had offered him a huge stake
in like one of their biggest energy companies,
if he could get Donald Trump to remove all of the sanctions
that we had at the time on Russia,
which on the face of it made no sense.
'Cause he's like a low-level advisor on the campaign.
He's not even in the administration.
- Was this based on intercepted emails?
- No, this was based off the Steele dossier,
which was opposition research that Hillary Clinton had funded,
where she hired this British spy
to go like dig up dirt on Donald Trump.
And they put together this whole dossier,
alleging that he was, you know,
he had been in bed with Russia for years, he was compromised.
It was that the prostitutes were peeing on him and all this like crazy shit.
And they all knew it was unverified.
They all knew it was like,
and all of it, almost all of it was ended up being disproven.
But so when they went to Carter,
but just to understand like the idea of trying to bribe a low-level advisor on
a campaign
to then somehow take over the administration once he got,
it'd be like on the level of if someone was like,
"We're gonna bribe the door guy at the mothership
to make sure that the Joe Rogan experience only talks about these subjects."
And you're like, I mean, even though there's a loose connection between you
and the guy who works at the mothership,
the idea that he would ever then be able to come in
and take over the show and control, it just made no sense.
But we now know that the CIA told the FBI
that Carter Page was a good guy, that he was a CIA informant.
Then they, so they told the FBI, they're like,
"No, no, no, he's not a spy.
He's one of ours.
So just lay off."
And then the FBI lied about that on the FISA application.
And this was the only guy who went down for the frame job,
was this one FBI lawyer for misrepresenting what the CIA said.
But basically he,
they said that he was approached by Russians
and that he was approached by a group of Russians
to see if he would turn and work for them.
And the CIA were like, "Yes, he was."
And he came right back to us and told us about it.
And then when they were putting in the application for the FISA warrant,
the FBI said, "He was approached by these Russians and the CIA confirmed it."
So they, they said that the CIA confirmed that he was approached by these guys,
but they left out the part that the CIA said,
and he said, "And he came right back to us and told us about it."
So that one guy was the only guy who got charged.
- Did he get so...
- 'Cause it was so, no jail time, but he did get charged.
- Carter Page got charged?
- No, no, no, the FBI agent who,
the FBI lawyer who lied on the application.
- Oh, interesting.
- Carter Page, they had three FISA court warrants on him.
They spied on him all up and down.
Never been charged with anything.
'Cause he wasn't a spy.
- Right.
- Look, Donald Trump, even now with all these charges, right,
he's never been charged with treason.
He's never been charged with inciting an insurrection
because they know they can't get him on those charges.
So what they're getting him on is all these like novel legal theories.
Well, it's not very clear that he violated the statute,
but if we interpret it this way,
we could make the argument for the first time ever
that this was actually a violation of law.
It's all like they're grasping at straws.
And it's very clearly like they've weaponized
the legal system against this guy.
It's not a coincidence that all of these indictments
are coming down right now.
Like why was the January 6th thing?
Why would any of this be coming down right now?
- Right.
- All those other people in January 6th,
they got charged and arrested immediately.
It was determined by the powers that be,
you know, the corporate media, the deep state,
all of the establishment, that he was unacceptable.
And that's not new to Donald Trump.
There were a lot of candidates
who have been determined to be unacceptable.
Ron Paul was unacceptable.
Bernie Sanders was unacceptable.
Tulsi Gabbard was unacceptable.
And you saw like the machine
be weaponized against all of them to keep them out.
But Trump beat the machine.
The difference is Trump won.
I mean, there's other differences,
but the guy who they determined was not acceptable ended up winning.
And part of what was so powerful about that is that it kind of destroyed the
illusion of inevitability
that I think progressives rely on.
That, you know, like progressives will very confidently tell you that you're on
the wrong side of history.
You know, which is like a really interesting thing to say if you think about it.
Like you're on the wrong side of history.
Meaning like it's a guarantee that history is moving in my direction.
And I'm telling you how you will be judged in the future based off how you feel
right now.
And they kind of have good reason to feel that way because they have been kind
of moving in the direction that they want to move in.
But it was just like we just had the first black president and now we will have
the first female president.
And of course, you know, this throwback bigot male chauvinist Donald Trump
could never possibly win.
Like this is what's going to happen in history now is Hillary Clinton is the
next president.
How are they not happening?
How are they going to stop him from winning again?
They're trying.
Oh, yeah, that's what all these indictments are right now.
The problem is it has the opposite effect on his base.
It doesn't make people reluctant.
It makes people more convinced that there's a conspiracy against him.
It makes people more convinced that there's corruption that's fighting against
him.
I think personally that Trump was at his most vulnerable within the Republican
primary at the very beginning.
I thought he for the first time to me, he seemed like he was very out of step
with his own base.
He's sitting there still bragging about Operation Warp Speed and how he saved
hundreds of millions of lives by developing the vaccine.
He was getting booed a few times at his own speeches.
He just seemed kind of out of touch.
And it seemed like, you know, it seemed like the energy of his campaign wasn't
2016, which was make America great again.
This was like my vengeance tour.
They screwed me.
I lost, but I really won.
I'm going to come back and win again.
And it seemed to me like that wasn't really connecting.
And then, you know, this is before DeSantis got in the race, but it was heavily
speculated that he would be getting in the race.
And, you know, he was like this guy who has a very good record on COVID, at
least compared to all the other governors, just about all the other governors.
And there just seemed to me like there was an opening there.
There was like a vulnerability.
And then they raided his house in Mar-a-Lago.
And I felt like that that guaranteed Trump front run, like that that guaranteed
it for him, because as soon as they did that, it was like, oh, now it's like it's
it's shifted right back to this.
Like, look what they're doing to your guy.
They want to not give you the chance to vote for this guy.
They're going to weaponize the justice system against this guy because you like
him.
They're not and they're doing it to him because they want to do it to you.
It kind of gave him like all this energy back.
And so there's a real dynamic to that where his numbers go up every time a new
indictment comes out.
Yeah, people aren't buying into it because it's not like, you know, look, it's
just so obvious that it's politicized.
You know, the interesting thing, there's an interesting thing about the law.
Like people have this conception of what the law is and then there's the
reality of it.
Like people have this conception of like there's a rule written written down on
a piece of paper and that's the rule.
If you break that rule, you broke the law.
If you don't break that rule, you didn't break the law.
But that's not really how it works.
It's like in the same way, like down to the lowest level, if you get pulled
over by a cop, you know, there's times where he could give you a ticket or he
could let you off with a warning, you know, and like sometimes it's just how
that guy feels.
Maybe he knew you.
Maybe she goes, oh, shit, Joe Rogan, I'll let you off with a warning.
You know what I mean?
Like there could be so many different factors.
Well, like just for example, okay, so James Clapper, you know, he was the
director of national intelligence as basically the head of the shadow
government.
That's the highest position in the deep state.
You're that the CIA answers to you.
You know, you oversee the CIA and the NSA and FBI and all this stuff.
And he lied to Congress very blatantly, like no question about it.
He was asked point blank, is the NSA involved in any bulk data collection on
American citizens?
And he said, no, we're not doing that.
And then Ed Snowden came out and exposed that he clearly was.
And he was the DNI.
Like he knew this.
Okay.
He lied to Congress.
Why isn't he arrested for it?
It's like, because there's no political will to arrest that guy.
He's of the deep state.
He's one of the top guys.
He's not getting arrested.
Now, Michael Cohen lied to Congress.
He got a month wrong when he was talking about a deal that he was working on
for Trump.
He said it happened in June, but it was really in January or something like
that, but he got charged with that.
And because they wanted to put pressure on him to get him to flip on Donald
Trump, which he did.
So that's, it's not like there are crimes that are committed all the time.
There's just no political will.
There's no desire to arrest that person.
And I think the thing that's wild about this with Trump is that if you think of
all the crimes that presidents have committed,
the idea that this is what one of them is actually going to go down for is
insane.
Like Bush instituted torture.
You know what I mean?
Obama murdered American citizens without charges.
These guys lied us into wars.
By the way, every war is illegal.
The supreme law of the land is the constitution.
And it says only Congress can declare war.
The last declared war was World War II.
Every war since then has been an illegal war.
Anyone could be arrested for this at any time.
The legal defense is that they're military actions, not wars.
So you know that thing in Vietnam?
It probably smelled like a war to you, but no, not a war.
Korea wasn't a war.
Iraq wasn't a war.
Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen.
None of those were wars.
You know, it's anyone, if there was any political will,
any one of these presidents could be arrested for, for any number of crimes.
And yet they're not.
But yet Trump didn't give back the classified information quickly enough,
even after they asked him, oh, he's got to, he's got to be indicted for that.
Even though other presidents have done pretty much the same thing.
No, he's got to be indicted for that.
What is the, the Georgia thing is interesting because he was going to have a
press conference
where he was going to reveal all of the information that proves that he was
telling the truth about
the Georgia election being rigged.
Yeah.
And he didn't have the press conference.
Yes.
Well, this is a thing that I got to say is a kind of knock on Trump here that,
you know,
this is a thing his lawyers, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, who just turned
himself in,
into custody today.
But they, they would always say this after 2020,
we have proof that millions of votes were stolen from Donald Trump and will be
releasing this soon.
And then it just never kind of comes.
So I don't know what he thinks he's going to tell us about that.
The issue with the thing in Georgia where I will grant, there's like a little
bit of a gray area
there.
And I think that, look, it's there, there is a gray area there.
It's kind of like when they impeached Trump over Ukraine,
there was like a little bit of a gray area of like what exactly he did.
It's just that when you look at things of all the crimes that presidents commit,
the idea that you go after a president for this, it's so petty compared to
these greater crimes.
But like, he kind of, he called the secretary of state in Georgia and was kind
of like,
I need you to find me these votes.
But he was saying, he was like, look, there's been fraud.
I know there's been fraud.
You got to go look for it.
And the guy's like, I don't see any evidence that there's fraud here.
And he's like, find it.
I know there's fraud.
You know, he was putting pressure on the guy to go look.
But it's not as if he was telling the guy, I need you to commit fraud.
Right.
He wasn't telling him, I want you to flip votes or I want you to manipulate
something.
He's like, I want you to go find where the fraud is.
Right.
Because I, so you'd almost have to prove that he didn't really believe that.
Right.
In order to prove, you know, because if there was really fraud,
he has every right to tell the guy to go find it.
Right.
So now, so now they're arguing that he didn't.
And in the indictment, they argue that he knew it.
And he was like, he knew that there was no fraud, but was still trying to get
the guy
to go find it.
And the case that they're using to argue that is that he had advisors around
him who told him
that the election was legit.
The problem with that is that that doesn't prove at all that Trump believed
those guys,
just because they told him that.
Right.
If there's one thing I'm fairly confident in, I believe Donald Trump believes
he won the election in 2020.

Dave Smith on the Trump Indictments

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- Well look, even like with this Trump thing, man,
it's like, it's like I was saying how so many people
still believe the Russia collusion story,
which was all made up, man, and you can go,
like you can go follow this whole thing.
It was all made up, and they knew it.
They knew what they were doing.
There's that clip, by the way, before any of this stuff,
this is before Donald Trump ever took office.
Did you ever see the Chuck Schumer Six Ways to Sunday?
- You were telling me about it last night,
and you were saying we should watch it today.
- We should play this.
'Cause, and let me just preface it briefly
to kinda set up what's so amazing about it.
There are these occasional moments where,
even like I said, the thing where Chris Murphy
just happens to blurt out like,
oh yeah, our policy's overthrew Yanukovych, right?
Like, there are these moments where kind of like,
these rare moments of honesty
from the kind of leaders of the regime,
and this one comes because Rachel Maddow
asks him like an impromptu thing.
And she says that, she leads that.
And just so you know, this is, Donald Trump has been elected,
but he hasn't been, he's a president-elect here.
So it's after the election, but he's not president yet.
So this was about him tweeting something here.
- But he's taking these shots, this antagonism,
this taunting to the intelligence community.
- You take on the intelligence community,
they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.
So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman,
he's being really dumb to do this.
- What do you think the intelligence community would do
if they were moving to? - I don't know, but I, from what I am told,
they are very upset with how he has treated them and talked about them.
- So, and what happened right before that is that Rachel Maddow goes,
she goes, "All right, I'm sorry to put you on the spot here,
but Donald Trump just tweeted this thing about the intelligence community.
Any thoughts on that?"
- So it's not like he was prepared for this.
- Right.
- The most powerful senator in America,
his initial gut reaction was like,
"Well, dude, you're taking on the intelligence."
I mean, you want to go up against the CIA?
You think you're going to win that fight?
- Yeah. - Like, they're going to get you.
And this was already after they had already been,
they were spying on his campaign.
They had already kind of begun framing him for this whole,
this whole Russia thing, which was always nonsense.
Now, it started with, you know, the Steele dossier and all that stuff.
And then they were spying on Carter Page,
who was like a pretty low-level advisor in Donald Trump's campaign.
And the allegation was that the Russians had offered him a huge stake
in like one of their biggest energy companies,
if he could get Donald Trump to remove all of the sanctions
that we had at the time on Russia,
which on the face of it made no sense.
'Cause he's like a low-level advisor on the campaign.
He's not even in the administration.
- Was this based on intercepted emails?
- No, this was based off the Steele dossier,
which was opposition research that Hillary Clinton had funded,
where she hired this British spy
to go like dig up dirt on Donald Trump.
And they put together this whole dossier,
alleging that he was, you know,
he had been in bed with Russia for years, he was compromised.
It was that the prostitutes were peeing on him and all this like crazy shit.
And they all knew it was unverified.
They all knew it was like,
and all of it, almost all of it was ended up being disproven.
But so when they went to Carter,
but just to understand like the idea of trying to bribe a low-level advisor on
a campaign
to then somehow take over the administration once he got,
it'd be like on the level of if someone was like,
"We're gonna bribe the door guy at the mothership
to make sure that the Joe Rogan experience only talks about these subjects."
And you're like, I mean, even though there's a loose connection between you
and the guy who works at the mothership,
the idea that he would ever then be able to come in
and take over the show and control, it just made no sense.
But we now know that the CIA told the FBI
that Carter Page was a good guy, that he was a CIA informant.
Then they, so they told the FBI, they're like,
"No, no, no, he's not a spy.
He's one of ours.
So just lay off."
And then the FBI lied about that on the FISA application.
And this was the only guy who went down for the frame job,
was this one FBI lawyer for misrepresenting what the CIA said.
But basically he,
they said that he was approached by Russians
and that he was approached by a group of Russians
to see if he would turn and work for them.
And the CIA were like, "Yes, he was."
And he came right back to us and told us about it.
And then when they were putting in the application for the FISA warrant,
the FBI said, "He was approached by these Russians and the CIA confirmed it."
So they, they said that the CIA confirmed that he was approached by these guys,
but they left out the part that the CIA said,
and he said, "And he came right back to us and told us about it."
So that one guy was the only guy who got charged.
- Did he get so...
- 'Cause it was so, no jail time, but he did get charged.
- Carter Page got charged?
- No, no, no, the FBI agent who,
the FBI lawyer who lied on the application.
- Oh, interesting.
- Carter Page, they had three FISA court warrants on him.
They spied on him all up and down.
Never been charged with anything.
'Cause he wasn't a spy.
- Right.
- Look, Donald Trump, even now with all these charges, right,
he's never been charged with treason.
He's never been charged with inciting an insurrection
because they know they can't get him on those charges.
So what they're getting him on is all these like novel legal theories.
Well, it's not very clear that he violated the statute,
but if we interpret it this way,
we could make the argument for the first time ever
that this was actually a violation of law.
It's all like they're grasping at straws.
And it's very clearly like they've weaponized
the legal system against this guy.
It's not a coincidence that all of these indictments
are coming down right now.
Like why was the January 6th thing?
Why would any of this be coming down right now?
- Right.
- All those other people in January 6th,
they got charged and arrested immediately.
It was determined by the powers that be,
you know, the corporate media, the deep state,
all of the establishment, that he was unacceptable.
And that's not new to Donald Trump.
There were a lot of candidates
who have been determined to be unacceptable.
Ron Paul was unacceptable.
Bernie Sanders was unacceptable.
Tulsi Gabbard was unacceptable.
And you saw like the machine
be weaponized against all of them to keep them out.
But Trump beat the machine.
The difference is Trump won.
I mean, there's other differences,
but the guy who they determined was not acceptable ended up winning.
And part of what was so powerful about that is that it kind of destroyed the
illusion of inevitability
that I think progressives rely on.
That, you know, like progressives will very confidently tell you that you're on
the wrong side of history.
You know, which is like a really interesting thing to say if you think about it.
Like you're on the wrong side of history.
Meaning like it's a guarantee that history is moving in my direction.
And I'm telling you how you will be judged in the future based off how you feel
right now.
And they kind of have good reason to feel that way because they have been kind
of moving in the direction that they want to move in.
But it was just like we just had the first black president and now we will have
the first female president.
And of course, you know, this throwback bigot male chauvinist Donald Trump
could never possibly win.
Like this is what's going to happen in history now is Hillary Clinton is the
next president.
How are they not happening?
How are they going to stop him from winning again?
They're trying.
Oh, yeah, that's what all these indictments are right now.
The problem is it has the opposite effect on his base.
It doesn't make people reluctant.
It makes people more convinced that there's a conspiracy against him.
It makes people more convinced that there's corruption that's fighting against
him.
I think personally that Trump was at his most vulnerable within the Republican
primary at the very beginning.
I thought he for the first time to me, he seemed like he was very out of step
with his own base.
He's sitting there still bragging about Operation Warp Speed and how he saved
hundreds of millions of lives by developing the vaccine.
He was getting booed a few times at his own speeches.
He just seemed kind of out of touch.
And it seemed like, you know, it seemed like the energy of his campaign wasn't
2016, which was make America great again.
This was like my vengeance tour.
They screwed me.
I lost, but I really won.
I'm going to come back and win again.
And it seemed to me like that wasn't really connecting.
And then, you know, this is before DeSantis got in the race, but it was heavily
speculated that he would be getting in the race.
And, you know, he was like this guy who has a very good record on COVID, at
least compared to all the other governors, just about all the other governors.
And there just seemed to me like there was an opening there.
There was like a vulnerability.
And then they raided his house in Mar-a-Lago.
And I felt like that that guaranteed Trump front run, like that that guaranteed
it for him, because as soon as they did that, it was like, oh, now it's like it's
it's shifted right back to this.
Like, look what they're doing to your guy.
They want to not give you the chance to vote for this guy.
They're going to weaponize the justice system against this guy because you like
him.
They're not and they're doing it to him because they want to do it to you.
It kind of gave him like all this energy back.
And so there's a real dynamic to that where his numbers go up every time a new
indictment comes out.
Yeah, people aren't buying into it because it's not like, you know, look, it's
just so obvious that it's politicized.
You know, the interesting thing, there's an interesting thing about the law.
Like people have this conception of what the law is and then there's the
reality of it.
Like people have this conception of like there's a rule written written down on
a piece of paper and that's the rule.
If you break that rule, you broke the law.
If you don't break that rule, you didn't break the law.
But that's not really how it works.
It's like in the same way, like down to the lowest level, if you get pulled
over by a cop, you know, there's times where he could give you a ticket or he
could let you off with a warning, you know, and like sometimes it's just how
that guy feels.
Maybe he knew you.
Maybe she goes, oh, shit, Joe Rogan, I'll let you off with a warning.
You know what I mean?
Like there could be so many different factors.
Well, like just for example, okay, so James Clapper, you know, he was the
director of national intelligence as basically the head of the shadow
government.
That's the highest position in the deep state.
You're that the CIA answers to you.
You know, you oversee the CIA and the NSA and FBI and all this stuff.
And he lied to Congress very blatantly, like no question about it.
He was asked point blank, is the NSA involved in any bulk data collection on
American citizens?
And he said, no, we're not doing that.
And then Ed Snowden came out and exposed that he clearly was.
And he was the DNI.
Like he knew this.
Okay.
He lied to Congress.
Why isn't he arrested for it?
It's like, because there's no political will to arrest that guy.
He's of the deep state.
He's one of the top guys.
He's not getting arrested.
Now, Michael Cohen lied to Congress.
He got a month wrong when he was talking about a deal that he was working on
for Trump.
He sai