whatsoever that Russia directly hacked our voting systems.

Now, the first thing you need to know is that this is a narrow claim. They're not saying that Russia did nothing bad about the elections. They're just saying that they did not, as far as we could tell, hack into the election systems themselves and make a change.

Now, the story is that we now know that Obama said, take that back before it gets published. And the worry was that Trump's team would see it because apparently if you're the president-elect you get to see the presidential daily briefings and if they had put out something that said that our intelligence people say that Russia had not hacked our election systems, being very specific, just the election systems, that might be a bad look.

So instead, allegedly Obama ordered his people to go back and instead of saying what did not happen, they should rewrite it to say what did happen. Now, if Russia had changed actual vote outcomes directly, that would be the biggest problem in the world. But this other stuff, although it looks like it might have been real, was trivial and wouldn't have affected anything. And it would be hard to say that necessarily they did it, Russia did it for the benefit of Trump. It might have been consistent with Russia's past that they were just trying to reduce our credibility in our system. So they wouldn't care who won. They would be more concerned with reducing the credibility of our own system. That would be sort of normal Russia activity.

So some of the things that Russia did do is allegedly, I don't know this for sure, but allegedly they hacked into the DNC's email. The worst thing that they would have found there is that the Hillary Clinton and DNC people screwed Bernie Sanders. So you could argue, well, if we found that out, would that cause somebody to switch their vote to Trump? Probably not too many. I mean, the average person isn't following the news that closely that they would have even known any of this happened.

Then there were two states where apparently the Russian hackers got into the voter database of each state. Now, the voter database apparently was not changed and it wasn't used in any way that would have affected the race. So that's trivial.

And then, as you know, Russia bought some Facebook ads, but only $100,000 worth, which is so small that it wouldn't affect anything. And then they made some memes or advertisements that were so poorly done that even if you saw them, you wouldn't even definitely wouldn't say it was going to help Trump.

But here's the clever part. Brennan was asked to find out if Russia was doing these things to help Trump or were they just doing these things because they chip away at our credibility in any way that they can. And John Brennan went away and came back and said, "Oh yeah, definitely Putin wants Trump and Putin is doing these things specifically to help Trump."

Now because Brennan put that narrative on it that allowed the Democrats to say, "Wait a minute. Are you saying that Russia was involved in meddling, interfering, hacking, and maybe some information warfare, and that according to our own intelligence people, the reason is that Putin wanted to help Trump? Well, that's basically Russia collusion." I mean, there's no actual collusion, but Democrats don't really need much to make a claim like that.

So the politicians could look at this mess, this messy situation, and they would say, "Yeah, there you go. There's your Russia collusion." And then they would throw in the story about Paul Manafort, who was apparently running a scam on some Russian oligarch and saying that he would give him insider information about the campaign, but never gave him any more than some stale internal polling. And then he went to jail for it. But there was no evidence anybody in the Trump campaign was aware that he was scamming the Russian guy. So there was no collusion there. Just bad behavior by Manafort.

So here's the bottom line. The claim is that Obama manipulated the intelligence with Brennan to build a picture of Russia helping Trump. And the reason that they did that is to essentially get Trump out of office and degrade him.

Now, you might say, "But Scott, if all this is true, is this really, as Trump says, one of the worst things that's happened in the country?" And I would say yes. Yes. If this is all true, this is one of the worst things we've ever seen in the country. And Brennan has some questions to answer because he's never really told us nor would we expect him to. How do you know that what Putin wanted? How do you know Putin ordered this for the purpose of helping Trump? Because it turns out that at least two senior people who were part of that decision told Brennan that there's no evidence that Putin wanted to help Trump and it looks like the allegation is that Brennan just made that up. So he put together some stuff to make it look like there was some backing for it but it looks like it was just made up. So, you know, like the Steele Dossier, just totally made up.

So when you see the news talking about it, you'll see stuff like NBC News, which is not a credible source of news in my opinion. They'll put together the things that Russia did which you could definitely call meddling, interfering, hacking or you know information warfare but so trivial that there's no way it affected the election and then on top of that on top of the fact it didn't affect the election as far as we know they added that it was Putin's intention to get Trump into office and there's no evidence for that that we've seen.

So when you watch this story, you'll see them conflate the first thing that Obama did with the revised story and it gets really confusing.

Now, do you believe even if you believe this is all true, does this look like a crime to you? Well, maybe there's some crime here, but how easy would it be for Obama, I'll be Obama's defense attorney now. You've been accused of changing telling the intel people to change their report for political reasons. And then I'm Obama's lawyer and I say, "What do you mean? It doesn't make sense to do a daily briefing to the president to tell him what didn't happen. Why would you need to tell him what didn't happen? It would make more sense to tell him what did happen." So Obama wanted it to be rewritten to say what did happen instead of what did not happen. Where's the crime in that? Because there are lots of things that didn't happen. Are all the things in the world that could have happened but didn't happen in the presidential daily briefing? No. The presidential daily briefing is not to tell you what didn't happen. It's the opposite. It's to tell you what did happen. So that's all he did. That's all Obama did. He said instead of saying what didn't happen, which by the way, I don't recall that even being in the news. Does anybody recall back then was there any credible news that Russia had literally changed the votes by hacking? I don't even remember that being in the news. So why would it make sense to put that in the daily briefing when instead you could say all the things that they did do? So I think he's got an out there.

But then you say, "But what about Brennan making up the fact that Putin wanted to do it to help Trump? Isn't that a problem?" Well, it might be if you could prove it. But instead, I think it'll turn into well yeah, there were people who said there was no evidence or insufficient, but there were other people who said some things which I interpreted to be important. And my opinion, and this is always opinion, you know, I was hired to give my opinion. My opinion was that when you looked at the totality of the evidence, the people who said there was nothing there plus the people who said there was something there. And I made a call, you know, a decision. And my decision was there was enough there to conclude based on everything we know about Russia, based on all of our experience with Russia in the past. It was a reasonable assessment. Might have been wrong. I might have been wrong, but there's no law broken. It was just a reasonable assessment that it looked like Putin was behind it.

Now, where is the crime? And then the Democrats, the politicians, and the news, they get to say stuff like, "Well, you know, we've proven that Russia was helping Trump, and we're going to call that collusion." Well, when politicians lie, it's not really a crime. It's just a Tuesday. The politicians lying is not a crime.

So when I look at this I see everybody conflating the things that would have mattered with the things that didn't matter and leaving out the fact that it didn't matter. And I don't see the crime. Now again, I'm not a lawyer. So a lawyer might look at this and say, "Scott, you fool. There are 10 crimes right in front of you. Why don't you see them?" And I would say, well, I'm not a lawyer.

So, as you know, I absolutely hate Brennan and Clapper and Obama and Susan Rice and John Kerry and all the people who are alleged to be behind this biggest hoax in American history. I hate them. I would love to see them go to jail. I just don't think there's evidence that would put them in jail. So if I had to predict, my prediction was that there would be no convictions over anything we've seen so far. Even if we knew, even if we were positive that the reason they did what they did is because they're weasels, you would never be able to convince a jury that the reason you changed the presidential daily briefing was because you were trying to change the politics. It would just look too much like why are you doing a briefing saying what didn't happen when you should do the briefing that says what did happen. That would completely convince me if I were on a jury. If you put me on that jury, I would say I don't see the crime.

So don't get too excited that we've seen the smoking gun and the weight of the law will be coming down on them any minute. I just don't think that's necessarily going to happen. I'd like it to happen. I would be very happy if it happened. I don't see it yet. Maybe something else will happen. Anyway, that's my take on that.

Apparently, according to the Daily Wire, immigrants to the United States are sending $200 billion a year out of the United States, sending it back to their families. Most of it, the biggest part of that is going back to Mexico.

Now, I have two feelings about this because the Trump administration has put a 1% tax on that and they're resisting it. At least in Mexico, they're trying to resist it. But on one hand, I think people should be able to spend their money on whatever they want to spend it on as long as that's legal and it's completely legal to send money to your family in another country. So I don't like it being limited because I don't like limiting people's freedom.

On the other hand, if you come into this country and work illegally and you're shipping money that would have been would have gone to an American worker and then that American worker would have spent it in the United States, there's a pretty big difference between the money just leaving our system and benefiting the other country versus staying in the country where it multiplies, you know, that the person who earns it buys something in the store. Now the store owner has some money and they buy something and etc. So there is a really big difference between the money leaving the country and staying in the country and multiplying. So overall, since I'm America first, I would like to see that tax. It makes sense to me.

I saw a post on X from PhD Kevin Bass. I don't know who he is, but he says a 2020 paper showed that of 500 randomized controlled trials, now if you're a nerd and you follow science, you know that a so-called RCT or randomized controlled trial is the gold standard of science. If you see that somebody did a randomized controlled trial, you would trust that result, wouldn't you? Because that's the best the science could do. They've randomized, they've controlled, they've got a comparison going on, right?

But it turns out that half of the ones analyzed had