e's even better.

So I was talking about Piers Morgan and his show. His co-host was talking about the fine people hoax as if it were real. And she was repeating the fake news that the president called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville fine people. Now they were talking to Al Sharpton.

So as I was saying before we got cut off here, that Al Sharpton, you would expect of all people in the world, would agree with the hoax. In other words, you would expect Al Sharpton to act as though the president really had called neo-Nazis fine people in Charlottesville. But he didn't. He didn't. Al Sharpton did not agree expressly with the hoax that the president called neo-Nazis fine people.

Instead what he said was that if the president was talking about people on both sides of the statue debate, specifically the Robert E. Lee one, and Sharpton explained Robert E. Lee was, in Sharpton's view, a bad guy because he was trying to overthrow the government, which is pretty bad, and he was a slave owner, which is really bad. They're both really bad.

So Al Sharpton is not wrong about characterization of Robert E. Lee. You know, other people will characterize it differently, I understand there's a difference of opinion, but he wasn't wrong on the facts. And then he said that that's even the worst part, that if you could support people who support that statue, that's pretty darn racist.

Now I'm going to claim success here because most of you know I've been talking about this forever. I object to offensive Confederate statues, but I also recognize that there are normal, good Americans who are not racists who just wouldn't destroy any historical monument no matter how offensive because it's just part of their history, their culture, or whatever. And again, good people could disagree on that. We understand it's context.

So it's not, you know, maybe you should not be offended. My view is that while I believe people should not be offended by it, people are offended by it. You can't change that. The fact that you don't want people to be offended by it doesn't really change the fact that they are. So if you live in a country where some huge percentage of your citizens are deeply offended, I mean pretty deeply offended, and they've got a good argument for it, just be a good citizen. Why would you offend half or a third of your country if you don't need to?

Anyway, so I'm opposed to Confederate statues, but I'm more opposed to the fine people hoax, which is a complete fabrication and has been driving the narrative about this president since 2017, I guess. So even Al Sharpton was unwilling to say on television that the president called the neo-Nazis fine people. I'm pretty sure that by now he's been exposed to the actual transcript and he would actually be embarrassed to push the hoax that even the host of the show is pushing. I call that success.

Now my article that I wrote, or my blog post, in which I documented all of the ways that people go down the hoax funnel, from starting with the pure lie that the president called neo-Nazis fine people, to showing the transcript, you could see it debunked, but then they go down and say, well they were marching with the Nazis. And then you show that they weren't. Well okay, they weren't marching with the Nazis, but you know, why does the president wait so long? And why doesn't he, you know, so you can deflect with these random questions instead of a statement.

Anyway, it got picked up by Zero Hedge, has republished it today. And where else has it been republished? A few other places. It was republished... why am I forgetting? Oh, and then Ann Coulter is featured in Breitbart talking about the hoax as well. Now there's no reference to anything I've done in that. She just does her own work. And Larry Elder got after Piers Morgan for spreading the hoax. Who else we got going here?

Anyway, oh and here's the funny part. Apparently MSNBC is saying that the people who were calling the fine people hoax a hoax, in other words people like me, they're calling us truthers. Truthers. Now if you're gonna insult me by calling me a truther, this is the very best way you can do it, because I'm pretty sure that I am actually telling the truth in a way that any media organization can validate. They report it as the truth. So the things that I say are even what all the news organizations report as the truth. It's actually what he said. He condemned the Nazis.

All right, so I guess it was Nicole Wallace on MSNBC who was referring to the hoax busters as the Charlottesville truthers. I hope they stick with that. Oh my God, are you telling me that we lost this again? Are you kidding me? Seriously? Can anybody hear me now?

All right, I was frozen for a minute. Let me just confirm that we're back on here because it just doesn't feel like this is accidental anymore. Honestly, let's talk about... anyway, let me just put a bow on this fine people hoax thing. A number of people... how many of you have tried my challenge where you guess somebody who believes the fine people hoax and you walk them through the hoax funnel by debunking each claim until the claims get smaller and smaller until people are asking just dumb questions like, well why didn't he... And as soon as you get to, well okay you've debunked everything I thought was true but how do you explain this, if you're down to "how do you explain" and it's all easy to explain, you've kind of won.

How many of you have tried the challenge on someone? I saw on Twitter that somebody tried the challenge. Have any of you tried it yet? And I just want to see if you had the experience I predicted. That the person you asked to read the quote from President Trump where he condemns totally the neo-Nazis... the challenge was to see if you can actually get them to read it out loud to you. And the challenge is that I don't think people can actually speak the words. I think that their brain would actually freeze. And I mean that. I mean that there would be an actual psychological phenomenon that you could spot where they wouldn't be able to say the words. They would get mad or they'd throw it at you or they'd say it's made up or it's out of context or you're lying, but they wouldn't be able to just read it.

So that's the challenge. See if you can get somebody to read the words.

How do you debunk so many proven lies? I don't know what you mean. I'm just looking at your comments to see if we still have a connection. I think we do.

All right, let's talk about Barr, who apparently all yesterday I called Bob Barr but is William Barr. Bill Barr. So let's call him Bill Barr because that's actually his name. We'll do that today.

I've been trying to figure out from the terrible, terrible news coverage, and really the news coverage of the Barr testimony was maybe the worst I've ever seen. Probably the worst I've ever seen. And I'm not talking about one network. It was all bad. It was just all bad everywhere. I mean disgustingly bad. Even on the same network, and I won't name names, but even within the same network they were reporting the news as opposites. Somebody would say that Barr is claiming X and the next person would say Barr is now claiming Y. And I'm thinking, this is the same network. Just decide what the news is. You know, do you have to be right? But just report it the same on your network.

But here are some of the things I've figured out. And I don't know how many of you have figured this out as well. There was a wonderful article which I just retweeted by Will Chamberlain, which takes you through the fascinating story of how the lawyers for the president probably got to this good result. And the basic story, I thought I knew this story, but Will offers one piece of speculation I hadn't heard.

So you knew that Bill Barr, before he was Attorney General, wrote a long, well-researched piece in which he said that the obstruction thing doesn't apply. And he made a very narrow interpretation of it. And his argument was based on that. And I thought to myself, with all this reporting, I don't believe I've ever seen the actual word of the law. In other words, the specific wording that everybody is saying the president either violated or did not violate. Like what exactly is the law? So that's one of the failings.

So I'm going to read you the obstruction law. There are two parts and the two parts are what's important. Now Barr's argument apparently is that the second part is referring to the first part, and Mueller's interpretation is that they're just two separate parts. All right, now I actually agree with Mueller on this because they look like just separate parts to me. But one says that you could be guilty of obstruction of justice if you alter or destroy documents or materials. Now that was very clear and there's no claim that the president destroyed any documents or had anybody destroying any documents.

But the second part is sort of a cleanup part where it says the word "otherwise." Or otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding or attempts to do so. Now that to me seems exactly applicable to what the president did, of otherwise obstructing, influencing, or impeding. So that argument is the obstruction argument.

Apparently Bill Barr wrote a piece that said that that second part was really just a cleanup to the first part. And so the law on obstruction is so narrow that since the president didn't destroy any documents, that it didn't apply. Now I don't think that's a good argument. I'm no lawyer but it doesn't sound good to me. But that's just one of the arguments.

And then what Will added was a speculation that the lawyers for the president may have asked Bill Barr to write that letter. And then when it was a letter that they liked, they got rid of Sessions, got the president to fire Sessions after the midterms, brought in Barr so that they knew they had somebody who would have the right interpretation.

Somebody's mentioning Alan Dershowitz in the comments and that's where I'm going next. So one argument is that the obstruction ruling should not be interpreted the way Mueller says it is. It feels like a weak argument to me and I'm not the Supreme Court so don't take my word for it.

The other is that we heard was that obstruction only applied to a pending case and there was no pending case against the president. I won't get too technical but apparently that argument got thrown away because the obstruction rule has been interpreted, or there's some precedent to say that potential cases are also included. And certainly there was a potential case. So the argument that there's no ongoing criminal case was not valid.

Okay, so it's two arguments that I've heard that don't make sense to me. Again, not a lawyer, just a person watching the news.

Then there's one that says that everything the president did was within his job description. I think this is closer to the Alan Dershowitz argument. That you can't say somebody had intention to obstruct justice if what we've observed are the normal actions of a president doing the job of a president. That even if that did have the effect of impeding the investigation, you couldn't say that was the intent because it was also just doing regular president stuff.

Now I think that's the argument that Bill Barr settled on, essentially abandoning or at least not mentioning his own original argument. So when he did his summary of the Mueller report, and God knows I might be getting some of this wrong, when he did a summary he didn't use his original argument, the document he wrote before he was AG, which is interesting. He didn't use his own argument. He used what sounded like more like the Dershowitz argument, that there's no evidence that the president had intent because everything was just an example of him doing his job.

Now here's where... and then there was the argument that you can't indict a sitting president. And apparently that was never anybody's argument. So Mueller never made the argument, Barr never made that argument. So that was just sort of a pundit argument I guess. So that one really never became important in the case.

For those, one of the arguments... and then I was watching Judge Napolitano on Fox News saying that... I hope I just heard this wrong so I'm going to say just so I don't get sued for some kind of libel or slander that I may have heard this wrong. So don't take it from me as fact. I'll put it out there as I don't know what I'm seeing and I don't understand it.

It looked to me like Napolitano was saying that Barr was basing his legal opinion on the fact that there was no underlying crime. I didn't see that. Does that even sound like a reality that you were watching? Did you see Napolitano say that? Did anybody see Barr say that the reason there was no obstruction is because there was no underlying crime? I don't think he said anything like that. Indeed I'm pretty sure he believes the opposite. Although I don't know if he said it specifically, but why wouldn't he believe the opposite when every lawyer in the world believes it?

I mean it sounded like Judge Napolitano was saying that Barr is the only lawyer in the world, in the whole world, he would be the only one who believes that obstruction of justice can only be applied if there's an underlying crime. I don't believe that anybody believes that who's a lawyer. So I didn't know what I was seeing. How could Judge Napolitano, who presumably is a very smart guy, how can he be saying that and how could it be on the news? Yeah, he said the opposite, right?

So I didn't know if I was hearing it wrong. But this is my larger point. When I was watching the news yesterday, did anybody... and if you have the same reaction, that the news didn't seem to be news. It looked like complete BS on all the channels all the time. It looked like nobody really understood what they were watching. Nobody understood who said what. Nobody could remember what anybody's opinion was. It just looked like a mess. That's what I saw.

Now maybe the news will start to focus more. We're getting out of this fog of war situation. But I come down to this: there's no way you could get 12 jurors to convict a president. You know, forget about a sitting president, even an ex-president. You can't get 12 citizens of this country to say that the president trying to impede something that he alone knew wasn't valid... because remember everyone in the world didn't know what was true and what wasn't except one person. Only the president knew he didn't collude. He was sure. Nobody else was sure but he was sure.

So if you could tell me you can get a jury to convict on that, good luck. You're never gonna convince me of that. Even if the facts say it should be a conviction.

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