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Good evening. It's Tuesday, August 15. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight: It's getting very hard to count how many times Donald Trump has been indicted. We are now up to four, two federal cases and two state cases. Yesterday, a district attorney in Georgia, Fani Willis, who represents the deeply blue Fulton County home to Atlanta, convinced a grand jury to return an indictment of 13 felony counts against Trump, with many more against 18 of his closest political allies, including his attorney, Rudy Giuliani. The latest charges are based on very similar grounds as the prior indictment brought, this one by special counsel Jack Smith, namely, charges that the former president committed multiple crimes for, in essence, claiming the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud and then seeking to invalidate the outcome of that election through what the last indictment and this one alleges are unlawful means for doing so. The primary difference between yesterday's Georgia indictment and the federal one brought last week by special counsel Jack Smith is that the law in Georgia is – as a result of having been shaped by a so-called tough-on-crime mentality for many years, decades, in fact – the law in Georgia is far more sweeping, rigid and threatening than federal law is. Indeed, Georgia has a very permissive entire racketeering statute, meaning the equivalent of RICO, the statute used by federal prosecutors to charge mafia bosses, with being part of a broad criminal conspiracy since they often are not susceptible to being convicted of any standalone crime. So, they created this racketeering theory to drag mafia bosses or other high-level mafiosos into broad crimes committed by low-level people that the district attorney would charge with crimes and then hope to convince or coerce them into becoming state witnesses against these higher-ranking people. The district attorney succeeded in characterizing the efforts of Trump and his allies as a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election and then treated it as eligible to be criminalized under the racketeering laws of Georgia, which makes everyone who did anything as part of the conspiracy, to further the conspiracy, a full and equal member of the criminal ring equally responsible for every crime, even if committed by others, as long as they were committed in furtherance of the criminal conspiracy. The real motive for charging so many people the way she did is to pressure the lower-level conspirators into turning the state's evidence and then accusing the higher-ups of criminality as a way of saving themselves, then trying to use that coerced testimony to convict the bigger fish.
Needless to say, to a liberal prosecutor, representing a county full of Democrats, there is no bigger fish than convicting Donald Trump. Already the media worship of this district attorney has predictably begun. She's not quite at the level of toughness and attraction as Jack Smith is, but she's rapidly making her way there. And while this indictment suffers from many of the same flaws and dangers of the prior one brought by Smith, the rigidity and heaviness of Georgia criminal law pose real challenges to Trump's legal team, including the possibility of far harsher pretrial measures, almost certain to include his first mug shot, the possibility of pretrial restrictions or even jail pending trial, the immunity of the state prosecution to any presidential pardon – because it's a state crime –and the very pro-prosecutor provisions written into the law that will govern the pretrial proceedings and the trial itself.
As we have noted before, criminally accusing populist and popular political leaders and then rendering them ineligible to run is an increasingly common West weapon in the democratic world and that is at least part of what is motivating this spate of prosecutions. We'll examine this latest indictment and its various implications and put it in the overall context of liberals and other establishment defenders around the country desperately seeking to find a way to return Joe Biden's primary election competition into a felon.
Then: at the start of the latest stage in the war in Ukraine, in February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged supporters of his cause and the cause of Ukrainians throughout the West to stop cheering for the war and make themselves feel strong and powerful and Churchillian by doing so on social media and instead go to Ukraine and pick up arms to help them fight against the Russian army, based on the argument, among many, that Ukraine has far fewer people to fight against the much more populous country of Russia. Unsurprisingly, very few of our pack of Western world cheerleaders in the media or political and punditry classes heeded Zelensky's pleas. Very few of them actually went to Ukraine to help them fight and expel the Russians. And as a result, Ukraine, which already faces a massive disadvantage in population size as compared to Russia, has really been struggling from the start, especially now that the most trained and most aggressive fighters, a lot of them, have been removed from the battlefield, killed or wounded, they're really struggling with an inability to match the sheer number of Russian men who are either willing or required to fight in this war. Lately, as a result, however, President Zelenskyy has become increasingly more repressive, both in terms of banning all dissent from being expressed. He has imposed martial law, making it clear that there will be no elections until this war is over, which means he will remain in power for the foreseeable future into the indefinite future and he has really had to crack down on the attempt by Ukrainian men, increasingly, either to bribe their way out of the country or to just risk their lives fleeing the country because they don't want to be used as cannon fodder in what they obviously regard as an increasingly futile war. We will look at the latest events in Ukraine, including on the part of President Zelenskyy, that are increasingly anti-democratic in nature, that signifies the futility of this war effort, as well as the U.S. role, and remind you of some of the worst offenses of media propaganda that have been designed to sell this war to the West, something that plainly is eroding as a majority of Americans have decided they no longer favor any further aid.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
