Transcript for Obstruction of Transition

[Marc Jacobin]
Outgoing President Joe Biden has gotten himself on the naughty list, and not the good kind of naughty list. He betrayed a time-honored tradition that has made America exceptional among nations for most of the last 227 years. The peaceful transition and relinquishment of power, keyword being relinquish.

Not since John Adams and the Federalists of 1801 has a president attempted to project his influence into the subsequent administration, and that includes you-know-who in 2020. 43 presidents have acquiesced to the will of the people after the November election, and started the process of winding down their administrations. They accepted that their mandate had expired, and a new president with a fresh agenda would steward the country's interests in the new year.

The 45th president did not go as quietly as his predecessors, but number 46 has raised the bar for obstruction of transition. Joe Biden has finally out-Trumped Trump, and not in a good way, but could such an aspiration have any other conclusion? In 2020, Donald Trump delayed Joe Biden's president-elect intelligence briefings while contesting votes, and refused to attend Joe's inauguration.

Donald may have stamped his feet and held his breath like a petulant child, but these acts of conceit had no material effect on the presidential transition. Opinions vary on Donald's precipitation of the January 6th occupation of the Capitol, but he had no direct hand in obstructing the certification of Electoral College votes. At the time, these were the most severe transgressions against the traditions of transition, and Jacobin Brothers noted them as such.

It may be that Donald simply lacked the wherewithal to substantially undermine the incoming administration, and the chaos of his first term supports that proposition. Conversely, the machinations of a man who has been a politician for more than half of a century should not be discounted, and the experience of those years as a perennial swamp-dweller has paid dividends in lame-duck efforts to preserve his withering legacy and further advance his failed policies prior to being escorted from the White House in January. I am Marc Jacobin, along with my brother James, and this is Extemporaneously.

James, we have filed eight charges of obstruction of transition against Joe Biden. What is the first charge? Number one, subversion of democracy.

Defendant did knowingly and willingly perform acts contrary to the will of the people after an election that rejected his party and policies. Number two, fomenting nuclear war. Authorized the use of American munitions against targets deep in the Russian interior with full knowledge that Russia reserves the nuclear option to defend the motherland.

[James Jacobin]
Number three, abusive use of clemency.

[Marc Jacobin]
Commuted the sentences of 1,499 people without scrutinizing individual cases.

[James Jacobin]
Number four, abusive use of pardons.

[Marc Jacobin]
Pardoned his son Hunter for any and all crimes committed during a 10-year period.

[James Jacobin]
Number five, selling border wall construction materials.

[Marc Jacobin]
Auctioning millions of dollars worth of border wall construction materials for as little as $5 a unit.

[James Jacobin]
Number six, vetoing increase of number of federal judges.

[Marc Jacobin]
Vetoed a bipartisan bill that would add 63 federal judges to adjudicate millions of backlogged cases. Number seven, attempting to preserve partisan and bureaucratic job. Introducing rules to protect federal workers who could be eliminated by future administrations.

Number eight, preemptive pardons. Contemplating pardoning any and all politicians and bureaucrats who committed crimes during the Biden administration. So James, these are the eight charges that we have filed.

Let's take it back up to the top with our blanket charge, subversion of democracy. This sounds like a really scary thing.

[James Jacobin]
Yeah, this is exactly what the 45th president, soon to be 47th president, was charged with and actually impeached for in the closing weeks of his presidency. A lot of the, some of them are written down. Most of them are voluntary, started by George Washington when he voluntarily left after his second term so many centuries ago.

What is usually accepted, especially in the 21st century from Clinton on, when the other party wins the election in the transition period, or even before that, George W. Bush stopped with his agenda because the American people rebuked him. Barack Obama more or less disappeared at the end of his presidency because the American people rebuked him.

Donald Trump did not, but like you said, he didn't materially affect the transition of power. He just did it in a temper tantrum way. I won't go to the inauguration.

I won't accept the results of the election. I'll say stuff like, stop the steal. I'll send my lawyer out there to say I have a fire hose of evidence, but it did not obstruct the transition, minus not letting Joe Biden get the presidential briefings until the exact time that the regulations said he could.

[Marc Jacobin]
Yeah, and that was only a few days. And he was already getting security briefings as part of a presidential. He did obstruct the transition, and at the time, he was the president to have done it to the most extreme degree since John Adams.

[James Jacobin]
Plus Trump didn't know that former vice presidents and presidents still get security briefings. Biden was already getting security briefings at a level as a former sitting vice president anyway, but Trump didn't know that.

[Marc Jacobin]
Let's go to the second charge, fomenting nuclear war. This seems to me to be the most insane decision that any president has made since the end of World War II.

[James Jacobin]
It's not just insane in a transition period, it's just insane. We're fortunate all to be here, and hopefully we'll still be here by the time Trump 47 takes office because the escalation in the Ukraine of authorizing President Zelensky to use those missiles to fire into Russia still can have disastrous results. And this is even assuming that Joe Biden's even making this decision.

[Marc Jacobin]
We'll get into that discussion a little later on. What people have to realize is that by authorizing the use of American munitions, American provided munitions, in Russian territory, NATO is now at war with Russia. They just haven't started shooting.

We spent 50 years trying to avoid this. The entire global consciousness was focused on avoiding nuclear war between the United States and Russia that was part of the USSR at the time. And now we just have a president randomly saying, hey, let's shoot missiles at Moscow.

[James Jacobin]
Well, Marc, that was in the actual Cold War. Back then, members of the aristocracy, bureaucracy, and what's called the swamp, and you lead us to the 1%, all of them have hundreds of millions of dollars of investments in Ukraine. A very small number of people in America would benefit from the Ukraine remaining intact, but not because of freedom for Zelensky and the Ukrainian people.

It's because of the financial interest.

[Marc Jacobin]
Charge number three, abusive use of clemency. Without getting too much into the details, there is a distinction between amnesty and pardons and clemency, which is commuting of sentences. So Biden pardoned 60 some odd people.

A cursory review of those seems like they were nonviolent. It seems like not too much harm could come to society as a result of these pardons. The greater area of concern is the number of sentences that were commuted, 1,500, give or take, 1,499.

I don't like to round people. It doesn't seem like there was a lot of care given to the individuals who were actually part of those commuted sentences.

[James Jacobin]
Well, no, Marc, you're denying due process and the rights of the victims. The 4,000 juveniles that were improperly imprisoned as children for a for-profit prison where the judge pled guilty to doing this, went to jail for it, got out on a little bit of early release to a house arrest because of COVID, and now has had the sentence wiped away. And we know of at least one of these youth offenders that in their early 20s committed suicide because they never got their life together.

At least one. This is just unforgivable.

[Marc Jacobin]
This was a crime against the people to begin with because this former Pennsylvania Judge Michael Conahan originally received only a 17-year sentence for destroying the lives of 4,000 children.

[James Jacobin]
4,000 children and their families and the lives they could have had. The guys should have got life, life with no parole.

[Marc Jacobin]
This is bulletless genocide.

[James Jacobin]
Child abuse, abuse of power of the highest order. And so when the president commutes that abuse of power, he himself is abusing his power. I mean, this is supposed to be, aren't the Democrats supposed to be the we love everybody, we take care of people, we're inclusive, we care about humanity.

What humanity was shown to those children who are now all adults and their families who've had to live with this forever? And you just wave away the guy's sentence. It's almost like a war crime.

[Marc Jacobin]
It seems like over the years, the Democrats have become less concerned with victims and more concerned with looking out for the perpetrators of crime. That seems to be the case here. The 4,000 victims were disregarded and the perpetrator is now the sympathetic character.

[James Jacobin]
And that's to say nothing for a man by the name of Jim Carlson of Minnesota, who was convicted on dozens of felony counts for selling synthetic drugs. This is drug dealing, very dangerous narcotics, which then leads these people when they run out of the synthetic drugs to go to the street to score smack black tar heroin, fentanyl. It was drug dealing.

He's El Chapo. He's El Chapo. And now he's free.

And why is that? I think a cursory look of where donations come from and where the staffers that push this through for lame duck President Biden are going to work after January 20th.

[Marc Jacobin]
It's evil. So that was abusive use of clemency. Let's move on to abusive use of pardons.

Pardon his son, Hunter, for any and all crimes committed during a 10-year period.

[James Jacobin]
Yeah, most pardons take place after you've been convicted, except for President Nixon. By accepting the pardon, you admit guilt. And it's specific to a crime or series of crimes that could be looked at as prostituted, as political in nature.

What Biden did here was pardon his son retroactively for anything he might have done from 2014 until the end of November of 2024. What exactly is it that Hunter could have done? Because he wasn't charged, much less investigated for anything.

I'm just curious, because I know 2014 was the year that Hunter Biden got a job in Ukraine, where now President Biden just authorized them to use long-range missiles into Russia. I don't think there's a connection, though.

[Marc Jacobin]
And I think if Nixon were alive, he might have something to say about this, because perhaps all of Nixon's crimes prior to 1970 should have been pardoned as well. At this point, it would feel like he got a raw deal. Yeah, he's like, hey, wait a minute here.

But he was the president. That's the point we're trying to make. On one side of the coin, you have a president pardoning his son.

You might be able to look the other way. But now you have a president granting a pardon that is broader and bigger than any pardon granted to anybody, except a former president, which was done in the interest of national serenity, as opposed to keeping someone's family member out of jail.

[James Jacobin]
Yes, and it took great political courage for Ford to do that. Cost him his reelection. And history has been kind to Ford, because we can all agree now that that was the right thing to do.

Partying a member of your family that could potentially snare Biden and his whole family up in a corruption scandal from 2014 is exactly what they accused Trump of being and doing. They are what they say Trump is.

[Marc Jacobin]
That's pretty scary, because they've made Trump out to be quite the monstrous individual.

[James Jacobin]
And if the Congress had any integrity, Democrats, Republicans and independents alike, they would charge Biden with a single charge of abuse of power and impeach him for this. But they won't.

[Marc Jacobin]
Number five, selling border wall construction materials. This is just unheard of.

[James Jacobin]
It's petty on the one hand, but on the other hand, it's subverting the will of the people. Donald Trump has been running on that wall for nine years. He's been handed a large victory to complete that wall and secure the border.

And now the Biden administration is taking hundreds of millions of dollars worth of material paid for in full at full price by the American taxpayer, selling them for pennies on the dollar to do two things. Obstruct the will of the people and make it much harder for Trump to secure the border. The issue that he won on in 2016 and won on again in 2024 and make the American taxpayer pay full price for everything again.

This is so absurd that it almost defies explanation.

[Marc Jacobin]
And it's not the first time, or rather, it's the continuation of an act that started last year, where they had already sold off about $150 million worth of materials. $300 million of materials were sitting around not being used and rusting. That left the news cycle.

But then after the election, Joe decided, oh, he might build that wall. Let me get rid of these materials again and force the American taxpayer to pay for them again. That level of petty corruption is not supposed to happen in the United States of America.

[James Jacobin]
And it's happening in broad daylight. Everyone knows about it. And the national media, the left media will not criticize them for this.

You know why? Because they like it. And when this was happening prior to the election, they liked the 10,000 people coming over the border every day illegally.

And you know why? Not for humanitarian causes. Not so Nancy Pelosi could wash the feet of the immigrants.

It's so they could get a built-in majority thinking that all the people coming over the border would vote for the Democrats. They found out to the tune of 45% of Latino vote in this election that they were wrong.

[Marc Jacobin]
Moving on to number six, vetoing increase of number of federal judges. Vetoed a bipartisan bill, because these days any bill is bipartisan, that would add 63 federal judges to adjudicate millions of backlogged cases. Now, the fact that they got the Democrat Senate to go along with this to say, hey, we do need these 63 federal judges.

It seems to me this is something that the country needed and was not a partisan issue.

[James Jacobin]
And this is all happening in the transition period. I'm pretty sure Biden doesn't veto this with, or Jill Biden or whoever's actually vetoing the bill or handing him the pen and writing signature for him, is this. If you have a Democrat in office, if Kamala Harris wins the election, then Kamala Harris gets to appoint the 63 judges.

But since Trump gets to appoint the judges, we're going to veto that bill, because apparently they're not needed. They're only needed if they can be Democrat judges. Apparently.

Apparently justice only needs to go on if it's from a Democrat appointed judge.

[Marc Jacobin]
Number seven, attempting to preserve partisan and bureaucratic jobs.

[James Jacobin]
Well, Joe Biden introduced rules to protect federal workers who could be eliminated by future administrations and to do it to a period where it would run the length of Trump's term. Again, and this is a theme here, subverting the will of the people who 76 million voted for Trump, over 30 states, most of all the counties, all the swing states, won the Senate, won the House, won the popular vote. But yet Joe Biden feels free to leave all the bureaucratic people in place that the American people want thrown out.

Again, it's abuse of power and it goes directly against the will of the people.

[Marc Jacobin]
Number eight, preemptive pardons.

[James Jacobin]
Joe Biden is doing something also very historic, Marc. He's contemplating pardoning any and all politicians, bureaucrats, who committed crimes potentially during the Biden administration. On this list would be Dr. Fauci, Merrick Garland, and other potential people that they think Trump may target improperly. The new Congress, many times in our history, will investigate the prior administration for their wrongdoing or potential wrongdoing. It's called oversight. There's something called the House Oversight Committee, and their job is to have oversight on the executive branch.

Joe Biden does not want the next sitting Congress to do any retrospective oversight and look into the potential wrongdoing of his executive branch. So he's just going to preemptively pardon everyone, which sounds exactly what they were accusing Trump of being, an authoritarian Nazi dictator. This is the move of a dictator.

Only a dictator doesn't want his policies and his people in his administration reviewed.

[Marc Jacobin]
There's an old saying, if you didn't do anything wrong, you don't need a pardon. There is an ongoing debate and at least one precedent that says, if you accept a pardon, then you also admit guilt. There are a lot of other legal arguments against that.

But I'll go back to the first thing. If you didn't do anything wrong, you don't need a pardon. This basically accuses the internal democratic machine of misbehavior during the Biden administration.

It's an admission of guilt. It says all these people did something wrong that warrants investigation. And they're also projecting onto President Trump something that they want people to believe that he will do.

But history has shown that he has not. James, when he came to power in 2016, how many of his individual political enemies did Donald Trump investigate?

[James Jacobin]
Zero. And he specifically said very early on that he would not investigate Hillary Clinton, that it was just a rough campaign. She's a good person, a good opponent, and she'd served the country well.

Now, Donald Trump was then indicted by every single left-wing corrupt DA from Georgia to D.C. to the Southern District of New York. So since they did this to Trump, they're like, oh, well, he might try and do this to us. So they've been playing the game of politics on the dirtiest level.

And now they're doing it to the expense of the American people. Because when you start pardoning people who've never even been investigated, much less placed under oath for questioning, and are indicted by a grand jury or a DA such as Dr. Fauci, what possibly could Dr. Fauci have done that he needs to get a preemptive pardon for?

[Marc Jacobin]
One of my favorite quotes from one of the Democrat insiders is that, this type of use of pardon could be abused by future presidents. I said, no, no, no, sir. This is an abuse of power being performed by this president right now.

[James Jacobin]
Right now in real time. It's happening right now. We're not going to find out about it until later, because the current media only will report on the Biden administration after all the damage is done.

See the Wall Street Journal in-depth article where they have 40 sources saying that Biden had been incompetent and then made defective since day one. But now they can report on it because Biden has lost. So apparently at some point down the road, we'll find out how wrong this is.

And thanks to the media for that.

[Marc Jacobin]
Let's check the balance on the scales. One of the problems with the polarization of the American political system over the last two decades is that whatever my guy does is fine and whatever your guy does is bad, even if they're the same thing. We've gone through and we've filed eight charges of obstruction of transition against Joe Biden.

But I want to make sure that people understand that we're not letting the Don off the hook for the things that he did when he left in 2020.

[James Jacobin]
No, you're 100% right, Marc. People go back and listen to the catalog of shows that we did, specifically the venom I was spewing towards Trump on his way out the door because he was violating the protocols of the presidency and the transition. The refusal to go to the inauguration, the refusal to stand next to Joe Biden and show the world that we have yet another peaceful transfer of power, the refusal to back down his base with the Stop the Steal campaign, which led to years of acrimony in civil discourse in the country.

Trump is guilty of every bit of that. And now Biden has taken this to the next level because Trump did not have the wherewithal, the smarts, the political savvy, or the aides around him who've been in government for 60 years to screw the Biden administration and the American people on the way in the door. Biden knows how to do this because he's been a political hack.

And so has his aides and his wife for 50 years and his corrupt, drug addict son who sits in cabinet meetings with his dad now. So the level of transitional crimes that Trump committed was bad.

[Marc Jacobin]
Was it as bad as the Clinton administration when they obstructed a transition to the George W. Bush administration, particularly by removing all of the W's from the keyboards in the White House?

[James Jacobin]
Yeah, well, because some of those people from Texas, so they didn't even use typewriters more if they didn't need them. I get where you're going with that. And so once you start stepping over those invisible lines, such as Trump not attending the inauguration, not accepting the results of the election, you then open the door four years later for all the people who are Democrats, liberals, members of the left or the Biden administration or Democratic voters to say, well, Trump did it, so it's okay for us to do it.

So now we're all acting like six-year-olds. But the difference are the consequences are far reaching to include potentially starting a nuclear war with Russia. So I guess there you go.

I guess everyone's happy.

[Marc Jacobin]
The other unspoken premise that this presentation is built on is the assumption that Joseph Robinette Biden is actually the one calling the shots in the Oval Office. And as you mentioned, according to the Wall Street Journal, that has not been the case since March of 2021.

[James Jacobin]
That's true. Now, there's many of us who suspected this from the get-go. I believe at Jacobbrothersback.com in March of 2021, you wrote an article saying this very same thing. Over the years, when legitimate journalists tried to point this out, they were shouted down. They were called traitors. They were fired.

It was called deepfakes. They were drummed out of the business or shut down. Now they've all been proven right.

And everyone's like, oh, whoops, sorry about that.

[Marc Jacobin]
If Joe Biden has been a senile senior citizen, not his fault. Everybody gets old. Everybody has the potential to decline in their senior years.

But not everybody is the elected president of the most powerful country in the world, advertisedly. So that's a problem. If he hasn't been the one calling the shots, who is?

[James Jacobin]
Well, I think Joe Biden is a big suspect. His wife. And then all the aides, the Obama carryover aides in the Biden inner circle that encased him for years, going back to his plagiarism of the late 1980s.

They sold it as, well, he's not a mourning person. He's a gaffe master. He's just not eloquent spoken like Obama or Clinton or Reagan.

But the truth is they all knew from the very get-go. And I'm highly suspicious, Marc. There was a doctor, from what I understand, entered the White House between five to eight times in the first years of the Biden administration, who was, I believe, a Parkinson's doctor.

Now, my question is, why was he there? Who was he there to visit? Was he there to visit the 27-year-old intern?

Possibly. But more likely, he was there to take a look at the 80-year-old president who couldn't complete a sentence.

[Marc Jacobin]
And this, I think, is one of the biggest crimes perpetrated against the people during the Biden administration, is the obfuscation of reality, that we actually had a weekend at Bernie's president in the White House. And this was a facade that was perpetrated not only by the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., but it was also echoed by the establishment media and the national press.

[James Jacobin]
And echoed with an iron fist by his press secretary, who went out day after day, week after week, month after month, and just lied. And then echoed by Vice President Harris and candidate Harris, who said, no, I was in the meeting with Joe. Every time he was the final decision maker, he was fine.

[Marc Jacobin]
Yeah, but I've seen some of her speeches, so I think you have to consider the source.

[James Jacobin]
Quite possibly, they were on intellectual level playing fields, if I didn't seem odd to the sitting vice president, with all due respect to the office. This brings us to something else. The media, the left-wing media, pardon me, and Joe Biden himself, want to come out and say he's the greatest one-term president ever.

He passed the most legislation since Lyndon Johnson. But since we've been doing polling in this country for the last seven decades, he's going to leave out the door with the lowest approval rating ever to beat Truman, to beat Nixon, to beat W, to beat Trump. And in a couple of years, I guarantee you, there'll be another Democratic candidate saying, well, 97 intellectuals and presidential historians have put Joe Biden number nine all the time due to his legislative achievements.

But it doesn't square with reality. Because if it did square with reality, he wouldn't have had the dropout of the race based on the 20% poll numbers internally and the fact that he was polling behind Trump in New York state. And it wouldn't square with the reality of an actual election.

Because these presidential approval polls really mean nothing. The only poll that means anything is an election. And Donald Trump polled at nearly 50% and 76 million votes.

That's the poll that the American people want honored. They want Trump to be allowed to govern this time. They want his cabinet picks to be allowed to do their jobs.

They want that border wall built. They want the wars ended overseas. They want the economy addressed.

And they want more because them to die. That's the only poll that matters.

[Marc Jacobin]
Let's look at some of the other items that have come out of reality. More than 6,000 retail store location closures this year. More than last year's 5,500 retail store closures.

The highest number of closures and bankruptcy since 2020, which, by the way, was also created by the federal government when 200,000 businesses went belly up as a result of the federal government's COVID policies where they put all of these small businesses out of work and propped up the big corporations. All of these things rest squarely on the shoulders of the Biden administration.

[James Jacobin]
100% on the shoulders, Marc. And these are the same people who want to tell you that, oh, there's no inflation. The economy is great.

Look at the stock market. Oh, you mean Trump got elected because gas prices were a little more than they were four years ago? They're delusional.

[Marc Jacobin]
Something that people need to understand is that when the government says the economy is good, the definition of the economy from a government perspective and from the newspaper perspective includes only big business and blue chip stocks. It doesn't include Ma and Pa America. It doesn't include small businesses.

It doesn't include average Joe and Jane worker. It includes, hey, the stock market's great, so the economy must be great. But anybody who's been to the grocery store in the last five minutes compared to the price changes from the last 20 minutes knows that the economy is in trouble.

[James Jacobin]
Well, inflation is rising again. And on top of that, Marc, that's the way they want it. COVID was a godsend for the left.

It was a godsend for them, even though they don't believe in God, because it pushed out tens of thousands of small business people into bankruptcy and back into the workforce. And they got to go to work at places like Walmart and McDonald's who the government propped up during COVID because those were essential. See, this is what they want.

You drive all the small business people out and then you come in and you put them on welfare or give them a small subsidy and make them reliant on government. And then you turn around and you can vote for the Democratic candidate who bailed you out and saved you. It's a big circular firing squad to absolutely destroy small businesses, the working class and everyone who isn't wealthy.

And then force them all by proxy through the falseness of I'm helping you, the government is helping you, to vote for them, to create a permanent left-wing majority. And it's all backfired.

How the hell do you think Trump won?

[Marc Jacobin]
We've been talking Extemporaneously.

[Announcer]
This has been Extemporaneously, presented by Jacobin Brothers.
For more episodes and content, visit jacobinbrothers.com.