And that's why Julian Epstein is perfect.
He's a big-time lawyer, served as chief counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, staff director of the House Oversight Committee for the Democrats in 1996 and 2001. So yesterday's ruling, Julian, essentially the Supreme Court on a 6-3 decision ruled that there will be a degree of immunity for the president on basically when he's functioning in his job. But stuff outside his job, it would be up to a lower court to decide if it is within his scope of his duties, correct? That's absolutely correct, Brian.
And first of all, good morning and thank you for having me back. Yes, it's exactly what happened. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled that sitting presidents have civil immunity in their official acts, but not in their private acts. And what the court did yesterday was completely predictable.
I think you and I have talked about this in previous shows. It was completely predictable they would take the case and it was completely predictable that they would come down the way they came down. The best way to understand this is an example. If the president invokes the War Powers Act and sends troops into combat and some of our troops are unfortunately killed, should he be able to be criminally tried by a prosecutor for wrongful death? Of course not. But if the court had ruled otherwise, it would leave open that possibility. But on the other hand, if the president is bribed to drop a bomb, then he could be tried criminally.
That would be outside the official act. So I want you to hear the president described it. Julian, I want you to hear how the president described it last night. He's also a lawyer.
Cut one. Now over 200 years later, today's Supreme Court decision, once again, it will depend on the character of the men and women who hold that presidency that are going to define the limits of the power of the presidency because the law will no longer will no longer do it. I know I will respect the limits of the presidential powers I have for three and a half years, but any president, including Donald Trump, will now be free to ignore the law. So I think that was a total mischaracterization of what was ruled. That's right. And somebody gave him that to read. And, you know, Arthur Brooks, who was the head of American Enterprise Institute, had this great piece a couple of years ago. We said, you know, what is fueling our politics today is the culture of contempt. So what, what, what keeps politicians in office, what drives cable ratings, what sells newspaper copy is contempt for the other side. So you always have to hyperbolize.
And that's the culture that we're living in. And what we saw yesterday, not just with President Biden, but with AOC introducing articles of impeachment and sort of the entire left, their heads exploding collectively, was this, you know, the sky is falling and presidents are going to be dictators. And there is nothing of the sort. As I said, we've had civil immunity for 40 years.
There hasn't really been any major issue. And this is making that jurisprudence symmetrical on the criminal side. So, you know, if there's a criticism of the court that I would have here is that it didn't give enough guidance on where that line is drawn between public and private.
But I think as a general matter, what the court did was entirely predictable. And, you know, Thomas Sowell had this great line that when sort of the left comes out at you with their heads exploding and the moral outrage, the question you should always ask them as compared to what, you know, what would you want the Supreme Court to do here? Would you want the Supreme Court to say that all of the president's official acts are open to being second guests in a criminal court?
Of course not. So as compared to what? And so all, you know, Schumer and on down the line, all of the critics are not really being very substantive. They are not asking or answering the question as to what they think should happen instead. And the reason that I think the left's heads are exploding is because this means that there will almost assuredly not be a trial for the January 6th case against Donald Trump. And so, you know, the left wants to blame the Supreme Court. Where the left should put place the blame is with Merrick Garland. I mean, why is it that it took Merrick Garland almost four years, three years to bring this case against Donald Trump, the January 6th case? Why did they wait until election season? Why did they time this in a way so they wanted to have the January 6th committee first, the January 6th committee, which was built for theater, built for primetime television, was actually hired an ABC reporter. They had two Republicans who hated Trump on it.
And people, they put produce a great production. And basically I'm Kinzinger or Liz Cheney are no longer Republicans. So, or no. And that tells you that this was, that tells you this was not really about the lofty principles. They said it was about, this was about political theater, because if they believe that the traditional rule in Congress is that the Congress always waits for the justice department to do its work first, Congress steps back.
But here they reverse that. They said, let's have Congress do the theater, put on the hearings for a year, and then we'll come in at the last moment and we will prosecute this case when we are close to election time. And that was exactly the reverse of what usually happens, which is adjusted, the Congress defers to a justice department prosecution, but it shows a lack of seriousness.
And it shows that this was always about lawfare and always about politics. And, you know, again, I've been very critical of how they've handled these Trump prosecutions. I predicted that, you know, the court would take this case. I predicted the January 6th case and the documents case would come into all kinds of legal problems.
These were entirely predictable, but you're hoisted on your own petard when you try to be too cute by half. So I want to talk about the president. It's time to take the quiz. Five questions, five minutes a day, five days a week. Take the quiz every weekday at TheQuiz.Fox and then listen to The Quiz podcast to find out how you did.
Play, share, and of course, listen to The Quiz at TheQuiz.Fox. Let's talk about the president's condition after the debates. They are really straining to change the subject and talk about Donald Trump. And they say that Donald Trump had January 6th in this trial and injustice, and we got to expand the Supreme Court and we got to impeach him according to AOC. But then Carl Bernstein sits down with Anderson Cooper and you think, well, it's going to be a typical, I don't know, Russia hoax investigation. It's got to be an anti-Trump conversation. But instead it was Carl Bernstein doing reporting of the constant failings, mental failings of Joe Biden behind the scenes.
Cut 18. Well, these are people, several of them who are very close to President Biden, who love him, have supported him and have been among them are some people who have raised a lot of money for him. And they are adamant that what we saw the other night, the Joe Biden we saw, is not a one-off, that there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed. And what's so significant is the people that this is coming from and also how many people around the president are aware of such incidents, including some reporters, incidentally, who have witnessed some of them. Well, it looks like he sat on this story for a year.
He went on, I can't play the whole thing, but almost every word mattered. So the story in Politico comes out and it says that he's surrounded by five people, Mike Donnell and Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed, Ted Kaufman, and Ron Klain. And that's it, his sister and his wife.
And they don't let anybody in. And everyone's almost afraid to brief him or give him bad news because he bites off their head. He gets angry. Nobody wants to brief him.
They're all afraid of him. And now we have these issues of him having these failings that we all saw and were ridiculed, including you were ridiculed, for pointing this out. So this is building, Julian. You were first, one of the first, but now it's building. And most of the people who are beginning to get upset about it, you are in your Rolodex.
So where's this heading? Yeah, three of the five White House staff you mentioned are friends of mine. I mean, look, there is I appreciate what Carl Bernstein is doing. I appreciate some of the work he's done, but there is a lot of covering your petard that's going on with the mainstream media now, because they've known that Biden was not mentally fit to be president for a long time. But they've acted as cheerleaders for the Democratic Party. And this is part of the cultural decay that's going on, because the arrogance, I think, of the White House and I think to the extent of the Biden family, and I don't say this easily as somebody who voted for Biden in 2020, the arrogance where you believe that you can persuade the public to believe something different from what they saw on their screens last Thursday night is just breathtaking. But why is there that arrogance amongst the commissars of the Democratic Party?
It's because the media has enabled them for so long. You and I have talked about this before. You go back to September of 2021, when President Biden got his senior military brass, agreed with him that we should have a complete withdrawal of all of the troops from Afghanistan. When all of the senior brass said, no, we need to keep a skeletal force in there to stabilize the government. Well, he didn't know that. That is a major national security issue for the United States, particularly when you look at what happened since when Al Qaeda has basically reoccupied parts of Afghanistan and presents a national security threat to us. Well, that's exactly what the military senior brass wanted to prevent. And Biden didn't know that.
We're talking three years ago now. And we have hundreds of examples to Bernstein's point that what happened on Thursday night was not a one off. We've seen him not be able to complete sentences or complete thoughts. You know, if the White House wanted to prove it was a one off, they could do something very easily. They could put the president out in terms of in a primetime press conference before a national audience. And if they believe that really that this was a one off or that he was overbriefed or that the makeup was wrong or whatever, he would be able to dispel this in a heartbeat. But they won't do that because they know the president isn't up for that.
If the president isn't up for that, he's not up for dealing with the five or six hot spots that are happening on every continent across the globe right now. Here's the thing. I don't know if I agree with you that nobody else knew like David Plouffe eviscerated him the other day, David Plouffe, a key man in the Obama White House, and said he looks so old, especially compared to Donald Trump. You know, we hated to say that Donald Trump was on his game. You might not like anything or everything he said. It doesn't matter.
No one said he was too old. And that's the problem. And they act like they're shocked. Everyone's shocked. You had Morning Joe like he went from the sharpest guy to he's got to go. And now they're trying to quickly rehab him. How could they not know?
And I don't know the answer to this question. But how could the people that see his failings like they know his failings? They watched him stiffen up during a fundraiser at the Four Seasons where he almost had rigor mortis set in.
Scary. Yet they said, we need a June debate. I got to debate Donald Trump in June on my terms. Even Trump said, OK, if you want that, I'll do it. And we're going to forget about the whole presidential debate conference. We're not going to use them. I'm going to make the rule.
OK. So Trump says, yes, he fails miserably. They're blaming each other. And now they're trying to say it was just a bad night. Where's the truth? Who called for that debate?
Well, that's that's exactly right. Well, the truth is that they didn't think Trump would accept the terms of that debate. An early debate, two debates, a debate in June. They didn't think he would accept. Trump surprised them by accepting.
And then they thought if he did accept, well, they could get it out of the way. But my point earlier is that, yeah, of course, the media knew that Trump didn't have the mental fitness for a second term, but they thought they could gaslight the public. And the reason that and they went along with the gaslighting of the public from the White House, the reason the White House believed they could gaslight the public and sort of have another basement like campaign the way they did in 2020 was because they have so many media enablers in the mainstream media that are letting them get away with it. To the point about David Plouffe and Carl Bernstein and everyone else, you know, everyone else is covering their ass right now by coming out and saying, OK, you should leave.
So I agree with questions. Where were they? Where were they? Where were they a year and a half ago when this thing was so obvious to anybody that was paying attention? And the answer is they thought they could get away with it. And there is an arrogance here. There is a you know, the thing that led to led to the the French revolution was Marie Antoinette saying, you know, let them eat cake. It's that arrogance. It's that disconnect from the from the from the masses that the elites have where they really think there's a lack of accountability. There needs to be a reckoning here.
There needs to be a reckoning with the party and with the mainstream media about telling the truth about such important things. Julian Epstein, always great. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Ryan, great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
