A former federal prosecutor on this addition to. The politicking on larry king our says hes independent impartial and a defender of the rule of law critics say hes behaving as a political actor serving trumps interests and not those of the people lets start there with former federal prosecutors stephen den haag he served as associate independent counsel for ken starr during the investigation into president bill clinton he is in miami all right what was your assessment stephen of bars testimony yesterday. Well i think from a legal marriage didnt really break any new ground i think he tried to say all the right things and looking stand he was very measured i think from a political perspective i think he probably won the day in the sense that the democrats really tried to. Beat on him from a political matter and they didnt really pin him down as well as they probably could have this question could have been better with a few exceptions. Barnes said hes independent impartial and a defender of the rule of law do you agree. I think he believes he is i think he has his view of the presidency and breath of the power of the presidency and i think he is supporting that view of the unitary executive i can see why people think that hes being not that and that hes not independent because he is i think hes supporting the president and giving the president wide berth from up from a constitutional standpoint i think its very hard for people to divorce that from their political views what is the law of the constitution say attorneys general are supposed to be on the lawyer for the country what is their involvement with the president well thats a great question right and i think the world really changed after the whole nixon watergate situation you know at the end of the day each cabinet member serves at the pleasure of the president under the constitution for the president and if you believe the president is the boss they serve to the president and so that means that the attorney generals no different than the secretary of agriculture or the secretary of commerce and is not and so therefore serves for the president i think since watergate we have come to see the attorney and let me give an example of Bobby Kennedy was. The president s brother at end and certainly served to protect him i think since nixon weve changed our view and the prevailing view is then that the has been that the attorney general should be more independent and i think with this particular president and the last 2 attorneys general weve had people who are probably a little more pro president than than the Previous Post nixon attorneys general and i think thats come as a as a bit of a an adjustment for many people particularly critics of the president do you like that idea. You know. I like the idea a little more independence from the department of justice i think it sits in a very special place in the in the part of the government of the United States when people are in court and people are going to have their liberty deprived they need to know that its fair and they need to know that there is no favoritism one way or the other and i think one of the real problems with the stone case and more and i think this puts it in very serious relief is on the one hand attorney general barr said yesterday at the hearing look hes a 67 year old man he was going to go to jail for 90 years i dont think thats appropriate and i think a lot of people would agree with that and i had made that argument on behalf of my older clients in court and someone younger clients and people ive made arguments similar to that but the problem is that when it appears to the rest of the world that the president s friend gets a deal and other people dont and that undercuts the fairness and i think that that slows the seeds for some very very Serious Problems in our country as if we cant believe as a as a country that the Justice System is fair and that people are fairly prosecuted and with the you know blind justice as it were i think we start on the path to a very serious problem like how many of the 67 year olds d who got longer sentences did the bar asked them to reduce the sentence well the answer appears to be none and thats a very serious problem and thats and thats thats a serious issue and when you just suppose that against the cohen situation where komen wasnt helpful to the president and he goes back into jail right so it looks like hes getting punished and then a judge in new york takes a map and says that so it was abuse and then all this is happening within a 3 week period and and that causes people to ask some serious questions about fairness and you know i think you know remember the. The constitution starts with we the people we the people in order to form or Perfect Union and i think that people are willing to take on up legations and theyre willing to take on this tough stuff and theyre willing to see people lose their rights but they want to be fair and when theres this feeling that its not fair that is very corrosive from my perspective and we have to guard against that what do you make of his defense of the federal forces in portland thats another problematic situation i mean he says the right things right theres no question at all that people burning down buildings and particularly attacking federal installations like court houses that exist out of bounds i think we can all agree that thats not right and i think we can all agree that the federal government has a huge interest in bringing on foresman to protect federal areas when that Law Enforcement starts to stray down the block and when that Law Enforcement starts to come into places where it its not it starts to exceed the mission then it it leads to the possibility that at least what we have now is that people just start question and then the plight of the president s political rhetoric on tama on top that were going to dominate the process protesters it makes it feel as though this is punishment rather than protection of the federal assets and thats again a very raises really Serious Problems ok what about bars statement that he does not agree with the assertion that there is systemic racism in the American Police departments. So thats really interesting because in his Opening Statement what he wrote is he said that he had spoken to people about it and that they had looked at it and he said that the concern is a legitimate concern i think those release exact words but then one pushed exactly on and he said that he doesnt believe there is systemic racism i think thats a tough one to swallow for a lot of people you know who know the criminal Justice System well i think. I think people really believe and i think rightfully so that folks with darker skin are more likely holdover traffic stops are more likely to get a more punishing sentence and get treated a little differently and thats just not a good thing so. You know its just a good example where on paper he was measured when he got into the congress i think he was a little more proactive but i also dont i dont dispute that he actually believes that like and i think there are people who believe that and so i dont think he was sitting there lie. But thats troublesome of the attorney general believes that his wouldnt. You know i would want the private want to turn a general of the United States to be going out of his way to make sure that justice was fair to every american no matter what no matter what wealth Race Ethnicity sex whatever it just should be equal and we should be doing every single thing we can to guard against any not just. That the not just different outcomes and different treatments but the perception when you when you make a motion to ask a judge to recuse him or herself from a case the issues not just is the judge factually should just factually be recused the issue is should the judge. Should is there a perception that the judge should be recused and i think the same thing is true with this i think i think we have to go one step further than the charge general going when he used the word super to discuss the president s handling of the pandemic that surprise you. Know but its another excellent example of where hes acting i think as a political act are and and and not as necessarily an independent. Legal voice i mean im sitting here in miami and we have a very frightful situation down here with code it may have our hospitals are overrun we have running low if not completely done ventilators its just a little scary to be and for the president or any of his people to say that were doing a circular job. It doesnt sit well it doesnt sit well with me you know i got a lot longer and ive had since 1008 and its because i cant but the barber and just cant leave my house you know its at that just didnt sit right with me. Miami leads the country whats it like to be there. Well. You know its a little scary i got to tell you in the sense that you know we have more and more people getting sick and we have more and we have fewer and fewer hospital beds and so i you know i really worry for people who are older and people who have Health Problems and i think what were seeing here is what were seeing in the rest of the country is there are a number of people that can work from home and this really hasnt fully made a change in their lives and thats good for them but we also have people who notwithstanding all this problem have to go out and work their jobs when they were going to Grocery Store or hospital or whatever and i think you know i dont feel comfortable i feel comfort going with my mask to a Grocery Store but i dont know that id feel comfortable working there every day for 8 hours a day so. Bars says that is no reason to think the election will be rigged but he says there is an increased risk of masks of voter fraud when you have mail and do you agree with dan. Well yes and no i it almost depends on what you mean theres no question that if you have people mailing in ballots its less secure than people walking up to a polling place showing their id and voting in person but the question is does that undermine the election and im not sure that i think i dont think it does i think we have maryland for a long time how much confidence do you have in the election i integrity and the election. I have a confidence in the election i do i think. I have faith that 1st of all you know its 50 different states and i think i think there will be some for it around i think there always has been there are allegations of fooling around the beginning of the republic but in the end there are very few states that are super super close and i think its diverse enough that that it will be ok. Stephen always great talking with you thank you so much for your time and stay healthy thank you you too and thanks for having me have a great evening thanks even been hard for joining us while i was politicking right after this. Its definitely something because the dark its a small. Crew its only a few trevor this may want to get vaccinated and. If you want to overcome the troops travel restrictions economy was straight since then we have to have a go go back see. How can you explain love ive been to 82 countries i did in 12 but i came here and in those 3 days i just filled with hope. And he kept pretty isnt it sick show. I made my decision to come here because i felt i knew i could build a new life here. You know companies and. Goes a priest but i think god decided that this money is not going to be free while prostyle it it would only. Then hes here now where my one dream is that all my children d find the same kind of happiness i do. I love my home here i love cold weather i like the culture i like the history i like everything about it. One little bit of those nights in a session finally i know that i share and. I am join you could be a ski a russian fama in the a. While back to politicking right bods joel pollak penned an article on claiming that big tech and Mainstream Media have joined forces to crush free speech and press freedom and censoring alternative medical views on the coronavirus lets find out what he means as joel joins us from los angeles he is Senior Editor at large and inhouse counsel for Breitbart News his latest book is red november will the country vote red for trump or red for socialism in the article joe you wrote that a big check and Mainstream Media have joined forces to crush free speech how do you mean. Well whats happening is that big tech is censoring content that it doesnt like and the Mainstream Media are often pointing out targets to the Technology Company isnt asking them to censor these targets or asking them why they havent censor them yet and in the example i brought up there was a press conference that was held by a group of doctors it was a Political Group was sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots which is a conservative group but there was a group of doctors presenting their views on covert 19 and we showed up as did some other outlets and we were lifestream being the press conference and one of the doctors made a claim that hydroxy couric when was quote unquote a cure for coke at 19 im not sure if she actually meant it completely cure the disease or what she meant but they have justified taking down that video wherever it is appear they Facebook Twitter and so on but in addition to that twitter suspended our count in punished us for merely being the source of the video some people have used no we were Live Streaming a press conference we didnt know what this person was going to say beforehand so the standard thats now being applied by big tech is that you have to be able to vouch for the factual accuracy of any claim made in a press conference you have to be able to vouch for the resumes of the people speaking there and if other people take your video and make memes out of it or tweet or signs of it or whatever you could be punished and this is a form of prior restraint that basically means you cant go into any Just Press Conferences now of course it only applies to one site you dont see this happening to left wing groups they can do and say what they want but if we just live stream a press conference we stand some risk of losing our traffic losing our business and its a form of prior restraint the government did it and prevented Media Companies from covering certain kinds of things everybody would recognize it was a violation of the 1st in. And it happens to be done by private company in this case but the Mainstream Media Companies Like the New York Times and c. N. N. And others they run around pointing out content they dont like and that they dont think should be on these platforms and on the platforms are blocked and thats what happened in this case with the New York Times flag something on twitter as being objectionable in terms of the coronavirus statements that were made at the press conference by one of the doctors and facebook took it down and then twitter took it down and then you tube took it down and its the standard they create is really just hostile to free speech and the free press. To a whats wrong if the information is blatantly false well i think there are standards that the medical press profession applies to itself and there are also standards in advertising that we do have. Some restrictions on what you can say there are laws against false advertising and so forth but in this case in the case of hydroxy corkran there really is a debate about whether its effective in treating covert 19 there was a study that came out from i think it was the Henry Ford Hospital system with thousands of patients couple weeks ago saying that they found very significant effect in helping and there are other studies that said they hadnt found that effect and you can have a debate about it because there certainly is a debate in the medical literature but we cant somehow have that debate in public even though it affects a very important political issue because big tobacco has decided that if trump likes it it must be wrong and thats the problem with this debate were not actually having a medical debate about medical facts and im not qualified to judge whether one thing works or doesnt im just pointing out the principle that we should offer a press conference we had no idea what this person was going to say and our website was punished because of something somebody said on a live stream you know you know its not like were sitting there and getting a video and then putting something up and saying hey this is news this is useful information we showed up to take a video of a press conference people are looking for other sources of information other than the government on this on this disease and you know some of the other people got up instead things that were entirely uncontroversial there was a doctor who said scientists are telling us its safe to go back to school the c. D. C. Says its safe to go back to school as Direct School and things of that nature so just the one doctor they have jacked it to and for that we punished our website. But you know would you agree that that one doctor i saw a table that had to say was a little ridiculous when the governments Scientific Community is telling you that this drug does not work. Well again i am not sure that thats what the consensus in the Scientific Community is i do think she went too far and i think she ventured into hyperbole when she used the word cure i think the problem with the word curious people assume that youre getting rid of the disease entirely i mean this is an effective treatment in some of the studies but nobody has said this actually cures anything so whether she meant it in a medical scientific sense or just sort of in a colloquial sense i dont know the other thing she said was that we dont need to worry about masks and again thats something i think it can be interpreted in a bad way although i think in the context that she made that comment she was saying well if we have this treatment you know master sort of secondary but i agree with you we should not be allowing people to put out false information but there are other ways to correct now other than saying to the people who showed up with a camera and said you know were going to punish your website for providing live coverage of something you know there are politicians who say false things all the time i mean joe biden couple years ago said that his advice for gun owners was to shoot to shotgun blasts through the front door if theyre worried about an intruder i mean thats crazy stuff but you know its news you got a cartridge i mean somebody saying. You know you can be careful intent try to avoid people but when there are doctors who have some expertise as clinicians in the field you know you its very hard to advance to say well i dont want to hear what this person has to say what do you make of this minority opinion that a steam doctor followed she is is wrong. Well hes been wrong about some things by his own admission and he said in march or early on independent that there was no need for people to wear masks and then he changed his mind and said people should wear masks and he was at a baseball game he didnt wear him out i mean you know hes been generally pretty credible but but theres also a lot of evolving science on this i mean i read some of the early papers in the new england journal of medicine about this and im really not qualified to judge even though i have some scientific background i definitely have no medical background and i think the scientists have been all over the map on this so i disagree with those who say that found she is motivated by that intentions and i think there are some people saying that i dont think is any evidence that i think hes done the best he can when hes been right has been right when hes been wrong hes been wrong i think his intentions have been good but he approaches the problem differently say then peter to borrow who say whos an economist whos not a doctor who looks at the Economic Cost of the shutdowns and i think the point is that theres tradeoffs there are always tradeoffs the economist wants people who go back to work and the doctor wants people to stay home and somewhere you know in the middle somewhere in the middle of that theres theres where the public is going to find itself yeah what is an economist know about spreading the virus. Its odd because the economists got one thing very right they found she had it wrong which was the travel plans Peter Navarro proposed banning travel when the pendennis began spreading from china and that probably bought us some time im not sure we used it as well as we could if there were some problems at the c. D. C. With testing and so we lost a couple of weeks there but it would have been much worse if we hadnt had that travel ban but found she was against it at the time the Public Health community was against the travel bans Peter Navarro service to a travel ban trumped at the travel ban and afterwards struck she said you know what it worked and thought she was fully behind the travel ban from europe after that so he changed his mind about travel ban i mean my only point is that the doctors have changed their minds because this is a Novel Coronavirus this is a new to seize and we dont know enough about it so i think anybody who says they have absolute knowledge of whats going on is probably either not informed themselves or is trying to misinform others but we have to manage the risks and if you ation and so i think dr tachi is definitely a valuable part of the conversation but i dont agree with the approach is that we should just give all the decisions over to him because then none of us none of us would be the house in we would have thrown away our masks in february and tried to find them again in april wouldnt you say the medical community has been 95 percent right on the coronavirus. No. You know thats a no no no no 95 percent thats the problem and the other problem. When you can say no i need i say theyve been writing about some things i definitely think that. That people should wear a mask i mean thats thats what theyre saying now but remember the Surgeon General of the United States was sitting until i think april some time that we shouldnt wear a mask for archie now says they were going along with that policy because they were worried that there werent enough masks to go around so they wanted to keep the masks for the hospitals so trump made sure the manufacturers produce more masks now we dont have that problem now we can tell you want to wear a mask but you know they admitted to kind of lie to us that appears so so i dont know you know i dont think anyones been 95 percent right about anything the one thing ill say that gets downplayed very significant way is the Public Health consequences of all the lockdowns i mean there are people struggling in a very big way with with other Public Health challenges that have come about or have worsened because of the lockdowns and we dont see that as much in the media would you agree that they have that the government has not handled this very well. No i think theyve actually done a very good job and i include democrats and republicans and yeah yeah i think i think that for example you know here in california i mean if i can talk about a democratic system for jobs you know i think Gavin Newsome did a good job a better job if i can say this and then andrew cuomo in new york because andrew cuomo had a directive saying that people who are sick with grown virus should be sent to Nursing Homes and Gavin Newsome in california had a similar directive but when people raised objections he listened and he canceled it and probably saved thousands of people so i think Gavin Newsome is you know deserves credit for canceling that because they started to learn that older people were particularly susceptible and that was inappropriate so you know the people are learning as they go i think i think trump did a good job i just finished this thought. Primarily because you got private industry involved in because he didnt create a big new government bureaucracy to do this he let the states figure things out on their own and so were starting to learn from some states what worked and what didnt and i think that thats the best you can do in a situation where nobody knows anything want to have now those getting worse before it gets better. Well the pro not so low that though its just an editorial in the wall street Journal Wednesday morning about how theres been a resurgence around the globe and even the countries that people said early on oh they did such a great job theyre now having a resurgence its just a virus that happens to strike whatever people are getting back to work when people are out and about you know we still dont know exactly everything about its transmission and almost every country you know you can you can meet any country that one side or the other says its successful you know there are some republicans who like to say sweden did it right because in lockdown their economy but sweden had a very high death rate and some people like to say well you know australia did a right as they had very few deaths very few cases now theyre in the middle of a massive surge of cases and israels to say maybe next and yahoo was was riding high he was the guy who locked everything down and kept the disease from affecting a lot of people they opened things up a little bit and it had a huge search it was just its just a problem everybodys dealing with joe you are never dull. That you so much for joining is joe the best compliment ive ever received thank you and you are you are never you are always shocked how about that for a come thanks for your time today jol and bank you for joining me on this edition of politicking remember you can join the conversation on my Facebook Page or tweet me at kings things and dont forget to use the politicking hash tag and thats all for this edition of politicking. The. U. S. Secretary of state like ok ok is on a mission he claims the world must change china china will change us we interpret this the cold war to be waged against nation this is also implying force regime change china is certainly a major global competitor but he said now. There is. Competition or free Market Competition the. Beauty of free market capitalism. Free market capitalism for drug prices in america shows you have an entrenched. Price. Hes right to try to but without that kind of premium for these drugs for these companies that however i dont see how theyre going to command the stock market so hes got to hes. Either going to take a 50 percent hit on the stock market going to lose a lot of people the drugs. Illegal takeover of the government by a small group. Rather than revolution result. Small group b. When you have a tiny group of people who have all the power you have to have some means to make sure the rest of us dont get together and take it back. These are sacrificing. Places that capitalism exploited and destroyed for profit and left behind misery poverty environmental devastation and so you see things like Voter Suppression building more prisons you seem gerrymandering all sorts of undemocratic practices. In the world focused world. Of the. Top stories this tragedy into a force of a. Father to coronavirus uses is a bit sure to highlight Americas Health policy failings on the devastating legal cost to families. Just a few days before he had been saying you know that im excited to come home on monday and that would have been 29 june and he actually ended up passing away on june 30th. While the french royal Marine Le Pen takes aim at the countrys