you cannot be both with us you are. attorney general bill barr testifies on capitol hill he claims he's impartial and independent from the president his critics say otherwise we'll get perspective from a former federal prosecutor on this addition to. the politicking on larry king our says he's independent impartial and a defender of the rule of law critics say he's behaving as a political actor serving trump's interests and not those of the people let's 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 didn't really break any new ground i think he tried to say all the right things and if you're 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 didn't really pin him down as well as they probably could have this question could have been better with a few exceptions. barnes said he's 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 he's being not that and that he's not independent because he is i think he's supporting the president and giving the president wide berth from up from a constitutional standpoint i think it's 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 that's 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 general's no different than the secretary of agriculture of 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 we've 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 we've had people who were probably a little more progress and then in the previous post nixon attorneys general and i think that's 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 it's 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 he's a 67 year old man he was going to go to jail for 90 years i don't think that's 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 i've 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 don't then that undercuts the fairness and i think that that slows the seeds for some very very serious problems in our country as if we can't believe as a as

a country that the justice system is fair and that people are fairly prosecuted and with the with 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 who got longer sentences did the bar asked them to reduce the sentence well the answer appears to be none and that's a very serious problem and that's and that's that's a serious issue and when you just suppose that against the cohen situation where komen wasn't helpful to the president and he goes back into jail right so it looks like he's 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 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 they're willing to take on this

tough stuff and they're willing to see people lose their rights but they want to be fair and when there's this feeling that it's 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. that's another problematic situation he says the right things right there's no question at all that people burning down buildings and particularly attacking federal installations like court houses that is just out of bounds i think we can all agree that that's 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 it's 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 we're going to dominate the press protesters it makes it feel as though this is punishment rather than protection of a federal asset and that's again a very raises really serious problems. ok what about bar's statement that he does not agree with the assertion that there is systemic racism in the american police departments so that's 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 doesn't believe there is systemic racism i think that's 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 more punishing sentence and get treated a little differently and that's just not a good thing so. you know it's 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 don't i don't dispute that he actually believes that like and i think there are people who believe that and so i don't think he was sitting there lie. but that's troublesome of the attorney general believes that his wouldn't. 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. the 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 be. 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 it's another excellent example of where he's acting i think as a political act are and and and not as necessarily an independent. legal voice i mean i'm sitting here in miami and we have a very frightful situation down here with kogut i mean we have our hospitals are

overrun we have running low if not completely done ventilators it's just a little scary to be and for the president or any of his people to say that we're doing a circular job. it doesn't sit well it doesn't sit well with me you know i got a lot longer and i've had since 1008 and it's because i can't but the barbara i just can't leave my house you know it's at that just didn't sit right with me. miami leads the country what's it like to be there. well. you know it's 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 we're seeing here is what we're seeing in the rest of the country is there are a number of people that can work from home and this really hasn't fully made a change in their lives and that's 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 don't feel comfortable i feel comfortable going with my mask to a grocery store but i don't know that i'd 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 was an increased high risk of mass 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 there's no question that if you have people mailing in ballots it's 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 i'm not sure that i think i don't 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 it's 50 different states and i think i think there will be some fooling 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 it's 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. join me every thursday on the alec simon show and i'll be speaking to guests of the

world of politics sports business i'm show business i'll see you then. it's definitely something before the ball too small. to trigger this may want to get vaccinated and protect. if you want to overcome the trends travel restrictions economy restrictions then we have to have if you see. if there was competition or free market competition in drugs in america the price would be low that's the beauty of free market capitalism the fact they don't have free market capitalism for drug prices in america shows you have an entrenched goal accompli or monopoly and they gouge it's price gouging and he's right to try to dismantle that but without that kind of premium for these drugs for these

companies the however i don't see how they're going to command the multiples they do on the stock market so he's he's got a he doesn't. saying he's either going to take a 50 percent hit on the stock market or is going to lose a lot of people that the drug. thinking of getting abused probably won't be gotten here she's around watching this video until he's trapped in this tiny little wired we don't need a crate with him he will just. freaking out into the wall when it's free even anywhere near it fells and saluting dogs are caged in the interview lane conditions on puppy farm i mean 67 years you know they've been locked up in cages outside you see no protection from the weather the heat you know the courtier the rain the snow the funder nothing they have no protection. to get you. it's 2 kids. across the u.s. cruel puppy mills are supported by dog shows and pet stores most of the puppies are

coming from this large scale factory farming kind of operations are being sold in stores even joined a group businesses are involved like cargill in months until there's been a shocking amount of the organized opposition to efforts to increase the standards of care for dogs bred in commercial breeding facilities most of that opposition is coming from huge agricultural groups and industries that have nothing to do with dogs don't buy dog on a hearty. welcome back to politicking bright bods jabal pollack 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 let's find out what he means as joel joins us from los angeles he is senior editor at large in the house counsel for breitbart news his latest book is

red november well 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 what's happening is that big tech is censoring content that it doesn't like and the mainstream media are often pointing out targets to the technology companies and asking them to censor these targets or asking them why they haven't 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 life streaming the press conference and one of the doctors made a claim that hydroxy couric when was quote unquote

a cure for coke at 19 i'm not sure 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 a live streaming a press conference we didn't know what this person was going to say beforehand so the standard that's 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 yes 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 orson's of it or whatever you could be punished and this is a form of prior restraint it basically means you can't go into any just press conferences now of course it only applies to one site you don't 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 it's a form of prior restraint if the government did it and prevented media companies from covering certain kinds of things everybody would recognize it was a violation of the 1st and. 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 don't like and that they don't think should be on these platforms and then the platforms are blocked and that's what happened in this case where the new york times flagged 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 if the standard they create is really just hostile to free speech in the free press. well what's 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 corcoran there really is a debate about whether it's 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 a very significant effect helping and there are other studies that said they hadn't found that effect and you can have a debate about it because there certainly is a debate in the medical literature but we can't 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 that's the problem with this debate we're not actually having a medical debate about medical facts and i'm not qualified to judge whether one thing works or doesn't i'm just pointing out the principle that we should offer a press conference we have no idea what this person is going to say and our website

was punished because of something somebody said on a live stream you know you know it's not like we're sitting there editing 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 it's safe to go back to school the c.d.c. says it's 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 would you agree that that one doctor i saw a table that had to say was a little ridiculous when the government's scientific community is telling you that this drug does not work. well again i am not sure that that's 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 you're 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 don't know the other thing she said was that we don't need to worry about masks and again that's something i think 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 we're 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 they're worried about an intruder i mean that's crazy stuff but you know it's 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 it's very hard to advance to say well i don't want to hear what this person has to say what do you make of this minority opinion that this team doctor followed she is is wrong. well he's been wrong about some things by his own admission and he said in march or early on depend demick that there's 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 but he didn't wear him out i mean you know he's been generally pretty credible but but there's 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 i'm 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 don't think is any evidence that i think he's done the best he can when he's been right has been right when he's been wrong he's been wrong i think his intentions have been good but he approaches the problem differently say then peter to borrow who say who's an economist who's not a doctor who looks at the economic cost of the shutdowns and i think the point is that there's 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 there's there's where the public is going to find itself yeah what is an economist know about spreading the virus. it's 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 i'm 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 hadn't 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 truck to 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 don't know enough about it so i think anybody who says they have absolute knowledge of what's 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 darcy is definitely a valuable part of the conversation but i don't agree with the approaches 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 wouldn't you say the medical community has been 95 percent right on the coronavirus. no. you know that's

a no no knight no 95 percent that's the problem and the other problem. when you can say no i need i say they've been writing about some things i definitely think that . that people should wear a mask i mean that's that's what they're saying now but remember the surgeon general of the united states was sitting until i think april some time that we shouldn't wear a mask out you know says they were going along with that policy because they were worried that there weren't 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 don't 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 don't know you know i don't think anyone's been 95 percent right about anything the one thing i'll say that gets downplayed very significant way is that 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 don't see that as much in the media would you agree that they have that the government has not handled this very well. you know i think they've actually done a very good job and i include democrats and republicans in that yeah yeah i think i think that for example you know here in california i mean if i can talk about a democrat is done the job 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 didn't create a big new government bureaucracy to do this he let the states figure things out on their own and so we're starting to learn from some states what worked and what didn't and i think that that's the best you can do it a situation where nobody knows anything you want to have now those getting worse before it gets better. well the pro not insulin at both there's an editorial in the wall street journal wednesday morning about how there's been a resurgence around the globe and even the countries that people said early on oh they did such a great job they're now having a resurgence it's just a virus that happens to strike whatever people are getting back to work when people are out and about you know we still don't know exactly everything about its transmission and almost every country you know you can you can name any country that one side or the other says it's successful you know there are some republicans who like to say sweden did it right he didn't lock down the economy but sweden had a very high death rate then some people like to say well you know australia didn't write this they had very few deaths very few cases now they're in the middle of

a massive surge of cases and israel's the same of the netanyahu 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 it's just a problem everybody's dealing with joe you are never dull. that you so much for joining is joe that's the best compliment i've ever received thank you and you are you are never you're always shocked how about that for a come thanks he had turned of age all 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 don't forget to use the politicking hash tag and that's all for this edition of politicking. it's.

join me every thursday on the alex salmond short and i'll be speaking to guest on the world of politics sports business i'm showbusiness i'll see you then. a dark industry comes to life in los angeles every night. dozens of women sells their bodies on the streets many of them underage. los angeles police reveal a taste of their daily challenge no if you're going to exploit for a child here in los angeles there we're going to come as you see officers going

undercover as 6 workers and customers to fight. in headlines today ditch and switch in portland no sooner had donald trump out a local pressure to pull federal militia from the city now he says the more powerful national guard is waiting in the wings to get stuck in if the race protests are important to control so. turning a tragedy into a force for change a daughter who lost her father to coronavirus uses his of bitchery to highlight america's health policies.