Rantz Rewind: November 25, 2024

Thanks for downloading the Jason Ranch Show podcast. I really do appreciate it. Be sure to check out our brand new website, Seattlered.com. News, opinion, analysis without any of the left-wing spin covering the entirety of the Pacific Northwest. Check it out throughout the day, read stories, share stories, and watch exclusive videos. That's Seattle Red.com. Now, back to the Jason Ranch Show. Coach. Seattle left. Good afternoon, Seattle. Welcome to the Jason Rans show. I, of course, am not Jason Rants. I'm Josh Hammer, host of the Josh Hammer Show, which you can hear right here on AM 770, KTTH Seattle, every weekend. Thrill to be filling in for the great Jason Rants, both today and tomorrow and Wednesday in case you didn't get your fill. We'll be with you for the next three hours, so go ahead and buckle it. We've got a great show plan for you. Let's go ahead and find out what's trending, brought to by Legacy Group Capital Construction Loans. What's trending? So in case you've been sleeping under Iraq for the past 12 hours or so, today was something of an earthquake in the world of lawfare, in the world of the rule of law, in the world of the United States Constitution and the integrity of our constitutional system. More generally speaking, I speak, of course, about the fact that so-called special counsel, Jack Smith, the hit man for the Democrat lawfare complex, as I referred to him in a column about three months ago. Jack Smith finally throwing in the towel and admitting defeat against former and now confirmed to be future president, Donald J. Trump, in both of Jack Smith's cases. That would be the classified documents case, the Marlago case down in Florida, in my neck of the woods, as well as the... 2020 election case in Washington, D.C., which was long, which was long viewed as the crown jewel, as the marquee case of the sprawling tentacles that comprise this Democrat lawfare complex. So after much speculation as to what Jack Smith would do in the aftermath of Donald Trump's crushing defeat of Kamala Harris, his mandate election victory winning all seven swing states, an election that was not nearly as close as many liberal prognosticators and the lame corporate. media had predicted it would be in the aftermath of that. One of the big questions was, what the heck happens to the prosecutions against Donald Trump? And now we know the answer, at least as it comes, to two of the four prosecutions against Donald Trump, the two federal cases. They are dunzo. So here is, for instance, What Jack Smith filed today in his motion to dismiss, his formal motion to dismiss that he filed to Judge Tanya Chukin, the district court judge presiding over the 2020 election case in Washington, D.C. I'm going to go ahead and just read part of this motion to dismiss. It's going to be a lot of legalese, but I do want to unpack it for you afterwards, so bear with me, and then we're going to get into some analysis. Quote, as a result of the election held on November 5th, 2024, the defendant Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as president on January 20th, 2025. It has long been the position of the Department of Justice that the United States Constitution forbids the federal indictment and subsequent criminal prosecution of a sitting president.

But the department in the country have never faced the circumstance here where a federal indictment against a private citizen has been returned by a grand jury and a criminal prosecution is already underway when the defendant is elected president. Hold that thought for now. Here's my insert to that. Yeah, dude, it never happened before because no one ever had the temerity, the Hutzpah before, to actually try this. You freaking idiot. Okay. I had to interject that. But the motion goes on. Quote, Confronted with this unprecedented situation, the special counsel's office, consulted with the department's office of legal counsel, whose interpretation of constitutional questions such as those raised here is binding on Department of Justice prosecutors. After careful consideration, the Department of Justice has determined that OLC's prior opinions concerning the Constitution's prohibition on federal indictment and prosecution of a sitting president apply to this situation, and that as a result, this prosecution must be dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated in January. And here's the key part. Pay very close attention to what I'm about to say here. That prohibition is categorical. and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government's proof or the merits of the prosecution, which the government stands fully behind. Based on the department's interpretation of the Constitution, the government moves for dismissal without prejudice, so on and so on. Then it was just a few hours later. This literally happened less than an hour and a half ago at 1.45 p.m. Pacific time, Judge Tanya Chukin going ahead and formally ordering the case in her courtroom in Washington, D.C. to be dismissed. So therefore, she agreed with the motion to dismiss from Jack Smith, a motion that obviously went unopposed from Trump's counsels because they want the case dismissed as well here. But I emphasize that part towards the end of Jack Smith's motion to dismiss. where he reiterates, and I'll just read it one more time, this prohibition is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charge, the strength of the government's proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the government stands fully behind. Let me translate that for you. Let me translate what is going on here. Jack Smith is even here at the bitter, bitter end of this unprecedented crossing of the Rubicon experiment in attempting to bankrupt, incarcerate, and utterly destroy a political opponent. This grand experiment in warping the rule of law to not be a rule of law but to be a rule of men. This attempt to subvert the Constitution and our inherited Anglo-American legal tradition and to transmogrify us into something closely resembling a third world hellhole, a sub-Saharan tin pot dictatorship. That is what is happening here. We cannot forget what has happened here. And more on what should come next to just a second here. But even here at the bitter end, at the bitter freaking end, Jack Smith is clinging.

I certainly understand why he did it, given the Department of Justice policy that you cannot prosecute a sitting president. I think it is a shame for justice in this country. It establishes that Donald Trump is above the law. The Supreme Court put him above the law in that opinion that Paula just mentioned. But now he appears to escape full accountability for what were crimes charged by a grand jury. We cannot normalize. the fact that Donald Trump as the president-elect should not be held accountable for crimes that he committed before. If he were to have fired the special counsel, that would be a gross abdication of the independence of the Department of Justice. And if the shoe were on the other foot, for example, and Joe Biden were to have fired David Bari Weiss, who clearly had a politicized investigation because the House Republicans, effectively scuttled a plea agreement, everyone would be up in arms. This is really one of their favorite talking points, isn't it? They love, love, love talking about the idea that the Supreme Court held that Donald Trump is quote unquote above the law. This is an unfathomably stupid talking point for multiple reasons. The first and most glaringly obvious reason is that what the Supreme Court actually wrote in the Trump versus United States presidential immunity case from July 1st from this summer, obviously does not necessarily apply. To just Donald Trump. Rather, it was a constitutional ruling pertain to separation of powers, and it applies to all presidents of the United States current and henceforth in the future there. So that's the easiest and lowest hanging fruit, you might say, reason as to why this notion that Trump is above the law is just such a stupid talk mind. The more profound reason why this talking point is so dumb. It literally makes my ears want to explode whenever I hear it. You know what you people are missing, you people who are invoking this talking point? What you're missing, quite simply, is that the law, what is the supreme law of the land? The Constitution of the United States, for God's sake. You want to go back to Civics 101, go back to your middle school, high school civics class? That is the entire point of one of the most famous rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, the 1803 ruling in Marbury v. Madison from Chief Justice John Marshall, that according to the... Textbooks is typically cited for the proposition that judicial review is real, but that's kind of sort of what Chief Justice Marshall held. What he actually held in the Marbury v. Madison case is that the Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land because it says it is. Because that's the entire point of writing a written Constitution. That's actually what makes the United States legal system different in many ways from the Anglo system, the English Constitution.

that in many ways we did model our system afterwards, but in many crucial ways we separated quite a bit. The very fact that the framers at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 wrote down a physical constitution and elaborate and wonderfully crafted and beautifully envisioned constitution, a constitution that they thought about for months and months and that sweltering summer in Philadelphia, a constitution that they cited sources as diverse as Sir William Blackstone to Cicero and the Romans, to Aristotle and the Greeks, to the Bible, of course, itself. That Constitution includes, last time I checked in my Constitution currently sitting at my desk, it includes Article 2. That is the second of the three articles of the Constitution. And guess what it does? It establishes the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, Clause 1, known as the Vesting Clause of Article 2, vests, quote, the executive power in a president of the United States. That is what the Supreme Court interpreted. In Trump versus the United States, they were interpreting what, quote, the executive power to which the Article 2, Section 1 clause 1, vesting clause refers, the limits of the executive power. So you can agree or disagree with what the executive power entails from a presidential immunity perspective. What you definitely, definitely cannot do, is to claim that they are ruling that the president is above the law when they're literally just interpreting the law, which in this case, again, is Article 2 of the Constitution. So it's such a stupid, stupid, stupid talking point. I really just, I really just can't with it, frankly. Incidentally, while Jack Smith, the so-called special counsel is moving to remove these cases. While he is moving to withdraw these cases, you're having action on the two other prosecution cases as well. So in New York City this past Friday, you had Wanamershahn, the very anti-Trump judge. They are in the so-called hush money case. This is the case involving Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen, where they got the jury to convict, even though we literally still don't know exactly what the prosecution's theory of the case was. This past Friday, you had Waner-Shan indefinitely delay. Donald Trump's sentencing. It's at least the fourth delay on my count. Initially, sentencing was going to be July 12th, right around there. They delayed it until September in light of the aforementioned Trump v. U.S. Supreme Court case. Then in September, they delayed it again until after the election. And then they delayed it again after the election until late November, and now he's done indefinitely. So we don't know exactly what Mershan's going to do from here. In theory, I guess he could decide to set a sentencing date again. This is not the end of the road there, but given that Jack Smith has even moved to withdraw.

I would highly, highly suggest that the Soros-funded hack prosecutor in New York County, New York, the Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, as well as his assistant Matthew Colangelo, which the Manhattan DA's office actually hired from the Biden-Harris DOJ. That was a little suspicious at the time, wasn't it? How this high-ranking Biden-Harris DOJ official by the name of Matthew Colangelo resigned to go to the lowly New York County, New York local DA's office. seemingly for express purposes of prosecuting Donald Trump there in this absurd, absurd, alleged bookkeeping error and furtherance of some unspecified crime. I mean, that particular case there had more holes in it than a block of Swiss cheese is not ultimately going to stand one way or the other. It will ultimately get overturned either in the New York state courts when it comes to a misapplication of underlying substantive New York state law or it will, if need truly be. get overturned in the federal courts due to the glaring Sixth Amendment, 14th Amendment issues here. The fact that the jury instructions literally did not even require juror consensus. They didn't have to be unanimous as to what their theory of the case was, which is ludicrous and all but assuredly a 14th Amendment due process clause violation. So one way or another, this is one way or another, this is ultimately going to. Get overturned. The only question now is whether or not Mershon follows the lead of Jack Smith and Tanya Chukin and throws this case out, or we do this actually the hard way. I increasingly think he probably, probably does it the easy way. We don't actually know exactly what's going to happen at this particular time in the final case. That's the Georgia case down in Fulton County, Georgia. We'll see if our guests in Hour 3 of the program, my friend and Article 3 project colleague, Mike Davis, we'll see if Mike has any thoughts on where that case stands. But right now, in Georgia, the Court of Appeals has indefinitely delayed. its own appeal as to whether or not Fani Willis, the embattled DA there in Fulton County, Georgia, whether or not she can stay on the case. So we don't actually know exactly where things are going to stand in Georgia, but again, the correct thing to do there is to follow the lead of Jack Smith and Tanya Chukin and to dismiss this case. Okay, so the big question now. And we're probably going to return to this question later on the show today and or on tomorrow's show because this is one of the most important questions, I think, that we can possibly discuss here in the transition era before Donald Trump takes power come January 20th. And that question is, now what? Now what? Well, I want to read to you a tweet or a post on X, whatever we're calling it these days. From Sean Davis. Sean Davis is the CEO and co-founder of the Federalist, the popular online conservative publication. I want to read to you this post. I think Sean basically nails it here. He's talking here about Jack Smith moving to withdraw his cases against Donald Trump. Here's what Sean Davis in the Federalist tweets, quote.

People are wrongly celebrating this as a victory and a defeat of lawfare. But we only narrowly escaped. And perhaps only temporarily, the nation-ending consequences of the Democrat Declaration of War against the rule of law. People's lives were ruined. Families were bankrupted. Had the election gone the other way, Pandora's box would never have closed. And when, not if, Democrats win again, their do... They're going to double down on the lawfare unless there are consequences. People need to go to prison for what they attempted to do this country. Jack Smith should be forced into exile. Every single corrupt attorney involved in the criminal weaponization of our legal system should be permanently disbarred and banned from government employment. So the posture right now should be a steely resolve to hold accountable everyone involved with these abominations. Examples need to be made to ensure this never happens again. If everyone is content to just high-five each other, all they're doing is buying a temporary piece and putting a down payment on a much more devastating war in the future, never again. Powerful stuff from Sean Davis, who I think basically nails it here. Now, look, I mean, you have a lot of people on the left freaking out. about retaliation or retribution. So for example, actually, let's go ahead and quickly take a listen to Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren of California, who was stirring the pot with this sort of talk earlier today. Well, some of the Trump supporters are suggesting that there should be retaliatory measures taken against the lawyers in the Department of Justice for doing their job. That would be extraordinary and a real misuse of power. and a subversion of the rule of law. So we'll see whether, you know, President Biden preemptively pardons people who would be wrongfully charged. Who knows? But to use the levers of power in a revenge mode, which is what Trump has suggested, is a misuse of presidential authority and a subversion of the rule of law. A misuse of presidential authority and a subversion of the rule of law. Hmm. Where have I seen that? Oh, yeah. When the current administration tried to throw its political opponent in jail. That was a misuse of presidential authority and a subversion of the rule of law. And don't tell me that Jack Smith is somehow independent. No, no, no. He is subservient to Merrick Garland and the Attorney General, who is himself subservient to the President of the United States, who I'm told in theory is Joe Biden. Haven't seen a whole lot of evidence for that recently, but we'll hold that aside for now. That is what just happened, Zoe Lofgren. Have you been sleeping under a rock, Rip Van Winkle style for the past two and a half years? Maybe she has. What the heck do I know? People have to pay a price for this. You know, it's basic game theory, as my friend, the Cal Berkeley Law Professor John Yu explained at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. earlier this July, John and I both spoke with that conference. And what John said is it's really just Econ 101. It's Game 3 101. If you want to deter the opponent from taking horrific, destructive action.

You're going to have to proverbially, not literally speaking, but proverbially speaking, bloody up some noses a little bit here. I am not suggesting, God forbid, that you do as they do and to literally take a man and find the crime, Joseph Stalin style. What I am suggesting, what I am suggesting. is that you have to go after them in some targeted ways. Get a new special counsel for Hunter Biden. Look into the foreign affairs stuff. Ukraine, Romania, China. Get creative out there. There's so much low hanging fruit. But no, no, no. You cannot, for goodness sake, let this go away after what they have done. back at jason ranch uh once again folks josh hammer fill in for jason i'll be with you for the rest of Rest of our day here today as well as tomorrow and Wednesday, Jason enjoying a very, very well-deserved break of time off. If you like, what you hear, by the way, I'm on X, Josh underscore Hammer. And then my own show, the Josh Hammer Show, can be heard right here on AM 770, KTCH, Seattle, Saturdays, 6 to 7 p.m. local time and Sundays, 8 to 9 a.m. local time. So as we roll into the second half of the first hour of our program today, We were just wrapping up talking about the death of the Democrat lawfare complex and all that it entails. On the one hand, it really is so glorious. On the other hand, there is this truly, truly pressing question as to what comes next. And we're going to return to this topic. Again, we're going to bring on my friend and colleague at the Article III project, Mike Davis, in our three of the program, and we'll probably return to this as well, tomorrow as well, just because it is such a big deal. There really is this looming question as to what will come next. And if I have one parting message to you when it comes to this, I just feel a need to reiterate that it is imperative. It is imperative that we not simply allow us on the right, those of us on the side of civilizational sanity more generally is imperative, that we not simply just roll over and take it. Because unless you fight back to some extent, it is just going to happen again and again and again the next time these animals take power, which have no doubt about it. They will at some particular point. Nonetheless, as pressing as that topic is, there are obviously a lot of other things happening in the news. And as we turn our eyes towards the international scene just a little bit here as well, the huge news towards the end of last week, and it really is just disgusting and tragic, is that the ICC, the International Criminal Court, which is the purported international court of the United Nations. It is based in the Hague, in the Netherlands. It was established in 2002.

pursuant to a treaty called the Rome Statute. This is a court that the United States, by the way, is not a party to. The United States has never actually ratified the Rome Statute Treaty, so we have nothing whatsoever to do with the ICC, and thank goodness for that. In fact, the ICC in the past has been involved with investigating and recommending prosecutions against the United States military when it comes to its conduct in Afghanistan, among other places there. So this is... You know, this is an international body, as so many international bodies are, that is just completely overrun with leftist zealotry that is completely antithetical to the values that Western civilization is predicated upon. It is a loathsome and disgusting body in many ways. And they are now out with their latest gimmick, an emphasis on the word gimmick. And that latest gimmick is that they have put out arrest warrants. Yes, arrest warrants from the ICC against Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of the state of Israel, as well as Israel's former defense minister, Yoav Galant. Now, they technically have done this at the same time as they have issued an arrest warrant for the acting head of Hamas. But there's so many reasons here as to why this is just so loathsome and disgusting. It's difficult to know where to begin. I guess before we go further down this rabbit hole, let me go ahead and take a listen to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, just blasting the ICC's issue of an arrest warrant. The decision to issue an arrest warrant against me, the democratically elected prime minister of the state of Israel. And our former defense minister was made by a rogue prosecutor who's trying to extricate himself from sexual harassment charges and by biased judges were motivated by anti-Semitic sentiments against the one and only Jewish state. So Karim Khan is the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. That is who Benjamin Netanyahu is talking about. Karim Khan absolutely unequivocally has an anti-Israel agenda. And if you look at the lawyers that he has hired to help him pursue this case, there was an interesting Wall Street Journal op-ed on this very topic a few months ago. If you look at the lawyers who he has hired, they're typically legal academics and lawyers who have a long and inglorious history of promoting BDS, boycott investment sanctions, and various other anti-Semitic anti-Israel things as well. So this is someone. who really had the conclusion, frankly, before he even had the means to do so, that being Kareem Khan. And as you hear from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu there as well, Kreme Khan also has somewhat of a checkered present. He's dealing with a sexual harassment scandal of his own there. He is refusing to comply in many ways with the own internal checks when it comes to his own sexual harassment scandal. By the way,

Kareem Khan, one thing he did earlier this year when this investigation gone underway was that he said that before deciding whether or not to launch the investigation or deciding whether or not to issue arrest war, that he would actually go visit Israel personally and see for himself the facts on the ground with the war. He said that he would meet with Benjamin Netanyahu. And then he actually went ahead and launched this investigation against Israel live on air, literally during a CNN interview. back earlier this year, I think it was in April or May or so if memory serves it. So the man is just a total hack, a total and complete hack, and Benjamin Netanyahu is correct about that. Now, when it comes to the illegitimate nature of this particular prosecution, we're going to bring on Rich Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Hour Three of the program to get Rich's thoughts. He's a subject matter expert on this. But I'll just give you some various reasons as to why this ICC prosecution and the issuing of arrest warrants against the democratically elected ruler of one of the western world's shining beacons why this is just so illegitimate first of all Israel is not a party to the ICC, the same way that the United States is not a part of the ICC. Israel, like the United States, has not signed the Rome Statute for the very simple reason that Israel sees this with morally clear eyes the same way that the United States does, and they see that the ICC is a rogue body that exists to just be the cat's paw of the anti-Western civilization movement, of the forces of leftism and Islamism and all the various forces. that are acting in hegemonic manner to subjugate those of us who still hold through traditional biblical values and so forth. So Israel is not signed the Rome Statute, therefore they are not a party to the ICC. Second of all, even if Israel were a party to the ICC, You actually cannot launch investigation against a country that has a functioning internal judiciary. So the ICC is basically a fail-safe mechanism. It's a backup plan in case a country doesn't actually have a legitimate judiciary that is capable of investigating and adjudicating disputes and handling its own investigations, basically airing its own dirty work internally. But Israel is a First World country. Not only is a first-world country, they have a highly functioning judiciary that, oh, by the way, despises Benjamin Netanyahu. You know, before the October 7, 2023 massacre, the big political issue in Israel was their judicial reform. Benjamin Netanyahu was trying to reform the Supreme Court because they have unvarnished judicial supremacy and all sorts of powers that we would never in a million years countenance here in our American constitutional system. And the left opposed it because the court is their friend. So obviously the Supreme Court of Israel was fully capable of investigating and handling all these accusations themselves. So that's another reason why the ICC probe and arrest warrants are legitimate. Third, you have to assert, even according to the Rome statute, according to the ICC's own operations, you have to actually launch a probe on behalf of a different state, on behalf of a different actor.

Well, do you know who they actually say that they're doing this on behalf of? Again, this is all in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre and the war in Gaza. Well, Kareem Khan, the prosecutor, says that he is invoking the ICC's jurisdiction on behalf of, quote, the state of Palestine. Well, last I checked, that is an estate. It doesn't exist. It exists the same way that Narnia or Tatooine exists. It is quite literally not a country. And you can argue whatever you want for a two-state solution in this. Okay, but the point is that right now under essentially any possible way that a country becomes legitimate, that is not a state. It is certainly not a state in the eyes of the United States. It is certainly not a state in the eyes of most other first world countries around the world, most European countries even. So you can't even invoke jurisdiction that is the ICC on that basis either. On these substantive allegations of alleged genocide, there's so much wrong with this. Again, it's hard to know where to start when it comes to Israel's prosecution of the war in Gaza. But I guess I will just leave you with this statistic. You know, at Newsweek where I work, we've published a number of op-eds since the October 7th massacre by a man by the name of John Spencer. John Spencer is a very impressive fellow. He is the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point at the United States Military Academy. He is quite literally, by dint of that title I just said, the Western world's leading experts on urban warfare. Quite literally. He was on the ground in Mosul, Iraq, in 2016, 2017, during the U.S.-led ISIS counterinsurgency. And he has seen urban warfare up close. He has studied it. And he has crunched the numbers and found that the militant to civilian death ratio in Gaza since the war there started after October 7th. That ratio of militant to civilian deaths is 1 to 1.5. According to John Spencer, that is the most humane ratio ever, literally ever, in the history of urban warfare. Again, this is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, for goodness sake. Just for comparison, by the way, that same ratio during the U.S.-led ISIS counterinsurgency in Mosul was 1 to 2.5. So pretty good, actually. That's a very humane ratio, according to these sorts of metrics, but it's not quite as good as what the IDF has done in Gaza. So there's just so much wrong with this disgusting smear by the ICC that, again, it really is just difficult to unpack it all. But hopefully that ought to give you just just a sense of that. You know, incidentally, a lot of people who really should know better are taking the ICC at its word. Let's go ahead and take a listen to the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, for goodness sake. Go ahead and take a listen to this one. Now that the ICC has issued warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Galland, Canadian law enforcement is in...

obligated to arrest them should they come to Canada. Will you allow that to happen or will you step in to prevent an arrest? We are one of the founding members of the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice. We stand up for international law and we will abide by all the regulations and rulings of the international courts. This is just who we are as Canadians. Yeah, apparently who we are as Canadians is giving in to this disgusting, immoral, illegal, and anti-Semitic nonsense from the international criminal court. Get the heck out of here, Justin Trudeau. Look, I mean, at this point, I mean, let's limit forward visas to Canada. I mean, heck, I mean, let's reciprocate by sanctioning Justin Trudeau. I mean, I'm making that up. I'm shooting from the hip here. But, you know, there's all sorts of clever things that the Trump administration can do come January 2025. The good news is that I am told that many of the folks close to Trump in the national security orbit, folks like incoming national security advisor, Mike Waltz, folks like. like Marco Rubio, who is going to be our Secretary of State. Apparently, they are already trying to think about what could happen here. Again, we'll get into all of this a little bit more in our three, the program, when we bring on Rich Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. I do want to just touch on here another Israel-Middle East-related story, and this, unfortunately, is a really tragic story. So I turn my phone on after Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath ended on Saturday evening, and I'm scrolling through catching up on what I missed. And for the first time, I saw that there was a rabbi in Abu Dhabi in the capital of the UAE who was missing. A rabbi by the name of Svi Kogan. And I actually myself go to a local Chabad synagogue. This is the Orthodox movement that Rabbi Kogan was affiliated with in Abu Dhabi. And he was doing amazing work there on the UAE. He was helping to co-manage a kosher supermarket in Dubai, one of the first kosher supermarkets in... probably hundreds of years, if not ever, like probably literally the first ever in an Arab country in that part of the world, in the Arabian Peninsula. He was doing amazing work, bridging divide between the Abrahamic religions, most specifically Islam and Judaism there. He was one of the leaders of the Emirati Jewish community. And he was found tragically on Sunday murdered. His body found about 90 kilometers, I believe it was, from Dubai. The UAE has already arrested three culprits here. It has already arrested three individuals who are Uzbekia nationals. And we believe, although we are not certain, we believe although we are not certain, that these individuals were sicked to the job. They were put on the job by the Iranian regime for no other reason than the fact that Rabbi Kogan was Jewish.

This is just an unconscionable tragedy. It is a major setback for the Abraham Accords Alliance that was put into effect in 2020, where the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan agreed to make peace with Israel there. And really now the onus is on the UAE. The onus is now on the United Arab Emirates to really see this arrest and prosecution through. This is a stress test for the Abraham Accords. The Abraham Accords have actually held up quite nicely in the aftermath of the war in Gaza, the war in Lebanon, and all these various other wars. Bahrain, UAE, Morocco, Sudan, they're not going anywhere when it comes to peace with Israel. But right now, in the aftermath of the tragic, tragic death, the senseless murder, murder, just cold-blooded murder of this rabbi who was doing so much good in the world trying to bridge religious divides in the UAE. This is going to be a tremendous test for just how durable the Abraham Accords Alliance is. I saw Jared Kushner put on Twitter that he and Ivanka have donated a million dollars to the Khabad of the UAE in solidarity. Good for him. Good for them. But just horrible, horrible news at the UAE. Again, Rabbi Svi Kogan, may his memory be a blessing. And as we say in Judaism, may his blood be avenged as well.

Welcome about the Jason Rand Show, Josh Hammer, filling in for Jason. My own show, the Josh Hammer Show, can be heard right here on AM 770, KTCH Seattle, every Saturday, 6 to 7 p.m. and Sunday, 8 to 9 a.m. But for present purposes, I'll be with you for the next couple hours, as well as tomorrow and Wednesday. So I want to just briefly tie the loop on what I was just saying there before turning to one final. topic here in our first hour of the program. So just going briefly, briefly back to the tragic murder of this rabbi who was really kind of doing the work of the Abraham Accords, who was quite literally invested in bridging these divides and ultimately in the work of peace, in the work of peace. That really was what he was doing there in Abu Dhabi the capital of the UAE. I just want to clarify that what I mean as a stress test for the Abraham Accords is that... If this senseless murder, if this senseless murder is not seen to fruition, then that is a five-alarm fire glaring red flag for the Abraham Accords. If an Arab country, the UAE, can not ultimately see this through the criminal justice system through fruition, where the underlying murderers, these Uzbekian nationals are presumably Muslims and that they are being tasked, we believe, from the Islamic Republic of Iran, then that is a massive, massive, massive issue if that happens. So, God willing, they will do the right thing there. Frankly, my own thoughts on what should happen to these thugs if they are indeed found to have committed this murder in a court of law. I guess I would just say this. The UAE, the last I checked, does not have the equivalent of the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishments. So I will leave that to your imagination to fill in the rest of what I'm getting at here. In any event, there are some other issues happening here on the home front besides everything happening in Trump World. We'll get into more about Trump World, by the way, to open the next hour of our program. But other issues that I have my eyes on. There are some very under-discussed developments happening in the world of big tech and antitrust. So Google, which is really kind of just the paradigmatic big tech company, has been under trial for multiple, multiple antitrust lawsuits. And specifically, actually, their lesser-discussed lawsuit, the DOJ's probe against Google when it comes to Google's monopoly in the advertising technology space. That second lesser discussed trial actually formally wrapped up today, literally earlier today there in the Washington, D.C. area. There was a relatively brief two-week trial in September, but then the two sides reconvened earlier today in Alexandria, Virginia for closing arguments. And, you know, interesting takeaway here from a DOJ lawyer by the name of Aaron Titlebaum in this particular closing argument. I thought this is a very quotable line, quote, Google is once, twice, three times a monopolist. Pretty powerful stuff. And at least the once or twice monopolist is referring to this other Google antitrust case where you had a landmark ruling.

from Judge Metha, a Washington, D.C. based federal judge in August. And Judge Amit Mehta found that Google actually was a monopolist under the nation's most foundational antitrust statute, the Sherman Act, literally the original antitrust law from the era of the Gilded Age and the robber barons and Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilton and all of them there. I mean, that's the Sherman Act. And the judge in August just found that Google is actually an old-fashioned Section 2 monopolist, that they have illicitly gained their monopoly stature. And the recent development in that case that I thought was particularly newsworthy is that you had the DOJ's antitrust division, which is overseen by Jonathan Cantor. They finally recommended at least one possible remedy. And one of their remedies is that they are recommending, perhaps you may even say that they are demanding, that Google divest Chrome. It's a very popular web browser. And then they're also suggesting that Google impose restrictions to prevent Google's mobile Android operating system from favoring its own search engine. This is very, very similar. I must say very, very, very similar to the Microsoft antitrust case of the early aughts. That was the last time that there was a massive big tech related antitrust case. Back then, the theory was that Microsoft was acting in monopolistic fashion. by bundling its Internet Explorer browser with its Windows-based PCs and making it too difficult to uninstall Internet Explorer. You know, funny, back then, the rival web browsers back then were Netscape, Java. I mean, these browsers that no one uses today kind of shows you just how it changes there. But anyway, going back to the Google case there. This is a powerful remedy. And, you know, it's worth noting that this original antitrust case against Google, the Section 2 Monopolis case for Google's trademark search function, which actually does have a 90 plus percent market share, which last night chat qualifies you for monopolistic status. You know, this case was actually originally brought not by the Biden-Harris administration, but it actually was originally brought by the Trump administration. It was brought by Attorney General Bill Barr in the final year of the Trump presidency, and then Bill Barr's antitrust lieutenant, a wonderful lawyer by the name of Macon Delaheim. So this is actually one of the only things in the world that I think the Biden administration has probably done right is some of its big tech enforcement stuff, specifically the case against Google, which Jonathan Cantor of the DOJ antitrust division has continued from Bill Barr and Macon Delrahim. The real question now when it comes to Trump, and again, this will segue into what we're talking about at the beginning of our next hour, the real question now is who are they going to stack up the rest of their...

antitrust enforcement wing with. Who is Donald Trump going to have be Pam Bondi's assistant to head up the DOJ antitrust division? Who's going to be the FTC chair? Who's going to replace Lena Khan? These are very, very, very important questions. And I look forward to seeing what the answer is. Crucial, crucial stuff for sure. Once again, folks, Josh Hammer filling in for the Jason Rand Show. We'll be right back.