Josh Dubin and Joe Rogan revisit the Ohio Four’s wrongful convictions—Al Cleveland, Lenworth Edwards, John Edwards (J.R. Will), and Benson Davis—based on William Avery Jr.’s recanted, fabricated testimony after a $2K offer ballooned to $10K demands. With Marsha Blakely’s roommate, Raymond Epps, murdered similarly but no charges filed, Dubin exposes prosecutorial manipulation, like Lorain County’s J.D. Tomlinson refusing exoneration due to political pressure. They link systemic failures—DNA theft in the Perlmutter case, Nixon-era psychedelic bans—to broader weaponization of justice, from Clinton’s 1994 crime bill to Trump’s hush money prosecutions, questioning whether "justice" is ever truly blind. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, I was in St. Louis, of all places, which is only memorable because that's where I was when someone called me and said, have you looked at the news?
And I said, I was in court, and I was on a break, and...
If you look at exonerations, resentencings of people that have been incarcerated for more than 20 years, it's that low.
And, you know, the...
The harsh reality is that if you put someone on a public platform and they then do what he supposedly did, it's going to make headlines.
I realized something, though, that...
Look, no one could have imagined what's in the dark recesses of that man's soul.
Whether it's, you know, his group home upbringing and abuse, the prison experience.
It's not to make an excuse.
He did it, if he did it.
If he's convicted and he did it, that's on him.
What I'm guilty of is giving a guy a second chance.
And I am...
Why am I reluctant to say this?
I can't apologize for giving someone a second chance and then, you know, they squander it.
All I can do is say, what could I have done better?
I mean, I have a deep understanding, I think, of what incarceration means.
I mean, I read this book...
I always get his name confused.
Is it Henry Jack Abbott or Jack Henry Abbott?
It's called In the Belly of the Beast when I was in college.
And it's a series of letters that this inmate wrote to Norman Mailer.
It's a fascinating book.
About what incarceration does to somebody from the standpoint of the practical day-to-day from the deep psychosis inducing confinement and everything else.
And two days before the book was released and it was reviewed by the New York Times, the guy snapped and killed someone in the East Village.
And no one will know what it is like to be in there.
And again, I don't want to offer this as an excuse, but what it has caused me to do is reevaluate and say, look, maybe I need to take a much closer look at what sort of mental health counseling these folks are getting.
Like Sheldon, I arranged for him to be speaking to a trauma therapist.
Should I have been on him more to be going to those appointments?
I don't know if I'm doing it just because I'm distancing myself from it subconsciously, but I don't know all the circumstances.
But apparently this was someone he knew from childhood and from in prison.
I've heard rumors and stories about the guy threatened his son to he slashed Sheldon when they were in prison.
I don't know if you remember Sheldon had this big gash across his face, but I don't know.
And I frankly don't want to know at this point because someone lost their life.
And that, you know, I think unfortunately for my mental health, I just wear that stuff.
You know, if I felt even remotely responsible for that, which I do, and, you know, I have to – I can – I can be at peace with it, but I didn't cause that death.
And I don't, you know, I can take some responsibility for it in the sense that what could I do going forward?
Whether it's people that are being exonerated for crimes they didn't commit, or if it's people that are getting resentenced, you cannot undo decades of confinement.
You just can't.
And they all need mental health counseling, all of them.
And I have to put that on my shoulders.
I just do.
Because, you know, they all have issues.
And they come out and need mental health counseling.
And there's a stigma attached to it, especially in the African American community.
And there shouldn't be.
It's no different than if you have a problem with your liver, you know, and you have to take medication.
I mean, I've always been upfront about the fact that I'm on medication.
It's nothing to be ashamed of, and it's especially warranted when you're in those circumstances.
Again, none of this is to make an excuse, but I just think that there's a lot more emphasis that I can focus on Assimilation more.
And I think that making sure that they have job training and that they feel safe when they get out.
I mean, there hasn't been one person who I've been involved in their case where Even when they're innocent, they get out and it's a fucking shock.
And I need to be a lot more sensitive to that, I think, and pay a lot more attention to what they're doing, how they're doing.
Again, I had the foresight to put Sheldon in touch with and ensure that we were getting him mental health counseling with a trauma therapist, but I didn't want to meddle too much in that because it's on him to go.
Well, if the guy really did slash his face, if you've been in literal mortal combat with a person and this person is allegedly threatening your son or whatever, there's only so much you can do to stop a person from seeking revenge.
Especially if they don't have any hope outside of the system and they've been completely institutionalized, which, given the length of his sentence, is reasonable to assume.
By telling the truth about the state of race and the criminal justice system in this country.
You see, the thing is, the one force field I have around myself is when that's incoming, I'm able to say, okay, thanks for the fuel, thanks for the fuel.
I'll never respond to it.
You know, unless you're doing mental health counseling in a prison, unless you're a corrections officer, a police officer, know what it's like to be incarcerated, you have no fucking business giving me your shitty opinion about what you think I am or others that do this work.
Get in the fucking arena and do it yourself.
And I, you know, so I take that with a big grain of salt.
I had, you know, I have enough common sense and practical sense to sort of let, to disregard that.
But I have to be a big enough person to look at myself and say, well, what can I learn from this?
And what could I do better?
Because, you know, I was talking to Derek Hamilton, who's been on the show and the deputy director of the Freedom Clinic at the Perlmutter Center.
And, you know, Derek said, look...
Mental health counseling, when I was incarcerated, was something that was like...
It flew in the face of the us-versus-them mentality.
I didn't think they could help me.
And I didn't want the help.
I was mad.
And there was a stigma attached to it that I was soft if I did it.
We're trying to formulate a plan to normalize mental health counseling in prison.
So Derek and I are doing a town hall at Shawongunk, which is a pretty rough prison in New York on December 6th, to try to get some of the inmates to understand that it's okay to ask for this help.
I think when they see Derek and hear his story, it's helpful for them.
It's going to sound pretty controversial, but I think one of the conversations that I've had repeatedly, I've had it with JD Vance, I've had it with quite a few people, is psychedelic therapy for veterans.
People with severe PTSD because of war I think are the most deserving of psychedelic therapy and the benefits of it and the fact that that stuff is Schedule 1 and is illegal in the United States I think is absurd.
It's ridiculous.
It's horrible.
It's a massive disservice to those people that put their lives on the line and went over and experienced horrific things that the average person like myself can only imagine and you're not going to do a good job of imagining it.
I think prisoners could benefit from psychedelic therapy as well.
I think there's a lot of people that could be rehabilitated by changing the way they view things, literally changing their mind, changing their perspective.
And I think there's a lot of psychedelic therapies that could aid in that, particularly for people who, you know, they're not violent people.
They're just a victim of circumstance or they made bad decisions in their life or what have you.
And they're stuck.
And they're stuck both mentally and physically.
And if we want to use prisons as just a deterrent to crime, I think we should probably put some effort towards rehabilitation.
Sincere, significant efforts towards rehabilitation.
And one of the best ways to do that is to try to change the way people view themselves and view the world and view themselves as a part of the world.
The fact that you would even think that that would be controversial, I think, is just a byproduct of the fact that anything that somebody articulates that's outside of what's considered mainstream is rejected.
Unquestionably, the research is overwhelming that psychedelics are one of the best, most effective therapies for PTSD. My therapist has,
has, you know, counseled people with PTSD coming back from war and, you know, has espoused the not only the efficacy of it, but how remarkably different it is from but how remarkably different it is from conventional therapies in the most positive of ways.
And I could not agree with you more.
I think that if you look at some of the European countries that look at their prison systems as a real rehabilitative model, I mean, we have to decide.
We talked about the stats, and I'm not going to You know, re-litigate that here, but look, we incarcerate people at a higher rate than any other civilization on Earth.
So we have to decide as a society, are we just going to throw people away and put them in cages and make them worse, even if they committed the crime?
Or, as you said, are we really going to try to rehabilitate people?
Because some people are getting out no matter what.
Whether they have people like me involved and other great people that do this work.
But they're going to get out.
Do you want them out like they were just an animal let out of a cage?
Or do you want them out where rehabilitation is a cornerstone of their incarceration?
We talk about like looking up at the mountain and saying, can I scale it?
I think what you have to do, and I'm talking about this, all it takes is one state, one municipality, one person who says, that's interesting.
Show us the literature.
We have this amazing policy director.
At the Perlmutter Center named Sarah Chu, and she's in the trenches having these arguments, having these fights, trying to get forensic labs, you know, ensuring that they have the proper training accreditation so that they're not introducing, you know, various forms of junk science.
All it takes is just the effort going forward to try to start pushing that boulder uphill or else, you know, again, this goes to The incoming hatred in a situation like we had here is like, what the fuck are you doing to help try to make the situation better?
Because just calling names and pointing fingers and saying, you fucked up, or this person that we threw away is not worth saving, listen.
Everybody has made some mistake that they wish other people didn't know about.
You know, and it's not always homicide, obviously, but a lot of people have done something that, but for the grace of God go I, right?
Where if somebody was looking, if law enforcement was looking, it could be you that was there.
And would you want a second chance?
Would you want redemption?
Would you want the help to overcome whatever demons?
And I just think why psychedelics aren't, you know, looked at.
Ketamine, the little bit that I did.
Going through a dark time, it almost snapped me in a different direction.
And, I mean, I, you know, you urged me on to it.
I mean, you were the one that said you should really think about this.
And my therapist urged me on to it.
And I think, you know, so I know that the literature is there.
It's just we have to get past this whole, it's so weird that you mentioned that.
I was talking to a guy on the plane on the way down who asked me if marijuana legalization passed in Florida because we were talking about where you're from, this and that.
And he was telling me that...
He's from Colorado.
And he told me that, you know, in Colorado, when marijuana was legalized, that there was this whole movement of people that were saying that it would be a gateway drug, and that it was going to lead people down the slippery slope to doing other hardcore drugs.
And he said, you know, the gulf between smoking weed and turning into a meth addict doesn't exist.
He said that the bridge between the two doesn't exist.
And if you start walking marijuana use and trying to link it to...
Drugs that the U.S. government considers a problem, the link just isn't there.
So, I mean, he was sort of trying to explain to me how he didn't understand how marijuana is any different than alcohol.
And I said, well, go tell that to the state legislator in Florida.
Well, it all goes back to 1970. It all goes back to the Nixon administration, the sweeping psychedelics act of 1970 that turned everything, Schedule I, that was designed to cripple the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.
That's what it was about.
It was about having new tools to imprison people that were anti-war, that were protesting the war.
The Black Panthers, civil rights organizations, all these people that were doing drugs, that were using psychedelics to try to achieve a different state of consciousness and that brought them to these ideas that we're all one and that war is evil and that the United States government is being controlled by the military-industrial complex and that this is a giant problem in our culture.
People were so weirded out by the Timothy Leary's and, you know, the whole tune in, you know, turn out, whatever the fuck his motto was, drop out.
This whole thing of leaving polite society and being a loser and just like traveling around.
And doing drugs in a van.
This was like the perspective that people had that was going to take their kids and turn them into ne'er-do-wells and turn them into losers.
And that we were going to have a society filled with people that didn't understand the ethics of hard work and what made America great and all this bullshit.
You're legalizing that intelligence gathering that allows you to start violating people's civil liberties so that you can gain intelligence on them because the way they think is unlike you.
So, you know, it's, again, sort of, to me, all ties back to this very...
I guess tribal mentality that you're either like us or you're like them.
And everything that you mentioned, the Psychedelics Act, the resistance to the civil rights movement, it was all based on the fact that, look, we have a potential uprising here of people that are going to challenge the way we think and the way we do things.
So for people that call me a race baiter, Right?
I, you know, I feel like I'm more of a truth teller and just taking the thread through history.
And, you know, I have at least I'll read and try to educate myself and get perspective.
If it wasn't a fact that brown and black men and women get incarcerated at a higher rate, Mm-hmm.
these are drugs and they're bad versus you sit and speak to someone and take some, you know, pharmacologic form of therapy that has probably way worse side effects, can be addictive, and can lead pharmacologic form of therapy that has probably way worse side effects, can be addictive, and
and can lead to a whole host of other issues that you then have to take something else to address versus just having the openness to take a look at a different way to potentially help someone.
So I don't understand it.
And the only thing that I can do is just to keep on being open-minded and try to figure out if there's other ways that we can convince the people that are in these penitentiaries and that run them to allow programs that at least give you a crack in the door to get in.
Well, I think the doorway to that is to first show the effectiveness with veterans and with other people that aren't incarcerated.
And that once that gets established and once that becomes something, I think it's much, much more established now than it was when I first started talking about this stuff 20 years ago.
You know, like probably when I've had my first experiences was a little more than 20 years ago.
I think people have this very ignorant idea that was born out of propaganda.
Because you have to think 20 years ago, it was only 30 years removed from the Sweeping Psychedelics Act.
So you're dealing with a whole society that's been...
Just programmed by propaganda and lies.
And those propaganda and lies were established in order to villainize this one group of the population that was completely changing the culture.
The difference in the United States culture from 1965 1955 to 1965 was so dramatic.
It was such an enormous shift.
You know, then you have the Vietnam War, the protests, all these things that were happening in the 60s, the music, everything was changing so radically and so drastically that the people in power had a very, like, an accurate sense that they were losing control.
And that change was inevitable.
And they threw water on it.
And they did a great job, if you look at it from that perspective.
The difference between me, it's terrible what they did, but it was effective in that from 1970...
Yeah, a great job of changing culture, which was changing in a potentially beneficial way for everyone.
To get us to recognize that we truly are all one and that the way to make things better for everyone is to make things better for the most disadvantaged.
And this was the civil rights movement, right?
And this was the anti-war movement.
This was recognizing that people are being taken advantage by the military-industrial complex and just sent overseas so that they could profit.
The first guy that I met that really changed my perspective on the world, especially in terms of what I could potentially do as a lawyer, was Jerry Lefcourt.
Jerry Lefcourt was Abbie Hoffman's lawyer.
He was the lead attorney in the Panther 21 trial.
I was like a kid.
I was in my late 20s, and I met with him to help him pick a jury on a case, and I had read about him before.
And he saw something in me.
We hit it off.
He became like my surrogate uncle.
And he would regale me with tales of the Panther 21 trial.
And here's a guy that was kind of winging it in his late 20s and can feel the change that you're talking about happening.
And he could feel the weight against him, the pushback coming.
From the other side where he would get death threats.
He would get bomb threats at his office where he could not even see his client in jail approaching trial and had to get on a cherry picker.
And outside the jail to be able to get even with the window so that they can communicate.
So Jerry Lefcourt, and he, by the way, got a full acquittal in the Panther 21 trial against all odds.
He was the first person that told me about CoinIntelPro and what the lengths that the government will go to when they feel like their message, their way of doing things is being challenged.
And I think that you hit the nail right on the head, which is this was like a flew in the face of...
Leave it to Beaver.
It flew in the face of, you know, father knows best.
It flew in the face of what white America was trying to instill as a value system that should be followed by all people without question for all time.
And people started to say, what the fuck is this about?
I want to explore the messiness and the gray areas of what it means to exist as a human being.
And that expression, whether it was Richard Nixon or the people around him that got their backs up, You know, so if you are a student of history and you start to understand sort of why we're here rather than just looking here and forward,
I think these things for me are a little bit easier to understand when somebody comes at me and calls me a race baiter for the work that I do because I talk about the problem of race.
It stops me in my tracks when I think about it, when I talk about it, because it's like the only way that we can get to a more common understanding is to, you know, I think to read books like that and to talk to people.
And if you're so closed off and closed minded, and again, I keep on sort of adding this disclaimer, and maybe this is my...
My aversion to, like, getting attacked.
I am not excusing if Sheldon did this.
I just think that it's not so simple as, oh, you helped some guy get out and get resentenced and look what he did and fuck all these people and fuck your movement.
Someone in my family, a cousin of mine, sent me a link to a story About you endorsing Trump and wrote, what the fuck?
And I said, right, what the fuck?
Why are you sending this to me?
Like, first of all, what the fuck?
What the fuck are you...
Because you all of a sudden support this woman who, by the way, probably should have accepted the invitation to come on the show.
It might have been the difference between people getting to actually know who the fuck she was.
But putting that aside, it's like I have to do a much better job of filtering that stuff out because the notion that, you know, you...
Are going to be influenced by outside forces other than what you're doing.
Like for you to say you know what you're doing.
I like to think I know what I'm doing and I feel like I'm doing good things.
And I just got to keep on working in that direction.
Not let what happens slow me down.
Try to learn from it and go forward.
Look, I don't want this to come across as like constantly being like Situation where I'm, every time I get on here, I thank you.
But I think the importance of this forum was made clear by having the president on, by having the vice president on, because it's the only open forum where you don't have to worry about being judged, about Someone chopping up what you say and twisting it or leaving some remarks on the cutting room floor.
And it's also important because you don't give a fuck about what...
Other people say or think and you just do what you feel is the right thing to do because I've I mean I've told you privately I'll say it now again It would have been the easy thing for you to do would have been to say well fuck this guy I'm turning my back.
I don't need to have him on again It was never gonna happen.
Yeah, well listen what you've done is amazing and the people that you have brought on this show I've changed a lot of people's perspectives about our justice system.
A lot of people.
You brought on some incredible people, and you've told some incredible stories, and as you said, people have been exonerated for crimes that they didn't commit.
If you are a person who's listening to this, and you could be fucked by the system.
It's possible.
You could be trapped by a corrupt prosecutor.
It happens.
Thank God it hasn't happened to you, but if it did happen to you, you would pray that there's a Josh Dubin in the world that pays attention to your case.
And I think highlighting that and highlighting the need for that and understanding of how the system can railroad you and the system can really fuck you over.
I think one of the things that we saw during the Trump campaign was the legal system being used against one of the most powerful people in the world.
And how they can get away with turning 34 misdemeanors, so essentially one misdemeanor, but 34 versions of it, 34 writing in a ledger incorrectly that's a misdemeanor and is past the statute of limitations, can be converted into a felony and turned against a guy who's running for president as lawfare.
It's just completely using the legal system to try to attack a guy And try to take him out of the race and also try to label him a convicted felon.
So once you have this label, a convicted felon, you heard it on all the talk shows, convicted felon, convicted felon.
But enough people had a chance to look at The circumstances of the case and understand what he was actually being tried for.
Paying someone off to not talk about how he fucked them?
Is that what we're worried about?
Are we worried about World War III? Is that what we're worried about?
Are we worried about terrorist cells being established in the United States because our border's wide open?
Are we worried about the price of groceries and people being able to feed themselves?
That's what we should be fucking worried about, not whether or not some guy fucks someone.
It's so interesting to me because the conversations that people in the legal community in New York were having at the time, I cannot tell you how many times.
It didn't matter what side of the spectrum you were on politically.
But in New York, there's a lot of fucking Democrats.
And I can't tell you how often I got this call.
What is the crime here?
I mean, with regard to that particular case, first of all, the DA Manhattan seemed to...
Realized that it was a futile endeavor to go after this guy and retreated.
And then something happened.
And you remember the special prosecutors quit because they were furious, apparently, that the DA wouldn't go forward with the case.
Then something happens in between.
And Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan, proceeds with the case.
So many legal scholars said, what is the crime here?
I understand there's a series of misdemeanors that somehow gets flipped into a felony.
Legal scholars that had issues with it.
And if they spoke about it publicly, they were attacked.
Alan Dershowitz was one of them.
He was attacked.
Anyone that would speak out.
And there's this fear for good legal minds to get behind defending a case like that because it's viewed in democratic strongholds like kryptonite.
Right.
So, I mean, remarking on that case, yeah, it was weaponized against him.
And that's why I think it was this morning.
The judge in that case agreed to a joint motion by the prosecution and the defense to put everything on hold because they're deciding whether or not they're going to dismiss that case.
And if you remember, the drum that was constantly beat before this election was he'll never get out of these state cases, the federal ones we understand because he can pardon himself.
But the state cases, oh, those are going to be a problem.
Well, not so fast, right?
Because now, if it was that much of a crime and that people were so up in arms about it, why are they now considering dismissing it?
And I think that it puts the lie to the notion that this was really something that we wanted to make an example out of and you can't engage in this type of conduct.
What conduct?
You know, it was obviously politically motivated.
And, you know, and it happens all over the country.
It happens all over the country.
On both sides of the aisle, though.
I have a case right now that, and for me to be able to say this, is probably, you know...
I had to think, is this the craziest fucking case I've had?
And it has to be.
It has to be.
Because the DA that is sitting in judgment of whether or not these four men that I'm going to tell you about in a moment...
Right before the election, for him to become DA, gets indicted.
He gets indicted for allegedly harassing a former employee and then trying to bribe her not to file a complaint against him.
Something like that.
Right before the election.
And all of a sudden, he is now embroiled in this.
He loses the election a couple of weeks ago, and he now finds himself, according to him, wrongfully accused of a crime he didn't commit.
Well, my client is a guy by the name of John Edwards.
And there were four guys.
This is in Lorain, Ohio.
Lorain County, Ohio.
John Edwards, Lenworth Edwards, Benson Davis, and a guy named Al Cleveland.
New York guys in the early 90s who were selling drugs in Ohio.
They were going back and forth from Ohio to New York.
And one morning, a man by the name of Epps is found dead in the street.
His roommate is found about seven hours later, a woman named Marsha Blakely, dumped in an alley behind a shopping center.
The case is cold for a month.
The police have hit dead ends.
They have nowhere to go with the case.
The prosecutor's office offers a $2,000 reward for anyone with information about the case.
Wouldn't you know that the next day, a man by the name of William Avery Sr. walks into the Lorain County Prosecutor's Office.
They sit him down with the police, and he says, I have information about the case.
Now, this guy, William Avery Sr., was a known informant.
The police knew him.
He had come and tried to give information about other cases.
Didn't pan out.
He was also a drug addict.
And they sit with him for over an hour.
And they say to him, everything you're telling us has been in the papers.
So you're not giving us anything new here.
He shows up the next day with his son, William Avery Jr. And he says he witnessed the murder.
So William Avery Jr. talks to the police.
At the end of that interview, he goes, what about the reward money?
And the officer says, let's turn the tape recorder off and let's talk about that.
They tell him, we're not giving you the reward money because now you're telling us that information that's been in the papers and all you're telling us is that you saw Marsha Blakely assaulted in an apartment.
You're not telling us anything about the murder.
The very next day, he shows up and says that Al Cleveland told him that he murdered Marshall Blakely.
So let's put a bookmark in it because I decided I wanted to do something a little bit different today.
At the end of the episode, I'm going to give you a Twitter account.
I've submitted today a 40-page submission.
All of the exhibits that are mentioned in that submission to the Lorain County prosecutor.
His name is J.D. Tomlinson.
So now I'm going to invite the public.
Before you go writing a letter to him or calling him, you read the submission and look at the exhibits yourself.
Because what often happens is that in these reinvestigations, Prosecutors' offices have something called a Conviction Integrity Unit, where they say they'll reinvestigate the case.
And the very first thing they make you do is sign a no-media agreement, that you won't go to the media, because the last thing they want you to do is what I just did, is to talk about the case publicly.
So we're not in a conviction integrity unit.
We're trying to appeal to a prosecutor, J.D. Tomlinson, who from what I understand has told Al Cleveland's wife, because I've spoken to her, her name is Roberta, great woman, came up to her in the summer at a barbecue and said, when I was a law student, I sat in on your husband's trial.
And it always bothered me.
And I want you to come in and have your lawyers come in.
I'm going to do the right thing.
And now that he's been indicted, he has gone silent.
I haven't heard from him.
I've texted him.
I see he reads my messages because he has read receipts on.
And I guess he doesn't know that.
And I've asked him for his time.
I think in his wildest dreams, he probably never could have imagined that the case was going to now become national news.
He has between now and December 31st to do the right thing and exonerate them.
The incoming DA would never do it, I don't think, from what I've heard.
So I'm going to invite the public, and I'll give you the link at the end, and I want to tell you the rest of the story.
Because some of the things I tell you, you're going to say, come on, that can't be true.
So I have the exhibit sitting in a folder for everybody to read.
But...
You know, I think that the justice system has been weaponized against J.D. Tomlinson because he was coming up for a re-election.
There's all sorts of, like, personal animosity between him and the guy that just got elected.
There's allegations, at least, that the guy that just got elected helped, you know, was somehow involved in...
Getting him indicted by a special prosecutor.
I don't know if it's true or not, but it doesn't just happen on the big national stage.
It happens all over the place, and you just don't always hear about it.
Well, I think the fact that it happened on the big national stage the way it did, and not just the case of the hush money, but also the case of Mar-a-Lago being overvalued, which is preposterous.
That was one of the most ridiculous ones.
They listed it at, what, 17, 18 million dollars?
I would buy five of those if they were available for 18 million dollars.
You know how much money you would make for that kind of property?
And the fact that they want to say that it was actually...
So what does it say here?
Okay.
350. Okay.
So the club had revenues of $25.1 million for the calendar year of 2017, 22 in 2018, and 21 in 2019. 2022, Forbes estimated the value of the estate around $350 million.
I think Trump jacked it way higher than that.
And I think...
I've read somewhere that someone had said between seven and nine, if you could...
Like what a real estate evaluation would be, like what it's actually worth in the state that it's at.
I think there was an issue though that it was, wasn't it like listed as a national historic landmark or something like that, Jamie?
Right, so then you really can't do anything to it, which devalues it somewhat, but still.
Across the street, they have the beach club that sits right on the beach.
But the point is, is that they're meddling into, look, the bank could have said, well, we're going to send an appraiser out there, and we're going to determine whether or not we agree with you that it's worth that.
Look, there's a lot of white-collar crimes that I've been a defense lawyer on where you see the human cost of a prosecution, what it does to the person accused, but also their family.
And to somehow crawl out from under the weight of the federal government, these take years and a fortune to defend.
And oftentimes you're thinking, why did they bring this case?
Who are the victims here?
And they come up with some loss calculation that's very theoretical.
I'm talking about cases where you can't point to a victim that lost money.
You know, you wonder why some prosecutions are brought and others aren't.
And you see again what it does to not only devastate families and the accused, but is it really deterring anyone?
I would never, ever enter an industry where I was working with stocks, bonds, commodities, anything that was regulated in any way by FINRA, the SEC, because they'll – oh, it seems like the SEC, because they'll – oh, it seems like they can make a case sometimes when there isn't a case to be made.
And hopefully, regardless of what side of the political spectrum you're on, what happened to Trump should be eye-opening to people because you don't have to agree with him or his politics or his policies to see what's happening today as we sit here when everything is being reconsidered.
And you think about the massive expense that it takes to prosecute these cases.
That guy has...
I don't care what anybody says about him.
He's got to be one of the toughest motherfuckers you've ever met to stare down all of this.
And most people would be in a puddle.
To stare down these prosecutions and the threat of going to jail and everything else, that breaks a lot of people.
I mean, the guy's 78 years old, and I talked to him for three hours, and he didn't pee before, he didn't pee afterwards, just sat here, talked, didn't lose any energy, and then flew off to do a campaign rally.
Yeah, I mean, what was happening—well, this was way back when—I think it was days before she was selected to be the vice presidential running mate for Biden.
But I think it was Carpenter who was—is that his name?
Dan Crenshaw took a clip from the podcast and was circulating it on Twitter.
And it was me being critical of her.
And again, that's a situation where she had so many opportunities during this campaign to just say, listen...
I watched a little vignette about this family who was prosecuted for their truant child.
And it ruined them.
So all of this, I'm a prosecutor, and I'm going to prosecute the case against this.
That petrified me.
Because I have sat in rooms...
With prosecutors that just want to be right and win, and I would just say, please, just open your mind a little bit.
I just sat in a room with a conviction integrity unit, and there were prosecutors in the room where, and I can't sign one of those agreements, so I can't name the case or the city or the borough, but where the prosecutor went to federal prison.
for bribing witnesses and is accused of the same conduct in this case where he was giving money to someone who has recanted their testimony And the prosecutors sitting in the room were like, it wasn't that they weren't open-minded.
They had their mind made up before we got in there.
I have a friend I mean, I learned so much during this election.
I have a friend who is from Central America, and she was telling me, when Trump won the first time, I was furious.
I couldn't stand the guy.
But when I came to this country, I saw my mom fight for citizenship, and I saw what she had to go through the right way for me to get citizenship.
And she said, so I just can't vote for anybody but him.
So everybody has their own reasons for doing it.
It doesn't mean it has to be all about a cult of personality and you're endorsing everything about the person.
And I think that having that understanding that, look, a lot of people that...
I spoke to a friend of mine the other day that grandparents were in the Holocaust.
His grandfather survived the Holocaust and he voted for Trump because he's like, I didn't feel protected by the other side.
You know, as those grandson of people that went through that.
So, yeah, I just think that watching a system get weaponized against someone in that way, it's upsetting and hopefully, like you said, it opens people's eyes to the fact that if they could do it to the president, it could happen to you.
Well, that's the thing is like I don't know how much time he has to investigate the cases, right?
So he has probably people telling him things and who are these people and what is their evidence?
What's their information?
I would hope that if you have something that's so controversial, like you ran for president, you believe you should have won and they rigged it, you should have data that you could spit out at any cocktail party.
And the evidence against it was like, well, they're not all moving to swing states.
Well, okay, you can't tell people where they can and can't move once they come to the United States if they have family that's in Texas or if they have family that's in Arkansas or whatever.
They're going to go over the fuck they want to go.
But a significant number of them were in the country.
If you're bringing in 10 million people, you have quite a bit of a buffer.
It's not a perfect system.
But if you're trying to let people in illegally and then give them not just protection, but also money, food, food stamps, housing, taking care of them, housing, taking care of them, and then giving them an incentive to vote for the party that did that to them when the other party wants to – they want to round people up in mass deportations.
Vice President also won New Hampshire, which requires voter ID, but allows individuals without one to either have their identity confirmed by a designated official or fill out an affidavit.
Harris also won both Delaware and Virginia.
So there's a couple states that she won that have voter ID. But these are like these deep blue states.
But I do see evidence that people are trying to make it easier for illegals to vote.
That disturbs me.
The pathway to citizenship has always been kind of difficult.
And when you talk to people that have done it the right way, it's very hard.
They have to go up for review.
They have to hope that this person decides that they're a person worthy of being in this country, and you had to be a person of extraordinary skill and talent where that talent and skill wasn't available in the United States.
And if that keeps going, the state's going to go red.
And I think if the state keeps falling apart, people are going to come to their senses and recognize that the policies that they have in place right now are fucking gross.
They're gross.
And you've got a bunch of bureaucrats that are profiting off of the homeless situation.
They're taxing the fucking shit out of people.
The state tax is 14. If you live in L.A., it's another one.
So 15% of all your money just goes to incompetence.
And we had to grind it out and there were financial problems and everything else.
So the American dream is to make it on your own, to be self-made.
And then you get to that point and you get demonized for it.
Now you need to give back in a way that how dare you not give more than half your effective salary, more than half your income if you live in California or New York.
If they were doing a great job and they were legitimately making people's lives better, I'd be fine with that.
If there was a system where I had to pay 50% because I make a lot of money and I had to pay 50%, but that 50% was changing people's lives, they could show you all these success stories.
It's like revolutionizing.
The way poor people are allowed to make it out of that situation.
I read this article once about how there was a poll done of female voters when Bill Clinton ran the first time and they asked the reasons why and it was multiple choice and one of them was that he was good looking and had a full head of hair.
It was very interesting to me that this is playing out in real time with the incoming president, and I have this parallel situation going on in Ohio.
This is called a weave.
I'm weaving back to Ohio.
And I want to tell you the rest of the story about the Ohio Four.
So this guy, J.D. Tomlinson, is the prosecuting attorney in Lorraine.
He's under indictment right now.
He's got two months left.
Like I said, he now knows, according to him, what it's like to be wrongfully accused of a crime.
So watch this.
You have these four guys.
So, again, it's Al Cleveland, Lenworth Edwards, John Edwards, Benson Davis.
Yeah, you gotta light up for this one.
So I told you, William Avery Sr. goes in, tries to get the reward money.
They tell him, fuck off.
Brings his son in the next day.
They say to him, no dice.
Then he comes back and says, OK, Al Cleveland told me he committed the murder.
Comes time for their trials to begin.
And they're going to all be tried separately.
And William Avery Jr. gives this account of how this murder happened.
And he says that he watches this woman, Marshall Blakely, get beat for 15 to 20 minutes inside of her apartment and that, you know, the reason this woman gets beat is because Al Cleveland wanted him to work off a debt and beat her up.
And he said no.
So then these four men bust in the door and this is how the crime occurs.
It comes time for the first trial of these four men.
And William Avery Jr. shows up as the prosecution's star witness, and he says, I want $10,000 to testify.
He gave me two, I want $10,000.
And the prosecutors say, we're not giving it to you.
And he says, then I'm not testifying.
The judge throws him in jail.
He's in jail.
He is cool in his heels, as they say.
And he says, you know, I made this whole thing up.
And I did it for the money.
And no one believes him.
And the judge says, what are you talking about?
You're going to get on the stand and testify.
He says, no, I'm not.
And now he's facing potential perjury charges.
The judge declares a mistrial.
He then comes back with a news story to the prosecutors and says he witnessed the beating.
He witnessed other details of the crime.
He then goes on to testify at all four of their trials.
After the first mistrial, they all get convicted.
He then fully recants of his own volition Says he got off drugs.
Says he wants to straighten out his life.
He's in the process of cooperating with the FBI and the Secret Service.
Now these exhibits are sitting in this folder.
You go to Twitter.
It's Free the Ohio Four.
Free the Ohio Four.
There it is.
And if you just click on that URL... One person's following?
If you click on that, it will bring you to a folder with this 40-page submission that I put in today.
And references to all of the exhibits.
So this is my first page.
At the trials of Al Monday, that was his pseudonym, Al Cleveland's pseudonym.
At the trials of Al Monday and those charged with him, I testified under oath that I was an eyewitness to Alfred Cleveland, who I knew as Monday, along with other people I knew as J.R. Will and Shaquem, who was John Edwards, beat Marsha Blakely at Floyd Epps' apartment and then murder her behind Charlie's Bar and Lorraine.
All of this was a lie.
I never witnessed the murder of Marsha Blakely, was not with her or Al Cleveland the night she was murdered.
I only done it for the money, and everything was not true.
The entire case was built on this man.
There's no forensic evidence, no eyewitnesses, nothing.
Oh, that was what they ended up coming up with was that she was a drug user.
Cleveland was a drug dealer.
It must have been drugs gone wrong.
So something involving drugs gone wrong.
So William Avery Jr. is, after they get convicted, is working as an informant for the FBI and the Secret Service.
Now, prior to this case, maybe this is how obtuse I am.
I thought that the Secret Service's purview was the president, but apparently they have other investigative functions because he was working on some food stamp scheme as an informant.
The Secret Service tells the FBI, and the testimony is in that exhibit file.
The Secret Service tells the FBI, this guy, William Avery Jr., he's not to be trusted.
He's lying to us, and he's lying to us for money.
They contact the prosecutor.
The FBI calls the prosecutor in Lorain County and says, this guy, William Avery Jr., used him as an informant in that case against these four men.
He's a liar.
And he does this for money.
So they end up getting Al Cleveland's lawyers, John Edwards' lawyers, Lenworth Edwards, Benson Davis, they end up getting an evidentiary hearing.
And William Avery Jr. comes to testify.
And he's coming to testify that I made the whole thing up.
And he's in very exquisite detail.
His father, who obviously brought him there, threatened his life.
He sat him down and smoked crack with him to calm him down.
You can't make this shit up.
Wait till you read the affidavit.
He sat down to smoke crack with him to calm him down and told him, I need that reward money for my drug habit.
He was a fucking junkie.
So he needs the reward money and he gets his son to go in there.
And it's obvious if you watch...
If you read the interrogation and his testimony that he's being led, they show him pictures of the apartment where this woman was allegedly beat.
He's getting details wrong.
He changed his story.
He was telling conflicting versions of the story.
So at these post-conviction hearings where these men should have all been exonerated, He gets on the stand and before he testifies, the judge says to him, have you been advised?
Do you have an attorney?
He said, I don't think I need an attorney.
And he tells William Avery Jr., well, you need an attorney.
We're going to appoint you an attorney because you're about to perjure yourself.
Because you either did one of two things.
You either lied and that put four men in prison or you're about to lie now to set them free.
Either way, you've lied under oath.
Think about the mindfuck of this.
So this guy is coming to clearest conscience and the judge threatens him with prosecution.
So he gets an appointed attorney And they go and ask the prosecutor, will you give him immunity so he can tell the truth?
They say no.
His defense attorney asks the judge, will you give him immunity so he can tell the truth?
And they tell him, we're going to charge you with perjury if you tell the truth.
He walks out of the courthouse, okay, after pleading the fifth and is interviewed by the local paper walking out of the courthouse.
That's in the exhibits.
And he says, they're all innocent.
I made the whole thing up.
I've been trying to tell the truth here, but I can't go to jail for whatever time they're going to give me.
So here you have a guy that is...
The son of a known junkie.
The prosecutors in this, in Lorain County, have been told by the FBI that he's not reliable, that he makes things up just to get money.
He's been caught in lie after lie after lie, and now he comes and wants to tell the truth.
And set these men free.
And this judge puts him in this situation where he can't tell the truth or else he's going to get prosecuted.
This is what happens in this country.
This is the kind of thing that these four men, two of them are out, two of them are serving life sentences.
Al Cleveland's wife, Roberta Cleveland, saw this DA and he said he was going to do the right thing.
He knew that the case was problematic.
And now, because he's worried about his own indictment, you know, he's not responding.
So what we're asking for is your listeners to go through and read this very detailed submission.
That I've made along with the Ohio Innocence Project, the Ohio Public Defenders, and a great attorney by the name of Kim Corral, who you actually had a good laugh over one time, oddly enough, because she was at the White House when Kanye West was there.
She was apparently standing over him, smiling, and you were like, look at this fucking girl.
She just thinks that, like, how the fuck did I get here?
Damon John, back then, was a hardscrabble New Yorker.
He was doing whatever he could to grind it out.
This was before FUBU. And he was friends with Al Cleveland, and Al needed to have a TV moved, and Damon had like a gypsy cab service, a car service in New York.
You lived in New York, right?
You remember what it was like you call a cab service?
Because they pinned it on these guys and this guy, William Avery Jr., only came in with information about one of the murders.
The cases were so clearly connected that the medical examiner pointed it out.
These people were killed in the same way.
Why there isn't an outrage, a fucking outrage about this case is beyond me.
When I got this case, I said, there is no way what you're telling me is true.
That this guy has come and wants the clearest conscience and tells you exactly what happened and the FBI told the prosecutors that he's a liar.
And these guys are still, two of them are still serving life sentences.
And when you have to live stamped as a murderer, even in the free world, you know, Al Cleveland is out and he's suffering.
I mean, I had to listen to his wife heaving.
She couldn't get a hold of herself because she went down to J.D. Tomlinson's office and said, you told me you were going to help.
And he said, I can't now.
I'm sorry, I've been indicted.
The last time I exonerated someone, look what they did to me.
Because he exonerated someone else and his political opponents attacked him.
You know, human beings, we...
Sometimes get in our own way because of outside forces.
What we think other people are going to say, think J.D. Tomlinson's been voted out.
He's been wrongfully accused of a crime.
It's time for him to say, you know what, I'm going to do the right thing.
All I ask is actually a meeting with him.
I want to meet with you between now and December 31st.
Let me lay everything out for you as I have in this submission.
He's now going to have it in his hands.
He wouldn't answer my text messages.
I'll give him a break.
He was obviously going through some...
Serious personal issues, being under indictment, running for re-election.
This is an easy thing.
This is just doing the right thing.
There is no way that you could look at this evidence, and this is why I think it's a good idea for...
Rather than give a snapshot of a case and have to rely on some process with these conviction integrity units behind closed doors where they run the reinvestigation.
I like the public being able to get invested and look at the evidence themselves.
Everyone loves a true crime story.
So why not, as part of this, let the public help make the case.
And when they write a letter They'll do it more forcefully.
Or they call him and say, how could you ignore this?
So I would just encourage everyone to go on Twitter and go to FreeTheOhio4 and look at the evidence.
And if you ever – I've gotten so many reach-outs.
How can I make a difference?
What can I do to make a difference?
This is it.
You can write.
You can call.
His cell phone number is online because he was running for re-election.
Let him know that the public is watching and expecting him to do the right thing.
That's the...
The best use I feel like I can make of publicly advocating for change is to help bring in the public and give them a vested interest in trying to help.
There was, you know, suspicion that she was trading sex for money so that she could feed her drug habit.
So, I just don't...
I don't...
I've never had a case where the FBI calls the prosecutor and says, this guy is a liar.
And he goes in for reward money and for financial gain and he can't be trusted.
Never had a case where a judge says, if you tell the truth...
We're going to put you in jail.
If you tell the truth, it's just as bad as putting these guys, you know, you either told a lie to put them in jail or you're now telling a lie to free them.
I mean, I just don't get it.
I just don't get it.
I don't understand why, you know, in almost half of the cases where there has been an exoneration based on a sole eyewitness's testimony, over half the people recant.
And the courts are very critical of these recantations.
So in other words, if someone makes up a story and then they come back and say, look, I made that up because my dad was threatening me, because the police threatened me, that's somehow viewed very, very critically.
Whereas the initial allegation, it's really easy to put someone in jail.
So, do you think that's because the system is set up to not reverse convictions because it's bad for the prosecutor's record, it's bad for the confidence of the judicial system?
And I said, well, there is something that you can do as part of this bill.
We would like to make it not only a felony, but give defense attorneys that have a good faith basis to believe that it's an alternative suspect's DNA. The same right to collect that DNA as law enforcement.
And if they make a showing to the court that they have a basis to believe that this is an alternative suspect.
So I had a former police officer who was a member of the Judiciary Committee say, look, I was a cop and we used to do it all the time.
And his exact quote was, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
And I think if you can make a good faith showing, I want to support that.
When it came time for the bill to go to the Senate, the guy that was sponsoring the bill wasn't responding to me.
I said, we got overwhelming support not only to get the bill made from a misdemeanor into a felony, but also to allow defense attorneys, criminal defense attorneys with an adequate showing to collect the DNA of alternative suspects. criminal defense attorneys with an adequate showing to collect the And I said, so we'd like to add that amendment.
And he just stopped responding to me.
And finally, I got him on the phone and I said, what's the story?
Why aren't you responding to this?
And he goes, it's not happening, Josh.
It's just not going to happen.
And I said, why?
He goes, I'm not going to go into that, but it's not happening.
So, you know, obviously there was some political pushback to it.
He just wasn't going to have that part of this bill.
So, you know, I don't know what else you can do to push these issues back.
You know, other than get out there in the public and bang the drum about it and try to get people to pay attention.
And this, I think, is a rare opportunity because it gives people...
It allows them to invest in this.
It allows them to see what the evidence is and actually, you know, write a letter and say, hey...
I saw the testimony of this Secret Service agent, of this FBI agent under oath in these post-conviction proceedings.
Why can't...
What more would you need?
You have the power to exonerate these guys and end this 30-year-long nightmare for them.
Also, circumstances are different for every fucking human being.
And for you to think that there's no way that I would do a crime...
Especially a crime like that.
Are you sure?
Are you sure if you were in their shoes, if you lived their life?
We all like to think that everybody's life is the same as ours.
We only have one life that we can kind of reference.
When we look at other people's lives, we kind of imagine what it would be like to live their life.
We don't know.
People do desperate things in desperate times, depending upon your environment, depending upon how you grew up, what your influences were, what trauma you experienced, whether you were incarcerated at a young age.
No one has any understanding of that other than the people that get trapped into the system.
They just don't.
Tough on crime.
Yes, I think you should be tough on crime.
I think you should arrest criminals and evil people that do terrible things and make society awful.
Yes, so do I. But also, you should definitely not arrest innocent people.
You should definitely not imprison them and then punish someone who's trying to say, hey, the reason why these people are in jail is because I told a lie.
But I'm trying to make more educated judgments rather than Judging someone based on, you know, not having a complete picture of what they might have been through and also not being able to put myself as best I can behind their eyeballs or in their brain.
It's hard unless you really make an investment and I think the easy thing to do is to make a quick judgment and keep it moving.
I can't thank you enough because, again, it's a rare occurrence these days to be unaffected by the outside noise.
And...
I promise you I'll do better in making sure that I'm a little bit more plugged into the help people are getting when they get out, whether they have done it or not.
We've had two recent re-sentencings.
One guy was paralyzed and blinded in prison.
And he's in a wheelchair and he can't see.
And part of the reason he was paralyzed was because of poor medical care that he was getting.
It was a difficult decision to make initially because I said, shit, another resentencing, a guy that was found guilty.
And then I saw the horrific medical treatment he was getting and I said, you know, this just isn't right.
You don't just throw out a human being like this.
And what threat is he?
In a wheelchair, blind.
But, you know, I have to do a good job of making sure that people are getting the attention and care they need.
It takes resources and, you know, we're thankful to everybody that continues to reach out and support any of these causes.
The Perlmutter Center, you know, the Midwest Innocence Project is a great one.
The Ohio Innocence Project, those are all satellite projects, but The Freedom Clinic at the Perlmutter Center, we've had some terrific folks, including the Perlmutters, that have given us the resources we need to make a difference.
And my thing about the outside noise is you should never put any effort or time or focus into something that has no net benefit.
There's no benefit in the outside noise.
Especially if you're an introspective person.
If you're a person who thinks everything you do is awesome, maybe it's good to see people shit on you.
Maybe it's good to see that some people don't like you.
Maybe it's good.
Maybe it's good to hear other people's perspectives, kind of like you put your ego in check.
But if you're a person that's introspective, and I know you are, if you're a person that is hard on yourself when you make mistakes, no one's harder on me than me.
One of the best things I did in the wake of this whole Sheldon Johnson incident is I turned my comments off on Instagram and turned my account private.
I think I'll make it public again after today because I want to generate support for the Ohio Four.
But turning comments off is a nice thing because you can't believe the good stuff or the bad stuff.
Hey man, look, when I was on my way over here today, I was walking into the Uber and a guy at the hotel goes, I hope you're going to talk that talk over on the JRE. And I said, yeah, I am.
And it turns out that he went to high school with Rodney Reed, who's on death row here in Texas.
And I got into an interesting conversation with him.
like man his older brother could pop and lock He goes, man, this motherfucker was popping and locking all the time.
He's telling me about him breakdancing and he's like, no, for real, you know, shining a light on this stuff gives a lot of people out here hope.
And I told him that, you know, I wrote a letter to the legislator here in Texas that's reconsidering that case.
So it's just real cool, man, to get people behind it that really care about this stuff and The public can really help out.
You don't have to be a lawyer.
You don't have to be a psychologist.
You don't have to be a therapist.
Pressure does break pipes.
So reaching out to J.D. Tomlinson and making noise between now and December 31st.
Bruce Bryan works at the Queen's Defender's Office.
He has not been without challenges, trust me.
But he's actually going, I'll leave you with this, Bruce is going to hope-hope that parole lets him, because we're still working on his full exoneration, even though he was granted clemency on the innocence claim.
Bruce is going to Nairobi and Uganda to speak to prisoners there.
And he's a climb advocate for the Queens defenders.
Derek continues to be a whirlwind of positive activity.
He's just amazing.
He's getting people out left and right.
Robert Johnson, who we had on, is continuing to do amazing things down in New Orleans.
And all of them are just thriving.
They're doing well.
Not enough attention is given to the happy endings, right, than we give to the bad stuff, but...
Because it makes them not think about the suck of their own life.
That's why they like it when a celebrity falls, like a P. Diddy gets arrested, because they see these people living these lives they could never imagine, like yachts and Rolls Royces and all that shit.
And then they see them get taken down like, yeah!
Because they were, you know, envious.
And it's also like, it's a part of our culture is to celebrate wealth in the most disgusting and extravagant ways.
You know, like, I mean, how many social media personalities have emerged just all about, look at all the stuff I have.
I've been playing with this idea and something that I'm writing right now, and it couldn't be more impression than right now, is this notion of what the truth is.
I don't know.
It happened to us right here.
Are some of the swing states requiring ID or all of them?
It's hard to keep a grasp on reality and the truth these days because there's information that is intravenously injected into your veins, it seems like.
So I have a hard time knowing what's true anymore.
It's not like a conversation like we have where Jamie checks it in real time and I saw a thing that said the states that required no voter ID are the ones that she won.
She won other ones as well.
But when you have the news saying things, so they have researched it.
They do know that it's a lie.
This is not like a live conversation like we're having where I didn't know we were going to talk about that at all.
Nor did you.
It just spontaneously came up.
These people are putting narratives out there that are just flat-out lies, and they're doing it all the time.
I mean, Obama did it during the campaign where he repeated that lie about Donald Trump talking about white supremacists saying they're very fine people on both sides.
And you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were Very fine people on both sides.
You had people in that group, excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures as you did.
You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
George Washington was a slave owner.
Was George Washington a slave owner?
So will George Washington now lose his status?
Are we going to take down statues to George Washington?
Because the news has said that lie over and over and over and over and over again.
The news, the mainstream corporate-controlled news that wanted this narrative that Donald Trump was a Nazi said that over and over and over again.
They repeated it.
They compared him up until the election.
Was literally comparing him to Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini.
And spent a whole piece describing right-wing dictators, that he is going to be a right-wing dictator, just like Hitler, just like Stalin.
This is the lie of the media.
So this is one of the reasons why it's so hard to tell the truth.
It should be illegal to do that.
It should be illegal to say that.
Because it's not true.
And you're changing the perspective of millions of people, especially low-information voters that look at Obama like a thing from the past when time was sane, when the world was normal.
A brilliant guy who was the president.
If this brilliant guy is willing to lie in front of everybody...
But in the context of a campaign where you're completely distorting the perspective of the person you're running against, not just who they are, but what they've done and what they've said and what they stand for.
I didn't follow it closely enough to say- I think they all lie too, but there's not a thing like that that I can point to where he was saying something about Biden that was factually incorrect.
Here's the thing that turned me off completely about the election this time and why I said, fuck it, I'm voting for Jill Stein, a physician that probably is the least qualified of anyone.
Only as my form of saying, I'll protest it.
Kamala Harris, during the debate, said that there's not a single American soldier deployed in a war zone.
And then I saw videos of American soldiers in a war zone watching it in parallel reality.
Like talking about people eating dogs and cats and the election being rigged, all sort of baseless shit takes away from the fact that, you know, the things that stick out to...
And it's like, get out of your own way, bro.
He pardoned Jack Johnson.
He pardoned one of my clients.
I think that he has done more and cared more about criminal justice reform than certainly than any other president in my lifetime.
This is what Dan Crenshaw responded with no US troops active combat zones question mark How did ABC let Kamala get away with that during the debate US sailors and Marines are fighting?
Off Houthi attacks in Yemen over 3,400 troops are engaged in Iraq and Syria We have forces in Western Africa battling terrorists just this year Three US soldiers were killed and 40 injured in Jordan by an Iranian-made drone Nearly 1,000 troops are still deployed in Syria and 2,500 remain in Iraq under Operation Inherent Resolve.
But it's also just shows you how corrupt the relationship is between the media and What we get to see it's corrupt There's a bunch of people that had decided that they were going to fact check Trump Continually and not fact check her and they were doing this because they wanted her to look better than him because they wanted her to win Yeah, I mean listen the most I
I have, and this is why I mentioned, you know, it's hard to know what the truth is.
The reason why I posted all the exhibits, the reason why I put the letter up, and the reason why I put the contact information up is that when you have a transcript and you have, you know, actual documentary evidence, that's hard to argue with.
It's not a sound bite.
It's not a clip.
So I feel like maybe part of what appeals to me about this work is trying to get closer to the truth, a truth that is a bit more provable.
You know, I would probably have been very happy as a mathematician if I was any good at math.
I stink at it.
But I think that there is—it's very difficult to understand.
You know, I feel like I'm sitting here and I feel manipulated by the fact that I never—and it's really on me that I didn't go and watch the entirety of— That comment.
Because I literally don't think I've ever listened to the part where he says, obviously the neo-Nazis and, you know, the people that were there for the wrong reasons need to be condemned.
You know, when I was watching recently, I was talking to the great Dubini about this.
He pointed out to me that comment about Liz Cheney.
So then you start to wonder, well, how much is my opinion of him...
Been formed by my concern about other people lashing out at me.
I mean, you should hear the shit I got when I spoke ill of Kamala Harris by, you know, I guess call them the left.
You know, and it was like infuriating to me.
You know, so I don't, politics to me is too, it's too much of, you know, you have to serve so many different interests that you sort of forget who you are and what you stand for.
So that's what turns me off about it.
And, you know, I don't think that that'll change.
That's why I sort of shifted to, this is the most I've talked about politics in probably five years.
That's why I've shifted to, let me just put my head down and get to work on what I can work on.
I think what you said is very important for people to understand that a lot of what people say, they say it because they don't want people to attack them.
They say it because they think that if they say it, it will clear them.
They'll be okay.
If you say you support X, you might not even support X, but if you say you support X, you're not going to get attacked and the right people will leave you alone or agree with you and appreciate you or praise you.
Thank you for saying that.
There's a lot of that out there.
There's a lot of people that don't speak their mind.
Do you know how many artists that have reached out to me that are like fucking hippies, man?
Like artists, like musicians, comedians that thanked me for endorsing Trump because they can't do it.
They said they want to, but they don't want to be attacked.
They can't say it.
They think the country's going in the wrong direction.
They think that this control of social media by the government, which we would have had pretty much fully if it wasn't for Elon buying Twitter, that this is a dangerous precedent to set, whether it's a right-wing government or a left-wing government.
And that what you see that's happening in the UK where people are being imprisoned for tweets and Facebook posts is fucking crazy.
The whole thing is nuts, and it's a dangerous path that we were on.
We were on that path.
Trump has vowed to have free speech become a very important part of what he's standing for, and that this censoring of information needs to stop, and that we need to stop all government influence in what people have to say.
You know, and I think it's so transferable to what I do in this context because a lot of The reluctance of prosecutors not to do the right thing or what their conscience tells them is the fear of the backlash.
You have to be a blindly ambitious sociopath who can weave your way through these sort of social and political relationships and to get to the top.
For what?
I mean, imagine if one of those person does wind up becoming president that has no real thought or no real care about the country, no real ambition other than the blind serving of their own success.
Well, I think that that's what, for people that are so like, it's hard to explain if you didn't live in New York.
For people that are just like, oh my God, what's the next four years going to be like?
Like it's a funeral.
Get up and do something all four years that you think is going to help make society better.
You do that.
Whether it's getting out and knocking on doors and making your – for whatever you're passionate about, not just when an election is coming up, but get out and knock on doors.
Get out and get involved in some organization that you believe in.
Do something that you think will help lend itself to bettering society in some way.
What happens is every four years there's this polarization and people get on one side or the other and they complain and bitch and then they wallow in it too often for too long a time.
I think that the people that actually make the most change happen are the ones that can sit and talk with people that might have different beliefs than them and don't make them other than.
If that can't shake the foundation of this forum, I think we're going to just keep on making great change happen and hopefully we free the Ohio four and keep on moving.