Episode 106 LIVE: Trump Prosecutor Pleads Fifth! – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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Thank you.
Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem for the Democratic Party.
He can cause a lot of hiccups in passing applause.
So we're going to keep running those stories to get hurt again.
If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots.
You are in the right place.
This is the movement for you.
You ever watch this guy on television?
It's like a machine.
Matt Gaetz.
I'm a canceled man in some corners of the internet.
Many days I'm a marked man in Congress, a wanted man by the deep state.
They aren't really coming for me.
They're coming for you.
I'm just in the way.
Welcome back to Firebrand Live.
We are broadcasting from Room 2021 of the Rayburn House Office Building in the Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C. Our border is in total disarray.
I've got news from Tallahassee, my alma mater, Florida State.
I also have my reaction to a good Samaritan in New York being arrested.
The total mischaracterization What am I trying to say?
Miscarriage of justice that's happening there.
And certainly grateful everyone is tuning in on the live stream.
We've got folks from California, Oregon, Texas, Florida, Arizona, internationally from the UK. Travis on Facebook says the Democrats are liars.
Bob on Facebook says he's drowning in BS. Tired of the BS, wants action, not talk.
Well, I can tell you the action I was directly involved in today.
I spent hours taking the deposition of Mr. Mark Pomerantz.
Mr. Pomerantz was the person from the New York Manhattan DA's office who left, wrote a book.
We now had him before the committee.
And when it became evident that the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, Was going to take this unprecedented step and indict the former President of the United States, Donald Trump, on dubious legal grounds.
The House Judiciary Committee was understandably very concerned.
Were federal funds misused?
Were laws broken?
Were constitutional rights impaired?
All for the sake of politics.
Let's remember, this is President Trump.
It's easy to see how shady the Alvin Bragg indictment really is.
Alvin Bragg is a Soros-backed, ultra-liberal prosecutor who campaigned explicitly on taking down Trump, said he had sued Trump more than 100 times as the organizing principal of his campaign for the Manhattan DA position.
Now, Bragg's predecessor, Cyrus Vance, declined to bring charges against Trump, given the lack of Michael Cohen's credibility and presumably other major factual and legal challenges.
There was a statute of limitations problem they faced.
There was a merging of federal and local law, and Cy Vance decided not to bring an action during his tenure, and even initially Alvin Bragg decided not to, but then that changed.
Alvin Bragg bootstrapped federal campaign law to local business regulations to invent a felony where none would have existed for any person other than the left's number one target, President Trump.
Former president, leading Republican candidate for president in 2024. So should Congress take action to insulate current and former presidents from political prosecutions funded in any part by federal dollars?
It's an open question.
Enter Mark Pomerantz, the subject of this discussion we're having on the podcast today.
Mark Pomerantz described himself as one of the legal eagles of New York.
He's a top-flight shark.
And he literally volunteered to go into the Manhattan DA's office to take on a special role for Cy Vance in building this case against Trump.
When he wrote a book about it, he wrote a scene where he comes home from having obtained this position from Cy Vance.
And his wife asks him about the economic conditions of this new employment relationship.
And Mr. Pomerant said to his wife, Oh, the financial terms are outstanding.
They gave it to me for free without even knowing how much I would be willing to pay to go and prosecute Trump.
You shouldn't be able to buy your way with influence or prestige into a case just because you have a particular grievance with someone who could be a target or a subject.
When Alvin Bragg initially declines to prosecute before then deciding to prosecute, Mark Palmerance literally wrote a book slamming Alvin Bragg and many of the actions taken by the Manhattan DA's office.
He even went on Chuck Todd's Meet the Press to defend his decision to write that book.
Take a listen.
Here's some legal experts.
Barbara McQuaid, a former U.S. attorney, writing a book about a pending investigation was really poor form.
Cynthia Altsney, a former federal prosecutor, strikes me as totally improper.
Eliza Orleans, New York City public defender, this book could do irreparable damage to an ongoing investigation.
I know you've heard this criticism.
What say you?
Well, I think the criticism is unfounded, and I can tell you in a nutshell why.
First, with respect to the Stormy Daniels investigation that has gained impetus over the last month or so, the facts have been in the public domain for literally years.
In fact, as I was doing research and pulling together the facts for my summary of what would go into the book, Where I went to discover those facts was the Internet, Michael Cohen's book, and the publicly available information from the federal prosecution of Michael Cohen.
That's item one.
Item two...
In fairness, you know what was in that grand jury testimony, though.
So you know what...
You can't unknow that information, so even though you're using the public record, what you choose to excerpt is certainly not, is it not influenced by what you know took place in the grand jury?
Everything that went into the book with regard to the Stormy Daniels investigation, the financial statement investigation, was in the public domain and If there was a detail that wasn't, as soon as there's an indictment, if there is an indictment, we don't know yet whether there will be a prosecution.
If there is a prosecution, on day one, under New York's discovery law, which is among the most liberal in the United States, the defendant, in this case Donald Trump, will get everything that the DA has by way of witness statements, documents, facts, and so on.
So there's nothing that...
So in theory, anything in this book, what you're saying is...
He's going to get disclosed to him on day one, post-indictment, if one is apt.
He will get on day one all of the materials, for instance, that reveal what...
And we are back live on Rumble.
The question is asked, will Bragg be investigated?
On Instagram, Steve says, drag Bragg before Congress.
Well, this is the investigation.
We sent a letter requesting documents and witnesses, and here was the first subpoena that we had worked to convert into a deposition.
And that deposition resulted...
And Mark Pomerantz taking the Fifth Amendment.
That's what I'm here to share with all of you live on Firebrand.
Now, because Mark Pomerantz had written a book on the subject of his time at the Manhattan DA's office, because he was a Trump-hater working to build this case, because he may have broken laws on rules of legal ethics, statutes, we wanted to interview him in the House Judiciary Committee.
That interview occurred today, and I can report exclusively to our Firebrand audience.
Mark Pomerantz, the prosecutor who was literally in charge of building the case against Trump, pled the fifth to almost every question we asked him today.
I asked him if he violated Donald Trump's constitutional rights.
He took the fifth.
I asked if he violated standards of legal ethics.
He took the fifth.
I asked if he misused federal funds.
Fifth.
I asked if he broke any laws during his time with the Manhattan DA while investigating Trump.
And he exercised his constitutional right not to incriminate himself.
While every American is entitled to take the fifth, and taking the fifth in no way means that someone is guilty of anything, It sure does raise additional questions regarding the propriety of the unprecedented charging of Donald Trump.
Think about it.
Mark Palmerance was pleading the fifth to all these questions about a subject he was willing to literally write a book about.
Pomerantz even pled the fifth when Democrats asked him questions.
New York Democrat Representative Dan Goldman asked Pomerantz if he still speaks to folks at the DA's office.
He took the fifth.
Goldman asked Pomerantz if he has non-public information on these cases.
Fifth.
He even asked Alvin Bragg questions that would...
Be easily answerable just by a review of the documents before him, and he asserted the same privilege.
Something is rotten in the New York Manhattan DA's office.
I am more certain of this now than when this day started, and we are not done investigating potential misconduct, misuse of federal funds, and further concerns.
I suspect we will be calling Mr. Pomerantz back to compel responses when we are armed with a court order requiring him to do so.
I believe he engaged in a subject matter waiver of the Fifth Amendment rights he asserted.
More on that later.
Switching now to a story of a Subway Superman.
You're sitting on the subway...
In New York City, a crazed lunatic appears.
He starts threatening violence against your friends, your family, your loved ones, your spouse, your children.
Even against innocent bystanders.
Do you take action?
Do you do your duty as a free American?
Or do you just sit there, like an extra in the movie, watching the violence go down?
Well, Marine U.S. Patriot Daniel Penny probably asked himself similar questions, and he decided to act.
When the dangerously insane Jordan Neely walked into Daniel's subway car, when he was making violent threats, Daniel bravely put himself in harm's way to subdue Jordan Penny.
And to put him in a hold until the police arrived.
Daniel is even on video providing due care and releasing this person from the hold, even trying to wake him up after he was subdued.
Tragically, and in the course of this altercation that could have been avoided, Jordan Neely took his last breath.
Maybe you haven't heard of Jordan Neely.
But the NYPD has.
Jordan Neely has been arrested 42 times.
Many such cases involved crimes on the subway.
These soft on crime policies like we see in New York kill.
It's just a matter of whom in far too many cases.
And it shouldn't be the people not committing crimes.
If we reopen the asylums and put disturbed and dangerous people like Jordan Neely inside them when they need to be, maybe he'd still be alive today.
Maybe there would be some opportunity for recovery or a renewed life.
But the left doesn't actually want this.
The Soros prosecutors like Alvin Bragg They want you to fear for your life.
They would rather you die than defend yourself.
Maybe you die while asking yourself the question about whether or not you should defend yourself.
But it isn't Jordan Neely that the New York City prosecutors are removing from the streets.
They never did that, in fact, never to any success or significant oration.
It's Daniel Penny.
Daniel had the nerve to stand up to the anarcho-tyranny That is running rampant throughout New York and particularly in their public transit systems.
And now it seems he will pay dearly for it.
Look at how New York prosecutors perp walked him.
I mean, this was the guy who literally...
He stood up to protect those around him from what could have been a dangerous situation.
Now it's imperative that Daniel prevail and that Alvin Bragg drop the bogus charges against him.
This nonsense is all too familiar.
When did we see this before?
Kyle Rittenhouse faced the same evil that Daniel Penny is now facing when he defended himself against a group of armed pedophiles and rapists chasing him down to murder him in the streets.
And Firebrand listeners will also remember the case of Jose Aldo, the bodega store owner in New York City.
We talked about him on Firebrand.
Then he was one of the witnesses in the House Judiciary Committee's field hearing on crime in New York City.
He faced similar persecution when he used a knife to defend himself against a couple who tried to beat him to death when he insisted that they pay for a bag of Doritos.
In blue cities, there is an all-out assault on self-defense.
Meanwhile, they let the criminals and the dangerous and the insane seemingly do whatever they want to the rest of us.
Preventing good women and men from defending themselves and their communities is nothing new, actually.
It comes from some of the worst governments that have ever existed.
The Marxists have been doing this for ages.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn commented on this very problem.
He famously said,"...in the Criminal Code of 1926, there was a most stupid article 139 on the limits of necessary self-defense, according to which you had the right to unsheathe your knife only after the criminal's knife was hovering over you, and you could stab that criminal only if he had stabbed you.
Otherwise, you would be put on trial." This fear of exceeding the measure of necessary self-defense led to a total spinelessness as a national characteristic.
A hoodlum once began to beat up the Red Army.
Alexander Derhoff was that army member.
He was outside of a club and Zakharov took out a folding knife and he killed the hoodlum.
And for this, he got 10 years for murder.
And what was he supposed to do?
He was astonished, and the prosecutor replied, you should have fled.
So tell me, who creates the hoodlums?
This isn't unique to communist dystopias either.
Actually, 40 years ago, on March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York...
Funny how this is New York again.
See how much it's changed since 1964. So in 64, we have this case, Kew Gardens, Queens, New York, 28-year-old Catherine Genovese, known as Kitty, was brutally murdered.
But it wasn't the particulars of the killing that became the focus of the nation in this case.
It was the response, or the lack of a response, from her neighbors.
As this 28-year-old woman screamed for her life, please help me, please help me.
38 witnesses in that community did not do anything to intervene.
And according to reports, nobody even bothered to call the police.
One witness later explained himself with a phrase that passed into infamy.
Quote, I didn't want to get involved.
This was so bizarre back then in New York.
Psychologists struggled to comprehend the behavior, the despondence.
Were we all becoming sociopaths as bystanders that we wouldn't react and help someone screaming for their life?
The public quickly picked on this story as an example of the ills of contemporary urban decline.
And the decline of life in urban areas.
People even cited the general moral collapse of modern society, the decay of Western civilization because of what happened in 1964 in Kew Gardens, New York.
Back then it was shocking.
Now, it's the norm.
And if you do respond, if you do get involved, you may end up just like Daniel Penny, on the wrong end of the law.
A life ruined because you wanted to be a good Samaritan.
But the American left isn't alone in its depravity.
If you want a glimpse into the future, look at China.
China is famous for this behavior.
They are collectivists with no sense of community.
Look at this horrible video of what reality is like in China.
China is doing a little soul-searching after this heartbreaking video began making the rounds.
It shows a two-year-old girl being struck by a van, not once, but twice, as more than a dozen people walk, drive, and cycle by, ignoring her, leaving her to lie in a pool of her own blood.
The scene unfolded Thursday and was captured by a surveillance camera.
A garbage worker eventually comes to the girl's side and picks her up.
She is alive, but in a coma.
The drivers of both vehicles have been arrested.
However, the public outrage is directed mainly at those who went by and did not help.
One television commentator says the morality of the whole country has taken a hit.
We're back live.
That is the future that the left wants for us, that you just saw there on that clip from China, where we are so desensitized to human life and the loss of human life that we would walk by, that we would let bad things happen.
Well, Daniel Penny wasn't going to let bad things happen at the hands of a person who had been arrested 42 times, who was harassing and scaring the other people who were there.
We can't let this happen.
We can't let that vision from China become our America.
We have to push back.
We have to take back our streets.
And we have to repopularize the notion of duty.
The duty we have to one another.
Our brother's keeper.
Our fellow Americans.
Some say, stay out of the situation.
Don't put yourself in harm's way.
But it's our duty to act, and when good men sit silently watching as criminals and deviants take over our streets, evil gains ground.
It's not only permissible, but it's right and just to act in self-defense and in the defense of others.
This is the behavior that all great societies must encourage.
We must do our part to save Daniel Penny from the leftist lynch mob.
He deserves our support.
Today, it's a Marine in New York facing the proverbial firing squad.
Tomorrow, it's you and yours.
Alvin Bragg must drop these charges, and we must make our country righteous and just and fair again.
Daniel Penny has set up a Give, Send, Go account, and I will be donating to his legal defense personally today.
There's another story I want to bring to you regarding Florida State University, my alma mater, big news out of Tallahassee, and sadly it is the news of fraud.
Only good part is I think we've got the fraud fees are identified, caught, and appropriately exposed.
An African-American professor named Eric Stewart from the criminology department at Florida State University has abruptly left the university after more allegations of fabricating data used in his papers to make it seem like racism against blacks and Hispanics is more common than it is actually came to light.
Once again, the demand for racism is greater than the supply.
Imagine building a career on crying wolf over racism while you fake and manipulate data to support those very delusions.
That's your brain on critical race theory, I guess.
Now this story was first reported by the Florida Standard's Livia Caputo, and it's really something else.
Apparently Eric Stewart, who made quite a name for himself as a, quote, fellow of the American Society of Criminology, has had six research studies retracted.
What a doofus.
But it's not general incompetence.
It appears to be more sinister.
Stewart was first accused of falsifying data in 2019 by another professor who co-authored a study with Stewart in 2011. This particular study resulted in Stewart's findings published, saying,"...as black and Hispanic populations grow, so did the public's want for more discriminatory sentences." Sounds grisly.
Maybe even racist.
The problem was that the actual data showed the exact opposite.
Stewart had rigged the data so bad to show bias that the numbers added up to the point of a mathematical impossibility.
Since then, Stewart has authored a number of similar studies that have been retracted and put under investigation by a three-person committee at FSU. The investigation stalled, of course.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that two of the committee members had previously authored papers with Stewart, which violates FSU's own academic conflict of interest rules.
Stewart has no other defense than to call these investigations and allegations racist.
What a clown.
Hopefully nobody takes this moron seriously anymore, and it is a shame that anyone ever did in the first place.
Thankfully, after the sixth retracted piece, the last of which coming in June of 2020, it seems Stewart has left Florida State University.
Goodbye.
His sudden unexplained absence in March of 2023 and subsequent replacement indicates his fraudulent life work has come to an end with the Knowles.
What does this teach us about academia?
The peer review process is bogus, and if fraud is ever discovered, these universities are slow to act.
The media and academia are starving for content that shows racial bias in society.
Some have literally built their careers on it.
There's so much of an incentive to put out the fake data and push this BS, but there is no oversight and little accountability when people get caught just making it up, literally making up numbers so that you believe that your fellow Americans are racist when in fact, while we all have our bumps and bruises and warts and problems, this is a just, kind, and loving society.
We need a complete and total auditing of academia and a mass purging of some of the academics.
People like Eric Stewart are simply evil and they should be ashamed of themselves for doing this.
They are absolutely, absolutely wrong to bear false witness.
In the meantime, we need to go after these ilk, catch them in their lies, and force universities to hold them accountable.
Maybe even hold federal funding back if they continue to promote this nonsense or if they turn a blind eye to manipulation of data so that there can be social virtue signaling.
We owe it to our future to force academia to do better.
Other big news of the week, I wanted to share the passage of HR2 in the House of Representatives.
I voted for it proudly.
We have got to secure our border.
We have got to get these asylum reforms in place.
And the key feature of HR2 is to not just release and parole people in the United States.
You wait in Mexico.
You wait in your home country.
If we have detention beds, people who are Justly and appropriately in the right categories to be detained should be detained.
But telling people to show up somewhere and self-report as illegal immigrants or however they've abused the asylum process to call these people asylum seekers, they're not.
It's just a legal fiction.
Anyhow, this bill, very important.
If it were law today, the Title 42 authorities that are expiring under the public health end of the emergency disaster declaration, those authorities would transition over to an immigration context and be used to turn people away.
Detain or turn away.
The vote was 219 to 213. Two Republicans voted against the bill.
One was Thomas Massey, our good friend and frequent Firebrand guest.
Thomas Massey's objection was to the E-Verify provisions of the legislation.
I support E-Verify.
You can go back and watch the episode I did with Andy Biggs, Homeland and Security, to see some of the points and arguments there around E-Verify, but that was why Massey didn't vote for it.
And the other no vote was Representative John Duarte of California's 13th District.
He put out a statement afterwards saying, quote, While I wholeheartedly support enhanced border security, valley families deserve practical solutions that both Democrats and Republicans can support.
Unfortunately, this bill would harm any families that work in our valley and create difficulties for our food producers.
So the Duarte standard for a bill he would support is that Democrats have to vote for it too.
That's quite the standard because every single Democrat voted against HR2, even the ones in the border communities who are being overrun and harmed the most by this Biblical Migration of people without permission, without process, without consequence, and it must be stopped.
H.R. 2 would solve the problem, but we know the Senate will not take it up.
Fundamentally, we will not secure this border until a Republican is in the White House because the executive powers are essential to exercise fully and thoroughly to internally enforce our existing immigration laws in our country,
To expel the people who are not here legally and to ensure that none come again without us inviting them and giving them the great extension of American grace that we've always been willing to give to people willing to do it the right way, not the people whose first act in our country is a criminal act of unlawful entry.
We'll have more on the border and on our investigative work in the coming days and weeks.
Thanks so much for joining us on Firebrand.
The big favor you can do me, make sure you share this episode, give us a five-star rating, leave a comment with the information you'd like to learn about in great detail from the United States Congress.