| Time | Text |
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Judge McAfee Hearing
00:15:31
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| Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East. | |
| Potentially as a liar, a perjurer, and corrupt. | |
| If she goes, the whole case could go in a prosecution that was looking very scary for Trump, given the rabidity of this DA and the jury pool in Fulton County, Georgia. | |
| Judge Scott McAfee holding a hearing at 2 p.m. with Terrence Bradley, the former attorney, friend, and one-time law partner of Nathan Wade. | |
| Wade is a special prosecutor in the case against Trump. | |
| He stands accused of engaging in a kind of improper kickback scheme with DA Fannie Willis, with whom he had an extramarital affair. | |
| The allegation is that Ms. Willis hired her alleged lover to work on the Trump case, capping his hours at a higher number and paying him more than the other two special prosecutors she brought in, and far more than any assistant DA in her office. | |
| And that the two of them then enjoyed the fruits of those payments on lavish vacations paid for by Wade in places like the Bahamas, Aruba, and Napa. | |
| That all of this created a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of one, for prosecutors whose mission is supposed to be the pursuit of justice, not the pursuit of pina coladas by the sea on the taxpayer's dime. | |
| Both Wade and Willis claim the affair did not begin until after Willis hired him. | |
| They say it was early 2022 when it started. | |
| She hired him November 21, and have testified there were no kickbacks. | |
| That Willis repaid Wade for all of those trips in cash with no receipts, no ATM withdrawal slips, no deposit records, nor anything else to document the alleged repayments. | |
| By the way, in their write-up on this story today, the New York Times did not think it was relevant to tell its readers the alleged repayments were all in cash with no receipts. | |
| If you're a Times reader, here's what you were told. | |
| Willis and Wade have testified that they roughly split the costs of their vacations, end quote. | |
| Nothing to see here. | |
| Great job, Times. | |
| Great job. | |
| So, did the affair begin prior to 2022, contrary to the sworn testimony of both of these prosecutors? | |
| And can this court give credence to the testimony of Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade that despite the absence of receipts, Willis paid Wade back for these many vacations? | |
| Ms. Willis's longtime friend, Robin Earty, took the stand on February 15th at the motion on the hearing on the motion to disqualify and told the court the affair began long before 2022. | |
| She said it was as far back as 19. | |
| She said she saw it with her own eyes and she also heard about it from Ms. Willis, her good friend. | |
| Quote, no doubt in her mind about it. | |
| From everything that you saw, heard, witnessed, it's your understanding that they were in a romantic relationship beginning in 2019. | |
| Yes. | |
| You have no doubt that their romantic relationship was in effect from 2019 until the last time you spoke with her. | |
| No doubt. | |
| And did you observe them do things that are in common among people having a romantic relationship? | |
| Yes. | |
| Such as, can you give us an example? | |
| Hugging, kissing. | |
| Action. | |
| All before November 1st of 2021, correct? | |
| Yes. | |
| But Willis ultimately dismissed Miss Yurty from the DA's office, where Yurty worked for a time. | |
| And thus, her testimony could potentially be discounted by this judge. | |
| Maybe she had a motive to lie, though that was not effectively fleshed out on the stand at all. | |
| They just got her to testify that she was booted, and it did not appear to be with her agreement. | |
| Lots of people get fired and would not go on to perjure themselves to get back at their old boss, especially when to do so would be a felony. | |
| This is not like two gals at a bar talking about a third. | |
| This woman's under oath on the witness stand in a court proceeding. | |
| They did nothing to prove to us that Robin Yurty is the kind of person who would go that far to get back at someone who let her go from a job. | |
| And despite all their promises, they were going to put on witness testimony showing that she's a liar, it didn't happen. | |
| They didn't bring a soul. | |
| Then there are Nathan Wade's phone records. | |
| Nathan Wade's phone records, the Trump defense counsel got a hold of the special prosecutor's phone records. | |
| They were submitted by Trump's counsel after the hearing closed. | |
| The prosecution wants to keep them out. | |
| A hearing on that happens this Friday. | |
| If they come in, however, they show that these two, Wade and Willis, called each other more than 2,000 times in an 11-month period in 2021. | |
| 2021, before they claim their affair began, more than 2,000 times and texted each other nearly 12,000 times. | |
| Platonic friends. | |
| That's an average of six calls a day for 11 months and nearly 36 texts a day. | |
| Think about the people in your life. | |
| Who do you text with 36 times a day? | |
| As a grown adult, right? | |
| Atlanta Journal Constitution columnist Bill Torpy noted, this is a level of connectedness not usually reached by teen BFFs. | |
| 100% true. | |
| That's right. | |
| The phone records also show that Nathan Wade appears to have visited Fannie Willis at her home as many as 35 times in 2021 before they say their affair began, including at least two overnights, complete with what looks like the got home safely text at the end of one of those. | |
| Any thinking person can see what was going on here. | |
| They always tell jurors, you don't check your common sense when you walk into the jury box. | |
| To the contrary, it's your most important skill. | |
| But could this judge, it's not a jury case yet, right now, it's just the judge's decision, could the judge nonetheless refuse to consider the cell phone evidence? | |
| Yeah, he can say it was filed too late. | |
| It wasn't supported. | |
| It's not conclusive. | |
| Cell phone tower data is used all the time by prosecutors in criminal cases. | |
| It's odd how suddenly Ms. Wade, the prosecutor, Willis, that is, suggests it's totally unreliable here. | |
| Well, it's so weird. | |
| If you were a defendant in her jurisdiction being prosecuted by Willis or any of her DAs, wouldn't you be bringing those words back to haunt her in a motion right now? | |
| All of which brings us to Terrence Bradley, Nathan Wade's old pal and today's star witness. | |
| He tried to get out of testifying at the hearing on whether Willis and Wade should be disqualified two weeks ago, despite the fact that it appears he had already given up the game before he raised those objections, exchanging text messages with one of Trump's, well, one of the Trump defendants' lawyers, saying that the motion to disqualify, quote, looks good. | |
| It looks good. | |
| Thumbs up. | |
| And according to that lawyer, confirming her allegations about this affair, when it began, and so on. | |
| Ashley Merchant is the name of that attorney. | |
| She represents a guy named Michael Roman, who's been tried as being accused along with Trump. | |
| She has all of these text messages. | |
| They were between Merchant and Terrence Bradley. | |
| She's got them in her possession. | |
| She read at least two of them into the record at the DQ hearing. | |
| In one of them, Merchant asked Bradley if he knew anyone who would give her an affidavit about the affair. | |
| And he responded, no one would freely burn that bridge. | |
| Listen. | |
| Can you repeat the question? | |
| The question is, did I text you asking you if you knew who I could get an affidavit from about the affair? | |
| And you responded, no, no one would freely burn that bridge. | |
| Yes, I do see that. | |
| Now, the other message shared in court, Terrence Bradley was asked about being sent the January 8th motion to disqualify that first detailed the alleged allegations, the affair allegations, I should say, before it was filed. | |
| She wanted him to look it over. | |
| He was somebody who knew Wade. | |
| He was someone who'd gone way back with Wade. | |
| And Terrence Bradley responded to that draft motion saying, looks good, as I mentioned. | |
| Merchant sought to confirm those messages and others with Mr. Bradley and to get him talking about what he knows about this affair at the hearing two weeks ago. | |
| But Bradley clammed up on the stand, repeatedly citing the attorney client privilege. | |
| Well, those privilege claims have not held up. | |
| It's official now. | |
| At a closed door meeting with Judge McAfee yesterday, during which Mr. Bradley's former client and friend, Nathan Wade, was reportedly right outside waiting in the courtroom, Terrence Bradley tried to justify his privilege assertions again, something that would have been very hard for him to do. | |
| Since we know for a fact he already disclosed much about this tryst to attorney Ashley Merchant. | |
| So Bradley was either mistaken when on the stand he said these communications were all privileged or he was correct and he unethically divulged them to counsel for the defense. | |
| Okay, so either he was wrong to say they were privileged or he was right to say they were privileged, which would have made his disclosure to Ashley Merchant of the communications improper and unethical. | |
| Tough spot to be in. | |
| But I think I'd rather be in the I mistakenly asserted privilege on the stand camp. | |
| Late yesterday, the judge issued his ruling. | |
| Hasn't yet been released publicly, but the New York Times has it quoting here. | |
| The court believes that the interested parties did not meet their burden of establishing that the communications are covered by the attorney client privilege, and therefore the hearing can resume as to Mr. Bradley's examination. | |
| Thus it would seem Terrence Bradley must now reveal what he knows about the relationship between Fannie Willis and Nathan Wade. | |
| It's go time. | |
| If he testifies consistent with what is in his texts to Ashley Merchant, putting the lie to the testimony given by Wade and Willis, there is zero doubt that they should be thrown off of this case. | |
| Two prosecutors in one of the biggest criminal cases in the country lie to the judge under oath about the nature of their potentially conflicted relationship and they can continue on with impunity? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| I don't think so. | |
| Even Fannie Willis's defenders get stuck on this point. | |
| Before they were saying, no, they can't be booted. | |
| No, there's not enough of a conflict of interest. | |
| No, the appearance of a conflict isn't enough. | |
| It has to be an actual conflict. | |
| What's the conflict? | |
| No, she reimbursed him half the money. | |
| She paid in cash. | |
| So was she doesn't have receipts. | |
| The judge is going to find her credible. | |
| You get to the point of two officers of the court lying under oath and you watch them wither on the vine. | |
| Read the articles. | |
| They all start stumbling. | |
| Watch the cliffs. | |
| They all start stuttering. | |
| They know very well they can't stay on this case. | |
| These folks may not care about the vacations or the affair, but any honest lawyer will tell you an officer of the court lying to the judge under any circumstances, never mind under oath, is a serious ethical breach, not to mention, oh, a felony. | |
| It's a felony. | |
| And the lie here would be to cover up their conflict of interest and the alleged kickback scheme. | |
| So it's not like it was a meaningless lie. | |
| They will be lucky not to wind up convicted felons, never mind prosecutors on this case. | |
| So those are the stakes today, and we're waiting for it to start. | |
| Will Terrence Bradley say on the stand what he said to Ashley Merchant in these texts? | |
| Or will he hem and haw again and try to protect his friend? | |
| If he confirms the affair began prior to 2022, expect the state to once again attempt to attack his character, as they did when he said almost nothing two weeks ago. | |
| What these two should do instead is to spare themselves and the citizens of Fulton County the embarrassment of this spectacle and resign. | |
| It will do Fanny Willis no good in her quest to avoid ethics charges with the bar and probably others to continue this fight if Terrence Bradley does her in today. | |
| Judge McAfee should not have to order these globe trotting lovebirds off of this case. | |
| They should do the right thing and step down. | |
| Joining me now, Phil Holloway. | |
| He's back. | |
| He's the founder of Holloway Law Group in Cobb County, Georgia. | |
| Phil, good to have you. | |
| So I understand you actually saw Terrence Bradley earlier today. | |
| He's out and about practicing law and doing his job. | |
| And do we expect him to show up in Judge McAfee's court today at two? | |
| Well, great to be with you again. | |
| Of course, Megan, you know, here's the thing about today. | |
| It's all about what is and what is not attorney client privilege. | |
| And so look, if you are my client and you tell me where you buried the body, I can't talk about it ever. | |
| But if I see you burying the body, that's a different story, right? | |
| So Ashley Merchant, a few weeks ago, in one of her responses to something the state had filed on this very issue, she says that Bradley has non-privileged personal knowledge that he can testify to that this affair began prior to Willis being sworn in as the district attorney in January of 2021. | |
| So he denied that he denied that on February 15th. | |
| Yeah, he did. | |
| And so now we're in the situation where if he denies this again today, if she has any prior statements that he may have made, and this is where we were talking about the text messages and things like that, if he has ever said anything contrary to that, if Ms. Merchant has this documented, she can confront him with the prior inconsistent statement. | |
| And that inconsistent statement, if it exists, can be used as substantive evidence in the case. | |
| So that is what the judge is going to have to consider here is, is there any corroboration that Mr. Bradley can bring to the issue that would corroborate Robin Yurdy, that would corroborate the cell phone data. | |
| And if so, the judge can believe that Terrence Bradley and Fonnie Willis were lying about the cash payments, because this all relates back to that. | |
| It's this personal financial benefit that is at issue. | |
| And if the judge believes that they are not telling the truth about this, he is entitled and should disbelieve their testimony about the cash reimbursements. | |
| So we're all going back to the very beginning here, and we're going to have to sort out whether or not there was a personal financial benefit to the point that Fonnie Willis had a conflict of interest. | |
|
Corroborating Cell Data
00:14:34
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| Prosecutors cannot have a financial interest in even the existence of a case. | |
| And that is what this is about. | |
| We're talking about fundamental fairness, due process. | |
| And if the case goes away because of a due process violation, then so be it. | |
| We've got to have a fair system. | |
| If prosecutors are not fair-minded, if they don't play by the rules, we don't even get to the point of having a trial in the case. | |
| So it's important to remember that this is about fundamental fairness. | |
| It's about due process. | |
| It's all very interesting, this sideshow that we have now. | |
| It's a circus, basically, right here in Fulton County. | |
| It's like the real, I don't know, real lawyers of Atlanta. | |
| There's got to be some kind of a reality TV show that could be made out of this because it's really quite disturbing. | |
| The judge is going to have to decide about the conflict of interest. | |
| But here's the other thing. | |
| If she's lied to the court, if anybody has lied to the court, the judge, in my opinion, has really a duty to do something about it. | |
| And what could that look like? | |
| Well, he could hold them in contempt and throw them in jail if he believes they've lied. | |
| He could refer them to the state bar. | |
| He could refer them to maybe the attorney general's office to see if they've committed the crime of perjury. | |
| This is a disbarable offense if there's been a fraud perpetrated on the court. | |
| And by the way, it doesn't matter if a lawyer says something false to a judge that's under oath or not. | |
| We have the ethical obligation of candor to the court. | |
| We've got to be honest, even in things that we put in writing. | |
| So this is why I say that this pleading that Ashley Merchant filed where she details what she believes Terrence Bradley is going to say, she has to have a good faith basis for that. | |
| You heard prosecutors call her a liar? | |
| They said, you don't have a good faith basis. | |
| Well, today, Megan, is the day that Ashley Merchant gets to tell us. | |
| And I think we're going to get to see what her good faith basis was. | |
| And that's really what's at the heart of all of this. | |
| Here we have a little bit of that. | |
| Fanny Willis attacking Ashley Merchant as soon as she got on the stand, the witness stand Fanny did, suggesting that the lawyer had lied for the basis of the disqualification motion because it was based in part on what Merchant admitted she'd been told by Terrence Bradley. | |
| We all watched Ashley Merchant tell the judge that when they were pressing her on what her evidence is, that this affair began long before the two said it did, and so on and so forth. | |
| And Fanny Willis took that stand, loaded for bear, and unleashed a cam on Ashley Merchant. | |
| Here's a bit of it in stop three. | |
| Did you listen to any arguments? | |
| I did. | |
| You look at the arguments this morning. | |
| It's ridiculous to me that you lied on Monday, and yet here we still are. | |
| And I did listen to that argument. | |
| All right. | |
| So that was it. | |
| Just the argument. | |
| There's that. | |
| All right. | |
| I listened to the argument this morning where Adam Abadi, I thought, did an excellent job pointing out how dishonest you were with the court on Monday. | |
| And I'm actually surprised that the hearing continued. | |
| But since it did, here I am. | |
| Did you meet with Mr. Wade and talk to him about the motion that I filed to disqualify you? | |
| On January, this first January motion? | |
| Yes. | |
| I don't know if you can say talked about. | |
| I probably had some choice words about some of the things that you said that were dishonest within this motion. | |
| But it seemed today that a lawyer writes a lie, and then it's printed for all of the world to see. | |
| When I met him, Judge Reeves introduced us. | |
| He handed me his business card. | |
| I'm unsure if I handed him my business card, but we exchanged information. | |
| He said, if you ever need any help, give me a call. | |
| And he walked to the parking lot. | |
| So after that, you started dating shortly thereafter. | |
| Correct? | |
| That's a lie. | |
| That's one of your lies. | |
| So virtually every time she mentioned that word lie in that first exchange was a reference to Terrence Bradley. | |
| She didn't say it explicitly, but that's what she was talking about because Ashley told the court, I spoke with this guy. | |
| He gave me texts. | |
| And then the other side said, oh, you never actually spoke to him. | |
| And she said, well, I have text messages. | |
| You can see my whole phone. | |
| I'll introduce it into evidence if you want. | |
| And then Bradley had been up there saying, all right. | |
| He's like, they knew he wasn't going to give it up once actually asked to say it under oath. | |
| So she thought she was going to get away with just calling Ashley Merchant a liar. | |
| And now that bill's coming due today at two. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, I know Ashley Merchant. | |
| I've known her for a long time. | |
| She's been a guest on my podcast and we've had cases together. | |
| She's not the type of person, in my view, that's going to take this allegation laying down. | |
| If she's got a good faith basis, I expect she's going to try to present that today. | |
| She says in this pleading, she says more specifically, she says Bradley has information about the relationship between Wade and Willis directly from Wade and not in the context of him seeking legal advice. | |
| She goes on to say that Bradley has personal knowledge that Wade and Willis regularly stayed together at her home until Willis' father moved in sometime in 2020. | |
| So she's telling us in this pleading, she's telling the court that Bradley knows this stuff. | |
| How does she know what Bradley knows? | |
| Unless Bradley has told her what he knows. | |
| So that's what this is really about. | |
| We're going to see today exactly what kind of cards Ms. Merchant is holding. | |
| I think we might see the text messages. | |
| We've talked a lot about those. | |
| And in the past, it seems like those text messages were really going to be the smoking gun. | |
| But if there's direct testimony today from Mr. Bradley, as Ashley Merchant has said would happen in this pleading, then we won't need the text messages. | |
| On the other hand, if there's a discrepancy between what he has said to her in the past or what she believes has said or what she can prove, he said, if there's a discrepancy, then she's going to come out with the prior statements. | |
| And so then the judge gets to weigh, you know, what has he said in the past versus what he's saying now under oath. | |
| And the judge is going to have to decide which of that to believe. | |
| But one thing that I know for sure is that Ashley Merchant's not going to take these claims laying down. | |
| She's not going to sit by and have anybody call her a liar. | |
| She's not going to sit by and have anybody say that she doesn't have a good faith basis for making this claim. | |
| And so I'm going to be. | |
| Do you expect, like I watched Nathan Wade, not Nathan Wade, I watched him too, but I watched Terrence Bradley the first time and he tried to wiggle, I mean, like nobody's business out of saying anything, anything. | |
| Every answer was slow. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Then another word.com. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| I'm imitating him. | |
| Long pauses. | |
| You're like, oh my God, is he done? | |
| Like he's not saying anything. | |
| And then it would be these long, long pauses in between his words where he would wind up saying absolutely nothing other than it's privilege. | |
| It's privilege. | |
| It's privilege. | |
| So it seems to me pretty clear that this judge has now said those assertions of privilege are not valid. | |
| That's what they were arguing over, whether he could assert the privilege in response to these questions about when the affair began, what he saw with his own eyes and so on. | |
| And this judge has now overruled the objections in chambers and in this order, which we haven't yet seen ourselves. | |
| It was his email to the counsel last night, but it wasn't posted on the docket. | |
| In any event, I read you the words according to the times of what he ordered. | |
| So do you believe, at least in the judge's mind, that it's time for Terrence Bradley to answer the question, when did the affair begin? | |
| What was the nature of the relationship prior to 2022? | |
| Yeah, so I'm glad that the judge has ruled that there was no attorney client privilege that would apply. | |
| So that would tend to, I think, help Mr. Bradley feel better about freely testifying because he doesn't want to take the stand and testify if he thinks that he's giving up attorney client privilege. | |
| So hopefully we'll get to the bottom of all of this. | |
| Undoubtedly, there's going to be some knowledge that he has that's attorney client privilege because he was the lawyer on the divorce. | |
| I think he filed the complaint for divorce. | |
| So clearly there's some degree of attorney client privilege. | |
| But what we don't know is how much latitude the judge is going to give the parties. | |
| We don't know if there's some things that are still off limits. | |
| We're going to have to wait and see how the judge rules on this. | |
| He's not going to let him go on a fishing expedition and get too far afield. | |
| But it's clear that the judge believes that Bradley has some relevant information. | |
| The judge could have simply said, you know, there's no attorney client privilege here, but this is all much ado about nothing. | |
| This is all irrelevant. | |
| So we're just going to move on. | |
| He didn't do that, which that tells me the judge believes there's some benefit to having additional testimony from Mr. Bradley. | |
| And so it's all going to depend on what is the basis of his knowledge. | |
| The pleading that Ashley Merchant has filed says that he has non-privileged information. | |
| And so that is what we're going to be drilling down on. | |
| What are the things that you saw? | |
| What are the things that you observed? | |
| What are the things that you talked about in some setting other than an attorney-client conversation? | |
| And I mean, it's good, but he's in a very strange position right now because he tried to deny that there was any of that back when he took the stand on Feb 16. | |
| And so he said, no personal knowledge of anything. | |
| You remember the audience will remember. | |
| He said, nope, no personal, everything I know, I know because I'm an attorney. | |
| And then the prosecution got up there and cross-examined him as though he had given up the farm and tried to lambast him with not one, but two sexual assault allegations against you. | |
| That's why you left the Nathan Wade law firm. | |
| And the guy's like, whoa, no, none of that is true. | |
| What are you doing? | |
| Well, you're coming for me. | |
| And the judge, once again, they had gotten into a privilege discussion because Terrence Bradley tried to say the circumstances of my departure from the firm are all privileged. | |
| And that was when the judge got the light bulb saying, this man doesn't understand the nature of attorney client privilege. | |
| This does not cover all of this stuff. | |
| And I got to go reexamine this. | |
| So the prosecution opened the door to this whole thing. | |
| So it is still possible. | |
| Like basically, Terrence Bradley's in the position of having to either pick the position he took in his texts to Ashley Merchant or pick the position he took while on the stand. | |
| But he's going to have to contradict one of those prior things. | |
| Yeah, it's not a good position. | |
| And I certainly don't envy anybody being in that position. | |
| And another thing that we don't know, I think it's worth talking about is what did he say to the judge that was in the in-camera. | |
| Discussion back in the jury room or in the judge's office or wherever. | |
| They did it behind closed doors, do we know? | |
| It's okay, so it's going to be um, who was there, who was there yesterday, and and then you'll tell me what's happening today. | |
| Yeah, it would be the, it would be the, the witness, mr Bradley, the judge um, counsel for mr Bradley and a court reporter. | |
| So there's going to be a record and it's, and it may wind up being sealed, it may be revealed to the parties. | |
| It certainly is part of the record that would go up on appeal when there's any appeal from any of this um, but so there is a memorialization of what was said. | |
| Um, and so, until or unless we know exactly what that was, it's really hard for us to fully analyze all of this. | |
| But uh, if there's any discrepancies between um, what mr Bradley or any other witness, quite frankly, has said previously versus what they say in court, today is the day that he has an opportunity to clarify that. | |
| He's got the opportunity to say you know what? | |
| And philosophy, if he told the judge a story yesterday, if he actually did say judge, here's the story, and this is why i've been the way i've been, then the judge has that knowledge today and is going like he's not going to be able to get away with it today, because now the judge knows what the answers are versus where we were two weeks ago. | |
| Yeah, and that discussion was just yesterday. | |
| So uh undoubtedly um what, what we'll hear today may be some uh, iteration of what was discussed with the judge yesterday, what the judge would have been asking him to say, look, you know, tell me what the information is and tell me the circumstances uh, surrounding how you, you obtained it. | |
| And so there's. | |
| The judge is probably going to parcel out some instances where it might be um, attorney client privilege, but what? | |
| What Ashley Merchant is saying is, this was personal knowledge that was not obtained in the context of an attorney client relationship, and so the judge is, I think, going to allow her to drill down on that. | |
| She's going to be able to say look, this is the good faith judge now knows the content, so he's going to know which doors can open and which doors can't. | |
| But I just, even when I was a practicing lawyer, you'd have to present what's called a privilege log when you were withholding documents from the other side. | |
| And even in the privilege log which you know you, you've got to tell the other side like we've got all these. | |
| You'd have to say, this is the date of the document, these are the two participants, or three whatever, whoever, these are the participants on the document. | |
| And here is the nature of the communication. | |
| Without revealing the communication, you know there are certain where when who when why where, facts around a privileged communication that are revealable to the other side without getting to the what right, so like. | |
| All of that can fairly be probed by Ashley Merchant today, and I actually do expect substance of the communications. | |
| I, this judge, in his order, said the I these claims of privilege do not hold up, and so he's overruled the objection to having him testify to these subjects. | |
| That's what I expect will happen today. | |
| Right, let me ask you something else. | |
| Yeah, go ahead. | |
| No, I was gonna say there's another thing that we could. | |
| That could happen. | |
| It could be that there was privileged information that he's got, but the privilege may have been deemed waived by mr Wade because his prosecution team called Ashley Merchant a liar and said that she had no good faith basis. | |
| They may have opened the door, so to speak, to the admission of this type of information, even if it once was privileged. | |
| The judge might very well say, you know what, that's been waived and we can get into it now. | |
| Well, that's so interesting because it comes in. | |
| It's almost like a hearsay objection. | |
| It's not coming in for the truth of the matter, it's coming in to redeem Ashley Merchant. | |
|
Waived Privilege Claims
00:16:28
|
|
| There's not, I don't know that there's such an exception to the privilege law. | |
| But yeah uh, it could certainly have been waived by Nathan Wade, not not necessarily by his lawyer. | |
| Uh, I did think it was interesting. | |
| In that soundbite we played of hand Fanny on the stand. | |
| A lawyer writes a lie and then it's printed for all the world to see. | |
| She was speaking about Ashley Merchant, who did not lie. | |
| But that line is true about Nathan Wade, and we haven't even talked about his perjury in his divorce case which, which this judge knows very well, he committed because you don't need that, that's not a matter of dispute. | |
| He said in his divorce case under sworn interrogatories, that he never had an affair. | |
| He said on the stand in front of this judge that he did, that he had an affair with Fanny Willis while he was still married which, by the way, he still is. | |
| The divorce is not final. | |
| Um, so we know. | |
| And then he went back and tried to amend it with his fake made-up privacy privilege, which is not a thing, like saying oh, never mind I, I amend my answers to asserting a privacy privilege. | |
| That's not a thing, it's improper. | |
| So at a minimum he should answer for that unethical behavior with the bar and with the court. | |
| Um, but I want to get to this because I only have a minute with you left, Phil. | |
| Yeah, are there other DAS who could take this case if Banny Willis were disqualified and the whole office goes with it? | |
| Or Nathan Wade as well? | |
| And keep in mind there are two special prosecutors other than Nathan Wade who have been on the case. | |
| What is likely to happen? | |
| Are there other DAS who would take this circus? | |
| Yeah, you got to have a special prosecutor is not enough, you got to have somebody with the constitutional authority as a prosecutor. | |
| So what would happen? | |
| In Georgia we have something called the prosecuting Attorney's Counsel. | |
| It's a state agency and when they, when there's a conflict or some reason why a district attorney in the actual jurisdiction that we're venue would lay for an alleged crime, when that prosecutor can't for any reason handle the case, the prosecuting attorney's counsel has to decide. | |
| Look, are we going to appoint somebody else and, if so, who? | |
| And they're going to have to have. | |
| If they do that, they're going to have to have somebody willing, which this is an excellent point. | |
| I'm glad you brought it up because finally, Willis was disqualified from uh investigating Georgia's current lieutenant governor, Burke Jones, because he was was he was going to be one of these defendants if Willis had her way, but she had supported and given money and, I think, campaigned maybe, for his opponent in the election last time, and so the judge said, that's a that's a conflict of interest, you're disqualified. | |
| You can't go after people that you, you know, you politicked against. | |
| So to this day, the The prosecuting attorney's counsel has not referred that matter to any other prosecutor in the state of Georgia. | |
| So I'm of the mind that I need to, I'm not sure, Megan, whether or not they even would send us to another district attorney. | |
| But if they did, anybody that takes it is going to have to pick it up from the beginning and I think start over from scratch because if the investigation has been so tainted because of a constitutional violation for fundamentally unfair prosecutorial tactics, then all of it's going to have to go away and they're going to have to start over from scratch. | |
| And I don't know any prosecutor that wants to do that because it's going to consume their office. | |
| Most offices in Georgia don't have the resources that Fulton County seems to have for this. | |
| So I think that it's going to be a tough sell getting anybody to pick it up. | |
| Maybe there will be someone. | |
| But we may not even be necessary if the judge tosses the whole thing because then we're in the appeals courts. | |
| But, you know, it's going to be very interesting to see where this goes. | |
| We all need to buckle up. | |
| This thing was such a long stretch to begin with, this case against Trump and the other co-defendants. | |
| Fanny Willis, in my view, wanted to be a star. | |
| She wanted to make a national name for herself. | |
| She barely won this election. | |
| She failed in her election to be a judge. | |
| She gets in as DA and she saw an opportunity. | |
| There are reports from the defense counsel that she hired this media monitoring firm that she paid a bunch of taxpayer money to to make sure she knew about all the media hits on her. | |
| What are they saying about me? | |
| How often does my name appear in the press? | |
| Tell me everything they're saying about me and my case. | |
| She sat down for interviews. | |
| She did her press conferences. | |
| She was more out there than any of these DAs, certainly more than Jack Smith, I have to say, even more than Alvin Bragg in New York. | |
| She wanted to be a star. | |
| Well, there's famous and there's infamous, and she's starting to learn the difference. | |
| I don't think there's any way in which she sees this case through to the end. | |
| And I think the end is very clear. | |
| It's very near and clear for her and for Trump. | |
| Phil, thank you. | |
| To be continued, we'll do it again tomorrow when we know what happened. | |
| Yeah, you bet. | |
| Let's talk soon. | |
| All right, good deal. | |
| Okay. | |
| First, though. | |
| Well, we're going to get to Breitbart in two minutes because there's a reporter from Breitbart who's coming on with new information about what's going on inside Fannie Willis's office that we thought was so interesting. | |
| We're putting him on. | |
| So stand by for that. | |
| Now we continue our Fannie Willis coverage with a reporter who's been following this closely and he's been breaking news on this story. | |
| Wendell Husebo is a politics reporter at Breitbart News and he joins me now. | |
| Wendell, welcome to the show. | |
| How are you doing? | |
| Megan, thanks for having me on. | |
| Good day to you. | |
| Sure, and to you. | |
| All right. | |
| So you've got some reporting out today about a possible connection between the Biden White House and Fannie Willis's office. | |
| There's been a lot of buzz about this because we saw billings from Nathan Wade, who met with the White House in connection with this case. | |
| I think it was more than once. | |
| It was at least twice. | |
| And people were wondering what exactly was going on there because the White House wants us to believe they've had nothing to do with any of these prosecutions. | |
| None of their fingerprints are anywhere on them. | |
| This is just a Fannie Willis project. | |
| So what have you learned? | |
| Well, I have multiple credible sources with direct knowledge that a man named Jeff DeSantis is a plant or a type of liaison to the Biden administration in Willis's office. | |
| Jeff DeSantis is a DNC operative. | |
| He's been around Georgia politics for years and years. | |
| He ran Fannie Fonnie Willis's campaign in 2020. | |
| He helped her to transition in 2020 into 2021, and he's still there as a deputy DA assistant. | |
| So what, how connected is this guy to the Democrat Party outside of Georgia? | |
| He's very connected. | |
| I mean, he's run multiple campaigns. | |
| He probably knows everyone on the Rolodex of Joe Biden. | |
| I don't know that for sure, but that's just how connected this guy appears to be. | |
| His bio is extensive. | |
| He worked for the Georgia DNC. | |
| Like I said, he's run multiple campaigns and I have a story coming out tomorrow exposing that he worked with a member of Congress. in 2020 and was receiving funds in 2023 as a consultant. | |
| And so this just raises questions as to why he would be working for Fannie Willis at the same time as, you know, double dipping essentially on the campaign front. | |
| Or was it just, was it a convenient accident that this guy with national DNC ties winds up in the Fannie Willis office? | |
| Or was it intentional, right? | |
| That's the question. | |
| Did they just get lucky that somebody who's disconnected to the Democrats writ large wound up in her office or was he placed there? | |
| My sources tell me it's not a coincidence. | |
| That has yet to be, you know, sussed out how connected the White House is. | |
| But my sources, which have direct knowledge of the ongoings of the office, say that this guy was the point guy. | |
| Nothing happened in that office that this guy doesn't know about, this guy being Jeff DeSantis. | |
| And so more reporting to come. | |
| We have more breaking news in the following days on this. | |
| Okay. | |
| And just as a refresher, Mr. Wade's expense reports show he traveled to Athens, Georgia for a conference with the White House counsel's office on May 23rd, 2022. | |
| I do believe there was at least one other because there was that 24-hour bill that he submitted for his time. | |
| So we know that there's been at least some chatting between Wade and the White House. | |
| And we also understand that he's had multiple meetings because he's invoiced for them with the January 6th committee team meeting, conference with J6, research legal issues to prep interview. | |
| There's at least four of those bills by Nathan Wade's own hand. | |
| So, you know, all of this has the feel of coordination. | |
| I mean, we know we reported earlier, this was based on a political report that Biden's very angry at Jack Smith for not moving faster on those prosecutions. | |
| I think the Georgia prosecution was their ace in the hole. | |
| New York is going to be like a slap on the wrist. | |
| The federal prosecutions are big and bad, but they're not going anyplace anytime soon because of all the legal maneuvering. | |
| And Georgia was their ace in the hole because they have a very Biden-friendly prosecutor, a Biden-friendly jury pool. | |
| And while the judge is right down the middle, he's a former Federalist guy. | |
| So I think he's more Republican-leaning. | |
| It's better to have a good jury pool than to have the best judge. | |
| So this is the position they were in, which is why all of this is so potentially devastating. | |
| So this guy, DeSantis, what do we know about him? | |
| Like, what do we know whether he's been actively involved in the Trump case? | |
| My sources say that Jeff DeSantis is involved with targeting President Trump, helping organize it in the background. | |
| And between Jeff DeSantis and Nathan Wade, we have two guys who sources say were involved before and after this prosecution of former President Trump. | |
| And going back to Nathan Wade, Nathan Wade was on the transition team. | |
| Breitbart News reported this on Sunday that he led the transition team of Fannie Willis, Fannie Willis, coming into office and was in charge of hiring and firing Fonnie's staff. | |
| Willis was, Wade was not a staff member of Fulton County yet. | |
| So that really raises questions why he was there. | |
| Why was he directing staff decisions? | |
| On top of it, the sources told me that it was obvious that Wade and Willis had a relationship going on during this transition. | |
| And that contradicts what Wade said on the stand, which is that, you know, the affair really got going in 2022. | |
| Well, that's not what my sources are telling me. | |
| What did your sources observe between them? | |
| They observed behavior that, you know, indicates that they were in a relationship. | |
| I didn't go deeply into that. | |
| My reporting is mostly on how, number one, Wade was involved and led the transition team. | |
| And that number two, Jeff DeSantis, sources are telling us was a plant from the Biden administration. | |
| By the way, we should reach out to Jeff DeSantis and we'll bring you his response if we get one from him on this allegation. | |
| I assume he's. | |
| And I have reached out. | |
| I have reached out and I have not heard back. | |
| I would love to hear back and report their side of the story. | |
| Yeah, same. | |
| And we will reach out. | |
| The other piece of it is we've been listening to Fannie Willis from the moment this broke. | |
| You know, this alleged relationship and the kickbacks and all of that. | |
| She wouldn't come out and deny it directly to the voters because she knew she was having an affair, but she went in front of her church now twice, but especially the first time, got very political, started making it a race thing, saying they accused me of playing the race card. | |
| Isn't it they who played the race card and so on? | |
| She said they were picking on Nathan Wade because he's black. | |
| You've just uncovered information to show this woman's obsession with the skin color thing as, you know, indicative of who you are as a person runs deep. | |
| It didn't just start with the Trump case or these accusations against her. | |
| What's your latest reporting on that? | |
| Over at Breitbart News, you can go there right now. | |
| And our reporting is that Fonnie Willis essentially was running a race education program dubbed by many leftists as a DEI program. | |
| And my sources gave me slides, gave us slides. | |
| They gave us video of this race education program that was going on. | |
| If you look at the slides at Breitbart.com, you can actually see where the user of the software program was supposed to decide which color face was good or bad, predicated on if they were white or black. | |
| And so if you ask me, this is just explicit racism. | |
| The left cloaks this under DEI, equality, inclusion, all that garbage. | |
| But in reality, they are training or were training employees to judge people based upon skin color. | |
| It's really amazing because not only is this racist, but she's the DA. | |
| If this were a white DA doing this about black people, this person would be bounced out on their behind immediately trying to associate badness with a skin color. | |
| And it's no less pernicious just because she's black doing it to whites. | |
| You know, I'm sure the Trump defendants would love to cross-examine her a bit more on why she thinks white faces ought to be associated with these colors, with bad, with these judgments. | |
| You know, you did, I know, talk to some people who know Fannie Willis and they know how her office operates. | |
| Her reputation, I mean, it doesn't sound from your reporting like she's known as exactly, you know, an Einstein running around that place. | |
| No, in fact, the sources said that before Fonnie Willis won election in 2020, the staffers were very happy. | |
| And then when she came in, there were systematic changes to change the chain of command so that all of the employees were walled off except for a few select Jeff DeSantis and Nathan Wade to communicate with Willis. | |
| And so these sources tell me that the shop or the office over there was very corrupt and it was a very hostile work environment, which honestly you can see with Fonnie Willis being on the stand, she was very contemptuous and she was admonished by the judge after she had some sort of temper tantrum. | |
| And so these sources, again, they have direct knowledge of the office and they know these individuals inside and out. | |
| So their reporting is that it was largely a hostile work environment, that she's not the brightest bulb, that the thing was being basically run by DeSantis and Wade, that DeSantis has extensive DNC ties and also potentially ties to the White House, and that the belief by many people in a position to know close to and around her is that as you write your piece, anyone that has common sense knows the White House has been involved in this prosecution. | |
| This shouldn't just miraculously happen. | |
| Of course, Willis is not going to prosecute the former president of the United States without the current administration's approval. | |
| I mean, that makes sense to a lot of us. | |
| It doesn't seem like this, you know, relatively new DA with absolutely no resume behind her would run in there and start saying, yeah, I'll get him without some sort of a blessing or push. | |
| But it hasn't yet been proven explicitly. | |
| And to the contrary, it's been denied by those in power. | |
| You're casting real doubt on that today. | |
| We are. | |
| We are. | |
| I encourage everyone to go to brightbartnews.com. | |
| We have the DEI story up right now. | |
| In that story, in fact, we have a video of what Fonnie Willis showed the employees. | |
|
Sanctuary City Debate
00:15:36
|
|
| And it, you know, tells the employees to rank judges based upon their skin color and political affiliation. | |
| Well, judges in Georgia don't run for their position based upon political affiliation. | |
| So another thing is that this video was taken with a bunch of data that had nothing to do with Fulton County. | |
| It was an overarching data piece. | |
| And so the whole thing just seems to me just to be a bunch of hooey. | |
| Well, that would make sense because that's what her prosecution looks like to me, not to mention her sworn testimony. | |
| More on this case as we get it. | |
| The developments will continue throughout the day and we will bring you the latest news just as soon as we have it. | |
| Don't forget to tune into the show tomorrow because we'll have the full rundown. | |
| Wendell, thank you. | |
| When we come back, Mary Catherine Hamm is here. | |
| Don't go away. | |
| I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM. | |
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| Offer details apply. | |
| We are learning grim new details about the Georgian nursing student who went for a run in broad daylight, broad daylight last week and wound up dead. | |
| Lake and Riley was just 22 years old and by all accounts, well-liked. | |
| A sister. | |
| Look at this one young woman. | |
| A daughter, a friend who loved God, something her family says exemplified every aspect of her life. | |
| According to new court documents, her accused killer beat her so brutally, her skull was disfigured. | |
| Mother Effer. | |
| She was dragged to a secluded area, apparently in an attempt to conceal her body. | |
| Her death is shining new light on our open borders because her accused killer is a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who entered this country illegally and of course had prior run-ins with law enforcement. | |
| And while many are rightfully pointing to the fact that we simply do not know who has been allowed to run free in America, especially in the wake of this sick crime, one Democrat had a very different take on this tragedy. | |
| Listen to Katie Porter. | |
| Well, I think when a horrible tragedy like this happens, I think whenever we're dealing with violent crime, there is a sense of outrage, of sadness, and of loss. | |
| But I think the important thing to focus on is any one instance shouldn't shape our overall immigration policy. | |
| Joining me now, Mary Catherine Hamm, host of the Getting Hammered podcast. | |
| MK Hamm, great to have you here. | |
| How about Representative Katie Porter, Democrat of California? | |
| You know, what's important is to, is, shouldn't focus on any one instance to shape our overall, it's just this one, just this weird one-off. | |
| We're an illegal American. | |
| By the way, Democrats are so good at being very rational and calculating and never pinning their policies on one emotional story, right? | |
| That's like their whole MO. | |
| Look, a lot of being a Democrat is about policing what the rest of us are allowed to be upset about. | |
| And in this case, I'm upset about the loss of Lake and Riley. | |
| It's an outrage. | |
| It is viscerally awful to think about this young woman not being able to live her life from 22 into the future. | |
| Part of the reason is because I have a personal connection to the place where she died. | |
| It is a place that I ran that trail every single week of my college life. | |
| I went to the University of Georgia. | |
| I look at the pictures of her with her classmates, her best friend, her roommate. | |
| And I see a woman who's finishing a half marathon, who's going to tailgates with her friends, who's enjoying downtown Athens. | |
| And yes, going for this run in broad daylight, as you note, in a place that really felt safe, that was a wonderful place of memories for me. | |
| I know exactly where her body was found. | |
| I know the place they're talking about and what it feels like and what it smells like. | |
| And the reason it felt safe is because it was safe. | |
| There hasn't been a homicide on campus at the University of Georgia in 30 years. | |
| But the left will tell you that you're not allowed to be upset about this incident because it might like, give people wrong. | |
| Think about the border right. | |
| That's what the media will say. | |
| They're like, oh, let's just downplay that he was an illegal immigrant, because those are facts that don't help the conversation that we in the media think we should be having. | |
| But the conversation we should be having is about facts, right? | |
| She's you point out that the media and you know your own experience on this trail, and we talked about this yesterday. | |
| But the ap you saw it yesterday the killing of a nursing student out for a run highlights the fears of solo female athletes, as though the University OF Georgia had been having a problem with their solo female athletes just out running and being randomly attacked for those 30 years, as opposed to 30 years of peace. | |
| And then what changed our open border right? | |
| No, and and I want to, I think, part of. | |
| Look, there's two stories here. | |
| Right, there's a personal story for the friends and family of Lake and Riley who, by the way, the whole UGA campus had this very emotional memorial service on in the center of campus just flooded with people partially also for Wyatt Banks, a young man who lost his life to suicide the same week. | |
| So it's been a tough week for them and I want to honor that part of it and the personal part of it. | |
| It is also a policy story and if you want to honor the people who are involved and you want to honor Lake and Riley, you have to deal with the facts of the actual incident. | |
| So the person in custody is an illegal immigrant who had in run-ins with the law several times over, was hanging out with his brother in Athens, which is a sanctuary City sanctuary area, with a da who's promised to treat undocumented immigrants with uh, with kid gloves and those are, in her words uh, the undocumented immigrants, part um. | |
| And so he's hanging out there with three arrests. | |
| His brother comes down the the alleged perpetrator in this. | |
| He's arrested, maybe once in Athens, definitely once in New York, and these two guys, because of the federal policy and because of sanctuary city policy, don't have to worry about that endangering their time in America. | |
| They don't have to worry about that endangering their uh, sort of pseudo asylum claims. | |
| Right, they get to do, they get to live just as they want until the moment that they stop an innocent young woman from living and then maybe, maybe we'll hold them in custody. | |
| That's or the the, the one guy in custody. | |
| That this is. | |
| It's a travesty. | |
| She was failed by her government, whose fundamental, actual job is to keep her safe. | |
| You, you. | |
| There is a difference between this and, let's say, the George Floyd situation, where worst case scenario and we did the whole documentary on Derek Chauvin, which was very eye-opening um, but worst case scenario it's about a cop behaving badly and an individual. | |
| That's worst case. | |
| This is about a government system and policies put in place by the, by the sitting president, that have a direct connection to this guy's entry into the country illegally, as he quote, claimed asylum, which is just nonsense, and this young woman's death. | |
| But they won't. | |
| The Democrats won't turn this one incident incident, the way they did with George Floyd, into a national story. | |
| I mean, there was a tweet yesterday. | |
| Hold on a second. | |
| Where is it? | |
| I really liked it because I like this guy. | |
| But he was talking about how this is exactly what the Dems do. | |
| And they'll, what was it, Chad Panther? | |
| Yeah, it was Chad Brader, comedian, and wrote, hmm, they shaped a shit ton of policy after George Floyd died. | |
| I would say Lake and Riley's murder is a solid reason to shape overall immigration policy, especially when it was caused by a federal policy. | |
| And he said accurately, Katie Porter would change her tune if it happened to her. | |
| But Katie Porter is protected, so she doesn't have to worry, unlike Lake and Riley and the other girls and young men just like her on college campuses and elsewhere. | |
| Yeah, this is not a say her name scenario, right? | |
| They only liberals and media get to decide, by repeat myself, get to decide whose name we say. | |
| Well, I would like to say Lake and Riley's name, right? | |
| And we can all do that outside of their narrative setting. | |
| And that is something that we must do because look, you're right. | |
| The left will fabricate a way to change policy for its preferred ends based on an emotional isolated incident that may or may not apply at all, right? | |
| This one seems to actually apply to real policy and you could take care of some things to perhaps prevent such tragedies in the future. | |
| And that's the thing that I'm worried about. | |
| Because by the way, one of the brothers apparently had a job on campus, right? | |
| He has several arrests to his name. | |
| And why is that? | |
| It's partly because he has fake papers, right? | |
| So when he goes to the dining hall and says, I want a job, they run his papers and nothing pops, right? | |
| Because they're fake. | |
| An American citizen who has an arrest would actually have to pay a price for that. | |
| It might endanger their employment opportunities. | |
| But it's different, especially for an illegal immigrant in a sanctuary city. | |
| And Americans are right to look at the situation and be like, well, why don't you care about my safety or my employment? | |
| And it's always this person who's being put above me. | |
| It's like, not only do we need to look at, you know, where to send our kids to school, a place that's safe, ideally not woke, trying to indoctrinate them into hatred of Jews. | |
| You know, take your pay. | |
| These are the things we now need to worry about, right? | |
| As we send our kids off to school. | |
| But now you have to actually look, you think, Georgia, okay, yeah, that's good. | |
| South, it's like they're not going to. | |
| No, look within Georgia. | |
| It's becoming more and more blue. | |
| There are sanctuary cities there. | |
| There are whole counties that elect people like Fannie Willis and sick her on the former president. | |
| Like you really do have to pay very close attention. | |
| Who would want their child going to school in a sanctuary city? | |
| Where even, you know, we just saw the news in New York City where Mayor Adams was like, we're open. | |
| Welcome immigrants here. | |
| We will always be a sanctuary city too. | |
| Now we need to stop the sanctuary city policies. | |
| Too many people are getting hurt. | |
| We can't handle it. | |
| No, and I think, look, this is a calculation certainly for, and probably a surprise to some of the parents who sent their kids to the University of Georgia. | |
| Certainly, it's probably a surprise to some of the students who are there who didn't really think that this was the attitude of their local government because you're not generally really in tune to your local government when you're a student, but they are being failed, right? | |
| And their needs are not being put above those of the illegal immigrants who come to this community. | |
| Now, it matters, by the way, that the parents of those students, many of them and the students themselves, are Georgia voters, right? | |
| And the parents groups, by the way, who have University of Georgia kids lighting up. | |
| Just they are on fire this week. | |
| There was another person held at gunpoint apparently near campus during the same week. | |
| So they're going through a lot. | |
| They're talking about these things. | |
| They're paying a lot of money in many cases to send kids to a place where they like to be assured that someone's interested in keeping them safe. | |
| And it's something they're going to demand of local leaders. | |
| And they have some clout to do that. | |
| So I look forward to that. | |
| Here's the other thing. | |
| Here's the other thing that's disturbing about this guy's case is he wasn't, although there are plenty of single men who are coming across that southern border. | |
| And, you know, you really got to, of course, you feel differently about them than you do about single women. | |
| Single women are not the ones who are attacking women on running paths and generally are not the ones who are causing the felonious harm. | |
| And honestly, that's true of American citizens too. | |
| But in any event, it's mostly these men who do it. | |
| But this guy was married. | |
| This guy has a wife who's also an illegal immigrant claiming asylum. | |
| And under the Biden policy, his new quote, humane policy, those two would have been, they would have had the red carpet. | |
| There's no way he would have been holding them to account on returning back for asylum hearings and so on. | |
| Meanwhile, this is who we let in. | |
| According to new arrest affidavits that have just been released, he used some type of object as a weapon and is accused of, quote, disfiguring her skull. | |
| They have not said exactly how she was killed, only that her death was caused by blunt force trauma. | |
| He's accused of dragging her, 22-year-old woman, to a secluded area, that it was committed between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Thursday, and that he also stopped her from making or completing a 911 call, which is chilling. | |
| That's chilling, MK Ham, because, you know, she like, she must have tried and they must have seen it or they must have a record that she tried. | |
| And by call for help. | |
| By the way, this is a, this is an echo of the Molly Tibbett case from 2018, which the Associated Press in that story you noted about being afraid to be a solo jogger. | |
| They note the story of Molly Tibbetts. | |
| Molly Tibbetts, strikingly similar story, university student went out for a run, disappeared. | |
| It turned out the guy who's serving a life sentence for this was an illegal immigrant. | |
| And the reason that he attacked her was because she picked up her phone and said she was going to call police when she had a run in with him. | |
| So these are like, strangely, the AP can't find that common thread when they are writing this story because they don't want to find that common thread. | |
| That's not the conversation they want you to have. | |
| Those aren't the facts they want you to have. | |
| Wasn't that case? | |
| It's been a couple of years. | |
| Wasn't that the case in which a case in which her brother said, no, don't use this guy's immigration status against him? | |
| Like she wouldn't have wanted that. | |
| We don't want that. | |
| And I remember saying at the time, with all due respect to the grieving brother, that's not for him to say. | |
| That's not, that's not for him to say because there are other girls out there and young men who are going to be hurt by illegals just like these two. | |
| And we must say what led to this person being here and that it's a factor we have to consider and stop. | |
| No, you're correct. | |
| I read up on it the other day and part of her family did say that. | |
| And nonetheless, as I said, there are two different stories. | |
| There's the personal story and we want to honor the person who's a victim of this and their family. | |
| And also there's a policy story and the facts matter to the policy story. | |
| And somebody on Twitter asked me yesterday, well, they said, well, the statistics show that way more Americans commit these kind of crimes proportionally than undocumented immigrants or something like that. | |
| Are you scared of them? | |
| And I said, well, generally I'm scared of, I'm scared of all murderers, actually, when I'm around them, but I don't discriminate in that way. | |
| But what I would say is our question as a society and what government should be used for is at what point is this terrible crime preventable? | |
| And in the case of an illegal immigrant, it's preventable at the moment that they come across the border. | |
| It's preventable anytime they have a run-in with the police after that point. | |
| And so at many points, this might have been preventable. | |
|
Democrat Double Standard
00:02:35
|
|
| And that is just worthy of more outrage, frankly. | |
| It's so unthinkable that you could have stopped this and didn't. | |
| And didn't care to. | |
| The other piece of it is back to our Democrat double standard. | |
| The White House spokesperson responding to this, this must have been somebody other than KJP because I think it's just a written statement. | |
| We would like to extend our deepest condolences to the family and loved ones of Lake and Hope Riley. | |
| Now, this is the point at which when the right says this after an incident involving a gun and you say thoughts and prayers to the children or whatever, they excoriate you. | |
| You can't say thoughts and prayers. | |
| That's not allowed. | |
| Do something. | |
| Doesn't apply when the White House responsible for these policies says deepest condolences to the family. | |
| Okay. | |
| It doesn't work both ways. | |
| People should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law if they are found to be guilty. | |
| Wow. | |
| Given that this is an active case, we would have to refer you to state law enforcement and ICE. | |
| Very different messaging than we heard about, say, Kyle Rittenhouse naming. | |
| You can't talk about an in-progress case now. | |
| Oh, so weird. | |
| Right. | |
| Very suddenly. | |
| And people should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law if they are found to be. | |
| You mean this guy whose name we have, who actually is an illegal immigrant, Jose Antonio Ibarra? | |
| Say his name. | |
| Yeah, no, it's always this egregious double standard. | |
| And I think genuinely many in media, that's the area where I happen to have experience, think like, well, no, we're doing it for the right reasons, right? | |
| When we change policy, we're doing it for the right reasons. | |
| When we sensationalize something, when we're angry about something, it's for the right reasons. | |
| When you guys do it, it's for the wrong reasons. | |
| So bad, bad, bad. | |
| I mean, that's really as ham-handed and simple as it is. | |
| But that doesn't help people who end up being victims of crimes that you could otherwise prevent. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Ham hand. | |
| I like how you got ham handed in there, MK Ham. | |
| This is the MKs. | |
| Yesterday we had on the EJs. | |
| Now you and I are the MKs. | |
| I do want to point out that there, I mean, we could be doing this all day if we wanted to talk about the crime being committed by illegals, but here's just another one that just happened on Thursday. | |
| Campbell County, Virginia, 32-year-old Venezuelan, again, Renzo Mendoza Montez, arrested in connection with the sexual assault of a minor. | |
| He is here illegally. | |
| He was detained and released by Border Patrol in El Paso on September 2nd, 2023. | |
|
Troubling Background Details
00:09:56
|
|
| It was, he was just, it just happened. | |
| He was held without bond, but has reportedly, he was being held without bond, but has reportedly now been taken into ICE custody in the wake of this alleged crime against a minor. | |
| It's just our children. | |
| This is becoming an issue for Democrats too. | |
| And that's the only, you know, silver aligning to this mess is that they too are paying attention to the thing that Republicans have been jumping up and down about for a long time. | |
| All right, let's shift gears and talk about something else in the news, which is dark but stunning and also has this very strange media slash activist angle to it. | |
| And that is the death, this suicide, death by suicide of Aaron Bushnell. | |
| Now, if you're not online, you may not have seen this yesterday, but it was all over X. | |
| And it's too disturbing to show. | |
| I'm sorry, we are not going to show you this video. | |
| It's on X, but it's just too disturbing to look at. | |
| But this 25-year-old man set himself on fire outside of the Israeli embassy on Sunday. | |
| He, again, is a relatively young man. | |
| He was in the U.S. Air Force. | |
| He had joined in May of 2020. | |
| His service, I understand, not yet complete. | |
| And he doused himself with a liquid, some sort of accelerant, we believe, and set himself on fire. | |
| He had posted a video online saying he did not want to be, quote, complicit in genocide. | |
| And he shouted free Palestine as he burned. | |
| Per a friend to the Washington Post, he was scheduled to leave the military this May. | |
| Now, just a bit of background in him, MK, for the audience. | |
| He was part of something called the Community of Jesus, raised at a religious compound in Orleans, Massachusetts on Cape Cod. | |
| He eventually left the group, but the group's school is alleged to have created an environment of control, intimidation, and humiliation. | |
| This is via Washington Post, that fostered and inflicted enduring harms on its students. | |
| So clearly, there's some troubling things in this guy's background. | |
| You won't be surprised to learn. | |
| A former group member talked about members losing a sense of belonging once they left the group. | |
| That makes it sound like a cult, right? | |
| Once you're out, if you no longer feel the sense of belonging, could to potentially be. | |
| And his friends talking to the Washington Post talked about how two weeks before the incident, they had talked about their identities as anarchists and what kinds of risks and sacrifices were needed to be effective. | |
| That he, Bushnell, texted a friend on Sunday. | |
| I hope you'll understand. | |
| I love you. | |
| This doesn't even make sense, but I feel like I'm going to miss you. | |
| Sent a friend a copy of his will on Sunday. | |
| In it, he gave his cat to a neighbor in a fridge full of root beers to a friend. | |
| And then another friend, Lupe Barboza, told the Washington Post that this man, Bushnell, was outraged about what's happening between Israel and Palestine, in particular in Gaza. | |
| He knew no one who was in charge was listening to the protesters out there every week. | |
| He knows that he has privilege as a white man and a member of the military. | |
| And in response to seeing this guy set himself on fire, you literally have two of the presidential contenders, Cornell West and Green Party politician Jill Stein, celebrating what he did. | |
| The Cornell West post on X takes the cake. | |
| Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell, who died for truth and justice, exclamation point. | |
| I pray for his precious loved ones, exclamation point. | |
| Let us rededicate ourselves to genuine solidarity with Palestinians undergoing genocidal attacks in real time. | |
| And from Jill Stein, rest in power, Aaron Bushnell. | |
| I quote, I will no longer be complicit in genocide, free Palestine, quoting his dying words, may his sacrifice deepen our commitment to stop genocide now. | |
| My God. | |
| I mean, the story, the initial story is deeply disturbing and sad, and his death is useless. | |
| And then to see the reaction to it, and probably even more disturbing, possibly than the initial thing. | |
| Like the idea that we have a society where major figures who would be considered, I believe they call them thought leaders are valorizing self-immolation is just insane to me. | |
| There are moments when you look around at your fellow Americans and you don't want to have that moment, but you look around and you go, are we living in the same world? | |
| Are us, the two of us, are we living in the same world? | |
| Because any society that starts glorifying self-immolation is on a very, very bad path. | |
| And it's a very short path, by the way. | |
| And one of the few things that you can take from this, it's like a silver lining. | |
| It's a very short path to someone who would hurt a bunch of other people in the name of a political cause. | |
| He happened to only hurt himself, which is sad enough. | |
| But this is frightening. | |
| This reaction actually made me disturbed in sort of a physical way. | |
| I had to put down my phone and walk away from this conversation because I was like, what, what is happening here? | |
| What's happening? | |
| Yeah. | |
| How do you look at this? | |
| Again, we're not going to show it, but this deeply disturbing video. | |
| And I will just say he does not die immediately. | |
| And it's very, very bizarre to see this man on fire walking around, seemingly shouting. | |
| And to look at that and have any reaction other than this is horrifying. | |
| This is obviously a deeply disturbed man. | |
| And, you know, care and love to those who have survived him, who cared about this man, but we need to do more about mental health. | |
| That's the normal person's reaction. | |
| Here's Wajahat Ali, who was one of the guys in that infamous Don Lemon video. | |
| He used to be at CNN. | |
| You remember this, MK, who was sneering at the Trump supporters, you Trump supporters with your maps and your meth. | |
| Remember that clip with Don Lemon, this guy, and the Lincoln Project guy. | |
| So here he decides to weigh in. | |
| Rick Wilson was the third. | |
| There was a poster on X saying, I strongly oppose valorizing any form of suicide as a noble, principled, or legitimate form of political protest. | |
| Wajahat Ali responds. | |
| There is no evidence Aaron Bushnell was suffering from mental illness other than the fact that he set himself on fire and took his own life at 25, as you point out in an act that will do absolutely nothing to change the national conversation around Palestine. | |
| He was very clear about his reasoning for self-immolation, the most extreme form of protest against what he believes is an ongoing genocide against Palestinians by Israel. | |
| His last words were free Palestine. | |
| This is not the right horse to die on, Wajahat Ali. | |
| They really do see this guy as noble and totally sane and competent in body and mind and made this just a choice. | |
| It's like on the menu of things you can do, like get your picket sign and set yourself on fire and die at 25. | |
| It's right there. | |
| There it is. | |
| Yeah, and he sees it as courage, right? | |
| Yes. | |
| All of them do. | |
| Adherence to your values in the face of real odds. | |
| That's what he sees this as. | |
| And that's scary, frankly. | |
| And they're not going to do it. | |
| You know, not that I want them to, but I'm saying they're not going to do it. | |
| They don't think it's so wonderful they're going to do it. | |
| You know, they're going to use these terms loosely and irresponsibly. | |
| And then some other young disturbed person is going to do it because you're going to be like, oh, presidential candidates are praising it. | |
| Were we told on the right that you need to be very careful about things like that, right? | |
| Because you could set off the next school shooter. | |
| You have to be much more responsible in your rhetoric, Cornell. | |
| No, again, the rhetoric rules are always one-sided, Megan. | |
| Okay. | |
| So if we do it, bad. | |
| If they do it, it's for the right reasons. | |
| But I do think like there's actual studies that media coverage of suicide can create more suicides. | |
| Like you actually no longer say it. | |
| MK, that's why you're no longer supposed to say what the method of suicide was. | |
| Like after Kate Spade took her own life. | |
| She died by suicide. | |
| There was Anthony Bourdain. | |
| There was a spike. | |
| And the word went out. | |
| I was at NBC at the time. | |
| Like, we're no longer saying how they did it because it puts it in the mind of vulnerable people. | |
| Now, this, I mean, it's all, that's out the window too. | |
| All these same people want to be extra cautious when it's a civilian, don't care at all. | |
| Why? | |
| Because he's white and he's a Marine or he's an Air Force guy? | |
| I don't, or just given the cause and the fact that they, they're celebrating the fact that he thought his whiteness and status as a member of the military was something to be ashamed of and why, you know, he needed to do something extraordinary. | |
| We've lost our designs. | |
| No, it's crazy. | |
| There's a real left eats its own moment here where people were talking about the phrase rest in power and white liberals were pointing out you should not use the term rest in power for this individual, not because he self-immolated on behalf of a political cause and that's bad, but because that is a phrase reserved for the black community. | |
| And therefore to do that would be appropriating that and it's disrespectful. | |
| Like in the mind of some left-leaning tweeters, a person can literally light themselves on fire for your cause and it he's still just a white guy, right? | |
|
Contextualizing Hijackings
00:02:28
|
|
| Like it's it is the the insanity is sort of magnificent and it makes me like I said like viscerally disturbed just to see this fight play out. | |
| Like I want to like so that I might not cry, but I can't. | |
| Here's the hold on a second. | |
| Here's the best, the best piece of it. | |
| And by that, I just mean like the most stunning and horrifying. | |
| A Palestinian writer described himself as a writer and a poet, Muhammad L. Kurd, has nearly 400,000 followers on X. He's lamenting from the sound of this the following. | |
| You can't protest peacefully. | |
| You can't boycott. | |
| You can't hunger strike. | |
| You can't hijack planes. | |
| You can't block traffic. | |
| Yes, you caught me in there. | |
| In between hunger strike and block traffic, he's lamenting, you can't hijack planes. | |
| You can't throw Molotovs. | |
| You can't self-immolate. | |
| You can't heckle politicians. | |
| Yes, in between Molotovs and heckling politicians, he has self-immolate. | |
| You can't march. | |
| You can't riot. | |
| You can't dissent. | |
| You just can't be. | |
| His tweet has 3 million views. | |
| And then a Twitter poster, an ex-poster called Rose Dark retweeted L. Kurd and wrote, quote, reminder that plane hijackings used to be perfectly normal and were mostly nonviolent. | |
| 9-11 was an outlier and the first of its kind. | |
| That's Rose Dark trying to rehabilitate the reaction. | |
| This poster, you know, Muhammad L. Kurd, after people like, you know, you and me said, you can't hijack planes? | |
| You're equating that with it. | |
| And so Rose Dark says, plane hijackings used to be perfectly normal. | |
| They were mostly nonviolent. | |
| 9-11 was an outlier and the first of its kind. | |
| And I must, must spend a minute on what Charles C.W. Cook of National Review responded. | |
| He responded as follows. | |
| Yet another thing 9-11 took from us. | |
| The joy of those perfectly normal. | |
| It's callous humor, but we must. | |
| The joy of that. | |
| Nonviolent plane hijackings we all enjoyed. | |
| I remember it well. | |
| Do you have a layover? | |
| My parents would ask. | |
| That depends, I'd answer impishly. | |
| And then we'd all laugh and shout, fingers crossed. | |
| No, it's wild. | |
| These are wild takes. | |
| You have to contextualize the plane hijackings. | |
| You see, who was oppressed? | |
|
Molotov Cocktail Comparisons
00:02:51
|
|
| Who was not? | |
| Let's hash it out. | |
| The good old days. | |
| No, maybe I'll make it. | |
| Maybe I won't. | |
| I'm going to book a layover just to see. | |
| Here's a couple more from him. | |
| It was a simpler time back then. | |
| In the 1980s, my mother hijacked at least four commercial airliners in protest at the ongoing roadworks on the A-14. | |
| My uncle got to seven. | |
| My sister tried once after she was grounded, but she couldn't get the Stanley knife to open. | |
| Imagine, he adds, being so online that you can cast the pre-9-11 hijacking of planes, which was terrifying for all involved, as a perfectly normal form of political protest. | |
| Embarrassing. | |
| Grief. | |
| I know. | |
| Embarrassing. | |
| They're not embarrassing, though. | |
| Oh, it's again, embarrassing. | |
| The idea, by the way, that, and this is a problem on the left in general, that this guy can't tell the difference between something like self-immolation or Molotov cocktails versus protesting and hunger strikes, which you are absolutely allowed to do and you guys do all the time. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You're engaging hours without eating, just like two weeks ago. | |
| I know. | |
| And by the way, even the Molotov cocktails thing, it turned out in 2020 and that summer, not really so much problematic and often not rescued. | |
| So you got a lot of leeway in this country. | |
| Tons. | |
| One more. | |
| Barhana Sultana, a professor of public affairs, I'm embarrassed to say, at Syracuse University, told her followers that despite his self-immolation, indeed, Bushnell was of sound mind. | |
| RIP Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy as a political protest against genocide. | |
| Don't believe the spin doctoring otherwise. | |
| He showed more moral clarity and courage than politicians and genocidaires. | |
| They still try to spin doctor it as mental health issues, but he was rational and clear about his political reasoning. | |
| How the f does she know anything? | |
| She doesn't know jack shit. | |
| Sorry. | |
| Which resonates with the majority of the world. | |
| May his sacrifice not be in vain. | |
| Indeed, it was legitimate moral outrage and courage against the Holocaust and barbarity in Palestine with full U.S. participation. | |
| May his sacrifice not be in vain. | |
| May his last words on this earth ring true. | |
| Hashtag free Palestine. | |
| Now she has set her Twitter profile to private, but we did see before her big things were, I'm broadly interested in water governance, climate justice, political ecology, critical development studies, transnational feminist theories, critical urban studies, social justice, human rights, citizenship, decolonizing, and South Asia. | |
| But then you didn't need me to tell you that. | |
| You could have written that bio yourself. | |
| By the way, just everybody think about the money you're spending on college. | |
|
Media Conformity Bubble
00:11:46
|
|
| Think about it real hard. | |
| We spent 60 grand so I could go there back in the 80s to 90s. | |
| It was expensive back then, 15,000 a year to be exposed to idiots like this who want to celebrate the courage of somebody who dies by suicide in this manner. | |
| It's just true. | |
| If that's courage, what's not acceptable in the name of something you deeply believe in as long as it's a lefty belief? | |
| That's a good question. | |
| That's a scary road to walk down. | |
| Well, I mean, what are they going to do when somebody like that sets himself on fire and somebody else dies, which could have happened here? | |
| Exactly. | |
| Who knows? | |
| Like, God only knows. | |
| He could have wandered out into the street. | |
| Somebody could have hit him in the car and hurt themselves. | |
| Is that we're celebrating? | |
| Are we going to be morally conflicted about that because it was in the name of the Palestinians? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| All right. | |
| Last but not least, I've got to talk to you about this guy, Adam Rubenstein. | |
| I know you've been commenting on this. | |
| This is while we're on this subject of media, we'll end it on a lighter note. | |
| So this is one of the guys who was at the times when that whole Tom Cotton op-ed on what we should do with the rioters in the wake of George Floyd and whether the National Guard should be used to maintain order in the cities. | |
| He got caught up in all of that. | |
| There was the top guy who got booted eventually out, James Bennett. | |
| And then there was this guy who said he was kind of, it sounds like he was second in command on the on the Times side for this article. | |
| And he has written like a full download of what happened to him in the Atlantic, the title of which is, I was a heretic at the New York Times. | |
| I did what I was hired to do, and I paid for it. | |
| And we'll get to all of it, but we've got to begin, of course, with the opening paragraph, which I know you've read. | |
| It reads as follows. | |
| On one of my first days at the New York Times, I went to do an orientation with more than a dozen other new hires. | |
| We had to do an icebreaker, pick a starburst out of a jar, and then answer a question. | |
| Oh, Lord. | |
| My starburst was pink, I believe. | |
| So I had to answer the pinked prompt, which had me respond with my favorite sandwich. | |
| My God. | |
| Russ and Daughter's super heapster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn't a great way to win new friends. | |
| So I blurted out the spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A and considered the ice broken. | |
| Now, you or I could have told Adam that that was a mistake in front of the New York Times. | |
| So I think as soon as you say Chick-fil-A, if you spend any time on the right or consuming any sort of left or right of center media, you know that this is this is a trigger word for the left. | |
| Adam finds out the hard way. | |
| The HR representative leading the orientation, because there's always got to be some big boss there, you know, corralling your language, chided me, quote, we don't do that here. | |
| They hate gay people. | |
| Didn't you know? | |
| You're supporting gay hatred if you eat the chicken sandwich. | |
| People started snapping their fingers. | |
| My God, is everyone there 17? | |
| In acclamation, I hadn't been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman's opposition to gay marriage. | |
| Not the politics, the chicken, I quickly said, but it was too late. | |
| I sat down ashamed. | |
| And things did not get much better for Adam from there. | |
| So what do you make of his look back at how he was, his career was basically ruined over that Senator Cotton op-ed? | |
| No, so this, this is like a microcosm of all the problems with the media. | |
| The whole story is worth reading. | |
| This Chick-fil-A thing in particular, can I just note that a bunch of people on Twitter, like the Nicole Hannah Joneses of the world, are saying, we don't believe that this anecdote happened. | |
| Well, I've written at the Atlantic. | |
| They do a lot of fact checking. | |
| I imagine they have some backup for this. | |
| And also all of us believe that this happened because if I took a sack of Chick-fil-A into a room filled with the Chick-fil-A truthers who are saying this never happened and said, I got you guys lunch, they would call me out. | |
| They would say it's hateful for me to bring that chicken to them. | |
| We all know this. | |
| And yet they... | |
| Did you say Chick-fil-A truthers? | |
| Yes. | |
| You're right. | |
| That's what they are. | |
| I saw her. | |
| I saw her saying it's not true. | |
| Meanwhile, now all the friends of this guy, Adam, are like, he told me the story of the Chick-fil-A at the time. | |
| It's turned into this whole thing. | |
| It has. | |
| So, but the whole story is really bad. | |
| And what it, what it illustrates is not only that this newspaper did not have Rubenstein's back at all. | |
| He was a, you know, a mid-level opinion editor. | |
| He goes through all the right channels to publish this perfectly reasonable op-ed from a senator of the United States of America that a position, by the way, with which that he's expressing that most Americans agreed with at the time, which is that maybe we should have some military authority use some muscle to try to break up the riots here. | |
| Now, it made a distinction between protests and riots. | |
| They pretend it didn't, but it did. | |
| This should have been non-controversial in the paper of record. | |
| However, it was not non-controversial. | |
| And what happened was Rubenstein got called out by name in public by the New York Times as the person responsible for this op-ed, which all of the staffers at the New York Times, having never been exposed to anyone who disagrees with them in their media journey from Ivy League to the New York Times, that they said it made them unsafe. | |
| It made them unsafe, Megan, to see words that they disagreed with. | |
| Words. | |
| And unfortunately, the staff of the New York Times and the higher ups were either in agreement on this or too cowardly to say, no, you guys are wrong about this. | |
| And Rubenstein is the one who took the fall. | |
| The details about what happens in the New York Times Slack channel, which should be abolished immediately. | |
| I mean, these people are so dumb. | |
| Get rid of the Slack channel. | |
| Do not let the little hens get in there and cluck away. | |
| Are you going to wind up with, you know, a thousand of these situations, which they already have? | |
| He says he's conservative. | |
| He said he wrote for the Weekly Standard for a bit and the Wall Street Journal. | |
| So he should have known about Chick-fil-A. | |
| But he says it was a strange experience to be conservative or at least considered one at the times. | |
| I often found myself asking questions like, doesn't all this talk of voter suppression on the left sound similar to charges of voter fraud on the right? | |
| Only to realize how unwelcome such questions were by asking I'd revealed that I wasn't on the same team as my colleagues, that I did not accept as an article of faith the liberal premise that voter suppression was a grave threat to liberal democracy while voter fraud was entirely fake news. | |
| Same thing happened to him on the Hunter Biden laptop story. | |
| And then there's this. | |
| There was a sense that publishing the occasional conservative voice made the paper look centrist. | |
| But I soon realized that the conservative voices we published tended to be ones agreeing with a liberal line. | |
| It was also clear that right of center submissions were treated differently. | |
| They faced a higher bar for entry, more layers of editing, and greater involvement of higher ups. | |
| Standard practice held that when a writer submitted an essay to an editor, the editor would share that draft with colleagues via an email distribution list. | |
| Then we'd all discuss it. | |
| But many of my colleagues did not want their name attached to op-eds, advancing conservative arguments. | |
| And early to mid-career staffers would routinely oppose their publications, their publication entirely. | |
| They didn't even want their name associated with being an editor on it. | |
| So upsetting were the views of literally half the country, MK. | |
| No, this is the opposite of thinking. | |
| This is the opposite of inquiry. | |
| And Adam Rubenstein walks in there as a center-right person. | |
| Like, just like, I know that feeling. | |
| Everything he wrote, I was like, I know exactly what he's feeling, right? | |
| Because you see things slightly differently. | |
| And in a newsroom that was interested in finding news and facts and understanding the way people see the world, they would say, oh, interesting. | |
| That is a different way of looking at that. | |
| Can you please explain that to us? | |
| But actually the virtue for New York Times staffers is, as he notes, to already have a position, to take this as a given, that whatever thing the left believes is already true, done and done. | |
| You're done. | |
| You don't have to think about it at all. | |
| But the act of news gathering should be about thinking. | |
| It should be about rationally evaluating fact versus quotes and scenarios and an explanation from different sources and what their motivations are. | |
| But like the call is to not do that on the left. | |
| It's just to take in whatever the line is and agree with it. | |
| And then they surround themselves with nobody who disagrees. | |
| And someone like Rubenstein gets the, either takes the fall or gets the boot, right? | |
| If you object to that. | |
| Somehow he got in. | |
| So that's, this is how, you know, Barry Weiss left the New York Times too. | |
| I mean, she was in particular on Israel, outraged at their one-sidedness, wound up leaving. | |
| This guy, James Bennett, wound up leaving. | |
| I'll give you one last paragraph here because it's worth it. | |
| He writes about how it went down before the op-ed by Cotton was published and some of the back and forth he had with his higher ups there before they hit print. | |
| And he writes, I had one more task to take care of before it printed. | |
| Cotton's office had emailed me several photos that they wanted to see published alongside his op-ed, showing times when the same legal doctrine had been invoked in the past. | |
| One was of U.S. troops enforcing the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962. | |
| I sent these to a photo editor, and he names names, Jeffrey Henson Scales, and asked him to consider them. | |
| He wrote me back to say, quote, a false equivalence, but historical images are there now, meaning he had added them to the story file in the system. | |
| I thanked him and added a confusion emoji, emoji, in case he wanted to expand on what he meant. | |
| He replied by sending me the emoji of a black box representing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. | |
| Done and done. | |
| Did I write this in our in a fever dream or did this really happen? | |
| No, it's amazing. | |
| And by the way, he names names for a reason on that photo editor because that photo editor leaked his Slack against company policy to the New York Times' own reporters who were reporting on the placing of an op-ed in their own paper, and they misrepresented the chat to make him look as if he was admitting to inaccuracies in the piece. | |
| Like completely lied. | |
| That's right. | |
| That's right. | |
| That's actually a whole other thing. | |
| Right, where he talks about how the New York Times, once it went into a full meltdown about the fact that they had published the piece and there was all this blowback, that they just lied. | |
| Reporter after reporter, editor after editor, executive after executive just decided the only way to handle this was we all hate Tom Cotton. | |
| Some rogue employees got out of control. | |
| Didn't do the proper vetting, right? | |
| That's that's what this is. | |
| And really, you know, he exposes on now, it's not what happened at all. | |
| They're just cowards. | |
| No, I say this sometimes, and sometimes I feel like a little hacky saying it, but there are far too many people in media who have been taught to highly trained to reflexively lie for an ideology or to stay sort of in the conformity bubble. | |
| And not a lot of people who are practiced in thinking through issues because the thinking through has become a problem. | |
| College is the opposite of a place for free inquiry. | |
| It just is. | |
| And so if you're not ready to put your neck out like a Rubenstein, you're not here. | |
| You're not going to hear other arguments. | |
| You're not going to be the other arguments. | |
| You're not going to try to get to the bottom of something. | |
| And certainly it's not only the left that is guilty of this, but dag on in media. | |
|
Disregard for Dictators
00:04:21
|
|
| Woo! | |
| They are in control and they have trouble hearing anything that deviates from the line. | |
| Okay, I lied. | |
| I do have one other thing I want to get to you with. | |
| And that is President Biden finally gave an interview. | |
| He didn't want to do CBS and Gail King. | |
| So he decided instead to go, you know, forgive me, balls to the wall, Seth Meyers. | |
| Seth Myers? | |
| I honestly, like, I think I can safely say the biggest hack at NBC, the truly, like the weakest need, biggest hack at NBC. | |
| And it's a fierce competition. | |
| So right on, Seth. | |
| You're number one. | |
| Yay, you won. | |
| That's why you were chosen. | |
| We knew this about you beforehand, but that's why you were chosen. | |
| So congrats. | |
| And here is some of the scintillating exchange. | |
| And don't forget, NBC, as Rachel Maddow has explained to us many times, is a place you go for truth, for fact checking when something false is said. | |
| That's the principle they live by. | |
| That's why they cannot even air Donald Trump, cannot even air his acceptance speeches after these big victories. | |
| But this can air with absolutely no problem. | |
| Listen. | |
| It's just outrageous what he's talking about. | |
| He talked about how he wants to be a dictator in day one, but only day one. | |
| You are someone who has dealt with dictators over the years. | |
| It does seem as though democracy, in vague terms somehow, is not easy for us to grasp. | |
| Having dealt with dictators, what do you see in a world where democracy is actually at risk in a way it might be in this election? | |
| The first thing they do, the dictators do, is they disregard whatever the rule of law is. | |
| They just disregard it. | |
| Here's the guy who says he wants to, he thinks he can change the Constitution and just ignore portions of the Constitution. | |
| Here's the guy who talks about retribution. | |
| Here's the guy. | |
| Look, you have the guys, the thousands of people who stormed the Capitol, stormed the Capitol. | |
| They're insurrections. | |
| Two cops died. | |
| Other people were badly hurt. | |
| And what did he say? | |
| They got convicted and or they pled guilty. | |
| And he said, they're patriots. | |
| God, patriots? | |
| And he says he's going to forgive them all. | |
| He's going to, you're going to, every one of them is going to be released. | |
| What is, I mean, that's what happens in Eastern European countries. | |
| That's not what happens in America. | |
| And the idea that he thinks he can do that, the idea he talks about things like, for example, the idea that he said the Congress wants to pass an overwhelmingly a border provision that would allow us to control the border. | |
| First bill ever introduced call for that. | |
| And here they're saying, he's saying, no, don't do that because that'll help Biden. | |
| Help Biden. | |
| It's about not about Biden. | |
| It's about the United States of America. | |
| And look, it just, I don't want to get started. | |
| Democracy is a state. | |
| It literally is. | |
| I mean, there's so much. | |
| Okay. | |
| There's so much. | |
| I know. | |
| I'll give you, I'll give you a couple of my thoughts on it. | |
| Disregard the rule of law. | |
| Trump wants to disregard the rule of law. | |
| Okay. | |
| You mean like what you're doing in these federal prosecutions, breaking norms that we never crossed before in our 200-plus year history. | |
| Ignore the Constitution. | |
| He wants to ignore the Constitution. | |
| You literally just bragged about doing that with respect to student debt, quote, forgiveness. | |
| They told me I couldn't do it and I did it. | |
| I didn't listen to them. | |
| There are many other examples. | |
| Retribution. | |
| He's about retribution. | |
| Look what he's doing to Trump. | |
| Not to mention that FBI informant who turned out to be, they say, not credible and who they believe who lied to him, who's getting treated like no one else who double-crossed the FBI or who gave false information. | |
| They stormed the Capitol and cops died. | |
| That's not true either. | |
| They've been telling that lie over and over. | |
| Congress wanted border protection and he stopped it because it would help Biden. | |
| It's not about Biden. | |
| It's about the United States of America. | |
| We've covered that in the beginning of this show. | |
| It is about the United States of America. | |
| You say we need to be more humane, which is why you opened the border and your proposed border bill was full of holes and was actually totally feckless. | |
| We could go on, but democracy is at stake, MK, but not for the reasons he says. | |
| I like my jaw dropped, but I didn't hear any of that from Seth Meyers. | |
|
Certifying Election Results
00:01:18
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|
| Oh, no, no. | |
| It's not his job to push back on that. | |
| You know what a nefarious government might also do? | |
| And he notes like that's what Eastern European countries do. | |
| They might call the duly elected president a foreign asset and use national intel wrongly against him and other American citizens and use a compliant media to say that he was a Russian asset for about four years of his presidency to then go like, oh, oops, we didn't have the goods and then pretend that that never happened. | |
| That's a thing that might happen in one of those countries. | |
| And that's what happened to Donald Trump. | |
| Like that's a real thing, guys. | |
| But they do not see it in themselves because, of course, they do it for the right reasons. | |
| Other people do it for the wrong reasons. | |
| By the way, there was a piece, just to come full circle on the media. | |
| There was a piece in the Atlantic this week about, hey, you know, if Trump were elected again, Democrats could on January 6th refuse to certify the election. | |
| Yeah, that is exactly right. | |
| But the Bill is wrong. | |
| Just FYI retribution is deeply wrong. | |
| MK Ham, what a pleasure, my friend. | |
| Great to see you. | |
| Good to see you. | |
| To be continued. | |
| All right. | |
| And don't forget, tomorrow we'll have a full rundown for you of what happened today with Terrence Bradley. | |
| We'll see you then. | |
| Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show. | |
| No BS, no agenda, and no | |