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April 23, 2024 - The Megyn Kelly Show

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Gag Order Violation 00:14:41
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111, every weekday at least.
	Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
	Did former President Donald Trump violate the gag order issued by Judge Murshon in the New York City hush money case?
	That was the question argued before the court this morning.
	The judge has not made a ruling yet, but it does not look good for the defense.
	And what would happen if Mr. Trump is found to be in violation of the gag order?
	We're in unchartered territory right now.
	This as his actual trial is back underway.
	Pecker's up.
	He's up again.
	He's back in the courtroom, back with us to discuss it all.
	Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article 3 Project, and Dave Ehrenberg, state attorney for Palm Beach County, Florida.
	Find Mike on Fox and Dave on MSNBC, but only together right here on the Megan Kelly show.
	Guys, welcome back to the program.
	So this judge did not seem like he was happy about Trump's statements out of court about Michael Cohen.
	For example, he seemed to be begging the defense lawyers to give him a reason why he should not find Trump violated the gag order.
	I don't know why he hasn't ruled yet, but you tell me, Dave, doesn't look good for Donald Trump here.
	It seems to me like he's about to be found in violation.
	Yeah, Megan, good to be back with you and Mike.
	I think the worst part was where the judge told the lawyer, Mr. Blanche, for Trump, that you're starting to lose credibility with the court.
	That's never a good thing when you're a defendant.
	You hear that your lawyer is losing credibility with the judge.
	But ultimately, I don't think Trump is going to get a big penalty here at the beginning.
	I think he'll just get the fine.
	It'll be graduated over time.
	And then maybe at some point, if this continues, he'll get something more serious.
	But in that sense, I do think he's being treated differently than others.
	I can tell you as a prosecutor, Megan, if someone else acted like this, they would be wearing steel bracelets by now.
	But, you know, the judge is very aware that Trump is running for president and he is Trump.
	He's going to let Trump be Trump.
	And so although the judge is seemingly very annoyed right now, I don't think that this is going to result in anything more, at least for now, than a fine.
	The judge said to Team Trump, Todd Blanche is Trump's lawyer, you're losing all credibility with the court.
	This is citing from the New York Times when Blanche insisted that they, meaning Trump and his staff, are trying to follow the rules.
	He said, you're losing all credibility with me.
	He also said he wants to hear an assertion under oath that Donald Trump believed he was not violating the gag order when he made some of the posts they were discussing.
	That doesn't sound good, Mike.
	That sounds, I don't, I doubt they're going to get such an assertion from Donald Trump.
	Todd Blanche was saying, look, this gag order, we're trying to comply with it, but Trump has a group of folks who work for him.
	They find articles that they think Trump's audience should read.
	And some of those articles may have criticisms of witnesses like Michael Cohen.
	And that shouldn't be held against Trump, I suppose, is the line of argument.
	So this Democrat Manhattan judge, Juan Rashon, questioned Trump's lawyer's credibility.
	Let's look at Judge Mershon and this court's credibility on this case.
	You have this sorrow-spunded Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg who campaigned on getting Trump.
	He brought these bogus charges against Trump that are at best campaign, that are at best bookkeeping violations.
	They're not even bookkeeping misdemeanors, but at best they're bookkeeping misdemeanors from 2017 that are clearly time barred beyond the statute of limitations.
	This case was brought after Matthew Colangelo got deployed from the Biden Justice Department, the number three office in the Biden Justice Department, a top political appointee who worked for, you know, Eric Holder and Tom Perez and Obama and Democrat Attorney General in New York and Biden and Merritt Garland.
	He gets deployed to the Alvin Bragg's office to resurrect this zombie case 30 months later after Trump left office.
	This is clearly election interference.
	It's clearly lawfare.
	It's part of the Democrats organized campaign.
	There before this Democrat, Manhattan Judge Juan Murshon, who donated to Biden in 2020, he donated to another anti-Trump cause.
	And more importantly, his adult daughter, Lauren Michon, is a top Democrat campaign operative and she's raised nearly $100 million off of her father's unprecedented criminal trial of a former and likely future president of the United States.
	That is a clear conflict of interest under New York law requiring Judge Murshon's recusal.
	That's not just Mike Davis saying that.
	That is a former Clinton federal judge in the Southern District of New York going on Caitlin Collins' show on CNN on April 5th and stunning Caitlin by saying that this Judge Murshon has not recused.
	His actual response has been to put an unconstitutional gag order on Trump.
	Okay, but that doesn't, I appreciate the sentiment, but like, let's stay specific for today because our audience has heard these more sweeping arguments before.
	And I do think it's very interesting whether this judge is going to punish Trump for violating the gag order because you really are gagging a presidential candidate from speaking publicly about the witnesses who are out there about him all the time.
	So I get the unfairness of it.
	I'll stay with you on this, Mike.
	I get that it's unfair, right?
	That Cohen can go on MSNBC every day and say the most despicable things about Trump possible.
	But for now, the order, the gag order says Trump is not allowed to respond.
	And so what do you think this judge is going to do?
	Because it does appear to me Trump's violated the letter of the gag order by attacking Cohen.
	But what now, what position is this judge in?
	Because he's either going to fine him or he's going to throw him in jail.
	I don't think we're yet at point B.
	Well, the problem is that this judge put in place an unconstitutional gag order.
	It is not constitutional to broadly gag a criminal defendant like this.
	If there's anyone in America who must have the first, sixth, and 14th Amendment rights to speak out against the judge, the prosecutor, the witnesses, the staff, the biases, the process, it is a criminal defendant going through a criminal process, particularly when that criminal defendant is a presidential candidate, and particularly when that presidential candidate is on the receiving end of obvious Democrat lawfare and election interference.
	So yes, this Judge Murshon could say, yes, we're going to put President Trump in jail.
	I actually dare him to do that because I actually think that will guarantee that President Trump is back in the White House.
	I know.
	I mean, I think he knows that, Dave, right?
	Judge Mershon is not oblivious to the fact that if he actually put this defendant in jail for violating this gag order, it would cause a meltdown in the country.
	Yeah, agreed.
	That's why they're just going to do $1,000 per each violation.
	That's even what Bragg asked for.
	Didn't ask to sentence Trump to pretrial incarceration.
	So they're not there yet, but he does need to cool down on the attacks, especially on the jury.
	You know, you had at least one member of the jury, the alternate, came to the judge and said in tears that not sure if he wants to continue.
	One member of the jury pleaded to get let off and she did.
	So it is a problem.
	I mean, you have jurors who are there doing their civic duty and they're getting accused of being 95% Democratic as far as Manhattan being Democratic and being like plants for the Democrats.
	You got to calm down on that.
	And as far as attacking Michael Cohen, he can't engage in witness intimidation.
	I know it seems unfair that Cohen can attack him.
	And I know prosecutors are probably cringing at the fact that Cohen is still going after Trump online.
	That's not a good look.
	It's not good for the prosecution.
	But our system is that if you engage in witness intimidation and harassment, that's a violation.
	That's against the law.
	And at some point, Trump needs to dial that back.
	It's not a good look for him.
	And he could get hit with bigger things than just a fine if he continues in the future.
	Michael Cohen was all over MSNBC, I think, just within the past few days, calling Trump despicable.
	He wants to see him convicted.
	I mean, all of this is terrible for the DA's case because he's going to be a witness, a trial, and he's going to get cross-examined with all those statements.
	Like, you'll say anything.
	You can't stand him.
	He's become your nemesis in life.
	You'll do anything to see him go to jail, just like you did, sir.
	Isn't that true?
	Like, this is terrible, but Michael Cohen wants his name and lights and to see his face on television more than he wants to preserve whatever is left of the integrity in this trial.
	So, I mean, in a way, it's not bad for Trump to have Cohen out there saying all this stuff, but I can see how it's very difficult for him not to respond.
	All right.
	So, we'll find out how the judge rules on the gag order.
	I agree.
	It's probably going to be a slap on the wrist.
	Thousand bucks here, a thousand bucks there.
	I don't think he violated anything on the jury, though, in the reference that you just made.
	I did listen to it.
	I have it here.
	It's immersed in a discussion from MSNBC between Rachel Maddow and Andrew Wiseman, former prosecutor, where they were talking about whether this was a violation of the gag order.
	And I'll play it here, but for reasons I'll explain, I don't think they've got him on this at all.
	SAT 7.
	Here it is, Donald Trump talking about the jury in his trial.
	That jury was picked so fast.
	95% Democrats.
	The area is mostly all Democrat.
	You think of it as just a purely Democrat area.
	It's a very unfair situation that I can tell you.
	That jury, 95% Democrats.
	Again, the last item in the gag order forbids Trump from making or directing others to make public statements about any prospective juror or any juror in this criminal proceeding.
	So you have Donald Trump clearly goading the judge.
	The fact that he's doing something that appears by all accounts to be a direct violation of the order.
	Dave, I don't see it.
	I think he caught himself.
	Trump's very clever.
	He's no dummy.
	And he said they're all Democrats, this area, right?
	It was like comma, this area.
	And he saved himself that he is not going to get in trouble on that one.
	What do you think?
	That's a really good point because you can look at it different ways, but it looks like he did catch himself.
	He's wrong.
	The area is not 95% Democratic, but he won't get in trouble for saying that.
	But it went 87% for Joe Biden in Manhattan.
	87%.
	He's close enough.
	It was a good reference.
	Well, you can have a lot of independents who vote Democratic, but yes, a point taken.
	But he can't really, he shouldn't be just addressing the jurors, their party affiliation, their biases at all.
	So yeah, you may be right, Megan, that he doesn't get slapped down specifically for that yet, but he'll be admonished.
	I suspect that Judge Mershawn is not only going to hit him with fines, but is going to broaden the gag order to say no more mentioning juries in any way.
	So I think it's going to be a tighter gag order against Trump and a fine.
	But yeah, nowhere near impartial.
	Let me ask you about that.
	So then, Mike, I mean, would Trump under this, you already said you think it's unconstitutional.
	So I get that.
	But let's just talk about the letter of the gag order.
	Would he be prevented from saying on this juror, on this jury, I have seven men and five women.
	I have jurors only from Manhattan.
	I have mostly professionals and college graduates.
	Would he be prevented from saying that?
	Because if he's not prevented from saying that, he's not prevented from saying they're mostly from a Democrat area.
	You're proving the point, Megan, that this gag order is unconstitutional.
	Gag orders are supposed to protect criminal defendants.
	They should be gagging Cohen, right?
	Because he is a witness who is tampering with the jury pool by going on TV and bashing Trump.
	They should not be bashing Trump.
	He's the defendant, right?
	And that's.
	Let me just jump in and say one thing to your point, Mike.
	I'm thinking about the Idaho case, which, you know, we've talked about a lot on the show against Brian Kohberger.
	That judge issued the sweeping gag order, which people are unhappy with, but even the families of the victims there are barred from speaking.
	The defendant's barred from speaking.
	They're all barred from speaking.
	It has some, you know, equal weight on both sides of the case.
	This one is just the defendant.
	You will keep your mouth shut about everybody other than the judge and the jury and the prosecutor.
	He's allowed to criticize the prosecutor and the judge.
	Yeah, and that's the problem.
	The whole point of a gag order is to protect the defendant.
	It's to make sure it's a limited time, place, and manner restrictions on other people's free speech rights in order to protect the criminal defendant's constitutional rights to get a fair, public, and speedy trial.
	It is a limited time, place, and manner restriction that goes away after the trial.
	You gag other people.
	You don't gag the criminal defendant.
	If the criminal defendant is actually making threats against the judge, his family, the witnesses, the jurors, there are criminal statutes that address that.
	Obstruction of justice, witness tampering, not this vague and over broad gag order on a criminal defendant going through the process, particularly when he is a presidential candidate, the leading presidential candidate.
	And your point is, your point's perfect, Megan, that can he talk about that it's 50% men and 50% women or whatever?
	That's the problem.
	He doesn't know if he can talk about that.
	That makes this gag order unconstitutional on its face.
	Yeah, it's just, it's not, they were talking about that soundbite, Dave, as if Trump had said, like, these jurors suck.
	They're biased.
	They'll never give me a fair trial.
	He says that about the judge every day, including today after the gag order hearing, he posted something untruthful.
	That's okay.
	He can go after the judge.
	But they're talking about in that soundbite as him as though he said that stuff about the jury.
	And he didn't.
	All he said was what we played, nothing more.
	So I think that was a sleight of hand.
	And I predict he'll be okay on that.
	You agree with me.
	Yeah, I do think he'll be okay with that.
	Well, I think it'll be a tighter gag order to prevent him from doing that in the future.
	But I do think that he was pretty clever in catching himself on that.
Bogus Felony Case 00:16:27
	The fact that he can continue to bash the judge is such a shock to me as a prosecutor that judges are allowing a defendant to go ahead and go after them.
	The gag order does not prevent Trump from going after the judge or the prosecutor, just the judge's family, just the witnesses, just the jurors.
	So that's why I think he's being treated better than other defendants.
	Remember, once you're arrested for a crime, you don't have the same First Amendment rights as everyone else.
	You're told you cannot communicate with victims.
	You cannot communicate with witnesses.
	You can't drink alcohol.
	There's all these other limitations on you.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, we see that all the time.
	It's enough to stay above the law.
	But wait, so you're telling me in your average case, if you have a defendant, the defendant's not allowed to criticize the judge?
	Oh, if a defendant criticizes the judge, that defendant we brought in and held in contempt.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I don't know of any other case.
	I don't know of any other case where the defendant is out there bashing the judge.
	This judge is allowing, and all the judges have been allowing Trump to do things that no other defendant that I'm aware of has done.
	And I've never seen it before.
	I've never seen someone do that.
	I'm sure it's the unique circumstances of his role in the public eye and potentially public service.
	Here's what he tweeted or posted on Truth Social.
	It was, it says 8 a.m.
	He writes, highly conflicted, to put it mildly, Judge Juan Murjon has taken away my constitutional right to free speech.
	Everybody is allowed to talk and lie about me, but I'm not allowed to defend myself.
	This is a kangaroo court and the judge should recuse himself.
	So the judge is allowing that, which I just think he has no, he has no choice but to allow.
	Okay, enough on the gag order, as fascinating as that is.
	It's way more interesting to talk about what happened in court yesterday.
	And I'm dying to talk to you guys.
	I'm so glad that we had you booked because as Alvin Bragg laid out through his emissary, Colangelo, laid out what he's actually alleging, Mike, I was like, heh, right?
	Where was the big thing about the campaign finance violation, which is what resurrected the dead misdemeanor, right?
	It wasn't there.
	You know, the audience is probably familiar enough with this at this point, but you know, it was like he has a misdemeanor under New York law of alleged falsification of business records.
	And that statute of limitations had long since run.
	The only way he resurrected the dead claim was to say the reason they falsified the record was to cover up an underlying felony.
	And we all said when Bragg filed the indictment, okay, what was the underlying felony?
	Lay it on us.
	And remember, we talked about on the show.
	He was like, I don't have to tell you.
	He said that at a press conference.
	He's like, I don't have to say.
	And then he's like, it might be finance law in New York State.
	And then that quickly fell apart.
	People were like, you don't have that.
	No, that's not it.
	And so then it was kind of like, well, federal, federal election law, but he's kept it pretty vague.
	And for this past year, we've all been looking at federal election law.
	Like, I guess it's campaign finance violation where he's saying this $130,000 payment that was made to Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet in advance of the election was considered a donation to his campaign that he didn't properly document, blah, blah, blah, all that.
	That's not how it's sounding.
	It's sounding much more amorphous and innocent than that.
	He's saying yesterday, Mike, the DA, it's about a conspiracy, which has not been alleged as a crime, to help Trump get elected by this whole catch and kill scheme where Trump's friend at the National Inquirer was paying off women to give him the exclusive rights to their stories, and then he wouldn't publish them to help Trump.
	Like, that's it.
	Were you surprised?
	Is that the sum and substance of this case now?
	I'm not surprised that this is a bogus case because I've been saying that.
	But did you hear what I heard?
	Did you hear?
	Like, were you waiting for like the big, like, where is it?
	Is this it?
	That the AMI?
	No, I mean, I knew they had nothing.
	And that's the problem is that you have, and there's no reason that Judge Murshon should not have dismissed this case on a motion to dismiss the indictment because it doesn't add up.
	There's no legal violation here.
	Even if everything Matthew Colangelo and Alvin Bragg allege is true, there's no legal violation.
	You don't violate any law.
	And remember, it's not a crime for a businessman to settle a nuisance claim or hush money or whatever you call it.
	It might be unseemly to some, but that happens all the time.
	And you'd have to prove that Trump only did this because he was running for president and he was trying to do this to benefit his campaign.
	You know, let's look at Trump's past.
	I bet he's paid off a lot of nuisance claims in his 40-plus year business career.
	And that's why this case is so silly.
	I mean, it's why the prior Manhattan DA, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney, the Federal Election Commission, and Bragg himself declined to prosecute this case until Colangelo got sent.
	But if Trump talks about Colangelo, he violates the gag order.
	So there was a very interesting piece today, Dave, staying on this same point in the New York Times.
	It was a guest essay by Jed Handelsman Sugerman, law professor of BU.
	And the headline is, I thought the Bragg case against Trump was a legal embarrassment.
	Now I think it's a historic mistake.
	And he goes on to talk about how he listened to the opening statement yesterday by the prosecutors and said this is such a vague allegation about, quote, a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election, which he says has him more concerned than ever about their unprecedented use of state law and their persistent avoidance of specifying an election crime or a valid theory of fraud.
	This is how I was feeling too.
	And he went on to say, look, as a reality check, it is legal for a candidate to pay for a non-disclosure agreement.
	Hush money is unseemly, but it's legal.
	And that's exactly how I felt.
	He said in this opening argument, the prosecutor still evaded specifics about what was illegal about influencing an election, but then just claimed it was election fraud, pure and simple.
	None of the relevant state or federal statutes refer to filing violations as fraud.
	Calling it election fraud is a legal and strategic mistake, exaggerating the case and setting up the jury with high expectations that the prosecutors cannot meet.
	And indeed, the defense got up there and said, it's not election fraud to try to get yourself elected, to try to pay off people who want to say damaging things about you.
	Like that's not, they're boiling it down to something that is going to be, I think, rather easily dismissed.
	Megan, here's what's going on.
	And I was surprised too, because Mike and I and you, we all agreed that this case was going to be about falsification of business records.
	And the second crime, which takes it to a felony, would be federal campaign finance violations.
	But remember, there were some problems because can you piggyback on a federal law to elevate a state misdemeanor to a state felony?
	Well, the prosecutors decided to go in a different direction.
	And this is the most underreported story out there.
	I'm glad you're asking me this question.
	Instead of federal campaign finance violations, they instead found a different statute, a second statute that's a state crime.
	And that is section 17-152.
	You can read it with me and your audience can read it with me.
	It's called conspiracy to promote or prevent election fraud.
	I think it's here.
	Here's what it says.
	Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
	So what they're doing is they're taking this obscure, vague statute that creates a misdemeanor for conspiring to influence an election and using that to elevate this underlying crime, the falsification of business records into a felony.
	Okay, this is very important.
	This is extremely important.
	I want to let you finish your point.
	People need to pay attention.
	We've been talking now for a year about how we thought they were going to try to make it a campaign finance thing, and he's not.
	He's going a different way.
	And this, what the statute you mentioned is it.
	Conspiracy to promote election fraud by two or more people, two or more people conspire to promote election fraud by unlawful means and election by unlawful means.
	What are the unlawful means?
	Because you can't jump right to the falsification of business records.
	We have to start with the felony before you can even ask whether he falsified records about it.
	What were the unlawful means?
	Right.
	And that's that is the issue that prosecutors are going to have because the unlawful means is not the hush money payment.
	That's not illegal, as Sugarman and Mike have said.
	But what is illegal is the campaign finance violation.
	So we're back to the state, excuse me, the federal law.
	We're back to that again because when Michael Cohen made the contribution of $130,000, that was a federal campaign finance violation.
	That's the illegal means.
	So that's what they're saying.
	They're saying we don't need to rely on federal law.
	There's a state law on the books that makes what Michael Cohen did illegal.
	And thus, one misdemeanor plus another misdemeanor equals a felony.
	The biggest problem, though, that I think prosecutors will have, Megan, is not at the trial.
	I actually think there's enough evidence to convict.
	I think on appeal, the judges on appeal may say federal law preempts state law in this area.
	The federal campaign finance law preempts a state law, and thus the felonies are thrown out.
	And we're just going to keep the convictions against Trump as misdemeanors.
	That could very well happen.
	This is so convoluted.
	So it's the underlying felony that resurrected the dead misdemeanor is this state law saying two people can't conspire to promote an election by unlawful means.
	And the unlawful means jumps us over to federal law.
	And it's an alleged campaign finance violation in that he paid $130,000 to a porn star to keep quiet with the sole purpose of advancing his election.
	But we've already interviewed election officials, former commissioner of the FEC on the program saying in order to qualify as a campaign finance violation, that $130,000, not even just in Trump's mind, would have had to be for something that could only ever be used for an election.
	In other words, the test isn't exactly, it's hard.
	Let me try to restate it.
	To figure out whether that $130,000 is an illegal payment, like a campaign finance violation.
	You have to prove that no one would ever pay a hush money payment for any purpose other than to win an election.
	Mike is shaking his head yes, and Dave is shaking his head no as I say that.
	That's the law.
	Why do you say no, Dave?
	Because I was on the program with you, Megan, when we had that expert and I counted.
	Brad Smith.
	Right.
	And remember, I counted, I said, what about John Edwards?
	And he said, oh, yeah, that was the exception.
	And so the Fed did prosecute John Edwards for it.
	Now, it was a hung jury.
	He wasn't.
	Okay, how'd that work out?
	Yeah, it didn't work out too well.
	But I think the facts actually are stronger against Trump than John Edwards, but that's we can talk about that later.
	But there is precedent for it.
	So that's where I disagree with Brad Smith.
	So Dave actually proved my point when he said that there's enough evidence here to get a conviction that may not get upheld on appeal.
	That's the whole move here.
	This is what Alvin Bragg is doing.
	This is what Matthew Colangelo is doing.
	This is what Judge Murshawn is doing.
	They are trying to get a criminal conviction of President Trump, a felony conviction of President Trump before November 5th, 2024.
	They don't give a damn if that gets upheld on appeal by the New York courts or the Supreme Court of the United States.
	It just proves that what they're doing is election interference.
	Okay.
	The misdemeanors would hold up.
	Yeah, the misdemeanors would hold up, but not necessarily the felony.
	They're time barred.
	They're time barred.
	Well, why they could continue to prosecute the misdemeanor in this guy.
	I thought the court said no, that you can continue.
	It just may not rise a level.
	I thought we were talking about the falsification of business records, which was expired two years after it happened.
	So, you know, that would have been done back in, what, 19.
	And the only way it got resurrected was because it was to cover up an underlying felony.
	But if there's no underlying felony, if that if that jiu-jitsu you just walked us through is not blessed by the appellate court, the case is dead.
	But if you don't have the underlying misdemeanor, the underlying 34 counts of falsification on business records, and the whole case goes away.
	So that's not barred by statute limitations.
	You can still pursue that.
	It's just a question of whether it will ever rise to a felony.
	And that's something for the appellate courts, because I do agree we're in uncharted territory here.
	I think you're saying.
	I think we're not on the same page.
	Mike and I are saying you can't, you don't even like once that underlying felony collapses, we don't have to spend any time on whether there was falsification of business records.
	It's done.
	It doesn't live as a claim unless you can prove an underlying felony.
	That's all we're trying to say.
	And we think that the underlying felony is not going to be found by an appellate court.
	No, you can still have the falsification of business records standing alone.
	It's just that no prosecutor would have ever brought that.
	But it's time barred.
	But those were from 2006.
	Yeah, it's over.
	You cannot have those.
	That's why he had to tie it to an underlying felony because the time statute of limitations had expired on that claim.
	Megan, we're on different pages here, but it's my understanding that you couldn't even bring the case if the underlying misdemeanors.
	Remember, the only counts in this are 34 counts of misdemeanors.
	That's the indictment.
	That's the only thing.
	And if those were time barred, they couldn't bring it, regardless of what the second crime is, which he's never expected.
	I don't know what he's saying, but Mike and I in the audience understand this perfectly.
	I don't know what Dave took a gummy before coming on the show today.
	A vitamin B gummy, maybe.
	Okay.
	I'm pushing that argument off to the side because it was confusing and I don't think we're on the same page, but I think we've accurately stated the law as it is.
	Okay, let's talk about some of the analysis that I've been watching because I love to watch how the media covers these events.
	And here is some of the Trump defense.
	Actually, let me do this soundbite before we get to the stuff I saw in MSNBC.
	The Trump defense is in part on whether that misdemeanor, Mike, writing down legal expense when in fact it was a hush money payment.
	His part of his defense is there was nothing wrong with what I wrote.
	You know, even if Michael Cohen was paying off Stormy Daniels on my behalf and then I reimbursed him, categorizing it as a legal expense is not a lie.
	It's not a falsification of a business record.
	So he's going to take on, you know, he definitely thinks that claim is time barred and he thinks there's no underlying felony, but he does have to fight the fight.
	So in fighting the fight about whether he falsified a business record, he's going to say, I think, first of all, I didn't do anything.
	I had a bunch of accountants and people who handled this stuff for me.
	But second of all, what did they do?
	They marked down legal expense when they were paying off my lawyer, Michael Cohen.
	Here's a bit of that.
	This is Trump yesterday speaking to it.
	SOT1.
	They called a payment to a lawyer a legal expense in the books.
	They didn't call it construction.
	They didn't say you're building a building.
	They called a payment to a lawyer.
	This is what took me off and takes me off the campaign trail because I should be in Georgia now.
	I should be in Florida now.
	I should be in a lot of different places right now campaigning and I'm sitting here.
	And this will go on for a long time.
	It's very unfair.
	So what about that?
	If my lawyer pays off a debt that I owe and I reimburse my lawyer, what's wrong with documenting it as a legal expense?
	That's a good question.
Fraudulent Legal Expenses 00:14:59
	I mean, I think it happens pretty routinely with businessmen when they have their lawyers settle claims for them, right?
	And this is going to set a pretty interesting precedent for these New York businesses and New York corporations and New York businessmen.
	If they're settling a nuisance claim through your lawyer, which is pretty routine, if they're going to be charged with bookkeeping misdemeanors and that's going to be transformed into felonies many years down the road, if you're in political disfavor with the prosecutor and the judge, I mean, that's the path we're heading down.
	I feel like this is one of those things, Dave, that a jury could get very easily.
	They wrote legal expense.
	He was paying his lawyer.
	How is that fraud?
	Well, you have two lawyers on the jury and an engineer, and they're going to really dissect this.
	That could be beneficial for the defense.
	But they have evidence that Trump was part of this scheme with Michael Cohen and David Pecker to pay hush money and that these weren't legal fees.
	The legal fees were a ruse.
	Michael Cohen was a fixer.
	He had a campaign email address.
	And there are lots of other things that show that this was all about the campaign.
	And so it should have been disclosed as a campaign expense.
	It was hidden by filing it as a legal expense.
	And Trump is saying, I had nothing to do with it.
	I know nothing.
	It was a low-level accountant whose name I can't, I don't even know.
	And I think that's hard to believe, especially because I think you have to take that leap to think that Michael Cohen somehow did this on his own, and then Trump just reimbursed him afterwards.
	Michael Cohen is a lawyer, and Mike is an excellent lawyer, but not even Mike Davis will shell out $130,000 of his own money, take out a home loan to pay off a debt of his boss and not tell him until later.
	So I don't buy that explanation by Trump.
	Well, and they're also going to have testimony in connection with another payoff to another woman, Karen McDougall, that has Trump on tape acknowledging the deal.
	So they don't have that on the stormy payment, but they do have it to show, look, he knew about this one and blessed it.
	What are the odds that he didn't know about the stormy one and that Michael Cohen just did that out of the goodness of his heart?
	And Cohen, of course, is going to testify.
	Trump knew all about it.
	And the only reason I paid it is because he told me to.
	And that's why Trump's going to say he's a liar.
	But yeah, I mean, I think there probably will be some evidence that it wasn't just some random accountant and that Trump knew the payment was being made to Michael Cohen.
	But the documentation of it, you said legal fees.
	I do think that's different.
	A legal fee is different from a legal expense, right?
	Legal fee to me implies I'm paying you for your time as a lawyer.
	Like I'm paying you for your research, your drafting, your appearances in court for me.
	Legal expense, I don't know.
	I think we're closer to what they actually did.
	You went out and incurred an expenditure on my behalf and I reimbursed you for it.
	Yeah.
	Well, they've got phone calls between Michael Cohen and Donald Trump at the time that Michael Cohen created the entity that would be used to pay off Stormy Daniels.
	And they've got Halen Weisselberg's notes that he took that describes the reimbursement scheme and they're pretty detailed.
	And then you have this text message between Stormy Daniels' lawyer and someone at the Trump team or it was, I think it was, I forgot who it was.
	It was Stormy Daniels' lawyer at the time who texted someone right after Trump won the election to say, what have we done?
	What have we done?
	Yeah, what have we done?
	Yeah.
	It was the AMI.
	Wasn't it the AMI?
	It was Pecker or somebody or Dylan Howard.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it was Dylan Howard Howard, who's underneath Pecker over at National Inquirer.
	Okay.
	So you keep saying scheme.
	And this is one of the things that I'm stuck on too, Mike.
	Can we use a scheme in this way if what they're doing is legal?
	Like scheme makes it sound, I guess, extra bad.
	That's what we hear all the time in the court and outside in the press.
	What really is he accused of doing?
	He was running for president.
	A porn star with whom he may or may not have had an affair comes forward to say, I'm going to the National Inquirer.
	I'm going to tell the world that I slept with you.
	True or not, I'm going to tell them that.
	Everyone's going to hear that.
	Your wife, your children, your minor son.
	And I'm going public with it.
	And he says, you know, this billionaire to whom $130,000 is, yes, he's a penny pincher.
	They point that out in court, but he's a billionaire.
	It's not like $130,000 for you or me.
	Says, get rid of her.
	Like, fine.
	Like, by the way, not for nothing, but that amount, like $100,000 to $150, that is classic.
	Just make them go away money.
	That's not huge dollars.
	That's like a nuisance value settlement.
	So the number comports with just get rid of her.
	I don't want to deal with this.
	And the scheme was, I'll just do it through my pal, David Pecker, who runs the National Inquirer.
	He's going to catch and kill the story.
	He's going to say, come here.
	Here's $130,000, or in the case of Karen McDougal, $150,000.
	Write your story.
	Supposedly, we'll print it, or maybe we won't, but we buy the rights to it.
	And then you go away.
	So how is this schemey?
	Like so far, even according to this BU professor in the Times that I read from, or was it BC?
	I just make sure Boston University.
	That's not illegal.
	And when did this Karen McDougall catch and kill allegedly happen?
	Was it during the presidential campaign?
	It was before the presidential campaign.
	So that actually provides evidence that Trump, if he did this, he's not doing it to benefit his campaign.
	He's been doing that for a long time.
	That's the thing.
	So like, Dave, scheme, okay.
	But like they're taking conduct that, let's face it, men have been engaging in for a very long time and trying to make it this big illegal scheme.
	It's like he paid off a woman who was threatening to say something embarrassing about him.
	How is it a scheme?
	The way that it was structured is to make a campaign contribution, essentially.
	It's an expenditure to the campaign.
	It's something that Michael Cohen was paying Stormy Daniels $130,000 when the limit was $2,800 at the time.
	And when you do that, that's a violation.
	That's the illegal conduct on which the statute rests.
	So that's the problem here for Trump.
	But in the way, so under that logic, Dave, under that logic, no man can pay off somebody, a woman, any woman who comes forward or person from their past and says, I'm going public with damaging information while that man is running for president.
	You cannot do it.
	Once you've declared, you have to let all the terrible information come out.
	You just have to let yourself be smeared by everybody.
	You can't pay off anybody to keep quiet and sign an NDA.
	Well, you have to do it legally under campaign finance laws.
	You can use like third parties.
	Trump could have just paid it out of his own pocket.
	That's the thing.
	Trump wanted his company to pay it.
	You can go to the fact that Trump didn't like to dig into his own pocket.
	But if he had just reimbursed it out of his own pocket, there'd be less of a campaign finance issue here.
	But the fact is, Michael Cohen paid it and then his company reimbursed it.
	And there is the issue because it was an illegal campaign contribution from a donor, in this case, Michael Cohen.
	And then it wasn't recorded as what it really was in the business records.
	So that's what led to this problem.
	And as far as John Edwards, this is important on this.
	John Edwards had third parties pay his mistress.
	Bunny Mellon.
	Right.
	And the payments started well before the election.
	And here's the key for John Edwards, though.
	They continued after the election.
	So for Trump, there's evidence that he told Michael Cohen, don't pay Stormy Daniels after the election.
	Let's try to postpone this so we don't have to pay.
	Then it won't be, that won't matter.
	So that shows that the whole intent here was to influence the election.
	So I don't think he used his business.
	I don't think he used business funds to pay this.
	I think it came out of the revocable trust in his personal funds.
	Dave has no comment on that.
	I don't know what that is.
	Well, regardless, the way that it was recorded was legal fees, which is the statute here.
	That's the violation.
	But if when Michael Cohen made the payment, that was the contribution that needed to be reported.
	And then separately, the Trump organization, whoever reimbursed it, has to report it properly.
	And it wasn't legal fees.
	Well, the problem is that the statute applies to business records and that this payment came from personal funds.
	And so that's another legal problem with this whole case is that they're going after President Trump for having fraudulent business records or whatever they're labeling that he, but the problem is he used his personal funds to pay this.
	It's so convoluted.
	There is no jury that's going to understand this, but I do think a jury can understand how is it fraud when he wrote down legal expense.
	He paid the lawyer back and he wrote down legal expense.
	How is this a fraud?
	Hold on.
	There's an update from inside the courtroom on Pecker.
	When describing this via New York Post, when describing the August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower, this is between Trump and David Pecker, where they struck this deal.
	You know, you're going to help me bury bad stories.
	David Pecker said he warned Donald Trump that women would try to sell stories about him as his presidential campaign heated up.
	I was the person that thought there would be a lot of women to come out to try to sell their stories because Mr. Trump was well known as the most eligible bachelor and dated the most beautiful women, Pecker said.
	It is my experience that when someone runs for office like this, it's very common for these women to call the National Inquirer and try to sell their stories.
	He goes on to say he had an unwritten agreement with Trump, quote, it was an agreement amongst friends, end quote, when learning that there was a negative story about Trump.
	He said the agreement was mutually beneficial, meaning it would help Trump's campaign and help sell magazines.
	Pecker testified that he didn't want anyone to know about the agreement, telling editors to keep this as quiet as possible.
	I do think the timing of that is rather interesting.
	The meeting was August of 2015.
	August 6th, 2015 was the presidential debate, the very first of the Republican season, in which I asked Trump that question about women.
	And that became, you know, a lot, that narrative was interjected into the campaign in a very visible way.
	And then these two sat down and I'm sure did come up with a deal where his friend would take care of him.
	I mean, if I were friends with David Pecker and I were running for president, I'm sure I'd go to him and be like, please bury the negative stories about me.
	You know, they're like, I'll tell you a story.
	Back when I left NBC or right around there, the Daily Mail, which I now love, but they were writing terrible pieces about me all the time.
	And a friend of mine knew somebody who knew somebody who was like running the Daily Mail or owned the Daily Mail.
	I can't remember.
	They said, you know, I can arrange a meeting for you with this person.
	And you can basically ask for a pardon.
	You know, you can beg for them to stop hitting you.
	And I was like, I'm not going to do that.
	It's the media.
	This is what we do.
	Like, they're allowed to write hit pieces about me.
	It doesn't have to be pleasant for me, but that's just, you know, that's life.
	Kind of have to suck it up.
	Not everybody makes that choice, but like, would that have been improper if I had been somehow running for office?
	I have a connection.
	I say, yo, could you please lay off?
	No.
	So this is not actually that untoward.
	There's nothing wrong with Trump using a personal connection who runs a national tabloid to say, please don't let these women come forward and say these things about me, which for the record, Trump is denying are true.
	He is denying.
	I know kind of a lot of people think he just did it, but for now, he's denying that it even happened.
	There's nothing nefarious about it.
	You can talk about what's whether it's right in the lane of morality, but that's not what we're here to adjudicate.
	Okay, this brings me to Rachel Maddow.
	And she got into on her show last night, her one hour a week for which she gets 30 million bucks, this scheme of catch and kill.
	Because it wasn't just Donald Trump that the National Inquirer did this for or other publications did this for, but she winds up landing this in a different place than I will.
	So here's SAT six.
	Today when David Pecker was on the stand, he is the one who volunteered the phrase checkbook journalism.
	They do sometimes.
	They do sometimes, with people other than Donald Trump, find out negative information about a person and then decide not to run it.
	And why do they do that?
	Because they want to have that person consent to be on their magazine covers for other reasons.
	They want to own them.
	They've done this about Cosby.
	Bill Cosby had a bunch of bad information about him.
	They did not run it in exchange for Cosby then doing exclusives with them.
	They had a bunch of bad information on Arnold Schwarzenegger, did not run it in exchange for Schwarzenegger doing a bunch of stuff with them.
	The difference is when they did it with Donald Trump, they only did it when it came to the election.
	Prosecutors said today in their opening statement they had never before paid anybody for any information related to Donald Trump.
	It was to help Donald Trump win the election.
	And that is when it became a crime.
	Okay.
	I just want to say the sanctimony espoused on that set last night about this checkbook journalism and how these media outlets would bury stories in exchange for, you know, some sort of an exclusive or for nefarious purposes that are really not above board is really rich coming from NBC News, which has been most infamous over the past five years for having the Harvey Weinstein story.
	They knew he was raping women and sexually assaulting women.
	They had allegation after allegation through Ronan Farrow, and they spiked it and let Ronan Farrow walk out the door with what would be a Pulitzer Prize winning story on Harvey because, according to Ronan Farrow, they didn't want Harvey to unleash on Matt Lauer, who they had reason to believe was hurting women inside of the NBC building,
	had been sexually harassing or assaulting women within their own roof.
	And so they allowed effectively, in my opinion, Harvey Weinstein's rapes to keep going so that Matt Lauer's sexual harassment and assaults could keep going.
	That was the deal they struck, which does not give her the moral high ground to come out there and condemn Trump saying, could you please bury the porn stars allegation against me in no way, shape, or form, alleged to be non-consensual.
Critique of NDAs 00:14:30
	That's the underlying sickness behind every discussion NBC is having about this.
	And only those of us with a memory that's longer than two minutes understand how wrong it is.
	I'll start with you on it, Mike, for NBC to be playing moral arbiter here on so-called checkbook journalism.
	You're exactly right.
	And they're just purely partisan operatives on NBC, particularly on MSNBC.
	Rachel Maddow's one of the worst.
	They're so intellectually dishonest about this.
	They're so partisan.
	And for them to pretend like that, you know, they're the moral crusaders here is just absolutely laughable.
	All right.
	And it's not, I'm not going to go to Dave because he goes on MSNBC and I don't want to put you in the uncomfortable position of criticizing a network that is good to you.
	I understand.
	That's not appropriate, but Mike's good.
	Here's Ronin when his book, Catch and Kill, hit publicly explaining some of this.
	Watch.
	They ordered a hard stop to reporting.
	They told me and a producer working on this that we should not take a single call.
	They told us to cancel interviews.
	The question for years has been why.
	I mean, you lay out the suggestion that Harvey Weinstein was blackmailing NBC News.
	Multiple sources do say that, and the way in which that's framed is very careful.
	All of NBC's denials are in this book.
	We fact-checked for many hours with them.
	That said, it is indisputable based on the evidence in this book that there was a chain of secret settlements at this company that were covered up with victims of harassment and assault.
	Some of them about Lauer, some about others in the company.
	This was a pattern.
	It was concealed from journalists there.
	That is what the extensive conversations and transcripts and documents presented in this book suggest.
	It's really unbelievable to sit them, the very network.
	I mean, it's the same thing.
	NBC and MSNBC have the same top executives at the top level.
	And to sit there and try to sell to us that what we're seeing with Trump is criminal after what they did.
	And no one was hurt in the Trump allegations.
	He had allegedly a consensual affair that someone threatened him with exposure of, and he paid her money to go away.
	In their situation, sexual assaults and rapes and allegations were happening in both lanes, the Harvey lane and the Matt Lauer lane.
	I understand the denials, as they point out.
	Harvey denied it.
	He's been convicted.
	Lauer denies it too.
	NBC denies Ronan's allegations.
	But it's rich, Mike.
	It's perfectly rich.
	These are the people we're relying on for honest coverage on this case.
	I'll give you the last word.
	I just say I dealt with Ronan Farrell during the Cabinet confirmation, and he came at me because, you know, for you, I don't think you've, I think he was going to write a hit piece on me on how I handled it.
	And I actually talked to him and he gave me a very, you know, he wrote a very fair story.
	You know, it wasn't a, it was certainly not a warm and fuzzy story, but it was a fair story.
	So I do respect him as a journalist.
	And it's not just Ronan.
	Rich McHugh, his producer, backed him up.
	Okay, guys, we'll be right back.
	Another word on NBC before we leave the subject.
	There's another woman over there named Alex Wagner who was on the same panel making a similar point.
	I'll stick with you on this, Mike, about how they're trying to, quote, normalize NDAs, non-disclosure agreements in this abominable Trump courtroom.
	All right, take a listen to her.
	Number one, for all journalism students out there, checkbook journalism, not a thing.
	It is not a thing.
	The strategy from Trump's team, at least as I understood it today, seems to be to normalize outlandish things.
	The arguing that NDAs are just a common practice, that lots of wealthy people do them.
	This is nothing abnormal.
	Everybody has NDAs.
	You guys might not have heard about them before, but it happens.
	This is a thing that is done.
	Just because Trump had a bunch of people signing NDAs doesn't mean there's anything suspect about that.
	Catch and kill.
	It happens all the time.
	There's nothing illegal about this scheme.
	This sort of thing happens all the time.
	This is from Todd Blanch's mouth to the jury.
	And then my favorite, there is nothing wrong with trying to influence an election.
	It's called democracy.
	That is not how the world works.
	There is so much to dissect there, Mike.
	I mean, NDAs, NBC is the king of NDAs, okay?
	Somebody in this discussion right here might have been forced to sign one.
	I have a list of women that's longer than Santa's scroll who have been forced to sign NDAs by NBC News and MSNBC, Alex.
	So you might want to do your homework before you bash them as a tool that's only used by people who are on criminal trial.
	Although on second thought, maybe NBC will be headed there someday and her remarks will prove true.
	But that's right.
	And the checkbook journal, like this is not how story, how journalism is done.
	As I point out, this is how NBC News handled journalism when it came to its Pulitzer Prize winning story that it let walk out the door and go to the New Yorker.
	And not just that, Mike, but look at the number of stories that were manipulated, suppressed, buried, or promoted. during the 2020 election.
	We could go back to 16 too for Hillary, but let's just stick with 2020 when it came to Trump v. Biden.
	To sell to a jury that only the Republican did this evil thing of manipulating the media is going to be very tough.
	Yeah, I mean, I was a real lawyer in Colorado for 10 years before I got dragged back into DC and the political scene.
	And I'll tell you, NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, these payments, they happen every day in the legal practice.
	And to say that Trump is trying to normalize them shows that this young journalist is absolutely clueless and sanctimonious or she's lying.
	So it's one of the two because it's routine in the practice of law and the practice of politics and the practice of journalism that you use non-disclosure agreements and you have to make payments.
	You have to make, you have to settle nuisance claims from time to time, actually quite frequently, if you're a big target.
	You know, you can call it hush money, but it's the settlement of a nuisance claim with a non-disclosure agreement.
	The other thing is, Dave, you know, the New York Post reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop was universally suppressed by the mainstream media.
	And we saw just two weeks ago an expose by an NPR insider saying they were intentionally keeping that out of the news at NPR because they knew that it would help Trump.
	And they openly said, no, this will help Trump.
	Okay, no cash exchanged hands, but it's in principle the same exact thing, a friendly media outlet that says, I want the election to turn out a certain way and shapes its coverage accordingly.
	Well, Megan, first off, you're right.
	NBC has treated me very well.
	So I'm not going to criticize them, but you can see why the mainstream media is critical of a publication like the National Inquirer, who was actually working with Trump to try to help his election in this case.
	Now, you're bringing up the New York Post story, and I think actually it's fair to bring that up because you had the press who thought this was some Russian disinformation or something that was going, that was planted and they stopped it.
	And in the end, we don't know exactly where it came from or what, but it's something that probably should have been out there and let the people decide.
	But yeah, I hear- I know where it came from.
	It came from Hunter to a legally blind repair man.
	Then Hunter never picked it up.
	And then a legally blind repairman called Rudy Giuliani.
	And by the way, the FBI had it too and verified that it was Hunter's.
	Well, regardless, it is something I agree with you that should be out there.
	Actually, and as far as NBC, they're the ones who are trying to point to this National Inquirer as what you should not do.
	And I agree with them because you don't engage with a presidential campaign to try to figure out a way to help them get elected and be used as a tool to buy a story and to kill it just to help a campaign.
	Can I go back to one thing real quick, Megan?
	I promise real quick.
	Because you said I was doing the gummies, but the reason why I talk about the statute of limitations issue, I just have to tell you, and Mike and I were talking off air, is because there is a provision of New York law that says that when you move away, like in the White House or Florida, the statute of limitations has paused for up to five years.
	So that's why I still believe that even if it's just misdemeanors, that prosecutors could still bring the case against Trump for falsification of business records.
	I was not smoking the peace pipe.
	I don't think that virtually anybody else accepts that.
	I mean, none of the legal experts I've been following in this believe that that would have resurrected this dead claim.
	But okay, point taken, no gummies involved.
	Thank you.
	I do want to, let's see, hold on a second.
	There's, I want to make sure I've gotten everything here.
	Oh, okay.
	This last question on the Trump trial.
	We had the ruling yesterday morning that virtually everything Trump has ever done is going to come in against him if he gets cross-examined.
	And we've been talking about this issue in New York State in connection with my pal Arthur Idala, who represents, speaking of Harvey Weinstein, he represents Harvey Weinstein.
	And he just had an argument before the New York State Court of Appeals, our highest court, saying you made it impossible for him to take the stand in his own defense by saying like every woman he ever interacted with or had a complaint about him was going to be allowed to take the stand against him.
	And like the prior bad acts evidence would have been so overwhelming, it would have absolutely ensured a conviction.
	And the ones they even allowed, even without him testifying, was very lengthy.
	It was a lengthy list.
	So Trump is kind of facing the same thing where they had a hearing and they said, if he takes a stand, it's going to be a lot of bad things we're going to let in.
	And this is where Andy McCarthy, he had a piece on this today.
	The law fare against Trump, Dave, that's already gone down, is really coming back to haunt him because the judge is going to let in the Letitia James, you know, $450 million judgment against him, fraud, corporate fraud.
	The case against Weisselberg, his top financial guy, who was found guilty of a criminal violation, another fraudster.
	The fact that he defamed Eugene Carroll, but not the fact that he allegedly sexually assaulted her.
	You know, a liar.
	He's a liar.
	And on and on it goes.
	So like, it's almost as if the Democrats have been laying the foundation for all of this to support a criminal conviction in this flimsy case all along.
	And so you tell me whether there's any chance, given the judge's ruling, all that can come in, that Trump will take the stand.
	Megan, he was never going to take the stand.
	It would have been walking into a perjury trap.
	He'd have embarrassing details of his relationship with Stormy Daniels.
	And yes, prior bad acts can come in up to the judge's discretion.
	He allowed some, not others.
	He allowed talking about the Access Hollywood tape, but not the playing of the Access Hollywood tape.
	I thought he was pretty fair in his rulings, but I think this is all for naught.
	I mean, look, it's like asking me, what teams do you want to play for in the NBA?
	Like, yeah, I'm never going to play in the NBA.
	Donald Trump was never going to take the stand in his defense.
	This is something he's done in the past.
	He said, I'm going to take the stand, you know, in the Eugene Carroll case and didn't.
	And I'm going to talk to Robert Mueller in the investigation.
	Then he didn't.
	I'm going to take the stand in the civil fraud case and he didn't.
	So that's just bluster.
	He was never going to take the stand in his defense.
	He took it in the second Egypt case.
	That was when he did take it in.
	I don't think you should take the stand at all, Mike.
	Do you?
	I wouldn't in this case.
	I mean, I would say that Trump is different from other criminal defendants.
	If you're a criminal defense attorney, you generally would advise most of your clients not to take the stand.
	I would say that with President Trump in some of these matters, that he should be out there, maybe not taking the stand, but he should be out there making public statements to defend himself against this lawfare and election interference.
	But I don't think he should take the stand in this case.
	There's little upside and there's a lot of downside, as you just laid out.
	And this process is so clearly rigged against them.
	Do not give them any rope to hang you.
	Okay.
	One other story, and then I want to get to these college protests.
	But before we get to the college protests, we got to talk about Alec Baldwin.
	Did you guys see this viral video of him?
	I have to say, I'm not, you know, whatever.
	Alec Baldwin's got a temper, and he's obviously in a lot of trouble right now out in New Mexico because of the death of this cinematographer on his movie set.
	But I am 100% team Alec Baldwin when it comes to what just happened to him here.
	Here's the video for those of you who haven't seen it.
	Alec, can you please say free Palestine one time?
	Why did you kill that lady?
	You killed that lady and got no jail time?
	No jail time, Alec.
	So sorry.
	No jail time, Alec.
	You're putting innocent people in jail, Alec Baldwin.
	So sorry.
	Free Palestine, Alec, just one time.
	And I'll leave you alone.
	I'll leave you alone.
	I swear.
	Just say free Palestine one time.
	One time.
	One time.
	One time, Alex.
	You know he's a criminal.
	You know he's a fucking criminal.
	Come on, Alec.
	Just say free Palestine one time.
	One time.
	Just one time, please.
	And I'll leave you alone.
	Free Palestine.
	Fuck Israel.
	Fuck Zionism.
	Please say it.
	One time.
	Could you give me one picture?
	And then he gets her with his left hand.
Alec Baldwin Assault Charges 00:02:01
	Clearly grabs the camera or knocks it out of her hand.
	And she goes by Crackhead Barney.
	So Crackhead got into an altercation with him and tweeted out that this white devil assaulted me.
	Dave, you're a prosecutor.
	If Crackhead came to you and said, I want to file charges against Alec Baldwin for assault, what would you do?
	No file.
	And here's why.
	She can go to police and she can fill out a complaint.
	And this could be technically a battery because it's an unwanted touching.
	It's a very low bar.
	You have to just have probable cause.
	But then it would come to my office as prosecutor.
	And the question is, could I prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt?
	There is not a jury in the United States that would find Alec Baldwin guilty.
	When Megan Kelly is standing up for Alec Baldwin, you know, there's not a jury in the world that would side with Crackhead, whatever her name is.
	And, you know, this shows you the problems with this pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian movement that she's a part of.
	Number one, they're the ones engaging in bullying and harassment.
	You can just see it for your own eyes.
	Number two, their whole philosophy is based on ignorance.
	They don't know anything about what's going on in Gaza.
	They just discovered Gaza just a few months ago.
	This is just a trendy thing.
	Yeah, it's a trendy thing for them to get on board.
	And lastly, there's no self-awareness here.
	I mean, she actually portrays herself as a victim.
	Meanwhile, Alec Baldwin is opening the door, asking her politely to please leave.
	And she's the one who thinks she's the victim.
	This is why they're losing support for people who see things like this.
	This is why even you, Megan Kelly, come to the defense of Alec Baldwin and justifiably so.
	Well, I have nothing against Alec Baldwin as a human.
	You know, I definitely think he's got problems out there in New Mexico and his politics are pretty harsh.
	But it's not like, you know, me defending Megan Markle.
	Like that would be truly extraordinary.
	But I'm capable of seeing Alec Baldwin fairly.
	It's not like I have an inherent bias against him.
	But Mike, this is so obnoxious, right?
Campus Civil Rights Chaos 00:10:15
	I think like, what would you have done?
	What would you have done, Mike Davis, if somebody came up to you in like a nice restaurant like that deli slash restaurant and done this to you?
	I loathe Hamas supporters.
	I loathe anti-Semites and I loathe people who protest in restaurants.
	And this person was all three.
	So I think that Alec Baldwin showed tremendous restraint there.
	He did.
	I think I would have given her a comment.
	I think I would have been like, I do, I do have something I want to say.
	Thank you for giving me this opportunity.
	Go F yourself.
	Only I would have used the actual word.
	Anyway, it's infuriating.
	It reminded me of the BLM protests where they were getting in people's faces at restaurants just trying to live their lives and like have a beer.
	And they were like, say it, say BLM, say Black Lives Matter.
	These poor people couldn't continue their meal unless they said the words like, hello, this is America.
	Sit the F down or I'm calling the cops.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Whatever you call yourself, crackhead.
	Okay, crackhead.
	Anywho, I wanted to talk about what's happening on the college campuses because the situation is growing more insane by the day.
	We've got these anti-Israel protests disrupting classes on campus after campus.
	And now dozens of people are being arrested.
	So finally, there is some sort of a law enforcement crackdown.
	Columbia has now canceled in-person classes.
	I don't know that they're going to resume before the summer.
	The gates to Harvard Yard have been closed.
	And at NYU, an encampment swelled to hundreds, hundreds of protesters at NYU.
	Staffers were seen forming a human chain as the protesters wanted to pray.
	Watch.
	Oh my lord.
	The school says it warned the crowd to leave, then called in the cops after the university said it learned of reports of, quote, intimidating chance and several anti-Semitic incidents.
	Shortly after 8:30 p.m., officers began making arrests.
	Watch.
	Look at this chaos.
	People throwing things at the cops.
	It's total chaos as people try to keep their little tents that they've set up around themselves.
	The cops try to instill order and they're throwing things at cops.
	The whole world is watching, and your behavior is terrible.
	The cops are outnumbered.
	No one's complying.
	They all have their little masks on, their COVID masks, because they're cowards.
	Wow.
	Good luck walking around New York City right now.
	NYU and Columbia.
	Great.
	Terrific.
	Good luck finding a nice college for your kid, too, by the way.
	Tensions, as we've been discussing, hi at Columbia.
	We've been talking about that for a couple of days.
	The campus gates were locked to anyone without a school ID.
	But even one professor who's been a very staunch and outspoken supporter of Israel, we've played him, Shy David I, on this show before.
	He had his access cut off.
	Watch.
	Shame on you.
	Standing at the gates.
	Not just a civil right, a civil right as a Jewish person to be on cafes.
	I have a right as a professor employed, employed by the universities to be on campus.
	They deactivated my court.
	These are five lawsuits in happening, but we don't want anyone to be Jewish in your life.
	I just want to be Jewish in public, he said.
	At Yale, police officers arrested about 45 protesters and charged them with misdemeanor trespassing.
	All were being released on promises to appear in court later.
	Some folks in the area also, of course, blocked traffic because they really make it their mission to be as annoying as humanly possible.
	So we've been having an ongoing debate, you guys, on what can be done about this, right?
	Because free speech is available on college campuses and we want to make sure that we can go on the college campus and say things that are provocative, that aren't, quote, allowed or politically correct.
	I certainly don't want my kid to go on a college campus and be forced to use, quote, preferred pronouns, right?
	I want my kid to be able to say what's real.
	I want my kids, if they're more conservative leaning by the time they get to college, to be able to say what they think about all these controversial issues, it's important to protect free speech.
	I am fine.
	I don't agree with, but I am fine with Israel's committing genocide, right?
	Like down with Netanyahu.
	Those are all fine.
	This has morphed into something else.
	And I think you tell me, but the law to me is pretty clear.
	And even the ACLU has said this, that when you morph from just saying even hateful or offensive things into speech that is openly harassing of a targeted group or individual, you marched yourself right out of First Amendment protection.
	Dave, am I right?
	Yes, trespass is a crime and police could go in and remove the encampments inside and outside Columbia because Columbia owns the property around there.
	But apparently the president of the university won't give police the rights to do that.
	So shame on these weak university administrators for enabling this.
	Also, assault is a crime.
	Disorderly conduct is a crime.
	Hate speech by itself is not necessarily a crime.
	It could be protected by the First Amendment, but when you have action, that's a crime.
	But even if it's just hate speech, just calling for the death of, well, the end of Israel, for example, at some point it becomes a violation of the university code.
	Just imagine if instead of blasting Jews, they were blasting another group or they were telling other members of a group to go back to wherever they came from.
	Do you think they would last a minute on campus?
	Not a chance.
	And it is just shameful that you have these weak administrators and these professors who are part of this problem running the show.
	It's like the inmates running the asylum.
	And at some point, perhaps the governor needs to call out the National Guard or the police need to start being a little tougher on what's going on out there.
	Yeah, that's, I don't understand why there's not actual law and order being imposed on these people because we aren't out of the free speech realm, Mike.
	You can't, there cannot be targeted harassment of a specific group that creates what is in essence, a hostile work environment or hostile learning environment for a vulnerable group or a protected class.
	You can't do that.
	So when I go on a college campus, if I see a trans person or a man pretending he's a woman, I can say, you're a man.
	It's a he.
	Stay out of the women's restroom.
	And I should be allowed to do that.
	But if I get a group together and we see a trans person go by or we see like a trans group sitting there having a meeting and we start chanting mean things about them like trans people should be attacked or down with the trans people they're evil.
	We could get in trouble.
	Like you targeted harassment can take you out of the free speech protection.
	It takes a lot, thankfully, but they're there.
	They're there in these protest videos.
	What do you think?
	Yeah, I mean, it's the Brandenburg test from the Supreme Court, the eminent lawlessness.
	And when you are threatening or actually perpetuating violence against anyone, particularly a religious minority, that's clearly a violation of many different state, local, federal laws.
	And where is the Biden Justice Department?
	Where is the Civil Rights Division and the Biden Justice Department?
	Where is the Biden Justice Department, Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights?
	is they open investigations into multiple schools.
	All of them are mostly Ivy League schools.
	Mary Catherine Hann was tweeting today about how she feels really good about how she's indoctrinating her children and love for SEC schools.
	But it's mostly IVs, right?
	So there's a, because people make complaints and then the Civil Rights Division has to open an investigation.
	So they've done that, but nothing's been done, Mike.
	Where are the results?
	It's all well and fine to investigate what's happening to protect the kids.
	And it's not just the civil side.
	It's not just a Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that the Department of Education would investigate.
	It's also, there are criminal laws.
	There are federal civil rights laws that deal with this.
	There are state civil rights laws that deal with this.
	There are state assault and battery laws.
	There are state trespassing laws that Dave's talking about.
	Maybe Alvin Bragg shouldn't have the Manhattan DA's office so diverted to getting Trump based upon time-barred misdemeanors at best and actually using law enforcement resources in New York City to go after these Hamas supporters, this third world trash who are terrorizing Jewish students on these campuses and Jewish professors.
	This is unacceptable what they're doing.
	And when the Trump 47 Justice Department comes back in after January 20th, 2025, I think that there will be more action taken.
	I think that these students should have their visas revoked if they're openly supporting a Hamas, a terrorist organization.
	If they are here on visas as non-students, they should be deported.
	They should be sent home.
	And if they've been naturalized as citizens and they lied on their citizen application about being a Hamas supporter, they need to be denaturalized.
	They need to be sent home.
	Yes.
	Well, we look forward to that day, Mike, and whomever could be in charge of the DOJ when and if that happens, we'll find out.
Deporting Hamas Supporters 00:02:34
	Guys, such a great discussion.
	Thank you so much.
	And to be continued.
	Thank you, Megan.
	Okay, when we come back, do you guys remember this story of Tickle versus Giggle?
	This Australian website that was for women, and then a man posing as a woman got identified as a fake woman, and he sued because he so desperately wanted to be in the women's online space.
	Well, we have the creator of that website, Sal Grover.
	Remember, we discussed her with Adam Carolla.
	Well, she's here and it's next.
	Don't go away.
	I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.
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	Next, we are joined by two incredible women who are involved in a court case in Australia that has gained international attention as it relates to the essential fight for women's rights.
	Sal Grover is an entrepreneur and the founder of the women-only app, Giggle.
	She's facing a lawsuit from a man for barring him from the app as quote, she claims she is now a woman.
	See, this is the problem.
	They make you use their language.
	It's a man claiming he is a woman and therefore demanding access to this female-only space.
	You see the problem.
	Sal's joined today by one of her lawyers, Catherine Deeves, who is representing her in this landmark legal battle on which we are still awaiting a ruling.
Lawsuit Against Women-Only App 00:04:58
	Sal and Catherine, welcome to the show.
	Thank you so much for having us.
	Great to see you, man.
	Here's mine.
	I know it must be like 3.30 in the morning over there right now.
	So God bless you.
	It's very hard doing hits with my Aussie friends.
	So I'm grateful to you and you look awesome.
	So Sal, you started this website.
	Just a quick primer for our background, for our audience in the background.
	You started this website for women only.
	Why?
	So I had actually been in Hollywood as a screenwriter for almost 10 years.
	And this was like in the pre-me to world.
	And it was as horrible as everyone says it is.
	And I had experienced all of that.
	And I came back to Australia and I was sort of a shell of a person.
	And I went into therapy just to sort of recover from it and get the tools to sort of, you know, move on with my life.
	And it was my therapist who said, you need to have a strong female support network in your life.
	And my mom and I were just talking about it.
	And it was my mom who had the idea and said, why don't we create an app where women can connect to get emotional support, to find roommates.
	We had lesbian dating on there.
	Just basically, we thought any reason why a woman would need like something on the internet just to exist in.
	And so, yeah, so we developed it.
	And just before we were about to launch, transactivists found us and changed my life, basically.
	So this man who goes by the name Roxanne Tickle claimed that he had a right to be on this women's only site.
	Yeah.
	Roxanne, you really got to work on it.
	I like we were talking, you have the facial recognition software that will show if a man is on there.
	I mean, eyes would also work in this particular person's case.
	He's not even making an effort to look like a woman, and yet he wants to just demand access to our spaces by saying he is one.
	So you somehow sniffed it out and said, no, when I said this is for women only, it's really for women only.
	And then he sued you.
	So what's the basis for his lawsuit?
	Yeah, so basically what happened, I don't actually remember kicking him off because thousands upon thousands of men would try to get on the platform pretty much every day.
	And sometimes they would get through our gatekeeping system.
	So it wasn't an event removing him.
	It was just, it would have just been another day at the office, like removing another man.
	And I thought nothing of it.
	And then he actually called and text my phone, which was when he sort of became a person in my life because no other user, potential user, ex-user of the platform had ever called my or contacted me via phone.
	It wasn't company policy.
	And it really scared me.
	And I called my dad and I said, like, this guy who has been blocked from Giggle has called my phone.
	And he said, just like block his phone number and don't tell your mother because my mom sees all the death threats that when the abuse that women receive for speaking out about this.
	So I did that.
	I just blocked him and I just sort of tried to block it out of my mind because it did freak me out.
	And then about two months later, I got an Australian Human Rights Commission complaint for gender identity discrimination.
	And that's when I had to get a legal team together.
	And basically, how the Australian Human Rights Commission works is you can settle it.
	Basically, you go to conciliation, but the conditions to settle it before it would escalate to federal court was I would have to agree to let him on, agree to let all men who claim to be women on the platform and go to sex and gender education, which could only be re-education.
	And I said, no, I wasn't willing to do any of that.
	And so the Australian Human Rights Commission advised him that he could file in federal court if he wanted to, and he did.
	So Catherine, that's where you come in.
	You're representing Sal and you've had your own history in dealing with this issue where you receive blowback for saying what we all know is true.
	Men don't belong in women's sports and standing up for the actual differences between men and women.
	So you were probably not surprised that this guy was causing trouble for Sal.
	Were you, how did you like your odds when she came to you of, you know, Sal's in this case?
	Well, this conflict was set up in Australian law back in 2013.
	And it is something that I had been researching.
	I came to law later in life and I had been looking at this conflict that had been created in our Sex Discrimination Act way back, would have been about 2018.
	And what happened was our first female prime minister altered the Sex Discrimination Act, which deals with discrimination against women and enables them to have equal opportunities in public life.
Critical Safe Spaces for Women 00:04:13
	And gender identity, sexual orientation and intersex were glommed on in 2013.
	And it sets up this conflict.
	So we knew that at some point there was going to be a case that was going to be brought in the federal court because this raises constitutional questions that are going to have to go to the high court to be settled.
	So we knew it was just a matter of time.
	So I'd known Sal through her advocacy around women's sex-based rights.
	She knew of me.
	So when it escalated to federal court, I got the call and here we are.
	I've heard you in other interviews, Catherine, speak so eloquently about why we need women's spaces.
	And I've heard you both say, and I love, because we do.
	We don't have to explain it to you.
	Like we want them and we're entitled to them.
	And that's the end of the story.
	But I do love it when you take the next step and explain just why they are so important and why, even though we might not run around articulating it every day, we know on an inherent level that we need them.
	So with respect to women's spaces, I mean, Sal has a daughter.
	I have three little girls.
	And women should be entitled to dignity, privacy and safety, particularly when they are vulnerable, when they go out into the public sphere.
	And I mean, Sal has articulated this argument as well, but women should not have to rely on the fact that they are traumatized, that they have religious or cultural restrictions, that they have suffered male violence, that they are women who maybe are ashamed of their bodies.
	They may be overweight, postpartum, dealing with things.
	You know, as women, we have to deal with things that men simply do not understand.
	And it is right and proper for us to have male-free spaces when we go out into public, if we're using change rooms, if we're using toilets, if we're breastfeeding our children, and enable for us to participate fully in public life, we need to be able to access those spaces.
	I mean, years ago, they had what they called the urinary leash, which was a woman could only leave her home.
	The distance that she could leave her home was only as far as she could manage to hold on before she needed to go to the toilet again.
	So when we look at losing us, yeah, when we didn't have public toilets, I mean, we've only had public toilets, women, for around 120 years.
	And when they first started providing them over in Europe, you know, the men were burning them down and crashing their crashing their horse and carts into them and so forth.
	So women's worlds were very restricted because if you couldn't go to your mother's house or your friend's house or somewhere where you could actually use the facilities, you couldn't travel very far.
	So it is absolutely critical for women to have these spaces.
	And we know, like with respect to women in the third world, accessing education, having single sex provision is absolutely critical to girls attendance at school in refugee camps.
	We know that sexual assault is off the charts and it's absolutely critical for women to have safe provision.
	So I know it's very, it's very basic and people are very denigrating of, you know, the toilet argument, but it is absolutely critical if women are able to get out there in the world and participate fully.
	I, you know, I keep thinking of this incident I had when I was pregnant with my first child and, you know, how it is where like you feel the baby moving and that's your daily reminder, he's doing okay in there.
	And it's a comfort to a pregnant mother.
	And there was one day in which he hadn't moved and I was starting to get worried about him.
	And I was working and I kind of let some time go by and finally called my OB and she was way more concerned than I expected.
	And she said, I was at the Marriott about to do an interview for my job.
	And she said, you need to get into a women's room in the Marriott.
	You need to have a drink of orange juice and you need to lie down on the floor and tell me if he's moving.
Bathroom Access Verdict 00:13:00
	And I remember going in there and I'm in this Marriott bathroom with the cold floor.
	And I go in there and I did it and I was scared.
	It was my first child.
	You know, thank God he was okay.
	He started moving.
	He fired right up.
	And there were other women in there and we were kind of looking at each other and they were sweet and they were asking if I was okay and you felt just the sisterhood.
	That's all.
	I cannot imagine if one of these men, if this guy, Roxanne, had been in there looking at me, having an experience he will never have nor ever be able to relate to, it would have changed the entire dynamic.
	That's just one example that I'm sure every woman has got many that they could point to.
	But you know what they say, Sal?
	I've heard you respond to this and I agree with you, but they say there aren't that many.
	So like, what are you complaining about?
	The numbers are low.
	And just be kind.
	Would you just be kind?
	Yeah, we get that just be kind comment all the time.
	Yeah, it's not kind to ask women or demand women see men as women or to give up all of our rights, to give up our spaces, to give up our language.
	That's not kindness.
	So if you want to have a conversation about being kind, that's actually the first hurdle you're going to have to get over is that there is going to have to be kindness to women as well.
	This is not a one-way street.
	I also actually don't think it's kind to tell men who are under the delusion that they are women, that it's true.
	I think it's actually kindness to tell them the truth.
	And so, even when we're talking about like the female-only spaces, like as Kath was saying, like these are necessary.
	This is a kindness to women.
	And we are constantly being like forced to relive like these traumatic experiences that we've had to justify them.
	It's like, no, we want them.
	And furthermore, these people, I don't even think are like negating the necessity of female only spaces necessarily.
	They're just trying to get us to force, like to get us to see these men as women.
	It's like, so we are allowed these spaces so long as these delusional men are allowed in them.
	It's like, no, you have there could be just one in the world, one man who thinks he's a woman in the world, but the moment he's in that female-only space, it's no longer a female-only space.
	He's destroyed it.
	So it doesn't, it doesn't actually really matter how many there are.
	There's actually quite a lot.
	And so it's concerning of how increasingly many men are claiming to be women.
	But, you know, there are like four billion women on the world, surely in the world.
	Surely we count for something.
	Yeah, that's right.
	This is more and more the argument I hear them going to.
	First, we were told, Catherine, this isn't happening.
	You're making this up.
	You know, show me the incident in which a woman has been accosted or hurt in any way in a bathroom or a locker room.
	And now that's starting to happen more and more.
	And now we're hearing the argument in sports: oh, you know, there are X number of trans athletes in women's sports, and there are millions of women playing sports, and therefore the ratio is just so small.
	This is a nothing.
	And, you know, I've got a lot of thoughts on that, but I wonder as somebody who's actually in the arena fighting these fights all the time, what you think of that argument.
	Well, you only have to have one male there to displace a great number of women.
	So if you have a race with a thousand women in it and he comes first, there's a thousand women that have been affected.
	So I think it's disingenuous to say, oh, there's just a few of them.
	And I mean, for example, just yesterday here in Sydney, there is a women's soccer competition, and there was what was formerly a lesbian group called the Flying Bats, but now there are five men who pretend to be women on that team.
	And last night, they beat the women 12-0 in a soccer match.
	12-0.
	So once you have these men in there, as Sal pointed out, it's no longer women only.
	And also the amount of damage that they can do to a competition, because we hear that women self-exclude the message that it sends to our little girls.
	I mean, I've got three little girls who play sport and they see a man standing up there on the podium and not even, you know, for example, you take Laurel Hubbard.
	He was 40.
	He was heavily overweight.
	He was competing against women less than half his age.
	He was not a very good weightlifter to begin with.
	And no matter the sacrifices that they make, no matter how hard they train, no matter how athletically gifted they are, you can have a quite ordinary, aged-out male athlete come in and take their rightful place, take the women's rightful place on the podium.
	So we're also sending this message to little girls of learned helplessness that no matter what they do, a man's feelings will always be more important than their right to fairness.
	And I think that is an absolute betrayal of young women and girls to be teaching them that message.
	Yes, I don't know if you guys saw Riley Gaines's Twitter post yesterday showing the sign in the bathroom at one of the State University of New York facilities, a college in New York State, saying, if you see a trans person, meaning a man in the female bathroom, do and don't.
	And all the do's were, you know, be kind, be accepting, be supportive.
	And all the don'ts were, don't complain, don't tell him he doesn't belong here.
	And it truly is a genuine suppression, Sal, of all the things we learn as women from birth and that we, most of us are taught by our moms and dads.
	You know, if you have that instinct in the back of your head go off, like, I might not be safe, they don't tell you to suppress it.
	They tell you it's a gift.
	Yeah, I mean, it's one of the most evil parts of gender ideology is that it is telling women to ignore our instincts and our boundaries.
	It's part of why I don't think this is completely an accident that sort of me too, this sort of grassroots movement of women to have boundaries was replaced by a movement where any woman who has boundaries is a bigot.
	I think this, I don't think this is an accident.
	I really do think that this was almost by design where someone found a great opportunity to just come in and swoop in and take it away and put women in a worse position than we were five or six years ago.
	You know, it is actually kind of impossible to ignore your instincts.
	Like human beings have actually evolved to be able to tell the difference between males and females.
	It's just babies can do it.
	It's a really necessary skill.
	So when you see a man, you just see a man.
	Like you have an involuntary reaction to that, especially if he is in a place where he shouldn't be slash, he's not welcome.
	Like that was one of the things, like in the Tickle V Giggle case, it's like, I just saw a picture of a man and acted accordingly.
	And I'm being taken to federal court for that.
	And the Australian Human Rights Commission is against me.
	It's always been my position on it is I have human rights too, as does by extension, every other woman and every other man in the country and the world.
	I think men should be able to see a man and say that's a man or that's a woman if that's a woman as well.
	This it's affecting us all in the most negative way.
	I can't think of one good thing that gender ideology is actually bringing to the world, not one.
	And I've looked for four years.
	The same.
	And so if this ruling goes against you, this could have serious implications for all women in Australia.
	What will happen if it goes against you?
	So if it goes against me in federal court, and I'm basically, so I'm found guilty of either direct or indirect discrimination, I will appeal it to the High Court.
	I've always had that position from when it was in the Australian Human Rights Commission days.
	I mean, I'm in this fight now.
	I'm not going to sort of stop the marathon halfway through.
	So we will get a verdict.
	We had the hearing a week and a half ago, two weeks ago.
	So we'll get the verdict in the next three to six months.
	And then, yeah, if we lose, we then appeal to the high court.
	One of the things with that, for the federal court, we had to raise $500,000 to be able to say that a man is not a woman.
	If it goes to the High Court, it will be at least another $500,000.
	So I'm basically looking at a million dollars to be able to fight for the right to say that a man is not a woman.
	Are you getting donations?
	Are your fellow Aussie women supporting you?
	It's been the kindness and generosity of strangers all around the world, actually, it's been amazing.
	I went to the UK to do some interviews about six weeks ago because in Australia, there is a total censorship on this issue.
	We've broken it a little bit in the last few weeks, but prior to the hearing, there was a total censorship.
	No one in Australian media would talk to me about the case.
	And it really bothered me in part because the case was allowed to happen because the judge deemed it in the public interest.
	And he's correct.
	It is in the public interest.
	But then the fourth estate was just not giving it any airtime.
	And I was like, I need people to know about this.
	This is really important because while it might just seem like, oh, a case about a guy just wanting to get on an app, it's actually not.
	It's about women's rights on a whole and our Sex Discrimination Act and our Sex Discrimination Act is linked to sort of women's rights all around the world because of CEDAR, this international bill of rights, which we are defending because it is a document for biological females that is being abused by men who claim to be women and the organizations who support them.
	But this is going to have national implications if you lose at the high court.
	I understand you'll appeal.
	But that's, I mean, you tell me, Catherine, as a lawyer, if the high court rules against you and rules that telling a man based on his biological sex that he can't join a woman's group or a woman's web suit, if that's gender identity discrimination, which is not at all what she's thinking about, she's thinking about his biological sex, then that will be applied everywhere.
	I mean, this could be the thing that actually makes it right unlawful for women to have any spaces anywhere in Australia.
	That's right.
	So should this end up in the high court and Sal has an unfavorable outcome, it will mean that biological sex no longer exists in federal law in Australia.
	It's been superseded by gender identity.
	This is the what is a woman case.
	It is what is the meaning of the word woman within the United Nations Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
	So within the international human rights canon of law, there are nine conventions, and this is the one that pertains to women and girls.
	And this is based on their biological sex.
	This convention gives rights to women because it acknowledges that women have historically been discriminated against.
	They suffer violence because of our sex bodies, because we, you know, men are bigger, faster, taller, stronger.
	It acknowledges that women have not been able to participate fully by being able to vote or have mortgages or be educated or choose who they marry.
	So this is absolutely predicated on our biological sex.
	And if the meaning of the word woman within CEDAW now includes men, it has completely upended its purpose and objective.
	So for any country that's a signatory to this convention, this may have ramifications.
	I mean, certainly the decision here is not a binding precedent, but it is the first time it will be decided at a court at this level.
	So it will certainly be instructive for any other countries that are facing the same problems, the United States included.
	So should we see litigation be bought with respect to what's happened to Title IX or the NCAA Riley Gaines' case, they may be looking to the decision of Tickle versus Gigal in how they argue the case.
	So this is really, really important globally, whatever happens.
	Well, I look forward to the UN enforcing its new potential rule against gender identity discrimination in Iran and Palestine.
	We'll see how that plays out.
Men in Female Sports 00:04:02
	This person, Roxy Tickle, does not to me seem like an honest broker.
	And I also am very suspicious of Roxy's open whiskers.
	I mean, I've talked about this with a lot of experts in this field, from Helen Joyce to Kelly J. Keen, a lot of people who have done a lot of research who say someone who is genuinely transgender wants to be seen as female.
	Like they would not be wearing whiskers.
	They would not be showing off a penis in a locker room.
	That's not what Roxy allegedly did.
	But many of these folks have been caught doing this, like Leah Thomas.
	And it tells us, in general, something about this particular kind of man.
	Usually it's that he's one of those men who actually gets sexually aroused by dressing as a woman and then going into women's spaces.
	I don't know whether that's Roxy Tickle's thing or not, but just for the audience at home, here's Roxy on camera talking about sports.
	My name is Roxy Tickle.
	I'm a trans woman from Lismore, New South Wales.
	I play hockey for East Lismore Hockey Club and I'm one of the people that the Save Women's Sport Bill is asking you to be worried about.
	The downside is that having a third of the testosterone of the average cisgender female, I have a smaller engine.
	My heart can't pump as much oxygen around my body.
	I think the save women's sport bill is based on fear and misunderstanding.
	It doesn't appear to be based on me.
	And yet it's going to affect me.
	I absolutely believe that I should be playing hockey in a women's team.
	I am a woman.
	End of story.
	Oh my God.
	It's so not the end of the story.
	It's a fake story.
	That's a fake news story.
	So Sal, what do you make of the argument there, first of all, that he's got less testosterone than the three of us have as individuals, and therefore it's perfectly fair.
	What are we complaining about?
	Yeah, I mean, I don't know his medical status or anything like that.
	I don't know anything about this person.
	All I know actually about him is that he's male and litigious.
	And so I also, I don't care.
	I mean, a woman is even if there is a man who really is sort of putting in effort to look like a woman, he still isn't a woman.
	I mean, when women aren't an outfit, we're not a costume to be worn.
	We are our own actual class of human being.
	And that has to be recognized in law.
	I think that Roxy is fully entitled to play hockey in the male team.
	Or if there is a unisex team where everybody is, you know, a willing participant in a male and female competition, fine.
	Okay.
	Like no one's actually trying to take rights away from these men.
	What they're actually trying to do is take rights away from us while gaining privileges that no one else has.
	I mean, if you're allowing men to say that they're women and they can go into female spaces and female sport, that's giving them more rights than just men.
	Like they're just this group of people that have more rights than everyone else while gaslighting us all that they are the most marginalized and oppressed people on the planet.
	No, they're not marginalized or oppressed.
	They're getting laws changed in stealth.
	Like you think of how gay people practically had to beg for the right to get married, but men who claim to be women just get whatever they want.
	It's just nonsense that they're even trying to keep up this act that, yeah, that they are oppressed.
	But I think that when the entire premise starts with a lie, everything else that follows is a lie from that as well.
	So a couple of points.
	Number one, yes, anybody who's post-male puberty has got an advantage over women physically.
	But I really like the point that you're making, which is I don't care whether they do or they don't.
	I don't care if it's pre or post.
	They're men.
	They're boys.
Social Contagion Claims 00:05:23
	Period.
	That's the end of it.
	And I want to follow up on that, but your reference to We're Not a Costume made me think of Brand Dove, who I assume you've seen her beautiful poem, The Irish 14-year-old girl who wrote that amazing.
	She's come on the show.
	I feel like every woman who's at all interested in our rights has read this poem, but I pulled up that part.
	I am not a dress to be worn on a whim.
	A man in a dress is nonetheless a hymn.
	Women are not simply what we wear.
	If this offends you, I do not care.
	She goes on.
	It's so worth, for the audience listening at home, it's pronounced Brand Dove.
	That's what she goes under, but it's spelled brand dub, D-U-B-H.
	Just google it and you'll see her amazing poem.
	I am not a dress um, but on that front, you know we're, we're getting more and more to the point where it's like well, more and more kids have this delusion.
	Catherine, you know we're transing children.
	Now it's become massive, a massive problem in Australia, in the Uk uh, in Scandinavia, in the United States, in Canada, and we're allowing it here in the United States.
	We haven't caught on to any of the restrictions that have been imposed in some of those other places and I don't think Australia has either.
	I think we're behind.
	Uk stopped puberty blockers for kids and Scandinavia has as well, as well as cross-sex hormones, not us.
	We're full steam ahead.
	And I wonder what you think about that?
	Because when they have a prepubescent boy who hasn't yet gone through male puberty right, he doesn't have the longer femurs and the stronger muscles and the bigger heart, and they say we put him on puberty blockers and we put him right on cross-sex hormones.
	He's essentially a woman and has no advantages over you and he should be allowed access to all the spaces.
	And then let's say he has the surgery and physically he makes himself resemble a woman, as much as one can do as a human.
	What are we to do with that boy slash man?
	Well, the benefits from testosterone start accruing in utero about six weeks after conception.
	They get a big dose of testosterone, uh.
	They get another dose about six weeks after birth and that continues throughout childhood.
	So, even if you arrest and interfere with his puberty, he still has uh, the benefits of that.
	And, as sal pointed out, i'm sorry but that child is still a biological male and i'm of the view we should not be lying to them.
	I mean, I grew up with a gay sibling.
	Um, he was very effeminate as a child and should we have been children now, I have no doubt that they would have tried to target him for transitioning, and I think that we should just should be teaching children that they're perfect, just the way they are.
	They can be as effeminate or masculine as they choose.
	But you're right, Megan.
	I mean, we're going to have a real problem with some of these children that have been led down the garden path with this lie and they come to the realization later in life, and I think that here in Australia, when these children actually realize what has been done to them, that they have been experimented on, that they have had their fertility uh robbed normal sexual functioning, that they are left with a whole extraordinary range of medical complications and the lawsuits start.
	I think probably that's what's going to happen in the Us.
	You're going to have to have some of those extraordinarily massive payouts before they stop what they're doing, because obviously health is for profit.
	In your country, unfortunately.
	But here in Australia the Cas report has been released and with gender medicine, here the justification for what they're doing to children has been, oh, we're just looking to the gold standard, to best practice, we're looking to Wpath, we're looking to what they're doing in Tavistock have a stock and we're just replicating what they're doing.
	But now that the CAS report has come out, the response has been, oh, Australia is substantially different.
	We're not going to follow what they've come out with on that report.
	We're going to continue what we're doing.
	So unfortunately, I think it's going to have to take massive lawsuits or medical insurers who refuse to indemnify practitioners who want to practice this type of experimentation on children.
	And you know, one, this problem snowballs on its own because, you know, back when we were kids, the thing that girls were getting sucked into was like an eating disorder.
	You know, you're, somebody in your class might have had one and then you kind of started looking at it or considering it in a way maybe you hadn't before.
	It's, it was its own kind of social contagion and still is for some girls.
	But now this is a social contagion on steroids.
	And the more this makes its way into our world, the more these young kids see it.
	And girls who are typically never affected by gender dysphoria or confusion of any kind are now the number one victims of it and of a system that says, affirm, affirm, affirm.
	And the CAS report talked about that too.
	And so now you've got Hollywood celebrities outing their allegedly trans kids at younger and younger ages.
	And we're supposed to celebrate it like it's totally normal and we're bullies if we think there's something wrong with this.
	And in the States, you guys probably, you might know of Mr. Beast.
	He's a worldwide YouTube celebrity.
Ridiculous Gender Presentation 00:02:52
	He's got this right-hand man whose name is Chris, who just fully transitioned on camera in front of kids.
	Kids are Mr. Beast's core audience.
	He's only like 25 or 26 years old if that.
	And this guy, Chris, who was married with a baby, and I understand the wife just left him, of course, who could blame her, has just debuted his new, you know, fully feminine look and had similar language to Roxy Tickle in that soundbite we just played.
	Take a look at him in SOT 23.
	Mr. Beast's sidekick has now revealed she will be using a new name following her transition.
	The viral YouTube star shared a picture to her social media standing next to letters that read Ava, and she simply captioned the post.
	In case you haven't heard, she also changed her name across social media to Ava Chris Tyson, keeping her former forename as her middle name.
	The name change comes nine months after the star revealed she's transgender.
	I was so scared of saying I'm a woman and then instantly hearing, no, you're not.
	Because in my head, I fought with that every day.
	I mean, today you showed up fully presenting as a woman.
	I did because I am a woman.
	Oh, yeah.
	She heard.
	You've never said that before.
	I've never said that publicly.
	No, but I've been fully like confident in that decision for over a year now.
	I'm like, I, that I am a woman coming from a man, it's like, it makes my skin crawl.
	What are your thoughts on a sal?
	I mean, they just look ridiculous.
	I'm very much of the thought that like you can, you can be a guy and wear makeup and a dress if you want.
	Like that's a free society.
	And if we were in a movement that was just about men wanting to be like classically feminine or girly and stuff like that, I'd be all for it.
	I don't really care.
	Even though, I mean, I know a little bit too much about autogynophilia now to completely support it how I might once have.
	But at the same time, they do look ridiculous.
	Yes.
	There's just something about it that they're not fooling anyone.
	Yeah.
	I mean, he doesn't look like a woman.
	He's presenting as a woman.
	No, he's presenting as a man.
	This is the whole part of it where like the legal statute for it and whatnot, it's like, you know, you've got to live as a woman.
	What is living as a woman?
	Because that is different in every culture.
	It is different in every household.
	I mean, some women work full-time.
	Some women are stay-at-home mums and do the housework.
	What is living as a woman?
	I'll say this much, that cutting off your penis and then putting on a dress that you never worn before and you're scared to wear and tell people that you're a woman.
	That's living as a man.
	That's not living as a woman.
	None of these men can live as women because they're not.
Strict Sex Stereotypes 00:03:59
	It's that simple.
	I don't know how many other ways we can say it.
	I feel like for four years, I'm just trying to reinvent other ways to say men are not women, men are not women.
	I'm kind of running out.
	I can't believe we're still having a conversation.
	Back to Bran Dove's poem.
	I am not defined by sexist lies.
	There is more to woman than that shallow guys, that guise of dresses, bikinis, and skirts.
	Those clothes are not what womanhood is worth.
	Exactly it.
	That's what you're saying.
	You don't put on the dress and even cut off your penis and get to join the club.
	Sorry, it's God-given and man-made and it cannot be changed no matter what you do.
	But I do worry, Catherine, about children's cartoons more and more introducing non-binary characters and trans, so-called trans characters and Mr. Beast fronting formerly Chris, now Ava, as if this is just not even a thing.
	This is basically just dyeing your hair from brown to blonde.
	Everything's cool.
	I don't think on Mr. Beast, they're going to be talking about the dramatic trauma that your body goes through if you try to engage in this medical engineering.
	Look, this is where parents have to step in and be extremely vigilant about what their children, about the media that their children are consuming.
	You need to let your children's school know that you do not agree with gender identity ideology.
	You do not consent to them being taught anything about it.
	You know, for example, there is a child identifying as the opposite sex at my children's school.
	And I said to my youngest, you can call him a he.
	He is a he.
	And she said, am I going to get in trouble?
	I said, do you know what mommy does for a living?
	So, you know, I'm happy to have that fight with the principal.
	But we really, really need to be vigilant and particularly, you know, with children.
	I mean, this whole movement is so regressive.
	The fact that you're telling children, if they don't adhere to very strict sex stereotypes, that they must be the opposite sex, that we are telling them, you know, puberty is a discomfort.
	Yes, it's distressing and we'll put you on medication.
	You don't have to do it.
	Instead of saying, just being frank with them and saying, yes, everyone goes through it.
	We all struggle.
	It's all awful.
	We all get pimples, but everyone's going through it at pretty much the same time and you will get through it.
	So this is where parents really need to step in and have those conversations and be involved in your children's life.
	And, you know, I mean, I don't want the school.
	I don't want the media to indoctrinate your children.
	I mean, it's up to you to instill your values in your, in your own children.
	And the only way you do that is by having conversations and spending as much time as you possibly can with them.
	I know.
	I've talked to my own daughter about this.
	And of course, they do all get, you know, acne and so on in puberty, like we all did.
	But I've really started to watch my own messaging around what happens to our bodies during puberty because there are also so many awesome things about it, you know, like you get your hips and you get your breasts and you get this beautiful shape and you, you know, get taller and your hair gets fuller and, you know, your face changes a little and you get some angles eventually.
	And it's all part of this amazingly beautiful metamorphosis, you know, of girl into woman.
	It's these guys we're talking about, Chris or whatever Roxy was before he stole that female name, would give anything to have the beautiful joy of going through actual female puberty.
	It's something unique to us and such a once in a lifetime opportunity for these girls to really transition into these full-fledged women who are going to rule the world someday.
	So I do start to like, you know, I watch my own messaging around it.
	You know, yes, acne, but you get it even worse if you try to transition into being a, quote, a boy.
	You don't think going on testosterone isn't going to bring even more your way.
Pushing Back on Trans Rights 00:02:37
	All right.
	So what's going to happen?
	Because I got to say, sitting here, I don't feel good about how it's going to turn out, ladies.
	I don't trust your high court.
	I don't trust this court.
	I would like to say I do, but I don't.
	I just feel like everything's woke now and the court's probably going to go against you.
	Hopefully I'm wrong.
	But if they do, do you open tickle to the roxies or giggle?
	Sorry, I'm sure everybody screws that up.
	Do you open giggle to the roxy tickles of the world?
	No.
	No, I have no interest in running a platform that would actually become male only because all of the women would leave.
	There's no point to it unless it's female only.
	I mean, if men are allowed who claim to be women are allowed on it, congratulations to me.
	I've invented Twitter.
	It's absurd.
	No, I want to run a female only platform for females.
	It's as simple as that.
	And I won't stop fighting.
	So we have federal court and then we've got high court.
	After high court, if we were to lose in the high court, it would just be trying to get politicians in Australia to have some kind of political appetite to not only not even protect women's rights, to actually give us some.
	And gosh, who knows?
	I mean, that could take our entire lifetime.
	I hope not.
	I'm quite optimistic.
	I see that around the world that things are changing.
	And sometimes there is something where you have to take one step back to take two steps forward.
	Like Title IX, I think, is a classic example of that, where this utterly stupid thing has happened.
	But you know what?
	More people now know what's happening than they did a week ago because something really stupid happens and more people wake up to it.
	So I actually think that they were able to get most of the stuff into laws and organizations all around the world because they did it in stealth.
	They don't really have that as an asset anymore.
	From four years ago when I found out what was going on to how it is now, it's just a completely different atmosphere.
	And I think that we are all going to win eventually because the truth does eventually win out.
	Gender ideology is a complete lie from start to finish.
	And so I think bad ideologies do fall eventually.
	We just have to push back and push back until they do.
	I love that.
	I'm going to let that be the final word because it's inspirational and it's hopeful.
	And I really want to believe it's true.
	I feel the tide starting to turn.
	You're so right about the stealth effort, but we're awake now.
	Now we're paying attention and don't underestimate us.
Crowdfunding Legal Fight 00:01:20
	Sal, all the best to you, Catherine.
	You too.
	Please come back.
	Come back when you get your ruling and anytime you want to talk about what's happening over there.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you, Megan.
	It was great to join you.
	Well, much love to you both.
	Now, to support Sal and Catherine in this effort, you can go to gigglecrowdfund.com, gigglecrowdfund.com.
	Even if you can just, even if you donate five bucks, it would really help.
	You can see she's got her work cut out for her when it comes to this legal lane, but they're fighting.
	She's got a good lawyer.
	So fingers crossed.
	Tomorrow, Heather McDonald.
	Oh, I can't wait to talk to her.
	She's so brilliant.
	She'll be on tomorrow.
	Can't wait.
	And we'll see you all then.
	Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show: No BS, No Agenda, and No Fear.
	At my moment, talk for Marksman.

Chapters

00:00:00 Gag Order Violation
00:14:42 Bogus Felony Case
00:31:10 Fraudulent Legal Expenses
00:46:10 Critique of NDAs
01:00:40 Alec Baldwin Assault Charges
01:02:41 Campus Civil Rights Chaos
01:12:57 Deporting Hamas Supporters
01:15:32 Lawsuit Against Women-Only App
01:20:31 Critical Safe Spaces for Women
01:24:44 Bathroom Access Verdict
01:37:44 Men in Female Sports
01:41:47 Social Contagion Claims
01:47:11 Ridiculous Gender Presentation
01:50:04 Strict Sex Stereotypes
01:54:03 Pushing Back on Trans Rights
01:56:40 Crowdfunding Legal Fight