The Megyn Kelly Show - 20240513_michael-cohens-glaring-credibility-issues-and-decl

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May 13, 2024 - The Megyn Kelly Show

01:37:43

20240513_michael-cohens-glaring-credibility-issues-and-decl

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Trump's Credibility Issues 00:15:04
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at noon.
	Hope you had a great Mother's Day.
	I did not post anything on X about it yesterday because I was enjoying the family.
	In fact, I only made one post yesterday and it was on Instagram, and it was about Thunder trying to save my children who were not in any danger, but she didn't know that in the pool where a large basketball hoop had fallen in.
	And my good girl Thunder barked and barked and barked until we went out and took a look.
	Everyone was fine, but my sweet girl didn't know that.
	She was letting us know.
	Stradwick just sat there, did not bark, and then ruined Yardley's soccer ball.
	Okay, so the legacy media Sunday morning news shows barely covered the trial of former President Donald Trump yesterday.
	And you know why?
	Because it's going well for him.
	Trust me when I tell you that if it were going poorly for him, if Stormy had been the nail in the coffin of Donald Trump, they would have been all over it.
	So the fact that they barely touched it should tell you everything you need to know about how the Stormy Daniels testimony actually went down last week.
	We now turn to the prosecution star witness, and that is Mr. Trump's former fixer and lawyer, Michael Cohen.
	It's been a very interesting morning.
	He's a convicted felon himself.
	He has massive credibility issues to put it mildly.
	He's been on the stand all morning, and we will bring you the latest.
	We've been watching every single line of testimony.
	Joining us today, Viva Fry.
	He's a lawyer and Rumble creator.
	And Phil Holloway is a legal analyst and host of Inside the Law on YouTube.
	Welcome back, Viva and Phil.
	Great to have you.
	Thank you for having me, as always, Megan.
	All right.
	So I think it's fascinating seeing this happen.
	I mean, to me, it's like a Greek tragedy.
	You know, Michael Cohen gets picked by Donald Trump to work for him when he's a young lawyer in his 30s, gets a good job, a good salary.
	He's idolized Trump from his perch growing up in Long Island.
	You know, of course, Trump was known by us all back in the New York early days.
	And his job is not exactly as lawyer and counselor.
	It's more as fixer, where Trump wants him to do certain things and he does them.
	And like he knows, he testified one of the things he did for Trump was to negotiate down certain fees Trump owed or contracts Trump was obligated to pay on.
	And it occurred to me when I was listening to this, you know, the relationship was fraught from the beginning, right?
	Like, I think there's a reason Trump hired someone as sketchy as Michael Cohen.
	He was reportedly always desiring to have someone like Roy Cohn, you know, the famed lawyer who would just famous for his strong arm tactics and getting things done.
	And this was supposed to be his Roy Cohn.
	And Cohen spent a lifetime trying to just get Trump what he wanted.
	As he put it, I just knew my job was to make him happy.
	And I don't know what sort of corners were bent or what happened, but New York real estate is infamous for corners being bent and you know for operators doing what they need to do in order to get these buildings built and deals done.
	That's just the way it is, not just Trump, by the way.
	I know a lot of these guys.
	So, of course, Trump had this lapdog working for him, who then, when he started to run for president, was just begging, begging, begging to be part of the administration, to be taken along, you know, for the next piece of it.
	Take me with you, take me with you.
	And the theory being posited by the defense is once Cohen realized he was not going anywhere near the White House, things started to go sour when he realized that he was just going to be on the outside as a surrogate and he was not going to be holding my heart here, attorney general.
	My God.
	My God.
	Can you imagine?
	Okay.
	Trump was like, Yeah, no hard no, not you're not going to be attorney general.
	But the prosecution side, Viva, is it that's not what turned things south.
	What turned things south is the jig was up.
	They'd been working together with AMI to cover up these women stories who were coming forward: Karen McDougal, the playmate of the year in 98, Stormy Daniels, with whom Trump allegedly had this one night stand.
	And Cohen was working with AMI or in the case of Stormy on his own, paying off these women to keep him quiet.
	And when the shit hit the fan, Trump cut ties, let him twist in the wind, and he went down for it.
	And now it's Trump's turn.
	So that's kind of how it shook out this morning.
	And the Greek tragedy winds up, you know, as in others, with the wannabe aspiring son sticking the knife in his dad, turning on him.
	He says Trump turned first, but in any event, he's up there testifying so far this morning about how he loved Trump.
	He was happy.
	He really loved his job.
	If only, if only the dad had seen how wonderful he was, Viva, perhaps we wouldn't be here today.
	He might have been a better attorney general than Merrick Garland, in fairness, but the competition's not very high there.
	Good point.
	But it's so wild.
	We're listening to this in real time right now.
	And it's as though, look, there are Better Call Saul type attorneys, and then there are Alan Dershowitz type attorneys.
	And quite clearly, I mean, I like Better Call Saul.
	I mean, he seems like a nice guy, but quite clearly, Michael Cohen was of that pedigree of an attorney.
	And there was, I'm now convinced, by the way, listening to all of this, that Michael Cohen and David Pecker were in on this quasi-extortion scheme against Donald Trump.
	When you have Michael Cohen basically the fixer, and I forget who said it last week, yeah, he was the fixer because he broke everything.
	You know, Opix says he's he's fixing, you know, negotiating these deals on stories that they know are false, making work for himself so he can bill for this, even though they know the stories are bunk.
	It's like everybody was having a dip at Donald Trump's pockets.
	But the bottom line is, even if all of this is true, there's no underlying crime to any of this.
	But the more bottom line is that Michael Cohen is a corrupt extortionist of his own, in my humble opinion.
	I'm not talking like in law, but it's certainly seen that they were all just making work for themselves so they could dip into Trump's pockets and all take a piece of the pie as Trump is paying it up because it's not worth his time to deal with any of this.
	So you don't believe that Trump had a one-night stand with Stormy Daniels or had an affair with Karen McDougal?
	McDougal, I don't know.
	Stormy Daniels, no.
	From what I know, from like, I'm not intimately involved with anybody in the, you know, in the campaign.
	Like for someone who is a self-proclaimed neurotic hypochondriac myself, you're not having unprotected sex with a porn star who is in the industry of having unprotected sex because she's allergic to latex condoms when you have options that are better if that's your proclivity in life.
	So I don't believe it for a second.
	And I believe that Stormy Daniels is an extortionist who was trying to get money out of Trump, as Michael Anna and Michael Avenatti has now seriously implied from his jail cell in New York.
	You know what's crazy, Phil, is I came into this trial completely believing that Trump had had a one-night stand with Stormy and an affair with Karen McDougal.
	And I still believe he had an affair with Karen McDougal.
	That one got a little bit more detailed from testimony.
	I think it was today with Cohen, where it was, it went on allegedly for a long time, for months, if not years.
	And Cohen confronted Trump with the fact that she was shopping the story around.
	And his first response, according to Cohen, was, she's so beautiful.
	So they definitely knew each other.
	There are pictures of them together.
	I still believe it.
	They didn't call her and they're not calling her.
	But I no longer believe the Stormy Daniels story.
	I at least have very serious doubts about it.
	I would not find beyond a reasonable doubt, not that they have to, but I would not find beyond a reasonable doubt that they had an affair.
	She came across as so not credible, as we discussed on that Friday night show.
	I just, I can't, I don't put any stock in what this woman's her new Me Too remembrances.
	I now believe it could have been a whole, could have been a setup.
	She met him at the Tahoe thing.
	Maybe she went to his apartment, his hotel room.
	Maybe she didn't.
	But I can't believe a word out of that woman's mouth.
	Well, considering the source being Stormy Daniels, and of course, now if Michael Cohen says it's true, then I am irredeemably confined to believe the alternative that it did not happen.
	If Michael Cohen says the sky is blue, I'm going to doubt the validity and the truthfulness of that statement.
	You know, Michael Cohen, back to him, you know, we talk about him being a fixer.
	Well, it sounds to me like he likes that moniker way too much.
	It seems to me that he's embracing that.
	It guess it goes to his ego and pumps up his ego just a little too much.
	You know, when you talk about renegotiating contracts and you talk about working down the number on the dollar amount that you owe people on bills and things like that, that's actually practicing law.
	That's not necessarily being a fixer.
	But in Michael Cohen's mind, he gets more mileage on TikTok out of being labeled the fixer for Donald Trump.
	So when you talk about whether the affair ever happened or any of this other stuff, by the way, look first to the bias of the people making the claim.
	Does Stormy Daniels have a bias against Donald Trump?
	Most assuredly so.
	Does Michael Cohen have a bias?
	Most assuredly so.
	And the fact that they are leading this testimony or perjury, whatever it is, with evidence that makes the case for him being biased against Donald Trump, I think only goes to help Donald Trump.
	Because first and foremost, before you get into all of the prior inconsistent statements and the convictions for things related to fraud and lying, if a defendant who sits in the witness chair has a built-in bias against the defendant, you can disregard all of their other testimony.
	And the same goes for Stormy Daniels and whether or not they ever had an affair.
	So far, Michael Cohen is trying to sketch a relationship in which he's tight with Trump, Viva, that he, it was an open door policy.
	He could go in there whenever he wanted, didn't need an appointment, and that they were so close that Trump shared his contact list, like in his, I don't know if it's his phone.
	I don't think Trump, yeah, it seems to be a shoe.
	Yeah, the Rolodex phone use, but his Rolodex.
	And I actually just heard people on CNN saying, oh my God, who would do that?
	Who would share every single contact they have with their right-hand person?
	Meanwhile, I'm like, Abigail Finan literally knew when it was time for me to get more birth control.
	Back when I was taking it, my assistant.
	Let me tell you, there are plenty of us who share everything with our right-hand person.
	But the whole point is to show they're tight.
	They're tight, tight, tight.
	And later, it will be argued, Michael Cohen would never have done anything without running by Trump.
	Well, okay, well, I have to get this thought out of my head before, because this goes back to the question as to whether or not you believe Trump did this with Stormy Daniels.
	For anybody who didn't watch her testimony, she said she was allergic to latex.
	So in all of her hundreds of movies of career, she never used a condom.
	And we're to believe that Donald Trump, who by all accounts is a germaphobe, would do this.
	It's like that old commercial when you have unprotected sex with somebody, you're not just having sex with them, but everyone who they've ever had sex with.
	So all of that, I had to say that before I forgot it.
	Do I believe Michael Cohen's testimony is all over the place?
	I put out a meme because it's hilarious where his answer was yes, I mean no.
	That was one of the last tweets from inner city press Matthew Russell Lee that I had the privilege of reading before we went live.
	The guy's, he'll say anything.
	What's clear is that he's got overt malice and animus towards Trump, as does Stormy Daniels.
	And she's got a personal vendetta or at least financial interests in seeing Trump go down because she owes him a half a million dollars and doesn't want to pay any of that.
	They have clear animus if they don't have potentially other mental issues.
	I mean, Stormy touched on it as to whether or not, you know, she might be suffering from some mental issues.
	Michael Cohen, if he doesn't touch on it, it might appear to be apparent from his behavior.
	But what we've seen, you know, in the broader scheme, we've seen a politically weaponized machine that has no qualms about using the mentally unwell as tools for political profit.
	The way they exploited EGE Carroll to go after Trump under that law that they recently amended to allow her to do it.
	I see to some extent the way the machine exploited Fetterman in his time of illness just because they needed him on the seat.
	And then when he started saying things critical of the party, they start potentially throwing him under the bus.
	We see an exploitation of Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels to their detriment to pursue Trump.
	And my concern is it doesn't matter what evidence is presented or is not presented.
	We are in New York.
	Trump is getting convicted the same way he was found liable for that nonsense EGE Carroll suit.
	So the bottom line, I don't think it matters what evidence is on display or what evidence is contradicted.
	I think Trump is getting convicted regardless.
	It'll be for the appeals.
	That's how I feel too.
	I feel the same.
	I feel like it's kind of beyond.
	It's kind of a moot point.
	I hope it's not, Phil, but it's kind of a moot point.
	I mean, we're lawyers, so we want to analyze the evidence and say, are we convinced?
	Has the prosecution proven its case?
	But I mean, I just can't get past the fact that New York went Manhattan when 87% for Joe Biden.
	And those 13% probably voted for Jill Stein and no one.
	Like, I just, this is not a Trump-loving town politically, Manhattan.
	And the odds are lawyer or not lawyer, you know, healthcare worker, not, they don't like Donald Trump.
	No one they know likes Donald Trump.
	Their families hate Donald Trump.
	Their wives hate Donald Trump.
	Those are the odds.
	So I just can't get past the fact that we're kind of out here like bobbleheads.
	The trial's already lost in all likelihood.
	That's what Alvin Bragg is banking on because this truly has to be one of the worst cases I've ever seen.
	You tell me about your experience, but I mean, it's such a joke that he must be just banking on the fix being in with the jury given their politics.
	You know, when I was a prosecutor, I could not even imagine for one second bringing any case to trial, let alone one against a former president where there is absolutely no corroborating physical or other evidence to support the testimony of a disbarred,
	convicted, felonious liar named Michael Cohen, who goes on TikTok and wants nothing more than to show the world him and his Donald Trump behind bars t-shirt when that is the person who concocted any kind of scheme or made any legal plan or gave any legal advice.
The Fraud Exception Trap 00:14:39
	And he wants the jury to send the client to prison for doing what he as the client's lawyer asked them to do.
	It's just not a rational thing to expect in a rational legal world.
	But when the deck is stacked in your favor, like it probably is for the reasons you said for Alvin Bragg, then you can just go for it.
	And all you care about is the short-term potential for a short-term conviction.
	And let's not kid ourselves either.
	Harvey Weinstein, yes, his case got reversed because a judge let in too much irrelevant stuff to slime a criminal defendant to the point that it became an unfair trial.
	But we cannot say that we can expect the same thing for Donald Trump because for the same reason that the jury has got it in for Donald Trump, the same reason Judge Murshon, I think, is biased against Donald Trump, the justices and the judges in the appeals process also probably hate Donald Trump because it is, after all, New York.
	So this thing from beginning to end, top to bottom, just stinks of being unfair.
	And it's the kind of thing that in a rational world would not have gotten this far.
	But we've got this convicted, felonious liar, Michael Cohen, who has to not only make out all the elements of the crime because we haven't seen that yet, but we also have to get a jury, I guess, to pretend that all the other times he may have lied under oath, so be it.
	But this time he's decided to get away from the story.
	Oh, yeah, we'll get to where Michael Cohen is.
	We'll take some time to dig into that.
	You know, the thing is, they've proven, you know, they've had testimony that Trump was concerned about this Karen McDougal, the playmate of the year with whom he allegedly had an actual affair, not like a one-night stand.
	And that he, that the National Enquirer paid her $150,000 to, you know, give them exclusive rights to her story, which they never published.
	That Stormy Daniels came forward alleging a one-night stand and that Cohen paid her $130,000 and then sought reimbursement.
	That's the underlying basis for this case.
	They also have proven that this doorman, this doorman at Trump Tower claimed that there was a woman inside Trump Tower who is the mother of Trump's illegitimate baby.
	And the National Enquirer paid that guy 30 grand to catch and kill his story.
	We know that one was not true.
	And Trump presumably knew that one was not true.
	So there's no question that Trump did pay through Pecker.
	I guess he didn't reimburse him because Trump is an infamous cheapskate.
	I mean, that is pretty much the uniform testimony.
	But Trump, Trump wanted that story caught and killed, Cohen and Pecker, and they did.
	They caught and killed the $30,000 doorman thing, which indisputably was fake.
	Now, I heard CNN this morning talking about, I'm like, well, these payments are a lot higher.
	$130.
	No, they're not, you dumbasses.
	You guys know in the law of the world of law, the difference between $30,000 and $130,000 is nothing.
	It's basically how dumb is your opposing counsel who's trying to shake you down, right?
	Like, I'll pay probably $150 to get rid of you.
	That's nuisance change.
	That's what my client's going to pay in legal fees if we have to do this for the next six months.
	But it's a nuisance value settlement either way.
	So we can't tell anything by the money.
	This was Caitlin Collins, by the way, suggesting this.
	Can't tell anything by the money about whether Trump thought it was true, Viva, or knew it was true.
	Caitlin Collins has not had the best takes on things in any realm of the universe, but I think this actually highlights something a little bit more insidious where you had Michael Cohen and Pecker, you know, the fixer fixing things that they break, going to Trump with a story that everybody knows is false, but saying, you better pay it off and you better pay us off to do the work, or if it goes public, it might cause harm anyhow.
	And it does sound an awful lot like Michael Cohen and Pecker were involved in a shakedown scheme on Donald Trump.
	And it might explain, it might explain why AMI, which is Pecker's organization, signed the nonprosecution agreement with the state back in 2018.
	But one thing that's worth mentioning in all of this, it's not just that it's a biased jurisdiction and a corrupt judge.
	Like we're talking about all this now, and we're still forgetting, or we seem to be forgetting that Trump is still being gagged.
	He's still incapable of publicly addressing these two confirmed liars, a porn star and a convicted perjurer, according to Arthur Engeron, the other New York corrupt judge.
	He's still gagged while all this is going on and can't publicly refute a lot of the lies that they're saying.
	Stormy Daniels gets up there and says, I felt drugged.
	I mean, objection sustained, but what the hell is that to say?
	I feel like I blacked out.
	Like, it's so prejudicial and so absolutely irrelevant to the underlying theory of the case, the underlying felony.
	And a shout out, by the way, to this guy named Joe Nierman.
	Megan, you might not know him.
	Joe Nearman, Good Logic, a New York attorney, who's trying to lift the gag on Donald Trump with the not so novel, but pretty obvious argument that the gag on Trump doesn't just violate his First Amendment rights.
	It violates all of ours because we have the right to hear what he has to say.
	But bottom line saying that too.
	Yeah, it's why it's wild.
	So this guy, he's doing some good work, ungag Trump, but like he's being gagged.
	These two people come out and spew the most prejudicial of lies.
	And if he dares to comment on it publicly, corrupt Judge Marshawn, whose daughter is profiting handsomely from this trial, as is Adam Schiff, her client, if he says anything, he'll be fine.
	As is Michael Cohen.
	Oh, yeah, Michael Cohen with his TikTok and all this crap.
	I don't know how that works.
	But if Trump says anything, he might go to jail because it'll be his 11th strike for contempt charges under this corrupt judge, Juan Marchau.
	The whole system is freaking broken.
	And to is it Al Pacino?
	The whole system is out of order right now.
	And people really need to appreciate it and start speaking up about it.
	You're out of voter.
	You're out of voter.
	Yes.
	No, it's actually amazing because Stormy Daniels has written a book.
	She's had a documentary made about her.
	She's gotten paid off both by Michael Cohen and then by all these news agencies, including NBC News, which gave her $100,000 for back footage, for back footage.
	Bullshit.
	They bought her interview.
	They're just like the National Inquirer in that way.
	They're making bank off of these allegations.
	And Michael Cohen now, despite the fact that he's a convicted felon with a TikTok, with merch he's selling that has Trump's picture in jail.
	This is like a week ago.
	This was out there and he was touting it and celebrating it.
	This is their star witness.
	Biased much.
	The only person who can't comment on it is Trump.
	And then we have their sitting president of the United States making jokes about Trump's trials at the White House correspondence dinner.
	Once again, Trump can't respond.
	He has to keep his mouth shut or they're going to throw him in jail for real.
	What if this case is still going when it comes to an appeal or what have you, when these two, if these two finally do have a debate in October, which is typically when the two candidates debate?
	And Joe Biden brings it up.
	Can he say anything about it then?
	Does the gag order last until the end of the entire case, Judge?
	Or is he allowed on the presidential debate stage to actually offer a retort when he's under attack?
	That's how absurd this whole thing is, Phil.
	Yeah, the whole thing is absurd from top to bottom.
	This business with the gag order, I just can't, for the life of me, understand why Judge Murchond seems to think that he can't issue a gag order against somebody who's under a state's subpoena.
	For Christ's sake, he can.
	He should.
	And the fact that he refuses to do so is only, in my view, more evidence of his bias.
	But if I can get to this one question back to Michael Cohen, where is attorney-client privilege?
	Why is the judge allowing all this into evidence?
	Because all the stuff that Michael Cohen was involved with was attorney-client privilege.
	And the fact that he's not a lawyer.
	Are they saying crime fraud exception, Phil?
	Well, I mean, nobody seems to be litigating this, Megan.
	And I don't see anybody objecting.
	I don't see anybody standing up saying, you know, this is my attorney client privilege.
	I object to all this stuff.
	And Michael Cohen, by the way, is out here talking about things that are not even related to the issue at hand in this case.
	And so there should be an objection every time something like that comes up.
	There are two lawyers, as we know.
	And you know, can I just take a look at it?
	Let me just jump in because I'm going to argue against myself.
	So how can it be crime fraud exception?
	Basically, for the listening audience, if Phil's my lawyer and I tell him a bunch of stuff, it's privilege.
	But if what I'm telling him is I'm committing some sort of a fraud and I want you to paper the deal for me and you have to put it down in a false way because that's how I'm going to get away with my fraud.
	And Phil's like, yeah, I'm on it.
	I'll do it for you.
	That would not be privileged because of the crime fraud exception.
	But they're not alleging.
	Even the prosecution knows that a hush money payment is not illegal.
	Paying off Stormy Daniels, paying off Karen McDougal, even paying off the dumb doorman, not illegal.
	What is allegedly illegal is the documentation of it, which they say wasn't proper, but they're not talking about communications, at least not yet, related to the documentation.
	That's actually what they're really missing is testimony from Michael Cohen that Trump directed or knew about exactly how this was all going to be documented.
	Maybe we'll get there, but go ahead, Phil.
	For crime fraud, you've got to have some judicial determination that there was a fraud.
	Here, there's no evidence outside of what Michael Cohen says is that there was any kind of crime, or certainly there's no fraud.
	You've got no victims.
	You've got somebody making a writing a check to his attorney.
	It's either for attorney's fees or it's to pay for the consideration that's necessary to support a valid contract.
	So there's been no judicial determination that crime fraud even applies here.
	So how this whole thing is coming in without any objection, apparently, is beyond me.
	And hopefully the two lawyers on the jury will at least see that because we lawyers, if nothing else, we take pride in the attorney client privilege.
	It's sacrosanct because if without it, we couldn't do our jobs.
	We could not represent our clients, whether it's in a criminal case, a business relations case, domestic, anything.
	We can't do our jobs without a attorney client privilege that is held sacrosanct by the courts.
	Maybe these two jurors on this jury, these two lawyers on this jury will appreciate that and see that there is something very, very rotten in Denmark.
	I mean, Michael Cohen, for the record, is no longer a lawyer.
	He's no longer a licensed attorney.
	He's been disbarred.
	That's just the smallest of his many problems with the law.
	Convicted felon, you know, admitted liar, lied before Congress while under oath, said he lied to a federal court, was cross-examined by Alina Haba, Trump's lawyer in one of the other cases, and admitted, yeah, I've lied repeatedly to federal courts.
	I mean, he's just being disbarred as an attorney is the least of his worries, but he tapes his own client.
	You know, they spent some time this morning on his tape viva with Trump discussing the Karen McDougal payment, which is color to this case, but is not really at issue in this case.
	The documentation of it is not something he's been charged with.
	It's the documentation of a different payment to a different woman.
	The prosecution is just setting the stage with the Karen McDougall stuff.
	Look, the evidence that we've been seeing adduced by Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels has had no probative evidentiary value.
	It has only been for the purposes of being prejudicial in that it's humiliating or paints a picture of.
	When you're talking about the crime fraud exception, look, I won't venture out of my alley.
	I was a Quebec attorney, no longer practicing because I don't live in Quebec anymore.
	But when Michael Cohen was recording these conversations, there was no crime even being alleged to have been committed.
	And so he's recording the conversations with his client, not because he's being bullied into breaking the law by an El Chapo type client.
	He's recording it to extort his client at a later date, if need be.
	And that's what we're seeing.
	Let me just interject.
	What he said today was that he recorded him because he wanted to then go show the National Inquirer.
	See, this is like, he's on me to make sure it's getting done.
	We got to make sure this gets done.
	You know, I'm back connected.
	Megan, and let me just tell you how.
	I'm not calling you this name.
	I'm calling Michael Cohen how insanely idiotic that explanation is that he's going to go tell David Pecker, I secretly recorded my own client.
	And now I'm showing you something that he doesn't know I even recorded.
	I mean, it's so crazy for you.
	What he did was make a recording, potentially with the long-term objective of extorting Trump.
	And that's exactly what he's doing right now.
	He failed to get on the campaign.
	It seems that he was heartbroken and some people might have suggested suicidal, but that's what he was doing.
	He wasn't even recording a crime in real time.
	The ultimate irony in all of this is that I don't know if you followed Michael Avenatti, the other convicted lawyer extortionist in this wonderful trilogy of characters from jail, tweeting out that he gets a call from the producer of Stormy Daniels' documentary Netflix series.
	And then they admit that they circumvented payment to Stormy Daniels to circumvent the money that she owed Donald Trump.
	And so they concocted a fraudulent payment scheme to conceal Stormy Daniel assets from Donald Trump.
	I mean, it's another realm of accuse your enemies of what you're doing, you know, confession through projection.
	They are the ones who are guilty of everything they're accusing Trump of.
	But bottom line, when Cohen was recording that conversation, his explanation is untenable at best.
	To say, I'm going to go to some other guy now and show you a secret recording between me and my client, untenable.
	He was doing it first.
	You know, it does occur to me, I don't believe that Trump has committed a crime here, but I would say if you're thinking about committing a crime, you should definitely do it with a bunch of losers, convicted liars, and people with no reputation.
	It's very helpful when they take the stand.
	It was very easy to dismiss.
	For the record, here is that Cohen Trump audio from September 2016.
	All right, this is two months before the election, not even, discussing Karen McDougal.
	And you can hear Cohen suggesting the matter's been handled.
	And you hear Trump say something about cash.
	And you'll hear Cohen say no, no, no.
	And then they say check.
	I don't know.
	The submission was that this is Trump clearly being like, pay her in cash for God's sake.
	And Michael Cohen saying no.
	I don't, I'm not sure if my own take on it is that it hasn't really become an issue, not for nothing, but here's the tape.
Why Cohen Was Reimbursed 00:15:18
	I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David, you know, so that I'm going to do that right away.
	I've actually come up and spoken to me and I've spoken to Alan Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with funding.
	Yes.
	And it's all the stuff.
	All the stuff because, you know, you never know where that company, you never know where he's going to get to.
	Correct.
	So I'm all over that.
	And I spoke to Alan about it when it comes time for the financing, which will be, listen, we'll have to pay you.
	So I got no, no, no.
	Okay.
	So that's the, you know, it's showing how involved Trump was in the payments to Karen McDougal, not Stormy.
	And thus the implication by the prosecution will be he was this involved in Stormy as well.
	And I assume, Viva, shortly, we're going to hear Michael Cohen probably testify to that too, that he micromanaged all the payments, including the Stormy payments.
	Again, though, they have to get to him also saying, and this is how I would like it to be documented in the books.
	This is how you should bill it, Michael Cohen.
	And this is how our bookkeeper will write it down.
	I really, I don't know that I wouldn't put it past Cohen, but I'm actually not expecting that testimony.
	This is the portion where Michael Cohen said that when asked, is there a longer conversation he had later?
	He says, yes, I mean no, I think.
	And I think this is the same one where he says that the call got or the recording got cut short because he got a call from Capital On, correct?
	All right.
	I'm not sure that I even believe that that recording was cut short as a result of an incoming call.
	I wouldn't have anybody to cut it there because who the heck knows what they discussed afterwards.
	What do I surmise from that?
	Absolutely nothing to quote the great movie UHF.
	Absolutely nothing.
	All right, good.
	And that doesn't even have to do with the alleged payment in the alleged 34-charge felony indictment.
	This is just to color the file with a bunch of prejudicial, irrelevant information to attack a character or make someone look bad.
	All that I know is listening to that, Michael Cohen sounds like the scumbag stereotype of an attorney that we all know that he is.
	It's so dirty, Megan, to record a conversation like that.
	What was he doing?
	I know.
	That was challenging to put that up.
	Client with a client, with your only client.
	And when you point out accurately, he knew this wasn't a crime, that there was one even allegedly crying.
	He just recorded him without telling him on his iPhone.
	All right, standby.
	When we come back, I want to, the movie clip that I think best embodies who Michael Cohen looks like right now.
	And we'll get into some more detail about what he's saying on the stand and the many, many, many, many lies already told by Michael Cohen.
	How will the jury take this guy seriously?
	So completing our Greek tragedy, he wanted to be attorney general.
	He wanted to be taken along to the administration.
	Trump was smart enough to realize: no, there's no role for you there.
	And then this is basically what happened to Michael Cohen.
	He became very familiar to many of us who have seen this movie many, many times.
	He jumped out immediately in all of the writings he did about Trump and podcasts he did about Trump and testimony he gave about Trump, becoming absolutely obsessed with the man.
	I give you Glenn Close.
	I just want to be a part of your life.
	Oh, this is the way you do it, huh?
	Show it up at my appointments.
	What am I supposed to do?
	You won't answer my calls.
	You change your number.
	I mean, I'm not going to be ignored, Dan.
	Yes, that's Michael Cohen today.
	He makes his living based on Donald Trump.
	He talks about Donald Trump.
	Even on the stand, he seemed a little wistful about his earlier time when he mattered to Donald Trump.
	And now he's just like everything about this guy is defined by Donald Trump.
	He did switch his tune.
	I mean, I like, okay.
	He has lied so many times, it's hard to keep up.
	But he's praised Trump repeatedly.
	I'll just give you a little.
	Okay, here he is in SOP three in a montage.
	One thing Donald Trump is, he's a compassionate man.
	He's a man of great intellect, great intuition, and great abilities.
	Mr. Trump's memory is fantastic.
	And I've never come across a situation where Mr. Trump has said something that's not accurate.
	Mr. Trump truly cares about America.
	He loves this country.
	He's an amazing negotiator, maybe the best ever in the history of this world.
	The words the media should be using to describe Mr. Trump are generous, compassionate, principled, empathetic, kind, humble, honest, and genuine.
	He's not lying.
	He was protecting a friend.
	There's a difference.
	What is the difference?
	The difference is he was being a true friend.
	He was, it didn't matter to him.
	He will ultimately, and I've said this so many times, he will ultimately go down in history as the greatest president.
	Oh my God, with Chris Cuomo, who, by the way, has got his hands totally dirty in this whole thing, too.
	So that's the government star witness today, Phil.
	I mean, I realize he changed his tune, but it's so self-serving.
	A jury will see through this.
	I hope a jury will see through it, but we're talking about New York after all.
	And we've well documented that this jury, Alvin Bragg, is counting on this jury to be sort of in the bag for Bragg and against Trump.
	You know, when you got a lawyer who is surreptitiously recording a client and then basically saying this little snippet of a conversation proves all the other things that I'm saying that are negative about him, which by the way weren't recorded, it just defies credibility.
	There's just no way in the world that a rational jury in a rational legal system would buy off on any of this, Megan.
	You've got this individual who's capable of saying all of the things that you just played in that site.
	And then fast forward to today, everything that he says under oath before this jury is going to be diametrically different.
	Normally, we would say that that person is a compulsive liar and is not the kind of person you want to build a felony prosecution around.
	They have not proven the elements of this case.
	There's been no evidence yet in this case that Donald Trump committed a crime.
	They're going to have to hang their hat entirely on the testimony of this liar.
	They're going to have to get a jury to say, you know what?
	All the other times he's lied, we're going to give him a pass.
	We believe beyond a reasonable doubt he's telling the truth here in court.
	And it's going to be all done without any corroboration.
	There's no physical evidence.
	There's not going to be any documents.
	You're not going to have Donald Trump writing a letter saying, hey, Michael, I want you to use this money.
	I want you to pay it for something.
	And I want to record it on the books in another way.
	No, this is payment for legal fees or legal matters.
	And that's how it was.
	Legal expenses.
	Legal expenses, which is even more ambiguous.
	That's the word they used.
	How's the accountant?
	Yeah, well, that's exactly right.
	I mean, the CFO is in jail.
	He's at Rikers.
	And I don't expect him.
	There's a real question about whether they're going to drag him in and testify.
	And if they don't, whether they're going to get an adverse inference drawn by jurist instruction.
	We'll see.
	But here's Michael Cohen.
	I gave you the, he's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
	That was like Glenn Close and Michael Douglas in the beginning of the movie.
	The hot elevator sex, the days and days behind closed doors while the wife was away.
	It was actually only one night.
	That was the beginning.
	Then Trump started to ignore the calls.
	And much as it had the same effect on Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, here's what it did to Michael Cohen.
	All right.
	I'll show you.
	Let's start with thought five.
	Michael Cohen here with another Michael Cohen reacts.
	Well, I've been receiving countless phone calls by people, all concerned because they're hearing on the media that Donald Trump is going to run again.
	And he's going to make this fucked up bullshit announcement sometime after the midterm elections.
	All right.
	I still to this day maintain that he is not doing it.
	It is still part of this great grift of Donald Trump.
	Now, for me personally, I hope to God that this fucking scumbag runs.
	I really do.
	And he's asking me why.
	Well, first of all, because 24 hours after that, I'm going to put together my own team.
	I want to run as a Democrat.
	I want to put myself up on a stage against this fat fuck, this orange-crested Mandarin oompa loompa.
	So let's see.
	Let's see if I'm right.
	Stay tuned.
	I'll be back.
	Then he took his bunny off the stove.
	This is their star witness.
	Well, I mean, I don't use the word grifter very often.
	I'm not going to use it now.
	But that very much seems like someone who's going to say one thing when it's profitable one way and say something that's the exact opposite when it's profitable the other way.
	And the other thing is when he's out there, you know, praising Trump, first of all, I happen to agree with him back then, but he's not just praising Trump because he is like a narcissist indirectly praising himself.
	This is how smart Trump is, how good he is and all this stuff.
	And I'm his right-hand man.
	I'm his fixer.
	So it must be a reflection on my own greatness as well.
	But the idea that this guy is a convicted perjurer, he is a confirmed liar.
	He's a scoundrel of the highest order.
	I am now retrospectively reanalyzing Judge Engeron's decision in the EGE Carroll case, where he addresses Michael Cohen.
	And he specifically says, it's very funny why he said it.
	This man is a convicted perjurer.
	He's a liar.
	Some Engeron was the fraud case, the $400 million fraud.
	Angeron was, yes, the $455 million.
	And Cohen testified in that case.
	Keep going.
	Yes, not the E. Gene Carroll.
	Sorry, just to clarify that there.
	Engeron said as a matter of his decision, Michael Cohen is a convicted perjurer.
	And while some triars of fact might not give much weight to the words of a liar, I believe him here.
	I'm paraphrasing, but it's almost verbatim.
	It's almost verbatim.
	And now that I'm listening to that and rethinking it, it's like Engeron was phrasing what the jury has to spew out in terms of coming to a conviction here.
	Yeah, he's a convicted perjurer.
	Some jurors might think he's a liar now, but we choose to believe him now because once a perjurer, not always a perjurer.
	But no, I think Angeron actually telegraphed and laid up the script that the jury is going to gobble up to come to their foregone conclusion.
	Everyone around him felt is a liar.
	Michael Cohen is a liar.
	He had a lawyer and continues to have a lawyer.
	He's still represented by this guy, David Schwartz, who you may recall Michael Cohen got in trouble a couple months ago when he was trying to get out of jail not long ago, late 23, and he cited a bunch of case law to the judge.
	It was all made up.
	It was fake cases that he used some AI generator to come up with.
	And his lawyer was this guy, David Schwartz.
	And I've got to show you this.
	So David Schwartz came on my show at NBC shortly after this whole story broke about the $130,000 payment and so on and so forth.
	And now we know that Trump reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000.
	We know that.
	And it's almost better if Trump just would have done it himself because you can make unlimited donations to your own campaign, but you can't have a third party do it, which is how they're trying to get him.
	But anyway, there's no question that Trump reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000.
	But the first defense that Cohen came out with was, I was not reimbursed.
	And I just did this out of my love.
	Again, back to the Glenn Close in the elevator for Donald Trump.
	And Schwartz came on my show and tried to spew this nonsense.
	Look at this.
	He got approached.
	It'll take $130,000 to make this go away.
	He had to make a decision.
	Okay.
	I get it.
	I'm not even challenging you.
	I'm challenging you on the impossibility.
	It's not.
	That he paid $130,000 for something he didn't do and never saw reimbursement.
	When you're looking at it in a vacuum, but if you understand the relationship here, it makes complete sense that he's approached.
	Am I going to go to the boss or am I not going to go to the boss?
	All right.
	What do I do?
	He chose not to go to the boss.
	He chose to take care of this thing.
	Why wouldn't he get 130?
	Why would he pay 130 grand of his own money?
	Well, you know what?
	You're going to, when Michael Cohen does come out, you're going to find out the mechanics of that.
	No, you're not answering.
	You're dodging.
	You're getting out of balance.
	I am answering.
	What's the truth?
	The truth is he loves, he loves the boss.
	He did it out of love.
	He did it.
	He did it.
	He did it out of love and he did it out of loyalty.
	All right.
	So they laughed openly at him.
	We know that he was reimbursed.
	Of course he was reimbursed.
	And that's his lawyer.
	The lawyer is a liar.
	Cohen is a liar.
	The jury's not stupid.
	I know they hate Trump, but they're not stupid.
	And I just gave you one soundbite.
	Here's a little bit more of Michael Cohen on the record since the breakup talking about Trump.
	SAP4.
	I think he's hit the patent button a while ago.
	However, what he's very good at is hiding it in front of the camera.
	He's calm cool and collect because he's a sociopath.
	I looked at him and I said to myself, boy, what a sad-looking, pathetic, deflated individual.
	He is playing to the lowest denominator of American that exists in this country.
	He is truly the most dangerous person right now in this country and possibly the world.
	Trump 2024, more like Trump 20 to 24 years.
	Okay.
	What?
	So the thing is, oh my gosh, a lot to unpack.
	The prosecution's trying to front a lot of this in indirect.
	So to take the sting out of what's going to be an absolutely brutal cross.
	But there's no way they can take all the state.
	They'd spend every day, all day for the next two weeks beating him up if they really wanted to get after everything the defense is going to do to him.
	And I just can't believe that once the defense is done, the jury is going to be having any feeling other than, I want to vomit.
	Get him out of here.
	But Megan, you say the jury's not dumb.
	The problem is they're partisan in all likelihood.
	And that's a big, it's a big distinction.
	They're not going to do what they're going to do out of stupidity.
	They're going to do it out of partisan prejudice.
	And that's what I think is a foregone conclusion.
	But everyone should re-watch that Michael Cohen and just appreciate confession through projection.
	Everything that Cohen just said about Trump is true of himself.
	But Megan, one thing, but Phil, sorry, I cut you off.
	You mentioned it a moment ago, and it's something that people should really understand.
	By reimbursing Cohen, the allegation is that it was a disguised campaign contribution because, you know, Cohen made it and then he got repaid for it.
	The bottom line is, even if that's the case and that's the theory of the case, it should be Cohen who should be the defendant in this and not Trump because, like you astutely observed, you can't over-donate to your own campaign.
	And so if it was Trump donating to his own campaign in kind or whatever, it's not a crime.
	If it's Cohen who did it because he got reimbursed and it exceeded his campaign contribution, Cohen should be the one on the defense.
	Well, here's the other thing.
	Here's the other thing, Phil.
	I heard Andy McCarthy raising this point as usual with Andy.
	It was a good one.
Identifying the Real Victim 00:02:54
	Who was defrauded?
	Who was the victim of this alleged fraud?
	Because Michael Cohen paid the money.
	Michael Cohen and everybody around him, the testimony is consistent.
	He got paid back and Trump paid him double what he paid out so that he could pay full taxes, 50% on all the monies.
	So New York State did not get defrauded.
	The only thing that was defrauded was a book, allegedly, in which they didn't write down reimbursement for hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.
	They wrote legal expenses paid to Michael Cohen pursuant to a retainer agreement.
	And the testimony was there was no written retainer agreement.
	But meanwhile, all these lawyers are coming forward saying, I never have one written down.
	I've had so many cases in which I don't have a written down retainer, even if you're supposed to.
	Anyway, so who was defrauded?
	The book.
	The book was given bad information that was kept internally at Trump organization.
	The book wasn't even filed as an addendum to a tax return or to some sort of corporate submission that was required.
	It went on the shelf and it sat there until Alvin Bragg subpoenaed it.
	So who was defrauded?
	Because fraud in the ether is not actionable.
	And the law is really clear on that.
	They won't enforce fraud claims unless there's an identifiable victim, which is one of the reasons why the whole fraud claim under Engeron was so outrageous.
	But there, at least, we had a specific statute saying it was okay.
	Yeah, well, Engeron, of course, doesn't require any victims before he labels something fraud.
	Neither does Letitia James.
	And apparently neither does Alvin Bragg.
	In the TikTok video with Michael Cohen, when he says he might run in 2020, because he wants to be sort of on stage, well, that's what's happening right now.
	He's got his way.
	He is on stage.
	This whole thing is a theatrical stage production.
	It's not a court of law.
	This is nothing that's based on reality in terms of law, because for the reasons you pointed out, there's no victims, no victims, no fraud.
	It's the only time in history that I know of where two misdemeanors, arguably with the statute of limitations having passed, are combined together to make a felony or 36 felony fraud counts where nobody was defrauded.
	It's absolutely ridiculous to call this thing a court of law.
	This is simply a theatrical production.
	And Michael Cohen has gotten his way.
	He is now on center stage with Donald Trump, and his TikTok followers are just going insane.
	And his own star in his own mind is on the rise.
	But let there be no doubt, Megan, that this jury is going to make their decision based on their feelings about Donald Trump, not about what's going on in this courtroom.
	I can only hope that there's one or two, maybe even three, that will say, look, you know what?
A Theatrical Courtroom Show 00:04:16
	Even though we don't like Donald Trump, we don't see a crime here.
	And if he can.
	And we love the law.
	All right, wait, stand by.
	Hold that.
	Hold the rest of that thought, Phil.
	Quick break, and then back with the guys right after this.
	Gentlemen, for what it's worth, Trump sued Michael Cohen for breaching attorney client privilege months ago, but he dropped the suit in October.
	There was some allegation perhaps it wasn't viable because Cohen was acting as quote fixer and not attorney.
	But of course, Trump's whole defense is that he paid legal expenses.
	So I don't, I'm not sure why or even if the Trump team abandoned the Michael Couldn't Cohen shouldn't be talking at all because he's my lawyer defense.
	We'll have to look into that more.
	Here's what just happened before they just broke for lunch.
	It's 1 p.m. Eastern.
	Cohen testified that Donald Trump told him to quote take care of the Stormy Daniels story.
	Cohen says that Trump, upon learning that Stormy Daniels was shopping her story, was very angry with Michael Cohen, who you recall by this point in the story had been working with AMI, National Enquirer, to tamp down these stories from Karen McDougall and the doorman, et cetera, calling it, he says Trump did, a total disaster and saying, quote, women are going to hate me.
	Cohen says he responded that he had no control over Daniels' story, quote, just take care of it, he says Trump told him.
	Cohen says he kept Trump informed on Daniels' situation.
	Quote, that was what I always did, which was to keep him abreast of everything.
	Cohen said Trump, quote, was not thinking about Melania.
	This was all about the campaign, end quote.
	While discussing the Daniels deal, Cohen said he, Cohen, raised Melania to Trump and that Trump responded, quote, Don't worry, he goes, How long do you think I'll be on the market for?
	Not long.
	He wasn't thinking about Melania.
	This was all about the campaign.
	Per CNN, Trump smirked and shook his head when Cohen mentioned Melania.
	Here's what's annoying to me still.
	And the audience has heard me like this on a broken record, but like we've been over this.
	Campaign finance law does not look at what was in the subjective head of the defendant to figure out whether you violated the campaign's finance laws.
	It looks at the nature of the payment.
	If a hush money payment is paid for any reason other than to help somebody's electoral chances, then it's not a violation of the campaign finance laws.
	It's only something like a payment for polling or, you know, the lectern to set up for a debate that you're never going to have again or use again.
	That could be a legitimate campaign finance expense.
	If Trump tried to claim this hush money as a campaign finance expense, they would have come after him saying that it wasn't a legitimate one.
	This wasn't a campaign finance donation expense, et cetera.
	They're only claiming it retrospectively.
	But even Trump's defenders, Phil, on CNN and elsewhere, just skip right past this and go right to, it was all about Melania.
	It wasn't about, and I'm sitting over here pulling my hair out saying, no one gives a shit.
	We don't care whether it's about Melania or it was about the campaign.
	All that matters is, is a hush money, the kind of payment that could only ever be used to advance one's electoral chances.
	That's the only inquiry and nobody will talk about it.
	It won't wind up in the jury instructions and the jury will be misled the same way CNN is about what the relevant test is.
	Was it more Melania or was it more of a campaign concern?
	And in addition to that, Megan, I want to know where the objection is to this speculation.
	You're asking a witness to talk about what may or may not be in the head of the criminal defendant in this case.
	I don't know.
	This is why it's so frustrating when you can't watch the actual court proceedings on a live stream or on television because you're getting it second and third hand.
	But when a witness wants to tell a jury what somebody else thinks, that's an improper question.
	It calls for speculation if they have some type of proof intrinsic that shows, you know, this is what is in somebody's head.
	If they wrote a statement and you can infer something from that, but for this man to offer his opinion is absolutely an objectionable question.
	And it makes me wonder what kind of kangaroo court is Murchan even running here.
	Because if the defense lawyers don't object to it, why doesn't the judge himself object to it?
	It's patently an improper question.
The Little Judge Do Moment 00:04:13
	He's starting to feel a little judgedo-y to me.
	I mean, I realize he didn't allow cameras in the courtroom, but he's feeling a little judgedo-y-y to me.
	Like he doesn't have control of his courtroom.
	He's not compelling the control of the witnesses before him.
	And it is his courtroom.
	And things are spinning out of control.
	We saw that with Stormy, and I have no doubt Michael Cohen will be similar.
	On the Michael Cohen front, Viva, I want to show you two things.
	Number one, we talked about how he's banking.
	He's cashing in on being the Trump nemesis.
	He's got a TikTok show he does, which he agreed to suspend until after his testimony out of deference and respect for the court.
	This after he was doing the show and tweeting and giving interviews to CNN and MSNBC elsewhere for days and days and days while this trial was going on, it was only when the judge said to the prosecution, please control your witness.
	And they said, we can't control him.
	We didn't strike a deal with him.
	Like he's actually not under our control.
	And he was getting, he was jeopardizing the case.
	So Michael Cohen finally said, all right, I'll be quiet until after the trial or after my testimony, not the trial.
	But here's what he was doing.
	For the listening audience, I'm going to describe this video.
	Okay.
	Here he is talking about Donald Trump.
	And the listeners put here like a baseball cap on him.
	This is like the viewers can, they put hearts above his head.
	He's like the resistance leader.
	They put a cowboy hat and a mustache.
	Like they love him.
	Like, yeah, you go.
	He keeps doing hearts with his hand, you know, like Justin Bieber hearts.
	Like, yeah, when everybody says something nice, like he keeps doing it over and over to show how much he appreciates the positive feedback.
	They're breaking a heart with a crown on top of this.
	Hold on, a couple more.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	I'm just, for the listening audience, what we're watching is pure insanity.
	When they give him like these, I think TikTok tips, he's got to do the sign that they put in their TikTok tip.
	It's enough to make you think you're going crazy watching what he's doing.
	Sorry, just.
	Is that what that is?
	Okay.
	I think they give tips and he does.
	He has to do what they do in the graphic.
	Well, somebody got on there and made him look like a fool with, not that he doesn't there, but I mean, extra, with like a silly knight's hat.
	And look at this.
	He looks like Woody Allen over there on the right.
	And I think ABC News did an article about all this and then he denied it.
	He said they were fake news.
	Okay, well, we can kind of see it with our own eyes what you're doing.
	But he is a hero to those on the left.
	And now, Viva, this is my second point.
	Who doesn't remember Donald Trump, right, with The Apprentice?
	And this is really how he rose to fame beyond New York with this show.
	All right.
	And I'm going to show you.
	Let me show you top 14 first, just for those of you who don't remember The Apprentice promo.
	I've mastered the art of the deal and have turned the name Trump into the highest quality brand.
	And as the master, I want to pass along my knowledge to somebody else.
	I'm looking for the apprentice.
	And credit to the New York Post for finding this and pulling it.
	Good for them.
	Now take a look at Michael Cohen's promo for his show he's pitching to all the networks called The Fixer.
	I've been on a journey of redemption, working to set things right with my family, my friends, my country, speaking truth to power and calling it like I see it.
	But now I'm paying it forward, wielding the tools that I've learned for regular people in trouble.
	The little guy doesn't usually have access to people with my particular set of skills, but that's all about to change.
	I'll work with you, offering expertise, advice, and solutions to fix your problem.
	Together, we'll change your life.
	I am your fixer.
	My God, someone's probably going to pick it up.
	Give him credit.
	That's well edited and that's well put together, but that is the proverbial lipstick on a pig.
	No, Megan, one thing that cannot also be overstressed, when you talk about the hush payments, and unless it's exclusively for the campaign, then it's not unlawful to begin with.
	Just compare this to historical precedent.
	You had John Edwards paying off.
	No, just to interrupt, Viva, because it does bother me.
Legal Expenses vs Crimes 00:15:24
	It's not, they don't have to prove that it was exclusively for the campaign.
	They have to prove that the nature of the payment is such that no one ever pays or would pay this payment for anything other than a campaign like campaign polling.
	Okay, so it's not even what's in his head is totally irrelevant.
	And if this judge had just allowed some expert testimony from a campaign finance expert, he would know that and it would be changing the shape of this trial.
	Sorry, keep going.
	No, well, it's a good clarification because I was not only going to leave this at John Edwards, who made a hush payment in a campaign season and it was deemed, I think, totally lawful.
	Hillary Clinton's opposition research with the Steel dossier, which served one and one function only campaign, campaign purposes, which was misrepresented in terms of how it was paid for, mislabeled, and also, oh yeah, it was an outright lie that was used to be smuggled to the FBI via Hillary's attorney.
	And for that campaign violation, for that, you know, disguised unlawful relabeling or mislabeling of a payment, she got fined $8,000 in the DNC, $130,000.
	That was the actual crime.
	That was an actual crime, as opposed to what they're going after Trump for now.
	So it's again, like it's not just double standards.
	It's outright lawlessness because they're going after their political adversary and they just have to find a politically prejudiced jury to pull the pull the switch.
	This is why you have even Fareed Zakaria, no right-wing zealot he over at CNN saying the following, Sat 9.
	The trials against him keep him in the spotlight, infuriate his base who sees him as a martyr, and even may serve to make him the object of some sympathy among people in general who believe that his prosecutors are politically motivated.
	This happens to be true, in my opinion.
	I doubt the New York indictment would have been brought against a defendant whose name was not Donald Trump.
	Good for Farid, though it's bad.
	It's not bad because it's bad.
	It's bad because it's helping him.
	I mean, what moral and ethical depravity?
	It's not objectively bad, so therefore wrong.
	It's bad because it's strategically not working the way we want it to.
	Go ahead, Phil.
	Yeah, so I mean, Farid is absolutely correct.
	And I'm glad that he said that because look, and I would say the same thing, too.
	If this were a trial where you had a Barack Obama or a Bill Clinton or even a Joe Biden that was being targeted by a partisan district attorney in an area where the deck is absolutely stacked against it from a criminal defendant standpoint, I would be saying the same thing because this needs to be about fundamental fairness, fairness in the justice system.
	That's what due process is.
	That means fundamental fairness.
	And if they can take it and they can do it to someone like Donald Trump, a former president of the United States, then they can do it to you.
	They can do it to me.
	They can do it to Viva or anybody else watching this show.
	So if we allow our justice system to be weaponized and bastardized in this way simply because we don't like a specific person, orange man, bad, or whatever.
	And if you can get the deck stacked with a jury, a judge, and a prosecutor all on the same team designed to get a specific individual citizen of the United States, then our system of justice means nothing anymore.
	And I've got to believe that it means more than that now.
	If we can have more on the left, like Zachariah, saying these and pointing this out, then great, because we need the left and we need the right.
	We need everybody to understand that this is about something bigger and more than Donald Trump.
	It's about the very existence of our judicial system as we know it.
	Reject the bastardization of our legal system.
	All right.
	Just here's a little bit of color.
	Okay.
	Exactly.
	Because, you know, it's one thing to say Cohen's lied under oath, but this is via Politico who went through it and did a good job.
	By his own admission, he's lied in court, he's lied to the media, and he's pleaded guilty to lying to Congress.
	In 2018, he pleaded guilty to nine criminal charges, including campaign finance violations.
	Those were tacked on at the end.
	He said, okay, yeah, that one too, because that'll help me get Trump.
	Tax-related charges and lying to Congress, sentenced to three years in prison.
	He told Politico that when he lied to a Senate committee in 2017, he did so solely for the purpose of benefiting his then boss, Trump.
	He wants that as an excuse.
	Soon after his many guilty pleas, Cohen began saying publicly that actually he had not committed tax evasion, despite having told a federal judge in court that he had.
	Example, when Cohen attempted to get his sentence reduced, federal prosecutors said that they had substantial concerns about his credibility as a witness and that following his sentencing, he, quote, made material false statements during meetings with prosecutors and the FBI prosecutors declined his offer to meet with them again.
	During Donald Trump's civil fraud trial, Cohen again remarked, this time under oath, that he had not committed tax evasion, the thing to which he pleaded guilty, and said he had lied to the judge when he pleaded guilty.
	Trump's lawyer said, so you lied at the time you lied more than once in federal court.
	Is that correct?
	Cohen, correct.
	After his testimony in the civil fraud case, Cohen had sought to have his supervised release requirements eased, but federal prosecutors for the Southern District opposed that, and he did go back to jail.
	They told the judge overseeing the issue that Cohen, quote, has continued to deny responsibility for his own criminal conduct and appears to have lied under oath in a court proceeding.
	This guy, you couldn't ask for a less credible witness, especially on his Glenn close subject, Donald Trump.
	Now, can we just spend a minute on the legal expenses and the actual documentation, guys?
	This is like, this is drier, but it's really the most important thing.
	I keep asking my team because we have to read the updates same as you guys do.
	Has Cohen yet testified Trump directed how these payments were going to be written down in the books?
	Or that he knew about it or that he directed it?
	Cohen has testified just right before lunch that he directed and knew about the repayment to Cohen for the payoff to Stormy.
	All right, so that's in the record, but that doesn't get us there.
	They need him or someone to testify that Donald Trump was the one who not just signed the checks, which did not say what they were for on them, but who said to Cohen, this is how we're going to document it, you know, to get around the campaign finance laws.
	That's that's Bragg's theory.
	Has not happened so far.
	So back to Andy over at National Review.
	Okay, let me just read you these stats and then you guys weigh in.
	Here's what he points out: okay, this is important.
	Each month in 2017, beginning in February when the arrangement was finalized, Cohen was to provide an invoice.
	That invoice would be paid by check.
	An entry would be made on the Trump org's books.
	DA Alvin Bragg says that the Trump records are false because the payments to Cohen really constituted repayment of a debt, not legal expenses.
	And that debt was incurred in October 2016, the $130 paid to Stormy.
	But they were made to appear in the records as if they weren't repayment for a debt, as if Cohen was being paid for ongoing legal services provided in 2017.
	The checks don't say anything about why Cohen was paid, just that he was paid $35,000 a month, which is true.
	As for the entries in the Trump organization records, testimony at trial this week showed that the bookkeeping department logged the payments as quote legal expenses.
	And there was testimony that not much thought went into this, that the bookkeeping department was using a drop-down menu on a computer program designed in the early 90s and routinely put payments to lawyers and related expenses into this general category.
	And then, you know, he makes the case, as many have, that these actually were legal expenses.
	Cohen was Trump's lawyer.
	By the way, he also goes through the money.
	Arthur Adala was confused about this, as was I on Friday.
	This is how much they paid Cohen: $420.
	A lot of people have said, well, why $420 if it was only $130 to Stormy?
	Here's the math.
	They doubled it up for taxes.
	So that gets us to $260,000.
	Then they also gave him $50,000, which was for 2016 tech services from a communications firm called Red Finch Solutions.
	All right, so now we're up to 360.
	And then they gave him a bonus for 60 grand, which is not described.
	We don't know what the bonus is for.
	Andy points out.
	It could be retrospective recognition of past services.
	Could also be prospective expectation that Cohen, in his then new capacity as a private lawyer, who had just separated from Trump, would continue to serve Trump as needed.
	So there we have it.
	That's the payments are written down.
	The bookkeeper made a decision based on a drop-down menu viva.
	Nowhere, anywhere, has there been testimony tying it to Trump's knowledge, and this is a fraud case, so that matters.
	Megan, it's a joke.
	Was it Makani last week who said that Trump basically knew nothing about this and it was for legal services as per retainer agreement?
	I mean, that is what it has always been.
	And, you know, these numbers might seem a lot or astronomical for people who have never practiced law or for people who are not wealthy like the Trumps.
	I mean, this is what, a couple hundred thousand dollars for a man, Michael Cohen, who's off doing his business and Trump doesn't want to be bothered with every detail that's going on.
	Michael Cohen does his business and says, here's what it costs this month and go.
	And, you know, unless there's some radical need to look over invoices and see what's going on, that's what was going on.
	And but the problem is, even if it was what they want to say it was, it wouldn't be legal, but it's not even what they want to say it was.
	This is all just a big kangaroo coat show trial.
	So they can hopefully eke out a conviction before November.
	So sleepy Joe Biden can repeat the talking point: convicted felon.
	Do you really want this guy to be a president, even though it gets overturned on appeal?
	Because all of this is unconstitutional or unlawful, because you can't have a state prosecuting for federal election crimes that the feds themselves looked into and refused to take on.
	All right.
	Last question fell on a different subject matter because there is a significant piece of news out of Atlanta today.
	We talked last week about how the Court of Appeals down there and state court of appeals had accepted the.
	the case.
	They said that Trump could file an interlocutory appeal, meaning before the trial is done, over the judge's refusal to disqualify Fannie Willis.
	They gave him, or he had, until May 18th to do it.
	Today's May 13th, right?
	Today's May 13th.
	So there's news in that.
	What is it?
	So we now have, I think, the first of the several notices of appeal having been filed.
	So basically, the way it works is once the trial court and the court of appeals agree to the interlocutory pre-trial appeal, then the parties go back and file their formal notice of appeal with the trial court.
	And that is what officially transfers the case or begins that process anyway to the Georgia Court of Appeals.
	So far, I think we know that Michael Roman, of course, that's Ashley Burchant's client, Ashley being the one who basically uncovered all of this for the benefit of the world.
	And so now she has filed her notice of appeal.
	Donald Trump, to my knowledge, has not yet filed his notice of appeal.
	I would suspect that he's probably going to wait until close to the end of the 10-day deadline in which to do that.
	But this is significant because in my opinion, this formally divests the trial court of any jurisdiction to take any further action on the case.
	Some lawyers don't agree with that, admittedly, but I believe that now that it's in the Court of Appeals, I believe that no other action can be taken.
	And even if it can be, it's probably a bad idea for the trial court to continue with any other business because it might all be for nothing if it turns out that Fonnie Willis has no business remaining or being the prosecutor in this case.
	It is amazing.
	I mean, the last word on this, Viva, but you've got Georgia stopped in all likelihood.
	Mar-a-Lago's not going anywhere before November.
	January 6th is stopped because the Supreme Court has the case on immunity and another case that may gut that January 6th federal prosecution involving non-Trump J6 defendants.
	And now we have this New York joke case with Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels as the star witnesses.
	It's amazing what the Trump team has been able to pull off.
	Well, it's wild the depths of the depravity that this system is going after Trump because they don't want democracy to run its course.
	I would only say in the Fannie Willis case, first of all, I predicted Fannie Willis would get disqualified.
	And when McAfee declined to disqualify her, I felt a little deflated.
	I will claim vindication if the Court of Appeal does disqualify her.
	And I think they will because I couldn't see them taking this with all the delays unless it was to overturn what McAfee did.
	Just to highlight, McAfee had a nice fundraiser with one of the witnesses, the former governor and Democrat Roy Barnes, who apparently is representing Fannie Willis in the state investigation.
	You know, it's, it's, they raised 40,000 bucks for McAfee in his run against his challenger, Robert Patillo.
	So interesting stuff.
	Corruption, good politics.
	I guess it's only a question of perspective, but I want full vindication when Fannie Willis gets disqualified.
	Yeah, same.
	Guys, thank you.
	Great job.
	Great to see you both.
	Thank you for having me.
	And here's what's interesting for the listening audience.
	All this happens.
	You know, as I've said, Trump's pulling the inside straight.
	That's what he needed to get out of this and he's doing it.
	And so as Viva points out, it's shit.
	It's just left to democracy now, right?
	That's how the left feels.
	God, remember that Chris Hayes thought?
	Like, it's really going to be up to the voters.
	Like the horror.
	New York Times reporting this morning on a brand new New York Times Sienna poll revealing, quote, an erosion of support for Mr. Biden among young and non-white voters upset about the economy and the war in Gaza, leading to the following headline: Donald Trump leads President Biden in five battleground states.
	In Wisconsin, this is showing Trump behind just by two.
	You recall he won Wisconsin in 16.
	Trump lost it in 20.
	In Pennsylvania, Trump up by three.
	In Arizona, Trump up by seven.
	In Michigan, Trump up by seven.
	In Michigan, Trump is up by seven.
	Wow.
	In Georgia, Trump's up by 10.
	10.
	My God.
	And in Nevada, Trump's up by 12 points, 50 to 38.
	My God.
	I got news for you, Alvin Bragg, et cetera.
	It's not working.
The Prosecution Suicide Mission 00:05:13
	That's why it wasn't on the Sunday shows.
	And they've realized this was a suicide mission.
	They thought it would be a kamikaze where they take him out, maybe hurt themselves a little.
	It was a suicide mission for them.
	And we are getting closer and closer.
	I mean, summer's two weeks away.
	Once the summer's on, we're into the conventions.
	And then the vote is here.
	This was a disaster.
	It was a disaster of epic proportions what they did with this law affair.
	And the American people, love Trump or hate him, knew it.
	It motivated people in a way nothing Trump could have done would have.
	Nothing Biden could have done would have.
	This was absolute folly.
	And it's great to see the voters holding them accountable.
	I mean, honestly, this is why, you know, I spend my summers with Jersey Shore.
	Jersey Shore is definitely pro-Trump, for sure.
	I mean, you go to Atlantic City where he used to have a casino, and it's like every boat has got the Trump, But New Jersey typically votes blue.
	And you saw Trump went on his, you know, he gets the weekends off from his trial.
	Did you see the crowds?
	They estimated 100,000.
	I don't know whether there's 100,000 or not.
	It's irrelevant what the actual number was.
	For sure, it was tens of thousands.
	Look at this.
	It's incredible for the listening audience.
	I mean, it looks like a stadium almost of people.
	They're dying to hear from him.
	They miss him because he's been kept off the campaign trail.
	And they're angry for themselves and for him.
	I hope you like it, Alvin Bragg, Jack Smith, Fannie Willis, because you're going to get a lot more just like it.
	Okay, we'll be back in one moment with Corey DeAngelis on the nightmare that is your child's school.
	Standby.
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	School choice is gaining in popularity.
	Gee, I can't imagine why.
	With all the campus protests, CRT, DEI obsession, and gender ideology craziness, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
	Joining me now is one of America's most prominent and influential school choice advocates, and that's Corey DeAngelis.
	Corey is a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children and author of the new book, which comes out tomorrow, The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.
	Man, Corey, that is the perfect title.
	That's exactly the kind of book I want to read.
	You do, they do need to be rescued.
	There are radicals who are ruining the schools.
	And perfectly, you dedicate the book to Randy Weingarten.
	Tell us why.
	Yeah, well, the teachers' unions overplayed their hand by fighting to keep the schools closed as long as possible to secure ransom payments from taxpayers.
	They were able to leverage the school closures to call for more money.
	They gotten $190 billion in so-called COVID relief since March of 2020.
	And guess what?
	They overplayed their hand and they sparked a parent revolution because families, one, saw that the school system didn't care about them all that much.
	And families had to, they were desperate seeking alternatives.
	They were trying to pay out of pocket for private school tuition and fees while still paying for the closed government schools.
	But the silver lining was that the teachers' unions planned backfired very quickly when, through remote learning, which we really should have just called it remotely learning, not a lot of learning was going on, but families got to see what was happening in the classroom.
	And guess what?
	We now have 11 states with universal school choice.
	Milton Friedman's vision finally coming to fruition.
	I wish he were alive today because now one in five states already have school choice for everybody.
	No picking winners and losers.
	Everybody can take their kids' taxpayer education dollars to the school that works best for them.
	That could be the public school.
	You know, if you like your public school, you can keep your public school.
	But if not, for whatever reason, unlike with your doctor, you can take that money in the form of a voucher or a scholarship to a private charter home or other type of educational learning environment that works for them.
	So it's this is the silver lining of the pandemic.
School Choice and Hypocrisy 00:15:56
	I mentioned a lot of the hypocrisy and just theatrics and fear mongering in the book.
	And if you want to take Ted Cruz's advice on the back, he says, ruin Randy Weingarten's day by reading this book.
	I did dedicate it to her.
	I sent her a signed copy.
	My handwriting wasn't all that great.
	I apologize, but it's because I went to government schools.
	She can't really blame me.
	The parent revolution, the parent revolution, the parent revolution.
	That's the name of it.
	Let me tell you something.
	I've often thought while doing the show, if I just, if I only cared about, there's your dedication, your note to her.
	If I only cared about doing a fun and interesting show, I would have kept my kids in their indoctrinating New York City schools because it would have been nonstop fodder for my program, the insanity that went on there.
	But I actually love my children and it seemed like actual abuse to me.
	And so as everybody knows, I pulled, we pulled our kids from those schools and found much better schools out here in Connecticut.
	Well, I checked in with some of my friends at those same schools still.
	And my one dear friend has a son who was in my younger son's grade.
	So now they're in fourth grade, right?
	So her son, she shared with me a little essay.
	It was like a little paragraph that her son had to do about America.
	And I am going to read to you with her permission what her son read.
	She got it home and could not believe her eyes.
	Okay, he writes, the event I would teach people about is slavery.
	The reason I think it's important to teach people about this event is so that we can see that America was built on black people, not on whites.
	Behind the scenes, it's all blacks.
	The reason we have picked crops, built houses, and America is because black people did it all.
	The only thing white people did was take credit for work they didn't do.
	As a white person, I stand with black people all the way.
	This is a 10-year-old boy who is not getting this from mom and dad.
	He's learning this at an institution that in the third and fourth grade is trying to indoctrinate the children to hate the country and hate whites.
	It's very clear.
	The only thing whites did was take credit for it all.
	She was shocked.
	And I don't believe they'll be at this school next year.
	And look, the taxpayers are spending about $40,000 per student per year in the government-run schools in New York City.
	And look, the whole school system is supposed to be meant for creating a more cohesive society, creating more of a civic participation and tolerance of others' views.
	This is the exact opposite of what we're seeing in our government institutions today.
	And that's why the parent revolution has been sparked.
	The schools aren't focusing on the basics.
	They're not focusing on math, reading, and writing, on education.
	They're indoctrinating kids in ways that are antithetical to their families' values and to the values of this very country.
	And so families are saying, hey, why not give me half that money?
	Give me 20,000 or even 10,000 to take my kids somewhere else so that I don't have to pay twice, once through the tax system and again, out of pocket for a private school or even to homeschool at a fraction of the cost of what they're spending in these government failure factories.
	How do you measure it, Corey?
	Do you measure it like by state, how many states now have school choice?
	Like what's our metric for success here?
	The barometer of success used to be whether you had any form of school choice at all, whether that was for low-income kids or special needs kids.
	The new barometer of success, the new measuring tape is whether you have universal school choice.
	So we're not picking winners and losers anymore.
	Everybody pays for a public education and everybody is guaranteed a publicly funded education.
	That doesn't have to happen at a government school, though.
	And now you have before 2021, no states did this.
	Now we have 11, all red states controlled by Republican legislatures, Arizona being one of the first and one of the most recent being North Carolina and Alabama this year as well.
	The momentum isn't subsiding and it's because it's really popular of parents.
	In Arizona, for example, right when they opened the website to sign up for the scholarships, the government website broke down.
	I mean, so you can make a joke about it being a government product.
	That's why the website broke down.
	But it's also because so many families flocked to the alternatives that we now have 80,000 families in just about a year flocked to the school choice program in Arizona.
	It's popular with parents.
	It shouldn't be a partisan issue.
	If you look at voters, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents on the ground, they support school choice nationwide with super majority levels.
	If you look poll after poll after poll, the problem is the Democrat elected officials are a wholly owned subsidiary of the teachers union.
	Joe Biden's a hypocrite on school choice.
	He went to private school.
	He sent his kid to private school and then he fights against school choice for others, pulling the ladder up from behind himself.
	Thankfully, Donald Trump is a supporter of school choice.
	He would support it and fight for it as hard as possible.
	He did so when he was in office last time.
	But the problem is Randy Weingarten, who I dedicated my book to and sent her a copy, she's the head of the American Federation of Teachers.
	99.97% of their campaign contributions in 2022, guess what?
	They went to the Democrats, not the Republicans.
	It's a complex money laundering scheme.
	It ought to be illegal.
	They use public funds to lobby against the public, and it's all just a way to funnel money to the Democratic Party.
	Some Democrats are defecting on the issue in elected office, but it's a very rare case for them to buck the party trend.
	And it's all about money.
	It's not about logic.
	There's no better example of this than in Illinois, which is just so disgusting when it comes to children and school choice.
	There, I never miss an opportunity, my audience knows, to play the video of those moronic Chicago teachers during the pandemic while this children, low-income, in great need of education were kept at home, as you point out, not learning.
	They were dancing.
	They were doing interpretive dance to show us how these totally able-bodied teachers could not possibly go into the classroom with these little germ-carrying monsters.
	Let's watch it.
	Make it make sense.
	Safety is essential.
	Oh my God.
	Keep our students and our teachers safe.
	All right, if these women are 35, it's a lot.
	They could be in their late 20s.
	And yet they wouldn't teach the children because they were terrified of dying of COVID.
	They refused.
	Chicago's legendary for its bad public schools and Illinois in general.
	So tell us why Illinois in your book, you point out, is a particularly sad case.
	It's worse than we knew.
	Yeah, I mean, they're totally pathetic, but they did show families nationwide how low the unions will go.
	In Chicago, they had a board member vacationing in Puerto Rico, thousands of miles away, but while railing against going back to work in person, somehow it was safe enough to travel halfway across the planet, but it wasn't safe enough to go back to work.
	They just wanted to go on vacation.
	They used any excuse possible.
	In Illinois, the unions were actually successful last year in getting rid of a private school choice program specifically for low-income kids.
	And guess what?
	The teachers' union boss out there, Stacey Davis Gates, she sent her own kid to private school this year after just a year before calling school choice racist and calling private schools segregation academies.
	I mean, I don't know if that's not hypocrisy.
	I don't know what is.
	And look, other families should have opportunities too.
	If she wants to send her kids to a private school, fine, but she shouldn't step in the schoolhouse door and prevent other families from escaping her unionized failure factory.
	She knows it's not good enough for her kids.
	It should be good enough for other families to access alternatives as well.
	They shouldn't be trapped in her government-run dumpster fire we call the Chicago public school system.
	It's so sad.
	Your book points out that it was in 2017 that the Republican governor made a deal with the Democratic-controlled legislature to pass a budget that included school choice scholarship program for low-income students.
	But there was a catch.
	The scholarship program was set to expire in 2022 unless they extended it, which they did, but only till 2023.
	That year, more than 9,000 kids were benefiting from the scholarships, but the unions don't care about the kids.
	They don't pay union dues, you're right.
	So they set about strong-arming politicians to oppose it.
	In 2023, the legislature failed to enact an expansion of the program before the legislation, the session ended.
	And Governor J.B. Pritzker, who I'm sorry, is a villain in my view.
	He's just on the wrong side of everything, did not appear to lift a finger to help the families benefiting from the scholarships.
	And now the scholarship program has expired.
	Most of those poor kids deprived of those scholarships will likely end up back in Chicago's government schools where only one in 10 black students can read on grade level.
	Only one in 20 are proficient in math.
	This is 9,000 families that wanted better for their kids.
	Most of these families will be minority who wanted to give their kids a leg out, who wanted to learn, who had the attitude, who are ready to do the hard work and were learning.
	And they just pulled the rug out from under them.
	What they want to do instead is that when those kids get to be in junior or senior year in high school, totally unprepared for the colleges to which they're applying, to just get rid of SAT scores, to just ignore GPAs, to forget all the learning loss that they've had from K through 12 that they otherwise could have had had this been still open, and admit them to the IVs or the junior IVs or what have you, then give them gentlemen's A's where they're totally unprepared.
	They're not learning anything because they're incapable of doing the math and the English, and then force them out on society and pretend that when they don't make it, it's racism that led to them getting fired.
	You can see the pipeline.
	If they actually cared about these black and brown kids, they would do something about this.
	I mean, they were calling reopening schools racist.
	The Chicago Teachers Union in particular, they put out a tweet saying that the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.
	They threw every buzzword at the wall to see what would stick, and they deleted it pretty quickly after I replied to them with the CNN headline of all places that said that the school closures disproportionately hurt black students and it widened the achievement gap.
	So it was the complete opposite.
	If anything, it was more racist to close the schools than to open them.
	And maybe they realized that, but you had them nonstop fear mongering with caskets and fake tombstones.
	Even in DC, where I was living at the time, they placed fake body bags outside the public school offices, implying that if you wanted to have them go back to work, just like everybody else, just like the private schools, just like daycares, everybody else is literally going back to work.
	They were the only ones fear-mongering, saying that you're trying to actually kill us if you want to.
	I mean, no one wanted that, obviously.
	And it was just so ridiculous.
	And in Chicago, they were striking in 2022.
	I mean, to think about it, two weeks to slow the spread turned into two years to flatten a generation of kids in leftist cities like Chicago.
	They were even calling for police-free schools, Medicare for all, a wealth tax to reopen Los Angeles schools.
	I mean, this is the same union president in Los Angeles that said that there was no such thing as learning loss.
	I mean, if families aren't awake now, I don't know when they will be.
	The good news is we're seeing a lot of evidence of a parent revolution where parents are pushing back at school board meetings.
	Yes, in some cases, they're having their mics cut off for reading content that they don't deem appropriate for the public school setting.
	It's not age appropriate.
	But you have these same people who say that conservatives are banning books.
	They actually called to burn my book.
	A teachers union executive board member in Wisconsin said that it's a great day for a book burning party, hasn't even read it yet.
	They're total hypocrites.
	But parents also got silenced by the NSBA, who sent a letter to the Department of Justice or to the Biden administration implying that parents should be investigated under the Patriot Act for domestic terrorism.
	They even had a threat tag created by the FBI specifically for parents protesting at school board meetings.
	But Megan, the good news is since then, 26 states have already left the NSBA, which means parents, if they band together, they can start a revolution and not just start it, they can win it in their specific states as well by becoming a political juggernaut.
	The parent revolution by Corey DeAngelis.
	And it's well worth your read if you're a parent, especially stuck in one of these schools.
	But even if you're not, like, we love our schools now, but I care.
	I care about other people's students and children and the next generation and how they're coming up.
	The political indoctrination is just yet another problem.
	That's everywhere.
	Libs of TikTok and Chaya Rachik, she just interviewed a woman about this.
	Here she is explaining the problem in SOT 21.
	This is Chaya.
	Libs of TikTok has obtained a disturbing lesson plan being used in the Tigger-Tualaton School District in Oregon, centered around Nazi Germany propaganda and the Holocaust.
	This lesson, used at Twilight Middle School, appears to display political bias by equating former President Donald Trump to that of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
	On the last page of the lesson, students are asked to guess from a collection of quotes which ones originated from Donald Trump and which ones originated from Adolf Hitler.
	It's unbelievable, Corey, but that's not the outlier.
	That happens a lot of places, that kind of rhetoric to children on politics.
	I mean, these clowns, this is why they're so afraid of families actually getting a say in their kids' education because the left almost doesn't even need to have kids anymore.
	If they can control the school system, they can still control the cultural direction of America going forward.
	If they're indoctrinating other people's kids in the government school system, that's about 50 million kids being churned through a system for 13 years of their lives for seven hours a day.
	Conservatives can't win this battle just by having more kids of their own.
	They need to be able to fight back at school board meetings, win school board races, but also fight for the right to take your kids' education dollars to another school, which gives parents, conservative parents, more agency.
	The school board won't want to cut off your mic or call you a terrorist if you have real leverage.
	If you can say, hey, I'm going to take my money elsewhere.
	I'm going to take my kid elsewhere.
	Then they'll have an incentive to listen to you in the public school system.
	So school choice can be a rising tide that lifts all boats, but it's also not just important for your parents, for your family and your child.
	It's also important for the future of this country because the left has infiltrated the school system to turn kids into socialists, which will mean bigger government in the future, will mean more of a leftward drift in the future.
Parents as the Party 00:02:58
	But what I'm thankful for is that in these 11 states so far, since 2021 alone, a revolution has ignited and we're winning this war that the unions have waged on our kids for far too long.
	Bit by bit, people are starting to pay attention, Corey.
	The parent revolution is the name of the book.
	So what is it?
	I mean, I know that the unions, you know, as you pointed out, donate overwhelmingly to the Democrats.
	And then the Democrats just feed the unions whatever they want.
	But like, what is it?
	What's in it for the unions?
	Why are they doing?
	Why don't they give two figs about the children?
	Well, because they're a teachers' union, not a kids' union.
	And they don't even treat the teachers all that well either.
	The ones that are doing a good job, the unions just serve as a way to protect the lowest common denominator.
	They create rubber rooms in New York City where they put teachers there who can't even be around kids.
	And then they pay them, you know, they spend millions of dollars on this each year.
	And it's for this, because they won't fire them.
	I mean, it's just totally ridiculous.
	But we now have a kids' union.
	They're called parents and they've woken up.
	They're never going back to sleep.
	They're never going to unsee what they saw in 2020.
	And the parents' union can beat the teachers' union because parents outnumber the employees in the system and they care about their kids' educational needs more than anybody else, certainly more than bureaucrats sitting in offices hundreds of miles away.
	I think if Democrats are smart, however, they'll stop listening to the teachers' union.
	If enough of the band together, the teachers' unions will become powerless and they won't have as much control over them in the future.
	We've seen some whiffs of this this year.
	In Louisiana, for example, their house just passed universal school choice overwhelmingly, 72 to 32.
	They didn't need any Democrat votes, but they had 20% of their House Democrats vote for the bill.
	And so more Democrats are starting to do the right thing on the issue.
	It's more of the exception than the rule.
	But you also had in Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, when he was running for governor, he said he supported private school choice.
	It went on Fox News last year saying he supported school choice.
	He ultimately caved to the unions that spent over $700,000 on his campaign.
	But my point in the book and that what I'm telling you today is that because there are some, the GOP has picked up the football and moved the ball forward as the parents' party, that becomes politically disastrous for Democrats to oppose parental rights and education the more it's a political winner for the GOP to win on the issue.
	In some polling, including from the Democrats for Education Reform, in some states, they're finding that Democrats have lost their double-digit advantage on the issue of education.
	And that poll from the Democrats for Education Reform, they also put out a press release saying Democrats would be smart to try to come along on school choice too, because it's such a popular issue.
	So people are trying to get the GOP to break up with the NRA.
Breaking Up with the NRA 00:01:08
	That's a tall order.
	Listen, thank you for writing the book.
	Again, it's called The Parent Revolution by Corey DeAngelis, the subtitle, Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.
	It's out tomorrow.
	You can pre-order it right now on Amazon.
	Corey, thank you.
	Thank you so much, Megan.
	It's amazing.
	I mean, and you got to get loud.
	You got to be the squeaky wheel.
	I remember when my son started last year in seventh grade, and we're at a non-woke school.
	They hired a new teacher.
	The teacher opened up the class by saying, this is an anti-racist Ibram X. Kendi classroom.
	All that matters is a fence, not intent.
	We called the school and we were like the 50th family to call.
	Everybody had called saying, oh, no.
	And guess what?
	That teacher was corrected and made clear to that this is not how you're going to run this classroom and is no longer with the school.
	Be a squeaky wheel.
	Use your voice, even if you're not used to it.
	Come back to the show tomorrow because Ruthless is here.
	Can't wait for that.
	We'll see you then.
	Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no

Chapters

00:00:35 Trump's Credibility Issues
00:15:40 The Fraud Exception Trap
00:30:19 Why Cohen Was Reimbursed
00:45:37 Identifying the Real Victim
00:48:32 A Theatrical Courtroom Show
00:52:48 The Little Judge Do Moment
00:57:01 Legal Expenses vs Crimes
01:12:26 The Prosecution Suicide Mission
01:17:39 School Choice and Hypocrisy
01:33:36 Parents as the Party
01:36:34 Breaking Up with the NRA