Donald Trump asserts the U.S. will not lease but must own Greenland for national security, while panelists debate a 20% to 100% acquisition probability amidst his waning independent support. The episode critically examines Timothy Busfield's bail hearing, where defense claims accusers' parents are fraudsters seeking contract renewals, contrasting with evidence of grooming and prior settlements totaling $150,000. Legal experts analyze the Minnesota church disruption by Don Lemon, debating federal charges under the FACE Act versus Supreme Court limitations on KKK Act applications, ultimately highlighting the complexities of proving abuse allegations and the challenges Republicans face in regaining voter trust before midterms. [Automatically generated summary]
Think that you sit in the car and drive, and then drive it in the car.
Even if you know that you don't want to do it, then pull out your hand.
It's right now you have to stop yourself and take your hand back on the road.
If you get it, you need to make a plan.
Then it's a bit easier.
To drive is the only thing you need to do.
Hilsen Statens Leveisen.
I mean, we have a lot to go over with the legal panel in our second hour.
The judge overseeing Timothy Busfield's alleged child sex abuse case, releasing Busfield from jail pending trial.
We'll do a deep dive on the new evidence that has emerged about the parents of the children who are making the accusation.
And it is not good for the prosecution.
The defense lawyers got up there yesterday and said these parents are not just like fraudsters, they're actual con men.
And I have to tell you, they're right from what I've seen, in my opinion.
That doesn't mean the boys are necessarily lying.
You cannot attribute the parents' fraud to the two children, but this is a devastating development for the prosecution.
These parents, the father, is a convicted fraudster.
He served time for fraud.
He was disbarred.
These are bad, bad, bad facts for the prosecution.
None of this was disclosed, and there are other issues that have come up with the case.
We'll take a fair look at it as we always do with our legal panel.
Dave and Mike are here.
And boy, do they have their hands full with what's happening in Minnesota as well today.
First, though, President Donald Trump once again shows up at the World Economic Forum in Davos to completely mock other world leaders.
It was such a tour to force.
It was amazing to watch.
He delivered a show as only Donald Trump can.
He spared no one, not even the leaders of Switzerland, which is where the conference is.
I mean, everyone.
He had it for everyone.
It was like boom, boom, boom.
And you over there in the back, what are you laughing at?
Here's one for you.
The main headline of the speech was the president for the first time explicitly saying that America will not use force to take Greenland.
Okay, he's saying that for the first time.
I won't do it.
But he says that in order to defend Greenland, which he says Greenland must have a defense, which he does not believe Denmark can do, the U.S. has to, has to actually own it.
Watch.
You probably won't get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be, frankly, unstoppable.
But I won't do that.
Okay, now everyone's saying, oh, good.
That's probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force.
But I don't have to use force.
I don't want to use force.
I won't use force.
All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland.
And all we're asking for is to get Greenland, including right, title, and ownership, because you need the ownership to defend it.
You can't defend it on a lease.
Number one, legally, it's not defensible that way, totally.
And number two, psychologically, who the hell wants to defend a license agreement?
I mean, good point.
And it went on from there.
I have so many great soundbites that I want to show you.
It's just Trump was in rare forum this morning.
Tom Bevin, Carl Cannon, and Andrew Walworth watched it.
With real clear politics and also on the Megan Kelly channel on Sirius XM Live every morning at 11 a.m. Eastern.
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Guys, welcome back.
How's it going?
I don't know.
I thought the president was highly entertaining today.
And to me, this is like Trump in full flourish.
This is the guy who, at the, I don't know, it was like one of those economic summits first term, and he grabbed the guy from Montenegro and shoved him, shoved him to the back because the United States president wanted to be in the front row.
That was him, Tom.
He was that guy today.
Like, you over there, you wouldn't even exist if it weren't for us.
And you'd be speaking German if it weren't for us.
And what are you laughing at over there?
I got something for you, Switzerland.
Your former prime minister is annoying.
It was, it was, I really enjoyed it.
And I have to say, I think I'm in the minority right now, but not for long.
I agree with him on Greenland.
He's actually convinced me on that.
I'm not so big on the Venezuela thing, and I certainly don't want to invade Iran.
But on Greenland, he's gotten me.
I can explain why, but your thoughts overall, Tom, to kick it off on where we are and that soundbite in particular.
Yeah, this was something by Trump.
And I did not see his press conference this day.
I was traveling back from Arizona, and so I didn't see that.
It didn't get good reviews.
Apparently, he just sort of rambled on and on.
This one he stayed on script pretty much.
I mean, he always goes off script to a certain degree, right?
But he did, he explained the rationale for why it's important for not just the United States, but also Canada, which he took a shout at Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada as well, but also for Europe.
And he also said, and I thought this was interesting, that, you know, when he was talking about Europe, he said, listen, we want a strong Europe.
His, you know, we want you to be strong so you can defend yourself and we want you to be successful.
And in order to do that, you have to change these policies that you've had in place for 40 years that have weakened you as countries.
Mass immigration and energy being the two specific ones that he mentioned.
But on Greenland, he did explain sort of the rationale for it.
Now, whether you agree with it or disagree with it, I think it's clear, though, that Trump sees this as a matter of national security interest for the United States moving forward.
And I was going to say urgently, and maybe it's not urgent, but I think to Trump it is.
I mean, he's only got a couple more years left in office, and he sees this as part of, I think, his legacy in terms of defending the United States.
And he talked about the Golden Dome and all that.
So it definitely was, I think, classic Trump and fairly entertaining stuff from him.
Here's a little bit more of what he said on Greenland on explaining why he wants it.
Sat 4.
Would you like me to say a few words of Greenland?
I was going to leave it out of the speech, but I thought, I think I would have been reviewed very negatively.
I have tremendous respect for both the people of Greenland and the people of Denmark.
Tremendous respect.
But every NATO ally has an obligation to be able to defend their own territory.
And the fact is, no nation or group of nations is in any position to be able to secure Greenland other than the United States.
Everyone talks about the minerals.
There's so many places.
There's no rare earth.
No such thing as rare earth.
There's rare processing.
But there's so much rare earth.
And this to get to this rare earth, you had to go through hundreds of feet of ice.
That's not the reason we need it.
We need it for strategic national security and international security.
And that's the reason I'm seeking immediate negotiations to once again discuss the acquisition of Greenland by the United States.
Here's just a little follow-up here in SAT 6.
So we want a piece of ice for world protection.
And they won't give it.
We've never asked for anything else.
And we could have kept that piece of land and we didn't.
So they have a choice.
You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative.
Or you can say no, and we will remember.
So, Carl, he's putting it online saying we want it.
It's actually not for rare earth minerals.
It's for national and international strategic and security reasons.
And the real explanation around this has been, you know, if you look at Greenland on a map, you will see that thanks to global warming, we've had the entire sort of ice sheath around it melt away.
And it's far more accessible by people like Russia and China than it ever was before.
And if you pursue Trump's reasoning on the Monroe Doctrine, not in our hemisphere, that was coined by our fifth president, that we're responsible for what happens in our hemisphere, which Greenland is.
And this one's been exposed in a way it wasn't 30 years ago, and that we actually have to take responsibility for it because it's, you know, it's right above our evil top hat, Canada, and also to the right a little.
That's Michael Knowles' term for Canada, that we have to take responsibility for it.
So what do you make of that?
I don't believe any of it.
I don't think it has anything to do with national security.
And I don't even think it's because of all the minerals.
I think Donald Trump wants a feather in his cap.
He wants it like, you know, Seward's Folly.
We got Alaska for what, $7 million.
I think he wants Greenland because he, for the same reasons he renamed the Kennedy Center after himself.
I think he wants to acquire this territory.
It is rich in minerals.
But this thing, Megan, Tom and Andy, I don't think, feel as strongly about this as I do.
I don't think they agree with me at all, actually.
But this idea that you ridicule these people or shame them or threaten them because we liberated Europe from the Nazis.
Russians lost 20 million people.
We shouldn't forget that, liberating Europe from the Nazis as well.
But it sets on its head Americans' idea of itself in the world.
It was General Mark W. Clark, World War II general, who said, point out, we didn't go to Europe for conquest.
We went there to free these people from Nazi tyranny and protect the world, protect ourselves.
And he said, and all we ever asked for was a place to bury our dead.
That's the only territory we wanted.
Colin Powell said the same thing.
If you Google it, Google will tell you Colin Powell said it.
But he was actually quoting Mark Clark, General Clark.
Now Trump comes along and said, no, sorry.
You guys would be speaking German if it wasn't for us.
And we had this territory and we want it back.
It's really ours.
It's like the most un-American thing.
It's like a New York insult comic, turn real estate man, turn politician.
Another word for it is true.
It's true.
I've said my piece.
It's like, what?
No, I appreciate it too.
I appreciate the counter point of view because I got to tell you, like, we'll talk about the polls later.
And I know Trump's losing the independence and he's starting to lose them by a lot.
He's got overwhelming Republican support and he doesn't have any Democrat support.
He's starting to really slide with independence.
And my mom is an independent.
My mom is kind of a lifetime Democrat, but she did vote for Trump.
And she's in that independent group that's starting to slide.
And she sounds a little bit like you, Carl.
So like, I appreciate the POV because there are a lot of people who have it.
So it's important to be exposed to it and understand how Trump is affecting some people.
I mean, I think, Andrew, like the there's a real question about whether Europe is what it used to be and how closely tied we ought to be to Europe.
It's not your granddad's Europe.
It's just not.
I mean, they're turning into an authoritarian group of countries themselves.
They are literally arresting people in Germany and the UK for thought crimes, for thinking the wrong thing and for tweeting the wrong thing.
I mean, it's getting genuinely scary over in Europe.
And so like people say, oh, we shouldn't be aligned with Russia.
We should be aligned with Europe.
It's like Europe is doing its level best to get closer and closer to what Russia is when it comes to free speech every day.
They're the ones making themselves less like what we first aligned with with the influx of migrants and the changing on civil liberties and free speech.
And I think Donald Trump is looking at them saying, amidst all this, you want us to pay for your defense, which is effectively what we do through NATO.
Those days are over.
And if they're not over, we want something for it.
And maybe it's a higher tariff, whatever, but actually what I'm telling you I want is Greenland.
And what I really want is for you to just stay the hell out of it.
Stay out of it.
We'll stay in NATO.
We'll continue paying the bills.
You all said you'd raise it to 5%, but you're not, in fact, doing that.
It's the United States price tag.
We all know that.
We're the ones responsible for defense.
If Germany gets attacked, if France gets attacked, it's the United States that will swoop in to save them.
Everyone knows that.
And now we have a president who's saying, we'll do it, but we actually do want something in return.
And what we want right now is a country called Greenland, a territory.
And the reason we want it is, okay, he says not rare earth.
I accept that, but strategic importance to the United States.
And we have an eye on our two main adversaries, Russia and China, in a way we didn't have to up there.
Well, I think I can buy part of that, but I do question whether the strategic importance of Greenland in his mind is really what's at stake here, because Greenland is important, but it's not that important.
And everything that we want to do in Greenland, we could do without acquiring the territory.
And the idea that somehow legally we would not defend it, well, we defend bases, U.S. bases all over the world that are in all different countries.
Wind Farms vs Gas Coal00:14:54
And we do have this thing called Article 5 with NATO, which says we're going to defend France and Germany and the other NATO countries.
So I'm not sure he's on firm ground legally when he says we need it in order to defend it.
But I do think that, and we played on our show, Howard Luttnick's bite, which I thought was very revealing, where he talked to your point that Europe has followed this path of globalization and globalization has been a failure.
And that to me is the theme of the administration at Davos.
And I think that's a powerful theme.
And I think that Lutnik in particular, because he made the point, he said, why would you go in the direction of electrification and trying to be sort of carbon neutral by 2030 if you don't even make your own batteries?
It was sort of like, oh, yeah, that's a really good way to put it.
So I think that message to Europe, we'll see if it gets through.
The other thing that he said, to your point, Megan, is he said that he knows that the U.S. will come to defend Europe.
He's not so sure that the opposite is true.
And that, you know, that makes you think as well.
I mean, would France and Britain come to our defense?
It's a question that's worth asking.
Carrie is a little bit more on that, Andrew, where he spoke to the changes in Europe in SOT1.
Certain places in Europe are not even recognizable, frankly, anymore.
And I love Europe, and I want to see Europe go good, but it's not heading in the right direction.
In recent decades, it became conventional wisdom in Washington and European capitals that the only way to grow a modern Western economy was through ever-increasing government spending, unchecked mass migration and endless foreign imports.
The consensus was that so-called dirty jobs and heavy industry should be sent elsewhere, that affordable energy should be replaced by the Green New scam, and that countries could be propped up by importing new and entirely different populations from faraway lands, very foolishly followed, turning their backs on everything that makes nations rich and powerful and strong.
So, Tom, what do we think the point of that was?
Why?
I agree with every word he said, but what is the point of saying that at Davos?
Well, I mean, I agree with it too.
And I thought that was probably the strongest part of the speech.
And it goes back to what Andy said, you know, this clip of Howard Luttnick saying, you know, listen, he's called globalization is a failure.
Now, that might be too strong of a word, but certainly the argument that he's making that the United States is pursuing a different path now that is going to put American workers first and is going to put American security first.
And oh, by the way, Europe, you should think long and hard about adopting these policies yourself because it will help make you stronger.
And you've been pursuing these policies for 40 years, which have made you weaker.
I mean, Trump went on this riff about windmills and how the more windmills they have in a country, the worse it is.
We have it.
Hold on, let me interject it quickly, but hold your thought because I do want to hear the back end, SOT3 here.
There are windmills all over Europe.
There are windmills all over the place.
And they are losers.
One thing I've noticed is that the more windmills a country has, the more money that country loses and the worse that country is doing.
China makes almost all of the windmills, and yet I haven't been able to find any wind farms in China.
Did you ever think of that?
That's a good way of looking at it.
They're smart.
China is very smart.
They make them.
They sell them for a fortune.
They sell them to the stupid people that buy them.
Other than that, I think they're fabulous, by the way.
Go ahead, Tom.
It's classic Trump.
I do want to fact-check him on the wind farms in China and see how many there are.
Well, there's wind farms all over Texas, Tom.
I mean, they exist.
Yeah.
Well, of course, under Joe Biden, they were subsidized, but they're a fucking nightmare.
Excuse me.
They're a nightmare.
The wind farms are disgusting.
They barely get the light in this studio on, and they're an eyesore, and they're killing the whales.
They really are.
Go look at Michael Schellenberger's.
They kill the whales, they kill the birds.
They're terrible.
They're really actually not very good on a variety of levels.
They're toxic.
Those huge blades.
They're as long as an air, like a 747 aircraft, and there are multiple of them on each windmill.
One falls into your water.
Your summer's effed.
Your kids not going into the ocean.
It's like broken toxins everywhere.
For what?
So like you can.
The same as like me blowing air in this studio.
It's barely any energy.
It's a nightmare.
Sorry.
I've got strong.
I was going to say, how do you really feel?
Windmills, Megan.
Because I spent my summers at the Jersey Shore and we've been dealing with this for years now.
So I've become a bit of an expert on them.
And they're really truly a nightmare for the environment.
Like you may think that they may help with global warming.
Let me tell you something they don't help with.
The environment, the existing earth is completely toxified and polluted by windmills.
And for what?
We're the coal captains of the world.
We have tons of oil.
We have so many wonderful natural resources that we can tap into that is more than like blowing like a little desk fan at the expense of our wildlife and our sea life and our vistas up and down the beautiful east and west coasts of America.
Sorry, Tom.
That's okay.
You triggered Megan, Tom.
You know, a couple of decades ago, I remember when it dawned on me when Ted Kennedy was like, you know, all the liberals are like, we got to have wind.
We got to have these wind farms.
And Ted Kennedy was like, you're not putting this thing off of Martha's Vineyard.
And I was like, oh, okay.
I wonder why.
So anyway.
And look what happened.
Look what happened two summers ago.
A windmill collapsed.
It had some sort of a problem and the blades fell into the water.
And the people in Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard were affected and couldn't swim.
And the kids were like not able to go in the water.
It's just like taking a toxic stew, dumping it into your ocean, and then putting your three-year-old in it.
It's a no.
I mean, I already lived that swimming in the Hudson River at my grandparents' boatyard in the 1970s.
I could have been at NASA, okay?
But because of that, I wound up sitting at this desk trying to save the next gen. That is great.
Well, that was quite a digression, I must say.
What were we talking about?
No, look.
Well, he's right about the windmills.
He's the point.
And he was attacking Europe on energy.
Exactly.
And he is right about the windmills.
But it speaks to this idea that, again, the message of the Trump administration going to Davos, in addition to speaking about Greenland, was, hey, we're pursuing policies that are different from what you guys have all been pursuing here at the WEF and all your Davos elites for the last 40 years.
And we've come here to say those policies have failed.
And the proof is in the pudding.
If you look at growth rates across Europe and birth rates across Europe and mass migration and all of the welfare that they, all the money they spent, we talked about this on our show a little bit.
You can see the pendulum is now swinging back in the other direction in places like Denmark and Sweden and some of those countries who have, who are, these are not populous countries necessarily.
And they've imported all of these migrants from Northern Africa have completely changed the nature, the landscape and the culture.
And so I think this is a message that deep down in their hearts, they already know.
A lot of Europeans already know that they've been on the wrong track.
And as I said, you know, Trump is saying, and I think he said, I'm Scottish and German and I was derived from Europe.
And we want Europe to succeed.
We want Europe to be strong and prosperous.
And we will be great partners with you.
But you need to be sort of get your own houses in order.
And I think that message, it resonates.
It resonates, I think, at home with Americans, but it also resonates with a lot of people abroad.
Yeah.
Here's a little bit more on the energy point, SAT 2, where he hits them for relying on others for energy in Europe.
Here in Europe, we've seen the fate that the radical left tried to impose on America.
They tried very hard.
Germany now generates 22% less electricity than it did in 2017.
And it's not the current Chancellor's fault.
He's solving the problem.
He's going to do a great job.
But what they did before he got there, the United Kingdom produces just one-third of the total energy from all sources that it did in 1999.
Think of that, one-third.
And they're sitting on top of the North Sea, one of the greatest reserves anywhere in the world.
And this is, and we've heard this from him for a while, Carl, because he's very proud of bringing down gas prices here in America with the drill, baby, drill.
You know, all options are on the table and has been touting as he hit his one-year mark in the second term, how gas prices have fallen even below $2 in some places.
I mean, it's really, it's remarkable.
Speaking of my childhood, when I learned how to drive back in 1987, I remember it was like a big deal of the gas prices, if you could find one that was under $1.
Now, that was like 40 years ago.
Oh, my God.
Not quite, but like four decades ago is about $1 a gallon.
And Trump's talking about under his energy policies, in more and more places, it's under two.
And in several places, it's just over $2 a gallon.
That is huge.
And he's standing up there, all these European leaders saying you could have the same if only you didn't pursue this obscene climate change agenda, which is holding you back.
And as a result, holding us back in our partnership with you.
Yeah, I think that's right, Megan.
I don't want to agree with you, but I do.
So the thing is, though, this, you know, we used to hear this.
When Trump was first elected, I moderated a panel, Real Clear did an event.
I think American Petroleum Institute was the sponsor.
And because it was Real Clear, I said, okay, you can have some petroleum guys there, oil, gas, coal.
Let's get some.
I won't mention windmills, Megan, but I'll mention solar.
Solar.
Thank you.
And, you know, straight out conservationists.
And nuclear.
And the nuclear guys were amazing because they looked like they'd had a reprieve.
The global warming, my beef with the global warming scare always was this.
If you really believed all these things you were saying, you would champion nuclear power.
And they never did.
They opposed it.
Same people, groups like NRDC that really should know better.
And it was partly cultural.
You know, they came from the left and there was no nukes.
I understood the coalition politics element of it.
But if you really believed in global warming was a threat, you would favor, you would have all of the above.
And they would say all of the above, but they didn't really mean it.
They meant all the above except natural gas, coal, and, you know, fossil fuels.
But they didn't also want nuclear.
Germany and these countries, they've stopped building nuclear power plants.
They've taken coal fires.
That's crazy.
They've taken coal off.
What is China doing?
I don't know about China and windmills.
Again, Tom's right.
You have to fact check Trump.
He just sort of wings it sometimes.
But I know.
Our information is they do have windmills in China and I presume wind farms.
I think it's a question of scale, like how many are building nuclear power plants.
They're building coal-fire plants.
China really is doing all the above.
And if you cared about the economy and the environment, because you have to care about both, you would favor these other sources that are the disfavored sources, particularly nuclear power.
And what Trump is talking to these guys, you know, he has his own way of speaking.
What he's telling Europe is use some common sense.
For Germany to take these plants off of offline and not build nuclear power plants and then have to buy gas from Russia while they're trying to oppose Russia.
You know, it's a mess of governance.
And what he's really saying to them, I think, is, you know, roll up your sleeves, get to work, do good for your economy, quit being so politically correct.
Quit being hamstrung by, you know, your ideology or what's the fad of the moment.
He's talking to them like he's a business guy.
And I think that's a message they probably need to hear.
And most people in Europe probably want to hear.
Andrew, when I listened to the speech today, what he was, it was very much in line with that speech JD Vance made when he was over there and speaking to our European counterparts.
Like, you got to stop this.
You got to stop with the open borders and the mass migration.
You got to stop with the free speech crackdowns.
Like, if we're going to have this long-standing partnership, we're BFFs and special relationship, start acting like it.
Like, start behaving like something that is familiar to us.
And to me, this is Trump completely doubling down on that with a different, a different, slightly different angle.
He mentioned those things.
But his overall message to me was, stop with the freeloading.
Like, those days are done.
You know, you had the president of the European Union stand up yesterday and say, oh, well, you know, I guess times are changing.
And while we're really nostalgic for the way it used to be, we have to accept it.
And we're going to have to just like lean into our independence here in Europe.
And he had all these leftists like crying a tear, like, oh, he's broken up our BFF relationship with Europe.
And it's no, Trump is looking at them saying, no, you're the leech friend who always makes me pay when we go to the movies.
Everything we do.
We have dinner, I pay.
We have drinks, I pay.
We go to the movies, I pay.
And by the way, I'm not even asking you to pay when we go to the movies.
I'm just asking you to not object when I go into the radio shack and steal that radio.
Kind of where we are.
Let me give you a little flavor as he takes a shot at Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who kind of ripped on us yesterday saying, we stand with Greenland, we stand with Denmark.
And here was Trump today in Saad 8.
Going to be defending Canada.
Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way.
They should be grateful also.
But they're not.
I watched your Prime Minister yesterday.
He wasn't so grateful.
They should be grateful to us.
Canada, Canada lives because of the United States.
Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements?
Okay.
Okay.
Thoughts?
I mean, I guess a couple of things.
To me, like, you know, to understand Trump, you sort of have to go back to the art of the deal.
Iceland Greenland Strategic Alliance00:05:40
And if you look at this sort of chain of events, you go from Venezuela, where he uses military force, and he talks a lot about oil.
And then he turns around and he has the whole world sort of focused on the idea that he's going to use military force in Greenland to go after strategic minerals, right?
Because it follows.
It makes sense.
But what he's really doing is sort of, he's amassing leverage is what he's doing.
And I think that's the way you sort of have to look at what he does.
Always think of like, what leverage is he deriving from this latest action, even if you don't understand it in the moment.
So today he goes there and he says, or he says, look, I'm taking, it's not about strategic minerals.
And I'm taking military force off the table.
And the market booms.
And the market's up about 500 points, I think, right now.
And everyone has this sigh of relief.
And all of a sudden, we seem to be in what now is the new normal, which is it seems okay that what we're negotiating for is to take over a piece of territory that belongs to another country.
But everyone kind of sighs, you know, sighs with relief at that.
So he's moved, I don't want to call it, you know, four-dimensional chess or any of that, but he certainly has moved the conversation in the direction he wanted it to go.
And that's where we are.
Very true.
And to your broader point about Europe, I think the message there is, and I think Tom alluded to it, it's not just that we don't want you to be the freeloader anymore.
You would be better if you got your act together.
That's like saying to a friend, look, you know, you really should stop drinking.
You ought to wake up in the morning and do some exercise because that's what's good for you.
It's good for me that you're no longer, you know, that I no longer have to pay for the popcorn, but it would be better for you if you actually got them on your two feet and manned up and took care of your economy, closed your borders, provided your own people with your own energy and control your destiny.
That's what he wants America to put in terms of Trump to do.
Trump might understand.
It's like looking at the, you know, the girlfriend who's gained 100 pounds.
Like, I'd love for you to lose the pounds.
I'd love for you to get back down to like a size four to six.
And then we can go out together again.
We can be seen together again.
You don't have to be my girlfriend who's in the dark bar anymore.
Like, I want to show you off.
And Europe's like shoving, you know, processed food into its mouth.
Like, what do you mean?
What's wrong with us?
There was this moment.
I actually think it was kind of funny because, well, he's getting ripped for it, but I had a different take.
He kept confusing Iceland for Greenland.
He kept saying Iceland instead of Greenland.
Here's a bit of that in SAT 7.
Until the last few days when I told him about Iceland, they loved me.
They called me daddy, right?
Last time.
Very smart man said, he's our daddy.
He's running it.
I was like running it.
I went from running it to being a terrible human being.
But now what I'm asking for is a piece of ice, cold and poorly located, that can play a vital role in world peace and world protection.
With all of the money we expend, with all of the blood, sweat, and tears, I don't know that they'd be there for us.
They're not there for us on Iceland, that I can tell you.
I mean, our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland.
So Iceland's already cost us a lot of money.
But that dip is peanuts compared to what it's gone up.
In response to which, everybody in Iceland was like, well, leave us out of it.
We're at least.
Well, you know, Megan, in geography school, when I was a kid, the teacher once told me, how do you differentiate Iceland from Greenland?
Iceland is green and Greenland's icy.
So I think that's right.
Iceland, ironically, is the nice warm one.
That's going to, you know, if we're talking about like tourism, that'd be definitely the one we would start.
What were we going to say, Tom?
Do you think he scared the bejesus out of people in Iceland?
Totally.
I think Iceland's like, oh, shit.
This is a Greenland problem.
No, I was going to say, and it said everybody on the left screaming, you know, 25th Amendment.
We've got to, you know, invoke the 25th Amendment.
Trump can't remember Iceland from Greenland.
Meanwhile, I have to say, that's a very easy one to confuse.
I mean, he's talking about a block of ice, which is what Greenland is.
It's one huge hunk of ice, slightly less hunky right now because of all the melting, as I pointed out.
So he went after Canada's PM.
He got into it a little bit with Macrone, who stood up there yesterday in these weird blue glasses.
And there was a lot of speculation online about whether Brigitte had taken another shot at him.
Remember, we saw her smack him getting off of their plane that time.
It was very weird.
And let's not forget.
I mean, these two are very bizarre.
Like she was almost 40, and he was a 14-year-old in her class when she fell in love with him.
I mean, it's very effed up, his relationship with Brigitte Macron.
So here he is in these weird glasses at the Davos summit.
Many people were speculating why, of course, there's got to be a reason he wouldn't just wear those for his speech.
So it was one of those things.
It's kind of on the nose, but, well, literally on the nose, but that we had no explanation for.
And Trump, God love him, because truly any great TV producer, and at heart, that's what Trump is, will mention the elephant in the room, right?
Foreign Policy Tariff Costs00:15:12
I mean, just as a quick aside, when Anna Nicole Smith went to the U.S. Supreme Court and I did my package for Britt Hume's show, Special Report, I did not mention how stunning and transformed she looked.
She had lost like 40 pounds.
And he pulled me aside and he's like, you've got to mention that.
He's like, that's what everybody's noticing.
All the audience is looking at this new, like even more stunning Anna Nicole Smith.
You didn't call attention to it.
Like, and everyone's thinking it like right behind their frontal lobe.
And it's your job as the reporter to say the thing.
And Trump says the thing.
So here's Trump on Macron in SOT 10.
So when I called up Emmanuel Macron, I watched him yesterday with those beautiful sunglasses.
What the hell happened?
And I like them.
I actually like them.
Hard to believe, isn't it?
And I said, Emmanuel, you're going to have to lift the price of that bill to $20, maybe $30.
Think of that.
That means it's a doubling, a doubling of prescription drugs.
Might be a tripling, might be a quadrupling.
It's not easy.
No, no, no, Donald, I will not do that.
I said, yes, you will, 100%.
He said, no, no, no.
And if you don't, I'm putting a 25% tariff on everything that you sell into the United States and a 100% tariff on your wines and champagnes.
No, no, Donald, I will do it.
I will do it.
It took me on average three minutes, a country saying the same thing.
You will do it.
They all said, no, no, no, I will not do it.
You're asking me to double the cost of prescription.
I said, that's right, because you've been screwing us for 30 years.
There he is.
He's talking about prescription drugs and how he, one of the hardest things that he had to negotiate was RFKJ just said this is the toughest thing of his first year, was to change the drug policy here to make us most favored nation with our drug companies and American drugs that were selling to France for $10 a bottle and were selling to Americans for $300 a bottle, which Trump and RFKJ took on.
And that's Trump giving us some of the backstory of how he handled it with the foreign leaders.
Like, I'm sorry, but your price is going to go up and our price is going to go down.
There's still going to be a huge imbalance in your favor, but we're going to do something to make it a little bit more even.
That is the shoot it into my veins stuff that could win Trump the midterms, notwithstanding these terrible numbers that we mentioned earlier, right?
Like that's it right there.
People love that stuff, I think, hearing how he's fighting for us.
France gets screwed, not Iowa.
Thoughts?
Well, Megan, you're a lawyer.
So I want to know what you think of this because when I went, I watched that tariff part very carefully today.
And he, I had two reactions.
They're opposite.
One is he said that the president of head of Switzerland, I don't know if it's a president or prime minister.
Well, I'll get to that.
I have the Swiss.
Yeah, he said, yeah, he said, you know, okay, she kept saying, but we're a small country.
And he was so irritated by her, he raised her tariff from 30% to 39% just because he was pissed off.
And I thought, okay, if I'm on the Supreme Court, he's just giving me permission to say he can't raise tariffs.
But then, as he went on, you realize he's using tariffs.
It's not an economic, he's conducting foreign policy there and in a very direct way.
And the Supreme Court is reluctant to interfere with the president's right to do foreign policy.
So I was wondering which of those you thought would be more with that Supreme Court notice, would they notice those two sort of opposite?
So I don't think they're going to notice.
He's made that argument.
100% they've made the argument before the Supreme Court, which for the listening audience, they are deciding whether Trump single-handedly manipulating tariffs is constitutional or whether this is something he needs congressional approval on.
They made the argument that he's using them as a foreign policy tool, which is uniquely the function of the executive.
I'm sorry to tell you, I think Trump's tariff regime is going to get struck down.
I do not think he has any real hope of the Supreme Court upholding it.
I hope I'm wrong, but the argument did not go well for the government.
And I do not think Trump's tariff power is going to last much longer.
And the real question in my mind is, what does that mean for all the tariffs he's already negotiated?
Manipulated.
You know, like the Supreme Court, nine justices aren't going to get involved in figuring that out.
Well, and that was one of his arguments to the court, too, is like, well, they have to stay in place because we've already done it.
And if we have to undo all this stuff, it's going to be a disaster.
And so maybe Congress.
It's not a great position.
Maybe Congress will do its job and get back involved in a way that they should be in the first place.
Pollyanna over here on third base.
We have all kinds on our show, mate.
I love that about you guys.
We do have the Switzerland soundbite, which, I mean, it might have been my favorite soundbite of the whole thing.
It was like an aside he decided to tell us about his dealings with the no longer prime minister of Switzerland.
She just left in December.
And now there's a new guy there.
But here's, listen to this.
So they come in, they sell their watches.
No tariffs, no nothing.
They walk away.
They make $41 billion on just us.
So I said, no, we can't do that.
But I brought it up to 30%.
And the, I guess, prime minister, I don't think president, I think prime minister called a woman.
And she was very repetitive.
She said, no, no, no, you cannot do that, 30%.
You cannot do that.
We are a small, small country.
I said, yeah, but you have a big, big deficit.
You may be small, but you have a bigger deficit than big countries.
He said, no, no, no, please.
You cannot do it.
Kept saying the same thing over and over.
We are a small country.
I said, but you're a big country in terms of.
And she just rubbed me the wrong way, I'll be honest with you.
And I said, all right.
Thank you, ma'am.
Appreciate it.
Do not do this.
Thank you very much, ma'am.
And I made it 39%.
And then all hell really broke out.
And I reduced it because I don't want to hurt people.
I don't want to hurt them.
I realized with that, I don't know, I was so because she was so aggressive.
And I realized in that conversation that the United States is keeping the whole world afloat.
There it is.
By the way, I guess it's the president, not the prime minister.
Yeah.
Corinne Keller-Sutter is out.
Her term ended in December.
Now there's a new guy.
But there it is.
I realized in that conversation that the United States is keeping the whole world afloat.
I mean, if you could sum up the whole speech in one line, I think that's it.
Like he's done.
The freeloading days are over and we want something now.
And the price that he's asking for at the moment, I mean, you talked about other, we talked about other prices he exacted, like, yo, France, you're gonna have to pay a bit more for these medications so that we pay a little less.
And you're so dumb to rely on all this like wind farm energy.
And why don't you get more self-sufficient?
And then you wouldn't be so dependent on Russia, Germany.
But what he's really saying is, I want Greenland and I kind of want it now.
And that leads me to the unexpected hero of the week, Mort Halperin.
You guys may or may not have heard him.
You know the last name.
And his son happens to be a very famous journalist by the name of Mark, who has his own podcast called Next Up with Mark Halperin and it's on the MK Media Podcast Network.
And Mark had his dad Mort on his show last week.
And his dad, I think, is 92.
And at first, I like you, I'm like, why is he putting his dad on to talk about the foreign policy issues of the day?
Well, it turns out his dad is a pretty famous foreign policy expert who worked for the Johnson, the Nixon, and the Clinton administrations, actually in government roles, I think both at Pentagon and at state, if I'm not mistaken, and knows a thing or two about foreign policy and in particular, NATO in our history with NATO and the United States' role in NATO.
We played this on AM Update the other day.
Listen to Morton Halperin on the Greenland issue.
At the end of the day, our alternative is not to use military force.
Our alternative is to leave NATO.
And opposition has always been: we will tell you what we need to remain in the alliance, and you will tell us whether you do that.
And if you're not, we won't be able to stay in the alliance.
That's perfectly reasonable.
Perfectly reasonable.
And this is obviously a Democrat.
He's connected with open society.
Like he's, this is not a right-leaning guy.
And he went through on Mark's show some of the examples.
Like at the beginning of NATO, the U.S. wanted the Germans to rearm.
And the rest of Europe did not want that at all, given what they just been through in World War II.
They did not want it.
They were forced to agree to it.
The U.S. said, we'll only do NATO, the formation of it, if we're allowed to put nuclear weapons in Europe.
The Europeans didn't want nuclear weapons in Europe.
We said, you will agree or we're not doing it.
They did it.
He had multiple examples of where we, as the big dog of NATO, said, We understand you don't want it.
We don't give a shit.
It's happening because we're the most important member of NATO.
So that plus the Don Roe doctrine make me say, I get it.
And Trump is out there like, you're a bunch of freeloaders.
This is what we want.
Stop complaining and just give it to me.
So do we think it will happen?
Okay, we've fleshed out some of the arguments for and against.
Do we think it's going to happen as a result of today or Trump in general?
Tom?
Do I think that we are going to purchase Greenland?
We get Greenland.
Yeah.
I do not think that that is going to happen.
I would probably peg it at like a 20% chance, which is not nothing, but I think the odds are still against.
I take the opposite.
I'll take the 80% chance by the time Trump leaves office.
I say we have Greenland.
It's a territory.
It's not going to be a state.
Nobody wants them to have voting rights as Americans.
What do you say, Carl?
I think it's going to blow up on our face and Greenland's going to end up as an independent country with a government that resembles Mamdani's cabinet in New York City.
Oh, my God.
Oh, man.
Okay.
Andy?
Well, I will say that Lord Halperin is a very prominent foreign policy expert.
And it's great that he's still with us.
I'm glad to hear that.
And I'm glad that he's still talking.
I would say it's a bigger chance today than it was yesterday.
I think that I'd give it about a 30 and a third percent chance.
I think it's a one.
Okay.
Three.
I actually think that some sort of, you know, there's some sort of agreement somewhere between statehood and where we are now that we end up.
I think it'll change for sure.
What do you think, Megan?
So we got 80.
I say 80% chance by the end of turp.
Yeah.
We're going to get it.
We're getting agreements.
Yeah, I really feel so.
So when you say we're getting it, how are we getting it?
We're getting it.
Like Puerto Rico?
What's it going to be?
We're going to negotiate.
We're going to negotiate.
We're not taking it over by military force, but Trump is going to scare them to the point where they give it to us because it's just easier because we're footing all their bills.
They want the free dinners and they want the free movie tickets and they want the population.
Are they giving it to us or we're buying it, right?
We're going to pay for it, right?
We're buying it.
We're going to buy it.
I'll tell you something and he'll tell you.
I'll tell you that.
The same $7 million we paid for Alaska.
No.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's that cheap anymore, but he'll find some way to say to the American people that we're not exactly paying for it.
You know, he's going to use the Venezuelan oil money, something like that.
Keep going, Andy.
Here's 100%.
However it turns out, Trump will take credit for it and it will be a great victory.
Wow.
I don't think it would be Trump's credit.
I mean, then nobody else would have been able to push this through.
But I think he's going to do it.
So he got 80 from me, 20 from Tom, 33 to 3rd from Andy, and zero, it blows up in our faces from the optimistic Carl Glenn.
If it does happen, Megan, I am looking forward to staying at Trump Tower and playing the golf course in Greenland.
That's going to be a lot of fun.
Let's go.
We'll ride a dog sled together, Tom.
All right.
Let me ask you finally a political question, which is those polls.
They're not good.
Just a couple of CNN polls.
His overall job approval now at 39.
But what they show is that his approval rating amongst independents is now at 29.
It was at 29 in October, too.
So it's not exactly falling, but they're not feeling so rosy about the Trump presidency.
And those who say they're extremely enthusiastic to vote in the midterms are all Democrats.
The lopsidedness of enthusiasm and readiness to vote in November is alarming, I think, for anybody who likes Republican rule, shall we say.
So is there any chance we turn this around?
It's not tomorrow, but it's 10 months away.
So I would say that Republicans have about six months, if that.
I mean, these days we're so tribal, like a lot of people have already decided who they're going to vote for, right?
Republicans are locked in for Trump.
Democrats are locked in, or I should say Republicans will vote for Republican in the midterms and Democrats will vote for Democrats.
And as you mentioned, Democrats right now are way more enthusiastic than Republicans are.
And then the question is, is there movement among independents, right?
Can Trump and Republicans win back some of the independents before they actually go to the polls?
I think the answer is yes.
And I think they've got about six months to do it.
Trump has been promising, Mike Johnson has been promising, hey, you know, the one big beautiful bill is just kicking in.
Just give us some more time.
Trump just complained about his PR folks the other day, right?
Which is, you know, when your poll numbers are bad and Biden did this, I mean, Obama did this.
It's always like, it's a messaging problem.
It's not a policy problem.
It's just, you know, our message is, you know, voters are too dumb to understand or we're just not getting through to them.
It's not a good sign.
No, that's not a good sign.
And I think Republicans.
But I have to say, part of me thinks it might actually be true in Trump's case because he does have a good story to tell.
I think there's a reason he's out there now personally telling it.
Got to run.
Love you guys.
Thanks for being on the MK channel to be continued up next, our legal panel with Dave Ehrenberg and Mike Davis.
Don't go away.
Klan Act Rights Violations00:15:27
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And when I come back, I'm going to play myself on the shoulder.
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After having learned more about the shady past of the two little boys' parents.
Not the two little boys, but their parents.
All right, we're going to get into all of it today with our MK True Crime contributor Dave Ehrenberg, who you can find on Substack at Dave Ehrenberg, and Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article 3 project.
I'm so happy to have you guys here.
There's a lot to dig into on just those few matters.
Okay, let's just start with the.
I mean, I thought it was an act of terrorism what we watched in that church on Sunday.
I don't call it a protest.
It wasn't a riot exactly.
It was more of like an act of terrorism targeting innocent people minding their own business who had done nothing and trying to scare them.
Yep, there's a little bit of it.
Even Don Lemon admits on the tape that he saw little children frightened and scared, didn't care.
Neither did the protesters who clearly wanted to scare the people there.
And what we heard Christy Noam say last night on Fox Mike, or no, it was on maybe Newsmax, was you're going to see arrests within hours.
Now, before I officially toss it to you, a lot of people saying they're taking too long.
Pambandi, Harmeat, Harmeat runs civil rights.
Pamboni's, of course, the overall AG.
It's taking too long.
But when you're in federal court, when you're the DOJ, you have to bring charges with a criminal complaint and a warrant.
And that requires a judge's signature.
This happened on Sunday.
Courts are closed.
Monday, courts were closed because of MLK Day, which gives them Tuesday to possibly get all this stuff ready, cross all the T's and dot the I's because this is going to be challenged and scrutinized, and there's going to be 10,000 ACLU-type groups looking to poke holes in whatever they file.
So it is important that they be very careful here.
But I think today's the day, Wednesday, that will probably see arrests.
And if not today, then tomorrow.
You take it from there, Mike Davis, because I have a feeling you're more in the loop than I am.
Well, I think that Attorney General Pam Bondi and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Harmeet Dillon, along with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Cash Mattell, they have all made it crystal clear that people who terrorize church services, people who trespass into Sunday services, disrupt the service,
they're going to face federal criminal charges.
And there are two federal statutes that are directly on point here.
There's the Federal Face Act passed in 1994 by Bill Clinton to protect both abortion clinics from obstruction.
And as a compromise for Republicans to get the 60 votes to get this passed in the Senate, they also passed the FACE Act to include houses of worship.
So that is a federal crime to obstruct churches, to obstruct synagogues and mosques.
And it's very clear that that's what Don Lemon and his co-conspirators, his modern day Klansmen, did when they went into this Minnesota church and disrupted the service.
Don Lemon actually went up to the pulpit and disrupted the pastor during the middle of the service.
This is a slam dunk Facebook Act violation.
It's also a violation of the Ku Klux Klan statute, 18 USC Section 241, conspiracy against rights, when you have a mob of people going into churches to disrupt the churches because of their Christian faith, because of their race.
And Don Lemon made it very clear in his so-called reporting.
That's why he did it.
That's why his co-conspirators did it.
He's also going to face charges under the Klan statute.
I'm with you, Megan.
I wish that Don Lemon would have been charged under the Klan statutes on MLK Day.
It would have been so rich.
But the grand juries are not in service on federal holidays.
Yes.
So we looked into it, and it does appear to me, Dave, that the likely charges coming are going to be exactly what Mike just said.
It's not just going to be the FACE Act.
It's not just going to be the Klan Act.
It's going to be both.
And if you charge both, then you have the effect of basically raising the FACE Act from a misdemeanor to a felony.
If you use the Klan Act, you can charge a felony.
And there was just case law out of the 11th Circuit, which oversees where you are down in Florida.
This, of course, happened in Minneapolis, but it's persuasive and it's not binding out of the 11th Circuit over Minnesota, but it's persuasive, saying that the violation of rights under the Klan Act can be, like you can charge somebody with violation of rights under the Klan Act, if they have violated the FACE Act.
So if they have obstructed physically or intimidated anyone attending a religious service, that can be the predicate violation for a violation of the Klan Act, which raises what would otherwise be a misdemeanor to a felony, potentially up to 10 years in jail.
I mean, no one is really expecting that to be the penalty, but it does make this a lot more serious than a misdemeanor, which could be more of a slap on the wrist.
Your thoughts on it.
Megan, good to be back with you and Mike.
And thank you, by the way, for your nice words.
I heard them on a previous show about me that I'm one of the good, good liberals, although I don't consider myself a liberal sort of centrist, but I appreciate the nice words.
Thank you with all heartfelt.
Thank you.
Well, I disagree with my friend Mike.
I know that surprised you, but when it comes to the Ku Klux Klan Act, and then we can talk about the FACE Act, but the Ku Klux Klan Act has to face the Supreme Court decision from 1983.
It's called Bray versus Alexandra Women's Health Clinic.
The issue is you have to show that they blocked the church because they had animus towards Christians.
And Justice Scalia was the one who wrote for the majority in that opinion.
He said that the opposition to abortion, this was an abortion clinic case, opposition to abortion did not equate to animus against women.
So the Ku Kuwaits Klan Act did not apply.
The protesters targeted women only because they were the ones obtaining abortions.
The goal was to stop the activity, not to hurt the class.
So if you apply that here, that the reason why they were there was not because they hated Christians, because they went after David Easterwood.
He is the pastor of that church, who is also an ICE guy.
He's like high up somehow in ICE in that area.
If Easterwood had been on a golf course, they would have protested there.
So I don't think you can show the animus against Christians there.
I think that the Ku Klux Klan Act does not apply.
You could have trespass, you could have disorderly conduct, but I don't think there's a federal trespass.
Yeah, and I agree.
If you have trespassed, dead to rights, but that's a state crime.
And we probably aren't going to see a state prosecutor that wants to pursue it.
So we have to stay in federal lane if we actually want to get these folks charged.
Mike Davis, this is an interesting argument, though, about is there animus by the protesters, so-called, against the church.
I know you've raised this.
Their number one protester, Don Lemon, seems to have served Pam Bondi up a beautiful dessert on a silver platter here with the following comments because he can't keep his stupid mouth shut.
He decided to go talk all about his great feet on the Angry Leftist Ladies podcast and said a couple of things about these churchgoers.
I'm going to play 31 and 32.
Listen.
Jesus turned the tables over in the temple, right?
He flipped the tables because he was tired of them not doing what they're supposed to do in his father's house and not living up to the tenets of Christianity.
And so, you know, it is surprising to me if it is true that this person somehow works for ICE.
And also it is true that they're not understanding now of the protesters, is that they're doing the exact opposite of what Christianity is supposed to be about.
I think that there is obviously there's racism in it.
The whole point of it is that they're trying to, they're detaining people on the streets because of accents and the color of their skin.
And they're also targeting, you know, targeting people of color and black people as well as brown people.
So there is a certain degree of racism there.
And there's a certain degree of entitlement.
I think people who are in religious groups like that, it's not the type of Christianity that I practice, but I think that they're entitled and that that entitlement comes from a supremacy, a white supremacy.
And they think that this country was built for them, that it is a Christian country when actually we left England because we wanted religious freedom.
It's religious freedom, but only if you're a Christian and only if you're a white male, pretty much.
And so, yeah, absolutely 100%, but it's an intimidation tactic.
Okay, Mike, thoughts?
Don Lemon is probably the dumbest person on television right now.
He just admitted to his criminal intent under the Klan statute when he made it very clear that they were going into that church because they are Christians, A, and B, because they're white Christians.
So you have religious bigotry and racial bigotry, which makes this fall squarely into the Klan statute.
Don Lemon, He is, if I were a betting man, I would put everything on the line that Don Lemon will be indicted under the FACE Act and the Klan statute under felony charges.
Now, remember, under the FACE Act as well, it is a Class A misdemeanor, up to one year in jail for first-time offenders.
But if there is repeat offenders or if there is violence as part of the FACE Act violation, it becomes a felony.
So he could face two felony charges if you are threatening people inside the church like they did.
You saw the terrified child.
I don't think any jury is going to be.
Does he have to do it, Mike?
Does he have to do the threatening?
No, it's part of the conspiracy.
Everyone who's involved with the conspiracy is responsible for the conspiracy.
So I think Don Lemon is totally screwed here.
You know, he's the non-lawyer, non-attorney.
Don Lemon is going out there telling people what the law is.
He's trying to cover his ass.
It's not going to work.
Pam Bondi and Harmeet Dillon are almost certainly going to indict him.
He did something very dumb, Dave, and it was the same thing that Timothy Busfield did.
He spoke out about his alleged crime in a way that no lawyer would have wanted him to.
Timothy Busfield spoke directly to police and made a bunch of admissions that came back in his face yesterday.
And Don Lemon, speaking with the Angry Lady, made a bunch of admissions there about targeting these churchgoers for a specific reason, that they're doing the exact opposite of Christianity, that he believes they target people of color.
They're racists.
They're white supremacists.
They have a sense of entitlement, that they don't practice Christianity the way I practice Christianity.
That's what he actually said on camera.
I mean, it went on and on.
He like, it's not enough to say he tripled down.
He like quintupled down on this messaging, which is not great for his defense lawyer.
Well, I watched the interviews that he had on his channel and he was showing people on both sides of this debate.
And I didn't get that he was anti-Christian.
He may have said they have a different interpretation of the religion as I do.
But Justice Scalia himself said that protesting an activity like ICE enforcement is not the same as hating a class of people.
They were chanting slogans like justice.
They were chanting slogans like ice out.
They weren't chanting anti-Christian slogans.
So I don't think they can get there on this.
In fact, to prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt, the one thing I agree with, Mike, is that I do think that they'll all be indicted because we saw this with the Trump administration going after James Comeby and Letitia James, but I think he'll meet the same fate or he'll get dismissed before it ever gets to a jury.
One last thing on this.
Just for Don, just to just be clear, are you talking about just for Don or you're saying all the protesters?
There's no criminal charges against all the protesters.
I think against Don, it's weaker than the others because he is a journalist.
I think the others, I think they'll all be charged, but I don't think you can get the federal crimes here.
I think they could be convicted of trespass and disorderly conduct, but those are low-level misdemeanors.
You're right.
They're state charges, not federal charges.
I don't see them being convicted of either the KKK Act or the FACE Act, which is what we mentioned earlier, which is supposed to protect houses of worship because also they didn't block people from leaving.
They were chanting.
They were really made people uncomfortable.
But the standard is in the Eighth Circuit, which is a conservative circuit, that you got to block people from leaving.
It's like chaining yourself to an abortion clinic.
Physical Obstruction Federal Charges00:14:53
That's a no-no.
Chanting outside of abortion clinic, that's free speech.
No, no, no, no.
Okay, just so we know what the statute says.
I'm going to give it to you, Mike, but let me just read the statute in part, the FACE Act, 18 U.S. Code, Section 248.
Whoever by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction intentionally injures, intimidates, or interferes with or attempts attempts by, again, this is by force or threat of force or physical obstruction.
You can do it by any one of those means.
You can use force against the people.
You can threaten to use force against them or by physical obstruction.
If you do by any of those means, if you attempt to intimidate, injure, or interfere with any person who is trying to exercise their First Amendment right of religious freedom, you're done.
You're like, you're guilty.
So that's the question.
Did they, by force, by threat of force, or by physical obstruction, intimidate or interfere with someone exercising their First Amendment right of religious freedom?
I mean, Mike, to me, that is so clear.
It's so clearly a yes.
It's crystal clear.
When Don Lemon, the agitator, went up to the pulpit and stopped the church service and argued with the pastor during the middle of the church service.
I don't think you can get more facey in the FACE Act.
Like he was literally in the pastor's face under the FACE Act.
So I think the FACE Act is squarely on point here, and so is the Klan statute.
And he was told specifically by the pastor, they don't want to talk to you.
Like he made perfectly clear, the church pastor made perfectly clear to Don Lemon, who emerges their spokesperson, they want you out of here.
The people don't want you here.
And the pastor screamed from the pulpit through his microphone, this is wrong.
This is immoral.
He wanted them out.
He made all of them aware of that.
And they continued to terrorize the group.
So, I mean, you tell me, no, they didn't like hold people down, Dave, but they were blocking the aisles.
We saw that quite clearly.
They came in, a mass of them, and blocked the aisles, overtook the front where the pulpit is, to the point where people felt intimidated and were in tears.
Did those people feel totally free to leave?
They just decided to stay there crying?
Well, people left.
And as far as whether some did.
Right.
And some sat there crying.
Well, it's an important factual point here as to whether they did block the ingress and egress.
That's important because the term physical obstruction, that's the key here.
And that is defined in the statute.
If you look at subsection E4, it says the term physical obstruction means rendering impassable ingress to or egress from a facility or rendering passage to or from such a facility unreasonably difficult or hazardous.
So you've got to show that they made the service more than just uncomfortable.
You've got to show that they made movement impossible or hazardous.
That's not what Don Lemon did.
As far as the protesters, I don't know.
Hold on.
The Biden Justice Department imprisoned for years 75-year-old Christian men and women who went into abortion clinics and prayed, right?
If you can throw elderly Christians in prison for praying in an abortion clinic, you can put Don Lemon and his fellow Klansmen in prison for what they did at that church last Sunday.
Remember, this is the same Minnesota where you had a trans terrorist go shoot people inside of the church of the Catholic Church.
I can't remember which one it is.
I'm a bad Catholic, but Assuncian.
So, yeah, that there was a trans terrorist who just lit up that church and killed two children and injured many others, right?
So I think people were certainly in reasonable fear for their safety when Don Lemon and his fellow Klansmen barged into that church, stormed into that church and disrupted it the way that they did.
They need to go to prison.
Yeah, I mean, well, go ahead.
Is a case in the Eighth Circuit.
Eighth Circuit is tough on the government on this one because it's the Dinwiddle case.
What circuit is Minnesota?
Eighth Circuit.
Eighth Circuit.
Yeah.
It's got that right.
So within the Eighth Circuit, in this Dinwidd case from 1996, they said that there's a distinction between physical blockades and aggressive speech.
So you got to show it's a physical barrier.
So if they were physically blocking them from leaving the prisoners, then yes, that would be a crime, but that's not what it appears to be.
And that would be a factual dispute.
Also, as far as Mike, I don't know of any peaceful protesters outside of abortion clinics who are not blocking people that were locked up and put in prison.
Okay.
And by the way, though, it's not just physical obstruction.
It's also threat of force.
And there'll be an argument about what that means and what was perceived by those audience or by the people who are the congregants.
Because take it away from Don Lemon for a second.
That guy, William Kelly, was extremely aggressive in the faces of the churchgoers, screaming at the top of his lungs.
I mean, screaming in their faces.
I don't know.
Do we have it?
Do we have it?
Do we have some of that here?
I think it's, is it SOP 45?
Is that him in the church?
We have a bunch of William Kelly.
But the point is, you can absolutely see this guy and some of the more aggressive so-called protesters in there reasonably putting people in fear of their safety.
And I think there will be an argument that they did feel there was a threat of force being used against them by this extremely aggressive, unhinged man.
Yep.
But by the way, if I can say, I think that this was a huge miscalculation by these protesters.
First off, I disagree with their tactics, but also look at what we're talking about now.
Instead of the debate over the shooting itself of Renee Goode, this has given Republicans a good talking point.
And so I think that's a total miscalculation by this group.
And I think that they should rethink their tactics.
But also, when you talk about that standard of threat of force, it's got to be something more than just chanting.
Like they have to chant sort of, we will burn this church or we will hurt you.
It was more than chanting, Dave.
It was more.
They went in, they infiltrated the service.
They stood up at a certain time.
They rushed to the front of the church, the most holy part, the altar, you know, where they keep the communion.
And they turned on the congregants and started chanting at the top of their lungs, some screaming in their faces, an unhinged guy.
And then their religion got attacked.
They got attacked on an individual basis for what they're doing there.
Why are you here?
Why aren't you out there at the facility where the feds are?
Like aggressive confrontations person by person.
That is not the same as we quietly stood up.
Here's just an example of that guy, William Kelly.
Just here's one.
As you can see, all these pretend Christians, all these comfortable white people who are living lavish, comfortable lives while children are dragged into concentration camps.
You're living real life, nice lives with your lattes, doing absolutely nothing for your Latino and Somali brothers and sisters.
You are a fake Christian.
Why are you not standing with your Somali and Latino communities?
Why do I not see you out at Whitbull every day protesting this attack on humanity?
You're sinners.
You're pretending to be Christians.
But we know you live an easy life, don't you?
Living real comfortable while children are dragged into concentration camps.
You're all living real comfortable, aren't you?
Shame.
Following them as they try to do something.
Stand with the Somalis.
Stand with the Latinos.
Quit ignoring this injustice.
And also, Dave, calling them fake Christians and sinners.
It's really not great for your side.
Oh, that's why I think they miscalculated here.
I mean, that is a mistake, what they did.
They should not have done that.
Those tactics are going to turn people off all across the country.
But it does look make it look like it's about religion.
And you can easily see an argument on that the people felt threatened, that there was a threat of force.
The guy's following them out of the church.
He's screaming at young teenagers as they try to get away from him.
It's really not that hard to prove threat of force.
In the dewittled religion, race and religion.
But in the Dinwittal case I mentioned, the Eighth Circuit said that aggressive speech, and that's aggressive speech, is protected unless it crosses a line into a true threat.
I didn't see a true threat of violence there.
I saw aggressive speech.
And so I don't think they're going to be able to get a conviction here.
Can I just, can I point this out?
You may be right.
Can I point this out?
I think they've got a very good shot.
Go ahead.
This is outrageous.
Like what Don Lemon did is the most outrageous thing you can do.
You're going into a Christian church on a Sunday and scaring the hell out of everyone, including the kids.
And you're doing it because of their Christian faith and you're doing it because of their race.
And they say that very explicitly because Don Lemon is so stupid that he would actually say this.
This is unacceptable behavior.
Not only is it bad political judgment, like Dave says, this is felonious conduct.
Remember, the Biden Justice Department put 75-year-old Christian women in prison for praying inside of abortion clinics outside of abortion clinics.
They put a black, young black mother in prison for 41 months for praying and obstructing an abortion clinic.
This behavior last Sunday was much more egregious than that.
It was.
Imagine if this were a mosque or a black Christian church instead of a white Christian church and the left would be or even Mike Davis with a MAGA hat.
Like I would be, I would be strung up by that.
Picture the worst, picture the worst possible example.
And it just makes it so obvious.
You have a bunch of skinheads going into a temple or going into a mosque and getting in the face saying, you're fake Muslims, you're fake, following their children as they rushed to leave to get away from these nutcases, following them right up to the side of the van as they tried to slam the door closed, saying, you're sinners, you're fake, and attacking their religion and screaming at them inside the church, outside the church, while their ringleader is saying, trauma is part of the process.
Trauma is what protests are all about.
Not his, not Don Lemon's, but the children with kids crying inside the mosque or the temple.
Are you kidding me?
This will be a fucking no-brainer.
Just because it's Christians, we have to bend over backwards to find a way out from it's bullshit.
And there's a new sheriff in town, all right?
And his name is Donald Trump.
And Pam Bondi and Harmeet Dylan are, they've had it.
There will be, there will be criminal charges coming, I'm sure, either today, tomorrow, or Friday.
Be patient, MAGA, because it does take a while to cross the T's in federal court.
It is not as easy as it is in state court.
But I'm telling you, the charges are coming.
And I have to say, I don't know.
I mean, do I really know what a Minneapolis federal court judge is going to do?
I don't.
You could be right, Dave, that this judge is going to be sympathetic or read the law the way you say it should be read and throw these charges out.
But we have to see them brought.
They must be brought because MAGA has sat back too long and watched its favorite members get dragged across the coals, starting with President Trump himself.
And they've had it.
They've had it.
I mean, what, if you were the state prosecutor and you were a state prosecutor up until very, very recently down in Florida, would you charge them with anything under state law?
You know, there is a Minnesota law that makes this illegal to go in a house of worship and do what they did.
So I would charge that under the state law.
Not sure if it's a misdemeanor or a felony under state law, but I think it's just a misdemeanor, which is why they want the federal government to come in and impose these more serious laws.
But like I said, I think you can get them on the trespass and disorderly conduct.
And I wish those protesters, those people who claim to be pro-Palestinian protesters who went into synagogues and protested while people were praying, I wish they would have been charged with crimes.
I haven't seen that either.
So all this stuff is really distasteful.
But as far as whether it's a federal crime.
But it's more than that.
Because here's the only fact.
Yes, they should be.
Okay, I get it.
I accept that.
I mean, I don't agree with it, but I totally accept your position as the one that will be argued.
Here's the other thing.
If I were one of those parents, Mike Davis, with the children crying next to me in those pews, I would sue Don Lemon for intentional infliction of emotional distress.
He knew it.
He's on camera repeatedly endorsing it.
We played the bit yesterday of him outside the church as they're fleeing, saying trauma is part of the process.
Trauma is part of protests.
Sorry, not his.
The children fleeing.
He was enjoying it.
Here's SOP 30.
Is it 30?
Hold on, no, no.
Sorry, I think.
Yeah, yeah, it's 30.
Here's SOP 30.
Watch this.
This is the beginning of what's going to happen here.
When you violate people's due process, when you pull people off the street and you start dragging them and hurting them and not abiding by the Constitution, when you start doing all of that, people get upset and angry.
And if you remember what the civil rights movement was about, the civil rights movement was about these very kinds of protests.
And for some reason, in our modern era, people think that in order to have protests, you got to be, you know, cordoned off to a certain area.
And, you know, what time you can protest.
There's nothing in the Constitution that tells you what time you can protest.
You can protest at any time.
That's the whole point of it, is to disrupt, to make uncomfortable.
And that's what they're doing.
And that's what I believe when I say everyone has to be willing to sacrifice something.
You have to make people uncomfortable in these times.
If you see how uncomfortable people, uncomfortably, and how harsh people are being treated on the streets, you have to be willing to go into places and disrupt and make people uncomfortable.
That is what this country is about.
Okay, all of that's going to be used against him in the criminal case.
All of it, Mike Davis.
But I think you have a strong case if you're a parent of one of those crying children or if you yourself are traumatized on the heels of a sension.
These kids, they don't know what hands up don't shoot is.
They have no idea who Michael Brown was or Ferguson, Missouri, or how that's a lie.
All they see is a bunch of strangers hijack their Sunday service and start screaming about shooting and hands up.
That's what these kids do.
Then they see their friends trying to flee and get getting chased by fucking nutcases like William Kelly.
And that's what they went through.
And so I doubt William Kelly has two nickels to rub together in between his ears or otherwise, but Don Lemon does.
And I would 100% sue him civilly for intentional infliction.
Private Bail Motive Minors00:16:28
What do you think?
Absolutely.
I watched that with Don Lemon and he makes my blood boil.
That guy is a fucking monster.
Not only should he be put in federal prison for many, many years, he should be bankrupted, like you said, Megan, for intentional infliction of emotional distress.
There's also a federal civil cause of action under our federal civil rights statutes.
When you go after people, when you target people like Don Lemon and his fellow Klansmen did there because of their Christian faith and because of their white race, there needs to be no mercy for Don Lemon because he has shown zero remorse.
Like you said, he's tripling and quadrupling down on his felonious misconduct.
He's an asshole and he needs to go to prison.
He needs to be bankrupted.
Yeah, I look forward to watching that process play out.
All right, we have more to discuss.
We've got to get into Buzzfield.
Quick break, then we'll do that.
Don't go away.
Mike and Dave, stay with me.
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Dave Ehrenberg and Mike Davis are back with me now.
So we've got to talk about what happened in the Timothy Busfield bail hearing yesterday, where he was granted bail and was not held in state custody pending his trial on charges of alleged child abuse, alleged child molestation.
Two little boys ages seven at the time, 11 today, allege, twin brothers, allege that he molested them, that he fondled one outside of his clothing, and that with the other one, it was less of a fondling, more of like inappropriate touching, but one explicitly having his private genitalia touched, he claims by Timothy Busfield, who was there, the kids' director on this show, the house cleaner, I think it was called.
In any event, he's denied the charges.
And then when the arrest warrant was issued for him on last Friday out of New Mexico, he took a total of five days.
He didn't turn himself in in Albuquerque, New Mexico until Tuesday.
And now we know that he was driving cross country and he was working with a lawyer to take what they say is a legit polygraph that he says he passed, sit with a sexual assault like evaluator to assess just how threatening he may or may not be to children, and issue a statement on camera to TMZ, which we have already addressed as having signs of deception per Phil Houston, the human lie detector and CIA agent of 25 years who invented their deception detection methods.
Now, we said at the time we had not heard his defense, and now we're getting a look at it because his lawyers came in, both guns blazing, to try to get him bail.
And the most shocking allegation, pretty much everything they alleged in his defense, we kind of knew, but we did not know that the parents of the two boys are a couple of, as the defense lawyers, I'm sorry, adequately said, con men.
The mother and the father both appear to be serial fraudsters, which let's face it, changes the outlook of this case, changes the likely outcome, and changes how we need to view the allegations themselves.
I'm going to give you guys just a little bit from the defendant's opposition to the state's motion to hold Busfield without bail.
They say the dad has been, he's a former attorney who was convicted of federal conspiracy and wire fraud and was later disbarred following the prosecution for a multi-million dollar scheme in which he used his law license to deceive vulnerable victims for profit.
He pleaded guilty, so there's no question he did it, to conspiracy to commit wire fraud arising from a mortgage modification enterprise that defrauded more than 1,500 homeowners of approximately $6 million.
It happened, I believe, during COVID where he was taking advantage of vulnerable people.
This is as an officer of the court where he has a duty to, you know, be an extra duty to be ethical and honest.
The children's mother, they write, has an equally disturbing history.
She has had multiple civil judgments entered against her, and not just civil judgments of like you had a car accident and whatever, or like you punched somebody.
It's judgments that relate to her honesty.
So it's all like potentially, it's all very relevant for fraudulent and dishonest behavior.
She was sued in 2011 by somebody to whom she sold her Bentley for $91,000.
The guy took possession of the Bentley, but she never transferred him the actual title.
And then she had the vehicle unlawfully repossessed and then traded the Bentley in and got a Porsche instead, which she registered in her mother's name.
Then a complaint came against her and apparently they are alleging that there was a judgment against her.
And then in addition, there were judgments against her for over $400,000 for unpaid gambling debts in which she allegedly wrote bad checks to MGM Grand in one other casino trying to pay for it, but the checks were bad.
So, I mean, this is like, if all this is true, it's alleged by Busfield in his response.
It was stated in court yesterday.
The prosecutor did not take it on at all, saying it's not true.
These are lies.
So it's not a case of mistaken identity from the look of it.
This is deeply problematic.
Now, I don't know, Dave, I'm going to start with you on this because, again, you're just coming off of yours as a state prosecutor.
So you would be, you know, the guy saddled with this revelation of your two minor plaintiffs in a child sex abuse case.
It's not like the children have been found guilty of fraud.
I don't know that it even gets admitted to be honest, right?
Because it's like the whole defense is going to be the children were coached by the parents.
The initial statements that they gave to an investigator were that they weren't molested.
Then a year later, it changed to, yes, I was molested.
And they're going to say that that's because of these con man parents.
But is it admissible when the parents are fraudsters and the children are alleging sex abuse?
I think, Megan, for the defense, they're going to lean into the motive here for the kids to lie at the behest of their parents because there's also a report during the internal investigation that the mother was found to have said something to the effect of if the twins did not get their contract renewed for the show, that she would get Timothy Busfield.
And so yeah, she was going to get her revenge on him.
Right.
So in that sense, her past and a history of fraud and shakedown schemes and things like that could be relevant here.
So the judge is more lenient to allow the defense to pursue motive than they would to allow the prosecution to expose prior bad facts about the defense.
So that's why I think that it could come in because that's how you have a fair trial.
You have to flush out whether there was a motive to lie, especially because these kids are minors and they originally said to investigators that there was no inappropriate touching and then later changed their story.
They played that on his defense lawyer played audio of the boys initially denying that Busfield had inappropriately touched them.
Here it is in SOT 50.
And you know what's right and wrong, right?
You know, where people can't touch where people can't.
Yeah, you know that, right?
Does Tim ever do that?
No, he's never touched me.
Never touched you?
In your private areas, right?
Never did that?
Never.
Okay.
Let's go on, Your Honor, to Defense Exhibit AA.
This is five minutes later, separate.
The boys were separated.
The same police officer, and this time speaking to SL out of the presence of his brother.
So you know what's right and wrong, right?
You know, no one could touch your private areas.
Yeah, but it didn't touch him.
He doesn't touch your private hearts.
Okay.
That's not, Your Honor, a failure to disclose.
That's an express denial.
That's Busfield's defense attorney, Mike.
But the problem, the problem there is, of course, that little kids who are molested often do an express denial when they're first asked about it.
There's a lot of shame associated with it.
So, I mean, that's not as probing as like a lay witness might think.
Like it's, it is very frequent that an abuse victim initially denies it.
But the parents' background, as somebody who I think Timothy Busfield is a creep, an absolute creep.
And we've learned he's even more creepy than we knew because we learned about two other females who have come forward complaining about him at yesterday's hearing.
But that doesn't necessarily mean he's a child molester.
So we really do need to look at the credibility.
I mean, yes, of the boys, but they're little ones, you know, but these parents, is it relevant?
Yes.
I mean, I would say this.
Look, I've had friends who are sexually abused as kids, and it destroys them for the rest of their lives.
There's nothing worse you can do than sexually abuse a kid.
And I personally think you should bring back medieval punishment for the people who sexually abuse kids.
I know the Supreme Court says we can't have the death penalty anymore for child rape.
I think the Supreme Court should reverse that now that Justice Kennedy is no longer on the Supreme Court.
I think these people should be brutally and publicly executed to people who abuse kids.
But we also have the presumption of innocence.
And we also have sexual abuse allegations that have been weaponized for political or financial reasons many times in our past.
I saw this when I ran Justice Kavanaugh's Supreme Court hearing as the chief counsel for nominations when six bullshit allegations were brought against Justice Kavanaugh.
So I am very leery about these allegations, particularly when you have these shady ass parents who look like they have a financial motive.
It looks like it was a shakedown here that they, when they, what Dave just said, when they said if they continue this contract, these allegations go away.
If you're a parent, your kids are sexually abused.
You don't give a damn about some contract.
You want to make sure that someone who's sexually abusing the kids are arrested and held accountable.
Well, they're saying they didn't know at the time that the kids were employed by the show.
They did, that the parents did not know.
The kids went to, they got examined by a doctor.
The doctor saw evidence of grooming.
The doctor called in to the police.
The police interviewed the children.
They denied it.
You heard that.
But then the parents put the children into therapy and the therapist a year later, now the other side says it was right after Warner Brothers denied their claim and did an independent investigation and said, guess what?
You're not getting anything.
You're not getting any money.
But a year later, the boys said to the therapist that they were touched.
The therapist, who would typically have an ethical obligation to mention if she thought the boys had been coached by the parents, did not say that.
The prosecution was quick to point that out.
The prosecutors would too have an obligation to say if they thought the boys were groomed by the parents or were not groomed, manipulated by the parents into saying that they'd been touched when they hadn't been.
And obviously the prosecution believes these boys.
But yeah, it's the timing of it.
It's not ideal.
And Dave, the reality is in a sexual abuse case like this involving children, they're very hard to make anyway.
There's almost never a witness.
There's not a witness here.
Now the story has changed because the boys initially in the Warner Brothers investigation appear to have said that this happened when it was just Busfield in the room with them.
But they pointed out the defense did.
I didn't hear the prosecution respond to this exactly.
Yesterday, they pointed out, oh, no, now it's the room was filled.
No, there were lots of people there, but he just managed to sort of sneak it in.
But it's like the prosecutor claimed, oh, we never said that nobody was in the room, but the defense said, yes, they did.
And they read a transcript of the Warner Brothers investigation where they claimed initially that nobody else had been in the room.
All these contradictions undermine their credibility.
Right.
Witnesses are really powerful here.
Normally it's a he said, they said, but here you've had the show's director of photography, a guy named Alan Codillo, who testified that the children were never left alone with adults on the set.
And he also said that it was the parents who frequently encouraged the children to hug the adults.
So all of that is relevant.
And that the adults felt uncomfortable with it.
Like Alan testified, I didn't appreciate that.
I didn't want some guy sending a seven-year-old over to hug me when clearly the kid didn't want to do it.
Right.
But again, that kind of suggests what was his father up to?
Was he trying to get like some sort of lay the foundation for a claim that like people on this set were inappropriate?
Well, well, that's why these cases are so hard.
You're dealing with minors, you're dealing with repressed memories, and you're dealing with contradictory statements.
So they're naturally tough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
And then you add the specter of the defendant's past, where it could go either way, right?
Because he's been accused of misconduct with teenagers in the past.
And yet, perhaps you could argue the parents knew about that and knew this was the weak spot for him.
And when they said, apparently, according to witness, that they were going to get him if their kids did not get renewed and then they didn't get renewed.
And perhaps that's the way they got him because they knew about his past allegations against him.
So this is a convoluted mess right now.
That's why the judge allowed the defendant to go home instead of staying in jail pre-trial.
And that's why it's going to be hard to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt.
I have to say, I would have let him go home too.
I just feel like now having heard the defense, I'm not persuaded it didn't happen.
I'm really not because I don't impugn the children because of their parents' fraud.
But there's enough defense evidence that this case suggesting this case could go away or certainly result in a not guilty that I don't think it's fair to hold him in jail pending trial.
He's not allowed to have any contact with children.
But, you know, there is more to the story, Mike, because Timothy Busfield got on the phone with the police on November 3rd.
Melissa Gilbert was on the phone and admitted that he would playfully tickle the boys on set.
And also, after admitting that and admitting that they had taken the children out to dinner and given them Christmas gifts, then said, I don't remember these boys.
Now, he directed them for two and a half years.
So that's why I referenced earlier.
He did what you're not supposed to do, right?
Which is talk to the cops, even if you're innocent.
Don't talk to the cops.
I think most defense lawyers say, keep your mouth shut.
I'll do your talking for you.
But he did do those things, according to the police.
And then he looked guilty as hell in his TMZ video.
I mean, he just reeked of dishonesty to me and to Phil Houston's AI tool, which is accurate 97% of the time in detecting lies.
Shady Parents Cop Confessions00:02:00
And then we're going to take a quick break, but on the back end, we'll talk about the serial abuse of teenage girls, which is not, of course, the same as a seven-year-old boy, but it is a pattern of abuse.
So I don't want to be too harsh on these children just because the parents appear to be absolute losers.
Yeah, I mean, you're exactly right.
This is a tough case because you have shady-ass parents, you have a story that's changed, but you have a guy who appears to be a creep.
So, this like again, there's a presumption of innocence in this country.
This man, like every other criminal defendant, deserves the presumption of innocence.
But this is a very, very messy case.
And the prosecutor tried to address the business about the parents' backgrounds just by saying the parents have troubles, but we can't impute those to the boys.
I mean, that was really her defense, which is probably the only defense you can go with.
But it's amazing to me.
I mean, you tell me, Dave, in the next 30 seconds, would the prosecutor have known about the parents' history at the time they brought these charges?
Not necessarily.
That's why the defense hires their own investigators.
And they probably found that out after the fact.
So, I don't blame prosecutors for moving full speed ahead on this.
I would too.
But then, when you find this out, you're like, oh boy, it's not something natural you would find out on your own until you did more digging.
If you were in this position and you found that out after you filed, what would you do?
I would question the case.
I would make sure I would look at get all the discovery I could.
And if I believed that because of this and other things that I could not get a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt, I wouldn't file the case or I would dismiss it.
Okay, stand by.
There's another piece to talk about right after this break.
Don't go away.
If your credit card balance is freaking you out after all the holiday spending, real.
Prosecutors Move Full Speed00:02:19
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Teenage Abuse Evidence Defense00:14:56
Back with me now, Dave Ehrenberg, host of MK True Crime, and Mike Davis, founder of the Article 3 Project.
I do want to offer what the prosecutor was saying because I want to be fair to these two young boys.
She pointed out that it was November 2024 when the doctor first raised concerns of abuse.
What we know from the police complaint is that the parents had heard that Timothy Busfield had a history of being inappropriate with underaged women.
And that prompted them to start asking questions, which eventually brought them into the medical center with their boys.
The doctor interviewed the boys and the doctor, based on his interview with the boys, said they need to be evaluated for potential child sexual abuse.
The police interviewed them.
You heard the excerpts of the boys saying, no, he didn't touch me.
And then I gave the chronology of what happened after there.
They started getting therapy.
The therapist said the one boy allegedly was having nightmares.
It came out that court hearing yesterday that allegedly, according to the defense, the boy had told the therapist he was just waking up several times in the middle of the night because he was hot or cold, I think hot.
And the father was the one who said he's having nightmares.
So the defense is suggesting the dad's trying to like layer up the kids' injuries.
And the suggestion is that they're fake.
I don't know what's true.
But in any event, the contact with the therapist went on and ultimately the therapist said that the boys changed their story and that the one said he had been physically touched, you know, inappropriately, his genitals had been touched by Timothy Busfield.
And the other brother did not go that far, which, you know, I did think the prosecutor raised several times yesterday that that's actually a nourish to their benefit.
If this was just some money grab, two's better than one.
You get paid higher if both boys have been molested.
And they did not allege that.
The one boy whose name begins with a V said it didn't go that far.
The one boy whose name begins with an S said indeed it did.
And that Timothy Busfield molested him by touching, forgive me, his penis and his bottom.
They went on to say it's normal for children to deny it.
And the questions asked, she said, by that first police officer, did not comply with best practices.
She said the kids continued to show signs of abuse and continued to disclose they should not be tarred with their parents' past.
She said it's very difficult to coach children at that age.
And even though they gave, even though it's tough to coach children, she said they managed to actually come out and tell their stories and they gave details.
And then she points to, oh, then she says the therapists know about coaching.
She would have put that in her note.
She didn't.
Same with the doctor.
Doctors know about coaching.
He would have put that in his note.
These are people who know these boys and have spent many hours with them in the case of the therapist.
They did not sense coaching.
They thought that these were real complaints.
And then she got into defendant's admission.
Timothy Busfield admitted, and I pulled back up the complete, the police complaint.
According to the police, he admitted the following.
He writes, I did ask Timothy if he ever had any physical contact with these boys and if he ever picked them up and tickled them.
Timothy said it was highly likely that he would have.
Timothy said it was a playful environment like he wanted.
And I'm sorry, right there.
This is why I'm not ready to completely rule him out despite these weird parents.
I know, I know, if I ever said to you, Dave Ehrenberg, did you ever pick up somebody else's boy in a professional setting and tickle him?
You easily would say, hell no.
Every man knows not to do that, whether he's directing them in a film or not.
It's a very strange answer.
Can we agree on that?
Yes.
He's 68 years old, so he's a little different generation than a, but I don't know anyone who just does that normally.
And anyone who did, maybe that was like three generations prior where that was okay.
It's not okay.
It hasn't been okay for a long time.
Also, it is true that when he was accused of improper conduct, they were not children.
They were teenagers, but he did pay out $150,000 to a 17-year-old girl.
It was relating to costs and fees after an unsuccessful countersuit.
But there is some past conduct here that could become relevant in a trial where they could bring it up as what's called Williams Rule in Florida.
Every state has it where it doesn't have to be a conviction.
It just can be if it's like his MO, a pattern of conduct.
And so that's where it could come back to hurt him.
So it is a messy case, Megan.
But our conversation here, it by no means means that he is not guilty of this.
We just don't know.
And the fact that it's messy makes it harder for prosecutors.
Yeah, well, I mean, well, my obligation as a reporter is to bring the audience updated information when I get it.
And this is certainly worth them considering in deciding what they think of this case.
Here's the other thing from the police affidavit.
He says, Timothy then stated, I don't remember those boys.
No, I don't.
I don't actually.
I don't remember if it happened.
I don't remember overtly tickling the boys ever, but it wouldn't be uncommon for me.
So now he's gone from, he's directed them in his show for two and a half years and had social engagements with them.
And Melissa's bought them presents to, and I probably did.
It's highly likely that I tickled them to, I don't remember them.
What?
Like, what boys?
Okay, that too is highly sketchy.
And then I do want to get into the other alleged incidents of abuse and tell me what you think, Mike Davis.
Because what we learned is that Mike mentions there was a 17-year-old girl whom he accused him, who accused him of molesting her physically and sexually in some way.
And she sued him.
And he countersued.
He sued her law firm because they were trying to get $150,000 in fees and costs.
And he lost.
He said that they had defamed him.
And he lost that defamation claim.
He did have to pay the money and he settled with the 17-year-old.
Okay, we don't really know much about that.
Maybe it was a money grab.
I don't know.
Then there was a 28-year-old who alleges that they went out to a movie together and that in the movie theater, he took what was a kiss and turned it into a physical sexual assault, shoving his hands down her pants, grabbing her genitals.
She was like squirming to get away from him.
She wanted nothing to do with him to the point where she went to the police.
Okay, the police said, we can't really make anything out of this because it's like he said she said, and you were on a date with him, something to that effect.
That's, that's a lot.
I mean, I don't like the average guy doesn't have somebody turning like a movie kiss into something that results in a phone call to the cops, but there's that one.
Then there is this other report that they raise.
There are two other reports.
One is like a, eh, from an assistant who worked for both Melissa and Timothy recently that suggests he's kind of a douchebag.
But then there was a new one by name by an actress named Claudia Christian who is out there.
Actually, I googled her.
And if you look at her face, she looks kind of familiar.
I think she's a fairly successful like character actress who back in 1991, I think it was, because that's when they started a movie together.
She and Timothy Busfield were working together, alleges that when she was 16, he came for her too.
Here's the prosecutor describing those other two incidents, 48.
See, exhibit five is from the defendant and his wife's personal assistant.
They worked, I believe, through the May of 2017 until 2019.
And she mostly describes how the defendant was inappropriate, intimidating, that there was a lot of, you know,
this position of authority that we've kind of seen play out in this case and all of the other victims that have come forward and had made comments to her about the way she acted and that he might have a crush on her if she continues that behavior.
So there was concerns of inappropriate conduct with her as well.
State six, Claudia Christian, who is an actress.
She has reported that when they were filming the strays, the defendant and her, she was already passed as an actress.
And during the show, they were running lines, which was common, and they went to his trailer.
She stated that once she got there, he was alone.
And after, almost immediately after she entered his trailer, he forcibly grabbed her and threw her against the wall and started kissing her.
And he had an erection.
Okay, so that's Claudia Christian, who went on the record apparently with the prosecutor.
Would have been 1991.
By my math, she would have been 26 when that happened to her.
So we've got a 28-year-old on a date.
We've got a 26-year-old on set with him.
We've got a 17-year-old who he accused of defaming him when she accused him.
And instead, he had to settle that case and pay her lawyers $150,000.
And then there's a 16-year-old girl who's come forward as well.
She was 16 when this happened to her, who claims he molested her when she was auditioning at his children's theater.
And it was so significant.
Hold on a second.
I have the allegations here.
In a seven-page filing, New Mexico prosecutor said the law enforcement official, they received a report Tuesday from her father who said Busfield kissed his 16-year-old daughter and touched her intimate parts several years ago.
And that when the father went to him, Busfield, quote, begged the family to hold off on reporting the alleged misconduct to the police if Busfield got therapy.
The father was himself a therapist and so agreed to that.
So that's a 16-year-old girl whose dad is on the record.
It's a 17-year-old girl who got a settlement and her lawyers did too.
It's a 28-year-old girl who said she was out on a date this happened to her at a movie theater.
And then there is Claudia Christian, who I guess would have been 26 when she says she went into his trailer.
He molested her, threw her against the wall and started grabbing her.
Okay, that's four.
Payouts in a couple of them.
One case, an agreed therapy that he got.
And now we have these boys.
So all of this, look, has me, I got the same questions you guys have about these parents, but Timothy Busfield is a creep.
And Melissa Gilbert is gross too, because this whole thing started for me because she was out there trying to suggest that I downplayed the abuse of women because I was making the distinction about whether Jeffrey Epstein technically legally qualified as a pedophile if his thing was 15 year olds versus if it were, you know, five year olds.
And legally, that definition only applies to an attraction to pre-pubescent girls.
Meanwhile, she knows full well her husband was out there allegedly molesting a 16-year-old, a 17-year-old, a 26-year-old, a 28-year-old.
And she's out there trying to cloak herself in this sort of moral, you know, glory when she knows full well that he's done all those things or at least settled the cases.
And on top of that, when she's doing it, knew he'd been accused by these seven-year-old boys.
They're now 11, but the abuse allegedly happened between seven and nine.
All of it speaks to her and her husband's disgusting hypocrisy, but it also could be pattern evidence, Mike Davis, that potentially could get admitted some of those claims.
Yeah, I mean, generally under our criminal procedures, you cannot bring in propensity evidence, meaning you can't, if someone robs a bank, you can't bring in prior bank robberies to show that they are likely to or they have a disposition to rob banks.
That is generally not permitted.
But as Dave talked about, you have MO evidence or modus operandi evidence.
If you show that you rob banks wearing a clown outfit, you can bring that in generally under MO evidence.
That's not propensity evidence.
That shows that's how you go about doing these bank robberies.
And so it shows evidence that you committed this bank robbery.
So the distinction between propensity and MO evidence.
Generally, with sex crimes, and I think this would apply in New Mexico.
I'm not licensed in New Mexico, but I think the same rule applies in New Mexico.
With sex crimes, you can bring in propensity evidence.
So this would all get admitted, sorry it probably would get admitted if this case goes to trial.
And it would be very damning for him if the jury heard this evidence.
Go ahead.
Megan, this is the key to the case.
It's whether you can bring in that MO evidence, the prior bad acts.
It does not bode well for the prosecution when you look at the words from Judge Murphy when he ordered Busfield's release.
If you look at his order, he said this, there is no evidence of a pattern of criminal conduct.
There are no similar allegations involving children in his past.
So that tells me, at least for now, that the judge is skeptical of the prosecution's pattern argument that he is separating.
But also, he did say, I mean, I listened to the whole hearing and what he said was that have been tested in a legal forum.
Like he's talking about no criminal convictions with respect to these other women.
Well, if he was only talking about convictions, then that is good for the prosecution because you don't have to have a conviction to bring in past bad acts.
But it did seem like he was differentiating as you did in that whole Epstein controversy between a young child, a seven-year-old, and a, in this case, a 17 or 16-year-old.
Yeah.
Oh, Doug and I were laughing because the irony of Melissa Gilbert's attack on me is she should have been leaning into that defense.
She should have been like, yeah, there's a big difference between the teenagers and the young ones, because of course, that's what her lawyers are going to argue on Timothy Busfield's behalf and trying to keep all this evidence of him molesting teenagers and women in their 20s out, out of the jury's purview.
Scott Weiner Boogeywoman00:04:27
But unlike Timothy Busfield, I actually do think there's a serious problem in molesting 15-year-olds.
I just didn't think it legally qualifies as pedophilia, which is true.
Okay, last but not least, Riley Gaines gets attacked.
The reason I'm raising this, Dave, is because you told me last time you were on that you actually went to school with the disgusting Scott Weiner, who's running for Nancy Pelosi's seat.
He's a state legislature and legislator in California, but now he's running for Nancy Pelosi seat and even California.
I know how left they are.
They have to stop it.
You have to say no.
I'm sorry, but you cannot vote for this man.
He gets online to attack Riley Gaines as a, quote, weird grifter who's mad she tied a trans swimmer for sixth place and the ad that she's doing for milk.
These creepy people keep one-upping themselves.
So he's calling Riley Gaines weird and creepy.
In response to which I tweeted out a photo of Scott Weiner on the public transit in California wearing stiletto hot pink heels.
Hello, California.
This is what you want in your U.S. congressman.
Bad enough, he's a state legislator.
Now you're going to put him.
Can we see the picture, please?
Show it to the audience.
Or he's parading.
All right, we're going to add it.
Parading around there in his high stiletto heels.
And then all these other audience members started to pile on with other disgusting pictures of Scott Weiner, which I can't unsee of his disgusting naked body with weird little like, I don't know what this is, his tie.
He's parading around without his shirt on.
I'm not sure what we're dealing with here, Dave, but we don't need any more weird, creepy, to use his words.
And I'll use my own perverts in the U.S. Congress.
He's a pervert.
That's my opinion.
So this is your friend from school, law school or college?
Both.
I knew him both.
I knew him better in college.
I didn't know him well, I must say, but he was a campus activist.
And so everyone knew Scott Wiener.
He was the head of the LGBTQ group on campus and he made it known.
He was out and proud.
And I knew him a little bit then.
In law school, he was much quieter.
At least, though, I must say this.
I had respect for his principles.
It seemed like he had principles.
And the same was true when he was in the state senate.
He believed in what he was saying, I thought.
And he actually, because he was born into a religious Jewish family that he believed in the state of Israel.
And now what's crazy is that after he got razzed at a hearing, at a campaign event, because he said that it was not a genocide, Israel's defensive war against Hamas, then he decided to switch.
So he literally compromised everything he's been saying and believed in for his entire career and switched overnight to gain votes.
So that to me makes him no better than any other self-obsessed politician who just looks at the next election rather than the next generation.
So I don't put any stock in anything he says.
I'm done with that guy.
And he should get all the criticism that's leveled his way.
Yes, I'm sorry, but he absolutely strikes me as a creepy pervert who we absolutely should not let into the U.S. House of Representatives.
Mike Davis, any thoughts on Scott Wiener?
Do you know of this guy?
I've seen him online.
I would say this as a highly partisan lunatic Republican.
I love the fact that Democrats are going to put this new boogeyman or actually boogeywoman if he's wearing stilettos in the House of Representatives.
Unclear.
He's definitely not a woman, but he could be a wannabe.
But boogeywoman, Scott Stilettos, I love that the Democrats may put this guy in the House.
He will be the number one political target for Republicans.
We will run against this Scott Weiner every election.
So as a partisan Republican, yes, if we're going to get some goofy Democrat in San Francisco, we'll take this guy.
Just think of all the renewed New York Post headlines we'll get that we had to say goodbye to once Anthony Weiner was out of the news.
Weiner out.
There were so many, so many great ones by the post.
It was endless.
So that will be our one comfort if he winds up winning.
Guys, thank you.
Thanks for sticking around overtime.
Always great to have you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, and we are back tomorrow with Allie Beth Stuckey and more.