Adam Andrzejewski (Trump’s charges aren’t unique!)
Russell chats to Adam Andrzejewski from 'Open The Books', a non-partisan organization who provides facts and data to help people find truth. Last year they filed 50,000 Freedom of Information Act requests and “captured nearly every dime taxed and spent at every level of government across America.” Adam shares how Trump's charges aren't unique to politics and how it's a bi-partisan issue. He tells "Mr Brand" about earmarks; a way to legally bribe members of Congress for their votes on big spending bills and why a prostate cancer drug is being sold at $190,000 despite legislation that could bring the price down.Take a look at Adam's journalistic work, here: https://www.openthebooks.com/ Also, thanks to Newsnation National Correspondent, Robert Sherman who joined us in New York. You can follow him on Twitter: @RobertShermanTVFor a bit more from us join our Stay Free Community here:https://russellbrand.locals.com/Come to my festival COMMUNITY - https://www.russellbrand.com/community-2023/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
We are a little bit late because we have been swimming in a deluge of propaganda.
Trump's trial awaits us.
His speech from Mar-a-Lago has been delivered We can now unpack the 34 charges and decide for ourselves whether they are misdemeanors or felonies and how they stand up against the great war crimes of recent history.
We're going to be having a deep look at how the crimes of Trump stack up against the crimes of Biden, Obama, Bush and Clinton.
And what laws we uphold.
What are our true values?
And in a sense, how this spellbinding, hypnotic show is distracting us from deep, deep truths.
We've got fantastic guests coming up.
We've got Adam Andrzejewski.
What's amazing about this guy is he spends all his time bothering people that have access to, I would say, files of incredible corruption.
President Trump, will you come speak to us?
President Trump?
First of all, let's have a look at Donald Trump ignoring the mainstream media's pleas
for a quote and then look at a virtual child getting an exclusive.
Have a look.
President Trump, will you come speak to us?
President Trump?
Trump then walking out of court without a word.
How did you plead, President Trump?
How did you plead?
We will speak to President Trump.
There you go, the mainstream media unable to get Donald Trump's attention.
You'll have noticed that every single detail is being amplified and magnified, essentially because there's very little to look at in reality.
But now, we live in a world where at Jar Sosa 25 is able to extract an exclusive on the street.
Check this out.
Donald Trump, tell them you're innocent, bro!
I'm not a prosecutor, I'm just a person.
You're innocent.
I remember that, bro.
Amazing!
It's a persecution, not a prosecution.
In a way, I think you can see right there, Gareth, not in microcosm, but in that opposition, the problem that we have now.
The mainstream media once had sole access to information.
Now we all have access to information as well as the ability to communicate it.
So what the mainstream media now requires is either authority and legitimacy, which it can no longer make claim to because of the way that it's funded, because of its biases.
So now what it needs is to be able to delegitimize the opposition.
The fact is, is that a kid on the street has extracted more information from Donald Trump than MSNBC, than CNN.
And so, in a way, the theatre and the performance of media has become more valid than its actual access to facts.
Yeah, I think one of the things that the mainstream media were really excited about with this case was that obviously cameras weren't allowed inside the courtroom.
And so one of the comments, I think Robert Sherman, who's coming up later, was really excited.
And a piece that we were looking at of his yesterday, where he was saying, you know, it's like the old days, it's because people can't use social media inside the courtroom, they're going to have to come straight out and report to the mainstream media.
So this was a chance for the mainstream media to get it back, to get their power back.
But as we see in this case, they tried and failed with Trump and a kid on the street using social media has got more access.
It's amazing.
It's extraordinary, really.
I guess that's what we're living in.
Centralised authority is being continually challenged.
They have the opportunity to revise their models and accept more democracy.
Except more decentralization.
Except that there are different ways of reporting, different ways of seeing reality.
Or double down on authoritarianism by condemning and smearing peripheral figures, whether they are in media or in politics.
Their legitimacy is, I think, being not only eroded, but almost completely vanquished.
When you see them Criticizing and condemning Russia for the arrest using the Espionage Act of that Wall Street Journal journalist while Assange remains in prison in Belmar.
She recognized that the hypocrisy is so pronounced that there's barely anything that you can trust them on.
They must know that putting Trump in this position gives him the opportunity to do stuff like this.
I think about this often.
If you are one of the virulently anti-Trump folk that really are passionate about your hatred of Trump, that see him as the epitome of the problem, I wonder how you feel when you watch him at Mar-a-Lago and he is able to say there was the first impeachment hoax,
there was the hunt a Biden laptop thing, there was the attempt to ally me with Russian disinformation.
I wonder how they process that.
I wonder how they are able to say, no, Biden is significantly different
in these these ways.
I don't know how you can legitimize your condemnation anymore,
other than in the sort of vulgarity of Trump.
Say I'm talking about how they condemn and criticize.
Interesting what you're saying about the Hunter Biden, because obviously that was broken on.
Twitter wasn't it and then repressed on Twitter and it's interesting at the moment with all the mainstream reaction to Trump and of course we saw Matt Taibbi recently in Congress and this issue of kind of mainstream versus social media or independent journalism He's really playing out with this and you really see in the Trump case the way in which the mainstream media focus on such minutiae like whether or not Donald Trump stares in a certain direction or you know moves from left to right and yet at the same time there's the kind of vilification of independent journalists like Matt Taibbi and you really feel that that's where truth is coming from now independent journalism even through like social media and we're seeing it play out in front of us the ridiculousness of the mainstream and its focus on the minutiae.
You're right.
They question the credibility of a journalist like Matt Taibbi.
But then, as you say, on the mainstream media, they try to sort of suck analysis out of the angle of Donald Trump's head in a courtroom.
Oh, he's looking this way.
He's definitely angry.
All they have now is speculation undergirded by lower third graphics.
That's what they can offer now.
Just endless pontification.
Stay free with Russell Brand.
See it first on Rumble.
Little renegade tracking my use of bullshit countries and shithole countries there.
Got it right eventually because he did actually say shithole countries not bullshit countries.
CTHU1HU, I looked up her porn vids and they're pretty shit.
That's what's going on.
That's not the research that I was looking for.
Wait a second, let's see this even if Stormzy Daniels' porn vids are any good.
She's not even that good at pornography.
I like that we did a whole video there about how this is all we should be looking into war crimes, the military industrial complex.
The real search is, is this any good?
This just in, Stormzy Daniels' porn videos ain't even that bloody good.
But, Now here's a person that understands the deep state at depth, who knows how power works and how power obfuscates.
It's Adam Andrzejewski from OpenTheBooks.com.
We've met before and I thought I loved you then.
And Adam, if anything, you've become yet more beautiful.
Thank you for joining us again.
Mr. Brand, it is great to be here.
Thanks for having me back.
I'm honored that you would even come back after some of the travesties that took place last time.
Adam, thank you for coming.
What I want to ask you about primarily is, given the nature of the charges that Trump faces, it's worth investigating whether they are particularly unique or particularly pronounced or specifically and Obviously worse than the types of crimes that ordinarily take place within political campaigns and campaigning.
Can you give us any sort of references that perhaps contextualise Trump's charges?
Well, it's a sad day for the American people on a lot of levels, Mr. Brand, but specifically, you know, I'm from Illinois.
It is the Super Bowl of corruption, and our governors are legendary for their corrupt practices.
At a recent point, four out of our last nine governors served time in the federal penitentiary.
And so, you know, we've got a unique perspective on this.
It is a new era of brass knuckle politics across the entire country.
So, for example, if you're Hillary Clinton, if you have the Clinton Foundation and it's based in Little Rock, Arkansas, Pulaski County, there's a prosecutor there.
You better be able to justify your quarter billion dollar endowment.
Or the 75% drop in your fundraising between the time you left Secretary of State's office and 2020.
If you're Nancy Pelosi, and if there's a new Republican president, you'll probably get a knock from the Securities and Exchange Commission, and they're going to ask you to justify your stock market trades.
If you're President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, the entire family on a new Republican president, I mean, this opens up a whole Pandora's box.
It is a troubling moment in the history of the country when a local prosecutor goes after a former U.S.
president and leading contender in a major party and decides to arrest In Iranian.
I suppose so.
So what you're saying is, is you have to have a legitimate and transparent authority to conduct an investigation like this.
And it's clear, even from the examples that you have cited, that there is no moral authority, that how would Nancy Pelosi and Paul Pelosi stand up to rigorous investigation?
How would the Hillary and Bill Clinton Foundation look under scrutiny in their relationship
with some of their donors?
And more broadly, there is so much systemic corruption.
The relationship between politics and finance and the military industrial complex, lobbying itself,
the number of people in Congress that own stocks and shares in companies that they regulate,
it's so murky and so messy.
And in fact, obviously, that's to some degree what led to the rise of Donald Trump, his anti-establishment rhetoric being what most people who love him find appealing about him.
If you are going to start to address these types of issues legitimately, not as part of a political witch hunt to get rid of an obvious potential opponent, then you're going to have to dismantle the machine itself.
Well, jailing your political opponents is no solution.
And look, Trump never had a chance here.
Take a look at the case from 2011.
A twice-running former presidential candidate, a former U.S.
Senator from North Carolina, a Democrat, John Edwards.
Well, the Justice Department came in and indicted him on six counts.
For allegedly taking a million dollars worth of campaign cash, actual campaign cash, to cover up his affair with a mistress.
Okay, he beat those charges.
Five were eventually dismissed.
The one that went to the jury, that rendered a decision, he was not guilty.
In this case, Trump is being prosecuted for not paying $130,000 for Stormy Daniels and disclosing it as a campaign expense.
The exact opposite of John Edwards.
So you can't have it both ways.
This is a flimsy case, and quite frankly, it's a sad moment for the American experiment.
You can't call America an experiment at this stage, Adam.
Clearly, some results are already in.
Now, I wanted to ask you a little more about earmarks, which I believe you're going to demonstrate to us is a great example of bipartisan corruption.
At the moment, I don't even know what earmarks are.
Will you please, as you have done ever since the moment I first clapped my hungry eyes upon you, educate us, Adam?
Well, earmarks are the currency of corruption in Congress, Mr. Brand.
So earmarks, they were dead for 10 years.
There was a ban on them because they were so abused in the past.
Earmarks is quite simply a legal bribe doled out to maximize the power of the House Speaker.
They dole out earmarks.
on these big spending bills, the omnibus, minibus spending bills, to make them bipartisan on the votes.
So you give away a member pet project in their district, and then you grease the skids for the vote.
So in the last omnibus spending bill in December of this year, it was a $1.7 trillion bill.
There was 7,500 earmarks in that bill, costing the American taxpayer $16 billion.
And some of the examples are just absolutely outrageous.
See, you've got a million dollars on a macadamia nut research earmark in Hawaii by the U.S.
Senator.
You've got a million dollars doled out to the Great Blacks in Wax Museum by Kawame Nfume, a congressman from Baltimore, who actually has a wax statue in the museum!
You've got a million dollars doled out for a new stairway, not to heaven, but to the beach in Mondo Beach, California, so the surfers can hit the waves faster.
You've got a million dollars doled out for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.
You've got $3 million doled out for the Hip Hop Museum in New York.
You've got $3.5 million doled out by the Republican U.S.
Senator Susan Collins in Maine for the Irish Heritage Museum.
The examples are endless.
Can you tell us a little more about the collusion between Big Pharma and the government?
In particular, we want to talk about the Buys Dole Act.
Well, I think that's right. Yeah.
Like, you know, recently when we saw Joe Biden railing against the pharmaceutical industry,
we were struck by his failure to use an existing piece of legislation to prevent people paying
$190,000 a year for a cancer drug.
I understand that you know more about this than us, and frankly, that's not hard, but
would you please share that knowledge?
[BLANK_AUDIO]
So at $180,000, $190,000 a year for this prostate cancer drug, by the way, which is really effective, activists felt that this would be a great test case example for the National Institutes of Health to finally come in and use what's called their march-in powers to be able to knock down the price of that drug.
The National Institutes of Health, they weighed in and they did not use their power.
They did not use their regulatory power to knock it down.
So on its face, This looked like a great textbook example.
There was a high price.
The National Institutes of Health, the U.S.
Army, everyone agreed had helped fund the development of that drug.
UCLA had received those federal grants, and they had pioneered the technologies to help that drug actually come to market.
They had licensed it to the pharmaceutical company, a foreign one from Japan, so you have a foreign pharmaceutical company to boot.
And so they felt this was a great, honest face.
This would be a great textbook example to see if, for the first time in history, NIH would use its power to regulate and knock down the price of that drug.
In Japan, for example, it's $30,000, not $190,000 a year.
Well, the Biden administration decided not to use it.
And look, I think it's because This ran right up against the Pfizer footprint, against the Pfizer fiefdom.
So UCLA, which had licensed the technology to the pharmaceutical company, had collected a half billion dollars between 2012 and 2016 on royalties, but then they sold their future royalty stream out through 2027 for over a billion dollars to Royal Pharmacy, who was then quickly acquired by Pfizer.
Even though the patent for the drug is held by the Japanese pharmaceutical company, the U.S.
market is run by Pfizer.
So now, Russell, you have Pfizer.
When they make a sale since 2016 in the United States, not only do they reap the profit from their sale of the pill, but they also reap on the back side a piece of the royalty payment as well.
They're double-dipping every sale on that pill.
So I don't think the Biden administration wanted to get in the way of Pfizer.
Double dipping is unhygienic in any language, isn't it?
It's disgusting to hear of the double dip going on at a time like this during a high-profile case involving a pornography actor.
It's disgusting to hear that the double dip is being practiced so flagrantly.
Did you hear?
Adam called you Russell then for the first time.
I saw that and I enjoyed it.
I felt that was more intimate.
You can double dip me in the Brandel or the Russell, Adam.
Last time we spoke, you were a good enough sport to pluck at random a book from behind yourself and read a passage.
I see those books behind you as your throne of authority.
What particular piece of hermeneutic knowledge will you share today, Adam Andrzejewski?
Hey, I actually prepped a book for you, Mr. Brand.
It's called The War on Waste.
I mean, we need, I want to throw a gauntlet challenge down to President Biden, House Speaker McCarthy, To embrace the transparency revolution, declare war on waste.
I think they'll find a target-rich environment at every level.
This is a book that was done by Peter Grace at the behest of Ronald Reagan back in the mid-1980s.
It was called the Grace Commission.
And what they found was, when they took a look at federal spending in the 1980s, that 30 percent, 30 cents on every dollar was wasteful spending.
And nobody You mean nobody today believes that that situation is any better?
God, you're adorable.
One of these days, I'm going to come to that corrupt state you're dwelling in and give you such a cuddle.
The day that I'm in that frame with you, able to pluck those leather-bound books from that shelf will be a great day for me.
Adam, thanks once again for continuing to educate us.
You can follow Adam as well by going to OpenTheBooks.com.
We're very grateful to you, both for the great work you've done and for the beautiful face that you have.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We'll see you again soon.
Thank you very much.
Now, almost as if we're a genuine news channel, we're going to go directly to one.
We're not going to go directly.
We're going to say like we've been we've been dabbling in mainstream media for a little while now.
We we spoke recently to an Australian journalist who was live at those Parisian riots.
Well, you know, like all of the media actually outnumbered the public outside outside the courtroom where Donald Trump was about to be arraigned
and he's now being arraigned and like you, I didn't use the word "arraigned" until about
48 hours ago. Well, here we are co-opting and hijacking our own correspondent, Robert
Sherman. Before we talk to him, let's see him in action on the mainstream media before seeing a
different side to a man that I believe to be incredibly handsome and lucid. Let's look
at Robert Sherman doing the news.
No matter how you slice it and no matter how you feel about it, this will be a historic
day for the United States.
It has never happened before.
And this is what we're seeing on the streets of New York City.
This was yesterday awaiting the arrival of former President Trump.
Large amounts of media.
It has become a total media frenzy out here.
Robert Sherman, or as we know him on Stay Free, The Shermanator.
Robert is joining us now.
Hey, how's it going, mate?
Well, I'm feeling a lot better now that I've just gotten such a warm compliment and a warm welcoming.
Thank you so much for having me, Russell.
What was it like being there in that media throng?
Is there a lot of competition to get the best spot?
Is there a lot of elbowing one another?
What's the vibe like between reporters on the scene?
You know, I mean, typically at a small story, there's a little bit of camaraderie in something like this.
Nothing of the kind.
I'll tell you this, Russell, that I thought that the biggest media circus I'd ever see was the Super Bowl or something like that.
Not even close to what we saw here.
You had media outlets coming in from Germany, Japan, Australia.
I mean, you see some of these images, people just crawling on top of one another to get the same photo that the person right next to them is going to get.
I've never seen a scene like this before.
Do you feel pressurized to amplify particular details?
Because, let's face it, not much really happened.
Donald Trump came, he waved a bit, he went into a courtroom.
Do you feel under personal and professional pressure to create a narrative out of, in a sense, just ordinary details?
No, not at all, especially over at Art Network, because this was something that we really talked about here is that, look, have you had this narrative coming in that there would be all of this activity happening here, you know, the potential for riots and things like that?
And we said, look, unless the narrative actually happens, don't play into it at all.
That was our perspective.
So we try to stay away from that as much as possible and just give you the facts.
That's good, because we're trying to do that here.
We sort of see ourselves as, I suppose, an anti-establishment news organization that looks to create alliances from across sectarian divides and infuse our content with the potential for spiritual awakening.
We've got no one on the ground, and that's where we could collaborate.
You, the Shermanator, could be regularly, essentially doing what you're doing anyway, but then doing a bit of it for us as well.
Maybe for cred, and if it came to it, possibly for money.
Well, I appreciate it.
I appreciate it.
No, it was a pretty unbelievable scene that you had out here today.
Nothing like it at all.
But as you said, you know, a whole lot for nothing.
And I think one point to make here as well is that, I mean, you see all these scenes of the people who were outside as well.
I feel compelled to tell your viewers that at least four out of five people who were out here yesterday were either members of law enforcement or members of the press.
I mean, yeah, you had demonstrators who were out here, both for and against the president.
I mean, press certainly outnumbered protestors.
It wasn't even close out here.
In a way, it's like the spectacle is creating and consuming itself.
It's almost like if there were no media and no law enforcement there, the event kind of wouldn't be happening.
I'm sure that you're familiar with the writing of Jean Baudrillard, certainly if you watch this channel, we're always banging on about him, because he talks continually about how the media is creating a sort of synthetic reality that we're all existing in.
When you look at the work of someone like Chris Hedges, you realise that you're not capable of fully understanding the horror of war, nor would we like to.
So war is kind of simplified to a sort of game, justice is simplified to a kind of game, and All of us are in our own ways participating in it.
Do you ever feel compromised, Robert?
Or do you feel like you're able to keep in alignment with your personal principles even when participating?
As you know, I accept that we are also in the reporting of a sensational story that's doubtless being amplified for the purposes of entertainment rather than justice, say.
Right.
And you know, I mean, that is what you have to do as a journalist.
And I'm not going to lie to you.
I mean, everybody who's out here who is a journalist has an opinion on what's going on here.
You have to put that aside.
And of course, you know, your viewers are well aware of it.
There are some people who don't do that.
But you have to put it aside.
You have to just call the balls and strikes as they happen out here, which is what we've been trying to do.
But, I mean, of course, you know, there are some people who don't do that, and there are some people who do, you know, stoke the flames a little bit.
I would push back, though, and say one thing, though, is that a large part of the reason that so much of this attention came down here was because of the former president putting so much of a limelight on this case with some of the things that he put on social media a couple of weeks ago.
Of course, the indictment brought a lot more attention to that, but it's not as if the limelight just is created by the press.
There is a starting point as well, and sometimes we just come out here.
I suppose so, yeah.
One of the things we try to do is use it as a means to pose this kind of story with other stories like, you know, we've done some analysis on NATO and tomorrow we're talking to Aaron Maté about NATO's expansion into Finland, for example.
And we are just really trying to tackle the complexity of being respectful of various and often opposing
mainstream and alternative news perspectives.
But I can see and feel that you're really open to that.
So in a sense, this could be the beginning of a longstanding and eventually,
I would say erotic collaboration.
Well, open to anything as well.
Really appreciate you having us on, Russell.
Thank you so much.
Robert Sherman there.
The Shermanator.
Look at that.
What a pro.
What a brilliant segue.
We couldn't do that.
Thanks for joining us.
Live on the scene, the Shermanator will be joining you again for sure.
Thanks so much, Robert.
It's good to chat to you, mate.
Thank you for having me.
Take care.
There he goes.
One of the best goddamn journalists, I'd say.
It's about Baudrillard and eroticism, I can't imagine.
I think he dealt with it very deftly, didn't he?
In his bar, bar.
Also, I thought he was more relaxed with us.
Very relaxed.
Well, I think we bring out the best in people.
I'm not taking all the credit for Robert Sherman's personality.
That's a complex thing that's come about over time and his whole family have to take credit for, as well as culture itself.
But I reckon we bring out the best in him and perhaps in each other.
Who could possibly say?
Hey, guess what's happening?
Tomorrow, as I just said to the Shermanator, we've got Aaron Maté coming on to talk about NATO, to talk about the use of this trial.
We're going to talk also about how one of the things that Trump said that was, I would say, somewhat iconoclastic and challenging was that you don't even need NATO.
Why not disband NATO?
That's the kind of rabble-rousing stuff that Trump came out with that caused so many people to condemn him and so many people to adore him.
If you want, you can sign up to Locals for weekly guided meditations, live podcast recordings.
There's all sorts of stuff that we do here.
We're going to be having a break We're going to have a break soon.
Over the time of Easter, whether you consider it to be a pagan festival or a Christian festival, or simply something that's happening in your hemisphere, we're going to have a little break to regenerate and renew ourselves.
So we're on on Thursday, we're on on Friday.
Friday we're going to have a fantastic show.
I think we're going to have an interview with Rainn Wilson from the office, talking about his new book, about spirituality and stuff.
This book's coming out in a little while.
So we've got some fantastic shows coming up this week.
Join us tomorrow, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
