BONUS: Trump WINS as NY $500M Judgement goes to ZERO plus DEM Registration Plummeting, Sen Eric Schmitt on Fighting the Left in Court & Biden Auto-Pen Scandal Gets Worse
In this episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz: Trump's Legal Victory in New York The New York Court of Appeals overturned a $500+ million judgment against Donald Trump. The hosts argue this was a politically motivated case by NY Attorney General Letitia James. They claim the penalty violated the Eighth Amendment (excessive fines) and due process. Democratic Party Voter Registration Decline Citing a New York Times analysis, the hosts discuss a significant drop in Democratic voter registration across all 30 states that track it. They interpret this as a sign of disillusionment with Democratic policies and leadership. Interview with Senator Eric Schmitt Promoting his book The Last Line of Defense: How to Beat the Left in Court. Discusses legal battles against COVID mandates, censorship, DEI/ESG policies, and the Biden administration. Shares behind-the-scenes stories, including depositions of Anthony Fauci and FBI officials. Biden’s Autopen Pardons Controversy Allegations that President Biden delegated pardon decisions to staff using an autopen. DOJ officials reportedly raised concerns about legality and transparency. Hosts argue this undermines the constitutional authority of the presidency. Please Hit Subscribe to this podcast Right Now. Also Please Subscribe to the 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson and The Ben Ferguson Show Podcast Wherever You get You're Podcasts. And don't forget to follow the show on Social Media so you never miss a moment! Thanks for Listening YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@VerdictwithTedCruz/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/verdictwithtedcruz X: https://x.com/tedcruz X: https://x.com/benfergusonshow #autopen #pardon #SenatorEricSchmitt #NewYorkCourtofAppeals #Trump #PresidentTrump #AnthonyFauci #TheLastLineofDefenseHowtoBeattheLeftinCourt #DonaldTrumpSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
It is Verdict with Center Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you, and it's nice to have you with us wherever you're listening around the country.
We have got a lot of news that has been breaking this week, including a major victory as a New York Appeals Court has thrown out that half a billion dollar penalty against Donald Trump, something that we predicted right here on this show.
Well, that's right.
There's an enormous amount we're talking about today, but I want to say at the outset that this podcast is brought to you by Cracker Barrel.
They don't have crackers, they don't have barrels, they hate you and your family.
There's nothing that your values stand for that they stand for, but they are happy to be woke and erase their entire history, erase American uh exceptionalism.
That of course is not true for those of you who are hiring lawyers right now.
That is what's known as parody.
Uh so that is not accurate.
But but I will say what is accurate uh is what Ben just said that President Trump won a massive victory today in the New York Court of Appeals.
The New York Court of Appeals throughout the entirety, every penny of the $500 million judgment that the rabid partisan attorney general in New York, Letitia James, had had had gotten against President Trump.
We're gonna break that down, explain to you exactly what happened.
We're also gonna talk about an amazing story that the New York Times broke about how Democrat Party registration is plummeting.
It is plummeting everywhere in every single state in the Union that measures measures party registration.
Democrat Party registration is dropping through the floor.
We're gonna give you those facts as well.
We've also got a special guest on today's podcast.
We've got my friend and colleague Eric Schmidt, Senator from Missouri.
He's got a brand new book about fighting the Biden administration, fighting the left in court.
We have a discussion about the strategies that work to fight the left-wing woke lunatics.
And finally, we're going to talk about a story that broke as well about how the Biden Department of Justice raised serious legal questions from the auto pen in chief.
Serious questions about the pardons that Joe Biden's autopen signed at the end of his presidency.
We're going to talk about how those serious questions uh draw in to real doubt the legality of those autopen pardons.
All of that on today's verdict.
I told you it's a packed show.
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All right, so Senator, we predicted this.
Uh, it doesn't mean that this law fair uh was was easy.
We did say that the appeals court you thought would throw out the egregious half billion dollar penalty against Donald Trump.
Uh the president saying in a post it's now with interest would be over five hundred and fifty million dollar judgment against him.
And the appellate court's thrown it out.
Explain exactly what happened.
Well, this podcast is covered at length.
Uh the egregious law fair that was waged against President Trump.
He was indicted four times by rabid Democrat prosecutors who wanted to stop the voters from doing what they in fact did in November of 2024, which is re-electing him as president.
And then this case by Letitia James, another hard partisan who campaigned promising the Democrat primary voters if you elected her, she would go after Donald Trump, which is of course an absolute abuse of uh the the justice, the role of attorney general, fair and impartial administration of the law.
It is a weaponization of justice.
And and she in a mockery of justice, the the the New York trial court uh issued an order that, as President Trump rightly pointed out with interest in penalties would be worth over five hundred and fifty million dollars.
This was all uh for loans that that President Trump and the Trump uh organization took from very sophisticated global banks, and and they claim that he overstated the value of his real estate.
Now, mind you, there were no victims.
Uh the the supposed aggrieved parties were giant banks who were perfectly capable of valuing real estate on their own, and they did value real estate on their own.
They lost no money, not a penny.
They said they were thrilled to do the loans and they would be eager to do more loans going forward, and yet the New York Attorney General said you gotta pay five hundred and fifty million dollars, and and the New York appellate division overturned it and it reduced the that penalty from five hundred and fifty million dollars to zero.
Zero dollars and zero cents.
It concluded that the disgorgement was an excessive fine that violates the Eighth Amendment.
This is exactly right.
Uh and and this is what we predicted on this podcast.
Look, one of the things about the verdict podcast, it it is we make real predictions.
We make predictions that are sometimes out there that are sometimes very few people are making.
Early on, more than a year before the election last year, I predicted Joe Biden will not be the nominee at the time.
Uh this podcast was mocked.
Ben and I were mocked for being crazy tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist.
That of course proved correct.
I want you to listen to what we said a year ago, uh, predicting the result that just happened this week.
Give a listen to what we said one year ago.
Letitia James, who is a left-wing partisan Democrat, she ran for office promising to get Donald Trump.
That was her campaign promise.
You elect me, and I'm going after Donald Trump.
I'm gonna get him.
So this was not an a fair and objective application of the law.
This was a political vendetta from day one.
Let me ask you this.
How is that not against the law to run for office saying that when you become what is supposed to be a steward of law and order, that you're actually running to lock up someone you disagree with politically.
How is that legal in America today?
Well, I think that's gonna be a very serious claim on appeal.
Uh, and and I think there is a significant chance this gets overturned on appeal, but that's going to take a long time.
The the prosecutor on her on a on her face is not fair, is not impartial, but is engaged in a partisan political vendetta.
She said that before she knew the facts of anything.
I mean, this was a while ago.
This is February 19th of last year, like 2024, and when we said it, people were like, This is ridiculous.
Well, it is, and then we went back to it in March of 2024, and we talked about the specific legal claim that the New York appellate court just addressed, and and that was the Eighth Amendment that it would that it was an excessive fine.
And and when we come back in just a minute, we're gonna play what what we said in March of 2024, laying out the legal ground uh that just has been put in place to set aside this absolute abuse of power.
Now, to be clear, this claim will go up on appeal.
There's one other level of appeals up to the New York Court of Appeals, the top uh appellate court in New York, and and so it's possible the New York appellate courts reverse it yet again.
I don't think they will, and I think if they did, it would go to the Supreme Court and be reversed once again.
So one way or another, this order is not going to go into effect.
Donald Trump is not gonna have to pay a half billion dollars.
Today is a day for celebration because the New York courts actually did their job and they corrected a grotesque injustice from an abusive district judge in New York.
I want to take you back to March twenty-third of twenty twenty-four, and I want you to hear what we had to Say about this case on this show.
The impact if Trump is not able to post this bond, the effect would be to deny him the right to even appeal the absurd partisan decision from the from the district court.
I gotta say this is such a profound abuse.
Now, that doesn't mean Trump would be out of options, because if the New York courts insist you gotta put up a half billion dollars in order to appeal this decision, I am confident that Trump will appeal that and potentially appeal that all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
And the U.S. Supreme Court, he would have multiple arguments, constitutional arguments, including the Constitution prohibits denying an individual, depriving an individual of property without due process of law, and there would be an argument that this is such an excessive bond that that it constitutes a violation of due process.
He would also have an argument under the Eighth Amendment.
The Eighth Amendment specifies excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Now, the Eighth Amendment uh typically applies in in a criminal context, but given the magnitude here, I would expect him to make both an Eighth Amendment argument and a due process argument, and it is entirely possible that would prevail ultimately, but what New York is doing, what the New York Attorney General is doing is the conduct of a banana republic.
Cond of a banana republic.
It doesn't sound crazy now at all, even though others said it was.
Yeah, look, and I want to say I'm glad that the New York appellate courts actually did their job.
They followed the rule of law.
Uh the ground that I predicted in March of last year of excessive fines is exactly the ground on which they set it aside.
And I gotta say, Tetisha James put out a statement today that I found side splitting funny.
She said her statement today, she said, quote, the the first department today affirmed the well supported finding of the trial court.
Donald Trump, his company, and two of his children are liable for fraud.
The court upheld the injunctive relief we won, limiting Donald Trump and the Trump organization's officers' ability to do business in New York.
It should not be lost to history.
Yet another court has ruled that the president has violated the law and that our case has merit.
We will seek appeal to the Court of Appeals and continue to protect the rights and interest of New Yorkers.
So she's celebrating that they said our case has merit, other than the fact that they took the fine from $550 million to zero.
That's an awfully weird decision to celebrate as a victory.
This was a crushing loss for Letitia James.
It was an enormous victory for President Trump, and it was an enormous victory for the rule of law.
And by the way, ironically, it was an enormous victory for the state of New York because I gotta say, if this had been upheld, you would have seen a significant exodus of businesses being willing to do business in New York, because if the attorney general could could simply go after any business and shake them down for hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, a whole lot of people would say this is not a place I can do business.
And so this week's decision is cause for celebration.
Yeah, it really is.
And this brings us to another story that I think ties in perfectly.
Democrats are losing support, and they're now facing a voter registration crisis.
Democrats are facing a crisis as more than 2 million voters leave the party in just a four-year, based on data and analysis coming from the New York Post, also the New York Times reporting on this, several others.
I go back to Letitia James, a great example of this.
When you go rogue, and you try to destroy people's lives, and you go after Donald Trump the way you did, and you use lawfare, and all that we now know about the deep state and the corruption, it's a great way to make people say, maybe I don't want to be involved in this party.
Well, Ben, look, you you you're just a right-wing partisan.
Uh obviously you're saying things that that that favor one side of the political aisle, but but why should anyone trust you?
It's not like anyone else is saying this.
Oh, wait.
Wait, here is the New York Times.
Not not exactly a right-wing partisan outlet.
Let me just read from the New York Times this week.
Here's the headline.
The Democratic Party faces a voter registration crisis.
The party is bleeding support beyond the ballot box, a new analysis shows.
And here's what the New York Times writes in the body of the article.
The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.
Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party.
Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections, and often by a lot.
That four-year swing towards the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters.
a deep political hole that could take years for the Democrats to climb out from.
The stampede, that's the word that the New York Times is using, the stampede away from the Democratic Party is occurring in battleground states, the bluest states, and the reddest states too, according to a new analysis of voter registration data by the New York Times.
The analysis used voter registration data compiled by L2, a nonpartisan data firm.
This is stunning.
All told, this is again reading from the New York Times.
Democrats lost about 2.1 million registered voters between 2020 and the 2024 elections in the 30 states, along with Washington, D.C. that allow people to register with the political party.
Republicans gained 2.4 million.
That says an enormous amount that the Democrats are in crisis, that even the New York Times is saying so.
And I gotta say, I don't know a single one of my colleagues in the Senate, the Democrat colleagues, who is asking why.
Why is it that so many people are running away from our disastrous policies?
The Democrats continue to embrace those policies, and I think as long as they do, you're going to continue to see this and you're going to see it even accelerate.
Yeah, it's going to accelerate.
And I also think part of this is the Democratic Party has let the extremists really come in and take over.
And now there's an identity crisis.
Are we Marxists?
Are we communists?
The old Democratic Party is dead.
Is that the feeling in Washington, D.C. around your colleagues as well?
Are they concerned?
Well, no, not among the Democrats.
Look, the Democrats seemed oblivious.
Here's a quote from the New York Times quote I don't want to say the death cycle of the Democratic Party, but there seems to be no end to this, said Michael Procer, who tracks voter registration closely as the director of data science for decision desk HQ.
And it points out that the party saw some of its steepest declines in registration among men and younger voters, two constituencies that sharply swung towards Mr. Trump.
At the end of the day, this is not complicated.
When you embrace policies that are a failure that cause inflation, that open borders that threaten your families, when you take every 80-20 issue in America, and the Democrat Party says we'll take the 20, people run away from your party as extreme and out of touch.
One of the fun things about what you do is uh you've got colleagues that you know well, and from time to time, great books are written, and one of your colleagues, Senator Eric Schmidt from Missouri, is with us right now, and he's got a new book out.
Well, we're glad to welcome Eric Schmidt uh to the podcast.
He has a brand new book.
It is entitled The Last Line of Defense, How to Beat the Left in Court.
And Eric is a good friend.
Before he was in the Senate, he was the attorney general of Missouri, and he was a warrior.
He was a warrior taking on the Biden administration, taking on big tech, taking on the the radical left, and he built a very strong record as attorney general.
Uh, and that's the record he campaigned for Senate on.
And when Eric launched his campaign for Senate, I endorsed him early on and and came to came to Missouri, campaigned alongside him.
He ran a fantastic campaign.
He won decisively, and now he's a colleague of mine on the Commerce Committee and on the Judiciary Committee.
So we spend a lot of time together.
We have have similar passions.
Eric, welcome welcome to verdict.
It's great to be with you guys.
Thanks for having me on.
Uh, all right.
So tell us about the book.
You have a brand new book, The Last Line of Defense, How to Beat the Left and in Court.
Tell us why you wrote it and and and why folks want to go out and buy it.
Well, yeah, it's really a kind of a field manual from the front lines of this battle against the left-wing lawfare machine that I saw front and center in my time as Missouri Attorney General.
And I know that we're kind of on the other side of the fever dream, guys, after President Trump delivered this historic victory and got all these wins, we're celebrating.
Uh, but if you go back to if you take that DeLorean back in time, just a few years, it was a time of lockdowns and compulsory COVID shots and you know open borders and DEI struggle sessions and ESG requirements and a censorship enterprise that was so vast I think it was the biggest affront of the First Amendment we've seen in a nation's history.
So when I was AG, we stood up and we fought back.
We took the uh the uh COVID vaccine mandate all the way to the Supreme Court when we won.
We took the student loan debt forgiveness case all the way to Supreme Court and we won.
We filed Missouri versus Biden and we uh un uncovered this vast censorship enterprise.
We took the deposition of Fauci, we took the deposition of Elvis Chan, who was pre-bunking the Hunter Biden laptop story for the FBI.
We took on mass mandates at local schools.
We pushed back against ESG requirements, went after local school districts for their e for their uh CRT.
So we were in the middle of the arena, and I wanted to write the book because there's a lot of lessons learned here.
We won we stood up, we fought back, and we won, and it's a playbook.
It's a playbook moving forward.
This isn't the last time we're gonna see that from the left.
In fact, they're kind of engaged in law there right now.
Uh so anyway, there's there's a lot to learn here, and I think the readers are your listeners will get a lot from it from these sort of behind the scenes stories of how it took place.
Good.
Let's talk about about several of the topics that that you dove into.
Let's let's talk about Anthony Fauci, and you and you talked about taking his deposition.
Tell us what you learned, and and and I have said many times Anthony Fauci is the most damaging bureaucrat to have ever lived.
I I think you have said very much the same thing, but tell us about that deposition and what you learned.
Yeah, so this uh took place in November of 2022, just after I was elected this uh to the uh U.S. Senate.
And we one of the key things that you'll appreciate this, one of the things that we talked about in the last line of defense you can order on Amazon right now, is that we sought discovery before the injunction.
Typically with these cases, you seek an injunction to get the government to stop doing what they're doing.
We sought discovery first.
We knew uh it would get a lot of attention as far as the case.
They everybody labeled it a conspiracy theory that conservatives were actually being throttled and deplatformed.
We knew it was true.
So we got to take the deposition of Fauci.
He comes in the room.
Um fun little story, Jeff Landry, who's my colleague from Louisiana had uh the RFK Juniors, the real Anthony Fauci book on the middle of the table as he walked in.
I'm sure Fauci did not find that very humorous.
But um it kind of set the stage, set the stage for the day.
We went through.
And what's what was really interesting about it was he said I can't recall 174 times, sort of simultaneously as declaring he was the science.
He didn't like to be challenged, and there's those depositions.
Like what kind of things could he not recall?
What what what was he what what kind of questions was he dodging?
So we initially started with where did this virus come from?
And you know, he was very adamant that it couldn't have come from the Wuhan lab, right?
Because he kind of funded the Eco Health Alliance uh to fund the Wuhan lab.
He knew it would come back from so he's very interested in making sure people didn't think that.
And then when he was confronted with statements about, I think, well, no, it's a plausible theory, I suppose.
He was kind of vastly.
I don't remember saying that.
He discredited Ted anybody that challenged him on whether it was the lab league theory or masks.
We presented him with an email when we asked him if masks were effective, and of course he said, yes, of course they're effective, and we presented with an email early in 2020 where a friend asked him, hey, I'm getting on this flight.
You know, do you think I should wear a mask?
He said, No, no, no, masks aren't effective for this.
So he was just caught in inconsistency after inconsistency.
I think probably the most telling thing, honestly.
We came back from a lunch break and the court reporter sneezed.
And he turned to the court reporter.
This is in November of 2022, not April of 2020, and demanded that she put a mask on.
This was the guy in charge of our public health.
Are you kidding me?
It's totally insane.
And so I think that those are the kind of insights that I think people will give from the last line of defense.
It's just fascinating, but terrifying at the same time.
So I will say this podcast when when when COVID, when the pandemic began in in 2020, this podcast in March and April of 2020 was laying out chapter and verse, the evidence that was clear even then that the COVID virus originated in a Chinese government lab, I think likely the Wuhan Institute for Virology.
We laid out the facts, and and while it was being censored virtually everywhere else, verdicters had those facts right at the beginning.
Now, your most significant case was was challenging uh internet censorship and big tech censorship.
Tell us about that case.
Tell us the facts you found and and tell us what happened.
Yeah, and I actually say too, Ted, one of the things that we can note in the book, we sued the uh communist China for unleashing the the the COVID um pandemic on the world through that Wuhan lab, and Missouri has a twenty four billion dollar judgment now.
So that's just sort as an aside.
That's also in the book.
Wow.
Yes.
The Missouri versus Biden lawsuit.
You know, we saw that.
I for one am looking forward to when you own the Great Wall of China.
I think it's gonna be a nice wall and and and you know, m folks from Missouri, a little redneck, so I'm not sure what you're gonna pay on the Great Wall of China.
pay over there, no problem, right?
Well, we'll have to move that over to separate Missouri from Kansas.
Roger Marshall will be very disappointed, I'm sure, when we lose that great wall.
But by the way, Bett is from Memphis, so it's not hard for a Memphis guy to talk talk crap about Missouri, but but feel free to pop back hard at him.
But uh but yeah, listen, Jen Saki's saying we're flagging stuff for Facebook.
They started this disinformation governance board.
We had a hunch, we filed a lawsuit, we got discovery first uh in that lawsuit, and and again, what we found was just shocking, these secret portals between high-ranking government officials and big tech giants, take this down.
The CDC was telling them words and phrases specifically.
We took the depot of Elvis Chan, the FBI guy, who again was pre-bunking the Hunter Biden laptop story.
They knew it was real in 2019, and in 2020, they're telling them, hey, censor this because it's not real, and that was verified by Yule Roth, who worked at Twitter.
Uh, there's just reams and rings of documents.
So the FBI was lying and they knew they were lying.
They absolutely knew they were lying, and it was the first time anybody had them under oath to prove it.
And so this was a Ted, this was a leviathan of government agencies aimed at the American people, meant to censor conservatives who question mass or efficacy of vaccines or the 2020 election or the Hunter Biden laptop.
We've got to make sure that never happens again.
So this book, I mean, a lion share, honestly, the middle chapters are really dedicated to protecting free speech, exposing the censorship regime that existed, and uh I'm proud to have stood up for that.
And we had some big wins along the way, but this is uh the last line of defense, how to beat the left in court.
You can order it now, is really a playbook, and it's war stories, yes, but it's a playbook for the future, too.
All right, talk to us about DEI and ESG, because you you also, as as AG of Missouri, we're we're fighting against both of those and and and and making a real difference.
Yeah, as as attorney general, you have um subpoena power, and when we saw what was happening with ESG and this net zero banking alliance, which was really kind of really go after credit worthy applicants because they, you know, uh had had a portfolio of fossil fuels or whatever.
They these banks wanted they decided that by 2050 they were going to have a portfolio that was carbon neutral.
Well, the only way you do that, Ted, is that you basically start denying credit worthy applicants uh loans, including the family farmer because they have diesel trucks.
So we opened this up, we had a suspicion this was violated antitrust, we opened up this investigation, ultimately they backed away.
And again, it takes courage to go do that.
These are some powerful interests, but what you find out when you do it, you can be really proud of it, and you can win.
Same with um with DEI, not only in corporate America, but what we found in school districts.
So we were taking on obviously the Biden administration, the censorship regime at the highest levels of government, but also the local school per superintendent in Springfield, Missouri.
We uncovered documents, we had a hunch, we got a tip from a whistleblower that they were, you know, uh spewing this poison our kids, teachers, and staff.
Turns out they were, you know, engaged in things like the um the gender unicorn and the the pyramid of oppression and all this nonsense to divide the classroom by race.
Other school districts then chimed in once we started finding out this out across Missouri.
This is in Missouri now, that kids were being forced to do the privilege walk.
I mean, this is nuts.
So, but again, what we have to do, Ted, you've been you've done this your whole career.
We have to have the courage to stand up and fight, and we can't cede the courtroom to that.
So this book isn't written for lawyers, it's written for people who are seeing this, and how does this all kind of come together and what can we do to push back?
The court is a major battleground, and I will say there are lessons in this book that I think are really useful for the Trump DOJ, including at at uh using discovery, make the facts public, shine a light, get them under oath, hold them accountable, be aggressive, speak the truth, don't be afraid.
The book is called The Last Line of Defense, How to Beat the Left in Court.
It's by my friend Eric Schmidt, Senator from the Great State of Missouri.
You can get it on Amazon.
You can get it anywhere books are sho sold, so go buy the last line of defense.
And Eric, thanks for joining us here on verdict.
Thank you guys.
Appreciate it.
One other big story we got to get in here, Senator, is Biden's autopin.
We've got a new big update on this story.
And apparently Joe Biden deliberately ignored his own Department of Justice's warnings over legally flawed auto pen pardons.
And we also found out about how many pardons they were giving out.
And they claimed from the White House podium that these are all nonviolent offenders.
That was also a huge lie.
Well, that's right.
And I will say this is the sort of story why we do verdict as a podcast, why we do it as a radio show.
Because this is the kind of story you will never see on CNN.
You won't see it on MSNBC or ABC NBC CBS.
It will not be covered by the corporate media because it is inconvenient.
We have talked about at length the problems with Joe Biden's auto pen, that the president does not have the authority to delegate presidential power to another staff member.
And when it comes to an autopen, the critical question, whether a statute signed in law by an auto pen, an executive order signed by an autopen, or a pardon or commutation signed by an auto pen.
The critical question for whether it is legally valid is whether the president personally and directly authorized it, whether the president made the decision.
If it's a staffer who made the decision, it is not valid and is legally void.
Well, what broke it is recently as this week is that at the time that Joe Biden was using the auto pen, or rather the White House staffers were using the auto pen, a senior career staffer in the Biden Department of Justice was raising real legal questions about it.
Here's the story on Fox News headline.
Biden's autopen pardons disturbed DOJ Brass docks show, raising questions whether they are legally binding.
New documents and communications between Biden White House staff and career officials of the Justice Department prompted scrutiny of the legality of former President Joe Biden's thousands of last minute pardons.
The oversight oversight project shared documents obtained from the Trump DOJ with Fox News Digital, showing that a career prosecutor warned Biden's inner circle that the administration's pardon process was unorthodox and legally troubling.
In the most scrutinized email, then assistant deputy attorney general Bradley Weinsheimer wrote a group email to several executive office staff members on January 18th asking questions about the more than 2,500 pardons.
Quote, the White House has described those who received commutations as people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses.
I think you should stop saying that because it is untrue or at least misleading.
That's what DOJ said to the Biden White House.
Mind you, they didn't stop it.
They continued to be untrue and misleading.
He continued, quote, as you know, even with the exceedingly limited review we were permitted to do of the individuals we believed you might be considering for commutation action.
We initially identified 19 that were highly problematic, he continued.
He cited convicts Terrence Richardson and Faron Claiborne, who were included in the clemency grants, and noted that the DOJ received received voluminous objections from the victims' families and law enforcement as the men had been sentenced to life imprisonment for drug trafficking offenses during which a police officer was killed.
Mind you, this is what the Biden White House said was a nonviolent offense.
Drug trafficking where a police officer was killed.
And beyond that, uh, according to Oversight Project Vice President Kyle Brosnan shows that DOJ was concerned about the quote vague construct of Biden's pardons and how they appeared to be, quote, illegally delegated to staffed.
That left the DOJ wondering at times which offenses for people with multiple convictions were specifically being expunged.
Later in the email, he was like, quote, look, I read the statement you put out in the president's name saying you've released a bunch of nonviolent drug offenders.
You've got murderers on your list today.
So I'm trying to figure out what the president wants here for this funky warrant.
That is incredible, isn't it?
I mean, funky warrant.
That and that's coming again from his own DOJ, saying we don't know what he wants, we don't know what he's doing, it doesn't make sense.
Yeah, this is the Biden DOJ.
Winsheimer continued, quote, I think it is best that we receive a statement or direction from the president as to the meaning of the warrant language that will allow us to give full effect to the commutation warrant in the manner intended by the president.
And there was ultimately no explanation for what the offenses or the or the proverbial descriptions were, according to document tranche.
And uh instead, there was simply a spreadsheet of convicts attached to one of the emails that came from the U.S. sentencing commission.
But only the president has the power to grant pardons, not the sentencing commission.
Treating it otherwise would be an illegal delegation of presidential authority.
When you look at this, what does this mean moving forward for the investigation into the president's use of the auto pen and many things he may have signed that he uh didn't know about, right?
This was just anybody at the White House, pretty much that had any type of power could just walk in there and get things done.
And what does this mean for all of the they claimed non violent offenders that they were they were pardoning?
We've also found out a bunch of them.
Well, that was a very violent.
It was a lie.
Yeah, it was a lie.
They knew it was a lie.
Their own Department of Justice told them it was a lie.
They didn't care it was a lie, they continued lying to the American people.
They knew that the New York Times would never call them out.
They knew that the corrupt media would never call them out, so they could lie and lie and lie and know that no nobody would know about it.
And and as a legal matter, uh the the Brosnan from the Oversight Project said, quote, Biden did not pardon individual people, but laid out categories of types of people to release and left it to staff to figure out who meets that criteria.
Attorney Sam Dewey told Fox News Digital that, quote, literally no one, including DOJ officials, understands what the aforementioned pardon criteria are.
And he continued, quote, you generally don't see people write emails like this.
This isn't a CYA.
This is I'm going to do a Pontius Pilot routine because this is a drug deal, and I want to make sure it doesn't come back on me.
And the consequence of that is that the pardons, if they were not authorized by the President of the United States, they are invalid.
And so what I have urged the White House to do, what I've urged the Imp.
Department of Justice to do, is to go through the records of everything that was auto-penned and determine there may be some.
The President does have the authority to direct someone to auto-pen something that he's signing, whether a law or an executive order or pardon.
And if it's the president who's making the decision, uh the prevailing Department of Justice uh interpretation is that is legal and binding.
But if the president didn't make the decision, if it's a staffer who's making the decision, then it has no binding force.
And so what I've encouraged both the White House and Department of Justice is to find those pardons, those executive orders, those statutes that were auto-penned for which there is a clear lack of evidence that Joe Biden had awareness of it, made a decision about it, and then formulate and carry out a legal strategy to challenge and end up concluding that those statutes, executive orders, pardons, and commutations are invalid.
I think the possibility of a legal determination of that is rising significantly.
And the fact that you had senior career DOJ officials in the Biden administration ringing the alarm bells and saying you're lying to the American people and what you're doing is lawless, that is yet another stunning revelation that has come out this week.
Yeah, and it's going to be a story that's going to keep unfolding, and I can promise you we're going to cover it for you.
Don't forget we do the show as a podcast Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so make sure you have that subscriber auto download button wherever you get your podcast.
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And the Senator and I will see you back here on this station next week.
