Bob Amsterdam, a 40-year legal veteran, accuses Ukraine’s Zelensky of using USAID to fund "fake churches" while banning pro-Russian faiths, calling it religious persecution ignored by Western media. He details professional blacklisting—denied Capitol Hill access and labeled a "Russian stooge"—while his clients face violence. Criticizing U.S. overreach, he ties FCPA enforcement to corporate favoritism and blames law schools for abandoning constitutional rights like Brandenburg v. Ohio. Carlson highlights YouTube censorship, framing it as platform bias, as Amsterdam describes a fractured legal community now rejecting libertarian principles. The episode frames Ukraine’s war as a tool for suppressing dissent under the guise of democracy. [Automatically generated summary]
Look, there are tons of dictatorships around the world, but the West is supposed to be this beacon of freedom and enlightenment, respecter of human rights, etc., etc.
What does it tell you as an American, as a product of the West?
That all of our big institutions seem to like the Zelensky dictatorship.
They like it.
I've confronted a bunch of people.
You think it's okay to ban a church?
Well, that church is pro-Russia.
Okay.
Well, you say it's not pro-Russia.
I don't care if it is.
You can't ban other people's religions.
Period.
I don't care how much you dislike them.
I don't care if it's Scientology or Kabbalah.
It doesn't matter.
Hinduism doesn't matter.
You can't ban other people's religions.
And yet, I don't know anyone who's bothered by it.
In high position in the West.
So what does that tell you about the people in high positions in the West?
unidentified
Well, it means that we have become disconnected from, in reality, who we are and who we're supposed to be.
You said you've been practicing for over 40 years.
When you graduated law school, I bet there were a ton of people with your attitudes in your class.
Similar attitudes about human rights, rule of law, politics, America's place in the world.
Now you're literally the only one left that I've met from your generation.
What's it been like for you with your friends, your peers, people you know have known your whole life.
You come back and all of a sudden you're being denounced as a Russian stooge.
What effect has that had?
unidentified
Well, it's interesting.
I said 20 years ago that there was a terrible danger in the United States to the corporatism of criminal law.
We have turned criminal law into the activity of big corporate law firms.
In New York, even today, there are a bunch of...
Small firms that take on difficult cases, Brafman, Agnifolo, some of these guys in small firms taking on tough, tough, tough cases that I think of as real defenders.
But the corporate titans that are doing the big cases have become entirely focused on Compliance.
You're somebody, I'm sure, with far more resources than a poor guy like myself.
But if you engage in transnational business, you know the hassles of even moving $10 across borders.
These corporate law firms are making tens of millions off of managing compliance because of, and this is a separate story, in my view this Over-regulation, money laundering allegations.
Money laundering is the most dangerous crime governments have ever invented because it basically criminalizes activity that very many people never knew was criminal.
And you could be charged with money laundering if you've engaged in asset or money transfers when you had no idea at the time that it was criminal.
A lot of countries don't have rape on subway platforms because that's horrifying.
It's a violation, the most basic violation of someone's civil rights.
What they care about is money laundering.
I noticed.
I just read today DOJ was issuing some statement on money laundering.
Every day it's money laundering.
It's because people using their money that they earned in ways that they choose to use it, that's a massive threat to the people in power.
unidentified
Yes, it is.
And again, another day, I'll tell you about my use of human rights law to stop the freezing of assets and freezing of monies.
This compliance psychology is a tremendous danger that we foster in our big firms.
And that is, you know, so if you ask me after 45 years, how do you feel?
It is a sense of...
Tragedy that our basic rights have been withered away in so many events of emergency.
Whenever I hear emergency or crisis, whether it's COVID, the war on terror, the war on crime, these are all events that chip away at our freedoms, and they're cumulative.
They go on and on and they further narrow the scope for our activity.
And we need a dramatic rethink of all of that in order for us to be free.
So when you were a kid, when you were a young lawyer, when you were in law school, Brandenburg versus Ohio, the big speech cases, those were all very well known, right, to everybody in your class.
Do you think someone graduating Yale Law now has any real sense of that?
unidentified
You know...
I'm giving a speech Friday to 60 top law students.
I'll know better after that.
I think that, unfortunately, we're raising lawyers to fit into these corporate firms.
This whole sort of compliance culture.
And, you know, I'm probably, God help me, probably one of the only lawyers that will applaud the Trump administration for stopping FCPA enforcement.
It's not that I'm in support of corruption, and it's not that I think we shouldn't come up with a system to stop it.
It's that the FCPA has represented a massive...
Commercial barrier for American business to enter Latin America and Africa.
We need to be in those places.
And now maybe we'll have a shot because the compliance barrier simply made it only possible for some of our largest businesses.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking.
With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that is true, not intentionally deceptive.
The way to do that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel.
Subscribe.
Hit the little bell icon to be notified when we upload and share this video.
That way you'll have a much higher chance of hearing actual news and information.