Donald Trump's anticipated appointment of Kash Patel as FBI director signals a potential reckoning for Letitia James, whose $500 million Mar-a-Lago fraud suit is criticized as politically motivated given the document's low value. While Patel vows constitutional investigations independent of the Attorney General, the host contrasts this with James's alleged coordination of "lawfare" against Trump and her opposition to his new Guantanamo Bay migrant facility plan. Ultimately, the episode frames these legal battles as a broader conflict between state-level protections for immigrants and federal enforcement authority, suggesting a decisive shift in how political adversaries are pursued under the new administration. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Garland's Supreme Court Confirmation00:07:18
This has been a very difficult last almost 24 hours at this point.
My heart goes out to all the families who have lost their loved ones.
We're going to get into all of that, including some of the president's comments and his dust up with the media surrounding that tragic event.
But I'll tell you, this is also a time when you're going to see a lot of reckoning and a lot of changes in how things are done.
They're in government, and it's going to affect one Leticia James.
Kosh Patel is about to be confirmed there.
We heard from him earlier today, and I just want to show you he's got what, a 94% chance?
94% chance.
He's up 36%.
Let me tell you, Polymarkets are usually spot on on this.
They called the election before anyone.
And I think this does suggest we get ourselves a new head of the FBI, and boy, oh boy, does Washington not like this.
Kosh is promising to investigate fully when and where needed.
And you know what?
He doesn't want to have what happened to Donald Trump happen to any other politician ever again.
He's insisting that, you know what?
We do the right thing by everyone.
I want to go to an excerpt from him here on Capitol Hill today.
I am telling you, he means business.
And Letitia James, watch out because he's coming for you.
For sure.
Confirmed as the next FBI director, I will remain focused on the FBI's core mission.
That is.
To investigate fully wherever there is a constitutional factual basis to do so, and to never make a prosecutorial decision that is solely the providence of the Department of Justice and the Attorney General.
For the first eight years after law school, I served as a public defender, first for Miami Dade County and later for the Southern District of Florida.
During that time, I represented some pretty awful human beings charged with some pretty heinous crimes.
But what I learned there was the core value that has been enshrined in me since.
That due process must be provided without bias to all Americans.
And if we cannot provide due process to the worst, then there can be no due process for anyone.
And our constitutional republic fails.
But I battled on that hill for that due process.
Yeah.
And that means, Tish James, I think that given where you went and everything you did and the enormous fees that you tried to impose on the president, we're going to have some problems.
We're going to have a lot of problems.
With other Democratic AGs across this country to make sure that we would be ready to respond to any attempt to roll back our rights.
So here we are.
We've studied their platforms.
We've identified certain possibilities, fact patterns.
We've created contingency plans.
So, no matter what the next administration throws at us, we're ready.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, glad to hear that because you better be ready.
Because I have a feeling, just a little feeling, just a little inkling, judging from some of what I heard from Kosh Patel today, that he's actually going to be coming for you.
And you know what?
I'll go back to Poly Market.
It's looking like this guy's going to get confirmed.
So, this is going to be the new head of the FBI.
And I think you're going to have to answer a few questions.
I mean, Eric Trump was asking these questions back in 2023 when you were going after his dad.
He laid it out pretty well here.
Right.
You have a corrupt attorney general who literally ran on the campaign promise of taking down my father.
She goes, I'm going to go after Donald.
I'm going to take down his family.
I'm going to go after his children.
I'm going to get her exact quote I'm going to get to the office of attorney general every day.
I'm going to sue Donald Trump and then I'm going to go home.
I mean, she fundraised off of this nonsense.
Like this was her entire platform going after Donald, right after my father.
Then obviously she gets into office and she does exactly that.
And you've got to, Crooked court and everything else.
But actually, I think we're making a breakthrough with the judge.
I think they're trying to realize there are no victims.
First of all, my father's statements are undervalued, not overvalued.
Second of all, she's going after banks.
She's trying to protect banks that made hundreds of millions of dollars with Trump, meaning there were no aggrieved parties.
There were no defaults.
There were no loan covenants.
You guys made money.
That's why she did.
We would borrow money, go do a great project, be very successful, pay a tremendous amount of interest, and then pay the banks back in full.
We never had so much as a default.
So what we're saying, they're saying, Is there a victim in this?
I mean, you're suing us that there's no victim, but Carly, it's nonsense.
The DOJ has told Letitia James to make my father's life hell, to keep him tied up in a courtroom, to cost him tens and tens of millions of dollars, to distract him.
Right, and that's exactly what she did.
And this is what she campaigned on.
He's absolutely right.
I mean, what kind of world are we living in when you campaign on one thing, you're just going to get someone because he's your political enemy and you think it's actually going to land you some campaign dollars?
This is what she did.
You know it.
He's called me venomous.
Wait, what?
Fight back to your attempt to bring Trumpism to New York City.
He's called me disgraceful.
Of the fact that they stumbled a Supreme Court seat.
An illegitimate president and an illegitimate member of the United States Supreme Court.
He's called me radical.
Listen, we know he's crazy.
He's called me a racist.
We've got to stand up to an administration which is too male, too pale, and too stale.
We know he doesn't have a sound mind.
Okay.
So, you know the drill, all right?
You know who she is.
You know what she did.
But what Kosh is going to try and get at, and this is what's going to unravel everything, and this is what everybody's so freaked out about, is just exactly what role Merrick Garland, the DOJ, Biden, et cetera, played in all of this.
Because I have a feeling they played a pretty decent instrumental role.
This is something that Matt Gaetz.
Was trying to get at when he was in the House of Representatives.
I want to show you this exchange he has with Garland, and he's pushing him and he's asking just exactly what kind of communications did you guys have?
It has now come out that we know at least they were communicating with Fannie Willis's BF, who was running the case down in Georgia.
That was all thrown out because of disqualification, of course.
Really lousy attorneys right across the board that were involved in this.
Anyway, you've got Merrick Garland who can't answer Matt Gaetz's question.
This is really important.
We've got to get back to this, and I know Kosh will.
I want to play it for you.
Here we go.
Communicating with these state and local prosecutions against Trump, you can clear it all up for us right now.
Will the Department of Justice provide to the committee all documents, all correspondence between the department and Alvin Bragg's office and Fonnie Willis' office and Letitia James' office?
The offices you're referring to are independent offices of state and local government.
The $500 Million Fine Case00:03:44
I get that.
I get that.
The question is whether or not you will provide all of your documents and correspondence.
That's the question.
I don't need a history lesson.
Well, I'm going to say again, we do not control those offices.
They make their request.
The question is whether you communicate with them, not whether you control them.
Do you communicate with them and will you provide those communications?
We make a request, we'll refer it to our Office of Legislative Affairs.
But see, here's the thing.
You come in here and you lodge this attack that it's a conspiracy theory that there is coordinated lawfare against Trump.
And then when we say, fine, just give us the documents, give us the correspondence, and then if it's.
But they couldn't.
You see, or they wouldn't.
And instead, they leveled a nearly $500 million, that's half a billion, guys.
Like, this is a lot of money, right?
It makes no sense.
Against Donald Trump in the case of Letitia James and Judge Erdogan, who, Arthur, who somehow thought that Mar a Lago was worth only $18 million.
I mean, this was bonkers.
Remember this?
This is part of the case, actually.
Just after he won the presidency, his lawyers came out and they tried to get her to drop this in the interest of the country.
And they're like, you know, This doesn't really make any sense because Mar a Lago, you were trying to say, was somewhere around $18 million.
$18 million, it makes more than $56 a year.
Like, why would it be worth?
Usually things trade on a multiple, right?
You might say it's going to trade at 10 times earnings.
Well, if the earnings are $56, how are you valuing it at $18 million?
I'm sorry, Letitia.
Like, you're not even a good lawyer, but forget about valuing any kind of assets.
And yet they come up with this $500 million fine, and she's out ready to. seize his assets just waiting so she can take over Trump Tower and take over his golf courses.
It's nuts, you guys.
Four days after a judge ordered Donald Trump to pay $355 million for a decade of fraud.
New York Attorney General Letitia James says she's prepared to do everything she can to make sure the former president pays his fine, including, she told us, seizing the buildings that bear his name.
If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek, you know, judgment enforcement mechanisms in court.
And we will ask the judge to seize his assets.
That's what she was waiting for.
Oh, she just wanted to seize those assets.
I mean, it's bonkers.
So now it's in the appellate court, right?
And we're waiting on the Court of Appeals, who really can't get off their you know what.
And they're sitting there, and they haven't done a damn thing yet.
Even though we know how they feel, I mean, they wouldn't even let Judith Vail, who was representing New York and Letitia James, she's at the appellate.
Court, right?
So she's supposed to be a little bit smarter, and the judges are supposed to be a little bit smarter at the appellate court.
Here's the New York Court of Appeals.
They wouldn't let her get a word out.
May it please the court, Judith Bale, for the New York Attorney General's Office.
All of the defendants repeatedly violated.
Ms. Bale, can you identify any previous case in which the Attorney General sued under Executive Law 6312 to upset a private business transaction that was between equally sophisticated partners where the supposed victim had the ability and legal obligation to discover?
The allegedly misrepresented matters by conducting its own due diligence, where the supposed wrongdoer advised the supposed victim through written disclaimers to conduct its own due diligence and to draw its own conclusions, where the alleged misrepresentation almost entirely concerned inherently subjective valuations of properties and businesses.
Patel's FBI Due Diligence00:02:27
Yes.
And where the victim never complained about any fraud in the transactional losses from it.
Because I've gone through the cases which you've cited.
And all of them always involved the consumer protection aspect.
It involved protection of the market.
And I want to add to his question and little to no impact on the public marketplace.
Boom.
Okay, so no impact on the public markets.
You have no victim.
It sounds, as the judge said, like a private case.
And yet Letitia brought it anyway.
And now we're in a situation where she's promising to double down.
She's doubling down, but yet, you know, you got one classroom.
Patel, who's coming in as head of the FBI, and I think he's going to be wanting to do some of his due diligence to figure out just exactly how this all came about, which is why people like Dick Durbin are so freaked out.
He goes on CNN he's trying to talk down Cash and say oh, he's not qualified.
Let me tell you the guy's qualified.
It is such a loss are.
Are you aware the hearing is still going on as planned today in less than an hour frankly yes, 930 we're going to start the hearing on the person the president has chosen to lead the Federal Bureau OF Investigation.
I can tell you I have some questions, serious questions, about his competence for that responsibility.
Remember, we're talking about 38,000 criminal and civil investigators and the premier law enforcement agency, not just in the United States, but in the world.
We want a person there who is responsible, experienced, and can handle this awesome responsibility.
And, Senator, you have general questions, as you just said, about his ability to handle an agency of that size.
But you also have very specific questions about a specific moment during the end of the Trump administration.
Explain.
Well, I can tell you that there was.
You don't have to go searching for a playbook when it comes to Mr. Kash Patel.
He has published a book called Government Gangsters, which goes into excruciating detail about his theories on political conspiracies and retribution against those.
Who did not treat him properly over the years.
To give this man the authority of leading the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I think is questionable.
We need someone with sound judgment who is not driven by politics, and Mr. Patel does not fit that description.
Kash Patel's Political Conspiracies00:10:03
Understood.
And I was referring to the hostage rescue and his.
Okay, yeah.
Like Biden's people were not driven by politics.
Are you kidding me?
I mean, he says this, right, with a straight face.
So they hate him because they're terrified of what he is going to find out.
Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fannie Willis, and Jack Smith.
Like they're so freaked out about what is about to be uncovered if Kosh gets the gig, and Kosh is going to get the gig because, well, you know, I'm basing this on Polymarket, which tends to have a pretty good instinct on these things.
94% chance at this point in time he's going to get confirmed.
Pete Hegseth got confirmed.
RFK is going to get confirmed.
I'm telling you, the whole world is going to change as you know it.
Maybe Tulsi, we'll talk about that in a little bit.
But Joy Reid, you know, she's the one who was just, oh, thank goodness, you know, all these people like Letitia and Fanny and Alvin, they're bringing it home for me.
In prison.
But for me, there is something wonderfully poetic about the fact that despite the fact that even if convicted, he's not going to go to prison, the first person to actually criminally prosecute Donald Trump.
Is a black Harvard grad, the very kind of person that his former staff, the people who worked for him, Stephen Miller, et cetera, want to never be at Harvard Law School.
But he was.
And he came out and graduated, and he's prosecuting you, Donald.
And a black woman is doing that same exact thing in Georgia.
And a black woman forced you to pay a $175 million fine that's now also in question because the people who put it up, that might not be legit.
Donald Trump is being held.
To account by the very multicultural, multiracial democracy that he's trying to dismantle.
And for me, there's something poetic and actually wonderful about that.
It says something good about our country that we're still capable of having that happen.
Go DEI.
My DEIs are bringing it home today.
Her DEIs are bringing it home.
Bunch of lawsuits that, by the way, you know, I guess they got Alvin Bragg and they can brag that they got the felony conviction there, but that's eventually going to get tossed out in the appellate court.
Letitia James has got nothing.
In fact, if anything, if you listen to what those appellate judges were saying, they were like, wait a second, we need to make sure that like this kind of stuff doesn't happen before because, again, because if it happened here, it could happen again and we need to rein in these very politically motivated prosecutors.
And The DEIs, I'm sorry, but like, been there, done that.
Like, that's not working.
It's not working for this country.
You know, we are a meritocracy and we were founded on that.
And the United States of America, we don't care what color you are, we don't care what sex you are.
We only care that you can get the job done.
Let me tell you, that's all Donald Trump cares about, for sure.
I mean, for goodness sakes, we saw that today, did we not?
We saw that on display.
He said over and over and over again, we can't be relying on DEI.
We're going to get into that coming up.
I mean, it's one of the reasons I started 76 Research, by the way, my financial firm, 76research.com.
Use code word dollar.
You can get the 76 report for just a dollar a month.
I encourage you to do that.
But this was in part because I saw Wall Street doing this and I'm like, this makes no sense.
I talked to my buddy Rob, who'd run billions of dollars for decades on Wall Street.
And I'm like, what is going on?
We both have the same reaction.
So that's partly why we started that.
I'll get into more of that later.
But I just want to say, like, DEI is not, like, that is not, that is not a reason to be doing things.
Really?
I mean, if you want diversity because it actually gets you to a better place and you want other perspectives, great.
But if you're just trying to check a box because you want to make other people feel better about themselves, no, Look, and I'm just going to point this out.
You know, Letitia's going after him now because of, well, this.
Today I'm also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000.
Person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay.
Most people don't even know about it.
We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.
Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back, so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo.
This will double our capacity immediately, right?
And tough.
That's a tough place to get out of.
Today's signings bring us one step closer to eradicating.
the scourge of migrant crime in our communities once and for all.
And it was just a purely, it's just an unforced error that we even have to be doing this.
Now we need Congress to provide full funding for the complete and total restoration of our sovereign borders, as well as financial support to remove record numbers of illegal aliens.
Yeah, well, Letitia apparently doesn't like that very much.
Steve Frisch saying Trump should sign an executive order, Operation Hummingbird, against these people.
Look, it's happening, Steve.
It's happening, you guys.
This is not the same Trump administration.
They have been through.
Hell.
Okay.
For four years, they were trying to bankrupt him.
They were trying to put him and his family in jail.
They know what the Democrats are capable of.
And they want to make sure that that doesn't ever happen again.
In the meantime, in the meantime, guess what?
He also wants to make sure that the country's in a better position.
So that means, yeah, getting rid of some of the DEI stuff.
It means, yeah, arresting criminals.
Because by the way, Letitia, whether you like it or not, the federal government does have jurisdiction.
Over things like who is in the country.
You don't have jurisdiction over that.
And for the most part, most people don't want criminals in the country.
I mean, heck, even Whoopi Goldberg admitted so much on The View just yesterday.
This must have taken a lot out of her.
I'm telling you, the contract's on the line.
She must be in like renegotiation right now because she's actually sounding normal.
It's just for a couple of seconds.
87% support deporting criminal undocumented parents.
If he focuses on the government, I don't know anybody in the world.
Yeah, I don't know anybody in the world.
Who wants to keep the criminals?
I don't know anybody.
That's where you should be focused.
Can I say something?
Because, you know, no one in the world actually wants to keep the criminals.
It's like 87%.
The polls are overwhelming, showing no one actually wants criminals in the country.
Although ICE tells us we have 650,000 of them.
650,000.
And the administration would say, you know what, you're a criminal if you're in this country illegally, period.
Well, here's Letitia saying, guess what?
We got laws.
We got laws that protect our immigrants and limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
Efforts, those laws should be followed by law enforcement and officials in our state.
I'll always uphold our laws and protect immigrant New Yorkers.
So she's like, you know, going AWOL.
Like she's kind of like left the reservation here.
Leticia thinks that New York is its own little country and can do its own little thing.
And we hate to remind her, I mean, she's a lawyer after all.
Maybe not a very good one, not a very bright one, just a very political one.
Leticia, the federal government.
Like, if they have any power at all, it's the power over who is in our country.
It is the power over our borders, lady.
Understood?
No, she doesn't understand.
Here she is just this week talking about how she's going to take on Trump.
Not only does this administration's new policy put people at risk, but it is plainly unconstitutional.
The president does not get to decide which laws to enforce and for whom.
When Congress dedicates funding for a program, the president cannot pull that funding.
On a whim.
Later today, I am leading and joining with my colleagues, my fellow Democratic attorney generals, in suing this administration to stop this illegal freeze.
Okay, so you know where she's going.
You're hearing the same thing out of California, and you're going to have these little annexes of places that are all going to try and do this.
And I'm just going to remind you that there's a new team in charge.
You got Pam Bondi coming in as attorney general.
You're going to have Kosh Patel running the FBI.
So, I'm just going to say, Letitia, you know what?
He's got some top people right now who are not going to put up with your BS.
And this is one fight.
I'm sorry, lady, you're just not going to win.
She says she's ready, though.
She's been preparing for this day forever.
With other Democratic AGs across this country to make sure that we would be ready to respond to any attempt to roll back our rights.
So, here we are.
We've studied their platforms.
We've identified certain possibilities, fact patterns.
We've created contingency plans.
So, no matter what the next administration throws at us, we're ready.
We're ready to respond to their attacks.
Okay, yeah, she's been fundraising for a while on this.
She's all ready to throw a few more lawsuits out there.
She's got one already.
She brags about how she got 100 in during the last go around.
So, give her money because she'll sue Trump for you.
Listen.
This shouldn't be that controversial, okay?
Getting rid of DEI should not be controversial.
I mean, Martin Luther King is the one who didn't want to see people by color.
Now, did he?
And yet all they can see is color.
Obama vs Trump on Immigration00:01:02
Obama, he actually led the charge on getting illegals out of the country.
He was right out in front of this.
And by the way, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, they all said the same thing.
But it's funny how it changes when it's Trump, right?
Like, I mean, look, I played this for you guys.
I'm going to play it again.
Here we go.
If you're a criminal, you'll be deported.
If you plan to enter the U.S. illegally, your chances of getting caught and sent back just went up.
The actions I'm taking are not only.
Oopsie, I didn't want to come off.
You'll be deported.
If you plan to enter the U.S. illegally, your chances of getting caught and sent back just went up.
The actions I'm taking are not only lawful, they're the kinds of actions taken by every single Republican president and every single Democratic president for the past half century.
And to those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer.