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May 3, 2024 - Viva & Barnes

01:31:48

Interview with Norm Pattis - Attorney for Alex Jones, Jan. 6'ers! Life to Lawfare! Viva Frei Live

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	I think it's more than divestment as well.
	I think given the fact that the University of California is founded on colonialism, it's inherently a violent institution.
	There needs to be an addressment of U.S. imperialism and its ties to the UC system and how it perpetuates war and violence abroad.
	Not only abroad, but also here locally.
	We see this with the The brutality, the police brutality that black and brown students face here at UCLA, Arab students, Muslim students, Palestinian students, and I myself have personally faced those violences that the UC has perpetuated and continues to perpetuate.
	It's not just a means of divestment, it's a divestment from Zionism.
	Hold on a second, people.
	Cue it because it's never been more appropriate in the history of humanity.
	Never before has this been more merited than right now.
	What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard.
	At no point in your rambling, incoherent response...
	Oh, it's not playing!
	It's not playing!
	...anything that could be considered a rational thought.
	I gotta start it again.
	I gotta start it again.
	Sorry.
	What you've just said...
	I'm an idiot.
	is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard.
	At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought.
	Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it.
	I award you no points.
	I award you no points.
	And may God have mercy on your soul.
	Okay, I'm just going to take that out.
	You know, this whole stream is now going to get copyclaimed by the fine folks at NBCUniversal.
	Good afternoon, everybody.
	I've been looking forward to this one for a very long time as well.
	Ever since we were all sitting there watching the Alex Jones kangaroo court show trial out of Texas.
	Norm Pattis, a man who...
	For those of you who don't know, you have to know who Norm Pattis is.
	Norm Pattis is...
	We're going to get into the career.
	We're going to get into how he ended up representing Alex Jones, how he was not, whether or not he would make the same decision now if he knew what would happen to him as a result of him taking this up.
	I suspect he could have predicted it.
	The man who represented Alex Jones, the unrepresentable, the toxic, the evil, the man whose mean words are worth about a third what the Armenian victims of genocide were asking for by way of reparations in terms of damages caused by words.
	Norm Pattis represented Alex Jones.
	He represented, I think it's Joe Biggs of the January 6th, but there might be others.
	And we all met him in the context of that kangaroo court show trial where liability had already been adjudicated by way of default verdict.
	And Norm has now started doing the rounds on the law verse to interweb thingy things.
	So that's what we're getting today.
	It's going to be amazing.
	What I want to do before we get going is make sure that we are...
	Live and a-live everywhere.
	We are live on Rumble.
	I'm looking at it right now.
	Oh, I'm getting an ad for how to break through windshields of cars, which is ironic because I just cracked the windshield of our car trying to stick a kayak in it.
	I told you about this yesterday.
	So we're live on Rumble.
	We should be live on vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	Let me make sure we're good here.
	And we're good.
	VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com.
	I put up a page earlier, or a post earlier, asking for everybody's questions for Norm.
	So, what we might do, we're going to have a beautiful interview, and then I'm going to have an after-party with locals.
	Maybe we'll do, we might toggle that onto supporters only, and we're going to get to the questions from our locals community, if they haven't already been gotten to, but I suspect they're going to get got to, because me asking a lot of questions.
	Norm, are you ready to come in, sir?
	He's looking good.
	Sir, you know what?
	I'll keep it wide.
	How goes the battle?
	As the French say, it goes, right?
	And now everybody out there, we were trying to figure out some microphone issues at first.
	He's using the native mic to the computer, so you might not have the beautiful Shure microphone.
	The dulcet tones that they're used to, right?
	Yeah, and you won't get the ASMRs if we get really close to the mic.
	Norm, thank you for doing this.
	This is amazing.
	I've been looking forward to this for a long time.
	30,000-foot overview.
	We're going to get into everything.
	Life, history, how you ended up where you are, every question that I've ever had about representing Alex Jones in the environment that we live in.
	But who are you, for those who may not know?
	So I am, you know, an old man now.
	I was born in 1955 in Chicago.
	Amid unusual circumstances, an only child.
	My father was an illegal immigrant, snuck into the country from Crete across Windsor into Detroit.
	Was an Oliver Twist-type character, had his own street gang, lived by armed robbery for years, and in 1954, when he shot someone, ran off to Chicago with the young woman he was dating, who became my mom.
	So we settled into Chicago, and my dad disappeared one day when I was about seven.
	He never reappeared.
	I didn't meet him again until I was in my mid-40s.
	He told me he just couldn't cut the straight life, and he went off.
	He tried to return to the life of crime, but he had aged out.
	So he ended up settling in Virginia, married to a school psychologist at William& Mary.
	Lovely couple.
	They had no kids.
	I've been married a couple times, working on my second marriage now, which I've done my best to mess up, but my ever-loving wife has shown mercy to me, and I am blessed beyond measure in love.
	Three kids.
	Well, I don't want people to identify them, but one works in AI for a major institution.
	Another is an MD, PhD, and then I've got a housewife in the middle.
	Six grandkids.
	I taught moral and political philosophy at Columbia for a while, where I was an ADD in political theory.
	My unfinished dissertation topic was David Hume and the Strategy of Enlightenment.
	I wanted to know.
	Since my childhood passion was to know God, and I didn't, I wanted to know how to live a good life in a godless universe.
	And David Hume, I thought, taught me that.
	But while I was at Columbia, I studied with Herbert Dean, one of the world's leading Augustan scholars, and had a stopover in Switzerland where I studied with Francis Schaeffer, an American fundamentalist.
	Taught college for a while, just hated it.
	No one in my family had graduated.
	I went to do some journalism, wrote editorials for some of the oldest newspapers in the United States, telling other people how to think, as it were.
	I gravitated to the law and have been doing it for 30-some years now.
	I started in a firm that was nationally known for its advocacy in federal civil rights cases with John Williams.
	And I've been involved in hundreds of cases involving police officers accused of violating people's constitutional rights.
	For the last 21 years, I've had my own firm.
	And I now have a junior partner as I transition to whatever the next phase in life is.
	But we now specialize in criminal defense and First Amendment work.
	So in recent years, I've had Alex Jones' case.
	I've represented.
	Joe Biggs of the Proud Boys leadership in an insurrection case in D.C. I'm getting ready to try another, I don't even know how many I've done now, another murder case next week.
	So life is a journey, and I'm on it, as we all are.
	Norm, if I'm booknoting, or what are the bookmarking, a lot of stuff that you just said there.
	And first of all, you're representing Joe Biggs, and the reason why I was late on my thumbnail is because I accidentally, well, I didn't accidentally, I used...
	Enrique Tarrio.
	I was using a figure of January 6th and I don't want anyone accusing me of misrepresentations.
	I know Enrique well.
	He wouldn't be upset.
	He's a good guy.
	The internet never forgives.
	Back this all the way up to your dad shooting someone.
	Holy hell.
	I did not know this.
	When you say he's an immigrant from Crete.
	Here's the truth.
	None of us really know the date of our birth.
	We take it as a given on trust from those who love us and tell us what they know about us.
	And we read public documents that are admissible, birth certificates and public records.
	But you weren't aware of your birth.
	I wasn't aware of mine.
	I take it as a given and on faith that I was born in the day I've been told I have.
	And my documents suggest it.
	I wasn't with my dad when he, with his father, snuck into Detroit from Windsor, Canada.
	They'd come over from Spakia, Greece.
	I didn't know this about my father until I was probably in my mid-40s when I met him for the first time in 35 years.
	I was, as I always am, preparing for trial, and a voice came over the intercon, and my secretary said, there's a woman on line one.
	She claims to be your father's wife.
	And I'm like, this is interesting.
	So I pick up the phone, and hi, my name is Jan Pettis.
	She's now deceased.
	I'm your father's wife.
	And I said, well, before we go any farther, here are the two questions every white male wants to know.
	Tell me about heart disease and Alzheimer's.
	She was not your mother.
	She was his wife.
	Correct.
	And your last name is Pattis.
	Was that your dad's?
	Yeah, Papenotes was the Greek derivation.
	It was the Greek term, and it got shortened to Pettis.
	So Greek goes to Canada, sneaks into America from the Hudson board.
	That's wild already.
	What year did he sneak in?
	Or what year did he come in?
	You know, sometime in the 30s.
	I don't really know.
	I mean, you know, there are questions in my mind about how old he was when he died.
	He was either 74 or 84. He told me that he lied to his current wife.
	Taking 10 years off his age because he didn't think she'd be interested in an older man.
	So, you know, all I know is he smoked three packs a day for about 70 years and died a robust old age.
	So I'm hoping I got his genes.
	And he left when you were seven, but he actually led a life of crime and actually did shoot someone.
	That wasn't humorous.
	That's what he tells me.
	Again, you know, put yourself in my position.
	You're seven years old, and what you're doing is doing what seven-year-olds do, watching cartoons, playing with your train set, out in the park, getting as much time in the sunshine as you can, playing basketball with your buddies, and eating all that good food that mom puts on the table.
	And then one day, dad doesn't come home, and there's no explanation for it.
	It was devastating and life-changing.
	Okay, and now...
	This is one of the things which I don't often say you can't understand until you're a parent.
	I think this might be one of those things that you can't understand until you experience it.
	When you have a kid and then you're the adult and you no longer live for yourself and you say, if I disappear, if something happens and I'm leaving a 14, a 10, a 7-year-old kid, that's the biggest nightmare is how they might respond to some tragedy that's beyond everybody's control.
	My kid's now going to be 8. I know it would be devastating.
	You don't know if he's dead or if he left, and as far as you know, it could have been either, but you're being told he just up and left and abandoned you at the age of seven.
	Nobody really said anything.
	My mother had issues, and I was sent to live with relatives, and we struggled for a number of years.
	I stayed with my grandparents for a while.
	Then my mother reappeared.
	We stayed with an aunt and her family for a year.
	We lived in an unheated attic in Detroit, which is cold in the winter and hot in the summer, for a year.
	Then we lived in a rooming house with a woman who was so terrified by crime she never left the house.
	We did that for a year.
	Then we got an apartment of our own.
	Then she met a man who came to live with us who was very hostile to me and me to him.
	And I probably have him to thank for whatever success I've enjoyed because he made being home so uncomfortable.
	I took to the streets and found a way to survive by my own wits and haven't done half bad.
	And your mom, do you know of her origin story?
	She is the child of a French-Canadian...
	A Quebecois lumberjack and a former resident of a monastery, I believe, a foundling who was placed in a monastery.
	And, you know, it was hard.
	Life has been hard on our side of the family.
	And she didn't finish high school.
	Gorgeous woman.
	I have a couple pictures of her.
	One of her and my father, they look like something out of GQ, you know.
	As you can tell, I didn't get their genes.
	But, you know, I was largely, I mean, I am proof of Hillary Clinton's line that it takes a village to raise a child because I was the sort of pass-around kid.
	People would, you know, I knew where I could go for a meal on Tuesday nights.
	I knew what doors were open on Wednesday.
	I was involved in the Big Brothers program, and my Big Brother made me part of his family.
	And along the way, I've always...
	Enjoyed the care of strangers, if not the care of a family.
	That's very interesting.
	I'll bring it back when we get to, you know, you mentioned you're on your second marriage, whether or not that type of childhood makes living in a married situation more difficult.
	But in terms of trust or distrust in humankind, what you're describing, I would initially or reflexively think would lead people to distrust everybody.
	When the person who is supposed to love you the most and take care of you the most abandons you, how you can then trust anybody ever again, did it make you fundamentally distrustful or more trustful of people at large?
	I don't know.
	I mean, my lifestyle has been turbulent.
	I mean, I'm not a guy that acquires lovers at a breathtaking pace.
	Breakneck pace.
	I've been married once for 13 years and once for now 28 or 29 years.
	When I come, I come to stay, as it were.
	I'm looking for a home.
	I think that my first wife once said of me, you can't get him out of the house, but once you do, he's the life of the party.
	I have a strong homing instinct, and the woman in my life becomes my life.
	Norm, what we're going to do now, I'm going to end this on YouTube and bring it over to Rumble exclusively.
	It changes nothing on our end, and everyone on YouTube, I will upload the entire interview afterwards, but you're going to get the non-live version if you're watching this tomorrow, and we're going to vote with our feet, vote with our eyeballs, and move on over to the free speech platform.
	So ending on YouTube, the link to Rumble is up there, and we're going to continue this conversation.
	Hey, so speaking of family, My virtual, the closest thing I have to a brother just walked in.
	Everybody say hi to Jim Nugent and say hi to his new dog, Bo.
	Jim, where are you?
	Make sure Jim knows what goes on the internet stays on the internet forever.
	Here is Bo.
	Oh, Bo, Bo, Bo, what do you know?
	Oh, yes, what a good boy you are.
	Bo is clearly a puppy.
	Like, I would say six months, four months?
	No, but three weeks.
	Oh, really?
	Okay, I'm going to blame that on your computer.
	That's...
	I'm joking, everybody.
	That's a beautiful dog.
	And I'm going to go with something of a cocker poodle, like a cocker spaniel, poodle, maybe Portuguese.
	Listen, I'm going to be a couple of hours, so...
	Are you going to do a fire this weekend or all?
	I will definitely...
	We could even go up if necessary.
	Sorry about that.
	That's beautiful.
	This is wild.
	Your dad ups and leaves.
	Now at 7, you have no idea what the hell is going on.
	By 13, do you have an idea?
	You know, no.
	About him, no.
	By 13, I was...
	Looking for God.
	I wanted to know what it was to be alive, why there was a world rather than not, and what the purpose of human life was.
	And so I lived in a tough environment.
	I don't know how else to put it.
	My mother's lover was a rod buster, an iron worker from Detroit, an Irish Catholic drunk.
	And he and I didn't see eye to eye.
	And, you know, just a horrible night.
	It kind of sets the tone.
	You know, he once beat up a local drug dealer, and the drug dealer called to say he was coming with his crew to exact vengeance.
	So I had a gun, which I had acquired in Detroit back then.
	He had a gun, and he waited out front, and I waited out back, and my mother was panicking.
	He wanted to call the police, and he wouldn't let her.
	That's not how we solve our problems, he said.
	So I sat in the back of the house with my gun, hoping they'd go out front and shoot him, but scared to death and scared enough to shoot if somebody came out back.
	And so these are not pleasant memories, and for people who hear this for the first time, there may be a certain sort of shocking quality to them.
	But many people live these lives, and owning them and coming to terms with them and finding the redemptive power of love in spite of it all is every human's journey, and it's been mine.
	You mentioned studying philosophy, even teaching philosophy.
	I'm not sure if you taught it, but...
	I did, yeah.
	So are you...
	There is a very close bridge between philosophy and religion.
	Do you consider...
	I mean, it's clear you're philosophical.
	Are you also a religious human?
	Depends on the day.
	You know, I mean, I...
	You know, it depends on the day.
	I mean, I...
	I...
	I can't say...
	I know I'm talking to you.
	And even though this is a virtual thing, I have every reason to believe you're real.
	And in fact, I know you are.
	I don't have that sort of sensory perception of God.
	But I have an intuition that he is, or she, or it, or the divine is everywhere, forever present and just out of view.
	And in my moments of greatest need, I have prayed.
	And I've never received an answer.
	I want the Tigers to win the World Series.
	It shall happen, my son.
	I've not had that.
	I want your grace and redemption.
	So be it.
	But I believe in the power of love.
	I think Augustine, who is one of my favorite philosophers and religious writers, once defined sin as love of the wrong thing and basically said of humankind that we live in a world typified by brokenness, by original sin.
	That there's something in the nature of our being that places us at war with ourselves.
	The Apostle Paul once said, that which I would do I don't, which I don't, that which I would not do I do.
	And I know that of myself.
	And so I've had to learn to be somewhat forgiving of my many failings.
	And I've been drawn to the defense of those accused of serious crimes because I believe that no one is the sum of their worst moments.
	And that the cry for human dignity is nowhere louder.
	I'm in a courtroom standing next to a hated individual where whatever they have done, I know to a moral certainty there is no mob more dangerous than a self-righteous mob.
	And it is my job to do, as I think the apostle said, greater love has no man than this, that they lay down their life for a friend.
	So standing next to the accused has become a vocation.
	It's become a way of my healing, as it were, for the expense of abandonment and despair.
	Black despair, I felt as a child.
	Now, you mentioned that at times, in moments of despair, you reached out.
	I don't want to ask all of them, but if one of them wasn't the night when the drug dealers might be coming to exact revenge, do you have a distinct memory of what another one might have been that you would share?
	You know, I've been married and divorced.
	I've been married twice, divorced once, nearly divorced twice.
	My relationship with my current wife has been strained from time to time, and I pray often for grace, and I've prayed with her for God's grace and for the ability for us to overcome our shortcomings and see the divine within one another.
	I often pray going into a courtroom.
	I've had clients immobilized by terror.
	And it's not uncommon for me to read Psalm 23 with them.
	In fact, I've read Psalm 23 to jurors.
	The Lord is my shepherd.
	I shall not want.
	I've cast closing arguments in its terms.
	On my desk, I keep a copy of the Roman Catholic Daily Missal, which divides the Bible into a series of readings over a day.
	You know, I mean, I pray, and I guess I would say with Paul, or with whoever it was, it says, you know, I believe, help down my unbelief.
	I'm trying to Google Psalm 23, because not to say I'm not as familiar with it as other people, but every time I get, every time someone references a good passage from the Bible, it does stick with me.
	No, and I mean, it's a great, you know, I mean, whatever, the Bible is an extraordinary piece of literature.
	You know, I'm working my way through the Old Testament now, and just this, a people's sense of being chosen by God and its commitment to God.
	You know, it's an easy thing to ridicule in an era that is devoted to data and what we can measure and whatnot.
	But we are sustained by faith and by hope and by charity.
	I believe that.
	Even though I'm no theologian, even though you won't see me in church most weekends, you might find me there on an afternoon, on a bad afternoon, asking God for grace.
	But I believe in our religious destiny.
	In fact, I had a fun experience the other day.
	I love speaking.
	I love running my mouth.
	That's why I'm a lawyer.
	That's why I'm here with you.
	It's our second time seeing one another today.
	So whenever I'm asked to speak at a dinner group or public event, I go.
	I'm going to be speaking to the...
	The Michigan Criminal Defense Lawyers Association at their annual meeting in July.
	I'm thrilled by that.
	I'm ecstatic that they would reach out to Connecticut.
	They have some AC come out and talk to them.
	But I got an invitation to speak to the New Haven Ladies' Aid Association one night.
	And I thought, okay, I'll go.
	Good dinner and what the heck.
	And I walked in and it was all these old guys about my age and older.
	And I said, is this the Ladies' Aid Association?
	I said, yeah, well, where are the ladies?
	Well, they stay home.
	We created this club a century ago.
	We give them a Thursday night's off, they and the cooks, and we come out together and have dinner.
	So I talked to them about what I call the need for a new great awakening in the United States.
	If you look at American history in 1735, we had our first one with Jonathan Edwards, and a nation was gathered together in prayer, looked to the heavens, and hoped for unity.
	Every 50 to 80 years, we have another religious awakening.
	We're about 60 years since the last one in the 1960s with Jesus people and so forth, or the 70s maybe.
	And time moves a little quicker.
	When I look at the divisions within us and the hatred that typifies our public life, I know, I know that as individuals we inspire more.
	I know that we aspire to grace.
	And so I spoke to this group of neurosurgeons, bankers.
	Lawyers about the power of prayer and the need for a great awakening in the United States.
	And they listened and they loved it.
	So I'm on to something.
	I don't know what.
	You have a rough childhood, we'll put it mildly, but at some point you find your way into university to study law.
	Well, that was roundabout.
	So, you know, I had no idea I was a good student until, because we moved every year, right?
	And you didn't get followed or tracked or anything.
	So in high school, I get called down to the principal's office, and I'm like, now what did I do?
	And, you know, we used to take standardized tests, and she says, you know, you test really well here.
	You know, there's like 4,000 kids.
	This was Denby High School on Detroit's east side.
	What are your plans?
	I said, I don't have plans.
	You know, I knew I needed to graduate high school, and I knew I was miserable at home, so I started to go to night school so I could get out early.
	And I was determined to get that high school diploma.
	And she said, if I could get you into college, would you go?
	And I said, sure.
	So they let me out of my senior year before the Christmas break.
	I left in December and then I was done.
	And I started in January.
	I got the Mother's Club scholarship, which I always thought offended the nerds.
	And I taught myself to study and then went to Purdue and did really well, much to my surprise.
	I remember one year winning first, second and third place in a literary contest for essays I submitted.
	And they called and they said, there's a dinner.
	Are you coming?
	And I said, why?
	Nobody else must have applied.
	I won first, second, and third.
	Well, it was.
	It was a big deal.
	You know, Clive Barnes from the New York Times came to speak, and I went.
	And then the next, much to my surprise, I ended up with a fantastic fellowship at Columbia that paid for everything.
	Everything but library fines, I joke.
	You know, my tuition and cost of living.
	And, you know, hung around there for about six years, taught for a couple, and then left.
	So that's how.
	And then law school was an afterthought.
	You know, I grew up in Detroit in the 60s.
	We had the riots.
	I remember I was kind of interested in law at that point, but figured that people from my side of the tracks, my side of the tracks didn't do that.
	We broke the law.
	We didn't study it.
	And then when I watched the city go up in flames, I thought, this country can't endure.
	I'd rather study justice than the law.
	And so that's what I studied.
	And how long before you actually get into the practice?
	Did you teach before or did you teach at the same time while practicing?
	After.
	I became a lawyer in 1993.
	I was in my mid-30s at that point.
	93?
	Seems like just the last year.
	I was 13 in 93. Okay.
	So you become a lawyer.
	Not middle-aged, but are you married at the time you become a lawyer?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	All right.
	And so you become a lawyer and is it solo practice?
	Like you hang a shingle up and that's it?
	No, I, you know, again, I've been really lucky in the people who've taken an interest in me.
	I was taking criminal procedure and the professor hooked me up with a guy named John Williams down in New Haven.
	And I spent my senior year, my last year in law school, writing a...
	Brief in a death penalty case for a man named Daniel Webb.
	Connecticut had what was called a proportionality review at that time, which meant that you had to compare the nature of the crime and the character of the defendants of all the people who were accused of capital felonies within a given period in Connecticut.
	And that involved the reading of some 90,000 pages of trial transcripts.
	So that's how I spent my senior year.
	And then I got to write the brief.
	And then I wrote the merits brief.
	It was like almost 275 pages of legal briefs.
	And then I got to argue it a couple of years out of law school.
	And so, you know, and John was wonderful to me.
	He opened the federal courts to me.
	I tried.
	I don't even know how.
	I don't even know how many federal frauds I tried.
	I've tried.
	I remember.
	Thinking I would remain at his office until I'd been there for two years or 25 trials, whichever came first.
	And at about that two-year mark or 25-trial mark, I was packing up to go.
	And he came up and he said, what are you doing?
	I said, you know, I've got to go create my own shop.
	And he made me a partner.
	And so, you know, I was lucky that way.
	But I must have had some talent because he trusted me with a lot and I did a lot.
	Well, we're going to get to, I think you've got a borderline encyclopedic memory when it comes to case law, in principle, if not in name.
	But when you say you're doing the brief in a death penalty case, that is to say your client has been convicted of murder now and the brief is to spare him the death penalty?
	Yes.
	Can I ask in that particular case, how was the murder committed?
	The case was State of Connecticut versus Daniel Webb.
	Mr. Webb was accused of abducting.
	And yeah, I mean, these are...
	Hard stories to tell.
	I've got hundreds of them.
	But he was accused of abducting a bank vice president at the lunch hour and raping her, shooting her, and as she begged for mercy, returned and shot her to death in a public park.
	And that was the case.
	See, this is...
	Okay, and now I'm going back to what you said earlier, that nobody should be judged by the sum of their worst life experiences.
	I'm paraphrasing it not as eloquently as you put it.
	There's going to be a great many people out there who say even trying to...
	Well, I always said I can no longer support the death penalty only because of the human error in the system, but this sounds like one of those cases where innocence was not a question.
	Innocence is always a question.
	It's the question of what the state can prove.
	At that point in my life, I was an absolutist against the death penalty and believed that the state was an artifice, an artificial creation, much as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke put it, that in the beginning was nothing, as it were, and then out of nothing we created something, and among those somethings are civil society.
	And the state.
	Now, in the social contract theory, that's highly stylized, and it's done by way of contract and agreement.
	And both Hobbes, Locke, and even Rousseau wrote elegant treatises and complex treatises on how this came to be and how it happened.
	Thomas Hobbes had an authoritarian twist to his civil society and state, and he said of the state of nature that in the beginning, life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
	And we created a sovereign to protect us and gave it absolute power.
	But that power was limited when it came to the sovereign's decision to try to kill us.
	And at that moment, we retained our natural right to exist and to resist.
	And so I viewed the state's decision to try to kill Daniel Webb as a moral outrage, whatever he had done.
	I put that into practice a few years later in a civil case where a client of mine...
	The public defender's office asked me to represent a man named Kevin King.
	The state sought to kill him for a brutal murder.
	It failed.
	It got life without possibility of parole.
	And before he was to be taken to the supermax, he made a bid for freedom.
	He studied the guards in his building, learned what cars they drove, picked somebody who was about his size, lured the guard into his cell.
	Demanded the guard take the uniform that they were wearing and give it to him.
	And when she said no, he shanked her in the chest, put her uniform on, tied him through his bed, and took her car keys and nearly made it out the door.
	When the guards found him, they beat him up.
	And the public defender's office asked me if I would take his case.
	And so I did.
	And I argued to the jury that when the people that we asked to protect us behave like those from whom we are to be protected, civil society is insecure.
	And that jury gave him a $2.1 million verdict.
	It was the first time I made national news.
	It was, I think, 1997 or 99. Awarding him $2.1 million because the cops beat up a guy who just did that terrible thing.
	Yes, and I told the jury that.
	I looked him in the eye and I said, look, you are the conscious of the community here.
	If you're comfortable with what the guards did, then endorse it.
	Now, criminally, however, what happened to that man?
	Does he get to spend his money in jail or was he not in jail?
	So we got the $2.1 million verdict and it was remitted, cut down by the appellate court.
	We ended up arguing it in New York City in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
	It was reduced to $350 million and the state sought to seize.
	The money that went to him, we got a percentage of the $3.50, and they took his money, and then we gave him some of the money we earned as a gift.
	And to my knowledge, he's serving a life sentence somewhere.
	I've lost track of him.
	Well, I mean, it's an interesting...
	Yeah, give him the money, and then seize it for the victims of violent acts, or whatever it is, and it goes to the victims of his act, and then lawyers get paid.
	Well, it's interesting.
	If the guilt...
	I'm trying to think, even if the guilt is not at issue, The other guy who raped and murdered a woman didn't get the death penalty, so this guy should be spared as well?
	I mean, is that the essence of the argument?
	Connecticut has eliminated the proportionality review requirement.
	It was an odd exercise.
	And I found myself engaged in a sort of logical fallacy.
	And that is, you know, there were 12 or 13 people in the pool, as I remember, maybe more.
	And I did a table, you know, summarizing what they were accused of and who they were, and then tried to make my client look better than them.
	And I realized the problem with this argument is they could all be bad, you know, just in different ways.
	But that wasn't my job.
	My job was to argue for the sparing of his life.
	And, you know, we succeeded in only one argument of the...
	Dozens that we raised, and so his case was remanded, sent back to the trial court for further proceedings.
	Complicated story then.
	In the end, Connecticut abolished the death penalty, so they never killed him.
	I'll call it that as a win.
	That is where I can understand it.
	I'm looking at the chat, and everyone's like, well, he deserved to die, and I can understand that rationale, save except that you can never trust the state to come to that definitively, unless he says, I did it, and there's a reason why I did it.
	Empowering what we know is a corrupt state, a corrupt government with the ultimate power.
	Yeah, that's been my evolution over time.
	Everyone, when they're young, it's gung-ho.
	Yeah, kill them if they're guilty and let God judge the soul.
	So you've been doing pretty ugly cases your entire life.
	I mean, I say this is ugly from a criminal defense.
	You're doing the stuff that they make shows about.
	Apparently.
	So now, I have to get into the political orientation of your life.
	I haven't asked yet, but Barnes always describes you as sort of the 70s-ish, the leftist hippie type.
	I can only know you from what I've seen in the last few years.
	If I go by stereotypes, I would expect to see someone like you at a Grateful Dead concert or maybe 20 years younger at a Phish concert.
	Politically speaking, what has been your orientation, your evolution over your life?
	Confused.
	I don't know that I really have an orientation.
	You know, I used to sell copies of the militant Socialist Workers Party newspaper at Purdue and read it zealously because I was interested in the COINTELPRO FBI surveillance of dissent.
	When I went off to Columbia, you know...
	I don't think I voted.
	I didn't pay much attention to politics.
	I was interested in the nature and destiny of man.
	I was interested in knowing what was true.
	You know, the most frightening book I ever read was Rene Descartes' Discourse on Method, which is a sort of rationalist critique on how we know anything.
	And ultimately, we don't.
	We take most things on as a matter of faith.
	I think that, you know, when I left Columbia, came to Connecticut, I wrote about politics for the Hartford Courant and the Waterbury Republican.
	I got to meet presidential candidates when they'd wander through the state doing their endorsements.
	I don't think I had a robust sense of what a good life and a good society is.
	I was attracted to Donald Trump largely because when Hillary Clinton gave a speech in 2016 to a group of African Americans saying that White people owed them something.
	I was sort of outraged by that.
	Nobody gave me anything.
	I wasn't about to give somebody something on account of their skin.
	I view Trump as an interesting canary in the coal mine.
	I don't know what he says about us, that he remains such a popular candidate.
	I don't know that I have a political orientation right now.
	I don't ever really plan to vote.
	The last time I voted, I happened to be in town hall paying my real estate taxes for the primary day.
	So I went ahead and voted.
	And I went to the...
	I don't know that I think politics matters that much.
	Bob's take on me is interesting.
	We met through a former partner of his, who is now deceased, whose name I'm forgetting, Brian Mahaney.
	And we met in the Alex Jones case, and we didn't always see eye to eye on how to handle the case.
	Much to my regret, we've never really gotten to know one another.
	And so I think that I would characterize him as a freewheeling, libertarian, right-wing something or other.
	He'd call me a granola.
	I think he actually used granola.
	He's used that term, I'm not sure, on you specifically.
	But I suspect that we're both far more complex than those stereotypes.
	Could you flesh out, for those who may not know, what Operation COINTELPRO was?
	I'm so stupid, Norm.
	For the longest time, I thought it was...
	I don't want to say what I thought it was until I looked into it a long time ago, but I thought it was COIN.
	COINTELPRO.
	And I was like, oh, this is a laundromat case or something.
	And then I, you know...
	You Googled and just tell everybody what COINTELPRO is because it might be more applicable today than it was at the time.
	Well, it definitely is.
	And so, you know, the United States at its formation, our communities didn't have police forces.
	And think about that for a moment.
	I mean, we largely left it to our communities to govern.
	We developed professional police forces in the 19th century and by the early 20th century.
	The Bureau of Investigation became the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was run by Herbert Hoover for basically 50 years, and it became a very powerful surveillance entity.
	And as the United States struggled during this period with its reaction to organized labor, the perception of the threat that immigrants and radical immigrants, typically from Italy and Russia, posed to domestic stability in the United States, there were those who thought that we needed to keep an eye on it.
	These people, to make sure we knew what they were all about.
	This got transposed into a concern for communists in the 50s, and we developed a very aggressive national surveillance entity over civil rights workers, Martin Luther King, left-wing groups, and government agents actually spent time, money, and effort to sow discord, disagreement, and disinformation among these groups.
	They sought to destroy Martin Luther King's marriage.
	By recording sounds of him in flagrante delecto with another woman and sending it to his home where his wife opened it.
	This was your government at work trying to destroy dissent.
	And so this came to light.
	And I don't know how many of you have actually read Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost.
	I only read it for the first time this past year.
	It's about 1,300 pages, so you've got to invest in it to read it.
	But it's an amazing story about the CIA's investment in the elimination of John F. Kennedy.
	And, you know, it's close enough to the truth, given everything that I've read, to be chilling.
	Power abhors a vacuum, and power seeks to justify itself and to hold itself.
	And the glory of our institutions in the United States is we've fractured power with respect both to state and federal government and the concept of federalism and within each branch of government or within each government by means of separation of power.
	And so, you know, there's a deep trust of mistrust of people, but our government has turned on us.
	And this was displayed in the church committee.
	So, James Risen.
	If you're looking for a good weekend reading, James Risen wrote a good book called The Last Honest Man, I think it was, and it was about Frank Church and the formation of the Church Committee, which brought to light a lot of the FBI abuses and CIA abuses, both domestically and foreign.
	This was followed up by the House Committee on Assassinations, which concluded that there was a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy.
	They just didn't know who the conspirators were.
	Now, all of this, who cares you're saying about ancient history, especially you young people, you know, 1970?
	Huh?
	You know, what was that?
	You know, it was yesterday.
	And the institutions that did this continue to exist, and I believe they're now being used to surveil the right in ways that parallel.
	What was going on against the left and the COINTELPRO evidence.
	And I come by this belief honestly.
	I'm not an ideologue.
	People have that tendency to think I am.
	I get involved in cases, I read as much as I can, and then I talk because I love to talk.
	And I draw inferences.
	Here's what I saw in the Proud Boys trial.
	There is a vast infrastructure within the federal government of confidential human sources who are managed, as it were, If not off the books, independently of the oversight of line prosecutors.
	And line prosecutors often don't even know what they're up to.
	Did you know?
	There was a point in the Proud Boys trial where one of my colleagues, Carmen Hernandez, was cross-examining a witness about his role as a confidential human source or his knowledge of confidential human sources.
	And the prosecutors came up to her and said, where are you getting this information?
	I mean, even the prosecutors didn't know who all the CHSs were.
	And so I made it a mission to learn as much as I could and to force this issue at trial.
	And one night during the trial, I had an extraordinary meeting with a senior Justice Department official.
	What do you want?
	I was asked.
	I said, I want to know how many confidential human sources were embedded in the Proud Boys from the election of November 20th, 2020.
	Until January 6th, because there was no plan to engage in seditious conspiracy.
	There just wasn't.
	And you know what?
	By knowing all these ears and eyes that you had in the organization, if they didn't hear it, it didn't exist.
	And what had happened is in a normal...
	Sorry to give such long answers.
	No, no.
	This is amazing.
	In a normal federal criminal case.
	There will be one FBI agent who is responsible for knowing the file, so to speak.
	He is the case agent.
	There were five or six of them in the Proud Boys case.
	There was that much data.
	I think it was 19 terabytes of data that we were supposed to have mastered.
	I don't think any one person can master that.
	So we get a...
	FBI agent up, and they wouldn't know anything.
	They wouldn't know anything.
	And so this person said, I said to the person, I'm going to ask each and every one of these case agents about CHSs.
	And this person, a female, she said, they won't know.
	And I said, well, let them tell that to the jury.
	Let the jury find out that even the FBI doesn't know how many CHSs there are wandering around in the country surveilling domestic groups.
	She said, oh, the FBI knows, but they won't know.
	And it turns out that there is a separate institutional infrastructure, I don't remember what it's called within the FBI, with its own set of regulations and rules that manages CHSs, and you're given access to them on a need-to-know basis.
	So I said, fine, produce for me the head of that agency, that infrastructure, so that I can ask some questions.
	And it wasn't going to happen for a number of reasons.
	So we entered an agreement.
	And that agreement was that the FBI would, the government would stipulate that there were at least eight CHSs.
	I think that was the number.
	Eight, we'll call them informants, but confidential human sources embedded within the Proud Boys, eight of them.
	Well, eight, well, again, I want to choose my words because words really matter.
	And I know that many of your listeners are ideologically charged.
	I'm not saying these are FBI agents.
	I'm not saying these are full-time people who were sent to infiltrate the Proud Boys.
	I'm simply saying that the FBI had eight people who were in contact with FBI agents who reported intermittently on what they observed.
	That's all I'm saying.
	No, no, absolutely.
	My crowd or my environment might be...
	I don't think they are, but this is the common misconception where people say Fed, Fed, Fed.
	It's like, oh, I don't get paid by the Fed, but that's not what anybody really means, colloquially speaking.
	A Fed, anybody who answers to, advises, has turned, is paid.
	It's a...
	It's a big umbrella.
	We had hearings.
	A lot of what happened in the Proud Boys trial just took my breath away.
	The number of times the press was thrown out of the room and the courtroom proceedings sealed and the transcripts ordered confidential, and we were given information that we were ordered not to share.
	I'd never seen that occur in a case before.
	And, you know, the pity of it was that at this very moment, while all this was going on, this was just after the House committee.
	It made its report on January 6th.
	I represented Alex Jones before that committee.
	That was interesting.
	And now the Republicans were in control of the House, and Jim Jordan and company were chomping at the bit for information.
	They never once reached out to any of the lawyers in the Proud Boys case who put a subpoena on one of us and made us choose whether to honor a congressional subpoena.
	Or face contempt, or honor a court order and face contempt, a glaring sort of separation of powers issue.
	They did half an investigation, and as far as I was concerned, it was a joke.
	The House Republicans lack gravitas, in my opinion, with respect to CHS.
	They never really wanted to do the work.
	They grandstanded for social media.
	They grandstanded for the press.
	And we didn't have a frank church in the institution the way we had to expose control parole.
	And from my perspective, that's one of the great untold stories in American life right now is how much domestic surveillance is going on.
	Let's also not presume everybody knows.
	You represented Joe Biggs.
	He was one of the Proud Boys.
	You didn't represent Enrique Tarrio.
	I can't remember the other names.
	Joe Biggs and the others were accused of seditious conspiracy among other charges.
	What was his outcome, Biggs?
	Convicted.
	How many years?
	I think Biggs got 17. Okay.
	It's outrageous.
	It'll just get me angry.
	But the question is this, and you've alluded to it now.
	You know that it is disclosed that there are, let's just say, at least eight confidential human sources.
	That was speculation, yes.
	Okay, at least.
	That's what the FBI knew about.
	As the case unfolded.
	Listen to this.
	This actually happened.
	I don't have to make anything up here.
	At one point, and you should get Roger Roots to come on.
	Roger Roots was one of Dominic Pozzola's lawyers, and he took the lead on some of these issues.
	But Roger learned of other agencies and institutions, federal agencies and institutions, that had informants on the ground, including the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department.
	And so at one point, he made a motion to the judge.
	To have the United States government disclose the number of informants.
	And the judge basically said, there's so many federal agencies, do you really expect them to know?
	And our reaction was, well, hell yeah.
	It's the United States of America versus our clients.
	You know, if our clients are going to be held accountable, who holds the government accountable?
	And the judge didn't want to hear about it.
	Well, no shit.
	I mean, because whether or not, I don't want to say the judge is in on it, but it's a system.
	But this is my point.
	Eight confidential human sources, at least, who had embedded, infiltrated, were reporting to intelligence.
	Seditious conspiracy, a plot to overthrow the government.
	No.
	No.
	Words matter.
	And, you know, a lot of people took it that way.
	Seditious conspiracy means agreeing to use force against the authority of the United States government.
	Okay, no.
	Distinction without a difference.
	No, it's a huge distinction.
	Because at the end of the day...
	The prosecutor who gave the opening closing argument for the government said, look, there doesn't have to have been a plan in order for there to be a seditious conspiracy.
	This could have been an implicit understanding formed at the moment the first barricade was breached.
	So basically what they said was...
	This could have been just something everybody agreed to do at once, because a conspiracy, a meeting of the minds, as it were, can take place in an instant.
	No, true.
	And when I say the distinction without a difference, only from the perspective of the question I was going to ask.
	Sorry.
	But I understand the distinction from the defendant's perspective.
	But here, the idea is that they had infiltrated, embedded, and were aware of planning.
	They were alleging that planning had gone into it in the weeks and months before, correct?
	That's the proof they tried to put on, but all they had were text messages that, in my view, were nothing more than protected speech.
	See, you're always looking at this from the innocence of your clients, and I'm looking at this from the guilt of the scheme.
	Their evidence that they're trying to put on is that they had infiltrated.
	This was being planned in the weeks and months leading up to January 6th, and yet somehow they were caught with their fingers up their butt on the day of, pants down, and they didn't know what was going to happen, and they let this building get overrun.
	They had bike racks to protect when they had alleged by their own evidence that they had infiltrated what's designated...
	There are two ways to do this, though.
	If I'm right...
	They infiltrated and there was no plan.
	All they knew is there were a bunch of pissed off people coming and maybe they should have planned better.
	If you take their strong rhetoric seriously, they knew and they didn't plan, well, that creates a different impression.
	I have the luxury of having spent five and a half months watching this evidence come in on a daily basis for hours and hours and hours.
	I just don't think there was a plan, period.
	My thing is to show that This was a let it happen on purpose, a LeeHop or a MeHop, or just going back to COINTELPRO, just like it was a setup so that it could be exploited exactly the way it was.
	The idea that they get there and they're understaffed because of COVID.
	They have bike fences, they're letting people in, and they're alleging also simultaneously that this was a plot conspired in the weeks and months leading up to it.
	FBI had infiltrated, had intelligence, and they didn't advise the capital of this.
	They're sucking and blowing at the same time.
	You know, you, I don't have, you have more, perhaps, faith and confidence in the ability of groups to accomplish their ends than I do.
	I view this as a bad day with pissed off people.
	No, I'm just saying, from the FBI's own, like, their theory of the cases, it was weeks and months of planning.
	They had infiltrated all their evidence, and then...
	We had no idea January 6th was going to happen.
	And that fault line explains how people react to the case in such radically different ways.
	Now, I'm not giving you a hard time here, so don't look at me like I'm giving you a hard time.
	I know what people think, and I know what I think, and people don't really distinguish between arguments from the defense attorney versus political or arguments in principle.
	One of the defenses or one of the mitigating factors that you had argued before the court was that You know, you sort of pointed the finger back at Trump.
	Absolutely!
	Okay, and now people are going to say Trump, well, other people are going to say simultaneously, Trump never said anything about getting violence.
	He said, you know, peacefully protest patriotically, and he legit sincerely believes the election was stolen.
	And I think it's undeniable, not necessarily for Dominion voting flipping switches, whatever, but for Hunter Biden controlling information, infiltrating social media, etc.
	But people are going to fault you for saying...
	You're imputing to Trump what none of us believe Trump said in the first place, in the defense of your clients.
	Maybe I am, maybe I'm not.
	Here's where I come down.
	I'm a reasonably sophisticated consumer of the news, I think, at least by contrast to jurors that I pick who don't follow the news at all.
	Many people...
	We elect a man president, we call him the leader of the free world, and with that comes the power to use a bully pulpit and the sort of imputed admiration and regard of millions, tens of millions.
	This man said over and over and over again that the election was stolen.
	This man stood on the ellipse on January 6th and told people the election was stolen.
	This man stood on the ellipse and said, go to Congress to stop the steal.
	Joe Sixpack, Mr. Member of the Proud Boys, Mr. Member of Three Percenters, somebody mulling around on the ellipse, they had no reason to doubt what the president was saying.
	He was their president.
	You know, if the president tells you, is it a crime to believe the leader of the free world?
	Is it a crime to believe the president?
	And, you know, should Trump have been more responsible?
	Yeah, perhaps.
	I don't know what I think of Trump, frankly.
	You know, I watch his conduct in the Mershon trial, the Stormy Daniels trial, and I just sort of marvel at him.
	The other day on Law Pod Daily, Mike had a picture of Trump, a very glaring picture of him on the screen, and I pretended I was Judge Mershon lecturing Trump about honor to the court, you know.
	And it was a sort of powerful experience because Trump has this dark charisma about him.
	That is so compelling to so many.
	And I found myself getting sucked into his world, and I didn't like the feeling of it.
	But I think that, you know, part of my defense, and we tried to subpoena Trump to trial.
	It's hard to subpoena a former president.
	You know, part of my defense of the Proud Boys was they believe the leader of the free world.
	And what can be, you know, the federal government likes to stand up there and say they attack the temple of democracy.
	You know what?
	There's something even more fundamental and more outrageous.
	If my vote has been neutralized, if the election has been stolen, that's an even greater outrage against the Republicans storming a Capitol one day.
	And so that's as far as I can go.
	And I'll give not just the benefit of the doubt, but understanding strategically.
	My qualm, even strategically, though, is to say that shifts it from they didn't do it.
	There was no plan to.
	Well, they did do it, but they were brainwashed by the president, so to speak.
	Or they believed him.
	And, you know, it may be that that was a mistake.
	I mean, it's the call I made at the time.
	You know, would I try the case differently now?
	I don't know.
	I mean, it was a...
	It's a brutal trial.
	I mean, normally in a federal criminal case, it takes a day to pick a jury.
	It took us 13 days.
	It was hard to find a fair and impartial jury in D.C. I think it was actually factually impossible that you just wasted 12 days because the outcome would have been the same.
	So Joe Biggs convicted.
	Enrique Tarrio convicted.
	It was a foregone conclusion.
	Norm, you know that the Proud Boys were declared a terrorist organization in Canada?
	Yes.
	It's the wildest and most stupidest thing imaginable.
	I don't want to get you in trouble, but if you say something that you shouldn't, I don't want to get you in trouble.
	You've learned stuff in the context of that trial that you're not at liberty to disclose to the public.
	Yes.
	And I presume, I'll put words in your mouth and you can nod or wink, it's worse than we even think it is.
	What I learned is about the extent of confidential informants' involvement in surveillance of domestic groups.
	It's what I've described.
	What I have is simply details, the identity of the people, what they did, who they did it with.
	It's no worse than that.
	I'm not aware of a secret plot to poison the water in Tuscaloosa or something like that.
	It's just the sources and methods that the FBI uses.
	To gather information are national security topics as far as they're concerned.
	And the Justice Department fought hard to make sure that those of us who came to possess the details are under court orders not to share them.
	That's all I'm saying.
	Interesting.
	And now there's an angle that I...
	It's not that I've ever missed it, but I've never fleshed it out as thoroughly as other people have an understanding of it.
	Everyone was...
	A lot of people were saying that there's an overlap of the players between the fed-napping plot of Gretchen Whitmer, I'm using hyperbolic words, but I'll just say the kidnapping plot of Gretchen Whitmer, and those involved in January 6th.
	How easily could you speak to that?
	I can't.
	I'm aware.
	I have only an anecdotal press account of the Whitmer trial.
	I think I might have a copy of the trial transcript around here somewhere.
	You know, they're seven days in a week, 24 hours in a day, and I work too many of them as it is, so I haven't gotten there.
	Okay, so that's January 6th.
	What's the status of, are you doing Biggs' appeal, or does he go to an appellate lawyer for the appeal?
	I'm doing the appeal for Joe Biggs and for Zachary Rell, another proud boy.
	And the basis of the appeal?
	Among other things, the primary issue will be the use of Protected speech to prove criminal intent in a conspiracy formed instantaneously.
	And I wrote the question out the other day.
	It sounds a lot better then than it did now.
	But here's what I'm worried about.
	You and I talk here today and we say, ah, the Yankees suck.
	You know, excuse me, maybe I should be more sensitive.
	The Yankees stink.
	We should burn down Yankee Stadium.
	That'll teach those bums.
	Now we're just talking here.
	Being a couple of hotheads.
	Suppose we go to a ballgame two nights later and we're standing next to somebody who throws a Molotov cocktail.
	Did that protected speech become circumstantial evidence of our involvement in a conspiracy?
	Maybe.
	And I think that one of the consequences of the Proud Boys trial is it has made people afraid both to speak and to use their right to freely associate with others who think like them for fear that if they turn up at the wrong place at the wrong time, they'll be charged with a crime.
	So that's one issue.
	A second issue is currently before the United States Supreme Court.
	I filed a petition for certiorari in the so-called Fisher issue.
	We did it on behalf of Jake Lang.
	The court decided to hear Fisher's argument rather than ours, but our case remains pending.
	And it'll have an impact on the proud voice, and that is whether the obstruction of justice charge was appropriate in that case or not.
	A third issue has to do with...
	The use of soap.
	There are other issues that are technical, but those are the primary issues.
	I feel stupid for not knowing this.
	Are you representing Jake Lang as well?
	Yes.
	I filed a petition for certiorari for him in the United States Supreme Court.
	I'm on the docket as trial counsel for him, but I've moved to withdraw, and I don't think I will be at his trial.
	Okay.
	I just had him on.
	I mean, he came on, I forget, like three or four weeks ago.
	And I had my questions and queries as to how someone who's in prison is able to do podcasts.
	But then the news did break that he was taken back down to solitary shortly afterwards.
	Do you know what his current situation is?
	I believe he is in solitary, but I don't know.
	I'm not his primary counsel.
	I was brought in to help Steve Metcalf.
	Steve Metcalf is primary trial counsel for Lange.
	Metcalf represented Dominic Pizzola.
	The fellow who broke into the Capitol with the shield on the window, and he and I became great friends during the Proud Boys trial.
	You know, you wonder, eight lawyers, five-and-a-half-month trial.
	What do the lawyers talk about during trial?
	Well, I'm going to give you an example.
	We developed alternative persona.
	We became BBC television or radio commentators.
	And when some of the lawyers would go on, I was Nigel, and he was Rupert.
	Or maybe it was vice versa.
	I can't remember.
	But I would turn to him, and I guess he was Nigel.
	I'd say, well, Nigel, here we are on day 63 of the never-ending trauma known as the United States of America versus the Proud Boys.
	And Judge Kelly is on the bench once again pondering the imponderable.
	How many angels can die on the head of the pin as lawyers endlessly argue about inconsequential points that need absolutely nowhere.
	And so he'd talk back to me in that way.
	And some days we'd start giggling, and everybody would look at us.
	That trial.
	It was like watching ice melt in a Montana winter.
	It was slow.
	How long did it last?
	Five and a half months.
	And you're living in D.C. for five and a half months?
	Yes.
	We'll get back to this when we talk marriage, but I presume your wife is not spending the five and a half months with you in D.C. Correct.
	This was a very difficult period for us.
	I mean, it's like being at camp, except it's too long, it's not fun, and you're not with the people that you want to be there with.
	Not to say anything bad about not speaking ill to clients, but you've got family.
	I spent, in the last five years, too much time with my cases, not enough time with my wife, and it cost us dearly.
	Okay, we're going to come back to that in a second, because one of the other cases, which I suspect might have contributed to that, was the Alex Jones case.
	Yes.
	I didn't ask this, but how did you even get to represent any of the January Sixers?
	I have been a legal journalist of some sort for many years.
	I had a print column in the Connecticut Law Tribune, an organ of the American Law Journal, for 20 years and developed a readership and then had a general circulation newspaper column weekly and developed a readership.
	I blogged with Mike Cernovich.
	I've known Mike Cernovich since he was a law student at Pepperdine.
	He had an interest in federal civil rights litigation, so he came out to meet me while a law student, and I'd make him a guest in my own home for a week or so at a time, and he'd come to my office and help me write legal briefs.
	I came to regard him as a young and brilliant and precocious mind.
	In about 2002 or 2003, he started a blog page called Crime and Federalism.
	And he asked me if I'd blog with him.
	And I said, what's a blog?
	And he told me, and I did.
	So we did for a while, and then we went our own separate ways.
	He went on to fame and fortune, I suppose, as a social media influencer.
	I remained a bread-and-butter hellraiser in the courts.
	And we kind of lost track of one another.
	We communicate from time to time.
	So one of the associations that I made in that public side of my law practice was Dan Hall.
	And Dan Hall was representing Joe Biggs.
	And Dan called from time to time early in the case to ask tactical questions and then asked me to come along for the ride.
	So I did.
	That's amazing.
	And you have no thoughts, no second guesses, no fears about taking on a case like that that might set aside the personal issues, but from a governmental perspective, like you have no fears or concerns about that?
	Financially, it was a disaster.
	And if anybody wants to write me a check for about a half a million dollars, I would love it.
	The legal fees were supposed to be crowdsourced, and they weren't.
	And so at the time of trial, I didn't even cover my Airbnb expenses with the legal fees I've been paid.
	I've had a few people make some contributions, but it's hurt the firm and it's hurt my family.
	In terms of government retaliation, no.
	What are they going to do?
	A bunch of guys with a warrant are going to come and block me up and send me to Guantanamo.
	That's not the way this country works.
	That's a social media wet dream.
	Or they'll just come and stick you in solitary for a week while they figure out that they had no basis.
	Or they'll audit you and make your life miserable there.
	I have always been an outspoken thorn in the government side.
	And will be most likely until the day I die.
	I think that most people who work in the government are just like you and me.
	They're doing their jobs in a situation that imposes constraints on them, and some days they do them better than others.
	I'm not sure I'm so forgiving with those who work in government, but I am.
	I am.
	They're humans, and they get dependent on the hand that feeds them but torments the rest of us.
	Alex Jones.
	So you were representing Alex Jones in, I presume, the Connecticut And ultimately in the Texas case as well.
	Well, I tried to represent him at trial in Texas, but the local counsel there opposed my admission.
	And so I worked with the lawyer who defended him in Texas.
	Why am I forgetting?
	I mean, I was there.
	I watched it.
	I'm forgetting who that lawyer was.
	And Dino Raynell.
	Okay.
	And so I spent an enormous amount of time in Texas.
	I couldn't even tell you how many months at this point.
	Another really, frankly, source of...
	I might do it differently if I were to do it again, because it certainly imposed a hardship on my family.
	We're going to get there, I presume, as these questions flow, but you get involved in Connecticut, and to defend Alex Jones, Satan incarnate, from the most you would think, and many people do, That Alex Jones had a hand in the atrocity itself.
	You make that decision.
	We know what type of person you are right now.
	First of all, what was the backlash?
	And then we've got to get into that, I will call it a kangaroo court show trial because there was no meaningful trial on the merits.
	Any backlash merely by virtue of the fact that you get involved and you're a Connecticut local?
	Oh yeah.
	I mean, I've gotten a lot of hate mail.
	Because I'm a public figure, I think it affected my family, my extended family.
	It created deep fissures between them.
	It created fissures between my wife and I, who I thought was siding with her family and actually wasn't and was afraid to talk to me about it.
	Because, candidly, the pressure was so great in that case.
	It's unimaginable.
	I don't know how to describe it.
	I just lost track of my wife and nearly lost her.
	You said you have three kids?
	Yes.
	And I mean, I have not yet had any such problems, but maybe times are changing a little bit.
	But did the kids feel blowback?
	And did it create resentment between you and them?
	Like they say, why are you doing this?
	Just find another case.
	They live in different parts of the world.
	I have a child in Seattle, one in Great Britain, and one in New York City.
	And they all have busy, independent lives of their own.
	You know, one is a college professor and researcher.
	Another does AI work, and it worked at Microsoft previously.
	My housewife daughter is a very free spirit who...
	Basically, before she had kids, you know, she'd work three or four months and then go hiking.
	So, you know, I'd get a call from her, Dad, I'm going down to South America.
	I want to see Machu Picchu.
	I'll be back in a couple months.
	And so that's her.
	And I know she was in Christchurch area when that earthquake took place.
	And when we hadn't heard from her for three or four days, I was getting ready to go on a plane and go look for her.
	And then she called to say she didn't even know there'd been an earthquake.
	You know, my kids are not political.
	We're not a political family.
	We might be one of the few families that really doesn't watch television.
	I haven't watched television in years.
	I was yesterday, you know, 48 hours.
	I know some reporters.
	They were trying to get me to talk about one of my cases.
	So we had coffee.
	And I mentioned, you know, I haven't seen television in a couple of years other than to watch college football.
	And they were like, yeah.
	How can I be?
	You're bad for ratings.
	Well, yeah, I guess so.
	Okay, so now you get involved in this file.
	People don't even understand what happened in this trial.
	Barnes has talked about the inorganic law affair against Jones, and in particular as relates to Connecticut, as relates to Sandy Hook.
	Who was it?
	There was a recent breaking story.
	I forget what it was.
	It doesn't matter.
	So how do you get involved?
	What's the case like?
	And then how does it progress where you end up seeing what you end up seeing in this case, what I think is a total abrogation of justice?
	So to start at the end and then go back to the beginning and come back to the end, I do have Alex's case on appeal before the appellate court.
	We argued it in February.
	We should get a decision sometime within the next couple of months and let's see what the appellate court does.
	I do think it was a miscarriage of justice.
	I think it was obscene and shockingly so.
	I got involved in the case in March of 2019.
	Bob Barnes called.
	And I don't want to reflect on our communications without a waiver from the client or Bob because this is work product.
	But at the moment I got involved, a very prominent personal injury firm, Koskoff Koskoff and Beder, was handling the file for the plaintiffs.
	And when I got involved, Jones had lawyers who had filed what's called an anti-SLAPP motion to dismiss.
	A SLAPP means Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.
	Connecticut had a new law that permitted a defendant sued under such a statute to ask for a motion to dismiss early to stop the litigation on the grounds that it was chilling speech.
	The Koscoff firm made a strategic decision to ask for a lot of discovery from Jones, a lot of material from Jones.
	And when Jones couldn't produce it, they were able to gin up and create a crisis atmosphere in the trial court.
	The trial judge would have biweekly status conferences by the time I got involved, and she was on a slow and steadily increasing burn that became, I would say, something like a rage against Jones and his counsel.
	So at the time I got involved, we were trying to work out the mechanics of discovery compliance and were unable to do so.
	I remained in the case.
	I don't think Bob was permitted to come in or maybe chose not to come in.
	I don't recall.
	And so now I'm counsel for Jones in Connecticut together with another firm.
	And we went on a torturous merry-go-round ride to try to find historic information about Infowars and Alex Jones.
	And the other side never believed what I think is the truth, and that is that there just weren't records to support the claims that the plaintiffs made.
	A lot of Alex's inventory of what he said and when he said it was maintained by social media.
	But when he was deplatformed, he lost his library, he lost his past, as it were.
	There weren't internal records or documents to support a lot of the...
	And so at one point, she entered a default as to liability.
	She concluded that because he had not substantially complied with discovery, he was not...
	We argued that he did substantially comply, that he provided tens of thousands of documents, that he and his people sat for dozens of depositions.
	They signed documents under oath.
	They filed requests and responded to requests for admissions.
	And one of the arguments on appeal was that the default was disproportionate.
	Because the plaintiffs were able to take information from Jones and use it to their benefit while he was unable to defend himself.
	We'll see what the appellate court does with that.
	I know at least one of the three judges who I argued in front of didn't seem very impressed with that argument.
	Norm, you have to explain this.
	I've never understood it.
	I was a lawyer.
	I practiced for 13-plus years.
	On one occasion, came across a decision, oddly enough, coming out of the States, where the conduct of the defendant was so egregious, they defaulted verdict.
	But even in that case, I don't think it was a default verdict.
	I think they just defaulted from defending, foreclosed from pleading, and then they still had to make their evidence as the plaintiff.
	In this case, they defaulted verdict, and then the plaintiffs never even had to make evidence of liability.
	As to liability, that's right.
	The way the case came in.
	It was a little confusing, but the court basically concluded and told the jury that liability had been established.
	That's what the jury was told.
	We asked for the jury to be told that it had been established by way of a discovery default.
	So the jurors wouldn't be concluded that there was a conclusion he had done these things.
	The court denied that motion.
	And so they were told that liability had been established and that all they were to determine was the amount of damages.
	But that, see, it's one thing to say, all right, Alex, you've been such a bad boy.
	You don't get to defend and they still need to prove their case based on evidence as though the defendant is not there.
	Not as though the defendant is already guilty.
	That's what I just, I don't understand how that's a...
	How that's even a thorny question for the Court of Appeal to decide, that the conduct was so egregious, not just that he's foreclosed from pleading, but that you assume guilt and they don't even have to prove it.
	Statute of limitations, causation, they have to prove nothing.
	Again, you're mixing and matching.
	A civil trial is a couple-act play.
	There's liability and damages.
	As to Act 1, that was established.
	They didn't have to prove that.
	As to damages, we had lengthy arguments during trial about the laws.
	They had to prove the extent of their damages, and we argued that they didn't.
	And among other things we took up on appeal was the amounts here were shocking, shocked judicial conscience.
	But we'll see what the appellate court does with that.
	It was a very difficult trial.
	You know, there were four or five lawyers from Koskoff, and I was there with a paralegal, and it was exhausting.
	I remember at one point, you know, just responding to another motion, and one of the lawyers said, you know, we don't know how you're doing it.
	And I said, I don't know either, but I got a guarantee for you.
	Throw all the shit you have at me, and I'll still be the last man standing in this courtroom.
	And I was.
	But again, you know, it came at a cost.
	You remind me of John Travolta from A Civil Action.
	Now, how did the default verdict from Connecticut get superimposed or imported to Texas?
	I don't think it did.
	I think that was a separate default for similar reasons.
	Judge Barbara Bellis was the Connecticut judge.
	I can't remember her first name, whether it was Maya, but Judge Gura, I can't remember her name, the Texas judge.
	They were independent of one another.
	If they ever spoke, I don't know about it.
	But the same discovery compliance issues that Jones had in Connecticut arose in Texas with a similar response.
	Okay.
	I mean, I see fantastic.
	Fascinating.
	And which case was it that landed you with the suspended license?
	Well, it was both.
	So we had a lot of data, and Jones was in bankruptcy court.
	Free Speech Systems, I think, was in bankruptcy court.
	We got a request from bankruptcy counsel for the file as to Free Speech Systems.
	It was urgent.
	We sent him the file, and in the file were records that the court had designated highly confidential.
	It should only go to counsel of record.
	You know, the court concludes that I erred.
	In giving those to bankruptcy counsel because he was not counsel of record in the Connecticut case and he didn't need those records, given the exigency of the circumstances rather than cull through a million documents and whatnot, we gave it all to him.
	He then turned it over to Texas counsel and one of Texas counsel's office staff mistakenly sent confidential records to the plaintiff's lawyers who used them in a Perry Mason moment in the Texas case.
	The Connecticut judge read about that in the newspaper or heard about it on television.
	And rather than holding a normal disciplinary hearing, she did a show-cause hearing requiring me to appear to defend my license.
	And as a result, I pled the Fifth Amendment because there are issues we're not talking about.
	And as a result of her findings, she recommended a six-month, she imposed a six-month suspension of my law license.
	That's on appeal.
	And, you know, that's a difficult challenge.
	I'm going to have to, again, if any of your viewers want to contribute to the, you know, suspended lawyer, took a beating in the Proud Boys case lawyer, I'd appreciate it because it's a difficult challenge.
	Holy hell.
	All right.
	And now all of this, I guess, bringing it back to the beginning, but the toll that this takes...
	It was last week with Eric Conley where you mentioned it.
	I only presume half of marriages end in divorce under...
	Well, who was it I was listening to?
	No, not half of marriages end in divorce that say one in two people get divorced, but some people get divorced more than once and it skews the stats.
	But marriage is a tough thing even when it is not tough.
	You've been now living a life which...
	Few people have lived and is undoubtedly difficult.
	And you spend tons of time away from spouses.
	You're always nose deep in work.
	What happens?
	Over time, you end up effectively becoming cohabitating roommates and lose track of each other that way?
	I don't want to comment out of respect for a woman that I love on what went wrong with our marriage.
	Suffice it to say, there were communication difficulties and significant misunderstandings, and we're working on it.
	And I'm infinitely grateful for her love and support.
	And a word of advice as not an old person.
	You're not that old.
	Hold on.
	How old are you?
	You were born in...
	I'm old.
	I'm old.
	What is the, I don't know, not a piece of advice or biggest takeaway, but maybe a bit of both.
	What do you want to impart on the world?
	I think, you know, pay attention to the work-life balance.
	Just because it glitters doesn't make it gold.
	My ambition got the better of me.
	I've had a successful law career, but you wouldn't know it with the last three cases that World's Press covered.
	The Fotis Dulo's case, a murder case, he killed himself.
	Alex Jones gets a $1.5 billion verdict against him.
	The Proud Boys trial, I lose.
	You can say, well, that was a foregone conclusion.
	You can say that Jones'case was a kangaroo court.
	It was cooked, and I didn't kill my client.
	He killed himself.
	I was a faithful steward who stood next to these men and did everything that I could.
	And that's true.
	But in terms of public relations, you know, it's not the legacy I wanted.
	I mean, I was picking a jury in Danbury not long ago.
	And that's two towns over from Newtown.
	And one of the jurors said, I recognize you.
	And I said, oh, yeah, from where?
	He says, you're all over the TV, some of your cases.
	And he mentioned that he got to Alex Jones.
	And I said, oh, would it surprise you to learn that I've received thousands of pieces of hate mail involving Alex Jones?
	No.
	I said, you didn't send any of them, did you?
	He laughed and he said, no.
	And I said, what if I just told you I'm an ordinary guy doing my job and I want nothing more than to love and be loved?
	Would that change your perspective on me?
	And he said, yeah.
	And I picked him as a juror.
	You know, I think that, and then the other day, you know, I was walking in Worcester Square in New Haven, beautiful Italian neighborhood, taken in the spring air, and a woman came jogging by with her dog.
	You're Alex Jones' lawyer, aren't you?
	I said, yes.
	You should be ashamed, ashamed, ashamed.
	I mean, you know, should I?
	Isn't everyone entitled to a defense?
	You know, and I think that, you know, I took Alex's case in part because I'm a lawyer and I like challenges, in part because I'm defiant and I'm a contrarian.
	And if you say white, I'm going to ask you how you know that.
	I took it in part because I think that free speech is important and I believed.
	At that point, that Alex might have a hate speech case that would make it to the U.S. Supreme Court.
	In fact, if you look hard enough online, you'll see a May Day address I gave to judges in New Haven in either 2019 or 2020.
	It's on a blog page I wrote.
	And I talked to them about Alex Jones, and I talked to them about why I thought it was important to defend him.
	But I think in hindsight, If I was advising young lawyers, I'd say pay attention to the work-life balance.
	Don't let your ambition get the better of you.
	And be modest.
	My pride has been my undoing.
	Do you have time for more if we go and get specific questions for you?
	Sure.
	I wanted to say one other thing.
	This will be the last question for Rumble and everyone come on over to Locals.
	I'll ask my question, my number one question.
	Have you lost faith in the system?
	No.
	I think the system does the best it can.
	You know, let me tell you a fun story.
	I was this close to being a federal judge twice in my career.
	The first time, I used to argue a lot of appellate court cases in the Second Circuit, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City, back when Sonia Sotomayor...
	I was on it before she was a Supreme Court Justice, and I loved arguing with her.
	She was aggressive.
	She was smart.
	She was irreverent.
	And people have said all those things about me.
	So I remember one month I was up there, and she sprang a hypothetical question on me, and I sprang it back at her.
	I said, you know, if you say that, well, how would you answer this?
	And she gave me that salty New York jurist book.
	Counsel, counsel, I'm not here to answer your questions.
	All right.
	Another month, next month, I was up there, and the same set piece occurred.
	And she said, counsel, I'm not here to answer your questions.
	And without thinking, because, you know, the brain-mouth barrier isn't too well equipped here.
	Without thinking, I said, Judge Sotomayor, this is the second time in as many months we've had this exchange.
	When are you going to call me so we can have dinner and discuss our philosophic differences?
	Now, this was in the days of phone slips, right?
	So I come back to my office a couple months later, and I see Sonia Sotomayor.
	You know, whatever the area code was with 917 or 212.
	And I'm thinking this has to be a joke because I had told this story to people.
	It was her.
	So she invites me to come down to New York to present to her class at Columbia on appellate advocacy.
	Also presenting that night was Charles Freed, former Solicitor General of the United States.
	And before dinner, we sat in her office and she said, have you ever thought about becoming a federal judge?
	And I looked at her and laughed.
	I said, how much do you think you know about me?
	And she knew a lot.
	We owned a bookstore.
	We knew about my biography.
	She'd done her homework.
	She said, you know, and this is before I knew she was on her way to the Supremes.
	She says, you know, the Obama administration is looking for civil rights and criminal defense lawyers.
	And you have a lot of support here in New York.
	You should think about it.
	So I did.
	And, you know, I went home and I talked to a couple.
	I talked to our senators.
	I talked to a lot of judges.
	And, you know, I had a shot.
	And then I concluded that I wouldn't do it because I just like being a participant.
	I don't want to sit on the wings.
	And then when Donald Trump got elected, one of my friends was on the committee that vetted Gorsuch and we're talking and she said, do you have any interest in being a federal judge?
	And I laughed.
	I said, I went through this, I guess, four years, however many years ago with Obama.
	I'm not doing it again.
	I can't.
	Watching another lawyer try a case, I told it would be like watching ice melt.
	Second time I used that metaphor here, but at least it's mine.
	And she said, no, we're talking about the Second Circuit.
	And I paused for a moment because I thought, yeah, that could be kind of cool, be a federal appellate judge.
	But then I laughed and I said, you know, I've got as much chance of being appointed as Donald Trump did of being elected.
	But that didn't go anywhere.
	Well, Norm, I wanted to say the only reason why the analogy doesn't work is because if you throw ice into lava or ice or you drop like a steaming hot red ball into ice, it's actually kind of fun to watch it melt.
	It's quite explosive.
	All right, Norm.
	So what we're going to do now, it changes nothing on our end.
	I'm going to end on Rumble and I know that the chat on Locals is going to have specific questions and they're going to love it.
	So Rumble, I'm ending it.
	Come on over to vivabarneslaw.locals.com and I'm going to put the entire audio up on the internet and the entire video up afterwards.
	But we're just going to go over and pay some...
	Hold on one second.
	How do I do this?
	And give the folks at Locals what they...
	I can't even end this.
	What's my problem anymore?
	Ending on Rumble.
	Don't forget to click on LawPod daily.
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	I'm sorry.
	Where can people...
	I should say this before we end on the platforms.
	Where can people find you for everyone on Rumble and what can they do to help you?
	So Mike Boyer and I are co-hosts of a podcast called Law and Legitimacy.
	We've been doing it for about three years, and we're just getting on our feet.
	We're not in the Viva Barnes, Viva Frey crowd.
	We're trying to figure out how to make a buck at it, because candidly, I need an income stream independent of the law.
	I have no idea how to do that.
	So you could like us, you could spread the word, you could offer us financial support, and you could listen.
	You know, we're on daily.
	Monday through Friday, most days anyhow, 8 a.m.
	We talk for a half hour or 40 minutes or so.
	And our topic is basically to explore what Cicero said.
	Cicero once said that a race publica, a public thing, a commonwealth, isn't any ordinary collection of people.
	It's a collection of people bound together by common interest and a common conception of right.
	And we're trying to create a space for dialogue about common conceptions of right in the United States and to reframe the political discussion away from right versus left to people of goodwill reaching across the aisle.
	And some days we fail and some days we succeed.
	In terms of support, you know, I don't know who listens to this podcast, but I hear about big money donors.
	I did take a beating in the Proud Boys case, and I'm about ready to sit out for six months.
	If you know any DeepPockets out there, track me down and get me in touch with them because I can use the help.
	The podcast version, when I download it, typically it's like, I don't know, 5,000 downloads, but most people watch it on Rumble.
	So they're going to see this.
	I'm going to put your Twitter.
	It's the Twitter page.
	Twitter page.
	It's the Twitter handle that I just brought up.
	LawPodDaily, yeah.
	Okay, excellent.
	Norm, you and I will have a discussion offline in terms of this internet thing, because it's not intuitive, and it took me...
	I screwed up for five years.
	I didn't even know what I was doing for five years of content creation, so people can learn faster from my mistakes.
	This is what we're doing.
	I'm going to put all the links up afterwards.
	Right now, I'm going to end this on Rumble.
	Come on over to vivabarneslaw.locals.com for the after-party and Q&A unique questions from our community now.
	Now, I'm going to go into the chat here.
	And I'm going to say this.

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